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Arrr is for Run-of-the-mill

In a recent interview with the Radio Times, outbound Doctor Who showrunner, Chris Chibnall, stated that he expects Russell T Davies will ignore the changes he made while showrunner. According to Chibnall- “every era contains a contradiction or left-turn from what has come before.” Like when Moffat completely ignored the regeneration limit or the destruction of Gallifrey. Ignore the fact that in doing so, he also took into account the War Doctor and two Tenth Doctor regenerations, effectively making the Eleventh Doctor the Thirteenth Doctor. Or that the War Doctor and his future selves reversed the outcome of the Time War. Steven Moffat didn’t simply ignore what came before, he wrote something that worked within the parameters of the show. You know, like a writer.

It’s odd then that Chibnall should find himself on his second to last episode following a time-honoured tradition in Doctor Who reaching back as far as 1972. That tradition being the making of a Doctor Who story starring the Sea Devils that isn’t very interesting. Because let’s be honest, this isn’t exactly a sacred baddie. To the best of my knowledge, what most anyone likes about the Sea Devils is how they look. The sympathetic redesign of the Sea Devils leaves nothing to be desired, they look great. The good news is that the Sea Devils are no worse off than they were at the end of 1984’s “Warriors of the Deep.” The bad news is, there’s very little worth mentioning about “Legend of the Sea Devils.”

From the outside, this episode should be a winner. A beloved classic villain making its return for the first time in the new series, with pirates nonetheless! The problem here is that, much like the Sea Devils, Doctor Who has never really done a decent pirate episode before. If “Our Flag Means Death,” has proven nothing else, it’s that the pirating world is still rife with possibilities. Yet on Doctor Who, they always seem to fizzle (except “Enlightenment,” which owns ass, and I will not take questions). The pirates never feel particularly campy in this or even “The Curse of the Black Spot.” When you hear about the Doctor on a pirate ship, you want to get terrible dialogue and ridiculous set pieces. What we got instead were terrible dialogue and ridiculous set pieces. But you know, not like that.

Doctor Who has swashbuckling in its blood. Just look at Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker. David Tennant riding through a mirror on the back of a horse in front of the entire French court is as dashing as any pirate. The Doctor is a penniless explorer in a stolen ship crewed by wayward souls. She’s rubbed shoulders with the Corsair and fenced with a spoon. So why does this suck so hard? Probably the pacing, the writing, the plot, the structure, and the everything. I’ve said in the past that all I really wanted from Chibnall’s remaining episodes is that he fly under the radar, and boy howdy did he deliver. It would have been nice to expect some big dumb fun, but what we got was closer to big dumb boredom.

Right away you know something is off because everyone is stupid and vague. We meet “Madam Ching,” the pirate Queen of 1807. We don’t really get the giant obnoxious letters telling the location like we normally get, just the year. A father and son argue about stopping Madam Ching who is currently banging a MacGuffin dagger against a MacGuffin statue of a Sea Devil. It’s no question to the audience as to what is about to happen. The giant statue looks almost too big to be a Sea Devil, which is driven home all the more by the presence of a human figure in the grasp of the creature’s scaly fist. If this creature was frozen into a statue, was the human figure as well? Why didn’t they also emerge from the statue? Why were they so small? Was the Sea Devil killing a child? Did the child not survive the carbonite freezing process? Maybe someone added it later to make the creature more terrifying to ward off potential idiots like Madam Ching.

The entire scene plays out in the dumbest way possible. An older man, Ying Wai, tells his son, Ying Ki, to take over guarding the statue in case he dies. Ying Wai promptly goes off and dies. The Sea Devil, known as Marsisuss strikes him down. The magnetic whathaveyou of Marsisuss being freed pulls the TARDIS off course and draws the Doctor toward the action via her earring. Then, as if lying in wait, a floating pirate ship equipped with floaty green bits emerges from the sea, piloted by Sea Devils. What they had been doing in all that time is anyone’s guess. You would think that if your captain doesn’t reappear for about 300 years, the first mate might take command, eventually. It’s like Marsisuss left the car running with the window cracked and his kids are still waiting for him to return from the bank.

What may have been more illustrative, or even more engaging is perhaps Marsisuss needs to first awaken his troops from the sea. Maybe he needs to blow a conch that signals the reviving process and the Doctor tries to stop him. Instead the ship merely appears in the sky like Bowser’s airship. I say this not just because the ships are similar, but that they both have about as much setup. Despite the abrupt and unlikely appearance of Marsisuss’ getaway ride, it does at least look cool. Up to that point, the special effects had been somewhat lacking, so much so that my wife spent the first five minutes marvelling at how bad everything looked. But I honestly don’t mind when Doctor Who looks a bit naff. Like Nintendo, it’s not about the graphics. You want Playstation 5 quality, go watch The Madalorian. I knew the score though, they were saving most of the effects budget for the Sea Devils and their giant sea monster. It’s pretty standard filmmaking, that. Save the money for the important stuff.

