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 about 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. This was the first story Chris Chibnall sat down to write after season eleven had gone out and you can tell that he’s taken at least some of the criticisms on board. He’s brought an old name back, spent more time on the characters and let the plot unfold at a more natural pace, with less coming and going between plot arcs. Better yet, he’s found a way of making Dr 13 work making her less scatter-brained and antisocial and more focussed and loyal. You’re no longer second guessing what she might do next (something that was getting old, fast) but cheering her on as what seemed a simple plot at first unravels more and more as the episodes go on. He’s kept the parts that were working and amplified them though: the best thing about the Chibnall era is that sense of a global threat that affects more than just the home counties and you get that feeling here more than ever before in a story that keeps hopping borders and crossing countries. Perhaps best of all ‘Spyfall’ is a story concerned with being more than just a ‘Dr Who’ episode and for the first time since ‘The Ghost Monument’ we’ve got that sense of channel-hopping back again, the sense that The Doctor has been dropped inside another genre and has to think on her feet against a foe who’s come prepared. The result is arguably our first proper ‘spy’ Who since ‘The Faceless Ones’.
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 meant to be OK because he oozes cool. He’s the sort of person you’d want
on your side in a war, especially a cold war, yet doesn’t inspire people to be
better the way The Doctor does. He 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). He’s
used to blending in the background though in a way The Doctor could never do. The
biggest difference though is that Bond plots have him supporting the sort of shady
governments that the Doctor takes down. So to have The Doctor turn the genre on
its head, being her very individual self and subverting the usual genre clichés
by doing something cerebral rather than macho and by standing out rather than
going under cover is very clever. Having Dr Who take on such a masculine
franchise while the lead is played by a female is hilarious and proof of how
adaptable ‘our’ series is (you could never have a female Bond, it just wouldn’t
work). It’s the one story that actually makes use of the Doctor being a woman
(well, that and being a witch in ‘Witchfinders’
I guess, but that subplot would have worked better for a companion anyway);
this one makes a popint without actually coming out and saying it. ‘Spyfall’,
riffing on the Bond film title ‘Skyfall’, has The Doctor do everything James
Bond usually swans in and does, better in some ways (the future technology) and
worse in others (the 13th Doctor is a terrible spy – she’s more shaken and
stirred than her cocktail and so couldn’t go undercover in a duvet). The clash
of the two universes, usually so far apart, is hilarious and makes for some
great jokes, but it also gives the plot a sense of urgency and a sense of
immediacy sometimes missing from Dr Who. This isn’t a story happening in the
future or past (well, not at first anyway, until The Doctor gets trapped) but
in the here and now. It also gives Segun Akinola a great chance to throw in
some John Barry ‘homages’ in the soundtrack, with a feel more epic than his usual
scores that works nicely (though I still say we should have had a ‘theme song’).
Given that we’re turning
the usual Dr Who conventions upside down it makes sense that we have The
Doctor’s nemesis and polar opposite back. While The Doctor is an eccentric,
closer to Bond villains than Bond themselves, The Master is the closest thing
to Bond in the Whoniverse. He is (at least in his early Roger Delgado days
before he becomes a bit more unhinged) dapper, controlled, not shaken or
stirred. Putting him in this story is perfect and while I sympathise with fans
who felt it was too soon after Missy having a new Master works well in this
story as Sacha Dhawan playing a more controlled and powerful Master than the
later borderline histrionic variations he’s caused to play. For the first time
in the Chibnall era it feels as if The Doctor is actually up against a proper
threat, one that can’t just be solved the usual way, but she manages to defeat
him by being her eccentric self. The Master is introduced quite brilliantly too:
one of the first things Chibnall said about taking over the show was that, with
the reduced episode count, there probably wouldn’t be as many cliffhangers and
indeed there weren’t any in his first year. I wish he’d written more though
because he’s actually really good at them: the end of part one is a terrific
cliffhanger, with a great twist you don’t see coming at all. Spoilers: That
