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Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #79 – Christmas On A Rational Planet by Lawrence Miles

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#52
Christmas On A Rational Planet
By Lawrence Miles

The name’s Larry.  Mad Larry.  Although maybe not to his face.

Lawrence Miles would go on to be one of those infamous Doctor Who names, known for twisting old canon as well as generating his own.  His books are memorably geeky and odd, running the gamut from spirited fannish mystery (Alien Bodies) to grim fannish treatise on his ideas and how interesting they are (Interference).  People call him Mad Larry and his first book, Christmas On A Rational Planet, makes a pretty good case for that.

All the same, it’s not (and he’s not) that weird in context.  I’ve read New Adventures more obsessed with surrealism, to the point where you can barely read the bloody things; some that take similar or greater gambles with canon; and a few with a cockier authorial voice.  Heck, if we’re dubbing him Mad Larry then why not Mad Marc, Strange Ben, Disturbed Daniel, Weird Simon or Positively Unusual Dave?  The New Adventures often tend towards weirdness – “too broad and too deep” used to be the sales pitch.  I think what we have here, for better or worse, is Another Trippy First Time Novel.  Unsurprisingly it’s marmite.

It makes a considerable first impression.  Roz is running from a gynoid – shapeshifting thing, don’t worry about it – in a desert somehow out of sync with the universe.  So far, so trippy.  But Miles effortlessly chops between this encounter and the one directly before it, where Roz (avec Doctor and Chris) encounter the same creature in the same desert, only not quite?  These bits are in italics and there’s no real confusion about where or when we are.  It’s deft stuff, helped along by a confident, pithy climb inside Roz’s head.  “‘Useful,’ the Doctor had said, five minutes before the world had opened up and dragged her down into its shadow.  Just that, as he’d pressed the sphere into her hands.  ‘Useful.’”

Roz gets far and away the best character writing in the novel.  Miles just seems more invested in her.  Stranded alone in a backward America, circa 1799, she spends her time tolerating racism and working as a fortune teller.  “‘Abracadabra, shalom-shalom … I see into the mists of time and stuff, blah blah blah.’”  /  “‘Is it true you eat people in Africa?’ he heard himself say.  ‘No,’ she said, emotionlessly.  ‘But that isn’t going to stop me biting your face off.’”  Of course she hates it, so she finds a creative but very dubious plan of escape: she meets Abraham Lincoln’s father, if she shoots him she will alter history – and the Doctor will come.  This sort of works and the Doctor is understandably furious, but she blames it semi-convincingly on the cruelty and racism she is living with.  “‘I’ll tell you what it is.  It’s the not knowing.  I don’t know how I’m supposed to act here, and neither do they.  They can’t even decide whether I’m human or not.’”  I think Miles knows this is still a bit of a stretch, but then later on Roz is confronted with a duplicate of herself from before she met the Doctor.  The point is to illustrate how far she’s come – and not with a subtle touch – but if she’s willing to kill a man just to get out of here, is she “better” than her ask-questions-later self?  If not, does the comparison serve us very much?

Hey, I didn’t say it was all good character writing – only that she gets the best of it.  To tackle everyone else we’ll need to examine the plot, an area Christmas On A Rational Planet isn’t entirely comfortable with.

Reality is on the blink.  Roz loses the amaranth, a tool that reshapes the world, when she lands in 1799.  The TARDIS (which is linked to it) consequently isn’t quite itself and refuses to let the Doctor in (stranding him, too, in 1799).  The rest of the town of Woodwicke follows suit, i.e. goes a bit wibbly.  Soon there are monsters – I hope “gynoids” is enough of a descriptor for you – and the local Renewal Society, made up of Rationalists who hate anything superstitious, find themselves on a mindless crusade to round up the local black populace.  They’re led by Matheson Catcher, a disturbed young man hearing voices, whose home has morphed into an “UnTARDIS”.  Meanwhile in the police box, Chris finds an Interface that gives the ship a voice (while it also falls apart), and he shares the experience with Duquesne, a survivor of the French Revolution working for the mysterious Shadow Directory, against Chris and any other world-altering “caillou” like him.  So the Doctor and Roz.

There’s a lot of information here, but I’d hesitate to describe it as a plot.  There is one, certainly: an ancient psychic force (from before the dawn of time etc.) has awakened and the amaranth is a handy tool for getting its way.  But that sentence doesn’t fill nearly 300 pages, so in practical terms, Roz and the Doctor try to survive a mad crusade while Chris wanders around the TARDIS and Duquesne loses her marbles.  And that’s… still not really enough for a book, or for me anyway.  The Doctor has the usual stand-off with a baddie (or two), but otherwise he gets interrogated, lightly tortured and generally just has an awful time.  Chris has some arguably interesting experiences, but his moment of catharsis pointedly isn’t his own, and he otherwise comes off nearer the dumb, horny end of his spectrum.  (It’s not a big spectrum.)  The madness in Woodwicke isn’t very interesting – no one knows what they’re doing, and since reality is borked, what are the stakes?  We all love seeing inside the TARDIS, but that always seems to be code for “gee, I wonder what LSD is like?”  Inevitably there are hallucinations sprinkled on top.  There’s a lot of chopping between these short, weird sections, and it’s difficult to stick with it when there isn’t much of a through line.

There are themes, particularly the Psi Powers arc, although Christmas doesn’t do nearly as much for that as SLEEPY did.  This one essentially underlines that there are psychic forces out there, but it leaves the Doctor and co. still at square one investigating it.  In a broader sense we have Reason vs Cacophany, and how one can ironically lead to another.  And there is a lot of symmetry, as seen in that nifty time-shifting prologue, or scenes of two people separately being frightened by Catcher, or separate journeys through the UnTARDIS and the TARDIS, or the disembodied Carnival Queen of Cacophony and the disembodied TARDIS interface, or Roz’s double.  But I’m not sure how much of that is a deliberate effort to hold up mirrors and how much is just some groovy, trippy repetition.  Call it a mental lapse, but I don’t know what all these echoes are supposed to tell me anyway.  I don’t like halls of mirrors very much.

I’ve read rapturous reviews of Christmas On A Rational Planet which lap all this up, and power to them (and you, if that applies).  But I think there’s fuel here to suggest this isn’t a work of genius.  Like how Miles’s supporting characters have one or two attributes each, but no underlying personality – and how he hammers each attribute until it whimpers.  Erskine Morris lets off an expletive seemingly every other sentence, usually ironically Biblical.  (“Hellfire and buggery!” isn’t hilarious the hundredth time.)  Daniel Tremayne really wants to get away from here and yearns for more out of life.  Duquesne gets an unpleasant feeling in her spine when she’s near something world-changing.  And Matheson Catcher, oh, Matheson ruddy Catcher.  Every character that meets him feels the need to observe that he is, in some way, clockwork.  Again and again this point is made – we get it.  But then later when the voices of the Watchmakers start to get to him, he begins thinking and speaking in caps.  It starts looking like a crude way to make his dialogue stand out – like another character whose name escaped me, who stresses the occasional word to the point where you don’t pay attention to what she’s saying – and when Catcher starts audibly capitalising random letters, it all starts looking a bit desperate.  He certainly never elevates to a character that is intimidating or interesting, despite the enthusiastic caps.

Miles is on a bit of a keyboard walkabout, particularly when the book’s psychic force starts talking for itself, and it uses a tilde and a space instead of speech-marks.  (!)  All this is creative in a blunt sense, but it’s trying a bit too hard for little reward.  So he adds his own, with characters repeatedly congratulating themselves on idioms and expressions.  “He was pleased with the way he put that.”  /  “You can’t chart a river without visiting its source...  thank you, Marielle, a very nice metaphor.”  If you do say so yourself.

Somehow, despite the wealth of words, Christmas On A Rational Planet is often lost for them.  The gynoids are just… things.  (“Each of the creatures looked completely different to the last, different in ways Chris couldn’t quite get his head around.”  Or Miles, it seems.)  The Watchmakers are mentioned frequently, and with a dash of portentous world-building they become possible predecessors to the Time Lords, but god knows how present they are in this story or what they’re doing or what they look like.  Places like the UnTARDIS shift in and out of the gobbledegook dimension.  (“He was at one with the room.  He was in every corner, stretched along every surface.  Its angles were his angles  ...  Then one of the corners blistered again ...  The wall burst open, vomiting madness into the cellar.”  Uh huh.  Oh right.  You betcha.)  Paragraph breaks often begin or end with some perplexingly vague-yet-immense explosion of everything, nothing, etc., which just becomes the done thing after a while.  The whole book hums with excitement at getting all of this down, which is cool, but I was often bored by the lack of definition.  I also began to suspect that every time I put it down some little sod was stuffing it with extra pages, as it was occasionally like reading a treadmill.

Despite all that, and rather fitting the book’s schizophrenic theme, it is occasionally very good.  Miles can turn a phrase beautifully when he fancies it: “Furniture disagreed with him.”  /  “The clock in the church tower struck nine, listlessly, perhaps aware that no one cares about the time this close to Christmas.”  /  “[Tourette was] a man who finds it difficult to come to terms with a piece of machinery as complex as an oar.”  /  “Most of the rain seemed to be missing him somehow, as if the droplets knew that he wouldn’t grow no matter how much they watered him.”  Fill your boots, there’s loads.  One of my favourite bits – where yes, Miles is playing games with prose in his enthusiastic puppy way – sees the TARDIS Interface musing about Chris and Duquesne in the text, and then Chris noticing one of the roundels blinking at him.  That’s as close as a book gets to wading in and telling their characters stuff, and I love that sort of interplay.  Plus there is good character writing, although it is bobbing up and down in the word soup.  Behold, the best argument for not revealing the Doctor’s real name, so shut up already Moffat: “I usually just say my name’s ‘Smith’, if anyone asks, but I’ve been thinking about finding another pseudonym.  It’s getting dangerously close to becoming my real name.”  (Miles also said “It’s smaller on the outside” before he did.)

If you like a few continuity shots fired, you’ll do well.  Obviously telly Who is represented, but if it’s fan-films you’re after (PROBE), or comics (Abslom Daak, referred to here as fictional), or other Virgin books (SLEEPY, The Scales Of Injustice – which came out the same month), you’re equally in luck.  Some of the TARDIS interior stuff is beguiling, particularly the image of the food machine trundling through the corridors in search of customers, and the library that leads to other worlds.  More noteworthy I suppose is an eyebrow-raising reference to the Seventh Doctor’s death in the TV Movie.  Combined with some portentous talk of Eighth Man Bound, a Time Lord “game” where the player tries to see his future regenerations – and no one has ever gone further than seven – it pushes closer to a conclusion for the New Adventures Doctor, which is ballsy for a first-time writer – and is the kind of thing Miles would repeat later in his career.  (There’s also a reference to Lungbarrow, in case you didn’t get the hint.)  I’m still not sure how highly I rate this sort of thing, as referencing Who to a captive audience of Doctor Who fans is fruit so low-hanging you might need to crouch, but it can clearly be done well.

I’d love to say I’m torn about this, but my mind’s pretty well made up.  This one was work, and that doesn’t happen when you like the book.  It’s not as if I don’t like a bit of creative language and world-building; I want to hug Sky Pirates! just thinking about it, The Also People could be my happy place, SLEEPY (which this is a sequel to) practically knocked me on my arse, and I still boggle about the visuals in Parasiteand Lucifer Rising.  But the underpinnings are just too wobbly here for me to believe this is a work of genius.  There are great ideas (always a rather loaded compliment) but they’re not tied to a strong narrative.  The best thing about it is knowing he’d do better later on, which is more than you can say for some of Virgin’s other surrealists.

