I Had Every Right to Leave (Fugitive of the Judoon)
It’s January 26th, 2020. Eminem is at number one with “Godzilla,” featuring the late Juice Wrld, which is not a sentence I realized I was going to get to type before now. That was fun in a way the music charts haven’t been since the Wilderness Years. And I don’t even much rate “Godzilla.”
Anyway, at the precise time this airs, I’m with Penn at my mother’s house in Newtown, just a few hours we leave for JFK and fly to London for a week. It’ll be my first time there since just before Christmas of 2011, where I wrote The Ribos Operation entry in a hotel in Manchester. I think this time I’m working on the early stages of Dalek Eruditorum, trying to get that to work and having it go about as well as writing up this era of the show does, but with less obligation to keep at it. Anyway, I’d long since switched from a full laptop to a tablet/keyboard case combo, so I couldn’t have torrented the episode if I’d wanted to, and even if I had I’d have been racing the car to leave to the airport, and frankly Chibnall Doctor Who didn’t warrant that kind of urgency.
So instead it’s January 27th. The charts don’t change til Thursday. Penn and I are holed up in a fourth floor walkup hotel room in Paddington. We’ve gotten in at the ass hours of the morning and run straight into the classic overnight to London problem of being at your hotel hours before it’s ready for you, exhausted and smelling like you’ve been wearing the same clothes for 36 hours. So we spend the afternoon in the Science Museum looking at the reconstruction of Babbage’s Analytical Engine and sitting on a bench, then stagger back to the hotel, pass out for a three hour nap, and get ready to go out to our “holy shit we’re in London” dinner reservation. And somewhere in there, I pull up Fugitive of the Judoon on iPlayer, literally the only time in my life I have ever watched Doctor Who on the BBC.
I don’t remember if I’m spoiled. I probably am. I usually am. But what’s remarkable is that this is a concept. The fact that Twitter is buzzing about the episode—that people are talking in awed voices about its twists and implications—is unusual for this era. There’s an excitement and enthusiasm that hadn’t really been there since The Woman Who Fell to Earth, save, perhaps, among those who were especially excited about the short-awaited return of the Master, and that won’t be seen again until the buildup to the second Davies’ era. Perhaps most notably, the ratings saw an appreciable uptick—one of only a handful in the course of the Chibnall era’s gradual bleedout, and something that appears to have been caused at least in part by the hype over how seismic this episode was.
Or at least, appeared to be. It’s difficult to recapture that now, knowing where all of this is going, and more to the point where it isn’t. But equally, we have an entire essay to talk about The Timeless Children and we don’t need to do it here. So let’s just look at what’s here. To start, of course, there’s Vinay Patel, the only writer of Series 11 who straightforwardly came out of it looking good. And that explains at least some of this episode; there’s a tightness of characterization and structure that feels sharp and coherent in the same way that Demons of the Punjab did. Even in its final form you can see the story about fugitives and refugees that Patel wanted to tell.
But, of course, that’s not the story we have. Instead we have the version where Chris Chibnall plowed into the script of his best writer to say “what if we threw out your actual story and made it a giant mess of continuity that set up my fan theory about The Brain of Morbius.” Ah, but I’ve gotten ahead of myself again. All the same, there’s a clear sense of Patel’s story getting shoved out to the margins of itself here, the actual episode being cancelled midway through so that we can have the big double reveal of the Whittaker Doctor finding the buried TARDIS while the Martin Doctor figures out the chameleon arch.
The thing is, though, that reveal is absolutely spectacular—probably the best single moment of the Chibnall era in terms of actually working on the screen. It’s helped by the presence of Nida Manzoor, who almost instantaneously outgrew the show to become a name in her own right, and who imbues the sequence with gorgeous shots like that drone pan-around of the Doctor standing at the top of the lighthouse. And, for that matter, by Jo Martin, who handles the emotional journey to her transformation with grace and aplomb before turning on a dime and unleashing a character who’s recognizably the Doctor, but also tangibly wrong in alarming ways. But fundamentally, it mostly works because it’s a genuinely brilliant reveal. Sure, it’s basically just Alien Bodies turned inside out, but honestly it hits with an absolutely delicious weight that none of Moffat’s attempts to rip off Alien Bodies ever did, just because killing the Doctor is obviously something that’s going to be undone, whereas revealing a secret Doctor is not. As usual, Moffat haunts this observation, but there’s an audacity and sweep to this that’s very different from the consciously self-contained reveal of the Hurt Doctor.
