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.

Fugitive of the Judoon

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

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

Context:

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

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

Orphan 55

Chapter The 245th, in which someone called Benni finds himself at something of a crossroads.

Plot:

The Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz go on holiday in an unspecified future year to Tranquility Spa. This is a resort within a protective forcefield on an 'orphan' planet, i.e. one that wars and ecological disasters have rendered uninhabitable. This one is Orphan 55, but who knows what planet it could possibly have been in the past before wars and ecological disasters? It's literally impossible to guess. The resort's head of security Kane abandoned her daughter years ago to earn money through this enterprise. The daughter, Bella, now grown up and posing as a holidaymaker, sabotages the resort with a computer virus to get back at Kane. This lets in a Dreg creature from the wastelands outside. The Dregs are the survivors of the race that used to inhabit Orphan 55, who've evolved to breathe in carbon dioxide and therefore survive the inhospitable climate. Most of the holidaymakers and staff are killed before the Doctor can protect them. A few remain alive including Kane and Bella, and an elderly couple, Benni and Vilma. Benni is kidnapped by the Dregs, and the others go off to save him. Their vehicle crashes and they have to escape on foot trying to reach a tunnel that will take them back to safety. Many are killed before they can reach there, including Benni, and many are killed in the tunnel including Vilma. The Doctor and friends find Cyrillic script on the tunnel walls indicating that they are in Siberia. Orphan 55 is Earth - what a surprising development! Back at the resort, the Doctor rigs up an escape teleport and gets the fam and a couple of other people to safety. Kane and Bella go down fighting, side by side. Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor lectures everybody on ecological sustainability.

Context:

I'm still not attempting to interest my family in watching Doctor Who stories for the blog. So, I sat down to watch this on my own one day, with the Blu-ray (from the series 12 box set) in the player. Just before I pressed play, I thought I'd check the news on my phone. Long-term readers of the blog will know that I always do the - possibly annoying, sorry I can't help it - running gag of adding 'Hi Mum!' in brackets every time I refer to long-term readers of the blog; also, long-term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I am a UK parliamentary politics junkie. The day I'd chosen to watch Orphan 55 was the 19th October 2022, and there was more UK parliamentary politics on that day than occurs in months when the country's governance is more stable. I was hooked on the news until late - refreshing the page on twitter, then a news site, then back to twitter - to see the latest updates on the chaos. I finally watched the Doctor Who story the following evening - not that the 20th October 2022 was exactly uneventful either as it saw the resignation of the UK's Prime Minister Liz Truss (see Deeper Thoughts below for more details). 

First Time Round:

Watched this story live with the whole fam when it first went out in the UK on BBC1, Sunday 12th January 2020. The buzz of the big festive special / two-part series opener Spyfall, with its many twists and revelations, was only just subsiding. The next - quieter, regular, one-part - story was always going to be a bit of a come down. I didn't mind it on first watch, though, and the younger two of the kids (aged 7 and 10 at the time) were scared by the Dreg creatures. It must have been doing some things right. I saw a bit of a hostile internet reaction when I checked immediately after broadcast, but there's always some of that no matter what Doctor or era one's watching. You can't please all the people online all the time, and it would be foolish to try. It was later and gradually that I became more aware, over the years between then and now, of the poor reputation the story had (more on that immediately below).

Reaction:

Orphan 55 is regarded unfavourably by fandom as a whole. It's hard to say for sure where it would sit in a series-wide, 1963-to-date Doctor Who Magazine fan poll, as there hasn't been one since the story was broadcast (maybe they'll do one for the 60th anniversary next year, perhaps), but it's a good bet that it would be nearer the bottom than the top. Aside from a lot of internet digs as mentioned above, there's some hard data out there to indicate this too. It came bottom of the magazine's series 12 poll in 2020. More interestingly, there's the audience appreciation index recorded after it went out: it scored 77, the second lowest for any episode shown since 2005 to that point (2006's Love and Monsters being the lowest scorer at 76). Some stories that aren't popular with fans got perfectly respectable appreciation index stories, meaning that the general audience probably didn't notice any significant difference to whatever was shown the previous week. An example would be Fear Her, a story hated by a significant section of fandom, but which scored 83, same as - amongst others - Tooth and Claw, a much more fan-respected story from the same season. Orphan 55, though, seems unappreciated by everyone, fan or not. When you watch it, though, it rattles along. Stuff happens without any moments that drag. It's perhaps not the most original stuff, comprising a lot of things that other Doctor Who stories and genre works do (base under siege, small rag tag group being picked off one by one, underlying message). Being fairly generic is far from unique for a Doctor Who story though. So, what exactly needs fixing in Orphan 55. And, is it the same things for fans as it is for a general audience?

