This review contains spoilers.
It’s revealing that pretty much all the responses I’ve read to Fugitive of the Judoon (episode 5, series 12) consist of fan theorising, rather than, say, criticisms of character or plot. It’s not difficult to see why: this story of rhino-like Judoon descending into a weekday-morning Gloucester to menace an apparently unremarkable couple features a cameo from Captain Jack Harkness, back for the first time in ten years, a hitherto-unknown incarnation of the Doctor (the first played by a person of colour) and a cryptic reference to “the lone Cyberman” to which, we assume, the long arc of series 12 is bending. Oh! And a bonus sexy Time Lord. With its hints and mysteries, it’s not so much a standalone episode as it is a set-up for larger stories to come.
And yet it works pretty well, certainly in my view, as a lore-focused episode; in fact it’s probably the best of the series’ stories so far. Unlike, for example, Spyfall, it’s pretty consistent in tone and perspective, following a single mystery – why are the Judoon after a tour guide and someone who works at Bathrooms4U? – through to its conclusion, without getting distracted along the way.
I think that what makes it work so well as a fan-service story is that it’s self-consciously structured as one: it asks us to revise our understanding of Doctor Who just as it asks the Doctor to revise her understanding of her own past (a process whose significance will become clearer later on in the series). The first half of the episode juxtaposes the mundane and the alien: the Judoon in a quiet cathedral town, inside the cathedral itself (“this is a place of worship,” the Doctor says, “show some respect”), besieging an ordinary-looking block of flats.
The recurrent image of a lighthouse leads us, appropriately enough, into the second half of the episode. A lighthouse is decidedly not mundane; nor is the practice of living in it, as tour guide Ruth’s parents apparently did. This mysterious building, which Ruth sees a couple of times in flashback before taking us there, functions almost Gothically: it’s a liminal, haunted space where Ruth and the Doctor encounter unexpected truths about themselves, before travelling into the fully alien space of a Judoon spaceship.
So the episode leads the Doctor, and by extension us, through a psychological rupture, leaving our understanding of Chibnall-era Who fundamentally changed. Its biggest flaw is probably Captain Jack’s subplot: his literal only purpose is to kidnap Graham, Yaz and Ryan accidentally and give them a cryptic warning before depositing them back on Earth, which seems a rather clumsy way of removing the Doctor’s companions from the main plot. On the other hand, I appreciated the depiction of the Judoon as a trigger-happy police force – an analogy given particular force by the fact that Ruth is Black.
All in all, I’d call this the first good episode of series 12, a turning point leading into a relatively stronger second half.
The English Student 