The Doctor was bound to get a dose of good old-fashioned sexism sooner or later, but it did take eight episodes to find it. What happens Team TARDIS encounters witch hunters in the day of King James I?
Summary
The Doctor is trying to get her crew to the coronation of Elizabeth I, but ends up in Bilehurst Cragg in the time of witch hunting. They witness the murder of Old Mother Twiston (Tricia Kelly) at the hand of Becka Savage (Siobhan Finneran), Twiston’s cousin who married up and now controls the whole town. Twiston’s granddaughter Willa (Tilly Steele) watches on in horror as her grandmother is tested for witchcraft and dies by being drowned in a river. The Doctor tries to dive in and save the woman, but she’s already passed by the time the Doctor can get her to shore. She uses the psychic paper to get Becka to believe that she’s the Witchfinder General, and insists that she stop her trials for the time being.
Yas follows Willa, and notes that when she gives a prayer as she buries her grandmother, the mud around her comes to life and tries to grab her. Meanwhile, the Doctor, Graham, and Ryan are trying to find out what Becka is up to when they’re interrupted by King James I (Alan Cumming). The psychic paper tells him that the Doctor is the Witchfinder’s assistant, and they have to say that Graham is now the Witchfinder General. The Doctor goes to investigate what Yas saw, leaving Ryan and Graham with the king. She talks to Willa and insists that she can help her; Willa tells the Doctor and she’s related to Becka and that her grandmother only ever used herbs and brews to heal people. They go back to the gravesite and find the mud in the area reanimating the corpses of the witches who have been killed. The king and Becka arrive and see the corpses and decide that the Doctor is a witch. They convince Willa to also protest against the Doctor. Becka puts the Doctor on trial and tries to drown her before Yas, and Ryan, and Graham can reach her. The Doctor escapes and confronts Becka, who she knows is at the center of the turmoil.
It turns out that everything started when Becka decided to cut down an old, special tree that was blocking her view, and the mud around the tree began to fill her up. She couldn’t fix it with any medicines, and decided that it was Satan’s doing—and that the only thing that would save her would be devoting her life to ridding Bilehurst Cragg of Satan’s influence by killing witches. It turns out that the tree was alien biotech keeping a prison locked under Pendle Hill. The prison housed a Morax army, and now they intend to break out and take over the world. They kidnap King James to fill his body up next, but the Doctor and crew re-lock the prison and send them back underground. King James seems to have lost his fire for witch hunting, and he and Willa see the crew disappear in the TARDIS.
Commentary
I dearly wanted this episode to work, but it just did not come together in any direction. The episode is intending to call out many different issues that pertain to sexism, but in failing to stick to just a few, the whole thing kind of falls apart. First, we get a chance to see the Doctor have to deal with direct sexism for the first time, but the story doesn’t twist that knife at all. Instead, she grumbles about it and continues to work behind everyone’s back; it never slows her down for an instant, even when she’s literally sentenced to death at her own witch trial. And if that was supposed to be the point, that could have given us an incredibly emotional crux to drive through, but the episode seems to think it’s actually addressing sexism from the Doctor’s perspective when it emphatically isn’t. Sexism is instead briefly inconvenient for her, and then not an issue at all because she manages to have a nice chat with King James, and he’s suddenly fine with her.
Speaking of King James, Alan Cumming is a treasure as always… but he seems like he’s appearing in an entirely different episode. He’s far too fun for the subject matter being tackled, and while it’s great to watch him flirt and ponder and come out the other side a different sort of man, it’s hard to imagine why that needed to be any part of a story about witch hunting, or the pain and suffering that it brought to communities of women throughout history. One or the other needed true focus, rather than splitting the difference awkwardly. And while he’s utterly divine to watch, his presence simply isn’t needed in the story at all (aside from maintaining Doctor Who‘s obsession with the Doctor meeting and befriending/irritating as many British monarchs as possible).
