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Two episodes in and still loving it.
At a key point in the plot of “The Ghost Monument,” the Doctor asks a holographic projection to clarify the situation because she’s a little confused. This leads to a very funny little pan around the group in which each member of the companion team (Ryan, Yaz, and Graham from “The Woman Who Fell To Earth”) briefly articulates their personal level of confusion. For the viewer, though, this is a very simple and non-confusing plot. Six people are looking for the same object, all for different reasons. The stakes are high, because they’re all on a planet which is extremely hostile to life, and they all need to get the hell off it. To get to the object, they have to negotiate various hazards, traps, and obstacles. It’s all pretty straightforward; but it’s elevated by three important things. One: Chibnall’s character work, not only on the Doctor and the companions but on Angstrom and Epzo, the two aliens who are vying to be the first to reach the object. Two: the Doctor’s gradual unfolding of the backstory of the Most Dangerous Planet Ever. Three: the identity of the object, which alas is a spoiler. Although I’m betting by now even people who haven’t seen the episode yet can guess what it is.
So, again, this plot gets no marks for originality or cleverness. There are no major TWISTS, really. By and large, the rules don’t change; people are who they say they are; and they act in ways consistent with who they are shown to be. But, and this is my point, I did not miss any of that. I’m more interested in what Jodie Whittaker, in a little behind the scenes featurette, identifies as the real conflict here: the one between Epzo’s hard-man individualism and the Doctor’s idea that we are, as she says, “stronger together.” (I’ll just remind anyone who’s forgotten this that “Stronger Together” was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign slogan.) The real arc of this plot is not so much the finding of the “Ghost Monument”–i.e., the TARDIS, thank you Chibnall for not trying to milk that reveal–as the gradual incorporation of Epzo into the group. In his opening scene, Epzo establishes that he would *almost* rather die than accept help from a stranger. Over the course of the episode, he’s the one who travels the farthest and grows the most.
It’s made clear, however, that Epzo’s outlook has been formed at least in part by the cruelty of the world in which he grew up. The race itself is a zero-sum game that enforces this kind of every-man-for-himself attitude: there can only be one winner, and everyone who’s not the winner is a loser. We’re all fucking tired of living in that world. It’s the world of Brexit and the world of Buttercup and his fucking wall: anything good that one of THEM has is something that was taken from ME. Epzo, we discover during the boat ride, was taught this trust-no-one point of view at the tender age of four by his abusive/insane/desperate mother. Everyone on Team Doctor tries to tell him that his mother was seriously fucked up; but he doesn’t want to hear it. But the beautifully butch Angstrom, while more interesting to me in every way, is only slightly less hard-bitten; she too has grown up in a cruel world where her family is being terrorized by the Stenza (the baddies from Episode One), and even at the end of the journey, she’s just as determined as Epzo is to claim the prize for herself.
The corrosive power of a toxic environment is literalized in the landscape of the planet Desolation; as the holographic Ilin (played by Art Malik, who played the prison governor in “The Final Problem”) actually says, “this whole planet has been made cruel.” But the whole point of the plot of “The Ghost Monument” is that this idea that you have to become cruel to survive cruelty is a fallacy. These six people survive only by pooling their resources and helping each other. Whittaker makes the most of Thirteen’s sparring with Epzo, creating a little string of gemlike character-defining moments. My favorite is her angry defense of her determination to find out what happened to this planet, in which she makes both the idealist and the pragmatic case for finding out what the fuck happened to the inhabitants before just blithely striking out into the poisonous distance. The reading of the signs on the floor was a bit Mines of Moria for me, but at least in this case it’s plausible that they would have had time to write all that down before offing themselves and everyone else.
If you’re going to go simple, as they always say on Top Chef, you have to get it absolutely right; and this episode mostly does. The paper-bag creatures, for instance, are very simple but very creepy. The trick with the acetylene mists is not rocket science but it’s pretty cool (and they do a good job of introducing the self-lighting cigar without totally giving the game away). My only question is WTF these people are doing for food and water, given that the planet does not offer either. But the ending is handled well; the heart-warmth of Epzo and Angstrom’s willingness to get over themselves and join forces is immediately undercut by Ilin’s callousness to the four extras, as he condemns them to a painful death with–literally–a snap of the fingers. And then we get the TARDIS reunion.
And here is where I would like to finally stop and give Jodie Whittaker her propers. After she’s entertained and problem-solved and done all the Doctory things the Doctor always does– “I love a big locked door”–the look of absolute devastation on Whittaker’s face as she has to tell her new best friends that she won’t be able to get them home after all is just heartbreaking. So is the desperate longing we see as soon as that wheezing sound becomes audible. And though–like many things about this script–it may be a bit on the nose, I would not give up those moments when she’s pleading with the TARDIS and the universe at large for the happy ending. Her prayer to nobody in particular to “just let us have this” felt very much like Nine’s “Just this once” plea in “The Doctor Dances.” Her direct address to the TARDIS is also significant, emotionally and otherwise: “Come to Daddy. I mean…come to Mummy. I mean…I really need you right now.” It underscores something I really appreciate about the way they’re handling the gender swap. Thirteen does it the old way; then she tries saying the exact same thing but just changing the gender; then she comes up with something truer and more emotionally honest than either of these versions, and that’s what finally works. Thirteen isn’t just an inverted Twelve, or a “female version” of the Doctor. She’s her own thing; and that thing is, to borrow a phrase from Ryan, “proper awesome.”
Her emotional reunion with the TARDIS is beautiful; and so is the new TARDIS. Once again, it looks back to the pre-Moffat era but forward into the future. It was Moffat who started the tradition of redesigning the TARDIS with every regeneration. Nine and Ten had the same TARDIS design, and I loved it. Moffat, of course, has to put his own mark on everything; so he rebuilt it for Eleven the year he took over, and then it gets another makeover for Twelve. Arwel Jones, who designed Thirteen’s, talks about it in terms very similar to the ones I used to describe what I loved about the Nine/Ten TARDIS: it’s organic (they borrowed fractal patterns from tree canopies for the basic pattern; the crystals all glow amber, just like the Nine/Ten TARDIS’s did) and it’s designed for manual operation; as Jones says, there’s no keyboard, it’s all things for Whittaker to push, pull, bump, slam, and step on, because she’s “quite a physical actor.” Thank you, Arwel Jones, for recognizing that and giving her something work with. Ten’s TARDIS had a mallet hanging off the console–you know, for when he had to do some really delicate engineering. Thirteen’s TARDIS has that same lived-in, hands-on, steampunky feel, but looks less beat-up and scrappy. It’s just crying out to be touched…
Originally posted by doctorwhogeneration
Eleven out of ten for TARDIS design, Arwel.
I would be remiss if I did not point out that this is a very queer episode. There’s Angstrom, who is more convincingly and hotly butch than 90% of TV canonical lesbian characters (when Graham mentions that the Stenza killed his wife, Angstrom says, “Mine too”); and now we have Thirteen tenderly reuniting with her first and probably really most important love, the TARDIS, who’s always been gendered female. That probably has something to do with how much I love all this; but it’s not the only reason. Chibnall has given Thirteen, instead of a companion love interest, a little companion family. It sets up a different, and I believe a more promising, dynamic for season 11, and you can see it right away in their first alien adventure: it’s not about burning the universe to save The One (as it was for Twelve in Clara’s final season) but about helping everyone get out alive. Which–incredibly–they all actually do. So one more time with feeling:
