After taking a brief break from historical name dropping in “Orphan 55,” Doctor Who is back in Earth’s past with “Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror,” spending time with Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison.
Emmet Asher-Perrin had to have brain surgery last week, so for those who follow their Doctor Who coverage, the next few weeks will be a slightly different format. There are no recaps here—instead, you get to follow along as Emmet and their husband, Sylas K Barrett, discuss what they thought about the episode!
Emmet: Ohh, this episode is written by a woman.
Sylas: Hurray!
Emmet: That’s the dude from Practical Magic who tries to kill Nicole Kidman.
Sylas: He looks so much like the actual Nikola Tesla it’s impressive. As is that hairstyle. [A short amount of googling later] And the actor is Croatian, which is appropriate because Tesla was from modern-day Croatia.
Emmet: Oh that’s really cool.
Sylas: Yaz’s pants dress is amazing. That whole outfit is gorgeous and she makes it look so good.
Emmet: Oh wow, it’s pants! I bet they have pockets, too. I love that Yaz was so practical and was like, ‘give me something I can run in.’
Sylas: She’s been with the Doctor long enough, she knows what she’s in for. But you know, they kind of are dropping the ball with Yaz so far this season. Like, she’s competent and doing things, but she’s not getting as much interesting interaction with the people they meet or as much time to put her personal stamp on things.
Emmet: Yeah. I really like what they’re doing with Ryan this season, and he and Graham have about equal focus in the episodes, but Yaz just kind of seems tired. Like she’s a bit fed up with things. And you know, she’s the one who was told in the first episode that she’ll lose her job if she stays away too much longer. So they may be building up to something, possibly in the season finale. I hope so, because otherwise they’re really not doing Yaz justice.
Sylas: Yeah there’s been some weird character things that they’ve dropped both in this episode, and in the last one, I thought. Like the whole thing with Bella and her mom in “Orphan 55” was so under explained. You can’t say a woman is willing to bomb a spa because her mom neglected her and not explore that further. Also, did you notice how the Doctor didn’t wipe Tesla and Edison’s memories like she did for Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat-Khan?
Emmet: I did! I think it’s just sloppy housekeeping. As show-runner, Chibnall should have caught it and told Nina Metivier ‘hey, this is something the Doctor is doing now.’
Sylas: It’s just so weird because it comes off weirdly sexist? Why does Inayat-Khan not get to remember the things she saw but Edison can? And Lovelace literally begs the Doctor not to take away her memories of the future, but Tesla has this beautiful speech at the end about how the future belongs to him.
Emmet: Yeah I agree. But I do like this episode a lot. The really interesting thing is this juxtaposition between Tesla and Edison. You spend the episode building up to this fight between them, we’re waiting for it. And finally we get Edison saying ‘I’m a genius because I curate and bring people’s good ideas to reality, and I bring the good inventions to the people.’ And Tesla responds ‘But you don’t have ideas, I have my own great ideas and that makes me better.’
Sylas: Right.
Emmet: But they’re both wrong, and I love that they’re both wrong. We can see that so clearly with Edison, of course. And the episode is very much on Tesla’s side, but in actuality the lone wolf genius thing is also wrong. Collaboration, and teamwork, and community is what makes the best ideas and the best work.
Sylas: Oh wow, you’re so right. I hadn’t thought of that. And it’s true, the episode thinks Tesla’s right, but Doctor Who and the spirit of Doctor Who is very much about this idea of collaboration and teamwork. Even though the Doctor is always the center figure whose genius and determination saves the day, the show continually reiterates the importance of the people around her and the people who she work with, whether it’s regular companions or episode companions.
Emmet: Even though the Doctor is always the man, or woman, who comes in and saves the day with her genius.
Sylas: Yeah it’s a weird balance. But Tennant’s era made a particular effort to have him be reminded of that fact from time to time, and now we have Thirteen with her whole group of companions the way some of the classic Doctors do, which brings that theme home again. It’s very reminiscent of Peter Davison’s era.
Emmet: And then the Edison angle is mirrored in the Queen of the Skithra. She gets other people to do her work for her, and scavenges all her tech. She collects other people’s and other societies inventions and tech, and literally asks the Doctor what would be the point of making things themselves when they can take them, or force others to help them. And in the end, she needs a Tesla, just like Edison does.
