42: Rank - 281

         42

(Season 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 19/5/2007, showrunner:  Russell T Davies, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Graeme Harper)  

Rank: 42

(no only kidding, 281)

‘Right, we need to get down into the engines and solve a pop quiz, all our lives are depending on me knowing the answer…How many Spice Girls song were there? How am I supposed to know that?!? The only alternative to burning up and dying a miserable death is if I take the Tardis back in time and listen to them all in order…You know what? Burning up in the heart of a sun it is’

Chris Chibnall's first script fooled all of us at the time who assumed it would just be tits tanks 'n' teleportals like his work on most of spin-off series Torchwood. It's fooled many a fan whose worked backwards since he became showrunner too, when his episodes tend to be either mega-complicated or slow, thoughtful and character-driven. Instead '42' is one of Dr Who's most breathlessly action-packed stories, one that spends precisely thirty seconds of the plot either side of the action when people’s lives aren’t in mortal peril, with one of the few times anyone in outer space actually uses the Tardis like humans used to police telephone boxes, sending a distress call and asking for help. What’s enough of a danger to call in help from a perfect stranger? There’s a spaceship on a crash-course for the sun that’s about to explode in 42 minutes' time, more or less in 'real timey-wimey'. By 2007 showrunner Russell T Davies was looking into scenarios from the olden days they hadn’t done with the news series yet and realised that although they’d had a number of space stations they hadn’t done a story set on an actual spaceship yet. Given that Chibnall had been running Torchwood more or less unsupervised Russell didn’t load him with any more than that – unlike most writers he farmed his ideas out to – his only stipulation being that there should be possessed humans with ‘glowing red eyes’. Unlike some writers who pushed Russell’s ideas and took stories into places he had never expected to go that’s pretty much what he got: ‘42’ is a runaround in a spaceship away from people with glowing red eyes and not a lot else, in the same way that ‘Dinosaurs On A Spaceship’ is about dinosaurs on a spaceship and a lot of his own stories as showrunner can really be summed up by their titles (Oh look, ‘Spyfall’ has a spy, falling and ‘Demons Of The Punjab’ is about demons of the Punjab, while when I first heard about the title I seriously wondered if ‘Ascension Of The Cybermen’ was just going to feature some metal giants climbing some stairs). So we end up with ‘42’, one of the most straightforward Who stories that stood out for its lack of twists and turns even in one of its most straightforward years (with everything between ‘Gridlock’ and ‘Human Nature/Family Of Blood’ easy to guess from their opening few minutes). There isn’t even the gratuitous violence or clumsy sexiness Chibnall was known for in ‘Torchwood (Indeed it’s hard to believe that McConnell and Korwin even know each other never mind that they’re husband and wife; this is one of the most chaste romance in the series). 

 Now there’s a section of the fanbase who like to have their Dr Who simple and straightforward entertainment, in which case this one will be right up your alley: the effects are quite brilliant, the sets believable, the plot sort-of makes sense (if you don’t think about it too hard) and there’s plenty of action going on, with barely a pause for breath. I’ve certainly seen films emptier and worse-looking than this do well at the cinema. ‘Sunshine’, for instance, a George Clooney film with a hundred times the budget of this episode and a plot even more bananas and basic about a spaceship heading into the sun did really well, despite being one of the daftest things ever committed to celluloid; by chance it was released a mere month before this was and most of the people who saw both reckoned Dr Who did it better (the trail caused quite a rush in post-production in fact, with a sudden name change as both ships had used the name ‘Icarus’, from the Greek myth about the man who flew too close to the sun in his hubris at catching up with God, so that his wings melted – something which surely must be the single least suitable name for a spaceship heading towards the sun ever named. Why that’s like naming a starship ‘Titanic’ or something! Oops…Why does nobody in the following few centuries seem to remember the myths and legends that have survived millennias intact to our time? ) The question really is whether mindless exercises in running around is what Dr Who is for. This is a series format with such elasticity that having an episode that seems like every other action series around, without the imagination of 99% of other scripts, feels like a bit of a waste. There’s nothing to ponder or ruminate on here, no hidden message to think about, nothing to change how you view the world (despite a last minute twist that – spoilers – this particular sun is ‘alive’, a twist so mind-bogglingly out of keeping with everything we know about the rest of the series and science in general we’d really rather not have had it). The result is one of Who’s least imaginative and most brainless stories – although the good news is that at least it’s a well made bit of brainless television, big on drama, danger, spectacle and (by Dr Who standards) budget. 

 The most interesting thing about this story is the title. Chibnall took Russell’s offhand comment about having a countdown to disaster and ran with it, figuring that it could be the Dr Who equivalent of the series ‘24’, a big hit at the time with the hook that it was a series that unfolded more or less in real time, across twenty fours of a single day (but broadcast an hour at a time). The Dr Who version though, had to be shorter and in much more of a hurry to tell the story: ‘42’, the same number backwards, by chance happens to be the number of minutes is the usual length of an episode if you discount the opening and closing credits. On another level its set in the 42nd century, a time we’d visited in the series a few times before. It’s also a sneaky clever reference to one-time Who script editor Douglas Adams and ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ where ‘42’ is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything (ironic, really, that this is one of the few Who stories that isn’t about those things and indeed is one of the least Adamsy of all modern Who stories, with the sort of plot Douglas would have parodied: indeed there is a sequence at the end of the first book in the trilogy of five-and-a-half books just like this one, where the stolen spaceship the Heart of Gold is on a crash course for the sun, something solved by the use of an improbability drive that causes it to shift out of time and space and then when it’s about to be attacked by a series of missiles the same drive turns them into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias. No, seriously: if Douglas had written it thirty years later everyone would have assumed he was laughing at the Davies era’s unlikely sudden plot resolutions coming out of nowhere). Just to ram the point a home this story even recycles a lot of the sound effects used in both radio and television versions: mostly doors shutting. That real time sense is cleverly done adding a real breathless urgency to everything in this story, a ticking timebomb about to go off and even though they chicken out of having the timer up on screen the way they do in ‘24’ (partly because they have to fudge it: technically this story has 39 minutes of plot while the timer runs and the updates in the dialogue don’t always match the actual time left since the button was pressed, because of cuts in editing as much as anything else, but that’s a less interesting number anyway) you do get enough of a sense of the time pressure for that to work. This remains probably the only Who story definitively told in ‘real time’, which is a clever and neat trick, an original gimmick that does something the series had never done before while also making this episode feel very contemporary (‘24’ caused quite a rush of dramas doing things like this though it was by far the best: ‘Homeland’ ‘Reacher’ ‘Prison Break’ ‘Archer’…Heck it’s a surprise we didn’t get a spinoff about the Elton and Ursula tracking down The Abzorbaloff in real time). 

