Demons Of The Punjab: Rank - 304

                         Demons Of The Punjab

(Season 11, Dr 13  Graham Ryan and Yaz, 11/11/2018, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writers: Viney Patel, director: Jamie Childs)

Rank: 304

'I’m the Doctor and here are your wedding vows: For better for worse, depending on how deeply you looked into the un-tempered schism. To have and to hold, however many arms you have. To love and to cherish with both of your hearts. From this day forward – or backwards – or sideways. Till death do you part, eventually, after 13 regenerations or however many lifespans your particular species has. You may kiss the bride. But be careful, you don’t know where in the universe they’ve been’.  

At last! A fun action packed episode with killer turtles!...Oh wait, no, that's the offscreen story we've just left in favour of another lecture wrapped up as entertainment. Now, I should adore this episode as it’s exactly the sort of thing I want Dr Who to do more of: it’s a big emotional companion-heavy story set somewhere outside London (or Cardiff) for a change and set in one of the most fascinating historical eras of them all: the 1947 partition of India. So many of the best Dr Who stories come from one side set against another when nothing is as black and white as right and wrong and few scenarios lend themselves to that sort of story better than the artificial dividing line that was drawn up between Pakistan and India, despite the fact that so many people who counted themselves as one or the other fell into the ‘wrong’ side. Dr Who is a series that’s all about breaking down barriers between people, be they humans, aliens, cyborgs or giant overgrown insects, of finding common ground between everyone, so neighbours who used to be friends (or at any rate grudging co-workers) turned enemies and traitors is exactly what this series should be about, a powder keg of tension waiting to be lit. Only for some odd reason we don’t get that story (there’s decidedly little jeopardy and violence in this story even than normal), we get an odd alien invasion plot grafted on top of a bland soap opera about a family we just don’t know (it would have helped the feeling that this story has grown organically if Yaz had so much as mentioned her nan in the four stories before this one or indeed in a future one).It’s such a wasted opportunity that this of all stories, which is exactly what Dr Who was for, ends up being just another Dr Who runaround with monsters, interrupted by a wedding that goes on so long it feels like it lasts longer than some whole alien cultures. This story could have been so much more, but every brave step it tries to take, every knowing stance it tries to hold, every rule of the usual Dr Who storytelling it tries to break ends up being watered down until you get a story, set in one of the most bloody and violent and downright busy periods of human history, where barely anything happens at all. 

 There are two big Eratos in the room this week that they don’t dare mention or at any rate barely mention anywhere. One is the way that this division was on religious grounds as much as anything else, the artificial barrier setting off long-standing feuds between Muslim and Hindu families. Dr Who used to be quite radical in the way it tackled the idea of a multi-faith society on screen in its early days (‘The Crusade’ might well be the single bravest bit of TV of the 1960s, in the way it suggests Christianity isn’t all its cracked up to be and not all Muslims are infidels) but since then it’s become far more squeamish about even the mention of the question of faith (even while it’s become less squeamish about blood and violence and politics). So they mention it, because they have to, then stick it in the background and hope we don’t actually notice. We get told that this is a Muslim falling in love with a Hindu and defying both their faiths, Romeo and Juliet style, but that’s about it really – we’re told that people from both sides don’t like it without ever being told why. If you stop to think about it though it’s easy to see why: neither God accepts that the other God exists. It’s easier to look the other way when strangers are marrying strangers and your religion tells you that neither are going to make it into heaven, but this is the family of both sides convinced that their family member is being condemned to either non-existence or a fiery death in Hell. They’d be way madder and be trying way harder to stop this wedding than anyone does on screen. Prem is the only one to really voice opposiotion and he’s painted as such a boo=-hjiss baddy that we’re not meant to listen to what he says, but from his point of view he’s trying to stop his brother throwing his life away – not just with his new wife, but the afterlife, for all eternity. You can debate whether he’s right or wrong (and in a series that’s all about tolerance, whatever certain critics of the recent era may say, it’s obvious which side it comes down on) but nevertheless the story makes him out as being a ‘baddy’ when all he’s trying to do is stop his brother committing a cardinal sin that will condemn him for all time. But of course they can’t mention the afterlife in a still-sort-of-for- kids show on at a Saturday teatime so what could been a fascinating opportunity for a discussion of faith and tolerance and compromises gets ducked in the mix until it’s barely there at all. 

