Do I like the Thirteenth Doctor era? No. Do I hate the Thirteenth Doctor era? No! I honestly don’t hate the Thirteenth Doctor era or the Doctor herself. There are certainly things about this era that I hate, at its worst it is some of the worst Doctor Who episodes of all time, there’s aren’t many I’d necesarrily call good and sadly not one episode I’d consider a proper classic. And there was a lot about the Doctor’s characterisation that I was really disappointed in, the dynamic with her companions was really stilted and always took the easy way out whenever there was any indication of conflict between the team, and the Doctor would often be written in a way that was specific to the story not how the Doctor’s natural personality would affect the story itself. Such as the Doctor believing locking a bunch of spiders in a room to slowly starve, suffocate or eat each other was more humane than just shooting them, or how about acting socially awkward and kind of dismissive of Graham confiding in her his fears about his cancer returning, with the excuse that she’s still trying to figure out her regeneration when this was the tail end of her second series! I never got the sense that Chibnall or even Jodie Whittaker properly worked out who the Thirteenth Doctor is. As for my thoughts on her upcoming Big Finish series I’ll save that for the end as I’d like to go over some of her televised highlights cos the claims that every single episode of the Thirteenth Doctor era was among the worst of all time is honestly not true. And now that the locusts of the fandom (you know the ones I mean) have moved on to the current era and the dust has settled on this one, I think we can all finally take the opportunity to look back on and acknowledge the shortcomings of this era and appreciate what it succeeds in or at least what it was going for. So here are some picks of mine that range from decent to actually quite good (albeit flawed)
The Woman Who Fell to Earth - I actually remember really enjoying this one when it first aired and I saw it live, I think part of that was it was just refreshing having an episode that steps out of Moffat’s umbrella for the first time in almost a decade, even having new music after over ten years with Murray Gold. Looking back on it today my enjoyment of the episode is certainly not what it used to be but it also doesn’t really do much wrong either, apart from completely neglecting the intro credits for some reason known only to Chris Chibnall! I love the scene where the Doctor actually builds her own sonic screwdriver, it’s one of those scenes where you’re surprised it took so long for them to come up with. Whittaker’s performance is one of her best as the Doctor, she does nail all the post regeneration hyperactive behaviour, little did I know at the time that this was to be her behaviour for the majority of her era however much I wished she’d settle down a bit!
Rosa - Another episode I wou;d’ve preferred as a pure historical though given the setting and the subject matter I think it may have been a lot darker than what the show would normally be able to get away with. Rosa does a great job in showing just how dangerous the past can be for the Doctor’s companions, Ryan and Yaz, and it’s not even a war or a natural disater or living in a more violent age, it’sjust an ordinary town with ordinary folk in an age very close to when Doctor Who was born! And it does a great job with the stakes at how history hinges in such a simple moment having huge waves throughout the future, that’s what made the story of Rosa Parks so inspiring to begin with.
Demons of the Punjab - This is one of only two episodes I’d actually call very good, it almost attains the level of classic! Again, a pure historical would’ve been the preferred option but the way the aliens are tied in thematically actually works very well despite my concerns. The setting in this is one of the darkest ever depicted in the show with the pardition of India, a time where millions of hindus and muslims were displaced and killed and the aliens are there to watch over those whose names are lost in time so that they’re remembered and won’t die alone. It’s a beautiful idea and it has a great ending, honestly one of the strongest in Modern Who where the Doctor and the companions are presented with a tragedy that they can’t prevent, and eventually they’re forced to accept it and leave. We’ve had so many years of Russel and Moffat shoehorning in last minute fairytale endings that it’s such a welcome change to go for a more tragic and gutwrenching ending.
