Another beautifully written historical episode. I think the fact that showrunner Chris Chibnall has ensured that people of colour are hired to write historically sensitive episodes like this, and ‘Rosa’, is making a palpable difference. Writer Vinay Patel‘s grandparents were Indian, and his previous credits demonstrate his experience and passion for writing in a way that draws on his roots. It matters that these episodes are not simply written by white people about a white Doctor interacting with these moments, and I think it shows in the quality of the episodes, which come across to me as personal, engaged, and centred on the moment in history and not on the Doctor.
In this episode we see Yaz (Mandip Gill) begging the Doctor to take her back in time to an important moment in her family’s history – the day her grandmother received a watch from her grandfather. We’ve seen similar story premises before, most notably in ‘Father’s Day‘, where the Doctor takes Rose back in time to see her father, and we all learn why that’s generally a bad idea. Some moments are fixed in time, and if you try to change things for those moments, Reapers sweep out of the fabric of the universe to correct things.
With plenty of warnings from the Doctor about not interfering, she eventually agrees. Because the Doctor will always side with curiosity.
Only this time it turns out that they arrive not only at an important moment of family history, but of the history of India and the world. They arrive the day before the Partition of India, when the country was divided in two – creating Pakistan.
I am going to own up and say that this truly significant moment in history is one that I knew nothing about prior to today. Zero. Nadda. As a white girl who attended British and American schools, no one ever told me anything about this. This new season of Doctor Who is once again serving up genuine history lessons – not only for the children who will be watching, but for many adults, too.
When I consider comparing this episode to other Doctor Who historicals – ‘The Romans‘, ‘The Visitation‘, even ‘The Fires of Pompeii‘ – there’s really no contest. The vast majority of Doctor Who historicals are focused on white European and American history, and it tends to focus on the kind of history that kids will be learning about in schools anyway: the Tudors and Stuarts, the Romans, Pompeii, the Moon Landing, the French Revolution. There are exceptions. I wish we had the lost serial ‘Marco Polo‘ – I listened to the 30-minute reconstructed episode about ten years ago… but it’s not the same. It’s also noticeable that it’s an episode focusing on a European encountering Kublai Khan and the Silk Road, and I’m not even going to hazard a guess as to whether it was sensitively handled.
This episode – and ‘Rosa’ – are doing something very different and very good. The Doctor isn’t explaining history to us and history is not simply an entertaining backdrop, focusing on the greatest hits of what English school kids are probably going to hear about anyway.
When the political situation in India is discussed, it is outlined for us by two brothers on opposing political sides. One a Hindu man, Prem, who wants to marry a Muslim woman; the other his brother, who is firmly opposed. When they discuss the British involvement in Indian history, again, it is the brothers who tell us about it and contextualise it from the point of view of the war that Prem fought in, and that his other brother died in. When we learn of the drought and starvation that India endured, it is Yaz’s grandmother and great-grandmother who tell us about it.
We are also introduced to Hindu and Muslim marriage ceremonies and a Hindu holy man. We are shown culture, not merely facts. And we are shown the hope that exists in these times, too. Thoughts about creating new ceremonies and new ways of living together, not simply enmity and despair.
This is a rich episode.
I also loved that the inevitable alien involvement turned out (minor spoilers) not to have any affect on the historical events. Doctor Who is not attempting to rewrite history. It is not inserting the Doctor, or alien species into human conflicts, which is a particularly problematic trope when it comes to white people interpreting things that happened to, or were achieved by, people of colour.
And because I’m sure someone, somewhere will say it: no, it is not the same if aliens turned out to have built Stonehenge or the Doctor started the Great Fire of London. One significant difference is that no one believes that ancient Britons could not have built Stonehenge, whereas a disturbing number of people think that the pyramids of Egypt and the Nazca linescould not have been achieved by the ancient peoples of Egypt and Peru and must have been made by aliens. It is different when science fiction stories posit aliens being responsible for the events that happen to marginalised groups. It matters that the Thijarans are here to witness history, and not make it.
That the Thijarans come to witness the ‘unacknowledged dead’ is so deeply moving, Not only simply as a thought for us all about death and baring witness, but also as a reminder of our role as viewers, and a description of what the writers are doing in bringing this episode to us. Part of remembering history is acknowledging the lives lived and people lost. It matters that we try to witness them as they were – to value them as people in their own right, and not simply facts in history, numbers of dead in terrible conflicts. That we acknowledge them as people who lived and died.
They’re also striking as alien creatures – their architecture and costumes are dark and gothic, but acknowledged to be beautiful by both the Doctor and her companions. They also seem to be inspired by bats – their heads resemble bats, and the CGI effect that shows when the matter transmitter is used recalls the motion of bats flying. I’m curious as to what inspired them, and briefly wondered if they reflected any aspect of Hindu mythology, but my GoogleFu suggests not. I’d welcome comments from anyone more knowledgeable!
I’d also like to give a shout out to the writing for Graham in this episode and the performance by Bradley Walsh. There are several nice, understated moments when he really shows the value of having an older companion in the TARDIS. His understanding of why Yaz’s nani might not want to talk about difficult and traumatic times from her past provides a welcome word of wisdom. I’m loving the way his character is developing to consistently provide quiet insight – an insight that tends towards respecting others whilst embracing the new.
Lastly, I would just like to say that Shane Zaza, who plays Prem, is a very beautiful human being who can assuredly get it, and I would welcome seeing more of him on my screen.
In all seriousness, though, this was an excellent episode that continues this series’s run of presenting groundbreaking, original, and truly moving television.
I have a blinding headache, so this is just a quick note to say I thought this episode was a lot of fun.
Loved the Space General with her robot consort.
Loved the multiple explorations of family dynamics.
Loved the pregnant dude – a million fanfic writers pumped the air!
Hate, hate, hated the line “Boys give birth to boys and girls give birth to girls.” That’s nice – what happened to the rest of us? The non-binary people and intersex folk get shafted again. You thought this was gonna be a nice bit of trans representation – hahaha, no. Please enjoy a slice of gender essentialism in a gender binary sandwich. FUCK whoever wrote that line.
Loved the adorable, vegetarian killer alien. Loved it’s smug little face when its belly was full.
Loved the general aesthetic of the spaceship.
Was confused by the fact that everyone could understand each other but they couldn’t read the signs. If they’re without TARDIS telepathic translation then something is still doing the translation.
Loved the Space General and the Doctor fangirling each other, Loved that the Doctor was smug enough to one-up her on it. Not enough of the Doctor’s massive ego in this incarnation yet.
And that’s about it. I’m off to find some ibuprofen.
This was a solid episode. It didn’t blow me away the way that the previous three episodes did, but it didn’t have to. Not every episode has to deal with issues as prescient and historically significant as ‘Rosa’, and we shouldn’t expect them to.
While sometimes phobias can be caused by a traumatic experience, there’s thought to be a genetic element that affects common, simple phobias – like the fear of spiders and the fear of heights. This is often misleadingly referred to as ‘ancestral memory’. Arachnophobes don’t ‘remember’ a bad experience an ancestor had with a spider, but it was likely a genetic advantage to be sensitive to, say, the distinctive movements of spiders, and to respond with the fight or flight reaction. Such a response is irrational in the UK, where there are no native poisonous spiders, but less irrational in Africa, or indeed most continental landmasses.
Fear of spiders in the UK is one of the least rational fears you can have, and yet it persists. I should know. I started being afraid of spiders at the age of six.
Nearly 30 years later, the phobia persists, yet I was not particularly scared by this episode. That’s not the episode’s fault. I’m rarely scared by TV or film when I watch it by myself. My Twitter feed was full of grown adults who certainly seemed to be watching through their fingers. But even if adults weren’t scared, this had all the elements to make a lasting impression on a child.
Because spiders are strange. What they do to flies is usually no danger to most of us, but if they were large enough to subdue humans and wrap them in their web cocoons, that would be pretty fucking scary. To be rendered helpless and immobile and enclosed in a claustrophobia-inducing manner, and to be kept in a spider’s larder as something’s food.
It’s a perceptual shift. Very little truly threatens human beings in nature. Very little eats us as a matter of course. Many things could eat us. It’s quite rational to be afraid of a lion, for instance. But those things are rarely a realistic threat for most humans in most places. Consequently, one’s first encounter with the suggestion that people could be food tends to leave a lasting impression.
For me, it was giant spiders. Two years before I developed the phobia of normal spiders, I saw the second episode of the original Battlestar Galactica. I can’t say that I fully understood the plot. For years it lived in my memory sort of merged with Logan’s Run, and it was a long while before I understood that the two things were different.
But I remembered the spiders.
The spider-like Ovions that cocooned unwary gamblers on Carillon and kept them as food.
A few years after that my teacher read an abbreviated version of The Hobbit to my class. Again, the Great Spiders of Mirkwood stuck in my memory as uniquely horrible. Especially when the party is cocooned. Those spiders were going to feed on them. Suck them dry as they hung, swaddled in webbing and helpless.
I think there will be a few young minds who will be forming similar memories tonight. So the fact that it didn’t really scare me doesn’t matter. It will have scared the children – which Doctor Who should if it possible can. *evil laugh*
As a kind of sop to the ‘should we really be making children scared of spiders’ worry, we see that towards the end of the story the Doctor is reluctant to kill them and says of the mother spider ‘She’s probably more scared of us than we are of her’. As an arachnophobe, I can’t tell you how tired I am of that particular phrase. I understand why they included it, but it’s honestly so beside the point. Phobias are not rational.
I do not believe the spiders in my house can harm me. I am quite worried about how easily I can harm them – in fact, my visceral reaction to dead spiders is actually worse than my reaction to live ones. Phobias are not rational.
