Review Category: Doctor Who TV

As talking points go, a speaking frog is probably going to end up making the Kandy Man look like Davros in the pantheon of unexpected antagonists. And in the middle of this back-to-basics version of Doctor Who, the Solitract’s chosen form was such an incongruous visual, it will have had viewers frozen mid-sip wondering if their television was playing tricks on them – and perhaps not especially well-conceived tricks either, as the physical frog was somewhat less articulate than its master. For the longer term fan, this was a jump-the-pond moment that can be pointed at with loud cries of ‘I told you so!’ directed at the basement ceiling. But for those of us who are prepared to let the programme turn its attention occasionally to places like the Land of Fiction or the inside of the Confessional Dial, this was simply evidence that Doctor Who – even in its current Sunday evening iteration – hasn’t lost its sense of wonder and imagination, and is still prepared to give them an occasional free rein.

But oh boy, that frog came mighty close to taking us right out of It Takes You Away.

If you’re looking for a location in which to set a mythology-deconstructing narrative, a remote wooden cabin as close to the top of the world as you can reasonably get was as appropriate as any other. Only time will tell quite how successful Hime has been at blending his influences, but what threatened to be 2018’s Fear Her might have turned out to be Series Eleven’s Kinda instead; or rather, and especially being in the penultimate slot of the run, this was The Metaphysical Mirror, or What Graham Did.

There were two stories taking place here, and whatever you might think of the current production’s Sunday evening execution – in which Jodie Whittaker instantly removed most of the mysteries by immediately telling us what was going on every time anything strange happened – you can’t fault Hime for stacking up his building blocks with careful attention to what each of them was saying, and it was nice to see some disguise about the theme and destination too. So what this was really about was the relationship between Ryan and Graham, given a classic ‘Is this really your dead wife/grandmother returned to life?’ spin.

We began with an abandoned blind child, whose mother had died and whose father had disappeared, and as this plot unfolded it became clear that abdication of duty – whether voluntary or not – was part of the issue. Cue Ryan instantly spotting the similarities between this situation and his own parental circumstance, and if the rest of the regulars were having none of it then Ryan was ultimately proved correct – allowing him to recognise the man who’d stepped into Ryan’s family and was still holding what remains of it together, for what he is. The ‘grandad’ moment therefore was both earned and by this point predictable, but no less satisfying for happening.

Graham, meanwhile, was being put through the emotional ringer, and maybe this subplot didn’t work quite as well, because although Bradley Walsh’s performance was just as assured and authentic as it has been all year, here his story existed more to facilitate Ryan’s development than perhaps as some kind of closure for Graham in its own right. Still, it was lovely to see them finally recognising the bond they’ve formed in words, as while this has been the main character development this series, a lot of the actual progress they’ve made has gone unspoken.

It was also nice to see Yaz commenting on her police training rather than simply using it unremarked upon in understated ways that have made her appear less developed and less useful than she’s really been. She’s an integral member of this TARDIS team, a quiet supporting character – in the best sense of the expression – and if she hadn’t been there we’d miss her much more than we might expect. This group will probably break up after Series Eleven is over, and while they’ve not been as involved or as ostentatious as many of the other modern companions, what they have been is an engaging and integrated bunch who have lightly exhibited a lot more chemistry than they might have appeared to.

But inescapably, we have to come back to the frog.

Chris Chibnall promised that Series Eleven would give old and new viewers alike a sense of the variety that Doctor Who can produce, and It Takes You Away was the series ‘doing David Lynch’ in a stripped back Scandi setting and with all the science-as-magic rationale you’d expect from the programme. If it would have been more satisfying not to get such comprehensive explanations for the anti-zone and the Solitract as we did (and Hime – or Chibnall – threw in a little brand new Doctor mythology for good measure, which no doubt will have offended fans who hold The Deadly Assassin up as one of the series’ high water marks), then at least the troll went unclarified and we could bring our own interpretation to his existence.

Not that he needed a lot. The anti-zone was pure mythological limbo, its realisation somewhat less than convincing but its status quite ameliorating in that respect – and both  Ribbons of the Seven Stomachs and the Pitch Black-style flesh moths felt an organic part of its existence, each revised according to Doctor Who’s ‘homely oddness’ methodology.

The implementation of all this was occasionally patchy, and still rent through with this sense of not being willing to confuse the Antiques Roadshow crowd. But although It Takes You Away has its antecedents in the recent universe – The Doctor’s Wife and the aforementioned episode of Class, for instance – it’s also in theme and tenor unique to this iteration of Doctor Who just as much as Rosa and Demons of the Punjab were before it. Say what you like about that frog, but It Takes You Away had the courage of its convictions and looked caution in the eye without blinking, and for that it deserves the benefit of any doubt.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 9: IT TAKES YOU AWAY / WRITER: ED HIME / DIRECTOR: JAMIE CHILDS / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, SHARON D CLARKE, ELEANOR WALLWORK, KEVIN ELDON, CHRISTIAN RUBECK, LISA STOKKE / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED DECEMBER 2ND)

For the third time this series we’re back in a period of history where a particular group of people are being persecuted for no very good reason – this time women, pertinently to the Doctor’s new identity – although there is a first here in that this time, there’s some nasty aliens up to no good. Which is not to say that Wilkinson skips over the running theme of misjudged antagonists behaving without deliberately malicious intent entirely; our chief opponent turns out to have been at least partially possessed by something approaching the Devil and by the episode’s end almost everyone has been partially either exonerated or at least justified in something of their beliefs. Even Willa (‘valiant protector’, etymology fans) goes off to practice her alternative therapies medicine at the end of the instalment, placing her somewhere between witch and doctor. Joy Wilkinson’s script, whether by accident or by design – and presumably by design – might be the most satisfying of the series so far.

