Fugitive of the Judoon

BEWARE: SPOILERS APLENTY!

Now here’s an episode that defies analysis. There’s no rulebook for this sort of madness and after a thrilling first watch, I’m in no way sure whether I liked it or not. My head’s certainly buzzing with fizzing ideas and the realisation that after a year of no-returns, all bets are now off: I’m sure there are more surprises to come. Chris Chibnall’s approach to marketing last year was to lie low, one of spoiler avoidance. The problem was he didn’t have any spoilers up his sleeve and the one he did (the Dalek) he ultimately gave away in the trailer. Last night, the one person I never ever expected to return did so in a joyous chutzpah performance and I was punching the air. Then, there came his warning and a series of revelations so unexpected and out of leftfield as to leave me wondering, “Did I really just watch that or was it a dream?”

There are lots of things happening here that the average punter must think Doctor Who does all the time. Returning rhino-headed, intergalactic policemen, the Judoon, speak their own language for long stretches at the beginning of the episode from their spaceship and, like scenes of the Daleks talking with one another in the 60s, they quickly become boring. Then, the moronic things parade around Gloucester looking faintly ridiculous whilst, on an uncharacteristically off-day, Segun Akinola provides music telling us to be very scared. It represents a tonal ambiguity that feels uncertain rather than confident and it’s easy to see how your average “I don’t do sci-fi” man-in-the-street could be turned off by it. Are we supposed to take this seriously or not, because the show’s makers don’t seem to know?

It’s difficult to carry on a review without talking about Jo Martin’s Ruth. Please do stop reading if you haven’t seen the episode yet. Strangely, Chris Chibnall and Vinay Patel choose to use elements from thirteen-year-old story Human Nature (without so much as an explanation for the casual viewer) to introduce this new take on our heroine. For us fans, it’s riveting but I do wonder how perplexing it would be for newcomers to the show. My wife certainly hadn’t committed “Chameleon Arch” to memory. The imagery is splendid though: a lonely lighthouse, a buried TARDIS ‘neath an unmarked gravestone. It has the visual identity of a classic. As the mystery unravels, we are dragged along with it, the show sinking its claws into our fannish bewilderment in its strangeness. Sadly, like Jodie Whittaker throughout much of this episode, Jo Martin does not convince as the Doctor. Lumbered with a comic-book costume (For a minute, I thought she was yet another Master, sporting similarly purple Dhawan-Tweed) and a gun too big to be comfortably held, she looks cumbersome and awkward. Her acting style, like Whittaker’s is on-the-nose and explanatory. Note in her first scenes as Ruth how desperately she tells us that this is a Friendly Normal Person Who You Can Relate To. Her other half, the enigmatic, subtle Neil Stuke out-acts everyone he appears on screen with and like Goran Visnjic last week, upstages the regulars and highlights their limitations. Elsewhere, Tosin Cole’s almost invisible line readings seem even more vacant opposite the giddy, breezy campery of John Barrowman. Casting these major players – Jodie, Jo, Tosin, even Bradders, has not been Chris Chibnall or Andy Prior’s crowning achievement. The scenes in the Judoon ship with the two leading ladies could have been thrilling. Instead, we’re in am-dram country from a performative and even a costuming perspective. In her first scene, Jodie can’t make a line as comic as “Platoon of Judoon near the moon” sound funny.

Cannily, the writers know we won’t be predisposed to liking this Johnny-Come-Lately-Doctor so they make her deliberately different and unDoctorly. She fools Gat into killing herself, violently removes a Judoon horn and behaves in a fashion unbecoming of the Time Lord we know and love. She’s a gun-toting badass, not the gentle, wondering wanderer. It makes us feel that perhaps, just perhaps, Chibnall isn’t going to tear up every page of the rulebook. This must be a parallel Doctor? Coupled with a parallel Master? I don’t mind re-writing the show’s history at all, as long as it’s done with conviction, drama, laughs and energy. But knowing that Chibnall usually errs on the side of caution, I’m not sure if he doesn’t treasure that rulebook a little more dearly than I do?

