Doctor Who: The Power of the Doctor

 "We could call this the Master's Dalek plan..."(!)

I love the line above. A nice little fourth wall breaking riff on a story that was televised fifty-six years ago and three quarters of which no longer exists.

Anyway, before I proceed to, yes, praise this epic story by Chris Chibnall (yes, I know), let's just briefly acknowledge that it makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, yes, I can dig the Master getting Daleks and Cybermen to join forces against the Doctor a la The Pandorica Opens... but get them to share ownership of Earth as a foundry for their respective races? Nah. Also, the Doctor is about to regenerate so she effectively tells Yaz to naff off?  That's cold, even though the script tries to pretend it isn't. What happened to their romance? Dan's departure seems forced as well.

And yet... it works. It's entertaining, it made me laugh, it made me cry. It contains everything but the kitchen sink, and the TARDIS full of the Doctor's "extended fam" at the end even outdoes Journey's End. Yet it works, all of the characters get room to breathe without outdoing Jodie on her swansong. Even the glimpses of past Doctors- David Bradley, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann- are nice bits of fanwank, but kept in proportion.

And there's a lot of fanwank here. The Companions Anonymous meeting at the end is outrageous. I mean... Mel, Jo, bloody IAN CHESTERTON: William Russell will be ninety-eight next month. Yet, emotionally, it works.

Oh, and who's shipping Ace and Graham? Because Chibbers is.

Ace and Tegan are pitch perfect and absolutely joyful to see. With Tegan, she's the mouth on legs we love so much, brave hearted, wonderful, missing Adric. With Ace we have the jacket, the Nitro 999(!), and even the bloody baseball bat. Ace is absolutely herself, middle aged yet absoklutely the same teenager we know and adore so much. And both of them get to meet their Doctors, courtesy of plot necessity. 

Tegan's line to Yaz- "We used to be you, decades back" is a delight.

And I can't believe the early scene of the Cybermen being demagnetised into space isn't a nice little reference to The Moonbase. I love Ace's shock that Cybermen are now explicitly no longer vulnerable to gold. It's about time that was cleared up.

Sacha Dhawan is superb as the Master. His performance here- ever gaslighting and playing with our heads- makes him a serious contender to be the best Master ever. Yes, possibly better than Roger Delgado, John Simm, Derek Jacobi, even Michelle Gomez. And it cannot be denied that the Master, as Rasputin, in 1916, playing Boneyb M's "Ra Ra Rasputin" is one of the greatest televisual moments ever. The idea of Rasputin's hold over the Tsar and Tsarina being due to the "I am the Master, you will obey me" thing is genius.

But we end with the regeneration. Which, despite the rather forced departure of Yaz, is very well handled indeed. Jodie Whittaker is superb. She and Yaz get one last date and one last ice cream. It's just a shame they didn't kiss.

And then she does indeed, as rumoured, regenerate into David Tennant. Yet it's clear this is not a degeneration but a new incarnation with an old face. Tennant's dialogue is, of course, predictably amusing, but that's what RTD intended.

This was not without its flaws. It's possible that I may revise my opinion downwards in future; that happens with Chibnall scripts. But this episode was a joy.

We end with a preview for next year. Ncuti Gatwa is in it... and he's playing it Scottish?

Doctor Who: The Timeless Children

“Gird your loins, gentlemen.”

“I don’t... I don’t know how to do that.”

Now that is how you do a season finale. No, none of the “Fam” died, in spite of the many subtle hints. And the explanation of the “Timeless Child” was perhaps the most likely one. But I simply have to admit yet again this season that Chibbers has produced the goods. This is a cracking season finale, and what it does to Doctor Who lore is at once brave, radical and exciting. The whole thing looks amazing too, and there are truly excellent performances from both Sacha Dhawan as a dangerously and compellingly insane Master and Jodie Whittaker as a Doctor forced to confront what she’s never been made to confront before.

Much of the episode has two parallel plots- the Doctor within the Matrix receiving a massively game-changing info-dump from the Matrix while the Fam and their friends dodge peril from Ashad and his Cyber-army. I like this juxtaposition and, much as we fans are fixated on the big revelations, the exciting scenes with the Fam are important. There are some great moments, such as Graham telling Yaz just how awesome he thinks she is, and indeed one of their friends wanting to retrieve the body of his fallen comrade because her greatest fear was always being altered by the Cybermen- it’s this kind of thing that makes the Cybermen so effective in this two parter.

But we can’t help be excited by the scenes on Gallifrey. We begin with the Doctor and Master engaging in some edgily dark repartee mixed with nostalgic references to Borusa and the Panopticon, showing us what fantastic chemistry these two actors have. But when the Doctor is attached forcibly to the Matrix the revelations keep coming.

So once the sentient race of Gallifrey was the Shabogans- nice nostalgic touch- and one of them- Tecteun- was an early space explorer, crudely heroic. But one day she came across the Boundary, and found a child there, apparently abandoned. So she adopted that child and studied it, until one day it died- and became the first person on Gallifrey to regenerate. So she studies the child even further- a creepy, Stranger Things type example of an innocent child being used and experimented on, regenerating again and again. Some childhood.

But Tecteun eventually reached the point where she was able to risk testing her theories on herself- and so she became the first native Gallifreyan to regenerate. Dialogue then tells us vaguely that history passed, that the Citadel was built and that those dwelling in it became a race apart and eventually, presumably after Rassilon and Omega, Time Lords. It’s made explicit that only these elite Gallifreyans are Time Lords and are able to regenerate- an artificial twelve times- and that the rest of the planet’s population are presumably still “Shabogans”.

Meanwhile, Ashad has in his chest a device to destroy all organic life on the planet, a somewhat obvious case of Chekhov’s Gun. And the Master, latest in a long line of Tobias Vaughns, is inviting his Cyber-Army to invade Gallifrey. This is hardly rational of him, to say the least, but then that clearly isn’t the point. And it’s hugely amusing to hear the Master say what we all think about Ashad’s plan to destroy all organic life so that everyone, himself included, can “”ascend” to being purely mechanical creatures- “Oh, you mean robots?” Indeed.

But there’s a big revelation still to come, of course- the Timeless Child is the Doctor. She had many lives before the ones we knew (so The Brain of Morbius doesn’t need retconning after all!), and the Matrix has been redacted to remove all details of those lives- but the sheer size of those redactions imply there were many. And, let’s not forget, we have absolutely no idea where the child came from.

All this is brilliant. At a stroke the mystery of the Doctor is revealed- what happened in this previous lives? Who even is she? What of the Jo Martin Doctor, who we see in a mental pep talk sequence? And, let’s note, what’s even more brilliant is that the bureaucratic, arrogant, silly old Time Lords are no longer even all that relatively important to the central mystery. I love it.