It might be the new cameras, although it’s happened often enough before, but Series Eleven can’t rid Doctor Who of the minor niggle of people standing around waiting for their cue during its action sequences. And oh boy, there was an awful lot of music this week; if people thought the arrival of Segun Akinola was going to save them from having to complain about the score being mixed so loudly as to drown out the dialogue then they’ll be scratching their heads about how wrong they were. But those two production grumbles aside, this was a story that achieved what it set out to, and with a modicum more wit than has been apparent in other recent instalments.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, we’re here to consider Alan Cumming though, aren’t we. Has there ever been an actor who has enjoyed his appearance in Doctor Who quite as much? The miracle of Alan Cumming, is that he doesn’t rein himself in one iota, and yet while he comes perilously close to tipping the tonal balance completely out of its equilibrium, he manages to instil King James with just enough sympathy to make the portrait a lovingly embellished one, rather than being wilfully and unnecessarily show-stealing. This reviewer actually held his breath just for a moment at the end of the episode, not quite entirely certain that Ryan wouldn’t take the monarch up on his offer; with Cumming in situ it was always a given that James’ early preference for the company of boys be presented in one way or another, and his taking to Ryan was both amusingly awkward and awkwardly amusing – in quite the most entertaining way. And what a lovely parting moment between the two.

As a plot, The Witchfinders was as predictable as anything else this year, which is not meant disparagingly. If Series Eleven has been as consciously set up so as to fit right into Sunday evenings after Countryfile and in the Antiques Roadshow’s slot as it seems, then it’s been a roaring success – and Wilkinson’s script was filled with easily fathomed, but equally rewarding, reason and resolution, from the mystery surrounding the village’s disappearance from historical records, to the explanation for the mystery of the Morax’ key. Despite a fair amount of hopping around – never anything to complain about in Doctor Who – it even retained that composed pace we’re taking so long to get used to. If the narrative alluded back towards The Visitation, the tenor of the story was very much more akin to The Woman Who Lived, complete with a stranded extra-terrestrial menace with vaguely leonine features, and a plot revolving around ritual execution. This was probably also the most graphically frightening episode since The Woman Who Fell to Earth, but in that slightly rustic manner that made it just a bit more palatable – or disorientating, depending upon your sensibilities – for those Sunday evening viewers.

Jodie Whittaker could still do with adding some quiet self-possession to her repertoire as the Doctor, but the obvious comparisons that were being made between her and David Tennant or Peter Davison were thankfully a little less in evidence this week. But ‘Honestly, if I was still a bloke, I could get on with the job and not have to waste time defending myself,’ was maybe just a bit too on the nose not to cause a bit of a squirm. Likewise some of the comedy, especially that revolving around the hat and the position of Witchfinder General, vacillated between hilarious and honest, and strained to the point of eye-rolling – but that’s an easily accepted compromise, especially in a production that’s taking care not to retread its predecessor’s paths while being mindful not to wander too far away from them either.

Is this the episode everyone’s going to remember from 2018? No. With Rosa and Demons of the Punjab for company, it isn’t even the most striking historical story – and not by some distance. But The Witchfinders set itself certain goals and didn’t miss a one, and managed to achieve them with a touch more subtlety than we might have expected it to. Along with great dollops of obviousness too, of course. Which makes it every bit as successful as each of those two stories, and no less meaningful either, albeit in perhaps more surreptitious ways. This is a series that has in almost every episode focussed in on something that’s worth dealing with, whether that be an obvious ‘issue’ or not, and at the end of fifty minutes it’s abundantly clear that James has learned a lesson, even if the viewer isn’t being struck across the head with what that lesson might necessarily have been.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 8: “THE WITCHFINDERS” / WRITER: JOY WILKINSON / DIRECTOR: SALLIE APRAHAMIAN / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, ALAN CUMMING, SIOBHAN FINNERAN, TILLY STEELE / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED NOVEMBER 25TH)

‘The systems aren’t the problem. How people use and exploit the system: that’s the problem.’ It’s a simple lesson, that it’s the people who run companies like – well, take your pick, but Amazon would appear to be the obvious analogy in Pete McTighe’s corporate satire – who shoulder the responsibility for their employment and human rights records, but it’s one that needs reinforcing from time to time, as we gaze upon these edifice-like businesses and sometimes forget that it’s not the companies who are running themselves.

It’s kind of a shame we had to pay a visit to the planet Kandoka, or rather its industrialised moon, for the refresher. Because while Kerblam! was as on the nose and as straightforward as all the other Series Eleven episodes so far – the only confusion it might possibly have engendered was during the ‘I’m the good guy!’ ‘No I’m the good guy!’ sequence, which surely took its inspiration from Spartacus – there was plenty of potential in its commentary for something just a little deeper, a little more ambiguous. The final twist revealing the culprit of the enterprise – as satisfying as it was to finally take a lurch into the unexpected this year – did rather leave capitalist exploitation somewhat off the hook. Although we can maybe take some comfort in the implication, given that this particular business really was running itself, that maybe Kerblam is a not-for-profit organisation. Perhaps this is how industrial socialism might look, should we ever achieve it – and possibly there’s an underlying message here that we don’t need the Sugars and the Trumps of this world greasing their palms on the oiled wheels of industry in order for that industry to function; Kandoka would seem to suggest that automated commercialism can run for the benefit of the people it’s supposed to serve, just as well as it currently does for those that take advantage of it. But that’s a bit of a stretch – and one that’s rather undermined by the episode’s conclusion. For Message Television that’s as blatant as this that was a bit of a fudge at the end there.

