TV Review | Doctor Who: “Fugitive of the Judoon” by Vinay Patel & Chris Chibnall

After Spyfall’s apparently aberrant shift back towards the show’s past (in both its returning antagonist and some of its stylistic trappings), the subsequent brace of episodes saw Doctor Who return to the format of its previous season, cultivating a sense of security that even the well-publicised return of everyone’s favourite trigger-happy space rhinos didn’t seem likely to threaten. My little girl and I were certainly excited by the prospect of her Doctor locking horns with the brutal and bureaucratic Judoon of “Smith and Jones” fame, but neither of us were even remotely prepared for the fist-pumping rollercoaster ride that would begin, of all places, in contemporary Gloucester. 

Penned in part by the writer of one of last year’s best stories, “Demons of the Punjab”, the only clue as to this episode’s surprising significance is to be found on its title card, which credits Chris Chibnall as Vinay Patel’s writing partner. Indeed, with the exception of the unusually moody and arc-heavy TARDIS scenes, which I had assumed would account for the showrunner’s co-writing credit, the opening of the episode plays very much as expected - the Judoon cordon off the sleepy cathedral city with an enforcement field as they hunt for their eponymous fugitive. The lively and often humorous plot steers viewers squarely towards secretive Bathrooms 4U employee Lee Clayton (Neil Stuke, Game On), while in the background a more likely suspect emerges in the skies above Earth – one who’s trying to scoop the Doctor up onto his ship, and not making a very good job of it. Despite some beautifully sharp dialogue, perfectly pitched performances even some absolutely sumptuous Glostonian visuals from director Nida Manzoor, “Fugitive of the Judoon” initially feels a lot like the routine rhino runaround implicitly promised by its billing.

And then an alien ship speaks with a familiar voice, and what would in any other episode have been the bombshell of the week is dropped as Captain Jack Harkness materialises in front of a baffled Graham. It’s the sensational shot in the arm that the show needed after last week’s relative calm, and John Barrowman milks the moment for all that it’s worth, aided and abetted by Bradley Walsh at his incredulous best. The former Torchwood chief might not look a day older than he did a decade ago (and why would he – he’s immortal), but the Doctor has certainly changed since they last met, and like Stephen Fry’s C before him, Jack inevitably mistakes the Doctor’s eldest companion for his old Time Lord friend. Jack’s ensuing reaction to news of the Doctor’s change of gender is wonderful in its cheeky exuberance – it’s as if all his Christmases have come at once when, in fact, it’s actually the viewers’ Christmases that have arrived en masse.

Jack, it seems, it just being a tease – a warning (“The Lone Cyberman - don’t give it what it wants. At all costs!”) and a promise rolled into one. Viewers barely have time to process their disappointment at having to wait for the inexorable meeting of Jack and the so-called “Thirteenth Doctor” when the episode’s titular fugitive is unmasked as Lee’s seemingly innocuous tour-guide wife Ruth (Jo Martin, Holby City). Having used a chameleon arch to make herself human, this suddenly woken – and, indeed, woke – woman introduces herself as the Doctor. And, with her flamboyant outfit and brassy attitude to match, it’s easy to believe her. 

Yet Whittaker’s Doctor has no memory of being her, and vice-versa. More confoundingly still, Martin’s Doctor hails from a time in which Gallifrey and its resident Time Lords are a power in the universe. This immediately suggests that, if she’s legitimate, this new Doctor must either pre-date William Hartnell’s “original” or exist between the Doctor’s purportedly second and third incarnations (as the Patrick Troughton to Jon Pertwee regeneration is the only one that we’ve never been shown) – unless, of course, the Time Lords are either miraculously returned from the dead (again...) or revealed not to be. Remember, the series has only shown us a smoking Citadel and a dead planet. Grim, but hardly concrete evidence of a race’s extermination. However, while the how might be baffling, the fact of the matter seems clear - “Fugitive of the Judoon” goes out of its way to emphasise that Martin’s Doctor is the real deal, as opposed to some clone or parallel-universe iteration. Her brain chemistry matches the Doctor’s exactly. Her identity is verified through Time Lord mind-to-mind contact. Martin is even billed as the Doctor on the programme’s closing credits. The truth of her identity is chiselled in stone.

