| Episode: | 850 | | | Serial: | 286 | | | Writer: | Chris Chibnall | | | Air Date: | 09-Dec-2018 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I would've been writing about Doctor Who series 11's epic two-part finale, but they decided to end the season with a relatively low-key one-part story this year so I'm stuck writing about that instead.
I feel like I should be talking about how The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos is actually the first and only one-part finale in the revival series, as modern Doctor Who seasons always get ridiculous at the end, but I checked and it turns out that The Wedding of River Song and The Name of the Doctor both packed their absurdity into 45 minutes, so it ain't true.
But I can talk about its singularly awkward name, because Chris Chibnall's gone against 55 years of tradition here. You get one made up word per Doctor Who title, that's the rule, and unless I've overlooked something it's never been broken until now. Mostly because writers typically gravitate towards titles that people are able to remember, spell and say. They really tripped up a lot of podcasters with this one.
Anyway, I won't be going through the full episode scene by scene this time, I'm just sharing observations and opinions here, but if you continue reading past this point you'll find yourself knee deep in SPOILERS for this story and maybe earlier ones as well. The Pirate Planet jumps to mind. Castrovalva too, but ain't no one wants me to go off on a tangent ranting about Adric and block-transfer computation so I'm pretending I didn't think of it.
Right away the episode makes a point of mentioning that there's nine distress calls, all coming from a planet with mind-altering effects. My first thought was that they were going to be dealing with different groups of survivors who were in conflict with each other because of their paranoia and lack of judgement and the Doctor and crew were going to have to really struggle to win them over. Nope! Only one distress call matters, as the ones who sent the others are either non-speaking extras or they're dead already.
Speaking of the character in distress, Mark Addy's shady confused survivor seems like he's going to be important at first, and man that scene at the start where he had that gun trained at Team Tardis was giving me some World Enough and Time flashbacks. But once he's given out all his exposition and it's revealed that's he's an upstanding (but weirdly out of shape) space hero, his role as an actual character pretty much ends. All he gets to do after that is show up in scenes, shoot some robots and lead the captives to his ship. Seems like a waste of a good actor really. (Also, I thought these sniperbots were supposed to get right back up again after being shot, because guns are rubbish and using your brain to defeat threats is great, but he was taking them down no problem. Is the episode letting us know that guns are cool and good now?)
Plus the Doctor finally gives her team communicators so they can stay in touch when separated and the first time one of them tries to use them the Doctor tells them not to! More importantly the Doctor gives everyone neural-balancers because to go out without one would cause amnesia, paranoia, and loss of intellect, leaving us wondering what will happen when one of them inevitably loses one. Will Yaz's break causing her to lose her typical levelheadedness? Will Ryan's cause him problems with his dyspraxia? Will Graham lose his and really try to kill Tzim-Sha? Will the Doctor lose hers and not be smart enough to solve the problem to save the day? There's so many possibilities! Then the Doctor and Yaz both make the daring choice to give theirs up and they're pretty much fine until they get them back five minutes later. Not the most interesting direction they could've gone with.
Also Tzim-Sha's been stranded in near isolation and passing himself off as a god for longer than Christianity's been around. Longer than the Doctor's been around even! A viewer might be inspired to wonder how he's changed in all that time. Maybe he's gone absolutely insane, or maybe he's developed some kind of a conscience and regret! Nope, he's the same as ever, except now he casually murders planets instead of folks who chuck salad at him. And all he really does in the episode is get up, walk into a room, and get shot.
They should've called it something like Doctor Who and the Temple of Tzim, or The Revenge of Graham. Or maybe The Pirate Planet, seeing as it rips off the original series serial's idea of having planets shrunk down by a cyborg lunatic who's put themselves in charge of people with telekinetic powers. It even rips off the ending, with the Doctor doing something technical and clever and kind of under-explained with the Tardis to save the day.
Anyway, I spotted at least three things that the episode's maybe about:
The Ux (mostly Andinio) put blind faith in the first person they saw, as they assumed he was their god, despite the fact that they're the ones with godlike powers and he's a bastard with a face full of stolen teeth who was dying due to his own DNA bombs. To be fair their meeting was fairly miraculous. When the Doctor teleported blindly across the universe she ended up in the vacuum of space, but Tzim-Sha ended up standing on a habitable planet right next to two people with super-powers who would worship him unconditionally. Even more miraculous is that he was able to keep his balance, seeing as he was falling backwards when he teleported out.
There's a bit of symmetry here with how the Tardis materialised for the Doctor in the same way after her own long walk through a wasteland in The Ghost Monument (which the story makes a point of reminding us about). But after the Doctor's finished breaking the faith they've kept for 3407 years, she ends the episode by telling them to continue to have faith. So I guess the episode's stance is that faith is a good thing overall, as long as you ask plenty of questions about your god's supervillain plans, travel a lot, and you don't mistake one of Chris Chibnall's epic coincidences for a sign of divinity. Have faith in Graham instead, that's usually a good bet.
It's also apparently a good thing to let the Ux off the hook for the billions they've (possibly) murdered in the name of their god. Well they seem sorry about it and they probably won't do it again, so why not? I mean that seriously; forgiveness and moving on seems to be the ideal outcome for everyone here and good on Paltraki for not even considering revenge and instead offering to give them a lift in the end. Unless he's only doing it so he can shove them out of an airlock on the way home.
