Was the audio mixing particularly bad for anyone else in this episode? The whole season's had its ups and downs in that area, but in this one, I kept having to rewind scenes to understand what was being said (I don't care for my TV's closed captioning display). The music was really loud compared to the dialogue, and the bass seemed to randomly blow up for no reason. Just me, or an actual thing? Who knows.
Anywho, we open with The Doctor and friends stumbling wildly into yet another dangerous historical time, though at least unlike "Rosa" and "Punjab", they have the excuse of trying to go somewhere else (Elizabeth I's coronation) and being redirected apparently without the chance to view their time period. Turns out they're in 17th century Lancashire, and just in time for a witch trial (I expected Salem, Massachusetts, given the subject matter, but I guess that's a little played out... and they couldn't justify the inclusion of a certain irritant if it were in America). Concerned, they rush off -- tailed by a mysterious masked man -- and arrive just in time for a woman to be drowned in a ducking stool. The Doctor admirably tries to save the drowning woman, but fails, and in a rage she takes authority of the situation away from the woman conducting the trial by psychic-papering herself into the "Witchfinder General" spot. I quite like this turn of events; this episode is probably Whitaker's most fully-realized outing yet, whatever the flaws with the episode itself, and she gets a lot of great work as her companions continue to flounder about.
The strange woman presiding over this township's witch trials -- which have already killed 36 -- is named Becca Savage, because I know writers who use subtlety and they're all cowards. She's your typical witch trial conductor, manically convinced Satan has infected the area and determined to root him out, though she transparently knows more than she lets on. I hate her. In contrast to a certain irritant, nothing is done to humanize her or even give insane justification to her actions throughout the episode; she's fueled purely by wild religious fervor and a selfish refusal to see her own evil even as things spiral wildly out of control, and that's one of my least favorite types of villain. Her actress is fine, but the performance is little to write home about. Guess Charlie was an odd-one-out for this season's villains.
On the way to her manor, though, she says the following to the Doctor: "It's very difficult in these times, especially for a woman." The charitable reading of this line is that she's just hypocritically pointing out how rough it is to be a woman during a witch trial, but I'm not feeling particularly charitable; the way it comes off unmistakably is an on-the-nose acknowledgement of period sexism, which is not only one of those hacky stock time travel lines, and not only wildly contradicts Savage's characterization, but sticks out like a sore thumb because there's not nearly as much focus on gender in this plot as one would expect. Outside of a certain irritant. Moving on. Right before the TARDIS crew reach her manor, we're told of what's initially a decent mystery: the township's name is completely unknown to the modern day, and somehow none of Savage's numerous murders are on record. What happens to the town? Will it be disappointing? All this and more on Doctor Who!
Once we get into the manor, things really go to shit, as we're introduced to... well, I've danced around him long enough. The ominous masked man strolls in, and pulls off his mask to reveal that he's KING JAMES! The Bible man himself. Played by Special Guest Star Alan Cumming, which I guess is a big deal. I find this alone massively implausible in addition to being a waste of a tease, but if the king really was known to make surprise visits to small towns virtually alone and sneak around in costume, feel free to enlighten me. But even leaving that aside, I cannot stand this guy. He's so campy and over-the-top that I almost thought he was the next regeneration of The Master, and while I can enjoy some good ham and cheese in a silly performance, Cumming blows it out more than the bass in the audio mixing. Sometimes less is more, and this king just does not have a fucking off switch. It didn't work for me, and he's in so much of the episode that he just became a weight on my neck; I could only stand him in one scene, and he barely speaks there.
But back to the plot. King James is a raging sexist, so when The Doctor shows him the psychic paper, he sees "Witchfinder's Assistant" instead and automatically assumes she's subservient to "Witchfinder General" Graham. Then he minces around some more before the scene just sort of ends, but not before Savage gleefully reveals that she's ready to defeat Satan even if it means killing everyone in the entire town. Nuance, thine name is more alien than The Doctor's. And we're not even at the bad part of the episode yet. The first two acts are over-the-top and not super compelling, but they can't hold a candle to what comes at the third act.
Meanwhile, Yaz is searching around for the elusive "thing for Yaz to do", and sort of finds it when she spots the drowned woman's grieving daughter praying in a field, oblivious that she's about to be attacked by... a weird little mud tentacle. Yeah. The monster for this episode turns out to be evil mud. Evil blankets, eat your threads out. Yaz hacks the thing apart with a shovel, and after some tomfoolery that gets the Doctor and the rest to the area, we learn that the grieving woman is named Willa -- and that she's Savage's cousin. Despite appearances pointing to witchcraft, the Doctor scans her thoroughly and finds that she's completely normal. Must be aliens.