Yes, two pieces of media featuring giant spiders left a lasting impression on me from childhood, but they had nothing to do with my phobia. It was a couple of years after seeing Battlestar Galactica that I became afraid of spiders (and heights – it happened at around the same time) and a couple of years after that before I was read The Hobbit. There’s no sign at all that scary giant spiders had anything to do with my becoming afraid of little spiders.
It’s almost certainly a genetic fear. No amount of people telling me the spiders are more scared of me than I am of them is going to change it. But on the plus side, I doubt the BBC created millions of arachnophobes tonight. It’s either going to happen anyway or it won’t.
Overall, this episode solidly delivered on a classic concept. It wasn’t particularly original, but if didn’t have to be – it will be new to the six year-olds watching today.
Beyond the central conceit (which really is just Big Spiders Are Scary) there were a few other nice notes.
Chris Noth makes for a perfectly loathable villain, as the slimy big businessman with his sights on the US presidency. I know him best as Alicia Florrick’s inferior half in The Good Wife, where he plays a corrupt politician and philanderer; so it’s a familiar fit, and he did a creditable job portraying a man whose money and confidence has blinded him to morality.
I was a little confused by their positioning him as a man who hates Trump while characterising him as… a man very much like Trump. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to take away from this, and I’m worried that it sends the message of ‘Both sides are as bad as each other; all politicians are equally loathsome’. That is not a message we need in these times, where the last week has seen a Nazi shooting in a synagogue and bombs sent to Trump’s political enemies by a fanatic Trump supporter. People are literally equating these actions to members of the Trump administration being yelled at in restaurants.
Some politicians are much worse than others. Both sides are not the same. I want to find another reading for this, but I’m baffled as to how we are supposed to see it any other way.
Still, Noth does a good job in a familiar role.
We also have some lovely notes of family togetherness as the Doctor is delighted to be invited to ‘Tea at Yaz’s’. I liked that Yaz’s family kept asking whether Yaz was in a relationship with any of the members of the group, and Yaz firmly answered ‘No’. While I see the possibility of a relationship slowly developing between her and Ryan, I like that we’ve not immediately jumped there. There’s been far too much of ‘All women must be in relationships’ in the Doctor Who of recent years, and this is a pleasant change of tone. We get both the message that men and women can just be friends and the opportunity to note that Yaz’s family are entirely comfortable with the idea that she might like women (ie the Doctor).
Meanwhile, there are some really touching scenes as Graham goes home and remembers Grace – his wife and Ryan’s grandmother. I thought this was really nicely handled. The only thing that felt off about it was that Ryan doesn’t seem to feel the same kind of grief and desire to go home. Of course, the plot needs to keep rolling, but Grace seems to have performed a motherly role for Ryan, and it’s weird to see Graham’s grief taken so seriously while Ryan seems to brush it off and get on with adventure.
Overall, a solid episode. I wasn’t blown away, but I don’t need to be. This one was for the kids, and that’s OK.
This week Doctor Who tackled a pivotal moment in American history with heartbreaking resonance for current events. With white supremacy on the rise again, choosing to have the first historical episode in this season focus on Rosa Parks is bold and important.
Headed by the first female Doctor (Jodie Whittaker), this season has shown itself as making a bold stand for women in the present and the future already. It was always going to be significant which women they chose to celebrate from the past. It would have been very easy to celebrate white women. And even though we have a female Doctor, we’re still on our thirteenth white Doctor. There have been calls for a person of colour to play the Doctor for as long as there have been calls for a woman to play the role – possibly longer. And there was no reason that the call to cast a female Doctor could not have been answered by one of the many capable women of colour who I’m sure would have jumped at the role.
So it’s important that we’re not, for instance, revisiting Elizabeth I, or taking in Catherine the Great, or even one of the suffragettes – many of whom were only fighting for the emancipation of white women. We are instead introduced to a key figure from the civil rights movement whose refusal to move from the ‘white’ section of a bus sparked a wave of protests that helped end segregation in the US.
It’s important, too, that this is a TARDIS with two people of colour as companions. We aren’t seeing this from a completely white perspective. While it’s good that the Doctor recognises Rosa’s significance, that recognition isn’t nearly as interesting as her resonance for Ryan (Tosin Cole) and Yas (Mandip Gill), the Doctor’s black and South Asian companions.
It is a strength of the episode that much of the history of this period is recounted by Ryan and Yas, and not the Doctor. And even when some of the explanation comes from Graham (Bradley Walsh), her white companion, he attribute’s his knowledge to Ryan’s grandmother.
We also get to see Ryan and Yas discussing their own feelings of powerlessness – the warnings their parents gave them not to fight back because it is just too risky. It is important that white children watching the show know that in our supposedly enlightened world their friends may not feel as safe and easy – that they have a privilege in not experiencing that fear as a part of daily life.
I have only recently come to understand this in the past few years. I grew up in the 80s and 90s thinking that racism was mostly a thing of the past. That ignorance is a part of how it has been possible for the far right to rise again, targeting people of colour. That ignorance stood in the way of understanding and solidarity. We need to know the truth of what is happening to others when we feel safe. Privilege is blindness. Dismantling that blindness often involves coming to recognise your own complicity in accepting ignorance and not questioning more.
But it’s also important to recognise the role that this representation plays for the children of colour watching this episode, too. That their experiences are validated. That they feel a part of a community with common struggles that extends beyond their own front door. That these struggles are shown as a part of something as iconically British and widely viewed as Doctor Who.
From this perspective, I’d like to encourage you to seek out the reviews of people of colour and not just read my thoughts on the matter. I am likely blind to both problems and successes in this episode, and I can only draw on empathy to guess what this episode must mean to people of colour, not direct experience.
For what it is worth, the episode seemed by and large sensitive and skillfully constructed.
The racist 1950s white folk are shot in such a way as to feel very much like sinister Doctor Who monsters who might pop out of the darkness at any moment to pounce on our heroes. There’s even a creepy musical theme that plays to make us feel like they’re always watching, and the camera often views the Doctor and her companions from the shadows – just as it would if there were gribblies waiting to jump out.
There are gribblies here. They are the white people.
And the interactions with 1950s American white people made for uncomfortable watching. I’m always less comfortable with episodes that go back in time because there’s always a bit of second-hand embarrassment as modern characters get the behaviour and dress of the time wrong. But the discomfort here wasn’t that jarring kind of embarrassment humour. The discomfort that arose from modern people interacting with historical characters was not (mostly) played for laughs. Ryan doesn’t ‘get it wrong’ when he tries to hand a fallen glove back to a white woman. He is doing nothing wrong. It is the racist reaction of the white people that makes the scene uncomfortable.
It’s a kind of discomfort I should have to sit through. White people are fragile when it comes to race. Even where we believe in equality, we don’t want to talk about it. We’d prefer to pretend that everything is fine and everyone is already equal. But being ‘colour blind‘ is its own sort of racism. It is not fair to the struggles that people of colour face to insist that their experiences are the same as ours – that we don’t see the difference. It is harder for them. White people make it harder. Denying that you can see any difference is not a good thing, and it leads to one being insufficiently critical of one’s own blindspots.
So it’s uncomfortable to watch Ryan face the prospect of death and imprisonment for a kind act. It’s uncomfortable to watch black and Asian characters be refused service. It’s uncomfortable to witness Rosa Parks (Vinette Robinson) being told to move to the back of the bus because of the colour of her skin.
It’s uncomfortable, and it’s good that white people are being asked to live with that discomfort.
But it’s also important that this is not just a tale of terrible things that happened and are happening to passive black people. We are told directly that Rosa Parks was not just a tired woman who refused to move; we see her as part of a movement. I particularly like that Ryan, as the only black companion, is also the only companion who gets to meet Martin Luther King. He deserves that honour and it is good that it’s not overshadowed by what would have been the Doctor’s delight, or Graham’s, or even Yas’s. Other people of colour can identify with these struggles, but they are also not a homogenous group. Black people in the US suffered a particularly fraught history, and this is their story, Rosa is their hero. As a black British man, Ryan has a different and much closer relationship to those struggles than the other characters.
I also liked that there was a brief acknowledgement that though this is a particularly American moment in history, Britain cannot claim any kind of superiority over race relations. In addition to Yas and Ryan discussing their experiences of racism at home, a throw-away line from the Doctor makes a gesture towards acknowledging British imperialism: “You know us Brits,” she says, “very imperious.”
It’s not really enough, but they cover a lot of ground in this episode, and perhaps it would have been too distracting to delve deeply into British historical racism as well.
Similarly, I watched hoping that there would be some acknowledgement that Rosa Parks was not the first black person to refuse to give up her seat on the bus. Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat nine months before Rosa. But Rosa was a more palatable hero. Claudette was 15 – a teenager – and seen as less reliable. She also noted of Rosa Parks: “Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class… She fit that profile.” (Source.) I’m always a bit bristled when I see a woman written out of history, but again, it was perhaps too much detail for what had to be a very tight episode and cover a lot of ground.
We do see Rosa as an activist, though, and that she did not work alone. And I was really glad that Ryan got to play a significant role in standing up against the white supremacist baddie. This was not simply the Doctor acting as a white saviour and co-opting black history. It isn’t even entirely her plan that sets history back on track – all the companions contribute.
That said, the Doctor, Graham, and Yas become a necessary part of history by taking up seats on the bus – an issue that is directly discussed as Yas notes that they must have always had to be there to make this moment in history happen. That is not entirely cool. That is white people (and Yas, who is not white, but is shown to be treated differently to black people on buses) making this moment in black history possible. I… would have preferred if the writers hadn’t gone down that route, or at least made it less explicit.
