First of all the nagging feeling I’ve been having this season about the behind the scenes stuff was confirmed this week. I’ll explain; during the off season I suspect that the Producers were hauled into some bigwig at the BBC’s offices, were told to buck their ideas up and were reminded how successful the show was under Russell T Davies and why don’t you try and replicate that? As a consequence it seems the team have carried out the order to the letter.
Anyway…I was settling down for another disappointing episode, another ‘watch because I’m a Doctor Who fan’ fifty minutes. I wasn’t expecting to actually enjoy it. I was fooled and not in a bad way, in a ‘thank you producers’ sort of way. How could a Doctor Who fan not enjoy Prisoner of the Judoon? You’ve seen it, you know what I mean.
This feels like a Chibnall episode but it’s co-credited to Vinay Patel. It feels like Chibnall when he wrote for Doctor Who rather than ran it, in that it’s heavy on the lore, if a little stilted in the execution. It started off as a workmanlike, a sub-Davies normal human life sort of episode, which I could live with, yes it felt a bit weird in context with other stories of the era but I was fine with what we saw.
Oh heck, who really cares? The great success of the Chibnall era is his ability to keep secrets, the production team’s desire to completely floor fans consistently. We knew this, and this episode absolutely confirmed this. It was extraordinary. The Judoon deliberately used in the pre publicity to fool us into thinking one thing and hiding the shocks that this episode was really about. At the time I thought – there, old Daviesian one dimensional monsters coming back and being better than any of the new monsters – but we were supposed to think that. Even the ‘who is the alien?’ was a delightful sleight of hand as the early scenes suggested a sort of Hitch-hikers’ Ford Prefect vibe but that was a feint as well. Then Graham gets teleported and that voice in the background sounds like Captain Jack. Dammit, this team has no clue about the history. Oh, it IS Captain Jack. And I was sooooo pleased to see him. Then once we got past the compulsory Jackness and you start to relish expected hilarious flirting with the now lady Doctor and then he doesn’t even meet her at all and just passes on a message. Will he return? He must.
And then Ruth, an alternate timeline(?) version of the Doctor, and a cold, calculating one. And the reveal again was extraordinary. We knew there was something going on but the TARDIS buried under a gravestone reveal was another cracker. You can make a case that Doctor Who is just a series of iconic images and memories – well this story seemed to take this idea and totally run with it. The buried TARDIS was brilliant. You start to question what you know what it going on. It’s brave cult niche television and the fans will love it. What about the general viewer though? Is this going to alienate? The answer is ‘of course’ and it was what Davies was always scared of. There will be a price to pay and this is the price of someone telling the production team to do a Davies.
Whittaker gets some acting to do at last. She shelves the kookiness, and broods, gets secretive and my goodness it is a welcome sight. The slight prickliness between her and the fam, the reluctance to engage is just … better for the character, it feels right for the first time since Whittaker’s been in the role. I’ve discussed before the need for a female Doctor to find something different to emote because they can’t do anger and rage without triggering stereotypes, and the whacky eccentric isn’t really convincing so this closed and hurt version of the Doctor is quite brilliant and it would have been great to have seen it more often before.
Now, there is the reality that whatever is going on is going to be resolved in a boring and irritating way. The Ruth Doctor cannot exist and so will be forgotten about at some point in the future. And it has to be said this reminded me of The Next Doctor; watching someone else prance around being the Doctor ludicrous clothes is always wrong and it feels wrong and I can’t work out whether that’s deliberate acting choices or us the viewers simply rejecting the imposter. And Whittaker stepping up and leading as well as a reminder of the quality of previous companions with Captain Jack further confirmed what we all know deep down – we have two many companions and they aren’t exactly vintage. As a pal in the pub said the next day (and after an exhaustive and wonderful conversation on all the old companions (fancying them was a decreed a valid character trait)) we concluded that they are the worst companions ever – Mel was above them because Langford was trying and therefore Dodo was the only serious competition.
We have been here before, a huge revelation conveniently forgotten: I remember the Valeyard in episode 13 of Trial of a Timelord, which was a similar wow moment, with not many viewers. I suspect it will be used to create a monster finale that will underwhelm, but praise where praise is due, that was fun and a very slick story. It just isn’t a story that can be shown on mainstream BBC1 on Sunday night for much longer. This could be the day we remember Doctor Who was all over on tv again.
