"Whowatch Part 22" but smeared in blood over a boarded-up door, faint screaming in the distance
A day short of Whowatch's one-year anniversary, I'll forgo the usual upfront miscellaneous notes - yes I loved My Adventures With Superman but I'll probably save thoughts there for further down the road, yes I have speculation on the further Superman: Legacy casting but I posted that on Bluesky, and SDCC is probably going to give me plenty to chat about soon enough - to make an announcement: with my previous main outlet no longer accepting pitches, I've finally decided to start a Patreon. My inaugural post's up, where I explain that by kicking a pittance my way per month, you'll get to have some say in where this newsletter goes! Everything on the newsletter itself will remain free and publicly available though, to be clear.
The Happiness Patrol
The Woman Who Fell to Earth
The Ghost Monument
Rosa
Arachnids in the UK
The P’ting Dilemma
Demons of the Punjab
Kerblam!
“But this is part of the lengthy and torturous period where Doctor Who avoids politics at all costs. And here we see why that was such a terrible idea – because the series isn’t about anything anymore. There’s no content here. Saying you’re going to be apolitical just means that you’ve given up on being about the real world at all. Which is fine right up until you remember that reality is inescapable and that flights of fancy come back to Earth eventually. Here’s our crash landing.”
-El Sandifer
Sean: Welcome to the mid era of Doctor Who. Usually, we would begin by talking about the various Doctor Who stories we watched. However, I decided to bail on this project entirely. This era sucks and I want nothing to do with it. Fortunately, I have press ganged a friend of mine to take my place. Joining you now for the remainder of the Chibnal era, it’s Freezing Inferno!
Frezno: If you're reading this message, that means that Sean is trying to get me back here onto Whowatch to discuss the Chris Chibnall era of Doctor Who. Unfortunately, I am currently in the middle of nowhere on an empty stretch of highway somewhere in Iowa atop a riding mower. Moreover, watching the Chris Chibnall era took years off my life and filled me with gallons of venomous bile towards referential tentpole science fiction that took watching the entirety of Quantum Leap and nearly all of the filmography of David Lynch to exorcise from me. I'm not going back to that headspace. You're not paying me, Sean. I'm not going back. I'M NOT GOING BACK!!! I hope you can survive the milquetoast, continuity-obsessed, unethical mess that Doctor Who reflected under this showrunner's eye.
Fuckity-bye! =)
Sean: Damnit. GOD DAMNIT! God damnit, I was so sure that would fucking work. Ok, fine. Hi everybody. It’s me. It’s Sean. I’m here. I’m going to talk about The Chibnall Era, I GUESS! Because I’m too much of a dumbass that I actually watched the fucking era. So… WOMP! WOMP!
David: Does this live up to its predecessors? No. But is it fine Doctor Who? Also no. But separate from all dogmatic considerations of what the series ‘should’ be, or even what it could be, is it if nothing else a basically watchable piece of populist cheapo sci-fi adventure fiction? Also also no. There is no joy in having to be dunked into the “so BY PURE COINCIDENCE the moment they made a girl The Doctor the show completely disintegrated and it’s not Doctor Who in any way that matters anymore, the only fix is bringing back all the old guys'' pond with the chuds, but the eyes see what they see.
Sean: To be quite blunt, this is the straight era of Doctor Who. This is Doctor Who for Straight White people who want to be really good allies, but can’t bring themselves to actually challenge their own beliefs. This is perhaps most evident in Rosa, whose opening scene not only highlights how bad of an idea getting rid of the pre-credits sequence was and is extremely inept in terms of trying desperately to be a Spielberg riff, but also demonstrates the political noxiousness of the era. And that’s even before The Doctor shows up and is so goddamn insufferable. An era pillared by shitheels for being “woke” in spite of it frequently attempting to be extremely apolitical throughout the majority of its run (bar ‘A Very Special Episode’ or two). This is an era that actively aimed for the Arrowverse, and missed.
David: Sean it’s so bad. And the problem is it’s mostly not cartoonishly bad in the way of getting stabbed in the side with something pointy, which is at least a distraction. It is the yawning fucking void between the stars as a television program. Rosa’s that first one though.