It is, of course, a familiar Doctor Who trope for the Doctor and her companions to become a part of history and to turn out to have been necessary all along. It’s heavily implied that the Doctor was integral to such moments as Nero’s burning of Rome and the Great Fire of London. But there’s something very different about the morally questionable First Doctor giggling about the fact that he might have had a hand in Rome burning and a modern, progressively framed Doctor inserting herself into recent history that was an important moment of black triumph.
Overall, I do think the episode appropriately centred black characters and people of colour, and Rosa’s moment is appropriately tense and powerful. It would be remiss of me not to note these qualms, but ultimately I’m not in a position to say whether it really marred the episode. It does feel like the most important historical episode I can think of. In the spirit of genuine educational messages that this season seems to be going for, the episode takes an important moment in history that is relevant to our current political climate and, well, educates. Historian, EK, on Twitter was crowing with delight:
Children are not only being given an account of an important moment, but shown part of how historians do research, as the Doctor and her companions piece together Rosa Parks’ day from bus time tables and newspapers.
Where the previous two episodes gave us a classic Doctor Who aliens-on-Earth encounter and a dystopic-future encounter, tonight’s episode was a classic Doctor Who historical – mixing history with adventure and a powerful social message.
This season continues to prove its classic credentials while offering something that stretches us and takes the format further. I can’t wait to see what they do next.
I am in geeky glee. Squee, as we would have called it in the naughties.
We start off with our heroes being scooped up from the vacuum of space, just as the Heart of Gold rescues Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent after they are expelled from an airlock in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide. The Doctor’s companions emerge from medical pods reminiscent of the cryo-stasis pods shown at the beginning of Alien. A strong link? No, but coupled together with the plethora of other sci-fi references, I’m sure it is intentional.
The companions are split between two space ships that are in a race. The Race. The last Race. And the pilots of those space ships are the last survivors of this very dangerous inter-planetary quest. One of the ships is clearly a piece of junk, owned by a taciturn fellow who swears that it is the best ship in the galaxy. There are definite notes of Millennium Falcon as the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and Yas (Mandip Gill) lift panels in the floor to try to fix this hunk of junk. As it goes in for a crash landing I get definite notes of the Serenity, the spaceship from Firefly… and the film Serenity. It’s not one simple reference, but an appeal to a trope of dodgy space-faring misanthropes and the ships they love. The appeal to the archetype will warm the hearts of older fans and introduce it to new ones.
Meanwhile, the pilot of the other ship is striking a definite Fury Road chord. In this shot the goggles and wild hair and dirt-smeared bandana combined with the vertical lines drawn by the chains the men behind her are clinging to cannot help but evoke Mad Max and the War Boys, and the presence of a strong female character in this context immediately draws connection between the female pilot, Imperator Furiosa, and the female Doctor. Women are powerful forces in this episode, although it is worth noting that they are again notably out-numbered by men, and the show really needs to address this.
Moving on, we learn the nature of the Race from a holographic projection who performs a similar function to Seneca Crane from The Hunger Games and the Grandmaster from Thor: Ragnarok. He is richly robed and carefully styled as he directs others to compete to their deaths. Although forbidden to directly kill one another, it’s clear that many have died along the way, and only one person is supposed to make it to ‘The Ghost Monument’ – the end of the race.
Again, the most obvious visual references are to The Hunger Games and Thor: Ragnarok, but this type of premise has a long tradition in science fiction, not just in explicitly violent iterations, such as Battle Royale and The Running Man, but also in perhaps the most direct comparison: The Long Walk, in which competitors simply have to outlast each other in a walking race – none directly killing each other, but all facing the prospect of death from exhuastion. It is worth noting, though, that all these examples are of spectator sports – it’s not obvious that anyone apart from Ilin, the games master, is watching. I think we’re expected to assume that they are, but this could have been more clearly articulated.
We also learn that the monument that marks the end of the race is (this isn’t a spoiler as we learn it very early on) the TARDIS. A little predictable, but it makes for a nice incentive for all our characters to keep going in the same direction.
The episode continues to hit us with visual references, with shoot-outs that reference Call of Duty (hat-tip to @richmondbridge for pointing that out); a green and black computerised map that, again, feels very like the Alien radar blips that track the alien hunting the crew of the Nostromo; and of course, Star Wars – another franchise with a long history that has taken a stand by centring female characters in recent years. It’s hard to see any desert planet and not think of Tatooine, and several moments seem to deliberately call this out, such as the spaceship that cuts a trail across the clear blue sky, which recalls the escape pod that R2D2 and C3PO escape in, and the fact that this desert planet has three suns. Of course, Tatooine has two suns, but it’s close enough that it was inexorably brought to my mind by the context.
There are also several call-backs to previous Doctors – again, establishing the Thirteenth Doctor’s credentials. She uses a Venusian Aikido move (the favoured martial art of the Third Doctor), and has a TARDIS that dispenses biscuits (the Eleventh Doctor famously squared off with a Dalek using only a jammy dodger). I am also fairly sure that the first exterior image we see of the TARDIS directly echoes one of the iconic early shots from either the first or second episode in 1963. I don’t have my copy of those episodes to hand and my GoogleFu has failed me, but I will update if I can confirm.
There’s also a direct call-back in that the words of the Remnants, who seem to see into the Doctor’s mind and mention a Timeless Child that the Doctor has abandoned and others have forgotten. This could either be Susan (the Doctor’s granddaughter and the original Unearthly Child) or Jenny, the Doctor’s child via DNA extraction, who the Tenth Doctor left for dead and we know to have regenerated. Either possibility has me very excited, especially as both are Time Ladies themselves and would be a great addition to this female Doctor Who – again, cementing her roots in Whovian history.
This episode is using the past not just as a reference point, but to drive us forward. It makes me feel like this is a season that is going to be both returning to roots and taking us somewhere new.
The fast-paced chase through ruined cities and desert lands kept me gripped throughout and once again the monsters were suitably scary. I loved the creepy cloth monsters and loved more that the Doctor was able to defeat them with scientific knowledge of the properties of acetylene. She also defeats robot guards with an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) – something she explains to the audience, again sneaking in a little science lesson in just the way I kind of think Doctor Who always should if it possibly can. Getting kids excited about science and history in an action-packed, alien-filled science-fiction plot that somehow involves a lot of running. That’s the Doctor Who I know and love, and a Doctor Who I am very much ready to see more of.
The first episode of series eleven of new Doctor Who (New Who) just aired. Theoretically controversial, but actually massively supported, the most striking feature of this episode is that it marks the debut of the first female Doctor, Jodie Whittaker.
Long time readers of this blog will know that I am a massive Whovian, with affection for both Classic and New Who, but I stopped reviewing the show a heart-breaking five years ago because the sexism just got too much. It takes too much out of a person to review week to week a show you have invested so much into that starts regularly making women the butt of jokes (from the Doctor’s mouth, no less), spouts gender essentialist nonsense, and frames even ‘strong’ women as obsessed with men, and marriage, and the Doctor as the kind of attachment-avoident smug git that former showrunner Steven Moffat thinks drives women wild. We know this not only from textual analysis, but because he’s been quite vocal in his sexism. If you want to know more, I recommend Sophia McDougall’s well-cited blog post on Capes, Wedding Dresses and Steven Moffat – I don’t want to focus any more on the depressing past here.
Because the long-awaited episode that aired tonight was brilliant.
Whittaker was vibrant and excited and weird and spontaneous in just the way we expect the Doctor to be. As a fan with a specific fondness for regeneration episodes, I loved that she couldn’t remember her own name. I loved that she was ill and incapacitated for portions of the experience. I loved that she explained what was happening as well as she could to her companions as she went along, while still being just cryptic enough.
I loved that we avoided the awful, awful, awful ‘goodness! look! boobs!’ jokes that Moffat shoe-horned into ‘The Curse of Fatal Death’ in the 1999 Red Nose Day spoof in which Joanna Lumley briefly became the Doctor. I know a lot of men who liked that spoof, but few women. It seared in a generation’s mind the idea that any female incarnation of the Doctor would be instantly sexualised – her secondary sexual characteristics becoming the most important thing about her change.
It didn’t happen.
The Doctor doesn’t realise she is a woman at first – she’s oblivious to her physicality in a way quite in keeping with previous incarnations, who have variously rejected the entire idea that their face belongs to them (the Third Doctor); started immediately unpicking the trappings of their previous incarnation (the Fifth Doctor, famously unspooling the Scarf); or noted they have different teeth, before simply getting on with things. She asks whether it suits her – crucially, not whether she looks good or pretty, but just if her appearance seems appropriate for her – and then does exactly that: she gets on with things. It doesn’t matter. She’s waiting to find out who she’s going to be, and that doesn’t have anything to do with her sex.
Moreover, in the scene where she changes her clothes (delightfully, in a charity shop) she indicates she’s worn women’s clothes before. We can read into that a certain fluidity in approaching gender, even though the show’s canon suggests the Doctor has not had a female incarnation before.
Side note: I’ve seen some people start hesitantly referring to the Doctor as ‘they’. I’m referring to her as ‘she’ because this seems to be what she prefers. I’m a non-binary person and I prefer ‘she’ even though I’m agender. Some non-binary people prefer ‘they’, ‘zie’, or other gender-neutral pronouns, but there’s no single right way to do it. That said, I think the Doctor most closely aligns to genderfluid. She uses male pronouns when in a male body and female pronouns when in a female body. This isn’t quite how it is for those of us who are stuck in one body and are genderfluid, but it’s the closest analogy. Above all, in matters of gender: be led by the person you are speaking to or about. The Doctor uses female pronouns now, but if you were talking about her fourth incarnation, you’d say that he wore a scarf.
