Doctor Who Series 11 Retrospective

(Yikes, it’s been a minute and a half since I’ve put up a piece on the Looking Glass. To make up for it, this one’s bigger on the inside.)

I: Who?

I promise not to wax too self-indulgent on you, but I need you to understand my perspective on Doctor Who to see where I’m coming from. As both a fan and as a creator of sci-fi, I had three big reckonings in my life: if fare like Metroid, Star Wars, Star Fox, et al lit a fire under me in terms of the appeal of sci-fi aesthetics, and Mass Effect later opened me up to the joys of solid worldbuilding, then it was Doctor Who that really opened my mind to experimenting with increasingly wild speculative concepts and much larger timescales in a narrative.

I hope that didn’t come off as crass self-promotion – I needed you to understand that when I say this show means a lot to me, I mean that much like those other series I mentioned, it has done me proper good, and improved me as a writer. And just from an entertainment standpoint, it’s one of those shows I can always return to.

So I let this show get away with a whole lot of stuff that might not be as good a look on other shows. With half a century of continuity to draw from, sure there’s going to be the occasional inconsistency, but the continuity holds up remarkably well considering the impossible task it has.

That said, I’m not a blind fanboy – there are episodes I have a problem with, and there are episodes I just plain don’t like that much. I find Kill The Moon to be more caustic and over-cynical each time I see it, The End Of Time has a host of issues despite how badly it wants to be a big epoch-ending epic, and Love & Monsters is just balls. That said, I can find stuff to like even in problem episodes: Kill The Moon has those freaky moon-spiders, The End Of Time has an awesome score and the choice to upgrade Wilf to companion was perfect, and Love & Monsters can be turned off.

So all that’s to say that when I criticize this show, I do it from the most earnest and well-meaning of places.

Now then in kicking off the actual season review, I’ll lay my cards on the table and set a tone for the rest of the article: Jodie Whittaker is perfect in the role of the Doctor. She’s got that tireless springy energy, she’s quirky and prone to going off on rapid-fire tangents, and she can turn stone-serious at a second’s notice. I would compare her most closely to Tennant in that regard.

It does feel like the casting directors at the BBC really know what they’re doing on this show: going back a regeneration, Capaldi left a lot of people tepid in Series 8 (not really his fault, because the Doctor was working through some personal shit at the time that didn’t make him as warm or springy or “likable” as the arcs before or after), but Series 9 and 10, and certain downright Oscarworthy moments within (yes, I realize they don’t give Oscars for television) revealed that they picked exactly the right actor. And how perfect was David Tennant to showcase the Doctor’s more optimistic, outgoing outlook that Rose had helped him achieve throughout Series 1? And so forth, and so on. And Whittaker is the next in a proud tradition of exactly the right Doctor-actor coming about at exactly the right point.

But new showrunner Chris Chibnall has not provided her the material with which to really shine.

To be clear, I don’t think there are any episodes here that fall below ‘good’. They all have the irrepressible energy that makes Doctor Who what it is. But there’s one big reason (well, two, but they’re interconnected) why I found Series 11 to be the weakest Doctor Who season since Series 1.

II: The Arc Is Spaced

This is the first Doctor Who season in the new millennium to do away with a season-arc format, and take place entirely via adventure-of-the-week episodes. Chibnall also made the decision to not have any familiar characters other than the Doctor herself, to have a season completely unburdened by past continuity.

Now that it’s been given a chance and the season has finished out, I can comfortably say this was a bad idea.

I can understand wanting to be able to start fresh. Davies and Moffat both got generally clean slates to work with, with the Doctor having freshly regenerated each time and being promptly thrust into new adventures, new stories with new companions. The same courtesy was of course extended to Chibnall, as it should be. In a way, this is Doctor Who distilled down to its nucleus: the loony Time Lord in a blue box, having adventures throughout time and space with her companions.

The thing is, all those other seasons had adventure-of-the-week episodes in droves as well, and the over-arching plot didn’t really intrude on them too much in most cases. Rather, it enhanced them, with the promise of a big, unifying climax to come. A friend of mine described these over-arching plots as “connective tissue”, which I thought was a wonderful way of putting it, such that you can expect me to keep using it throughout this review.

There’s one positive I will extend to this decision: it does make Series 11 a good jumping on point if you’re just coming in and want to see what the Doctor’s about without fearing you’ll be coming in the middle of a bunch of stuff. And having semi-regular jumping-on points is so, so important when you’re a show as long-running as this.

In fact, Series 10 also intended itself as a jumping-on point: at least, most of it. It ushers new viewers in in a way that feels easy, because we’re re-introduced to the Doctor through the eyes of a new companion. Most of the episodes are Adventure Of The Week, and they’re really well balanced between modern (The Pilot, Knock Knock), historical (Thin Ice, The Eaters Of Light) and futuristic (Smile, Oxygen), with some other neat stuff in between, giving you a nice all-access tour to what the show is all about. But still, there’s references throughout, as well as the connective tissue of the Vault subplot, which leads into the subplot of the Mistress’s attempted reformation.

And here’s another crazy thing: if his idea was to have a season full of new encounters and weekly-adventure episodes, Chibnall was following up a season that had just done that! In Series 10, a full seven episodes were standalone adventures, and we were introduced to seven new monster/alien types, and no less than ten episodes work without needing any past-season character/plot knowledge beyond the occasional reference! We just did this, and I thought it worked great in Series 10!

Of course, new viewers are advised, at least by myself, to catch themselves up on past seasons before finishing Series 10, because the last three episodes – World Enough And Time, The Doctor Falls and Twice Upon A Time – are kind of a continuity singularity. To get the most out of them, you’ll want to have working knowledge of the Capaldi, Tennant and Hartnell eras. It’s a lot to swallow if you don’t (in the parlance of another Moffat show) have a whole wing of your mind-palace devoted to Who continuity.