There’s a sort of parallel between the Doctor and Madam Ching. Both are famous women travellers piloting a ship by themselves, which actually should be piloted by an entire crew. The parallel is strained by the fact that Madam Ching is so much better a solo pilot than the Doctor. It’s not a question of skill, but a mere observation of facts. We’ve all seen sail barges in movies. You don’t keep a ship crew for the company, these men all have jobs! No matter how much tenacity one woman may have, nobody could sail such a ship alone. If she is on the hunt for the Legendary Ji-Hun’s sunken treasure, she would need a crew to operate a bottom trawler. We’ve all seen these movies and read these stories. We’ve heard “Raise the flag and hoist the mainsail!” time and time again, so it rings hollow when we see something so physically impossible. It’s like Mr Plinkett says- “You might not have noticed, but your brain did.”

The Doctor and Yaz go off to have a bit of lesbian processing while Dan and his new friend Ying Ki are caught spying by Madam Ching. The Doctor’s plan is to go to the point where the treasure was lost at sea and rescue it before it falls to the bottom of the ocean, even though the Doctor illustrates that the TARDIS can actually sit at the bottom of the ocean with an air bubble protecting them. While back in time, aboard Ji-Hun’s ship, we see Ji-Hun forcing his men overboard and pledging allegiance to Marsisuss. The ship never actually sank, but was rather taken over by the Sea Devils and decked out with green floaty bits. They must have been proud of this visual because they give the ship three big reveals. It’s like “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” in here. The Doctror and Yaz abscond back to the TARDIS just as a fight breaks out between Ji-Hun and Marsisuss. Landing at the bottom of the ocean, the Doctor finds no sign of sunken wreckage. Using the Little Mermaid ambience, the Doctor chooses this as the moment to flirt with Yaz a little.

At this moment, the ground begins to open and a giant sea monster emerges and captures the TARDIS within its mighty jaws. If only that thing could dematerialise. Luckily, this sea monster is no more than a glorified lift. I half expected a Flintstones gag where monster looks at the camera and says “Eh, it’s a living.” This wouldn’t be the first time Chris Chibnall has taken a big concept and reduced it to a means of safe transportation for the Doctor. They did that with the Weeping Angels too. It’s the worst kind of consistency. Set up without exploration. Your giant monster isn’t even a giant monster, it’s an elevator. Whatever.

Aboard the Sea Devil vessel, the Doctor and Yaz see Ji-Hun, still alive, but kept prisoner in a Tim Shaw type of thing. My guess is that Marsisuss must have been fully conscious while trapped in that statue. It’s the only reason I can think that he would just spill the beans of his entire plan to the Doctor. He was desperate for a bit of banter. His basic plan is to use something called the keystone, which is yet again, another MacGuffin to flood the earth using magnetism or some such nonsense. Ignoring the fact that there’s not enough water to flood the earth, what would be the point? Water covers over 70% of the Earth. Bro, you’ve already won. If you can’t control the planet from the majority of its surface, another 30% isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re dumb and your plan is dumb and you’re a bad leader. Your crew didn’t even know how to appoint a new captain. You’ve given them no guidance on what to do in your absence, so of course, you’re losing.

After realising the Doctor doesn’t know where the keystone is, Marsisuss decides it’s time for her to die. Before he can cut her down, the Doctor pulls a big switch that sends the ship to the surface of the water. During this time, we’re expected to believe that the ship resurfacing is enough of a distraction that Yaz and the Doctor are able to escape unscathed. Somehow, they are able to gain their bearings faster than the guy who actually knows the ship, and are able to swing from ropes to the safety of Madam Ching’s boat. It’s like when Yaz and Dan witness the Weeping Angels killing two old people and then are perfectly fine in the next scene. It’s almost as if they hope that if they throw this crap at you fast enough, you won’t have time to think about how stupid any of it was.

What comes next is arguably the best part of the episode. Finally, some actual swashbuckling! For a brief moment, the story remembers this is a pirate episode and we get some actual swordfighting. The Doctor even gets in on the action, which is great to see. In fact, Jodie Whittaker is on her A-game for this story. Unfortunately for her, the writers, Ella Road and Chris Chibnall were not. I feel sorry for Ella Road because so many of Chibnall’s deficiencies are on display here, that it feels unfair that she must shoulder the blame. We get the Doctor’s weird morality in the form of disgust that Ji-Hun may want to avenge his crew by cutting down Marsisuss. I say weird in that just moments later we see Dan cut down seven Sea Devils in two blows like he was straight from Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Even worse than that is the moment where the Doctor lets Ji-Hun die in her place. Evidently, he deserves to die because he killed the guy who imprisoned him for 300 years. It’s as though Chris Chibnall took none of the criticism from “The Timeless Children,” to heart. The Doctor, who once gave one of her lives to save a companion she’d only just met, allows men to die as doorstops. Their sacrifice affording her a coward’s exit every time. When Steven Moffat received criticism for his writing, you would often see a meta commentary within the show, as if it were Moffat’s way of addressing the issues. There was a conversation going on. Here you see a cowardly writer writing a cowardly Doctor and refusing to admit any wrongdoing. I feel as though any restraint shown by Chris Chibnall at the end of Flux was more of a dictate from above, than any kind of re-direction. It feels petulant and selfish. The only way to redeem this kind of cowardice would be for it to be how the Doctor dies.

