Category: Doctor Who

The 1996-2012 Cultural Zenith, and the 2012-2024 Cultural Nadir

For a number of years now, I have claimed that in Britain there was a cultural high-point that ended at the end of 2012, and that ever since we have been in a cultural wasteland. In this post, I would like to prove it.

One of the early indicators I got of this was the decline in good fantasy and science fiction shows on the BBC. I remember in the late 2000s we had both Merlin and Doctor Who on television at the same time. Both of these shows were great – I remember being so excited for new episodes, and upon seeing each new episode me and my friends would spend hours and hours talking about them. We also had the BBC’s Robin Hood series (which was flawed – just as Merlin and Doctor Who were – but still great).

Robin Hood ended in 2009, and Merlin ended in 2012 (with a finale that rather frustratingly lacked closure). And the thing is, I don’t think I know of any good fantasy television shows that have been on the BBC since Merlin ended. Doctor Who has continued, of course, but it has steadily gotten worse, and is now completely unwatchable. A lot of people liked Matt Smith’s Doctor, but I started to notice the cracks from his very first episode. (That’s a niche joke there. (And that’s another niche joke there – one for the etymologists.)) Matt Smith took over in 2010, and by the end of 2012 the show had really deteriorated – whenever I rewatch those 2000s episodes of Doctor Who, I often don’t make it through all the Matt Smith ones.

So by the end of 2012, Robin Hood was gone, Merlin was gone, and Doctor Who was crumbling. From 2013 to 2015, the BBC gave us Atlantis – a show specifically designed to fill the gap left by Merlin, and created by many of the same people. But despite having some AMAZING actors – including Robert Emms, Sarah Parish, and Mark Addy (one of my all-time favourite actors) – it just wasn’t very good. It just wasn’t written very well.

Quite frankly, the BBC seemed to give up on fantasy and science fiction. It was as though they thought it was too hard to make – or they looked down on it as a genre, as a number of middle class, not-quite-as-intelligent-as-they-think-they-are people do.

Of course, we had Game of Thrones to keep us occupied, but even that seemed to fall to the post-2012 corruption in the end. The last two seasons of that – it is generally agreed – are quite flawed, and some would say even season six had quite a few issues. That takes us back to season five, which aired in 2015 – only 3 years after 2012.

Another early indicator I got was the decline in good comedy shows on the BBC – and on other British networks, actually. This decline has been much sharper. In the 2000s (including 2010), we had Little Britain, The Catherine Tate Show, That Mitchell and Webb Look, Come Fly With Me, The Armstrong and Miller Show, Harry and Paul, Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, Newswipe with Charlie Brooker, Peep Show, Green Wing, The IT Crowd (apart from the special), Gavin and Stacey (again, ignoring the specials), The Office, Extras, and even Coupling. That is A LOT.

What’s more, back then, Live At The Apollo was actually good. (I haven’t watched any of Live At The Apollo in years – they just kept inviting people on who weren’t very funny.) Back then is also the golden era of Mock The Week. Mock The Week continued for many years afterwards, of course, but it always seemed to be struggling to survive.

The first two series of Miranda were also in the 2000s (again, including 2010). The third series and the specials for Miranda were nowhere near as good as the first two series – something strange happened there. The early series of Not Going Out were also in the 2000s. (That’s had some great later episodes, but the early ones, for the most part, are better.)

Would I Lie To You was started in the 2000s – and again, those early episodes were great. (I haven’t watched any of the recent stuff – it just felt like it was going on and on.) QI! That was great when Stephen Fry was hosting it – again, mostly in the 2000s. I’ve watched almost none of it since Sandi Toksvig took over – it’s just terribly boring. (And think, all of the famous moments from the show – the ones that get watched over and over again on YouTube – are from Fry’s era.)

And Have I Got News For You was better back then too. Brian Blessed’s first appearance – which I think is the all-time high-point of the show – was in 2008. Nowadays HIGNFY is just awful – I can’t watch it. It’s mostly not funny – there’s just the odd weak pun that at most elicits a thought of ‘That’s funny.’, but no actual laughter and not even a half-smile. It feels like they’re just going through the motions. Ian and Paul know that the BBC’s never going to cancel it, so they’re just going to sit there, occasionally making a witty remark, until they’re too old and frail to walk on set anymore.

And what else have we had since 2012 that’s been any good? I mean we’ve had all of the Philomena Cunk stuff (where it’s her own show) – that’s been good. We’ve had 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown – a lot of the early stuff from that was good, although it’s deteriorated. There was also, briefly, 10 O’Clock Live and Live At The Electric – but those were quite early on since 2012. Other than that, what has there been?

The main comedy show that the BBC seems to have been pushing since that time is, of all things … Mrs Brown’s Boys. Jesus Fucking Christ. That show is one of the worst shows to have ever been created. Fuck it, it’s one of the worst things to have ever been created. I could write out a lengthy argument as to why it’s so absolutely fucking awful, but the reality is if you don’t already know why it’s awful, there’s no helping you. It’s the exact thing that was parodied by Ricky Gervais’ Extras – which the BBC themselves had aired just a few years before – but apparently having that template of what not to do did not help them.

Mrs Brown’s Boys should never have made it to air in the first place, and yet it seems to have been the BBC’s flagship comedy show for several years now.

So when it comes to comedy, we really are living through an absolute dearth of it.

I think I have already demonstrated that 2012 marks a boundary point – lots of good things had already finished by that point, and there aren’t that many good things that have come about since. But actually, the very first sign I got that we were entering a cultural nadir happened just a few minutes past midnight on New Year’s Eve / New Year’s Day going from 2012 to 2013.

2012 had been a great year for Britain. We had hosted the Olympic Games – at which we had won an extraordinary number of medals, and the opening and closing ceremonies were some of the best we’ve seen since the turn of the millennium (though they still had quite a few flaws). It was also the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. Now, even though we got to see a Platinum Jubilee for Queen Elizabeth, the Diamond Jubilee was better – the Queen was able to do more for it, and the celebrations themselves were better. (I remember the barge.)

It felt like Britain was at its all-time peak. It felt like we could do anything. But I remember staying up ’til midnight on New Year’s Eve to watch the fireworks on television. (The fireworks have long since become tedious and obnoxious, but that’s a rant for another post.) Once the fireworks were over, the BBC played their new ident for 2013. ‘Love 2013’ it read. It was so underwhelming. I knew at that moment that we were about to start a decline.

