Bombshell

Review of Fugitive of the Judoon
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

In Jodie Whitaker’s first series, I often felt that showrunner Chris Chibnall was playing it safe, not going too far outside the fan comfort zone in his storytelling while fandom got used to a casting choice that definitely stretched some fans’ limits. Not so this series.

If by some miracle you’ve neither seen the episode yourself nor been spoiled, then by all means stop reading now and go watch it. Immediately. As someone who managed to avoid spoilers, I can attest to the fact that Fugitive of the Judoon is worth watching cold.

I’ll admit that I was actually a little surprised by the magnitude of the reveal. Given the show’s history with teasing news (like the hype before they announced that Richard E. Grant would be playing a guest role), I was unimpressed with the publicity tweets leading up to this week. When they teased “Thought the Master returning was big? You won’t believe what happens this week!” I rolled my eyes.

But writer Vinay Patel (Demons of the Punjab), along with Chibnall, who also got billing as a writer for the episode, caught my attention and kept it the whole way through, ratcheting up the suspense until the key moment. And then I was kicking myself for not catching on sooner.

Like any well-crafted reveal, Patel & Chibnall left a trail of breadcrumbs that are easy to follow on repeated viewing. In fact, one thing I really enjoyed watching with that hindsight was all the parallels between the behavior of Lee and that of Martha in Human Nature / The Family of Blood. For that matter, Ruth Clayton sounds an awful lot like John Smith when she tells our Doctor, “I’m not that person. I don’t want to be that person.” Alas, in the end she doesn’t have a choice.

That is, of course, all to the good for us, because Ruth!Doctor is fabulous! I mean, I was excited when Jodie’s casting was announced, but what I really, really wanted was a woman of color as the Doctor. I am beyond thrilled that Chibnall has beat everyone to the punch by slipping another new Doctor into the canon (or at least as canon as Doctor Who gets) this way.

Apparently my daughters felt the same. One of them quite literally bellowed “YES!” when Ruth said, “Hello. I’m the Doctor.” Cue rampant fan speculation.

I will admit that I spent the rest of the episode waiting for the other shoe to drop. How is this awesome twist not actually as awesome? I wondered. I wasn’t alone in positing that she is from some alternate reality or timeline, or in some way not “really” the Doctor. But Chibnall insists that’s not the case. According to The Mirror:

“The important thing to say is – she is definitively the Doctor,” he explained. “There’s not a sort of parallel universe going on, there’s no tricks.

“Jo Martin is the Doctor, that’s why we gave her the credit at the end which all new Doctors have the first time you see them. John Hurt got that credit.”

In the same article, Chibnall says that Capt. Jack—the other big surprise of the episode—won’t return this series, though Chibnall “hopes” Jack will get to meet the Thirteenth Doctor in person some day. I hope so, too!

I know that this whole Ruth thing has got a certain element of fandom up in arms, but I’m excited by it. Chibnall’s as big a fanboy as RTD or Moffat. He knows the show’s history, and he is playing in the sandbox just as thoroughly as his predecessors, taking what they’ve done and extending it. So let me take what we know so far and share some of my own hypotheses about Ruth!Doctor.

First and foremost, Ruth!Doctor’s TARDIS has taken the shape of the phone box, which means she’s a post-Hartnell incarnation. The design of the control room looks very ’70s, though the roundels and central column also had similar designs in the ’60s and early ’80s. That’s a pretty broad range, and given that the Doctor is known to redecorate on a whim, doesn’t yield many clues.

I’ve seen some fans say that since Ruth!Doctor didn’t recognize the sonic screwdriver, then she had to be between Troughton’s and Pertwee’s Doctors, since the latter had a sonic but the former did not. Given that Troughton’s Doctor was actually the first to use a sonic screwdriver (as an actual screwdriver, no less, in Fury from the Deep), I find that reasoning suspect. The conclusion that she comes between Troughton and Pertwee, however, still has some merit.

The most compelling argument for this placement lies in the Doctor’s regenerations. To begin, we never actually saw the Doctor regenerate from Troughton into Pertwee. The Second Doctor was sentenced to regeneration by the Time Lords at the end of The War Games, but doesn’t appear on screen with a new face until Spearhead from Space. We don’t actually know what happened to the Doctor in the intervening time, nor even how much time passed between the two stories.

Further, I have never bought the argument that “Handy,” the metacrisis Doctor from Journey’s End, counted as an actual regeneration. Even with Hurt’s War Doctor added to the mix, then, Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor was only the twelfth incarnation—unless you insert another Doctor into the sequence. Including Ruth!Doctor solves that problem nicely.

Stepping back from this huge plot twist for a moment, I wanted to take some time to give some love to other elements of Fugitive of the Judoon. For instance, I love the way Thirteen keeps trying to get in her three-part rhyme: “Judoon platoon near the moon”; “your platoon of Judoon near… that… lagoon.” And the lighthouse that is so very Horror of Fang Rock. And the snark-and-forth between the two of them (“Is there a word for how stupid you are?” “‘Doctor’?”). Even the fact that the Judoon captain intoned, “Language acquired: Human” as if there were only one language on the planet—as science fiction is prone to do on non-Terran planets—was delightful.

Of course the fact that all of this is leading up to some larger Plot Point is one of the most exciting parts of the episode for me. Jack’s messages to “Beware the lone Cyberman” and “Don’t give it what it wants” are dire and foreboding enough. But add in the Doctor’s musings that “Time is swirling around me. The Master, Captain Jack Harkness, Ruth. Something’s coming for me. I can feel it,” and you’ve got a recipe for an epic narrative climax.

I desperately hope the show can deliver.