Ascension of the Cybermen by Chris Chibnall

We may be stealing episode titles directly from RTD now, but Ascension of the Cybermen owes a lot more to 1980s Cybermen stories. Mainly in that it's not very good.

OK fine, I lured you in with a click-bait headline. There's actually a lot more to recommend this episode than I'm giving it credit for at the top of this article. Let's start with the obvious. It's better than last season's finale offering, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, in that it doesn't actively make me want to claw my own eyes out and never watch television again. It didn't horrifically drop the ball at any point and kept my attention throughout most of its 50 minute run-time, which is an achievement.

This is a difficult episode to review. So much will depend on what happens in the finale. However, I've always believed, particularly in Modern Who, that every episode should be able to stand on its own merits. So, here we are, reviewing the first half of an incomplete story. It's a surefire way for me to look silly in a few days time after the final episode airs and any speculation I engage in here turns out to be completely wrong. As it is, I've got a sneaking suspicion I know what direction The Timeless Children is going to go in, but to avoid potentially looking like a fool, I'm going to keep those musings to myself until next week when I can claim that, whatever happens, I was right.

The problem that Ascension of the Cybermen has is the same one that afflicts a lot of 'first-half' episodes. There's not enough material to sustain the story for 50 minutes. Much of what happens just feels like stalling until it can reach the cliffhanger. That strategy can work, particularly if the cliffhanger is a sufficiently jaw-dropping one (think The Stolen Earth or World Enough and Time). But here, it is all far too predictable. Companions being threatened by an army of Cybermen feels pretty pedestrian in a Cyberman story and, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, we get the return of the Master. It tries very hard to be big and epic, but it can't quite manage it. In some ways, it's a victim of its own marketing. If the promotion material for the episode hadn't been leaning so heavily on how 'game-changing' this was going to be, I might not have felt quite so underwhelmed by the cliffhanger that we actually got. There's only so many times you can promise to change the game.

The Cybermen themselves are used pretty effectively in this story. I'm fully aware that the visuals are doing a lot of the work here. Doctor Who has rarely looked better. Yes, the Cyber drones are a bit goofy, but they do lead to one of the best action sequences we have seen in the show. There's some striking visuals later in the episode as well. The bits of dead Cybermen floating through space. The Cyber army beginning to wake up and menacing the companions and their fellow travellers (don't ask me to remember any of the guest characters' names, that would imply they had any function in the story or discernible personalities). It's all beautifully choreographed and directed and maintains a level of excitement that is not always present in episodes written by Chris Chibnall. There may be a hollowness to the whole thing, but it is at least compelling.

In fact, I think the Cybermen would have worked better here without their leader. After an interesting first appearance, the follow-up with Ashad is distinctly underwhelming. His discussion over holographic projection with the Doctor is a particular lowlight. There's nothing remotely compelling about The Lone Cyberman's justifications; he's just another 'generic evil guy with delusions of grandeur' in very much the same mold as Tim Shaw. The Doctor's apparently profound revelation that Ashad is just doing it because he hates himself is about as cliched a villainous motivation as you could possibly imagine. I said in my review of The Haunting of Villa Diodati that I was hopeful that his almost religious zealotry for Cyber technology would be followed up in interesting ways. Suffice to say, it was not. It feels like Chibnall is reaching for some compelling themes here, but can't quite manage it. The Cybermen have historically been about the absolute subjugation of the individual beneath ranks and ranks of identical machine creatures. If you're going to break with that tradition and have a Cyberman with a distinct and definable personality, at least try to make it an interesting one.

There's a similar lack of follow-through in how the episode deals with the remaining humans. There's the beginning of some kind of subtext in describing them as refugees, fleeing a conflict that has ravaged their entire civilisation, unwanted pariahs because the Cybermen would always come after them. Unfortunately, despite being hinted at, it's never given any dramatic weight or narrative importance. And once again, we fail to properly deal with the consequences of the Doctor's actions. Her decisions in the previous story lead directly into the events of the story and may be lead to the resurrection of the Cyber empire. That feels like something that should face more scrutiny than a pretty unfunny joke about how there's never a good time to mention that your species has nearly been wiped out. The Doctor is allowed to just carry on as if nothing has happened. It genuinely felt earlier in the season like we were getting to the point where the companions might be in a position to challenge her extremely baffling morality, but in the hands of the showrunner, there is no such luck.

Surprisingly, I actually quite liked the subplot involving Brendan and his life in what I assume is 20th century Ireland. The whole narrative comes out of nowhere, and doesn't any point connect to the main plotline, but that's OK for the moment. As with a lot of other things, much will depend on what happens in the finale. It feels like a very Moffat-esque writing quirk, in that the story you expect is not quite the one that's being told, and it is all done with minimal screen time and very economical storytelling. It feels unpredictable in a good way. For the first half of the episode or so, I was convinced that we were getting an origin story for the Lone Cyberman and a whole section of the story dedicated just to that would have elicited little more than an eyeroll. But as it goes on, it's increasingly clear that that's not what's happening at all. Why is he seemingly unable to die? What is going on with his distinctively not aged father erasing his memories? There's still plenty of scope for the whole thing to fall apart, and if it's going in the direction I think it is, it may leave me feeling decidedly unimpressed. The storyline can't quite redeem the entire episode on its own, as it feels so much like a sideshow at this point, but colour me suitably intrigued to find out how it all fits together.

