I love you. Get out!

“I’d like to see a butterfly fit into a chrysalis case after it’s spread its wings.” —Second Doctor, shortly after beginning to exist (1966)

They’re restarting NuWho – I told you so. When Russell T. Davies was announced as returning showrunner in 2021, it only made sense that his role was to echo what he achieved in 2005. Start the show again. Yeah, there are other motives behind resetting the season number to 1; the BBC was bent on packaging the show to an international streaming partner, delivering it to a new world. And yet…as we’re now seeing, the change is deeper than skin. Age is more than a number. This is a TV show craving a break with its cultural detritus, a chance to feel genuinely unfamiliar once more.

The familiarity had become rot, and the rot had become horror. What perhaps seemed quaintly outdated by 2017 had become an unbearable, insular parasite by 2020. Not merely because it’d do something as churlish as throw up Morbius Doctors (which I can picture RTD doing with as much indulgence as Chibnall), but because it had become so hooked on the taste of eating itself that it brandished its swollen entrails to the whole nation: a hideous knot of fandom complexes wherein Reference, Continuity and Mythos chug round and around, as people’s lives go all but forgotten in the gaps. The dessicated state of the programme’s human element was amply evidenced by the disinterest it showed in its leads’ inner lives toward the end. The Doctor’s adoptive mother(!) was revealed and eliminated without consequence. The Doctor’s companion fell in love with her, was fobbed off, and never spoke of it again. Meanwhile it was helpfully clarified that Cybermen developed resistance to gold bullets, a weakness few remembered and fewer cared about.

How will you ever convince people to re-engage with this lifeless landscape?
A promise that things will not be as they were before, a shock infusion of the radical and the relevant, would certainly be a place to start. Already in the teaser for 2023 Christmas special The Church On Ruby Road, we see the new Doctor living in a way he never has, moving and simply being in a way that’s far removed from Who’s Victoriana yet also ripped straight from reality, from the true cultural life of joy. Everything else more-or-less unspools and explains itself from that image. There’s your reboot, located firmly in people rather than legacy.

When you have a new start this clearly defined, you could say wrapping up what came before is optional. The show’s used to moving on without fuss. Should one make the fuss, though, the result will not only colour everything behind it but teach us how to think about what comes next. This is where RTD’s little 60th anniversary mini-series, a bridge between Who (2005-2022) and Who (2023-), comes in. These three episodes form something of an intervention, a last outing for Who-II before Who-III begins in earnest.

You could argue it needed one. Or deserved it. Or more pragmatically, the reboot will benefit from a final act of healing performed on the crash site of its predecessor – bring viewers from II to III with a lot more than promises and faith.
The meta-plot had become as scarcely-salvageable as the human element; the Doctor’s home planet had been casually blown back up while you weren’t looking, any semblance of emotional stakes or an arc was spaffed out the window, and by the end the show was giving mixed messages about whether it had just obliterated the entire universe, or at least whether anyone noticed. An unenviable wreck. As if spurred by both its implosion and its inability to go anywhere that mattered, RTD now rushes in to bring that meta-plot to a full stop. It’s his first project upon returning, like an emergency manoeuvre disguised as an anniversary celebration.

For what we’re about to receive isn’t just the usual soft-reboot that accompanies each new Doctor. This one needs to be hard enough to cover, like, a decade’s worth of lost time. (Capaldi’s tenure is my favourite, but I can still admit we’re playing catch-up.) So mere newness may not be enough – something calls for an actual separation, the way the 2005 revival was distanced from everything it followed. And Davies can’t manufacture 16 years off-the-air out of thin air. The break must be narratively driven.

Thus he comes up with something quintessentially RTD, steeped in his own bizarre, mythical dream-logic…yet as direct a symbol of show-rebirth as anyone could imagine.

And some fans aren’t prepared to accept the story that’s just been told. Many are simply lying to themselves about it. So let’s cut through the bullshit first – then we can talk about opinions.

(If it wasn’t obvious – big, big, BIG spoilers for all of the 60th anniversary specials, right below the cut!)

Nall Gone

This little island we live on is an endless exercise in the elevation of emptiness. For example, the class of people who get to decide what happens to us all – and whose best mates usually decide how it should be reported, mediated, commentated, processed – are a squalid collection of vacuous failures. Animated by vapid, cruel fantasies rather than insight or knowledge, they generally operate the country by slamming it into a wall over and over until money falls out (for them to pocket). When this starts to look to people like the senseless violence it is, official reasons are soon invented for why There Is No Alternative. A bit of creative mathematics here, a bit of xenophobia there. None of them actually make sense. Not one mote of this has ever made sense; all of it’s just an empty rationale for plunder and poverty. Our consensus reality, our culture, is a matryoshka doll of bullshit.

