The Virgin New Adventures: Luciferian Blood and Rising Heat

The story so far: after the Timewyrm arc established the Virgin New Adventures and the Cat’s Cradle arc saw them leaning into their more experimental side, the run of novels from Nightshade to Deceit saw Ace leave the TARDIS, 26th Century archaeologist Bernice “Benny” Summerfield joining, and Ace coming back again after spending some time in the 26th Century becoming a catsuited warrior badass. The next tranche of novels would explore the “new normal”, in which in a departure from his televised appearances the Seventh Doctor would be accompanied by two companions at once. (OK, sure, there was Dragonfire which had Mel and Ace in it, but Ace doesn’t officially sign on as a companion there until Mel says “I’m interested in Glitz so I’m calling it quits.”) This would be an important test of the concept; stories like The Highest Science had shown that Bernice could work very well as a solo companion, but now the chemistry between the Doctor, Benny, and new-Ace must be tested. Let’s see how that goes…

Lucifer Rising by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore

The first journey of the Doctor-Benny-Ace trifecta takes them to the gas giant Lucifer and its moons, Moloch and Belial. It’s the 2150s, and Earth Central has set up a research programme – Project Eden – with the goal of examining the mysteries of this system, such as the space elevator connecting the two moons (in a manner which makes a nonsense of everything physics tells us about how gravitational orbits work, the hollow world within Moloch full of vegetation, the weird artifacts concealed in Belial, and the utterly strange aliens, dubbed the Angels, that live in the atmosphere of the gas giant itself. The ultimate goal is to establish communication with the Angels in order to gain their co-operation in extracting rare materials from the core of the gas giant – materials which could be useful to Earth’s ever-growing requirements for energy.

In her own time, Benny knows this as an archaeological oddity; records showed that some fruitful research had happened here, only for the whole thing to shut down under mysterious circumstances. The Doctor’s fascinated too, and Ace seems to be taking an interest as well, despite her grumpier attitude and her deeper commitment to violence. Perhaps Ace’s skills will be of use – for within a few weeks of the TARDIS crew ingratiating their way into Project Eden, Paula Engado dies. Paula, daughter of Project Coordinator Miles Engado, ended up suffering a malfunction in her starsuit – an advanced spacesuit with significant self-propulsion capabilities – and fell into Lucifer’s atmosphere, the extreme pressure rupturing her starsuit and killing her. Adjudicator Bishop has arrived to investigate the case, and everyone is a suspect – including the Doctor.

Bishop is right to be suspicious. The ultimate value of Project Eden, from Earth’s perspective, are those sweet sweet anomalous materials in the gas giants, not the research – and that means powerful interests are paying attention to Project Eden. That includes IMC – the dodgy mining corporation from Colony In Space – who’ll stop at nothing to take control of things. With the Project staff on edge and off their game thanks to the shock of Paula’s death, the IMC’s spy could end up with a fairly free hand. It’s a good thing that the Doctor, Benny, and Ace are all carefully keeping an eye on things… or it would be, if there wasn’t a dangerous, manipulative chess game being played with time travel here. And this time, it’s not the Doctor who’s playing. For back in the 2500s, Ace made her own deal with IMC…

Lone Wolf and Cub: Surprisingly Not Furry

Released between 1970 and 1976, the Lone Wolf and Cub manga by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima has unleashed a range of spin-offs, and perhaps the most famous is the series of six movies put out by Toho. Four of the six were released in 1972 alone, with an annual release in 1973 and 1974 before the sequence petered out; the series was initially produced by Shintaro Katsu, star of the long-running Zatoichi series which habitually put out several instalments in a year, and on his part it seems to have been his bid to craft a similar regular gig for his elder brother, Tomisaburo Wakayama, who took on the lead role of Itto, the Lone Wolf.

