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The temptation discussing The Giggle will be to start at the end, with the various implications – both cynical and sincere – about the story’s second half.

After all, much of the publicity around The Giggle was built on the promise of shocking revelations. Davies teased that the commentary would be essential listening and recorded a video advising viewers to watch live. The episode certainly delivered on those terms, with a closing few minutes that fans will undoubtedly be unpacking and dissecting for months and years ahead. At the same time, those choices somewhat overshadow the bulk of the episode, which is effectively a good old-fashioned Davies-era finale, albeit with an updated twist.

Both The Star Beast and Wild Blue Yonder suggested that Davies had lost none of his urgency and engagement on returning to Doctor Who. After all, Davies had spent his time away from the series writing charged miniseries like Years and Years or It’s a Sin. Davies’ writing was always angry and vital, and he spent a significant portion of his original run on Doctor Who holding up a mirror to contemporary Britain in the same way that Andrew Cartmel had done before him and Steven Moffat would do after him.

The Giggle begins as a biting piece of social commentary, a Davies-era finale for the modern world. However, like so many earlier Davies-penned finales, the narrative unravels in its race towards the climax. There’s a certain clumsiness and broadness to the story’s resolution, a narrative sleight of hand that neatly sidesteps a lot of the story’s bigger ideas in favour of a more emotionally satisfying resolution. This isn’t a problem. There’s a reason why fans look back fondly on episodes like Doomsday or Journey’s End. Certainly, after the past five years, it’s reassuring to know that Doctor Who has a heart again. Two, even.

There’ll be dancing in the street…

One of the big thrills of these three specials is the sense that Davies has been learning and evolving as a storyteller in the intervening years. Part of this is undoubtedly his work outside Doctor Who, but it is also obvious that Davies has been paying attention to the work done by his successors. In particular, these three stories feel like the work of a writer who took notes while watching the Moffat era. The Star Beast was very obviously influenced by Hell Bent in its resolution of the Donna’s arc from Journey’s End.

However, there’s also a lot of Moffat’s influence evident in The Giggle. Superficially, the production design of the Toymaker’s Realm as a tero hotel with a series of unended corridors haunted by the ghosts of those who can’t escape recalls both The God Complex and The Angels Take Manhattan. Thematically, the idea of the Doctor essentially settling down and living an ordinary life recalls stories like The Lodger, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, The Power of Three and The Time of the Doctor.

More fundamentally, the basic premise of The Giggle owes a lot to the Silence from The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon. It is a story about a hidden message buried in a television broadcast, one that is not consciously perceptible to human beings, but which has imprinted on them over and over again. “It’s the very first image,” the Doctor explains. “Has been hiding in every screen ever since. Sneaking into your head. Carving a wave. And waiting.” The Toymaker “burnt himself into television itself.” It’s ultimately just an extrapolation of the Doctor’s use of Neil Armstrong’s foot in Day of the Moon.

Of course, television has always been central to Doctor Who. In An Unearthly Child, the Doctor likens the TARDIS to a television set. There are analogues of television in stories like The Three Doctors and Carnival of Monsters. Davies has always been heavily influenced by Vengeance on Varos, and it was an obvious inspiration for his later work in episodes like The Long Game and Bad Wolf. Stories like The Idiot’s Lantern and Blink are about the power of television. Even the Weeping Angels and the Silence are monsters tailored specifically to the medium.

He’s a dummy.

Indeed, it feels like The Giggle might have been a better Centeniary Special than The Power of the Doctor. This is a story about the power of television and the influence that it holds over people. It also feels like a statement of purpose from Davies. The Toymaker weaponises television against the human race, imprinting something monstrous and contagious on it, something that makes humankind the worst possible versions of themselves. Given that The Giggle frames the Doctor and the Toymaker as foils to one another, then perhaps Doctor Who suggests the power of television to do good.

This is something that has clearly been on Davies’ mind with these specials. He has talked openly about reinventing Davros for Destination: Skaro, trying to get away from the stereotype of the monstrous disabled person, a decision that obviously intersects with the introduction of Shirley Anne Bingham in The Star Beast and the addition of ramp access to the TARDIS in The Giggle. It’s also reflected in the inclusion of Rose in The Star Beast, the casting of a transgender performer as a transgender character being such a strong political statement in a show with this profile that it generated a transphobic backlash.

To a certain extent, this is Davies carrying over a theme from the Moffat era. The Moffat era was very much engaged with the idea of Doctor Who as a show that mattered to children. Episodes like A Good Man Goes to War were very much about the idea that there were limits to the kinds of stories that Doctor Who could tell. The Day of the Doctor is built around the idea that the Doctor could not have murdered millions of children. Even stories like Extremis are about the power of watching an episode of Doctor Who in a world that seemed to be unravelling.

