Having killed billions of children offscreen in Series 12, Chris Chibnall’s bloodlust was not satiated. ‘It’s not enough,’ he thinks (as the blinking cursor seems to say ‘More Chris. MORE’). And so, in a moment of inspiration, he decides ‘I’m going to kill off most of the universe!’
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| "Did you ever count?" "Count what?" "How many children were on Gallifrey that day?" |
But he doesn’t stop here. ‘Oh ho ho ho ho ho! Delightfully devilish, Chris Chibnall’ he thinks, as he realises that not only can he kill off countless trillions, but that the space they previously occupied can be replaced by the floating corpses of seven billion dead dogs.
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It would be unfair to dismiss Chris Chibnall’s contributions to Doctor Who entirely.
His first series featured no returning monsters and brought in a promising array of new writers to the show. Relocating the companions’ home to somewhere outside London (Sheffield, and then Liverpool for Series 13) was another breath of fresh air. The show was also looking at parts of history that it hadn’t previously, and in the case of Demons of the Punjab this produced a highpoint of its series. While the weak link in Series 11 was unfortunately Chibnall’s scripts, the guest writers largely delivered solid to great work (and, in the case of Kerblam! a morally awful but objectively well written story that was fun until its clever and terrible twist). Its finale was dull, but ended on a clear note of ending a circle of violence, with Graham rejecting his urge to kill and Tim Shaw’s planned destruction over before it reached its conclusion. The foundations were there to explore the characters and build on this continuity-free take on Doctor Who that explored new territory.
So. How did we get from here to seven billion dead dogs in space?
Sadly it’s not such a leap. There was an undercurrent of nastiness present from the start: there’s the more immediately visceral moments like Tim Shaw mutilating his victims, but what lingers is the nihilism of characters like Epzo and Robertson going unchecked, and the fridging of Kira (especially egregious given that the Doctor dismisses her murder with the line ‘The system’s aren’t the problem’ despite it being the system that killed her).
Series 12 went further. In the first two-parter another antagonist faces no repercussions, Gallifrey is destroyed again, the Doctor uses the Master’s skin colour against him in Nazi-occupied Europe and then non-consensually wipes the mind of a woman fated to be executed by the Nazis. The Cybermen wipe out humanity, and are led by a part-converted zealot who not only killed his children but ‘slit their throats’. The Master reveals the Doctor was experimented on to provide the Time Lords with their power of regeneration, and that he has frozen the corpses of all the Time Lords in order to convert them into Cybermen. This new race and the remains of the Time Lords are then destroyed.
Doctor Who often involves cycles of violence that are ended by the TARDIS’ team’s intervention (For example: arriving on Zanak or Varos or Terra Alpha and changing the regime, or thwarting the Dalek Invasion of Earth). In the case of Zanak, in The Pirate Planet, the scale of destruction causes the Doctor to rage in fury and bewilderment. It’s a fantastic scene that addresses the scale of the loss of life.
What we get with the Thirteenth Doctor is a recurring issue involving these cycles of violence: she doesn’t stop them. Robertson comes back in the 2021 New Year special to cause more death, and again he walks off unchanged. The Doctor chooses to empower the Cybermen to destroy most of humanity (the other option being letting Shelley die, which apparently would be worse - not because of the intrinsic value of a human life - because he's a poet). She ends up faced with the converted remains of the Time Lords, unable to pull the trigger. It's like the Second Doctor's speech in The Moonbase was 'There are some corners of the universe that have bred the most terrible things, things which act against everything we believe in. They must be looked at with big sad eyes.'
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There’s a huge difference between overcoming overwhelming odds through sacrifice/high collateral (as in, say, The Doctor Falls) and passively watching genocides with additional bodily-desecration elements. And lo, Flux continues this tradition: most of the universe is wiped out; the Sontarans, Daleks and Cybermen at best suffer huge losses, and we are invited to consider the idea of the aforementioned canine multitude tumbling limply through the void. While no-one had this on their Series 13 Bingo Card, I can’t honestly say it’s a shock.
The thing is, it’s not intrinsically bad for the Doctor to trick her enemies to their destruction. Or at least, it’s not out of character. However, Chibnall’s writing offers no clarity, no moral opinion. Earlier in the same episode Azure says of the Doctor:
“Your biggest fear isn't yourself. It's the destruction of other things. It's an obsession. You want to keep things alive. You want creatures to breathe and live. You want species and races to build. I look into your mind and your hearts, and I don't know why you want it so much. And I don't know why you're so afraid of the opposite.”
Which is strange considering about forty minutes later she’s actively trying to bring about the destruction of the Sontaran fleet, and happy to let the Daleks and Cybermen take a hit. The above dialogue is laid out as some sort of major character point, but it’s contradicted in the same episode. As with all the regulars written by Chibnall, we have no clear sense of who they are (as with Chibnall’s writing Plot conquers all).
So we’re left with a sense that the Doctor has saved Earth, but little else. No attempt has been made to restore life, the universe and everything. The death toll isn’t addressed by the Doctor. We’re told by the mysterious older lady that it’s the Doctor’s fault because Division decided to destroy the whole universe to stop the Doctor finding out who they were (and then they decided to kidnap her and flat out tell her, which makes this even more ludicrous). The Doctor reacts by asking ‘Who even are you?’
In the previous episode she had stated ‘morality is a strength’, but unfortunately failed to address what kind of morality. Stalin had a morality. Ian Brady had a morality. In this story we’re invited to see the Doctor as a champion of life through Azure’s dialogue above, but her actions contradict this. If this is deliberate, then we now have a Doctor who is meant to be morally hollow, espousing vague beliefs and failing to live up to them. Either way, it’s grim.
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| TV is a visual medium. |
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| And yet. |
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| And yet. |
The Doctor is more interested in discovering her new backstory than the ridiculous motives that produced the highest death toll the series has ever seen. We’re a long way from Journey’s End, which also features a presumably huge death toll, but there it’s implied rather than explicitly seen or stated. The resolution involves a sense of catharsis, and while I don’t agree with the ideas about the Doctor’s morality the finale explores, at least they’re clearly conveyed. Here, to paraphrase the author of The Pirate Planet, ‘things just happen, what the hell’.
We could go into the many, many loose threads, unsatisfying resolutions, hollow cliffhangers, and pisspoor attempts at motivation, but fundamentally even if Doctor Who is told at a breezy pace with funnier dialogue and more stuff for Jodie Whittaker to do, it’s still completely undermined by the fact that Doctor Who isn’t a show about someone who fights monsters, or saves the day. Now it’s a show about someone who watches everybody die.
