13's Character Arc is more like a square bracket on its side

 
I wrote about the Thirteenth Doctor's character arc for Den of Geek, because it's now become apparent that she actually has one.

'Oh, another four pages of exposition.'

Preventing Catharsis

Most Doctor Who stories are nonsense, really. Even the agreed-upon classics have some moments of absolute bibble in them. 

However, the reason they’re still classics is that the stories overcome these issues through other means, because if you enjoy a story you’ll willingly overlook or accept its flaws. This also means if you dislike a story or its creative team you’ll find grievous faults in it that you’d let go if it happened in one of your favourites. These likes and dislikes can also build up momentum, so when you have (for example) three series of Doctor Who your gut instinct says is bad, when you find further flaws you're less inclined to let these pass. Or at least, that's what happens with me.

Am I basically saying ‘Good Doctor Who is about vibes’? Yes. Yes I am.

For example: In Genesis of the Daleks we have the giant clam scene, how easy it is to travel between the Thal and Kaled cities, Sarah’s radiation poisoning not being mentioned again, the fact that a BBC studio explosion is not going to take the Daleks a thousand years to clear, and of course the fact that the ‘Have I the Right?’ scene only works as a clip out of context. 

I don’t think Genesis is a bad story though - it’s a strong war story that’s impressively realised - but if my initial impression was less positive these are aspects I could seize on to bolster my opinion. 

Which brings me to Eve of the Daleks. 

Eve of the Daleks (2022)

It has numerous flaws. However, overall I’d say I enjoyed the episode in spite of them. To contrast this with The Vanquishers (where the more I thought about it the more the story fell apart) here I thought about it, but didn’t find the problems totally overwhelmed the positives.

However, I think there are enough positives and negatives here for it to go either way. I think there are a lot of interesting aspects to Eve of the Daleks, such as how Sarah and Nick had enough going on to suggest internality in the space of fifty minutes and we’ve only just got to that stage with Yaz and the Doctor after three years (and with two episodes left). Dan is still not a character, he’s just John Bishop in Doctor Who doing whatever the plot needs him to do. Casting comedians is clearly a good shout though because Aisling Bea is great, really lifting her character beyond contrivances and masking over the implausibility of her situation.  

With a small cast and location, the story is able to generate some pathos and shock with the initial deaths and builds up a lot of tension about exactly how everyone will get out alive (even though, again, the fact that there’s a fortunately open door and the unseen Jeff left exactly what was needed for them to escape is clearly hugely contrived). In the bewildering swirl of the final few time loops (well, time loops-ish, not sure how they kept their memories beyond ‘the plot needed them to’) the Doctor emerges as a figure of authority because she gives a big speech (that was almost there but needed an edit, IMO) and there’s a genuine sense of catharsis when they get out alive and the building explodes (they hide about twenty yards away and are fine).

In that description is a lot of nonsense, but it’s a New Year special and I feel like they should have a bit of leeway. It’s not a classic but it’s an okay way to spend an hour. What really sold me on it was that the ending featured the Doctor doing stuff and saving people. There’s a proper sense of catharsis which has been sorely lacking from the Thirteenth Doctor’s adventures, contributing to the sense of overwhelming grimness I get from them. 

So I get why people would overlook the unease over Nick and Sarah (the tone and Adjani Salmon’s performance says ‘it’ll be alright’, but Nick’s actions are creepy and say a lot about romcom conventions), and worry about Yaz and the Doctor’s relationship (is there time for it to go anywhere, is it not a bit late to be moving this forward?) but also given Chibnall’s last two series finales it’s a relief that he’s even attempting a happy ending. 

This is, though, not exactly a ringing endorsement. If the most positive review I can come up with is ‘this time not everything was shit at the end' then obviously something’s gone wrong.

Also, I’m fairly sure format has determined this as much as authorial intent. I’ve read a lot of smart and insightful threads about Eve of the Daleks being a foreshadowing of the Thirteenth Doctor's inevitable regeneration, and maybe it is, but to be honest I reckon Chris Chibnall's starting point was 'How come the Daleks don't just shoot the Doctor?' 

To which the obvious answer is ‘there’d be no show’, but this means writers keep having to come up with in-story explanations that don’t diminish the Daleks too much. Chibnall manages to have his cake and eat it here, keeping the Daleks threatening for long enough to generate tension before their inevitable failure.

One of Chibnall’s constants is mistaking grimness for seriousness, so here he makes the Daleks feel more efficient and threatening by getting them to shoot almost the entire cast. However, the format of Doctor Who and romantic comedies (which this was marketed as) determines that the regulars cannot die very often (if they did then we’d all be yelling at potential companions ‘Run away! Everyone dies!’) and that couples get paired off at the end. 

Doctor Who’s format has saved the day here, forcing a release of tension generated by the showrunner’s grimdark tendencies and finishing the story in into a happier place (assuming Nick has a very sharp learning curve about relationships in that taxi).

