The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

Chapter The 220th, no, it's not an anagram, believe it or not.

Plot:

After his encounter with the newly regenerated Doctor in Sheffield, nasty Stenza warrior Tzim-Sha falls through time and space to land on the planet Ranskoor Av Kolos. By a massive fluke, he immediately encounters a credulous duo, the Ux (knock-off Jedi, essentially) who accept him as their god. Thousands of years later, the Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz receive multiple distress signals from the planet. With each of them wearing a special brain patch to stave off the mind-altering effects of the planet, the TARDIS team materialise and explore. They quickly find a lone survivor, Paltraki. They put a brain patch on him too, and he gradually fills in the exposition as the effects of the planet wear off. The Ux have created a huge structure that acts as a weapon powered by their mental energy; Tzim has been using this to crush planets down to extremely dense rocks. He keeps these in a trophy room and uses them to power his life support system, as presumably he has seen the story The Pirate Planet from the classic years of TV's Doctor Who. As revenge for his defeat by the Doctor, the next planet to be crushed is going to be Earth (hey, that also happened in The Pirate Planet - what a coincidence!). Before the Earth is crushed, the Doctor manages to persuade the Ux that Tzim is not the messiah, just a very naughty boy. Graham is tempted to kill Tzim because he was responsible for Graham's wife Grace's death, but in the end he chooses only to entrap the Stenza in one of his own cages. The planets are returned to their normal size and place, and hostages from the many crews who tried to attack Tzim's fortress are freed.

Context:

Watched from the disc in the series 11 Blu-ray box set one Saturday. The youngest child (girl of 9) came in briefly, but otherwise I was on my own. Coincidentally, the moment that she witnessed included the display of a dentally-decorated boat race that had caused her great consternation in 2018 (see below). This time, she didn't bat an eyelid; what a difference a few years has made.

First Time Round:

Watched live on its debut UK BBC1 broadcast on Sunday 9th December 2018 with almost all the family. I was accompanied with the Better Half and two boys, but youngest child (6 at the time) was off in another room watching another screen. This was because she had found the reveal of Tzim-Sha in the season opener, with all the teeth in his face, too frightening, and had sworn off Who for a long time thereafter. It's probably good therefore that she missed this one back then, given that Tzim was back for a rematch with the Doctor and friends, teeth and all. I had finished and published a blog post here a couple of days earlier, and I expressed there a small reservation about the current series lacking a little oomph. I also mused there on the preponderance in the stories of non-monster monsters: everyone the TARDIS 'fam' faced off against in 2018 had a more interesting motivation that just being simply evil. This resulted in a less action-packed finale than Doctor Who usually presented. 

Reaction:

I am just going to state it as fact and dare anyone reading this to disagree: this story has the worst title in the history of Doctor Who on television, including both the classic and new series stories. It's not just those last three sort-of words (though see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more on using made up gubbins in story titles), it's the second word too. There's no battle depicted here. Any major action took place before the events the audience is shown, and given the numbers of hostages freed at the end, it comprised only minor skirmishes at best. The story feels underpopulated, with active roles for just the fam, one ally, one villain, plus two of the villain's duped henchpersons (and not all of them are that active, Yaz has very little to do - again). Comparing this story to last year's epic Flux, with the latter's many crowd and action scenes (soldiers versus Sontarans in the Crimea, say, or hordes of refugees being sucked up into Passenger forms), I think the uninitiated would guess the wrong one was made within severe restrictions during a pandemic. It is puzzling why this story is so scaled down and restrained for a season finale, particularly the finale of the lead writer's first year on the job. As mentioned above, Chris Chibnall - for it was he - was making a deliberate effort to do something different in his first run. There are no recurring elements from Doctor Who's past featured, and a lot of thought has been put in to antagonists' motivations to avoid the usual genre cliches. This gave rise to a refreshing, and to my mind somewhat underrated, set of stories leading up to the finale in 2018, but it caused problems for the finale itself.

