i thought it worked fine! people here are just thinking about it too hard.
you rang?
Director Mark Tonderai is immediately a massive improvement on the staging from last week – that 1-minute DePalma-y tracking shot in cramped cockpit space! – but overdosed so insanely hard on Teal & Deep Yellow that I had to go outside and walk around looking at trees for two hours afterwards. Joke’s on me: it’s Autumn in the northern hemisphere. (Also, the visual artistry lessens drastically once we reach the planet, but it’s harder getting good setups in a desert.)
Beyond that, pretty much every hole Chibnall looked like he was digging last week gets fallen straight into. The simplicity of last week is at least replaced with a plot that’s intended to look like a massive series of clever points that all link up together. Except that none of them actually connect, most of them contradict, and things that try and pay off fall over and get left behind.
Even if the plot did connect together, there’s no actual story. Nothing advances any character’s development, nothing tells us more about the ongoing characters, and no goals are achieved by anyone.
Even if you want to argue that the Doctor started this adventure (at the end of last week) wanting to get her TARDIS back, and she does by the end, Chibnall doesn’t even manage to pull this off perfunctorily: he fails to set it up in the episode, resolves it 15 minutes later, and then forgets to have it actually happen.
CLIFFHANGER: name the most obvious way one could resolve “a bunch of people teleport into space with seconds to live.” If you said “a spaceship appears out of nowhere and takes them on board,” you’re ready to run the biggest (nominally) sci-fi show in the world. But would you leave an inexplicable gap where one ship grabs two out of four for no reason, using a long grabby scoop, that must take several minutes to extend and retract, then fly away out of detection by either visuals or space radar – rather than going into warp drive or lightspeed or w/e, bcz they’re so close to the planet that the Doctor’s TARDIS detector ray got ‘em there – and THEN another ship blorps into existence and scoops up the other two, who have mysteriously not died in the several hours this has taken?
I feared last week that blorping into adventure just minutes after harassing two grieving family members into ditching THEIR WIFE and GRANDMOTHER’s WAKE might not get paid off. That Chibnall’s admiration for a four-person TARDIS team might be echoing 1981-2’s Tegan and Nyssa, who respectively saw their closest living relative (an Aunt) tortured and murdered by Missy, and their beloved father murdered, hollowed out and worn as a skin suit for several years by Missy. And who never showed even the slightest aftershock from these events, not even when Missy kept turning up over and over to taunt them, while still wearing Nyssa’s dad’s body. Instead, the “fam” stick up for the Doctor – “we trust her implicitly” – despite her getting them almost killed a few hours ago, and getting things wrong over and over in their experience of her. There’s no moment of fear or distrust, or of “well, she got us into this, but we have no choice but to follow her,” and her competence and character winning them over.
There are attempts to build emotion and character into moments between setpieces, but they’re totally hollow – and only come for the guest characters and the blokes. Yas, who is so far only defined by wanting to have more fulfilling tasks as a cop, basically says and does nothing all episode, let alone even trying to impose order, convey authority over miscreants, or exhibit observational or problem-solving or nascent detective skills.
Angstrom telling Ryan they’re “Just off the final planet” is delivered as though they should know what she’s talking about – she mocks him for even acting as though he doesn’t know. But there are no spectators to the race, no cameras broadcasting it, no indication that anyone is aware of it taking place apart from the participants. There’s no reason she should expect either for these rescues to know about the planet, or even for the raceholder to have the honour to pay out when nobody in the universe would know whether they won or not. Especially given that sabotage has been allowed in the rules on every previous leg, and capturing slaves to sell to the raceholder has evidently been part of the race in every previous year, given that both participants are disappointed that he is not buying them in this instance.
Why is it happening? What is the point of there being prize money? Why did Malikgram take over running it after winning? If this is the biggest prize in the race’s history, has he been funding every prize, every year since he won, solely from his own winnings? Why did people keep taking part if the packet dropped so enormously the next year, and stayed low until his bond investments paid off enough to finally give away more than he won that one time?
“Strap yourself in.”
“We’re not doing anything. Unless you turn this ship around and go and look for our friends.”