There is a certain maturity to Davies’ return to Doctor Who. He seems more conscious of the platform and the power of Doctor Who, which broadcasts in a prime slot on Saturday night on the most popular television station in the United Kingdom and which has a global reach over streaming. As the United Kingdom sinks deeper and deeper into paranoid xenophobia and hateful transphobia, Davies understands that there is an obligation to try to counter that in some small way. The Giggle feels like a statement of purpose.

Props for inventiveness.

The Toymaker manipulates the public through screens. The villain’s plans begin with the first television broadcast and come to fruition with the launching of a satellite that fully connects the human race. “The world is now one-hundred percent online,” Kate explains. “For the first time in history, everybody has access to this,” the Doctor explains of the internet. The eponymous giggle is a viral cue that passes through that media, affecting the way in which people think and act.

The Giggle is not especially subtle, but there’s charm in being direct. This is a story about how hate spreads through broadcasts, over television and the internet. It is about the use of channels like Fox News or GB News to stoke anger and resentment among a population. It is about how human beings are now permenantly connected to the internet, bombarded via social media services like Facebook and Twitter with stimula of such intensity that it is impossible to parse the signal from the noise.

Indeed, it’s fascinating to watch The Giggle from Ireland, just a few weeks after social media stoked up anti-immigration riots that almost destroyed the city centre by spreading disinformation. Davies has his finger on the pulse, and it’s bracing to watch an episode of Doctor Who that is so charged and so aggressive in understanding its monster and making its point. There really hasn’t been an episode of Doctor Who this righteously angry since the comment on the health service in World Enough and Time. This is a lot more potent than something as limp as Revolution of the Daleks.

The Giggle is obviously heavily influenced by Davies witnessed during COVID. After returning to Earth, the Doctor discovers that everybody has turned into a rugged individualist unwilling to accept even the basic compromises to individual rights necessary for society to function. A man wanders out into the road, into the path of an oncoming taxi, declaring that his taxes pay for the street. “It is mine. I paid for it and I’ll do what I like.” The Doctor responds, “You could just stand over there and be safe.” It’s an absurdist sequence, but it captures the feeling of watching anti-masking protests.

All hands on deck.

Davies hammers this metaphor. Returning for her obligatory season finale cameo, Trinity Wells uses her platform as a news anchor to declare that she refuses to wear the Zeedox armband that would block the signal causing this chaos. “I am anti-Zeedex,” she proclaims, righteously. When Kate Stewart removes her armband, she aggressively responds to the Doctor asking how she is. “It’s an invasion of my privacy,” she states. “In fact, it’s an assault on my civic rights. And I think it’s highly relevant that the person demanding information from me is an alien.”

Much like Wild Blue Yonder, there’s a cynicism underpinning The Giggle. As demonstrated by episodes like Turn Left or Midnight, Davies doesn’t really seem to trust people. The Doctor stresses that this breakdown of civil order might have been aided by the Toymaker, but it’s fundamentally human. “The human race might be clever and bright and brilliant, it’s also savage and venal and relentless,” he explains. “That’s human, that’s who you are.”

The Toymaker becomes an expression of individualism in its purest and most cynical form, an embrace of the idea that the world must be divided into winners and losers. Everything is a game and there are win conditions that do not prioritise the greater good. Summing up the crisis, Kate explains, “Every single human being thinks they’re right and won’t be told otherwise.” The Toymaker boasts, “I made every opinion supreme.” He elaborates, “Now everyone wins.”

As the Toymaker juggles, he insists, “The ball was the very first game.” In the Toymaker’s telling, the ball was the first rock used to smash the first skull. The first winner was a murderer. It’s a clever invocation of the show’s history, recalling a key moment from An Unearthly Child in which the Doctor tries to use a rock as a murder weapon. However, it’s also just a beautiful expression of the episode’s central theme. A world that insists every person must either be a winner or a loser is going to set people against one another in a way that fundamentally underminds the social fabric.

Puppet Master.

It helps that Davies makes some of the subtext explicit. The Celestial Toymaker was a racist serial. After all, the term “celestial” was used there in the same way that it was in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. While Michael Gough didn’t wear yellow face, he was dressed in stereotypical Chinese garb and can be heard doing an accent during the “tri-logic” game. The decision to drop the “celestial” from the title is a smart move, and Davies makes a point to have the Toymaker act explicitly racist, greeting a dark-skinned customer with the loaded question, “You must be used to sunnier climes?” 

The hatred in The Giggle is not abstract. It is not fantastical. It is mundane and real. When she removes her armband, Kate lashes out at Shirley for using a wheelchair. “I’ve seen you walking!” Kate screams. Like her identification of the Doctor as “an alien”, this hatred isn’t accidental or random. It flows in particular directions. It is recognisable to the audience. It makes it very clear what the show is about, to the point that it’s hard to understand The Giggle as anything more than a righteously angry howl.

