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.

Sandpitting

It’s not entirely without precedent, mind you. Between Series 12 and 13, the vast chasm of the Doctor’s past pre-Unearthly Child is reimagined as a theoretically endless lineup of boilerplate Doctors; the much-hyped secret of the Fugitive ‘Ruth’ Doctor amounts to her flying around in a police box TARDIS, announcing herself to people, swearing off weapons, fighting baddies, running away from/working for the Time Lords, and even taking on companions. It’s a mostly familiar interpretation of the Doctor, copypasted into a slot where nothing familiar ought to exist – doing its best to kill off any imaginative potential by providing the most boring answer possible. I described this before as ‘losing the park but getting a tiny, tiny, tiny sandpit to play in instead’.

Chibnall has some form with this by now. If you thought there might be an interesting story to emerge from the Doctor being banged up in Space Prison at the end of The Timeless Children, along came Revolution of the Daleks to clarify that she just sat on her arse for 200 years until Captain Jack showed up. (Likewise, if you thought their eventual reunion would be a climactic one…the less said the better.) One gets the sense he doesn’t really want to explore the playground at all.

Thasmin’s sandpit is a bleak one. The two of them now exist in an uncomfortably tiny window, and I don’t just mean their remaining minutes of screentime. Rather than the fandom ideal of Thasmin wherein 13 and Yaz are girlfriends, Eve of the Daleks leaves Yaz in a far less fortunate position – incapable of even admitting her feelings to herself, she’s been putting up with it all in secret while the Doctor (aware of everything) pointedly ignores the issue. Yaz’s attempts to petition the Doctor for a degree of trust, at least an explanation for why she keeps hurling them both into dangerous pursuits of The Division or why she keeps making ominous statements of doom, are met with dismissal. Even after the Doctor seemed apologetic for that behaviour at the conclusion of Flux, she’s right back into it by the end of Eve:

YASMIN: What did you mean, when you said your actions were catching up with you?
DOCTOR: Nothing. Nothing. I don’t remember. I say lots of things. We all say lots of things we don’t mean.

Essentially, Yaz is still being held at arm’s length. It’s a world away from a relationship of mutual respect, even before Yaz’s unvoiced feelings come into the picture. Legend of the Sea Devils, devised by new writer Ella Road and then given a final draft by Chibnall, picks up the thread and has 13 finally get honest with Yaz – but far from a more romantic vision of Thasmin, the result is a further deflation of all hopes.

Thasmin’t

DOCTOR: You know what I said earlier about not being a bad date? Well, dates are not something I really do, you know. I mean, I used to. Have done. And if I was going to, believe me, it’d be with you. I think you’re one of the greatest people I’ve ever known. Including my wife.
YASMIN: Your what?
DOCTOR: Ah. Wasn’t going to mention that. It was a long time ago. I was a different man back then. But the point is, if it was going to be anyone, it’d be you. But I can’t.
YASMIN: Why not?
DOCTOR: Because at some point time always runs out. […]

DOCTOR: Yaz, I can’t fix myself to anything, anywhere or anyone. I’ve never been able to. That’s what my life is.
YASMIN: Yeah, of course.
DOCTOR: Not because I don’t want to, because I might. But if I do fix myself to somebody I know, sooner or later, it’ll hurt.
YASMIN: My nani says, courage is knowing something will hurt and doing it anyway. Mind you, she also said it’s the definition of stupidity.
DOCTOR: Can we just live in the present? Of what we have, while we still have it?
YASMIN: Sure. […]

DOCTOR: I wish… I wish this would go on forever.

What’s remarkable about this is that the Doctor, somehow, simultaneously kind-of reciprocates Yaz’s feelings and firmly relegates her to friend status. “I wish this could go on forever” is surely as close to a love confession (or proposal) as we’re ever likely to hear from Thirteen…if it could go on forever, then apparently she’d be willing to take Yaz as partner in a tangible capacity. But she isn’t. Because eventually they’ll have to part ways.

And there, the episode concludes, in a manner decidedly free of drama. It’s so easy to imagine that final scene going a different direction: the Doctor hesitating in her philosophical cowardice, Yaz offering her piece of Umbreen’s wisdom, the Doctor asking if they can just live in the present, Yaz asking her to stop worrying about the future, then the two of them taking that electric, risky, unfathomable step over the line into – bliss, impermanent yet essential. Roll credits. They still leave next episode, it’s still sad (sadder!) but something happened first, something genuinely interesting.

What’s the alternative? Languishing once more in the Doctor’s self-pity, using ‘the curse of the Time Lords’ as an excuse never to commit to anyone or feel anything, eternally distanced from her companions and pretty much everyone else. Not only was this well, well-worn territory following Rose’s departure, but it’s also the path of least resistance dramatically. It’s easy to just have characters avoid growing closer to each other. It’s easy to write the Doctor existing at a remove from the companions, aloof and inert, making profound-sounding sad speeches instead of putting anything at stake. It’s a plastic version of the show.

Furthermore, it’s one we’ve already seen outgrown. A reluctance to love, or be vulnerable, is the kind of character flaw you might naturally present as a starting point for further explorations – this was the story of Moffat’s Doctor and River, and it concluded when he finally grew up enough to face saying goodbye to her. An acceptance that time spent with your loved ones is worth it, even though it can’t last forever, was the gorgeous resolution to The Husbands of River Song. (This makes it bizarre, almost insulting, that 13 invokes her wife while justifying herself to Yaz.)
Regressing from that might not be a problem, provided it meant the beginning of another journey or at least had some consequences. Yet here we are, one episode from the end. This is just the status quo. This is all there is. Any other futures are already foreclosed upon.

