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(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.
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’
(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
In which something nasty is discovered buried under a town centre. And no, it's not Richard III (who was actually one of our nicer Kings but who had a really really bad p.r. manager)...
Chris Chibnall didn't want the pressure of writing a Christmas special so, for the first time, we got a New Year's Day special instead. Now, unlike Xmas, New Year's is only special 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. Notably it's slower than usual, less whizz-bang-whallop like most festive specials and more like a hangover than a pub crawl - which is odd but does at least mean the plot is easier to follow. The plot is based around archaeology, something which isn't often used in DW even though its the closest us mortals can ever really get to time travel and uses it well, so a big tick for that. Also, we've never really spent time with the Daleks outside their famous exterior shells and this episode makes strong use of just how creepy a mutated blob is when its trying to possess you, so big tick there too. The problems come with the cast: there's a dumb soap opera sub-plot about Ryan's dad suddenly turning up despite not being 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!) As if that wasn't sickening enough the main sub-cast are having a romance 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. The result is the weakest Dalek story, a convoluted watch that just isn't special enough for New Year's Day and yet one that I still prefer to most of the rest of the Chibnall era, with nothing that goes terribly wrong either.
Positives + Against all the odds, after some seriously limp monsters in season 11, Chibnall turns out to be one of the better writers specifically for the Daleks. Here he makes them properly scary and dangerous again, capturing their sheer desperation and Brexity need to be pure at all costs no matter who it hurts - even when its them.
Negatives - Oh look, we're back in Sheffield again, that's convenient. Why are the Daleks suddenly interested in where the Dr crashed into and found her companions, even though they don't know that. 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!
(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.
(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.
(Special, Dr 8 with Grace, 27/5/1996 (UK premiere, a fortnight after the USA and Canadian premiere), producer/showrunners: Phillip David Segal, Alex Beaton, Jo Wright, Peter V Ware and Anthony Jacobs, writer: Matthew Jacobs, director: Geoffrey Sax)
Rank: 285
It's time to drezzzz for the occcashun as the TV movie aka that weird American McGann thing is here!...
He was finally back! After a 7 year absence! And - to quote the best thing about it, the promotional tagline - it was about time! Oh and it was American too, the only time DW has ever been made outside the UK (though like many things American it was actually filmed in Canada where it's cheaper, for some reason). The build up to this was colossal and so was the budget, at least in relative terms to the BBC. Things seemed so promising too: a long list of high profile names were auditioned and the process seemed to go on for so long it felt as if time had stood still (I long for a parallel universe where I can watch Tony Slattery, John Sessions or Michael Palin. Though frankly I'm grateful it wasn't Rowan Atkinson or Michael Crawford). In the end it went to Paul McGann, who looked bemused the whole way through (then again, so would I if I was made to wear his wig). The result was...odd. It all felt small somehow, inconsequential, despite all the fuss and big effects. So many decisions were just wrong. The casting for a start: McGann is a really good Dr now he's had time to adapt the part to his strengths as a more battle-scarred emotional quirky Dr, but as a kissable Edwardian Brit standing on a box to make himself look taller and not much to go on in the script he's totally lost. A lot of fans like Julia Roberts' brother Eric as the latest Master but for me he's worse a strange mixture of an ice-cold presence who still hams up every word he speaks. As for Grace it's great to have another Dr in the Tardis but seeing as her character traits seem to consist of being haughty, loving opera and random kissing she's not exactly a great character either. As for the plot it's another one that re-writes all of DW history. The idea of the Dr being half-human 'on his mother's side' is rightly mocked by fans, but the idea of the eye of harmony powering the Tardis is actually a pretty neat idea (if too easy a solution at the end). In other words it's a near unmitigated disaster that, as such a high profile episode, killed the franchise off for another 9 years. Fans speak of it in hushed tones nowadays, if at all (it doesn't even have a name we all agree on. 'That weird McGann thing' is how most fans know it; 'Grace:1999' my favourite nickname). For all that, though, there's...something there. Writer Matthew Jacobs is clearly a fan (his dad was in 'The Gunfighters' episode in 1966 after all and once took him on set; a lot of Wild West tropes end up here too). McCoy's departing Dr is well written for (well, before and after they kill him off anyway), the millennium setting is fun, there's a nie lot of action between the talking and there are some clever one liners too. Had this gone to series, with the (many) problems wrinkled out I'm one of those fans who reckons this might have worked out. Yes, even the remake of 'The Web Planet' from 1965 with its giant ants and butterflies they were talking about doing. As a 90min one-off though it just had too much to do and got too much of that wrong.
