Doctor Who 11.10
And thus, minus a New Year's Special to come, the season ends. I liked it, as I liked all but one of the episodes. There hasn't been one to slay me with its brilliance, but neither, excepting the Not!Amazon in space tale, has there been one where I felt disappointed, and I've grown very fond of the new Team TARDIS. So, overall: nice debut of the Chibnall-Whittaker era, and it will be a looooong year to wait for the next season.
Should have known that sending Tim Shaw back a few millennia would mean he'd make himself the god of something, I mean, I know how genre works, and yet, like the Doctor, I was caught by surprise. Also, hats off to Chibnall; the season finale proved one more time he and his fellow writers managed to provide good ensemble stories with memorable, individualized guest characters in each episode. Considering that one of my problems with Chibnall's RTD-era DW episodes - the one with Ten and Martha versus solar flares - was that I found that episode's ensemble absolutely undistinguishable and hard to tell from each other -, I am all the more impressed. This time around, we get the Captain (he seemed familiar, but I couldn't tell from where until I saw him refered to as Robert Baratheon in someone else's review), whom you could observe coming back from his shattered state bit by bit throughout the episode (which, btw, I thought was a better acting showcase than what the actor got to do as Robert in s1 from Game of Thrones together, but then Robert Baratheon wasn't exactly a layered character), and who made the stakes for people not our team more real than the glowy statis fields did, and the two Urks (spelling?). (And Tim Shaw, who still was standard evil alien, though more powered up this time around.)
But really, the emotional heart of episode and as it turns out, now that it's over, the entire season, was Graham and the Graham-Ryan relationship. Grief, what it does to people and how they move on (or not) brings out the best in Chibnall as a writer (see s1 of Broadchurch, see Adrift in s2 of Torchwood), so in retrospect, that, too, makes sense. (It's also not something you can continue without pressing the reset button, so I'm assuming that whatever the big emotional arc of s12 will be, it won't be around Graham and Ryan.) I might have rolled my eyes a bit at "if you kill him, you'll become him" because really, didn't we move on from that far too easy fallacy in storytelling, but otoh Ryan's "I love you" and Graham finally getting the fist bump felt earned through the entire season, and from a Doylist perspective, I'm actually okay with not killing the villain because all too often, either the Disney death by falling from a high cliff (so the hero doesn't have to do it) or the grimdark opposite (there is no option BUT kill kill kill) feel like the two default options these days, so DW trying to let its characters find a third option is fine by me.
The Doctor references two RTD episodes in her dialogue (turning Margaret the Slitheen into an egg and dragging the Earth through space), which reminded me of the Ninth Doctor and Margaret "takes one to know one" (killer trying to make themselves feel better by mercy) scene, which is the kind of sharpness re: the Doctor's characterisation this season avoids, though there's the occasional moment (like with James in The Witchfinders) that at least alludes to it. And you know, for a season, I'm fine with that, too; Twelve has been through hell in his last years, and thus it makes both Watsonian and Doylist sense for the Doctor to emphasize kindness at this point of her life. And not letting the Companions kill. Journey's End didn't just feature the TARDIS dragging the Earth through space, it also had Davros tell the Doctor that he turns his Companions into killers, and that's not touching on Donna's fate later. Yes, I rolled my eyes (see above) at the "don't become him", but is it entirely ic for the Doctor, given the backstory? Absolutely. (As is the admission to Ryan that she's making up rules as she goes along.) Also, this season has been generous to Doctor/TARDIS shippers (and who among us isn't? If there's one ship the fandom can agree on, it's surely this?): Thirteen's look of adoration as her "ghost monument" materializes being yet another case in point.
The bit with the Doctor and Yaz having to take their rage-blocking devices off for a while made me suspect that an early draft of this story might have been a two parter where this resulted in an entire subplot of these two going darkside for a while until their teammates bring them back, and then Chibnall was told he wouldn't get 12 episodes per season, only 10, and had to rewrite, which makes it a bit of a pointless red herring.
Let's see, what else: quarries! All the nostalgia. The Doctor replying to "does it have to be us?" that everyone else has ignored the distress call felt like a comment to present day politics, but maybe I'm reaching. The Captain being alive and well at the end, having rescued the other hostages: most welcome. I was afraid he was a goner, the token tragic death of the finale, but apparantly that was his crewmate in the opening.
