It’s January 19th, 2020. Stormzy, Ed Sheeran, and Burna Boy are at number one with “Own It,” with Lewis Capaldi, Future featuring Drake, Roddy Rich, and the Weeknd also charting. Life is settling into a certain rush—exchanging e-mails about the new place and the fact that our new landlord apparently lost our lease and needs us to sign it again while preparing for the fact that in a week Penn and I are leaving for a trip to the UK, primarily though not entirely to see the Tate’s massive Blake exhibition.
While on television, what passes for quality in this awful day and age. It’s not that Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror is good. It’s manifestly not—it treats its audience like idiots, has nothing to say that isn’t a cliche, and at no point even considers aspirations beyond “do about as well as The Masque of Mandragora or Under the Lake/Before the Flood.” But if you’re high and have a decent game to fuck around with on your phone it’s no less entertaining to have this on than it is to have some Pertwee-era adequacy like The Dæmons, and in an era with The Bok Choi of Rainbow Akkaidians, The Timeless Children, and Legend of the Sea Devils that counts for something. (Ironically, it is apparently the only script of the era that Chibnall did not take a final editing pass on.) Barring a real surprise out of rewatching Can You Hear Me? or something, it’s going to be hard to have this much fun again with Doctor Who until Eve of the Daleks. We may as well at least try. After all, we have a story that’s actually about something. It’d be criminal not to analyze that.
The key thing that makes this story function on the level of aboutness is that the villain and Thomas Edison are paralleled. Tesla attacks Edison for having “a factory full of men to do your thinking for you,” saying, “you’re not a man of vision, you’re a man of parts.” Meanwhile, the Skithra are portrayed as precisely that—an alien invasion made of spare parts of other alien invasions, from aliens who the Doctor furiously asks whether “there’s a single thing on this ship that you’ve built yourselves.” It feels surreal to explain such a basic concept in a blog where I’ve previously spent a fair amount of time on moderately advanced topics in narratology, but this is sort of thing that makes themes work. By overtly paralleling the Skithra and Edison the story ensures that each of them serve as a commentary on the other.
It’s crucial to note that this does not constitute an episode that can be decoded into a singular meaning. Series 9, with its hybrid plot, used the technique consciously to create a cracked mirror funhouse of signification that never did anything so crass as resolve. In contrast, Kerblam!, for all that it collapses into a single, unambiguous, and flatly evil moral, never really bothers to do this sort of mirroring. The point of the technique isn’t to increase clarity of communication, but rather to increase the moment to moment intensity of communication. You make parts of the story mirror and tacitly comment on each other so that there’s simply more going on in every scene. Again, Series 9 is useful here, in that it never really resolves its hall of mirrors into anything. The resolution is emotional, rooted in character work. The hall of mirrors is just there to crank up the volume—to amplify the dysfunctional glory of Clara and the Doctor.
Here, likewise, the Skithra-Edison parallel never actually resolves into anything. In the end the default logic of the Doctor Who story wins out. The Skithra, as monsters, are bad. More to the point, Edison, as a historical celebrity, is good. For all that the Doctor likes Tesla better, and for all that he and (in absentia) Graham get their moral points against Edison, Edison still gets his big hero moment, turning his evil publicity genius into the thing that saves lives. And by the end of the story Edison and Tesla are treated not as a moral parable about the nature of human ingenuity but as chummy rivals. He may be overtly paralleled with the villain, but that doesn’t actually go anywhere.
On one level this is a pity. A celebrity historical in which a celebrity is fully deconstructed would be a pleasant novelty. One thing that the Chibnall era does deserve at least some praise for is that it flirts with this—King James, Edison, and Byron are all held up to varying levels of critique, if never outright rejection. Pushing further in that direction would be good—indeed, it’s bordering on moral necessity in an era where even criticizing fucking slaveholders is politically controversial.
On another level, though, it’s just part of this episode’s basic status within the annihilating void of the Chibnall era. This is the one where things go basically as you’d expect for a generic episode of Doctor Who. That momentary hitch, like a lucid moment in a fast declining loved one, becomes something faintly interesting—an execution of generic Doctor Who in the midst of what is otherwise essentially nothingness. This is unique. In stellar eras, successful execution of generic Doctor Who functions much like a virtuoso performance of a beloved standard. Here I’m not talking about things like Under the Lake/Before the Flood or 42—cliche-ridden low spots in strong eras—but things like Mummy on the Orient Express or The Curse of Fenric, interesting because of the stylistic flourishes, like a brilliant cover. In less functional eras, it becomes an interesting lab for their failed obsessions—a way of seeing what they were going for, like Frontios or Gridlock.
