Doctor Who: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos - Review

Earlier this week, I started thinking about how Series 11 had been going, and realised that, though some early episodes were decidedly mediocre, we hadn’t had a completely awful episode.

Jinxed it, didn’t I?

Let’s start with what I liked:

• “Yippee ki-yay, robots!”

• The René Magritte-esque exterior of the building 

And then they got inside it, and it looked like a Welsh power station.

The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos (I'm going to start spelling that wrong in a bit) is a shambles of an episode, executed with the sub-Stormtrooper precision of the robots who shoot each other in a scene shockingly on par with the barely first draft quality of this entire episode’s illogic. Everything makes you ask: why? Why would you set up the planet’s mind-altering field and then have it amount to giving the Doctor a bit of a headache? Why is it relevant that 3407 years have passed when all of this could have been achieved in six months? Why do they keep putting things on their faces this series?

If there’s anything that comes close to working here, it’s Graham’s desire for revenge against Tim Shaw. There is an idea in there for a way to close his character arc about grieving. But the episode almost completely avoids drawing any conflict out of this. The Doctor considers stopping him, then... just doesn’t. Graham gets the chance to kill Tim, then... just doesn’t. It’s all a load of nothing.

‘Nothing’ is also a fair description of the amount of development Ryan, Yaz or the Doctor get in The Wandering Around of Ranskoor Av Kolos, and of the depth of Mark Addy’s character, who might as well have remembered his name as Commander Exposition. A better script could have done something interesting with the Ux, exploring them as religious fanatics manipulated into extremism, but again this episode can’t even begin to do anything interesting because it doesn’t get past the level of basic competence; it’s utterly baffling that they start worshipping Tim so quickly and then, after 3407 years, are persuaded to stop so easily.

Perhaps on a side note, something that’s been irritating me this series is how many alien races are identical to humans, or in the Ux’s case, humans with squiggles on their faces, as if prosthetics haven’t moved on since the first few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It makes the universe a lot less exciting.

Meanwhile, Tim Shaw has been stripped of all the cultural specificity he had in The Woman Who Fell to Earth in favour of being a cape-swishing supervillain screaming for revenge. He worked quite well in that first episode, but doesn’t have the gravitas to be a finale big bad. Compare the incredible appearance of the Dalek army in Bad Wolf or Missy’s reveal in Dark Water to the complete shrug that is the return of Tim, which boldly assumes everyone will recognise his generically evil voice and mask (surely what we remember about him was the face of teeth, but no, we get the mask).

And that lack of gravitas is the problem with The Battle of Rather Have Colonoscopy as a whole – with no tension, it’s utterly boring. Not what you want from a finale. In this respect, it’s possibly the worst final episode of post-2005 Doctor Who; while some of Moffat’s made as little sense, at least they felt big, and had moments that kept you halfway to the front of your seat, if not at the edge. Even The Name of the Doctor had the John Hurt reveal. Here, Chibnall seems averse to making us give a shit about anything. The Doctor’s task in the climax of this, the final episode of the series, is to put some planets that are already dead back in their orbits. Why?

Chris Chibnall confuses me. Sometimes he’s really on it – Broadchurch Series 1 and 3, for example, and there were some good decisions made in the run-up to this series, not least the casting of Jodie Whittaker and excellent choices of guest writers. But sometimes, he does Broadchurch Series 2, or Camelot, or this piece of P’ting shit. Perhaps he’s a worse writer under pressure – I’ve heard that Broadchurch Series 2 was rushed into production by the BBC, and that he struggled with being thrown into the showrunner role on Camelot – in which case, this may not be the job for him.

The BBC announced shortly after the episode finished broadcasting that Series 12 won’t be coming next year, but in early 2020. That’s a well timed decision, as after such a dire finale, it’s difficult to be eager for more. But it also might be a good decision; let’s hope the extra time allows Chibnall to do at least second drafts this time round.

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 11 RANKING

1. Rosa
2. It Takes You Away
3. Kerblam!
4. Demons of the Punjab
5. The Witchfinders
6. Arachnids in the UK
7. The Tsuranga Conundrum
8. The Woman Who Fell to Earth
9. The Ghost Monument
10. The Bottle of Rick Astley's Cum