 Mostly, though, it feels like lots of different Dr Who stories stuck together. Say what you will about Chibnall but he knew his Dr Who perhaps better than either Davies or Moffat: certainly he’d been more involved with the fandom than either of his colleagues and written more about Who (as opposed to stories set in the Whoniverse) than either of them and his first chance (for all he knew his only chance) to write for his favourite series is full of allusions and repeats of earlier episodes. Some would call this a sweet gesture to fans, others cheap recycling, but whatever it is there’s a lot of it and it makes a lot more sense here than when Chibnall tries it later: at the time the thrill of seeing things from the old series carried to the new ones was still new. Russell had gone out of his way to make series one a fresh start for newcomers and only admitted for definite this even was a continuation not a re-write of the old series come the second year. So there’s a lot: The name of the ship, The SS Pentallian, a last minute replacement for the SS Icarus, is named after the drive that played such a crucial role in the plot of ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ (presumably both are named after a scientist in our future who plays a big role in space-travel). The spacewalk (which went on much longer in the original script before being cut for budget reasons) is straight out of ‘Four To Doomsday though, mercifully, without the cricket ball (as is the countdown to destruction, though characteristically the older story is at a much more leisurely pace with four days till impact when we first join). The idea of an entity that’s a sentient power source infecting people is just like the helix from ‘The Masque Of Mandragora’. The slow possession of a person just alive enough to be horrified of it is straight out of the ‘Inferno/Ark In Space’ invasions book, while the plot hotting up over the course of the story is a dead steal from that first story too. This bunch of petty law-breaking criminals are directly from ‘The Space Pirates’, another story about the lawlessness of space because its too wide for any one police force to patrol, while the idea of a ship that doesn’t quite work properly is featured in that story and ots of others from season six (notably ‘The Seeds Of Death’); while other series are utopian about technology on the future starting with Star Trek Dr Who has always taken the British assumption that it’s all going to be a bit rubbish still, just like it is now. The idea of the plot being solved by a character jumping out of an airlock clutching the baddy is exactly what happens to semi-companion Katarina in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’. More recently this very orangey story set in space is very like ‘Satan’s Pit/The Impossible Astronaut’, with David Tennant donning his distinctively coloured spacesuit again and stuck in the 42nd century, while Martha’s sudden horror at the thought nobody back home would know what had ever happened to her is exactly like Rose’s realisation in that story (and notably not a worry any other companion has ever had before or since). For a time the similarities were such that this was a full-blown sequel to the later story complete with Ood in the holding bays because Russell thought it might have been better with an actual monster in there somewhere. Martha herself might have recognised the scanner at the start of the story: it was the one she used on the moon in ‘Smith and Jones’. ‘The End Of the World’ too sees a sun burning up a world, even if in that case it’s our sun and planet Earth. Maybe this sense of familiarity is why the story was given to Graeme Harper to direct, the only one from the old series to be asked back for the new series (he’d been a youngster whose first job was in the McCoy era). The thing is though, those references back to the past are a double-edges sword: while thrilling for fans who pick up on this stuff and allowing this series to feel as if its taking place in the same universe, you have to have something new to say besides the parts recycled from past stories, some reasons for all these plot elements to be here in a different configuration to how they were used before. That’s where this story falls down: there’s nothing ‘42’ does any better than these stories except for the graphics and the only parts it does that are ‘new’ it botches up completely. 

 For instance that plot, which is one of the most unfeasible in the history of the series, with so many holes you begin to wonder if Chibnall wrote it while suffering from heatstroke. The plot revolves around a spaceship crashing into a sun, but the sun isn’t a static object like a planet or a meteorite: it’s a whacking great big thing that comes in layers. Even in the future, with huge advances in technology, there’s no way a vessel would crash into the sun rather than simply burn up on the edge. This crew really have tobe thick not to have realised they’re on a ‘crash-course’ before this: I mean the sun’s quite big and hard to miss out the windows and there really isn’t any sign of panic until the story starts (even the text prequel has people realising they’re in danger a mere few minutes before we start). Even if their whole plan is to scoop the sun’s corona to use as fuel, so they need to be close, if my life was on the line you can better believe I’d be keeping a better eye on the controls of where exactly the ship was before this. Typical reckless sun-ray drivers! The whole idea of (spoilers) using the sun as fuel is an odd one too. Yes we have solar panels on earth to heat homes, to convert that light into different uses like heat and energy, but to have a machine hanging in space convert it into the necessary fuel needed to run seems impossible even for the future; surely the sheer amount of power the ship would need to defy the sun’s gravity would overpower any fuel it would actually gather; you’d always be on the losing end that way. It’s like driving from your house to a petrol pump with a leaky fuel tank that loses petrol every time you move and expecting to get home in one piece again, when you’d have been better off staying in one place. This lot take petty rule-breaking to a new level too: fusion energy scoops are banned outright, apparently to stop things like this happening, and yet while the people on board the Pentallion know all about the rule they’re breaking they don’t seem to know what it was there for. That’s like people ignoring the smoking ban and lighting up cigarettes without having stopped to think what the ban is there for, that cigarette smoke is harmful to health of you and the people around you. At the very least you’d think the Doctor would know about iut given that he usually knows everything, but this law seems to have passed him by: he’s as genuinely clueless as everyone else what’s causing all the problems, working it out after even most of the audience are screaming ‘it’s the Sun wot dunnit!’ That’s without the sheer weirdness of having a sun, a point of light and heat in space, be ‘sentient’. If that were even vaguely true it would change how we think about the universe forever, but we know it isn’t from the suns nearby to us and why would suns far away work to a different evolutionary structure (plus how would they possibly fuel a brain in a ‘body’ that big?) Riley says that you can’t afford to get close to people and have family in a job like this one, even though his two bosses are flipping married to each other! Even on a smaller level the Doctor screams himself hoarse in the empty vacuum of space shouting ‘I’ll save you!’ to Martha over and over. Why doesn’t he just phone her? This wouldn’t be so much of a problem had this story not featured two whacking great lengthy scenes about the Doctor souping up Martha’s phone and her calling her mum. And even if the Doctor’s somehow forgotten to take his own phone with him we’ve seen him use his sonic screwdriver to call Rose in the past. Maybe the sun spots are interfering with the signal, but in that case – how come Martha can hear her mum from another century with no problems at all? If you have any answers please phone in… 

 It’s just…odd this story. Part of that is probably down to the revisions made at more or less the last minute, which changes the structure of the story while leaving a lot of the same plot beats. Originally this wasn’t’ s rogue spaceships sticking their straws into Capri-sun drinks in space but a research station wondering why this one particular sun was different, with whole generations of scientists living and dying on board without working out why. Russell changed this partly to get away from having another space station but also because he thought the scientists would have to be pretty thick not to have worked out what was really going on; at least in this story these are opportunists more than they’re scientists, after fuel not knowledge, but even then they’re unbearably thick not to have worked this out before now. Really the humans being greedy for ‘promethean fire’ and the sun turning nasty when its already given them so much and the sun taking people over to have people yell at the people concerned is a very clunky way of giving the age-old Dr Who morale of co-existing with nature. It’s very heavy-handed and obvious as a metaphor for what humanity is doing to our planet and even that’s not given enough time to sink in: the Doctor looks horrified and yells at everyone when possessed for being stupid but he doesn’t tick people off when the story’s all over, nor does he tell the survivors to go home and tell their story so that nobody is ever stupid enough to risk a plan like this ever again. The ending is rushed all round: everyone goes home, even though they’re still pretty darn near to a sun belching fire that can kill everyone, still seconds away from danger in a ship that might be dragged back any second (the Doctor seems to put an awful lot of trust in a sentient star that’s still kinda red hot with anger). 

As the first Dr Who script Chris Chibnall wrote it’s interesting to note just how much and yet how little it has in common with his era to come (in the same way that ‘The Empty Child’ sort of dictates the Steven Moffat era, but not really). That whacking great moral message that feels like a lecture, even to those of us who agree with what its saying, is the most obvious giveaway (and yes there are plenty of moral messages in Russell’s stories too but he likes giving hope and solutions with the message for why humanity’s bigger and better than this, while Chibnall’s stories end with making us feel small). The most common accusation with the 13th Doctor stories is that they’re all quite talky with nothing very much happening. That’s certainly not the case here: ‘42’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t have much time to breathe and given that the jeopardy is all there from the start we don’t have time for these characters to actually talk to one another (they shout instructions at each other for the most part). Most Chibnall stories are very much Earth-bound in different eras, so having him write about space is quite something and he’s actually good at it, or at any rate that feeling of isolation and emptiness, that there is no one out there to come to the SS Pentallion’s rescue, that these people are far from home with no chance to escape. It is, in that regard, the most ‘Troughton base under siege’ of the Davies episodes, something that as a rule Chibnall steers well clear from during his time in the boss’ chair. There is a brief interlude that feels a bit Jodie Whittakery and in many ways it’s the best bit, when Martha is in an escape pod and separated from the Doctor, when we go from the sheer chaos of the shuttle itself, all bleeping sirens and panic mode, to see the stillness and silence from her point of view. The way the plot stops so Martha can go through domestic issues, calling up her mum to sort-of say goodbye for what seems like hours, is also very Chibnall, an emotional moment that doesn’t feel earned (honestly Martha’s mum is such a nasty piece of work she makes Jackie Tyler and Sylvia Noble look like saints; why doesn’t she call up her brother and sister? She’s way closer to them). Some of the actors too: Chibnall remembered Vinette Robinson’s blink-and-you-miss it part as Abi here and casts her as 'Rosa' Parks the minute he becomes showrunner. His is also the start of a long tradition of Chibnall naming characters after people he knew: Riley was his Godson. 