So 2012 is the end-point of the zenith – when did it start? I put it in 1996. 1996 was the year that Pokémon came out. (Granted, Pokémon is not a British cultural creation, but we still had it here – and it was BIG. Everyone who is around my age remembers it from school – we all played the games, swapped the cards, and watched the movies. It had a profound cultural impact on my generation.) Also, the first Harry Potter book came out not long after – in 1997. And thus began the intense craze for Harry Potter. People who have grown up after that time could not possibly imagine what that was like. The obsession with and adoration for the Harry Potter books and films was like nothing we’ve seen ever since.

The first Harry Potter book came out in 1997, and the last Harry Potter film (with the films always lagging behind the books, of course) came out in 2011 – almost perfectly bookending my proposed era.

There has been nothing like Harry Potter in the years since – either in book form or movie form. Game of Thrones came close – and might well have gone down as one of the all-time great television series, had they not screwed up the ending. And of course, George R. R. Martin himself has not published any more of the book series (the last one being published in 2011 – making my point again). He is never going to finish that series. He’s had 13 years and he still hasn’t done the next one. He is never going to do it.

The 1996-2012 cultural zenith also includes the Lord Of The Rings movies, of course – which will be classics for many centuries. It even includes the Matrix films – which again were not a British cultural creation, but they still had a big impact here. (And of course, there are only three Matrix films.)

And my goodness it even includes the Star Wars Prequels. Some people don’t like the prequels, but their cultural impact cannot be denied. The number of iconic lines, characters, and pieces of music greatly outstrips the ‘sequel’ films that Disney made. I’ve long thought that you can tell how culturally impactful a movie is by how many memes it produces – and the prequels are used in memes every day.

And gosh, now that I think about it, this era mostly overlaps with Star Trek: Voyager. Again, a number of people don’t like Voyager, but I think it’s almost as good as The Next Generation, and certainly far, far superior to anything that’s been made in recent years.

And actually, that just shows how post-2012 has been characterised not just by an absence of good television shows and movies, but by a presence of bad ones. I’ve commented on this sort of thing many times, of course, but to list just some of the awful shows we’ve had post-2012 (and much of which is after about 2015/2016): Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks (and I’m sure the other Star Trek stuff has probably been shit as well, but I haven’t seen it), the Star Wars ‘sequels’, the Han Solo film, the Kenobi Show, The Acolyte (and again, I’m sure lots of the other Disney Star Wars stuff has been shit too, but I haven’t seen it), all of Doctor Who since Jodie Whittaker took over, all of the Fantastic Beasts films, most of the MCU films since Endgame (a common observation), Amazon’s Rings of Power, The Matrix 4. I could go on but really what’s the point.

Of course, much of this can be attributed to the deterioration of Hollywood that’s been going on from about 2015 / 2016 (although the process started much earlier). There’s a lot to be said about the interplay between American and British culture, but I won’t say it in this post.

But what has caused this current cultural nadir? Well, thinking specifically about Britain, I think it is in part because of a deterioration at the BBC. I have long thought that the BBC has lacked the ability and the determination to make good fantasy, science fiction, and comedy. A game show, a quiz show, a travel show, a cookery show, a dancing show, a soap opera, a rerun – these things are not difficult to conceive of. Good science fiction requires true insight, and a willingness to do what no-one else is doing. The BBC has long seemed far too conformist for that.

I think there are other, nebulous reasons for this cultural nadir too. Britain is not doing as well as it was in the 2000s. It is a grimmer place. This is partly economic – our economic situation is worse than it was 12 years ago. (I will not defer to statistics here, but I think we all sense it.) Britons are less able to take chances on creative projects. The causes of our economic misfortune are manyfold.

When will this current nadir end? I don’t know. It could go on for a LONG time yet. I couldn’t say if we’re past the worst of it. I think I’d know it if I saw the beginning of the end, but perhaps not. But I do think the solution has remained the same throughout: bringing about a new cultural zenith requires extraordinary determination and discernment from talented creatives.

All that is left is to name these eras, but I can’t think of any good ones – yet.

For the sake of clarity, I have listed below many of the aforementioned television shows and books that belong to this pre-2012 zenith and post-2012 nadir. (There is, of course, a certain ‘fuzziness’ to these endpoints.)

The 1996-2012 Cultural Zenith

  • The Vicar of Dibley (1994-2007)
  • Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)
  • The Harry Potter Books (1997-2007)
  • The Men in Black Movies (1997-2012)
  • Pokémon Red and Blue (EU: 1999)
  • The Star Wars Prequels (1999-2005)
  • The Matrix Movies (1999-2003 – there is no fourth movie)
  • Coupling (2000-2004)
  • The Office (2001-2003)
  • The Harry Potter Movies (2001-2011)
  • The Lord Of The Rings Movies (2001-2003)
  • Shrek (2001)
  • Look Around You (2002-2005)
  • That Mitchell and Webb Sound (2003-2013)
  • Little Britain (2003-2004 – the first two series)
  • Peep Show (2003-2015)
  • QI (with Stephen Fry – 2003-2016)
  • The Catherine Tate Show (2004-2007)
  • Green Wing (2004-2007)
  • The Incredibles (2004)
  • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005)
  • Extras (2005-2007)
  • Doctor Who (before it became shit, 2005-2010 (-ish))
  • The Thick Of It (2005-2012)
  • Mock The Week (2005-2022 – its golden era was earlier on)
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008)
  • That Mitchell and Webb Look (2006-2010)
  • Hyperdrive (2006-2007)
  • The IT Crowd (2006-2013)
  • Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe (2006-2008)
  • Robin Hood (2006-2009)
  • Harry & Paul (2007-2012)
  • The Armstrong & Miller Show (2007-2010)
  • Gavin & Stacey (2007-2010, ignoring the specials)
  • Merlin (2008-2012)
  • Newswipe with Charlie Brooker (2009-2010)
  • Miranda (2009-2010 – first two series only)
  • Avatar (2009)
  • Come Fly With Me (2010)
  • Him & Her (2010-2013)
  • Twenty-Twelve (2011-2012)
  • 10 O’Clock Live (2011-2013)
  • Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee (2012)
  • The London Olympic Games (2012)
  • Live At The Electric (2012-2014)

The Post-2012 Cultural Nadir

  • Mrs Brown’s Boys (2011-now)
  • Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
  • Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
  • Doctor Who (Whittaker and after – 2017-now)
  • The Mash Report (2017-2022)
  • Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024)
  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
  • Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
  • Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)
  • Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
  • Aladdin (2019)
  • Captain Marvel (2019)
  • Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023)
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020-2024)
  • Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett (2021-2022)
  • WandaVision (2021)
  • The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021)
  • Loki (2021-2023)
  • Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
  • Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022)
  • Star Wars: The Kenobi Show (2022)
  • She-Hulk (2022)
  • Amazon’s The Rings Of Power (2022-2024)
  • Star Wars: Ahsoka (2023)
  • Star Wars: The Acolyte (2024)
  • and more …

It’s over. It’s dead. 0/10 – Doctor Who – The Church on Ruby Road – Review

Before the 2023 specials, I was cautiously optimistic that Doctor Who could come back from death. There had been a number of concerning pieces of information that had come out in the lead up to these specials and the next series, but I remained hopeful.

