It’s over. It’s dead. 0/10 – Doctor Who – The Church on Ruby Road – Review

Before the 2023 specials, I was cautiously optimistic that Doctor Who could come back from death. There had been a number of concerning pieces of information that had come out in the lead up to these specials and the next series, but I remained hopeful.

The specials were a mixture of underwhelming, mediocre, and infuriating – not so much a problem if only one episode is like that, but all three were. Together, they were the worst writing I have ever seen from Davies – by far.

We’ve now been given a Christmas special – which I’m treating as the first episode of the next series, even though I think officially it’s not. I was optimistic about Gatwa as the Doctor – particularly in contrast to Jodie Whittaker, who was shit. But this optimism was misplaced.

This was one of the worst episodes of Doctor Who I’ve ever seen. (In fairness, I didn’t actually watch a lot of the Whittaker run – including that episode with all the ‘timeless child’ bollocks – my sense of how bad those episodes are comes from watching other reviews – it’s a much less visceral sense.) I award this episode 0 out of 10. I don’t think I’ve ever given anything 0 out of 10 before.

This episode completely and utterly shattered the immersion. You know those shatterproof rulers you used to have in school? Remember how ear-splitting the snap was when you did try to shatter it? That’s what this episode did to Doctor Who. This episode was so unlike Doctor Who, that when I was watching it, it was like I was watching another show. It was like I was watching one of Davies’ gay shows: Queer As Folk, Cucumber, It’s A Sin. Everything about it – the pacing, the aesthetics, the tone, the setting – was just like from one of those shows. This wasn’t a new series of Doctor Who – this was a new series of Queer As Folk.

The moment in the episode that exemplified this the most was the Doctor dancing in a nightclub, wearing a low-cut tank top and a skirt. (People will say that it’s a kilt, but to me its form appeared closer to a skirt – and given the gender-bending obsession of Russell these last few episodes, it seems plausible.) This moment is what drops the score to 0/10. There was actually one good thing in this episode (just one), but this nightclub scene was so bad that any and all remaining points are deducted.

I’ve already seen the qwerties of Twitter desperately trying to defend this shit. All the arguments boil down to the same thing: the qwerties like going to nightclubs themselves so they want the Doctor to as well – because god forbid the qwerties watch any character who isn’t identical to them.

The Doctor spinning around, arms in the air, grinning like a woman from HR getting kompromat on an employee at an office party, wearing a tank top that would be considered racy even in the queue for a glory hole, all while the most bland, directionless, meaningless, tuneless, non-music echoes in the background, and support dancers surround him, screwing their faces as hard as they can in a desperate attempt to suggest profundity, is a moment that shows us a character that is in no way connected to the actual Doctor at all. This is not the Doctor. This is so utterly incompatible with anything we have previously seen of the Doctor’s character, that all we can conclude is that this is not the Doctor. The immersion has been snapped. We are no longer watching Doctor Who – we are just watching Ncuti Gatwa dancing in a nightclub. That’s it.

Gatwa should be utterly humiliated by this. The absolute worst thing for you, as an actor, should be the audience not seeing the character – only seeing you. If that happens, it shows that you have utterly failed as an actor. We are not supposed to see you; we are supposed to see the character. This episode, in my opinion, seriously damages Gatwa’s career. I would hope that his agent is shouting down the phone to Russell at this very moment for allowing this to go out on television.

Nothing – nothing at all – about Gatwa as he appears here is reminiscent about William Hartnell’s portrayal of the Doctor. It’s laughable to even mention them in the same sentence. As I say – this isn’t Doctor Who – it’s an extra episode of Queer As Folk. Even worse, this moment has fuck all to do with the rest of the episode – it’s just there to make a statement.

The rest of the episode is little better: an inexplicable voice-over at the start (Russell seems rather keen on those at the moment), a lot of wasted time and dialogue (this episode could have been 15 minutes shorter), a grotesque set design for the apartment (it looked like the 70s had thrown up all over it), some pointless and unrealistic dialogue from the supporting actors (and some ghastly acting too – particularly from the actors who played the next-door neighbours).

Gatwa’s non-character claims to discover a new kind of science in this episode: the science of luck. Once again Russell is showing his recent lapse into unoriginality here – he did a similar thing in that episode about Shakespeare in series three. Gatwa’s non-character also claims to be ‘learning the vocabulary of rope’ as he tries to understand some knots. He’ll be gutted to discover that topology has already been studied and well understood for decades.