Sylas: Right. The only difference between them is that Edison isn’t a murder scorpion from another planet. You know, it’s interesting that they chose to do Ada Lovelace and Nikola Tesla in the same season, and so close together.
Emmet: Last season they made a big deal about how this version of the Doctor is so much more into science than any of the modern Doctors. This deep fascination has been such a through line for her character, and I wonder if this has anything to do with the season arc. We’re getting all these individual geniuses, maybe they’ll come together at the end, either literally or thematically.
Sylas: Maybe it has something to do with The Timeless Child?
Emmet: Yeah, I wonder if it will. Especially since the Master was like “the truth of our existence is bound up in this thing” and “they’ve lied to us about who we are.” I wonder if this is going to be payoff about how the myth of the founding of the Time Lords is built around a singular person called the Timeless Child, but that’s not actually true.
Sylas: Well, this fits with what we know about Time Lord culture, with all the weird patriarchal stuff we’ve seen in Classic Who, and then there’s Rassilon as this weird savior figure, which Russel T. Davis brought back into New Who in Tennant’s last episodes.
Emmet: That’s a whole other thing, because we’re not entirely certain if they’re keeping all of that Rassilon stuff. They could be—I wouldn’t hate if they were but also it would make sense if they decided not to.
Sylas: Which famous inventor do you think they’ll do next?
Emmet: Well, they could do Rosalind Franklin. I find it fascinating because Lovelace and Tesla are people who in the past ten to fifteen years have finally been more recognized, and getting their dues. I remember reading the book The Double Helix in junior high, and at the time I totally missed the Rosalind Franklin angle—and the way they wrote it makes it sound like she was just a really competent assistant. And then later I realized that she was the one who was doing all the real work.
Sylas: You know, at one point I thought maybe this was going to be like the Van Gogh episode, that they would prove to Tesla that someday he was going to get his recognition, even though it doesn’t come in his life time.
Emmet: But Van Gogh was dealing with depression, and that episode was about how you can’t always save a person from their own demons. But Tesla doesn’t have this problem. He’s frustrated that he can’t get his funding and whatever, but he’s confident in himself and his work. He says it. “Having an idea and creating it is the best thing I know.” He’s okay.
Sylas: That’s true. And he gets to always know that Edison was jealous of his importance to the aliens, which is more than a lot of people get. He’s lucky. And so is Dorothy Skerritt. I loved the fact that they made a point of comparing her journey in Tesla’s sphere to Ryan’s as a Doctor companion. It felt very respectful, and a reminder that Doctor Who at its best recognizes that the people who attach themselves to the Doctor, and extraordinary people in general, do it because they themselves are special and important. They aren’t lesser than.
Emmet: Yeah they don’t always get it right, but when they do it’s great.
Sylas: So overall we like the episode?
Emmet: Yeah! Some of the Skithra stuff is pretty sloppy, like how they have illusion technology but also there’s a guy in a cloak? Why do they always do that, you can’t see anything in a hood like that, it’s silly.
Sylas: What I think is silly is the whole hive-mind, if you kill the Queen, you kill all of them thing. Doctor Who has used up that trope, it needs to stop. Also there is no way that the Skithra aren’t a cousin species to the Racnoss, I refused to believe it. You can’t put Anjli Mohindra in makeup and prosthetics that similar, and have such a similar performance, and just ignore it. Give the Doctor one line about it and I’ll let it go, but it’s so weird that she doesn’t say anything.
Emmet: That’s fair.
Sylas: It’s just the Christmas Star all over again. But with Tesla and TARDIS-amplified lightning. But they made the costume easier and cheaper by making her humanoid somehow. She was dressed like the blacksmith from The Mandalorian, but with the Queen of the Racnoss’s face and some Klingon jewelry.
Emmet: You’re cute.
Sylas K Barrett would like to point out that, while this is not coverage of “Orphan 55,” the best character in that episode is named Sylas too, and even spells it the same way! Maybe I should dye my hair green.
Emmet Asher-Perrin would like the Master to dome back now, please.
Did we skip the Orphan 55 episode? I’ve checked the categories and seems like this is the first article since Spyfall 2.
