Doctor Who - God Is A Frog!!

"Metaphysics and Doctor Who don’t always mesh – remember that interminable 2015 dispatch in which Peter Capaldi spend 50 minutes running up a stairs shouting at himself?" - Ed Power, The Independent

Even in this anti-spoiler new regime of the beloved Macrocephallic Apostate Chris Chinball the first, not much was known about It Takes You Away. Even the hilariously-unhelpful DWM previews had nothing, and their total info beyond episode title and writer could be fit onto the back of a post-it note!

The Woman Who Fell To Earth - it's set in Sheffield and we meet everyone!
The Ghost Monument - it's not set in Sheffield and there is a spaceship
Rosa - it's about Rosa Parks
Arachnids in the UK - it's set in Sheffield with spiders and Yaz's mum is there
The Tsuranga Conundrum - it's not set in Sheffield but there's a hospital
Demons of the Punjab - Yaz's grandma did not enjoy the partition of India
Kerblam! - it's not set in Sheffield but it is set in a very Sheffield-like warehouse
The Witchfinders - it's not set in Sheffield and King James is there
It Takes You Away - um...it's not set in Sheffield...
The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos - it's not set in Sheffield and it's the season finale!

ITYA barely gets a quarter of the page! Take away the title, a photo of Brad Walsh and you're left with a handful of paragraphs saying that setting a story in Norway is sort of like more ominous and creepy than bustling Sheffield and lo across the English-speaking world, Private Dexters did come together and shout "OY-YAH-I-HADDEN-FORT-OF-DART!!!" at the top of their voices.

Ironically, this episode is probably one of the few this season to use the companions to their best potential instead of giving us the impression either Ryan or Yaz were hastily given lines in the finished episode. Hell, you could actually remove Yaz from her episode Demons of the Punjab without ruining it, so it's good that she gets a strong role here as "the proper companion" to the Doctor while also actually having useful police skills. Ryan, the Jamie to Yaz's Nyssa, also is sensibly dumped into a situation where his deep cynicism, bravery and lack of people skills can cause maximum shenanigans. Why give Yaz the job of looking after a frightened blind girl when they want her to relax? Just let Ryan babysit and sightless Hanne will, as she does, assume this is no big deal. And Graham, as always, effortlessly justifies his position as "top dog" of the gang and that it's possible for a non-psychotic seductress to earn screentime every episode. Don't bitch about it, Moffat, you know in your heart it is true.

So the plot kicks off like some cheap noughties horror film with a deserted cabin in the Norwegian woods, noises of monsters in the background, blind girls being betrayed by paranoid authority figures and before we can wonder why this story isn't called The Night of M. Shamalyan it goes all Warriors' Gate as it turns out there's a mirror portal that leads to a medieval labyrinth that leads to another universe altogether. Guarded by a clearly dodgy Gollum-like monster called Ribbons who wears the urine of his peers, we probably shouldn't dwell too much on what the hell he's doing in this "antizone" between realities, or why flesh-eating moths are everywhere. Did they all just spontaneously evolve in this buffer-zone that only came into existence a month ago?

Oh well, maybe BF will do The Return of Ribbons one day in their Classic Doctor New Monsters boxset and have Tim Treolar find out exactly who pissed on Kevin Eldon. Hey, we need to know this.

So, the Warriors' Gate vibe increases as we see the other side of the mirror - there's a neat visual cue this is unreal (everything is back to front), ghosts from the past appear alive and well (Grace, obvs), there's a fairy tale style mythology to the backstory (as told to the Doctor by one of her grandmothers) and the most popular companion contemplates staying on this side of the mirrors and is fueled by compassion. Instead of axe-weilding skull-faced robots we have flesh devouring giant moths, instead of tossing coins we have following threads through the maze. Even the bad guys are quite sympathetic (Hanne's monumentally-assholeish dad has had a complete mental breakdown and realizes he needs help). The final scene with Ryan and Graham walking off to the TARDIS is eerily similar to Romana and K9 heading away from it.

Jeez, shove a Spanish live-action cartoon and one of those five-minute Danger Mouse episodes after the end credits and this IS Warriors' Gate! Which is fine with me, because I love that.

If you've seen Warriors' Gate - and let's face it, who the hell hasn't? - you'll probably remember the trippy, dialogue-free sequence which you might at times wonder if you dreamed where the Doctor stops by a castle and tries to peer through a window. Eventually he gives up and meets a teenage girl Tharil who holds his hand and leads him away, floating through a black-and-white photo of the castle interior.

Now imagine that was the dramatic climax to the story.

