Doctor Who: Ascension of the Cybermen

An entire story driven by in universe and real incompetence.

This story picks up where the last episode left off, with the Doctor having given away the weird sentient goo, turning up on a war torn planet to clean up her mess.

And boy does she suck at cleaning up a mess. This is apparently the same character who could turn an enemies armies around with a speech. The same character who could weaponise their surroundings to fight the very same villain. The same character who could perform trillions of calculations within milliseconds, in order to win a fight.

So it should come as no surprise that the Doctor’s clever defences are overwhelmed by ‘cyberdrones’ within seconds of the erected and she simply panics and tells everyone to run away. Bear in mind that this was her plan; she had time to draw on her thousands of years of warfare experience and come up with a rock solid plan of attack.

Placing this swift defeat of the Doctor in the context of the show as a whole, makes her seem significantly weaker and less intelligent then her predecessors.

Having the Doctor panic and simply say things like ‘they’re attacking our defences’ makes her seem plainly incompetent. Also, who is she saying this to? Did she think that her ‘fam’ didn’t notice that all the weird looking machines were being shot at? Did Chibnall think that the audience couldn’t figure out what was going on in front of us?

This scene was supposed to establish the Cybermen as a threat that can match the Doctor. However, it’s driven entirely by the Doctor being incompetent, rather than caught off guard and seems to suggest that Thirteen lost a lot of IQ points in the regeneration.

Also, is Seth McFarlane watching this, because Doctor Who just ripped off the drones from The Orville?

The ‘fam’ gets separated (through further incompetence) with Yas and Graham driving their part of the story through poor decision making and the Doctor and Ryan doing the same. There are other characters, but Chibnall doesn’t care enough to give them personalities, making them pretty obvious red-shirts.

Tosin Cole continues to phone in his performance throughout. I’m honestly not sure whether he’s a bad actor or whether he’s realised he’s in a bad show.

Mandeep Gil is endlessly annoying as Yas, but I’d put this more down to the writing and directing. She’s playing Yas like a pseudo-Doctor in this episode (clearly a writing choice) but we’ve never seen her do this before. With previous companions we’ve seen them progress from being out of their depth to being familiar with the Doctor’s lifestyle. The writing room treats the whole cast as tools for their plots rather than characters, so Yas has changed week on week depending on what the story needs her to do.

This results in her act of taking charge in this episode seeming like a bumbling idiot who read about how to survive an alien attack online and thinks they know everything. This type of arrogance literally got Clara killed in ‘Face the Raven’ but since the story needs Yas to survive, I’m sure it’ll just be the red shirts who bite the bullet.

Anyway, The Doctor, Ryan and a red-shirt find their way to a planet occupied by space-Barristan Selmy who protects a portal to Gallifrey. And then the Master jumps through and promptly demonstrates another area of writing that Chibnall is really bad at.

Remember in ‘World Enough and Time’ when Missy pointed out that Bill and Nadole were just there to provide comic relief and exposition. That wasn’t a simple case of her breaking the fourth-wall; it fit with her character in-universe, it was said casually so only the older viewers would notice it and it wouldn’t confuse the younger ones. But, above all, it was earned by the character development and story.

Sasha Dhawan jumping out of a portal and saying ‘that was a good entrance wasn’t it’ has been in no way earned by Chibnall. He has not developed this character or built up enough good faith with the fanbase to get away with trying to joke about how obviously forced the Master’s “dramatic entrance” was.

Oh and in the meantime of this episode an immortal Irishman has been doing Immortal Irishman things. The writing elsewhere was so bad that I don’t even care about who he turns out to be.

We’re coming to the end of series, where things will apparently change forever.

Chris Chibnall is not the right person to make a radical change to a franchise like this.

Maybe ‘change forever’ means being cancelled and coming back in five years as a couple of Netflix specials.

Doctor Who episodes 7-8

Can You Hear Me?

Does anyone remember “Amy’s Choice”, where the Doctor and companions were forced into a dream state which exposed their fears, insecurities and culminated in the reveal that the villain was the Doctor’s own unconscious mind? It was much better than this.

Does anyone remember “Listen” which was all about how fear of the unknown can lead to obsessive and dangerous behaviour which undermines your friendships and those of your closest confidants? It was much better than this.

This episode was a rip off of far better predecessors, that had far better writers and far better actors.

Tosin Cole takes the cake with his wooden concern for his friend Tibo. Although perhaps the line delivery is so wooden because it’s so obviously redundant. When a person sits in silence and is openly living like a slob, you don’t need to spell out to the audience that they’re not in the best mental health. That’s what all the mise en scene was for.

 We also get to learn that Yas was bullied when she was in school and had to be talked out of sitting on a hill by a police officer. I believe the phrase is ‘first world problems.’

I’m not trying to be mean to anyone who has suffered at the hands of brutal bullies here, by the way. We’ve never been shown anything in Yas’ personality that suggests she suffered anything other than a normal education. This piece of ‘character development’ comes out of nowhere and is probably destined to go to the same place as Ryan’s vlogging (admit it; you forgot that Ryan’s a vlogger  - like Chibnall did).

