The Ghost Monument
Series Eleven, Episode Two
And, breathe. Now that all the stress of The Inaugural Episode is out of the way, and with it the burden of introducing everybody – which ended up being neither terrible nor worth getting very excited about, yaaay I guess? – Doctor Who can get on with just telling stories. And The Ghost Monument certainly gets on with it, going right from last week’s incredible cliff-hanger to a brisk and exciting opening. In the time it normally takes to blow the steam off your tea there are two separate rescues in space and a crash landing. I’m a bit mystified that they put the titles before this, as it has the makings of a really good pre-title sequence. Oh well.
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| Pictured: A very expensive art project getting flushed down the loo. IN SPACE. |
That’s a good start. I love stories that cut out all the “Where are we and what’s going on?” stuff, though… okay, The Ghost Monument still sort of does that, because Series 11 has a serious thing about characters announcing that they don’t understand what’s going on. (As well as the Doctor apologising. It’s only been two episodes, but seriously, stop it.) I’ll bet it’s their way to underline just how Normal And Relatable the companions are, but even the Doctor gets in on it sometimes. “Why would you need robot guards on a deserted planet?” Because the planet’s part of a deadly race and you’ve been told to expect difficulties, dipstick. Jodie Whittaker gets her teeth into this one a bit more, regardless of how well she’s written, and she has plenty of opportunities to politely or angrily shoot down the monotonously friendless Epzo. She even rips him for one of the crappier lines of dialogue – “Maybe I don’t play by the rules.” “Did you practice those lines in the mirror?” – which almost-but-not-quite excuses having it there in the first place. Hey, if even Chibnall can recognise the crap bits, maybe that’s a start?
So far, the show hasn’t found a lot of ways to make the Doctor seem clever, which is another worrying trend after the rousing choruses of “We Don’t Understand It, Guv.” A heroic rescue using an EMP blast is one such excuse, but she pretty much stumbles on a robot with a built-in EMP button, which sort of takes care of that. She fails to spot that a room full of cardboard human-shaped targets is… stay with me… a shooting range. She announces that their air supply has been cut off and they’re all in imminent danger, in a gigantic corridor that surely has buckets of air stored, before promptly urging them all into certain danger outside. (Why not wait and have a think?) More than once she points the sonic screwdriver at stuff and just hopes aloud for a solution to show up. The script ain’t helping: a surprise attack with a lit cigar and a cloud of acetylene gas would come as more of a surprise if Epzo hadn’t loudly announced that his cigar lights with the click of a finger – gosh, do you think that might come back?
I think Whittaker does have a better time this week than The Woman Who Fell To Earth, because there’s none of that wobbly First Episode-itis and she can just be the Doctor. But, random stupidities aside, they more than cock that up at times: when they arrive at the finish line hoping to the see the TARDIS, but don’t right away, the Doctor laments “All this way, for nothing.” Eh?! Her companions try to buck her up, but it’s no use: “We’ll be dead within one rotation.” She laughs this off when the TARDIS shows up, but come on, that’s bollocks. It’s so out of character for somebody otherwise gleefully stomping ahead, all “Let’s get a shift on” and “Get out of my head!” (in a heroic way, not the did-we-just-become-best-friends way).
But hey, whoopsie-pooh characterisation swerves are a hallmark of Chris Chibnall. He arguably manages a good one earlier in the episode, granting Graham a no-nonsense spine he didn’t seem to have last week. Bradley Walsh rises to it, so just go with it. I mean it’s not like we’re getting anywhere with Ryan.
Alas, Ryan. Three companions is a big ask, but you would hope their creator would have plenty to draw from. Is anyone here for this guy? All Ryan does is complain – understandable in a life-or-death situation he just fell into, but it’s all the time. When he isn’t quivering at the prospect of climbing a ladder, which looks as rubbish as it sounds, he’s inexplicably firing off crack shots with a space rifle while running. “I play a lot of Call Of Duty” is Chib’s excuse for that little get-out-of-dyspraxia-free card, but I’m not buying it. As for character work, we do have the ongoing thing about Ryan Not Calling Graham Granddad, but that just feels a bit binary. At some point, he’ll stop being such a twonk and he will call him Granddad. I don’t massively care either way, though Graham’s likeable enough that you want to thump the other little git.
