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
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