 Mostly though this feels like a Chibnall script in that not a lot actually happens and there are no great little character moments that makes us care for the people that nothing is happening to: this is as faceless and generic a bunch of supporting characters as we ever have in the Davies era. The heart-tugging we’re meant to feel every time one of them snuffs it feels unearned too: there’s some belated angst as McConnell listens to her converted husband Korwin blaming her for everything that happened to him, but unless you were paying close attention at the start you don’t even know they are husband and wife – they never share romantic glances, or care about the other beyond saving the whole ship, there are no shared memories of better times or hopes for families back home, nothing. As for the rest of the crew they don’t even get that much: you learn far more about these characters from a few lines of text on the BBC website than you do watching the actual episode. And while the suspense in this story is well done and the threat very real and the ticking clock makes a big difference in how caught up you get in the story ultimately you only really care for the Doctor and Martha. The intrusion of the overall series arc, setting up the finale five whole episodes early with someone working for Mr Saxon having captured Martha’s mum, also comes out of nowhere and really doesn’t fit this story at all: it’s confusing, more like the impenetrable Moffat series arcs to come and just yanks you out of the story. This is quite an interesting story in their relationship. The BBC admitted to Russell late in the day that they were resting Dr Who for a week to make way for the Eurovision Song Contest which lead to a change in the scheduling and a re-think. Realising that ’42 was the best episode for a soft re-launch of the show, picking up action after a gap, Russell decided to make this the show where Martha is a full-time companion not a ‘guest’. The story starts with her getting a copy of the Tardis key and the Doctor souping up her mobile so she can call home: a big deal at the time, as the first person to get them after Rose (in the olden days only Romana and occasionally Susan ever had their own keys and they were timelords themselves). The Doctor trusting Martha is a big moment, even if by rights she’s saved his scrawny hide moiré times than Rose ever did. Chibnall struggles to write for both these characters though: to date he’s only ever nailed the 11th Doctor-Amy-Rory dynamic and on paper the 10th Doctor and Martha just talk the same way that the 13th and various companions do to each other. They don’t share much chemistry or any real bond, there’s no sense of trust that the other is always going to get them out of trouble, no sense of responsibility on the Doctor’s side for putting Martha in harm’s way again. equally, while there’s a single scene where Martha tries to be a Doctor, she’s notably a lot less calm in this crisis than she was when we first met her in ‘Smith and Jones’. Thankfully though the difference is David Tennant and Freema Agyeman who make even this story’s poor and bitty dialogue become at least half-sentient. He’s excellent in a very un-Chibnall/Jodie part, rushing around at the heart of the action and ending up being possessed by the second half, with burning red eyes and the burning anger issues that go with it. There’s a measure of thought within fandom that maybe Jodie Whittaker might have been brilliant with a different showrunner: she might well have been (I’d love to see Russell write for her) but this story is proof that Tennant can raise his game even with rubbish dialogue (and it is awful: ‘Burn With me’ is the silliest catchphrase yet and makes even ‘Eldrad Must Live!’ ‘The Quest Is The Quest’ and ‘There’s No Such Thing As Macra’ sound good). Freema’s part is more subtle: she’s literally cut off from everyone for most of the plot but she’s the quiet heartbeat of the series, our link to normality and she spins a human face on the events unfolding, thinking about the people who’ll never know if she was missing and sharing a sort of war-time liaison with Ashton. It’s a very World war two story all round in fact, the Doctor shouting early on ‘where’s that Dunkirk spirit?’ and having people pushed to their extremes finding out that they’re tougher than they think they are. Had Chibnall played that aspect up at a fraction of the big set piece danger scenes then ‘42’ might have been more memorable all round. 

 Instead the things that linger in the mind from this story aren’t the plot or the dialogue but the whole look of the story. The lighting gradually gets more and more orangey-red the closer we get to the sun (no practical reason for it, except that the set designer told everyone to ‘think of red fire engines’, but it works aesthetically: it’s dripped into our subconscious that red means danger) and the cast are covered with more 'fake sweat' (actually water) scene by scene until the climax is almost painful to watch. Baby oil was plastered in people’s hair too, making them look all greasy: poor Freema was found to be deeply allergic, coming out in big red rashes, so blusher was used on her face instead. You wouldn’t know it from what ended up on screen but the location shooting was actually bitterly cold and they had to work hard to take the shots of everyone’s breath misting up in post-production; you especially have to pity poor Michelle Collins (at the time one of the biggest guest stars names in the comeback series after her lengthy stint as Cindy Beale on ‘Eastenders’, the highest profile regular cast member of still the only official series to cross over with Dr Who – sadly she wasn’t in ‘Dimensions In Time’ in 1993): she’d just come from holiday in Bali and here she ws across January-February in Wales (she got sick straight after shooting something her Doctor said was probably caused by the extreme difference in temperatures). An old saw mill (St Regis paper Company to be exact, in Sudbrook, Caldicot) might not seem the most obvious place to film the inside of a futuristic spaceship but it ‘works’: the stainless steel base (shot on the ground, underneath where the rollers were, which must have made camera angles a nightmare) really has the feel of the sort of clinical design we might have in the future and the props department works overtime bringing n control panels and the like. Best of all, unlike some Who stories of years past, it looks lived in, battered and bonked as if people have been rubbing shoulders out here for years before we join the action. All the more impressive, too, given that the production of this story was as rushed as the writing, sent into production before it was quite ready after delays on another project meant that Derek Jacobi wasn’t quite ready to film ‘Utopia’ and that story had to be switched around in production order with this one. Unlike the writing, though you can’t tell: if ‘42’ has a selling point it’s that space looks better and more believable in this story than maybe any other Dr Who story (‘The Ark In Space’ maybe, but even that’s a step below this one even adjusting for period technology; ‘The End Of The World’ too looks gorgeous on screen but that’s just the bit of space around earth: this is ‘space’ space). 

 The result is, sadly, still a bit of a mess all round, a story that is a little too obviously rushed in writing and equally rushed in production, leaving you with an impressive adrenalin rush and a sense of urgency but not in need of a rewrite (or three). The real trouble though is that everyone’s rushing around madly to stop a countdown at all times. That’s it, for 42 minutes. There are no subplots, no scenes getting to know this world we’re on properly to see these characters before they’re under pressure. There’s no metaphor here, no allegory like the best of Who, no sub-plot where the companion gets to find out what we’re saving while the Doctor actually saves it. A lot of stories in series 3 tend to be slower, to be talkier than those in series 1 and 2, but this one goes the other way and is all action. Good as it is when its on, you don’t take anything away from it afterward: there’ nothing to remember, no dialogue to stick in the mind, no conundrums to ponder (unless you’re seriously counting al the hardold saxon references before the big finale). It’s not that these 42 minutes are bad – certainly they’re eminently watchable and with the sound turned down it’s very atmospheric. With the sound on, though, you can hear how daft the plot is, how empty the characters feel and are reminded of many times we’ve heard bits of it before in better stories. This story is 42 minutes of your life you’ll never get back again and to some extent they’re wasted on a story that teaches you nothing and has no impact on how you feel about the universe, while it doesn’t add anything much to the two characters we’ve been following and caring for either. There are most definitely more misguided Who stories out there, ones that get far more wrong than this and one thing in its favour is that ’42 is never ever boring, perhaps the biggest crime a Dr Who story can commit (other than stories that cast Kylie Minogue or starts taking pot shots at pacifists anyway). Somehow though, despite the endless action and the shouting and the ever ticking clock, it still ends up being a kind of boring: you know exactly how this story is going to turn out and while everyone is madly running around at high speed in a spaceship hurtling towards the sun somehow it’s never exactly moving. Hot stuff it might think it is but most of ‘42’ leaves me cold. If anything this story seems better to us now we know it was a one-off that the series never tried again and any scenes with tenant at the peak of his powers is welcome. At the time however, at the end of a run of three out of four or five of the weakest stories of the comeback so far, it seemed as if Who was on a collision course with disaster, all its good ideas used up. Thankfully a classic is just over the horizon, so impact is again averted. For now… 

 POSITIVES + A spaceship in space heading towards a whacking big sun. Sounds simple doesn’t it, but it’s so hard to pull off – as, indeed Hollywood blockbuster ‘Sunshine’ discovered. But how do you make a light source be present in the story without shining in everyone’s faces so much you can’t see what’s going on? The answer is you do it with lighting, giving everything a glow without being so bright it hurts your eyes. Sometimes it goes a bit awry (there’s no way anyone that close to the sun would go space-walking without a visor: they’ve done that so we can see David Tennant’s sparkly eyes but scientifically it’s a no go) mostly though the lighting is, you could say, the shining light of the entire production. Practically all the atmosphere in this story comes from that decision to have the sunlight as a presence growing (and indeed glowing) throughout the story without making it blindingly obvious, as it were. 42 stars to the lighting team right there. 

