Tom Salinsky

Arghh!! So close!

This is Chibnall’s best script so far. But it’s probably the fourth best story of the year, about level with Arachnids in the UK and with some of the same flaws.

What’s frustrating is that Arachnids was almost as good as it could have been, it just needed an ending that made sense and was on-theme. Whereas Battle comprehensively squanders any number of hugely promising story ideas in its last ten minutes, in a rather dispiriting and depressing way.

The opening is some of the best stuff we’ve seen all season.The Ux are a fascinating creation and the visuals are absolutely eye-popping. The mystery of Ranskoor Av Kolos is fascinating and guest star Mark Addy makesa great impression as Paltracki. I have two niggling complaints about all this.

Firstly, the neurobalancers are clearly going to be very important later (read on) but why don’t we get a clear shot of team TARDIS applying them?And why does this story need two separate unrelated little black gizmos which you stick to your face? Secondly, as always sagacious Andrew Ellard points out, Chris Chibnall’s talent for euphonious alien planets, characters and races lags very far behind his showrunner predecessors. Epzo, Tsuranga, Krasko, Ranskoor Av Kolos and even Paltracki are all awkward in the mouth and grating on the ear.

Then, the mission is defined and the team sets off. Two things here. Firstly, Steven Moffat acutely pointed out that a great deal of classic Doctor Who, for budgetary reasons, involves people standing around urgently. Russell T Davies brought running to the series, if not for the first time, then certainly as a regular feature. Chris Chibnall’s revolutionary vision for the show seems to involve walking. An awful lot of walking. Walking towards the Ghost Monument, walking around Robertson’s hotel, walking around the corridors of the Tsuranga, walking up and down Pendle Hill, walking through the anti-zone and now plodding across the surface of Ranskoor Av Kolos. Rather like the anti-zone (although far less colourful and dramatic) it’s another plot-retardation device. Everyone needs time for a chat. Have to keep the plot on hold for a bit. It’s bad writing. It just is.

However, one of those chats is probably the best-written and acted scene in the whole season. When Graham tells the Doctor he’s going to kill Tzim-Sha if he gets the chance, I believe him. And I care. It’s powerful stuff, paying off story threads started nine weeks early, beautifully played by both Whittaker and Walsh.

The rest of the actual plot is pretty much standard middle-level Doctor Who science fiction nonsense. Ancient religion, blah blah blah. Mysterious crystals, blah blah blah. Hugely powerful forces, blah blah blah. Fine, but hardly the point.

It really is best not to think too much about the details. One of the bad-guys who was just banished but not killed in an earlier episode (Tzim-Sha) returns, leaving the fate of Racist Fonzie still open. The robo-sentries from the terribly tiresome Ghost Monument are back for no very good reason. The Doctor finally admits that her anti-gun rhetoric is inconsistent, hypocritical and badly thought-through, further weakening her character. The Ux are a race of exactly two people (saves on budget) who live three thousand years or more, conveniently the same time that Tzim-Sha has been waiting for the Doctor. The very important people who urgently need rescuing just get treated like cargo and contribute nothing to the story. Nothing really feels like it means anything or it matters terribly much. Even getting back out of the floating rock castle in the sky, which took an awful lot of sonicking and frowning to get into, happens easily, quickly and off-screen.

As things ramp up, Jamie Childs does his best to build the energy and excitement, so it does feel dramatic, but when the character stuff should be paying off, there’s nothing he can do to fill the void that Chibnall leaves him. In order to save the day, the Doctor has to convince Andinio andDelph that their creator is a fraud and that the last three thousand years of sacrifice and toil have been for nothing. This should be appalling news and they should hate her for telling them this. No, they just happily agree to switch sides. On Earth, Tzim-Sha killed passers-by without a second thought. Now, he just stands there and listens to the Doctor explain that she’s going to foil his plan, and then lets her do that. Oh wait, he’s plumbed into this machine in some way. Is that why he can’t act more directly? It must be super-important that he stay connected. No, he just pulls out the tubes when it’s time to go and be shot by Graham.

And most egregiously of all, the hugely built-up neurobalancers come to nothing. Forcing characters to act against their nature, confronting them with their darkest secrets, paranoid fantasies and basest thoughts is a wonderfully effective science-fiction trope which can really reveal character in a way which is not available to conventional drama. The Doctor and Yas losing their identities as the terrible forces of the planet take hold once they’ve removed their neurobalancers could have been an amazing sequence, easily helping me to overlook some of the other rather iffy plotting and catapulting this to the top ranks of this season.

What actually happens? The Doctor and Yas get a bit of a sore head for thirty seconds, then put the neurobalancers back on again. I’ve never seen a writer so allergic to drama, so blind to the possibilities of their own scripts.

The other big payoff here is Graham’s confrontation with Tzim-Sha. As I’ve said, this is very clumsily arranged, and it doesn’t really come to anything. Graham just decides not to kill him – but again trapping a villain for eternity is presented as a kindness, compared to a quick death. What does help slightly is that Tosin Cole does his best work of the whole season. His stuff with Graham gives us a flash of what this relationship could have been, with a bit more time, a bit more care and a bit more talent.

And that’s it. We’re done for 2018.

Chris Chibnall has had more time to prepare fewer episodes than any showrunner in history, and yet most of these scripts felt to me like hasty first drafts. There’s enough good stuff here to scrape together four stars, but the only really good scripts this year have been the three without Chibnall’s name on them – the fun Kerblam!, the very dramatic and funny Witchfinders and the truly excellent It Takes You Away. These are also the only scripts to even attempt to make proper use of the four regulars (can you tell me one necessary or even interesting thing which Yas does in this entire episode?).

As usual, let’s compare my reactions to fandom at large. Over on Gallifrey Base, Rosa comes out top, averaging 8.49 out of ten. with The Woman Who Fell to Earth just behind it on 8.44. But Rosa has a lot more 9s and 10s. The Ghost Monument does surprisingly well in fourth place with an 8.26, just inching ahead of It Takes You Away. The Tsuranga Conundrum is decisively last with an average of just 6.6 and nearly double the 1s and 2s of its nearest rival The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos.

So, this has been a divisive year, to say the least, and we now need to wait till early 2020 for the next full season. But ratings are top-notch so I imagine the BBC will be happy, and therefore that the job is Chibnall’s for as long as he wants it. Sigh.

One troubling stat though is to be found on Rotten Tomatoes which aggregates critics’ and users’ ratings. For the first ten seasons of the revived series, critic ratings range from a low of 71% (Series One) to a high of 100% (Series Two to Five) with recent series all in the mid to low nineties.

Audience ratings range from a high of 94% (Series Two) to a low of 73% (Series Ten) with Russell’s stuff generally doing better than Moffat’s and Smith’s stuff generally doing better than Capaldi’s.

Series Eleven gets 95% from critics and a jaw-dropping 46% from users.

Can they all be woman-hating, mouth-frothing, misogynistic bros who just loathe the show now because of the sex of the lead performer? I mean – it’s possible. But maybe, just maybe, Chris Chibnall should look at some of the feedback in more detail. Once the fans turn on you, there’s no going back…