 |
The Doctor confronts a corrupt Internet mogul (Lenny Henry) - But he's the least of her problems...
|
2 episodes. Running Time: Approx. 121 minutes. Written by: Chris Chibnall. Directed by: Jamie Magnus Stone, Lee Haven Jones. Produced by: Nikki Wilson, Alex Mercer.
THE PLOT:
Intelligence agents are being targeted - but apparently at random, the attacks claiming agents of every nationality. Every victim has suffered the same fate - Wiped clean, their DNA entirely rewritten by some unknown, alien force. "C" (Stephen Fry), the head of MI6, has the Doctor and her companions brought in and reveals that they have only one lead: Daniel Barton (Lenny Henry), founder of VOR, an in-no-way Google-like Internet company that "C" describes as "more powerful than most nations."
While the Doctor and Graham travel to Australia to meet Agent "O" (Sacha Dhawan), Yaz and Ryan go undercover in San Francisco as a reporter and photographer to interview Barton. They quickly find that Barton is in league with the aliens, known as the Kasaavins - who abduct Yaz, and somehow transport her to Australia.
The reunited TARDIS team, along with "O," crash Barton's birthday party to confront him about the aliens. Barton flees to his private jet, but not before the Doctor and her friends manage to stow away.
Whereupon "O" makes a startling revelation. Barton is not on the plane. "O" is not who he appears to be. And everything the Doctor thinks she knows is a lie...
CHARACTERS:
The Doctor: I said in my Series Eleven overview that I thought Jodie Whittaker had the potential to be a great Doctor, but was not one yet. In this story, she meets that potential. The Doctor has a lot to do, particularly in the second part, and Whittaker nails pretty much all of it. There's a scene in Part Two in which the villain of the piece threatens to murder innocents unless the Doctor kneels. She does so - But with an eyeroll, followed by a glare that would melt steel. Her final scenes opposite this villain showcase a more ruthless side, which reinforces my impression from Demons of the Punjab - that this is a Doctor who, for all her surface "niceness," has the potential to be a little frightening.
Graham: "Looking outside was actually quite low on my list!" Continues to be the voice of the everyday viewer's common sense - You don't run toward the alien, and when something spooky is happening outside you stay indoors. Which doesn't stop him from following after "the Doc" and "the Fam," because a part of him loves the excitement as much as Grace did, and the rest of him wishes she could be there to enjoy it with him. When they are separated from the Doctor, he is the one who insists that they will see her again - and firmly states that they will ask some questions about her once they do reunite.
Ryan/Yaz:: Though this is not a companion-centric story, they both get good moments. Yaz is properly scared - maybe for the first time since meeting the Doctor - when the aliens transport her to their home dimension (or whatever it is), and it takes her a few scenes to shake that off. When separated from the Doctor, once the group has settled on taking action, she is the one who pushes them to act. Meanwhile, Ryan recognizes the need to destroy their cell phones to hide from Barton. Both of them are experiencing pressure from their professional and social circles, thanks to the excuses they create to justify their time away with the Doctor; as with Rory and Amy so long ago, "Doctor life" and "real life" just aren't proving compatible.
Daniel Barton: Lenny Henry is Bill Gates... um, Steve Jobs... um, Daniel Barton, the apparent villain of the piece. For most of Part One, he is basically the face of the evil force behind the story. And in a story that gives more than a passing nod to the James Bond franchise, Henry's billionaire Internet industrialist fits the villain bill perfectly. He's a sneering, ultimately petty man whose main motivation seems to be resentment. He resents his mother (Blanche Williams) for not acknowleding his accomplishments, and he resents being socially ostracized at school for being non-white; a part of me wanted a Social Network moment in which someone told Barton the reason for his lack of friends wasn't because of race - It was because he was a ****. Henry manages to squeeze a few layers into a fairly cardboard villain, but it's not much of a surprise that he is mainly a stand-in, drawing our attention to catch us off-guard when the real bad guy is revealed...
"O":: The agent who is more than he seems, the reveal of his true identity effectively is the Episode One cliffhanger. For benefit of the three people who haven't found out (but who for some reason are reading this), I will not disclose it here. Suffice to say, Sacha Dhawan is terrific both before and after the mask drops. In retrospect, there are several clues to his true identity - But it was hidden well enough to be a genuine surprise. Dhawan and Whittaker bring out the best in each other's performances, and the scenes in which they verbally spar are the highlights of a generally excellent 2-parter.
THOUGHTS:
I love Chris Chibnall's writing and showrunning... When he's writing and showrunning Broadchurch. In Doctor Who, I have generally found that Chibnall's scripts tend to fall somewhere in the range of "pretty good" to "just okay." I've never dreaded Chibnall episodes the way I used to dread Mark Gatiss' annual offerings - Chibnall's very worst have still been consistently watchable. But there has always been something a little bit timid about his Doctor Who stories, as if he's too reverent a fan to really properly dig into his vision of what makes the character tick.
Spyfall is not timid. Chibnall sold it ahead of time as "the biggest episode of Doctor Who we've done." He promised stunts and action on the level of a motion picture, but without losing sight of the characters. I'll admit, I braced myself for disappointment - the idea of a Bond pastische did not particularly line up with my personal series wish list, and had the potential to go very wrong.
Fortunately, the Bond elements are largely there as window dressing, even forming part of the misdirection as to the nature of the story. Part Two maintains the "bigness" of the story, moving from globe-hopping to time-hopping with some breathless set pieces in a 19th century exhibition and in 1943 Paris. Along the way, the Doctor teams up with computer pioneer Ada Lovelace (Sylvie Briggs) and World War II heroine Noor Inayat Khan (Aurora Marion), and the three make an engaging team.
But the heart of the piece lies with the character conflict between the Doctor and "O," and it is their exchanges that dominate the memory long after the episode itself has finished. I want to see these two spar again - And with so much left unresolved, I'm fairly certain I'm going to get my wish.
The two-parter does a good job of telling a story that is passably complete in itself, with an alien invasion thwarted and the world saved (all served with a sharp, all-too-accurate analysis of how blithely we serve ourselves up to the World Wide Web), while at the same time leaving plenty of threads dangling for the rest of the season.
Spyfall is a terrific story, the best solo script Chris Chibnall has written for Doctor Who. It's also a superb season premiere - in my opinion, the best season opener since Matt Smith's tenure.
Oh, and a final aside: The current TARDIS interior, which I've mostly disliked? It looks fantastic in blue! Can we keep the blue, please? No? Ah, well - Can't have everything.
Overall Rating: 9/10. I retroactively deducted a point for the dangling plot threads that were never tied up or even mentioned again. It's still a terrific opener... but too many elements never get addressed again, and that rubs me the wrong way in retrospect.
Previous Story: Resolution
Next Story: Orphan 55
Search Amazon.com for Doctor Who
Review Index
To receive new review updates, follow me:
On Twitter:
On Threads:
No comments:
Post a Comment