Whowatch Part 25: The Finale
The Gunfighters
Carnival of Monsters
Paradise Towers
Remembrance of the Daleks
The Star Beast
Wild Blue Yonder
The Giggle
The Church on Ruby Road
Sean: And here we are. At the end of all things. The Final Whowatch. To join us for the last waltz, we have long time guest Eliza Edwards!
Eliza: Sean! David! Thanks for having me back for my fourth go-around. Just think of me as Whowatch’s David Tennant — I’ll pop back on no matter the occasion! And what an occasion we have before us today!
David: Behind us now lay hundreds of episodes of cheap British sci-fi I’d avoided for years - like the lead, it turns out I was just taking the long way around. But back at the start of that road before our main and final attractions, we have The Gunfighters.
Sean: People who are often wrong about television have made it their duty to proclaim The Gunfighters, out of all Doctor Who, to be the single worst story. Which is saying a lot considering the various candidates for that position, even if you only look at the Classic Era.
Eliza: Absolute gibbering lunacy, that take. The Gunfighters is a total hoot, a fantastic script by Daniel Cotton elevated by a number of talented & game guest performances, and a compelling Howard Hawks-esque aesthetic to the filmmaking. I haven’t seen a ton of Hartnell — I’ve watched, lemme see, An Unearthly Child/100,000 BC, The Edge of Destruction, The Aztecs, and The Sensorites — but I’m quite tempted to delve further into his tenure if this serial was anything to go by.
Sean: In many regards, this is another in a long tradition of Doctor Who jumping into various other television shows. You have the period costume piece of Black Orchid, the reality television of Bad Wolf, and the tv budget Quatermass of the entire Pertwee era. But here, we have Doctor Who doing a tv western complete with musical numbers, bastard cowboys, and frankly disturbing violence.
Eliza: The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon! Proof to anyone who was ticked off by the musical number in The Church on Ruby Road that this is one of the show’s oldest tricks! (And darn catchy, to boot!)
Sean: It’s an absolutely delightful song, like literally every single song made for Doctor Who. Even Doctor in Distress has its relative charm (assuming one removes it from the historical context and ignores the Ian Levine of it all).
David: Charming’s the word for it, but it’s also an episode culminating in a kind of nihilism that’s particularly interesting in terms of where ‘The Doctor’ as a figure is going to be going - Hartnell after an episode of ineffectual tut-tutting is given one last chance to convince someone of the futility of violence, actually succeeds, but the whole thing happens anyway because he’s simply too late. He’s not the guy yet who saves the day when everything comes crashing down, he’s the guy who’ll have no idea what Bill’s talking about when she says there’s a reason after all Good has a chance at triumphing over Evil. It even has a Twilight Zone-esque ironic ending in the form of its setup for the next episode, his promise of a utopian future beyond the senseless horror and brutality they’ve just witnessed giving way to a tomorrow that appears to be even more thoroughly wrecked by all our worst impulses than the time they’re escaping! Bearing a, uh, rather unfortunate title.
Eliza: Well, that’s unfortunately not the last we’re gonna see of Unfortunate Racial Politics in the Classic Who serials we watched for today.
Sean: Or even the one we didn’t, but still have to talk about anyways.
Eliza: Going back to what you were talking about regarding the Doctor’s narrative presence, he’s tremendously marginalized over the course of the story, to the point where you could quite convincingly argue that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday both are closer to being the story’s protagonist than he is. Normally, I’d find myself a little bummed by that — I like watching the Doctor take control of a situation and imperiously save the day! But for this story, where all the characters exist on a continuum of brutality, ego, and overconfidence, it feels right that the Doctor can’t wrestle the story away from its participants. He almost ends up acting like a Greek Chorus, similar to the Ballad itself. Hartnell gave a spirited, irritable-but-warm performance, despite a few notable line flubs, and the running gag of different characters giving the Doctor a gun to his continual annoyance and chagrin is a beat that’d work just as well in the modern show (imagine Matt Smith holding a gun as though he’s never seen one before in his life, and we can all pretend that A Town Called Mercy doesn’t exist).
Sean: In many regards, A Town Called Mercy is what The Gunfighters would look like if the boring Doctor Who fans what don’t care for The Gunfighters got their way. A pat melodrama about how sad the western man is and there’s no musical numbers and… I actually don’t remember anything about that episode other than the guy from Farspace was in it.
Eliza: The Gunfighters is very much “the Doctor lands in Rio Bravo”, as opposed to “A Western turns into a Doctor Who story,” and in fairness I understand why people want the latter! But the setting has almost zero texture or specificity, whereas this serial utterly luxuriates in all the trappings & rhythms of a classic Western.
Sean: I wouldn’t say Rio Bravo, as there’s not a lot of team building in this story. It’s more television westerns like F Troop, Bonanza, or Bounty Law. In fact, in many regards Bounty Law was the Western answer to Doctor Who. A series of adventures following a lone gunman traveling the west without a set supporting cast. Only a new world to uncover with each episode (but still a general formula for some of the episodes that you can have some fallbacks like Base Under Siege). What separates Doctor Who from these adventure serials (that The Prisoner’s brilliant Living in Harmony doesn’t capture) is the presence of the companion. Peter Purves is a delight as Steven, spending the vast majority of the story tied up by the baddies trying to survive with quick wit and a song in his heart. And for all that Dodo doesn’t work as a character, Jackie Lane is still delightful in the part. I especially love the bit where she holds Doc Holiday at gunpoint, clearly having no idea what she’s doing, then returns the gun to him. Delightful.
Eliza: That scene’s a total charmer. And I suppose I can forgive Dodo’s complete dunderheadedness throughout the serial on the grounds that if Steven can be a himbo, she can behave like a bimbo without our casting judgment. (Is… is this my misogynist era?)
David: Anyone on Doctor Who is allowed to be an idiot at any time for any reason, it’s fine.
Sean: I’m pretty sure most characters on Doctor Who are idiots 90% of the time. Doctor Who especially.
Eliza: Extremely true, carry on.
David: I liked “Doctor…who?” “Yes, quite right.” I don’t know how often they went to that well in the early years, but in the grand scheme of things one of the first times and somehow it’s funny every time.
Sean: I’m pretty sure Doctor Who didn’t have a name imposed onto him until Pertwee. Speaking of whom…
David: So IS that blackface?
Sean: About as much as the original Klingon designs are.
Eliza: It’s not great, whatever it is!! (Not remotely helped by the cameo from the Orgons in Ep. 1.) It’s also definitely intentional on Robert Holmes’ part, right? I mean, the functionaries on Inter Minor are explicitly race-baiting, immigration-fearing eugenicists, and the Major makes a snide comment about how he wouldn’t trust an Indian servant to cook his meals. Blended together with the Miniscope and the serial’s musings on exploitation of intelligent life forms, there’s clearly a deep thematic interest in these questions, but there’s… virtually zero resolution for any of those ideas?
Sean: On the other hand, Robert Holmes also wrote The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Which, ah… What can I say but YIKES.
Eliza: [sounds of hideous groaning are heard] Well, uh, at least the non-racist bits were really good? (A qualifier you’ve gotta affix to a depressing number of Holmes scripts.)
David: At the last, I can say Pertwee’s grown on me, and getting to see her properly in her element in a way I don’t recall The Three Doctors having space for, Katy Manning’s Jo is a delight, as is the owner of the Miniscope who kinda looks like Jackie Earle Haley.
This one’s kinda got it all - Robert Holmes space bureaucracy! Excellent sets! Good effects, except when they’re not! A clever structure of the small quirk of capturing Doctor Who for a sideshow leading via multiple degrees of remove to an alien civilization nearly being overthrown without him having any idea! The memory wipes leading to what amounts to real-life stealth mechanics! A terribly prophetic line in “They last forever, that’s why they went bankrupt”! And the real zoo, as ever, being…SOCIETY.
Eliza: An interesting tidbit I’m borrowing from the Eruditorum: this serial was actually constructed around its structural gimmick, in a way that may have been a first for the show! See, producer Barry Letts had the bright idea of splitting a four-parter equally between two locations + guest casts, because that would allow the show to pay each set of guest actors for only two weeks’ work instead of the whole four. So he put perhaps the cleverest of his regular writers on the case, and even bothered to direct it himself! The behind-the-scenes effort pays off in spades; beyond Holmes’ usual magic with droll wit and sparkling supporting characters, the location work Letts does on the SS Bernice is fantastic — the sections shot on film absolutely shine on rewatch. Also, while I’m fairly cold on the Third Doctor, I ironically find Pertwee far more engaging in episodes where the Doctor travels throughout spacetime than he is as UNIT’s Chief Scientific Advisor.
