At first glance, this formulation does not seem atypical for Doctor Who. The Beast Below by Steven Moffat, and the Torchwood episode Meat by Catherine Tregenna both feature a large, ancient “monster” that has been captured and abused by the human race. But in both these stories, the beast is largely passive, an object of mingled pity and horror. Ultimately, the beast becomes a metaphor, a stand-in for the Doctor, in the case of The Beast Below, and a stand-in for Jack in Meat. These monsters give us the capacity to better understand and empathise with both series’ non-human leads.

Chibnall is doing something different. His natural monsters are deadly and non-apologetic. They kill people, and they don’t do it nicely. But the crux of both 42 and Arachnids In The UK is that this is not their natural behavior, and they wouldn’t be acting this way if it weren’t for us humans and our frustrating habit of greed. Much of science fiction asks us to empathise with and pity unfortunate scientists, who become victims of their own god-like creative urges. Chibnall, though, has no sympathy for those who despoil and distort the natural world. In fact, he would prefer that we reserve our sympathies for the writhing spider, suffocating under its own weight. It’s a bold move to insist on human accountability, and deserves respect, but the execution thus far has left something to be desired.

Moreover, instead of a standard good/evil binary, Chibnall has set up a binary of the natural vs the unnatural, which is human-induced. This binary is inherently limited and limiting. There’s a reason Doctor Who‘s most famous monsters are the Daleks and the Cybermen – both cyborgs. The cyborg, a mix of organic and machine, complicates the boundary between the natural and unnatural. The Daleks and Cybermen function like robots, but their motivations and flaws are all too recognisably human. They force us to ask ourselves where we draw the line between the human and the non-human, and how much the human can be altered, how much the natural can be distorted, before we deem it monstrous and unrecognisable.

You might say there was a sense of scale and wonder missing so far in Chibnall’s Doctor Who. And that’s because at the end of the day, everything is coming down to humans. The motto of Torchwood, which Chibnall co-produced, is famously, “If it’s alien, it’s ours”, and this pattern has played out in season eleven – it might seem alien, but really the problem is our own, a human problem. In The Tsuangra Conundrum, even the obstacle of an unstoppable, energy-munching mini-monster is overshadowed by an entirely human problem: that a medical transport ship is rigged by the powers-that-be back home to explode at the slightest danger. This tendency is at its height in Rosa, an episode where the enemy is racism, and any sci-fi elements are incidental.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a step-back from the tired ‘aliens plus historical figure’ formula. Aliens plus Dickens! Aliens plus Shakespeare! Aliens plus Robin Hood! By this point, the formula has grown stale. And as other commentators have noted, the ‘pure historical’ was a Classic Who staple long extinct in the Nu Who reboot. But a historical that makes its central characters all human has to deal with the challenge of making all the characters… human. That is, fully-rounded and fleshed-out.