Let's start with what works, and there's a hell of a lot of it. These things are subjective, of course, but I think anyone would have to accept that the Dregs are an effective monster design. Creating new memorable monster races didn't seem to be a priority for the Jodie Whittaker era, with returning creatures from Who's back catalogue more often featuring, as well as single alien or human foes, and everyday creatures turned monstrous (spiders, birds, and on one unforgettable occasion, a frog). The only other new foe from this era that was as effective to my mind was the P'ting, and that's more cute than monstrous. The Dregs might not be as durable as post-2005 creations like the Ood or the Weeping Angels, but they were new, well-designed and scary, and the scenes with them in the story are effective. The location work too is exemplary. The Auditorio De Tenerife, location for the Tranquility Spa exteriors, is a wonderful building and well used, but the scenes in the desolate grey landscape outside the forcefield are just as visually striking. The old Russian metro tunnels, and the spa interiors are perfect too. It's hard to know what's location or studio, such are the grand spaces being created. The music is good, the effects are good, and I'd say the script is good too. Writer Ed Hime is, as mentioned above, doing something a lot more traditional than his work for the previous season, It Takes You Away, but it's full of incident and the dialogue is good. Maybe there's some minor pacing improvements that could be made, a tiny bit of material could be chopped out of the climactic section to make it move faster, but that's it (and a lot of stories, including those in the same season that were better appreciated, have worse pacing). There's one other script change that could be made, but we'll get on to that later.

The characters we're presented with are all fine on paper, and again they are perfectly in keeping with the genre. This era with its too many regulars does warp horror / disaster narratives - every rag-tag band of survivors being picked off one by one has to include four people the audience knows will be safe. Orphan 55, though, features a decent number of distinct guest characters, and kills a good few of them off to ramp up the tension. This is possible because of a plot hole where, for no offered nor obvious explanation, all the surviving characters go off on the quest to find Benni. There's no need for all of them to be there, except to provide Dreg fodder, but it's forgivable as it makes for a more dramatic middle section. Besides, if they'd split up it would be just as much playing up to the genre formula. No, the problem is that in some places the characters are not realised well (the green wigs of James Buckley's maintenance man and his son, holiday rep Hyph3n's look that is a bit too similar to Barf from Spaceballs) or not performed strongly enough (Julia Foster as Vilma, who struggles to make her despair and loss credible, and whose every cry of "Benni!" elicits humour rather than pathos). This is enough to make the piece as a whole seem embarrassing, and that is the kiss of death for a fan's enjoyment of a Doctor Who story. We fans, you see, set a lot of emotional store by a programme that many other people find silly. As such, it's much easier to cope with a story being credible and well made but boring, rather than contain anything that might make us cringe in embarrassment. It's drilled in to us by many memories of watching episodes with less invested family members who might laugh at the bits they're supposed to find impressive or scary. Change a couple of costuming choices, and recast one actor, and it would be fine. Many of the performances (particularly the always reliable Jodie Whittaker, and Laura Fraser as Kane) are strong.

Did some of those low audience appreciation scores come from young fans whose Dads or Mums were guffawing at the sight of the bloke from the Inbetweeners in a silly wig? Maybe. I'd say, though, that it was a different reason that made a more general audience take against the show, and that is the preachiness of the ending. This is the required script change I mentioned earlier: cut out most of the Doctor's ending speech, and let the story itself convey the message. This might be helped by seeding in earlier on that we're witnessing only a potential future for Earth. Maybe have something wibbly happen when the Doctor and friends first teleport to the resort that can later explain why they have moved into just one possible time branch, and it's therefore not too late change Earth's fate. With those tweaks, I think that the story would be better thought of by fans. As for whether it would have got a better appreciation score from the more general audience, it's not easy to say. A few subsequent stories in the 2020 run got scores almost as low as Orphan 55, and everything has been in the 70s from Revolution of the Daleks to date (though note The Power of the Doctor's score hasn't been published at the time of writing). Most episodes of Flux performed the same as or worse than Orphan 55 (the third chapter 'Once, Upon Time' achieved a new low for post 2005 Who of 75). Perhaps the general audience is tired of Doctor Who in its present form. Perhaps these numbers don't matter, particularly when the future of the show is assured. Many Patrick Troughton episodes that are now looked upon as classics were rated poorly at the time and could have meant cancellation back then, but the series carried on and achieved increasing popularity. If the audience wants a change, there's definitely a change coming - see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more details (but beware spoilers).