The specials were a mixture of underwhelming, mediocre, and infuriating – not so much a problem if only one episode is like that, but all three were. Together, they were the worst writing I have ever seen from Davies – by far.

We’ve now been given a Christmas special – which I’m treating as the first episode of the next series, even though I think officially it’s not. I was optimistic about Gatwa as the Doctor – particularly in contrast to Jodie Whittaker, who was shit. But this optimism was misplaced.

This was one of the worst episodes of Doctor Who I’ve ever seen. (In fairness, I didn’t actually watch a lot of the Whittaker run – including that episode with all the ‘timeless child’ bollocks – my sense of how bad those episodes are comes from watching other reviews – it’s a much less visceral sense.) I award this episode 0 out of 10. I don’t think I’ve ever given anything 0 out of 10 before.

This episode completely and utterly shattered the immersion. You know those shatterproof rulers you used to have in school? Remember how ear-splitting the snap was when you did try to shatter it? That’s what this episode did to Doctor Who. This episode was so unlike Doctor Who, that when I was watching it, it was like I was watching another show. It was like I was watching one of Davies’ gay shows: Queer As Folk, Cucumber, It’s A Sin. Everything about it – the pacing, the aesthetics, the tone, the setting – was just like from one of those shows. This wasn’t a new series of Doctor Who – this was a new series of Queer As Folk.

The moment in the episode that exemplified this the most was the Doctor dancing in a nightclub, wearing a low-cut tank top and a skirt. (People will say that it’s a kilt, but to me its form appeared closer to a skirt – and given the gender-bending obsession of Russell these last few episodes, it seems plausible.) This moment is what drops the score to 0/10. There was actually one good thing in this episode (just one), but this nightclub scene was so bad that any and all remaining points are deducted.

I’ve already seen the qwerties of Twitter desperately trying to defend this shit. All the arguments boil down to the same thing: the qwerties like going to nightclubs themselves so they want the Doctor to as well – because god forbid the qwerties watch any character who isn’t identical to them.

The Doctor spinning around, arms in the air, grinning like a woman from HR getting kompromat on an employee at an office party, wearing a tank top that would be considered racy even in the queue for a glory hole, all while the most bland, directionless, meaningless, tuneless, non-music echoes in the background, and support dancers surround him, screwing their faces as hard as they can in a desperate attempt to suggest profundity, is a moment that shows us a character that is in no way connected to the actual Doctor at all. This is not the Doctor. This is so utterly incompatible with anything we have previously seen of the Doctor’s character, that all we can conclude is that this is not the Doctor. The immersion has been snapped. We are no longer watching Doctor Who – we are just watching Ncuti Gatwa dancing in a nightclub. That’s it.

Gatwa should be utterly humiliated by this. The absolute worst thing for you, as an actor, should be the audience not seeing the character – only seeing you. If that happens, it shows that you have utterly failed as an actor. We are not supposed to see you; we are supposed to see the character. This episode, in my opinion, seriously damages Gatwa’s career. I would hope that his agent is shouting down the phone to Russell at this very moment for allowing this to go out on television.

Nothing – nothing at all – about Gatwa as he appears here is reminiscent about William Hartnell’s portrayal of the Doctor. It’s laughable to even mention them in the same sentence. As I say – this isn’t Doctor Who – it’s an extra episode of Queer As Folk. Even worse, this moment has fuck all to do with the rest of the episode – it’s just there to make a statement.

The rest of the episode is little better: an inexplicable voice-over at the start (Russell seems rather keen on those at the moment), a lot of wasted time and dialogue (this episode could have been 15 minutes shorter), a grotesque set design for the apartment (it looked like the 70s had thrown up all over it), some pointless and unrealistic dialogue from the supporting actors (and some ghastly acting too – particularly from the actors who played the next-door neighbours).

Gatwa’s non-character claims to discover a new kind of science in this episode: the science of luck. Once again Russell is showing his recent lapse into unoriginality here – he did a similar thing in that episode about Shakespeare in series three. Gatwa’s non-character also claims to be ‘learning the vocabulary of rope’ as he tries to understand some knots. He’ll be gutted to discover that topology has already been studied and well understood for decades.

There is one good thing in this episode, and that’s the CGI for the goblins – they’ve done that very well. The goblin king is also fun and well-designed. (Although again, Russell shows his unoriginality – this goblin king is very similar to the one in The Hobbit.)

Unfortunately the goblins are ruined by their giving us a musical number. An overly-heavy beat and a trumpet that sounds like an Argos keyboard isn’t something anyone with a mental age greater than three wants, Russell. You might think that couldn’t get worse, but it does – with the addition of an autotuned Gatwa and side-kick (I forget her name – she’s quite a forgettable character).

There’s a hilarious moment when a woman in the nightclub shouts ‘Give us some willie!’ at a man pretending to be a woman on the stage. I think it’s supposed to be ‘Give it some wellie!’ – the perils of enunciation.

I’m surprised that the qwerties weren’t outraged by the goblins in this episode. After all, the qwerties insist, time and time again, that Rowling’s use of goblins in Harry Potter was antisemitic. In this episode, goblins are not only present, but they literally steal and eat children. They are also the cause of all the misfortune in everyone’s life. Why on earth the qwerties aren’t screaming antisemitism at this episode, I don’t know. (But consistency of position was never their strength.) I also notice that no-one asked each other what their ‘preferred pronouns’ were in this episode. According to Russell, this is bigotry, so I guess we are supposed to consider all of these characters bigots.

And all the remaining time in the episode is just filled with virtue signalling and The Message.

That was an absolutely atrocious episode. With that episode and the three that preceded it – all of which had a multitude of serious, serious flaws – I am forced to conclude that Doctor Who is well and truly dead. Completely and utterly dead. There is no point watching the rest of Gatwa’s series. I won’t be watching it or reviewing it.

