The Robots of Death

Chapter the 252nd, is a late Christmas present - shiny and decorative on the outside, but underneath is something even more wonderful.

Plot: 

The Doctor and Leela materialise in a mobile mining craft, the Sandminer Storm Mine 4, which roams the surface on a desert planet (or possibly a vast desert on a planet, it's not 100% clear) to extract precious minerals for company profit. It is crewed mainly by robots. There's also a small human crew, getting smaller every moment as they are being strangled, one by one. Suspicion falls on the Doctor and Leela, and the craft's commander Uvanov has them locked up. One of crew, Poul, doesn't believe they did it and releases them for the Doctor to share his theories; Poul also doesn't believe what the Doctor suggests, which is that the robots have been programmed to kill everyone. Poul and D84 - a supposedly mute robot that secretly can talk and reason - are undercover agents investigating threats made in letters sent to the company about a robot revolution. These came from Taren Capel, a robotics scientist, who's lived mostly with robots for his whole life, so nobody knows what he looks like. Poul breaks down, suffering from robophobia, on finding grisly evidence that the Doctor was right after all. Taren Capel turns out to have taken the place of Dask, one of the Sandminer's engineering crew. He and his controlled robots go on the offensive against the TARDIS team and remaining crew. The Doctor confronts Capel, with Leela hiding in the room with a cylinder of helium, slowly releasing the gas into the air. This changes Capel's voice such that the robots no longer recognise him, and kill him.

Context:

This was a random choice but within certain constraints. As it was Christmas, I decided to watch a story I really liked. I chose my favourite one of the stories that remain yet to be blogged for each Doctor, and then used a random number generator to select which one of the dozen or so I would watch. The fates dictated it would be The Robots of Death, a nicely fitting pick for three reasons. First, it was a companion piece to the last story blogged, Voyage of the Damned, which took some inspiration from the titular robots many years later; second, Robots was shown as a festive repeat almost exactly 45 years before this watch (as two fifty minute combined episodes on the 31st December 1977 and January 1st 1978, forming the final edited Christmas repeat of a long run in the 1970s); third, and most importantly, it acted as my personal tribute watch for its writer Chris Boucher, who sadly passed away earlier in December 2022. I watched on Blu-ray, from the disc in the Collection Season 14 box set, on a day during late December, accompanied by the younger two of my children (boy of 13, girl of 10) and the Better Half (it's one of her all time favourite stories).

First Time Round:

I first watched the story when it came out on VHS in the very early days of releases. It was 1988, and the original, classic Doctor Who was still a going concern on TV, but there was a sudden, giddy, wonderful chance to own episodes from long ago of which one may have heard. and one may have even read in novelisation form, but now they could be watched and re-watched, time and time again. Before this, in the late 1980s, only five titles had been made available and I'd collected them all. The gaps between releases seemed like ages, but were only a few months each time. Sometime around mid-February of 1988, I went into the upstairs of W.H. Smiths in Worthing and found two new tapes, The Robots of Death and The Day of the Daleks, on the shelves. I bought them both as soon as I could, took them home and watched them a lot. Both stories were particularly good examples of 1970s Doctor Who, though Robots was the stronger of the two for me (just marginally). With seven titles now owned, it felt much more like a collection than before. Even the box was a prized artefact, the cover images impressing despite showing the robots with blue-screen inserts in their eye sockets, used in the show to create their evil red-eye when under the influence. The version of the story on the 1988 tape was edited to remove the beginning and end credits of the middle episodes. I finally experienced the story in full as broadcast when an unedited version came out seven years later in mid-February 1995.

Reaction: 

The story behind The Robots of Death's superlative art-deco look and feel is that the director Michael E. Briant thought the script wasn't all that good, and therefore felt that he needed to lift it with the visuals. This confuses me, and I suspect has done the same to other Who commentators over the years, as it is clearly an excellent script: a simple idea executed well with great dialogue, merging ideas from big science fiction (Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert) with the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie. What was Briant reading that he found the material underwhelming? My theory is that the idea itself didn't appeal to the director (Boucher was sticking to the 'Whodunnit in space' brief given to him by the production team, but that's not necessarily everyone's cup of tea), and that blinded him a bit to the merits of Boucher's work. The upshot was, though, that an already excellent story gets an equally excellent realisation. Briant challenges every department to push the boat out in terms of opulence, and this creates something very special indeed. However good Boucher's blueprint initially was, the series produced based on it could have been unimaginative. Picture, for example, the robots and the sets being basic and utilitarian instead of the works of art they ended up being. It could also have been incoherent - each person on the crew pulling in a different direction - but the deceptively simple art-deco concept helps to integrate all the different contributions. The treadmill method of making classic Doctor Who didn't allow time for the 'tone meetings' the new series stories benefit from, but Briant essentially has one anyway.

That's it really. I could just end this now saying "It's an all time classic" and leave it at that. Maybe it would be just as quick to list the parts that don't quite work. The feet of the robots are not that great. Heads, bodies, voices, rhythm of speech, their choreographed movement, are all perfect, but you can't have everything. The robots' feet are plimsolls covered in silver sticky tape. It's just a shame that Briant uses a number of shots that focus on their footsteps advancing on their prey. Some scenes before the reveal of the murderer give the game away (his face isn't sufficiently disguised). A couple of the performances are not as good as the others. The make-up is a bit over the top. The corpse markers (robot deactivation discs stuck on each victim) are clearly rear reflectors for bicycles. That's all that comes to mind, really. But, having said that, it's nice that the mystery is solvable for the children in the audience (the ending's use of helium's voice-changing qualities is nicely appealing to children too). The cast is one of the most diverse presented in Doctor Who of this period, with good roles for women and people of colour; if that means some slightly less experienced performers were used, it's a fair exchange. Kids with a spare bike reflector get the chance to play robots of death with screen accurate props. And, it occurred to me on this watch (apologies if I'm being slow), that the heavy lines of make up around the Sandminer crew's eyes and noses make them look more like the robots, a hint at how important the "creepy metal men" are in this world, and a subtle highlight of the humans' love/hate relationship with their servants in this society. The Robots of Death's flaws aren't that bad, and may even be strengths.

The Robots of Death's definite strengths are, well, everything else: Dudley Simpson's score, the fantastic model work, the deft world building (brief mentions, such as to "Kaldor City", were enough that they could be developed into story after story, and indeed later were in books and audios). The key members of the cast, Russell Hunter, David Bailie, Pamela Salem, Gregory de Polnay, Miles Fothergill, and - oh gosh! - the wonderful, wonderful David Collings, are all brilliant. They are more than matched by a brace of regulars at the top of their game. Tom Baker is at the height of his powers and new companion actor Louise Jameson is more than good enough to match him. They make everything memorable, even a nice little bit of nonsense like their opening scene where the Doctor explains dimensional transcendentalism to Leela with a couple of boxes similarly to how Father Ted explains perspective to Father Dougal with some toy cows. I mentioned the excellent dialogue earlier, but it's worth repeating. There are too many good lines to quote them all; just one to call out as a personal favourite is Tom Baker's wonderful delivery of the beautifully clever line "Nine times out of ten" as he leaves the TARDIS (you'd have to see it in context, but I'm guessing if you're reading this that you have). The story even achieves some depth amongst the fun and the thrills and chills, for example in the exploration of "robophobia". This is a dread fear of what has subsequently been called the 'uncanny valley', our brains' difficulty in reacting to a creation that's almost like a human, but not quite.