But before that I guess we should probably talk at least a little bit about The Woman Who Fell To Earth.
Sean: Tim Shaw is the main villain. While ‘Baddie what with teeth on his face’ could be good for a laugh, it just doesn’t work. The show is too straight, too drab to actually pull it off. But besides that, we’re introduced to the main character of the majority of the Chibnall era, Graham O’Brien! In that he is the only one of this three person TARDIS team to actually have a character, including The Doctor. And it’s rather the bland old man that Chibnall loves to put in his works. You can tell because when Graham does eventually leave, he’s replaced by another old White guy who has that characterization.
As for the others, Ryan is certainly there to be comic relief. And also tell his White Step-Grandpa he loves the old guy who basically spent his introduction scene being a dick to his grandkid for being neurodivergent (something that will only be marginally brought up later). Yaz, meanwhile… There's a joke from the reviews of SFDebris wherein he’ll say “Today, Chakotay has always been into [rolls dice] [thing he’s into this episode]!” The same gag could be applied to Yaz. Mandip Gill is probably the best actor of the three (though Bradley Walsh does have more experience with crap telly and is better able to work with it) and is extremely underserved by the material. She tries this series, but basically spends the next two riding it out until her contract runs out and she can have a proper career in a mid-tier Marvel project.
David: You can tell Graham as the old White guy in the room is the only one Chibnall remotely cares about because Bradley Walsh is the only actor whose performance becomes modestly but noticeably better over time. Ryan has the tiniest crumb of an interesting tack in ‘a Doctor Who companion who’s physically bad at doing most of the Doctor Who climbing and jumping stuff’, but that’s about it. I defy anyone to tell me Yaz is a character. And Whittaker herself as The Doctor is nothing, bordering on sucking, but I don’t think that’s particularly her fault; Matt Smith had some growing pains in my opinion, but once he and the show figured out how to stretch his legs, he could elevate mediocrity with the best of them. There is no rhythm here for Whittaker to fall into but a Saturday morning cartoon version of The Doctor - specifically 10 and 11 - who’s generically quirky and righteous with some occasional wine mom liberalism for flavor; zany with no actual repartee.
Anyway the first 20 minutes are vaguely promising but then it has a CGI wire blob and a Halo soldier show up and there’s your whole thing, which pretty well sums up the show’s new aesthetic in a nutshell. The TARDIS being the worst casualty in the next episode when reimagined as “What if it was properly cool and spacey, but it still had all the Doctor Who doodads and spit out toast so you know we still get how to have fun around here 🤪”
As for all the comparisons to bad comic writers you’ve been making Sean, I don’t think Chibnall dementedly, absurdly misunderstands the material he’s drawing from interestingly or consistently enough to earn most of those parallels. But someone described the era’s fans to me as claiming “No showrunner has so honored the past while forging so bold a future!”, and then it turned out The Doctor basically says that in the kickoff, which I’ll cop to being pretty reminiscent of the worst of the worst of contemporary big two.
Sean: To be fair, we haven’t reached that part… yet.
[OMINOUS FORESHADOWING!]
The second I typed that, thunder struck outside.
David: This is true folks, they mentioned it to me on Discord and I asked them to include that information in the discussion.
Sean: But anyways… I watched this episode recently, and I could not tell you a single thing that happened. The era is extremely infuriating in the moment while also being extremely forgettable as soon as you leave it. Like, can you tell me what the name of the two guest stars from The Ghost Monument were? Can you tell me anything about them?
David: The ones who disappear immediately before their character arcs end however they were gonna end, and not in a way where that narrative inconclusiveness is the point?
Sean: Only one thing from that episode ever gets followed up on, and it’s not them.
David: Wait, not even the bit about Tzim-Sha’s people being seemingly set up as arc villains?
Sean: …Two things from that episode get followed up on.
David: lol okay, that would’ve been a pretty astonishing fumble even for this. Also I like that The Doctor gives a condescending lecture about cleverness being more useful than guns, then demonstrates it by pressing a button immediately next to the gun that allows them to instantly win. The cigar trick would’ve been okay if the other half of it had any buildup though, so almost a kudos for that.
