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Planet of the Dead: A Bus, a Desert, and Four Knocks

by Hutch Morzaria April 20, 2009

written by Hutch Morzaria

“Planet of the Dead” is the 2009 Doctor Who Easter special, in which the Doctor and a cat burglar called Lady Christina de Souza are carried through a wormhole on a London bus to the desert world of San Helios. The post covers the heist opening, the stingray swarm that strips planets to sand, UNIT’s Malcolm Taylor, and the Doctor refusing to take Christina along.

It argues the special is slight and sunny but worth watching for its final scene, where a passenger delivers the third warning that the Doctor’s song is ending, this time with a number attached. The post rates it 3/5.

Of the specials filling the gap where a full series ought to be, this is the lightest by a distance. A bright, sunny romp with a heist, a double-decker bus and a lot of sand. For about fifty minutes “Planet of the Dead” is content to be a good-natured adventure with no particular weight to it, and I was perfectly happy with that. And then, in its final ninety seconds, it says something that turned my stomach over.

The Number 200 to Nowhere

We open on a heist, and it’s the best-staged sequence in the special: Lady Christina de Souza, aristocrat and professional cat burglar, abseiling through a museum to lift a golden chalice while alarms scream. She makes her escape by leaping onto the number 200 bus, which is exactly the sort of ridiculous swagger the episode is going for. I grinned all the way through it, and I’d happily have watched an hour of her doing that.

The Doctor’s already aboard, tracking an energy reading. The bus goes through a tunnel, hits a wormhole, and comes out the other side on San Helios, a desert world under three suns, with London and its bewildered passengers several galaxies behind them.

The bus passengers make a decent little ensemble for the runtime they’re given. A young couple bickering, an office worker mainly concerned about whether she’ll be back in time for her shift, and a quiet woman called Carmen who turns out to matter a great deal more than anybody expects. It’s a familiar trick by now, the ordinary British public dropped somewhere impossible and responding mostly with mild irritation, and it still works. It’s also very British, and I mean that as a compliment.

Michelle Ryan is good fun as Christina: unflappable, arrogant, extremely competent, and entirely uninterested in apologising for any of it. She and the Doctor spark off each other immediately, and the episode’s smart enough to let her be genuinely useful rather than just decorative. She’s the one who gets the crystal, does the climbing, and keeps her nerve.

There’s a running argument between the two of them that’s rather more interesting than the plot around it. Christina steals things because she’s bored and rich and extremely good at it; the Doctor disapproves loudly and then spends the rest of the hour doing very much the same sort of thing for better-sounding reasons. She calls him on it, too. They’re both adrenaline addicts who dress the habit up in principle, and she’s the only one of the pair honest enough to say which she is.

What I like most is that nobody on the bus is in on the joke. Christina treats the whole thing as a more interesting kind of burglary, the Doctor treats it as a problem to be solved, and the commuters treat it as a very long delay. Those three reactions pull the tone in different directions, and the episode keeps all of them going at once without ever quite dropping any, which is harder than it looks. It’s the kind of easy confidence you only get when a show knows its audience will follow it anywhere for an hour.

A Planet Eaten

The mystery of San Helios is a decent one. This isn’t a desert planet, it’s a planet that has been made into a desert. A year ago there were a hundred billion people living in cities here, and the sand blowing across the dunes is what’s left of them. That’s a properly grim thing to hide inside something so cheerful, and it’s the one moment in the middle of the hour where the tone slips and I sat up.

The culprits are a swarm of metallic stingray creatures that strip a world down to grit and then tear open a wormhole to the next one. It’s a simple, effective threat with a nasty implication: they’re not invading, they’re grazing, and Earth is next on the route. The swarm effects have dated a little, if I’m honest, but the image of a spiralling cyclone of them rising off the dunes still works for me.

There’s also a pair of crashed Tritovores, fly-headed scavengers whose ship provides the necessary technology, who exist mostly to explain things and then die. That’s a slight waste of a good design, and I’d have liked to see more of them than a few minutes of explaining.

Back on Earth, UNIT are holding the wormhole, and Malcolm Taylor is a joy: a bouncing, hero-worshipping Welsh scientist who has named a unit of measurement after himself and is practically in tears when the Doctor says his name. After the prickly, wary UNIT of The Sontaran Stratagem, it’s a nice reminder that the organisation contains people as well as guns.

I did wish the middle had a bit more bite, though. The bus gets stuck in the sand, the passengers wander about, a few things go wrong and get fixed, and for a stretch it feels like a good idea waiting for a second one. The pieces are all good. The Doctor and Christina are good, Malcolm is good, the swarm is good, but they don’t quite lock together until the finale forces them to, and I’d have traded one of the desert walks for a scene where the passengers had to make an actual choice.

The Woman He Wouldn’t Take

The bit that matters comes at the end, and it isn’t the monster.

The Doctor gets the bus flying, brings everyone home, and UNIT slams the wormhole shut on the swarm. Job done. And Christina, clever, brave, resourceful, exactly the sort of person who ends up in that blue box, asks to come with him.

He says no.

Not a gentle no, not a “maybe one day.” A flat refusal, and the reason is the whole point of this stretch of the show: he’s lost too many people. Ever since he wiped Donna Noble’s mind and left her on a doorstep at the end of Journey’s End, he’s been travelling alone on purpose, and he isn’t going to risk doing that to somebody else. It’s the same wound that ran through The Next Doctor at Christmas, and he’s no closer to dealing with it. Go back to Voyage of the Damned and you can see him doing the same thing the Christmas before, losing Astrid and pressing straight on as though nothing had happened.

The trouble is that this Doctor without a companion is a slightly worse person, and the special knows it. Nobody argues with him. Nobody grounds him. He’s charming and effective and just a bit too pleased with himself, and there’s no Donna in the passenger seat to tell him to shut up. Letting Christina fly off in a stolen bus rather than taking her aboard is played as a bittersweet grace note, but it reads to me more like a man declining to be looked after.

Four Knocks

And then Carmen.

She’s the quiet woman from the bus with a small psychic gift, played with beautiful understatement, and as the Doctor turns to leave she stops him and tells him what she can see.

Your song is ending, sir.

That’s the third time. A dying soothsayer in the ruins of The Fires of Pompeii, then Ood Sigma on a snowy hillside in Planet of the Ood, and now a woman on a London bus. Three separate sources, across thousands of years and several galaxies, all telling the same man the same thing.

But Carmen goes further than the others. It is returning, she says. It is returning through the dark. And then he will knock four times.

Four times. A number. After two years of vague, unsettling poetry, the prophecy has suddenly acquired a detail, and it’s the specificity that makes it awful. The Doctor’s face when she says it is the best acting in the special, not fear exactly, but the look of a man who has just been handed a date. And unlike the previous two warnings, there’s no cosmic distance to hide behind this time. This isn’t an oracle choking in a burning city, or an alien elder standing on a snowfield at the far end of history. It’s a slightly psychic woman off the number 200, standing in an ordinary London street in broad daylight, telling him something she plainly doesn’t understand herself and can’t take back.

Easter Special, Christmas Mood

I know I’m making a lot of the last two minutes, and the other fifty-eight are fairly disposable. It’s amiable and well paced, with a plot that never quite justifies its own scale and a supporting alien race who exist to be killed. If you only want the fun side, the heist and the bus on the dunes carry it comfortably, and plenty of people online seem to have enjoyed exactly that, including this fan review that picks up on the same warning from Carmen.

What I keep coming back to is how little the sunshine matters once she speaks. An Easter special is supposed to be the easy one, a day out in the desert before the next big serious thing, and instead it ends with the Doctor alone again and being given a countdown. Maybe it’s meant to feel like that, a bright afternoon with a shadow right at the edge of it. It’s worth watching for the heist, for Malcolm, and for a final scene that hangs over everything after it.

I’ll admit I went in expecting nothing much, and for most of the running time that’s about what I got, only with better jokes than I’d planned for. It’s the ending that’s stayed with me, and I’m not sure the episode around it quite earns that, but I’d still rather have a light special with one real sting in it than a heavy one that has nothing to say.

Rating: 3/5

April 20, 2009 0 comments

The Next Doctor: The Man Who Borrowed a Name

by Hutch Morzaria January 4, 2009

written by Hutch Morzaria

“The Next Doctor” is the 2008 Doctor Who Christmas special, set in Victorian London in 1851. The Doctor meets a man calling himself the Doctor, who turns out to be Jackson Lake, a grieving father whose mind was overwritten by a Cyberman infostamp, while the Cybermen and Miss Hartigan plot to raise a giant CyberKing.

The post praises the first half’s character work, David Morrissey’s performance and the dinner ending, but finds the CyberKing finale daft and out of tone with the rest. It rates the special 3/5.

The Doctor is alone. That’s the fact this special is built on, and it’s why it works as well as it does, for the first half at least. “The Next Doctor” opens with the best hook the show has dangled in years, spends forty minutes doing something genuinely tender with it, and then a building-sized robot stamps through Victorian London and the whole thing goes a bit peculiar. Half a great Christmas special, and the good half is very good indeed.

Another Man in a Long Coat

London, Christmas Eve, 1851. The Doctor steps out into the snow and hears somebody shouting for help, and the man who comes charging round the corner in a frock coat, brandishing a sonic screwdriver and trailed by a fierce and capable companion, introduces himself as the Doctor.

It’s a lovely premise, and the episode plays it with real mischief. This other Doctor has a sonic (an actual screwdriver, sonic-ed), a companion called Rosita, an alarming amount of confidence, and a TARDIS, which turns out to be a hot air balloon standing for Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style. He also has no idea who this thin, bewildered stranger in the pinstripes is.

Rosita deserves a mention as well. She’s sharp, thoroughly unimpressed, and does a good deal of the actual rescuing, and there’s a nicely pointed moment where she asks flatly why she’s expected to trot along behind a man having an identity crisis. For a few seconds the special notices that the companion role looks rather different viewed from the outside, and then, sadly, it moves on.

David Morrissey is terrific, playing it absolutely straight: brave, theatrical, slightly overcompensating, exactly like a man doing an impression of someone he admires. And the Tenth Doctor’s reaction is where the episode finds its heart. He assumes he’s met a future regeneration, and instead of being alarmed he’s delighted, a bit wistful, a bit relieved, quietly reassured that he goes on. Which, given that two separate people have now told him his song is ending, is a rather poignant thing to watch him cling to.

The truth is much sadder, and it’s the best thing in the special. The other Doctor is Jackson Lake, a mathematics teacher. The Cybermen killed his wife in front of him and took his son, and in the chaos he was hit by an “infostamp”, a Cyberman data cartridge loaded with the complete history of the Doctor. It poured every one of the Doctor’s adventures into a grieving man’s head, and his mind, unable to survive what had just happened to him, took the escape it was offered. He became the Doctor because he couldn’t bear to be Jackson Lake.

That’s a genuinely beautiful idea. Not a villain, not a trick, just a man in unbearable pain who reached for the nearest story about someone who never gives up and climbed inside it. The scene where the memories come back and Morrissey has to be Jackson again, watching his wife die a second time, is superbly played and the emotional peak of the hour.

What makes it sting is the detail of how thoroughly he built the thing. The screwdriver, the coat, the balloon with its carefully worked-out acronym, even the companion — he assembled an entire functioning version of a man he’d only ever encountered as data poured into his skull, right down to the swagger. And the swagger is the giveaway. The real Doctor never needs to announce himself; Jackson does it constantly, because he’s holding the whole costume together with sheer volume.

It also lands hard because of where the Doctor is. He’s been travelling alone since he wiped Donna Noble’s memory and left her on her mother’s doorstep at the end of Journey’s End, and he is not coping. It’s the second Christmas in a row he’s ended up wandering on his own, after Voyage of the Damned, and meeting a man who invented a version of him to survive grief is not a comfortable mirror.

Cybermen, Again

The plot around all this is the weakest part. The Cybermen have fallen through the Void into the nineteenth century, the same escape route that closed behind them at Canary Wharf in Doomsday — and they’ve allied with Miss Hartigan (Random Remarks has a plain blow-by-blow if you lost track of who’s who), who runs a workhouse and has been supplying them with stolen children as labour.

These are the Cybus models we watched being stamped out in a Battersea factory in The Age of Steel, which gives them an oddly poignant status here: refugees from a dead parallel world, stranded in the wrong century with no factory, no fleet and no way home, improvising an invasion out of whatever the nineteenth century happens to have lying around. That’s a genuinely interesting premise, and it’s a shame the special doesn’t do a great deal with it beyond using it to explain why they’re short-handed.

Miss Hartigan is a decent villain, and Dervla Kirwan gives her real venom: a woman treated as furniture by every man in Victorian London, who takes the Cybermen’s offer because it’s the first power anyone has ever handed her. Her contempt for the men on the workhouse board is the sharpest writing in the second half.

Then the Cybermen make her the CyberKing, and the CyberKing turns out to be a several-hundred-foot Cyberman-shaped war machine that rises out of the Thames and stomps through Victorian London while people flee in the streets.

It is, and I say this fondly, absolutely daft, the sort of thing I’d have loved at eleven and rolled my eyes at a bit now. The scale is ludicrous, it obliterates any sense that this is a story happening in real history — you cannot hide a skyscraper-sized robot walking through 1851, and it drags a delicate character piece into a monster movie for its last fifteen minutes. The resolution, with the Doctor in the balloon and an infostamp overload, is fine. It just belongs to a different, sillier episode than the one I’d been enjoying.

Dinner

The ending pulls it back. Jackson Lake gets his son back, alive, and the two men stand in the snow having both survived something. And then Jackson invites the Doctor to Christmas dinner.

The Doctor always says no to this. And here, finally, he says yes, because a man he barely knows worked out that the loneliest thing about him is that nobody ever asks. It’s a small, warm, well-judged ending, and it does more for the character than the entire CyberKing sequence.

Rating: 3/5. The first half is among the best character work the show has done at Christmas, and the second half is a giant robot fight. Averages out to a special that’s well worth watching and slightly frustrating to think about.

January 4, 2009 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

Journey’s End: The Most Important Woman in Creation

by Hutch Morzaria July 14, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

“Journey’s End” is the second half of the Series 4 finale of Doctor Who. It picks up from the Doctor’s near-regeneration, resolves it with the severed hand from The Christmas Invasion, and follows the Daleks’ reality bomb plan, Davros’s confrontation with the Doctor and the creation of a half-human second Doctor.

The post argues the episode is crowded but powerful, praising Catherine Tate’s DoctorDonna and the Davros scenes while calling Donna’s memory erasure the cruellest ending the show has written. It rates the episode 4/5.

Three years of storytelling arrive here. “Journey’s End” picks up from the golden light pouring out of the Doctor’s hands at the close of The Stolen Earth, and it’s exactly the finale all that build-up suggests: enormous, overstuffed, occasionally ridiculous, and absolutely devastating when it matters. It resolves a cliffhanger with a conjuring trick, it gives the Doctor the worst thing anyone has ever said to him, and it does something to Donna Noble so cruel that I’m still angry about it. Not a flawless episode by any measure. An unforgettable one.

Start with the regeneration, because it isn’t one. The Doctor siphons the excess energy into the severed hand he’s been carrying around in a jar since a Sycorax took it off him in The Christmas Invasion, healing himself without altering a single cell. It is, unquestionably, a cheat. It’s also been sitting on the console in plain sight for two and a half years, so it’s a cheat with a receipt, and I’d far rather have that than a reset button. The show immediately makes the hand matter rather than leaving it as a get-out, because Donna touches it and something extraordinary happens: a two-way biological meta-crisis. A second Doctor grows out of the hand, part human, one heart, wearing a blue suit and rather more impulsive than the original. Donna, in exchange, receives a Time Lord mind on top of her own.

The DoctorDonna is magnificent

Catherine Tate playing Donna Noble with the Doctor’s intellect running underneath is the most fun this season has had. She rattles through calculations at double speed, finishes his sentences, and insults him fluently in two disciplines at once. She’s the one who disables the entire Dalek fleet, spins the reality bomb into reverse, and saves every universe there is, a temp from Chiswick doing it with a keyboard and a great deal of shouting. For a character who has spent her whole life being told she’s nothing special, by her mother and worse by herself, having Donna be the one who saves all of creation is a superb payoff. The season has been signposting it since a soothsayer looked at her back in The Fires of Pompeii, and it lands exactly as it should.

The moral centre of the episode, though, is Davros, and he’s superb precisely because he never fights. Strapped into his chair below the Crucible, he simply talks, and what he does is read the Doctor a roll call. Everyone in this building is prepared to die. Sarah Jane has a warp star. Jack has a bomb. Martha has a key that will crack the Earth open. Every one of them arrived at the same place, willing to commit atrocity and willing to be destroyed, because of him. You take ordinary people and you fashion them into weapons. It is the single most devastating thing anybody has ever said to this Doctor and the show pointedly declines to give him an answer. Tennant plays it as a man watching a bill be itemised. It lands harder because we’ve watched him earn it: the eternal punishments he handed out in The Family of Blood weren’t the act of a gentle man, and Davros has simply noticed. The sting in the tail is that the meta-crisis Doctor then wipes out the entire Dalek fleet in one stroke and the real Doctor is horrified by him, which is of course Davros’s point arriving from a second direction. A version of himself, born in battle, doing precisely what he’d never allow.

And then the cruellest ending this show has written

A human mind cannot hold a Time Lord consciousness. Donna is burning up, and there’s exactly one way to save her: the Doctor has to erase every memory of him, all of it, every trip, Pompeii, the Ood, the Library, and take her home. She begs him not to. She knows exactly what she’s losing while she’s losing it. And she goes back to being who she was in Partners in Crime, loud and brash and a bit lost, entirely unaware she was ever anything else, while her mother and grandfather are told she can never remember or the burning will start again and kill her.

