Spyfall Part One Spyfall Part Two |
BBC Spyfall |
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| Story No. | 314-315 | 
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| Production Code | Series 12, Episodes 1 and 2 | |
| Dates | January 1 and 8, 2020 |
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With Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill
Written by Chris Chibnall Directed by Jamie Magnus Stone Executive Producers: Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens |
| Synopsis: Spies are being murdered across the world. The Doctor and fam must go undercover to find out why. |
"Pulverised, burned, nuked" by Hugh Sturgess 28/9/24
With this story, Chris Chibnall hit upon a happy way of quickly belting out scripts to meet deadlines in a way that was at least exciting and diverting to a first-time audience. The trick is to constantly introduce new premises, locations and subplots so the audience's attention is being constantly moved to a new thing. Like the writer of a comic book or a Saturday morning serial, Chibnall follows up a premise not by developing its ideas, characters or themes but by replacing it with a new premise. When you don't know where this is going, it's like a rollercoaster sweeping you through constant new high-concept premises as you wonder where this is all going. Of course, this being Chibnall, the answer is always "nowhere".
Since Spyfall is the first outing of the style that goes on to become the definitive storytelling approach of the Chibnall era, I think it's fun to look at just how he does it. He starts off with essentially the same scene told three times: Kasaavin attacking spies. This lets him introduce three separate locations and three mini-scenarios playing with standard tropes of spy stories, which nicely resolve in less than a minute. Then after the opening titles we get the same scene told four times: the men in black picking up the Doctor and Fam. Telling two plot beats over seven scenes (!) at this point in the episode avoids feeling repetitive because we're scrutinising each iteration for any clues about the situation; of course, we get none, but that's only obvious afterwards. Then we get the action scene on the motorway, followed by a new location introducing the episode's first piece of stunt casting (Stephen Fry). An exposition scene is then followed by another action scene and (another Chibnall favourite) the crew splitting up so we have two new locations, the episode's second bit of stunt casting (Lenny Henry) and two simultaneous Kasaavin attacks. It's only after this, around the forty minute mark when the main cast is reunited in Australia, that the episode stops for a breather. On first viewing, it's hard to pull yourself out of the story and ask just what the hell is going on until this point.
You could imagine Spyfall being broken into five- or ten-minute webisodes. Nothing in any of these minisodes is developed in the slightest, but that's only noticeable at the end of Part Two when you realise just how little of the first forty minutes of a two-hour story was necessary.
On the DVD commentary for Part One, Chibnall casually discloses that the first episode was being recorded while he was writing the second. While he sounds cheerful about it, it indicates just how haphazard and rushed the process of making this story (and his whole era) was. In fairness, that it looks this good is a miracle. Scenes like the car going crazy on the motorway or the Fam chasing after Barton on motorbikes, look way better than they have any right to be given how this story was made.
But the story is a mess. We have Barton the tech mogul, with his company's role in the operations of whole governments and the public's voracious appetite for data making him one of the most powerful men in the world. We've got MI6, spies, code, espionage. We've got the history of computers. We've got Noor Inayat Khan and the Nazis. It's a dizzying array of concepts and themes; the story positively crackles with connections. Is there a potential message here about technocratic capitalism, electronic surveillance and fascism? But the connection of Ada, presented here as the grandmother of the computer, to Noor seems to play against this: after all, the primary use of computers in World War 2 was at Bletchley Park cracking German codes, fighting fascism.
Weaving these ideas together would be an ambitious undertaking for the most skilled writer. Chibnall, without any real passion for these ideas and no time to work on it, just throws them at the screen in a way that suggests word association. Spies, surveillance, computers, Ada Lovelace! Spies, Nazis, Noor Inayat Khan! There's a chain of association but no logic or overall coherence. In that same DVD commentary, Chibnall said that there were people working on the show whose job was to find interesting female historical figures he could potentially base stories around ("binders full of women", to use Mitt Romney's infamous phrase). The sort of dispassionate magpie attitude this implies explains a lot about this story, doesn't it?
Scattered like detritus over this tangled mass are a constant stream of bum notes. Why are both Yaz and the Doctor so affected by being teleported to the Kasaavin's realm when it's just a misty space filled with tubes? They've both been teleported before, so why all the histrionics about thinking they've died? What exactly was the 7% of Barton's DNA that isn't human? The implication of the line that he is "proof of concept" is that it's whatever data the Kasaavin intend to store in humanity's genes but... what was that data? They're time travellers from another dimension, why do they need lots of data storage anyway? The Master's remarkable line that the Kasaavin are "Russia... but bigger!" is just perfect. It explains jack shit about them while presupposing that we all understand that Russia = directionlessly evil, so it subtly establishes that the Kasaavin are just determined to destroy humanity for no particular reason because that's what Russia is too.
