Doctor Who – The Giggle

What’s the Show? The final 2023 Doctor Who special.

What’s It All About, JG? In the prelude, John Logie Baird’s assistant buys a dummy from the mysterious Toymaker, who’s a bit of a racist prick. The dummy is used by Baird in a test transmission… what could go wrong?

The Doctor and Donna are back on Earth where everything has fallen apart because some mysterious force – you know, the one in the pre-credits sequence – has made everyone believe that they are right all the time. The Doctor and Donna hook up with UNIT who are trying to contain the situation, with limited effect. Mel (Mel!) is also at UNIT for… reasons, helping out. The Doctor and Donna travel back to 1925 to find the Toymaker, who first taunts the Doctor about the fate of his previous companions and then leads him on a merry chase around an ever-shifting series of corridors. The Doctor loses a game of cards to him but survives using the “best of three” rule. Ahem.

Once they escape, they high-tail it back to UNIT HQ where – following a dance sequence – the Toymaker eventually shoots the Doctor. This triggers a so-called “bi-generation” whereby David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa can share some screen time. The Doctor(s) defeat the Toymaker in a game of catch, then the David Tennant 14th Doctor heads off to have a nice life (it says here) with Donna and her extended family while the 15th Doctor heads off to have adventures of his own.

Is It Any Good? It’s everything RTD is, for both good and ill. Whether you regard that as “good” or not is probably a matter of personal opinion but “The Giggle” demonstrates all his very best and very worst tendencies as a writer. So there’s the great character work he’s rightly known for, the clunky social moralising, the self-referencing (Trinity Wells’s inclusion is especially pointless, but also the tooth thing at the end), the playing with canon and the mythology of the series…. There’s a lot of moving parts here. The result is uneven, where the good outweighs the bad but also leaves one with the feeling that “the bad” didn’t need to be there at all and could easily have been avoided.

Let’s start with the Toymaker, the racist piece of crap character Hartnell faced off against. The “celestial” toymaker (and celestial is, in the original, very much in the Chinese sense of the word rather than the astronomical, portrayed by a white guy in “oriental” drag) is one of those concepts that fans seem inexplicably fond of, despite the obviously racist issues around him and the fact that the actual story the character is in is Grade A crap – slow, tedious, and resoundingly dull at best.

RTD’s attempt to deal with this is to actually lean into it – the Toymaker really is racist, putting on dreadful, exaggerated German and American accents, being straightforwardly racist towards Logie Baird’s non-white assistant, and generally just being a dick. This works as well as it’s possible for a character like that and goes some distance to rehabilitating the Toymaker as a workable concept in the 21st century. It’s remarkably successful and if we have to have the Toymaker back – which we don’t – then this is a best-case scenario. Full props to RTD on that one. He also takes the chance to reconfigure “celestial” to explicitly mean “astronomical” rather than anything else which works for the current show but doesn’t fix the Hartnell use. So nice try, but no.

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Neil Patrick Harris is clearly having the time of his life in the role, and that obvious enthusiasm also makes up some of the distance. Harris is ideal for the role – over the top in a way that you can only really get away with in Doctor Who but not (quite) so over the top that the performance becomes unwatchable or clichéd. That’s much harder than it sounds – John Simm gets this balance wrong in “The Sound of Drums” / “Last of the Time Lords” and it’s hugely undermining, so when the dramatic bits arrive they don’t land as well as they might because we haven’t been able to take the character seriously as a credible threat up to that point. Note how much better he is in “The Doctor Falls” precisely because he dials it back a bit while still being absurdly theatrical. Harris has fewer dramatic bits to do here but what he does, he does remarkably well, and his taunting of the Doctor at various stages manages to carry that threat through successfully without undermining anything. He commits to his silly accents but is also good enough to pull them off, and of course, he can switch between camp teasing and genuine menace at the drop of a hat. He’s top-tier guest-star casting, basically.

We should also deal with the other Big Guest Star, at least as far as Doctor Who is concerned, which is the return of Bonnie Langford to the series as Mel. She’s… fine. I’d love to be able to say more but honestly, there just isn’t all that much to remark on. She’s good at what she’s given but what she’s given is remarkably little. Compare and contrast with what Ace and Tegan got in “The Power of the Doctor” – i.e. being central to the plot – and the difference is obvious. Mel, often regarded as one of the two worst companions of the original series alongside Adric, was long ago rehabilitated by Big Finish (back in the day when they were capable of doing that) and Langford has been re-embraced by a fandom no longer as precious as it was back in the 80s. So it just feels a shame that none of that is capitalised on.

And Langford is good here but her inclusion feels somewhat pointless. Basically, everything she does here could be done by some anonymous Exposition Corporal from UNIT. It feels like a waste, though presumably (hopefully?) it’s a way to get her back into the series so the character can be picked up again later. We’ll see if that happens but for what we have here, Mel’s inclusion feels weirdly irrelevant (to say nothing of how she got back from three million years in the future, which is roughly when “Dragonfire” was set, or how she knows Glitz died at 101 while she’s only aged about 35 years). If it’s a sop to fans who need their anniversaries to include nods to the past then, well, fine it’s there for them but it doesn’t land because nothing’s done with it. So – nice to see but doesn’t amount to much.