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #78 – Killing Ground by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#23
Killing Ground
By Steve Lyons

Did somebody say “video nasty”?  Well, I hope so.  Killing Ground is another book set in the Sixth Doctor’s wilderness years, between his unsuccessful swansong in the hastily rewritten Trial Of A Timelord and the actor’s unhappy exit via the thrillingly unusual medium of Sylvester McCoy in a wig.  Steve Lyons has had two goes at filling that gap, and the possibilities are varied.  Both times he’s turned the clock back to Season 22.  The Sixth Doctor once again is brash, maudlin, doesn’t make friends easily, and violence follows him around.  He even shoots a Cyberleader – four times, in the back.  I can practically hear Eric Saward rubbing his hands with glee.

Not to say this is a bad thing, since there’s an audience for practically any sort of Doctor Who.  It’s just that grimdark isn’t page-turner-fuel for me.

The Cybermen are back, and to his credit Steve Lyons does something different with them.  Instead of attacking a world, space station or insert-base-under-siege here, the Cybermen have an arrangement with the planet Agora.  They come, they convert some of the locals, they leave; the Agorans get to live so long as they replenish the “breeding stocks”.  This is under the eye of the Overseers, Cybermen-appointed officials who sell out their own kind just to stay alive.  No one is happy to see the Cybermen – they just don’t think a revolution will work because one has failed before.  Officials like Madrox do a fair bit of rationalising to make it all seem right.

On a jollier note, the Doctor has already arrived (between Cyber-visits) and totally failed to help.  The Cybermen anticipated his arrival and the Overseers locked him up.  The plan is to interrogate him (see his black eye on the front cover) until he gives up his companion(s).  The Cybermen know that he’ll have someone with him who may throw a spanner in the works, and they planned accordingly.  90 pages elapse before we even see the Cybermen (not including a flashback to set the tone), or before the Doctor gets a chance to stretch his legs or do anything of use.  We’re on our own.  Killing Ground is much more interested in life on Agora.

The absence of Cybermen makes them look better.  Memorable monsters they may be, but they can’t hold too many scenes by themselves.  Lyons builds up a sense of dread and resignation, heightened by the willingness of people to betray their own kind.  (Think Day Of The Daleks meets The Best Of Both Worlds.)  And they’re ahead of the game without even showing up.  Standing orders to catch the Doctor are an unusually smart move, as is the breeding stock.  I wasn’t ever sure how these things match up with the creatures from the series, but the Cybermen are in factions at this point (which is a cheeky way to explain their different looks), and they may work differently towards the same goal.  When they finally arrive, there is a quiet violence to them.  Absent a lot of exclamations (or god ’elp us, “DELETE”), the Cyberleader at one point says simply of a prisoner: “Break him.”  (For good measure, the Doctor gleefully takes the piss out of the Cyberleader putting his hands on his hips.)

We get several perspectives on Cybermen – with so long before it all kicks off, we’ve got time – most notably via a couple of historians from the future.  Jolarr is young and impressionable, Hegelia is his superior, with way too much investment in her subject matter.  She views this as history and the people involved as footnotes; the Cybermen are myths to her and can do no wrong.  (It was maybe a bad move not to give her a psych screening before sending her on her way?)  It’s not a surprise when she ultimately wants to be a Cybermen, and record her transformation for posterity.  She even rationalises it as, having shot a Cybermen in self-defence, she needs to sure up the numbers to fix history.  It’s a perverse interpretation of the Doctor’s own respect for time.  Hegelia’s transformation is inevitably revolting, but it’s also one of the high points of the book.  She is academically interested to the end, despite the pain and gore.

There is inevitably the question of how Agora is going to fend off the Cybermen without the Doctor, and there’s an almost inevitable answer: they build their own.  The Bronze Knights are semantically unlike the Cybermen, but still involve altering humans with mechanical implants.  You can already see where this is going, and the book never really shies away from it, even capping it off with, god ’elp us, a “What have we created?”  And yet, despite a brutal demonstration of their lack of tolerance for dissent, and the likelihood that the universe has just come up with another form of Cybermen, there isn’t time to address it.  The Bronze Knights are potentially just as bad, but they help fight off the Cybermen, and in the end they shoot off into space to carry on the work.  The Doctor remarks that the Agorans have more or less followed their enemies’ evolution and that’s that.  It’s not a moral dilemma so much as dropping a bad thing in your lap and going, “What do you think of that, then?”  Frankly, we have too many action scenes to get through for that sort of thing.

In amongst the carnage, and once it starts it doesn’t let up, we have our regulars.  Now would be a good time to talk about Grant Markham: introduced in Time Of Your Life, he’s the first fully-fledged new companion in the Missing Adventures.  There’s exciting – look at Bernice Summerfield! – but Lyons takes a rather odd path with it.  Separating him from the Doctor doesn’t exactly show off his companion qualities, and indeed there are glib references (or snipes) to how well he’s doing.  (“It’s a new chap – he’s not very good.”  /  “Oh, and by the way, thanks for releasing me.  It’s just a shame you were partly responsible for my capture in the first place.”)  He only came to Agora to address his demons, which seems an odd thing for this Doctor to enable – his successor would be all over it – and at one point he’s so despondent about the misery he’s uncovered, and possibly inflicted, that he decides to become a Bronze Knight.  Then he changes his mind.  To the extent the novel focuses on Grant, it seems to give him a vague purpose on Agora so we can write him out, but then the Doctor has him back at the end anyway.  Yay?

We haven’t known Grant long enough for his catharsis to pay anything off, and Lyons never really brings him to life – a point oddly highlighted by the illustration on the cover.  It’s very good, but it is literally the artist himself, as if nobody really minded what Grant looked like.  The Doctor thinks of him offhand as a way to keep from meeting Mel and becoming the Valeyard.  Frankly, that ain’t the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The Doctor, unsurprisingly given the state of him, is not in a great mood.  (Again that Season 22 snippiness.)  He’s angry at the Agorans for creating the Bronze Knights, he’s not pleased to see Grant because he didn’t rescue him sooner, and his showdown with the Cybermen becomes a strangely vicious shoot-out while he and they die slowly of radiation burns.  Making his way back to the TARDIS, he contemplates suicide to permanently avoid the Valeyard problem, only to have an epiphany and come back springy and optimistic after recuperating in the TARDIS.  Glad we addressed all that, then?  (Admittedly, this sequence is worth it for his monologue.  “I am the Doctor, whether I like it or not!”)

There are interesting things here.  The sorry tale of Madrox, the Overseer who quite likes his job but is catatonic when faced with Cybermen; the madness of Hegelia, who sadly gets what she wants; the generally subverted expectations in the first half.  But there’s also a lot of just slogging through it, as the Cybermen get into fights, the Doctor gets locked up again, Grant has internal wobbles and people die.  We don’t meet too many Agorans and (understandably) those we do never crack a smile, instead juggling varying levels of anguish.  You get used to the violence (except maybe Hegelia’s transformation), with one character gratuitously almost murdered twice before someone finishes the job.  Lyons handles the menace of the Cybermen better than a lot of TV material, but in the end falls into their usual trap – a lot of stomping, blasting and corpses left on the landscape.  You’d need to be a Hegelia-level Cyber fan to really love it.

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #77 – GodEngine by Craig Hinton

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#51GodEngineBy Craig Hinton
Boring.
Well, why dress it up?  Some of these novels are great and deserve to be rediscovered.  Some are abominable.  But there’s a hefty chunk of fillery fan fiction that just sort of... exists.  Books like GodEngine are what most people think of when you say you’re reading a tie-in novel.
As just about any of his reviewers will tell you, Craig Hinton coined the term “fanwank”.  Perhaps the reason it keeps coming up is that, despite nailing the perfectly disdainful term for it, he kept practising it.  GodEngineisn’t as knowingly silly as The Crystal Bucephalus or as creative as Millennial Rites, so a lot of the continuity references just sit uselessly on top of the text.  You expect this from fans, but you’d hope that published writers – fans or otherwise – would rise above it.
Setting your story alongside The Dalek Invasion Of Earth?  You’d better have a random bit-part be related to one of its characters.  Need a tragic back story?  Room for references there!  (“He had lost his job as a psychometric assessor at IMC because he had become hooked on vraxoin.”)  Remember to chuck in nods to Tereleptils, Nimons, Magnus Greel, Professor Kettlewell – anything so that we don’t forget we’re reading Doctor Who.  Although if you can also elbow Star Trek and, sod it, Die Hard then you might get some bonus points.  (Let’s call them garyrussells.)  And hey, going back to Dalek Invasion Of Earth, why not retcon that story’s central (admittedly very silly) plot device into something of your own?  It’s lazier than making up your own thing wholesale, but everyone loves that story so... maybe that’ll rub off somehow?
It’s surprisingly not the first New Adventure to skirt around The Dalek Invasion Of Earth (Lucifer Rising did it better), but at least this one has some added novelty value.  Holy crap, there are Daleks in this?!  Er... sort of.  Numerous books have alluded to or even shown them a bit before, but I suspect GodEnginegoes as far as Virgin’s permissions will allow.  The Daleks are after the titular thingumabob; their ships blow up a moon some of our character are sitting on; a Dalek communicates via hologram; and the resident humans still don’t know what Daleks are.  This keeps them in the shadows, and the actual word count of “Dalek” is kept to a minimum.  (Do the Nation Estate count words?  I wouldn’t rule it out.)  The New Adventures more than survived without a licence to exterminate, but it’s still exciting to glimpse the pepperpots.  The new series and Big Finish have a tendency to overdo them, so the restraint here is refreshing.  But it’s probably the only example of restraint in the novel, and I think Hinton oversteps the mark by changing their motivation in that earlier story.  That’s not adding to a previous script, that’s rewriting it.
As for what he’s rewriting it with... whatever you think the GodEngine is, it’s probably more interesting than what he comes up with.  The book endlessly oohs and ahhs over its big scary namesake – and yes, “GodEngine” isa lazy “Ooh isn’t this epic” name for a Big Bad – and eventually bursts the balloon with... a death ray.  A big-ass death ray, make no mistake, but 200 pages is still an awfully long wait for “I dunno, the thing from Star Wars or whatever?”
Still, I’m undecided whether that is the dampest squib here.  How about the destruction of the TARDIS?  Heavy, laboured sigh… no reader is going to buy that for a nanosecond, and any story or characterisation built on such an obvious fake-out – for instance, the Doctor suddenly turning into a moody, xenophobic jerk – is entirely redundant.  But GodEngine soldiers on, handing you the ultimate blowy-uppiness of the TARDIS in deadly earnest and honestly expecting you to take that as read.  It’s a naff, obvious shock, and one of many decisions that make me surprised this is Craig Hinton’s third book, and not his first go at fan-fiction that fell down the back of his hard drive.
Of course there are other indicators, such as the prose, which wobbles between ghastly and laughable.  Hinton was already over-fond of chopping and changing in The Crystal Bucephalus, but he’s absolutely mad about it here.  We initially leap between 1) the Doctor, Roz and some colonists on Mars, 2) Chris and some scientists on Charon, 3) a group of Ice Warriors and 4) another group of Ice Warriors, but they soon mix it up a bit so we can follow Chris on his own, some of the scientists, various internecine Ice Warrior struggles and more.  For me, nothing stops ongoing tension like changing the setting every half a page.  Nothing builds.  But then, wherever we are we’re stuck with wooden characters, and that includes the regulars.
They’re not helped by the prose or the dialogue, which are creaky even on a technical level.  Hinton can’t distinguish between interesting details and technobabble, so you end up with turgid claptrap like “it was an optical illusion caused by the universe’s interaction with the primary subspace meniscus”, or endless dramatic moments hinging on a “subspace infarction”, or just fantasy gloop like “Thanks to the Fississ-cal-oon, Aklaar, Cleece, Esstar and Sstaal had reached Ikk-ett-Saleth.”  Jesus, imagine it as an audiobook!  Most of the book is a trek through the innards of Mars, but it never feels very important that anyone gets anywhere, and none of the locations or perils stand out.
Hinton is obsessed with putting the other character’s name into every line, so it’s “But wait, Doctor,” then “What is it, Roz”, even when there’s only two characters in the room.  Some names get said three or four times per page – it’s like the characters can’t understand who is speaking unless there’s a formal invitation.  Heartfelt moments are often signified by a touch on the arm – or in one not-meant-to-be-hilarious moment, two separate arm-touches on the same guy – and sometimes you get a bit of both.  “Sstaal squeezed McGuire’s hand.  ‘I can only [forgive you] once you have forgiven yourself.  And that, Antony, is going to be the hardest thing of all.’”  As for how Hinton handles the Ice Warriors, that was one speaking, so yeah, they sound just as clumsily melodramatic as everyone else here.  We do find out that their hand-clamps are just wildly impractical gloves, and there’s a bit where one of them gets his genitals out, so that’s like, two garyrussells right there, probably?
Meanwhile, back-story is unspooled like we’re using it to put out fires.  One angry character dislikes Martians, as well as people who like Martians: “Bleeding heart liberal!  McGuire’s wife and children were dead because the Martians had acted first.”  /  “McGuire blamed the Ice Warriors for the death of his wife and children; discovering that one of the party was preparing to give birth to a new generation of Martians probably wasn’t the best news that he could have received.”  The prose is always happy to wade in and point out the obvious, or better yet ask an inane rhetorical question.  “[She] began to wonder about this mysterious Michael.  He had obviously influenced Rachel’s feelings towards Martians, but how, why?”  /  “Had the destruction of the TARDIS been the final straw; was he cracking up on them?”  /  “‘Is that important?’  Obviously it was, but given the Doctor’s current reticence to engage in conversation, such questions were necessary, just to keep him talking.”  /  “‘Any good ideas?’  Because she certainly didn’t have any.”  /  “‘Professor Anders?  The head of the ill-fated Charon research project?’  She nodded.  Who was this odd-looking man?  ‘And you?’”  GodEngine’s characters sound like absolute idiots, mentally narrating a film trailer from the ’50s and prefacing or underlining every thought.  I was willing the death ray to explode.
So we come to the regulars, and… oh dear.  It seems safe to assume that Hinton intended Bernice to be in this one, as 1) it’s a novel primarily about Mars and Ice Warriors, and 2) the novel never shuts up about the fact that Bernice isn’t in it, even ending with a Martian symbolically giving Roz a book of Martian lore… to give to Benny at some point, even though he hasn’t met her.  Roz is somewhat out of sorts here, making occasional efforts towards flippancy and getting teary-eyed at the sight of the TARDIS (oh shoot, spoiler alert?), and generally feeling like a dodgy Bernice substitute.  (But we do get some Rozzy signifiers with typical GodEngine grace: “But xenophobia’s my province, isn’t it?”)  Chris spends most of his time away from the Doctor, believing – as the Doctor and Roz do of him – that his friends are dead.  This is as compelling as when Hinton “killed off” Tegan and Turlough in Bucephalus.