This exchange exists so that Chibnall can have Graham make a character-defining statement, but it’s cardboard, it’s hack, it’s a photocopy of a photocopy and it only works if he doesn’t think about what it fails to say about the character of her out of Cracker. She’s grabbed these bodies as salvage to traffic, she wouldn’t slow down to reason with them. The second he says “we’re not,” she should be ignoring him and getting on with the urgent matter of flying the ship. But he doesn’t want us to know that she’s a slave trader yet, and he never wants us to think about the fact that she is, as he intends to use her through the majority of the episode as an all-in-together travelling pal of the people she tried and failed to sell into slavery.
Meanwhile, on the other ship, Epzo is furious at Doctor Who and Yasmin that he wasted fuel scooping them up (to sell into slavery), but he was stopping there because he thought the planet was there. Why would the extended funfair claw machine arm use fuel from the engines? It also makes no sense for him to only grab two out of four of the “little bonuses,” leaving two for another racer to get, even when he thinks it’s still a four-person race, not two.
Why has the planet moved? This could be a hint that there’s something more to what we’ve been told about it, that what we get told can’t be trusted. Or a hint that Art Malificent is rigging the game – he’s got mighty cosmic powers, has taken the planet from its orbit to create an extra challenge. We and the racers should be watching out because he will undermine them, set extra traps… but no. It’s in the wrong place just because.
And why has the TARDIS gone to this planet? She has never abandoned the Doctor like this before, disappearing across the universe. If it was to bring the Doctor to a place where she needed to resolve something, what is that thing? No injustice is righted, no injustice undone. And once the TARDIS found the planet in the wrong place, shouldn’t it have waited to save the Doctor on her arrival?
Once again, half the dialogue might as well be from a Big Finish audio, explaining things that don’t appear, and even that do. The Doctor points at a screen we don’t see, announcing that the planet’s there. On the planet, they lampshade “What’s that?” / “It’s a tent.” But yes, we can see that too. “Look Doctor, scorch marks.” To be fair, we can’t see those. “A big locked door. I love a big locked door.” However, the set designers don’t love building one, so we just have the Doctor pointing offscreen, a door-scraping noise on the soundtrack, and then her walking offscreen.
“Does the planet have a name?”
“Only a symbol. Or a warning. Closest word is… Desolation.”
Is desolation a symbol? Or a warning? How would BEWARE or STAY AWAY or DEATHTRAP not be closer? Or YELLOW TRIANGULAR SIGN WITH A SILHOUETTE OF A BLOKE BEING SHOCKED BY A WHOPPING GREAT LIGHTNING BOLT, if it’s a symbol? Also, presumably it wasn’t called WARNING SIREN FEATURING MATTY SAFER before the enslaved scientists turned it into a hellish deathtrap. Who put up the DANGER SYMBOL sign on it – the distressed scientists, before they died? The Stenza, who wanted to make sure nobody got hurt by the deathtrap they’d built, although they left it populated by death creatures?
Epzo was the first to get to the “planet,” and had flown so far away in the new direction of the planet before Angstrom blorped out of hyperjump that he couldn’t be seen. Yet she manages to overtake him on the way in a straight line from The Fam In Space to THE ONE EXACT SAME DITCH ON THE SURFACE OF AN ENTIRE PLANET.
A PLANET.
A WHOLE PLANET.
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO A PLANET? THEY'RE PRETTY BIG
…without ever spotting him and his spaceship. Neither she nor Graham nor Ryan have any greater skill at navigating in a ditch than they do in space, though, as when the front bit of Epzo’s ship comes hurtling towards them, they decide to OUTRUN A SPACESHIP BY TROTTING LIGHTLY ALONG THE DITCH instead of - just spitballing here, top of the head – running out of the ditch and out of the path of the plummeting chunk of metal. And how does Doctor Who manage to “pull up” or “brake” or whatever once she hits the ditch, when she THREW AWAY THE ENTIRE PART OF THE SHIP THAT HAS A PROPULSION SYSTEM, and it has no wingflaps to pull up? Yasmin isn’t even fiddling with the “stabilisers” at that point.
There are times where it seems Chibnall has set himself a rule where all of these have to be written in order, and he can’t go back and change anything from last week’s episode once he’s written it. I pointed up Tim Shaw’s perfect English last week, in the absence of a TARDIS to translate, and one supposes that must be the case, as ol’ Chinballs suddenly remembers that aliens who looks exactly like humans won’t speak English, even though aliens who only looked mostly human do. Instead of having an early hint of hope in the half-arsed quest narrative, by the Doctor concluding that the TARDIS must be nearby enough to be translating somehow, Chibs knocks it down to a quarter-arse by having them all be shot up with universal translators.