Whatever the answers turn out to be, I’m rather more excited by Captain Jack’s warning of the “lone Cyberman” than I am by the Gallifrey mythology. “Don’t give it what it wants.” You just know the Doctor is about to be put in an impossible situation and I can’t wait to find out what it is. The show feels open again with a clear trajectory but full of mystery. There are multiple threads now hanging: the Ruth Doctor, the Master, Daniel Barton, the other universe, the Timeless Child. We must be heading for a showdown of a finale. If Series 11 stagnated after five episodes, Series 12 can’t stop running. As tonally askew, wild, chaotic and impenetrable as Fugitive of the Judoon was, with the bravura return of Captain Jack (getting all the best lines of course and livening up the screen enormously), the revelation of a new Doctor and several callbacks to Russell T Davies’s time on the series, there’s no question about it: Doctor Who is not what it was and there’s no guessing what it is about to become.

6/10

JH

Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror

Nina Metivier’s first Doctor Who script proves to be a distillation of all that is terrific about the programme. She brings her historical characters to life with economy and heart, allowing us to feel for both Tesla and Edison, avoiding the easy route of making Edison the villain of the piece; her monsters have a simple, clearly-defined plan and there’s space for a rollicking chase sequence, perhaps the most exciting and well-shot of the series since Chris Chibnall took over as showrunner. This is an extremely accomplished episode of Doctor Who and as solid an example of the show as one is likely to find. If a stranger to the programme were to ask what the whole thing was about, you’d do worse than to point them in the direction of this exciting adventure.

Director Nida Manzoor is also a newcomer to the Doctor’s world, but judging by her display here, you’d be hard pressed to tell. Like Metivier, her first voyage into the time vortex establishes her as a more than worthy TARDIS pilot. There is an assuredness on display here. From that first slow pan down from Niagara Falls to the kinetic train sequence, and the lovely reveal of the TARDIS crew in situ, the episode feels confident, measured and well-paced. Were the next episode written by Metivier and directed by Manzoor (one out of two ain’t bad!), I wouldn’t be worried about quality for a minute, such is their obviously refined talent.

Manzoor also shoots the Queen of the Skithra carefully, usually in full, angry close-up, possibly to disguise the shortcomings of a costume which doesn’t quite chime with the fellow CG scorpions. Anjli Mohindra puts in a creepy performance and sells the psychotic nature of the sting-tailed foes, but she’s lumbered, like Sarah Parish before her, with a costume which isn’t quite fit for purpose. Whereas Parish was clearly immobile but definitely a spider, here Mohindra is clearly mobile but definitely not a scorpion, her tail only appearing in a couple of shots as a CG addition. It’s telling that we never see her in a long shot and the only scene in the episode that doesn’t completely work is the first one on the ship: there’s a lot of dialogue here but because of the shot limitations, it feels cumbersome and long-winded. When we get back down to Earth, things quickly pick up again as Manzoor broadens the scale of her storytelling.

Star of the show, perhaps unexpectedly, is Goran Visnjic, as the titular Tesla. He brings a real edge of class to proceedings and oozes actorly charisma. His turn as Tesla is affectionate, subtle and all the more powerful for that. He’s not doing the mad scientist bit; he’s inhabiting this very real man. Robert Glenister too, puts in a fine performance as Edison. He is almost unrecognisable as the Salateen of yesteryear and in the end both he and Metivier expose a little of his otherwise unseen charm. Sadly, after what I felt was a real improvement this year, Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor returns to a more leaden form of delivery, her hands in the last scene with Yaz doing more than her voice. Watching the two leads in scenes together (especially that penultimate one) exposes sharply the quiet talent of Mandip Gill, again excellent, and the overreaching, try-hard measure of Whittaker. She has more rabble-rousing speeches and history lessons to deliver this week and sadly, like the wet wedding speech in Demons of the Punjab, she just hasn’t got the patter or the power to make them sing.

Speaking of Demons, this is the first historical story of the Whittaker era to feel joyous, truly celebratory of humankind’s achievements. Rosa and Demons, whilst powerful, were understandably earnest and sombre. Witchfinders was haunting and Spyfall – Part Two serious and dark. Here, we’re having fun again and it feels good and so right for Doctor Who to be a bit more freewheeling. To encapsulate the differences in the miniscule: Rosa does everything it can, very obviously, to not rob Rosa of her agency. However contrived that feels, it would after all be distasteful. A fortnight ago, Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan were mind-wiped to allow them to continue their Earthly stories with ideas all of their own. Chris Chibnall’s take on history is cautious and careful, not wishing to tread on the toes of pioneers and heroes. However, that caution is thrown to the wind here by Metivier and Tesla and Edison end the episode memories intact, having seen a glimpse of a new world, just as Shakespeare was enlivened by the Doctor or Dickens chose to write of aliens in his final novel. This feels like such a positive shift after the worthier historicals of last season. Because who better to steal from, who better to look up to - whoever you are, however famous - than the Time Lord who stands for all that is good? Yes, we have our Earthly heroes whose talents and achievements should never be devalued, but can’t we also allow them a bit of fun escapism with the Doctor too, a hero to everyone?