David: In that context him being smugly above his surroundings conveys him being brilliant and bold instead of being a dick to his coworkers.
Sean: I didn’t actually get a chance to rewatch this one for the Whowatch due to Christmas hijinks (I remember liking it when I watched it a little over a decade ago), so I’ll just say that the monsters in this episode are called Drashigs and the name came from Holmes making an anagram for what they look like: dish rags.
Eliza: A legend. Before we move on from this one, unless David’s got anything else to add -
David: No, it’s the next one I’ll be sounding like a lunatic about.
Eliza - I just want to shout-out the wonderful work done by the supporting players in this. While none of them bear quite as much narrative weight as Earp or Holliday did in The Gunfighters, the serial would crumble to pieces if Leslie Dwyer wasn’t able to make Vorg simultaneously a complete piece of shit and a font of charisma (almost like the character’s supposed to be a reflection of the Doctor!), and Michael Wisher is a delicious snob as Kalik.
Sean: Of note is Ian Marter, who would go on to return to Doctor Who as some imbecile. I remember him being pretty good as the ship’s captain here.
Eliza: Alright, now I wanna hear David sound like a lunatic.
David: So I completely love Paradise Towers’ unhinged absurdist society, from its lesbian cannibals to PEX.
Eliza: ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
Sean: RED KANGS ARE BEST KANGS!
David: But going by a casual search, I don’t get the sense it being a bonkers religious allegory is a common read on it?
Sean: David. It’s children’s panto JG Ballard. But do go on.
David: After being created by Kroagnon - sounding like Cro-Magnon, from which humanity stemmed - the creator of PARADISE (Towers) became furious that they in fact made use of what he made, i.e. they bit into the fruit (“Your usual failures as an architect - not making allowances for people”). Abandoning humanity, they go mad in a search for meaning, the children forming their ritualized gangs, the elderly their neighborly rituals thinly masking their hideous brutality, the soldiers forming their hyper-bureaucratic fascist cult, the failed coward trying to reinvent his place in society as a necessary one. In a perverse inversion, the top of the tower is ‘Hell’, home to a demon, while the bottom is where ‘God’ dwells, who incarnates himself into mortal flesh to bring about his terrible vision for the world until being overthrown by the weakest and most despised among them.
Sean: Yeah, that sounds about right for a description of children’s panto JG Ballard. More specifically, Paradise Towers is a riff on the novel High-Rise, wherein an apartment complex slowly descends into madness such that the book opens with the line, “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” It’s especially notable for being adapted a few years back into a spectacular film by noted filmmaker Ben Wheatley.
Eliza: I’ll note that the caretakers in particular brought to mind The Hand in Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta (Cartmel was apparently a huge fan). A group of petulant little fascists whose leader has an extremely Oedipal relationship with the central computer that acts as the society’s functional dictator.
Sean: I love the cannibal grannies who try to eat Mel. There’s something delightful about these catty, queer women who have nothing better to do than gossip about people they never actually meet and make traps to eat children who are too clever to fall for them. Even then, the traps often turn out to be ‘Throw a net at ‘em.’ They are just so delightfully cruel.
Also of note is Mel, who is given a good script for the first time in her tenure as a companion, and Bonnie is able to use the material to her advantage.
Eliza: Mel’s fascinating as a counterpoint to the Doctor in this episodes, as they present alternative modes of engaging with foreign cultures as a privileged British traveler: the Doctor takes Paradise Towers on its own terms, curious, eager, and respectful in his initial engagements with the complex’s residents; Mel, on the other hand, waltzes in with ironclad expectations surrounding culture & comfort, stumbling blindly into danger because of her insistence on treating Paradise Towers as though it were just another sprawling English concrete complex. Luckily, Langford is charismatic enough that I never found myself disliking Mel even as I wanted to scream at her through my laptop.
Sean: This is just a delightful episode to watch. I love the aesthetics of the crumbling ruin of what was already a pretty crap living space. The implications of the world when you stop and think about Pex for a moment. The sheer catty brutality of teen girls who hate you. There are some problems with the episode to be sure. The resolution with Part 4 could have used another draft (or, more appropriately, another two episodes). The Kangs, Rezzies, and Caretakers coming together doesn’t really work when you take it all in. But really, what you want is more time in this mad, mad world of killer cleaning robots, naff failbois, and mad zombie dictators.
I should also note that I podcasted this serial a few years back with fellow Whowatcher, Freezing Inferno. The audio is absolute crap, especially on my end, but we still had a lot of fun. Though I think I had more fun on The Angels Take Manhattan. At least there, I was actually coherent.
Eliza: One last comment and then I’ll give David some space to talk: this episode clearly had a profound impact on both Davies and Moffat; you can see exactly where Davies starts to envision what will become The Long Game (Simon Pegg is definitely playing a Chief Caretaker-esque villain), and the messy resolution you just mentioned seems a plausible inspiration for Davies playing out The Long Game’s consequences over the course of Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways. And of course, Moffat straight-up rewrote this episode with The Beast Below, from the Doctor’s idiosyncratic navigation of an alien space (and let me also just say, Sylvester McCoy absolutely kills it in this serial; he’s already in complete command of the character) to the plot of children being disappeared by the bizarre robot servants of a fascist state. It might also be one of the best-directed Classic Who serials; Nicholas Mallet conjures a truly impressive sense of scale with his sets, and the camera is a dynamic participant in the storytelling, with visual reveals used to great effect throughout. On this viewing, Paradise Towers leapt up in my estimation from ‘underrated gem’ to ‘sincerely a top ten Classic Who serial.’ I want more Doctor Who like this.
David: I don’t know that I have much more to say, beyond that I too would happily have gone another episode or two of luxuriating in this particular flavor of social nightmare. I also of all things really liked the perfectly-chosen blood red coloring of the marker as Kroagnon marks off his slaughter floor by floor, makes it look like the tower is filling up with pools of gore.
And in our final classic Who, what has in hindsight to be considered the first shot in the Time War is fired. Was this The Doctor’s first genocide or was that already a go-to?
Sean: Officially, this is the first. Unofficially… Well, let’s just say we’re not watching Warriors of the Deep and leave it there.
Eliza: For me, the difference between Paradise Towers and Remembrance of the Daleks is the equivalent of the difference between Davies’ first and fourth seasons. The former is crackling with a frenzied adrenaline, bombarding the audience with strange imagery and striking concepts, whereas the latter has honed its style to a razor’s edge, executing its ambitions with utter confidence and self-assurance. Remembrance of the Daleks just works, in the way that say Human Nature/Family of Blood or Day of the Doctor just work, where it almost feels redundant to bother listing everything it does well because it’s so self-evident.
Sean: There’s a degree to which Remembrance of the Daleks is a tad bit overrated. Not that it isn’t great or even deserves its spot as one of the top 10 Doctor Who stories. But rather it’s the rallying point for a specific type of Doctor Who fan who proselytizes it to such a degree that being snippy about its quality is actually worthwhile. And the core failing of the story is, well, race. It’s very much a bit undercooked on the thematic parallels between the Dalek civil war occurring between the Black Daleks and the White Daleks in comparison with the general racism of 1960s England. There’s not a connective tissue between the ideas, and what’s there is engaged with to the level of ‘And then, Ace threw the No Coloureds sign onto the floor in disgust.’ It’s not as bad as, say, ‘The Doctor and her fam have to do a racism for the sake of history.’ It’s just an undercooked element in a story with probably fifty great ideas.
Eliza: Remembrance of the Daleks is about racism the way The Star Beast is about transphobia (but I’m getting ahead of myself).
David: On a lesser note of critique, have to mention I picked up a bit of allusion to The Cartmel Masterplan, which forced me to remember The Cartmel Masterplan was a thing. Otherwise however, four episodes of just about nothing but stuff to love. I got to see Ace in her element for the first time here with her Dalek-bashing baseball bat, and my favorite moment there was her excitedly declaring a piece of technology “Unsophisticated but impressive!” because she so wants The Doctor to think she’s smart and cool without ever coming in spitting distance of actually saying she values his approval that much. I liked the one scientist’s defeated exasperation, sitting for a bit with the idea of someone’s whole conception of how the universe works and their place in untangling those lovely mysteries getting shot all to hell by this genre asshole galavanting through and upending everything.
Eliza: “This genre asshole” is my new social media bio.
David: The secret golden Dalek plunger. THE AMAZING DESIGN AND VOICE OF THE EMPEROR, such that I was actually pretty disappointed that it was Davros instead of a distinct subcategory of Dalek we could potentially ever see again.
