Doctor Who: The Power of the Doctor ★★★★
Jodie Whittaker bows out in a frenetic BBC Centenary special, packed with faces, friends and foes from the past
Story 300 BBC Centenary Special Storyline When masterpiece paintings and the world’s top seismologists go missing, the Doctor’s former companions Tegan and Ace join forces with Unit, whose leader Kate Stewart sends an SOS to the Tardis from London, 2022. In Russia, 1916, the Master is posing as Rasputin, while hatching a new plan with the Daleks and Cybermen to destroy Earth and erase the Doctor from existence. The Cybermen invade Unit HQ and flatten it, while the Daleks plan to explore the world’s volcanoes and lure the Doctor into a trap. For a while, the Master becomes the Doctor in a forced regeneration, while she sees vestiges of her former selves in a limbo netherworld. The Doctor and her allies beat their enemies, but the Time Lord is mortally wounded and bids Yaz a sad farewell. As many of the Doctor’s former companions gather in a support group, the Time Lord regenerates on a clifftop into a new body with a familiar face from the past… First UK broadcast Sunday 23 October 2022 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Dan Lewis – John Bishop The Master – Sacha Dhawan Tegan Jovanka – Janet Fielding Ace – Sophie Aldred Kate Stewart – Jemma Redgrave The Doctor – Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, David Bradley, Jo Martin, David Tennant Melanie Bush – Bonnie Langford Jo Jones – Katy Manning Ian Chesterton – William Russell Vinder – Jacob Anderson Graham O'Brien – Bradley Walsh Ashad – Patrick O'Kane Deputy Marshal Arnhost – Joe Sims Train Marshal Halaz – Sanchia McCormack Curator – Danielle Bjelic Alexandra – Anna Andresen Nicholas – Richard Dempsey Jos Slovick – Messenger Dalek and Cybermen voices – Nicholas Briggs Dalek operators – Barnaby Edwards, Nicholas Pegg, Jon Davey Cybermen – Simon Carew, Jon Davey, Chester Durrant, Mickey Lewis, Felix Young, Richard Price, Andrew Cross, Matt Doman Crew Writer – Chris Chibnall Director – Jamie Magnus Stone Music – Segun Akinola Producer – Nikki Wilson Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens, Nikki Wilson RT review by Patrick Mulkern The Power of the Doctor does not disappoint. It excites. It surprises. It confounds. It confuses. It brings an erratic four-year chapter of this constantly evolving saga to a satisfying close. Showrunner Chris Chibnall started with a clean slate in 2018, deliberately eschewing the trappings of the past, but bows out on a tsunami of the stuff. His frenetic, 90-minute finale is a prime example of what I call "kitchen-sink" Doctor Who. A lot of the favourite old crockery is sloshed around in a bowl and held up to the light to show a new sparkle. Here, we see not just ancient foes but antediluvian Doctors and companions – characters that one might expect in an anniversary (the 60th is only next year) but who have been revisited for a special to mark the BBC’s centenary. And let it be noted, The Power of the Doctor is the 300th story since Doctor Who began in 1963. Despite an abundance of distractions, Jodie Whittaker and Mandip Gill remain the throbbing heart of the story, as the Doctor and Yaz breeze through a rollicking adventure but must prepare for a sorrowful parting. Chibnall’s script pitches the emotion at just the right level for a show like Doctor Who. No love-in. No smooching. Just a convincing display of empathy between two women who accept they can no longer travel together, despite adoring each other as much as the actors playing them clearly do. The composition of the duo, perching on top of the police box gazing at planet Earth, is gorgeous. Dan (John Bishop) is jettisoned surprisingly early, after the well-staged space-train sequence at the beginning. Halfway into the tale, Graham (Bradley Walsh) pops up inexplicably in a volcano, and Vinder (Jacob Anderson) crashes through a wormhole conveniently close to the seat of the action but sadly has little to contribute. This leaves the special clear for a broadly female line-up of heroes – which works in its favour. As Kate Stewart, Jemma Redgrave has been a constant since Chibnall introduced her 10 years ago in the Matt Smith episode The Power of Three. She is always welcome. More significantly, Chibnall reintroduces 1980s companions Tegan and Ace after many decades’ absence. For some fans who’ve followed their adventures in the Big Finish audio dramas (I have not), perhaps they’ve never really gone away. It’s delightful to see actors Janet Fielding and Sophie Aldred stepping with apparent ease back into the mother show. Age has not withered their spirit. Now investigating mysteries of their own volition, Tegan and Ace are stronger, wiser and a shade more humorous. The moment when, after decades, they are reunited with the Doctor as a young woman is priceless. "I think I handled that quite well," shrugs the fractious Tegan. In nods to their heyday, Tegan rolls out her singular cuss "Rabbits!", and Ace is still calling the Time Lord "Professor". More than that, though, they relive their greatest hits. Tegan moves stealthily through an infrastructure evading Cybermen in an echo of the 1982 classic Earthshock, while Ace dons her old bomber jacket and takes a baseball bat to a Dalek, just as she did in 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks. There will always be an appetite for the Time Lord’s archenemies but, after decades of bluster and defeat, I do wish the baddies could gain one victory. The Daleks and Cybermen remain the lousiest shots in the cosmos and are easily dispatched like coconuts in a shy. I enjoyed how Steven Moffat developed the Master, and showed Missy (brilliant Michelle Gomez) seeking redemption, but under Chibnall, the Master has reverted to the ridiculous; his motivation unclear, his disguises daft. Why is he bothering to pose as Rasputin with blue eyes and a manky beard in Siberia and St Petersburg in 1916? I remain baffled by the "selective regeneration" that the Master forces upon the Doctor. Is Sacha Dhawan playing a new Doctor, or the Master inside the Doctor’s body and mind? Or both? Sure, he’s an obsessive weirdo and loves dressing up, but now in the middle of a blithering "Master’s Dalek Plan", he has time spare to robe himself in a mishmash of former Doctors’ garb, with accoutrements such as Doctor Two’s recorder and Doctor Five’s lapel celery. Mercifully, we’re spared jelly babies. The air of confusion isn’t helped by the Master’s TARDIS being a minimally re-dressed, relit version of the Doctor’s horrible domain. I do love the devilish trick he plays on Tegan, though, with the Cyberman figurine in fact being a Russian doll, a "tissue-compressed" but reversible Trojan horse. The attack on UNIT HQ is quite fun if you enjoy a lot of clashing and banging. The Taskforce’s new skyscraper home is an architectural miracle, which can topple into itself, leaving its fleeing personnel safe on the forecourt, merely puffed with dust. There are various daft ideas in this special, such as a Dalek being able to breach the TARDIS defences to lay an obvious trap. Why hasn’t this gambit occurred to them before? Because it should not happen. Another is the hologram of the Doctor. We’ve seen versions of this since Christopher Eccleston’s last episode, but here the holo-Doc is a tad too interactive. Why shouldn’t a holo-Doc always appear wherever and whenever to talk their companions through a crisis? It’s playful and forgivable, though – and allows Ace and Tegan to interact with their own Doctors. Yes, old Doctors are back in the Whoniverse. What a gift! Not just Jo Martin’s refreshingly strident turn from recent years and David Bradley’s endearing take on the "original" Doctor, but now Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann. It’s poignant to see this quarter of venerable gentlemen, their aged countenances glossed over in a throwaway line. All still possess the Doctorly charm. But why these incarnations and not others? Obviously, some of the actors are no longer with us and their parts haven’t been recast, whereas others were unlikely to be asked or are being withheld for the coming 60th. A further fleeting but incandescent blast from the past comes near the end at the inaugural gathering of a kind of Companions Anonymous. Yaz, Graham and Dan join Kate, Tegan and Ace as well as three other souls whose lives were turned upside down by the Time Lord. Thus, Mel (Bonnie Langford), Jo (Katy Manning) and Ian (William Russell) return to the programme for the first time in (respectively) 35, 49 and a staggering 57 years – representing 1980s, '70s and even '60s Doctor Who. Another gift for this BBC centenary. All-too-quickly glimpsed. And all proving that, across a lifetime and long careers, there’s no resisting the allure and the power of the Doctor.
The classic monsters are faithfully resurrected but resurface in maritime mediocrity
Story 299 Easter special 2022 “Since when do Sea Devils have a ship?” – the Doctor Storyline Pirate queen Madam Ching raids a coastal village in 1807 China and unwittingly releases a Sea Devil warrior, which has been encased for centuries as a stone statue. Ching is on a mission to find the lost treasure of legendary sailor Ji-Hun, to pay the ransom for her kidnapped crew. The Sea Devils unleash a giant sea serpent to attack Ching’s ship. The Doctor, Yaz and Dan join forces with Ching to fend off the lizards and infiltrate their base to stop their latest plan to flood the Earth. First UK broadcast Sunday 17 April 2022 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Yazmin Kahn – Mandip Gill Dan Lewis – John Bishop Ying Ki – Marlowe Chan-Reeves Madam Ching – Crystal Yu Chief Sea Devil – Craige Els Ji-Hun – Arthur Lee Ying Wai – David K S Tse Sea Devils – Jon Davey, Simon Carew, Chester Durrant, Richard Price, Mickey Lewis, Andrew Cross Crew Writers – Ella Road, Chris Chibnall Director – Haolu Wang Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Dafydd Shurmer Executive producers – Chrish Chibnall, Matt Strevens, Nikki Wilson RT review by Patrick Mulkern I feel a bit sorry for today’s young viewers. I grew up watching Doctor Who in the 1970s and, while it might not have been immense every single week, we could rely on a fairly steady stream of classics – and scares and chills agogo. Sitting through Legend of the Sea Devils is like watching seaweed dry. The 50-minute Easter special has a problem in common with so much modern Doctor Who in that, while it abounds in action, CGI spectacle and bombastic music, there’s a dearth of tension and suspense, there’s no time for a slow build, no eeriness, no real appetite for proper frights or even the mildest stab at the macabre. Doctor Who can be, and is well-known for being, behind-the-sofa or edge-of-the-seat viewing but making that is almost a forgotten art. The closest this era has come to it was Village of the Angels in last year’s Flux. Kudos to Chris Chibnall, though, for bothering to bring back the Sea Devils. They are legendary Doctor Who monsters – first emerging from the Solent half a century ago – and their resurrection is long overdue. Apart from fleeting glimpses since (and a mask used out of context in a 1981 Blake’s 7), there was one dismal rematch 38 years ago (alongside their lizard cousins, the Silurians) in Warriors of the Deep. Otherwise, flap all to write home about. Perhaps mindful of the design compromises of the Silurians’ return in The Hungry Earth (2010), Chibnall has steered costume designer Ray Holman and the monster-making team to honour faithfully the 1970s Sea Devil look – in particular, the turtle-like head with gills sculpted by John Friedlander in 1971. They’ve clothed the creatures in more appropriate garb than the originals’ ragged blue fish-nets, and there’s now moderate animation around their eyes and mouth – more than the rigid 70s masks could muster. That said, these Sea Devils still don’t enjoy a Big Moment, a major chill. This lot break out of stone, wield swords, fly, steer a huge ship and pull faces – but what they don’t do is get wet. Not a drop of water on them. The big thing a Sea Devil does, its raison d’être, is emerging spookily from the sea. But not here. This is like having a Dalek come on who doesn’t exterminate, a Cyberman who doesn’t want to convert you, a Weeping Angel that doesn’t send someone back in time. There’s not a solitary or mass emergence from the waves – such as their predecessors enjoyed 50 years ago, searing themselves into the memories and nightmares of the nation’s children. It wasn’t Jaws but the first airing of The Sea Devils and its two repeats that made nippers think twice about wading into the sea in the 1970s. The South China Sea is an unusual setting for the series and for the most part laudably realised, because of course the cast and crew couldn’t actually go anywhere near the Far East but were stuck filming in studios and at a farm and harbourside in Wales. Something is amiss in this production, though. Sloppy script-editing and choppy footage editing lead to incoherent storytelling. There’s no time to care for the slain in the village. There’s no build-up to Yaz and Dan suddenly springing a net around the Sea Devil. There’s painful exposition and name-calling and saying-what’s-happening-as-it’s-happening, while in the same space to-ing and fro-ing in time lead to ennui and confusion. The vast sea monster remains a puzzle. The costumes look beautiful but also as though they were sewn together yesterday, not clothes worn day in day out by poor folk living in 19th-century conditions. Madam Ching (Crystal Yu) is remarkably well-appointed and muck-free for a desperado who spends her life at sea. Conveniently (or perhaps Covid-driven), she is crewless yet manages to navigate and control an entire sailing ship as a one-woman captain plying the South China Sea. Ludicrous. Ying Kei (Marlowe Chan Reeves), the young villager whose father is slain, cleaves to the pirate queen like a lovestruck companion. More should have been made of Ching’s similarity in spirit to the female Doctor. They missed the boat on that, too. It’s lovely to see the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and Yaz (Mandip Gill) dressing for the occasion in fine, flattering silks from the moment they step outside the Tardis. John Bishop is visibly enjoying Dan’s absurd panto-pirate drag but is a spare part, except to provide lighter moments and prod at the embers of the Doctor/Yaz love match. Even in this day and age it seems bold to be venturing down this path with the Time Lord but it can only be a positive step and, as the Doctor alludes, she/he (or should it be “they”?) once had a wife (River Song), and that was a keenly felt and persuasive union. Let it not be forgotten that the first three Doctors showed flickers of interest in women they encountered, and Doctor Who has long discarded the vogue for ascetic, cosmic eunuchs portrayed by Tom Baker and Peter Davison. Surely, Chibnall’s co-writer Ella Road was brought in to finetune the touching heart-to-hearts between the two women. Nearing the end of this era, it’s a happy pay-off for viewers who have invested in this burgeoning romance and for Whittaker and Gill, who’ve formed a close bond in real life over the past four years. This progressive attitude is the most refreshing aspect of this maritime mediocrity. Hopefully, the Sea Devils will be put into storage and rise again soon with less wishy-washy material. Just the so-called Centenary Special to come now, concluding the Chibnall/Whittaker era later this year. Let’s hope it is what it promises: something special.
Multiple extermination and unrequited love in a time-looped storage facility
Story 298 New Year’s Day special 2022 Storyline On New Year’s Eve, customer Nick turns up for his annual visit to a storage facility, whose owner/manager Sarah he has a crush on. The Doctor resets the Tardis after it was damaged by the Flux, inadvertently putting the storage facility in a time loop, which reduces by one minute with each repetition. An extermination squad of Daleks is on her tail, tracking down and killing the Time Lord and the humans within each loop. With time running out, can they outwit the Daleks? First UK broadcast Sunday 1 January 2022 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Dan Lewis – John Bishop Sarah – Aisling Bea Nick – Adjani Salmon Mary – Pauline McLynn Dalek voices – Nicholas Briggs Dalek operators – Barnaby Edwards, Nicholas Pegg, Jon Davey Karl – Jonny Dixon Crew Writer – Chris Chibnall Director – Annetta Laufer Producer – Sheena Bucktowonsing Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens, Nikki Wilson RT review by Patrick Mulkern Fifty years to the day since Doctor Who legends Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning and Nicholas Courtney faced the Day of the Daleks – and I was sitting there on New Year’s Day 1972, glued to our temperamental telly – the winning team of Jodie Whittaker, Mandip Gill and John Bishop gamely take on the Eve of the Daleks. This special has been touted in some quarters as "a romcom with Daleks". If that’s showrunner Chris Chibnall’s aim, it falls down on the "com" front. Odd, given that most of the cast (Bishop, Aisling Bea, Adjani Salmon and Pauline McLynn) are more recognised for comedy. Yes, there’s the occasional amusing line or incident but no more than in a standard episode. The wittiest stroke is an in-joke when an indignant Dalek blurts, "I Am Not Nick!" – voiced, of course, by Nicholas 'Nick' Briggs. Eve of the Daleks fares better in the "rom" department. Sarah and Nick are a couple of weirdos. He’s weird for using the storage facility only to preserve the effects of his failed relationships, dated with Post-It notes. She’s weird for keeping Elf Storage open for her sole customer Nick and his annual visits on New Year’s Eve. Despite strong performances from Bea and Salmon, they remain to the end a mismatched, unconvincing pair. Far more romantic heft comes in the shape of Yaz. Just when she and Dan are looking superfluous to the material, making up numbers as Dalek fodder, Dan cuts to the heart of the matter and asks Yaz outright about her feelings for the Doctor: "Have you ever told her? How you feel about her?" For the first time she has to vocalise her adoration of the Time Lord. "I’ve never told anyone. Not even myself." This is by far the loveliest aspect of the special. We’ve been here before with Rose and Martha’s adoration of David Tennant’s Doctor and Amy’s flirtation with Matt Smith’s. All long ago. Yaz-and-the-Doctor has been simmering for years. Mandip Gill plays the emotion subtly and tenderly, as does Whittaker, who, like all incarnations before her, must rise above earthly desire and romantic entrapment. The Daleks are on sturdy form in their third successive New Year’s Day special after Resolution (2019) and Revolution of the Daleks (2021). Interesting that no matter what reboots they undergo, they always revert to the gorgeous bronze models brought in back in 2005, even if the latest trio are tooled up with an eight-barrel gun at the tip of the exterminating shaft. As they emerge from shadows and time and again get the better of the Doctor – "Daleks learn!" – their menace is enhanced, even if the repetitive rounds of extermination soon lose impact and engender the ennui of a video game. The time loop structure, losing a minute each time, is worthy of former showrunner Steven Moffat, while the use of a countdown in real time (albeit looped) also recalls Chibnall’s underrated Doctor Who debut episode 42 way back in 2007. If there’s one glitch, it’s how Sarah’s mammy (McLynn) keeps phoning, when she is outside the time loop. Eve of the Daleks succeeds as a contained piece, a 'locked-room' thriller, sagging only a little in the middle but gaining momentum in the final minute’s loop. Anyone who’s ever spent time wandering through the warren of a dimly lit storage facility will know how damned creepy they can be – even without a Dalek materialising at every turn. The final explosion and demolition of the multi-storey building is another of this era’s impressive CGI effects. If you think the chap at the end, gawping at the fireworks, is vaguely familiar, he is Karl (Jonny Dixon), the crane operator that Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor saved in her debut episode in 2018. That seems so long ago, and now we’re approaching the end of days for this Doctor, just as Whittaker has become so persuasive in the role. Only two more specials to go… The teaser for the next episode ends with a further echo of 1972 – a glimpse of a Sea Devil. Classic monster lives again! Chibnall brought back their land cousins, the Silurians, with some success in The Hungry Earth in 2010, so I’m cautiously hopeful for Legend of the Sea Devils.