I haven't talked much about the performances of the regulars, but they're pretty much what we've come to expect. Jodie Whittaker continues to impress, and her more serious and snappy performance helps sell the tension in a way that the other characters don't really manage. I'm very much looking forward to finding out what she can do with a third series in the role. The "fam" are pretty functional here. While it's nice to see Graham and Yaz interacting at all, and more than holding their own among a ship full of Cybermen, it very much feels like we've gone as far as we can with these characters, at least as a unit. The mileage has run out and it's time for some new, or maybe even just fewer, companions. It's a shame because I enjoy all their performances, and two of them have been badly wasted in their roles, but it's time for a fresh approach I feel.

Ascension of the Cybermen is not terrible by any means. It flirts with some interesting ideas, but does so in a very half-hearted way. It seems to be operating under the assumption that a suitably grandiose army of Cybermen will be enough to deliver the kind of excitement we usually get from penultimate episodes. This is the slot that has been filled by The Sound of Drums, The Pandorica Opens and Heaven Sent and we've come to expect, rightly or wrongly, something bold and ambitious. But this episode is held back by its lack of ambition. I struggle to believe that the height of what Doctor Who can achieve in 2020 is a remake of Earthshock (and let's be honest the lack of Beryl Reid clearly having no idea what she's agreed to appear in means this was always going to be inferior). There's nothing inherently wrong with that as an idea, and it provides some effective moments and great visuals. It might have worked better as a mid-season episode, but as a build-up to a finale that has been billed as "nothing will ever be the same again", it can't help but feel underwhelming.

Random musings

• Yes, the transition from the first scene through the eye of the Cyber helmet to the opening credits is very cool.

• Sacha Dhawan seems more comfortable in the role of the Master in the few seconds he appears here than he did throughout all of Spyfall. This feels like a positive development. And he looks pretty damn hot in purple.

• I haven't even mentioned Ko Sharmus yet. I have a suspicion I know who he might be, but he feels very much like a 'let's talk about him next episode' character.

• The trailer for The Timeless Children was the most interesting 20 seconds of the episode let's be honest. I think it's pretty clear that the finale is either going to be great or quite shockingly terrible, and there's not much room for anything in between.

Rating

6/10

The Haunting of Villa Diodati by Maxine Alderton

Generally very good, but the morality of the Chibnall era is beginning to irritate me.

One of my biggest complaints of this era of Doctor Who is its incoherent morality. This is most obviously manifested in how it characterises the Doctor. From deciding that it's somehow fundamentally better to let the spiders in Arachnids in the UK suffocate to death rather than shooting them, to her lecturing Graham for wanting to kill Tim Shaw in The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos despite planting DNA bombs in him earlier in the season, the Doctor demonstrates an overly simplistic and pretty warped worldview. Time and time again, this Doctor has been shown to be a pacifist in the broadest and most literal interpretation of the word, but without any thought or reference to the situations unfolding around her. I'm not sure any of these moments are deliberately designed to make the Doctor look either hypocritical or, if I'm being uncharitable, just ridiculously naive, but that's the message that's communicated.

At the same time, the show's politics is pretty murky to say the least. Both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat clearly have left-leaning politics and that bled through into their themes. Remember when the Doctor basically ended capitalism in Oxygen? I'd be much more hard pressed to say for certain what position the politics in the Chibnall era comes from. Instead of actively fighting and destroying systems of oppression, the Doctor appears at best mildly disinterested and at worst actively complicit in these systems (hello, Kerblam!). The show's morality is fundamentally muddled.

This bring us to the major, but far from fatal, flaw of The Haunting of Villa Diodati. Its ending is total garbage. It poses a ridiculous moral dilemma, the premise of which has no business in Doctor Who. Long gone is the Doctor's quietly understated and character defining pronouncement from A Christmas Carol that "in 900 years of time and space, I've never met anyone who wasn't important." Instead, we are told that the Doctor has to sacrifice the future to the Cybermen because history cannot possibly survive without...Percy Shelley. And it frames its argument in precisely those terms. This is not the Doctor proclaiming that she refuses to view moral choices as a numbers game, and that she has to do the most good she can with whatever the situation is at that moment, but instead that she has to save Shelley because he is a person she deems fundamentally important. This is not the moral position we can or should expect from the Doctor. The trolley problem has always been an entirely fatuous thought experiment posing as a moral dilemma and here it's used to undermine the Doctor's character and doesn't make any sense at all. The reality is of course that Percy Shelley is a minor historical figure, certainly compared to his (sort of) wife, Mary Shelley, but the episode doesn't actually seem that interested in Mary. She's basically just there to be inspired to write Frankenstein because of the Cybermen, an idea Big Finish has done before and done much better.