That’s a horrible ending and the show knows it. Donna Noble saved every universe there is and doesn’t get to keep it. The one companion who genuinely grew, from the shouting bride who turned him down to the woman who put her hands on that lever in Pompeii, is the one who has all of it taken away, and she doesn’t even get to be sad about it. I wasn’t the only one left bitter, as Cathode Ray Tube’s write-up shows. Wilf gets the last word, promising to look up at the sky for her every night, and it finished me off completely. The Doctor walks back into the TARDIS alone, in the rain, and closes the door.

Rating: 4/5. Too crowded, and the reality bomb is an awful lot of plot for a resolution that turns on one very fast keyboard. But the character work is exceptional, the Davros scenes are the best writing of the season, and the last twenty minutes are as good and as sad as this programme gets. Everyone he ever saved in one room, laughing, flying a police box, and then a beach and a doorstep and a man walking off alone in the rain. Worth noting too: two separate people have now told him his song is ending, and nobody has explained what that means.

July 14, 2008 6 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Stolen Earth: Twenty-Seven Planets and a Familiar Voice

by Hutch Morzaria July 8, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

Doctor Who’s “The Stolen Earth” is the first half of the Series 4 finale. The Doctor and Donna find Earth missing from its place in space, one of twenty-seven planets stolen and hidden by the Daleks, and the episode gathers the Doctor’s former companions and allies, including Martha, Sarah Jane, Captain Jack, Rose and Harriet Jones, to help find him.

The post covers the full-scale Dalek invasion, Davros’s return, Dalek Caan’s madness and the growing hints about Donna, before landing on the Doctor being shot just as he reunites with Rose. It rates the episode 4.5/5 as breathless and overstuffed but confident, and ends on the open cliffhanger.

This show has spent three years building a cast of people the Doctor left behind, and “The Stolen Earth” is the episode that collects every single one of them, drops the planet into a hole in space, and lets the Daleks walk down the middle of a British street. It is enormous, gleefully overstuffed, and it ends on the most upsetting cliffhanger this show has ever attempted. As event television goes, this is about as good as it gets.

Twenty-seven planets

The Earth is gone. That’s the opening: the Doctor and Donna step out of the TARDIS into an empty patch of space where the planet ought to be, and the show plays it completely straight. No monster yet, no explanation, just an absence. It turns out Earth is one of twenty-seven worlds that have been stolen and hidden in the Medusa Cascade, arranged in a precise configuration for reasons nobody will explain until next week. The stars going out in Turn Left weren’t a metaphor after all, and something has been quietly removing pieces of the universe for weeks. The Doctor’s search takes him to the Shadow Proclamation, the galactic authority whose name he’s been bluffing his way past since his first series, and it’s a nice bit of pay-off to finally see the thing behind the phrase, complete with an imperious Architect and a barracks full of Judoon. It’s also where the sheer scale of the theft gets spelled out, and where the Doctor starts to look genuinely frightened. Donna’s contribution there, an apparently daft aside about the bees disappearing, turns out to be the thread that actually unpicks it, which is a lovely piece of misdirection at the expense of everyone in the room with a doctorate.

Everyone he ever knew

Back on the stolen Earth, the Daleks arrive in force, and the show does something it has never had the nerve to do before: full invasion. Saucers over cities, Daleks gliding down suburban roads exterminating people in their front gardens, news broadcasts collapsing mid-sentence. It’s the apocalypse the series has been circling for years, finally delivered at full scale. The domestic scale of it is what really stings. This isn’t a war fought over skylines in wide shot, it’s a Dalek hovering outside a suburban front door while a family cowers in the hallway, and Wilf Mott coming out to meet it swinging a paintball gun because it’s the only weapon in the house. Bernard Cribbins squaring up to a Dalek armed with nothing but outrage and completely the wrong equipment is simultaneously very funny and genuinely brave, and it’s precisely the note this show hits better than anything else on television.

And then it starts assembling the family. Martha Jones with UNIT in New York. Sarah Jane Smith and her son. Captain Jack with what’s left of Torchwood. Wilf with that paintball gun. And Rose Tyler, arrived from a sealed universe with an enormous gun and an expression that suggests she has run out of patience entirely. Watching them all realise, separately, that the only person who can help is unreachable, and then work out how to shout loudly enough, is enormously satisfying. Each of them has been on their own since the Doctor moved on: Sarah Jane since he left her behind decades before School Reunion, Jack since he was abandoned on a space station, Rose since a beach in Norway at the end of Doomsday. The episode’s real argument is that he doesn’t just leave wreckage behind him, he leaves people who learned how to do it themselves.

The best of it belongs to Harriet Jones. Deposed, disgraced, living quietly with the ruins of the career the Doctor demolished with six words in The Christmas Invasion, she turns out to have kept a secret subwave network precisely for a day like this, and she uses it to link everyone together and boost a signal loud enough to reach him. When she meets the Daleks she holds up her ID and says “Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister,” and gets the old reply, “Yes, we know who you are”, and it’s genuinely moving rather than a gag. She dies doing the right thing, having spent three years being told by the Doctor that she was wrong. The show lets her be right.

Davros, and the street

And then the voice behind the invasion, which is a proper fanfare moment: Davros. Creator of the Daleks, believed lost in the Time War, hauled out of the jaws of something unspeakable by Dalek Caan (a fan review at Slice of Sci-Fi lays out the same rescue) and now sitting in the dark below his own creations, having grown a new Dalek race out of the cells of his own body. Julian Bleach is superb, quiet and courteous and faintly amused, far more unnerving than shouting would be. His relationship with the new Daleks is the interesting part: they don’t obey him, they keep him. He built them and they’ve put him in a basement. Dalek Caan, meanwhile, the last survivor of the Cult of Skaro, who fled the wreckage of Canary Wharf into an emergency temporal shift and then flew unprotected into the Time War itself, has come back completely insane, hanging in a broken casing and giggling prophecies. It’s a properly strange, unsettling image, and his rhymes about the coming darkness and the Doctor’s “most faithful companion” dying are the sort of thing you rewind and squint at.

Donna is having a strange time of it, too. Caan’s prophecies keep circling her without ever quite naming her, the Shadow Architect notices something distinctly odd about her timeline, and she spends the hour quietly unsettled by things nobody will explain to her. It’s a slow, deliberate drumbeat. The season has been pointing at Donna Noble since a dying soothsayer in Pompeii clocked something on her back, and here it starts pointing considerably harder. Whatever’s coming, it increasingly looks like it belongs to her.

The last five minutes are extraordinary. The Doctor finds the Earth. He steps out into a London street, and at the far end of it is Rose Tyler, and they see each other, and they run. It’s the reunion two seasons have been building toward and the show gives it the full slow-motion treatment, absolutely earned. And a Dalek shoots him mid-stride. Jack and Rose drag him inside the TARDIS, and the golden light starts pouring out of his hands, and he begins to regenerate on the console room floor while the people who love him stand there and watch. That’s where it stops. No resolution, no reassurance, nothing. Just an ending, and he’s shot running toward the one person he lost.

Rating: 4.5/5. Breathless, sprawling and occasionally so busy it can barely breathe, but the sheer confidence carries it. If it fumbles anything it’ll be next week’s problem; as a first half it’s close to perfect. I don’t know how they get out of this. I’m not sure they do.

July 8, 2008 3 comments

Doctor Who Television

Turn Left: The World Where He Died

by Hutch Morzaria July 1, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

Turn Left is the Doctor-lite episode in which a fortune teller sends Donna back to a junction where she turned right, and a Time Beetle makes her turn left instead. The piece covers the world where the Doctor never met her, the disasters nobody stopped, and the turn against refugees.

It lands on Donna’s sacrifice, Rose’s warning of Bad Wolf, and the stars going out. The argument is that the Doctor matters most for the times he happened to be in the right place. Rating: 5/5.

Doctor Who does a Doctor-lite episode most years to ease the production schedule, and they’re usually a bit of a curiosity. “Turn Left” is not a curiosity. It’s the bleakest, angriest hour this show has ever made, it uses the Doctor’s absence as its entire argument, and it is comfortably the best thing in Series 4. It’s also, unexpectedly, a nastier piece of political writing than anything the series has attempted before.

One small decision

On a market world, a fortune teller talks Donna into examining an old choice: a day, years ago, when she sat at a junction in her car and her mother nagged her toward a temp job at a security firm called H.C. Clements. She turned right. That job is where she met the Doctor for the first time, in The Runaway Bride. And while the fortune teller keeps her talking, something climbs onto her back, a Time Beetle feeding on altered possibility, and makes her turn left instead. It’s a superb premise, and it also quietly cashes a cheque the season wrote months ago. A dying soothsayer in The Fires of Pompeii took one look at Donna and said there was something on her back. Everyone, including me, filed it under atmospheric nonsense. It wasn’t. Den of Geek thought it was really, really good as well, and I can’t argue.

Turn Left: The World Where He Died - Doctor Who episode still

What follows is the episode’s masterstroke. Donna doesn’t die, and the Doctor isn’t erased from history. He just isn’t there for any of it, and the show walks us through every catastrophe of the last two years playing out with nobody to stop it. The Doctor dies under the Thames dealing with the Racnoss, because Donna wasn’t standing there to shout at him. Then the dominoes fall. A hospital is transported to the Moon, the Judoon incursion he defused so easily in Smith and Jones, and everybody inside suffocates. Sarah Jane Smith and Martha Jones both die saving the people they can, and Martha’s death by radiation is delivered as a line on a news bulletin. The starship Titanic, which he hauled off its collision course at the last second in Voyage of the Damned, comes down on London instead and takes most of southern England with it, a nuclear-scale hole where the capital used to be. The Adipose breed unchecked in North America and sixty million people die. Torchwood stop the Sontaran gas from The Poison Sky but every one of them is killed doing it. Watching the season’s own back catalogue turn into an obituary list is a genuinely chilling trick, and it’s the strongest possible argument for what the Doctor actually does. Not the speeches, not the cleverness, just the number of times he happened to be standing in the right place.

Britain closes its doors

But the disasters aren’t the point. What the episode really cares about is what comes after. With England broken and refugees flooding north, the country turns. The Nobles are billeted into a shared house in Leeds, rationing bites, and the rhetoric hardens by degrees, England for the English, we can’t take any more, they’re taking our housing. Then one evening soldiers arrive and take the Italian family they’ve been living with away to a labour camp, and Wilf, who fought in a war, stands in the street and says quietly that that’s what they called it last time, and then he breaks. It’s the bravest thing this show has ever put on screen at teatime, and it’s played entirely straight, with no aliens involved and no monster to blame. Bernard Cribbins is devastating, and the episode makes its point with total clarity: catastrophe doesn’t turn people into fascists, it just gives the ones who were ready an excuse.

Meanwhile Donna, Sylvia and Wilf grind each other down in a cramped house, and Sylvia, stripped of everything, stops even pretending to like her daughter. It’s a brutal watch, and it makes Donna’s ordinary life back in the real world look like an enormous kindness. What’s most striking is how little of this involves anything alien at all. The middle third of the episode is a straight domestic drama about a family losing everything and slowly turning on one another across a shared kitchen table, and it would play almost unchanged with every science-fiction element stripped out of it. The show has done grim before, but never this sustained and never this recognisable: the queueing, the shortages, the billeting, the neighbours quietly informing on neighbours. It is the most convincing apocalypse the series has ever staged, precisely because there is no spectacle anywhere in it.

The woman who wasn’t there

Threaded through all of it is Rose Tyler, appearing at intervals to steer Donna, refusing to give her name, and visibly straining to hold herself in a universe she shouldn’t be able to reach. The blonde woman who walked round a corner and vanished in Partners in Crime is now doing the whole job herself, organising UNIT, running the operation, dragging Donna toward the fix. Billie Piper plays her harder and older, and the episode is careful never to explain how she’s here. It just keeps her slightly out of focus, doing the impossible, while the sky empties. She’s also, pointedly, doing every bit of it without him: giving the orders, improvising a rescue for a universe that is visibly coming apart at the seams. Whatever Rose Tyler has been doing since that beach in Norway, she has very clearly not spent any of it waiting around to be collected. Because that’s the other thread: the stars are going out. Not metaphorically. Constellation by constellation, the night sky is being deleted, and nobody can say why.

The fix requires Donna to go back and make her past self turn right, and the only way to stop that car at that junction is to put something in the road. So she does. She steps in front of a lorry, and dies, so that a version of herself she’ll never meet takes a different turning. It’s an extraordinary thing for a companion to do, and the show gives it the weight it deserves, because this is Donna, who has spent four series being told by her own mother that she’s nothing special, choosing to die for a world she won’t be in. As she goes, Rose leans down and whispers two words for her to carry back: Bad Wolf. Donna wakes up in the real timeline, and the words are everywhere, on posters, on shop fronts, on hoardings, and finally burned into the sign on the TARDIS door. The Doctor sees them and the colour drains out of him. Those were Rose’s words, scattered across all of time in The Parting of the Ways, and their return means something is very badly wrong.

Donna stepping in front of that lorry to hand a stranger a better life, when the stranger is herself, is the best thing she’s ever done, and no speech about why the Doctor matters could have landed as hard as watching two years of disasters play out without him. Then the stars go out, because whatever’s coming is bigger than a monster.

Rating: 5/5. Bleak, furious, superbly constructed and anchored by two career-best performances from Catherine Tate and Bernard Cribbins. That it manages all this while barely featuring its own lead is astonishing. Whatever’s coming next, I don’t think anyone’s ready for it.

July 1, 2008 3 comments

Doctor Who Television

Midnight: The Thing That Learned to Talk

by Hutch Morzaria June 23, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

Midnight is the Doctor Who bottle episode in which the Doctor takes a shuttle excursion on a deadly planet and something unseen gets into the cabin and starts taking Sky Silvestry over, copying what people say. The piece covers the escalation, the passengers’ turn into a mob, and the hostess who ends it.

It lands on the idea that the scariest thing here is ordinary people rather than the creature, and on the quiet ending where the Doctor survives only because a stranger died for him. Rating: 5/5.

No monster. No effects budget. One room, ten people, and about forty minutes. “Midnight” is the cheapest episode Doctor Who has made in years and it is, without much competition, the most frightening thing the revived series has produced. It is also the nastiest thing it has ever said about human beings, and it says it without raising its voice once.

The planet Midnight is a diamond world drenched in Xtonic radiation, sunlight so hostile that nothing can live on the surface and anything caught in it is destroyed instantly, so the colony survives in sealed leisure palaces under glass. Donna, sensibly, stays by the pool. The Doctor, being the Doctor, books himself onto a four-hour shuttle bus excursion to look at a waterfall. His fellow passengers are a beautifully ordinary bunch: an academic and his weary assistant, a bickering family with a sullen teenage son, a hostess doing her job, and a woman travelling alone after a bad break-up. There’s a moment early on where the entertainment system fails and everyone has to speak to each other, and it’s played as a small social catastrophe. It’s funny, precise, and it does all the character work the rest of the episode will need. Then the shuttle stops in the middle of nowhere, and something knocks on the outside of the hull.

Knock knock

What follows is a masterclass in escalating dread built entirely out of dialogue. Something gets in, it takes Sky Silvestry, the woman travelling alone, and its first symptom is the simplest and most unnerving idea in the episode: she starts repeating what people say. Not after them, but with them, exactly in time, matching every word the instant it’s spoken. Lesley Sharp’s performance is extraordinary and the technical feat of it alone is startling. The reaction of the room is what really sells it, though. The other passengers don’t scream, they get embarrassed. They tell her to stop it, they talk over her more loudly, they try to make it into a joke, and none of it works, and gradually the cabin falls silent as everyone present arrives at the same conclusion: whatever this is, it is not a woman having a breakdown. Not everybody was sold on how it ends, but Dan Owen still admits the tension and claustrophobia stick in your head, and that matches what happened to me.

Midnight: The Thing That Learned to Talk - Doctor Who episode still

Then it escalates in stages, each worse than the last. She stops repeating everyone and repeats only the Doctor. Then she starts speaking in unison with him. Then she starts arriving a fraction of a second early, anticipating him, getting there first, and then, in the moment that genuinely chilled me, she simply takes his voice altogether, leaving him paralysed and mute while she speaks his words back at the room in his rhythm and his phrasing. That’s the cleverest thing about it. The entity is never seen, never named, never explained, and it has no design and no motive we ever learn. What it has is the Doctor’s greatest asset, his ability to talk, and it takes that away from him and uses it against him.

The mob

And here is where “Midnight” stops being a monster story. The passengers are frightened, trapped and out of their depth, and they turn. Not instantly, which is what makes it work. It happens in reasonable-sounding increments: someone suggests the possessed woman should be thrown out of the airlock, someone else objects, someone points out the Doctor is the only stranger here, the one with no name, the one who’s been enjoying this a bit too much, and within minutes a busload of perfectly normal people have talked themselves into murdering a man they’d been sharing biscuits with an hour earlier. They get as far as physically dragging him toward the door.

