DOCTOR WHONGOVER

Morning, kids.

Skip this if you don’t want to read about Doctor Who. Sorry. It’s just one of those things – like Star Wars – that has been such a big part of my whole life, and I’m always going to have an opinion on it. I’ll never stop wanting it to be great, and a huge success, and all that. 

This will be spoiler-free about the new episode, but I’ll probably mention the previous season.

So! 

I watched the first ep of the new series on iPlayer this morning… a bit hungover, in all honesty. We went out to see my oldest mates last night, and… well, I don’t drink beer very often. Feeling a teeny bit fragile now, but I hadn’t seen them in about 18 months, so I was feeling giddy to be out of the house. 

Anyhow. Doctor Who. I’ve not been looking forward to this new series. It has been more like I’ve been fearing it.

Even during the Chris Chibnall era, I always had some hope that each season would be a step up from the previous one… but last year’s first Disney season kind of killed that hope. I still love Doctor Who – as a whole, as an idea. I mean, all the things I love haven’t gone anywhere. Those episodes still exist, they’re there to watch forever. 

But… after the pretty decent return of Tennant for the 60th anniversary, and with RTD’s pedigree, my hopes were high. And it had been hyped SO much. 

Consequently, the result was… disappointing. Crushingly so. And not just because it had been hyped, or because I’d inflated my expectations too much. 

OLD ROPE

Objectively, I just felt the series was broadly pretty ropey and kind of confused.

Despite a fresh injection of cash, it seemed oddly dated – playing the same sort of tropes as the first RTD run, while shoehorning in awkward nods to modern sensibilities. I wanted a reinvention, but it just seemed like more of the same… only with fewer highs. 

The tone was all over the shop, and somehow the overall takeaway lacked impact. We went from unashamed kid-oriented fare to darker, grown-up, ideas, and it gave me "the bends".

DOCTOR: Check me out, Ruby – I’m pretending this sausage is my nose.

RUBY: Ha ha! LOL! 

<The Doctor dances around the TARDIS in a funny style, clapping his hands>

DOCTOR (singing): The sausage is my nose! The sausage is my nose! Bibbly-wibbly-ping-pong-plop!

RUBY: Look at that funny style in which you dance! You so cray-cray!

DOCTOR (seriously): You know what else is cray-cray, Ruby? The military-industrial complex. 

<The Doctor punches the wall, screams with anguish>

DOCTOR: Oh look - it's The Kinks!

I love the anthology format of Doctor Who and always have, but… I dunno. It was trying to be all things to all people, and from purely a marketing angle, from trying to hang onto an audience, it was playing a dangerous game.

You’d get moments of complex humanity next to the dumbest crap imaginable; story beats and reveals that had zero internal logic – like the show was being written simultaneously by a mature, experienced, writer... and a 10 year-old. 

Pick a lane! One or the other! I love dumb crap. I also like complex sci-fi. I don’t necessarily want them in the same sandwich.

Maybe having fewer episode means you need more consistency. For the past 20 years the show has always veered between different tones, but with more episodes it had the space (pun not intended) to do that without feeling disjointed. This was more like whiplash.

Yes, I know. I'm the fine one to talk given Digi can go from serious to stupid. Maybe we're as guilty as Russell T Davies. But at least we're not in charge of a massive sci-fi franchise.

BABIES... BUT IN SPACE

That first episode, Space Babies, must’ve lost SO many potential viewers who would’ve enjoyed later, more grown-up, episodes. See also that jaw-droppingly terrible and bizarre song-and-dance at the end of the subsequent ep. And then the following week is a dark episode about the moral complexity of war! Who is this show for now!?!? That’s what I kept asking.

It was like they were almost going out of their way to push away as many people as possible. My favourite show of recent years is Severance. I'm not sure I'd like it as much if every other episode had the characters, I dunno, trying to cure the excessive flatulence of a bunch of talking kittens.

Though to be fair, written down that is the sort of thing that would happen in Severance. But at least they'd do it in a way that was tonally consistent.

