Doctor Who Series 11 First Impressions: Episode 8 (The Witchfinders)

Thanks to Kat for this, because it's basically perfect.

We're going to play a little game over the course of this text review, and it's called "Why In The Fuck Are The Historicals The Episodes I Like The Most In Series 11?". The game, as it is, is pretty self-explanatory as far as the title is concerned. The Witchfinders is the third story set in the past this year, and as far as quality goes it's like... oh, I don't know. Third? Fourth? Somewhere around there for my personal rankings. The other definite members of the top three are Rosa and Demons Of The Punjab, with that number three spot nebulous. We're not worried about that right now. What we're worried about is The Witchfinders, and how it basically works. It fumbles the football at the end a bit, but not enough to ruin things for me overall. The hell with it. Let's dive into that icy pond that is this episode and prove that we're not a witch. Or are one. This metaphor got away from me. It's time to talk about the episode.



Okay, so by now I'm getting a sense of the default mode of the Whittaker era. It's a delicate balancing act between the Doctor being active and passive. We start off as passive, with the whole chestnut about not fucking about with history. Then the Doctor, in the midst of a witch trial where an innocent woman is dying, says fuck it and interferes. Good on her. Too bad it didn't save the woman, but the mere willingness to step up and meddle is applauded. This puts the Doctor in an active role for most of the episode, as she tries to stop the whole witch hunt thing along with figuring out what the fuck is going on. She remains mostly active until the ending, in which we go back to that passivity and not fucking around with history. Usually that shit doesn't work for me, but here it doesn't interfere with me liking the episode. Demons Of The Punjab and Kerblam! established this for me. This balancing act is basically what defines Whittaker under Chibnall for me, warts and all. (It's a pun because witches.) The Doctor's passivity, at least, is aimed in more of a right direction. In Demons, it was used to underline the beautiful tragedy of Prem and Umbreen. In Kerblam! it was the equivalent of staring capitalism right in its greedy little goddamn dollar-sign eyes face and going ‾\_(ツ)_/‾. Faced with 35 innocent women being drowned by witch paranoia, the Doctor vows to make it stop. She does, basically. It's her who gets the big Scooby-Doo esque reveal of what Becca Savage's motivations and beliefs really are, and it's her who gets to use her sci-fi powers to stop the mud monsters at the end. We will have much to say about those two in a second, but let's talk about the Doctor's difficulties in this one. Here, more than ever, her gender is used as an obstacle to solving the plot. It's interesting because I thought all the scripts had been written without her gender in mind, like before Whittaker had even been cast or anything, but maybe editing happened after the fact. Whatever the case, we do get our first female Doctor's take-charge attitude being ignored because she's a woman, and she's subjected to a witch trial. Hm. It's a unique obstacle.



We'll get to the absolute ham of Alan Cumming, but the far more interesting villain is Becca Savage. She starts off, of course, as your typical God-fearing witch hunter looking to drive Satan out of their Christian village, like you do when it's the 17th century and you live in the North. What makes her utterly compelling to me is that end reveal of why she's so adamant about killing witches; because she's been possessed by alien mud/stalked by reanimated corpses possessed by alien mud, is convinced it's the work of the devil, and honestly believes that killing other sinful witches will purify her and make everything better. It's a wonderful mix of zealotry with the utter conviction that she's the heroine of her own story and is doing the right thing which makes her a fascinating villain, up there with Judge Frollo from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame as a Lawful Evil villain who believes her actions are just. Then she gets possessed totally by alien mud, and... oh dear. What once was a compelling villain who you could believe was acting via her own moral compass becomes a generic alien who wants to take over the world. The Morax, who admittedly are pretty macabre when they possess corpses and shamble about, become something akin to Mark Gatiss's The Web Of Caves Sketch. "I... I'm bad." Actually, come to think of it, didn't The Unquiet Dead also have corpse-possessing aliens which turned out to be one-note "I'm bad" types? Goddamn. The point when this episode switches from its compelling human villain to shitty mud people wanting to take over the world is when it loses me. In fact, shit doesn't even last that long. The Doctor burns a magic cyber-tree and they light the mud king on fire. The end. It's tacked on. It's dull. It distracts from the very human villain who was so much more interesting. I don't care for it.


And then there's Alan Cumming. Dear god. The ham. Stalking around in a disguise for the first ten minutes or so like a 17th century Tuxedo Mask (thanks, Rainiac), his King James is an absolutely ridiculous character, but a dangerous one nonetheless. It's a very interesting dissonance, and it's one that had me from "oh my god this is silly I love him" to "oh he's a sexist ass, I hate him" in about ten seconds flat. Somehow Cumming pulls off this tightrope. He's reprehensible, but also clearly having a great delight in being over the top. He, of course, pulls a Robertson and lights the mud queen on fire, raises the Doctor's ire, and gets away because that's what happens to people who make the Doctor cross now; the passive switch gets flipped. I'm more forgiving of it here because of simple realistic expectations. As much as I might want a Time Lord Victorious to shove King James into a ditch for being an asshole and "burning the witch", I know damn well that Doctor Who isn't going to mess with the arc of history. You may want it to, but it's less jarring when it's history as opposed to some fictional idiot the writer literally invented to do a bad. The passivity doesn't work as well as Demons Of The Punjab, but it's not as frustrating as Arachnids In The UK or Kerblam!. That, then, was The Witchfinders. It works. It basically works. It's middle of the road Doctor Who that doesn't particularly strike many sour notes with me, and the disturbing thing is that's enough to make it one of the better episodes this season. Will either of the final two boot it off the list? God, I hope so.