And no culture can accept that it’s an enormous sham. Not when its participants need the emotional safety net it provides.
So instead of being chased away or made to suffer every human indignity they’ve inflicted on the masses, the leaders of our political and media establishments enjoy widespread tribute to their emptiness. They attend a perpetual banquet of adulation and unearned trust. It’s heaped upon them in the genuine belief that they somehow deserve it, they’re better, they’re qualified, because they must be, because that’s the only way the way things are makes any sense whatsoever. All they have to do in return is play up to our subterranean expectations of them.

Decades of this have watered down our hopes and desires to such ephemeral levels, it’s spiritual homeopathy. An atom of the most half-hearted pandering appears magnified in this barren landscape, in the eyes of consumers so numbed to the desert that they’re hypersensitive to the smallest drop – the faintest acknowledgement they exist. Viewers as raw nerves waiting for a puff of air in their direction, convulsing from head to foot when one at last skims them. This is the product of training. Human beings can be trained to react the same way to an empty visual cue as you might to a great victory, a confession of love, the safe return of a dear family member. Trained to interpret a handful of crumbs as a three-course meal. It’s achieved by stifling their curiosity, their capacity to even imagine a life beyond their own.

Only in the utter absence of counterexamples can a nostalgic farce government look like a safe pair of hands, a briefcase-dragging tribute act sound like a champion, a hierarchy of sadism feel like a loving family. Only there might we see carceral fanatics as valiant protectors. Apologists for inaction as fearless wits. Shallow signifiers as substance. This suite of dim iconography has become a substitute for our interest in fellow humans, in each other, even in our own thoughts. Why am I feeling these things? What is happening in my brain? Why do I like this? Why do I dislike that? What made me this way? Why do others think differently? Who are these people on my screen and why are they saying those words?
People who’ve given up asking those questions, force-fed the truism of “this is just the way things are“, only get any fulfilment when the icons slot into place. The momentary thrill of recognition replaces hope itself. The reassurance that the same old gruel can still be spooned out transcends any evaluation of said gruel. Opinions can only be had on the presence or absence of the signifiers – not on why they exist or whether they should.

This inverted world, this conceptual black hole, is where the quality of life goes to die. Compassion? Emotional honesty? Self-respect? All demolished. Nothing can ever be made right when we no longer even care to notice we’re upside down.

Which is a roundabout way of saying this is the episode we deserve:

ACE: Gold bullets, tin-heads! Did you think UNIT wouldn’t be ready?
TEGAN: Why isn’t it working?!
ASHAD: We long ago developed resistance to gold.

Space over kids

October 2022 – a short sequel to 2019’s post on Kill The Moon.

“Second-hand space shuttle, third-hand astronauts.”

“It was in a museum. They’d cut the back off it so kids could ride in it. We’d stopped going into space. Nobody cared.”

At one point the Doctor flippantly makes, by any metric, a poor argument against blowing up the Space-Dragon-Chicken: “you might have some very difficult conversations to have with your kids”. Given that the apparent alternative is risking the deaths of said kids, difficult conversations aren’t that scary a prospect. (Some people think difficult conversations with kids should be shut down at all cost, but they tend to be the sort who don’t respect kids’ autonomy at all…I digress.)

Undaunted by this prospect, Lundvik fires back, “I don’t have any kids.” Except this isn’t so much a rebuke to the Doctor’s point, as to his crude assumption that she’d feel threatened by the thought of kids being upset at something done for their own safety. And we know she’s taking kids’ safety into consideration from what she asks Clara later:

“OK, you imagine you’ve got children down there on Earth now, right? Grandchildren, maybe. You want that thing to get out? Kill them all? You want today to be the day life on Earth stopped because you couldn’t make an unfair decision?”

Following that line of logic, however, if Lundvik had kids then surely she’d be more eager to destroy the creature than she already is, not less. Kids represent a degree of personal investment in the Earth. Far from a softening force that would magically make her more defensive of the dragon-chicken, having children can be the exact opposite. Many adults would, and do, happily kill anyone and anything in the name of protecting kids.
So what’s the true significance of her having no kids?

