Lux

Chapter the 327th, where RTD's turning Doctor Who into a soap again!

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so be warned there are spoilers ahead.] The Doctor, trying to get Belinda back to the 24th May 2025, materialises the TARDIS in 1952 Miami to take a triangulation reading with a gizmo. The local cinema is closed and locked: three months ago, 15 people went missing there. The projectionist Reginald Pye seems to be showing films to an empty auditorium. The Doctor can't resist investigating, to find that the films are being played to Mr. Ring-a-Ding, a cartoon character come to life, who is feeding off the light; widower Pye has been tempted to do this because the cartoon - really another member of the Pantheon of Discord, god of light Lux - brought Pye's dead wife back to life from an old home movie. Lux has done the opposite to the missing people, trapping each in a frame of celluloid. He also does this to the Doctor and Belinda, rendering them two-dimensional inside a cartoon film. The TARDIS team work out that they can use emotional feeling to give themselves depth and dimensionality; this returns them to normal, but they are still trapped. Attempts to scroll the film up or down, or to break through it outward, just lead the pair into illusory scenes Lux has created to toy with them; at one point, the Doctor meets fans of his TV show, but it's not real (or is it?). Eventually, the Doctor realises they have to hold the film frame still, let the projector burn through it, then they can escape. Back in the real world, the Doctor heals his burnt hand with spare bi-regeneration energy. Seeing this, Lux captures the Doctor and feeds off the energy, growing and starting to become three-dimensional. Pye sacrifices himself, aiming to be reunited with his wife, by blowing up the projection room. Sunlight comes in from outside - this energy is too much for Lux who grows and grows until he becomes one with the light of the universe. The Doctor is freed and the missing people reappear.

Context:

A new series of Doctor Who has begun, and is underway as I write this. It's the seventh to kick off since I began the blog; it might turn out to be the last, if you believe what you read in the papers (see Deeper Thoughts below for more on that). The blog has needed the injection of vitality that a new set of episodes brings (last time I was reduced to blogging an episode of Class, for Amdo's sake!); as soon as the season started, I fired up the random number generator to select the first story of this new run to blog, and it chose Lux. A few days after I saw it for the first time, I watched it again taking notes (the middle child, boy of 15, who'd watched it with me first time - see below - came in, sat down and watched it all again, he enjoyed it that much first time round).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the first story covered from the 41st season (or 15th or 2nd depending on your numbering protocol), Ncuti Gatwa's second run. It looks like the last two episodes of the run will form a 2-part finale, so there are six stories remaining after Lux to blog in random order. Beyond that, I've completed ten Doctors' televisual eras (the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth Doctors) and 36 out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

Even though a lot of people moaned about it in 2024, I liked the midnight iplayer launch time for new episodes of Gatwa's first series, and made a point of staying up to enjoy each week's new offering. I hadn't, though, formed any habit by the time Lux dropped of watching at the new time of 8am on Saturday morning (many - just as many? - people moaned about this new time, of course); instead, I got round to watching it at about 6pm on the 19th April 2025, an hour before it was going to be shown live on BBC1, from the aforementioned iplayer streaming service. As such, if I understand the methodology correctly, had our house's TV been one of those 5000-ish in the UK with BARB 'peoplemeters' attached to capture ratings, our viewing would not have been included in the overnights. This, despite at least two big Doctor Who fans (me and the middle child) living in the house. This just goes to show how pointless a measure they are (see Deeper Thoughts below for more on that). Both of us audibly gasped and looked at each other with wild excitement in our eyes at the reveal of Mr Ring-a-Ding's laugh, and both agreed afterwards that the story had been an effective and enjoyable one. The next day, the eldest (young man of 18) made a point of messaging me - he's away at university currently -  to tell me how he too had much enjoyed the story.

Reaction:

Shortly after Lux's broadcast, I was amused to see a fan review on a website whose headline read 'It's messy and weird, but "Lux" feels more like Doctor Who again'. What amused me particularly was the word 'but', and to a lesser extent the words 'more' and 'again'. It's messy and weird, "Lux" feels like Doctor Who - that's more like it. What had the writer been watching previously that they'd got the idea that Doctor Who feels like Doctor Who despite the weirdness and messiness? Messy and weird were built in to the show from the very beginning, and Lux was an effective continuation of that tradition. Don't get me wrong, though, the messiness I'm talking about is the show's slippery nature regarding classification: people looking for hard science fiction, for example, might have been disappointed by the more fantastical Lux, but the Next Time trailer at the end for following story The Well, with lots of soldiers in futuristic gear with blasters, would hopefully have piqued their interest. Doctor Who is messy because it can morph into dozens of different things, often within the space of one story. This indeed happened in Lux, the 'meta' sections in the middle allowing the story to playfully comment on itself. What was not messy was the production design and effects work, which was superb and precise throughout. Lux is visually stunning, the evocation of early 1950s Miami in 2020s Wales was such that the viewer was fully immersed from the off. The interaction of animation and live-action throughout was seamless. The extra budget has been wisely spent creating new and engaging concepts for use in the show: a cartoon come to life, live-action characters turned into animation, live-action black and white characters interacting with others in colour. That this 60+ year old show is still finding new things to do makes every cent from the Disney+ co-production deal worthwhile.

