Strange New Worlds Season 3 Preview

I haven’t had much of a chance to talk about Strange New Worlds here on the ‘cano, since the last season went off the air just before I got this place firing on all thrusters.

I absolutely love it, it really might have ended up as my favorite live action Trek. Between SNW and Lower Decks, it’s hard to believe maybe the two best Trek shows of all time are airing at the same time.

Over the weekend, Paramount posted a preview of the next season, which is presumably the opening of the first episode, directly following on from last year’s cliffhanger. Here, watch this, and I’ll meet you below the embed with some assorted thoughts:

• Hey, that’s the music from “Balance of Terror!”
• I know this makes me sound old, but I can’t believe that’s how good “TV Star Trek” looks now.
• Closely related: I really love this iteration of the Enterprise design. I can’t believe how good the old girl looks in this show. Inside too!
• I saw someone griping about Pike being disoriented at the start of this, but I though that was a pretty clever piece of filmmaking to have Pike need a beat to get his bearings in order to give the audience a little space to get their bearings as they get dropped into the middle of a cliffhanger from a year and a half ago.
• Star Trek has always been a show about people working together to solve problems, but I’m always impressed at how good a job SNW does at genuinely letting every member of the cast contribute to a solution under pressure, and do it in a way that the audience can follow along with.
• It’s been fun watching the LED screen tech from The Volume expanding out from The Mandalorian and into the industry at large. Case in point: the Enterprise Main Screen really is a screen now. There’s a camera move about halfway through that clip where the camera tracks sideways towards Uhura’s station (while the Balance of Terror music is going) and the parallax and focus on the screen stays correct, because it’s really a screen. Every cinematographer that’s ever worked on Trek over the last 50 years would have killed for that shot, and they can just do it now. Go look at that again—can you imagine what Nick Myer would have done to have been able to to that in Wrath of Khan? Or Robert Wise?
• I’m a simple man, with simple tastes, and someone on the bridge going on the shipwide intercom with a warning always works for me.
• And big fan of the pulsing movie-era “alert condition red” logo.
• This also gives me an opportunity to introduce my invention of The Mitchell Index. It goes like this: the quality of a given episode of SNW is directly proportional to a) if Jenna Mitchell is in the show and b) how many lines she has. So far, it’s been remarkably accurate, and this clip is close to to highest score yet recorded. She even gets the big idea!
• Speaking of Mitchell, love the way she tags the Gorn with a real torpedo too; sure, you gotta make the dud look good, but also: their shields are down and screw those guys.
• Heh, “Let’s hit it.” Hell yeah.
• Man, I love this show.

Ten Years of the Twelfth Doctor

I missed it with everything else going on at the time, but this past August marks ten years since the debut of Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor Who, who is, without a doubt, my all-time favorite version of the character.

His take on the character boiled down to, basically, “Slightly Grumpy Aging Punk Space Dad”, and it turns out that’s exactly what I always wanted. Funny, weird, a little spooky, “kind” without necessarily being “nice”. If nothing else, the Doctor should be the coolest weird uncle possible, and, well, look at that picture! Perfection.

(This is a strange thing for someone who grew up on PBS reruns of Tom Baker to admit. But when I’m watching something else and wishing the Doctor would show up and kick things into gear, it’s now Capaldi I picture instead of Baker.)

Unlike some of the other versions of the character, Twelve took a little while to dial in. So it’s sort of appropriate I didn’t remember this anniversary until now, because this past weekend was the 10th anniversary of the eighth episode of his inaugural series, “Mummy on the Orient Express.” “Mummy” wasn’t the best episode of that season—that was easily “Listen” or “Dark Water”, but “Mummy” was the episode where I finally got what they were doing.

This is slightly embarrassing, because “Mummy” is also the most blatantly throwback episode of the year; it’s a story that could have been done with very few tweaks in 1975 with Tom Baker. The key though, are those differences in approach, and one of the reasons a long running show like Doctor Who goes back and revisits old standards is to draw a contrast between how they were done then vs now.

Capaldi, unlike nearly all of his predecessors, was a genuinely well-known actor before climbing on board the Tardis. The first place I saw him was as the kid that falls in love with the (maybe?) mermaid in the criminally under-seen Local Hero. But his signature part was Malcom Tucker in The Thick of It. The Thick of It is set “behind the scenes” of the British government, and is cut from the British comedy model of “everyone is an idiot trying to muddle through”. The Thick of It takes that model one step further, though, and posits that if that’s true, there must be a tiny group of non-idiots desperately keeping the world together. That’s Malcom Tucker, nominally the government’s Director of Communications, but in reality the Prime Minister’s enforcer, spin doctor, and general Fixer. Tucker is clearly brilliant, the lone competent man surrounded by morons, but also a monster, and borderline insane. Capaldi plays him as openly menacing, but less straightforwardly malevolent as just beyond caring about anyone, constantly picking up the pieces from the problems that the various other idiots in Government have caused. Capaldi manages to play Tucker as clearly always thinking, but it’s never clear what he’s actually thinking about.

Somehow, Tucker manages to be both the series main antagonist and protagonist at the same time. And the character also had his own swearing consultant? It’s an incredible performance of a great part in a great show. (On the off chance you never saw it, he’s where “Omni-Shambles” came from, and you should stop reading this right now and go watch that show, I’ll wait for you down at the next paragraph.)

So the real problem for Doctor Who was that “Malcom Tucker as The Doctor” was simultaneously a terrible idea but one that was clearly irresistible to everyone, including show-runner Steven Moffat and Capaldi himself.

The result was that Capaldi had a strangely hesitant first season. His two immediate predecessors, David Tennant and Matt Smith, lept out of the gate with their takes on the Doctor nearly fully formed, whereas it took a bit longer to dial in Capaldi. They knew they wanted someone a little less goofy than Smith and maybe a little more standoffish and less emotional, but going “Full Tucker” clearly had strong gravity. (We’ve been working our way on-and-off through 21st century Who with the kids, and having just rewatched Capaldi’s first season, in retrospect I think he cracked what he was going to to do pretty early, but everyone else needed to get Malcom Tucker out of their systems.)

Capaldi is also an excellent actor—probably the best to ever play the part—and also one who is very willing to not be the center of attention every scene, so he hands a lot of the spotlight off to his co-lead Louise Coleman’s Clara Oswald, which makes the show a lot better, but left him strangely blurry early on.

As such, I enjoyed it, but spent a lot of that first season asking “where are they going with this?” I was enjoying it, but it wasn’t clear what the take was. Was he… just kind of a jerk now? One of the running plot lines of the season was the Doctor wondering if he was a good man or not, which was a kind of weird question to be asking in the 51st year of the show. There was another sideplot where he didn’t get along with Clara’s new boyfriend which was also unclear what the point was. Finally, the previous episode ended with Clara and the Doctor having a giant argument that would normally be the kind of thing you’d do as a cast-member was leaving, but Coleman was staying for at least there rest of the year? Where was all this going?

For me, “Mummy” is where it all clicked: Capaldi’s take on the part, what the show was doing with Clara, the fact that their relationship was as toxic as it looked and that was the point.

There are so many great little moments in “Mummy”; from the basic premise of “there’s a mummy on the orient express… in space!”, to the “20s art deco in the future” design work to, the choice of song that the band is singing, to the Doctor pulling out a cigarette case and revealing that it’s full of jelly babies.

It was also the first episode of the year that had a straightforward antagonist, that the Doctor beat by being a little bit smarter and a little bit braver than everyone else. He’d been weirdly passive up to this point; or rather, the season had a string of stories where there wasn’t an actual “bad buy” to be defeated, and had more complex, ambiguous resolutions.

It’s the denouement where it really all landed for me. Once all the noise was over, the Doctor and Clara have a quite moment on an alien beach where he explains—or rather she realizes—what his plan had been all along and why he had been acting the way he had.

The previous episode had ended with the two of them having a tremendous fight, fundamentally a misunderstanding about responsibility. The Doctor had left Clara in charge of a decision that normally he’d have taken; Clara was angry that he’d left her in the lurch, he thought she deserved the right to make the decision.

The Doctor isn’t interested in responsibility—far from it, he’s one of the most responsibility-averse characters in all of fiction—but he’s old, and he’s wise, and he’s kind, and he’s not willing not to not help if he can. And so he’ll grudgingly take responsibility for a situation if that’s what it takes—but this version is old enough, and tired enough, that he’s not going to pretend to be nice while he does it.

He ends by muttering, as much to himself as to Clara, “Sometimes all you have are bad choices. But you still have to choose.”

And that’s this incarnation in a nutshell—of course he’d really rather be off having a good time, but he’s going to do his best to help where he can, and he isn’t going to stop trying to help just because all the options are bad ones. He’d really rather the Problem Trolly be going somewhere nice, but if someone has to choose which track to go down, he’ll make the choice.

“Mummy” is the middle of a triptych of episodes where Clara’s world view fundamentally changed. In the first, she was angry that the Doctor expected her to take responsibility for the people they came across, here in the second she realized why the Doctor did what he did, and then in the next she got to step in the Doctor’s shoes again, but this time understood.

The role of the “companion” has changed significantly over the years. Towards the end of the old show they realized that if the title character is an unchanging mostly-immortal, you can wrap an ongoing story around the sidekick. The new show landed on a model where the Doctor is mostly a fixed point, but each season tells a story about the companion changing, sometimes to the point where they don’t come back the next year.

Louise Coleman was on the show for two and a half seasons, and so the show did three distinct stories about Clara. The first two stories—“who is the impossible girl” and “will she leave the show to marry the boring math teacher”—turned out to be headfakes, red herrings, and actually the show was telling another story, hidden in plain sight.

The one story you can never tell in Doctor Who is why that particular Time Lord left home, stole a time capsule, and became “The Doctor”. You can edge up against it, nibble around the edges, imply the hell out of things, but you can’t ever actually tell that story. Except, what you can do is tell the story of how someone else did the same thing, what kind of person they had to be ahead of time, what kinds of things had to happen to them, what did they need to learn.

With “Mummy”, Clara’s fate was sealed—there was no going back to “real life”, or “getting married and settling down”, or even “just leaving”. The only options left were Apotheosis or Death—or, as it turns out, both, but in the other order. She had learned too much, and was on a collision course with her own stolen Tardis.

And standing there next to her was the aging punk space dad, passing though, trying to help. My Doctor.

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Both Moffat’s time as show-runner and Capaldi’s time as the Doctor have been going through a much-deserved reappraisal lately. At the time, Capaldi got a weirdly rough reaction from online corners of the fanbase. Partly this was because of the aforementioned slow start, and partly because he broke the 21st century Who streak of casting handsome young men. But mostly this was because of a brew of toxic “fans”, bad-faith actors, and various “alt-right” grifters. (You know, Tumblr.) Because of course, this last August was also the 10th anniversary of “GamerGate”. How we ended up in a place that the unchained Id of the worst people alive crashed through video game and science fiction fandoms, tried to fix the Hugos, freaked out about The Last Jedi so hard it broke Hollywood, and then elected a racist game show host to be president is a topic for another time, but those people have mostly moved the grift on from science fiction—I mean, other than the Star Wars fanbase, which became a permanent host body.

The further we get from it, the more obvious what a grift it was. It’s hard to describe how how utterly deranged the Online Discourse^TM was. There was an entire cottage industry telling people not to watch Doctor Who because of the dumbest reasons imaginable in the late twenty-teens, and those folks are just… gone now, and their absense makes it even more obvious how spurious the “concerns” were. Because this was also the peak “taking bad-faith actors seriously” era. The general “fan” “consensus” was that Capaldi was a great actor let down by bad writing, in that sense of “bad” meaning “it wasn’t sexist enough for me.”

