The Giggle - a review

 

If you've yet to see The Giggle, I wouldn't venture past this sentence...

This evening Doctor Who underwent its biggest shakeup in six decades - even bigger than Regeneration, Time Lords or Timeless Children.

For a lot of people, especially of the older generation, a line has been drawn under the series which began in November 1963. The Doctor decided to retire for a while at the conclusion of the third and final Anniversary Special, and we will no longer be following his adventures.

Instead, we are going forward with the "divergent" Doctor - the one being played by Ncuti Gatwa.

Because this evening the Doctor was fatally wounded by the Toymaker but instead of simply regenerating as normal, his next incarnation emerged as a separate entity - a process which we're calling "Bi-Generation". Thus we now have two of them, concurrently.

Gatwa's Doctor retains all of the memories and life experiences up to this point - and the script is chock full of references.

Which begs the question - Why? If the new Doctor is simply going to go forward precisely like the previous Doctor, then what was the point of doing this? If it was to permanently retire the 1963 - 2023 Doctor then I'm afraid it was obvious from the final garden scene that this is only ever going to be a pause in his travels. RTD2 even refers to him only being "parked" on Unleashed...

You could argue that Davies has actually started Gatwa off at a disadvantage, and is showing a lack of faith in him - he's not the real Doctor. The real one can be wheeled out again if Gatwa fails.

Despite this having been rumoured for a few weeks, even prompting an article in The Independent, the internet is sure to be breaking right now. I hope most will be accepting, but some will declare that they are calling it quits.

Begun, the clone wars have...

On to the actual story itself...

One of my biggest worries going into this episode derived from the trailers, in which the Toymaker came across as a manic, cartoonish character. The concern was that he was going to be played as a generic insane omnipotent villain, coming across not unlike some of the recent Master incarnations. 

The great Michael Gough played the Toymaker totally straight. He was quietly sinister, with just a hint of malicious humour ("Make your last move, Doctor. Make your last move...") but the evil was beautifully underplayed. 

My concerns were unfounded, I'm happy to report. The Toymaker could certainly be manic and cartoonish at times, but on the whole the performance was nicely balanced.

I very much admire NPH as a performer. He's certainly a multi-talented individual, being able to turn his hand to drama, comedy, song & dance and even magic. He was clearly indulged here as he gets to demonstrate quite a few of his skills as the Toymaker. We actually have a big musical number, as he invades UNIT HQ. It could have been embarrassing, but it's a magnificent scene, perfectly in tune with the character.

RTD2 is on record as saying he was concerned about the audience accepting fantasy in the series. Considering that a number of stories had already touched on this going right back to the 1960's, I'm surprised he worried. 

We had some wonderfully surreal and creepy imagery here - people turned to puppets with the Toymaker quite literally pulling the strings, or the aforementioned musical number. 

Particularly creepy was the scene with Donna attacked by the puppets of Mrs Stookie and her 'bawbies'.

I fail to understand why the BBC did not trumpet Mel's return in this episode, when she could be seen in the background of a number of clips and publicity photographs from the HQ set. They announced her involvement in the next series, yet not here.

As mentioned above, the script was full of references to old stories. As well as the puppets of more recent companions and mention of the Flux, we heard tell of Logopolis, Adric, the Kay to Time, Mavic Chen... Mel naturally spoke of Sabalom Glitz.

The Toymaker is said to have defeated the Master and imprisoned him in his gold tooth (which was picked up by an unknown female hand at the end - shades of the Saxon Master's ring). He also claimed to have turned the Guardians of Time into mannequins.

A lovely touch was the inclusion of some colourised footage from The Final Test, the only remaining episode from The Celestial Toymaker. (The BBC obviously have a new colouring-in machine, and they're determined to get their money's worth).

A couple of minor gripes from me were the (non)involvement of Wilf, and the climactic battle on the helipad. Obviously when they filmed the street riot in Bristol last year they weren't to know that Bernard would pass away soon after. He would have been too frail to travel to the destination, so a double was used. It's a shame they couldn't have found a way to remove him from these scenes altogether, leaving us with last week's closing sequence as our final memory of the character. 

As for the ending on the helipad, then I'm afraid I found the scenes of people throwing a ball about simply failed excite, no matter how hard they tried to make it humorous and visually interesting.

I daresay the point was to show how the two Doctors join forces to defeat the Toymaker, but I would have preferred something a little more exciting. It wasn't just the Toymaker who dropped the ball - it was the writer. Perhaps showing him as an expert juggler just half an hour beforehand was a bit of a mistake, if you're going to make the dropping of a ball by him a crucial moment.

                             

Setting the wider implications of his presence aside for a moment, Gatwa made a remarkable entrance. He charms from the start, helping save humanity in his boxers. 

I think he'll make a superb Doctor, though we really need to see how he tackles the serious stuff. 

What does all this mean for me - as a representative of the older generation of fans? 

Well, in this blog I cover the series and its spin-offs as made and broadcast by the BBC (irrespective of any co-production partners). That's what I've been a fan of since 1971.

The "Bi-Generation" is obviously a seismic change which will take a day or two to get our heads around, but I see no reason not to continue to follow the series when it returns at Christmas and beyond.

If Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel and DC fans can accept prequels, sequels, Multiverses, Infinity-verses, Kelvin Universes and sundry other spin-offs then so can I, with just this single divergence in Doctor Who. It's simply a branching off, which may even prove to be temporary if a future showrunner elects to revisit the "original" Doctor.

For better or for worse, I'm sticking with the series as it moves forward.

Personally, I think we won't see anything different from what has already gone before (which does take me back to that question of why do this in the first place...?).