The script mines every moment it can from the imaginative jumping off point of characters being able to jump off, and back on to, film frames. Once the Doctor and Belinda are turned into two-dimensional cartoons, the narrative runs through each of the obvious actions that they might take to escape, visualising each perfectly within the cartoonish reality that's been established. They use their emotions to make themselves become more and more three-dimensional (a neat way to allow the Doctor and his new companion to share detail about themself to the other without it being an info-dump), they move the film up and down, they hold it still so it starts to burn with an evocative projected celluloid melting and bubbling effect. This is catnip to the young and not so young viewers who want their imagination to be engaged. In the most bravura sequence, the TARDIS team go outwards rather than up or down, literally breaking the fourth wall. The Doctor and Belinda then get to meet three Doctor Who fans within the story world of the programme itself. It's a very funny sequence: the three fans are positive, but not uncritical; through them, writer of the story and show-running executive producer Russell T Davies gently chides himself - and/or the conventions of genre screenwriting - for the overt seeding in of the mechanism that will be crucial in the denouement (with fan Robyn harking back to a line of dialogue about old film being highly flammable), and for never being able to write something as good as Blink (all three fans' favourite story, much better in their eyes than the ones with the goblins, the Beatles or the Doctor standing on a land mine). Just when one might think that the story's disappearing up its own metaverse, it turns poignant: the three Doctor Who fans know they're not real, and they know that it doesn't matter.

Even though they are just part of an illusion created by Lux to toy with the Doctor, Lizzie, Hassan and Robyn's appreciation for the Time Lord has taught them to be cleverer than Lux; they can help the Doctor escape, even if it means they'll blink out of existence. In the scene, Davies also celebrates the power of Doctor Who to bring people together, this being the way that the three fictional best friends met. Towards the end of the scene (my eyes were not dry by this point, I'm not ashamed to admit), Lizzie says "Maybe, just now and then, you can think of us - then we might live on just a little bit". In a mid-credits scene all three are revealed to have continued on, so presumably the Doctor did just that. The Doctor lives beyond the confines of a screen because he's lodged in the minds of his fans, and now he gets to return the favour and the reverse is true too. Having just finished John Higgs's Doctor Who book (see the Deeper Thoughts of this blog post for more details), I'm guessing he'll have loved all this, it being in line with his theory about the character of the Doctor having outgrown the bounds of fiction. The script also has time to touch on the fear and potential of the early atomic age, AIDS, and the injustice of segregation. The Doctor, in dialogue that's sure to be on a T-shirt one day says "I have toppled worlds; sometimes, I wait for people to topple their world - until then, I live in it and I shine!". There's lots of great dialogue ("I'm a two-dimensional character, you can't expect backstory"), some scary moments (the three-dimensional Mr. Ring-a-Ding is wonderfully creepy), and a great ending: the light of the sun is so powerful that Lux goes from fake to true godliness ("Invisible... intangible" / "Amen!").

Any criticisms I could make would be the tiniest motes of dust, nothing as big as a hair in the gate. Linus Roche is lovely in an understated way as Reginald Pye, but the character's death scene isn't perfectly staged. He's doing the noble sacrifice, so should just stay still in the room with the film on fire not leave it and close the door (which makes it look like he's trying to escape and confuses the issue momentarily of whether he survived or not). The story is essentially just a slightly more successful repeat run of The Devil's Chord, with the reels of film wrapping the Doctor up exactly as the musical scales did to Ruby Sunday, plus many other parallels. Alan Cumming's great vocal work as Mr. Ring-a-Ding / Lux can't quite get up to the camp levels of Jinkx Monsoon's full, live-action appearance as Maestro, but he gives it a hell of a good go. The parallels are almost certainly deliberate, this being another run-in with the Pantheon in the exact same place in the running order of the season. Any repetition is worth it for those of us (like me and the middle child) who are invested in the ongoing plotline. There will likely be more run-ins with members of the Pantheon before the end of the season. Is Mrs. Flood one of them? She time-travelled for the first time in Lux, appearing in Miami at the end to tell all that the Doctor's time is nearly up: his limited run ends on the 24th May 2025. In real life it doesn't, of course. That's the date of the penultimate episode of the run, hinting that the episode shown on 31st May 2025 will have to be even more apocalyptic to top it. I'm excited to see how it all pans out.

Connectivity:

This is a neat one: the forces of antagonism in Lux and the Class opener For Tonight We Might Die are, respectively, anthropomorphised light and anthropomorphised shadow.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Metrics Reloaded. Without meaning to discount all the craft and talent that goes into it, Doctor Who is a product of industry (as all TV programmes are). As such, there will be measures by which it is judged by the industry involved in its making. The most obvious of these, but not necessarily the most useful, are ratings. As recently commented upon here (in the Deeper Thoughts section of the recent blog post for Slipback), the UK tabloid press had been happily spreading rumours about the bleakness of Doctor Who's future for months before Ncuti's second run started. No fan - and probably no journalist - knows anything to help them predict the future. Any fan or journalist, though, could have predicted what would happen once the first overnight rating for Gatwa's second run was recorded. After weeks of articles speculating based on no data, there would be another spate of articles making the same speculation but this time based on just one datum. There was no realistic figure for the overnight rating of The Robot Revolution that would have silenced the speculation; it would have had to be something like 8 million, I think, for the online warriors of the UK tabloids like the Express, Mail or Mirror to have shelved the copy that they'd probably already written about how 'Doctor Who's woes continue', or whatever. As it was, it got 2 million, not far from what it was getting for overnights last year, but slightly down. It was the fourth largest overnight of the day, second for the BBC behind Gladiators with 2.9 million - one tabloid categorised the pumped-up shiny game show as having a "whopping" lead over our favourite Time Lord's latest adventure. The suggestion that 2.0 million is disappointingly small but 900,000 is impressively large seemed illogical to me.