nice ‘O’, who’s been The Doctor’s sort of ‘scientific advisor’ in this episode
has really been keeping her under observation because he’s the new Master! Master
number 007 if my maths is right in fact, something I’m surprised they didn’t flag
up in the publicity for this story. The twist works because the hints are there
but not so obvious we see them(of course The Master has a set of paranormal magazine
‘The Fortean Times’ given how many of the things in there were caused by him)
while, 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 recognise other timelords on sight beyond their appearance, why
doesn’t she recognise him? They can’t have it both ways! This isn’t set up in
the plot the way that Professor Yana was in ‘Utopia’
either, with his timelord essence hidden in a pocket watch: he just makes the
big reveal and teleports, leaving our friends in danger. Notably The Doctor
calls The Master ‘a friend’, despite hints in
‘Planet Of Fire’ that he was family. He feels like more of a threat than he
has in a while though, especially the welcome reappearance of his tissue compression
eliminator for the first time since the 1980s. It’s that cliffhanger reveal
though that sells this incarnation, at least for now. It isn’t just solved
immediately either – it’s one that’s solved by degrees, as The Doctor teleports
and leaves a ‘Blink’ style message for her ‘fam’ that they reply to as if she’s
right there – Chibnall’s best ‘borrowing’ of Moffaty timey wimey ideas. Though
Sacha’s Master will end up an uneasy cross between Simm and Ainley in his other
appearances, over the top and demented, here he works nicely as a more suave
Delgado type Master, fully in control until The Doctor thwarts his plans. By
chance Sacha was working with Peter Capaldi when he found out he got the job –
under strict Dr Who code he wasn’t allowed to tell the actor about the part but
spent the rest of the production pretending to think up ways to exterminate
him! He’s a sensible casting choice, on the production team’s mind after playing Warris Hussain, the
director of ‘An Unearthly Child’, in Mark Gatiss’ superb drama about Who’s early
days ‘An Adventure In Space and Time’ back in 2013.
The Master isn’t the only
baddy though. Lenny Henry’s Daniel Barton is an unusual character for Dr Who
too. He’s not this era’s typical alien with Godlike powers or hurt Human who
didn’t get enough love: he’s a privileged brat who got every good thing life
could throw at him but still feels empty and hollow episode. He feels familiar,
but the fanbase can never quite decide who he’s meant to be: Is he Putin,
isolated and cold, distant enough from his feelings to shoot his own mum (no Dr
Who villain has ever done that except by accident, at least on TV – Big Finish
do have Davros carrying out experiments on his parents, but even that’s
manslaughter and recklessness not murder). Is he Mark Zuckerberg, tech giant
who created facebook because the only way he could understand people was by
turning them into an algorithm? Is he Steve Jobs, trying to get the warmth of a
world by offering them updated phones, without realising that if he maybe
didn’t bring so many out and made them cheaper we’d love him more? Is he Larry
Page or Sergery Brin, the shadowy founders of Google who went from nothing to
having power over just abut everything when they became the de facto search
engine (despite having more gaps and being harder to use than their rivals like
Yahoo, DuckGo or Ask Jeeves). It seems a bit early but is he Elon Musk, looking
for love but finding relationships scary if he can’t control how the other
person reacts (his ex, Miss Evangelista in ‘Silence
In The Library’, has quite some stories to tell). Or maybe Barton is meant
to be all of them, that particular 21st century trend of the tech
whizzkid in an era when gadgets are everything but they can never quite throw
off the tag of being an unlikeable nerd? Either way Barton seems a threat in a
way that few Chibnall baddies do and it’s almost a shame when The Master comes
along as well as he was doing a fine job on his own. That said, the sudden
return to stunt casting doesn’t do the role any favours. 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) and he’s long shown that he understands
this series well (a 1985 Dr Who sketch on the Lenny Henry show effectively
invents Ncuti’s Dr!) However 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. He’s also too nice. It’s not quite as bad as Beryl Reid’s stunt casting in
‘Earthshock’ or anything and he looks the part in a tuxedo, but most people’s
reaction was ‘I can’t take this seriously and unseen forty years of who this
man is’ rather than ‘what a revelation!’ (as with Bernard Bresslaw’s Ice
Warrior or Peter Glaze’s evil Sensorite, both parts even more against type).
