Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall's
first season of Doctor Who has
(pretty much) come to an end. Yes, we have the New Year's Day special
coming in just over two weeks, which will surely act as a sort of
second season finale, but for all intents and purposes this week's
The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos
wraps up series 11, closing its principle character arcs and bringing
the first year of Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor full-circle. And what
a year it has been for Doctor Who:
between the groundbreaking debut of the first female Doctor and the
soft-reboot brought by a new showrunner, this was the beloved series'
best-rated season in several years. But how has it stacked up in the
grand scheme of the long-running show? Jodie Whittaker has been
resolutely fantastic, feeling unmistakably like The Doctor from her
first episode, and giving us a perfect mix of familiar traits from
past Doctors (a bit of Davison, a bit of Tennant, a bit of McGann,
and occasionally still a dash of Capaldi) and new eccentricities and
personality traits all her own. But for at least the first half of
the season, she was without a doubt the best thing about it by a long
shot. After a very good season premiere, the first few episodes –
all scripted by new showrunner Chibnall – were intriguing,
engaging, and full of great potential and ideas, but also rather
uneven. The Ghost Monument and
The Tsuranga Conundrum
were both pretty solid, retro-feeling sci-fi yarns which built
memorable worlds that were ultimately better than the
macguffin-filled stories themselves. Rosa
told a strong time-travel-paradox story with very relevant and
powerful social commentary at its core, but some of its writing was a
tad on-the-nose in a way that made its execution not quite as smart
as it could have been. And Arachnids in the UK
was pretty terrible, with a half-baked plot and one of the laziest
Trump satires in current pop culture (I mean, he practically is a
parody of himself, and Chibnall couldn't be any more clever than
this?), all of which was about on par with the bad title that I can
only assume was an awkward stretch of an Anarchy in the UK
joke.
Most
of these episodes were uneven for the same two core reasons. Firstly,
introducing four brand-new characters all at once is a lot for the
show to juggle. It struggled to give all four leads significant,
characterization-building things to do in each episode, and in the
process it spread itself a bit thin, and took longer than most
seasons to make the new TARDIS team really feel established. Aside
from brief, episode-or-two-at-a-time groupings like 10, Rose, Jackie,
and Mickey or 11, Amy, Rory, and River Song, Doctor Who
hasn't had a consistent, every-episode four-person TARDIS crew since
Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan, and Adric, and this is
why: given the action-oriented nature of the show, it takes almost
half the season for the large cast of characters to all start feeling
like fleshed-out real people. All of them had clear, likable
personalities, but it took way too long to really figure out what
made them tick, and this is including The Doctor, who was often just
as shortchanged in terms of substantial characterization as her
companions. However, this probably was exacerbated by the second core
reason: that Chris Chibnall is a very uneven writer, and he was
trying to do so much with these first few episodes that he stretched
himself in ways that were not always successful. Or perhaps he
underestimated how much character drama we needed relative to the
amount of sci-fi action, or tried too hard to keep things moving fast
and fun to ease fans through the transition between eras or win over
the naysayers who were skeptical of the first female Doctor (though
it would have been a bolder move to not care whether those folks were
put off or not). Either way, the first half of the season needed to
slow down a little more and spend more time with its characters when
they weren't running around.
However,
Chibnall appears to be a stronger showrunner than he is a writer, as
most of these issues resolved themselves at the season's halfway
point. In addition to Whittaker being an excellent Doctor, Bradley
Walsh, Mandip Gill, and Tosin Cole have from the start made strong,
likeable supporting characters, even if the scripts didn't always
give them enough to work with. But around the midpoint of the season,
as their characters became more defined, all three of them solidified
into excellent companions, with Yasmin and Ryan's personal
quarterlife struggles feeling believable, and Graham rather
unexpectedly becoming the show's second heart (Gallifreyan anatomy
pun intended) after The Doctor, with his mix of humor and sadness and
his story arc of dealing with grief. The scripts also improved
significantly... ironically once Chibnall stopped writing them every
week. Demons of the Punjab
was an absolute masterpiece: the best episode of the season and one
of the best historical stories in years. Kerblam!
was a fantastic mix of sci-fi thriller and snarky social satire with
great art design and atmosphere, feeling a bit like a Black
Mirror-inspired retelling of the
Tom Baker-era classic The Robots of Death.