Cue a final confrontation, the awesome spectacle of regenerating Cyber-Gallifreyans complete with high collared robes, and a magnificent final confrontation between the Master and the Doctor. And a splendid performance by Jodie Whittaker as she and the Master discuss whether she will indeed sacrifice herself to stop him- fortunately, there’s a convenient character on hand to make that sacrifice instead. Meanwhile, the “Fam” and friends are sent back to contemporary Earth in a Hartnell-era TARDIS which, like the Master’s, has disguised itself as a house. Cool.

And then we get a very RTD ending, complete with “What? What? What?” As the Doctor is suddenly kidnapped by a “cold case team” of Judoon and bunged in a prison without trial. Probably for a crime she can’t remember. Wow. At least we presumably have a long time to digest this before Revolution of the Daleks...

Oh, and while we wait, here are all my Doctor Who reviews...  https://llamastranglermarathon.blogspot.com/p/doctor-who-index.htmlhttps://llamastranglermarathon.blogspot.com/p/doctor-who-index.html

Doctor Who: Ascension of the Cybermen

“We're carrying the Cyberman that makes other Cybermen scream..."

Well, yeah. That was very good indeed. Actually, it was sort of excellent. And Chris Chibnall bloody wrote it.

So it's a long time in the future, after the Cyber-Wars, according to the pre-titles CGI with narration which rather niftily takes us into the title sequence through a Cyberman's eye. It's a cool beginning to an episode with not much wrong with it.

One intriguing sub-plot, beginning immediately after the titles, concerns an ordinary couple in mid-twentieth century Ireland who find a baby in a basket, abandoned like Moses, and we see scenes throughout as they raise the lad into a decent, nice young man who decides to join the Garda. But his survival after he's shot and falls from a cliff makes us (and his worried father) worried that things may be going a bit Clark Kent. Only after his retirement, and his forceful accosting by two youthful doppelgangers- itself weird- do we learn that he's been under the influence of a Chameleon Arch for his entire life. A time lord, presumably? Perhaps even yet another unknown incarnation of the Doctor? The one thing I’m certain of is that the explanation is closely liked to what the Master tells the Doctor at the end of the episode. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s just say the payoff to this segment is awesome.

But, for the Doctor and her Fam, the world surrounding them is very different from idyllic rural Eire. It’s a period after the Cyber-Wars, where the Cybermen are almost dead but humans are almost as endangered, the Doctor telling Yas, Ryan, Graham and the viewers that the seven people in the precarious settlement before them are the only humans left, at least in this part of the galaxy. It all feels very Frontios. These characters are likeable and well-sketched for an episode with so much else to do, but as the Cyber-drones (robot Cyber-heads) arrive we’re very firmly told that this is a narrative with no time for the Doctor’s usual tricks as a couple of characters are killed, all of the Doctor’s smugly presented gadgets are destroyed and suddenly things are looking very worrying indeed, so much so that the Doctor panics, in what is a rather important scene for Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor, forcefully telling the “Fam” that they need to do as she says and not question her, and she regrets putting them in such deadly danger. All this is very ominous, especially as a trio of attacking Cybermen force Yas and Graham to flee in a separate ship from the Doctor and Ryan. Oh, and one of those three Cybermen is Ashad from last episode. It’s beginning to look awfully as though his survival, after last week, is going to result in the death of at least one of the Doctor’s friends.

There are some nice touches to these scenes- the Cybermen's legendary weakness to gold is mentioned, but rather forcefully batted away as irrelevant. The Doctor used to hotwire warp drives on weekends as a teenager, "not that we had weekends, or teenagers". And this Doctor, instead of jelly babies, has humbugs. But things look ominous. Ashad seems to imply to the Doctor that he is, to semi-quote the old Cartmel Masterplan,more than just a Cybermen: he eagerly embraced conversion, or "ascension" but was "denied"- because of some kind of apparent destiny. And now, with the Cyberium, he seems to hint at literally precognitive powers, and foresees the end for humanity. Who is he?

We end with Yas, Graham and their friends on a ship full of dormant Cybermen of a quasi-Invasion vintage, and watching in horror as Ashad and his two lieutenants arrive to painfully awaken the Cyber-army. They seem to have no hope... but this is but one cliffhanger.

Elsewhere, the Doctor, Ryan and their friends arrive at the promised land (there's a lot of Biblical allusion in this episode) to find a selfless old man, Ko Sharmus, and a magic portal just into the sea that transports the desperate to a completely random point in the universe- and yet, as the Doctor looks into the portal, the sees the orange skies and the Citadel on Gallifrey. Why there? Why Now? And, no less importantly, why does the Master, still played by the brilliant Sacha Dhawan, choose this moment to jump out of the portal to gleefully tell the Doctor that everything she knows is wrong?

So... yeah. That was amazing. And will take a long time to digest. Next week's finale certainly looks big.

Doctor Who: The Haunting of Villa Diodati

“I must poppeth to the little boys' room."

Now that was unexpected. Also clever. This looks very much, for a large chunk of the episode, to be a very standard celebrity historical. After all, we have Mary Shelley, a superficial but fun version of Lord Byron (with a shout-out to his awesome daughter, who was from Leicestershire, you know), and (eventually) Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ad in the fact that it's the night Mary S wrote Frankenstein in 1816, a haunted house, foreboding visions, ghosts, plus loads and loads of very effectively atmospheric direction from newcomer Emma Sullivan, and this looks to be an example- and a rather bloody good one-of the formulaic pairing of a celebrity historical figure with a science fantasy threat thematically related to their life- as per earlier in this season with Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror.

Except that's not what this ultimately turns out to be. Well, sort of; the episode does sort of have its cake and eat it by playing with the tropes of the celebrity historical for most of the run time. But this turns out in fact to be an arc episode, a harbinger of the final two-parter that reminds me somewhat of Utopia. Because it is here that the Doctor encounters the lone Cyberman as prophesied by Captain Jack- and ends up giving it what it wants in a huge timey-wimey dilemma. And the consequences are nailed on certain to be dire.

But the celebrity historical horror bits of the episode really are bloody good, from the house going all Castrovalva to the moment with Dr Polidori walking through the walls. It's an impressive script from newcomer Maxine Alderton (no writer credit for Chibbers), with some nice touches such as all the exposition early on being imparted via gossip during the dance early on. And there are a lot of characters to keep track of- not only the TARDIS crew but Byron, Mary and Percy Shelley, plus John Polidori of The Vampyre fame, and everyone gets some kind of development, even if necessarily superficial.

But the explanation for the, well, recursive occlusion is cool enough- a perception filter- and the nature of the threat is awesome- Nick Briggs playing Ashad, a horrifyingly part-Cybernised Cyberman, with half a human face and emotions still intact, which gives us a very clear pointer that he's insane. This really wrenches true body horror from the concept of the Cybermen. And it's looking for the "Cyberium", an artifact from the Cyber-Wars of the future which seems like the kind of Cyber-Planner Kit Pedler would probably have written for The Invasion if William Gibson had been a thing in 1968.

