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.

Review: Doctor Who 11.1: The Woman Who Fell To Earth

This is late, but then so am I.

Thirteen (Jodie Whittaker) proudly brandishes her
"Sonic Swiss-Army Knife"

Well then. Doctor Who is back after a long wait, now with a woman in its lead role. Casting Broadchurch actress Jodie Whittaker as the new Time Lord was a genius decision, if only for the fact that it brought discussion of the show to an all time high as people of every background argued back and forth about what a woman would bring to the role. I was cautiously optimistic - I knew that the performance of any new Doctor was half performance and half writing, and with Chris Chibnall at the controls it was anyone's guess what the writing would be like. The result of this experiment desperately wants us to think that it's The Eleventh Hour but in Sheffield, but it fails to reach that level for a variety of reasons.

I'm not sure what Jodie Whittaker was aiming for with her characterisation of the Thirteenth Doctor. She's manic, brutally honest, and also breathtakingly human and vulnerable. It's hard to get much more than that because we get precious little time with the Doctor on her own to assess her as a character in her own right; instead, she feels like the leader of a gang of kids, which is what Chibnall seems to have been going for. A lot of her key character moments, like shouting at someone for attacking an already-downed foe, or her triumphant "I Am The Doctor" speech, would have been a lot better if not for the utterly pedestrian editing, which was all over the place and gave the episode an odd, out-of-place feeling. I am confident that she at least knows what she's doing, which is why I'm optimistic, but at the moment I'm struggling to get the same gravitas from her as from previous Doctors.

The TARDIS team (or should I say TARDIS-less for the moment) has been packed with three new companions - dyspraxic Ryan (Tosin Cole), his step-grandfather Graham (Bradley Walsh) and PC-in-training Yaz (Mandip Gill). Most of the episode's focus is on Ryan, as he struggles to learn to ride a bike in the Sheffield hills, with grandmother Grace (Sharon D. Clarke) and Graham watching on. After he discovers a bizarre alien pod in the woods, he calls Yaz, and the two of them eventually end up on a train with Grace and Graham as an alien attacks and an amnesiac Doctor falls through the roof. After heavy publicity around the three companions, Grace's increasing presence in the adventure was immediately suspicious - and, on cue, she dies near the end of the story, creating lasting drama for Ryan and Graham. The two male companions have got the most drama going on, and the most tension for future episodes (although the whole "Call me Grandad" thing is lame, he's 19, he can call you what he wants) which really leaves Yaz in the cold a bit. A lesson not learned from Season 19 here - three companions is far too many, and so far Chibnall isn't even running damage control by splitting them up; they're together all the time, which leaves Yaz with very little to do besides asking questions and making the occasional joke.

Bradley Walsh provides some unexpected emotion at
Grace's funeral

While I did enjoy the episode's villain, Tsim-Sha, and his creepy face, the episode did very little to extract tension from him until the end. Most of the episode is spent working out who he is, and the Doctor comes up with the wrong theory, and so the actual exposition is left up to the villain himself, who monologues extensively and then takes part in a chase sequence about 10 minutes later where The Doctor kills him by melting his DNA with his own weapons. We're treated to a bizarre shot where The Doctor shouts at Karl, the bounty hunter's intended victim, for kicking his remains off of the edge of the crane they were fighting on - right after The Doctor herself saved the day in a painful and gruesome way. I hope this hypocrisy isn't a repeated theme.

Aside from a few other things like some really quite nice cinematography and a cool cliffhanger ending with our leads floating in space, this episode didn't really feel like a triumphant return to form. The decision to have three companions is already causing issues, and the writing isn't making up for the problems that that many side characters brings. I also want to say that I really want to like this Doctor, but there are a few niggling doubts in my mind that I hope are settled in the next few weeks. Overall The Woman Who Fell To Earth was an interesting start to a new era, and I only hope that the show manages to iron out its few kinks by the end of its run.

Thanks.

P.S. It's good to be back! Although I only really wrote this review because I really wanted to discuss next week's episode, The Ghost Monument.