But here’s the thing. Those final three episodes of Series 10 are widely, if not near-universally, considered the best of the season, the most powerful, the most cathartic, the most epic, the most earned.

And that’s the power of invoking continuity. Those episodes bring together events and consequences from three different eras of the show, and things like that make the big emotional and cathartic moments resonate across the entire show, rather than just secluded in their individual episodes.

How about The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End in Series 4, a tour de force epic that brings together all the Doctor’s Davies-era companions and their families? Not even that, but we also get Sarah Jane and the Torchwood cast, pulling in the two spinoffs from the era! It wouldn’t have been possible if they hadn’t built up that continuity and chosen to cash it in. Would it still have been awesome if the episodes had just featured Donna, the Doctor’s Series 4 companion? Yes! Would it have been a mere shell of the dramatic, chillbump-inducing, white-knuckle, stand-up-and-cheer epic that we did get? Also yes!

Or how about in Series 9, when the fateful decision that the Doctor made all the way back in The Fires Of Pompeii ultimately begins a chain of cause-and-effect that leads him on a course into Heaven Sent, one of the most shocking Doctor Who episodes of all time?

Think about it on a smaller scale too. There are all sorts of smaller things running throughout the show that demonstrate just how weaving such a wide web of connective tissue in such a far-reaching show can both provide instant gratification, and even enrich older episodes: there’s a funny little moment at the end of The Shakespeare Code in Series 3 where, right as the Doctor’s saved the day and is getting out of dodge, Queen Elizabeth storms in and demands the Doctor’s head. We don’t exactly know why, but it’s a funny way to end the Doctor and Martha’s adventure with Shakespeare. But then, years later in The Day Of The Doctor, between series 7 and 8, we finally see just what the Doctor did that got Lizzy in a tizzy. No, these little things aren’t strictly-speaking necessary, but they do enrich the experience in so many ways.

So to my eyes, the decision to place past continuity by the wayside in Series 11 is unfairly dropping this new era into the arena with one hand tied behind its back.

Now, there is another positive, at least with the first few Series 11 episodes: after such a heavy trilogy of episodes preceding them, episodes which both put us as viewers through the emotional wringer and required working knowledge of three different Who eras to fully appreciate, I think it was a great idea to start off Series 11 with a handful of adventure-of-the-week episodes, self-contained stuff, to really let viewers ground themselves again. And, looking at the rising and falling action of the show as one huge epic narrative, it serves as a necessary breather.

(Fun fact to consider – after the time-jump early in TDF, The Doctor Falls, Twice Upon A Time, The Woman Who Fell To Earth and The Ghost Monument all take place, from the Doctor’s perspective, immediately after one another, with each episode leading directly into the next. S/he’s had quite the day!)

But an entire season without connective tissue? It’s too much no matter how you look at it. It starts out as a necessary breather, but it isn’t long before you as a viewer will be begging for something, anything more ambitious than this. It just feels like it’s handicapping itself.

Speaking of handicapping the show, let’s talk about Chibnall himself, and the way he writes and directs episodes. There’s nothing ostensibly wrong with his episodes, to my eyes, but there’s something that becomes very noticeable when you watch the work of the past couple showrunners, then jump immediately to Chibnall’s season.

To put it bluntly, Davies and Moffat’s work as showrunners just had so much more oomph. It’s more cinematic. It’s more emotional. It’s more raw and honest with itself about the breadth of its scope. It’s more willing to whip curveballs at you in any given episode. There are moments where we are made to come to terms with the Doctor’s enormity as both a character and a concept. Davies and Moffat’s runs provide such incredible moments of catharsis that elevate this to the kind of show that swims about in the back of your mind long after you turn it off.

Just off the top of my head, think about how many moments this show has had that – to co-opt the memesphere’s vocabulistics for a second – hit you right in the feels, for any reason – the epic scope, the catharsis of playing up continuity, or the raw drama of it.

I can think of so, so much. The Doctor and Amy bringing Van Gogh into the present day so that Bill Nighy’s exhibit curator can unwittingly explain to him the enduring legacy of his work. Pretty much the entire last act of The Family Of Blood, from John Smith’s tearful sacrifice, to the tranquil fury of the Time Lord, to the present day scenes. The Doctor’s epic speech climaxing The Rings Of Akhaten, while the score has the sheer balls to accompany it with a freaking singalong number and it works. The Girl In The Fireplace, just…all of it. Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead, where we see Moffat at the absolute peak of his powers, deftly juggling more speculative fiction ideas in two episodes than most shows manage in their entire run, all wrapped around an emotional, epic yet deeply personal lynchpin Who adventure that will leave you feeling like you’ve been through the wringer. The Doctor and Rory throwing down all the chips they’ve gathered in their time together to rescue Amy in A Good Man Goes To War. The Doctor at the end of Extremis, his whole reality shattered, without hope, without witness, without reward…still coming up with a last-ditch plan at the end of everything, made even better by the complete lack of music during the scene, right up to the moment it clicks, at which point one of his classic motifs kicks in. That moment toward the end of Series 6 when the Doctor, busy boasting about how he has all the time in the world, is brought to a somber halt by the revelation that the Brigadier has died. He never did have the time to say goodbye proper.

And so much more. So, so much more.

These moments are made possible by an intersection of factors, of the show’s unprecedented pool of continuity, of the massive timescale it’s dealing with, of the ability to have the same character leading half a century’s worth of continuity through a breadth of different actors because of the regeneration mechanic, making it incredibly unique among live-action narratives.

What, you think those ten and a half pre-Chibnall seasons had such an impact on me without such a raw emotional impact?

I can say without a doubt that if the general direction and writing of Chibnall’s work in Series 11 had been consistent throughout the past ten seasons, Doctor Who would not have had the same career-improving impact on me that it did.

In fact, it’s not even about the fact that no pre-existing characters or races appear here other than the Doctor, because it’s more about the fact that (most of) these episodes simply don’t have as much impact as Doctor Who should at its best.