And the Doctor's dilemma (ahem) is an appalling one- Jack warned her not to give the Cyberman what it wants, on pain of untold death and suffering. But the alternative is the premature death of Percy Bysshe Shelley and, as the Doctor rightly puts it, "words matter". Poets are as important as scientists, and it matters in these Gradgrindian times that this be said. A universe without Shelley hardly bears thinking about, and not only because, as the Doctor says to Ryan, the butterfly effect would mean that he and her other friends would never be born.

As the Doctor points out (rather forcibly), it's in these decisions that she is, and must be alone, a being apart, stil the Lonely God, and there is the question as to how three ordinary humans can really be friends to such a being on the level they believe they are. And yet, even when offered the chance to sit out the upcoming saga of the Cyber-War, all of Graham, Yas and Ryan insist upon coming along. I'm getting the strong stench of imminent tragic death.

And so yes, that was rather good- both as a story in its own right and part of the spine for the season. In mixing up the types of Doctor Who stories it's a Time Meddler for out times. ♥But what is being set up...?

Doctor Who: Can You Hear Me?

“What do you think it feels like to be them, to be such tiny, ephemeral flashes of existence?"

That was an extraordinary piece of television- effective as drama, deeply creepy and scary, developed all of the regular characters significantly and equally. It also had a subtle couple of nods for the old school fans and probably has more significance for the season arc than we think at first.

Best of all, it was actually about something.

It's often a sign of a good script when you have a complex situation- and here we have 14th century Aleppo; Yas, Ryan and Graham all visiting friends or relatives in Sheffield and later move to outer space in the far future. It's complex, but never confusing if you're paying attention, all to the credit of new writer Charlene James, with Chris Chibnall getting a co-credit. It's all wonderfully structured, including a pre-titles teaser for the first time in ages- yay!

The regulars all get meaty stuff. We discover that, three years ago, Yas had a bit of a crisis- bullies, slipping grades, parents not getting it- and was only prevented from running away by a kindly police officer, herself a nicely written character. Ryan has a best friend who has suffered alone with mental health issues lately, and it's clear that Ryan feels he's been neglecting the people at home while he's away travelling in the TARDIS. His conversation in the TARDIS with Yas at the end makes me feel he may not want to keep travelling for much longer.

Then we have Graham's fears and anxieties about his cancer returning- and a nice little character moment for the Doctor of the kind that was missing last season as Graham confides in her and she frankly confesses her social awkwardness. More of this sort of thing please.

At first, in Aleppo, it appears the baddies are going to be the nasty CGI monsters- but it's a whopping great clue when we're told that the monsters don't exist. There's quite a lot of clever misdirection. The first part of the episode is creepy and atmospheric, a wonderful combination the excellent visual style we consistently get with Doctor Who these days (something I don't praise often enough) and equally good writing. It's a great sci-fi concept that we hav two colliding planets with a wondrously engineered artifact between them preventing armageddon, and also that this artifact seems to be a prison containing a woman being fed nightmares- a great concept, and a puzzle. Ian Gelder is superb, too, as the incredibly creepy finger-detaching man.

Yet the revelations pay off superbly- like how, in solving the apparent puzzle of breaking the lock combination the Doctor fails to solve the puzzle of what's going on, and falls into a terrible trap. And I love that the pair of cruelly playful immortals behind it all strongly echo the Eternals from Enlightenment- although, quite rightly, it's left ambiguous that this is what they are. What does seem to be clear is that they're the same as the eponymous villain in The Celestial Toymaker. Whatever the continuity implications, I love the visual style of how we get all the animated exposition. And I suspect their existence points towards something significant, hence the audio flashback to the Master telling us of dark Gallifreyan secrets and the Timeless Child.

But this is, at its root, a story about mental health. These immortal beings feed on our nightmares, our self-doubt, our feelings that we're not good enough. And it's in being strong, in rising above these doubts, that we can triumph. A wonderful subtext to an episode which is exceptional in every way.

Doctor Who: Praxeus

“That’s why you smell of dead bird!”

That was rather good. Not, perhaps, up there with last week or Spyfall, but at last this season has given us a story of the week that is more than “quite good”. This was a solid tale, and not only because it looked amazing- well shot and looking far more e pensive than it actually was.

I’m reminded of The Enemy of the World in how this story flits from location to location- in this case Chile, Hong Kong and Madagascar- in a story that can feel somewhat bewildering. Perhaps the story struggled to squeeze everything into its running time but I’m nevertheless impressed with how the supporting cast were well fleshed out, the Doctor gets to be extremely Doctorish, the regular cast are all given lots to do while being shown to be awesome, and the story is actually about something- the scary amounts of microplastics we are releasing into our world.

The plot is rather daring, beginning with the TARDIS crew split up on various missions and allowing the TARDIS itself to link the various strands. Yet this allows each regular character to have a little development- especially the arguably neglected Yas- and shows how far each of them has come since they started travelling with the Doctor. We get to see an international and pleasingly diverse cast. We even get a sympathetic and three dimensional same sex relationship where, at the last moment, the more three dimensional of the two narrowly escapees a heroic yet cliched death. Phew.

Also, it’s interesting to have the baddie be a deadly alien pathogen for once, and for the sentient alien antagonist to be using humans as lab rats in a desperate attempt to find a cure. As stories of the week go this feels new, experimental, expanding what Doctor Who can do rather than fitting into an established story type like “celebrity historical” or “base under siege”. No, this may not end up as one of my all time favourites, but it’s well conceived, well scripted and well made. At last the stories of the week this season give us something impressive that’s more than “quite good”. And, after last week, it’s good to be reminded that you don’t need loads of continuity to redefine what this programme can be capable of.

Doctor Who: Fugitive of the Judoon

“Consider your rhino backside imperially regulated!"

Er... so this isn't a story of the week, then. Blimey.

I'm still more than a little shellshocked from that. Did they really squeeze all that into forty-nine minutes? Impossible, surely?

So let's take a deep breath. I shall try and be coherent about what I just watched. Firstly, it was very good- I'm not sure how much was Chibbers and how much was Vinay Patel; frankly a big chunk of it was very heavily arc stuff so you can see how Chibbers ended up with a co-writing credit. Nevertheless, between this and Demons of the Punjab I'm impressed with Patel, on present evidence one of the more promising of the new writers.

I'm also extremely impressed with Jodie Whittaker. So far she hasn't been given scripts which allow her to show the kind of range that other recent Doctors have, and the result has been a kind of vague post-2005 generic Tennant-style performance. But here we get to see more of this Doctor's hidden depths, and at last Whittaker is called upon to dig deep- and she really nails it. This, more than anything with current Doctor Who, is what I've been waiting for. We know that this isn't going to be an episode of the week from very early on, in the TARDIS, where the Doctor is uncharacteristically secretive to her friends about what the Master told her at the end of Spyfall.