Connectivity: 

There aren't any obvious connections I can see between Orphan 55 and Extremis. Maybe this is pushing it, but both contain the Doctor and friends with others trapped in a 'fake' environment, beyond which lies death.

Deeper Thoughts:

Two Yorkshire women with blonde bobs leave their jobs in the same week. It's all random, but with luck another Jodie Whittaker story will come up to be blogged in the few weeks before 2022's end. I'll use that to reflect on Whittaker's (and showrunner Chris Chibnall's) era as a whole, and its culmination in The Power of the Doctor. For now, it's too soon for that; I'm still processing the events of that final feature length episode (which has just been shown at time of writing). My immediate reaction to The Power of the Doctor in and of itself? Like The Day Today's Crisis Correspondent Spartacus Mills, I can't summarise it in a word, and if I had to summarise it in a sound it would be "Wuuaaaaaaah!!!!". (If you haven't seen the story yet, then you might find the rest of this section too spoilerific, definitely the second paragraph - be warned!) I've now seen it twice. On first watch, the surprises were all the things that were included (Like him! And her! And them! And all them too!). On second watch, the most striking things were those that were missing. It defied my expectations, for example, in not picking up the Timeless child / Division arc at all. The Doctor's decision at the end of Flux didn't seem final at the time, but looking back it's a good ending to that plotline: the Doctor decides that the memories stolen from her aren't necessary for her to be the Doctor she currently is, so she locks them away. If Chibnall wasn't going to pick up that plotline in subsequent episodes, he may as well have made it more final and have her throw the pocket watch into the heart of a sun or something, rather than hide it in the TARDIS (future writers motivated to revisit the Division, if there ever there were to be any, would still have been able to write their way out of it). The other thing that was missing was any direct reference to Yaz's romantic feelings for the Doctor. To me it played as an emotional farewell of a long-term friend, but not someone with a - possibly reciprocated - crush. When this had been such a focus of scenes in the last story Legend of the Sea Devils, it stood out as an omission.

[****SPOILER WARNING; seriously, don't read this paragraph if you haven't seen The Power of the Doctor; if you were happy with the level of reveals in the first one, the next para should be fine if you want to skip to that.****] Some online commentators said the parting of Yaz and the Doctor was too abrupt, but it seemed okay to me. It would have been better if Yaz had been allowed a bit more say in the decision to part (she knows the person she loves is going to change into someone completely different, which is a reasonable motivation). The Doctor just says, "I think I need to do this next bit alone" and that's that. As any long-term fan knows, this is not always true. Yaz is now in touch with previous companions; it'll be a bit embarrassing if Tegan lets on to her that she was allowed to watch the Doctor change when she'd only known him for five minutes. That quibble aside, though, the regeneration scene itself was a triumph. Good last words, a beautiful location, nice effects work, and a final surprise. Interestingly for yours truly, a Doctor Who fan and politics nerd as mentioned above, the changeover in the show mirrored what was going on with the changeover of Prime Ministers of the UK government. Just like in Doctor Who, a woman was leaving the role, and there was a question in everyone's mind about whether we'd see a younger man of colour take over, or whether the guy who had done the job before would instead be back again. Superficially, the Conservative party took the more progressive choice; but, it wasn't much of a choice, really. At almost the exact same moment as David Tennant reappeared as the Doctor, former Prime Minister Alexander Johnson MP published a statement bowing out, unable to get sufficient support to unite his party and provide stable leadership for the country. Tennant, needless to say, has a lot more support from fandom. It's a great thing that someone without white skin can finally be Prime Minister of the UK, and another finally play Doctor Who. We just have to wait a little longer for Ncuti Gatwa, that's all. According to the press release, that wait is until the 'festive season' of next year, with Tennant appearing in three episodes before that in November 2023 for the 60th anniversary.

