After what has felt like a long time away, due to an extended between-season break, Doctor Who is finally back, with the season that will really establish what kind of era showrunner Chris Chibnall and star Jodie Whittaker's tenure is. Season 11 was a good but not great debut season for Whittaker's 13th Doctor. Whittaker herself was excellent from the start, and quickly found her footing and established her identity as a very strong Doctor.
The season had some very good episodes, and at least a couple truly great ones, and the whole thing felt very evocative of the classic series, and particularly the excellent (and pretty underrated) 5th Doctor Peter Davison era. The three companions – Tosin Cole's Ryan, Mandip Gill's Yaz, and Bradley Walsh's Graham – eventually developed into really good characters, with Graham being the unlikely standout. But the problem with the season was that introducing four new characters all at once, while also trying to establish the tone of a new showrunner's era, was a bit too much; The Doctor, Graham, Yaz, and Ryan all got a bit shortchanged in the character-development department in various episodes in the season's first half, as the scripts would sometimes feel spread a little thin between such a large ensemble of newcomers. All of them got to be the dramatic focus of a couple episodes, and we eventually got deeper into all of their characters and motivations, but by the time we really got to know all of them, and they finally felt like the family unit that Chibnall was clearly trying to develop, the end of the season was starting to creep up pretty fast. As such, it could be said that season 11 was more of an establishing season, laying the groundwork for a new era of the show in a way that took a little while to get where it was going, but should let the series thrive now that it's there.
Of
course, it would be a fair criticism to say that a better showrunner
should have been able to develop all four characters a bit faster,
and in a way that didn't leave some of them feeling neglected and
underutilized in certain episodes; it must be admitted that Chris
Chibnall has always been an uneven writer for Doctor Who
and Torchwood,
providing some excellent episodes but also some very mediocre ones,
and the verdict might still be out on just how good a showrunner he
actually is. His decision to fill season 11 entirely with
single-episode monster-of-the-week stories, and not employ a larger
season-long story arc, didn't help either: the slower pace of
two-parters and the grander-scope possibilities of season-long arcs
both provide great opportunities for characters to thrive and
develop, and it was to its detriment that the season had neither. But
still, season 11 came together by the end and finished very strongly,
and delivered at least some great episodes along the way, lending
credence to the theory that the large cast and new showrunner just
needed time to properly establish themselves. Last year's New Year's
special, Resolution,
further supported this theory: right from the start of that episode,
the four leads genuinely feel like a tight-nit family of
well-developed characters, and that proved to be one of their best
episodes yet, propelled largely by the strength of the chemistry
between them. Now Whittaker and her three cohorts are going into
their first season as an established and fully-developed TARDIS team,
and can hit the ground running and build on all of that momentum and
character-building. Season 12 has loads of potential behind it; the
question is, can Chris Chibnall properly channel that potential into
a season as good as these characters deserve?
Spyfall,
Parts 1 and 2
The
most striking thing about Spyfall,
from very early on, is how directly and thoroughly it addresses and
corrects for every one of the flaws I mentioned earlier from season
11. It feels very much like Chris Chibnall took an honest look back
at the previous season during season 12's longer-than-usual
development period, took note of where that season was lacking, as
well as what it did well, and really let those lessons inform his
writing. This is a very nearly perfect season premiere, and
everything I could have hoped for. While it may have taken season 11
longer than I would have liked to build its family unit and find its
voice, the investment pays off beautifully now: just as in
Resolution,
Graham, Ryan, and Yaz truly do feel like The Doctor's fam, as she is
fond of calling them. They now feel like just as solid a TARDIS team
as the 12th
Doctor and Clara did in season 9, or as the 11th
Doctor, Amy, and Rory did in seasons 5-7. The story itself is an
absolutely fantastic example of everything that modern Doctor
Who does
really well: it's an alien conspiracy mystery, a rather action-packed
sci-fi espionage thriller of the kind that recalls the best UNIT and
Torchwood tales, it's a time-hopping historical story in its second
half, and it's a great cat-and-mouse game between The Doctor and a
classic archetypal enemy. I will not say who that enemy is, since BBC
made the infuriating decision to spoil the reveal as loudly and
unavoidably as possible on social media way too soon after the
episode aired, and I'm not about to do the same, but suffice to say
that I was very happy with how they handled it, and it felt like a
good reveal (if one that could have used more explanation).