Added up, it's an all-time classic, no other way to say it. Between them, Briant and Boucher, the former thankfully going strong, the latter now sadly no longer with us, created something truly excellent.

Connectivity: 

The robots of The Robots of Death were clearly the inspiration for the Host in Voyage of the Damned, but also both stories involve a group of people trapped aboard a craft being picked off one by one, these events orchestrated by a lone male figure who is more robot than man (figuratively in the 1970s, literally in the 2000s) working from a secret workshop on the craft.

Deeper Thoughts:

Next Time Trailer. Making predictions at New Year's is almost as silly as making resolutions, but call me silly - I'm going to make some anyway. I did the same last year in the final 2021 blog post for Flux. It's probably an even more silly thing to do to check back on how well or badly I predicted 2022's events last year, but I'm a sucker for punishment and will do that too. I was mostly on the money regarding Jodie Whittaker's finale; I guessed that both Sacha Dhawan as the Master and Jo Martin as the Division Doctor would return, and that the story would leave a lot of the questions about the Timeless Child and the Doctor's past unanswered (I failed to anticipate exactly how extreme Chris Chibnall would be in avoiding the subject altogether). Happily, I did not predict all the surprises of The Power of the Doctor (I mean, who saw most of that coming?) just as I didn't predict the return of the Sea Devils in a pirate-themed episode at Easter. That was revealed early on in 2022, in a trailer immediately after the January 1st special Eve of the Daleks. There won't be such a special in 2023, but instead we got a 60th anniversary teaser trailer released on Christmas Day. That may well be all we get now before full trailers are shown, likely only a couple of weeks before the specials air in November next year. I didn't really predict the lack of a festive special in the 2022/2023 Yuletide period so much as know it already as it had been heavily implied by statements made earlier in 2022. I did wonder last time whether there would be any Christmas special in 2023, at either end of the year, stating "The schedulers and Davies could move the special back to the 25th December and there'd be one before [2023] is out". That could still come to pass. Statements have repeatedly said that Ncuti Gatwa's first story will air "over the festive period" in 2023. To my mind that means they haven't decided / been given a date yet, so it could be shown anywhere from December 23rd 2023 to January 5th 2024. I very much hope it's on the 25th as it would be nice to want to watch things on the big day (only the Ghosts episode held any interest for me this year on all the four main UK channels).

What do I predict for the content of the David Tennant specials? Much as I tried to remain un-spoilered, I'd seen some bits of the location shoots posted online before the teaser trailer, so already had something of an unfair advantage re: predictions. It's been heavily hinted that a US TV star who's engaged to appear (I'm dancing around the specifics just in case anyone reading this has somehow missed the publicity and wants this all to be a surprise) is going to be playing a returning character from the early days of the classic series. Also, some creatures featured may well be slightly obscure characters from the extended Who universe (they certainly look like them). Nothing's absolutely confirmed though. Beyond that, I would expect more surprising returns from the past befitting an anniversary year. I expect, though, that they may only be old faces from the 21st century series now (beyond Donna and her family, who have been confirmed) or perhaps more extended universe characters. The Power of the Doctor thoroughly covered the classic series, and there isn't anyone or anything to bring back from 20th century TV Who that they haven't already. The only significant monster that hasn't been redesigned and reintroduced is the Yeti, but Steven Moffat did the Great Intelligence (without its cuddly hench-beasts) a decade ago. No, I think it's more likely that we'll see an appearance by, say, the Slitheen than the return of, say, the Terileptils. Mind you, Russell T Davies brought back the Macra for one night only, so anything is possible. Beyond the new broadcast episodes, there will also be new product coming out in 2023. The big continuing range is the Blu-ray box-sets of classic seasons that form The Collection series. Last year, I took a punt on which three seasons would be released in 2022, and came up with 13 (Tom Baker's second year), 22 (Colin Baker's first full run), and 2 (William Hartnell's second season). In the words of Meat Loaf, two out of three ain't bad. I didn't anticipate that only two sets would come out in 2022, so season 13 is still awaited. I'll roll over that prediction to 2023.

I'm going to guess (hope) for three Blu-ray sets next year, so in addition to 13, I'll predict season 20 (Peter Davison's second year released in time for its 40th anniversary) and another black-and-white 1960s season.  As they've done a Hartnell one this year, I'll go for a Troughton, season 6 (Troughton's third and final run). There are only a few gaps to fill because episodes don't exist in the archives. Five missing episodes of The Space Pirates can be presented as an audio and picture reconstruction, and the two episodes of The Invasion have already been animated. Whether those two episodes can be presented in high-definition will be a big question: they were the first missing episodes to be animated back in 2006, and the company that made them no longer exists. Britbox offer the story with the animated missing episodes one and four, and it looks good on my old TV. Talking of animations, I predicted last year that as well as The Abominable Snowmen, another animation would be released, and I guessed at The Wheel in Space. I wasn't to know that a funding partner for the animations, BBC America, would cease to be a broadcaster of Doctor Who outside the UK, and would therefore no longer be putting the money in. Will Disney+ now be taking up that baton? Nobody knows at the moment. I suspect that it will happen, but maybe not in time for any releases next year. If a story is released, my money would still be on The Wheel in Space to be the one, completing the visuals of Troughton's second year, season 5, and making that a possibility for box set release in the near future too. Many online fan commentators have expressed worries about Disney+ involvement in Doctor Who, and how much influence they will have. As we approach a new year, I'm minded to be optimistic. It's not so long since Disney+ shows were being touted as competitors of Doctor Who (see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Husbands of River Song post last Summer for more details), and now we're all on the same side. Anything can happen in the next 12 months. Happy New Year!

In Summary:

I'll just say it's an all-time classic, and leave it at that.

Voyage of the Damned

Chapter the 251st, where a disaster movie featuring a famous face or two is perfect for the Christmas TV schedule.

Plot: 

The Doctor arrives aboard the Starship Titanic, a luxury cruise ship from the planet Sto run by the Max Capricorn company, in orbit around Earth in the present day. He befriends a waitress Astrid, who joined the company to see alien planets but has never had the chance. Using the psychic paper, he gets himself and Astrid down to London with a handful of other passengers in a landing party. When they return, the Titanic is hit by meteoroids. The Captain has been paid off by someone to cause the disaster, and the ship's robot servants, the Host, are programmed to kill any survivors. The Doctor, Astrid and the others in the landing party make their way to the bridge where the one remaining crewmember Midshipman Frame is holed up. They battle the Host, and the extreme environments of the damaged ship, and many of the group are killed. The Doctor works out that whoever is controlling the Host is in a secret compartment on one level, and confronts them. It is Max Capricorn himself; he is attempting to destroy the company's reputation after being kicked off the board, by causing the Titanic to crash into the populated Earth. Astrid saves the Doctor from Max's attack, but at the cost of her life. After saving the Earth by pulling the ship out of its plummet just in time, the Doctor realises that because she was wearing a teleport bracelet when she died, he can bring Astrid back. But he can't make her become fully corporeal, so has to let her go. The Doctor takes the tour party leader Mister Copper to Earth; Copper had lied about his credentials and worried about any investigation. The Doctor tells him that he's rich based on Earth/Sto currency exchange rates, and wishes him a merry Christmas..