It's not mandated for tabloid journalism to be logical, of course. If it were, then those writing it might consider that the figures for people watching a show in a particular broadcast slot on a TV channel aren't as relevant when that show is a streaming-first prospect. Arguably, they aren't relevant for any show: I now consume zero BBC programmes except through the iplayer, and I doubt I'm alone in that. Anyway, logic dictates a decision about Doctor Who's future is based on the metrics important to Disney+ rather than anything to do with UK broadcast. It's not mandated for international streamers to be logical either, of course. The metrics are often opaque, but there's been many a time when by any visible indication (such as a vocal fanbase clamouring for a recommission) shows that are popular still get canned by the streamer, often after just one or two series. There might be nothing that can be done, and we could be about to see Doctor Who come to an end (at least temporarily). Given that we fans are powerless, we may as well stop worrying. Instead, we could have a look at metrics about our favourite show that are more fun. For example, at three letters long, Lux has the second shortest title of any story in Doctor Who's history. Given that all the other titles for this year have already been published and they're longer, and given that the shortest title ever (2007's David Tennant-starring '42') comprises just figures, Lux could be accurately said to win the prize for the fewest number of letters used for a Doctor Who story title. If the show does come to an end, it will keep that prize for some time, perhaps for ever. There are obviously periods in Doctor Who's history where it's difficult to compare ratings, as the broadcasting landscapes of those times were disparate. Somehow, our funny, lovable, weird and messy show manages to make the same true even for a metric as simple as the length of story titles...

Early on, stories didn't have overall titles on screen; the same is true in more recent years. The early period has unofficial titles; for the recent period, people tend to use all the linked episode titles chained together. Even both those approaches have points of contention, though. Accepting that some might disagree, I can tell you that in its first eleven years, production teams eschewed very short story titles; shortest were The Ark (six characters and a space) in 1966 and Inferno (7 characters) in 1970. It's not until Tom Baker takes over that there's a story title of five characters (his debut, Robot). There was one more of that length (Kinda) plus another that never made it to screen (Shada), but no classic era story title with fewer characters. When the show returned in 2005 it breached that lower limit; the very first story title was four characters long (Rose) and that became a relatively common length later (Hide, Rosa, Flux, Boom). As for the longest story title, the classic series champion is Doctor Who and the Silurians (28 characters including spaces) but the inclusion of the first three words of the title on screen was a clerical error. The new series winner could be Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (52 characters including spaces and separators) but there's disagreement about whether that first episode is part of the overall story or standalone. Without Utopia, it loses out to Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (49 characters including spaces and separators). If multiple titles linked by separators feels too much like cheating, then the winner is Matt Smith Christmas special The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe (38 characters including spaces and punctuation). That feels like it could potentially be bested one day. But, even if the programme's future proves less bleak than speculated, it seems unlikely that there will be many more story titles of three or two characters' length.

In Summary:

Lux-uriously good.

Class: For Tonight We Might Die

Chapter the 326th, which is just what the world needed, a Buffy / Waterloo Road mash-up.

Plot:

Something awful is happening at Coal Hill, and it's not that the school has now adopted Academy status: a sixth-form student has gone missing, and nobody's talking about it. A gang of wholly original pupil characters not like any others ever written - jock, prim do-gooder, nerd, posh one, gay one - notice weird shadow creatures following / attacking them. The posh one turns out to be an alien prince, and the pupils' somewhat aggressive teacher his unwilling bodyguard. They were enemies on their planet, but are now both fighting the Shadow Kin, who infiltrated their world and killed everyone else. A time traveller called the Doctor brought them to Earth where they could lie low. Unfortunately, the Shadow Kin have tracked them down, arriving at the school through a tear in space-time. The teacher isn't able to wield a gun, thanks to the Doctor's interference. She had earlier got the missing pupil to shoot one of the Shadow Kin for her; unfortunately, the gun that destroys the shadow also disintegrates the person firing it. With the school's Autumn prom for sixth-formers in full swing, the Shadow Kin attack en masse. The jock (a footballer) loses his leg, and his girlfriend gets killed. The prim do-gooder ends up linked to the Shadow Kin King through a shared heart. The others manage to get the non-speaking prom attendees out of the school, but then get locked in. The Doctor arrives and saves the day, gives the jock a futuristic false leg, and leaves the teacher as the pupils' protector as a further penance for getting the missing pupil killed. The Shadow Kin were seeking a super weapon that the alien prince has, powered by the souls of his fallen people. He claims that the box is empty, the souls thing a myth, but - big twist reveal at the end - he's lying about that.

