Spyfall: Ranking - 127

                                                             Spyfall

(Series 12, Dr 13 with Graham, Ryan and Yaz, 1-5/2020, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, directors: Jamie Magnus Stone and Lee Haven Jones)

Rank: 127

  'How those spy films would have looked with the Doctor involved:

You Only Live Thirteen Times
Draconians Are Forever
From Gallifrey With Love
The Cyberman With The Golden Gun
Judoonraker
Regenerate Another Day
Morphotrons: For Your Googly Eyes Only
A View To A Rill
The Living Daleks
Quark Of Solace
Dr No
Dalek Another Day
and the cybermen's least favourite film 
Goldfinger'

 

 What do you get when you cross (cyber) men in black, (seeds of) Doomwatch and (Blake's)007? You get the then-most interesting Chibnall era story by far! Suddenly, by sticking team Tardis in the middle of another world (spies and shady government agents) everything that’s been so fuzzy and unconnected about this era suddenly comes into focus, with a clever plot that gets the balance of action and exposition just right and the regulars all become about 100 IQ points smarter too, re-acting like actual people would and with a few sassy lines thrown in. Now I’m not a big James Bond fan. He’s everything our beloved clumsy but earnest Doctor isn’t: unflappable, sophisticated, misogynistic, borderline racist and, let’s face it, frequently drunk while his escapades endanger multiple lives all the time but that’s OK because he oozes cool. 007 doesn’t even own a proper sonic screwdriver in his gizmo of gadgets and can’t do anything as interesting as time-travel or regenerate (although that would explain why his face keeps changing so much). The biggest difference though is that Bond plots have him supporting the sort of shady governments that need spies that the Doctor takes down. There’s something very right about the Doctor taking the genre off though, of doing everything James Bond usually swans in and does, better in some ways (the future technology) and worse in others (the 13^th Doctor is a terrible spy – she’s more shaken and stirred than her cocktail and so couldn’t go unseen and undercover in a duvet). The clash of the two universes, usually so far apart, is hilarious. The storyline of baddies harvesting data and using it against us in a very Putinesque way feels like whole new territory for DW too, the sort of thing that wouldn’t have been around in the ether even a Doctor ago (this is the time of those awful amazon echo dot things, which is basically an open ticket for companies to take down your info and make you pay for the privilege on top, even if we’re still missing the most obvious 21^st century DW script no one has yet written: a sentient Alexa device going rogue). Best of all and against all odds quite frankly the only ‘proper’ cliffhanger in the entire Chibnall era is a terrific one you don’t see coming at all with a great twist. Spoilers: Oh, that nice O is the new Master! Number 007 if my maths is right in fact, something I’m surprised they didn’t flag up in the publicity to this. The twist works because, like us, the Doctor didn’t know The Master had regenerated – though it raises a problem. How come he can recognise her when he doesn’t know what The Doctor looks like now or how come, if as some other stories have hinted timelords can recgonise other timelords on sight whether they’ve changed or not, that she doesn’t recognise him? They can’t have it both ways! Weirdly this has never come up before – the only time it might have done, with the John Simm Master, his timelord hiding pocketwatch gave him away. The result is, in part one, easily one of the best of the Chibnall Whos: characters we care for doing things that make sense with a message about trust that’s very DW, big action sequences interspersed with strong characterisation scenes and a big ol’ twist just when things are getting boring. Inevitably part two can’t keep this good work up though and after an unexpectedly clever way out of that multiple cliffhanger things go downhill fast with an impenetrable couple of sub-plots that drag the story down to a little past the halfway ranking. One has The Master as a nazi officer in France in 1943, which seems a little too on-the-nose for the character. I mean, we know he’s an evil narcissistic psychopath, but honestly he’s still too nice an evil psychopath to hang around with a bad influence like the nazis while we’ve had so many stories set in WW2 lately that its gone from the one time the Tardis never seemed to go to the one it never seems to blooming well leave. Worse is what the Doctor is up to alongside. Ada Lovelace (nee Gordon) as the latest person-from-history-we’re-going-to-treat-as-perfect-and-modern-even-though-they’re-decidedly-not. Compared to the genuine way Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens and Marco Polo were portrayed on screen Ada is a cardboard cutout that doesn’t resemble the real,person at all. This part truly has little or nothing to do with the main plot and seems more here to wave some tired right-on feminist flags as she bosses Charles Babbage around and is generally heroic. We get it: after the distinctly, erm, mixed reaction to series eleven this is Chibnall waving his credentials and arguing that we’ve had brilliant women in the past so why not make the Doctor female too? The thing is though that after a first episode where Dr 13 is finally the equal of her predecessors (scatty and talkative like Dr 4, but using it as a ruse the way Dr 2 would with the earnest playfulness of Dr 11) the second half of ‘Spyfall’ has Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor going straight back into embarrassing fangirling cardboard cipher – a far better response would have been to keep her as the interesting, kooky, unpredictable eccentric alien. That’s typical of this era all round sadly – they work out belatedly how to do something properly, then lecture us on how something they weren’t doing properly works, really, if you just try harder to accept it. What a shame. Of all the Chibnall era stories ‘Spyfall’ is the one with the most promise that still ebbs away by the end. Nevertheless the ending doesn’t take anything away from that first part or the best DW cliffhanger in years. I still really enjoyed ‘Spyfall’, as explosive a start to a series (and new year) as any in Who’s long history and with a genuinely exciting story that really moves on at quite a pace, but with space for the characters to do character things and a real sense of DW eccentricity that doesn’t get in the way of the plot. Had the second half lived up to the first this one would have been in the top fifty for sure.

+ That cliffhanger is really quite something, the best since, ooh Dr 10 started regenerating in ‘The Stolen Earth’ I’d say. It’s not just the O reveal, though goodness knows that would be enough. It’s the fact that, after this reveal, The Master disappears leaving everyone stranded. In a plane. About to crash. Never mind though, the Doctor will surely do something clever – that’s what she does. Only suddenly the Doctor’s been transported! How are Yaz, Graham and Ryan ever going to get out of this?I mean, its not Sarah Jane or Ace we’re talking about here – its Yaz, Graham and Ryan, companions who aren’t exactly great at solving problems or keeping out of trouble. Well, even though the cliffhanger is an easy fix in the end its still a clever one and unlike some DW two parters resolving it takes up quite a chunk of part two – the better part by far. Chibnall should have written more two-parters – credit where its due, he’s really really good at cliffhangers and making you want to see how the heck they’re going to get out of this next week. After a slow series that left a lot of the general public jaded in the series finally people were talking about DW again.

- Most of the supporting cast are really good, with Sacha Dhawan way better here in his dual role as O and a more muted, professorial Master than he will be in any of his OTT comebacks. However the other two big names blow it big time. Lenny Henry is a great actor, and come such an impressively long way in his career against all odds of classism and racism since his early days in our tiny village when my mum used to tick him off for revving his motorbike in the middle of the night and waking me up when i was a baby (true story). but his shifty portrayal that’s meant to draw our eyes away from the 'real' baddy is not one of his better performances, too hammy by far. Worse still is Stephen Fry who completely over-eggs his role as MI5 man 'C' and treats the whole thing as a joke that’s beneath him. Good job he never finished his DW script for the Christopher Eccleston series really...