Falling Spies
The serviceable “Spyfall: Part Two” can't keep pace with its predecessor.
“Spyfall: Part Two”
Series 12, Episode 2
Written by Chris Chibnall
Directed by Lee Haven Jones
Starring Jodie Whittaker, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill, and Bradley Walsh
Guest Starring Sacha Dhawan, Sylvie Briggs, Mark Dexter, Sir Lenny Henry, Aurora Marion, and Blanche Williams
61 minutes
Original broadcast 5 January 2020
1. Ups & Downs
Perhaps “Spyfall: Part Two” was always destined to disappoint Doctor Who’s viewers.
Maybe, after the remarkable highs attained by its inventive predecessor (the Series 12 premiere, no less), the need to tie up so many loose ends means that writer Chris Chibnall can’t top himself, especially given the slam-bang revelation that the Doctor’s longtime nemesis the Master (Sacha Dhawan) is alive despite being killed, seemingly for good, in the Series 10 finale, “The Doctor Falls” (written by then-showrunner Steven Moffat).
Perchance, following a segment so blindingly paced that just keeping step counts as victory, we should never have dared to dream that Chibnall could satisfy every appetite provoked by “Spyfall: Part One’s” fusion of James Bond film tropes and Doctor Who whimsy.
Yes, my friends, we must bow to the reality that “Spyfall: Part Two,” while good, is a letdown. This response is surely my own fault. After all, while watching and reviewing “Spyfall: Part One,” I ignored the niggling political implications of casting two actors of color (namely, Sacha Dhawan and Sir Lenny Henry) as that episode’s world-historical villains, just as I neglected to mention that Part One’s extraterrestrial threat receives so little development that its design (as a gang of pure-light creatures) remains this species’s most notable aspect.
Did I forget to say that, although Part One brilliantly casts Stephen Fry as “C” (the head of MI6, Britain’s secret-intelligence agency), Fry only appears onscreen for five minutes before his character is assassinated? While, on one hand, this death subverts viewer expectations in the same way as does Alfred Hitchcock killing off Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane thirty minutes into Psycho, on the other hand, hiring Fry for so small a role wastes this great actor in a trifling part that any day player could’ve filled.
So yes, dear reader, “Spyfall: Part Two” falls back to Earth, literally and figuratively, in unsurprising ways. Given that “Spyfall: Part One” concludes with the Thirteenth Doctor’s (Jodie Whittaker’s) three companions—Ryan Sinclair (Tosin Cole), Yasmin “Yaz” Khan (Mandip Gill), and Graham O’Brien (Bradley Walsh)—aboard a crashing plane, this result is disappointing, if inevitable.
My reservations, however, can’t gainsay how strong overall Series 12’s two-part opener is. Yet “Spyfall: Part Two,” by slowing down just enough to take a breath, permits us to consider flaws in its predecessor that weren’t apparent upon first viewing. Chibnall, in “Spyfall: Part One,” embraces the classic yarn-spinner’s trick (and ironclad New Who rule) that the faster the tempo, the less time people have to notice imperfections, no matter how small.
Chibnall doesn’t exactly write himself into narrative corners in “Spyfall: Part One,” although the sense that he does is half the fun of returning to watch “Spyfall: Part Two.” Imagining how Chibnall will extricate his heroes from peril might overvalue the quality of his eventual explanations, but at least Chibnall trusts our intelligence enough to design complicated, time-tripping answers to apparently insoluble storytelling traps.
First up: Getting Ryan, Yaz, and Graham off that crashing plane. This scene, with all three companions screaming in fright, effectively suggests the raw terror that such a scenario would provoke. Luckily for them (and for us), Ryan notices little plaques left behind (or is that ahead?) by the absent Doctor directing him to connect his smartphone into the plane’s computer system, an action that permits Ryan—much to his, Yaz’s, and Graham’s surprise—to land the aircraft.
