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
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