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Graham announces his intent to seek revenge
on the alien who killed his wife.
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THE PLOT:
The time travelers come to Ranskoor av Kolos, a planet that is the origin point for several distress signals, and whose name roughly translates to "Disintegrator of the Soul." The planet is home to the Ux, a long-lived race that uses the power of its faith to bend reality - Which explains why the atmosphere is wracked with reality-distorting waves. The Doctor counters these waves by fitting her team with neural blockers that they must wear at all times. "Don't lose them," she admonishes.
They materialize on a ship, and are confronted at gunpoint by its captain, Paltraki (Mark Addy). He has lost his memory, but starts to regain his faculties after the Doctor gives him a neural blocker. Looking around the ship, they discover a strange object - a rock of some type encased in a protective substance, which Paltraki recalls is important in some way.
The ship's communicator sounds, and a masked figure demands the captain return the object - killing a captive member of Paltraki's crew to demonstrate his seriousness. The voice is a familiar one: T'zim-Sha of the Stenza, the alien responsible for killing Grace. He is posing as The Creator, the Ux deity, manipulating and weaponizing their faith to serve his ends.
Hearing his voice, Graham becomes very still and reserved. As they move out to rescue Paltraki's surviving crew from the floating Ux shrine where they are imprisoned, Graham pulls the Doctor to one side and informs her of his intent: To kill T'zim-Sha if he gets the opportunity, to get justice for Grace. Even if that means the end of his time in the TARDIS.
CHARACTERS:
The Doctor: It's clear how serious she considers this situation to be when, before entering the Ux shrine, she produces grenades and bombs. When Ryan calls her out on her willingness to use these weapons after chastising him for shooting sniper bots, she blithely replies that her rules are "flexible... (They) change all the time." One consistent trait of this Doctor is a greater respect for faith than previous incarnations. We saw her join in with a vigil in The Tsuranga Conundrum, and preside over a wedding while freely talking about faith in Demons of the Punjab. Here, she meets Andinio (Phyllis Logan), the Ux leader, and remains not just respectful but downright impressed at the feats she and her kind can perform through faith - While at the same time showing naked scorn for T'zim-Sha, for manipulating and weaponizing their abilities.
She behaves differently with each character in this episode. With Paltraki, she is cautious but compassionate, patiently explaining that she is here to help even as he points a weapon at her. With Andinio, she acts as a voice of reason, asking questions to challenge her belief in T'zim-Sha as The Creator, particularly the question of how he can possibly know her. With Graham, she is very direct: If he takes revenge for Grace - assuming he survives the attempt - she will not allow him to travel with her anymore.
Graham: Is very direct in telling the Doctor that he will kill the Stenza if he gets the chance. The way he does it, pulling her aside to talk to her privately, feels like a mark of respect. He knows she won't approve, but he will not insult or betray her by trying to hide his intentions. When Ryan calls him on his revenge plan, demanding to know what Grace would have thought of such a course, he replies: "Your Nan would want to be alive. She actually liked being alive, and she was really good at it!" For all of his anger at the Stenza, however, he does not neglect the task of freeing the prisoners to try to hunt him down. He focuses fully on the job at hand, not compromising the safety of his charges at any point. It seems clear his intent is exactly as he says it is: If he gets the chance to kill T'zim-Sha, he'll take it, but he won't go so far as endangering others to get that chance.
Ryan: When the others wonder what happened to Paltraki's crew, Ryan jumps to the worst possible conclusion and wonders if the troubled captain killed them. This is consistent with the previous episode, when his first thought was that Hanne's father had abandoned her. In that episode, he was right; in this episode, he is wrong - But taken together, it seems clear that he instinctively looks for the worst in people, likely as a result of his abandonment. Graham is the one male authority figure who hasn't abandoned him, despite his early efforts to push him away. By this point, he has accepted Graham as family, and even tells the older man that he loves him and doesn't want to lose him... and at the end of the episode, Ryan goes back for him, almost certainly saving his life in the process.