This clever—if absurd—solution proves that Chibnall knows how writing Doctor Who as a James Bond action extravaganza requires him to hug nonsense so tightly to his authorial bosom that no one—not Chibnall, not his characters, and certainly not his viewers—can claim to take these events earnestly, much less seriously, while watching them. Why, after all, diminish the fun by letting reality intrude?
Preposterous as this opening sequence may be, “Spyfall: Part Two” doesn’t wallow in impossibility for long, even if finding the Doctor inside a bizarre forest of tree-like ganglia pushes the boundaries of believability to the breaking point. This murky, hazy space seems threatening precisely because its elements and boundaries remain undefined, although the stick-like trunks conducting light pulses skyward make this forest spooky even by New Who’s standards.
The Doctor has little time to contemplate her surroundings before stumbling upon a nattily dressed woman named Ada (Sylvie Briggs), who claims to retreat to this realm whenever her body experiences paralysis. Ada’s clothes are old-fashioned, while her description of the forest suggests that the Doctor does, in fact, inhabit this woman’s mind, with the trees being, in reality, nerves pulsing with the energy of Ada’s thoughts.
When an extraterrestrial light creature that Ada calls “Kasaavin” appears in front of them, the Doctor warns her away, but Ada calls this creature her guardian. Believing that her paralysis will momentarily end, Ada extends her hand to the Doctor, who, upon taking it, vanishes alongside her.
They find themselves in London’s Royal Gallery of Practical Science in the year 1834. The Doctor, happy to see this pre-Victorian exposition full of wondrous, steam-powered devices, is bowled over to meet polymath Charles Babbage (Mark Dexter), who proudly displays an ornate, beautiful, and complicated calculating machine that he calls the “Difference Engine.”
The Doctor is even more astounded to realize that Ada is, in fact, Ada Lovelace (née Gordon), the daughter of renowned mathematician Annabella Milbanke and legendary poet George Gordon (Lord Byron), and a woman who is, according to the Doctor, “one of the great minds” of 19th-Century England.
2. Ins & Outs
This entire sequence—complete with a visit from the Master, who shrinks several people into small dolls using a trick from Classic Who (1963-1989) known as “tissue compression”—returns New Who to the franchise’s roots as children’s educational programming meant to teach history to young viewers while taking them on trips through space and time. Just as Series 11’s third episode, “Rosa,” brings Rosa Parks to vibrant life, Chibnall here reclaims Who’s pedagogical mandate by having the Doctor relate Ada’s status as perhaps the British Empire’s first computer programmer.
Lovelace is clearly Babbage’s equal in intellect and his better in temperament, so full marks to Chibnall for highlighting Ada’s significance. The Doctor, not wishing to linger in 1834 after the Master’s attack, devises a way to return to 2020 but, thanks to Ada’s determination to tag along, transports them only as far as Paris, France in the year 1943.
Here, the City of Lights suffers Nazi occupation and nightly bombing runs, leaving the Doctor and Ada momentarily helpless as Schutzstaffel (SS) jeeps patrol the streets. Chibnall once again engineers an extraordinary narrative coincidence by having them quickly cross paths with Noor Inayat Khan (Aurora Marion), helpfully described by the Doctor as “the first female wireless operator to be dropped behind enemy lines.” Yes, Noor is a spy for Great Britain’s Special Operations Executive who secretly transmits information about Nazi movements to her London superiors.
Including two important-but-little-known female historical figures in one episode may lead us to wonder if Chibnall found his plot in the two-for-one bin at Writers ‘R Us, but, no matter how or why he incorporates these actual people into Doctor Who’s fictional setting, at this point those nagging, niggling political implications begin to surface. Sylvie Briggs and Aurora Marion play their roles with the grace, gusto, and guts befitting such extraordinary women, but, like the Kasaavin, they are less full-blooded characters than narrative props that Chibnall chooses to salute in shorthand rather than dramatize in detail.
