Doctor Who: THE BATTLE OF RANSKOOR AV KOLOS (S11E10) Review
- Adam Tye
- Jan 13, 2019
- 10 min read
Y’all didn’t know what bad writing was when Moffat was in charge.
A thing that has come to fascinate me intently about Doctor Who lately, is its capacity for transformation. We see this most clearly in the show’s infrastructure (whole generations have been forever trained to associate the word ‘regeneration’ with a sci-fi show from the 60s), but it’s the moments within the fabric of its stories that really stick with me. Moments like when Amy looks into the TARDIS for the very first time and sees all of her childhood – once probed and categorised and dismissed – come to life in front of her. The show has tended to approach its finales with this goal of transformation in mind. Hell Bent takes a series arc built on buzzwords and recurring characters, then shows us the cogs that were really ticking underneath. The Doctor Falls takes a relatively straightforward series and funnels it through Moffat’s last grand encapsulation of what the entire show is and can be. It’s so good that it actually makes me like episodes leading up to it more as a result.
All of which is preamble to this: Series 11 has been a frustrating time. Chibnall’s jettisoning of the show’s wit has never sat well with me and I’ve had the persistent nagging feeling from week to week that there isn’t actually anything being said or reflected on across the nine previous episodes. But (and I hope my friends would back me up on this), I’ve still attempted to meet the creative team halfway on this one and wait for the series to wrap up so I have the full picture to look at.
The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos finally broke me. If Doctor Who finales have the power to transform, then ‘Battle’ transforms the entire season prior into an absurd, unfocused, unambitious waste of time. It is the clearest representation of how Series 11 has embraced an utter absence of storytelling and a catastrophic failure of showrunning. I think hating any episode or film is usually unwise, as it ends up being a reductive view of the creative process and generally makes you look like a tit. But I hate ‘Battle’. I hate every inch of it, from its lacklustre direction to its stupid fucking title. This is an episode riddled with bullet holes so numerous yet so ‘quiet’ that it’s tempting to gloss over them and dismiss the whole as ‘mediocre’. But that just lets the whole off the hook. If ‘Battle’ is mediocre, then it is a nebulous, insidious kind of mediocre; one that points to a creative vision (or lack thereof) that is utterly, fundamentally broken.
And we’re gonna go through it all, piece by piece. Even if it makes me look like a crazy person in the process.
Side note: None of this is going to touch on the garbage-fire of criticisms regarding the show being “too PC’. I hate this line of thinking and want to move on quickly, but just so everyone knows where I stand here: the show has always been liberal so get over it. In fact, S11 is arguably the most conservative approach to Doctor Who since the reboot, which makes these criticisms look even stupider (Kerblam! Has the Doctor endorse an ugly capitalist system, whilst in ‘Arachnids’ she lets a clearly evil Trump-esque political figure get away and run for President. So much for ending a politician’s career with just six words).
Perhaps most exasperating about 'Battle' is the way its individual problems aren't inherent to this particular story. In fact, many of its issues ripple out so thoroughly across Series 11, that they begin to feel less like a bug and more like a feature of this new era.
The episode begins with the Doctor and ‘fam’ receiving nine distress signals from the planet Ranskoor Av Kolos – a planet ravaged by war and slathered in a psychotropic field that causes amnesia and madness to anyone unprotected by it (which, believe me, I will be getting back to later). They all strap on some neuro-balancers to protect against the waves and drop down to the planet below to investigate one of the signals. In fact, this will end up being the only signal the Doctor investigates, before they apparently forget about the rest. Or perhaps the people sending those signals are already dead? It's never really clear what is happening here. I’ve criticised Chibnall in the past for his tendency to be ‘narratively transparent’ (contriving scenes that are too obvious in how they are supposed to set up moments and payoffs) and that habit is on full display all across ‘Battle’. We have nine distress signals not because it is necessary for the story, but because nine sounds bigger than one, so therefore it must make the episode feel more pressing and epic. It’s a detail so quickly tossed away that I’ve spoken to people who legitimately forgot about it by the credits, but it speaks to a thin attempt at conjuring drama.
