Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
The problem here—if you even want to call it a problem—is that absolutely none of the plot beats are earned or make a goddamn lick of sense. Abena is almost wholly swallowed in the mix, the Barber is wildly too complicated a premise to justify in the time allotted, none of the characters in the barbershop are fleshed out, and the plot is little more than a bunch of themes gesticulating wildly. I’m sure that, if I were to bother looking up other people’s reviews and reactions, I’d see loads of complaints about the plot holes, just like last week when an unusually large number of people apparently noticed that UNIT stories don’t make any sense for the first time.
The truth is, I have any amount of sympathy for this view. As an actual watch this was uneven; I’m not actually sure I enjoyed the experience more than last week. But reviews are about more than whether or not you liked something. Really, they’re barely about that at all. Honestly, my brain forms the thought “what will it mean to like or dislike this” as quickly as “do I like this.” I’ve got ideological positions to establish. So what do I want to think about this episode?
I find myself going back to Ghost Light. The complaint with that episode is that it doesn’t actually cohere. And I largely dismissed that complaint back in the day, pointing out that all of the components of the story were pointing in the same aesthetic direction, and that this helped paper over the gaps—an argument I’m pretty sure I stole from Miles and Wood. You can flesh that out a bit by saying that Ghost Light has too many ideas for three episodes, and so doesn’t quite manage to join all the dots, even as it’s clear the dots can be joined. Indeed, that’s part of Ghost Light’s charm—the way the story is bursting at the seams with ideas. Here we have something similar, except that instead of cramming too many ideas into a seventy-three minute container we’re doing forty-eight minutes, leaving everything even more jammed in.
Is that a bridge too far in terms of compression? Probably, actually. But it’s where we are on Doctor Who these days. It’s certainly not interesting to take ambivalence about the current format of Doctor Who out on an individual episode, and even if I were going to do that, I wouldn’t pick the one by a Black writer set in Nigeria with an almost completely non-white cast to suddenly do it, even if it does offer a clearer illustration than most of just how overstuffed the show is these days.
But look, what’s the alternative? A show that doesn’t take big conceptual swings, doesn’t tap playwrights from diverse backgrounds to write scripts despite their lack of TV experience, doesn’t treat its apparent limitations as challenges to meet? We could have a nice tidy procession of bases under siege and alien invasions and land comfortably within the realm of what the show can do. Or we could go nuts and accept that the price of getting The Gunfighters or The Greatest Show in the Galaxy or The Beast Below is that they’re uneven as fuck.
Nothing in the Gatwa era save perhaps Dot and Bubble has tried this hard or aimed this high. It could have missed by a lot more than it did and it would still be worth loving.
- And there is, to be clear, quite a bit to love. For all that it’s overstuffed, there’s a nice deliberateness to the build-up. The Barber and Abena having cryptic villain conversations about the plot had a genuinely charming classic series energy. Loved the way the Barber sat just off-frame for the first part of the episode, and much of how he lurked on the edges of the space. And it’s nice to see the show roll up its sleeves and put in the work on making a believable Lagos—a task they clearly spent a pretty penny on given how much of the episode is then shot on a single decidedly unflashy set.
- The one beat where I found the story to not just be eliding steps but actually not quite adding up was the Doctor’s anger at Omo. It’s not actually especially well set up—it’s emphatically not the beat upon which the previous Doctor scene ended—but more to the point, it doesn’t square away with the actual plot. It’s not as though Omo sent a distress call for the Doctor and lured him into a trap. He just showed up. More to the point, since when does the Doctor throw a strop at saving his friends? The lines about the Doctor feeling like part of a community are important and worthwhile, but this was probably the part of the episode that most fell outright flat.
- I also wish the “I want to be credited for my work” beat had been fleshed out a little more, because it’s a really nice bit of character work on an otherwise slightly inscrutable villain. Ellams has a line in one of the bits of press he did about this story being in part inspired by the realization that the French term for a ghostwriter is “le négre,” which, also great. Then again, follow this thread too long and you end up creating a Mind Robber prequel, and honestly who wants that.
- Jo Martin’s return was… I mean, look, I still hate that entire plotline with the fury of a thousand suns, but I did appreciate the series openly snarking about how that plot is horribly unresolved. But… why does the Doctor remember that adventure in the first place?
- I like Belinda. Quite a bit. But I could do with not hearing her insist “you need to get me home” in the exact same intonation every episode.
- I quite like the barbershop, with its vast maze of passages out the back and its conspicuously polygonal heart. And the Doctor Who credits playing out on the window. Just an absolute simp for this stuff.
- As unexpected developments in Doctor Who go, “creepy visitations from Captain Poppy” ranks impressively high.
- I may have undersold just how charmed I am by the villain motivation “I want to kill all of the gods,” and doubly so for the plan being “by destroying the very notion of stories,” which has some deeply solid theological foundations. I also appreciate that the value of stories is rooted in culture—there’s that line about passing down traditions, which is a much more grounded “magic of stories” take than one usually expects.
- Which of course brings us to Sága. There were some suggestions a few weeks ago about Mrs. Flood turning out to be Sága, and I really can’t express how deeply miserable they made me. I don’t really want my goddess to become Doctor Who fanfic. Indeed, I find the idea skincrawlingly repulsive. I got rid of all my random Doctor Who merchandise and stuff ages ago because, frankly, I don’t want to make Doctor Who my personality. It’s both my job and something I love deeply, but that only reinforces the degree to which having boundaries around it feels important. And that definitely included having Doctor Who and my spiritual life intersect in any sort of substantive way.
- On top of which, for all I joked last week about Davies reading the blog, I also just don’t want to be that entwined with the series. Doctor Who made in my image has never been something I wanted. If the series actually did “the Doctor is from the Land of Fiction” I really think I might just turn it off and never watch it again. Besides, I’ve definitionally seen my own ideas before.
- All of which said, a throwaway line about the Doctor having hung out with Sága once is broadly delightful. And I can 100% confirm that Sága does not like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Ranking
- Lux
- The Story and the Engine
- Joy to the World
- Lucky Day
- The Well
- The Robot Revolution