Doctor Who should be cancelled. What the franchise needs is to be left alone – for at least a decade. Leave it alone; do nothing with it. Whoever picks it up again after that will be someone entirely different – hopefully someone who hasn’t been infected with this idiocy virus. It’s rare that I will outright call for a show to end, but now I am: cancel it. This also represents the downfall of Russell T. Davies. He has written many excellent shows over the years: Queer As Folk was well-written for what it was (I just don’t want Doctor Who to become it); Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, and It’s A Sin were all fun; and of course, the first four series’ of New Who. But these episodes have been an absolute disaster. Russell appears to have lost his talent.

Preachy, tiresome, but with a few fun moments, 7/10 – Doctor Who – The Giggle – Review

Where to start with this review? This episode was all over the place. It had some moments of brilliance, some moments of tiresome idiocy, some very promising moments, and some moments of what I can only describe as übercreep.

But first, Russell T. Davies would like us all to know that he’s very, very clever. Really, he is. He is very, very, very, very clever. He’s far cleverer than all of you, and he’d like you to know that.

It was clear right from the start that this was one of those episodes that’s going to have that gross, grotesque, ‘creep’ factor – in the form of those horrid dolls. This is certainly not the first episode to have that factor – S5E2 The Beast Below had it – with those horrid, disgusting ‘smilers’. It’s a thing that’s appeared in many other shows too. I think of this quality as being very easy to identify, but I don’t think it really has a proper name. I find it grotesque and repulsive, but these words alone don’t really emphasise just how perverse it always seems, so I think I shall call it übercreep. I find that kind of imagery – those misshapen dolls, with their malformed noses and rather noncy grins – to be uniquely repulsive. That’s the point, of course – to be creepy and repulsive – I guess some people find it entertaining – I don’t.

I think there’s this idea that übercreep makes for good television because it’s ‘scary’. But it’s not scary – it’s just repulsive. As such, it doesn’t really maintain any suspense. Things in a story are only really scary when the characters can’t do anything about them, but the only correct respond to these rather noncy dolls is to kick their fucking faces in and toss them in a skip, and preceding that to talk about how noncy they are. When tension is only maintained by a creep factor, you can cut through it with only words.

Some people like übercreep; I don’t – and it’s subjective, so I won’t mark the episode down for that.

Also, in case you missed it, Russell T. Davies is very, very clever. Did you know that? Very, very clever. And he’s going to remind you of that every two minutes in this episode.

We get some dialogue telling us that everyone in the world has suddenly started thinking they’re right all the time. The dialogue is absurdly expository (Jesus fucking Christ Russell, put some fucking effort in) and it’s also wrong. We see in that scene, as well as all later scenes, that people don’t actually just think they’re always right, they’ve just been driven into a state of mania where they’re very entitled, conspiratorial, and angry.

You see, what Russell’s doing here is very clever. Did you catch it? No of course not, because Russell is being very, very subtle here. He’s making an allegory for social media. Everyone always thinks they’re right on social media don’t they? And they’re always arguing with each other aren’t they? What an astute observation Russell’s made in 2023. (That was sarcasm, for the people at the back.)

Yep, this whole episode is going to be one giant allegory to social media. 

Now, I don’t dislike allegory. I’ve written quite a lot of allegorical stories myself, and hope to keep writing more. But as I’ve said before, it’s not good when allegorical stories come across as preachy or patronising. (I hope mine never do – I fear that it’s something one cannot detect in one’s own stories.) It’s also not good when the allegory is insanely basic. What Russell seems to have gone for here is ‘social media bad’. Wow – what insight Russell. No-one has ever made that observation before. Do expand on that. Oh, you’re not going to?

As I said, Russell is very, very clever.

We’re taken to Avengers Tower. Oh no wait it’s UNIT Tower. They look very similar. Russell’s really going for the original ideas this series. It’s nice that UNIT has been made sensible again – I could never keep track of what was going on with them in the Moffat and Chibnall years. (Also nice that we get a bit of that UNIT leitmotif back – they could stand to do a bit more of that.)

Jemma Redgrave is back as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. I can hardly remember anything of the Capaldi run, so I couldn’t tell you anything about this character’s backstory, but I vaguely recognise her. Jemma Redgrave performs the part very well.

Bonnie Langford is back as Melanie Bush. I’m not well-versed in Classic Who, but I could tell the second she appeared on screen that she was a classic character. Langford also by far gave the best performance of the episode, despite having quite a small part.

Wheelchair Lady is back. She’s fun. Did they ever tell us her name? I don’t know. They make a point, though, of, when Lethbridge-Stewart has her anti-spike Zeedex turned off, her angrily saying ‘I’ve seen you walking’ to Wheelchair Lady, and then apologising to her when her Zeedex is turned back on. An obvious allusion to the phenomenon of people online not always believing when someone is disabled. Isn’t Russell clever for putting that in there? Isn’t he clever? It definitely doesn’t pull you out of the story for a few moments.

Actually that reminds me, I don’t think I heard a single person in this episode ask anyone what their ‘preferred pronouns’ were. Bigots, the lot of them. That’s what Russell thinks, anyway.

We get some more wonderfully subtle, subtle, very subtle, totally-not-obvious allegory from Russell: ‘The world is now 100% online.’, ‘Everyone is connected.’, ‘For the first time in history, everyone has access to this – a screen.’, ‘Hating each other – you never needed any help with that.’. Tip of the fedora back to you Russell – this is top stuff. It’s said that the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed, well the dildo of unsubtlety is twelve inches too big and slathered with mayonnaise, and Russell is going to slap you in the face with it.

Tennant and Tate have seemed ‘off’ for the last two episodes. In this episode, they are right back to form. The Doctor and Donna in this episode seem like an exact continuation from series 4, which is good.

The Toymaker makes a return in this episode. I’m quite glad that they’re selectively bringing back things from Classic Who. He’s played by Neil Patrick Harris. Unfortunately Neil Patrick Harris always just seems like Neil Patrick Harris. He’s like Johnny Depp and Ryan Reynolds – he’s always really playing the same character. I felt like I was watching A Series Of Unfortunate Events – this rendition is basically just Count Olaf.

Also, Russell seems to be almost exclusively choosing gay, transgender, or “queer” actors for parts. Neil Patrick Harris, Nathaniel Curtis, Miriam Margolyes, Yasmin Finney, Ncuti Gatwa. Statistically unlikely to not be a deliberate choice. Is it even legal to hire people on those grounds?

There are some basic errors of continuity. The Doctor says ‘when he was young’ when referring to his last encounter with the Toymaker, but with all the Timeless Child nonsense, the Doctor was already old by the time he was the ‘First Doctor’. The Doctor also calls himself a Time Lord, but he’s not – he’s an unknown species. (Well, that’s my understanding based on what I’ve heard of the Timeless Child nonsense – I never watched the episode itself – only the reviews.)