Whereas the Zatoichi sequence ran for over a decade, Lone Wolf and Cub was over within a few years – then again, in the same general timespan Zatoichi also petered to a halt, so perhaps the market was shifting. Either way, it’s the Lone Wolf and Cub movies which have gained more recognition with Western audiences, for reasons I’ll get into towards the end of this article; the Criterion Collection has put out a compilation of Lone Wolf and Cub, in particular. For this review, I’m going to review all seven movies in the six-part series – no, that’s not a typo, you’ll understand by the end…

Oh, and rape is a frequent feature of these stories, so content warning for discussion of that below here.

Sword of Vengeance

We open with Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama) attending to some business with the lord of a noble house, who has been denounced as a traitor. The lord is, alas, a small child – but such are the draconian measures the Tokugawa Shogunate are turning to, along with a network of ninja spies and assassins. Officially, Ogami’s role in the state apparatus is to act as the second of nobles who are performing seppuku, to ensure they can do it properly or to perform the act himself if they cannot (as is the case with this small child). In practice, everyone knows and admits that he is the Shogun’s executioner.

There are those, however, who have decided his usefulness is at an end – shadowy forces gathering power to themselves within the bureaucracy who realise that Ogami is unlikely to be recruitable for their schemes, but is eminently replaceable – simply engineer an incident at his home to prompt an investigation, plant incriminating evidence to conprehensively discredit him, and you open up his position to be co-opted. So it is that ninjas infiltrate his household and kill Ogami’s wife Azami (Keiko Fujita), family, and servants, and soon after Inspector General Bizen Yagyu (Fumio Watanabe) – a senior agent of the conspiracy – shows up to frame Ogami as a traitor intending to assassinate the Shogun.

By the end of the gambit, the Ogami clan is near extinct; only Itto himself and his tiny son Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) have survived, Itto having slain the Inspector. Now the former executioner journeys through the land as a dishevelled ronin, toting Daigoro in a baby cart…

Doctor Who: The Sonic Salvaging of the Sixth, Part 1

The consensus in Doctor Who fandom seems to be that whilst the Sixth Doctor’s run on television was kind of rough, Colin Baker was really able to turn the character around in the Big Finish audio dramas, where at long last he was given solid material to work with and wasn’t caught up in a power struggle between a script editor and a producer with opposed views on the show’s direction. If we set aside the multi-Doctor oddity The Sirens of Time, Colin Baker’s first Big Finish audio was Whispers of Terror. This paired him with a returning Nicola Bryant in a story which managed to be, if not stellar, at least more consistently enjoyable than much of the material they’d starred in together. Over year 2000, Baker would go on to star in four different Big Finish audios – none of which featured Peri, or for that matter Mel – for Baker would be the first Doctor to perform the role for Big Finish opposite companions he’d never travelled with during the TV show.

In the case of the Sixth Doctor, there’s a compelling creative opportunity set up for this. The timey-wimey nature of The Trial of a Time Lord means that it sets a firm end point for his journeys with Peri, who’d been his companion since prior to his regeneration, but whilst he leaves the courtroom with Mel at the end of the saga, this sets up a bit of a paradox – because Mel comes to the courtroom from some point in her personal timeline after Terror of the Vervoids, which was picked out by the Doctor as a case from his future, involving a companion he hadn’t actually met yet.

The smoothest way to resolve the paradox is to assume that the Sixth Doctor and Mel don’t go directly from The Ultimate Foe to Time and the Rani without any stopovers in between; instead, the Doctor dropped Mel off wherever she’d been plucked away from to attend the courtroom (where she was most likely then picked up by a future version of the Sixth Doctor), and then went off on his own way, eventually encountering Mel for the first time and experiencing Terror of the Vervoids for real instead of as courtroom footage.

This means that, just like the Second Doctor is theorised to have enjoyed an entire “Season 6B” following The War Games in which he undertook tasks for the Celestial Intervention Agency before his forced regeneration was imposed upon him, so too can we imagine any number of “Season 23Bs” enjoyed by the Sixth Doctor; in fact, Season 23B is even better-supported by the TV show itself than Season 6B, because the mere existence of Terror of the Vervoids implies its existence directly, no reasoning outside of the television show needed. We can go further than that, though: sure, sooner or later the Sixth Doctor must meet Mel for the “first” time, but who says he can’t go the long way around to get there? It’s possible to infer all sorts of new friends for him to meet in between – and in doing so, this creates a creative space to explore how the character might have further developed into the softer direction which Trial gave us glimpses of.

