13.12: Spyfall, Part One

In which Chris Chibnall is good at casting.

Broadcast: January 2020

Watched: July 2022

“In five seconds, die.”

The title is cool and tells you what kind of story this is, but is actually, if you think about it for half a second, completely meaningless. That feels telling. 

So does the fact that I stopped watching halfway through – we’d realised we had covid and needed to do some contact tracing, lol – and came back to it the next day, and that didn’t feel in any way like a problem. The first half was an exciting half an hour of things going boom. So was the second half. But the second half didn’t feel necessary to the first. 

The plot begins with a trick we haven’t seen from Chibnall yet, but will see a lot of over the next couple of years: several unconnected action bits in exciting locations, which we travel to via the medium of CAPTIONS. Then we get the men in black bit, followed by a car chase and then a trip to MI5, where Stephen Fry dies, almost immediately... Then the writer has a brain wave and realises that, with four characters, he can split them up! (At no point in the previous season had this occurred to him.) So two go to the Australian outback and two to California, then we meet Lenny Henry, then there’s a bit with a party that pretends to be a casino, and then a motorbike chase... 

Okay, none of this is about anything, and that’s going to come back and bite Chibnall on the bum, both in part two of this story, and in a broader sense. But it is actually good *television*. There are good jokes and exciting set pieces. As with Resolution, the production feels more assured even if the plot is going nowhere.

But all that said... what is the plot? What is O’s plan, and how long has he been hiding in the dessert for it to come to fruition? (Longer than he once pretended to be a scarecrow, I assume.) What is Barton’s plan, come to that? And why does he go from being a mildly standoffish and irritated host to shooting at them, immediately? 

It’s genuinely fun TV, and it fixes at least some of the problems with Chibnall 1 (at no point are there a dozen characters following the Doctor from scene to scene). It also gets away with a lot because it ends on such a brilliant scene, and Sacha Dhawan is fantastic in it. Twice.

But none of it links up. And it’d be nice if there was some sense the writer knew where he was going with all this. 

Other things:

• In some ways it’s odd it took this long for Who to get to Stephen Fry as a guest star, since he's a fan, and he did [the 2001-2 webcast] Death Comes to Time two decades earlier. The fact that he clearly only does one day of filming suggests a reason why it took so long. Mind you, casting two other possible big name Masters in other roles is a great way of hiding the identity of the one you've actually cast.

• That brilliant scene: the moment where the Master comes clean/Dhawan lets rip is almost certainly the highlight of the era thus far, and possibly ever. Even so, “Come on Doctor, catch up” feels like another awkward comment on the fact this Doctor is always behind the plot. Love the Master being so unhinged he’s kept the real O in a matchbox for years, just so that he can show the Doctor, then immediately chuck him away.

• “Is he just here for the running commentary?” I prefer Chibnall's messages from Fred when, like this, they double as characterisation: he’s committed to Graham being the irritable Greek chorus now. 

• The annoying infodump lines (“Data from Barton’s pass says he left the building hours ago. Everyone must have gone by now. Let’s have a look”) work less well. FFS, Chris, we can infer that rubbish. Yaz’s “I couldn't work out who’s in charge of who” about Barton and aliens is also, I fear, a bit of a tell. 

• It is also extremely unclear why at one point Yaz seemingly ends up minaturised in a carpet, or how she gets from there to Australia. (“Yaz! How are you even here?”)

• While we're on the fam: Yaz refusing to give her sister Ryan's number feels like an artefact of a pre-Thasmin version of this show. Ditto the “I thought I was dead”/”I’m never gonna let that happen to you” scene. Then there’s Yaz flirting with O. This show is very clearly rewritten a lot on the fly.

• Ryan and Graham losing it with excitement at the gambling tables is very sweet. Ditto the Doctor playing snap. A lot of what is entertaining about this era comes from the fact that this cast are lovely to watch.

• Is Barton meant to not know any of his guests? It’s unclear if it’s a party full of strangers all for show or if he’s just a terrible antisocial host.

• “VOR”. LOL.