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.

Demons of the Punjab

Chapter the 257th, sees a nation and a family divided, and the Doctor and friends can only watch.

Synopsis:

Yaz's Nani gives her a broken watch as a memento; it's something to do with her wedding - she claims to have been the first woman married in Pakistan. Yaz is curious, and persuades the cautious Doctor to take her back in time to see her Nani (Umbreen) when she was young. Connecting the watch to the TARDIS telepathic circuits brings them, accompanied as ever by Ryan and Graham, to near what will imminently be the India Pakistan border; it is the eve of the 1947 Partition. They bump into Prem, who turns out to be Umbreen's intended, but crucially not Yaz's grandfather. He is a Hindu, while Yaz's family are Muslim; this has caused upset, particularly with Prem's hothead younger brother Manish, but local sadhu Bhakti had agreed to marry them. Unfortunately, Bhakti is found dead with two aliens near his corpse. The Doctor identifies these as Thijarians, infamous intergalactic assassins. Prem has seen these "demons" once before, on a battlefield when he was fighting in the second world war; he found his older brother dead, and glimpsed them.

Manish has early warning of the exact partition lines and proudly shows the others: Umbreen's mother Hasna's house is now in Pakistan, so she will have no choice where to live. Tensions mount as Manish tries to persuade his brother not to marry. The Doctor helps protect the others from the Thijarians, but then she discovers that they are no longer the ruthless creatures they once were. Turning over a new leaf, they have now decided to honour the dead, travelling through time to be there when someone would otherwise die alone. Who then killed the sadhu? It was Manish. He has also called in a group of Hindu nationalists to stop the wedding. Umbreen chooses to get married holding hands with Prem across both sides of the border. The watch is Prem's, given to Umbreen as a symbolic gift, and accidentally broken. The Doctor officiates the ceremony. Immediately after they are married, Prem goes to confront the mob, while Umbreen and Hasna escape into what has become Pakistan. Prem is killed. Back in the present day, Yaz talks to her grandmother, finding out that Umbreen has no regrets at how her life turned out.

 

Context:

The children have got into a pattern of humouring their old man by occasionally watching with him a Doctor Who that's come up for the blog, usually on a Sunday afternoon. I'd run the random number search in advance and Demons of the Punjab was the next one to watch. I'd also run the search for the next few titles after that. When it came time to watch, on a Sunday in late February 2023, I decided that the Jodie Whittaker story (based on a distant memory of the last time I'd seen it a few years before) was a bit dull for the children. Instead we watched the first half of a classic series story that has a reputation for being comically terrible, and so I thought it would be more fun. I may have miscalculated (it'll be blogged next after this, and you'll see the full ordeal that I put my poor kids through). The classic story was bad in a weary way; Demons of the Punjab (which I watched alone midweek from the Blu-ray) had a lot more energy.

First Time Round:

Watched on its debut BBC1 broadcast on Sunday 11th November 2018 with the whole family except the youngest (a girl of 6 years old at the time) as she'd taken against the show at that point for being too scary. Just under a week later, I was at the BFI for a screening of Earthshock to tie in with the Blu-ray box-set release of Peter Davison's first season (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details). I was accompanied by fan friend David, who commented at one point about the connection between what we were watching on the big screen and the most recently broadcast Doctor Who story, as both did something different with their end credit music to hammer home the emotion of the story's denouement (Earthshock plays the credits in silence, Demons reimagines the Doctor Who theme as something of a lament). I didn't know what he was talking about as I'd already forgotten all about the new Doctor Who episode I'd seen six days before. It clearly hadn't left that much of an impression on me.

Reaction:

Who's the protagonist of a Doctor Who story? Is it the Doctor, or the companion, or a new guest character who only appears in that story? The answer is that it can be all three, but the chances diminish as you progress through the three parts of the question. It's generally expected that the Doctor will be active and make a difference in the story because they are the title character. Less often, but regularly, a companion has the vehicle role, being the audience's proxy witnessing wonders, and maybe like us at our best saving the day now and then. If one is tuning in and seeing a story driven by some new character one's never seen in the series before, though, the obvious question is why do the Doctor and their friends need to be there at all? So, a story like Demons of the Punjab, where the protagonist is Prem, a character we know for less than 50 minutes of screen time, is an exception. But exceptions can be still be, well, exceptional. The central story of two brothers falling out over partition, with the younger one radicalised and wanting to block the elder's inter-faith marriage is emotionally resonant, and meets the very earliest educational remit of Doctor Who, illuminating a point in history new to many in the audience. It's not too polemical either; the rushed nature of the British plans for India's independence and the immediate consequences this had country-wide are there in the background if you want them, but the focus is on the foreground tale of familial responsibility and love.