The storyline of baddies
harvesting data and not eradicating humanity but adding them to hard-drives feels
like whole new territory for Dr Who too, the sort of thing that wouldn’t have
been in the ether even a Doctor ago. It makes sense of a growing feeling of
confusion and panic as to how quickly technology is growing and who is controlling
it all and for what agenda (this is the time of those awful Amazon echo dot
things, which is basically an open ticket for companies to take down your info for
their own purposes and make you pay for the privilege on top, although I’d be
first in the queue to buy one if they’d made it in the shape of K9. I’m amazed
that even all these years on we’re still missing the most obvious 21st century
Dr Who script no one has yet written: a sentient Alexa device going rogue: I
thought that was going to be the whole plot. Incidentally when Hakim asks Alexa
to play something from The Beatles’ ‘Rubber Soul’ they miss an obvious joke:
this is an album with two very apt Kasaviaan songs next to each other, ‘You Won’t
See Me’ and ‘Nowhere Man’. Presumably they couldn’t afford Beatle songs in the
soundtrack for real). While I’m not sure the idea of having such technology ‘created’
by an alien menace and then boosted, Fendahl style, by the Kasaviaans quite
works it fits the changing villainy of this era: the worst thing a villain can
do isn’t kidnap you or kill you but harvest your data and expose you to the
world. The best Dr Who stories always reflect the fears of the times in which
they were made and it’s a shame the series hadn’t done more with this, a few
Moffat phobia stories aside, given how much of our lives are online these days.The
Doctor can’t simply walk in and do something clever the way they usually do
because she’s slightly out of her depth in this universe too and has to finds a
new way of thinking. This being Dr Who there’s also a sub-plot of DNA strands
being changed into aliens, something that is more like what we’ve had before
(see ‘The Lazarus Experiment’
particularly) but even this leads to creatures that we haven’t really seen in
this series before: monsters that can come through the walls and form out of
thin air. This makes the scenes of the usual ‘spy’ type things (such as
checking a room for bugs or searching for the plans) all the more difficult:
you’re not listening out for guards, but waiting for things to appear out of
thin air.
There’s a nice sub-plot
about trust too and how it can be both a good and bad thing. It’s the three Tardis
travellers’ faith in The Doctor that saves their bacon, while it’s only The
Doctor making friends with both Ada and Noor that save her bacon. Yet on the
other hand it’s The Doctor’s automatic trust of ‘O’ that puts everyone in
danger and everyone’s acceptance of The Master that puts him in a position of
power. The moral is that you have to be careful who you put your trust in: we’re
always being called on to trust strangers and sometimes that works for us and
sometimes it backfires. That’s a particularly worthy message given the
settings: trust is of course at its lowest in a war when people would sell you
out as soon as look at you and in the 1830s too a lot of scientific inventions
were being created because of trust and sharing between scientists, often in
the face of a highly religious society that only had faith in God, not science.
It’s in the present day though, that this theme comes alive: this story wouldn’t
have happened had humanity not taken so many tech giants ‘on trust’, taking devices
into their homes and giving away their data without thinking about the
consequences. This is an era of people signing away all sorts of unpleasant things
rather than read realms of data protection details and a time when companies
can find out anything about you they like. This is also an era of more normal ‘spies’
back again, such as the Russian poisoning of defector/whistleblower Litvinenko
in a London suburb and the novochock poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal from
their own front door. Britain was no longer on alert for a mass invasion but
something subtler, something more like betrayal. ‘Spyfall’ does a good job of
tapping into that period fear, making this story at one with earlier tales of
very 1960s menaces (the similar yet very different spy story ‘The Faceless Ones’
stealing your identity), 1970s (Autons stealing your face) and 1980s (Thatcherist
monsters stealing your liberty). The pane hijacking also puts you in mind of
the missing Malaysian flight MH370, the biggest ‘mystery’ of the 21st
century so far, which is still unexplained (and thus is ripe for Dr Who-ing in
the same way The Daleks took over the Marie Celeste and the Loch Ness Monster
turned out to be a pet of The Zygons) although handled in such a way that they
don’t draw attention to the fact and leave it up to the viewer given that real
people (presumably) died within recent memory. Hopefully a future Dr Who will
riff on the idea of an airplane abducted by aliens in the future as it’s a good
one.
Unfortunately, while the
first episode is the best in years (‘World
Enough and Time’?) the second half does a Moffat and goes in a completely
different direction, leaving most of these promising plot strands hanging (it’s
even filmed by a different director, the only time modern Who does this). These
Kasaviaans and their powers are never fully explained and while we think they’re going to be
something important they’re just a background detail that dies out when The
Master is zapped back in time. It’s uncomfortable seeing 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. For all his bad qualities and attempts to destroy The Doctor he’s
generally more noble and fair than this: it’s hard to imagine any previous
Master in this role. There’s also no way he wouldn’t have risen up through the
ranks and hypnotised Hitler into giving him the top job. Playing around with
such a sensitive and relatively recent part of history is uncomfortable too,
even though 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. At least the last time was had Nazis on screen River Song baited
them and Rory locked Hitler in a cupboard, which was bad enough, but this time
we have a sort of cartoon comicbook tongue-in-cheek flavour overlaid on top of
a source of real historic pain and suffering and it just feels wrong.