There’s a remarkable number of posts out there what’s left of the social web of people saying, essentially, “I never watched this because $YOUTUBER said it was bad, but this is amazing!” or “we never knew what we had until it was gone!”

Well, some of us knew.

I missed this back in November, but the official Doctor Who magazine did one of their rank every episode polls on the advent of the 60th anniversary. They do this every decade or so, and they’re always interesting, inasmuch as they’re a snapshot of the general fan consensus of the time. They’re not always a great view on how the general public sees this, I mean, a poll conducted by the official magazine is strongly self-selecting for Fans with a capital F.

I didn’t see it get officially posted anywhere, but most of the nerd news websites did a piece on it, for example: Doctor Who Fans Have Crowned the Best Episode – Do You Agree? | Den of Geek. The takeway is that the top two are Capaldis, and half of the top ten are Moffat’s. That would have been an unbelievable result a decade ago, because the grifters would have swamped the voting.

Then there’s this, which I’ve been meaning to link to for a while now. Over in the burned-out nazi bar where twitter used to be, a fan of Matt Smith’s via House of the Dragon found out that he used to be the lead of another science fiction show and started live tweeting her watch through Doctor Who: jeje (@daemonsmatt). She’s up through Capaldi’s second season now, as I type this, and it’s great. She loves it, and the whole thread of threads is just a river of positivity. And even in the “oops all nazis” version of twitter, no one is showing up in the comments with the same grifter crap we had to deal with originally, those people are just gone, moved on to new marks. It’s the best. It’s fun to see what we could have had at the time if we’d run those people off faster.

This all feels hopeful in a way that’s bigger than just people discovering my favorite version of my favorite show. Maybe, the fever is finally starting to break.

TV Rewatch: The Good Place

spoilers ahoy

We’ve been rewatching The Good Place. (Or rather, I’ve been rewatching it—I watched it on and off while it was on—everyone else around here is watching it for the first time.)

It is, of course, an absolute jewel. Probably the last great network comedy prior to the streaming/covid era. It’s a masterclass. In joke construction, in structure, in hiding jokes in set-dressing signs. It hits that sweet spot of being both genuinely funny while also have recognizable human emotions, which tends to beyond the grasp of most network sitcoms.

It’s also a case study in why you hire people with experience; Kristen Bell and Ted Danson are just outstanding at the basic skill of “starring in a TV comedy”, but have never as good as they are here. Ted Danson especially is a revelation here, he’s has been on TV essentially my entire life, and he’s better than he’s ever been, but in a way that feels like this is because he finally has material good enough.

But on top of all that, It’s got a really interesting take on what being a “good person” means, and the implications thereof. It’s not just re-heated half-remembered psychology classes, this is a show made by people that have really thought about it. Philosophers get named-dropped, but in a way that indicates that the people writing the show have actually read the material and absorbed it, instead of just leaving a blank spot in the script that said TECH.

Continuing with that contrasting example, Star Trek: The Next Generation spent hours on hours talking about emotions and ethics and morality, but never had an actual take on the concept, beyond a sort of mealy-mouthed “emotions are probably good, unless they’re bad?” and never once managed to be as insightful as the average joke in TGP. It’s great.

I’m gonna put a horizontal line here and then do some medium spoilers, so if you never watched the show you should go do something about that instead of reading on.

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The Good Place has maybe my all-time favorite piece of narrative sleight of hand. (Other than the season of Doctor Who that locked into place around the Tardis being all four parts of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”)

In the very first episode, a character tells something to another character—and by extension the audience. That thing is, in fact, a lie, but neither the character nor the audience have any reason to doubt it. The show then spends the rest of the first season absolutely screaming at the audience that this was a lie, all while trusting that the audience won’t believe their lying eyes and ignore the mounting evidence.

So, when the shoe finally drops, it manages to be both a) a total surprise, but also b) obviously true. I can’t think of another example of a show that so clearly gives the audience everything they need to know, but trusts them not to put the pieces together until the characters do.

And then, it came back for another season knowing that the audience was in on “the secret” and managed to both be a totally new show and the same show it always was at the same time. It’s a remarkable piece of work.

The next Dr Who Blu Ray release is… Blake’s 7?

It turns out the next Doctor Who blu-ray release is… the first season of Blakes 7? Wait, what? Holy Smokes!

I describe Blake's 7 as “the other, other, other, British Science fiction show”, implicitly after Doctor Who , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Red Dwarf. Unlike those other three, Blake didn’t get widespread PBS airings in the US (I’m not sure my local PBS channel ever showed it, and it ran everything.)

Which is a shame, because it deserves to be better known. The elevator pitch is essentially The Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai in space”; a group of convicts, desperadoes, and revolutionaries lead a revolt against the totalitarian Earth Federation. In a move that could only be done in the mid-70s, the “evil Federation” is blatantly the Federation from Star Trek, rotted out and gone fascist, following a long line of British SF about fascism happening “here.”

It was made almost entirely by people who had previously worked on Doctor Who, and it shows; while there was never a formal crossover, the entire show feels like a 70s Who episode where the TARDIS just never lands and things keep getting worse. My other joke though, is that whereas Doctor Who’s budget was whatever change they could find in the BBC lobby couch cushions, Blake’s budget was whatever Doctor Who didn’t use. It’s almost hypnotically low budget, with some episodes so cheap that they seem more like avant garde theatre than they do a TV show whose reach is exceeding its grasp.

On the other hand, its got some of the best writing of all time, great characters, great acting. It revels in shades of gray and moral ambiguity decades before that came into vogue. And without spoiling anything, it has one of the all-time great last episodes of any show. It’s really fun. It’s a show I always want to recommend, but I’m not sure it ever got a real home video release in North America.

So a full, plugs out release is long overdue. The same team that does the outstanding Doctor Who blu-ray sets is doing this; same level of restoration, same kind of special features. Apparently, they’re doing “updated special effects”, except some of the original effects team came out of retirement and they’re shooting new model work? Incredible. The real shame is that so many of the people behind the show have since passed; both main writers, several of the actors, including the one who played the best character. Hopefully there’s some archive material to fill in the gaps.

Blake ran for 4 years, presumably the Doctor Who releases will stay and 2 a year with Blake getting that third slot.

Happy Bell Riots to All Who Celebrate

Stay safe out there during one of the watershed events of the 21st century! I was going to write something about how the worst dystopia Star Trek could imagine in the mid-90s is dramatically, breathtakingly better than the future we actually got, but jwz has the roundup of people who already did.

Can you imagine the real San Franciso of 2024 setting aside a couple of blocks for homeless people to live? To hand out ration cards? For there to be infrastructure?

Like all good Science Fiction, Deep Space Nine doesn’t say a lot about the future, but it sure says an awful lot about the time in which it was written.

Further Exciting Consulting Opportunitues

I am expanding the offerings of my consulting company,we now offer a second service, which is this:

When someone is making, say, an eight season of a tv show for a streaming service, they can come to me and tell me what events will take place in those eight episodes. And then I will say,

“That is four episodes, max. What do ya got lying around that you’re saving for the second season? Let’s jam that in there too.”

Handicapping Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases, Updated

Previously: Handicapping future Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases

…And they’ve announced the next release: Season 25. I’m pretty pleased with myself, since that was one of the ones I predicted for release this year. Also delightfully, this make my boy Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor the first classic series Doctor to have a complete run on blu-ray. This should be a great one, extended cuts on all four stories, new sound mixes, and they really did get the rights to that PBS documentary I was thinking about. Mark Ayres, who did the music for several Seventh Doctor stories, was the last employee of the Radiophonic Workshop when it closed down, and has been a key member of the restoration team for the home video releases has been working hard to make sure the McCoy episodes got the absolute gold-star treatment, and this looks like a fitting conclusion.

On the other hand, I get docked some points since I guessed this would be a three-release year, and it sure looks like they’re only going to do two. Looking at the pattern now, it sure looks like two a year is going to be the standard? That implies they won’t be done until 2030, which is in keeping with this show to finish a set of releases long after the format has been surpassed. I was hoping they’d be done before the kids all moved out of the house, but what can you do? This also means the Jodie Whittaker logo is now the “Classic Who” logo, and is going to stick around probably long past the end of the RTD2 run? That’s funny.

This also means that for the rest of the run, we’re now even between color and black&white seasons left to do, with five of each—1 & 3-6 for B&W, and 7,11,13,16,21 in color (plus the hypothetical but almost certain “Wilderness Years” set.)

Looking back at my predictions from January, I think my reasoning is still sound, but assuming only two a year changes things a little. I genuinely can’t believe they’d have a year with only B&W releases, so that implies a color and B&W every year from here on.

So, re-dealing them out, my revised predictions look like:

• 2024:

  • 15—done.
  • 25—and done.

• 2025:

  • 11—this has got to be less work that 7, even if the rumors are true and they are replacing those dinosaurs.
  • 6—there’s no universe where they’re going to animate “The Space Pirates”, so this is pretty much ready to go?

• 2026:

  • 4—they’ll probably also blow off animating “The Highlanders?”
  • Wilderness Years—for 30th anniversary of the TV movie.

• 2027

  • 16—It’s the Key to Time, so that oughta sell pretty well.
  • 3—I can’t believe they’d release a blu-ray without animating “The Dalek’s Masterplan”, but it’s also five and a half hours long, so who knows.

• 2028

  • 7—it feels like you wait until the last possible second in hopes the prices go down for the compute time needed to fix the color here.
  • 5—The last missing one in this season has the Cybermen, so they’re absolutely going to animate it eventually.

• 2029

  • 21—one last Davison set.
  • 1—the checks should have cleared by this point.

• 2030

  • 13—Zygons, shutting off the lights.

Doctor Who and the Empire of Death

And there we go! Thats a wrap on first season of New New Who.

Before we go any further, let’s check in with the target audience. Traditionally, and I think this is still the case, the BBC had separate departments for “Childrens’s shows” and “Adult Drama”, as you would expect. One of the reasons that Doctor Who has always been a bit of an odd duck content-wise is that it was, and is, a children’s show, but one made by the Drama department, not the Children’s department. This can spawn a lot of Tedious Discourse^TM about whether it’s “for kids” and if so what we can use that as an excuse for (see also: Star Wars), but the practical upshot is that the target audience has always been, essentially, Smart Tweens and their Parents. That 12-14 range has always been the show’s sweet spot in terms of how scary it is, the content, the kinds of complexity it has. And like all good children’s TV, it talks up to them rather than down, and as such tends to hang on to its audience as they age out of the tween sweet spot.

Well, as it happens, I have both a 12 and a 14-year old, and they absolutely loved it. My 14-year old was practically hovering the entire show as she vibrated from excitement, and as the credits rolled she declared this episode to be the “greatest Doctor Who ever!”

And you know what? That’s the review. Whatever us middle-aged former tweens thought about it, the core audience loved it. Mission accomplished.

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Before we get to the finale proper, the folks in the UK got an appetizer—an amuse-bouche, if you will. BBC4 aired a surprise bonus episode of Tales of the Tardis featuring “Pyramids of Mars”. Recall that Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor was the surprisingly unrepresented Doctor when the other TotT episodes dropped back in November, now we know why.

The biggest disappointment is that Tom didn’t come back. But, he’s 90 now, and I think we’ve seen the last of his Doctor in live action. Instead we get Gatwa and Gibson in the Memory Tardis, with the Doctor telling the story of the first time he met Sutek.

