Stenza

A season finale has to resolve something. That’s the entire job. Series 11 spent ten weeks deliberately avoiding an arc, which left this episode with nothing to pay off, so it goes back to the first episode and brings back the villain nobody was asking about.

“The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” is a finale in scheduling only. There’s no battle worth the name, no scale, and no sense that anything has been building. It is, by a comfortable margin, the flattest note this era ends on.

There is one good thing in it, and I’ll get to him.

Tim Shaw, Again

Tzim-Sha survived The Woman Who Fell to Earth and has spent the intervening time on Ranskoor Av Kolos being worshipped as a god.

The setup isn’t bad on paper. He crashed here, half-dead, and was found by the Ux, a two-person species with the ability to reshape reality through faith. They mistook him for their deity. He has been using them for millennia to build a weapon that steals entire planets and shrinks them into stasis, held in a chamber in his temple.

That’s a genuinely enormous crime. He has stolen five inhabited worlds and has them hanging in jars.

None of it registers, because Tim Shaw remains the same inert lump he was in episode one. Samuel Oatley does what he can under the prosthetics, but the character has no menace, no wit and no presence. He shuffles, he wheezes, he threatens. The show keeps telling us he’s a monster and never once makes us feel it.

You cannot build a finale on a villain the audience has already dismissed.

Nothing Has Any Scale

The production can’t afford what the script describes and doesn’t find a way around it.

Five stolen planets. A weapon that unmakes worlds. A species that shapes reality with belief. All of this happens in a small set of grey corridors with about six people in it. The Ux are two people in a room. The planets are glowing marbles in a cabinet. The battle of the title consists of the fam walking through some fog and then standing in a chamber talking.

Compare it to any previous finale. Davros and a stolen Earth. The Pandorica opening. The Cybermen coming up the floors of a colony ship. Those episodes made you feel the size of the threat even when the budget was straining. This one makes the destruction of five civilisations feel like a filing problem.

Mark Addy turns up as Paltraki, a decent, weary salvage captain who has lost his crew and his memory, and he’s fine, and the episode has no idea what to do with him either.

Graham Is the Only Reason to Watch

Here’s the good part.

Graham has been carrying a pistol since the last episode and he has told Ryan exactly what he intends to do. When he gets Tim Shaw alone, disabled and helpless, he has every reason and every opportunity.

He doesn’t kill him. He locks him in one of his own stasis chambers instead, which is both a better punishment and a decision that lets Graham stay who he is.

Bradley Walsh plays the whole sequence with a stillness that the rest of the episode can’t match, and Ryan turning up to stand beside him is the closing of the only real relationship this season built. Ryan calls him Grandad again. The two of them earned this over ten weeks, and it’s the sole thread that pays off.

It’s a good five minutes in a bad fifty.

The Doctor Has No Answer

There’s a moment that ought to be the centre of the episode and lands as an accident.

Tim Shaw’s whole grievance is that the Doctor humiliated him and cost him his position among the Stenza. Everything he has done since, the stolen worlds, the false godhood, the millennia of manipulation, follows from the day she beat him in Sheffield. That’s a real idea. The Doctor’s habit of winning and walking away has consequences, and here is one of them standing in front of her wearing a crown.

The show gestures at it and then declines to engage. She never has to answer for it, never has to weigh what her victory cost five planets, and the script gives her no moment of doubt. She simply treats him as a nuisance to be filed away.

Compare that to A Good Man Goes to War, where the Eleventh Doctor’s reputation built an entire fortress full of people waiting for him. That story made him look at it. This one changes the subject.

The Structural Failure

This is where I get properly annoyed, because the problem isn’t this episode. It’s the plan.

Chibnall decided against a season arc. Fair enough as a reaction to years of increasingly convoluted Moffat mystery boxes. But an anthology season only works if the individual stories are strong enough to stand alone, and this run produced two I’d genuinely recommend. The rest were themes in monster costumes.

So the finale arrives with nothing to conclude. No villain has been seeded except the one from week one that didn’t work. No mystery has been running. The Timeless Child was mentioned once, in episode two, and is not referred to again all season. That’s not restraint. That’s a hook dropped and forgotten, later dragged back to justify a rewrite of the Doctor’s origin that I still think is the worst decision this programme has ever made.

An arc would have given the season a spine. Better standalone monsters would have made an arc unnecessary. Doing neither leaves you with this.

