I seem to recall using the heading "The Second Coming" on this blog, when I posted the news that Russell T Davies was returning to Doctor Who. (Very apt, as not only was he coming back to the show he helped revive, but it was also the title of his Christopher Eccleston-starring drama about God reappearing in present day Manchester).
RTD was being seen as a saviour, come to make things right again with the Doctor Who world after the series had suffered under Chris Chibnall.
We heard that David Tennant and Catherine Tate would be reprising their old roles in not one but three 60th Anniversary Specials, and there was talk of various spin-offs. Then Ncuti Gatwa was announced as the Fifteenth Doctor.
So far, so promising.
The Anniversary and Christmas Specials, I've already considered, and I've reviewed each new S14 episode as it arrived, but how did the season work as a whole?
Whilst individual episodes can be viewed in isolation, there is also the overall shape and tone to a season, including the way in which each instalment links with those around it (or not).
Is there a story arc and, if so, how did it play out?
The days of "Bad Wolf", when Doctor Who was being discussed by fan and non-fan alike across the country, are long gone. We've even had one recent series which dispensed with an arc altogether.
This year's story arc was mainly set up in advance, in The Church on Ruby Road, though one element went back to The Star Beast - reference to some powerful figure who would arrive imminently to threaten the Doctor.
Strange things happen around Ruby, and she wants to know who her mother was - seen only as a hooded figure leaving her at the titular church on Christmas Eve 2004.
Added to this was a neighbour known as Mrs Flood, who knew that the Police Box outside her house was a TARDIS.
Less noticeable so early on was the appearance of an actress named Susan Twist, who featured briefly in the pre-credits of Wild Blue Yonder, and then again as a different woman in Church.
The new series - officially termed "Season One" because of its arrival on Disney+ but known as Series 14 to the vast majority - was only going to be eight episodes long, and it was announced that the first two instalments would be broadcast on the same evening. The programme would therefore only run for seven weeks - half of what it did back when RTD2 first ran the show.
It was also decided - specifically for the benefit of Disney once again - that new episodes would drop at midnight GMT on the BBC i-Player / Disney+, with the UK terrestrial broadcast not arriving until 18 and a bit hours later. This decision was to enable foreign viewers to watch at a reasonable time, whilst British TV licence payers were expected to stay up until 1 o'clock in the morning (2am that first week) or run the risk of spoilers on social media on the Saturday.
(The finale also got a cinema outing, which again meant anti-social hours for British fans).
Apparently some thought had been given to commencing the series straight after the Christmas episode, or perhaps March or Easter when previous seasons had opened, but instead a decision was made to launch in May and run into June - when the weather means TV audiences generally dip.
Also new is the decision by the BBC to no longer release appreciation figures. These have been available for every Doctor Who episode since An Unearthly Child, right up to The Church on Ruby Road.
Viewer numbers would still be released (overnight, 7-day and 28-day) but not by Disney.
RTD2 has since stated that one of the things he was asked to do on coming back was to specifically increase Doctor Who's under 30 age demographic. Presumably an unspoken part of that instruction was that it should also retain all the other demographics. (To rely solely on the most fickle of demographics does not wise business sense make).
That's the background, so what of the series itself...?
We launched with Space Babies and The Devil's Chord back-to-back on the evening of the Eurovision Song Contest.
It's quite obvious from dialogue that the latter episode had been moved from later in the series, presumably so that the music-themed adventure would tie in with the Contest. (We know this as it is stated in dialogue that Ruby has been travelling with the Doctor for a number of months - whereas the third instalment will claim to show only her first visit to an alien planet).
Davies has tended to make his opening episodes lighter in tone, and on occasion he has also veered into the infantile, with burping wheelie-bins and farting aliens, but Space Babies takes both of these to a ludicrous extreme.
In the following Unleashed programme, Davies asked "How could I resist?". Well, this episode answers that question in the negative. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should...
We are presented with talking toddlers, abandoned on a space station. They are seemingly all alone, but later discover that one adult member of staff has remained behind to look after them.
Also on board is an impressive looking monster. It looks good, but we then find out that it is composed of snot - a literal bogeyman.
The station is then moved through space towards a safe haven planet thanks to a mess of soiled nappies.
Even the bodily function-obsessed Red Dwarf wouldn't have stooped quite this low.
It's a really weak, childish episode, which will not have impressed new viewers - even 5-10 year olds, who prefer more grown-up drama.
As a launch episode of a brand new era, it is a mistake. 200,000 viewers failed to stick around on the same channel for The Devil's Chord.
