chibnall

Chris Chibnall’s style is hugely sensationalist. You can see it in Law & Order: London, where he sorted through the archives of the original show to find the most sensational handful of scripts possible, then ramped up the sensational qualities within them, and the emotional response of all the characters in the show, such that often it all can feel a bit… icky, to my tastes. Everything that he writes seems to be a canvas for characters to make bad decisions and scream at each other.

The thing is, if that’s what you’re looking for, Chibnall is very good at it. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to write; it’s that his taste and style and judgment aren’t the kind of thing that I like much, and I’m not sure if they’re all that appropriate for Doctor Who.

It’s easy to get the two mixed up. I know I tend to dismiss anything I feel is crass or tawdry. But any aesthetic can be done well, and Chibnall has consistently shown that he knows what he’s doing and can translate his vision into any genre that’s thrown at him.

Taking this in another direction, I’m rather afraid he may be taking a note from Gatiss and Roberts here, as from the clips and the previews this episode sounds like basically a pastiche or conflation of all the fan-favorite Pertwee stories. We’ve got the town trapped under a bubble from The Dæmons. We’ve got the experiment from Inferno. We’ve got the antagonists from The Silurians.

I’m always apprehensive about stories that people describe as delightfully old-school, as it tends to mean they’re more concerned with evoking memories of past stories by quoting huge swaths of them than with taking the show into new and interesting directions. I’m sure it’s possible to make a story that evokes classic Who without simply remaking it. “Amy’s Choice” feels very 1960s to me, for instance, as does “Midnight”. That comes out of working creatively within similar logical constraints — budget, limited sets and effects — rather than rote imitation.

Of course I’ve not seen it yet, so I’m just voicing apprehensions. One sign that this story may be a bit more advanced than I fear is, perhaps unintuitively, the makeup. The original Earth Reptile stories were great, but considering the neutral line they tried to walk they were somewhat let down by the difficulty in making the antagonists individual, identifiable characters. The Silurians and the Sea Devils all look the same, and any characterization is let down by the immobility of their masks.

Of course it’s unfortunate that for a character to be identifiable that means, in cosmetic terms, to make them more like us, basically people with green bumps on their faces. But outside of complex animatronics or something, the most elegant solution is to show us the actors’ faces — their eyes and mouths and facial muscles — and to dress them individually. Then the dilemma becomes not just an intellectual exercise where, yes, in theory we can understand the Doctor’s argument that these are intelligent beings with their own legitimate argument that we ought to take seriously. Instead we might have a chance of giving a damn about the Silurians ourselves, on an emotional level.

Considering the emotional level that Chibnall likes to work on, that also makes me wary. But we’ll see.