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: 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.