In terms of its Doctor Who-ness, Kerblam! was about as old school (post-2005 old school, that is) as Series Eleven has managed to get, and it was a more comfortable fit than we might have expected. But for the balance being weighted more heavily towards the Something To Say than the entertaining manner in which it was being said, this could have been Planet of the Ood; instead, and in the absence of a giant brain in a tub and Tim McInnerny’s extraordinary transformation, this was a closer cousin to Steven Moffat’s The Beast Below, even down to the truth being ultimately found at the end of a perilous journey to the basement. And while we were never going to get anything approaching Donna’s impassioned revelations about the nature of the business being conducted, we did get the double whammy of the villain being twice hoist by his own petard; the first time when the system takes his rather sweet potential girlfriend Kira – and it was oddly gratifying to see her offed with a relative minimum of fuss, even if that and the rather superficial nature of their burgeoning relationship in the narrative, made the Doctor’s citing of her feel equally perfunctory – and the second in what might have been an homage to Planet of the Daleks by way of I, Robot.

Still, the use of bubble wrap didn’t feel quite so much like it was making up for The Ark in Space as it might have.

Much like the ostensibly rather similar The Sun Makers, this was meat-and-potatoes mid-series Doctor Who given a little bit of extra accessibility by the casting of the redoubtable Julie Hesmondhalgh and the surprisingly effective Lee Mack, who downplayed his comedy persona in the service of giving us a sense of the story’s stakes, and was thus the cause for the episode’s one Big Emotional Moment, more than ably performed by Mandip Gill, who in the last two episodes has come much more into the centre of things. Not that either of her co-friends gave up any of the limelight to let her in; Bradley Walsh continues to be the series’ big revelation and Tosin Cole was especially good too, particularly during the return – or the return to the foreground – of his dyspraxia. Although as has been noted almost everywhere, Yaz’ police background does seem to have been almost forgotten and this ought to have bene the perfect place to redress that.

The big improvement this week was in the Doctor, though; after a handful of episodes in which she’s been either at the mercy of the plot or too keen to over-examine it, Kerblam! seemed to strike a nice balance between the know-it-all and the cosmic investigator, and if it’s still hard to tell quite where Jodie Whittaker’s pitching her characterisation, in this episode at least it was harder to tell that it was hard to tell. Or to put it more plainly: here she felt like a defined Doctor coasting rather than one who maybe knew what she wanted to achieve but wasn’t quite sure how that fitted in with everything else. Although there’s still a lot of Tennant by way of Davison going on in there.

It’s odd that such a modest episode as this felt so much more natural than its counterparts, even if the music and photography are still keeping the series from unleashing its inner romp. There were shades of Keff McCulloch in the score, which attempted a lightness on its feet that the McCoy-era orchestral stabs and percussive stylings didn’t help, but the conveyor belt sequence, while impressively ambitious – and thank heavens for some honest to goodness action at last, much as it might have resembled something the Tenth Doctor would have got involved in – was probably the instalment’s weakest moment, the budget plainly not being big enough to quite do it justice.

That’s where we are with Series Eleven, though; there’s a new ‘normality’ at play, one that’s playing well enough with your casual audiences to offset the furrowed brows within certain quarters of fandom, and while there have been references back aplenty, Kerblam! is at the dead centre of the Venn diagram between The Way Things Were and The Way They Are Now. Another production regime might have made something more light-hearted and overtly entertaining than this, but for this production regime, this is probably as light-hearted and entertaining as it gets.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 7: KERBLAM! / WRITER: PETE McTIGHE / DIRECTOR: JENNIFER PERROTT / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, JULIE HESMONDHALGH, LEE MACK, CALLUM DIXON, CLAUDIA JESSIE, LEO FLANAGAN / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED NOVEMBER 18TH)

It’s funny how the world turns, isn’t it? Back in Doctor Who’s mid-1970s heyday, every episode was like a trip inside a child’s nightmarish perception of some pretty lurid, and in many ways exotic adult fiction. And the larger-than-life dialogue and performances were there to disguise how essentially meaningless – no matter how fun – it all was, with Tom Baker’s fourth Doctor fronting up against some memorable but ludicrous villains. ‘I could play all day in my green cathedral’ has to be one of the ripest and most ridiculous lines ever committed to VT, closely followed by, ‘Oh, what a magnificent head.’

Ten years earlier, the dialogue had been – mostly, the occasionally eloquent historical serial aside – considerably less florid, as this then-new series found its feet and developed an audience. Ten years after Tom Baker’s first flush of success, and the dialogue was now a brutal necessity, simply there to facilitate some equally brutal action. As the series evolves, so does its audience and their expectations, and the various factors which combine to create Doctor Who – the sets, the music, the performances, and the dialogue – similarly evolve to compensate.

