Review: Doctor Who, The Giggle
A comedic family adventure, a mini historical celebrity encounter, a creepy bottle episode, a big world-ending finale with callbacks to the classic series, the most unlikely of multi Doctor stories. In the end, Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary specials were less of a birthday celebration and more of a mini season designed to showcase everything that Doctor Who can be at its best—all while closing one chapter and opening a new one. And while that makes them a terrible jumping on point for new viewers (we’ll get that in this year’s Christmas special), they’re just what the show needed to reset itself for a new era and win back the many long-time fans who dropped off somewhere in the Peter Capaldi or Jodie Whittaker eras. Russell T Davies’ original flavor of NuWho is back, baby, but it’s also evolving in brand new directions too.
After the more familiar story templates of “The Star Beast” and “Wild Blue Yonder,” “The Giggle” is the most boldly experimental of the three specials (I can’t think of another Doctor Who episode quite like it), and it’s also where the thesis of this whole project snapped into focus for me. Given that the big misstep of Donna’s original ending is that it eschewed her perspective in order to center the Doctor’s pain, I initially assumed these specials would re-anchor themselves in her point of view; that Ten’s face returned to make amends with his old friend or maybe even to alleviate any remaining guilt Wilf had over his role in the Doctor’s regeneration.
In the end, however, these are actually some of the most Doctor-centric episodes Davies has ever delivered. The one-off episodic plotting of “Wild Blue Yonder” is a red herring for just how crucial that episode is to the emotional arc of this trilogy. It’s where the Doctor first acknowledges just how much pain he’s experienced in the 15 (Earth) years since he last saw Donna Noble. And it’s where Davies first starts to plant the seeds that what the Doctor needs more than anything else is time to heal from his trauma; to process his emotions instead of just running from them; to stop claiming “I’m always alright” and actually put in the work to make himself better; to go to emotional rehab.
From an in-world perspective, that’s why this story had to unfold with the Tenth Doctor—the regeneration most defined by emotional repression. Born out of love for Rose Tyler, Ten is the most human of all the Doctors, with all the complex flaws and foibles that implies. He’s the regeneration who couldn’t bear the thought of losing his identity, who created a Meta-Crisis version of himself rather than change his face, and who literally departed with the words, “I don’t want to go.” Of course he'd eventually find a way to stick around forever.
While I haven’t checked online to get a sense of the general response to this episode yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are plenty of people who are annoyed with Ten’s perfect happy ending here—that it arguably feels cheap to break the rules of Doctor Who in order to create a mythic “bi-generation” that allows Tennant’s Doctor to keep on existing even as Ncuti Gatwa’s version takes over the main continuity. Yet what I love about this ending is how much it plays as a reflection and refraction of “The Stolen Earth”/“Journey’s End,” in which the Tenth Doctor shoved Rose and his Meta-Crisis self together in a parallel universe and took off, making a unilateral decision about what would make everyone happiest—which was both a bullish power play and also probably a pretty accurate assessment of the situation. (There’s a thematic reason this episode is about people who always think they’re right.)
Here, however—after a lifetime spent sacrificing his happiness for others—Tennant’s Doctor is the one forced into a happy ending for once, by the one person who actually understands him: Himself. The image of a calm, tender Gatwa taking a battered, guilt-ridden Tennant into his arms is a beautiful portrait of self-love as only Doctor Who can deliver. And it’s crucial that Gatwa’s Doctor isn’t just helping his past regeneration, he’s helping himself as well. “I’m fine because you fix yourself,” Gatwa’s Doctor explains. “We’re Time Lords, we’re doing rehab out of order.” It’s the Fourteenth Doctor’s period of rest and healing that allows the Fifteenth Doctor to emerge as a more mentally stable, emotionally open version of the character—even if the logistics of how that actually works are mysteriously timey-wimey.
As is so often the case with Davies finales, the final 15 minutes of this episode are so emotionally rich, it’s easy to zero in on them to the detriment of everything that comes before. (Even in a complicated two-parter like “Army of Ghosts”/“Doomsday,” all I ever want to talk about is the Bad Wolf Bay scene.) But on the whole, I found “The Giggle” to be a massively impressive hour of TV, and one of Davies’ more thematically satisfying finales.