There’s another aspect of sexism being called out in this episode that doesn’t stick the landing in how its portrayed—the ways in which women hurt other women due to the pressure that sexism exerts on their lives. Willa’s betrayal of the Doctor is the purest form of this argument. She gives up the Doctor to Becka and the king for completely understandable reasons; her grandmother was just murdered and she’s terrified for her life. Two very powerful people who have no qualms about killing her are asking for her cooperation in bringing down another woman, and she gives in out of terror. This is how real sexism operates under a patriarchal system. Women are made to believe that standing against sexism is too costly to their own survival, and leave other women to bear punishment when they speak out or move through the world too loudly.
If that had been an important turning point in the episode, it would have all come together nicely, but it was only a tiny footnote in a much muddier theme. Instead, the person who is meant to bear this particular mantle is Becka, a woman who has murdered three dozen women (they only ever say she murdered people in the episode, but they are clearly all women, and it’s incredibly important to keep pointing that out in an episode about female-centered violence) because… she wanted to chop down a tree for a better view?
This is where the episode collapses and under its overly-ambitious multitude of plot threads. What turns Becka into a witch hunting murderer is something that has nothing to do with sexism or power or witchcraft. She’s just a jerk who wants to chop down a lovely tree, an error that leads to an alien infection, and subsequently causes her to take up the mantle of God’s avenging angel. That theme might have worked, if it had been played just right… but at the end of the day, this is an insult to the very real women who lost their lives being accused of witchcraft. Those women weren’t killed because another woman was scared that she was being taken over by “Satanic forces.” They died because they practiced earlier forms of medicine and midwifery (just like Willa’s grandmother, though here she merely dies for not helping Becka enough), because religious institutions of the day thrived on paranoia and fear mongering, because these women frightened men who could not bear to see women with a modicum of power that they did not possess for themselves.
This episode, titled “The Witchfinders” has nothing to do with the persecution caused by witch hunts at all. Not really. It doesn’t demonstrate an understanding of the power dynamics that created it, or any amount of care for why those women were actually killed. It’s used as a handy backdrop for a hackneyed alien plot about an army who possess bodies somehow using mud. The Morax army isn’t interesting, or all that scary, or in any way important to the rest of the plot. No one comes away with any understanding of what made witch hunting such a heinous pastime in Europe and beyond. The Doctor isn’t moved by how being a woman forced her into a very different position than she normally occupies on her own adventures because it never hindered her all that much. The bad guys are stopped by stuffing fire into a tree stump.
If you’re going to tackle a period of violence that was used as an excuse to rid the world of “misbehaving” women, there should be some intention behind it. But this episode barely paid lip service to the idea. There was a better idea here, somewhere. It’s not as though the Doctor doesn’t know what it feels like to be singled out and nearly killed (“Midnight” comes to mind as one of the greatest examples in that direction), and foregoing the humor and occasional winks from King James might have given the story a purpose and a direction that led to great things, even if it was harder to swallow.
Asides for this week:
- There is suspicion by many historians that King James I was bisexual, which the episode gives a nod to in the king’s flirtations with Ryan. (Also, we’re talking about Alan Cumming here, who probably gets it written into his contracts that he’s allowed to flirt with any and all male costars.)
- We have some genuine timeline muddying here. King James I makes the point to Ryan that people have tried to blow him up before, which would seem to reference the 1605 Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes. The Doctor herself believes that they’re in the “early 17th century.” But the king had already cooled on his interest in witchcraft and witch hunts by 1599, so something got fudged…
- The Daemonologie that the Doctor notes in Becka’s room was an actual tome written by King James I about black magic and necromancy, and is believed to have served as inspiration for Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
- The Doctor mentions having hung out with Houdini, hence her ability to escape chains while underwater.
- The Doctor likely survived her drowning due to her respiratory bypass system, a fun bit of Gallifreyan physiology that the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Tenth, and Twelfth Doctors have put to use in various adventures.
- The Doctor quotes Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law to King James I, which is something that she’s quite fond of name checking and paraphrasing. (Both and Seventh and Twelfth Doctors have brought that one up before.)