Context:

I have finally bowed to the inevitable. Tired of having to keep buying knock-off generic remotes for my very old (but still trusty) Blu-ray player, I bought a new player. Just for the remote. During a cost of living crisis. Who am I, Rockefeller? Anyway, I am now 4K ready for when I have to upgrade the very old (but still trusty) TV, and I hope that's not for a long time. This meant that I could watch this story from the DVD in the new series 4 box set. I was accompanied by the three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) who were all enthusiastic. We've been watching various Christmas specials and films all through December, this Doctor Who offering being just one of them. Before the main event, I put on Time Crash, the short made for the Children in Need telethon that was shown a month before the 2007 Christmas special's broadcast in December. It's a sketch featuring David Tennant meeting Peter Davison's Doctor. The children hadn't seen it before, and found it mildly diverting. It was interesting to note how many ideas and jokes that its writer Steven Moffat reused when he did a full-on Doctor meets his old selves story in 2013, The Day of the Doctor. We then preceded to watch Voyage of the Damned. The youngest particularly liked the character of Bannakaffalatta, and was so annoyed when he was killed off that she almost stopped watching. The eldest kept mentioning that the Host were a rip off of the robots from 1970s story The Robots of Death, and he's right - they are. Although, I think it's meant to be a homage (French for rip off).

First Time Round:

I remember a lot of hype in the build-up to the first UK broadcast of this story on BBC1, Christmas Day 2007. The family (which was just me, the Better Half and eldest child, one year old at the time) had just moved into a new place, our current home, a month before. A couple of weeks later the Christmas Doctor Who Magazine celebrated Kylie Minogue's guest appearance with a now rather famous cover of her posing with a bronze Dalek while wearing a bronze-coloured dress. I had been out one evening in London for the day job's Christmas party, at a Teriyaki restaurant, and was slightly merry from drinking a bit too much saki. As my subscription copy hadn't yet arrived, I impulse bought the issue at the train station to read on the train home, as I wanted to keep myself awake. In my state of festiveness there was a good chance that I'd fall asleep and find myself waking up at the end of the line in the early hours of the morning. It's no reflection of the content of the articles within, which as I remember were most engaging, but I fell asleep and found myself waking up at the end of the line in the early hours of the morning. I had to get a cab home, and found that the driver didn't know the area where I lived. As I'd only recently moved, I didn't know the area where I lived either.

I got the driver to go along the seafront road until I could see some landmark through the window that I recognised where he could drop me off. Finally, I saw it - a low bridge I remembered walking under near the train station. It turns out though, as I discovered after he'd driven away, that there is more than one low bridge in the area, and all low bridges look the same. This is why, in the wee, small hours of an early December day, I found myself wandering around suburban roads in the dark, searching for my home, clutching a magazine with a glammed-up Kylie and Dalek on the front as if it were a charm to ward off the cold. I did finally find my new home, and got in before I died of hypothermia. The lesson is: don't drink too much Saki. Anyway, a couple of weeks later on the big day I was safely inside in the warm. Of the relatives who were visiting us that year, only the Better Half's grandmother was watching with me. She stayed silent throughout except for the moment when a certain spiky, red faced alien was dying after a noble self-sacrifice. She said simply and loudly: "Who thinks of these horrible things?" and then lapsed back into silence again. I took this to be a rhetorical question, so did not reply with the full nerdy detailed answer that I could well have given.

Reaction: 

The viewing figures for Voyage of the Damned in the UK were 13.31 million viewers with a peak of 13.8 million. This still is, and is likely to remain, the highest number for any 21st century story, and is up there with the biggest audiences the show ever got from 1963 to 1989 (when, lest we forget, there were larger audiences in general for top charting programmes). It was the second biggest audience for a TV programme in all of 2007. Purely based on this quantitative data, including chart position, it's the biggest Doctor Who story ever in terms of getting bums on seats compared to other entertainment on offer. Why would this be? There was still a large captive audience for TV on Christmas day 15 years ago, with a mass of people wanting to watch something without the alternative of streaming services that they have now. That's clearly a factor, but the previous Christmas specials in 2005 and 2006, though getting very respectable numbers, were not so stellar. Was it just down to having an extra special star guest in Kylie Minogue (who played Astrid)? Not only was Minogue incredibly popular as a pop star, there was the additional interest generated by her return to acting after a long time away. It may have been that this was something of a draw, but how much? The following Christmas special in 2008 got almost the same audience numbers (13.1 million), and - with all respect to him as an incredibly good actor - David Morrissey does not generate the kind of guest star publicity as does Minogue. I think the big draw of Voyage of the Damned is David Tennant.

Tennant is stunningly good in this story; he'd really found his groove in the role by this time. He had also built a fanatic (but deserved) following through his first two series and two Christmas specials. This, his third yuletide offering, saw him enter a sustained period of intense popularity - large audiences, high chart positions - that only ended when he left the role (by which time he was appearing in the Christmas idents in front of every programme). They could have paired him with the talking cabbage that Tom Baker always joked that he wanted as a companion, and Tennant might still have got 13 million people watching in December 2007. This is not to say that Kylie's presence isn't welcome. Some have criticised her acting in Voyage of the Damned, but I think that's unfair. It's not supposed to be a showy performance, and I think she delivers what's on the page well, with a couple of nice flirtatious moments with the Doctor. Of course there's only one way that introducing a character that wants to travel to the stars and is enamoured of the Doctor, but who's played by someone who has touring and recording commitments such that they are never going to become a series regular, plays out. Astrid's tragic demise, and the Doctor's desperate and doomed attempt to bring her back to life, is one of the best moments and acts as a nice counterpoint to the disaster movie action elsewhere.

Davies always throws some grit in the oyster, putting some dark or even potentially problematical material (I'm thinking of Elton's love life at the end of Love & Monsters, for example) into a knockabout romp. He doesn't hold back even at Christmas. It's interesting to compare this to Steven 'Everybody Lives!' Moffat, who essentially pulls the same trick at the end of his Library 2-parter story in the following year's run. Moffat has Tennant's Doctor go through with saving River Song as a ghost in the data, whereas Davies positions it as a cruel fate. Both choices are valid, and both create memorable moments in their respective stories. Davies can do happy, too. Clive Swift had an off day with a Doctor Who Magazine journalist on set, and the snippy interview that resulted was printed in full. This maybe overshadowed how good he is in the story, and how much Mister Copper is the heart of the piece: a person keen to learn, keen to live, with a bumbling tendency towards being endeared. He may be a metaphor for all of us; I hope he is. The final scene where he gets his reward is another stand-out moment. Such moments wouldn't work if the action movie material wasn't solid too, but it definitely is that. After many subsequent years from 2007 to date of Doctor Who pushing the envelope with its visuals, this story is now looking slightly less spectacular by comparison, but at the time it popped out of the screen. Before the disaster, the Titanic looks suitably opulent, inside and out. After the meteoroids hit, there are interesting, grand spaces for the plucky band of survivors to fight their way through.

