The Witchfinders

Chapter the 277th, here's mud in your eye!

Plot:
The Doctor, Yaz, Ryan and Graham arrive near Pendle in Lancashire in 1612, and witness the ducking of a supposed witch, grandmother Twiston. The Doctor tries to save the woman in the water, but is just too late, leaving granddaughter Willa distraught. Twiston was the 36th suspected witch killed in the village in recent times, all of these overseen by lady of the manor Becka Savage. King James I has come to visit at the same time as the TARDIS travellers because of this remarkable industry. Using the psychic paper to pretend that she and the fam are Witchfinders, the Doctor investigates. The mud of the village seems to be sentient, and floods into corpses, including Twiston senior, and reanimates them. The Doctor realises that this has something to do with Becka, and her reign of terror has all been to protect herself as she's been infected by the mud. The mud contains the lifeforce of the Morax, a violent, criminal group of aliens that were locked in a prison beneath Pendle Hill and released recently when Becka cut down an old tree that acted as the key to their prison. Becka turns on the Doctor, and pressures Willa to denounce her as a witch. The Doctor is ducked but saves herself with escapology taught to her by Houdini. The mud floods into Becka, taking her over. She and the other Morax incapacitate the Doctor and friends, and take the King, planning to make him the vessel for their own leader. For some reason, it takes them ages to get around to doing this, and our heroes wake up and use parts of the tree (to which the Morax are allergic) to defeat the baddies and save the King.

Context:

I started this randomly-ordered blogging endeavour with a lot of enthusiasm, and even more naivety. There was a lot of material to cover. That was in 2015, when there were 34 seasons of Doctor Who (26 old series, 8 new) and a smattering of specials to work my way through in random order. There have been another five seasons and quite a few more specials broadcast since. Even at my reasonably slow pace of covering each story, though, I am catching up, and the point where I run out of stories and meet up with the serially broadcast current Who will be within the next year or two. I feel that I'm reaching a tipping point and it is likely to be mainly blogging milestones from now on. The Witchfinders marks the completion of another season, the thirteenth so far (classic seasons 3, 7, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25, and new series 6, 11 and 13 are all now done). Jodie Whittaker is the first modern Doctor for whom I've completed two seasons, so she could well be a contender for the first Doctor's era to be completed (excepting Paul McGann, who - with only one story unless you count his recent cameo in The Power of the Doctor - was completed very early on). The story was watched one Sunday afternoon accompanied by all three of the children (boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11). Eldest has recently become enamoured of the works of Quentin Tarantino, so his ears pricked up at Graham's quoting of the very unbiblical Pulp Fiction version of Ezekiel 25:17. The youngest on seeing King James's first appearance in a plague doctor mask was reminded of the figure that appeared fleetingly in the background of King Charles's coronation earlier in 2023.

First Time Round:

The family (except the youngest child, aged 6 at the time, who was avoiding watching after being scared by Tim Shaw's face the month before in the opening story of the season) all watched the story go out live on BBC1 on Sunday 25th November 2018. This was just a couple of days after the 55th anniversary of Doctor Who, which passed without any fanfare. In this phase of its long history, Doctor Who was accentuating the new, and didn't go in for any remembrance-related frippery. Nonetheless, there was a bit of harking back, as this was one of the most traditional stories of 2018 (a little bit of history, a celebrity from the past, lumbering monsters, and a lack of any universes in the shape of frogs).

Reaction:

There's something just a little lacking in this story, and I struggled to put my finger on it. As I watched, I could see that at an intellectual level it contains many good elements. I loved the novelisation when I read it (which I thought was relatively recently, but turns out it was back in 2021 - see the Deeper Thoughts of the blog post for The Awakening for more details) so I don't think there's anything amiss with the characters or the plot. The concept and visualisation of the monsters is interesting: first, sentient mud attacking in tendrils, then filled-up corpses that stagger around as mud zombies. The rationalisation of this as being the consciousness of alien war criminals who've been trapped for years under the earth is neat, and the little details selling that are also nice, like the ancient tree, cut down and turned into a ducking stool, being an old piece of alien tech that acted as the key to their prison. Joy Wilkinson seems like a mensch (I don't know why she hasn't come back to write for the TV show since) and what she created was nicely traditional, allowing for a lot of mystery up front and a chance for the Doctor and her companions to investigate and piece together the backstory. The rarity of both the writing and directing being done by women (which has happened only a few times in Who's long lifetime) allows for fresher perspectives. The historical setting adds colour, and the performances are excellent too, from lesser known actors such as Tilly Steele as Willa, through the majestic Siobhan Finneran as Becka, and all the way up the scale to his largeness Alan Cumming as the King.