Positives +Poor McCoy had a thankless job. He's effectively fired here after 9 very interrupted years, dies in the least heroic way possible (of all the Drs its this one that forgets to check the scanner during a gun battle?!) and has the indignity of his (even) smaller co-star standing on a box. He doesn't even get many actual words. And yet still he shines, outclassing all the more famous actors and actresses here.
Negatives - Nobody talks about it with so many other higher profile mistakes going on but creepy comedy morgue attendant Pete is my candidate for the single word, or at least unfunniest, Dr Who character ever. I can kind of see why things went wrong with every other aspect of this episode, made it was a by a whole new production team, but how did this part go so very wrong?
(Season 12, Dr 13 with Graham Ryan and Yaz, 2/2/2020, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writers: Pete McTighe and Chris Chibnall, director: Jamie Magnus Stone)
Rank: 286
Plastic not fantastic! A party political broadcast on behalf of climate change combined with a properly scary, moody story...
It's quite eerie in retrospect how much this episode, made in 2019 and broadcast in Feb 2020, foreshadowed covid and perfectly imagines an unsettled world suffering from an unseen virus caused by a climate change and made worse by disinformation. Now this is Dr Who we're talking about so the virus in the microplastics that litter our planet are being used to evil ends by an alien mastermind but the principle's much the same. It's legitimately scary too in a way that most of the Chibnall era isn't, with everyone taking this story seriously for once. Best of all there are some action scenes in between the dialogue - ones that are integral to the plot too. It just...doesn't feel like DW somehow. It's uncharacteristically joke-free and sombre, the use of voiceovers is (largely) new and the alien might as well have been Human given that they look just like 'us'. There was an outcry at the time about DW doing a story about climate change, presumably from people who'd never seen 'The Green Death' in 1973. It feels like exactly the sort of thing DW should have been doing. I just wish it felt more like DW when it was doing it, with everyone acting oddly out of character.
Positives + It's one of those rare DW stories set on earth but outside Britain, with some clever location filming in South Africa standing in for all sorts of countries and giving this episode real scope and makes the threat feel worldwide.
Negatives - Unfortunately, while worthy, it goes way overboard at times and is DW at its preachiest, with some scenes unwatchable. Even when it's right I hate the way Chibnall era DW assumes that I'm part o the 'problem' not the 'solution'.
(Season 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 4/10/2014, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Peter Harness, director: Paul Wilmshurst)
Rank: 287
In which it's a loney looney lunar Doctor Who voyage into space that's a real alien curate insect's egg
This one is such a season 8 episode, in both good ways and bad, taken to extremes. It asks several very pertinent grown-up questions of time-travel and saving the universe. Who should you trust? How many lies should you tell to cover it up in your daily life? Does humanity have any greater right to life than a species who only want to multiply and thrive rather than destroy? The Doctor is worn out from answering such questions and leaves them up to Clara, but is she really qualified to think beyond her own species? As our identification in the series, what would we do by extension? Perhaps most fundamentally it asks the question is the life you live worth the risk if it hurts the people around you? And then it ruins all that hard work with two most random decisions. Would Clara really risk the life of a pupil she barely knows on a moonbase crawling in winged alien insects? Moreover would the Doctor let her, given that last time he was here he met a bunch of Cybermen? And all that pontificating by one of the most ridiculous plot resolutions in years. You know the moon? That big thing hanging there in the sky? earth's only satellite that's been there as long as the Human race? That's an egg that is. All that time and nobody's guessed. I mean, maybe you would have thought Apollo 11 would have cracked it open by sticking a whacking great flag in the crust? Wouldn't one of our scientists have noticed a heartbeat or the traces of an alien winged insect? This isn't in some parallel dimension either, nor the distant future, nor the distant past. It hatches in 2049. Even though the alien quickly lays another one (weird in itself) you would have thought this would have had some impact on humanity in future episodes but no one ever mentions it before or since. Not even the cybermen who invaded a base in 2070 there but no one ever mentioned needing an egg whisk! This is the sort of one-off joke fans love laughing at in annuals and cigarette cards, never mind on TV, and is such an odd denouement to such a thoughtful, cerebral story it rather overshadows it.