Sean: I mean, arc villains might be too strong a word. “Hastily scrapped together baddies to tie the season together because they couldn’t do the actual arc of the series in this series” is more accurate. Would you believe there’s an entire gap year after the series ends? The potential book about the Production of this era is going to be more interesting than the era itself.
Speaking of, the girl one highlights an aspect of the show that will be extremely important. That being, she’s one of the few pieces of gay representation in the entire era. And like all the gay rep from this series, she has a dead lover. It’s either that or she’s dead herself, or she and her girlfriend both die! This is especially astonishing considering producer Matt Strevens was quoted as saying, “There will be characters from across the spectrum.” Though Chris Chibnall’s statement in the same article of, "There are LGBT characters within the show. Obviously, last year we had Bill in the show. [But] in terms of sexuality, it's often not necessarily a thing you go into in a Doctor Who story" is the more telling of the show’s actual ethos.
As I said, this is the Straight White Ally era of Doctor Who. The one that lacks any of the problematic edges when it comes to sexuality, gender, class, or any such thing that defined the Davies and Moffat eras. It’s everything a good ally would want out of Doctor Who. Perhaps the most telling nature of this was Rosa, which Chris Chibnall co-wrote with author Malorie Blackman, a very special episode about how thanks to the progression of History and the defeat of racism (as demonstrated by the election of Barack Obama), Yaz can be a cop!
On a fundamental level, good god, the opening is crap. The opening shot implies that the person we’re initially following is going to be important by virtue of directly following them, only to then reveal that they’re not. The era specific pop song is cut off at a random point and replaced with Tense Music™. And the blocking on the bus is store brand Steven Spielberg without any of his understanding of shot composition. The only reason it exists seems to be to highlight that this is the BAD TIMES™, as if Ryan being spat on didn’t have the same effect.
David: Full body cringe from the first minute, carried through by having the Black guy be the one who needs the history of civil rights explained to him, and capped by the old White guy having to support racism in order to prevent the eventual triumph of Space Racism. I cannot stress enough how hard this episode ends on a “would you say the n word to keep a nuke from going off in an orphanage”, a premise that would actually fit decently in a scathing enough parody of Doctor Who in general and this period of it specifically.
Sean: It’s Space Racism attempting to prevent the fall of Old School Racism to make Space Racism great again. On that note, Arachnids in the UK, which I do believe David skipped.
David: My first ever ‘pass’ for this project, I’m not fucking watching a giant spiders episode for Chibnall. Skimmed the transcript, don’t get the impression I missed anything special here.
Sean: Well, we’re introduced to a very unsubtle Donald Trump parody played by the guy who played Mr. Big a few years before his sexual assault allegations happened. He’s a rather unlikable sort (but he’s not Donald Trump, he hates that guy) who inexplicably gets to walk away scot free after knowingly poisoning the land with toxic waste that led to a lot of people dying (including two more gay women). Worse yet, his answer of ‘Shoot the queen spider dead’ is viewed as a vile, evil act that The Doctor’s only response to is to shake her fist at impotently. After all, her plan was the far more humane decision to let the queen spider die a slow, agonizing death of asphyxiation. Ryan does shadow puppets, which is the most fun he’ll have in this show. Also, for some reason, Ryan has a bunch of comics from decades apart, including an issue of the Justice League Unlimited series and Fight Club 2, showing he has as much aesthetic clarity as he does a core character.
So the Donald Trump guy is going to come back later. And it’s going to suck.
The P’ting Dilemma is not what the next episode’s called, and I bet you don’t even remember what its actual name is. (Also, it needs to have the apostrophe in there, I don’t care if the TARDIS Wiki or whoever is in charge says it doesn’t have one. It only makes sense if it does!)
David: The something Conundrum! Mr. Doctor Man wasn’t a much better actor than liar imo but at least this return to the ‘base under siege’ format makes the stakes feel marginally higher. “Things get smaller, faster, and cheaper, that’s progress” is a pretty funny comparison to draw to Moffat/Capaldi even before we get to Kerblam! I’d make fun of 13 loving Hamilton but that’d be a cheap shot when 10 loved friggin’ Harry Potter, we never know for sure how stuff will age in the popular consciousness.