It Takes You Away - This is one of those that I’d plce in the experimental category along with episodes like Listen or 73 Yards, it doesn’t quite work for me but I do appreciate that they tried something like this to begin with. It goes for three different concepts, the first being locked in an isolated cabin in the woods with a monster outside, teasing a base under seige story, only to morph into a sillier haunted house story with a dark spooky cavern with a creepy side villain and some killer moths, and then in the third act it goes for a more surreal otherworld concept with dead loved ones restored to life and the Doctor communicating with a concious universe in the shape of a talking frog. Personally I love the surreal side of the story and wished the episode had focused more on that instead
Spyfall - Our two part opener to Series 12 and the first multi-part story since The End of Time to keep the same title, which may have been an unintentional clue. As you’d guess this is here mainly for Sacha Dhawan as the Master, he’s easily the best part of the Whittker era and he does bring out the best in Jodie. The story itself is admittedly a fun time travel runaround with ideas you’d normally expect to find in the Moffat era.
Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror - Again! Why not make this a pure historical?? Why is the show so afraid of having another go at this format? Especially when they were clearly struggling for a good monster this episode with the really lame villains we get in this one. Otherwise, this story’s being carried by Goran Visnjic as Nikola Tesla, probably the best peformance for a guest historical celebrity since Tony Curran as Vincent Van Gogh.
Fugitive of the Judoon - The real beauty of this story is all in it’s deceptive appearance, on the surface this seems like a run of the mill mid series episode with a familiar monster. Only to pull the rug out in the first ten minutes by bringing back a companion from over a decade ago and then giving us a massive twist making this one of the most significant episodes in the show’s history. You really have to applaud how they managed to pull off bringing back Captain Jack without it getting leaked, something that’s nearly impossible in this day and age, it genuinelly a shocking moment! But of course the real of the story is introducing Jo Martin as the Fugitive Doctor, in just ten minutes she manages to outshine Jodie Whittaker’s entire three series stint, I am very much looking forward to her work in Big Finish next month (early Januarary here’s hoping!)
The Haunting of Villa Diodati - This is the best episode of the Jodie Whittaker era and as such my favourite Thirteenth Doctor story (at the moment). It’s often overlooked given its ties to The Timeless Children finale which as we all remember was a very quiet event and calmy recieved by the fans. The side cast in this are some of the best guest cast of the Thirteenth Doctor era with the famous Villa Diodati writers played very well and of course the inclusion of a Cyberman in a story featuring Mary Shelley. I remember people at the time accusing this of being a ripoff of The Silver Turk from Big Finish which just goes to show how few people actually listened to The Silver Turk cos to call this a ripoff is the same logic as saying The Lion King’s a ripoff of Kimba the White Lion! The star of the story is our Lone Cyberman who just has this great design and great portrayal. This is also Whittaker’s best performance as the Doctor as she seems a lot more comfortable with the script and directing and has a great speech towards the end about how sometimes the difficult decisions come down solely to her.
War of the Sontarans - An episode that so clearly was meant to be its own thing before getting tied into the Flux story arc. Maybe someday Big Finish can do the Lost Stories for the original Series 13, it’d certainly be a lot better than whatever the hell Flux was, I still can’t wrap my head around most of this series. War of the Sontarans is one of the more coherent stories of the series and it does shine when it focuses on the Crimea setting with the Sontarans trying to integrate themselves into human history. We get the usual copy and paste from wiki exposition dump on Mary Seacole and the Crimean War, and the climax does involve the Sontarans (the most efficient fighting force in the galaxy) to all be taking a nap at the same time (though in fairness, Big Finish did a similar thing in Starlight Robbery). But it’s great seeing the Sontarans in a more villainous role again after so many years being used as awful comic relief. And I really dig the new designs, more so than the previous ones. Even the plot is surprisingly more imaginative than what you’d normally se in Modern Who, the idea of the Sontarans invading human history by erasing all of Russia and creating their own country called Sontar, admit it, you can’t think of many Modern Who episodes that try something like that!
Village of the Angels - I’d really love to see Maxine Alderton get more opportunities to write for Doctor Who in the future, ya know, when someone in the BBC or Disney finally tells Russel to share his toys and let other people write a few episodes for a change! Having written this and The Haunting of Villa Diodati, she clearly has an eye for atmosphere and horror, something that’s always welcome in Doctor Who. My only issues with this are the fact that a lot of the rules that have been introduced for the Weeping Angels over the years (and even some new rules introduced here) start to become counter productive and raise more questions than I can just let slide. They really need to go back to basics with the Weeping Angels if they ever plan on using them again. Aslo it has a great cliffhanger that leads to…NOTHING!!!