What – and appreciate the smoothness of this link, if you will – does amount to much is the bi-generation. Though, honestly, not that much. It’s the episode’s big selling point – Ncuti Gatwa and David Tennant being able to share scenes together as the Doctor splits themself down the middle. For all that this was touted as a big “major change in mythology”, it’s more a modification of what we already know. And it’s absolutely fine.

It’s nice to see the two Doctors share some screen time, it technically fulfils the “multi-Doctor” story some sections of fandom were clamouring for by having the two interact, and it works as a way to give the 14th Doctor some peace by having him head off with Donna for a life of, let’s assume, domestic bliss. Seeing Tennant and Gatwa together is sweet – other than “quite camp” it doesn’t elucidate much about the 15th Doctor just yet but, despite what some seem determined to insist on, it doesn’t overshadow him either. The focus is on the 14th Doctor finally getting some peace, true, but ultimately, Ncuti Gatwa is simply too big a personality to be overshadowed by that. He gets his moment of kindness (“I got you”) and gets to do the comedy TARDIS split thing with a big cartoon hammer, but ultimately nobody with that much charisma is getting left in the shadows.

And the 14th Doctor getting to join his surrogate family is sweet. The 14th Doctor has felt distinct from the 10th, not least because Tennant is older and has developed as an actor in the intervening years. That means the idea that the 14th Doctor just needs to stop and rest works wonders and Tennant’s performance is fantastic in this regard. Of course, he and Tate maintain the perfect energy they’ve had together over the last couple of stories but seeing the 14th Doctor sitting around having something to eat with his new family would be inconceivable for the 10th. He’d have angsted his way back into the TARDIS, delivered some line about “better alone” and buggered off. Some Doctors could do the dinner scene – it’s easy to imagine the fifth, seventh, or the thirteenth in that setting, but not the 10th. For this older, more considered 14th Doctor, though, who’s been through the Flux and so very much more since Ten bowed out, it works and gives the character a well-earned rest. And all this without eclipsing the incoming Doctor while also still implicitly impacting him by allowing the new Doctor to be free from the weight of past Doctors. That’s very deft writing indeed.

While there are plenty of things one can question about “The Giggle”, the most important was landing the transition between the 14th and 15th Doctors, and in this, the episode undoubtedly succeeds. It’s a bit wonky in places but wonkiness is always part of Doctor Who so that’s fine. There’s plenty to love about the little we see of Gatwa but as Tennant’s swan song (at least until an inevitable special at some point in the future) he really couldn’t ask for better. The question as to whether Donna’s fate needed to be changed remains and always will, but if it had to be changed then this is the best-case scenario for her too. Tate is resoundingly brilliant as she always is, Tennant gets a suitable send-off, and Gatwa gets an unprecedented amount of screen time for an incoming Doctor. There’s really not much to complain about there.

Would You Recommend It? Yes. But with caveats, because though there may not be much to complain about in terms of how the two Doctors and Donna are dealt with, there are loads of things that could also be better. And as mentioned “The Giggle” may well show off RTD’s best tendencies but there’s plenty of his worst as well.

As is often the case, he has massive blind spots when it comes to certain aspects of cultural awareness. The satellite that comes online and allows the giggle to be transmitted around the world is said to work because “everyone is now connected” and everyone has as screen to stare at. Which is glossing over the fact that 16% of the world – over a billion and a half people – don’t even have access to electricity never mind those selfsame screens. But hey, most people in the West do, and that’s basically the whole world, right? Er, no. This was dodged with the Archangel network – explicitly referred to here – because it cast its signal over the world from satellites, but the giggle specifically relies on technology. Which, you know, huge chunks of the world don’t have. A couple of lines about how it’s adversely affected societies who depend on screens too much would both let the satire (if that’s not too big a word) work and avoid the cultural blindness but it doesn’t so it doesn’t.

Then there’s the game of catch to defeat the Toymaker. Sorry, but that’s crap. “I don’t have a resolution, here it is, move on, hope nobody notices” didn’t work in the RTD1 era and it definitely doesn’t work here where, 15 years later, he should have learned how to resolve a story. Handwaving away the end of someone of the Toymaker’s power in that way just feels incredibly cheap. Putting aside what the “rules” of the game are (could one of the Doctors have just tossed the ball six inches, where the Toymaker wouldn’t have been able to catch it?) it’s just a really limp ending.