That
Chris Chibnall initially wrote more for Torchwood
than
Doctor
Who shows
– in a good way – in Spyfall
Part
1, which unfolds as a fairly action-packed invasion conspiracy
thriller centered around a mysterious tech billionaire who is
obviously an amalgamation of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. It is
excellently paced, has some nice twists and turns, and gives each of
the four main characters moments to shine. Plus, it also features a
very fun guest-starring performance from none other than the great
Stephen Fry. Then Spyfall
Part
2 shifts gears to the story's time-travel cat-and-mouse mode, and
proceeds to hop back and forth between the past and present, with
events running in parallel in both times, in a way that the show
rarely does, especially considering that it's a time-travel series.
It handles the multiple-time-zones storytelling so well that it makes
me really wish the show did that more.
This
story arc also does something that season 11 was very much lacking:
it sets up what looks to be a very interesting season-long story arc,
which taps into the show's long-running Time Lord mythology, and
looks as though it might flip it on its head (not to mention address
one dangling plot thread from season 11). After two seasons of mostly
monster-of-the-week stories, a return to an overarching-season-story
format is a very welcome one, and any story that sets out to explore
and expand upon the history and dark secrets of Gallifrey is
immediately a fascinating one. Of course there will undoubtedly be
fans who are upset that this arc appears to be really messing with
the show's long-term mythology, with the door appearing to stand open
for major plot points to be retconned. But this is hardly the first
time this has happened: in addition to the twists and turns of
Gallifreyan lore in the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi years, the Tom
Baker and Sylvester McCoy eras both famously messed with the Time
Lord mythos a lot, and turned established canon on its head in ways
that were very controversial at the time. But now those eras are
considered classic, and those changes to the mythos are now revered
as established canon; all we're seeing here is the natural life-cycle
of Doctor
Who as
a constantly-self-reinventing show coming around again, and fans
would do well to relax and see how this arc plays out before getting
too grumpy about it.
With
Spyfall
Chris Chibnall and his cast and crew have really come out swinging:
this is possibly the best script that Chibnall has written for the
show, and the four lead actors execute it excellently, despite being
one of the larger TARDIS teams in the show's history. It is a great
story; or rather two different types of great story joined into one
ambitious whole. If this is the standard of writing that we can look
forward to, then season 12 will easily make up for season 11's flaws
and solidify the Jodie Whittaker era into a strong one for Doctor
Who.
Orphan 55
Orphan
55
finds The Doctor and her fam in what starts out as decidedly familiar
territory, before distinguishing itself with some interesting and
topical themes. The set-up for the episode is basically a mash-up of
two of Doctor
Who's
most well-worn, frequently-utilized plot concepts: the
base-under-siege story, and the monster-on-the-loose action/adventure
with lots of running down corridors. The premise built around those
concepts also feels very familiar: the TARDIS team go to what is
allegedly a luxury vacation spot, but soon find that the
ostensible-paradise is quite dangerous, and has dark secrets. It's a
premise that has been used multiple times throughout the original and
new series (most obviously in The
Leisure Hive for
the original and Midnight
for
the new), and between that and the use of those time-honored
formulas, Orphan
55
starts off with a certain sense of deja vu. However, this ultimately
isn't too big a deal because the episode does it really well. At the
beginning of the story the utopian atmosphere of the resort is
certainly enough to draw the viewer in, and when the monster mayhem
starts to break loose, the pacing is fast, aggressive, and exciting;
once it kicks into gear, it really never lets up. The monsters
themselves are very impressive: some truly nasty practical-effects
beasts that give the episode a bit more of a horror-focused Aliens
vibe.