The biggest problem with all this is that Davies doesn’t really have an ending. Now, there are a couple of mitigating details here. The most obvious is that it’s probably a bit much to ask Doctor Who to imagine a solution to late-stage capitalism. The other is that Davies has never been particularly good at endings. His season finales tend to just keep going until it’s time to wrap things up, and then offers a very convenient loophole or piece of technobabble to send the Daleks and Cybermen back into the void in Doomsday, rejuvinate the Doctor in The Last of the Time Lords or defeat the Daleks in Journey’s End.

As much as Davies as matured as a writer, The Giggle is very recognisable as a Davies-era finale. It hits many of same beats. The “bigeneration” leads to the obligatory “what? what!? WHAT?” gag. The Trinity Wells cameo feels almost expected. The Toymaker’s song-and-dance number to Spice Up Your Life doesn’t just provide a nice wink to Strictly Come Dancing, it also evokes the Master dancing across the Valiant’s bridge in The Last of the Time Lords.

Last week, we had one long corridor.
This week, we have an infinite number of smaller corridors.
Really, this anniversary has everything.

To a certain extent, the Toymaker feels like Davies taking another shot at the Master. Shirley directly invokes the Arkangel Network from The Sound of Drums. The Toymaker specifically mentions defeating the Master, effectively top-trumping him as the Doctor’s arch-enemy. Even the Doctor’s late-game appeal to the Toymaker recalls his attempt to reconcile with the Master at the end of The Last of the Time Lords. “Come with me,” the Doctor begs the Toymaker. “We can play across the cosmos.”

Indeed, even the inclusion of the Fifteenth Doctor feels like Davies revisiting an old idea. The concept of a multi-Doctor story with a future version of the Doctor was hinted at with Jackson Lake in The Next Doctor, but that episode ultimately went a different direction. This concept seems to be on Davies’ mind. The writer even directly invokes that episode by name. “I play the third game with the next Doctor,” the Toymaker boasts.

That said, it is reassuring that Davies is his old playful self underneath it all. Davies has talked openly about his plans to build spin-offs for the show. U.N.I.T. seems like a safe bet, and The Giggle is clearly designed to serve as a stealth pilot in the same way that Army of Ghosts set up Torchwood. The office set and the core cast all seem to be primed for a show launch. Mel is there as a legacy character, while the Vlinx is established as the token alien. The U.N.I.T. skyscraper even looks like Avengers Tower, the embodiment of this obsession with sprawling shared universes.

So it is somewhat hilarious that The Giggle ultimately comes down to a game of catch played on a closed set between Neil Patrick Harris, David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa. Despite the obvious expense and spectacle of the episode around it, The Giggle culminates in a dramatic beat that children can replicate in a school playground. After years of Doctor Who chasing the phantom of prestige television, it is reassuring that Davies is willing to be so esoteric and goofy, to take all that Disney money and funnel it into three actors throwing a ball around.

A card-carrying villain.

Then there’s the finale and resolution, which seem certain to be provocative to online fans. The Giggle ends without a regeneration. The Fifteenth Doctor is now running around time and space, but the Fourteenth Doctor is still alive. He will regenerate into his future self at some unspecified time, but there are now effectively two incumbant leads: Ncuti Gatwa and David Tennant. The show has never really done anything like this before. It is, conceptually, as radical a concept as something like The Timeless Children.

It’s easy to be cynical about this. It allows Davies to keep David Tennant around indefinitely in a way that is not true of any previous Doctor. It means that, whatever Davies intentions, Gatwa is a Doctor, but not the Doctor. It leaves open the possibility of bringing back Tennant at any point in the future when the ratings flag, and dangling the prospect of Tennant and Tate getting their own spin-offs. It’s an idea that has a fairly significant risk involved, and could damage the show in the long term.

More than that, it is ridiculously indulgent. Davies has always played favourites with his characters. He has always spoiled them. When Rose has to leave the TARDIS in Doomsday, she ends up with a restored family unit. When she returns in Journey’s End, she even gets a copy of the Tenth Doctor that she can take home with her. In the final moments of The End of Time, Part II, the Tenth Doctor declares, “I don’t want to go.” The end result of The Giggle is that he never has to.

There is an inherent absurdity in the idea that Davies could effectively write his own version of The Three Doctors starring three different versions of the Doctor played by David Tennant. In fact, he could probably stretch to four if he counts the regeneration in Journey’s End like Eleven does in The Time of the Doctor. In hindsight, “vanity issues” feels like quite the understatement. It’s interesting to imagine how much more vicious the online reaction to this twist might be if it were written by Steven Moffat.

It’s all up in the air.