On to the show. I won’t dwell too much on the plot, as I want to avoid spoilers, but I’d say it gave everything you’d want from a Doctor Who episode. There were new and original aliens, even while there were nods to science fiction classics. There are little notes of Predator vs Alien (shut it, you, it’s a fun film), the 2016 female Ghostbusters (Holtzmann fans will enjoy a goggles-related nod), and even an earlier Doctor Who episode (I can’t be the only one reminded of the scribble monster from ‘Fear Her’).
There were also a good few scares that would have had me hiding behind the sofa as a kid. It’s easy to forget, watching as an adult, that Doctor Who is a kind of sci-fi horror for kids. Two things any good episode of Doctor Who should deliver if it possibly can are scare jumps and the kind of horror that gets in your brain and makes you think about possibilities you never considered before. I think this episode has both in spades. There were a number of deaths that reminded me of Doctor Who deaths that really affected me as a child – little moments that stayed with me and provided both a bone-chilling and thought-provoking fear. That people with families can lose everything in a moment, and their loved ones might never know what happened.
I also loved the diversity. There still were more men than women – boo! But the main cast was exactly equal. It also had great racial diversity. It felt plausibly like inner Sheffield, and not the white-washed version of an inner city we usually see on TV.
I was less keen on the Doctor getting the sonic screwdriver back and declaring that it’s not really a screwdriver, it’s a tool for nearly everything. This has always been a bugbear of mine. I know the Doctor lies, and that gets us out of a world of continuity errors, but in the old days the sonic screwdriver was just one of the Doctor’s many tools – his favourite, but not the only one – but I liked the fact that the Third Doctor said it literally could only open and close things. That limitation was narratively interesting. And while I think destroying the screwdriver entirely is unnecessary (as happened in the Fifth Doctor’s era because it was too much of a get-out-of-jail-free card), sticking to a few rules about its limitations is really helpful for dramatic tension.
Honestly, if the screwdriver is just a wand of do-anything, it’s boring.
If it being sonic is key (like when the Tenth Doctor combines it with a speaker to disable an alien with sound) or if being a screwdriver is key (opening hard to open things, fixing things) that’s interesting! That’s thought-provoking. That’s science fiction. And I like Doctor Who when it’s trying to be science fiction and inspire kids to have scientific and mechanical curiosity. I know some people say that it’s a fantasy TV show, but I don’t think it used to be, and as much as I love fantasy, some honest sci-fi is good for kids.
I also wasn’t a fan on the Doctor choosing a nickname on behalf of one of her companions or continually getting the alien’s name wrong because it was difficult for her to pronounce and she found it funny to insult him that way. That’s a straight up bullying tactic and it’s racist. How many kids are gonna go away and start garbling people’s names in school because they don’t sound ‘British’ enough and laughing at the other other kid when they get frustrated. The Doctor did it, so it’s fine, right?
No. It’s not. It’s bullying. And it’s racist.
And it is really not OK to choose to shorten someone else’s name without permission, wither. Ryan calling Yasmin ‘Yas’ is fine because they are old friends. The Doctor deciding to do this without even knowing Yasmin likes being called ‘Yas’ is a dick move, and again, not something we should be recommending to kids.
But these are minor complaints in an overwhelmingly positive experience. As well as everything mentioned above, I’m super-pumped that an older black lady got to have a heroic story arc, and her grandson was shown giving her real respect. And we get a companion struggling with dyspraxia – I was really glad that this was not magically cured by determination! It sends a really great message that people with learning difficulties can have genuine problems that can’t be wished away without being lesser as people – the message is about having hope and drawing strength from your support network, not about just trying to find a way to be cured or be ‘normal’.
Overall, this was a great episode, with action and touching family moments and cool-looking aliens (and gross-looking aliens) and it really delivered on what I want from a Doctor Who story. New showrunner, Chris Chibnall, shows that passion and imagination he brought to Torchwood along with the maturity of outlook he demonstrated on other projects, like Broadchurch. He handled this crucial transition episode remarkably well.
I’m excited about where this is going to go. The preview of the season that followed the episode shows an exciting mix of international stars (like Alan Cumming!) and new faces, and a continuing range of diversity for race and gender. I think it’s going to be amazing.
Well, that was the best episode of Doctor Who we have seen in a very long time. It was near perfect in execution, nodded to a past that charts back before 2005, and had some deep, troubling and interestingly explored themes. I was impressed and captivated. There was a clear impression that this needed to be a landmark episode, and it delivered.
Hard to believe it took eight years to show an interior of the TARDIS that was more than nameless corridors, but when push came to shove we were not let down.
Plot
The Doctor decides to let Clara try and fly the TARDIS as a way of getting the two of them to feel more comfortable with each other. (The TARDIS has made it plain that it doesn’t like Clara one bit and doesn’t trust her to be aboard without the Doctor.) For some reason putting the TARDIS in some kind of safety mode to allow Clara to fly involves turning off some plot significant shields? (I said near perfect execution, didn’t I?) Anyway, the moment is provided for the TARDIS to be exposed and some likely lads in a salvage vessel spy it and try to haul it in.
During the process of this the TARDIS is damaged, and somehow the Doctor is thrown outside the TARDIS whilst Clara is trapped within (fudge fudge fudge). The Doctor convinces the salvageers to help him enter the TARDIS and find Clara on condition that they receive the ‘salvage of a lifetime’.
Meanwhile, Clara becomes lost in a very unhappy TARDIS (fires are periodically a problem, because of… reasons) and she finds herself chased by strange, dark, creepy creatures.
The Doctor and the salvageers (it’s a word, shut up*) enter a race against time to save Clara and stop the TARDIS from exploding, hampered by the fact that some of the salvageers are more intent on salvaging than saving.
To add spice to the mix, one of the salvageers is an android, and he can sense the pain of the TARDIS, causing tension as he urges against his teammates’ impulse to just loot and get out.
My thoughts
This was bright, bubbly, entertaining, nostalgic, and dark. Which is a lot of what I want out of Doctor Who. We had some lovely nods to TARDIS episodes past, including the fan-beloved swimming pool. I would have liked to see the Cloisters (we do hear the Cloister Bell), maybe the rooms of some former companions, and I’m madly curious about the Doctor’s own bedroom, but there you go. They had to go wherever the plot was relevant, so fair enough.
There were a number of notes that made me wince. It wasn’t as bad as a Moffat penned episode, but there were a few completely unnecessary gender-oriented jokes which went unchallenged, and I continue to feel uncomfortable with New Who’s (mainly Moffat Who’s) emphasis on the conception of the TARDIS as female and in some kind of romantic relationship with the Doctor. Yes, there is a tradition of referring to ships using female pronouns, but that’s a sexist time and location-centric Earth tradition, no reason for the Doctor to buy into it. No obvious reason for the Doctor to think of the TARDIS as gendered at all. Being gendered is not a requirement of sentience. I know the Neil Gaiman penned episode is popular and all, but one of the things that made me less keen on it was this emphasis on the TARDIS as female and in love with the Doctor – even thinking of herself as called ‘Sexy‘, which if you wanted to encapsulate everything that’s wrong with Moffat era Who, a lot of it is said right there.
There’s nothing wrong with the TARDIS being feminine per se (she couldn’t possibly be female (sexed), TARDISes don’t mate), she can be gendered however she fancies. The problem is that she’s in a master/slave relationship with a paradigm patriarchal figure in an epically popular television show aimed at children. And don’t get me started on the people who think the themes don’t matter because it’s a family show. Do you even know what a theme is? A theme isn’t something invented by academics, it’s something academics label as a way of identifying messages embedded in a work of literature (yes, TV is literature, just like plays, deal with it) and issues tackled. If your message is one of iconic figures with whom children will identify being engaged in deeply problematic master/slave relationships with the division being created along gendered lines in a show where the male patriarch increasingly belittles women… yeah, it’s a problem.
Let’s talk about the master/slave dialectic; it’s an important tool of societal, psychological, and literary analysis. Marx liked and popularised it for that reason, although it originates in Hegel. One thing I think really raises the bar of this episode of Doctor Who is that it directly addresses the problematic of master/slave dynamics.
The Hegelian theory is that a consciousness cannot be self-aware unless it has encountered another consciousness which it recognises as like itself and yet distinct from itself (don’t worry about why, it goes back to Kant’s transcendental idealism, which is a whole other thing, just accept for now that it’s a theory with a good amount of history behind it). As such, any consciousness is reliant upon other minded beings for its own existence, and yet (according to Hegel) it is always trying to destroy, or at least assert dominance over the Other. It doesn’t like that there is a consciousness out there that is not its own, so it seeks to destroy or absorb it. Which it can never do without destroying itself. Thus a symbiotic relationship forms. The ‘winner’ of the struggle becomes the ‘master’, dominating the ‘slave’, and yet the master becomes completely reliant on the ‘slave’ for nearly everything. Masters are not producers.