Ultimately I found myself not caring that it was rather formulaic and
familiar, because it was so much fun.
But
then as the episode goes on, it shakes up that formula with some
revelations that make it very topical. The episode reveals itself to
be about some decidedly present-day issues involving climate change
and class division, and these themes bring a breath of fresh air to
the somewhat recycled setup. The episode has a very valid, important
message that is worth repeating, and it is very much in classic
Doctor
Who style
to deliver such a message through a sci-fi/adventure lens. While
there are a few moments that are a bit more on-the-nose than they
need to be, I thought the themes were quite successful, and set the
episode apart quite well from its familiar predecessors, making it
more than just another monsters-on-the-loose/base-under-siege story.
Of
course, this being 2020, there is a certain angry subset of fans over
on the right who felt the need to rail against this episode as hard
as possible, repeating the old talking points that “the liberal SJW
agenda is ruining the show,” “why did they have to bring politics
into it,” “the series never used to push messages like this,”
etc. And I truly don't understand it; those complaints make me wonder
if those people even watch the same show that I do. Because I'm here
to tell you, as a lifelong Whovian who has continually watched a lot
of classic Who
since
I was about 8 as well as the new series for the whole time it has
been on... Doctor
Who
has always been a very progressive, liberal show. At the heart of the
series there has always been a philosophy of humanism, and a
preoccupation with social and environmental justice. Story arcs have
dealt with environmentalism and climate change as far back as the
late-60s and early-70s (The
Ice Warriors
and The
Green Death,
for starters), The Doctor has always fought fascists, bigots, and
tyrants (The Daleks, introduced in episode 5 of season 1, explicitly
represented Nazis, after all, and that story arc has a speech by
companion Ian equating their worldview with the present day's
racism), and while the classic series – especially its early years
– certainly had an uneven track record in how well it wrote and
treated its female leads, more than a few writers fought hard to
bring feminism into the show (companions like Zoe Heriot, Liz Shaw,
and Sarah-Jane Smith being good examples at their best-written). Not
to mention that the first season of the new series gave us a queer
recurring character at a time when LGBTQ rights still faced an uphill
battle in mainstream politics, and the show has been very
LGBTQ-friendly ever since. And of course, The Doctor has always given
big, show-stopping speeches about his philosophy, going at least as
far back as The Second Doctor's iconic speech in 1967's The
Moonbase,
in which he sums up his attitudes as “there are corners of the
universe that have bred the most terrible things, things that act
against everything we believe in... and they must be fought.” For
anyone to say that a “liberal, SJW agenda” has infiltrated and
ruined Doctor
Who
simply shows that they fundamentally don't understand what this show
has always (within the context of its time-period) been; same goes
for the similar statements made against the current iterations of The
Twilight Zone and
Star
Trek,
which likewise have both always been progressive, humanist shows that
had very liberal attitudes for their day.
This
isn't to say that there aren't fair complaints that can be made
against Orphan
55;
just that that
isn't a legitimate complaint, since the episode's social attitude is
very much in line with the attitude Doctor
Who has
always had. The writing can be clunky or too on-the-nose at times,
there is a subplot involving a would-be romantic interest for Ryan
that strains plausibility in how it plays out, and the episode does
sometimes feel a bit too much like a “base-under-siege”-by-numbers
story. In the end it is a good-but-not-great episode which
nonetheless is a lot of fun to watch, and whose heart is in the right
place. Even when I recognized that there were elements we've seen
before in other stories going back decades, I had a great time with
it because the action and the pacing is very well-executed, the art
and creature design is great, and Jodie Whittaker really gets to
shine with a few big classic-Doctor speeches. It's solid fun, but it
probably won't go down as one of the season's best.