What has all this to do with Demons of the Punjab? Simply that here, with the first episode of Series Eleven not to bear Chris Chibnall’s name on the writing credits, we have the best and most lucid example yet of quite what an evolution this latest version of Doctor Who has taken.

In 1964, the two travelling schoolteachers were an anchor of normality by which the audience could engage in an increasingly bizarre series of adventures, the programme performing a daring balancing act between the kind of visuals never before seen on British television, and character relationships – and through them a comprehension of the ideas – that were ordinary enough to offset the craziness. When the Daleks invade London, Barbara only manages to escape because she’s wetting her handkerchief in the river.

When Doctor Who returned in 2005, Russell T Davies was well aware of this contradictory relationship, and made a roaring success of throwing first a shop girl and later a temp into the heart of some wild and crazy adventures. And when Steven Moffat took what Davies had achieved and filtered it through his Sorkinese gift for dialogue and his Burtonesque imagination, he had a similar period of roaring success. By then the British public knew what the programme was, and wanted to see what it was capable of – just as they’d lapped up the utter bonkersness of Hinchcliffe and Holmes after the relative familiarity of Dicks and Letts.

But the Moffat era lasted perhaps two years too long, meaning the BBC risked a generation who hadn’t experienced enough of the basic version in order to relish its elaborate child. And when all you know is extravagance, it becomes harder to ground that in something more recognisable.

Demons of the Punjab, then, is 1964’s Marco Polo retold for an audience which cherishes Call the Midwife and Downton Abbey. There’s an apparent peripheral threat – albeit no explanation this time for a modern audience as to where the expression ‘deadliest assassin’ might have come from – and a predestined journey with a bittersweet destination, one which the characters had advance warning about, hailing from its future. And this is the polar opposite of Moffat’s approach, whereby the joy of the destination is in disguising its arrival, such that you only realised you knew what to expect in the moments after its materialisation. Here, Vinay Patel set up a pair of conundra – the fate of Yaz’ prospective step-grandfather-in-law, and the reason for the presence of aliens during the partition of India – and reveals the solutions to both long before either becomes relevant or prompt. Because this is the age of walking the audience through the plot, rather than leading them through it.

And that’s fine. This is a Doctor Who that’s no less the most unusual thing on British TV. It’s just unusual-with-a-map.

The story, then. In the months before Brexit threatens to become a segregating reality, on the day that the world stopped to remember the hundredth anniversary of a global disaster of a war, at a time when civilisation is at its most schismatic for decades, this was the most apposite episode of the series so far. And it did what Doctor Who is most famous for: it boiled all this hysteria, all this history, and all this allusion down to half a dozen people standing around talking in a barn.

It was an episode that asked you to respond to Yaz’ situation, but put that circumstance on too much of a plate for you to have to feel your way into it and thus fully empathise. And while Graham had another of his now-vaunted moments, it didn’t feel as earned as previous ones had, and his relationship with Ryan seemed to take a back seat too. The new Doctor is still too over-excited and too little in command, and with Mandip Gill underplaying – quite handsomely, it has to be said – the regulars did feel as much tourists as they did interested parties; tourists not just in history, but in people’s lives.

Mixed success, then. Segun Akinola’s music continues to confound, sometimes wonderful and understated, sometimes seriously failing to be as agile as this kind of drama demands. But boy, was this possibly the most visually gorgeous episode ever. If it was stodgy, then, like unsweetened porridge – filled with substance and oh so very good for you, but not as easy to digest as it might have been – at least it was beautiful to look at.

It looks like Series Eleven might not get any lighter on its feet than this. What we’re getting is mostly good, often solid, and always straightforward Doctor Who. But after eight years of Steven Moffat, and with Chris Chibnall’s plan to revisit 1964 from a modern political perspective more apparent than ever, this does very much feel like Russell T Davies at 33 1⁄3 rpm.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 6: ‘DEMONS OF THE PUNJAB’ / WRITER: VINAY PATEL/ DIRECTOR: JAMIE CHILDS / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, AMITA SUMAN, SHANE ZAZA, LEENA DHINGRAHAMZA JEETOOA / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED NOVEMBER 11TH)

The real conundrum thrown up by The Tsuranga Conundrum is, how do we go from the best of intentions – because nobody sets out to make a dull or uninspired production, no matter that it’s apparently the studio-bound mid-series quickie – to something that’s, at best, a bit lacklustre? All the elements are in place for a potentially cracking episode of Doctor Who; this had the set-up of something like Alien, a not-unlikeable cast and some beautifully designed and executed sets. Oh, and the creature, once it appeared, was exquisitely animated even if the concept and design were residing in different galaxies from one another. And the narrative, such as it was, was perfectly reasonable; this was Doctor Who as procedural in much the same way as the last two episodes had been, with roughly the same amount of logic and motion and there was nothing especially you could put your finger on and get burned by.

Yet once all this found itself in the pot together, it never really got cooking. It just kind of sat there, a meringue mixture filled with all the correct ingredients in essentially the right proportions, waiting to be mixed and cooked – and perhaps it was the lack of mixing that left it undercooked, because it’s become so easy this year to spot what Doctor Who’s doing, even the surprises aren’t remotely surprising.

Which begs two questions. How deliberate is the lack of mixing? And how important is the distinction? Because something really strange has happened this series, and it’s becoming more and more apparent in fans’ reactions to the episodes: Doctor Who is leaving much of its invested viewership behind.

