With a flamboyant showing of King James I, mud zombies, and a brand new alien threat, ‘The Witchfinders’ somehow ends up being both the campiest and creepiest episode yet in series 11. New writer Joy Wilkinson dips back into the sort of historical episodes we might have expected from the Tennant era where famous icons frequently met outlandish creatures, and yet she also balances this with the more sombre tone of recent historicals such as ‘Rosa’ and ‘Demons of the Punjab’.
After witnessing an English witch trial during the 17th century, the Doctor, Ryan, Yaz, and Graham quickly find themselves in familiar moral territory – how much can they interfere with the past without destroying the main timeline? This has been the crux of previous episodes, and yet this time round the Doctor is unable to bear this responsibility and inserts herself directly into the events taking place. As the deceased women accused of witchcraft start to rise from their graves, the TARDIS team find themselves drawn into a conspiracy that is stoking fear among the locals and a paranoid King James I.
Alan Cumming steals every scene in this role, chewing the scenery as the delightfully foppish monarch. Despite his theatricalities, Cumming’s portrayal is strikingly accurate when compared to historical records. Controversially homosexual and fascinated with witch-hunts to the point of obsession, Cummings injects some lightness to the episode when it is often at risk of being dragged down in grimness.
It is also worth noting how dependent the Thirteenth Doctor has been on her psychic paper this series, and in this episode we are enlightened a little as to the reason behind this. More than any of her predecessors she is struggling to be taken seriously as a leader in tight situations, and this is never more obvious than when King James positively refuses to accept that she could be a Witchfinder General. When the Doctor deduces that the leader of the witch trials, Becka Savage, may have a hidden agenda, her own assertiveness and sharp wits backfire as false evidence for dabbling in witchcraft. This is a fairly definitive moment for the Thirteenth Doctor, as she states so aptly:
Honestly, if I were still a bloke, I could get on with the job and not have to waste time defending myself!
This isn’t the first time we have wrestled with historically institutionalised sexism in Doctor Who, but ‘The Witchfinders’ is particularly innovative in the way it positions the Doctor as the one directly threatened by it. This is the sort of story we would not be able to get with any other incarnation, and Jodie Whittaker nails each moment of it. The stakes are high in the same way they were in ‘Rosa’ and ‘Demons of the Punjab’ – naturally, anyone transported back in time would have to adapt to entirely different social expectations or risk their lives.
Bullying becomes the main theme of ‘The Witchfinders’, and Wilkinson specifically examines how a victim’s allies may be pressured to turn against their friend out of fear that they too may become victimised. We see this most obviously in Willa’s betrayal of the Doctor, but we also see it in the way Becka lashes out at the innocent women of the town to distract from her own insecurities and secrets. We also spend some time learning about Yaz’s own experiences with bullying, which strengthens these themes and simultaneously develops her own backstory.
Although the mud zombies are brilliantly realised, the explanation for their rising comes a little too late in the episode, and feels weirdly out of place with everything else going on. Perhaps it is because we are so used to the more pure historicals from earlier this series, but the sudden introduction of the Morax race is heavy on exposition and is resolved far too quickly, leaving an ending that is rushed and underdeveloped.
Despite this, ‘The Witchfinders’ continues a run of strong episodes that know what they’re about and unabashedly follow through on what they promise. The balance of campy and sombre tones allows the story to rein itself in before going too far in either direction, and it instead hits a comfortable midpoint between the two. Apart from a couple of times that ‘The Witchfinders’ loses its footing, these slip ups fortunately don’t detract too much from what is a wonderfully thrilling and creepy story.
