Starting with Tom Baker, Doctor Who became a Saturday evening staple in a childhood which begged for a stable, relatable influence and was found in a nomadic character battling monsters that could have been my own bullies.
No matter how silly they looked in bubble wrap and over-sized Licorice Allsorts, they were after me for being half-Indian.
The Doctor saw them off.
Like a lot of British kids, on a Monday morning playground, I was cast in a replay of the weekend’s episode, that usually involved Daleks whether they were part of the actual show or not. I joined in the enthusiasm without ever revealing that my adoration for the Doctor was primarily due to his awe-inspiring ability to do something I so desperately wanted: change his body.
I passed my adoration down to my son who began his Saturday evenings with Christopher Eccleston. Before I transitioned, my son had declared Matt Smith as his all time favorite Doctor. Although I didn’t encourage it, the notion that Smith came into being through regeneration tempered his feeling that he was losing his father.
As an adult, my looking forward to each new episode of Doctor Who with the feverish impatience of a child was as much learned as it was earned by writers Russell Davis and Steven Moffat.
At the script’s most corny or convoluted, the characters always shone through and a new Doctor inevitably won me over. Although I’m in the minority, Peter Capaldi grew on me as an actor who captivated even throughout an entire hour’s worth of a monologue.
So, in July 2017, when Jodie Whittaker was unveiled as his replacement, I shook my head at the purists who felt that the BBC would crumple in fear after Tweeted declarations that the casting of the first female Doctor was unforgivable enough for them for them to boycott the show.
Actually, I looked forward to the moment when Whittaker took the role and so defined my earliest dreams.
Two episodes into Whittaker’s second series and I’ve joined the purists. I’ve stopped watching.
It’s not Whitaker’s fault.
No matter how good an actor is, it is damned near impossible to rise above shabby material and Whittaker’s debut series was not just shabby, it was pitiful.
Doctor Who’s new show runner Chris Chibnall reminded me of a director who tried to turn a theatrical production of George Orwell’s Animal Farm into an unfortunate cross between a My First ABC picture book and a drum circle.
Under the same fanatical desire to completely reinvent the wheel, Chibnall’s vision buried any sense of danger, tension, character and even accidentally funny attempts at a joke six feet under a pile of inoffensive, non-threatening, eco-friendly rubber mulch.
There was such a bizarre desperation to present the progressive with such utter virtue that Chibnall didn’t so much preach as he did wallop me around the head with the kind of guilt-trip that made a day at a National LGBTQ Taskforce Annual Conference humbly checking, rechecking and begging for forgiveness for one’s privilege feel like a self-gratifying bit of ego-fulfilling hedonism.
Whittaker and her bland “fam” of all-representative, unappropriated TARDIS associates didn't face down monstrous antagonists as much as glean life-lessons from understandably motivated, sympathetic mischief-makers.
Even the appearance of ridiculous, overgrown CGI spiders was unnecessarily tempered with a “twist" that pointed an accusatory finger to anyone who’d ever deliberately squashed one.
They were followed by what I think was supposed to be a not quite terrifying, maybe malevolent talking frog. I don't know, I'd just about given up trying to seal anything into my memory by that point.
"To be fair, they cut out all the jokes," Capaldi’s Doctor observed in his final episode.
He must have popped forward in time to watch Chibnall’s take on biting wit that involved forcing an unfortunate Whittaker to stick out her "Tongue!” and observe its correct identification with “Smart boy! Biology."
After that, the humor went into a steep decline along with a show that peaked at the Rosa Parks third episode.
Without a story arc to keep the pages turning, curious expectation was limited to “What’s this week’s message going to be?”
Standalone episodes work as a combination of good character development creating a fascination as to how they will deal with different situations.
Both Chibnall’s lead and supporting cast weren’t carrying each story as much as the weight of a weekly lecture that took priority over my knowing and caring about them above and beyond their diversity.
This was also true of Chibnall’s choice of composer Segun Akinola who laudably wanted to go in a new direction after Murray Gold’s sometimes OTT emotion-wringing score.
Unfortunately, Akinola’s themes seemed to involve randomly dicking around with a synthesizer with a nonchalance that was about as memorable as a Phillip Glass opera about nihilism during an insurance seminar.
After the ratings decline that was Series 11, it seems Chibnall received a memo strongly-worded enough for him to defensively promise that his new series would address the concerns aired by the the majority of his audience.
Unlike the critics, they did not fear extermination by the relentless fury of a Twitter mob and so counter-pointed a simpering Rotten Tomatoes aggregate by noting one or two things that Chibnall’s writing was lacking.
Along with the pledge of a story arc, Chibnall touted a new direction for 2020 like the owner of a pet shop selling dead parrots.
“I think we’ve got some amazing monsters. It’s probably a bit scarier,” he said.
Ignoring the Skyfall title’s childish wink that made Benny Hill’s look refined, I reasoned that writers need time to find their stride and Chibnall deserved one more chance to do so.
Before Doctor Who opens with Akinola’s arrangement of the theme tune, there’s the sound of a long, synthesized fart.
Two episodes into Series 12 and it seems an appropriate enough way to announce either Chibnall’s passive aggressive “Up Yours!” to his detractors or his utter incompetence.
It took a year for him to accomplish only one thing: proving that you can’t put a silk hat on a pig especially when you stole the hat from people who knew how to actually make one.
Rather than acknowledging the lore established by his predecessors while inventing his own, Chibnall hijacked a Davis/Moffat highlight reel and attempted to pass it off with not so much a personal stamp as an attempt to Wokeadjust past episodes such as The Sound of Drums and Blink.
