Category: Doctor Who

The Doctor’s attempt to teleport to the last location of the TARDIS goes wrong…badly. Not only does the process deposit the Doctor in the airless void of space, but it also leaves Graham, Yaz and Ryan there as well. Ryan and Graham awaken on a spacecraft whose captain accuses them of slowing her down. The Doctor and Yaz have been rescued by a ship whose captain makes the same accusation, and whose ship is falling apart. The Doctor manages to help that pilot, Epzo, pull off a survivable crash landing by ditching the aft section of his ship. The planet where the time travelers are reunited, known only as the Desolation, is the site of the Rally of the Twelve Galaxies – a race to survive to the finish line where the winner takes all and the loser loses it all, though the contestants are forbidden from killing one another. The Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz are unable to claim the prize, but are likely to be killed by the planet’s harsh desert environment before anyone reaches the goal – a blue, box-shaped apparition known to the contestants as the Ghost Monument. But the Doctor knows this box as the TARDIS, and so the deadly race holds very high stakes indeed for the time travelers.

written by Chris Chibnall
directed by Mark Tonderai
music by Segun Akinola

Cast: Jodie Whittaker (The Doctor), Bradley Walsh (Graham O’Brien), Tosin Cole (Ryan Sinclair), Mandip Gill (Yasmin Khan), Susan Lynch (Angstrom), Shaun Dooley (Epzo), Art Malik (Ilin), Ian Gelder (voice of the Remnants)

Notes: The thirteenth Doctor’s title sequence (and a new arrangement of the theme tune by Segun Akinola) makes its debut at the beginning of this episode. The Desolation is revealed to have been desolated by the Stenza, the species from which the previous episode’s alien enemy hails.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

The TARDIS lands in Montgomery, Alabama mere days before December 1st, 1955, the night on which Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. It’s only after Ryan innocently tries to return a dropped item to a white couple that the time travelers crash into the brutal reality of the racism in this era of American history – and meet Rosa Parks herself. Soon afterward, the Doctor becomes aware that another time traveler is in Montgomery at the same time, something that can’t possibly be a coincidence, and finds herself confronting a man whose preference for a racially-segregated future has led him to try to change history. Ryan attends a meeting at Parks’ home and gets to meet Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while the Doctor, Graham and Yaz put a plan into motion to keep history on the right track to advance the American civil rights movement…but to do that, not only must they derail the scheme of their rival time traveler, they must remain still, and seemingly indifferent to the reality of race in 1955 in America, as they occupy seats about the same bus on the night of Rosa Parks’ arrest.

written by Malorie Blackman and Chris Chibnall
directed by Mark Tonderai
music by Segun Akinola

Cast: Jodie Whittaker (The Doctor), Bradley Walsh (Graham O’Brien), Tosin Cole (Ryan Sinclair), Mandip Gill (Yasmin Khan), Vinette Robinson (Rosa Parks), Joshua Bowman (Krasko), Trevor White (James Blake), Richard Lothian (Mr. Steele), Jessica Claire Preddy (Waitress), Gareth Marks (Police Officer Mason), David Rubin (Raymond Parks), Ray Sesay (Martin Luther King), Aki Omoshaybi (Fred Gray), David Dukas (Elias Griffin Jr.), Morgan Deare (Arthur)

Notes: Vinette Robinson had made a prior appearance in Doctor Who, in the 2007 episode 42 opposite David Tennant’s Doctor; she has also appeared in Black Mirror (Hated In The Nation) and Sherlock. Joshua Bowman has some time travel experience of his own, as Jack the Ripper in the short-lived 2017 TV adaptation of the movie Time After Time. American-born actor Morgan Deare previously appeared opposite Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor in the 1987 three-parter Delta And The Bannerman, and in the 2001 Big Finish audio story Minuet In Hell, starring Paul McGann’s Doctor. He has also appeared in Star Cops (another BBC science fiction series produced in 1987) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

As unlikely a topic as Rosa Parks’ arrest might seem for a British science fiction series, the reality is that this historical event had ripples that reached England as well, in particular a boycott of bus service in Bristol, inspired by the boycott following Parks’ 1955 arrest, and arising from the bus company’s refusal to hire non-caucasian drivers or other employees. Unlike the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, the Bristol boycott organized by Paul Stephenson lasted only two months in 1963, and was resolved by the bus company’s hire of its first non-white bus conductor a mere three months before Doctor Who premiered. (This also partly explains Ryan and Yaz’ degree of familiarity with Parks’ role in American history.)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

The TARDIS somewhat unexpectedly deposits the Doctor, Ryan, Yaz and Graham not just in the present day, but within a short walk of Yaz’s apartment, and the Doctor is crestfallen when her companions seem all too ready to part ways with her. An impromptu invitation to have dinner with Yaz’s family softens the blow. For Graham, however, nothing softens the blow of going home to an empty house filled with cobwebs.

Too many cobwebs, though – and it’s not isolated to Graham’s home. As Yaz goes to pick her mother up from work, the Doctor and Ryan are asked by a neighbor to help perform a welfare check on a woman who hasn’t been seen leaving her apartment for days… only to find that she’s dead, cocooned in a thick web woven by a frighteningly oversized spider. The neighbor – a research scientist studying spiders – admits that there have been similar incidents in and around Sheffield. All the activity points toward a hotel, owned by American business magnate (and presidential hopeful) Jack Robertson, mere days away from opening. Robertson has discovered that the rooms of his hotel are also infested with giant spiders…and his bodyguard has just been dragged away by the largest one. It turns out that his hotel business builds on toxic sites operated by his waste disposal business, which, while cheap, now threatens to turn Earth into a planet of the spiders… and threatens to turn the human race into dinner unless the Doctor can find a way to stop the spiders’ spread. But her ideas and Robertson’s are vastly different, since his solution is to go in shooting.

written by Chris Chibnall
directed by Sallie Aprahamian
music by Segun Akinola

Cast: Jodie Whittaker (The Doctor), Bradley Walsh (Graham O’Brien), Tosin Cole (Ryan Sinclair), Mandip Gill (Yasmin Khan), Chris Noth (Robertson), Sharon D. Clarke (Grace O’Brien), Shobna Gulati (Najia Khan), Tanya Fear (Dr. Jade McIntyre), Ravin J. Ganatra (Hakim Khan), Bhavnisha Parmar (Sonya Khan), Jaleh Alp (Frankie Ellish), William Meredith (Kevin)

Notes: Actor Chris Noth is no stranger to American audiences, having been a regular on such series as Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Sex And The City, The Good Wife, Gone, and Tyrant. But alongside his mainstream successes, he’s also done some voice work, in Justice League: Crisis On Two Earths (as Lex Luthor, no less) and the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s big-screen anime From Up On Poppy Hill. Shobna Gulati has had two long-running stints on UK soap Coronation Street as Sunita Alahan, as well as Doctors, Casualty, and River City. Tanya Fear has appeared in the series Spotless and the movie Kick-Ass 2. Guest roles on Coronation Street and Doctors also appear on Ravin J. Ganatra’s resume, along with the movie Entrapment, and a prior appearance in the Doctor Who universe (as a different character) in the Torchwood episode Greeks Bearing Gifts. The episode’s other American character is played by American-born William Meredith, who has appeared in Band Of Brothers and Outlander, but has also done voice acting for the Battlefield video game franchise.

LogBook entry by Earl Green