So how does Jodie's newest escape go?
Of course, for the first time since 2008's Partners in Crime, the story opens not with a teaser and mini-cliffhanger but the actual title sequence itself. A not-unpleasant acid-trip through a kaleidoscope of blue purple ink (completely out of keeping with the red gold of trailers and publicity), it's enough to make even Superiority Complex Audio Dramas sit up and take notice.
Ewwww. Just awful. I've seen YouTubers do a much better job. This was just a random assortment of liquid graphics. No theme to it. Yeah, no face. I'm not deducting points for that. It was bad enough not to need any more help.
A YouTuber did make this.
Did he? Seriously?
...moving on.
Well, having accidentally teleported herself and her "fam" into deep space 500 solar systems from Earth, all looked bleak for our endearing Thirteenth (sic) Time Lord. Surely there's no way out short of an infinitely-improbable passing spaceship picking the gang up before that lungful of air runs up for them to survive?
...oh. Kaaaaaaaaaay.
I'm not sure if two spaceships arriving makes this more or less likely, especially as the female piloted ship takes the blokes while the male picks up the chicks. The female, Angstrom (played by that crazy big-nosed dog-lady from the second Cracker episode who has done lots of other things) lands her ship on the BBC-funded South African quarry world Desolation smoothly. Her rival Epzo (played by the nice loser cop from Cuffs) is, however, crap and his ship can't fly with the weight of both him and the Doctor and Yaz aboard. The Doctor deals with this Cold Equations situation the exact way no one else does - she jettisons the rest of the spaceship and at no point starts stalking her friends with a gun and singsong voice calling "I need your help."
Of course, this immediately shows the crucial flaws in Graham and Ryan's status as new travelers in time and space. Or, to put it another way, they've gone to The Prometheus School of Running Away From Things by remaining directly in front of a crashing spaceship. Though they have more reason to than Charlize Theron, since they were in a gully at the time and otherwise have far greater common sense and survival instinct than the rest of Liz Shaw's loser mates. In short order, the not-yet-TARDIS crew are back together and Epzo and Angstrom are sparking unresolved sexual tension as they head into a nearby tent on this dead world.
And, oh look, it's Art Malik.
(No one remember that catchphrase from Goodness Gracious Me? No?)
Art's been in Doctor Who before, of course, and his appearance as a blue skinhead hippie being threatened by a stoned Lucie Miller pretending to be an evil capitalist crocodile has clearly informed his appearance here as a dull-eyed, no-more-fucks-to-give rich bastard who can't even be arsed to be anything more than a trick of the light.
With a character as insubstantial as his hard-like hologrammatic form, Art is there to provide exposition like Michael York in an Austen Powers flick. Art won the twelve-galaxy rally chase across the cosmos and is now hosting it again. For some reason. And he wants to make this the last ever rally. For some reason. He could have axed the competition if he was so annoyed, but no, do it again. Having got rid of 3998 other more interesting competitors, Angstrom and Epzo have to cross the barren deserts of Desolation within one day to the finish line of The Ghost Monument of the title. Said monument is actually the TARDIS which has been glitching in and out of existence every one thousand days since forever or something.
The Doctor is overjoyed at this news and so decides that she and her fam should join this quest to the finish line which involves a rubbish solar-powered kayak across a river of liquid flesh-eating evil. Mind you, we have to take her word for that, it doesn't actually eat anything. As the gang get the boat working, we get a triumvirate of character based scenes - Graham and Ryan dwell on how Grace's death hasn't improved their relationship at all, Angstrom reveals she's in the race for the prize money to save her family from the galactic jihad currently under way and Epzo gets a long scene to answer the ultimate question:
The answer being that he had a hilariously-abusive childhood where his mother constantly betrayed him in "trust exercises" that crippled him repeatedly. You do wonder why his mother went to all this trouble to instill such utter nihilism and paranoia in her child instead of, I dunno, just killing him. "Mm, I'm pregnant. Do I abort or spend the next twenty years psychologically destroying him until he is a complete sociopath with a backlog of medical bills? Ooh, the agony of choice..."
With five out of six people agreeing Epzo's mother ranks a full eleven out of ten on the Sylvia Noble Scale of Maternity Obscenity, the gang arrive in the ruins of a hotel on the other side of the beach. However, it turns out this particular shooting location is just that - a firing range for burqa-wearing death-bots who we, as fandom, all assumed would be pureblood Sontarans in an epic continuity fest. Or Zygons. Or maybe Judoon. But no, they're just robots in hoodies with laser guns.
Fortunately, having been abandoned on this planet for ages and never actually passed their death machine qualifications, the robots are bad shots. Ryan thus decides to go Call of Duty on them with a spare blaster only to discover that, for the robots, this is just paintball and they aren't harmed by the bullets. When Ryan runs out of ammo and the robots keep firing, he runs off with a pitiful squealing that will make most right-minded folk burst out laughing like they're watching Lenny Henry pretending to be Michael Jackson.
The Doctor is furious at Ryan's impulsive, unhelpful shoot-first attitude and tears a metaphorical strip off him and making it clear she's not stepping off this soap box any time soon. Then she uses a handy EMP gizmo to wipe out all the robots and if you listen very hard and ignore all the pompous commentators going "Ooh, what a hypocrite! She used a gun just with a different name!" you might hear her explaining she's paused them long enough for the gang to escape the shooting range.
On the way, they pick up Epzo who's been shot and rub his face in how his "every man for himself" policy has totally screwed him over and if he wants to survive, he has to accept other people put their money where their mouth is in regards to being friendly and cooperative.