It’s lucky that the ppl on his own planet who hate Tim Shaw enough to send him away on dumb hunts keep sending him to the exact same city on the exact same tiny island on that planet. Have you been to this planet? It’s pretty big etc. If they really wanted to fuck with him, they’d make him try and get his hissy, spit-filled mouth around a new language every time.
Anyway! It becomes a big point a few minutes later that Epzo and Angstrom are completely different species. Different planets, different worlds, different technologies ---- but the differently-designed medical pods on both their ships both have the same policy of injecting universal translators into randos? If every interstellar exactly-like-human species has shared this technology, which they just in order for it to work on any species, then surely anyone who goes interstellar travelling would have it already, and not need to build it into the medical pods that they ALL have immediately behind the cockpits of their ships, at the expense of sleeping quarters or galleys or whatnot.
Our man actually picks up on one of these fuckups at one point: the Doctor offers Graham “her shades,” noting that she can’t remember who she borrowed them off, Audrey Hepburn or Pythagoras. Somewhere in the edit, either Chibs notices, or someone else manages to point out, that she has none of her own possessions, and is not wearing her own clothes with her own items in the pockets. A really clumsy ADR line is looped in over the back of Jodie’s head, adding “well I say ‘mine,’ they remind me of a pair…” I look forward to revised holo-DVDs from the roboticised brains of the Restoration Team in 2037, adding five-minute shots of the back of everybody’s heads, looping explanations for anything else that doesn’t link up.
(Also idgaf about this type of continuity, but it’s been consistent in nu-Who that humans from Earth eventually colonise space and build societies in the far future across the universe. Davies and Moffatt both used this to build messages of aspiration and progress, and support why the Doctor dedicates so much of her time to looking after humans and saving their home planet. By having the universe already full of exactly-human aliens, Chibnall undermines that totally.)
The Holomalik’s holo-tent manages to cast shadows, and people leaning close to his face cast shadows on him, and the foley artists include the sound of his hands slapping his thighs, and the real people walk on the flat floor of the non-existent tent, but if you wave your hand through a bit of the hologram, the whole thing makes a loud noise and flickers out of existence for a second.
He also gives them both a physical object, despite not being there and unable to hold or touch anything. The Doctor’s scan notes that he’s “projected in from a very long way away,” but projected by what? It can only be projected from within the atmosphere, or the light would be disrupted.
Even if we take it as the rules of these holograms, it makes no sense that the Doctor picked up loads of gossip from the time she was a hologram. Either people think you’re real – in which case you’d get exactly the same amount of gossip as actually being real – or they touched you and found out you were a remote spying device, in which case they would prooooooobably be a little less likely to confide in you than if they thought you were real. “Ooh, floating around as a fake person in order to secretly gain my confidence, is it? Well then, you’ll definitely want to know that Doris nicks people’s lunches from the work fridge, I’ve been having it off with my married boss, and Mister Saxon has the pee tape!”
I rewatched to make sure I’d gotten my details right before posting, and forgot that Holomalik also says he ALREADY TOLD THEM that bonuses are over! Making the entire opening, and general survival of our cast pointless! It would raise the stakes at this point to tell them the rules have been changed, that their survival is more on the line, that the homestretch is different. Instead he just tells us that despite being the only ones to survive, our protagonists are dipshits who can’t actually remember the rules and instructions of the race.
Doctor Who then apologises to Epzo that he’s not able to sell her, and the pal she’s just promised to keep alive, into slavery. “Sorry! Some of this is my fault.”
Having just failed an opportunity, Chibnall tries to raise the stakes by announcing it’s the final ever race, but there’s no reasoning behind it. What portentousness does “it’s the final race ever” add to this situation at all, beyond an empty attempt to add RTD-style Space Gravitas? And he then undercuts it with a nonsensical bit of comedy doubletalk predicated on the universal translators not being able to translate currency amounts. Which, okay, fair enough, but – does it not have trouble translating other measurements? Like distances and times and everything else that then apply to the quest they’re set?