 The other big unspoken element is that the partition is, well, to put it brutally kind of ‘our’ fault. There’s a reason most Dr Who stories set in the past 200 odd years tend to be set in Britain: we’re the villain in a lot of the stories that might be set in other cultures. (let’s face it, we’ve been at war with most people at some point). This story is set in 1947 and the disintegration of the British Empire. When our soldiers pulled out of the raj we had established there we left a country that hadn’t known anything else for decades and left them to govern themselves. That’s an opportunity for all sorts of extremists to get involved in politics when they think the government of the day is distracted and so it proved. The country left behind was just too big to be ruled by local administration but something needed to be done, so a decision was taken to make an arbitrary land in the sand, right down the middle of the country, regardless of the different cultures and sub-cultures that had grown up in between or the religious tensions between the two sides. Like the Berlin Wall to come and Hadrian’s Wall I the past its hugely symbolic of failure, of a time when mankind couldn’t rub shoulders side by side civilly but engaged in all out bloody war over differences that, today, don’t seem like enough to start a family dispute over never mind a war. All cultures, most time periods, tend to have at least one flashpoint, but this one was long and bloody and went further than most. There’s a brief moment where it looks as if Britain have become The Thijarians, bureaucratic reptilian types who think the best way of solving problems is to shoot at things, but it feels as if someone in the production team went ‘blimey we can’t do that – there’ll be a riot’ so even that metaphor gets soft-soaped and back-pedalled, to the point where the aliens turn out to be benign in a way the British most definitely were not, commemorating the fallen so that they aren’t forgotten and creating a shrine to remember local victims. Unless this is a serious re-telling of history (and it could still be English volunteers working with the Red Cross, medics stepping in to save who they can) that’s not a metaphor then. 

 What is surely a metaphor though is Brexit, a more recent tale of politics versus people (see, I told you most time periods have one - and goodness only knows what future times are going to make of that). Back when this story was being written it seemed like a done deal: Europe was being divided between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and we took the decision to pull away and rule ourselves, with talk in the news every single blooming day about artificial borders in the middle of the sea and how we were ‘taking our country back’ from colonial powers (when it had never gone anywhere). By the time this story was transmitted everyone working on this at the time would have expected Brexit to be an actual thing by now – but of course Brexit ended up being so unnecessarily complicated that it ended up taking longer to finalise than blinking ‘Shada’ did, but that’s what they expected when they were making this: that the first stages of Brexit would be a done thing, the way the partition has just becomes a done thing here. We’re meant to see the parallels, to be reminded to hold on to our humanity and togetherness in a time of turmoil and division and while I don’t think anyone seriously considered a bloody revolution it was in the air (we’re just two years after MP Jo Cox was murdered for supporting the ‘remain’ vote). British politics were creating divisions like none seen here since the English Civil War (give or take the fuss over joining the European Union in the first place in the 1970s – and see the two ‘Peladon’ stories for how even the same production team couldn’t make up their minds if it was a good thing or a bad thing), where brother was set upon brother in bloody battle (well, a rant over breakfast when the papers were delivered or the news was on, anyway). ‘Brexit’ was one of those things everyone had an opinion on, whichever way they voted – and it must be remembered that a majority of Britons didn’t vote at all. A right-wing ideology that came out of left field and nobody saw coming, it’s closer to the partition than you might think. Not least because it was all so unnecessary: David Cameron, the smirking Davros of our universe, set up the poll over whether to remain with the EU or leave never expecting to lose, trying to circumvent the minor pressure from the new parties of the far right by having a definite vote. What he didn’t see coming was that so people were so fed up with him personally and his horrific policies that they voted to leave in order to shut him up, assuming that everyone else would be sensible to vote ‘remain’ or the sheer venom with which their ‘leave’ opponents would start making up lies and sticking the on the side of busses (no, seriously). What people from other countries don’t realise (and even a lot of us have forgotten) is that the vast majority of people were too apathetic to vote in the first place. It just wasn’t seen as a thing and neither side were very good at talking through the repercussions sensibly or thoroughly. 

What we ended up with was a situation where things were turned on their head because of a passionate fringe minority when most people didn’t want it and a law was put into place above people’s heads anyway. We became like India and Pakistan, divided in two by something placed upon us from on high. There are lots of lines in this story about the healing power of coming together and of not letting our divisions over something small make us forget the similarities we share that will, I suspect, look downright odd in a few years: the way the youth versus parental politics of the 1960s or the constant brainwashing and possession of the cold war stories of the 1970s seem to casual viewers today. I mean just look at the way Graham delivers the line ‘there’s nothing worse than when families set on each other’ with a knowing wink to camera. This results in some of the cringiest scenes in all Dr Who, as Graham – who you can tell had never even heard about the partition of India five minutes ago – is there telling people who are facing the biggest changes in their lifetimes ‘all we can do is strive to be good men’ or The Doctor presiding over a wedding and telling a Muslim and a Hindu that ‘you might just be the two strongest people in the universe right now’ (she might have had a point another year down the line, but for now we’re still so early after the division that nobody quite knew what was happening, so it’s not really all that brave – by Dr Who standards anyway).It’s all very clap-on-the-back, reducing big complex problems into easily solved soundbites where everything is solved by thinking positively and being kind. Something which didn’t help with the partition one iota and didn’t make any impact when dealing with Brexit either. 

