The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

And a big hand for… that title. For a series that has seemingly done its best to be as inoffensive and inclusive as possible, there’s a title that’s destined to have a few million switch off before we even get to the first shot. And what is it with the absence of pre-titles sequences this year? I love the purple titles but I miss the howl of the music and the promise of things to come which has been characteristic of the show since 2005 and replaced the once-traditional cliff-hanger. Here as well, we’ve ironically got the opportunity for a really thrilling pre-titles sequence. The opening scenes of the Ux beginning to build a reality with their minds, only to be interrupted by the arrival of Blue Tooth is almost the stuff of legend. The effects and the performances feel mythic, large and ancient. In fact that’s something this series has done particularly well: the race of The Ghost Monument, the Morax of The Witchfinders and even last week’s universe-as-a-frog all seemed steeped in mythology and heritage.

As a finale though, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos can only be deemed underwhelming. It is solid enough but by far the least interesting of all the series finales since the show returned and the most derivative. The Big Bad Villain from the opening episode returns, as do a few other faces from the series (if the Sniper Bots can be said to have faces) and the whole show feels as if it’s been leading here. The only trouble is here isn’t a very interesting place: it’s predictable and like much of this series, including the opening episode, fairly drab. The cinematography is extraordinary, as it has been throughout this year, but essentially you can’t make a grey quarry seem anything other than what it is. That green sky in the trailers might have helped but this finale wants to feel doomy and atmospheric. It does and as an exercise in atmosphere, it certainly works. But Doctor Who needs more fire than that, more shazam! This episode, like several others from Chris Chibnall, is content to stew in its dark lighting for a bit while the minutes tick languorously away.

That said, Battle is not without merit. Mark Addy is reliably excellent as the scared, amnesiac Paltraki, though why he has to be amnesiac when his memory returns moments after the TARDIS fam work out what’s going on is an odd structural decision and he later disappears from the narrative altogether, ending proceedings as a lift home for some extras. Samuel Oatley is also worthy of note, giving the finest performance across the fifty minutes. He is a loathsome villain, voiced in sonorous, deep snarls and his appearance perhaps even more frightening than the last time we met the now self-appointed God. 

In the Stenza, Chibnall has created a truly evil adversary for the Doctor, one worthy of her mettle and their relationship with Ryan and Graham makes their return for the season finale a sensible choice. The real meat of the tale is not in the Pirate Planet homage of shrunken planets inside plastic cabinets, or the reality bending Ux; it’s in Graham’s admission that he wants revenge on the creature that killed his wife. What a shame that Bradley Walsh can’t quite meet the requirements of the script. “If that is the creature from Sheffield, I will kill it if I can,” he says pleasantly, the steely resolve of such a statement missing from behind his eyes. Had Walsh truly managed to sell the rage, the vengefulness of this grieving hero, the finale would have been markedly stronger. We might have believed he’d have the terrifying strength to murder. As it happens, he predictably won’t kill Tim Shaw and we were never in any doubt that he wouldn’t. What this finale really needed was for him to shoot Blue Tooth in the face and give us something properly shocking, properly dramatic. The fist-pump my wife predicted all those weeks ago is not the stuff of which show-downs are made.

Equally, there’s no real sense of agonising when it comes to the decision to either kill the two Ux or save the Earth - and it should be massive. Jodie Whittaker actually skips away from the camera in an effort to show her Doctor “thinking” and then uses the TARDIS in a stated throwback to (bizarrely) Boom Town and Journey’s End!  Now the series is over, it’s perhaps a fairer time to analyse what she’s given us as the Doctor. The same sorts of decisions have been made throughout the ten episodes. There are moments of strength but by and large, it really does pain me to say it (I inwardly wince typing this), she’s just not very good. This week, she has a scene with Andinio in which she asks why the female Ux allowed the hostage to be killed. She has a steel in her eyes and as the Doctor, she’s almost there. Elsewhere though, she spectacularly fails to make the technobabble work and that last speech is about as inspiring as a wet blanket. As a note to end the series in, it’s glaringly flat. She quite often has a line with three or four very distinct thoughts delivered in exactly the same way. The most obvious example that comes to mind is during the opening scenes of Demons of the Punjab when Yaz asks her, “You OK?” Whittaker replies, “Think so. Probably. Don’t know,” in a staccato monotone meaning none of those thoughts are transmitted and there’s absolutely no differentiation between the three clearly different thoughts. Whittaker is all impulse but without an inherent, important understanding of text. Resultantly, her Doctor simply doesn’t get off the ground. Without an understanding of the source material, she can only deliver a performance of a certain degree. Perhaps she should have watched some of her great, great predecessors to at least gauge how to make a word as sophisticated as “technology” sound believable. 

The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos does have a finality about it. Segun Akinola shines throughout, building an oppressive, funereal tone across the episode. The entire planet Earth is under threat and a finale is just the sort of place for God-like beings and ancient vengeance. But it lacks resonance. There are incredible explosions (a terrific shot of Yaz running through the fires) but there’s no one to care for. We’re never in fear that the bomb Graham is set to ignite will remotely hurt him. Compare this to The Parting of the Ways where the deaths of those minor characters are economically yet tangibly, actually felt. “You lied to me! The bullets don’t work!” one victim of the Daleks cries and we feel for her as she dies in that instant. Here, we’ve got five planets we’ve never heard of and a pair of Gods to worry about it. Paltraki’s absence of memory is harmful to the plot as we don’t know enough about him to care about his ultimate fate. All the things that mean Battle should work are present and correct, but there’s no context for them, no energy or personality to make them a success. It’s like the recipe has been followed but the knack hasn’t been found.

Overall, this series has been an unusual one. There have been rich, wholesome story premises: Witch Trials, Rosa Parks, The Indian Partition, Amazon in Space and Bloody Giant Spiders. It should have been a spectacular success. However, the episodes haven’t always tremendously excited and there is no real stand-out 10/10 classic for me this year. The standard of production, from design to lighting to cinematography and costume has been exemplary – the best-looking show on British television in fact. But the scripting has been largely workmanlike, hampered by an uncharismatic leading lady and disproportionate sequences of lethargy. Mandip Gill’s Yaz has been criminally underdeveloped. In fact, the show may have worked even better were she not there, the focus being solely on the family unit that was Graham, Grace and Ryan? Series 11 has seemed almost like a stencil has been employed to generate “typical” Doctor Who plots, so traditional and straightforward have they seemed. They’ve been missing a sense of true peril and jeopardy though, always taking the easiest scripting routes and plot solutions. It may make for an accessible series, one which invites newcomers and makes it easy to dip in and out of, but there’s been a lack of passion, a lack of purpose and invention. There have been no surprises despite the refusal to market an episode by giving us even a hint of something to talk about in the trailers. It’s been consistent in the way it’s been made but also in the way it’s been written. It looks glorious but has never really shone. 

For this episode though, which was full of atmosphere and dread, boasted a terrific central villain, Mark Addy being brilliant and some mythic imagery despite lacking the gut-punch of a traditional finale, on its own terms, I’d give it a 7/10. The series on the whole, less than the sum of its parts, with stand-out episodes in Arachnids in the UK, Demons of the Punjab, The Tsuranga Conundrum (Oh yes!) and The Witchfinders, but overall simplistic and lacking in sparkling vim, gains an unimpressive 6/10. 

JH