Review : Doctor Who series 12

WARNING, SPOILERS AHEAD !

I wasn't overly impressed with season 11 of Doctor Who. It had some good episodes and made much better use of the historical episodes, using them as morality tales instead of excuses to randomly add random alien monsters at random into random historical events, randomly. But the Doctor herself was weak and ineffectual - small, polite and helpful to an absurd degree that made no sense whatsoever for the established character, even given that regeneration allows for major character changes. Some limits can be broken but really, really shouldn't.

Although the full consequences have yet to be played out, I'm highly suspicious that season 12 has gone too far in the other direction. It had a strong opening, getting away from the "play it so safely that it's deadly dull" approach of last season and back to the epic style of modern-era Who. It took risks again, meaning that although we had to deal with stupid episodes, we got back to the potential for high drama. But has it actually delivered ? There's a fine line between clever shock twists and just making stuff up...

I don't know. My verdict has to be provisional, because the final episode ends in such a way that I'm not at all confident in what's going to happen next. I cannot really explain this properly without spoilers, so if you don't want any, stop reading NOW.

My feeling on Doctor Who is that it's the moral heir to Star Trek, even though Doctor Who came first. Fundamentally, it has to be optimistic. Yes, things can go badly, badly wrong - main characters can suffer and die, disasters are plentiful... hell, genocide is a recurring theme. And yes, time can be re-written, and yes, scientific accuracy is something that happens to other people. But consistency can only be violated with some difficulty, and a large degree of fundamental optimism is essential. We all know the Doctor's going to win in the end, because that's what the Doctor does. Ultimately, even if things go wrong, they eventually either get better or are reset in a time-wimey fashion. When Capaldi's Doctor says "nobody wins for long", he's clearly referring to villains.

This season's finale seemingly violates this. I've never seen a season end in a way where I think, "well, that was just depressing" before. Yet this one did to such a degree I have to wonder - hope would not be too strong a word - that they're going to undo everything next time. Never before have I wanted a season finale to be undone. After all, season finales are supposed to be the moment where tragedy is overcome, not where everything goes wrong.

This season has, to its great credit, had plenty of shock reveals : the return of the Master, the destruction of Gallifrey, the Lone Cyberman, the earlier incarnation of the Doctor as Ruth. They've been deftly revealed as part of a larger storyline in a cleverer way than either Davies or Moffat ever managed. What's more, the Doctor is significantly more complex and less goody two-shoes than in the last season. Though they still haven't managed to get the humour working again (I think Jodie Whitaker is just no good at it), kudos to Chibnall for fixing a lot of problems.

... except.... I worry that the solution may be worse than the problem. I'm not at all convinced this storyline is one the show should have pursued. It's not merely dark - it's bleak, not to mention joyless.

Early in the season, it was revealed that the Master has destroyed Gallifrey on having discovered some great secret. This was worrying, since having spent ten years getting Gallifrey back, for the show to immediately destroy it again just feels downright mean : not like it wants to toy with the viewer or keep them guessing, but as though it actively hates its own audience. But this is merely a prelude to prepare the viewer for how much worse things are going to get.

The series ends with shock revelations in spades. The Master reveals that the Doctor isn't a Time Lord at all, but an alien who fell from another dimensions on to Gallifrey early in its history. By deciphering her genetic secrets of regeneration, the Gallifreyans eventually became the Time Lords we're all familiar with. Ruth was just one of those earlier regenerations of the Doctor; the whole limit of 12 regenerations thing being a lie as far as the Doctor is concerned. Apparently while this limit applies to the other Time Lords, the Doctor has infinite regeneration capacity. Faced with this awful truth that his nemesis was responsible for all Gallfreyan achievements, the Master destroyed Gallifrey by means unknown. And then, just for good measure, he brings in the Cybermen to use the Time Lord corpses to raise an invincible army of regenerating Cyber Lords to make war across the Universe.

Not even Chibnall is mad enough to let the Master actually succeed, so the Doctor destroys the whole damn lot of them with a "death particle" carried by one of the Cybermen. Okay, so she and her companions survive, as they must. But this doesn't feel like winning - it's just avoiding personal death in the face of a catastrophic defeat. All the Time Lords are dead, and Gallifrey - if not actually obliterated - is left a smoking ruin. This is not nice.

I'm just not sure I want the show to go this far. I like the show because it's fundamentally happy, especially since it's one of the few such sci-fi shows around at the moment. What kind of message is it to say, "be a good person and you might survive the death and destruction of everyone you love ?" A fucking awful one, is the answer. Screw that Stoic crap, I want the show to be fun. I want to see the joy of exploration. I want a message that the Universe isn't a horrific nightmare from start to finish. Bleak, depressing sci-fi has its place, but God alive I don't need to be saturated in it. I don't need to be guaranteed that every sci-fi show is just going to vomit depression at me. To see Doctor Who turning grim is like turning on Sesame Street and seeing Big Bird torturing kittens in a cocaine-fuelled orgy of death and destruction. It's like watching Sooty boil Sweep alive and eat his soggy corpse, or eviscerating a pregnant Sue. I don't need to see that, and no-one else does either.

Then there are the practical matters. Just how did the Master manage to destroy the entire race of Time Lords ? Were they really that pathetic ? That undermines their whole established image. And the Doctor being billions of years old ? I don't see the point of that. Moffat went through a phase of giving companions pointless epic backstories, but if there's anyone who doesn't need an epic backstory, it's the Doctor. The intention being to make the Doctor something even more than she was before doesn't really work - you should only boost a character who needs boosting. Never mind that there's no obvious reason why the Time Lords should have kept the truth from her.

Of course, the show being what it is, it's possible the whole thing could be re-written in the very next episode or in the future. But it doesn't feel like it's being set up for that. It feels like the writers want to undo the last 15 years and send the show into a new and horrible direction. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not optimistic.