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!

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‘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.)

Doctor Who saves Amazon in episode 7 #Kerblam! #DoctorWho #JodieWhittaker #DrWho

A robot delivery man carrying a mysterious parcel teleports onto the Tardis. It’s a Kerblam! delivery (a sort of intergalactic Amazon) and the Doctor gets all excited. But there’s a message in the parcel: ‘Help me!’ The Doctor and her pals decide to go undercover in the Kerblam! distribution centre to find out who needs their help. The centre is of course highly automated – full of creepy robots – with only a 10% quota of human staff (the lucky ones in the galaxy, apparently).

It emerges that the human staff have been disappearing! One of the staff is Lee Mack – he’s allowed one decent joke before he is spirited away in the spooky lower levels of the centre. It’s a shame we don’t see more of him in the episode really, as he displays far more verve than the other staff, who are mainly dull sorts (to be honest, we don’t really care too much what’s happening to them).

Yes, this episode sets out satirising Amazon, SportsDirect and warehouse companies in general. Except the satire is a bit confused. The working conditions aren’t that bad, although the jobs are dull. The staff are grateful to have the jobs, because it seems that the rest of the galaxy has been made unemployed by automation and A.I. So is the episode a criticism of automation and A.I.? Well, no, not really, as the ending completely retreats from any real condemnation of automation (I’m avoiding spoilers here). So it’s not entirely coherent, sadly. The end is a bit of a fudge and a fumble.

There are nice things about the episode. It feels properly near-future and relevant to today. It’s a warning of what will happen if we don’t take steps now. There are the usual quips and moments of pithy moralising from the Doctor, and the compulsory chases down long corridors. The BBC attempts it’s usual edutainment for the masses. But the social politics and socio-economic underpinnings are an utter mess, in truth. It’s an episode of the week, a filler and ultimately a bit of a sell out. It only gets 6.5 out of 10 from me. Hopefully, normal service will be resumed next week, cos there are witches in the time of King James I.

 

Doctor Who bears witness in episode 6 #DemonsOfThePunjab #DrWho #DoctorWho #JodieWhittaker

I watched episode 6 of the new series with a certain trepidation: for the second time this season the BBC was choosing to revisit a highly sensitive moment in recent history. In the Rosa Parks episode (4), such revisiting had come disturbingly close to revisionism, cultural appropriation and the Doctor playing white saviour, all in the name of light entertainment/edutainment! It was a relief, therefore, to see the BBC judge it perfectly with ‘Demons of the Punjab’. Phew. This was an extremely moving episode. It was far more than light entertainment. Far more.

The Doctor’s assistant, Yaz, convinces her to take them all back to the Punjab of 1947 so that they can see the wedding of Yaz’s grandmother (an episode the grandmother is too reluctant to talk about). They arrive to discover that the Partition of India and Pakistan is just about to take place. Added to it all, the holy man who is due to oversee the wedding winds up murdered (apparently by demonic aliens), so it seems that the wedding won’t take place and Yaz will never be born! She’ll be erased from history.

More than that will spoil it, but it’s safe to say all is not as it seems. Of course, there can be no happy ending either. And it was extremely pleasing to see Yaz central to events, since she barely got a single line in episode 5. I highly recommend this episode – and trust that it represents the series really getting into its stride (after a slight wobble in episodes 4 and 5). Keep the faith!

Doctor Who fights an angry Pikachu in episode 5 #TsurangaConundrum #DoctorWho #DrWho #JodieWhittaker

So, episode 5 of the series is ‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’. The Doctor and her companions accidentally set off a sonic mine on a junkyard planet and wake up on a medical ship. The ship is promptly boarded by a ‘Pting’ (a cutesy monster that looks like nothing more than an angry Pikachu), which proceeds to devour all the ship’s vital components and systems. To make things worse, it destroys the ships life pods, meaning the crew cannot escape in any way. Nor can they ‘fight’ the Pting, cos its skin is poisonous and it can devour all materials in existence. It even gobbles up the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver.

The big ‘conundrum’, then, is how the Doctor can save them all, while still telling jokes. At the same time, there is a male passenger who’s heavily pregnant. A comedy birth scene will need to take place. And there’s a sick space general (Eve Cicero) who’s dying. So, we’ll need to engineer a meaningful, self-sacrificing death scene for her. And the Doctor has injuries from the sonic mine, so she has to wince her way through many a scene. In fact, things feel so contrived throughout, that the viewer can’t help wincing a fair bit either.

This episode is a curious one. There’s a lot going on, but for most of the episode all the Doctor’s companions feel like spare parts. They simply follow the Doctor around and serve as foils for exposition. The character of Yaz barely has any lines throughout. Bradley Walsh gets plenty of droll lines, but he’s commenting on the action as a bystander really, and Ryan provides an emotional but entirely random/irrelevant narrative about how his father ran out on him when he was young. Ryan hasn’t yet forgiven his missing father, and that’s why he’s never really got on with the ‘stand-in father figure’ of Graham (Bradley Walsh). At one point Ryan says, ‘Why am I even talking about this?’, and the viewer has to wonder the same.

All that said, the hectic and pell-mell nature of things means that there is just enough entertainment to see us through. Yet, without the considerable acting chops of Jodie Whittaker, the series and the BBC would probably have ended up embarrassing themselves. Jodie even does the ‘educational’ bit about the anti-matter engine (‘like an iPhone version of the particle accelerator of CERN’) with a certain panache (so the BBC can tick it’s box of supplying edutainment for the world). To quote the Doctor at the end of the episode: ‘Hope prevails!’ But episode only scores 7 out of 10 from me.

Doctor Who does Trump in episode 4 #ArachnidsIntheUK #DoctorWho #DrWho #JodieWhittaker

‘There’s something wrong with the spider eco-system in South Yorkshire,’ says the Doctor. Surely, an immortal line. But she’s right. There’s something very wrong. Very wrong indeed. Damn big ass spiders, that’s what! (I hate spiders.) And they’re over-running Sheffield. Wrapping people in webs to be eaten later. (This’ll scare adults and kids alike, trust me.)

And that’s not the worst of it. The spiders have been created by illegal toxic-waste dumping under the latest Trump hotel. Okay, it’s not Trump himself, but someone who is entirely in his mould. And he’s the monster that created them. In fact, he’s more of a monster than the spiders are.

It’s not the subtlest political satire. But it works all the same. This episode, ‘Arachnids in the UK’ (a pun on the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK album title), is very much a standalone episode, but that doesn’t mean it’s a lesser episode. There is a lot that is very touching in this episode: about what enobles us as humans, about what we have in common, about what things transcend race, and about what lives beyond each of us as individuals. When the different sub-plots are considered in relationship to each other… maybe the satire and poignancy are entirely subtle after all. Maybe this is actually a wonderful episode. I would certainly recommend it. Give it a chance and let it mulch… like the toxic waste under Trump’s latest project. I score it 8.5 out of 10.