In the last five
weeks Doctor Who series 11 has given us some very good
episodes (give or take a misstep or two), and has consistently
developed a strong core dynamic with loads of highly promising
potential in the new TARDIS team lead by Jodie Whittaker. Now, with
episode six, the season – and the Whittaker/Chris Chibnall era as a
whole – has its first truly brilliant story. All of the pieces have
been coming together over the last month: Whittaker has long since
come into her own as a great Doctor, her TARDIS team is developing
into a trio of very strong characters with genuine emotional arcs,
and the stories have given us a thoroughly enjoyable blend of
classic, vintage-feeling Who and a very 2018 variety of
socially-conscious, humanistic sci-fi. But as usually happens after a
soft reboot on Doctor Who, the season has been playing around
with tone and style, finding its voice across different sorts of
episodes; sometimes successfully (the tense and claustrophobic The
Tsuranga Conundrum and the thematically fascinating if somewhat
uneven Rosa) and sometimes not so much (the hamfisted and
underwritten Arachnids in the UK). But now, at the season's
midpoint, the elements have clicked into place, and this newest
regeneration of the show asserts its voice very strongly with a
genuinely great hour of television. Ironically, the season's best
episode yet is the only one so far to not be written by new
showrunner Chibnall; it is instead written by playwright turned
screenwriter Vinay Patel. It is Patel's first script for Doctor
Who, but it is also an obviously very personal historical drama
that feels like a passion project rather than just a typical script
for a weekly serial. After Rosa it is this season's second
historical story, and it finds The Doctor and company in India on the
day of Partition: the hasty and quickly disastrous separation of the
country by the British into India and Pakistan, which lead to massive
displacement, riots, religiously and ethnically-motivated violence,
and ultimately the deaths of about a million people.
Demons of the Punjab
puts Yaz in the spotlight, as The Doctor takes her back in time to
learn about the painful past that her grandmother never speaks about.
The trip places them in the heart of a country that is dividing not
just geographically, but socially, as religious/racial intolerance
and hatred stoked by divisive politics tears communities and even
families apart. There are also aliens, of course, lurking in the
background with shadowy motives, but this is ultimately a very human
story: the demons of the Punjab are our inner demons, and our
tendencies to turn against each other. The aliens serve to give the
story a definite Doctor Who twist,
but the tale of a divided family in a divided time is so strongly
told that it could stand on its own without all that. It is obvious
that the script is written by someone who cares deeply about telling
this history, and for whom this history is part of their own
heritage, and it makes the events feel vividly real and powerfully
tragic. Using time travel to tell this story allows Vinay Patel to
explore the events from two perspectives: that of the characters for
whom this is the present, and who thus have hope that things will
turn out well, and that of the characters for whom this is the past,
who know that events are going to end very badly. This lends a
certain amount of dark fatalism to the story which adds to the
punch-in-the-gut feeling that it has at times, though it
counterbalances that with Doctor Who's
typical humanism and hopefulness, even in the face of such a grim
human-rights atrocity.
One
also can't help but see warnings about our modern world in the
episode, as there are very clear parallels between how India became
ideologically divided and how our society is similarly divided now.
Extreme, divisive rhetoric stoking fires of nationalism, racial
supremacy, and Islamophobia... these themes are all frighteningly
familiar, as is the grim statement by the one of the episode's
protagonists, that the violence is being cause by “ordinary people
who have lived here all their lives, whipped into a frenzy to be part
of a mob... there's nothing worse than when normal people lose their
minds.” This episode is not only a powerful history lesson, but an
equally powerful reminder that we are still susceptible to those same
tactics, and that violent tragedies and societal self-destructions
like this are things that we are still all too capable of if we don't
learn from the past.
Demons of the Punjab
is not only by far the best episode of Doctor Who series
11 so far, but is also the best historical episode in a few seasons
(possibly even since Vincent and The Doctor),
packing an emotionally resonant punch. It raises the bar on what this
already strong season can do, and announces Patel as a very strong
new writer for the series, and one who I very much hope will return.
He has pushed Whittaker's TARDIS team in a new, dramatic direction,
and all involved have risen to the challenge beautifully. If this
episode is representative of the Whittaker/Chibnall era at its best,
then we have some amazing things to look forward to.
- Christopher S. Jordan
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