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Tag: Graham

Spiders, Families, and Other Sticky Topics

Review of Arachnids in the UK
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

This episode is not for arachnophobes. Straight up—if spiders squick you out, skip this one. Do Not Pass “Go,” Do Not Collect $200.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

If you can handle spiders, well… It’s still plenty creepy. There’s something primordial that just gets at one’s brainstem when something is crawling rapidly toward you with purpose, especially when it has many legs. As usual, though, the creatures are just a convenient (or inconvenient, depending on your perspective) backdrop for a deeper story.

This time that story is nominally about the greed and egoism of a man who is such an obvious analog for the current US President that they actually had to use said President’s name in the dialog in order to maintain deniability. The parallel actually made it hard for me to watch whenever that guy was on screen (that and the fact that the actor will forever be Mr. Big to me, though that actually worked relatively well in context).

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Hitting It Out of the Parks

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

I’ve managed so far to stay unspoiled for Series Eleven; I don’t even know the names of the next episodes until I start poking around the BBC website looking for details of the current one. So my first inkling of what was coming for episode 3 was its Next Time trailer. It made me nervous.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

I wasn’t nervous because they were going to look at the beginnings of the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s—quite the opposite; I love a historical. But it has been the habit in Doctor Who to depict the real events of history as being caused by the Doctor, either through direct action (e.g., The Visitation) or through her influence (e.g., giving words and ideas to Shakespeare or Christie). I didn’t want to see Rosa Parks’s very real, very human bravery be cheapened by implying she wouldn’t have acted as she did without the Doctor arriving on the scene.

I thus spent my first viewing watching with a constant underlying tension, always fearing that some major faux pas lurked around the next page-turn of the script. I shouldn’t have worried, given that Malorie Blackman, the first woman of color ever to write for Doctor Who, was the primary writer for this episode (a fact that escaped me until a subsequent viewing). She hit it out of the park.

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Intellect Over Brute Strength

Review of The Ghost Monument
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

If I hadn’t bought into Whittaker as the Doctor after her first episode, I would have within the opening minutes of this one.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

As part of our cliffhanger resolution, we find the Doctor on the bridge of a ship arguing with its pilot in tones so familiar we don’t even need to hear or comprehend the words fully to get the sense of the conversation in progress: something dire is happening, she’s trying to convince the pilot to take a particular course of action to prevent a tragedy, and he’s wondering where this random person who showed up out of nowhere gets off telling him how to fly his own goddamn ship. It’s such classic Doctor fare as to be cliché. And yet it did my heart a world of good to watch that cliché play out—all the way to her casually stepping out of the wreckage with a witty remark.

Yes. She’s the Doctor.

I suspect winning over the skeptical long-term fans was high on Chibnall’s list of desired outcomes for this episode. He certainly gave it the old college try with such blatant nods to the Classic era as the Doctor’s causal use of Venusian aikido and her exclamation at the end of the episode, “You’ve redecorated!” (even if the following line was a predictable subversion of that trope). I don’t know whether or not he’s succeeding, but so far I’m happy to go along for the ride.

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The Doctor Is In

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Review of The Woman Who Fell to Earth
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I really wish I could remember the exact moment—I wasn’t taking notes during that first viewing—when one of my daughters felt moved to declare her verdict: “Yep, she’s the Doctor!”


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

I think that, no matter their view on changing up the actor’s gender, that question gets at the crux of what fans have really been especially anxious about for this particular regeneration: would the Doctor still feel like the Doctor? The answer we got after this opening episode of Jodie Whittaker’s first series was, as far as I’m concerned, a resounding “yes.”

It always takes me a while to warm to a new Doctor (the exception being Capaldi, whom I was so ready to love going in that he was the Doctor to me from the moment those attack eyebrows first appeared). Even though I’ve been eagerly anticipating Whittaker for months, it was a tough change even for someone as favorably inclined as me to wrap my head around. But my kiddo is right: she’s the Doctor. She showed us so over and over again throughout the episode as both she and we recognized some parts of herself and not others.

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Confession #116: I Dig the New TARDIS Team

In the past week or so, several (shall we say) less-than-awesome things have been making news in Whovian circles (e.g., Nicholas Pegg getting fired from DWM, the public revelation that someone well-known in the US con community is a sexual predator, and the death of Dudley Simpson). It made me glad I had some happier news to discuss here. Sometimes it pays to be late to the game…

I’m referring, of course, to the two-and-a-half-week-old news that there will once again be a crowded TARDIS when Thirteen begins her tenure at the controls. In a press release on the official website, the BBC announced that there would be three regular cast members accompanying the Doctor on her travels (as well as someone in a “returning [recurring] role”).

Even putting aside the fact that I think a larger cast can make for more interesting character interactions, and thus better stories overall, I love the way that it recalls TARDIS crews of old. When we first met the Doctor fifty-odd years ago, he traveled with his granddaughter and two humans who eventually became friends; Susan, Ian, and Barbara remain one of my favorite TARDIS teams.

Similarly, I know a lot of folks who became fans during the Fifth Doctor’s run. He, too, traveled with a posse (Nyssa, Tegan, and Adric). I can’t help but think that reminding those fans of their favorite era by stuffing the TARDIS with a variety of friends for the Doctor might tempt them to give this new version of the show a try, even if they’ve been more reluctant of late.

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