Space rhinos, dead grannies and hope for the Doctor in ‘Fugitive of the Judoon’ #DoctorWho #DrWho #FugitiveOfTheJudoon

A ship of mercenary police called the Judoon turn up and surround Gloucester. And start killing grannies, as you do – their knitting needles are classed as weapons, you see. The Judoon are space rhinos who have been tasked with finding a particular fugitive for their client.

Captain Jack Harkness then comes bobbing through with warning of a lone cyberman – in an episode yet to come.

And Jodie is fretting about the Master – who’s still out there somewhere.

A black tour guide called Ruth turns out to be who the Judoon are looking for, but her bio-shield allows her to avoid the scans and escape with the Doctor. Turns out (spoiler)… Ruth believes she’s the Doctor (a bit like ‘the black slayer Kendra in Buffy moment’). And Ruth has her own TARDIS. Jodie-Whittaker-as-Doctor gets all confused, believing Ruth to be a future version of herself, but Ruth says she has no memory at all of Jodie-as-Doctor.

There seems to be a split in the timeline. In Jodie’s timeline, Gallifrey has been destroyed… but not in Ruth’s. And the mysterious ‘client’ who’s after Ruth is from Gallifrey!

And that’s the episode. It comes at you from all angles. There are twists and turns – but remains coherent (mainly). It’s the best episode of the series by a good chalk. There are jokes, some terrible acting, the Doctor (Ruth) knowingly using a gun to kill someone, and more. It all works! Hurrah!

Doctor Who cares? Worst viewing figures in 34 years #DoctorWho #DrWho #JodieWhittaker #BBC

Doctor Who has suffered the worst viewing figures since Colin Baker was Time Lord in 1986 – but star Jodie Whittaker insists she is not ready to quit yet. Sunday’s episode, Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, was watched by 4.04m people – the eighth worst showing in the show’s 57-year run – as fans (including 12-year-olds!) branded the new series ‘badly written’. But Whittaker vowed to carry on, saying: ‘I absolutely adore it.’ [Story as reported by The Metro and a local school.]

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!