And it’s an absolute crying shame because so much of the Toymaker has been effective up to that point. The looping corridors the Doctor and Donna get lost in are very effective and the sight of him looming over a roofless room, literally pulling the strings on a puppet with a human head, is exactly the sort of horror that Doctor Who does so well. It’s weird and strange and unsettling in all the right ways and a tremendous invocation of what makes the Toymaker a genuine threat without him just seeming like another Master redux or whatever – it is something unique to this character.

Similarly, the Doctor has been taunted by enemies before – Davros in “Journey’s End” feels like an appropriately apropos example. But the puppet show the Toymaker puts on helps crystalise the Doctor’s previous failings without just making him stand there limply unable to defend himself and feels particularly relevant to this kind of opponent – playing games isn’t just about solving the Towers of Hanoi or whatever, he’s playing mind games too. The Doctor tries to justify himself here and explain away the fate of previous companions, only to have his rationalisations brushed away with a sarcastic, American-voiced, “Well, that‘s alright then!” It’s a brutally effective undercutting of the Doctor’s typical self-justification and again feels wonderfully appropriate for the Toymaker as a character.

Though, as a slight aside, Bill was the last companion in the puppet show, which some have read as a deliberate slight or sidelining of the Chibnall/13th Doctor era. But it isn’t because “the Doctor fucks up his companions” doesn’t work with the 13th Doctor. What’s the Toymaker going to say? Ryan got to gain a new self-confidence, learn to embrace life, and grew up while coming to understand himself within a new family with his step-father, Graham? Well, that is alright then! Graham got to overcome his fear of cancer, build a new relationship with his stepson, and find both peace and purpose in old age. Well, that is alright then! Yaz came to understand herself, discover and come to terms with an aspect of who she is and came to understand what she was capable of. Yeah, that’s alright too. Dan… well, Dan’s just Dan by the end of “The Power Of The Doctor” but he’s fine as well. The 13th Doctor is unique among the new series Doctors so far in actually improving the lives of her companions rather than damaging them. That’s rather refreshing from the usual run of melodrama around companions but however you read it, it’s certainly not something the Toymaker can use against the Doctor and so therefore definitely not a sidelining of that era (and there have now been more than enough references to the Timeless Child and the Flux to make it clear RTD isn’t doing that anyway).

Where were we? Oh yes, the Toymaker. So indeed, he has this unique approach and it’s what makes him such a devious opponent. So what you really need to defeat him is the Doctor doing something clever. The “best of three” is RTD again being very Western-centric in his outlook but at least it demonstrates the Doctor thinking hurriedly on his feet to get out of a tough spot. And that’s what the resolution needs – the Doctor doing something clever to defeat the Toymaker at his own game. The Hartnell Doctor managed it, so the Tennant and Gawta Doctors combined ought to be able to. But that’s not what we get. Instead, we get a trivial game of catch that elucidates nothing about Doctor, the Toymaker, or why this is supposed to be a satisfactory conclusion to an hour of adventuring. Because it isn’t.

It’s also the point where the air kind of goes out of the episode. Once the Toymaker is defeated everything else is just wrap-up. Prior to this RTD has… well, “self-plagiarized” is maybe too strong, but so many of the beats here have been seen before, up to and including the campy, over-the-top dance number. But they’ve mostly been given a fresh coat of paint and keep things moving right along. it doesn’t always work but given how nostalgia0-driven and throwback the three specials are, you can at least lampshade it.

If you want to be generous you could say he’s reinventing the old standards, if you want to be cynical you can call it a lazy re-hash but whichever side you come down on it keeps up the crackerjack energy of the episode (and it’s a much more impressive sequence than the “I Can’t Decide” back in “The Sound of Drums”). Even the celebrity historical aspect feels fresh because it’s just a quick few minutes at the start rather than the Doctor spending the whole episode waxing rhapsodic about how great Logie Baird is. But once the deeply uninvolving game of catch is over that’s pretty much it. The Toymaker is perfunctorily defeated, it’s all fine, the Doctor gets his peace while the new guy steps into the role but the actual animating energy of the episode is gone. Or to put it another way, the structure is off – there’s too much wrap-up that starts too early in the episode.

Which isn’t fatal, to be clear. All the wrap-up stuff is implemented as well as it has ever been and as always, RTD’s skill at getting us to invest in characters shines through. The poor resolution of the main plot is pretty much unforgivable for a writer of his experience – claim it as a stylistic choice all you want, it’s still rubbish – but the character work all lands successfully.

And that’s where we leave things, ready for the Christmas special. The three 14th Doctor specials have been genuinely interesting – only “Wild Blue Yonder” is an unmitigated triumph but there’s plenty in both “The Star Beast” and “The Giggle” to enjoy and nothing’s really bad. Yes, there’s plenty of nostalgia and indulgence all over the place but mostly this diversion has been a worthwhile and refreshingly different thing to do with the series. Gawta gets a great set-up, Tennant and Tate get a charming send-off, and the series is certainly back with a bang. Let’s hope the Christmas episode can focus on the good points and relegate the obvious missteps to history.

Scores On The Doors? 7/10