To back up my point, here’s a short list of past episodes featuring villains/aliens which are never seen again to this day, and whose events land with a resounding boom.

-We never see the one-off Pyrovile race after The Fires Of Pompeii, yet that episode’s shocking, emotional, seriously gravitas-drenched climax still resonates to this day. Not only does it insert the Doctor into one of history’s great natural disasters, but it shows him causing it to prevent the same fate befalling the entire world. If you want to show someone just how heart-wrenching this show can be in the span of a single episode, show them this one.

-The…thing in Midnight. We never find out what it was. It gets away. We’ve never seen it again. (Unless you subscribe to various fan-theories like it was the mind of the Beast, or it was a fragment of the Great Intelligence, etc, etc) But its influence leaves the Doctor deeply rattled, for this episode deals with just how weak and cruel some folk can be when the social order goes to hell.

-The Vashta Nerada. Enough said.

-The entity in the water, in The Waters Of Mars has never been seen again, but the episode has never stopped resonating for its raw impact. Don’t ever let the Doctor travel alone.

Compare this to Series 11: with the exception of Grace dying in The Woman Who Fell To Earth (and I don’t know that I should even count that, as she was also introduced in that same episode), and some outliers I’ll discuss in a minute, each episode tends to end with “everything’s fine now, bye, off to the next one!”

And doing that with some episodes is good! Doing it with all of them robs the season of its long-term impact.

Or, to put it another way – in the final pre-Chibnall episode, the Doctor says this, as he stands upon the battlefield of Ypres. And these would just be words, but for the fact that the ten and a half seasons of NewWho to that point had more than earned them in their tragedy and their enormity.

And there are times when Chibnall appears to be going for the same raw gut impact as his predecessors, where it just kind of…falls on its face. Rosa is a solid episode on the whole, and while the language used by various angry racists in the episode is obviously cleaned up a bit (nobody tunes in to Doctor Who to hear characters drop the n-word), it otherwise doesn’t flinch from depicting the reality of Parks’ time and place. At any rate, at the very end of the episode, Chibnall seems to be trying to channel the same last-minute impact of twists like the one in The Girl In The Fireplace, where we finally find out why the clockwork droids wanted Madame de Pompadour, or the end of The Angels Take Manhattan, when the Doctor rushes to grab that last page he ripped out. At the end of Rosa, the Doctor talks about the impact that Rosa Parks’ actions had, the ripples she sent out through time and space, and she ended up getting…an asteroid named after her. An asteroid. In an asteroid field. Um. Alright?

III: What’ve You Got For Me This Time?

There are moments and episodes in Series 11 that ‘earn it’. I need to shout out Demons Of The Punjab, where that old Who magic is conjured masterfully, as the Doctor finds herself and her companions thrust into a historical situation where holding a fixed point means allowing a human tragedy to play out. While there are aliens in this episode other than the Doctor, they act as a red herring of sorts, but their place in the adventure only reinforces the theme. This is one of those chillbump episodes, and fully worthy of the Doctor Who mantle. If I was to hold up a single episode to represent the best of what the Whittaker era has to offer so far, this would be the frontrunner.

The music is wonderful, a dazzling blend of symphonic melodies, world instruments and vocals. There is such a spellbinding emotional tether to this episode, where we are reminded that traveling with the Doctor does not always mean saving the day. It starts out in a very similar way to Father’s Day, all the way back in the Eccleston era, with a companion wanting to use the TARDIS as their own personal family-history adventure, but it blossoms into so much more.

And as historical episodes go, I rather found it educational in a good way: there’s really not a lot of Western entertainment media about the 1947 Partitioning of India, and information about that event is integrated really fluidly into the episode, as a crucial key to the drama. At least, given that the episode was written by an Indian person, I am assuming that what’s on the screen is by-and-large accurate, sans the Time Lady and teleporting aliens. As far as one-off history-based adventures that pack an emotional punch, I would put this one damn close to Vincent And The Doctor. And if someone wanted to see exactly one Whittaker-era episode to get a taste of the era of Thirteen, this is a sterling choice.

It Takes You Away is on the whole a wonderful episode. It starts out low-key and creepy (almost like The Lodger in that regard), but soon blossoms into an ideal Who episode, throwing us into a malevolent pocket dimension and a sentient alternate universe, concepts that should be bread-and-butter for any good and faithful fan by now. The way it seamlessly throws us into these extreme fringe-science concepts brings to mind episodes like the Gaiman-penned The Doctor’s Wife and especially Neil Cross’s perturbing Hide, another adventure that begins as a lower-key creeper and soon reveals itself to be a fringe interdimensional trip.

There’s actually a moment in It Takes You Away where we do see the fire of the Time Lady begin to emerge, as she stands up to the personification of the sapient universe, demanding that it take her instead of her companions. Granted, if you compare this to the Akhaten speech I mentioned back there, it has a similar setup – the Doctor boasting of eldritch knowledge to a massive cosmic entity and showing it what’s good – but it’s much shorter, much less epic, has much less impact. Honestly, great episode, though. And I even liked the frog, as silly as it was.

And my, The Witchfinders! I was looking forward to this ever since it was announced, and it did not disappoint in the slightest. You’ve got Alan Cumming hamming it up as King James, you’ve got some of the creepiest one-off creatures since the Boneless (Cumming’s scenery-chewing performance aptly knocking the viewer off their guard when the creatures do appear), you’ve got the Doctor’s new gender actively working against her in a realistic way (a strong, eccentric female stranger with strange gadgets bursting in on a witch hunt? Welp), and you’ve got a bloody great episode on the whole.

And these are not Chibnall episodes. In fact, the fan consensus seems to be that the brightest shining stars of Series 11 are the non-Chibnall episodes.

