The Ghost Monument: Ranking - 270

 The Ghost Monument

(Series 11, Dr 13with Graham Ryan and Yaz, 14/10/2018, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Mark Tonderai)  

Rank: 270

And it's go, go go, go! Jezza Whittaker, Captain Slow, Hamster and Ryan are set a new Top Gear challenge by an alien Stig in which they have to win the ultimate prize. A certain blue box...

Well, at least it’s different. That’s how most fans come to look back on the all-important second Jodie Whittaker/Chris Chibnall episode, a sort of intergalactic Wacky Races with a dash of The Crystal Maze as the new Doctor and her three companions end up mixed up in a gigantic race across multiple planets (though we only see one) and it is the only Dr Who story to date where there’s actually a trophy at stake. Although in true Who style the prize everyone’s after is not what it appears to be at all but…enlightenment. No wait sorry, wrong story, of course I meant The Tardis, which the Doctor lost in the previous week’s story. Quite what anyone else was going to do with a blue wooden box that’s bigger on the inside that no one else could open anyway is one of the great unexplained mysteries of this story. In a way this is a story about enlightenment though: the two racers left in a competition that once numbered thousands couldn’t care less about the trophy: what they’re after is the money, or to be more accurate what that money represents: ‘a lifetime of safety’, which in a universe this messy and unsafe is a mighty fine prize indeed. The loser, meanwhile, gets stranded behind on a desolate planet and left for dead, just like on ‘Top Gear’, only without the ridiculous backup car (that might have been fun actually: ‘here’s your space shuttle, it’s just like the one off ‘Button Moon’) or like the contestants who get locked in after failing a task on ‘Crystal Maze’ (this story’s setting looks a cross between the Aztec and Futuristic zones if you can imagine such a thing, with a border onto Ocean Zone). And even though neither entrant is Human (or indeed has ever heard of ‘mooman beans’) their very human reactions to the competition, one selfish but understandable one selfless but naïve, and the realisation that life doesn’t have to be a competition but a co-operation is a sort of enlightenment after all, the very Who idea at the heart of this story that just allows everyone to get away with it. 

 The idea is one that made a lot of sense at the tail end of television’s obsession with making everything a competition. Who’s big Saturday night rival was ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ and when that wasn’t on the air there was X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and weirdest of all ‘Jump’ and ‘Splash!’, which seemed to be a competition in how many famous faces could hurt themselves trying to behave like Olympic athletes. It’s also the idea that was in the air for both ‘The Hunger Games’ franchise and ‘Squid Games’, that when in desperate circumstances the most civilised of people will break any rules in order to survive and how thin that veneer really is for all of us. In one of Chibnall’s worthier dances with the typewriter he creates two opposing points of view in this Kornavista-eats-Kornavista world: the cynical Epzo, a Muxtaran who was brought up believing that the world was against him and no one was going to protect him (his story about his mother telling him to leap from a tree only to move out the way to ‘teach him a lesson’ that broke his arm and busted his ankle is a little detail worthy of Russell T Davies) and Angstrum, an Albarian who is trying to do too much, saving her entire family when all the kiin in the universe isn’t going to be enough to save everyone she loves. They are, I suspect, Chibnall’s take on two very different forms of parenting: The Muxtarans are too callous and make their children out to be bitter cynics who won’t open their heart or trust anyone. The Albarian, meanwhile, is too smothering and protect their children a little too much (in physics an ‘angstrum’ is a particularly tiny unit, roughly a billionth of a metre long, and is generally referred to within particles where protons are squished together so closely they stop elements working as well as they might). Whose right? Neither or both, depending on how you look at it: both would surely have been doomed to lose this challenge without the Doctor’s help, yet at the same time by working together in an uneasy truce they get to share the prize. Co-operation you see, helping each other feed the dogs long enough to make our escape, that’s the only way any sizeable number of us are ever going to get out of here alive. That’s a worthy topic for any Who story and even if the setting of it inside a competition is a bit weird this show’s format is elastic enough to stretch to that. Certainly it’s a lot better than merely having this race be about the money, although the scene about intergalactic currencies is a neat bit of period-setting detail (this book you’re reading is only a mere 0.5 kiin or 3.2 kjavlons or 2 forvalars or 270 tyrnites or one quarl or half an imperial knut, or you can just charge it to your Labarian express card, a bargain at those intergalactic prices we know you’ll agree!) 

