In 2017 Chris Chibnall took over from Steven Moffat as head writer and showrunner of Doctor Who, and I figured, after two series and two New Year Specials, it was time to assess him. As always, these are merely the opinions of one person. I must also thank the denizens of the Who sub-forum on the TrekBBS message board for their invaluable knowledge and perspectives.
I’ll start with Torchwood. Chibnall was the lead writer, and under his auspices the first two seasons were highly inconsistent in tone and quality, the show seeming to have little idea of what it wanted to be, or where it wanted to go. A lot of potential for intelligent, properly adult – as opposed to the violent, dark, rather tone-deaf stuff so common lately – sci-fi was squandered. Only Children of Earth realised that promise, and that miniseries was headed up by Russell T Davies. Not encouraging, to say the least.
In contrast, there’s Broadchurch. I’ve not seen the show myself, but I’m well aware of its strong reputation. The second and third series seem to have garnered somewhat mixed reactions, but the first is pretty uniformly praised, and overall it’s seen as a quality crime drama. More encouraging.
To the best of my knowledge, Chibnall’s relationship with Doctor Who itself began with the episodes he wrote while Moffat was in charge. Generally, they’re fun and entertaining, if not especially memorable. I personally most enjoyed his Silurian two-parter, though that’s at least partly due to how much I love the latter race’s design – a triumph of make-up – and having no prior knowledge of them. If I had seen earlier Silurian stories, I’d have cottoned on to a defining trait of Chibnall’s Who writing a lot sooner.
In a word, it’s derivative. His Silurian story wasn’t much more than a reworking of the two main Silurian stories from the classic series, albeit a good one. So much of his output has been rehashing or reusing old ideas that it’s genuinely difficult to pinpoint anything original he’s come up with. Even his grandiose reimagining of Who mythos isn’t original, repurposing the Cartmel Masterplan and potentially the Season 6B theory.
Compounding this is the fact that he’s primarily a plot-driven writer, and all-too-frequently a perfunctory one. Strong evidence for this is the number of antagonists who simply disappeared the instant they ceased being useful to the plot. Even when one did reappear, Robertson in the recent special, he was basically just a rent-a-douche plugged in to save the effort of creating a new character, and again conveniently vanished with no repercussions come the end.
This unfortunate combination of traits and habits has also meant that not a single new villain or monster introduced in the Chibnall era has really registered. It’s also meant that only one of the three most recent companions, Graham, has had any proper substance, and that’s mostly due to Bradley Walsh. It’s also meant topical and thematic episodes have mostly been too on-the-nose, too heavy-handed and obvious to work properly, the most egregious example being the painful Orphan 55. Worst of all, it’s also meant that Jodie Whitaker’s historic first female Doctor isn’t nearly what she could have been.
This is a compassionate Doctor whose compassion comes and goes at the whims of the plot, caring about a Dalek’s hijacked victim up until they’re rescued, then pretty much forgetting about them. This is a Doctor with an unsettling lack of agency, to the point she’s told the truth of her history by a Master she’s a helpless captive of, instead of actively uncovering it herself. This is a Doctor who keeps promising to save people, then signally fails to.
To be fair, we are only partway through a reportedly five season long arc, but if the Doctor’s repeated failure is part of it, flat repetition of the same beat, with no variation or evolution, is not the way to go about it. Flat is actually a good word to describe Chibnall’s Who in general, for though it’s had its moments, it’s generally hollow, and underwhelming, too familiar, and too lacking in spirit and energy and a sense of fun, to truly engage. It could even be described as a little downbeat and dispiriting, not characteristics that should ever be associated with Doctor Who.
In summation, Chris Chibnall is a writer who has serious difficulty coming up with new ideas, relies largely on rehashes of old ones as a result, seemingly struggles when expectations are placed on him, and is either unwilling or unable to do the hard graft that makes a story fully come to life. Considering that, the departure of Tosin Cole and Bradley Walsh, the arrival of the less-than-inspiring John Bishop in a tease that lazily revisits the War Doctor reveal, the series-reducing impact of Covid, and the possible loss of Whitaker herself, it’s hard to be optimistic about Who‘s future.
But then, if anyone can overcome the odds and prove the naysayers wrong, it’s the Doctor.
Foxy Musings 