 The theme of people losing all they knew, on a bureaucratic whim, is so Dr Who it hurts. But the way it’s done hurts more. This is one of the biggest events of the 20th century, wrapped up in a story masquerading as a possible metaphor for the 21st century. Why then does it all feel so bland? ‘Punjab’ is, despite the setting, one of the most boring Dr Who stories of them all, in which nothing much happens. Even in an era of the show that’s low on action and big on dialogue this is a very static story in which people stand around discussing things. As much as people say the Dr Who stories of the 1960s tend towards the slow and boring, at least we got action scenes in between the talking: the most interesting thing that happens in this story is somebody finds a body. A lot of things feel as if they’re going to happen any moment, mind. The red herring alien invasion plot really feels like it’s going somewhere: it would be entirely in keeping with other Dr Who historicals if a division that seems so head-scratchingly odd to us, in another country and another time, turned out to be caused by an intervening alien after their own ends (and I can’t wait for the story about Brexit being a secret Slitheen/Master plot or the revelation that David Cameron was actually Sil in thirty odd years’ time) – only it isn’t. Clever as the twist is and as interesting as the Thajilarians are, the whole sub-plot just looks weird. Why would an alien culture pay its respects to the dead of another culture? Why are they even here in this part of the world at his particular time when there are so many other ones to choose? India in 1947 is not exactly the sort of place you want to hang around, for all the Dr and companions seem to be having a nice stroll through the country for most of the episode. There’s another intriguing ‘Back To The Future’ sub-plot where if the Doctor and Yaz meddle too much her grandparents might never meet and she might just blink out of existence. Yaz looks suitably concerned by this for all of minute and then no one ever mentions it again. Why not? This is the premise for one of the greatest Dr Who stories of them all (‘The Space Museum’) and it would have allowed the series to do so many things at once: make us care for Yaz more, shown the awesome power of time travel and avoided the mentions of religion and British empire and the bloody war going on just out of shot. But then they ignore it for a big fat geek wedding and collecting a bit of bull spit so that an alien can project what really happened in a local murder to the Doctor. Eh? How on Earth did writer Vinay Patel end up here, with all that glorious source material to play with? 

 The trouble is, too, if you’re going to try to show something this complex and nuanced on screen, you can’t do it with the heavy-handedness this episode does. This entire story is about how there’s no such thing as black and white, good and bad, Indians and Pakistans, only Muslims and Hindus who have everything else in common except their religion – at least in this period, after living together for so long. It’s a story crying out for nuances; you can only dream of how David Whittaker or Russell T Davies might have made these characters sing, of how the real villains of the story are the complicated convoluted ways that mankind creates society that favours rules and regulations over people. But this is an era that thinks it can only paint a picture in broad strokes, so we get a dodgy brother whose clearly evil trying to take down a brother whose good and Yaz’s nan who clearly has to be cleaner than clean. We don’t meet anyone else except the aliens and they start off being shown to be all bad, before a revelation that makes them all good when they just disappear from the plot. You can get away with that in stories set in the future which, for all we know, might end upjust like that in a simpler time when humanity is less complex than it is now. But in the past? The past isn’t like that. The past is complicated, uncertain, fragile (as you can see in any of the black and white Who stories). What we see started because of events that happened long before the Tardis lands and will go on having ripple effects on times long after the Tardis has taken off again because that’s how time works: people do something, their victims do something back, and before you know where you are there’s been a hundred year’s war and people who used to be friends have become the enemy. Anyone whose spent even five minutes studying any period of history properly knows that it’s not a case of good fighting bad in any era, but differences of opinion doing what they think is best for their people (however big or small a proportion of people that might be), which just happens to clash with another group of people who also want to do the best for their people. Neatly always people mean well, even when its as dictator convinced their way just happens to be the only way to save people and anyone who stops them needs to be put down violently: ask them direct and they’d say what they were doing is for everyone’s good, even when it blatantly isn’t. This, of all stories, was a great opportunity to remind viewers, after the oddly fairytale and unbelievable historical of the Peter Capaldi era, how fascinating, complicated and confusing history can be when nobody knows how the future will turn out yet. Of all the missed opportunities in this story, this misunderstanding of time might just be the worst. 