There is one good thing in this episode, and that’s the CGI for the goblins – they’ve done that very well. The goblin king is also fun and well-designed. (Although again, Russell shows his unoriginality – this goblin king is very similar to the one in The Hobbit.)

Unfortunately the goblins are ruined by their giving us a musical number. An overly-heavy beat and a trumpet that sounds like an Argos keyboard isn’t something anyone with a mental age greater than three wants, Russell. You might think that couldn’t get worse, but it does – with the addition of an autotuned Gatwa and side-kick (I forget her name – she’s quite a forgettable character).

There’s a hilarious moment when a woman in the nightclub shouts ‘Give us some willie!’ at a man pretending to be a woman on the stage. I think it’s supposed to be ‘Give it some wellie!’ – the perils of enunciation.

I’m surprised that the qwerties weren’t outraged by the goblins in this episode. After all, the qwerties insist, time and time again, that Rowling’s use of goblins in Harry Potter was antisemitic. In this episode, goblins are not only present, but they literally steal and eat children. They are also the cause of all the misfortune in everyone’s life. Why on earth the qwerties aren’t screaming antisemitism at this episode, I don’t know. (But consistency of position was never their strength.) I also notice that no-one asked each other what their ‘preferred pronouns’ were in this episode. According to Russell, this is bigotry, so I guess we are supposed to consider all of these characters bigots.

And all the remaining time in the episode is just filled with virtue signalling and The Message.

That was an absolutely atrocious episode. With that episode and the three that preceded it – all of which had a multitude of serious, serious flaws – I am forced to conclude that Doctor Who is well and truly dead. Completely and utterly dead. There is no point watching the rest of Gatwa’s series. I won’t be watching it or reviewing it.

Doctor Who should be cancelled. What the franchise needs is to be left alone – for at least a decade. Leave it alone; do nothing with it. Whoever picks it up again after that will be someone entirely different – hopefully someone who hasn’t been infected with this idiocy virus. It’s rare that I will outright call for a show to end, but now I am: cancel it. This also represents the downfall of Russell T. Davies. He has written many excellent shows over the years: Queer As Folk was well-written for what it was (I just don’t want Doctor Who to become it); Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, and It’s A Sin were all fun; and of course, the first four series’ of New Who. But these episodes have been an absolute disaster. Russell appears to have lost his talent.

Ricocheting between iconic and farcical – Red, White, & Royal Blue Review

I had no idea about this film when it was actually released – didn’t know it existed. I’ve only found out about it from the images and GIFs shared prolifically on social media in the months since its release. This suggests a somewhat underfunded marketing operation – given that I am probably the film’s target audience (gay, a royalist, and a big comedy fan).

I’ve been meaning to watch this film for the last few weeks, and now that I have (or am – I’ve actually started writing this with about ten minutes of the film left to go), I find the experience is utterly bizarre. This film violently ricochets between moments that could be iconic, and moments of such bad dialogue, such cultural ignorance, such TV-obsessed Californian idiocy that I almost stopped watching then and there.

The flaws in this film appear right from the outset in the form of utterly dreadful dialogue. And it’s all of the usual stuff we tend to see in bad dialogue: sentences that no real human would ever say, characters expositing their own psycho-analysis as the first line of a conversation, the writers using the actors as conduits for their Twitter-informed political beliefs, and gross TikTok slang spoken unironically as though it won’t horribly date the film in just six months. The most egregious example of that last one is Rachel Hilson’s character (whose name I couldn’t even guess) saying at 1 minute 37 seconds into the film ‘you’ve been yucking my yum all day’ – a phrase so unpleasant I think it could actually give someone IBS.

The bad dialogue appears right throughout the film, but about half the time it is compensated for by the skill of the actors. I have long said that a great actor can take even the worst-written dialogue and make it sound amazing (although perhaps sometimes only with a few spontaneous edits to it). In this regard, Nicholas Galitzine (who plays Prince Henry) and Rachel Hilson shine. (Hilson has had many years of experience fighting with unwieldy dialogue on Love, Victor – a show that is the unproclaimed king of unnatural dialogue.)

In fact, this is a film carried by its core cast, not by its writing. In this regard it is similar to Heartstopper, Love, Victor, and Love, Simon. (Why do so many recent gay romance films and television shows have this problem?) This film is mainly carried by the charisma of its two leads: Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez – with the former giving a really stand-out performance. Of course, this is the main requirement for a romance film or show – the two leads must have chemistry. Everything else can be a disaster, but as long as the two leads are convincing, the story will still be enjoyable. (I’ve said this of Heartstopper too – a disastrous, wholly unconvincing plot, but wholly convincing leads.)