After briefly cutting to King James revealing his tragic past to Ryan (whom he then not-so-subtly flirts with) in a scene that's not as bad as his introduction but not as good as the later scene, the Doctor scans a mud sample and is puzzled by it being completely normal. That is, until the sample starts vibrating around, and everyone turns around to see MUD ZOMBIES! Yes, everyone killed by the witch trials -- including Willa's mother / Savage's aunt -- has been dredged up as these surprisingly creepy bone-white mud zombies, which are apparently the result of the mud straight-up piloting their corpses. King James and the gang arrive on scene quickly, but James' assistant / barely-coded lover Alfonso tries to shoot the zombies and is killed by a really stupid-looking sonic blast that the main zombie emits when she claps her hands. So close to being a decent monster, too. Once everyone has run a sufficient distance away, the Doctor realizes Savage clearly knows a lot about the mud, but she fires back with a predictable witchcraft accusation -- and Willa backs her up, being too scared to resist. I do so love a plot that's only allowed to get as far as it does because people refuse to talk.
Anyways, the Doctor is dragged off for a trial, but first, she's tied up and left alone with King James, who interrogates her about her "magic wand" and general mysteriousness. This is the single scene in which Cumming's James is not awful, and not just slightly below tolerable, but outright pretty solid -- and he barely talks after the Doctor starts going, because this is also one of Jodie Whitaker's best scenes and she entirely carries it. In a cheesy but so very Doctor-ish monologue, she appeals to his sense of humanity and implores him to solve the mysteries of the heart before worrying about supposed magic -- and equally predictably, he seems to ignore it and sends her away for her trial. It is incredible how no matter the flaws in these past three episodes, the other writers have understood Chibnall's vision for the Doctor far more clearly than Chibnall himself.
After we cut back from the companions fucking around with the zombies (the whole group really is just background noise in this episode), the Doctor gets chained into the ducking stool. As she tries to bore into Savage's reasons for covering up what she knows, Savage gets even more annoyingly obstinate, even as she's zapped by the ducking stool's wood and cries a tear of mud in her rage. Right around this, you might expect that she's been so obstinate because she's a spy for the evil mud deliberately screwing things up as part of a plan; you'd only be half-right, but we'll get to that stupidity. Down into the depths goes the Doctor, but after a few seconds, King James -- clearly shaken by his earlier chat with her -- takes pity and commands the furious Savage to raise the stool early. However, the Doctor has already escaped the chains regardless, and (in one of the defining Thirteen scenes of the series) marches up to the shocked crowd, sopping wet and bizarrely upbeat, and carries on her investigation. However, she doesn't have much time before the zombies show back up.
And here, cornered by the zombies, we learn why this whole mess started. Savage is obviously to blame, but rather than for the sake of an alien plot, she's been doing it all for pure mind-boggling selfishness. Apparently everything started going to shit when she decided her aunt's favorite tree was blocking her view, so she personally took an axe to it and inadvertently released an unknown entity from inside the tree, which pierced her thigh with a tentacle and infected her with the mud. She'd gone to her aunt for help, but when her aunt wasn't emotionally strong enough to cut off her niece's leg, she went crazy and started killing people. Sounds like a reasonable unreasonable explanation, right? Mankind is the real monster, and all that.
Except then she turns into a stupid generic-looking alien, and the episode flies so violently off the rails it tanks everything that came before it. The alien mud creature, which has now completely overtaken Savage's personality, announces / loudly exposits that it's the queen of a warrior race called the Lorax (actually Morax, but it's a dumb name and there's a tree connection, so who cares); the Lorax have been imprisoned in a technological prison disguised as a tree, and Savage's cutting broke the seal just enough to let the queen out. The ducking stool is actually made of the same alien technology, and it's serving as the lock to the prison the queen has been trying to break open by continuously drowning women...?! I'm pretty sure that's the explanation, at least. It's nonsensical. It's really stupid. Then the queen and the rest of the zombies just explode mid-sentence while screaming about how they're going to dominate the world, which is shortly revealed to be them teleporting away with King James, but comes so late in the episode's run time and is so violently abrupt that I genuinely thought that was how the writers were etching the problem away.
Blech.
The Lorax Queen uses King James' blood to completely break open the seal on the prison, somehow, I guess. If blood was the key to opening the prison, I don't know why the ducking stool was implemented or why she didn't use a method of execution that produces blood, but who cares. The tree explodes open to reveal a fairly large and goofy-looking mud tentacle, but it doesn't get very far before the Doctor and friends technobabble the problem away by lighting up some torches made from the ducking stool and somehow using them to instantly reactivate the Lorax's prison. This leaves only the queen, now on her own, only for King James to rush forward and burn her to explodey death with one of the torches. The Doctor is very cross about this, but little is made of it afterward.
We then come to a hasty epilogue, where King James resolves the earlier mystery by just vowing that he'll cover up everything that happened there, and Willa -- who is barely a character and has had little in the way of an arc -- says that she's going to follow the Doctor's namesake and become a doctor of her own. James flirts with Ryan again, and Graham quotes Pulp Fiction at him before they all fly away. Roll credits.
This... was... shoddy. It's nowhere near as bad as "The Ghost Monument" (which seemed unfinished) or "The Tsuranga Conundrum" (which is stupid and I hate it), and actually got off to a fine start save the irritating villains and some narrative quibbles. But then it went and wasted its setup on a needless alien plot whose villain just roared about destroying Earth, and any themes or arcs that were set up before were muddled into nothingness. This was the narrative confusion everyone blasted "Kerblam!" for supposedly showing.