I do wish, however, that ‘The Ghost Monument’ had come a bit later in the run. It’s the odd one out in Chibnall’s era in so many ways, an outlier that’s not like other Who stories recycled (although, yes, it is just ‘Enlightenment’ minus the sailing ships and Black Guardian parts). At the time it just seemed like an episode that was very different to ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ but in the end nearly every episode ended up like ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ and this episode’s quirks only become obvious in retrospect. The reason it is second in the order is so that Chibnall can dedicate extra time to the Tardis reveal instead of it being a bit lost in the middle of Jodie’s debut, but that aspect of the story is handled quite badly, or at least inconsequentially. I mean, I like the irony that the Tardis, a symbol of hope and peace, is unwittingly used as the prize in a competition based on evil and pessimism. But really why is it a prize at all? For yes, it turns out to be the ‘Ghost Moment’ of the title that everyone keeps talking about, the problems caused by the regeneration in ‘Time Of The Doctor’ causing it to have blown a gasket and phased out of time so it only turns up ‘every 1000 rotations’ of the planet Desolation (which might be once a millennia or once a minute for all we know; please tell me there’s more than one planet named this so we can have a ‘Desolation Row’). This could have been a big reveal at the end of the episode, but alas they stick a whacking great hologram of it on screen a quarter of an hour in and suddenly this becomes a race about getting to the Tardis instead of between two deserving candidates who need each other. Even when we get the revelation at the end it’s one of the flimsiest reveals going: the companions don’t even seem that surprised that it’s bigger on the inside; the only one who is amazed is the Doctor who gets far more excited about a custard cream dispenser than you might expect (the designer rang up and asked Jodie what her favourite biscuit was so she could have an equivalent to Matt Smith’s Jammie Dodgers). Most showrunners have practised how their first ‘Tardis reveal’ scene is going to look since they were seven, but for Chibnall it’s almost an afterthought, despite the two episode delay making this reveal feel an even bigger moment than usual. Also, every fan whose watched the show for more than these two episodes absolutely knows the Tardis is going to find a way back to the Doctor too, for all they try to set up the ‘I’ve stranded you behind on an alien planet and it’s all my fault’ scene. 

 Had this episode come later in the run then Chibnall might have understood his characters a bit more too, as they’re not quite set yet (I’m willing to bet the last draft of ‘Woman’ came after the last draft of this one, though recording wise the season opener was the earlier by three months). The Doctor is chatty even for her without that aloofness and awkwardness that got written in later: she’s strangely personable in this story actually, perhaps because the plot needs her to be right in the middle between the two protagonists. She also practices Venusian aikido out of nowhere, the only time any of the Doctors have post-Pertwee and while she does it to intervene in a fight it doesn’t really make her point about the importance of non-violence as well as she seems to think it does (after all, paralysing someone is still violent, even if its better than killing them, but she hasn’t even tried to reason with Ezpo first when she uses it). As it turns out this Doctor’s character trait will be the theme of this story writ large: learning to countenance her aloofness and alien-ness with a big heart and trust in the people around her, without turning on them and pushing them away. Only Chibnall doesn’t seem to have come up with that character trait yet so what we have is basically a copy of the 10th or 11th Doctors at their chattiest (i.e. when they’re not called to do dark and brooding); she’s already referring to her companions as her ‘fam’ and she seems heartbroken at the thought of putting them in danger: there’s no sense, yet, that she doesn’t know how to relate to them or what to say in stressful situations. That’s a shame because Jodie’s a lot better at playing the part of everybody’s friend, playing for time by nattering as a distraction, than she’ll ever be at playing cold and distant.

