Two episodes into Chris Chibnall’s tenure as showrunner for Doctor Who and the word that springs to mind is “breathless”. Both the extra-long season premiere and tonight’s episode are paced as dead-out sprints, with “The Ghost Monument” even structured around the desperate last leg of an epic intergalactic race.
That’s the situation into which The Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and new companions Graham (Bradley Walsh), Ryan (Tosin Cole) and Yaz (Mandip Gill) find themselves when they recover from last week’s cliffhanger: accidentally teleported into deep space by The Doctor in an attempt to reconnect with her lost TARDIS. The group is initially split up between two pilots, with half being rescued by Angstrom (Susan Lynch) and the other two being picked up by Epzo (Shaun Dooley). But one very expensive-looking crash sequence later, everyone is reunited on a seemingly deserted planet.
Turns out, Angstrom and Epzo are the last two competitors in a massive space race (which, we learn, started off with 4000 participants). A holographic presentation by smug race organizer/former winner Ilin (Art Malik) informs all parties that the winner will be the one who first arrives at the eponymous “ghost monument” which turns out, of course, to be the TARDIS, skipping through time as it is wont to do.
Ilin also instructs the gang that they cannot, under any circumstances, travel by night, a warning that pays off shortly thereafter when the killer robots show up, as they are wont to do. Damn killer robots. Always…you know…killing.
But first, angst!
Both Graham and Ryan are still grieving the loss of Grace (Sharon D. Clarke) in the previous episode, with Graham struggling to create some kind of bond with Ryan, and Ryan shutting such efforts down. In one of the episode’s lovelier moments, Graham admits that part of his dealing with Grace’s loss involves trying to imagine what she would say if she were with them.
“Well, right now, she’d be going, ‘What’s the matter with ya? You’re on another planet! How cool is that!” Graham remarks.
The Doctor Who revival has had its share of damaged Companions (Rose signed up for TARDIS rides in the hopes of saving her Dad from untimely death, remember) but both Graham and Ryan are walking wounds in a way that feels different from any other TARDIS team in the current era, their grief providing a counterbalance to the time-tripping, world-hopping zaniness.
Meanwhile, we learn that Angstrom is participating in the race in the hopes of using the prize money to save her family, fleeing from some kind of intergalactic space genocide (there’s always at least one of those going on wherever/whenever The Doctor lands), and that Epzo is a compulsive loner forged by childhood abuse into believing that everyone is alone in the universe, which of course flies counter to The Doctor’s own values.
It’s in the conflicts between Epzo and The Doctor that we for the first time begin to see how a lady Doctor affects the tenor of the show. We’ve seen this kind of conflict before, but often it is the mannerisms of a particular Doctor that cause troubles between the TARDIS crew and whatever small-minded lout is gumming up the works that week. Here, it comes down to a basic, seemingly unbridgeable gaps in world/universe-views, and it’s hard not to watch Epzo’s smug isolationistic dismissal of The Doctor without finding something gendered about the dynamic. Whittaker’s Doctor remains largely an endlessly chipper exposition machine, but the irritation she expresses towards Epzo are the first smatterings of the righteous fury that we know this Time Lord/Lady is capable of unleashing when the mood strikes. We’ll have to wait and see what it will take to raise her temper to true ire.
Until then, the group continues to hustle across the appropriately named “Desolation”. Fleeing from the aforementioned killer robots, 13 and company discover an underground facility (There’s always an underground facility. At a certain point, anyone constructing an underground facility for experiments has to just assume they’re constructing their own tomb, yeah?) and learn that Desolation is so desolate because the planet was used as a sort of giant nuclear testing site for scientists kidnapped and pressed into building myriad weapons of war.
By who? Why the Stenza! That’s right, the Mr. Freeze-looking, tooth-faced asswipe from last week! Looks like we got ourselves an ongoing arc, folks.
Anyway, then Epzo gets attacked by a killer blanket.
Turns out there are actually a lot of blankets, and they’re actually cloth-based killer lifeforms known as “the remnants”, and they are responsible for wiping out all life on Desolation. Yup, it seems the scientists created a creature that kills those in which they sense fear. This is all very hurriedly established and explained towards the episode’s end, leaving something of a hole where the episode’s villain should be. As with the first episode, even with longer running times it feels as though Chibnall’s scripts blow right past key moments of plot and information while lingering too long over others. Previous showrunners Russell T. Davies and Stephen Moffat had similar habits, but they made up for it with zippy interpersonal banter that kept spirits up during down episodes. Even if you were never sure exactly how or why David Tennant or Matt Smith were doing what they were doing, it was always a heckuva lotta fun watching them do it. Here, Chibnall keeps things moving at such a breakneck pace that once again the characters feel like passengers to their own adventure as opposed to the driving force behind it, and too much time is spent laying out dots that don’t satisfactorily get connected.