“Pyramids of Mars” is, of course, a stone cold classic, one of best stories from one of the old show’s best periods with probably the best pair of leads the show ever had. For a long time, “Pyramids” was my pick for what to show someone whose never seen the show before; it may not be objectively The Best^TM, but if you don’t like this one, Classic Doctor Who may not be the show for you.

There was some consternation in the usual parts when an unnamed TotT episode popped up on the schedule, because the time slot was 75 minutes, but any classic 4-parter clocks in at 96 or so. And look, I genuinely love that old show, but there isn’t a single 4-part story that couldn’t lose 20 minutes to its benefit. (Off the top of my head, I’m pretty sure I know what I’d chop out.)

The end result is a win all around. The trims were what you’d hope—the padding and explicit racism, in that order. Gatwa sets the tone from the get-go by describing the archeologists at the start as looters, his disgust palpable. (“I’m a time traveler. I point and laugh at archeologists.”) There’s some tastefully upgraded special effects, in keeping with the style of the blu-ray releases.

As aired, it’s placement was slightly puzzling; Ruby clearly knows who Sutek is, and they discuss how impossible he is to defeat, despite the fact that they’ve clearly escaped from the cliffhanger at the end of “Legend of Ruby Sunday”, implying this is all taking place during “Empire of Death?” Once EoD aired, it wasn’t explicit, but there was clearly a place where it was supposed to go, I suspect you could edit them together basically seamlessly.

As a teaser it works remarkably well: a rerun of a story from the old show, introduced and contextualized by the current cast, acting as an extended “previously on” flashback/table-setting for the finale? That’s a great idea. They should do this more often.

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The show itself: it was a classic Davies season finale. As soon as the store-brand Thanos disintegration effects started, it was clear that this was going to be one of those stories where everything was undone at the end; it was going to be 30-ish minutes of moping, followed by 5 minutes of hand-waving. Or as I put it last week, some bullshit. As such, there’s no real stakes, it’s clear this is all going to un-happen as soon as the “minutes remaining” counter gets low enough. As such, it’s mostly sort of Diet Drama, empty calories and fake sweetener. Given Davies’ track record, it’s slightly disappointing, but not surprising.

That said, it wasn’t terrible. Gatwa and Gibson have enough raw charisma to make much worse TV than this work, Langford continues to prove how terribly misused she was in the 80s, and Redgrave lands the hell out of her two or three scenes, aware that she’s not playing a character in this one so much as a plot accelerant.

Davies likes to power these kinds of big stories on emotional connections and big feelings rather than police procedural–style plot logic; we’re in a space much closer to David Lynch’s dream worlds than we are to something like Columbo. This particular speed of maximalist-melodrama isn’t the my favorite speed for Doctor Who. I mean, bring death to death? Did the Doctor really use the Uno reverse card? Fine, sure. The only part I genuinely disliked was the “now I become a monster” bit, which is staggeringly unearned and also incredibly played out. This is the kind of plot structure that tends to get dismissed as “bad writing”, and it isn’t—this is very good writing making some very specific choices that I just don’t care for myself. But people like me are why they also made “Boom” and “Dot and Bubble.”

Why is Rose Noble in this? Not that it isn’t fun to have her there, and that “how’s your uncle” isn’t a fun zing, but… she just stands around and then gets dusted? Or really, most any of the guest cast? There’s a lot of actors who got paid to watch the episode from on set, and good for them, I guess?

I really, really liked the resolution to the mystery of Ruby’s parents. The basic resolution to the “mystery”, that people and things are important if we believe them to be, not because someone else declares them to be, I thought was a great basic statement of principles for the show. Apparently, on the commentary track, Davies says that her mom turning out to be just a regular person was at least partly inspired by Rise of Skywaker reconning that out of Rey’s backstory. I thought it was great— Doctor Who has always been a show where “what you do” is more important than “where you came from”, and this made that very literal in the text. Just some regular people caught up in something bigger than themselves: sounds like Doctor Who to me.

I have to admit to not having much else to say about it? It was fine. But, seeing as we’re at the end of the season, rather than picking at the threads of this one in particular, let’s pull out and see how we’re doing overall. What shape is this show in versus where it was back in May?

Let’s start with the Doctor themself. Gatwa has a really interesting take on the character, which I really like. We’ve talked about how he’s more scared than his predecessors, and that his emotions are always up at 120%, but the thing I think is the most interesting is that he plays the 15th Doctor as much more of just a regular guy. In this case, the comparison to “Pyramids of Mars” is fascinating, as it also invokes a comparison with Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor, who is many things, none of which are “regular guy.”

As one specific example: I’ve talked a lot about how scared this incarnation gets, and “Pyramids” is probably the most visibly scared Tom’s Doctor ever was. But Tom played “scared” by getting grimmer and grouchier, and without letting his opponent see it, a real “never let them see you bleed” approach. Gatwa is very visible about it. Both “Pyramids” and “Legend/Empire” have a scene where one of the humans snaps at the Doctor for their behavior, but in “Pyramids” it was Sarah reminding the Doctor that these are real people dying and don’t be so callus about it even if there’s a bigger picture, here it was Mel telling the Doctor to get his shit together and do something. A very different take on what a masculine hero looks like, and frankly, I’m enjoying the change.

A fun distinction you make make with the actors who have played the part is that a small but vocal subset of them grew up as fans of the show before they became actors—Davison, Colin Baker, Tennant, and Capaldi have all been very open about growing up as fans. And it’s not that the “fan Doctors” are better, but they do have an extra trick they can pull out of their back pocket when they need to; Davison would pretty obviously channel Troughton when he was stuck, and both Tennant and Capaldi would clearly start doing a Tom Baker impression when the script let them down. (The exception was Colin Baker, who I think correctly realized that the only way his version of the character was every going to work was if he started at 110% and kept going.) And look, “what would Tom Baker do here?” is a pretty solid backup plan for a script that isn’t firing on all cylinders.

But now we have a new category: Doctors who grew up as fans of the Revival show. Gatwa has been pretty clear about watching the Tennant years as a kid, and so I was curious to see if we were going to be able to spot any Tennant impressions. And I can’t actually say that I did, or rather, I can’t spot the different between Gatwa channeling his childhood versus the fact that Tennant’s portrayal is the new baseline for the character, replacing Troughton. It’s not an impression so much as “like David Tennant” is how the character acts now. So I suspect that it’s not that he falls back on an impression as that Gatwa really gets how that baseline works, so that leaves him a little more cognitive space to build things on top of that.

It’s a performance I really like, and kept being surprised by, and what else can you ask for with this show?

What about Ruby? The “companion” role in Doctor Who is a strange one; more than a sidekick, but not really a full co-lead. Mostly, the role exists so that the Doctor can deliver the exposition the audience needs via dialoge. This is why the show has settled on companions from the modern day, that way the companion needs the exact same set of exposition as the audience does.

(As the story goes, Clara was originally going to be the victorian version from “The Snowmen,” but then they realized that if, for example, you had an episode set on an 80s-era cold war submarine, if the character is from the modern day all you have to say is “cold war submarine!”, whereas if the character is from somewhere else you still have to tell the audience “cold war submarine!”, but then you also have to explain to the character what a submarine and a cold war is, and then explain to the audience why you’re explaining that, and when you have a fast-moving 45-minute show, that eats up a lot of time thats better spent on literally anything else. Back when you had 96 minutes to fill in the form of four 25-minute parts, that sort of thing gave you a free scene per episode to organically fill time with.)

But you also need a character that can step in and credibly take charge of the b-plot, so not someone helpless or just there to ask questions. My general belief is that the really successful companions are the ones that you can imagine starring in their own show. Even better, ones where you have a pretty good idea of what that show would be like, and then then upgraded to the better show. As some examples from the classic show, it’s really easy to imagine what a UNIT show held down by the Brigadier, or a freelance journalist show held down by Sarah Jane would look like (even before that one happened,) or a 90s teen angst show with Ace. For the new show, both Rose and Donna explicitly sketch in their respective shows before the Doctor crashes into them.

(And this is getting away from me a little, but what makes Amy fun is that she seems like she’s that kind of character, except her “home show” doesn’t make any sense. And Clara—the best modern companion—is the reverse, in that she does have her own show she makes sense in, but doesn’t get there until she leaves. But I digres.)

Ruby immediately presents as a character in the Rose/Donna mold, a quick sketch of her home show with her adoptive family and her band, and then the Doctor crashes in. Except it’s a little more generic than her predecessors, the show she actually starts in is a different show altogether, and then the bits around her, while effective, kind of float into the background behind The Mystery. However, as much as Ruby is a little generic, she held down an entire episode of “The Ruby Sunday Show”, so by that metric, she’s a big success. Like I said back in December, Ruby dones’t feel like anything so much as Davies looking at Clara and thinking “ooh, I’ll have one of those,” complete with a mystery where the resolution is that the Doctor was seeing secrets where there are none.

I’ve had a note here reading “science ‘fiction’ vs ‘fantasy’?” since the show started, assuming this season would give me an excuse to dig into that, but this is another case where the contrast with “Pyramids” is enlightening. Sure, that story had mummies that were really robots, but it also had a rocket that was able to fly because “it transposes with its projection. Pyramid power.” I can’t with a straight face say that there’s anything significantly different due to this “pivot”; in practice most of the differences here seem to be stylistic ones due to Von Däniken–esque Chariots of the Gods–style ancient aliens aren’t the hottest thing in pop culture anymore. And the Doctor spitting “cultural appropriation” was a more interesting take on the material than the old show ever managed. (or, for that matter, the entirety of Stargate.)

I’m kinda fascinated that they spent all that money on that new Tardis console room, and made a big deal out of the jukebox, and then just didn’t use either? They had to build a new one, since Whittaker’s salt lamp set didn’t exist anymore, but maybe you didn’t need to build all that if you weren’t really going to use it? The Tardis set that got the most time ended up being the Memory Tardis. That’s funny.

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By any objective measure, this is the best shape the show has been in for a decade. Good reviews, solid cast, more chatter online than I’ve seen in years. It’s got a big spot on that top carousel on Disney+! It starts one of the Kens from Barbie!

There’s always a certain amount of hand-wringing from the more phlegmatic corners of the the fan base who are convinced that the show is doomed and about to be cancelled, again. Which is funny, since I’m not sure there’s any other media property that’s gotten the number of “second chances” or “new leases on life” that Doctor Who has. And inevitably, if you ask these people what the solution is, the answer is always to make the show exactly like it was when they we’re twelve, and, yeah. Between that and summoning the internet version of soccer hooligans—that is, Star Wars fans—by invoking TLJ, and the internet is in full froth this weekend. I read maybe six of the worst takes on any piece of media ever over the weekend. One guy I saw actually openly wished the show was more like Farscape, and I don’t know how to tell you this, fella, but you’re not nostalgic for that show, you’re nostalgic for being fifteen.

There’s also a lot of free-floating fan anxiety about whether it was a “good starting point”, which forms a feedback loop with the incredibly tedious is it season 1, 14, or 40 “discussion.” (It’s season one, deal with it.) People with a straight face telling newcomers that they can’t watch this season yet, they need to go watch a 20-year old show from 2005 first. There’s lots of “I enjoyed it but my wife who doesn’t really like the show and hasn’t seen the old show didn’t” and like, buddy, the show isn’t the problem there. You ever watch a show with her that she picked?

The right answer to “where do I start” is “what’s on now”. Go watch that episode Disney+ says is Season One, Episode One. “Shows with lore” is a thing that exists now, in a way it didn’t in 2005; plus, as much as this is a soft reboot, there is a reason why wikipedia refuses to call this anything other than season 14. There’s this charming but weird pathology amongst a certain set of terminally online fans that while THEY will read wikis non-stop, “regular people” need to have everything explained to them or they’re be lost and confused.