+ I don't follow the argument, common in fan circles, that Clara is just a walking plot device rather than a 'real person'. Jenna Coleman is exceptional here, wrestling with big concepts even when they prove to be daft, making Clara by turns curious, calm, funny, outraged, protective and guilt-ridden and you believe it all. This is one of Peter Capaldi's better episodes too. - Coal Hill School has really gone downhill since Susan left! Courtney is an extremely irritating character, but its not the actresses' fault - that's the way she's written. It's like someone believed the worst lies about Generation Z and stuck them all together in one stereotype of someone's whose ignorant, rude, easily offended and blase even when whisked off into space. I doubt anyone in the production team ever knew anyone that age when making this. You also have to wonder why they did it, given that they were then at just the right age to start becoming Whovians back then. In retrospect no wonder the ratings started to freefall after this point in time when this was meant to be 'their' representative.
(Season 11, Dr 13 with Graham Ryan and Yaz, 9/12/2018, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Jamie Childs)
Rank: 288
In an emoji: đŸ”«
'Thinking
outside the Uxx for 3707 years’
Since its return in 2005 Dr Who had gone for big series finales – stories that seem colossal and complex and ties up all sorts of loose ends. The Chris Chibnall years hadn’t fitted to any one pattern though, so we were really intrigued how he might cope with a series now that it didn’t seem to be quite as obsessed with such things as series arcs and big moments in quite the same way. Would this series go big, go small or go home (to, you know, Sheffield, the closest this era of the series has to a ‘base’)? Would we finally see returning monsters as we’d been sort of half-promised, kept back across the year for a the big reveal at the end? Or discover a whole new race of impossible brilliance we’d never come across before who’d been secretly pulling strings unseen and connecting all these adventures together? After all, it had to be something big, right? For all its faults it felt as if series eleven was really leading somewhere, with a run of stories that all seemed to be playing with higher stakes across the series’ second half, so even fans who were mildly disappointed with how the year had gone so far, like me, felt that something unexpected and brilliant was about to happen. Instead Chibnall seemed to confuse extraordinary with ordinary and aftwr a series of defying expectations in every way chose this moment to stop give us a story that is as Dr Whoey as they come, about an alien that was being greeted as a long lost God (shades of ‘Face Of Evil’) in a world of telepaths (‘The Sensorites’ ‘The Sunmakers’ et al) in the wake of a battle (‘The War Games’ etc) using bits of local technology to take over people’s minds (way too many to mention) filmed on a quarry doubling as an alien planet in near-darkness (see a good third of every Dr Who story from every era). This story couldn’t have been more Dr Who-like if it had a scarf and a packet of jelly babies and came packed in a big blue box. We didn’t quite know what to think – or at any rate I didn’t. Finally we got the return-to-basics Dr Who tale that I’d been calling for, but at the time when I least expected it. The result is a story that, you have to say sees far less go ‘wrong’ than a lot of the 2018 series. So why weren’t we pleased? Well, apart from the fact that Dr Who fans are never pleased for very long, the sad truth was that this story just didn’t feel special: there’s a time and place in time and space for stories like these that don’t do much new and don’t get much wrong (and this story does get less wrong than probably any other story from this troubled year), but the long-awaited series finale isn’t it. We expected something big and bold and we got small and flat. That’s what happens with purchases from Ikea, not Dr Who stories at the end of a series.