This second episode benefited from a period setting (Abbey Road in the early Beatles era) and an appearance by Drag Race star Jinkx Monsoon as the somewhat OTT child of the Toymaker.
As we said, it's a music-themed instalment. However, for many this element was taken too far at the conclusion as we were "treated" to a song and dance number.
Davies has come extremely late to the musical episode of an on-going drama. Buffy did it decades ago.
It's left to the end of the episode, after Maestro has been defeated by Lennon & McCartney. To be honest, I didn't mind it. It would have felt worse stuck in the middle of the episode - unless it had been used as part of Maestro's defeat. Instead it's more of a coda, celebrating the return of music to the world. It is dragged out too long, however, by a pointless segment on the famous Abbey Road crossing.
The song is called "There's always a twist at the end" - which fed into rumours that Susan Twist might be prefiguring the return of the Doctor's grand-daughter - who had been talked about in the course of the episode.
A lot of people next day went on-line to say that this ought to have been the opening episode, with Space Babies scrapped altogether, rather than shunted elsewhere.
The two episodes at least build upon the chemistry between the new Doctor and companion. Sadly, this would not be capitalised on...
Susan Twist featured in the first two episodes - as a briefly glimpsed crewmember on a screen on the space station, and as an Abbey Road Studios tea lady.
She's far more prominent in the third episode - Steven Moffat's Boom. She plays an AI avatar on a number of robotic ambulances.
The first episode not to be written by RTD2 sees the Doctor and Ruby land on her first alien world, as mentioned, and it's a bleak place wracked by war. Moffat uses a lot of his old ideas, like medical AI that proves to do more harm than good, and uses them to beef up a 3 minute sequence from Genesis of the Daleks Part One into a full episode.
The Doctor steps on a land-mine in the first few seconds, and is stuck there for the duration. The Clerical army folk are back, fighting what turns out to be an arms manufacturer. (There is no actual enemy - they're battling their own weaponry so that they will be forced to buy more).
Lots of themes which we've seen before. The episode is spoiled for me by the inclusion of a brattish child, and a surfeit of saccharine.
With the episode concentrating mostly on the Doctor, Ruby was left to dither on the periphery. A two-hander would have worked a lot better. One item of note was the first appearance of the actor who is to become Series 15's companion - though playing a different character as pointed out in Unleashed.
The general reaction from fans next day was that Moffat once again proved he's a better writer than Davies. However, as we'll see shortly, it gained a very low audience.
A word on the making-of show. The presenter, Steffan, is certainly watchable, but they could do with making a couple of changes to the format. The "work experience" bit would be interesting if it was a role we actually wanted to know about. Five minutes of watching someone show you how to roll up a cable does not good TV make. We are also promised a spoiler at the end, but the clip is so brief (less than 10 seconds sometimes) and irrelevant that it becomes pointless.
This started off excellently, with a folk-horror tale brewing. The Doctor has vanished and Ruby is being trailed by a strange woman who maintains a distance of 73 yards from her at all times. Anyone who interacts with this person runs off in terror - even her foster mother and Kate Stewart of UNIT. This promising start is squandered when the episode suddenly left turns into Stephen King's The Dead Zone - protagonist knows that populist politician is going to doom the planet and has to stop them. It does have a clever resolution - Ruby manipulating the strange woman into interacting with the politician.
Twist features as a hiker in one scene.
Reaction was certainly positive for this episode, and end of series polls continue to rate it highly.
A Doctor-lite episode is then followed up with an episode in which he hardly features - and this time Ruby is virtually side-tracked as well. Dot and Bubble deals with a colony of bright young things obsessed with social media, who are blissfully unaware that they are being devoured one by one by monsters. These big Tractator-like creatures are only the second monsters to feature this year.
As a satire, it lacks subtlety, though one aspect of the script did pass a lot of people by until the last moment. The audience identification figure - Lindy - is no Sally Sparrow. She turns out to be a selfish so-and-so who lets her saviour die to save her own neck, then she and her fellow survivors reject the Doctor's help because he is not one of them. They and all of Lindy's social bubble are white, you see. Caught up in the story-telling, many failed to realise the significance of this and it had to be pointed out on Unleashed.
If it takes an interview after the programme is finished to get a point across, then something's wrong. Reaction was very mixed.
The dark satire series Black Mirror was mentioned a lot as inspiration - admitted by Davies - but this only went to show how unoriginal the backdrop to this episode was. Once again, Davies is coming late to the party.
In my review I thought it would have been more tragic if the survivors had been deserving of being saved, yet still rejected the Doctor - whereas the episode as broadcast sees the Doctor getting all upset at the actions of a bunch of people we don't actually care about.