When the credits role on Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, there’s a real sense that the show has its joy back, that it is content and assured enough to be a rollicking adventure again. With such a strong script, beautifully rich costume and set designs, an extremely effective musical score from Segun Akinola and a new sense of joie de vivre, this is as lavish and confident as Doctor Who is ever likely to be.

8/10

JH

Orphan 55

I feel as if I’ve been punched in the face. Over and over again. And not by the arguably vexing sledgehammer message at the close of Orphan 55, sure to get some folks’ backs up, but by the relentless onslaught of this frenetic, pounding narrative, directed with so much energy and pace by Lee Haven Jones that it leaves one gasping for breath.

The speed at which this manic story unfolds does two things: one good, one bad. To take the former first, the relentlessness papers over multiple cracks in the plotting and characterisation – the improbability of a mother not recognising her daughter, the improbability of a father going off to fix the mechanics seconds after losing his son to scary monsters, the running away from a working teleport to make the same journey on foot (oxygen rapidly deteriorating), the fact that two people commit noble self-sacrifices, one twice. I’m sure there are more crazy leaps in storytelling, not least having the entire cast piling into the vehicle to rescue Benni but so much happens in Orphan 55, at such a roller coaster lick, that it’s incredibly easy to shrug these oddities off. 

The latter problem though is that, amid the high-octane, wrought energy, moments of stillness don’t get the time they deserve. Like his other tale, It Takes You Away, Ed Hime seemingly wants to do creepy horror-movie after five minutes, but creepy horror-movies are slow, brooding and rely on an establishment of locale and character. He doesn’t give himself the time. The scenes in the steam room are almost there but with so much going on around them, there’s no respite for genuine tension. The moment when Benni asks someone to shoot him isn’t punctuated by character reaction because we’re swiftly shunted along to the next breakneck set-piece. Explanations too fall by the wayside or are made unclear in the freneticism: quite how the Doctor recognises the leading Dreg and quite why he is able to be locked in the cage is beyond me, however gripping those scenes might be.

Given its important message and gut-wrenching revelation in the tunnels, it’s a shame Orphan 55 doesn’t quite hold together on its own terms. Its message is a simple, robust one (Save The Planet), its plotting less so. Quite how Hime manages to give Tosin Cole’s Ryan some of his best material, as well as a true moment of dread for Graham when he realises Ryan is missing, I’m not sure. But the TARDIS crew really work here. There are some laugh-out-loud Doctor moments (the spam gag) and Mandip Gill shows signs that she is quietly the best actor of the four and it would be lovely to see her given something really meaty to get her teeth into as Yaz. I have a feeling it’s coming. Once again, she seems to slightly mistrust the Doctor and I’m hoping the rest of the series digs deeper into this fertile dramatic seam.

I am still hugely excited by Doctor Who Series 12, after the lacklustre turn taken by Series 11 midway through. At times, this felt like a different show. There was nothing in Series 11 to match the pace of Orphan 55, no episode with quite so many ideas. Yes, it was muddled and illogical, but it was an action-adventure thriller, like Earthshock, like The Time of Angels, like The Satan Pit. If it were content enough being only that, I think it may even have come out all the better for it (given it some focus) but the fact that it had a message probably, despite its clunkiness, means that Orphan 55 finally is about something. Although it may seem childish, the lecture at the end is a simple call to arms from a writer shouting at the world. What’s notable here is that his bent is one of ingrained cynicism and that’s an unusual and stirring path for Doctor Who, a show usually so full of hope. Here is a worldful of neglectful parents, neglectful humans and an environment hounded by the literal dregs of humanity. Quite what Hime wants us to do, I’m not sure. Maybe even he doesn’t know but it’s a loud enough shout to make it impossible for a critic to ignore. In much the same way that regardless of the messy plot mechanics and the awkwardly attached lecture alongside the sometimes wild characterisation, one can’t help but enjoy this well-meaning, often frightening and breathless sucker punch of a run-around.  

