It’s January 1st, 2020. Ellie Goulding is at number one with “River,” and the charts are otherwise hilariously unchanged from the last ones we talked about. In the year since Resolution, it’s been a pretty sizable upheaval in my life. A few days after it aired, I drove down to Virginia to pick up a reader of mine who rather direly needed to escape her abusive home and helped her transfer to the community college outside of Ithaca where I was working. By the time the Chibnall era is over, I’ll have adopted her.
A few months later, after a particularly nice visit to see my boyfriend Penn in Boston, he and his wife Anna decided to move to Ithaca and form a four person poly family with my then-wife. They moved down at the beginning of July, by which point I’d decided to quit my community college job on the back of a successful push to increase my Patreon funding so that I can afford to go back to writing full time. This began a period in which I am effectively living in two houses, split between the apartment my then-wife and I already had, called within the polycule the Cave of Skulls, and the one that Anna and Penn are renting, called Tree House.
New Year’s Eve is spent at a pleasant if last minute party at a friend’s house that, in hindsight, will turn out to be the last real time the stable social circle that I’d enjoyed for a few years in Ithaca all hung out. Waking up the next day, the big question looming over my New Year’s Day is the fact that there’s a new Doctor Who to watch, and more to the point the fact that my Patreon is currently below the admittedly ambitious threshold I set to review it.
I’ve made a New Year’s Resolution to watch a hundred movies in 2020—I fail—but I get started with Knives Out at the local Regal in the dying mall, and it’s as we’re heading into the theater that I get the ping that my Patreon has gone high enough at the last minute, I’ll have to actually watch and review/podcast about Spyfall Part 1 when I get home. So we head back to Trees, pull up the new episode, and I have a look.
Let’s start with the first, oh, nine minutes or so, because they’re actually pretty good. We get a nice, tight cold open of some monster kills that bustles with all the international sweep that slapping location captions over stock footage and shots of Cardiff can muster. Then we have credits, and, in a nice cheeky bit of flag planting, an identical caption for Sheffield that puts it on the same level as the locations we’d been touring a minute before. Here we get a quick reintroduction to the core cast, doing an efficient “how their lives have changed traveling with the Doctor” sequence for each before having them picked up by mysterious men in black, as, finally, is the Doctor. They’re bundled into a car, which assassinates its driver as its satnav proceeds to give the instruction “in five seconds, die” and the car begins to drive backwards on the motorway.
At which point the Doctor—who has at literally no point been driving the car—exclaims, “someone’s controlling this car, and it isn’t me!” and you abruptly remember that you’re watching a Chris Chibnall script. And this is scarcely the only moment where the Doctor’s engagement with the story is odd. The decision to continue putting her in three-quarter length trousers even when she’s doing her tuxedoed James Bond cosplay emphasizes the degree to which she feels like a child dressing up as the Doctor instead of like an immortal time traveller. And this isn’t helped at all by the degree to which she is portrayed as shockingly and comprehensively inept. Just consider the sequence where, moments after being informed that the Kaasavin are from “far beyond” and seek to take “this universe,” she is perplexed to find that their language does not correspond to any known language in the universe, somehow failing to make the most basic leap.
Language is clearly important here. It’s repeatedly stressed that the Kasaavin—OK, no, I refuse to keep checking where that double a goes, hang on. It’s repeatedly stressed that the Shitty Vardans are focused on moments key to the development of computers, while the Doctor notes that “it’s all in the patterns. Steganography, encrypted code, attacks on intelligence agents.” Which is to say that we’re actively pushed to look for the message hidden within the vast and sprawling web of signification—a conspiratorial secret.
Taken as a whole, this web can only be understood in terms of the Master. The first episode, in particular, is structured around his reveal. It’s a machine for setting up Sacha Dhawan as the Master. Being a machine constructed by Chibnall it does, of course, not actually work. Most glaringly, its key reveal—the Doctor catching the Master in a lie—is a lie about information we’ve never been given before. It’s a wholly arbitrary moment—a point at which the light switch is thrown between “the Doctor is ignorant” and “the Doctor understands” by nothing save authorial fiat.
Speaking of authorial fiat… we have an episode in which the Master is in control of the overall structure while the Doctor is not merely on the back foot but seemingly removed from the occasion, so diminished she’s now left to lag behind the audience in figuring things out. In which case it’s interesting that the Master is initially presented as a paranoid and conspiratorial fanboy. It is, of course, painfully on the nose, especially when the bad fan becomes the puppetmaster who lords the fact that “everything you know is a lie” over Doctor and audience alike.