Worse is what the Doctor
is up to when she gets sent back in time, hanging out with not one but two
leading female scientists while the ‘expected’ hero from history, Charles
Babbage, gets shunted to the side. While not quite as bad as ‘Nikolai Tesla’ and what they did to Thomas
Edison this sub-plot, too, smacks of someone so desperate to ‘correct’ history
that they go too far the other way. What was wrong with making them equals?
Then again, how much research did Chibnall actually do? Neither Ada Lovelace
nor Noor Inayat Khan are anything like their ‘real’ selves and display no
characteristics or personality beyond being bright Victorian scientists. Ada,
the daughter of Lord Byron from ‘The Haunting Of
Villa Diodati’, was every bit as smart as this and was the first to
recognise how much could be done with Babbage’s inventions. But she was the
assistant, the Jo Grant to his 3rd Doctor, and far more of a
mathematical genius than she was a scientist. If they really wanted to blow
viewers’ minds they should have told the truth and had her doing his sums for
him really fast without a computer, proving for once and for all that girls can
‘do’ maths. All that part about urging The Doctor on to fight monsters and
being the first person to believe her story also seems out of character – it
would have been more accurate, given her interest in mesmerism and phrenology,
to have her assume The Doctor to be a phantom, a side effect of a séance. She
also never checks The Doctor’s head for lumps once. She was also a lot more
sickly than this, which they do mention, but from a case of Measles that was
far more severe than anything we see on screen (and a big part of her drive to
being a scientist). Ada got off lightly, though compared to what happens to
Noor, a British resistance agent working in France during WWII, who was as
brave as they come. The thing is though, you don’t get to work undercover and
be as immediately understanding and in some ways as gullible as Noor is,
believing The Doctor’s story instantly. She was brave, she wasn’t stupid and
while Ada might have the imagination to think about aliens from other worlds
dropping in for tea and test-tubes British agents just don’t have that luxury.
This also leads to one of those occasional tone-deaf Chibnall speeches where
The Doctor tells her to keep going because fascism will die out and all will be
fine – even though she must know that a) things aren’t fine for her (she’ll be
arrested, deported to Dachua workcamp and thrown in prison, shackled by hands
and feet dying of starvation in 1943. She wasn’t executed, despite a cut scene
showing that) and b) we never do fully get rid of fascism. This story written
to the backdrop of Joe Biden getting elected instead of Donald Trump, but we
know now a second (fixed) election later that it was a false dawn and even at
the time how easy Trump had made it for the right-wing to escape from the box
we thought the end of the war had put them in. It all smacks of arrogance and
smugness, that ‘our’ era has seen sense when theirs hasn’t and is superior in
some moral way, which isn’t true at all. Why doesn’t The Doctor simply say they
win the war and leave it at that?
Alas when the end comes
it all gets solved far too easily too. The Doctor, in 1834, plants a virus so
that when The Master, who’s lived through the 20th and 21st
centuries (how come he doesn’t turn up at UNIT HQ and give his Delgado self a
hand, or if he can’t alter his own timeline at least laugh at The 3rd
Doctor in exile?) arrives to start his great plan again it backfires. It’s the
sort of plot that was done as a joke in Comic Relief spoof ‘The Curse Of Fatal
Death’, which suddenly we’re being asked to take seriously (I’m sure it breaks
multiple alws of time altering something that doesn’t technically exist yet!) As
for the other three, they spend half the second episode on a crashing plane and
half under arrest, kept safely out the way for The Doctor to get all the good
bits. Barton, meanwhile, just kind of disappears (perhaps set up for a sequel
that never came). After the promise of that first episode, with the stakes so
high and so many interesting ideas, it’s a real shame the whole thing comes
crashing to the ground (funnily enough starting from the moment in the story
when the plane doesn’t) And yet even that seems better than average Chibnall:
Jodie Whittaker never gets this much time to herself in any story again and
while she’s paired with one-off companions throughout the episode she’s far
more ‘herself’ with any of them than the usual three. The near death experience
gives Yaz and Ryan some space to reflect though and Graham some strong moments
of comedy relief (The Master has his number, saying here’s there for ‘running
commentary’, as a big part of his character is stating the obvious), so even
that’s not a total loss (though the scenes of Ryan playing basketball and
scoring hoops first time, despite his dyspraxia, are another no no: while the
bigger the ball the easier for co-ordination purposes, there’s no way Ryan
would ever be ‘a natural’ at this, or indeed playing sports when he doesn’t
have to. What’s wrong with him meeting with his mates for something less
co-ordinated? I’d also be amazed if Ryan can fly a plane first time, given that
part of the problem with dyspraxia is co-ordinating your left and right hands.