At least there’s that much promised, oft-hinted returning monster though, at last! Now we’d see what the Chibnall era was made of, with a chance to compare how his era did things compared to the showrunners and producers who’d come before...Only cheekily that promised returning monster turns out to be Tzim-Sha from ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth, the not-that memorable alien from the seasons’ opening story twelve weeks earlier. Time enough for most fans to have forgotten him completely. Most of us had him down as an embarrassment never to be mentioned again, not a returning regular. Bringing him back for the all-important season finale is the equivalent of making the big stories of yesteryear like Tennant having a showdown with the scribble monster from 'Fear Her' or having the all-important Hartnell-Troughton regeneration triggered by Yartek, leader of the Alien Voord. To be fair, ol’ blue face’s return gives him a much better story this time around and gets to be more than just background detail while a regenerating Doctor gets on with the business of meeting her new friends and it’s a concept that picks up on a lot of true Dr Who ideals from the Russell T and Steven Moffat years, of how the Doctor’s actions bring consequences. When the Doctor sent Timmy away from Earth with a flea in his ear he crash-landed onto the strangely named planet of Ranskoor Av Kolos where the superstitious local population treated him as a God, re-building their civilisation around him and his technology. It’s a setting that plays nicely into Tim’s ego and the combination of his knowhow and the locals’ telepathic abilities makes for a much stronger sense of jeopardy and an unknowable, unstoppable force this time around. Even so, it’s hardly a thrilling revelation the thought that a villain we barely remembered and that the Doctor had already beaten without breaking sweat was being brought back again (honestly, when The Doctor said ‘I know that voice!’ it took me a few scenes to place it, never a good sign when so much of the story hinges on his big return). I applaud Chibnall’s idea for not bringing any monsters back straight away after the Moffat era was so full of them you couldn’t turn on your DVD without tripping over a stray ‘Tenth Planet’ Cybermen or a Weeping Angel, but it’s also a dangerous game because if you put enough emphasis on these characters to bring them back they have to be good and Tzim-Sha is just, well, ordinary. If it had been the talking frog from last week it would have been less of a surprise somehow.
The Uxx are one of Chibnall’s better ideas though, beings who are holding the planet together through their miraculous mental powers, even if they end up not doing very much with them that we actually get to see (we just have to take it on ‘faith’ that they do, which is very apt really given the main theme of this story). This was the era of Roblox and Minecraft when world-building was in and many fans were walking around with their eyes glued to their phone thinking up imaginary worlds – having beings who are effectively glued into their computers keeping together the very world we’re on (a little like ‘Logopolis’, but from a more poetic rather than mathematical point of view) is both very in keeping with Dr Whos in the past and nicely contemporary. Even if there’s a disappointing lack of square robot chickens in this world to ram the point home (though a lot of Dr Who villains lend themselves to the chunkier square style – there was, indeed, an official Dr Who-Roblox crossover in 2020, when the fad had all but died out). Like The Mentiads before them the Uxx are a telepathic race with impossible powers that just happen to be mute and so can’t tell us about themselves. With my cynical head on, they’re handy for budget reasons as it means the production team can just wire some extras up to the mains and not have to pay for many speaking roles, but with my story-telling head on they work all the same: in a race of thinkers meeting a ‘doer’ who doesn’t think stuff through and shouts as much as Tzi,-Sha must have seemed very, well, alien for lack of a better world. They’re a powerful force in their own right, but their abilities have been left without direction till now and the problem with that is that you trust whoever comes along first and tells you what you want to hear: sadly for the Doctor Tzimmy Tzimy Tim-Tims got there first. Though I would have still liked to feel it more, there is a nice sense here of the sheer horror of being told that the entity you’ve built your entire civilisation round for thousands of years is nothing but a fraud and the identity crisis that comes with that. It’s a fitting message that’s run through Dr Who since the beginning, of making your mind up without just taking traditions on trust, but it’s one that’s never been done quite like this in the series before, in such a faith setting: of the earlier stories only ‘gridlock’ does something similar, by creating a whole religion around a traffic jam, but even that’s quite sweet and doesn’t quite come out and say ‘it’s all a lie!’ in case a Church somewhere gets offended. That’s the theme though: that just because you’ve believed in something for 3707 years doesn’t make it right. At last, in series 11’s dying moments, it’s that as much as anything else that makes this feel like ‘proper’ Dr Who again at last – the pushing against the envelope and using this series to actually say things that could only be hinted at in the past.