Now, there’s a feminist history of rejecting the struggle for dominance in the master/slave dialectic as a specifically masculine view. I do not subscribe to this. I think such views rest on an unsubstantiated essentialist view of gender which reads women as fundamentally submissive or non-combative. There’s plenty of evidence that this is false, even if you think that women are, on the whole, more submissive or gentle than men. Personally, I don’t just believe, but know, that many women are neither submissive nor gentle; however, I do not assert that this is an indication of superiority. I know there’s substantial reaction against Anglo-American feminist insistence on active and assertive agency as the only legitimate and respectable way for a woman to demonstrate her worth. Gender aside, one should concede that praising only the assertive and aggressive is problematic. My point is rather that assuming that these are exclusively, or even predominantly, male attributes is both false and problematic. I do think there is a natural human drive towards dominance. ‘Natural’ merely in the sense that the genes of those that strive for the most food, the most mating opportunities, etc., have a tendency to result in continued survival, and that’s common between men, women, gender queer, monkeys, catfish, and elephants. Nevertheless I also agree that struggling for dominance is not the only successful survival trait, and often beings that expend their energies in other directions can be more successful. Megan Lindholm’s masterpiece, Alien Earth, which is also deeply concerned with analysis of the master/slave dialectic, is particularly interesting in its exploration of cooperative ecologies and their relation to combative ones.
What I’m getting at is that the master/slave dialectic as an analysis of sentient interaction is an idea with legs, but not one we should be uncritical of. The Doctor’s relationship with the TARDIS is an exemplar of the master/slave dialectic. (A point the Doctor’s relationship with the Master has flirted with drawing out under the hands of some of Doctor Who‘s more insightful writers in the past.) The Doctor is the ‘master’, yet he is almost completely dependent upon the TARDIS for just about everything. She is his slave, and must do what he tells her, yet he’s not even a Timelord without her, he’s just the last Gallifreyan, not even able to reproduce. You can see why, then, it’s problematic to phrase this particularly iconic master/slave relationship in gendered terms. I am reminded with bile in my throat of the discussions I have had with male geeks about the sexism inherent in David Eddings’s works. All the women are ultra feminine, but, it is always said, the men would be hopeless without them. Polgara may be an immortal sorceress, but she likes cooking and darning socks. And that’s fine. Many women like cooking and sewing. The problem is that the men around Polgara exploit the assumption that she will like these things by completely neglecting to develop any skills in these areas. In this way, she has to perform these services for them. Dividing labour along gendered lines enforces a restriction of women’s options even as it makes men dependent on them. The catch is, the actions that men depend on women to perform are rarely those that allow women to accumulate extra resources with which to commission services from men.
And so the feminist Marxist analysis of the master/slave dialectic goes.
So. The thing I liked about this episode is that it confronts these problematic elements embedded in Doctor Who head on. By having a character who is othered (designated as the slave role) by virtue of him being literally a machine (the theoretically non-sentient analog of the slave role) we are confronted with the deep inappropriateness of such relationships. I don’t want to transgress into the Spoiler Zone, but let us just say that the emotional impact of the inappropriateness of such a relationship is made viscerally evident.
Moreover, despite the depressing tendency towards sexism in recent Doctor Who, and some unsettling elements of characterisation of the TARDIS with respect to her gendering as female, the TARDIS has a long history of defying the Doctor’s expectations. The majority of Peter Davison’s era, for instance, is spent with the Doctor having very little control over where the TARDIS goes at all. His repeated attempts to return Tegan to Heathrow airport in the correct era represent an utter failure of mastery. Similarly, ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’ is structured by scene after scene of the TARDIS asserting control and rendering the Doctor, his companion, and everyone else aboard her utterly helpless.
This is why I think Stephen Thompson is to be commended as the writer of this episode. This is an acknowledgement and exploration of the Doctor’s problematic relationship with the TARDIS at a level we rarely see. Like the salvageers exploiting their ‘robot’ companion, the Doctor has gained immeasurable benefits – near godlike status – exploiting the TARDIS. And when the Doctor ‘offers’ them the TARDIS in compensation for rescuing Clara (one assumes he always plans to double-cross them on this, but it’s still a startling thing to do with a being you regard as sentient) one is confronted by the narrowness of their vision as they proceed to try and dissect the TARDIS, ignoring the fact that the TARDIS as a whole is worth immeasurably more than any circuit could be. The slave, we are reminded, is usually much brighter than the masters – he or she has to be; she or he does all the work.
It should also be noted that this is probably unique as an episode of Doctor Who in which people of colour outnumbered white people, and I suspect that it no mistake. One of the factors underlying the current instability of our economic situation, after all, is that so-called first-world, predominantly white countries like the UK and the US have had their wealth bolstered by exploitation of people of colour for centuries. It is a mistake to think this ended with the abolition of legal slavery. As a relatively poor person in the UK I can still buy a top for £3 if I want to. How is that possible, but that someone, somewhere, earns far less than I do? Now, following the credit crunch, our economy struggles to stabilise in a world where developing nations we are used to exploiting are gaining greater economic power.
One might still think ‘Well, that’s all very well – elucidating the master-slave relationship, but the status quo remains unchallenged for the Doctor at the end’. I think there’s some legitimacy in that. People talk about having a female Doctor or a black Doctor as a way of balancing the scales, but I still kind of feel like that’s missing the point. Not that I’m against it. I think a black Doctor could now be possible with nothing problematic to it at all. A female one… well, I have no faith that it would be well-executed under the current regime, and the total dominance of Doctor Who by male writers is preventing a woman from gaining sufficient credibility to take the helm and challenge the way of things. But in another time, under different leadership, with different writers… sure, it could be fine. My point is rather that 50 years of the Doctor flying around acting as the Great White Male Saviour to countless cultures that have not his wealth**, his education, his technology, cannot be erased by having one iteration of the Doctor be black, or Asian, or female. The problem with viewing it like this is that we are still maintaining the wealthy white man as the ideal by making it a goal to have people of colour and women play his role. The real goal is to surround this show where a rich, educated, white man saves the day again and again with a normality where any man, women, intersex or gender queer individual can save the day in any way he/she/zie damn well likes. The Doctor should not be the standard we all seek to attain. The Doctor should be just another character. Rich, complex, exciting, amongst other rich, complex, exciting characters, each of whom is rich, complex, and exciting in different ways. The rich, white, educated male ideal is not the only one to which we should aspire.
Nevertheless, I do think credit is due to Stephen Thompson and it must be noted that although there is little he can do within the confines of the show to change the cultural context in which it appears, or the necessity that the Doctor is and always will be the title character whose centrality is determined by his possession of the TARDIS – nevertheless, he does show us that if the TARDIS wishes to assert control she is more than capable of doing so. Moreover, although the status quo is re-established amongst the salvageers as well, the way in which the wrongness of their situation has been underscored provides a counterpoint with which to remind the audience that just because things have returned to the status quo, that doesn’t mean that it’s OK.
*I might have just started reading The Three Musketeers, it’s not important, don’t look at me like that.
** Incidentally, ever notice that the Doctor never thinks to carry money and never knows what would be appropriate to give someone when he has some? That’s a classic sign of someone whose wealth has become so vast they can’t even count it anymore or relate to those who lack it with any real understanding. You may not think of him as rich, but the TARDIS offers him so much wealth that money doesn’t mean anything to him. Not caring about money is not a sign of having grown ‘beyond’ such trivial things. It’s a sign that you’re rich enough that you’ve never had to care. One thing I like about Clara is that she consistently challenges the Doctor on his privilege, and expresses concern that the opportunities the TARDIS offers have distanced him from being able to connect with other people on any normal level.
I rather enjoyed this episode. Have I surprised you? I’ve seen a lot of disappointment on Twitter, contrasted with a bunch of other people shouting about how it was PERFECT and haters are gonna hate. Given my feelings about recent Moffat Who you might expect me to be in the former camp. OK, I don’t think it was perfect – far from it! – but we’ve seen a lot worse in recent times, and there was a lot to enjoy.
Plot
A weird phenomenon has been spreading over Wi-Fi. Open wireless connections are appearing with weird symbols as names. If you select that wi-fi your consciousness is uploaded to a mainframe and within a day your body dies.
Meanwhile, the Doctor has been hiding out in a monastery in 1207, trying to get the peace of mind to figure out what’s going on with Clara Oswin Oswald and why he keeps seeing her in different places. Until, that is, the TARDIS phone rings, enabling the gag that names the episode, as the TARDIS has a St John’s Ambulance sign on its door.
The call is from Clara, who has been given the number of the TARDIS’s fake phone (which ought to be just a part of it’s camoflage as a police box) as an IT helpline. The Doctor realises it’s her and goes to find her. Together they take on the uber-coporation.
Things I liked
There was a lot of fun in this episode. The joke of the title was a little throw-away and contrived, but in that kind of groan-joke way that’s completely appropriate for Doctor Who. Matt Smith was on fine form as his bumblingly eccentric Doctor who’s surprisingly smart underneath. Very Sylvester McCoy mixed with Patrick Troughton and a dash of Paul McGann. I like it. I liked that the fez and bow tie came out again, and I enjoyed the gag that monks’ robes are ‘not cool’ in contrast to such stylish accessories. Perhaps some find touches like this gimmicky, but I love them I love them for their eccentricity and because the Doctor has always had such peculiar quirks – recorders, capes, scarves, celery, umbrellas, hats… they make me smile, and they’re a great feature for a kid’s TV show. Kids can pick up on them and feel like they’re in on an in joke, and they can very easily play at being the Doctor just by getting hold of an inexpensive item like a fez or a clip-on bow tie without going full Comic Con regalia. That’s important because it’s inclusive, and because it helps spark children’s imaginations – especially when it’s encouraging them to think about what counts as ‘cool’ in different ways, and in ways that change over time. It’s important for showing children how to be more accepting of differences and to be more experimental in their own thoughts, as well as fashion choices.
Whilst the ‘be careful what you share over the Internet and beware of using and/or stealing unsecured Wi-Fi’ moral was a little obvious, I didn’t particularly mind. On the one hand it felt a little technophobic, but the Doctor and Clara didn’t respond to the crisis with a full on Sarah Connor Computers-Are-Bad routine. They used computers to retaliate against the human enemy, which was the real culprit for its misuse of technology.