Susan Twist's role in this is as Lindy's mother, seen on a video message.
With Boom and this episode we were finally starting to see a stronger performance by Gatwa, who at times was coming across as far too light, and not convincing as a thousand year old Time Lord. Too many cultural references - always a problem with Davies and something that will date his writing badly - and too much of his own personality. I've never watched Sex Education, but some reviews I have read since claim he was basically playing the same character.
By this stage - five episodes in - Millie Gibson was being praised far more than Gatwa.
We were promised that the Doctor's life would be changed forever, but this proved to be a load of hyperbole. The Doctor falls in love with someone he's only just met, and we're supposed to feel his heartbreak when Groff has to go back to being a Tony-winning musical theatre star.
There's nothing remotely unique about the character and you have to wonder why they thought we'd feel anything special about him.
Not only is the episode inspired by Bridgerton, it spends half it's running time telling us so. As I said in my review, just watch the Torchwood episode Captain Jack Harkness instead. Far superior, and Tosh gets a lot more to do than Ruby does here. There's an interesting new bird-like alien race, but they're totally wasted. They're shallow - just like the supposed love story.
Twist is only seen in a portrait in this one. One of the problems with this arc is that not enough emphasis has been placed on her. The recurring face should have been ringing alarm bells by now, but the Doctor and Ruby hardly comment on it. It suddenly becomes a big thing at the start of the next episode, but for them it seems to come from nowhere.
Davies attempts to make the Shalka Doctor canon (a cartoon voiced by Richard E Grant, he's a Ninth Doctor who was consigned to the dustbin by RTD himself).
The series so far has suffered from a lack of cliff-hangers, but we now reach the two-part finale. If you look at my review, you'll see summarised all the questions that fans wanted to see answered - and the general lack of answers which we got. Or the wrong answers...
Things started so well, with what is sure to be seen as the best episode of the season. (That's episode, not story. The second half will really drag it down). The Legend of Ruby Sunday might be a meaningless title, but it nicely brought many of the arc threads together at UNIT HQ and hit us with the shock reveal that Sutekh, from the classic Pyramids of Mars, was back.
He's a big, fake-looking CGI Sutekh, but - hey - we'll get the proper one next week, won't we?
Revisit the review if you want to see how the promising set-up fell flat on its face with Empire of Death.
Reaction has been mainly negative on-line. Crap Sutekh, confusing resolution, and too many narrative dead ends. If you are going to ask people to invest emotionally in a story, you have to give them something at the end of it all. RTD2 can argue "Well, I never promised you that..." but he is a long term fan himself and should have known what would have made for a satisfying conclusion. Even non-fans thought it flat.
The biggest problem with Empire is that it will always colour the season as a whole.
So, overall, a very uneven season which wasn't helped by Gatwa's relative absence in the middle of it all. Even the better episodes were let down by some element - like the derivative political sidestep of 73 Yards, which would have made for a much better full-on folk-horror tale, or the extraneous characters in Boom.
Too many threads which went nowhere. Some things, like Mrs Flood, are obviously being reserved for next year - but she was so badly integrated into the series that few of us are caring. I don't do scores on my reviews, but if I had to rate the episodes it would be (as of today - could change later on a rewatch):
1. The Legend of Ruby Sunday (for build-up and cliff-hanger),
2. 73 Yards - for its first 20 minutes,
3. The Devil's Chord - because it was actually quite fun,
4. Boom - for the bits that the annoying kid isn't in,
5. Dot and Bubble - a conventional monster episode, with extra dimensions
6. Rogue - shallow, like its villains, and done far better by Catherine Tregenna,
7. Empire of Death - because it's a complete let-down after what came before,
8. Space Babies - because it's quite literally a load of crap.
Before we go, the ratings. Everyone points out that you simply can't compare figures from today with those of previous years, because TV is watched differently now.
Whilst that is certainly true if you're comparing S14 with Hartnell, Tom Baker or McCoy seasons, for example, viewing patterns haven't changed all that much in just the last couple of years.
If an overnight of 2.20 million is bad at Easter 2022, then an overnight of 2.02 million is bad in June 2024.
If 7.61 million (+7 days) are watching The Star Beast in November 2023, and only 3.50 million (+7 days) are watching The Legend of Ruby Sunday in June 2024, that's bad.
If there is a broader range of opportunities to view the programme, shouldn't that equate to more viewers?
Expect the spin about audience share being good. A large percentage of a small number is still a small number, however. A hollow victory, surely.
Either people are watching, or they're not. Either people are enticed back, or they're not.
No comments:
Post a Comment