Like most stories of this period, it looks amazing - the sun-kissed Spanish locations standing in for the Punjab are colourful, and the verious departments contributing to the production design create time and place effectively. Writer Vinay Patel in his first script for the programme produces something wonderful in the main plot. The characters are well defined in an economical fashion, and the guest cast ably translate what's on the page. Shane Zaza as Prem is effective in the lead (for this week only), but he is matched by Amita Suman as Umbreen, who appropriately as one of the star-crossed central couple earns her place in the spotlight next to him. The script is careful to give her character agency, rather than just be a complicating factor emblematic of a religious or political divide - she's a vivid, dynamic character in her own right. Hamsa Jeetooa plays Manish sensitively, one is not blocked from empathising, if not fully sympathising, with his radical point of view; his murderous and treacherous actions don't come from nowhere, and make one sad rather than angry as he is almost as much of a victim of circumstance as anyone else. Smaller guest roles are also handled with aplomb, with special mention to Leena Dhingra playing the older version of Yaz's indomitable Nani.

Mandip Gill as Yaz finally gets a bit more to do. With four regular characters in this period, stories are crowded, and at least one companion is usually superfluous to the plot. It's tended to be Yaz in the previous five stories since the character's introduction, so it's a nice change for a story to be built around her family. Most of what she has to do is just react wordlessly to events, but Gill does it well, with emotion but restraint. In fact, everyone in the regular cast can only react to events. It's built in to the story. Like in Rosa earlier in the year, the history being presented is too important and too recent for alien intervention. Imagine if the younger brother Manish was radicalised not by the people and the circumstances around him, but by some alien ray; it would be crass. So, what are the aliens and the Doctor to do? Patel decides to tuck them away in a harmless subplot: the Doctor misunderstands their nature at first, but then her investigations prove that they are benign. It's a bit of a sideshow, and could almost lift out completely without impacting the rest of the story, though it does set up a nice reversal (that it is Manish not them that has killed the holy man in an attempt to prevent his brother's wedding). The Doctor then gets to officiate the wedding herself, which is cute.

A flaw with the alien subplot, though, is that the Thijarians are set up as having worked all through time and space on their mission to honour the fallen; this being so, it seems like an almighty coincidence that they manage to get themselves spotted twice, and both times by the same human. It's teased at first as of possible significance when there's still a mystery about the aliens, but once the truth is revealed it turns out to definitely to be only an almighty coincidence. One could retcon it that Prem's destined for death, so the Thijarians don't mind allowing him a peek, but it isn't played like that in the moment. It also wouldn't explain how the Doctor sees the aliens at the site of the sadhu's demise. One doesn't want to pull on this thread too much as things might unravel: for people who were supposedly dying alone, they sure seem to have a lot of people around. I think all of this can be forgiven, though, when at the end Prem is left on his own to die and the Thijarians come to him, then his holographic face joins the thousands of others in their ship representing the previously unrecognised dead. A big emotional surge ties everything together at least at the 'feels' level. It's not something the show could get away with every week, but as a one-off it works.

Connectivity:

Both Demons of the Punjab and The Woman Who Lived are adventures in Earth history that involve a tragedy impacting a woman known to the Doctor and/or their companion.

Deeper Thoughts:

The History of Historicals. As most people know, Doctor Who's very earliest stories tended to oscillate between those exploring Earth's past and those set in the future with strange, strange creatures. (There was also the occasional 'sideways' story exploring a strange concept that didn't quite align to either of the 'back' or 'forward' types, but they were rare enough to forget about for today.) What people don't necessarily remember - even possibly some people who later made the show - is that this format didn't really work, and certainly didn't last. There is ample evidence from the start that audiences didn't care for the historical stories nearly as much as anything that featured alien monsters. The recent Blu-ray box set of the second season of the programme, containing the stories that aired from October 1964 to July 1965, is a reminder if one were needed that the production team started to tweak the formula as early as one year in. The historicals of the first season (adventures with cavemen, Marco Polo, Aztecs, and spies during the period following the French revolution) are a full 50% of the season, and all played it pretty straight. The following year, though, it is four stories in before there's a historical setting, and it is definitely not played straight. The Romans is experimental for the treatment of material in a comedic fashion, and also it features the first ever scene of an extra-temporal influence creating history as we know it, with the Doctor inadvertently planting the idea of setting Rome ablaze.

