Thassion of the Chris

On the last-minute martyring of fandom’s favourite Chibnall Who couple.

Thasmin was the soul of Chib Who. For better or worse.

In the absence of rich potential directions for any of its characters, a romantic attachment between the thirteenth Doctor and Yasmin Khan (who was always at a remove from the Graham-Ryan drama of Series 11, and also seemed to lack drives or motives beyond liking the Doctor a whole lot) filled itself in as a de facto candidate for the Whittaker era’s emotional centre. It was a no-brainer. Who could fault fans for wanting love – between two women on the TARDIS, no less – in an otherwise rather barren cosmos?
Having textually raised the idea himself as early on as his fourth episode, showrunner Chris Chibnall guaranteed that people would be constantly searching, scanning, hoping, waiting…every passing minute with no development on this front became a problem. In a situation where our first glimpse of Yaz’s past and interiority came near the end of her second season (Can You Hear Me?), the possibility of Thasmin became the last hope for the show having real characters in it at all. If the two of them were girlfriends, that would at least mean something had been happening all this while; that the first female Doctor wasn’t consigned to a spiritually empty nightmare of a run, where her immediate predecessors each traversed their own agony and ecstasy. Essentially, no Thasmin would mean no soul.

So in spite of it being very, very, very late, Chibnall’s decision to finally confront Yaz’s feelings for the Doctor head-on in Eve of the Daleks was greeted with rapture. At long last, Thasmin is indisputably canon.

Except that it’s Chibnall’s version of Thasmin. And in this strange, sudden, short streak of specials just before it all vanishes from us utterly, his Doctor Who bares its soul like never before.