It’s genuinely horrible to watch, because nobody in that cabin is a villain. They’re a professor protecting his reputation, a mother protecting her son, a man who wants somebody to blame. Every step is understandable and the destination is a lynching. This show has done a lot of monsters, and this is the first time it’s done a mob instead, and it’s far worse than any of them. Even Planet of the Ood, which had plenty to say about human cruelty, could point at a company. Here there is no company, just a busload of people. The specificity is what makes it land, too. Nobody proposes murder outright. They propose getting rid of it. Then they propose taking a vote on it. Then somebody explains that the rules are simply different out here, so far from anywhere. And then they’re holding his arms. The sullen teenager is the only person who keeps objecting and the only person nobody listens to, while the professor, an educated and decent man, supplies the reasoning. That’s the real horror of the sequence: not that these people turn into monsters, but that every one of them remains entirely, recognisably themselves the whole way through it.

The Doctor’s usual armoury is useless here, which is the point. In Forest of the Dead he faced down a swarm that could kill him instantly and won purely by being confident and well documented. Here the same confidence is precisely what condemns him, because he’s clever, he’s foreign, he won’t say his name, and he keeps telling frightened people what to do. Everything that usually saves him is the evidence against him.

The hostess

The resolution belongs to the one person nobody has looked at all episode. The hostess, no name, barely any lines, a woman doing a job, is the only passenger who works out what has actually happened: that the thing is still in Sky, and that it has been playing them. So she grabs hold of her and throws them both out of the airlock into the Xtonic sunlight, and is gone in a flash of light. She saves everyone on that bus, and the episode’s last cruelty is that nobody knows who she was. The Doctor asks. Nobody can tell him. She’s simply the hostess, and now she isn’t anything. The final scene, with a subdued Doctor rejoining Donna and not wanting to talk about it, is one of the quietest endings the show has done, because he doesn’t win this one. He survives it, and only because a stranger died for him.

There’s a small, very effective frame around the whole thing as well. Donna spends the episode by a swimming pool being eminently sensible, and when the Doctor finally comes back she takes one look at him, works out that something is badly wrong, and doesn’t push him about it. After a season of the pair of them cheerfully talking over one another since Partners in Crime, her simply sitting there with him in silence says a great deal about how far they’ve come.

The monster itself goes unexplained start to finish, same as the thing in the pit in The Satan Pit, except this time there’s no mythology to hang it on at all, which is worse. That restraint is the whole trick: this show almost always shows you the creature, and here it simply refuses.

Rating: 5/5. Faultless. A bottle episode that turns its own limitations into its greatest strength, with a career-best guest performance and an idea about people that’s far scarier than anything with tentacles. I’m not sure I want to watch it again. I’m certain it’s brilliant.

June 23, 2008 3 comments

Doctor Who Television

Forest of the Dead: Saved, and What That Costs

by Hutch Morzaria June 16, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

Forest of the Dead is the second half of the Library two-parter, picking up with Donna living a simulated life inside the computer and the Vashta Nerada closing in on the survivors. The piece covers the reveal of what “saved” actually means, the monsters’ claim on the Library, and the fate of River Song.

It lands on River’s sacrifice for a Doctor who hasn’t met her yet, and on the quiet loss Donna never gets to know about. The upload ending softens River’s death slightly, but the episode earns it. Rating: 4.5/5.

The second half of a two-parter like this is usually where the clockwork becomes visible, and “Forest of the Dead” is no exception, because every apparently disconnected thing from Silence in the Library turns out to be holding something up. But what elevates it above a clever machine is that it spends its resolution on grief. Three separate people lose something irreplaceable here, and only one of them ever finds out.

Donna’s other life

We left Donna’s face on a statue and a voice announcing she’d been saved. What that meant, it turns out, is that she’s inside the computer, living a life. The sequence is superbly unsettling. Donna is in a bright, ordinary world where time jumps: she meets a man called Lee, and then she’s married to him, and then she has two children, all in a series of hard cuts that skip the connective tissue entirely. She never notices, because that’s how the simulation works. Everyone in this world moves the same way. Everyone’s memories start in the middle. It’s Miss Evangelista, dead and uploaded and rendered brilliant by a data corruption that also disfigured her, who forces Donna to see it. And the moment Donna does, the episode turns genuinely cruel: she looks at her own children and they simply blink out of existence, because they were never anything but a subroutine. Catherine Tate plays the whole run beautifully, and the show doesn’t spare her.

Evangelista is the standout of that whole strand. In life she was the one everybody talked over and quietly sniggered at. Corrupted in the upload, she has become the cleverest person in the story and is profoundly, articulately miserable about it, hidden behind a veil because her face didn’t survive the process intact. The episode uses her to land the point it was always building toward, that she was never stupid and was simply never listened to, and the cruelty of it is that now she can out-think every person in the building, she’s lonelier than she has ever been.

What the library did

The central explanation is elegant. A century ago the Vashta Nerada hatched in their millions and the Library’s computer did the only thing it could: it teleported all four thousand and twenty-two people inside itself and stored them. Saved, exactly as you’d save a file. They’ve been sitting on a hard drive for a hundred years while the shadows owned the surface. And the little girl watching it all on her television is CAL, the computer, a dying child of the Lux family whose mind was wired into the Library so that she could live forever with every book ever written. That’s a genuinely lovely, sad idea, and it retroactively explains every strange cut and flicker in part one.

The Vashta Nerada get a good explanation too, and it’s the best line in the story: the paper in every one of those billion books was pulped from trees on their world. They didn’t invade the Library. They hatched in it. This is our forest. The monster has a legitimate grievance, which is a very Doctor Who move. The confrontation that follows is a good one as well. Faced with a swarm capable of stripping him to the bone in about a second, the Doctor doesn’t fight it at all. He tells them precisely who he is, invites them to go and look him up in the several billion books surrounding them, and then asks for one day to get the survivors off the planet. It’s the sort of scene this programme does better than anything else on television: a man winning an argument with a trillion carnivorous microbes purely by being enormously confident and extremely well documented. Reviewers had spent the week asking whether this two-parter could live up to its hype, Slice of SciFi among them, and I think this scene is where that question gets answered.

Spoilers

Then River Song, and the part of the episode that will stay with me. The plan requires someone to be wired into the computer to power the download that restores four thousand people, and it will kill them. The Doctor intends to do it himself. River handcuffs him to a pillar and does it instead. Her argument is unanswerable and it’s the whole point of the character: he can’t die here, because she has already met the man he becomes. She knows his future. She’s seen him older, and kinder, and standing at the Singing Towers of Darillium with tears on his face, giving her a sonic screwdriver as a gift. She knows all of it, and she refuses to tell him a word of it, because, and she keeps saying it, spoilers. Alex Kingston is magnificent, and the imbalance set up in part one pays off completely. She’s dying for someone she’s loved for years, in front of a man who met her yesterday and still doesn’t know her name. He is devastated and slightly bewildered, which is exactly right. He hasn’t earned this yet. She does it anyway. The show has circled this territory before, since Reinette lived a whole life in the gaps between visits in The Girl in the Fireplace, but this is sharper, because River isn’t waiting for him. She’s ahead of him, and she’s chosen to go first.

The Doctor works out that the screwdriver she carries is one he hasn’t given her yet, which means he will, which means there’s more of this coming. He uses it to catch her consciousness at the moment of death and upload her into the Library, where she gets a kind of afterlife with the crew who died and a little girl who owns a world of books. It’s a fudge, and it’s a beautiful one.

The quietest heartbreak is saved for Donna. Restored to the real world, she doesn’t remember what she lost, but Lee was real. He was another saved mind, and he’s there, in the crowd, trying to call after her. He has a stutter. He can’t get her name out in time. She walks away without ever seeing him. Nobody tells her. The Doctor sees the whole thing and says nothing, which is either mercy or cowardice and the episode refuses to specify. After the way she’s grown since Partners in Crime and the lever she put her own hands on in The Fires of Pompeii, watching her lose an entire life she never knew she had, twice and in different ways, is a bleak note to leave her on. The show plays it in near silence, too. No swelling strings, no dialogue spelling out the tragedy, no reaction shot telling you how to feel. Just a man in a crowd failing to force a word past his own stutter, and a woman walking straight past him toward a blue box, and the moment closing over both of them. It is comfortably the most restrained thing in the episode and comfortably the most upsetting.

Rating: 4.5/5. A dense, satisfying resolution that pays off every thread and finds real emotion inside its own machinery. The upload ending softens River’s death slightly, but by then the episode has earned a little kindness. Spoilers, apparently. I’ve never wanted a spoiler more.

June 16, 2008 2 comments

Doctor Who Television

Silence in the Library: Count the Shadows

by Hutch Morzaria June 9, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

Silence in the Library is the eighth episode of the fourth series of Doctor Who, the first half of a two-part story set on a planet-sized library where the shadows eat people. The post covers the Vashta Nerada and their count-your-shadows rule, Miss Evangelista’s data ghost, and the introduction of River Song, who knows the Doctor far better than he knows her.

The review calls it beautifully constructed and properly scary, losing only half a mark for being the front half of a story. It ends on Donna’s face on a statue and an unexplained ‘saved’, and rates the episode 4.5/5.

This show keeps finding new ways to make something ordinary frightening: gas masks, the statues in Blink, clockwork, and now shadows. “Silence in the Library” takes the simplest possible thing, the dark patch on the floor behind you, and turns it into the most efficient monster of the season. It also introduces a character who upends everything about how the Doctor’s story works, and it does that quietly, in the middle of a horror episode, while nobody’s looking.

A planet of books

The setting is magnificent. The Library is not a library on a planet, it is a planet that is a library, the whole surface of a world given over to shelving, containing a copy of every book ever written. Continents of fiction. An entire biography section the size of a country. And it’s empty. A hundred years ago the Library sealed itself, broadcast a single message, count the shadows, and four thousand and twenty-two people vanished from it without trace, while the systems simultaneously logged a million million lifeforms still present. Nobody has been back since. That’s a superb opening mystery, and the direction sells it: enormous vaulted halls, dust, silence, and the Doctor cheerfully wandering into it because he can’t help himself. Donna hates the place on sight, which is the correct response.

They aren’t alone for long. An archaeological expedition arrives, funded by Strackman Lux, a corporate heir with a proprietorial interest in the planet and a non-disclosure agreement he’d like everyone to sign before they’re permitted to die in it. His team are a decently sketched crew: two men both confusingly called Dave, a dry, capable archaeologist called Anita, and the sweet, slightly dim Miss Evangelista, who is treated with casual contempt by nearly everyone around her and whose fate the episode later uses to make a very sharp point about exactly that. Running alongside all of it is something stranger still, a little girl in what looks like a present-day suburban living room, who sees the Library whenever she closes her eyes. Every time the story cuts to her the Library flickers, people vanish mid-sentence, corridors rearrange themselves, doors reset. Her psychiatrist calmly tells her that the Library is the real world and her own life is the dream. The episode never explains it, and it keeps quietly pulling the floor out from under everything else.

Count the shadows

The Vashta Nerada are the best monster this show’s done since the Angels, and they work on exactly the same principle: a rule you can check yourself. They are microscopic, they swarm in their trillions, and they live in shadow. They strip a person to bare bone in about a second. You cannot fight them, you cannot outrun them, and you cannot see them, but you can count your shadows, because a person with two shadows has already been marked and the second one is not a shadow. The horror lands because the show plays it with total discipline. There’s no monster reveal, no creature effect to be disappointed by. There’s just a dark patch on the floor that is fractionally in the wrong place, and a man in a spacesuit who has stopped talking, and a helmet full of skull. The moment a character glances down and sees two shadows where there should be one is as good a scare as this programme has managed. The monster here is essentially a lighting note, and it works better than half the CGI creatures this show has ever spent real money on.

Even better is what happens to Miss Evangelista. Killed early, her neural relay keeps transmitting an echo of her last thoughts, a data ghost, looping and confused, asking where everyone’s gone and then repeating two words about ice cream until the signal degrades. It is genuinely horrible, and the other characters’ helpless embarrassment as they listen to a dead woman fade out mid-sentence is the most upsetting thing in the episode. It’s also, characteristically, an idea nobody else would have thought to put in a Saturday teatime drama. Donna’s part is smaller than usual after the best lines in The Unicorn and the Wasp, and the show makes that unease part of the texture rather than hiding it. She spends the hour wanting to leave, saying so out loud more than once, and being gently talked round each time, and on every occasion she raises the possibility of simply going home the Doctor breezes straight past it without really hearing her. Given where she ends up by the closing minutes, that little pattern looks rather different on reflection than it does in the moment.

The woman with the diary

And then, in the middle of all this, there’s River Song. She arrives with the expedition and she knows him. Not knows of him. Knows him. She has a diary full of their adventures together, in an order that hasn’t happened yet. She’s exasperated by him, fond of him, calls him “sweetie”, and is visibly hurt when it becomes clear he hasn’t the faintest idea who she is. Alex Kingston plays it beautifully, and the effect is genuinely disorientating. Every scene between them runs on an imbalance we can see and he can’t: she has a whole history with this man, and she’s standing in front of a version of him who is looking straight through her. When she has to prove who she is, she does it by leaning in and whispering something in his ear, and whatever it is, it stops him dead. She knows his name. His actual name. It’s a hell of a swing, and other fans were just as taken with it. The show has spent this whole revival treating the Doctor’s past as the mystery, and this quietly introduces someone for whom his future is the settled thing and the present is the awkward part. This isn’t the first time the show has done lovers meeting out of sequence, since Reinette lived a whole life in the gaps between his visits in The Girl in the Fireplace, but this inverts it. This time the Doctor is the one arriving too early.

The cliffhanger is vicious, and it’s aimed squarely at Donna. She’s teleported out of danger, or so we’re told. Then the Doctor finds one of the Library’s information Nodes, the stone statues with real donated human faces mounted on them, and this one is wearing Donna’s face, and it says, in Donna’s voice, that Donna Noble has been saved. Nobody explains it. Nobody has time to. The shadows are closing, one of the crew is already a skeleton walking around in a suit, and the episode simply stops there. “Saved” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and none of it sounds good.

Rating: 4.5/5. Beautifully constructed, properly scary, and carrying a genuinely destabilising new character. It loses half a mark only for being the front half of a story, since everything it sets up, it sets up superbly. I’ve no idea what “saved” is supposed to mean in that sentence, and I’m fairly certain I don’t want to find out. Count the shadows. Seriously, go and count them.

June 9, 2008 1 comment

the unicorn and the wasp agatha christie

Doctor Who Television

The Unicorn and the Wasp: Utter Nonsense, Beautifully Dressed

by Hutch Morzaria May 27, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

The Unicorn and the Wasp is the seventh episode of the fourth series of Doctor Who, a 1926 country-house murder mystery in which the Tenth Doctor and Donna meet Agatha Christie and a giant shapeshifting wasp. The post covers the genre pastiche, the episode’s use of Christie’s real ten-day disappearance, the cyanide-and-ginger-beer set piece and Donna’s lighter turn.

The review calls it silly, beautifully dressed and very funny, not a classic but an absolute pleasure, even if the plot collapses when prodded. It rates the episode 3.5/5.

After a fortnight of Sontarans and battlefields, Series 4 puts its feet up and does something entirely frivolous, and gets away with it completely. “The Unicorn and the Wasp” is a full-blooded Agatha Christie pastiche with a giant alien wasp in it, and it commits to both halves of that sentence with total sincerity. It is silly, it is beautifully dressed, and it is very funny indeed. Not a classic, but an absolute pleasure.

The TARDIS lands at Eddison Hall in Surrey in December 1926, in the middle of a garden party, and the show immediately starts ticking off the checklist. There’s a grand country house, a crumbling aristocratic family with a secret, a colonel in a wheelchair, a vicar, a lady’s maid who knows too much, a flapper with a suspiciously fluid accent, and a footman with something to hide. Within twenty minutes somebody is dead in the library with a length of lead piping, and everybody in the room has both a motive and an alibi. The house is stuffed with exactly the right sort of people: Lady Eddison presides with the brittle graciousness of a woman guarding something enormous, her husband is a colonel confined to a wheelchair with rather more mobility than he chooses to advertise, her son is conducting an affair he cannot possibly acknowledge, and the lady’s maid knows every secret in the building and voices precisely none of them. Everyone present is lying about something, and in proper Christie fashion most of the lies turn out to have nothing whatever to do with the murder.

The Unicorn and the Wasp: Utter Nonsense, Beautifully Dressed - Doctor Who episode still

The pleasure of it is how straight it’s played. Gareth Roberts, who did much the same trick with Elizabethan London in The Shakespeare Code, clearly loves this stuff, and the episode is packed with the specific furniture of the genre: the drawing-room gathering, the accusations flying, the flashbacks with unreliable narration, the moment where everyone’s secret comes out at once. It even does the bit where the detective assembles the suspects and walks them through it. There’s a lovely running gag in which the Doctor and Donna keep accidentally saying Christie novel titles at each other in ordinary conversation, murder at the vicarage, why didn’t they ask, while Agatha stands right there half-noticing. It should be unbearably smug and it somehow isn’t, mostly because the cast play it completely deadpan.

Agatha Christie, detective

The episode’s best idea is what it does with Christie herself. Fenella Woolgar plays her not as a national treasure but as a woman having the worst week of her life: her marriage has just collapsed, she’s convinced her books are disposable rubbish, and she has no interest whatsoever in being clever for anybody. She solves the murder because she can’t help it, and she takes no joy in it at all. That gives the froth a spine, and when the Doctor tries to reassure her that her work will last, she doesn’t believe him, and the episode is smart enough to leave that hanging until the final scene rather than resolving it with a speech. It also hangs the whole thing on a real mystery, because in December 1926 Agatha Christie genuinely did vanish for ten days and was found in a hotel in Harrogate with no memory of how she got there, and never explained it. Using an unsolved biographical gap as the shape of a Doctor Who plot is a genuinely elegant move: the show fills the hole and then puts it back exactly as it found it.

