Doctor Who First Impressions: 60th Anniversary Specials Episode 3: The Giggle

Russell just had to throw a curveball on that last one and make my hobby a little harder, huh? Alright, fine, that mild grumble has gotten my foot in the door and now I'm here in my notepad typing about The Giggle, so mission accomplished there. Trying to quantify how I feel about the episode has been difficult. It's gotten near universal praise from all the critics I respect, and yet I didn't come out from the end of the show hooting and hollering about having seen the greatest new piece of Doctor Who ever. I've had to grapple with it and really let my thoughts marinate, and honestly they could marinate for another week before I could have a solid take on the episode. Still, timeliness is timeliness and this is supposed to be a First Impression, so let's get to it. I did like the episode, but not as much as Wild Blue Yonder. It does some neat things, but many of the bold things it does left me conflicted and wanting, really having to mull over if I thought they were good ideas or not. Let me see if I can dig into that confliction and find the nuance of truth within them.

We may as well start with him. the guy, the thing which I kept dreading for all this time until it finally got confirmed. "Beloved" 60's Doctor Who villain, the Toymaker, is back. I don't like that on paper. I do admit, a lot of that stems from El Sandifer being a formative critical voice and her old post on the original Toymaker story pretty solidly cementing my opinion that the repeated re-use of this nostalgic old villain is not a very good idea. Since that post, there's been endless debate and blog post and massive Twitter threads that dig into production notes and scripts and all of that, and even Sandifer herself is just like "I wrote this 12 years ago, leave me alone". I don't want to get into that. I'm not here to do that. Before the bile really builds in me, let's just leave it at "my opinion is that the Toymaker is a bad idea". That being said, at least I understand RTD's thought process here. He came up with the creepy puppet television origin thing, realized he needed a puppet master, and saw a piece of Doctor Who lore that fit what he was doing and pulled it out of the toy box and polished it up for the modern day. That's a better thought process than starting with "I WANT TO USE THE WEIRD GOD MAN FROM 1966", in my opinion.

Well, it manages to clear the low bar of "best Toymaker story I've ever experienced", but that bar is low to the ground considering his original TV story is wretchedly dull and that I couldn't tell you a goddamn thing that happened in The Nightmare Fair. This certainly is a very competent episode of television about a godlike being obsessed with playing games and doing cultural appropriation. There are standout moments I liked involving him, of course. The spooky moment of the episode with the puppets was quite good. I also was quite amused at the Moffat era puppet show, and have been enjoying the various memes of other companions' untimely fates being shrugged off with an "OH WELL THAT'S ALRIGHT THEN". I am not immune to propaganda, especially if said propaganda is a Clara mention. Then there's the dance, and oh my god. As a child of the 90's who had just a bit of an obsession with the Spice Girls back then, it was absolutely buck wild. Rasputin, hold my fucking beer. There's an anarchic glee and malice to Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker, and it just about makes one see why people love pitting the Doctor against this particular godlike gamesmaster sporadically over 60 years. Just, shame about the original, you know?

His original scheme in this episode, though, is something original and which just about manages to say something about the world. Everyone believes that they're right, and the world descends into chaos because of it. There's a prickly sense of nihilism that pokes out at you while watching this shit unfold, and the RTD who wrote Midnight comes out a little bit here. There's the grim joke of the politician openly stating WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT ANY OF YOU?, and the horrific moment of Kate Stewart letting herself be affected by it and spouting fire at Ruth Madeley's Shirley. That in particular stings because it's far too real, the kind of thing assholes on Twitter were yelling about her just two weeks ago. The Doctor ends it all with a big speech about how, actually, yeah, humanity kind of is the worst, huh? There's a meanness which is unleashed here, a meanness stemming from the Toymaker playing about in this universe. It permeates not just the show, but the world in which it airs. It permeates not just from the Toymaker as a character, but the unfortunate nature of him as a concept from back in 1966. It's enough to break the show in half, and then it does.

