The Cutprice Guignol

So, I don’t usually do a post-season breakdown when it comes to Doctor Who. But I have to be honest – this last season has left me with so many questions, I feel like I have to exorcize them on to this blog so I can move on with my life, you know?

Firstly and most foremostly, though, I want to make it very clear that what I’m talking about here is the writing and marketing for this season, which I think make up the vast majority of the problem. This isn’t an article intended to dunk on Ncuti Gatwa or Millie Gibson or, indeed, any of the actors this season – the issue very much lies behind the scenes, and that’s what I want to get into here.

So, with that aside, let’s touch on where the problems all began – before this season even began to air, showrunner Russel T Davies had discussed at length the new, improved version of the show he was planning to usher in with this run. This new season was announced as season one (which it most certainly is not – it’s season fourteen of the 2005 reboot, and season forty of the show overall) of the show, a bizarre choice that signalled issues to come for me right then and there. I can understand the 2005 version being given the season one moniker, after the show was off the air for over a decade and featured a soft reboot for the show that would pretty much serve as a re-introduction for new fans, but this?

Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor plopped out of David Tennant less than ten months ago. The show is one of the biggest things on the planet, pop culturally. It didn’t need a reboot or a re-introduction – we already know this show. It’s been virtually inescapable for the better part of a decade now – even trying to pull off a reboot of something that has been so omnipresent seems like an uphill battle, and one that’s not even really worth doing in the first place.

And I know that a big reason for this banner reboot promotion is the shift to streaming on Disney Plus. Now, I think this was an inevitability for the show at one point or another, given how much streaming has dominated television in the last few years, but Disney does not lay claim to a great track record when it comes to getting their hands on genre franchises (Star Wars, I’m looking – well, not looking, actually, because I’ve been avoiding you like the plague for more than a year – at you). This reboot being so tied to the show’s move to Disney threw up red flags for me from day one; whatever version of Doctor Who that had come before (however patchy) was one that stuck to its roots as a BBC show.

Okay, so I hated the idea of this weird reboot season one from the start, I’ll admit that. But how did the reboot function in practice?

Well, if you’re reading this, you’ve likely read my reviews of this season – ranging from mediocre to bad to I Am Calling My Mum to Pick Me Up and Take Me Home, I am Terrified, I am Changing My Identity, Never Contact Me Again, so you already know what I think of the season as a whole. But, ultimately, I think what renders this season one/season fourteen such a flop is how cynically it used the history of the show, especially in the final few episodes.

First, of course, was Disney’s profound and overarching need to deliver a franchise’s first same-sex kiss; the episode Rogue was received with media fanfare and plenty of back-patting about how Important it was that Who had finally had its first on-screen same-sex kiss in sixty-odd years of programming. I mean, that was, of course, factually a lie – a bizarre and easily-disprovable one that made the reboot look like a cynical attempt to lay claim to progressive “firsts” that the show already very much did (at a time when it was markedly less culturally acceptable to do them). It felt like a bit of a slap in the face to fans of the show, especially LGBTQ ones like me, who found a lot of comfort in seeing those aspects of themselves in such a mainstream show.

And then, of course, came the finale. With the reveal that the big bad for this season was none other than Sutekh – a character introduced in the Tom Baker era several decades before, who’s apparently been kicking around in the background of the show ever since.

Not only is this revelation just an invitation for the fandom to uncover the endless series of plotholes that comes with it, but it’s also a profoundly weird choice for a show that seems to be moving away from its history. Davies could have invented pretty much anything for this season’s major villain, but the choice to not only go with a pretty niche classic villain (and to require at least some knowledge of his past on the show to make sense of him in this season) but to then retcon that villain into all the stories that have come since? It’s a choice I genuinely can’t make sense of as part of even the softest of soft reboots, one that not only draws on the first run of the show, but makes active changes to the storylines of every plot that has come since.

This is ultimately what lowered this season from “a collection of relatively bad episodes” to “a genuinely terrible and baffling piece of TV” for me – Davis, and the production and marketing around this season as a whole, wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Ignoring and rewriting aspects of the show’s history to claim significant “firsts”, but then drawing on pretty obscure lore to lend a big bad weight. It felt cynical, and if there’s one thing I can’t stand in Doctor Who, it’s cynicism.

I would love to hear what you thought of this season below – how does it work as a soft reboot for you? Should it have been a reboot at all? How are you feeling about the show’s future after this season? Let me know in the comments!

If you liked this article and want to see more stuff like it, please check out the rest of my Doctor Who reviews! I’d also love it if you would check out my horrible short story collection, and, if you’d like to support my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon!

(header image via The Scotsman)