A vicar, a wasp and a very silly explanation

The alien is where things get gloriously daft. The Vespiform is a giant shapeshifting wasp, and the reason it’s committing murders in the style of an Agatha Christie novel is one of the most enjoyably convoluted explanations the series has produced, involving a telepathic gem, a love affair in India forty years ago, a hidden child, and a psychic link that accidentally imprinted a stack of detective fiction onto an alien’s developing mind at the moment it woke up. It makes not a great deal of sense and it doesn’t matter even slightly. Other fans enjoyed it for the same reason, all that murder-mystery furniture played completely straight. A respectable country vicar as the monster, undone by his own borrowed genre conventions, is exactly the right ending for this episode, and the resolution is neat, with the gem going into the lake and the wasp following it and Donna the one who throws it. Agatha is horrified that she’s caused a death and the Doctor tells her, gently, that she didn’t. The show’s touch is so much lighter here than a fortnight ago it’s almost funny: The Doctor’s Daughter closed on a dead soldier and a father quietly lied to by the universe, and this one closes on a vicar turning into an insect and falling in a pond. Series 4 has been unusually willing to swing between moods from one week to the next, and it largely gets away with it because the central pairing stays absolutely constant throughout.

Detoxing with ginger beer

The set piece everyone will remember is the poisoning. The Doctor, dosed with cyanide, has to flush it out of his system by miming his requirements at Donna while barely able to speak, protein, salt, shock, resulting in her sprinting round a kitchen assembling walnuts and anchovies and finally snogging him full on the mouth to deliver the necessary jolt, after which he expels the poison in a cloud of gas and announces he needs to detox. It’s pure farce, brilliantly timed, and Tate and Tennant are having such an obviously good time that it’s infectious. It also underlines what’s working so well about this pairing. There’s no romantic tension to navigate, the kiss is a first-aid procedure and both of them treat it as one with Donna immediately complaining about it, so the show can just let them be funny together. After two seasons of unspoken yearning, the sheer relief of a Doctor and companion who bicker like siblings cannot be overstated.

It’s a very long way from the shouting bride who wanted nothing to do with any of this at the end of The Runaway Bride. Donna spends this episode thoroughly enjoying herself, swanning about in borrowed twenties evening wear, interrogating suspects with a great deal more enthusiasm than tact, and walking off with most of the best lines in the script. After the moral weight of Pompeii and the Ood Sphere, letting her simply have a lovely time at a party is a smart bit of pacing, and Tate is visibly relishing every second of it.

The last-scene grace note is the thing I keep coming back to: showing a miserable, brilliant woman who thinks her work is worthless a copy of her own novel still in print in the year five billion. Unashamedly sentimental, and it completely lands.

Rating: 3.5/5. Lightweight and entirely disposable, with a plot that collapses if you prod it, but hugely enjoyable and gorgeous to look at. Sometimes an episode just needs to be fun, and this is very fun. Utter nonsense, and I loved every minute.

May 27, 2008 1 comment

Doctor Who Television

The Doctor’s Daughter: Born From a Machine

by Hutch Morzaria May 19, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

The Doctor’s Daughter is the sixth episode of the fourth series of Doctor Who, in which the Tenth Doctor and Donna land on the colony world of Messaline and a tissue sample grows him an instant daughter, Jenny. The post covers the episode’s best idea, a generations-long war that turns out to be only seven days old, along with Donna’s role in cracking it and Martha Jones’s quiet departure.

The review lands on a split verdict. The seven-day reveal, Donna’s detective work and Jenny’s death scene are strong, while the pacing is rushed and the resurrection coda undercuts its own punch. It rates the episode 3/5.

An episode with a title that gives away its own hook and a premise that could have been a disaster: the Doctor gets a daughter, instantly, from a machine, in the first five minutes. “The Doctor’s Daughter” is a mess in places and rushes several things it should have sat with, but it has one genuinely superb twist, a very good Donna, and it quietly closes the book on Martha Jones. Uneven, but never dull.

Generated anomaly

The TARDIS is dragged off course to Messaline, a colony world where the Doctor is immediately grabbed, his hand shoved into a progenation machine, and a tissue sample spun up into a fully grown adult in seconds. She steps out of the device armed, uniformed, and delighted. Donna, who spent half of Partners in Crime miming across a pair of office windows to catch his eye, names her Jenny, short for generated anomaly, and the Doctor spends most of the episode refusing to look at her. That refusal is the best character material here. Jenny is his daughter by any biological measure, and he wants nothing to do with her, because she came out of a machine built to make soldiers and because he has been a father before and lost everything that went with it. Tennant plays the coldness convincingly and the thaw slowly, and there’s a lovely, painful scene where he finally admits what he had and what the war took. It’s the most he’s said about it since he sat in a bar and told Martha about the burnt orange sky in Gridlock. Georgia Moffett is very good as Jenny too, all instinct and enthusiasm, a person with no childhood and no context, learning what she is in real time. Her delight at everything is genuinely charming, and her frustration at being rejected by the one person who should understand her lands.

Seven days

The twist is the reason to watch, and it’s terrific. Messaline is locked in a war between human colonists and the Hath, fish-headed aliens who were once their partners. Both sides breed soldiers instantly from progenation machines. Both sides talk about generations of conflict, ancient grievances, a war that has consumed their entire history. The war has been going on for seven days. Because a generation, when you can grow an adult in twenty seconds, is about an hour. Whole lineages have lived and died since last Tuesday. The “ancient” hatred was invented within a week, and nobody left alive remembers a time before it because nobody left alive is more than a few days old.

What makes the reveal sting is what it says about the people fighting it. Every soldier on Messaline believes themselves the inheritor of an ancient cause. They recite the history, they honour their fallen, they know precisely who the enemy is and exactly why, and every scrap of it was assembled inside a week, by people who are themselves only days old. It’s a genuinely sharp idea about how quickly a grievance can calcify into a birthright, and the episode is wise enough to state it once, clearly, and then move on rather than stopping to lecture anybody about it. And it’s Donna who works it out, from the numbers stencilled on the corridor doors. She’s a temp. She has spent years in filing systems and stock rooms, and she recognises a sequence when she sees one. It’s a brilliant use of the character: not clever in the Doctor’s way, but observant in a completely ordinary way that nobody else in the room would think to be. She’s been quietly earning this since she put her hands on that lever in The Fires of Pompeii, and here she solves the entire mystery on her own.

The Doctor's Daughter: Born From a Machine - Doctor Who episode still

The object both armies are killing each other over, the Source, turns out not to be a weapon at all but a terraforming device, the thing that was always meant to make this dead world habitable. Seven days of slaughter over a gardening tool. General Cobb is a serviceable zealot, the sort of man who needs the war more than the war needs him, and he’s the real monster of the piece, a man who equates peace with victory at any cost. The confrontation gives the Doctor his best moment, though. Holding a gun on Cobb, with every reason to use it, he puts it down and tells the new society exactly what to build itself on: he’s the man who never would. Given what we watched him do to the Family of Blood, it’s a line he has to keep re-earning, but here, in front of a brand-new civilisation with no history yet, it means something.

Jenny, and Martha going home

Cobb shoots anyway, and Jenny takes it for him. Her death is the strongest scene in the episode. The Doctor, who spent the whole hour refusing to call her his daughter, holds her while she goes and tells her everything he wouldn’t say when it might have mattered. It’s brutal, well played, and completely earned. And then the episode does something I’m still chewing over: after everyone leaves, the terraforming energy washes over her body and she wakes up, steals a shuttle, and heads off into the universe to have adventures. The Doctor never finds out. I genuinely can’t decide whether that’s a lovely grace note or a cheat that undercuts the death it just spent ten minutes selling me. Probably both. Other fans came away with a mixed bag too, and I can see exactly why. It would be devastating if he knew, and instead it’s a secret I’m left holding on his behalf.

Quietly, in the middle of all this, Martha Jones leaves for good. She spends the episode separated with the Hath, trekking across a hostile surface, watching one of them drown saving her. That sequence is rather better than it needed to be. The Hath are effectively mute, communicating in bubbles and gestures, and the show wrings a surprising amount of pathos out of a fish-headed alien and a human doctor learning to trust one another with no shared language whatsoever. When Peck goes under to haul her out of a sinkhole, it genuinely lands, because here is a creature she couldn’t exchange a single word with, dying for her, on a world that belonged to neither of them. At the end she chooses to go home, not wounded this time, not running from anything, just finished. She’s got a fiancé and a career and a life she likes, and she tells Donna to look after him. After the year she walked across in Last of the Time Lords, it’s a fittingly undramatic exit for a character who earned an undramatic ending. She gets to just stop, and be fine.

I’ll admit the title spoiled the hook for me before the credits even rolled, and I spent the opening scenes waiting for the daughter to turn up. Donna cracking the whole thing with temp-work pattern recognition is what I’ll remember, because the show keeps finding ways to make her ordinariness the useful thing and it keeps working.

Rating: 3/5. Rushed, tonally scattered, and the resurrection coda pulls its own punch. But the seven-day reveal is superb, Donna is excellent, and Jenny’s death scene is the best three minutes in it.

May 19, 2008 1 comment

Doctor Who Television

The Poison Sky: Burning the Air to Save It

by Hutch Morzaria May 12, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

The Poison Sky is the fifth episode of the fourth series of Doctor Who and the second half of the Sontaran two-parter. ATMOS gas is choking the Earth, UNIT’s counter-attack struggles, Donna ends up stranded on the Sontaran ship, and the Doctor builds a device to burn the poison out of the sky.

The piece covers the everyday-apocalypse imagery, UNIT’s bad day, Donna being tested, and the surprising ending for teenage genius Luke Rattigan. It lands on a competent but conventional hour with a better heart than its plot, and gives the episode 3/5.

The second half of a two-parter has one job: pay off the mess the first half made. The Sontaran Stratagem left us with four hundred million cars pumping poison into the sky, an old man sealed in a gassing car in his own driveway, and a fleet of very short soldiers in orbit having the time of their lives. “The Poison Sky” does that competently rather than brilliantly. It’s the most conventional hour of the season so far, all corridors and countdowns and soldiers shouting into radios, but it gives Donna a properly hard night, it finds an unexpectedly moving ending for its most irritating character, and it lets the Doctor be quietly, seriously angry about something worth being angry about.

Axes and Atmospheres

We left Wilf choking in a locked car, and the resolution is perfect: Sylvia Noble puts an axe through the windscreen. It’s a brilliant little beat, the mother who has spent two episodes being witheringly unimpressed by everything turning out to be the one who runs at a problem with a hatchet. The Nobles continue to be the best supporting family the show has had since the Tylers, and I’d happily watch a whole spin-off of Sylvia just being appalled at things.

The scale of the threat is well handled. This isn’t an invasion fleet in the sky, it’s every car on Earth belching poison at once, cities vanishing under yellow fog, hospitals filling up. The Sontarans aren’t conquering the planet in the usual sense, they’re converting it, turning the atmosphere into feed for growing clones, because a war with the Rutans needs bodies and Earth is a conveniently placed nursery. Humanity isn’t even the enemy. It’s just in the way of the breeding programme, which is a properly dismissive kind of villainy.

The imagery earns it too. There’s a genuinely unsettling stretch where the streets simply empty, abandoned traffic sitting in the road, yellow fog rolling between semi-detached houses, an entire country told to stay indoors. It’s a very British sort of apocalypse, all civil-defence broadcasts and people taping up their window frames, and it’s considerably more effective than the space battle that follows it. The show has always been good at catastrophe in suburban terms and this is a strong example, and I’ll take it over a fleet of spaceships any day of the week.

UNIT’s Bad Day

The military response is the most interesting failure in the episode. The Doctor warns UNIT off engaging the Sontarans and, being soldiers, they engage the Sontarans, and it goes about as well as he said. Even the launch of a nuclear missile gets stopped, with Martha’s clone helping the Sontarans from inside UNIT, which is when he works out what they’re really protecting. Colonel Mace’s counter-move is bringing in the Valiant, the huge flying carrier the Master used in The Sound of Drums, and it’s a nice piece of continuity. The sight of that thing rising through the fog to open fire is the best image in the episode.

The Doctor’s relationship with all this stays prickly, which I appreciated. He works alongside them, he uses what they can do, and he never once pretends to like it. The argument the two-parter started about whether his contempt for soldiers is entirely fair doesn’t get settled here either, and the show is right not to force it. After the cold fury of Planet of the Ood it’s interesting to watch him angry in a different way, this time at people who ought to know better and are doing it anyway.

Martha, meanwhile, spends most of the hour in a tank. The Doctor finds the real one inside a Sontaran cloning device and wakes her up, which kills the clone, and it’s a strange little scene watching Martha and her own duplicate. The clone thread doesn’t amount to a lot in the end, but it gives Freema Agyeman something to play besides explaining the plot.

Staal deserves a mention because he’s the reason the Sontarans still work as villains at all. Christopher Ryan plays him as a man who genuinely believes every word of the warrior creed and finds the Doctor faintly pitiful, and the scenes where the two of them trade insults across the ship are the sharpest dialogue in the hour. But the second half does ask them to spend a lot of time barking orders and being shot at, and that’s where the menace they had last week starts to leak away. I liked them more when they were smug and dangerous than when they were just loud.

Donna Out of Her Depth

The best material belongs to Donna, and it’s the first time this season has properly tested her. The Doctor gives her the key and tells her to wait in the TARDIS, which is exactly the sort of instruction she’s spent the whole run ignoring, and then the Sontarans teleport the TARDIS onto their ship with her still inside it. She’s alone, in the middle of an enemy warship, and visibly frightened. Catherine Tate plays the fear straight rather than for laughs, which is the correct choice.

It matters because Donna has spent her run being the person who tells the Doctor what to do rather than the person who does the running. Since the two of them put their hands on that lever together in The Fires of Pompeii, the show has been building her as an equal rather than a passenger, and this is where it starts cashing that in. She’s not clever like Martha or fearless like Rose. She’s an ordinary woman in a situation that’s far too big for her, and she holds it together anyway, which I think is better. Not everyone will agree, but I found it a lot more affecting than any of the shooting.

It also helps that the script trusts her. Den of Geek’s review from the week it aired picks her out as the one who keeps her head, and I’d say the same. Every time the plot threatens to turn into corridors and countdown clocks, it’s Donna’s reactions that pull it back to something human.

The Boy Who Wanted to Matter

The resolution is where the episode surprises. The Doctor builds an atmospheric converter to ignite the gas and burn the atmosphere clean, then heads for the Sontaran ship, not to use it but to offer them a way out first. Leave, or the whole thing burns. Staal, being a Sontaran, refuses without hesitating.

That offer is worth pausing on. He didn’t have to make it. He had the device built, the ship in range and every justification he could want, and he gave them a way out anyway, to a species that had just spent a day trying to suffocate a planet for breeding space. It’s the clearest statement yet of the line this Doctor keeps trying to hold: one chance, offered honestly, even to people who are obviously going to throw it back at him.

And then Luke Rattigan takes the Doctor’s place. The spoilt, insufferable teenager who sold his planet for a bit of flattery has watched the Sontarans make it very clear they were always going to use him and throw him away. So he teleports himself onto the ship, sends the Doctor back, and triggers the device. It’s genuinely affecting, mostly because the episode never asks us to like him. He doesn’t get a redemption speech, just a boy who finally understood what he’d done and made one correct decision at the last possible moment.

Meanwhile the Doctor was entirely prepared to die doing it. He’d told Donna and Martha to live good lives before he went, and nobody remarks on it afterwards, which is becoming a pattern worth watching.

What I keep coming back to is how little of this needed the Doctor to be clever. Most weeks he wins by spotting the one detail everyone missed. Here he wins by building a big machine, giving his enemy a fair warning, and then having a teenager take the decision out of his hands. It’s an oddly humble way to end a story, and I think it’s a big part of why the episode sticks with me more than the plot says it should.

Rating: 3/5. The most routine story of the run, heavy on corridors and countdown clocks, and the Sontarans lose a little menace once they’re just shouting at soldiers. But Donna’s night on the enemy ship and Rattigan’s ending lift it, and it never drags.

May 12, 2008 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Sontaran Stratagem: Every Car on Earth

by Hutch Morzaria May 6, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

The Sontaran Stratagem is the fourth episode of the fourth series of Doctor Who and the first half of a two-parter. Martha Jones returns as a UNIT medical officer, the Doctor and Donna investigate ATMOS, a satnav fitted to four hundred million cars, and the Sontarans and teenage genius Luke Rattigan turn out to be behind it.

The piece covers Martha’s return, the everyday horror of the ATMOS plot, the Sontarans as a warrior race with an exploitable code, and the Doctor’s uneasy relationship with UNIT. It lands on a sturdy, entertaining setup with one genuinely thorny idea and a good cliffhanger, and gives the episode 3/5.

A returning companion, a returning classic monster, and a plot built entirely out of satnavs. “The Sontaran Stratagem” is a solid, workmanlike first half. It hasn’t got the ambition of the season’s best, but it moves briskly, it brings Martha Jones back in a way that respects where she was left, and it lands a properly uncomfortable argument about the Doctor and the military. Also the Sontarans are enormous fun, which covers a multitude of sins.

Martha Jones, UNIT Officer

Martha walked out of the TARDIS on her own terms at the end of Last of the Time Lords, and the show has been sensible about what she did next. She’s finished her training, she’s a doctor, she’s engaged, she’s working as UNIT’s medical officer, and it’s she who summons the Doctor on her own authority because something on Earth needs him. I’ll admit I was braced for a lovesick Martha and didn’t get one, which made me very happy.

