{"id":2699,"date":"2021-12-05T20:44:07","date_gmt":"2021-12-05T20:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2699"},"modified":"2021-12-16T10:03:49","modified_gmt":"2021-12-16T10:03:49","slug":"so-what-did-i-think-of-the-vanquishers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/12\/05\/so-what-did-i-think-of-the-vanquishers\/","title":{"rendered":"So… what did I think of The Vanquishers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen plenty of promising set-ups undone by poorly-thought-out finales during modern Doctor Who, of course. Almost none of Steven Moffat\u2019s final episodes live up to the promise of the penultimate instalments \u2013 with the apotheosis of this trend being Heaven Sent<\/em> \/ Hell Bent<\/em>, one half of which is a total triumph of the television arts, the other half of which is wildly undisciplined, often makes very little sense and doesn\u2019t earn any of the emotional beats it strains for.<\/p>\n

This was rather different. The previous five episodes had been so poor in execution that it was scarcely possible for the final chapter to redeem them \u2013 but the concept of the season as a whole was also completely wrong-headed. When reviewing Dinosaurs on a Spaceship<\/em><\/a>, I noted that the Doctor spends some time early in the episode acquiring a temporary gang to surround himself with \u2013 behaviour so peculiar he is forced to comment on it, in the hope that that will make it seem more understandable (it doesn\u2019t). It\u2019s scarcely a surprise that when the end of the story comes, each of these people has a skill-set which exactly meets a need which the plot presents the team with. It\u2019s a version of James Bond using each gadget he\u2019s given by Q exactly once. It\u2019s basically a set-up and payoff, if you squint, but ideally you need not to notice that the set-ups are being set-up at the time.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same here, but with the volume turned up to eleven, the jump-cutting gone bananas and the technobabble so thick you could eat it\u00a0 with a spoon (or a quantum neutrino artron spoon, I suppose). I could, and I suppose I will, make a list of things which didn\u2019t make any sense, but honestly, what was the point of any of this? It\u2019s not an epic battle for the safety of the universe in any meaningful way, none of the characters get a chance to register and the whole thing is littered with cargo-cult drama.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s define that term for a moment. In the 1940s, westerners landed planes full of amazing cargo on remote islands and then buggered off again. The islanders, hopeful that more planes would visit, recreated the landing strip, lights and so on, turned into a religious ritual. They copied the form of what they had seen without understanding its function or purpose.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen this since early in Series 11. Chris Chibnall dimly recalls that the Doctor doesn\u2019t like guns, so he has her resort to non-artillery forms of fatal despatch, or condemns her foes to the torture of a long slow death rather than a quick painless one \u2013 while trumpeting her superior morality. She walks up to weeping angels, taunting them by blinking, because Chris Chibnall dimly recalls that blinking is a bad thing to do near an angel, but he\u2019s forgotten why. And here, he dimly recalls that having a sympathetic character die at the end gives the audience a rush of emotion, but Jericho\u2019s death is pointless and stupid and meaningless.<\/p>\n

So, because the story ends with the Earth intact, friendly characters restored to their right time and place, and the threat of the Flux withdrawn, we get a feeling of satisfaction. But the entire edifice collapses under the weight of a moment\u2019s introspection, there are no emotional beats that feel earned or worthwhile and the tactic of starting the story off with a flurry of different characters and locations didn\u2019t remotely pay off, because most of them stand around doing nothing during the climax \u2013 fairly standard for this writer but particularly galling when so much effort has been expended to set them all up. While the contrived neatness of the Dinosaurs on a Spaceship <\/em>gang feels first draft, forced, laboured \u2013 at least it is contrived. This is just excess for the sake of excess.<\/p>\n

Okay, if you can bear it, let\u2019s go through some of the things that didn\u2019t work, didn\u2019t make sense or left me confused. Let\u2019s start by noticing \u2013 as I didn\u2019t in my review of last week\u2019s episode \u2013 that among a series of easily-dismissed cliffhangers, the shocking end of episode four turned out not merely to be undone almost instantly, not merely to be yet another seemingly-fatal-event-revealed-as-taxi-service-to-the-next-bit-of-plot, but in fact the angels delivering the Doctor to the precise place and person that she had been seeking at the start of chapter one. <PITCH MEETING>Oh very convenient psychopathic killers!<\/PITCH MEETING><\/p>\n

The \u201cpreviously on\u2026\u201d montage seemed to blend into the beginning of the episode proper, which is cut so rapidly that it gave the whole episode a previously on\u2026 energy (a device employed for real by The Good Fight<\/em> recently, but here just the result of trying to pack too much into 60 minutes).<\/p>\n

What will Swarm and Azure do now they have the Doctor in their grasp? Well, they will split her through time enabling her to be exactly wherever she needs to be in order to foil their plans. The rest of their time together is spent portentously announcing the same kind of gibberish we\u2019ve been hearing since Fugitive of the Judoon<\/em> until they obediently commit suicide and let the Doctor go. Nothing that happens in this part of the plot matters at all. There are a couple of lines about the Flux not being quite as bad because of some Oodling around, but honestly, it doesn\u2019t make a difference. The Flux (and the Flux part two) have had such wildly inconsistent destructive powers that it scarcely matters if the Ood turns the volume down a bit \u2013 or up a bit, or anything.<\/p>\n

