Well, the verdict is in, at least for this season.
So what have we got?
Disappointment I’m afraid.
So far the Gatwa era consists of an extended cameo in David Tenant’s “The Giggle,” the Christmas Special, “Church on Ruby Road,” and an eight episode season starting with Space Babies and Ending with Empire of Death.
Overall impressions? Deeply uneven. Mostly unsatisfying. Three brilliant episodes, two unfocused sub-par efforts that we’ll generously call mediocre, and an opening and closing set of dumpster fires.
The larger problems? Gatwa’s overacting masks an underlying lack of commitment or emotional depth. RTD has become a shallow parody of himself. And critically, the show is deeply stagnant and failing to evolve or change. We’re getting the same old same old, as we got fifteen years ago, just tired and worn out.
The Christmas Special, Who cares?
The Church on Ruby Road was a… meh. It was okay, but it never quite gelled, more a collection of bits. It missed being great, it had some great concepts — the Goblin song should have been a showstopper, the Goblin ship was conceptually brilliant, the Goblins being critters that ate chance and had this alternate technology of ropes, was a great idea. But it just didn’t hold together, the song seemed flat, the story perfunctory, the resolution unsatisfying. It wasn’t awful, it just wasn’t… anything.
The rest of the series turned out to be wildly uneven, with many of the flaws of the special on display, often amped up to eleven. It was a season that failed to gel, a scattered season with various ideas, many of them undeveloped or mishandled. A season that seemed to mistake shouting for thinking. A season in frantic motion that often seemed to be running in place.
It got off to a bad start with back to back literal dumpster fires:
Space Babies and the Devil’s Chord, Kacking
Space Babies was unredeemable on any level, a bad idea that made no sense on any level, with more bad ideas piled on. The special effects were appalling — particularly the adult voices and mouth movements CGI’d onto babies was terrible. There’s nothing here that works. A few years back, there was a very short spate of talking baby movies — Look Who’s Talking and Baby Geniuses. They were terrible. This is terrible.
The Devil’s Chord, on the other hand, was a criminal waste of good ideas, executed ridiculously badly. Or maybe not, an evil godlike entity is stealing all the music from people’s souls which will lead to the end of the human race — that’s just deeply stupid. You can do this stuff, and even get away with it — Grant Morrison used to do this kind of thing all the time on Doom Patrol, but you have to do it right, and they have no idea how to approach it. Instead, what you get is lazy uninspired CGI, a story that makes no sense, and a woefully miscast Jinx Monsoon, who takes the role of a sly and malevolent fluid God… and does it as a standard one note drag act. No disrespect to Monsoon who is undoubtedly briliant within her meter, but she’s not in her meter, and instead does her standard shtick, when the part called for so much more. A visit to the 1960s and the musical revolution of the Beetles becomes aimless and tedious. The only bright spot is the wildly out of place dance number at the end.
It was a bad start. Terrible episodes, terrible scripts, terrible effects and terrible performances, including Gatwa himself, who seemed to have no idea what to do with the role. I almost quit watching.
73 Yards, Dot and Bubble and Boom, Cracking
But the next thee episodes were a brilliant streak. 73 Yards, Dot and Bubble and Boom were as different from each other as night and day, but each brilliant and heartfelt in their own ways. They showed the heights the show could achieve when it was on the ball, the ability to be diverse, experimental and compelling.
And Gatwa was barely in any of them. Apparently, he had unfinished commitments to Sex Education, so he wasn’t available for filming. Instead, they had him do some little fill in shots, and then just wrote around him for 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble. He was available for Boom, but his Doctor spends most of the episode standing on a land mine, and so they end up focusing on characters and shooting around him anyway.
73 Yards reminded me of 70s era ghost stories. It had mood and style to burn. The Doctor vanishes, his companion, Ruby Sunday, is left behind to live the rest of her life, haunted by a female figure that always remains 73 years away. It’s short on explanations and doesn’t really make any sense, but that doesn’t matter. There’s a constant claustrophobic feeling of unease and terror that never lets up. Kudos to the sound design and musical score. It’s brilliant.
