I think the problem for Chris Chibnall and his thirteenth Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, had been that Steven Moffat set the bar so high with his stories for Doctors eight through twelve: a recent poll placed five of his stories in the all-time top ten. How do you top that? Instead of taking the show in a more serious, dramatic direction, Chris Chibnall tried to carry on in a similar vein. But though everyone acted like they were still in the same, hilarious programme, the dialogue wasn’t as funny, and wasn’t as impactful. Watch “The Night of the Doctor”, the eight-minute episode Moffat wrote for Paul McGann: it has more quotable lines than the entire thirteenth Doctor era combined.
Returning to the show presents Russell T Davies with the same problem. Can he top what Moffat did? Can he top his own best stories?
The first anniversary episode, “The Star Beast”, certainly doesn’t. This adaptation of the classic story from Doctor Who Weekly, about insectoid hunters pursuing the cute and furry Beep the Meep through an English city, was disappointing on every level. After all the talk of bigger budgets, thanks to a worldwide distribution deal with Disney+, it felt like a big budget episode of the Sarah Jane Adventures rather than a big budget episode of Doctor Who. The comic had better special effects, better dialogue, and a better companion: Sharon, the Doctor’s first black companion, left out of the story this time around, in favour of Donna Noble’s 15-year-old trans child, Rose Noble, who in an odd bit of casting is played by a 20-year-old, Yasmin Finney.
It’s not hard to see why a gay showrunner in his sixties would find much to enjoy in an attractive and glamorous 20-year-old actor running around in a miniskirt, and I wouldn’t criticise Davies for that in itself – at least no more than I would criticise straight showrunners for sticking 20-year-old female actors in miniskirts to play teenage girls, which is far more common! But it does feel a bit like 18-year-old Winona Ryder being cast as Jerry Lee Lewis's 13-year-old bride in Great Balls of Fire, i.e. a way to make a controversial storyline more palatable to viewers, on a visual level at least. The casting makes Donna look like the supportive parent of an adult trans woman, rather than, say, one of those homophobic Mermaids mums, desperate to make sure her gay kid doesn't grow up to be a gay man.
As the episode proceeds, one gets the impression that Russell T Davies wants to be down with the kids when it comes to sex and gender, but doesn’t have a firm grasp of the issues involved. He seems to think “non-binary” is an umbrella term for anyone who doesn't conform to the stereotypes associated with their sex. The DoctorDonna crisis is ultimately undone with some blather about women but not “male-presenting time lords” being able to let things go, which makes no sense at all, given that biologically Rose Noble is just as male as the Doctor, and a few hours previously the Doctor was biologically just as female as Donna.
The second episode, “Wild Blue Yonder”, about the Doctor and Donna running around in an abandoned spaceship at the edge of the universe, also had quite cheap-looking special effects. But it had some strikingly horrific images, and I've no doubt it would, like “The Robots of Death”, have given me nightmares as a kid. It was just a bit disappointing for an anniversary special to be a bottle episode, with just the two actors in a CGI environment. Apparently a novelisation is forthcoming. Must be worth reading if only to see how the author stretched an episode of pure corridor-running out into an entire book.
Catherine Tate slips back into the role of Donna seamlessly, as bold and brassy as ever, but David Tennant struggles a bit in his return to the role. It's obviously much harder for him to surprise us now, and he doesn't get the greatest dialogue to work with in these episodes. But the old magic is there from time to time, such as in this episode when we see him trying to deal with what happened to the universe during the thirteenth Doctor's era, and in the third episode, when he thinks back over all the non-stop crises of his long, long lifetime. He seemed particularly tired in “The Star Beast”, though maybe that was deliberate, given the overall arc of the three episodes: the Doctor is worn out, and needs a lengthy rest.
The third episode, “The Giggle”, was for me the best of them, though that isn't saying much. It was like a mid-season story from a regular season. The Doctor and Donna arrive back in London to find everyone going nuts. They discover eventually that a five-note subliminal tune is affecting everyone’s brains, just like the Master's four-note subliminal dum dum dum dum did in season three. The tune has made everyone think they are always right, all the time, leading to self-righteous, wrongheaded rants and violence. Some viewers have taken this to be just about the alt-right or “gammons”, but I thought the target was a bit bigger than that; it’s about how everyone can act on social media, whatever our positions. (In fact, the tone of the ranters reminded me of nothing so much as Davies himself, drunkenly denouncing the LGB Alliance at an awards show.)
It was quite an interesting idea, but the story doesn't do much with it; that's just what is going on in the background while the Doctor and Donna and UNIT try to fight the Toymaker, returning from the Hartnell era and played with gusto by Neil Patrick Harris. This time around the Toymaker does several “funny” foreign accents (French, German, American), which some viewers found offensive, but I thought it was a clever way to address the character's previous orientalism, making mockery of other cultures part and parcel of his villainy. He's an all-singing (well, miming), all-dancing cross between Roger Rabbit and Two-Face, unconfined by our universe's petty rules, but beholden to his own strict code of conduct.
I found the guest appearance of sixth and seventh Doctor companion Mel in this story (played as ever by Bonnie Langford) very appropriate, since the series ends (spoilers ahead) by doing to the Doctor what the Trial of a Time Lord did to her. We never saw Mel meet the sixth Doctor for the first time – she was plucked out of his future. Similarly, the second David Tennant Doctor doesn't really regenerate; the Ncuti Gatwa Doctor is pulled from his future timeline and we'll be following him from now on, while the Tennant Doctor chills out with Donna, has low-key adventures and works on his issues. Russell T Davies has suggested that the Doctor has regenerated into two people at once, but that's clearly not true from the dialogue – Donna and the Tennant Doctor say that Gatwa's Doctor is older, and he agrees, and explains that he has benefited from Tennant’s downtime. I expect at some point Tennant will return again for his final, final, final adventure and we will see his actual regeneration into Ncuti Gatwa.
With that it feels to me like the show is making the same mistake it did during Jodie Whittaker's time as Doctor, when Tennant's Doctor starred in comics and games and led a huge crossover event (Time Lord Victorious). She didn't even appear on the cover of the 2021 annual, and shared the 2022 annual's cover with all the other Doctors. It tells people, if you don't like this one, don't worry, we have others you might like more. Jodie Whittaker didn't even get to regenerate into her successor. After all these years, I think Tom Baker was right to not return for “The Five Doctors”, and maybe the Doctor Who office was right in the 1980s to ban old Doctors from the book covers. Hopefully Gatwa's interpretation will be strong enough to succeed regardless. His appearance at the end of episode three is very promising. He seems full of character, has a nice way of delivering his lines, and brings a physical comedy to the part that hasn’t really been present since the halcyon days of Matt Smith.
Overall, compared to modern science fiction television like The Mandalorian, Foundation or Monarch, these three episodes felt a bit amateurish, and at times not far above the level of what you see on fan-made YouTube videos. Where Doctor Who has to shine is its scripts, its plots, its dialogue, its performances and most of all its ideas, and these episodes struggled on all those counts. But any Doctor Who is better than no Doctor Who. The next episode could always be better, and that was definitely the case with Russell T Davies’s last spell in charge: I liked each season better than the one before. Fingers crossed. Stephen Theaker ***
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