 Graham is oddly serious, not yet the oracle who specialises in dad jokes; rather than lagging behind the others in the action sequences he’s right front and centre too, which just seems odd if you watch these stories out of order.Ryan is the weirdest though: so much of this story is shown through his eyes so that, rather than be on the fringe of what’s going on as per usual (no companion has ever got to stand around with as little to do as Ryan episode on episode, except maybe Yaz) he’s front and centre. This week Ryan seems the most affected by all three companions to be actually out in space. Despite being younger and healthier he recovers slower than his step-Grandad not once but twice. Most irritating of all is the way Chibnall treats his dyspraxia: his entire character in episode one is ‘look at plucky Ryan, he’s riding a bike even though he can’t!’ In this episode, though, he’s the gun-toting action one, who is inspired by his ‘Call Of Duty’ gaming obsession to take on a whole bunch of sniper bots and act like a hero which is weird for two reasons. One is it’s Ryan, the most laidback companion the show has ever had, a lad whose reaction to the biggest crisis to ever hit the universe is to shrug his shoulders and wonder when he can have a nap: the flipside of this is that patience is his greatest strength. In another era he’d be telling Nyssa off for reacting too strongly, telling Adric he’s too emotional and needs to think more logically about life while looking at Tegan as if she’s more alien than the Doctor, while if Turlough tried to attack him he’d probably shrug and have a snooze. The other is that Ryan’s entire character has been built round his lack of co-ordination: there’s no way he’s be an even more perfect shot than flipping Ace in a gun battle, no matter how much gaming he played (and take it from a dyspraxic shoot ‘em up games are just as hard to play as shooting would be in real life; Ryan would have got bored of coming last amongst his friends a long time ago – which is not to say he’d turn down all games or be bad everything, just ones that call for great accuracy). This might not matter so much had there not been the cringe-inducing scene where Ryan climbs a ladder and the Doctor basically pats him on the head and tells him he’s a good boy. This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of dyspraxia, treating it as if it’s a phobia not a physical condition involving missed synapses in the brain. Far better for the dyspraxic community would have been if Ryan had shocked his step-Grandad by walking over uneven ground better than the others (because to sufferers all ground feels uneven and he’s had more practice at this than everyone else). But them how committed was Chibnall to portraying dyspraxia properly? He told Dr Who magazine that he was inspired to add Ryan’s condition because he had a nephew who suffered from it and wanted people to understand what it was, because no characters on TV ever seemed to have it; worthy indeed but by the looks of things Uncle Chris never actually spent long enough time with his nephew to find out what it was. By and large it won’t be referred to again until Ryan leaves, making you wonder what exactly the point of him having it at all was if they weren’t going to use it as part of his character arc or explain it properly. The Ryan-Graham dynamic is very at odds with what comes later too, even if it fits with the little we see in ‘Woman’: Graham alternates between being quite a git to his step-Grandson and pleading with him to open up more and express his feelings; Ryan, for his part, has just seen his beloved Nan die in front of him and blames Graham for it: if anything he should be angrier and more closed off. His relationship between them will ebb and flow but it’s at its most extreme of distrust here. Which might have worked nicely had it been worked out as part of the plot, the idea that co-operation is better than bearing grudges. Except that it doesn’t: Ryan and Graham never get to save each other. Oh I suppose one thing is true to the rest of the Chibnall era though: Yaz barely says a word. 

 Then again, already none of them are re-acting the way ordinary people would. All three companions have an oddly resilient faith in the Doctor for someone they have barely met and who, since they’ve known her, took an age to defeat Tim-Shaw and have already got them lost and facing certain death in space when trying to beam them up to her Tardis. After all, we at home know that The Tardis is an extraordinary machine that just can't be allowed to fall into the wrong hands yet but they don’t know that – I mean, the Doctor’s already proved to be, if not exactly untrustworthy, then not exactly reliable either and their blind faith in her has almost got them all killed at least once. If I’d been in that situation I’d have locked myself in either of the two space shuttle’s bathrooms, locked the door and not come out. There’s one scene going ‘I can’t believe we’re in space!’ but otherwise Yaz doesn’t look panicked about being awol from her police beat, Graham doesn’t worry that he can’t keep up with all the young things and Ryan is more fussed about his Grandad thinking he’s still asleep than being in an alien spaceship. The Tardis trio all tease the Doctor about the shape and look of her spaceship as a hologram image but none of them pause and say ‘hang on…she’s a bit mad this one, are we sure this really is a spaceship?’ They don’t even know the others that well – Ryan has been doing his best to avoid Graham while he’s been dating Grace, Yaz hasn’t spoken to Ryan much since school and Graham and Yaz were strangers a few hours ago – and yet all seem to take it as read that they’re a ‘team’ who’ve got each other’s backs, who’ll go through anything for each other. Admittedly that’s not new in Who: Ben and Polly met the same night they met the Doctor in ‘The War Machines’ and Nyssa and Tegan have forged quite a remarkable bond in ‘Castrovalva’ given that they’ve barely said three words to each other by the end of ‘Logopolis’. It is a tough sell, however, when so much of this story relies on the regulars with only three guest parts (and a voiceover for a sort of floating cloth that gives away the plot of ‘The Timeless Child’ nearly two full years early) and their parallel learning to work in co-operation with each other would have been the perfect mirror counterpart to the race itself. With just a tweak and a re-write they could have fixed this and made the episode hang together so much better, to make it a triumph of human faith and friendship, but by the end of the story you don’t get the impression these three understand each other better than when they arrived. 