But, again, there are no episodes of utter dreck. There are elements of certain episodes which don’t really work out, mind you. About halfway through the season, it occurred to me that Chibnall may have an issue with writing villains. Most of the baddies in his episodes can perhaps be called Excuse Villains, bads who are bad as a means of setting up the plot, rather than villains with exquisite evil plans and interesting characteristics or motivations. This on its face is not a dealbreaker, because those kinds of bads can be great for setting up fun setpieces, and can also reveal deeper layers as the narrative progresses.

Alas, most of Chibnall’s villains in this season don’t really do that. The villain of Rosa, for example, is basically a racist time-traveler from the future, who got out of Stormcage (the same prison where River Song was housed, and I’ll take any bits of connective tissue I can get my hands on in this season) and who intends to change history so that black people stay “in their place”. But that really just acts as a springboard to the episode itself, to have the Doctor and her companions run around in 1950s Montgomery, a place where, depending on your race, you’ll find it a bit less agreeable than, say, Skaro. On a high note, there is a palpable current of unease running through Rosa, as the Doctor bombs through town with a black guy and Indian girl in tow. You feel it. (And they’re lucky, given the Doctor’s past record with this sort of thing, that she doesn’t end up hook-punching any racists in a fit of rage this time, as unbelievably satisfying as that was in Thin Ice.)

So it kind of feels like Chibnall has a ‘villain issue’ in general for this season, which is strange, because this is the same writer who brought us the delightfully slimy Solomon the Trader (slimy enough that he became one of those villains whom the Doctor straight-up killed, albeit in an “I don’t have to save you” way) and his jocular robots.

The Tsuranga Conundrum should have been a season highlight. It’s a fast-paced sci-fi adventure that roots itself firmly in the tropes of its genre and leans on them to provoke a really fun, earnest watch. In that way, I suppose its ‘crisis on a spaceship’ framework is similar to Series 8’s Time Heist, an eminently watchable romp that plays up both sci-fi and heist tropes to great effect. The Doctor herself is eminently enthralling in this episode: when the realization that she’s left the TARDIS behind on a salvage world causes her to become single-minded and selfish as hell, fully willing to sacrifice the well-being of the patients on the medical ship to get back, it takes a dressing-down for her to realize how much of a dick she’s being. It’s not exactly the Time Lord Victorious, but I just love these moments where the Doctor’s raw id comes out. And that scene where she’s fanning over the ship’s antimatter drive is just awesome.

And there’s quite a nice subplot involving a decorated war heroine, suffering from a condition called pilot’s heart, along with great effects throughout (just like with the rest of the season, in point of fact).

(by the way, I was told after the fact that there is a blink-and-miss-it cameo by a Silent in this episode. Even though I had already seen the episode once, I was not aware of this until reading that. Considering what the Silence do, I am not okay with this.)

The episode would have been ideal, but for That One Thing. Yeah, you probably know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen the episode. I’m talking about Chibnall’s inexplicable decision to include a heavily pregnant man. And not just a single scene. A single scene would have been okay. No, this bloke is the episode subplot, right up to the birth being the B-side of the climax!

And just – I know everyone is going to have their own red line of what does and does not constitute squick (and that can be some really mundane things: some people who take umbrage with watching other people eat might not find the opening scenes of The Eleventh Hour especially agreeable), but if you decide to put in a whole subplot that could not possibly appeal to anyone who does not have an extremely specific fringe fetish, can you not?!

And Arachnids In The U.K. (bonus points for the title, absolutely) is yet another Chibnall episode that is right and solid except for That One Thing, and in this case, that is Chibnall’s decision to shoehorn in a character who is unmistakenly supposed to be a Trump expy, except this character hates Trump and wants to run against him, despite there being very little daylight between the two in terms of demeanor. And if I can break from decorum for a second, the one-line references in Series 10 were fine, but I really don’t want a whole character of that, because frankly, I don’t want that fucker anywhere near my Doctor Who, even in expy form.

Oh, I suppose it’s not that bad. Just another episode where Chibnall gives us a good adventure (with excellent spider effects!…feel free to count this as a positive or a negative depending on how big of a chill just washed down your spine) with some dumb thing dragging it down.

But there’s a moment toward the end where the Doctor realizes that this horrifying giant spider is really just dying because her physiology can’t support her huge frame. Then not-Trump shoots the spider, and the Doctor turns on him in a hurry. That’s so Doctor. Taking up for the innocent victims, no matter how many skittering legs they have. It’s a great moment. More of that, please.

I enjoyed The Woman Who Fell To Earth a lot more on my second viewing via the season blu-ray. As a post-regeneration episode goes, it builds up the new companions well, presents us with a nicely paced scenario in which the Doctor can air out her regeneration sickness (fortunately less of a loopjob than s/he suffered in Deep Breath, and she spends far less time asleep than in The Christmas Invasion). It also lets us get a feel for the city of Sheffield, where this group of companions is anchored, as opposed to London.

There’s this great dialogue exchange where the Doctor explains to her new companions the concept of regeneration. The Doctor’s explanation really drives home that Chibnall ‘gets’ the duality of the whole regeneration concept – of cheating death by changing rather than dying. Same person, same memories, but new body, new tastes and habits and quirks. The Doctor Falls and Twice Upon A Time dealt heavily in the fear of the change, and this conversation ties things up really well as a coda to this particular change.

If I can play Fashion Who for a sec, I really like how Whittaker carries the battle-damaged outfit s/he wore through World Enough And Time, The Doctor Falls and Twice Upon A Time. She wears it for almost the whole episode, in fact.

I really appreciate The Ghost Monument for what it is. It’s a fun, fast-paced swashbuckler of an episode where the season’s simplicity works in its favour: we’re stuck on a desolate alien world full of perils and we need off, time to go! And as Series 11 Chibnall episodes go, it doesn’t even have a ‘one thing’ to drag it down. As far as episodes of that nature go, I’ll happily throw it in with fare like Time Heist, Smile, Closing Time, The Shakespeare Code, et al – like good ol’ comfort food, nothing to sit especially heavy, but leaves you feeling good. And I really like how it takes that old “oh, you’ve redecorated” gag, and turns it on its head at the end.