I liked that they incorporated the Shard, an awesome piece of modern, futuristic architecture so new that I haven’t even seen it yet, but which has dramatically changed the London skyline. It’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s current, and it presents the future as something that we’re involved in creating, rather than merely something the Doctor can show us.
I liked Clara’s common sense response to a strange man landing on her doorstep demanding to be let in, and that only when he’s shown her a good reason to suppose it’s more dangerous to remain outside than to enter his small box does she agree to do so.
I liked the foreshadowing of a mysterious woman giving Clara the Doctor’s number (I’m guessing Rose?). I wondered if there was a deliberate reference to the Meddling Monk (a Time Lord antagonist of the First Doctor) in the Doctor’s hiding out as a monk at the beginning. And I LOVED that they got Richard E Grant in for the mysterious baddy. He’s a fantastic actor with oodles of charisma, and it’s a nice touch, what with him having played an AU Doctor in ‘The Curse of Fatal Death‘ and the animated adventure produced for Doctor Who’s 40th-anniversary, ‘The Scream of the Shalka‘. With the 50th anniversary coming up, we can expect big things, there, and it’s good to feel like we’re building towards that.
Things I didn’t like so much
Despite the fact that Moffat is now clearly aware of what people feel about his sexist attitude towards women (I don’t condone him being bullied off Twitter, but I assume it at least made him aware of the groundswell of feeling) he persists in throwing out sexist ‘gags’. Having the monk ask ‘Is it an evil spirit?’ and the Doctor reply ‘It’s a woman’ as though the two weren’t that dissimilar… it’s only funny if you hate women, which is out of character for the Doctor and a really bad message for kids. And… it’s doing you no favours, Moffat. It’s not just a few crazy feminists you’re continuing to poke with sticks because, for some reason, you think that’s funny, it’s 52% of the population that you’re insulting. We are watching, too, and some of us are little girls learning what the world thinks of our gender. Having it derided by an icon like the Doctor is pretty awful and entirely unnecessary. Not to mention the little boys who are learning about acceptable ways to interact with women.
On a similar note, I have some sympathy for the criticisms of Clara’s character as one-dimensional, used as a plot device and not really developed. As noted above, I do think she had some interesting elements of independence, but she has fallen into the tired old format of flirting with the Doctor. Although she says ‘come back and ask me tomorrow’ it’s token resistance that is presented more as a tease than any real sense that the Doctor’s being out of line in assuming that any woman who’s asked would willingly go with him. As others have noted, she’s too much like Amy and Riversong and all the other women Moffat writes, and not enough like a real woman with a personality that doesn’t revolve around her relationships to men. I am uncomfortable with how similar her speech patterns are to Riversong’s. ‘Run you clever boy’ is clearly drawn from the same smugly over-familiar well as ‘Hello, sweetie’ and, sexism aside, that’s just bad writing.
I also found some of the science a bit too silly. If the uploaded minds have been ‘fully integrated’ I don’t see how any of them could be re-downloaded without going mad. The cognitive scientist in me is irked. But on this point I am willing to subside and say ‘it’s Doctor Who, that’s just how it is’. Although this plot bore some similarities to ‘The Idiot Box’, I find the criticisms that it’s just a straightforward copy somewhat unkind. There was much more to the premise than an alien being simply absorbing minds. There was also a concept about integrating and altering minds – inducing paranoia, increasing intelligence, adding skills, enforcing obedience… some real interesting questions about the nature of personal identity and free will.
Overall, I found this episode considerably better than I expected. I still have serious problems with Moffat that I don’t think are going to go away. He seems to be digging his heels in on the sexism thing rather than listening to the voices of what women themselves think about his characterisation (or lack thereof) of them. But this was at least a fun episode with a good plot, some interesting ideas and a cohesive presentation. It was not a return of the ever more complicated confusions of the Riversong plot, and laid some stable ground for what I am tentatively hopeful will not be a complete train-wreck of an anniversary.
Two years! Woo-woo! Thanks for keeping with me. It’s been another hell of a year, and although Life Events have meant that I wasn’t able to review quite as much as I would have liked, you’ve stuck with me, and that’s awesome. In fact, with 28,000 hits this year, three times as many people have shown at least a vague interest in this little blog as last year. So: thanks! 😀
Those of you who were here last October 3rd will remember that to mark the aniversary of this esteemed blog I decided to hand out some meaningless awards: The Serene Wombles!
What exactly are the Serene Wombles? Well, to quote myself last year:
Eligibility for a Serene Womble i[s] conferred by being the subject of a review [on In Search of the Happiness Max] in the past year. There may have been better or more worthy things that came out this year, but if I didn’t find them relevant to my interests, or if I simply didn’t have the time to review them, they won’t be eligible for a Serene Womble. I make no pretense that these awards are significant or important in any way, but I enjoy having the opportunity to praise and draw attention to things I have loved.
The Serene Wombles are divided into two categories, those that apply to recent releases, and special Time Travelling Wombles for the most awesome things in my Reviewing Through the Time Machine posts. The division between the former and the latter may at times seem arbitrary – why should a film that came out in 2009 count as a recent release, whilst a TV Show that ended in 2009 requires a time machine? It’ll always be a judgement call, and the judgement will [usually] have been made on a case-by-case basis at the time of reviewing. Sometimes I use a time machine for my reviews because I want to review something that came out in 1939, sometimes because I want to review something more recent that’s out of print, or because it’s a TV show that’s been cancelled… At the end of the day, these are not the Oscars, they’re the highlights from a blog, and are therefore subject to my whim.
The competition was basically between Dredd 3D, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Hunger Games. If this category were about which film I’m most likely to rewatch… well, I’d probably rewatch all of those three, but I’d want to watch The Amazing Spider-Man first and most often. But this isn’t just about which film I found most fun. Each of these was well put together and entertaining, and The Amazing Spider-Man was also visually stunning and thematically well-conceived, but Dredd 3D was just in a league of its own – beautiful and thoughtful in equal amounts. It really felt like Dredd 3D was taking sci-fi back – giving us a real vision of the future, beautiful and provocative as well as dark. Breathtaking, is the word.
I doubt this film will sweep the Real and Proper awards in the way it deserves, but here in Womblevonia I’m doing my bit to recognise originality, inspiration, and artistic genius where I see it. Congratulations, Dredd 3D! Well deserved.
Tough crowd. I mean, we have The Fades, one of the most strikingly original and well-executed British fantasy TV shows in a good many years – a real tragedy that it was not renewed for a second series. Then there’s The Hollow Crown‘s adaptation of Richard II, which contains some of the very best Shakespeare I have ever seen performed, and for one of my least favourite plays, at that, including a truly spectacular performance from Ben Whishaw, as Richard II, and a simply wonderful portrayal of John of Gaunt by Patrick Stewart. And although Doctor Who has been highly questionable over the last year, I can’t deny that ‘A Town Called Mercy’ was excellent. Yet Game of Thrones is still hands down the winner, for me. It feels unfair to some of the competition to give it the Serene Womble for Best TV Show two years in a row, but given that it was even better this year than last year, I don’t feel that I can really deny it. Performances by Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, and Maisie Williams were stand outs, but everybody was bringing their A-game. The special effects were incredible – I now believe that dragons exist and that they are both very cute and very dangerous. Pretty much every element of music, direction, and writing was outstanding, and it stands out in my memory as the best thing I have seen all year.
As they say on these here Internets: All of The Awards.
Well, maybe not all of the awards. This is a new category introduced to include the burgeoning genre of web series. I was tempted to roll it into the TV shows Womble, but, upon reflection, I must concede that web series are their own medium. They are usually shorter and are often much lower budget. It’s neither fair nor practical to try and compare them to much longer, much higher budget shows. Moreover, they are developing their own tropes and styles and on the whole exhibit a different character to their televisual brethrin.
That said, there wasn’t a lot of competition in this category. Both these shows are Felicia Day creations, and whilst I did watch other web series over the course of the year, I can’t deny that Felicia is the mistress of this genre – she has not only talent but the extra experience of being one of the founders of this artform. It means that she’s been at it for longer, but also that she’s better known. Nevertheless, it is notable that The Guild greatly outstripped Dragon Age: Redemption. I suspect this is in part due to the fact that Felicia will have had much less control in the latter, but I also didn’t find her own performance as convincing. In all honesty, The Guild is just in a league of its own. It has the geek-following to bring in stars for the extensive cameos that were a feature of this series, and it’s starting to get the money that allows it to do more things. It’s also excellently and knowingly written for the audience that powers the Internet: geeks. Not to mention the spot on performances of the other cast members: Vincent Caso, Jeff Lewis, Amy Okuda, Sandeep Parikh, and Robin Thorsen.
It’s a deserved win, but with more and more people finding it natural to watch their visual content online, more TV stars using short videos as a way to get a bit more exposure and make a bit more cash on the side (see, for example, David Mitchell’s Soapbox), there’s a blooming new arm of the media that I’m thinking I need to investigate further in the coming year. I’m interested to see how things develop.
The Serene Womble for Best ActorBen Whishaw Elligible Actors: This category is open to any actor in any recent production that I’ve reviewed in the past year – film, TV, radio, podcast, whatever. I do not discriminate by gender. It’s a fight to the melodramatic death and the best actor wins, regardless of what’s between their legs or how they identify.
