Doctor Who steals from the best! #DoctorWho #DrWho #Orphan55 #TranquilitySpa

‘Get away from her, you bitch!’ So says the Doctor, using a line straight from the Aliens movie. More than that, the styling of the corridor chase sequences and the early glimpses of the monster in episode 3 of series 12, entitled Orphan 55, are lifted from Alien. And the episode nicks terraforming and teleporters from Star Trek. And there’s more borrowing (call it homage if you like), from Hitchhiker’s Guide, and so on. But you know what? It all works. Indeed, it works extremely well. What a relief after the stinker that was episode 2. You see, we have a new writer on board for this latest outing – thank the heavens and all that’s holy (and unholy, come to that – whatever it takes). I’m going to track down this Ed Hime, whoever he is, and roundly congratulate him.

Why is the episode so successful? Well, there’s genuine jeopardy involved in the action sequences. People die. Important people. And the sequences move the story forward as well, to an inexorable and shocking reveal moment – the answer to the mystery of the planet known as Orphan 55. There’s an eco-message that I was completely down with, though others might whine it’s a touch preachy. Matter of taste, I suspect.

You can actually tell from the opening scene of the episode that it’s gonna be a good one, and that we have a decent writer doing the work. There are refreshing jokes (proper ones) that add new dimensions to the cast of characters. Bradley Walsh has been collecting coupons from the coffee machine that they have in the Tardis – the machine is upstairs, which is downstairs, or wherever it is in the folded space of the place. And he now has enough coupons to take them all on holiday. The Doctor says she doesn’t need a holiday – and then all her companions turn on her and say, ‘No, you really DO need a holiday. Trust us. You do. Really.’ It’s a telling moment, and the Doctor actually learns something new about herself (rare, these days). The coupons are put together and they’re all teleported to… Tranquility Spa! But it’s all too good to be true. Of course it is! It’s Doctor Who, after all.

I’ll leave it there, to avoid spoilers, blah, blah. If you’re one of the legions of fans who’ve switched Doctor Who off, you might wanna switch it back on for this one. (Oo, and Ryan gets a hot girlfriend for himself!)

Doctor Who in Spyfall: Oh dear, more is definitely less! #DoctorWho #Spyfall #DrWho

So, series 12 of Doctor Who started with the double-header Spyfall. The name of the two-parter is a reference to the Bond movie Skyfall. It’s a weak pun… and ends up describing what is ultimately a fairly weak start to the overall series. It’s such a shame, because the first part had such promise too! We have Stephen Fry, Lenny Henry (as a convincingly evil and straight-faced Zuckerberg type character), a bunch of white-light baddies called the Kasavin (from beyond our universe) and Sacha Dhawan wonderfully playing an old nemesis of the Doctor (very good acting). Chuck in some Bond-type science fiction technology and a few twists and turns, and it was all sizing up to be an utter triumph.

Yet the second episode was pretty nonsensical, sadly. Quite unnecessarily, even more was thrown into the plot – Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Nazis, Gallifrey (honest!) and… other stuff that flashed by without any true explanation. It was a case of ‘more is definitely less’. There were action scenes that didn’t move the plot along, and which had no genuine consequence or jeopardy. So what’s the flaming point to watching them?People are getting miniaturised (and killed), and the Doctor (quite-out-of-character) simply doesn’t have time to care about murders. It left me numb too. Then we’ll get a talking-heads scene in which the characters are trying to make sense of what the hell’s going on. There are umpteen reveal moments that leave us none the wiser. And we wait for things to coalesce into something meaningful. And we wait. And we scratch our heads and wonder if we’ve missed something important, or dropped off at some important moment, or drunk too much wine. Maybe we’ve missed a crucial clue. But the final explanation of what is going on (after two whole episodes) was unguessable anyway, so the clues weren’t actually clues. And the big showdown finale… when the baddies flick the switch… is a complete and utter anti-climax. Computer says no. WTF?! One of the fundamental rules of writing good drama is that we must not deny the audience any of the ‘riches’ that they’ve been promised – if we have described a terrible threat, we must not simply abort the threat before the bad thing happens!

I watched episode 2 through a second time… and it was no more coherent on second viewing either. Jodie Whittaker was as brilliant as ever, as was Bradley Walsh. Honestly, they deserve better scripts. Still, there was so much thrown in that there were tantalising promises of what’s to come in the other eight episodes. They’d better not deny us those riches!

The Doctor fights a Reconnaissance Dalek in the New Year’s Day special, ‘Resolution’! #Resolution #DoctorWho #JodieWhittaker #DrWho

A thousand years ago, the Daleks sent a special Reconnaissance Dalek to Earth, to prepare the way for their invasion. The Reconnaissance Dalek was far more advanced than a normal Dalek, but the tribes of humanity came together to defeat it, disassemble it and spread its components to the four corners of the planet. Jump forward to today (literally, New Year’s Day 2019): two archaeologists unwittingly disinter and reanimate the Dalek, at which point it promptly sets about its former mission.