 NEGATIVES - Alright, get comfy because I have a real bee in my bonnet about one aspect of the story. Apparently they don’t have passwords in the 42nd century (did people keep on forgetting them? Did Cyber-Putin hack into everyone’s accounts? Did the Cryons get into encryption? We just don’t know) so every important decision that can risk life and death is hidden behind…trivia questions. Eh?! If people can hack into passwords they can certainly look up information that’s freely available to everyone (and I’ll bite that the internet maybe doesn’t exist as a resource in this era, which might be why out of the whole ship only Martha thinks about phoning her mum up for help, though why she phones her mother of all people, someone not exactly good at listening or being helpful at the best of times, is yet another mystery). It’s daft, too, because the trivia questions are by their very nature unanswerable for definite, ever-changing goalposts that keep moving. The first answer involves quoting happy prime numbers: fair enough you’d think as they’re a never changing source. But our greatest computers have never yet been able to calculate every happy prime number definitively: there are just too many calculations to make. That’s one of the reasons behind Douglas Adams’ punchline of ‘42’, the belief that if computers can run long enough we’ll get a pattern of numbers that can solve the answers of how the world works. There would be no way for the people programming this spaceship to include every right number. Then there’s the music trivia question: who had more number ones, Elvis or The Beatles? It’s the sort of thing that might sound like an obvious case of counting up singles from a list…but it really isn’t. Even I, as a Beatle fan whose written four whole books on the band and their solo records, can’t answer this question with any conviction because the answer is so debatable, never mind the fact that the computer systems would need to be re-written every time a posthumous single gets released for either. The history of the record chart is far more convoluted and questionable than non-music fans might think. For a start the question doesn’t pinpoint which country and there still has yet to be such a thing as a global chart. Elvis is American, but the Beatles are British, so that rules out being the ‘home countries’ chart and there are wildly different statistics for both (feel-good Beatley song ‘Eight Days A Week’, for example, was never even a single in Britain while America only joined in with ‘I want To Hold Your Hand’, with later re-issues of ‘Please Please me’ She Loves You’ and ‘From Me To You’ all charting lower in the charts precisely because ‘Hand’ was still at #1 at the time. There was a week, in February 1964, when the Beatles had all five of the highest charting records in a single chart and on three different record labels too). The answer changes, too, depending which chart you use: until 1958 there wasn’t one ‘official’ chart in either country(which cuts out some of Elvis’ biggest hits) and in Britain there were four potential ‘official’ charts tight the way up until 1968 9whn both acts had already had nearly all their hits), each one compiled in a different way (physical sales, record orders, word of mouth spot checks, stock takes in record shops) all of which had a slightly different answer: the ‘Record Retailer’ chart, for instance, which is the one the Guinness Book Of Hit Singles used as their guide reckons that ‘Please Please me’ was a #2 hit, but the NME chart which tended to be the most respected at the time says it was a #1). That’s without including the fact that the goalposts keep changing: The Doctor panics as to whether the remix version of Elvis’ ‘A Little Less Conversation’ counts as a #1, while we know that since this episode went on air The Beatles have scored another #1 with the execrable ‘Then and Now’ the ‘final Beatles song’ which is neither final (Paul, George and Ringo recorded the far superior and still unreleased ‘Grow Old Along With Me’ later the same day) Beatles (it’s a Lennon demo that Harrison did record a part for in the 1990s, which McCartney replaced in 2023) nor much of a song (Paul didn’t like John’s middle eight and cut it out, leaving the song lopsided and empty). Oh and what do we do with double ‘A’ sides? Does ‘We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper’ and ‘Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby’ (were there ever two more different songs on one slab of vinyl?!) count as two hits or four? The production team try to cover all of this with a general throwaway line about ‘pre-downloads’ but think about it: this is the 42nd century, downloads is probably an archaic term everyone lumps in with record buying anyway by now and who in their right mind is giving a trivia question of such high importance with a debatable cut-off point nobody can quite agree on sometimes from a century 2200 years ago? It’s madness. Plus that’s, of course, if we’re even using an Earth chart: for all we know The Korvanista took Elvis to their hearts after hearing ‘Hound Dog’ so made all his singles get retrospectively to #1 on their chart or maybe The Garm fiddled with the timelines so a re-recorded ‘Let Me Be Your Teddy Garm’ spent an entire century at #`1 in the e-space charts, or maybe Alpha Centauri had such a good time bopping to ‘twist and Shout’ they bought up a cartload of records to spread across the Intergalactic Federation? The 'correct' answer, as far as I can tell, is indeed Elvis but it’s questionable, certainly to questionable for a security question on which life and death rely…and by the time I'd debated all that to myself I would have been burnt to a crisp. 

 Also, the Doctor takes time out from running for his life to make a pun about ‘here Comes The Sun’ but fails to mention the even more ironic ‘Good Day Sunshine’ or the words to ‘rain’ (sunshine is just a state of mind) or mention the open-goal that Elvis was once on ‘Sun’ records. Oh and of all the things in this story that seem impossible the biggest is that someone from the 42nd century won’t know how to pronounce the name ‘Beatles’. They’re going to be famous and live forever, you see if they don’t. 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘That sun's alive. A living organism. They scooped out its heart. Used it for fuel and now it's screaming!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Uniquely in the Russell T Davies era ‘42’ gets a text-based prequel rather than a website or red button telly one, published on the BBC website in the week between ‘Lazarus’ and ’42’. It features events from minor character Erinna Lassek’s point of view (she’s the one who only gets a single scene, sarcastically muttering ‘kill me now’ before a mutated Korwin attacks her). This story gives a bit more insight into events before the SS Pentallian’s distress call with Erinna the new recruit whose only been on the ship a few days before, the hint being that she takes her job because she secretly has the hots (pun intended) for Riley, the one that Martha gets to snog instead (presumably Riley never finds out but this would make things worse if he did: he spends half the episode moping he never got to find anyone who was interested in him and she was under his nose all along). Erinna’s a little rich girl desperate to show that she’s as hard working as anyone else but is beginning to regret it as she gets all the rotten jobs, which fills in a lot more character of the moment where she dies, resenting becoming the station’s cleaner. Really, though nobody says it, she’s the heroine of the hour: if she hadn’t noticed the ship was too close to the sun and forced the others into sending a distress signal (against their will) nobody would have got out of this alive. Events quickly overwhelm her when the clock starts ticking down, from 45 minutes and 48 seconds, the Doctor and Martha turning up three minutes later. The short piece doesn’t really give much away and is more of an introduction to the characters as much as anything, but the piece has just enough flavour of the finished episode to make you want to watch (with the classic conclusion ‘to be continued…on TV!’) Written by Joseph Lidster, who did a lot of the Dr Who website text back then, rather than Chris Chibnell who wrote the episode it’s something of a desperate last minute plan to give Whovians something to tide them over when the show was delayed a week by the Eurovision Song Contest (in case you’re wondering it’s the year Serbia won with ‘Moltiva’, with the lady who looked like a middle-aged Harry Potter and sang like one too, though she was certainly far less daft than the UK entry that year, Scooch’s tongue-in-cheek ‘Flying The Flag’, a song so bad it made crashing into the sun in a supernova like something to look forward to rather than avoid). 