But while the content of the resolution is bad, it does elicit a terrific performance from Jodie Whittaker. She finally breaks from the "flat team structure" that she has insisted on for the best part of two seasons and declares that sometimes these decisions are hers alone. It's the kind of material that was so badly missing from her characterisation in Series 11. But it's more than made up for here and Jodie Whittaker totally owns the moment. There's been so little conflict between this Doctor and her companions, it feels like this has been building for some time. If some or all of the companions leave at the end of the season, we may look back at this as the beginning of the characters moving apart.

I much prefer the first half of this story, before the appearance of the Lone Cyberman. I get that a lot of this material is just stalling until the (very expected) reveal of the returning monster, but it's atmospheric and effective storytelling nonetheless. It's packed full of horror tropes like the severed skeleton hand creeping across the floor that are deployed to maximum impact. There are nice moments of comedy to balance out the scares as well, including Graham's relief that he's been given some food while not twigging that he's talking to a couple of ghosts and Dr Polidori campily challenging Ryan to a duel for no particular reason. The perception filter that has altered the layout of the house in order to trap all of the characters inside is a great little conceit as well, and adds some effective additional layers on to the mystery.

The episode falters somewhat when the Cyberman appears and becomes a pretty standard sci-fi runaround. Its plan is basically weird technobabble; something about a shimmering ball of silver energy and the Doctor assuming the role of "The Guardian" means the Cybermen can now conquer the future of the human race. If you say so I suppose. The Cyberman itself gets some effective moments, including one particularly chilling scene where Mary tries to reach out with kindness, only for the moment to be snatched away when it's revealed the Cyberman murdered his own children when they attempted to join the resistance. It's all very nasty, which is exactly what the Cybermen should be like. But these are just a few stray moments in a plot that feels like it's run out of steam.

The Cyberman design itself is good but I wish it had leaned further into the body horror in the way that Death in Heaven did with Danny's conversion. Here it feels a lot more like a man wearing armour rather than having been partially cyber-converted. Maxine Alderton is playing with some interesting ideas in her portrayal of the Cyberman, namely that he is a zealot who wanted to be converted as opposed to being forced into it, either through coercion or in order to survive. This is a concept that the show hasn't really played with before and feels like it has some mileage. It would have been good to explore this idea a little further and I'm hopeful that the finale will do so.

Despite my reservations, there is a lot to recommend The Haunting of Villa Diodati. As a horror story, it works very well indeed. As a setup for the finale designed to build excitement, it also works well. As a Cyberman story, it's a bit more hit and miss, and I just cannot connect to the moral dilemma at the resolution because I fundamentally reject its premise. It's still one of the strongest episodes of the season, as much because its flaws are a lot more interesting than the ones we've seen in many previous stories, and it builds some decent momentum as we head into the final two episodes.

Random musings

• "Save the poet, save the universe." Heroes references in Doctor Who. Just no.

• "I won't lose anyone else to that!" proclaims the Doctor, immediately evoking memories of Bill Potts. A reference to the Capaldi era? Don't do yourself an injury Chibnall.

• If the series finale tries to retroactively make out that Yaz has been in love with the Doctor (or even worse, The Master) this whole time, I will flipping lose my shit.

• Despite my cautious excitement, I'm getting such The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos vibes from the finale trailers, I think I might need to go and lie down.

Rating

8/10

Can You Hear Me? by Charlene James & Chris Chibnall

We're hybridising 2020 television themes with the Virgin New Adventures. It's odd.

An ancient God trapped since before the dawn of time. An enigmatic old man who feeds on people's nightmares. References to the Eternals, the Guardians, and the Toymaker. Enough dour expressions and angst to make even the cheeriest of us question our place in the universe. In many ways, Can You Hear Me? wouldn't have felt out of place in the 1990s series of Doctor Who books that continued the adventures of the Seventh Doctor from the point that the classic show ended but took it in a radical new and more (cough) adult direction. If you want to know what one of those books would look like in television form then this is probably about as close as you're going to get (apart from the more obvious example of the direct adaptation of Paul Cornell's Human Nature of course).

But this being Doctor Who in 2020, we also need a modern theme. The show has tackled mental health before, most notably in Vincent and the Doctor, but this is a much more direct confrontation of the issue, and it does this by framing it in terms of our regular characters. I'm not convinced it has anything particularly revelatory to say about the issue, but the message is simple: if you find yourself in need, then ask for help. It's not a bad message for Doctor Who to be conveying, and scrolling the internet after the episode aired, it's clear that it connected with quite a few people. That's no bad thing, even if I'm disappointed that a show with such limitless potential couldn't find a new and interesting perspective on this most important of topics.

In doing this, we finally finally get some kind of backstory for Yaz. It smacks faintly of desperation on the part of the writers, as if they've just noticed that the character is leaving in three weeks time and we still barely know a single thing about her. But, hey, I'll take it. The revelation that Yaz disappeared a number of years ago and (unspoken but implied) was on the verge of taking her own life because she was being bullied at school is powerful and hard-hitting stuff. The problem is that it's terribly underdeveloped. We never see the bullying. We've never had the suggestion before that it's made a lasting impression on Yaz, and the idea that she has an anniversary dinner with her sister every year to mark her disappearance is just plain weird. There's a really great idea underneath all this, and those few scenes at the end give Mandip Gill the chance to shine in a way she hasn't had the opportunity to do before, but it needed so much more work. It's the kind of concept that deserves an entire episode devoted to it, not just an afterthought because there's so much else going on. If anything, it makes me even more frustrated that so much potential in the character has been wasted.

But Yaz isn't the only character who goes through the mill this episode. We also get a glimpse of the other character's fears and nightmares as well. For the Doctor and Ryan, this is just a fleeting moment, in the Doctor's case connected to the season arc of the Timeless Child. But for Graham, it's a much more substantial and emotionally effective scene. I empathise enormously with Graham's fear that his cancer might return and the fact that the news is delivered by Grace, seen for the first time since Series 11, makes it a particularly devastating blow. Sharon D Clarke does a typically excellent job in the few moments that she is on screen, and it's a good reminder of why Graham's journey was by far the most emotionally satisfying part of last season. Grace, how we miss you.

Oh yes, and there's some kind of story about evil God-like beings who detach their fingers and use them to steal people's nightmare energy. There's actually quite a lot to like about this storyline. The visuals are suitably nightmarish, and Ian Gelder gives a great performance as Zellin. The detachable fingers are a bit of a gimmick but it makes for a pretty unsettling effect. The problem is that it's all very, and here's that word again, underdeveloped. The villains are only framed in terms of what they're not and we never really get a satisfactory explanation of who they are. The resolution is all too simple as well. The Doctor just blurts some technobabble, waves the sonic screwdriver, and suddenly they're trapped in their prison again. It's unimaginative and all very unsastisfying.

But there's also one thing about the episode I find pretty unforgivable and that's the scene that caused so much controversy after it aired. Graham admits to the Doctor his fears of his cancer returning and she...says she's socially awkward and gives him the brush off. Look, I get it. The Doctor is an alien and conversations about mental health can be difficult. But the Doctor is also a character that has an almost infinite capacity for empathy and compassion. For her seemingly not to understand how Graham is feeling is just wrong. Whether that was the intention or not is pretty irrelevant, as that's the message that is conveyed. The scene is clearly supposed to be played for laughs but it's painfully unfunny. It's perhaps an unfair comparison as his was the most mature interpretation of the character, but I keep wondering how Peter Capaldi's Doctor would have handled that conversation, and the Thirteenth Doctor doesn't come out of that thought looking very good.

Ultimately, this is an episode with a number of good, but half-baked, ideas. You can write a story about 14th century Middle Eastern attitudes towards mental health set in Aleppo, or about Gods that feed on nightmares and trick the Doctor into freeing them from their eternal prison, or about the troubled past of one of the companions. Trying to do all three is just too ambitious and it ends with a story that is all over the place. It's not the worst episode of the Chibnall era (far from it) because it's actually trying to do something interesting. But in trying to do too much, it ends up being a noble failure.

Random musings

• I complained about the overuse of globetrotting in the previous episode and it's even worse here. There's literally no reason for any of this to be set in 14th century Aleppo and it does a disservice to the setting, which would make a great location for a whole story, that it is so wasted. The same goes for the character of Tahira, who ends up as little more than window dressing while the episode focuses on other people.

• Ryan's greatest fear is Orphan 55. And so say all of us.

• The animation scene feels pretty out of place to be honest. It's cool that the show is trying something new, but it doesn't really work for me.

• The early part of this episode feels like a good opportunity to explore how this Doctor behaves when the "fam" aren't around. Turns out it's exactly the same as when they are.

Verdict

I can't fault the ambition of this episode. It tries a number of new ideas (and even new storytelling devices through its use of animation) but so many of them are underdeveloped that the story as a whole fails to land. It tackles an important theme but fails to bring a new perspective to it. On the whole, a missed opportunity.

Rating

5/10

Praxeus by Pete McTighe & Chris Chibnall

Plastic is our enemy this week. But it's not the Autons. Probs would have been better if it was.

There's a coherence of message in this episode that was sorely lacking in Orphan 55. Essentially, the moral of the story is the same, that pollution and climate change are causing untold damage to our planet and will eventually destroy us (cheery thought), but it's delivered with a great deal more elegance and subtlety in Praxeus. Or to put it another way, the Doctor doesn't need to turn around and say at the end, "Stop dumping plastic into the ocean, you bunch of dimwitted simpletons." (I feel like the Twelfth Doctor would have been fine saying this though). The episode itself is competently assembled, with some interesting individual moments, and zips along at a pretty reasonable pace. It's not great by any means, it's just kind of OK.

McTighe does a much better job of balancing all the regulators here than we've seen throughout most of this season. They each get something significant to do that advances the plot, even, and don't faint when you read this, Yaz. We'll talk a lot more about Yaz in the review of the next episode, but her relative importance in the most recent stories only goes to highlight how wasted the character has been. Mandip Gill brings a great deal of enthusiasm and charisma to the role and, if as looks likely from her growing independence, she's leaving at the end of the season, it will end up being such a waste of potential. She gets some good moments here, though, and I particularly enjoy her disappointment that she hasn't actually discovered an alien planet after all.

