The Strange New Face-Lift of Doctor Who
What’s Up With Who?
Doctor Who has had a face-lift, and the results are mixed.
The brand-new look, cashed in on Disney checks and fronted by “Sex Education” star Ncuti Gatwa, is marketed as Season One; the wrinkles of two decades on TV tossed off for a fresh-faced feel.
Never before has a new Doctor Who series felt more like cosmetic surgery, like the launch of a new brand.
If you’ll pardon the language, it even feels like the launch of a new franchise.
Coming off the back of the Whittaker era, where overnight ratings struggled to top repeats of the Antiques Roadshow, returning show-runner Russell T Davies (It’s a Sin, Queer as Folk) has laid his chips on an MCU-style reboot. Dubbed the “Whoniverse '', and made in collaboration with Disney+, the new era promises to be a return to the youthful energy of the show’s peak in the late noughties and early 2010’s.
It’s a big bet. If it works, Doctor Who has a new future competing with giants like Loki.
If it fails, the same axe which chopped the show in the late eighties could guillotine it again.
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Doctor Who on Speed:
The weight of pressure, at least, does not bog the show down; the new series is sci-fi on a sugar rush. Add a Dua Lipa song, and most scenes could be a hit on TikTok. “Space Babies” - a story set on a space station run by babies - is the kind of television you usually don’t make unless you’ve taken some kind of substance. The second instalment, “The Devil’s Chord”, pushes things even further. Imagine a musical written by Lovecraft, and you’re there. Steven Moffat returns for the third episode, “Boom”, a tauter stage-play style episode in which the Doctor is stood on a landmine and must save the day without being able to move.
Even on a landmine, though, the pace has been shocked into a higher frequency.
In all the episodes, there’s a big-budget joy which has been missing since the Smith years; it bleeds from the production - where episode two director Ben Chessell sweeps huge angles through the new TARDIS interior, which looks to be roughly the size of Kent - right into the performances. Gatwa is on fire. He’s a brighter, brasher, bolder Doctor than anything that’s come before. Millie Gibson, as new companion Ruby Sunday, does her best to keep up. Even the title sequence is reworked into a technicolour explosion.
The point is bursting from each frame: Put your phones down, kids - Doctor Who is fun again!!
The new TARDIS interior: they knocked down Birmingham to build it.
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The Comedown from Manic Who:
Is there a downside to this electrified pace? Of course there is.
Doctor Who has always beat with two hearts; the Doctor and the companion, and the dynamic between them, is the underlying beat which kept even the most uneven series of the modern show on track. But there’s no time for a rich relationship to build, here; before they’ve shared two full scenes together, Ncuti’s Doctor and Millie’s companion are bezzies for life and no takesy-backsies. Not even being kidnapped can faze the snap-crackle-pop banter which dominates their dialogue.
It’s charming on one hand - like the two naughtiest kids in class let loose on the universe - but without the thornier dramatic steps which previous companions had to make in order to adjust to the world of Who, the audience is left with the feeling of an AI-protagonist; a perfectly plucky, young, cheeky, blonde, attractive woman who has never met a time-machine she can’t instantly adjust to.
The second-worst thing about this is how it makes the alien nature of the show feel so unremarkable.
The actual worst thing about it is that when Ruby does have to adjust to life in space, it’s pointless.
In “Space Babies”, for example, she realises that since they’re now in the future, her mother back home is long dead. The Doctor takes her phone, science-fictions it, and tells her to call home; Ruby does, and her mum picks up, chattering about home life and oblivious to the fact that her daughter is now thousands of years in the future, in a time when she herself has been dead for millenia.
Ruby hangs up the phone, and there’s a phone bill joke.
Doctor Who fans will recognise this. It’s copy-and-pasted beat-for-beat from an earlier episode of the show, also written by Russell T Davies; 2005’s The End of the World. Contrast the two scenes here:
The difference between them is time.
In 2005, the moment had space to breathe - without music, the ramifications of the dialogue could sink naturally into the audience; travelling to the future means that everyone you love is dead.
In 2024, the beat is so perfunctory, so much a new-companion routine, that the Doctor must actively instruct Ruby to call her own mother and neither of them have much reaction to it when she does.