It all points to an insistence on plotting that never actually thinks about what is being written, or wants to look inwards to find something more. When returning tooth fairy Tim Shaw reveals his grand plan of shrinking planets to keep them in stasis, he claims to do it with the goal of realising an ambition that the rest of his people could never complete themselves - but that's all the motivation his machinations receive. By most accounts, Shaw is the same person as he was nine episodes ago, only a bit angrier and with a breathing problem (that never really comes to affect the story). Compare this to the complete and investigative portrayal of the immortal Ashildr from Series 9 and Shaw's 3000 year wait starts to look less like an attempt at developing character and more like the faux-dramatic dressing that it actually is. It's a problem brilliantly summed up by Andrew Tellard (script editor for the IT Crowd) in his latest series of tweet notes, where he describes these dressings as 'having the appearance of drama' without actually being dramatically interesting or enlivening to the story.
Nowhere does this become more apparent or baffling than in the episode's use of the neuro-balancers. Chekov's gun is placed on the table early on when the Doctor tells the gang that the planet will attack and degenerate the minds of those that set foot on it, unless they wear a neuro-balancer. This seed is reinforced immediately when the team land on the planet and are confronted with a crazy person wielding a weapon, with no balancer attached to their head.
Flash-forward towards the end of the episode; the Doctor and Yaz realise that the only way to stop the Ux from generating an Earth-shrinking beam is to remove their own balancers and use them to block out the Ux' psychic energy. This will save the Earth, but leave our two leads vulnerable to the psychotropy of the planet, risking insanity, memory loss, hallucinations and who knows what else. They remove the balancers, the Ux are saved, the Doctor explains what is going on and...gets a headache, so takes the balancers back, puts them on and they are never spoken of again. Chekov's gun never fires.
Immediately, any tension or drama that might have made the story interesting is quite willingly tossed aside. What is planted as an obvious jumping off point towards more interesting problems is instead hand-waved away as the solution to another less interesting conflict, and it stinks of utter bullshit. To be clear: when the neurobalancers are introduced its not under the pretence of 'these things definitely stop psycho-waves', it's with an explicit focus on the mindfuckery. They even show you what that looks like straight away, just so you know what the stakes are. But when the time comes to actually double down on the inherent drama of that mindfuckery, the episode doesn't just pull its punch - it buries it. A whole episode of stakes and tension, flushed down the toilet for a headache and a quick 'get out of jail free' card.
The thing is that all of this is infuriating, if not downright confusing, yet even I would struggle to boil my blood over something so...academic. Cold analysis is great for those of us roaming the Gallifrey subreddit, but who can really, truly hate an episode because of it? Especially after a series littered with the same issues. Does this just become the straw that breaks the camels back? For some it possibly might be, but for me I think this points to something even more infuriating. Because I don't believe that Chibnall is unable to engage with the greater narrative and thematic possibilities that he skirts around in his shows (you don't get to be head writer of Doctor Who if you can't write I hope). Ability isn't the problem.
The problem is that he isn't willing to.
Finales have the capacity for transformation. At the very least, they require...no...they need conclusion or a statement of some kind. This was the chance for Chibnall to show his hand and tie the bow on Series 11 and instead...there was nothing. There is no point to the Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos and there is no point to Series 11. The Doctor is faced with consequences that aren't actually consequences at all. There's nothing different in how the Doctor responds to Tim Shaw's revenge scheme than there is to when she first met him. More troublingly, the episode never seems to make up its mind as to whether Tim Shaw's revenge is even slightly justified. Given that we're dealing with the supposed heightened emotional stakes of a finale, we can almost persuade ourselves that Shaw's plan is understandable, and the focus on consequence would certainly address a key missing component of S11. Instead, however, the Doctor just plainly doesn't give a shit about any of this. In fact, her lack of caring is met with the reward of an easy victory.