So, let’s talk about mixing (after all, we had a rapper in the house this week).

Ordinarily, a lot of drama – and in particular Doctor Who – functions by working on multiple levels at the same time; one of the criticisms levelled at the previous regime was that people couldn’t follow the plots, or didn’t care about the characters, and this despite Steven Moffat doing everything Russell T Davies had previously done. Except Moffat tended to throw in one extra level of allusion and his varnish of comedy tended to be more evidently self-aware (Davies’ was just moderately self-aware). Chris Chibnall, on the other hand, despite being plentifully experienced at working to much the same template, has apparently deliberately chosen this year to make a version of Doctor Who where the ingredients are all laid out in a line in front of us. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean those ingredients are any less tasty – after all, a meringue isn’t the only thing you can make with sugar and eggs – but it does mean it’s very easy to sit there and spot ‘the sciencey bit’ or ‘the emotional bit’, and for a fandom that’s become used to showrunners who’re a whizz at baking up those ingredients till the constituent parts are invisible, stories like this in which they’re a plain as the egg on your face are a bit harder to stomach.

That doesn’t make this bad television, it just means it’s a rather odd Doctor Who.

And does it matter? Well, the answer to that is a rather puzzling yes and yes. Yes, on the one hand, because as Doctor Who fans, we don’t expect to be as spoon-fed as we are currently being (although sometimes we quite like it, if we’re completely honest). We like it when Doctor Who is simple and easy to follow, and predictable even, as long as it appeals to other parts of our fan-consciousness. So give us a bleak, lightning-rent planet and a performance like Philip Madoc’s and who cares about the illogicality, the disparate themes, and the predictable resolution in The Brain of Morbius. Woe betide you don’t include anything comparable, though.

But on the other hand, this isn’t Doctor Who for Doctor Who fans. And that’s the real puzzler. Because Russell T Davies didn’t make Doctor Who for Doctor Who fans either, yet his Doctor Who wasn’t like this. The difference is, Russell T Davies had a blank slate; Chris Chibnall doesn’t. Davies could essentially make any kind of programme he wanted, as long as it kept within a certain idea of the programme’s format. Steven Moffat inherited that programme, and pushed at the edges of what that format was – while still staying inside those boundaries. But after thirteen years of a particular kind of Doctor Who – Davies’, or Moffat’s Davies-squared – the programme has entered the arena of those things our TV audience takes for granted. And so the gradual decline in measurable viewing figures.

Chibnall hasn’t just moved Doctor Who to Sunday nights and cast an unexpected Doctor. He’s reprogrammed the cooker so that while the ingredients are all still there, the result is something entirely different. He’s made cookies, when we were hoping for meringue. And as lovely as cookies might be, they don’t have the sophistication or the skill in the execution. And when you’re used to the one thing, the other can be somewhat disappointing if not downright unpalatable.

But to people not used to the sophistication, this unsophisticated Doctor Who is just as nourishing in an easier-to-digest form.

The upshot is, this is a Doctor Who that’s patently working for everyone who ever thought that Doctor Who was something ‘a bit weird’. The ‘weirdness’ – the daffiness and idiosyncrasy; the flavour, maybe – has been whisked out of view. And what we’ve been left with is a Doctor Who that performs and functions according to its needs, but isn’t really then giving us a flavour or a texture to tingle our taste buds. It’s not quite Doctor Who-by-numbers, and that ‘weirdness’ really is still there; it’s inherent. It’s just hiding.

Hiding rather too well this week. The four regulars were great and Ryan and Graham in particular had some terrific moments. The rest? Russell T Davies once said he refused to set any story on the alien planet Zog because why would anyone watching care what happened there? That was The Tsuranga Conundrum’s biggest problem; in between all the gabbing and the explaining and the urgent standing around, and a final fifteen minutes where the tension did arise and this was not – by any stretch of the imagination – an episode without its moments, it didn’t really ask you to care.

And so whatever good intentions the production started out with, somewhere between the writers’ room and the director’s camera, the ingredients wound up being exposed. The problem set by the episode’s title (itself an allusion to Davies’ Zog that might have been better avoided) and its solution were fine. Everything else was fine. The characters were fine, the acting was fine, the photography was fine. But a whole lot of fine tends to have a negative effect when blended together; there wasn’t any pizzazz on the menu, and so the cook rustled up something less than whelming.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 5: “THE TSURANGA CONUNDRUM” / WRITER: CHRIS CHIBNALL / DIRECTOR: JENNIFER PERROTT / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, BRETT GOLDSTEIN, LOIS CHIMIMBA, SUZANNE PACKER, BEN BAILEY SMITH / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED NOVEMBER 4TH)

There were moments when it was a bit clunky, but Series Eleven’s first window onto history presented a rather crucial moment in the American civil rights movement without undermining Rosa Parks’ boldness or her resolve – in fact Malorie Blackman and Chris Chibnall were very careful to show her coming to her moment of decision quite independently of the rest of the plot – and without making the episode feel so much of a history lesson it rather missed its purpose.

And what was its purpose? This was segregation being illustrated not for an American audience, who ought to have been learning this stuff at school, but for the series’ domestic British one – and not to show how far we’ve come, but, in this modern era of exclusion and a focus on people’s differences rather than their commonalities, to show how far we still have to go. There might be a black man and a ‘Mexican’ travelling on the TARDIS this year, but sadly there was still an outcry from a certain quarter of the programme’s fandom about what an unnecessarily inclusive agenda this was promoting. Well, you don’t make progress without smashing a few status quo.