This is the dilemma the show exists in; no matter how much botox is pumped into the formula, the underlying tissue is worn. To touch on it again feels tired, but to build without it feels hollow. 'Space Babies' ' is the unhappy result; it presents neither fresh drama or safe repetition in its first five minutes, but rattles through the Doctor Who Wikipedia page instead. There’s so little to be said about how a new companion can be introduced to this world that the only thing left is to say it. Out loud. In bullet-point form.
A rose by any other name: my favourite blonde companions named after shades of red.
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Doctor Who with Themes:
There’s no crime here, on the surface; the end product is simply bad Doctor Who.
But the issue become uglier still when the scripts attempt to deal with real-world issues.
For instance, what if I said the word “genocide” to you?
It’s a loaded term right now; current assaults on Gaza and in West Darfur add to the doomer culture which this Who is bursting into. The word becomes heavier still when you remember that Ncuti Gatwa is of Rwandan heritage; after twenty-five years, the legacy of the Rwandan genocide still hums in current violence, another aspect of the responsibility we take in an information age, where news from any country is news in every country. Well, the concept of genocide is present in “Space Babies”.
It’s even tied to explicit talk of refugees, “physically forced to show up on someone else’s shore”.
That, in turn, ties into metaphors of abortion, “cared for up until the moment they’re born”.
And all of it is hollow.
When the focus of the show is placed on the cosmetic sheen, the deeper themes become stymied and in-grown; without the space for messages to speak naturally from the plot, they must instead be torn out from the soil and plastered egregiously into the dialogue. Ncuti Gatwa tells us about the plight of refugees once, and that is that - theme completed. The abortion undertones are just as undercooked.
In “Boom”, talk of faith and capitalism and religious warfare is again explicit. In that episode, AI-holograms of the dead return to loved ones for comfort, and that is the perfect symbol for the issues with this form of Doctor Who; it feels like AI re-representation of something once beloved.
An AI image of something once-beloved: Doctor Who in its weakest current moments.
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Doctor Who and AI:
Doctor Who and AI have a passionate little love-affair at the moment.
In the last week of March this year, when it was proudly announced that marketing emails from the show were created through artificial intelligence, fans were outraged, and the show u-turned back to human writers. In the initial statement, the BBC noted “Doctor Who thematically lends itself to AI, which is a bonus”. There is a fascinating tension here; a sci-fi show which marvels at the advancement of technology, which indeed casts futuristic tech as the symbol of magic, faces an AI-cancer in the real world which threatens to devour its actual creative team from the inside. And this tension shows up on-screen.
In “Wild Blue Yonder” - a David Tennant 2023 special - inaccurate copies of the Doctor and Donna who have no essential inner existence taunt them on the background of a futuristic space-ship.
In “Space Babies”, the monster is generated by computer systems in order to fulfil a story-telling duty; it is programmed to entertain the kids with stories, and generates a monster for that.
In “Boom”, the term AI is explicit; the hologram-ghosts are generated through technology and it is the algorithm itself which threatens the protagonists most urgently.
It seems the BBC was right - Doctor Who lends itself to AI, indeed. And just as anti-AI themes percolate in the sub-text, the show itself feels more generated than ever. Look at “Boom”; despite the brilliance of a Hitchcock-inspired first act, the script feels like someone told ChatGPT to “write a Steven Moffat episode of Doctor Who”. He has a vast bank of data for the algorithm to use, after all.
“Boom” is Moffat’s fiftieth episode and he was show-runner for six seasons. At this point, one is tempted to play Moffat bingo: in “Boom”, we have the usual dialogue quips and the moment where an antagonist scans the Doctor to see what a badass he is. We have the flirty woman with the hapless love interest. We have the tech-afterlife and we have the fake-out companion-death. All we’re missing is a dominatrix and a browser-history joke. Add this turgid repetition to a third act which muddles the the themes of the episode into little but schmaltz, and the AI-generated feel seems almost meta.
Part of the symbolic vision of this new era of Who is that the generative nature of the tech is the problem and the Doctor is the humanised hero who defeats it; this should be cathartic, but it’s hard to cheer on the death of AI when the tissue of the show itself feels stitched together by ChatGPT.
