It’s January 26th, 2020. Eminem is at number one with “Godzilla,” featuring the late Juice Wrld, which is not a sentence I realized I was going to get to type before now. That was fun in a way the music charts haven’t been since the Wilderness Years. And I don’t even much rate “Godzilla.”
Anyway, at the precise time this airs, I’m with Penn at my mother’s house in Newtown, just a few hours we leave for JFK and fly to London for a week. It’ll be my first time there since just before Christmas of 2011, where I wrote The Ribos Operation entry in a hotel in Manchester. I think this time I’m working on the early stages of Dalek Eruditorum, trying to get that to work and having it go about as well as writing up this era of the show does, but with less obligation to keep at it. Anyway, I’d long since switched from a full laptop to a tablet/keyboard case combo, so I couldn’t have torrented the episode if I’d wanted to, and even if I had I’d have been racing the car to leave to the airport, and frankly Chibnall Doctor Who didn’t warrant that kind of urgency.
So instead it’s January 27th. The charts don’t change til Thursday. Penn and I are holed up in a fourth floor walkup hotel room in Paddington. We’ve gotten in at the ass hours of the morning and run straight into the classic overnight to London problem of being at your hotel hours before it’s ready for you, exhausted and smelling like you’ve been wearing the same clothes for 36 hours. So we spend the afternoon in the Science Museum looking at the reconstruction of Babbage’s Analytical Engine and sitting on a bench, then stagger back to the hotel, pass out for a three hour nap, and get ready to go out to our “holy shit we’re in London” dinner reservation. And somewhere in there, I pull up Fugitive of the Judoon on iPlayer, literally the only time in my life I have ever watched Doctor Who on the BBC.
I don’t remember if I’m spoiled. I probably am. I usually am. But what’s remarkable is that this is a concept. The fact that Twitter is buzzing about the episode—that people are talking in awed voices about its twists and implications—is unusual for this era. There’s an excitement and enthusiasm that hadn’t really been there since The Woman Who Fell to Earth, save, perhaps, among those who were especially excited about the short-awaited return of the Master, and that won’t be seen again until the buildup to the second Davies’ era. Perhaps most notably, the ratings saw an appreciable uptick—one of only a handful in the course of the Chibnall era’s gradual bleedout, and something that appears to have been caused at least in part by the hype over how seismic this episode was.
Or at least, appeared to be. It’s difficult to recapture that now, knowing where all of this is going, and more to the point where it isn’t. But equally, we have an entire essay to talk about The Timeless Children and we don’t need to do it here. So let’s just look at what’s here. To start, of course, there’s Vinay Patel, the only writer of Series 11 who straightforwardly came out of it looking good. And that explains at least some of this episode; there’s a tightness of characterization and structure that feels sharp and coherent in the same way that Demons of the Punjab did. Even in its final form you can see the story about fugitives and refugees that Patel wanted to tell.
But, of course, that’s not the story we have. Instead we have the version where Chris Chibnall plowed into the script of his best writer to say “what if we threw out your actual story and made it a giant mess of continuity that set up my fan theory about The Brain of Morbius.” Ah, but I’ve gotten ahead of myself again. All the same, there’s a clear sense of Patel’s story getting shoved out to the margins of itself here, the actual episode being cancelled midway through so that we can have the big double reveal of the Whittaker Doctor finding the buried TARDIS while the Martin Doctor figures out the chameleon arch.
The thing is, though, that reveal is absolutely spectacular—probably the best single moment of the Chibnall era in terms of actually working on the screen. It’s helped by the presence of Nida Manzoor, who almost instantaneously outgrew the show to become a name in her own right, and who imbues the sequence with gorgeous shots like that drone pan-around of the Doctor standing at the top of the lighthouse. And, for that matter, by Jo Martin, who handles the emotional journey to her transformation with grace and aplomb before turning on a dime and unleashing a character who’s recognizably the Doctor, but also tangibly wrong in alarming ways. But fundamentally, it mostly works because it’s a genuinely brilliant reveal. Sure, it’s basically just Alien Bodies turned inside out, but honestly it hits with an absolutely delicious weight that none of Moffat’s attempts to rip off Alien Bodies ever did, just because killing the Doctor is obviously something that’s going to be undone, whereas revealing a secret Doctor is not. As usual, Moffat haunts this observation, but there’s an audacity and sweep to this that’s very different from the consciously self-contained reveal of the Hurt Doctor.