At first this seems like a fairly normal episode. Yes, we know the Judoon of old but they're portrayed as the same old occasionally murderous comic foils of old, with their silly language and vulnerability to having obscure legislation quoted at them. They're looking all around Gloucester (naturally, the episode gives us a good look at that fair city's main tourist attractions including, KGB assassins please note, the very pretty cathedral) for a fugitive, who seems to be a bloke called Lee, played by Matthew from Game On.

Except all this is just very clever misdirection. Because we begin the episode from the POV of Lee's very ordinary tour guide wife, Ruth, who is likeable, relatable and reacts just as a normal person would to all these alien rhino people. Only after a while, and after the appearance of the Judoons' immediate employer Gat, do we realise that all this is just misdirection and that Ruth- not poor, doomed Lee- is the fugitive.

None of this, at this point, seems to have much wider significance. Much more jaw-dropping is that ship orbiting the Earth that first Graham and then Yas and Ryan are transmatted to. Only gradually do we get the completely out-of-the-blue (at least to those of us who are unspoiled) return of Captain Jack. This is something of a joyous shock- and I love his reaction to the Doctor's current gender. I suppose it makes sense that Chibbers, former showrunner of Torchwood, would bring back a character he knows well. Even more intriguing, for vague reasons of plot convenience he can't hang around, and gets to impart some enjoyably cryptic and fascinating words before sodding suddenly off. The Doctor is to "Beware the lone Cyberman" and "Don't give it what it wants". It seems there's a big alliance against a massive Cyber-empire which can only be "brought down to nothing" if the Doctor does the right thing. Oooh.

All of this is huge, but it's not even close to being the main shock of this not-exactly-anonymous episode.Because Ruth shows some unexpected combat skills while facing the Judoon and the mysterious Gat in Gloucester Cathedral, which a probably going to get a few more tourists than usual. The Doctor accompanies her to her lighthouse childhood home and digs up a strange object while Ruth goes to what turns out to be a trigger for a chameleon arch (remember them?). The object turns out to be a somewhat '60s-ish looking TARDIS and Ruth turns out to be... the Doctor. We can add Jo Martin (who is very good indeed, and whom I remember from Chef) to the list. And she is absolutely Doctorish- right up to giving Gat a chance before letting her trip the fatal booby trap.

This is, I think it's fair t say, a bombshell. Oh, there's a certain amount of plot and peril until the episode finishes, but while all this is going on we, the viewers are trying to digest this information. Because this is clearly a past Doctor and that, as continuity currently stands, is theoretically impossible. There are thirteen incarnations in a regeneration cycle, and although it's slightly complicated by the fact that Jodie is the first of a new cycle of thirteen, we know every past incarnation of the Doctor, right? And Brain of Morbius, you can shut up. Multi-Doctor stories from The Five Doctors to Day of the Doctor have flat out stated that William Hartnell was the first.

But Chibbers, of course, knows this. He's one of us. It's pretty much certain that a) all this is done deliberately and with all due continuity obsessiveness and b) he has a plan. We're going to get yet another layer of retcon. The Doctor's past is looking a bit knocked about, certainly, but I for one am excited. Even more curious is that the employers of the Judoon are the Time Lords- but Time Lords from the past. This is the first time we've seen non-renegade Time Lords from Gallifrey's actual past, which in any other episode would itself be huge. There's clearly some kind of forgotten, buried past.

Then again, the TARDIS is a police box- so post An Unearthly Child? But no sonic screwdriver as yet, so pre-Fury from the Deep? And Chibbers is certainly well aware of these points.

We end with the Doctor and her friends reaffirming their togetherness, the Doctor concluding that "Something's coming for me", and a hook into next week's episode. We have a week to recover. Phew.

I have no idea, excited as I am, where all this is leading. But that's how you masterfully ramp up the revelations, beat by beat. Brilliant.

Doctor Who: Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror

“I work for the future. And the future is mine."

Well, that was... perfectly decent. Here we have a celebrity historical which hews very close indeed to the now time-honoured blueprint first seen with The Unquiet Dead as the Doctor visits the Gilded Age New York of 1900. We have a celebrity genius in the vein of a Dickens, Shakespeare or Van Gogh in Nikola Tesla- and the fact he's an inventor rather than a genius of the artistic kind makes little difference to how familiar this feels.

And there's nothing wrong with that, of course: Mark Gatiss' original template is one that works, and there's space in each season for an episode or two that's "trad". It's just a shame that we have, in Nina Metivier, a new writer, and certainly a competent one, but we haven't really heard her voice.

It's an entertaining bit of fun nonetheless. Goran Visnjic is splendid as Tesla while Robert Glenister (thirty-six years after playing the young Salateen in The Caves of Androzani) gives quite a nuanced and interesting, although also larger than life, performance as the genius but morally dodgy Thomas Edison.

The plot is clever and entertaining as the parasitic Skithra, a race of hive mind giant scorpions who travel across the galaxy cannibalising other races' tech, want to kidnap Tesla to be their ship's chief engineer, which is splendidly bonkers. Even better is the fact that Rani herself- Anji Mohindra- is clearly having enormous fun behind all that make-up as the Skithra queen. Interestingly, the tech stolen includes stuff from "Venusians" and a Silurian gun- so presumably a group of Silurians awoke before 1900? But then, I suppose there's also the question of where Madame Vastra came from.

One might perhaps point to the lack of obvious racism shown towards Yaz and Ryan but this, I think, would be churlish: the programme can't just not hire regulars of certain ethnic backgrounds, nor can it restrict itself from setting episodes in huge swathes of history. There have been plenty of instances where the programme has referred to the racist attitudes of the past- not least in Rosa last season. I think that earns it the right to downplay the whole thing sometimes too. We still get good character moments- I like how Graham recognises Edison as a certain type of greedy boss.

So we have a very "trad" episode for modern Doctor Who- a textbook "celebrity historical". And, yet again, an episode that's, well, quite good. No more, no less.

Doctor Who: Orphan 55

“That's a funny kind of linen cupboard..."

Not all episodes of Doctor Who have to be classics; they just have to try and be, at least quite good. It's reassuring, then, that last year's slightly disappointing season is followed by an excellent special, a superb opening two parter which seems to change the rules and is then followed by an episode which is, well, quite good. This may be no classic, and may not be as good as Ed Hime's superb It Takes You Away from last season but, if this is the baseline, this season is going to be a considerable improvement.

This is a story of the week- give or take possible romantic implications for Ryan, which I'll come to in a bit. But in one sense this story is important. Last year the Amazon burned. Australia is burning right now. Global heating is no longer a background threat but is reaching a very real crisis point. It would have been unforgivable for Doctor Who to fail to address this, and I'm glad that it has done so with such force and emphasis, even in a story which may be only quite good. Even the Doctor's concluding monologue, fourth wall or no, packs an effective punch. This is, I think, Doctor Who's attempt at a Tharg's Future Shock- a type of story it ought to be able to do.