But, of course, we have to balance that against the knowledge of where all of this is going. The grand secret that the Master lords over the Doctor is going to be a damp squib. More to the point, however, even strictly in terms of this story the Master’s scheme is an incoherent nothing, hinging on a betrayal of the Shitty Vardans that seems only to exist so that the Master can betray someone. His scheme has no attachment to his nominal motivation—having found out that the Doctor is secretly the progenitor of the entire Time Lords he decides on an entirely unrelated scheme in which he attempts to dispatch the Doctor at an arbitrary midway point without telling her anything about it. Barton’s presence in it seems to exist purely because the Master decided to infiltrate MI6 as a weirdo conspiracy theorist instead of just becoming a tech billionaire himself—he’s ultimately so superfluous that the story doesn’t bother to have defeated him, or really given him anything to do besides be an excuse to cast Lenny Henry.
All of which was, at the time, made even more frustrating by the fact that Chibnall’s big season premiere launching idea was to bring back the Master, a villain we’d not seen in exactly one season. More to the point, however, when we’d last seen the character it was in a version that even Moffat’s detractors largely admitted was a pretty good idea. Missy was the most clear cut triumph of late Moffat—something you could point to as the one time that the oft problematic character of the Master actually worked. And Chibnall’s big idea was to roll the character back to John Simm by way of Anthony Ainley. The problem isn’t Dhawan per se, although he seems to have embraced something akin to the Graham Crowden/Richard Briers approach of savoring the opportunity to engage in unchecked scenery consumption. The problem is that this seems to legitimately be the extent of Chibnall’s vision for the role. It’s sublime in its pointlessness, a character who serves only to unfix a longstanding narrative problem. At no point does he work. Worse, at no point does he even try to.
But then, that’s the Chibnall era. At no point does any of it work, and at no point does it even feel like it’s trying to. It’s very nearly impossible to consistently write two thousand words about these stories, and outright impossible to do it at a post a week. But of course it is. This is, after all, a story that, read closely, appears to be about the complete breakdown of meaning at the hands of a Chris Chibnall stand-in. It’s a story in which we are literally told that there’s a hidden secret meaning behind everything only to discover that it’s all completely meaningless and doesn’t go anywhere at all. Of course it’s difficult to write about.
In some ways, this is a mercy. Certainly the fact that the series seems to be, if not embracing, at least attaining an entirely nihilistic concept of communication makes things like “Kerblam!” or the Doctor’s absolutely astonishing decision here to expose the Master as a person of color to the literal Nazis easier to swallow, or her mindwipe of Ada Lovelace, or the casualness with which she leaves Noor Inayat Khan to her fate. There is, after all, no morality to be had in a narrative that lacks all notion of meaning. It’s literally insignificant.
In the wake of this revelation, watching the show becomes a sort of second order soap opera spent watching the actors attempt to cope with the growing realization that they are trapped in a show that cannot be said to be about anything other than its showrunner’s spectacular public collapse as a major and respected television writer. Jodie Whittaker is, alas, the least interesting figure here, seeming comfortable in the role in much the same way that her Doctor is comfortable in those stupid, infantilizing three-quarter length tuxedo pants. Whatever one might think of her performance, she is undoubtedly perfect for this role in this iteration of the show because she legitimately does not seem to have the slightest clue that she is acting in a complete and utter piece of dogshit.
Tosin Cole seems on the opposite extreme, painfully aware that his only role in this story is to be an incompetent idiot. When he comes out to talk to Yaz late in the first episode he seems genuinely exhausted by the prospect of playing out a scene in which his only role is to listen to some tell-don’t-show sci-fi dialogue and then to vow to protect the girl. You imagine him in his trailer marking off the days on the wall.
Bradley Walsh, meanwhile, has been around the block enough to be unphased. Like Lenny Henry and Stephen Fry, this is not his first time in a piece of shit, and so he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work not being the problem, correctly figuring that, when it’s all listed out on his Wikipedia page, two years doing this will serve as a charming capstone to the career of a television legend regardless of quality. If anything he seems to find a perverse enjoyment in looking at things like “dance around with laser shoes” and figuring out how to make it into a highlight of the episode.
As for Mandip Gill, she has in many ways the most interesting evolution. A noted in the Witchfinders essay, she spends Series 11 flagrantly being the person most invested in being impressive, recognizing that if she nails this she’s set for life. But by Series 12, there’s a clear sense that she’s realized there is no nailing this, and that nobody is emerging from this project looking good. And yet there’s little sense that this changes her basic approach so much as it creates a larger context of despair around her efforts, as if she is defiantly trying to stave off the nervous breakdown that has infected every other aspect of the show.
Perversely, it’s the first time in the Chibnall era you’re left with any curiosity about what could possibly happen next.