I wonder too if there’s something darker going on in the ideas of memories being wiped. That’s a big thing for Chibnall as a writer, in the same way playing with time was for Moffat and the dangers of becoming smug was for Russell, appearing so often in this era that it feels like something of a personal crusade (Chibnall’s talked far less than either of his predecessors so we don’t know, but I’m willing to bet there’s someone with Alzheimer’s in the Chibnall family tree somewhere). All three series arcs under Chibnall are basically about the same thing: people forget something important that would have shaped their lives in a different way. In time the Doctor will end up having her memories of her past wiped (‘The Timeless Child’) and hide her companions back amongst their own timelines (‘Flux’- and notice how similar that name is to ‘Uxx’, as if it’s an idea that wouldn’t let Chibnall go) but for now we get this on a much smaller scale, with a bunch of people we don’t know struggling to remember who they used to be. Or is the inspiration much closer to home, in a Who context? The idea mirrors the defensive ‘memory cheats’ slogan John Nathan-Turner used to say in the 1980s when fans used to criticise shows for not being like the ‘olden days’ (for good reason too, as we know now we can see most of them any time we like) – one of the people who rubbished that idea in 1987 (on the TV discussion programme ‘Open Air’ which debated the highs and lows of ‘Time and the Rani’) and who openly attacked writers Pip and Jane Baker and JNT himself was none other than… seventeen year old Chris Chibnall. Most writers on Dr Who pick up on the idea of regeneration and think it’s a series all about change, but I like the slightly crooked Chibnall angle that it’s a series that’s also about remembering who you are, even when events try to change you.
Talking of which, this plot also offers a nice series arc sense of closure for Graham and Ryan who’ve been running away from their grief this whole time, mourning their wife/nan Grace who died at Tzim’s hands in the season’s opening story and getting their revenge. It does a lot to build Graham’s character, as the comedy stooge suddenly turns into a gun-toting warrior hell bent on revenge, angry enough to defy The Doctor’s wishes and try to blow them out the sky. It all feels like a natural part of his character development, especially after being teased by Grace’s ghost last week in ‘It Takes You Away’. However even then something goes a bit funny: Graham’s a relative newcomer on the scene – he’s clearly besotted with Grace but truly he hasn’t known her all that long. Ryan’s known her all his life – on paper he should be the one chomping at the bit for revenge with his older Grandad, whose seen much more of life, trying to calm him down. Characterwise, though, they’re the ‘wrong’ way round for this. Ryan’s so laidback it’s a wonder he stays upright when he sits down – at times this makes him seem childish, to the point of imbecility, but sometimes as per here it makes him feel wise: faced with the face of the man who caused his nan to die he basically shrugs his shoulders and goes ‘oh well’, responding to Tzim-Sha as if he’s a mate down the pub who forgot to repay a fiver. It’s dramatically ‘wrong’ yet entirely in character that Graham, the more passionate of the two, would be the one waving the gun ,but you’d think that Ryan would at least be mildly miffed. There is, at least, a satisfying ending for the two where Graham admits to not being able to shoot in the end (the Doctor’s and Ryan’s warnings playing in his mind) and he seems to be about to have sacrificed his life in vain, till Ryan comes back to stop him and Graham finally gets to shoot out of defence to save his step-Grandson (albeit in the leg), the two acknowledging their newfound respect for each other and becoming ‘family’. Seeing them chat happily and fist bump over having shot an alien in the foot and stuck him an a stasis chamber might not be every family’s ideal situation to bond over, but it kind of works for them as characters and doesn’t feel forced or unearned, unlike a lot of the big emotional set pieces in this era. Had the two characters stopped their travels with the Doctor here it would have felt like a worthy end (and it was a surprise at the time that the ever busy Bradley Walsh, at least, was staying on for a second year) and the first time round there’s a slight frisson of danger that one or more of these characters won’t make it out alive.