The two parents of the last generation of British nerds: Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies.
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Doctor Who and The Devil’s Chord:
The solution, of course, is to dream it all up again.
What Doctor Who needs isn’t a face-lift, but a regeneration, the kind that it had in 2005. And good news - there is a lightning strike of freshness right here in the new series. Amid the garbled tech-allegories of the episodes which sandwich it, “The Devil’s Chord” is a fountain of fresh and clear-voiced revolution: even more, this is the first piece of Doctor Who you could call “postmodern”.
Set against the same 1963 background from which the show was birthed, “The Devil’s Chord” rips the tones of that show to pieces. Right from the start, where an AI script-writer would have the Doctor and Companion leave the TARDIS after receiving some futuristic SOS, Russell instead has our leads strut out of the TARDIS in pinstripe suits with the sounds of sixties soul blasting from a jukebox. It’s a real look into a new creative space; for ten straight seconds, you could be watching a Tarantino film.
Jinkx Monsoon gives a beautifully demented performance as Maestro - the embodiment of Music Itself - and it’s no coincidence that the fashion of this episode, blazed into life by costume designer Pam Downe, evokes such a new sense of style and performance. Rather than make-up slapped onto an old formula, the tone here is of a new presentation entirely: beehived, outrageous, knowingly new.
The mad creative swings don’t stop there.
There has no ever been an episode of Doctor Who so good to listen to.
Jinkx Monsoon, pictured inventing the new genre of Eldritch camp.
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Doctor Who and “Sound and Vision”:
Following the acclaim of films like “The Zone of Interest”, the use of sound in visual media has never been more relevant; where Jonathan Glazer used the noise of off-screen violence to add drama to the frame, “The Devil’s Chord” does the opposite: it allows the soundtrack to flood so directly into the narrative that the images themselves take on a melodic tone. Again, this is a postmodern sword swiping through the boundaries of Who - all bets are off. The climax being a literal music battle is the most obvious example, as well as the admittedly background inclusion of The Beatles and the twist number which rounds the episode off - but ironically, the quietest uses of sound show it off best.
In an episode where composer Murray Gold is having the time of his life, rattling out everything from piano laments to faux-Beatles skiffle tunes, nothing hits quite as much as silence. Compare how the theme here (loss of music is loss of life) is animated so naturally, to how garbled the messages became in “Space Babies”, where they were never allowed to sing naturally through the turns of the plot itself:
On the whole, The Devil’s Chord is a beautiful life-line for the one show mad enough to make it work.
The winds of change which bring the episode its musical aesthetic do more than just that; they provide a gust of fresh air between two episodes stifled in the stuffier currents of the past. Does this mean that Doctor Who must have a sing-a-long in each episode? Just the opposite. The new territory here must be advanced from just as bravely - more ground must be discovered, with only the spirit of change remaining the same. What is refreshing about “The Devil’s Chord” is not the new things which it discovers in themselves, but that Doctor Who still has the life to discover new things at all.
The Devil’s Chord: A brand-new look which works.
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Conclusion: Doctor Who and the Decision:
What the first three episodes of Series Fourteen show is a beloved franchise at a crossroads. On the one hand there is the superficial botox of “Space Babies”, and on the other the genuine verve of “The Devil’s Chord”. In between, stands the grippingly muddled explosion of “Boom”. Where to go, now?
The choice is not as simple as you might think. In the UK, Doctor Who is not a brand - it’s a cultural symbol pressed so deeply into the psyche of the nation that any change to it risks disaster, and Russell T Davies has established a formula for it that works. It’s not as if the wild swing of episode two is going to please the Dads who are patiently waiting for Robert Holmes to reincarnate and write an episode, and predictably it has been the return of Moffat which has drawn the most instant appreciation from the fans.
In the end, though, it has to be the new path which the show follows. Dreaming it all up again is the only option left when the standard forms have started to eat themselves from the inside; in the crisp and violent music of “The Devil’s Chord”, the show has found a new tune to get out of itself. More of that must follow.
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Series One Ranking:
The Devil’s Chord
Boom
Space Babies
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