Fortunately for us, the Doctor’s Earth-alarm is triggered and she comes rushing to the rescue. But she hasn’t anticipated having to deal with a superior Reconnaissance Dalek, and is outwitted time and again  by her old enemy. In desperation, the Doctor calls for UNIT (the Earth defence force set up in previous series), only to discover that because of Brexit the force has lost its international funding and been disbanded!

Because of Brexit, the human race is about to be conquered by the Daleks. The Doctor isn’t sure what to do, and fails to prevent the Dalek breaching GCHQ, where it sets about sending an invasion signal to the Dalek home world…

This episode is great fun. It has tempo, genuine jeopardy, humour and some proper scary bits. The Reconnaissance Dalek is a horrific thing indeed. I hesitate to give many more details, because I don’t want to introduce major spoilers. There is some sort of New Year’s message in there too – about sticking together and being big enough to forgive each other – and it’s never too shmaltzy or forced. Highly recommended. Well done, all.

Review of Jodie’s first season as Doctor Who #JodieWhittaker #season11 #DoctorWho #DrWho #Resolution

Jodie Whittaker plays the first female Doctor… and she played it superbly well. Her character and acting are earnest, innocent, zany-cute and intelligent. Her performance was also consistent, unlike some previous Doctors who seemed to have a different personality every episode, meaning they were all but schizophrenic (if you’ll excuse the term). With such consistency, it was possible to understand, engage with and empathise with the character of the Doctor. There was an ingénue sense to her performance that was extremely endearing.

It’s in large part because of Ms Whittaker’s convincing performance that season 11 of Doctor Who has done so well in terms of size of audience. The average audience across the whole series was 7.7m viewers per episode, and that’s the largest average audience for Doctor Who since 2010.

As for the writing involved in the series, that was a very mixed bag indeed. A very mixed bag.

There were two episodes that ‘revised’ real episodes from history: an episode about Rosa Parks (the woman of colour who sparked race protests in the US) and an episode about Partition (entitled The Demons of the Punjab). The Rosa episode was retold through a White Saviour trope, which was extremely problematic, whereas the Demons episode was done with extreme sensitivity, nuance, poise and poignancy.

Then there were two satirical episodes, one spoofing Trump and one spoofing Amazon. Both episodes were reductive (inevitably so, given the shortness of the episode format), clumsy, politically partial and ultimately lacking in coherence.

Then there were a couple of ‘episodes of the week’ that required the Doctor and her companions to solve a problem in space. They were against the clock, with loud music, frantic running about, insufficient material for all the characters to do much that was meaningful and, in the end, sadly, silly to the point of frustrating and a complete waste of the viewers time. Of course the Doctor is going to use her sonic screwdriver at the end to jury-rig a macguffin and save the cosmos. The solution to the problem is mummery. It’s made up nonsense. And we know it will arrive like some inexplicable deus ex machina. Utter rot.

And then there were a few better episodes which involved the murder of Graham’s (the magnificent Bradley Walsh’s) wife. Indeed, it was this murder that effectively served as the over-arching storyline of the series. Fascinatingly, the murder brought the usually affable Graham into direct conflict with the Doctor, because Graham had an overwhelming desire for violent revenge against the evil alien responsible. And the Doctor could not condone such violence. The stand-off between them is really affecting, since the viewer can see both sides of the moral dilemma and can’t see how it can be resolved to the satisfaction of both parties.

So, the positives were the acting of Jodie Whittaker and Bradley Walsh. The main negative was the inconsistent quality of the scripts. If you are going to watch some of the series and want my advice, to save yourself some time all you need to watch are the opening episode, the Demons episode and the final episode. Those are all you need. That said, the New Year’s Day special (entitled Resolution) looks like being decent! Onwards!

Darth Vader pretty much appears in final episode of Doctor Who #DrWho #DoctorWho #JodieWhittaker #TheBattleofRanskoorAvKolos

Episode 10 (The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos) is very good indeed. It brings closure to the tragedy of Grace’s death in episode 1. The companions Ryan and Graham finally sort out their man-nonsense. There’s a nice religious element (with a false God) and plenty of scifi spaceships too – a proper dark science or gothic episode, this one.

The Doctor and companions answer a distress call and materialise amidst the wreckage of a recent battle. Broken spaceships lie all around. The psychotropic waves emanating from the planet play tricks on the mind and make people forget their own names. They find a survivor who has retrieved a powerful device, but knows not from where. Neither can the survivor remember what he needed the device for… nor where his crew have gone.