The Sontaran takeover of an Earth surrounded by a shield of Lupari ships continues not to have any reality whatsoever. If it was happening, presumably it would look a lot like what we already saw in episode two. In which case, why did we spend an entire episode establishing how easily-defeatable the Sontarans are, before revealing them as the season\u2019s Big Bad? Their plan just about makes sense, but it doesn\u2019t seem to matter to anyone overmuch, and at the end of the day, when it\u2019s used against them, it\u2019s just a light show.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t say the same about the Williamson tunnels which allow visitors to travel to other worlds and other times. Williamson dug the tunnels to connect these different portals he had discovered, which is a neat trick given that he must have excavated first in order to have seen these portals. He then did more digging because he thought that yet more tunnels would give humanity somewhere to hide from the end of the world. The thought of making a shelter somewhere further from the destructive power of these portals did not occur to him, it seems. And lo \u2013 he was mocked for his foolishness, despite the fact that all he had to do was walk unbelievers into one of these portals and they would have seen with their own eyes he was telling the truth. He is dismissed from the narrative, having served his purpose, which was\u2026 nothing I can easily recall. Nothing about the tunnels solves the problem of the Flux or does anything other than muddle an already complicated narrative and provide a feeble justification for people meeting up who have no business being re-united. This is Chibnall\u2019s habit of \u201cI need this character to be here, so now they are,\u201d taken to ludicrous extremes.<\/p>\n

On which subject, having three Doctors knocking around does at least give the central character some agency, but at the cost of stopping anyone else from having anything to do. Yas and Dan come off worst, as usual. As far as I can recall, neither of them does anything other than gawp for the entire run-time. Kate Stewart from 2017 procures a TARDIS abandoned in 1967 and delivers it to the Doctor in 1904 by means not disclosed and then takes Vinder\u2019s moment of triumph away from him by pointing a second, redundant gun at The Grand Serpent \u2013 and now she’s done for the day too.<\/p>\n

Ah yes, The Grand Serpent. It\u2019s passably amusing I suppose that the Doctor takes the piss out of his silly name, even if this is this week’s script taking the piss out of how poor last week’s script was, but again, The Grand Serpent doesn\u2019t really have a role to play here either. Everything the Sontarans are doing they could have done without him, and evidently they could have done it all with or without UNIT in place to defend the Earth. But they\u2019re made to look and sound ridiculous by having a stupid obsession with candy bars, so that\u2019s nice.<\/p>\n

There probably are explanations as to what Jericho and Claire are doing on the Sontaran ship, what the Sontarans think they are doing, why they wanted them to do it, and what happened as a result, but I didn\u2019t pick them up. The Doctor\u2019s sacrifice of Jericho would have been pretty hard to take if his death was the only way in which the threat could be neutralised. It\u2019s kind of nauseating here, since it amounts only to \u2013 oops, butterfingers.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s far, far harder to take is that every single one of the six billion Lupari have been murdered to protect the Earth. At the end of the episode, as everyone congratulates themselves on a job well done, Karvanista doesn\u2019t seem any more than mildly peeved at this slaughter. Remember, he began the episode fully intent on killing the Doctor and Yas because she had dared to ask him about the Division. Now she\u2019s responsible (in part) for the wholesale massacre of his entire race, every single person he ever knew or loved, a grudging respect seems to have formed between them. What must really grind his gears is that he can fly every single one of those six billion Lupari ships on his own by remote control. So really all of his friends, colleagues, family and associates could have stayed safe at home. <PITCH MEETING>Whoops! Whoopsie!<\/PITCH MEETING><\/p>\n

I could go on, but honestly it\u2019s too tiring. This exhausting series has been characterised by juxtaposition over dramatic action, whirling pixels over personal jeopardy, confusion over mystery and a total unwillingness to grapple with the ideas the story has presented. When Yas and the Doctor have their heartfelt chat at the end, it almost \u2013 for an instant \u2013 feels as if, at the eleventh hour, Flux<\/em> might be about to give us something with some kind of meaning, even a cargo cult version of it. But no, comedy Dan is here to ruin the moment. Phew. Hurrah for comedy Dan.<\/p>\n

There will be time to put the Chibnall\/Whittaker era in its proper context soon. When we get to November 2023, we\u2019ll be able to see not just how we got here, but also where we went. For now, it remains inconceivable to me that a writer this incapable of basic characterisation, cause-and-effect plotting or sayable dialogue should have been put in charge of the BBC\u2019s flagship show, and equally inconceivable that he thought himself at all capable of handling a story this vast and sprawling.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t given stars for any of these episodes. With the previous two seasons, I think I was probably a bit too generous, as early optimism forced me to tack on extra points for \u201cjust being Doctor Who<\/em>\u201d or somesuch. That optimism now having evaporated, I think I would probably take a whole star off pretty much everything after The Woman Who Fell to Earth<\/em> because even the best instalments are labouring under the weight of terrible series-wide decisions. With these episodes, I guess Sontarans on Horseback<\/em> is worth two out of five, and Oh Look It\u2019s the Angels Again<\/em> might struggle up to three. The rest are all zeroes across the board, because they never actually cohere into stories.<\/p>\n

What a fucking shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019ve seen plenty of promising set-ups undone by poorly-thought-out finales during modern Doctor Who, of course. Almost none of Steven Moffat\u2019s final episodes live up to the promise of the penultimate instalments \u2013 with the apotheosis of this trend being Heaven Sent \/ Hell Bent, one half of which is a total triumph of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[18,19],"class_list":["post-2699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-doctor-who","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-Hx","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2699"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2723,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699\/revisions\/2723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}