Doctor Who - Revolution of the Daleks

When you’re good at something, never do it for free…and Chris Chibnall is good at being a terrible writer.  

Does anyone remember ‘Heaven Sent’, where the Doctor escaped a literally inescapable prison that was designed specifically for him? Well apparently, that prison was nothing next to the one that River Song escaped from on a weekly basis. 

 But that’s by the by; there’s far worse things about this episode. Starting at the beginning, having destroyed all of the continuity that was created by far more competent writers of the past, Chibnall has now even turned on his own past entries. 

Last year he turned in a New Year’s Day special, which could be described as ‘not terrible.’ It wasn’t good, but at the very least it was superior to the usual drivel that he normally scrawls on the back of cigarette packet five minutes before a deadline. 

 Seemingly not content with having demonstrated something approaching competence 12 months ago, Chibnall now takes the opportunity to retrospectively lower the quality of his one passible script. Once again the catalyst for the action is the Doctor’s incompetence; she apparently just left a Dalek shell to be picked up by anyone. 

 Keeping with this theme, no one on Earth remembers the multiple Dalek invasions; you know when they burst out of a void in Canary Warf and killed millions of people, and when they literally moved the whole planet to another quadrant of Space. Anyway, this collective amnesia means that only the ‘fam’ recognise the Dalek’s when they see one, but can’t get any help from the Doctor who’s making zero effort to escape prison.  Not to worry, Jack Harkness shows up to break her out. 

This is the first major problem; the Doctor is entirely passive in her escape from prison. No other version of the character would just sit there and be in prison. This continues the theme of the Doctor as incompetent; if Jack could think of a way out, the Doctor should have been able to think of ten. 

 Anyway the Doctor then makes it back 10 months after her ‘fam’ to receive a shove and an angry pout from Yaz. Did I miss something? Is Yaz her jilted lover or something? Also, all the Doctor does is apologise for being away for 10 months, when from her perspective she’s been imprisoned for more than 20 years. There’s no reason that she couldn’t simply answer with this, but doesn’t seemingly for drama. 

The most interesting dynamic between Clara and Twelve was that neither of them was ever willing to consider the other’s point of view. The dynamic between Thirteen and Yaz is that Thirteen just accepts whatever Yaz says as reasonable rather than ever standing up for herself. Call me old fashioned, but I think a protagonist who’s incapable of standing up for themself isn’t going to be convincing as a world ending super genius. 

 Anyway we move on to the Doctor lecturing the evil businessman about the dangers of messing with things he doesn’t understand. This is fine and in character, except it becomes pretty obvious that he isn’t doing that. The hipster who’s company he bought is doing that; but the Doctor lets him off, for…reasons. 

The Doctor’s end game of pitting Dalek against Dalek is a quite literal deus ex machina. 

 Tosin Cole takes his performance to new lows, with wooden line delivery from start to finish. It’s clear that he doesn’t care about the role and it’s difficult to tell if he ever did. He and Bradley bow out in an incredibly forced scene, that rips off Noel Clarke’s exit while someone losing all it’s meaning. 

 John Barrowman does his best to salvage his parts of the script, but is undermined by Chibnall’s inability to show rather than tell. At one point Barrowman delivers Jack’s signature camp indignation at his efforts being ignored. It’s obvious that this comes out of Jack’s insecurity, but Chibnall has to have Yaz say it, to make sure that the audience doesn’t miss it. Barrowman turns in one of the only decent performances, but has his writer working against him. 

 Overall, this was a poor and typical entry from Chris Chibnall that lowers last year's special by association.

Doctor Who: The Timeless Children.

I would call this lazy writing, but I think you actually have to work pretty hard to come up with something this bad.

Does everyone remember the War Doctor; played by John Hurt (created purely out of necessity as Christopher Eccleston didn’t want to come back) and slotted into the Doctor’s timeline in the gap between Eight and Nine.

Well turns out Moffatt doing things like that just encouraged Chris Chibnall to see if he could do something more game changing.

However, as has come up quite a lot, Chris Chibnall is a terrible writer and Steven Moffatt is not.

So let’s tackle the minor things first:

·      The support characters are better actors than the main cast.

·      Tosin Cole doesn’t know how to act.

·      Graham has a heart-to-heart with Yas in which he sings her praises, whilst talking about someone who is most definitely not Yas.

·      The Master’s plan is stupidly predictable.

·      The Cyber-Masters look ridiculous.

·      The entire cast keeps up the tradition of stating the obvious, due to Chibnall not understanding the television is a visual story-telling process.

Now,  the big universe shift.

The Doctor has been the first Time Lord all along and has had her memory erased to keep her from knowing. Also she has no limits to her regenerations as that was something her adopted mother imposed after stealing her genes.

Erm, does anyone remember when Eleven aged to death in his final episode. His body was worn out (like One’s) and he couldn’t regenerate because he had no life cycles left.

Anyway, we now know where the Jo Martin Doctor came from; she was from a previous set of Doctors that was erased from her memory.

Err, Chibs…if she pre-dates William Hartnell why does the Martin-Doctor have Hartnell’s Tardis? Why would this Doctor even be the “Doctor”? That was a name that the First Doctor adopted as his alias on Earth. Why would a previous version of the same person have arrived at the same alias?

It would have made more sense for the Master to have been the Timeless Child.

This would have explained why he was so pissed off when he found out about it.