Sean: I mean, if the Nation estate wasn’t such fucking pricks about it, you would.
David: And of course the note that The Doctor is around 900, which immediately set in motion the old ‘what is Batman’s exact timeline’ brain given Eccleston is supposed to be 904 until I accepted the choice was going into that or ever knowing sleep again.
Sean: Doctor Who was also thousands of years old when Jon Pertwee was around. Though, as one would expect of fandom, the Doctor’s age being wrong is a sign that Davies, Moffat, and the lot should be cast aside and the Big Finish people be given all the money.
Eliza: Final lil’ note on the episode: I love, LOVE, that the production team used so many damn explosives while filming the initial skirmish between the Renegade and Imperial Daleks that the cops thought there was a terrorist attack going on and shut filming down.
Sean: Now then… BEEP THE MEEP!
David: Once again the lead story of a Doctor Who Marvel(-owning companies’) #1! Oh Davies.
Sean: It’s a shame they didn’t have Stan Lee present this one.
I’ve already podcasted about this episode before with Elizabeth Sandifer and former Whowatch guest Ritesh Babu, so I’ll let you two take point on this delightful story.
Eliza: The Tennant specials occupy an odd liminal space; they’re simultaneously a eulogy for Doctor Who (2005-2022), a survey of its triumphs, failures, and promises, and an overture for Doctor Who (2023+). As I recall, a common thread in the first batch of reviews for this episode was the fear that Davies was just returning to his well of old tricks to restore the show to its former glory — a fear that seemed to stem from the belief that this was predominantly acting as an overture for RTD2. But that’s not how I read it at all — when Davies started teasing the details of the three specials, from his hyping up of Wild Blue Yonder as something the show’s never done before to his description of The Giggle as an “absolutely mad” episode in which “the very laws of reality break down,” I developed a theory about this trio of episodes: it’s Davies doing an archetypical episode in the style of each of the 2005-2022 showrunners. So The Star Beast isn’t just vintage Davies, it’s Davies in 2023 doing Davies in 2008. Is it self-indulgent? Sure, yes, whatever. Is it also an absolute hoot? Of COURSE.
David: We’ll elaborate as we go along but I 100% subscribe to this theory. David Tennant screaming at the universe how unfair it is to him that he’s going to have to kill his best friend, along with being the king of WE’RE SO BACK moments, could not be more 2008 Doctor Who…immediately followed of course by I GAVE AWAY…ALL MY MONEY!!!!!!!!!!
Y’know who didn’t give away all their money though? The people who make Doctor Who, oh my god everything’s so shiny now and thank god they went to Talalay to show it off properly from word go. My parents think it looks too expensive now though!
Eliza: Talalay’s presence here is just completely heartwarming. In the November issue of Doctor Who Magazine, Talalay revealed that she’s in recovery after years of battling lymphoma, which finally went into remission right as the hiring process for the specials began (the proximity was so tight that Talalay wore a wig to her Zoom meeting with Davies so that he wouldn’t be concerned for her health). According to everyone on the production, the shooting of the episode took place in as supportive & nurturing a creative environment as possible, and Talalay and Davies both credit the process with helping Talalay recover her energy & vitality (Davies in fact explicitly said, “We were Rachel’s post-cancer care.”)
Talalay isn’t here to showboat — the script isn’t a Heaven Sent or a The Doctor Falls, requiring heavily foregrounded genre stylings; instead, she’s getting a second crack at a big alien invasion UNIT story in the vein of Dark Water/Death in Heaven, only with money and Tennant/Tate. She’s clearly having so much fun blowing up tanks and having puppets get put on trial in a parking garage and having Tennant and Tate get their big emotional reunion while pulling a Kirk/Spock at the end of Wrath of Kahn. It’s probably as far into four-quadrant blockbuster territory as I’d like the show to go, but that’s very much the point of the exercise — this is Doctor Who as big, bold, bombastic Saturday night family viewing. It’s playing to the back rows, but everyone’s getting a helluva show.
David: That’s wonderful to hear about Talalay, and also…y’know, I don’t have that childhood association, I only started watching Doctor Who in the last year and a half.
But oh god My Doctor’s back. Tennant isn’t playing 10 here; in his ‘debut’ in the 2023 BBC Children In Need short (an absolutely god-tier pisstake) he’s largely riffing on Whittaker’s persona. And while maybe I still haven’t internalized Smith enough to pick up distinct notes of his in here, Capaldi’s searing intensity and understated but profound compassion are here on full display and, in blunting the worst of 10’s nature, gives a really well rounded ‘platonic ideal’ take on the The Doctor of ‘05 onwards, which of course Tennant would have to be the face of. But god he is also still very much that swaggering self-righteous brilliant idiot charmer so angry at the endless injustices of the cosmos whenever he isn’t getting distracted by something shiny and I couldn’t have been happier.
Sean: The Smith stuff is mainly in the disinterest in technobabble and his physicality.
Eliza: So you both know I’m a Smith girl. And moreover, I’m a Smith girl who came to the show in 2013 — right at the height of the Tumblr fandom wars.
Sean: Good times. [Reminisces while screams of horror play in the background]
Eliza: Which is to say, my adoration of Smith, 11, and the Moffat era all developed in very specific reaction to the things I disliked about 10 and the Davies era. I didn’t have any issues with Tennant’s performance, obviously, but it seemed much more straightforward than the off-kilter eccentricity Smith infused the role in. Then, as the years rolled by, I fell in love with Shakespeare, and it was while watching the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions of Hamlet and Richard II that I fell head-over-heels for Tennant as an actor. Since then, he’s absolutely skyrocketed to being probably my favorite leading man, and I’ve followed him from Jessica Jones to Good Omens to Des to Staged (and even looped back to Casanova!). So I have spent years plagued by the dissonance between my unequivocal adoration for Tennant and my… complicated relationship with the Tenth Doctor. All of which is to say: I GET A WHOLE NEW TENNANT INCARNATION WITHOUT ALL THE SHIT I HATE ABOUT TEN!!! It makes me absolutely giddy with joy.
Sean: Before we get into the adventures he goes on, consider Rose Noble. Well meaning on Davies part, overall delightful, and is definitely coming back given the trailer.
Eliza: Alright, as one of Whowatch’s resident trans girls, I should probably pass judgment on whether or not this is ‘good’ representation. And I think I come down on… it being ‘solid’! For one thing, Yasmin Finney is just an immediately endearing screen presence, and you instantly see why Davies would want her back. I’m a bit ambivalent over Davies’ choice to include Rose’s deadname in the episode, but from his post-airing conversation with trans extended Whoniverse writer Juno Dawson, he clearly put a lot of thought into the choice and I understand where it comes from on both a dramatic and logistical level. I think the only bit that fully tips into bathos is Donna’s line about “male-presenting Time Lords,” which weirdly blurs gender presentation and identity together in ways I don’t think Davies intended. But on the whole? Tons and tons of transphobic bastards were enraged by Rose’s presence, while all the trans girls in the audience got to have David Tennant become their loving adopted TV uncle. I can’t help but love that.
(Also worth noting: Tennant has a trans daughter and has frequently made appearances in support of trans rights in the UK.)
David: Paired with, unbelievably, a capital q Quality assuming-pronouns bit. Which leads us into The Meep, who is awful and sucks, and folks, we love The Meep.
Sean: BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP! BEEP THE MEEP!
Eliza: HAIL TO THE MOST HIGH!!! Perfect, perfect reintroductory villain for the show — obscenely silly, hugely endearing, and surprisingly threatening all in one. This is what Chibnall wishes he coulda pulled off with the P’ting in The Tsuranga Conundrum.
Sean: So that’s what that episode was called.
Eliza: I’m not entirely proud I remembered it off the top of my head.
David: Also perfect for its new setting in not only being a Scrunkly Disney Baby gone horribly wrong, but on the off chance some folks started with this rather than Gatwa, The Meep’s initial persona is exactly the kind of keening, syrupy sentimental goofiness newcomers might have expected from the show (not that it’s in fact adverse to that, and not that the designers and Miriam Margoyles don’t deliver one to effectively tug at the heartstrings for as long as necessary) only to pull the rug out and show just how gleefully mean Who can get.
Eliza: The poor Wrarths! Such sweet gentle bois with them big guns and insectoid faces.
Sean: I love how they look like crap Doctor Who baddies. Just a bunch of guys in rubber suits with mouths that barely move and literal bug eyes. And the way they fly feels like it came straight out of a low budget Tokusatsu show, so it’s perfect for Doctor Who.