Beyond Minogue and Swift, that plucky band of survivors are all perfectly written, cast and played: Clive Rowe and Debbie Chazen as Morvin and Foon Van Hoff, Russell Tovey as Midshipman Frame... everybody's great, there's no point in listing them all. This goes for villains too (George Costigan as Max Capricorn is overplaying it to a finely calibrated and delicious degree) and bit parts (Bernard Cribbins appearing as a newspaper vendor and being so good he'd be back as a regular before too long). And Geoffrey Palmer; good gracious, Geoffrey Palmer is so good in this. It's an embarrassment of riches. There's lots of great humour, but it's finely balanced with the thrills and the scares. A lot of the latter comes from the Host ("Information: you are all going to die"). Though they may be something of a Voc robot tribute group (see Context section above), they're still effective. There's obviously some deliberate in jokes about The Robots of Death thrown in (like one getting its hand lopped off by a door); when they remove their halos to use as killer frisbees, though, that's pure Russell T Davies.  There's some deft world building, e.g. discrimination against cyborgs on Sto, and some nice fun stuff like the cameos for Nicholas Witchell and the Queen. There's barely a blemish - maybe some of the hero shots of Tennant grandstanding (at one point the eldest said: "He looks like a bloke in a perfume advert"). Believe me, I hate agreeing with the hard-line Christian group that complained about it, but the image of the Doctor being borne aloft by angels is a bit much. These are tiny things, though. I challenge anyone not to break in to at least one massive grin by the time they reach "Allons-y Alonso!" (a punchline to a joke set up 18 months before). It's a Christmas cracker.

 

Connectivity: 

Voyage of the Damned features a spaceship and robotic adversaries (just like the last two stories blogged). In both this story and The Wheel in Space, the second billed character is a companion played by someone who is a recording artist as well as an actor (though Frazer Hines' musical career was a little more fleeting than Kylie Minogue's, mind you).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Year of Three Doctors. It's not quite over yet but I think it's safe to say that 2022 was a very interesting year for Doctor Who. It felt for a lot of the time like there were two separate and distinct series happening simultaneously. It will always be a bit like that when a new production team is starting to film while the old one's episodes are still airing, but it was more pronounced this time. Perhaps this was because the current production and the people associated with it, Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall, seemed to disappear from view early on. Multiple factors no doubt dictated the scheduling of the three Doctor Who stories shown in 2022, and the result was a big gap in the middle of the year. Eve of the Daleks, which I very much enjoyed, was made to be shown on the first day of the year to maintain Doctor Who's presence in the festive period schedules. Legend of the Sea Devils, which was okay but a bit slight, came not that long afterwards at Easter. Finally, The Power of the Doctor had to be aligned to late October to fit in with the BBC's centenary celebrations. Chibnall's approach to publicity has always been more minimalist than Russell T Davies's anyway, and in between those latter two stories, there wasn't a peep of publicity related to the current Doctor's era. There was loads, though, related to shows that would be shown more than a year later. The campaign was clever, using distinctive cryptic combinations of emojis in social media posts in advance of press releases. Any campaign can only be as good as the product, and - though we've only seen glimpses so far - the Doctor Who 2023 product looks like it has some very interesting and powerful features. An old Doctor returns, reunited - somehow - with a companion he once travelled with but whose memory has been wiped so she doesn't know of his existence. That scenario has a lot of potential, and it's just a prelude to a new era with a new Doctor.

The most exciting moment this year was inevitably the announcement of Ncuti Gatwa as the next-ish Doctor. The brief moment of him in the trailer after The Power of the Doctor was enough to get everyone excited about his take on our favourite Time Lord. I've not seen him act in anything yet, and am holding off from watching Sex Education so that his performance as the Doctor is as surprising and fresh to me as it can be. Not being a Coronation Street watcher, I also find Millie Gibson, cast as companion Ruby Sunday, to be an unknown quantity. The picture of these two future stars of Doctor Who in costume released recently was great to see. They're a youthful (Gibson wasn't born when the relaunched 21st century version of Doctor Who went into pre-production) and exciting new team, and it does feel like a big new start for the show after what will be a bit of nostalgia in the anniversary year stories with David Tennant and Catherine Tate. Talking of looking back, with less new stories on TV, the older back catalogue releases could have filled the schedule, but there were fewer of those releases too. The Blu-ray collection sets have maintained the great level of quality established in previous years, so it was a shame to only get two of them in 2022. The box-set for Colin Baker's first full season 22 was another opportunity to see lots of behind the scenes material that was kept from that time, as well as new documentaries. A highlight was Matthew Sweet's three linked 'In Conversation' interviews with the series' heroes Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, and its biggest villain, Michael Grade (who as the controller of BBC1 in 1985 tried to cancel Doctor Who). At the other end of the year, the first ever black-and-white set came out with the William Hartnell-starring season 2. Seeing these old episodes on Blu-ray is a minor miracle in itself, but the extras are good too (I'm still working my way through the set at the time of writing).

Previous years have had animated story releases as well as box sets of old and new seasons, but in 2022 that came to an end (or at least a pause). The final one was The Abominable Snowmen released in September, which I was lucky enough to see at the BFI Southbank in London (see the blog post here for more details). I got to enjoy similar events there for the aforementioned Colin Baker set (blogged about here) and the preview of the 4K restorations of the 1960s Dalek films (see the Deeper Thoughts section of tangentially connected TV story The Chase). I missed the recent event to tie into the Season 2 boxset in October as I had clashing commitments during half term. I hope to be able to go to more such events in 2023, though the lack of animations may reduce the opportunities somewhat. The reason the animations ceased was because a proportion of the budget was put in by BBC America. Recently, announcements gave the reason why: BBC America would no longer be showing Doctor Who as a deal had been done with Disney+ for them to be the home of Who outside the UK. Reportedly, there is going to be a more generous amount of funding flowing from the House of Mouse for extra-curricular activity (spin-offs have been talked about, for a start). Does this mean the animations could start up again soon? I'd like that very much. In the wider world, this was the year that saw a UK prime minister come within a whisker of leaving power before a single Doctor Who story was broadcast during their tenure, which would have been the first time it had happened since the show began. It's a while before the next stories will be broadcast, so we may see that happen to the next guy, who knows? I also had a holiday in the filming location for Gallifrey in Hell Bent, which was nice. Aside from Blu-rays I haven't really bought much in the way of merchandise, but there's not many sleeps to go until Christmas now, maybe I'll find something in my stocking on the big day. Merry Christmas!

In Summary:

Incidentally, a Happy Kylie-mas to all of you on Sto!

The Wheel in Space

Chapter The 250th, thank goodness the Cybermen are ruthlessly logical or else their plan here would be even more ridiculous.

