Happy New Year, Doctor Who is back! I’m pretty sure most Doctor Who fans were frustrated by the year-long gap between new episodes, the longest break since the show came back in 2005. With such a wait, the onus is on the new twelfth series to be well worth it, and showrunner Chris Chibnall is making sure not to leave us any longer, with the New Years’ Special for 2020 (taking over from the Christmas Special of previous years) being less standalone and leading directly into the new series –similar to “The Christmas Invasion”. And as a bonus, we don’t have another few months before the series begins proper with a direct follow-up to this episode coming on the weekend.
“Spyfall” is its’ name and it’s a terrible name. One of the dumbest puns of a title I can recall, and unusually sophomoric for an episode that’s otherwise quite intense. However, it does essentially tell you all you need to know: the episode deals with espionage, the Doctor and friends get to play spy for the duration, and it’s probably incredibly literal –much like, say “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” forecasted an episode with a focus on superheroes. “Spyfall” is better than that one, but it is pretty rough itself in a way I’m certain it wouldn’t be if it had been a self-contained story along the lines of last years’ “Resolution”.
Probably the biggest issue is the pacing, especially in the first act where its’ much too rushed to get the characters into the adventure while simultaneously reasserting their lives and identities in Sheffield. We see Ryan Sinclair, Yaz Khan, and Graham O’Brien prepping for more travelling by making arrangements in their own lives (Graham undergoing a physical, Ryan making excuses with friends, Yaz asking for more time off work), and it recalls an underlying theme that we’ve seen explored a few times in the last fifteen years: the relationship between the companions’ individual lives and their travels with the Doctor. However, the episode doesn’t allow us to dwell on this or any real character moments throughout, with the exception of one scene between Yaz and Ryan after the former is put through a traumatic experience that seems to once more hint at a potential romantic pairing. It’s mostly plot and building intrigue that it will supposedly pay off in the next episode, but as such feels more like it belongs in the middle of a series, rather than the beginning of one coming after such a long hiatus. A very bad first episode for anyone coming into Doctor Who now.
The plot concerns a race of mysterious, almost-incorporeal aliens seemingly assassinating a number of agents from spy organizations around the world, all in the process of investigating tech mogul Daniel Barton, played by Lenny Henry (a once parody Doctor himself) continuing his turn of playing serious characters for Chris Chibnall. The Doctor and her “fam” are brought in to assist MI6 in both finding out what these aliens are and how Barton is connected to them. There’s also the matter of how and why these aliens erase the DNA of the people they attack leaving the bodies as ‘empty shells’ as the Doctor puts it. Of course MI6 is removed from the equation pretty swiftly with the sadly premature death of Stephen Fry’s C –head of the agency, after he’s told them everything they need. And from there the episode pretty much follows a conventional Doctor Who formula, though deliberately using a spy aesthetic every so often. Two storylines branch out of it, one following the Doctor and Graham tracing an expelled MI6 agent whom the Doctor knows referred to as O, played by Sacha Dhawan, to an isolated cabin in the Australian outback; and the other sees Yaz and Ryan impersonating journalists in San Francisco to find out more about Barton, most significantly learning that he’s 7% not human. Both plots get more than a little cluttered in a way that reminds me of Moffat, and they aren’t very good at keeping your investment. Multiple times while watching I was thinking about how this is a show meant for children and how difficult it would be for them to follow chunks of it.
But there are a few sequences where the pace steadies, the writing mellows more accessibly, and the filmmaking (directed by Jamie Magnus Stone) does some interesting things. I mentioned how this episode is pretty intense, and while the first sequence that strives for that impression: the SATNAV system of the car escorting the gang trying to kill them, is wholly a bit messy and predictable, the first real appearance of the aliens at O’s cabin is atmospheric and even a little genuinely uncomfortable. These beings of white light in the shape of people in hats enter the scene one-by-one in the fashion of a horror movie anomaly, dispensing of the two poor Australian redshirts in a like manner. There’s something really creepy in their luminescence, how they have an Angel-like ability to sneak up on you, and the only way to describe their attack is like the poster of The Thing. The confrontation builds suspense through these aliens’ ability of phasing through matter and our protagonists’ methods of restraining them, with one legitimately interesting piece of plotting coming at the culmination of this when the Doctor manages to communicate and learns they want to take the universe itself.
The idea of these beings as some kind of extra-dimensional malevolent force, a cosmic horror of some kind not limited to the conventional bounds of this universe is a kind of scary entirely new to Doctor Who; and if it’s the direction here, I’m curious by it even if I doubt they can pull it off. But this implication is furthered by what we see happen to Yaz, who also encounters them with Ryan while snooping around Barton’s office and gathering information from his computer. Consumed by one of the creatures, Yaz is transported to a grim and desolate environment full of tendrils coming out of the ground as though they were trees. Its’ hard not to see in its dreadful atmosphere the shadow of the Upside-Down from Stranger Things, and somehow Yaz is relinquished from this world into the cage in the place of the creature the Doctor and O had captured. She later describes the experience to Ryan as feeling as though she were dead, and we’re left to ponder the nature of this existential plane, not revisiting it until the episodes’ final moments.