The Martha who left was hollowed out by a year of walking a conquered planet and by loving a man who wouldn’t look at her. The Martha who comes back is composed, senior and completely over it. Freema Agyeman plays the reunion with real warmth and zero yearning, and the show is smart enough not to reopen the wound.

Best gag in the episode is Donna and Martha meeting, with the Doctor visibly bracing for a catastrophe that never arrives. The two of them get on immediately and start comparing notes about him, which is his worst nightmare, and it’s a small scene that does a lot of work.

There’s a nastier thread under her return though. The Sontarans take a copy of her, a clone grown in a tank with her memories, walking around UNIT wearing her face and carrying her clearance. It’s a well-worn science-fiction idea, but the episode gets one really good chill out of it: Martha’s own body suspended in a growth vat while a duplicate carries on with her shift, and not a single person in the building noticing. She’s one of the most capable people they have and she’s been replaced, just like that.

Donna and the Doctor together are worth a line too, because it’s the first episode where I really felt them settle into being a double act. She keeps puncturing his speeches, he keeps letting her, and neither of them pretends to be the sensible one. After the mess of the last few companions, a pairing that just enjoys arguing is a relief, and Tate is funnier here than she’s been so far because she’s got somebody to bounce off.

ATMOS

The threat is a nicely mundane one. ATMOS is a device fitted to four hundred million cars worldwide, a satnav that also cuts exhaust emissions to precisely zero. It’s cheap, it’s everywhere, it’s in every vehicle on the road, and as the Doctor points out with the weariness of a man who’s seen this a hundred times, nothing that good is free.

Two things are wrong with it. The satnavs have started driving people into rivers and killing anyone who looks too closely at the company, which gives the first act a decent thriller pulse. And the emissions system is doing rather more than filtering. There’s something properly modern about the paranoia, a piece of consumer technology that hundreds of millions of people installed willingly, quietly turned into a global weapon by the company that supplied it. The show doesn’t labour the point, but it’s there, and it’s the sort of idea I’d have happily watched a whole episode on.

The opening death is the best-directed thing in the episode, a man alone in his car with the doors locked by a system he trusts completely, driven calmly towards a river while he hammers on the glass. No monster, no ray gun, no warning, just a machine following its instructions. It’s exactly the small domestic horror this show does better than almost anyone, and it sets up the threat far more effectively than the fleet-in-orbit spectacle that turns up later. If you want another take on the same episode, this fan write-up from the weekend it aired is a good read.

Pacing is where it wobbles. The investigation section in the middle spends a lot of time with people walking down corridors and explaining things to each other, and I checked the clock more than once. It’s a first half, and it feels like one: lots of setting up chess pieces and not a lot of playing with them yet. I forgave it mostly because I knew a second part was coming, and because the pieces are so much fun to look at.

Sontarans and a Clever Boy

The Sontarans themselves are a delight. Squat, potato-headed clone warriors who bellow “Sontar-Ha!” in unison, who genuinely can’t conceive of a fight not being glorious, and who keep a very obvious weak spot at the back of the neck. General Staal, “the undefeated”, is played with tremendous relish, and the writing gets the joke exactly right. They aren’t stupid, they’re so completely governed by their warrior code that it can be used against them. A species that can’t resist a duel is a species you can manipulate.

Their human collaborator is Luke Rattigan, a teenage genius with a private academy full of gifted students and an ego the size of a small country. He’s an effective creation, a boy so convinced of his own brilliance and so starved of actual respect that a race of alien soldiers telling him he’s special is enough to buy his entire planet. Insufferable, sure, but there’s real pathos underneath because the Sontarans obviously despise him and he can’t see it.

His academy is a good detail as well, a school of brilliant teenagers he personally assembled and can’t relate to for thirty consecutive seconds. Rattigan wants to be worshipped by people he’s already decided are beneath him, and that’s precisely the lever the Sontarans use to pick him up and carry him about. I’ve known a few people like that, though thankfully none with an army.

Soldiers

The most interesting thread is the Doctor and UNIT, and it’s properly prickly. He works with them and he does not like them. He bristles at the guns, at the salutes, at Colonel Mace calling him “sir”, at the whole apparatus of an organisation that solves problems by shooting them. Mace, to his credit, pushes back. These people are defending their planet, and the Doctor’s disdain for how they do it is easy to hold when you can leave whenever you like.

There’s no neat resolution offered, and the episode is better for it. Given what we watched him do to the Family in The Family of Blood, his squeamishness about soldiers is a rather more complicated position than he’d like it to be, and the show knows it.

Meanwhile Donna goes home, and it’s the warmest material in the hour. She sees her mother, who is as deflating as ever, and her grandfather Wilf, who is thrilled. Since Partners in Crime the show has quietly been building the Nobles into the most grounded family the series has had, and after the shouting of The Runaway Bride it’s nice to see her somewhere she’s loved. Which makes the cliffhanger land. The ATMOS devices activate worldwide, gas pours out of four hundred million exhausts at once, and Wilf is sitting in a locked car in his own driveway with the fumes rising, somewhere in there is a Martha who isn’t Martha, and an entire Sontaran fleet is in orbit, delighted.

Rating: 3/5. Sturdy rather than inspired, with some clunky dialogue and a middle section that marks time. But the Sontarans are a joy, Martha’s return is handled with care, and the cliffhanger is a good one.

May 6, 2008 2 comments

Doctor Who Television

Planet of the Ood: The Brain They Cut Out

by Hutch Morzaria April 28, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

Planet of the Ood is the third episode of the fourth series of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor and Donna land on the Ood Sphere in the year 4126 and find out why the gentle, servile Ood have always been so willing to serve. The piece covers the sales-conference setting, the hindbrain reveal, the Ood Brain and the red-eye outbreaks, and the ominous line Ood Sigma leaves the Doctor with.

It lands on a blunt, angry anti-slavery story that works because it treats the trade as ordinary business, with Catherine Tate’s Donna carrying most of the emotional weight. The verdict is 4/5: not the most elegant script of the season and the villains are broad, but the central idea is superb.

Two years ago, in a cramped base orbiting a black hole, the Doctor met a species of soft-spoken servants who told him they had nothing else in life, and he pulled a face and let it go. “Planet of the Ood” is the episode that goes back and picks that thread up, and the answer it finds is genuinely horrible. It’s Doctor Who doing an angry, unsubtle, thoroughly deserved anti-slavery story, and so far it’s the best thing the season has done with Donna.

The Sales Conference

The TARDIS lands on the Ood Sphere in the year 4126, in the snow, outside a facility belonging to Ood Operations, a human company that breeds, processes and sells Ood across the three galaxies. There’s a sales conference on. There are lanyards. There’s a marketing executive with a clipboard cheerfully explaining the product range, and a catalogue of translator-ball voices at different price points.

That’s the smartest choice the episode makes. The horror isn’t gothic or exotic, it’s procurement. Bulk orders, quarterly targets, a friendly rep called Solana walking buyers round the showroom, slavery rendered as an unremarkable line of business staffed by people who’ve just never thought about it very hard. Nobody in that building thinks of themselves as a monster, which is exactly why it’s so uncomfortable to sit through.

Donna is appalled, and her being appalled is the spine of the hour. After Partners in Crime and a very shouty return to the TARDIS I wasn’t sure how much of her was the loud version and how much was the person underneath, and this is where the person underneath turns up. She asks the obvious questions, why do they serve, why does nobody mind, what happens to the ones who stop being useful, and she refuses to be soothed by the answers. Then the Doctor turns it on her with the sharpest line in the episode: who does she think made the clothes she’s wearing?

It’s a cheap shot in one sense and completely fair in another, and the episode is brave enough to leave it sitting there. Donna doesn’t have a comeback. Neither do I. It’s a rare occasion when this show puts a properly uncomfortable idea in front of a family audience on a Saturday evening and then declines to tidy it away before the credits, and I’d like to see a lot more of that. And it’s a fair bit sharper than the “aliens are people too” lecture I was half expecting from the setup, mainly because the Doctor doesn’t get to be the good guy in that exchange.

The Doctor drifts around the showroom for a good while before he says anything, and I liked that. He and Donna pass themselves off as visitors, and the comedy of two people nodding politely at a product catalogue they find sickening does a lot of the early work for the script. You feel the episode holding its temper, waiting, which makes the moment it stops being polite that much more effective. It’s a slow-burn opening for a season that’s mostly been in a hurry, and it gives the story room to breathe before it gets nasty.

The Brain in Their Hands

Then the reveal, and it changes everything we saw back in The Impossible Planet.

The Ood aren’t a naturally servile species. They’re born with a secondary hindbrain that they carry in their hands, a soft globe of tissue held out and offered, the organ that connects them telepathically to one another. It’s the most defenceless thing imaginable, a creature that walks around holding its own brain in its palms as an act of trust. And Ood Operations cuts it off. Every single one. They amputate the hindbrain and bolt on a translator sphere, and what’s left is docile, obedient and marketable.

It lands like a punch precisely because we’ve spent two years mildly uncomfortable about the Ood without ever asking why. The polite servants who said they had nothing else in life had been surgically deprived of everything else in life. The Doctor’s little flicker of unease back then turns out to have been the right instinct, badly under-acted upon, and the guilt is written all over him here, particularly given how many Ood he watched die in The Satan Pit without ever asking what had been done to them. A sequel that goes back and makes the original more disturbing is rare, and this one does it without a single flashback.

Donna’s reaction to the hindbrain is the best work Catherine Tate has done so far. She asks to be shown one, then she can’t look at it, then she makes herself look anyway. It isn’t played as shrieking, it’s a woman deliberately forcing herself to understand something and being changed by it. It’s also a neat flip on the usual companion beat, because she isn’t frightened of the alien in front of her, she’s frightened of what people like her did to it. The Doctor, for once, hasn’t got a comforting speech ready.

The Song

Underneath the facility is the rest of the answer, the Ood Brain, an enormous shared telepathic organ in a pit at the heart of the world that links the entire species into one consciousness. Ood Operations has kept it suppressed under a dampening field for a very long time, because a connected Ood is not a sellable Ood. The “red-eye” outbreaks turn out to be the natural rage of a species leaking through the barrier, and the circle, as the Ood keep saying, must be broken.

The outbreaks work as straight horror in their own right, placid servants straightening up mid-task, eyes burning crimson, translator spheres suddenly playing a very different song. There’s an unpleasant sequence involving a member of staff that the episode declines to linger on and equally declines to soften. And because we know by that point exactly what was done to these creatures, the violence reads less like monstrousness and more like something several centuries overdue. Not everyone will be comfortable with me saying that about a Saturday teatime show, but I’m not taking it back.

The Doctor’s anger is worth a mention too. He’s furious in this one, properly furious, but it’s a tired kind of fury, the anger of somebody who’s seen a version of this before and knows the next one is already being planned. Tennant plays it low and quiet rather than shouting, and I think that’s the right call. When the Doctor raises his voice these days it’s usually a performance, and here he doesn’t bother.

Mr Halpen is a good, banal villain. Not a sadist, just a second-generation executive protecting a family business and irritated by the disruption to his quarter. His fate is the episode’s one moment of real relish: he’s been quietly dosed for a while with a “hair loss tonic” that’s been slowly converting him, and he turns into an Ood right in front of us. The Doctor’s deadpan reaction is perfect, the poetic justice is completely earned, and it’s the closest the hour comes to a laugh.

When the barrier falls the Ood are freed, and they sing. The song of captivity that’s been humming mournfully under the whole episode turns into something joyful, and the show lets it play, unhurried, in a story that spent most of its length being furious. It’s a lovely ending, and other fans who caught it live seem to have landed on much the same spot.

“Your Song Must End Soon”

And then the sting. As the Doctor and Donna leave, Ood Sigma thanks them, promises the Ood will sing of them forever, and adds, without any emphasis, that the Doctor’s song must be ending soon.

That’s the second time in a fortnight the show has pointed at somebody and said something ominous. A week earlier the prophet in The Fires of Pompeii said there was something on Donna’s back, and now an Ood says the Doctor’s song is running out, on a different planet and in a different millennium. Once is atmosphere. Twice, from unconnected sources and pointing at different people, is the show telling us something.

The Doctor brushes it off. Donna clocks it. I’ve no idea what it means and I’ve now heard it twice, which is exactly two more times than I’m comfortable with.

Rating: 4/5. Not the most elegant script of the season, and the villains are broad, but the central idea is superb and the anger behind it is real. The hindbrain reveal is the most quietly horrifying thing this show has done in a while.

April 28, 2008 2 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Fires of Pompeii: Two Sets of Hands on the Lever

by Hutch Morzaria April 20, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

A review of The Fires of Pompeii, the 2008 Doctor Who episode that lands the Doctor and Donna in Pompeii the day before Vesuvius erupts. The post covers Donna’s refusal to accept the Doctor’s fixed point in time, the Caecilius family, the soothsayers and the stone Pyroviles, the choice to set off the volcano with both of them on the lever, and Donna begging him to save someone.

It calls the episode gorgeous, genuinely upsetting and built around a moral problem it commits to properly, with the Pyroviles as the weakest element. It sees the shared lever and the rescue of one family as the whole case for Donna as a companion. Rating: 4.5/5.

Two episodes into Donna’s run and the show has already justified her completely. The Fires of Pompeii drops the pair of them into the most famous disaster in Roman history the day before it happens, and then spends the hour asking a question the series usually dodges, which is what it actually costs to be the man who knows what’s coming and doesn’t stop it. It’s funny for a while. Then it stops being funny, and by the end it’s one of the most affecting things the show has done.

Volcano day

The TARDIS lands, the Doctor cheerfully announces brand new Rome, and Donna’s delighted, right up until she asks why the seven hills of Rome have turned into one bare mountain with smoke coming off it. The ground shakes, a market trader sighs “here we go again”, and they both get there at once. Pompeii. It’s the twenty-third of August, 79 AD, and it’s volcano day tomorrow. Before that there’s a lovely bit of messing about, Donna trying out Latin on a stallholder who thinks she’s speaking Celtic, and the Doctor finding a stallholder has sold the TARDIS to a marble dealer as modern art. It’s light and quick and Tate and Tennant are bouncing off each other like they’ve been doing it for years.

And then Donna’s reaction to what’s coming is the right one, and the show knows it. She wants to warn them, all of them, right now, starting with the family whose house they’re standing in. The Doctor tells her no. Pompeii is a fixed point, one of the moments history can’t lose without everything around it coming apart. He told Rose that time was in flux, changing every second, back in The Unquiet Dead, and it turns out that’s only half of it. Some things are in flux, he says, and some things are fixed.

Donna’s having none of it, and her refusal is the engine of the whole episode. She isn’t being naive, she’s being human. Twenty thousand people are going to die tomorrow and a man with a time machine is standing in their kitchen making excuses. Rose found out what happens when you rewrite a death you care about in Father’s Day, but this is the first time a companion has looked at the rule and just refused to find it acceptable. So you get an argument rather than a lecture, because they’re both right. He’s right that history can’t absorb it, she’s right that walking away from twenty thousand people on the strength of a rule is monstrous, and the show never tidies that up, it just makes the pair of them live inside it for an hour.

The Caecilius family are beautifully drawn, which makes all of it worse. Peter Capaldi is terrific as the marble merchant, all anxious social climbing and real warmth, his wife Metella frets about the neighbours, their son Quintus is a disappointment with a drinking habit, and their daughter Evelina has started making prophecies and has an arm that’s slowly turning to stone. Pleasant, ordinary, doomed people, and the episode makes very sure I liked them before it lit the fuse.

Prophets and stone

The mystery is a good one. Pompeii has an unnerving surplus of soothsayers, the Sibylline Sisterhood, hooded priestesses whose skin is hardening to rock, and augurs across the city whose predictions have suddenly started coming true. Something has given this town the gift of prophecy and it’s killing them by inches. The culprits are the Pyroviles, creatures of living rock who fell from the sky so fast they shattered into dust and slept under the mountain for thousands of years, until the great earthquake seventeen years ago woke them up. Now they’re rebuilding themselves out of human bodies and using the volcano’s own power to do it. The design is superb, towering magma creatures glimpsed through the steam though they’re the weakest thing in the episode by some distance.

The Sibylline Sisterhood in The Fires of Pompeii

The really unsettling stuff is the prophecies. The soothsayers see straight through both of them. Evelina knows he’s called the Doctor and that Donna calls herself Noble, and then that even the word Doctor is false, that his real name is hidden and burns in the Cascade of Medusa, that he’s a Lord of Time. Lucius calls him the man from Gallifrey and tells him his home is lost in fire, said as casually as if he were reading it off a shopping list. He tells Donna there’s something on her back. And he tells the Doctor, flatly, that she is returning. Who’s she? The Doctor asks, and nobody answers, and it sits there like a stone in your shoe. I have no idea what to make of it, and after that blonde woman on a London street at the end of Partners in Crime I’m not sure I like any of the possibilities.

The lever

Then comes the choice, and it’s brutal. The only way to stop the Pyroviles is to turn their own machine against them and set the volcano off, the eruption that’s supposed to happen anyway. Pompeii or the world. And the Doctor says the thing that makes this episode, that if Pompeii is destroyed it isn’t just history any more, it’s him, he makes it happen. There’s no clever third option and no reversal, he has to push a lever and kill a town. And he doesn’t do it alone. Donna, who has spent the entire hour arguing against him, puts her hands over his on the lever, they look at each other, and they push. That one image, two people sharing the weight of something neither of them wants, is worth more than any speech, and it’s the best thing this series has given me so far.