A glaring answer to this question – and a marker of this story’s actual themes – lie in what she’s done with her life instead. She’s an astronaut in a world where astronauts no longer exist.

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.

Show Pieces

Nothing will come of nothing; speak again.

— King Lear, demanding empty words for their own sake. It doesn’t end well for him.

What’s the Flux?

The name suggests continual change, warping into the unexpected and unpredictable. In practice, we see that what it actually does (most of the time) is reduce stuff to particles. People, spaceships, buildings, planets, all kinds of large and complex structures broken down into the smallest possible units – homogenous motes of dust. It’s a blob subsuming everything else into its indistinct mass.

Refusing to be outdone, the Flux even manages to atomise itself; the after-effects we see it leave in episodes 3 and 4 – barren, post-collapse wastelands – don’t seem consistent with its planet-dissolving behaviour in The Halloween Apocalypse. Disconnected ideas of its role float around, as dots, rather than forming part of a larger whole. It’s in this manner that the Flux achieves its greatest conquest: disintegrating the show it’s a part of. We can view this as a model for the entirety of Flux as a season.

Reversion to draft?

In which I make a damning, obsequious climb-down from all my earlier rhetoric about NuWho being dead in light of the exciting, somewhat surreal new showrunner appointment…well, not exactly.

Because the possibility of someone interesting taking over the show always existed. The issue is really that whoever they are, they’d sort of need to start from scratch – not in continuity terms, that’s irrelevant; just in terms of assembling ingredients that make a fresh case for anyone bothering to watch. A well of yet-untapped possibility. NuWho 2, for real this time.

The original well’s been tainted by a couple years of unpleasant evidence that if you just keep playing the notes without the song – the notes here being the basics established by RTD’s 2005 revival – you leave open a gap which proves a fertile bed for the absolute worst fetishistic tendencies of cultural institutions (and indeed of consumer fiction). A Doctor Who that wields its social currency like a bludgeon. The embarrassing uncle at the get-together that people tolerate out of familial piety, even when he descends into an uninterrupted several-minute monologue at dinner expositing on the origins of the Time Lords, or interrupts them mid-sentence to insist on the canonicity of the Morbius Doctors.
This Doctor Who has transcended merely being uncool and become something far worse. When all interest or insight in life outside, beyond its own knotted continuity and near-meaningless rituals, has become a mere afterthought…its persistent hanging around becomes a continual symbol of imprisonment. A constant reminder of our inability to escape, to break patterns even when they are doing us no good; of the infinite vortex of impotent pointlessness threatening to emerge beneath every story, and ultimately just beneath every human mind. A putrefied cultural memory, a rotting culture reflecting a rotting society, an undead world.
And all because it’s resorted to coasting on the wisp of a memory of what was working for RTD at one point, blithely assuming people will love it provided you “just make that, really“. Still somehow inhabiting the cultural space painstakingly carved out for NuWho over a decade ago, despite barely possessing enough of its own voice to cast an echo in that vast hall.

There’s such a thing as violating a trust, burning a bridge. So many millions of people piled in to catch the debut of the first woman to play the Doctor, so many still stuck around another week to be rewarded with The Ghost Monument. It wouldn’t have taken much, really – any character, even just one, possessing what felt like their own identity or a bit of charm to inject into our lives, would probably have done the trick. Instead we got, you know, Series 11. And instead of rectifying…that, Series 12 began throwing return after hollow return at the screen, breathlessly hyping up the cataclysmic portents of a story arc with (as it quickly turned out) no tangible emotional stakes. On nearly all fronts, this era – the fact it was even permitted to transmit – provided a clanging signal to the millions that Doctor Who wasn’t just something they’d personally lost interest in; it was something that scorned their interest, that was satisfied with pre-programmed, ritualised worship regardless of its content. Send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us… ♪

We have to escape. We have to get far, far away – keep driving until the very notion of a show that gives 1/10th of a fuck about Morbius Doctors is no longer even a speck in the rearview mirror. Not that anyone will remember a bad series finale from 2020 before very long, of course…especially given how relatively few people even watched it…but everything about this iteration of Who lingers amid the culture-in-general like an eggy funk, the dark corner you don’t want to look at, the knowledge that it’s still out there and forestalling the existence of something better. (Its desertion of Christmas, which already features enough unpleasant relatives, is probably a mercy.) The next iteration has to clear the air. Redeem a tainted idea. Restore faith that something, anything at all, is possible. Follow death with rebirth.