Sean: Trust me, we’ll get there.
No thunder this time. Just miserable rain.
David: I have no further thoughts on this episode.
Sean: Next up, Demons of the Punjab, apparently everyone’s favorite episode from this era. It’s certainly something I totally have seen and not…
Ok, I’ve never actually watched this one. When the Chibnall era was first airing, I tuned out around The Ghost Monument. I saw episodes of the era as a secondary concern instead of the Need To Watch TV. When I hit The Halloween Apocalypse, I just gave up completely, content with listening to the opinions of Frezno and their mates talk about how bad it is. I only watched one episode of Flux after that because I was on a Weeping Angel kick and was curious. (It was crap.) I only watched The Power of the Doctor because a friend I owed had me on their Roundtable.
So when we got here, I tried to watch this one. I really did. But the era’s overall insufferable nature drained any interest I had in watching it. So I have not watched the one where they finally go to India. It’s apparently the best the show has to offer. Other than the evil one.
David: Ups and downs, by the standards of the moment. The Doctor actively pooh-poohs someone noting the injustice of the partition with a “I'll make a note of your thoughts and pass them on to Mountbatten if I ever bump into him again,” so there sure is that.
Sean: Yeah, The Doctor’s relationships with the worst people don’t stop or start with Winston Churchill. The Third one is apparently close friends with Chairman Mao.
David: I was saving this for the end but since you mention Churchill, this really does seem like a season of all Victory of the Daleks, pinging back and forth between inert incompetence and active horror. The actors and director Jamie Childs bring it solidly for the back half of the episode though, including The Doctor declaring regarding the threat of a time paradox that Yaz could be wiped out and “We can’t have a universe with no Yaz!”, which is one of the few moments the show lets her feel like Doctor Who instead of having her Doing Doctor Who.
Sean: I’ll just say it right now, rather than let it fester for five entries: Thasmin is the Doctor Who equivalent of SpideyPool. It’s what straight people think a tragic queer romance is like. It amounts to nothing, not the least of which because it’s clear the show was setting up Yaz/Ryan before the latter decided he had better things to do than stand around and react generically. And what crumbs you're given are insulting at best. At worst, it’s a cover of 10/Rose that doesn’t understand why that worked.
David: Why the fuck is it called Thasmin
Sean: Thirteen/Yasmin.
David: I’m an RWBY fan and as that cultural wretch I’m saying that’s a stupid ship name. Anyway the ultimate twist with the alien ‘baddies’ was also good enough to deserve to have been in a better season, as evidenced by that we’ve basically seen the same type of thing before. The degree to which finally rising to decency for a full 20-25 minutes offsets ‘The Doctor pooh-poohs complaints about the Partition of India’ is up to you. In a better season I would say no. But crap TV drives good people to desperation.
Sean: Before we talk about the evil one, let’s first talk about an episode from the era that most influenced the evil one. I am of course talking about The Happiness Patrol, a two finger salute to Thatcher’s England made by a script editor who got the job by answering the question, “What do you want to do with the show” with “I want to overthrow the government.”
The Happiness Patrol is one of the most delightful things Doctor Who has ever done, especially the Kandyman!
David: I wasn’t as in love with it as its reputation would have one expect, but I did like it! Phenomenal set design, Sylvester McCoy does some quality rolling of his Rs (and the scene of him daring the soldier to shoot him and the guy can’t do it? Spectacular), perfect ending, and what the hell, sure, let’s have some Morlocks. The Kandyman is the obvious standout, and what works about him to me is that no single element of him particularly disturbs me, but as a whole he’s so creepy, he feels like several villain ideas stapled together in an extremely productive fashion that gives him a very different ‘oh this dude is a FREAK’ vibe than the typical Who baddie. He doesn't look or move or feel like a weird candy monster, he feels like the normal-looking inhabitant of some offscreen weirdly mundane candy planet, who also happens to be a serial killer.
Sean: Them painting the TARDIS pink has actually come back in an extremely delightful way. It’s just a delightful story about the necessity of overthrowing the government in a way that one wishes Doctor Who did more. There’s a degree to which the episode could’ve used another part to fully flesh out the world (or, at least, a set designer on the same page as the costume designer), but what’s here is amazing.
