Doctor Who Series 12: Jodie Whittaker’s Season of Lost Potential

Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: Alan Moore, bbc, catherine tate, chris chibnall, david tennant, doctor who, jo martin, jodie whittaker, russell t davies, steven moffat, swamp thing

We look back at Jodie Whittaker’s second season of Doctor Who, undercut by unrealised potential & unfulfilled promises under Chris Chibnall.

The BBC released a compilation video of Series Twelve of Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker & Chris Chibnall‘s season, and it’s interesting to consider it in retrospect. That series was a season full of potential and promise, but Chibnall just couldn’t stick the landing. The problem being that he didn’t really come up with anything new, so much as old ideas in new bottles – bottles that can easily break.

“Doctor Who” Without a Plan

It’s especially interesting to consider this season of Doctor Who after Chibnall admitted that he didn’t exactly have a grand plan, he just made it up as he went along, and it shows when you rewatch even the moments and think about that season again. Doctor Who depends on new ideas to keep it fresh. Unfortunately, virtually all of the episodes under Chibnall’s watch were often lukewarm recyclings of ideas already done over and over before. There was the episode with the Environmental Message where the Doctor and companions are stuck in a future where the environment has gone to hell, and humans became monstrous mutants, done with no new ideas or even a clever way for the Doctor to save the day or at least everyone. That one was a sure tell that Chibnall either didn’t have the time or creativity to think of an ingenious or clever way to end the story and just settled for a grim “we can’t go back in time to save those people because RULES!” ending that’s just plain lazy.

Chibnall also blew up Gallifrey again after Moffat brought it back to give the next showrunners something to work with. Chibnall couldn’t think of anything to do other than kill them off again, though it’s probably just as well because Gallifrey has always been the most boring and tedious part of Doctor Who lore that old-school fans just can’t stop obsessing over. Then there’s the “Timeless Child” reveal that was designed to shock fans and give the show new mystery and intrigue, but it’s just a tired and lazy use of the “everything the hero knows about their origin is wrong!” plotline that Alan Moore introduced back in 1984 in the Swamp Thing comic, but every writer who read him has turned into an increasingly dull trope. At least the old-school fans popping their blood vessels over it was fun, possibly the funniest part of the entire season.

Unfulfilled Promise and Lost Potential

That’s not to say there weren’t fun moments in this season of Doctor Who. There was Sacha Dhawan showing up as the new Master, a twitching dervish of childish meanness and psychotic rage who managed to be funny and menacing at the same time. The biggest surprise of the season was Jo Martin‘s Fugitive Doctor, a lost regeneration whose unexpected chemistry with Whittaker makes Martin’s Doctor the biggest wasted opportunity in the show’s history because Chibnall didn’t really know what to do with her after that reveal, and only used her sparingly in cameos later on. The Fugitive Doctor was the biggest proof that Chibnall didn’t have a grand plan and just made it up as he went along. There was even an episode featuring a pair of tedious ancient evil villains who just stood around monologuing about how evil they were, a trope that was repeated with even worse, even more tedious results with the two big bads of Flux, the season where everything got even worse with only John Bishop‘s soulful performance as new companion Dan Lewis and Mandip Gil‘s performance of Yaz’ desperate devotion to The Doctor that would be pushed into the “Thazmin” romance after the season was over and Whittaker encouraged Chibnall to pursue it so that Yaz would finally have a personality and an arc.

Whew! Glad that’s Over!

Of course, all of this is under the bridge now. That era of Doctor Who is over. The whole “Timeless Child” plotline will likely be completely ignored, and everyone can pretend it never happened. Russell T. Davies is back with David Tennant and Catherine Tate returning for the 60th Anniversary Specials as a palette-cleanser for the mess the previous era was as they ease us into Ncuti Gatwa‘s era as the 15^th Doctor with Disney money added to the show’s budget. The old-school fans will still be bitching about how the “Timeless Child” plot should be retconned out by revealing that it wasn’t the Doctor all along, while everyone else is happy to move on. We said it before, and we’ll say it again: Jodie Whittaker deserved better.

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