There are two varyingly unfriendly groups of Martians in this, and Chris has run-ins with the worst of them, eventually going on a one-man terrorist spree to distract them, using tools given to him by the Doctor.  He’s really chuffed with this, and so is the Doctor: “That was a very nice bit of terrorism.”  At one point it’s confirmed that 200 Martians died because of it.  Very nice work, indeed.  For good measure, Roz becomes suspicious of one of the humans, who it turns out committed several murders during their journey.  They bond, her motivation turns out to be sort of for the good of mankind, and then Roz and co. just sort of forget about the murdering bit.  Charming.  Still, we shouldn’t be asking the Doctor any moral questions, as he thinks the TARDIS has been destroyed, which apparently gives him cart blanche to make xenophobic assumptions about Martians, long past the point when it’s demonstrated again that their society has facets just like anybody else’s.  Who.  Are.  These.  People?
It’s obvious from the afterword that Craig Hinton wanted to do the Ice Warriors proud, but for whatever reason, a good novel was not the result.  All his worst writerly habits have a field day – there’s no grasp of the characters, new or established, no compelling drive to the story, but significant time is given to fanwank.  Viewing it charitably, it’s bland and by-the-numbers, you’ve read worse.  But viewing it now, having just spent what felt like 58 years on a load of thankless dreck, I’m annoyed they let it escape.
3/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #76 – The Sands Of Time by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#22
The Sands Of Time
By Justin Richards

Well this didn’t go how I expected.

Not that I had any preconceived notions about the plot.  It’s a Pyramids Of Mars sequel, so Sutekh’s probably in it and there are definitely some mummies.  Otherwise I’m happy to be surprised.  It’s more that it’s a popular book, again obviously, because if you’re only going to get one Missing Adventure you’ll probably go for the sequel to a popular story.  It’s written by Justin Richards who’s a trusted hand at Doctor Who, and I’ve wanted to read it since I was little.  Reviews for it have been enthusiastic.
And it’s... quite dull.  Like, I’d better pair my socks, hold on while I check Facebook, is there anything good on the telly, please let there be something I can do instead of read thisdull.  It’s a perfectly average length for a Missing Adventure, yet reading it took weeks.  And I’m not (just) being a jerk about the story Justin Richards is telling – although I have issues with that too.  The major problem with The Sands Of Time is structural, and it scuppers the book right away.
Shortly after arriving in the British Museum, circa late Victorian, the Doctor and Tegan lose Nyssa.  They immediately bump into someone who appears to know them already, who invites them to a mummy unwrapping.  (Those were a thing, and are what inspired Richards to write the book.)  Everyone present seems to be acquainted with the Doctor and Tegan, as it turns out they’ve been on an adventure already.  Then they unwrap the mummy – and as you can probably guess, it isn’t Boris Karloff.
Like The Left-Handed Hummingbird, The Sands Of Time is largely an ouroboros loop: it’s already happened to everyone else here, so the characters need to play catch-up.  This is stylistically challenging for Richards, and a bit of a puzzler for the reader, but in narrative terms – your mileage may vary – it’s anathema.  We know from the outset that the Doctor and Tegan will survive X, Y and Z just to get to this point, as well as roughly what X, Y and Z are.  We know what’s going to happen to the mummy in order for there to be a mummy to unwrap.  (I.e., “Lie down”, followed by “nothing”.)  Yes, we always know no major character is going to get killed off between televised episodes, but there’s a certain disbelief you need for episodic television to work, and Sands throws cold water on it.  An early “shock” involves the abduction of one character and the subsequent reveal of the mummy, who is pronounced dead in one chapter (cue much wailing from Tegan and “Really?” from the reader) and then pronounced still alive immediately afterwards.  At the same time, it’s frantic and inert.
Richards starts his story almost as late as possible, which many will tell you is the best way to do it; the trouble is, he then back-fills his way to that point.  How did said person end up as a mummy?  Here you go.  How did the mummy end up in Kenilworth House?  Like this.  Did the Doctor and Tegan really run all the errands we’re told they did, such as eating lunch and laying out clothes?  They did indeed.  About 200 pages go by without seriously progressing anything.  The tension here is pretty much how Arnold Rimmer describes himself: dead as a can of spam.  Richards chucks in time-travelling asides between chapters, which he admits (in his introduction) are not really necessary but add a sense of scope.  I’d argue they take a narrative already on life support and regularly pause it so you can go to the loo.
As for the adventure itself, Richards seems more concerned with making sure the pieces fit together than with crafting interesting pieces in the first place.  The expedition is a forgettable mummy-fest; he wrote a much creepier expedition-gone-wrong in Theatre Of War, complete with murderous automatons.  When the familiar bandaged service robots show up, it all feels a bit rote.
The wider problem here is our rogues’ gallery.  The mummies were never as interesting or scary as Sutekh, so there’s not much you can do with them.  We get a couple of reanimated corpses, leading to a familial murder blatantly nicked from Pyramids, but their ring-leader Rassul is as dry and desiccated as the mummies; he’s far too talkative to give you the creeps like Marcus Scarman did.  Then we have the Big Bad, Nephthys, who is apparently even worse than Sutekh.  We’re literally told this a few times: “Her brother told me that all life would perish under his rule.  That where he trod he left only dust and darkness.  Nephthys is worse.”  But you know what they say about telling vs. showing.  Nephthys has scarcely any measurable presence in the story until the very end, and all the half-hearted insistence in the world that she’s a double-mega-ultra Sutekh can’t substitute actually seeing that on the page.  I wasn’t convinced for a sentence.
The heroes are pitched about the same: scarcely a personality between them.  Richards deliberately put a “linking” character in there, Atkins, who could be a consistent presence in the slightly fractured narrative.  Which is all well and good, except Atkins is a cardboard cut-out of a butler with hardly any interests or traits.  He asks a lot of questions and has a painfully chaste longing for Miss Warne, another staff-member at Kenilworth.  Atkins is supposed to learn and grow through the course of the story, but he does this like Data, in a Next Generation episode written by Data.  “Probably, Tegan thought, [Atkins] was a bit bored and lost.  But of course he did not show it, any more than he showed any real emotion.”  /  “[Atkins] had read and heard of the value of expressing one’s emotions.”  (Eventually he asks Miss Warne to have dinner!)  His primary function is to be a bit bewildered, but only enough to ask unceasing and perfunctory questions; he’s far too butlery to actually react.
Despite the rather alarming nature of the plot, for her anyway, Tegan falls into a similar trap.  I often laughed at the sheer amount of what-does-this-do and what-does-that-mean bumf Tegan spouts in this.  There’s a whole blob of exposition, nearly 200 pages in, where the Doctor has to explain to her why you can’t arbitrarily change history.  Yes, this may be news to Tegan, but is any Who-fan reading it going to be surprised?  It’s hardly fresh ground for Doctor Who.  (To be fair, it was fresher ground back when this book was published, before New Who did these sorts of conversations to death.  But even within the book, if the reader doesn’t get it by now then you’re a bit late explaining it.)  The Fifth Doctor is about as vanilla as he gets, despite a few amusing moments where he puts his foot in it with Tegan or Nyssa.  Without a compelling intelligence to face off against, since it’s literally asleep for most of the book, he spends all his time tying up loose ends.  There’s no memorable battle of wills.
The whole book feels like Richards has got his structure – which you may or may not hate from the outset – and he’s got the outline of the adventures that fill it, but he hasn’t fleshed any of it out.  There are small, random efforts, like Nyssa suddenly pining for her father (that’s a big enough issue to mine for a whole book, let alone a random paragraph in a story which barely features her), and the sad family that is forced to hand down the responsibility of waiting for the Doctor to show up.  There’s also a tragic romance which would amount to a lot more if, well, it amounted to anything; when we arrive at the plagiaristic Scarman vs. Scarman murder, it’s as surface-level horrible as any murder.
I wonder, from reading around on this book, if the Monsters Collection used an earlier draft.  There are certainly more errors than there should be, like: “The Doctor shook his heardsuddenly”, “A Mummy from Eygpt”, “She was finding it difficult to breathwithout coughing.”  There are a few questionable word choices or possible typos, either way crying out for a red pen: “He caught the smallest glimpse of Nyssa’s flailing trailing leg,” “She spent little time in considering how much this was like travelling with the Doctor, and more dragging dragging her feet.”  And the prose is often functional bordering on tedious, like the number of times Richards manages to get “fog”, “foggy” and “cobbles” into a couple of pages before surprising our heads off with this being… Victorian London?!  (Gasp!)  Richards has written significantly better than this elsewhere, and I feel like a tidier version of this must exist.  But then, at what point would you ditch the red pen?  I’d question the whole flip-flopping time travel bit, bulk up the villain role, either trim the supporting cast or add some more flavour, and send Atkins on an intensive How To Be Interesting course.  (Heck, give him some Jeeves & Wooster tapes.)
Richards wrote it on the road, in chunks.  He’s nostalgic about that, but I wish he hadn’t confirmed it: all of a sudden it’s perfectly obvious this is a narrative he periodically picked up and dropped, because that’s the level of excitement it engenders.  It must take some guts to rock up with a sequel to Pyramids Of Mars – and a pitch that equates to showing you a painted wall, then promising to explain in detail how the paint dried.
4/10

D.I.Y. Of The Daleks

Doctor Who
Resolution
2019 New Year's Day Special

Daleks.  Oh, go on then.  (And don’t say you weren’t warned, because 1) I’m a week late and 2) the BBC ruined it in their own trailer – but only by chucking an “Exterminate” in there, not in a big or showy way that might actually have helped the ratings.  Truly, the current Doctor Who wing of the BBC couldn’t advertise a piss-up in the proverbial.)