And it’s worth, I think, remembering that moment of giddy possibility. Sure, a moment of thought would reveal that the vast majority of options here were about as interesting as, well, confirming the Morbius Doctors. For those of us who would have emotions about confirming Season 6B, this was potentially exciting, but like working out obscure theories of how time works in Doctor Who, it isn’t exactly appealing to our best selves. And the truth is that, once you thought about it, even the best options were likely to amount to little more than the Platt Masterplan redux, and frankly, that’s even more of a lukewarm thirty year old leftover than destroying Gallifrey. But on the back of a phenomenally executed reveal it was just about possible to believe, in spite of the previous fifteen episodes, that this would be good.
In hindsight, though, even within the episode itself the thrills are cracking like the cheap veneer they are. It’s not just the dead end nature of the reveal, nor the “Yaz said you saw Nan” energy of not just actually having the beat “well, I guess whoever remembers this will know” as the Doctors part or of Whittaker realizing to her horror that Martin was right and was part of her past, nor the sheer fucking childishness of quick-sketching the Martin Doctor as edgy and dangerous with “she carries a massive gun.” No, in hindsight the real giveaway here is Captain Jack.
Set aside the persistent rumors that Patel didn’t even know Captain Jack was in his episode until transmission (although something certainly had to be behind Patel’s description of the year before transmission as “tricky” and his declaration that his work on this episode had left him resolved not to keep working on the program). Let’s also set aside John Barrowman’s long history of whipping his dick out at people, not because it’s excusable, but because it’s the thing that actually eventually gets dealt with and leads to Barrowman becoming a persona non grata in Doctor Who circles. Hell, let’s set aside his years long campaign of flagrantly lying about an entirely imagined crusade on Steven Moffat’s part to keep there from being a Torchwood revival, although you deeply question the wisdom of rewarding that behavior and bringing him back.
Instead let’s just look at what we have: a fifty-three year old man who’s more “botox rictus grin” than “silver fox” mugging his way through a bunch of party pieces on the shittiest set the series has seen since Underworld so that he can deliver cryptic dialogue about the amazingly uninspiring “lone Cyberman.” Even for people excited about Jack’s return—and in 2020 that was already a much smaller group than it used to be—this is thin gruel. It’s a desperate stunt—the sort of thing you do to spruce up a bland bit of midseason filler.
But here it is in a script that already has a returning Davies-era monster—not one anyone cares about, admittedly, but a returning Davies-era monster all the same—and an entire secret Doctor. And more to the point, once upon a time, before all this bullshit was dropped on top of it, it had a really good writer who didn’t actually need any of this crap to turn in a compelling episode. To look at all of this and conclude that what it really needs is a middle aged Dancing on Ice judge to ham it up is a genuinely stunning lack of faith in what they have. Or, perhaps more to the point, it’s a stunning failure to even appreciate what they have. It’s as though the show has decided that this, as the rough midpoint of the season, is the point at which all of the big attention-getting stuff happens, and simply given it no further thought. Chibnall takes his extreme spoiler-phobia and childhood love of seeing Earthshock and simply goes all in, creating an episode that consists of nothing but stunning and unexpected reveals. Right down to a Cyberman. Past that, the idea that there’s anything in this episode worth caring about is invisible to everyone except for Patel, Manzoor, and Martin.
And yet in the end all of these reveals are shockingly nothing. The Fugitive Doctor is going to be reduced to a Magical Black Lady who shows up when the Whit(e)taker Doctor needs some girl power—a development that’s in hindsight truly bizarre given the sheer degree to which the two don’t get on. The reveal of the Doctor’s secret past isn’t something that’s going to be fleshed out on its own merits, but rather used as setup to segue into a different reveal. The lone Cyberman is little more than a Macguffin. Captain Jack shows back up, but it has nothing to do with this, and in fact we never really get an explanation of why he’s the guy with the portentous message. There really isn’t anything to these Shocking Reveals beyond their shock. They’re just a bunch of “more will be revealed later” with no actual substantive buildup or preliminary revelations. It’s basically just a spoiler-free trailer for the finale done up to look like an episode and then given its own spoiler-free trailer. Yes, it worked to build hype. But that’s all it did. And at the end of the day, building hype that’s never going to actually get paid off is counterproductive. Even the Doctor’s moodiness at both beginning and end doesn’t actually connect.
