The Unquiet Dead: Charles Dickens and the Corpses of Cardiff

Three weeks in and the show has done contemporary London, the far end of time, and now a Victorian ghost story. I said last week that it can be anything it likes, and this is the episode that makes me believe the range is deliberate rather than lucky. It’s also the first one where I’ve come away arguing with the Doctor rather than the monster.

Cardiff, Christmas Eve, 1869. Mark Gatiss has written a proper Victorian ghost story and then quietly put a very ugly moral question in the middle of it, and I don’t think the episode ever fully lets anyone off the hook, including me.

A funeral parlour with a problem

It opens beautifully. A man sits grieving over his grandmother’s open casket at Sneed and Company, and while his eyes are shut a blue glow pours across the room and into the body. She opens her eyes and strangles him. That’s the teaser, and it’s played completely straight. No wink, no joke to take the edge off. Just an old woman sitting up in her coffin and killing her grandson.

What makes it work is that this is clearly not the first time. Gabriel Sneed, the undertaker, is less horrified than inconvenienced. He’s had corpses wander off before, he’s covered it up before, and his main concern is retrieving Mrs Peace before somebody notices. He’s played as a man managing an ongoing business problem, and that flat bureaucratic tone is far more unsettling than panic would have been.

And then after last week’s five billion years the TARDIS lands about a hundred and thirty years in the past instead, which is a nice bit of course-correction. The Doctor was aiming for Naples, 1860. He is wrong by a country and nine years, and the show has now established twice that he can’t reliably steer the thing.

What strikes me is how confidently it changes gear. Two weeks ago the threat was shop dummies in a department store and last week it was a woman made of skin on a frame. This week there is no spectacle at all for the first ten minutes, just gaslight and snow and a body that will not stay in its box. The show has worked out that it does not need a monster to be frightening, only a room where something is wrong, and it is willing to spend a third of its running time proving that before anything alien is explained.

Dickens, played properly

Simon Callow’s Charles Dickens is the best thing in it and it isn’t the performance I expected. This isn’t a cheerful cameo of a famous author being delighted by aliens. He’s introduced backstage before a reading, in a foul mood, estranged from his family, convinced he’s finished and that his imagination has gone thin. He does the show because it’s Christmas and he has nothing else.

So when the ghosts turn up in the middle of his own performance, his first instinct isn’t wonder. It’s to insist they’re a trick, loudly and angrily, because a man who has spent his life writing about spirits at Christmas cannot afford for them to be real. He debunks the whole thing while it’s happening in front of him. That’s a much sharper idea than the version where the great man is charmed.

The Doctor being an unabashed fan is very funny, mostly because he can’t help himself and keeps doing it at the worst moments. But the scene that stayed with me is the quiet one in the carriage where Dickens admits he might have been wrong about everything he believed, and the Doctor tells him his books are brilliant and always will be. It’s a kind thing to do for somebody, and the episode earns it rather than just handing it over.

There is a real cruelty in giving that part to Dickens specifically. He is the man who taught the English-speaking world what a Christmas ghost story sounds like, and the episode drops him into one and has him deny it at the top of his voice. He is not being stupid. He has spent a career insisting that his spirits were metaphors, and if they were not metaphors then he has been telling people something true by accident for thirty years. Watching him work that out in real time is better than any amount of running down corridors.

The argument I lost

Here’s the bit I keep turning over. The Gelth are gaseous, they came through a rift running under Cardiff, and their bodies were destroyed in a war. They want to use human corpses as vessels. Not living people. The dead, the ones already in the ground and in the parlour.

And the Doctor is in favour. Rose is disgusted, says it’s wrong, says you can’t do that to people. And he turns on her, quite hard, and tells her a corpse is a resource and that she’s applying her own century’s squeamishness to a species facing extinction. He points out she’ll happily accept a donated heart. He’s arguing for what looks like desecration and he is not obviously wrong, and that is a genuinely uncomfortable position for the hero of this programme to be in three weeks after it came back.

It’s a fan-favourite argument to have, and there are fans who organise a group rewatch of individual stories precisely to chew over this sort of thing, which I understand entirely. What tips it is that the Gelth are lying. There aren’t a handful of them, there are billions, and they don’t want the dead at all. They want everyone, and they’ll make more corpses to get there. So Rose was right, and the reason she was right is that the aliens were dishonest, not that the Doctor’s reasoning was bad. The episode gives him the moral argument and then takes it away on a technicality. I’m still not sure whether that’s clever or a cop-out.

It also lands differently coming from this Doctor. He told Rose last week that his own planet burned and everyone on it died, and now he is standing in a Cardiff parlour making the case for a homeless species with no bodies left. He is not being coldly logical about the dead. He is arguing for refugees, and the fact that he is wrong this time does not make the argument a bad one. It just means he wanted it to be true badly enough to skip the checking.

Gwyneth

Eve Myles is playing a Victorian servant girl who has grown up on top of a rift in space and time and assumed the voices were normal. I don’t think I’ve seen her before and she’s genuinely excellent. Gwyneth is the only character in it who is entirely without cynicism, and she’s the one who ends up carrying everybody.

The scene where she reads Rose is the best two minutes of the episode. She sees a flat in London and a father who died, and she says it kindly, and Rose is completely undone by it. It’s also the moment the show quietly tells you Gwyneth is far more powerful than anybody in the room has noticed, including her.

And then the ending, which I did not see coming and which is properly bleak. The gas is loose in the house, Dickens works out you can drive it back with more gas, and the Doctor tells him to get Rose out. He wants to stay with Gwyneth. He touches her neck to check she’s all right, and stops, and leaves without saying what he found. She stands there in the burning parlour and strikes a match, and the house goes up with the Gelth inside it.

Afterwards he tells Rose what he felt when he took her pulse: there wasn’t one. Gwyneth had been dead from the moment she stood in that rift and let them through. Everything after that — talking to them, working out the plan, choosing to end it — was somebody who had already died carrying on because the job wasn’t finished. Rose can’t accept it. Dickens quotes Hamlet at her, about there being more things in heaven and earth, and honestly that’s the right note to go out on. I came in expecting a Christmas ghost story and got one, and then it turned out the ghost was the girl making the tea.