There are two ways to look at the bi-regeneration which literally pulls Ncuti Gatwa's new Doctor Who right out of David Tennant. The first, which is what I was falling into when I first saw it, is abject cynicism. This is breaking the show and its rules into little tiny pieces. How the hell can there be two Doctor Whos? Then the realization dawns. We're going to be following the new Doctor Who, and the old Doctor Who gets to retire on Earth. Oh my god. Oh no. Russell, this isn't fair. We had a deal here. 2023 gets to be the Tennant nostalgia year, and then he turns into Gatwa and we move on to something new. If you have him split off and then retire on Earth... the man we've been following for 60 years just sort of gives up and stays in 2023 circa 2008, trapped in amber forever. More than that, you have just created a big shiny red David Tennant button. At any point while the man is still alive (and even beyond with AI, let's be real) the button can be smashed and David Tennant can come back to Doctor Who. The looming threat of remembering 2008 when the show was good is not exorcised with a regeneration. It's left behind, but it will always be there from now on. Forever. Oh dear God.

On the other hand, this is where I need my very own bi-regeneration. Here's the dark truth of it all: I'm mirroring the Tennant Doctor here. My trauma isn't the Flux, or the myriad of people I've lost in thousands of years of time travel. My trauma is the exact thing this episode marinates in. In 2022 I tried to exorcise these horrible feelings of fear and anger from macrocosmic lore bullshit, and now here's The Giggle and it has a mad Toymaker who is himself a continuity reference playing fast and loose and letting the toybox of callbacks spill out. We've got Mel! Trinity Jones! Archangel network reference! The Master's a tooth and a nail polished hand grabs them! Dancing to a funny song! Moffat puppet show and the Flux and Gatwa and Tennant referencing everything together! THE GODDAMN CHEEKY "CELESTIAL" LINE FROM TENNANT TO REFERENCE THE ORIGINAL TOYMAKER STORY! People love this stuff, and chuckle at it. I have my own private little meltdown in my head, and I'm letting a bit of it out on the page for dramatic effect. I have been hurt by this, in my own way. I flinch on reflex at this referential stuff now, thanks to how worn down I've been by all those betrayals of past. All those sci-fi tentpoles which burned me, this show included. Even when it's good now, I'm still wary and hesitant and untrusting. When you're hurt like this, it's hard to trust again.

That's why I envy the Doctor here. I wish another me, free of that trauma, a shining example of me from a future I've not reached yet, could come to me and give me a big hug and say "It's all going to be okay.". All that pain and trauma that the Doctor has felt over those thousands of years is something that he gets to stop running from. He gets to settle down and heal with the people that he loves, in the place that he loves, and every so often he may have another adventure here or there. The Doctor is healed by the Doctor, as symbolic and powerful a healing as Moffat did for him 10 years prior. Maybe Russell learned a thing or two from that special, and took the message to heart. Regardless, there he is. Ncuti Gatwa, the new Doctor Who, imperious and confident and kind, in his TARDIS. Free of trauma, of his anxiety, of the nightmare of losing so many people and the swirl of continuity. Maybe this is the way that we're resetting back to a new Season One. No angst over the Flux, no worries about Adric or Logopolis or the Dalek's Master Plan. No bi-regeneration or Toymaker influence being used as an excuse to bring all the Doctors back and to fully Marvel-ize Doctor Who. 

There's just this guy in a magic box that's bigger on the inside, making the universe a better place one person at a time, and he started with himself. That's lovely, and I wish I could do that for myself. Maybe I will, someday. I've not bi-regenerated, but those two halves of me make this particular whole. There are so many other utopic idealists who have inspired me before, and there will be many others afterwards. Maybe, just maybe, I won't be burned again if I trust this one. Someone once said that hate is always foolish, and love is always kind. So, I'll follow his example. I'll take the hand of that kind man who hugged the Doctor, and look into his eyes and trust him.

Ncuti Gatwa. The new Doctor Who. I want to remember 2024, when the show is new and strange and brilliant.