Fugitive of the Judoon

Chapter the 270th, which takes quite a turn, and then even more of a twist.

Plot:
The TARDIS registers that the Judoon are operating outside their jurisdiction in present day Gloucester, and the Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz materialise to sort the situation out. The Doctor is rapidly separated from her friends when Captain Jack Harkness beams them aboard a stolen ship he's piloting, and passes on a warning message about the Cybermen's imminent return. Meanwhile, the Judoon surround the house of a seemingly ordinary couple, Ruth and Lee. They have something to hide, with Lee having kept a non-Earth artefact in his house. The mysterious Gat, who knows the couple from some previous life in a shadowy organisation and has hired the Judoon to track them down, confronts Lee and he is killed. The Doctor sneaks Ruth out and gets her to the safety of Gloucester Cathedral. A message sent by Lee before he died awakens some memories in Ruth, and she makes short work of the Judoon that come looking for her there, using unarmed combat moves. Following a clue from Lee, the Doctor and Ruth go to a disused lighthouse where Ruth remembers growing up. The Doctor investigates an unmarked grave in the grounds, digging to reveal a TARDIS disguised as a police box. In the lighthouse, Ruth breaks the glass of a fire alarm and her memories are restored - she is the Doctor, and had used a Chameleon Arch to hide out on Earth. Both Doctors are in the TARDIS when it is dragged up to an orbiting spaceship by tractor beam. Gat confronts the Doctor she recognises, and is tricked into shooting herself with a booby-trapped gun. The fugitive Doctor leaves in her TARDIS, leaving the other Doctor brooding on why she has no memory of being this particular incarnation.

Context:

I watched this from the disc in the Complete Twelfth Series Blu-ray box set, which I notice I got in steelbook format. I don't collect the steelbooks like some, just get them occasionally when a different packaging format doesn't come up initially to pre-order. To be honest, they're always a bit irritating to remove discs from, as they're designed to be elegantly thin and therefore have multiple discs on one spindle. It interests me that owning something that's a source of obsessive joy and satisfaction to one Doctor Who fan could be meaningless (or even irritating) to another, even though the two are already united in a - let's face it - fairly niche pursuit. More of these grumpy old man style musings in the Deeper Thoughts section below.

First Time Round:

I first watched this story live with the whole family on the Sunday night of its debut on BBC1 in the UK, 26th January 2020. I enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine with the viewing, at the end of a busy weekend. The key moment I remember is hearing John Barrowman's distinctive voice from off camera returning to the series after a decade and thinking "Is that? It is!!" and exchanging a look of surprise with the Better Half. They had kept his return and all the other surprises in the narrative secret, and I'd seen not even the tiniest of leaks. I watched the story again on my own on the Monday evening as I couldn't remember the end. Don't get me wrong, I remembered all the big revelations, but after that it was hazy. What had happened with Captain Jack? What had happened with the fugitive Doctor? There was some stuff with a spaceship and a gun, but what had happened after that? I put this down at first to the glasses of wine making me a bit fuzzy. But nothing really happens with Captain Jack, he just disappears. And, despite all those earth-shattering revelations, the end of the fugitive Doctor story is a bit of nonsense with a spaceship and a gun, and after that she disappears too. Could such a shocking and explosive story really have finished on an anti-climax?

Reaction:

In an early Eddie Izzard stand-up routine, Eddie would pitch her idea for a story for Tales of the Unexpected, the long-running British TV anthology show, which showcased dramas with a twist in the tale. On stage Izzard would outline the story about a man concerned about his wife having an affair, who would take to following her. One day, he would see her go into a house, and would break in so he could see who she was with, would creep upstairs quietly, open the bedroom door, and then a pig would jump out and eat him. At the risk of dissecting the metaphorical frog, the point of the joke is that the unexpected nature of the story's end is not integrated with the rest of the narrative; the pig eating the protagonist does not resolve the story of his paranoia about the suspected affair. The two major twists in Fugitive of the Judoon - an old friend of the Doctor returns to give a warning but misses her, the Doctor discovers a past incarnation of herself that she has no memory of ever being - are similarly unresolved within the 50-minute runtime of the story. They would both get paid off by the end of the 2020 series, but would they amount to much?  Taking the Captain Jack cameo first, it certainly doesn't make any difference to the plot of the Fugitive story. It provides a very low-scale complicating factor to the main narrative by separating the Doctor from her companions, but Jodie Whittaker's Doctor barely even notices their absence. The warning that Jack delivers that the fam pass on is ignored in the later episodes of the season anyway. So, the sequences with Jack could lift right out, and all that would be gone was fan service and a bit of foreshadowing.