Dot and Bubble is an excursion into social commentary, comedy, drama and horror, and amazingly keeps juggling all those balls, never missing a step. The story revolves around a society so buried in its social media, that people don’t even notice their friends are being eaten by monsters. They’re so dependent, that it’s a titanic struggle not to turn left to avoid walking into their jaws. Most of the episode follows a young narcissist who slowly learns to step out of her bubble… but she and her surviving friends remain irredeemably awful. Location shooting her and in 73 Yards gives a spectacular production value, and CGI is used innovatively with deadly effect.
In contrast, Boom, written by Stephen Moffat is almost conventional. It’s a studio set bound production and you can feel it. Most of it is in a single location, leaving it feeling almost like a stage play. As noted, Gatwa’s Doctor steps on a land mine, and the whole episode is shot around him, as he struggles to save himself and the other characters surrounding him. It’s got that classic Moffat combination of genuine emotion with subversive ideas that catapults it into a top rank in any season.
Rogue, Bravely Uninspired
Going into Rogue, there was considerable accumulated good will. And some of it was kept. This is a Jane Austen/Bridgerton period piece and the costumes and production designs, the location shooting and sets are gorgeous. There’s even a mysterious Mr. Darcy character that the Doctor is immediately drawn to and flirts relentlessly with.
Then things go downhill — Milly Gibson’s character, so strong in the previous episodes, literally has nothing to do, and the little she does makes absolutely no sense — in the end, she takes the role of damsel in distress for the Doctor and his new friend to rescue.
The alien menaces are laughable, bird headed people, presented as terrifying shapeshifters. Yet despite being told that they’re terrifying and unstoppable, and indeed the Doctor is terrified, they’re mostly ineffectual and incredibly easily dealt with.
The Doctor has a romantic kiss with a man — big deal, we did that fifteen years ago. But it doesn’t feel honest or genuine, the script is rushed, the characters motivations and acts are about as smooth as a five year old smashing action figures together. In the end, guest star randomly sacrifices himself for the Doctor and his companion — a cliche that was incredibly worn out in the Whittaker era. Well sorry, bad writing and cheap outs in the Whittaker era are bad writing and cheap outs in the Gatwa era, and have the disadvantage of now being lazy, tired and unoriginal.
The episode just doesn’t hold together, there’s no sense of real emotions or real stakes, you enjoy it, but are never drawn in. At best it’s average, something to watch while you’re doing other things, and to occasionally pay attention to. Nice to look at, kind of hollow. This seems cruel, but I actually did like it, there are things to like here. But some of that is burning accumulated goodwill.
Legend and Empire, Return of the Dumpster Fire
Which brings us to the two part series conclusion. The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death. Oh my god, they’re bad. They’re just unbelievably, irredeemably terrible.
They’re not bad in the way of Space Babies and the Devil’s Chord. There’s an appalling cluelenssess to those episodes. It’s as if they simply gave two episodes to Japanese Macaques and just let them do whatever they wanted. These episodes look and feel like they were done by someone who knew how to do episodes, but simply couldn’t be arsed.
Laziness and incoherence are the bywords here. Not physical Laziness. There’s a lot of running back and forth. People got their cardio in. But it’s all ideas that aren’t developed at all, notions so poorly sketched out that they’re not ideas. Instead of story, or dialogue, instead of any kind of narrative, or even an explanation, it’s all just nonsensical lines shouted inanely, as if we should nod wisely and go ‘ah, it all makes sense.’ But nothing makes sense. Instead, things just seem to happen, whatever is necessary is just thrown in on the spot. Unit has a time window? Sure. And it can read thirty year old videotape? Why not. Every device is magic, capable of doing whatever demanded. It’s a mess. And because it’s a mess, there’s no pacing, no emotional investment, no drama, no nothing.