And let's just agree to ignore the increasingly tiresome crowd who object to Doctor Who getting political- it was ever thus. Environmental issues may have been done better in The Green Death and, indeed, as a subtext through the whole Pertwee era, but they're nothing new for the programme. There is, I think, a more interesting critique in that this feels closer than Doctor Who usually does to being hard science fiction- something which is not all that common in this science fantasy programme, and something which tends to foreground its political subtext.

It doesn't feel like hard science fiction at the start, though- I'm reminded of the junk mail robot at the start of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and, for much of the episode, of the entirety of Paradise Towers. It feels, for a great chunk of the episode, that fandom is going to have to resurrect the old term "oddball story". And the story slowly unfolds through some quickly sketched but quirky characters, none of whom have much depth but all of whom have enough personality traits to entertain. There's even, in Bella, a possible love interest for Ryan, who inevitably ends up occupying the narrative role of baddie but seems quite definitely redeemable- and is last seen snogging Ryan before facing a very uncertain fate. Will we, and Ryan, see her again? Or is this just a one off harbinger of romance for Ryan? Perhaps with Yaz? Time will tell.

But the big shock is the big shock of the reveal- they're in Novosibirsk, in Siberia, on Earth. It's a definite Ravolox moment, as I'm sure all of fandom has pointed out by now, echoing The Mysterious Planet. The story titl suddenly looks very Christopher H. Bidmead. Those fearsome alien baddies, like the xenomorphs in Alien, are us. And this world is a future Earth, its VIP's long since buggered off, rendered no longer habitable to anyone but monsters- and we, of course, should we allow this to happen, are the real monsters.

In-universe, the interesting thing here is that this fate, one of runaway global heating, mass migration, war and nuclear holocaust, is just "one possible future". It'd never been directly stated that everywhere the TARDIS lands isn't just one big continuity; plenty of stories feed into other stories, but here that supposition is thrown very much into doubt. What, I wonder, would Lance Parkin and Jean-Marc L'Officier say? Personally, yes, I raise an eyebrow. But, as the much-missed Terrance Dicks used to say, continuity should never exist in order to get in the way of a good story. This story may only be quite good, yes. But it's a story that needed to be told.

Oh, and another thing... Mrs Llamastrangler's YouTube channel is here. It's about coins. Be awesome if you could subscribe...

Doctor Who: Spyfall, Part Two

“By the way, I bring news from home...”

Wow. Ok, this blog post is going to be one of the longer ones.

Obviously, that was brilliant, and Chibnall has far outdone anything he did last season- and this two parter is not only superb but a statement of intent, giving us a new big story arc behind the spy stuff and giving us a story that, structurally, feels very much like a Virgin New Adventure novel in not only its use of cyberspace (or social media, as we call it these days) but the sheer number of elements in the story- alien Cold War type spies from another dimension using multiple time zones and figures from the history of computing, anyone? I don’t care if the plot doesn’t make sense; the sleight of hand works and that’s enough. The random timey-wimeyness and use of Ada Lovelace, Noor Inayat Khan and Charles Babbage.

In fact, the sheer number of elements in the plot felt very Steven Moffat. So did the way the second episode of a two-parter veered into very different territory from the first part, very reminiscent of Silence in the Library. All this shows Chibnall learning from his predecessor, and is a good thing. But I especially liked that it was about something- how we are all happily surrendering our privacy and intimate lives to unaccountable and unregulated tycoons very much like Daniel Barton (and Lenny Henry is utterly, utterly superb)- I’m looking at you, Zuckerberg.

But, of course, there’s the interplay between the Doctor and the Master at the heart of everything- and the chemistry between these incarnations is electric. It seems, pleasingly, that Chibnall is trying to recreate the Pertwee/Delgado dynamic where the Master doesn’t so much want to kill the Doctor as play games with her. We get a shoutout to the sound of drums. And Sacha Dhawan is absolutely a worthy Master, getting to do so many of  the Master’s signature tricks here, with a Wizard of Oz TARDIS to boot.

Incidentally, isn’t this the Master’s first explicit TARDIS of his own since Mark of the Rani?

And yet... there’s something behind this. All throughout the Master is dropping hints about both a massive retcon and what’s happened to Gallifrey- and so, once the Master is defeated in a satisfying and credible way- albeit one that owes a LOT to The Curse of the Fatal Death- we get a coda, as the Doctor visits Gallifrey and finds the Citadel empty and devastated. At first it looks as though Chibnall is doing another RTD, another “Last of the Time Lords”, but he quickly undercuts this with something deeper as the Master appears as a hologram in the TARDIS, just as the Doctor did to Rose in The Parting of the Ways, to admit that it was all his doing- and it was all an act of fury after discovering a massive lie in Gallifreyan history: “They lied to us, the founding fathers of Gallifrey”. And this is the “lie of the Timeless Child”, as mentioned in The Ghost Monument.

It’s also a very nice touch that Yasmin, Graham and Ryan get their own cool little James Bond adventure while all this is happening, complete with cool gadgets, but this is also the episode where they finally resolve to get the Doctor to tell them who she is... and she does. Up to a point. She has so much more to tell them and I’m sure we all have so much more to discover about Gallifrey’s last. I love me a good, epic arc.

A magnificent start to the season, then. Let’s hope Chibnall can keep it up.

Doctor Who: Spyfall, Part One

“The name's Doctor.The Doctor."

About bloody time. Another hiatus is over and Chris Chibnall’s second full season begins. I’ll make no secret of the fact I was somewhat underwhelmed by last season, in spite of a strong cast and generally sound show running decisions: Chibnall has shown good judgement while overseeing the show. But that doesn’t make him a particularly great writer, unfortunately. There’s some decent stuff in his track record but his scripts have never stood out, and he’s certainly not remotely comparable to an RTD or a Moff, and last season’s scripts by him tended to be weak points. Still, Resolution last year was much better; let us hope it was a good sign.

I’m also a little disturbed by a lazy narrative that seems to have emerged over the reaction to last season- that those of us with concerns are objecting to Jodie as a female Doctor or the liberal political leanings of stories like Rosa or Demons of the Punjab. This is, of course, nonsense: most of us are sensible types who are well aware that anyone using the word “snowflake” in a non-meteorological context needs to have their adulting licence revoked. The casting of Jodie as a female Doctor was a hugely positive step- but can we please give the character of the Doctor some actual development? And as for Doctor Who being a bit liberal and having a social conscience- that’s an ancient tradition from the anti-racist message of Remembrance of the Daleks to the environmentalist message of The Green Death or even as far back as Planet of Giants. One wonders how those people who apparently think Doctor Who is too left wing would have made of Malcolm Hulme. I’m afraid that’s how the programme has always been.

No; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the programme’s style, direction or broad show running approach. It’s just that the scripts have on average been sub-par. Will Season Thirty-Eight show any improvement?

This is the first two-parter of the Chibnall era and, I believe, the first since 1989 to have an overall story title rather than individual ones. It’s the first time in fifty-six years (The Enemy of the World is tenuous) that Doctor Who has done James Bond. It's got our first pre-titles teaser since Chibnall took over. It's also got a rejigged theme tune and title sequence- I like it.

It's also awesome. I'm not sure Chibnall will be able to keep it up but this is his second very, very good script in a row. The James Bond stuff is fun- the ridiculous number of gadgets, the casino party in tuxedos, the constant spying theme, and a brief but scene-stealing role for the great Stephen Fry as "C". We also get a motorbike chase- Pertwee would have loved this. The perilous sat nav scene was awesome, and far better than the similar scene in The Sontaran Stratagem. But the spies are not only alien but seem to be beings made of energy, wanting to invade our universe... perhaps. And Lenny Henry is excellent as a sinister IT tycoon and Bond villain... or is he? He's dodgy in a Mark Zuckerberg, privacy-invading sort of way, probably giving us the real-world subtext of what the story may end up being about, but could he be a red herring?

It's encouraging, too, that all four regulars get decent amounts of stuff to do, although the globe-trotting premise (South Africa is made to stand in for Ivory Coast and Australia, at least) certainly helps. Yaz, in particular, seems to be receiving some development as a character- we begin to see tensions appear between her travels in the TARDIS and her career as a police officer.

But THAT cliffhanger... I never suspected, being completely unspoiled, that Sacha Dhawan, having previously played Waris Hussein, would be the new Master. I punched the air, and again with the extra reveal of the Tissue Compression Eliminator. Even more intriguingly, before the cliffhanger ending with a bomb, a plane, and the Doctor somehow ending up in some other reality, he tells the Doctor that "Everything you think you know is wrong". Is this heralding a major retcon on the Time Lords this season, or the Doctor's past? What about the "Timeless Child" stuff from last season?

Regardless, I'm well and truly hooked. Best season opener since Deep Breath. Possibly.

Doctor Who: Resolution

“I always think I’m rid of them. I never am.”

This episode was written by Chris Chibnall. It is genuinely superb. Those two sentences don’t feel right together but, incredibly, they belong together on this occasion. This is a brilliant piece of telly, with a genuinely superb dramatic scene between Ryan and his father, and the best use of the Daleks since, well, Dalek, using the threat posed by one Dalek to banish all memories of recent years to re-establish them as the ultimate baddie to be feared.

The set-up is superb; narration, a mediaeval fairytale backstory and a mythical tale of an ultimate monster split into thirds and buried in far-flung places. A pair of archaeologists established as real characters through good dialogue before one of them is put through the wringer. And yet the true brilliance is in the basic plot- a naked Dalek without its casing reassembled after twelve centuries and forced to manipulate humans slowly into building it a makeshift casing out of available materials like an episode of the A-Team. This is brilliant not only because it's a fresh and superb take on the Daleks but because we are establishing that not only is one Dalek an unimaginable threat but that it doesn't even need any weapons or equipment or anything other than, well, a bubbling lump of hate itself to come damn close to annexing this planet.

Even better, the reveal of the Dalek casing is quite rightly held back, and the Heath Robinson nature of this Dalek has us clamouring for us to see how they actually look in the Chibnall era. No doubt we have that to look forward to. Next bloody year.

If I may nerd out a little more, though, it's great to have the little fan nods ("I wish I could remember exactly how long a Rel is") and the firm statement that there is no Kate Stewart and no UNIT in the Chibnall era; the Doctor and her friends are on their own. UNIT has been mothballed, it seems, for pettifogging and deeply shortsighted financial reasons, as happens in politics all the time, and the UK has decided to leave an international organisation which is vital to its security and prosperity and bugger the frankly terrifying consequences. It's good that nothing analogous is happening in real life, right?

This is also a much better episode for the Doctor and her by now very well-knit crew; right from the tour of the universe's best CGI for New Year at the start they're a united and supportive bunch, although Yas yet again seems to get the least to do. It's a phenomenally strong Ryan episode, of course, introducing us to his dad Ryan after a lot of set-up over the last season. The result is an extraordinarily written scene in a cafe between father and son, and a masterfully written arc for Ryan, Aaron and Graham. I like the nuances of Aaron's character; far from being a cipher of a deadbeat dad he's a highly competent and able engineer, and while no excuses are made for his past behaviour he's shown as genuinely wishing to feel his way towards redemption. And Chibnall should be praised for resisting the easy cop-out ending of having Aaron sacrifice at the end; instead his near-death helps him with beginning to re-connect with his son.

Come to think of it, not a single named character dies- in a Dalek story.

I can't really fault this. I spent the whole of Season 37 waiting in vain for Chibnall to wow me, and at last he's done it. For the first time he's written a story for Doctor Who that is worthy of debate as to whether it deserves classic status. What took him so bloody long?

Doctor Who: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

“Don’t aliens ever bother with doors?”

Sigh. That was a season finale?

It’s the moment of truth; the season has fully unfolded in all of its dubious glory and, well, aside from It Takes You Away it’s been good but hasn’t wowed me. And this episode- penned, fittingly, by Chris Chibnall himself- is the perfect illustration of why this season is often good but hardly ever more than that, and I expect more from Doctor Who.

This episode gets the usual things right, of course. Jodie Whittaker is a deeply promising Doctor in the vein of a Davison or a Tennant, in spite of being worryingly underwritten as a character who just does Doctorish things but isn’t given an inner life. Graham, Ryan and Yas are a strong TARDIS team, making a crew of four work as it did under Hartnell, and the characters are all strong- but let’s see a bit more development of Yas in particular. The show also looks awesome. It’s a good set-up.

But the problem is that Chibnall just isn’t that good a writer, either of episodes or of season arcs. I mean, this is the season finale and, yes, it pays off the death of Grace and features the return of Tim Shaw. Even the Sniperbits are back. But, well, really? That, and Graham’s predictable revenge sub-plot, is enough meat for a finale? This is thin stuff.

Then there’s the basic plot. I’ll forgive the steal from The Pirate Planet as the mood is so different, but the whole set up- the idea of the Ux as a species of two, the engineering, the faith; it all feels sonehow like the early New Adventures. Like all the Chibnall-penned stories set in space it’s grim, joyless apart from the TARDIS crew’s banter. In fact, that’s a big part of the problem; under Chibnall, Doctor Who is hard science fiction instead of the whimsical science fantasy we’vecall Known and loved for the best part of 55 years. Perhaps that’s why lastcweek’s talking frog had me grinning; Paul Cornell used to talk about frocks vs guns. Well, give me frogs over po-faced witless plodding plotting any time.