But it’s the other way around; normal people don’t watch every single episode of things, they’re used to using context clues to keep up—big evil death god dog, got it. It’s only that class of fan that needs absolutely everything explained or they go off the deep end about “canon violations” or “plot holes.” These aren’t documentaties about fake people, they’re stories. Grow some media literacy like those “regular people” you talk down about. These, of course, are the people who went absolutely berserk at the reveal of Ruby’s parents, because they can’t believe that all their paying attention to detail didn’t pay off. Like we said up at the top,Doctor Who is unique in that it’s a mostly sci-fi show where the “male, 18-25” demographic isn’t the core demographic, and that leads to some funny responses.

Anyway, the show’s back, it’s in good hands, it’s doing great, it’s really fun, and the core audience loves it. Glad you’re back, Doctor. Looking forward to Christmas.

Doctor Who and the Legend of Ruby Sunday

Here we are in 2024, and Bonnie Langford has been in what amounts to three season finales in a row. What a time to be alive.

Spoilers Ahoy

It’s hard to know quite what to say about this one. Back in his first run at the show, RTD established a very consistant pattern for the two-part finale they did every year: part one was 45 minutes of building problems that crescendo into a cliffhanger that seems unsolvable, and then a second part that started in a slightly different place and resolved whatever threat was threatening to destroy all life in the universe this week. The problem is, that of the five of those RTD did between 2005 and 2009, exactly none of them actually worked or were narratively satisfying in any way. Mostly, the first halves were good? But those first halves aren’t actually a story, they work more like a trailer for the finale than anything else. So, as much as I’ve genuinely enjoyed this season to date, I have to admit I spent most of this week thinking to myself, “yeah, looks like thats setting up some bullshit.”

This one was structurally a little strange, with the Doctor trying to solve both the mystery of the woman who keeps appearing and suddenly caring about solving where Ruby came from, not because of any hint they’re connected, but seemingly because he realized it was the finale and it was time to wrap both of those up?

The whole first act is strangely clunky, with the show recapping both mysteries, reintroducing the UNIT guest cast, plus Rose Noble, plus Mel, and going over the various red herrings, and seemingly just reviewing the chatter on the web from the last few weeks. It’s remarkable that fan discussions are predictable enough that RTD can summarize them a year before any of the episodes under discussion even aired. The thing it reminded me of the most was that episode of She-Hulk that stopped to check in on what the chuds were saying on twitter, and got it exactly right, despite being written and filmed ages before any of the show aired or any of those discussions happened. The other thing it kept making me think of was that episode of Sherlock where they review all the fan theories about how he could have survived the fall, before sheepishly revealing what they had in mind, and then waving a hand and saying, basically, but it doesn’t matter.

But things pick up once they open the time window and get Mel involved. The smeary visuals of the time window were probably the best use of that extra Disney money to date, Jemma Redgrave and Bonnie Langford were both excellent, and Gatwa and Gibson are always fun to watch. Actually, let me spend an extra sentence or two on that; both Kate’s scene with the Doctor reminiscing about who he used to be, and Mel’s scene telling him to get his act together were outstanding, both perfect examples of how this new incarnation of the show is supposed to work. RTD is incredibly good at those little emotional character beats, and thats the stuff that makes these slightly overwrought finales worth it.

It’s wild to me that they’re actually invoking Susan Foreman as a plot element rather than an easter egg for the first time, well, ever. It seems pretty obvious how that’s going to resolve next week—she’s gonna be Mrs. Flood, right? Mostly, I’m curious about where that goes now that we’ve broken the seal on it; there’s a reason why Susan got written out, and why the past 59 years the answer to “do you have family” has always been some version of “I don’t know” and a pained look.

I also have to admit I’ve really had my fill of Big Lore Reveals from the last couple of years; the last one I enjoyed was Capaldi gasping “I didn’t leave because I was bored!”; everything since then has been diminishing returns, to say the least. I’m slightly dreading the can of worms this seems likely to open.

On the other hand: wow, they really brought Sutek back! That rumor has been knocking around for a while, and I did not believe it one bit, but then 91-year old Gabriel Woolf’s voice boomed out of the speakers, and away we go. Incredible. “The Pyramids of Mars” is one of the all-time great Classic Who episodes, and Sutek stands as probably the best villain that never got a return engagement.

On a personal note, back in the days before Who came back, I once lifted Sutek wholesale for a tabletop RPG game I ran for a group that had never seen the show. I think, in 30+ years of DM-ing, that’s the only time I’ve ever lifted something from a movie or show wholesale without changing anything, because it was already perfect. I mention this to illustrate that I could not physically be closer to the center of the target audience crosshairs for bringing this particular character back.

It’s also a favorite of both my kids, and “I bring Sutek’s gift of death” is a line we quote all the time. You would not believe how hard everyone freaked out when the reveal landed.

In conclusion, a good time was had by all, and I’m bracing for next week’s impact.

Two last thoughts:

A character warning of imminent doom named “Harriet Arbinger” is absolute god tier, A+++.

A huge congrats to everyone out there who called “Sue Tech” a few weeks ago. I stand corrected.

Doctor Who and Rogue

Back during Davies’ first run on the show, the late season episode by a new writer was practically a genre into itself. It was kinda the try-out slot? But what’s that look like here in ’24, given that the seasons are so much shorter now, and that this is the first episode not written by someone who also wrote for 2007’s series three since 2020? Because this is the one written by Loki Season 1 director Kate Herron, and the immediate reaction is to wish the people behind Loki had let her do more than just direct.

Riffing on Bridgerton is the sort of thing that seems inevitable for Who to do, and lavish costume drama is the thing the BBC does best, so it looks great and everyone knows exactly what vibe to hit. British actors don’t always know how to hit “campy alien planet”, but they can all do “sinister Pride & Prejudice” in their sleep. The twist, that it’s aliens who are literally fans of Bridgerton who have gone back in time to cosplay is properly brilliant, the sort of thing you kind of can’t believe Doctor Who has never done before.

However, none of that’s what anyone wants to talk about with this one. Back in November I talked about the sense that Davies had unfinished business, a list of things he didn’t get a chance to do last time. It’s clear that very high on that list was “get the Doctor to kiss a man.”

So I don’t bury the lede here, I liked it, I thought it worked. Maybe more importantly, my kids loved it, by far their favorite episode of the season so far. Part of the remit of this season was to pull the “under 16s” in, and seems like mission accomplished. One of my kids is an absolutely huge Hamilton nut, and the fact that the Doctor was locking lips with King George? To great to even comprehend.

Personally, using the Doctor as a romantic character has always bugged me a little, mostly because they’re an ancient space entity, and it’s hard to imagine that working between a human whose a regular amount old, and an ancient alien from the dawn of time whose either thousands or billions of years old depending on how you read the end of “Hell Bent”? But this is where I argue against myself, because what’s so great and unique about the Doctor as a character is that sure they’re an ancient borderline-lovecraftian space entity, but they want to be just a regular guy when they grow up. And part of being a regular guy is occasionally smooching someone. And since that seal was broken two decades ago now, so yeah, lets go all-in on it. If you’re a billion years older than the other person, and a different species, and you can change your physical form almost at will, gender is where you’re going to draw the line? No, I don’t think so.

Speaking of unfinished business, this really felt like the original pitches for what became “Girl in the Fireplace” and the Captain Jack character from “The Empty Child” stripped back to their basics, mashed up, and handed to a different writer. Doomed time travel–centered love affair with an extremely gay Han Solo? Check and check.

Hope thats a thread that gets picked back up on.

And a couple of stray observations:

One of the many things I like about Davies, besides just being a great writer, is that he’s both a huge fan of the entire history of the show, but isn’t precious about it, and backs that up with an impish sense of humor. I’m slightly in awe of the level of trolling that went into slipping Richard E. Grant’s “Shalka Doctor” into the past Doctor montage. They even went and did a special photoshoot with a scanner to get the image! Doctor Who’s relaxed attitude towards it’s own continuity is something we’ve covered before, but that’s a whole lot of effort to go out of your way to make the show’s continuity even weirder for weirdness sake and I am here for it.

This episode got kind of a weird reaction, for reasons both obvious and not. I don’t spent a lot of time in fan spaces these days, but I dip in occasionally. Most of the sort of people who, shall we say, pronounce woke with the ‘hard r’, checked out somewhere around Christmas, and the chatter around most of this season has been pretty positive, all things considered. But this episode seemed to be the one that blew some fuses, there was a whole lot of “this is just too different!!!1” posts after this one, with increasingly less euphemistic ways to describe what, exactly, was different and why that was bad. Lots of “think of the children”.

Beyond that, this seemed to be the point where a lot of pent-up handwringing burst to the surface. Doctor Who fans can be a weirdly pessimistic lot, which is sort of justified because the show already got cancelled once? But lots of shows get cancelled, very few come back and then run for another two decades, so maybe unclench a little, guys.

This was also the point where it became clear that the ratings for this season were “good”, but not “great”, and with only the two-part finale left for the year, this seemed to be the point where everyone started armchair diagnosing “what went wrong.” For the record, nothing went wrong, it’s doing pretty well, considering the state of media here in ’24, and all the players involved seem happy. Outside the various weird internet fan corners, the show’s gotten a positive reaction. It’s one of those weird fan things where the hard-core fans are convinced that no one but them could possibly like this, despite the fact that by all appearances, the general public likes it just fine.

But okay, if this is where everyone does their bit about what’s been bugging them, let me tell you mine. As much as I enjoyed this, it really felt like there was a beat missing. This has been sort of bugging me all season in a way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but this episode sharpened it up for me—this is not a Doctor who ever really manages to size control of a situation, who never seems to get his feet under him.

This is a combination of the way Gatwa plays him, but also the way Davies is writing him as someone who largely inspires others to act rather than act himself. This is very similar to how Eccleston’s 9th Doctor worked, but that was back in 2005, and the approach really hasn’t been tried since.

Since Dungeons & Dragons gets a shoutout here, I’ll use that as the example of what I’m talking about: The Doctor has always been the exemplar of the maxed-out charisma hero. It’s not that he’s stronger or braver or even smarter than others, it’s that he can size control of a situation mostly by sheer force of personality, talk himself from being the chief suspect to running the whole murder investigation himself. The sort of character who swaggers into a room and rolls a whole series of nat 20s on persuasion checks. And as part of that there’s a move the show likes to do, where the Doctor acts like he’s thrashing around like an idiot for the first half of the show, and then somewhere around the midpoint decides he’s tricked the bad guys into telling him enough things, puts his “parent voice” on, and mixing a metaphor, grabs the wheel of whatever’s going on, and stays in the driver’s seat for the rest of the story.

And Gatwa’s Doctor, so far, just doesn’t do that. This one comes close, which is why I noticed it—the Kylie song and past Doctor montage scene, ending with the Doctor explaining who he is, looks like it’s one of those “okay, enough screwing around” turns, but then afterwards he goes right back to being back on his heels, and largely fails to resolve the story, with Ruby and Rogue making all the actually valuable decisions.

Especially combined with the theme of being scared a lot, it adds up to a fun but strangely ineffective version of the character, which I don’t think is the intent? As part of this soft reboot/revival, it’s as if they haven’t rehabbed all the old pieces yet, and havn’t quite redeployed all the tools in the toolbox. To be clear: I don’t think this is a problem, but it’s an aspect of the character that I miss, and I hope floats back in next year.

Doctor Who and Dot and Bubble

Well, okay, let’s start with that ending.