The return of the six-part serial format brings chilling highs and confusing lows as the Time Lord takes on the Flux and the Ravagers, and learns more about her own mysterious past
Story 297 Storyline As a destructive storm cloud called Flux rips across the universe, Ravagers Swarm and Azure, ancient enemies of the Time Lords, break free of their bonds and pursue the Doctor. Sontarans take advantage of the crisis to invade Earth across its history. The Doctor and Yaz befriend Dan, a Liverpudlian who has been rescued by a canine Lupari, Karvanista. Their adventures take them to the Crimean War, the Temple of Atropos on the planet Time, and to a village in Devon, 1967, beset by Weeping Angels. Yaz, Dan and scientist Professor Jericho become trapped in the early 1900s, while the Doctor is “recalled” to the mysterious Division, where she meets Tecteun, the woman she once called “Mother”. Tecteun holds the secrets of the Doctor’s lost past in a fob watch and reveals that Division unleashed Flux to extinguish our universe as they move on to another. As Swarm and Azure gain control of Division, the Doctor is trisected across time and space where she and her various allies strive to avert the ravages of Flux, while enemies such as Sontarans, Daleks and Cybermen die in the conflagration… First UK broadcasts Chapter One: The Halloween Apocalypse – 31 October 2021 Chapter Two: War of the Sontarans – Sunday 7 November 2021 Chapter Three: Once, Upon Time – Sunday 14 November 2021 Chapter Four: Village of the Angels – Sunday 21 November 2021 Chapter Five: Survivors of the Flux – Sunday 28 November 2021 Chapter Six: The Vanquishers – Sunday 5 December 2021 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Dan Lewis – John Bishop Professor Eustacius Jericho – Kevin McNally Karvanista – Craige Els Swarm – Sam Spruell Azure/Anna – Rochenda Sandall Diane – Nadia Albina Vinder – Jacob Anderson Bel – Thaddea Graham Grand Serpent/Prentis – Craig Parkinson Claire Brown – Annabel Scholey Joseph Williamson – Steve Oram Kate Stewart – Jemma Redgrave Fugitive Doctor – Jo Martin Awsok/Tecteun – Barbara Flynn Mary Seacole – Sara Powell Ritskaw/Skaak/Stenck – Jonathan Watson Kragar/Svild/Sentag/Shallo – Dan Starkey Old Swarm – Matthew Needham En Sentac – Sarah Amankwah K-Toscs – Charlie Oscar Wilder – Richard Tate James Stonehouse – Paul Leonard Wilma – Heather Bleasdale Kev – John May Jon – Gunnar Cauthery Eileen – Sue Jenkins Neville – Paul Broughton General Logan – Gerald Kyd Passenger – Jonny Mathers Priest Triangle – Nigel Richard Lambert Sonya Khan – Bhavnisha Parmer Police officer – Chantelle Pierre Reverend Shaw – Alex Frost Gerald – Vincent Brimble Jean – Gemma Churchill Mrs Hayward – Penelope McGhie Namaca – Blake Harrison Peggy – Poppy Polivnick Farquhar – Robert Bathurst Millington – Nicholas Blane Waiter – Guy List Kumar – Kammy Darweish Alfie – George Caple Scouser – Sonny Walker Cybermen and Dalek voices – Nicholas Briggs Mouri voice – Amanda Drew Weeping Angels – Barbara Fadden, Isla Moody, Lowri Brown Ood – Simon Carew Ood voice – Silas Carson Crew Writers – Chris Chibnall, Maxine Alderton (4 only) Directors – Jamie Magnus Stone (1,2,4), Azhur Saleem (3,5,6) Producer – Pete Levy Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens, Nikki Wilson RT reviews by Patrick Mulkern The Halloween Apocalypse Have you been drooling? With Russell T Davies poised on the horizon – in magnificent saviour mode – preparing his banquet for Doctor Who’s Diamond Jubilee in 2023, unlucky series 13 had all the allure of a tray of stale sandwiches few fancied at the wake of the unlamented deceased. But, as the BBC publicity machine went into hyperdrive – hawking its wares, rather than hiding them, as was the way in recent years – there was a sense of mounting anticipation. Could the maligned showrunner Chris Chibnall drizzle his sweet pumpkin juice over these Halloween offerings and conjure some spooky magic? Well, yes, it seems so. Would watching The Halloween Apocalypse feel like Sunday-night homework? Not a bit of it. Flux – Chapter One: The Halloween Apocalypse gets off to a rollicking start. Mid escapade. High peril. No hanging about. Well, unless you’re Yaz and the Doctor, who, as we join them, are dangling from a “gravity bar” over an ocean of roiling acid. The pace is set for a fast, fun-packed opener, impressively achieved by Chibnall and his team in the face of COVID. Shorn of former sidekicks Ryan and Graham, the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and Yaz (Mandip Gill) make good sparring partners, fielding a balance of amity and antagonism, and falling into the trad pattern in which the Time Lord withholds vital information, imperilling the companion’s life, who in turn proves to be plucky and resourceful. It’s great to have this show fronted by two heroic women. In times long gone, Doctor Who producers sometimes described their female co-lead as “something for the dads”. Oddly, in 2021, the dad-pleasing equivalent may be that endangered TV beast: Middle-Aged White Man – in the shape of John Bishop. No worries that he’s a comedian. He’s following a fine Doctor Who tradition of casting performers more established in light entertainment: Roy Castle, Bernard Cribbins, Jon Pertwee, Catherine Tate, Matt Lucas… Bishop is an instant hit as handy Dan. “Official Scouse”, he’s down on his luck on the work front and in the romance department. We first meet him exuding pride in his city, posing as a guide at the Museum of Liverpool. Dan Lewis is the kind of guy who helps out at a food bank, even though his own fridge and cupboard are bare. A good soul. And a creditable addition to the series. As it transpires, the comedy foil is Karvanista, a dog-alien played with funny bones and a Northern twang by Craige Els (another Liverpudlian). Not so much a villain but a saviour of mankind – “Man’s best friend” – he’s one of seven billion canine Lupari, each with their own “designated human” to rescue from the incoming Flux. His Wookie bearing and shih tzu fizzog are an adorable, semi-comic creation, while particularly impressive are new aliens the Ravagers. Known prosaically as Swarm and Azure, they are mighty creepy and will chill younger viewers. Their method of dispensing death is nasty – simply meeting one of them seems to be a shattering experience… Swarm, an aeons-old menace with regenerative powers and a crystalline blue appearance, reminds me of Eldrad, last of the Kastrians, from Sarah Jane Smith’s 1976 swansong, The Hand of Fear. Toss in some Sontarans (still not very menacing and mostly comedic; their commander likes to wear a helmet in his own spaceship) and a lone Weeping Angel (a tensely staged sequence), and Chibnall has a few juicy elements frothing in his hubble-bubble cauldron. What is the relevance of Vinder, the officer at deep-space Observation Post Rose? Where does real-life 19th-century philanthropist Joseph Williamson fit in? (To this day his tunnels under Liverpool’s Edge Hill remain a curiosity.) Why has Azure lured Dan’s date Diane into a gloom-hole? Who is the Angel-beset Claire and how does she already know the Doctor? We’re pointedly reminded of all these disparate strands in a weak montage in the crescendo of an otherwise strong cliffhanger as the maelstrom of the Flux ravages through the Tardis and towards Earth. In all, The Halloween Apocalypse is an engaging appetiser and revives my dimensionally transcendental taste-buds. Apologies for all the culinary terms. Maybe I am hungry. Maybe I’m just quite taken with the publicity shot of John Bishop brandishing a wok. Dan and his pan… Wallop! This is Chris Chibnall’s Halloween-night stir-fry. He’s turned up the heat. Let’s hope he can keep his pan sizzling across all six weeks. * War of the Sontarans Their battle cry may be “Sontar-ha!” but this is more “Sontar-huh!” – so what!? The second episode, or rather Chapter Two of Flux, has potential. Sontarans en masse. Sontarans with a robust, tweaked design. Sontarans looming over Liverpool Docks and fighting in the Crimean War. Sontarans claiming Earth as an outpost (as Linx once did in The Time Warrior) and invading time (as they did in, er, The Invasion of Time). Sontarans played by quirky actors: Dan Starkey (in such roles since 2008) and Jonathan Watson, who I loved in BBC comedies Bob Servant Independent and Two Doors Down. Despite all that, a lot of this hour-long conflict is pat and flat. Too much battle waffle and not enough action. The “War” promised by the title is a flash in the pan, although the brief CGI aerial shots are done well. I’m not expecting graphic massacre and screaming agony at teatime, but this war is anaemic. It has largely happened already or happens off-screen. The Sontarans, among Doctor Who’s most sadistic foes, have become comedic grunts, lousy shots and are easily thwarted. The potato-heads are still SpudULike not SpudULoathe. Chapter Two runs 10 minutes longer than the first and the one that follows and, at its best, is intriguing without for a moment rising to levels of excitement. Intriguing, that is, if you’ve the patience to follow where this protracted yarn is slowly leading. It gets off to a good start, though. The Doctor comes to in a black-and-white wasteland, seeing a nightmarish crooked house in the sky. She’s reunited with Yaz and Dan on the corpse-strewn battlefield of Sebastopol, where they soon meet a miraculously un-grubby Mary Seacole (Sara Powell). A Sontaran commander clomps through mist on a horse. Yaz and Dan fizzle out of time in a blue haze, and the Doctor is unable to find any door into her police box. Soon, she has one of her time-worn clashes with a military nitwit, who to her disgust (like her long-ago chum the Brigadier) eventually blows up the invaders. She also turns yet another historical figure into an ersatz companion. Good that it’s Mary Seacole when it could so easily have been Florence Nightingale. And handy that Mrs Seacole has so few wounded to tend, she can stand around nattering and act as an overnight observation scout for the “Doctoress”. Fittingly, the heroes do the decent thing and exploit the Sontarans’ weaknesses in both time zones. We’re told there’s been a “temporal implosion”, but does that mean that in the 1850s the Empire of Sontar no longer overwrites Russia and China, and that in the present their forces are no longer all over the planet? Unclear. Elsewhere, or to be precise in the Temple of Atropos on a planet called Time, Yaz and Vinder encounter prissy floating lights (akin to the Megara in The Stones of Blood). They’re led into the domain of the Mouri, “creatures who hold time in this universe together”. If you say so. Nice of them to do so. Funny we’ve never heard of them before. Vinder (Jacob Anderson) has yet to make much impression. As the Sontar-scenarios sag, it’s a relief when Chris Chibnall puts his newly minted aliens back on the chessboard. I’d almost forgotten them. Doggy Karvanista – or Bungle-from-Bolton as I now think of him – is still sniffing after Dan, and their developing bond, despite initial antipathy, is amusing. I’m also rather taken with sinister siblings Swarm and Azure – excellent masks/make-up and delicious performances from Sam Spruell and Rochenda Sandall as swishy fiends just on the edge of camp. On balance, I’m enjoying Doctor Who’s return to the serial format with tense cliffhangers. Each episode of Flux offers two. There’s a quasi-hanger before the title sequence, which would work better with that “Eeaaoowwhh!” musical sting, instead of a muted segue into the sludgy current version of the theme tune. The closing cliffhanger is also robbed of effect when, moments later, the Next Time trailer reveals the heroes alive and well in a completely different setting. * Once, Upon Time Chris Chibnall’s Flux has crossed the threshold into Chris Chibnall’s Delirium. If Chapter One showed the first signs of fever and Chapter Two a momentary lull, Chapter Three is like waking up in the night with the full-blown screaming ab-dabs. Once, Upon Time is one of the most dizzying and blatantly confusing episodes of Doctor Who – and I’ve sat through a fair few – which makes it tricky to engage with. Calling the overall six-part story Flux, establishing that space and time are disrupted and having characters stricken by "temporal haze" (flitting in and out of phase from one person and body to another, and between locations and times) may excuse a lot of seemingly random events, but there has to be the hope of coherence, a glimmer of internal logic. Of course, there can be pleasure in obfuscation and rewards from delayed explanations, and this instalment does start to make sense towards the end, maybe because the standard human brain has jettisoned much of the nonsensical detail that has gone before. At a time when Doctor Who needs to broaden its appeal, alienating its potential audience rather than drawing it in is a risky business. Viewers poised between Countryfile and the Strictly Results show couldn’t be blamed for fretting that their BBC One signal is on scramble or for turning elsewhere. Devoted fans will probably derive satisfaction from sifting through and unpicking this kaleidoscope of images and information, especially the notes on the Doctor’s past lives, forgotten deeds and involvement with "the Division". Followers who abhorred The Timeless Children (the series 12 finale in 2020), especially the dismally "Mastersplained" new backstory for the Doctor, will likely throw up their arms in horror as those missing chunks of the Doctor’s past are given further currency and legitimised by the events of Once, Upon Time. But this is where some of the gems lie. One glistening jewel is the unexpected return of "Doctor Ruth" (the “Fugitive Doctor” as she is billed), the past incarnation played majestically by Jo Martin. Any excuse for another glimpse of her, please. The same can be said for Barbara Flynn, who elevates everything she touches. She only has one scene, as the enigmatic Awsok, some superior being (wielding a screwdriver, note), who teases the Doctor with snippets about the origins of the Flux. Jodie Whittaker sails through all these encounters and is on top of the confusion, but I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when the cast first received this script. "Um, who am I now, where am I now and what is this all about…?" perhaps. It’s hard to pin down Yaz and Dan in this piece. Some of the time they aren’t quite in character or are possibly avatars for other people. There’s sharper focus on Vinder, the lost commander. I like his look, his changing hairdos, his jackets… he can even rock fingerless mitts. Jacob Anderson maintains sensitivity and charisma, even while Vinder’s backstory becomes staggeringly dull. He’s engaged in a crisis of conscience alongside a subdued Craig Parkinson (from Line of Duty) as the Grand Serpent (more of a Limp Grass Snake) and two bored-looking non-speaking-artist aliens. It’s charming when Vinder sends his love message across time to Bel. Appealing played (and narrated) by Thaddea Graham (from Netflix’s The Irregulars), she reminds me of the lone fugitive types that used to populate Blake’s 7. There’ll surely be more of their fractured romance as Flux proceeds. The delirium calls forth hovering gold Daleks, easily picked-off Cybermen (one of whom is unexpectedly talkative; nice work for Nicholas Briggs) and a flutter of Weeping Angels. Chibnall has certainly delivered some banging cliffhangers. And Chapter Three’s hits home as the Angels penetrate the Doctor’s inner sanctum. “The Angel has the Tardis!” she cries, and it is deeply chilling. Roll on, Chapter Four, which with any luck will be a blinking nightmare. In a good way. * Village of the Angels After last week’s needlessly complicated, off-putting concoction, it is a relief to turn to Chapter Four and heap praise: thrilling storytelling, faultless production, terrific performances and a jaw-dropping conclusion… in sum, or by multiplication, this is several orders of magnitude greater than anything that has Fluxed before. Expertly directed by the fittingly named Jamie Magnus Stone, Village of the Angels is an hour of drama that is coherent despite its complexity, exciting and satisfying as a slice of TV sci-fi. Showrunner Chris Chibnall and his co-writer for one week, Maxine Alderton, make a strong partnership. (She wrote the 2020 episode The Haunting of Villa Diodati, one of Jodie Whittaker’s finest outings.) It must have been both daunting and a buzz to be the first Doctor Who writers other than Steven Moffat to be allowed to play with his nightmarish creations, the Weeping Angels. Not only to honour what’s been established in the past but to flutter their wings further. These "quantum-locked" statues gain more mobility and agency. An Angel has hijacked the Tardis! They’re in alliance with the Division (shady Gallifreyan operatives from the Doctor’s forgotten past). We’ve long known "an image of an Angel becomes an Angel" – now one can emerge from a 1960s telly, even from a torn-up pencil sketch. A cluster of Angels have the power to take the whole village of Medderton "out of space, out of time", while mounting an attack on Professor Jericho’s house, bashing down his doors. "Are they really ringing my doorbell?" he gasps. We also learn what happens if you’ve already been Angel-zapped into the past but, like elderly couple Gerald and Jean, are foolish enough to stray near an Angel again. Instant petrification and disintegration. There are reminders of The Time of Angels in Matt Smith’s first season 11 years ago, when Amy Pond had an Angel in her mind’s eye and saw her arm turning to stone, and when the Angels first found a means to speak (through dead cleric Bob). These aspects are developed through Claire Brown, a "percipient" with second sight – as the Doctor says, "You had a premonition of an Angel in your mind and now it’s living there." Claire’s arms turn to stone and she sprouts Angel wings. The blue-stonewashed encounter between Angel-Claire and the Doctor is riveting (superb performances from Annabel Scholey and Jodie Whittaker). Here the imagery starts to become biblical. This rogue Angel is like Satan, the fallen angel, tempting the Christ-like Doctor, if not in the desert, on a beach where the sea is parting. She dangles the one prize the Doctor desires: her erased memories. Temptation also comes elsewhere in the form of Azure, high on a mountain, enticing the dispossessed masses, while Bel leads Namaca (Blake Harrison) not into temptation and is his saviour. Here endeth the lesson. Kevin McNally is strong as Professor Eustacius Jericho and is no stranger to Doctor Who. He was one of the few plus points in Colin Baker’s debut stinker, The Twin Dilemma, 37 years ago. Jericho is steadfast in the face of unimaginable horror, having been "one of the first British soldiers into Belsen", albeit insulted by an Angel via his TV set as "loveless, childless, hiding in academia for fear of the real world… a life of failure". He and Claire are like a 20th-century Doctor/companion pairing, also extremely close to Dougray Scott and Jessica Raine's characters in the 2013 episode Hide. They're people we'll want to spend more time with as Flux enters its latter stages. Village of the Angels presents the quaint English setting of Medderton cut off from the outside world and is very John Wyndham (The Midwich Cuckoos). It is of course redolent of 1971-vintage Doctor Who. The Jon Pertwee classic The Daemons saw the village of Devil’s End isolated and beset by a living statue that vaporised the locals. (Bok the gargoyle, who terrified me as a nipper, was a clear antecedent for the Weeping Angels.) I’ve no qualms about referencing Who’s ancient past when Chibnall does it freely himself. He peppers Whittaker’s dialogue with the fan-pleasing catchphrases of her predecessors: Pertwee’s "I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow" and Patrick Troughton’s "When I say ‘run’, run!". Chapter Four brims with tense sequences (the Angels’ pursuit of the Doctor’s party in Jericho’s "assignation tunnel") and impressive visuals. The illusion of Medderton teetering on the edge of space, and the split-screen between day and night and 1901/1967 are excellently achieved by CGI. There are smaller, precise FX such as Claire’s pupils suddenly dilating "on camera". The most striking image is saved to last with the hideous petrification of Whittaker’s Doctor into a Weeping Angel. It elevates this segment into "stone-cold classic". As a final Flux flourish, the credits roll is interrupted (a rare event; Nick Frost’s Santa did it at the close of Death in Heaven in 2014). It bleeds into an extended scene with Vinder. Finally, the trailer for Chapter Five flings out a mini-reveal of Jemma Redgrave as Kate Stewart, the Unit leader introduced by Chibnall in 2012 and last seen six years ago. More on her next time… Survivors of the Flux Chapter Five screams "penultimate". It’s nowhere as exciting as Chapter Four but it does advance the Flux storyline and Chris Chibnall’s wider myth-making scheme, while showing Grandmaster Chibs placing characters in key positions on his multi-dimensional chessboard, poised to make his last moves. Among several holding patterns, the most impressive is 'Around the World with Professor Jericho', who is in full Phileas Fogg mode with his companions Yaz and Dan. To be fair, it’s more sharp-as-a-tack Yaz and her blundering associates Jericho and Dan. Stranded in the early 1900s, the trio are doggedly pursuing a vague directive from the Doctor, which leads them from Mexico to Constantinople to Nepal to the Great Wall of China, and thence back to Liverpool (looking spectacularly un-sooty for 1904). The joke’s on them; they could have stayed in Blighty. Lots of fun is had along the way, with counterweight-pulley pratfalls in an Aztec tomb (surely a little nod to the pulley system made by William Hartnell’s Doctor in The Aztecs, 1964); a mickey-taking hermit halfway up the Himalayas; the graffiti-message-across-time daubed at the Great Wall; and Dan getting ribbed for being repetitively Scouse. The time-hopping tunnel-builder Joseph Williamson falls into place, too. On an ocean liner, there’s also a tender moment when Yaz watches her Doctor-hologram for clearly the umpteenth time and we observe how much she adores and misses her friend. The Time Lord, meanwhile, overcomes last week’s cliffhanger – petrification into Weeping Angel – with remarkable ease, while the Angels themselves are fast dispensed with like last week’s cat litter. Beyond our universe, the Doctor is in the company of an Ood and that mysterious taunting figure from Chapter Three. "I’m the one who found you," she now chooses to reveal. "I brought you to Gallifrey and raised you. I am Tecteun. The woman you used to call 'Mother'." These exposition-laden moments, teasing about the Doctor’s origins, are altogether less tedious than equivalent scenes in The Timeless Children – and gain import and grandeur in the hands of Barbara Flynn and Jodie Whittaker (both magnificent). Flynn is so fabulous as Tecteun that I flinched when that camp swine Swarm swanned in and, with a stroke of his glove, made her "sashay away". Not content with expanding the Time Lord’s backstory, Chibnall wades into Unit’s already messy timeline… and muddies it further. In his new potted history, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (latterly Unified Intelligence Taskforce) has been malignly influenced by the Grand Serpent aka Prentis (Craig Parkinson). Far more menacing than in Chapter Three, he’s been bumping off big wigs for decades, although it isn’t clear how his sickening serpent gets inside his victims to begin with. Also, how did Jon Pertwee’s exiled Doctor never bump into Prentis during his many years at Unit or spot the fully functioning Tardis they’ve mothballed? In a sweet, fleeting aside, circa 1967, the man who would become the Brigadier is heard off-stage (a snippet of Nicholas Courtney from Terror of the Autons). But surely he could never have served as a corporal, as described; Lethbridge-Stewart was always officer material. Prentis’s encounter with the Brig’s daughter, Kate Stewart, shows what a shrewd operator she is – and Jemma Redgrave is on redoubtable form, returning for the first time since The Zygon Invasion/Inversion six years ago. I was dismayed when Chibnall summarily terminated Unit in 2019’s Resolution. Especially because he had told me in 2012: "As a writer, you’re eternally grateful to everyone back in 1968 who came up with that idea because it’s a brilliant storytelling mechanism. Unit is embedded into the family history of the show." Now the time is ripe for Kate and Unit to regain their former status – and save planet Earth. In further Chibs chess moves, Vinder is paired up with Dan’s date Diane inside a Passenger, while Bel is "hyperjacked" by Dan’s dog-man Karvanista. Earth has become – as ever – the focus in the universe for ultimate destruction by the Flux, the Division and marauding Sontarans. And, of course, in another dimension the Ravagers are dangling the Doctor’s lost memories in a fob watch. Are we all keeping up…? Is everyone poised? Only one more Chapter to go… The Vanquishers In the face of adversity may we find what makes us strong. This has certainly proven so for Chris Chibnall, the man with a show to run in the face of a pandemic. Forced to scale back, to operate in a climate of fluctuating COVID restrictions, he redrew his parameters in pursuit of the best Doctor Who he and his team could deliver. In that respect, they have achieved an impressive feat in the six-part Flux. Returning the programme to its original serial format has been the key win. It has allowed an engaging, occasionally gripping, series of storylines to evolve and interweave, build to effective cliffhangers, and then to resolve satisfyingly in this sixth and final episode. At times, it’s been apparent that everything but the kitchen sink, the dog basket and the loo brush was being chucked into the mix. Multiple locales, time zones, Doctors… A barrage of old foes dusted down and given a chance to play outside again… Sontarans chiefly, but Daleks and Cybermen too – all looking foolhardy in this final conflagration… Even a friendly Ood joined the fray, while the Weeping Angels polished their badges as Who’s chill-supremoes. Note that none of the creations from Chibnall’s past two series were called upon: no Stenza, no whispering-rag Remnants, no froggy Solitract, no shimmering Kasaavin, no Pting, no Dregs… Consigned to oblivion, perhaps. What’s positive is that he has now fashioned memorable opponents in the Ravagers, Swarm and Azure. Outstanding performances from Sam Spruell and Rochenda Sandall allied to fabulous costume, masks and make-up – “Condragulations!” to the design team. RuPaul’s Drag Race champions, eat your hearts out! "We have everything we need – Division, the power to destroy your universe… and you!" gloats Swarm. They not only relish destruction ("The end of all spatial objects," purrs Azure helpfully), they long to replay the final throes of our cosmos, in a constant loop. Their finest moments involve tormenting the Doctor: Azure proffering the MacGuffin fob watch, "It will break your mind"; Swarm literally tearing the house down, as he rips apart and reassembles the crooked building that represents the Time Lord’s missing past. Then Azure finally steps from her sibling’s shadow to discuss with the Doctor their diametrically opposed faiths: life versus obliteration. There’s an anti-climax when the ghastly pair meet their comeuppance and are frittered away by the embodiment of Time. They seem ecstatic about their exit. "Ascension…" coos Azure as she disintegrates. Maybe she is going to a better place. When Time takes on the form of the Doctor, with Jodie Whittaker’s benign face, I half-expected a reference to Kronos the "chronovore" from The Time Monster. It portends doom for this Doctor and heavy-hints a rematch with the Master. Way before this, we’ve seen a fresh spin on The Three Doctors. "Wow, you’re cute!" she says to herself. "I’m being trisected across disparate dimensions. I’m split across three realities now. It’s quite draining and confusing and breaks every known law." It would be easy to take the mickey here, but Chibnall and Whittaker handle all this guff confidently, and provide a clever, new and very Who-ey way of telling a story and spinning plates. Chibnall’s Flux has trodden an eventful if uneven path, with one swill-bucket of bad dreams (Once, Upon Time) and one bona fide classic (Village of the Angels) along the way. The greatest triumph of this six-parter is that, while frenetic, it has given its characters space to breathe and come alive, which can’t be said of the usual, limited 45-minute format. We might not know much more about them at the end than at the start but they’ve become familiar and likeable and we root for them. Warrior-lovers-reunited Bel and Vinder go off to make babies, in the company of Bungle-from-Bolton Karvanista, now the last of his kind. 'Claire-voyant' survives the Sontaran mind probe and arrives back in her own time with her 2021 hairdo miraculously restored. Resourceful Diane "may just have saved what’s left of the universe", but she still turns down Dan. The Grand Serpent gets hissy with the Doctor but she tames him ("I’ve put you on the very naughty step") and he’s abandoned on a minuscule asteroid. With so much going on, Kate Stewart draws the short straw. So strong is Jemma Redgrave’s presence, there are scenes where I’m willing her to intercede with more than the few lines she’s allotted. She signs off with: "I like this regeneration. Hope I meet it again." Let’s hope that transpires in the coming specials. Kevin McNally is the other winner, in a way. His have-a-go-scientist, old-soldier Jericho is a splendid old chap but was always destined to be the one hero sacrificed in this piece. "What an awfully big adventure..." We salute you, Jericho. A bedazzling CGI Flux-obliteration of planets, spaceships and archenemies is all conveniently hoovered up by one of those Passengers, whose silhouette still hits me as 'Ena Sharples in gimp mask'. Straggly ends are tied in a leisurely but satisfying wind-down. Dan (John Bishop) has earned his place among the Tardis crew, and the Doctor makes peace with Yaz (Mandip Gill). As it should, the focus narrows in on this pair, their heartfelt 'womance' and a well-placed tear. Both characters/actors have benefitted from this revised format. In the final moments, though, Chibnall offers another reset, possibly just a pause. The Doctor drops her fob-watch memories into the heart of the Tardis – determined to remain “Doctor Who?”. Perfect.
