‘Wait, what-now?’
asks Tony.
For those who thought
Series 11 was a little meandering, with less of the dramatic oomph or
story arcs of previous series, Series 12 is doing its best to add
both punchy, power-packed episodes and story arcs. Fugitive Of The
Judoon begins as one thing, delivers on the somewhat
straightforward, linear promise of someone hiding from the Judoon in
21st century Gloucester, and then… well then, frankly,
it opens up wildly like a rupture in space-time, a Rift that takes us
back to that handful of heartbeats when Russell T Davies was running
the show, but it does it with a modern perspective that doubles down
on elements already seeded in the early episodes of Series 12 and
pushes the story forward in at least a couple of huge ways. Once
things start getting revelatory and surprising in in Fugitive
Of The Judoon – more or less at the point where the Judoon
become mostly an irrelevance - it’s a full-on adrenaline rush of
old elements given new twists right through to the end, and on
broadcast, it left many Who-fans needing a bit of a lie down and a
rewatch before they really knew what to make of it.
The episode opens
though with some nice bounce in its step, introducing us to Ruth (Jo
Martin), a city tour guide in Gloucester, and her partner Lee (Neil
Stuke). There’s a sense in which her introduction harks back to the
‘condensed life’ introductions of Rose, Martha and Donna, a
series of snapshot-scenes giving us a peak into the life of a bright,
bold, smiley human being who doesn’t know what’s about to hit
their world. Given the events of The Woman Who Fell To Earth,
you could be forgiven for thinking ‘Oh, a happy woman of colour…bet
she’s dead by the end of the episode.’ But irrespective of her
probable doom, we like her quickly – she’s open, clever, engaging
and a tiny bit dorky.
For comparison, see the
current Doctor on board her Tardis – a Doctor who’s withdrawn and
melancholy, hardly noticing her friends are there, feeling too old to
relate to their mayfly lives, not believing they understand a thing
about her, and looking for the Master. A distracted Doctor, sunk in
her own mental world while her friends watch from the side lines.
As if on cue to
distract from that melancholic tone, the Judoon appear, putting
Gloucester under a travel ban, which the Doctor circumvents with a
mouthful of technobabble and a lever pull. And we’re off to the
races in this story of Judoon law enforcement.
Can we talk about the
Judoon please? Firstly of course, they’re another Russell T Davies
element who haven’t been even the notional focus of an episode
since Series 3. But also, they’ve had what feels like a significant
upgrade since then – seeing them in their comparatively native
environment on board their ship gives them something beyond the
rent-a-bully existence they had in Smith And Jones, something
more akin to the life they’ve have in the extended universe, like
The Sarah-Jane Adventures and Big Finish audio. Their ship
looks modern, the animatronics of the Judoon-head feel like they’ve
had an upgrade, and while some things are still puzzling – if they
know they’re going to be surrounded by humans, why not pre-load
their voice units with contemporary Earth languages rather than
having to scare the bejesus out of a local when they get there in
order to assimilate the language, for instance? – they feel like an
altogether more with-it and believable alien threat in this episode
than they ever have before. Their shooting of two small subsidiary
characters feels intensely callous, but then that’s true to the
expressed nature of the Judoon – they are pretty callous,
they’re basically welfare assessors with guns, and if nothing else,
the deaths serve to underscore that stompy Dirty Harry vibe
they have – ‘Do you feel lucky, punk?’ should probably be their
troop motto.
When the Doc and her
Fam turn up, what we have is a fairly straightforward fugitive hunt
with the Doctor, being the Doctor, stepping right into the middle of
everything and offering to ‘arbitrate’ with the fugitive. The
discovery of an alien trinket box is perplexing but intriguing
because we’re Who-fans and we love a good MacGuffin, and pushes the
drama on. Is Lee the alien fugitive then? Certainly, we’re
encouraged to think as much by the suspicion of All-Ears Allan, but
that’s all a touch too obvious. When the Judoon’s employer turns
up…well, that’s when things give the first hint that they’re
about to go totally tonto.
Before we know where we
are, Lee’s dead, Captain Jack Harkness has returned like something
out of a Broadway musical, and showing off like he’s been scooped
from a point before the death of Ianto Jones. Graham’s copped a
snog, Allan’s dead – yes he was a div, but still, bit harsh –
there’s an absolute exposition-bomb dropped by Jack about a lone
Cyberman and how important it is not to give it what it wants,
because the Cyber-Empire has fallen but for that sole survivor, and
Ruth, cornered in a cathedral by a squad of Judoon, has come over all
Buffy The Vampire Slayer, without apparently knowing anything
about why or even how that happened.
Are ya keeping up so
far? Return of the Judoon, looking awesome and having much more
personality this time round, story set in Gloucester (co-incidentally
where outside footage for The Next Doctor was shot. Just
sayin’.) Lee’s dead, Jack’s back, lone Cyberman, Ruth’s a
badass, albeit a confused one.
Perfect time for a road
trip. A road trip to the lighthouse where Ruth apparently grew up,
where her parents are allegedly buried, but where she doesn’t live,
and apparently doesn’t use as a rental property either, despite
money worries being flagged up by amateur snooper Ryan earlier in the
episode.
A…ha.