Speaking of the Doctor’s death, we get a bit of a glimpse into the future with the Doctor mentioning she promised Yaz a beach. I can’t help but feel this is foreshadowing of the Doctor regenerating on a beach. It’s already been established that the Doctor will not be regenerating aboard the TARDIS. The cynic (or realist who has eyes and has been writing about this shit for four years) in me thinks this is probably going to be some weaksauce attempt to recapture the emotion of Ten and Rose’s teary goodbye at Bad Wolf Bay. Only this time, instead of an established romance, you’ll get the tacked on gay tragedy of Thirteen and Yaz. And I don’t care if you’ve been shipping Thasmin since day one, the relationship has been all in your imagination. Even Chibnall admitted it wasn’t a planned storyline.

As you would expect from an unplanned storyline, the Doctor and Yaz’s romance subplot comes out of nowhere, gets barely explored and is gone immediately. It’s exactly what I’ve come to expect from Chris Chibnall- an idea is presented, they talk about it, nothing happens. That isn’t to say that either Whittaker or Gill do a bad job in this scene. There is a part of me that really enjoyed the Doctor finally saying out loud why she doesn’t do romance. Though you could also argue that it never really needed saying. We already knew it. But I guess Yaz needed to hear it, because the poor girl is about to pop. At this point, all they’ve done is made an argument for the healing power of a quickie.

All in all, I place this episode as the third in a sort of spiritual trilogy of Chibnall episodes. Right alongside “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship,” and “Arachnids in the UK.” The central theme being that the premises of all three episodes promise big fun, and somehow manage to bore me out of my mind. Not everything was a disappointment, however. The Sea Devils looked great and I loved the costuming. The Sea Devil’s swords reminded me of the knives people make from bismuth on Youtube. It’s a cool way to make something look more natural while still other-worldly. I loved seeing the Doctor do a bit of action and drama. But the characters are so ill defined that I found it difficult care about anyone or anything. Madam Ching is a cool pirate, but other than that, she’s giving me nothing to work with. So when she and Ying Ki ride off into the sunset, I forget about them completely. In fact, I forgot most of this episode the moment it ended.

I wanted to save some room here at the end to talk about the end. Not of this episode, but rather, this era. If you hadn’t noticed, I haven’t written anything since the New Years Day special, and with good reason. I’m tired of writing about being disappointed. Granted, I could write about any other era, but mama needed a break. The tagline on this blog is “One girl talking about the shows she loves,” which is true, but not lately. I point this out because I feel like it’s important to illustrate the journey I’ve been on with Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who. The excitement for a female Doctor inspired me to start writing these articles. Now my lack enthusiasm for Chibnall’s idiotic brand of cruelty has left me drained. In fact, the biggest points of excitement I’ve had for the show have been about things beyond this era. Reading that Russell T Davies intends to return to a new series every spring filled me with joy. Far more than the revelation that one of my favourite companions, Ace, will be returning in October. With any other writer, I would be ecstatic.

Sure, it’s almost over, but we’ve seen the kind of damage Chris Chibnall can do with a single episode. Now he’s dragging one of my favourite companions into his mess? It’s like one last twist of the knife. I have loved writing for you all, but I have not loved writing about Chris Chibnall. I cannot wait to be excited for Doctor Who again. I cannot wait for this all to be in the rearview mirror. I used to speculate as to what certain clues meant, but lately, I just don’t care. Why speculate when it’s going to lead somewhere vague and depressing? Do you really expect Chibnall to give the Fugitive Doctor a satisfying character arc with only one episode left? With the reintroduction of Vinder, do we once again need to worry that bellend is going to introduce the Doctor’s parents?

Showrunners don’t outright ignore bits of Doctor Who that don’t suit their version of Doctor Who, they ignore the mistakes. We should ignore things like the Doctor being half-human on his mother’s side. We should ignore the times the Doctor’s age fluctuates back and forth. We should ignore the Twin Dilemma. But never in all of Doctor Who have I seen a bigger call to ignore an entire era. This is a real damn shame because I love Jodie Whittaker. I’ve heard fans suggest they bring Capaldi back for a new regeneration. I feel like that would be a mistake. Losing both Jodie and Jo as the Doctors would be a great loss, in my opinion. I don’t think it’s fair to the people who are fans of this era to do away with it. But if someone found some way to fix this mess, I would love to hear it. If RTD can’t fix this, I hope he does ignore it.

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