Doctor Who episode 10, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos review: This finale didn't pack enough of an emotional punch
The final episode of Jodie Whittaker’s first season in the Tardis feels like an appropriate moment to give this 55-year-old show a health-check. How is the good Doctor doing these days?
In recent years Doctor Who felt better suited to binge-watching teenage superfans, than to casual teatime viewing for the whole family. This trend reached its peak in the previous Doctor Peter Capaldi’s penultimate series, which was entirely made up of convoluted two-parters, where more than half the episodes were slapped with a 12 age certificate (rather than the usual PG).
But new head writer Chris Chibnall has taken a different tack, tweaking the show in admirably untrendy ways. A number of adult viewers complained that they felt patronised by the episodes about Rosa Parks and the Partition of India, but these straightforward historical jaunts returned Doctor Who to its original remit: an educational programme aimed squarely at children. Having grown up with the rebooted show - I was 11 when the first episode aired in 2005 - I’m attached to it, but equally aware that I’m no longer the target audience.
The breakneck complexity of the Moffat-era plots has been ditched in favour of slower, more character-driven storytelling. Rather than one “impossible girl” who later turns out to be the most important being in the universe (as several of previous companions were), the Doctor is now joined by three down-to-earth Sheffielders: dyspraxic Ryan (Tosin Cole, a bit wooden), police officer Yaz (Mandip Gill, rather good) and Ryan’s recently bereaved step-grandad, Graham (Bradley Walsh, surprisingly touching).
In short, Chibnall has made Doctor Who unshowy, believable and grounded. But is that really what we want from a programme about an alien flying through space? After nine weeks of solid but unexceptional episodes, with nary a Dalek or Cyberman in sight, this series was in sore need of an epic confrontation with a fearsome adversary to give it some pizzazz.
Things started well, with the Doctor answering a distress call from the planet of Ranskoor Av Kolos, a desolate war zone where bad vibes in the atmosphere forced any unprepared visitor into a haze of woozy, befuddled inattention. But as the minutes ticked by, I began to feel like I was there myself.
The tipping point was the return of “Tim Shaw”, the Doctor’s nickname for that tooth-faced blue warmonger you might recall from the opening episode. Or not. Tim Shaw is, to put it bluntly, not one of the more memorable Doctor Who baddies. Until now, this year had seen a new villain introduced each week, which offered at least a flicker of novelty. Breaking that pattern only to give an encore to tooth-face - along with a handful of generic robot guards from episode two - felt a missed opportunity.
Anyway, it transpired that Tim had tricked a pair of pious, ancient aliens called the Ux into welcoming him as their god, so he could use them to create a kind of faith-powered laser, which could shrink planets and trap them like flies in amber.
None of this really mattered; the planets were rescued, of course, and Tim Shaw imprisoned (priming the ground, depressingly, for yet another comeback).
What mattered, thematically speaking, was the moral arc of Graham, who was out for vengeance after the alien had killed his wife Grace. “I will kill it if I can, for what it did to Grace,” he said, in one of several lines of clunky exposition. The snappy (if slightly smug) screwball repartee that marked the Moffat era was particularly lacking in this episode.
So, a man in mourning grapples with his desire for vengeance, before realising that violence would only make him as bad as his genocidal enemy. Deja-vu? It was the exact same dilemma Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor faced in Dalek, back in the first year of the rebooted Doctor Who.
If only the talented Jodie Whittaker had been given something with that much dramatic meat to chew over, it could have made for a powerful finale - and lent more depth to her still underdeveloped Doctor. Instead, the emotional heavy-lifting was given to a supporting character, and the stakes were lower as a result.
As with much of this series, it felt like a reiteration of things we’d seen before. Despite the furore about Whittaker’s casting, the idea of turning a Time Lord into a Time Lady wasn’t anything new. Michelle Gomez’s unexpected reinvention of the Master as “Missy” back in 2014 gave the show its best villain in a decade.
At its most inventive, Doctor Who can tug a the heartstrings like no other show; the more outlandish the ideas, the more their pathos can catch the viewer off-guard. I’m not ashamed to say I wept at last year’s finale, when first-rate companion Bill was absorbed by her girlfriend, an amorous pan-dimensional puddle. The lonely space-frog in last week’s very good episode had some of that offbeat heart, but this episode packed no such emotional punch. Despite all the talk of radically reinventing the series, Chibnall’s week-by-week run of new monsters may mask a lack of original ideas. It was confirmed this weekend that the show will take a year off after the New Year's Day special. Let's hope it returns reinvigorated – regenerated, even – in 2020.