This was a tough one. I feel bad for stinting Peter Dinklage for the second year running after praising him so highly, but it was a strong field, and he did contribute to the overall Game of Thrones win – keep it up, Peter, there’s always next year. Lena Headey was also giving all the players a run for their money with her outstanding performance as Ma-Ma in Dredd 3D – a real performance of a lifetime. But I can’t deny the just deserts for Ben. He took a role I’d never especially liked or understood and made me see it from a completely different angle – an angle that was utterly compelling and heart-breaking. In all honesty I was far less impressed with Parts II and III of The Hollow Crown (and I somehow missed Part IV), and I’ll not deny that Tom Hiddleston did a good job, but Richard II blew me away, and Ben Whishaw was the lycnhpin of that production. Incandescent. Any actor that can ellucidate not just the character they are portraying but the themes of the play and have that render their performance more compelling rather than less, and to such a level… sheer genius.
Thank you, Ben, for showing me Richard II the way you see him. Have a Womble.
This one was probably the hardest. Kraken is the most imaginative novel I’ve reviewed this year, and it was certainly a gripping as well as intelligent read. However, it did have some minor gender issues, the attempt at rendering London accents was unconvincing, and although I found the exploration of personal identity fun, it was inconsistent.
Rome Burning‘s alternate history setting was imaginative in a different way. For exploration of gender, race, and cultural issues it was outstanding. The characters were interesting and varied. The pace was fast and gripping. The politics, nuanced and intriguing. And, overall, the harder-to-define ‘squee’ quotiant was just higher than for anything (new) I’ve read in a long time.
Romanitas, the first book in the trilogy of which Rome Burning is the second, was also good, gripping, and squee-worthy, but the writing was not quite as strong and the world-building was more developed in the second volume.
A Dance with Dragons is what it is: a novel to which I have mysteriously devoted a surprisingly large chunk of my life in reviewing; part of a long series that has given me both great joy and great frustration. Perhaps it is unfair to put it up for assessment when the review is as yet incomplete, but I’ll give you a sneak preview and say that, for all its good points, A Dance with Dragons was not really competition for any of the above.
The Serene Womble for Best ComicRomatically Apocalyptic
Another new category, and only two in it, but I couldn’t leave them by the wayside. Both of these are excellent, and I thoroughly recommend them to all of you. Both are surreal, hilariously funny, and gender balanced. Romantically Apocalyptic has an edge for me by being, well, apocalyptic; but then again, Real Life Fiction has Manicorn. The real clincher is the artwork, which, as you can see, is stunning. I have never seen anything like it in a web comic. Or any comic. Or ever. And the creator, Vitaly S Alexius, hands this stuff out for free. There are no two ways about it: this comic wins.
That’s right, I’m giving the award to a film it’s virtually impossible to buy anymore. It’s not available on Amazon (there’s a Korean film called Glass Slipper, but it’s a different movie), it’s never been made into a DVD, the only videos I can find are US vids on eBay, the cheapest was going for about £16 (inc. P&P) at time of posting. I don’t know if it’d even play on a non-US machine. My copy was taped off the telly in the 1980s. But if you can get it, I urge you to make the effort. And this is really what reviewing via time machine is all about: drawing attention to classics and forgotten works of art. How can we get great films like this pressed for DVD if nobody speaks up to say that they are wanted?
The Glass Slipper is beautiful, sweet, and knowing. To me, it is the definitive cinderella story, and that’s not just the nostalgia talking. I feared it would be when I went to rewatch for this review, but it’s not. This was a feminist take on Cinderella in 1955, long before anyone even dreamt of Ever After. And it doesn’t sacrifice the romance for its message; it is a heart-breaking, life-affirming, challenging, witty, and beautiful work of art.
This is not to discredit its competition, however; both of the other films were clear contenders, although each is very different to the others, and it was hard to make the comparison. Robocop is a cleverly written and directed critique of capitalism. Its ultra-violence and gritty realism stand at stark odds to The Glass Slipper’s colourful fairytale punctuated with surrealist dance-interludes. Soldier’s Girl is a moving and powerful adaptation of the true story of a soldier who was beaten to death for loving a transgender woman. It perhaps didn’t have the artistry of the other two movies, but I don’t know that you want a lot of whistles and bells for such a movie – its task is to tell someone else’s tale and command the viewer to witness a crime and recognise an injustice. It would be wrong for a director to grandstand and steal the show. So, what do you do, when confronted with three such different films, ones that resist judgement on equal grounds?
I think you have to go with your gut. The Glass Slipper is the one that had the deepest personal influence on me, playing a pivotal role in shaping my psyche and helping me figure out what sort of a woman I wanted to grow up to be. Children’s or ‘family’ movies are often over-looked as less serious art objects than ‘adult’ films*, but they help to form the worldview a child is exposed to when they are trying to figure out what this existence, this life, is all about. Films like The Glass Slipper, which show a child a multiplicity of roles for women, are incredibly important, especially when they do so in the context of a story that is usually cast to define women as romantic creatures whose ‘happily ever after’ lies in marriage, and not in independant thought. Doing that whilst keeping the romantic centre of Cinderella’s tale intact is a masterful stroke. It deserves this award.
The Time Traveling Womble for Best Actor Lee Pace
Eligible actors: anyone who has acted in a film I had to time travel to watch.
It may not have garnered the illustrious Time Traveling Womble for Best film, but I can’t deny the Womble to Lee Pace – head and shoulders above the rest – there really wasn’t any competition. Lee Pace plays Calpernia, the transgendered woman that Barry Winchell fell in love with, and was brutally killed for loving. The gentle, understated approach to this sensitive role is spot on. I imagine a lot of reviews of this film will have said something to the effect of what a ‘convincing woman’ Lee Pace made – I’m not even sure what that means, but it’s the sort of thing people say when they discuss a man playing a transgendered role. I’ve known a number of transgendered women – they’re as varied as any other random woman would be from another; they’re as varied as people. Which is not the same as saying that they have nothing in common or don’t have shared experiences. I don’t want to make any sweeping characterisations of what it is to be a transgendered woman and then proclaim that I think Lee Pace matched that stereotype. What I’m saying is that he portrayed a well-rounded character – a person with loves and passions and heart-ache, with interests both important and trivial; a person whose story moved me and made me think about an important issue.
The point that moved me most – that stood out – was a moment in the above scene. It spoke to me powerfully even though it was speaking about an experience I’ve never had, and am never likely to have. Because it’s a scene in one sense about a man struggling with figuring out his own sexuality in the high-pressure environment of being a soldier in the context of the US Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy – only revoked just over a month before I reviewed this film; still in force when it was made. To a large extent, that’s what the film is about. But it’s also about a woman, struggling to be acknowledged as a woman, finding it almost impossible to date, even though she is beautiful and charismatic, because straight men won’t acknowledge her as a woman. And here she has found a man, a man she is falling in love with, and she must always be asking herself: is this just an experiement, for him? Am I his way of figuring himself out? And all this time she has been loving and supportive and understanding that this is hard, for him, but here she finaly shows her pain and anxiety. Yet, it’s still within the context of that loving, caring, understanding character. Once he has affirmed his love for her she subsumes her own pain to his need for support. It is done with so much subtlety and nuance. Lee Pace isn’t the one bawling his eyes out in this scene, but the emotion is nonetheless powerful.
That’s acting. Acting and sensitivity; just exactly what the role needed.
I did think about including some of the works of Anne McCaffrey in this category, as I did talk about a number of them in her memorial post, but ultimately I decided that what I was really doing was celebrating a woman’s life’s work, rather than giving a review. Besides, I might want to review some of them properly somewhere down the line.
As for the two remaining novels… well, it was an unfair match. The Drawing of the Three is basically my most favourite book. The Blazing World is an important book that more people should read. It’s historically valuable and truly remarkable for its time. But it’s also the offspring of a genre (novel writing) in its infancy – the very first science fiction novel, in 1666. Don’t believe me? Go read the post.
As for The Dark Tower – ah… I suspect I shall spend my whole life trying to tease apart why it affects me so. My post, ‘Meditations on Death‘ explores just one aspect of my its power – the seductive power of the concept of death-as-release, what makes us resist its allure, and how this is expertly explored in The Drawing of the Three.
And, last of all:
The People’s Choice AwardThe Guild, Season 5 Perhaps the most arbitrary of all the awards, this is the one you voted for with your feet. The selection for this award is based solely on the review post with the single largest number of hits. And this year it was a landslide, with 8,431 hits and counting, this post has had more hits than my home page. It’s had several thousand more hits than the total for all hits of my most popular month (July). The closest runners up are The Amazing Spider-man and The Hollow Crown (both around 1,000).
And it’s not even because it’s been on the blog since October last year – the hits suddenly started raining in in July. I don’t know what it was, but it seems like all of a sudden the Internet woke up to The Guild, and all I can say is that it couldn’t be more well deserved. Congrats, Felicia and friends: they like you, they really, really like you!
And that’s it! The awards have been awarded, and it’s time to start all over again, selecting novels and films and TV shows and comics and web series, and kittens only know what else, to review in a brand new Womblevonian year.
OK, when Doctor Who wins its obligatory Hugo next year, I vote we give it to this episode. I thought that was stonking.
That said, I can see my Twitter feed is already a flutter with voices of dissent. I won’t pretend to know everybody’s reasons (people always take the trouble to tell me that it was for something different when I guesstimate), but US set episodes are always a slightly tougher sell. I know there have been grumblings around the blogosphere about catering to the growing US audience, but in all honesty, I can’t see why that’s a reason to complain. I mean, it isn’t like all the UK-based episodes aren’t catering to the UK audience. I grant you, ‘Daleks in Manhattan‘ was not the most successful of gestures in that direction, but Doctor Who has a long history of flirting with locations across the pond*. William Hartnell, the first doctor, even had a wild west story arc himself, in ‘The Gunfighters‘ (1966).
