The Doctor Who Review | Season 11 Episode 8

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WARNING! SPOILER ALERT! Welcome back to the Doctor Who Review, where I recap the week’s episode and give some thoughts and opinions on it. Please do not read if you have not seen this week’s episode. There are major spoilers ahead. You have been warned. Check out the rest of the Doctor Who Reviews here.

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Title: The Witchfinders

Written by: Joy Wilkinson

Welcome to Lancashire, England in the 17th century, where people are in the midst of accusing nearly everyone of being a witch. Team TARDIS lands in the middle of it all, and as the Doctor dives into the water to save ‘witch’ who has been dunked in using the ducking stool (Willa, the woman’s granddaughter, becomes a main part from here), we meet Becka Savage. Becka has been trialling witches for forever it seems, and the team are horrified to step into the middle of this story. As well they should be.

The Doctor persuades Becka that she’s the ‘Witchfinder General’, but when King James I appears in the story, the piece of magical paper doesn’t work on him, and it’s here that the Doctor’s new gender is finally really addressed. King James reads the paper and sees that the Doc is the assistant, claiming that Graham, the white man, must be the general. While King James is annoying and thinks women shouldn’t be doing anything, by the end of the episode you kind of love him.

Back to the story. Thirteen, Ryan and Graham head back to Becka’s house, where they meet King James, while Yas goes to find Willa. As they’re walking in the woods, they find Willa’s grandmother all spooky like and back from the dead, and it’s here that we get a monster to fight. The rest of the episode has Team TARDIS running around trying to figure out what these mud monster things are, and eventually it comes to light that they are Morax (spelling?), a race of alien warriors. Finally, some monsters!! They’re using the bodies of dead ‘witches’ and their leader wants Kind James, and while it’s touch and go for a while, the team manages to thwart the monsters, and all is (mostly) well again in England. The Doctor tells King James ‘no more witch hunts’ and they leave the 17th century.

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My thoughts on The Witchfinders

I realised, watching this episode, that I really really missed proper monsters. The whole season has been super ‘meh’ when it comes to actually creepy things, leaving every one of them with a tame problem to solve. Boring. Give me monsters. Thank you. If I were a young kid though, this episode would have been rather creepy. The zombie-like people walking around, the dunking of witches, the oppression of women, the whole thing is a little creepy … and it’s about time.

The story, as a whole, was enjoyable. I love me some historic episodes like this, heading back in the past on earth and causing mayhem (or fixing it, as the case may be), so any episode like that is going to move up in my favourites list. But just because it moved up, doesn’t make it an all time favourite. Far from it. There were still things lacking, and while we’re never going to have the perfect episode (or are we? Those library episodes in David Tennent’s day were pretty epic, and the Angel episodes with Matt Smith…just saying) the script wasn’t on point this week, and we didn’t even get a Doctor speech.

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Overall

Story was good, but there was no character development nor really strong calls from the Doctor. It’s a tough one, especially because I did actually enjoy the episode. Perhaps it’s the season as a whole that’s just getting to me. I don’t know. Two more to go!

What did you think of this week’s episode?