We get some more übercreep. I don’t care for it. Donna has the right idea – she kicks it in the face. Count Olaf gives us a recap of several series’, including ‘The Flux’ – whatever that is. I don’t care Russell – I just don’t care.

Did I mention that Russell is very clever? He’s certainly not going to let us forget. ‘[The Doctor] The human race, back in the future, why does everyone think they’re right? [The Toymaker] So that they win. I made every opinion supreme. That’s the game of the 21st century. They shout and they type and they cancel.’

Oh clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp Russell. Oh how astute! Those people on the internet they sure do love to ‘cancel’ don’t they Russell? When will they learn? Surely after witnessing this delightlessly deft writing, Russell. Now get this mayo dildo out of my face.

We get a scene of Count Olaf dancing to the Spice Girls. It’s actually quite a visually spectacular scene – well made on a technical level. But it did just look like Neil Patrick Harris having fun dancing in a costume – I wasn’t sold on it.

‘[The Doctor] I don’t understand why your so small!!!’ – that’s ‘cause he’s far away dear – move closer and he’ll appear bigger.

We’re then introduced to a new thing: ‘bi-generation’. I actually find this idea quite interesting. The Doctor has essentially reproduced here. We don’t know what species the Doctor is, so we don’t know how it reproduces – apparently it’s by mitosis. (With all Russell’s polemicising about the universe being ‘non-binary’, it’s ironic that he’s chosen a method of reproduction that is distinctly binary.) Apparently it’s caused by the galvanic beam, so the Doctor could now reproduce indefinitely (though obviously that won’t happen, for the sake of the writers’ feeble hands).

Can’t say I’m thrilled to discover what kind of underwear the Doctor wears, though. I’d’ve thought a time-travelling, billion-year-old super-genius would’ve worked out that white cotton button-up boxer-briefs are a hard no. Might I suggest a polyamide-elastane blend for sir? (Also, the clothes being shared between the bi-generated Doctors and the Gatwa-Doctor wearing underwear means that the Tennant-Doctor is going commando. That’s not something I wanted to know.)

We’re given a bizarre moment of Gatwa embracing Tenant saying ‘I got you.’. God it’s weird. Here’s a rule of television writing for you: never have a younger character act like a parent to an older character. It’s weird and creepy.

The Master is apparently locked inside the Toymaker’s gold tooth, which for some reason falls out before he goes all origami. A hand picks up the tooth, in an almost exact replica of the scene from several series’ ago where a hand picks up the Master’s ring, which somehow contains his essence. (I think that’s how it goes – I can’t be bothered to look it up.) Who’s hand is that? Who was even standing there on that part of the platform? I don’t think anyone was.

The duplicate TARDIS is apparently wheelchair-accessible. Apart from the entire inside, of course – quite a few steep inclines. Isn’t virtue-signalling great?

Gatwa doesn’t really have enough of his own time in this episode to judge his performance – I guess we’ll wait until the next episode to see how that turns out. 

And that’s it. That was the episode. Gosh, it’s worse on the second viewing. 

There were some great moments in that episode – the structure made it fun, and there were some entertaining (if not good) performances – but there was also a lot of dizzying, preachy, tiresome, eye-roll-worthy nonsense. This could have been a great episode – I think it could have been a 9/10, if Russell had just had some self-restraint. I’d have to put it at a 7/10.

I was hoping that with these three episodes Davies would establish that Doctor Who had turned around – that it would no longer cling to the tropes of bad fan fiction. These three episodes have failed to do that. This really should be a lesson for all writers in the importance of not doing things that pull your readers or viewers out of the story. When I think back over the episodes, the things I remember most vividly are the nonsense: the gender-woo of the first episode, Indian Newton of the second episode, and the multitude of weird things from this one. It all pulls you out of the story, and when something pulls you out of the story, it’s like putting a spotlight on that thing. 

I don’t want to watch any of these episodes again. Not a good sign at all – especially since as I’m writing this I’d quite like to go back and rewatch series’ 1-4 of New Who. I’ll give Gatwa’s first full series a watch, but I am much less optimistic about it than I was.

Somehow both boring and chaotic at the same time, 3/10 – Doctor Who – Wild Blue Yonder – Review

Well that was all over the place.

Let’s start with the first scene – a truly bizarre scene that becomes even more bizarre when you realise it had nothing to do with the rest of the story.

It’s 1666, and we see a man exiting an old house. He chats to a woman briefly, in a cheery English fashion, and then goes and sits under an apple tree, scrawling something in a notebook. One of the apples falls on his head, and he has an idea.

It’s Sir Isaac Newton. But for reasons entirely baffling, Sir Isaac Newton is played by half-Indian actor Nathaniel Curtis.

*Sigh*

Now, these episodes of Doctor Who cannot escape the context in which they are being released. As I said in my last review, Doctor Who has had three disastrous series’ led by Chris Chibnall. It needs to show, now, that it is going to change course. It needs to show, now, that it is not going to make the same mistakes. If it doesn’t, it will be well and truly dead. 

One of the major errors of the show during the Chibnall Era (which I think henceforth I will refer to simply as ‘The Mistake’), was its relentless pandering to Twitter misosophy. Every bad idea that received applause from the seals of Twitter was rammed into the show. It is a virus that infected Star Wars, Star Trek, Amazon’s “Wrongs of Prime”, as well as Doctor Who. Doctor Who needed to show that the fever had passed – that it was not going to pander to these anti-sci-fi, anti-logic idiots anymore.

One of the symptoms of this virus is the idea of changing the ethnicity of established characters or (worse) historical figures – always from “white” (a word that is only valid in a North American context), or native British or native European, to black (another word that is only really valid in a North American context), south Asian, or arabic. (For some reason, none of the other ethnic groups in the world get a share.)

I say again here that these episodes cannot escape the wider context. The ethnicity of the actor not matching the ethnicity of the character is not always a bad thing. The show Merlin – on the BBC about 15 years ago now – a fantastic show – had Lady Guinevere played by Angel Coulby. No-one cared. But that was for two reasons. Firstly, the show established very early on that it was a ‘modernised’ telling of Arthurian Legend. There were loads of changes to modernise it – including making all of the characters young. And it remained consistent with this modernisation throughout. But secondly, that show was not being made in a time when rabid ideologues online were trying to make every historical figure black and ‘decolonise’ every book and fact in sight. Viewers trusted that there was no vicious ideology behind the change – it was just creative licence.