Context:

As I'm spinning off again, I need to ask my standard set of questions of For Tonight We Might Die, opening episode of the 'Doctor Who adjacent' series Class. Does it star the Doctor? Yes; there's a surprise appearance by Peter Capaldi towards the end that's highlighted by a whopping great "And Peter Capaldi" in the credits at the start. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. It even has pictures, thought I recently relaxed that rule. With the questions successfully answered, I watched this episode from the BBC iplayer one evening early in April 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. When not covering spin-offs and the like, I have completed ten Doctors' televisual eras (the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth Doctors) and 36 out of the total of 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing - the 41st having just begun): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

Doctor Who was off air for a whole year between its 2015 and 2016 Christmas Day specials. As in previous 'gap years', a spin-off series provided a distraction for fans starved of episodes of Doctor Who proper. Previous staples Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures had both stopped airing a few years earlier, so 2016 got a completely new spin-off. Class was a series on BBC3, a channel with a target demographic of 16 to 24 year olds; at the time it was digital only (which mattered a lot more back then, now it's hard to tell the difference). I still watched the episodes on my TV (through an application running on a Sony Blu-ray player connected to the screen) accompanied by the Better Half. It's a hazy memory now, but I'm pretty sure I was intrigued enough to watch the first episode as soon as it landed, the 22nd October. It was one of two episodes that dropped that day, with the remaining six appearing weekly thereafter; the series completed in early December, a few weeks before Peter Capaldi returned as the Doctor in the main show on the 25th. Class got a tepid reaction from fandom in general, I think it's fair to say, and no second series was commissioned. At the time of first watching the series, I was mostly concerned with where my DVD of the newly animated The Power of the Daleks had got to; I'd attended the BFI screening of the first three episodes of Power in early November, the ticket price of which included a copy of the DVD to be mailed out soon afterwards. Unfortunately, it was delayed. A 50-year old story seemed more exciting to me in 2016 than anything Class had to offer: would I feel the same on this latest watch?

Reaction:

The thing that leapt out at me most on this watch was how odd the set-up is for the intended audience. BBC3 programmes generally didn't and don't get set in schools. Audiences don't tend to associate strongly with characters younger than them, so the cast being a bunch of sixth-formers - at the lower age end of the target audience - is a risk. The sci-fi twist that one of the sixth-formers is actually an alien prince feels like it would fit better in a CBBC show than a BBC3 one. One of the main cast is even younger, as she's been advanced a couple of school years (something that almost never happens in the UK school system, thus damaging the already shaky verisimilitude). Further to this, UK sixth forms don't have Autumn proms at the start of a school year, and don't have special classes for over-achievers seemingly untethered to any specific A-level topic. These all, mind you, are things that have happened in American series set in American schools. The creator Patrick Ness has dual citizenship, and the show was intended to be accessible to US Who fans, so perhaps it's forgivable that it has a mid-Atlantic milieu. It doesn't feel real, though, and that's an issue when the series is going to counterpoint the every-day with the fantastical. The characters also don't feel like real people, but instead twisted versions of John Hughes teen flick archetypes. The most interesting person is the fake teacher and unwilling bodyguard Quill, played with relish - and a very cool look - by Katherine Kelly. Unfortunately, she's introduced in scenes with a nasty edge. In fact, everyone is introduced with material that makes them seem like an idiot or arsehole or both. There are also inconsistencies: Quill and prince Charlie both arrived on Earth at the same time, but he has to google every pop culture reference that comes up, whereas she knows what Care Bears are and uses idioms like "Potayto Potahto".

In the episodes that followed, as each personality and backstory got more fleshed out, things improved. Even when something has an eight episode commission in the bag, though, the first episode has to act as a pilot in order that people might come back to watch the rest. With the characters not necessarily engaging from the off, the plot is left to be the attraction for audience. Unfortunately, the set-up is complicated (a side effect of setting a science fantasy series in the unlikely precinct of a school), so there's many sections of exposition dumping. This doesn't leave much room for a story of the week, and the skirmish with the Shadow Kin is therefore very slight: they appear, they attack the prom, they're seen off. The other thing that happens - which again is investigated in the remainder of the series - is the inadvertent linking of the leader of the Shadow Kin with do-gooder April. This means that there are two pairs of characters unwillingly linked to each other in the story, the other being Charlie and Quill, which feels like at least one pair too many. The stuff with the gun is also not very clear. Quill can't use a gun, so encourages a pupil to instead - tendrils extend from it wrapping round the shooter's arms (quite a cool visual) and then they can kill the Shadow Kin, at the expense of their own life as the gun shoots backwards too. This is suggested, in breathless snatches of easy-to-miss dialogue, as the only way to kill a Shadow Kin. Later, though, Charlie has a gun he shoots repeatedly at the Shadow Kin, but it doesn't do the tendril thing, and doesn't disintegrate him. Is it a different gun, or does it behave in a different way because it's being used by an alien? It's very muddled.