The day after The Power of the Doctor was shown, Rishi Sunak became leader of the Conservative party, and the following day he became Prime Minister. This means that, although she had stepped down as leader of her party for a brief leadership contest, Liz Truss was still Prime Minister when The Power of the Doctor went out. That didn't stop a large number of people online posting the un-fact that she was the first PM since the series started not to have an episode of Doctor Who broadcast during her time in charge of the country. It was thrown out there by all manner of different people, and thrown back corrected by just as many detail-conscious nerds. The truth never gets in the way of a good meme, of course; what's more interesting is that it hadn't yet happened before Truss, even though there were long periods when the show was off the air. From Douglas-Home in 1963 to Thatcher in 1989, and from Blair in 2005 to Cameron in 2016, the show was on for a number of weeks a year, and the PM didn't change too frequently. In between those two periods, John Major was in power when the Paul McGann TV movie was shown in 1996. From 2016, PM's periods in charge have got shorter just as more and longer gaps between Doctor Who showings have become normal. If those trends continue, it's bound to happen sooner or later, but it didn't for Truss. This was a miraculous stroke of luck, as Truss was only in power for 50 days, and Power of the Doctor just snuck in under the wire, two days before she was out of office. Rishi Sunak needs to still be in post in November 2023 to avoid being the first Prime Minister to suffer this trivial but nonetheless ignominious fate. Given the difficulties facing the country, and the engulfing chaos of the Conservative Party that's perhaps only been shoved a small distance below the surface temporarily, I wouldn't bet against it. The good news is that when it said goodbye to its recent blonde woman in the lead role, Doctor Who was in a much better state. Though time will tell whether this is true for the UK's ruling party, it's also already clear that Doctor Who's future is in safe hands...

In Summary:

It's maybe time for this poor unloved Orphan to be adopted by fandom, as it isn't nearly as bad as its reputation; in fact, it's only a couple of tweaks away from greatness. 

The Haunting of Villa Diodati

Chapter The 232nd, presents Mary Shelly's Cyberman.

Plot:

The Doctor, Graham, Yaz and Ryan visit Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva on the stormy night in 1816 that Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and others told ghost stories that led to the creation of Mary Shelley's ground-breaking novel Frankenstein. The fam are under strict instructions not to drop any hints or otherwise influence her and just to soak up the atmosphere, but - who would have thought it - events are in play that involve a half-converted Cyberman who's a bit like Frankenstein's monster. Percy Shelley, who's missing, hiding in the cellar, accidentally absorbed a Cyber computer / superweapon / globby blob thing, which the Cyberman has been pursuing through time. The auto-defences built in to the device, coupled with Shelley's mind, create various horror movie tropes in the house, which the fam and the other poets, writers and entourage get frightened by until they can find Percy. Graham also experiences some actual ghosts, nothing to do with the Cyberman plot, who make him a sandwich (this is not explained). Despite having been given a warning not to give the lone Cyberman what it wants, the Doctor extracts its prize to save Percy, and hands it over. The Cyberman disappears. The TARDIS team leave to track it down using coordinates that Percy wrote down during his time under the influence.

Context:

I watched the story on my own one summery evening on the BBC iplayer, through the interface of an Amazon firestick plugged into our old but luckily still reliable TV. I'm waiting for the right story to come along to tempt the children back to watching with me; they're not too fussed about Doctor Who at the moment. Frankly, the right story might be the one (or one of the ones?) being filmed at the moment for broadcast in 2023 as part of the new Russell T Davies showrunner era, or probably Jodie Whittaker's big finale later this year. It might not be an old one - the next story lined up for the blog is a black and white 1960s six-parter, so whenever it may be that they rekindle their enthusiasm for the good Doctor, it probably isn't going to be soon.

First Time Round:

I watched with the whole family on the Sunday night of this story's debut BBC1 transmission on 16th February 2020, at the beginning - if I remember rightly - of a week off for the kids' half-term. I can remember no details of that watch, but I remember that all through February there were rumblings in the wider world about a coronavirus that everyone was more and more worried about. Within a month, the UK would be in full lockdown, and in the interim circumstances dictated that I went to the most populous city within commuting distance (London), and used the associated overcrowded transport systems, about 40 times more frequently than I would have normally in any given month; a couple of weeks after The Haunting of Villa Diodati I was at the BFI for the screening of a Doctor animation (see here for more details) but there were also trips for a training course for the day job, other work events, going to shows with friends, and day trips with the family. I was lucky not to catch Covid (or at least, if I did, to get it asymptomatically - there was no test to check at that point). 