The eruption itself is superbly done, and the show doesn’t flinch from what they’ve just caused. The ash comes down the mountain, the sky goes dark, people run through the streets, and Donna’s shouting at them not to go to the beach. It’s genuinely upsetting. Every photograph of Pompeii I’ve ever seen is somebody who was standing there when this happened, and the episode’s just spent the best part of an hour making sure I knew a few of them by name.

Just save someone

The last part is where it all pays off. Back in the TARDIS, with Pompeii burning, Donna breaks. She isn’t asking him to undo it, she knows he can’t, and he tells her he’d go back and save them all if he could. So she asks for less. Just someone, please, not the whole town, just save someone. And he goes back and pulls the Caecilius family out of that house, and it costs history nothing, and it would never have occurred to him without her. Other Doctor Who fans picked out the same moment, Donna seeing one family where he could only see the big picture, and I think that’s exactly it.

That’s the whole argument for Donna Noble in one scene. At the end of The Runaway Bride, watching him stand there while the Racnoss drowned, she told him he needed someone with him, someone to stop him. This is the other half of it. She doesn’t just stop him doing terrible things, she makes him do the kind ones he’d have walked straight past. He even says it, in the TARDIS afterwards: she was right, sometimes he needs someone. Welcome aboard. After the way he was hedging about taking her at all in Partners in Crime, that’s a real shift, and “just save someone” might be the most useful thing anybody has said to this Doctor in a long time.

The coda’s lovely and a bit eerie. Six months on the family are in Rome, Caecilius chasing a marble contract, Evelina in a dress her dad doesn’t approve of, Quintus studying to be a doctor, and when Quintus kneels at the household shrine there’s a new carving on it. The Doctor, Donna and the TARDIS, the strange man and the shouting woman, turned into household gods. Capaldi and the rest got enough life that the eruption lands like a bereavement rather than a spectacle, which is why that last shot works.

Rating: 4.5/5. Gorgeous to look at, genuinely upsetting, and built around a moral problem the show commits to properly rather than dodging. The Pyroviles are the weakest element and it barely matters. The Doctor is measurably better for having Donna Noble shouting at him, and this partnership is going to be something.

April 20, 2008 9 comments

Doctor Who Television

Partners in Crime: Donna Noble Comes Looking

by Hutch Morzaria April 14, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

A review of Partners in Crime, the opening episode of Doctor Who’s 2008 series, in which Donna Noble and the Doctor separately investigate Adipose Industries and its diet pill that turns body fat into small alien creatures. The post covers the parallel investigation and the mimed reunion through a window, the Adipose and Miss Foster, the terms Donna and the Doctor set for travelling together, her family, and the unexplained appearance of Rose Tyler at the end.

It calls the episode warm, very funny and confident, light on plot and a little weightless after Voyage of the Damned, but a superb return for a character it had written off, with Wilf a highlight and the closing Rose cameo lifting it further. Rating: 4/5.

When Donna Noble turned down all of time and space at the end of The Runaway Bride, I thought that was the last we’d see of her. I was wrong, and I’m delighted to be. Partners in Crime brings her back, and not as a lucky bystander this time either, but as a woman who has spent the time since actively hunting the Doctor down. It resets the whole feel of the show in a way that’s genuinely fresh. It’s also very funny, which helps.

Two Investigations, One Building

The structure is the best joke in the episode. The Doctor is investigating Adipose Industries, Donna is investigating Adipose Industries, and neither knows the other one is there. So the first half runs them on parallel tracks, the pair of them knocking on the doors of customers with the same clipboard patter, sneaking round the same building, missing each other by seconds. Roger has lost a kilo a night, exactly a kilo, and his burglar alarm keeps going off at ten past one in the morning for no reason. Stacy’s delighted with the pills until Donna asks to use the loo. And I spent twenty minutes shouting at the telly for them to just turn round.

The payoff is the scene everyone will be talking about. The Doctor’s hanging outside Miss Foster’s office in a window cleaner’s cradle, listening in with a stethoscope, Donna’s creeping up to the same office from the inside, and they both look through the glass at the same moment. What follows is an entire silent, frantic conversation mimed across the office, him mouthing “What? What?” and her mouthing that she was looking for him, that she read it on the internet, that she crept along and heard them talking and hid. Tennant and Tate are superb, and the timing’s immaculate, and then Miss Foster turns round and asks if she’s interrupting. Other Doctor Who fans loved that mime too, and I think it’s the funniest thing this show has done in years. It tells you exactly what this pairing is going to be.

The Doctor and Donna spotting each other through the office window in Partners in Crime

Because Donna has been looking. That’s the change that matters. She went home and couldn’t settle, and she worked out that the way to find the Doctor was to look for trouble and wait for him to turn up. So she chased all of it, UFOs, sightings, crop circles, sea monsters, a bit on the internet about the bees disappearing. She believes all of it now, she says, apart from that replica of the Titanic flying over Buckingham Palace on Christmas Day, which has obviously got to be a hoax. She’d packed ages ago, just in case, and the boot of her mum’s car is full of suitcases and a hatbox. She didn’t wait to be chosen, she went and found him, and when they finally meet on the stairs the first thing she says is that he’s even got the same suit on.

And she arrives at exactly the right moment. The Doctor we rejoin here has been rattling about on his own since Martha walked away, and the last time we saw him he was letting a dead woman’s atoms go into space at the end of Voyage of the Damned. He’s lonely and he’s brittle, and when he works out who’s standing on the other side of that window the relief on his face does more than any amount of dialogue could.

The Fat Just Walks Away

The plot is pure high-concept silliness, and it works because it’s played so straight. Adipose Industries sells a diet pill with an irresistible slogan, the fat just walks away, and it does. Literally. Overnight a kilo of body fat pulls itself together into a small white creature with stubby arms and a big grin and toddles out through the cat flap. The Adipose are shameless. They’re marshmallows with faces, they wave, and they’re obviously going to be on every lunchbox in the country by summer.

But there’s a proper horror underneath it. Earth is a nursery, and when the schedule gets pushed forward the process stops politely taking the spare fat and starts taking the whole person. Stacy locks herself in her bathroom as the lumps move about under her clothes, and then there’s just a pile of clothes on the floor and a crowd of cheerful little blobs, one of them waving at Donna from the window sill before it jumps. It’s a nasty idea dressed up in something adorable, and that mix is very much what this show does best.

Sarah Lancashire is excellent as Miss Foster, brisk and contemptuous and completely unbothered, telling a tied-up journalist she’s travelled a long way to find obesity on this scale. Foster as in foster mother, she points out, since nobody asked. She’s a nanny from the stars running a baby farm on an unsuspecting planet, with the manner of a woman managing a regional office. Her end is a good one too. The parents turn up to collect their young, the Doctor points out they don’t need the nanny any more, and the beam she’s floating in simply switches off. No villainous speech, just a very long drop.

A Mate, Not a Girlfriend

The most important thing here isn’t the plot at all, it’s the terms they set by the car. The Doctor’s hesitant, and when Donna asks if he’d rather be on his own he admits that last time, with Martha, it got complicated, and that was his fault. All he wants is a mate. Donna hears “mate” the other way, tells him he’s not mating with her, sunshine, and makes it very clear she isn’t having any of that nonsense with a long streak of alien nothing. It’s a great bit of comedy and it’s doing a real job. Martha fell for him the moment they met back in Smith and Jones, Rose before her, and both of them got hurt by it, so having the possibility taken off the table in the first episode is enormously refreshing. It frees both actors up completely, and Tate and Tennant play them as squabbling equals with the chemistry there straight away.

Donna’s family are a fine addition too. Her mum Sylvia is a hard watch in a very recognisable way, dismissive and disappointed, always making it clear her daughter has amounted to nothing and mostly wanting the car back. Her grandad Wilfred Mott is an absolute joy, a warm old man with a telescope up at his allotment who shows her Venus and tells her that one day we’ll be striding out among the stars. She makes him promise to shout for her if he ever sees a little blue box in the sky. And his delight at the end, when one goes past with her waving from the door, “Go on, gal!”, is the loveliest moment in the episode.

The contrast between those two is doing deliberate work as well. Sylvia tells Donna she’s a failure, Wilf tells her she’s meant for something better, and Donna has spent her whole life listening to both. You can hear both of them in the way she talks about herself, the loud brassy bravado sitting right on top of a flat certainty that she’s nobody special. That’s more texture than a comedy episode strictly needed to bother with, and I’m glad it did.

The Woman Who Wasn’t There

And then, right at the end, the bit that stopped me dead. Donna’s still got her mum’s car keys, so she drops them in a bin on Brook Street, rings Sylvia to tell her, and asks a blonde woman standing by the police barriers to point out the bin when a tall woman called Sylvia comes looking. Donna goes. The blonde woman turns round, walks away up the street, and fades out of existence.

It’s Rose Tyler. Unmistakably. The same Rose who was sealed on the far side of a closed-off universe in Doomsday, for good, with the way between the worlds shut and the Doctor left crying in the TARDIS. She’s standing on a London street, and then she isn’t. No explanation, no music sting telling me what to think, and nobody in the episode even notices. I have absolutely no idea what it means or how it’s possible, and it’s completely hijacked my attention for the rest of the series. What’s she doing there, and does she know Donna, and why is it Donna she’s standing next to?

Rating: 4/5. Light on plot and a bit weightless after what the Doctor’s just been through, but hilarious, beautifully played, and a superb return for a character I’d written off. The last thirty seconds lift it a good deal, and I can’t wait to see where the two of them go first.

April 14, 2008 6 comments

Doctor Who Television

Voyage of the Damned: A Sinking Ship and a Doctor Alone

by Hutch Morzaria January 4, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

A review of Voyage of the Damned, the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas special in which a Doctor travelling alone boards a replica Titanic cruising above Earth and ends up leading a handful of survivors through the wrecked ship. The post covers the passengers, Kylie Minogue’s Astrid Peth, the golden Host robots and Max Capricorn’s scheme to crash the liner into the planet.

It finds the special overstuffed and uneven in the middle, with several characters there mainly to die, but praises the Host as a superb monster, Astrid as genuinely affecting and the final fifteen minutes as bleak and moving. It dwells on who survives and who doesn’t, and on a Doctor who plainly needs someone with him. Rating: 3.5/5.

We left the Doctor standing in his console room while the prow of an ocean liner smashed through the wall, which is a hard thing to follow. Voyage of the Damned follows it by going enormous: a luxury spaceliner, a cast of doomed passengers, golden killer angels, and a disaster movie played almost entirely straight. It’s the biggest, glossiest thing the show has tried, and it’s uneven, but the ending is one of the saddest the series has done. And it lands a point about the Doctor that’s been building for a while now, which is that he really shouldn’t be doing this on his own.

All aboard

The ship is the Titanic. Not that Titanic, a replica pleasure cruiser from the planet Sto named after it, because somebody liked the sound of the name and evidently didn’t look it up. That’s the joke the whole thing is built on, and it’s a good one, everybody aboard sailing on a ship named after the most famous catastrophe in human history and nobody having thought it through. The Doctor’s travelling alone, and that matters. After the year that never was and Martha walking away at the end of Last of the Time Lords, he’s got nobody, so he spends the episode collecting a substitute family out of strangers because he can’t help himself. Donna told him as much on a snowy street at the end of The Runaway Bride, that he needed somebody to stop him. He’s had a whole companion and a year of hell since then and he’s right back where she left him.

They’re a decent bunch, the strangers. Astrid Peth is a waitress who has spent her whole life on one planet dreaming about others, and Kylie Minogue plays her with a lovely, unforced wistfulness. The best moment she gets is early, teleported down to London on shore leave and finding the street completely empty, and she’s thrilled anyway, because it’s concrete and shops and no stars in the sky and it smells, and it’s a different planet. Other Doctor Who fans picked out that same energy in her, and it’s what cheers the Doctor up. Morvin and Foon Van Hoff are a sweet, broke couple who won their tickets in a phone-in competition (Foon dialled five thousand times, it turns out, which is its own small tragedy). Bannakaffalatta is a little red cyborg hiding what he is. Mr Copper is the ship’s Earth historian, and his cheerfully confident nonsense about the natives worshipping the great god Santa is the funniest running gag in the special. And Rickston Slade is a spectacularly obnoxious rich man, which matters later.

The Host

Then the shields go down in a meteoroid storm, which turns out to be on purpose, and the fun stops. The Host are a genuinely inspired monster, tall golden angel robots in flowing robes built to serve drinks and answer questions, whose halos come off and fly. When they’re turned to killing they do it with an unhurried, beatific calm, announcing “Information. Kill” in a pleasant customer-service voice. Angels as murder weapons at Christmas is a properly nasty image and the design is beautiful. It’s been a good year for angels as monsters, what with the statues in Blink, and these are the opposite trick, all movement and polish where those never moved at all. Copper gets the best line about them too, when the Host glide down on the survivors from above, that everyone had forgotten the traditions of Christmas and angels have wings.

What follows is a disaster movie. A small group of survivors picking their way through a broken ship over a drop straight into the engines, and dying, one at a time. Morvin goes first, a bit of beam giving way under his feet, and Foon screams at the Doctor to bring him back because he promised, and he can’t. She won’t go on without him, and a few minutes later she jumps over the side and drags a Host down with her. Bannakaffalatta finally shows everyone what he is and burns out his own power to short-circuit the Host, and dies asking if he did good. The show’s unsentimental about the arithmetic, because the Doctor keeps promising he’ll get everyone out and he keeps being wrong.

The Doctor and Astrid Peth with two of the Host behind them in Voyage of the Damned

The climb itself is well staged, a buckled gangway hanging over the nuclear storm drive with Host closing in from both ends. It’s the most straightforwardly action-movie the show has ever let itself be, and it’s shot like one. The characterisation is thin in places, and some of these people plainly exist to fall off something on schedule, but the scale isn’t thin at all. This is the show spending its whole Christmas budget in plain view and mostly getting away with it. Well over twelve million people watched it on Christmas Day, which I gather is the biggest audience Doctor Who has had since the seventies, and I can see why, it’s a rollicking old-fashioned adventure for most of its length.

Max Capricorn’s retirement plan

The villain, when we get to him, is the episode’s sharpest idea. Max Capricorn, head of the cruise line, voted out by his own board, and by now just a head on a life-support system, has arranged all of this so the Titanic crashes into Earth. Two thousand people aboard, a whole planet roasted, and the company that pushed him out finished by the scandal, while he sits safe in an impact chamber waiting to be collected and retire somewhere sunny. It’s petty on a cosmic scale. The Doctor calls it what it is, a retirement plan, and the show’s right to be disgusted by it. And it’s Astrid who stops him, driving a forklift truck into his life-support unit and taking the pair of them over the edge into the engines.

That’s a proper hero’s death, and the Doctor’s attempt to undo it is where the special earns everything. She was wearing a teleport bracelet, and the bracelet’s emergency setting has held on to what’s left of her, so he tries. He gets an image of her back, saying she keeps falling, and he keeps on pushing past the point where Copper is telling him she’s gone, shouting that he can do anything. He can’t. There’s not enough of her left, and all he can do is let her go out through a window into space as a drift of stardust, flying instead of falling. Tennant plays it raw and it hurts. What makes it worse is she’d only just asked if she could come with him, and he’d said yes.

Who gets to survive

And then the bill. Rickston Slade, the awful one, the man who called the Van Hoffs Mr and Mrs Fatso on the gangway, walks away richer than ever because he sold his shares just before the crash. The good ones died and the git lived. Copper says it straight out, that Slade isn’t who you’d have chosen, but if the Doctor got to choose who lives and who dies that would make him a monster. It’s an unusually blunt thing for a Christmas special to say out loud and I think it’s stronger for leaving the sour taste in. The Doctor saves the Earth, again, at Christmas, again, having failed the one person he most wanted to keep, and he promised Foon too, and that’s two people in one night he told to trust him.

The Christmas thing has quietly gone somewhere eerie, too. The Sycorax came for the planet in The Christmas Invasion, the Racnoss the year after, and now a spaceliner comes down out of the sky and misses Buckingham Palace by inches, with the Queen thanking him from a window. London’s empty because the newspaper seller’s worked out that Christmas is when things arrive, and honestly, fair enough. There’s a warm coda for Mr Copper, whose Earthonomics degree turns out to be from a university that’s also a dry cleaner’s, and who gets a new life on Earth with a million pounds he’d assumed was spending money. It’s a needed bit of kindness after all that. But when Copper asks what happens now, the Doctor tells him he travels alone, it’s best that way, and I don’t believe him for a second.

Rating: 3.5/5. Overstuffed and a bit shapeless in the middle, and the disaster-movie structure means several characters are only there to die on schedule. But the Host are superb, Kylie is genuinely affecting, and the last fifteen minutes are as bleak and moving as anything the show has done at Christmas. It’s the loneliest I’ve seen him. He needs somebody with him, he’s needed somebody for a good while now, and I don’t think he’ll admit it until someone forces the issue.

January 4, 2008 2 comments

Doctor Who Television

Last of the Time Lords: The Woman Who Walked the Earth

by Hutch Morzaria July 10, 2007

written by Hutch Morzaria

A review of Last of the Time Lords, the Doctor Who Series 3 finale, which jumps a full year past The Sound of Drums to an Earth ruled by the Master, with the Doctor aged and caged and Martha Jones out walking the world alone.

The post praises the bleak year of occupation, Martha’s journey, the truth about the Toclafane, the Master’s death and Martha’s decision to leave, but calls the glowing, floating Doctor resolution a big misstep. It rates the episode 3.5/5.