Nowadays, though, all of the great science fiction and fantasy film and television series’ have fallen into the hands of a horde of Hollywood lobotomites intent on destroying them (and succeeding). When characters and historical figures have their ethnicities changed nowadays, it is ALWAYS because of that ideology. So you must avoid it if you want to demonstrate that you are no longer deferent to that ideology.

This episode has not avoided it. In fact it’s put it front and centre, right at the start of the episode. This therefore shows complete adherence to this stupid, stupid, stupid ideology. It shows an orgasmic obsession with promoting The Message. This does not bode well for Doctor Who.

Any whole-brained person already knows why this case of ethnicity-swapping is bad, but for the slow people at the back, I’ll explain in more detail. Russell here is showing that he is completely on-board with this distinctly American ideology. It is an ideology that asserts that all Americans of European descent, as well as all native Britons and Europeans (who it erroneously labels ‘white’) are intrinsically bad, and that all culture and history must be edited to reduce their presence or remove them entirely. It’s an epitomisingly racist ideology. These ideologues go giddy when they see ‘white’ characters and historical figures changed to be ‘non-white’, but they would be apoplectic if it happened the other way round. (If we saw Martin Luther King played by Benedict Cumberbatch, or Nelson Mandela played by Eddie Redmayne, or Srinivasa Ramanujan (the great Indian mathematician) played by Daniel Day-Lewis, these ideologues would make it their life’s mission to exact revenge on everyone involved.)

Russell is showing that he doesn’t care about immersion. (Seeing a figure like Sir Isaac Newton played by someone who doesn’t look like Sir Isaac Newton pulls you out of the story (unless there’s an in-universe reason for it).) Any show about time travel has a great opportunity to explore history – Russell here is showing that he doesn’t care about any of that. History exists simply to support The Message. That is all that matters – The Message.

So instead of this being a fun opening to the episode, it just becomes two minutes of Russell desperately trying to appease American sociology professors.

The TARDIS crashes into the very tree that not-Newton was sitting under – how that weedy little tree was holding up the TARDIS I don’t know. The Doctor and Donna emerge, work out who the man isn’t, and make a joke about gravity. This, apparently, is the first time this random man has heard the word ‘gravity’. (Entirely ludicrous – the word ‘gravity’ was known about for centuries before this – but fine, it’s Doctor Who, whatever.) This random man is unable to recall the word just said to him, however, and accidentally remembers it as ‘mavity’. 

And that’s it – the scene ends. That was the first two minutes, and there was already that much wrong with it.

What’s worse, nothing in the rest of the episode had anything to do with it – well, with the exception of ‘mavity’. Later in the episode the Doctor and Donna sometimes say ‘mavity’ instead of ‘gravity’, suggesting that their short excursion to the past has altered history, and now everyone says ‘mavity’ (except the Doctor, sometimes). This is probably all setup for something later – which if it is, great. It does still make for a rather disjointed episode.

Now let’s get on to the actual story of this episode.

A lot of this episode was very slow. The first half of it after that opening scene was very slow. The characters talked much more than normal – with lines that added nothing. There were a lot of lingering CGI shots. Very few events happened, and the story did not set up a mystery or suspense well. In fact, the first part of the episode was so slow that by about half or two-thirds of the way through I started looking to see how long was left – that’s never a good sign.

This kind of problem is quite common in a lot of the Marvel and Star Wars shows on Disney Plus. Lingering shots – shots that are just too long or superfluous – and characters not getting anywhere – just kind of wandering around talking about irrelevant things. It’s very odd – and completely opposite to Davies’ normal style. Davies is normally excellent at using montages and music to increase the pacing, but here he has abandoned that. 

The pace of the episode does increase later. This episode did not need to be as long as it was – a lot could have been cut out – ten to twenty minutes of it, I think. It seemed like the script had been rushed – like it should have gone through several more rounds of edits to trim the fat.

At one point they refer to a thing called ‘the flux’ – I don’t know what that is and I don’t care to look it up – is that something they did during The Mistake? Don’t reference things from The Mistake, Russell, the returning fans neither know nor care about them. Treat The Mistake as though it didn’t happen. 

The basic idea of the story was okay: go somewhere where there supposedly aren’t any life forms, but actually there are. It’s been done many times. The whole which one of you is the real one has been done many times too – it was even parodied in Family Guy years ago. They’re not bad ideas – they’ve just been done a lot. 

The story did have a key flaw though. The Doctor suggests that the TARDIS brought them there deliberately to solve a problem (as it often does throughout the show – it takes them where they need to be). But had the TARDIS not appeared there at all, the problem would have solved itself. The ship would have blown up even if the Doctor and Donna hadn’t been there, killing the two aliens. The TARDIS didn’t need to appear there – and would have known this, given what we know about how the sentient TARDIS perceives time. This really is a script error – they just shouldn’t have had the Doctor suggest the TARDIS brought them there deliberately.

And then the episode ended with a glorious appearance from Bernard Cribbins. His character on the show remains incredibly popular – entirely because of Cribbins’ performance. It was a bizarre and sudden reversal of the tedium and nonsense of the rest of the episode. This episode would have been better if it had just been an hour of Cribbins and the Doctor chatting.

Unfortunately this moment was interrupted by explosions and stuff. We were also given the nightmare fuel of a plane falling from the sky and crashing nearby.

This episode was a mess. Before I started writing this review, I had a higher opinion of it. But this episode had ideological nonsense, slow pacing, lingering shots, boring dialogue, an overused core story idea, uninteresting set design and CGI, no memorable music, still a lacking vitality from the Doctor and Donna. The only properly good thing was Bernard Cribbins, and he wasn’t in it long enough. 

3/10

Almost good; marred by nonsense; 5/10 – Doctor Who – The Star Beast – Review

Doctor Who is dead. That was very much the status of the show by series 13. The show had been declining in quality for years, but the disastrous writing of Chibnall and child-in-oversized-wellington-boots portrayal of the Doctor by Whittaker made it unwatchable. Like Star Wars and Star Trek before it, Doctor Who had been killed, and Chibnall et alii were the Salisbury assassins who did it.

I tried watching series 11, but found it so bad that there was no point watching the last few episodes. I gave the first episode of series 12 a chance, but it was dreadful, and didn’t watch any more. Series 13 – not even a full series – apparently even those commissioning it knew something was wrong – hardly even registered as a thing. I had completely abandoned the show, with no intention of ever watching any more.