It was helpful that Rosa didn’t feature an alien intervention, although Krasko’s purpose in travelling back to 1955 served to make the episode even more relevant in 2018. Here was a white man from the future trying to undo over half a century’s worth of progress towards the establishment of equality, and that couldn’t have been more pertinent. We live at a time when it seems to be more attractive to look backwards than ahead, but Doctor Who at least showed that if you are going to become fixated on the past, there are worthwhile things to become fascinated by. We are, after all, supposed to learn from our mistakes as a species as well as individuals, and if there’s a lesson here it’s to not allow the normalisation of hatred to carry the day.

It’s a lesson that Doctor Who has always taught, and this was perhaps its purest expression.

Maybe it’s because that expression was so pure, that some of the rest of the episode felt a little heavy-handed. Blackman and Chibnall were possibly too busy dodging landmines to fill in enough landscape for the regulars to navigate. As sweet as the moment was when the Doctor discovered just how neutered the future bigot had become, that did also rather neuter the peril in the story, and the dashing around to ensure that history might be allowed to take its course felt just a little like running to stand still because of it. It was a well-chosen narrative – the time team protecting a soon-to-be-established state of affairs while most of the people they met were holding onto an old one – but it did make their actions seem rather perfunctory, and lacking in urgency. And while it was absolutely the right decision to show them only protecting the event from the changes that Krasko was seeking to make, rather than taking part in the moment itself, that did have the odd effect of making the series regulars look like bystanders. Bystanders at an historic moment – just as Ian and Barbara so often were – but bystanders nevertheless.

South Africa made a glorious double for the American south, on the other hand, and never has an episode of Doctor Who evoked or presented its location quite so effectively. Segun Akinola’s music was also a great surprise, this week forgoing some of that expensive-sounding programmed electronica for themes which exhibited a more human touch. He’s much lighter on melody than his predecessor was, but there was also a layer that sounded like nothing so much as W.G. Snuffy Walden’s appropriation of stirring American anthems.

And this week finally, finally, the regular team got an opportunity to split up and go off and have their own stories. Partly this was a relief because, beyond the obvious lecturing on history, there was less of the Doctor telling everybody what’s happening and more of them going out and getting involved in it. Bradley Walsh was especially good at making the exposition feel like genuine experience and explanation, and his righteousness when he discovered the part the team would have to play in Rosa’s moment was also well expressed. He’s proving more than his worth this year, giving a really surprising performance filled with depth and authenticity. Mandip Gill is also starting to emerge, ahead of a couple of episodes coming up in which she’ll take closer to centre stage. And Tosin Cole, who’s been almost as much the lead as Jodie Whittaker thus far, was given the best range of reactions to deliver; from his indignation at realising who in where he was, to his delight at meeting Martin Luther King – rightly included, but rightfully kept out of the story itself – Cole made Ryan feel like a regular human being caught up in something bigger than himself, and he was the audience’s touchstone in feeling the history as well as understanding it. Oh, and what a wonderful moment when he sent back to the far past the man from the future who wanted to bring the far past back to the future with him.

Whittaker was vastly improved, less shouty Tennant-lite than last week and more in line with where perhaps she might have developed after The Woman Who Fell to Earth, and giving a decent indication that she’ll find her own Doctor over the course of the rest of the series. There’s a niggling worry that maybe she’s too good an actress for the role, which generally requires less method than it does manner. Once she stops trying to play the Doctor and just starts being her, she’ll be the definite article. She’s not there yet, and she seemed to struggle with some of the episode’s more confrontational moments – it might be that she needs to further adopt Patrick Troughton’s approach to dealing with her enemies, guiling them into being outwitted rather than trying to overpower them – but the promise is there and she had some great moments of Doctor-ish unpredictability this week.

Chris Chibnall seems to be approaching Series Eleven as an opportunity to go back to 1963 and build the programme up from those original blocks once again. This year’s Doctor Who has so far been as much an edification as it has an adventure, the closest the revived series has got to Verity Lambert’s original aspiration towards sincerity, awareness and understanding. Rosa was The Aztecs with a little bit of sci-fi, and 55 years’ worth of advancement in entertainment, what Lambert’s Doctor Who might have been if it had been as much about improving people as well as educating them – and if The Daleks hadn’t come along and skewed it towards distraction. This was Doctor Who with A Message instead of just a lesson, and it imparted that message with just about enough lightness to get it across without it feeling declamatory.

And the song was a nice touch. Not just for what it represents, but because it’s another example of the series being unsatisfied with toeing its own format. Rosa was Doctor Who wanting to be something more than just Doctor Who, and if it didn’t quite succeed in being Doctor Who as well, it was nevertheless a very worthwhile extension to the programme’s limits.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 3: ‘ROSA’ / WRITER: MALORIE BLACKMAN, CHRIS CHIBNALL / DIRECTOR: MARK TONDERAI / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, VINETTE ROBINSON, JOSHUA BOWMAN, TREVOR WHITE / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED OCTOBER 21ST)

The natural end to last week’s opening episode of the Thirteenth Doctor’s first series, might have been the moment she’s finally reunited with her TARDIS after having fallen to Earth. New showrunner Chris Chibnall opted to close on a ‘lost in space’ cliffhanger instead, delaying that reveal of the new design and interior until the end of the second episode. An explicable choice – spreading the unveiling of everything and everyone that’s new or updated across two episodes, rather than cramming it all into the first (and leaving the curtain-raiser to concentrate almost entirely on the characters rather than the ephemera) – but a decision that does rather leave The Ghost Monument (the second episode in a row to be named after one of Doctor Who’s permanent fixtures) in a bit of limbo.

