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Tag: Series 11

Bookends

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

Last month when we watched the final episode of Series 11, we weren’t actually watching the final episode of Series 11. This was the final episode of Series 11.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2019 BBC

Resolution ties into the rest of Whittaker’s tenure to date so seamlessly, I can’t help but wonder whether or not it was Chibnall’s intention all along to make an eleven-episode series. Evidence of that idea is peppered throughout the special, making Resolution and The Woman Who Fell to Earth a pair of perfectly matched bookends.

For starters, both episode titles have double meanings. In TWWFtE, the identity of the eponymous woman is up for interpretation, while here the titular resolution could either be the Doctor’s stated intention to come for the Dalek or the completion of a plot through-line or two.

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Saving the Universe Like Adults

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Review of The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I think nothing sets apart the nascent Chibnall era from the RTD and Moffat eras so much as the final regular episode of this first series. Whereas previous showrunners have gone all out with bombastic, plot-heavy tours de force for their series finales, Chibnall… did not.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

There are still some familiar elements in The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, in that a thread begun back in the series opener (and continued in the second episode) was woven back into the TARDIS Team’s lives. Graham, and to a degree Ryan, finally had a chance to come to terms with the death that sent him scuttling into the TARDIS in the first place.

But it was more in the callbacks—both subtle and stated outright—that I was reminded of prior finales. Without the “Tim Shaw” tie-in, TBoRAK would be indistinguishable from any other episode in Series 11, and certainly not readily identifiable to a casual viewer as the series’s “big finish.”

That fact will make the episode a big disappointment for a certain segment of fans. For those who loved Moffat’s twisty, tricksy, over-stuffed plots, Chibnall’s writing will feel far too straightforward. If, however, you’re someone who loves stories grounded in character, there are plenty of satisfying moments to be had.

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Through the Looking-Glass

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Review of It Takes You Away
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

When I saw a friend’s review of this episode up on Vulture titled “Pining for the Fjords,” I thought, “Damn! That was the perfect title! Why couldn’t I have thought of that and posted it first?”


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

Then it dawned on me that Through the Looking-Glass, and What the Doctor Found There was even more apt. The Doctor and her friends literally step through a looking-glass into an alternate reality where everything is so topsy-turvy that Alice surely would’ve understood how off-kilter they felt. They even manifested as mirror images of themselves (check Erik’s T-shirt logo or the Doctor’s hair flop and ear cuff)!

Plenty of other little details seem inverted, too. Ryan’s initial take on the reason for Hanne’s dad to be missing, which everyone else rejects as a cynical and somewhat rude view of the situation, turns out to be correct. The monster in the woods isn’t the real threat. And the blind character—fabulously depicted by an actual blind actress (score another point for the production team!)—”sees” more clearly than anyone else. (Okay, maybe that last one’s a trope after all…)

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Ducking Gender Roles

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

In a way, this is the episode I’ve been waiting for since Whittaker was announced. Although she’s been so on screen for a couple of months now, this time the Doctor was finally “a woman.”


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

Up until now, she’s been able to do her usual trick of swanning in, acting like she owns the place, and being taken seriously. In fact, even when the TARDIS Team first arrived in Bilehurst Cragg, she flashed her psychic paper and was immediately accepted as an authority. But enter King James, and suddenly she is demoted from Witchfinder General to a “wee lassie”—and I loved it.

Not that I loved the Doctor being devalued; that part was, as always, difficult to watch. But I loved it because it was real. “Honestly,” the Doctor herself complained, “if I was still a bloke, I could get on with the job and not have to waste time defending myself!” Welcome to the club, Doctor.

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Great Packaging, Mediocre Product

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

I found Kerblam! kind of confusing. I don’t mean that I couldn’t follow the plot; rather, I came out of it not knowing how to feel about the whole thing.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

At first I thought it seemed too obviously derivative (scary robots—never seen those before! and could Kerblam be any more obvious an analogue for Amazon?), but then there were some elements that kept me engaged (most especially the Companions; I felt they were all great in this episode, and each got a chance to shine).

But more than anything, it was the overall message of the episode that left me scratching my head. Was I supposed to think that massive, faceless corporations are (or at least can be) the real “good guys”? And that enthusiastic young people who are fighting for rights for themselves and their peers are misguided murderers?

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Walking Someone Else’s Minefield

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

A few hours before the episode aired, I saw someone in one of the Doctor Who-related Facebook groups I’m in express his apprehensions about the potential for an episode set in India in 1947 to be a preachy, anti-British Empire bash-fest (totally paraphrasing)—airing on Remembrance Day.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

I have rarely felt as much of a cultural divide with the UK as I did in that moment. Such a concern had never—would never have—occurred to me. I thus sat down to watch Demons of the Punjab feeling like I was about to walk through someone else’s cultural minefield. But the type of mines that were actually scattered about were completely different than what I’d expected. And unlike the Doctor and her friends, I really had no context for what was coming.

The US and the UK share an awful lot of cultural DNA. As the former colony rather than the former colonizer, though (and here I’m entirely skipping how my ancestors helped to slaughter the original inhabitants of the land I now live on as they colonized it), the people of my country generally stopped paying much attention to Britain’s affairs after about the turn of the nineteenth century, where “American history” and “British history” diverge.

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The Showrunner Conundrum

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

The cautious optimism with which I entered this series has begun to wane.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

Here we are, halfway through the series, and I’m still not really excited about it. Yes, I love Whittaker’s Doctor. Yes, I really like the Companions—what I know of them, anyway. And yes, each story has had some really good, enjoyable elements to it. But it’s starting to feel very same-old same-old; after only five episodes, that seems like a precarious place to be.

Strangely, that feeling didn’t really hit me until my second viewing of The Tsuranga Conundrum. That is, the first time through, when I was just watching for the pure experience, I liked the episode fine. It didn’t fill me with giddy delight or move me deeply like some of the best ones do, but it also didn’t set my teeth on edge like the worst. However, when I went back to watch and take notes for this review, I found myself checking the run-time counter again and again, to see how much more I needed to sit through. Bad sign.

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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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