And it’s worth, I think, remembering that moment of giddy possibility. Sure, a moment of thought would reveal that the vast majority of options here were about as interesting as, well, confirming the Morbius Doctors. For those of us who would have emotions about confirming Season 6B, this was potentially exciting, but like working out obscure theories of how time works in Doctor Who, it isn’t exactly appealing to our best selves. And the truth is that, once you thought about it, even the best options were likely to amount to little more than the Platt Masterplan redux, and frankly, that’s even more of a lukewarm thirty year old leftover than destroying Gallifrey. But on the back of a phenomenally executed reveal it was just about possible to believe, in spite of the previous fifteen episodes, that this would be good.
In hindsight, though, even within the episode itself the thrills are cracking like the cheap veneer they are. It’s not just the dead end nature of the reveal, nor the “Yaz said you saw Nan” energy of not just actually having the beat “well, I guess whoever remembers this will know” as the Doctors part or of Whittaker realizing to her horror that Martin was right and was part of her past, nor the sheer fucking childishness of quick-sketching the Martin Doctor as edgy and dangerous with “she carries a massive gun.” No, in hindsight the real giveaway here is Captain Jack.
Set aside the persistent rumors that Patel didn’t even know Captain Jack was in his episode until transmission (although something certainly had to be behind Patel’s description of the year before transmission as “tricky” and his declaration that his work on this episode had left him resolved not to keep working on the program). Let’s also set aside John Barrowman’s long history of whipping his dick out at people, not because it’s excusable, but because it’s the thing that actually eventually gets dealt with and leads to Barrowman becoming a persona non grata in Doctor Who circles. Hell, let’s set aside his years long campaign of flagrantly lying about an entirely imagined crusade on Steven Moffat’s part to keep there from being a Torchwood revival, although you deeply question the wisdom of rewarding that behavior and bringing him back.
Instead let’s just look at what we have: a fifty-three year old man who’s more “botox rictus grin” than “silver fox” mugging his way through a bunch of party pieces on the shittiest set the series has seen since Underworld so that he can deliver cryptic dialogue about the amazingly uninspiring “lone Cyberman.” Even for people excited about Jack’s return—and in 2020 that was already a much smaller group than it used to be—this is thin gruel. It’s a desperate stunt—the sort of thing you do to spruce up a bland bit of midseason filler.
But here it is in a script that already has a returning Davies-era monster—not one anyone cares about, admittedly, but a returning Davies-era monster all the same—and an entire secret Doctor. And more to the point, once upon a time, before all this bullshit was dropped on top of it, it had a really good writer who didn’t actually need any of this crap to turn in a compelling episode. To look at all of this and conclude that what it really needs is a middle aged Dancing on Ice judge to ham it up is a genuinely stunning lack of faith in what they have. Or, perhaps more to the point, it’s a stunning failure to even appreciate what they have. It’s as though the show has decided that this, as the rough midpoint of the season, is the point at which all of the big attention-getting stuff happens, and simply given it no further thought. Chibnall takes his extreme spoiler-phobia and childhood love of seeing Earthshock and simply goes all in, creating an episode that consists of nothing but stunning and unexpected reveals. Right down to a Cyberman. Past that, the idea that there’s anything in this episode worth caring about is invisible to everyone except for Patel, Manzoor, and Martin.
And yet in the end all of these reveals are shockingly nothing. The Fugitive Doctor is going to be reduced to a Magical Black Lady who shows up when the Whit(e)taker Doctor needs some girl power—a development that’s in hindsight truly bizarre given the sheer degree to which the two don’t get on. The reveal of the Doctor’s secret past isn’t something that’s going to be fleshed out on its own merits, but rather used as setup to segue into a different reveal. The lone Cyberman is little more than a Macguffin. Captain Jack shows back up, but it has nothing to do with this, and in fact we never really get an explanation of why he’s the guy with the portentous message. There really isn’t anything to these Shocking Reveals beyond their shock. They’re just a bunch of “more will be revealed later” with no actual substantive buildup or preliminary revelations. It’s basically just a spoiler-free trailer for the finale done up to look like an episode and then given its own spoiler-free trailer. Yes, it worked to build hype. But that’s all it did. And at the end of the day, building hype that’s never going to actually get paid off is counterproductive. Even the Doctor’s moodiness at both beginning and end doesn’t actually connect.
Within the context of Doctor Who as content, this is a rousing success. But as with Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, the main takeaway from that is once again to expose the sheer hollowness of this model of the show. Only here, instead of resting on past glories, we’re simply inventing an entirely new past, the glories of which don’t matter because all that apparently matters is who the Doctor is now. Except she’s nobody. A pro-cop blowhard (unless they’re “trigger-happy,” apparently) with no ideals, no aesthetics, nothing save a promise that she’ll be back next week for more of this.
Which means I guess I fucking will be too.