Sure, you can have too much of a good thing, and there’s only so much you can do with shouty pepperpots.  But the only iconic thing in Series 11 was the TARDIS, and they managed to make thatlook like a rotten honeycomb filled with fingers.  After ten middling episodes where none of the main cast get hurt and nothing is complicated, a recognisable and dangerous monster is a sight for sore eyes.


Go on then: what are "cosmic fireworks"?
No remotely sci-fi explanation here, of course.  That would be weird.To his credit, Chris Chibnall gives us a slightly different Dalek.  Initially without its famous casing, the creature inside attaches itself to Lin, an archaeologist, and promptly sends her on a mission to get a message to the Dalek fleet and conquer Earth.  It’s a boringly simple plan – this isChibnall – and it essentially shadows Rob Shearman’s (obviously superior) episode, Dalek, where one Dalek runs amok and tries to get the band back together.  But hey ho, it’s a creepy journey to get there.  The Dalek hides under Lin’s coat and gives her instructions only she can hear, literally puppeteering her.  It’s nice seeing Daleks out of their element, and not trying to merge their DNA with humans or somesuch.  Nothing else the Dalek does is particularly interesting, but that opening – up until, say, it starts chatting to the Doctor – is pretty gnarly.

Plus the episode has a fun start even before we get to the Dalek.  Centuries ago – in locales signified with great big place-names, aww – a mysterious menace was defeated, just barely, and its body was separated into three bits.  These were buried on “opposite sides” of the Earth (can you have three opposite sides?), with a guardian sitting to watch each piece, and their descendants after them.  It’s suitably Lord Of The Rings prologue-ian, including the bit where one of them gets haplessly taken down by an arrow.  (Bad luck, mate: you beat a Dalek, and this is how it ends?  His assailants don’t even take his one obviously valuable possession.  He got murdered by morons!)  Cut to 2019 where two archaeologists (Lin and Mitch) discover the hapless guardian’s bones, and his quarry which incredibly wasn’t touched or stolen in all this time.  (Maybe it snowed a lot, immediately?)  Lin and Mitch are likeable enough, in that strange way of everyone who isn’t a main character (not including Graham) in Series 11; they’re one-note, but real enough that you’d miss them if they immediately carked it, which it feels like they’re going to.  Before this can happen, Chibnall handles their dialogue about a kiss on New Year’s Eve with his usual aplomb, i.e you’ll wish a Dalek would enter screen left and take them both out, but they do their best.  Lin is the best “new” thing here, with Charlotte Ritchie slipping smoothly between her good and bad selves.  Whereas Mitch doesn’t amount to much besides Bloke Who Fancies Lin And Owns A History Book.  Pretty soon he’s a fuzzy bit in the background, Yaz-style.

My interest really began to sag with the arrival of Team TARDIS.  Sue me: it’s been a long ten episodes, and while lovely Graham has made every scene he’s in a lot better, glimpsing the rest of them is like running into bubbly workmates you hate outside of work, and fatally making eye contact.  The Doctor promptly arrives, lists her three best mates and sends the archaeologists packing, allowing Yaz to do the only policeman-like thing she’s done in ages: sound like a policeman when she sends them out.  Suck it up, it’s also her only contribution to the episode.  Apart from this absolute side-splitter, delivered in earnest: “Hi, it’s Yasmin Khan.  We met in the sewers earlier.”  And to be fair, she does her usual bit of asking inane questions – “Where’s it going?  What’s it doing?”  Actual, consecutive dialogue there – but at this point, I seriously wonder how good the pay must be that Mandip Gill keeps coming to work.  Save yourself, Mandip.  This.  Is.  Not.  A.  Part.

Faring much better is Tosin Cole, because it’s that time at last, as Ryan’s dad shows up.  It’s just about plausible that this happens on the same day a Dalek gets loose, as his dad is doing a new year / make amends thing, and the Dalek is uncovered on New Year’s Day for gossipy, kissy reasons established earlier.  Anyway, Cole is really good in the scenes with his dad, gazing in disbelief at the nerve of the man.   Daniel Adegboyega seems suitably fish-out-of-water as Aaron, although their scenes do come with a free gift – specifically, a microwave oven he lugs around hoping to sell.  Neither Ryan nor you are safe from his sales pitch, which tells us 1) Chris Chibnall only just found out about microwave ovens, and he is SUPER PSYCHED, you guys!  And 2) THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT LATER.  They might as well have had those words flash on screen.  But before we get to the amazing, fantabulous microwave oven invention of 2019, a word for Bradley Walsh’s scenes with Aaron, which is: also brilliant.  Okay, two words, but Graham’s had more of an arc than anyone this series, and his pride at finally having Ryan’s approval (even if it came all of a sudden one week ’cos, sigh, Series 11) translates into some very believable anger at Aaron.  It’s also hilarious when he calls the Doctor and demands to be picked up, because there’s only so long before righteous indignation becomes awkward boredom when you’re stuck with the guy.

Hey, where is the Doctor, anyway?  Well, with Lin making her way to a weapons storage facility the Dalek found online, where a Dalek weapon is helpfully right on top of a pile of stuff, and murdering several policemen on the way – two of them on dash cam, Lin’s car in full view – the Doctor has got to find it.  So, she… stays in the TARDIS, doing that horrendous hot-footed-wobble thing Jodie Whittaker does when she’s saying something important (or busting for a pee), and trying to figure out what to do.  And it’s here I need to mention another reason you should be glad to see the Daleks: they’re a litmus test for the Doctor.  In some ways, an actor hasn’t really beenthe Doctor until they’ve faced the Daleks.  It’s the worst of the worst, and they’ve got to step it up.  No Doctor has ever needed a kick up the personality as badly as Jodie, who even now is giving it the mouth-gaping, snort-frowning, magic-wand-sonic hot-foot-wobble bullshit that has come not so much to define her, as fill the void.  A Dalek should be a test, and she should come out of it finally sounding, or for the love of god at least looking like the boss.


Chibnall has heard criticisms that his version of the show isn't funny.
Not to worry: he brought Dad jokes.Does she?  Well what do you think this is, a magic lamp?  Of course the Doctor in Resolutionis the same useless moron she’s been for ten episodes.  The people making the show like her this way.  So, when finally getting the Dalek on the blower, she orders it to let Lin go.  For no particular reason, with no threat of retaliation if it won’t, just, let her go please, or else nothing.  And it laughs at her.  (Yes!  I said they’d do that!  Vindicated!)  The Doctor promptly reveals that she’s stalling for time – aha! – because the Dalek effortlessly shorted out the TARDIS’s navigation.  (In fact it’s worse than that: it doesn’t know this is a TARDIS, so the Dalek shorted out the TARDIS’s navigation without trying.)  And afterwards, the Dalek merrily on its way (three dead by this point), the Doctor goes into hot pursuit!  Only the Dalek shoots out the traffic cameras on which she was relying (?), leaving her up a creek.  Oh.  But don’t panic, she can call for help!  (Really?)  And this scene is probably meant to cough “Brexit” none-too-quietly, as a bored operator tells the Doctor that UNIT are suspended due to funding problems.  Hilarious use of dead air, this.  The Doctor, disheartened, tells her gang that they’re on their own.

For crying out loud, right?  This is the Doctor.  She didn’t suss that it was a Dalek – to be fair all she saw was some goo on a wall, but she’s seen all the goo – she didn’t stop the Dalek at any point, and the script takes time out to inadvertently mock her for needing help from UNIT, then for failing to get it.  It’s even a bit hilarious that they have to go to all this trouble to stop one Dalek, when a bunch of medieval dudes managed it centuries ago without any technology.  So much for a more advanced kind of Dalek, right?

You can argue Chibnall isn’t trying to make his hero look like complete garbage, but he’s doing an awful lot of it by accident.  Thank goodness though, because they eventually locate the Dalek in a shed somewhere, and land in a field nearby.  Body #4 has dropped by this point, good job there.  The Doctor finally meets the Dalek, which improbably has built an entire new casing with shed parts – Chris Chibnall apparently believes you can manufacture literally anything in a shed, including rocket boosters, missiles and sonic screwdrivers.  She promptly tells it she’s the Doctor, because… nope, not sure why she wanted to paint an extra bullseye on herself, but I guess it’s de rigeur.  And what does she do then?  I’ll let the Doctor explain: “I slightly riled it and let it get away.”  Head.  Desk.  Head up.  Desk again.

After a spot of effortless army swatting, the Dalek whizzes off to GCHQ – don’t worry if you don’t know what it stands for, they really got you covered – hoping to send its message.  At this point you’re hoping the Doctor will unveil some sort of plan, and don’t panic, she is.  But panic a bit, because you seem to have forgotten who you’re dealing with.

Step 1: Politely ask the Dalek to go away.  Give it no incentive to do so and offer no tangible threat to stop it from staying and accomplishing its mission.
Step 2: Try to contain your surprise when it tells you to go exterminate yourself.
Step 3: RUNREALLYFASTSLIDEONTHEFLOORANDHOPEITDOESN’TSHOOTYOU, and best of luck with that as Daleks have 360 degree vision.  Except kidding, it’s crap at targeting now, you’ll be fine.
Step 4: Microwave oven time!  Hell yeah!  Why so stingy with the microwave oven action, Chris?  As we all know, when in doubt, disassembling a kitchen appliance and cobbling it together over an angry Dalek without a plug socket will… do something, probably.
Step 5: Bang.

By this point, Aaron is hanging around the TARDIS – which everyone else is constantly doing so it’s only fair he gets a turn.  As much as fans long for an episode set in the TARDIS, it’s the depths of the TARDIS they’re talking about, all the funky rooms full of weird stuff.  Not the console room, from which Jodie Whittaker barely strays all episode.  It’s contained.  It’s safe.  No one is in any danger, except all the hapless extras outside.  It’s also a time machine, for god’s sake, so they can comfortably take as long as they like working stuff out – knowing Jodie, weeks– and return in time to stop it.  Not that Chibnall has any interest in time, of course, as complications might put off the Eastenders crowd.