Plot:

The Future. The Cybermen want to take over the world, as ever, and believe that an Earth Space station, nicknamed the Wheel, will be useful as a navigational beacon to guide their fleet. They take over an Earth rocket and pilot it to near the wheel, far off its original course, so that it will intrigue the Wheel crew. They fire space-balls (yes, really) at the Wheel from the rocket that are small enough to get through its shielding. These contain Cybermats who then destroy the Wheel's supply of a metal vital for the operation of its laser cannon. The Cybs cause a meteorite shower that will collide with the Wheel. They believe that, under threat, the crew will be curious enough to check out the rocket and see if it has any of the metal onboard to fix the cannon to blow up the meteorites. Two of the Wheel crew spacewalk over, are taken over by the Cybermen, and then go back with a crate of the metal that has a Cyberman inside in a hidden bottom section, smuggling it into the Wheel. It then starts taking over other crew members. Now, I think they probably could have simplified that plan a bit, but they have a Cyber-Control device in charge that likes to say things like "Phase 3 complete" and has obviously created too many phases in the plan because of this.

Earlier, during the early phases of the Cyber-plan, the TARDIS malfunctioned causing - because this is a script by David Whittaker - mercury vapour to fill the console room, so the Doctor and Jamie materialised and escaped to take shelter in the rocket. Brought over with the Doctor to the Wheel after managing to signal to the space station, Jamie sabotages the cannon to avoid the Wheel crew blowing up the rocket with the TARDIS still onboard. This is lucky for the Cybermen as the Wheel's commander Jarvis Bennett (who's having a nervous breakdown, by the by) had ordered for it to be blown up, which would have stopped the Cyber-plan as early as phase 2. Anyway, the Doctor and Jamie help the crew, including brainy Wheel librarian Zoe, to repel the Cybermen, but alas many of the crew - including Jarvis - are killed. Zoe stows away on the TARDIS with the TARDIS team, to broaden her rigid outlook (instilled by the education methods of her time). The Doctor tries to put her off by telling her all about the dangers of creatures like the Daleks.

Context:

As a treat for reaching the 250th story blogged, I thought I would override the randomiser and pick a story from the remaining (and now quite small) pile of stories yet to be done. My first thought was to watch The Krotons. A Patrick Troughton story is always a treat, and it was the first full Doctor Who story I ever saw, when it was repeated in the UK in 1981. I then realised - such is my progress through the black and white stories, and the progress of the animation teams in creating new visuals for stories with lost episodes - that 2022 was shaping up to be the first full year since the blog began that I wouldn't cover a story comprising an audio and slide show affair. I'd watched wholly extant monochrome stories all year, plus one new animation. Long before animation was an affordable option, reconstructions were made by talented people used the surviving soundtracks matched with off-air photographs to recreate as closely as possible the original viewing experience of episodes no longer in the archives. I remembered when watching The Edge of Destruction that I'd seen a reconstruction of The Wheel in Space on Britbox, so decided to watch that instead. I also tried something that I'd never done with a classic series story for the blog before, and watched each episode a week apart, just as it was originally broadcast. The experience of watching The Wheel in Space over six weeks is much more rewarding than watching it all in one go, but I'll get onto that in a moment.

First Time Round:

I first saw the surviving episodes (three and six) on a VHS compilation of orphaned 1960s episodes featuring the Cybs called Cybermen - The Early Years, when it came out in July 1992. These compilations never made any effort to explain the missing narrative between the existing parts, but - purely by the whims of the archive gods - it happened that of the two stories represented on the tape (the others episodes were two and four of The Moonbase) had a bit present from the middle and the denouement. As such, it was possible - just about - to construct a plausible plot from these sections. A full audio release of all six episodes' soundtracks came out on CD in May 2004, and I can't remember a thing about that first listen. I'm clearly a visual learner; even with three times as much material, I still remember the pictures more than just the words.

Reaction:

The Wheel in Space marked the end of the "base under siege" era of Doctor Who. A couple of years earlier, the production team of the time had hit upon this formula, which allowed budgets to be used cleverly to set up tight and claustrophobic horror-inflicted tales. The base would usually be a futuristic one, usually crewed by an international group of spacemen (and more rarely one or two spacewomen too) with a boss who would generally disbelieve the Doctor's warnings about aliens, and complicate his efforts. The base would have one large area (in this case, the wheel operations room) that would look impressive and allow for different camera angles, plus a little studio space would be left for smaller rooms where the monsters of the week could creep in and loom over people and whatnot. It was an efficient way to structure scripts to get a lot out of a little, but it did become overused. In season 5, the 1967/1968 run for which Wheel is the finale, there's only one story that doesn't conform to the template. This is also the second time in the run that the Cybermen have terrorised a group of people locked in a particular location; in fact, all four of the Cybermen stories in Doctor Who up to this point have seen the silver giants, surreptitiously or otherwise, taking over a futuristic base. Other stories in season 5 had tweaked the formula a bit - what if the base was a monastery, or the tunnels of the London Underground?  Even The Tomb of the Cybermen, the previous effort for these monsters at the start of the season, innovates - it is the Cyber-base that's the setting, with the humans infiltrating as they think the metal meanies are long dead. The Wheel in Space though, is strictly made to the formula. It's set in space rather than the South Pole, and the monsters arrive on an intriguing rocket rather than an intriguing planet, but otherwise it's essentially the same story shape as the very first Cyberman story, The Tenth Planet.

Does the story have anything that raises it above the level of generic? Is it a selling point that the villainous plot is one of the most illogical these supposedly logical creatures have come up with in Doctor Who's long history? Wheel's story has to fill up two more episodes of running time than The Tenth Planet, so the Cybs can't just walk in and take the space station by force. Instead, there's a lot of activity to gradually move them into position, and it doesn't make any sense when you look back on it as a whole. The Cybermen deliberately create a meteorite shower that might destroy the place that's strategically important to them - this seems risky. They sabotage the Wheel's laser cannon, then have to repair it again for the latter stages of their plan. Everything hinges of the humans being curious enough to search for laser cannon parts on a mysterious craft that they were within seconds of blowing up earlier in the story. Why can't the Cybermats that the Cybermen successfully get onboard just kill everyone (it's shown to be a possibility when Rudkin is killed), then they could just walk aboard. The Cybermen aren't the only people behaving with hard to explain motivations, of course: their plan hinges on a crewmember of the Wheel not raising the alarm when he finds a Cybermat, but instead keeping it as a pet. The curious thing, though, is that none of this mattered to me on this watch, as I was viewing it as it was intended to be seen, one episode a week. In 25-minute chunks, the absurdities of the plot don't show up as they would if watching the story all in one go. I can't really complain if the story works as originally intended (home video releases of Doctor Who were as unlikely as laser cannons in 1968). In the gaps between, I was no word of a lie eager to watch each next episode, not something I've ever experienced with The Wheel in Space before. It was only at the end that it fell apart just a little - all the silly ins and outs of the ludicrous plot are just to allow the Cybermen to use the Wheel as a navigational beacon; a stronger motivation might have sold the whole plot better.

