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Synopsis
The eleventh series of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who premiered on 7 October 2018 and concluded on 9 December 2018. The series is the first to be led by Chris Chibnall as head writer and executive producer, alongside executive producers Matt Strevens and Sam Hoyle, after Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin stepped down after the tenth series. This series is the eleventh to air following the programme’s revival in 2005, and is the thirty-seventh season overall. It also marks the beginning of the third production era of the revived series, following Russell T Davies‘ run from 2005–2010, and Moffat’s from 2010–2017. The eleventh series was broadcast on Sundays, a first in the programme’s history, after regular episodes of the revived era have previously been broadcast on Saturdays.
The series introduces Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor, a new incarnation of the Doctor, an alien Time Lord who travels through time and space in her TARDIS, which appears to be a British police box on the outside. The series also introduces Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, and Mandip Gill as the Doctor’s newest travelling companions, Graham O’Brien, Ryan Sinclair and Yasmin Khan, respectively. The series follows the Thirteenth Doctor as she initially searches for her lost TARDIS, inadvertently bringing Graham, Ryan and Yasmin with her on her travels, who later contemplate returning to their normal lives but decide to continue travelling with the Doctor. Rather than an overall story arc similar to previous series’, each episode of the series served mostly as a standalone story.
With the exception of Chibnall, every writer and director who worked on the eleventh series were new contributors for the programme. The ten episodes were directed by Jamie Childs, Mark Tonderai, Sallie Aprahamian and Jennifer Perrott, and written by Malorie Blackman, Ed Hime, Pete McTighe, Vinay Patel, Joy Wilkinson, and Chris Chibnall, who wrote five episodes for the series solo, co-writing an additional episode with Blackman. Filming for the series commenced in October 2017 and concluded in August 2018. The series is also set to be succeeded by a New Year’s Day special episode in 2019, “Resolution”, instead of the traditional annual Christmas special.
(via Wikipedia)
| 277 | 1 | “The Woman Who Fell to Earth“ | Jamie Childs | Chris Chibnall | 7 October 2018 | 10.96 | 83 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryan, a warehouse packer with dyspraxia, comes across strange lights and interacts with them, causing a blue pod to appear. Ryan calls the police, receiving help from PC Yasmin Khan. Ryan’s grandmother, Grace, her husband, Graham, and Karl find themselves trapped on board their train with a floating orb of tentacles and electricity. Ryan and Yasmin head for the train, arriving just as the Doctor falls through the ceiling. The orb departs after implanting everyone with DNA destroying bombs. The Doctor and others track the pod down to a warehouse, where they encounter a humanoid alien. The Doctor constructs a new sonic screwdriver from spare parts. The group intercepts the orb, a mass of biological data-gathering coils. The second alien suddenly appears, revealing himself as Tzim-Sha, a warrior hunting humans. The group track down Karl, the actual target. Tzim-Sha captures Karl atop a crane, but the Doctor orders Tzim-Sha to leave. Tzim-Sha detonates the bombs, but the Doctor transferred them into the coils, which were self-implanted into Tzim-Sha. Grace destroys the coils but dies. The Doctor later tells the group she must find the TARDIS. She leaves, but accidentally teleports all four of them into deep space. | |||||||
| 278 | 2 | “The Ghost Monument“ | Mark Tonderai | Chris Chibnall | 14 October 2018 | 9.00 | 82 |
| The Doctor and others are rescued by Angstrom and Epzo, pilots competing in an intergalactic race. Reaching the hostile planet of Desolation, the group and pilots meet with the race’s organiser Ilin. They learn that the race’s final event involves reaching the Ghost Monument for extraction before the planet completes a single rotation. The Doctor learns that it is the TARDIS, stuck in mid-phasing. Joining the pilots, the Doctor promises to get her new friends home. The group and the pilots locate and repair a solar-powered boat, using it to reach the ruins of a former civilisation, now inhabited by sniper robots. The Doctor uses the remains of one robot to disable the others with an electromagnetic pulse, locating a series of tunnels to use as a shortcut. Trapped by a group of Remnants, cloth-like creatures, the Doctor destroys them with Epzo’s self-lighting cigar. Reaching the monument’s location, the pilots claim joint victory. Ilin reluctantly agrees to this, but refuses to teleport the Doctor and her friends off the planet. The Doctor hears the TARDIS emerging, using her sonic screwdriver to fully materialise it, and the Doctor offers her friends a trip home as she promised. | |||||||
| 279 | 3 | “Rosa“ | Mark Tonderai | Malorie Blackman and Chris Chibnall | 21 October 2018 | 8.41 | 83 |
