Throughout Jodie Whittaker’s first season as The Thirteenth Doctor, we’ve seen Doctor Who put her through a number of tried-and-true formulas. There’s been the contemporary earthbound mystery, the base-under-siege, the hang-out-with-famous-folks-from-history, all the favorites. With “The Witchfinders”, writer Joy Wilkinson and director Sallie Aprahamian toss The Doctor and her Companions into a good old-fashioned horror yarn to mixed results.
While appropriately creepy in places, “The Witchfinders” ultimately feels overstuffed and tonally imbalanced, with the episode’s busy plot and meditations on gender, power, class, and fear overpowered by a showboating guest performance that’s both the best thing in the episode and the thing that throws the entire enterprise out of whack.
Still struggling to get the new TARDIS console under control, The Doctor and Ryan (Tosin Cole), Graham (Bradley Walsh), and Yaz (Mandip Gill) end up wandering around an unspecified era of English history, at a place known as “Bilehurst Crag” (not subtle with the names this week), a place that Graham notes exists on no current maps and has no presence in any history book. So that’s odd thing number one.
Odd thing number two: These people are partying it up like they just got an official release date for the final season Game of Thrones. Turns out, there’s a reason why everyone is living it up, and that reason is that Sunday is the day when everyone gets together to “duck” an accused witch.
“Ducking” sounds adorable, or a euphemism, or like some weird stunt that dipshitty teens are getting up to, but it’s actually more like, well, torture-murder. The village’s landowner, Becka Savage (Siobhan Finneran) (really really not subtle with the names this week) has drowned over 30 people already, chaining them to a heavy tree trunk and dunking them in the lake. If they drown, cool, they were innocent. If they live, cool, we’ll burn them at the stake.
Despite cautioning her crew not to interfere in history, The Doctor leaps to the rescue of the latest victim, an old woman named Old Mother Twiston (Tricia Kelly). Old Mother drowns and Becka immediately turns on The Doctor as a potential witch, only for 13 to whip out the old psychic paper which declares her a Witchfinder General (you guys ever see the Vincent Price movie, Witchfinder General? That shit is fantastic).
Becka brings the gang back to her haunted-as-balls manor estate where she boasts about all the people she’s murdered in the name of God and King James. The Doctor comes like thisclose to grabbing control of the situation, only for King James himself to come swaggering into the room.
OK, so let’s talk about Alan Cumming. He is on some WILD shit in this episode, camping it up to the back-rafters as a flouncing, dapper madman who would be utterly loathsome in his small-minded paranoia if he weren’t so goddamn entertaining to watch. The early goings of “The Witchfinders” is almost oppressively dour, with Finneran channeling her inner Dolores Umbridge for a singularly unpleasant megalomaniac. Cumming throws off the tone of the entire episode with the way he purrs, leers, and generally carries on. It somehow is simultaneously all wrong while also being far and away the best and most memorable part of the episode. Damn you, Floop, you’ve done it again.
Along with a kit of witchfinder tools (and body parts) King James also comes bearing some of that ol’ timey misogyny. There’s a bunch of shoe leather with the TARDIS team getting split up and snooping around (this season’s episodes have all been a mite too long. I appreciate the show giving itself some breathing room for the slower, more internal adventures [“Rosa”] but an episode like this one needs to move at a stronger clip) with the end result being Yaz and The Doctor investigating OId Mother’s young granddaughter Willa (Tilly Steele) after she’s attacked by a mud tendril while burying her grandmother while Graham and Ryan attempt to slow down King James and Becka’s witch hunt expedition.
The Doctor discovers that there’s a patch of mud in the forest that reacts to being contained about as well as The Thing did to being prodded with a hot wire in that movie whose name I can’t remember right now. It’s then that the episode enters full-blown horror territory as The Doctor and company realize that all of the newly buried dead have risen from their graves, possessed by the mud itself.
Everyone runs away and runs into everyone else. When King James’ bodyguard attempts to attack the mud-zombies, they pulverize him, and everyone is sent scattering again. While the Companions go to investigate the zombie herd, The Doctor tries to suss out Becka’s connection to these strange goings on, since it surely can’t be a coincidence that the whole sentient mud/risen dead thing started going down when the witchhunting started. Becka in turn accuses The Doctor of being a witch (with the sonic as a magic wand, which, I mean, fair) and set for a ducking of her own.
The Companions follow a trail of mud people back to Becka’s house at the same time that King James approaches a bound Doctor and begs her to reveal the secrets of the universe to him, bride-of-Satan though he believes her to be. The Doctor in turn tells James that shit yeah she has the secrets of the universe, but they will always be closed to him for as long as he is governed by fear.