Signing Off Without a Send-Off

The other thing a finale usually does is mark an ending, and this one can’t even manage that.

Nobody leaves. Nothing changes about the TARDIS crew. There’s no cliffhanger, no regeneration, no cost carried forward. The four of them walk back into the ship and the episode stops, and the era’s first year closes on a shrug. Even the New Year special that follows isn’t set up here in any way.

That’s a defensible choice if the season has been about something. Series 5 ended with a wedding and a reset. Series 9 ended with a memory wiped and a diner in the desert. Both earned their quiet by having spent thirteen weeks building toward it.

Here there’s nothing to be quiet about. The season’s only genuine arc, Graham’s grief, resolves fifteen minutes before the credits, and then the show has another half hour of plot to get through and no idea what to do with it.

The Ux deserve one more mention. A species who build with belief, in a show about a character whose enemies are made powerful by what people believe about him, and the episode uses them as a lever.

What Ranskoor Av Kolos Leaves Us With

A finale with nothing to finish. Here’s what it plants:

Tim Shaw returns. The season’s weakest villain promoted to final boss, still shuffling, still not frightening.
Five stolen worlds, in a cupboard. Enormous stakes rendered as marbles in a cabinet. No scale anywhere.
The Ux. A species who reshape reality through faith, given two rooms and no exploration.
Graham doesn’t shoot him. The one genuine payoff in the hour, ten weeks in the building, and Bradley Walsh nails it.
No arc to resolve. The structural choice of the season comes due, and there’s nothing in the account.

Rating: 1.5/5 — A finale in name only: no scale, no threat, no accumulated weight, built around the villain the season had already proved didn’t work. Graham and Ryan get a real ending and everything around them is filler. A limp close to a run that never decided what it wanted to be.

Five stolen planets in a glass case and a god nobody believed in. The best moment was an old man choosing not to pull a trigger. That should tell you where the season’s strength always was.

A new Doctor gets one job in their first episode: convince you, before the credits roll, that this is the same person in a different body. Jodie Whittaker does it in about ninety seconds, somewhere between falling through the roof of a moving train and cheerfully informing a carriage full of terrified strangers that she’s the one who’s going to sort this out.

She is immediately, obviously the Doctor. That was the thing everyone spent a year arguing about, and it turns out to have been the least interesting question in the room. She’s brilliant at it. After the long, elegiac goodbye of Twice Upon a Time, the change of gear is total.

The problem is everything built around her.

The Best Version of This Character in Years

Whittaker plays Thirteen as restless, delighted and slightly scattered, a person who thinks out loud because the thoughts arrive faster than the sentences. There’s a warmth to her that Capaldi deliberately withheld and that Smith turned into performance. This Doctor just likes people, straightforwardly, and is enormously pleased whenever one of them does something clever.

The forge sequence is the episode’s best idea. Stranded with no TARDIS and no sonic, she walks into a Sheffield metalworks and builds a new screwdriver out of scrap and Sheffield steel, narrating the whole thing like a woman assembling flat-pack furniture at two in the morning. It tells you what she is without a single line of exposition. Give her a workshop and a problem and she’ll improvise her way out.

Her speech about regeneration lands too. “We’re all capable of the most incredible change” is the sort of line that could be unbearable, and she underplays it into something almost casual.

The Fam

The three companions are the reason to keep watching, and it’s worth saying up front that all three work.

Bradley Walsh is the surprise. Graham O’Brien is a retired bus driver in remission from cancer, and Walsh plays him with an unfussy decency that the show hasn’t really had before. He’s frightened, he says so, and he keeps going anyway. Ryan Sinclair has dyspraxia, which the episode handles by showing him fail at a bike and then simply moving on rather than making a lesson of it. Tosin Cole underplays him nicely.

Yasmin Khan gets the least to do, which becomes a running problem across the season, but Mandip Gill makes a probationary copper who wants a bigger case feel like a real person with a real job.

Three companions is a lot. The TARDIS crew hasn’t been this crowded since 1982, and the episode is honest enough to let them get in each other’s way rather than pretending the arithmetic works.

Sheffield as a Character

One thing this era gets right from the first frame is place.

Previous showrunners treated Britain outside London as somewhere you visit for an episode. Chibnall is from the north and shoots Sheffield like somewhere people actually live: the tram, the ring road, the allotments, the back of a warehouse at three in the morning. Nobody explains the accents or apologises for them. It’s the most convincingly ordinary Britain the show has had since Rose Tyler’s estate.