(I am so stealing the gun speech for something in the future.)
So… Kerblam!
David: The easy description is that the episode turns evil in the last 10 minutes but no it’s setting the evil groundwork way earlier, ‘ol Doc Who is SO excited about capitalism. The whole innocent minimum-wage dope monologue about cheering herself up by thinking about the magic of consumerism. The Doctor delivering a Bond one-liner about the death of a Gen Z stand-in destroyed by the noble emergent consciousness of Amazon as a corporation is the logical conclusion here.
(Also, to for once be That Guy: A. I feel like it should be slightly more difficult to beam onto the TARDIS mid-flight. And B. Why is The Doctor’s plan to explode all the delivery-bots except that we need the snot-nosed punk kid to be hoisted by his own petard?)
Sean: The moment the episode turned on me was the fucking speech the lady worker gives about how she’s happy to work for Amazon, even though she never received a package in her entire life. And The Doctor responds by giving a ‘this is a life affirming story’ instead of the usual response of ‘I am going to burn this fucking place to the ground.’ Further highlighting the anger is the episode’s main baddie, who is only revealed at the last minute with a speech about how leftist kids are going to change things, thus showing he’s the baddie.
It sucks, I hate it. And apparently the novelization shows that instead of learning anything, the author doubled down on the core idea that leftists are the real baddies, not the system that consumes everyone and everything until all the jobs are taken by automation because it’s cheaper.
By the way, we here at Whowatch support the efforts of the WGA and SAG against the motherfuckers who want to starve them out.
David: I didn’t expect Ron Perlman to more-or-less read aloud the Tumblr post about the need to remind management that unions are the alternative to breaking into their homes this week, but sometimes life's surprises are good ones.
Sean: And that the ultimate resolution is ‘A month off, with two weeks paid’ is fucking evil in an episode inspired by someone sending a “Help Me” message in an Amazon package! An episode that engages with the surveillance culture of Amazon where breaks are prohibited. It’s evil, pure and simple.
And it’s probably the best episode of the season, if not the era.
David: “10% People Powered!”, you can’t say this didn’t see the future. Speaking of noting that this episode proves Doctor Who can be full-on Evil while still adhering to the basic formula - heck, on an executional basis this was indeed one of the better of this batch, “The future is very confusing for my protocols!” is a good line - unlike usual I read El Sandifer’s Eruditorum entries right after each episode, and god, you can fully feel the foremost critical authority on the subject giving under the weight of trying to explain that her favorite thing hasn’t annihilated itself.
Not that I blame or judge her in the least to be clear: I have justified the early days of multiple all-time stinker Superman runs to myself. None of us ever wants to realize that Arcadia isn’t simply behind us, but that we are at this very moment plummeting off the cliff of its borders.
POST-CHAT EDIT: Sean has informed me having spoken with El this was not actually not her feeling at the time at all; I know she’s written about them since on Patreon with the benefit of hindsight and I imagine that writing will help clear things up for me, but I don’t believe I can be blamed for my initial takeaway.
Sean: So are you excited for the next batch of Doctor Who by Old Man McChibbers?
David: We decided near the start of this project that I’d watch all of Who up through Kerblam!, and after that we’d leave it in my hands whether to continue linearly or instead go for a change in format.
So Sean, how’ll we be structuring things going forward?
Sean: Veronica says you’re a coward for not committing to the bit.
David: And Ritesh says if I did I’d be a masochist.
Sean: Well in that case, the plan going forward is I’ll give David some summaries of the episodes from a given batch, which he’ll react to. Alongside those, David will watch some stories from the era that are important. Because he must suffer through The Battle of Rank and File Bullshit.
But before we get to that, we’re going to take the first of two break posts from the Chibnall era wherein we talk about good things that are still Doctor Who. (One of these will be for historical reasons that involve “London, 1965!” without directly involving that story.)
The first of these will, of course, be a jubilant affair! A celebration of the titular character. Featuring returning baddies, a Doctor Who that wears a coat of many colors, and a lot of laughs that I’m sure David will love talking about.
I am of course talking about All-Star Superman.
Next time: With special guest Evan “Doc” Shaner.