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.