{"id":3770,"date":"2024-05-13T10:55:18","date_gmt":"2024-05-13T09:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3770"},"modified":"2024-05-14T19:59:43","modified_gmt":"2024-05-14T18:59:43","slug":"so-what-did-i-think-of-space-babies-and-the-devils-chord","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2024\/05\/13\/so-what-did-i-think-of-space-babies-and-the-devils-chord\/","title":{"rendered":"So\u2026 what did I think of Space Babies and The Devil\u2019s Chord?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Doctor Who<\/strong> is a uniquely flexible format, and while there were some off-putting things in the first four RTD2 stories (\u201cmavity\u201d, singing goblins, sonic forcefields, cartoon mallets), as a set they express the enormous range of possibilities that the series can provide, from creepy space opera, to giant terrifying production numbers, to whimsy, to deep emotion. And possibly the most exciting thing about the new season was the new Doctor. After several goes (with varying levels of success) at portraying a closed off, emotionally-stunted timelord, this time we\u2019re getting someone open-hearted, generous and compassionate. It\u2019s a great place to take the character.<\/p>\n

And superficially, this is the 2005 playbook revisited: establish the rules; take a trip to the unfamiliar future; take a trip to the more-familiar past. And we get to do it all in a single night as \u2013 for the first time ever \u2013 we got two new episodes on the same day. But rather than express all the different things the show can be \u2013 scary, funny, exuberant, dark, mournful, thrilling, thoughtful, silly, angry \u2013 we got two potentially divisive episodes back-to-back which were both bizarre in much the same way. Three if you count the baby-eating goblins at Christmas. That doesn\u2019t send the message \u201chere\u2019s a show that can do anything\u201d. Rather, it sends the message \u201cHope you like bodily functions and people pulling faces, because that\u2019s the show now.\u201d Of course, both stories have more to offer than that, but after such a strong opening quartet, I can\u2019t understand why we now have two such defiantly quirky episodes right out the gate. It\u2019s unlikely to win new fans and it\u2019s almost guaranteed to anger existing ones.<\/p>\n

Taking Space Babies<\/strong> first, I have no problem with the so-called exposition dump as Ruby peppers the Doctor with questions. I wished that the \u201cbutterfly\u201d moment hadn\u2019t been in the trailer, as I thought it was the set-up for a whole story and not a single throwaway gag. Exploring the space station is suitably suspenseful, the babies are eerily convincing, and Golda Rosheuvel\u2019s Nanny was a nice blend of warmth and tension. Only Ncuti\u2019s repeated tic of \u201cBabies \u2013 space babies!\u201d grated just a bit, and the political points seemed grafted-on rather than emerging naturally from the underlying story logic. But my taste in humour doesn\u2019t include snot and nappies, and I\u2019m rather dismayed that the definition of the problem and a major part of its solution has to put these elements front-and-centre. Still, it should prove that Disney\u2019s funding isn\u2019t Americanising the scripts as the \u201cBogeyman\u201d pun only works in British English.<\/p>\n

The heart-and-soul of the episode is the Doctor risking his own life to save the slavering beast which for all its scary and slobbery appearance is simply playing its own innocent part in the narrative. The effects work is top-notch here, but compared to the wallop of the Doctor\u2019s conversation with suddenly-childless Carla Sunday, it doesn\u2019t have much in the way of depth or drama. It\u2019s kinetic, rather than truly moving, if you see what I mean. The only properly quiet moment is the weird meta-textual reprise of the end of Ruby Road<\/em>. The rest is a slightly odd remix of The Beast Below<\/em> and The Impossible Planet<\/em>, buoyed by Millie Gibson and especially Ncuti Gatwa, but never feeling like it amounts to very much.<\/p>\n

