Set during the 1953 Coronation, the Doctor and Rose arrive in a Britain gripped by television fever, only to find a predatory alien called the Wire feeding on viewers through their new TV sets. Portrayed by Maureen Lipman as a BBC announcer, the Wire strips faces from its victims while authorities quietly suppress the evidence.
Writer Mark Gatiss layers a second threat into the story through Eddie Connolly, a domestic bully whose intimidation mirrors the alien menace. When Rose is de-faced, the Doctor’s cold fury drives the episode’s resolution: trapping the Wire onto magnetic tape before she can feast on the Coronation’s mass audience.
Trust Doctor Who to take the cosiest image imaginable — a 1950s family gathered around the telly for a bit of pomp and circumstance — and turn it into a horror show. “The Idiot’s Lantern,” written by Mark Gatiss, drops the Doctor and Rose into a Britain buzzing with Coronation fever and finds something genuinely nasty crackling behind the screen. It’s a bright, brisk, slightly slight period romp with a surprisingly dark streak running down its middle, and after the metal and misery of the Cybermen two-parter, it’s a welcome change of pace.
Coronation Fever
The Doctor’s aiming for 1950s New York and Elvis; he lands, as ever, somewhere else entirely — London, June 1953, days before the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. And what a time capsule it is. The whole street is buying television sets, most of them for the first time, all so they can crowd round and watch the young Queen crowned. Gatiss and director Euros Lyn nail the period: the bunting, the Brylcreem, the aspirational shine of a shiny new box in the corner of the front room. With Mickey now gone — having chosen his own road in the parallel world back in The Age of Steel — it’s just the Doctor and Rose again, and the two of them roar into 1953 on a borrowed scooter, all quiffs and headscarves, having an absolute ball.
But there’s a reason those tellies are so cheap. Lurking in the signal is the Wire, a creature of pure energy — a criminal fugitive from some far-off world, executed by her own kind but clinging on as electrical life inside the broadcast. She appears as a genteel, plummy BBC announcer (Maureen Lipman, clearly relishing every syllable), purring at her victims through the glass before she strikes. And when she feeds, she takes their faces — literally. She drains the life and the very features clean off them, leaving behind blank, smooth, screaming-less horrors that the authorities are quietly bundling into the backs of police vans and hiding away.
There’s something deeply unsettling in how briskly it all gets hushed up. Faceless men and women are carted off in the dead of night and locked in a cellar, and the neighbours simply look away — because in 1953 you kept your head down, you didn’t ask questions, and you certainly didn’t make a fuss. The Wire has picked the perfect hunting ground: a buttoned-up, curtains-twitching Britain that would far rather pretend nothing is wrong than admit the shiny new telly has gone bad.
The Monster in the Living Room
The clever thing Gatiss does is put a second monster in the story, and this one has a face. The Connolly household is ruled by Eddie Connolly, a puffed-up domestic tyrant who wraps his bullying in flags and patriotism, barking orders at his wife Rita and his son Tommy and generally making his home a small kingdom of fear. When Gran is de-faced by the Wire, it’s Eddie who informs on his own mother-in-law to keep the shame off his doorstep. He’s a coward and a bully, and the episode is pointed about it: the alien eating faces on the telly is frightening, but the man ruling by intimidation in the front room is the real rot.
The Doctor sees it instantly and can’t stand it, and the confrontation that follows — the Doctor and Tommy against Eddie’s bluster — gives the episode a satisfying spine. Tommy finding the nerve to stand up to his father, and Rita finally throwing the tyrant out, is arguably a bigger victory than anything involving the transmitter. It’s a proper Gatiss touch, the same eye for the ugliness lurking under respectable Britain that he brought to the Victorian chill of The Unquiet Dead last year.
And then the episode plays its nastiest card: it takes Rose. Poking too close to the truth, she comes face to face with the Wire and is left blank and faceless on a police stretcher, and the shot of the Doctor finding her like that is genuinely chilling. Tennant flips in an instant from larking about to cold, controlled fury — the temper we’ve learned to watch for since the Sycorax — and from that moment the Doctor is not messing about. Hurt Rose, and you have made this personal. It recharges the whole episode. Up to that point the Doctor’s been a tourist on a lark; the instant Rose is taken, the story finds its urgency, and Tennant’s quiet, clipped rage is far more frightening than any shouting. He tears through the rest of the mystery like a man with a score to settle.
Trapping the Wire
The trail leads to Mr Magpie, the browbeaten telly-shop owner whom the Wire has enslaved into flogging her cut-price sets across London, and then up to the top of the Alexandra Palace transmitter mast, where the Wire intends her masterstroke. The Coronation will draw the biggest television audience in history — millions of faces all pointed at their screens at once — and she means to feast on the lot of them in a single stroke and finally gorge herself back into a physical body. “I will become flesh!”
The climax is a bit of a scramble up a radio mast, it must be said, but it’s a fun one, and the Doctor’s solution is pleasingly period-appropriate: he’s cobbled together a portable recording device, and rather than destroying the Wire he traps her, recording her onto magnetic tape at the moment of her triumph, sealing the screaming announcer into a spool of tape like a genie into a bottle. It’s a wonderfully analogue solution to an analogue-age menace — you beat the creature that lives in the broadcast by simply recording it, the way you’d tape a programme to watch back later. Gatiss plainly adores this stuff, and the episode is at its most charming when it’s playing with the technology of the age rather than sending the Doctor scrambling up an aerial. With the Wire contained, every stolen face is restored — Gran, Rose, all the blank victims suddenly whole again, just in time to catch the Coronation after all. It’s a warm, tidy ending to a story that flirted with real darkness.
What The Idiot’s Lantern Leaves Us With
A zippy period piece with more on its mind than its runaround plot lets on. Here’s what it plants:
- Television as the menace. There’s a sly satire humming under the fun — the whole nation gathering to stare, slack-jawed, into a glowing box that’s quietly feeding on them. In 1953 or any year since, it lands.
- The monster with a face. Eddie Connolly is the episode’s real villain, and the show is clear-eyed that domestic tyranny does more lasting harm than any energy creature. Watching Tommy and Rita break free of him is the true happy ending.
- Don’t touch Rose. De-facing the companion is a genuine shock, and the Doctor’s ice-cold response reminds us how dangerous this cheerful man becomes when someone he loves is threatened.
- A solo double act again. With Mickey gone, the Doctor and Rose are back to a two-hander, and the easy joy they’ve shared since New Earth carries even the thinner stretches.
- Gatiss and gothic Britain. Same knack for the horror under the net curtains that made The Unquiet Dead tick, transplanted to Formica and Festival-of-Britain optimism.
Rating: 3.5/5 — Stylish, sharply acted, and thematically richer than it first appears, even if the actual plot is thin and the finale is basically a man climbing a big aerial. Maureen Lipman and the Connolly drama do most of the heavy lifting, and they lift it well.
Faceless victims, a domineering dad, and a monster that feeds through the telly — “The Idiot’s Lantern” is minor Doctor Who, perhaps, but it’s minor Doctor Who done with real wit and real style. Now then — about that trip to see Elvis the Doctor still owes us…