Of course, to get the best out of that, you’d need the right companion, and as it happens Big Finish managed to strike gold the first time around…

The Marian Conspiracy

Dr. Evelyn Smythe (Maggie Stables), a middle-aged history professor, is giving a lecture on Elizabeth I’s rise to power and the difficulties she faced during the reign of Queen Mary. Unfortunately, a big-haired buffoon in a clownish coat has shown up with a machine that makes annoying bleeping noises; this proves so disruptive that Evelyn has to cut the lecture short. When she confronts the weirdo in question, he witters about how she’s somehow connected to a temporal nexus point which threatens the integrity of the timeline, and on top of all that insists that John Whiteside Smith – privy councillor to Elizabeth I and ancestor of Evelyn – never existed. To make things even more ridiculous, the stranger makes this claim on the preposterous grounds that he himself frequented Elizabeth’s court, and would have met Whiteside had he existed!

When the weirdo shows up at her home, Evelyn decides to let him see her family records for himself, just to shut him up. Not only is Whiteside missing, but Evelyn’s entire family tree starts to fade away before her very eyes! The stranger explains that some manner of time paradox has ended up affecting her history, and that if it is not resolved she too will pop out of existence. Well, Evelyn has felt a bit under the weather recently, and the disappearance of information from her notes is outright bizarre – perhaps there’s something to the stranger’s claims after all. After all, he is a Doctor…

A Coen Brothers Cross-Section: Early Works

Joel and Ethan Coen might, like David Lynch, be fairly entry-level talents in terms of people of my generation getting into the more arthouse side of movies. That isn’t to say their work is simplistic – Lynch’s certainly isn’t – but the Coens’ output, like Lynch’s, tends to be the sort of thing which gets widely and enthusiastically enough recommended that whilst they’re clearly not going for populist shovelware, at the same time you can hardly describe them as obscure. Can you really be a cult moviemaking duo if your work is so broadly well-received?

Still, even though it doesn’t get me any points on the niche-o-meter, I do really enjoy a lot of their work, and since part of the function of doing reviews on this blog is to help me Marie Kondo my collection to make sure I’m not needlessly hanging onto stuff I’ve fallen out of love with without realising, I may as well address their works. This article series is unlikely to be a full profile of all their work, it’s more a cross-section of their stuff which particularly stands out to me. For this article, I’ll look to the earliest phases of their career, starting with their debut.

Blood Simple

Texas bar owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) has a problem: Ray (John Getz), one of his bartenders, has been getting really close to Abby (Frances McDormand), Julian’s wife. In a vulnerable moment, Ray and Abby cross the line and check into a motel, where they bang – and where they’re tracked down by Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), a private detective working for Julian. A phone call in the morning lets them realise they’re rumbled – a meeting between Marty and Visser sees Marty tipped off. Abby and Ray see about getting her stuff out of the Marty household; Ray takes the risk of swinging by the bar quickly to demand his back pay from Julian.

Things don’t go so well, and get worse when Marty tries to kidnap Abby from Ray’s home, only to get his ass kicked. Despite his distaste for Visser, Marty decides to hire him to kill Ray and Abby, but Visser double-crosses him. When Ray stumbles across the aftermath of that, it inadvertently sows seeds of suspicion between him and Abby – neither of them realising that it’s Visser they should be afraid of…

Doctor Who: Seven’s Sonic Seasons, Part 1

As I’ve previously described, Big Finish announced the arrival of their Doctor Who audio dramas with the oddball multi-Doctor adventure The Sirens of Time, followed by a brace of stories featuring the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors to establish their credentials at telling solo stories featuring the Doctors of the 1980s. Over 1999 and 2000s, they continued to put out their monthly range, expanding each Doctor’s line of audio dramas until they eventually had done the equivalent of a short season of the television show for each of them.