This season has been a little stingy about giving Gatwa any big show-offy grandstanding moments, scenes where he can really flex. That’s been in keeping with the gear this season has mostly operated in—the Doctor’s a fun-loving guy with big emotions who tends to inspire others to solve problems instead of solving them himself. No big showdowns, so to speak.

But boy, he really got to uncork everything he had here. When the penny drops at the end, it’s a remarkable performance as the shock moves through anger and finally lands on total disgust. The Doctor whose emotions are always at 120% finally gets something to really point that skill at, and he gets to physically embody the platonic concept of “Frustration.”

The character beat I really liked was right after, where he decides not to save those rich kids against their will. He’s absolutely got the ability to do that, and saving people who don’t want to be saved would solidly be in character—but also in character is deciding that, nope, he’s going to let these assholes go ahead and live with their chosen consequences.

As soon as Gatwa was cast, the odds seemed good that they were going to do something with the fact the Doctor has a new skin tone. It seemed obvious that RTD was too good a writer to just do an unreconstructed Very Special Episode about Racism, but presumably going to get addressed somehow. And they didn’t really talk about it, and the season to date has more or less ignored that aspect of the Doctor’s current physical form. And going into this week, there was absolutely no indication that was going to change.

Instead, we get 40 minutes of narrative sleight-of-hand, looking for all appearances that what we have this week is a 60-year old man satirizing social media. And it fully commits to this, hitting all the points you expect to see, even making the “bubble” a literal thing. The kids can’t do anything without their socials! They can’t even walk on their own! They don’t notice anything around them! There’s even a character named “Doctor Pee!” Two-thirds of the way through, you’re sort of rolling your eyes, thinking, “yeah man, I had a bad time on twitter too, maybe give the kids a break.”

Davies trusts that you’re just not going to notice that after a season full of incredibly diverse casting, that every person in the video squares has the same pale skin color. That comments like “I thought you all looked the same” will slide by without connecting to anything. The guest lead’s reaction to the Doctor in Ruby being in the same physical space is weird, but not so weird it sticks out.

At the same time, theres a vague but growing sense that none of the people on this planet are good people. It’s not just that they’re rich kids dependent on a sytem they don’t understand, and convinced of their own superiority, but there’s a more fundamental moral rot. By the time Lindy gets the man who just rescued her murdered to save her own skin, it doesn’t come across as a shock so much as “wow, they really are all assholes.”

Going into the last act, there’s a weird unease about what kind of story this even is—it doesn’t seem like we’re making fun of instagram anymore, and we also seem to have moved past a story about sheltered elite kids learning how to be better, so where is this going? And then the trap snaps shut, because we were on the Racism Planet, populated by people who would literally rather die than be rescued by a Black man.

I love how absolutely surgical it is. Instead of doing 45 minutes of “oh no, the south!” it’s 40 minutes of distraction and then an absolute gut punch. Part of what allows them to obscure the fact that this was “the racism one” is that because the Doctor wasn’t looking for it, neither was the audience, and so it sneaks up on both him and us.

Back when New New Who kicked off in November we spent some time speculating about why Davies would choose to come back and do more Doctor Who at this point in his career. Like all things, it’s clearly complicated and not just one thing; he gave an interview with a kid a few months ago where the kid asks him how he keeps coming up with new monsters, and his response is that it’s the other way around, and that he got the job because he can’t stop coming up with monsters, and I suspect that’s a lot more honest than the joking tone makes it sound. But it was also clear that he was angry and had things to say, and this is the kind of thing I was imagining.

Again like last week, I really feel like this needed a little card at the beginning that said “look, he was still mostly working on that show with Agent Scully. We didn’t leave our main guy out of 1/4 of his first season by choice!” The video squares was a tremendously clever fix, as it let him be in quite a bit of the show, despite the fact that those shots were probably all done in one afternoon with no set to speak of. This was the second one they filmed, as the second half of the first production block, which means that the Doctor’s shriek of rage was the first scene Gatwa filmed for this season. That’s a hell of a thing to land on your first day on the job.

I sketched the first draft of this out as I was coming down with COVID, and originally I ended this with “…and I’m sure everyone is going to be completely normal about this.” But it turns out they mostly were! There were the usual suspects who tried to claim it actually wasn’t racism at the end, instead something else that they described that was actually just racism except they didn’t know it, but mostly everyone was on board! It turns out the one everyone got weird about was the next one…

Doctor Who and 73 Yards

The problem was that they needed to start filming before Gatwa was done working on Sex Education. Meaning even though they only doing 8 shows a year now, they had to open the production schedule with a Doctor-Lite episode like it was still 2008. This was the first one they filmed, before even the Christmas episode, so this was actually Gibson’s first time out with the part and on her own for most of it. It’s not clear when they realized this was going to happen, but it feels like it was late in the day, as this has a certain “written at the last moment” quality to it. It sort of feels like this all needs to be in a title card at the start, because I’m not sure much about this makes sense other than as a way to paper over a production glitch.

Opening without the regular titles is a nice touch, since “Doctor Who” isn’t actually in this one, this is the Ruby show. The whole opening act is nicely spooky, in a Kirkland-brand The Wicker Man sort of way. Wales is, as always, gorgeous, and the escalating tension in the pub full of unfriendly locals is a really solid horror movie sequence, with a killer punchline. The strange woman following Ruby is unsettling without being directly scary, there’s a solid rural horror ghost story fully assembled.

And then Davies does one of his favorite tricks, which is to run though the whole premise from the trailer in the first 20 minutes, and then move on and do something totally different. I was not expecting to pivot into a story set 20 years later, so kudos for the genuine surprise.

It’s a shame, then that the actual story feels assembled out of bits of other, better Davies scripts. The main thrust is somewhere between “Turn Left” and Years and Years, the evil prime minster is Harold Saxon plus any number of other evil government figures from past Davies Whos, and even the best part of this is a rerun of Lucy, Saxon’s wife, being abused in the background, except without, you know, the part at the end where she shoots him.

That said, the standout sequence is the scene where Ruby apologizes to the other campaign worker for not helping her earlier because she only had one shot and she had to be sure, and then maneuvering the ghost or phantom or whatever it is into position. That feels like the scene the whole episode was written outwards from.

A recurring theme in Davies work are characters trapped in a world where no one will help them. It’s not quite full-blown nihilism, but Davies has a very low opinion of the average person, and this episode is chock full of unkind, unfriendly, unhelpful people. It’s a tremendously negative worldview, exacerbated by the phantom making things worse.

The phantom woman’s effect on the people who talk to her is always effective, and it’s interesting that fear continues to be a major theme this year, even when it’s not the Doctor being afraid. The hiker, the pub denizen, her mom provide a solid building horror at what that phantom might be.

The best is the brief appearance by Jemma Redgrave’s Kate Stewart who gets to swagger in, show what a UNIT show starring her would actually look like, and then gets to act the hell out of the spell descending on her and becoming terrifying. Kate Stewart has been a recurring character for 12 years now, and she’s never been better deployed than she was here and in “The Giggle” last year, mostly by remembering that Redgrave can really act. And I really liked the beat that Kate knew something was up with the timeline. Here’s hoping some of those spin-off rumors are true!

And speaking of that, one of the rumored (working? code name?) titles for a spin off is something to the effect of “the war between the land and the sea,” which is a phrase that makes an appearance—and that probably means nothing, but worth noting.

(And as a stray comment, I’d be willing to bet the costuming note for “middle-aged” Ruby was “how close can you get to Michelle Pfeifer’s Selina Kyle before she turns into Catwoman?”)

But then the last act slides into the most unearned, garbage ending. As soon as the story skips forward in time the first time it’s clear there’s going to be some kind of closing the time loop reset ending, but… what? It’s not so much that the ending doesn’t make sense, it’s that it doesn’t even try to. The story carefully lays out two rules about the phantom woman: she always stays exactly 73 yards away from Ruby, and anyone who interacts with her runs and shuns Ruby. And the dual resolutions don’t engage with either of these. The evil prime minister, who might be the evil spirit the pub locals made up (?) runs from everything, not just Ruby, and then at the finale, when Ruby gets old enough, she… goes back in time and turns into the phantom? (And if that was Ruby all along, why was she doing what she does? Why are old Ruby and the Phantom played by different actresses? Was it really Ruby in the first loop, or did she replace the original phantom?)

The obvious point of comparison here is “Blink”—a Doctor-Lite episode built around a monster with clearly-stated rules, but in that show, the resolution centered on using the monster’s own rules against them, here the resolutions center around the monster growing new features suddenly.

Since this is where it becomes explicit in the text, we should probably say something about the much-discussed pivot towards the supernatural and paranormal. Mostly, the difference beween “science-fiction”, “science-fantasy”, “the paranormal”, and “fantasy” is a matter of which latin roots you use to make up the fake words with, but here it seems to be an excuse to just not bother about how anything works or wire up the ending, which combined with the “lol, music am I right?” ending to “The Devil’s Chord” is a little worrying.

Most seasons of the revival show seem to have that one episode that isn’t necessarily “bad” or “cheap”, but it’s clear that it got less attention than the ones around it, the one where everyone went, “yeah, that’s fine,” and then went back to working on the cool landmines or something.

The thing it reminded me of the most was “Boomtown”, from the revival show’s first season back in 2005. That was a last second replacement script for one that had fallen through, it was cheap(er), set in Wales, had one good scene in the middle, and had a nonsensical ending that was basically just “a wizard did it.” It wasn’t “bad”, so much as it was clear everyone involved was busy either working on the WW2 gas mask zombies on one side or making the big finale on the other, and just needed to get this out out the door.

And look, I kinda liked “Boomtown,” copout ending non-withstanding, and I kinda liked this with the same hedge. If your weakest episode to date still manages a solid 20 minutes of Welsh horror followed by a ghost preventing an evil spirit from starting a nuclear war, your show’s probably in good shape.å

X-Men 97

I liked it! I liked it a lot.

Taken mostly on it’s own: a really fun show, well made, great look. Really captures what’s fun and bonkers about the X-Men as a concept and a team. They nailed an animation style that looks like how you remember the old show looked, as opposed to how it actually looked.

Taken from the perspective of someone who retained more facts about “X” “Men” than is recommended by the surgeon general: And it also did a great job both following up on the old cartoon as well as riffing on stuff from the comics, and allin a way that spent a lot of time winking at long time fans but stayed completely accessable to people with no prior knowledge beyond “that one is Wolverine, right?” Immediately in the S-tier of revivals/reboots/continuations, or whatever we call these things now.

Taken as a show that’s part of the broader media-social-political landscape of the Twenties: Holy smokes I cannot believe they really had the balls to spend 10 episodes finding new ways to say “Magneto was Right.”

Doctor Who and BOOM

Doctor Who has always been a very writerly show. Part of this is due to the fact that it has always used individually-hired freelancers instead of staff writers or a single author, but also because the author is the one name that’s always been in the opening credits. This is part of what leads to the show’s anthology-with-fixed-cast vibe, with very different things promised by a show that opens with “by Robert Holmes”, “by Terry Nation”, or more to the point for this week, “by Steven Moffat’.

For everyone playing the home game, Moffat was the guy best known for the “Friends-but-British” sitcom Coupling before seemingly coming out of nowhere the first season of the revival show with the two best episodes that year—“The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances“—aka, “the one with the WW2 gas mask zombies”. It’s a trick he repeated the next three years, showing up and writing the best episodes of the season (“Girl in the Fireplace”, “Blink”, “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead”), before walking away from a movie with Steven Spielberg to take over the show himself for the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi Doctors, while also doing Sherlock at the same time. Somewhere along the line, he ended up as the person who had written the most televised Doctor Who, and then left at the same time as Capaldi. He followed his immediate predecessor’s lead in not returning to the show after he left, spending his time writing perfectly acceptable adaptations of Dracula.

