Doctor Who Series 11 First Impressions: Episode 10 (The Battle Of Ranskoor Av Kolos}

This is the way the season ends; not with a bang, but a whimper.

Through the ruin of a season, stalked the ruin of a showrunner.

You know, maybe this would have landed better if we didn't have the news that the New Year's Day special in a few weeks is our only televised Doctor Who for 2019. That's one hell of a bummer and 2016 was a real long drag of nothing, and now we get to do it all over again. Joy. Any hope we'd have gone out on a high note was dashed by the actual quality of the final episode of 2018. It's not bad. Not really. There's no political outrage behind a fun episode like there was with Kerblam!, and no outright indignation at being patronized like with, say, a Toby Whithouse episode. In the end, this is just a Chris Chibnall joint. It's just as passable and of the moment as pretty much the rest of his contributions this year. Let's deal with whatever the hell he put on screen, then. It's time for The Battle Of Ranskoor Av Kolos. Hey, I typed it without looking up. Go me.

...Of course, the battle has already happened. We're in a ship graveyard on the titular planet. Bad shit has gone down here, and the Doctor and pals are here just to answer a distress call. There's a sense that Ranskoor (I'm just going to call it that from now on to save time, okay?) is this super-dangerous place that assaults the senses, such that you need a neural blocker to not go insane, and we see this firsthand with Paltraki having a loss of short-term memory. This could have been real creepy, but it's just used as an amnesia plot device to keep us in the dark on what the situation is until the plot can catch up. Servicable, really. Then, of course, there's the nasty bad guy who lives in a floating fortress in the sky. Yes, that's right, it's everyone's favorite returning villain, Dav-- what? What, it's Tim Shaw? From the premiere? Oh. ...Okay. Alright then! Tim Shaw. When we last left off talking about him, in October of all things, I remarked that his whole plot line was basically Doctor Who Does Predator, only with the Doctor taking the piss out of the Predator. Now he's the big bad returning villain. Turns out that, when the Doctor teleported him at the end of the premiere, he ended up on Ranskoor 3400 years ago and installed himself as a god to these two people who can create things with their thoughts, and then like... stole five planets and put them inside crystals? Oops? You can see what the show is TRYING to do here, in a sense; it's a story in which the central conflict is a consequence of the Doctor's actions in a previous adventure. If Woman Who Fell To Earth was The Long Game, Ranskoor is Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways. Except... that doesn't work as an equivalence. The Long Game had the Doctor completely upend a society and overthrow its corrupt leadership before fucking off back into time and space without rebuilding it, and it was rebuilt all wrong and dystopian because of that negligence and the material cost was the end of the Ninth Doctor. Here... what did the Doctor do wrong, exactly? Is it that she whooshed Tim Shaw away instead of killing him, thus dooming five planets and the Earth to destruction? I can't believe that, because of the other plotline going on...


OH GOD. FRIDGING MANPAIN. Yep. Graham, upon seeing Tim Shaw is alive and well, immediately wants to avenge Grace's death by killing the toothy bastard. The Doctor says "no don't do that, that's bad, you're better than that.". Graham eventually does not kill Tim Shaw, and he and Ryan lock him up in a statis pod and sentence him to life. This is dire, but also really sad. Not in an emotional drama sense, I mean, but in a sense of quality. Send me that plotline in September, and I'd have said there was no way Graham would have actually done it. 10 weeks of the Chibnall era, and I'm suddenly so unsure of this show's goddamn moral stance that I was actually kind of convinced that Graham would shoot Tim shaw, solely because that's the kind of thing they wouldn't have done before. I'm glad they didn't, I am really glad they didn't, but the fact that I was questioning it? Not because of the episode itself being ambiguous, but its own goddamned morals this year being ambiguous? That says a lot. I did chuckle at the shot in the foot and Graham begging Ryan not to tell the Doctor, though. You know... I don't have much else to say. This is a mediocre episode of television. It's not bad but it's not [great] either, you know? The Ux are a really great concept, but even an idea I'm a total sucker for like "ideas made real" wasn't enough to save this one. It's a warmed-over retread of The Pirate Planet, with a fourth-rate antagonist, and I'm afraid it's just not all that good. That kind of fits Season 11, doesn't it? 10 episodes. Two unambiguously great episodes, two more that are really good but falter at the end, Rosa (which is in a class of its own), and then five middling pieces of Doctor Who... all by Chris Chibnall. He's not all that great. Season 11, barring those two classics (and Rosa) was kinda ehhh, y'all. Maybe it is for the best that we take 2019 off. Well, almost off. We'll see you in the new year for 2019's only Doctor Who episode. Oh joy.