- The Doctor bobbing for apples is now the cutest thing that has ever happened, goodnight.
Emmet Asher-Perrin would like to point out that the Doctor seems quite enamored of visiting Elizabeth I. You can bug him on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
“the whole thing kind of falls apart…”
I felt that more about last week’s inadequate economic analysis, but I mostly agree with your points. I’m almost starting to think that Who should go back to adventure stories and self-contained mythology. Some of these new stories don’t seem to be able to bear the weight of serious subject matter. And yes, pulling a deus ex aliena to explain sexism and religious paranoia is a disservice to the unjust suffering endured by these “witches.”
I liked the inclusion of the profoundly unfair “witch” test. Anyone with a bullshit detector should’ve figured out the set-up. Even in the past.
I was also a bit annoyed at the very mild innuendo throughout. The “fill you” and tentacles and even the flirting was misplaced if they wanted the subject matter taken seriously.
I thought it was okay for the most part, though I kept expecting King James to be an impostor, since having him just show up there in this remote village was a bit weird. But the sudden appearance of the Morax was a weird tonal swerve. After 45 minutes of trying to convince people that they were superstitious fools for fearing that their village was infected by an unearthly force of evil, it turned out that their village actually was infected by an unearthly force of evil? Way to undermine the message. And the Morax were about as corny and cliched a Doctor Who villain race as you can get, right down to the name.
Also, a tree that’s been in place for billions of years? Deciduous trees didn’t even evolve until the Cretaceous, and Pendle Hill is probably only about 320-odd million years old, from what I can find.
@1/Sunspear: I think the whole “They’re only innocent if they drown” thing is an exaggeration. Wikipedia says (with a “citation needed”) that they were deemed innocent if they sank, rather than drowning, and there was a rope tied to them so they could be pulled up and saved from drowning if they sank.
Oh, please.
You ruined the fun.
Given the Pendle connection, I assumed the episode was set in 1612.
I loved this episode. It was everything I want from Doctor Who: A bit scary, a bit funny, a bit corny, and Alan Cumming camping it up. It almost felt like an episode from the RTD era. It also had 13 at her most Doctor-y yet. I hope they can keep that form over the two remaining episodes.
I can see where the criticism is coming from, but I don’t agree with it. I don’t want heavy,serious, messagy eps from week to week. This one was fun, and I’ve missed this entertainment, this campyness in Doctor Who.
I’m inclined to agree with many of the points raised, although I’m not so vitriolic possibly because I’m not so invested. It was perhaps inevitable that the Doctor would encounter sexism in the past, but turning her into an oppressed female would not have worked. That’s not what the show or the character is. The Doctor is someone who encounters mistrust and suspicion, whether it’s because of gender or just down to being the stranger that appears at the same time things go wrong, but gets on with the job and manages to earn people’s trust and respect by actions. Doing anything else wouldn’t be true to the character. (And King James does take a lot longer to come round than people normally do.) Besides, the Doctor got accused of being a witch and told “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” back when she was a bloke. She’s probably been practising that “Love thy neighbour” riposte for centuries.
But yes, the episode’s made up of non-sequiturs. The early scenes imply some significance to the Twistons’ litany, which Willa speaks just before being attacked and which the possessed corpses even chant, but it just gets forgotten about. I’m not too bothered about the lack of focus on Willa’s “betrayal” though, which basically amounts to not standing up for someone who’s obviously on the back foot. (And having all her companions run off just beforehand so she’s on her own felt contrived.) And that last act: Good grief. It felt as if Joy Wilkinson suddenly remembered she was writing an episode of Doctor Who and so tacked on an alien invasion at the last minute because that’s what Doctor Who’s about.
Increasing the timeline difficulties, Becka mentions the King James Bible, which wasn’t completed until 1611. I should probably look up how accurate it is to have James I involved in hunting witches this late in life, but I had no problem with the characterisation. There’s no way someone like that could be portrayed as anything other than larger-than-life, yet we get hints of the pain below the false jollity and there’s no doubt he could switch off the flirting and turn on you in an instant.
