TV Review | Doctor Who: Spyfall by Chris Chibnall

Topping last year’s New Year’s Day special, “Resolution”, was a tall order, yet Chris Chibnall’s season-opening Spyfall has somehow managed it. The preceding run of stories had been a watershed for the programme, changing almost everything that had been a staple of it since Russell T Davies’ 2005 reboot and, in some aspects, long before. But despite tearing up the rulebook, Jodie Whittaker’s first year in the TARDIS boasted some of the programme’s greatest-ever episodes. Now, having clearly established the show’s new and contemporary aesthetic, Chibnall seems to be turning to the past to deliver something that’s substantially more fan-friendly, yet still immediately accessible to new and casual viewers. If this opening two-part adventure is anything to go by, Chibnall might just have perfected his recipe.

Although we still must endure an ill-fitting picture format, the series has reinstated a few things that I really missed last season, beginning with a pre-title sequence. Structurally, Doctor Who stories generally benefit from a teaser, and particularly with stand-alone episodes it also gives the series an opportunity to mimic that all-important cliffhanger feeling. Of course, being the first two-part story since 2017, Spyfall didn’t have to worry too much about that – its first episode’s thrilling climax more than makes up for lost time with its irresistible fusion of double-threat jeopardy and shocking revelation. Perhaps most significantly though, Spyfall marks a return to the old “Bad Wolf” style of storytelling that has riveted hardcore viewers for nearly fifteen years now. This one might be a two-parter in name, but it feels like just the start of a story that’s much bigger.

With its brazen 007 gimmick and both Stephen Fry and Lenny Henry on its well-publicised cast list, Spyfall’s opening instalment certainly has the requisite festive-special feel despite technically being a season premiere. Chibnall takes great delight in milking and then subverting just about every spy-film staple out there, without ever once tarnishing the Who-ishness of the whole affair. M becomes C and Q becomes O in a loving emulation of Bond that tips over into cryptic, phonic clues which leave viewers thinking that their own codenames should be R once the pennies have dropped. Graham doesn’t slaughter Barton’s heavies with his laser shoes, he scares them off; the Doctor doesn’t seduce, she accuses. It all feels so effortlessly exhilarating and hilarious that I can’t believe the series hasn’t properly paid homage to the genre before.

Both Fry and Henry justify their hype in their performances, despite the former’s being much shorter than most of us would have liked. Fry’s C is immensely endearing in an awful-old-duffer sort of way, particularly as his preconceptions about the Doctor are challenged when he meets her in the flesh (something that I find especially amusing when you consider that his preconceptions are borne of fact). Henry, meanwhile, really surprised me with his portrayal of the cold and calculating Daniel Barton. I’ve never seen him play anyone so devoid of amiability, yet he does so with a conviction that’s terrifying. What’s even more frightening though is the power that Barton wields – the power that just about every citizen of Earth has casually ceded to him though their reliance on VOR technology. Chibnall has a real knack for tapping into the zeitgeist and exploiting contemporary issues. The Kasaavins might make for suitably chilling ciphers, but what’s really scary about Spyfall is its small print.

Yet for a two-part tale, Spyfall doesn’t hang together especially well. It’s far from tightly plotted, with even its basic premise feeling forced – surely there are easier ways to get the Doctor’s attention than to disappear a load of spies? The longer running time doesn’t automatically lead to a more satisfying resolution of the story, either – the Doctor’s figurine virus smacks of narrative convenience; it’s scarcely much better than “anti-plastic”. However, the longer story does at least leave more room for the regulars to shine – rather than Spyfall being just a Yas story or a Graham story, every member of the gang is given their own substantial thread of the narrative and there are more than enough hero moments to go around. Yas’s realisation of her own mortality is beautifully written and played, as are the subtle seeds sown of her burgeoning feelings for Ryan. More fascinating still is the way Graham’s interest in the Doctor’s past is piqued by O, and how this curiosity spreads to the rest of the gang before being addressed by the Doc herself in a heartbreaking fashion evocative of “Gridlock”.