Within the context of Doctor Who as content, this is a rousing success. But as with Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, the main takeaway from that is once again to expose the sheer hollowness of this model of the show. Only here, instead of resting on past glories, we’re simply inventing an entirely new past, the glories of which don’t matter because all that apparently matters is who the Doctor is now. Except she’s nobody. A pro-cop blowhard (unless they’re “trigger-happy,” apparently) with no ideals, no aesthetics, nothing save a promise that she’ll be back next week for more of this.
Which means I guess I fucking will be too.
July 29, 2024 @ 11:38 am
For me the pile of up of “big” stuff in the episode actually works – once you’ve done Captain Jack the audience assumes that that is the episode’s “big” moment done and in the can (especially bc this era has been so light on the ground with that kind of thing), so the Martin Doctor stuff coming on top of that is actually a curveball that catches the audience’s expectations of the structure of things out. Its one of the few things Chibnall does in the show that actually works for me.
July 29, 2024 @ 1:49 pm
It’s also something which Moffat and Gatiss both praised about the episode at one of those RadioTimes covers parties, which makes a lot of sense – it’s a very Sherlock sort of move. One big reveal hidden behind another big return hidden behind the main return trailed in the publicity.
July 29, 2024 @ 2:55 pm
However, this is an exact copy
of what RTD’s Utopia does. Audiences are led, from the cold open, to expect that Jack will be the episode’s main draw. Unlike Fugitive of the Judoon, however, Utopia was a brilliant ratcheting up of incident, and actually led to something.
July 29, 2024 @ 11:52 am
I would dearly love for Nida Manzoor to come back to the show, though she’s quite possibly outgrown it by now. Her work since directing these two episodes, the absolutely sublime We Are Lady Parts (both seasons, which she scripted, directed, and wrote lyrics for) and Polite Society, has been fantastic, but also a close friend of hers has said she only got into TV in the first place because she wanted to do (a) comedy and (b) Doctor Who. Her next projects sound amazing and I wouldn’t want to lose them (“I’ve got this dark sci-fi comedy set in Bradford that I really want to make. And another action spy movie about body dysmorphia. I feel like action hasn’t been used enough to explore the visceral experience of what it means to be a woman”) but please please please can she come back to Doctor Who at some point as a writer as well as a director – her work on WALP is very heightened in a way that suits DW’s tone and universe, I think.
July 29, 2024 @ 3:37 pm
Honestly once RTD decides to re-retire, if she’s not the first phone call that Bad Wolf makes to pitch the showrunner job to, what are we even doing here? My only worry is that at that point even with Sony/Disney money, they won’t be able to afford her.
July 29, 2024 @ 12:51 pm
I am simultaneously annoyed and relieved that the fugitive Doctor was underused in Chibnall’s run.
Annoyed because she’s fucking great, one of the few things in this mediocre era and relieved that her being underused meant that Chibnall couldn’t ruin her.
If someone from Chibnall’s era deserves a second chance under a competent showrunner, its her
July 29, 2024 @ 9:56 pm
This is such a bugbear of mine. I don’t know how you can cast a new secret doctor and then just…not do anything with them. Like, what was even the point of it?
Instead of any of the many lore dumps that we get, we could have had an episode where we see it from the perspective of the doctor that was, you know, actually there to witness it. (And it could even tie into how she became a fugitive in the first place)
Even in “The Power of the Doctor” she’s the only returning doctor to be relegated to the sidelines as just a hologram. You had the actor available! Why didn’t you use her in the dream world with the others?
July 30, 2024 @ 9:16 am
Not only do we not get that Fugitive Doctor episode, when we do get an actual flashback to her story it is handled in the most astonishingly tone-deaf cack-handed way imaginable.
“If you don’t have anything interesting to do with X then don’t introduce X”: so many possible values of X for the Chibnall era but one of them is most definitely the Fugitive Doctor.