However, allowing for all these reservations, there is something appealing in all of this. On the one hand, it is another reminder of what Davies has learned from Moffat. This is Davies’ version of “just this once, everybody lives!”, applied to a regeneration story so that even the Doctor lives. There’s also something charming in the idea of a Davies story that doesn’t feel obliged to end in melodramatic tragedy. In the end, the Fourteenth Doctor settles down like the Eleventh Doctor did.

This gets at the big difference between The Giggle and something like The Timeless Children. For all that fans complained about how The Timeless Children broke the internal logic of the show, the biggest issue with that episode and that revelation was that it was just empty lore. The Doctor effectively stood in a circle of light while exposition was just dumped on her. It wasn’t emotionally or narratively compelling. At the very least, there is an emotional underpinning to this resolution of the Fourteenth Doctor’s journey.

“How’s it going to work, you and me?” the Fourteenth Doctor asks his successor. The Fifteenth Doctor elaborates, “I’m fine because you fix yourself. We’re Time Lords. We’re doing rehab out of order.” This is a big step for Davies. So much of Davies’ conception of the Doctor is tied up in trauma and violence and horror. Davies’ Doctor is fundamentally broken. This is a compelling dramatic hook, but it is also maybe wearing itself a bit thin after so many years. “You changed your face and you found me,” Donna tells the Fourteenth Doctor. “Do you know why?” She answers her own question, “To come home.”

It is heartening and it’s earned. Davies’ Doctor finally has a home. Davies’ Doctor can finally heal himself. Once again, there’s a sense in which Davies has learned from Moffat. The Fourteenth Doctor is essentially speedrunning the character arcs that the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors enjoyed. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of all this. It’s very obvious in hindsight that The Star Beast, Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle are about Davies closing off his earlier run, writing a postscript to his first tenure that demonstrates how he has changed and evolved.

Of two minds about this.

This gets at another crucial difference between The Giggle and The Timeless Children. While The Timeless Children over-complicates the existing lore in a way that makes it much more difficult for audiences to jump on board, a significant aspect of The Giggle is about streamlining the continuity baggage that the show has accrued over the past few eighteen years. It’s no coincidence that the cutting of strings is a major recurring visual motif. This is a story clearly intended to serve as a breakpoint between what came before and what will follow.

The Giggle is full of continuity references to everything from The Daleks’ Master Plan to Dragonfire. There are colourized and remastered clips from The Celestial Toymaker. At one point, the Toymaker sits the Doctor and Donna down so he can do a recap of the fifteen years since Journey’s End. (Even then, it feels a bit harsh that the Doctor can’t be bothered to remember Yaz, Graham, Ryan or Dan.) This is a lot of exposition and while it’s delivered charmingly, it underscores the extent to which the character has built up baggage and history.

At the end of the episode, the Fourteenth Doctor is given a wish that he might use against the Toymaker. “My prize is to banish you from existence forever,” the Fourteenth Doctor asserts. The Fourteenth Doctor effectively exiles the Toymaker from continuity. For all the episode includes continuity, it returns time and again to the relative lack of importance of that continuity. “Games don’t have a memory,” Donna explains at one point. “Every game starts from scratch.” The Giggle is about the end of a game that has been ongoing since the First Doctor.

The Fifteenth Doctor insists that his predecessor take some time out to unwind and unpack, to decompress and work through his trauma. It’s revealing that the Fourteenth Doctor is last seen talking about some previous adventure, indulging in nostalgic continuity. The idea is that this affords the Fifteenth Doctor a clean slate. Ncuti Gatwa’s first season is being marketed as “season one.” As such, The Giggle serves as something of a series finale for the revival at the very least and perhaps for Doctor Who as a whole. It gives Davies a blank slate to work with, much like the Time War did when it was introduced in Rose.

Rose sighting!

It’s also worth acknowledging that Davies clealry has his eye on the future beyond the Fourteenth Doctor. There are some rather clumsy bits of foreshadowing, like the Toymaker’s reference to “the One Who Waits” or that shot of a woman’s hand taking the gold tooth that seemingly houses the Master. Davies isn’t simply wallowing in nostalgia for his own golden age. He is pushing the show forward and moving the pieces into position for his proper run.

Of course, this is still a risky proposition. The fact that the Fourteenth Doctor still exists and still has his own TARDIS will always exert a siren call. Even if Davies himself is strong enough to resist it, what about his successors? More than that, what about the fans? There’s a real risk that this decision effectively allows the most cynical and awful people on the internet to insist that Gatwa is not the “real” Doctor. And while Davies most certainly is not responsible for what those people do, he is smart enough to understand how they work and what he has given them.

Still, these are all potential future problems. Davies has certainly earned enough goodwill to go along with this. The Giggle is a messy and charming finale, bristling with big ideas and resolving in a clumsy but emotionally sincere way. It is a Davies story through and through, just one that feels like the work of a writer who is older and more mature. Everybody wins.

Filed under: Television |