When Torchwood (an earlier BBC3 Who spin-off) started it was muddled in its own way too, with the most difficult aspect being tone. Figuring out how to make Doctor Who-style adventures but for an older audience led to some awkward and often risible lurches into both sexual and violent content. It took them a year to find the right balance. Class settled down quicker, but some of the lessons haven't been learned here in the first episode: there's a weird cameo from the magnificent June Hudson who apropos of nothing starts talking about finding her husband "fiddling with himself on the stairs", and there's some very gory action during the battle sequences. Clearly this wasn't enough to prevent the Doctor from appearing in Class (it was a consistently adhered to rule that the character was never to appear in Torchwood). I don't think the cameo works particularly well, but it's still the best part of the episode. One does wonder why the Doctor doesn't pop back every week to help out, as the Coal Hill gang face much worse challenges later in the series; this is a central flaw of any Doctor Who spin-off, though, so it's not fair to blame Class for it. There's good moments without Capaldi too, like the spooky chase scene at the start. It's nice to see Nigel Betts return as Coal Hill's headmaster, who appeared in a few stories in Capaldi's first year, and there is a nice reference to Clara Oswald and Danny Pink, former teachers / former companions (though how does the school know Clara's dead?). All in all, there's a lot of promise there, despite the flaws, but the first episode has too much set-up material to be seen as a standalone story.

Connectivity:

Both For Tonight We Might Die and Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children feature a character revealed to be more than the ordinary person they may seem to be, and are instead a key figure from an alien planet (Charlie is a prince, and the Doctor is the original template for her people's special power); in both stories, the Doctor doesn't do much in the story until the end (this is by accident for Whittaker but by design for Capaldi).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Never Ending Story? John Higgs book event, Ropetackle Arts Centre, 8th April 2025. I've gone to quite a few Doctor Who events in London that I've written up and shared here on the blog, but this time I had an opportunity to go to one closer to home. On the sunny evening of the 8th April 2025, I took a short journey along the coast from home to an arts centre cum venue in Shoreham-by-Sea, accompanied by the Better Half. City Books, a very lovely independent bookshop in Brighton, runs regular book tie-in events at Ropetackle; this was the first one I'd ever seen advertised that was Doctor Who-related. I don't know any local fans, but my judgement of the crowd based on T-shirts and the odd Tom Baker scarf was it was about 60% fan to 40% arty bookish types that might have had more interest in Higgs than Who. My internal split was about 50/50: Higgs is a cultural commentator and scribe who covers his subjects - in the past, he's covered William Blake, Bond, the Beatles and the KLF amongst others - with a playful, sometimes mystical, storytelling style. My holiday reading last Summer included his book The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds, which I very much enjoyed. That holiday I was continually being reminded of Doctor Who (as retold in the blog post for The Ice Warriors, which I watched while I was away). I didn't have room in that post to mention that as well as the many other reminders, including the foam machine used in a pool party, the KLF book contained multiple references to my favourite programme too. It was clear than Higgs was something of a fan. I was very intrigued to see how he would approach a book about Doctor Who, a topic much more extensively covered than the KLF or William Blake (and probably even more than Bond or the Beatles).

The stage is set (with question mark umbrella and jelly babies)

Higgs gave an illustrated talk, speaking for just over an hour with a few slides of images projected behind him (he very properly gave a spoiler warning before revealing the final one, an image from Ncuti's second series trailer). He started with an anecdote about an event that became his inspiration for writing the book in the first place, which is also mentioned in the book's introduction (I'd purchased the book from the City Books stall while waiting for the event to start - thrillingly a couple of days before it would be generally available - and had a read of the first few pages). Higgs was having a post work drink in Fitzrovia, London with Tom Baker sometime in 2007 - Baker having been providing voiceover work on a children's series that Higgs was directing. There was another man at the bar of an age such that he would have watched Doctor Who when Baker was in the titular role. Higgs witnessed the moment this man clocked his childhood hero drinking nearby, and saw an expression appear on his face of genuine awe. This stayed with Higgs; so few things are truly awe inspiring in this world that he needed to write about this one. His talk, as well as Simon Guerrier's review that I subsequently read, convinced me Higgs had pulled off the almost impossible task of saying something fresh about a topic covered by so many other writers and tomes over the years. At Ropetackle, he covered everything from the character's genesis to fill an absence (both in the Saturday night schedules and in the cast of characters in a series planning document) to the Doctor as trickster, and all the way up to the recent tabloid knife-sharpening by hacks anticipating Doctor Who's demise. Higgs, though, does not think Doctor Who will ever die, believing it has become an ever-lasting myth that will continue forever in some form or other. Given that it has given rise to spin-offs like Class, and that even those continue on (Class stories are still being made by Big Finish on audio) suggests that he's on to something.