Chibnall’s slant on the series is beginning to emerge, and this is perhaps where this second episode suffers slightly. His predisposition seems to be towards asking what the audience might expect at any given point, and then giving them something rather different, while compensating for the choice – for those viewers who prefer to be spoon-fed their family drama, perhaps – by over-explaining what’s happening right in front of them. So here, where a simple tale of good versus evil might have been the norm, we have a Steven Moffat-esque story about a race in space, where there aren’t really any bad guys at all – and just in case that leaves us a little confused (it probably doesn’t, but just in case) here’s the Doctor to explain absolutely every last little detail about what’s going on. There’s a real crossing point being navigated by wanting to create a version of Doctor Who that delights and surprises, and not wanting to leave any member of the audience scratching his or her head in confusion (the most common complaint about Chibnall’s predecessor, after all).

Sadly, this leaves Jodie Whittaker’s performance a little exposed; like Ewan McGregor acting against a green screen in The Phantom Menace, Whittaker spends so much time telling us what’s going to happen next, asking questions on our behalf just so we don’t miss needing them answered, or explaining how all the sci-fi works, it’s almost like every time she opens her mouth she’s talking to the entire guest cast at once – and the viewer at home – rather than actually, you know, interacting with the people around her. When she gets the occasional quiet moment, she shines, but for 75% of The Ghost Monument she’s pitching her performance somewhere just off the picture, and that was a little distracting. Because while she’s mastered Tennant’s art of following the thought processes as they jump around here, there and everywhere, she hasn’t yet found her own way of stopping and letting the charm ooze out, quite the way the tenth Doctor did. Tennant’s best moments were when he stopped talking, and just let his face reel you in; Whittaker hasn’t found her ‘Doctor face’ yet, maybe.

The story itself was fine, if a little lacking in urgency; the photography and music might be lush in new ways for the programme, but neither seems light enough to follow when the script calls for the episode to be a romp. And this probably should have been as frothy and as engaging as The End of the World, rather than as gleamingly glacial as Smile. I guess the planet’s not called Desolation for nothing.

South Africa did look splendid though.

There were plenty of indications as to where the series might be heading. The regulars were kept moving on the spot, suggesting a development across all ten episodes; while previous showrunners have given us fully-formed characters from the off and then explored what TARDIS-travel means for them, Chibnall patently prefers his Broadchurch approach of allowing us into their worlds just a little at a time. And this Doctor isn’t going to be as portent-free as the pre-publicity might have suggested; the “abandoned and unknown Timeless Child” isn’t something that’s not going to come back and haunt her by episode ten, and Stenza turned out to be behind not just the plot this week, but the ethnic cleansing on Susan Lynch’s character’s home planet too. A case of just using what you already had in your pocket, or setting something up to be further explored in episodes to come? We’ll see.

We also had another mogul in the form of Art Malik, to go with last week’s swindling monarch. There’s a minor theme of power without responsibility developing, perhaps.

There was a lot to enjoy in The Ghost Monument. Despite the overreaching, Jodie Whittaker feels very much like a Doctor-in-waiting – she just needs to settle down a bit after last week’s enthusiastic debut. And with a little more actual bonding, the likeable regular cast will be terrific. There’s no question there’s an imagination behind the programme, and we’ll see how that manifests itself over the course of the coming weeks. Now that the TARDIS is back – the new set’s a bit spartan and yet paradoxically over-decorated – we can hopefully get down to the business of being Doctor Who … and the feeling of ‘the same but different’ can be allowed to stretch into areas where the series excels, rather than hanging around its fringes. So far it’s all felt a bit well-meaning but overly wholesome; it’s time to break out the sparkle now please.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 2: “THE GHOST MONUMENT” / WRITER: CHRIS CHIBNALL / DIRECTOR: MARK TONDERAI / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, SUSAN LYNCH, SHAUN DOOLEY, ART MALIK / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED OCTOBER 14TH)

The eleventh series of Doctor Who landed on our screens not with a bang or a whimper, but rather more discreetly than anyone could have anticipated – although given this is the programme reimagined by the creator of Broadchurch, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. The alien menace looked like something from The Sarah Jane Adventures while the look and tone of the instalment were more from the Torchwood end of the extended universe, but the episode itself was much quieter than either Rose or The Eleventh Hour, a 63-minute introduction to the new characters that took its time letting us get to know them, doing so very slowly and deliberately. This is Doctor Who being repurposed for a broader audience and at times it felt like Doctor Who with its teeth removed.

The good news is that Jodie Whittaker looks like she’s going to make a great Doctor. From moment one she owned the dialogue and the character’s quirks – so much for the lack of idiosyncrasy – with the energy and unpredictability of David Tennant, although thankfully without the tenth Doctor’s particular vocal habits. Whittaker looks supremely comfortable in the Doctor’s skin, and it’s going to be a lot of fun watching her engage with the series’ diversity of narrative across the next ten weeks. She already feels fully formed.