July 31, 2024 @ 4:07 am
It’s a difficult one because, while I actually do agree with you in principle, what do you do with a second Doctor? Especially when you have Doctors with three-season limits and ever-dwindling seasons, doing anything with Martin’s Doctor means doing less with Whittaker’s Doctor. Now subjectively you can argue that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if you like Martin’s take and not Whittaker’s, but it’s a bit weird to overshadow your lead actress for half of her era by doing more with her alternate self.
At a push, in more financially flush times, they could have spun off Martin into her own series, but once you do that, you don’t have a daring different take on Doctor Who, you just have more Doctor Who. Chibnall didn’t have anything to do with Martin beyond “She’s the Doctor, but working for shady people”. Is there really a lot to make out of that?
It’s a bit like the War Doctor; there’s a lot of potential in the TV show for him. What did he do between his youthful appearance in Night of the Doctor and his tired pre-regeneration self in Day of the Doctor? Was using the Moment the only terrible thing he did, or did he commit a lot of atrocities before that day? There’s lots of possibilities there, but none of them could really be explored because you either have a series of an amoral Doctor committing atrocities, which wouldn’t really work, or do what Big Finish did and say “He’s basically the Doctor, but doesn’t call himself that and is a bit grumpy.”
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when Big Finish give her a full solo series, but I suspect it will be a lot standard Big Finish Who adventures, followed by an ending scene for each one that replicates the end of The Silurians. Then River Song versus the Eleven in the second box set.
July 31, 2024 @ 5:49 pm
The Fugitive Doctor did do one big thing for the show: She proved that it wasn’t the idea of a woman Doctor that was bad.
July 29, 2024 @ 1:02 pm
From! It should have been Fugitive FROM The Judoon!!
Also, for a while my pub quiz team name was The Payday Loan Cyberman. I feel like that would have been a better concept for Ashad, honestly.
July 29, 2024 @ 1:37 pm
You’re joking, but an actual Fugitive Judoon would be cool.
If the Judoon’s “Hat”, in the “Planet of the Hats” sense, is that they’re space cops, then what does a defector look like? Would they have been radicalized by their experiences, wanting to abolish the system and restart from the ground up? Would they be a Lincoln Project type, insisting that the general ideas are fine but that the particular Judoon in charge have taken it too far?
Someone who’s into Expanded Universe stuff, tell me: Has anyone ever explored this angle? I’m curious, if for no other reason that I find the idea of “a rhino RINO” to be pretty funny.
July 29, 2024 @ 8:51 pm
Interpreting the Judoon as bounty hunters is a big disappointment, and given the rest of the trends of Chibnall, stinks of a cheap way out of having to sit with the Judoon being antagonistic characters purely by virtue of ACAB.
July 29, 2024 @ 1:44 pm
I thought the Jo Martin reveal was so cool and unexpected that I couldn’t wait to find out what it all meant. My theory at the time was that the destruction of Gallifrey (again!) caused a disruption in the time line that allowed for a different and much more militant version of Gallifrey to take its place, complete with a different regeneration sequence and history for the Doctor that was in danger of supplanting the real Doctor’s history. I could imagine a universe in which Peter Davison regenerated into Jo Martin who immediately picked up a gun because it would have been teen Chibnall’s wet dream.
And then, it turned out that Chibnall’s teenaged wet dream was to grow up and be the guy who finally resolved “the Brain of Morbius plot hole.”
Fun fact: I consistently have to catch myself from identifying Jo Martin as Jo Grant, which would have been a very different episode.
July 29, 2024 @ 2:50 pm
Oh, if we’re bringing Jo Grant into it, then the perfect reveal presents itself: Jo Martin is an incarnation of Iris Wildthyme, playacting at being a Dark and Edgy Doctor for Reasons!
July 31, 2024 @ 4:09 am
The divergent military Gallifrey timeline you describe would actually be preferable to what went on-screen.
July 29, 2024 @ 5:13 pm
“But fundamentally, it mostly works because it’s a genuinely brilliant reveal.”
I seem to be in the minority here because I find both the Jo Martin Doctor reveal and her Doctor quite underwhelming. It just felt like a rehashed Hurt Doctor.