Though I was initially worried about how the show would balance a splashy guest star appearance from Neil Patrick Harris alongside everything else it needed to cover, the Toymaker is perfectly deployed here. Harris nails his fun, campy, creepy scenes and delivers a Spice Girls lip-sync performance that rivals Sacha Dhawan’s “Rasputin” dance break. Yet it never feels like he’s pulling focus from the Doctor’s story.
And while the Toymaker’s evil plan to turn humanity against itself by making everyone think they’re right offers some pointed social commentary, Davies shows merciful restraint there too. The storyline underlines the concerns of our modern socio-political landscape without totally running the idea into the ground. And the script similarly finds a way to get UNIT into the story while still mostly keeping this a Doctor-centric hour.
As with last week’s edge-of-the-universe setting, what makes the Toymaker scary is that he operates outside of the rules that the Doctor is used to. He has no logic or laws other than the rules of games—as the First Doctor learned when he first encountered him back in a 1966 serial. Thematically, the Toymaker forces the Doctor to confront his guilt over the companions and worlds he’s loved and lost (the Toymaker’s puzzle box house is very “God Complex” in that way). Mostly, however, the idea of “play” as a third element beyond order and chaos is a smart way to prime the thematic pump for the game-changing bi-generation to come.
Yes, Doctor Who is a show that deserves to be taken seriously, but a big part of what makes it work is its anything-can-happen, make-it-up-as-you-go-along sense of playfulness. The climax of this episode involves three grown men throwing a ball around and Gatwa’s Doctor explaining away the creation of a second TARDIS with a simple, “We won the game. You get a prize, honey.” Doctor Who is a show that operates on vibes and emotion far more than logic, and while we might get some logistical clarification later on, I think the bi-generation is best understood on those looser terms. Maybe Tennant’s Fourteenth Doctor eventually regenerates directly into Gatwa’s Fifteenth or maybe he goes on to become the mysterious Curator from the 50th anniversary special. The emotional point, however, is that trauma no longer has to serve as the Doctor’s defining characteristic. He’s allowed to move forward and heal.
The promise of Gatwa as a sort of post-therapy Doctor is a really intriguing starting point for his era of the show, which Davies has explicitly talked about as a new “season one.” That makes these 60th anniversary specials a passing of the torch, not just from one Doctor to another, but from one era to another too. We’ll always have the show’s past, tucked away in a sunny garden in London. For now, however, it’s time to blaze a new future.
When I opened my “Star Beast” review with a paragraph about how the Nobles were the Tenth Doctor’s family, I didn’t think that was going to wind up being so textually important to the show! Love to be so in sync with a Doctor Who showrunner again.
Bernard Cribbins was originally supposed to appear in this episode as well, but was too sick to film and passed away shortly afterwards. That makes his appearance last week feel like even more of a gift, and I’m glad that Davies chose to keep Wilf alive on the show.
Okay, if I have a quibble with Tennant’s happy ending it’s that it feels a bit too easy that his Doctor gets to keep his TARDIS. I wish Davies had reused the idea he cut from “Journey’s End,” wherein the Doctor was originally supposed to give Rose and the Meta-Crisis Doctor a piece of coral they could eventually grow into their own TARDIS. That feels like it would fit better with the “take time to slow down” idea, while still leaving the door open for Tennant to randomly pop up in future episodes.
I love how Tennant and Gatwa wind up splitting the Doctor’s costume: Tennant gets the undershirt, vest, and pants. Gatwa get the shirt, tie, underwear, and shoes.
If you haven’t seen Whittaker’s regeneration special, “The Power of the Doctor” (which you really should, it’s great!) it introduces the idea of Kate Stewart recruiting a bunch of the Doctor’s old companions to come work for her at UNIT. That pays off here with the sweet and sweetly casual return of Bonnie Langford’s Melanie “Mel” Bush, who traveled with the Sixth and Seventh Doctors.
Lachele Carl’s American newscaster Trinity Wells was one of the most reliable bit players in the original Davies era and it was so fun to see her pop up again as an unhinged anti-Zeedex-er.
I always love when Doctor Who points out that William Hartnell’s First Doctor is the “young” version of the character. Such a fun mind-bender.
Stuff teased for Gatwa’s run of the show: The Meep’s “Boss,” the Toymaker’s “Legion,” that mysterious “One Who Waits,” and, of course, the gold-tooth trapped Master and the mysterious hand that picks him up.
See you back here in just over two weeks for this year’s Christmas special “The Church on Ruby Road.”
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