 Previous ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ next ‘Human Nature/The Family Of Blood’

Resolution: Rank - 282

 Resolution

(Although fans always call it 'Resolution Of The Daleks'!, New Year's Day Special, Dr 13 with Graham Ryan and Yaz, 1/1/2019, showrunner:  Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Wayne Yip)

Rank: 282

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
Ad never brought to mind?
Not when you're a Dalek buried in the 9th century
And your enemy is as old as time

 

Happy new year! Of course, what with the timey wimey nature of books I don’t actually know when you are reading this review but I hope, however through the year we are, that things are going your way. If only we had a time machine to nip back and change things now we have the benefit of hindsight of how the year turned out, eh? How are your new year’s resolutions turning out? Possibly better than the characters in ‘Resolution’, a story that’s all about making the most of your chances while you have them without putting things off for another day (because there might not be one). Which seems an odd thing to say about a story that revolves around archaeology (a profession that’s all about patience if timing if ever there was one!), but that’s what happens when the unlikely duo of Lin and Mitch dig up an old discarded Dalek buried underground in Sheffield (those metal meanies get everywhere!)  It’s true though: the two lovebirds clearly fancy each other (you spend the whole episode shouting ‘get a room! Possibly a 9^th century one!’) but never quite get round to asking each other out and by the time Mitch plucks up the courage his wannabe girlfriend is part Dalek. Ryan’s dad, too, comes calling round trying to patch things up with his son after years away – but it’s too late, he’s grown up (well sort of, this is Ryan we’re talking about here) and doesn’t need his dad anymore (until the inevitable finale where love saves the day). Even The Daleks have left their invasion plans just that little bit too late, waiting until Earth is unified enough to destroy the signals back to their fleet and taking a stand together. If nothing else the first Dr Who story to go out on New Year’s Day since episode one of ‘Day Of The Daleks’ in 1972 (and, weirdly enough, only the third ever after an episode of another Dalek story, episode eight of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ in 1966) really makes the most of its slot, urging us to hit the ground running and do all the things we’ve been secretly wanting to do without putting off.

Why a new year’s day slot? Well, that was a new invention by new showrunner Chris Chibnall. He found the traditional Who Christmas Day slot hard to write for and figured that the holidays’ second most important date would be a better one to aim for. I can kind of see his point (it makes sense that a show all about time travel should pick a holiday that has to do with dates and change, both very Dr Who idea) but at the same time it felt very strange and not a little empty to be sitting down to Christmas Day lunch that year with just The Queen’s speech on telly (and a Queen that had pulled out of Dr Who cameos twice to boot!) They’d become an institution since Christmas 2005 and Chibnall’s predecessor, hearing that Chibnall wasn’t ready to start with a Christmas episode, had even stepped in to make ‘Twice Upon A Time’ to make sure his favourite show kept the highest profile slot of the year. It’s also far less of an ‘occasion’ all round. Now, unlike Christmas, New Year's is only a special day due to an accident of time, habit and quite possibly alcohol. Fittingly, then, this special is only really 'special' due to a combination of time slot, habit and quite possibly alcohol. Or so I've heard from fans who reckon this episode is better drunk. New year’s day simply isn’t that special, without the gift giving or same sense of goodwill and most people spend it hungover and/or dreading going back to work. As a result ‘Resolution’ never feels that special: though it runs to an hour (and honestly doesn’t really need to) it just feels like another Dr Who episode, no better or worse than the series it just followed, not an excuse to get the family round and have them share in your favourite programme  and have everyone feel better about the world the way the festive episodes (usually) do.
There is at least one thing that makes this episode different to the earlier Jodie Whittaker episodes and that’s the return of the Daleks. They were, admittedly, a bit of a surprise: Chibnall had himself made a resolution while running the programme that he would never have returning monsters and would only be using ‘new’ monsters of his own making, but such had been the fan outcry and so far had the viewing figures fallen that he changed his mind (matters came to a head when Chibnall unwisely promised fans that they would be ‘seeing an enemy you’ve met before’ in season finale ‘The Battle Of Ranskoor Av Kolos’ and we all waited with baited breath to see…Tim Shaw from the season opener ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ again, a character so memorable that we couldn’t remember the first thing about him even though it had only been nine weeks since we’d last seen him). To his credit, though, Chibnall listened to the outcry and the first story made after his series had gone to air puts a few things right, starting with him turning over a new leaf and giving us more ‘old’ monsters in the new year. Most fans call this story ‘Resolution Of The Daleks’, given the 1980s tradition for naming Dalek stories with the letter ‘R’, but the official title is simply ‘Resolution’ in an attempt to keep them secret (something blown out the water by the Radio Times coverage of the story and various not very well kept secrets in fandom). The Doctor, too, rather gives the game away by working out who the enemies are after just one scene of a shadow and that familiar grating noise in a realisation that could have been a heck of a lot bigger. 

If you were one of the three people who hadn’t heard the news or seen it coming, though, the Daleks are surprisingly well handled given that the writer hadn’t shown any interest in writing for them, with a welcome return after a four year gap since ‘The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar’ (their longest gap since the show’s revival so far, though we’re on target to match that next year). Chibnall always struggled to make new monsters convincing but he will end up with a pretty decent track record with the old ones, giving the Daleks a handful of good episodes and the Cybermen and The Master one each (see if you can work out which ones). Though future new year’s special ‘Eve Of The Daleks’ is better still ‘Resolution’ is really good at giving us something The Daleks would naturally do but which we have never seen them do before – quite a feat given how many Daleks stories there are around.  Sensibly taking a leaf out of ‘Dalek’s reintroduction to a new audience,  Chibnall gives us just one and makes it both vulnerable yet incredibly scary, with even a homeless Dalek without a casing having the power to bring planet Earth to its tentacles. We've never really spent time with the Daleks outside their famous exterior shells beyond the odd cliffhanger and this episode makes strong use of just how creepy a mutated blob is when its trying to possess you. The story winds up being a bit like ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’, with a human trapped as a Dalek, but inversely, so now a Dalek has the power to hypnotise humanity and ride them around as their casings. It’s  a brave choice, dispensing with the familiar casing design of most of the episode but still making them recognisably Dalek-like. While other writers never quite ‘got’ The Daleks (for Douglas Adams they’re a joke, for Eric Saward they’re a tank, for Steven Moffat they’re an army and for Russell T Davies they’re something that goes boom in series finales) Chibnall gets their raison daitre spot on: they’re a spoilt child with the world’s biggest arsenal at their disposal, utterly ruthless and cunning and dedicated to wiping out everything that doesn’t represent them. The Dalek shown here is as relentless and driven as any we have ever seen and very nearly gets away with his plan, despite being all alone. When Graham says to the Doctor that they’re bound to win because ‘there’s seven billion of us – plus you’ and The Doctor tells him no, that one Dalek is enough to wipe out humanity you believe it. This Dalek is slightly different to other by the way, even when reunited with its case: it’s the only time so far that an entire Dalek has been remote controlled without an actor/operator inside, powered by three separate operators for the eyestalk, gun and arm. It’s also much skinner than usual, which makes sense given that it only had to fit in electronics not a person (although it does seem a bit odd; not least because, following Christmas food, people tend to be fatter by New Year’s day). There’s even an audience pleasing mention of rels, how Daleks count time, invented by Terry Nations for the Dalek annuals of the 1960s and only ever referred to on telly twice (in ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ and ‘Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks’). In case you’re wondering 9376 rels works out, using Nation’s original annual sums, at three hours, seven minutes and 31 seconds. So not long, but possibly longer than you might be expecting given Dr Who’s penchant for doing things in the ‘nick of time’.