In any event, I enjoyed it on the whole. I’m a EE in real life and as such I tend to have issues when they handwavium things in modern Earth technology so all the “wireless” chatter rings hollow or gives me a weird technology uncanny valley sensation. I had the same issue with The Bells of St John back in the 11th Doctor era. Alien technology that is relatively inexplicable doesn’t hit me the same way.
Though on the whole, it was a fun episode. I find it weird with all these facial prosthetics like the Racnoss and these Skithra that I tend to focus on the teeth so much. Same with Empress of Mars back with the 12th Doc.
I suppose I always pictured Tesla as more tortured than his frustrated but generally optimistic sort but it works here. And the decisions about which historical figures get to remember fantastical events and which ones don’t is definitely a problem that’s brewing. I think I would have preferred it if they’d gone a route more like “Rosa” where the interfering alien efforts are more clandestine and unobserved by the central history, but that also screws up the central premise that the Skithra desire Tesla himself, and not altering events around him. So I don’t know that there’s a good solution there.
The persistence of memory here didn’t feel sexist to me, but it certainly felt jarring and inconsistent from Spyfall and the closer to modern day they play I think it’s more of an issue.
I’m hoping for a good script that’s got some heart and punch to it to come along soon. I love Jodie Whitaker’s iteration on the Doctor and the ‘fam’ but I feel like aside from some standouts, scripts are largely failing the group.
Um, that’s Noor, not Nora.
I hope you are feeling better, Emmet!
Both the writer and director are women.
Yaz has had important scenes in all the episodes. In the episode ORPHAN 55 she was emotionally paired with the elderly woman as Ryan was with Bella the Bonkers, and her scenes made a lot more emotional and plot sense than Ryan’s. In SPYFALL, she paired with Ryan and led the action. Graham hasn’t had that much to do as those two, but the actor is so strong and alpha that he makes a much stronger impression on the viewer.
Goran Visnjic who played Tesla was the bad guy/antihero in the time travel series, TIMELESS. He can’t seem to escape period clothes and time travel. An awesome actor, though.
Tesla was a theorist, Edison was a practical engineer. Sadly, most people will only know Tesla as the name of an expensive electric car and not for his theories which have become practical facts. This episode certain showed what a d*ck Edison was.
This was very much a Doctor as Tennant episode. She gave the scorpion queen one chance to redeem herself, and, when she refused, the Doctor destroyed her like Tennant did the alien leader in his first episode. The cheerful and light Jodie Doctor from season 1 has gone much darker because of the Master’s revelations.
I thought the storytelling in this episode was very much in the style of last season. The aliens are there as an excuse to have the historical characters rather than vice versa. Until this episode, this season has been more about setting up plots than the historical characters.
Isn’t the tardis powered by its own sun but it doesn’t have enough to power to run the forcefield and charge the tower at the same time?
Welcome back Emmet!
It’s not just Yaz who is underused. With this episode, I felt like there were so many characters that none of them got anything to do. To the point that I’m not sure that anything actually happened… Dorothy Skerrit in particular is used as the equivalent to the Doctor’s companions, but as soon as Edison enters the picture, she’s just… there. If the point of the episode is that having the ideas is not enough and that nobody is great enough to build the future on their own, what’s the point of having her at all in the episode? It seems she’s just there to be forgotten about.
Regarding overlooked scientists, there’s this quote by Jocelyn Bell: “If you get a Nobel prize you have this fantastic week and then nobody gives you anything else. If you don’t get a Nobel prize you get everything that moves. Almost every year there’s been some sort of party because I’ve got another award. That’s much more fun.”
Regarding the Skithra being connected to the Racnoss, that’s probably true. The Oods were introduced as coming from the same system as the Sensorites, because they were similar in concept. As if coming from the same system meant there should be some genetic connection… I’m sure there will be a similar explanation if ever one species or the other gets reused.
It’s interesting how the Doctor left the queen a chance, and then manipulated the events so that only she would die; but then the queen appeared to panic and summon her entire army to her exploding ship. It’s good that this Doctor is finally accepting that sometimes it’s necessary to kill people to stop them from killing others, but contrary to earlier iterations, she still isn’t pushing that logic to causing genocide (the death of the crew is entirely the responsibility of the queen here)
I do like the emphasis on historical scientists so far this series. Beyond Rosalind Franklin, it could be Marie Curie and her husband in the 1900s, or to get a bit (a LOT) more obscure, microbial genetic research power-couple Esther and Joshua Lederberg in the 1950s.
