Francine Jones

Here’s a gimmick that could have been unbearable and instead works beautifully: “42” takes place in real time. Forty-two minutes of story, forty-two minutes of episode, a countdown ticking in the corner of the screen and a cargo ship falling into a star at the end of it. 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.

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 is already rising. The hull is already groaning. Nobody has time to be surprised that a police box has appeared in their airlock, which is a nice touch, because this crew are far too busy dying to care who these two strangers are. The Pentallian itself is a nice piece of design, not a gleaming starship 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, underpaid, running a vessel that should have been serviced a decade ago. It makes the disaster feel less like bad luck and more like something that was always going to happen eventually.

The countdown is the whole architecture of the episode, and director Graeme Harper wrings it for everything it’s worth, with handheld camerawork, sweat, red emergency lighting, and people shouting over alarms. There’s no room for the Doctor to stroll about being clever. He arrives, assesses, and starts running, and he doesn’t stop for the rest of the hour. The central obstacle is a lovely bit of design. To reach the engines the crew must pass through a long chain of deadlock-sealed doors, each one opening only to the answer of a randomly generated trivia question, a security system some long-departed crew member thought was hilarious. So Martha and Riley end up sprinting through a burning ship answering pub-quiz questions about happy prime numbers and Elvis chart positions, which sounds absurd on paper and plays as genuinely nerve-shredding. It’s also a neat way of making the ship’s own history complicit, because the crew are being killed by their own carelessness at every level. That’s where Martha ends up phoning her mother from a spaceship to ask a trivia question, which is both very funny and, as it turns out, not entirely harmless. Francine takes the call at home, where somebody is quietly listening in.

Burn with me

The threat itself is the best idea here. The crew have been scooping fuel straight out of the heart of the star on the cheap, without scanning it first. The star is alive. It has been alive the whole time, and they have been mining pieces of a living thing to keep their engines running. So it takes them. Possessed crew members become walking furnaces, visors down, molten light pouring from their eyes, reducing anyone they touch to ash and repeating the same terrible line: burn with me. It’s a simple, primal image, and the show plays it as pure horror. Korwin turning on his own wife, Ashton stalking the corridors, the sun’s voice using human mouths to say it wants its property back.

The sequence everyone will remember is the Doctor’s. He gets infected himself, and rather than shrugging it off he comes apart, sobbing and terrified, begging Martha to freeze him in a stasis chamber before he kills someone. Tennant is superb here, and it’s genuinely upsetting to watch: the man who always has an answer reduced to pleading with his friend to make the pain stop. Doctor Who very rarely lets him be this frightened, and it resets the danger of everything around him. If he’s this scared, nobody is safe. It also puts Martha in an impossible position and lets her be magnificent. She’s the one holding him down, 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 is now unmistakably the person keeping him alive. It’s a straight line from the CPR she performed on a dying stranger back in Smith and Jones, except that time she was saving a man she’d known for an hour, and this time she’s holding down someone she has come to care about a great deal too much. The show understands the difference, and so, visibly, does she. There’s a fine set piece built out of it in the middle of the episode, too, when Martha and Riley are jettisoned in an escape pod on a direct course into the star, and the Doctor, half-possessed and barely lucid, has to claw his way back to himself in time to haul them in. Watching her drift toward a sun while he fights his own head is the best use the episode makes of its own countdown.

What it costs

The resolution follows the logic properly: you can’t out-fight a sun, so you give back what you took. The stolen fuel has to be vented, returned to the star, and the price of that is paid by Captain McDonnell, who walks her possessed husband out of an airlock and goes with him. It’s a grim, dignified ending for a character the episode has been quietly building as the one responsible, because she cut the corners and authorised the mining, and she settles the bill herself. There’s a good, uncomfortable environmental parable running under all of it. A crew strip-mining something living because it was cheap and convenient, insisting they didn’t know, and discovering that not knowing was itself the choice. The show doesn’t belabour it, which is why it works. 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, though where that two-parter was slow creeping dread, this is forty-two minutes of continuous panic. Different flavours of the same poison.

The coda matters, too. The Doctor gives Martha a key to the TARDIS. After all the “one trip” hedging, that’s the real promotion, not a speech but a key pressed into her hand. 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.

The stasis chamber scene is the one that stays with me: a terrified Doctor, and seeing him beg is more unsettling than any monster this season has managed. Martha is the steady one through all of it, and by the end she’s earned every bit of the key he finally hands over.