It’s interesting that Chibnall has honoured the classic series’ proclivity for overarching serial names here rather than titling each of his episodes individually, as has been the norm for the last fifteen years. This stands out especially as Spyfall is clearly a tale of two halves – each episode has its own clear setting and tone; even its own director. Jamie Magnus Stone’s year-opening extravaganza is full of sound and fury, evoking Bond films in deed as well as in spirit, whereas by the second part, the espionage gimmick is largely redundant as the Doctor finds herself lost in time with Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan, stalked by her adversary, “while” (and I use the word loosely, given the years between them) her gang are fugitives in the future. Perhaps Chibnall was just trying to keep things simple given the story’s composite theatrical release Stateside; more likely, though, it’s just the latest in a line of bold artistic choices made by a man determined to put his own stamp on the show. 

Of course, Spyfall’s main talking point centres on perhaps two of the boldest choices that Chibnall has made since casting Jodie Whittaker as the first female Doctor: bringing back the Master and killing off the Time Lords. Both moves left me dumbstruck – not because of their in-world improbability, but because I just didn’t think Chibnall ever would. The main thing to stand out about his first season as showrunner was its sense of separation; save for a brief dalliance with Dalek, it felt like a new show entirely. Spyfall, in contrast, grasps the programme’s heritage with both hands.

Sacha Dhawan’s Master is the perfect foil for Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor, just as Michelle Gomez’s Missy was tailor-made for Peter Capaldi’s. But rather than soften and ultimately break the character through redemption, as Steven Moffat did, Chibnall takes the Master back to a close approximation of his default settings. The resultant carnage is fresh and electrifying – recent converts probably haven’t ever seen the Master’s trademark tissue compression eliminator, which remains as chilling a weapon today as it was in 1971’s Terror of the Autons, while those raised on the Moffat era will be flawed by the sheer hate that Dhawan exudes. All this Master is missing is a flair for hypnosis; otherwise, he’s practically Delgado’s heir.

Indeed, with roles like Davos in Marvel’s Iron Fist and Manish Prasad in Line of Duty under his belt, Dhawan’s affable turn as Waris Hussein in Mark Gatiss’s 2013 docu-drama An Adventure in Space and Time is starting to look like the exception to the rule. Dhawan brings a legitimate sense of menace to the part that we haven’t seen since “The Magician’s Apprentice”, if not The End of Time. The character’s malevolence mounts with every tiny little figurine beautifully framed by second-part director Lee Haven Jones, culminating in the triumphant disclosure that he wiped out his own people – a reveal that leaves viewers in no doubt that, in this incarnation, the Master is as great a threat as ever he was. His anguished attempts to justify his actions to the Doctor only serve to highlight the extent of his dangerousness – Dhawan takes the eloquence of Roger Delgado, the madness of John Simm and just a little of the remorse of Michelle Gomez to forge a Master fit for the 2020s.

“One thing I should tell you in the seconds before you die. Everything that you think you know is a lie.”

 

At this point I’m less impressed with the Time Lords’ evident eradication – their constant ruin and resurrections are becoming as much of an old trope as the Master’s frequent returns from absolute, unambiguous and irreversible death. The first time that they perished, in the novel The Ancestor Cell, it had real weight. The second time it was even more effective as it was on TV, and thus “counted”, but mainly because Russell T Davies did such a captivating job of grounding his Doctors in guilt and regret. But when Steven Moffat brought Gallifrey back in “The Day of the Doctor”, undermining what would otherwise have been the show’s finest hour, not to mention the entire Davies era, the bubble burst. “Hell Bent” only poured fuel on the fire – Moffat brought them back just for that? I’ll reserve judgement on this latest twist in the tortuous Time Lord tragedy until the arc has played out fully, but for now I’ll admit to some cautious intrigue as to the identity of the “Timeless Child” of which the Master spoke and this lie upon which Gallifreyan history was apparently based.

 

Coming so hot on the heels of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, it’s tempting to look for parallels about backtracking and bowing to fan pressure, but the truth is that neither Davies nor Moffat rushed to embrace the show’s long legacy until they had established their own versions of the show, and the return of the Master (and the Gallifreyan trappings that go hand-in-hand with him) are more in development of the new Doctor’s character than they are callbacks to days long gone. For all its bombast and spectacle, at its twin hearts Spyfall is not fan service, but Doctor service, and I for one can’t wait to see where this new arc takes her.

Doctor Who airs on Sunday evenings on BBC 1 and is available to stream for the foreseeable future on BBC iPlayer. A season pass comprising all ten episodes of the season in 1080p HD and bonus material is also available from iTunes for £20.99, with episodes typically becoming available the day after transmission on BBC1. A Blu-ray steelbook is also available to pre-order from Amazon for £49.99.