The lack of mindwiping, at LEAST for Edison was very odd – it does seem like some sort of oversight at the showrunner level for this to be so inconsistent.
I like this episode. I keep defending it in conversations with friends who got used to look for mistakes in Doctor Who. This was great.
I think wiping memories to Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan was wrong – Doctor has met so many people (and told them so many spoilers) that it makes no sense whatsoever to start wiping memories to anyone now. Why these two? It pains me to hear people now question “why Doctor didn´t wipe Tesla´s memories?” – the real question is why she did it before.
I was surprised that Ryan and Yaz have apparently never heard about Tesla before. Had a “what do they teach in schools these days” conversation with a friend (we´re both around 30) and I´m curious – is Tesla really so unheard of in schools? (To be fair, my knowledge of this matter used to be “um, Tesla, um, something to do with fyzics and, um, electricity?” until I watched The Prestige and then googled more informations. But I still find it hard to believe that Ryan or Yaz would never ever even heard the name.
I agree that the Doctor made the right call here by not mindwiping Tesla and Edison. It was in Spyfall that she made the wrong call by violating Ada’s mind at the very least (Noor seemed to accept it). So this is more repairing the sins of the very recent past than getting it wrong.
As I said in another thread, I’ve never heard of Tesla, my dad had never heard of Tesla, so the surprise isn’t that Yaz and Ryan haven’t but that other people actually think he’s someone famous rather than an obscure figure from history.
And yes, not the Racnoss, and we were so busy focusing on that that we didn’t recognise Rani from Sarah Jane Adventures under the make-up! I agree that the “kill the queen and they all die” thing was a bit rubbish, and then made unnecessary by the fact they all beam back to the ship anyway, and then the ship doesn’t blow up (which would have probably resulted in it crashing in New York) but instead heads back into space or something? (Graphics really not clear at this point.)
Back to colour blind history, with no-one in 1903 commenting on our ethnically diverse TARDIS crew. No-one pays attention to Yaz’s warnings, but that seems to be more because she’s acting like a crazy person, and they listen to Edison because he comes up with a convincing cover story.
The movie The Current War told part of the rivalry between Edison and Tesla. It was not that Tesla did not want to collaborate with Edison. It was that Tesla’s ideas would make much of Edison’s previous research obsolete, so Edison would not support it. As a result. Tesla ends up collaborating with Westinghouse, who had also made overtures to Edison and was rejected. It was Edoson’s pride that got in thg he way.
At least according to that story.
I love Goran ever since he first appeared in ER.
I would love to see something about Roz Franklin. As the old joke goes: What did Watson and Crick discover? Roz Franklin’s lab notebooks…
I notice they did not “go there” with the urban legend that Tesla designed a death ray. Too bad he hadn’t built it yet or he could have used it on Edison…
@8, Apparently they want to have a diverse cast but not deal with the problems. It would be fun to plop the TARDIS crew down in African or Asian history and have the Doctor and Graham be the ones with the problem.
Edson is played by Robert Glenister, brother of Philip Glenister [BBC’s Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes].
@12: Who was also in the last Peter Davison story 36 years ago! (He and Davison played brothers in a near-contemporaneous sitcom. Which I’ve never seen.)
Telsa and Edison didn’t need to get mindwiped because this was a space-travel episode, not a time travel one. Edison and Telsa knew the Doctor was from somewhere else, but not somewhen else. People from throughout history have to deal with their own aliens…they just don’t get to know about the future.
…it’s not a great argument, but it has the benefit of at least an appearance of consistency.
I first learned of Telsa from Spider Robinson. To the best of my knowledge, the reality was even more eccentric than the TV depiction. When the Doctor first accused him of being a liar, I assumed she was saying he wasn’t the real Telsa because he wasn’t weird enough.
@13/cap-mjb
You’re not missing anything. It was pretty awful. If memory serves, it was shown between the announcement that Davison was to replace Tom Baker and the transmission of his first Doctor story, Castrovalva. It was called Sink or Swim.
Speaking of “name-dropping”, my ears certainly pricked up at the mention of the Silurian gun!