I know they want to push the ‘you an do anything and not let your handicap stop
you’ element, but give the steering over to Yaz and let Ryan save the world by
using his brains). At least there is an ending and at least The Doctor is a
proactive part of it, rather than standing around looking miserable while the
baddy accidentally messes up (something which happens in almost every 13th
Dr episode). There’s an ending involving
Gallifrey too which disappoints because they don’t do anything with it. Chibnall went to all that trouble reviving it
again in ‘Hell Bent’ and then
Chibnall comes along and breaks it, for no apparent emotional value (we’ve only
just been through the loss of Gallifrey which lasted the entire 9,10 and the
vast majority of the 11th Dr era). All those hints from The Master
of some big revelation and it ends up just being that. What a swizz!
Even so, while sadly the
rest of season twelve and most of season thirteen go back to being business as
usual, following the quality of the second episode of ‘Spyfall’ rather than the
first, nevertheless there’s something there. ‘Spyfall’ maybe lacks the
originality and humour of ‘Eve Of The Daleks’,
the seriousness of ‘Rosa’ or the
poignancy of ‘The Haunting Of Villa Diodati’
but as an overall watching experience is matched only by ‘Village Of The Angels’ in finding a way to
tell a decent story in new ways that we’d never seen before. It certainly isn’t
dull or slow the way so many Chibnall stories are and less incomprehensible
than most. There’s a plot that’s clever but not so clever we can’t follow it,
characters who seem real even when they do the usual spy film of having people
who are ‘not what they seem’ and a storyline that takes us all the way from the
Australian outback to the Ivory Coast and The Eiffel Tower (though most of
these places are actually Cape Town, South Africa, where they did a lot of the
filming this year and Paris is Cardiff, would you believe). Of course they can’t
match a Hollywood budget so it still seems cheap compared to any Bond film, but
compared to most Dr Who stories this one looks amazing. There are some really
nice little moments throughout, with Chibnall writing the quality of dialogue
from his earliest days on Who, from The Master’s annoyed comment to The Doctor ‘when
I arrange your death I expect you to stay dead’ to The Doctor’s latest maxim ‘where
there’s risk, there’s hope’. I really like the ‘Wizard of Oz’ gag too, The
Master’s Tardis, disguised as his house, taking off from the Australian outback
(Australia of course being known as ‘Oz’). Yeah there’s some dodgy ones too
(the car chase scene is poor and most of the scenes from the 1830s and 1940s
are cringeworthy) but even then they’re clumsy at doing things this series had
either never done before or not for a long time (this is a very different car
chase to the ones in the 1970s in Bessie or The Whomobile). The result is, in
part one at least, a triumph: characters we care for doing things that make
sense with a message about trust that’s very Dr Who, big action sequences
interspersed with strong characterisation scenes and a big ol’ twist just when
things are getting boring. Alas Chibnall will revert to type, go back to doing
things the way he did anyway and lose all the good momentum he’d built up for
himself here, with some truly shocking stories to come in this run. But for
now, for a week at least, we could dream that the crashing plane of Dr Who
might actually stick the landing without crashing. Had the second half lived up
to the first this one would have been in the top fifty for sure. Part one was
the first Dr Who story written after the death of long-term script editor and
Who writer Terrance Dicks and the episode carried a typically sweet tribute
caption. ‘Spyfall’ is the sort of story he would have loved: big on action, big
on metaphor and using a villain he helped co-create, even if like a lot of
Terrance stories, it loses it goes down a few cul-de-sacs and loses its way a
bit by the end.
POSITIVES + 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. Then just when they’re getting their act together the
screens blink of, leaving them alone. It’s a great scene, that works as both
drama and character piece, as Yaz stays calm, Ryan frets and Graham goes to
pieces, arguing with a Doctor who isn’t there (and a Doctor who knows he’ll
argue) while trying to keep them calm and safe. 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.
Previous ‘Resolution’
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