Doctor Who: Series 11, Episode 10 – “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” (2018)

We’ve got a New Year’s special coming up in a few weeks (then a long, Who-less drought, but thank all that is good, we have confirmation that Thirteen will be the Doctor for at least one more season!), but this is the finale for the Thirteenth Doctor’s first outing.  While a bit rocky for me – it feels at points like a number of interesting ideas that don’t necessarily all come together – I feel it ultimately sticks the landing.

A series of distress calls leads the Doctor, Graham, Ryan, and Yaz to the battle-strewn remnants of Ranskoor Av Kolos, where they meet a ship captain whose crew has been taken after recovering a mysterious object that, due to the unusual mental effects the planet can have on people, he can no longer identify.  Offered the promise of both an intriguing mystery and kidnapped people to rescue, the Doctor and co. spring into action, but at the heart of the adventure, they find themselves reckoning with past experiences.

I’ll start with what doesn’t work for me.  Some of the perils/crises feel a bit overly-manufactured and aren’t really the problems they’re initially made out to be.  Even though the central disaster in need of averting is a pretty genuinely big deal, the weight of that doesn’t always come across in the episode.  Don’t get me wrong – I don’t need billions of Daleks in the sky or the actual end of time for every season finale, but this feels just a bit too small.  And while the episode makes an attempt at wrapping up the season arc, it’s barely an arc, so tiny an arc that bringing this storyline back around (from a straight plot standpoint) seems to make it feel less meaningful than it would’ve to just leave it a one-and-done.  Also, it highlights the tiddly little throwaway bits earlier in the season that had an arc-y tinge to them but don’t really come up here at all – what were they all about, then?

That said, bringing the arc back around does provide some emotional resonance for the characters, especially the Doctor and Graham.  The central conflict and how we arrive at that is a little sketchy for me, but on pretty much every level, I like the solutions found by our heroes.  The story also introduces a neat new race of rather mystical “dimensional engineers” (awesome) and features such guest stars as Phyllis Logan (Mrs. Hughes from Downton Abbey) and Mark Addy (Robert Baratheon from Game of Thrones.)

Again, the Doctor and Graham get the biggest stories here and deliver as well as expected, but even though Ryan and Yaz’s roles are smaller, we get important moments from them too.  I particularly like Ryan’s panicked but determined urge to do the heroic thing when that winds up being a much bigger thing than he expected, and Yaz demonstrates real devotion to the Doctor that’s pretty lovely to see.

Now that the season proper is over, I’ll be moving the Sunday Who Review back to its usual place on, well, Sundays, where I plan to spend the time until the New Year’s special looking back on the new season.