A review of Gridlock, the third episode of Doctor Who’s 2007 series, in which the Doctor takes Martha to the undercity of New New York and a motorway where traffic has been jammed for decades. The post covers the world-building inside the cars, the hymn sequence, the Macra lurking in the fumes and the truth about the city above.
It lands on the Face of Boe’s final message and the bar scene where the Doctor finally tells Martha about Gallifrey, which the post treats as the real start of her time on board. The episode is rated 4.5/5, praised as odd, ambitious and unexpectedly moving.
Some episodes sneak up on you. “Gridlock” starts as a shaggy comic premise, a traffic jam so bad that people are born, marry and die in their cars, and by the end it’s turned into one of the most quietly moving hours the revived series has produced, and it pays off a mystery that’s been hanging around since Series 2. Strange, sad, oddly spiritual. And it finally lets the Doctor be honest with Martha about who he is, which after two weeks of him mooning about someone else was overdue. I loved it.
The Motorway
The Doctor brings Martha to New Earth, the same world we visited back in New Earth with its apple grass and its gleaming towers, except this time he takes her to the underside. Beneath the shining city is the Motorway, a sealed network of tunnels stuffed bumper to bumper with hover-cars, permanently jammed and crawling forward at a rate of a few yards a year. It’s been like this for twenty-four years. Which is roughly the point where I’d have got out and walked, but there’s nowhere to walk to, and that turns out to matter a great deal later on.
The world-building here is superb and very funny before it gets horrifying. People live in these cars. They have kitchens and bunks and pets. Brannigan, a cat-faced man married to a human woman, Valerie, with a litter of kittens in the back, is a delight, and utterly matter-of-fact about his journey to the next junction taking twelve years. There’s a radio station broadcasting to the whole motorway. There are the Cassinis, an elderly couple who’ve spent their entire marriage in one car and bicker about it like it’s a semi-detached in Croydon. Nobody questions any of it, the jam is just the condition of life and everyone has made a life inside it anyway, which is a bit too close to the M25 on a Friday for comfort.
Martha, of course, gets carjacked almost immediately, bundled into a vehicle by a young couple, Milo and Cheen, who need a third passenger to qualify for the fast lane. It’s a neat way to split the leads and give Martha her own thread, and her own quiet realisation that being the Doctor’s friend means regularly being in real danger with no guarantee he’ll reach you in time. After a couple of weeks of breezy adventuring I didn’t mind that at all. In Smith and Jones she saved his life with her own two hands, and here she spends most of the hour on her own in a stolen car with no sonic screwdriver and nobody to reassure her, working out that she’ll have to be her own rescue until he turns up. She’s very good at it. Better than he is, some of the time, because he’s off hopping from car roof to car roof down through the lanes, and she’s the one actually talking her kidnappers round.
Hymns in the Dark
And then the episode does something I did not see coming. The traffic stops, as it does every day, and over the radio a voice calls the whole motorway to prayer, and thousands of trapped strangers in thousands of separate cars sing a hymn together in the dark. “The Old Rugged Cross”, of all things, drifting up through the tunnels while the Doctor stands on a car roof listening to it.
It’s a startling, beautiful scene. The episode plays it completely straight, no irony and no undercutting gag, just a community of people who’ve been stuck in the pitch black for decades holding onto hope by singing to each other. For a show that usually solves problems by running at them, sitting still and letting faith be moving rather than naive is a real swing, and it lands. I wasn’t expecting to be choked up by a traffic jam. When the hymn comes back at the end of the episode it earns every note, and I’d honestly put it up there with anything the show has done since it came back.
The dark underneath it is properly nasty, too. Down in the fast lane, in the choking fumes at the very bottom of the system, something is eating the cars that go down there, and it’s the Macra, great crustacean horrors dragging vehicles into the murk with their claws. The lovely touch is what they used to be. An intelligent species once, and now degenerated into mindless appetite, scavenging in the poison at the bottom of the world. There’s a nice bit of series history buried in it for anyone who cares to dig, because the Macra are dredged up out of the black-and-white era, brought back not as a nostalgic victory lap but as something that’s rotted into a mouth. It’s a grim little idea to leave sitting right under all that singing.
The City Above Is Dead
The reveal is the episode’s masterstroke and it changes everything you’ve just watched. There is no fast lane out. There’s no traffic authority. Nobody is coming.
New New York died twenty-four years ago. A mood patch called Bliss mutated into an airborne virus and killed the entire overcity in seven minutes, everyone, in the time it takes to boil a kettle. So the Motorway wasn’t a jam at all, it was a tomb someone sealed to save the people inside it, and the someone is the Face of Boe, the giant head in a tank we first met at the end of the world watching the Earth burn. He shut the tunnels and he’s spent every day since keeping the whole system’s air and power running off his own dying life force. Tended by Novice Hame, the cat-nun from New Earth, working off her penance for what her order did in that hospital, he’s been slowly burning himself out to keep a few thousand strangers breathing who never even knew he was there.
That’s a gorgeous piece of writing. The comic traffic jam turns out to be an act of enormous, unglamorous mercy, kept up in silence for a quarter of a century with no audience and no thanks, and the Face of Boe gets more to do in these ten minutes than in both his earlier appearances put together. When the Doctor throws the roof open and lets the cars rise into daylight for the first time in decades it’s a proper cheer moment, and then the hymn comes back over the top of it and I was gone. I also liked that nobody makes a speech about it. The cars just go up, and Brannigan and Valerie and the kittens go with them, and the show trusts that to be enough.
Taken as a whole it’s basically a fairy tale about a traffic jam, and it works as one, with a sleeping city and a guardian in a tower and a door that finally opens. Slice of SciFi’s Gridlock review came out of it enjoying the episode more than they’d expected to as well, and I think that’s the common reaction, you go in braced for a silly one and come out a bit wrecked.
“You Are Not Alone”
And then Boe dies, and keeps his promise. Back in New Earth he had a message for the Doctor and refused to give it, the great secret he’d speak with his final breath, saved for their last meeting. Here it is, and it’s four words long. You are not alone.
That’s it. No context, no explanation, nothing to do with anything we’ve just watched, and the Doctor is left standing there completely thrown, and so was I. He’s spent two series now telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s the last of the Time Lords, going right back through The Parting of the Ways to Eccleston shouting at a Dalek in a basement, and an ancient creature has just spent its dying breath telling him it isn’t true. I have no idea what it means. It might mean nothing, or it might be the Face of Boe being cryptic for the sake of it, but I’ve been turning it over all week and I suspect we’re meant to.
What follows is the best scene in the episode and the reason Martha’s story really starts here. Sitting in a bar afterwards with the hymn going on outside, she refuses to let him fob her off any longer, and the Doctor finally tells her the truth about Gallifrey. The burnt orange sky, the silver leaves on the trees, the Citadel in the Mountains of Solace and Solitude, all of it gone. He’s spent two episodes deflecting her with charm and talking around another woman, and at the end of The Shakespeare Code the show was happy to let that sit there, uncomfortable and unresolved. Not any more. Here he treats her as someone who deserves the truth, and whatever “one trip” was supposed to mean, their partnership properly begins in that bar.
Rating: 4.5/5. Odd, ambitious and unexpectedly profound, with a reveal that turns the whole hour on its head and a final message that goes off quietly in the background and keeps going off. One of the very best scripts the show has had since it came back.
A traffic jam, a hymn, a dying head in a tank, and four words the Doctor can’t stop turning over. “You are not alone.” What on earth is that supposed to mean?
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