Series 3 ends with a finale that’s one part triumph, one part misfire and one part genuinely great character writing, and the great character writing wins, just about. Last of the Time Lords picks up a full year after The Sound of Drums left the Master ruling a conquered planet, spends most of its running time somewhere genuinely bleak, fumbles its own resolution, and then claws itself back with two of the best scenes of the season. Frustrating, fascinating, and in the end properly moving. I came away liking it a lot more than the middle bit deserved, if that makes sense.

The jump is brutal and brilliantly done. A year has passed and the Master has ruled unopposed, a tenth of humanity is dead, and the survivors are slave labour breaking up cars and houses for scrap in shipyards on every continent, building rockets for a war with the rest of the universe. He’s carved his own face into Mount Rushmore. The Doctor, aged past anything recognisable, is kept in a birdcage like a pet. Jack’s chained up in the brig on cold mashed swede, and Martha’s family are the household staff aboard the Valiant, fetching and carrying for the man who put them there.

It’s genuinely nasty stuff for teatime telly and the show commits to it. The Master’s rule isn’t a cartoon dictatorship, it’s petty and personal and cruel in ways designed to humiliate specific people, the Doctor most of all. Simm keeps the manic energy from last time but there’s real sadism underneath it now, and the sight of the Doctor reduced to a wizened little thing in a cage is hard to shake. And the whole time the Toclafane are zipping about giggling, which somehow makes it worse.

The aged Doctor kept in a birdcage aboard the Valiant in Doctor Who Last of the Time Lords

Martha Jones Walked the Earth

And then there’s Martha, who’s spent that year on foot, and this is the payoff of everything the season built. She got off the Valiant with Jack’s teleport and no plan anyone else could see, and she’s spent twelve months crossing a conquered world alone, through camps and ruins and occupied cities, hunted the whole time, telling everyone she meets about the Doctor. She’s become a legend. People whisper that she sailed the Atlantic, walked across America, was the only person to get out of Japan alive. The Martha who comes ashore on a beach in the dark at the start of this episode is harder and quieter than she was, with none of the eager brightness she had when she was a medical student caught up in a hospital on the Moon in Smith and Jones.

The year’s cost her, and it shows. It isn’t the first time this season has asked her to put up with something alone and unthanked, she spent months as a maid in 1913 swallowing abuse and guarding a fob watch in Human Nature, but twelve months walking across an occupied planet with a price on her head is a whole different order of thing. She came through it. She lost her whole family to that ship for a year and kept walking anyway. And she came back for everyone else, which is the bit that gets me, because nobody would’ve blamed her for just hiding.

It’s a magnificent thing for a companion to have done, and the episode’s right to make it the spine of the whole story. Whatever else this finale gets wrong, it understands that Martha Jones saved the world by walking across it. For me that’s the single most impressive thing any companion has done, and the show gives it the weight it deserves, right up until it has to explain how it actually worked.

Who the Toclafane Really Are

The reveal is the cruellest idea the show’s had in years, and it guts an episode I loved after the fact. The Toclafane are humanity. Specifically, they’re the people from Utopia, the last survivors at the end of the universe who boarded that rocket and flew off to the refuge they’d been promised, and found nothing there at all. No Utopia, no diamonds in the sky, just the dark and the cold and the end of everything. So they cannibalised themselves down into these giggling chrome balls to survive, regressing into children, and the Master brought them back through his paradox machine to slaughter their own ancestors.

That’s horrifying on every level. The hopeful, desperate people I watched queue for that rocket are the childlike voices carving up the Earth, and the last thing they ever did as human beings was give up. When one of them is asked why they’d kill so many of their own species and says it’s because it’s fun, it’s one of the ugliest lines the show’s ever had. Martha works out who one of them used to be from a single phrase about the skies being made of diamonds, a boy she’d actually met at the end of the universe, and that’s just horrible. It also makes the Master’s plan genuinely obscene rather than just villainous. He took Lucy to see the end of the universe, a Time Lord and his human companion, and she came back saying there was no point to anything, not ever. So he took humanity’s despair and turned it into an army.

The Word, and the Problem

Which brings me to the resolution, and I’ll be honest, it doesn’t work. Martha’s story about a gun that can kill a Time Lord, four chemicals scattered round the world, turns out to be a decoy. Her real weapon is the Archangel Network. For a year she’s been telling every person on Earth to think one word at one precise moment, and when everyone on the planet thinks Doctor at once, the energy pours into him, undoes the ageing and restores him. He rises into the air glowing, arms outstretched, drifts over to the Master, hugs him and says he forgives him.

The idea underneath is sound and rather lovely, the Master’s own instrument of control turned into an instrument of faith, and Martha’s year of talking to people being literally what saves everyone. But the floating, glowing Doctor goes one step too far and tips over into something faintly ridiculous. A beatific Doctor haloed in golden light asks me to accept an awful lot on very little, and after an hour of grounded, ugly, specific misery it lands like a different programme entirely. It’s the one real misstep in the finale, and it’s a big one.

Then the episode starts to recover. Jack shoots up the paradox machine, time snaps back, and the year unhappens for everyone except the handful of people who were aboard the Valiant. Only they remember it. That’s a haunting idea all on its own, a whole planet’s worst year wiped from every memory but a dozen, and Martha’s family having to carry it round in their heads while their neighbours get on with their lives. I’d have liked a lot more of that and a lot less glowing.

Forgiveness, and a Pyre

The Master’s death is where it really comes good. Cornered and beaten, he’s shot by Lucy, the wife who stood beside him through all of it. And he refuses to regenerate. He could survive, he just won’t, because surviving means the Doctor keeps him, locked up in the TARDIS being looked after, and he’d rather die than be forgiven. The Doctor begs him, rattling off the Axons and the Daleks, all the things they’ve done, the two of them the only ones left. And the Master just says “I win” and asks if the drumming will stop.

The Doctor, who’s spent two episodes saying he only wanted his oldest friend back, holds him while he goes, and then burns the body on a pyre on his own. Tennant plays it beautifully. For all the shouting, the last of the Time Lords is now genuinely the last, and he chose none of it. He wanted his friend back more than he wanted to win, and he lost anyway. Refusing to regenerate rather than be forgiven is the most revealing choice the show could have made for the Master.

There’s an odd final beat too, a woman’s hand with red fingernails reaching into the ashes to pick up the Master’s ring. Nobody explains it, and the camera doesn’t hang around long enough to give me any clue whose hand it is or what they want with a dead man’s ring. I’ve no idea what to make of it, and it’s been bothering me ever since, which I suppose is the point of putting it there.

Martha Leaves

The best scene is saved for last. Martha packs her bag and gets out, not in tragedy, not torn away like Rose at the end of Doomsday, she just looks at the situation clearly and decides she’s had enough of loving a man who won’t love her back. She tells him about her friend Vicky, who spent ages adoring a bloke in her student house who never once noticed her, and then says plainly that she’s not doing it any more. She’s spent a lot of time with him thinking she was second best, and it turns out she’s good. She’s got a family to put back together and a life to get on with.

So she walks out of the TARDIS on her own two feet, on her own terms, promising she’ll see him again. After a season of being second best to a ghost, that’s a superb exit, the healthiest, most grown-up departure a companion’s been given, and completely in character for the woman who walked the Earth. It’s a rare thing for this show to let a companion just choose herself, and I loved that it did. And then, because the show can’t help itself, the prow of a ship smashes through the TARDIS wall and the Doctor picks up a lifebelt with Titanic written on it. Of course it does.

Rating: 3.5/5. The floating-Doctor resolution badly undercuts an otherwise bleak and gripping finale, and it’s the reason this doesn’t score higher, but everything either side of it is excellent. Series 3 has been a strong run, and it ends on more highs than lows. I just wish the highs hadn’t had to share an hour with a glowing Tennant.

July 10, 2007 3 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Sound of Drums: The Master in Downing Street

by Hutch Morzaria July 2, 2007

written by Hutch Morzaria

A review of The Sound of Drums, the first half of the Doctor Who Series 3 finale, which picks up straight after Utopia and brings the Doctor, Martha and Jack home to a Britain that has just elected Harold Saxon as Prime Minister.

The season-long mystery of Harold Saxon resolves into the Master reborn as a giggling, dancing Prime Minister, ending with Martha as the last free person on an occupied Earth. The post singles out the Archangel Network, the Untempered Schism backstory and the Toclafane as highlights, and rates the episode 4.5/5.

So that’s what all those name-drops were for. The Sound of Drums picks up from the locked door at the end of the universe in Utopia, with the Doctor fixing up Jack’s broken vortex manipulator just in time to get the three of them out, and dumps them in an alleyway in present-day London. Which is where it turns out that Britain has just elected his oldest enemy as Prime Minister. It’s fast, funny, genuinely nasty in places, and it sets off about six months of quiet setup in the space of forty-five minutes. I loved it. And John Simm is having the time of his life.

There’s something really satisfying about how quickly it gets going, too. No slow build, no mystery about who the villain is this week, because we all saw him steal the TARDIS at the end of Utopia and the only question is what he’s done with it. The Doctor, Martha and Jack spend the first half of the episode on the run in their own country, hiding in Martha’s flat, watching the telly and trying to work out how a man nobody had heard of eighteen months ago ended up in Downing Street. It’s a bit of a thriller, a bit of a chase, with Jack reading out Saxon’s CV and a parade of celebrities on the laptop telling everyone to vote for him. Meanwhile Martha’s ringing round her family in a panic, trying to warn them before Saxon’s people get there, and her brother’s off in Brighton with no idea anything’s wrong.

Harold Saxon

The Master has had eighteen months in the twenty-first century and he’s used them well, a career, a party, a landslide and a wife. He’s Harold Saxon, the fresh-faced people’s Prime Minister, and Simm plays him as an absolute lunatic, jittery and gleeful, throwing his briefing papers in the air, singing along to the radio while he does something appalling. It’s a bold contrast with the cold, grand Master the Doctor keeps describing, and I think it works precisely because it’s so undignified. This isn’t a dark mirror of the Doctor, it’s a clever child who’s been handed a country and a lot of toys. It feels like a comment on Tennant’s Doctor as well, all the same energy and wit and eccentricity turned to a worse purpose. Same speed, same jokes, no conscience whatsoever.

Martha shields Jack aboard the Valiant in Doctor Who The Sound of Drums

Lucy Saxon is a genuinely unsettling addition to all this. She isn’t hypnotised, or at least not entirely, and she stands at his shoulder telling him how proud she is while a journalist who knows too much is killed in the next room, and her only worry afterwards is who else might know. The show never quite explains what he’s done to her, or what she thinks she’s getting out of the arrangement. And that’s far more disturbing than a tidy mind-control explanation would’ve been, because of everyone on screen she seems to be the one who chose this with her eyes open. By the end, on the Valiant, she’s looking very unhappy with all of it, and I’d love to know what’s going on in her head.

Vote Saxon

The mechanics of how he got there are the best idea in the episode. The Archangel Network, fifteen satellites and a mobile phone in every pocket in Britain, has been quietly broadcasting a low-level signal for months. Not commands, just a rhythm, a suggestion, a nudge. Vote Saxon, believe in me, over and over, until a man nobody could quite remember voting for was running the country, and the same signal hid him from the Doctor the whole time. As satire it’s about as subtle as a brick, and it’s all the more effective for it.

It also explains something the season’s been dangling since The Runaway Bride, where the name Saxon first turned up giving the order to fire on the Racnoss ship over the Thames, and again in The Lazarus Experiment, where it turns out Tish getting that job wasn’t a coincidence and his people were already briefing Martha’s mother against the Doctor. None of it was an accident, it was a campaign. Martha’s family pay for it first. Francine spent weeks being fed poison about the Doctor, and was sitting in her own front room with strangers listening in on her daughter’s phone calls back in 42.

Here she finally understands exactly what she’s been helping, and it’s far too late. She tries to lure Martha home for him, Clive shouts at her to run, and Martha has to watch from across the street while her mum and dad get bundled into a car. Watching Francine realise she handed her own family to this man is the cruellest beat in the episode. The Cabinet Room scene, where the Master puts on a gas mask and gasses his entire government while chatting away over the bodies, is where it stops being funny. Simm plays the whole thing as a joke he’s telling himself, and it’s genuinely horrible.

The boy who looked into the vortex

The best material, though, is the Doctor explaining him. At eight years old every Time Lord child was taken to stand in front of the Untempered Schism, a gap in reality where you can see the raw time vortex, unfiltered. Some were inspired, some ran away, and some went mad. The Doctor admits he was one of the ones who ran, and never stopped. And some say that’s when it all began for the Master, the drumming too, four beats, endlessly, the sound of a war drum nobody else can hear.

It’s a superb bit of Time Lord history, and it changes how I see the villain completely. He isn’t evil because the plot needs him to be, he’s someone who’s been in unbearable pain since he was a child, a wound inflicted by his own people, and it’s the most sympathetic this show has ever let this character be. The Doctor’s account of him is full of something uncomfortably close to grief, because these two grew up together and there’s nobody else left who remembers any of it. Tennant plays those scenes very quietly, and it’s the best thing he does all episode. A man trying to explain a childhood friend to people who can only see a monster, and half aware that they’re right.

When Jack offers to just walk up behind the Master and break his neck, the Doctor says flatly that he’s not there to kill him, he’s there to save him. You believe it, and it makes the whole confrontation sadder than it has any right to be. It’s a very Doctor thing to say about a man who’s just gassed a room full of people. He even manages a dig that Jack’s plan sounds like Torchwood, which is about the last laugh anyone gets for a while.

The Valiant

The last act is a proper escalation. The Master announces first contact with the Toclafane and stages the meeting aboard the Valiant, a huge flying aircraft carrier, with the American President there to take charge. The Doctor, Martha and Jack sneak aboard using TARDIS keys rigged as perception filters, which is a lovely gadget. Then it all goes wrong at once. The Master says two words and a sphere blasts the President to pieces, and then he pulls out his laser screwdriver, built with the genetic tech from Professor Lazarus’s machine, and ages the Doctor a hundred years in seconds into a frail old man. A neat, mean bit of continuity, the season’s throwaway monster-of-the-week turns out to have supplied the weapon.

Martha’s family are dragged in with their wrists tied, Jack gets killed again (not for long), and then the sky opens and six billion Toclafane pour down onto the Earth, laughing, to wipe out a tenth of the population while the Master dances to pop music on the bridge. The Toclafane are a horrible idea done beautifully, giggling chrome balls in the piping voices of delighted children, and pairing that sound with mass murder is exactly the kind of wrongness this show has done better than anybody since the gas mask kid in The Empty Child. It isn’t staged as an invasion. It’s staged as a party, which is exactly why it turns the stomach. Martha teleports out with Jack’s vortex manipulator, the only one of them left free, on a conquered planet with everyone she loves in the Master’s hands.

Rating: 4.5/5. I loved this, propulsive, witty and genuinely upsetting when it wants to be, with a villain performance that reinvents the role. It’s chaotic in places and leans hard on spectacle, but as the middle act of a finale it does everything it needs to and then some. And it’s Simm’s performance I keep coming back to, whatever else happens in it.

July 2, 2007 3 comments

Doctor Who Television

Utopia: The End of the Universe and the Watch on the Desk

by Hutch Morzaria June 24, 2007

written by Hutch Morzaria

A review of Utopia, the eleventh episode of Doctor Who Series 3, in which the TARDIS carries the Doctor, Martha and a returning Captain Jack to the year one hundred trillion. There they meet the gentle Professor Yana, his assistant Chantho and the last of humanity, and Yana keeps a fob watch he has never opened.

The post praises the bleak end-of-the-universe setting, Jack’s uncomfortable reunion with the Doctor and the long-planned payoff of the Face of Boe’s final words, and calls the watch reveal one of the great moments of the season. It rates the episode 4.5/5, losing half a mark only because so much of it is setup for what comes next.

Every so often a season quietly loads a gun in episode three and fires it in episode eleven, and Utopia is that shot. It starts out as a fairly straightforward last-outpost-of-humanity story, spends forty minutes being perfectly good, and then pulls off a reveal so well set up and so beautifully played that I actually said something out loud at the television. I loved it. This is where Series 3 stops being a run of separate adventures and turns into one story, and I didn’t see it coming at all, which is the bit that still gets me. For most of the hour it’s a Doctor Who episode doing Doctor Who things, a base under siege, a rocket that won’t launch, some monsters howling outside the fence. It’s good, it’s really good, but it gives no sign it’s about to pull the rug out, and that’s exactly why it works when it does.

It opens with a lovely bit of housekeeping, the TARDIS putting down on the Cardiff rift to refuel, the same crack in the world the Doctor was tinkering with back in Boom Town. Nothing much is supposed to happen. And then sprinting across the plaza toward it, rucksack flapping, comes Captain Jack Harkness, and his return is handled beautifully. The Doctor sees him on the monitor and sets off anyway, so Jack grabs hold of the outside of the ship as it dematerialises and just hangs on. It’s a great entrance because it’s so undignified, and because it tells you straight away that the Doctor isn’t as pleased to see him as I was.

Jack Can’t Die, and the Doctor Can’t Look at Him

Jack’s been waiting a very long time. He was killed on the Game Station at the end of The Parting of the Ways, brought back to life by Rose when she held the time vortex, and left behind while the TARDIS flew off without him. And now he can’t die. Not hard to kill, not lucky, actually unable to stay dead, which the episode shows you rather gleefully more than once. The TARDIS itself tried to shake him off, which is how they end up flung all the way to the end of the universe, and the Doctor admits he ran too, because a man who can’t die is a fixed point and every Time Lord instinct he has says Jack is wrong.