“Only here, instead of resting on past glories, we’re simply inventing an entirely new past”
This here is one of the most damning things about the Chibnall era for me. It’s so convinced that the best part of Doctor Who is lore that it invents a new past just so it can have even more lore.
July 29, 2024 @ 9:07 pm
Well, much like the War Doctor, I think I have some disappointment that they present us with “A missing character who is the same person as the Doctor, but is different, a doctor who is not bound by the characterization” – for Hurt, a Doctor who had forsaken the title; for Martin, a Doctor who predated the first Doctor’s character evolution… And then just gave us Basically The Same Character, perhaps a bit MORE generic than usual just so that we can clearly recognize them as Doctorish in the span of a single episode.
July 31, 2024 @ 4:15 am
Precisely this, with the generic nature emphasised by giving her a classic-style Police Box TARDIS when it doesn’t really fit with the plot just because it makes for a better reveal to have Whittaker uncover it.
The format of the programme sort of precludes doing anything too starting and interesting with unknown Doctors. How much more interesting would it be to see the Whittaker Doctor in absolute horror as the person she now realised was her past self mercilessly gunning down a squad of Judoon? How would she deal with an unknown past self being everything she’d ever fought against? That would have set up a lot about the character and explored why all the Doctors from Hartnell onwards are so determined to fight for what is right; to make up for an awful past they’ve forgotten.
But it wouldn’t be Doctor Who if the main character behaved like that, so we switch to generic mode. Same thing happened with Hurt, where the build-up implies he’s done awful awful things but the Day of the Doctor implies the only bad thing he did was the one thing they were able to reverse. Thus keeping the show light, but also ruining the potential of the War Doctor’s character.
July 30, 2024 @ 4:43 am
It’s hard to bear when the Doctor is portrayed as being unkind. The sequence at the end where she breaks the Judoon’s horn actually killed something in my love for the programme. In an era full of mis-writing of the Doctor’s essential character – her torturing of spiders, her rejection of a companion’s cancer, her betrayal of the Master to the Nazis, the whole Kerblam thing – this moment was the one that hurt the most. The implications of it strike deeper, for me, even than Sixth’s strangling of Peri, which one could at least (sort of/slightly) attribute to a drastically unstable post-regeneration (although it’s still very troubling from a characterisation perspective). A horrific, upsetting piece of storytelling.
July 30, 2024 @ 8:24 am
My mistake – of course, it’s in the middle where that happens, when “Ruth” has just discovered that her partner has been killed. But it still makes for very uncomfortable viewing.
July 30, 2024 @ 11:34 pm
Jack Harkness reappears in one (1) episode with no (0) fanfare and he doesn’t even fuckin meet the Doctor in it
like, WHY, Chibs. NO ONE WAS CLAMORING FOR IT,, AND YOU DIDNT EVEN FUCKING DO IT
July 31, 2024 @ 7:20 am
The worst thing about Captain Jack being in this episode – once we set aside all the things El sets aside in the article – is that it’s so transparently a kludge to keep the companions busy, so the Doctor knows about the Fugitive Doctor but none of them do.
Then in the Timeless Child, the Doctor is the only one who watches the Master’s Powerpoint presentation about the new backstory. The companions don’t get to know about it.
Then at the start of Flux it’s apparent that the Doctor has explained NONE of this to Yaz. Not one bit of it. Yaz has no idea why she’s risking her life investigating these leads. And all the Division stuff is dealt with by the Doctor on her own whilst the companions are stuck elsewhere.
For some reason I absolutely cannot fathom it was really, really important to Chibnall that the Doctor keep these things secrets from her companions. To give him a tiny sliver of credit, he had already established 13 as being fundamentally emotionally incompetent, so I guess that’s understandable. But even so, why would you do that unless you had a scene in mind at some point where the Doctor disclosed all that to the companions, or the companions found out and confronted the Doctor about it, or at least did SOMETHING with it, anything, any goddamn thing at all?
Friends, there is no such scene in the Chibnall era. He puts SO MUCH energy into keeping the whole Fugitive Doctor/Timeless Child/Division thing from the companions for NO REASON AT ALL, WITH NO PAYOFF.