Character development failed under a similarly ham-handed attempt to give Whittaker her own brand of quirks.
In the first few scenes of Spyfall Part Two, we find her on a mysterious alien scalp talking to herself.
Not in the way Tennant did just before we got a beautifully played moment of realization that he was alone......again, but having an entire conversation like some sort of benign and utterly boring take on Gollum.
It wasn’t even accidentally adorable. It was a scripted version of the farting noise and one which fell flatter than Russell Crowe trying to find his note in Les Miserables. There was no way an actor of even Whittaker’s caliber could pull it off.
Speaking of act....ing!
Chibnall kept up the diversity by upgrading the show’s long time villain, The Master into Indian actor Sacha Dhawan.
Like Whittaker’s introduction, I should have been thrilled.
But while the previous incarnations. as played most recently by Michelle Gomez and John Simm, could at least be said to have been unpredictable and moderately witty during homicidal moments tempered with reflection, Dhawan’s Master telegraphed malevolence through grimacing, bulging his eyes, grinding his teeth, repeatedly smashing his head against innocent consoles and screaming until he was hoarse.
Ted Neeley was never this excessive even when playing “The Screamin’ Jesus.”
Again, I’ve seen enough of Dhawan’s work with other writers to know it’s not his fault. Even without a look behind the scenes, you can almost hear Chibnall demanding “Do the line again, Sacha. I need more evil. Can you try shouting it with some spittle?”
Like his nemesis, Dhawan’s character is as bereft of anything beneath the surface as he deals with situations borrowed from better writers without any of the subtlety they employed.
For example, Dhawan’s Nazi takes a quarter page from Inglorious Basterds by machine-gunning holes into floorboards without any of the tension that Quentin Tarantino magnificently built between Christoph Waltz and Denis Ménochet.
As with last year, Whittaker’s “fam” this season were rendered just as forgettable.
We got the middle aged white guy doing a really sad routine involving laser shoe tap dancing.
I still can’t understand most of the tall Black guy’s dialogue without subtitles and even they give up with “??????” when he’s gone into extreme mumbling because he clearly doesn’t want to do this anymore.
Oh wait, there’s those two….and the other one.
There is, right? I mean, is she still here?
To Chibnall’s credit, he did introduce two historical characters in Spyfall that required his audience to do a quick check on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, Wikipedia was also about as much as research as Chibnall undertook before setting them to paper.
If he had added some depth to someone like Noor Inayat Khan, the sacrifice of a woman who helped change the course of WWII only to be executed at Dachau would have been keenly felt rather than ignored via a quick employment of Moffat’s memory wiping trick because Chibnall needed to get on with the denouement of an exercise in giving his critics the middle finger,
For seven seasons, we followed an angst ridden man who was one of the last of of his kind because he’d wiped out his own people.
There were those who loathed the idea that the Doctor spent his 50th anniversary sorting all that out via Cup a Soup. Nevertheless, the deed was done and everybody on Gallifrey lived happily ever after.
Until Chibnall decided there was no other way to make Whittaker angst ridden unless he blew them all up again at the hands of Dhawan’s Master; a feat, he admitted, that was accomplished during an extra-screamy temper tantrum, channeling our own outrage at the discovery that everything we’ve been told since 1963 is a lie.
I imagine the call, in early 2019 between Chibnall and Moffat, went like this:
“Steven? It’s Chris. I’m stuck. Everyone hated my debut series and now the BBC have told me I’ve got to be clever.”
“Busy waking Dracula. You’re on you’re own, mate.”
-Click-
“Bastard! I’ll show him and I’ll show the fanboys. Think J.J. Abrams can retcon? Wait until they get a load of this!”
Those who keep watching will doubtless have to wait seven more weeks during which there will be absolutely no attempt to address this “oh so exciting new arc” of the Timeless Child that’s been received by critics and fans like the boys singing for glorious gruel at the beginning of Oliver!
That’s because I’ll wager Chibnall has been busy making the Cybermen into misunderstood tin people who just want to be loved, the Judoon on the verge of extinction due to poaching and the Racnoss into a racist, contributing writer on Townhall who, after succumbing to a stern dressing down from Whittaker, saw the error of her ways and spends the rest of her life lecturing on the intersectionality between Tarantulas and people living under the religious oppression doled out by New New Earth’s cat nuns.
And on the eighth day...oh yeah the Timeless Child. Umm, speculative spoiler but it was probably a little girl of color from whom the Time Lords stole all their ideas from before oppressing her to death because that’s what Time Lords do because of male privilege and colonialism.
I’m not going to stay and find out.
Woke writing can be good in the hands of someone who knows what the hell they are doing.
Season Three of the Handmaid’s Tale went off the rails a bit but it did so with characters crafted with enough caring attention to make me care about them, finding elements of humanity even in the antagonists. It added genuine layers to otherwise unrelenting evil that could never have been accomplished had Aunt Lydia spent the entirety of her screen-time in purple-faced apoplexy and Serena Joy expressed her mental meltdowns by stealing coping techniques from Rain Man.
Inclusive storytelling to the point of a UIC Sociology class does not have to be the kiss of death the traditionalists have painted with the same “Go Woke, Go Broke” brush.
Under Chibnall, though, it is.
It’s not that he doesn’t mean well but that he can’t write anything with meaning.
As much as, with an intractability that borders on obsessive, he tries to elevate diversity, he hasn’t done it, the talent he cast to present it or a viewer who would have loved to embrace it any favors.