Now I'm looking forward to the New Year's Special, and not at all to the entire Who-less year to follow.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1317396.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Should have known that sending Tim Shaw back a few millennia would mean he'd make himself the god of something, I mean, I know how genre works, and yet, like the Doctor, I was caught by surprise. Also, hats off to Chibnall; the season finale proved one more time he and his fellow writers managed to provide good ensemble stories with memorable, individualized guest characters in each episode. Considering that one of my problems with Chibnall's RTD-era DW episodes - the one with Ten and Martha versus solar flares - was that I found that episode's ensemble absolutely undistinguishable and hard to tell from each other -, I am all the more impressed. This time around, we get the Captain (he seemed familiar, but I couldn't tell from where until I saw him refered to as Robert Baratheon in someone else's review), whom you could observe coming back from his shattered state bit by bit throughout the episode (which, btw, I thought was a better acting showcase than what the actor got to do as Robert in s1 from Game of Thrones together, but then Robert Baratheon wasn't exactly a layered character), and who made the stakes for people not our team more real than the glowy statis fields did, and the two Urks (spelling?). (And Tim Shaw, who still was standard evil alien, though more powered up this time around.)
But really, the emotional heart of episode and as it turns out, now that it's over, the entire season, was Graham and the Graham-Ryan relationship. Grief, what it does to people and how they move on (or not) brings out the best in Chibnall as a writer (see s1 of Broadchurch, see Adrift in s2 of Torchwood), so in retrospect, that, too, makes sense. (It's also not something you can continue without pressing the reset button, so I'm assuming that whatever the big emotional arc of s12 will be, it won't be around Graham and Ryan.) I might have rolled my eyes a bit at "if you kill him, you'll become him" because really, didn't we move on from that far too easy fallacy in storytelling, but otoh Ryan's "I love you" and Graham finally getting the fist bump felt earned through the entire season, and from a Doylist perspective, I'm actually okay with not killing the villain because all too often, either the Disney death by falling from a high cliff (so the hero doesn't have to do it) or the grimdark opposite (there is no option BUT kill kill kill) feel like the two default options these days, so DW trying to let its characters find a third option is fine by me.
The Doctor references two RTD episodes in her dialogue (turning Margaret the Slitheen into an egg and dragging the Earth through space), which reminded me of the Ninth Doctor and Margaret "takes one to know one" (killer trying to make themselves feel better by mercy) scene, which is the kind of sharpness re: the Doctor's characterisation this season avoids, though there's the occasional moment (like with James in The Witchfinders) that at least alludes to it. And you know, for a season, I'm fine with that, too; Twelve has been through hell in his last years, and thus it makes both Watsonian and Doylist sense for the Doctor to emphasize kindness at this point of her life. And not letting the Companions kill. Journey's End didn't just feature the TARDIS dragging the Earth through space, it also had Davros tell the Doctor that he turns his Companions into killers, and that's not touching on Donna's fate later. Yes, I rolled my eyes (see above) at the "don't become him", but is it entirely ic for the Doctor, given the backstory? Absolutely. (As is the admission to Ryan that she's making up rules as she goes along.) Also, this season has been generous to Doctor/TARDIS shippers (and who among us isn't? If there's one ship the fandom can agree on, it's surely this?): Thirteen's look of adoration as her "ghost monument" materializes being yet another case in point.
The bit with the Doctor and Yaz having to take their rage-blocking devices off for a while made me suspect that an early draft of this story might have been a two parter where this resulted in an entire subplot of these two going darkside for a while until their teammates bring them back, and then Chibnall was told he wouldn't get 12 episodes per season, only 10, and had to rewrite, which makes it a bit of a pointless red herring.
Let's see, what else: quarries! All the nostalgia. The Doctor replying to "does it have to be us?" that everyone else has ignored the distress call felt like a comment to present day politics, but maybe I'm reaching. The Captain being alive and well at the end, having rescued the other hostages: most welcome. I was afraid he was a goner, the token tragic death of the finale, but apparantly that was his crewmate in the opening.
Now I'm looking forward to the New Year's Special, and not at all to the entire Who-less year to follow.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1317396.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.