Well that was technically the season finale and er…
It took up 50 minutes. The effects were decent. The direction was solid, nothing too spectacular but not too pedestrian either. Bradley Walsh’s Graham was a star, deadly serious but funny with what I’m convinced have to be ad-libs done on the fly. Tosin Cole’s Ryan talked sense for a change and did a good job of grounding Graham, showing how much he’s grown since we met him.
Yaz was… there I guess. I’m sure she had a point A good one, and not entirely useless as she’s been from most of the series. I just need someone to try and prove it.
And I can’t put it off any longer. He did it again. Chris Chibnall read the wiki entry on a Classic Adventure, thought it sounded interesting and made a complete mess of it. This time he cribbed (Chris Crib-nall? Is that too obscure a joke to make) stole from Douglas Adams’s The Pirate Planet. Telepaths with near unlimited power, stolen planets crushed into the size of a small basketball and the Doctor having to fix it all. All done so much better in the Classic Tom Baker Story.
Throughout Jodie’s Doctor’s confrontation with the main bad guy I just wanted her to break out in a Tom Baker like response. Mocking the “surprise” villain. Sarcastically praising their “incredible ingenuity” and admitting:-“Very rarely have I come across a plan so ambitious, so incredible in scope. Tell me, are you challenging for the throne of the kingdom of morons, or have the other contenders simply given up in awe of your brain melting stupidity?”
Once again the Doctor is insulted for having a “small mind”. Rather than doing what the Doctor is known to do; deliver an intellectual smackdown on par with Godzilla crushing anything that comes underfoot Jodie’s version just keeps asking questions. Questions that any half-wit would notice the obvious answer to.
When the cretin, that’s decided to masquerade as a god this time, admits this is all for revenge you want some sort of reaction. A laugh, a witty come back, something to show just how much contempt the Doctor has for this tinpot dictator, this lunatic fool. They’re nothing, an insignificant idiot. Given the threats we’ve seen the Doctor face everything here is laughable.
Yet somehow Jodie’s Doctor has problems with it. Then there’s utterly pointless pilot points that just seem to exist to build false tension. The Planet is out to get people. Creating a psionic attack that renders it’s victims vegetables. There’s no logical reason for this and some people just happen to be immune. Why, God only knows. It’s only there so that the Doctor has the tools she needs to save the day. With a bit of a tweak to the high tech radios they could have bluffed the same thing and not needed the nonsense.
I really want to write more, but I would just be repeating myself. Chibnall has proven he can’t write clever stories. He can graft pointless asides onto an paper thin plot. Artificially inflating the runtime of stories while trying to appear smarter than they are, but he can’t write cleverly.
It’s paint by numbers story telling A to B to C. Methodical, plodding, uninspired. It feels like it’s a robot writing these adventures. It’s as if some computer was given an analytical dissection of previous episodes and told to make something. The result is thrown together, haphazardly. Inconsistent and often self contradictory. Plot threads are just bunched up and don’t seem to work off each other. Nothing grows organically from the story and opportunities are wasted.
Above all it feels soulless, somehow devoid of what makes Who great. Something is still missing. Several somethings, and until Chibnall stops cribbing from the past and actually acknowledges it, learns from it, his tenure on the show always will be hollow. That ingredient that holds the whole thing together is conspicuous in its absence.
How do I know he’s not giving the past the attention it deserves? That his talk about being a fan is just a bold faced lie? Graham is still calling the Doctor “Doc”. If Chibnall could be bothered to actually watch the classic show he’d know, from day one, the Doctor has always objected to that nickname. No matter the incarnation or the time period the Doctor has always gone out of their way to make sure no one called them “Doc”. John Smith, Professor, Merlin, The Oncoming Storm, even Theta Sigma. The Doctor has been called many, many things but never ever Doc.
It's a whole host of these little inconsistencies that's the problem. These are the not quite rights that leave the whovian in me cold. Maybe it is attracting a new audience and maybe that's a good thing, but I still feel the old guard are being repelled. We're not the audience anymore and perhaps it's me not wanting to give up but there should be room for both old and new. Not just the new blood.
There is a New Years Special coming in just three weeks and that’s the end of the season. Expect a review of that and then an overview some time in January.
Until then I’m going back into my archives with a miners helmet and a shovel to find my Doctor Who DVD’s. I feel the need for some Tom Baker classic goodness…
4 out of 13
Entertaining for the new fans, but nothing interesting for those of us that remember the good old days.
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