The charisma of the leads is enough to keep me watching (indeed, glued to the screen for their scenes together), but it isn’t enough to stop me recoiling in horror every two minutes at everything else. The film has a multitude of basic errors in how British royalty works that betray a distinctly American misunderstanding of the concept. Without wishing to insult my American friends, it’s not that Americans can’t understand royalty, it’s that there seems to be something about American culture that puts them at a unique disadvantage when it comes to understanding it – both the traditions of it and the reasoning behind it. Americans seem to have a much greater hill to climb in order to understand it, and they often stop half-way up. This film gives the strong impression that the writers have learned most of what they know about British royalty from other films and television dramas, rather than from watching actual royal events or even just reading about it – actually being interested in it. It is a parody of royalty – more alike to the show The Windsors than it is to the real thing. The royal family and their assistants are portrayed as stuck-up fuddy-duddies whose social attitudes and beliefs are still Victorian. They are the epitome of the ultra-conservative arch-nemesis that I think nowadays might only exist in the minds of internet commentators. The film is also laced with condescension – an attitude of ‘Oh you silly Brits with your royalty! The American way is much better! You should be like us!’. It’s an insular attitude that reveals someone as having not thought about the subject for very long.

As I say, though, this film veers wildly between moments dominated by these errors and moments that could have made this film great. The casting of Stephen Fry as the fictional King James III was inspired – he should play kings more often. Unfortunately, his performance was ruined almost immediately by overly-verbose dialogue that was contradictory from one line to the next. His character exists not as a person with a personality, but simply as a megaphone for the misapprehensions of the writers. The character’s best moments are when he’s not speaking.

It’s a shame – this film could have been great – iconic. Its basic structure is sound – all of the things that take it down are things that could have been fixed on the day of filming with just a few seconds of thought.

I don’t often do star ratings, but I would give this film a 5 out of 10.

Doctor Who – Series 12 Episode 1 – Dull, dull, ever so dull

Gosh it doesn’t seem all that long since series 11. After series 11 had aired, I had intended to make a video for my YouTube channel reviewing the series as a whole. I never got round to that in the end (as is the case with many, many videos), so I will just summarise what I thought of series 11 here.

I did not like series 11. The series had many problems, and I could have spent a long time describing them, either in blog posts or videos, but the main problem with the series was that it was deathly dull. It was unendingly boring; I tried to watch every episode of the series, but by the end I just didn’t give a shit anymore, so didn’t watch the last two or three episodes.

This followed on from many years of decline of Doctor Who. Peter Capaldi is an outstanding actor – one of the best living actors – but his series’ as The Doctor were increasingly dull. I can’t really remember the stories of any of the episodes he was in – there were no memorable moments. Getting rid of Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat and bringing in Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall was an attempt at revitalising the show. I watched series 11 optimistic that this would work, but it didn’t.

As a result of all of this, I had not intended on watching series 12 – once a show declines below a certain level of quality, one should stop watching it – how else will the showrunners learn? However, I’ve heard mixed things about series 12 so far, about half of which has aired, so I thought I’d watch this series (at least, start watching it – I may not make it to the end), to see for myself. I tend to tolerate one bad series of a show, but not two – that’s what I did with Star Trek Discovery.

So I watched episode 1 of series 12, optimistic that they would begin to solve some of the problems from the last series. But they didn’t.

I have four pages of notes on this episode, and each note could probably become two or three whole paragraphs in this review. If I were to try to fully describe what was bad about this episode, this review would become enormous, and I really don’t want to have to write and edit a giant piece of text – that takes a lot of time – considering this is just one episode. And I think it would be rather dull to read too. So instead I’m just going to give my overall thoughts on this episode – what the main problems with it are – and then chuck in a list of quick thoughts I had while watching the episode, to give the sense of just how many things are wrong with it.

The main problem with this episode is that it is dull – very, very dull. Throughout most of the episode I was just waiting for it to end, so that I could get on with other stuff. I just don’t give a shit about the mystery they are trying to solve or the villain they are trying to defeat.