 It would at least be worth if it we get to learn more about Yaz, till now the companion we know least about, but even by the end we don’t really know her anymore than we did before. Yaz is the companion who never reacts the way a normal human would (and yes, I include robots Kamelion and K9 in that list) so this was a golden opportunity to give her a background, a history, but honestly she’s an impenetrable after this story finishes as she was before. Yaz is a policewoman. She’s used to finding out the facts, of digging out the truth of the people around her. Her only real character feature is her tenacity and refusal to give up where others would have backed away long before (that’s one of the reasons she ended up roped into the Doctor’s life in the first place). You can see why a family mystery would really bug her, of all people. And yet she never seems to have had the slightest interest in it before the opening credits and never thought to ask questions about her nan’s heritage before – maybe her nan just didn’t talk about it and shut her down whenever she asked, but that’s not how it comes across on screen and Yaz wouldn’t have taken no for an answer. This whole episode is kicked off by her nan passing her a broken watch to her and telling her to never get it fixed, then clamming up and refusing to talk any more about it. Eh?! I’m all for the plot drive of family secrets (something that moves many a drama but only rarely Dr Who) and we soon see why nanny carried the shame of defying her family and local law to get married and move to the ‘exotic’ sounding Sheffield for a fresh start, without ever wanting to think back to the past again. But you don’t give something like that which you’ve carried all your life, on a whim, without expecting to be asked questions about it and certainly not to someone like Yaz. It all feels wrong, too conveneitn for the plot. Even when Yaz finds out what’s going on she reacts with mild surprise as much as anything else – the story’s best scene buy far has her pouring out to Graham that she feels as if her whole life is a lie and she doesn’t know who she is anymore, as she sees events unfold that dictate why her nan came to Sheffield, without which she would never have been born (and Graham’s reply, that her nan hadn’t become her nan yet and is entitled to keep secrets, is easily the best of all his ‘go-to’ chats this series, giving another perspective without being rude; why can’t he be like this all the time?!) That’s kind of it though: there’s no sense she’s been on the great emotional journey that, say, Rose did in this story’s close cousin ‘Father’s Day’. The audience isn’t sat sobbing in their chairs. We aren’t willing her on. We aren’t living this moment with her. We just kind of go ‘Oh right. Is that all? Ho hum. See you next week’. Notably Yaz doesn’t change between this story and the next, the sign of really good drama: she’s still as half-trusting yet half-cynical as she always was. 

 Ah yes, ‘Father’s Day’. Remember when the 9th Doctor fought with Rose for lengthy scenes before very reluctantly agreeing to take her to see her own past, before finding out she changed it and having the biggest fight those two ever had, before vowing he would never ever do anything like it for anyone ever again? Well, the Doctor says once to yaz that it’s a bad idea then does it anyway. She doesn’t even give Yaz a lecture first about all the awful things that might happen if she messes around with her own personal history (and this is a regeneration that likes to lecture people). Also, how come Yaz’s nan, whose far sharper as a character than her grand-daughter in many ways, doesn’t go ‘here, you remind me so much of this random person I met seventy years once during the most pivotal time of my life I think about every day and without which I wouldn’t be here, how odd!’ – not even once in the twenty years Yaz has been alive? If this was a Steven Moffat era story that would be the ‘big mystery’ – why her nan recognises her and a mystery she’s always wanted to solve. 

Far from holding back and refusing to get involved with local politics too, the Doctor’s front and centre in this story, even officiating over a wedding because as a ‘Doctor’ she has one of the few recognised professions who can step in when the religions on both sides refuse to marry the happy(ish) couple, which is so very very out of character. This is a Doctor who doesn’t like rules, who wasn’t exactly that thrilled to be tied down in a marriage of their own and who used to think meddling in history was the biggest crime you could commit (also, unless the Doctor studies for a marriage license at some point in her past regenerations – which seems unlikely. I mean can you imagine the 2nd 4th 10th or 11th Drs standing still long enough or the 1st, 3rd 6th 7th 9th or 12th Drs being patient enough to concern themselves with local Earth customs just in case they might need it one day? The only one I could possibly see doing this is the 5th and even then it must have been in the narrow window when he was alone with Nyssa because there’s no way his other companions would have stood for it. I mean can you even imagine a 4th Dr ceremony: ‘You may now kiss the bride – she’s very beautiful. Probably…’) – it’s null and void. Basically this annulls Yaz’s nan’s marriage without her ever knowing: all it takes is someone to look up whether she really is a Doctor and the marriage is over with all the stigma that comes attached to it. Yaz seems oddly unconcerned by the fact she’s technically illegitimate. It’s an odd scene all round, as a story that isn’t exactly galloping itself to a epic climax is put on pause for a rambling speech from the Doctor about overcoming obstacles that’s deeply inappropriate when there’s a mass army on the horizon. 