If we're being even remotely charitable, the complexity of parsing out Chibnall's reading of the central character is like solving long division whilst vaulting a castle wall. Perhaps the most egregious demonstration of this non-vision (and one of the more baffling interchanges I can remember in the history of Nu-Who), occurs when Ryan calls the Doctor out on her hypocritical use of weapons, only for her to hand-wave it away with something about how 'if it can be rebuilt, I'll allow it'. It's pure nonsense that manages to both ignore the actual complexities regarding the Doctor's approach to weapons in S11 (the suffocating spider in episode 4 poses an entirely different moral conundrum to the one Chibnall thinks he has solved here), whilst also being unbelievably insulting to the audience in how breezily the issue is sidelined. The episode seems to want us to think this line is evidence of some kind of thematic arc or introspection, to which I call the heartiest and most sincere bullshit.
But therein lies the real problem. Because I know that Chibnall can write the Doctor. Or at least I think he can, based off this one dialogue exchange from The Power of Three:
I cannot figure out how a scene so fantastically written can come from the same person who seemingly does not give a shit about the same character now that he's been handed the keys to the show. Instead, Chibnall seems to have taken a laundry list of characteristics we attribute to the Doctor and flung them together without much actual thought for what they mean. We get this strange deontological view of the Doctor where 'violence is intrinsically always wrong in any form', whilst being unable to weigh that against allowing a spider to suffocating miserably, yet also being very okay with violating that code by jamming bombs into villains' necks. The episode never stops to think, hence why it ends with the Doctor congratulating Graham on his lack of murder, despite that lack of murder leading Graham to encase the bad guy in an eternal state of suspended animation. A fate that befalls characters in Black Mirror is not something that Doctor fucking Who should be giving the thumbs up to. If you're going to do it at all, either make it something to fear, or at least question it.
But it isn't questioned. None of this is. And it's this lack of simple effort that rankles the most in this finale. There is no attempt at transformation and everything comes to nothing. Which is fine if you want to avoid bringing out the big guns for something more low-key, but once you take away the scale and the humour, you are actually supposed to replace them with something. Chibnall doesn't. Only the husk remains. Back before S11 aired, I remember an interview snippet going round where Chibnall claimed he wasn't sure the BBC would go for his ideas given how "bold" they were. Was he just talking about Jodie Whitaker? Because I want to know what that bold vision was and where it is.
I've felt faintly ridiculous describing how I felt towards this episode to my friends, given how intense my reaction was. But I'm also sick of people glancing over at this recent run of episodes and shrugging it off as though it's acceptable. Doctor Who has meant so much to me in a lot of different ways, but the one thing that I always loved it for was its commitment to storytelling. And it quite legitimately breaks my heart to see a team behind the wheel that don't seem to care for that aspect in the same way, or at the very least cannot seem to achieve it. When me and my brother are certain we could write a better finale, I know the show has fallen far from its past.
Which means, I suppose, that Doctor Who has transformed after all.
Other notes:
The people on the planets are dead, right? How is the Doctor okay with letting them hang there? Did I miss something? What the fuck is happening?
Graham's turn towards potential murder is weak and unconvincing. I legitimately thought his neuro-balancer had broken, which would have been interesting and explained why he was acting so different. But no, it just went nowhere, to my unending lack of surprise.
Yaz could be such a cool companion and I'd argue has more to her than Ryan. But then the show makes her do nothing, so we can never feel any of it. Mandip Gill, you deserve better than this.
The Doctor saying that the genocidal planet-shrinker 'really annoys her' is so utterly, insultingly stupid I actually can't believe anyone thought it was okay.
With the exception of Arachnids in the UK, Series 11 might also have the worst direction of the new era. A fair amount of grumbling has been made about the excruciating amount of close-ups, but I'm also aggravated by the lack of energy that goes into every episode. There's not a single iota of urgency for the entirety of 'Battle', which is cinematic death for a finale, but utterly criminal for a family adventure show.
Biggest laugh of the episode: when the Doctor said, "The Universe can often surprise you." and my brother replied, "It could surprise me with a good episode."
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