Doctor Who: Revolution of the Daleks ★★★★
Chris Chibnall doles out eerie set-pieces, the return of Captain Jack, protracted farewells and a glimpse of a brighter future
“How many people in the universe get to meet the Doctor, let alone travel with her? We’re the lucky ones, Yaz. Enjoy the journey while you’re on it. Cos the joy... is worth the pain” – Captain Jack Story 296 New Year’s Day special 2021 Storyline The Doctor has been languishing in a Judoon space jail for decades – until sprung loose by old friend Captain Jack Harkness. They return to her chums in Sheffield, only to learn of their concerns about the re-emergence of the Daleks. Entrepreneur Jack Robertson (a former opponent) is conniving with the Government’s Technology Secretary Jo Patterson to build an army of “defence drones” – in fact, a production line of Daleks. Soon after Patterson becomes Prime Minister, she is exterminated in Downing Street and the Daleks go on the rampage. The Doctor resorts to calling in Death Squad Daleks who are determined to eradicate the impure new versions. All surviving Daleks are then lured into a secondary Tardis and trapped in the void. Ryan and Graham decide it’s time to remain on Earth, but Yaz is determined to stay with the Doctor. First UK broadcast Friday 1 January 2021 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Captain Jack Harkness –John Barrowman Jack Robertson – Chris Noth Jo Patterson – Harriet Walter Leo Rugazzi – Nathan Stewart-Jarrett Armen – Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea Rachel – Helen Anderson – Rachel Dalek voices – Nicholas Briggs Dalek operators – Barnaby Edwards, Nicholas Pegg Grace – Sharon D Clarke Emily Maitlis as herself Crew Writer – Chris Chibnall Director – Lee Haven Jones Series producer – Nikki Wilson Producer – Alex Mercer Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Dafydd Shurmer Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern Blackened, buffed up and both having had a little work done, the Daleks and Captain Jack Harkness are back to elevate Doctor Who from the doldrums in a New Year special, which restores some of the zest lacking in recent times, as showrunner Chris Chibnall doles out eerie set-pieces, protracted farewells and a glimpse of a brighter future. But first, Revolution of the Daleks finds the Doctor banged up in a space jail. Incarceration is usually a dramatic dead-end in Who. It was verboten under Russell T Davies, although Steven Moffat made a virtue of it in the Peter Capaldi classic, Heaven Sent. In 2021, Chibnall also finds value as he shows Graham, Yaz and Ryan pining for their absent friend, yearning for shared adventures. For ten months. That’s a sensation we can all empathise with – albeit captured here inadvertently because this episode was written and in the can before Covid blighted our lives. Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor is diminished by her personal lockdown. Surely any other Doctor would have quickly found a way to outfox the rhino-cop Judoon. She is displayed simply counting the days, the years, no doubt processing the dismal revelations about her past in series 12, and gurning at fellow inmates: Ood, Weeping Angels and the silly Pting… She has to wait to be sprung free by Captain Jack Harkness. Jack is an odd fit with this era of the series. Until a brief comeback earlier in 2020, he hadn’t featured for a decade; his function superseded by another flirtatious adventurer armed with saucy one-liners and a time-hopping vortex manipulator, River Song. John Barrowman undoubtedly brings a star twinkle and camp-tinged bravado all his own, and has earned the right to spout continuity references to 16 years past. Jack credits Rose Tyler for his immortality, but this would have been better demonstrated with a few ineffective exterminations. He also over-eggs his former spell in the Tardis: “I saw more than I could have ever dreamed.” Really? When he has a space/time-hopping device all his own? Oddest of all, Jack literally phones in his farewell, blithering on about Gwen, his associate from Torchwood – a turgid offshoot we might otherwise have overlooked. There are two Jacks in Chibnall’s pack; the other being Jack Robertson, the despicable entrepreneur who blithely walked off set to freedom in 2018’s Arachnids in the UK and to this inevitable return. Chris Noth brings towering charm to the role and, after an hour of treachery against mankind, Robertson deservedly takes one step closer to the White House. And a likely rematch in series 13… This special wafts lots of daft events under our noses. Captain Jack’s rescue of the Doctor is as ridiculous as it is amusing. And just how many devices can he shove… ahem, secrete about his person? How unlucky is that lorry driver who stops at the one roadside cafe where an agent is lying in wait with poison? Why does no member of the public, no one in the Government or Armed Forces recognise a Dalek? In the Doctor Who universe, they’ve posed a highly visible threat to planet Earth for years. While Daleks quacking and zapping at each in the streets have become a thunderbore, Clifton Suspension Bridge makes for an audacious if fleeting battleground. Chibnall, the director Lee Haven Jones, voice artist Nick Briggs and the FX team all do sterling work to restore menace and a degree of horror to the old foe. The augmented models (sleeker, remote-controlled, black-with-snazzy-lights) look perfectly at home patrolling No 10 Downing Street and cause a frisson of delight by exterminating the venal PM, Jo Patterson (Harriet Walter) – although even they are outshone by the golden Daleks launched in the 2005 revival. The gratingly dubbed “fam” have fronted Doctor Who since 2018 and if you’ve grown to love this quartet (I haven’t), you’ll lament their break-up and may indulge the coda of farewells that sprawls over nearly eight minutes. Bradley Walsh is a significant loss. Across 22 episodes, Graham has shown the most heart, been the most alive, spouting wisecracks across the cosmos. But here, with the two Jacks hoovering up any scrap of humour, Graham is muted, resigned to his departure, even before he knows it. Ryan has been a plank for much of his run, but now that he’s going is at last allowed a proper one-to-one with the Doctor. The scene where he forces her to open up (“What I always thought to be the story of my life isn’t true,” she says) shows us a window into Ryan’s empathic nature and is tenderly played by Tosin Cole. “Things change all the time,” says Ryan. “Sometimes we get a bit scared cos new can be a bit scary, right?” This is a barely cloaked admonishment to fans who choked on the expansion of the Time Lord’s origins in series 12. Graham and Ryan return to the moorland bike-riding lessons from their debut episode, and – no surprises – are granted a final ray of sunshine with the other “woman who fell to Earth”, Grace (Sharon D Clarke would have made a dazzling Doctor). Mandip Gill persuasively conveys Yaz’s frustration with and passion for the Time Lord and her renewed determination to cling on to her woman. Yaz believes she has the Doctor all to herself now. But for how long? The BBC broadcast ends with the left-field announcement “Introducing John Bishop”… The head honchos of Who must be banking on another leavening of the line-up à la Bradley Walsh, or even praying for the Catherine Tate effect (one of the smartest castings ever in Doctor Who). This isn’t the first time a Liverpudlian builder with a funny bone was drafted into Doctor Who (think Tom Baker) – so don’t bash the Bishop just yet!
Doctor Who: Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children ★★★
A brutal, tense set-up dissolves into a woeful morass of 'Master-splaining' as the Doctor's personal history gains wads of earlier chapters
“Be afraid, Doctor. Because everything is about to change – for ever!” – the Master Story 295 Series 12 – Episodes 9 & 10 Storyline In the far future, the Doctor and her gang arrive on a planet ravaged by Cyber Wars and team up with a disparate band of refugees. Their defences destroyed by Cyberdrones, the survivors flee through space, pursued by Cybermen led by Ashad. They head for salvation at a mythical place called Ko Sharmus. Meanwhile, in rural Ireland, a young man called Brendan is seen growing up, joining the Gardaí and proving to have remarkable powers of survival. Ko Sharmus turns out to be the elderly guardian of the Boundary to another dimension – through which the Master triumphantly appears. Again in league with the Cybermen, he has prepared a trap for the Doctor. The Boundary is a portal to Gallifrey, where the Master has wiped out the Time Lords and laid waste to their Capitol. He is furious that they’ve been lied to for centuries but delights in revealing that the Doctor is in fact “the Timeless Child”, who long ago gave rise to the Time Lords’ regenerative powers. Irish Brendan and the mysterious Doctor who was Ruth are just two of many previous incarnations the Doctor has been unaware of. The Master also turns his allies and the slain Time Lords into CyberMasters, but Ko Sharmus destroys them by activating a “death particle” developed by Ashad. The Doctor’s friends arrive safely back on Earth but she is imprisoned in space by the Judoon... First UK broadcasts Ascension of the Cybermen – Sunday 23 February 2020 The Timeless Children – Sunday 1 March 2020 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole The Master – Sacha Dhawan The Doctor – Jo Martin Ashad – Patrick O’Kane Ravio – Julie Graham Ko Sharmus – Ian McElhinney Yedlarmi – Alex Austin Feekat – Steve Toussaint Bescot – Rhiannon Clements Ethan – Matt Carver Fuskle – Jack Osborn Brendan – Evan McCabe Patrick – Branwell Donaghey Meg – Orla O’Rourke Michael – Andrew Macklin Sergeant – Caolán Byrne Tecteun – Seylan Baxter Solpado –Kirsty Besterman Judoon Captain – Paul Kasey Voices of the Cybermen and Judoon Captain – Nicholas Briggs Cybermen – Matthew Rohman, Simon Carew, Jon Davey, Richard Highgate, Richard Price, Mickey Lewis, Matthew Doman, Paul Bailey Crew Writer – Chris Chibnall Director – Jamie Magnus Stone Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Dafydd Shurmer Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern The Ascension of the Cybermen Chris Chibnall has come out with all Cyber-guns blazing. There’s a clear sense of the showrunner relishing his Doctor Who finale. The first of a two-parter, this is already far more exciting and laden with import than His Chibs’s previous end-of-series effort, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos in 2018, which wasn’t really a finale at all in impact or intent. Steeped in Who since boyhood, he adores a cliffhanger and it’s highly effective here, in its crescendo and delivery. I’m left itching for the follow-up. Although it has to be said, this one is markedly close to his previous cliffhanger in Spyfall: the companions in mortal peril a long way from the Doctor… who is herself on the threshold of another dimension… just as the Master springs up from nowhere… This time there’s a biblical vibe. Elderly sage Ko Sharmus (Ian McElhinney) stands like Moses with his rod by the Red Sea, showing the Time Lord how the waves divide to provide a route to salvation, except for her it is less the Book of Exodus and more the Book of Revelation. She sees the apocalypse again, Gallifrey destroyed, and the Master pops up like Satan to taunt her: “Be afraid, Doctor. Because everything is about to change. For ever.” But let’s rewind. To the beginning. The grim spectacle of that sea of Cyber-debris in space. A portentous voice intones: “The Cybermen were defeated. The victors of a billion battles broken. But that which is dead can live again – in the hands of a believer.” There’s a majestic flourish as the image zooms into the eye socket of a dead Cyberman and the bowel-movement opening titles swell forth. Our reacquaintance with the Cyber-foes must wait, however, as Chibnall next plunges the viewer into a subplot about a baby abandoned in a cot. More Mosaic allusion. We’re shown a bucolic, sepia-tinged locale, unspecified but apparently early 20th-century Ireland. It provides contrast to the war-strewn bulk of the piece, and builds in mystery as the orphan Brendan grows up rapidly, miraculously survives a bullet and cliff fall, and eventually, as a retiring cop, is subjected to bizarre torture by his boss and his adoptive father. How will this hook into the threads of the Cyber-war and Timeless Child? It’s pointless to speculate, but it is intriguing. On the edge of the universe the Doctor tracks down Ashad the emotive Cybermoan from the previous episode, and rues involving her team (“I’ve been so reckless with you”). The foursome’s ineptitude in this warzone only adds to the sense of peril. Their gadgets are swiftly destroyed by Cyber-drones (alarming flying heads) and, inexplicably, they cannot retreat to the Tardis. Separated and on the run, Yaz, Ryan and Graham remain so plucky and brave that we can’t help but root for them or worry – or even hope (you know who you are) – that somebody won’t come out of this alive. The remnants of humanity with whom they engage are a sorry bunch. So fast is the action that they barely register as characters and their names are lost, though all are suitably desperate and grubby. Steve Toussaint (as former teacher Feekat) looked like he’d stay around longer. Julie Graham fares best (with smutty cheeks but thick, immaculate eye-liner) as Ravio, a nurse in a former life who takes a shine to Graham. “Strange is a compliment,” she tells him. “I like strange.” Flirting in the face of adversity is never a good sign. Patrick O’Kane gives another deliciously sinister performance as the Cybermoan, who was “chosen to revive the glory of the Cyber race… The death of everything is within me.” Cheerful! As Ravio observes, Ashad is “a Cyberman that makes other Cybermen scream”. He’s proper nasty. And he turns the Cybermen, who let’s face it can be unutterably dull, into a palpable threat. Creating his own aftermath of a Cyber-war and the AI “Cyberium”, Chibnall has effectively overwritten Neil Gaiman’s abysmal Nightmare in Silver (2013) and its “Cyberiad”. Ascension of the Cybermen is brutal, tense and rollicks along, with returning Spyfall director Jamie Magnus Stone expertly handling the high-energy set-pieces and grand spectacle. The space-hardware FX, the interior of the Cyber war-carrier and the Cyber-costumes in various states of polish and distress are all first-rate. Segun Akinola cranks up the unease with an edgy score. So far, Chris Chibnall’s Ascension is nudging up among the best Cyber-tales, such as Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis’s The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967), Eric Saward’s Earthshock (1982) and Steven Moffat’s World Enough and Time (2017). I may not be smitten with the “Everything changes!” shtick. That was John Barrowman’s mantra in Torchwood and it led nowhere memorable or interesting. But bring on part two, The Timeless Children – and further revelations… The Timeless Children What an awful, boring mess. That’s what I jotted in my notebook halfway through this Doctor Who finale and it didn’t much improve, so that’s what I pass on to you first, unadorned. Despite Cybermen stomping around, the Master grandstanding on Gallifrey and the Doctor learning loads about her earlier lives, The Timeless Children manages to be spectacularly turgid, an overblown gush of nonsense that gobbles up almost 65 minutes of primetime television. Frankly, I’d rather have sat through a double edition of Countryfile. Where to begin? “Everything is about to change.” Such is the Master’s teasing warning in the cliffhanger recap. I’m not remotely bothered if current showrunner Chris Chibnall scatters and scrunches the sacred texts. Really, there aren’t any. There is no Doctor Who Bible. Rather he has concocted an earlier, unknown Testament, but in so doing has stretched the mythology to breaking point. You can’t fault his audacity, but The Timeless Children can’t hope to be interesting, as any sense of drama or dramatic tension makes way for an exposition megadump. This lore fest might startle the drooling devotee but must signally fail to engage the programme’s dwindling audience. I prefer the idea of William Hartnell being the first, the original Doctor, but numerous incarnations prior to his…? I can accept them. I’ve been intrigued by this concept since 1976 when eight unfamiliar faces popped up in the mind-bending contest in The Brain of Morbius. (“How far, Doctor? How long have you lived?”) We also already knew that the Doctor (in The Time of the Doctor) and the Master (in The Five Doctors) were offered a full new set of regenerations. So none of this is new. The Doctor’s long, lost history exposed now offers one minor reward in that the “Irish” Brendan simulation establishes that he/she was at least once ginger, and a fine red head. Expect the actor Evan McCabe shortly to be whirled around the Who convention circuit and Big Finish audio merry-go-round. The finale disappoints by showing little of the magnificent Doctor Ruth (Jo Martin). This guff about the Gormless Kid, sorry, the “Timeless Child”, abandoned, dithering around on the Boundary to another realm, discovered by the Shobogan space explorer Tecteun, regenerating through a flurry of races and genders… This might read well in prose (one of the fan fantasies indulged by BBC Books perhaps), but narrated by Sacha Dhawan’s Master, at length, and enacted by a mute cast on BBC One, it does not make for involving television. For me, the crucial line in this is Doctor Ruth’s: “Have you ever been limited by who you were before?” Let’s hope we can file all these earlier identities under Unclaimed Baggage, forget and move on. Despite Dhawan’s considerable charm and maximum efforts, I miss the Master. I mean the proper Master. The original, you might say. I’m so lucky I grew up watching Roger Delgado’s interpretation in the 1970s. He was dastardly, suave, charismatic, utterly persuasive. I also miss Missy. A waspish, hilarious, black-hearted Mary Poppins who sought and earned redemption, expertly pitched by Michelle Gomez. Dhawan’s Master seems to be channelling the bonkers John Simm version. He’s trying too hard to be insane, pouring glee and little restraint into each scene, though his florid performance helps lift many a stagnant stand-and-mansplain moment. It’s the third finale in recent years to rely on the Master/Missy in alliance with the Cybermen. Remarkably quickly, these new arrivals on Gallifrey are blended with Time Lord body parts; they also have time to augment their armour with the outré regalia, those silly ceremonial collars that even in their debut The Deadly Assassin were described as “seldom worn robes with their colourful collar insignia”. They look ridiculous. When will the Who makers stop relying on the Cybermen? They are dullness personified. Ashad the Cybermoan shows some personality and promise but is “tissue compressed” in the most anti-climactic manner. His army yet again are lousy shots. It would have been gratifying had they at least grazed Graham, singed Yaz or flattened Ryan. Accentuate the positives. There are some. The heart-warming interlude where Graham praises Yaz for being “such an impressive young woman… you’re never afraid and you’re never beaten”, then worrying he’s offended her sensibilities, is beautifully written and played. The Doctor using all her memories to blow the Matrix and free herself is a flurry of joy, and a rare example of the signature tune being used mid-programme. In a vacuum of tension, one scene gets close to suspenseful when Yaz, Graham and co hide inside Cybersuits and are stalked by Ashad. Oh, I also liked the minuscule beat of relief when Ravio (Julie Graham) steps out of a Tardis/20th-century house and realises, “This is Earth. We’re on Earth.” Apart from the deliberate obfuscation in Chris Chibnall’s script, which simultaneously reveals but withholds so much, a few minor quibbles remain. How did the Master escape from his trap at the end of Spyfall? How did he destroy Gallifrey? How did he wipe out the Time Lords, stop them regenerating or deep-freeze a selection for Cyberconversion? He just does. How did the Boundary establish a handy link between Ko Sharmus’s beach and Gallifrey? It just does. How do the Doctor and the humans get off the exploding Cybership and suddenly access a working Tardis? They just do. How on Earth can the Judoon materialise inside the Doctor’s supposedly impregnable Tardis? They just do. Thus The Timeless Children clamps shut with a tedious cliffhanger. The Doctor being incarcerated is death to drama. Former showrunner Russell T Davies appreciated that and would never allow it during his tenure. Series 12 has improved on series 11 but, tragically, Doctor Who has been haemorrhaging viewers. At least in the UK. It’s still being made by well-intentioned, dedicated cast and crew, but it has become old hat on a good day and old toot on a bad one. They can’t physically produce the rate of episodes the BBC secretly would like each year, nor to a high enough standard. Will another overhaul help? A casting coup to entice young or disenchanted viewers? I would look to the emerging talent in Netflix’s Sex Education. This finale demonstrates that “everything is about to change” does not equate to “everything is about to improve”. With luck, there are a lot of lives left in the good Time Lord but, with a heavy heart, I’m saying she/he deserves – and indeed needs – a lengthy rest. Catch up on all the Jodie Whittaker episodes in the Radio Times Doctor Who Story Guide
Doctor Who: The Haunting of Villa Diodati ★★★★★
The Doctor must save Lord Byron and the Shelleys and yield to the Lone Cyberman in a ghost story that deftly subsumes the birth of horror into the show’s own mythology