I wonder, too, if Chibnall isn’t being slightly cheeky here. If you’re not British then this next paragraph won’t mean much to you, but if you are then there’s a single solitary word guaranteed to make anyone alive in the past decade groan out loud, whichever side they’re on: ‘Brexit’. As with so many things that have gone wrong in Britain so fart this century, it was David Cameron’s fault. The coalition leader (who seems like half of a ‘quintessential Holmesian double-act’ and had about the same idea of ‘equal relationship’ with Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg that Glitz did to Dibber in ‘The Mysterious Planet’ or Garron had with Unstoffe in ‘The Ribos Operation’) was  so scared by the rise of Nigel Farrage and the far right in Britain (a rise at the last election of, ooh, 3%, taking them zero Mps to, umm, zero MPs. Scary!) that he decided to hash things out once and for all with a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union and show that he was ‘boss’ by getting behind the remain campaign. He was most surprised when 52% of the population decided to leave and 48% decided to remain, even though a) most of the people who voted to leave that I’ve talked so did so to wipe the smug grin off Cameron’s piggy face b) genuinely thought eh result was such an obvious vote a lot of people never actually bothered to actually vote remain c) the referendum was spread through lies that were allowed to go through unchecked and d) Russia fiddled with the election results anyway in an attempt to ‘weaken’ Europe. Though the referendum took place in 2016 this is the first real Dr Who story that goes anywhere near it and, needless to say for a series that believes in equality amongst all species and knows that borders can be defeated by any monster with a raygun, it takes the side of ‘remain’. This is, after all, a peculiarly ‘English’ invasion even by Dr Who standards. The Dalek’s plan isn’t so much an attempt to invade so much as divide and conquer the Earth brainwash people one by one and turn them against each other. As in the olden days (but not so much since the 1970s, when Terry Nation stopped writing stories) this Dalek is driven by an idea of ‘racial purity’, of closing borders and not allowing the influence of others to affect you. This Dalek talks the big scary talk and drips evil with the rest of them, but it’s also more vulnerable than usual, a scaredy cat without it’s tank. It needs people to support it or it ends up being seen for what it is: just a green ugly blobby thing plopping around on the floor. Now Chibnall doesn’t go full on (the way that, say, Holmes or even Russell or Moffat would have done) but it’s there if you look for it: just compare the way modern Britain is portrayed, a community that never properly talks to one another, with the opening where 9^th century Earth only defeated the Daleks because they worked together. It’s also not that much of a stretch that The Daleks, designed by Terry Nation to represent right-wing Nazis, now represent right-wing Brexiteer Reformers and UKIPpers. Just look at how they ‘take over’ and change even people we ought to like, such as Ryan’s dad or Lyn, turning them into evil racist versions of themselves. This is also where we first hear about UNIT being cancelled – something that made Chibnall the antichrist in some fan circles but which I think is meant to be more a pithy comment on Brexiteers moaning about the costs of being in the EU (it’s specifically stated that the organisation has ‘been suspended, pending review’ following its funding being pulled. Which sounds like an EU-Brexit thing to me). Of course, in the end, the only thing that stops this Dalekukip in its tracks, isn’t mirroring the hate they spew but by showing love.

Yes, love. Oh dear. Unfortunately yet again Chibnall can’t quite stick the ending and has raised the stakes to such an extent he can’t get out of them: to be fair both his predecessors have this problem too, but at least they have endings that feel like endings until you stop and think about them a bit too much. In this story Ryan loves his Dalek-infested dad enough to make him overpower the Dalek’s control. Famously Terry Nation used to turn down Dalek stories, even when they were good, if they in anyway put his creations in a light that made them stupid (give or take a few TV adverts in the 1990s when the money dried up that is). You sense he’d have thrown the phonebook at this ending, despite Chibnall getting the Daleks largely ‘right’. It just feels like a desperate way to tie two plots together that don’t belong – not least because, every time the action is just getting going, we have another scene of Ryan being mopey and his dad being rude. The way hasn’t  been paved for the dad  at all, who feels like an afterthought: as Ryan points out, he wasn’t at Grace's funeral and having never even been mentioned before (when did they even have time to give Grace a funeral? They've been whizzing through time and space all series!) These scenes are amongst the most soap opera of all of Who (they say the 5^th Doctor years were a ‘soap opera’, given John Nathan-Turner’s love of the genre and the amount of characters living together, but it’s clearly the 13^th Doctor era where everyone seems to have ‘issues’ and complex home lives) and slow the action and drama down every time the story gets moving. It’s not just that the ending undoes a good Dalek story either, it unravels Ryan’s own character arc. The whole theme of this episode, of finding forgiveness before it’s too late, is undone by everything Ryan has to say to his dad: that he’s grown up without him, found his own two feet, surrounded himself by a ‘new’ family and doesn’t need the old one that abandoned and betrayed and walked out on him. He’s found a life without his dad and even though it’s Ryan we’re talking about (so the story is re-laid in a very laidback way, as if he’s reading his phone-bill) it’s as close as we ever see Ryan come to stand for anything. To see all of that undone by an ending that has Ryan declare his great love for his dad and his dad (who’s been sniping and bitching the whole episode) declare it for his son comes out of nowhere. I’m all for characters not saying what they mean and being too hurt to speak openly and vulnerably, but there hasn’t been one iota of proof that these two have ever thought about each other in all the time they’ve been out of each other’s lives. It’s a sign, both of how much Chibnall invested in this character and how much the audience hated him, that Ryan’s dad is never seen again and only mentioned in passing once. It’s also, I would say, borderline what you can get away with for the younger members of the audience to have a Dalek take over someone’s father: it’s one thing to have them take over a companion (that’s their ‘job’), an archaeologist (you don’t meet many of those in everyday life) or a stranger (who could be anyone) but to take over someone you could perhaps identify with and turn them into a scary ruthless machine is going a stage too far I’d say.

Ah yes, those archaeologists. I’m amazed Dr Who hasn’t used the subject more: after all, it’s the closest us mortals can ever really get to time travel and a good reminder of just how big and vast the human experience is, of how our lives are bigger than our own, even without other planets to visit. Archaeology, and history in general, reminds you how fragile our species is, how easily we can be led down the wrong paths and how nearly we have wiped ourselves out several times in dates past: all very Dr Who ideas. I rather like Mitch and Lynn too, far more interesting idealistic and, well, young than the archaeologists I used to hang around with after history lectures. Admittedly that’s not always a good thing they don’t seem like any archaeologists I’ve ever seen, being too young to be left unsupervised for such an important dig for one thing, while we don’t ever find out what they’re really digging Sheffield up for. They have a good line in banter these two, though, that make them seem more like ‘real life’ people than Chibnall’s average characters (nothing helps make a character seem more multi-dimensional than sarcasm). One of his best lines of dialogue as showrunner and Russell T level of sketching in two characters in a very small amount of time is when Mitch jokingly asks if Lyn thinks they will find ‘Alfred The Great’ where they’re digging the same way Richard III was discovered under a Leicester council car park (I wish we could have an episode about him setting the record straight: he was all in all one of our better Kings and what Shakespeare wrote about him was mostly made up, especially that part about locking princes in towers that wasn’t him; The King just had a lousy p.r. manager compared to his enemies that’s all. And a hump that was a gift to his critics. But I should hope by now Dr Who fans know to look beyond surface prettiness for ‘monsters’) and she replies ‘not without a change in history and geography we won’t and Mitch laughs, admitting to never being good at those subjects. They have a love story of their own, over the incredibly romantic setting of an ancient dig, although at least this romance feels plausible which is one up from a lot we've had this year. This does happen a lot lately though doesn't it? Romantic subplots are to 2010s Who what splitting up and getting lost was to the 1960s, possession and mind control were to the 1970s and ventilation shafts were to the 1980s. We at least feel that we know these people though and they seem, much like the young Amy and Rory in ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, an obvious couple to everyone who meets them except themselves. So there Mitch is, slightly in awe of Lyn and wishing he could get up the confidence to date her, little knowing that Lyn’s teasing hides an obvious affection for Mitch too. As a result you really feel it when Lyn is the first human to succumb to the powers of the Dalek and you can understand why Mitch throws himself into harm’s way so readily compared to a lot of the supporting characters in Chibnall scripts who, by nature, should be running a mile in the opposite direction (and I add both Graham and Ryan to that list by the way). The great irony of the episode is that these two, archaeologists used to looking at the bigger picture, think they have all the time in the universe to get it together,  but it only takes one lone Dalek to come along and disrupt their plans, just as life can be disrupted by any big unexpected (usually non-Dalek related thankfully) event. Chibnall’s message, don’t wait, do it now, comes over well. 