My grandson's favourite show is... well, weird animated YouTube tractor videos. I'm pretty sure he'd want to watch something else if one of those tractor videos suddenly featured a lengthy diatribe about capitalism or far-right extremism or something.

You might argue that this variety is one of the show’s strengths, but never has it felt so like a series comprised of entirely different formats aimed at entirely different audiences. For the first time it felt schizophrenic, and so tonally all over the place that it was off-putting. It didn’t seem to know who its audience was. I felt alienated (pun not intended) one moment, then catered to the next.

AND I'm not even sure if they get the tone right for the younger audience anyway. I've spent decades writing for kids. You don't write down to them ever... but RTD does exactly that in his "This is a family show!" episodes.

RUBY: Look at all these babies in space, Doctor!

DOCTOR: Space babies! Waby-baby-waby-woobly-doo-dah!

RUBY: Check that out – it’s a monster!

DOCTOR: Woaaaaah! And it’s made out of poo-poo. Poopy-woopy, woopy-poopy. I'm talking actual literal human excrement. Don’t forget: shit-monsters have feelings too. <cries>

RUBY: How are we going to get the space babies home, Doctor?

DOCTOR: I don’t know. I’ll try farting out of the window or something.

RUBY: I’m your best friend.

DOCTOR: You most certainly are, bestie! <cries/laughs/farts> Damn you, capitalism! Damn you to Hell!

Season 1 had its highlights. I like Ncuti Gatwa a lot; he has charisma to burn. There were some great ideas, a few really decent episodes, but… no all-time classic. Even from scene to scene something was missing overall. I mean, literally the Doctor himself in two of the episode, barring a couple of scenes. 

It never felt like we got to know him, and his relationship with Ruby was so sketched in. Ever since the series came back in 2005, the companion was always as important to the show as The Doctor. A real friendship should have ups and downs, and conflict, and there was just none of that.

These two met, became thick as thieves immediately, and there was just zero growth or development across the series. It felt as if we were being told we should like the new Doctor, rather than growing to like him. Maybe because of the reduced episode count, it seemed to be trying too hard. Some of it felt a bit forced. 

DOCTOR: I’m the Doctor.

RUBY: Oh, cool! I've been fostered.

DOCTOR: I've been fostered too.

DOCTOR: We’re best friends now.

RUBY: Totes amazeballs! 

DOCTOR: <cries for 10 minutes> Sorry. I was just thinking about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 - 1917. Y'know, how it's SO bad and that!

DAVINA MCCALL: Noot! Noot!

And the fricking mystery about Ruby’s mother that ran throughout the season, and was foreshadowed as this enormous thing, and hyped in interviews… well, to say The Big Reveal was a letdown is an understatement.  GAH!

RUBY: I can’t wait to find out the true identity of my mother who left me on the steps of a church while dressed in a mysterious cape and hood, and also this: why it keeps snowing wherever we go.

RTD: The big reveal is going to blow your mind!

RUBY: So, who is she, Doctor? The Rani? Missy? Davros?

DOCTOR: What? Oh. No no. She’s just like a normal person.

RUBY: What, completely ordinary.?

DOCTOR: Yeah, just like a really ordinary boring woman. 

RUBY: Is she a normal woman who is also a god? Is she from the future, or anything like that?

DOCTOR: She works in a shop.

RTD: People who work in shops are the most amazing people of all! There's nothing more amazing than working in a shop and coming home and having chips. That's what you need to get your thick head around. You're stupid if you don't realise that. You're loathsome. I hate you. Stop watching if you don't like it.

RUBY: Right. So, why was she wearing the cape and all then?

DOCTOR: Cross-promotion with The Traitors, another BBC brand. Totes amazeballs, babes! 

RUBY: And the snow?

DOCTOR: <shrugs>

RUBY: <shrugs>

DOCTOR: Oh wait – one more thing. She named you Ruby because you were born on Ruby Road. 

RUBY: Just as well I wasn’t born on Gropec*nt Lane! 

DOCTOR: <dances, laughs, and cries> 

RUBY: Why are you crying, Doctor?

