So. Doctor Who Series 11. Thirteen’s first season, and Chris Chibnal’s first season.

I’ll admit that I actually expected it to be worse. I stopped watching halfway through Twelve’s run and a while back I tried to run through it again to catch up back when The Thirteen specials were going on. I got through Twelve and really liked him, but got to Kerblam! and then I was turned off by just the intro (and, spoilers, but its still a shit episode). A while back I decided to just randomly start watching Face the Raven and go from there and I just finished Series 11. Watching Twelve’s final season and Thirteen’s first season, I can’t help but feel like Chibnal’s first season really was the worst in the show for either showrunner or Doctor. And because I’m trying to write about stuff more, I’m going to give my opinion on it while its still fresh.

Episode Overviews

I’m going to start by going over each of the ten episodes in brief and then maybe each member of Team TARDIS. Not counting Resolution, even though Chibnal considers it the finale, because I didn’t actually know that until I was already finished with the episode writeup.

The Woman Who Fell to Earth

I think this is fairly good for a new Doctor episode. I think those are best when the Doctor gets everything taken away and has nothing to handle the problem but her wits. Tzim-Sha isn’t really all that impressive, and there aren’t really that many moments like Eleven’s speech to the Atraxi. But I do like that the family of two of the Companions was killed by helping The Doctor. Though I think that Grace didn’t really need to even do what she did in the first place, which makes her sacrifice a bit underwhelming. But they did do a lot to make her likeable, and a decent amount of the episode is centered on the fallout. You actually feel like she mattered, which, honestly, I think Doctor Who has a problem with. Characters either die or have dramatic sacrifices, but there’s rarely any sort of exploration of who they left behind.

The Ghost Monument 

I think this episode has a few things going for it but overall its just sort of decent but not memorable. It is the first instance of The Timeless Child being brought up, which is the shocking revelation that led me back to the franchise. The “Sniper” bots are just way too inconsistent to feel like a threat, and even the Stenza connection feels underbaked, especially considering it goes nowhere. The episode has some decent ghost of a critique of systemic inequality, but not by much.

Rosa 

oooof. This episode is like 70% really good. I think that actually showing Ryan’s treatment compared to Thirteen and Graham is really good. I also think that discussing Yaz’s treatment as a “mexican” is good, and highlights how arbitrary racism is. They don’t lay it on thick enough to be depressing or uncomfortable to watch in a negative way, but at the same time there’s some stuff that just sort of feels forced, like going to the Whites Only motel and having the two colored companions sneak in the back window, and then sneak out when the cop comes to give that “we don’t take kindly to your kind round here” threat. I mean, I know its important for the narrative and to show the racism, but also why would the white characters not go to a motel where their friends aren’t legally allowed? But a scene like that is really undercut and ruined by Yaz telling Ryan that yeah, racism still exists in 2018, but she can take part in the systemic violence by being a cop, and America eventually got a Black president. I don’t like people getting racial epithets but its always going to be hard to have sympathy for anything that happens to a cop. I don’t really want to dwell on that, but it really is the sort of thing I hate seeing. The worst part of the episode is probably just the last third of it, where the team is scrambling around trying to stop the bad guy by doing the most ridiculous conspicuous things. I was cringing in advance thinking that Graham would have to fill in for James Blake as the one who called the cops on Rosa or something. The ending isn’t quite that bad, but its still so cringe. I will say I really like that the villain is a future criminal who killed a cartoonish number of people and he blames Black people for his problems so he wants to stop Rosa Parks. I think that frankly history would have reasserted itself because Rosa wasn’t even the first person to do that, she was just a better face for the movement than the unwed teenage mother. Though Rosa asserts that despite them talking about those things, she didn’t actually plan to sit in. Ultimately its at least memorable, but the cringe modern liberal politics kind of frustrate me. It was at least written by a Black woman, though, so its not as bad as it could have been.

Arachnids in the UK 

I think the biggest issue with this one is that its just not that interesting. I spent most of the time screenshotting the giant spiders to show Roomie, who loves spiders. There were some interesting spider facts, but I’m not sure these were accurate depictions of spiders with the way that they hunted and seemed to have webbing. I think that this could have been a pretty decent criticism of a certain real estate businessman with political aspirations, but other than his attitude I don’t particularly see what he did that was wrong? Like, the problem is that dead spider carcasses were put in the same place as toxic waste, which was otherwise safely stored in an abandoned mine.The spiders were then mutated. Except also the dead woman at Yaz’s apartment building had taken some spiders and they grew huge? I’m honestly not even sure what the issue was. Anyway, more important is the fact that Thirteen decides the most human thing to do is suffocate and starve the spiders after trapping them in a panic room. I’m not even sure the spiders would all flock to the bass beats of Stormzy, it seems like that much vibration would make them think its a predator and avoid it, and if they were hunting there’s no reason they’d all run together into the room. The mother spider on the other hand the Doctor kits herself up to herd safely with tea tree oil only to find that its already suffocating and dying and she’s opposed to the Trump expy just shooting it, but, like, its literally suffering in agony! Jack Robertson was a dick but he was right, it was a mercy killing. I feel like this could have been a meaningful exploration of Thirteen’s extreme pacifism, already highlighted when she refused to let Ryan even fight the sniperbots, but it doesn’t really do anything with it other than “that was bad and mean”. Its also very funny because when Ten faced off against giant spiders he drowned them in the core of the earth, and Twelve killed moon spiders with disinfectant.