That grounding matters more than it sounds, because it gives the fam somewhere to be from. Graham drove the buses. Ryan works in a warehouse and is trying to pass his driving test. Yaz is a probationary officer stuck on parking disputes. These are jobs, not backstory decoration, and the season keeps returning to them.

The direction lets the city breathe too. There’s a long take following Ryan up a hill with his bike that has no plot function at all and tells you everything about him.

The Villain Is a Man Who Collects Teeth

Here’s where it starts to wobble.

Tzim-Sha, which Ryan mishears as Tim Shaw and which the show then leans on as a joke for the rest of the season, is a Stenza warrior hunting a human as a trophy. He wears the teeth of his kills in his face. That’s a genuinely nasty visual and a decent hook for a villain.

He is also completely inert. He stomps about, he issues threats, he gets outsmarted by a woman with a homemade screwdriver, and at no point does he feel dangerous enough to justify the body count. The gathering coils, the DNA bomb, the whole apparatus of his hunt gets explained rather than dramatised. By the time he’s dealt with I’d stopped caring how.

This turns out to be the template for the season. The monster is a delivery mechanism for a theme, not a threat in its own right.

Grace

And then the episode does the one thing that genuinely sticks.

Grace O’Brien is the best character in the episode. She’s fearless, funny, entirely unbothered by aliens, and she dies climbing a crane to stop the coils, because she couldn’t leave it alone. It’s a real death, played straight, and the show doesn’t reverse it or soften it.

Everything good about the next ten episodes runs off that funeral. Graham’s grief is the only sustained emotional thread the season commits to, and Ryan’s slow, grudging acceptance of him is the only relationship that visibly changes over thirteen weeks. Sharon D. Clarke is in about twenty minutes of television and casts a shadow across the whole run.

The four of them standing in a field at the end, accidentally teleported into deep space, is a good closing image. Whittaker’s “come on then” is exactly right.

What It Gets Wrong

The direction is oddly flat for a debut. Everything is shot handheld and slightly grey, the Sheffield locations are used well but lit like a soap, and the new score by Segun Akinola is so understated it occasionally vanishes. After a decade of Murray Gold hammering every emotional beat, restraint is welcome. This is a bit further than restraint.

There’s also no hook. No crack in the wall, no impossible girl, no bad wolf. Chibnall has clearly decided the season-long mystery box is a Moffat habit worth breaking, which is a defensible call, and then puts nothing in its place. The episode ends and there’s nothing pulling you to next week except goodwill toward the cast.

No Title Sequence, No Theme

A small oddity worth recording: this episode has no opening titles.

It runs the cold open and then goes straight into the story, saving the new title sequence and Akinola’s arrangement of the theme for the end. It’s a confident choice and it works, treating the debut as an event rather than an episode.

The new sequence, when it arrives, is the best in the revived era. It drops the time vortex tunnel that every version since 2005 has used and goes back to the swirling, abstract, faintly unsettling patterns of the classic titles. The theme arrangement is sparse and percussive, closer to the Delia Derbyshire original than to anything from the Gold years.

Both are signals of intent. This production wants to look and sound different from what came before. It largely succeeds at that, and then struggles to find stories worth the new clothes.

What The Woman Who Fell to Earth Leaves Us With

A superb Doctor in a merely adequate episode. Here’s what it plants:

Whittaker is the real thing. Warm, quick, restless, unmistakably the Doctor. The casting argument was over before the first act finished.
A sonic built in a forge. Character established through craft rather than speech. The single best sequence in the episode.
The fam. Three companions who all work, which is harder than it sounds, with Bradley Walsh quietly the best actor in the cast.
Grace dies. The one loss the season actually commits to, and the engine for everything Graham does afterwards.
A villain who isn’t one. Tim Shaw looks superb and does nothing. First sign of a season that cares more about what a story means than whether it works.

Rating: 3.5/5 — A strong introduction to a Doctor I liked immediately, wrapped around a plot with no urgency and an antagonist who never earns his teeth. The cast is the asset here. The storytelling is already showing the flaw that defines the run.

She fell through a train roof, built a screwdriver out of scrap, and lost someone on the way. Good start on the person. Now do something with her.

The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos: A Finale That Forgot to Be One