It should be impossible for a story with Alan Cumming playing a slyly saucy but also mercurial King James facing off against mud zombies to be anything less than exciting. Somehow, though, the final product lacks a bit of oomph. My theory as to why this might be requires a little background material to be understood: it's all about Paul and the pear. This comes from an episode of Weekly Wipe, a comedy news and reviews programme written and anchored by Charlie Brooker, now most famous for Black Mirror. In a 2014 edition, the character Philomena Cunk, played by the incomparable Diane Morgan, is reviewing the Peter Capaldi-starring TV series The Musketeers, and comments about swordfights. Though comic, I think that this is an insightful, precise and succinct summary of the issues of dramatic action that is staged without sufficient reason for audience emotion or engagement. Swordfights are just the most obvious manifestation. Some quotes from Cunk: "Swordfights are strange because, although they look exciting, they never actually are"; "When you think about what a swordfight is, you should be on the edge of your seat because it's, like, all sharp things". Philomena, a most Shakespearean fool, goes on to expound: "Once, my mate Paul was slicing a pear at a festival with his penknife, and it was just unbearably tense to watch, because he was really drunk and sort-of cutting it in the hand he was holding it in, and I could hardly stand to watch that ... but with swordfights, even though swords are bigger than penknives, and they really wave 'em around, it's like a dance routine or a metal squabble. So there's never the same sense of danger as there was with Paul and the pear."

I think anyone who wants to write action sequences should watch it a few times over (a quick google will find it, and it's much funnier - though no less informative - with Morgan performing it than it is written down). We all have seen action sequences on films and TV that are less engaging than would be the watching of a friend, while drunk, trying to cut up fruit without injuring themselves. From swordfights in old movies through to smash-up fights between CGI characters at the end of modern superhero movies, and in between - dare I say it - the sort of choreographed stunt action that the Havoc crew did for Doctor Who in the 1970s. If it's just so much movement, without any emotional impact, it won't mean anything. Ultimately, if we don't care, then we won't feel anything. The mud zombies in The Witchfinders lumber and loom, but they don't really do much that's meaningful. Perhaps this is because the true danger in the story is not the aliens but the humans. In the period depicted in real life, no alien intervention was required to make people turn on their neighbours. The story of the social-climbing Becka denouncing those who were once her friends and family resonates with this, but some other material is less connected to the theme. The best and most emotional moments in the story are in close alignment; for example, Willa betraying the Doctor out of fear and peer pressure, the Doctor seeming to be more and more powerless as she's assumed to be a witch and characters turn against her, and King James - the camera focussing on his eyes in extreme close-up - torn between mercy and the strictures of his religion when deciding whether a ducking has gone on long enough.

The Witchfinders is perhaps the only story of Jodie Whittaker's tenure that concentrates on the differences in how she is treated on Earth now she is a woman, and this was clearly a main reason for the story to exist. King James is in the story as the personification of patriarchy, rather than a heroic figure - no wonder it's hard to care at the end when he's being threatened by the monsters. That sequence also takes far too long - too much standing about when the story needs a speedier resolution. In general, I think the first couple of years' stories for Jodie Whittaker didn't make much use of the extra time a 50-minute slot provided, and instead it was mostly the same amount of content spread out over a slightly longer running time. A pacier version of The Witchfinders with five minutes or so snipped out would hit the spot much better, I feel. Another factor that adds to the spreading out rather than honing of action is the presence of so many regular characters. Graham and Ryan had their fans, and I like them in other stories; but, I can't help thinking a version of this story that focussed on the female characters, with the two male regulars having a reduced involvement, might have been more interesting, and more in keeping with the story's thrust. 

Connectivity:

The third story in a row to feature a real historical person, and the second to feature an English monarch. The Witchfinders is set only 13 years after The Shakespeare Code, and Shakespeare was still alive during the events near Pendle. Like that earlier story, this one mentions Elizabeth the First (the Doctor was aiming for her coronation but overshot), and both stories feature witches without actually featuring any witches.

