Down-market Chewbacca and disco Skeletor? Chibnall gives us the trick rather than the treat for Halloween.
The Doctor (Jodie Whitaker) returns in a special Halloween episode called “The Halloween Apocalypse,” a title which ironically covers all the bases—both derivative and bland while being an accurate description on multiple levels. Personally, I’d prefer the term “disaster” but apocalypse is close enough.
The Chibnall era is like a pastiche of the RTD and Moffat eras, delivered by a sincere but incompetent fan. It has all the goofiness and bombast of the RTD era but without the wit and sincerity. Like Moffat, he tries to pen big ideas, but, Dunning-Kruger-like, it falls short because he’s no Moffat-mastermind. I suspect he’s trying to create his own secret sauce for the show by combining the best of previous eras, but pull back the curtain and that sauce is just mayonnaise and ketchup, the McDonald’s of Doctor Who. Just a collection of well-worn tropes thrown at once into the pot so that everything is vaguely familiar but there are no identifiable flavors.
Jodie Whitaker is fine as the Doctor, but I’ve honestly never warmed to her fully because over two seasons she has been given almost nothing of note to work with. Her Doctor initially came across as an overly enthusiastic host of a children’s show, and her companions remained mind-numbing in their vacuousness, behaving as though derived from personal ads bullet points, all of them thrown together by contrivances and coincidences that still remain unconvincing four years later. Their dialogue frequently sounded like high-school teachers admonishing their students, though never actually raising their voices and sounding aggressive or offensive, of course. There was never emotion or fire, and altogether the milquetoast nature of the show produced a vanilla blandness that made it neither terrible nor grand nor offensive, but generally forgettable.
In her second season, Chibnall tried to shake things up, but apparently thought the only way he could attract attention was to undercut everything fans thought they knew about the show—not the best idea when the re-gendering of the main character was already divisive for many. The end result of “The Prisoner of Judoon,” which may turn out to be Whitaker’s most compelling episode, was the Doctor spending a few minutes staring absently into the distance, thinking about her past. Yeah, finding out that William Hartnell wasn’t her first incarnation shook her up for just about the amount of time it takes for the credits to roll, and then she was off for another adventure. Finally, Chibnall realizes that personal tragedies are just as compelling to fans as the universe being under threat, and he decides not to hold the moment. Shallowness is the name of the game for Chibnall Who, grand universe-shaking shallowness.
Admittedly, in this new episode, the dialogue between the Doctor and her companion, Yaz (Mandip Gill), is notably an improvement, and the opening Bond-like sequence is wittier than most, but it still seems oddly derivative. Such moments were the norm in RTD and Moffat Who, I might add, in which the witty dialogue seemed woven into the fabric of the show.
Dan (John Bishop), as a companion, may indeed work out in the end, but the effort to sell him as a nice guy who works at the food bank when he has no food of his own feels heavy-handed and borders on cliché. (It’s like the reverse of creating a villain by telling us he’s a greedy billionaire and pedophile cannibal.)
Dan is introduced and then immediately captured by a member of a talking anthropomorphic dog race called The Lupari (wow, really imaginative naming there!) and put in a cage on the dog’s spaceship. Thank goodness for him that the Doctor just happened to be tracking that dog, apparently having homed in on the GPS signal from his microchip registry. I realize there is an attempt at humor here, but it borders on self-parody and ultimately falls flat. The self-parody is emphasized by having Dan comment on the ‘realism’ of the alien’s ‘costume’, when it actually looks exactly like a life-sized stuffed toy.
Aside from introducing Dan and his dog, there’s another character named Claire (Annabel Scholey), apparently from the Doctor’s future, some Weeping Angels, a subplot set in 1820, the Sontarans, and a bloke named Vinder (Jacob Anderson) on a distance space station. None of these elements appear to have any connection.
The actual story? Apparently, there’s a potential Time Lord coming back—maybe? I don’t know—something to do with the Doctor’s past, and, of course, the entire universe is yet again under threat, this time by the very unimaginatively named Flux. The Flux has something to do with a blue, skull-faced alien, who bears the equally unimaginative name Swarm, but it’s all a jumble that never gels because the “plot” is merely a series of vignettes and set pieces loosely edited together, all of which will likely remain impenetrable to the viewer. I’m uncomfortably reminded of 1993’s “Dimensions in Time,” a critically-panned charity pastiche which is almost universally loathed by fans. The tension isn’t built organically either. The Doctor spouts about how urgent it all is without explaining, something that Tom Baker could have probably gotten away with, but few others can, and instead of feeling excited, like Lennon, I wanted to reply, “control yourself or you’ll spurt.”
Personally, near the end, I had completely lost any investment in the characters or in trying to figure out exactly what in the hell was going on—and, trust me, I’m a very old hand at interpreting Doctor Who’s frequent inscrutability. I noticed the tension building up at the climax, but by then it was too late for me. I understand that there are five more parts which may build successfully on the story, but I suspect most people will be thoroughly confused by this episode’s complete lack of internal consistency. And regardless, it feels like lazy writing to throw a bunch of threads into the opener, planning to tie them later; each episode should stand on its own.
I suspect that one’s appreciation of this episode will likely depend on their opinion about this era in general. You’ll either be intrigued enough to come back and find out what it all means or find yourself tuning out about midway. If the latter, “The Halloween Apocalypse” is so bad that, like me, it may have you considering abandoning the series entirely.
1 1/2 out of 5 stars