Doctor Who: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

Oh I’m tired.

So this was okay, but not series finale material.

This episode is at odds with the stand-alone format for the series, as it’s a sequel to The Woman Who Fell to Earth.

Ordinarily there’d be nothing wrong with that, but it’s a bit strange that Chibnall made such an effort to abolish the series arc structure, but decided to go back to it when it suited him. As he appears to written fewer scripts than either of the previous show runners, it seems more like he just didn’t have any ideas rather than an effort to change up the structure of the show.

Anyway, the plot:

The Doctor, Graham and surplus-to-requirements respond to several distress calls coming from a planet. Oh but this had been set up before in a pre-credits scene that wasn’t a pre-credits scene (because Chibnall didn’t want to do those anymore), which led to a clunky “x amount of time later” transition.

Anyway, lots of people have come to this planet and died, the planet drives you mad (which is irrelevant because we don’t get to see this affect the main cast, beyond giving two of them a headache) and there’s a generic soldier guy there.

Oh yeah and the villain from the first episode is there posing as a god.

Whilst he was an effective villain before, in this episode, he is overpowered far too easily. Graham’s arc of wanted to kill him is pretty good, but does upstage the Doctor completely. Then again, upstaging the Doctor and making her a side character in her own show seems to have been a running theme throughout this series.

Everything else in the episode is pretty normal, story-wise; not bad, but absent any build-up.

As with the Woman Who Fell to Earth, the music fails to properly reflect the story beats. It just trums on in the background, whilst the action is taking place. There doesn’t seem to be any understanding about the importance of sound in a television production.

Overall, a very average episode to finish the series on, but I’m pretty tired of average being the best that Chibnall can produce.

Doctor Who: It Takes You Away.

Weak episode with a tacked-on payoff that it did not earn.

Right from the off there were holes in the writing in this one. The attempt at a joke about sheep at the beginning falls flat with the Doctor over-explaining it.

She should have just said “The Woolley Rebellion” and left it at that. The key to the Doctor dropping a good joke, is knowing when to leave it.

This episode also suffers from a lack of set up. This is a consequence of Chibnall doing away with the pre-title sequences. The result of this is that the Doctor is forced to use tenuous reasoning to set up the plot.

She says that it’s 2018 and there’s a cottage over there with no smoke coming from the chimney. She concludes that something is a miss. Erm….it’s 2018, central heating has been invented.

Once that’s set up, we get into it with twists galore…right after an unbearable amount of exposition. I get the impression that Ed Hime thought he was being quite clever and “subverting expectations.”

Point 1: after several series with Steven Moffat at the helm everyone is thoroughly sick of writers trying to show how clever they are at misdirecting the audience. Point 2, if you want to misdirect you need to do it properly; build tension then undercut it with the reveal, don’t have Ryan trudge out and disconnect a speaker, it’s anti-climactic.

Also, was the episode running short or something; here’s an actual piece of dialogue between Hanne and the Doctor:

Hanne: “it always comes out at this time”

Doctor: “The same time every day?”

That’s probably what “always” means. Whittiker is forced to use dialogue where any of her predecessors would have used a facial expression to imply their thought process. Show; do not tell.

Graham is back to stating the obvious. Hime apparently thinks that the audience needs all the help it can get in perceiving what’s going on in front of them.

The Doctor gets in on the action as well, explaining what a portal is to Yas, who apparently lost several IQ points between episodes.

The Doctor is also written as hapless and dull in throughout this episode. This completely undercuts the conclusion, because it just seems like she woke up for the last 30 seconds and suddenly grew some stage presence. Too little, too late.

The reveal that the “evil entity” just wanted some company was really obvious and has been done to death by Star Trek.

Overall, bad episode.

Now there’s something far more important to talk about.

We are one episode (and one special) away from the end of Thirteen’s first series and Thirteen has established nothing about herself as the Doctor.

I don’t know if this is a consequence of decisions made by Whittiker or the stand-alone-episode format of the series, but Thirteen has not become her own Doctor. Throughout this series so far, she has been borrowing traits from Ten and Eleven and never really building her own personality. There have been moments where she’s started to do something new, but they’ve been few and far between. I can only guess that either Whittiker or Chibnall (or both) is just playing it safe and having the Doctor act with tried and tested affectations without realising that those affectations worked because of the actors behind them.

We are on episode 9 and the Doctor remains without a personality.

Doctor Who: The Witchfinders

King James wants to shag Ryan…okay then.

The plot:

The Doctor accidently ends up in Lancashire in the 1700s, whilst trying to get to Elizabeth I’s coronation.

She and her companions then find themselves embroiled in the murderous plans of Lady Becka Savage who’s been branding every woman she sees a witch and killing them.