 There are a few bits that work and work really well. The idea of nanny Yaz dreaming of moving to the exotic sounding locale of ‘Sheffield’. Not knowing what it’s really like, is easily the best gag of series ten. The closing scene, where Yaz goes back to see her nan and can’t talk about this stuff directly but still asks her whether she had a good life anyway is really rather sweet; the answer that moving to Sheffield brought her ‘stability’ is just the right answer, without sugar-coating all the many problems she’d have faced as a 1950s immigrant to Britain or downplaying everything she left behind. I’m really quite fond of the Thajilarians, the Sycorax’s more placid younger cousins ’aliens with compassion’, and wished we’d seen more of them – they’re an alien race that deserve a full main plot to themselves not just being pushed back into the corner as they are here. There are moments when this script flies really well, with some really good lines buried here and there (‘We didn’t change when the line was drawn’)while Patel certainly understands Graham’s mixture of wise old owl and comedy sidekick better than most of this era’s writers, including the showrunner who created him, as he manages to be both less irritatingly than usual). There are moments throughout this story where it feels as if things are finally just about to get good. And then they stop and we get another scene of endless talking instead. 

 The result is a story that’s most odd all round, quite unlike any other in the Dr Who canon. Usually that’s a good thing, but there’s just so little to go on here and what could and should have been a fascinating story about uncovering dark family history ends up being like the most boring episode of family tree show ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ ever (odder, given that it’s all fictional so they could have done absolutely anything to Yaz’s nan. Making her an aspiring undercover policewoman herself and investigating the mysterious deaths in the village, back in the days when women weren’t allowed to do much at all, would have made for a much better plot in one go. Instead they make her an ‘everywoman’ as bland as they come). What should have been a gripping tale of fighting and slaughter and division ends up being a minor family disagreement with all the interesting stuff happening noises-off (sure, they can’t re-create this whole conflict on a Dr Who budget but they don’t even try – at least in the 1960s we got a few Crusade soldiers or Aztecs to give it a go. I mean, as a village skirmish standing in for what was happening in the rest of India it didn’t need to be very big). What should have been a story that showed the splendour of India, that re-created a whole culture as deep and colourful as any seen in Dr Who’s history, ends up not even being filmed there (it’s all too obviously Spain as part of a budget saving device. And to be honest it’s the bits of Spain that just look like Sheffield anyway; they should have just kept the filming of this one back to a sunny day and done it at home, in the countryside somewhere and it would have worked just as well. And why not just make it a Spanish historical if that's how far the budget will stretch?) There's just no weight to what should have been a very weighty episode, no nuance to what should have been a very complex episode, no sense of anything being different to most weeks even though the locale and the plot makes it one of the most unusual Dr Who stories of them all. This could have been a simple family feud for all the good the setting does. ‘Punjab’ is such a good idea to bring a bit of colourful multiculturalism into the series and explore one of these new companions, but it wastes it all for a story that’s about nothing much at all. One of the most forgettable Dr Who stories of the lot. 

 POSITIVES + The sub-plot about the watch is really quite good. A family heirloom that gets dropped during the wedding ceremony at just the wrong time, it’s taken in the then-present as a symbol of why this marriage is cursed and can never be. But in our present it’s a sign that you shouldn’t believe in curses and that something can last despite all the signs working against it if you believe in it. Yaz’s nan is right: it captures a ‘moment in time’ that was really special and whose ripples still run to the future. That’s all very Dr Who and the fact that it’s a watch that uses time, something we know in this series can be changed however much it seems to be fixed in one place, is very in keeping with the rest of this series. Still don’t know why Yaz’s nan gives it away to her granddaughter when she does though. 

 NEGATIVES – I had such high hopes for composer Segun Akanola’s score. As a general average I’d take his incidental music over Murray Gold’s: they tend to be more subtle, more nuanced, more varied, exactly what an episode like this one needs. Add in the fact that he has a whole collection of Indian instruments to play around with (some of the most beautiful sounds around) and I thought this score was going to be absolute gold. Instead it’s Murray Gold all over again – instead of subtlety and colour we get fast rat-a-tat tablas when people are running and chanting wordless Indian squawling when there’s something slow and moody happening. Also the line ‘You kept us fed mannish – will you let me feed you?’ is the single cringiest chat up line in the series and boy have we had some corkers down the years (half of them involving Ryan). 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘What’s the point in your best mate having a time machine if you can’t nip back and see your Granny when she was younger?!’