The same can’t be said for the other three regulars, and deliberately so. Chibnall has brought together a TARDIS team – and saved the moment we see them enter the ship, very wisely in an already packed episode, presumably for next week – with a lot of room for growth, at the head of a run of episodes that looks like it’ll take a much more traditional, almost serialised, approach to character development than is generally the case with Doctor Who. For the last thirteen years we’ve always felt we know the new regulars by the end of episode one, whereas The Woman Who Fell to Earth ended with us still asking who the new team are and how they’ll cope – although fortunately Chibnall hasn’t taken the early 1980s route and made them unwilling fellow travellers; one thing we have seen is that this team are going to bond well together, and that’s hugely promising. This also feels like the beginning of a period where the narratives will involve the characters, rather than revolving around them, a touch more than has been the case.

Despite appearing to be third in the pecking order, the way the episode ended called upon Bradley Walsh’s star quality and his scene in the chapel was immensely affecting. He’s far from playing a straight man, but much less of a comedy buffer than we might have anticipated. He’s the least appropriate TARDIS traveller we’ve had in a while though, somewhere between Rory and Wilf but much more authentic feeling than either, so it’ll be fascinating to see where his character takes us. Tosin Cole was our entry point – for this week at least – and like Mandip Gill was strong and sympathetic and believable; they’re both very likeable actors but we’re seeing the beginnings of their journeys, and you can tell there’s a lot more to come from each. Despite the moment of heroism each of the principals is called upon to perform, despite the resolve each of the regulars needs to find, you feel there’s a lot further for them all to travel.

The story, while perfectly serviceable, wasn’t the most inspired (Predator in South Yorkshire, essentially, although it was nice to see the Doctor giving the creature itself as much grief as she did) – and that’s not inappropriate for an opening episode. It was probably a bit grimmer and more gruesome than the promotional materials led us to expect, and being almost entirely centred around a night shoot a lot physically darker too, so it isn’t as much of a lurch out of the Peter Capaldi era as the talk of starting over might have indicated. In fact more than anything The Woman Who Fell to Earth felt like a Russell T Davies script being executed by the Steven Moffat production regime, and it doesn’t quite feel like Chris Chibnall’s stamp has been left on the programme just yet, although the same was largely true of The Eleventh Hour. That said, this maybe felt a bit too dark, a bit too grim, for the Sunday evening timeslot – but all that might change with next week’s episode anyway, of course.

There was a sense, however, of this being Doctor Who shorn of the showrunner’s personality; both Russell T Davies’ and Steven Moffat’s iterations were clearly the work of those highly distinctive writers, whereas The Woman Who Fell to Earth felt like the writer adapting himself to Doctor Who rather than the other way around. The benefits of this are twofold. On the one hand, this is much more in line with the classic series approach, whereby hindsight might allow us to spot the work of particular writers but the overall effect is of a more generic ongoing narrative. The other benefit of this is that it’s less off-putting to the kind of casual viewer who’s less inclined to stick with something distinct if it’s not tailored specifically to his or her tastes. We might be about to enter the most inclusive era of modern Doctor Who yet. Whether audiences will flock to it is to be determined; the opening night’s viewing figure was certainly beyond any realistic prediction of its size.

The downside is that this doesn’t feel as authored, and therefore there’s less to distinguish it from the rank and file of other television (monsters and alien planets notwithstanding) than in the last two iterations of the programme. This might be a period that will be liked by a lot more people, but ends up being loved by fewer.

The absence of a singular authorial voice also throws the spotlight more on the production itself, with mixed but promising results. Segun Akinola’s theme arrangement felt a touch too manufactured on first listen, lacking the organic feel of Murray Gold’s first few attempts, and the incidental music too being so rhythmically based didn’t have the ebb and adaptability of what we’d become used to. It’s not as emotionally prominent, but instead of dictating ‘the feels’ it rather imposes a pace and rhythm on the tone of the programme. The new cameras – while giving Doctor Who a visual sheen that removes it completely from any question of looking like a television production – also rob it of that slightly cartoonishness that has helped make the last thirteen years such a remarkable experience. This is a programme that looks and sounds more like its influences and aspirations than at any point since 1977.

It also had a cliffhanger straight out of Doctor Who’s very first episode in 1963 (with added, and probably easily fixed, space jeopardy), the new regulars stolen out of their lives against their better wishes. The ‘you will be watching’ sequence was a rather odd alteration though, presumably meaning we won’t be seeing ‘next time’ trailers at the end of forthcoming episodes. But it very much fit in with the pre-series promotion, emphasising characters and actors over threats and environments.

All in all, this was an unexpectedly moderate introduction to the new regime, making it hard to tell which aspects – beyond the weight placed on the acting and characterisation – will become more prominent as the series unravels. This was no classic restructuring the way Spearhead from Space was, but it’s not as potentially polarising to a mainstream the way Castrovalva or Deep Breath might have been either. We won’t know the true value of The Woman Who Fell to Earth for some weeks yet, but it was entertaining and agreeable and filled with suggestions of things we might yet come to fall in love with. The casting of the four regulars is its single best aspect; they’re perfect.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11, EPISODE 1: THE WOMAN WHO FELL TO EARTH / WRITER: CHRIS CHIBNALL / DIRECTOR: JAMIE CHILDS / STARRING: JODIE WHITTAKER, BRADLEY WALSH, TOSIN COLE, MANDIP GILL, SHARON D. CLARKE, SAMUEL OATLEY / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED OCTOBER 7TH)