For this article, I’m going to look at their early Seventh Doctor stories, following The Fearmonger. On the one hand, the Seventh Doctor’s brief television run ought to have set him in good stead for adaptation to the audio drama format – his seasons of the show were good enough to act as a showcase for how writers could get the best out of McCoy’s interpretation of the Doctor, but were brief enough to leave all sorts of directions unexplored. On the other hand, the Virgin New Adventures had taken the character in an odd new direction which on the one hand would never have flown on television, but on the other hand had been broadly embraced by the fanbase. This left Big Finish at a crossroads with their Seventh Doctor material: do they mimic the TV show, follow the lead of the New Adventures, or try to find their own way?

The Genocide Machine

The Doctor and Ace have come to Kar-Charrat – a jungle world that is home to a vast library that rivals even the Matrix of Gallifrey for the sheer range of information it contains. Chief Librarian Elgin (Bruce Montague) is only too glad to greet the Doctor, who becomes quite interested in the new “wetwork” technology the library has deployed for data storage. Meanwhile, spacefaring antiquities thief Bev Tarrant (Louise Faulkner) and her team are excavating a nearby ziggurat – said ziggurat being the latest antiquity Bev has been assigned to steal – when they are assailed by violent robotic pepperpots YELL-ING ANG-RI-LY. It’s the Daleks – but what are they doing here?

Penned by Mike Tucker, The Genocide Machine is the first of the loose Dalek Empire series which ran through the Doctor Who monthly range in its early years. In theory it’s a connected arc, but in practice it doesn’t seem like there’s much connecting the arc beyond “here’s this incarnation of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks on Big Finish”; the Dalek Empire title would later be assigned to a Doctor-less spin-off series about the Daleks doing one of their bids for galactic domination and some homebrewed heroes trying to stop them.

A Touch of Zen

Fort Jinglu is a foreboding ruin at rhe edge of a sleepy rural town that has stood empty since immemorial. Gu Shengzhai (Shih Chun) lives next door to it with his mother (Zhang Bing-yu), who frets that he’s satisfied being a mere scribe and scholar rather than trying out for the civil service, a good marriage, and other forms of social advancement. Shengzhai, however, has other things on his mind: he keeps hearing noises from the fort, bringing to mind all the old legends about it being haunted. What’s more, there’s strangers in town – the herbalist Dr. Lu (Xue Han) and his apprentice (Wan Zhong-shan) who showed up a month ago seem nice enough, but there’s something odd about Ouyang Nian (Tien Peng) – a strange man who only just arrived, seems to be spying on the herbalist, and appears intent on getting Shengzhai to believe in the ghost stories.

There’s no ghosts in the Fort, however – instead, someone very much alive is living in there, a coldly formal woman named Miss Yang (Hsu Feng). Who is Miss Yang? Who are the other strangers? Can Shengzhai’s mother convince him to try for Miss Yang’s hand in marriage? Why does Ouyang suddenly seem keen to encourage him to take the civil service exam and move away? And why has the Eastern Group – a feared secret police force controlled by the Imperial palace eunuchs – taken an interest in this sleepy little town?

Directed by King Hu, this followup to his previous Dragon Inn is another highbrow wuxia effort, but unlike that movie was not an instant hit; being rather long, it was initially released in two parts, neither of which performed well domestically, and it was only when the full three hour version had a showing at Cannes that it gathered widespread international praise. You can somewhat see why that is the case; it’s a three hour martial arts epic in which not a single blow is struck for nearly 40 minutes, the first proper fight doesn’t happen until around an hour in, and what appears to be the climactic fight happens half an hour before the end.

Tower of London: Corman Does Shakespeare

Edward IV (Justice Watson) is on his deathbed. His brothers Richard (Vincent Price) and the Duke of Clarence (Charles Maacaulay) rush to his side, and learn that King Edward intends that his son Edward (Eugene Mazzola) succeed him, with Clarence named regent until the boy-king comes of age. Richard has been Edward IV’s ruthless right hand, doing his dirty work so that the King’s hands remain clean; he has no intention of being second fiddle to anyone. That very night, Richard murders Clarance and conceals his body in the wine cellars. Can Richard, spurred on by his wife Anne (Joan Camden), clamber his way to the throne?