While its lack of connective tissue and lack of an arc cripple Series 11’s ability to shine as a whole, there is one character arc that stood out to me: that of Graham, one of the Doctor’s three companions. He spends the season struggling to cope with the death of his wife, Grace, in The Woman Who Fell To Earth. It more-or-less simmers along in the background, rather than the companions’ personal lives being put front and center as in the Davies years, but it’s there, coming out at select points. It’s both written and acted in a startlingly human way, despite the cosmic setpieces. And when the villain who killed her comes back into their lives in The Battle Of Ranskoor Av Koloss, in the season’s one bit of connectivity, Graham is ready to be the bigger one, and decides not to kill the villain as he originally was hell-bent on.

(Although considering that capsule will keep said villain alive and never let him free, Graham’s vengeance against ‘Tim Shaw’ proves to be more similar to what happened to the Family of Blood in Series 3. Never reckon with the tranquil fury of a Time Lord, or with a grieving husband…)

That said, despite being an enjoyable episode in a vacuum, The Battle also doesn’t really match up to previous Who season finales, and it’s easy to understand why. Yes, the villain from The Woman Who Fell To Earth returns. Yes, there’s an eminent cosmic crisis. But the crisis doesn’t really feel like a crisis, and is solved as quick as it happens.

It’s because Doctor Who finales are where the showrunners really get to let it all hang out, and I’m not just talking about the multiple finales where the Doctor gets naked. (Journey’s End and The Time Of The Doctor, in case you need a refresher.)

Finales are where the chips get cashed in, and that pretty much requires having a season arc to redeem. Series 1’s finale redeems the Bad Wolf stuff. Series 2 redeems the Torchwood stuff, et cetera. By refusing to arc up, and refusing to bring back past races and characters for this season, Chibnall had nothing to redeem.

I’m just gonna drop this here. Chibnall really thought this was a smashing idea in the same year that Infinity War became a cinematic moment unto itself precisely for being a powerful, epic part-one-of-two payoff to the continuity Marvel had accrued to that point?

I know I’m harping on this point, but I really feel the need to emphasize just how much a show like this – or, to be more accurate, this show specifically – loses when it loses these things.

But there’s one other important element of NewWho that I haven’t touched on yet, and it too has vanished as of Series 11.

IV: Gold Rush

Speaking of the theatrical and dramatic, here’s a criticism of the new season for which I cannot fairly blame Chibnall or…anyone, really. Moffat and Capaldi weren’t the only crucial players to step off the TARDIS for good (at least, until the next multi-Doctor special brings Capaldi back) after Twice Upon A Time. In fact, there was one other major player who left at the same time, and he was there longer than anyone else on the show: composer Murray Gold left, and while I reserved judgment as the season progressed so as to be fair to the new composer, I now feel comfortable saying that his absence is sorely felt.

To give some context to those remarks, Murray Gold’s original score for Doctor Who is something special. I get the sense that he approaches television composition like big-screen composers like John Williams and Hans Zimmer approach film composition. His melodies are big, flashy and vibrant, his motifs thoughtful and woven through the series arcs as the plot itself.

I wish more television composers had his ambition. Over the years, Doctor Who’s OSTs have blossomed from fair single-disc affairs, to double-disc releases, to these goliath four-disc sets that sit right there with the average JRPG OST in terms of size and breadth. That’s how much care Gold puts into his scores.

One can be forgiven for listening to A Madman With A Box, the cinematic overture for the Doctor as introduced in Series 5, and drawing parallels to He’s A Pirate, the triumphant motif scattered throughout the Pirates Of The Caribbean series. Fast-forward to the Series 8 OST, which brings us (The Majestic Tale Of) An Idiot With A Box, where we see the Madman melody overlaid with the new main theme introduced in that season, representing the Doctor’s recent regeneration. (Actually, click that link right now, because it’s a sped-up, uptempo version exclusive to the OST and it’s so great.)

There’s so much to love about Gold’s scores, and how he intelligently uses them throughout the series. That lovely, bittersweet melody that plays in The End Of Time when Ten realizes that he’s going to regenerate, taking him to what (we would later find out) he knows is the final body of his regeneration cycle? Described by Gold as ‘a flower poking through the snow’ in the OST liner notes, it’s collected on the Specials OST at 2:58 in the track Four Knocks, and it next appears in Time Of The Doctor, when Clara is reciting the poem Reflections On A Clock for the Doctor, and he prepares to face what he believes will be his final death. It later appears for one last time, in a slightly remixed variant, in The Husbands Of River Song (listen close to the house band when she and the Doctor are talking in the restaurant). So this special melody only shows up during episodes that are a swansong of sorts: the first two are obvious, and then The Husbands Of River Song was River’s final episode by airdate, and the one that finally closed the plot circuit that began/ended in Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead.

(I am still not convinced that that melody isn’t somewhere in Twice Upon A Time, even if it’s chopped up or played in a different key under something else. That ‘my testimony would shatter you’ speech would have been a perfect spot.)

And the versatility! Just check out the rocking UNIT theme he brought to the table for Series 4, or his ever-persistent ability to insert vocal tracks into his melodies without coming off as overly distracting, and in fact enhancing the mood and intent of his melodies.

I could go on as the day is long. I have ten and a half seasons of glorious music to squee about here. Gold’s final two episodes, The Doctor Falls and Twice Upon A Time, are like a magnificent send-off to Gold’s work throughout the series. As the Doctor stands alone, facing the army of Cybermen besieging that small farming community on board the time-dilated colony ship, as he runs between the trees, detonating fuel lines and blowing the Cybermen apart, shouting out all the times he’s bested them in the past, we hear a triumphant reprise of that incredible The Shepherd’s Boy theme from Heaven Sent, as perfect here as it was in its first appearance.

