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The Power of Fan Service

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Review of The Power of the Doctor
Warning: This review may contain episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

There was nothing subtle about The Power of the Doctor. It was pure fan service, from start to finish. Some of it we knew about beforehand, and some of it came as a surprise—again and again—but it was blatantly obvious that showrunner Chris Chibnall wanted to check off every single item on his bucket list on the way out.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2022 BBC

For the most part, I was happy to go along for the ride. Only in the final thirty seconds or so did I balk. (Yes, we’ll talk about that more, but under the cut.) It made me want to use my full-on Mom Voice: I’m not upset with you; just disappointed.

But let’s back up for a while, and leave that moment for later. First, let’s talk about the bonkers hour-and-a-half of Jodie Whittaker’s last episode in the lead role. This was Chris Chibnall’s ultimate fanfic moment; he threw in every plot thread and character he could think of (and book), and wrote a huge fix-it fic.

For those who may not be familiar with fanfic (I am only peripherally so, as I don’t read fic myself, though my kids do), the biggest purpose of the genre—as far as I can tell—is to tell the stories with beloved characters that the fan writer really wanted to see/read in the original media property, but was never given. (In other words, all of modern Who is basically fanfic of Classic Who, show-run by Classic fans.) And one sub-genre of fanfic is the “fix-it fic,” in which the fan writer fixes something that they felt was inherently wrong with the original.

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Watch Out for the Kitchen Sink

Review of Flux: Once, Upon Time
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Regardless of one’s opinion on how the series-long story as a whole is shaping up, one can’t deny that Flux is an ambitious project. And I appreciate the fact that every episode so far has felt like a different beast.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2021 BBC

At the beginning, we had a “meet the new Companion in the midst of an Earth-based crisis” episode. Then we got an alien historical. Now it’s a futuristic mind-f***. Whatever the flavor-of-the-week is, it’s been different than the week before.

I am also impressed, as a fellow storyteller, at how Chibnall has woven so damn many plot threads together. After last week, there were only two from the first episode that still needed to get tied back in, but before we even got back to any of those eight, he introduced a ninth with “Bel’s Story.” And by the end of the episode, not only that thread and one of the two previously pending ones, but also a thread from the previous series had been incorporated into Flux. Now we just have Claire’s story to connect into this mess (and it looks like that will happen next week—but I’m getting ahead of myself).

More than any other Chibnall-penned episode, this one felt like it could’ve been written by Moffat. It was packed with plot points, and switched among the various threads so quickly a viewer could barely get their bearings before needing to change focus. Moffat has often used that method to great effect to keep the audience from noticing plot holes, but there is still so much of this story left to tell that it’s impossible to make a judgement yet about how well it all holds together.

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Everything Changes

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

For better or worse, showrunner Chris Chibnall has left an indelible mark on Doctor Who. Series 12 finale The Timeless Children was packed with canon-expanding details that fans will be arguing about for decades to come.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2020 BBC

Whether you loved it or hated it (there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of in-between in the chatter I’ve seen), there was a lot to wrap our minds around. Did the Doctor see truth or elaborate lies in the Matrix? What is truth? Does it matter?

I choose to believe the Doctor saw the truth. Among other things, it might explain how she really could be the Other of Time Lord mythology. But mostly, I just think it’s a fantastic twist that simultaneously upends everything we thought we knew about the Doctor and ties in a bunch of things that previously made little or no sense.

The quintessential example of canonical inconsistency, of course, is all those faces that showed up when Morbius challenged the Fourth Doctor to look back on his previous lives, and they went back past the Hartnell incarnation. Add to that the question of how many regenerations a Time Lord has, and you get a recipe for confusion.

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The Sum of Its Parts

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

The Cybermen (well, one, anyway) crashed unexpectedly onto our screens last week, beating the series finale to the punch. Even so, Ascension had some quality Cybermen content, making them legitimately chilling again.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2020 BBC

Perhaps tellingly, though, what I found most alarming about this version of a Cyber-invasion was how Dalek-y they were. Viewing that pre-credit voiceover through the lens of current events and the rise of neo-Nazism set an alarming tone for me, making the Lone Cyberman’s final declaration of war on all life particularly unnerving.

As far as advancing the series-long story arc, though, it was difficult to get any purchase on events before the final scene (on which, more in a moment). Until then, the plot, though filled with tension for the safety of the fam, didn’t move beyond a typical Cybermen story. Yes, the Doctor’s enemies were (still) out to take over the entirety of the human race. Yes, there’s shitload of them (roughly a thousand per bay, ten bays per level, a few hundred levels works out to a few million Cyber-soldiers on this ship alone). Yes, there’s one particularly off-his-rocker Cyberman who “makes other Cybermen scream.” But it’s still just a story about the Cyberman threat.

Then those final moments arrive, and something plot-y starts to coalesce. There’s Gallifrey on the other side of the Boundary, and suddenly it’s not all about the Cybermen anymore.

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Bombshell

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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.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2020 BBC

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.

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