DOCTOR (sad): I hate that people die. All life is precious. 

<The Doctor stabs a goblin in the brain and kicks a dog in the throat> 

DOCTOR (laughing): Come on! It’s time to start running around again! Runrunrunrunrun! Armenian genociiiiiiiiide!

Plus… addressing the elephant in the room… I did feel RTD ballsed up his messaging. I’m all for The Message, I’m all for Doctor Who being inclusive and progressive – I mean, Malcolm Hulke who wrote for the show back in the 70s, was LITERALLY a Communist. Look at some of the Sylvester McCoy episodes in the late-80s; it wore its agenda on its sleeve. 

But man… RTD lost me – and no doubt a lot of other old bits - when it felt like he was shouting at me for having ever enjoyed the character of Davros and not considered for a moment that he was a bloke in a wheelchair. 

RTD: We’ve changed the Master now. From now on The Master will just be a normal, reasonable, bloke. Trust me, there is a very long tradition of mentally ill villains in fiction, and associating mental illness with evil, and… that is wrong. That. Is. WRONG. It just is. I’m sorry.  And that we are absolutely standing by, and you the viewer are part of the problem for allowing this to be perpetuated for so long. We should stop demonising mentally ill people. I am very, very, very, very, very, very proud that we’ve made this change, and if you don’t like it you can go and watch something else. I hate you. I loathe you.

I think he underestimated how many people took him at his word to stop watching the show.

So with the wilting ratings, the incessant questions swirling about the future of the show, RTD being condescending… and – frankly – the horrible side of the whole “Doctor Woke” bollocks… it just started to feel like Doctor Who was poisoned.

I mean, this week I made the mistake of looking at the replies under a BBC news story about the new companion, and I was shocked. Genuinely shocked and appalled. Just the worst sort of blatant, outright, racism, homophobia, misogyny. They don’t hide it anymore. It has become so normalised now, and so stoked from every side. 

I dunno. And all of that has left this cloud hanging over Doctor Who, and I'd found it impossible to get excited about the new run.

But… I watched that first ep this morning, and I kind of enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. Maybe it was because my expectations were so low, but it was significantly better than last year’s opener Space Babies. 

It wasn’t perfect – some of the plotting was stupid, it moved probably TOO fast even for me, and , but the dynamic between The Doctor and Belinda – his new companion – has way more potential. But it felt like it sort of landed, tonally, in the middle of Doctor Who’s extremes, which is where I feel a first episode should be. It did a far better job of inviting everyone in, and I’m hopeful for the rest of the series.

I just hope they stick the landing this time. 

Because, y’know, don’t get me started on the whole Susan mystery thing. It was the Star Wars sequels all over again; massively hype the return of a beloved legacy character, get the entire fandom excited, then don’t deliver, and tell the fandom they're wrong for being disappointed.

RUBY: You… you have a granddaughter?

DOCTOR: Her name is Susan. Or was. She might be dead. I don’t know. I’ll tell you what though… it would be an amazing moment if I was reunited with her after 60 years.

RUBY: God yeah. There would be some real drama, especially as the actress who played her is still alive. 

DOCTOR: Yeah, I abandoned her. I feel real guilt about it. She must be LIVID. Still, family is family.

RUBY (points to a machine): Wait - what's this?

DOCTOR: It's some kind of strange machine. The label says it’s something called the “Sus-ann 3000 Cyrogenic Storage Device”. 

RUBY: You don’t think she might be in there do you, Doctor? You know: your long lost granddaughter.

DOCTOR: Let’s open it and find out! Susan, babes, I’m a-comin'...!

<The Doctor opens the machine… with a dramatic hiss of dry ice, the Doctor recoils in shock>

RUBY: What is it, Doctor? Is it Susan? Is she in there?

DOCTOR: No. It’s just some peas. Just, like, some ordinary peas. Loose. On the floor of the Sus-ann 3000. <cries>

RUBY: The real family is the peas we found along the way.

DOCTOR: Peas, babes!