One of the things that made ‘Top Gear’ watchable was the location filming, so naturally in this story we get to travel…to Cape Town, South Africa. This exotic filming is going to be one of the best things about the Chibnall era when it gets going and after so many years of being in Wales with maybe one trip a year away it seemed a colossal sea-change having this episode not as the big re-launch mid-season or the grand finale but casually dropped in episode two. To an extent it’s the best thing about the episode: this really does feel like an alien planet with vast vistas and decidedly un-British weather and the few scenes they filmed here are broken up nicely across the episode, in between the filming back home for the ‘hologram projection tent’ and underground caves. Goodbye Sheffield darkness, hello Desolation sunshine (why did that planet get that name? Compared to Sheffield its almost luxurious!) Whereas 'The Woman Who Fell To Earth' felt more like a crime drama with aliens this one feels much more like scifi with a fully believable alien world that we get to see more of than normal. Lakes! Deserts! Caves! Space! Macassar Beach Pavilion! I wish they’d used the beauty of Africa even more though: they could have used a humble quarry for all the ‘look, drab grey scenery’ shots we have and there are so many beautiful sights to see in Africa, most of them sadly untapped in British TV. I mean, the expense in all location filming is in the travelling from Britain; if you’re going to pay for all the actors and all that equipment you might as well travel beyond a single location and make the most of it (the way they did Paris in ‘City Of Death’ and Lanzarote in ‘Planet Of Fire’). Still, this is one of those episodes that looks gorgeous and it was worth the tough conditions they went through to film it (the production team picked January to avoid the worst of the heat but were hit by a drought instead: showers were strictly rationed to two minutes per person). The desert-cave setting really breaks up the repetitiveness of pristine spaceships, ravaged warzones and Sheffield and the blazing sunshine (though technically not quite as strong as it ought to be on a planet with two suns) makes such a nice change to the de facto Chibnall shots made in the dark. 

The 'quest' style pacing, too, makes a change. In some ways this is the most ‘quest’ heavy Dr Who story we’ve had since ‘The Keys Of Marinus’ and this is a story that resembles that one in more ways than you might think: this is a ‘road’ movie but in outer space, one where the companions are split up early, have been warned in advance to expect obstacles, where there’s something deadly in the water and where they’re doing things for strangers in order to get something they need themselves. Had the hologram, the rather under-used Art Malik (One of the last semi-big Hollywood film actors to do a Who) ended up dressing in rubber and tripping over his own flippers it would have ticked all the boxes. On the plus side we’ve come a long way technically since the last time Who tried to do this: nowadays it really does feel as if we’re in space and on an alien planet that could be full of dangers lurking round every corner. In other ways though it’s all a bit of a letdown in that regard: you never feel that the regulars are in any real peril even when they blatantly are: a bunch of cloth aliens and deadly flesh-eating microbes in the water and sniper bots might not be the sort of thing I’d want to meet in real life but for a series that once pitted the Doctor’s wits against Daleks and Cybermen they seem like easy foes to beat. This was, remember, the year when Chibnall had promised that he wouldn’t be using any old monsters because he had so many ideas of his own he wanted to use; fans were anticipating a riot of imagination and spectacle. Piranhas and robots are the sort of thing generic scifi does not Who (well, not much) and the Remnants are the most cloth-eared idea the whole year (in sewing ‘remnants’ are the bits of cloth left over when a piece of clothing is finished and that’s what they seem here, the bits left over from other monsters). Presenting this to us as the biggest rally of twelve galaxies and then only featuring two quite similar and rather generic spaceships feels like a letdown too: sure we’re in the grand finale when only two ships are left but they could be lurking in the background. You only need to play this episode back-to-back with it’s even closer cousin ‘Enlightenment’ to see that this episode could have been so much more imaginative; even with the added benefit of 35 years there isn’t anything ‘The Ghost Monumnet’ does better. 