When Davies announced he was coming back, Moffat was the next person everyone asked about; after spending months as the worst kept secret in TV they admitted that yes, he was writing two—episode 3 and the ’24 christmas special.

And so for episode 3 we have a double showcase—an opportunity for Gatwa to really show what he can do with the part, while a returning Steven Moffat shows why he’s still the best thats ever written the show. The central conceit—the Doctor is stuck on a landmine and can’t move for the whole runtime—ends up being a phenomenal way to keep the show focused on what the Doctor is good at: talking to people and being clever.

One of the funnier aspects of the Doctor being literally the same character being played by different actors but in the same continuity is that you can’t get away with remaking old stories with the new cast. Unlike, say, Sherlock Holmes, you can’t just do “our version of ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’”, you have to find a way to run the standards while still doing a new story.

Moffat realizes that the structure of having the character in one place trying to disarm a landmine the whole time is great frame to hang a whole bunch of very Doctory things to see what he does with them.

Gatwa takes the material and makes it sing, occasionally literally. This feels like where his take on the character locks into place. He’s still doing big emotions at full speed, he’s still scared like other incarnations are not, but he’s thoughtful and charming and clever in a way he hadn’t quite ever been yet. For lack of a better vocabulary, he’s suddenly much more “Doctory”. Because it turns out the trick to writing Gatwa is to write like he’s Peter Capaldi?

And that’s not quite fair. One of the things you start to notice is that the very short list of people who’ve written for more than one Doctor tend to have their own take on who the character is, and write for “their” Doctor, and then trust whoever is actually in the part at the moment to put their spin on it. Moffat’s writing his version of the Doctor, so on the one hand, it’s very easy to hear Capaldi or Smith saying the same lines. But it’s not as simple as “he just wrote a Capaldi episode”, he’s a good enough writer to know that it’s Gatwa who is going to be saying the lines, and leaves him plenty of space to lean in with hit take on the part.

So you get moments like the Doctor explaining away that he can work out the exact weight of the cylinder based on the way it moved when Ruby tossed it into the air but that he didn’t want to look like he was showing off, which is scene you can easily imagine any of the other post-2005 Doctor doing, but none of them would have hit the same note of barely-controlled panic Gatwa does here.

And the beat where the Doctor looks like he’s being distracted by irrelevant questions at the expense of the immediate problem—“who’d pick a fight around here?”—is a great showcase for Gatwa to show what it looks like when the Doctor has actually figured out most of the real problem way ahead of everyone else, and then lets things unfold from there.

And “Give it time, everywhere’s a beach eventually” is a 12/10 Doctor Who line.

Ruby, on the other hand, Moffat writes as a sort of midpoint between Amy and Clara, which I think makes a lot of sense considering how thinly sketched that character is, and how much Ruby’s design owes to those two predecessors. The result is the best Ruby has ever worked by a wide margin.

Music continues to be a major thematic element, as it has since for the whole of the RTD2 era, with the Doctor singing to himself to calm down, and the shared song to determine the timing of the handoff. It’s unclear if this is going to be a plot point, or if this is like romance was in 2005, and this is just a part of how the show works now? Either way, it gives the show a sense of having learned a new trick.

It’s full of Moffat easter eggs and staples: Anglican Marines! Villengard! Glitchy tech! Characters who die and then end up in a sort of strange un-death! A killer robot-type thing that apologizes before it kills you! An absolutely furious satire of capitalism, the military, algorithms, and religion! Fish Fingers and Custard!

My favorite callback, though, was this slightly spooky poem or nursery rhyme the Doctor recites to calm himself down:

”I went down to the beach and there she stood,

dark and tall, at the edge of the wood.

“The sky's too big. I'm scared,” I cried.

She replied, “Young man don't you know there's more to life,

Than the moon and the president's wife?”

I love this, because it’s an absolute perfect way to handle continuity in Doctor Who. On it’s own, its a strange little poem that vibes with the mood of him trying to calm himself down that he recites almost like a mantra. It sounds like it might be from something, one of those late 1800s poems from the part of high school english you sleep through? On it’s own, it works!

But then, for a certain kind of detail-retaining viewer, the last line does a little twist and reveals that the young man in the poem is actually the Doctor himself? (And it wasn’t the president’s wife, it was his daughter. And he didn’t steal the moon, he lost it. Or so he claimed.) Because this is a callback to some event in the Doctor’s past that both he and Missy mentioned back in series 9.

Critically, this wasn’t a nursery rhyme about hybrids, or pandoricas, or cracks in the universe, or planets where you have to tell the truth, or time-traveling religious orders with priests you forgot you talked to, or immortal lesbian vikings, or bad wolfs, or time wars, or any other actual plot elements from the last 20 years. Instead the deep cut reference is to what amounted to a throwaway call-and-response joke from the fall of 2015, which at the time sure sounded like it was something that “didn’t really happen.”

And even better, nothing anyone said back in series 9 even remotely implied there was a dark woman, or a wood, or that someone wrote a rhyme about it. This is exactly the way this show should build up these little references, callbacks with a twist, adding pieces that don’t fit in ways that imply even more we didn’t see, and in a way where you know they’ll never actually pay off, it wont ever become a big plot point. Just layers of texture, built up over the decades. It’s not “fan service” in the usual sense of the term, the recognition if the source is pure value add.

The fact that the thing being called back to was from Series 9 is also appropriate, because content and theme-wise, this story could have slotted cleanly into that year, and not just because it was a story about toxic capitalism where someone goes blind. It’s an interesting revival-with-updates of what the show was concerned about at the time.

I’ve seen a couple of comments here and there that the satire wasn’t “pointed enough”, and I don’t know guys, a story about turning decision-making over to an algorithm which then immediately turns ambulances into murder machines to keep sales up feels like exactly the right amount of pointed for 2024. The fact that it’s an “algorithm” and not a skynet-style self-aware AI feels right on the nose for our current moment.

And speaking of right on the nose: Thoughts and Prayers! It was during Moffat’s run as showrunner with Matt Smith as the Doctor that the show really broke out in the US so he’s certainly familiar with that audience; “Thoughts & Prayers” with that font sure felt like it was tacking directly towards the new American viewers on Disney+.

On the less positive side, the direction is a little dull, even considering there’s only one location. Scrubbing back through the episode to get the words to the poem right made it really clear how the whole show is 2 or 3 camera angles at 2 or 3 zoom levels. They couldn’t have convinced Rachel Talalay to stick around for one more?

On top the direction, something seemed off about the whole episode visually that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, especially the strange locked-off head-on but distant shots of the Tardis. Turns out, this was the show’s first use of a Volume-style stage, with the crater being a set and then surrounded by LED screens. And I’m just delighted that Doctor Who has enough money now to do something like that, but still doesn’t have enough money to make it look as good as Star Wars. Just perfect.

The Susan Twist character has to pay off soon now, right? The show has been very careful to make sure the Doctor never saw her, but that’s over now.

And speaking of mysterious ladies, it was a genuine shock to see Varada Sethu a year early. Since this season and the next filmed back-to-back, she got spotted at several filming locations for next season’s esisodes, leading to some wild rumors that Gibson had been fired and replaced as the companion. After that simmered for longer than it probably should have, they finally announced that, no, Gibson wasn’t leaving but Varada Sethu was joining the cast for the next season. And that seemed to be that, until here she is! Now we get to wildly speculate about if this is a case of they liked the actress and brought her back, or if this was actually a case of launching the character early. Puts a whole different spin on the “you should get married” joke.

All-in-all, tremendous episode, and really feels like the show is properly back. Moffat is my favorite writer for the show not named “Douglas Adams”, show-ran my favorite period of the show, and was the guy in charge for my all-time favorite Doctor (Capaldi, for the record.) I was sorry to see him go when he seemingly left for good. I’m glad to see him back.

Doctor Who and The Devil’s Chord

First: what a great title!

If “Space Babies” was about re-establishing what median-value Doctor Who is like and getting everyone back on board, “The Devil’s Chord” seems like it’s about building out from that and establishing how the show is going to work going forward. Because as soon as The Maestro climbs out of that piano, it’s clear we’re operating in a different gear—excuse me—different key than we have before. Between this and the previous, theres a real sense of “mission statement”: this is the vibe Doctor Who is going for in this iteration. Evil drag queen space gods eating the concept of Music and destroying the future? Yes, please. We’re miles away from anything else on Disney+, or anywhere else on TV.

This is also where Gatwa’s and Davies’s take on the character is starting to come into focus. Back at Christmas and then in “The Space Babies” the take on the character was basically “big and fun.” And this stays true here, the Doctor’s excitement over where Ruby wants to go is a standout, and also feels like Davies riffing on the last time he was relaunching the show, where the first place the new companion wanted to go was to watch their dad get killed in a car accident? Finally, as he says, they want to go somewhere fun.

But I’m starting to run out of ways to phrase “this is all really fun!”, so fortunately this is where they start—and I’m sorry but I can’t help myself—adding more notes to the character. Presumably we’ll all be writing “this is when they really cracked the character” pieces next week, but for the moment two observations:

The second most interesting of these is when the Doctor realizes who or what they’re dealing with, and his response is to just… run away. The scene where they’re hiding from The Maestro and the Doctor makes a sound-proof zone to cover their tracks is probably the most effective sequence in any of Gatwa’s time so far.

“Scared” isn’t usually an emotional state the Doctor operates in, for solid structural reasons if nothing else. Doctor Who is frequently a scary show, and it’s sweet spot is right out at the edge of what the younger audience is capable of handling. But one of the things that lets Doctor Who get away with operating that far out on the ice is the character of the Doctor themselves. The Doctor is effectively indestructible, nearly always wins, and almost never scared, so they provide a real emotional safety net for the younger audience—The Doctor is here, so this is all going to be okay. Obviously we’ll see where this goes, but combined with them running away from the monster in “The Space Babies” as well, this take on the character seems to be centering on “enthusiastic but scares easy,” which is a fascinating take.

The most interesting scene, though, was the bit where he mentions that he and his granddaughter are currently living on the other side of town. Gatwa takes an interesting angle on the scene, and rather than sad or wistful, he plays the Doctor as basically cheered up by the idea that she was out there, regardless of where she is now. Unlike the last time Davies was show-running, this clearly isn’t a character that’s going to stand crying out in the rain.

This is, I think, the first time Susan has been mentioned by name in the 21st century version of the show. Like the premise speed-run in the previous episode, or the re-staging of the ruined future scene from “Pyramids of Mars” in this one, this feels less like a deep-cut continuity reference than a combination of making clear what elements of the show are in play while also deliberately hanging some guns over the mantle. Add to that the name drop of The Rani last week, and the not one but two mysterious women lurking around in the background of these last couple of shows, and clearly something is up. I’m going to refuse to speculate further, sine Davies likes to drop in these crumbs but never before built up a mystery that was solvable, these are always things that can’t make sense until the context of whatever the big-ticket finale does in June. But! Fun spotting the things that will make more sense on the rewatch regardless.

Because I grew up in a very Beatles-centric house, a few notes on the boys from Liverpool themselves. Lennon didn’t start wearing that style of round glasses until much later, but I understand wanting to flag “which one is John” with his most signature feature considering how little the actors look like the real people. I was hoping the the secret chord was going to turn out to be the mysterious opening chord of A Hard Day's Night. And look, if it had been me, I’d have had Harrison be the one to solve the puzzle.

Finally, the ending dance sequence looks like it was a lot more fun to make than it was to watch, mostly because that song wasn’t nearly good enough to spend, what, three whole minutes on? I think I see what they’re trying to do, but more than anything it had the quality that they had under-run and needed to pad out the show.