Eliza: Do we have anything more to add about this hour of frothy fun, or shall we invite Sean back into full participation with ‘Davies does Every-Moffat-Showcase-Episode Everywhere All At Once’ in Wild Blue Yonder?
David: Few more things - it’s a necessity given they only briefly had Cribbins, but I like that Wilfred is teased here like goddamn Thanos, they knew what we were all waiting for. RTD doing ‘what if a RTD Bad Mom tried to be good’ with Sylvia is incredibly effective, largely off the back of Jacqueline King’s performance as someone who with time and effort has largely paved over her old worst instincts.
Sean: You really can’t do worse mom than It’s a Sin’s bad mom.
David: And this new opening might be my favorite? Combining those big gorgeous cosmic vistas from the second Smith opening - now more lushly realized than ever thanks to the mouse’s cash infusion - as paired with a TARDIS moving through the screen almost playfully as it dramatically unfurls the actor credits before bursting through them into the unknown. Lovely realization of much of Who’s tonal scope in a concise visual.
Sean: And for Wilf, they actually did want to have more with the old bugger. But due to his health, he was only able to do the one scene. And perhaps that’s where we should start before getting into the horror of Wild Blue Yonder. In many regards, Wilf has a minor part, but it’s still extremely heartwarming to see him in the episode. It doesn’t feel like elder abuse the way William Russell’s appearance in The Power of the Doctor did. Bernard Cribbins feels like he’s aware and capable of making acting decisions with his face. And what a warm face he has. The delight Wilf shows in seeing Doctor Who again is such a treat. We can feel the years of guilt wash away into relief.
David: They had all of seconds to work with and it’s everything you want it to be. “Now nothing is wrong. Nothing in the whole wide world.”
Sean: Moving back to the episode proper… Food Fight meets The Thing certainly wasn’t on my bingo card for the Shin Davies Era, but I’m not complaining.
David: That’s what you want though, right? If you’re getting Tennant and Tate back, yes you want them to knock it out of the park with all the stuff they necessarily have to do for a 60th anniversary special, but also you want to see what them doing A Doctor Who again looks like now, with space and resources and talent to make it a real damn good A Doctor Who.
Eliza: Moreover, you really want a proper acting showcase for these two. A lot of fans were a little nonplussed over Tennant and Tate returning, on the grounds that it was nostalgia for a very specific era of the show. What they’re missing is the other big reason you bring Donna Noble back: Catherine Tate is one of the three best actresses to ever play a companion on the show, alongside Elizabeth Sladen and Jenna Coleman. She’s absolutely imperial when you give her some meaty material, and she rises to the occasion with a barnstorming performance, in absolute lockstep with Tennant at the top of his game.
Sean: I love the bit where Donna’s just motor mouthing her entire history to the Not!Doctor Who to distract him before noting that his tie has disappeared from the ground. (And Tennant’s subsequent read of “Oh, I see… When something is gone, it keeps existing.” is horrifying.) The Not!Donna laughs with cruel glee at Doctor Who’s grief over the Flux is chilling.
Eliza: A minor moment she sold with aplomb was her reaction to the TARDIS’s disappearance, which is the only time across these specials where her irritated fondness for the Doctor tips into genuine anger, forcing the Doctor to shift from ‘well you have to admit it’s like mostly your fault’ into actually being a good & emotionally nurturing friend.
Sean: Captain Bojack Horsegirl is one of those offhand ideas you wouldn’t think would have weight, but is tragic when you come to understand its implications.
Eliza: Oh, if we’re touching on the story’s resolution, is now where we talk about all the Moffat episodes this is riffing on? Because holy MOLEY is this crammed to the gills with Moffat showpiece references. We’ve got incomprehensible eldritch horrors (Blink), wandering around an empty spaceship with lots of banter & joy as the danger mounts (Girl in the Fireplace), a ship working under rules of bizarre time dilation (World Enough and Time), the seemingly-abandoned spaceship at the end of the universe with a solitary invader (Listen), and of course the whole structural gimmick of ‘Isolate the Leads and Have ‘Em Act Their Socks Off’ (Heaven Sent).
David: I wanted to mention that one Tennant read too - absolutely chilling - along with Tate’s equally unsettling “Love letters don’t carry very far.” And in the ‘A Doctor Who’ category, along with Captain Bojack Horsegirl, we also get a richly realized but also delightfully fake as hell massive spaceship with tunnels that appear to be operating on McDonalds Playplace principles. This is still Doctor Who as hell amidst the cosmic terror and narrative flair.
And hell yes, hadn’t picked up on all of those parallels given how plainly this draws comparisons to Davies’ own Midnight and how much attention that draws, but this is as ostentatiously showy with its cleverness and play with the ‘rules’ of Who as the best of Moffat, and just as willing to turn on a dime to the likes of ‘and then The Doctor and companion get chased by vampire Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon versions of themselves’. Another one where I could scarcely be happier, and one of the ones where I have a hard time enumerating virtues so self-evident. This is simply what The Good Stuff looks like on this TV show.
Eliza: I will say, the plot resolution is tidy but the moment where the time dilation crystalizes in the Doctor’s mind isn’t really a punch-the-air moment the way it would have been under Moffat’s pen. But that just means that this is an A instead of an A+, no reason to be churlish.
Sean: It’s such a good episode where everyone involved is firing on all cylinders.
Before I forget, Eliza, as the only one of us dumb enough to actually watch the entirety of Flux, what the fuck happened?
Eliza: Oh dear. It went fucking bananas bugnuts, is the simplest way to put it. The universe-destroying wave of antimatter that wipes out approximately half of all known life in the universe is defeated when the Doctor maneuvers the Sontaran Battle Fleet in front of the Flux wave and apparently that’s enough for it to be satiated? And I guess a snake dude from space went back in time to secretly found & sabotage UNIT, but that’s fucking stupid and we’re gonna just ignore that. All of which is to say, I cannot believe that Davies took on the challenge of substantively unpacking the Doctor’s emotional reaction to all this inane bullshit instead of just casting it aside with a snarky one liner, but I guess Davies has just got that dog in him.
Sean: Russell T Davies shower thoughts include contemplating what to do with the Rani and which pop song he should use next time a baddie does unspeakably fucked up things.
David: This is something I talked a lot about with Ritesh and Sean when Wild Blue Yonder dropped, and the proposition of ‘The Flux is the new Time War’ is insane but also just fairly economical, both in terms of ‘this is David Tennant Doctor Who, you want him to feel guilty about his part in incomprehensible cosmic horrors’, and as shorthand for just how much the characters’ been through since The End of Time. You can say ‘half the universe blew up because of bullshit with my mysterious origin’ without having to unpack the actual minutia of Chibnall nonsense. And speaking of the mysterious origin, as Ritesh noted (and thanks to mostly thus far discarding the actual Chosen One lorebrain details of it all and keeping to the barest version of the concept) RTD basically uses The Timeless Child as a tidy way of updating Who’s narrative engine for the foreseeable future - not the turncoat rascal of an empire when The Doctor’s relationship to Gallifrey as it was already reached a climax in Hell Bent, but its displaced victim seeking a home they’ve never known.
Eliza: It’s 100% the new Time War, but even more than that — the way that the Time War was a metaphor for the Wilderness Years, Davies ingeniously turns the Flux into a metonym for the Chibnall era as a whole: a whirlwind of incomprehensible trauma that’s left the Doctor (ie. Doctor Who (2005-2022) ) utterly shattered in its wake.
David: Yes yes yes, I know he’s buddies with Chris in real life but you could scarcely go more brutal than textually going ‘and then this thing happened which DESTROYED DOCTOR WHO, and we’re going to spend the finale of the series as it has been emotionally unpacking how hard it did that before starting over with a new Season 1 because we can’t move forward as-is’.
Sean: The Giggle is my favorite of the four specials.
It’s an absolute mess of a story where the elements introduced don’t really tie together neatly or even coherently. They’re great elements to be sure, but not all the I’s are dotted. And yet, the episode as a whole just works. It’s too fun to fall apart into the incoherent nonsense of The Timeless Children or Flux. I mean, it has Neil Patrick Harris dressed as a nutcracker dancing to a Spice Girls song while turning men into (still living) balls and bullets into rose petals. It’s just absolute nonsense and I had the biggest smile on my face every minute of it.
Eliza: In the Doctor Who Magazine issue marking Steven Moffat’s departure, Rachel Talalay quoted a note he gave to an editor which lodged itself in her mind: “The logic is flexible, but the poetry is immutable.” We’ll surely delve deeper into that as we discuss the specifics of the climax, but that’s the rule governing the entire episode. The plot is omnishambles, but the emotional logic is ironclad.
