(courtesy IMP Awards)
Doctor Who S14 aka S2
Do not let the bright and breezy, Roxette-ish tagline on the promo poster fool you!
Season 14 of the revived Doctor Who series – also treated as season one or two (honestly who can tell?) for the purposes of the show’s new distribution deal with Disney+ – may start out with Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), the Doctor’s (Ncuti Gatwa) latest TARDIS-travelling companion, oohing and aahing over all things Time Lord, and sure the first episode is all rambunctious fun and gleeful exclamation, but this is one season which doesn’t stay excitable for too long.
In fact, things get very dark, very quickly, with nightmarishly terrifying monsters – and if that sounds tautological, new/old showrunner Russell T. Davies has dreamt up some truly horrifying beasts indeed – very much the order of the day from capricious shapeshifters who see death as a game to psychotic gods from the very cruel belly of the universe to beings who delight in the end of all things.
So, yes, DARK.
Having said that, the season is luxuriously and extravagantly imaginative, both in a narrative and CGI sense (yay bigger budget!) and much of the fun of watching the eight episodes is glorying in how many wild and amazing races places Davies’ mind takes us.
His ability to imagine and world-build seems to know no bounds, which is handy in a show like Doctor Who which is built precisely to be able to go anywhere and everywhere, and so we get to travel to a utopian city where life is perfect (until it is monstrously not), see music get wiped off the face of existence and spend an entire episode where Ruby finds herself on a very solo mission to save the world.
Dark though the overall arc may be, and yes once again the show has gone heavy on the portentousness of a companion whose very innocence and normalcy leads to events which are anything but, but a great deal of thought and emotion has gone into making sure that while all kinds of terrible things happen, that it does in such a way that will you “ooh” and “aah” very much like Ruby in the first episode, “Space Babies”.
And honestly, that’s a good place to start reviewing, not simply because it kicks the season off but because it’s lightness and brightness, infusing a story where the Doctor and Ruby find a space station full of, yes, babies, contrasts well with the inherent dark melancholy that exists within too.
While later episodes like “Boom”, anti-war and anti-capitalist tale like no other which excoriates your heart even as it fills it up again, and “73 Yards” are bleak as hell, they all bear a little hopefulness and sing the praises of human connectivity ensuring that though we are starting into the hellish abyss, that we are not doing it alone.
That’s always been a hallmark of Doctor Who; while we may encounter terrible people, events and things, we can survive and even triumph because we have people around us, principally of course the great lone last Time Lord standing of Gallifrey, who give us the hope, love and sense of belonging to carry on.
In a season that is as imaginatively dark as this one that really matters because many of the episodes depict situations where isolation and a crushing sense of aloneness are afflicting key characters or in the case of “Dot and Bubble”, which put life lived in a digital world on trial and finds it gravely wanting, where the very heart of humanity has been hollowed out.
So, if you don’t have a strong sense of connection, and the moral support that bestows, it would be hell to spin into a nihilistic hellishness from which you might never escape; think of “Boom” where there’s so much loss and grief that if the people weren’t intimately bound to each other they might never get up again.
One other key thing worth noting about season 14, besides of course that Gatwa is a beacon of exuberant joy and light, and searing emotion too when called for, is that Doctor Who has finally, and very welcomingly, embraces its long evident but not openly expressed queer self (we have trans characters and same sex relationships and all manner of beautiful depictions from the narrow confines of the mainstream norm).
It helps that Davies is gay as is Gatwa, but simply having queer characters running and starring in a show doesn’t mean it will go full bore queer; if that were the case, almost every show or movie would be dancing down the gorgeous rainbow of obvious queerdom.
What I think has tilted this season that way is that it’s been recognised that much of what has powered Doctor Who to this point, and a trademark of the show, is its rich and prevailing diversity.
Each Doctor is different and thus while there are mainstays of their character such a love of justice and deep, fierce compassion for the human race, they have each expressed their Time Lord-ness in a wholly different way.
It’s simply time for the suggested queerness of Doctor Who, who can be anything and anyone, to get its moment in the narrative sun, and thus it does, reaching a crescendo in “Rogue” which is quite simply one of the loveliest examples of self-sacrificial love this reviewer has seen in some time.
As a gay man, seeing this emerge warms my heart, and while I don’t need every show or movie to be queer, seeing it manifest in a show like Doctor Who, where it’s long been suggested and intimated, is such a joy and a pleasure to watch.
A warm and wonderfully imaginative despite its very dark and oft times foreboding storytelling, season 14 of Doctor Who is well and truly worth your limited streaming time, possessing compelling characters, thoughtful moral quandaries, epic battles for survival and emotion writ so sharply and affectingly in stories that are gobsmackingly imaginative that you will marvel at what be done in just eight stories and how much these stories can affect you, not just while you’re watching them but for a good long while afterwards.
Doctor Who is currently streaming on Disney+