But, it was big and fun, and one of the all-time great cinematic battles of Ham vs Ham since Shatner and Montalban squared off. Jinkx Monsoon clearly looked at what Neal Patrick Harris did back in December and thought, “I can beat that.”

Were these two premiere episodes the best episodes of Doctor Who ever? No. But they’re more entertaining than the show has been in years, and it’s been even longer since it’s had this clear a vision of itself. In the six stories since November, we’ve gone from a 2008 revival piece to tuning up a whole new instrument. And then next week they’re handing it to the best person that’s ever played it…

Doctor Who and the Space Babies

And we’re back!

There’s an absolute sense of glee here. This is a show that’s absolutely in love with existing, made by people who are clearly relishing every second of their day, and inhabited by characters “glad to be alive.”

Thise sense of all-encompassing joy seems to be the central animus of Ncuti Gatwa’s take on the character—his is a Doctor who is psyched about everything and is here to have the best time possible, and hopes you’ll come along.

My favorite scene, if I’m honest, is the show ostentatiously spending the new Disney-infused budget on some gorgeous throwaway dinosaurs and then an absurdly expensive-looking prosthetic to land a butterfly-effect joke. It’s a show having an absolute ball that it can do things like this now. There’s a shot of the Doctor leaning against the Tardis while a volcano erupts in the background that’s exactly the kind of shot Doctor Who has always wanted to do, but never could until now.

And then, the final punchline of that scene with Gatwa’s muttered aside about having to turn on the Butterfly Compensator is the perfect example of the Doctor Who difference. On the one hand, it’s the exact kind of winking semi-science that’s Doctor Who’s bread-and-butter, but it’s also one of the things that makes the Doctor being an unreliable narrator of his own show so great, because it could just as easily be complete bullshit he made up on the spot because the real solution was more complex than he wanted to talk about.

But this is also our old friend, Russel T. Davies, angry nihilist, so my other favorite scene was the absolutely snarling satire about abortion and child care he banks into the episode halfway though, once everyone had relaxed and wasn’t ready for it.

Davies always liked a mostly fun and frothy lightweight season opener, and this is right in line. It’s just fun, infectiously so. After it was over, as the closing credits rolled, my fourteen year-old looked up and the screen and said “this show has got to be the best job in the world.”

⁂

It both is and is not a relaunch. On the one hand, Who has been in continuous production since 2005, albeit with an increasing irregular schedule. But on the other hand, this is the first regular actual season that wasn’t a one-off special or miniseries or something since January of 2020, and the show hasn’t been a mainstream hit since 2014 or so. And there’s probably a fair number of new-ish viewers coming in via Disney+.

So Davies splits the difference, correctly I think, and mostly seems to focus on people who have some familiarity with the show but need a refresher. “Remember that Doctor Who show you watched a decade ago? it’s back!” So the show speedruns laying out the premise, but in the gear of an extended “previously on” bit instead of making sure new viewers are keeping up.

But also, every show is a tangled mass of dense auto-continuity these days. And every episode of the show is streaming on iPlayer. Wikipedia will point you and the right ones. And every single references or easter egg is going to spawn dozens of explainer articles or reddit threads or youtube videos or some other SEO-chasing content glurge. Davies seems to cheerfully shrug and recognize that everyone that doesn’t know all this by heart is going to look it up anyway, so why burn too much screen time on it when he can use that for something else.

This doesn’t feel like anything so much as the start of a new creative team on a long-running comic, so the lore recap is not only there to help people jump back on board, but gives Davies a way to lay out which bits he’s going to be using. He’s clearly taken with the idea of the Doctor as an orphan, but all the other store-brand Campbell chosen one “revelations” that surrounded that a few years ago are left unmentioned. And his description of what happened to the Time Lords doesn’t really match anything we saw on screen before. But that’s less about “being inaccurate” than, I think, establishing the vibe the show intends to go on with. “There was a genocide and I was the only survivor” sets a very specific tone here in 2024, even before you factor in the fact that those lines are being spoken by the child of Rwandan refugees. It’s a very different tone from 2005’s “there was a war and everyone lost.”

It’s worth comparing the approach here with how Davies relaunched the show the last time, back in 2005. There, the show very carefully walked the audience through what was happening, and made sure everyone got it before moving on to the next thing. Here, the show knows that shows this complex are the default rather than the exception, assumes most of the audience already knows all this but needs reminder, and for anyone else, here’s enough keywords so you can fill in the gaps on wikipedia tomorrow morning.

The TV landscape around Doctor Who is very different now than it was in 2005. In ’05, there was basically nothing doing what Who does best—science fantasy adventure stories for smart 12-year olds and their parents. The only other significant science fiction show to speak of was Battlestar Galactica, and that was in a whole different gear. Buffy had just gone off the air, Star Trek Enterprise was gasping out it’s last season. Who had a lot of room to maneuver, but not a lot of context, so it started from “basically Buffy” and then built up from there.

Here in ’24, there’s a lot of TV operating in Who’s neighborhood. Heck, even just on Disney+, the various Marvel and Star Wars shows are going after much the same audience, and the next streaming app over is full of new actually good new Star Trek.

As such, Davies doesn’t waste a lot of time on median value Who, but leans all the way in on stuff only Doctor Who would even thinking of doing. One of the major animating forces here seems to be, basically “Yeah, Loki was pretty good. You ever see Loki do this?” and then pulling back the curtain to show a room full of babies. Space babies.

What makes this show different from all the other sci-fi-eqsue shows with baroque lore? A main character who loves life, loves what he does, doesn’t carry a weapon, and thinks it’s just as important to save the monster as anyone else.

A criticism you sometimes see about this show is that it “doesn’t take things seriously enough”, or variations thereof. And this is one of those criticisms that almost gets it, but missed the point entirely. Because the show does take things seriously, just not the same things that a show like Star Trek does. To quote the show’s own lead character, the show is very serious about what it does, just not necessarily the way it does it. To put that another way, Doctor Who is a show that takes being very silly very seriously.

At 46, I loved every second of this, but if I’m honest, I know I would have absolutely hated this at 15, and (even more embarrassingly) probably would have hated it at 30. What I didn’t understand then, but understand now, is that being incredibly serious all the time isn’t a sign of strength, or maturity, or “adultness”. It turns out, it’s the exact opposite. To quote the Doctor again, there’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes.

And maybe serious isn’t the right word for what I mean here. Doctor Who frequently isn’t “serious”, but it is always “sincere.” And that’s “The Space Babies”; it isn’t serious for an instant, but it’s as sincere as anything.

Plus, they spent a tremendous amount of Disney’s money to put a huge fart joke on BBC One in primetime.

Nice to see you again, Doctor.

Fallout (2024)

I found myself with more free time than I was expecting last weekend, and as I was also lacking in appropriate supervision, I “accidentally” watched all eight episodes of the new Fallout tv show.

I liked it! I liked a lot. It was fun, exciting, funny, great cast, looked amazing. But I’ve been wrestling with this post a little, because this is one of those weird bits of art where I genuinely liked it, I enjoyed watching it, and yet find myself with mostly only critical things to say.

Let’s get my biggest surprise out of the way first: Ron Perlman wasn’t in it. It’s a weird omission, considering how closely his voice is associated with the source material. Without getting too heavy into the spoilers, there was a scene near the end where a character looks over at a shadowy figure, and I thought to myself, “this is perfect, Ron is going to lean into the light, look the camera right in the eye and say the line.” And instead the shadowy figure stayed there and that other character looked the camera in the eye and said the line. Maybe it was a scheduling thing, and he was too busy teaching people how many ways there are to lose a house?

But okay, what did I like?

I liked the three main characters very much. Lucy, the most main of the main three manages to hit the very tricky spot of being “naïve”, but not “stupid” or “incompetent.” She’s just got a different set of experiences and skills than everyone else, but she learns fast and she figures out how to apply those skills to the new situations she finds herself in. She also manages the equally tricky maneuver of being a genuinely good person who stays a genuinely good person as the world around her gets weirder and more complex. She pretty much consistently finds the right reasons to do the right things, no matter how morally gray the world around her gets. She also looks remarkably like the starting model for the player character in the first game.

Maximus, on the other hand, manages to covey a sense of always being morally ambiguous and compromised no matter what he’s doing. It’s also a tricky performance, a character whose always likable despite the audience never really knowing why he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s always thinking, but you never know about what.

Rounding out the triptych of leads is The Ghoul, who is clearly designed to be everyone’s favorite character—the sort of hyper-competent amoral badass gunslinger thats always fun to watch. In addition, he’s played by Walton Goggins, who dials the goggins-o-meter all the way up to 11 and seems to be having an absolute blast. Goggins effectively plays two roles—the Ghoul in the post-apocalyptic present of the show, and Cooper Howard, the fading western actor-turned Vault-Tec spokesman in world before the bombs drop.

But the rest of the cast is outstanding as well. Everyone is great, they get the tone they’re supposed to be going for. And then, special mention for Kyle McLachlan—that’s right, hero to children Dale Cooper himself—who shows up for a tiny part right at the start and again at the end, and just absolutely owns the room. I’m not sure any actor has ever “understood the assignment” more than Kyle does in this.

My favorite parts of the show were those flashbacks to the world before the war—a world where there are robots and futuristic cars, but it’s been the 50s for a century. The production design here is outstanding; at first glance it’s the 50s, trilbies, poodle skirts, but with just enough high-tech stuff around the edges to produce a subtle dissonance. And then the show opens with every nightmare we had as kids growing up in the cold war.

Mostly, the show is those three out in the wasteland, paths intersecting, running into weird stuff. Their relative goals are less important—and frankly, underbaked—compared to them bouncing off each other and the various dangers of their world. The maguffin itself feels almost perfunctory, we have to have one for genre reasons, so this’ll do. The star attraction is the wasteland itself, a Mad Max meets spaghetti western desert full of monsters, mutants, skeletons. Whenever the show was about those three out having crazy sidequest adventures, following “the golden rule”, it sang.

But let’s step back and talk about Fallout as a whole for a sec. To recap: Fallout is a series of CRPG video games. The first kicked off the late 90s renaissance of “western-style” CRPGs. Fallout acts as kind of the “parent dojo” for a lot of the CRPG world; the leads for the first game would go on to form Troika Games, the team that made Fallout 2 would form the nucleus of Black Isle studios inside Interplay, which also worked with and helped launch Bioware with Baldur’s Gate. A Fallout 3 was in the early stages, but cancelled as Interplay finished going out of business.

After Interplay imploded, Bethesda picked up the rights to the series in the fire sale, and ten years later published Fallout 3. Meanwhile, many of the crew from Black Isle had reformed as Obsidian Entertainment, which would then work with Bethesda to make Fallout: New Vegas with a team composed of many of the people who worked on the original cancelled Fallout 3, and using some of the same designs. Finally, this was all capped off with Fallout 4 once again by Bethesda.

The point to all that is that the series is five games, each made by different people, at different companies, starring different characters, all with different tones and takes on the material, across nearly 20 years. I think it’s best thought of as an anthology series riffing on the same concepts rather than any sort of single vision or viewpoint. There’s a few core pieces—that mad max–meets–westerns wasteland, vaults full of elites waiting out the end of the world, mutant monsters, and a tone described as “satirical” by people who think that’s just a fancy synonym for “dark humor”—but otherwise, each game does its own thing.

