14.3: The Giggle

In which that’s alright then!

Broadcast/watched: December 2023

“Your good or your bad are nothing to me. All that exists is to win or to lose.”

For most of its run time, this is a properly brilliant movie-sized Doctor Who story, coming close to surpassing everything RTD has ever done before and more. And then there are the last 20 minutes, about which I keep changing my mind.

The big things in no particular order: I bloody love the theme of mass media, of screens, driving us gradually mad, making everyone think that they’re right. (The guy at the start who says “I’ve always been right!” is one of those brilliant one-shot performances; very unclear if he dies or not.) The government minister who is basically Boris Johnson feels like the sort of thing we might have got from RTD1; Trinity Wells as a Fox-style TV host who’s basically gone anti-vax does not. All this feels like a much stronger and angrier political statement than we’d have got from the sunnier RTD of the 2000s.

As to the Toymaker... A non-fan who hadn’t watched asked me if Neil Patrick Harris was any good, then complained that it was a waste to cast him and not give him a musical number. This was a delight because I got to tell her he had a whole dance routine in which he lip synced to Spice Up Your Life, thus proving that Doctor Who>literally anything else. 

NPH gives quite a different performance to the one Michael Gough did in 1966, far more lively and fun. I like the way the story gives him a series of absurd accents: bits like “You must be used to sunnier climes”, too, lean into the idea that the original wasn’t a racist portrayal, but a portrayal of a racist. (Jim Cooray-Smith has written about how the original TV story wasn’t racist, it’s just been misunderstood, largely by Americans; there was a good Twitter thread recently in which a young fan named Jamie highlights the fact these misunderstandings date back to at least 1985.)

The entire sequence in the Toymaker’s realm is brilliantly nightmarish: the maze of doors, the murderous dolls, people becoming puppets. The bit in UNIT HQ where the Toymaker turns soldiers into balls with screaming faces is genuinely quite horrifying. 

That UNIT HQ, by the way, looks *so* big budget! The idea you’d put a secret military outfit in a huge skyscraper in central London with a big gun on top remains hilarious. (Regarding it being on the site of Lloyds of London: is this a gag? UNIT also provides insurance?) I love that the Vlinx is just there, UNIT just has an alien robot computer thing now and we all need to deal with that. I hope that a) it’s not evil and b) it’s never explained.

I also love that they bring Melanie back but don’t really do anything with her: it’s just “Well we need a character, might as well give Bonnie some work, she’s great and got a raw deal in the ‘80s”. It’s a sort of nothing-y part as written,but will have greater resonance for fans than if she’d been some random character actor. I wonder if Chibnall’s mechanism for shifting ex-companions to the role of supporting cast will be one of his biggest legacies.

Ooh, UNIT is now nearly all-female! Seriously, though, where’s Osgood?

Okay. That’s enough blocking. Let’s talk about the ending. 

“It feels different this time...” 

The regeneration happens with 18 minutes left in the episode, which is kind of nuts. Like large chunks of the internet I was instinctively a bit uncomfortable with the idea of bigeneration: the fact the first black lead is immediately sharing the limelight with his most successful predecessor. Also if old Doctors can just survive it feels like it might kind of break the show? The fact regeneration is the death of the lead, but also not, feels kind of important. 

It also just feels weird that there are suddenly two Doctors there. It doesn’t obviously mesh with the other themes, of mass media driven madness or playing games. And it is fundamentally undramatic to beat a god by playing catch.

On the other hand, though… that game is foreshadowed in the toyshop. On that occasion, the game stops when Donna says “Enough!” and catches the last ball. She later says “Well, maybe I’ll save you”. Which she does. All that is rather lovely.

And once the thought it hit me - this may be my own baggage, sorry - that all this stuff is actually about Russell giving up work to care for his husband (“I’ve never been so happy in my life” contrasting with “I don’t want to go”), it… kind of broke me. I watched the end credits with actual tears.

“He’s not dying alone. You can do what you like to me, I’m gonna be with him.” Oh, Donna. 

As to the problems with bigeneration... I suspect they’ll all go away soon enough because Ncuti immediately owns the screen, and once we’ve seen him as the lead for a couple of episodes, the fact there’s a David Tennant Doctor eating tuna madras in Chiswick won’t matter in the slightest. It’s also clearly a mechanism for dumping all the Doctor’s angst in a corner and starting again a bit. (“I’m fine because you fixed yourself. We’re doing rehab out of order” - is the implication that the retired 14 is still, somehow, before 15?) That suggests I was wrong about how RTD planned to use Fluxi

Oh yeah, also they’ve parked Tennant and Tate in case they want to make a movie, right? You want your most successful cast, and doing it in the main continuity poses both licence fee and scheduling problems. Christmas 2026, you mark my words.

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Other things:

• “Soho, 1925” looks great, but not in any way like Soho.

• Instead of a perspex barrier, this week it’s a door. But there really is a lot of stuff about barriers between people this season.

• “Maybe long-term travel in the TARDIS puts you out of sync” - hang on, Wilf barely travelled in the TARDIS? OH MY GOD MISSING STORIES WITH THE 10TH DOCTOR AND WILF? Don't tell Big Finish, they’ll recast him. (Actually I’m a bit uncomfortable with Cribbins here being played by a hat, a wheelchair and some re-used dialogue, but needs must.)

• “An elemental force with the power of a god…” Talking of spin-offs, are the Toymaker’s numerous appearances in other media just not canon now? (Mel’s fate in the New Adventures is still fine: the 7th Doctor is such a dick in Head Games that she probably just went back to Glitz.)

• Kate is so different when she's being horrible, it made me realise that her general flatness is actually a performance choice. It’s interesting how she quietly became a proper long-running character: that’s 11 years she's been in it now. Also, the wheelchair bit referenced the discourse that happened following The Star Beast, even though it must have been filmed ages ago: RTD guessed what would happen! It was deliberate!

• The fact the Doctor doesn’t seem to realise that games don’t have a memory is, incidentally, a bit weird.

• The “Well that's alright then!” bit is *brilliant*. It’s funny that they work through the Doctor's guilt over the fate of his Moffat era companions, and then just... don't even mention Yaz? Damning critique of Chibnall’s lack of character work there. 

• The fact the new Doctor takes the new TARDIS not the old feels weird. Is that a misfire?

• Lot of references this mini-season - already had Midnight and (obviously) The Star Beast - but here they go into overdrive: this one feels like a mash-up of The Celestial Toymaker and Last of the Time Lords, with references to Mavic Chen, Logopolis, and Adric. Which reminds me:

• Regarding “The One Who Waits”: wouldn’t it be hilarious if it’s someone they keep mentioning, who they didn't use in Tales of the TARDIS, and who has a very good reason to hate the Doctor...? Just saying. 

• Oh I’ve already seen the Christmas special, by the way. It’s brilliant. And really: David who?