“Save the poet? Save the universe? Sometimes even I can’t win” – the Doctor Story 294 Series 12 – Episode 8 Storyline 1816: one stormy night at a villa overlooking Lake Geneva, the rakish poet Lord Byron and his young friends, including Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley, chill each other with tales of the dead. When the Doctor, Graham, Yaz and Ryan arrive, the Time Lord senses unrelenting evil in the air. They are beset by ghostly apparitions as the house seems to turn in on itself. In the cellar, Percy Shelley has been infected by the Cyberium, an AI from the future. It is manipulating everyone’s perceptions of reality to protect itself from the “Lone Cyberman”, who arrives to reclaim it. The Doctor ignores the warning Captain Jack gave her friends, yields the Cyberium to protect Shelley and his timeline, and vows to take the fight to the future… First UK broadcast Sunday 16 February 2020 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – Lili Miller Claire Clairmont – Nadia Parkes Lord Byron – Jacob Collins-Levy Dr John Polidori – Maxim Baldry Ashad – Patrick O’Kane Percy Bysshe Shelley – Lewis Rainer Elise – Sarah Perles Fletcher – Stefan Bednarczyk Crew Writer – Maxine Alderton Director – Emma Sullivan Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Dafydd Shurmer Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern It was a dark and stormy night… We’re at the birth of what would become a cliché but this latest Doctor Who embraces all the familiar ghost-story trappings and deftly subsumes the birth of horror into its own mythology. The Time Lord’s rules of engagement are set. Ryan: “Nobody mention Frankenstein and don’t interfere.” Yaz: “And nobody snog Byron.” I was mildly concerned about witnessing the gormless WhittakWho Quartet blundering into this key moment in literary history, not just literary history but a seminal point in the horror genre, the birthplace of frights in the night in novel form. Admirably, Maxine Alderton (who’s written for The Worst Witch and many editions of Emmerdale) handles her subject and setting with charm and sensitivity. The Time Lord cannot wait to engage with “some of the most enlightened minds of a generation at the pinnacle, the absolute zenith of their creativity”. Cue, the historical figures horsing about on a rug, then gossiping with the foursome during a quadrille (an elegantly concealed info-dump). What the drama makes clear is just how young these Bright Young Things of the Romantic era were, and it brings them to life with a strong cast of relative newcomers. Lili Miller glints with naughtiness and empathy for the dark side as Frankenstein creator Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, just 18, and already known as “Mrs Shelley” before marriage. Nadia Parkes plays her lovelorn stepsister Claire Clairmont, who at the end delightfully rebukes the rakish Lord Byron (Jacob Collins-Levy). Lewis Rainer looks splendidly wan and “matinee idol” as Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite an iffy wig. Most recognisable of the set, Maxim Baldry (Years and Years) glowers as the volatile, insomniac Dr Polidori. (It isn’t mentioned here but John Polidori wrote his short story The Vampyre at the villa, which later influenced Bram Stoker.) All five are well drawn by Alderton across the 50-minute time limit. Faring best is Mary, who relishes the tales of the dead: “Something to awaken thrilling horror,” she purrs, “to make us dread to look around, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart.” Mary delights in Byron’s reading of Hildegard the Death Bride, endures more horror than anticipated as the night unfolds – and eventually, inevitably, describes the “Lone Cyberman” as the Modern Prometheus. It is clever to suggest a Cyberman as inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Creature in her Frankenstein novel (formulated on that dark night in 1816 and published two years later). This cadaverous, botched operation of a man, reinvigorated by the equivalent of a bolt of lightning, lumbering about the villa, killing indiscriminately, responding tenderly to a baby… it’s so close to the monster that we have come to know in the movies. This bashed-up, war-torn loner is a welcome addition to the mythology, in much the same category as the solitary, recycled garbage-can Dalek in Resolution. His half-mask allows a performance to come through, vocally and via the one exposed eye of actor Patrick O’Kane. This wretched creature, named Ashad, does not have an emotion inhibitor, so we witness his rage, his sarcasm, his sensitivity. In a neat touch of arcane continuity, his roar of anguish echoes the Cyberman who was given emotions then went rogue in the London sewers in The Invasion in 1968. The Haunting of Villa Diodati is in good company with other haunted-house Whos: Peter Capaldi’s Knock Knock (2017), and especially Jon Pertwee’s Day of the Daleks (1972) and Matt Smith’s Hide (2013), both of which were beset with “ghosts” from the future. Are there “real” ghosts in this story, though? The Doctor leaves Graham guessing and gawping. Some details she cannot explain. The skeletal hand, the apparitions of a housemaid and a young girl provide fleeting chills and almost read like vestiges from an earlier draft. But Bradley Walsh delivers comedy gold again as Graham, spooked by this pair (“You two just need a spray tan and a kip”) and by the sinister valet Fletcher, who keeps appearing from nowhere. Perhaps more pressing is Graham’s need for a pee: “Big house like this, there’s got to be a lav somewhere” and later “Not a khazi for love nor money.” I don’t need to see Graham about his ablutions but am concerned that his quest for relief is never satisfied. The last we hear of this dribbling plot strand is when the valet points to a capacious po. While the links to recent and future episodes might be mystifying, the perception-manipulating power of the so-called Cyberium (“an AI from the future containing the knowledge and future history of all Cybermen”) is somewhat opaque and bewildering too. Why has someone sent this “quicksilver” to Geneva 1816? For the most part, the storytelling isn’t impeded – if you keep alert. For once, the detail and developments aren’t related with a bludgeon. “Words matter!” stresses the Doctor. “One death, one ripple, and history will change in a blink.” Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor is impressive, outfoxing Byron, encouraging Mary and Percy, nearly thwarting the Cyberman but, ultimately, not heeding the warnings of Captain Jack relayed via her team. She sees the bigger picture: “Sometimes this team structure isn’t flat, it’s mountainous, with me at the summit, in the stratosphere alone, left to choose. Save the poet? Save the universe?” No bragging; she’s stating her responsibility as a Lord of Time and admits, “Sometimes even I can’t win.” Lustrous, spooky, hitting every note, this episode is finely directed by Emma Sullivan, and has enough confidence and generosity to unwind with an almost minute-long poetry reading as the young Romantics loll in an idyllic setting. Maxine Alderton selects a passage from Darkness (a poem Byron wrote that summer) that reflects the mood of the piece and ends on an allusion to our favourite space/time traveller. Really rather beautiful. “The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before; The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air, And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need Of aid from them – She was the Universe.” Rare for this period of Who, The Haunting of Villa Diodati is one volume I would put on my shelf and contemplate dusting off again one day. And if it encourages viewers to reach out and discover the Romantic poets – and the progenitors of horror – this is a fine work indeed. Catch up on all the Jodie Whittaker episodes in the Radio Times Doctor Who Story Guide
From Aleppo to Sheffield, the Time Lord tackles Immortals’ games and the stuff of nightmares in a superb-looking, at times misguided, mystery
“I thought I should talk about it, cos those nightmares, they made me realise the fear is still there” – Graham Story 293 Series 12 – Episode 7 Storyline At a hospital in Aleppo, 1380, an orphan Tahira is terrorised by bestial creatures called Chagaskas. In 2020, Yaz, Graham and Ryan return to Sheffield to catch up with friends, but they’re soon beset by nightmares, controlled by a malign spectre, who abducts people in the night. The Doctor rescues Tahira, then with her friends is lured to a deep-space platform overlooking two planets frozen at the point of collision. The villain identifies himself as Gellin, a god-like immortal, who can now free his associate Rakaya from a prison orb between the planets. They intend to exploit the fears and nightmares of people on Earth and gorge on the dark forces unleashed. First UK broadcast Sunday 9 February 2020 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Zellin – Ian Gelder Tibo – Buom Tihngang Rakaya – Clare-Hope Ashitey Grace O’Brien – Sharon D Clarke Sonya Khan – Bhavnisha Parmar Tahira – Aruhan Galieva Maryam – Sirine Saba Anita Patel – Nasreen Hussain Gabriel – Everal A Walsh Fred – Michael Keane Mum – Amanda Liberman Old Tibo – Willie Jonah Andrew – Anthony Taylor Crew Writers – Charlene James, Chris Chibnall Director – Emma Sullivan Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Dafydd Shurmer Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern The stuff of nightmares. That’s always been Doctor Who at its best. There are certainly enough images and ideas in Can You Hear Me? to instil a few nightmares in younger viewers. A ferocious bestial monster lurking on a ceiling; a creepy old bald man who can materialise in your bedroom with a puff of black smoke; his detachable fingers lodging in your ears… But is this Doctor Who at its best? Not really. It does try hard, though. For a start Can You Hear Me? looks superb. The pre-titles sequence in Aleppo 1380 is gorgeously lit in sunset gold and after-dusk blues. The transitions in and out of dreams and nightmares make for beautiful swirling montages. And the peculiarly simplistic animation that depicts the Immortals’ origins seems original while also being reminiscent of an entry in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Like a lot of recent Doctor Who, there’s an intriguing build-up, a lot of dotting about across the planet and time zones, in such a way that you’re not sure even the writers have joined up all the dots, let alone the viewer. Why Aleppo 1380? Why Sheffield 2020? And then the express train of mystery and anticipation skids to a halt so that two or three people can stand still in a room and try to explain what’s going on. You can’t fault Chris Chibnall for harnessing fresh talent, and this week it’s Charlene James, a playwright who won acclaim for Cuttin’ It, a 2014 National Theatre drama tackling female genital mutilation. In 2018, she wrote two episodes of A Discovery of Witches for Sky, but Who is obviously a step up. It’s a decent debut, although of course it’s impossible to know where her input ends and the guiding hand of His Chibs takes over. Surely James’s homework didn’t include her going back to look at the early days of Doctor Who. For fans only, Zellin, the ghastly villain, acknowledges his antecedents. He references the Eternals from fifth Doctor Peter Davison’s story Enlightenment (1983), the god-like Guardians, who reach back to Tom Baker’s Key to Time season (1978/79), and even the Celestial Toymaker, thwarted by the first Doctor in 1966. Zellin neatly overlooks his own similarity to Ilin (Art Malik), a gamemaster as recent as 2018’s The Ghost Monument, whose kinship with the Toymaker I noted at the time. Zellin begins sinister enough, and seems to be several steps ahead of the Time Lord, but once he and his freed associate – predictably – set their sights on Earth and are standing in a British street ready to gorge on human fears, they become markedly less than god-like and just another dreary couple with peculiar needs. One major concern of series 12 has been the blandness of the Doctor’s three sidekicks, their lack of personality and emotional depth. Graham is reliably amusing but Yaz and Ryan too easily drift into vapidity. Will they be remembered in years to come like Rose Tyler, Amy and Rory? Decades later like Jo Grant and Sarah Jane Smith? Unlikely. But Can You Hear Me? goes a good way towards fleshing them out. It digs into their backgrounds, so that we see again Ryan’s best mate Tibo (Buom Tihngang), glimpsed in Spyfall, and Yaz’s stroppy sister, Sonya (Bhavnisha Parmar). All to the good. More importantly, it exposes their doubts, fears and, yes, nightmares. We learn that Yaz was bullied at school and three years earlier was a runaway, and thus has an unexpected bond with her sister and the policewoman who found her on the Moors. Ryan’s fear is the Earth burning within his and his aged best mate’s lifetime, and it leads him to question his long-term absence from his friends’ lives. Jovial Graham, understandably, is plagued with anxiety that his cancer will return more aggressively. (Lovely that he dreams of his dead wife Grace but gets no succour from the “still socially awkward” Time Lord.) Some of this detail is peppered throughout the episode but it also comes in a slab at the end. The final act may seem heavy and slow but at this stage such deepening characterisation is vital. Doctor Who rarely tackles mental health. This is a growing topic for TV drama and is handled well here, with Tibo, who seemed buoyant in the basketball game in Spyfall but has now troughed and is experiencing a bout of depression. No one should complain that this frivolous sci-fi series is attempting to address it, even if it sits a little uneasily in a storyline about god-like beings projecting nightmares, exploiting fears and feeding on the pain of others. This may not be quite dream TV or even your worst nightmare, but as a cry for help Can You Hear Me? is worth attending.
Deadly birds, a missing astronaut, the spread of an alien pathogen… this world-spanning mystery shifts from intriguing to enervating
“Two identical deaths on two different continents. It’s even more dangerous than I thought” – the Doctor Story 292 Series 12 – Episode 6 Storyline Ryan is in Peru investigating birds that are falling out of the sky. In Hong Kong, Yaz and Graham discover missing astronaut Adam Lang trapped in an alien lab, while the Doctor is on a beach in Madagascar, where the lone survivor of a submarine wreck is washed ashore and dies. These locales and events are linked to the spread of a deadly pathogen, Praxeus. It has been unleashed by aliens who view Earth as the perfect living laboratory to find a cure. Praxeus breeds in plastic, found in abundance on our planet, and ingested by birds and humans. The Time Lord and her allies produce an antidote and use the alien ship to disperse it across the world. First UK broadcast Sunday 2 February 2020 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Jake Willis – Warren Brown Adam Lang – Matthew McNulty Gabriela Camera – Joana Borja Suki Cheng – Molly Harris Jamila Velez – Gabriela Toloi Joyce – Soo Drouet Zach Olson – Tristan de Beer Aramu – Thapelo Maropefela Crew Writers – Pete McTighe, Chris Chibnall Director – Jamie Magnus Stone Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Dafydd Shurmer Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern The Doctor Who team have engineered a bit of a problem for themselves. Last week, they treated us to a taste of a startling new Doctor with a stronger personality, a nattier costume and a glorious Tardis harking back to the unbeatable original… We want to see more. But then this week… oh! We’re back to that again. But Praxeus is, in itself, disappointing. It’s co-credited to showrunner Chris Chibnall and more importantly Pete McTighe, whose satire on Amazon, Kerblam!, was one of the stronger episodes in series 11. I’d hoped for something similarly scintillating. Though Praxeus generates an intriguing mystery at the start with the dead birds, the avian attacks, the deadly infection, it soon starts to dither and plod. So much so that gifted composer Segun Akinola has to resort to burble-muzak, shimmering under every scene, to disguise the air of enervation. Like the previous episode, there’s a discernible Russell T Davies vibe. Which is no bad thing, normally. Multiple locations. Large diverse cast. A core relationship under threat. But whereas Russell T managed, ingeniously, to sketch a character as a fully believable person within moments and with a few lines of dialogue, that doesn’t happen here. I come away from Praxeus knowing little about any of these people nor caring about them, whether they live, or calcify and shatter. Who were the vloggers Gabriela and Jamila? Were they mates or an item? The scientist-turned-alien-villain Suki is instantly forgettable. Who was her associate Aramu who died on the beach, unremarked and unmourned? The closest to interesting characters are suspended cop Jake and British astronaut Adam – rewardingly, if unsurprisingly, a married couple. Their dysfunctional relationship and its imbalance of power bring a bit of humanity into the proceedings, but the actors Warren Brown and Matthew McNulty look like they’ve just met on set that day. Kudos, though, to McTighe and Chibnall for foregrounding a gay male couple (Doctor Who has majored on lady-love since the reboot) and allowing them a proper snog. No big deal. No issue. As it should be. Praxeus hops around the world: Peru, Madagascar, Hong Kong… Ambitious, but I didn’t get a true sense of any of these locales. We’re six episodes into series 12 and it’s noticeable now that, like RTD’s early seasons, the Tardis is rarely leaving Earth. Skyfall flirted briefly with a dark dimension (and Gallifrey); Orphan 55 turned out to be a devastated future Earth. What seems like another world in Praxeus is a crash-site under the Indian Ocean. Novel setting, drearily rendered. Can we have some alien planets soon? What does Praxeus have going for it? Well, like the Nikola Tesla episode, there’s an extensive five-minute set-up before the Doctor and her gang show up. The multiple settings mean that the quartet are split up, act independently and get a fair share of the action. Yaz starts to feel like a proper companion when she insists on remaining in Hong Kong to investigate solo and brave danger. But there can be little tension if the Time Lord is able to contact all her acolytes via a tiny comms device and then jump to their location and rescue them so swiftly that they don’t even bother to show the police box materialising. I hanker for bygone days when the Doctor could not steer the Tardis and would lose track of his companions. Why fret if she doesn’t even break sweat while rescuing Jake from death? “I can save him, just, if I materialise around him in the millisecond before the ship breaks up.” (That didn’t help the fifth Doc’s companion Adric in Earthshock!) The plot taps into our concerns about pandemic (timely), pollution and microplastic particles getting into the food chain, but I don’t buy into the alien pathogen, its need for plastic, the alien threat, the control of the birds, or the deaths (horribly realised though they are). I just don’t feel Praxeus. A mystery with no tension, little to coo at or chuckle at, not much to chew on. The complete Doctor Who Story Guide
Doctor Who: Fugitive of the Judoon ★★★★★
Enthralling times as Captain Jack returns and the Doctor discovers a mysterious other self (the excellent Jo Martin)
“Let me take it from the top. Hello, I’m the Doctor” – the Doctor Story 291 Series 12 – Episode 5 Storyline “Space rhino” law enforcers, the Judoon, storm modern-day Gloucester looking for a mysterious fugitive. They home in on Ruth and Lee Clayton, a seemingly innocent couple who are harbouring a secret and have been in hiding for decades. After Lee is executed, it becomes clear that Ruth is the Judoon target. The Doctor helps her flee to a lighthouse, where she discovers another police box buried in the grounds. Ruth is a previously unknown version of the Doctor, whose identity was cloaked by a chameleon arch. Together they face off the Judoon, but what does this all mean for the two Doctors’ timeline? Meanwhile, Graham, Yaz and Ryan are abducted by Captain Jack, who has a warning for his old friend: “Beware the lone Cyberman.” First UK broadcast Sunday 26 January 2020 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Ruth Clayton/The Doctor – Jo Martin Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Lee Clayton – Neil Stuke Gat – Ritu Arya Judoon Captain (Pol-Kon-Don) – Paul Kasey All Ears Allan – Michael Begley Marcia – Judith Street Tourist – Katie Luckins Judoon Captain voice – Nick Briggs Judoon – Simon Carew, Richard Highgate, Richard Price, Matthew Rohman Crew Writers – Vinay Patel, Chris Chibnall Director – Nida Manzoor Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Dafydd Shurmer Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern “AND YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS THIS WEEK” … Well, yes, I would actually. That Doctor Who tagline was flashed up on telly and all over social media in the days before transmission. Gawd, was that the best you could do, BBC!? When your ratings are dipping, don’t dangle invisible carrots. Put your wares in the bloomin’ window. Or at least some of them. Keep your exciting new/old Doctor under wraps by all means (more of her later) but flash Jack. That would have had the blue-rinse brigade tuning in, at least. Anyway, Captain Jack Harkness is back. Whoop-dee-doo! I can’t say I find his return particularly unbelievable. Surprising, perhaps, that the writers (Vinay Patel and, more so, Whorunner Chris Chibnall) deemed this undying yet moribund character worth reviving. Jack was a saucy beggar when he arrived in 2005, pansexing up the tail end of Christopher Eccleston’s tenure. He last appeared in Doctor Who ten years ago, but had already become tiresome from over-exposure in the turgid Torchwood. Mercifully, the spin-off expired in 2011, and Jack simply was not needed in Doctor Who. He’d been outclassed by another, superior pansexual vagabond with a vortex-jumping wristband – River Song. The role Jack plays in Fugitive of the Judoon could well have been taken by River and is bizarrely tangential. He has no interaction with the Doctor, though he plants a delicious smacker on Graham’s lips in a moment of mistaken identity. Jack’s dramatic purpose is to abduct Graham, Ryan and Yaz and stop them clogging the Doctor’s journey of self-discovery; and to drop another opaque warning (“Beware the lone Cyberman”) into the season arc. I don’t mean to sound down on Jack. I like John Barrowman. In person, he’s a charmer. We met long ago over a supper of cold meats in the Albany. That is not a euphemism (the Albany is an upper-crust residence off London’s Piccadilly). He’s a hugely talented actor and entertainer, terrific in West End shows I’ve enjoyed and on Broadway in the Sondheim revue Putting It Together 20 years ago. Remarkably well preserved, Barrowman has gamely kept puffing at the cinders of Torchwood for a decade. He deserves this reward, bringing much fun and vitality to the episode, and surely Jack will be back before long. The Judoon. No Bo Ko! Another return from the Russell T Davies era that few demanded. Yo Wo Doh! The rhino-headed law enforcers are thunderbores – Toh Bo Zzzo! – and have popped up several times, fleetingly, since their debut in the David Tennant episode Smith and Jones. Way back in 2007. Fo Ko Ho! That is a long time ago… I’d only recently re-joined Radio Times and I remember an excited Edward Russell, the Who brand manager, rocking up to BBC Woodlands (RT has changed address twice since then) with the first DVDs of series three. A group of us piled into TV editor Alison Graham’s office to watch Martha Jones’s debut. On the Moon. With the Judoon. So far, so “fan-pleasing” – if Jack and the Judoon float your boat. What with the Master, Gallifrey and random Time Lords aboard, series 12 is a vortex-jump away from Jodie Whittaker’s first. In 2018, Chris Chibnall’s clear-the-decks approach seemed salutary but it didn’t set the cosmos alight with its novelties. Given the right approach, I see little wrong in being “fan-pleasing”. But then I am a fan and I like to be pleased. Such is Chibnall’s heart that he goes one further from “fan-pleasing” to “fan-honouring”. In the credits, he’s named the Judoon captain “Pol-Kon-Don” after a Doctor Who fan who died last year. Paul Condon. I don’t recall meeting him, although I know he was a close pal of several friends of mine, so this is a very lovely act. Not a first. Steven Moffat named a teacher Tom in The Day of the Doctor after Tom Spilsbury, the lovely long-time editor of Doctor Who Magazine. And shortly before that Mark Gatiss gave a nod to one of his mates in The Crimson Horror. And maybe tonight’s Ruth Clayton is named after Spilsbury’s predecessor at DWM, Clayton Hickman. I’d like to think so. Apart from the fact that it’s told at quite a lick and is gorgeously directed by Nida Manzoor (especially at Gloucester Cathedral and that lighthouse), I love the playfulness of Fugitive of the Judoon. The boldness with which Chibnall throws another giant spanner into Doctor Who mythology. The reveal of the buried police box… the realisation that an ordinary Gloucester couple, Ruth and Lee, are in fact another Doctor and her companion… all majestically handled. A retro “white” Tardis is always a joy to see. I love when clues are hidden in plain sight. The episode starts with tell-tale close-ups: a timepiece, a wristwatch hitting eight, Ruth’s mystified eyes, her hexagonal mirror, her police box-like windows… I’m amused that our current Doctor is as flummoxed as the viewers. “Is there even a word for how dumb you are?” says the new/old Doctor. Great to see Neil Stuke (one of my late father’s favourite actors) as the secretive Lee but, well, a huge welcome to Doctor Who, Jo Martin. Two excellent, very different, strong performances in the space of 50 minutes. I am kind of chuckling at the image of any racists out there spitting feathers that at last we have a black Doctor. And any misogynists choking over the sight of two female Doctors on screen. Oh yes, and this new one is not only a second female Doctor but, mind-bendingly, also now the first female Doctor, somehow predating Jodie Whittaker’s. Haha! Many fans will be declenching their sphincters trying to bash this mystery woman somewhere, somehow, into the programme’s timeline and sprawling continuity. For me, it’s up there with the divine intervention of John Hurt as the War Doctor in the 50th anniversary; and all the previously unknown Doctors we glimpsed in The Brain of Morbius in 1976. That’s a thrill I remember to this day. For now, let’s enjoy what this portends… The BBC was wrong. I DO BELIEVE. And this could be the revival the programme desperately needed. (If we were awarding out of ten, this would be a nine; but I’m not feeling stingy so this is getting an RT top mark of ★★★★★.)
