Review: Doctor Who 11.2: The Ghost Monument

With all these extreme close-ups, it's a blessing this director
didn't work on any Eleven episodes.

Okay, now I'm starting to get worried. This series' premier had me concerned about some of the smaller details of the series' new production, and that the "crowded TARDIS" was going to cause issues with the way our characters developed. The Ghost Monument, ostensibly a race episode which leads to a conclusion where we first meet the new TARDIS interior, is a complete mess. The writing actively avoids tension for the whole runtime, and so the result is a messy hodgepodge of boring ideas poorly executed. Couple that with confusingly bad editing and cinematography, and Series 11 has already delivered its first clunker.

With the last episode leaving our heroes floating in space after attempting to use a teleporter to find the TARDIS, we find that two racing spaceships have scooped up half of the team each, with both ships crash landing on a barren planet called Desolation. The two racers, Angstrom (Susan Lynch) and Epzo (Shaun Dooley) are participating in the Rally of the Twelve Galaxies, run by Ilin (Art Malik) who promises a massive cash prize for reaching The Ghost Monument, which turns out to be the TARDIS stuck in a materialisation loop. Despite being a race, the whole six-strong cast travels together throughout the episode, and after overcoming obstacles they declare themselves joint winners and the remaining crew hop on board the new and improved TARDIS.

With the race element of the story being introduced a third of the way in, I expected some kind of tension, but instead the episode has the characters all travelling together at the same pace, explaining their backstories and motivations to the Doctor. Angstrom is a little coarse, but is trying to find her family. Epzo is selfish and ruthless because he comes from Space!Sparta. While the danger of the world is hyped up to no end, we never see any of the negative effects of their travels come to fruition: the water is deadly, they say, but we never get to see someone fall in. The air is poisonous, but nobody chokes. Nobody is thirsty or hungry after three days travel. The tell-don't-show nature of the episode's writing means that you're never genuinely worried for any of the characters, and that's poor storytelling.

Art Malik is wasted on a script that doesn't bother to give
him a character.

A large part of the episode is spent in an underground bunker, filled to the brim with boring robots and, later, intelligent murderous tablecloths that come out of nowhere and are dispatched with equal haste. A lot of emphasis is put on The Doctor wanting to find out why these people disappeared - something she makes a point of mentioning repeatedly. Does she find corpses or diaries, and work out what happened? No, because apparently someone wrote a big message on the floor in a language we can't read, leading the solution of that juicy story moment to be Jodie Whitaker staring at the floor for five minutes and explaining the lore to us. This carries through to the rest of the episode's ideas too - we never understand why Ilin is running the race, as he only appears for a few minutes. The androids and evil scarves could be extricated from the episode and nothing of value would have been lost.

And now we come to the continuing thread from my last review - how is Chibnall developing the characters, bearing in mind there's far too many of them? Ryan, who got by far the most development last week, continues to hold the spotlight as he struggles to climb a ladder. Graham's only real character beats are wishing he could go home and wishing that the 19-year-old who he has no relationship with would call him "Granddad", and Yaz... was here? The Doctor is also confusing here, shouting at Ryan for using a gun on non-sentient androids because she doesn't like guns, and then setting off an EMP bomb that kills them anyway. Later she aimlessly points her "Sonic Swiss-Army-Knife, without the knife" at a Scarf that's strangling Epzo, only for Angstrom to save him with her knife, leaving her looking rather silly. The Doctor's refusal to use guns and knives feels like someone watched the Tenth Doctor and decided to copy over a bunch of traits without thinking,and it feels hypocritical when Thirteen is willing to melt a person alive but having the Sonic cut things is too far? The only redeeming thing she did in this episode was the note of utter despair near the end of the episode when The Doctor believes that they're trapped on the planet without the TARDIS. Whittaker's exhaustion is palpable and it's a strong note in an episode otherwise without them.

Who turned out the lights?

There's a lot more I could nitpick and question, but I think my point is made. This episode's writing, editing and cinematography were all egregiously sub par. I know the second of every era ends up being a little dodgy, but this just doesn't feel right and it makes me really worried at whether Chibnall is the man for this job. He hasn't actually written any good episodes of Doctor Who yet, as far as I can reckon, and by writing so many of the episodes himself and by having too many companions he's really stacked the deck against himself. I will hold out hope that this series will improve in the next few weeks, but at its current rate it looks less likely to stride to the finish and more likely to shamble.

Thanks

Next Week: We visit the 1950s to meet Civil Rights campaigner Rosa.

P.S. Also, the new opening titles are rubbish. And so is the new TARDIS interior. Too dark, and the time rotor doesn't go up and down. Bleh.