Ducking into the local sewer system, our heroes - remembering the warning not to travel at night now the three suns are setting, just like in Pitch Black - decide to take a subterranean shortcut to the Ghost Monument. The Doctor is the only one interested in why Desolation's thriving population mysteriously disappeared leaving a death world full of ruins when she literally finds the answer written on the set. This spooky apocalyptic log reveals that the same aliens jihading the galaxy stormed Desolation and turned it into a weapons R&D base using their prisoners to designs WMDs. The prisoners rebelled and purged Desolation and themselves to stop the aliens from getting their hands on the weapons. And they wrote on the floor because if they used the computers the aliens would have noticed on the internal server, but again you have to block out the screams of "What a cliche! Writing over-ornate suicide notes on the ground instead of a post-it note! Advanced aliens, my arse!"
Oh and the aliens are the Stenza.
No, not the ugly cuckoo space babies in the worst ever episode of NuWho, Night Terrors. They were the Tenza.
The STENZA! The guys from last week! The new big bad? Yeah. Them.
But Desolation's the one place the Stenza won't be, because it's currently ruled by the Remnants! These are night-dwelling sentient pieces of telepathic bandages that fly around their prey and mummify them, spending the day lying around in the background like tumbleweeds and ominously moving when your eyes aren't on them. Plus they're voiced by the creepy Mr. Dekker from Torchwood: Children of Men. Pausing only to make some ominous Bad-Wolf-style cryptic references to a "timeless child" the Doctor has forgotten, they waste no time in trying to consume our band of buggered bushrangers!
Now, as alien threats go, some floating rolls of bandage resembling a living frat boy TP attack are not the usual sort of threat anyone faces, so the Doctor is forced to come up with a novel trick to stop them. No nifty sonic screwdriver here, just an acetylene swamp, an exploding cigar and an emphatic snap of the fingers. All it's missing is Daffy Duck pulling his beak the right way round and declaring war.
Having survived the night, our heroes reach the Ghost Monument. Except it's not there. That pretty much blows the wind out of the Doctor's sails as all her cunning plans depended on the TARDIS being there. On a planet with a toxic atmosphere (who's lethal presence is as noticeable as Ryan's dyspraxia - ie, we'd never know if you didn't tell us), hordes of killer robots and nighttime vampire toilet paper, surviving for more than a couple of days is impossible. Apparently. Oh, and the space ships they used to get there are buggered, that's established, so ignore the choruses of fridge logic tools.
Epzo agrees to a three-legged race with Angstrom, so technically they both win the race and split it fifty-fifty. Art Malik is outraged at this and then changes his mind, for some reason. He's a complicated guy, I suppose. He agrees and then he, his tent and the wannabe-Holmesian-double-act vanish from Desolation leaving the Doctor and her pals to face certain doom from the aforementioned paragraph.
And then the TARDIS glitches into existence, just like in The Lodger, and a zap from the sonic screwdriver stabilizes it. But the police box prop is different and is now the outer porch to a revamped crystalline gears-and-wire-frame interior that looks like a cross between Superman's Fortress of Solitude and the reject bin of a dildo factory. But the central console dispenses Jodie Whitaker's favorite biscuits, so for once the "You've redecorated!" catchphrase is followed by "I like it!" instead of the relentless wisecracking negativity of that Scottish guy who ran things ever since the days Australian Prime Ministers became a transitory phenomenon.
So, eschewing any "bigger on the inside" punchlines, our TARDIS vanishes off into time and space to face... 1950s Californian racial intolerance with Rosie Parks and a guy with a Dalek gun. Got to admit, not the fun swashbuckling I was hoping for, but hell, this new regime's worked so far. I wonder if Graham will end up being the bus driver who sends her to the back? Or Ryan the man who convinces her to stand her ground? Or maybe Yaz will do something. She was in this episode too, but you'd be forgiven for forgetting that.
And lo, was this a Hartnell story? Of course it was! A four-strong regular team separated from the TARDIS and forced to trek across the wilderness, fighting dreamy hallucinations in the desert, being beset by mindless bandits, threatened by the elements and with a good guy and a bad guy on the team as they barter their lives with a smug royal personage lounging around on couches?
It's not The Ark this time, it's Marco Polo!
And finally, of course, the words of the Fishfaced One himself.
4/5. Not too bad but too much talking and not enough monsters. Won't engage the casual viewers who watched last week. Nice to see Venusian Aikido back.
Once again, political correctness - defined as 'pushing an agenda at the audience, one that fits with a highly sensitive approach to life based on pseudo-moral condescension' - this week.
The political correctness this week includes: 1) The Doctor moralising at a young guy for using guns. Clear anti-gun messaging when in most cases guns would have worked against the enemy from a character having previously fought in a Time War (hypocrisy)! The point is that sometimes you have to fight back with guns. Imagine if the allies in World War II had said, 'Hey lets not use guns against the Nazis, lets try to reason with them.....' The Doctor was moralising against gun use to a young guy trying to save their lives from killer robots. Robots! Unfeeling machines, not sentient beings! Like chavs, in most cases killing them would be the right move to do!
2) The Doctor moralising at a guy because his mother taught him to trust nobody when the mother was clearly right. True, she may have gone too far but the point is that human beings are naturally selfish and disloyal and will betray each other for personal gain, including within families. The Doctor implied that a woman was a bad mother for teaching her son not to be gullible and over-trusting.
And I am not 'still trolling'. Nor have I ever done so. It is perfectly legitimate to have a grown up discussion about issues raised in Doctor Who regarding gun use and parental advice about not trusting people.I have been a fan of the series since 1973 and have an extensive collection of Doctor Who DVDs and books. I have a copy of 'Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text' and have sat opposite the husband of Victoria Watling (??) in a meeting in Clacton.
Adam Rickitt could be cast as the season 12 companion should Bradley Walsh leave.
Yep, everything's back to normal.
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