Unhappening

And that didn’t need to be the case. This little ‘arc’ could easily have kicked off two years ago, in Series 12. Perhaps even earlier! Nothing was forcing Chibnall to wait until his final three stories to grapple with these ideas. Was he so incurious about his own characters that it just never occurred to him until now? Or does this wriggling appendix of consequence-free specials, at the tail end of his tenure, just make for a safe environment to dump Thasmin into without any narrative ambitions? A suitably small sandpit.

Because the impending end of Chib Who absolutely defines the handling of 13 and Yaz in Sea Devils. “I wish this would go on forever,” the Doctor ruminates, followed by a regeneration special teaser with the narration “Nothing lasts forever!”. The Doctor’s sudden fixation with things being temporary and the futility of love and blah blah blah is simply foreshadowing her impending exit. She had a premonition of it at the end of Flux when the Big Bad Time Thing basically told her she was going to regenerate soon, and ever since then she’s been banging on about time catching up with her, time running out. Now it’s become an excuse for nullifying the prospect of an intimate relationship.

Everything’s gone meta – the fact it’s too late IRL for an uplifting development of Thasmin (at least an on-screen, satisfying one) has wormed its way backwards into the show itself! The hypothetical version of Thasmin that would see them actually get together in Sea Devils, one episode before being ripped apart far too soon in a horrible bout of dramatic irony, is almost the implied paratext of the Doctor refusing to date Yaz. While there’d be groanworthy optics in a groundbreaking gay couple getting shafted so soon (especially if Chibnall plans to kill Yaz off…hope not), it’d still be less embarrassing than feebly backing down at the first hurdle.

It’s as if we’re deliberately taking the route that means the eventual parting in the Centenary special will be less tragic, less affecting, less passionate. The main character of the show is trying to neutralise the drama, keep things between herself and Yaz as shallow and bland as possible. Almost like an authorial hand.

That doesn’t have to be a dead-end, of course. There are plenty of dramatic consequences to be found if you’re interested in writing them. The fascination of a character who stage-manages their own emotions and relationships like this, to stay shielded from everything, is the question of what happens when things don’t go as planned – perhaps they suddenly find themselves liking someone too much, or they hurt someone with their coldness. But not “nothing happens and everyone just accepts that”. Because while it might be heinously close to our social reality, a mindless uninterrupted continuation of a status quo isn’t much of a story.

No miracles

So much for Yaz. It’d be one thing to hear that the Doctor simply doesn’t like her in that way, but to be told that the Doctor could see it happening were it not for that pesky thing known as time…and to be asked to continue their usual arm’s-length relationship anyway? That’s rich.
According to Dan, the Doctor has pretended not to know – how many times? And how often has Yaz been kept in the dark about important matters, had her concerns shut down? Yaz’s feelings have been so thoroughly trod on by this point that she’d be well within her rights to recite Martha’s “It’s like my friend Vicky…” speech and get out of there immediately. They’re so not girlfriends it actually hurts. Chibnall has summoned the spectre of Thasmin into the show just to make Yaz the loser.

But if the “boo hoo curse of the Time Lords, love is banned” regression of the Doctor is a result of there being no time left in the era, the question is why did he do this at all? If this emotional subplot was only ever intended to terminate in anticlimactic emptiness like this, what was the point? Maybe it really will turn into a Martha repeat, and the point was finding a believable way to write Yaz out of the TARDIS at the last minute (although Sea Devils doesn’t give the impression that she’s about to go anywhere). The thought of only coming up with a story for Yaz when it’s required to kick her out is, in the nicest terms, pitiable.

One way or another, there’s an awful hollowness in the decision. Yaz’s genuinely moving revelation in Eve is put out there just so it can be tidied away again in the following story. No catharsis. This isn’t a first for Chibnall either, or even the most bewildering instance; remember a handful of episodes ago when a character, built up for all intents and purposes as the Doctor’s adoptive mother, showed up only to say a few evil-sounding things before getting turned to dust and never mentioned again? We could ask the same questions. Why bother? What was gained? Where’s the story? Series 12 kicks off with the reveal that all of the Doctor’s fellow Gallifreyans were casually murdered, while she wasn’t looking, and the consequences of this for her character amount to even less than when the same thing happens to Karvanista in the finale of Flux.

They’re distractions. We might get a decent scene out of them, now and again. But dramatically – thematically – none of these ideas ever approach their potential. They’re shuffled back out of the show without a care. Everything that seems like the catalyst for a story about the main characters, before long, boils down to naught but an idle plaything. A plastic toy. A momentary flash of engagement…then nothing. Staging a collection of moments that appear significant on the surface is the final and only goal. There’s no will to push these characters or their relationships anywhere, just as there’s no will to pursue any idea in particular. It was this lack of will that allowed Yaz to go three seasons in silence. And without a willingness to chase down an idea, see where it leads, stories can have no life.

Fans spent years waiting, waiting for the tomb to re-open. For proof of the soul. Wishing for wonders from a lord who never really understood the fuss about them in the first place – the careless prime mover in a universe of mediocrity. There was to be no overcoming, no transcendence, whatever glimmer of promise may have existed between the Doctor and Yaz this whole time. Just another sacrifice to the pale void.
There on the beach, we forked away from the hope of a payoff, and defaulted to our regular timeline of noncommittal mulch. We watched Chibnall pick up the baton of queer representation at long last (the assurances of 2018 feel like only yesterday), dangle it like a wet sock ever so briefly, until: all is enveloped in an indistinct white noise of Classic Who throwbacks, the thick mists of history roll in to claim these years for oblivion…something slips, and like a silent shrug he’s already gone. Goodbye. Everything should have been better.

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