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.

13th Doctor Announcement.

I’m worried about this…but not for the reason you think.

Sooo…a woman.

I think it’s pretty clear that this was going to happen. The build up to it has been “hinted” throughout the latter stages of series 10, with all the subtly of a club hammer.

In terms of Doctor Who’s survival, this change up would seem a logical step in the right direction. However, I remain pessimistic about the likelihood of it’s success.

And it has nothing to do with Jodie Whittaker.

My issue is with Chris Chibnall. Frankly, I have found most of his Who episodes to date…well…boring. I’ve reviewed most of them and the common theme is that he doesn’t have an eye for filler. Say what you will about Moffat, but at least his chit-chat and somewhat glib humour give you something to watch. Chibnall has never really been able to balance the action side of Doctor Who and the talky side of Doctor Who.

The other massive issue I have with him comes from his other work. I consider series 1 of Broadchurch amongst some of the best drama of the last 10 years. However it’s two sequels…well let’s just say I kind of felt like I missed the timeframe for reviewing them, but this seems like a good opportunity.  Series 2 completely removes the suspension of disbelief with a courtroom scene in which a judge orders a jury not to consider someone’s confession. Evidence in a criminal trial is subject to a pre-trial hearing so if defence had an issue with a confession they would have had to raise it prior to the trial. The judge would then decide if the confession was admissible as evidence. If the judge agreed with defence, the jury would never hear about the confession so it couldn’t prejudice their view at all. What does this have to do with Doctor Who?

Well if Chibnall is willing to throw both legal research and common sense out the window in the name of drama, how bad is it going to get when he’s working with a time travelling phone box?

Moving on to series 3 of Broadchurch…well…let’s discuss sexual crimes…I mean let’s discuss all of them. That’s what Chibnall tried to do with this series, to disastrous effect I might add.

The series follows the story of a character who’s been the victim of rape and then tries to build subplots around other characters who are either involved in or victims of other sexual crimes. The fact that DI Hardy’s daughter just so happens to be one of these victims seems too coincidental to be believed. Linking obtaining violent pornography to committing sexual crimes is a significant oversimplification of the issue. And most importantly, dotting those elements around the periphery of the main story doesn’t allow enough time to develop any of them. The issue of consent (that has become the centre of a national discussion) is what was at play in this series. The idea is that someone who would steal a nude photo of another person and distribute it has the same attitude towards consent as a rapist. This is, however, never explored by Chibnall (or any of the writers), as there simply isn’t enough time.

This is a problem. The BBC likes to use Doctor Who as a vessel for morals as well as entertainment. A head writer who likes to shove as many lessons onto the screen as possible and not leave enough time to explain any of them just isn’t going to work.

This becomes distinctly important, when you consider that Chibnall is invariably going to have to deal with issues of misogyny and women’s rights. I personally don’t think that Chibnall is up to the task.

His work on Who has shown a lack of ability to hold the audiences’ attention and his work on Broadchurch has shown a lack of longevity to his story arcs.

When doing something as radical as changing the Doctor into a woman (a move that will alienate a chunk of the audience) the show needs a head writer who can handle it.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s not Chris Chibnall.

Jodie Whittaker will have to be judged (as all who’ve played the Doctor) on her performance. But even the best actor in the world can’t work in a part if the writing isn’t good enough.  

What’s really going on with Barely Legal Drivers?

So I got round to watching the second series of Barely Legal Drivers, which, for those of you who don’t know is  BBC 3 show, following 12 (2 per episode) newly qualified or out-of-practice young drivers. It follows the formula of such shows as Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents, in that the participants are told they are being filmed for some other show, while the cameras are there mainly to allow their parents access to parts of their childrens’ lives that they would not ordinarily see. To add to that, they also bring in former traffic copper Judith and (for this second series) a top driving instructor, to make the actual assessment of the participants’ driving skills.

On the surface this would appear to be a show about entertaining people with the wacky antics of young drivers and focussing on the typical British family and how the idea of how the parent/child relationship shifts once a child has access to something as important as a car.

However something far more sinister actually lies beneath the surface of this programme. It is propagated on the same notion as that of Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents. The notion that it is perfectly acceptable for parents to lie to and spy on their children.

Now you could say that the whole issue of national broadcast date being set for a programme no matter what the participants think it is means they’re asking for this information to be made public. But that would miss the point I’m trying to make.

Consider how disrespectful it is to their children to lie to them about what’s going on, spy on them and then bring in a couple of external examiners to tut at them. This is linked to an overriding attitude that permeates the older generation in the UK.

It used to be that young people could be framed as disrespectful and unappreciative (“I didn’t fight a war, so you could speak to me like that”). However the generation that relied on that viewpoint has all but died off and been replaced by a generation that literally didn’t fight a war. This generation can’t legitimately frame their youngers as disrespectful so instead settles for going with dangerous.

Case in point, programmes like Barely Legal Drivers completely ignore older drivers who are awful behind the wheel, and are only interested in waggling a finger to young drivers and saying that their very act of getting behind the wheel of the car is a horribly dangerous thing that we should all be afraid of.

For example, one of this years’ participants was denied a car, given his propensity for driving at between 75 and 78 miles per hour on the motorway. Kids and adults alike, I’m going to tell you a secret; EVERYONE drives at 80MPH on the motorway. Unless they’re really bored the Police won’t even stop you for driving at 80 (usually because that’s how fast they’re going themselves). This was even pretty much said in the episode itself, with participants father pointing out that he usually drives about 80 on the motorway, only to be slapped back by his wife, who pointed out that their son was too young to be driving at that speed. Of course she was fine with her husband driving at that speed. Judith even dolled out some advanced driving lessons for this based on his being 8 miles over the speed limit. A speed limit that no one Judith’s age (or any age for that matter) respects.

The hypocrisy of this act is at it’s most evident in the next episode when Judith chastises another young driver for hogging the middle lane of the motorway and holding other cars up, by getting there and only driving at 70MPH. Well that’s all very well Judith, but in order to not be holding up the cars behind her up she’d have to be driving faster than 70MPH, which according to you is guaranteed to kill everyone using the motorway at the time. Incidentally I wonder whether the BBC will be offering advanced driving courses to everyone it recorded using the motorway on the occasion of my first example. While they only had a creepy telemetry box in the participant’s car, the fact that he didn’t collide with any of the cars in front of him suggests they were travelling at the same speed as him.

 

If these lessons really are being given out in the spirit of safety on the UK roads, then I’d say the BBC has an obligation ensure every single driver in their programme that’s been recorded doing something wrong should be educated about their mistakes.

Oh and to close out this point, if he was speeding so much, how did the camera car following him keep up? I mean it’s not like the camera car was speeding too? That would mean there were actually three different types of hypocrisy at work here.

So what’s really going on with Barely Legal Drivers? Am I just reading too much in to what the show’s agenda is?

Or is this a show (like Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents) that’s designed to promote and dislike and distrust of the young?