But here there are no failed obsessions. There’s nothing they’re going for. There’s literally no context to read this in light of—no coherent sense of “the Chibnall era” for this to take on in interpreting the standards. They are simply standards, interesting for no other reason than that they are standards of a thing we happen to be invested in. Here is Doctor Who, stripped of anything save for itself and basic competence. What do we make of it?
Perhaps the celebrity historical does itself no favors in this context. It is, as noted, Doctor Who in its most inescapably conservative—a subgenre that fundamentally glorifies both the past and the great man theory of history. Frankly, it’s a subgenre one struggles to come up with great examples of. I’ll give you Vincent and the Doctor for free in spite of the fact that it’s a strong candidate for the most wildly overrated episode of the new series, but let’s be honest—what’s the second best celebrity historical? The Unquiet Dead? The Unicorn and the Wasp? I mean, fundamentally we’re dealing with a subgenre where, what, five out of seven examples over the first ten series are by Gareth Roberts of Mark Gatiss? “Oh yeah, that’s not half bad” is pretty much the ceiling.
Equally, the floor isn’t that bad. Things like The Shakespeare Code and Robot of Sherwood aren’t favorites, but they’re perfectly adequate; nobody’s picking them as the weakest episodes of their seasons, certainly. For the most part the celebrity historical is the perfect place to look at Doctor Who in a pure state because it represents Doctor Who at its most adequate. It is in many ways modern Doctor Who at its most basic.
And yeah, it is in fact pretty entertaining. For all its conservatism, the push and pull of the historical celebrity, who’s typically played slightly stodgily, and the Doctor’s more anarchic energy is a pretty good engine, and spaceships and period costumes always offer decent visuals. And frankly the BBC is better than anyone at shoving moderately respectable actors in period costumes. It’s not a surprise that the Whittaker era’s three swings at it are generally the times it comes closest to working, and not just because Chibnall doesn’t write any of them. This really is Doctor Who at its most blandly functional.
What it’s not, though is… I mean, especially worthwhile. The world doesn’t actually need Teatime Tesla for Tots. If my ringing endorsements of the celebrity historical’s adequacy weren’t giving the game away, the truth of the matter is that this is endearing because it’s a Doctor Who tradition, not because it’s pulsing with some sort of urgency. At the end of the day, you can see the real reason the episode needs to endorse Edison’s cruel but effective showmanship in spite of the fact that he’s a man of parts: it is too.
Because the ugly thing that, perhaps, it’s finally time to admit is that parts don’t matter. Even if this were largely the good parts, and it isn’t… For all the pleasant and much quoted idealism about Doctor Who in the preface to this blog, it’s not valuable because of the beautiful flexibilities of its structure. It’s not valuable because of the amazing things it can do. It’s not valuable because of some magical breath of mercury at its foundation. It’s not, in fact, valuable at all, at least in and of itself. It’s a flexible container that was lucky enough to be written by people like David Whittaker, Robert Holmes, Ben Aaronovitch, Kate Orman, Russell T Davies, and Steven Moffat—to have had actors like Patrick Troughton, Peter Davison, Christopher Eccleston, and Peter Capaldi, to say nothing of Jacqueline Hill, Katy Manning, Lis Sladen, Sophie Aldred, Billie Piper, Catherine Tate, and Jenna Coleman—and to have intersected the careers of people like Delia Derbyshire, Verity Lambert, Douglas Adams, Bonnie Langford, and Ben Wheatley.
But even that’s just a list of names. What really matters is simply that things like The Rescue, The Mind Robber, Carnival of Monsters, City of Death, Enlightenment, Remembrance of the Daleks, Damaged Goods, and Hell Bent were made—that its theme music was a pioneering piece of electronic music, that it’s a who’s who of British television talent across the ages. It never mattered because it was Doctor Who; it mattered because it was often good, and when it wasn’t good it was often at least interesting. When that quality builds up over decades you get a fascinating and vital lens into British culture. But when that quality is absent, frankly, so does the importance. This, at the end of the day, is the crux of my longrunning beef with much of the spinoff material—they’re simply far too indifferent towards quality.
And sure, a perfectly reasonable definition of a fan is someone who likes something even when it’s not good. Certainly I’m a lot more likely to watch a middling Doctor Who episode while high and browsing BlueSky is than I am to watch a middling Star Trek episode. And that’s all well and good. I am blatantly, demonstrably a Doctor Who fan. But at the end of the day, if all a fandom is good for is picking what your televisual wallpaper is while you doomskeet then who cares? There is, as an endless parade of Marvel Cinematic Universe fans will rush to tell you if you accidentally mention color grading in a place they can hear you, nothing wrong with empty fun. But there’s nothing much right with it either. It’s not something you love.
This week, Chibnall actually managed to make a fifty minute block of recognizably Doctor Who-shaped content. But frankly, if I want recognizably Doctor Who-shaped content, I can watch Paradise Towers for the tenth time instead of this pile of borrowed glories.