Chibnall had painted himself into a corner. He couldn't bring out the big guns of Daleks or Cybermen, and there wasn't much point creating some completely new evil alien race that was just going to act like the Daleks or the Cybermen. A completely new force of antagonism would also not up the ante sufficiently for a finale. So, the antagonist of the first story of the year is brought back, in a neat bit of circular narrative. He's just one dude, though, defeated and weak by the time of the events depicted here. The inclusion of the Ux gives him access to a superweapon, which is an understandable move in the spirit of ante-upping; but, these very powerful beings have to be super-gullible to believe he's their god. It's based on a terrible coincidence too: of all the places in the universe he could land, it's somewhere with a breathable atmosphere next to two super-beings who can provide him everything he needs. The Ux, as another flavour of non-evil antagonists with non-standard villain motivation, can't be fought or zapped. So, overcoming them is just an act of persuasion, which the Doctor does without too much effort. There's also the SniperBots. These seem to have been introduced this series (they appear in an earlier story too) as there needed to be one set of baddies one couldn't reason with, and who weren't misunderstood underneath it all, and who could be shot at with a laser guns guilt-free. Alas, as there are so few goodies, there's no redshirt cannon fodder people that can be picked off, so the SniperBots have to be rubbish shots, undermining their menace somewhat.

The scaled down nature of the production also applies to the plot. As mentioned above, the antagonists aren't any great shakes. There's a little bit of questing and infiltration of a fortress stuff, but again it's pretty easy without significant obstacles. It looks like there will be a focus on psychological conflict, with the planet (or the Ux, or both, it's not clear) able to affect the brain, slowly driving people out of their minds. The neural inhibitors that our heroes wear to protect against this are set up carefully in such a way that the savvy audience member expects someone to lose theirs pretty quickly, and then have to battle their inner demons. This does not happen; instead the Doctor and Yaz briefly decide to take them off, and get a bit of a headache temporarily. That's it. The final thread of the plot that remains, Graham's wrestling with his conscience about killing Tzim-Sha in revenge after the killing of his wife, shows some promise too. It is however a subplot promoted to main plot status, and this undermines it. An actor as good as Bradley Walsh could make the whole conflict play on his face when finally in the same room as his enemy. It would need only a few moments and no dialogue. Unfortunately, as this conflict is doing heavy lifting in the ante-upping department, it can't be done with as quickly as all that, and instead Graham has to talk about getting his revenge a lot with various characters. It being pre-meditated doesn't fit very well with Graham's character, anyway, but all the advance talk kills any drama when he and Tzim finally face off against one another.

By the end of the story, it feels like there's been almost no consequences. The Ux are forgiven for their destructive religious fervour. Shrunken planets are put back in orbit; presumably millions of people have died, but we never met them and nobody seems to dwell on their deaths particularly. One hostage is executed, a member of Paltraki's crew. Seeing Mark Addy as Paltraki give as much gravitas as he can to the risible line "Her name... was... Umsang" one mourns not the character but the waste of Addy's talents on such thin material. It's all the more frustrating knowing that Chibnall is more than capable of doing a good finale, and managed some corking plot points, revelations and spectacle in the last stories of his second and third seasons. This first try, though, is unfortunately a misfire.  

Connectivity: 

In both stories there's a few stand-offs between people with guns, and also a good man is tempted into violent action to avenge a dead family member. Aside from that though The Gunfighters and The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos don't have much in common. 

Deeper Thoughts:

'Rose' - or 'Rosa' - by any other name (Slight Return). For the first part of my deeper thoughts on using made-up words in Doctor Who story titles, you'll have to go right back to the Deeper Thoughts section of the blog post for The Rings of Akhaten published in 2016. What I wrote at that time in relation to the title of the Matt Smith story applies just as much to 'The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos', i.e. it "is just the kind of 'King Thrash-wobbler of the Biddly Bong' name that repels a certain section of the audience, and prevents a mass appreciation of a fantasy product even if deserved, consigning it to the cult ghetto." But: "You might think - and if the mood's right, I might agree with you - screw 'em" and "If those people are going to switch off just because they can't cope with an odd sounding name here and there, they're not worth keeping". However, "That would be fine for any other show, but not Doctor Who [which] shouldn't ever be a cult; it should always aim to appeal to the widest possible family audience - that's what it was made for, from the very beginning." In 2016, The Rings of Akhaten was very much an outlier. Aside from that, and a tweak to well-known name from mythology Pandora (in The Pandorica Opens), every story title since 2005 up to that point was composed of actual English words, with an occasional established Doctor Who name like Cybermen, Zygons or Ood thrown in when required. Did things change, though, in the four broadcast seasons and specials that have been shown since I wrote that blog post?