You can't lift out the twist that Ruth is an earlier version of the Doctor, though, right? Right? Let's play out how that would work, just in terms of its impact to this one 50-minute story. The Doctor is helping a woman Ruth who seems to have been wrongly identified as an alien by the Judoon; but mild-mannered Ruth turns out to be an alien with "Jackie Chan" style skills that had been kept buried. Despite her being a bit aggressive and waving guns around, the Doctor still helps her escape the Judoon and the shadowy organisation that 'Ruth' used to work for who have hired the Judoon to find her. Without the story beat revealing that Ruth is the Doctor, it still works in a Nobody / History of Violence way, the revelation of an assassin hiding so well they are overlooked by society.  There's not much of an ending, but again all you lose is foreshadowing. And does it matter that there isn't much of an ending? The story as it wound up doesn't have any ending. As I mentioned above, this bothered me at some level from my very first watch. The fugitive Doctor leaves, never to be seen again (Jo Martin will return in character periodically as a series as memories and hallucinations, but will never come back as the Doctor). Nothing's explained, fair enough, but nothing's resolved either. The writers (Vinay Patel with showrunner Chris Chibnall) do their best with a final scene where the fam reassure their Doctor that she is defined by her actions not her past, but it doesn't amount to a climax.

Ultimately, the story can't help but feel incomplete - it's part one of a multi-part story where the next part isn't coming straight away. As such, it's borrowing from the future, creating story debt that will need to eventually be paid off. This is par for the course in a series like Doctor Who, of course, and Chibnall's predecessor as showrunner Steven Moffat did it a lot. As an example, The Name of the Doctor, at the end of Matt Smith (and Moffat's) third season in charge, introduces a past version of the Doctor of whom the audience have been previously unaware, but who doesn't really do anything significant plot-wise, just like Fugitive of the Judoon. One could argue that Moffat pays off the debt better in The Day of the Doctor than Chibnall in The Timeless Children (the latter story really just raises more questions, deferring the debt repayment to another day), but that's in the future: the two set-up stories face the same issue, which is that they don't have an end. Moffat manages with some clever word-play related to the story title, and by holding back the mystery new Doctor revelation to the last seconds, to make it seem like his story is in any way climactic. It's a pretty cheap trick. Chibnall isn't as good at those clever-clever narrative sticking plasters. Instead, as mentioned, he and his co-writer rely on a character scene. It rings a bit hollow, though, as none of the fam have shared the story with the Doctor, and haven't witnessed the morally dodgy gun-wielding, "Jackie Chan" kicking antics of the Doctor's previous self. How can they know the Doctor isn't defined by her past, if they haven't seen it?

The other pitfall of a story like this is the borrowing it does from the present too. The Whittaker story is not as bad as The Name of the Doctor, the entire running time of which is multiple scenes of consequence-free nonsense just to set up for the casting reveal of John Hurt playing the Doctor. Fugitive's beginning scenes of Ruth's homelife are just misdirection. It's really good misdirection, and stands up to maybe a couple of views (nice little touches like it opening with her staring at her watch, or Lee being described as a "faithful companion") but maybe not more than that. This is despite it being well designed, well shot and well performed. A number of people I've seen commenting online since have sniffily suggested that it's a shame to only have a few minutes of Jo Martin's Doctor and then be stuck with Jodie Whittaker thereafter. I think this misunderstands the nature of acting. Martin is only able to shine because of Whittaker's hard-work and generosity acting in counterpoint to her previous persona's forcefulness. Martin's Doctor is great as an icon, and great doing pop-up appearances in later episodes, but I don't think the character as presented in this story would work on an ongoing basis, it would need to be softened. There's lots of other smaller stuff in here that's enjoyable, even if it doesn't really contribute to the plot; no space to go into detail about the all, but Michael Begley's performance as All Ears Alan is joyous, and his death scene very memorable for the astonished gasp the lead Judoon makes on being shoved - great vocal work from the unsung hero of new Who Nick Briggs.