The plot isn't the only reason, and perhaps not even the main reason, that The Wheel in Space exists, of course. The big deal is the introduction of the new female companion. Wendy Padbury as Zoe fits right into the existing team, and is brilliant from the off. These three are instantly what they remained until they all left together a year later: one of the very best TARDIS teams to watch. The pattern of the Doctor with one male and one female companion had worked for many years, so a replacement was obviously going to come in immediately. The production team going the opposite way to last companion Victoria, though, creating someone from the future rather than the past, means Zoe can still be naive but allows for a more sparky relationship, particularly with Jamie. This is better than the somewhat cloying protectiveness he displayed to her predecessor; they are friendly rivals - her book smarts versus his street smarts. Like many stories around this time (The Dominators and The Krotons, for example) programmatic rote learning - that Zoe has been put through - is a plot point, but that's soon forgotten when she's a regular and she just becomes the bright brainy one without any angst. Apart from the new girl, the performances of the actors playing the rest of the Wheel's crew are all fine, with some nice character touches (like Leo and Tanya's flirting), but the international nature of the crew is achieved by everyone putting on accents, of varying degrees of accuracy. This is either a bit naff or insensitive and insulting, depending on how forgiving one feels. Michael Turner as Jarvis Bennett has a good stab at showing someone undergoing a mental breakdown in a stressful situation, doing some heavy lifting as the script doesn't do much to help him to justify such extremes. The new design of Cybermen and their new voices are good developments, and would be further finessed in their next appearance.

The choices in the first episode intrigue me. For a start, David Whittaker plays his Greatest Hits in the first few minutes (use of the fault locater, random images appearing on the TARDIS scanner as a warning, mention of fluid links and mercury). Thereafter, it's almost a bottle-ish episode (see here for more details of what I mean by that) or prologue, with the Doctor and Jamie exploring the rocket and tussling with a cute servo robot. The Wheel crew turn up only towards the end, which is odd - I would expect either for the focus to stay with the Doctor and Jamie for the whole episode, or to get them on to the Wheel sooner. It's something different at least. There's a bit of contrivance to engineer Jamie and Zoe to be out space-walking during a meteorite shower (Jamie has to drop a vital component on the rocket that they must go back for because it's somehow important to defeat the Cybermen) but I'll forgive that because the space-walking scenes are done most effectively (it's luckily a sequence that falls within an existing episode). There's no music, but Brian Hodgson's special sounds make up for this and fit the spacey locale of the story. There's also some nice dialogue too: "Proper little brainchild - all brain and no heart!", "Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority", and a nice exchange between a sceptical Zoe and Jamie about the Doctor: "Well, is he a physicist, biochemist, astronomer, biometrician?" "Yes, he is". Overall, it's not perfect, and unlikely to be anyone's favourite story of all time, but it's still very enjoyable (particularly when watched an episode a week). It was also a good thing, whether it was intended or not, to kill off the 'base under siege' format and let Doctor Who explore a bit more - season 6 might not be as popular as season 5, but it's much more varied in terms of setting and story structures.

Connectivity: 

The Wheel in Space, like The Ghost Monument, begins with the TARDIS team escaping imminent danger to end up on a spaceship (or two in the Jodie Whittaker story); they also both feature non-speaking robots. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Meaningless Milestones. Having reached the 250th story mark, and it being towards the end of 2022, it feels like the right time to do my annual stock take. I have already randomly chosen one of the remaining Doctor Who Christmas special episodes to watch next, as there won't be such a thing on TV. (I know that technically there has been a festive special in 2022, on the very first day of the year, but this coming festive season, i.e. 12 days of Christmas / Double-length Radio Times period, will be the first without a new Who offering since December 2004 / January 2005, and that makes me feel a little melancholy; luckily, it looks from recent announcements like it'll be the last Christmas for a while to be so bereft.) I have also run the random number generator to select a story to watch in the Chrimbo limbo period when I'll be off work (and it's a cracker). Assuming that I post both of these before year end, my total blogged this year will be 36 stories. This isn't my highest annual total ever, but it's up there. At this rate of blogging, anticipating only four stories to be shown next year, and the promised full series of eight episodes plus a festive special the year after, I will catch up with ongoing production by the end of 2024. If so, then I can still blog new episodes as they come up thereafter, of course, but it will trash the random order concept. I may soon have to start looking for some 'extended universe' offerings to drop in occasionally. Be ready for my feelings on Scream of the Shalka any day now, you lucky things! Anyway, examining the stories covered this year, I see that there was a three-way tie for the most blogged per Doctor between Tom Baker, Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker. It's all random, of course, but this makes sense to me. The Doctors with more episodes left are more likely to get picked more often. The two recent Doctors are those who've accumulated stories produced after the blog started, and Tom Baker started with a large number as he was in the role for a record-breaking seven years.

As I blew a number of Jodie Whittaker episodes in one go last year by covering Flux as one serial, I decided at the start of the year not to override the randomiser to blog any of the three 2022 specials as they went out. One did come up randomly, though, albeit my least favoured of the year, but that's the way the random numbers go. I managed to cover a spread of Capaldi's stories including his first and last (well, if you don't count Twice Upon a Time, and I try not to). The next highest Doctors in terms of stories covered this year were Matt Smith and David Tennant, jointly on four stories blogged each. Again, this is understandable, as they have relatively high totals (mostly because the majority of their stories are only one episode long). The 1960s black-and-white Doctors (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton) were both on three stories blogged. For Troughton, with a little bit of fixing as mentioned above, I covered pretty much all the myriad ways one can experience one of his episodes: one story - The Dominators - was fully intact as originally broadcast, another - The Abominable Snowmen - was wholly animated (though one episode exists), and Wheel in Space was a mixture of full episodes and reconstructions using audio plus stills. For Hartnell, amazingly, I got three full stories (12 whole episodes) in their original format, with no gaps having to be plugged. Next, on two stories apiece, were Jon Pertwee and Peter Davison. Again, it's all random: if I had a choice in the matter, I might have held off on covering more than one of the latter's, as there are very few left; in fact, only three now. Neatly, though, there is one left in each of his seasons. On the subject of seasons / series, I have completed a couple more this year, bringing the total to seven so far. Many more, like all three of Davison's, only have one story left to do, so I expect some more to get completed in 2023.

I've still not completed any Doctor's whole era, unless you count Paul McGann (I covered his single TV outing as lead actor in the blog's first year, but now he's appeared in another Doctor Who story as a guest actor, of course). The ones likely to be completed first, apart from Davison, are the three for whom I did one story blog post each this year: Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Christopher Eccleston. McCoy has three stories left to do (again, one per season - I don't plan it this way, honest), Baker and Eccleston, just two apiece. The other Doctors have a healthy handful to half a dozen left each; nobody's in double figures now. There are 53 stories left in all (not including any new stories expected to be broadcast in 2023), split pretty evenly between classic and new series (26 and 27 remaining, respectively), with no particular decade or producer / showrunner tenure favoured. There are nine monochrome stories remaining, five for Hartnell, four for Troughton. Of those, only two are wholly missing (one each - Marco Polo and The Highlanders) with no known plans for either to be animated anytime soon. Nothing is necessarily getting animated soon as things are, but both stories have challenges that mean they'd be amongst the last ones to be tackled ever anyway - I will most likely cover both for the blog before any new pictures are drawn for them. The remainder either are fully intact or have animated episodes to plug gaps. Marco Polo is also now the earliest story I have yet to watch, and the most recent is the Power of the Doctor. Little did I ever imagine when I first started this endeavour that the earliest and most recent stories remaining would share a cast member; Doctor Who still has the ability to surprise me.

