The Battle Of Ranskoor Av Kolos: Rank - 288

 The Battle Of Ranskoor Av Kolos

(Season 11, Dr 13 with Graham Ryan and Yaz, 9/12/2018, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Jamie Childs)

Rank: 288

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'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’.