Eve of the Daleks - One thing I’ll say about Chibnall for all his faults, I do love a lot of his ideas, especially the ideas he had for his three Dalek specials, these were some really creative ideas he had for the Daleks, just a shame they didn’t translate into a good stories. Eve of the Daleks fares the best mainly cos the concept is the most creative of the three and really the most creative the Daleks have had in decades. But I will say, the directing in this episode is appalling, it boggles my mind how this episode became subject to massive debating. Of course you can’t have our main heroes getting shot by the bad guys (circumstances of this episode to one side) but when you have our heroes standing out in the open with no cover whilst these Daleks (armed with gattling guns no less!!!) are shooting five feet away from them and all the shots are missing, I’m sorry but that just smashes the veil of fiction with a sledgehammer! And as far as all this somehow heated debating on the episode goes, here’s a bright idea! How about being a bit smarter with your filming and stage directions during action scenes to make it look like you actually care about what you’re working on!
The Power of the Doctor - Just off the bat, this is definetly not a good episode! Just getting that out of the way, this is Chibnall at his most “making stuff up as he goes along” script and just throwing in so many variables that even at an hour and a half it still felt like a cluttered mess! And yet, there’s also a lot to enjoy about this final episode of the Thirteenth Doctor. When it comes to Chibnall, sorry to say but he’s not a good writer! He just isn’t! His writing either falls into stupid or boring, and given the choice, I’ll take stupid every time and this is one of his stupidest scripts which I mean that in a good way. It jumps all over the place cos that’s his idea of giving stories an epic scope, characters just appear with no rhyme or reason, the plot has more holes than swiss cheese and again it feels like he was making this up as he went along. But it does also feature two of the best scenes of the entire Chibnall era with the surprise returns of several Classic Doctors, Five and Seven of which get these beautiful heart tugging scenes with Tegan and Ace. They certinaly made up for Thirteen, as I predicted, saying “Hi” then charing off for the rest of this overly rushed story. Sacha Dhawan is at his best as the Master in this one. It surprisingly feels more like a 60th anniversary special than the actual specials we got the following year! Even the regeneration I really liked, I daresay it’s the best since Eccleston, there’s no drawn out speeches, no crying, I give credit Thirteen’s smart enough to not regenerate inside the TARDIS mid-flight this time, and she gets a really nice final line to go out on. Is it a good episode, god no! But is it fun to watch, absolutely!
So those were my picks for some of the better episode of the Thirteenth Doctor era and to all Thirteenth Doctor fans, please don’t take it personally, it’s just not one of my favourite eras. As far as her upcoming audios go, I really don’t know what to expect, I’m certainly predicting better stories giving the writing team is more capable than Chibnall and she could very well get that first true classic of hers (my money’s one whichever one Tim Foley’s writing). But there are some things to be mindful of, one the comparisions being made to Big Finish’s work on Colin Baker isn’t one to pin your hopes on cos this is a very different Big Finish to the one from the early 2000s, two as I mentioned when covering the Ninth Doctor and the 9DAs, we got some of the Ninth’s Doctor’s best audios but also some of his worst and the series did fall into a very repetitive format that didn’t really do a lot of innovative things with the Ninth Doctor (outside of Archipelago), But, and that brings us to three, we have also recently had the Eleventh Doctor Chronicles series which was one of the best projects Big Finish had ever created and proof that they can work with the flaws of a Doctor but from a position that shows true love for said Doctor’s era in order to create something special. So again, I really don’t know what to expect, and I like not knowing, I look forward to finding out for myself. Until then, do share some of your thoughts on the Thirteen Doctor’s episode and I’ll see you tomorrow for the very brief run of the Fourteenth Doctor
but hey maybe I could do something for the end of 2025 like share my thoughts on the year’s releases for each Doctor both good and bad