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 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.