Such as: the TARDIS appears every thousand “revolutions”. But how long does a solar year take when there are three suns? Even if it’s equivalent to an Earth year, that means that a civilization existed here for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, long enough for the TARDIS’ appearances to be noted and recorded and measured, not be a Brigadoon myth… was the planet unnamed for all that time? The civilization grew and persisted in that area for multiple millennia, keeping records all the time, and working out that they were a planet that revolved around their suns in a consistent timeframe… but they never came up with a name for their planet? Ours is a very dumb and bad name, but at least we invented one.
There’s no mechanism to project the holograms, to deliver the physical trackers (to the non-existent table that they nevertheless sit upon), or to teleport the winners away. The holograms must be getting projected from the sky somewhere, but Holomalik has no staff present and is not attending himself. But if he’s not on the planet, how has he set up a boat right at the point where he expects them to need to cross the water?
“Take your meds, don’t travel at night, and don’t drink the water. In fact, don’t even touch the water.”
It’s filled with flesh-eating microbes, but this never becomes an issue. They’re trekking through the desert, but not having any water also never becomes an issue. The Doctor also says that the atmosphere is toxic, but they breathe that just fine with no qualms whatsoever.
They must complete the trek within “one full solar rotation.” How are they supposed to be able to tell how fast the sun rotates, as opposed to how fast the planet rotates? And which of the three suns??!?!
The dialogue is generally completely empty, the sort of thing that you might put in as a placeholder when blocking the plot, and then come back to fill in with character beats or jokes or subtle foreshadowing or ironic counterpoints. Chibnall does give the occasional line with spark to Jodie, such as “Taking it as a chance to surprise myself,” or “It’s very all that!” suggesting he is aware of the need to make her stand out to the audience. But equally, it suggests he doesn’t see the need for anyone else to do so. Why have a rammed-full TARDIS team of four if three of them are just there to ask “What’s that, Doctor?!” Even more so if her answer every time is “I don’t know, let’s all figure it out at the same time on the next page of the script when someone tells us.”
“Are we eligible too?”
“No, you’re irrelevant.”
It’s like he’s written himself a note, but forgotten to do anything about it on a second draft.
“…the ghost monument is on the other side of the mist swamps.”
“mist what?”
He ignores her – do they ever cross a mist swamp?
“Four people who barely know each other, stranded on a planet called Desolation.”
But it was a whole point that it ISN’T called Desolation, or called anything.
The Doctor throws a giant tantrum about needing to know what the ghost monument looks like when it appears. But there’s nothing to suggest that it WILL appear, they only have to get to the site. And the Doctor and fam have been specifically excluded from the race, so it doesn’t matter whether they go along or not. She just throws the tantrum because Chibnall has made it secretly the TARDIS, and has to reveal that.
“So we’re sticking with Graham are we, and not Grandad?”
This is meant to provide conflict, but it’s played as if Graham isn’t being a massive cunt. You’re not his grandad anymore! If you’re staying in each others’ lives, it’s by choice, and you’d do well to respect him by expecting to address each other as adults. (This is not a plot nitpick in this instance, but I doubt the relationship is going to continue to be played on this level.)
Continuity easter eggs don’t make sense: she’s a “grandmaster pacifist” in Venusian Aikido, but Pertwee’s Venusian Aikido was wildly violent, an excuse for the actor to show off and also dominate the guest actors. What’s more, she says her neck-poke is “fundamentally harmless,” but literally stops Epzo from breathing. As his physiology is evidently identical to human, holding him another ten seconds might well have killed him, given the physical condition he appears to be in. “You’ve redecorated………… I really like it” is flipping the line just for the sake of it, not revealing anything in particular about the new Doctor, just tipping the wink of “look, I did the opposite of the usual line, eh? Eh?”
Chinballs tries to have a deep moment with Graham and Ryan talking about how they’re not talking about Grace being dead. But they spent an entire week or more preparing for her funeral, organizing it together, hearing each others’ speeches – then Ryan skipped the wake and went charity shopping, they both blorped into space, and have not been alone for a single second until this exact moment. And yet Graham boasts? scolds? that he’s developed the coping mechanism of asking himself “IF she was here, what would Grace say?” Bloody when has he been asking this? He’s barely shut up from yapping about how unfair it is that they’re stuck here, and not had any time for moments of quiet reflection. “You talk about this stuff way too much.” / “And you don’t talk about it enough.” THEY HAVE NEITHER TALKED ABOUT IT, NOR HAD A CHANCE TO TALK OR NOT TALK ABOUT IT.
