The Witchfinders: Rank - 298

     The Witchfinders

(Season 11, Dr 13 Graham Ryan and Yaz, 25/11/2018, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Joy Wilkinson, director: Sallie Aprahamian)

Rank: 298

In which a witch in time saves mankind. There's alien mud in your eye James I! 

Oh great. The 1st DW story to be set in my adopted home county of Lancashire (barring a 6th Dr trip to Blackpool that was never filmed anyway) and it's about flipping witches. Well, it was going to be either that or gingerbread men I suppose. Historicals with a political bent are often my favourite episodes so I ought to love this. The period detail is excellent, the era is a fascinating one and its a wonder DW lasted 55 years before someone thought to do the plot. The problem is though, more than any other historical we're constantly being taught to see this through the eyes of now rather than the 1600s and using the contrast between then and now as an excuse to lecture on religion and feminism, rather than exploring what had to change since. There's almost no interest in what these people would naturally think when a load of people die in mysterious circumstances in what turns out to be sci-fi mud and then 4 people in funny clothes drop in. I'd probably suspect them of being witches too. The characterisation of James I is particularly off. A fervent Anglican with an interest in with-hunts with a stubborn streak he may have been, but he was neither stupid nor heartless the way he's portrayed here. In his eyes he was defending his people he cared for the only way anybody at the time understood how to do things. If anyone should understand that it's the Dr, but instead of keeping her timey-wimey ideas to herself she sound surprised to be tried as a witch (to be fair, it probably hadn't sung in yet that her new body was female). All that said it's a brave idea to pull off with a few good ideas and cracking lines.

Positives + Like all Who or indeed BBC historicals it all looks gorgeous and the costumes particularly are sublime.

Negatives - Just when it seems we're finally going to get a historical without any scifi business it turns out scifi mud is behind all the witchery pokery. How much stronger this episode might have been if it had turned out that the witch-trials really had been a colossal misunderstanding stoked by fear, paranoia, bad luck and mass hysteria - that would have made for some great parallels with modern times.