8/10

JH

Spyfall - Part Two

New Year’s Day’s opening episode proved to be a remarkable tour de force, giving the show a new mission statement and ending on a perilous, enormous cliff-hanger. Could the second instalment be as successful as this first blinder? Perhaps understandably, not quite, but there is lots to enjoy in this sprawling, sumptuous-looking episode, not least Sacha Dhawan’s delightfully insidious Master.

We open with the plane still crashing and the Doctor meeting a mysterious Ada in the strange netherworld. Disappointingly, the scenes with Ada prove dull to look at and dull to listen to, especially compared to the furious energy of the crashing plane. We cut between the two and the scenes with the Doctor, whilst frustratingly lacklustre, mean that the plane seems to take an absolute age to not crash. This sets up a lethargy of pace which is never quite shaken off throughout the episode’s first half.

After a switch in time to 1834, the Doctor’s mission soon becomes less about stopping the nebulous, alien villains and more about simply getting back to the TARDIS and the “Fam.” She is paired with Ada Lovelace and later, in 1943, Noor Inayat Khan. Whilst this is superficially lovely and the relative time-zones’ mise en scene look absolutely gorgeous, the impact these heroines have on the plot is negligible and actually stymies the threat level – we know nothing terrible can happen to either of them. A few mind wipes later and Chris Chibnall ensures tritely that neither can be robbed of their agency, not that Noor seemed to have all that much to begin with, save from providing a helpful hidey hole in the floor. What this story really needs is propulsion. We still don’t know what the aliens want apart from to take over our “universe” which in the last ten minutes manifests itself as actually taking over our bodies with an upgrade or “conversion” as Daniel Barton tells us. (Anyone else getting the Cyber vibe?) Without that propulsion, it quickly becomes a series of events, not necessarily leading into one another, and with no questions to ask other than “What’s going on?” We need a threat other than a stranded Doctor, also made less threatening by the fact we know she has to escape to help land a plane in the future.

What really makes this episode come alive though are our villains. Sacha Dhawan blisters as the Master. He is perhaps the first Master to be truly repellent, almost disgusting. He has an ill manner and an almost sickly complexion. His killing at the science show highlights his true terror and his meeting with the Doctor on the Eiffel Tower gives the episode its best scenes. Whittaker, it seems, really comes into her own during these duologues, with a decent villain to butt heads with. Last week she stood her ground against Lenny Henry – again, quietly sadistic here - and in the scenes high above France, the chemistry between her and Dhawan is felt.

Which brings us to talk of home: Gallifrey. Chibnall’s first foray into Who mythology is a daring one. We hear of times we know nothing about. We witness the planet crippled in a heart-breaking and truly awesome shot. Whittaker plays the loss terrifically. If last week was her best performance so far, here she delivers a performance of true worth, of mournfulness and strength and terror and unease. I’m still not convinced she has quite a handle on the bafflegab but when the narrative beats are clear and the emotions there to be engaged with, she steps up and seems to feel.

We end with the companions finally asking for a disclosure on who she is. “It’s not like we haven’t asked,” says Graham earlier in a crude piece of overwriting. They really didn’t actually, Mr Chibnall, not that you let us see. Did they ask all the big questions off screen? However, now they resolutely have been asked, we finally see some politics between our TARDIS friends. The Doctor is still holding back and given the snippets they now know, the crew ought only to be become more curious. This bodes well for the future. The TARDIS is going somewhere. The story is going somewhere. Surely, Daniel Barton - mother-killer lest we forget - has to meet his comeuppance. Surely, the Master needs to return to give the Gallifrey plot some closure. Surely, the more strain they encounter, the more complicated the TARDIS team dynamics will become. Who is the Timeless Child? Why have the Time Lords been lied to? I’m very excited to discover the answers. If Spyfall – Part Two itself lacked propulsion, it has certainly infused the rest of the series with it. Roll on next week!

6/10

JH

Big Finish - The Best of 2019

Big Finish now represents perhaps the ultimate Doctor Who factory. I started collected Big Finish releases back in 1999 with The Sirens of Time and in twenty years have never looked back. Of the thousands of CDs to adorn my shelves, I can think of only one or two which haven’t quite hit the mark. The astonishing quality of the company’s output is even more incredible when one takes a step back to think about the astonishing quantity of the company’s output. By the end of December, 2019’s Doctor Who and Torchwood related releases will have amounted to an incredible 146 CDs.

So where does a newcomer start? I’m always advocating Big Finish and fans I meet who haven’t tried a dip in the audio pool, I feel obliged to push in headfirst. Over the last few years, I’m delighted to say I’ve made a few more loyal subscribers, one now a rampant Jago & Liteoot-phile, another an Eighth Doctor and Lucie aficionado! But with the ever-increasing nature of the collection, there’s a possibility it might seem a little imposing to even begin to start buying anew. Some of the ranges are of such a particular niche that some fans may feel a little excluded before they even begin, latecomers to the party, as it were. (The upcoming Robots series, for instance, is a spin-off from the first episode of the second boxset of Ravenous, itself an extension of the Dark Eyes and Doom Coalition boxsets and harking back originally to Robophobia and before that the TV classic: The Robots of Death. That’s a very particular niche! Incidentally, I expect it will be magnificent!)

And so, for the first time in a hopefully annual tradition, I’ll be looking back at 2019 and talking briefly about my personal highlights. Hopefully, it might encourage one or two new listeners to dive into the pool!

10. RAVENOUS 3

Specifically, Companion Piece by John Dorney: a story with an almost impossibly long cast list, considering its hour’s length. The adventures of the Eighth Doctor, Liv and Helen feel like a parallel, ongoing new series, Big Finish’s equivalent of the Jodie Whittaker series. McGann feels as fresh and new as he did back in Storm Warning and his boxsets feel like real event audio. Occasionally though, something as fan-pleasing and indulgent as Companion Piece comes along, reminding us that we’re still in the same universe as Tom Baker, William Hartnell and Peter Davison. Whilst the Eighth Doctor takes a back seat for the most part, this is the tale of the leading ladies to end all tales of leading ladies. To avoid spoilers, I won’t go into details but this is a particularly special story with some lovely winks to the past. It’s also worth picking up Ravenous 3 for Deeptime Frontier: a frightening showcase for a terrified Paul McGann with plenty of spine-tingling moments to excite fans of more horrific Doctor Who.

9. THE THIRD DOCTOR ADVENTURES Volume Five

Despite the sad passing of our heroes: Jon Pertwee, Caroline John and Nicholas Courtney, the series of Third Doctor Adventures feels utterly authentic to the era it emulates and here, with the addition of Jon Culshaw as a tremendous Brigadier, alongside Tim Treloar’s Third Doctor and Daisy Ashford’s Liz Shaw, Big Finish ramps up the nostalgia yet further. Primord is a sequel to Inferno and goes in unexpected directions. The end of Episode Three is stark and as the Twitter generation might have it, a real WTF moment. The Scream of Ghosts is similarly strong, with the Home Counties England of the Pertwee years as palpable as the era’s Chromakey fringing. There’s also a nice surprise for fans of another 70s tale but to say too much would invoke the ire of River Song. If you’re a lover of the Pertwee era, you’d do far worse than to pick up this set of brilliantly well-written, superbly performed and authentically sound-designed stories.

8. THE SYNDICATE MASTERPLAN

It might seem like a bit of a cheat to choose a two-boxset eight-story arc of an adventure in the ninth spot, but at only £45 per CD bundle, the tales of the Fourth Doctor and Ann Kelso are an absolute steal. For anyone who loves The Daleks’ Master Plan (And let’s be honest, who doesn’t? It’s brilliant!), this Syndicate sequel is essential. It includes all the planet and time-hopping shenanigans of the original, as well as a police-drama in some ways akin to the first half of The Feast of Steven, a trip back into history alongside Ada Lovelace, and a Jurassic Park style Drashigs adventure! For all the shocks and twists along the way, as well as the call-backs to the past, what is perhaps most surprising about The Syndicate Masterplan is that these eight stories form one, quite isolated adventure: that of new companion Ann. It starts and ends here and feels complete, satisfying and at every turn, thrilling.

7. NIGHTMARE COUNTRY

Steve Gallagher – the renowned 80s writer of Warriors’ Gate and Terminus produces his third idiosyncratic, high-concept sci-fi thriller for the Doctor Who world. Admittedly, after fifteen minutes, this felt a little heavy, the story setting out its stall across the first episode in such as way as to feel non-user friendly. But prog rock albums are non-user friendly and usually by the last few bars, the listener wants to go back to the beginning and hear it all over again, unpeel the layers and feast in the intricacies, unpick how it was put together. Here, at the close of the very last scene and in the sting of the theme tune, one feels the same. This was something clever, something rich and was always aiming for this precise moment. It’s a beautiful, haunting, strange ending, even for Doctor Who. Second time round, like Warriors’ Gate, like Terminus, it’s easier to appreciate the hand Steve Gallagher is dealing, and Nightmare Country is a royal flush: Gallagher’s best.