Another heart-to-heart follows, with Angstrom almost revealing why people want to leave her world before shutting down. But despite knowing them only half an hour longer, she goes into all the detail she’d withheld before. Three minutes earlier Epzo had pointedly asked in front of everyone “how’s your family, then, Angstrom?”
And the revelation later comes that her wife died from the Stenza (played, I can’t help thinking, as though an alien of unknown gender having a wife is something we should be noting) – so she doesn’t count her wife as part of her family?
Having had two slow-down emotional-talking scenes, we then kick off across the deadly flesh-eating sea --- to no danger or drama whatsoever. Instead of raising the stakes, counterpointing the dumb hollow emotional drama with some physical action and peril, Chibnall has a THIRD character tell a dopey third-hand cardboard story of family trauma and aloneness… and then everyone lies down and goes to sleep. Epzo’s story involves breaking an arm and shattering an ankle; if he’s dropping from a height enough to shatter an ankle he would probably have been so high that his mother couldn’t catch him safely anyway.
Epzo’s cigar is permanently kept loose in his pocket, as shown when he takes it out to suck in in the holotent, when he shows it off while walking across the beach, and when Graham grabs it to hurl skyward. It’s triggered with a click of the fingers, a very generic snap sound – but can be set off from several metres away, with a whole variety of soundwaves flapping about in between. How is his pocket not catching on fire several times a day, whenever the cigar hears any noise, let alone a passerby clicking their fingers as they remember something? It would have only increased the preciousness, and been a chance to underline the alien oddity of it, to have him remove it from a sound-proofed space tube every time he wants to snort its already fifty-year-stale dry aroma.
Twice the Doctor says there’s nothing alive on the planet except them and the flesh-eating microbes – the second time “no organic life.” But they keep walking past various plants – shrubs, trees, grasses. Despite this:
“Why are there so few signs of life? What happened to everyone?”
You’ve already said that there’s nothing alive on the planet except for you and microbes (which, btw, establishes that her new sonic screwdriver can scan AN ENTIRE PLANET in seconds – let’s see if Chibnall ever has it unable to read something from behind a wooden door, or such, later on*) – why would there be signs of life?
*OH WAIT JUST SECONDS LATER she is unable to figure out the readings on the building right in front of them. Seconds. SECONDS.
Epzo is wily and cunning enough to have made it through a universe-crossing chase that killed 40 (iirc) other racers, but dumb enough not to notice a motion detector, even when he’s specifically casing the location with his weapon cocked, EVEN WHEN IT BUZZES LOUDLY FOR SEVERAL SECONDS AS HE SETS IT OFF.
“Well back in the tent, that bloke Illin, said not to travel by night.”
a) thanks for the recap, I assume BBC America put an ad break right before this
b) …..yeah but why shouldn’t you travel by night? Are there silent robot sentries on the planet that come out at night or something?
OH HOLY SHIT THERE ARE ROBOT SENTRIES THAT HAVE SUDDENLY APPEARED. IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. Without making a sound. We never find out why travelling at night is such a threat – the floating deathscarves don’t seem to be time-restricted. Although maybe they are, and the Desolation scientists also invented Mogwai. Can we have Joe Dante be the next American guest director?
“What we need to do is, totally unthreateningly, slowly back out of here.”
Everyone then walks forwards at a normal pace. (Is this on purpose? Is this the reason the robots also appear downstairs? Is it just the director not even bothering to pay attention to the words because they’re so dull?)
The Doctor’s line about not running straight is also ADRed – is it possible that by the time they were in edit, Chibs realized (or someone pointed out) that running in a straight line away from a crashing spaceship is super-dumb, so he tried to explain that away with the Doctor’s super-genius science brain being the only one able to figure out that running in a straight line doesn’t avoid anything coming directly after you, whether a massive metal building or a laser pulse zap ray?