And I think this says something important about writing mystery – something actually quite fundamental. The best mysteries are ones where the audience has a chance of figuring out the mystery before the characters do. We the audience should be given clues about the mystery throughout the story, and we can use these clues to solve the mystery, in the same way that the characters do. The problem with Doctor Who recently is the same problem that Steven Moffat’s Sherlock series had: we the audience have no way of figuring out the mystery ourselves, and so all we can do is watch the protagonist use their brilliance and genius to figure out the mystery using knowledge that we the audience don’t have. This is dull.

A very similar principle is true about ‘defeat the bad guy’ stories too. We the audience should be able to figure out how the bad guy can be defeated based on what we know of the rules of the world that the story is set in and the resources that the protagonists have access to. This is why world-building is so important. Part of world-building is establishing what the rules of your fictional world are, and once set, they should not be broken. The audience then knows what the rules of your world are, and can use that knowledge to figure out how to defeat the villain. The problem with Doctor Who is that it is one giant festival of deus ex machina. New rules and possibilities are introduced all the time, and old rules are disregarded. This means that all we can do as the audience is just sit back and bask in the genius of the protagonist as, once again, the protagonist uses knowledge of what’s possible and what isn’t, that we the audience don’t have, to defeat the antagonist. This is dull.

Doctor Who has had both of these problems for a long time, and this episode epitomised them. I simply don’t care how or why all of these people are being killed, because I have no way of figuring it out. Nor do I care about how The Master will be defeated – he’s always defeated. There is no threat; there is no suspense; there is no mystery.

That is the biggest problem with the episode (and I anticipate it will be the biggest problem with the whole series); that’s why it’s dull.

And now for a selection of random thoughts from throughout the episode:

  • Weird fucking dialogue right from the fucking outset. This was a problem in the last series too – for some reason the writers aren’t able to write realistic dialogue – the dialogue in this show just comes across as creepy, patronising, passive-aggressive, forced, and ultimately fake.
  • The side-kicks continue to have zero charisma. They have no personality – no character traits whatsoever. This isn’t a problem with the actors – this is a problem with the writers.
  • ‘Worst Uber ever!’ – y’know I think this line might epitomise the problem with Doctor Who at the moment. This line is played as a joke, but it’s not a joke – it’s a half-joke – a thing that is said that may be ever-so-slightly amusing, but which does not have the actual structure of a joke (yes jokes do have analysable structure). Half-jokes should never, ever make it into your writing, unless you are trying to mock the person who makes the half-joke.
  • MI6 seems a bit weak-sauce compared to U.N.I.T.
  • ‘I’ve read the files; The Doctor is a man.’ says Stephen Fry. ‘I’ve had an upgrade.’ says Jodie Whittaker. This is a bit of a fuck you to the people who didn’t like this change.
  • Even Stephen Fry can’t make the dialogue good. Normally a great actor can make shit dialogue good, but here the dialogue is just too shit.
  • I hate all of this walking and talking stuff – it prevents the suspense from building. Leave pauses in your scenes – you don’t have to have characters talking all the time. Suspense builds when we sense something ominous – little is more ominous than silence.
  • ‘Is she gonna die Doc?’ says one of the side-kicks. Once again, the side-kicks are just used as props for The Doctor. This was a problem last series too.
  • ‘MI6 has never countenanced the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.’ – I’m guessing all of those times aliens were seen by lots of people around Earth have been retconned then.
  • Stephen Fry’s character’s death has no impact.
  • The line ‘No-one’s mocking you now.’ is weirdly hilarious, though it’s not supposed to be.
  • Lenny Henry is thin now.
  • The show desperately wants to examine the big issues – like corporate data gathering and people being shits on Twitter – but it has no idea how to do it.
  • This was another fucking ‘end of the universe’ story. Stop it. This carries no weight in a series with world-building and characters as flimsy as this.
  • Fake-out deaths – these kill the tension – avoid them.
  • Jodie Whittaker plays The Doctor like a children’s television presenter. You’re not on fucking Blue Peter.
  • This is another episode that has characters talk about technology that’s been written by people who know nothing about how that technology works. If you’re not going to have any techie people write your show, at least get a fucking technology adviser so that your characters don’t say stupid things.
  • Lenny Henry is shit at aiming.
  • Lenny Henry does not make for a threatening villain. (This is actually a writing problem – as is the above point. Lenny Henry actually does very well with what he is given – it’s just that what he is given to perform is shit.)

That was one episode, and it had that much wrong with it. That episode was a complete disaster, and it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the series.