6. THE TENTH DOCTOR ADVENTURES Volume Three

This is the best David Tennant set yet. Although it seems to have been far less remarked upon than its immediate predecessors (understandably, it being Volume 3), for my money it’s streets ahead in terms of quality than the already strong boxsets before it. What makes these stories even stronger are the bolder, headline-grabbing concepts from which the three adventures springboards: DR WHO MEETS MOST HAUNTED; DR WHO IN THE UNDERWATER CITY; and DR WHO AND THE GREAT FOG OF ’52. The pace and mood of each of the stories is as breakneck and exciting as Tennant’s TV era. The narratives are neat and streamlined and end with a giant dinosaur skeleton rampaging through London. The lavish boxset too is a glorious thing: June Hudson costume designs, Mike Tucker storyboards and beautiful artwork and photograph make this a must-have!

5. TORCHWOOD: NIGHT OF THE FENDAHL

The Torchwood range is one of Big Finish’s best. Inventive, schizophrenic and on occasion delightfully distasteful, one never knows what to expect from the monthly releases. This year we’ve had an anthology horror story in Dead Man’s Switch, an X-Files (specifically the episode Arcadia) homage in Serenity and a murderous screwball in Sync. The Hope was bleak and disturbing. But the stand out of the year is Night of the Fendahl, as dark and nightmarish as it’s possible for Torchwood to get and that’s saying something. Deliberately provocative, Tim Foley perhaps proves himself as the most manipulative of Big Finish’s writers. Walking to work in the dark, this really got under my skin and I put it to anyone to try to listen cynically. This release, like the Fendahl itself, will fill you with dread. 

4. TARTARUS

Composed of two enormous episodes, Tartarus feels like a Ray Harryhausen movie through a Doctor Who lens: there seriously can’t be many better things than that! The two longer instalments give the story a feel of the epic and its channelling of Jason and the Argonauts makes the visuals easier to imagine. David Llewellyn conjures a vivid, rip-roaring world and even manages to stay true to his series Cicero, one of 2018’s crowning glories in the Big Finish gamut. On the surface, this might look like a straightforward, rollicking adventure but they’re harder to come by and harder to write than one imagines, and this eminently listenable yarn is a rare beast. 

3. WARZONE/CONVERSION

The conclusion to this year’s Fifth Doctor trilogy is a worthy sequel to Earthshock and finally, after all these years, the Doctor and his companions manage to properly discuss the shocking death of Adric. Even after almost 40 years, the scenes here feel raw, full of emotion. Janet Fielding does some of her finest work as Tegan and Peter Davison, even in the trailers, displays a near-mania when it comes to tackling his feelings towards the maths wizard. The conclusion to Warzone is nightmarish and springboards us into the events of Conversion. It looks as if the events of Conclusion is are about to push Big Finish listeners into even more unfamiliar and difficult territory: a Fifth Doctor TARDIS crew more at odds with one another than ever before.

2. DAUGHTER OF THE GODS

Billed as the fifth anniversary special that never was, Daughter of the Gods, is very definitely that: special. Easily the best single-story release of the year, David K Barnes comes up trumps again after delivering last year’s seminal Dalek Occupation of Winter and the best UNIT story of all the eight box sets, Breach of Trust. The greatness of Barnes’s writing is that is completely unshowy. There are no needless gags or structural gimmicks; just a confidence and brio that drags the listener along with it. The pitch for this unusual story, complete with its many leading regulars, must have been daunting but Barnes makes it look easy. Each piece of this jigsaw puzzle of a plot tessellates perfectly with those either side. It is neat, clever and eventually and rewardingly, heart-breaking. Just as Conversion deals with the death of Adric in as rich and powerful a way as is imaginable, here the death of Katarina proves the richest source material for an adventure which proves dangerously close to the Doctor’s hearts.