Doctor Who has established a long tradition of mining the classic series for villains and characters, just going for those memberberries. It’s a weakness. This time, it’s Sutekh, borrowed from the classic Pyramids of Mars, and rendered with some of the worst CGI of the 21st century, executing a plot that makes no sense, beaten by a scheme that makes no sense. Along the way, we’re treated to CGI borrowed from Brendan Fraser’s Mummy, or possibly Avenger’s Infinity War — maybe it was supposed to be terrifying, but we’ve seen it too many times.
And so Gatwa’s season ends, a scattered incoherent mess, with a few scattered diamonds.
The Good, Bad and Ugly.
The Good — Milly Gibson, I had a hard time warming to her, but she was undeniably talented, committed to the role and did well.
And on the positive side, there was a run of three brilliant episodes, a couple of mediocre but tolerable ones. Half the series was enjoyable, or at least it didn’t want to make you claw your eyes out.
Generally, some nice performances, sometimes working with bad material. Decent low budget sets like the bomb pit in Boom or the Memory Tardis.
Welcome returning characters/groups: UNIT, Kate Lethbridge-Stuart, Me, giving a sense of a universe beyond the Doctor. Not much is done with them, but I like memberberries as much as the next person.
The Bad — Sutekh’s CGI. Yikes. Not even just Sutekh but the pretty much all the CGI for the last two episodes, which looks rushed, hasty, amateurish and cheap.
You know, since Doctor Who has gone to Disney, one of the things we’re told is that there’s going to be tons of money, really ramping up the production values, etc. etc. I have to ask: Where’s the money? It’s not the episodes — Doctor Who has gone from 13 episodes per series to 8. The episode lengths have gone from 50 minutes to 45. They’re not giving us more show.
I generally don’t see it in the production values. The Tardis interior is a huge, amazing, wondrous set. It’s also barely used. We’ve seen it maybe once or twice? That’s a waste. There’s a UNIT set, also huge, complex, expensive, also barely used. Beyond these two rather inexplicable and mostly unused expenditures, the series doesn’t look markedly better in terms of production value than its predecessors.
And of course, there’s the four rancid dumpster fire episodes that bookend the series, and a general weakness in writing, plots and coherence.
The Ugly — I’m going to come right out and say it. Gatwa. He hasn’t found the Doctor’s character, he doesn’t embody. I suppose that’s okay, sometimes it takes a while for an actor to find the character, sometimes they get it right away. Gatwa is in the former category.
His characterization of the Doctor so far is inconsistent and mainly ineffectual. This Doctor doesn’t really act effectively, and when he is effective, it’s all deus ex machina — magic gloves, magic rope. In lieu of a character, Gatwa delivers emotion — his Doctor cries several times, never authentically, just a quivering lip and glycerin. His Doctor runs away in terror. His Doctor is wildly giddy. The trouble is that when you do these things constantly, it loses effect. It’s supposed to convey emotion, but if the underlying conditions for the emotion aren’t there, you have a problem. You can get the effect of emotions by displaying the emotions, tricking the audience by putting the cart before the hose. But without the underlay, it fades and becomes ineffective after a while. Gatwa is working his way to the most inauthentic performance since Colin Baker’s regeneration scene.
I can’t entirely blame Gatwa — he missed two episodes of his season, got boxed in on a third. He’s literally had five episodes, including the special to explore his Doctor, and they’ve mostly been garbage giving him nothing much to work with.
I don’t know that it’s going to get better though. Next series, Gatwa’s going to miss two or three more episodes because of other commitments. So he’s going to be handicapped in building his character.
But it does beg the question, if the Doctor can’t be bothered to be in Doctor Who, for up to a third of the episodes… why should the audience be bothered to watch? If the Star can’t commit, why should the audience? It’s a legitimate question.
Doctor Who is Stagnant
Beyond all that, I have a serious issue. The show hasn’t evolved at all. What we’re seeing is basically what we saw fifteen years ago, and what we’ve seen again and again.