| When the Doctor attempts to return to Sheffield, the TARDIS instead takes her to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. The Doctor finds traces of time travel energy in the area. Investigating, the group learn that they have arrived the day before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat as bus driver James F. Blake demanded, influencing the civil rights movement. Tracing the energy, the group locate a suitcase of equipment from the future, but are forced to flee from its owner, a rehabilitated murderer named Krasko, who is attempting to change history by ensuring Parks never had to refuse her seat. Destroying the vortex manipulator he used, the Doctor and her friends focus on thwarting him by ensuring Parks refuses her seat to Blake. While Ryan removes false notices at bus stops, he encounters Krasko blocking the bus route. Ryan uses Krasko’s displacement device to send him into the past. Removing the blockage, he and the others rejoin the Doctor on the bus as passengers. As the moment arrives, the Doctor realises they have become forced to stay aboard the bus. Parks is arrested by the police for violating segregation laws, and history has been kept intact. | |||||||
| 280 | 4 | “Arachnids in the UK“ | Sallie Aprahamian | Chris Chibnall | 28 October 2018 | 8.22 | 83 |
| Having returned to Sheffield, the Doctor meets Yasmin’s family, while Graham heads home to grieve over Grace. After Yasmin leaves to pick up her mother, Najia Khan, the Doctor and Ryan encounter arachnologist Jade McIntyre. The group discover that McIntyre’s colleague was killed by a large spider. After Graham rejoins them, the group learn that McIntyre has been investigating bizarre behaviour in spider ecosystems. The Doctor deduces that the spiders are linked to a luxury hotel complex, which Najia worked at until fired by its owner Robertson. Arriving at the hotel and joined by Robertson, the group learn the spiders have infested the complex. The spiders came from abandoned mine tunnels beneath the complex, which were used as a dumping ground for industrial waste. McIntyre, whose experiments involved genetically modified spiders, realises the giant spiders are offspring to a specimen that had been dumped there, the toxicity of the dumping ground mutating them. The group lure the offspring into a panic room, before encountering the specimen itself in the ballroom. Before the Doctor deal with it, Robertson kills it with a gun. Ryan, Yasmin and Graham decide to see more of the universe with the Doctor. | |||||||
| 281 | 5 | “The Tsuranga Conundrum“ | Jennifer Perrott | Chris Chibnall | 4 November 2018 | 7.76 | 79 |
| While scavenging on an alien junkyard planet, the Doctor, Graham, Yasmin and Ryan are caught in a sonic mine’s detonation. They wake aboard the Tsuranga, a spaceship travelling to a medical space-station. The Doctor meets the patients – Eve Cicero, a renowned general; her brother Durkas; Eve’s synth robot partner Ronan; and Yoss, a pregnant man. The Doctor and head nurse Astos gain access to the ship’s systems and notice an alien entity heading for the ship. Astos becomes trapped in a pod, and dies when the pod is jettisoned and explodes. Mabli, Astos’ colleague, tells the Doctor that the entity is a Pting, a creature that eats any non-organic material. While Yasmin and Ronan defend the ship’s anti-matter power source, Ryan and Graham help Yoss as he enters labour. Eve, who has a critical heart condition, sacrifices herself to pilot the ship through a dangerous asteroid field. The Doctor finds a bomb attached to the ship’s power source, removes it and tricks the Pting into eating it, ensuring that the energy of the blast feeds the creature before jettisoning it into space. The Tsuranga safely arrives at the space-station, and the group honours the death of Eve. | |||||||
| 282 | 6 | “Demons of the Punjab“ | Jamie Childs | Vinay Patel | 11 November 2018 | 7.48 | 80 |
| After talking with her grandmother Umbreen, Yaz is curious about her deceased Muslim grandfather. The group arrive in the Punjab in August 1947, and Yaz is shocked to learn Umbreen will marry a Hindu man, Prem. The Doctor learns the group arrived on 14 August, the day before the partition of India. The Doctor sees flashes of two aliens, and she find them with the dead body of a sadhu, Bhakti. Joined by Prem, who saw the “demons” during the Battle of Singapore, the Doctor assumes they killed Bhakti and recognizes them as Thijarian, a race of assassins. After the Doctor is teleported back to their ship while the others prepare for the wedding, she learns the Thijarians are the last of their kind, acting as witnesses to those who die alone, and they show the Doctor that Bhakti was murdered by Prem’s brother Manish, a Hindu nationalist who opposes the wedding. After the wedding, the Doctor accosts Manish for the crime, and he calls some armed colleagues. The Doctor and her friends help Umbreen escape, while Prem remains behind to reason with Manish. One of the nationalists murders Prem, as the travellers return to the present. | |||||||
| 283 | 7 | “Kerblam!“ | Jennifer Perrott | Pete McTighe | 18 November 2018 | 7.46 | 81 |