1962’s Tower of London was a quick little thing that Roger Corman knocked out for United Artists midway through the run of Poe adaptations he and Vincent Price were producing for American International Pictures. (Specifically, it came out in between Tales of Terror and The Raven.) Like the 1939 Tower of London – a Basil Rathbone vehicle from Universal – it’s largely based on the popular perception of Richard III as a murderous villain who backstabbed his way to the English throne. Given the role of Shakespeare’s history plays in baking this pro-Tudor perception of history into the popular consciousness, it’s no surprise the production takes in generous doses of inspiration from Shakespeare; it’s primarily riffing on Richard III and Macbeth, though one can detect touches of the likes of Hamlet, with the ghost of Clarence stalking the battlements like Hamlet’s father. (For that matter, one of the torture setpieces is lifted not from Shakespeare but Orwell, with a rat-in-a box concept taken directly from 1984.)

What immediately stands out about Tower of London is that it’s in black and white – which means that the sumptuous colours of the Poe adaptations are off the menu. Given the lavish costumes and interior sets, this is a shame in some way. At the same time, some benefit arises from the monochrome depiction; it evokes a world of concealing shadows, for one thing. For another, the exterior model shots and outside sets are far from convincing, but benefit somewhat from being shot in near-darkness to add to the medieval-gothic atmosphere of the whole thing.

And make no mistake, we’re in full Corman gothic mode here. The narration calls the tower “a monument to the corruption of the soul”, which given that it’s still the repository of the Crown Jewels is wholly accurate. The pro-Tudor propaganda of yesteryear is given an even more cartoonishly garish take, but that’s kind of fun in its own right, and if the royal succession of England is seen as a charnel house of horror than as far as I am concerned that’s all to the good.

Whilst a story largely focused on campy historical melodrama would have been fine by itself, here Corman gives things a substantially more supernatural bent. The ghosts here are a bit more inclined to direct interventions than in Shakespeare, and the more the ghostly manifestations pile up, the cheesier this all gets and the more this leans into outright supernaturalism. Although a lot of the manifestations could be written off as Richard losing his mind due to his guilt a la Macbeth, some of the incidents are a bit too heavy-handed to sustain that; Richard Hale appears as Tyrus, physician and occultist, who from his garb appears to come from somewhere in the Islamic world (the Ottoman Empire, or Granada, or one of the states of North Africa, perhaps), or maybe the recently-fallen Byzantine Empire, and seems to call up the spirit of the departed Edward IV at one point, for instance, and Richard’s ultimate demise comes in a form which suggests the spirits genuinely know the future.

The most chilling thing about the ghosts how intent they are to drag Richard down with them. There’s a bit where the ghost of Mistress Shore (Sandra Knight) positions herself just where Anne is about to stand, so when a terrified and infuriated Richard goes to throttle Shore he kills Anne by mistake; later, he has an implied necrophiliac obsession with Anne. In another instance, the ghosts of the princes in the Tower show up and attempt to lure Richard to walk to his death off the walls of the tower.

The ghost scenes, of course, hinge as much on Price’s reactions as Richard as they do on the ghosts themselves – more, in fact, because the ghosts aren’t really behaving like they did in life, and because Price is largely carrying the movie in the scenes with live human beings too. The movie is basically a vehicle for Price to be Price, whilst also doing a take on iconic Shakespearean role without the constraints of actually using Shakespeare’s script. The hunchback thing from the play is very much there; it would seem all the more prominent if it weren’t for everyone else using melodramatic poses as often as possible, but it still steers into a “deformity as sign of evil” trope which was part of the original character assassination. Richard has an only-wearing-one-glove thing going on which is weird but I guess a good way to play up his asymmetry, and that’s kind of how Price plays the hunchback thing – not as a burdensome disability but as a way of showing Richard as being asymmetrical, off-balance, and askew.