Which is not to say that it’s bad. There are some good lines (‘Come to mummy…I mean daddy!’ ‘Do you know how many songs they wrote about this spaceship?’ ‘Well if you don’t land it they’ll be writing operas about our demise!’) and a couple of nice scenes. A lot of the Chibnall episodes are clumsy: they’re full of exposition between characters to move the plot along, feature an awful ot of talking (Including having the Doctor stand still for multiple scenes while the baddy discusses what their dastardly plan is) and have maybe one or two big actions scenes the whole way through. This story doesn’t make any of those obvious mistakes. It moves along quite sharply and the plot resolves itself quite naturally out of what came before it. Ryan’s gun battle might be pointless given how much it moves on the plot (and as we’ve seen way out of character: it would have at least been funny if they’d given it to Graham) but it does break up the talky scenes either side of it and it does change the Doctor’s view of her companions, worrying that they’re too impetuous and won’t take orders (Doctor 13 really alternates between being the most freeform and the most stern of all the Doctors, pleased to see her companions becoming independent but downright angry when they fail to listen to her). The two rivals in the race really do end up growing to sort-of trust each other and having grudging respect for what the other has been through, just as the Tardis team have been through enough to lose a little of the awkwardness they started the episode with. Chibnall, as a rule, isn’t very good with consequences; his characters don’t tend to learn things and go back and forth in how much they know or how they behave but everything the characters go through in this story feels earned. Had the series continued like this under Chibnall’s run, doing something different every other episode with characters who are relatable and who we can learn from as they learn, it might yet have been, if not necessarily a golden age of television, then at least one that didn’t cause so many fans to tear their hair out. Best of all this story never lectures us: there’s a moment when Epzo and Angstrom start talking about their pasts when it looks as if this is going to turn into a polemic on ethnic cleansing but Chibnall backs away from that and makes it more of a motivation for his characters, a reason they care about this race so much they’ll go through all perils to reach their goal. And besides that’s a more worthy lecture to give us than practically any this era will go on to make – all the more so given that so much of this story was filmed in South Africa with its castes and class structure. 

 What it isn’t is anything particularly new or worth watching. Though ‘The Ghost Monument’ is different to most of what’s to come it’s not all that different to what came before and is still quite a dull watch (albeit not quite as dull as the previous episode). There’s nothing here to set your heart a flutter, to make you go wow, to make you want to tune in again next week. At this point, in episode two, we still didn’t quite know what the Chibnall era was going to look like and after Steven Moffat got a little stuck after being at the helm of the show for so long there was a real thrill at just how much imagination and spectacle this new era might have. Instead we got hit by a couple of clapped out spaceships, a bunch of basic monsters and a desolate landscape (albeit a different desolate landscape to Sheffield). A lot of the second episodes by production teams are the ones where they’ve worked out where they’re going and wamnt to knock people’s socks off with just how new and fresh and daring and bold the new era’s going to be – Dr Who is a series partly about the bittersweet inevitability of change, after all; think ‘The Daleks’ ‘The Silurians’ ‘The Ark In Space’ ‘The End Of The World’. At the time this story felt depressingly ordinary: the fact it seems rather inventive now is more a sign of just how bland the Chibnall era as a whole became than any great merit in this story. However some showrunners/producers do take longer to find their feet than others so hopes were high for next episode ‘Rosa’, a story so unlike anything the show had done before, building on the shoulders of this story to offer a history lesson in all meanings of the phrase, one that’s all about the message above everything else. 

 POSITIVES + Alas we never really get it again, but it felt at the time as if this story’s handheld camera style was going to be a ‘Chibnall signature’ as opposed to a co-st=cutting solution to location filming. It works really well I think, really placing you in the action so that from the moment Ryan wakes up you’re seeing things through his eyes, not quite sure when something is going to come out and bite you. Moffat had sort of done it but in a very different way – having the camera pan round a scene to reveal that all isn’t what it looked like for instance, or to show off just how quickly the Doctor’s brain works compared to mere mortals’. Here it just makes you feel a part of the action and as if it’s happening to you in a way we haven’t since ‘Warrior’s Gate/Logopolis’. I would have been happy if the whole of Jodie Whittaker’s run looked like that. 

 NEGATIVES - The moment when the Dr is finally reunited with the Tardis itself is a sweet moment but, ugh, the inside! Back in 'The Invasion Of Time' in 1978 the 4th Dr decided to decorate a room with hubcaps from Earth because, so it turned out, they could block alien interferences and leave the Doctor to talk in private without being overheard telepathically. The other timelords were more horrified at this aesthetic faux pas than they ever were about being invaded by Vardans and Sontarons, something totally in character. I was hoping this would be another plot point when the 13th Dr discovers her metallic Tardis but no, she just seems to have really bad taste. Just because we first saw the Tardis in a scrapyard doesn't mean it has to resemble one on the inside as well. The irony is that, had we been introduced to this in the opening episode of a new Dr, the way we always have done before, it would have just been another thing to go 'ooh' or 'aah' at and not think about too much after all, Tardis interiors get tweaked a lot during a season), but delaying our first sight of the new interior for 100 minutes means that the reveal is a bigger deal than usual and its, well, let's just say that in keeping with the theme of the episode it feels as if Jeremy Clarkson took up interior designing and nobody stopped him. 

BEST QUOTE: ‘Brains beat bullets!’