Part Two also sees an unwelcome return of the Doctor casually wiping people's minds against their will, something the Moffat era twice commented on and decided was unethical (in Hell Bent and The Pilot). On the commentary, Chibnall says he had Ada's mind wiped because he didn't want the implication that she got all her ideas from the Doctor. That's a laudable enough thought (you don't want to elevate Ada to greater public prominence while also saying that her insights weren't actually hers) but... this is the only time the Doctor ever does this! The Doctor meets historical figures all the time and leaves their memories intact! To pick a very obvious example, later this very season she meets Mary Shelley, and the episode strongly implies she was inspired to write Frankenstein because she once met a Cyberman; it directly says that she got her ideas from the Doctor! So rather than respecting Ada and Noor, it seems to be demeaning them. Unlike Tesla or Mary Shelley, they don't deserve to remember the Doctor. It's a truly inexplicable decision, solving a non-existent problem in the worst way possible.
Lots of people have noticed that Chibnall writes "Visual Big Finish" in the literal sense that he gives his characters dialogue that explains what's plainly happening on the screen in front of us. For instance, here Barton starts shooting at the Fam and Ryan declares "He's shooting at us!" Graham replies "Yes, I got that!" but he's hardly one to talk, stating the obvious so much when the Kasaavin attacks O's house that O asks the Doctor if Graham is just there for the running commentary. This truly gave me Big Finish vibes, like all those moments in their work when a character describes what's right in front of him (like, say, a monster about to eat him) and another character will crudely lampshade this by replying "I can see it, I'm not blind!" or words to that effect.
Spyfall innovates a bit on this by giving the characters dialogue to convey things the episode simply doesn't bother to convey visually at all. Take, for example, the Kasaavin attacking the two Australian security agents. We can clearly see at least one body on the ground surrounded by the Kasaavin yet the Doctor declares that they have "completely obliterated those bodies!"
The Doctor's joke at the top of Part Two, when she says she hopes she's not in a liver and then proceeds to beat the joke to death over the next three sentences, is a classic bit of Chibnall writing. It approximates the shape of a joke, and its first sentence is at least smile-worthy, but then he wrings it out as if unsure whether he's managed to actually squeeze the humour from it. There's a similar joke in Praxeus that is very obviously one of the bits Chibnall contributed to that script (it's the one about Ryan smelling like a dead bird). It's really quite bizarre, displaying a genuine ignorance of where humour lies in a joke that suggests (like so much of his dialogue) the work of a writer who has only had tenuous engagement with human beings before.
This becomes really exhausting really quickly. It becomes impossible to enjoy this as a rollercoaster action flick when the characters are motor-mouths who never shut up with a constant stream of banal inanities. At best it feels like the writer elbow-jogging us to appreciate what we're watching ("Look! A car chase and a gunfight! Those aliens are coming through the fucking walls!"). For the creator of an era that turns so much on spectacle, Chibnall seems remarkably insecure at his ability to get spectacle on the screen without a character literally narrating it.
When I reviewed The Timeless Children, I mentioned how struck I was by the episode's unrelenting grimness. It genuinely left me feeling awful, something I'd only experienced from Doctor Who before with Sawardian massacres like Attack of the Cybermen or Warriors of the Deep. Well, I felt the same way about Spyfall. There's so much death in this story, both on an individual level and on a colossal scale. The Master shrinking people and laughing about it. The implied spectre of the Holocaust, which consumed Noor Khan in real life (and which the story, for some ungodly reason, originally depicted before Chibnall thought better of it and cut the scene in the edit). Gallifrey destroyed all over again and everyone killed. It's an episode that revels in destruction and death. And this is made worse by the Doctor's reaction.
This story helped me realise that I hate the thirteenth Doctor. The first Doctor/Master scene at the inventors' fair is probably one of my least favourite scenes in the whole show. The Master is casually murdering innocent bystanders and the Doctor does... nothing. She stands there looking disapproving and vaguely bored waiting for him to get tired of sadism and make his demands. She has more of an objection to Ada shooting the Master in the shoulder than to the Master actually killing people, but then sounds positively gleeful when Ada starts lobbing grenades. Guns of any kind being bad and evil but bombs being fine, you see.