Anyway, Angstrom saves Epzo, the robots show up, everybody flees to the surface where they are cornered by a swarm of Remnants. The creatures (voiced by Ian Gelder) taunt The Doctor about the fear they detect in her, but even cornered The Doctor immediately sets to work releasing a field full of gas and priming Graham to ignite a cigar Epzo had set aside for a victory smoke. The Remnants are blown to smithereens and the group escapes to where the ghost monument is meant to be.
Only, there’s no TARDIS awaiting them. Only another holographic Ilin, unamused that Angstrom and Epzo opted to cross the finish line together and declare themselves co-winners. A strongly worded threat by Epzo puts an end to Ilin’s desire to declare the whole race null and void, and all our weekly guests get zapped up and away, leaving the regulars stranded on Desolation where they are almost immediately picked off and killed, brutally, in pornographic detail.
Nah, of course the TARDIS shows up to whisk everyone back home.
Before that though, we get our first moment where The Doctor’s post-regeneration indefatigability seems to falter, Whittaker’s sunny disposition clouding as she admits that she is out of tricks, tools, and options. But if The Doctor loses faith in herself, her Companions have learned not to give up on her or themselves, a leap of faith that is immediately rewarded with the iconic whirring of the TARDIS’s arrival.
And so at last The Thirteenth Doctor has her TARDIS, complete with a refurbished bridge and console, a towering crystalline construction that makes the TARDIS interior look more alien than ever before. Everyone gapes and gawps, and then The Doctor confidently throws the switch to bring them all home.
Which, if we’ve learned anything from 50-plus years of ongoing adventures through time and space, means that ‘home’ is the absolute last place any of them are headed.
Episode Thoughts:
-Director Mark Tonderai continues with the grittier feel established by the premiere, favoring handheld shots during both running escapes and charged emotional encounters. Whittaker greeting her returned TARDIS is shot with the same tight intimacy as Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga whispering sweet lovelies to one another during A Star is Born. The darker tone and color palette work well together, but it’s such a serious turn from the whimsy of Moffat’s run and the eye-popping (at times garish) color that Davies used that it will likely take time to get used to.
-Whittaker remains a treat, but I’m hoping Chibnall and other writers give her a little breathing room in future episodes. So far, Whittaker’s role has been to sprint around speed-reading exposition while spitting the occasional bit of sass. Such is the life of any Doctor, but the others in the modern era have all benefited from scripts that allowed them time to banter and bicker and develop real personalities (for God’s sake, Tennant spent his first episode in a bathrobe, just sort of hanging out). 13 is the first modern Doctor to seem truly free of crushing guilt and loss, but outside of the remnants accusing her of being terrified by “the new”, Whittaker hasn’t really had a chance to play with that.
-That said, there’s a lovely moment later in the episode where 13 commends a nervous Ryan, fretting over having to climb a ladder despite his dyspraxia, for all he has done so far. Ryan had earlier attempted to play hero by running into a robot swarm with a laser gun, an action that failed immediately and earned The Doctor’s annoyance. Heroism isn’t about racking up the highest body count, it’s about facing up to your weaknesses and trying to be better than them. As our most human (and humane) Doctor since at least 10, 13 recognizes and appreciates this.
-Graham spends much of the episode wearing lady sunglasses that 13 borrowed from either Audrey Hepburn or Pythagoras, she’s not sure which.
-Mandip Gill is a hugely appealing presence, but I’m still waiting for Yaz to get anything of note to do besides making sure that Ryan is doing OK.
-A bunch of people enter the TARDIS for the first time this week, but no one remarks, “It’s bigger on the inside.” I don’t know what you’re playing at, Chibnall, but THAT IS NOT OK. HAVE SOME STANDARDS.
The Weekly Timey-Wimey Moment: Doctor Who has long established that all peoples and aliens speak the Queen’s English thanks to Companions interacting with the TARDIS. Since none of our current crew had spent time in the TARDIS yet, 13 explains that each of them was automatically implanted with a translator when they were picked up by the racing ships.
Arc Alert: Not only do we get another name-drop of the Stenza, but the remnants taunt The Doctor about some secret, “outcast” child that 13 apparently does not know that she knows about.
Most Whovian Moment: The Doctor continues to have a troublingly erotic relationship with that blue box, and not even swapping genders seems to have changed that.