The first story to be broadcast after that Akhaten post was the 2016 Christmas special, The Return of Doctor Mysterio. I'm going to give its writer Steven Moffat another pass here: yes, Mysterio is not a real word, but it's clear what it means. Doctor Who was definitely a global brand in December 2016, and the title was inspired by the name the programme is given in Mexico, Doctor Misterio. For the following series in 2017, leading all the way to the next - and final to date - Christmas day special, every title is plain English. There's not even any Daleks or Cybermen name-checked, not that those familiar alien names are in any way, ahem, alienating. The only odd thing about the titles in 2017 is that for the first half they are all short, one or two words at most (The Pilot, Smile, Thin Ice), then for the second half, they suddenly get much longer (The Pyramid at the End of the World, World Enough and Time). I've seen bands do the same thing with track names on albums, e.g. Kill Uncle (trigger warning if you're planning on googling it - it's a Morrissey solo album). Perhaps this was a deliberate move on Moffat and his writers' part to show that the early stories are more light and fun, where the second half gets deeper and darker. Or it could just be a coincidence. There's wild difference in the tone suggested by the titles of Chris Chibnall's first year as lead writer too. Arachnids in the UK and Kerblam! are pretty pulpy, but then there is something more portentous like The Ghost Monument too.

That 2018 run is where unreal words became more popular. The finale's title alone contains as many made-up words as featured in all the previous stories from 2005 onwards put together; but there's The Tsuranga Conundrum too. It calms down a bit for the next full season. The opening two-parter is called Spyfall, which is not a portmanteau that anybody on Earth had thought to put together before, and maybe for good reason. It might seem uncharitable, but I'm less inclined to give this a pass than I am 'Pandorica' or 'Mysterio' because it's so naff. It's about spies, you see, and there was a famous spy film called Skyfall, yeah, and sky sounds a lot like spy, doesn't it? Urrgh. One positive the name had was that it set out a big budget widescreen intent for those opening episodes at least. Elsewhere, there was a similar mix of the pulpy with the more cerebral, including the last title including made-up gubbins to date, Praxeus. This is the sort of one word gnomic title that Doctor Who loved to use for its stories in the early 1980s, and it was nice to see this century get its equivalent of Meglos or Frontios. So as not to appear just to be pointing out problems without offering solutions, I suppose I should suggest some alternatives to these titles, though no doubt I risk presenting something the reader will think of as even worse. The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos could be The Planet Nervous Breakdown - that would be more of a hook, wouldn't it?  The Tsuranga Conundrum could be Holby City in Space (shades of Malcolm Hulke there). Praxeus, I think I'd just call: The Birds.

The reduced episode count imposed by Covid on Chris Chibnall's final season and specials saw the approach made more lean; anything more cerebral or worthy was jettisoned, and what remained was full-on crowd-pleasing adventure. This was reflected in the chapter and story titles. No more made-up words that nobody had heard of before; instead it was lots of straightforward English, and lots of monster names. There's been a Blank "of the Sontarans" and "of the Angels" and "of the Daleks", with a Blank "of the Sea Devils" coming in a month or two. If this is Chibnall's victory lap, then I'm loving it so far. The only title not revealed is the final Jodie Whittaker special planned for the Autumn, where everything will change. It seems very unlikely, but if it turns out to be called 'Return to Ranskoor Av Kolos', then we're in deep trouble!

In Summary:

Rank ol' bolox.