| The group travels to Kerblam!, a galaxy-wide online shopping service consisting of automated warehouses and a robotic workforce. As new employees, the group attempt to find out who had sent them a call for help. They learn from their new colleagues – Dan in delivery, Kira in dispatch, and Charlie in maintenance – that staff have been vanishing. When Dan disappears, the Doctor suspects something is wrong with the company’s artificial intelligence. When Kira is abducted, the Doctor tracks her, and she finds the remains of the missing workforce and an army of bots. With an early model of the bot, she learns the AI called for her help directly. Yasmin, Ryan and Charlie witness Kira die when playing with bubble wrap, and the Doctor discovers someone weaponised the material. Charlie, the culprit, used the staff as test subjects, intending to use the bubble wrap upon the company’s customers, knowing that blame would be placed upon automation and a lack of human diligence, his motive to prevent automation making human workforces redundant. The Doctor re-programmes the bots to deliver to themselves, and the floor is destroyed. Maddox and Slade undertake to rebuild Kerblam! with a mostly human workforce. | |||||||
| 284 | 8 | “The Witchfinders“ | Sallie Aprahamian | Joy Wilkinson | 25 November 2018 | 7.21 | 81 |
| The group arrive in Lancashire during 1612, landing near Pendle Hill. They observe Becka Savage duck her grandmother as a witch. To prevent further trials, the Doctor informs Savage she is the Witchfinder General, only to be greeted by King James I, who is paranoid and obsessed with witches. Yasmin meets with Savage’s cousin Willa, and protects her when a tendril attacks them. The Doctor discovers that trial victims have been possessed by an alien entity, and believes that Savage is hiding something. After deeming the Doctor a witch, Savage orders her to be ducked, but she survives. Savage reveals she was inflicted whilst chopping down a tree on the Hill. The trial victims arrive and possess her; Savage now identifies as the Morax queen. The Doctor discovers that Savage damaged a high-tech jail on the Hill, which the Morax had been imprisoned within. Learning that they intend to have their king possess James, the Doctor uses the tree Savage took to fight them back. The group rescues James and re-establish the jail, imprisoning the Morax. James declares that all records of the event will be erased, and he and Willa watch as the group leave in the TARDIS. | |||||||
| 285 | 9 | “It Takes You Away“ | Jamie Childs | Ed Hime | 2 December 2018 | 6.42 | 80 |
| The group arrive in Norway. Meeting blind teen Hanne, they learn that she and her father Erik moved following the death of her mother Trine, and that her father is missing. They discover a mirror with no reflections; the mirror is a portal. She, Graham and Yasmin enter, while Ryan remains behind. Hanne knocks him out and follows them, forcing Ryan to follow. The group find themselves in the Anti-Zone, a buffer-space between universes to prevent catastrophic damage, which they quickly escape by entering another portal. They find themselves in a cabin within a parallel universe, and encounter Erik talking with Trine, and Graham encounters Grace. The Doctor deduces they have encountered the Solitract, a sentient universe incompatible with the real one. When Hanne arrives and recognises Trine is not real, the Doctor convinces the Solitract to release them. The Doctor offers the Solitract her experience of travelling the universe, leaving the Doctor in a white space along with a talking frog, a form of the Solitract. She explains she can’t stay, and makes her way back through the Anti-Zone before the portal collapses. Erik returns to Oslo with Hanne, while Ryan bonds with Graham. | |||||||
| 286 | 10 | “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos“ | Jamie Childs | Chris Chibnall | 9 December 2018 | 6.65 | 79 |
| The TARDIS lands on Ranskoor Av Kolos, a planet with a psychic field that alters one’s perception of reality; the Doctor provides her companions with counteracting neurobalancers. They come across an amnesiac pilot, Paltraki. Paltraki gets a video signal from a woman, Andinio, and Tzim-Sha, who warns Paltraki to bring him an item, a rock floating in a protective shell, in exchange for his crew. Graham and Ryan look for the crew, while the Doctor, Yasmin and Paltraki seek Tzim-Sha. They encounter Andinio, who takes them to Tzim-Sha and Delph; Andinio and Delph are the Ux, a telekinetic race. Tzim-Sha has been trapped on Ranskoor and the Ux consider him their “creator”; he has had them shrink planets to tiny objects: the item from Paltraki’s ship. Yasmin and Paltraki discover four similar planets, while Tzim-Sha begins the same to Earth. The Doctor convinces the Ux to stop the process and help her return the planets. Graham and Ryan find the crew in stasis chambers, Ryan leads the crew to safety, and they stow Tzim-Sha in a stasis chamber. The Doctor, the Ux, and Paltraki’s crew work together to return the planets, and the Doctor and her companions leave. | |||||||
(Via Wikipedia)