Swag

Audience questions followed his talk. An early one touched on what stories he would use to introduce a newbie to Doctor Who; he chose some good 'uns: The Curse of Fenric, Pyramids of Mars, Evil of the Daleks, "there ought to be a Pertwee ... Carnival of Monsters", and finally added "The next one". In response to a question about Star Wars versus Doctor Who, he said that he believed the UK show could only compete with the US franchise by doing something completely different. He was asked about the fear factor of the programme and said that he thought it was healthy, and that viewers would never be truly scared, "because they know that the Doctor's there". I had a question, but didn't ask it as it was not really about his views on Doctor Who, which everyone else wanted to hear about. I got to ask Higgs when I spoke to him briefly as he signed my copy of the book. It struck me that his book about the KLF was almost a fictional story about real characters, whereas his Doctor Who book sounded almost like a real biography of a fictional character; given that, I put to him "Are your books tricksters?" He thought about this for a moment and said "Perhaps, but perhaps all books are." This good answer, plus his musing on which Pertwee story to pick and coming up with Carnival of Monsters (quietly the best Pertwee, and up there with the best stories in the history of the show, in my humble), plus this excerpt online from later in the book than I've currently read covering similar (and quite niche) ground to my Deeper Thoughts section of The Wedding of River Song post from this here blog, many years ago, and the swag that I got with my copy including stickers and a badge (I'm easily pleased) - all of these predisposed me to feel warmly about the book. I'm a few chapters in, and it's so far as good as I thought it would be - that's already enough for me to urge you to get a copy. Enjoy!

In Summary:

Class report: could do better.

Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children

Chapter the 325th, in which the Doctor fought the lore, and the lore won.

Plot:

The far future; an intergalactic war rages between humans and Cybermen. Ko Sharmus is one of a resistance group that sends the Cyberium (wibbly energy glob that is the Cyber's battle AI and database) back in time, where it ends up at Villa Diodati. Semi-Cybernised zealot Ashad returns from the past having recovered the Cyberium. He and the remaining Cybermen hunt the few remaining humans. Ko Sharmus stations himself on a planet on which there's a portal to far off worlds, and helps humans to escape. Two time travellers, the Doctor and Ryan, accompanied by a surviving human, arrive at the planet. Ko Sharmus shows them the portal, but it's now continuously linked to the planet Gallifrey. The Master emerges and takes the Doctor back through. A Cyber ship arrives, and Cybermen attack. The three left on the planet defend themselves, and are saved by some Cybermen who turn out to be two more time travellers, Yaz and Graham, and two other surviving humans, disguised in Cyber suits. All seven walk through the barrier to Gallifrey to find the Doctor. The Cybermen also travel there in their ship. The Master shrinks Ashad with his Tissue Compression Eliminator, and takes the Cyberium. Sharmus and Co blow up the Cyber ship. The Master uses dead bodies of Time Lords to create a new group of Cybermen with the ability to regenerate: the Cyber-Masters. The Doctor finds the miniaturised Ashad; there is a superweapon still inside Ashad's Cyber suit that will destroy the Cyber-Masters. The Doctor takes it and confronts the Master, after having put everyone else in a TARDIS back to 21st century Earth. Ko Sharmus doesn't go with the others, and follows the Doctor. When she cannot bring herself to use the superweapon, he takes it from her and sacrifices himself. She just manages to escape before everything blows up. Suddenly, Judoon appear, arrest her and imprison her.

Parallel to this, there is the incongruous tale of Brendan, who lives in rural Ireland in the 20th century; he joins the police, miraculously survives a fall, retires many years later, and then has his memories wiped by some sort of electro-convulsion therapy machine. The Master had previously plugged the Doctor into the Matrix on Gallifrey and set off on some lengthy, lengthy exposition: the Doctor was a foundling taken in by Tecteun, a Gallifreyan; by chance, Tecteun discovered that her adopted child had the ability to regenerate, and extracted the genetic material controlling this, putting it into generations of Gallifreyans, who then became Time Lords. Brendan's story is part of the Doctor's history that has been wiped from her memory, adjusted in the matrix with a Ballykissangel filter.

Context:

There are very few stories left to blog now; I'm eking the last few out to allow for some to be shuffled in amongst the stories from Ncuti Gatwa's second run (still a couple of weeks away at the time of writing). The randomiser picked this story next, the most recently aired of those remaining, leaving only one other story to blog after this from the first phase of the new series from 2005 to 2022. I watched it from the iplayer over a couple of nights in March 2025. Slipback (a story from the mid-1980s) was still fresh in my mind, which was handy as I saw some parallels (more on this in the Reaction section below).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era; Jodie Whittaker's thirteenth Doctor joins the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors, making ten completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season, the 36th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

Jodie Whittaker's second run, the 12th series after the relaunch of Doctor Who in 2005, aired each Sunday from the beginning of 2020. Its two part finale was broadcast on the 23rd February and the 1st March 2020, and I watched them both live accompanied by all the family. In between, on leap day, Saturday 29th February, I was at the BFI watching the animated version of The Faceless Ones (as blogged about in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post. Perhaps because the revelations hadn't yet come (all that was in the second part), I don't remember much discussion that day of the story currently being broadcast on the telly.