Tsuranga Conundrum 

I think the best thing this episode does is start with the characters in the middle of some other adventure, talking about a previous adventure, before this adventure starts. I really like that. I also think the Pting is cute and so is Mabli. But otherwise this is mostly forgettable and some of the side stuff used to flesh out the episode feels just sort of bland. The mpreg alien stuff is nice and gives Graham and Ryan something to do, but its mostly slapstick. The brother and sister’s conflict isn’t engaging or interesting and with her dying off it feels sort of unfulfilling. I do like that Eve knows of The Doctor. Someone suggested this is the worst of the season but it was watchable if not memorable.

Demons of the Punjab 

This is without a doubt the best episode of the season. Its not just “a good episode for this season”, its a good episode period. Its a historical where, for the most part, the aliens take a back seat and the real enemy is humanity itself. The root problem of the episode is the Partition of India. So that means the real villain is Britain. At the heart of the episode is a love story that ends in tragedy and the family history of Yaz. I don’t really think it gets better than this. Its a story of ethnic conflict that The Doctor can’t fix and is broader than one family. They don’t show anything other than the tension, but the audience is made to know that actual violence and rioting is happening, just outside the range of the characters. Its done so well. I even like the Thijarians. Going from assassins to making sure no one’s death is unwitnessed the way their world’s was, though I think there could have been another Stenza connection here if they really wanted. I like when the Doctor is both misinformed and acting on false information and when the antagonists of a conflict aren’t actually there to cause harm. I also think the overall design of the Thijarians is good, though I do wish they had actual mouths and could be expressive. This is without a doubt a great story. I’ve joked before that white people learn of Partition either from Doctor Who or Ms Marvel. I sure hope the next episode is just as goo—oh no

Kerblam! 

This episode isn’t just kind of mid and boring, its also right up there with Kill the Moon in that its an episode that’s got an overall moral that I actively find repugnant. The world is lesser because of this Doctor Who episode. From the start, where The Doctor is excited for her package from Space Amazon (which can somehow teleport into the TARDIS) this is just a bad episode. I feel like at first it felt like it was going for a decent enough critique of Amazon, but even where it was it feels hollow. They keep mentioning how few people have jobs on Kandoka, but that’s never actually explored. The idea that maybe they shouldn’t have to have jobs that don’t exist in order to exist is not considered. The episode also just doesn’t feel like it has the budget? There’s supposedly 10,000 workers at the Amazon factory but we only ever see like five of them. Team TARDIS is slow and casual while they do everything. Yaz never has to piss in a bottle. It doesn’t feel like an Amazon floor. Most of the episode is just mid, but the twist is where it gets morally abhorrent. The villain, who up until this point has been weirdly helpful at solving a mystery caused by himself, plans to kill random customers and has been killing his coworkers to test his explosive bubble wrap. It feels like Falcon and the Winter Soldier where Karli decides she needs to do terrorism against civilians because otherwise she comes off as too likeable, except here its just out of nowhere. I think the worst part of it is that The Doctor says the benevolent Algorithm was trying to make Charlie understand what its going to be like for all his victims by killing the woman he has a crush on. The Algorithm fucking murders someone and The Doctor just doesn’t seem to care? And then the ending is basically “do better”. The problem is not the way that people use The System. The problem is that the system was created for specific reasons and those reasons are bad. I think its really weird that even in a liberal fantasy the bosses shut Space Amazon down for a month but only give everyone two weeks of paid leave. Anyway, I hate this episode so much.

Witchfinders

Another historical, and its not bad, but I feel like its just sort of hollow. I like the bits where The Doctor is up against sexism, and how Graham gets treated as the one in charge because he’s the old white man. I also like the sort of half-joke that King James is flirting with Ryan. But it falls flat because it doesn’t really seem to get acknowledged. Its also an episode where the aliens just get in the way and its one of those things where the aliens are… boring. Its also weird that the aliens can be mushed up and turned to mud but still have coherent sapience. 