But then something utterly bizarre. It was announced that Russell T. Davies was coming back to Doctor Who. I couldn’t have predicted that. It’s so rare for writers and showrunners to return to things they’ve given up. But this made me optimistic for the show – Davies got New Who going, and all of the works of his I’ve seen over the years – Queer As Folk, Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, It’s A Sin – were all very enjoyable to watch. He seems to be a very reliable showrunner.

Doctor Who needed to show that it was going to turn away from the Twitter misosophy that has dominated both it and Hollywood for years. Maybe the return of Davies was that. Maybe he was returning to undo all of the nonsense that has happened in the last few years? So this series (I’m counting these 2023 specials as series 14) gets a chance. I’ll give the show a chance of one whole series (unless it’s REALLY awful, in which case it’ll only get a few episodes). Maybe, like an actual Time Lord, the show will cheat death and regenerate.

(I.S.: In the unlikely event that Davies himself is reading this, if you really want to win fans like me back over, decanonise all of that Timeless Child bullshit. All it takes is a tweet.)

Everything in this post so far I have written before seeing this first of the 2023 specials – titled The Star Beast. I am now going to go and watch the episode.

Well, that was … almost good. To be more precise, that was a mostly enjoyable episode – fun, compelling, humorous (and not with that special new ‘Hollywood comedy’ that gets put into everything nowadays). But it was marred by these short fits of current-day nonsense. They were very, very distracting – I kept getting pulled out of the immersion.

The designs of the aliens were excellent – very contrasting with each other and very different to anything else we’ve seen in New Who. Using the appearance and sounds of the aliens to make the audience make assumptions about their benevolence or malevolence was excellent. I was unsure about Miriam Margolyes as the voice of The Meep at first, but she did the contrast between the good and evil Meep voices very well. The CGI of The Meep was also some of the best CGI we’ve ever seen in New Who.

The plot was compelling – crucial for Doctor Who. Dull plots was one of the main failings towards the end of the Moffat Era. The idea of a species turned mad by a sentient star is stupid – and that would have been so easy to change, given that it was just a line of dialogue – but it’s far from the stupidest thing that’s been in New Who. (I’m thinking of that star with an angry face – so fucking stupid.)

I VERY much enjoyed Davies bringing back some of his world-building elements: invoking the Shadow Proclamation, UNIT being made into something not-silly. The CGI for the time vortex is fun, but I wish they’d stick to one idea about what it actually looks like. The new TARDIS interior looks fantastic.

David Tennant and Catherine Tate jump right back into their roles almost as though no time has passed at all. (Almost. There is something slightly off about them – a missing vitality, or something – but it’s so slight you can ignore it.) Jacqueline King makes a flawless return as Sylvia Noble – her character is perfectly consistent. 

Yasmin Finney, who plays the new character of Rose Noble, is a weak link. Finney was not the strongest actor in the cast of Heartstopper, and gives a similar performance here. Finney’s delivery lacks personality – compare it to Billie Piper as Rose Tyler and I think it’ll be obvious.

The thing that let this episode down was the gender-woo. I had assumed that they were only going to reference this in passing – if at all – but they made it the core of the story. Now, in fairness, they did put it with an interesting idea: the ‘Doctor-Donna’ metacrisis was a metacrisis between a male and female organism; part of the energy of the crisis was shared when the containing organism reproduced – i.e., Donna had a child – meaning that the energy was now not too much to overwhelm them, allowing both to escape its catastrophic effects; but because the metacrisis was between a male and female organism, the offspring carried some combination of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’. That’s an interesting idea.

But the gender-woo interrupted the story every few minutes or so, and it breaks the immersion every time. One of the most egregious examples is Finney’s line of ‘You’re assuming “he” as a pronoun?!’, referring to the furry, gremlin-like alien known as The Meep.

It would take several long blog posts to fully explain why this line is stupid. Every assumption that goes into it is incorrect, and there are A LOT of assumptions that go into it. I don’t have the time to go through it all – either you already know why it’s stupid or you don’t. It stops the show dead for a few moments in order to show deference to a very recently-created ideology from Tumblr. It rips the story out of its setting and places it firmly on 2023 TikTok.

Towards the end, when Donna and Rose are about to release their extra metacrisis energy, we’re given the lines ‘It’s a shame you’re not a woman anymore, ‘cause she’d’ve understood.’ and ‘Something a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand.’. I am disappointed, though perhaps not surprised, to see such rabid sexism in Doctor Who. If the sexes had been reversed for this scene and these lines, every media outlet in the western world would be screaming bloody murder.

Every time there’s a moment like that, it just pulls you out of the show, and you are agonisingly aware that you are watching actors read lines. The audience seeing an actor as an actor and not as the character they’re playing should be an actor’s worst nightmare. 

If it hadn’t had all that nonsense in it, this episode would have been a solid 8/10. As it is, it drags it down to a 5/10. As long as they don’t keep doing this stuff, the series may well be worth watching.

Dramatic Dissonance

In my reviews of Star Trek Picard, I’ve started using the term ‘dramatic dissonance’ to describe something that we’re seeing on-screen. This particular phenomenon or quality may already have a term to describe it – if it does, I don’t know what it is, so for now I’m going to use ‘dramatic dissonance’ (to mimic the phrase ‘dramatic irony’). And while I’ve started using this term in my Star Trek Picard reviews, it’s something I’ve seen in lots of other shows too – like Star Trek Discovery and recent Doctor Who – so I thought I’d write a blog post about it in order to define it more clearly.

Dramatic dissonance is when the reactions of the characters to each other, or to the events of the story, are different to the audience’s reaction to the characters or to the events of the story.

Here’s an example of this: one character says something, and several other characters around them consider it a very awkward thing to say, or a faux pas, but the audience doesn’t think that it’s an awkward thing to say.

Here’s another: one character does something (it could be anything), and all of the characters around them think that this character is a genius for doing it, but the audience isn’t impressed by it at all.

This second example is one we’ve seen a lot in both Star Trek Picard and Star Trek Discovery – in fact this second example is often a way of determining whether a character is a Mary Sue. (Other characters will just think that they’re brilliant no matter what they do.)

Dramatic dissonance is a bad quality for a show to have. It is, by its very definition, unrealistic, and if a show has it, the audience will sense something is amiss, even if they can’t quite put it into words. The audience can sense it because things in the show don’t seem to make sense.

I’m not sure I could exactly say what the origins of dramatic dissonance in a show actually are, but I don’t think it’s an acting problem – I think it comes from the writing. It may come from writers thinking too much about ‘How do I want this character to react?’ rather than ‘How would they react?’.