We have a magical companion — Billy Piper, Donna Tate, Amy Pond, Clara Oswald and now Ruby Sunday. Okay, fine, sure. I can live with that.
We have the continuing plundering of the classic series for iconic villains/monsters — The Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, the Sontarans, Davros, the Silurians, even the frigging Sea Devils. Okay, sure, I can live with that too. I could live with it being changed up, just for the hell of it. But okay.
But here’s the problem, we have this sort of ‘half arc’ season. Basically, a series of clues scattered in the background of unrelated stories — Bad Wolf references. Then in the closing two-parter, the all the references come together and we find out what they meant, and it helps to tie together the final story.
Every single time. Growing more stale and trite and cliche each time, particularly perfunctory and half assed in this season, visibly stale. Doctor Who has stood still, working its way deeper and deeper into a rut until you can barely see it. The formula so well worn there’s barely any investment, just going through the motions, without even understanding or caring. Just tired repetition and a complete failure to evolve.
But television has evolved. The landscape has changed dramatically with the rise of streaming services, binge watching, tight interconnected stories, novel approaches to storytelling and characters. Television has evolved, storytelling has evolved. We live in an era of Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, House of the Dragon, Snowpiercer, even frigging Velma. The Marvel Cinematic Universe. We live in this golden age of television with brilliance and innovation is everywhere (also unimaginable crap — I’m looking at you Star Wars and Marvel television).
Doctor Who has just gotten stale, a format, a storytelling legacy that allowed the show to do everything and anything has become an excuse to do nothing.
Chibnall’s Doctor Who failed at pretty much everything. But at least he tried. There were efforts to shake up the the structure. They failed, but they were efforts — an ensemble of non-magical companions, attempts of serial storytelling, particularly in the second series and the flux series.
Fifteen years ago, RTD was a pioneer, breathing life into the show, giving us a complex nuanced Doctor with a deep past, a companion entranced with the wonder of the universe. and stories that evoked the past while building something new.
Now? The rich nuanced tapestry is replaced with a hasty childish scrawl, everything so tired and worn it’s like RTD can’t be bothered. A ten year hiatus, and he returns with nothing new, only a barely legible faded copy of a copy of a copy of old shtick.
Why? Maybe it’s just a different world. When the show rebooted, it had this hidden legacy to draw on — all those Virgin New Adventure Novels, Big Finish, Bernice Summerfield, fifteen years of fan films and fan fic, a legacy of twenty-six years of serials, all of it percolating, forming a rich soil to grow a new series. There were writers that came out of this hidden, Paul Cornell, Moffat, RTD and others. There was a core of behind the scenes creative talent. A vast creative inheritance.
Now, after fifteen years, that rich inheritance is tapped out. Maybe the show really is tired. It’s certainly trite.
I’m not ready to throw the show under the bus just yet. The Gatwa series did produce three brilliant episodes. There’s a lively culture of novelizations, original novels, Big Finish audio productions, fan films, fan fiction. This is the golden age of television, Doctor Who can be a part of it. But it needs to evolve, and it needs commitment, not a part-time Doctor and a disinterested showrunner.
Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to evolve soon. The next series with Gatwa is already shot and in the can. I expect that the strengths and weaknesses of Gatwa’s first season will be in evidence.
Hopefully we’ll see a smattering of good episodes, perhaps more than a smattering. Some unfocussed and mediocre productions. Hopefully no stinkers.
But ultimately we’ll magical companions, recycling classic monsters or villains, a half-baked arc and an incoherent two part conclusion with the fate of the universe at stake. And we’re probably going to see Gatwa running through cheap counterfeit emotions, glycerin and all, and a tired retread down a road worn into ruts.
I could be wrong, but shooting two seasons back to back leaves little opportunity to rethink your strategy. Maybe RTD will wow us, but the most likely outcome will be more of same.
We’ll have to wait for another season, if there is one, for the show to have a chance to escape its dead end. Maybe RTD, Gatwa and Gibson will be the ones to lead the renaissance. Or not.