I liked the scene where Ryan got a bit confused how it's okay for her to hand out grenades but not for him to go Call of Duty on robots in The Ghost Monument, as it turned out that the Doctor had two perfectly reasonable answers for him: she was being especially strict back then to make sure they were on the same page as her, and she changes her rules all the time depending on how much she feels like blowing something up so deal with it.
They could've spent longer discussing the possible consequences of letting Tzim go a second time though, seeing as he's about as irredeemable as villains get in Doctor Who, especially in this season of misunderstood or morally grey antagonists. Last season we learned that even the Master wasn't too far gone for redemption, as 60 years of isolation gave guilt a chance to finally catch up with her, but 3000 years of exile and introspection hadn't done a damn thing to rehabilitate Tzim. In fact he managed to up his murder game exponentially. I don't think they should've killed him, but I think the episode should've done a lot more to justify letting him live.
I suppose the clue to the actual stakes here is in the title though, as Ranskor Av Kolos translates into English as the 'Disintegrator of the Soul'. The real Battle of Ranskor Av Kolos, the one the episode is about, is Graham fighting his hatred to save his soul.
The series so far has had several episodes where the Doctor defeated a villain and then someone else came up and killed them for their own less than heroic reasons. Like Karl shoving Tzim off his crane, Jack Robertson shooting the giant spider and King James setting mud-monster Becka on fire. Turns out that season was actually going somewhere with that, as here Graham got his chance to continue the pattern and chose not to. So they'd actually kind of earned the line at the end where the Doctor calls him strong, as we'd seen so many other people make the weak choice. I'm not sure that perpetual solitary confinement is actually more humane than putting a space bullet through Tzim's head, but it's not like they could've just put him on Paltraki's ship and sent him off to go on trial because... uh... hmm....
Oh right, he'd die if he ever left the planet. They never did explain why that was the case, though I guess they implied it was because he needed that massive life support equipment in his throne room and the Ux hadn't found a way to put it on board a spaceship.
I guess the Ux must have created all of this hardware from floating rocks over the course of millennia based on diagrams sketched by Tzim onto paper also made from floating rocks. Plus I suppose they would've also had to make food, toilet rolls, and toothpaste for his molar acne. And all that time it never even occurred to them that they were doing all of the miracles and the 'creator' was doing absolutely nothing but sleep on their couch. They even constructed some of those rubbish Stenza sniper bots for him, and made them authentically terrible at hitting anything standing too close.
You know, with his technological knowledge and centuries of experience, Tzim should've really been a serious rival to the Doctor. So it's funny that she basically just ignores the guy and lets her sidekicks deal with him instead. Which they did, effortlessly. In fact things have gone very Curse of Fatal Death for poor Tzim, as on the day he was going to become leader of his empire he got shoved off a crane by some ordinary bloke and exiled to a barren world for an eternity. Then on the day he was finally ready to get his revenge he got shot in the foot by a retired bus driver and trapped for another eternity! It must have been his Achilles foot I guess seeing as he was entirely helpless afterwards.
At least the end credits took pity on him and called him by his proper name this time. Plus the actor did another great job at bringing some proper menace to someone who should really be a running joke by this point. Though there's just enough of Scorpius in his performance and the suit to make me wish I was watching Farscape instead.
Anyway, overall I found The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos to be a competent but underwhelming conclusion to a competent and underwhelming season. It's the finale that series 11 deserved really, not a big two-parter featuring the Daleks or the Master that paid off a season arc of clues, but a relatively small stand-alone story that concluded a couple of character arcs. They made a good choice moving It Takes You Away to the end of the season and sticking it directly before this one, as it reminded us about Grace and emotionally tortured Graham to the point where I'm not surprised he wanted to put a bullet into the man who killed her. Well, the man who sent the device which threatened her son and motivated her to go on her ill-fated mission to climb a crane and electrocute it at least. Hey, the dude detonated the DNA bombs thinking one was still in her so he totally intended her to die even if he wasn't the one to kill her! The important thing is that Graham's need for payback was resolved a lot better than Nyssa's vendetta against the Master back in the Fifth Doctor era.
While Ryan and Graham were getting all the good emotional scenes as usual, the other two had the job of doing the science thing to resolve the plot. So the Doctor just kind of stepped around the villain on her way to save the day again, while Yaz got another opportunity to be likeable and sensible and stand around a lot reacting to what everyone else was doing. In fact I'm not 100% convinced that Yaz isn't an imaginary person that only exists in the Doctor's head, and the way she came up with the idea about the neural-blockers at the exact same time that the Doctor did only supports my obviously wrong theory!
In conclusion: I got what I expected, I was hoping for more. But I can't complain about Graham's line about shooting Tzim to shut him up, and the way he finally got a fist bump from his grandson.
COMING SOON
Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, my Doctor Who series 11 review!
Comments are very much appreciated.
I'm sure I'll buy this season once it's on Blu-Ray, like I have all the prior ones, but I've got to say that I haven't felt this ambivalent about a Doctor Who purchase since Capaldi's first season. Still, his Doctor improved later on, so I am still hopeful. I just wish we didn't have to wait two years to see.
ReplyDeleteIt was a strange episode, not in the same way as last week's, but because, as you say, nothing seemed to go anywhere, everything seemed vague, and undefined, but it did all sort of hold together. It's the perfect example of a 7 out of 10.
ReplyDelete