Aaron and Ryan’s scenes have been pretty good up to this point, microwave oven adverts notwithstanding, but they don’t exactly marry up to the plot.  We just cut limply between Ryan and his dad struggling to get on – or Graham and Ryan’s dad struggling to get on – and the Doctor and co. struggling to work anything out or do anything in the TARDIS.  The Dalek almost makes it through the episode unmolested.  (So to speak.)  At the end, we finally marry up the threads, with the mutant taking poor Aaron for a spin.  And, single note of relief here, they don’t do the heroic sacrifice bit you can hear lurching towards you.  But with the Doctor’s spectacularly stupid plan of opening the TARDIS doors on a supernova and hoping the air tunnel will suck the mutant, sans Aaron, out to its doom (?), we get pretty bloody close.  Yes, the Doctor miscalculates and Ryan has to save his dad.  Chris, you do understand the value of the Doctor, don’t you?  That we’re supposed to be impressed, a little perplexed, and ultimately able to rely on her?


"Not bad for a kid with dyspraxia, eh?"
Bit of a plot hole, this.  He's never mentioned having dyspraxia before.Ryan forgives his dad because he thought he was going to die, and not because he meaningfully made amends.  Which is great.  (The useless bastard had to ask Ryan what he needed him to say.  It’s SORRY, you complete ass-hat.)  Then the Doctor and co. confidently strut off to “everywhere”, which here sounds like “I couldn’t think of an exciting location to send them to at the end”, and Lin and Mitch are left back at the dig – which is nice, except Lin is on at least one camera murdering police officers, they’ll have her registration number and her car even if they didn’t catch her face, and she murdered several other folks too.  No ramifications at all here?  Uhh… best give Mitch a quick kiss before the fuzz arrive, Lin mate.

Honestly, I didn’t hate Resolution.  It’s just that there aren’t a lot of positives.  Creative start?  Tick, though it’s a weird choice to lose the title sequence.  (Always be selling the show!  For god’s sake, are they deliberately tanking it?)  The Dalek is a bit different in some ways, and it gets a steampunk-y redesign which ought to go down well, even if it just looks like Thanos squashed its top half.  Graham and Ryan are really good.  But it’s not Graham Who, it’s not Dalek Who: the Doctor, once again, is the least impressive thing here.  (Unless you count Yaz, holding the coats in the corner.  Ah, shit, she’s dropped them.)  Attempts to make the Doctor funny mostly come off awkward, and attempts to make her impressive die on their backsides.  Her dressing down of Aaron specifically for failing Ryan as a parent might be fair, but it’s about as alien and Doctorly as watching Corrie on the regular.  I’m out of patience with the way she’s written and performed, and right now I don’t know what’s worse: Chibnall deliberately writing her as a useless, unremarkable dunderhead, or him doing that by accident.  No, a new scarf doesn’t make all the difference.  (More weird advertising from the Beeb.  ERMAGERD, A SCARF?  WHY DIDN’T YOU BREAK THAT OUT EARLIER?!)

There’s something quite sad about giving up the Christmas slot.  Steven Moffat even stretched out Doctor Twelve’s regeneration to keep it.  Yes, it must be a tremendous strain writing something “Christmassy” every single year – although come on, you can just bolt a bit of snow on at the end, can’t you?  What’s Christmassy about the festive Eastendersepisode, where someone always dies, or the festive Mrs Brown’s Boys where you wish you would?  But seriously, Christmas is a big deal for TV scheduling, it’s a prestige thing, and Doctor Who just gave it up.  Chibnall couldn’t write one of the things.  Instead he sets it on New Year’s Day, a day people are generally too hungover to care about and, evidently, aren’t that bothered about what’s on TV either.  There are a few half-hearted references to New Year here – including the Doctor’s “resolution” to find and stop the Dalek, but aren’t resolutions more of a “work on it all year” thing?  Oh right, never mind – but evidently there’s bugger all interestingto say about this day either.  At least we’ve finally seen a Dalek again, and it was quite nice, really.  But on balance, I’d be happier if it won.

The Tooth Fury

Doctor Who
The Battle Of Ranskoor Av KolosSeries Eleven, Episode Ten

That’s a wrap on Series 11.  Did they save the best for last?  Guess.

There have been some odd production choices this year – and you have to hope they are choices, rather than concessions.  (Though that just makes them odder.)  We’ve maintained near-radio silence on what the episodes are about; cut down Next Time trailers appear after each one telling you practically nowt; we’ve lost two episodes a series; shifted it to Sunday nights; given up the Christmas slot; and oh, look at that, there’s no series at all next year.  Wizard!  Perhaps their next brilliant innovation will be to turn the show invisible.

Besides which, there’s no arc.  This is nice for people who fear tuning in mid-run, though they must be in the minority in an era of streaming and binge-watching, in which Doctor Whopresumably wants to survive.  It doesn’t exactly stoke the folks who are already watching it each week; shouldn’t you try to keep them hooked?  What happens when you get to the finale, and there’s nothing to wrap up?


"We're gonna have to carry this one, aren't we?"
"Like a couple of removal men, cockle."Er, this happens.  The same expectations apply and you have to finale regardless, and because you have to wrap something up it just becomes a question of what you’ve got to work with.  Because of another “helpful” production choice – no returning monsters, stuff your Dalek Radio Times covers – Chris Chibnall has Tim Shaw, tooth-faced alien git from the pilot episode, who teleported away to fates unknown.  (There was also Krasko the space racist, but they’re presumably saving him for Series 12.)  Tim wasn’t very enrapturing the first time, but them’s the brakes – problem though.  How can an ease-you-in-gently first episode baddie be retooled into a finale threat?  (Spoiler: dunno.)

Keen to find out, the TARDIS team follow a series of distress calls to Ranskoor Av Kolos.  (“Ranskoor Av what?” says Yaz, like “Kolos” is the weird bit.  But she’s right that it’s a stupid name.)  I was hoping this would separate them so they could investigate on their own, but no, they all troop over together to a crashed spaceship.  There they meet a troubled amnesiac played by Mark Addy; his crew has been kidnapped by Tim Shaw, who is keen to recover a mysterious object from the ship.  Team TARDIS must rescue the crew, so they bring the object along with them (do you think that’s wise?), and along the way Graham tells the Doctor he’s going to kill Tim if he gets a chance.  The Doctor tells him “if you kill him, you become the same as him.”  (Hmmm.)  All the while, the planet is emitting psychic waves that rob you of your memory and cause (among other things) mood swings.  (Literally, she lists three things and “change moods” is the third one.  Oh no, not mood swings!)  Luckily the Doctor has a bunch of neural balancers that cancel it out, but she urges them to keep them on at all times.  Remember that, everyone, it’ll be important later!

Despite the lack of build-up earlier in the series, there are interesting points here.  I’ve not even mentioned the opening: two people, the Ux, are on a (quarry!) barren alien world practicing some kind of mind-powers on the rocks (it’s a quarry!) when a strange alien arrives (in a quarry!).  Then we cut to 3,407 years later – a Moffaty trope so old, it’ll blow dust right into your eyes, though it’s sort of novel now.  Aliens with weird mind-powers, a planet that attacks your moods, crashed spaceships, audacious time cuts, and later on some plot elements right out of Douglas Adams.  Yeah, you could do something with this.

Who’s the episode by, again?

Your first little warning sign is how long it takes everybody to get to the action.  But that’s Series 11 all over: when in doubt, plod, plod, plod until something takes pity on you and happens.  It’s all written with Chibnall’s usual sci-fi panache, e.g. “I think I’ve found the on button!”, or “These panels must do something!”, or this shining intellectual moment for Yaz: “I think that’s the rest of them.”  “So there’s four in total!”  She’ll be counting in her head, next.

Still, the best bits are in the plodding.  Bradley Walsh plays a typical blinder again, being coldly determined when he talks to the Doctor, then eye-rolling with self-justification when Ryan tries to nag him out of killing Tim Shaw, then reassuringly human when he can’t do it after all.  An obvious arc, certainly, but well sold.  His and Ryan’s scenes are where the funny lines have been hiding out: “You see anything?  “Of course I can’t see anything, I’m looking at the same things as you.”  And their scenes escalate cleverly, with Ryan pointing out that he played the “Granddad” card last week.  (And Graham moaning that it took too long!)  Ryan’s “I love you” is so embarrassed and awkward that it’s utterly genuine, and really funny.  Graham on his own is brilliant; Ryan on his own is mostly pointless, but paired with Graham, it works.  If I had to recommend The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos for one reason, it’s this.


"But... how can he know you?"
Why is that such a sticking point?  He's basically god to them.
Isn't it weirder that she knows him?Which isn’t to knock the rest of the cast, but let’s face it, “amnesiac” doesn’t give Mark Addy much to work with.  (He tries to make a meal out of “I still remember how to take down robots,” but it turns out all that involves is Shoot Them With A Gun.  Uh, well done?)  Then you have the Ux, stars of the pleasantly weird opening scene.  The two aliens that enable Tim Shaw’s current scheme, it’s hard to sympathise with or care about them.  In 3,000 years it never occurred to them that their pet psycho isn’tthe one their prophecies spoke of?  How did he convince them?  (And if they can build anything with their minds, why are they so amazed by teleporters?)  Tim is his usual charming self every time we see him; does he put on a terribly convincing God act when we’re not looking?  It only takes the Doctor a couple of conversations to convince them of the truth.  “You are a couple of awesome Ux,” says the Doctor going for maximum cringe.  A couple of highly dangerous and award-winning morons, more like.  See also: when Tim is defeated and the Doctor leaves Mark and the Ux to get along and explore the universe, aren’t we forgetting all the broken spaceships and dead people?  The Ux helped that happen.  You’re just going to ignore that then, despite earlier telling Graham he’s as bad as Tim Shaw if he kills him?  Righty ho, then!

Because oh right, the plot.  Weirdly, it has elements that feel like they belong in a finale, even if the episode doesn’t feel like it isone.  Tim is using the Ux to collect and shrink planets that have wronged him – you could do something with that in earlier episodes, and while that would have felt like a Stolen Earth rip, what we get here is definitely a Pirate Planet rip.  (Imagine if The Pirate Planet was really, really, reeeeeeallynot written by Douglas Adams.)  Sure enough the next planet is Earth, and the Doctor must stop the Ux (who are totally awesome and not a danger to everyone in the universe, nuh uh!) from helping him.  Her only option, which she thinks of only after much clomping around (and only once Yaz has thought of it too, and probably Timmy Thicko in the back row as well) is to put the neural balancers on the Ux!  But wait, you say – what will that do to the Doctor and Yaz?!  I’ve been waiting for this since they set it up at the start!  Aaaaand, it does nothing at all.  It totally works, the Doctor gets a slight headache afterwards and then asks for her neural balancer back.  You couldn’t make it up.  Achievement Unlocked: Ineptitude.

But there are other perils here, surely?  Well sure, there’s those planets – but by all accounts, they’re all restored to normality at the end.  No harm, no foul?  There’s certainly no reaction from anyone on Earth when the whole planet changes colour for some reason.  Hang on, though – SniperBots!  Yes, it’s a bit pathetic that that is the level of “Remember me?” monster we’re getting this year, and it’s just weird that Tim has coincidentally made a bunch of the same robots we saw in Episode 2; it’s also puzzling why he didn’t just send the damn robots to retrieve his planet-rock from the harmless amnesiac dude at any time.  But still, SniperBots!  Who, at one point, come up on Ryan and Graham and then blast each other to bits because Ryan and Graham ducked.  Worth it.


