Doctor Who - The Ghost Monument

Final Desolation

Doctor Who - The Ghost Monument
Airdate: 14th October 2018
BBC 1

Last week, the new series of Doctor Who did something which it hadn’t done for a very long time... it ended on a cliffhanger. Well, hold on, bold claim that... there have been a few cliffhanger endings over the last few years so let me rephrase that. The last episode finished the story off by going straight into the next story with a cliffhanger to be continued in the brand new story the next week. That is to say, The Doctor transported herself and, accidentally, her companions out into the vacuum of space. Now this is something which the show used to do all the time. The first serial, nowadays known as An Unearthly Child, finished its last episode by showing the TARDIS landing and, unseen by everyone else but the audience, the radiation counter rising rapidly into danger levels. This was to then continue the week after in the story that would be the main factor in the show’s early success and which stopped it from dying an early death... the introduction of The Daleks.

And this practice of having each serial apart form the very last of each series bookending on to the next story is something which pretty much happened throughout the time that both William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton played The Doctor, before it was dropped, mostly for good after the occasional, brief, resurrection, when Jon Pertwee played The Third Doctor in the early 1970s. But new show runner Chris Chibnall brought it back for the last story (including the multi companion format which would be a staple of the First, Second and Fifth Doctors’ time on the show) and I guess it’s not a bad idea to give it another go. It kinda makes sense in this day and age where cliffhanger season finales and even... um... mid season finales (don’t even try to make sense of that phenomena) are a fixed feature of many TV shows. That being said, this week’s new story hasn’t continued that trend at all but it’s at least nice to have the possibility that this kind of thing could randomly happen at any given moment.

So how did new Doctor Jodie Whittaker do on her second full length outing in the role?

Well... mostly not bad I guess. I think she and her excellent co-stars did really well with a script from Chibnall which was... well, I think it must have looked fine on paper but I’m really not sure of the execution of it here. That being said, there was one clever thing in the script. When the main villain of the week started talking about The Ghost Monument of the title, I was pretty sure it would turn out to be The Doctor’s TARDIS in reality and... yeah, it was. The nice thing about that, though, is that rather than save it for a final punchline, which must have been a temptation and wouldn’t have worked because... well, because it’s pretty obvious... he immediately then confirmed it was the TARDIS there and then so that was a nice touch.

So... well we have the welcome return of an opening title sequence. So "Yay!" for that. Unfortunately it’s... well... it’s a bit rubbish. The second half of it reminded me of the worst of Sylvester McCoy’s opening titles and the start of it reminded me of... I dunno... some kinda disturbing liquid going around in a washing machine. Add in a really wrong sounding (yeah, I know it must be deliberate) arrangement of Ron Grainer’s original title music and we have something that, really doesn’t make me look forward to it, in all honesty. My one hope here is that it will grow on me.

We also have a redesigned TARDIS interior which is... also going to take some time to grow on me I suspect. Maybe it’s a good idea, though, in terms of it being quite roomy and easier to handle four inhabitants in the main console room at any one time. Who knows? Well... hopefully Who knows.

The main story itself, about The Doctor and her companions helping the final two surviving contestants in a cross galaxy race to find The Ghost Monument and win enough money to keep them and their families safe for the rest of their lives was... a bit action packed with a budget that was somewhat less than action packed, I felt. The planet of Desolation is a deathtrap world designed to kill all who set down in it but the way the various characters managed to escape death each time really wasn’t all that convincing. Seriously, if you’re going to have highly skilled sniper robots chasing after you with their weapons, it’s really not that credible that they are going to miss hitting you repeatedly. This didn’t look good and this and certain other death defying exploits just didn’t seem all that plausible, truth be told.

As for The Doctor? S/he is starting to change a little. I can’t remember The Doctor questioning herself for quite some time to this degree (since Tennant?) and the end where, frankly, we all knew the TARDIS would have to rematerialise anyway, really wasn’t all that convincing or, welcome, I reckon. However, like I said before, I like the idea of a female Doctor and it’s early days yet. New regenerations rarely come across as the definitive version of their characters until they’ve got a series or two under their belt and this counts as much for the writing team as it does with the actors and actresses involved.

So... yeah, really not a great episode for me and I really don’t like the idea that an underlying threat for the motivation of a couple of the characters in this one is the alien race of Stenza, one of whom we saw in the last episode. Because that means they’re probably going to come back again at some point and, truthfully, that was a really awful, unthreatening villain.

However, every series of Doctor Who has at least one or two weak episodes (or many more in the case of Steven Moffat’s run on the series) so I’m not going to let this one phase me. I’m just going to try and forget about it for a bit and hope next week’s episode has a little more going for it than this one. We shall see.