How do you adapt all that in to 8 episodes on Amazon Prime? This adaptation makes a really interesting choice, in that rather than directly adapting any of the plots of the previous games, or mix-and-matching elements from them, it tells a new story with new characters in the same world. It’s effectively “Fallout 5”. This turns out to be a great idea, and it’s one I can’t believe more video game adaptations haven’t done.

It also, in a pleasant surprise in this age of prequels, is set after the other games, so those stories are vaguely treated as having “happened” and then here are some things that happened next.

As such, the show gives itself the flexibility to pick and choose various bits from the games to use or not, as well as threading new new inventions. It manages to hit a sort of “median-value” Fallout vibe, equidistant from all the games, which is a harder accomplishment than it makes it look.

Tone-wise the show settles on something best summed up as “Diet Westworld”. Because, of course, this is made by the same team that made the “stayed on too long” Westworld for HBO and the “killed too soon” The Peripheral for Amazon.

It has a lot in common with Westworld: multiple characters stories interweaving, a story that plays out in two time periods, The Ghoul is who Ed Harris’ Man in Black wanted to be when he grew up, a sort of jovial nihilism. It’s not simplified so much as streamlined, the time periods are obvious, the list of characters is shorter.

It definitely inherits Westworld’s desire to have everything be the result of one mystery of another, it’s a show that constantly wants to be opening locked boxes to find another locked box inside.

And this is too bad, because for me, Fallout is one of those settings that works much better when it’s operating a vibes-over-lore mode. You’re out in the wasteland, and it’s full of weird stuff that no one can explain, because anyone who could died before we were born, and we’ve got better things to do than speculate. Why are these vaults here? Grandma’s notes don’t say. Rad scorpions, huh? Yeah, they seem bad. Super-mutants? Yeah, don’t get near them.

Unfortunately, the games, and now the show, have trended more towards the “explain everything and fill in every detail” school of design, which… sure. It’s fine. I bring this up because the show leans hard into my single least favorite corner of the setting, namely that Vault-Tec, the company that built the vaults, was Up To Something, and Dark Secrets Abound. And this has always made me make a kind of exasperated sound and throw my hands up in the air because, really? “A third of a percent of the population decided to wait out the end of the world in luxury apartments while everyone else did the work to survive and the rebuild, so their grandchildren could emerge and take over” wasn’t enough satirical payload for you? You had to also make them Lex Luthor? And this is probably because this happened during Peak X-Files, and wheels-within-wheels conspiracies were cool and trendy in the late 90s, but now that just makes me tired.

The show even kisses up against the Thumb Thing. Let me explain. The mascot of both the franchise and Vault-Tec is the Vault Boy, a 50s-esque smiling cartoon character usually shown throwing a thumbs-up. No matter how bad things get, there’s the Vault-Boy, happy as can be.

There’s this urban rumor meets fan theory that the reason the Vault-Boy has his thumb up is that this is a way to gauge how close you are to an atomic bomb going off; if the mushroom cloud is smaller than your thumb, you have time to get to shelter. And, this is the most Lore Brain thing I’ve ever heard. Of course that’s not why he has his thumb up, he’s doing that because it’s funny to have a relentlessly optimistic cartoon character in the face of the terrible horrors of the aftermath of a nuclear war. But the people poisoned with Lore Brain need everything to Mean Something, so this rumor persists, until the show dances right up to the edge of endorsing it. And this drives me crazy, because not everything needs to have some complicated explanation you can read about in the wiki, stuff can just be thematic, you know?

The show also picked up Westworld’s (and The Peripheral’s) grim sense of humor. I preferred the Fallout games when they were on the funnier end of the spectrum, and I could have gone with a funnier show. It’s not not funny, but it’s also a show that cast Matt Berry in a fully serious part, which feels wasteful.

And a final thing Fallout inherited from Westworld is the “adult-ness” of the content. I promise I’m not one of those weirdoes that thinks movies shouldn’t have sex scenes, but my hottest take is that most movies would be better one rating lower than they are. And normally, this wouldn’t bug me, except I have a 12-year old at home who loves Fallout, and I can’t in good conscience show him the show.

Because I lied up at the top, I didn’t just happen to watch it over a weekend, I previewed the first part to see if I could watch it with the kids, realized that the answer was “…probably not?” and then jammed the rest of the show to see if I was right.

And what really grinds my gears about that is the content is only barely over the line into that TV-MA / R level, it wouldn’t have taken that much to knock it down to a stiff PG-13. And, like, if you’re going to go “adult”, go all the way, you know? I kept grumbling “pick a lane!” under my breath while watching it; it kept feeling like one of those 80s movies that threw one dramatic stabbing or topless scene in just to get their PG movie up into R so the teenagers wouldn’t think they’d gone soft. If you’re not going to let my kid watch it, go full Robocop, you know? Or, more to the point, full Westworld.

Because, unlike Westworld, none of that stuff mattered! Whereas Westworld was fundamentally The Writer's Barely-Disguised Fetish (In Color!), here it’s all basically frosting. You could have cut around it, or panned away, and really not lost anything. On the other hand, if I’m honest, it wasn’t the mild sexy stuff or the CG gore that tipped it over the line to “nope, wait til he’s older”, it’s that there’s a sequence halfway through the first episode that’s every nightmare he’s ever had about a school shooting. And in fairness, that part is key to the plot the way the sexytimes and cartoon gore is not, so this is where I throw my hands up and say Libya is a land of contrasts, and that I get it, I really do, but I would have really preferred watching this show with my kid than not.

And my final gripe I’m going to air out here is that the show ended up with a worse case of Surf Dracula syndrome than it originally looked like it was going to have. She gets out of the vault in the first episode, but then the last episode ends on a note that’s clearly supposed to tease the next season, but instead feels more like they’ve finally arrived at the premise of the show. There’s a much better version of this show that got to that set of plot beats at the end of the first hour and built up from there.

Or to put that a different way, it feels like the show ended at the end of the first act of the main quest-line, after mostly draining side quests.

TV is in a weird place right now, and Fallout reflects the current anxiety over the form. It’s certainly not a old-style traditional episodic show, but nor is it the “badly-paced 8-hour movie” so many streaming shows tend to be, nor does it manage “heavily serialized but every episode does it’s own thing” as well as Westworld did. Instead it lands somewhere in the middle of all of that, and ends up feeling like a show that’s both very busy but also killing time until the next season.

And I don’t think dropping the whole show at once did them any favors. Whereas Westworld dominated the conversation for weeks at a time, this show is almost impossible to talk about, because everyone has seen a different number of episodes, so instead of talking about anything interesting, the web swirls around Vault-Boy’s thumb and dates on chalkboards. There’s a lot to talk about, and I notice every website that might want to talk about them already have the quality of walking back into the room saying “…and another thing!” long after the conversation was over.

I’m getting dangerously close to saying “I wish they had made a different show,” but I wish they’d leaned a little harder into the 50s aesthetics and had each episode be standalone new wacky adventures every week with the premise explained by the words to the theme song.

And this is all the nature of the medium here in 2024, but I really wish that last “okey-dokey” felt earned, that it felt like a punch-the-air climax to what had come before, instead of feeling like Dracula was finally getting his surfboard out.

Doctor Who Grab Bag

The PR machine is gearing up, and as such they announced all the episode titles and writers for the upcoming season over the weekend, along with a new trailer: Doctor Who's New Trailer is a Time-Traveling Delight

I’m hoping someone eventually writes a gossipy behind-the-scenes book about how this iteration of the show came about. The stories around the campfire sure makes it sound like the show really was effectively canceled after Chibnall & Whittaker left in ’22, and then something happened and now Davies is running a new show with the same name as part of a co-production with his old friends at Bad Wolf and spending Disney’s money to do it. It also sure seems like there wasn’t that much time between that deal happening and the new-new show going into production.

Backing some of those rumors up is the fact that of the eight episodes this year, RTD is writing six of them. The two he’s not writing are the long-rumored and half-heartedly denied return of Steven Moffat for what’s likely to the best show of the season, and the previously announced pair of Loki’s Kate Herron with Briony Redman.

Doctor Who never had a writer’s room in the American TV style, nor did it usually do the BBC-style single author, instead it tends to use a rotating bench of freelance writers, which helped give the show it’s “anthology but with the same regular cast” vibe. Having nearly every episode be written by the showrunner raised eyebrows in some corners of the ‘net. But I suspect there isn’t anything more to it than the fact that they had to stand up a new production essentially from scratch, and fast, and there wasn’t time to find and spin up a batch of writers, especially if there was a chance they would need any handholding. So, RTD leans into the throttle and does most of them himself, and then pulls in the one other guy whom he knows can deliver a script without any assistance, and then the woman who directed what was effectively the best season of Doctor Who in years.

Meanwhile….

If two weeks ago was “Caves of Androzani” at 40, that means the next story, “The Twin Dilemma” also turned 40 over the weekend. “Twin Dilemma” is mind-wrenchingly bad, and not in a fun way, just 4 25-minute slices of pure anti-quality, the mathematical opposite of entertainment.

One of the funniest things about classic Doctor Who is that one of the all-time best episodes aired back-to-back with the absolute worst. This is a power move very few shows attempt? Star Trek, for example, had the basic decency to put “City on the Edge of Forever” and “Spock’s Brain” on opposite ends of the run, you know?

Back before the show came back, we spent a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that the show’s early-80s implosion wasn’t as bad as it really was, that there were some gems in there, that you could appreciate it on its own merits, but also maybe there were some Lessons that could be learned.

Which brings me to last week’s other pair of Doctor Who-related anniversaries, as last week also marked 19 years since the new show came back, and 20 since they announced that it woud.

Because after the show came back, and was just casually wildly successful, we could all relax. The good parts of the old show were still good, but we didn’t have to convince anyone else—or ourselves—that the bad parts were otherwise. Because the only lesson from that part of the old show was actually “don’t hire people bad at TV to run your TV show.”

With all these popping in March, it feels like there’s a spring metaphor in here somewhere, but that would be crass.

And finally…

From basically the first moment it was announced that Davies was coming back to run the show, everyone assumed his first call was going to be to Moffat, in a sort of “If I have to come back, so do you” way. Moffat’s response to this was to give a series of very carefully phrased denials, where he never actually said he wasn’t coming back, and the fact that he was coming back after all became one of those worst-kept secrets around. The word on the street was that he was writing episode 3 of the season, and then it leaked via a producer’s CV that he was probably also writing this year’s christmas episode.

And so they finally admitted that he was coming back a week or two ago, with this vaguely embarrassed air of “why did we cover this up, again?” Because he is, in fact, writing episode, titled “Boom”, and still strongly rumored to be writing the christmas show, rumored to be called “Joy to the World.”

Armed with that knowledge, I’d like to call your attention to this interview from the end of January, from well before anyone admitted he was coming back (seriously, it’s only a minute or two, go watch and I’ll meet you under the link):

Doctor Who's Steven Moffat on possible return: "It's fine without me!" | Radio Times

My favorite part is the little pause where he builds the sentence in his head and works both his episode titles into his non-denial denial that he’s coming back. This is the guy who wrote an entire season that locked into place around the Tardis being all four parts of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” and also built a joke in “Blink” around trolling a specific web forum; glad to see the old magic is still there.

This is gonna be really fun.

Lightsaber Hot-Take Follow-Up

Following up on last Monday’s Hot Takes on Lightsabers: Last week’s episode of The Bad Batch? That’s how you pivot a story around a lightsaber powering up. A perfect example of “oh snap, it just Got Real.”

(Also, are you watching Bad Batch? You should be watching Bad Batch)

Doctor Who Season 1/14/40

As long as I’m linking to trailers and embedding video, there’s a trailer out for the new season of Doctor Who:

Wait, did they do the Akira slide… with the Tardis?