The Timeless Child won't make me stop watching Doctor Who - but preachy episodes might

OK, the DVD box set of series twelve of Doctor Who is finally out: time to blog about it. I apologise to non-Whovians in advance, as there will be two Who blog posts in a row: one with my reflections on series twelve (this one), one with a wish list for things I want to happen in series thirteen. Because though the show has some serious problems under current show runner Chris Chibnall, I'm still not giving up on it.

This series is an interesting one, as it raises an important question. What is preferable, that a Doctor Who show runner ignores the show's lore and treats it as any old time-travelling sci-fi story, or that said show runner does engage with Who lore and makes a complete mess of it? On the evidence of series eleven and twelve, I would say the latter. I was kinder to series eleven than, with hindsight, I think it deserves because I was so relieved not to be lectured at by Chibnall and co. all of the time. Having rewatched most of the episodes, though, I have to say that it's pretty bland and that the quality dropped considerably from the Moffat era. I freely admit that, in spite of the many questionable choices Chibnall made when it came to Who lore, I enjoyed series twelve a good deal more. He may have played fast and loose with Time Lord history, but at least there were Time Lords. He may have ignored the Master's/Missy's redemption arc by bringing back a Master who is hostile to The Doctor and without any redeeming qualities (apart from being fun), but at least we do get him back. Also, Sacha Dhawan as the Master delivers a top-notch performance, especially when he conveys the rage and pain under the character's psychotic glee. The show is still not as good as it was under Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat, but at least it feels like proper Doctor Who again.

As for Chibnall's decisions, well... the worst ones can still be retconned or just ignored, as has happened before in the show's history, not least in the modern era, which is the only one I'm really familiar with. Davies killed off the Time Lords and destroyed Gallifrey in the off-screen "Time War". Moffat brought them back, with considerable effort, in the 50-year anniversary special The Day of the Doctor. As for potentially game-changing revelations that didn't change things all that much, we fans seem to be good at ignoring the implication of a lot of Claras saving the Doctor at different times of his career (as revealed in Moffat's Impossible Girl story arc), and let's not talk about the Hybrid, shall we? (A hybrid can't be two people, Steven - the very point of a hybrid is that it's two or more components merged into one.)

So what is it that Chibnall has gone and done? Well, his most controversial plot point is that of the  story arc of the series, the mystery of The Timeless Child. In the first (strong) two-parter Spyfall, the Master tells the Doctor that their whole existence is "built on the lie of The Timeless Child". So who is this being? The disappointing answer came in the series finale where the Doctor learns the whole truth (or is it?) from her old friend turned enemy. The child, whose origins were unknown, was found and adopted by a Gallifreyan scientist, who then discovered that it had the ability to regenerate into a different body when close to death. The scientist experimented on her charge for years, going through several of its regenerations in the process, until she found the secret of its ability, which she could then gene-splice into Gallifrey's population. So far, so cool - even New Whovians like myself are wise to the fact that Time Lords are a shifty bunch. But here's the rub: according to the Master, this child of the seemingly endless regenerations was no other than - the Doctor. After having served the Time Lords in a sort of peace-keeping society for many years, they got their mind wiped, so that all the Doctors we have seen on screen don't remember anything of their illustrious past.

Various commentators on YouTube (and I imagine elsewhere) have pointed out nearly everything that's wrong with this idea, from the lack of respect shown to William Hartnell, who is ousted from his place as the First Doctor for no good reason, to the harmful effect it has on the Doctor's character: from being just an average Time Lord who has made a difference by their actions, he or she is now just another boring Chosen One trope, not special by what they do but by what they are. I couldn't agree more with this criticism. Actually, I think The Timeless Child arc is disrespectful to all Doctors we have seen on screen, as it implies that Whittaker's Doctor is somehow enriched by the knowledge of all these anonymous pre-Hartnell lives.