Rusty hangs a lantern on the repeated baby image in an effort to make it seem like part of an unfolding master plan (which it may yet prove to be) rather than a paucity of imagination on the part of the showrunner. And he tries the same trick again with The Devil\u2019s Chord<\/strong> which is clearly a re-run of The Giggle<\/em>, from the 1920s opening, to the explosion of camp villainy, to the unexpected musical number at the end. Although given that it\u2019s the third musical number in four episodes, I don\u2019t know if \u201cunexpected\u201d really works. The problem is that telling us that the two stories are related doesn\u2019t make the feeling of \u201coh, this again\u201d go away. Jinkx Monsoon\u2019s Maestro would have seemed much fresher if we hadn\u2019t seen The Toymaker a few months ago, or indeed the Space Babies an hour ago.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s new is the meta-joke that even with Disney money, the show can\u2019t afford to license any Beatles songs, and so the Doctor and Ruby\u2019s trip back to Abbey Road coincides with an erasure of music from the world. And we get the Pyramids of Mars<\/em> homage which Russell could never find space for in 2005. Inside all the whirl and dash of these stories there are lots of hints about a bigger, more complicated over-arching story. Adding to the hints about Ruby\u2019s past, the cryptic warning from The Meep, and mystery of Mrs Flood, we now have even more warnings from Maestro, and the Doctor asserting that \u201cthings connect\u201d.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, there are references to An Unearthly Child<\/em>, both in the dialogue and on billboards, not to mention an acting role for venerable costume designer June Hudson. There\u2019s also the repeated appearance of Coronation Street<\/em>\u2019s Susan Twist in multiple roles across various episodes. But a complicated series of connections won\u2019t make a bad episode into a good one. And this isn\u2019t bad exactly, but \u2013 again \u2013 what is it about? What does it mean? It doesn\u2019t have Chris Chibnall\u2019s inability to realise the dramatic potential of even the most extraordinary situations, thank goodness, nor his refusal to ever attempt both plot and character within the same scene, but it operates more on a sitcom level than anything we\u2019ve had for ages, which is rather a waste of this incarnation, defined as he is by his previously-mentioned emotional intelligence.<\/p>\n

For all that the interesting story seems to be at the fringes of the narrative and not at the centre, the second episode \u2013 which is ten minutes longer \u2013 feels better paced, even if the middle thirty minutes is basically one long extended confrontation scene. There are some deliciously weird and suspenseful moments here, and the notion that the beauty of music is what stops us from killing each other is both bleak and optimistic in rather a beguiling way. And yet there are some significant missed beats, as the Doctor hops from his panicky admission \u201cI can\u2019t fight this thing,\u201d to the ironclad confidence of \u201cI can find the chord to banish you,\u201d in the space of twenty minutes without apparently having found anything new out, or weakened Maestro, or the situation having altered in any way at all.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the issue that we have plenty of time for a song and dance routine at the end (which I\u2019m fine with \u2013 of course a story which takes music away from humanity and then gives it back should celebrate its return) but no time at all to understand what happened between Maestro arriving in 1925 and then being banished in 1963. Even a couple of quick cuts to reassure us that time was reset and that music flourished in the intervening decades would have been helpful.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t give Space Babies <\/em>more than three \u2013 it\u2019s so flimsy, so silly, and so scatological. The Devil\u2019s Chord <\/em>had some stronger moments and nearly reached four stars, but in the spirit of keeping my powder dry, I\u2019ll award it 3.5. Each of these instalments was disappointing in some ways, fascinating and beguiling in others, but neither had the sureness of touch which the four specials demonstrated, and each seemed to think that it, and only it, was the one-off \u201coddball\u201d episode from the middle of the season, when in fact the job they had to do was to set the tone for Doctor Who in 2024. Still, Moffat\u2019s back next week, and everyone likes Moffat, right? Right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Doctor Who is a uniquely flexible format, and while there were some off-putting things in the first four RTD2 stories (\u201cmavity\u201d, singing goblins, sonic forcefields, cartoon mallets), as a set they express the enormous range of possibilities that the series can provide, from creepy space opera, to giant terrifying production numbers, to whimsy, to deep […]<\/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-3770","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-YO","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3770"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3777,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770\/revisions\/3777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}