Since it returned to our screens in 2005, each season of
Doctor Who has ended with a bang. Their often multi-part finales would tie up all the year’s narrative threads, and sometimes more besides, while at the same time finally pitting the Doctor against a big bad whose footprints had covered the preceding eleven or twelve episodes. Each year seemed determined to outdo the last - Daleks?
Pah! Daleks vs Cybermen! Daleks vs Cybermen?
That’s nowt! Let’s see the Master ruling the world! How’s about a fully-fledged Dalek conquest of present-day Earth with every single modern-era companion on hand and an
ersatz regeneration chucked in to captivate the media? Or the return of the Time Lords to the universe? Things had become so thrillingly and preposterously untoppable by the time that Steven Moffat took over as showrunner, he had to reboot the whole damned Whoniverse to be able to start the cycle up again, only this time with even longer-running and more elaborate arcs. Chris Chibnall, however, seems intent on going his own way. But then, that’s hardly surprising from Mr Sunday Night.
Chibnall’s approach is as commendable as it is daring. Before the season began, he promised ten episodes free from the encumbrances of pre-existing monsters and villains, and that’s exactly what he delivered. Instantly accessible wherever you jump on board, Chibnall’s
Doctor Who is structured as much like the classic series as it is the new (we really need a decent retronym here; we can’t keep saying “new series” more than thirteen years post-“Rose”). To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter which order you watch these ten episodes in, provided that you start with the first two and end with the last two. It’s a timely and welcome reprieve after ten seasons of bad wolves, impossible girls and diminishing returns.
The price paid for such liberty, though, is the lack of a climactic feel to this closing episode - Chibnall’s model is underwhelming by design. Whilst outwardly “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” ticks many of the necessary boxes for a season-ending script, it does so only barely, even concluding with a wrap-up speech from the Doctor that evokes the Sylvester McCoy voiceover dubbed onto the end of
Survival in an attempt to engender the closure that the preceding drama hadn’t. Whilst the stakes are high enough for a season finale here, the threat to Earth feels remote and nebulous. We have guest stars the calibre of Mark Addy and Phyllis Logan, but despite expectedly marvellous performances from them, there is little that is noteworthy about Addy’s gruff space captain, and Logan’s Ux is merely a new spin on rather a tired old sci-fi trope.
Most disappointing of all though is the season’s bookending villain, Tzim-Sha (“Tim Shaw” to you and me), the
Hirogen Stenza hunter. Chibnall clearly flourishes telling stories about people, not monsters, and so naturally the new Doctor’s first big bad had to be an individual rather than a group or even an entire species. The trouble is that Tzim-Sha is by no means as well-drawn or alluring as any member of Team: TARDIS. As a monster of the week, he’s perfectly adequate, comfortable in the company of Sycorax and Atraxi, but as the chief antagonist for Jodie Whittaker’s dazzling Doctor, he’s a washout. Even (much) older and sporting a Darth Vader-like iron lung (at least when it suits the drama), embittered old Tim’s only real ‘virtue’ is his history with Graham, which allows Bradley Walsh to deliver one final, emotional performance to complete his character’s poignant and rousing arc.
It’s here that “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” delivers.
Perhaps more successfully than any other in the history of the show, even the unforgettable 1963/64 run that kick-started it all, this season has introduced us to a TARDIS full of folk that it’s difficult not to care deeply about. The Doctor’s three friends are all down-to-Earth, relatable sorts, yet each is distinct with his or her own clear story arcs – arcs that “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” concludes rather beautifully. For the bereaved boys, events come full circle, forcing Graham down a path that Ryan won’t follow him down. Their thread of plot feels tense, volatile and thoroughly rewarding, delivering the sort of punchline that only
Doctor Who really can. It’s just as delightful to see Mandip Gill's PC Khan complete her transformation from Judy Hopps to poised interstellar adventurer, particularly as her development has largely mirrored the new Doctor’s. The self-assurance that seems to have eluded the titular Time Lord’s first female incarnation until very recently is now manifest; it’s as if, like Yaz, she’s finally learned to trust in herself and her judgements. Or maybe it’s just that I have, and I’m just projecting. Either way, it works magnificently for me.
That being said, Thirteen still lacks the gravitas of most of the male Doctors, particularly Sylvester McCoy and those that we’ve been blessed with since 2005. If we haven't seen it by now, I doubt that we’re going to - she is who she is. This isn’t automatically a bad thing; just another distinction to set her apart from her predecessors and further the reinvigoration of the series. Quite ironically, given his comments about the Doctor’s sex change, Whittaker’s Doctor seems to be most similar in nature to Peter Davison’s fifth Doctor, who survived his misadventures on “feckless charm” and wit as opposed to the fire and steel of later iterations.
Even so, I was hoping, even sort of
expecting, that by this point I would have fully accepted the notion of the sex-changing Time Lord, but the reality is that my once-trenchant views have simply become... less so. The only real difference between my opinions today and those I held three months ago is that now, being quite taken with Thirteen, I want to like the idea. (Quite literally) nine times out of ten, the Doctor’s change of gender hasn’t affected my enjoyment of the programme at all; Whittaker’s been so very extraordinary that, while watching, my mind has seldom had the chance to wander onto the issue. The sting only comes when I revisit an earlier Doctor, as I’m currently doing with my David Tennant-mad eldest daughter, and the analytical fanboy in me can’t reconcile his long-held belief that the Doctor has always been the same man with the reality that ‘a Doctor Who’ can be whatever the BBC decide they need it to be depending on the politics of the moment. Time Lords, especially the Doctor, changing their sex just doesn’t concur with everything that I’d always understood about them. Yes, the Doctor was never a Hollywood dick-swinging character, but as my current revisitations are reminding me, he loved Rose. He got himself a wife. Once upon a time he even had a family. As a bloke, you could put yourself in his Converse. Now, you have to try bloody hard to stop yourself falling in love with your brilliant idol suddenly rendered woman. All I can do is try not to ruminate on it, because when I’m watching the show, I’m enjoying it so much that the issue scarcely enters my head. And, ultimately, that’s the only time that it would ever matter.
“It doesn’t fit my rule...”
And so
Doctor Who’s finest season since Matt Smith’s first, if not David Tennant’s last, ends on an emotionally rewarding but somewhat subdued note, with an episode that, for better or worse, encapsulates all of the season’s pros and cons. This season’s few low points may have been excruciating, but most of its misses have been near ones, and audacious ones at that, and its high points stand up against even the most respected stories in the show’s fifty-five-year canon. “
Rosa”, “
Demons of the Punjab” and “
Kerblam!” could hold their own against any story that you could pluck from the golden eras of Russell T Davies; Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks; even the unassailable Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes. As the new Doctor might say, I really like it.
Sadly the series’ traditional Christmas special will now follow Saturday nights, pre-title sequences and 230,400 pixels into the abyss. Particularly with no new
Star Wars movie to fall back on, it’ll be lonely this Christmas, though with a title like “Resolution”, there is every chance that the series’ first New Year’s Day special since
The End of Time might just provide us with the fireworks that “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” was missing...
Doctor Who
will return to BBC One for a one-off special on 1st January 2019. This episode is available to stream or download on BBC iPlayer in the UK, where the preceding 155 episodes are also currently available. A series pass is available from iTunes for £23.99.