7 Billion Dead Dogs in Space: Chris Chibnall’s Vision for Doctor Who

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!’

"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.

***

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.'  

'

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. 

TV is a visual medium.

And yet.

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.

The Entire Edgelord Culture is Built on a Lie

I've been trying to put my finger on why it is I'm not enjoying Doctor Who at the moment and explain it in a constructive way. This is an article that came from that.

We don’t need to talk about canon

SPOILERS FOR THE TIMELESS CHILDREN

So obviously that was a lot.

But also: barely anything happened.

A big change in continuity got dropped into that episode - with all the skill I deployed single-handedly destroying the P7 Trip to Arran display in the gym hall during “The Netball Incident” – and it’s pulling focus somewhat. The Doctor’s past is a mystery to both us and her now, and we learned that the Time Lord ability to regenerate was harvested from her.

The Time Lords didn’t want it to be known that the ability they graft onto people when they graduate wasn’t innate to them, so this was hidden deep in the Matrix (like, eight subfolders down and marked ‘Locked Data Do Not open’) and had a Ballykissangel filter applied rather than be redacted or deleted. I think that’s what happened. Anyway it’s a big secret, and then the Time Lords invented Time Travel (which, to be fair, they also lied about how that came about in the official records so they do have form for this – oh, if only they could have squeezed in more exposition).

That’s a brief summary of that, and avoids any real commentary on how this affects the series and whether or not it’s a good thing. I think it’s quite possible to write about The Timeless Children in a critical way and not thoroughly address the changes to the Doctor’s character, because something more important than this happens:

The Master has killed everyone on Gallifrey.

2.47 billion children.

He killed them because the Time Lord ability to regenerate comes from the Doctor and makes her special. This makes her a significant part of the Master’s lineage, moreso than their millennia-long intense friend/enemy relationship.

Irrespective of whether you like the retcon that there are Doctors pre-Hartnell who got their mind-wiped (and Chibnall loves a non-consensual mindwipe), irrespective of whether you like the retcon that the Doctor is a key figure in Time Lord history, you need to justify genocide on such a scale – that the show has already addressed – with one hell of a reason.

This idea that the Doctor is a special figure in Time Lord history is used to justify the Master killing everyone on Gallifrey and putting their bodies into cold storage to create a race of Cyber-Masters. Let’s just skip over the fact that the Master has morgue facilities for the entire Time Lord race, and that dead Time Lords contain the ability to regenerate perpetually (which begs the question ‘What are you doing being dead?’) and furthermore will insist on another change to the Cybermen design (to be fair, that’s quite an accurate portrayal of the Master’s predilection for overly complicated nonsense). Let’s skip over a few things, basically, and then come back to the Master killing billions because of this news. Compare and contrast it to the War Doctor destroying the Daleks and corrupted Time Lords to save the universe.

My reaction upon hearing the Master’s reasoning was ‘Wait, that’s it?’. And the Master, while obviously a long-established villain, has never deliberately committed genocide before. Mainly they’re much smaller stakes than this. I cannot connect my knowledge of the character to this action on either a gut feeling level or an intellectual one. Killing the High Council, maybe, but the entire planet? While the planet is trapped towards the end of time? I can’t buy the Master being that angry about this, but then this is a Chibnall story. The nasty edges burst through.

This action impacts previous stories. At the end of The Day of the Doctor, once the Doctors have saved all the children on Gallifrey, we now know that this isn’t true. Their slaughter is just deferred.

If this Master is pre-Missy then perhaps it makes slightly more sense for his character, but if he’s meant to come after Missy then her end too is diminished; if we know she just becomes this much nastier, brutal character without any of her development (and working with the Cybermen twice) being addressed. This is what I’m used to over the past two series: characters doing things in service of the story, rather than stories being driven by character.

I like Sacha Dhawan’s interpretation of the scripts, trying his best with the material, but Chibnall keeps giving him long laboured punchlines to wrestle with (‘It’s red because it’s drenched in the blood of our people’ rather than ‘There was a lot of blood’ for example) and also the bulk of the dialogue in this episode. There’s a good observation about that here:

Exposition is difficult, but this storyline didn’t help itself by having to cram so much in. The structure of the series was such that we were teased for revelations at the start and middle, then had them explained at the end. These are big ones too, and need room to breathe, especially in the wake of the criticism of the previous series that only two of the four regulars had any character development (as well as the series’ structure this criticism can be levelled at individual episodes too). Indeed, we are told by Graham that he thinks Yaz is great based on no specific examples – the show simply hasn’t devoted time to its characters for this scene to work. All Ryan gets to do is throw a bomb and that achieves nothing. There isn’t any tension over their survival, conversion, or departure.  