As a partially cyber-converted Bill sobs over the Doctor’s body as he lies on the dead earth, as Heather reveals herself and proves, ‘where there’s tears, there’s hope’, we hear an instrumental reprise of the Song Of Freedom, the vocal-based melody that last played in Journey’s End, six and a half seasons, two regenerations and one showrunner prior, as the Doctor and all his Davies-era companions worked together to return Earth to its rightful place among the stars. (No music links, sorry – they still haven’t released the Series 10 OST officially)

And after an unexpected adventure with his very first self, the Doctor finally decides that he needs to stay alive, to regenerate, to face the change. As the Doctor gives spirited counsel to his future self, a reminder to hold to the mark no matter what, we hear The Shepherd’s Boy one last time, now used for three very different scenes, all moments of facing great hardship with determination and courage.

Then, after the Doctor regenerates, we hear another ancient melody: the smooth, mysterious and wistful motif first heard in the episode Rose, and later co-opted as Ten’s theme – not a coincidence as it turns out, given Thirteen’s chirpy Ten-isms.

Still not convinced? Alright, I’ll do my best to convince you of Murray Gold’s compositional genius with exactly one example.

The Series 9 episode Heaven Sent was, and remains, one of the greatest Doctor Who episodes of all time. I won’t spoil it for you, except to say this: this slow-burning hour is one of those moments in entertainment-art when the stars just align. It’s a spellbinding hour of deliberate and measured direction, centered around a kingmaking performance from Peter Capaldi, and it all brings us one of – if not the – most shocking and harrowing reveals in the show’s half-century history.

And the music is a big part of the episode’s appeal to me. When the Series 9 OST finally released, a life-age of this earth later (the OST actually uses the Chibnall-era title font despite being a Moffat-era season, that’s how long it took to release this OST), the third disc was entirely devoted to Heaven Sent. It deserves it. I mentioned The Shepherd’s Boy, which originated here, a perfect companion to said reveal. (As I mentioned, the fact that the Series 9 OST alone is four discs large is a testament to the richness and depth of Gold’s scoring for this show.)

Now, good and faithful Who fans know that in The Day Of The Doctor, the Doctor altered his personal timeline to save Gallifrey instead of destroying it and the Daleks, while making it appear to the universe at large (and to his past self, ensuring that his guilt and rage would still drive his heroic deeds throughout time and space) that he had actually used the Moment and destroyed everyone. Or, for you Chrono Trigger fans, think the Chrono doll scene on a planetary scale.

Heaven Sent sees the Doctor finally returning to Gallifrey at the end. That’s not even the shocking part of the twist, not even close. But The Shepherd’s Boy plays before he finally makes it back to Gallifrey, the long way round.

I was watching Day Of The Doctor one day, and something occurred to me: watch and listen closely during the scene where the War Doctor is about to activate the Moment, until Clara convinces he, Ten and Eleven to take a different path. Listen close after the vision of war-torn Gallifrey.

Holy shit – that is absolutely The Shepherd’s Boy melody playing as the Doctor(s) begin thinking of a plan to save Gallifrey without the universe being the wiser! On the Day Of The Doctor OST, it’s on the track This Time There’s Three Of Us (A Majestic Tale), starting at 2:19. It’s a more tentative, subdued version than the sweeping flourishes that we would get in Heaven Sent, which is why I went so long without connecting the dots, but it’s absolutely there. What’s more, the same chord progression that would ultimately come to a cathartic head in The Shepherd’s Boy can be heard throughout that scene’s score in Day Of The Doctor, leading up to the melody at 2:19.

The now-iconic melody first appears, then, at the moment that the Doctor realizes that he has changed his mind about burning Gallifrey, and that he can save it instead of destroying it, in a way that won’t send retcon ripples through time and space.

The melody resurfaces next during the showstopper episode that ultimately sees the Doctor returning to Gallifrey, a road that began at that previous moment in Day Of The Doctor, two seasons earlier, only then erupting from a subdued background melody into a full-on flourish.

Murray Gold is a goddamn genius.

Precious is the composer who not only has a keen ear for creating scope and drama through melody, but also who has such a fine understanding of storycraft that they are capable of weaving a thread through the story they’re scoring. And it’s such a loss that the show even lost his legacy themes, the various scores he had composed throughout those ten and a half seasons. Or, at least, Chibnall chose not to play any of them. My hope had been that the show would retain his incredible music for use during important call-back moments and the like, supplementing it with new scores by the new composer, but we didn’t even get that. I do not know if the BBC retained the usage rights to Gold’s music, so I won’t speculate further.

By contrast to the big OSTs I’ve talked about up there, Series 11’s score is structured very differently. I can recall a few big moments – the Theme of Thirteen is solidly memorable, the music when the Doctor’s jimmying up a new sonic screwdriver is pretty lit, there’s that rising crescendo in the background when the Doctor is explaining the Solitract in It Takes You Away, and Demons Of The Punjab has a wonderful score throughout –  but by and large, to sum it up, Series 11’s music feels appropriate enough when paired with the episodes, but doesn’t have nearly as many moments that are readily listenable on their own, if you catch my drift. The new scoring style is by no means bad; it’s just different. Unfortunately, it’s different in a way that, by and large, I like less than Gold’s way. Just look at how little time I’ve devoted to Series 11’s music compared to all the Gold-digging I’ve just done. It’s because there’s so much less to talk about.

V: In Which I Go There (Briefly)

Let’s just sweep this off to the side while I’ve got you here. If you can accept the idea of a time-and-space-traveling alien, who can regenerate a new body upon receiving a fatal wound as a way of cheating death, but you can’t accept the idea that some of those bodies might end up being female, then the real problem here exists not on the screen, but in the space above the couch.

Anyway.