And the big one of course; no not that the Doctor saves the day with her sonic screwdriver (that’s a given when you let Chibs co-write); The Doctor brushes off Graham’s fear of his cancer returning.

This has been rightly called out as at best a colossal screw-up on the part of the writers or at worst a mean-spirited attack on cancer survivors.

In a response to Radio Times (that was apparently not intended for publication) the BBC claimed that they wanted to use the exchange to highlight the important issue of social awkwardness. Yeah I can see why they’re claiming that wasn’t for publication.

A scene that plays like fear of cancer returning and killing you should come second to being uncomfortable at parties, followed by a complaint response that doubles-down on the level of stupidity involved in that perspective.

The Haunting of Villa Diodati

Does everyone remember reading Byron’s work for GCSE English? Does everyone remember reading Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein for GCSE English?

Maxine Alterton and has re-purposed what I can only assume is the essay she wrote about them into a script that can be described as… ‘approaching something that may have been quality at some stage’.

Like Fugitive of the Jadoon, this episode had the seeds of a good story.

However, it was written for the wrong television program.

It’s like Chibnall got hold of it and said ‘well there’s some good sci-fi ideas in here but I’m afraid we don’t accept quality here. Can you dumb this down a bit, add a lot of redundant explanation for things happening on screen, a non-amusing piss joke and some sorry attempts at comedy handed to the one cast member who we can comprehensively say is the worst actor.’

But the true downfall of this episode; the moment that drop it from meh to bad, is the Doctor’s speech.

Here we have a concept that can only be explored in show like this.

If the Doctor doesn’t surrender the glowy thingy, she will risk polluting the established time line (something which could have massive consequences). If she does surrender it, the Cybermen will ascend once again and restart their conquest of the universe.

Following a telephone call from Tosin Cole to phone in the line ‘it’s him or the whole universe’ Jodie Whittaker delivers her monologue as though she’s bitching about someone stealing her lunch at work.

Remember the sorrow in Christopher Eccleston’s performance in ‘The Parting of the Ways’ when the Ninth Doctor admits that he’ll have to sacrifice Earth in order to stop the Daleks? In the space of seconds he strips away all the glamour and excitement of being a time traveller. He shows the terrible weight that rests on him and the torment that he suffers as the person who always has to make these choices.

Whittaker, on the other hand, comes across like she’s pissed off that Ryan’s questioned her authority. Talking about a metaphorical mountain that she’s on top of with everyone else at the bottom. Aside from being poorly delivered, the metaphor just instils the Doctor with a false sense of superiority. She’s never played this character as assertive before, so it’s just not convincing.

We are now arriving at the two-part series finale next week or as I believe it will be sub-titled, the lowest rated episodes in 40 years.

Doctor Who Series 12 Episodes 4-6

Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terrors.

Boring as hell.

Snooze-fest with an entirely unoriginal villain and incredibly simplified titular character.

According to Doctor Who’s Facebook page, Jodie Whittaker had fantastic chemistry with Goran Visnjnic…either it was incredibly subtle or the television industry has recently redefined what ‘chemistry’ means.

Fugitive of the Jadoon

There were the seeds of a good episode in here.

In a rare act of competence, co-writer Chibnall played to his strengths by starting this episode like Broadchurch (the first series; before it became rubbish).

The mystery and twist style of the episode actually works quite well, but the insinuation of the twist is a step too far.

The suggestion that the Ruth-Doctor pre-dates the 13^th Doctor (the common theory being that she pre-dates the 1^st Doctor) is a risk that didn’t need to be taken. Why couldn’t she be a future version; or a rebooted version of the Valyard?

Other than that, the main issues comes from the return of Jack Harkness (which reeks of re-shoots given how out of place his scenes are) and the fact that Whittikar gets out-acted by the guest character yet again. The fact that that guest character is another version of the Doctor just makes me wonder if these series would be any better with Jo Martin in the main role.

Praxues

A return to our regularly scheduled ham-fisted messages.

Stop polluting the ocean everyone; or aliens will come here to experiment on us, with plastic viruses.

Even worse than that, we’ll be inundated with bad actors. What’s that, your best friend of 5 years has been killed; it should take you a good three and a half minutes to get over that.

To add to the ham-fisted messages, this episode has possibly the greatest unintentionally hilarious sacrifice scene ever. We’re supposed to be feeling the despair of Jake’s husband whilst watching him awkwardly jerk his head around on monitor.

Yaz has traded in her personality for Clara’s, as the plot required her  to needlessly put herself in danger.

In fact, the plot is driven by the characters needlessly doing stupid things.

One character is killed by infected birds after needlessly staying outside to keep an eye on them. Why would you need to watch them; you’ve already seen that they’re swarming around?

The Doctor decides to move a critically ill man to a random lab in Madagascar, so that she can examine him. Except he had just been on board the Tardis, which we know can scan, medically examine and cure people. It even has it’s own sick bay and lab. The Doctor even uses that Tardis to make a cure for the alien virus later on.

Do I even need to mention the absence of show-don’t-tell, given that Chibnall wrote this one?