Doctor Who: Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror ★★★★
A delightful tale as the Time Lord unites with Tesla and Edison to thwart the giant scorpion Queen of the Skithra
“Nikola Tesla, you’re going to change the world, but first you’re going to save it” – the Doctor Story 290 Series 12 – Episode 4 Storyline At Niagara Falls in the early 1900s, the undervalued inventor Nikola Tesla becomes the quarry of the Skithra, giant alien scorpions whose Queen needs an engineer to repair her damaged spaceship. The Doctor and her friends arrive and a chase ensues to New York, where Tesla’s rival and former employer, Thomas Edison, joins the fray. They combine resources at Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower project on Long Island, where the Queen threatens to destroy Earth, but the scientists beam electric rays into the sky to repel the Skithra. First UK broadcast Sunday 19 January 2020 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Nikola Tesla – Goran Visnjic Thomas Edison – Robert Glenister Queen Skithra – Anjli Mohindra Dorothy Skerritt – Haley McGee Harold Green – Paul Kasey Bill Tallow – Robin Guiver Mr Sorensson – Erick Hayden Mr Brady – Russell Bentley Mr Martin – Brian Caspe Foreman – Shaun Mason Crew Writer – Nina Metivier Director – Nida Manzoor Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Dafydd Shurmer Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern Science, at last! Doctor Who normally steers clear of real physicists and inventors from history. Not surprising, really. Science and invention need a lot of research and much authentic hardware on show. Scriptwriters are evidently more comfortable depicting cultural icons (Shakespeare, Dickens, Van Gogh, Agatha Christie) and rulers (Elizabeth I, Victoria, Nixon, Nero, Churchill and Hitler). Of course, the Doctor is always the scientist in the room. All others pale in her or his presence. And there’s the small matter of her/him not being seen to influence scientific progress. Long ago in the 1970s, Tom Baker’s Doctor joked about having climbed a tree and dropping an apple on Isaac Newton’s head. Lo, gravity! In the 80s, Colin Baker’s incarnation kept “Father of Railways” George Stephenson on track against the Luddites. Such examples are few in Who. Pleasingly, series 12 is going where no Who has gone before. Spyfall involved the pioneers of computing, and only two episodes later we’re presented with the rivalry between inventors Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Nina Metivier (a relatively new writer who script-edited for series 11 and won a Bafta for her CBBC series Dixi) delivers a carefully honed script – instantly getting the meter of modern Doctor Who. She deals with her characters fairly: the visionary genius and thwarted ambition of Tesla; and the bald avarice and business acumen of Edison, who isn’t quite as despicable as he first seems. He’s shown to care when his workforce is massacred. In the quieter moments, the meeting of minds, the enmity and empathy between these two and the Doctor are a delight. (How I long for an adventure with Alan Turing!) The casting is spot-on. Goran Visnjic, a Hollywood actor of Croatian birth (best known as Dr Luka Kovac in ER), stalks the screen as the saturnine, idealistic immigrant Tesla. The Canadian Haley McGee is sparky as his secretary/devotee – go on then, companion – Dorothy Skerritt (another real person). Equally commanding and charismatic, despite Edison’s ruthlessness, is Robert Glenister. Probably best known for the BBC1 series Hustle and Spooks, aeons ago Glenister played Major Salateen in Doctor Who classic The Caves of Androzani – Peter Davison’s swansong as the fifth Doctor. (On 12 January 1984, an appalling 36 years ago, I was on the studio floor at BBC TV Centre watching Glenister act out Salateen’s dramatic death by gunfire. Take after take. A fabulous memory.) It’s a relief that this trio are not, at the end, recipients of the Time Lord’s cavalier “memory wipe”, which Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan suffered in Spyfall. Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror has so much going for it. That tart and tarty title. Strong performances from a fine guest cast. Immaculate set dressing. A balance of action and contemplative lulls. A lengthy scene-setting sequence at Niagara Falls; four-and-a-half minutes elapse before Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor blunders in comically in the manner of Matt Smith’s version. The evocation of New York (actually a set in Bulgaria) is reasonably persuasive; not as teeming or filthy as one imagines. Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower project on Long Island is excellently re-created. And there’s an easy-to-follow plot in which the men and women of science unite to fend off an alien threat… It’s not all rosy. That alien threat is a tad underwhelming. Yes, there has to be hokum, and the giant scorpions are well realised via CGI, but they are also patently absurd, hilariously inept when chasing Edison and Yaz through the streets. The Queen of the Skithra is a gorgeous/hideous make-up job on the mush of Anjli Mohindra (an alumna of The Sarah Jane Adventures and memorable as train bomber Nadia in Bodyguard). This sovereign scorpion is too reminiscent of the Empress of the Racnoss from The Runaway Bride. It’s amusing when she turns up unexpectedly on terra firma at Wardenclyffe, but is mostly a bit of a bore in the lower drawer of Who baddies, her galactic scavenging and threats of obliteration lacking originality. It’s lovely to see Tesla and Edison stepping into the Tardis and marvelling at its transcendental dimensions. I can’t help thinking they’d have been more staggered by the previous and infinitely superior Tardis control room designed by Michael Pickwoad. Such is the speed of the emergency that none of the historical figures has chance to question the Doctor and her party in detail about their origins. To realise that they are from the future and learn what history will say about them. Perhaps kindly, Metivier resists the temptation to do a Vincent and the Doctor on Tesla and bring him to now for a glimpse of his legacy. Her achievement above all is to honour and venerate Tesla, without entirely besmirching Edison, and to bring into public view a great thinker who would die penniless but, with his “world wireless system”, foresaw wi-fi. “I work for the future and the future is mine.” He exits on a high and we experience pathos not bathos. Let this be a trend, then. More scientists from the past, please, with tarty episode titles. I’m thinking: Rosalind Franklin’s Helix of Fear, Alan Turing’s Enigma of Doom, Marie Curie’s Curious Incident of the Doc in the Night-time…
It’s “Benidorm meets Aliens” with a timely eco-message as the Dregs of humanity break into a futuristic holiday resort
“Unless people face facts, catastrophe is coming” – the Doctor Story 289 Series 12 – Episode 3 Storyline Graham wins the Tardis foursome an unexpected holiday at Tranquillity Spa, but their vacation spirals into a nightmare when a hopper virus breaks into the resort’s facilities and its perimeter is breached by marauding monsters. The Doctor discerns that these creatures are the Dregs of humanity, last survivors on a possible future Earth laid waste by greed and pollution. First UK broadcast Sunday 12 January 2020 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Kane – Laura Fraser Bella – Gia Ré Nevi – James Buckley Vilma – Julia Foster Hyph3n – Amy Booth-Steel Vorm – Will Austin Benni – Col Farrell Sylas – Lewin Lloyd Lead Dreg – Spencer Wilding Crew Writer – Ed Hime Director – Lee Haven Jones Producer – Alex Mercer Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Dafydd Shurmer Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern I remember wilting while watching Ed Hime’s 2018 debut It Takes You Away (a sort of Nordic noir meets Lost in Space), but his follow-up excursion is a step up, sprinkled with innovation, tension and food for thought, and certainly more rewarding. It smacks of Benidorm meets Aliens with perhaps a tiny touch of The Truman Show. Basking at the two-weeks-inclusive Tranquillity Spa, elderly couple Benni and Vilma could almost be Donald and Jacqueline at the all-inclusive Solana in Benidorm (the ITV sitcom), albeit without any saucy swinging. The naughtiest they confess to is being unmarried for 46 years. Aliens (supposed) come in the form of the drooling Dregs. A splendid creation, hideous, inexorable, a bit dim, they lumber slowly in the tradition of the finest Doctor Who monsters. They would probably have scared me as a child; the suggestion that they’re the mutated dregs of humanity is particularly unedifying. The Truman Show? The spa’s fake environs with an illusory perimeter. The FX work (dome exterior, escape vehicle, marauding mob) is top-notch, while the filming locations at Mount Teide and the Auditorio de Tenerife are worth the schlep and offer more texture than those perpetual South Wales backdrops. The cast may have enjoyed some fun in the sun in the Canaries but they also had to become troglodytes in Barry Island. The wasteland’s ridiculously handy, seemingly pointless service passage looks to be the same creepy, disused railway tunnel in Barry that we’ve seen in everything from Sherlock to Torchwood and several Doctor Whos (The Doctor’s Daughter in 2008 and Flatline in 2014). All four of Team Tardis have material that plays to their strengths, and Jodie Whittaker is impressively Doctorly, completely believable now as the resourceful, dependable, quick-thinking Time Lord. Her “mardy mood” after Spyfall’s traumatic revelation soon improves as she imbibes a new challenge: “I’ll have a quick look around by myself.” Orphan 55 rapidly develops a disaster-movie vibe as Tranquillity Spa spirals into Holiday from Hell, first with the hopper virus (a nasty idea, amusingly remedied) and then as visitors and staff are picked off one by one in sanitised off-screen squelches – slaughter left to our imagination. As Vilma, Julia Foster even does a turn as the genre’s self-sacrificing biddy à la Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure. Mother of broadcaster Ben Fogle, Foster was a bit of a TV siren in the 70s, and a Radio Times cover star as Moll Flanders (above) in 1975. A decade earlier she’d played Michael Caine’s pregnant girlfriend Gilda in Alfie. Quite what she’s doing in this episode I’m not sure. I'm not one for bashing up old ladies so let's just say she does it with a puff of old-school acting technique. “Benni!” “Benni!!” and “BENNI!” More bankable guest stars for the PR machine are Laura Fraser (Breaking Bad, The Missing, Traces), who can’t help being appealing as the hard-hearted Kane, and James Buckley (The Inbetweeners, White Gold) as the feckless engineer Nevi. My toes curl into a clump at the abrupt inclusion of their familial discord: the dismal mother/daughter melodrama between Kane and Bella (formerly Trixabelle); and the useless-dad/bright-kid dynamic between Nevi and Sylas – a colourless aside, notwithstanding their green party-shop wigs. “Too toxic for life” – that’s the prediction for Earth in the future. It has been laid waste by the human race and designated an orphan planet. I’m not sure how this squares with many other doom-laden projections across the history of Doctor Who. The 1970s were dotted with dystopian futures, and in 1986 The Trial of a Time Lord also saw a scorched Earth that was identified by a derelict Underground station, as in Orphan 55. It’s salutary that the latest imprint of Who should offer its own cautionary tale to the audience, no matter how that cataclysm conflicts with what has gone before. This is only, as the Doctor says, “one possible future, one timeline”, but she warns, “Unless people face facts, catastrophe is coming.” Earth dead. Gallifrey dead. Within two episodes. Where is series 12 taking the time travellers? They are rightly appalled, as we should be. Doctor Who has been bashed recently for ramming home messages or being too PC. My message to the naysayers is: “Bog off and watch something else!” The programme has always had a message. Way back to the first Dalek serial in 1963/4. Its opening episode was called The Dead Planet. Like Orphan 55, it gave a vision of a world turned to ash by war, all its lifeforms mutations. The Daleks were exterminating racists driven by “a dislike for the unlike”. Then and now Doctor Who might lack subtlety (2018’s admirable Rosa clunked towards preachy). But this is a family show with impressionable young people watching. We may crave sophistication but more often we need a timely eco-message banged home with a sledgehammer. And Whittaker wields it beautifully at the end. Awarding star ratings is not a science, and I always try to do so within the context of the current phase of Doctor Who. After a second visit to Tranquillity Spa wearing my hotel critic fedora, I’m revising Orphan 55 from a ★★★ to a ★★ rating, which places it better in the quality spectrum of Chris Chibnall’s stewardship.
A Masterly Sacha Dhawan energises the launch of series 12 as Chris Chibnall delivers a dark but fun-fuelled 007 spoof
“Call me by my name!” – the Master Story 288 Series 12 – Episodes 1 & 2 Storyline When the world’s top intelligence agents are eliminated by alien forces, MI6 chief C pleads with the Doctor and her friends to investigate. Yaz and Ryan follow a lead to global digital company VOR in San Francisco and its ruthless boss, Daniel Barton, while the Doctor and Graham head to the Australian Outback to meet an old contact, Agent O. He reveals himself as a new version of the Master, who is in league with the Kasaavin, luminescent creatures from (and portals to) a dark dimension. With her friends on the run, the Doctor is trapped in England 1834, where she meets computer pioneer Ada Lovelace; and then in Paris 1943, where they’re helped by British spy Noor Inayat Khan. They must thwart the Master and Barton’s plan, threaded through time to the 21st century, to rewrite humanity’s DNA to serve as a hard drive. The Master also claims that he has laid waste the Time Lord home planet and that everything the founding fathers of Gallifrey told them was a lie… First UK broadcasts Part One – Wednesday 1 January 2020 Part Two – Sunday 5 January 2020 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill O/The Master – Sacha Dhawan Daniel Barton – Lenny Henry C – Stephen Fry Ada Lovelace – Sylvie Briggs Noor Inayat Khan – Aurora Marion Charles Babbage – Mark Dexter Najia Khan – Shobna Gulati Hakim Khan – Ravin J Ganatra Sonya Khan – Bhavnisha Parmar Sniper – Melissa De Vries Passenger – Sacharissa Claxton Older passenger – William Ely Operative (US) – Brian Law Tibo – Buom Tihngang Sergeant Ramesh Sunder – Asif Khan Mr Collins – Andrew Bone Rendition man – Ronan Summers Ethan – Christopher McArthur Seesay – Darron Meyer Browning – Dominique Maher Inventor – Andrew Piper Airport worker – Tom Ashley Perkins – Kenneth Jay Barton’s mother – Blanche Williams Voice of Kasaavin – Struan Rodger Crew Writer – Chris Chibnall Directors – Jamie Magnus Stone (1), Lee Haven Jones (2) Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Dafydd Shurmer Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern Part One “Everything that you think you know is a lie,” crows the bonkers new Master. Just about sums up 2019, doesn’t it, really? But his cryptic words cap an eventful launch episode that propels Doctor Who into the 2020s with a sizzle of energy – rather like its dazzling new monsters. There’s a sense of renewed confidence in showrunner Chris Chibnall’s writing and in the polished performances of the central quartet, returning for a second lap. I’m guardedly optimistic. If they can sustain this, Series 12 might show a marked improvement on the lacklustre Series 11. Despite the BBC bragging about the last series’ ratings success, the good Doctor, in my book, did require life-giving surgery. Earlier in 2019 I was at a big bash with a crowd who love Doctor Who and I didn’t hear a syllable of praise for its current incarnation. More tellingly, this Christmas I found my four nieces and nephews (aged 12 to 18, its key audience) entranced by a repeat of the 2010 special, A Christmas Carol. They all said Matt Smith remains their favourite Doctor, with Jodie Whittaker languishing at the bottom of their pile. They lamented Series 11’s unengaging storylines and characters, notably Yaz and Ryan. So, work to do. Like them or yawn at them, the Tardis foursome all have plenty to chew on in Spyfall Part One. Chibnall takes a moment to re-establish the companions’ backgrounds, letting their family and friends remark on lengthy absences from home and work. Ryan’s dyspraxia is subtly touched upon. Yaz is assertive, if implausible as a journalist penetrating the baddie’s HQ. Again, Bradley Walsh lands the funnies (“Worst! Uber! Ever!”) as Graham, and maybe it’s significant that we’re reminded of his cancer scare, albeit in remission after four years. Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor remains uncomplicated and zestful, a person you might feasibly contemplate time-travelling with, despite squawking once more about her “fam”. Please stop. Spyfall blatantly guns for a 007 vibe – and as a spoof of a parody it largely succeeds. But this is Doctor Who. Even on a 21st-century BBC budget, it can’t hack the film franchise’s sophistication – but then it’s scarcely attempting to. Part One races along and is slickly directed by newcomer Jamie Magnus Stone. His grandfather was Magnus Magnusson, the broadcasting legend behind the BBC quiz, Mastermind. A clue hidden in plain sight? The chases (planes/bikes/automobiles) show ambition, and the action flits between far-flung locations. All the foreign ones, be they Ivory Coast or Australia, were actually only an hour or two’s drive from Cape Town. The obligatory casino sequence looks crummy and would shame James Bond, although the Time Lord playing Snap! makes me smile. A raised eyebrow to composer Segun Akinola for infusing his score with nods to John Barry. Lenny Henry lends a light touch as the (decoy) villain, while Stephen Fry adds flummery and a sip of class as MI6 boss C. His early demise is a surprise. Spyfall’s other Big C – Mr Chibnall – keeps the intrigue flowing. It was a pleasure to watch Part One at the BFI launch in early December with an excited throng – many of them children, given plenty to gawp and gasp at. Hook and spook – that’s what Doctor Who does at its best, and His Chibs and the team score with the new monsters, radiant, indeterminate figures bursting from another dimension; with the nightmarish alien realm like a drained, dead kelp forest; and the florid reveal of the Doctor’s “best enemy”: “I did say look for the spymaster – or should I say ‘spy Master’?” How many of you had suspicions about Agent O? Even if you’d avoided spoilers, surely it was significant that a guest artist of Sacha Dhawan’s standing was absent from all publicity – including the Radio Times cast list. He was omitted from one of the few press photos (the Tardis team in the vineyard), although we can now see he is in that scene. Did you spot that Agent O’s unlikely forcefield, which repels the aliens in the Great Victoria Desert, has a tell-tale hexagonal Time Lordy/Tardis-y pattern? Every Doctor gets the Master they deserve. In the 1970s, Jon Pertwee’s debonair Doctor was matched by the suave and saturnine Roger Delgado. Tom Baker’s seedy bohemian incarnation was stalked by a putrescent Phantom of the Opera cadaver. The 1980s Doctors contended with Anthony Ainley’s panto-villain interpretation. John Simm provided a zany-loon counterpoint to David Tennant, while Peter Capaldi was mirrored in Michelle Gomez’s waspish, self-doubting and, of course, Scottish Missy. I’d like to have seen Jodie Whittaker up against her own Missy (Suranne Jones!) but Chibnall opts for a reverse gender reassignment and, yes, a geographical shift to the North of England. Whittaker and Dhawan were born only 35 miles (and two years) apart, either side of the Peak District. Thus “Mar-ster” is no more. In the mouths of these actors, the arch-foe’s “a” is shortened. “Call me ‘Master’…” Rising to prominence in The History Boys (Alan Bennett’s 2004 play; 2006 movie), Dhawan is a charismatic addition to the series. He’s been on its periphery for ages. In 2013’s An Adventure in Space and Time he played the role of Waris Hussein, Doctor Who’s founding director. Now with considerable relish he ramps up his performance from the nerdy, Doctor-obsessed Agent O to the theatrically crackers Master. The warped swine still enjoys killing with his “tissue compression eliminator” and – this is plain daft – long afterwards keeps the shrunken remains of the real O in a matchbox in his pocket. It’s a cute/shonky effect, and has been ever since its debut in Terror of the Autons in 1971. We shan’t glean the purpose of the “spy Master’s” nutty plan until Part Two – or even later this season – but its details already show lapses in logic. Much of what has ensued is ludicrously reliant on luck: the Doctor’s team easily penetrating Barton’s party; dodging a hail of bullets in a motorbike chase; catching up with a plane and all clambering onto its tailgate before take-off – including, in the final scramble, the “I’ve never been good at sprinting” Master. What if none of this had come to pass? Naturally, the Master rejoices as if it were planned and he was keen to jump onto a plane with a bomb in its cockpit. Silly, but why complain? It feeds into the return of a key Who hook, the crescendo cliffhanger with that melodramatic “eeeooowww” sting created by BBC Radiophonic Workshop king Brian Hodgson circa 1970. Roll on, Part Two! Doctor Who is good at acknowledging its greats and their passing into legend. This episode ends with the caption “Dedicated to the Masterful Terrance Dicks” – the script editor, author and general writing giant who died last autumn. Dicks co-created and named the Master back in 1970. I reckon he’d have been tickled by this latest diabolic regeneration of the Doctor’s Moriarty. Part Two Doctor Who’s Part Twos often fail to deliver on the promise and exhilaration of what has gone before. This was notably an issue during Matt Smith’s period. Spyfall’s culmination almost skyfalls into the trap. It soon extricates the Doctor from her cliffhanger fate (trapped in a realm “far beyond”) and Graham, Ryan and Yaz from theirs (incineration in a cockpit-less plane) in a complicated-looking but actually ridiculously simple manner. There’s a chance meeting and a handy dimensional portal for the Doc, while she sends help back in time for her blooming “fam”. It was always going to be easy. Part Two does sew up the threads of Part One and leave a few tantalising loose ends. It keeps stoking the threat of the dazzling aliens and insidious tech, while plunging the Doctor back to two settings in the past: the Royal Gallery of Practical Science in 1834 and Paris, 1943. Part Two feels at one with One, even though a different director (Lee Haven Jones) takes the helm (from Jamie Magnus Stone). And writer Chris Chibnall keeps us alert by opening the Doctor Who Lore Book – something he assiduously avoided in series 11 – and then tearing out its pages. Jodie Whittaker is on convincing form. It helps that she spends most of the episode out of her rainbow garb and in a black tailcoat and bow tie. Away from Part One’s James Bond shtick, it brings her closer in guise to the second Doctor Patrick Troughton. Placing her opposite her archenemy (and a very good actor in Sacha Dhawan) also invigorates her performance. Many will miss Missy. I do. Michelle Gomez was sublime, hilarious and alarming. Steven Moffat developed the character thoughtfully, having her eventually repent of her sins and allied to the Doctor. It’s a shame that’s been jettisoned, although nothing confirms that this latest Master is Missy’s successor. He could be an earlier incarnation. Dhawan is terrific, though, at bringing this version to life, relishing the melodrama and gobbledegook, the casual shrink-killings, the crazy asides, sparring with Whittaker in two-handers that at first thrill, then atop the Eiffel Tower teeter towards boring. This dip is rescued when the Master rips up the myth (“When did you last go home?”) and claims that their home planet Gallifrey, still in its bubble universe, has been “pulverised, burned, nuked”. I pity the inhabitants of Gallifrey. Successive showrunners have batted it in and out of existence like a ping-pong ball. The Master will be back for sure, but let’s keep him in his sleek outfit and not swamped in engulfing costumes. When he toddles on as a Nazi commandant, it looks like Michael Bentine’s Potty Time. Graham is amusing in most situations and doubly so in extremis, freaking out on the plane and, later, goofing around with his laser shoes to fend off assailants. Bradley Walsh gives gold. Ryan is a dullard most of the time but you can’t help feeling a twinge of joy for him when he says, “I can’t ride a bike but I can fly a plane.” Well, almost. Yaz, um, yes. She is there. She just about registers. She tries to think and act as the Doctor would do. Otherwise slim pickings. She’s no Sarah Jane Smith. A cheer for female empowerment, though, as Chibnall again honours the more quietly sung heroines of the past. To wit, computer pioneer Charles Babbage is deftly sidelined to foreground his associate Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter and crucial in the development of Babbage’s Analytical Engine. She’s played with gentility and gusto by Sylvie Briggs, while Aurora Marion is handed less to shine with as Noor Inayat Khan, the first woman wireless operator dropped behind enemy lines in the Second World War. Blah, blah. The Doctor reads historical figures the first line of their Wikipedia bios to their faces – andkeeps stopping to explain the plot. To be frank, it is helpful to the drifting viewer, but there are subtler methods to dispense information. Daniel Barton is a tricky case. Lenny Henry is such a familiar figure, I find I’m just seeing Lenny Henry. Nice guy. Not a tech giant. No villain. No menace. Even when he’s bumping off his own dreary mother. Henry is almost chilling at Barton’s conference speech, as he reveals his diabolical plan. Anything about the perils of humanity’s slavery to tech wins a tick from me. After the bizarre Master plan unravels at the first computer virus, Barton skulks off, with no payback, just like Jack Robertson (Chris Noth) in Arachnids in the UK. The door is, as they say, left open. I’m pleased that series 12 is embracing the Who lore it eschewed in 2018. For a fresh start, it was arguably a good move to encourage newcomers. But the mythology is irresistible. To fans. To the programme. To the unfolding text. To Chibnall. He’s delivered the Master, and now the first mention of the Doctor’s home world, and even its constellation, Kasterborous. There’s a long-awaited, startlingly plain info-dump at the climax as she informs Graham, Yaz and Ryan of her origins. And, at long last, Doctor 13 utters the phrase “I’m a Time Lord”. Baggage reclaimed.