That conversation is the best character stuff in the episode for me. Jack is owed an apology and doesn’t really get one, and the Doctor is honest about his revulsion in a way that isn’t flattering to him at all, telling a friend to his face that just looking at him feels wrong. But the affection underneath it survives, somehow. The two of them bicker like they’ve never been apart, and the back-and-forth between the Doctor and Jack just sparkles. There’s a real sting under the jokes, though, and neither of them fully says what they mean.

John Barrowman slots straight back in like he never left, and the three-hander of Doctor, Martha and Jack has an easy energy the season hasn’t had before. Martha finds herself with this handsome stranger who knew the Doctor first and knew Rose, one more person from before her time, and she just gets on with it. Jack, meanwhile, deserves a lot better than the way he’s treated here and mostly takes it with grace.

One Hundred Trillion Years and the Stars Gone Out

They land on Malcassairo in the year one hundred trillion, and it’s magnificently bleak. The stars have gone out, the universe is running down, and what’s left of humanity huddles in a concrete silo while the Futurekind hunt them across the wastes, feral people with filed teeth who used to be human and have given up on it. The show has done far-future stories before, but never this far out and never this hopeless. This isn’t the heat death of a physics lecture. It’s a black sky with nothing in it at all, a rust-coloured wasteland, and the last few people alive queuing in a bunker to board a rocket aimed at a rumour.

There’s something close to unbearable in that, a whole civilisation reduced to hoping a signal nobody can decode is coming from somewhere better than here. And in the middle of the ruin is Professor Yana, cobbling the rocket together out of salvaged junk to send everyone toward that signal, Utopia, the last rumoured refuge at the end of everything. Derek Jacobi plays him gentle, apologetic, a little defeated, a brilliant man who’s spent decades doing impossible work with rubbish tools and no thanks. He’s delighted by the Doctor. He’s almost overwhelmed to finally have someone who understands his equations, and it’s genuinely sweet.

His only company is Chantho, an insectoid assistant who starts every sentence with “Chan” and ends it with “tho”, and who is quietly, hopelessly in love with him. She’s a small gem, and the episode gives her far more dignity than a comic speech tic has any right to carry. Her scenes with Martha, two women comparing notes on being devoted to a brilliant man who hasn’t noticed, are gently funny while you’re watching and pretty brutal once you think about them. Martha recognising her own situation in somebody else’s is one of the better quiet beats of the season.

The Watch on the Desk

Yana is the most likeable guest character of the season, and Jacobi plays him with such decency that I spent the whole hour rooting for him. Which is, of course, the trap. The clues have been sitting in plain sight the entire time. He’s been troubled all his life by a sound in his head, a relentless four-beat drumming that’s been there since he was a child and that nobody explains. He was found as a boy at the edge of the Silver Devastation with nothing but a battered fob watch, which he keeps on his desk and has never opened because he’s sure it’s broken and it makes him uneasy.

Professor Yana and Chantho at work in the laboratory in Doctor Who Utopia

And Martha, who spent months in 1913 guarding exactly the same kind of object in Human Nature, sees it and knows the circular Gallifreyan engraving straight away. I got there maybe half a second before she said it, and the horror arrived with the understanding, which is just brilliantly put together. Then the season’s other loose thread snaps tight. The Face of Boe used his dying breath in Gridlock to tell the Doctor four words with no context, you are not alone. Not a prophecy, an acronym. Y-A-N-A. It’s been sitting there since April, eight episodes back, and I never once saw it.

Yana opens the watch, Jacobi’s face changes, and the kindly old professor is just gone. What’s left introduces itself with four words and a smile: “I… am… the Master.” It’s a masterclass, the same actor in the same room playing an entirely different person, done with no makeup to speak of and nothing but his face and voice. He’s on screen as the villain for a matter of minutes and he’s completely unforgettable, so good in that little window that it’s almost a shame he doesn’t get to stay.

Locked Out at the End of the Universe

Because he doesn’t. He electrocutes Chantho with a live cable, and poor Chantho, loyal to the end, shoots him as she dies, which forces a regeneration into a younger, wilder man who takes one look at the situation, laughs, and steals the TARDIS. The Doctor, Martha and Jack are left locked out at the end of the universe with the Futurekind breaking into the base, hammering on the door while the ship fades away without them. No ship, no way home, the literal end of time, and his oldest enemy has just walked off with the only way out. That’s a cliffhanger.

What really sells it is Tennant. The Doctor’s spent all this time defining himself by one fact, last of the Time Lords, sole survivor, the one who was left behind, and watching that fact come apart in front of him turns out not to be any kind of relief. He goes white. He pleads through a locked door, trying to reach whatever might be left of the professor in there, and it doesn’t work, and the look on his face as the ship goes is the first time all season he’s looked properly, helplessly frightened. And the drumming is still there, four beats, never explained, which I’m fairly sure is the key to something.

Rating: 4.5/5. I absolutely loved this one, slow and sad and beautifully acted right up until it goes off in the last fifteen minutes. It loses half a mark only because so much of it is setup for what comes next, but as a piece of season-long planning it’s about as close to flawless as the show’s got. The whole season suddenly looks different looking back from here.

June 24, 2007 2 comments

Doctor Who Television

Blink: Don’t Turn Your Back, Don’t Look Away

by Hutch Morzaria June 19, 2007

written by Hutch Morzaria

A review of Blink, the Doctor Who Series 3 episode that barely features the Doctor and follows Sally Sparrow as she finds his warnings hidden under wallpaper and on DVD Easter eggs. The post covers Sally as a lead, the Weeping Angels and how they work, and the closed time loop the plot is built on.

It calls Blink the best episode of Doctor Who it has seen, praising Carey Mulligan, the Angels as one of the great screen monsters, Billy Shipton’s lost lifetime and the cellar climax, and names it the one episode to show someone new to the series. Rating: 5/5.

I’m going to say this plainly: “Blink” is the best episode of Doctor Who I’ve ever seen. Yes, I said something very close to that about The Family of Blood only last week, and I meant it, but this one’s got it beat and I’m not going to argue with myself about it. It’s got almost no Doctor in it, its hero is a young woman we’ve never met and probably won’t see again, and it’s still a flawless, terrifying, perfectly put-together hour of telly that I reckon people will still be talking about in twenty years.

Sally Sparrow

Our lead is Sally Sparrow, played by Carey Mulligan, who breaks into a derelict house called Wester Drumlins because she likes old things and finds a message under a peeling strip of wallpaper. It’s a warning, it’s addressed to her by name, it’s signed by the Doctor, and it was written in 1969. What a way to open. Mulligan is tremendous, curious and dry and frightened but never helpless, the kind of hero who runs toward the mystery and then handles it sensibly once she’s in it. Putting a complete stranger at the centre instead of the Doctor is the boldest thing the episode does, and it works because Sally’s such good company I’d happily have watched her for another hour.

She’s got one of the best throwaway lines the show’s ever had, too, when she’s asked why she’s sad and says sad is happy for deep people. She’s a delight, and she never once feels like a stand-in for somebody else, which is quite something in an episode where the Doctor is mostly a face on a telly screen. Larry, Kathy’s brother, is great value too, a DVD nerd who’s been obsessing over these weird Easter eggs for ages without a clue what they are, and he turns out to be exactly who she needed. And where the last Doctor-lite go, Love & Monsters, swung wildly and connected about half the time, this one never puts a foot wrong. Same constraint, completely different result. The difference is that Blink turns the Doctor not being there into the actual engine of the plot rather than a gap to be worked around, so the whole thing depends on him being stuck somewhere else.

The Lonely Assassins

And then there are the Angels. My God, the Angels. The idea is so clean it feels like it’s always existed, they’re quantum-locked, so they can’t move while anything’s looking at them, and in front of any living thing they’re just stone statues, harmless. Look away and they cross the room. Blink and they’re on you. They’re the fastest, deadliest things in the universe and you can stop them completely just by staring, right up until your eyes water. Don’t blink. Don’t even blink. Blink and you’re dead.

It’s the rare monster that turns watching telly into something physical, because I started noticing my own blinking, I started distrusting statues. And the episode’s brutally disciplined about it, no transformation shots, no big reveal, barely any music in the worst moments, just a hard cut and the thing’s suddenly six feet closer with its hands away from its face and its mouth open. The scene in the cellar with the lights failing is one of the most frightening things this show has ever done. They’re barely an effect at all, people standing very still in stone make-up while the camera cuts, and all the horror lives in the gaps between shots and in me not being able to stop watching.

Even better, they don’t kill you. They send you back in time and let you live to death, feeding on the energy of the life you would’ve had, which is a beautifully cruel idea, a monster that murders you with a long, complete, ordinary life somewhere you never wanted to be. That’s a far more haunting fate than being exterminated. They’re easily the best new monster since the show came back, and one of the great screen monsters full stop.

Timey-Wimey

The plot is a machine and every gear meshes. Sally’s friend Kathy gets touched by an Angel and wakes up in 1920, lives a full life, marries, has kids, and arranges for her grandson to hand-deliver a letter to Sally at the exact moment she vanished. A young policeman, Billy Shipton, gets sent back to 1969, ends up in publishing, and meets Sally again the same night she met him, as a dying old man in a hospital bed. It’s about four minutes of screen time between his two scenes and a whole human lifetime goes by in between, and it’s quietly devastating.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is stranded in 1969 with Martha and talks to Sally the only way he can, as a hidden Easter egg on seventeen unrelated DVDs, holding up his side of a conversation with someone he can’t see. How that works is the single most satisfying bit of plotting I’ve seen on this show. Larry is writing down the Doctor’s half, Sally’s speaking the other half, and the transcript in Larry’s hands is the one Sally will eventually give the Doctor so he knows what to say. A closed loop with no loose ends, and the show’s confident enough to let the Doctor shrug at it, because time isn’t a straight line, it’s a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

There’s a lovely joke buried in his predicament as well. Stuck in 1969 without his ship, the cleverest being in the universe is reduced to leaving cryptic messages on home video and hoping somebody watches the special features, so for once he’s the one who needs rescuing, and the only way he can ask for help is more or less by post. It’s got the same obvious delight in playing with time as the windows in The Girl in the Fireplace, and the same creeping dread as The Empty Child, where one repeated phrase was enough to terrify a nation of children. Blink welds the two together into the tightest thing the show’s done, the horror and the clockwork locked so closely that neither would work without the other. Nothing’s arbitrary. Every apparent coincidence turns out to be cause and effect running backwards.

Weeping Angels closing in around the TARDIS in the cellar in Blink

Don’t Blink

The climax is beautifully simple. Sally and Larry are trapped in the cellar with the TARDIS and four Angels closing in, the lights failing, nothing to defend themselves with except their own eyes, and the way out doesn’t need a weapon at all. The TARDIS dematerialises out from between them, and the Angels, lunging in from four directions, are left staring straight at each other, frozen forever by the only thing that can stop them. It’s clever and it’s funny and it’s the perfect use of a rule the episode set up earlier. And then a year later, with Sally and Larry running a shop together selling old books and rare DVDs (Sparrow & Nightingale, which is lovely), she spots the Doctor and Martha in the street. For them it’s before any of this has happened. He’s never met her, he’s got no idea what she’s on about, and she hands him the folder of notes anyway, and the loop closes right there on a pavement with him looking baffled and her looking like she’s finally put something down she’s been carrying for a year.

Then the very end turns it all sour again, a montage of statues, in parks and churchyards and on the sides of buildings, while the Doctor’s voice tells us they could be anywhere and the only defence is to keep looking. It’s a closing gag and a genuine threat at the same time, and it sent me to bed uneasy. I’ve been checking the garden ornaments all evening and I’m not entirely joking.

Rating: 5/5. Perfect, and I loved every second of it. Tightly plotted, genuinely frightening and emotionally sharp, and if someone’s never watched Doctor Who and wants one episode to explain why the rest of us are like this, it’s this one.

June 19, 2007 7 comments

the family of blood john smiths sacrifice

Doctor Who Television

The Family of Blood: The Man Who Had to Die

by Hutch Morzaria June 11, 2007

written by Hutch Morzaria

A review of The Family of Blood, the second half of the Doctor Who Series 3 two-parter that began with Human Nature. The post covers John Smith being asked to give up his human life so the Doctor can return, the schoolboys turned into soldiers, Joan and Martha’s parts in the story, and the Doctor’s punishment of the Family.

It calls the episode the best thing the show has done, praising Tennant and Jessica Hynes in the vision of the life John and Joan could have had, Joan’s refusal to go with the Doctor, and the Remembrance Day ending with an elderly Tim Latimer. Rating: 5/5.

The first half of this story asked what would happen if the Doctor became human, and this half asks the harder question, which is what happens to the human when the Doctor needs to come back. I loved it. “The Family of Blood” is the payoff to everything Human Nature set up and it’s magnificent, easily the best hour of Series 3 so far and up there with the best the show’s ever done since it came back. And in its last act it’s genuinely frightening, in a way I really wasn’t expecting.

A man who doesn’t want to die

We left John Smith being invited to choose which of two women should die, and he doesn’t get out of it by being brave. Tim opens the watch for a second, the Family are distracted, and it’s Martha who grabs a gun and gets everyone out, because John Smith isn’t a hero, he’s a schoolteacher, and the episode never lets him be anything else. Then it only gets worse. The village is under attack, the school is under siege, and the answer is the scene that’s stayed with me most, rows of boys in uniform, some of them really young, lined up with rifles and a machine gun to mow down the advancing scarecrows while the headmaster talks about duty and honour. They cut the straw men to pieces and it changes nothing, and one of the boys realises what he’s actually doing and can’t stop shaking. It’s autumn 1913, less than a year before the war, and the show’s holding up a picture of British schoolboys being taught this is glorious, and nobody has to say the word. It just sits there.

The Family's possessed maid inside their invisible ship in The Family of Blood

And then the heart of it. Tim Latimer brings the watch back, and John Smith’s finally told what he really is and asked to hand his whole existence over to a man he’s never met. He doesn’t want to, and honestly that’s the bit that got me. He’s terrified and furious and completely right to be, because from where he’s standing this isn’t a noble sacrifice, it’s an execution. He begs, he asks whether John Smith isn’t a good man too, whether being kind and ordinary and in love isn’t worth something, and there’s no good answer to that. Then he and Joan hold the watch together and see it, the life they might have had, a wedding, kids, work and worry and growing old, John Smith dying peacefully in bed with his family round him, a whole lifetime offered and taken back in about thirty seconds. Tennant and Jessica Hynes play it without a scrap of sentimentality and I was a wreck. He weeps. She lets him go anyway, because she’s braver than he is.

The life they could have had

Hynes is the quiet triumph of the whole story, for me anyway. Joan is nobody’s love interest, she’s a widow who’s already buried one man, who sees perfectly clearly what’s being asked of them both, and who does the necessary thing without needing to be asked twice and without once pretending it doesn’t cost her everything. He opens the watch and John Smith stops existing, and the show’s very careful never to pretend that’s anything other than a death. The whole two-parter was always going to live or die on Tennant, and this is the scene where it pays off, the moment the watch opens and the man you’ve spent two weeks with is just gone.

Martha’s part in all this is thankless and Freema Agyeman is superb in it. She spends the entire story as the only person who knows the truth and can’t tell anybody, watching the man she loves court somebody else, and then she has to be the one who walks up to him and explains that he needs to stop existing. When John Smith turns on her in his terror and says some genuinely cruel things, she takes it without flinching. Nobody in the episode ever thanks her for any of it, which I noticed, and I’m fairly sure I was meant to.

Why he was hiding

Here’s the turn that makes the whole thing. I’d assumed all along the Doctor hid because he was scared of the Family, and he wasn’t. He hid out of mercy, because he knew that if he ever turned his full attention on them he’d be merciless, and now he has. The punishments are brilliant and horrible at the same time, told like a cold fairy tale, the father bound in unbreakable chains forged in the heart of a dwarf star, the mother thrown into a collapsing galaxy, the sister trapped inside every mirror in existence, the one you catch out of the corner of your eye, and the son wrapped in chains and left standing in an English field as a scarecrow, awake, forever. They wanted to live forever and he gave them exactly that. It’s the most frightening thing this Doctor has done, and it matches what Donna saw in him at the end of The Runaway Bride, the man standing in the flames watching the Racnoss drown, who needed someone to shout at him before he’d walk away. That was a glimpse and this is the full thing, calm and eternal. He did warn us, in fairness, standing on a Sycorax ship in his dressing gown in The Christmas Invasion telling a beaten enemy he’s the sort of man who gives no second chances. It played as bravado at the time, a bit of showing off. Turns out it’s policy, from the same man who once stood in front of a Dalek fleet and chose coward over killer in The Parting of the Ways.

Joan gets the last word, and it’s the sharpest line of the season. She won’t travel with him. She looks at this stranger wearing the face of the man she loved and asks him one thing, if he’d never chosen this place on a whim, would anybody here have died? He’s got no answer and there isn’t one, and the show, for once, makes him stand still and hear it. Then the ending, which is perfect. In the trenches Tim remembers something the watch showed him and it saves his life, and in the present day an old man in a wheelchair sits at a Remembrance Day service, poppies and bowed heads, and looks up to find two figures at the back who haven’t aged a day. No dialogue and no explanation, just an old soldier and the Doctor acknowledging each other across ninety-odd years. This is what the boys with the rifles were marching toward, and the Doctor was there at the start of it.

Rating: 5/5. I absolutely loved it. Superbly written, extraordinarily acted and not afraid of its own cruelty, it gives the Doctor a real reckoning and gives Tennant his best material yet, and it’s the best thing this show has ever done. I need a minute.

June 11, 2007 2 comments

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