It Takes You Away

I’m not sure if the core concept itself, of Hanne’s father setting up a fake monster so that he can snog his mirror wife, is all that engaging, but it does feel like something that could be fleshed out more. I’m just not really sure why the Solitract was trying to get people to go spend time with it in a remote cabin in Norway. But the real good part of this episode comes from Graham and the usual “being misled by a fake dead wife” thing. I actually think this part of the episode is done really well, and I half expected Graham to stick around in an alternate reality with his dead wife’s ghost. Instead it ends with the Doctor talking to a frog and then convincing the frog that there’s no reason to keep her there. Kind of falls flat. But the Graham stuff here does work well.

The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos 

This is another episode I was told was a particularly bad one, but I didn’t really feel like it was. Not a great finale, though. It just sort of feels like a normal episode, aside from Tzim “Tim Shaw” Sha returning. I feel like Tzim-Sha and the Stenza in general aren’t really explained enough for me to understand why the Ux think he’s a God or their creator. I’m not even clear on whether the mind altering effects of the planet are due to Stenza technology or the Ux powers or what. Its not really even clear what the machinery around Tzim-Sha is doing, and whether or not he’s becoming charged up. Or why he can’t leave the planet without dying. Its all a bit loose, narratively speaking. Where the episode really shines is in Graham’s story, and the way that he wants to get revenge on Tzim-Sha for killing Grace. I feel like this works best because we just saw him trying to reconnect with what he thought was Grace an episode earlier. The conclusion is satisfying. But like I said, other than an ‘old’ enemy returning, this doesn’t feel like a climactic episode that ends the show for several months until New Years. Also there’s not really any battle within the episode, so the title is a bit misleading.

Team TARDIS

So, that’s a brief (for varying definitions of the term) overview of the individual episodes. Overall the season isn’t as terrible as I expected it to be, though I have been told that its the best of Chibnal’s run, so with this not being so hot that’s not really something to look forward to. Still, low expectations are better than high ones.

Now I want to go over the characters themselves. I’ve read that Chibnal really wanted the Companions to be more of the story instead of just audience surrogates for the Doctor to explain things to. But did he really do a good job here?

Ryan Sinclair

I’ll start with Ryan since, honestly, he’s the one I find least interesting. I remember watching a Jay Exci vid that’s just a parody of the Thirteenth Doctor where Ryan mostly just goes “wow, it must suck being blind. I lost my mum and nan, and my dad left me”, and that’s more or less how he actually functions in the show. I feel like Ryan is a failed himbo. He’s written as dumb, but either Tosin Cole is not charismatic enough to pull it off, or Chibnal decided this is what the character should be like. Most of his scenes he comes off as bored, he never smiles, and, again, he’s just written to be stupid and I hate that. Sometimes he’ll pick up a gun or otherwise try to be cool. He mostly just casually drops that his dad left him into conversation, and the only time that really comes up as a meaningful thing is when it conflicts with him trying to relate with Hanne. Though then he really was right, Hanne’s dad did leave her. I think that scene where The Doctor writes a “map” on the wall that tells him to assume Hanne’s dad is dead and try to find someone else to care for her is really good, and his interactions with her are the best he does in the whole season. He’s also maybe the first companion with a disability, but its dyspraxia that we’re mostly informed of but never actually ends up being a problem. I think it would have been interesting if it actually mattered.

Yasmin Khan

Yaz is up next, and the common complaint seems to be that Yaz and Ryan (and sometimes Graham) are interchangeable, that no one on Team TARDIS really has a personality. I feel like that’s kind of unfair, but I do think that Yaz isn’t really all that developed, aside from Demons of the Punjab, where she’s still mostly in the background while The Doctor does things. She is however one of the ones who seems most interested in going off on her own or following the Victim of the Week to try to understand their problems. Although to be fair in one case of that the victim is her mum, and in another its her nani. So maybe its just Witchfinders. She is however the first one in any mess to go “Doctor!” so I can see where the Thazmin shipping comes from. I look forward to being completely disappointed by nothing coming of that until the middle special and then getting no real meaningful resolution. I was a bit surprised to see Najia asking if she was “seeing” the Doctor, though. That also probably helped people ship them. I’m obviously going to have a hard time getting to like Yaz because she’s a cop, but strangely enough that barely seems to come up. Which is a problem. You’d think someone who wants to become a detective would be more proactive at, you know, detecting.