Reaction:

When he got the job as Doctor Who showrunner, I commented here that it wouldn't be too long before online wags highlighted Chris Chibnall's past appearance on a BBC TV programme, where he criticised mid-1980s Doctor Who, as an example of long-term karma. In this final blog post for a story from his tenure, I'm going to have to hark back to that. In 1986, Chibnall was one of a number of teenage fans on Open Air, a discussion programme about other BBC programmes; he couldn't know that many years later he'd be on the receiving end of similar criticism, so dished it out without compunction. I don't reference it to snipe, just to point out that - however critical he might have been of it - mid-1980s Who had clearly made a formative impression. I can't think of any other reason why so many years later, he wrote an Eric Saward script as the two-part finale of his second series in charge. Let's look at some of the evidence from Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (which is a long-winded title that I'm tempted to abbreviate to just 'Ass'): a Doctor who doesn't drive the narrative, but is buffeted by overly bleak and violent action? Check. A mercenary character who is a more effective presence than the Doctor, in whom the writer seems much more interested than the nominal star of the show? Check. An unhealthy obsession with Time Lords and Cybermen? Check. It's like we've been pulled through a portal to another time and place. Just like Saward giving all the best lines in Revelation of the Daleks to his own character Orcini, so Chibnall allows Ko Sharmus to do all the fun stuff. Even minor points are similar: when Cybermen attack near the start, the fam get split up because they can't make it back to the TARDIS. Parking far away from the main action is something done in many a Saward story, including Revelation; at least Chibnall didn't have the Doctor spend the whole first episode walking to where all the other characters were.

There's a scene early on where the Doctor arrives with the fam with lots of gadgets to help the humans defend themselves against the Cybermen. All the devices are set up, named, discussed, and it sounds jolly impressive; then, they're blown up in an instant. The intention is clearly to up the ante by making the situation seem bleak, but that only works if the protagonist overcomes the bigger obstacles later; unfortunately, Jodie Whittaker's Doctor doesn't do this, as she's whisked off by the Master to her own subplot before she can do anything more in the Cyberman plot. Ko Sharmus, though, gets a very similar scene in the second episode but all his hardware is effective. It's not a one-off, either: the Doctor boasts about her ability to hotwire spaceships, but then some rando human can do it better than her. I found myself inwardly screaming 'It's her show, give her a win!' the longer things went on. There's nothing much that the Doctor gets to do other than receive information (this is harder to see on first watch as the surprise revelations about the Doctor's hitherto unknown past make it seem significant, but it's still exposition not plot). The only actual act that the Doctor does that's effective is using the power of her memories to break out of the Master's prison (a nice scene with lots of archive clips). The ending, though, has Ko Sharmus sacrificing himself to save the day, and the Doctor letting him do so with not much more than a shrug. This sort of scene is not unique to Doctor Who; the Doctor needs to survive to the next episode, so often someone else has to do the dirty work. The Doctor usually (and heroically) fights against this: the problem here is that the script and direction don't put her under sufficient pressure to make a decision, or have it made for her: Ko Sharmus needs to knock her out or lock her out of the room, or something along those lines.

The Doctor not being an active protagonist is far from the only problem; the surviving humans - only seven of them (who at first are presented as the only humans left, which later turns out not to be the case, an unnecessary extra confusion) - are a dull and featureless lot who don't speak like anyone you might have met. The script is also a bit contradictory about them: dialogue suggests that they are still very linked to their old lives ("We've got a childminder, a driver, a builder") but they are still able to act like expert soldiers, spies or saboteurs when the need arises. Additionally, a character who's presented as an older teenager confirms that he's been fighting Cybermen since he was four years old. Given the destruction this war is shown to have wreaked, is it feasible that people would still be as connected with their old lives after more than a decade, or indeed that there would be any civilisation left at all? Ashad's a dull villain with a tendency towards portentous speechifying; with the Doctor sidelined and the too many companions not having enough between them to do, this leaves only the Master. It's a great performance by Sacha Dhawan despite his character's motivation being hard to understand. Ian McElhinney as Ko Sharmus is solid too. There are some great visuals, but they often seem sterile (the beginning sequence with a cyber head floating towards the screen) or not aligned with the central premise (how is there still a big spaceship full of lots of dormant Cybermen, if they've been all but defeated?).

The most successful moments are those set in Ireland. The disconcertingly out of context interruptions depicting the life of the mysterious Brendan intrigue the audience precisely because they are disconcerting and out of context. It's almost a shame when they are explained as visions the Master has beamed into the Doctor's head (particularly as there's none of the traditional TV grammar that would normally be applied if a character was having visions - sometimes the Brendan cutaways happen when the Doctor isn't even on screen - so it feels like a cheat). The most controversial aspect of this story, the revelation of the Doctor's Timeless Child backstory, also works well. Many people dislike such a massive realignment of Doctor Who mythology, but it's clever and engaging, and is something that can be built on in future stories (as it was in Chibnall's Flux or in Russell T Davies' early Ncuti stories) without overwhelming the show. It has to be seen as something of a triumph in a nearly 60-year old show, to find a new take on the main character that was surprising but nonetheless broadly consistent with what had gone before. More analysis of this aspect of this story can be found in the Deeper Thoughts section of a blog post from close to the original transmission. It's just a shame that the delivery mechanism of these revelations is a fairly flat Cyberman versus humans story. 

Connectivity:

Both Slipback and Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children see the Doctor on a spaceship, and both stories feature aggressive law enforcement officers. In both stories, the Doctor is passive, not driving the story forward much or at all, with another Time Lord appearing partway through to explain things to them. The resolution sees a character other than the Doctor blow themselves up to save the day.

 

Deeper Thoughts:

Hand in hand through our... Arc life! Series and serials: Doctor Who fans who obsess over the details of its production and history (so, pretty much all of us) hear these terms all the time, but maybe don't think about them too much. When Doctor Who was first developed in 1963, there was a big difference between series (ongoing weekly adventures of a set of characters, plus new guest cast, that were one and done every week) and serials (bounded stories with mostly the same characters told over multiple weeks, with each episode forming only a part of an overall narrative that comes to a definite conclusion in the final episode). If there are antecedents, I'm not aware of them, so I think Doctor Who was the first, the mold-breaker, to be shaped as a series of serials. The challenges that the Doctor faces are not completed in a single episode, they take four or six or seven weeks, and the guest characters - and writer and director - stay more or less the same in that time; but then, once that challenge is resolved and a story comes to a firm conclusion, the fun doesn't end and there's a new story, new guest cast and different people involved behind the camera, following over multiple weeks. It's a very unusual approach; the televisual orthodoxy - particularly of that time in the 20th century - would dictate that if one is going to sacrifice the appeal of anyone being able to drop in at any particular point to engage with a clean slate, then it should only be for a short run; if one misses the first episode of a serial, then one is free to make a decision to watch something else for a few weeks, and then when another serial comes along it will be completely new with no baggage. With Doctor Who, there would be an unknown number of weeks before the next jumping-on point, and there would be at least some continuity between the serials.

This is probably why not many shows since have adopted the same format, and those that did - Sapphire and Steel, Timeslip, The Tomorrow People - were fantasy shows consciously modelling themselves on Doctor Who to a lesser or greater extent. What's curious, though, is that it worked: Doctor Who was a hit from that first series onwards, and in its 20th century run nobody considered changing the format. In the 1960s, production teams leant into it even more: there would be cliffhangers in between the serials too, making it one long adventure - singular - in space and time. One thing that probably helped it work is that the arcing narrative (that baggage that I mentioned earlier) was kept to a minimum: the Doctor was trying to get the two schoolteachers Ian and Barbara back home. That was it. Once those characters left, there was no arc plot at all, just a shared set of characters between the serials, and usually a cliffhanger to lead in to the next one. When Doctor Who was made in colour for the first time in the 1970s, the show was on for fewer weeks of the year, and those lead-in cliffhangers disappeared. For the rest of Jon Pertwee's years, the serials were not directly interlinked. A bit of arc plot came back in at this stage: mainly based on character dynamics (Jo Grant's growth as a person, Mike Yates's allying with the bad guys and the aftermath of that). This was the first time in Who's history when the final story of a run became a season finale, tying up some of those characters' plots, but it was still fairly loose. When Tom Baker took over, the new producer and script editor who came in with him got rid of even that. The last story of any particular run was usually the six-parter of that year, but the stories could have been shuffled into any order, and it wouldn't have made any difference.

A couple of times in the 1970s and 80s, the series experimented with linking all the stories under an umbrella theme - a quest to find the six pieces of the key to time, the Doctor on trial; but the last stories of those runs were the only other season finales of 20th century Who. It was probably a good decision; a year after the key to time season, a strike meant that the final story of the run, Shada, was not completed. With the potential disruption of industrial action always present (it killed off a story again in 1983), it was wise not to saddle any one serial with tying up a long-running narrative, just in case it never made it to screens. As the classic series of Doctor Who came to an end in the late 1980s, a pilot for a TV series being made in America was going to change the nature of things. David Lynch's Twin Peaks was influential in setting up a new standard: the detectives would not solve the murder at the show's heart in one week, the same investigation would continue the following week, and thereafter. Lynch, in his art school terrorist way, never wanted the case to get solved ever, but the network (and to a large extent the viewers too) disagreed. Since that experiment, the default has been established that one has to have a significant pay-off -  even if it isn't revealing everything - at the end of every season. It's more unusual for TV detectives to get a new case every week now than it is for them to get a new one every year. Series and serials have essentially become the same. Fantasy series have a bit more variety: the X-Files (probably the first major SF show to be influenced by Twin Peaks) was still in the story of the week mode, but with significant season or multi-season arcs. At the other end of the scale, Lost (whose creators have cited Twin Peaks as a significant influence) had minimal pay-offs from one year to the next, and frustrated many viewers.

When Doctor Who returned (an event celebrating its 20 year anniversary as I write this) it followed the X-files approach via Buffy. It was mostly single stories (though there were 2-parters in the mix too, as Doctor Who was felt to require cliffhangers) but with season-long arc plots, based both on developing character dynamics and also fantasy elements (usually a build up to the Big Bad confrontation in the season finale). Sometimes, showrunners planned their arcs over multiple years: Chris Chibnall sneaks in a reference to the Timeless Child within Jodie Whittaker's second story, long before it would be fully explained. Even to this day, though, there are still some echoes of Doctor Who's 20th century approaches too. The newly announced (at time of writing) episode titles, and writer and director credits, for Ncuti Gatwa's second season seem to confirm that its shape will be the same as the season in 2024: most stories the same length, but with one longer story at the end, just like Tom Baker used to do it. Pre-publicity has also suggested that the Doctor's aim throughout the run will be to get his new companion back home, just like he was trying to do with Ian and Barbara more than six decades earlier. Plus ça change...

In Summary:

The game changing exposition is actually quite interesting, and a neat idea, but it's surrounded by a bunch of ass -cension of the Cybermen.