Doctor Who - Mud-Wrestling GILFs!

"What do you think of that good old rattling adventure yarn, then?"

"Rotten."

"Ah, but surely it had a certain surrealistic symbolistic quality? Just captivating the very futility of life, death and indeed the search for the existence of god himself was mirrored by microcosm, mm?"

"Load of old cobblers."

"Certainly."

Watching Doctor Who with my family can, at times, be bloody annoying - particularly when my dad makes a lame joke which, while not incredibly offensive in and of itself, has already been done on the internet to a degree you want to slug him (for example "She can't pilot the TARDIS because she's a woman driver!" Ho, ho and thrice ho). At the climax of Jodie's eighth episode, The Witchfinders, he commented it was like watching some hyperactive kids playing with their action figures as the monsters barely manage to spit out their wikipedia entry before our heroes are busy killing them with some serious polarity-reversal.

I personally prefer a hyper-excited monster fight than the wrist-slashing misery of the Capaldi Years (my parents hadn't noticed that, but agreed when I pointed it out), but even Whovians noticed this felt like a two part story that had at last second been compacted into a single episode. Indeed, with its brutally misogynistic plot, half-assed celebrity historical and a plot thread about a camp British monarch trying to bang the Doctor's young male companion - not to the mention the abrupt "Hahah! We're aliens! Oh shit we're dead!" climax - you could write it off as another bizarre effort of televised Who trying to make a sparacus story work like Hide, Face the Raven or Knock-Knock. What does fishface himself have to say?


3/10. Yet again a potentially interesting historical episode was spoiled by a pointless tagged on alien concept. Started out well but as soon as James I appeared the quality plunged downhill. What could have been a gripping and edgy episode dealing with witchcraft persecution and the Pendle Witch Trials degenerated into a semi-comical romp with a generic sci fi threat and a depiction of the King that even Horrible Histories would find rather silly. The characterisation of King James was absurd. He would not have spoken with a generic 'posh' accent and would not have travelled on his own to a remote Lancashire village without members of the royal household. And suspects being dunked in the river were innocent if they sank not if they drowned.

How would you not sink when tied to a ducking stool?

And given the ducking stool was normally a non-fatal punishment, in this episode specifically turned into a pointless execution by a corrupt woman to cover her tracks, it's hardly a problem.

Anyway, once again Jodie's Doctor lucks out on a historical holiday and reminds us all that our ancestors were bigoted, untrusting psychopaths and nowhere is more dangerous than Earth that once was. There's always a strain in expecting companions to enjoy the dangerous life of the TARDIS but right now you'd think all three of them would refuse to step outside if it's Earth pre-2018. In this case, it's the primitive past when people are burnt as witches.

It's fair to say that while the TV series hasn't actually tackled witchcraft paranoia to this degree, it's still not exactly brimming with surprises. Yeah, Jodie ends up on the ducking stool with her magic-wand-waving-suspicious-intellect gets her targeted as Satan's live-in lover, but it's not like the male Doctors weren't constantly being accused of witchcraft either. True, the drama is more on whether her captors are going to knowingly give into selfish paranoia rather than if she'll easily escape, but it's hardly pulse-pounding material.

I can't judge from the great unwashed but it's hard to find a "burn the witch" plot that differs much from that Blackadder episode - the slightest bad luck is interpreted as the apocalypse, overzealous witch-hunters are summoned, scapegoats picked out entirely out of spite than logic, there's a clearly rigged trial, our heroes are about to be executed, they escape at the last moment and there's the clear implication if there's any evil going on around here then it's the bastards wanting to ethnically cleanse witches. Probably the only notable twists to the formula are Monty Python and the Holy Grail (where it turns out the mob actually did get the witch, who admits her guilt when she gets a fair trial) and Buffy: Gingerbread (where the mass hysteria is being fed on by demons and the mob with flaming torches act terribly casual about the whole thing).

Doctor Who, of course, has never had the guts to do a proper witch-trial story. The paranoia might be an overreaction but there really is a plague-spreading Terileptil or ancient daemon or primordial trickster who have pushed the locals to panic and it's always obvious that if these alien time meddling bastards hadn't turned up, none of this horror would have happened. Even Steve Lyon's "pure historical" The Witch Hunters needs a telepathic space girl going through puberty and Rassilon's time scoop to cause chaos in Salem. This week's episode is no exception, as some rather naughty aliens unwittingly turn humanity on itself.