Oh, but come on.  There’s Tim!  Who among us wasn’t counting the days?  Setting aside the curious notion of anyone wanting to see him again, Tim isn’t any scarier because of his Big Bad Scheme, he just does a lot of his usual standing around and snarling – and maybe or maybe not dying when he’s without his mask, it’s not really clear.  In the end, Graham easily subdues him with a gunshot to the foot, then locks him up forever.  So he was just a daft monster-of-the-week… except in 3,000 years, no one managed anything similar?  What kind of horrendous luck were all those guys having?  (Oh right, the wonderful Ux kept killing them.  Yay Ux.)  The best thing about Tim’s return is him blaming the Doctor for sending him here in the first place, and therefore causing all this, but need you ask, they do bollocks all with that.


"Hi, Creator?  It's me, the Ux.  Just... just wondering about the teeth, really."The stakes aren’t exactly high, are they?  This is the finale, but it feels like a wet Sunday afternoon.  But that’s the playing field with this Doctor.  No, Chris, endlessly repeating that she’s “clever” does not make it so; we all know a gee-I-hope-this-works magic-wand-point when we see one.  Yet again, the Doctor doesn’t seem to knowanything.  She’s forever badgering people for answers or flapping about until they independently come to her.  She even tries to torture the I-know-nothing bit into a sign of great intelligence.  “I don’t have to answer all these questions.”  “That’s what my teachers used to say, just before they quit teaching.  I’ve got so many questions.”  (Asking questions is a sign of an enquiring mind, but it would be nice if it helped her ever come prepared.)  At one point she even says “We’re really clever,” meaning her and Yaz!  Yaz, who bumbles around looking utterly bewildered by basic conversation.  Is Chibnall incapable of writing an intelligent character, or is he deliberately talking down to his audience, or both?  Because dude, people won’t run screaming if the ancient genius in the title role knows something they don’t.

Screw it, ten weeks is enough to know, isn’t it?  Worst.  New Who.  Doctor.  At this rate, she might be at the bottom of the fifty-year pile.  The quest to make her as relatable as possible has meant a supposed genius who mustn’t outsmart the audience.  Everything sounds like a guess, and each one comes as easily as a mammal laying eggs.  No wonder she’s crashed back to relying on the sonic.  We still get some of the random eccentricities that New Who uses for “alien” shorthand, but there’s nothing to back it up.  Case in point, the bit where she mutters to herself about wellies (and having half invented them) just sounds like an actor riffing in desperation.  Whittaker plays every script dead straight, throwing out fewer variations than “Press 1 for brooding, 2 for angry” Tennant.  At least he gave it some welly.

The Doctor is the linchpin of the show.  He or she is the bit you can rely on, even if the script stinks.  Look at Peter Capaldi and Matt Smith rescuing terrible material on the regular.  It’s part of the job!  And to be fair to Jodie, they didn’t just have workmanlike dross to work with.  They had Eleventh Hours and Heaven Sents, too.  But god, what is she doing to lift any of this up?  The same hand gestures, the same restless wobbling back and forth, the same weird lip curl, the same generic excitement that could come from anyone at CBBC.  It’s truly not her fault that the scripts are less interesting than an instruction manual, but you’d hope for somethingunique in her performance to set it apart.  Maybe for the first time, it’s not happening.  Out of the four main characters, I’d rather spend a scene with Graham.  I’m glad there haven’t been any Daleks, as they’d just burst into uncharacteristic laughter and blast her before she even figured out what she was looking at.  The Doctor is out.

Oy, it’s been a rough series.  Remember that this is Chibnall’s first, and what it was like when Russell and Moffat started – a starburst of ideas each, with hits and misses to be sure, but hits.  They each set out a vision for the show, one an irreverent fast-paced sci-fi drama with a lot of heart, the other a clever fairytale in space.  Few of these episodes are truly ghastly, as admittedly some of Chibs’ predecessors’ were, but the bar is so low now.  The plots sit patiently and wait for you to catch up, even if you’re there already.  The characters spout dialogue in turn, but they don’t often grow or relate to each other, unless they’re Graham, or a combination of people that involves Graham.  They certainly haven’t made the Three Companions thing actually work, although they have made it significantly harder to have a big guest cast.  There are good episodes to be found here, but the good bits tend to belong to characters who don’t travel in the TARDIS.  For all the Doctor’s random speechifying at the end, about how amazing the universe is and how it can surprise you, there don’t seem to be many surprises in Doctor Who as it stands.  Perhaps they needed the year off to figure out why they’re doing this in the first place, and why it seems like such hard work for so little.

I Wanna Be Like You

Doctor Who
It Takes You Away
Series Eleven, Episode Nine

Well that was… interesting.

Seriously, there’s a lot to be said for interesting.  Series 11 can be aggressively uncomplicated: it’s hard not to imagine the writers being like Jodie Whittaker, hopping from foot to foot, flapping their arms up and down and hoping the next scene will write itself.  It Takes You Away is the first episode that seems genuinely mysterious, with plot developments not altogether guessable from the outset.  The script has ideas – plural!  And while Rosa and Demons of the Punjab did things a little differently from most of the New Who you’ve seen, this one feels eerily apart from everything else this season.

Which is all very nice, and worth celebrating.  I really hope there’s more like it to come.  But oh, wouldn’t it be nicer if it worked.

Apropos of nothing - certainly none of her other behaviour - this is
the most unfluffy, alien thing this Doctor has done.  I love it.  More pls.For a while you’re spoilt for choice.  The TARDIS arrives near a mysteriously empty cottage in Norway – and the Doctor has to check where they are by tasting soil, which is legitimately funny but wow, look what happens when you replace all the TARDIS tech with sweetie-dispensers, doodads and bits of old honeycomb.  I’ve long wanted a TARDIS you can’t steer properly, but pairing that with an already intellectually-challenged Doctor just makes her look even more useless – also, doing that with the first female Doctor is… yeah.  Talk about whoops.

Anyway!  Noticing what appears to be someone inside, they barge in and “investigate” (no input from Yaz here, even though a police officer might have an interesting POV, oh well) and they find Hanne, a blind girl whose father is missing.  A monster is stalking the woods at night, and it may have made off with him.  Before they can really investigate this – although seriously, the Doctor’s spidey-sense should have gone off by now, how much of a monster expert is she, she has ears, I mean come on – they discover a mirror in the house showing no reflections, on and off.  A quick peep of the sonic and it turns out this can be paused (?), and the mirror is actually a portal to somewhere else.  This is a horrible cave world full of flesh-eating moths, dead rats and a very rotten-looking Kevin Eldon.  It’s not clear how he’s managed to survive here or if anyone else has, or if the place is any bigger than a particularly craggy corridor, but anyway, it’s time to see what’s on the other side of the mirror: a whole mirror universe!  In it are some of our dead loved ones, and all they want is for us to stay.

Monsters, weird monstery-places and dead loved ones in a backwards world – there’s loads of potential here (and just plain loads, generally), but there’s a reason it’s hard to suss what’s going on.  I’m guessing these elements all came about independently, since the “monster” doesn’t inform the cave world at all, and the cave world has no deeper relationship to the mirror world than it happens to link it to ours.  Why get excited about Kevin Eldon’s weird little character and his idiosyncrasies?  It’s all padding to get us to the mirror place, which is what the episode probably should have been about in the first place.  Unless you think they should have really gone to town on the Norwegian Cottage In The Woods, which is fair enough – I’d watch that.  (I’m not sure Walking With Flesh Moths has legs.)  There probably is more to say about the cabin story, what with the dad deliberately using fake monster noises to keep his blind daughter indoors, honestly rationalising that she’s a teenager and there’s food in the fridge.  But no, we leave those two together at the end, almost no questions asked.  All good?  Off we pop then.

The focus, and certainly the lasting impact of the episode is on the mirror world, and not wanting to leave people behind there.  It’s a shame Hanne’s dad is already in our bad books, as it makes it harder to empathise with his need to stay with his “wife”.  But that’s where Grace comes in, causing Bradley Walsh to have some more impactful scenes that Yaz and Ryan probably wish were getting shared out at this point.  (Yaz might as well go already: her whole job is underscoring the obvious with inane questions, or asking incredibly stupid ones like “So is it a good thing or a bad thing?” after the Doctor loudly says “OH NO.”  Jesus Yaz.  What do youthink?)  The Graham stuff is good, although Grace – even a fake one – is such a monotonous presence that it’s all on him.  It’s poignant watching him cling to his experiences with the Doctor as the reason he should keep an open mind here.  But the whole thing is distinctly wobbly because the Doctor, not to mention the script, can’t quite decide if there’s an antagonist present.  In one scene she says Grace and Hanne’s mum aren’t aware of what they’re doing, in another scene she says they are.  By the end it’s pretty clear there’s no harm intended.  The deadies spend most of it just looking bewildered.  It’s all a bit too shrug to be properly creepy or truly heart-rending.

"...like reverse the polarity or something."
Sure, I can buy Yaz plucking this out of nowhere.  YAZ.A lot of this, as is so often the case with Series 11, is the script.  There’s a point around 30 minutes in where the Doctor is doing what she always does to work things out – flail her arms about and think no faster than she can speak.  And the script, having given us no prior clues to work any of this out, sees no alternative and goes for broke.  The Doctor, on the spot, unprompted, remembers a story her gran told her about the Solitract, a dangerous force that once existed in our universe only to get exiled.  And this is probably it, she’s guessing.  (Needless to say, Yaz follows this with “Hang on, are you saying we’re on the Solitract plane?”  YES, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE YAZ, HOW HARD IS IT TO KEEP UP.)  And this is the Doctor for the rest of the episode: when faced with the dead loved ones, she tells them they probably don’t know they’re involved.  Then tells them they are.  Then tells them they “want the same thing you’ve always wanted!” before spelling that out, too.  No one seems to have any agency here, it’s just the Doctor showing up, guessing what’s going on, shrugging, then insisting that’s what’s going on.  It’s an avalanche of telling rather than showing, all megaphoned by a character that sounds like a kid making it up as she goes.

And then we get the ending, which will be the bit people who seriously hate the episode open and close with.  The frog.  The Doctor tells “Hanne’s mum” that it’s not her husband she needs, it’s a Doctor, so then it’s just the two of them.  Only, because it’s a mixture of what Grace said to Graham about frogs, it’s now a literal frog on a chair, talking with Grace’s voice.  This is the Solitract: a sentient universe that wants to be a part of ours, only it can’t because it’s toxic to us.  (Exhibit A: the bit where Hanne shows up in mirror-world, and the Doctor promptly tells everyone that this probablymeans there are too many people now and it will all fall apart.  All power to the Guesstimator!)  All her wibbling about whether the Solitract means any harm is finally disarmed, as the Doctor convinces it immediately to let her go.  (“We’ll be friends forever,” she says before departing and having no idea if the Solitract survived.  Grand.)  It’s a weird enough scene, what with the frog, and Jodie acting to nobody again, arms-a-go-go, trying to make her tortured yackifying sound like an epiphany, before you get to the actual frog.  The rubbish, fake-looking frog that probably could have been bettered in ’80s Who.  The frog that can’t lip-sync properly.  (Why even bother?  It just flaps open and closed, Kermit-style.)  Did, seriously, nobody look at that and think, that’s a bit shit, better be careful it doesn’t detract from the already loopy ending we’re shooting here?