As I was talking about this season on Discord, parsing out some of the thoughts that would end up in this review, a friend asked me if I thought that Chibnall turning out a relatively bland, ambitionless season as Whittaker’s first would end up hurting the whole concept of a female Doctor. I replied that it hurts Whittaker specifically, both her as a professional actress and her era of this show, because she deserves a chance to shine in a barnburner of a season that thrills with compelling plots and insane timey-wimey twists, because that’s what every Doctor-actor before her got to have. And what’s more, Whittaker’s Doctor deserved a chance to be in such awesome adventures that the people innately against the idea of a female Doctor would be banished to the same Stygian depths of laughable internet butt-rage as the people who were angry when their Bowtie Husbando regenerated into the oldest Doctor-actor since Pertwee. And this season did not provide that for the reasons we’ve been discussing.

It really is an honest disappointment to me, though, because right from the jump, I love the idea of the Doctor being able to have a broader concept of what it means to regenerate. In-universe, the only weird thing about it is that it took this long to happen.

And I would have been disappointed in these decisions no matter what form the Doctor next took. If the Doctor had regenerated from Capaldi into yet another male body, I’d still have been dismayed by the plotless and ‘isolated’ nature of the overall season. But I suppose you can say my disappointment over that is a little more visceral in large part because of the Doctor being a woman now, because I do love the idea and Chibnall has fumbled it out of the gate.

VI: Resolution

And then I watched Resolution, and I realized that Chibnall’s been holding out on us for the majority of Series 11. Resolution is all-around great. It’s exactly the shot in the arm that the show needed right then. The connective tissue is back, and the whole thing has an urgent scope and feel.

Yes, it’s a Dalek episode. But the fact that I’m even able to get excited about yet more Daleks at this point, just shows how desperately I (and many others) were for continuity to reassert itself.

To lend some context to those remarks for those of you who don’t know about the show’s strange relationship with the Daleks: in NewWho, the BBC are able to keep using the Dalek race by permission of the Nation Agreement (the late Terry Nation being the creator of the Daleks). This agreement had a peculiar clause built into it that stipulated the BBC would only retain use of the Daleks, so long as they used them at least once per season.

From a copyright standpoint, I understand why the Nation estate wanted the BBC to actually use this intellectual property, so that it didn’t just sit there tied to a franchise that wouldn’t use it, and ergo be cosigned to IP purgatory where it would be hoarded yet unused. But from a creative standpoint, what were they thinking? They had to have known this would happen.

There came a point where pretty much everyone was fatigued of the Daleks, because the showrunners were forced to insert them into every season. This meant that rather than building up to them as a race to be feared, they were inserted out of obligation. Some rather excellent episodes were made out of this, as well as some episodes clearly done to appease the Agreement.

In fact, series 6 and 10 went so far as to loophole the agreement, by including one-scene cameos for Daleks in episodes and arcs that otherwise didn’t involve them: in Series 6, the Doctor is interrogating a Dalek for information about the Silence, and in Series 10, the Doctor travels back to one of the Dalek battles that took place during the Classic era to try and defeat a new threat by plunging it into “the deadliest fire in the universe” (a Dalek laser).

Does that sound like a show that’s especially happy with this contract it’s signed, re: the Daleks? (Granted, Twice Upon A Time at the far end of Series 10 also had some Daleks, but they’re also a tertiary part of the episode, plus Rusty feels less like “another Dalek” and more like a proper individual character by this point anyway.)

However, before this, the last proper Dalek episode we had was The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar at the very start of Series 9. Really more of a Davros two-parter as far as character arcs go, but you don’t usually get him without them. So we went most of Series 9, all of Series 10 and all of Series 11 to this point without a Dalek episode. So even without the continuity starvation that the rest of Series 11 put the series through, I’ll give this a passing grade.

And, acting like a real showrunner, Chibnall expands the Dalek mythos a bit by introducing the Recon Scout Dalek, the first units to leave Skaro, who have a different (and dare I say, a bit more Lovecraftian) appearance, and are more resilient out of their shells than the average Dalek, with some different abilities, like the power to latch onto humans and puppeteer them – think a more hands-on precursor to the creepy forehead-eyestalk walking corpses that the Daleks would later use. And when you’ve got a situation like the Nation agreement, where you need to keep using this thing in a show as long-running as Doctor Who, you’ve got to constantly find ways to re-up and make it fresh and interesting. I would dare say the Recon Scout Dalek (god, that sounds like such an action figure name) accomplishes that.

The Dalek finally reconstructs its shell – from what shell remnants it can find in England, as well as spare parts, leading to a new grungy Dalek look that the Doctor mockingly refers to as ‘junkyard chic’. But I love the symmetry at play here: the Doctor had to construct her new sonic screwdriver from spare parts and Earth metals, and the first Dalek she meets afterwards has to do the same for its shell.

There is this one weird moment where the Doctor tries to contact Kate Lethbridge-Stewart for aid, and we find out that UNIT’s operations have been suspended pending funding disputes with the UK’s major partners. Now, obviously this is a dig at Brexit, and – let’s be real, if something as clusterfucked as Brexit were to happen in the Doctor Who universe, this would probably be a thing that happens. But did they really have to take down one of the show’s staple institutions, which was there since the classic series, for the sake of a time-stamped political shot across the bow?

Resolution has quite an entertaining score. It uses a lot of rock instrumentation to construct its rhythms, and while that is not totally unheard of on this show, never before has a Doctor Who episode used a drum/guitar rock soundscape to such a degree. I like it, and I’d be quite okay with them doing more scores in this vein going forward.

Overall, I thought Resolution was a great episode. Here’s the thing, though.