Connectivity:

Fugitive of the Judoon, like Cold War, features an alien that's been stuck on Earth for a lengthy period. Both stories also contain a Doctor separated from their TARDIS, and a craft being pulled up from below the surface of the Earth by another craft's tractor beam. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Mainlining modern modular multi-media mythmaking. I don't understand Doom's Day. I didn't understand Time Lord Victorious either. For the uninitiated, both of these - the former launched this year, the latter was a similar thing from 2020 - are umbrella titles for multiple different connected Doctor Who tie-in stories across different media platforms. Taken together, they form a larger epic tale, but they - reportedly - stand-alone also. I understood more the logic of doing something of this sort in 2020. Covid lockdowns were keeping everybody at home; there'd only recently been a series of Doctor Who shown (Jodie Whittaker's second run, of which Fugitive of the Judoon is part, aired in the early months of the year and was finished before lockdowns started) and it currently wasn't possible to make a new one. A host of new stories to satisfy the needs of Doctor Who fans' expansive story appetites was probably right for that moment. Even so, I only ended up experiencing two of the many stories on offer. The first was a comic strip that I read because it was printed in Doctor Who Magazine, which I subscribe to and read anyway. I've read every issue of the magazine without a break from the mid-1990s, and with only a few breaks since the early 1980s, so it was essentially a freebie. The story was called Monstrous Beauty, I think, and featured the Christopher Eccleston Doctor and Rose fighting vampires... I think. It didn't leave much of an impression, but I'm sure it was fine. The other story was the animated Daleks! that was available to watch online for free, and which I covered in more detail in the Deeper Thoughts section of The Christmas Invasion blog post from December of 2020.

There was the odd unexplained moment, but it didn't matter much to appreciating them in isolation. Whether they were truly stand-alone, I don't know for sure. Similarly to Fugitive of the Judoon, as observed above, each of those two stories had accrued just a little story debt; the only way to see how that paid off would be to watch every different story under the Time Lord Victorious banner. TLV, to give it the abbreviation used at the time, sprawled a bit, though. There was even a T-Shirt that one could buy that contained a small amount of the wider story. I couldn't even keep track of all the different parts, let alone purchase and experience them all. That lesson seems to have been learned for this second similar event in 2023. Doom's Day - as hinted at in the name - comprises a more contained and affordable 24 sub-sections, each one a different hour of the titular Doom's... erm, day. Doom is a female assassin played by Sooz Kempner, and seems to me (and it might just be me) to be totally and utterly unengaging. She has to track down the Doctor for some slightly woolly reason, or else she'll die. So far, so so. Is that story special enough to be told in such a grandiose manner, though? As we've seen, the teasing reveal of an entire new lifetime for the Doctor only warranted 50 minutes of airtime in 2020. Time Lord Victorious dived into the Lore with a capital 'L'. Is Doom's story important enough? Let's examine the different parts of the wider tale. The first and last of the 24 'hour' chunks are online stories, free for all. There are also two parts that are going to be new levels on a phone-based Doctor Who game; again I think that involves no purchase, so will only cost you your time. For the rest you have to stump up some cash.

The remaining 20 hours divide into five groups of four, each provided by a different purveyor of Doctor Who extended universe material: an audio box-set by BBC Audio, another by Big Finish, a novel by BBC Books, and comic strips by Titan Comics and Panini. The last of these, comprising hours two to five in Doom's story came as a separate 20-page comic with issue 592 of Doctor Who magazine. I've read it, and it has some nice moments and decent art. It'll forever, though, be incomplete to me, as I'm not going to buy any of the other parts. I wonder how many people will. Who is the audience that this is aimed at and how large or small is it? I use myself as a yardstick of these things; I have been a Doctor Who fan for over 40 years; I have a collector's mindset and I have a reasonable amount of disposable income. I have bought products from most of those five names over the years, but - excepting Panini - I've not bought all or even most of their Doctor Who output - I'd be bankrupt if I had. And I've never bought a single thing that Titan Comics have ever produced. No offence to them, there's probably fans with all the Titan Comics that have never bought Doctor Who Magazine, or others that like the BBC audios, but not Big Finish's, or vice versa. Is there a significant number of mega-fans that collect them all? I doubt it. If I'm right in this, maybe Doom's Day's purpose is clear; it's to tempt people like me, who are easily separated from their money where Who is concerned, and who don't like not knowing how a story ends, to try out some ranges they wouldn't otherwise, and maybe they'll get hooked. It's the Doctor Who equivalent of drug pushing; I'm Just gonna Say No!

In Summary:

A story in debt: some expertly tooled surprises, but endings all put off until another day.