It makes the tone incredibly jarring then when the gang very quickly follows this up with a more lighthearted set-piece at Bartons’ birthday party, an excuse to just give the characters a Casino Royale moment as it shortly diverts into another chase scene with the heroes on motorcycles pursuing Bartons’ car –though it does give us the chance to see the Doctor in an extremely stylish tuxedo. Yaz, who less than ten minutes ago was in a state of shock, now joyously responds to O’s question of “is this what it’s like being with the Doctor?” as they’re being shot at with a coy “this is one of the quiet days”. A lot happens between the party and the episodes’ end, including this chase, a dramatic stowing away aboard an aircraft, a major reveal, and a dire new development, yet it’s all done in roughly fifteen minutes.
That reveal though especially needed more time, or possibly less, to digest. It either should have been drawn out earlier or saved till the last moment, because unexpected twist though it may be, it throws a wrench into a lot of the plot up to this point. But while it doesn’t work much on a narrative sense, it is dramatically thrilling. There was something curious about O from the start, an agent whom the Doctor knew but had never appeared previously in an episode to my knowledge (though Dhawan is not new to the world of Doctor Who, having played the series’ debut director Waris Hussein in the 2013 biopic An Adventure in Space and Time); O was someone who’d met the Doctor when she was a man and had compiled a shelf-full of documents researching her –I particularly liked his comment: “a lot of inconsistencies but it’s very, very interesting”. And I noticed in terms of scene composition and in a handful of particular shots, such as his reaction to seeing the inside of the TARDIS, that he wasn’t an ordinary guest character. It comes to a head when he weirdly makes multiple comments about not being a good sprinter after the others help him make it onto Bartons’ escaping plane (honestly Graham ought to have been struggling a lot more with that kind of a stunt, given he’s a retiree in remission from cancer), and the Doctor points out that his personnel report mentions he’s a champion sprinter.
And thus, his cover is blown in such a silly manner, one that could have so easily been avoided or excused, and yet it’s perfectly fitting given his history that he would seem so careless. O, we find out, is The Master, reincarnated and having taken the place of a would-be MI6 agent (he shrunk the guy down, it’s unclear whether he’s dead or not). He’s been behind everything and with a bomb planted where Barton was supposed to be, he’s ready to leave the Doctor and companions to die.
So …this was a choice; and we’ll have to wait until part two to see whether or not it was a good one. It certainly raises more questions than it answers in terms of what the whole goal is here, with story points making less sense the more you think about them. Most importantly though, we suddenly have a whole new Master to contend with. Dhawan is a good actor, and as a person of colour continues the trend of the Master being the testing ground before diversifying the Doctor. From what we’ve seen, given the sharp change in personality once he reveals himself, Dhawan seems to be going for the mischievous interpretation of the character John Simm brought to life, with the theatrically and clear penchant for duplicity of Anthony Ainley. But my humble opinion is it’s a bit too soon to be bringing the Master back. Last time the character made a return it was after four years, which added to their impact. We’ve only been without him now for one series, and he’s a character easily over-exposed, as was the case with Ainley. And though I know we saw her begin to die in “The Doctor Falls”, I held out a little hope that it wouldn’t be the last we’d see of Missy, as she was too good an incarnation to be confined to just one Doctor –though I am curious how they’re going to get around Simm’s Master sabotaging her regeneration cycle. What does fascinate me though is that the last thing this Master says to the Doctor before disappearing is that everything she knows is a lie –a loaded line for sure, but one that could mean something very big.
Undoubtedly, the biggest thing the return of the Master signifies however is that the rules of the last series don’t apply anymore. Where Chibnall in 2018 made the conscious choice not to feature any classic villains or serialized stories, really allowing series eleven to stand out as a result, this series is now more fully tied into the long-running mythology of the franchise. I’m not sure how to feel about that given I liked the refreshing style of series eleven, and I feel it would be a mistake for the writers to play all their cards at once. We know that the Cybermen are coming back, we don’t need the Daleks or even the Autons or the Angels showing up –let them rest for a bit. I also wouldn’t want the show to go back to the kind of grand scale convoluted storytelling this episode seemed to be embracing in lieu of character drama and creative concepts. But there is another episode coming in a few days that might make up for that.
In any case, it’s nice to have the Doctor back. It’s nice to have Ryan and Yaz and Graham back as well. The TARDIS is functioning again and ready to set off on new adventures, the Doctors’ “fam” are ready to confront the thrills and dangers of time and space, and if the teaser is anything to go by, they look promising. The tagline of this series is “space for all”, which is such a wonderful phrase for Doctor Who, declaring that not only are the wonders of the universe open to everybody but that they are so marvellous that they are worth everybody experiencing -and I hope series twelve lives up to that sentiment.
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