Reaction:

Obviously, contentious views are good for clicks, but that comes at a cost of coarsening our collective dialogue. As such, I always try to be kind, rigorous and thorough in my reactions to Doctor Who stories here. It might be more fun, and certainly would take up less time and energy, to just say of something "it was shit", but it's not very useful. I've probably come close occasionally to saying a particular disliked Doctor Who story is shit, but I hope I've fully expounded on my reasons for thinking so. I don't often disagree with the critical consensus just for the sake of it, either, and always try to explain my reasoning (as I did last time when admitting that, yes really, I think Time and the Rani is good). The Haunting of Villa Diodati is generally well thought of by fans as accurately as can be gauged from online commentary; writer Maxine Alderton is lauded (and was the only writer aside from showrunner Chris Chibnall to contribute to the following series when it was shortened as an impact of the Covid-19 pandemic); like that contribution to Flux, Village of the Angels, her series 12 story is big on horror, which tends to make a story popular with fans. In the Doctor Who Magazine series poll, it was mid-table - fourth out of eight, but it was beaten only by the big two-parter series opener and finale, plus mid-season twist episode Fugitive of the Judoon, which won the poll, and featured massive revelations and returns. I think it's fair to say that most fans like it; I am out of step with this feeling. I found the story utterly and totally unengaging, to such an extent that I can barely think of anything to say. Don't all cheer at once (!) as I will force myself over this mental block and put something into words.

It's a solid concept, the Doctor meeting Byron and the Shelleys on this famous night of horror stories, and them then getting caught up in a horror story of their own; the use of a Cyberman who's not as complete or finished as normal, so looks more like the reanimated creature of Mary's Modern Prometheus, is also good. Like any such narrative, the risk is that it robs the historical figure of agency, suggesting that their imagination needed a big prompt. The classic series did this in the story Timelash, giving a character only revealed at the end to be H. G. Wells the idea for a handful of his novels. At least here, the historical personages are depicted pretty accurately; in the classic series Doctor Who story, Wells was the bumbling comic relief. Bryon's not so bumbling but still is mostly there for the lighter moments, including lots of flirting with the Doctor. It raises a smile, and the guest performances are perfectly good throughout, as are the designs to evoke the period. It's most definitely competent, and directed well. I think the problem is focus. Perhaps because of the worries about a plot that suggests that a woman in the 1800s wouldn't be able to come up with Frankenstein on her own, the story doesn't lean in enough into the concept, to my mind. If one is going to do it, better to do it full-bloodedly. The lone Cyberman does not appear until halfway through the episode's running time. He should instead arrive right at the beginning, perhaps exhausted and needing to galvanise himself with electricity; the rest of the story should be the Doctor and Co with the Cyberman, trapped in the house, and in passing working through every Frankenstein's monster cliché before the reversal (which is there in story as it aired) that this is no figure of pathos but a vicious killer.

Instead of this, the script throws every haunted house trope imaginable into the mix for the first 25 minutes, excusing it with some technobabble about defence mechanisms that is within an skeleton's hair's breadth away from "it was all a dream". The animated skull and bony fingers turn out to be a collective hallucination, just like the nightmare scenario of the building folding in on itself, so one could walk and walk and never escape (it made me, as a long-term fan, think of the Peter Davison story Castrovalva, of course). Throughout all that, I just wanted the script to pick one horror scenario for the characters to be in, rather than bombard me with several. There wasn't any particular moment that worked as an effective scare either - it's atmospheric, but never frightening or even surprising. One of the scenarios thrown against the hallucinatory wall to see if it'll stick is Graham's mini-subplot where he sees dead people; in some ways this is the most effective part of the story: it's fun to watch Bradley Walsh giving a down-to-Earth performance amidst the strangeness, trying to find the toilet and moaning about being hungry. The script seems to be jokingly suggesting the ghosts he sees were real, but the defence mechanism explanation is so confused and confusing there's no reason they can't be hallucination too, and this undermines the humour. Toisin Cole as Ryan is having an off-day and his humorous dialogue falls a bit flat too. Once the Cyberman finally arrives, it doesn't really do anything of note; almost all the guest characters cannot die as history notes that they survived the night, so only a couple of servants get bumped off; the ante can't get upped. The end sees the protagonists and antagonist leaving to continue the story elsewhere, which leaves The Haunting of Villa Diodati seeming like so much set-up, but not much more.