THE LEGACY OF TIME

The number one spot then. Of course, it seems obvious and easy, but The Legacy of Time, Big Finish’s biggest adventure of all time, is also one of its most successful. It is grand and important, Lies in Ruins featuring a Gallifrey in a state of planet-wide demolition, but each of the six episodes is focused on its own strong story. The Split Infinitive is a strong Counter-Measures tale with a callback to one of Big Finish’s most successful original villains. The Sacrifice of Jo Grant is possibly the apex of the set, its closing few minutes surely able to move the most stony-faced of long-term Who fans. There are surprises aplenty here. Those who have been with Big Finish for the last twenty years are amply rewarded here and the last twenty minutes feel like a true celebration in a way that The Light of the End strangely didn’t. Of all the Doctor Who that have ever been made, in any medium, The Legacy of Time seems to sum up the very essence of the programme. I’d put it up there with Steven Moffat’s definitive Day of the Doctor novelisation or the original transmitted version of The Five Doctors as one of the greatest celebrations of our show to ever see fruition. 

In celebration of its release, and as a failed entry in the recent Big Finish competition, I produced this piece of art. I hope it captures the wonder and excitement of such a terrific story!

JH

Spyfall - Part One

Danger: Spoilers abound!

Almost every other review that I’ve read online about this New Year’s Doctor Who thriller begins with a statement about the critic’s feelings towards Series 11 and I can completely understand why. The show split fandom – some were never to watch again whilst others lauded the fresh, new approach. I reviewed the show weekly as the episodes went out and have had some time to reflect on the relative merits of Series 11 over the past year. Sharing those brief reflections might give you a better idea of my hopes and aspirations for Spyfall and Series 12 before I settled down to watch. If you can understand where I was coming from, hopefully you’ll appreciate even more clearly what a vivid, rollicking and perhaps unexpected success I thought this blast of a series opener was.

Series 11 was a strange beast. Whilst each individual episode had moments of brilliance and terrific central ideas, the journey of the series itself seemed unfocussed and messy. I was with Chris Chibnall up until Episode 6. Despite the fan hatred, I loved Arachnids in the UK and The Tsuranga Conundrum and felt they went a long way to pushing the TARDIS team forward, establishing their motives and dynamics. It felt as if with each passing episode, we uncovered a little more about the regulars. After that however, rather than build on the considerably strong groundwork, the show stalled and became an anthology series with a cast who didn’t learn or change from episode to episode. Kerblam!, The Witchfinders, It Takes You Away and arguably Demons of the Punjab could have happened interchangeably, so little did the results of the adventures affect the crew members. It was almost as if the “flat team structure” of the TARDIS team was mirrored by the writing squad, as if the stories needed a stronger guiding hand to push them onwards rather than allowing them to live solely by their own merits. If this were an ongoing narrative, as established in the first half of the series, why wasn’t it going anywhere? Similarly, onscreen, there was no driving force in the TARDIS. Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor was bluntly underwritten with too much to say and too little to do and even more bluntly, badly performed. As I said in my very first review of The Woman Who Fell to Earth, the gender of the Doctor seemed instantly and joyously unimportant, but the casting of Whittaker seemed like a mistake. Her performance throughout the series was laboured and heightened, her gags fell flat and lots of the time, she irritated. It was like watching an actor unable to read Shakespeare trying to perform in an idiom they clearly weren’t comfortable with. The bafflegab, the “Artron energy,” the devices, the tech, were all emphasised with an explanatory, patronising manner that only an actor unfamiliar with the trappings of sci-fi would deliver. Whittaker didn’t need to assume the viewer couldn’t keep up with ideas she possibly couldn’t.

Ultimately then, it was a series less than the sum of its parts. Some really vivid, important episodes, such as Punjab, were left as islands in a sea of disparate ideas and a narrative that, despite the brief writers’ room set-up, had not been properly developed, plotted or thought through. The beats and discoveries of character had not been as confidently posited as it seemed they might have been by the half-way mark and we ended with a finale which made for a fairly strong episode in itself but a poor culminating climax without a narrative build up, ending the show with a disaffected shrug rather than a need to find out where these people are going next.

I’m so thrilled to be able to say that Spyfall – Part One is a return to the confidence and character building of the first half of Series 11 and I am so shamelessly happy that this seems to be the most big-budget, thrilling and glamourous that Doctor Who has ever been. As fans, we delight in the intricacies of plot and clevernesses of character, but we love it most of all, after the decades of incessant, lazy, journalistic “wobbly sets” guff, when our show looks bloody good. And here, it simply looks better than ever, and if last year did anything right, it already looked amazingly good.