Graham O'Brien

My favourite of the three human members of Team TARDIS is probably Graham, but really only because he gets the most development. That he’s holding onto the memory of Grace is pretty evident, and it doesn’t feel as forced as Ryan’s dyspraxia or bad father. He always has a saying of Grace’s, and it feels like he’s remembering her fondly instead of just looking to inform the audience of an attribute. He’s a bit of a grump, but in a likeable way, and I think Bradley Walsh does a good job of being a grandad. The relationship with Ryan is probably where I think the season is weakest, because while all three of the humans do know each other and that comes off, it doesn’t really feel deeper than that. One bit of a Ryan moment that I did like a lot was when he very clearly noticed that The Doctor didn’t give Graham an explosive. Ranskoor av Kolos was probably the best of the two of them together, and that and turning away from the Solitract because it didn’t want to save Ryan felt good. When Ryan does tell Graham he loves him and calls him grandad, that feels good. Even the moment in Rosa where he steps in to say “that’s my grandson” shows that he does care about Ryan and sees him as family, even if its just as a connection to Grace. I really hope the next few seasons actually do something with that, because its the best relationship in the show here, and I think it needs it. And I really want Ryan to do something other than looking bored and shrugging and telling someone how his dad left him.

The Thirteenth Doctor

But of course no Doctor Who thoughts would be complete without talking about The Thirteenth Doctor. And I think… she’s okay. There’s some writing bits that I feel irritating, or maybe they’re just Whittaker’s delivery, but sometimes she feels too quirky, but then again that’s how The Doctor is in other seasons and episodes as well. You can tell that in addition to being a woman she’s autistic just by looking at the outfit she chose. She’s very pacifist to a fault so far, and I like the way that she’s using Venusian Aikido a few times to stun people. But she feels very inconsistent and all her references are to historical Earth figures (and one future sheep war). There’s no Jim the Fish, just Elvis and Frank Sinatra. I do get a kick out of all the references to body and gender regeneration. I think those continue, so its fun. I like when Fourteen’s psychic paper calls him a lady. Its peak trans humour.

Closing Thoughts

So, what about all of Team TARDIS? The Fam? How do they work together? Well. I don’t really get the impression that they’re super good friends, the way you got with The Doctor and Rose or Clara, or Amy and Rory. Those relationships felt fun, but here they’re just folks on holiday together as opposed to real friends and family, despite The Doctor calling them her best friends. There’s one moment in Witchfinders that was really good where the fam convinced King James to let up on dunking Thirteen and then it turned out she got out herself because of one very wet summer with Harry Houdini. I’d thought that the gang might have had to rescue Thirteen, but then it somehow was even more disappointing. Ryan and Yaz have meaningful skills as a cop trying to make detective and a mechanics student, but they never really get to use those skills. Hell, Graham gets to use being a pensioner who drove buses more! Closest Ryan gets to using mechanical engineering is when the Doctor gives a lesson on flammability.

It isn’t a bad season, Kerblam aside, but I wish it was better. Very undercooked. The bad parts are really bad, the good parts are actually really good. But so much of it is just a bit mid. And I’m not really sure the show has worked out who this Doctor should be. The fact that I can barely remember episodes I watched less than a week ago is bad.

Bonus: Resolution

I went back and finished watching the New Year's Special and hot damn, it was so much better as a season finale. The threat feels suitably impressive and meaningful to the overall story of The Doctor, even if ultimately it's not much more than a blip. Just the presentation really sells this threat. The uncased Dalek itself is really menacing looking and the way that it speaks and controls people. I think on that end this is a really good episode. Love a good Dalek. Not all Dalek episodes are good, but this one definitely feels like it is, and I think a lot of that is carried by how The Doctor acts. Whittaker actually conveys the sort of terrified anger that The Doctor has towards these creatures, and in some ways it feels similar to the meeting between Nine and the Dalek in Dalek. I do wonder what it's trying to send a transmission to, though, considering Skaro is probably destroyed. I'm pretty sure it was mentioned as destroyed in Stolen Earth at least, and this thing has been dead for a thousand years and change. But I can't keep track of these sort of things, and the show barely can either. I also think that Graham spending time with Aaron is handled well, and once again Graham gets the best emotional moments of the season, though they actually let Tosin Cole act in this episode and Ryan's scene with his dad feels raw and emotional. His scene with his dad nearly dying is also emotional, but we don't really have much reason to care about him saving Aaron because they've had like one real interaction and it was negative. I don't really think that it's on Ryan to forgive his father, even when a Dalek is pulling him into the gravity corridor of a sun. Graham had more interaction with Aaron, and it would have been nicer if there was more of Aaron actually trying for forgiveness. Once again, I also would have preferred if Ryan was the one to suggest using the microwave to melt the Dalek's casing, so that he could actually show off his own engineering skills instead of showing off the skills of his dad, who will probably not get seen again. And then after the emotional scene of reconciliation they once again feel the need to remind us that Ryan has dyspraxia, because they can't seem to figure out how to show that instead of telling, and they need to tell us each time.

Of course, with Graham getting left behind it really highlights that problem of Companion interchangeability. They never actually seem to notice that Graham got left behind. He just gets replaced by a temporary companion and things continue on as normal. The Doctor calls the fam her "best friends" but it doesn't feel like they are. Much as I felt this was a good episode in terms of threat and tension and the enemy, it was a big example of some of the flaws of the season.