Francine Jones

A review of 42, the seventh episode of Doctor Who’s third series, which plays out in real time as the cargo ship SS Pentallian falls into a living sun. The post covers the countdown format, the door-quiz obstacle, the possessed crew, the Doctor’s own infection and Martha holding things together.

It finds the episode one of the tensest of the season, lifted by Tennant’s frightened Doctor and Martha’s steadiness, while noting a thin supporting crew and that it fades from memory quickly. It also picks up the strangers listening in on Martha’s mum. Rating: 3.5/5.

Here’s a gimmick that could have been unbearable and instead really worked for me: “42” takes place in real time. Forty-two minutes of story, forty-two minutes of episode, a countdown ticking away and a cargo ship falling into a star at the end of it, and I spent most of it sitting forward on the sofa. It’s Doctor Who doing a pressure-cooker thriller, and while it’s not the most memorable hour of the season it’s easily one of the tensest, which I’ll take any week.

Forty-two minutes

The TARDIS answers a distress call and lands aboard the SS Pentallian, a battered working freighter with dead engines, a skeleton crew and a sun filling every window. The heat’s already rising and the hull’s already groaning, and nobody has time to be surprised that a police box has turned up, which I liked, because this crew are far too busy dying to care who these two strangers are. The Pentallian isn’t a gleaming starship either but a grubby industrial hauler full of exposed pipework and sweat stains, with the general air of a place where corners have been cut for years. The crew match it, tired working people in overalls rather than uniformed officers, bickering and underpaid and running a ship that should’ve been serviced a decade ago. So the disaster feels less like bad luck and more like something that was always going to happen eventually. And the TARDIS isn’t a way out either, it’s stuck in a part of the ship that’s got too hot to get back to, so the Doctor and Martha are trapped in it with everyone else, which takes away the usual escape hatch and I liked that a lot.

Captain McDonnell, soaked in sweat aboard the overheating Pentallian

The countdown drives everything, handheld camera, sweat, red emergency lighting and people shouting over alarms, and there’s no room for the Doctor to stroll about being clever. He arrives, works out what’s going on and starts running, and he doesn’t really stop. My favourite bit is the obstacle in the way. To reach the engines the crew have to get through a long chain of sealed doors, each one opening only to the answer of a trivia question, a security system some long-gone crew member obviously thought was hilarious. So Martha and Riley end up sprinting through a burning ship answering pub-quiz questions about happy primes and whether Elvis or the Beatles had more number ones, which sounds daft on paper and was honestly nerve-shredding to watch.

It’s also where Martha ends up phoning her mum from a spaceship to ask a trivia question, which is very funny and, as it turns out, not entirely harmless. Francine takes the call at home, and somebody is quietly listening in, and I’d love to know who. The episode just leaves it there and goes back to the fire.

Burn with me

The threat itself is the best idea here. The crew have been scooping fuel straight out of the star on the cheap, without scanning it first, and the star is alive. It’s been alive the whole time and they’ve been mining bits of a living thing to keep their engines running. So it takes them. Possessed crew become walking furnaces, visors down, light pouring out of their eyes, turning anyone they touch to ash and repeating the same horrible line, burn with me, and the show plays it as pure horror. Korwin going first, laid up in the medical bay with his temperature climbing while McDonnell tries to keep her ship in one piece, then turning on his own wife, Ashton stalking the corridors, the sun using human mouths to say it wants its property back.

Then Martha and Riley get jettisoned in an escape pod on a straight course into the star, and the Doctor goes outside to work the magnetic control that drags them back, and that’s where the sun gets into him. What happens next is the bit I’ll remember. Rather than shrugging it off he comes apart, sobbing and terrified, begging Martha to freeze him in a stasis chamber before he kills someone, and Tennant is superb in it. It’s genuinely upsetting, the man who always has an answer reduced to pleading with his friend to make it stop. The show very rarely lets him be this frightened, and if he’s this scared, nobody’s safe.

And it lets Martha be magnificent. She’s the one holding it together, working the controls, doing the thing he’s asked her to do while he screams. After being dropped home like a taxi fare a couple of weeks ago in The Lazarus Experiment, she’s now very clearly the person keeping him alive. It’s a straight line from the CPR she gave a dying stranger back in Smith and Jones, except that time she’d known him for an hour and this time it’s somebody she’s come to care about a good deal too much, and I think the show knows the difference, and so does she.

What it costs

The ending follows its own logic properly. You can’t out-fight a sun, so you give back what you took, the stolen fuel gets vented back into the star, and the price is paid by Captain McDonnell, who walks her possessed husband out of an airlock and goes with him. Grim, and dignified, for a character the episode’s been quietly building up as the one responsible, because she cut the corners and she settles the bill herself. There’s a nice uncomfortable environmental point under all of it too, a crew strip-mining something living because it was cheap and convenient and insisting they didn’t know, when not knowing was the choice they made. It doesn’t hammer it home and I was glad of that.

The shape of the thing owes an obvious debt to the base-under-siege stories the series does so well, and the isolation and dwindling crew of The Impossible Planet are all over it, the Doctor again stuck with something far older and bigger than him that’s using people as a mouthpiece. But where that two-parter was slow creeping dread, this is forty-two minutes of continuous panic, different flavours of the same poison really. The crew here are thin, too, apart from McDonnell I couldn’t tell you much about any of them, which is the price of never stopping for breath.