Above: “Something was taken, and something was lost.” David Morrisey was not the next Doctor

But I’ve been burned before. When the news of David Tennant’s departure was quickly followed by a Christmas special entitled “The Next Doctor”, fandom was alight with speculation of precisely the sort that is currently lighting up every corner of the Internet. Back then, despite sharing many an adventure with earlier incarnations, a reigning Doctor had never encountered a future self (on television, at least), and so the idea that the show would be bold enough – and prepared enough – to dip into its own future was incredibly tantalising. Unfortunately, David Morrissey’s Doctor proved not to be an illicit glimpse of a future life but a parody of a past one, and whilst Martin’s performance here is, comparatively, a study in seriousness, it is typified by a number of troubling traits that don’t sit well the Doctor’s typical characterisation.

Admittedly, most of the Doctors have been just as ruthless as Martin’s is – Sylvester McCoy’s was a destroyer of worlds, while John Hurt’s warrior incarnation was prepared to commit double genocide in service of a greater good. Even the post-Time War, pre-Jodie Doctors were brutal to their enemies. But, crucially, they all drew the line at using firearms to kill. There is something very wrong about the image of the Doctor looking down the barrel of a gun at a foe with malicious intent, and Patel and Chibnall really play upon this unease as the incumbent Doctor struggles to reconcile her own self-image with this evident embodiment of her past or future.

Above: Faces of the mid-1970s Doctor Who production team, or evidence of past lives...?

The creation of Martin’s Doctor is tantalising move, however you look at it, and one that successfully revivifies the Who in Doctor Who for the first time since the show’s anniversary year. The longer the programme has run, the more difficult it has been for its writers to sustain the mystery of the Doctor. Over the years, different production teams broached the issue in different ways. The intrigue surrounding the character was never greater than when Steven Moffat’s need to fill Christopher Eccleston’s shoes in the fiftieth anniversary special forced him to create Hurt’s forgotten incarnation who’d renounced his name to fight in the Last Great Time War. Ultimately though, the “War Doctor” was not only explained but fully explored – the fleeting sense of mystery conjured by the closing moments of “The Name of the Doctor” lost in service to the story.

Above: Not in the name of the Doctor... John Hurt as (another of...?) the Time Lord’s forgotten incarnation(s?)

Some of the more successful attempts to recapture the Doctor’s initial magic were more subtle. The procession of pre-first Doctor faces drawn from the fourth Doctor’s mind in The Brain of Morbius was the programme’s first reference to potential incarnations preceding William Harnell’s, but not its last. In the late 1980s, John Nathan-Turner and Andrew Cartmel took this intriguing idea and elevated it - Sylvester McCoy’s many littered asides in serials like Remembrance of the Daleks and Silver Nemesis all hinted a character who was “far more than just another Time Lord.” Whether the Doctor’s life prior to his supposed first incarnation would ever have been explored on screen or not, we don’t know, but the Virgin range of New Adventures novels that picked up where the original series left off saw it through to its conclusion, delving into the fascinating intricacies of Gallifrey’s Intuitive Revelation and the ancient ruling triumvirate that created Time Lord society: Rassilon, Omega and another whose name history forgets.

Above: The Doctor, the Doctor and the... Other?

As we know from The Three Doctors, Omega’s time travel experiments would eventually consign him to a universe of anti-matter, while Rassilon would become such a tyrant that the Time Lords rebelled against his cruelty - including this “Other”, who cast himself into one of Rassilon’s earliest progenerative chambers to be reborn long after the tyrant had fallen from power - perhaps reborn as the first Doctor. I don’t think anyone expects Martin’s Doctor to be this Other, but the notion ably demonstrates the sort of freedom the writers have to work with when it comes to the Doctor. Ghost of the past, vision of the future or even sideways on and upside-down, Martin’s Doctor could be anything they need her to be.