Very shortly after we
arrive at her childhood home, the tonto dial gets turned up to 13. Or
possibly some other number that’s definitely not from a parallel
dimension and is totally legit, honest Fam. Chameleon arcs, hidden
personalities, Time Lords wanting to track down and destroy the
Doctor for some reason, it’s all agreeably mad and retro but the
retro, importantly, pushes us in new directions – when Ruth is
revealed as the Doctor, it messes with our brain. Sure, she could be
a Doctor from the future of our point of view, but she doesn’t
recognise sonic screwdrivers, has no memory of being all ‘rainbows
and trousers that don’t go all the way down,’ has a way with
laser rifles and hand-to-hand combat, has been hiding as a human from
the wrath of the Time Lords, and all in all feels a bit of an enigma
compared to the Doctors we know of late – except possibly the War
Doctor. Damn, though, she’s good. Plenty of fans have gone the
whole hog and said she eclipses Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth
Doctor, and there’s a degree to which this point is worth conceding
– Jo Martin’s Doctor has a presence, a passion, a grin that
invites immediate fan-fiction, and her striding about the place,
involved in her own story with Gat the Judoon-employer does rather
make for an intriguing Time Lord. And oh gods, that Tardis – that
retro, updated, screen-stealing Tardis. Oh all kinds of hell yes. But
it’s a mistake to assume that means she’s ‘better’ than
Whittaker’s Thirteen – they’re very much different
personalities, and to some extent it’s like Martin’s Pertwee
arriving in a Troughton era: the personalities are sharply contrasted
while still both being highly believable incarnations of the same
individual.
Jo Martin’s Doctor
opens up absolutely acres of room for fan theorizing too, with most
people seeming to fixate on where she’s from in the Doctor’s
timeline, or whether there’s a pre-Hartnellian explanation, or an
Unbound Universe solution to her existence. Because fandom, that’s
why.
Fewer people are
worrying away at the in-story elements of her being – why
was she hiding away under a chameleon arch personality in Gloucester?
Why, come to that, are the Time Lords, or at least one Time Lord, for
whom she used to work, determined to come and kill her? Whoever heard
of the Time Lords using Judoon to find one of their own? What has she
done to make her worth exterminating in the eyes of her own
people? And where along her line did the Doctor start snapping the
horns off Judoon as a distraction?
There are plenty of
nits to pick with Vinay Patel and Chris Chibnall’s story should you
want to do that – the use of the Judoon at all serves no logical
purpose in-story, though as a production decision, it’s great to
see them again and they feel like they’ve had an expensive upgrade,
simply by virtue of the way they’re shot and delivered. The return
of Jack Harkness to deliver his exposition-bomb…alright, if you
absolutely must, though it jars with his development in later
Torchwood on TV and audio, and he feels a bit like a caricature of
himself, so there’s a sense in which it has a whiff of desperation.
The Judoon platoon gag was overdone the moment it appeared in this
script and by the time we got to the ‘lagoon,’ it was flogging a
dead rhino for no good reason. It’s getting really quite irritating
when people mistake Graham for the Doctor – it was fabulous in Juno
Dawson’s The Good Doctor novel. Since then, it’s brought
diminishing returns, and it would really be great if people cut it
the hell out now, because every succeeding time it’s used, it
undercuts Whittaker’s authority in the role just a little bit. And
then of course there are the fans who believe any explanation for Jo
Martin’s Doctor that doesn’t involve her being from a parallel
universe (naturally, as showrunner, Chris Chibnall almost immediately
stirred the pot by insisting that wasn’t what was going on here)
means a ruination of the last five decades of continuity, and that
Doctor Who will be ‘destroyed’ by anything invented as part of
this series story-arc to fit her in to the chronology we know.
This may or may not be
the case – my money’s very firmly on ‘not’ because Doctor Who
canon only ever really exists if we want it to, and many a showrunner
has smashed it to bits with a baseball bat before now. But what can’t
be denied is that Fugitive of the Judoon does a lot with its
screen-time – it extends the ‘mardy Doctor’ drama with the
companions, and ultimately gives it a bit of a salve at the end of
the story, it brings back a moderately mediocre ‘monster’ and
gives them a bit more stomp and danger, it brings back an old
companion, giving Jack-fans a bit of a School Reunion moment,
it foreshadows future stories with Cybermen, and then Holy Hell,
it gives us a new Doctor out of nowhere, throws us into confusion and
theories and pulls us forward along the story arc of a destroyed
Gallifrey, and Time Lords with despicable secrets we’ve never
known. By doing all of that under the notional cover of the
small-scale flag-wave of ‘Yay…the Judoon are back!’ it turns
Doctor Who back into watercooler TV, the way it was at several punchy
points during its first decade of resurgence. It makes the fans
squeal, and chunter, and theorize and argue – all of which are
signs of a buy-in to the story arc – and it makes casual viewers
widen their eyes and prick up their ears, to go ‘Wait…Doctor
Who’s doing what now?’
All of that gives
Fugitive Of The Judoon a much greater significance than it
ever could have achieved as just a ‘returning monster’ story. The
return of the Master was huge, but as far as we knew, he was the
Master we already understood, just in a new body. The arrival of a
new Doctor, given an out-of-the-park performance by an actor of Jo
Martin’s quality, electrifies the whole series with a new buzz of
potential.
I’m
off for another rewatch now. You probably should be too…
Tony lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly
nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who,
Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the
70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By
day, he
runs an editing house, largely as an
excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book.
With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk
Post Top Ad
Tags
# Captain Jack
# Chris Chibnall
# Doctor Who
# Fugitive Of The Judoon
# Jo Martin
# Jodie Whittaker
# John Barrowman
# Review
# Tony Fyler
# TV
TV
Labels:
Captain Jack,
Chris Chibnall,
Doctor Who,
Fugitive Of The Judoon,
Jo Martin,
Jodie Whittaker,
John Barrowman,
Review,
Tony Fyler,
TV
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment