Spyfall Part Two by Chris Chibnall

Even now I have no idea what it's supposed to be about.

It's pretty clear now that Chris Chibnall's approaching to writing this season is to operate his RTD random idea generator and smash half a dozen of those ideas together to create an episode of Doctor Who. The end result of that is Spyfall Part Two, an episode that has some great individual set pieces, but is also a tonally inconsistent mess. Taken together, this two-parter is The Sound of Drums meets Army of Ghosts meets The Sontaran Stratagem, and it ends up being lesser than all of them. This iteration of the show is going to have to learn pretty quickly that recreating Russell T Davies era Doctor Who without the crucial ingredient of...er...Russell T Davies is a recipe for, if not quite disaster, then just pretty mediocre television.

Let's start with what works. The Thirteenth Doctor works. At last. As you'll see below, I'm yet to be convinced by Sacha Dhawan as the Master, but what he does do is bring out the best in Jodie Whittaker. The Morse code rhythm of two hearts message that brings them together in wartime France leads to one of Whittaker's best scenes in the role so far on top of Eiffel Tower. There's finally some depth appearing in her Doctor and it's great that Series 12 is making the most of how good an actor she is.

One of the great innovations of the Chibnall era has been the resurrection of the educational historical episodes. Rosa and Demons of the Punjab were two of the strongest entries in the last season. I particularly like the focus on less well known historical figures. Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan in this case (it'll be Nikola Tesla later in the series, and even Mary Shelley is less of a household name than Queen Victoria or Charles Dickens). They are participants in the storyline, and get to help the Doctor defeat the Master, at the same time as teaching us something about these incredibly important women.

Unfortunately, there's also a lot of problems. Most notable is the Master. I'm just not yet sold on Sacha Dhawan. It's perhaps unfair to compare his performance to Michelle Gomez, but if you insist on bringing back the character so soon, that's inevitably what people are going to do. Gomez's version of the Master was a triumph, and by far the most interesting we've ever been given. Here, the Master does a lot of leering and shouting. He works best in the quieter moments but even then, I'm yet to see any distinctiveness to his characterisation. I'd have liked to have seen him interact with the companions more. There's an interesting story to be told about him sowing distrust of the Doctor among Graham, Ryan and/or Yaz that seems itching to be told, and it's a shame that this possibility isn't explored. As he'll clearly be back later in the season, I hope he gets a lot more to work with. 

What's more, Lenny Henry is wasted, just as I feared he would be after Part One. The scene where Barton kills his mother feels like it's tacked on because he hasn't done anything villainous for a few minutes and the audience needs to be reminded that he's actually in the story. Him and the Kasavin feel incredibly out of place here in an episode that's trying to be a chase through history between the Doctor and the Master, but still has to resolve its plot threads from the first part. It just doesn't feel like Barton is an important part of the story.

That is, until we get the lesson™ and the whole plot just falls apart. It's not that the idea of warning against the horrors of modern technology is inherently a bad idea. The problem is that it's not remotely connected to the rest of the story. Barton's plan isn't hinted at throughout, it's just delivered in one big exposition dump to an audience whose reactions we can charitably describe as 'stilted'. In fact, the episode is so disinterested in Barton's plan that the Doctor thwarts the whole thing off screen using a laminator and then just tells us that's what she's done. Truly a villainous masterplan for the ages.

But it turns out the Master's not quite done yet. Hinting earlier that all was not well at home, he convinces the Doctor to travel to Gallifrey and she finds it in ruins. There's something really quite cynical about this creative choice. It's designed to make us care by going big and important but without doing any work for it. I understand the temptation to end each episode with some big reveal, as it leaves the audience thinking the whole thing was much better than it was (see The Almost People) but I struggle with the idea that Chibnall's first big contribution to Doctor Who lore is...just destroying Gallifrey again. Come on, we've been there and done that. At least Jodie Whittaker absolutely sells the reaction to see her planet destroyed.

I also want to deal with the two most uncomfortable things about this episode. Yes, we're going to talk "problematic." First, the Doctor mindwipes Ada while she's begging her not to. Seriously, Doctor Who? I thought we'd been over this. It was bad when 10 did that to Donna, but to do it again twelve years later, even after the show had specifically acknowledged that particular mistake, is not good. One of the best things about Hell Bent is that Clara asserts her right to her memories and makes it clear the Doctor has no right to take them away from her. Giving your characters agency is generally a good idea, it's just a shame that Chibnall wasn't taking notes.

The other moment that is somehow even more spectacularly misjudged is the Doctor weaponising the Master's skin colour and turning him over to the Nazis. Reading that you may think, "that doesn't sound much like the Doctor." You're not wrong. I've commented before about the Doctor's incoherent morality in Series 11, but this is just bad on so many levels. This is not an original take by the way (go check out Andrew Ellard's tweet notes on the episode for a much more coherent explanation of the problem) but I thought it was important to acknowledge it. I don't want to condemn Chibnall too harshly for this, it feels a lot like carelessness rather than being genuinely callous, but it sticks out horribly. Doctor Who can and has done better than this.

Random musings

• I enjoy the way the Doctor saves her companions from the plane crash. It's like a Moffat solution but way simpler and sometimes simpler Moffat is better Moffat.