The ducking commences (in answer to your question, yes, I have written “the fucking” instead “ducking” more than once) with The Doctor continuing to badger Becka with questions about the whole “I know you know what’s the deal with the mud zombies” deal, even as she’s lowered into the water. The Companions rush to the scene to try and save the day, but 13 has already freed herself thanks to some key (natch) advice she gleamed during “a very wet weekend with Houdini.”
Anyway, Becka starts weeping mud and the mud zombies arrive bearing an ax. A terrified, desperate Becka then finally admits the truth: A tree on the hill near her house was spoiling her view, so she went to chop it down. But when she struck the tree (whose wood is now used for the ducking) a mud tendril struck and infected her. She sought help from both medicine (including Old Mother Twiston) and prayer, eventually concluding that if she did “God’s work” by killing “witches” she would be spared.
Yeah, no. The mud overtakes Becka and transforms her into an alien visage, leading to the second info-dump in as many minutes. See, turns out there was a race of aliens called the Morax and the Morax were all huge dill-weeds so they were reduced to mud and imprisoned underneath the hill, with the tree actually being a piece of alien security equipment that was weakened over the course of millions/billions of years standing sentry. (“Oh well, it’s obvious when you put it like that,” Graham grumbles. He’s the best.)
The mud zombies (mombies?) zap The Doctor and company and grab King James, intending to fuse him with their own still-buried king and then go forth and conquer the world, as you do. The Doctor, her Companions, and Willa burn the tree stump in the hope that the smoke will prove toxic to the Morax and drive them back underground.
This turns out to be the case and the Morax king flees before it can possess James, while the rest of the Morax are purged from their hosts. Only Becka, the Morax queen, resists, but before 13 can compel her away, James seizes a torch and burns her on the spot.
Fed up with old timey times and their old timey people, The Doctor collects her crew and heads back to the TARDIS, taunting James with the knowledge that the TARDIS, like so much else in the universe, will remain a mystery that he will never solve.
Episode Thoughts:
-There’s plenty of great stuff in “The Witchfinders”, but it never quite congeals into a successful whole. Cumming and Finneran are both exceptional versions of two very different kinds of Doctor Who villains, but they go together like oil and water. Finneran’s plays her mania so real, while Cumming plays his obsessive lunatic so arch, that the characters barely seem to belong in the same planet, let alone the same episode. And as I mentioned a little earlier, the episode is overstuffed by half, with everything involving the Morax crammed into the final minutes in big rushes of exposition. It’s certainly not a bad episode, and I can see myself revisiting it semi-often if only to bask in Cumming’s line-readings (see below) but it feels sloppier than we’ve been accustomed to this season.
-No one is hurt by that sloppiness more than Steele. Her character Willa has this whole arc involving secret family ties to Becka and betraying The Doctor and coming back to the side of the angels and while it theoretically works on the page, Steele is swallowed up by the machinations of the plot and Cumming’s devouring the episode.
-The Doctor likes apples again.
-Graham, flustered at being put in charge of The Doctor: “It’s a very flat team structure!”
-The Doctor never mentions that she’s, you know, actually met and chatted with Satan.
-Last week’s episode was a satire of dehumanizing corporate culture that concluded with the reveal that the blue-collar worker was the true villain. This episode tackles genocides perpetuated by male-dominated power systems, yet the teeth-gnashing villain behind it all is a woman. For all the complaints by huge fucking assholes about how “SJW” Doctor Who has become (Newsflash Dipshits: It was always this) the show seems unwilling to engage with its own metaphors and the results are thematically confused and self-defeating even as the show continues to hum along week to week.
-King James killing Becka after the Morax threat has already been defeated recalls Not Trump executing the queen spider as she was already dying in “Arachnids in the U.K.”. Past or present, there will always be panicky dudes destroying what they can’t understand.
-A series of lines that are unimpressive on paper but are comedy gold when performed by Alan Cumming: “And I know all about Satan!” “Now, I’m going to have some fun. Eh, Ryan?” “Witchcraft!” “My protector!”
-Ryan confides in James that he has also experienced loss with the death of his mother and grandmother. That leads to this exchange: “My father was murdered by my mother who was then imprisoned and beheaded.” … “Yeah, that’s worse.”
-Like five seconds after I thought about that Arthur C. Clarke quote about technology seeming like magic, The Doctor spat out that exact line.
-Some choice Doctor-isms this week: “Honestly if I was still a bloke I could get on with the job and not have to waste time defending myself.” “Check out my rhymes! Poetry under pressure!” “I thought they’d come to kill you, which is a fair assumption given the ax.”
-And this, which practically doubles as a thesis for the show: “You want to know the secrets of existence? Start with the secrets of the heart. I could show you everything, if you’d stop being afraid of what you don’t understand.”