My favourite thing here, other than Graham’s sandwiches which are a greatidea thankyouverymuch Ryan, is the discombobulating sense of weirdness the episode puts across.  Too many times this year we’ve just plodded through the motions, and it’s oddly refreshing to look at stuff like a weird mirror world and think, huh?  On the other hand, I want to love the emotional baggage at the end, which is well acted, with Ryan finally calling Graham “Grandad” – sure enough, it was pretty binary, i.e. Ryan has just decided not to be a tool now – but I don’t think the script makes a clear enough case for what these phantoms actually are, and how hard it is to leave them behind.  Especially as being there at all is probably going to kill you.  And there goes the weirdness, too, as the script has too many separate parts and no idea how to organically weave information between them.  It Takes You Away has some hallmarks of a standout episode, certainly against this motley lot, but sorry.  By the end I was bored again.

Mud Lark

Doctor Who
The Witchfinders
Series Eleven, Episode Eight

Who’s up for more history?  The current series seems to work best when it’s set in the past, so it’s a yes from me.  Even if it’s not a pure historical.

Yeah, I know it’s not gonna happen.  Sort of.  In any other year that would be a crazy thing to expect, but Series 11 has come tantalisingly close, hasn’t it?  The only sci-fi thing about Rosa was time travel, which you get just by having the Doctor turn up.  Demons Of The Punjab went a bit further and had bona fide aliens in it, only surprise, the story wasn’t about them and you actually just watched a programme about history!  Sucka!  So I think it’s reasonable to hope The Witchfinders will finally throw off the New Who scaffolding that comes with historical episodes, and just have a bit of period drama with a TARDIS in it.  There is no rule anywhere that says this has to be boring, or that it can’t also be a great story for the regulars.

Hey ho, it’s not a pure historical – and it would be unfair to criticise an episode for what it isn’t.  (Maybe next year for pure history.  Or next series, whenever the hell they make it.)  As for what it is, The Witchfinders is the most recognisably New Who-ey historical episode we’ve had this year, tropes ’n’ all.  When Kerblam! fell out of a wormhole to the Tennant era, there’s a good chance this one came with it.  But it makes good use of some Series 11 stuff, which sets it apart nicely.


"Now we have no way of knowing if Mother Twiston was a witch or not!"
Er, well she's dead.  That's a pretty big vote for no, isn't it?After decidedly failing to arrive at the coronation of Elizabeth I, the Doctor and co. discover a witch trial in ye olde Lancashire.  After her usual “don’t interfere” spiel the Doctor of course interferes and ingratiates herself with the local witch-finder, hoping to settle things down on the mob-violence front.  I’m not sure at what point they’d have left in the normal run of things, as it’s one of those historical situations where they have no local knowledge – Graham says he knows all about the area and never heard of any witch trials – so they get a free pass, I guess?  One of the quirks of Doctor Who time travel: ignorance is your ticket to interfere.

The psychic paper cuts through any awkwardness here, which is an annoying shortcut (that the show largely did away with until recently), but events soon put the Doctor back in the hot seat.  And I quite like that.  The whole point of the psychic paper was to cut through the accuse-the-Doctor-of-the-crime-because-he-showed-up-when-it-happened rigmarole, which the show had plenty of time for when it wasn’t done in 45 minutes.  But doing that also cuts out the need to use personality and authority to win people over.  Rely too much on it and you get, well, the Tenth Doctor; all “LISTEN TO ME-AHH” followed by people slapping him.  It’s strangely rewarding to have the Doctor’s easy power grab flit away to nothing.  Sometimes you’ve got to put the work in, and with all due respect to Thirteen, authoritah isn’t her strong suit.

Still, for me The Witchfinders is Jodie Whittaker’s most consistent episode yet – and she does get some authoritah later on.  The Doctor tries to rescue someone from drowning (and fails, but welcome to Thirteen), robustly faces down her own witch-ducking, and has a number of don’t-mess-with-me moments that actually resonate.  When she’s about to get ducked (sorry, I know it looks like an AutoCorrect) and lays into Becka the witchfinder, it’s like one of the properly grumpy Doctors back on patrol.  The whole ducking thing (sorry) is a ruse, since she’s good enough at escapology to get out of it, but she wants to find out more.  That’s good stuff.  Even better, this is the first episode (that I noticed) where she’s inconvenienced because she’s a woman.  King James cheerfully refuses to believe she could be in charge of her group, and the Doctor suddenly remembers what she looks like.  It’s a nice little nod to realism in history, like Yaz and Ryan suffering in 1950s Alabama.  Admittedly they over-egg it with the Doctor saying “Becka was right, these are hard times for women!”, but over-egging is one of Thirteen’s super-powers.  It gives her something to react against, anyway.

It’s not long before some sort of alien doodad rears its head (and the pure historical disappears like a dream upon waking, boo), and it turns out it’s… mud.  Like Kerblam!, the explanation turns up in the last ten minutes via a hasty info-dump.  There’s not enough information to figure it out earlier; sci-fi tends to fail as a mystery, as it’s entirely possible the villain will be a mutant blob from Planet Fleb and you’re never going to guess that.  The Witchfinders at least gets some creep value out of resurrected women, who look disturbingly Evil Dead-like and behave suitably disgusting when they’re hungry for more mud.  As with the creepy postmen in Kerblam!, though, they don’t really do anything, and they humourously leave the Doctor and co. unharmed and unconscious while they pootle off to do something else.  The whole sci-fi side of the script gets suddenly pedestrian when we find out they’re really the Morax, imprisoned aliens guilty of crimes unknown who fill your body with Morax mud and want to take over the world and blah blah blah.  What does any of it matter this late into the episode?  And New Who strikes again: aren’t witches much more interesting when they’re actually Blorgs from planet Blarg, and they only look like witches?  Er, no, actually.


The Doctor actually says "According to my calculations."
Pictured: calculating.The Doctor pieces a lot of it together as a best guess, since she’s spent the episode picking up pieces of information, but then the solution manifests as “burn bits of their tree prison, point the sonic screwdriver at the burned bits, point those bits at the tree and abra cadabra it’s all fixed,” and you can feel the average IQ of the room drop.  It all feels very, “This is the sort of thing you get at the end, right?”, complete with King James offing a witch that refuses to be imprisoned.  This handily saves the Doctor from figuring out what to do with her, and may or may not be worse than imprisoning her for all eternity, which was the Doctor’s plan.  She gives the King the cold shoulder for Doing A Bad Thing, obviously, because these things are binary.

As a sci-fi story, The Witchfinders is pretty much a dud.  As a historical, it’s no documentary.  But fortunately there’s other stuff here.  Siobhan Finneran gives Becka buckets of self-belief; she’s actually quite nice when you’re on her side.  (Admittedly no one asks how, if all 35 witch trials have ended with a drowned innocent woman, they’re still drawing crowds, but I guess people do keep watching Most Haunted.)  Alan Cumming will probably divide a few fans with a performance that is, let’s just say not shy, but I enjoyed it.  Cumming is playing a comedic King James and no mistake, with enough witty emphasis that you know he’s going to say “Satan!” again and you’ll probably laugh.  (Well, I did.)  I’m not entirely sure this episode needed a funny turn, but every scene was more enjoyable because of it.  Best of all, he flirts outrageously with Ryan, which gives Ryan something to react to, thank god.  In another “Welcome to 2018” nod, this is played exactly the same as if he were a female companion.  There’s no embarrassing nudge-wink about a man having the hots for Ryan – although there is a wry glance from everybody when King James asks him to stay at the end.  Ryan is, if anything, respectful about the whole thing.  (But maybe don’t say things like “I feel ya”?)  Elsewhere, Yaz at least sounds like a police officer when she goes to comfort the granddaughter of a murdered “witch”, and Graham gets to play policeman (sort of) as a witch-finder in a spectacular hat.  For once some of the good bits are shared out between the three of them, as they’re all genuinely horrified by what’s going on.  This is one of the reasons I like historical episodes: they put the characters in context, which is something they badly need and don’t get from spaceships.  I don’t need to repeat that these aren’t the deepest characters the Doctor has known, but any help bulking them up is appreciated.

The script isn’t brilliant.  It certainly has some good stuff in it, like not letting the Doctor march around witch-trial England waving the sonic screwdriver without consequences – this sort of thing is why people take the piss, especially when you scan someone and unironically say “No magic,” like there’s a scan setting for that.  But you’ve also got odd little clunkers like “What’s going on here at Bilehurst Cragg?” (like last week’s “There’s something very wrong here at Kerblam!” – is the Doctor part-SatNav?), and a should-be-brilliant face-off between the Doctor and a gloating King James wobbles when she says “You wanna know the secrets of existence?  Start with the mysteries of the heart.”  (Is she reading that off a fridge magnet?)  As much as I love the Doctor not being cowed by Becka, I wish there was a better point for her to make than comparing it to Yaz’s experience with a school bully – which is largely Yaz’s contribution this week, and not a very well-developed one at that.

Hey ho.  First time around, I was disappointed that The Witchfinders didn’t do what I wanted.  Second time, I enjoyed Finneran and Cumming’s performances a lot more, savoured the Doctor stuff, didn’t want to shove Ryan off a short pier for once and tried to ignore the bollocksy bits.  Words like “runaround” come to mind, and that’s not always an insult.  It’s an entertaining, if uneven runaround.  This series, it’s probably best to pick your battles.

Pop Til You Drop

Doctor Who
Kerblam!
Series Eleven, Episode Seven

Here’s one they made earlier.  Like Arachnids In The UK, Kerblam! could have fallen down the sofa during the RTD era.  This approach makes sense for a season trying to hit the “populist” button and get away from the continuity-sodden Moffat era, although it risks making you wish you weren’t in this era either.  Kerblam! is like one of Rusty’s old filler episodes, only in the Series 11 mould, for better or worse.

For example, this year we don’t get any bits before the titles.  I don’t know why they got rid of them: they’re useful when you only have 45 minutes to set up and deal with a problem, and they hold the viewer over until the threat picks up again, which is usually about 10-15 minutes later.  (Nearly 20 here.)  Now they’ve taken out the pre-titles and left in the wait, which might explain why so many episodes this year just seem to amble along.  These bits weren’t needed in Classic Who as the episodes were half as long – the actual stories continued for several weeks and you could fill up on scares along the way, with a cliff-hanger every week.  Contrast that with Kerblam!, where it takes a good half an episode to determine what the problem even is.  (And 40 for the bad guy to put the Doctor out of her misery and explain what he’s doing.)


This is "the Home Zone".  Holodeck?  Park outside?  Dream sequence?Despite all my moaning it gets off to a nice start, though I may just be intoxicated by the exciting time vortex effect.  (I still hate the TARDIS – does she really start it off by twirling an egg timer?  It’s supposed to be a machine, not just random bollocks in a room!)  While jaunting through the vortex (phwoar), the TARDIS (yuck) gets a delivery from Kerblam!, aka space-Amazon.  (It’s a fez.  Shut up, you’re crying.)  Attached to this is a literal cry for help, so the Doctor and co. promptly visit Kerblam! HQ and get jobs so they can investigate.  She even uses the psychic paper to get in.  Feel the RTD vibes.  They soon meet some lonely people who help make up Kerblam!’s 10% human workforce.  The 90% are creepy robots.  They couldn’t possibly malfunction and kill everyone, could they?