Connectivity: 

Both The Haunting of Villa Diodati and Time and the Rani feature famous historical Earth figures whose brains are collectively affected because of a returning classic series baddie.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Netflix of Analogies. I've tried to be a little less political in these sections of the blog recently, more for the sake of my blood pressure than anything else, but long term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I very much dislike and disagree with the current Conservative government of the UK, the people that form that government, and their policies - if the drunken lurching from one half-baked reactionary slogan to another regressive tabloid headline can be called policy. At the time of writing, they are shaming my country by simultaneously granting themselves a flimsy legal cover for breaking international treaties while also recreating transportation, this time to Rwanda rather than Australia, and this time as punishment for the "crime" of seeking asylum at a time when the ruling party is unpopular and wants to feed red meat racism to the worst of its followers. It somehow makes it worse that they are as incompetent as they are vicious. By the time you read this, they will likely have stumbled on to something even worse. Compared to all that mess, and to every person impacted by the current cost of living crisis that their rabid posturing does nothing to alleviate, it probably seems churlish to concentrate on the vandalism they are doing in the area of broadcasting, but this is a blog about a TV show and I have to keep things vaguely on topic; plus, I think there's a sobering cautionary lesson to be learnt there.

Nadine Dorries, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, from various pronouncements she has made in her time in post so far, has made two things very clear; first, that she - on behalf of her party - wants to do away with public service broadcasting; what other impact can there be from privatising Channel 4 and getting rid of the licence fee that funds the BBC, two things she has explicitly stated were going to happen on her watch? Second, she has made it clear that she is not qualified for the position of Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. I'm trying to be kind, but it's hard to do so when watching Dorries's slow motion vandalism play out: she is cultured only in the same way sour milk is. Channel 4 is doing very well at the moment, and the recent consultation on Channel 4's future had over 50,000 responses from members of the public and more than 96% of respondents did not want the channel to be privatised; Dorries reversed this in a recent select committee appearance, claiming that 96% were in favour; this was either deliberate misinformation or bumbling - neither option reflects well on her. The government's own summary of that consultation, which is available online here, uses many weasel words to explain why it isn't going to take any notice of the responses and is going to privatise anyway. It would have been more concise to write "We can do what we bloody well like, and we don't give a toss for the public good", but corrupt administrations are never known for their directness. I wonder why they went to the bother of having the consultation at all.

The summary admits that Channel 4 ain't broke but is still going to be fixed, thus "The government recognises Channel 4’s success in delivering on its remit and its current financial performance. However, we cannot be short-termist in our thinking and must consider the longer-term outlook for Channel 4." This long-term outlook bullshit means that imaginary risks and opportunities that might come along in the future can be conjured up to justify anything. Any populist government will have trumped up (pun intended) threats and enemies they inflate in rhetoric that they can say they are protecting "the people" from; it feels like another step towards the abyss, though, to go from exaggerating current known situations to imagining and not even specifying hypothetical future risks, and burning down anything with that justification. What is particularly galling is the comparisons that are often made, including by Dorries herself in a tweet, to Netflix. The thrust is that Channel 4 and the BBC have to be able to compete with Netflix and similar subscription-funded streaming services. Watching the Villa Diodati story on the BBC iplayer is a similar experience to watching, say, Stranger Things on Netflix, and that similarity allows this con of false equivalence. Netflix does not provide news for a start, let alone radio stations and local broadcast journalism, and online services and all the many other things that the BBC provides. Even more galling about the comparison related to Channel 4 is that while the latter - as even the government concedes - is in rude financial health, the same cannot be said of Netflix.

The current and future existential threats to Netflix are far from imaginary. It lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022, and its own forecasts predict it will lose millions more in the next few months. When this news was public, the share price took a dive. Yet, it is still the UK governments analogy of choice. Months after those bad results, the government Health Secretary chillingly said "We Have A Blockbuster Health System In A Netflix Age". No matter that in a subsequent press briefing, a spokesperson - possibly too young to remember Blockbuster video - seemed to think he'd meant 'blockbuster' as a positive, and no matter that Netflix is currently not an exemplar of an institution to which anyone should necessarily aspire, the meaning was clear. The NHS, another UK public service, is at risk of being replaced by a subscription service. As Russell T Davies said on this topic, on the BAFTA red carpet accompanied by Ncuti Gatwa on the day of the announcement that Gatwa was taking over as the Doctor, if you don't want the sell off of Channel 4, or the removal of the licence fee, "Go and vote differently". Such an action has to be good for the NHS's chances too. The trouble is, how much damage is this government going to do before we get the opportunity to vote them out?

In Summary:

Not good enough to be this century's Castrovalva, maybe this century's Timelash?