Before we touch on the grand climax, I want to spend a second lauding the extraordinary opening 20 minutes. Davies conjures a sincerely terrifying and utterly plausible apocalypse — the idiot yelling at the guy driving a car because it’s his road, goddammit, is scary in a way that the Daleks could never be — and the first ten minutes in the gorgeous new UNIT headquarters just keep escalating: Jemma Redgrave is on absolute fire during her xenophobic and ableist remarks while under the effects of the Toymaker.
Sean: And, of course, the return of Trinity Goddamn Motherfucking Wells as an Alex Jones type. Just the best use of that character. No notes.
Eliza: (As a matter of fact, all the blatant setup for the UNIT spinoff did a shockingly good job of making me want to watch a Doctor Who spinoff, a television genre with fewer hits than misses.)
David: I want it just for The Vlinx!
Sean: The Vlinx! What a delightful young lad. He has a future in this industry. He might even surpass K-9 or, dare I say, Charl.
Eliza: But by far the scariest part of the episode for me was the Giggle itself. Y’see, I’m a choir girl to my core — seven years in school choir between sixth grade and senior year of high school, on top of four years of operatic training and ensemble work in three school musicals. Which is to say, the C Major arpeggio is lodged deep in the recesses of my brain; it was the first thing I sang multiple times a week for over half a decade. So when Donna began charting the structure of the sound waves on paper, and Bonnie Langford sang the initial arpeggio, I fully froze in my seat.
Seriously: I have never, never been even a tenth as terrified by an episode of Doctor Who as I was hearing that arpeggio sang over, and over, and over again, before David Tennant gravely declared it the underlying musical mind-control mechanism the Toymaker used to drive humanity insane. I swear, the blood drained from my face. I shivered. So, uh… good job, Russell. That was sincerely upsetting.
Sean: Davies, for all that he is a soppy romantic (and this episode is, if nothing else, written by a soppy romantic) has a streak of raw anger and nihilism at the potential cruelty humanity is capable of. It’s what makes the best moments of Years and Years shine through the mudding nature of his romanticism. It’s certainly filtered through the lens of children’s telly, but you can feel the raw anger in writing the Prime Minister just stating the quiet part out loud. (And Donna, of course, rolls her eyes and notes nothing changed there, which feels right for her.) At the heart of it all is a giggling puppet.
David: An entire world running on the cartoon dipshit logic of the children who’d play The Toymaker’s games, and one, as you and Donna and The Doctor all point out, not one really as functionally different as we’d hope. But then, this is the only way it could end. For this is in many ways The Final Doctor Who Adventure, and it brings him up against his greatest enemy of all: his native medium of television, turning everyone into complete assholes. And then he beats it so that’s why he gets to retire and not have to be on TV anymore.
Sean: William Blake, understanding the mavity of the situation, played the Toymaker’s game, won, and that’s why Sir Isaac Newton looks like that now.
Eliza: An understated aspect of the specials is how well it captures the disorientation a lot of people felt after coming out of quarantine. Consider: The Star Beast is pre-quarantine times, with challenges & danger & drama but ultimately contained within a recognizable landscape. Then Wild Blue Yonder is the quarantines themselves, everyone trapped in isolation while plagued by their anxieties & regrets. And then The Giggle is post-quarantine, with people emerging from their homes only to find that everyone else has seemingly gone insane, with virtually zero regard for the notion of community or personal interdependence.
David: Oh that’s real good. On the note of your previously mentioned structure, the Chibnall comparisons here are hyper-visible: a historical factoid kicking off a story driven by the deepest of continuity references and oldhead complaints about everybody spending too much damn time on their phones, with a perfectly contextually vicious little note that The Doctor is “staggering” now. He even gets a fam at the end!
Sean: And, of course, there’s the return of a Classic era companion in the form of Melanie Bush. Who is absolutely delightful here. If we’re being honest, Bonnie doesn’t get a lot of things to do in the story, spending most of it as tech support/gal in the chair. But she’s absolutely delightful. From the aforementioned arpeggio to her relating to Doctor Who about both of them being orphans all the way to the final scene of her being Mad Auntie Mel.
(That said, there’s going to be an awkward conversation at the Former Doctor Who Companion Support Meeting. Especially if 14 comes along.)
Eliza: I was charmed to read in an interview that Langford was delighted that Mel, a computer programmer, is finally seen using a computer in this episode.
Do we want to talk about the Toymaker’s domain for a minute? Because GOD were those puppets freaky.
David: “I thought I was cle-ver! I thought I was cle-ver!” got me cackling in sheer awed horror in the way the best of The Immortal Hulk managed, A+ work, cheers all around. The kind of razors-edge giddy madness you need on the eve of The Doctor deciding after 2000 years that maybe they need to finally take a breath.
Eliza: [whines like a scared dog]
Sean: Practical effects are fucked up. Oh god, the body. Oh god, oh god, the little ones.
Eliza: Donna full-on murdering the puppet mom, then giving the kids a ‘I’ll fuck you up too, just watch me’ glare before she leaves.
Sean: And, of course, there’s the puppet show where Neil Patrick Harris reacts in real time to what happened to Clara.
Eliza: SHE VAS KILT BY A BIRD! :(
David: RTD mentioned Harris coulda played The Doctor in a theoretical American version of the show and god if that ain’t true and also why he works so well as the ultimate nightmare in this. The juggling alone lands like the footsteps of damnation approaching our heroes, and even his unexpected notes of feeling trapped by his godlike (or, well, far more than godlike if you take him at his word on that one) power is the kind of grounding texture you need for a given Doctor. He’s not the kind of Time Lord pull you’d expect for this of all stories, but he’s a magnificent mirror.
Eliza: Davies also does an incredible job writing a full-on Lovecraftian Old One, which as it turns out is a distinct muscle from the incomprehensible horrors of Midnight and Wild Blue Yonder. Tennant’s ruined expression as he remembers falling out of the universe into a dimension governed only by the rules of play instantly sells how deeply and truly fucked our protagonists and humanity as a whole are.
Sean: The difference here is there’s a sense of the known to something like the Toymaker that the creature from Midnight and the Not Things from Wild Blue Yonder don’t have. The Old Ones may not have comprehensible shapes, but they have names. They have implications. We know they do not regard humanity with anything bar apathy. The Toymaker, meanwhile, is driven by cruelty for the sake of itself. Seeing the world as one big game where there are winners and losers.
David: Even the split-second glitch flashback to the Toymaker’s original appearance helps sell the horror! It may be colorized but it’s so clearly of an entirely different kind of show (there’s TV again!), lightyears apart in terms of visual definition, that the weight of those “so many years” really lands to help convey why this of all the monstrosities he’s faced is the one that has our guy truly and deeply scared as hell.
Sean: And speaking of that original serial…
Eliza: Whelp, we’re back to racism in Classic Who!
David: Davies’ HE USES RACISM AS A WEAPON OF DISORIENTATION comments are a little ehhhhh, the initial thoughtless dick comment in the opening as a reminder that this guy sucks was more than enough in terms of ‘we have to acknowledge this somehow’. But who am I to turn down NPH doing wacky accents?
Sean: If I had a nickel for every time Neil Patrick Harris was dressed as a Nazi in a beloved science fiction project, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice. That said, the vibe I’m getting from Davies comments is more in line with a desire to keep doing Toymaker stories while acknowledging that – despite twenty seven post long threads trying to argue otherwise – this fucker was always racist. Davies didn’t even bother to watch the original serial.
Eliza: King!! While we’re still on the subject of the Toymaker, can we take a second to contemplate how utterly messed up Tennant’s pre-regeneration offer to him is? It’s of course a mirror image of his offer to the Master in Series 3 to travel the universe together, the same way the Spice Girl sequence (best 90 seconds of television this year, full stop) is a remake of the Master’s Scissor Sisters dance, but it’s also infinitely worse. For all that the Master is a bloodthirsty sociopath, the Doctor’s affection for him is profound and earnest. The Toymaker, on the other hand, is a nightmare from the other side of the looking glass. And the Doctor is volunteering to spend infinity — literally forever — in the unspeakable torment of playing endless games with this god of sadism. The Fourteenth Doctor is an utterly broken man, one who’s entirely acquiesced to his self-loathing and internalized helplessness. Indeed, it’s probably worth highlighting that he doesn’t actually save the day in any of the three specials! He’s rendered helpless at the end of The Star Beast until he restores Donna’s memory, where after she takes over the climax. Then, in Wild Blue Yonder, when deciding between the two potential Donnas, he straight-up calls it wrong, only doubling-back to save his real best friend after clocking that her wrist was the wrong size when it’s almost too late. I find it funny that people think Davies is keeping Tennant around as a backup Doctor, because the show could not be more textually clear that this guy does not have it in him to keep being the protagonist of Doctor Who.