And then King James I turns up, and I'm reminded that for all the gags that Blackadder didn't have Lord Flashheart turn up in the serious episodes.

Alan Cumming - in his second DW appearance, but we don't talk about the first because shut up that's why - immediately makes his entrance like Atlan the Space Rat arriving during Torchwood: Children of Earth. It's utterly jaw-dropping to see this over-the-top, screaming whoopsie turn up on a seemingly one-man mission to make the episode impossible to take seriously. Innocent women are being murdered and as our mincing monarch boasts that he's Satan's enemy, it's like revealing Jack the Ripper was Big Gay Al. He'll murder every witch he finds, but in the best possible way and my good man, fancy looking on the inside of my godpiece for a truly Plantagenet portion? Ooh er, nudge-nudge, say no more!

If you had to cope with the dearth of Doctor Who in the early 1990s you might have caught Time Riders, about an eccentric female time traveler and her artful dodger companion who end up marooned during the English civil war and hijinks ensure. With plenty of gags and comedic grotesques, the violence and carnage passes by with cartoon-like jolliness until the last episode where the Witchfinder General turns up. He doesn't make jokes. He doesn't have fun. He takes the whole thing deadly seriously and while our not-Doctor can easily bluff her way with logic and sass to the Roundheads and Cavaliers alike, the WG isn't going to budge. He believes she is a witch and death is the only way she can be freed from her current fate. Nothing will stop him.

I think the effect would be ruined had he started doing Kenneth William impressions while prancing around with a feather boa, which is all but what happens here.

Of course, Cumming is a good actor (he can still reduce me to tears in Bernard and the Genie) and the script makes it clear this outrageous performance is just that. A performance. The real King James is paranoid, on the brink of a nervous breakdown and his Liberace-style antics are in fact a coping mechanism. The Doctor demolishes his act in a few lines, noting that his anti-Satan campaign is a desperate deflection of James' fear he himself might be tainted by evil and is determined to overcompensate. Alas, James doesn't end the episode older and wiser. In fact, having seen supernatural bog monsters possessing human corpses and a police box vanishing, he's given nothing but solid proof that "magic" is real and evil does walk the Earth. His claim he'll preemptively rewrite any history books to ignore the events of this episode might solve some historical gaffs, but not much else. If anything, he'll be twice as vicious and ruthless now, though presumably he'll be torturing folk for being creatures from Metulla Orionsis rather than the depths of hell. And won't he look fabulous?

While both King James and the ridiculously-appropriately-named Becka Savage have shades of grey to their acts of religious execution, the aliens of the week do not. The Morax, barely cameoing in the last bit of the episode, is a race of sentient mud that infect bodies because they're evil. They're just the Gelth, really, and while the mud-witches do look creepy and unsettling with their sonic bitchslaps and horrible screams, their unsympathetic nature is quite surprising. I mean, they're pure evil and if dunking the witches would stop them, then it's purely justified. Even Jodie's patented once-an-episode decrying pointless violence is left hollow as the Morax are totally beyond reasoning with or defeating peaceably. They have less personality than the witches of TV Comic or the Carrionites.

Becka Savage is, of course, the true villain here. She ditches her common family for a cushy house and some riches the first chance she gets, performs some ecological vandalism, then when all the signs are she's suffering demonic possession she tries to sweet-talk the baby Jesus into sparing her by... murdering women she knows are innocent of witchcraft. Specifically her own family, who might suspect she's turning into living mud. It makes all her sanctimonious preaching about cleansing the area twice as hard to stomach and her attempt to play the sympathy card is thankfully averted as King James is disgusted and would have executed her for her crimes no matter how many muddy tears she weeps. Savage is perhaps the most loathsome villain since that prick in Empress of Mars, and we've had the Saxon Master, a bloke who rips open folk's jaws for shits and giggles, not Ben Chatham and not Donald Trump since then!

Of course, it's very hard to make a morally-bankrupt witch-killer sympathetic.

But Keith Allan managed it, and even justified the "ordeal by water" idea...

The witch shall be ducked. If she dies, it proves the devil has abandoned her and she shall be buried on consecrated ground. If she lives, showing the devil still to be in her, she shall be burnt alive! Hard to know which one to hope for...

Well, there's no answer to that, is there?