Turns out, a baddie has the crew hostage and will kill them one by one if the Doctor doesn’t return the device. Also turns out the baddie is an adversary from the start of the series too. Graham has murder in his eye and swears he will have revenge for his wife’s death in episode 1. This sets Graham at odds with the Doctor (who will never sanction killing) – and there is a fascinating stand off between them. The viewer genuinely has divided sympathies, especially as the baddie is proper bad (definitely channelling Darth Vader) and intent on destroying the universe with his sick superweapon.

There are moral dilemmas and genuine jeopardy in this episode. It looks like the Doctor is properly out-gunned this time… and it’s all of her own making too. There’s a lot of dark and cosmic irony going on. The Doctor’s also not the biggest noise in the universe either, cos we meet a couple of beings more powerful than her!

Suffice it to say, this episode redeems the series somewhat (cos there were some definite duff filler episodes along the way). It makes me proper look forward to the New Year’s Day Special too! Hurrah! Onwards!

‘God’ is a talking frog in episode 9 of Doctor Who #JodieWhittaker #DoctorWho #DrWho #ItTakesYouAway

At last! A well written episode of Doctor Who! The plot is coherent, it isn’t overloaded with extra characters and themes, and there’s an actual moral dilemma to engage us properly. Phew, cos we haven’t had a decent episode since Demons of the Punjab (episode 6). The Doctor and her companions materialise by a beautiful fjord in Norway (cue a reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide vis-à-vis ‘the frilly bit in the north’). There’s an isolated cottage by the water… that’s barricaded from the inside. The Doctor and crew check on what’s going on, to find a girl who has lost her father to a monster in the woods. I was expecting a Beowulf type episode, and actually there are strong echoes of such a storyline (albeit in a modern setting).

There’s a murder-mystery and horror vibe to things (Scandi Noir style) as our heroes investigate what is really afoot. They find a strange mirror that doesn’t always show their reflections. Turns out… it’s a portal (not a spoiler, believe it or not).

Suffice it to say, the Doctor and co. end up in an anti-zone between realities… and then encounter a ‘conscious universe’ completely alien to our own. The ‘Solitract’ (the name a clever play on ‘Tesseract’ of Transformers and the Marvel universe perhaps) has existed since the beginning of time, but was exiled from our own universe because its individual nature interfered with the creation and running of our own universe. It’s become lonely and is looking to access our universe, to attract humans towards it. The character of Graham (the brilliant Bradley Walsh), still grieving for his dead wife, believes he’s found his lost love.

This is a moving and intelligent episode (replete with intertextuality). It describes exactly where we’re at in the field of astrophysics and where we’re at in terms of the deity/free will debate. It has both a personal and cosmic scale. How the writer pulled it off in a mere 50 minutes… it’s a triumph of SF writing. Scores a 9 out of 10 from me!

The Doctor desperately hunts for witches and coherence in episode 8 #JodieWhittaker #DoctorWho #DrWho #TheWitchfinders #AlanCumming

Episode 8 (‘The Witchfinders’) of the new Doctor Who series is overloaded with themes – feminist themes about the treatment of women, King James coming to terms with how his mother abandoned him, a young girl suffering and eventually overcoming her anxiety, Yaz working through how she was bullied at school, witchcraft, demons rising, mud tentacles, aliens taking over the Earth, the homosexual leanings of the King, a murderous woman in denial about her lowly past, scapegoating, and a few others I’m sure – so many themes indeed that they can never all operate coherently at the same time. And despite all the apparent content, we never really cared about any of it – because there was no real moral dilemma involved. The writers of the current series really need to understand that less is more. More is not more. And even more is… just a mess.

The episode opened extremely strangely, with the Doctor warning her companions not to interfere with anything, because it could change history and the future. It was very much like Star Trek’s Prime Directive. But the whole point of the Doctor is precisely that he/she interferes. Indeed, in all the other episodes of the series so far, the Doctor has consistently interfered. So, our gang stands by and watches an innocent woman drowned as a witch (despite the Doctor’s last minute attempt to save her). The murder left me a bit befuddled. What was the episode trying to say? Bizarre.

Don’t get me wrong: there were some great things about the episode. Alan Cumming was magnificent in the role of King James – and was an excellent foil to the always excellent Jodie Whittaker. There were some great lines and jokes, and some great moments (like the Doctor being accused of being a witch).

But the ‘messages’ of the episode were always a bit off, flippant, paradoxical or throwaway. The young girl suffering anxiety eventually shrugs and says ‘Well, I’ll just have to be brave’. This is utterly anticlimactic, and a misrepresentation of the debilitating nature of the anxiety many young people suffer today. King James is charming and endearing – and by the end is simply told not to conduct any more witch-hunts – yet it is historical fact that James conducted many more decades of terrible witch-hunts. And so it went.

It was all a bit of a shame really. It had all the essential elements and potential of a brilliant episode. It just didn’t quite work. It scored 6 out of 10 from me. (And I’m now beginning to think that I’ll have to help out the BBC by writing an episode myself.)