Really wanted to get this out yesterday but got a migraine at 6 PM and was out for the day. So it goes.
What makes a good Doctor Who episode? A list of things off the top of my head:
- adventure with an edge of horror, usually gothic
- characters playing different versions of themselves
- going undercover
- a villain who chews scenery like raisin bran
- gallifrey lore
- the master, usually
- getting involved on a personal level with a major historical event
- rocket launches
- taking down a political tyrant, who may or may not have your face
- robots who have a different survival agenda than humans
- running around paris
- or amsterdam
- the doctor dealing with grief and loss
- a dimension of the universe outside our understanding where strange, inexplicable things can happen
- the TARDIS has something to say
I made this (very incomplete) list as a reminder, mainly to myself, that there are lots of things that make a compelling Doctor Who episode. When the phrase ‘Doctor Who can do anything and be anything’ gets parroted from producer to fan, it’s usually framed as a positive thing. The show can run forever! It will never get boring! But what I’m finding more and more in my reactions of late is that the show can do and be anything, but those things aren’t necessarily good. It’s great that the show can do whatever it wants, because it means the ability to shed the bad and move on quickly. It’s a way to adapt, not a way to be.
Obviously, I’m having a lot of trouble with this series, and I’m endlessly searching for reasons why. It’s not like all the elements I listed above have been absent. I hated Series 7 but was able to acknowledge that the poor, messy writing was a phase, and one bad season was not going to ruin the legacy of the show. (Well, considering how many fans left that season…but anyway). I loved Twelve but at the same time he was not my Doctor. He was a great Doctor, with much better writing than Smith ever got, but there was that little extra bit of Doctor Who magic that was missing for me. And that was okay. Not every Doctor is my Doctor.
I still want to see Jodie at fan conventions, but I worry that looking back on this era in ten years, when fans work to excavate and recuperate its reputation, that I still won’t be able to join in. There is something fundamentally boring about the episode I just watched – and it shouldn’t have been, considering it had servant robots and temples and Crimean front lines and Sontarans and garbage chutes.
The Actual Review of the Episode
The base of the episode is a fairly standard monster of the week plot. The Doctor, in 1855, is faced with convincing a bullheaded commander to not lead his troops to massacre against an overwhelming number of Sontarans. She enlists progressive nurse Mary Seacole to help, as one does. Dan and Yaz are almost immediately whisked away to their own storylines – Dan to modern day Liverpool, which is also overrun by Sontarans, and Yaz to a weird temple in need of repair. It’s a smart way to run parallel narratives through the episode, with the Doctor and Dan dealing with the immediate Sontaran threat while Yaz is caught up in the overarching Flux mystery. The Crimean-Sontaran conflict is most readily reminiscent of two classics, “War Games” and “The Silurians” (if you don’t want constant comparisons to older episodes you have come to the wrong place). The moral conflict of “The Silurians” came from Brig wanting complete domination over the enemy threat and the Doctor trying to convince him that negotiation with a species that actually had pretty legitimate claim over the land might fare better in the long run. I’m not going to say “Silurians” is ‘good’ Doctor Who, but the last confrontation packs a punch because it’s such a personal and moral betrayal of the Doctor. In watching “Sontarans” I kept wishing that the parallels between General Logan and Skaak had been more heavily leaned on, especially in their face off. Despite Logan contantly rattling on about Queen and country and dismissing the Doctor for being a woman, there didn’t seem to be any personal verve or vitriol behind his actions. If the show wanted to make the argument that humans are just as war-eager as Sontarans, where are the scenes that showed that?
In other news, the Sonataran have gotten significantly worse at war. Weapons that kill them from the front? Never heard of shifts? Why invade all history when you can invade the prehistoric era and go from there? Sloppy, you guys, sloppy.
The other pet peeve specific to this era is Dan just being on board with the Doctor after maybe twenty minutes. Taking camera diary footage narrated specifically for the Doctor seems a little extreme, and we never get a reason why Dan would want to travel with Doctor over, say, his personally assigned savior. I found his fraught relationship with Karvanista much more compelling and plausible. Karvanista as a character seems to work because although ‘dog alien’ is perhaps one of the broadest strokes of character, he is fundamentally a dog despite his better self, and there’s a ton to work with there! While I enjoyed Dan’s comedy, and especially the shots of him waddling around with a frying pan, his particularly brand of cluelessness only took off when paired with Karvanista’s frustration and disdain for humanity.
Which sort of brings me to my last question in this neverending search: Is Flux fun?
A show doesn’t have to be good to be fun, and I know for a fact by evidence of my tears that this show doesn’t have to be fun to be good. But there’s an emptiness at the core to the storytelling here that lacks excitement or pleasure or angst or heartbreak. I mean, could Doctor Who be depressed?
End notes:
- Swarm in particular shows promise as a campy and unnecessarily extra villain (my fave) but it’s still hard to connect through the make-up. More often than I not I have to use subtitles.
- Yaz didn’t get much to do except wander around a temple and get threatened. Vinder was similarly occupied and didn’t even get as many lines. I was still happy to see him but if he becomes a romantic lead for Yaz I will scream.
- so is the sontaran-british war now just…a part of history? instead of the russians? how does that work? what about Sontar the country? crimean war seems like a pretty fixed point in time, in which case, time will fix itself and all those soldiers wouldn’t have died which is even less reason to care. I need this era to explain things to me, just not the things it’s been explaining over and over (like charging up a phone. I understand how charging up a phone works)
- the visuals in this ep aside from the LOTR moment were pretty neat
- I’m trying not to be a downer bitch about this series, I’m really not
Next week:
Cybermen! Weeping Angels! Falling! Mid-season!
If you want to support me, or even just to spite me, consider donating a cup of caffeine to my kofi