Jodie Whittaker tackles her first Dalek in an enjoyable, explosive New Year special – but, alas, Unit is suspended
Story 287 New Year’s Day special 2019 Storyline On New Year’s Day 2019, an archaeological dig under Sheffield Town Hall unearths and accidentally reanimates the remains of a long-dormant Reconnaissance Dalek. The cephalopod mutant attaches itself to archaeologist Lin and compels her to construct a new makeshift casing for itself. As it goes on a killing spree, the Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz set off in hot pursuit. The Dalek breaches GCHQ, determined to summon a Dalek fleet to conquer the Earth. First UK broadcast Tuesday 1 January 2019 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Lin – Charlotte Ritchie Mitch – Nikesh Patel Aaron – Daniel Adegboyega Dalek voice – Nick Briggs Police officer – Darryl Clark Security guard – Connor Calland Farmer Dinkle – James Lewis Mum – Sophie Duval Teens – Callum Mcdonald, Harry Vallance Call centre Polly – Laura Evelyn Sergeant – Michael Ballard Crew Writer – Chris Chibnall Director – Wayne Yip Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Arwel Wyn Jones Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern Let off some fireworks! After an initially promising, ultimately disappointing Series 11, the Doctor Who New Year special is no damp squib but actually most enjoyable. Resolution is the first New Year special since David Tennant’s departure on 1st January 2010 – a staggering nine years ago. This is Jodie Whittaker’s first special and showrunner Chris Chibnall’s too. But let’s talk Dalek. No Time Lord can call him or herself the Doctor until they’ve stared down the eye-stalk of the archenemy. Having eschewed the timeworn baggage of old monsters in series 11, His Chibs has at last delivered a Dalek. Just the one. But a very fine one. Cleverly, lovingly, hideously deployed. He’s pared his lone Dalek to its roots as a deadly, implacable foe – a squid-like mutation desperate to build a new armoured shell, weaponise itself and exterminate humanity. I like how Lin, the possessed archaeologist, welds the Dalek casing in a foundry, mirroring how the Doctor forged her sonic screwdriver from Sheffield steel in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. The “junkyard chic” result, like some scrunched rusty bean tin, where nothing is quite right, yet it’s still undeniably a Dalek, is a design triumph that retains menace. And Nick Briggs, overlooked for voice-work throughout series 11, is back to add the creature’s chilling, grating cadences. More importantly, the presence of the Dalek elevates Whittaker’s stature. Her Doctor no longer reads like a floundering ingénue fresh out of Gallifreyan diapers. She acknowledges her history. “I learned to think like a Dalek a long time ago.” Finally, there’s a sense that she has lived a very long life. (Note, though, in all 11 episodes she has demurred from identifying herself as a Time Lord, or Lady.) Whittaker gives such commitment to the role you can almost feel her energy emanating from the screen, and here she’s well served by a punchy plot and dialogue. Wit is still parsimoniously dispensed, so that I laughed when she says, “I must remember – how long’s a rel?” She lands the line – but it’s a line that would have been a chicken nugget at a banquet served by Steven Moffat. (FYI Fact Fans: a “rel” is a Dalek unit of measurement, usually indicating time. It was coined in 1964 in The Dalek Book, the first Doctor Who book ever published, where a rel was defined as “a Dalek measure of hydro-electricity”.) While I’m recalling the 60s – alas, poor Unit! The United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, latterly the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, a mainstay of Doctor Who for five decades, is no more. Or at least it’s been “suspended pending review”. I was watching as a toddler when Unit debuted in The Invasion, a 1968 classic with Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, and I adored it when Jon Pertwee’s Doctor made a home at Unit HQ in the 70s alongside Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart. So I’m aggrieved at this development. Unit has proved invaluable to 21st-century Who: Russell T Davies quickly reintroduced the organisation in Aliens of London in 2005, and Chris Chibnall was also delighted to bolster Unit in his Matt Smith episode The Power of Three and established its new CO, the Brig’s daughter, Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave). In 2012, he told me: “There’s a strange invasion going on, so Unit is the best thing to deal with that. As a writer, you’re eternally grateful to everyone back in 1968 who came up with that idea because it’s a brilliant storytelling mechanism. Unit is embedded into the family history of the show.” A change of heart then. Now a helpline operator explains that “all Unit operations were put on hold following financial disputes and subsequent funding withdrawal from the UK’s major international partners”. This overlooks the fact that Unit has always been an international organisation, headed from Geneva, and for a long time associated with the UN. Without her stalwart allies, the Doctor gulps, “We’re on our own.” It works for this story, making the Time Lord and her family of friends self-reliant – even though the narrative and budget still run to an explosive showdown between the Dalek and some non-Unit military types. Resolution provides a decent mix of action sequences and stop-talk-emote pauses. I’m not interested in Ryan’s woes, but the scenes between Ryan, his dad Aaron and “Gramps” Graham are well written and performed. I guessed immediately that Aaron’s thumping great microwave would have a bearing on the plot. In the guest cast, Charlotte Ritchie and Nikesh Patel are fine as Lin and Mitch, the digging duo who find love and horror among the bones under Sheffield Town Hall. Although Sheffield is frequently name-checked, I gain little sense of place from what’s on screen – it’s all warehouses and dreary interiors, cars speeding on A roads. I’d have welcomed a set-piece with the Dalek causing panic in the Moor, the city’s packed shopping precinct – but that would’ve blown His Chibs’s big surprise. The rebirth of the Dalek and its gradual reveal within the narrative are probably the greatest successes of this New Year special. Do I miss Doctor Who being on Christmas Day? No. Though pleased the Beeb held the programme in such esteem to place it slapbang in their yuletide schedule for 13 years, I was never sold on the idea of festive Who. This time it means my extended family didn’t once switch on the TV on 25th December. Am I optimistic for the future? For sure. But further Who is far away. Sadly, there will be no more adventures until 2020. After the perceived success of the 2018 relaunch under Chibnall/Whittaker, and whatever spin the delay has been accorded, surely few at the BBC and BBC Worldwide can be pleased with the situation – and their licensees with product to shift but no show on air will be especially vexed. See you in 2020!
Doctor Who: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos ★★
What became of baddie Tim Shaw? The Doctor finds out in a slow but diverting conclusion that eschews the usual high-stakes finale
Story 286 Series 11 – Episode 10 Storyline The Doctor’s recent foe, Stenza warrior Tzim-Sha (aka Tim Shaw), was beamed to Ranskoor Av Kolos, a planet with an atmosphere beset by psychotropic waves. He became a deity worshipped by the Ux, a “duo-species” with the power of telepathic dimensional engineering. Together over centuries they’ve been miniaturising other worlds to utilise their energy. The Doctor’s team meet members of a fleet sent by the Congress of the Nine Planets, who have lost their memories upon arrival. They must unite to stop Tzim-Sha and the Ux from targeting Earth. First UK broadcast Sunday 9 December 2018 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Andinio – Phyllis Logan Paltraki – Mark Addy Tzim-Sha/Tim Shaw– Samuel Oatley Delph – Percelle Ascot Umsang – Jan Le Crew Writer – Chris Chibnall Director – Jamie Childs Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Arwel Wyn Jones Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern It’s a title to trip off the tongue... Actually, I can think of no more awkward mouthful for a title in the history of Doctor Who. When I was a nipper, The Masque of Mandragora was as challenging as it got. For a moment, I wondered if “Ranskoor Av Kolos” might have some hidden import, perhaps be an anagram. I got as far as “anorak…” and knew it was time to stop. Is this really a finale? Is it episode 10 of 10 or simply ep 10 of 11? For sure, this is the end of a block of ten, but the official BBC billings have numbered each instalment of this series out of 11, with the 11th being the New Year special. That is the true end of this series. The Battle of doodah (I’m not typing all that out again) certainly isn’t a thrilling high-stakes finale of the sort we’ve come to expect from Doctor Who since 2005. In the old days, by which I mean the olden days of 20th-century Who, each series mostly petered out, perhaps with a regeneration if we were lucky or a comical scene (a Unit sergeant emerging naked from a baby’s nappy; yes, that did happen, in 1972). A series can just come to a satisfying conclusion – and it always strikes me as odd when the last parts of conventional dramas such as Poldark or Line of Duty are trumpeted as “finales!”. There is at least a sense of conclusion here, though. Chris Chibnall has brought back Blue-Tooth Man Tim Shaw – no surprise there! – the windbag menace who vanished at the end of episode one, for a bit of closure with the Doctor (“I know that voice”) and Graham (“If that is the creature from Sheffield, I will kill it if I can”). The take-home message, however, is “Thou shalt not kill”. But it’s not a ram-home message. Chibnall ensures the moral dimension isn’t preachy and clunky. This is what the Doctor does. This is what being with the Doctor means. Loveable Graham learns a life lesson, and in a face-off with Tim Shaw simply immobilises the drear by shooting him in the foot – “Just the foot! Just to shut ’im up. Don’t tell the Doc. She’ll be livid.” It’s almost comical – in a series that’s been devoid of humour, save for Graham’s geezer asides (and Chris Noth’s masterclass). Halfway into the episode’s transmission on BBC1, I had a text from a dear pal: “This is SO boring.” That made me chuckle. I wasn’t bored. I was bemused perhaps. I was reasonably engaged for its 50-minute duration, making notes diligently, willing it to be better than it was. This sort of heavy-weather sci-fi with portentous dialogue and ancient powerful races (the Ux and the Stenza – we kept hearing about their unholy alliance) does usually leave me cold. But this is a triumph of style over substance. Chibnall’s narrative is clear and methodical, the pacing incredibly slow but as a whole is elevated by Jamie Childs’s terrific, sharp direction, allied to Segun Akinola’s doomy undercurrent of wall-to-wall music. Of the Time Lord’s other sidekicks, Ryan gets a fair crack of the action, challenges and supports his grandad (“We’re family and I love you”), but alas poor Yaz; yet again she has next to nothing to do bar cleaving to the Doc and being her sounding board. There’s a better-than-usual guest cast. Mark Addy gives a strong performance of tearful bewilderment as the marooned spaceship commander Paltraki, who becomes steadily more steadfast and heroic. Phyllis Logan takes a rare trip into fantasy-land as Andinio of the Ux, a duo of faith-driven dimensional engineers, and she carries off the cobblers with aplomb. Reference-spotters should delight at the mash-up of other sci-fi, some of the less-important planet-plodding episodes of Blake’s 7, the spaceship graveyard from Alien, the edifice hovering in the sky like one from Arrival (the 2016 movie). And as every proper Doctor Who fan will have noted, the power derived from shrunken planets in stasis is a direct steal from The Pirate Planet, a 1978 serial by none other than Douglas Adams. Not that a medley of steals, borrowings and reinventions hasn’t stood Doctor Who in good stead down the ages. Was this a catastrophe? Far from it. Was it a classic? Not on your nelly. But as a diverting piece of telly it just about made a wobble in the space-time continuum.
Despite a lush Nordic noir start and a sentient universe embodied by a frog, this tale is disjointed and dull
Story 285 Series 11 – Episode 9 Storyline When the Tardis arrives above a Norwegian fjord, the Doctor’s team find blind teenager Hanne abandoned by her father in a remote lodge and traumatised by faked monsters. A mirror in the loft is a portal to an anti-zone, a gloomy buffer between realities, where they encounter a shifty alien called Ribbons and flesh-eating moths. A second portal leads to another domain, the Solitract, a consciousness expelled since the dawn of time. Benign but lonely, it tempts visitors to stay with visions of dead loved ones, including Graham’s former wife, Grace. When the Doctor befriends the Solitract, it takes the form of a frog but she must leave it alone again. First UK broadcast Sunday 2 December 2018 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Ribbons – Kevin Eldon Hanne – Ellie Wallwork Erik – Christian Rubeck Trine – Lisa Stokke Grace – Sharon D Clarke Crew Writer – Ed Hime Director – Jamie Childs Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Arwel Wyn Jones Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern It Takes You Away begins well and ends well. The opening treats us to a gorgeous vista of Norwegian forest and fjord, the police box nestling iconically among the undergrowth. The travellers’ investigation of a barricaded wooden lodge offers a few mini-chills, until its lone occupant, a blind child Hanne, is discovered, abandoned by her father. So far, so Nordic noir. The conclusion back at the Tardis is also reasonably satisfying, delivering a long-anticipated, tender punch as Ryan finally connects with Graham, opens his heart and calls him Granddad. Surely, the main purpose of this episode was to concoct a “Grace ghost” that would bring Ryan and Graham together. But what happens between these points? Well, it’s almost as if a noir-ish thriller shimmers into 1960s Lost in Space, tumbling through a mirror into a dark dimension and coshing us with its Shifty Alien Of The Week. (I adored Lost in Space as a nipper but Doctor Who was always by far the better programme.) Kevin Eldon (the likeable comedy actor and writer) has the challenge of portraying “Ribbons of the seven stomachs”, a scavenger who smells of someone else’s wee, an annoying, duplicitous weirdo who is the time travellers’ only guide through this murky netherworld. Unfathomably, Ribbons carries a lantern in a domain plagued by flesh-eating moths and he isn’t mourned when he carks it. It Takes You Away is for the most part staggeringly dull. Odd, because the writer Ed Hime generates potentially intriguing ideas: the mirror/portal; the anti-zone, described as “a protective buffer to keep threats at bay”; the aforementioned moths; and the Solitract. “A whole conscious universe” going back to the dawn of time, it’s actually just a bit lonely, poor thing, and is eventually – don’t snigger! – embodied as a solemn frog squatting on a chair. It’s soon apparent that the anti-zone is not just a buffer between universes but tedious filler in the narrative. The subsequent Solitract tract isn’t exactly riveting, either. It’s deadened by screeds of chitchat as any viewer still awake waits for the “dead wives” to show their hand – literally, as an outstretched palm conveniently flings each character back into the anti-zzzzone. I don’t buy the idea of Erik having left his blind daughter for days on end with just scraps of food and rigging loudspeakers to freak her into not venturing out. No matter how lost in grief he was or how happy he is to see his dead wife, he’s a character in search of conviction. How did he flit with ease between universes to set up the lodge for Hanne? Why not take her with him from the start? The script doesn’t pause to flesh Erik out or give him redemption, or waste time with Solitract temptations for the Doctor and Yaz. It’s in haste to secure that series tent-pole of reuniting Graham with Grace. We probably all guessed we’d get at least one more sighting of Sharon D Clarke, who still makes me wish she’d been part of the Tardis team all along. On a positive note – and I do look for them, reader! – young blind actress Ellie Wallwork convinces as the traumatised but on-the-ball Hanne, while the casting of Norwegian actors Christian Rubeck and Lisa Stokke as her parents adds a veneer of authenticity. Against the odds, Jodie Whittaker excels in her final exchange with the frog – alone in a white space, acting in reality with nothing. It’s like an audition piece. She radiates a beautiful spirit, some of that ethereal luminance promised in her debut as the Hooded Woman in BBC1’s big reveal. A quality that hasn’t really materialised in series 11 as she’s galumphed around. On balance, It Takes You Away is a disappointing excursion and mostly plays like some generic dreck you’d stumble upon while channel-hopping through the higher numbers on your TV Guide, tolerate for 30 seconds before moving hastily on. Extraordinarily, it’s going out under the banner of Doctor Who on primetime BBC1.
Despite star turns from Siobhan Finneran and Alan Cumming, this Jacobean witch-trial lacks the magic ingredient
Story 284 Series 11 – Episode 8 Storyline Despite her rule not to meddle in history, the Doctor determines to stop the witch-trials and drownings that her team stumble upon in 17th-century Bilehurst Cragg. The bleak Lancashire village is ruled with misguided religious zeal by Becka Savage, whose mission to drive out the Devil is bolstered when the demon-obsessed King James arrives. Mud tendrils are reanimating corpses of the supposed witches and have infected Becka, who morphs into a Morax Queen. These aliens are trying to break free from imprisonment on the benighted Pendle Hill nearby. First UK broadcast Sunday 25 November 2018 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill King James – Alan Cumming Becka Savage – Siobhan Finneran Willa Twiston – Tilly Steele Old Mother Twiston – Tricia Kelly Smithy – Arthur Kay Alfonso – Stavros Demetraki Crew Writer – Joy Wilkinson Director – Sallie Aprahamian Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Arwel Wyn Jones Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern It’s a ripe and tasty script from newcomer Joy Wilkinson, who clearly has a sense of history, a grip on detail and how to pepper it throughout a Doctor Who episode. She establishes colourful characters – from the wicked lady Becka Savage to the troubled King James – and invests scenes with psychological heft. Her monstrous mud zombies are a spooky invention and the sci-fi spin on the benighted Pendle Hill isn’t a bad one. This all looks good on paper. Unfortunately, the execution on screen falls flat. Despite a grim location, the lowering skies and seeping mist, the dreich weather that beset filming, this production fails to muster much dramatic atmosphere or authenticity. I can’t really see past a clutch of actors gamely trudging about in mire and freezing cold. The mud-crones especially look like a ragbag of exhausted extras called to lurch hither and thither. By contrast, Mistress Savage’s baronial hall looks English Heritage pristine, unlived in, with no hint of Jacobean grime. The director Sallie Aprahamian (who also helmed Arachnids in the UK) livens things up with overhead sweeps, lots of low-angle close-ups, especially favouring the king, but there’s still no disguising so much standing-around-talking, a dearth of action and tension. Siobhan Finneran is a formidable actress forged from northern steel, so it’s no surprise to see her minting another tough nut in this northerly imprint of Who. I’ve been tickled by her froideur in everything from Rita, Sue and Bob Too (the 1986 movie) to Downton Abbey. She can do no wrong in my eyes. Five years ago, on the set of Benidorm, she was friendly and invited those present to call her “Shiv” but when I dared ask about her abrupt departure from Downton, she looked daggers at me. I’d been Shivved. She’s magnificently shiversome as Becka Savage, the widowed landowner of Bilehurst Cragg. An appalling harridan obsessed with purging Satan from her village, Becka holds weekly “celebrations” to eradicate any locals who’ve crossed her or could even tenuously be construed as witches. “My conscience is clean,” she asserts. As ever, though, the bully has the most to hide, and soon muddy goo is seeping from her tear ducts. Mistress Savage starts to lose her hold on me once her secrets are exposed. A gritty northerner she may be, but it’s unlikely that her ladyship would have climbed Pendle Hill to chop down that tree by herself. She’d have minions for such menial tasks. And once she transforms into the Morax lady monster… Well, it’s a decent make-up job, unpleasant bordering on ridiculous, and far too similar to the wooden Eliza in 2018’s Knock Knock. And what a yawn when she starts bawling out her threats and backstory in one of those standard sci-fi synth-voices. I also have a few problems with King James. The informed viewer may already be aware of his zeal for witch-hunting and that he’d published his treatise, Daemonologie, but would the monarch really be stalking the land without a horse and with just one “protector” by his side? “I have to travel incognito and also I rather like the drama,” James offers, by way of explanation as he whips off his mask. And would Becka Savage, or most loyal subjects across the kingdom, instantly recognise the sovereign and accept this stranger’s credentials? Alan Cumming is undoubtedly a star turn. He’s Giving A Performance – one that’s peculiarly pitched somewhere between Blackadder and scotch egg. He plumps for a “posh anglicised Scot” brogue – but then who knows how James actually spoke? Cumming’s shtick takes me right out of the drama, but I’ve a suspicion I would relish his interpretation more, should I ever visit this episode again. King James I of England and Ireland (James VI of Scotland) has rarely been explored as a central character on TV or film; he’s usually peripheral in dramas about his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, his son, Charles I, or his would-be assassin, Guy Fawkes. But James is a fascinating figure, and his complexity is well drawn here by Joy Wilkinson. I enjoyed his heart-to-heart in the woods with Ryan; he doesn’t belittle Ryan’s recent bereavements but can only trump them with “My father was murdered by my mother, who was then imprisoned and beheaded”. Wilkinson toys with James’s sadistic streak, doesn’t undersell his faith in God and obsession with Satan, or dodge his sexuality. Of course, the king takes a shine to Ryan. “What is your field of expertise, my Nubian prince? Torture?” he fantasises. His final royal command is for Ryan to join him in London as his new “protector”. It’s lovely that Ryan isn’t horrified but deflects His Majesty’s ardour with gentle humour. Strangely, the time travellers gravitate towards Becka and James – almost relishing the company of these bloodthirsty murderers because they’re the most charismatic people in the vicinity. The dynamic shifts as trust is won and lost, but the Doctor especially keeps trying to draw the king out. “You can’t go hurting people just because you’re scared to face up to the darkness inside you,” she says. “You have to be better than that.” He listens to her counsel, blocks it and decides to duck her in the pond anyway. If the filming was miserable for cast and crew, it looks to have been doubly dismal for Jodie Whittaker. It must be a stuntwoman not the star who dives into the pond to help Old Mother Twiston and, later, is submerged in the Doctor’s witch-trial, but Whittaker spends a lot of the episode sopping wet. Good on her. She’s heroic. Of course, this female Doctor was always going to be tried as a witch. Inevitably, she escapes her chains blithering about Houdini (really, again Doctor?) and is excruciatingly annoying when she flops up the bank like a waterlogged mallard, squawking, “Hi team! Gang! Fam!?” Duck her again, I say. I had high hopes for a story written and directed by women, with a female lead, a fabulous actress as chief villain and an award-winning star who happens to be gay as a monarch mooted to be gay, but as a production The Witchfinders doesn’t coalesce into an intoxicating potion. Some vital magic ingredients – and I can’t quite put my finger on what – were not sprinkled into the cauldron.