But as I say, the companions are all reasonably well served here, or at least as well as they can be within the constraints of the 50 minute episode format. The tried and tested trick of splitting them up and having each of them contribute something to solving the mystery is effectively utilised here, as well as I'm sure easing some of the pressures of production. Ryan gets to investigate and then dissect the birds and discover that they're full of plastic, which works well to actually sell the message the story is trying to convey because the whole thing is just incredibly icky. Yaz goes off on her own and discovers the alien construct. Even Graham, whose role this season has largely been comic relief, gets a few nice moments. The scene where Jake confesses his insecurities to Graham is lovely, and there's a lot of unspoken references to Grace in how Bradley Walsh plays it. Despite the rushed feeling of the story, there are at least a few moments for each companion to shine.

Although, I feel like it could have been even better for the regulars if we hadn't spent so much time globetrotting in this episode. Don't get me wrong. I like that this season has an international element to it. Early New Series Doctor Who was so fixated on London (and occasionally Cardiff for ease of filming reasons) whenever the TARDIS landed in Earth, it was easy to forget that there are other cities in the world. But there's no reason for any of this to be set in those places in particular. The only thing that distinguishes that some of the scenes are set in Hong Kong is that we get a big caption that says "HONG KONG". We don't get a sense of the culture, the history, or really anything to do with the location. It helps keep the story moving forward with some sense of momentum but it might as well have been anywhere. I feel like we could have cut one of the locations and some of the side characters and just slowed things down a touch.

This feels like a step backwards in terms of the Doctor's characterisation as well. Gone is the darkness and edge that Jodie Whittaker has weaved into her performance so far this season, and we're left with something much more closely resembling the Series 11 Doctor. She's there to basically dump exposition with a fixed zany grin on her face, and when you're talking about the world being poisoned by plastic, it feels very jarring. The script leans heavily on technobabble to explain what's happening, but the writers don't have the flair that Steven Moffat had for making exposition interesting and so the whole thing feels clumsy. A lot of the work falls to Jodie Whittaker to make those moments work and they just don't. Hopefully this is just a temporary setback and we'll be back to the more three dimensional characterisation as we approach the finale.

More positively, the gay representation in this episode is a massive improvement. So far in the Chibnall era, it's become a running joke that LGBT+ characters only turn up to be killed a moment later or to refer to their dead spouse. Burying your gays is one of the more unpleasant narrative devices in storytelling. Luckily Jake and Adam feel like fully rounded characters who actually get a happy ending. Shock horror. On the whole, it's very skillfully and sensitively done. Although I could have done without Jake's whole noble self-sacrifice thing as Jamie Mathieson kindly eviscerated that particular trope during the Capaldi era. Go and die to save a hairband, indeed. At least they don't actually kill him I suppose.

I'm left wondering what it is that justifies the co-writing credit from Chris Chibnall here. In the last episode, it was clear after the fact why the showrunner had had such heavily involvement in it. Here I'm not so sure. It feels like McTighe is a skilled enough writer that it might have benefited from less involvement from Chibnall. Either way, what we have is as solid and functional as Chibnall era Who gets. It works well enough, but I doubt I'll remember much about it in a few weeks.

Random musings

• There was a lot of speculation following this episode that Yaz was behaving strangely and that it might have something to do with the season arc. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that this was categorically not followed up in the next episode. But then that's what happens when you don't bother to give one of your characters any characterisation for a season and a half, people end up leaping to conclusions because there's no consistency in their behaviour.

• The effects when people are consumed by Praxeus are very effective. Nasty but staying on the right side of gruesome for pre-watershed television.

• Poor Aramu. Not sure anyone even noticed you died.

• The jokes about vlogging feel like they were written by two 50 year old men. Which, of course, they were.

• "Can't get the breathing apparatus off to see the face." Why hello, The Empty Child.

Verdict

As a standalone episode of Doctor Who, Praxeus is solid if pretty unremarkable. But as a follow-up to the arc heavy and revelatory Fugitive of the Judoon, it can't help but feel a little disappointing.

Rating

6/10

Fugitive of the Judoon by Vinay Patel & Chris Chibnall

The capacity to be unpredictable has always been one of the show's greatest assets.

Let's get the gripe out of the way first because my take on this episode is going to be almost uniformly positive. But I don't know why Jack Harkness is in this. Even moving passed John Barrowman's recent questionable comments and his weird insistence that Steven Moffat has some sort of vendetta against him, Jack's presence feels incredibly cynical. He contributes nothing except to dump exposition and tease future adventures. Let's face it, his character always was a bit much, even in the mid-naughties but he feels incredibly out of place in 2020 Doctor Who. Twitter loved it, but the whole cameo left me feeling cold. It's long passed time that this era of the show stopped trying to recapture the greatness of the Russell T Davies era (the viewing figures suggest that this isn't remotely working) and actually strive to do something original. The strength of this episode is how it seeks to upend the rules of Doctor Who in order to do something different; it succeeds when it's looking forward, not when it's looking back.

However, accepting that, Fugitive of the Judoon is pretty unequivocally excellent. A fitting Episode 5 comparison would be Series 9's The Girl Who Died. That similarly starts out like a mid-season bit of fluff, a filler episode albeit it with an interesting premise and characters, before gradually revealing that it's got some quite profound revelations about the Doctor. And while The Girl Who Died is one of my favourite episodes of Doctor Who that this can't quite live up to, I'm impressed that it manages to have a damn good try.

The advertised return of the Judoon proves to be nothing more than narrative sleight of hand to make the audience look one way while the story sets up much bigger and more important reveals. That said, it's a welcome reappearance. The Judoon have always been one of the more effective original monsters of the revived show, and the improved animatronics help give their leader a more defined character than before (I love the little gasp that it makes when Allan gives it a shove). They strike the right balance between seeming genuinely threatening and bringing some much needed lightheartedness to the story, particularly when they are arguing with the Doctor about who is in charge and bargaining how long she has for arbitration.

About halfway through we think we've got the measure of the situation. The Judoon are pursuing an alien criminal who has disguised themselves as a human. It's almost entirely the narrative beats from Smith and Jones and the expectation is that it will resolve itself in a very similar way; one of the guest characters will reveal themselves as the villain and the Doctor/the Judoon will deal with them accordingly. Only that's not what happens and instead we get one of the boldest twists that Doctor Who has attempted in a number of years. Ruth turns out to be the Doctor. One of my main complaints with this era is how basic it feels; everything that happens happens because it's the most obvious and (often as a result) the least interesting choice. That's not the case here.

In fact, the Ruth!Doctor is something of a revelation. She seems utterly in control of events, contrasting with the Thirteenth Doctor, who often has felt like someone who drifts from one bad situation to another without having any say in the matter. She takes an active role in events, from holding her own against the Judoon to sabotaging a Gallifreyan weapon in order to turn the tables on Gat. Her mere existence poses some pretty existential questions for the show to answer about how many lives the Doctor has lived, the history of the Time Lords and the Doctor's relationship with them. But I have to admit that when she strode across the garden of the lighthouse to triumphantly declare that she was the Doctor, I was totally buying it.

It's pretty much impossible to work out at this point where Ruth fits into the Doctor's timeline, and it'll be interesting to see whether Chibnall can make the explanation work without descending too far into an utterly myopic quagmire of continuity. All we can say for certain is that this new Doctor and our current Doctor are far from fans of each other, and this conflict brings out Jodie Whittaker's best performance in the role. There's something incredibly fresh and distinctive about their relationship, in a way that the show has never quite managed before between different incarnations of the Doctor. Even with the War Doctor, there was still a certain level of cheeky banter and camaraderie between him and his successors, but these two could not feel more different. There's plenty more mileage to be explored with this dynamic, which is lucky as it's pretty much certain that we'll see Ruth again before the end of the season.

The story is filled with striking visuals, in a way that the brown and grey palette of earlier Chibnall era episodes just felt a little washed out and uninspiring. The Judoon appearing on the streets of Gloucester and menacing the local population with the cathedral in the background. The energy of the Chameleon Arch streaming out of the broken glass and into Ruth. The lighthouse that neatly mirrors the look of the TARDIS. The Doctor discovering the familiar shape of a police box under the soil. For the first time in a long while, these are moments that actually stick in the memory after the episode has ended. Jack's ship looks terrible though.

This is another episode where the companions are superfluous to requirements. Realising that it has nothing to do with them, the story maneuvers Graham, Ryan and Yaz out of the way. This helps prevent it from feeling overstuffed and allows the writers to focus on the central relationship between the two Doctors. As much as it is disappointing for the three companions to once again be given so little to do, this time it does at least feel like it's in the service of a much more interesting narrative.

And in many ways, this is an unfinished narrative. Its greatness is predicated on the promise of future greatness. If viewed in isolation without the rest of the season, this would seem strange and incomplete, and there is a lingering sense of dissatisfaction that none of the story is really resolved here. But taken in context it succeeds absolutely in what it is intended to do, which is to confound expectations at every turn and deliver some shocking revelations about the Doctor and her personal history. Doctor Who feels unpredictable again and that is to Patel and Chibnall's great credit.

Random musings

• "Look at you, and your platoon of Judoon...near that lagoon" may be the first time I've properly laughed out loud in this series. It's a riff on an old RTD joke, but it works. There's a few funny moments involving the Judoon, like their totally arbitrary countdown on the temporal isolator. In fact, the whole episode feels like a throwback to when the show took itself a bit less seriously.

• My 'defensive of Moffat' tendencies started to tingle at people lapping up the amount of continuity this episode throws at the audience when we heard endless complaints about it under the previous showrunner. It's mostly stylishly done here, but I do wonder what casual viewers will have thought at the sheer amount of callbacks and references.

• Yaz remembered she was a police officer for a moment there. Fittingly, she was almost immediately teleported away before it actually became important.

• I see Jack's as much of a sex pest as before. Did I mention I really don't like his cameo...?

• "Beware the Lone Cyberman. Don't give it what it wants." We're getting to River Song levels of unhelpfully cryptic. Spoilers, I guess?