The Witchfinders was
another excellent historical, for the first time pitting the first
female Doctor against historical misogyny in a very interesting way
(to be honest, it would have been nice if the season had further
explored how her new gender affects how different cultures treat her,
but at least they did it well here), and bolstered by a top-notch
performance by the great Alan Cumming. With that run of episodes
series 11 made up for its early unevenness and then some, allowing it
to go into its final two installments in top form.
It Takes You Away
isn't entirely successful, and gets a little messy at times, but when
it is good, it is very good, and stylistically it is something very
new and different for the series. If this had been a two-part story
with more time to develop its ideas and mythology it would have been
pretty much perfect, but as it is there is a lot about it to love,
even if it probably has too much going on for its own good.
Stylistically and narratively it feels like a combination of a
Christopher Nolan reality-bender and a modern high-concept-horror
film like A Quiet Place or
Hereditary.
Beginning as the tale of a blind
girl found locked in a seemingly-besieged cabin in the Norwegian
fjords, the episode goes to places that you would definitely not
expect from its opening minutes; places creepy, fantastical, and
both. And it does it all with excellent art design that is among the
season's most striking and surreal. It also gives some major,
well-deserved attention to both Ryan and Graham's character arcs, as
they both cope with grief and anger for family members gone. But
ultimately this is a bit too big and ambitious a story for 49
minutes, and the script several times relies on plot devices or
made-up-on-the-spot bits of mythology to justify itself, at least a
couple times delivered in fairly clunky dumps of exposition. If this
were a two-part story it could have introduced these elements in a
more gradual way that would have felt less arbitrary and more earned,
and the whole thing would work better; as it is, there are some
moments where (more than usual for Doctor Who)
you have to just suspend your disbelief and enjoy the ride. But
considering how strong the episode's strong points are, that isn't
too hard to do.
The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos,
on the other hand, tells a grand-scale story that is perfectly fitted
to 50 minutes. It is similarly epic in scope and big on ideas (with
at least one major new thing to add to the show's lore), but it is
told in a way that feels perfectly tuned to the length of the
episode. Chris Chibnall returns to write this one – his first
script since the first half of the season – and it is by far the
best episode he wrote this year, and one of his best Doctor
Who scripts period. This feels
once again like Chibnall the writer/showrunner of the acclaimed first
season of Broadchurch...
not Chibnall the writer of Arachnids in the UK.
This finale brings the season full-circle, back around to its
premiere in both narrative and thematic senses, and it does it in
fairly unexpected ways. A familiar foe returns, Graham and Ryan's
grief and anger over the murder of Grace is once again at the
emotional forefront, and both of these elements are delivered on in
very satisfying ways that feel earned. But the plot surrounding those
elements is something rather new, and it unfolds brilliantly in its
own right as an effective blend of dark sci-fi and fantasy. This is a
finale which often feels like a standalone adventure, but it works as
both equally well; a rare quality indeed. Because it isn't one of
those finales involving a conflict that has been built up across a
season (or perhaps, let's be honest, because Steven Moffat isn't
writing it), its stakes don't feel forced or absurdly high, but it
still connects back enough to tie the season together into something
more cohesive than the collection of standalone stories that it
generally has been. It ends the season on a high note, and the way
that it pulls some significant emotional threads together makes the
whole of series 11 stronger.
Jodie Whittaker
ends the season impressively, firmly anchored in the role of The
Doctor. She inhabited the character wonderfully from episode one
onward, but has nonetheless grown into the role as the season has
gone on, despite having to sometimes contend with underwritten
scripts that didn't give her quite enough to work with. After
struggling to get enough characterization amid limited available
screen time, the TARDIS team of Ryan, Yasmin, and Graham have
coalesced into a very strong ensemble, and the chemistry both among
themselves and with Whittaker has become wonderful to watch. His
first season as showrunner may have gotten off to an underwhelming
start amid underwritten scripts, but in the second half Chris
Chibnall has proven himself to be a solid leader for the show. After
these last few episodes, and especially this finale, I am very
hopeful that the Whittaker/Chibnall era will go on to be a great one.
Assuming it can run with this season's strengths, learn from the
things it didn't quite get right, and bring back some of the stronger
writers that were responsible for its finest moments, this finale
left all the pieces in place for a fantastic series 12.
Overall score for episodes 9 and 10:
Overall score for series 11:
- Christopher S. Jordan
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