In Summary:

It's Wheel-y good (if you watch an episode a week, and don't think too hard about it!).

The Ghost Monument

Chapter the 249th, in which it looks very much like they-all's in a race...

Plot: 

Immediately after the end of her first adventure in Sheffield, the Doctor, along with Graham, Yaz and Ryan, is suspended in the vacuum of space. All are quickly scooped up by two people in spaceships racing one another, boys taken into the ship piloted by Angstrom, girls in the very old and collapsing one piloted by Epzo. It is the last leg of a rally of various dangerous rounds that started with hundreds of competitors, these two being the only last ones remaining. The next destination is the planet Desolation. Angstrom lands her ship first, but Epzo's crashes, narrowly avoiding Graham and Ryan; luckily, nobody is hurt. The race's organiser Ilin appears to everyone as a hologram, and tells of the final challenge. They must cross the hostile environments of Desolation until they reach the Ghost Monument; from the description given, the Doctor realises this is her TARDIS, phasing in and out of reality. Helping out the two competitors, the Doctor and Fam escape many different terrors - flesh-eating microbes in the water, patrolling sniper robots, sentient and telepathic strips of fabric - and discover that this planet was taken over and made into a weapons factory by the Stenza. When they reach the site of the monument, the TARDIS is nowhere to be seen. Reluctantly, the projected-in Ilin accepts that Angstrom and Epzo - who've learned the strengths of cooperation along the way - can share the prize, and he and they vanish. Left alone, the fam hears a noise: it's the TARDIS appearing. Once the Doctor has stabilised it, they all get in and see the newly redecorated interior. The Doctor offers everyone a lift back home.

Context:

Watched from the BBC iplayer (I must get round to ordering a new Blu-ray remote before the classic series season 2 box-set comes out) accompanied again by all three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10). The eldest and youngest were losing interest by the end, but middle child was glued to the screen, transfixed throughout. This was a bit surprising as, with his enthusiasm for Doctor Who expanding, he has sought out many youtube videos to watch, some run by the angrier end of the fandom spectrum. I've finally had to have the sort of heated discussions I've up to now avoided by refusing to engage on social media, e.g. about how - in the boy's and the angry nerds' opinion -  Chris Chibnall's Timeless Child arc has ruined everything that is special about Doctor Who, and created too many continuity errors. This is how full-on a fan he is becoming. Luckily, the brief mention of that arc here (the Remnants can see into the Doctor's past and namecheck "the Timeless Child" at one point) did not put him off.

First Time Round:

Watched live, including the obligatory two minutes of the end of the preceding show Countryfile, on the story's debut BBC1 broadcast on Sunday the 14th October 2018. All the family were watching bar the youngest - six years old at the time - who was refusing to watch any Doctor Who at that point as Tim Shaw's toothy face (and not in the Tom Baker way) had scared her the previous week. This latest watch was her first time seeing The Ghost Monument. She said afterwards that it was "Okay".

Reaction: 

The Ghost Monument slams onto the screen at a hectic pace and doesn't let up for a good while. The early scenes of our heroes being rescued from space only to find themselves in the next chaotic situation aboard spaceships are well realised, well performed and well shot. They then arrive on planet Desolation, filmed in South Africa, and I don't think it's hyperbole to say that it is depicted with the best visuals of any Doctor Who story up to that point. Following the pattern established when the show came back in 2005, Whittaker's first episodes of this 2018 series started with an Earth based adventure story, strange things happening in the commonplace world of the new companion characters, and would go on in its third story to journey back in time. In between is the story where the people from the commonplace contemporary Earth are thrust into an alien world with futuristic tech and many monsters. This time, though, it's beautiful too; the widescreen vistas are almost a statement of intent: we're giving you alien, but it's going to look good. After seven minutes of pacey sequences, there's the scene of the spaceship crashing into the planet as Graham, Ryan and Angstrom sprint to get out of its path. No exaggeration, it's Hollywood movie levels of quality. It screams 'budget's been spent on this!', but not at the cost of breaking the viewer's suspension of disbelief. Events keep on coming to keep us engaged: the TARDIS 'fam' are reunited, the concept of the race - a simple but effective structure for the action - is set up, and the characters are on their way, journeying to their destination with stunning backdrops along the way.

The pace unfortunately can't sustain for the whole of the story. Towards the end, there's a scene where, having reached the area of the Ghost Monument, one of the two competitors has to beat / betray the other in order to win. It should be a fast and dramatic scene, but it's static and talky. I don't blame director Mark Tonderai, who does solid work throughout - I think it's more the curse of 50 minute episodes, which Doctor Who adopted from Jodie Whittaker's first story onwards. The extra five minutes, compared to the standard 21st century episodes of the previous years, might not seem like much, but it puts a disproportionate strain on this kind of breakneck actioner. It does, though, allow for more character moments, like Epzo's speech about his mother's unconventional parenting style, utilising a cruel twist on a trust exercise. The story is focussed by only having three in-person guest parts (one a cameo), and each gives a great performance. Susan Lynch as Angstrom and Shaun Dooley as Epzo are as good as you'd expect, and both are of the 'how come they've not been in Doctor Who before now' contingent, as is Art Malik as Ilin. Malik makes the most of only a couple of scenes to be the contemptuous amoral presence running this survival challenge. He gives a nice line reading with his final, half-smiling 'No' as he disappears, abandoning the Doctor and friends after having been asked to help them. It's a happy ending, though, with the new TARDIS design being revealed to characters and audience alike. It was a bit disappointing for me, though. It looks alright, with the crystalline approach perhaps in some way reflecting the coral version of the first ever 21st century console. But I don't like the fact that the doors now don't open into the larger space, but instead into a police box-sized antechamber stuck on to the main area. It reduces the impact and the magic when any new character first steps in.

Lots of little touches lift the simple story to be something a bit special. By holding back the TARDIS interior and the first beginning credits sequence to this second episode, there's still new aspects of this era to reveal. Part of the purpose of this story, as mentioned above, is to highlight the alien nature of their surroundings for the three new companions, and undercut their preconceived expectations. For example, when Yaz appeals to the two competitors that they should work together with her and her friends, as fellow human beings: "I'm Muxteran; she's Albarian" replies Epzo; "I've never even heard of Moomin-beans" adds Angstrom. Making the Stenza, the aliens from the previous story, the people that devastated the planet and terrorised the scientists there to build them weapons adds an overarching coherence to the series. It also allows Graham and Angstrom to share something despite their differences, both of their partners having died at the hands of the Stenza. The Remnants - the sentient scraps of fabric - are an interestingly new idea for a monster, looking innocuous at first until one attacks and you're being suffocated. The dialogue is lively and characterful, production design and interiors seamlessly match the quality of the exterior visuals, and Segun Akinola's score is great throughout. Best of all, so good you might already take her for granted, is Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor doing all those wonderful Doctorish things: name-dropping famous people from history, schooling her companions about pacifism, and later teasing out Ryan's learning from his NVQ to help them in a tight situation. As a showcase for the new lead actor, this story can't be faulted.

