DOCTOR WHO
“I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek” better be on the soundtrack…
WHEN WE WERE TOLD on the first of March this year that “The Doctor will return in ‘Revolution Of The Daleks’”, no-one could have known just how far away a festive special would feel.
Sentenced to “whole of life imprisonment” by the Judoon, Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor was transported from the TARDIS to a maximum security facility in space, moments after learning that her life as she had known it had changed forever.
Now showrunner, executive producer and writer of the latest instalment of Doctor Who Chris Chibnall, is in the final stages of overseeing what comes next. That means grading the colour – “If you saw a lot of the raw footage when we film it, it still looks like it was shot in the 1970s” – and listening to demos of the score, before, he jokes, “it becomes a fight between the composer and the sound effects and the dialogue”.
It’s mid-november when SFX dials into a Zoom chat with Chibnall – the man himself aptly flanked by a groovy futuristic space background. He says that working remotely has all gone well, after the effects of the global pandemic forced post-production on “Revolution Of The Daleks” into the homes of the cast and crew. “Unless when it turns up on
TV it ends up in black and white, in which case it didn’t go well,” he deadpans. “It’s a very interesting end to the process, because obviously it was written in the summer of 2019 and filmed in the autumn of 2019.”
Does that mean that a year of lockdown has allowed him to get ahead?
“No!” he laughs loudly. “Quite the opposite, my friend. The pandemic changes everything for film and TV making. We have spent the last six months trying to figure out how we can make Doctor Who again – could we make Doctor Who again? It’s literally taken up all of our time. The series that we were preparing, we wouldn’t be able to make – we won’t be able to do any overseas filming. There’s things about how many people you have in a scene, how many crowds you can do if you can do a crowd. We have to reimagine and reinterpret how we make the show from the ground up. And that’s what we’ve been doing, but I think we’re in a really exciting place with it now.”
His leading ladies, Whittaker and Mandip Gill, later hint at having worked on something quite big that they’re not at liberty to share.
“We are filming imminently…” he acknowledges. “So we are in a very, very exciting phase. A very, very busy phase,” he laughs. “There are a lot of conversations going on. There are a lot of emails flying, there’s a lot of Zoom chats happening. And that’s about as vague as I’m gonna keep it, to be honest,” he laughs. “We did test filming today, we’ve just asked every question. But it is undoubtedly the end of this year and next year that will be the biggest challenge the show has really ever faced in terms of making a series.”
Don’t go expecting a modern-day “Shada”, however; just because the next series will have eight episodes instead of 11, it doesn’t mean that some of series 13 will be left unmade, or held back for another year.
“It’s not quite as binary as that, to be honest. It’s more there are some things you can do and there are some things you can’t do. With scripts, you never know whether they’ll make it into production anyway, so it’s quite hard to go, ‘Oh, okay, you take a whole chunk, and you park that’. There were things we would have
I’ve not cried like that for such a long time… Brad couldn’t cope with it at all
done that we’re still doing; there are things very clearly that we can’t do, because you can’t represent certain places on-screen in a way you would have done if you could have gone and filmed in X place. The great thing about film and TV production is it’s full of problem solvers, and Doctor Who is particularly full of those people. So it’s what people do every day. It’s just sort of pivoted into going, ‘Okay, this is the huge problem we now have to solve, alongside all the other problems you solve on a daily basis in production.’”
Just to make it even easier for you… “Yeah I know! I have had texts from Steven [Moffat] and Russell [T Davies] going, ‘Oh, that’s gonna be interesting for you,’” he laughs.
WHAT GOES AROUND…
Before all that, there’s the “festive” special – it’s not set at Christmas by the way – coming to screens shortly. Can he elaborate on the title “Revolution Of The Daleks”?
“Not really,” he smiles. “It has a number of different meanings. So it’s not just a sort of narrative meaning. I think once you’ve seen the episode, it will become clear and the different possible meanings of that will become clear. And also it is a sequel to… well, it’s standalone, but it’s also a sequel to [last year’s special] ‘Resolution’, in a way.
“I think it provides the Doctor some reflection time on what’s just happened to her at the end of the previous series in ‘The Timeless Children’. And we haven’t seen that before. You’re always looking for situations and strands and sequences and moments and stories that you haven’t done before. So actually seeing the Doctor properly in prison, and having been there for a very long time when we pick up at the beginning of this episode, it’s a great thing to do.”
As you can’t have failed to notice from our cover, the Daleks have a new look. Is it fun for him to change established things?
“I think you’re always doing it,” he says. “The great thing about the back catalogue of Doctor Who monsters is that there are some absolute design classics in there. When you bring them back, you’ve got a number of options, and also you’ve got a number of different iterations.
“With Daleks particularly, there are so many different Daleks already in existence. So what you’re doing is you’re adding a variant – you’re not going, ‘Okay, these Daleks will now replace every other Dalek you’ve ever seen.’ You’re just going, ‘This is the latest one in that line of action figures you’ve got at home, and this is the one for this special’.
“There’s a very, very clear plot reason why they look like they do in this episode, just as there was for the Dalek in ‘Resolution’. You’re just looking to have fun with them and enjoy them, because it’s one of those things.
“It’s great as a showrunner, it’s great for the team. It’s a privilege to be in the team who are able to have Daleks in your show. No other show gets to have them, and you want to keep them fresh and interesting – slightly different, slightly the same. New designs ask questions.”
THE NEXT 50 YEARS
Speaking of change, he answers quickly and firmly when asked if it had always been the plan to change the origins of the title character.
“Yes. Yeah, it was. Because it offers more narrative opportunity. It broadens the universe, it broadens the narrative universe. It challenges the central character in a way they’ve never been challenged. And it offers a lot of new avenues, not just for while I’m on the show, but for the next 50, 60 years. It was about feeling that you could open up a few walls, really.
“You were always looking for… in any drama, you’re looking for, how can you challenge your central character?” he continues. “How can you give them emotional journeys? How are you not just repeating the same beats? But also, I think more importantly, last series was all about identity. I think in these times, it’s not enough to have a central character who’s not going on an emotional journey. It’s very of the time to be discussing these issues and what it means to be the Doctor, but also what the Doctor thinks it means to be the Doctor.
“So it just represents endless new possibilities without compromising anything that’s gone before. Because it’s not like anything we’ve seen changes, because the Doctor experienced that. Everything is true, but there’s more. That’s all it is: everything is true, but there’s just more, and everybody in the world can now write those stories, and all future showrunners can as well.”
When asked about making a decision that upset more vocal members of fandom, Chibnall explains that it doesn’t take anything away from the mythology of the series.
“It would have been naive to go into that season, knowing we were telling that story, without understanding that some people wouldn’t like it,” he admits. “But also, you go
You need to get yourself prepared, because it is going to be shocking