This is clearly a character without any coherent moral framework whatsoever, or indeed any appealing qualities of any kind. She's complacent (her repeated platitudes about generic "darkness" never sustaining), smug (bragging about being a pacifist in wartime), annoying (her aforementioned motor-mouthness), obtuse (look how long it takes her to reach obvious conclusions like the Kasaavin being from another universe) and ineffectual. Jodie Whittaker's performance really doesn't come into this - how could anyone salvage this ethical and dramatic disaster of a character? The "Fam" gets an entirely pointless subplot, and yet I'd rather spend every scene with Cole, Gill and Walsh doing nothing than any more time with the Doctor. (That said, it's also unforgivably bad that this is a four-person TARDIS team where two companions are pure comic relief by this point and Yaz's job is just to occasionally say generic companion-y things like "what's that Doctor?" and overwrought statements of how special the Doctor is.)
This is also the episode when pathological secretiveness gets retconned into the thirteenth Doctor's character. Suddenly we are informed that the Fam have been repeatedly asking the Doctor (offscreen, natch) who she is and where she's from. At the end of the story, the Doctor finally tells them that she is from Gallifrey, but of course she's just found out that Gallifrey has been casually nuked again, so this is just swapping one secret for another. This becomes a recurring feature of the thirteenth Doctor's character: she keeps information from her companions for no clear reason, and if she ever discloses it there's always a new secret to keep.
Combined with destroying Gallifrey again, this is blatantly an aping of the characterisation of the Doctor in the RTD era. The Doctor's companion asking to see Gallifrey, and the Doctor deciding to lie and not reveal it no longer exists is right out of Gridlock. Beyond the tedium of this being old ground the show moved past a decade ago, it's also just done incredibly badly. Being the last of the Time Lords, wracked with guilt at being the one who killed all the others, added pathos to the Doctor's character. It led to operatic moments of anger and sorrow. Whereas the thirteenth Doctor is left in a "mardy mood" sulking her way through a series of (offscreen, natch) adventures. (This leads to an incredibly hilarious shot of the Doctor brooding while the Fam is off to the side widely spaced apart watching her, utterly irrelevant to everything.) Having so unnecessarily reset the Doctor's status back to "last of her kind", Chibnall then does everything possible to do nothing interesting with it.
RTD used the Doctor's trauma and angst as a method for heightening the drama. It generated stories. The tenth Doctor doesn't just keep a secret about Gallifrey, he comes clean about it to Martha. He states outright why he lied about Gallifrey: so that he could pretend for a moment that it was still there. (It also serves to highlight to Martha that she put herself in enormous danger alongside a man she barely knows.) But the thirteenth Doctor keeps secrets for no purpose. It doesn't illuminate anything about her character. The tenth Doctor lying to Martha told us about his grief. The thirteenth Doctor keeping secrets from the Fam merely tells us that she's secretive. It's a directionless, irreducible part of her personality apparently. The Fam appears utterly okay with this, so it's no opportunity for drama either. When the companions find out in The Timeless Children that she didn't tell them about Gallifrey's destruction, they don't react. How could you play these characters with any interiority when this is what's written for them?
This is aping RTD the way a child might. It's directly copying a past beat without any clue what its purpose was. The host (alias Neo) of the great podcast Who Cares? compares the repeated circular beat of the Doctor being secretive to something like a catchphrase, a running gag or a musical theme that plays when a character comes on screen in a sitcom ("Hey everybody!", "Hi Dr Nick!"). It's static and familiar and in that way comforting. I've long found it fascinating how much fans of this era impose their own headcanons onto the text to justify its flaws (as I discussed in my Power of the Doctor review), but that does fit, since the Chibnall era often feels rather like bad fanfic itself. Rather than treat the show as a drama, it treats it like a bundle of misremembered conventions (Doctor angsty! Gallifrey gone! Companions ask questions! Master has evil plans!) without any curiosity or any sense of how these things lead to interesting dramatic possibilities.
(Much has been made of Spyfall forgetting that Gallifrey wasn't still stuck in a bubble universe, implying Chibnall never watched Hell Bent. But forget that: why does the script contain a blatant reference to Logopolis but mistakenly think the fourth Doctor fell off Jodrell Bank and not the Pharos Project? It wasn't even filmed there!)
As befitting the old claim that every Master reflects aspects of the Doctor they're paired with, we have the introduction of the equally unbearable "Spy Master" incarnation, played by Sacha Dhawan. Missy was always going to be a hard act to follow, but nevertheless there's something horrifying in just how comprehensively Chibnall doesn't even try. With Missy, we had a version of the Master who just straightforwardly worked as a character. Missy was able to reconcile the "old friends" side of the Master with the callous villain side in a way that not only strengthened both, it also illuminated the Doctor more too. It gave us lines like Missy's (to Clara) that she and the Doctor have "a friendship older than your civilisation and infinitely more complex" or the Doctor's (to Bill) that Missy is "the only person I have ever met who is even remotely like me". It was so obviously the best thing that had ever been done with the character that to do anything else suddenly seemed superfluous.