• "Hello friends, or should I say plane thieves?" Doesn't even begin to make sense.

• Graham's laser shoes kind of work because Bradley Walsh is clearly loving it.

• The companions are relegated to the subplot because the episode isn't interested in them (this will become a recurring theme). They get some nice moments but having all three of them superfluous to the main action feels like a waste.

Verdict

So it's a mess, but an often entertaining one. It's got some excellent moments like the Doctor confronting the Master on the Eiffel Tower or the Nazis invading Khan's home while the Doctor and Ada hide under the floorboards. But those moments are lost behind a broader narrative that's utterly incoherent. It uses fan service and big reveals to disguise its fundamental flaws. Unfortunately, it's beginning to look like incoherence may be a feature of the Chibnall era, rather than a bug.

Rating

5/10

Spyfall Part One by Chris Chibnall

I approached the opening episode of Series 12 with more than a little trepidation. I recently rewatched all of Series 11 (yes, including The Tsuranga Conundrum and that's forty-five minutes of my life I'll never get back) and, although it holds up better than expected, it's got serious issues that I feared might be structural features of Chris Chibnall era Doctor Who. What's more the thing that anchored the entire season and by far the best thing about it, namely Graham's character arc, had pretty much been resolved. Series 11 without Bradley Walsh is not a series of Doctor Who it brings much joy to think about.

And for thirty minutes, it felt like I was living in that world. The first half drags. It takes ten minutes reassembling the TARDIS team without telling us anything notable about the companion's lives while it's at it. Yaz is still (at least nominally although you'd never know it) a police officer, Ryan still has dyspraxia and Graham's wife is still dead. There's nothing new here. It then deploys tropes from spy thrillers left, right, and centre without ever threatening to do anything remotely interesting with them. Even the presence of Stephen Fry playing the Head of MI6 as if he was...Stephen Fry isn't enough to maintain interest. 

The pace picks up considerably as we move into the final half though. I particularly enjoy the Bond pastiche of the casino party. It's a cliche for sure, but it gives a chance for the characters a few moments of fun rather than having to relentlessly exposition the plot. They all look great in their formal gear as well. The aliens threatening the characters (both the Doctor and co in Australia and Ryan and Yaz in America) are solidly well constructed set pieces as well. I doubt the Kasavin are going to top anyone's list of the show's greatest monsters, but they're reasonably intriguing here, and give off the air of being dangerous.

The casting of Lenny Henry as an evil version of Mark Zuckerburg is an interesting choice (although I'm not sure Zuckerburg would manage to register as even 93% human on the Doctor's gismo, but moving passed that). It feels like someone as good as him could make a lot more of a meatier role, rather than seemingly as the human lackey to either The Master or the Kasavin, but he gives a characteristically strong performance. I particularly enjoy the scene he gets with The Doctor, and it gives Jodie Whittaker a chance to perform something other than zany light-heartedness. More of this please.

At this point, after a car chase that is well shot and pretty fun, it looks like the episode will end a bit limply. And then it turns out that O is actually The Master and all hell breaks loose.

It's a twist that I (along with everyone else in the universe) didn't see coming. Mostly because I was surprised that Chibnall decided to resurrect the character so soon. It's been two and a half years since Missy's "death" in The Doctor Falls, but in story terms, it's actually only been a dozen episodes. I don't mind Sacha Dhawan's performance here, and he does the switch from good to evil pretty effectively, but it feels just a bit too similar to John Simm's RTD era performances in those couple of minutes. My major concern bringing back the character is that whatever they do with them next will necessarily not be as interesting as Missy's redemption arc, and the character performing like a crazed villainous version of The Doctor is just about the most boring take on the Master you could imagine at the moment. Missy showed us there was a great deal of potential in doing something different with the character, so let's hope that's what we get with Dhawan's incarnation eventually.

But the twist itself is very effectively executed and leads to a stunning cliffhanger. I'm a sucker for fanwank so the reference to the Tissue Comprehension Eliminator and previous Masters' predilection for shrinking people brought a smile to my face. His parting words of "Everything you think you know is a lie" promises a season arc that Series 11 was sorely lacking. The final few minutes are the shot of ambition the show desperately needed at this point and hooks you in to find out what happens next.

Random musings

• The Doctor finds out O is lying because he lies about not being good at sprinting. That's...decidedly rubbish but never mind. 

• It was nice not to be spoiled on a big reveal for a change. A lot of people compared it unfavourably with the John Simm spoilers in Series 10, which I think is unfair. It's a lot easier to hide the surprise when you have a new actor playing the Master and the fact that Simm had been shooting on location was bound to leak at some point.

• Humour that was such a natural part of the RTD and Moffat eras is still very thin on the ground here, but there are a couple of moments: the Doctor yelling "snap" during a game of blackjack is fun.

• The tribute to Terrance Dicks at the end is suitably lovely.

Verdict

A tough first half gives way to a much more interesting final 25 minutes. Everything from the moment the Doctor and co enter the casino party is incredibly compelling and the cliffhanger is a major shot across the bows in terms of a new direction for this season. It's weighed down by many of the flaws that afflict a lot of Chibnall episodes but it's pretty good nonetheless.

Rating

7/10