“Spyfall: Part Two” tells more than it shows their formidable presence, so shoehorning Ada and Noor into this installment’s already-packed storyline forces them to exist as pencil sketches, not oil portraits. Despite the great service Chibnall does by integrating both women into Doctor Who’s Series 12 premiere, he diminishes them—unintentionally, it seems—just as their stories get going.
When the Master arrives, masquerading as a Nazi officer who hunts French Resistance spies throughout Paris, “Spyfall: Part Two” stops being the fun romp-through-the-decades that it could (and should) be. No amount of Bondian homages, tropes, and gags can overcome the sight of the Master commanding an SS squadron in regalia that demonstrates costume designer Ray Holman’s commitment to period authenticity. If only Chibnall had considered—or, perhaps, reconsidered—the propriety of making his incarnation of the Master, played by an English actor of Punjabi descent, into one of Hitler’s acolytes, then this creative choice’s bad flavor might taste less bitter.
Jodie Whittaker and Sacha Dhawan play their characters’ interaction with the same crackling energy that “Spyfall: Part One’s” final scenes promise, thereby equaling the various Doctor-Master pairings we’ve seen throughout New Who. The problem, as always, is not the cast’s acting, but the scene’s writing.
Chibnall and director Lee Haven Jones have the Doctor and the Master stalk one another around an Eiffel Tower platform like prizefighters aching to pulverize their opponent, with their verbal accusations battering each other as effectively as any body blow. Yet the Doctor’s solution to the quandary the Master creates when his SS squad arrives to arrest her is to disable the perception filter he uses to mask his actual appearance—that of a brown-skinned, brown-eyed man—in favor of the Aryan type favored by his Nazi compatriots.
By doing so, Chibnall deepens the troubling implications of having this (or any) character of color impersonate a Nazi. Since Chibnall could’ve dropped the Doctor and Ada at any point in human history, why choose World War II?
Perhaps the showrunner wishes to remind viewers that the Master, despite the Twelfth Doctor’s efforts to reform Missy throughout the Steven Moffat-produced Series 10, is, indeed, a time-hopping sociopath with fascistic tendencies, so much so that, at the conclusion of the Tenth Doctor’s penultimate adventure (2009’s “The End of Time: Part One”), Russell T. Davies has John Simm’s Master transplant his Gallifreyan genetic code into every human being on Earth, not only changing each person into a clone of himself but also transforming humanity into what the Simm Master diabolically calls “the Master Race.”
This sick joke lands as precisely that, a terrible spectacle that Simm plays for all it’s worth in 2010’s “The End of Time: Part Two” (and that nauseates Tennant’s Doctor as much as we viewers). The fact that Simm, a white Englishman, sees his dark hair bleached blonde drives this point home without letting the character, the writer, or the audience off the political hook.
3. Peaks & Valleys
The most charitable-possible reading of Chibnall casting the Dhawan Master as a Nazi officer is that, as showrunner, Chibnall wishes to acknowledge the character’s terrible history when, in fact, this choice becomes a terrible historical perversion of Chibnall’s own making. As the Doctor shuts off the Master’s perception filter, she says “Now they’ll see the real you! Good luck,” which only highlights how Chibnall makes the major villains of Series 12’s two-part opening adventure not merely men of color, but men of color who revel in their villainy to control, to oppress, and to kill everyone around them.
No doubt these concerns will be accused of reading too much into Chibnall’s commentary on fascism’s overwhelming power to capture the loyalties of even the people it subjugates, but such a response gives sympathy to the wrong party. Despite my general admiration for his New Who writing (even before becoming showrunner), Chibnall makes a nearly fatal error here that only serves to draw attention to how his and the franchise’s treatment of non-white characters is, at best, troubling despite their creators’ best intentions.