Personally, I would be thrilled if Martin’s Doctor turned out to be the original Doctor. Such a move fits reasonably well with how she is portrayed in “Fugitive of the Judoon” – Hartnell’s Doctor might have eventually become quite noble, but at the outset he was an irascible kidnapper who was quite prepared to cave in a caveman’s head with a rock if it saved his own skin. There is even enough wiggle room with the Doctor’s initial run of regenerations for this idea to work as, in his hurry to address the restrictive “Time Lords only have thirteen lives” rule arbitrarily imposed by Robert Holmes in The Deadly Assassin before leaving the show, Moffat counted the Doctor’s aborted regeneration in “The Stolen Earth” as one of his allotted twelve. I had no issue with him doing so – it makes perfect sense as it saved the Doctor from that Dalek’s blast as effectively as a new body would have – but, equally, I’d have no issue accepting otherwise if it gave us an exciting new Doctor to explore.

The rub comes in the shape of the TARDIS’s shape: the Doctor’s ship’s chameleon circuit doesn’t malfunction until the end of the series’ first episode, which would of course be in this new Doctor’s personal future if she were somehow a pre-Hartnell Doctor. However, I think Chibnall is likely to worry less about continuity points like this than he is what he predecessor got up to. Surely a more pressing concern is that a forgotten Doctor has not only been done before, but recently and superlatively? There’s not an actor alive today who could do as fine as job as John Hurt did. As such, I think this new / old / new old Doctor is most likely to be the third Doctor - particularly with this episode’s focus on her “job”, which is of course the focus of the second Doctor’s post-War Games adventures in the existing canon.

Above: The earner of little privileges. Following his trial at the end of The War Games, the second Doctor’s sentence was suspended while he carried out top-secret missions for Gallifrey’s Celestial Intervention Agency. Who’s to say that he wasn’t mortally wounded on one of these missions, triggering his regeneration into Jo Martin’s Doctor?

Martin’s Doctor hailing from the programme’s relative future would be a much safer but just as stimulating ploy, albeit a ploy much more difficult to pull off - the series would be set on a fixed course which, unless Chibnall and company are über-prepared, would be a logistical nightmare, not to mention potentially very limiting. Moffat didn’t let this stop him throwing Peter Capaldi’s incarnation into “The Day of the Doctor”, of course, though the circumstances there were very different as Matt Smith’s reign was all but over and work was already well underway on Capaldi’s first season. Bringing in a new Doctor now, at least a season and a half early (when going by recent lead’s tenures), would be completely unprecedented – and utterly thrilling.

For all its excitement and potentially wide-ranging repercussions, though, “Fugitive of the Judoon” has one rather glaring little weakness, and it’s one that’s becoming something of a worrying trend. We’re now at the season’s half-way point, and only Spyfall has catered for all three companions well. When an episode focuses heavily on the Doctor, as the last couple have, it’s at the expense of her three companions. This episode is the season’s worst example so far as it effectively treats them as one amalgam entity as opposed to three individuals – they’re growing more curious about the Doctor together. They’re getting annoyed with the Doctor together. Sure, Yas has the odd moment in which she can utilise her police background in this episode, just as Graham’s flexed his working man’s wings last week, but there is nothing of substance for them to run with. Sadly, there just isn’t enough screen time for each character to have a different reaction to this season’s drip-fed revelations, which is incredibly frustrating given how well Chibnall’s first season built up each one of them.

This time last week, I was writing about an episode that I felt destined for obscurity. “Fugitive of the Judoon”, however, is its opposite in almost every meaningful way. It’s either the series’ most significant episode since “The Name of the Doctor”, or its greatest hoax since “The Next Doctor”, but either way it is one that we’re going to be talking about for a long, long time.

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 their transmission on BBC 1. A Blu-ray steelbook is also available to pre-order from Amazon for £49.99.