So, not one of the season’s success stories, but I’d still rather watch this than The Tsunranga Conundrum.
And it’s amusing to recall that 25 years ago Alan Cumming was appearing in a straight-to-video drama with four Doctors that was an attempt to sneak in a back-door 30th anniversary special. How times have changed.
The episode also reminded me of Midnight, for how the Doctor alienates already suspicious people by drawing attention to her skills, knowledge and quirks. She’s trying to prove that she’s not a witch by waving a magic wand! In this context, even a man would have been executed (the king mentions doctor John Dee, showing that accusations of witchcraft were not only for women, although men fared better). But no, she keeps doing her clearly unchristian things, and the more she does, the more the king trusts her: it makes no sense.
This episode was a little disjointed tonally, but I enjoyed it none the less. Alan Cumming was delightful as always. But the mix of light and dark moments was a little uneven. There were probably too many weighty issues thrown in for the whole thing to work, but I thought the writers gave it a good try. My wife, who has been enjoying the season to date, said that the Doctor’s know-it-all attitude was beginning to grate on her.
When I heard the “Morax,” I started thinking of them as a dark version of Doctor Seuss’ “Lorax,” who also had issues with people who chopped down trees…
I agree with Mr. Bennett @2 — my sci-fi plot instincts had me waiting for the reveal that King James was a doppelganger. The king of England, randomly wandering the countryside, hunting witches, with just one silent retainer for company (who gets killed a few minutes after he first appears)? I don’t know much about the historical King James’ personality, but Alan Cumming seemed rather jovial and inappropriate to the situation.
@8: When I heard the “Morax,” I started thinking of them as a dark version of Doctor Seuss’ “Lorax,” who also had issues with people who chopped down trees…
I was kinda hoping for dryads or similar creatures instead of yet another race of aliens when they first mentioned the tree, but, oh well… it’s Doctor Who, corny aliens are pretty much the heart and soul of the show, so I can go with it.
I actually thought the mix of light and dark moments worked well, with a bit more emphasis on the “light”, which was much needed after the heavy (and often heavy-handed) topics of the previous episodes. And we finally got a Doctor-speech! After eight episodes, that was about time!
Oh my gosh! King James I roaming the country, alone, looking for witches????
James I was a card caryying physical coward and very conscious of his Divine rights. No way he would be roaming the countryside rubbing shoulders with commoners. What he would be doing is hunting, surrounded by cronies and pretty young men.
King James was was very interested in witchcraft. He expressed that interest by writing scholarly books and reading records of trials. NOT by hunting witches himself.
BTW there was never an official organization of witchfinders, even Matthew Hopkin’s title of witchfinder general was self iimposed and unofficial. Witch hunters were like psychic investigators, they had no official standing but unlike psychic investigators they could lay criminal charges and be listened to.
I found the episode quite boring, the only salvageable thing is the Doctor and her companions, and how they interact. That, and King James unabashedly flirting with Ryan.
Perhaps it should be “the corpses of the people killed accused of witchraft”?
There’s an opportunity to make this episode an excellent drinking game if you take a shot whenever anyone says “Satan”. It makes the King James tentacle porn at the end much more fun.
There should be more to say about this episode, the most explicitly Christian in its themes since The Curse of Fenric. But in the end, it just turns into another ho-hum midseason episode in a series constructed of nothing but. I was really struggling to work out how the TARDIS team developed in this story–or if they’d developed at all, with Ryan and Graham’s grief now shrugged off.
Also, there must’ve been some more interesting explanation for mud zombies than the umpty-millionth evil alien army. Like, maybe the mud hosted some kind of empathic alien (or naturally evolved) entity that had absorbed the negative emotions from all the misogyny and paranoia and murder of the witch trials, so that the destructiveness of the persecutors was rebounding back on them. That would’ve at least fit the story thematically rather than feeling like such a random swerve.
