The second half of the series is still proving to be superior to the opening half, and the writers whose names aren't Chris Chibnall are still proving to be far better than the one who is called Chris Chibnall. He has finally taken a back seat and let others come up with a clutch of more interesting storylines.
I quite liked The Witchfinders, by Joy Wilkinson, though it was far from perfect.
This was a darker episode which dwelt on horrific themes - both historical and fictional. I wasn't at all happy that they actually pointed out that women had a hard time in the 17th Century. Talk about stating the obvious. I'm sure even those viewers who have little interest in history in general, or of the witch craze of the 16th and 17th centuries in particular, were aware of this. This lecturing was made rather redundant when they had the local landowner, most powerful person in the district, a woman.
The real history derives from the fact that hundreds of people - most of whom (but by no means not all) were women - were branded as witches and subsequently jailed and executed. Female victims were generally older, unmarried women, in a time when the norm was that women were supposed to have a husband. Many had acted as midwives and herbalists, and knew how to prepare potions for the curing of various maladies. As soon as a neighbour turned against them and made an accusation - often simply because they wanted their property or had a simple falling out with them over something - these things which had benefited the local community could be twisted and used against them.
King James I (VIth of Scotland) certainly had an obsession about witches and wrote a book about them - prompted by his belief that a group of Berwickshire witches had attempted to kill him by summoning a storm to wreck a ship he was travelling on. This, however, was not enough to justify his presence in the storyline. If you are going to come up with a Celebrity Historical, then the celebrity has to have a reason for being present. If you know anything about James, then you'll know that he was extremely paranoid, following a number of abduction and assassination attempts going back to when he was a baby. The idea of him running around the wilds of Lancashire in the middle of a witch infestation, with minimal protection, was simply ludicrous.
The fictional horror derived from a couple of movies - 1968's cult classic Witchfinder General (starring Vincent Price as a fictionalised Matthew Hopkins), and its unofficial follow-up Blood on Satan's Claw (1971).
With the dead witches rising from the grave I was also reminded of the Hammer film Plague of the Zombies (1966).
The two guest artists were fine in their own ways. Siobhan Finneran played Becka Savage totally straight. At first glance she seems an outright monster, but we then see how she wants to save her community and will do anything it takes to protect the villagers from Satan. Alan Cumming, on the other hand, has a lot of fun with a foppish King James. Some might think his performance a tad pantomime-ish, but personally I thought that such a bleak subject matter needed a little lightening, and he did have a great scene with the Doctor when she had been captured and accused herself by Savage of being a witch.
In the same way that I thought it highly unlikely that the King would be traipsing around the countryside, so I thought that it was nonsense that a powerful landowner would go round cutting down their own trees. A job for the servants, surely.
The witch outbreak turns out to have alien origins - the work of the Morax. At last we get an alien species in the programme who are actually evil. All the aliens this season, just about, have been a huge let down as they have turned out to pose little or no threat, and been superfluous to the plot. This has been one of the problems with Jodie Whittaker's Doctor. Doctors are defined by the threats they face, and how they deal with them, and she has had nothing to play against. We've still to see any sort of defining moment for this particular incarnation.
When Becka began to mutate into a Morax I half expected her to shout "Pyrovile!". As I said, the revenant witches reminded me of a classic horror movie, and they were genuinely creepy as they stalked through the mist-shrouded forest. Sadly, this took place quite late in the proceedings, and we were treated to a rather rushed ending.
Not a bad episode, but well short of being a great one. Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts had far more fun with witches a decade ago.
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