Then the Doctor gives Martha a key to the TARDIS. After all the “one trip” hedging that’s the real promotion, not a speech, just a key pressed into her hand, and I was properly pleased for her. And then she phones her mum again, and Francine is sitting in her front room with strangers listening to every word, and the smile drops off the episode entirely.

Rating: 3.5/5. I really enjoyed it while it was on, relentless and anchored by a superb Tennant, even if the supporting crew are thin and it’s faded from my memory faster than it should have in the week or so since. That stasis chamber scene hasn’t, though.

Back where she started

The Doctor opens by doing something faintly cowardly, dropping Martha back home on the same night she left. The “one trip” he insisted on in Smith and Jones has stretched to several, and rather than talk about it he just puts her back where he found her, all breezy thanks and no commitment. Martha’s face says it all. She’s been to New Earth and 1930s Manhattan, she’s saved his life more than once, and she’s being dropped off like a taxi fare, which I thought was a bit rotten of him. Then the TARDIS vanishes and pops straight back, because he’s caught the name Lazarus on the news, and suddenly it’s not goodbye after all.

Her sister Tish is working for Professor Richard Lazarus, and he’s unveiling something big at a black-tie do that evening, so the Joneses are all there, Francine already suspicious of this strange man her daughter keeps turning up with and brother Leo tagging along. The domestic bickering gives the episode a nice grounded feel before anything starts eating people. And it’s a smart use of a supporting cast the show’s been quietly building since episode one, so that when things go wrong there are people in the room I actually care about, not just extras in evening wear.

The man who wanted more time

Lazarus himself is the reason to watch, and Gatiss is great in it. He plays him as a silky, vain, very persuasive man of seventy-six who’s built a machine to reverse his own ageing and then steps into it in front of a room full of guests, because of course he does. When he comes out decades younger the room applauds, and it’s a fantastic scene because the triumph is real and the horror hasn’t turned up yet. But the newly young Lazarus has an appetite that’s unsettling straight away. He wants food, he wants attention, he wants a woman on his arm, he’s got his youth back and his first instinct is to consume.

The catch is standard issue but done well enough. The process hasn’t stopped, it’s switched on something dormant in his DNA, and he keeps changing, convulsing and mutating until he’s a scuttling, skeletal thing with a tail that drains the life out of anyone it catches and leaves a husk behind. The design’s decent, though the CGI is doing more than it can comfortably afford and a few of those shots looked rough even on first watch. Guests in evening dress fleeing through the gleaming lab atrium works nicely. What worked best for me was before the monster shows up properly, Lazarus doubling over mid-conversation and trying to hold a charming smile together while his own body turns on him, and Gatiss plays that losing battle beautifully. I was glad the change came in stages rather than all at once, so by the time he’s fully monstrous you’ve watched a man get taken apart by his own success.

Professor Lazarus as an old man in black tie, before he steps into his machine

Underneath it all is the point the episode’s actually making, and the Doctor makes it well. Lazarus quotes poetry at him and talks grandly about beating death, and the Doctor, who’s watched more people die than anyone alive, isn’t remotely impressed. A longer life isn’t the same as a fuller one, and as he puts it, it’s not the time that matters, it’s the person. Coming from a man who’s been going for over nine hundred years and has buried everybody he ever cared about, that lands, the immortal telling the would-be immortal he’s got the whole thing backwards. It’s also one of the few times this series he’s talked about his own age without ducking into a joke. And I couldn’t help thinking about Martha, who’s spent weeks getting nothing out of him about what he actually is, while here he is telling a stranger the plain truth about what a very long life costs you.

The thing in the cathedral

The chase ends up in Southwark Cathedral, which is a lovely choice, Lazarus dying and monstrous and crawling back to the church where he sheltered as a boy in the Blitz. There’s a flash of the frightened kid inside the creature there, and the episode’s better for that bit of pity. The Doctor’s solution is proper Doctor Who: he gets up to the organ and turns the cathedral’s pipes into a weapon, blasting sound until the resonance knocks the thing off the bell tower, and it dies as the withered old man it was trying so hard to stop being. Tidy on its own terms, and a really atmospheric location, even if it goes a bit routine in the middle getting there.

Martha does well all the way through. She’s the one up that bell tower with the thing, she keeps her head while people are being drained around her, and she and Tish get a decent sisterly thread out of it. It helps that Tish isn’t written as a damsel either, she’s ambitious, a bit starstruck by her charismatic boss and absolutely mortified once she grasps what she’s been working for, which makes the danger feel personal in a way a ballroom full of strangers never would. And at the end Martha plants her feet. She won’t be dropped off again, tells the Doctor she’s not a passenger, and this time he agrees, so she stops being a stand-in and becomes a companion in her own right after six episodes of earning it.

There’s a colder note under the happy ending, though. Francine’s spent the night being wound up about the Doctor by a well-dressed stranger at the party, a man very interested in her daughter’s new friend and full of pointed warnings about how dangerous he is. And the man he works for turns out to be the same one who put money into Lazarus’s work, a Mr Saxon. That name came out of nowhere in The Runaway Bride too, when the army got the order to open fire on the thing over the Thames. Twice is a coincidence, I suppose. I’m starting to think it isn’t one.

Rating: 3/5. It was ok, efficient and well acted and right about what it’s saying, but it drags a bit in the middle and the effects aren’t up to what they’re being asked to do. Gatiss and the Martha stuff lift it above the average episode, and I’d happily watch his first scene in that machine again.

42: Forty-Two Minutes to Fall Into a Sun