Doctor Who’s New Year Special was a step up from the preceding season finale – but then, almost anything would have been. While Ryan has a difficult reunion with his absent father, the Doctor must deal with the return of an ancient threat, the most dangerous creature in the universe.
And so, this season of Who has reached its consonant-happy end. When nine distress calls lead the TARDIS Team to the ruins of an old battlefield, they must face off against an old foe. Those who have been following the show will probably be able to guess who that old foe is, so very few points for the surprise factor.
This season has seen Doctor Who jump between two worlds: the shaky vision of showrunner Chris Chibnall and the much stronger realm of guest writers (with one notable exception). Fittingly, this episode sees the TARDIS Team find a portal from the humdrum to the fantastical.
The latest Who was another historical, a romp through the witch-hunt-happy England of King James. When Team TARDIS try to stop the killings, they uncover a larger mystery, as ever.
It’s an old joke in the Doctor Who fandom that every season of the revived series has that one episode we don’t talk about. Maybe it’s the one with the Absorboloff or the one where the monsters were made out of sleep-eye-dust. But, as divisive as those episodes are, none of them went to bat for Amazon. It is with some sadness that I must file my first ‘this sucked’ Who Review.
Last Sunday saw Who return to historical form. Demons of the Punjab, written by Vinay Patel, brings the TARDIS team to the Punjab in 1947 because Yaz is anxious to learn more about her grandmother’s past. But, as you may know, the Punjab in 1947 is a dangerous place to be. The Partition of India is on the verge of tearing apart the whole country and Yaz’s family. What’s more, she discovers her past-grandmother on the eve of marriage to a man Yaz has never even heard of before. Also: aliens.
Doctor Who has a tradition of ‘base under siege’ stories. Even keeping it to Modern Who, many will recall that weird David Tennant one where they literally meet the Devil or the Capaldi one with the ghosts. It boils down to the Doctor and their companion(s) semi-accidentally getting stuck in a base with a cast of new, one-off characters and some alien threat. Tensions rise between everyone as they try to find a way out of the mess.
And so it is with ‘Tsuranga Conundrum.’ The gang end up stranded without the TARDIS on a hospital-spaceship with a strange and deadly intruder on board: the Pting, a cute but nasty little CGI buddy. So, with the hospital crew and patients in tow, they must figure out what the Pting is, what it wants, and how to stop it.
Chris Chibnall goes to work one morning. He has to pitch the fourth episode to the producers. “What if, uhhh,” he says, “spiders? Like, what if we just did spiders? It’s been a while since spiders.”
So: spiders. More specifically, the Doctor finally coaxes the TARDIS into bringing her friends back home but discovers that something spooky is afoot with the local eight-legged population. Why have they all converged on a hotel? And why is there a Trump-alike character swanning about?
Content warning: discussion of racism in 1950s segregation-era USA.
Over the last nearly-55 years, Doctor Who has been a bit antsy around the topic of racism, unless you count the instances where it was the perpetrator.
In a Series 10 episode, ‘Thin Ice,’ there was a notable instance where a black companion, Bill Potts, visited Regency-era London and was immediately nervous. Wouldn’t she be kidnapped and sold into slavery or something, she wondered. The Doctor didn’t really have an answer. Later, he socks a racist in the face. This story was a careful step in the right direction, but it felt wanting. There still wasn’t any substantial discussion, either in dialogue or narrative, of racial issues.
Well, not anymore! Get ready to be very uncomfortable.
Having firmly established our new gang last week, Doctor Who ploughs ahead to give them their first alien planet. A slapdash teleportation device accidentally lands the Doctor and her new friends Graham, Ryan, and Yaz on Desolation, a dangerous desert planet with three suns (very Star Wars). Their search for the missing TARDIS quickly embroils them in a race across the landscape against two other space travellers. Along the way, they find that Desolation hides some dark secrets.