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| Sorry, Doc: the best thing about robots is that they can't shoot straight. |
Character-wise, it ain’t much, besides a strangely more grounded performance from Bradley Walsh and more action for Jodie Whittaker. A scene where some killer CGI bandages are suddenly psychic and drop portentous Hints With A Big H about something to do with the Doctor is as painful as it sounds. (It almost – almost – makes you miss certain departed showrunners, who at least had more practice with this kind of thing.) Both the contestants get some background stuff, Epzo about his terrifyingly misanthropic mum, and Angstrom about her family on the run from the Stenza. (The blue, face-full-of-teeth people we met last week. Seeing them again is not a thrilling prospect.) It’s all pretty straightforward for their character-types, but it’s well acted. And the game’s originator, played by a leisurely Art Malik, has glorious fun dismissing the needs of the Doctor and her friends; I loved his cheery refusal to teleport them off the planet, even if I didn’t buy his sudden caving to Epzo’s threats after he refuses to grant a joint victory. And yeah, the let’s-do-it-together ending is a hard sell, which just might be why they decide to do this off-screen.
Epzo and Angstrom make it damn clear how much they’ve done to get this far and how much winning means to them, so it’s bizarre that they’d chuck away half of it now. Sure, this planet sucks, but this can’t be their first reminder that other people get killed, or that maybe helping others is a good thing. They must be harder than this to even be here. On the other hand, the minute they arrive they seem quite enamoured with each other – one way, anyway – and they spend almost the entire “race” idly strolling along beside one another. Epzo even goes for little naps, apparently confident the rest of them won’t ditch him. It’s not very life or death, is it? By the time they reach the end of what must be, surely, not the most exciting lap of this race, it’s almost a shrug to actually finish the thing.
But hey, that’s one of the problems with producing a script like this. You can talk up the planet’s pitfalls and terrors all you like but the budget is the budget. We get a great looking landscape, an eerie empty structure, some robots and the aforementioned (quite creepy when they shut up) CGI bandages. “Toxic water” is conveniently cheap – take regular water, say it’s toxic, then nobody is stupid enough to get in it – the “toxic atmosphere” is mentioned but never seems to be an issue, apart from some apparently isolated acetylene fields. As for “killing machines and creatures inhabiting every corner,” ehh, no. Stay out of the robots’ way and don’t go to sleep next to some rags and you’re pretty safe. No one even gets thirsty or hungry en route. Several naps are had. Wake up! This is supposed to be exciting!
There’s really not a lot going on, which is already becoming a Chibnall era trope – relax, you won’t hurt your brain – and it’s never as thrilling as it seems to think. But it starts with a bang, looks brilliant, and the dialogue doesn’t clunk as resoundingly as I’ve come to expect. It’s also slightly shorter than last week’s, which helps with the pace. Backhanded compliments and little victories, I admit, but this here’s Chibnall Town, and you takes what you can get.
NB: That new TARDIS, though. It looks like they shrunk the cast down and stuck them in a bee hive with a rotting sweet in the middle.
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| The giant dead fingers are a lovely touch. |
Oo, nice. We've got a sneaking feeling our comment on this one has been abducted by a Stenza. If that's the case, let us know and we'll attempt to reconstruct it from archaeological evidence.
ReplyDeleteBother. I hadn't noticed one pop up. Here's a trowel...
DeleteRight then. We think you liked this a little more than we did. It made us very cranky. We'd go a little further than it sort of still doing the where are we and what's going on thing, because the Doctor seemed to do nothing but the entire time. Which ties into the thing you so rightly point out that the Doctor was not the sharpest knife in the drawer here. One of us thinks, given the relentless banality of Chibnall's work, that he's simply incapable of writing a smart Doctor. Wouldn't that be a fun way to spend the Chibnall era. We noted the buckets of air in the tunnel thing at the time, but it failed to get in our review because for the second week we couldn't bring ourselves to watch all of it a second time. Not a terrific omen. Yes! The naps! What we he thinking? Evil Guy had to have one to allow him to be menaced by cloths, but the others? It's a classic beginning writer's blunder always sending their characters off for sleeps, but it's not Chibnall's first rodeo and he can't be that naïve. Can he? You're right that he whacked in some character development for the guests, but couldn't it have been a little less clichéd than faaaaaaamily? And good catch on the dyspraxia suddenly disappearing when it's convenient. That's a pretty bloody offensive way to deal with a disability. Sort of on a par with handing a female Doctor a bunch of wibbliness {Sorry! Bye! Sorry! Sorry!). Re the TARDIS: if the custard cream dispenser breaks down, they can always lick the pillars. Assuming they can find them in the dark.
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