Tripwire’s Man In Los Angeles Reviews Episode Three of Doctor Who Season One

War is Hell

Tripwire’s man in Los Angeles Robert Cave just reviewed Doctor Who Season One: Boom…

Boom
Written by Steven Moffat
Directed by Julie Anne Robinson

Hmmmm. That was an interesting one, and as The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) points out, “it is kind of hard to sum up.” On first watch I didn’t immediately enjoy it. But that doesn’t make it a bad story.

The first episode of the Disney+ era that wasn’t written by showrunner Russell T Davies was instead written by… former showrunner Steven Moffat. As much as I’m eager for some fresh stories from fresh writers, there is something pleasing about that. Moffat wrote some of the most critically acclaimed stories of Russell T’s first run as showrunner. I’d argue Moffat often produces his best work when someone else is running the show and he can just focus on the story he is telling. I’m glad he gets a chance to play in the new era, reaching that wider Disney+ audience.

This feels like a story that is aimed squarely at that new wider audience. Moffat is a great recycler. He is in no way opposed to revisiting his old plots, characters and other ideas that he finds compelling. He did so with Sally Sparrow finding messages from the past in the 2006 Doctor Who annual, later reworked into the 2007-episode Blink. He did so again with his first Doctor Who short story Continuity Errors, in which the Doctor travels back into a character’s past to make them more amenable to him, and perhaps a better person into the bargain, as in the 2010 episode A Christmas Carol. For established Who fans there is a lot here that will be familiar; The military wing of a religious order (Anglicans, because that’s the established church in the UK), the Weapons manufacturers of Villengard, deep cut references to classic Doctor Who that would fly over the heads of more casual viewers (The Doctor stepping on a landmine, as he did in Genesis of the Daleks). It also has a familiar feel of a Moffat Doctor Who episode. A certain indescribable sense that comes from familiarity with how he tells his stories.

Doctor Who S1,18-05-2024,3,Ruby Sunday (MILLIE GIBSON) & The Doctor (NCUTI GATWA)
,BBC Studios/Bad Wolf,James Pardon

There is something necessarily stagey about it. This isn’t a bad thing. Limitations force creative solutions on the writer, and it certainly helps the show avoid that other cliché of its past; the continual need for running down corridors. The Doctor stands on a mine and spends the rest of the episode trying to prevent it from going off. Put like that, maybe this story is easy to sum up after all.

I liked the absence of sci-fi fantasy monsters because humanity has always excelled in making its own monsters, worse than anything that could be merely imagined. And in this episode, we have three unfettered man-made monsters; capitalism, religion and war, all rolled into a single bloodthirsty beast. That will no doubt discomfort some people. I’m good with that – heartened in fact. As someone who does not have particularly warm feelings for Disney as a global giant of story-selling, one fear I had for their co-producing Doctor Who was that it would affect the stories that got made. That going-forward, all new Doctor Who would be machine-tooled to maximise sales and minimise offence.

Coming back to the idea of a new audience, there is something I find very American about the phrase “thoughts and prayers.” It is a contemptable phrase, one marinated in notions of religion that I do not share, and I thoroughly approve of the contempt it invokes in the story. Its use as a substitute for meaningful engagement with tragedy (a word whose abundant overuse has also threatened to push it over the edge into the abyss of triteness) has rendered it into a casual insult of indifference to be delivered from the powerful to the powerless. That probably brings me to why I didn’t really enjoy the story. It wasn’t a narrative that engaged me as much as it was something I broadly agreed with. However, its ending, of “parent power” taking down the computers of Villengard didn’t ring true in a world where massacres of school children are still tolerated and occur regularly.

Splice (Caoilinn Springall) and Mundy (Varada Sethu) weren’t given time or space to engage with their respective losses. Or maybe that engagement was only expressed through their faith, and consequently not something I could share. Either way, it all fell a little flat for me. Never mind. There will be another Doctor Who story in seven days.

What we will also likely be getting more of next week is the actress Susan Twist. She has already appeared as various characters in every Gatwa story so far (plus Wild Blue Yonder in David Tennent’s run as the Fourteenth Doctor), but her role in this episode as the face of the Villengard AI ambulance interface is the most prominent by far. So prominent in fact, that it feels the Doctor and Ruby (Millie Gibson) should probably start to notice this recurring familiar face. Russell T has made a habit of seeding series-long mysteries through his Doctor Who work. Will he give us the twist of the Doctor and Ruby spotting and commenting on it? Only time will tell. See you next week.