However the rest of the plot is bananas, even by Chibnall standards. It’s clearly a joke that in the ancient past a Dalek ‘reconnaissance scout’ was defeated in the 9^th century and tidied away into three triangles of the globe: Siberia, the island of Anuta and Sheffield. It’s a nod of the hat from the showrunner to his old university town where nothing much ever seemed to happen that it’s now one of the three most important points on Earth. But think about that: having The Daleks turn up in the 9^th century, even as a long-forgotten myth, is a nonsense, both of Dalek history and our own. We don’t know which Dalek fleet they were, but even if they turned up after meeting the Doctor and seeking revenge on his ‘favourite’ planet it would have shaped their history in some way we’d have seen on screen. The Doctor, too, would have known about it and had the whole of his 3^rd incarnation to look up strange facts and figures about his newly adopted home planet. Surely a drawing of a Dalek and a myth about metal beings that came from the skies saying ‘exterminate’ would have got his attention? As for humanity, who were these amazing people who defeated the Daleks without the Doctor around, something even the killer Movellan robots who were supposed to be indestructible (in ‘Destiny Of the Daleks’) couldn’t do? Even if they were all destroyed too there would be some record of them. Plus as much as the 9^th century seems a long time ago this wasn’t ancient history when all our records were lost (most of them in the burning and looting of the Library of Alexandria – the 1^st Doctor’s fault, according to a Big Finish audio), this was a time when people wrote things down and did ad nauseum. I wouldn’t mind so much if this was your run-of-the-mill Dr Who story (the fiction has to be interspersed somewhere with the fact after all) and we could fudge around the idea we’re in an alternative timeline. Except these are two archeologists who’s job it is to know all of history. If even they haven’t heard of it before the dig (and clearly both secretly think it’s a load of hooey) then you’ve got problems. Plus surely some straggler survivor from the 9^th century, having lived through hall that mayhem and struggle, would have put up some sort of a sign or a monument basically saying ‘don’t dig here – here be Daleks!’ We’ve had weirder things in the history of the Earth I know, but most of them from  ’before time’ (like the Racnoss and Fendahl) when it can’t be contradicted. Every single bit of genuine recorded human history says this story never happened. Maybe if Chris Chibnall ever needs to make another resolution as a writer then it’s to stick to adding fictional accounts in timelines where they actually fit.  

One other issue, common to many Chibnall stories: the pacing. Notably it's slower than usual, less whizz-bang-whallop like most festive specials and more like a new year’s hangover than a pub crawl. We’ve mentioned the way we keep cutting from the bursts of activity from The Doctor to Ryan staring at his dad in gloomy silence, but it really does stop this story from coming alive. The whole story feels woefully slow and boring at times, late to get moving and too easily halted while everyone catches their breath. There’s no real tension there, even though the Dalek’s possession and it’s slow burn move to taking over the Earth ought by rights to feel huge and unstoppable. In other stories it might not be that noticeable, but in the new year’s timeslot watched while everyone is hustling and bustling about either going somewhere or coming back from somewhere, it really stands out. As for the ending, even before Ryan saves his dad from Dalekdom, the plot comes to a climax in such a weird way with The Daleks finally defeated by the bizarrest Earth object yet: a microwave. What next? A Dalek defeated with an Earth sink plunger?

There are problems with the cast too: Daniel Adegboyega really struggles to make anything out of Aaron Sinclair beyond making him a sort of ‘anti-Ryan’, self-centred and closed off (more shades, perhaps, of Chibnall’s comment on Brexit dividing Britain and how we ought to make it up, even with racist family members. Even those easily fooled by right-wing Daleks). The script asks a lot of him: he has to read out that pompous voiceover (something that’s usually OTT when the Doctor or companions are reading it out loud never mind dads of companions. Why? It just makes a mockery of a series we’re meant to ‘overhear’ rather than be ‘told’. Why would the dad know any of the scenes he isn’t in?), be enough like Ryan to be convincing as ‘just a dad’ and be terrifying as a Dalek puppet. Interestingly Daniel nails the last one (which by rights out to be the hardest) but is woeful at the other two. Mitch is played with just the right gormless hapless charm by Nikesh Patel, the first time really we’ve had the future Chibnall trope of the ‘beta male’ who can’t get it together with a girl but in many ways the best. Lyn though is a struggle, Charlotte Ritchie strong as that other future Chibnall trope the ‘alpha female’ who thinks she can get any boy she wants but has never quite got round to it but less certain of how to pitch it when she’s possessed by a Dalek. As for the regulars they really struggle reduced to their caricatures, which is a real shame given that the first story written by a showrunner who’s had the chance to actually see his cast play his characters usually knows exactly what to do with them and increases the character development, not delay it. Ryan gets more lines than ever before but doesn’t grow or change and Tosin Cole continues to play him like he’s half asleep and/or stupid, reacting with the same shrug whether his dad is back from the dead or a Dalek is nearly making him and his friends dead. Bradley Walsh is reduced, as he so often is, to making quips. There’s a moment when the dad turns up and Graham gets resentful/jealous over Ryan having his biological dad back in town but it’s fleeting, we never fully find out what he’s feeling. Yaz, more than ever before, is a spare part with nothing to do. And The Doctor? As per normal with Chibnall it’s hard to say what Dr 13 actually does. She doesn’t drive the action so much as comment on it, at speed, until confronting the baddy whereby she stops doing anything and just looks on pathetically waiting for help to arrive. It’s Ryan who saves the day for once, which ought to feel like a ‘punch-the-air’ moment as he proves to his dad that he’s not useless. Except he still is (just not quite as useless as The Doctor). As for the dialogue it’s…variable. For every joke that’s genuinely funny (‘Don’t take these with alcohol, or you’ll grow an extra head’ says The Doctor to a confused Lyn after curing her inside the Tardis) there’s another that misses. Badly (that line about the daleks cutting off the power and the children moaning about having no internet or Netflix and ‘having to talk to each other’ falls flat; once again with Chibnall it feels like he’s laughing at us rather than with us, given that he’s the reason we’re stuck inside watching TV on New Year’s day without going out somewhere and once again he’s downright rude to the younger generation who are meant to be ‘his’ fans who grew up on the 13^th Doctor. If the Doctor isn’t siding with the generation of youngsters watching the first time round you’ve had it, frankly: they should be on your side above anybody, even old-timer fans who should instead be getting nostalgic for when The Doctor was talking about them).

The result, then, is a mixed bag. There are times when Chibnall seems to has learned from his mistakes and resolved to turn over a new leaf, writing for better supporting characters and returning monsters, two of my major issues with series eleven, getting The Daleks just right. Unfortunately we still have lots of the old problems (the lack of character in the regulars, the plots that make no sense, the pacing) and to top it all off we get a new one (the soap opera aspect that nobody cared about: even Ryan, apparently, given his nonchalance). The result is, oddly enough, a surprisingly good Dalek story dropped inside another story that’s pretty characteristically terrible. The result is a convoluted watch that just isn't special enough for New Year's Day and felt like a letdown at the time – not least alongside the announcement that we wouldn’t be getting a full (and still shortened) season for another year. A year! Even though Dr Who fans know that time is relative, that still feels like an awfully long time and loses any momentum this special had built up. For all that, though, it’s a sign of how far Dr Who had fallen that ‘resolution’ still feels like a gigantic step up in many ways, giving Dr 13 a foe that’s truly worthy of The Doctor and a hint of something bigger going on in the present day that was always exactly the sort of thing Dr Who was is and always will be ‘for’.  

