13.10: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

In which I rewatch the only Doctor Who story ever whose name my brain simply refuses to learn.

Broadcast: December 2018

Watched: July 2022

“Ranskoor av what?”

The first episode of Who since the show came back, I think, that annoyed me so much I haven’t seen it since broadcast. Will it be better than I expected, now I’m expecting it to suck...?

Er, no.

Okay, it is mildly entertaining at first – the first half of the episode is clearly meant to be about building up tension (the portentous opening involving people who’ve walked for years who can move rocks with their minds, the planet that messes with your brain, etc.). There are good bits: Mark Addy is great, with an absolutely empty role; the landscape of wrecked spaceships looks good, as does the “edifice” floating in the sky (very Lawrence Miles and/or Douglas Adams). Bradley Walsh is quite compelling when he’s so understated in the “I’m going to murder that f*cker” bit.

But that scene is also intensely anti-dramatic – someone announces what they’re going to do, then doesn’t do it because they’re actually nice, there’s no tension there. (There’s clearly meant to be a thing where, by helping the non-speaking extras, Graham chooses mercy over revenge, but it’s poorly articulated, the two things don’t seem to connect.) The sniperbots, a monster so memorable that I bet you can’t remember which episode we first encountered them in, feel like a relic of a draft in which there’s much more this season about how the Stenza are a universal menace rather than “that blue bloke we vaguely remember”.

And you can tell Chris Chibnall is panicking about how to inject some drama into this because the first time we meet Mark Addy he just walks in and waves a gun at someone, as happened in all the worst episodes of Torchwood. 

The biggest problem, though, is that it’s all building up to nowhere. The denouement is... what, Ryan and Graham helping some extras out of pods? The bit where the Doctor runs in slow motion while Tim Shaw explains the plot (I’ve already forgotten), which I think is meant to be like that bit of A Good Man Goes To War but actually reminded me of Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace? I watched this three days before writing these notes, and I can no longer remember what the threat even was.

 

Other things:

• The thing that's always annoyed me about this title is that the meaningless set of letters are impossible to remember, but actually on reflection I think the most annoying thing is: this episode does not feature anything one might mistake for a battle.

• Checking in with another theme of this season, this story gives us two (2) more things you can attach to yourself to give you magical powers.

• Regarding the Ux: if there are only two of them at any one time, how can they be found on three planets?

• “And yet I should thank you”... Chibnall clearly likes this bit (god knows why) because he later reuses it in The Halloween Apocalypse.

• Why are there only two crew being held hostage at the beginning, but then it turns out there are dozens? Why is this never explained? Why do none of them get dialogue? Why does Mark Addy not even talk to his crew once he's rescued them?

But the biggest question of all is:

• How do you do a trailer for the new year's Dalek episode and forget to put a Dalek in it?