Verdict

Fugitive of the Judoon is a bold statement of intent, demonstrating that this era can be as exciting and unpredictable as the two that preceded it. The online response when this was broadcast was probably the most uniformly positive I've seen since The Doctor Falls and that was nearly three years ago. It's not quite the best episode of Jodie Whittaker's tenure so far. It's a close second to Rosa, because that felt more like a complete story, whereas this is an excellent episode of Doctor Who that can't quite stand on its own without its wider context. The season still has a lot of work to do to make me content with the story emotionally, but there's no doubt that I'm intrigued to find out where all this is going. After two weeks of inconsequential filler, we're back in business. Let's see if it can stick the landing.

Rating

9/10

Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror by Nina Metivier

I work for the future, and the future is mine.

The final line of this episode is an adapted real quotation from Nikola Tesla that goes "The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine." For a second, I thought the story was about to go all Vincent and the Doctor on us and I'm glad that it didn't. As much as the moment where the Doctor shows Vincent Van Gogh how much he is admired in the future is one of the most beautiful moments this show has ever produced, trying to replicate it seems like a totally doomed endeavour. Instead, it's a much simpler resolution. And that's a good way of describe this episode: simple. It's nuts and bolts Doctor Who, taking a well worn idea of the celebrity historical and executing it well, without ever threatening to break new ground or give us a classic for the ages. All of this is a long-winded way of saying, it's pretty good.

The episode is anchored by two absolute powerhouse guest performances from Goran Višnjić as Tesla and Robert Glenister as Thomas Edison. Višnjić in particular absolutely oozes charisma and makes Tesla one of the most memorable one-off characters for some time. He also shares some very effective chemistry with Jodie Whittaker and the parallels between the two characters are not hard to spot. Although, the cynic in me wonders if Tesla essentially being a well meaning but ultimately powerless and inconsequential figure isn't too close a metaphor for the Thirteenth Doctor than the writers would like to admit.

Edison meanwhile is portrayed as the shit he basically was, but he's not without moments of redemption in the story either. He seems genuinely horrified when a load of his workforce are killed and also helps the Doctor and co clear the streets of civilians before the Skithra attack. This kind of moral ambiguity hasn't always been present during the Chibnall era, and it's nice to see the show grapple with a historical figure with a little less of a rose-tinted view than it has before (yes, we're talking about you Victory of the Daleks). The central conflict between Tesla and Edison of idealism versus pragmatism helps keep the episode feeling grounded as well as mirroring the scavenger nature of the Skithra, who are a parallel for Edison's world view, even down to adopting Tesla as their engineer. It's not deep thematic resonance I know, but it is at least a theme.

The major flaw is that the strong guest characters also serve to highlight the shortcomings of the regulars. This was the episode when I realised that the three companion model just isn't working, particularly when you combine it with stories that move at breakneck speed through their narrative. I struggle to remember anything notable that the companions did, and their roles in the episode are pretty much interchangeable. Even Bradley Walsh, who provided so much of the good material in Series 11, is poorly served here, despite a fun moment when he struggles to remember anything that Tesla actually invented. Three companions hasn't really worked since the First Doctor's era, and is even trickier to pull off when your stories only last 50 minutes. This is also another example of the Thirteenth Doctor's baffling morality. Guns are bad, but it's all right to destroy an alien spaceship with a bolt of lightning. OK.

The Skithra themselves work well enough for what the episode needs them to do. The design is strong, even if the Queen is a little too reminiscent of the Raknoss from The Runaway Bride. They serve as good foil for the Doctor, who genuinely seems disgusted by them, but there's little substantive to say about them apart from 'scavenger scorpions'. This seems to be a recurring problem for the show with its monsters. I'm struggling to think of any memorable original villains in the most recent seasons of Doctor Who. It's probably The Silents, and they were introduced nine years ago.

To end on a positive note, the episode looks great. It's no secret that the BBC is far more adept at making period drama than it is at episodes set in the future, but the production values here feel particularly strong. The direction is solid, especially during the action sequences (I enjoy the little additions to the Skithra like having them scuffle with each other when they collide during the chase scenes) and the effects are all very good. A lot of this season has lent on a more global setting for the show, but often this has felt superfluous to what's actually going on. This episode feels authentically like it's set in America and it's all the better for it.

Random musings

• I see we don't need to mind wipe Tesla and Edison after this adventure. Maybe it's just women who aren't allowed to remember stuff. Get some consistency Doctor.

• I like that the episode gives Edison the chance to articulate his reasoning that brilliant ideas aren't worth anything unless you can make them sell. It's pretty clear who Nina Metivier wants you to sympathise with, but the room is there for the audience to disagree.

• I focused a lot on the two major guest stars, but a shout out to Anjli Mohindra as well, who chews the scenery nicely as the Skithra Queen.

• They don't get much to do, but the companions all look great in their period dress.

• Small gripe, but the Silurians aren't aliens and probably shouldn't be described as such.

