Monday 6 January 2020

Doctor Who Series 12 First Impressions: Episode 2 (Spyfall Part Two)

Oh, Chibnall. Oh, Chris Chibnall. That was so close enough to fine that what I have to complain about almost hurts to do. I want to stress that last sentence again. Last week, I called Spyfall Part One the best story Chibnall has ever put out for Doctor Who. Now that Part Two has aired, I can't say that I want to take that back. Part Two is functional and good and a wild ride that kept me guessing up until the very end. The act of watching it was fun! It's a fine episode when you look at it from broad strokes; not quite as good as Part One, but still a solid like... 6/10, if you want to play the number game, where Part One is a 6.5 or maybe even a 7. Look, I don't know, I don't play the number game, numbers are bullshit. We've got to rip the band-aid off, though. Part Two's revelations, along with a handful of other teeny little nitpicks, compound together to form something that just does not gel with me. We'll get to those, but I really want to start this off with praise. We'll do that, and then I'll let my grievances out. Okay? Okay. Here's Spyfall Part Two.



Look. I kind of love the sheer playful "fuck it" mode of resolving the cliffhanger with a fucking Bill And Ted-style predestination paradox. Just seeing the confusion on the companion's faces as they find all the setup pieces is one thing, but the payoff at the end of the episode with the Doctor realizing she has to go back and set all that shit up is hilarious. Granted, Chibnall nicks a joke from Blink, but it doesn't spoil just how fun this all is. From there, now that we have two villains in the form of the Master and David Barton, the companion/Doctor split allows for an interesting structure where each of them gets to face off against one villain. The Doctor has adventures in history, jumping around time and meeting historical women while the Master keeps running into her and trying to kill her. In the meantime, the companions are on the run thanks to Barton's dominion over the tech world, trying to figure out how to stop him without the Doctor's help. It's quite well-structured, and the Doctor half in particular is kind of neat. Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan play off of her well, but it's Ada who works especially great here. I could almost see her as a Big Finish-style companion in the future, were it not for how the episode ends.


Then there are the aliens, the Kasaavins. I had to look that up. In Part One, there was a real air of mystery about just what the hell these things even were. They're... well, exactly what the Doctor thought they were. Alien spies trying to infiltrate our dimension, using time travel and technology to find out how best to do it? Also they wipe your DNA to use it as a genetic hard drive and want to do that to everyone on the planet. I think that's the plan? We get Barton's big villain speech at a tech conference, and it seems like the episode's going for a thing about big tech and invading your privacy and all that. Hell, he even quotes Steve Jobs. If anything falls flat from being explained in this episode, it's the Kasaavins for sure. The idea of interdimensional invaders is a wild one, and the mystery behind what they were in Part One helped a lot. Here, I don't think they even get a line and they just get thwarted by the Doctor doing a clever thing off screen. Hmm.


I'm going to level with you. Writing up the positives about this is proving difficult. The positives of the episode involved the journey along the way, and I can't take you on that journey in text. Summarizing the elements doesn't work nearly as well. Part Two is very strange in that regard. Analyzing single elements of it doesn't give you much to work with. Putting it all together into the whole tableau, though, does give you something. Most of the things I mentioned here work when you put them all together. I again want to stress that this episode's fine. That being said, there are elements I didn't like. Again, when taking these elements in isolation, they can seem like needless little nitpicks; things that raise an eyebrow but otherwise don't hurt the episode. Put together, though, they form an unsettling picture, and one I can't say I'm fond of. Let's start with the Master. I made a thing last week about how I hoped there was justification for him being bad again. There's probably maybe one line in there about how killing people makes the Master's hearts go doki-doki. Okay. He's bad because it's a rush, an addiction. In isolation, disappointing but acceptable. Sacha Dhawan is once again fine, it's just... well, the little things around the episode. Alright, fuck it. I'm going to have to rip the band-aid off and try this paragraph again. I'm giving you my real time thought analysis here. This isn't working. We need to just out and say it.


Gallifrey's ruined again and it kind of sucks. Chris Chibnall's grand arc idea appears to be just rolling the clock back to 2007, where the Doctor and the Master are the only two Time Lords out there. There's also something at play involving, of all things, the Timeless Child mentioned in The Ghost Monument. Look. I want to give Chibnall the benefit of the doubt. Spyfall Part One was good. I'm not out to hate him on principle and say that he can do no good. I just don't see this going anywhere interesting. Oh. The Time Lords have a deep dark ancient secret from the forbidden annals of their past? You don't say. I will eat humble pie if I must, but there's nothing interesting here. It's a retread of shit we dealt with years ago. That gets into the other major thing; the level of Moffat-era erasure at play here. As I said, it's all little things. The Master reverting from Missy's ambivalence to being a baddie again with little to no explanation. Gallifrey, having been revealed to be saved in the Moffat era, now a ruin once more. Two non-consensual mind wipes of Lovelace and Khan, when Hell Bent specifically made a big deal out of how the Doctor was an asshole for doing this to people. This whole thing is a retro throwback to the RTD years, and it kind of feels like it's throwing the Moffat era under the bus in order to do it. Quite how severe this is depends on your own personal takes, of course, but I hang out in a lot of spaces which liked the Moffat era and the people whose takes I respect are not pleased. Nor am I, really. It's not an arc I'm particularly excited for, nor am I happy that the era I liked had to be ignored (or, worst case scenario, actively erased) in order to make it happen. I'm not a fan. That'll do it on Spyfall Part Two. Thankfully, we get six weeks of not Chibnall writing, so we'll see some more varied takes and maybe less of this arc. Time will tell. Until next week, I'm very tired.

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