Deeper Thoughts:

Jodie Erasure and the Big Discourse. Being a Doctor Who fan on social media - well, frankly, being anybody on social media these days - is becoming more and more of a slog. Aside from the activity on blogger, which you know about, I mainly use twitter (and yes, I'm calling it twitter as I always shall for evermore), but increasingly only in read mode. Avoiding the many adverts that have got more intrusive and are for dodgier and dodgier products the longer Space Karen owns the platform, I scroll through my self-curated timeline. It is mainly politics, Doctor Who and cat videos. Only the last of those isn't guaranteed to descend into septic online conflicts after only a few replies, and - quite frankly - I wouldn't put it past people not to drag the cat video commentary that way too. Even when it's friendly, I find the Doctor Who discourse mostly hard going. It might just be my age; most of the fans regularly posting are much younger than me. I've being thinking about and arguing about the minutiae of this one BBC programme for more than 40 years now; perhaps I'm reaching a limit. Obviously (I wouldn't have stuck with this endeavour otherwise) I prefer longer form criticism. The sort of Who hot takes anyone can cram into 280 characters are usually going to be one of three categories: bits of trivia that I already know discovered by the poster anew, bits of trivia so tiny or obscure that they possibly shouldn't be of interest to anyone, and moaning. Moaning about this showrunner or that showrunner, that overrated actor or this one.

Have I finally had enough of hearing about Doctor Who? Well, no, obviously - at the time of writing I'm partway through reading a non-fiction book about Doctor Who, and am looking forward to the imminent delivery of a Blu-ray box set that will be crammed with many documentaries about different aspects of Doctor Who. It's just when Who meets social media that I'm struggling. Maybe I'm not the only one. In the Doctor Who magazine that came out on the 14th September 2023, current Who showrunner Russell T Davies used his regular column to unleash a remarkable stream of consciousness at the reader. I haven't received my copy yet, but I know the contents thanks to a fourth category of irritating social media activity: cutting and pasting huge sections of print media onto the internet the minute one receives a publication. This time I'm glad someone did that, as the reactions Davies's words had elicited were already all over my timeline, and I couldn't understand exactly what he'd done to produce such a response. The column attempts to put one into the mind of Russell as he watches as a fan the first of the forthcoming 60th anniversary Who specials The Star Beast. There follows internal thought after internal thought touching on many of the obsessions of online fandom of recent years: why hasn't there ever been a release of the music from season 10 of the new series? When is the Doctor Who Experience coming back? How can Donna feature in the stories when if she remembers the Doctor she'll die? And on and on. He even throws in references to releasing "the Snyder cut" and "covfefe" to show his knowledge goes a pretty long way back, and isn't just restricted to Doctor Who.

Either Davies has someone who comprehensively informs him of what people are talking about online, or - more likely - he's been lurking there himself. He's nothing if not accurate, There's a section about the featuring of Jodie Whittaker's TARDIS exterior in the story, which means that "she has NOT been erased (and yet by not erasing her, are we erasing the argument that she's been erased and therefore this is an act of erasure, IS IT?)". There are lots of parentheses and block capitals used. Fans realising that he's paid attention to what they have said, and that he's then played it back to them in a slightly mocking fashion, have become a bit upset. I don't personally think it was intended to hurt. Any satire needs to start with an amount of empathy, before the comic exaggeration takes place. Davies is including himself in this heightened version of fandom. I think it's supposed to be an affectionate depiction of all our tortured imaginings, including Davies's own. The trouble for me was that it only highlighted how uninteresting most online preoccupations are. What it also highlighted, though, was how much more interesting this copy was than anything published in Doctor Who Magazine for a good while. It was provocative, and in recent years the magazine has sought to play things very safe for fear of offending anyone. The show had maybe been a bit like that too during the same period. Nobody sane wants to erase Jodie, but some of the perfectly good stories like The Witchfinders could have benefitted from being a bit less safe: more killings by the mud Zombies, more Saturday night and less Sunday evening. The magazine issue featuring this column from Davies is the first under a new editor, and The Star Beast is going to be the first Doctor Who story under new management too. It will be interesting to see if and how things develop. I just might not tweet much about it, that's all.

In Summary:

The Witch? Doctor consumer review: lots of good stuff in there, but it's not quite magic.