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| Promotional photo for "The Witchfinders" (from BBC One - Doctor Who, Series 11, The Witchfinders) ©BBC |
"The Witchfinders" -- written by Joy Wilkinson -- isn't the first time Doctor Who has covered witch hunts and trials (see, for instance, Steve Lyons' excellent first Doctor PDA The Witch Hunters, which covers the Salem witch trials -- and which is one of a handful to have been reprinted relatively recently, so you should be able to find a copy without too much trouble), but it is the first time televised Who has directly tackled the subject. And this episode feels a lot closer to what we'd come to expect from BBC Wales's trips into history, with a famous historical figure (in this case, King James I, played marvelously by Alan Cumming) and an alien threat, than what we've gotten so far this series.
But what really makes "The Witchfinders" work is that it's the first episode to really take into account the fact that the Doctor is now a woman. Up to this point it's been acknowledged a little bit but then largely ignored, and the previous trips into history have been set up in such a way that the Doctor doesn't really need to justify herself just because of her gender. But here Wilkinson chooses to directly tackle what it means to be a woman in the past, and more importantly what it means for the Doctor to now be ignored just because of that. It starts small, with King James I reading the psychic paper as calling the Doctor the Witchfinder's Assistant, instead of the Witchfinder General as Becka saw, and treating her as second-class as a result. "Hold your tongue, lassie," King James tells the Doctor after she tries to interject into the conversation. "Stick to snooping and leave the strategy to your king." But then things escalate as the Doctor investigates the living mud which has started inhabiting the corpses of the "witches" Becka has already tried: "'Cos this is my problem. I can buy that this is the biggest ever witch hunt in England, or I can buy it's an alien mud invasion. But both on the same day? I can't buy that. ... Unless they're connected. Your witch hunt's been going on a while now, so there's no way that mud has just rocked up today. What do you know, Becka? What's going on here in Bilehurst Cragg? A woman who keeps an axe by her bed. What have you seen?" And since Becka knows that she's been infected (by Satan, she believes) and doesn't want to be found out, she instead accuses the Doctor of being a witch and turns King James against her. "Honestly," the Doctor grumbles, "if I was still a bloke, I could get on with the job and not have to waste time defending myself." But that's the point here; the Doctor now has to deal with the sexism of the time, and even though she's the smartest person in the room (so to speak) because she's a woman she can't get people to listen to her, and it ultimately leads to her being tried as a witch. It's a clear demonstration of the extra barriers that she now has to deal with, and it's handled very well, and in a way that it's difficult to imagine any of the male Doctors having to deal with. (Sure, Becka could accuse the Doctor of being a warlock, but it's honestly very hard to envision a version of this story where, say, the twelfth Doctor was disbelieved and then put on trial.)
So much of the drama here comes from the way the Doctor is constantly on the back foot, where all her skills can't convince people in power that she's not the enemy, and which leads to her being ducked as a witch herself, that everything after this point, where the aliens reveal themselves to be a race called the Morax, imprisoned inside Pendle Hill for war crimes until Becka Savage unwittingly released them by cutting down a tree that was actually the prison lock, feels a bit anticlimactic. We get some green flame (made from the wood of the not-tree) that's toxic to Morax, and then the Doctor does something clever and handwavy to reimprison them, and that's about it.
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| King James shows off his witchfinding tools. ("The Witchfinders") ©BBC |
But the ending is really more a minor flaw than a major problem. The real focus of the story is the Doctor, and how she handles being a woman in a time and place where that means being ignored and brushed aside. It was a story that needed to happen, and Joy Wilkinson does an excellent job of bringing it to life. "The Witchfinders", with a good script and some fabulous performances, is a standout of series 11.