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The Doctor Who revival’s 11th season has been something of a mixed bag, in my opinion. I thought it started out strongly with “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” “The Ghost Monument,” and “Rosa,” then went through some peaks and valleys afterward. For every strong episode like “Demons of the Punjab” or “Kerblam!,” there was a mediocre episode like “The Witchfinders,” or even a straight up bad one like “Arachnids in the UK.” I’m very happy to report, then, that the season finale, “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos,” is a return to the strength of the season’s early episodes.

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

It’s fitting to call “Battle” equal in quality to the season opener, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” because together they form bookends to the season. The Senza warrior Tzim-Sha, whom the Doctor banished from Earth at the end of “Woman,” reappears in “Battle” with vengeance on his mind. To be honest, I found the wounded, sick, and angry Tzim-Sha of this episode to be even scarier than he was in “Woman”! With additional callbacks to the episodes “The Ghost Monument” and “Demons of the Punjab,” it feels like the season has come full circle and offers a kind of closure. It’s not a season-long arc, exactly, but it helps make the season feel like a cohesive whole.

I liked when Graham tells the Doctor he’s  going to kill Tzim-Sha for what he did to Grace back in “Woman.” Finally, I thought, some conflict! Unfortunately, I thought the conversation that follows suffers from the same lack of emotional depth that has plagued the writing in many episodes this season. Their conversation feels very stilted and cliched. How many times have we heard someone say, “If you kill him, you become just like him”? I would much rather have seen the Doctor tell Graham about the toll that comes with taking a life, speaking from her own experience, or even seen her get mad at Graham and tell him she didn’t ferry him all the way across space and time so he could have revenge. Instead, the conversation feels rushed and by-the-numbers to me. I wanted more emotion, a criticism I found myself repeating often throughout the season.

As for Tzim-Sha’s plan, I have to admit I didn’t fully understand it. Why keep the crews from the crashed ships alive in stasis? He can’t leave this planet, so he can’t bring them back to the Stenza homeworld as trophies. Also, why shrink the other planets down instead of just destroying them? Maybe that has more to do with the Stenza idea of keeping trophies, but still, it seems overly complicated. Then again, I should have stopped trying to make sense of Doctor Who villains’ plans a long time ago, as they rarely make sense.

Anyway, I liked “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” a lot, and I’m so relieved this up-and-down season ended on a high note. I like the cast and the character development of Graham and Ryan, I just hope next season we’ll have a little more emotional depth. And also maybe a little more Yaz?

And now for some Doctor Who neepery! The Doctor mentioned the TARDIS once regressed a Slitheen back into an egg, which is a reference to the events of the 2005 Ninth Doctor episode “Boom Town.” She also mentions the TARDIS once towed the Earth “halfway across the universe,” which is a reference to the 2008 Tenth Doctor episode “Journey’s End,” which coincidentally also dealt with stolen planets. Another story that deals with stolen planets, and miniaturized ones at that, is the 1978 Fourth Doctor serial “The Pirate Planet,” in which the hollow planet Zanak would materialize around other planets, plunder their mineral wealth, and then crush those planets down to tiny rocks. One such shrunken planet was Calufrax, which turned out to be a disguised segment of the Key to Time, a cube composed of crystalline shards that look remarkably similar to the ones Tzim-Sha was keeping his own shrunken planets in!

Next up, a New Year’s Day special (in which it is rumored the Daleks, whom we haven’t seen since 2015’s Twelfth Doctor episode “The Witch’s Familiar,” will return), and then…no new episodes until 2020? Say it ain’t so! These long breaks between seasons are a drag!

Tangent Online has a great review of my story “The Fifth Horseman” in Black Static 66. Here’s a snippet:

This was a deep and thoughtful horror story; here there is no right and wrong, just humanity’s fortes and foibles. A hard-to-put-down read.

Click through the read the rest, including reviews of all the other stories in the magazine as well!

This is my awards eligibility list for 2018!

Stories:
“The Fire and the Stag,” Black Static 63, May 2018, 7,300 words
“The Fifth Horseman,” Black Static 66, November 2018, 11,800 words

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

“It Takes You Away,” like many of the episodes this season, can best be described as okay, with a few standout moments, but not great. It’s more middling than anything else. The problem is that the episode is actually two different stories, and both are somewhat disappointing because the other is attached to it and by necessity truncating it.