The whole robot sequence just gets stupider and stupider and stupider. Turns out the robots are SNIPERS and yet are unable to land a single shot on a target from point blank, medium range OR long distance. Even collectively. (Finally, in their THIRD shoot-out, they get ONE shot, through the non-essential part of one person’s lung.) “Gasp! It’s a target range!” they say, after standing in the middle of a target range with targets literally popping up at them for several minutes. (While another example of writing for radio, this is probably very useful for kids and grannies who don’t read the visual cues immediately – but they could say “uh! Must be a target range” as soon as the targets pop up in their faces, not half a scene later.)
But what does the target range ADD, anyway? It doesn’t make it more likely that the robots will appear and shoot at them - in a goofy mistake! We were just in their gym by accident! – OR more threatening that the robots are crack shots due to all their practice, because we’ve already seen that they can’t hit the broad side of a holographic tent. They’re not even made to LOOK like robots – scarves over their faces could have been weird or spooky metal heads. And if they’re fucking SNIPER ROBOTS then why are they not designed as weapons, instead of being so human-shaped that their guns are MADE SEPARATELY and operated by HUMAN HANDS so simply that someone who has never been to this culture before, let alone learnt how to operate a gun, can grab one and fire perfectly instantaneously?
And the person who does it has a coordination disorder yet can play fast-response hand-eye coordination FPS games. Even if his level of dyspraxia does allow that, how would it translate to the real world? He can’t ride a bike but can carry a gun so heavy that it takes a robot to lift it, run fast and dodging, still carrying the gun, and aim fire multiple crackshots in motion, without a single miss, thus to a skill level greater than that of superhuman beings created only to be crack shots. And then run away again, still carrying the gun, now in one hand. And all the while, whether on the attack or in flight, screaming & shouting and drawing attention to himself.
As a counterpoint to the non-mechanical Tim Shaw making hydraulic robot noises when he moved his arms last week, the robots in this can move entirely silently, half a dozen of them appearing across an area completely unheard. Except if you shoot them down, then they start making hydraulic noises when they move their arms.
“Guns, never use ‘em. Out think them.”
“You can’t outthink bullets.”
She then demonstrates outthinking the guns by saying “you picked up the wrong thing from the floor,” instead picking up a BOMB and BLOWING UP THEIR OPPONENTS ('s brains). How is this an example to set to children. How is this out-thinking. THANKS OBAMA.
The hypocrisy gets doubled and then tripled down on – last week I said it was hypocritical to condemn knives when she’s forever getting her companions tied up, and Chibnall can’t go a week without having a new travelling companion saved from suffocation by someone carrying a knife. Having already condemned guns this week (and immediately undermined this), he doesn’t have Doctor Who condemn Angstrom for saving a life with a knife and say she should have out-thought the strangulation robots. And even though the deadly towels must, by inference, be robots due to there being no organic life on the planet (despite all the plants onscreen) – they think, they speak, they read minds AND they see into the past! These are totally sentient beings, an entire new species, even if it was created by scientists. And while it’s wrong to shoot robots with guns, it’s not wrong to blow up robots with guns, and it’s not wrong to MURDER SENTIENT BEINGS, alive in every way apart from being organic, by SETTING THEM ON FIRE.
At the end she endorses Epzo winning not by following the rules, not even by loopholing them creatively, but by threatening torture and murder to his target’s (holographic) face. This is the example being set to children. Don’t win on your merits! Always outthink your opponents, and by outthink I mean break the rules, and perform mass killings or one-on-one torture. The Doctor has been hypocritical about killing before, and Chibnall’s Doctor has murdered before, but this is a new Doctor, a chance to establish a role model, and he’s teaching these as lessons without any moral equivalence built into the text. Philip Hinchcliffe got fired as showrunner because ONE OLD WOMAN wrote in (a lot) and complained about a dream sequence where the Doctor got strangled. Chibnall’s being acclaimed for making the character endorse torture, as a solution to someone refusing to let you break established rules in order to get a huge amount of money. WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK. “That makes him smart.” – Chris Chibnall, probably.
Chibnall wasn’t concerned about Ryan’s running and marksmanning, but has him say “why is it always ladders?” before descending one. But he climbed up AND down the huge crane tower last week, he climbs down the tunnel this week, and suddenly needs a coaching from the Doctor to climb BACK up the short tunnel ladder at the other end?