It’s not that the other characters are without their charms. The way the widowed Queen (Sarah Selby) and Richard’s mother (Sara Taft) form a compact against him is quite fun. The head torturer is called Gelder, which is simultaneously funny and grim. Interestingly, Henry Tudor is barely a presence in this, beyond a passing mention in dialogue as the Duke of Richmond, but a decent court of supporters and rebels is developed over the course of the movie. But with a running time of under 80 minutes (the poster above is flat-out wrong, so far as I can find out there’s no 83 minute version), there’s no time for anyone other than Price to get more than cursory development.

If you’re watching this on the strength of his performance, that won’t be a problem – and if you’re watching this at all, it’s probably because you want to watch Price chew scenery in a Corman-directed historical gothic extravaganza. Given the Shakespeare themes, this would go well in a double bill with Theatre of Blood.

Doctor Who – The 2022 Specials: CHIBFALL

I imagine that every so often, Chris Chibnall has a disconcerting dream. He’s sat on a panel at a convention somewhere, discussing his Doctor Who work with the audience, when somewhere out in the crowd he catches sight of a teenage boy in spectacle frames that somewhat overpower his face and an overly neat suit. He realises that it his sixteen year old self, as he was when he voiced fan complaints about the show to Pip and Jane Baker (and, phoning in to the feedback segment they were appearing on, John Nathan-Turner).

He looks down to reassure himself of his identity – yes, he is the present-day Chris Chibnall, despite the 1986 one also being present. He looks to his left. There, sat at the panel table with him, are Pip and Jane. He looks to his right. There’s John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward. Ian Levine is out in the crowd, carrying a microphone, and Chibnall realises that the panel has reached its Q&A section. A chill runs down his spine as Levine walks impossibly slowly towards the back of the room, towards Chibnall’s 16 year old self, ready to offer the microphone to take young-Chibnall’s comment. Chibnall presses his hands against his ears, but they block no sound. He does not want to hear. He does not. For he knows that young-Chibnall will comment this time not on The Trial of a Time Lord, but on Chibnall’s tenure as showrunner, and these words will destroy him.

He looks to his left again. Pip and Jane are gone. He looks to his right again. Saward is gone. Wasn’t there someone else to his right?

He looks down.

He is wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

He realises, just before he screams himself awake, that he has become John Nathan-Turner.

The story so far: after a shaky first season, an utter disaster of a second season, and the strange experiment of Flux, Chibnall was a dead showrunner walking. Even before Flux aired, Chibnall and Whittaker announced their intention to depart. In 2022, only three episodes of Doctor Who aired – a last brace of specials to round out the Chibnall era. If I were still trying to give Chibnall the benefit of the doubt, I would rhetorically ask here whether Chibnall could use these last episodes to turn things around for the era of the show, but it’s pretty evident that it’s way too late for that and, unless Whittaker is as hopelessly optimistic and woefully slow on the uptick in real life as she portrays the Doctor as being, everyone involved ought to have known that. This is a death march, a last lap of the circuit done not to mark victory but out of pure obligation, filling the gap before Russell T. Davies once again returns to save Doctor Who from oblivion.

We kick off with the New Year’s Day special – Eve of the Daleks. After all of the palaver of Flux, the Doctor needs to let the TARDIS defragment its temporal hard drive, so she parks it in a car park and everyone hops out to let the old girl sort herself out. The Doctor is disturbed to detect a temporal anomaly two floors above – in a run-down self-storage facility – which doesn’t seem to be due to the TARDIS’ presence. It turns out a Dalek has teleported in. The Dalek duly kills everyone present in the facility – Nick (Adjani Salmon) the customer, Sarah (Aisling Bea) the manager, Yaz, Nick, and the Doctor…

…at which point time rewinds to around the point when the Doctor and the others arrived. As the victims’ memories seep back, Sarah and Nick attempt to leave only to discover that the building is sealed by some manner of force field, the Doctor and the fam investigate, and it all gets a bit Groundhog Day.

The cast try to sneak off to the pub without inviting Chibnall.