Emotional weight is also difficult, and frankly we’ve been spoiled by RTD and Moffat, but in the wake of their storylines the pathos seems especially hollow here. The Doctor – given all that has happened in the stories since 2005 – is faced with going back to the planet she saved, now destroyed by her former best friend who she thought redeemed, in order to destroy all life on it again as she did on her darkest day because she sees no real alternative…it feels like this should be a bigger deal, but the end result is a predictable self-sacrifice that also comes with its own special additional bit of exposition while the Master and the Cyber-Time-Lords stand around letting them chat.

Ah yeah, the Cybermen.

Who could possibly have predicted that Chibnall’s take on the Cybermen would be to make one really nasty and brutal?

Everyone, because that’s his main thing. He takes the potentially interesting idea of an emotional Cyberman and just has it be angry and edgy and GRRRRRRRRR. He has it be Tim Shaw. I know the Cyberman has a name but it was so dull I’ve forgotten it (this is Chibnall’s second thing). The storytelling potential of someone who wanted to be converted, who has a religious zealotry for the Cybermen, that’s decent, but all Chibnall does is have him tell the Master that he wants to be a robot. Because when you want to be converted into a Cyberman clearly it’s because your end goal is to become a robot. This is a plan so bad that the Master takes the piss out of it and then shoots him.

"oh no"

Oh, and he had a MacGuffin in him which was conveniently a really specific and correct legend. And he drilled a hole in another Cyberman for no reason other than Chibnall’s edgelord tendencies. FUCKING HELL, we’re meant to think, HE’S WELL HARD. THIS IS WELL GRIM. JESUS. WHAT WON’T HE DO NEXT?

Anything of note.

These episodes raised the notion of Cybermen being able to use dead bodies for conversion. In Death in Heaven this was seen as a new and rare idea, but now seems to be a fairly standard process. I’m intrigued as to why the Cybermen have never just stunned people and converted them, but now I know. Whether they prefer their bodies dead or alive, they just can’t fucking shoot anything. They hit two people over the course of the episode, one of whom is hit about 14 times and isn’t even killed. Yeah, the Cybermen are scary again. They’re big clanky cyborgs who kill you by shooting like a 9-year-old at Laserquest, which is definitely the scariest thing you can do with the Cybermen. This is a fitting use for the current version of the show. The Cybermen are an interesting idea, but all the show does with interesting ideas at the moment is swing a mirror by them, so you don’t really get any investment in them but have to admit they are technically there.

In the face of such monotonous grimness, do we get a Doctor who is a counterpoint to this?

No, we get another case of Thirteen being written as passive and powerless. Nigel Auchterlounie, who writes Dennis and Gnasher for The Beano, offered this as a possible alternative:

Just for fun... an alternate end to #DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/JLXXCla7ni

— Nigel Auchterlounie (@spleenal) March 2, 2020

There’s nothing wrong with having the Doctor on the backfoot, under pressure and having a bad day, but usually that works because it’s a contrast. Thirteen hasn’t had an ‘Everybody lives!’ moment. She’s not even had a ‘Life will out! Hah!’ moment. She has, at least, blown a kiss to a giant frog. That’s not nothing, but her victories haven’t been cathartic moments of joy. So we have a series where the series finale presents this as the good guys winning:

The heroine cannot bring herself to destroy the animated corpses of her entire species, so Joe off of Derry Girls has to do it for her. Hooray. An entire planet now a lifeless husk. Yay Doctor Who.

So no, overall I’m not that bothered about the big shifts in continuity. I’m bothered that the lead writer is sucking the joy out of Doctor Who and replacing it with one where hope and triumph and joy and characters that actually resemble real people are being gradually replaced by this cold, clanking monstrosity that makes me long for a forgotten humanity.

Doctor Who, at least, is Chris Chibnall doing the Cybermen right.

Fan Service

I wrote another batch of Fanwank/Fan Service Hotline articles for Series 11. My approach was to never be totally critical, and to always include some positives in the options.

On occasion I struggled to do this. It may come through, and if so there may be a pattern to these occasions.

1. The Woman Who Fell To Earth
2. The Ghost Monument
3. Rosa
4. Arachnids in the UK
5. The Tsuranga Conundrum
6. Demons of the Punjab
7. Kerblam!
8. The Witchfinders
9. It Takes You Away
10. The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

An important thing to remember is that Doctor Who is not always made for you. There is a Reality Bomb podcast which asks fans for their opinions on Series 11, and it becomes clear that a lot of the problems I have with it are positives for other people. I also disagree with a lot of the reasons people dislike it, just to keep things simple. For example, a negative comparison to The Sarah Jane Adventures which I think is incredibly unfair to The Sarah Jane Adventures. 

Ultimately it doesn't matter to anyone apart from me if I'm not enjoying Doctor Who as much as long as enough people are enjoying it. My worry is that, having made the show something that children can enjoy more, the gap between series means that the momentum will be lost and that this momentum was slowing down anyway.