The Morax? The Lorax?
with all these social commentary plots, i wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they do a nazi episode soon enough, where we find out Grahams dad was a nazi sympathiser
Shock, social commentary in science fiction! In Doctor Who, nonetheless!
@17 yes, true. But in Every Single episode of this series? It’s just too much, every episode becomes social commentary instead of rollicking adventure.
Again, it’s science fiction, and it’s Doctor Who, a show created to teach history to kids. Plus, not every episode this season has been about social commentary.
It’s the heavy handedness of the ‘commentary’. And they clearly didn’t bother to do any historical research for this one. And which story this season wasn’t social commentary barring the intro.
Moving goalposts: the heavyhandedness was not what tezza98 complained about, just the social commentary. Neither was the lack of research.
The first episode (The Woman Who Fell To Earth), The Tsuranga Conundrum, and The Ghost Monument were all devoid of overt or extensive social commentary. Over one third of episodes aired thus far, a very high percentage of the season for a show that, again, is usually about that.
Can’t speak for Tezza but heavy handedness and bad history is what I object to. I don’t need to be lectured on the evils of segregation thank you, or sectarian violence thank you. Not to mention the tired old evil corporation.
Okay, don’t watch it.
I didn’t. I haven’t seen any Doctor Who since the first one. All of them sound variously annoying.
Oh, right. I forgot who I was talking to.
@22/roxana: “Not to mention the tired old evil corporation.”
This proves the folly of judging episodes you haven’t seen. It turned out the corporation wasn’t evil after all, or at least wasn’t the primary threat. It was actually such a break from the expected trope that it arguably undermined the episode’s message.
If course all this talk of witches and Satan is nonsense. There haven’t been witches in England since Queen Elizabeth the Fiesta reign, and at this point in the timeline Satan is safely trapped in an impossible prison orbiting a black hole.
@myself. While Queen Elizabeth the Fiesta is a hilarious thought, that should have read the First.
You’re right, CLB. I forgot.
Heavy handed political commentary isn’t everybody’s bowl of fish. James I’s interest in witchcraft peaked in the 1590s while he was still King of Scotland. After moving to England he was much more interested in enjoying the wealth of his new country and playing theologian. James was actually quite skeptical of the cases he studied and the death penalty was only invoked when the ‘witchcraft’ had caused physical harm – which for obvious reasons was not easy to prove. I assume this episode is based on the Pendle Witch trials which began when the family of a man named John Law complained to magistrates that he’d been harmed by witchcraft. Things snowballed from there. Most of the accused seem to have been practicioners of Folk Magic and believed in their own powers. The initial investigation was made by the local JP and the accused were tried according the admittedly questionable laws of the time at the Assizes. The chief evidence seems to have been the confessions, accusations and counter accusations of the assorted defendants who belonged to two rival families. No ‘witchfinders’ were involved. Nor was King James.
As this season goes on I am growing less and less impressed with Chris Chibnall’s version of Doctor Who. I am loving Jodie as The Doctor, though, and the only regret I would have about the rumors of Chibnall leaving after next season would be that it would likely also be the end of her tenure, the third shortest after Eccleston and McGann.
Oh I hope not! She’s a fine Doctor. I don’t like the scripts but I have no problem with her, or at least no more problems than I have had with other Doctors re: odd moral choices and a superiority complex
Doctor Who’s historically accuracy is not a constant thing.
@31/Roxana: “She’s a fine Doctor.” – Absolutely. When I can have a character like this, I can live with mediocre storylines.
Anyway, I’m new to Doctor Who. Was the historical accuracy better in previous series?
@33/Jana: “Was the historical accuracy better in previous series?”
Hit and miss. It started out in the early ’60s as an educational show for kids, with the Doctor’s first companions being his teenage granddaughter and her human science and history teachers… and let’s just say its history episodes were somewhat better-researched and more plausible than its science-fiction episodes. But some took more liberties than others. “The Gunfighters,” for instance, did such a hamfisted job with the OK Corral that it makes Star Trek: “Spectre of the Gun” look authentic.