To its credit, Kerblam! answers this with a cagey “…no?”  Even better, online shopping is a smart setting for a sci-fi show, and given Series 11’s interest in right and wrong it makes sense to slyly examine Amazon and its shady treatment of staff… oh, we’re not doing that?  Huh.  (Is it just me who thought they’d go there?)  If anything Kerblam! comes away with a slightly muddled message that more people should work jobs that are “really repetitive”, but we’ll get to that.

The episode is very interested in the people who work at Kerblam!, and its strongest scenes are the ones focusing on them.  (Some more Series 11ness for you: come for the guest stars, tolerate the regulars.)  Lee Mack generates more than enough laconic charm for his few scenes as a dad missing his daughter – although his comment about a necklace outliving him is a wee bit on the nose.  Best is Julie Hesmondhalgh as the company’s “Head of People”, a bright and slightly downtrodden worker who seems genuinely to want the best for everybody.  Of the regulars, Graham predictably shines, having been marooned with cleaner’s duties and trying to cheer up his young, lovesick comrade.  Graham has the best journey here, seeing the place from the ground up and ultimately getting a bit heartbroken by the villain, but still encouraging him to get out of harm’s way.  Bradley’s killing it again.  And gosh, I’m a broken record this year.  (Is Graham the best one?  The answer might surprise you!)

It’s a good one for Jodie Whittaker, although I’m mostly talking about one scene: the bit where the Doctor sticks up for another worker is one of the most Doctorly scenes she’s had to work with, and she gives it just the right mix of flippancy and do-not-mess-with-me.  The script overdoes it later, with her repeatedly telling the Kerblam! higher-ups to be worthy of their position or they’ll have her to deal with and so on.  I mean, there comes a point where you have to back this stuff up.  (“Or you’ll have me to deal with!” didn’t cut much ice with the Pting, did it?)  She mostly does her usual, plodding around and trying to figure out what’s wrong, which is improbably difficult.  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner, there’s too many things going on, too many variables.”  Really?  She makes a few wrong guesses along the way, of course.  Seeing a list of missing people she immediately assumes the man keeping the list is behind it all.  So why aren’t there any non-missing people on the list?  Is he done now?  Similarly, Ryan makes a “He’s the baddie!” call about Charlie the cleaner, because his crush is trapped in a sound-proof room and a mysterious package is teleported in there with her, and Charlie is visibly concerned.  It turns out he’s right, but I’m calling dumb luck here: Charlie, Ryan and Yaz were all concerned about what was going to happen, and probably so were you.  Maybe we all dunnit.


"Hi I'm Ryan, do you have a moment to talk about me having dyspraxia?"
*promptly high-fives someone behind him on a fast-moving conveyer-belt*I’m going to be a broken record again: the crowded cast makes it difficult to move things along at speed, as they’ve all got to find something to do and at some point, just take turns talking.  (And stand in a line – an amusing go-to for most of the directors this year, what with there being few other ways to get the Doctor and all the bloody companions in shot.)  While there are some really fun touches, like the aforementioned Kerblam! workers and the creepy robots, it’s another episode that plods along looking for its ending.  We barely see anything odd going on and nothing tying Charlie to it, so all that seemed a bit left-field to me.  Could a robot really have forced Lee Mack’s character to pop some deadly bubble wrap?  Why does he care about the explosions being localised, since he’s all right with murdering people in the first place?  Does Charlie really think that killing hundreds (thousands?) of people with Kerblam! robots is going to bring about a more human-led workforce, and not just sink the company?  Hell, if he loves humans so much, why is he offing them?  After his plan back-fires (and him along with it), the Head of People announces she’ll try to get more humans working there after all.  You mean he could have just asked?

The whole dénouement is rather botched, with the slightly-too-sudden reveal and the Doctor realising the Kerblam! System was the one calling for help – it’s been fighting back all along!  Which is all very sweet, except the System also murdered Charlie’s would-be girlfriend to “show him how it felt.”  Christ!  And the Doctor says the System isn’t the problem?  It’s a problem, isn’t it, if it’s able and willing to murder people?  And you’re just going to leave things like that?  Okay then.

Kerblam! is occasionally charming and old-school, and it has some fun ideas, especially the killer bubble wrap.  I wish it executed them better, like getting the killer bubble wrap involved in the first half of the episode.  At least it shows that Chris Chibnall doesn’t have a monopoly on ploddy plots.  It’s a nice-enough and likeable episode, probably in the top half of Series 11 so far thanks to some enjoyable scenes and well-judged performances – even the manager the Doctor shouts at, Callum Dixon, manages to get across that his heart isn’t really in yelling at people – but mostly I think it underlines what a knack there is to this sort of episode, and that they don’t have it.  History again next week – now you’re talking.

We Can Remember Them For You Wholesale

Doctor Who
Demons of the Punjab
Series Eleven, Episode Six

Praise the lord – or the magic David Tennant that can hover and be transformed by wishes if you’re so inclined!  We have temporarily escaped the scripted clutches of Chris Chibnall!

Of course it would be wrong to pretend this can fix some of the more fundamental problems of Series 11.  For instance, the TARDIS is absolutely minging and no amount of clever direction can hide that.  (This week I spotted those giant fingers / insect legs actually moving when the ship’s in flight.  Euw!)


"Christ... okay, just pull focus on the actors."
"But you've got to show the TARDIS some ti-"
"PULL. FOCUS."More importantly, there are too many characters.  Three’s a crowd, four is just a bunch of people standing around.  Okay, you can still do something with that – Doctor Who has managed it, including when it began in 1963 – but it helps to set up relationships and motivations between them first.  Graham being sad about his dead wife and Ryan being a bit of a twat about it isn’t enough – especially as most of the time Ryan just stands there looking on.  (All the really juicy bits go to Graham instead, a trend that continues here.)  Even worse, there’s barely anything tying these people to the Doctor.  Case in point, the inciting incident for Demons of the Punjab.

Yaz is curious about her grandmother’s history so she asks to go back in time and sneak a peek.  You may recall the similar plot of Father’s Day, where the Doctor reluctantly agrees to let Rose be with her dad when he dies.  There’s a danger of disturbing time by allowing this but his feelings about Rose get the better of him and he says yes.  It was one of the really striking early episodes of New Who, showing off the character-driven nature of the show.  Now, Yaz’s gran (not dead) doesn’t go into quite enough detail during a family chat, so Yaz nags the Doctor and the Doctor says fine, try not to set fire to anything.  Isn’t it obvious how this might go wrong?  The dangers of time travel were sort of instilled in Rosa, but keeping history on a famous course isn’t the same as having no idea what happened in the first place and standing around to watch – or worse, mucking in and meeting all the main players.  The whole setup is weirdly complacent for Doctor Who.  Why not, it says?  I can think of several reasons why not.

On the flipside, this is historical Doctor Who – if you saw Rosa you know that’s a good place to start.  There’s (hopefully) less reliance on McGuffins and technobabble, and you might learn something.  For instance I didn’t know anything about Partition Day, or the kind of bitter feeling (and deaths) it caused in India.  It’s great to have an episode that educates, even if it’s Doctor Who so you automatically need to take any “facts” with large sacks of salt.  And okay, so we get more sci-fi doodads than we did in Rosa – just from the trailer it threatened to go full-blown “history, but only because of all this bollocks we made up”.  But writer Vinay Patel keeps the focus on the history, with the sci-fi bits merely a coincidence.  That’s two historical episodes now that strike a balance of story and people first, which in a way is a genuine improvement on a lot of Doctor Who.  So yeah – take that, Series 11 gripes!

On arrival in 1947 Yaz is confronted with a strange man who is not her grandfather, but who is going to marry her grandmother.  Meanwhile another man has been killed and aliens have been seen with the body.  The Doctor is curious and quickly realises these are Thijarians, famed assassins; also that Partition Day is about to happen, with deadly results across the country.  And really, there’s not a lot more plot than that.  The partition is going to happen, we learn more about the Thijarians, and history takes its course.  The episode almost seemed to drag the first time I watched it, not necessarily out of boredom but because there wasn’t a lot going on minute to minute.  Instead it revels in character, which is easy when it’s as well cast and well directed as this.  It’s cinematic and beautiful to look at, and the small cast are incredible, particularly Shane Zaza as the magnetic and hopeful Prem.  The episode gives him such a full character to play with, it’s just a pity his story is more involving than anything that happens to the regulars.  Seriously, Ryan doesn’t even phone it in any more – he asks a mate to text it in for him, while Graham gets several emotional moments to reflect on life and mourn death.  Bradley Walsh gets (and to be fair, sells the hell out of) more heavy hitting moments than Yaz, and this episode is about her family!  I would hope that certain actors are having words with their agents, but it just boils down to too many cooks.


Yaz: the reason they're going.
Graham: three funny lines in a row.
Ryan: "Yeah, I'm well up for it."Still, it’s hard to mind.  The focus here is on Umbreen and Prem getting married, and the difficulties they will face on this unfortunately famous day.  It’s tense in that way that Rosa was, and so many episodes of Doctor Who are not – this is history, the things that happen matter, and real harm could be done here.  It’s here that the episode’s real coup comes about, as we realise the demons of the title are not the ones in the alien makeup.  The truth about the Thijarians is perhaps a little too familiar in Who terms, which is maybe inevitable in a long-running show like that.  Maybe Steven Moffat could have double checked upcoming episodes when he wrote Twice Upon A Time.  Where his glass aliens went around the universe downloading people’s consciousness into a form of technology afterlife, the Thijarians are compelled to be with people when they die alone.  (Which is also an echo of Father’s Day, where the whole reason to travel in time was to grieve for someone on their own.)  I find the latter more affecting and thoughtful anyway, and it’s an intelligent choice to air something like this on Remembrance Day.

As for the demons, they’re more insidious than any Doctor Who monster: ordinary people compelled to do awful things by what they believe.  In truth, I don’t think the episode sells this to the full because there aren’t that many people in it.  Prem’s brother Manish is our spokesman for everyday people twisted by ideology, and the rift between the brothers is heart-breaking, but it’s still a bit odd that we don’t hear from anyone else on the “bad” side, including the pointedly mute group who show up at the end.  I know I’m nit-picking, by the way: the second time especially, this episode packs a genuine punch as a very hurtful form of history exacts its consequences.  Again, like Rosa, there’s nothing the Doctor can do to prevent awful things happening in the past, or at all sometimes.  It’s a tad surprising that we’re going there twice this series, but the episodes do show history from different sides, one a triumph over dark times, the other a survival of them.

Among all this great stuff is the TARDIS team, aka a collection of gooseberries who don’t impact the plot very much.  The Doctor officiates a wedding and otherwise bumbles a bit and thinks a bit; she doesn’t come across as particularly useless and thick for once, and can be forgiven for not guessing about the Thijarians and their change of lifestyle.  The bit where her sonic screwdriver breaks is a bit of a red herring, especially two weeks running.  It’s too much to hope she’s learning to live without it.

As for Yaz, I’m not sure what she learned that isn’t obvious, and I’m not sure what she needed to learn.  But there’s nothing Vinay Patel can do to cheat character mileage, or makeprevious episodes set this stuff up the way Russell T Davies did with Rose.  The script does it all very well, it’s just unfortunate that we’re doing this stuff in dribs and drabs whenever a script randomly calls for it.  Demons of the Punjab is ultimately a gift horse episode: get involved in the story of these people, take note of the history, and if it’s not exactly brilliant as an episode about the cast of Doctor Who, well, what is these days.


Quality aside, what kind of person would I be if I didn't mention this line of dialogue:
"You could interfere yourself out of existence."
Ahem.  Maybe take another pass at that?