Nikola
Tesla's Night of Terror
I've
always really enjoyed the historical episodes from Doctor
Who,
both those from the early classic series that were basically just
straight historical dramas with a bit of a time-travel twist (The
Crusade and
The
Reign of Terror are
good examples), and the more recent ones that explore historical
events or the personalities of historical figures through a
genre-story setting (Vincent
and the Doctor and
Demons
of the Punjab,
for example, were my favorite episodes from their respective
seasons). So right from the start I was very excited about this
episode, and it did not disappoint – at least, not in terms of what
I wanted from it. Former ER
heartthrob Goran Visnjic guest-stars as Nikola Tesla, in the heat of
his feud with Thomas Edison (Robert Glenister) in 1903, when he
becomes the target of an apparent alien assassin, and The Doctor and
fam must intervene. Again there are legitimate fan gripes about the
episodes: the alien subplot feels a bit underbaked, and while my
assumption due to the extreme similarity in mannerisms and design is
that the scorpion-like aliens are meant to be a sister species of
season 3's Racnoss, that this is never explicitly stated has caused
some fans to instead feel that the baddies are just very derivative.
Whether intended or not, the aliens definitely feel like the same
threat from that David Tennant episode repeated, and the alien plot
does indeed feel a tad perfunctory. But I think that is completely
fine, as that is clearly not what the episode is really interested
in, nor I for that matter.
The
soul of this episode is all about exploring the tension between Tesla
and Edison, the polar opposites of their two personalities, and why
one got all the common-knowledge historical credit for inventing
electricity while the other was mostly just known and revered by
science geeks until Elon Musk named a car after him. Graham, Ryan,
and Yaz all more or less fall into the common-knowledge,
not-a-science-geek category of starting the episode thinking of Tesla
as “that guy who the car is named after... but what exactly did he
invent again?” while The Doctor is just about the most star-struck
we've ever seen her in any historical episode. The episode's mission
harkens back to the early days of the original series when the show
was meant as a quasi-educational sci-fi show that would focus on
history (a mission that changed quickly when The Daleks proved wildly
popular): it wants to teach viewers more about who Tesla was, and
correct the common misconceptions about who really deserves to be
celebrated as the father of electricity.
The
episode portrays Tesla as a visionary dreamer; a poor immigrant who
wanted to change the world and benefit humanity with science,
possessing a brilliance that was years ahead of his time, but lacking
the business sense to sell that brilliance in the cutthroat world of
America's gilded age. Thomas Edison, on the other hand, is portrayed
as a greedy, self-aggrandizing, rather unscrupulous jerk who is very
much a business mogul first and an inventor second. By all accounts
their portrayals in this episode are very accurate (Edison certainly
was guilty of scientific espionage against Tesla, and was notorious
for taking credit for inventions actually made by other scientists in
his employ), and if you take out the aliens this episode is pretty
solidly-grounded historical fiction. Both actors are great in their
respective parts, with Visnjic in particular making an excellent
Tesla, coming off as inspiring and charming when his knowledge that
he is (unless The Doctor's around) the smartest person in the room
could easily have come off as arrogant in the hands of the wrong
actor. While the alien threat itself may be a tad disposable, seeing
these two opposite personalities, who were real-life rivals, have to
begrudgingly work together to stop it is an absolute joy.
Spyfall
remains my favorite of the season so far overall, but Nikola
Tesla's Night of Terror
is a very good episode, especially for those who love the historical
episodes. I may not yet be entirely sold on Chris Chibnall as a
showrunner – that will rather depend on how well this season comes
together as a whole – but I will say that his era has been very
good about delivering great historical episodes, which I think is
worth a lot, since time-travel stories to the past are both rarer and
arguably harder to execute well than time-travel stories to the
future. Of course, we have not yet seen anything else connecting to
the overarching story set up by Spyfall,
which is something I am eagerly awaiting. Perhaps we will see a bit
more of that in the two-parter that begins this weekend, featuring
the return of the Judoon.
Stay
tuned – now that we're caught up with the season so far, regular
reviews of each week's episodes will follow on a more consistent
basis, as well as some other Doctor
Who reviews
and articles related to the current classic-series blu-ray line!
Score
for season 12 so far:
-
Christopher S. Jordan
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