The first of the Big Finish audio stories featuring Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor and Mandip Gill as Yazmin Khan, “Vampire Weekend,” dropped on July 3. It’s thoroughly mid. The quality of Big Finish audio adventures has been steadily sinking for a decade thanks to too many releases and a shrinking pool of writers regurgitating the same ideas. Now, it’s a pale shadow of what it was in the 2000s.
It’s not that writer Tim Foley turns in a bad haunted house mystery. It’s just that it feels very stale and phoned-in. We’re a long way from weird adventures where the theater of the mind can do stuff that would be impossible on television. The days of wild experimentation in stories like “Scherzo” or the Sixth Doctor’s fights against Nobody Noone are long gone. Having the first woman Doctor and first all-woman Tardis team (to say nothing of the rampant lesbian couple subtext) break into the audio medium by crashing a catty bachelorette party to fight vampires that make people say exactly what is on their minds in an adventure written by a dude felt like something an out-of-touch executive would order, not a hungry young writer conceive.
There are some bright spots. Whittaker gets some real zingers in. “Have you met somebody who turns up in a place and then everything goes bananas and people start screaming? Right, well, you have now.” There’s also a fun moment when Yaz is helping an injured Doctor back to the Tardis only to find that she’s parked in the middle of a hedge maze. “Why would you do that?” asks Yaz. “Because I’m a silly billy,” The Doctor replies. Little bits like this capitalize on the excellent characterization Thirteen got in her first season before the Chris Chibnall era fell apart.
Unfortunately, Thirteen and Yaz’s relationship is still as awkward and poorly written as it was on television. Yaz goes from fawning to frustrated and back in a matter of minutes, even listing some of The Doctor’s faults while Thirteen pretends not to listen to her as she works on a sabotaged fuse box. I guess it’s nice that we’ve gone from Thirteen being unreasonably mean to Yaz to Yaz doing it back, but it does both characters a disservice.
I think Yazmin Khan is probably the greatest squandered opportunity in New Who, and “Vampire Weekend” just further highlights it. The only reason that Yaz is so well regarded is because Gill herself is wonderfully likeable and the friendship between her and Whittaker is clearly genuine. Yet, she never achieves the sense of partnership seen between Twelve and Clara or Fifteen and Ruby.
Part of it was the fumble over their romantic relationship. Yazteen is one of the most intense Doctor Who ships of all time. However, it always seemed like Chibnall was afraid of addressing that openly except at the end of Whittaker’s run with a sloppy rejection by The Doctor that felt like Whittaker could barely suppress an urge to vomit while performing. There’s a reason Russell T Davies had Thirteen pop in during “The Reality War” to confess she loves Yaz to her successor.
Still, this could have been great. Unrequited love stories surrounding The Doctor go back to “The Aztecs” and have been used for all kinds of narratives. Martha Jones got an incredible character arc that went from pining for a man on the rebound who didn’t love her that way to asserting herself in the best Tardis walkout since Sarah Jane Smith.
There are plenty of love story templates that Yaz’s crush could have gone through, from Amy Pond to River Song, but Yaz just ended up this background character. If there is one thing that was consistently wrong with the Thirteenth Doctor’s time, it was that stories were almost always afraid to take that last step into something new and daring. It was a cautious half-measure style, the Democratic Party of storytelling, and it’s just as frustrating.
More than that, though, is everyone’s refusal to address Yaz’s role as a cop in a meaningful way. In “Vampire Weekend,” she reminds everyone that she’s in training to be a detective, which she probably has to do because her sleuthing is par at best. Doctor Who is always pulling from Scooby Doo, and Yaz ranks no higher on that scale than any non-cop companion.
There were so many interesting things that could have been done with Yaz’s role as a cop the way we saw Belinda use her nursing skills or Donna’s admin background. In fact, in places where Yaz should get some deep emotional scenes related to her pre-Doctor life, we never see it. When the Tardis crew visits the witch hunts, Yaz doesn’t get to wrestle with how authorities are used to persecute people. When Britain is literally using Daleks to enforce a police state, Yaz has no meaningful crisis of conscience about it.
It’s not even that Yaz comes down on the side of the police. It’s that the matter is not really addressed at all. Yaz is always The Doctor’s plus one and never part of the system of law enforcement except when she has to defend her competency at figuring out a puzzle. Even “Demons of the Punjab,” arguably Yaz’s best story with her as a main focus, is mostly about the complicated racial politics and not about the arbitrary nature of force.
Think back to the Jon Pertwee era where Three and the Brigadier were constantly at odds with each other over what it meant to use armed force in the name of peace. That’s an existential crisis that has shown up in everything from “Day of The Doctor” to Tom Baker’s famous “do I have the right?” speech. It’s imbedded in the foundation of Doctor Who, but when The Doctor has a literal cop along for the ride, that cop usually has no opinion on the matter because she’s too busy having a romantic relationship badly written by men.
I was deeply hoping that Big Finish would be the redemption format for Thirteen the way it has been for Paul McGann and Colin Baker. Instead, the first outing is a lackluster adventure that feels like a b-side. Thus far, there is little being done with Thirteen or Yaz that Chibnall already didn’t try. It’s deeply incurious and unadventurous, and Thirteen and Yaz are the team that can least afford that in their canon.
“Vampire Weekend” is available now at BigFinish.com