And after the first few seasons, they stopped doing pure historicals (where the TARDIS crew’s presence was the only science fiction element) and adopted the practice of having every story set in Earth’s past involve an alien presence of some sort. Generally the past era was just the background for a story about the Doctor vs. the evil aliens/time travelers/whatever, rather than the story focusing on a specific historical event or real person (although sometimes they did both).
Did anyone else laugh at loud when the commercial break immediately after the Morax threat to “our King will fill your King” started with a Burger King commercial which has the first line of “The King’s gone crazy!”? I know I did.
@33, Jana, Seconding CLB, historical accuracy has never been Doctor Who’s strong suit and The Gunfighters was incredibly egregious but this episode dips into actual misrepresentation. You want (unofficial) witchfinders you have to go to the 1640s and the English Civil War.
You could actually have a terrific episode with James I, who as I mentioned spent a lot of time hunting from remote Manor houses. Have him encounter the Doctor and company on such a trip and have him provide comedy relief through the rest of the episode as he tries to fit alien hijinks into his world view.
I’ve enjoyed every episode up to now, but not this one.
Look, King James the Sixth and First dealing with an alien invasion foiled by the Doctor, flirting with Ryan, reference made to how keen he used to be on foiling witches, on how someone tried to blow him up (so he had the guilty tortured to death, as you do), and how he’s thinking of having a proper translation of the Bible in English: that would have been fun. (Particularly with our Alan.) And they could even have a widow who’s a landowner in her own right.
Or look, a village is killing witches but no matter how many witches they kill Satan keeps rising, as they say, and it turns out that what they call Satan is this awful tendrilly mud of alien invasion, foiled by the Doctor, etc. Okay. Except why would King Jamie show up for it? As others have noted, he wouldn’t: I kept expecting him to be some kind of shapeshifter.
This episode felt like two better episodes rammed together. And as noted, it didn’t do a good job of calling out sexism.
In the Peter Davidson episode ‘The King’s Demons’ it was perfectly logical for King John to show up with entourage at a nobleman’s castle, as it turns out it’s not really King John but there was nothing unreasonable about the King being there and nobody including his hosts and the Doctor are surprised.
The presence of King James all alone at a village in Lancashire should have had everybody scratching their heads and the Doctor openly dubious. It Makes No Sense. And he is the real King!!!
35: I watch Doctor Who on the BBC, like always. What is this “commercial break” you speak of?
@39: Its a barbaric custom that you’re better off not knowing of.
@39. jcarnall: we are uncivilized here in the States. BBC America insists on breaking up the show with ads. I watch on my cable app with Adblocker on. Usually skips the pesky things.
I think you’ve done a great analysis, but I think the choices it makes have to be evaluated in light of its aim to be a family show. I watched it with my 8yo daughter, who did not have any previous exposure to the concept of witch trials or even of the kind of sexism portrayed in this episode, and it was a real eye-opener for her. She was shocked and outraged at the witch testing. This kind of history is not taught till tween / teen years and Dr Who is pitched to accommodate a younger audience. I don’t think this audience is well equipped to comprehend or emotionally process the detail you identified as being absent.
I have noticed that this Dr Who consistently aims to avoid modelling sexist behaviour, and to model behaviour that is respectful of and normalises diversity. This is actually almost unique in television and is clearly a conscious choice and one I really welcome. I think the approach the show took to the subject matter of this episode is consistent with treating these issues in an age-appropriate way.
That said, I do think the mud monsters were clunky, and felt like an unrelated plot that had been plonked in without much thought. The themes you point out could have been better developed using the mud monster as a metaphor for paranoia and misogyny, which would have resonated with the subject matter much better but without dragging the story to a place that would have been too dark and complex.
So it was a bad episode because all that plot and character development got in the way of the preaching?
Roger that.