We go from the mean streets of Moscow, to the Australian outback, to inner city London, to a sun-kissed, San Franciscan vineyard casino, to an airport and a flying plane. Hell, we even visit Ryan’s warehouse in Sheffield. Chibnall promised us the biggest episode ever and, like it or not, this definitely is the biggest episode ever. It looks and feels like a Bond movie and makes a decent TV-budget-sized effort to match them for spectacle. We have three huge set-pieces which, perhaps for the first time in Doctor Who, don’t feel limited by resources. I can’t think of a single Doctor Who episode to match the money on screen here.

Aesthetics over with, how about the content? Well, gratifyingly, it matches the visuals. Chibnall is no great shakes when it comes to memorable or even graceful dialogue, but he has a keen eye on pace and this story plunges from one thrill into the next, sometimes with the most shameless abandon. Like Russell T Davies, Chibnall is not as interested in the ties that bind the scenes together but by the thrill of living every moment. This is a story that puts entertainment at its centre, never relenting in its pursuit to make the viewer sit up and pay attention, and even makes room for the quiet, tense, paranoia-fuelled interview with Lenny Henry’s troubling, Tobias Vaughan-like Daniel Barton as well as the jumpy, horror-movie night scenes in Australia.

We are quickly reacquainted with our leads and given a deliberately silly short-term history to lend credence to their ongoing travels with the Doctor from their peers’ perspectives back in Sheffield. Speaking of which, the TARDIS is introduced in a possibly provocative, extremely funny sight gag which manages to give us a laugh whilst at the same time establishing in an incredibly clever economy of storytelling, that the Thirteenth Doctor is now very much based in Sheffield just as the Third was down to Earth during the UNIT years or the Tenth Doctor was drawn to the Powell Estate. And as soon as we have our regulars escorted away by a tall, imposing man in black and a (forgive me) laughably short and unimposing man in black we’re off to adventures anew.

Stephen Fry arrives with a fiendish joke to gag the “Doctor Who is a man” naysayers and then is shockingly disposed of. We fly Ryan and Yaz to San Francisco and they are really beginning to work as a double-act. There’s a Mulder-Scully, will they-won’t they vibe about them which should prove fun to follow as the show progresses. Yaz is then properly shaken up and we get a sense that all is not quite going to go as smoothly for these people as it did during Series 11. Then we are introduced to Agent O and the fun really begins.

Sacha Dhawan has long been on my list of tremendously charming and dependable guest actors. I recently watched him in the overlooked The Deep with James Nesbitt and noted again, the huge talents of the man. He played a beautiful Waris Hussein in our very own Adventure in Space and Time. Here, from the off, there’s something peculiar about him. The lusty grin he gives Graham when inviting him to read the Doctor’s files is the first sign of danger. To then realise who the man is and watch Dhawan suddenly go for broke is devastating. You realise that from now on, absolutely anything might happen. And despite her furious, dynamism, we are forced to ask the question: Michelle Who?

Lastly, we see a Jodie Whittaker Doctor who is more relaxed, more charming and for much of the episode, frightened and emotional. She has no idea who the sinister, Vardan-like aliens could be and then realises how very out of her depth she is in the episode’s closing minutes. Whether she is responding to a script which gives her slightly different material or is simply more comfortable in her own skin, I’m not sure. But here, she gives her best performance as the Doctor to date especially when up against Barton at the house party. There are a few gags which land way off the mark though. (Seriously, did anyone tell her the “Doctor. The Doctor,” joke was a Bond reference?) Seeing the desperation of this Time Lord, however, is thrilling. It’s reminiscent of Davison – at his best when losing control. With the Master now firmly ingrained in the plot, it’s probable she might end up even more at sea and I for one cannot wait to see what happens next.

Spyfall – Part One is a truly spectacular kick-off to Doctor Who 2020 and with episode two another 60 minutes long and seemingly taking place in Paris, it looks as though we may, as promised, be in for the biggest show ever. It feels like Doctor Who is new again, and vital and urgent, even after its more obvious differences opening Series 11. I’m thrilled by the return of the pre-titles sequence (Essential in my book!), I love the altered TARDIS set (Less plasticky and more refined.) and I love a cliff-hanger! Perhaps the greatest achievement of Chibnall’s script is that it doesn’t feel like a homage to Bond or a spoof of Bond; it feels like another Bond movie and probably an altogether better one at that. Spyfall proves that Doctor Who, even yet, can be anything its creators want it to be and right now, that seems to be a tearaway success.

9/10

JH