A satire on online shopping – with lethal robots and Lee Mack – this is a prime delivery, customer satisfaction guaranteed
Story 283 Series 11 – Episode 7 Storyline In the Tardis, the Doctor receives a delivery from Kerb!am, the galaxy’s largest retailer, along with an anonymous call for help. Investigating at Kerb!am’s HQ on the moon of Kandoka, the time travellers find it mostly staffed by TeamMate robots with a 10% human workforce – some of whom have been vanishing. At first it seems the system is responsible, until a deluded janitor Charlie shows his hand. He’s planning to dispatch an army of Kerb!am Men, delivering boxes packed with explosive bubble wrap, to kill customers and discredit the company. First UK broadcast Sunday 18 November 2018 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Judy Maddox – Julie Hesmondhalgh Dan Cooper – Lee Mack Jarva Slade – Callum Dixon Kira Arlo – Claudia Jessie Charlie Duffy – Leo Flanagan Kerb!am (voice) – Matthew Gravelle Crew Writer – Pete McTighe Director – Jennifer Perrott Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Arwel Wyn Jones Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern Did anyone else’s heart sink at the sight of that title with its cartoonish screamer? I had an inkling, though, that Kerblam! might confound expectation. Mercifully, it does. Welcome to the warehouse of fun, Pete McTighe, a writer new to Doctor Who – at least in terms of on-screen credits. A Brit based in Melbourne and former head writer on the Oz prison drama Wentworth, he’s a fan of the Time Lord and has been building to this moment for a long time. Top marks for developing a nifty bit of branding. Actually, typographically, it’s Kerb!am. I kept thinking of Lord Sugar’s hapless “candidates” in The Apprentice, who would be very lucky to come up with a brand name, logo and ethos as catchy as this. In the great Doctor Who tradition, the story takes something commonplace and turns it into a threat. Kerb!am, “the biggest retailer in the galaxy”, is a transparent satire on Amazon and our craving for online shopping, while relatively innocuous bubble wrap (I can’t tell you how much I got through in house moves in 2018) may also be an environmental menace in the real world but here is seen to be explosively lethal. But none of this is po-faced. McTighe has fun with his satire. I’m amused by the corporate jargon, the systems breakdowns, and am hooting when Ryan, Yaz and Charlie tumble down the dispatch shoot and onto conveyor belts, being rejected as unwanted organic contaminants. Kerblam! has a fast-moving plot, fine characterisation, something to occupy every member of Team Tardis, Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor gets to goof about and be taken seriously, and there’s a reasonably sinister new robot, the Delivery Bots, reminiscent of the Dums, Vocs and Super Vocs of The Robots of Death. Julie Hesmondhalgh is a sunny presence as Judy Maddox, Kerb!am’s empathetic Head of People. A middle-management bod in sharp suit and specs, she’s a world away from Corrie’s frumpy transsexual Hayley and Trish, the woman who was raped in the final run of Broadchurch. And isn’t it good to see her with a decent hairdo for once? And fun seeing Julie/Judy proving her mettle when she rips the head off a Bot to stop it throttling Charlie. McTighe wrote the part with Hesmondhalgh in mind, and created warehouse worker Dan Cooper for Lee Mack, who has long wanted to be in the programme. Mack plays Dan with barely a whisker of distinction from Lee in Not Going Out, his BBC1 sitcom. All the shifty mannerisms are in place, and if you like Lee Mack, as I do, this is a positive. It’s surprising, then, when Dan lands in danger and expires in the first third of the action. McTighe shows Russell T Davies’s knack of making you care about a short-lived character and doesn’t flinch from letting them die. We might hope there’ll be a reprieve for Dan or the sweet-natured packer Kira (Claudia Jessie, most recently in Line of Duty and Vanity Fair) but no. He’s been “liquidated” into the viscous goo that Graham discovers in the basement and Kira is vaporised by bubble wrap. In the denouement, the deluded maintenance man Charlie (Leo Flanagan), who cooked up the whole crisis, is blown up with his deadly Delivery Bots. At last a wrongdoer in series 11 who gets their comeuppance. As this series rolls on, I’ve warmed to the sloshing title sequence and new/retro version of the theme music, whereas the other constant, the Tardis control room, is looking less impressive with each appearance. It’s not a patch on the previous vault-like set by Michael Pickwoad. Those prominent crystalline pillars evidently restrict the angles and vantage points for a director, especially with four travellers to position. As a whole, though, this episode is slickly directed by newcomer Jennifer Perrott. Nods to the past include a reference to David Tennant’s Agatha Christie episode in 2008 and Matt Smith’s fez (a very late delivery from Kerb!am). In my mind this moon world orbiting Kandoka with its enclosed society and pink skies could have come straight out of 1980s Who under producer John Nathan-Turner. But Kerblam! mostly feels like very progressive Doctor Who, a highly polished production with honed storytelling, all wrapped up in a neat package and delivered first class to your living room.
A romantic tragedy with considerable charm set during the turmoil of the Partition of India
Story 282 Series 11 – Episode 6 Storyline Yaz’s family are celebrating the birthday of her elderly grandmother Umbreen. Yaz urges to the Doctor to let her see Umbreen when she was young and the Tardis takes them to her wedding in the Punjab in 1947. It is also the time of the Partition of India, with families and communities being torn apart along racial and religious lines. Muslim Umbreen’s marriage to Hindu Prem is doomed when his radical brother cannot accept the union. The event is overseen by Thijarian warriors, who are not as demonic as they first seem. First UK broadcast Sunday 11 November 2018 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Nani Umbreen – Leena Dhingra Umbreen – Amita Suman Prem – Shane Zaza Manish – Hamza Jeetooa Hasna – Shaheen Khan Najia Khan – Shobna Gulati Hakim Khan – Ravin J Ganatra Sonya Khan – Bhavnisha Parmar Kisar – Nathalie Curzner Almak – Barbara Fadden Kisar (voice) – Emma Fielding Almak (voice) – Isobel Middleton Crew Writer – Vinay Patel Director – Jamie Childs Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Arwel Wyn Jones Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern An imperfect jewel, this one. A few rupees short of a ruby. Part romantic tragedy, part historical re-enactment, with a fantasy element in passing, Demons of the Punjab doesn’t feel much like Doctor Who, but at the same time it is quintessentially Who. For Yasmin Khan, however, it’s Who Do You Think You Are? – a personalised edition of the BBC1 genealogy show, courtesy of the Time Lord. Except that while WDYTYA? uncovers the secrets of deceased ancestors, Yaz has the temerity to nose into her grandmother’s past while the old gal is still breathing. What a snoop! Chris Chibnall has spoken of such episodes (including Rosa) as “global historicals”, harking back to the expansive reach of the very earliest Doctor Whos, when the 1960s Team Tardis joined Marco Polo’s trek across ancient Cathay or failed to halt the human sacrifices of the Aztecs. Those ambitious serials were recorded in the BBC’s Lime Grove Studios and Television Centre, never daring even to ponder a film shoot overseas. Anyone familiar with the Punjab of the 1940s or the present day might say there’s something not quite right about the scenery in this Doctor Who, but I’m relaxed about it. It was filmed in Andalusia in high summer and, whether filtered or “doctored”, the golden glow of the location footage and the shots in the forest and the wide open, with the Time Lord running through a meadow of wild flowers, are just gorgeous. We even see poppies. Either by design or serendipity, it’s good timing for a first transmission on the centenary of the Armistice. Where would you go if you had a time machine…? Most of us must have contemplated this idea. The first thought that always comes to my mind is to see my grandparents – all now dead and all of whom I adored – when they were young. So I am already on board with Yaz’s desire to do so. The top and tail sections when she’s sitting with her elderly Nani, Umbreen (Leena Dhingra), have immense charm. To start: it’s the old lady’s birthday but she is the one doling out gifts; treasures from her past; love letters, a pressed yellow poppy and a broken wristwatch that must never be mended. “I’ve such stories I could tell you,” she teases. To end: Yaz now knows how the watch was broken 71 years earlier but wants her Nani to keep her secrets. I was expecting Umbreen to acknowledge Yaz appearing in her past and that she’s long kept that secret too, but there isn’t even a hint of it. The two women simply express their unqualified love for each other. It’s very touching. Vinay Patel (a writer lauded for the harrowing 2016 BBC drama, Murdered by My Father) has done a terrific job of bringing the personal, the political and the historical together in a single tragedy. The Partition of India in 1947, as the Doctor informs her team and the viewer in an info-dump less clumsy than usual, means that “tens of millions are about to be displaced, more than a million are about to die”. Friends, family and communities will be torn apart. Yaz’s forebears find themselves (OK, unlikely) living right on the new border, and the marriage between Muslim Umbreen and Hindu Prem serves to crystallise the turmoil of the day. Given the ferment, it seems odd that they blithely proceed with their nuptials but it explains why no other relatives or locals attend; one could also infer that an inter-faith union is already frowned upon, so people are staying away. Yaz is thrilled to see her Nani as a young woman. I would have liked a beat, too, showing her curiosity in meeting Umbreen’s mother, her own great-grandmother. But the storytelling is condensed by the timeframe, the friction between brothers Prem and Manish rapidly reaching a head – and an execution. It’s a shame that yet again the Doctor offers scant moral guidance to the bad guy. As with the Rosa Parks incident, her team must not intercede; they turn and walk away as the gunshots are fired. History has to run its course – otherwise Umbreen’s life and family in Sheffield will never be. Yaz will wink out of existence. The eponymous demons are largely superfluous, but all historical Who seems to require a sci-fi intrusion these days. These beings, remnants of the Thijarian Hive, once “the deadliest assassins in the known universe”, are a reasonable addition to the programme’s carnival of monsters but hardly original. They resemble the Judoon and turn out to be benign observers – witnessing, recording and honouring death. We need only look back to the Testimony in Peter Capaldi’s final episode for the same concept. This time there’s enough to occupy all four of Team Tardis, and Yaz, who’s been under-served in series 11, becomes the focus. Mandip Gill shows tenderness and sensitivity and moments of impetuosity as a young woman surprised to learn the past is not as it’s been told to her. “I thought I knew my nan’s story. She inspired me… She lied to me.” Graham, the great sage, offers: “I honestly don’t know whether any of us know the real truth of our own lives, ’cos we’re too busy living them from the inside. So just enjoy. Live this moment.” At last – six weeks in – Graham and Yaz have had a conversation with each other. The soundtrack is magnificent throughout, the score awash with mournful motifs or throbbing with a bhangra beat. Unlike the heavy-weather anthem that closed Rosa, the ethereal Indian makeover of the Doctor Who theme tune is an unexpected delight. To be replayed and replayed. Composer Segun Akinola and his team have particularly impressed this year.
It’s Casualty in Space, a dismal misfire with an absurd critter called Pting
Story 281 Series 11 – Episode 5 Storyline The Doctor’s team are sifting through a junk planet when they set off a sonic bomb. Largely uninjured, they’re picked up by a passing medical spaceship, Tsuranga. It’s mostly automated, but they befriend the few staff and patients on board, as the vessel comes under attack from a small junk-gobbling creature known as a Pting. The Doctor must expel this intruder before the space station they’re heading towards remotely detonates the Tsuranga. First UK broadcast Sunday 4 November 2018 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Astos – Brett Goldstein Mabli – Lois Chimimba Eve Cicero – Suzanne Packer Durkas Cicero – Ben Bailey Smith Ronan – David Shields Yoss Inkl – Jack Shalloo Crew Writer – Chris Chibnall Director – Jennifer Perrott Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Arwel Wyn Jones Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern Every Doctor has her or his turkey. This is WhittakWho’s first. I fear it won’t be her last. The alien of the hour even looks like some freak-show poultry, force-fed and plucked, ready for basting. The “Pting” is quite the most ridiculous mini-critter in Doctor Who since… well, I’m thinking of those cutesy Adipose fat-blobs in Partners in Crime ten years ago. This junk-gobbling gremlin doesn’t convince and is patently absurd (bearing in mind one must be prepared for all degrees of absurdity in Doctor Who). I only hope the smaller kids watching will appreciate its cartoonish nature, bug eyes and bad manners. The episode gets off to an unprepossessing start with the Tardis team grubbing about on a junk planet, sifting through rubbish – a bad omen if ever there was for what is to follow. Is this really the most enticing mission the Doctor can offer her pals after last week’s inspiring all-hands-together communion in the Tardis…? In quick time, they’ve stumbled upon a “sonic mine” but it has negligible effect upon their anatomy; the downside for the quartet is being collected by a passing rescue craft, where they must endure the remainder of this brightly lit but otherwise dismal instalment. It’s Casualty in Space. Unlike the BBC1 medi-soap, this emergency unit is understaffed and largely automated. A spaceship that is traversing the cosmos undefended, it’s prone to attack – either by marauding aliens or by “remote structural termination” from its own base hospital. Failing hospitals everywhere, be warned. In a vacuum of pleasures, the ship itself almost becomes the star of this show. It’s elegantly designed, clinically gleaming of course, but with skill and imagination put into the sweeping curves, gadgetry and detailed interactive displays. The mood music, almost a low-wattage Jean Michel Jarre hum and burble from Segun Akinola, enhances what little atmosphere there is. A few interesting scientific and sci-fi ideas emerge but aren’t fully developed. Perhaps best is when the Time Lord starts marvelling at the ship’s antimatter drive, represented by a glistening coil. Jodie Whittaker becomes impassioned and almost sells the impression that she’s the most intelligent person in the room, which, in most cases, the Doctor should be. She witters and caws too much for my taste, diminishing the character, but is still the person you’d most want around in a crisis, and it’s novel to see the Doctor thinking, feeling towards answers. Significantly, there isn’t enough action, or division of action, to warrant four regulars this week. Yaz is asked to help out in the emergency and bundles up the Pting in a blanket, and that’s just about it for her. Except when she ventures into soapland in the midst of the crisis and initiates a conversation with Ryan about how his mum died. Ryan and Graham end up saddled with a subplot about an alien man in childbirth, cutting open his stomach, snipping his bi-umbilical cords and coaching him into fatherhood. As an exercise in male bonding, it’s as hopeless as it is embarrassing. None of the guest characters – staff, patients or attendants – is particularly vivid. Not the fault of the actors. Lois Chimimba is endearing as the vulnerable No 2 medic, Mabli. Closest to interesting is sickly General Eve Cicero, with whom the Doctor shares an entry in The Book of Celebrants, whatever that may be. Adding to the Casualty vibe, Eve is played by Suzanne Packer, who was Sister Tess Bateman in the BBC1 series for many years (2003–2016). Her “expertise in symbiotic neuro-piloting” comes in handy but she expires in the effort of steering the ship. The tech that’s stuck on her while she’s in pilot mode is another underdeveloped idea that fails to satisfy. Every week something different. That’s Doctor Who for you. The perennial pattern. Series 11 has certainly managed to deliver five varied dramas in succession. The showrunner Chris Chibnall has written four of the five so far and had a co-writing credit on the third. I doubt this is a sign of him running out of steam already, but at this stage you should still expect to see an episode showcasing something a writer wants to get out of their system. Apart from the weird angle on fatherhood, there’s very little to take away from this misfire. The Tsuranga Conundrum is just like a trip to A&E. I was rushed in, struggled to remain conscious while an unpleasant lump was removed, was only partly reassured by a junior doctor, and now I’m so relieved it’s all over and hope never to return.
Chris Chibnall delivers shivers and social comment in this giant spiders hokum – and Chris Noth is a hilarious Trump-alike. Plus, Doctor Who legend Katy Manning gives her verdict
Story 280 Series 11 – Episode 4 Storyline Returning to Sheffield, the Doctor gets to know Yaz’s family. Her mum Najia has just been fired from a new hotel owned by callous US magnate Jack Robertson. He’s been using old mines below as a toxic landfill site, which is causing mutations among the city’s spiders. Giant arachnids are now emerging and dragging locals to their larder. The Doctor’s team aim to deal kindly with the mother spider in the hotel ballroom but Robertson shoots it. Later, Graham, Ryan and Yaz decide they’d love to resume their travels in the Tardis. First UK broadcast Sunday 28 October 2018 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Jack Robertson – Chris Noth Najia Khan – Shobna Gulati Dr Jade McIntyre – Tanya Fear Hakim Khan – Ravin J Ganatra Sonya Khan – Bhavnisha Parmar Frankie Ellish – Jaleh Alp Kevin – William Meredith Grace – Sharon D Clarke Crew Writer – Chris Chibnall Director – Sallie Aprahamian Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Arwel Wyn Jones Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern I’m often in my happy place watching a slab of hokum and, in the right frame of mind, Arachnids remains enjoyable, though I've cooled somewhat towards it since the original transmission. The first three episodes of series 11 had much to recommend them, showed the programme going in a new direction with fresh talent aboard, and here it feels like they’ve settled in. I’ve always relished a monstrous menace in the now, a few shivers and jump scares, a bit of social comment – and a smattering of mirth. This is a terrific script from Chris Chibnall, which all the cast, especially the guest stars, have fun with. Shobna Gulati is delightful as Najia, the hotel manager fired in her first scene, who simply has to be Yaz’s mum and indeed is called “Yaz’s mum” throughout by the Doctor. Anyone calling her “Nadia” gets short shrift. Like all mums in light drama, she’s instantly nosing into Yaz’s new friendships and love life, and wants to know if Yaz and the Doctor are “seeing each other”. Even the Doc isn’t sure: “I don’t think so. Are we?” One of series 11’s several gentle nods to lady love. Let’s have some man love to even things up – oh and more of Najia, please. “I’m going to litigate you until your last breath, Nadia!” snarls Jack Robertson. What about Chris Noth! At first, I couldn’t quite believe he was really going to play it that way. We may know Noth as Mr Big in Sex and the City; now he goes BIG in Doctor Who. The man is from a different academy, a different galaxy, of acting. I love what he does with this part. He’s hilarious. A Trump-alike, Robertson is a ruthless property magnate, his swagger tinged with looniness, a buffoon whose OCD calls for scheduled bathroom breaks and whose paranoia demands a panic room in all his hotels. He abandons his PA to a chomped-by-spider fate – and is more concerned about his cellphone. He shoots to kill. His worst crime, though, is a hideous taste in hotel décor. Instantly recognisable to Joe Public, or Graham O’Brien (“You’re that bloke”), he has an eye on the White House. It’s a relief when POTUS is at last namechecked – and dismissed: “Please! Don’t mention that name.” Jack Robertson has hated Trump for decades. Noth has such majestic control and delivery, a nutty glint, that almost every line makes me chortle. “A giant spider just smashed through my bath tub and took out my bodyguard Kevin.” “What’s wrong with this country? Why don’t you do what normal people do? Get a gun. Shoot things like a civilised person!” He’s the best bad guy in ages. And we’ve seen some duffers in series 11. As a wonderfully Who-ey counterpoint, the Doctor arrives in the hotel ballroom armed only with a spray of peppermint and tea tree oil to ward off the mummy spider. Jack Robertson just shoots it, then walks out of the ballroom and out of the episode. No pay-off. This is becoming A Thing. In every episode so far, characters have left with no farewell, either winking out of existence (Tim Shaw in ep 1; Ilin, Epzo and Angstrom in ep 2; Krasko in ep 3) or, in Robertson’s case, stomping off set. Options kept open. I trust Chris Noth has been booked for a rematch. “You fill up disused mines with landfill waste and build a luxury hotel on top,” observes the Time Lord. How very 2018. Of course, it’s also a throwback to the ecological-disaster message of 1970s Doctor Who. I remember as a child sitting a foot away from my telly in 1973 watching The Green Death when the third Doctor and Jo Grant were trapped in a coal mine and giant maggots emerged from toxic slime. A year later, in the same position, I was enthralled as a gigantic spider materialised on a “magic carpet” in Planet of the Spiders. Chibnall has mashed the two and dared the FX experts to deliver. High praise for those teams: DNEG TV, Real SFX and Millennium FX. So many pitiful oversize insects, bugs and arachnids have “crawled” over TV and cinema screens down the years. A lot of shonky critters have featured in Doctor Who. But these spiders are a dream (or nightmare), totally convincing, beautifully (or horribly) realised – depending on your phobia/philia. If there’s any failing, it’s in the plot’s 19th-century-novel levels of co-incidence. That Yaz’s mum works at the hotel at the epicentre of the crisis. That the Khans live two doors down from a woman connected to the spider research base. The script contorts and unfurls its eight legs to explain that one. And can the heroes be sure that Ryan’s grime blare has lured every mutant spider from across Sheffield? Their entrapment is tidy and comical but their demise (starvation, suffocation) is un-Doctorly. Team Tardis are fully bonded by the episode’s close and the final moments are pure joy. You might often wonder in Doctor Who: why do these people travel together? Not here. We know the Time Lord craves company, but her three new best friends all have plausible motivation to resume their travels. Ryan can’t face returning to work in his warehouse. Yaz longs to escape her family bubble and perhaps does have a crush on the Time Lord. “I want more time with you. You’re like the best person I’ve ever met.” And there’s Graham who can’t bear being at home: “The thing about grief is it needs time.” The scenes in his living room with the phantom image of Grace are sharply touching. Bradley Walsh excels again – he could sell sand on Mars – but all four leads weave delicate fibres into this web. Katy Manning’s verdict “Wow!” laughs Katy Manning. “A lot of people who hate spiders are going to be freaked out by this – but I LOVE spiders!” Indeed, the former Doctor Who star happens to be one of the universe’s greatest arachnophiles. This is a woman who has handled tarantulas. She loved Arachnids in the UK. “Yes, I liked it bestest of all, without a shadow of a doubt. Out of the four I’ve seen – and they’ve all been different – this one is more my kind of Doctor Who. I think it’s really well written, the dialogue is snappy and quick, and very credible. Everybody is connecting well.” Katy Manning in 2018 and (inset) in Doctor Who: The Green Death, 1973 Katy played companion Jo Grant for three years in the 1970s and, as you may recall, tackled giant maggots in a polluted coal mine in her Doctor Who swansong. “It’s a subject I care about. Polluting the planet! This is exactly like The Green Death. And I do like modern Earth stories every now and again, because it’s less expected. It makes it more scary.” She found this episode “more emotional than any of the others so far. That was a really nice ending – all the hands together on the Tardis lever.” And she was most amused by guest star Chris Noth. “He’s got to go down well… because the show’s massive in America. He was funny. I laughed all the way through – but what happened to all the baby spiders!?” She was dismayed at the solution of trapping the spiders in Robertson’s panic room. “That really upset me. I was worried because they put all those spiders in that room but… Give them some food! It’s not humane to shove them in a room they can’t get out of. I would have fed the spiders and tamed them.” Picture the sequel. On balance, Katy concludes: “That’s one you go away from cheering. It gives me that ‘YES! Doctor Who!’ feeling.” Katy Manning is still very much part of Doctor Who family. She regularly attends conventions and records Big Finish audio dramas all the time. In 2012, she helped us review Asylum of the Daleks and The Angels Take Manhattan. Patrick Mulkern’s 2012 interview with Katy Manning: “I’ve been a naughty girl!”