He spends lifetimes knowing he was the Master; of feeling superior to others for reasons he can’t explain and being consistently shunned by Rassilon and the High Council. Then he finds out that he is the source of all of the Time Lords’ power; that they are derived from him and by rights he should stand above them as their creator; their Master.

It would explain where the Master gets his instinctive sense of superiority from; the unconscious knowledge that he is the most powerful Time Lord in the universe.

You could even work the previous Doctor story-line into it, by saying that the Doctor has been resurrected before as he/she has been shown to be able to stop the Master’s plans. Their childhoods could have been manufactured to always keep them close, so that every version of the Doctor would always develop a deep knowledge of the Master, that he/she needed to give him/her the edge in a fight.

And that would by why the Doctor was the only other Time Lord that the Master left alive; he’d want to defeat her last to make sure she knew that she was literally created for him. A final slap in the face to the person who foiled all his plans.

This version even fits better with the Doctor’s speech at the end about how he can’t rob her of her identity. I mean what’s going to give you more of an identity crisis, learning that you’re a walking god or learning that your literal life’s purpose is to keep an eye on one of your high school friends?

And it works better with the Jo Martin Doctor; the thing she did wrong could have been to abandon her duty, creating a chain of events that the Time Lord’s foresaw would lead to the Master discovering his true nature. Gatt’s mission was to bring the Doctor back, wipe her memory and place her back in the timeline in a place that would avert the Master’s eventual discovery.

However, the intervention of Thirteen, which was caused by the fact that she had no memory of the Martin-Doctor meant that Gatt’s mission failed. The Time Lords undid themselves with their hubris and their process of recreating the Doctor backfired as Thirteen could have worked out what was going on if she’d had the memories they took.

But…instead we get some half-baked excuse that the Master can’t stand the idea that he is derived from the Doctor.

This is just plain bad writing; a contrivance used to justify character actions that don’t make sense.

Anyway, the Master creates some hilariously bad looking Cyber-Masters but they’re all destroyed by Space-Barristan Selmy. Apparently he was the one who sent the cyber goo back in time in the first place. So, among all other things, we have to admit that Space-Joffrey was right to dismiss him from the Kingsguard; on the grounds that he was too old and had lost his wits.

Barristan, you have time travel; send the cyber-goo forward in time to the end of the universe to be swallowed up by all the nothingness there. Not backwards in time, when they’ll be loads of poets milling about.

So the series ends on a cliff-hanger with Jodie Whittkar doing an impression of David Tennant in a jail cell, ending her second season still not having established a personality for her Doctor.

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 Series 12 so far.

Bad…just bad.

Is it really necessary to elaborate further than this.

Okay then.

Spyfall Part 1.

Sacha Dhawan works really hard to try and save a dumpster fire, by ending the episode with a fantastic John Simm impression.

This is the kind of episode that would have been described as  average in the Tennant era. Coincidentally, characters like Ryan and Yas consistently describe the Tenth Doctor, when talking about the Thirteenth. When they’re about to try going undercover in Lenny Henry’s evil Facebook rip off, they talk about how she walks into places like she owns them. Thirteen has never walked in somewhere like she owned it, if anything she’s been consistently left in the background of her own show. This comes off like a script that Russell T Davies turned down when he was in charge and that Chibnall re-purposed.

Oh and acknowledging the fact that Graham is just there it state the obvious doesn’t negate the fact that it’s a trope of lazy writing.

Spyfall Part 2.

One giant plot hole with a deus ex machina sat on top of it.

The Doctor finds herself thrown around time to meet some famous women so she can gush about them (and avoid the awkward issue of the real life horrific death of one of them).

Sacha Dhawan continues his battle against the terrible writing, by being the only positive thing in the episode.

The Doctor then resolves the crisis and banishes the invading aliens from a different universe, by using time travel to insert fail safes into the Master’s space bending devices.

That’s a basic paradox, which has been established as something the Doctor cannot do; as soon as the Doctor becomes part of events, she cannot use time travel to alter them, as she would remove the reason for altering them in the first place and thus never have used time travel to alter them at all.

The reason that this has been historically worked into the canon of the show is that allowing the Doctor to reverse an opponent’s plan with time travel means that the Doctor could solve any problem with time travel. This was the main joke in the parody ‘The Curse of the Fatal Death” with the Doctor and Master constantly jumping through time to set traps for each other.

Although I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that Chibnall didn’t just have the sonic screwdriver save the day like normal.

Orphan 55

Move over Greta Grunberg, move and you Elton Musk, Ed Hime has some thoughts on climate change and they’re every bit as profound as ‘it’s bad.’

Just when I was worried that the hamfistedness of series 11 might have left us, he’s swung in with a mixture of finger waggling and condescension that would give even the most stereotypical of school masters a run for their money.

 The resounding message is ‘change or we’ll all turn into horrific predators who breathe carbon dioxide.’

And ‘pay attention to your kids or they’ll turn up at your day spa to bomb it’

Also, how much of a dickhead is the Doctor in this episode? Crazy owner lady and her daughter fight off the monsters by themselves so the Doctor and co (sorry ‘fam’) can escape and the Doctor starts off on a lecture about looking after the planet, after being asked what will happen to them.

You have a ship that bends time and space; fire it up and go save the people who are fighting an army of monsters to protect you. Or just insult the intelligence and morality of the audience.

Forget the climate change message; would any of other version of this character just leave two people to be horrifically murdered liked that in order to deliver a ‘powerful message’?

This tips the episode from being a hamfisted attempt at commentary to an insult directed at it’s audience and main character.