The Cutprice Guignol

With The Reality War, Ncuti Gatwa’s time as the Doctor on Doctor Who is behind us – and I’d like to take a look back at his seasons on the show, and exactly how it was fumbled as badly as it was.

So when it comes to talking about the problems with Ncuti Gatwa’s era, I want to make it very clear that the problems I have aren’t with him and never have been. Given that Gatwa is both the first black and first openly-gay actor to play the Doctor, there are plenty of people who have concluded that these factors are influential on the quality of his era, and I think that’s just comically, obviously, wrong. In the same way that the issues with Jodie Whittaker’s era had nothing to do with her being a woman, the issues with Gatwa’s era have nothing to do with him being part of certain minority groups; there is no inherent issue with a person of any race, gender, or sexuality playing the Doctor, and I’m not going to be swayed from that stance.

Gatwa’s a great actor, and I generally really enjoyed his turn as the Doctor – yes, even the crying (it seems to have been a huge bugbear for some viewers – maybe it’s just because I’m prone to a bit of blubbering over not-much myself, but it never took away from his performance for me). Gatwa’s performance that was bright and distinct and witty and warm in a whole lot of ways – there are a few episodes where he really, truly shines as a version of the Doctor that we should have gotten more of, like his most recent Christmas special, and even when the scripts weren’t there to back him up, he gave it his all. There is a version of this era that makes the most of Gatwa as an actor and what he brings to the role, and this wasn’t it. He didn’t even get to meet a Dalek. It’s a piss-take, honestly.

Which brings me to my main issue with this era – which is, of course, the writing. As far as I’m concerned, these last couple of seasons have featured the absolute worst writing of the entire rebooted show’s run – even episodes with strong ideas or interesting screenwriters behind them were often limited by cramped runtimes, and let’s be honest, there were only a small handful of them as it was. I thought of putting together a best-of episodes list as I did for previous eras for this article, but, in truth, there aren’t three episodes in this era that I like unequivocally enough to put them there.

It seems quite clear to me, looking back on these two seasons, that they were only ever intended to be a single run – leading from Space Babies to the round-up with Poppy at the season’s end – which was hastily sliced up across two seasons and multiple companions when behind-the-scenes issues led to desperate fudging to keep things somewhat in hand. And while I’ve got sympathy for problems off-screen leading to problems on, they don’t explain the sheer drop-off in actual scene-to-scene writing quality that was present in this era.

The quality of the writing, especially from RTD himself, was pretty shocking at times – clunky, blunt dialogue, thematic elements flogged to death, stories that required you to ignore gaping plot holes just for things to hang together. Shifting the show into a more fantastical realm with the pantheon gods gave the stories less meat-and-potatoes plot to get into, and often just revolved around some deus ex machina (excuse the pun) that was reliant less on wit and ingenuity and more on hand-waving in the writer’s room. When your big bad is defeated by dragging him along behind your car on a lead for ten seconds, maybe we need to go back to the drawing board, you know?

For a show like Doctor Who, one of the most iconic pieces of genre fiction of all time, to present stories as nonsensical, messy, and blundering as this – it feels almost as though it was going out of its way to suck at times, such was the level of drop-off from the previous era. I mean, Space Babies, for fuck’s sake! It’s been a year, and I’m still not over how fucking awful it is.

The politics of this era are perhaps the most confusing part of it, especially with regards to its treatment of women – for all the time it spent finger-wagging about incels and entitled men, the arcs for both Ruby Sunday and Belinda Chandra came down to matters of motherhood at the end-up. Belinda didn’t even get a choice in the matter, retconned in canon into always having been a mother just an episode after that very fate was presented as part of a regressive right-wing fantasy world. 73 Yards was a particularly questionable episode, with sexual and physical abuse meted out against a female character in a way that the episode clearly did not know how to handle. Doctor Who features some of my favourite female characters of all time, and to see Davis revert to stories about motherhood as the central part of a woman’s life felt like such a missed opportunity.

And that’s not the only one he missed. Conversations about tokenism, I often find, are thin covers for people to bitch and moan about showrunners casting more diversely. But I have to admit, I really felt like some of the minority characters were treated as little more than symbols here, especially with how the marketing around the show promoted them. Rogue was held up as an example of the show’s first same-sex kiss, when it just wasn’t, only for his plot to get all-but forgotten in the second season. Rose (Yasmin Finney) appears in the last season pretty much for the Doctor to point at her and assure us that she’s too special and unique for bigots to imagine her – she’s in UNIT, for God’s sake, let her do something interesting! It felt like many of these characters were boiled down to what demographic tick they could fill for the show, and that’s just really fucking atrocious writing alongside the obvious utter cynicism.

And that’s the word I would use to describe this era above all else: cynical. Dredging up classic characters only to make no decent use of them, promoting progressivism that the show had already achieved twenty years previously, sandwiching Gatwa between two returning fan favourite actors to try and drag in some nostalgic fans – it was hard not to see so much of it as a calculated move to boost the then-flagging show. But Doctor Who is, at its heart, an earnest little tale of adventures through time and space, and coating that in the veneer of cynicism has done nothing but hurt it. With the return of Billie Piper (which I talked a bit more about earlier this week), I can’t imagine that we’re going to see that change anytime soon, but I’m still hanging on to hope. Because, with this show, I always will.

I would love to hear your takes on this era in the comments – where does it land for you in terms of previous eras, both in New Who and original flavour? Are you sad to see Ncuti Gatwa go, and would you like to have seen him stay longer? 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 joining me on Patreon!

(header image via BBC)