The first story is about a blind girl named Hanne who is alone in a cabin with a missing and presumed dead father, as well as something terrible in the woods outside that comes every day at the same time. It’s a great setup, and in fact it reminded me a lot of the equally great setup to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Unfortunately, it makes exactly the same wrong turn that The Village does with the twist that there is no monster in the forest, it’s just a recording her father left to keep her in the house. (Not to mention keeping her terrified and helpless. This guy’s not winning any Father of the Year Awards. I really wish either the Doctor or Ryan, who was abandoned by his own father, had truly taken him to task for his actions, but like in the episode “Kerblam!”, where the Doctor didn’t seem all that upset that the system had murdered an innocent person just to make a point to the villain, the writers keep forgetting to have the characters react to anything outside the main conflict.)

The second story also has a great setup: a mirror universe created by an ancient entity who was exiled from our universe and wants to come back. Most of the good things in the episode happen in this story, in particular the scenes with Graham and his seemingly resurrected wife Grace. Those scenes add a much needed emotional depth to the story — an emotional depth that, frankly, has been missing for most of the season. But there’s barely time to explore this fascinating concept of a mirror universe created by what is essentially a godlike being, because there’s all the stuff from the first story to deal with too, and also an absolutely dreadful interlude in the Anti-zone between universes with an alien named Ribbons and some dead rats and creatures called flesh moths, and really the less said about that the better. Also, the Solitract takes the form of a frog for some reason when it tries to keep the Doctor in the mirror universe, instead of taking the form of someone the Doctor loves, as it did for Hanne’s father and Graham. Probably, they couldn’t bring Alex Kingston or a previous companion back for the scene, but still, as cute as the frog was, the choice didn’t make much sense or have any emotional weight.

Everything having to do with Graham and Grace, and that scene at the end when Ryan finally calls Graham “granddad,” is wonderful. (Also, the fact that Graham carries sandwiches with him after realizing they don’t often stop for meals on their adventures. Basically, everything Graham is making me happy!) The rest of “It Takes You Away” is such a muddled mishmash that even when it’s dealing with what should be intriguing concepts, it just doesn’t have the power to grab you. Also, Ryan’s dyspraxia is gone again, as he runs through the Anti-zone and away from the flesh moths without any coordination issues at all.

As a side note, I think I’ve figured out what Chris Chibnall is trying to do with this season, and why it’s not necessarily working for me. I think Chibnall is trying to bring Doctor Who back to being a child-friendly family show with a classic-era structure of each episode being its own adventure without a season-long arc, making it easier for new and young viewers to jump in at any time. However, because I’m still used to the preceding years’ more adult tone and almost airlessly self-referential, continuity-heavy arcs, it feels lightweight to me, rightly or wrongly. I will admit that aside from a great cast, some nice character work, an almost cinematic look, and what I thought was a strong start, I’ve found this season mostly underwhelming. With only one episode to go (as well as an eventual New Year’s Day special), I don’t see things having much time to turn around.

And now for some Doctor Who neepery! When Ryan and Graham discover they can’t see their reflections in the mirror, Ryan makes a joke about how they would presumably know if they were vampires. The Doctor has actually met vampires before on several occasions. In the 1980 serial “State of Decay,” the Fourth Doctor encounters three astronauts from Earth who were turned into vampires by the Great Vampire centuries ago. In the 1989 serial “The Curse of Fenric,” the Seventh Doctor encounters the Haemovores, mutated humans from the far future who drink blood and are repelled by symbols of strong belief. There were also the Plasmavores in the 2007 Tenth Doctor episode “Smith and Jones,” and of course in the 2010 Eleventh Doctor episode “The Vampires of Venice,” the victims of the Saturnyne take on vampiric attributes. At one point in “It Takes You Away,” Yaz recommends the Doctor reverse the polarity of her sonic screwdriver to try to open the portal back to their world, and the Doctor replies, “You speak my language!” This is a reference to a long-running joke on Doctor Who about “reversing the polarity of the neutron flow,” a phrase that goes all the way back to the Third Doctor.

Next episode is the season finale. Here’s hoping things pick up a bit!