Sean: To further emphasize this point, he fucking dies in The Giggle. Doctor Who first loses the game to The Toymaker and then, shortly after confronting the baddie, is immediately hit with a frickin’ laser beam that kills him.
Eliza: And then an entirely normal regeneration occurs which everybody liked and made nobody mad at all.
Sean: So a completely abnormal regeneration then.
David: I love, love love love love love love LOVE, that Davies gives Tennant the exact hack faux-profound ‘Don’t worry, my character arc has come full circle from the end of my last appearance so this is cool and triumphant. Contextually apropos catchphrase!’ pre-regeneration speech anyone on Earth might have guessed is what he’d be sent off with before hitting you upside the head with instead realizing - hey, one last mention of them! - Morrison’s old ‘what if instead of a teamup with past Doctors, we did a teamup with FUTURE ones?!’ pitch in the most unexpected fashion possible.
Eliza: Ncuti just walks away with the episode from that moment on. His overjoyed “Oh, I am me! I am so me!” while wiggling his exposed pecs at a blushing Bonnie Langford, his wry, bemused “push” to 14, and then instantly holding his own toe-to-toe with Tennant AND NPH. It’s a charm offensive to rival The Eleventh Hour.
Sean: Ncuti Gatwa is, of course, delightful. He spends the entire episode without pants, has the most charisma in a room with Neil Patrick Harris and David Tennant in it, and is just a delight. His warm smile, his catty demeanor befitting an old queen like Doctor Who, everything about his Doctor Who seems primed for greatness. For all that Tennant has been playing the hits of the past 18 years, Gatwa feels like the future.
Eliza: He’s also, and I don’t wanna get too controversial here, so fucking hot. I could feel myself going into heat when he showed up on-screen.
Sean: He’s not wearing pants and he has his pecs out. This, more than any other incarnation, is one for the queers. I mean, look at that mustache.
Eliza: Oh, believe me, I am looking. Looking SO Respectfully.
Sean: In interviews, Gatwa compared himself to the equally slutty Pertwee Doctor Who, and I can see it. I certainly hope we get some gurning action from Gatwa that was sorely lacking in Capaldi. Just get some ropes, tie him up, and…
David: On the one hand, it’s very thematically significant that for once two different regeneration eras of The Doctor immediately get along. Both because of course you wanna sell the new guy, but moreover because this by flipping the script is about the promise of the future rather than the regrets and jealousies of the past as in the usual multi-Who stories.
But also the idea of trying to sell a sympathetic protagonist NOT liking Ncuti Gatwa would have been an immediate nonstarter. Jesus. Oh Jesus Christ. He’s. Ahem. He’s very good at this.
Eliza: And then, in perhaps the episode’s peak moment of ‘this is so fucking stupid and I love it so fucking much,’ the two Doctors vanquish the Toymaker with a game of catch. I probably don’t have to explain why this is stupid. But on the flip side — Davies just made the climax of the regeneration of one of the most popular actors to ever play the Doctor a game that any primary school student can play with two of their friends on the playground. That’s perfect, isn’t it? How could you not find that at least a little endearing?
David: You have just hit on a VERY important point I’ll be saving for the end. But before that, we’ve got bigeneration - I know there are already plenty of interpretations even among this group of what it means logistically. I’m team ‘14 splits into 14 and 15’, Eliza’s team ‘once 14 regenerates he’ll be pulled back in time to the moment of bigeneration to become 15’, Davies is team ‘now every Doctor is back so they can go on spinoff adventures if we want to do those, or at least come back with less need for explanation than usual...’
(Eliza: Look, Davies’ “Doctorverse” concept is bugnuts when you try to unpack the in-universe logic, but from our perspective as audience members he’s just literalizing an unspoken, implied storytelling mechanism, ie. the idea that cast members from way back can pop in for a quick hello. His real stroke of genius is using The Two Doctors to justify the Doctorverse, wiping Season 6B off the map in favor of something a million times more ludicrous.
Furthermore, Davies noted that the Doctorverse was inspired by the Spider-Verse and all the MCU’s multiverse shenanigans, which when combined with what Davies refers to as the “bigenerated timeline” might very well just mean that he’s decided to introduce multiverse team-ups into the show’s vernacular.
Sean: I’m just imagining the implications of Davies' comment regarding this happening to every incarnation of Doctor Who leading to the quite funny idea of 12 stealing the TARDIS from 13 as she’s falling down to Earth. Not to mention 13 trying to figure out everything that’s happened to her while resisting the urge to call Yaz and actually deal with her emotions for once instead of just repressing them down deeper and deeper. Oh god, 5 reacting to what 6 does in The Twin Dilemma.
OH GOD, ROMANA!)
David: …but that’s secondary to its larger narrative role in giving weight to this as an end to an era beyond what usual regeneration can provide. You’ve got Gatwa immediately getting to strut his stuff without the ghost of ‘I miss 10/14’ lingering over a few scant seconds and then a proper debut driven by REGENERATION MADNESS. You can’t give Tennant a full tying-off-all-loose-ends arc or it’d feel like Gatwa was getting shafted, and you can’t save it all for Gatwa or else there’s no reason for Tennant to be there besides the blatant fanservice (which, tbf, it’s David Tennant and also the 60th anniversary, but).
What you’ve got here is what amounts to a reprisal of good old The Amazing Story of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue!, a take on a ‘final’ Superman adventure that by splitting our lead allows multiple usually-irreconcilable avenues of catharsis to be achieved. You’ve got Tennant as the end of The Doctor That Was, up against a villain from way back in the first incarnation, going up against TV itself as I mentioned before, and finally having the impossible peaceful ending you crave your guy to have while he gets to deal with his baggage as a mature adult in a way an ongoing adventure hero never can. He even comes truly full circle by once again assuming the archetypal role of ‘the old guy’ as he takes his younger relative on low-key educational adventures. If Moffat’s original planned climax to his era was meant to be ‘ANYONE can be The Doctor’, and Chibnall’s is ‘No, not even another Time Lord in that same body can do it, because The Doctor is a magical superior miracle child everything wonderful springs from’,* Davies ends this incarnation of the series on ‘You can NOT be The Doctor, if you want? Maybe there are better things.’ And at the same time we get the continuation, the even newer than just new but still our old hero The Doctor with their shit finally squared away and off to adventures unknown, free of the accumulated weight of an eternity and leaping into the spotlight to see what getting this right in the 2020s looks like.
*Okay yes obviously that’s not remotely the point but I noticed the parallel immediately after the last Whowatch and it was too funny not to include.
Eliza: On top of the metafiction resonances, it’s such a visceral way of depicting the necessity of letting go of one’s traumas. Tennant’s absolutely “The Doctor That Was,” but he’s also the embodiment of every one of the Doctor’s self-destructive impulses. Even his desire to go straight back into TARDISing is regarded with huge concern from Gatwa and Tate both. Gatwa is the radiant, effervescent lover of life who needs to soak up all the universe has to offer, while Tennant is the man who was willing to spend eternity being tortured by the Toymaker just so long as nobody else got hurt on his watch.
I’m a trans Whovian, so I’m sure readers will be shocked to learn that I have a long history of anxiety, depression, and C-PTSD. Seeing The Doctor literally bifurcate into the best and worst versions of themself, only for the shiny new one to extend his gentle compassion to the worn-out elder, completely wrecked me. I’ve only recently become the kind of person who gets teary-eyed at movies & the like; the only times Doctor Who has ever made me cry were when Amy comforts the Doctor at the end of The Beast Below and when Clara finally accepts 12 for who he is at the end of Deep Breath. In The Giggle, however? Davies got me twice: the first time, with the tender hug and kiss on the forehead Gatwa gave Tennant; the second, when Donna realized that the reason he’d returned to this face was so he could come home. God, I can even feel myself getting a bit weepy as I remember those moments. Just truly exceptional emotional storytelling.
David: “And that’s the adventure.” was what got me. All the rules being broken to speak the one truth a story that needs to go on forever never can, to find something healthier. That maybe the simple, impossible good thing isn’t that after all.
Sean: I don’t really have much to add. A lot of the time in these Whowatches, my role is to let extremely clever people go off on the things they love or learn to love. Occasionally, I am one of those people. But I don’t think I have much to add. The guide has become the guided, we have arrived at the finale. Only one last episode to talk about.
Eliza: I’m blushing. Which, incidentally, was also my reaction to watching Gatwa writhe on the dance floor of a queer bar as Ruby Sunday falls in love.