Doctor Who – Series 12 Episode 1 – Dull, dull, ever so dull

Gosh it doesn’t seem all that long since series 11. After series 11 had aired, I had intended to make a video for my YouTube channel reviewing the series as a whole. I never got round to that in the end (as is the case with many, many videos), so I will just summarise what I thought of series 11 here.

I did not like series 11. The series had many problems, and I could have spent a long time describing them, either in blog posts or videos, but the main problem with the series was that it was deathly dull. It was unendingly boring; I tried to watch every episode of the series, but by the end I just didn’t give a shit anymore, so didn’t watch the last two or three episodes.

This followed on from many years of decline of Doctor Who. Peter Capaldi is an outstanding actor – one of the best living actors – but his series’ as The Doctor were increasingly dull. I can’t really remember the stories of any of the episodes he was in – there were no memorable moments. Getting rid of Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat and bringing in Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall was an attempt at revitalising the show. I watched series 11 optimistic that this would work, but it didn’t.

As a result of all of this, I had not intended on watching series 12 – once a show declines below a certain level of quality, one should stop watching it – how else will the showrunners learn? However, I’ve heard mixed things about series 12 so far, about half of which has aired, so I thought I’d watch this series (at least, start watching it – I may not make it to the end), to see for myself. I tend to tolerate one bad series of a show, but not two – that’s what I did with Star Trek Discovery.

So I watched episode 1 of series 12, optimistic that they would begin to solve some of the problems from the last series. But they didn’t.

I have four pages of notes on this episode, and each note could probably become two or three whole paragraphs in this review. If I were to try to fully describe what was bad about this episode, this review would become enormous, and I really don’t want to have to write and edit a giant piece of text – that takes a lot of time – considering this is just one episode. And I think it would be rather dull to read too. So instead I’m just going to give my overall thoughts on this episode – what the main problems with it are – and then chuck in a list of quick thoughts I had while watching the episode, to give the sense of just how many things are wrong with it.

The main problem with this episode is that it is dull – very, very dull. Throughout most of the episode I was just waiting for it to end, so that I could get on with other stuff. I just don’t give a shit about the mystery they are trying to solve or the villain they are trying to defeat.

And I think this says something important about writing mystery – something actually quite fundamental. The best mysteries are ones where the audience has a chance of figuring out the mystery before the characters do. We the audience should be given clues about the mystery throughout the story, and we can use these clues to solve the mystery, in the same way that the characters do. The problem with Doctor Who recently is the same problem that Steven Moffat’s Sherlock series had: we the audience have no way of figuring out the mystery ourselves, and so all we can do is watch the protagonist use their brilliance and genius to figure out the mystery using knowledge that we the audience don’t have. This is dull.

A very similar principle is true about ‘defeat the bad guy’ stories too. We the audience should be able to figure out how the bad guy can be defeated based on what we know of the rules of the world that the story is set in and the resources that the protagonists have access to. This is why world-building is so important. Part of world-building is establishing what the rules of your fictional world are, and once set, they should not be broken. The audience then knows what the rules of your world are, and can use that knowledge to figure out how to defeat the villain. The problem with Doctor Who is that it is one giant festival of deus ex machina. New rules and possibilities are introduced all the time, and old rules are disregarded. This means that all we can do as the audience is just sit back and bask in the genius of the protagonist as, once again, the protagonist uses knowledge of what’s possible and what isn’t, that we the audience don’t have, to defeat the antagonist. This is dull.

Doctor Who has had both of these problems for a long time, and this episode epitomised them. I simply don’t care how or why all of these people are being killed, because I have no way of figuring it out. Nor do I care about how The Master will be defeated – he’s always defeated. There is no threat; there is no suspense; there is no mystery.

That is the biggest problem with the episode (and I anticipate it will be the biggest problem with the whole series); that’s why it’s dull.

And now for a selection of random thoughts from throughout the episode:

  • Weird fucking dialogue right from the fucking outset. This was a problem in the last series too – for some reason the writers aren’t able to write realistic dialogue – the dialogue in this show just comes across as creepy, patronising, passive-aggressive, forced, and ultimately fake.
  • The side-kicks continue to have zero charisma. They have no personality – no character traits whatsoever. This isn’t a problem with the actors – this is a problem with the writers.
  • ‘Worst Uber ever!’ – y’know I think this line might epitomise the problem with Doctor Who at the moment. This line is played as a joke, but it’s not a joke – it’s a half-joke – a thing that is said that may be ever-so-slightly amusing, but which does not have the actual structure of a joke (yes jokes do have analysable structure). Half-jokes should never, ever make it into your writing, unless you are trying to mock the person who makes the half-joke.
  • MI6 seems a bit weak-sauce compared to U.N.I.T.
  • ‘I’ve read the files; The Doctor is a man.’ says Stephen Fry. ‘I’ve had an upgrade.’ says Jodie Whittaker. This is a bit of a fuck you to the people who didn’t like this change.
  • Even Stephen Fry can’t make the dialogue good. Normally a great actor can make shit dialogue good, but here the dialogue is just too shit.
  • I hate all of this walking and talking stuff – it prevents the suspense from building. Leave pauses in your scenes – you don’t have to have characters talking all the time. Suspense builds when we sense something ominous – little is more ominous than silence.
  • ‘Is she gonna die Doc?’ says one of the side-kicks. Once again, the side-kicks are just used as props for The Doctor. This was a problem last series too.
  • ‘MI6 has never countenanced the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.’ – I’m guessing all of those times aliens were seen by lots of people around Earth have been retconned then.
  • Stephen Fry’s character’s death has no impact.
  • The line ‘No-one’s mocking you now.’ is weirdly hilarious, though it’s not supposed to be.
  • Lenny Henry is thin now.
  • The show desperately wants to examine the big issues – like corporate data gathering and people being shits on Twitter – but it has no idea how to do it.
  • This was another fucking ‘end of the universe’ story. Stop it. This carries no weight in a series with world-building and characters as flimsy as this.
  • Fake-out deaths – these kill the tension – avoid them.
  • Jodie Whittaker plays The Doctor like a children’s television presenter. You’re not on fucking Blue Peter.
  • This is another episode that has characters talk about technology that’s been written by people who know nothing about how that technology works. If you’re not going to have any techie people write your show, at least get a fucking technology adviser so that your characters don’t say stupid things.
  • Lenny Henry is shit at aiming.
  • Lenny Henry does not make for a threatening villain. (This is actually a writing problem – as is the above point. Lenny Henry actually does very well with what he is given – it’s just that what he is given to perform is shit.)

That was one episode, and it had that much wrong with it. That episode was a complete disaster, and it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the series.