POSITIVES + I love the opening gag that, not content with one new year’s eve, The Doctor’s taken her fam to lots of them: apparently nineteen though we only hear about three (Sydney in 1999-2000, 1800-01 when team Tardis travelled to a dwarf planet with Giuseppe Piazzi and ‘the first’ in Mesopotamia, presumably in 0-1AD). As ever with Chibnall, these little asides and hints at other adventures seem a lot more fun and exciting than anything we actually get on screen (or indeed anything they can actually afford to do). Still, it’s a fun and quirky idea that helps sell the idea of time travel to anyone stumbling across the episode that hadn’t seen it before and gives the story a ‘present day urgency’ when The Doctor lands on the very day we’re watching (you’d be surprised how few times in the series this happens).
NEGATIVES - Oh look, we're back in Sheffield again, that's convenient. Why are the Daleks suddenly interested in the city where the Doctor by chance crash-landed the Tardis into and yet which no previous or indeed future incarnation of The Doctor had ever visited 9eve in spin-off material as far as I’m aware). Bit convenient isn't it? Anyone would think it was just so random relatives of Ryan could suddenly start showing up and keep him and Graham occupied! 
BEST QUOTE: Doctor to Dalek: ‘What do you call this look? Junkyard chic?’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Broadcast two months after the episode and roughly ten months before ‘Spyfall’, ‘I Need Your Help’ is the official name given to that year’s Comic Relief Dr Who segment. It’s one of the shortest of the lot, not quite running a minute, as the Tardis materialises in a back alley and the 13^th Doctor breaks the fourth wall to talk directly to viewers (on Earth – and on the planet Quicksarpantagarus: let’s hope the exchange rate between the two is good or we’ll be down on the trynties come the fundraising total). Weirdly the Doctor, whose spent her whole life not thinking about tax (with the one obvious exception of ‘The Sunmakers’, where it was very much a bad thing) then lectures us on how if we’re a UK taxpayer giftaid will get you another 25% on your donation (Gatherer Hade would be spinning in his grave if he was large enough to have one; only kavlons and krins are accepted on Quicksarpantagarus as being tax exempt, just so you know). None of the companions appear and the Doctor doesn’t exactly do much, making this one of the more missable charity extras despite the fun script.

Previous ‘The Battle Of Ranskoor Av Kolos’ next ‘Spyfall’

Time and The Rani: Rank - 283

 Time and The Rani

(Series 24 (20th Century), Dr 7 with Mel, 7-28/9/1987, producer:  John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writers: Pip and Jane Baker, director: Andrew Morgan)

Rank: 283

In which the Dr bumps his head on the Tardis console and has a bad dream before playing the spoons, while an old Galiffreyan rival steals the intelligence of leading scientists and dresses up as his companion... 

While we're on the subject of dodgy debuts...It seems strange to think that this episode was the baseline for everything that could go wrong with DW back when I started being a fan and yet here we are nearly at the end of January before reaching it. Anyway, anyone whose ever seen it will know why this universally hated story is near the bottom of the list: That script! (particularly the dialogue). The incomprehensible plot! Those lurid colours! The acting! Kate O'Mara impersonating Bonnie Langford! (that one alone might just be the most misguided in all of 20th century Who). And then there's poor Sylvester McCoy, dropped in at the deep end on a production team in disarray and a TV executive who was trying hard to axe the show completely and made to regenerate wearing Colin Baker's and a terrible wig because, understandably, the actor they'd just axed didn't want to come back for just one scene/story. Never mind having to speak lines written before anyone had the first clue what the new Dr might be like, never mind who was cast in the role. This is one of those stories where it was always going to go wrong because nobody felt fully in charge: not the actor just hired, the new script editor who arrived after it was commissioned nor the producer who thought he'd left the show only to be brought back at the last moment. It's the sort of story where nothing goes right and everything goes slightly wrong, the one that more than any other fans watch to make fun of and then hide from the general public in shame. For all that, though, there's nothing quite so ridiculously wrong with it as many of the lower ones on the list. It actually makes more sense than either of Pip 'n' Jane Baker's previous scripts and Kate O'Mara tries hard to make things work as the baddy. There are parts I actually like a lot. For 1987 Lakertya really does look like an alien planet with its computer bubble traps are some of the best of the 1980s. There's a fair bit of promise here that a more confident production team would have ironed out - but of course nobody was confident in DW anymore in 1987 after a suspension year and a sacking and the future of the show still in doubt. In other words if there's a reason this story doesn't work its the fault of Michael Grade, who still has the audacity to show this story as a reason why it should have been 'rested'.

Positives + McCoy is far from his best here, playing a wildly comic ditzy version of his stage persona as a circus performer as everyone tries hard to stop him being like Colin baker without actually knowing what to make him like. You can see why so many fans hated him on the spot after the first episode when he's extremely irritating, misquoting axims and playing the spoons. But Sylv, an improvisational comic whose TV experience had mostly been on children's Tv before this, learns on the spot how to shrug off all the people giving him notes and learn and grow into the role. by episode 4 he's nailed the darker, moodier Dr we'll come to know more. In the context of what was going on behind the scenes the wonder isn't that he messed up episodes 1-3 but that he got there in the end.

Negatives - It's a longstanding complaint that people in Drip 'n' pain Baker's scripts don't talk the way people do. Any people. This really shows in this story's big emotional scenes where people are trapped or scared or - God help us - impersonated by a renegade timelord in a girly squeaky voice. There should be a lot of moving stuff in this plot but it ends up just being pantomime.

The Woman Who Fell To Earth: Rank - 284

 The Woman Who Fell To Earth

(Season 11, Dr 13 with Graham, Ryan and Yaz,  7/10/2018, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Jamie Childs)

Rank: 284

It's the debut of Jodie Whittaker's Dr and Chris Chibnall's time as showrunner, not to mention 4 varying companions (one of which they kill off here) on a story not really much like the era to come that might more accurately be titled 'Space Oddity'... 

Re-watching this one after the end of the Jodie Whittaker run is a very different experience to watching it at the time, now that we can see which bits were quirks of this particular episode and which were of the series as a whole. At the time I might have put this one right at the bottom rung of the ladder, given that it lacks the 'special' feel of all the other DW debuts - a lowkey start to a new era with a bonkers but pathetic new enemy, no links to the past beyond the name (not even the Tardis) and post regenerative trauma that makes the Dr quite unwatchably bonkers for long periods. Most of all though the chance to see the universe through a whole new showrunner's eyes is reduced to wandering around the uglier parts of Sheffield in the dark. Watching it again though lets you enjoy the things that the rest of the Chibnall era didn't really do. Keeping so much of it to the 4 regulars (plus Grace) gives them all more character than they'll ever have again, in time we'll get so bored of old monsters returning Tzim-Sha doesn't seem so bad and it'll end up being quite rare staying in the present day for quite so long as this. Oh and that post regenerative trauma? Actually it's gone within a few minutes and this regeneration of the Dr is really going to be like that for 30 whole episodes. Still, you can't win them all. Thankfully the preaching here is kept to a minimum and even the speech about gender equality we feared might come after the Dr changed gender was handled nicely with 'why are you calling me madam? Wait I'm a woman? Really? Busy day!' one of a few great lines this episode. Like the era that follows its a bump watch, with a big finale set on a crane particularly something of an anticlimax following 'Rose' and 'The 11th Hour' et al. At times though it does take off and that fall to Earth is in style.

Positives + Grace is great. She's sassy, naughty, rebellious and has all the best lines. I'd have been more than happy to see her as a regular, particularly compared to the three drips we got. So of course she's the one who has to snuff it before the end credits. One of many confusing writing decisions that sum up the era.

Negatives- Ryan, for instance, is very poorly handled. As a dyspraxic I can't tell you how much the scenes of him trying and failing to ride a bike made me wince. Even undiagnosed I knew at 8 that riding bikes just wasn't going to be a thing for me. Ryan is 19 and knows why he can't ride one. Presumably the scenes of him trying and failing over and over again are meant to make him seem determined and for it to seem endearing. But it doesn't. So he can't ride a bike? No problem - he's 19, everyone's out in cars by then anyway. Had they made his dyspraxia make him fail his test I would have believed it more. The 'struggling to climb stairs' scene also hints that Ryan can overcome his co-ordination problems if he really tries hard enough. Trust me, you can't. Dyspraxia is a fault of the brain where the synapses don't line up properly. All the wishful thinking in the world ain't going to put that right. What's worse is that future episodes will have Ryan doing the most ridiculously accurate co-ordinated things with no mention of his dyspraxia. We don't get much representation on TV; it matters when they get it this wrong. What makes it worse is that Chris Chibnall says he got the idea after knowing a relative with the condition - yet he clearly didn't understand it at all. They had all the right intentions and could have done so much good and they blew it! Ultimately its that aspect of this episode that's going to sum up the era more than anything else.