Yaz: "I'm with you, whatever happens." Said flatly and firmly, when the Doctor tries to send her away in the closing stretch. She has developed an unswerving loyalty to the Doctor. When the Doctor hesitates to disconnect the Ux from a Stenza device, Yaz prods her with all that is in the balance - But she doesn't try to override the Doctor's judgment or enforce her own. Instead, she seems to trust that the Doctor will find a way to do what's necessary while still staying true to her own moral code.
THOUGHTS
The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos is the Series Eleven finale... sort of. Given that Resolution aired less than a month after this, and followed up directly on the Graham/Ryan character arc while also delivering a story that felt a bit "bigger" than the norm, I'd argue that it is the true finale in all but name. I'd also argue that this line of thinking helps the season as a whole. It certainly helps The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, because while this isn't at all bad when judged simply as an episode, it does not do the job as a finale.
WHAT WENT WRONG: MORE TIME NEEDED
This episode really needed to be 60 or 65 minutes. It has many potentially interesting ideas and plot turns, but most of them don't get enough time to make a proper impression. This is true in two different ways of the manner in which the Doctor and Yaz stop the Ux from destroying Earth and convince them of T'zim-Sha's true nature. They remove their neural blockers, which the Doctor modifies to interrupt the Ux's mental signal - but at the cost of exposing them to the planet's disruptive mental effects.
This should be a fantastic way to ratchet up the tension at the climax... Except that the episode does nothing at all with it. We should see the Doctor and Yaz fighting to keep their focus and even their sanity while still solving the problem - perhaps with Yaz succumbing to the effects and the Doctor having to incapacitate her while still battling to finish the job. That would convey a sense of tension, conflict, and jeopardy. It would also require at least a few minutes of screen time to play out. Instead, we just get a line from the Doctor about feeling "fuzzy" and a few constipated expressions from Yaz in the background, turning what should have been a terrific complication into... Well, nothing really.
In the same scene, after fitting the Ux with the neural blockers, the Doctor still has to convince them that their "god" is nothing of the sort. This turns out to be remarkably easy to do. The Doctor just tells Andinio who T'zim-Sha really is, and Andinio instantly believes her. Far too easy, and utterly undramatic. With more time, the episode might have found a more convincing and interesting way to convince her, perhaps with T'zim-Sha himself accidentally revealing the truth when taunting the Doctor. As it stands, it takes the Doctor a little over ten seconds to talk around a woman who should be desperate to cling to her beliefs, if only so that she can continue believing that all she has done has been for some greater good.
WHAT WENT RIGHT: ATMOSPHERE AND STRUCTURE:
Director Jamie Childs has been the big find of this season. All four of his episodes have demonstrated an ability to create a strong visual atmosphere. Given a script that's too often guilty of telling instead of showing, Childs creates tension out of a wasteland of destroyed spaceships, or out of the artificial, yellow-hued lighting inside the Ux shrine. The visuals of T'zim-Sha, framed always in the darkness, lit indirectly from light that's anywhere but where he is, make the Stenza more formidable and threatening than in his earlier appearance, and the use of close-ups is particularly effective.
I will also credit Chibnall's story structure. The first Act raises mysteries: What happened to Paltraki's crew? What is the nature of the object Paltraki took from the Stenza? The first question is answered quickly, kicking off the rescue mission that drives the story. The answer to the second question is held back until near the end, but the script continually returns to it, with the Doctor asking it of both Andinio and T'zim-Sha.
An attempt to ratchet up the stakes by threatening Earth feels forced and doesn't quite land, but the resolution of Graham's revenge plot is more satisfying. He ultimately does not kill his target, but takes a more poetic justice - As with the Doctor's freeing of the Ux, he finds a solution that fits within his moral code while still satisfying his need for justice.
OVERALL:
I will admit that, as an episode in itself, I find The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos quite entertaining. Even with the weaknesses, I strongly suspect it would have been much better-received had it aired in the mid-season, perhaps as a set up for a final confrontation with "Tim Shaw" later on.
That said, I will acknowledge that this episode is all surface. I was entertained, but I was never emotionally engaged, and I never felt like the stakes were as high as the script kept insisting they were.
Overall Rating: 6/10. Judged as an episode. But at least one point lower if judged as a finale.
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