Verdict

The Doctor and Nikola Tesla seems like the sort of combination that someone should have come up with before now. The similarities between the characters are not hard to spot: both outcasts, with ideas far ahead of their time. Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror is a solid, workmanlike episode of Doctor Who that has all its pieces facing the same way and broadly coheres into something that works. For an era of the show that often borders on almost incoherence (and having just seen Episode 7, there'll be plenty more to talk about this later), this feels like no small achievement. The Chibnall era definitely works better when set in the past. It's probably the best episode of the season so far but that doesn't feel like a particularly good place to be. Four episodes in and I'm still waiting to be seriously impressed. Luckily...

Rating

7/10

Orphan 55 by Ed Hime

The message alone is not enough.

The best thing you can say about Orphan 55 is that its an episode that ostensibly has its heart in the right place. Doctor Who has been doing environmental politics since at least the mid 1970s and it feels only fitting that the message that we live on a planet that is rabidly starting to boil is delivered with a lot more urgency and a lot less subtlety than it was back then. The broadcasting of this episode coincides quite effectively with the wildfires currently engulfing large parts of Australia. The problem is that before it gets to that final message, Orphan 55 fails at almost every basic element of good storytelling.

For a start, its narrative is utterly incoherent. It picks up ideas and drops them again a few moments later with casual disinterest. Everything is subsumed beneath the greater need of getting your characters from one location to another so they can fulfill the demands of the plot and discover the twists when they need to.

The major issue with structuring a story like this is that it requires your characters to behave like idiots. Taking the entire cast on a suicidal mission to rescue one old man. Bella deciding to kill lots of people because she's got abandonment issues. Nobody in the right mind would think any of this was a good idea. They're only doing it because the narrative demands that they do (see Season 8 of Game of Thrones if you want to understand more about what this looks like).

The guest characters are similarly under baked. Bella and Kane suffer the worst from this. The revelation that Kane is Bella's mother and abandoned her is supposed to carry emotional heft. But these characters never feel like more than thinly drawn sketches. I defy anyone that they reacted to that revelation with anything more than a shrug. Nevi and Sylas suffer from the same problem. I quite like the idea that the kid is actually the one with the skills to save everyone (particularly if you view it as a metaphor for how it's the younger generation that have the ability to actually deal with climate change even while no one in authority is listening to them), but it's done in another blink and you'll miss it moment. The characters never get the attention their relationship deserves, which is a great shame. I complained about Spyfall under-using Lenny Henry, and they've done it again here with James Buckley.

The twist that Orphan 55 is actually Earth is neat. It's directly stolen from the Colin Baker era story The Mysterious Planet, even down to an underground station sign being what gives the game away, but Doctor Who has a noble tradition of ripping off its own ideas. The Dregs, which are a good design well executed, are actually the future version of humans. The key difference between those two stories is that the former gave us some perspective on what this all meant through Peri's reaction to her home now being an uninhabitable wasteland, while here the revelation is smothered beneath another set piece action sequence with the Dregs.

After the resolution, the main characters get delivered back to the TARDIS so that the Doctor can (pretty much) turn to the camera and warn us about the catastrophe we've just witnessed. It's delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face. That in itself, I don't have a problem with. If there was ever a need for non-subtle calls to action about the environmental catastrophe unfolding around us, it's now. But the episode hasn't earned it. Its theme aren't developed enough. We're never given the space to reflect on what it means for Earth to have become a poisoned wasteland because the story is still too busy vomiting new set pieces and ideas at us. There's a lot to be said for weaving themes throughout the structure of a story, rather than just having someone unilaterally declare them at the end.

I hesitate to say this should have been two-parter, because then you're just asking for 45 minutes of pain to be extended to 90, but with a little room to breathe, this might have managed to form together into something slightly more coherent.

Random musings

• I vowed that the main section of the review would avoid talking about "BENNI!" but I can't resist bringing it up somewhere. Pity the poor actress who plays Vilma, the most unintentionally hilarious character in Doctor Who since...who knows when. We all breathed a sigh of relief when she was finally gobbled up by the Dregs.

• Speaking of Benni, I just don't get what was happening with the Dregs possessing him, or torturing him, or whatever it was. Were we even supposed to know what was going on? It feels like there's a scene missing that explains this. We can add that to the list of ideas this episode doesn't feel particularly interested in.

• "Give me crayons and half a container of spam and I could build you" is probably the only memorable line in this whole episode.

• Very little from the series arc here, but the Doctor's blunt reaction to Yaz saying she's in a "mardy" mood is a good character beat.

• If anyone ever tries to signal romantic attachment to me by sucking their thumb, I'm ending the date right there.

Verdict

According to the online reviewer database IMDb, Orphan 55 is the worst episode of post-2005 Doctor Who. Putting aside the fact that the IMDb rating system is basically broken for the Thirteenth Doctor's stories (even before they're broadcast, the site is flooded with tedious Not My Doctor types), this feels like an overreaction. Yes, the episode fails on almost every conceivable level. But it's not actively worse than say The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos because I can at least see what this episode is trying to accomplish and can imagine a world where it kind of works. In contrast, there's no world in which the ideas in the Series 11 finale are anything approaching interesting. It feels a lot like damning the episode with faint praise when the nicest thing you can say is that it had potential, but there we are. It had potential.

Rating

4/10