To add my own pennyworth, having female Timeless Child Doctors running around the place, even if the current Doctor doesn't remember them, lessens the impact of the Twelth Doctor's subconscious decision when he regenerated (which I had just about made peace with) to give a female incarnation a try. Jodie Whittaker's reaction when she saw that she was a woman - an enthusiastic "Oh, brilliant!" - underlines that this was something new, an experience the hitherto often very blokeish Doctor was prepared to make the most of. But if he started life as a girl - eh - not quite such a leap then, is it? Also, I dislike the idea of there being a zillion Doctors out there. The Doctor used to be the plum part within British television, and the revelation of the casting of a new one was a big event. But now? Doctor rankings may have to include a lot of bit-part players. Syndrome's words in The Incredibles come to mind: "When everyone's super - no one will be."

For all that, The Timeless Child wasn't my major gripe with this series. Chibnall made other choices which were nearly as bad - destroying Gallifrey again, after Moffat went to such pains to restore it; ignoring the Master's redemption arc, as I've already mentioned; implying a bleak future for planet Earth, when what we learned during the Davies era pointed in another direction (what happened to the Great and Bountiful Human Empires?) and claiming that most of the human race succumbed in the Cyber Wars - but they didn't as, at the end of time, 300 trillion billion years into the future, there are enough humans around to be able to seriously threaten their ancestors. Remember the Toclafane? The worst thing of all, though, were the two environmentally themed episodes, Orphan 55 and Praxeus.

Of all the political messages that can be peddled in popular entertainment, I believe "monstrous man is ruining the planet" is my least favourite one. Environmental issues are interesting and relevant, I'm sure, but they're also complex. If this is the sort of thing that interests you, you'd be better off watching a well-balanced documentary which properly explores how certain problems arise - it may not all be the fault of us wicked Westerners. In both Orphan 55 and Praxeus, though, we got the usual simplistic hand-wringing which adds nothing and only irritates. Orphan 55 was an instance of preaching to the choir where even the choir thought it was a bit much. It was a shame, as Ed Hime wrote the best episode of series eleven, the blissfully unpolitical It Takes You Away. But now both he and Peter McTighe, who dared to not let Big Business be the Big Bad in Kerblam!, have signed the pledge - McTighe co-scripted Praxeus with Chibnall. They are, it turns out, as full of self-righteousness as just about any other Doctor Who writer out there.

Praxeus is often compared favourably to the universally loathed Orphan 55, but when it comes to the messaging, there is precious little to choose between them. True, Orphan 55 tried the viewers' patience with irritating side characters, a "twist" filched from Planet of the Apes and a "now, children" speech by the Doctor at the end. Plot- and characterwise, Praxeus did better, but the green-preaching was almost as unsubtle as Orphan 55's doom-laden warning against "global warming" (the one-size-fits-all term "climate change" apparently having been abandoned). The message of Praxeus was that plastic in the oceans is bad (my, really?), and this was shown by an alien virus which fed on plastic taking root on Earth. The alien scientist who'd brought the virus explained that Earth, being "saturated with plastic", was the ideal place to experiment on the locals and find a cure, and that she and her crew had travelled "three galaxies" to find such a suitably plasticky environment. Seeing as plastic is one of the most useful materials we have, I'd be interested to learn what these three galaxies use instead, and whether we can have some.

This may be a lot of space to devote to what is after all only two preachy episodes, and it's not as if Doctor Who hasn't had them before in the Davies and Moffat eras. (Planet of the Ood, anyone? The curiously well-regarded Oxygen?) I do feel, though, as if the moralistic tone of the show is becoming more and more of a problem, something I feared would happen when I heard Chibnall was about to be show runner. The whole Timeless Child arc may have happened partly in a misguided attempt to make the Doctor more diverse: the Timeless Child versions of the character we glimpse in the finale flashback, including the first one (a little black girl), are nearly all so diverse it almost tips into self-parody. This kind of tinkering with the Doctor's history does no cause any favours, however, and may even damage the future casting of a "real" Doctor with, say, a black actor, as people will be so sick of the Timeless Child nonsense they will see it as just another "woke" gimmick instead of awarding a good actor (like Paterson Joseph or Adrian Lester) a part they've richly deserved.

But it's not all bad news. There were episodes in this series I really liked, such as Can You Hear Me (we've seen the nightmare theme before and more chillingly in The Sarah Jane Adventures, but this was still good and Zellin was a great villain) and The Haunting of Villa Diodati, the most solid historical episode in ages. Plus we got a cameo from Captain Jack! I'm not signing off yet - but a lot depends on how the next series turns out.