‘Beware of the lone Cyberman. Don’t let it have what it wants.’ This fulfils the same role (and episode position) as last series’ The Witchfinders: a quintessentially Doctor Who-ish pseudo-horror where the supernatural events have a rational explanation, meaning the show can have its cake and eat it. Disembodied skeletal hands crawl the lightning-lit corridors of the Villa Diodati, space folds back in on itself trapping the villa’s occupants, a ghostly figure is glimpsed from the windows, and all the basic ingredients for Mary Shelley’s seminal work of sci-fi horror are revealed to her, because God forbid a woman can conjure these things out of her imagination.

Continue reading →

‘Eternity is long, and we are cursed to see it all.’ The Armageddon Factor of the 21^st Century with two godlike beings pitting twin planets into the chaos of war for their own perverse entertainment. Zellin and Rakaya reference the Guardians and seem to be Eternals (in the vein of Captain Wrack and, perhaps, the Shadow, on his base between two warring worlds). They reference the Toymaker as a peer, and talk about humans as ‘Ephemeral’, whose nightmares fuel the Eternals’ creativity.

Continue reading →

‘It could get around the world incredibly fast, attacking and infecting every living thing. We may potentially have a cure, but we don’t know if it works.’ A pandemic story broadcast the month the pandemic began, in retrospect this looks both prescient and hopelessly naïve. The prescient bit: how quickly a new virus can spread in an interconnected world, and how relatively quickly, given the right focus, a cure can be found. The naïve bit: entirely missing the reaction of individuals and governments and the months of lockdown, fear and uncertainty. You’d never make it like this in 2023.

Continue reading →

‘Whoever you were in the past or are in the future, we know who you are right now.’ Doctor Who had never really done “arc” episodes like Babylon 5 or The X-Files – episodes that were more significant for moving an ongoing plot forwards than as entities in their own right. Arguably it’s 20 years late to the party, but here we are with the first. On its own, this is mostly procedural – the Doctor and Fam try to beat a platoon of Judoon to find a fugitive and limit the collateral damage (like The Sarah Jane Adventures had done 10 years previously). But the real story is that the fugitive is a mysterious other incarnation of the Doctor herself, hiding as in Human Nature. Oh, and Captain Jack turns up like a cheesy gay Deep Throat to drop a cryptic hint about a lone Cyberman – ‘If you go to Z’ha’dum, you will die.’

Continue reading →

‘Nikola Tesla, you’re going to change the world. But first, you’re going to save it.’ I think this is the first time I switched off a Doctor Who story halfway through. Watching it now, in full for the first time, I can’t remember what I found so objectionable. It’s utterly inoffensive. Or perhaps that was the problem – on the back of Orphan 55, the series desperately needed something more than middle of the road. By this point, the procedural, “another case solved!” approach, which had seemed somewhat fresh in Series 11, has started to wear thin, and, as yet, Chibnall’s show doesn’t seem to have anything else in its arsenal.

Continue reading →

‘Benni, where are you?’ Given that Benni (not that one) barely features, his name comes up a lot in this episode. Which is probably the thing most people remember about it – Vilma repeatedly calling out for her beloved Benni, wondering where Benni is, wanting to know what’s happened to Benni. Of course, even when Benni’s not on screen his presence looms large, because Benni has been captured by the Dregs – Hoix-like creatures that have invaded the spa where Benni is planning to propose to Vilma.

Continue reading →

‘Ada, wait till you hear about Noor. She’s as impressive as you.’ In theory, having the first female Doctor travelling through history meeting real-life inspirational women isn’t a bad idea. Cramming it in alongside a new Master, an RTD-style takeover of Earth, a shock reveal of the fate of Gallifrey and Moffat timey-wimey results in an episode that lacks a clear focus, and relegates its notable guest characters to near walk-on status. We get no insight into what makes Ada Lovelace or Noor Inayat Khan so remarkable besides the Doctor telling us they are. The result feels tokenistic instead of celebratory, something that might have been written by AI – it has the ingredients of a spectacular series opener but doesn’t really land the emotion or characterisation.

Continue reading →

‘Everything you think you know is a lie.’ Chibnall and Whittaker’s second series opens with an episode that recalls The Impossible Astronaut, with the Doctor and her team reassembling in the face of a global alien infiltration. But before we get to that we have some brief establishing sequences of the Fam back on home turf. Ryan has been lying about his illnesses; Graham is still in remission from his, and Yaz is apparently embezzling Sheffield taxpayers’ money to gallivant around the universe while pretending to be on secondment. ACAB indeed.

Continue reading →

‘On the first day of the year 2019, across the land and sky of Britain, an army of unlikely friends came together to face an impossible opponent and prevailed.’ Having conceded the grand prize of Christmas Day to Mrs Brown’s Boys, Chibnall goes for the runner-up slot of New Years Day which, in theory, saves us from more sinister Santas but brings its own baggage of hangovers and back-to-work blues. Apart from a brief skit at the top of the episode about visiting New Year on 19 planets and a joke about the Wi-Fi going down forcing families to talk, Chibnall avoids too much holiday spirit slipping into the 13^th Doctor’s first face-off with the Daleks.

Instead, we have Alison from Ghosts excavating the buried remnant of a Dalek that invaded Earth in the Ninth Century and was only defeated by an unlikely (read: impossible) alliance of Siberians and South-Sea Islanders. But here it is, a millennium or so later revived and very, very angry to have woken up in an episode of Bonekickers. So, it hijacks Alison and gets her to repeat the Doctor’s trick of throwing together a sonic screwdriver from bits of Sheffield steel. Except instead of a screwdriver it makes a new Dalek casing (with a super-skinny wasp waist, very chic), then it goes to GCHQ to summon the Dalek fleet where the Doctor catches up with it, busts it open with a microwave and chucks the mutant into a supernova thus saving New Year!

Oh, there’s also a B-Plot about Ryan’s Del Boy dad finally showing up and Ryan getting to say, ‘I love you dad’. Beautiful.

And that’s basically it. It’s as linear as The Ghost Monument. The guest characters are quite fun. Chibnall throws in a few spicy one-liners that set up his wider stories (the Doctor seems not to have had a father – ‘Dads are [complicated], so I’ve heard’ – giving anyone of the Lungbarrow persuasion their first frisson that the Other is coming). UNIT has been disbanded due to ‘financial disputes’ (I’m guessing there’s a political dig but it’s too subtle for me). I remain a bit confused on the logistics of this TARDIS crew’s wider lives: does Yaz even have a job anymore? Do Graham and Ryan pop home between adventures, or is the house a sitting target for the burglars that Yaz is no longer out catching?

I quite like it (though I think its clear inspiration, Gareth Roberts’ I Am A Dalek, is better), and I appreciate Whittaker getting some hero moments against the Daleks though I wish they weren’t so frequently undercut by goofy self-deprecation – she’s allowed to be kick-ass save-the-day sometimes. It went down quite well with the Alka Seltzer.

Next Time: Spyfall

‘What every living creature wishes for: revenge.’ RTD’s finales always involved an end-of-the-world threat engineered either by the Daleks or the Master. Moffat’s brought season-long plots together, usually with universe-ending stakes. Chibnall stays true to his own choices with no returning villains or apocalyptic danger, although it’s hardly small scale given the Earth is the next planet on Tim Shaw’s revenge list. The real story is Graham moving past his own need for retribution to be the better man, embracing his role as Ryan’s grandfather and the Doctor’s friend over Grace’s avenger.

Continue reading →