Sean: What a great moment. It’s something Doctor Who hasn’t done since Bill. And it’s just delightful. I loved Ruby’s band, headlined by a trans woman who isn’t trying to pass, which is a surprising representation you don’t often see. (Though Davies nicked the band idea from his novelization of Rose.) If The Star Beast was for the straights (in an eye poking sense), this is for the queers.
Eliza: Absolutely the moment where I thought to myself, “Oh this is the guy who wrote It’s A Sin.”
Sean: You could see an older Lydia West sipping a martini in the background, watching this new generation of whippersnappers having fun. And then, in the corner of her eye, walks a Patti LuPone type and Lydia opts to have some fun too.
Eliza: Brb gotta go write some fanfiction.
Before we get into all the major parts of the episode, I want to highlight a small touch I loved: Davies has chucked Chibnall’s anamorphic lenses! Instead of that wannabe-prestige 2:35:1 aspect ratio, Mark Tondari shot The Church on Ruby Road with a 1:85:1 aspect ratio on spherical lenses — which is to say, the visual hallmark of the first ten seasons of the 2005-2022 show. No more insecurely competing with the big Netflix series — we’re back to our charming silly lil’ space fantasy!!
Sean: Let’s be honest, competing with the Arrowverse.
David: The nightclub establishes not only Gatwa but the real ethos of this new era. I can babble about thematic resolutions and resonances all the livelong day, but the truth is, RTD has simply gone back to the same core revitalizing innovation he did the first time he had this job:
The Doctor Fucks Now.
The difference is simply that in 2005 that meant him being a tragic hero who despite his shenanigans is smothered beneath the Byronic weight of his blood-soaked past and doomed love, in 2023 that means Ncuti Gatwa electrically flirting with the new companion’s grandma.
Sean: I’m sorry, but look me dead in the eye and tell me 12 doesn’t fuck.
David: 12 makes love.
Sean: …Point.
David: I mean 15 also definitely does.
Sean: But he also Fucks.
Eliza: Davies compared this episode to The Eleventh Hour, and the comparison works on multiple levels, but one of the biggest is that Gatwa gets to just stroll in and be The Doctor, instead of having to labor through an episode of ‘becoming’ himself. And he’s straightforwardly perfect! So far, we don’t have a ton of qualities distinguishing 15’s personality from his predecessors — although he certainly offers up the information that he’s an orphan to Ruby wa-a-ay quicker than they usually would — but Gatwa already completely owns the part. His initial flirtation with Ruby, his incredulity when he sees her dangling off the rope ladder, the musical number, and then, GOD, the ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ finale.
David: I’d say he’s infinitely chiller and more meaningfully self-confident than pretty much any prior incarnation, as visually demonstrated by his sonic screwdriver being the first one ever you couldn’t do this gag with.
Sean: IT EVEN HAS A THREE SETTING!
If I’m being honest, this felt less like The Eleventh Hour and more like The Pilot. Where The Eleventh Hour was out to prove itself in the wake of the highly popular David Tennant leaving the show, here it feels like we’re being presented with a safe pair of hands. This is perhaps fair in the wake of three specials that were doing a lot of showing off, but at the same time it makes Gatwa’s first proper adventure feel a bit muted. This is an odd thing to note with regards to an episode that introduces magic into Doctor Who and has a musical number featuring an army of goblins dressed like pirates.
And I should note that I fucking love the musical number. I’ve had a love for the trumpet being involved in songs since I was a young, watching the Billy and Mandy episode with the giant brain eating rock. I love the apocalyptic trumpets used by They Might Be Giants in their Live version of Istanbul (Not Constantanople). I just love a fucking great use of trumpet.
Eliza: Honestly, d’you know what I think the main reason this episode felt a mite underwhelming? It’s that Gatwa just impales the Goblin King on a church spire instead of getting a classic showpiece monologue the way Tennant, Smith, Capaldi, and Whittaker (well, Chibnall tried, at any rate) did.
Sean: Yeah, it felt like something was missing towards the end. Just a lack of a massive statement moment the way the other eras had. Even Whittaker had the seemingly serial nature of her early run before it all came crashing down into rote, stand alone adventures that were basically what people said they wanted Doctor Who to always be like. And it sucked.
Eliza: The Eleventh Hour comparison is partly due to Gatwa, but also comes in large part from Ruby, who feels in many ways like Davies remixing all his favorite qualities of Moffat’s companions. You’ve got the fairy-tale mystery surrounding her youth like Amy Pond, the problem-solving and attitude of Clara Oswald, and she’s a queer orphan like Bill Potts. And on top of all that, you’ve got a proper Davies companion family, with both her mother and grandmother leaving an instantly favorable impression on the audience.
David: Davies doing a good mom! Truly every character arc is now complete.
Sean: Again, you really can’t do worse Bad Mom™ than in It’s a Sin. But holy fuck the version of Carla is bleak and miserable and utterly hateful and understandable. Just a depressing portrait of desperation without love. It’s honestly hard to watch in a way that doesn’t feel as crass, cruel, or mean spirited as many It’s a Wonderful Life riffs can get. (I have so much contempt for the Spider-Man one.)
Though given the presence of the crack in the wall, perhaps the more apt comparison is with the Moffat era and the initial Amy arc.
Eliza: The Eleventh Hour! Like I said!
David: Regarding both Ruby and the lack of a conventional showstopper moment for Gatwa, it feels extremely notable that this episode ends without yet delivering the traditional thesis statement moment: why the new companion is going to go traveling with The Doctor. Rose and Donna want to escape their dull lives, Martha and in a sense Amy are in love, Rory's there because Amy's there, and Bill's kinda yoinked into it. Clara's the only one who's immediately onboard for the sake of it and that ends up being the red flag that informs her whole character; we don’t know yet what’s going to convince Ruby, she only even gets the first glimmer of who and what The Doctor actually is in the final seconds.
Sean: I found Ruby to be quite charming, especially in the even better second half of the musical number where, when Doctor Who calls her in to sing, she’s clearly not okay with this but immediately rolls with the punches. There’s also a degree to which (and this is probably due to the eyeliner and lipstick) Millie Gibson looks similar to Jenna Coleman, such that Doctor Who people are speculating that the mystery woman is Clara.
David: I half-expected a note that they perfectly pulled off an impromptu musical number because of the coincidence-based magic going on, but it didn’t need it. And yes, mandate in waiting or not, Gibson’s immediately endearing and engaging, can’t wait to see how she and 15 develop together.
Eliza: There’s obviously the element of despair at the complete lack of leads on her birth family, which is of a piece with Rose’s desire to see her father again, and he’s obviously brilliant and charming and gorgeous, but you’re absolutely right, there’s never that moment of crystallization.
David: I think a lot of this is ‘okay THIS is the real Disney+ kickoff, so we’re gonna have everyone be incredibly charming and do magic and musical numbers and uncomplicated lovely sentimentality to hook newcomers, and next time we’ll really lay out what’s what.’ And y’know what? I think it’s good enough to bank on that.
Are we ready for some final thoughts? I had an unscheduled piece of reading worth mentioning, as well as a half-formed theory about the direction RTD seems to have in mind here.
Sean: I had fun. It’s nice having Doctor Who that I like again. I’d watch the next season this spring. Really wish Disney+ would include the Next Time trailers.
Eliza: My final thought is, I’m so glad that my favorite show is back. I schlepped through the Chibnall era with the other poor, unfortunate souls, and by the end of every season I began to wonder why I thought this show was so brilliant in the first place. But god, from the first encounter between 14 and Donna, I felt myself being utterly swept away. It’s a profoundly romantic show, in the classical sense, grand and poetic and utterly delightful. Moreover, it’s back to being a stealth comedy, after the leaden dialogue of the Chibnall era, populated by characters who have a deep emotional investment in the stories they’re in. I couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come next year. And, in the long, long buildup to Davies’ return, it’s been such a joy to revisit the show time & again with both of you. Doctor Who holds a special place in my heart; I’m glad that I feel like it deserves that place again. Thank you both so much for having me on as often as you have; it’s been an absolute honor and a joy.
Sean: It was our pleasure.
David: And you’re always welcome back!
Incidentally to all of this, for Christmas I got and finished in a day Steven Moffat’s novelization of The Day of the Doctor! Much like Maggin’s Superman novels, it’s a delight to see a favorite creator with a million thoughts on a character and their world who typically works in a visual medium without literal space to indulge the full scope of those thoughts, now given permission to stuff in everything they’ve ever wanted. It’s interesting seeing the changes made in terms of which he made to flatter the format vs. which he made because now he has a second draft vs. which bits he has to concede on as not working as previously presented outside of live action vs. where he's able to go totally outlandish in a way he never could in the actual show. As a chance to see him do a definitive Who story of a different kind than all the other ones, an utter treat.