I also rather liked the touch of the Doctor saying that they were heading for a Mexican day of the dead festival (before someone spilled from crumbs on the console). Like so many science fiction programs, Doctor Who has always been limited in its realism by its centring on the country of its origin for its plots. Budget has been a big factor in this – I don’t suppose we shall see a Doctor Who episode set in New Zealand in the near future. Curiously, New Who has had, if anything, even more of a problem in this way than Old Who, setting unusually high numbers of episodes on Earth in an attempt to not scare away mainstream viewers, and consequently giving more time to Great Britain over alien locales. Exploring a bit of Earthly culture outside the European therefore seems rather healthy, to me.
But then, I spent a couple of years growing up in the US as a child, and have a longstanding affection for the wild west as a result. Perhaps I am biased because of this, but overall I thought this episode was tightly plotted, original, well-acted, challenging, and exciting. We were not tortured by the notoriously bad American accents that were one of the many flawed elements of the Manhattan based episode mentioned above. Moreover, rather than the recycling of old favourites that we have seen so much of, lately, we got a new (to my knowledge) alien race and a cyborg. (OK, so it is hitting a lot of the Ro buttons, but surely everyone likes cyborgs, right? Right?)
Minimally Spoiltastic Plot
The Doctor, Amy, and Rory arrive at the town of Mercy, somewhere in the US. The town is surrounded by a mysterious ring of rocks and wood, as well as a pointed ‘Keep Out’ sign, which the Doctor pointedly ignores. Almost immediately upon arrival they are challenged by the locals and when the Doctor confirms that he is both a Doctor and an alien, they unceremoniously evict him. In response to his crossing the ring around the town, an ominous figure, named by the locals as ‘The Gunslinger’ materialises in fits and starts, slowly getting closer to the Doctor, hefting a big gun.
At the last moment, the local sheriff, Issac (Ben Browder), declares that the Doctor must be allowed back in, and takes him aside to explain. There is, apparently, another alien doctor in the town, and the Gunslinger wants to kill him. The other doctor, Kahler Jex (Adrian Scarborough), has apparently done a lot of good. The sheriff mentions that the war he, Issac, fought in is only a few years in the past, and the experience convinced him that if a man wants a second chance, he can have one. Kahler Jex has done a lot of good to the town, and Issac is determined to protect him from the Gunslinger.
The Doctor agrees, but is naturally curious as to why it is that the Gunslinger wants this other doctor dead, and whether Kahler Jex is truly a man worth protecting, whatever he may have done for Mercy.
Analysis
I felt like there were a lot of geek nods hovering around this one. You can’t say ‘The Gunslinger’ to me and not have me think of Roland of Gilead, who is so termed in Stephen King’s magnum opus, The Dark Tower. But I’m willing to concede that I’m super sensitive to such things. I also don’t know if it’s just me who found that the Gunslinger bore a striking resemblance to a warped version of Kryten from Red Dwarf, which, of course, had its own western episode. I dunno, maybe it is just me, but the black, bulky clothes; the waxy, cyborg face; the awkward stance and movements; the misshapen hands… it just felt familiar. On the other hand, I know that the Terminator font used for the cyborg-view writing that said ‘TERMINATE’ was intentional.
So what were all these references (or putative references) doing? I’m not entirely sure. They might have been just nods. However, this episode was particularly concerned with exploring the themes of warfare, justice, law and order, and the impact of the past on the present, as well as whether an individual can change. The responsibilities and changeability of the individual is a frequent question where artificial intelligence is concerned. Dave Lister, in Red Dwarf, is constantly trying to get Kryten to change as a way of enabling freedom by defying his programming. This is positive freedom, and yet could also be seen as a restriction of Kryten’s negative freedom to simply be who he wants to be. Kryten seems to enjoy the positive freedom that Lister grants him, yet he is also frequently wracked with guilt over the minor transgressions Lister persuades him to because they are in conflict with an existing moral code that Lister is not entirely successful in providing him with reasons to reject. I’m not saying Red Dwarf has any especially in-depth discussion of these things, but it is a feature of debates about artificial life that they always bring with them questions of responsibility and freedom. Programming is taken as restrictive – yet arguably, we are just as predetermined by the laws of physics and our circumstance. Can programming free one from responsibility? If a choice is unavoidable, does that mean it was not chosen? Was it really as unavoidable as we like to tell ourselves it was? And if we create life, are we not responsible for the actions of that life? Or does accepting such responsibility deny the power over its own life that each individual has?
These are questions that the Terminator movies (especially Terminator 2: Judgement Day) are more overtly concerned with. Questions of responsibility and freedom stem from both the AI plot elements and the time travel ones (another shared theme with this week’s Doctor Who. John Connor’s message to himself, via Kyle Reese and his mother, is that ‘The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves’. It’s a bastardisation of a quote from Sartre’s seminal paper, ‘Existentialism and Humanism‘**:
Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself… man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future, and is aware that it is doing so
Terminator 2 is all about choices, and I’ll restrain myself from getting too deep into my thoughts on T2***, but I hope this is sufficient to show the connection. Anyway, ‘A Town Called Mercy’ is also about choices and the weight of responsibility – the weight of the past. The Doctor is a man who has tried to wipe his past away – a thing that might feel like freedom, but must also be dangerous, especially for a man with a past as weighty as the Doctor’s. Here he is confronted by a number of mirrors: the sherif, who has responded to his experiences of war with kindness, and a resolution to judge all as though their crimes can be written off if they can prove themselves valuable members of the community. The other doctor, who has worked hard to atone for a murky past, but whose past has followed him, anyway, and now threatens others because it has been ignored. And the Gunslinger, another dealer of death, who is bitter and full of anger for the role that has been thrust upon him, yet who follows a certain code nonetheless. The nature of morality and when and whether it is ever right to kill is constantly challenged and interrogated from a number of angles. And hanging in the background, addressed with a subtlety that New Who has sometimes lacked in the past, is the issue of the Doctor’s own past, of his war-crimes, of his status as a warrior, and whether he even has the right to call himself the ‘Doctor’ and not the ‘Predator’ or something more ominous.
One senses that the Doctor can never truly resign himself to the passive role of healer. The clean slate that Issac wants for others (and tacitly for himself) is perhaps an ideal that cannot be attained precisely because the history of our past actions frames our present and our future. The Doctor was always more the sort of doctor who searched after knowledge than who stopped to attend to the less exciting business of tending to the sick. He has helped people, countless people, but he has also left a wave of destruction in his path. The ‘Oncoming Storm’, if you like. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: ‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy‘. Or perhaps, he’s a little bit of both.
The Doctor is one of the more interesting heroes – one of the most enigmatic, charismatic, and magnetic – precisely because he is both darkness and light. Even before this episode aired certain corners of the Interwebs were muttering about the Doctor handling a gun and behaving in a morally questionable manner. But he’s always been a bit morally questionable. He’s not a comfortable hero, and his value lies precisely in that, because he makes us question ourselves. He’s makes us question whom we choose to idolise, and whether people can be fitted into neat categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Not a lot of television shows suitable for children dare to muddy the waters in this way, and yet I think it’s a thing that children respond well too. It’s an important lesson, not only that good people can do bad things, but that bad people can do good, and that maybe the distinction between the two is not as clear as our parents might like to pretend when they tell us that ‘No – don’t do that. That’s wrong – only bad children do that’.
This is a challenging and nuanced look at morality and responsibility all packaged up in a great ball of fun filled with aliens and cyborgs and the wild west. What’s not to love? I might just go watch it again.
In the mean time, and because I cannot resist it, I just have to post this glorious video again, as a reminder of the Doctor’s darker side…
*He-he, I said ‘pond’.
**The literal translation is ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, but the title is usually rendered in English as ‘Existentialism and Humanism’.
***Give me enough time and freedom and space to write in and I will almost always end up talking about existentialism and Terminator 2 – it’s like monkeys and Shakespeare.
This was a solid episode. It didn’t blow me away the way that the previous three episodes did, but it didn’t have to. Not every episode has to deal with issues as prescient and historically significant as ‘Rosa’, and we shouldn’t expect them to.
This week Doctor Who tackled a pivotal moment in American history with heartbreaking resonance for current events. With white supremacy on the rise again, choosing to have the first historical episode in this season focus on 
The companions are split between two space ships that are in a race. The Race. The last Race. And the pilots of those space ships are the last survivors of this very dangerous inter-planetary quest. One of the ships is clearly a piece of junk, owned by a taciturn fellow who swears that it is the best ship in the galaxy. There are definite notes of 
Meanwhile, the pilot of the other ship is striking a definite Fury Road chord. In this shot the goggles and wild hair and dirt-smeared bandana combined with the vertical lines drawn by the chains the men behind her are clinging to cannot help but evoke Mad Max and the War Boys, and the presence of a strong female character in this context immediately draws connection between the female pilot, 
Moving on, we learn the nature of the Race from a holographic projection who performs a similar function to 
There are also several call-backs to previous Doctors – again, establishing the Thirteenth Doctor’s credentials. She uses a Venusian Aikido move (the favoured martial art of the Third Doctor), and has a TARDIS that dispenses biscuits (the Eleventh Doctor famously squared off with a Dalek using only a jammy dodger). I am also fairly sure that the first exterior image we see of the TARDIS directly echoes one of the iconic early shots from either the first or second episode in 1963. I don’t have my copy of those episodes to hand and my GoogleFu has failed me, but I will update if I can confirm.
Yup. That’ll do.
In Search of the Happiness Max 