Against this familiar backdrop Jodie Whittaker's Dr suddenly springs into life: her babbling is deliberately distracting rather than annoying, as she covers up her confusion by confusing others and managing to be both the moral high ground and the most alien alien in the room. She’s not just rude or angry for no reason in this one and after instructing his writers to make this Doctor unearthly and aloof for most of the year Chibnall finally writes her as warm and caring, just easily distracted and socially awkward. She’s almost nice to Graham at the end in fact, which is a colossal change from where we started last time everyone was fighting Mr Blue. As the last script of the year Chibnall’s been able to watch how Jodie Whittaker adds to his dialogue and has worked out that she’s a lot better at eccentric colour than she is at long scientific speeches or big emotions, so he gives her lots of cute little scenes that suit her offbeat regeneration, such as the one where she pontificates about being there at the creation of the wellington boot or having too many ideas in her brain at once. She’s a much calmer Doctor all round, which in turn makes her more authoritarian this week. Yaz, though, still continues to do almost nothing – it’s always tricky to give the cast enough to do when there are three companions (as happened in the Hartnell, Troughton and Davison eras too), but Yaz always seems to be getting the short straw. On this planet of all planets you think she’d snap into place and start taking control as a trained policewoman or at least leading the locals to safety automatically, as it’s not that different to what she does in her day to day job anyway, while the thought of an alien race who creates the laws and makes them bad ought to make this one of the scariest foes a rule-worshipping straightlaced companion like Yaz ever faces. But all she gets to do is stand at the back and occasionally ask questions as if the writer had forgotten she’s there; she doesn’t even notice the whacking great guy tied to a wall because she’s too busty staring at planets (it’s part of her training to sum up situations really quickly and work our priorities of what to do and who to save – so this scene would have worked with ordinary simpletons like Graham or Ryan but not Yaz). Mostly we just forget she’s there. It’s clear that she’s Chibnall’s least favourite of his four children and only really snaps into focus during season 13 and ‘Flux’, long after the point where most Dr Who companions have left already.
There’s a much bigger problem with this story though: it’s all so small scale. Not just for a series finale either: the title of this story alone promises us a ‘battle’ but, a solitary explosion aside, this story suffers from the usual Chibnall curse of being all talk and no trousers, with almost no action and characters standing around declaiming at people instead of getting on with it. The battle of the title was fought for long ago, all we have now are the smoky ruins and people discussing what happened. There’s a scene at the end where Tzim-Sha talks to the Doctor about his evil plan for nearly five whole minutes while The Doctor stands around looking a bit lost. Exposition is an inevitable part of mot plots and you need some scenes somewhere to tell us what’s going on, but the smart writers do something clever with it, while doing something else like have the heroes running down a corridor or having multiple characters learn different things in the same scene or simply doing something against type (my favourite example is the Doctor discussing his plan to get Ben and Polly back from their brainwashed selves to Jamie while stuffed into a photo-booth in between posing for photographs as per ‘The Faceless Ones’). There’s just no sense of a dramatic build here, of one scene leading to another, of a feeling of impending doom and at no point foes it feel as if these characters are in any lasting danger, even from a being who starts off having the entire planet on their side and claims to be a God (you’d think there’d be some angst here given Grace’s death, but that was an accident, a consequence of Tzim-Sha’s actions and her bravery, he didn’t shoot her or blow her up). That’s another thing: where are all the characters? We only see a small handful of them, a few stragglers from crashed spaceships with memories wiped (where do they get their food and resources? Even if their minds have been brainwashed to not need food you’d think their bodies would still disintegrate) and a handful of Uxx world-building with their own ‘Mindcraft’. It should all be so big and epic and it’s a story on the verges of being big throughout, but until a sort of vaguely medium-sized ending that would feel small in most stories, almost nothing happens all the way through. The Doctor and companions stumble around, they meet locals with their memories wiped, they discover the alien big bad and only then, at the very end, do they stop him. Eventually. You have to really feel for composer Segun Akinola who comes up with some of his best musical themes for this story but then has to keep them going and going and going, playing that particular sort of scraping sound you only get in TV and films that tells you that something’s about to happen and you’re not allowed to rest but it’s not quite here yet, a score that lasts for nearly half an hour yet barely gets to change key. Because the script doesn’t really change key either.
