Doctor Who Series 11: 10 Huge Questions After Kerblam!

The death toll for series 11 continues to rise, and the sneak peek into next week’s witch trials episode suggests this not about to slow down. There isn’t any pattern behind the killings (unlike the deaths in series 8 for instance), rather death is indiscriminate and often interrupts the flow of the story, just as it shatters life itself. We are not always moved to care about the victim (the kebab guy in episode one is the first that comes to mind), and feel instead a sense of injustice that the villains, up until this week, have not been getting their comeuppance.

Not before time we have a villain who meets his end, but the moment isn’t even bittersweet. There can be no satisfaction of justice or glib joking about how he received his just desserts. He might be a terrorist, but Charlie is depicted as being as much of a victim as those he claims to represent. Coming straight off the back of Prem’s death in Demons of the Punjab, finally we can understand the ninth Doctor’s jubilation that ‘just this once, everybody lives.” Whether we will be able to join in such a dance remains to be seen.

Has Doctor Who ever been so grim? In the classic series, Doctor Who took a particularly deadly direction in the Saward/Nathan-Turner years. Resurrection of the Daleks is probably the classic series episode with the highest number of on-screen deaths. But the death count while dramatically shortened during Steven Moffat’s time at the helm, had been surprisingly high after Russell T Davies brought the series back. With over 100 victims, David Tennant’s fourth series has notched up the most on-screen deaths since 2005. Series 11 perhaps feels more focused on death because so far almost every death occurs on an individual basis and receives specific comment or reflection.