Nicole Hill, in her insightful 17 January 2020 Den of Geek article “Doctor Who and the Complications of Color-Blind Casting,” states this case better than anyone else, with the following comment precisely analyzing the problem: “From casting more diversely without thinking about how those diverse identities affect the character and story to killing off characters with marginalized identity in the service of white male character development, Doctor Who is making a lot of the same missteps that we see throughout the current era of storytelling.”1
Hill particularly objects to the Dhawan Master’s Nazi disguise, as well as to Daniel Barton’s (Lenny Henry’s) heartless execution of his own mother. In the first instance, Hill puts the matter this way:
The show one-ups itself, and has the Doctor, a blonde, white woman, “unmask” the Master, a Brown man, to the FUCKING NAZIS! Somehow he survives that, instead of being shot on the spot, which does not absolve the Doctor, or actually make sense. Again, this feels like an unnecessary narrative choice made without any thought to the racial dynamics at play, or how diverse viewers might experience it. The Doctor could have just as easily outplayed the Master in another way, as his decision to moonlight as a Nazi is not given much narrative weight.2
Yes indeed, particularly since “Spyfall: Part Two’s” layover in 1943 Paris, despite the serious issues in play, generates the same feeling of light, pseudo-travelogue fun that every James Bond film indulges. Chibnall, indeed, doesn’t consider those issues seriously enough (or as serious enough) to make the Dhawan-Master-as-Nazi subplot anything beyond a regrettable interlude in an outing that calls into question Part One’s overall fineness.
In the second instance, Hill notes how pernicious it is to see Daniel Barton, in the person of Sir Lenny Henry, zip-tie his nameless Black mother (played by Blanche Williams) to a chair and then allow the Kassavin to murder her for never having supported or complimented his success. Since this scene is the single time we see this character (credited only as “Barton’s Mother”) in either half of Series 12’s two-part premiere, Hill is correct to say:
[It] should’ve been clearly established that Barton had a tumultuous relationship with his mother and given narrative value outside of establishing just how cutthroat Barton appears to be. At any point in “Part One,” Barton could have made an attempt to contact his mother only to be rebuffed. No work was done to humanize her character so her life—and thus her death—are given no weight.3
I cannot put the matter better than this commentary, so readers in search of similarly nuanced analyses of Doctor Who’s incongruous approaches to race and ethnicity should not only consult Hill’s writing at several different websites (Den of Geek, Black TARDIS, and Black Girls Create foremost among them) but also Lindy Orthia’s excellent 2013 volume “Doctor Who” and Race (published by Intellect Books), particularly its second section, titled “Diversity and Representation in Casting and Characterization.”
Given these objections, the fact that the Doctor manages to exile the Master to the Kassavin’s realm as “Spyfall: Part Two” concludes might tempt us to think “all’s well that ends well,” but this episode’s missteps—particularly Chibnall’s ill-considered authorial choices—mean that we can’t leave Series 12’s second outing nearly as exhilarated as we left Part One.
Despite its quality, despite director Lee Haven Jones’s good work, and despite the cast and crew’s continued excellence, “Spyfall: Part Two” disappoints just enough to become emblematic of both Chibnall’s time as showrunner and, for good measure, the entire Who franchise. When they achieve dramatic highs, they’re astonishing, but when they dip low, those depths are—to say the least—disturbing.
And yet, warts and all, I admire “Spyfall: Part Two” enough to look forward to future outings. Indeed, I find myself so eager to see them that I wish the BBC “dropped” all installments simultaneously, in the fashion of Netflix and other streaming services, so that I could binge them all at once. Is this a sign of unshakable faith in Doctor Who? Or, to phrase it another way, a mark of unremitting Whovian addiction?
Who can say? Certainly not myself, meaning that, with regret, I cannot exclaim “Bravo!” to “Spyfall: Part Two” as I did to Part One. Yet it remains a compelling and thought-provoking hour of television that will be fodder for debate for years, and perhaps decades, to come.
So, “okay job” is the best I can do for “Spyfall: Part Two,” which I hope is good enough to convince you, dear reader, to take a gander.
FILES
NOTES
Nicole Hill, “Doctor Who and the Complications of Color-Blind Casting,” Den of Geek, 17 January 2020, https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/doctor-who-the-complications-of-color-blind-casting/.
Ibid.
Ibid.