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