Doctor Who Series 13: Doctor In Flux

The story so far: after a shaky first season, Jodie Whittaker’s tenure as the Thirteenth Doctor has had an utterly disastrous second season, with Chris Chibnall’s judgement, taste, ability to promote the show, production knowhow, and writing approach all disintegrating. At this point, COVID struck. Rumour has it that there was about an hour or so during the pandemic when Doctor Who was cancelled or on hiatus, but Chibnall persuaded his superiors that it would be viable to do a six-episode mini-season for 2021 under COVID-safe production conditions.

There are many ironies arising from a teenage Chibnall’s appearance on a 1986 episode of feedback show Open Air, but perhaps the ultimate one is that after making a memorable television debut running down The Trial of a Time Lord, he ended up producing his own riff on the same basic concept – a season of Doctor Who with a truncated number of episodes compared to a full-size episode of the period, with one big story spanning the season divided into a series of smaller tales. The overarching tale is Flux, but I am going to treat each episode as an individual story because, as in The Trial of a Time Lord, mashing them all together risks letting unusually bad sub-stories off the hook and selling unusually good sub-stories short.

Our first episode is The Halloween Apocalypse. We open with a light, quip-heavy action sequence in which it turns out the Doctor and Yaz have annoyed a fairly generic space villain called Karvanista (Craig Els), who’s left them in a deathtrap whilst he heads to Earth to destroy it. They escape in a big, cartoonish way, and then use the TARDIS to pursue Karvanista. Meanwhile, Scouse pest Dan (John Bishop) is making a nuisance of himself at the Museum of Liverpool by pretending to be a tour guide, the mysterious entity known as Swarm (Sam Spruell) escapes from its aeons-long confinement and transmits to the Doctor a telepathic vision of its liberation, and the TARDIS has sprung a nasty leak. When Karvanista commences his invasion of Earth by busting into Dan’s house, Karvanista is perturbed when Dan seems immune to his mental powers. Can the Doctor and Yaz save Dan, stop Karvanista, figure out what the deal with Swarm is, and fix that leak?

Doctor Who Series 12: Doctor In an Origin Story

The story so far: Chris Chibnall’s tenure as showrunner of Doctor Who has endured a difficult first season. Jodie Whittaker has done her best as the Thirteenth Doctor, but the material she has been given is a mixed bag at best, and whilst there’s some episodes worth seeking out such as It Takes You Away or Demons of the Punjab, there’s also signs of profound creative trouble. Season closer The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos was, by Chibnall’s own admission, shot using a first draft script because he ran out of time, and on a broader, more systematic level, Chibnall’s creative instincts seem shaky (greenlighting an episode in which Amazon is presented as basically benign, save for the labour protests disrupting their warehouses, showed poor taste), and the experiment in having a large TARDIS crew ran into the problem large crews always encounter, which is that there’s too frequently not enough for everyone to do.

The companions were all very broadly and shallowly defined – the sort of brief character sketches which might have passed muster for a companion idea in the mid-1980s, but haven’t been acceptable ever since the writing of Ace raised the bar in the McCoy era. Can Chibnall and his team of new writers turn things around and give Whittaker and her fam the material they need to turn this ship around?

Fuck no.

The show had taken a year off after the transmission of Resolution on New Year’s Day 2019; this season made its debut a year after that, with the first episode of the Spyfall two-parter airing on New Year’s Day 2020. It’s a Chibnall-penned story in which the Doctor and the fam are called in by C (Stephen Fry), the head of MI6, to investigate a string of attacks on intelligence agents around the world. Every agency from every country has suffered casualties – and none of them, separately or in collaboration with others, could plausibly be responsible for the attacks, not least because they aren’t being carried out with human technology.

All of them have one thing in common: they were investigating tech bro Daniel Barton (Lenny Henry), founder of the Vor search engine, and a former MI6 agent who ended up withdrawing cooperation. When the sinister force behind the attacks assassinates C midway through the briefing, the Doctor and fam have to undertake their own investigation. Good thing that the Doctor is buddies with the former operator of MI6’s recently-abolished X-Files department, O (Sacha Dhawan). It’ll be a good thing to have a spyMASTER onside…