The second episode of a new era usually has one job: prove the first one wasn’t a fluke. “The Ghost Monument” instead proves something less encouraging. It shows you that this production team can build a genuinely beautiful piece of television and then forget to put a story inside it. It looks tremendous. South Africa doubles for the dead planet Desolation, all bleached rock and hard light, and after ten years of Cardiff quarries the sheer scale of it is a pleasure. Segun Akinola’s score finally gets some room. There are shots here as good as anything in the revived show. Nothing that happens in front of them matters.
The race that isn’t
The premise is a race. Two survivors of the Rally of the Twelve Galaxies, Angstrom and Epzo, are competing for a fortune, and the finish line is a structure that appears on Desolation once every thousand rotations. The Doctor and the fam get scooped up en route and tag along. A race needs urgency. This one has none. The two competitors stop racing almost immediately and spend the episode walking, which turns the whole structure into a countryside ramble with occasional briefing. Nobody overtakes anybody. There’s no clock you can feel. The prize is money, which is the least interesting thing anyone in Doctor Who has ever wanted. Susan Lynch and Shaun Dooley are both decent, and both are given exactly one character trait each. She’s looking for her family. He was taught not to trust anyone by a mother who left him on a mountain. They swap these facts, learn to work together, and share the prize. You can see the shape of it from the first scene.
The planet is the best thing in the episode, and the show keeps almost using it. Desolation was a weapons laboratory. The Stenza, briefly and usefully connected back to Tim Shaw, hired scientists to build here and then killed them and poisoned the world. There are killer robots patrolling the sand, sniper drones, and water full of microbes that eat flesh. That’s four separate genuinely good threats. Each one gets about three minutes. The robots are dispatched, the drones are dispatched, the water is crossed. Nothing escalates. The episode moves through its hazards like a checklist rather than building any of them into a real obstacle, and by the halfway mark you understand that none of these things are going to seriously trouble anybody. The Doctor’s line about the Stenza, that they conquer by making a world uninhabitable and then taking it, is the closest the season gets to building a recurring threat, and a rare thread back to The Woman Who Fell to Earth. It goes nowhere.
The Remnants and the clue
Then, briefly, the episode gets frightening. The Remnants are rags. Strips of cloth that hang in the dark, move like snakes, and speak. They read minds, and they use what they find, which is the one moment in the hour where something feels genuinely wrong rather than merely hazardous. Rachel Talalay would have done something extraordinary with them. What they say to the Doctor is the whole reason this episode gets discussed at all. They taunt her with something she’s buried: “the Timeless Child.” She has no idea what it means. For now it’s just two words in the dark, and as a hook it works.
The Doctor without her ship
There is one thread worth following, and it’s about faith. Thirteen spends the episode insisting the TARDIS will come. Not hoping. Insisting, past the point where the evidence supports it, to three people who have no reason to believe her and every reason to be furious that she brought them here. Whittaker plays the certainty as something closer to stubbornness than confidence, and when it briefly cracks, the crack is the best acting in the hour. Graham gets the sharpest material off the back of it. He’s the only one willing to say out loud that they might die out here because a stranger made a promise she can’t keep, and Bradley Walsh delivers it without rancour, which makes it land harder. Ryan’s response, emptying a rifle at a squad of robots because he learned to shoot on a games console and it doesn’t work, is a nice puncture of the action-hero instinct. The fam are still the reason to watch.
The ghost monument is the TARDIS, phasing in and out of reality, and the moment it finally solidifies is the emotional payoff the episode has been saving. The new interior is gorgeous: crystalline pillars, a hexagonal console with a slab of what looks like alien rock in it, biscuit dispenser included, and warm orange light rather than the cold blues of the Capaldi years. It feels lived in and slightly organic, and it’s the first design choice of the era that’s unambiguously an improvement. Whittaker’s delight at seeing her ship again is lovely. So is the custard cream gag. The last two minutes are the best two minutes.
The problem underneath
Here’s my real complaint, and it’s about the season more than the episode. Two episodes in, this show has decided it doesn’t do returning monsters and doesn’t do arc plots. What’s left has to be monster-of-the-week storytelling strong enough to stand alone, and “The Ghost Monument” is not that. It’s a travelogue with a moral about cooperation, and the moral arrives on schedule whether the story has earned it or not, which is the same complaint I’d end up making about Arachnids in the UK a fortnight later. You can strip out the aliens entirely and the episode still ends the same way, with two people learning to trust each other. When the science fiction is that removable, it isn’t really science fiction. It’s set dressing.
Worth flagging one small design decision that pays off across the season, though. The new sonic screwdriver, built in the forge last week, is deliberately limited. It scans, it analyses, it does some basic mechanical work, and it repeatedly cannot do the thing the plot needs. The Doctor complains about it. She has to improvise around it. After a decade of the sonic quietly becoming a magic wand that resolved any obstacle within reach, that’s a healthy correction, because removing a get-out-of-jail tool forces the writing to find actual solutions. The trouble is that this season doesn’t take advantage. Having stripped the Doctor of her easy answer, the scripts mostly replace it with a lot of talking rather than ingenuity. She still solves things quickly. She just explains more while doing it.
What it leaves behind is the best-looking episode of the era, South Africa and hard light and a proper sense of scale, because whatever else is wrong, the photography isn’t. It leaves a race with no racing, two competitors who stop competing in act one, chasing a prize made of money. It leaves four threats and none developed, robots and drones and poisoned water and killer rags, each getting three minutes and none of them escalating. It leaves the Remnants, genuinely unsettling for about four minutes and then gone, the one thing here I’d have wanted more of. And it leaves “the Timeless Child”, two words that will eventually be used to rewrite the Doctor’s entire origin, badly, which works as a hook and should never have been kept as a promise.
Rating: 2.5/5. Handsome, watchable and completely inert. The new TARDIS is a win and the Remnants are a flash of something better, but a race with no urgency and hazards with no escalation makes for an hour that evaporates on contact. The cast keep it afloat. Nothing else does. A dead planet, a walking race, and two words whispered by a rag in the dark. The ship came home, at least. That part I’ll take.