While I like the sound of Akinola’s score more than most of Gold’s, there’s still more score than the story demands, and often running counter to the mood of the scene in a way not heard since Keff McCulloch. This very nearly becomes a plot point when Epzo is being strangled. The others suddenly hear from three rooms away and down a hall in a concrete bunker, and run to save him. But there’s nothing at all to hear, except for the score blaring ominous attack-y noises! Perhaps in a few weeks we’ll see that, like the pimps in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, the Doc is being followed around by a bloke with a whopping big synth, soundtracking her life and delivering her clues.
The scientists worked for years and years (if not millennia – long enough to develop new forms of life) building murderbots and death traps for the Stenza… but then suddenly decided to destroy it all when the Stenza came back to pick the traps and bots up? Where were the families being held? Who did the torture? If they were able to resist once they’d built a whole planet of deathtraps, why not resist and die earlier?
Also, would scientists have written their message in swirling cuneiforms on the floor, that one has to walk around in spirals to read? If they’re leaving a dire warning for future travelers (??!?!), they ought to have made it clearer. Furthermore, once the designers determined that the writing was going to be in big swirls on the floor, someone should have told Chibnall, so that he could change the bit where the Doctor says “there are two more words below that,” indicating she’s been reading something laid out top-to-bottom.
The idea of digging a ditch to hide from a gas explosion makes sense. Shame that drawing a shallow line in the sand and then lying on top of it would still actually burn your entire face and clothes off. Also that if you want to remind everyone of how flammable the gas is without saying so out loud, by going “remember that other thing I said about it,” it would be helpful if you actually had told them that it’s flammable. With any other writer I’d assumed an earlier line had been cut for time, but it really seems plausible that Chibnall tried to create a mystery by not giving the audience that info, and decided to not have the Doctor tell the travelers either. Until after she’s set it on fire. And nod-winkingly told them to dig ditches and jump into them. OH MY GOD WHY DOES NOTHING ACTUALLY MAKE CONNECTED-UP SENSE IN THIS WHEN IT SO EASILY COULD. IS HE DOING IT ON PURPOSE.
Doctor Who loses her absolute shit when the TARDIS isn’t there. “I don’t understand. It should be here!” But why should it? All you know is that it appears once every thousand years (maybe three thousand, if it takes three times as long to go around three suns!) when the planet is in its proper orbit. The planet is not in its proper orbit. Even if the finish line of the race was a time, not a place, you shaved half a day off your travel time by going through the tunnels. So you would be expecting to wait twelve hours before the TARDIS appears. But it’s just a place, and you know it’s a chance whether the TARDIS shows up at that place or not. You’ve been there for about 20 seconds. Using Earth figures, one minute of watching = a 1 in 525,600,000 chance of seeing it. But you don’t even know if that’s how long to wait, because THE WHOLE REASON YOU DON’T HAVE THE TARDIS ALREADY IS THAT THE PLANET IS NOT IN ITS PROPER ORBIT.
Honestly, Chibnall is so incredibly bad at thinking about how any single plot point he puts into his scripts connects to any other, or to the overall, that it’s a wonder he even uses the same character names from scene to scene.
“We can wait, can’t we?”
“No, we’ll be dead within one rotation.”
“Who sez so? We come this far, in’we?”
Look, make up your mind: can they survive a year on the planet by eating the plants, or is there no organic life on the planet?
The new TARDIS design is whatever, but having an entire Police Box grafted into it, that you walk into and then out of, so that you can see the back of it from inside, is dumb. It’s also weird that they’d fuck around with it so much, but have the sonic screwdriver make exactly the same sfx as the previous ones, despite being made out of murder-alien technology instead of by the TARDIS.
After watching this with a dedicated-but-more-casual-fan, who listens to DVD commentaries but doesn’t know who writes episodes, she was so disappointed that we watched The Eleventh Hour as a palate cleanser. Apart from tearing my hair out over how every line and scene in that is doing something artful and clever and steeped in a sense of wonder, I was reminded that Smith coughs some gold shortly after regeneration too, so I rescind my waiting to see if last week’s Jodie-cough is leading to anything.
I was heartened that at least the Rosa Parks episode had been written by a woman of melanin, until it came out midweek that Chibnall has a shared writing credit. Let's brace ourselves for tomorrow.
― My Gig: The Thin Beast (sic), Saturday, 20 October 2018 23:53 (five years ago) link