So for Chibnall, a mere twelve episodes after The Doctor Falls, to present the character as a ranting, cackling villain whose sole motivation is that he hates/is obsessed with the Doctor and wants to rule the universe but also has a death wish because he's just so dang damaged MAAAAN... this is like effacing the Mona Lisa so you can do a finger portrait. Why does he hate the Doctor so much? The Timeless Children gives us a line about "the history between us, the rage and pain in my hearts", a line which merely says "I do too have a motivation" rather than actually supplies one. Make no mistake, this is just as revisionist a take on the Master as the drums or Missy were. Does this make sense for any previous Master? Was Delgado filled with rage and pain at the Doctor? Was Ainley or Simm? Chibnall doesn't even have convention to hide behind here. This is his own brand-new take on the Master, and it's garbage.
I honestly feel bad slagging off Sacha Dhawan, a wonderfully talented actor who has shown that he has put huge thought into this puddle-of-dog-piss-deep character. But his performance is genuinely unbearable. His little sniffs, his wannabe-edgy sudden explosions of anger, all his ticks and quirks to convey that the Master is an unpredictable, mercurial character are embarrassing to watch. You know all those notorious over-actors of the Graham Williams era, like the "weakling scum!" guard or Soldeed or Tryst? This is the New Who version. It's the product of an actor who's (correctly) decided that this character is a pantomime villain so he'll just devour as much of the scenery as possible before he goes back to serious television.
So we have a Master whose sole aim is villainy of the cruelest, most murderous sort and whose sole motivation is a non-specific hatred of the Doctor rising to meet a Doctor whose moral compass is just the word "pacifist" written in crayon on a piece of scrap paper and whose solution to the problem happens entirely offscreen.
To broaden what I said on the subject of Missy, the Capaldi era would have been hard to top for anyone. Between 2014 and 2017, the show reassessed and brilliantly subverted some of its most enduring features --- the subordinate nature of the companion, the Doctor's angst, the portentous "curse of the Time Lords" that means he must always be lonely, the arrogance that led him to wipe Donna's mind or send Rose to a parallel universe --- in such a way as to tell brand new stories. Episodes like Dark Water, Hell Bent or The Husbands of River Song weren't possible until Moffat overturned conventions that had hardened into cliches about how the show is "meant" to work.
But Chibnall's decision to not merely fail to play in the spaces Moffat opened up but actively close those spaces off, regress the show to a half-remembered midpoint between RTD and the Davison era and feels like nothing so much as a conscious middle finger to the idea of the show doing anything new.
It genuinely feels like the work of someone who thinks Doctor Who just isn't that deep and trying to do interesting new things with it is at best unnecessary and at worst laughable. By hewing so faithfully to Generic Doctor Who and producing something this bad, the era seems to find the whole show vaguely contemptible. This shit is enough, apparently. The Chibnall era is rotten to the core, because it's Doctor Who made on the assumption that it doesn't have to aspire to anything other than being a mushy ball of Doctor Who conventions. And it found willing co-conspirators in fans eager to excuse repetitive, drama-avoidant beats like the Doctor's aimless secrecy, the Master's motiveless evil or the companions' agency-less submissiveness because that's just what happens in Doctor Who, and asking for more is unreasonable.
Spyfall got a decent reception when it aired, but upon rewatch it's awful. I honestly thought The Timeless Children was the show's nadir, but this somehow manages to be almost as bad. Series 11 wasn't good, but it felt weird and different to RTD and Moffat and genuinely fresh. It failed, but at least it failed in occasionally interesting ways and produced some really distinctive episodes like Demons of the Punjab and ≤ href=ittakes.htm>It Takes You Away. Series 12 was a chance to refine that vision and fix the problems Series 11 had.
But Spyfall junked all of the interesting aspects of Series 11 and gave us Generic Doctor Who doing Generic Action Thriller. The Doctor's morality is even more broken. The Fam are just as useless. And now Chibnall has to go and undo two of Moffat's biggest long-term changes: restoring Gallifrey and fixing the Master. Like the car the Master hijacks, the show has stopped in its tracks, gone hard into reverse and proceeded to nearly throw itself over a cliff. For all that fans thought The Timeless Children did long-term damage to the show, by far the biggest and more negative long-term impacts of the Chibnall era come from Spyfall.