The next historical story, The Crusade, is the only other 'pure' historical of the year (I'll get onto the concept of purity in this context in a moment). The final two stories of the season would revolutionise the use of history in the programme. The Chase was the first to show that other alien creatures than Gallifreyans can time travel to Earth's past (though it was restricted to just the Daleks initially). This story - a peripatetic adventure that takes in many locations, most futuristic and/or alien - sees the Doctor and Daleks briefly make a stop on the Marie Celeste in the 1800s, causing the crew to abandon ship. This was another 'explanation for historical event is time travelling aliens' story beat as seen in The Romans, and this would become a regular trope of this kind of story in subsequent years. Following directly on after The Chase, The Time Meddler is the first full story using a setting of Earth's past as a backdrop for the Doctor tussling with an out of this world problem (in this case, a meddling time traveller of his own race with their own TARDIS). With this quick one-two at the end of its second season, Who gained the 'pseudo-historical' story type, as it came to be known by fans later. This is as opposed to a pure historical that contains no elements unknown to history, except for the Doctor and friends.

Like many mini-genres created in the Hartnell period, when Doctor Who was trying out new story structures every week, the pseudo-historical was used sparingly at first. The Daleks and the Monk from The Time Meddler would appear together in an ancient Egypt section of the Dalek Master Plan story in season three. Mostly, though, the past-set stories were still pure; a good few used humour like The Chase, and then there was a short run where they were not trying to recreate history for its own sake but sampling classic adventure book texts (like Treasure Island in The Smugglers, or Kidnapped in The Highlanders). After that, from early on in the fourth season, that was your lot. There would be a rare pseudo historical (Daleks in the Victorian era in the last story of that season The Evil of the Daleks, for example) throughout the rest of the 1960s and 70s, nowhere near the every other story frequency of the very earliest period of Doctor Who. And the idea of having a story that just depicted history without any monsters or sci-fi was gone for ever. Well, very nearly. Obviously none of these fan terms is officially defined anywhere, but some online wags have interpreted a pure historical very literally as "no aliens except the Doctor" meaning they can claim stories like Thin Ice and Legend of the Sea Devils (where the monstrous creatures are confirmed as or likely to be indigenous) as fitting the bill. I'm assuming this is just a bit of fun, and nobody really believes there were giant fish creatures in the Thames during the London frost fairs, nor reptile pirates in the 19th century.

From the 1980s to the present day, the frequency of historical stories has increased for certain periods, maybe, as mentioned above, because someone in a production role had a vague idea that regular historical stop-overs were expected. In Peter Davison's first year, which has markedly more trips into history than the seasons surrounding it (to the beginning of the universe, the 1600s, the 1920s, and Earth circa the Jurassic period), there was even one pure historical, the first and last (to date) after the mid-60s. This was Black Orchid, but an examination of that story will show that it uses the visual grammar of a Doctor Who monster story to tease the audience and keep them interested. Plus, it's only two episodes long, very brief in classic Doctor Who terms: consciously or subconsciously, those making that story didn't want to risk challenging the audience's expectations for long. Some fans still hanker for a similar experiment again. Probably, the nearest the show will ever come was in the first Jodie Whittaker series of which Demons of the Punjab was part. It's not quite alternating frequency, but three out of ten of the season were set in the past and the stories were unabashedly exploring that history, mostly without too many sci-fi trappings getting in the way. In Demons of the Punjab, the monsters are a red herring and a distraction; in Rosa, the villain is just a racist white bloke from the future - he's more emblem than antagonist. The reason I don't think the show will go further is what was touched upon elsewhere in the blog post above: without monsters to fight, and with history respected and unchangeable, there's nothing left for the Doctor and companions to do but be tourists.

 

In Summary:

An interesting and important story, but it's not really a Doctor Who story as the Doctor doesn't (can't) have anything to do except experience a historical in the sun: a holiday in someone else's misery.

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.

The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

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

Plot:

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

Context:

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

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

Connectivity: 

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

Rank ol' bolox.