Connectivity: 

Both stories appear in the first season of a new Doctor and new showrunner; it's the third such story in a row, in fact, starting with The Vampires of Venice (just like the Vampire story, The Ghost Monument features extensive foreign filming and hints about an arc plot element - The Timeless Child, The Silence - that won't be paid off until the next season). Both The Ghost Monument and Father's Day feature a crash early on that two cast members playing relatives only narrowly avoid. This is the third story in a row where a featured monster race isn't named in dialogue - the snake-like strips of cloth are known as Remnants in fandom commentary, but never referred to as such on screen.

Deeper Thoughts:

Chibnall and Whittaker's Almanac. A few weeks back when I posted about Orphan 55, I hoped another Jodie Whittaker story would come up before the end of the year, and so it has come to pass. At that point, in late October just after the broadcast of The Power of the Doctor, it was too soon to process my thoughts on the Jodie Whittaker / Chris Chibnall era, as the finale was still fresh in my mind. Now, enough time has gone by to consider the period as a whole. Whatever one thinks of the quality of the stories he created, Chibnall will always have a special place in Who history as the Doctor Who showrunner who first cast a woman to play the lead role, just as Whittaker will be known for being that first female Doctor. This is important enough to outweigh any negatives that might be aimed at the era, I feel. I remember before a woman was ever cast in the role, but knowing it was an inevitability, thinking that the real pressure would not be on that initial casting, but the immediately next recasting of the role afterwards. If one were to cast a man next (as indeed they have with Ncuti Gatwa), it risks making a female Doctor Who look like a brief experiment, or worse, a failure. Chibnall put in a pre-emptive fix, though, whether he meant it as such or not, by casting Jo Martin as another Doctor that made occasional appearances in Whittaker's tenure. He made history again casting the first person of colour to play the Doctor, to boot. Of course, one big thing that characterised Chibnall's time as showrunner was unending criticism of him and his story decisions. It might be that such a reaction is common for all Doctor Who eras, but it has seemed more pronounced this time. One criticism I've seen from a few online fans now that the era is completed is that Martin wasn't used enough. I disagree: less is more, and the character of the 'fugitive Doctor' always had a great impact in the few surprise appearances after being introduced.

I think fans very keen on Jo Martin's Doctor need to be realistic about a showrunner not wanting to overshadow their lead actor. Whittaker comes over as a very generous performer, and this shows in the way she pitched her performance in scenes with Martin (always on the back foot allowing Martin to be a more traditional authoritative version of the character), but she's still the star of the show. There is talk of more spin-offs happening in future; if that had been true of this era (Chibnall is the first 21st century showrunner not to have a spin-off series run during his time in charge) it would have been a no-brainer to me for Chibnall to trial a series called The Division to give Martin's Doctor more opportunities to shine. Anyway, she will continue to feature in 'extended universe' tie-in media like books and Big Finish audio plays. In a way, I feel it's Whittaker that wasn't used enough. She did her traditional three seasons and specials, the pattern for the three Doctors preceding her, but her seasons were shorter, particularly the Covid-curtailed third season, Flux. The quality of her contributions to any story has been high and has never wavered, so I'm left wanting more (and I can't be the only one). She really nailed it, particularly in what I think is her most effective and important performance (and Chibnall's best moment too). Curiously, this wasn't in the main series, but was the short video made at the start of the Covid lockdown in the UK where she reassured younger viewers. The stories in the three seasons proper came in for a lot of criticism from fans for the quality of their writing, and they were a mixed bag, but no more mixed than any other season of Doctor Who in the 21st century. There have been some clunky lines of dialogue too, but again that isn't unique to any particular period or producer.

Maybe some of this criticism was coming from those dissatisfied that the Doctor was being played by a woman and finding any possible faults, or maybe it was people who can't forgive Chibnall for the rushed and often dodgy first series of Torchwood, for which he was showrunner, or other stories he wrote during other showrunners' tenures. He doesn't get enough kudos for the things that turned out right, though, and there were lots of those right from the off. As mentioned, my sons have fallen back in love with Doctor Who again recently, particularly the middle child, a boy of 13. He's watching a story a day on average. Recently, he put on The Woman Who Fell to Earth; I watched some of it with him, and saw just how strong an opening story it was; having now watched the following story The Ghost Monument and knowing Rosa comes next, I was reminded (and I had genuinely forgotten) what an incredibly powerful start the series had. The decision to write an entirely original set of stories in that first year, using no returning elements from the show's history, was a brave and original one. Usually, a sparing use of old friends or foes is de rigueur for big openers or finales, but it wasn't needed for that big relaunch; so, the series in 2018 did come over as being a new and different thing in a way it hadn't since 2005 (or even earlier). It did not manage to sustain the energy for the finale of the year, though, which was crying out for some Daleks to turn up (they were held back for the festive special instead). There are some great stories in between, though, and a few new or updated monster designs from the era as a whole - the P'ting, the Kerblam robots, the updated Sea Devils, and the Cyber-Masters - may well endure, in the memory and perhaps even in the future of the show. More importantly, some more diverse historical settings were explored, mirroring the increased diversity of writers and directors working behind the scenes.

After Chibnall's first season, the old elements came flooding back, and some of the best treatment of these elements in the history of the show resulted. Resolution finds a genuinely new and interesting angle on oldest Doctor Who adversaries the Daleks; Flux contains the best use of Sontarans to date, and the series again found the perfect person of the moment to play the Master. The most controversial treatment of old elements, of course, regards Sacha Dhawan's Master plus the Time Lords and the Doctor herself: the Timeless Child arc. The Ghost Monument's teasing reference shows that this was always Chibnall's plan, and it is certainly worthy of the phrase 'game-changing' in a way few previous twists in the show have been. Obviously, it made a lot of people annoyed (including my son - see above), but it doesn't bother me. For more details of my feelings about it, and how some of the continuity errors that agitate can be explained away, see the Deeper Thoughts section of the Mummy on the Orient Express post from shortly after the big revelatory episodes in 2020. Whatever anyone thinks of the implications of the arc, I think they would have to concede that it was an impressive feat to find such a substantial and more or less backwards-compatible new story to tell within a mythology that had grown over 55 years of official and unofficial material. As well as the big and audacious, the show also had successes with the smaller and intimate; probably destined to be most remembered is the Doctor's relationship with Yaz, the first significant same-sex crush depicted in the series, albeit depicted quite tentatively. More could have been made of the emotional goodbye at the end of The Power of the Doctor, but images like Yaz carrying the injured Doctor, or later taking up a place in a support group of those who've had their lives changed by the Doctor over the years, were very strong and will stay with people.

The final image of this era is indelible too, the Doctor regenerating atop Durdle Door. It was planned when the future of Doctor Who was uncertain, Chibnall was not aware of any new showrunner taking over from him at the time, and so it could have been the final image of the show (at least for a while). As the programme has got a new (old) showrunner in Russell T. Davies, the show goes on as it must. It's likely that the next era will not develop any of the new lore set up in Chibnall's period, but it could happen. Don't write off the era completely: Gallifrey could very well stay destroyed, Dhawan or Martin could come back, as could Whittaker herself. Maybe even a P'ting could pop up now and again: time will tell, as it always does.

In Summary:

Really very good, and unfairly overlooked.