I’m so glad RTD had 15 tell Ruby in her second episode about the Timeless Child stuff upfront as part of the TARDIS 101 lesson.
July 31, 2024 @ 7:45 am
It’s even funnier when you remember that she kind of DOES tell Ryan a bit about all this in “Revolution of the Daleks” (the one additional TARDIS scene filmed in 2020 and added in). So not only did she not properly open up to the companions about the whole Fugitive Doctor / Timeless Children storyline, but when she does, she tells the outgoing Ryan about it far more than she does the supposedly-close-to-her Yaz.
July 31, 2024 @ 6:39 pm
Oh dang, I forgot that bit. Blame the Chibnall era’s all-pervasive None Of This Matters field.
But yeah, you are completely right. You either get to be trusted by 13 with her secrets (kind of), OR you get to travel with her, but not both. Wow. What an appealing and heroic character trait.
August 1, 2024 @ 3:33 pm
The disconnection of setup and payoff seems to be a central problem of Chibnall’s competence: he loses track of the details of any of his own storyarcs if they’re beyond an episode long. I remember El remarking on this about one of the disturbing things about how he planned to deal with any set leaks about Broadchurch: that he would alter the final script of the season at the last minute to reveal another character as the murderer, no matter what other evidence or lack of evidence had connected that character to the murder throughout the story.
Torchwood Season 2 had a similarly empty setup-payoff structure. Captain John had this big, elaborate, crazy setup in the first episode, but a payoff for his character that amounted to a cameo in a barely related plot where he was sort of coerced into his role by the season’s Big Bad (which itself had no setup in earlier episodes). The form was there, with Captain John’s appearances bookending the season, but the content was irrelevant.
It’s more backing up the idea that Chris Chibnall is the qlippothic showrunner. He knows that you hook an audience with a mystery’s setup that’s paid off later, but the content of setup and payoff never correspond. It’s only ever the act of setting up and the act of paying off, as if their content didn’t matter.
July 31, 2024 @ 5:51 pm
When you publish your Whittaker book, I hope you subtitle it “A Memoir.”
August 1, 2024 @ 10:19 am
I’m getting the suspicion that the most difficult part of writing an Eruditorum on the Chibnall years is trying to figure out why any of what’s on screen is actually happening. I think we’ve figured out Chibnall’s own motives, which is that he has no conception of what else or greater or deeper Doctor Who can be other than ‘Doctor Who, taken reasonably seriously.’ But that isn’t enough to explain the incompetence, because ‘Doctor Who taken seriously’ would simply be a straightforward but fine Doctor Who story like “42,” “The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood,” or Torchwood season 2.
This is where I think the image of Chibnall as a qlippothic Ian Levine can help. Levine’s approach to the show, which you best described in “Attack of the Cybermen,” was that exploring Doctor Who as a compendium of facts about Doctor Who was all that you needed to produce exciting, interesting Doctor Who. A central cause for this approach not working was that Levine was trying to wring excitement out of things he remembered about the show that no one else really did or could: like thinking that a straightforward sequel to “The Tenth Planet” was a good idea when hardly anyone but a superfan had been able to see “The Tenth Planet” since twenty years ago. He thought that building stories around facts about Doctor Who were enough to make them good Doctor Who stories. He was wrong, but at least there was some kind of real engagement.
Once he has control of the entire production and marketing process, Chibnall produces a show that’s concerned with only the present fact of Doctor Who: Here is some Doctor Who on TV. But all his ideas seem to come from riffs on old facts from the show that he privately expounded nerd theories about: the secret Doctors like Jo Martin are his thoughts about what kind of continuity could justify the face montage in “The Brain of Morbius;” the timeless child ideas express his naive hero worship of the Doctor as a character. But he’s confusing his own fan memories and perspectives on Doctor Who with what would make the show fun and engaging for wider audiences. This is why he gives John Barrowman some work, now that no one else wants to work with him because nobody wants to deal with the risk of spontaneously seeing John Barrowman’s penis. Working with John Barrowman was presumably a great part of Chris Chibnall’s career (and I can presume that Chris never saw John Barrowman whip out his penis). Even when we get to the Flux, I can’t figure out how that’s any different from the entropy wave back in “Logopolis,” except with a more central plot role and a bigger visual effects budget (Chris C: “What we we did the entropy wave that I thought was so cool in 1981, but made it look awesome!).