The story is serviceable, if a little patronising. This is ironic, as it’s most patronising moment came when the Doctor pretty much looked at the camera and said ‘I’ve just been patronised because I’m a woman in the 1700s.’ I mean, was that supposed to be a self-aware joke; I just saw that happen, the Doctor’s visible frustration is enough to convey that. Visual story-telling; Show, don’t tell.

There were some funny moments, mainly based around Alum Cummings’ performance as King James. In particular, his poorly disguised infatuation with Ryan calls back to the old days of Russell T Davies’ comedic use of sexuality.

Another thing that’s back from the T Davies era; really bad audio management in the post-production. I actually said out loud to turn the music down during the Doctor’s witch trial. As budgets go for BBC series, Doctor Who gets a shedload, so there’s no excuse for this amateurism.

The witch-zombie things are pretty effective as villains, but the big boss (Evil Becka Savage monster queen) kind of strips away their creepiness, given that she looks like the monster of the week.

Overall an improvement on story, but a poor effort by post-production…looking at you sound guy.

Doctor Who: Kerblam!

Sports Direct is bad…and terrorism is good, so long as you direct it at the right company.

That’s the message of this episode, which is slightly confusing as far as responsibility goes.

So, the plot.

The Doctor receives fez from the titular delivery service that was apparently ordered by Eleven. It contains a note calling for help that the Doctor acts on in order to progress the plot.

The episode is alright even if it does carry over some of the ham-fistedness of last week.

The message is obvious and adequately delivered, but for the Doctor spelling it out right at the end which was unnecessary. Why work the message into the themes of the episode, if you were just going to run through it in dialogue later.

Lee Mack also has a cameo in this episode, contrary to what the post-credit guest star run down from episode one would have you believe. He gets to tell a few jokes and I suppose it’s an improvement on the last time they just threw a comedian into an episode.

Everyone is given something to do in the episode, with clear roles for all the cast to occupy. Ryan has another piece of back-story added, as he used to work for Sports Direct. I’m a little bit worried that this is going to become a habit of the writers, in terms of just throwing things into Ryan’s past. What happened to his vlogging?

The Doctor finally manages to wrestle back the limelight after being overshadowed in both the preceding episodes. Although, her moment is slightly undermined by the fact that she’s written to be unsure of herself. She can’t be the moral authority of an exchange and simultaneously unsure if she’s saying the right thing. It seems that writer Pete McTighe has taken more than a fez from Matt Smith’s run. But the reason that Smith could pull off the mad man in a box routine was that he dropped it when a serious moment arose. That sort of thing ensured that the tone shifted at the right time.

Aside from that, the Doctor’s stage presence is massively improved, but it’s too far into the series for her to still be trying to figure out her personality.

The special effects are…clearly “within budget” particularly in the massive distribution scene.

Overall, an improvement, but the bar wasn’t exactly high.

Doctor Who: The Demons of The Punjab

Ham-fisted and patronising.

This is the second episode of this series to address historical events and the repercussions thereof.

Like ‘Rosa’ a guest writer has been brought in for this one; Vinay Patel. Unlike ‘Rosa’, Patel cannot match Blackman’s writing talent and so misses the mark entirely in terms of conveying the consequences of carving up a  country.

Every issue is exposited through dialogue rather than visual representations. This means that we essentially have characters saying “this is really bad” over and over again. First rule of screen writing; show don’t tell.

The supporting cast in this episode could have done with some refinement. Hamza Jeetooa is completely wooden as Manesh; a person supposedly filled with religious/culturally motivated rage. It would lend credibility to his character, if emoted he every once in a while. Amita Suman is similarly without emotion throughout most of the episode. It was impossible to take either of these characters seriously when they were played as though their lines were being read of a teleprompter.

The fact that the titular demons turn out to be nothing is also annoying. A red herring has to be earned, else it’s just a cop-out. This is no different from ‘Kill the Moon’ where there was actually never a threat.

I was hoping that another guest writer might create a spike in the quality again, but sadly the story remains firmly on the Chibnall-level. Although the clearly low budget for this episode may be down to the head writer himself blowing a chunk of the cash on the terrible previous episode.

Another carry over from last week’s episode is the Doctor being completely without presence. She’s along for the ride in her own show and comes across like a side character.

Even when Moffat chose to focus more on Clara, the Doctor would still steal every scene. This probably has something to do with the fact that people are tuning in to watch Doctor Who. Not to view a patronising, poorly paced, GCSE level lecture on recent history.

If this lack of quality continues, we’ll have no choice but to forgive Moffat for ‘Twice Upon a Time’ and get him back on the writing staff.