ITYA, of course, doesn't have the wordless dreamy stuff but you are going to find yourself watching the Doctor in a white void shaped like an attic talking to a friendly-looking rubber frog on a chair. Speaking with the voice of a dead black woman. Now, I won't lie, that frog is never going to be mistaken for a living thing (not even by me and I was sure the kitlings in Survival were real yellow-eyed cats that could snarl on cue), but the story isn't saying it's a real frog. It's a sentient universe taking a random avatar to communicate with, based entirely on a brief telepathic contact with someone from another universe. It's not supposed to be convincing as a frog any more than the white void is supposed to be convincing as a quantum probability of zero.

What it is, however, is to show how motherfucking awesome Jodie Whittaker is as she does a clear Doctor-defining speech to a creature that is neither evil nor hostile. It's a scene Capaldi could never have done - okay, Capaldi could easily have done it, but the Twelfth Doctor couldn't - full of passion, optimism, hope and empathy. And she does it all to an unconvincing puppet on a stick. Jon Pertwee couldn't do that and they asked him to do it with incredible frequency (in three consecutive stories in 1971 I seem to recall.)

I was watching Horns of Nimon the other day (or further than that) and for all Tom Baker's piss-farting about in the TARDIS, he never once failed to convince me he wasn't sharing the scene with David Brierly. Which is impressive because we should remember he's literally sitting there next to a cardboard box with a tape recorder off-camera, but he completely sells the idea that, if nothing else, K9 is real and probably reconsidering doing panto season. Jodie likewise sells the idea that she is in a dialogue with another actress, and not emoting at a prop.

That's a hard skill. You don't see that nearly enough. Agro's Cartoon Connection, for example, sucked.

Frankly, if I'd had my druthers I would have swapped this with The Tsuranga Conundrum. This episode much better shows Team TARDIS adapted to their new lifestyle better than the "what hit us?" of TTC, and the fact that every episode past Arachnids in the UK has been fundamentally-interchangeable in running order.

Not that the current order has done much damage. Not only is Doctor Who so popular in Australia it is once again getting specific trailers and now dominated the iview adverts, it is now the go-to show to explain the increasingly deranged state of Australian politics. Last week, Micallef's Mad As Hell spent a full three minutes showing the Treasurer of Australia as Matthew Waterhouse before the serious political analysis program Insiders officially went "Fuck it!" and had scenes from Trial of a Time Lord edited into Order in the House so Colin Baker is continually heckling Bill Shorten and Soldeed is on 7:30 with Leah Sayles.

 

Those Alzarian mathematical prodigies are just a bunch of economic girly-men, Shaun!

Apparently the drop of 1 per cent in audience appreciation figures is something to be alarmed about, but let's be honest here - the entire Capaldi era is still summoning up the courage to lick Jodie's boots and the Chicken Littles (or Dickhead Bigs) of the world are really overreacting. They're not axing the show when it's still getting a baseline of 80 per cent of all viewers love it. Frankly, the news would enjoy that AI. Even a zombie apocalypse wouldn't threaten Doctor Who at the moment and as a result, all the haters and bitchers are left coming up with more and more pathetic excuses.

We've seen Jodie. There's no reason left to worry about a woman in charge. She can act. People love her. Kids love her. The public are up with this and the same people writing to the Daily Mail screaming that they refuse to tolerate anyone trying to alter their ingrained politics were the same one bitching that Bill was gay, Clara was too popular, Matt Smith was too silly, the stories too complicated, Tennant too sexy, Captain Jack too gay, Rose too vulgar and to be honest they were never that impressed with McCoy and Aldred...

Your feeble delusions have been exposed. No one cares what you think and your righteous fury will change nothing. You can either keep screaming pointlessly into the void or do something else, but you can no longer cling to the illusion you're on the winning side.

Or to put it another way:

"What are you doing here?"

"Nothing."
 
"It's all right for you!"

"And for you, too. Do nothing."

"Do nothing? Yes, that's right. Do nothing, if it's the right sort of nothing..."

Hah. Enough of Warriors' Gate (assuming there is such a thing). As Tommy Jeffry Peter Light Hope Hinchman Coburn Himinez is still unable to comprehend how people are able to like Doctor Who beyond the three seasons of the entire franchise he "sort of" likes, there's nothing from the SCADs this week. Though I do hope they reedit Dalek Oblivion so Jodie is in their regeneration flashback - it looks really sad for them if she isn't, and that's saying something from a franchise determined to ignore anything post-1989 and insist Anthony Ainley is alive.

So, what else is there to say?

3/10. The central concept was ridiculous but there were a few scary moments. The flesh eating moths were good. But that ridiculous frog...... Chibnall promised that none of the iconic monsters from the past would be returning this season. Instead were to get exciting new monsters. What did we get? A few forgettable aliens needlessly tagged onto his historical message episodes and a toy frog. A TOY FROG! Many [people (sic) would have been laughing at the frog and at the show. Key point: laughing at it not with it. Ridiculous and looked like something bought cheaply from poundland as a kids toy.

Yeah, it's fair to say Emperor of the Fish People wasn't overly-enamored with the frog.

The rest, he fucking loved.