As for the theory: it strikes me that all of the new RTD stories thus far are preoccupied with varying degrees to the idea of childhood. Star Beast is about a teenager reaching a cosmic coming of age pitted against an evil stuffed animal; Wild Blue Yonder a pair of creatures slowly discovering their physical nature in their first ever unfamiliar forms; Giggle with its toys and games and rebirths; Church on Ruby Road is literally about saving babies. There’s no coherent big obvious statement yet, and it’s a cute thing in any case to focus on for a new beginning, but it feels deliberate enough that I’m pretty sure it has something to do with where it’s all going, though I won’t be too annoyed if I turn out to be totally off-base.
What a good show. Eliza’s got her favorite one back; as of this last year and a half, I’ve got a new and dear one. Onwards and upwards to the next 60.
Sean: Which leaves us only with David’s reward: He doesn’t have to write about Doctor Who. He is, like us all, free to do with it as he pleases. He may choose to write about this mad, mad, show in the future, the same as any of us. But there’s no obligation.
We’ve told our tale and put our pen down.
We leave the future entirely in your hands.
Goodbyeee.
Anyways, here’s Wonderwall.
END OF WHOWATCH QnA:
Sean: Looking back, what did you make of the Ninth Doctor?
David: It’s a shame things were so bad behind the scenes we only got one season of Eccleston, but it’s hard to imagine it any other way; he might just have the cleanest, most coherent character arc in the entirety of the current era, from mercurial traumatized god to a hero reborn. Can’t imagine what series veterans would have thought of him at the time, but he’ll always be a favorite of mine.
Sean: You’ve mentioned 10 is your favorite Doctor, any particular highlights?
David: “I'm so old now. I used to have so much mercy.” in School Reunion, shortly followed by his farewells to K9 and Sarah Jane. The lonely angel staring off at the end of Girl in the Fireplace, never understanding what just happened. His visceral discomfort at the idea of building an actual normal life with Rose in Impossible Planet, and not managing to spit out the words in Doomsday. Hanging with his favorite Doctor/future father in law. Every moment with him and Donna. His offer to Joan and her response. Sending Astrid to the stars. Hearing the Ood. His grandest bloviating declaration of all at the end of Doctor’s Daughter. Everything Midnight throws at him. Zipping around the TARDIS with all his friends in Journey’s End and the most GIFable sadness of all time after leaving Donna. Having a blast being a companion in The Next Doctor. “I’ve gone too far” even if I don’t rate the buildup as highly as most. Telling Wilfred he’d have been proud to have him as a dad, and that we look like giants.
Sean: What do you make of the 11th Doctor?
David: I have the same dissonance with him I do with Tom Baker - I love them both and immediately recognize why they’re the iconic shorthands for the original and contemporary eras for Who, but they’re definitely not ‘my’ Doctors (for Classic Who that’d probably be McCoy, with a nod to Troughton as well). Don’t want to understate that I really do like him though, really drew me in to a lively, squirrely, often haunted performance that I’d first only seen through the lens of lacking the obvious dramatic richness of his immediate predecessor.
Sean: What of the 12th?
David: Tennant is my guy but I’d be hard-pressed to argue against Capaldi as the actual best Doctor. Imperial, sweepingly all-encompassing, the best of Eccleston’s bare bruise of a man and Tennant’s rageful heroism and Smith’s uncomplicated decency shot through with looming menace. The show could’ve ended with him.
Sean: How would you compare the Moffat and Davies Eras?
David: It took Moffat until his second half to get on Davies’ level as a showrunner imo; the Smith seasons are largely lovely, they’re also largely messes. But while he never hit the same level of ‘oh my god, of COURSE’ cleverness in terms of how to structure a season as Series 3, he also never remotely flubs the emotional arc the way Series 3 does either, so I’d call it a wash. Once Capaldi’s aboard it’s pretty much golden.
Ultimately, the thrust of the difference between the two eras to me is Davies is writing a story about damnation and Moffat about salvation. I’m on Twitter, Tumblr, and Bluesky if you want to accuse me of reductionism there.
Sean: Given the small amount of distance you’ve had, what do you make of the Chibnall era as a whole?
David: I hated it when it gained confidence and started making the biggest dumbest swings you could think of, becoming the worst possible version of giving CBR forumgoers a big two superhero to steer. But y’know, in the final analysis, I guess I didn’t hate it as much as I did when it was initially an insecure, hollowed-out carcass of itself incompetently pleading for the love of people who would never watch this show anyway. At least later on I could tell someone somewhere in the process was somehow having fun. Also Whittaker was bad the whole way through as anything other than a person I could recognize as being generally Doctor-ish but I do not blame her, what on Earth was supposed to be the ramp-on moment that defined her character for her to latch onto to elevate future crap with?
Sean: What’s your favorite Doctor Who story?
David: Still Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. The platonic ideal, every best aspect of the series firing on all cylinders. Perfect location, perfect monster, perfect gimmicks, perfect new character, perfect performances, perfect reveals, perfect culmination.
Honorable mentions to The Mind Robber, The Three Doctors, Survival, Girl in the Fireplace, Human Nature/The Family of Blood, Voyage of the Damned as not really in the same tier as the rest but one I have a lot of affection for, Midnight, The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, The Next Doctor as my perennial freak pick, Amy’s Choice, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, A Christmas Carol, Year One of the Eleventh Doctor comic as my real introduction, The Girl Who Waited, The Rings of Akhaten, The Day of The Doctor, Robot of Sherwood as my favorite ‘best of the rest’, Dark Water/Death in Heaven, The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar, Sleep No More, Heaven Sent/Hell Bent, World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls/Twice Upon A Time, and The Star Beast/Wild Blue Yonder/The Giggle.
(Sorry The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, you inflicted Harkness on us. Maybe Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways belong in here too, it’s been a good long while)
Sean: What did you make of the Classic Era of Doctor Who? Would you be interested in more?
David: There were not-infrequent chunks of it that felt totally lifeless to me (most frequently, surprisingly, during Tom Baker’s tenure despite my enjoyment of his own performance), but at its best there was an oddball joy and unexpected poetry to it. I don’t imagine I’ll ever do a whole deep dive, but I’ll probably check out a bit more in years to come. I could conceivably be convinced someday to watch the entirety of McCoy.
Sean: Any interest in the Expanded Universe material? Obligatory plug for work reasons.
David: I would be curious to see more of what Lawrence Miles got up to, and check out a few recommended novelizations. Maybe I’ll listen to a very small handful of Big Finish stories if they sound like dopey fun. And I’m very much looking forward to Dan Watters’ upcoming 15th Doctor ongoing title!
Sean: Would you take my place and guide someone else through the labyrinth of Doctor Who?
David: Not to the same extent, but I’ve already sent one person a ‘if you check out Gatwa’s first episode and like it, here’s a season’s worth of continuity-lite highlights’ list.
Sean: How did I do?
David: Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And y’know what? So was I!
Sean: What’s next?
David: Next is the long-promised We Only Find Them When They’re Dead essay, followed by a retrospective on stuff I watched, read, played, and so forth in 2023 (well, and from 2023 that I’ll be checking out a bit after the fact). I’m opening up classic Tumblr-style asks to $1 patrons rather than saving it for $3; I realized that’s asking quite a bit, especially for a fledgling thing, and it’ll still serve the same purpose of weeding out the types of folks who got aggressive in my latter days on there. And I’m talking with a couple people about Whowatch-type projects for the future, but those won’t be right away, and without a looming deadline they’ll happen at a more leisurely pace. I put my regular essay writing on the backburner for a lot of the year to focus on Who, and I don’t regret it in the least but would like to reprioritize what my blog says on the tin.
(And yes I’ll probably put ‘here’s what I thought of the new Who!’ upfront in future posts. The disease is in me now.)
Sean: As for me, I’ll be joining a Kamen Rider Reviews podcast to help introduce, among other people, Freezing Inferno to the exact Kamen Rider series you’d expect me to introduce them to. I’m working on smaller stuff for now, but also a Western comic and a rather depressed look at Internet Reviewers. I also owe someone an article on Steins;Gate. Years behind on that one. And I’m bumbling around looking for work.
Thank you for having me this past year and a half. If I may get sentimental, the previous year was probably one of the worst years of my life. An absolute shitshow for reasons I will not talk about publicly. But through it all, these monthly chats about a silly kids show gave me something to look forward to. So thank you David.
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