There’s one idea in this episode that genuinely justifies casting a woman as the Doctor, and it’s a good one. For fifty years this character has walked into a room, produced a piece of psychic paper, announced they’re in charge, and been believed. Drop her into Lancashire in 1612 and none of that works, because nobody in that village is going to take orders from a woman. “The Witchfinders” understands this. It’s the only episode of the season that does anything with the Doctor’s gender beyond a passing joke, and when it stays on that idea it’s sharp. Then there’s a mud monster.
Pendle
The setting is a gift. Witch trials, a village drowning its own people, a landowner running the ducking stool. Joy Wilkinson’s script gets the texture right: the ordinary neighbours who show up to watch, the way accusation spreads once it’s been made profitable, the total absence of anywhere to appeal. Siobhan Finneran is very good as Becka Savage, the landowner presiding over the killings with a conviction that curdles into panic as the episode goes on. She’s hanged thirty-six people. She’s also, crucially, a woman who has secured her own power by being the loudest enforcer of the system that would otherwise crush her, and Finneran plays that with no sympathy asked for. The ducking sequence is properly grim. The Doctor arrives mid-execution, tries to stop it with authority she doesn’t have, and fails. Someone dies in front of her while she’s still explaining who she is.
That’s the good stuff, and it keeps going. Graham gets handed the Witchfinder General’s hat and is instantly assumed to be the one in charge. The Doctor’s protests are treated as a woman making noise. She dives in to save a drowning woman and is immediately accused of witchcraft herself. By the third act she’s tied to the ducking stool with the King of England presiding over her execution. Whittaker plays the mounting frustration well, and her line about how she’d have sorted this out in a heartbeat in her old body is the best joke in the run, because it’s true and because it stings. It’s a real idea, dramatised rather than announced, which is what Rosa kept failing to do. The episode doesn’t have anyone deliver a speech about seventeenth-century misogyny. It just removes the Doctor’s authority and lets you watch her cope without it.
Alan Cumming is in a different programme
King James I is the most entertaining thing here and also completely destabilises the tone. Alan Cumming plays him as a camp, paranoid, flirtatious, wounded man who is genuinely frightened of Satan and genuinely attracted to Ryan, and he is having the time of his life. Every line reading is enormous. The performance is legitimately funny. The trouble is that the episode around him is about state-sanctioned murder of women, and the two pitches don’t mix. One scene is a woman being drowned by her neighbours, the next is Cumming doing a double take. The whiplash is severe, and the episode never decides which show it wants to be. His backstory lands, mind. The father murdered, the mother who abandoned him, the lifelong terror of being got at. It’s a genuinely sad portrait, buried under a lot of mugging.
The episode has a fourth strong element that gets squeezed out, and it’s a shame. Willa Twiston is a young herbalist whose grandmother has just been drowned as a witch, and who is next in line for the accusation because she knows which plants do what. Tilly Steele plays her as frightened and practical, and the episode briefly has something genuinely interesting in hand: the woman with actual useful knowledge is the one most at risk from a community hunting for supernatural explanations. That’s the real history of witch trials in one character, because midwives and herbalists and widows with property were disproportionately the accused, since expertise in a woman looked like power and power looked like the devil. The script raises it and then needs her to run down corridors instead. Yaz gets a decent scene protecting her, which is at least Yaz getting something to do, and then the plot swallows both of them.
And then, mud
The Morax are where it collapses. The alien threat is a prison colony sealed under Pendle Hill, released when Becka cut down the tree that capped their prison. They reanimate corpses, which become mud zombies, which shuffle about the woods. They look terrible. Not stylised, not cheap-but-effective, just bad: grey clay faces with glowing eyes, moving slowly through fog. Every time one appears the episode’s carefully built dread evaporates. The Morax Queen possesses Becka, delivers some standard threat-of-conquest dialogue, and is defeated by being lured back to the hill and re-sealed. None of it connects to the witch trials in any meaningful way. The village has been murdering innocent women for years without alien assistance, which is the horrifying and true thing the episode had in hand. Adding actual supernatural evil to a story about false accusations of supernatural evil is a category error. It muddles the one point worth making.
Take the Morax out. Keep Becka, keep James, keep a Doctor who can’t get anyone to listen. You’d have a tight, nasty historical about how a community talks itself into murder, with a lead character stripped of her usual tools. That episode is right here, three-quarters written. The season’s format demanded a monster, so it got one, and the monster is made of clay. Eight episodes in, I’ve stopped expecting this run to trust a story without one. Doctor Who has a long history with witch-hunt stories and this one sits low in the pile. “The Daemons” understood that the power of the setting comes from a village turning on itself. “The Masque of Mandragora” and “The Awakening” both used superstition as a lens on real social control. Even The Shakespeare Code, which is a much sillier episode, had the sense to make its witches genuinely theatrical and to keep the historical figure at the centre of the plot rather than orbiting it. What those stories share is a refusal to let the supernatural element off the hook. If you introduce real magic into a story about false accusations of magic, you have to reckon with what that does to the accusers. Were they right? Partly right? The episode never asks. There’s also a missed opportunity in James himself. A king who wrote a book on demonology, presiding over the execution of a woman who genuinely is from another world, is a delicious irony that the script notices and does nothing with.
What it leaves behind is authority removed, with Graham getting the hat and the deference while the Doctor gets accused, the best use of the gender change in the entire era. It leaves Becka Savage, Siobhan Finneran as a woman enforcing the system that would otherwise destroy her, played without a plea for sympathy. It leaves Alan Cumming, wildly entertaining and in a completely different programme from the one about drowning women. It leaves the Morax, mud zombies that look dreadful and mean nothing, in a story about false accusations of the supernatural. And it leaves a historical that dramatises instead of lecturing, with no speeches, because the situation makes the argument and it works.
Rating: 2.5/5. A strong idea, a great guest performance and the season’s smartest use of its own casting, dragged down by a rubbish monster that actively undercuts the point. There’s a very good episode in here with the aliens deleted. As broadcast, it’s half a good one. A village drowning its neighbours, a king terrified of the devil, and a Doctor nobody would listen to. All it needed was to leave the mud in the ground.