Unfortunately the supporting cast are as forgettable as they come – not least because they’ve all had their memories wiped. It’s a useful plot contrivance, meaning that the Doctor (and us at home) don’t just get to have all the answers handed to us on a plate in the opening minutes, but at the same time it also means that the action draws to a halt while people walk around clutching their temples going ‘I can’t remember’ and pulling a gun on our Tardis team because they’ve forgotten they did it a few minutes ago already. If this were a book it would work quite well, but it’s poor telly with people standing around a cave in the dark doing the same things over and over. By its very nature Dr Who is a series full of capturing and escaping and staving off the big showdown till the end. But it’s a series that usually makes up for that with something else going on to break up the action, a sub-plot that piques our interest. ‘Ranskoor’ is as vanilla as A-plots come too: there is no plot, other than the returning villain taking over the planet that Graham has beef with. Other than a few bits of colour and characterisation sprinkled through like hundreds and thousands on top at random, this is a plain cake with no icing and when the main plot is as basic as this it makes everything else feel flat. The basics are more right here than perhaps anywhere else in series 11, but you need more than just the basics to make a good television programme. By his own admission Chibnall seems to have realised this. While he’s still proud of ‘The Timeless Child’ and ‘Orphan 55’ (despite all fan opinion to the contrary) he’s admitted that this story wasn’t ‘special’ enough but was the victim of the tight deadlines on a show like this, the one that lost out given the sometimes heavy re-writes on other episodes, a self-admitted ‘first draft’ that went into production because no alternatives were available.
In which case maybe Chibnall should have had tighter deadlines not looser ones? ‘Ranskoor' is, in context, refreshingly free of the convolutions, complexities or plot-holes of other stories this year. Of all the Chibnall scripts (as opposed to Chibnall era scripts as there are some great ones by outside writers to come, or Chibnall scripts for other showrunners as there are some classics there too), this is one that gets the most right – or at any rate, the least wrong. There is a decent Dr Who plot here, even if it’s one we’ve had a few dozen times already. There is a big emotional crisis that for once doesn’t feel forced, even though its one resolved in the plainest no frills kind of a way. There is a villain whose sort of a threat, even if Tzim-Sha is still hardly a top tier villain and even though we’re told about his amazing powers we don’t really get to see them in action. The companions feel more ‘real’ than at any time this year, although none of them feels like people you particularly love or find yourself rooting for either. Watching this at the time gave the combined sense of ‘oh at last!’ coupled with the feeling that ‘we should be further on than this by the end of a year’. All season finales in Dr Who were deeply memorable til this one – sometimes, admittedly, not for all the right reasons, but there isn’t one that you could forget, This one just doesn’t lodge itself into the brain at all, to the point where I began to remember so little about this show before re-watching it I thought Tzim-Sha had wiped my memory too. It’s not a catastrophe, but it’s not terribly memorable either. And, in a sign of worrying things to come, it all looks terribly cheap too, like the bad old days, with objects of remarkable power made out of flimsy polystyrene and a villain who looks as if he’s been painted with blue felt-tip pens. Still, compared to where we were across the rest of most of the series, the fact this problem even stands out compared to the usual bigger problems of storytelling and plotholes and monsters is telling in itself. Like many a battle, this one’s a stalemate, the good and the bad pretty much equally cancelling each other out.
POSITIVES + There’s a great, subtle, quiet moment between two of the Ux (almost the only words we hear them speak) about their faith and what it means to them, which after so many decades of not being willing to put religion on screen (officially as per BBC guidelines in the 20th century, by choice in the 21st so as not to upset anyone) makes this the one part of the episode that feels ‘new’. Delpth has been training for his religious career for seventeen years, but even before he discovers his ‘God’ is a big blue alien he’s having doubts. How can he teach others what he doesn’t believe in himself? His teacher Andidno tells him that ‘the more we learn the more realise how little we know’, with the idea that there must be something out there to explain what science cannot – but that faith is more than just a science that has all the answers, it has to be felt and experienced more than its understood. A few more deep-thinking and original moments like this in the Chibnall era would have gone down a treat.
NEGATIVES - For the love of humanity, please could an alien planet afford to pay some bills and stick some lights on, pretty please?! This is a problem with many shows of this era not just Dr Who: for some reason I the second half of the 2010s people equated drama with darkness, even when (as stories like ‘Ghostlight’ demonstrate) used in the right way light can be just as effective. No wonder the Tardis visits Edison and Tesla not long after this for some artificial light, it’s got eyestrain from materialising in the dark too often...
BEST QUOTE: ‘You ask too many questions’ ‘That’s what my teachers said too. Usually just before they gave up teaching’.