I never thought I’d be the “x must go” type of fan, but this season has me concerned about the programme in a way I haven’t ever been before, and I’ve been a card-carrying fan since Part Two of Remembrance of the Daleks. I’ll never stop enjoying Who, even if not as much as I’d like, and I’ll never stop watching it, blogging it or being as much a part of fandom as work, fatherhood and caring for my disabled wife allow. But I will say one thing.

Chibnall must go.

Doctor Who: It Takes You Away

“I see the sheep have moved on. Probably off plotting.”

You know how I’ve spend the whole of the season so far whingeing that yes, many episodes are good, but none of them have wowed me? Well, with one episode to go, this season has finally gone and bloody done it. Ed Himes, you can write for Doctor Who again. This is a splendid fifty minutes of television. It still doesn’t mask some underlying issues with Chibnall’s reign, though; still no arc beyond very basic character stuff, leading to a sense of drift. And, while Jodie Whittaker is excellent as ever, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that her Doctor isn’t getting any character development.

Still, bravo. Big sci-fi ideas, for a start; a sentient universe that just wants to be friends but isn’t very good for the health of reality, and the subject of a bedtime story from one of the Doctor’s seven grandmothers to boot, plus of course the whole scene with the frog. It’s also about something; Hanne’s dad is a parallel bad dad to Ryan’s father at first glance, although he’s addled by grief and sees the error of his ways. And Graham’s own grief gets played with horribly by the “resurrection” of Grace. Yet the whole thing brings Graham and Ryan together sufficiently for Ryan to call him “Grandad”, an earned and powerful moment.

All this, and the lines about the sheep. And the flesh moths. And Kevin Eldon A’s a nasty, duplicitous demon. And the whole concept of “antizones”. And so much subtext I’m sure I’ve not even noticed half of it.  I don’t know if we’ll ever see another Neil Gaiman episode, but this is pretty damn close, and just as good.

And yet... it’s a one off episode, full of one off brilliant and a Doctor Who does Doctorish things but isn’t written with any inferiority. Sometimes it’s the exceptional episodes what make you worry about where things are headed.

Doctor Who: The Witchfinders

“If I was still a bloke, I could get on with the job and not have to waste time defending myself!"

A very good episode but, par for the course this season, lacking in the stuff of greatness. Still very good, but no more. And it’s becoming worryingly clear that the series doesn’t seem to aspire to that under Chibnall. But is this just my expectations, having come in recent years to appreciate the depths of writing of an RTD and a Moffat, while Chibnall is focused on creating a family show that appeals to kids, and successfully at that? Am I, a 41 year old fan, the target audience, as I was for Moffat? Should I be?

The episode is genuinely good and the new writer- Joy Wilkinson- is one I’d be happy to see again. The history is a little vague (characters called “Willa” and “Becca”?) and suggestive of a younger audience than we were used to in the recent past, but the plot is solid, even if the resolution is rushed; Pendle Hill being an ancient prison for some rather well-realised alien villains is a fun concept. And the of course there’s Alan Cumming’s superb performance as King James VI and I, a portrayal that rings very true for this highly intelligent, intellectually lazy, psychologically damaged king who took refuge in absolutism and boys. Oh, and in not suffering a witch to live. Especially that.

Jimmy One is clearly well-researched; indeed, we get a whole scene with Ryan (naturally, Jimmy takes a shine to him) comparing their hard childhoods which shows off the research splendidly. And I also love the big chat he gets with the Doctor just before she faces the ducking stool.

It’s perfect that a story about witch hunts- the ultimate in misogyny- should be the first to really explore just how different things are for the Doctor when stripped of her male privilege. She is patronised, disbelieved, her very title mocked, with Graham having to stand in as figurehead. Yes, on the whole it’s rather good. But yet again it stops short of wowing me and the season so far is no better on the whole than “good enough”. I like the new Doctor, the new format, the new characters. I approve of the reorientation towards a family audience. And this tabloid nonsense about “PC plots” is just silly. But can we have some brilliance in the writing please? So far, every season since the show returns, I’ve liked some series more than others, and not all episodes have been good. But you could always be confident that an episode of sheer brilliance would turn up soon-ish. Is that still the case?

Doctor Who: Kerblam!

"Have you smelt her?"

"Oddly enough, I haven't..."

Terrible title and, I was confidently expecting from the preview, terrible episode. Turns out I was wrong; along with last week's episode this heralds what's looking like a definite upswing in quality with a thoughtful bit of what science fiction was made to do- satirical extrapolation of current trends to the nth degree.

What we have here is a bit of a cross between Doctor Who Discovers the Effect of Automation on the Workforce and Doctor Who Discovers the Appalling Working Conditions in Amazon Warehouses, a very topical bit of telly that will be very relevant to many viewers. The satire is simultaneously made blatant- the ancient junk robot seems awfully like Amazon, and the degree of employee monitoring that goes on is truly terrifying, although not as terrifying as automation itself. Just how many of us, even in professional jobs, will not have our livelihoods threatened by automation in say, twenty years' time? How will we pay our mortgages? Will it be a dystopia or was the great John Maynard Keynes right to expect increased leisure time? Somehow I expect neither will happen, but those of us with mortgages and dependents can be forgiven for being nervous.

Political though he episode is, mind- the working conditions on show are genuinely horrifying- the baddies are not the bosses but a protester- yet the system exploits him as surely as he exploits the system; capitalism is and is not the villain here, which is nicely nuanced.

The robots are splendidly creepy, too, and the reminiscence to the robots in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy parallels the similar opening scene in the TARDIS - is the deliberate implication that the delivery robot in both stories is from Kerblam? On the subject of continuity I liked the fez from when the Doctor was Matt Smith, and the shoutout to The Unicorn and the Wasp. And we can't not mention The Robots of Death either- we even get "robophobia" referred to. But this is, at its heart, a welcome piece of contemporary sci-fi which addresses major issues of the world we live in and gets away with doing so at prime time by having robots in it. Brilliant.

Doctor Who: Demons of the Punjab

”You know there are aliens, right? In Punjab, during Partition? And you're worried about me being gobby?"

At last, an episode that's more than quite good and actually both moving and interesting. And it's written by Vinay Patel, who is 1) the first non-white person to write for Doctor Who, which is quite awful at this late date; 2) new to the series; and 3) not Chris Chibnall, thank the gods- indeed, this is the frst episode of the season where Chibnall doesn't have a writing credit.. This script is assured, thoughtful and moving.

Moreover, after Rosa, it's tempting to muse on the possible return of the near-pure historical. In that story the only science fiction element was timey-wimey stuff; here the aliens merely observe, and mourn. They seem a little metatextual, although subtly done, and if anything they represent us as viewers. They are not the titular demons of the Punjab; that would be humanity.