Malorie Blackman tackles bigotry in a well-meaning if clunky story, in which a future foe aims to thwart Rosa Parks and the American civil rights movement
Story 279 Series 11 – Episode 3 Storyline The Tardis team arrive in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 and immediately experience the racial prejudice embedded in its society. They meet Rosa Parks, the seamstress determined to stand up against bigotry and segregation, who famously would refuse to give up her bus seat for white folk. It’s a touchstone in the dawn of the civil rights movement in America – but Krasko, a villain from the future, intends to throw history off course. First UK broadcast Sunday 21 October 2018 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Rosa Parks – Vinette Robinson Krasko – Joshua Bowman James Blake – Trevor White Mr Steele – Richard Lothian Police officer Mason – Gareth Marks Raymond Parks – David Rubin Martin Luther King – Ray Sesay Fred Gray – Aki Omoshaybi Elias Griffin Jr – David Dukas Arthur – Morgan Deare Waitress – Jessica Claire Preddy Crew Writers – Malorie Blackman, Chris Chibnall Director – Mark Tonderai Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Arwel Wyn Jones Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern Malorie Blackman, co-writer of this episode, happens to be black. As are its director Mark Tonderai and the series’ new composer Segun Akinola. Skin colour should be immaterial and is something I wouldn’t normally think to mention. However, in a valuable initiative to increase diversity on the programme, this episode marks a significant confluence of talents in key posts. These three people are the first black writer, director and composer to work on Doctor Who in its 55-year run. I’ll let that sentence stand for a moment. It was a timely confluence, too, because October 2018 was Black History Month in the UK and other parts of the world. Malorie Blackman, the former children’s laureate coming fresh to Who, justly seizes her moment to relate a pivotal point in “black history” – the brave decision in 1955 by Rosa Parks to stand up against bigotry in her home town, Montgomery, the State capital of Alabama, and refuse to give up her bus seat for white folk. We recognise it now as a touchstone in the dawn of the civil rights movement in America. It is important to give such events currency, to make the ignorant or complacent aware, and to remind people who, like me, know of the incident and its repercussions yet are hazy on the details. It’s right to present this story to many young viewers who won’t be apprised of the injustices of the past and the decades-long fight of civil rights activists to bring us to where we are today, to a finger-hold on freedom and equality that still seems precarious. Doctor Who has touched upon racism many times before. From the abuse that Bill Potts received in Thin Ice in series ten, right back to the first Dalek story, where we learnt of their “dislike for the unlike” and thirst for extermination, the Time Lord has always fought against repression. Calling the episode Rosa is a neat nod to Billie Piper’s 2005 debut Rose, and there’s a measured central performance from Vinette Robinson as Rosa Parks, buttoned-up, stoical, kind, principled, the seamstress who would resist racial segregation on her doorstep and eventually bring about countrywide change. The “monsters” in Blackman’s tale (co-written with Chris Chibnall) are the prejudiced oafs of the Deep South, the businessman in the street, the patrol cop, the waitress, the bus driver (James Blake), who treat some humans as lesser beings just because of the colour of their skin. Given the timeslot, there has to be a careful choice of language. The toxic N word is rightly verboten; it should still unsettle us to hear the terms “Negro” and “coloured” bandied about in the context of the drama. Ryan and Yaz are denigrated as “a couple of mongrels” by the cop. Otherwise, almost amusingly, Yaz is given an easier ride as “Mexican”, while the Doctor and Graham are dismissed as Brits. I love that telling moment when Graham introduces Ryan as his grandson, not with pride, just a modern matter-of-factness, which simply does not compute in 50s Alabama. At last, Ryan and Yaz have some material to run with. The scene they share, cowering in an alley, in America, not so long ago, is potent and painful. As they make clear, racism remains their day-to-day experience in Sheffield, 2018. “It’s not like Rosa Parks wipes out racism from the world for ever,” says Ryan. Yaz admits she’s called names while on patrol and “a terrorist coming home from the mosque”. She tries to be positive: “They don’t win, those people. I can be a police officer now because people like Rosa Parks fought those battles for me.” What’s pleasing is that there are no Clever Dick solutions. The time travellers work hard to keep time on track. Who’d have thought that getting a tweedy seamstress and a driver on the right bus at the right time would provide dramatic tension? And there’s a sharp beat when the Time Lord realises she and her team are part of history: “We have to not help her.” They must remain on the bus and sit quiet while Rosa is manhandled. Director Mark Tonderai pulls all this together, and succeeds at making South Africa look like Alabama with more contained spaces than the previous episode (also filmed there). But – I’m loath to introduce a “but”, and there are several – while we should always learn from the past, a drama shouldn’t seem like a lesson at Sunday School. Rosa feels like a throwback to the earliest days of Doctor Who when they had a remit to educate young viewers and alternated sci-fi with historical yarns. Many were excellent, but every so often the action would pause for an ill-disguised info-dump. At least now they play around a little. Ryan isn’t clued up on Rosa Parks and, when pressed, offers, “First black woman to ever drive a bus..?” “Your nan would have a fit,” scolds Graham. But mostly the wheels on the Blackman/Chibnall bus clunk along. Thudding with tedium is the meeting at Rosa’s house, which might have delivered a punch, had Martin Luther King’s name not been telegraphed earlier. Doctor Who in 2018 is gunning for simple storytelling but shouldn’t shed the layers of wit and sophistication it has long clothed itself in. De-cloaking to a more naïve state might make Doctor Who more accessible. But let it not plod. Let it not clunk. Let it not preach. The Rosa Parks incident deserves respectful treatment, but there’s also a more gripping drama aching to be told. The villain Krasko (Joshua Bowman) is dismally lightweight. An ex-convict from the future, he’s emerged from Stormcage prison facility – like River Song before him – primped for a fashion shoot, and has prepped for his mission by studying Danny in Grease or Fonzie in Happy Days. His motivation is unclear. He’s a time meddler, yes, keen to nip the civil rights movement in the bud, but what will it lead to centuries hence that bugs him so? Is Krasko a racist or does he have some other agenda? It’s not specified. This Brylcreemed berk’s every move is accompanied by an annoying two-note thrum on the double bass, so close to John Williams’s Jaws theme I’m expecting to see a fin on his back. I’m also unmoved by the final soundtrack wash-over of Andra Day’s anthem Rise Up. I hope that for many watching it will let their spirits soar. But it’s another leaden cosh over the bonce for me. What is touching is the coda when the Time Lord shows her chums the real Rosa receiving her Congressional Gold Medal from Bill Clinton in 1999 – and then the asteroid that’s been named after her. Hovering over this episode like a ghost is Grace. Our heroes harp on about her, as well they might. Ryan’s nan, Graham’s wife, who died in The Woman Who Fell to Earth, knew all about Rosa Parks and her achievements. Says Graham: “She had a T-shirt that said ‘The Spirit of Rosa’ – and I wish she was here now.” Agreed. Let this not be Malorie Blackman’s only brush with Who. She should return and write an episode called Grace.
A simple quest tale, gorgeously filmed in South Africa, with Bradley Walsh’s Graham as its beating heart
Story 278 Series 11 – Episode 2 Storyline The Doctor, Graham, Yaz and Ryan are rescued in deep space by Epzo and Angstrom, the last two competitors in the final Rally of the 12 Galaxies. Arriving on the planet Desolation, they encounter the hologram of race master Ilin, who reveals that an arduous trek will lead to the Ghost Monument – in fact the Doctor’s missing police box. Various challenges include flesh-eating waterborne microbes, Sniper Bots and suffocating, cloth-like Remnants. At the end of the race, Epzo and Angstrom declare a draw and the Doctor is overjoyed to be reunited with her remodelled Tardis. First UK broadcast Sunday 14 October 2018 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Epzo – Shaun Dooley Angstrom – Susan Lynch Ilin – Art Malik Voice of the Remnants – Ian Gelder Crew Writer – Chris Chibnall Director – Mark Tonderai Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Arwel Wyn Jones Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern First challenge: the latest title sequence... Does it show Time? Is it Space? They’ve always been abstract but this one surely depicts Matter. It’s like watching extravagantly soiled nappies churning in a Zanussi, an almighty “Rabelaisian bowel movement” (phrase © Tom Baker) being flushed – with some resistance – down the drain to the sewage works. Not what you want to see with your teatime bangers and beans. The opening theme music is similarly turbid and sludgy and takes some digesting. I appreciate the reuse of elements of the old Radiophonic Workshop score, and over time it’s grown on me and become peculiarly fascinating. And I do like the simplicity of the black title card with the episode and writer names in gold. The boldness (or inadequacy) of Chris Chibnall’s Who is that it doesn’t stop to explain the inexplicable. Last week, there was no explanation of how the Doctor fell through the sky and landed on her feet in a train without any injury. This week, the WhittakWho Quartet are stranded in space but do not freeze/explode/boil or whatever else is supposed to happen physically in the vacuum. They’re scooped up intact by passing spaceships and revived without frazzled brains or popped eyeballs. I suppose the point is it doesn’t actually matter and it makes for a bit of jeopardy and good visuals. The Ghost Monument does look very good indeed. This isn’t just down to the epic scale of the South African locations – the desert, the mountains, the ruined coastal resort – captured in gorgeous sunlight and thoughtful camera angles. It’s well directed by Mark Tonderai in the smaller details too. Right from the top. The opening montage as seen through Ryan’s eyes, reflected in his pupil – stars, spaceship, medical equipment – is strange and disorientating but resolves on a reassuring close-up of Graham as he leans over and mutters, “Breathe slowly, son. Well done.” The Doctor may have two hearts but Graham is really the beating heart of the revamped series, in a delightful, understated performance from Bradley Walsh. He comes close to the role Bernard Cribbins played a decade ago as Donna’s grandad Wilf and even Rory’s dad Brian (Mark Williams), a lovable character Chibnall developed in his two 2012 episodes (Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and The Power of Three). Graham’s good-natured blokey-ness is the closest this show now gets to humour. “Eh? Pythagoras never wore shades,” “Can people and fings stop puttin’ stuff inside me wivout my permission!” and “Yeah, she sounds trific,” after hearing Epzo’s boyhood anecdote about his ghastly mum. Graham is by far the strongest personality among the Doctor’s new friends, leaving the other two, Ryan and Yaz, teetering towards vapid. The script picks up on Ryan’s grief, his dyspraxia and impetuous impulses, but Yaz is given little of note to do or say this week. Now we can tick off some of the guest actors deemed worthy of bigging up in last week’s risible trailer. Art Malik plays the race-master Ilin and looks like he’s just emerged from a heavy lunch at the Garrick and been asked to judge a jam competition. “You’re intruding on the final stage of the last ever rally of the 12 galaxies,” he tells the Doctor’s party without interest. At the end, he is persuaded to accept joint winners with remarkable ease. So much for investing in that story then. Susan Lynch and Shaun Dooley are likable performers and make Angstrom and Epzo three-dimensional. She’s harsh with a heart. He gives damaged tough-guy oik. Yet they’re implausible as the last two standing from 4,000 competitors in this interstellar contest. Amusingly, these aliens know nothing of Earth and have “never even heard of ‘Moomin Beeins’ [human beings]”, though no attempt is made to give either of them alien looks, voices or attitudes. Both actors have long CVs. If you’re struggling with Susan Lynch, in 2018 she was in Killing Eve as Anna, Villanelle’s ex-teacher in Russia, with a thicket of dark hair. I’m trying to put my finger on why I enjoyed this episode a little more than last week’s. It’s not that it’s a better story. It’s a simple quest. Something presented myriad times in sci-fi and fantasy. And even then, this quest cuts out a lot of its potential perils when the Doctor’s team discovers a tunnel system to bypass them and arrive fast at the finish line. Handy in a 50-minute ep already stretching its budget. One peril, the robot guards, are featureless, unmemorable and, typically, lousy shots. The Monsters of the Week, the Lethal Cloths, the Hissy Flaps, whatever they are (according to the credits “Remnants”), are literally rubbish. What next? Vexed refuse? Deadly dust? Oh yeah, Mark Gatiss did that one already. This isn’t even particularly original within the Saga of Doctor Who. Boil The Ghost Monument down to its basics. A race against time on a distant world… a series of tests set by a fine-robed Eastern potentate… fought alongside shifty male and female competitors… with the police box as the almost unobtainable prize… These are the bare bones of The Celestial Toymaker, a 1966 Doctor Who adventure – only that William Hartnell and Peter Purves weren’t flown to South Africa to incinerate Dirty Rags. The Ghost Monument is another clearly told, linear adventure, realised with pace and panache, far sunnier than last week’s Torchwood-lite grim-fest. It has underlying themes of trust and the importance of family. There’s another terrific score from Segun Akinola and his team, often mournful, heavy on the horn and cello, quite different from last week. And it has Walsh in Space. Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor continues to impress, despite the odd wobble. She witters under pressure, reviving the gabbling and gaping of David Tennant’s Doctor, and often registers as Bossy Head Girl. But as the end approaches, with her goal in sight and the police box materialising, she clicks into Doctor mode again, and I start to believe in her. And the new Tardis interior is a warm, embracing cave of burnished bronze hexagonal cogs and golden crystalline pillars. The final scene inside the Tardis re-instils some magic, not just in Chibnall’s Doctor Who but in Whittaker’s Doctor too.
Doctor Who: The Woman Who Fell to Earth ★★★
Jodie Whittaker is instantly engaging as the first female Doctor in Chris Chibnall’s promising if less-than-enthralling debut as showrunner
Story 277 Series 11 – Episode 1 Storyline Now in female form, and expelled from the Tardis, the Doctor falls to Earth and foils an attack on a train by a tentacled Gathering Coil. In modern Sheffield, she befriends retired bus driver Graham, his wife, a nurse called Grace, their grandson Ryan and a fledgling cop, Yaz. Ryan has discovered an alien pod, from which emerges a Stenza warrior called Tzim-Sha (the Doctor hears his name as Tim Shaw). He’s hunting for a human captive to take home, and the Doctor’s party set out to stop him. In a night-time encounter in a builders’ yard high up on cranes, Tim Shaw is thwarted but not before Grace plunges to her death. After the funeral, the Doctor traces the Tardis and teleports herself, Graham, Ryan and Yaz into the vacuum of space… First UK broadcast Sunday 7 October 2018 Cast The Doctor – Jodie Whittaker Graham O’Brien – Bradley Walsh Ryan Sinclair – Tosin Cole Yasmin Khan – Mandip Gill Grace – Sharon D Clarke Tim Shaw – Samuel Oatley Karl – Jonny Dixon Rahul – Amit Shah Sonia – Asha Kingsley Janey – Janine Mellor Ramesh Sunder – Asif Khan Andy – James Thackeray Dean – Philip Abiodun Dennis – Stephen MacKenna Gabriel – Everal A Walsh Crew Writer – Chris Chibnall Director – Jamie Childs Series producer – Nikki Wilson Music – Segun Akinola Designer – Arwel Wyn Jones Executive producers – Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens RT review by Patrick Mulkern Jodie Whittaker is a winner. Instantly engaging as the 13th Doctor, she radiates positive energy, fizzes with fun – how did she ever keep that so tightly bottled as anguished Beth Latimer in Broadchurch? She gives this 13-year-old – or 55-year-old – series the power-surge regeneration it needs. I haven’t the slightest problem with the Doctor suddenly becoming a woman. I would have welcomed it years ago and remember going “Wow!” when Joanna Lumley became the Doctor all too briefly in 1999 in a Comic Relief spoof. I’d have gleefully followed her in the programme proper. Landing slapbang (and remarkably unscathed) in the middle of a crisis, making friends fast, WhittakWho is a quirky, joyful adventurer. She exhibits none of the existential angst of her 21st-century predecessors. The Yorkshire accent is welcome, as is her youthful speech pattern, although I flinched at one lamentable instance of “I would of ”. For most of her debut episode she rocks Peter Capaldi’s tattered togs and in the closing moments even sells her own absurd costume. Clown Assistant’s First Day at the Circus it may be, but it’s also non-gender-specific gear that girl and boy cosplayers can emulate with a bit of effort. We’re in a golden age of British TV and in 2018 I was glued to a lot of brilliant, very grown-up but preposterous dramas – Bodyguard, Killing Eve... Doctor Who has always been preposterous so I’ve no qualms on that front, only that it remains distinctive enough in a field crowded with risk-taking mainstream attractions. We’re in the hands of a new showrunner, Chris Chibnall, who made his name on Broadchurch (which had mixed fortunes). A few years back he penned some Doctor Whos I greatly enjoyed as well as some dire Torchwoods. I’m approaching the dawn of his era with an open mind and open heart. But before going in, there are three points that matter to me. Three hopes for series 11: 1) That it feels radically different from what has gone before. (It doesn’t.) 2) That it is still somehow recognisably Doctor Who. (It is.) 3) That it makes for good, no, excellent telly. (Time will tell.) There’s been much guff about enhanced HD pictures and a change in widescreen ratio but the on-screen patina isn’t vastly different to my eyes and won’t be clocked by most viewers. There is no jaw-dropping chasm-leap in style or direction. What does strike immediately is the simpler form of storytelling. The delicious complexity of many Steven Moffat episodes has been eschewed. Chibnall seems to be resetting to the familial milieu of the Russell T Davies era, aiming for relatable characters rooted in reality who don’t spout wisecracks. And as he told Radio Times readers, “If you’ve never seen Doctor Who before, the first episode this year is the perfect place to start.” He needs to draw in new viewers and bolster the show’s declining audience. So there’s the promise of baggage-free entry; a degree in Time Lord lore isn’t required. Wrenching Doctor Who away from its Home Counties and South Wales heartlands to urban Sheffield and the gorgeous Peak District is well worth it. The story begins gently with: “Man Falling Off Bike in Yorkshire on a Sunday Night”. Last of the Summer Wine territory. But the mood soon shifts to an encounter with creepy alien artefacts, then terror on a train. A fine start, even if the pace slackens in the middle of this hour-long episode. Certainly, Chibnall’s Who sounds different. There’s a doomy score by composer Segun Akinola. If only the series had braved this approach earlier. Now almost every Brit drama favours that electro-clang/judder/warble borrowed from Scandi noir. In the end credits, we also catch Akinola’s fresh take on the theme music, utilising elements of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop version from the 1960s. The original was always the most effective. But there is no title sequence, no opening theme; the title is eventually displayed at the end: The Woman Who Fell to Earth. More accurately, it’s The Women Who Fell to Earth – the other being Grace, played by the magnificent Sharon D Clarke. An actress I’ve long admired, she was sensational as a seasoned hooker in The Life, a musical at Southwark Playhouse last year. I’d like to have seen more of Grace, but alas, she’s a goner, coming to rest on the ground in an elegant supine pose like so many before her in Doctor Who (see Jenna Coleman in The Snowmen and Tom Baker in long ago in Logopolis). I had no doubts about Bradley Walsh’s abilities, having caught him in the odd episode of Law & Order: UK and as Danny Baldwin in Coronation Street. He brings humanity and humour to the role of Graham – and the only tangible note of pathos when delivering his eulogy for Grace. The Doctor’s other new friends show promise but aren’t an instant sell like, say, Bill Potts was last year. Yaz is a probationary PC fed up of dealing with parking disputes; Ryan’s a bored warehouse worker with dyspraxia who can’t master his bike. Both are ripe for adventure with the Time Lord. Both actors look considerably older than 19. Tosin Cole is 26. Mandip Gill is 30. There’s a tad too much mugging from subsidiary characters – the boggle-eyed guy who snares the alien pumpkin and the crane operator gibbering with vertigo. Both slot into a Venn diagram with Ryan as Young Men with Issues. I’m all for empowering women but does the corollary have to be the enfeebling of men? Boys need role models too. Bye-bye Daleks and Cybermen for now. His Chibs has put them back in the toy box and this year promises all-new monsters. Will the Foes of the Week alarm the tiniest viewers? Well, I was disconcerted by the thrashing ball of tentacles in the train crash sequence – though it reminded me of the thrashing tentacles only four episodes ago in The Eaters of Light. “Tim Shaw”, latest in a long line of masked uglios, isn’t exactly pants-wettingly scary. Gross, I grant you. He breaks the jaws of his victims to take a tooth as a trophy. (In his galactic travels he’s evidently encountered a lot of mammals with good dentistry.) But with his Vader voice and passionless threats, Blue Tooth Man is a bit of bore really, poor dear. The denouement up among the cranes is not edge of the seat and I don’t really care who survives. Fleeting thoughts. Surely a few weeks must pass between the night of the cranes and Grace’s funeral, so where has the Doctor been staying all that time? And why haven’t her new friends suggested earlier that she change her clothes? She must whiff to high heaven. As a calling card, Chris Chibnall’s debut doesn’t have the zing of Russell T Davies’s reboot with Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper in 2005 or Steven Moffat’s takeover with Matt Smith in 2010. His trump card, though, is Jodie Whittaker and I’m more than ready to join her on some fresh adventures. The Woman Who Fell to Earth is less than enthralling but enjoyable hokum. I remain cautiously optimistic about Chibnall’s vision for Doctor Who. To end, it has to be said that the closing trailer or “series taster” showing a gallery of guest actors you’ve often never heard of nor longed to see in Doctor Who is an extraordinarily duff way to promote coming episodes.