I'm going to be honest, this has been a hard post to write.
I've intended for several weeks to put down in words my thoughts and feelings about Doctor Who with Chris Chibnall at the helm.
Part of me wanted to be snarky and reference how approximately 35 years ago, a chat show on the BBC featured a smart, outspoken lad named Chris Chibnall who did not have a kind assessment of Doctor Who at that time.
Doctor Who was still under the watchful eye of it's executive producer John Nathan-Turner, a fan boy made good taking over the reins of this icon of British television. Nathan-Turner's enthusiasm for Doctor Who did not always translate into good decisions.
I wanted to dwell on the irony that when Chris Chibnall himself became the fan boy made good taking over Doctor Who four decades later, he inexplicably made the same questionable choices of the man whose work he had criticized 35 years before.
But such an approach was not satisfactory to me.
Look, the questionable quality of Chris Chibnall's time as the head writer and producer of Doctor Who has been detailed at length in any number of Whovian blogs, TikToks and more. I wanted my look back over this time with the Doctor to be more positive.
Things started off well when "The Woman Who Fell to Earth” drew a record setting audience for Doctor Who. But even with that strong start, there were some questionable choices.
1) A Doctor Who episode with no opening theme music? Really?
2) A Doctor Who episode with no TARDIS? Really?
3) A Doctor Who episode with no Doctor? OK, the Doctor shows up early in dramatic fashion crashing into a passenger train to confront an alien menace. But the Doctor spends almost 90% of the episode not remembering she is the Doctor. Which seems like a misstep to me.
The series had a new focus on history in episodes like “Rosa,” “Demons of the Punjab,” and “The Witchfinders” evoking the classic series.
Therein laid part of the problem. After a decade plus of more thoroughly modern Doctor Who under Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat, fans had a clear idea of what Doctor Who looked like, sounded like, felt like. Chris Chibnall's turn towards classic Doctor Who was not what fans expected or wanted.
I guess the worst assessment I have about the Chibnall era of Doctor Who was that it was underwhelming. Even on a TV budget, Doctor Who under Davies and Moffat crackled with the energy of a near cinematic experience. The show under Chibnall felt like it was just a TV show.
The change in music didn't help. Murray Gold’s big screen bombast was replaced by Segun Akinola's atmospheric minimalism. Akinola's music wasn't bad per se, it just lacked a sense of wonder, power and tension. It was mostly generic.
The emphasis on totally new worlds and aliens in Chibnall's first season with no returning enemies, monsters or even allies was commendable in one sense. Points for original thinking and all that. And Chibnall wanted to make the show accessible to new viewers so again, a noble objective, I suppose.
But the total absence of anything from the Doctor's history made the new series feel disconnected from all that had gone on before. Doctor Who did not always feel like Doctor Who.
Chibnall made a hard lurch sideways by the 2nd season towards playing with the shows legacy but mostly by cribbing from Russell T Davie's play book.
Davies had a psychopathic Master who was someone else in disguise then totally went all in for the evulz? So Chibnall brings in a psychopathic Master who was someone else in disguise then totally went all in for the evulz.
Davies blew up Gallifrey and killed all the Time Lords? So Chibnall blows up Gallifrey and kills all the Time Lords.
Davies wrote the Doctor as the last of his kind? So Chibnall makes the Doctor the last of her kind... and the first?
Oh God, the Timeless Child?!? OK, so Chibnall opens up the mythology of the Doctor so that William Hartnell's first Doctor is not the first and there are other regenerations preceding that. A lot fans did not like this development. I have to admit I am not a fan of the Timeless Child concept but I am not totally opposed to the idea. It's an idea that if accepted has the potential to open the Doctor's mythology to new story ideas; it's also an idea that can just be ignored going forward.
Which quite frankly what the Doctor herself chooses to do at the end of the Flux storyline.
Oh God, Flux?!? So yeah, a lot things get tossed at the wall to see what sticks which has the potential to be a lot of fun. But it's potential is wasted with perhaps too many things tossed at the wall with not enough sticking to make any sense or have any real impact.
You know how at the end of "The Pandorica Opens", Steven Moffat has all the Doctor's enemies show up? It's like Chibnall decided that yeah, he can do that too without any real idea why it worked the first time.
When Chibnall wasn't trying to restore Doctor Who to storytelling more in line with the classic series, he's straight up borrowing from the playbooks of Davies and Moffat without a solid, meaningful story to go with those ideas.
Let's talk about casting for a minute. Sacha Dhawan chews through copious amounts of scenery as the Master which is what the job description calls for. But Dhawan's plays the Master as a straight up super villain lacking any of the nuance and pathos of previous performances by John Simms and Michelle Gomez. Dhawan's Master is right up there with the mustache twirling villainy of Anthony Ainley's Master from the same run of Doctor Who that young Chris Chibnall said was not very good 4 decades ago.
Sacha Dhawan's Master had possibilities. His Master impersonating Rasputin in "Power of the Doctor" was a particularly intriguing turn. But mostly, Sacha Dhawan's Master was a (excuse the pun) masterclass in wasted potential.
And then there's Jodie Whittaker. We cut Jodie a lot of slack because she got a lot of undeserved bullshit just for being a woman and also she didn't have the best writing to work with. But if there was a determined effort to make the Doctor female, I am not entirely convinced Jodie was the best person for the job. Oh, she was dynamite when the Doctor needed to be quirky and weird and do the talk fast technobabble but she never could quite pull of those moments when the Doctor needs to turn on the serious face kick ass moment.
Not that Chris Chibnall gave her many opportunities for those serious kick ass moments.
No moments for Jodie like, "I'm the Doctor and I'm going to save your lives and all six billion people on the planet below!"
Chris did give Jodie this line: "Earth is protected by me and my mates!"
Hardly the ego-centric line reading we got from previous Doctors. Another way Doctor Who did not feel like Doctor Who.
OK, I feel like I'm being more negative than I wanted to be in this post.
Let me say positive stuff about what others have been negative about: Yasmin Kahn. A lot people complained that Yaz was underdeveloped and under utilized which may be true. But Yaz was consistent in her character and her actions supporting the Doctor. From her police officer training, Yaz knew how to take control of a situation and be the voice of reason. Yaz could be counted on to lead with a sense of compassion, to sense pain and loss in others. Whatever was lacking in her character development, I found Yaz to be a very positive addition to the Doctor's pantheon of companions.
I was a bit put off to hear that Chris Chibnall was not aware of the true depth of Yaz's feelings for the Doctor. Yaz's love of the Doctor was willed to life by Mandip Gill and the collective fandom. Apparently Chibnall had no clue what his own characters were up to until he was forced to acknowledge it in "Eve of the Daleks".
Not everyone agreed with Chris Chibnall's take on the Daleks but I found his Dalek episodes to be his strongest entries and on par with the Davies and Moffat eras. "Eve of the Daleks" was a particularly strong and clever outing.
So what were my favorite episodes under Chris Chibnall
- The Woman Who Fell to Earth
- The Ghost Monument
- Rosa
- Arachnids in the UK
- Demons of the Punjab
- Kerblam!
- The Witchfinders
- Resolution
- Spyfall Parts One & Two
- Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror
- The Haunting of Villa Diodati
- Revolution of the Daleks
- Flux Chapter 2 - War of the Sontarans
- Flux Chapter 4 - Village of the Angels
- Eve of the Daleks
- The Power of the Doctor
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