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…

Doctor Who Series 11: Doctor With a Fam

The Story So Far: with the end of the Twelfth Doctor era, Grand Moff Steven has been sealed inside the Pandorica and a new showrunner has taken the throne. This is Chris Chibnall, whose original Doctor Who claim to fame was griping about all the “running up and down corridors and silly monsters” in Terror of the Vervoids, and more generally the unambitious and unchallenging nature of the fare the show was offering, when he appeared on national television on a feedback show and got to put his opinions to Pip and Jane Baker and John Nathan-Turner.

Since then, Chibnall had penned a number of stories for the show – 42, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, Dinosaurs On a Spaceship, and The Power of Three – before taking the Twelfth Doctor period off, during which his most notable televisual achievement was conceiving, writing, and showrunning Broadchurch, a British take on the Scandi-noir crime genre whose first season was a big hit and featured Doctor Who veteran David Tennant and an up and coming actress called Jodie Whittaker, whose main sci-fi claim to fame was appearing in Attack the Block. On taking over as showrunner, Chibnall installed Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor.

Casting a woman as the Doctor felt overdue. Grand Moff Steven had kind of done it when he had Rowan Atkinson regenerate (after some false starts) into Joanna Lumley in The Curse of Fatal Death, and had rendered the possibility canonically viable with the revelation in Dark Water that the Master had regenerated into Missy. Significantly before that, none other than Patrick Troughton – the actor who arguably defined regeneration, for he was the first one who had to actually carry its consequences forwards (Hartnell, by contrast, merely needed to take a bit of a lie down and then didn’t need to worry about what happened next) – had spoken approvingly of the possibility of a female Doctor.

Nonetheless, regressive sections of fandom (and people who really weren’t fans but has an axe to grind) were ready to write off the Whittaker era before even a second of it had aired, ideologically driven by the assumption that the Doctor being a woman was somehow a bridge too far. We can, of course, set the opinions of such people aside. Whittaker is a perfectly capable actress, and there was no reason, on the face of it, that her stint in the role should not have been just as successful, if not more so, than the other modern Doctors’, provided she had material of a suitable quality to work with and a showrunner capable of marshalling the cast and crew to yield decently executed productions of those scripts.

There was a window of time when believing that the man who made Broadchurch could pull that off. It seems somewhat more doubtful that the man who wrote 42 or Dinosaurs On a Spaceship could. The man who wrote the Cyberwoman episode for Torchwood is clearly, obviously wrong for the job. Which Chibnall are we going to get? Hopefully, one who’s not going to give us lots of running about in corridors and silly monsters!