I can’t be totally sure whether my feelings on Resolution are because of the episode in itself, or because I as a viewer was so starved for something, anything that tied back to the greater Who mythos.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a smaller-scale episode. Much like the episode simply titled Dalek from Series 1, this is a good reminder of the damage that a single Dalek can do when faced against Earth’s militaries. And in fact, Chibnall worked up a really cool version of this to begin the episode: before we even find out that this is in fact a Dalek, we’re treated to an explanation about how, in the ninth century CE, three separate tribes who would have otherwise never worked together, had banded up to defeat a seemingly unstoppable foe. When they finally had taken down the enemy, they divided its body into three pieces, and rode with the pieces far and wide, burying them and watching over them for generations so that the enemy may never reconstitute itself. That is a good bloody reminder of just how scary even a single Dalek can be when written right.

Still, time will tell.

If there’s a plus on the meta side of things, Series 11 has put into more stark focus just what it takes to make a good showrunner on Doctor Who. Moffat got his share of flack during his run, but I have always looked at Moffat as a textbook example of what a showrunner should be. I’m not saying I agree with every decision he made, and I’m not saying everything he did landed perfectly, but he never rested on his laurels. He was always thinking ahead and looking for ways to keep his run fresh and interesting. And he never cut the connective tissue.

Moffat’s first three seasons (so, the Matt Smith years) were, from a structural standpoint, fucking insane. I’ll explain.

Actually, Doctor Who was never more popular than during Smith’s run, and viewed from long-sight, those three seasons and the long-game arcs within are some of the most absolutely lunatic pieces of narrative I’ve ever seen. Viewing the whole thing from afar, the whole thing is an absolute clusterfuck of wheels within wheels within time loops within time loops within wheels within oh my god. You know how when you have a bunch of game consoles plugged in at once, and the wires take on a life of their own and start forming a jumbled-up mass that takes forever to unfurl? That’s what it would look like if I was to make a map of series 5-7’s plot threads.

And yet, because Moffat took his time over three seasons, playing things out at a digestible pace in a way that was both coherent and hooky, Smith’s run does not feel like that. It’s the most insane long-game I’ve ever seen any writer attempt, but it works because Moffat keeps viewers focused on the here-and-now. And given that all this made for some of the most popular Who seasons ever, I think it’s safe to say that people want this kind of crazy timey-wimey continuity in their Who. We thirst for the insanity, otherwise we wouldn’t be watching this show.

And he regenerated the show again in the Capaldi era, because each of those three seasons takes a wholly different approach from each other, in terms of theme, tone and structure. Of note, Series 9 communicates almost exclusively in multi-part adventures, with only one ‘standalone’ episode, not counting the Christmas specials.

In fact, after seeing what Chibnall did, or did not bring to the table, I bet a lot of Moffat critics are inadvertently quoting that scene in Day Of The Doctor: “I didn’t know I was well-off!”

Because that is how you run a show like Doctor Who. You keep us focused on the amazing events happening on the screen, without cutting the connective tissue that makes this such a special show. And you can make the connective tissue as cerebral and crazy as you want, so long as you allow enough space in the narrative for it to be digested by the viewer.

And at the end of the day, I would go as far as saying that that connective tissue is just about an essential part of the Doctor Who experience. Sure, all you need for Doctor Who is the Doctor bopping about in the TARDIS with his/her companions throughout space and time, but you’re not using the most of your assets.

That said, with all six of Moffat’s seasons being notably different from each other in the manner of structure, atmosphere and tone, I hope that Chibnall will be the same, and that Series 11 was merely an experiment. One that didn’t work, because taking away everything from merely having an arc, to the pre-existing races and characters, to the simple idea of some episodes having shocking cosmic consequences, was never going to be a good idea. It wasn’t even an idea, it was a lack of an idea. But hopefully this means that Series 12 will be different and play to the show’s strengths.

Even if it was a one-off experiment, though, I still feel like it could harm Whittaker’s legacy as Thirteen going forward. The past three Doctor-actors got three seasons each before bowing out. (Well, Tennant got three and a half because of the year of specials between 4 and 5, a period that I tend to refer to as Series 4.5.) If Whittaker is the same, then Chibnall has sacrificed a full third of her tenure, a third that could have been used building up connective tissue and seeding plots, to an ill-advised experiment in nothingness.

Then again, it could be that Chibnall is doing all this deliberately, to lull us into a false sense of security before the next season is an absolute scorcher that burns down everything we thought we knew about how far this show is willing to go (and it’s already willing to go far, far beyond most shows). Time will out.

If I have a bottom line, it’s that Series 11 is good, because it provides episodes that are good on a blow-for-blow basis – but it strips away the best narrative elements that make Doctor Who a special show. And it underutilizes the talents of Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor.

And, you know, I’d like to drop it here that I think Series 11 will, by and large, age well. Once the next season rolls around and Chibnall gets an arc rolling to continue the massive long-game that is Doctor Who, I think Series 11’s episodes will provide the kind of one-off rush that you can always go back to when you need a quick Who fix.

Oy vey, this ran long. I don’t even normally do these season-long reviews of shows. But I think that’s because this was a unique opportunity for me to talk about the importance of arc-storytelling, strong continuity and the like – in Doctor Who, yes, but also in every narrative series out there.

So I would go as far as saying it’s worth watching. It even achieves greatness at a couple points, like the beautifully bittersweet Demons Of The Punjab, the spooky, surreal mind-trip that is It Takes You Away, and the fires-on-all-cylinders The Witchfinders. It is on the whole good. And good is good. And, to be fair, I did find myself enjoying things more on the second go-around via the blu-ray, knowing ahead of time about the season’s structural shortcomings and just taking each episode for what it is. If you’re a Who fan, see it, and enjoy Whittaker’s beginnings as the Doctor. Just temper your expectations for the season as a whole.

But the thing is, most Who seasons have so much more to offer when you really get to dig deep and lose yourself in it all. There’s so much that reveals itself the longer you’re there, much like companions exploring the TARDIS itself. But Chibnall’s arcless first outing at the helm of Doctor Who, for the reasons I’ve been discussing, is sadly not bigger on the inside.