It all just seems to be repetitions of the ideas and facts about the show that already happened, but had happy impacts on Chris Chibnall. Yet for everyone else, they’re empty signifiers.
August 1, 2024 @ 11:30 am
I’d say this is very true. I think a big example is in this very episode where there is an expectation that the audience will understand what a chameleon arch is, ten years after we last saw it. Even when it was reintroduced in Utopia there was a flashback and an explanation to help the general audience understand why Martha was freaking out over a fobwatch, and Human Nature was only a few weeks old. But Chibnall didn’t think there was any need for exposition as to what had happened, because obviously a fan would know. It’s not too far from building a plot out of Cyberman facts.
(In fact even a lot of fans don’t seem to get that the Doctor didn’t just have their memory wiped but was given a whole new biological identity when they left the Division)
August 1, 2024 @ 12:04 pm
I do wonder if Chibnall felt he had to add the reveal of the police box because he couldn’t rely on audiences remembering the fobwatch, which of course instantly put an enormous continuity problem right in the middle of his tiny continuity fix (and also came to feel like a massive cheat for anyone trying to work out how and where the Fugitive Doctor fits in because they probably put more thought into it than Chibnall did)
August 1, 2024 @ 4:56 pm
I feel like this presumes the idea that Chibnall does have personal feelings about Doctor Who in the first place. Which, don’t get me wrong, is something that obviously has to be true – he’s been a fan for a long time, and chose to write several episodes and then showrun it for a reason. But I don’t get the sense from anything he’s ever written that he actually cares about anything, ever. It would be one thing if it was an overload of continuity references coming together in ways that are only interesting to super-nerds, because at least I would get the sense, oh, this is cool to someone somewhere. But I don’t think it ever is.
August 2, 2024 @ 7:45 am
There are two frequent types of imperfect writers in franchise media: big fans whose fannish impulses get in the way of their craft, and jobsmiths who just see the series as a series of tropes to be thrown into the correct order.
Chibnall appears a combination of the two: someone whose deep fandom of the show blinds him to what most audiences want out of the show, unaware how idiosyncratic his engagement with the show is, yet who cut his teeth as a jobsmith writer on other people’s show and thus learnt to minimise his own voice write such that his work will fit in sequence surrounded by that of others.
And so you end up with an era that’s so disconnected from the rest of the show to alienate its core audience, yet which has none of the style to work as an unique take on the material. Too weird to be normal, too normal to be weird, satisfying to absolutely no-one.
August 8, 2024 @ 1:31 pm
I think you’ve just summarized the Chibnall era better than I ever could. He really is so strange. Moffat and RTD and every showrunner of any show ever are full of idiosynacracies and flaws, but for most writers, it’s clear that they’re enjoying what they’re writing, even when they’re tiring themselves out grinding out script after script. But any enjoyment Chibnall could have had with the show seems to have been strangled by the grind of writing 50-70% of the episodes, leaving only idiosynacracies and flaws behind. So you just find yourself watching a show where all you see are the craft errors and strange fixations of the writer repeated on loop for 50 minutes for 10 episodes. It’s truly a grueling experience.
August 8, 2024 @ 6:06 am
Goodness, your life is dull. More Who, less of your tedious recent life. Then again, I can see why these episodes leave you desperate to fill space.
August 8, 2024 @ 10:07 am
Aren’t you charming.
August 8, 2024 @ 1:25 pm
The main moment I remember from watching this episode was when the Doctor says something like “they’re space police, but…. bad” and then I automatically started waiting for a character to say “so they’re space police.” Obviously that line would never happen in any Who era, but it’s almost absurd how much the script invites you to think it. There’s even dead space after the doc says it!
The rest of the episode is Glup Shitto nonsense. I really want the show to do Jo Martin justice sometime in the near future, at least for like one episode. I think she and the Gatwa Doctor would have a really good vibe together, especially if they keep her more militaristic and aggressive persona. They’d get along enough, but there would be a clear source of tension. Plus, you could potentially get the ratings boost of a multi doctor episode without actually having to make it a big deal.