Partition happened only in 1947. Back in the monochrome era this was both far too recent and too close to the bone for a British programme, it being no longer ago to them than the New Labour years are to us, and there being no serious view of Partition, and its millions of deaths, that doesn't largely blame the British. This is skirted over here, but it is there.

The plot s simple, really; Yas wants to find out her grandmother's mysterious past so persuades the Doctor to take them back in time to the Punjab during what turns out to be Partition, and there ensues a tale of genocide and star cross'd lovers as she sees her Muslim grandfather marry Prem, a Hindu man who is not her grandfather. If you're used to stories about time travel- and many viewers may not be- it's straightforward stuff, but full of potential for drama and pathos as we see the inevitable tragic events play out.

It's worth emphasising again how much I like this TARDIS crew. They have fun, they have heart, they have a real developing bond; I love that brief scene between Yas and Graham about what she must be going through, yes, but also how great their lives are. And Jodie Whittaker is brilliant again. Chibnall has got so much right about the shape of the show. But there's definitely a pattern developing where the ones he doesn't write are the better ones.

Doctor Who: The Tsuranga Conundrum

“It just ate my sonic!”

Well, I admit I’ve been waiting all season so far to say this, but, well, that was very Chibnall, wasn’t it? It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t great either. It just... was.

The regular cast are as great as ever, of course. And the Pting is a great monster, very Pokemon, both a cool concept and (this may be controversial...) looks awesome. The whole thing looks classy and well made, although it’s rather obviously the cheap studio episode full of inexpensive but adequate sets.

There are some nice sci-fi concepts too- l loved the concept of junk galaxies and, of course, the pregnant bloke, obviously there so Ryan can slowly begin to think about fatherhood and begin to understand his father, just a teenager when he was born. Yet again the four-strong TARDIS crew works well, and they’ve established a strong bond. I’m glad that dialogue early on established they’ve travelled a fair bit since last episode. And yet... it all feels very much by the numbers.

The real saving grace, though, is Jodie, elevating a series of mediocre to quite good scripts by her sheer charisma and Doctorishness. I am already seriously impressed by her, but I’m beginning to become really quite concerned by the humdrum nature of the scripts. Yes, Chibnall make good showrunner decisions, but his scripts are as formulaic and unispiring as ever they were. That was fine when he contributed just the odd script but not when he writes the bulk of the season, as he has so far. He can do character, he can do the big picture, but he’s lacking in depth, coolness and fun. And, while his decisions to go for the family audience again are quite correct and clearly successful, I think in the medium term that the standard of scripts needs to aspire to be more than just good enough. This is Doctor Who.

Doctor Who: Arachnids in the UK

“Are you Ed Sheeran? Is he Ed Sheeran?”

Another script by Chris Chibnall and another episode which is well made, in this case with superb CGI in particular, but is, well, quite good. And no more than that. Steven Moffat was a genius writer but tended to write for fans (broadly defined) rather than a general family audience. Chibnall seems to be the reverse. Again he seems to be making smart decisions as showrunner, again he writes stuff that the general public seems to like, again he comes up with a script which is, well, ok.

Forget Moffat, though; the true comparison is with RTD, in terms of style if not talent. Season 37 echoes Season 27- The first episode introduces the new Doctor, then we have an episode in the future, one in the past, and then this: what we have here is the analogue for Aliens of London. The TARDISeers return to Sheffield, are embroiled in an exciting adventure with giant spiders and corporate greed (very topical, I suppose, and the script blatantly admits that the baddie is essentially Trump) and then decide to continue travelling. Oh, there are slight differences; Yaz’s mum being suspicious of the Doctor calls to mind Martha’s mum in Season 29. And indeed the whole TARDIS crew dynamic calls to mind Season One, but the point is, of course, that this is Doctor Who as a set formula, calculated carefully to use what works. What’s this with no pre-titles, though? That certainly seems to be a thing by now.

“Quite good” is still good, though; the spiders look great, and this Hallowe’en episode is suitably full of jump scares. Jodie Whittaker is still absolutely the Doctor, and I like all of Yaz, Ryan and Graham. The dynamic works well, with an ensemble cast allowing for characterisation to be shared out more. The direction is superb, especially the opening shots. And the ending, where all three of the Doctor’s friends choose to stay, is interesting. The Doctor seems very keen to mak sure they all make an informed decision to stay, and emphasises that she can’t guarantee their safety. Is someone going to die?

The bottom line is, though, that yet again I find an episode just quite good, no more than that. I want Doctor Who to amaze me again. Please?

Doctor Who: Rosa

"You ain't Banksy."

"Or am I?"

Ok, that quite impressed me. It's not the greatest episode ever but it's solid, it works both mechanically and emotionally, and it manages to avoid being overly didactic and preachy as, for me, Vincent and the Doctor was, despite that music. (Well, aside from that song at the end, but we'll come to that). It may not be a particularly deep look at racism, and it may choose a somewhat blatant type of prejudice rather than something more challenging, but it's written by Malorie Blackman who is, I believe, a writer of novels for teenagers, perhaps with that audience in mind. To be fair, though, on that level, it works. It's time to recognise that, while Chibnall may not be on the same level s a writer as RTD or the Moff, his vision of the show- less clever, more kid-friendly- may be closer to what it needs rather than appealing to people like me who will, let's face it, always watch Doctor Who. Besides, I still enjoyed it.

It's impressive how this return to having four TARDISeers, evoking early Hartnell, helps the storytelling and works well with fifty minute contained episodes. It's also nice to see the characters interact- Ryan and Yas discussing racism, Graham and Ryan bonding a little but not quite there, Jodie Whittaker being absolutely the Doctor. It's also interesting, for the first time since The Time Meddler, to see a story entirely about a cat and mouse game changing the little things that can alter history. There's no physical threat here, just a threat to the timeline, but it's chilling that the time travelling antagonist is a racist from  future where racism still exists. After all, here we are, sixty-three years after Rosa Parks refused to get off that bus, and racism is still there, Trump is president, and today's news is full of voter suppression in today's Georgia. Did Jim Crow ever really go away?

Still, we get a nice balance between showing racism in action in the Jim Crow Deep South and having the Doctor and gang put it into context with dialogue which nevertheless feels natural. It’s nicecto seecthevDoctor and Graham forced to be complicit at the end. And we get a celebrity historical cameo from Martin Luther King. And I'll admit I didn't recognise Vinette Robinson from Sherlock until Mrs Llamastrangler pointed her out.

It's interesting, on a more banal note, so see again that, while continuity is much more subtle under Chibnall and  much friendlier to the casual viewer, he still cares about consistency; here we have mentions of Artron Energy, Stormcage (but not River Song) and a Vortex Manipulator. But ultimately this is a good episode but perhaps not a memorable one. And, while I'm no purist and don't object to a song being played over the closing titles, does it have to be such sub-X-Factor chart fodder?

Sigh. I liked it. I really did. It's just that I've become accustomed over the last several years to using a stronger word than "liked".