Rating: 3.5/5. Relentless, well-directed and anchored by a superb Tennant performance, even if the supporting crew are thin and it fades from memory faster than it should. As a piece of sustained tension, it’s a real success. A ship falling into something alive, a captain who paid her own bill, and a Doctor begging to be frozen before he burns someone. And back on Earth, someone is sitting in Martha’s mum’s living room, taking notes.

Back where she started

The episode opens with the Doctor doing something faintly cowardly: dropping Martha home, back to her bedroom, on the same night she left. The “one trip” he insisted on in Smith and Jones has stretched to several, and rather than address it he simply returns her to where he found her, all breezy thanks and no commitment. Martha’s face says everything. 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. What saves her from that indignity is her family, who are having a night of their own. Her sister Tish works in PR for Professor Richard Lazarus, and the man is unveiling something extraordinary at a black-tie gala. The Joneses are all there, mother Francine on the warpath and father Clive with the younger girlfriend in tow, and the domestic bickering gives the episode a nice, grounded texture before anything starts eating people. It’s a smart use of a supporting cast the show has been quietly building since episode one.

The man who wanted more time

Lazarus himself is the reason to watch. Mark Gatiss plays him as a silky, vain, utterly persuasive man of seventy-six who has built a machine to reverse his own ageing, and who steps into it in front of an audience because of course he does. When he emerges decades younger, the room applauds. It’s a fantastic scene, because the triumph is real and the horror hasn’t arrived yet, and Gatiss plays the newly young Lazarus with an appetite that is immediately unsettling. He wants food, he wants attention, he wants a woman on his arm. He has been given his youth back and his first instinct is pure consumption. The catch is standard-issue but well executed. The process hasn’t stopped. It has switched on dormant possibilities buried in his DNA, and he keeps changing, convulsing and mutating and eventually erupting into a scuttling, skeletal, scorpion-tailed thing that drains the life out of anyone it catches and leaves a husk behind. The design is decent, the CGI is doing more than it can comfortably afford, and the sequence where guests in evening dress flee through a gleaming laboratory atrium works nicely. There’s a genuinely effective piece of body horror in the transformation itself, too, with Lazarus doubling over mid-conversation, bones visibly shifting under his skin, trying to hold a charming smile together while his own body openly rebels against him. Gatiss plays that losing battle beautifully, and the episode is wise to let the change arrive in stages rather than all at once. By the time he’s fully monstrous, you’ve watched a man be dismantled by his own success.

The Lazarus Experiment: Growing Young and Coming Apart - Doctor Who episode still

Underneath it is the episode’s actual argument, and the Doctor makes it well. Lazarus quotes poetry at him and talks grandly about defeating death, and the Doctor, who has watched more people die than anyone alive, isn’t remotely impressed. Extending a life isn’t the same as filling one. As he puts it, it isn’t the time that matters, it’s the person. Coming from a man in his ninth century who has buried everybody he ever cared about, that lands with real weight, and it’s a neat inversion: the immortal telling the would-be immortal that he’s got the whole thing backwards. It’s also a rare instance of the Doctor talking about his own age without ducking into a joke. He’s spent most of this series deflecting Martha’s questions about what he actually is, and here he tells a dying man the plain truth about what a very long life costs you, with the camera making a point of showing Martha listening to every word. The episode doesn’t underline the moment. It doesn’t need to, because she’s just heard him say out loud the thing he won’t say to her.

The thing in the cathedral

The chase ends up in Southwark Cathedral, which is a lovely choice, with Lazarus, dying and monstrous, crawling back to the church where he sheltered as a boy during the Blitz. There’s a flash of the man inside the creature there, frightened and small, and the episode is better for the sliver of pity. The Doctor’s solution is properly Doctor Who: he climbs into the organ loft and uses the cathedral’s pipes as a weapon, blasting sound at the thing until the resonance scrambles it into falling from the bell tower. It dies as it lived, reverting to the withered old man he was trying so hard to stop being. Simple, tidy on its own terms, and it makes good use of a genuinely atmospheric location.

Martha does well throughout. She’s the one who works out what the machine actually did, 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. She’s ambitious, faintly starstruck by her charismatic employer, and utterly mortified once she grasps what she’s been promoting. Her horror at having spent weeks selling this man to the press gives the Jones family something to do besides bicker, and it makes the danger feel personal in a way a ballroom full of strangers never would. At the end, Martha plants her feet. She refuses to be dropped off again, tells the Doctor plainly that she isn’t a passenger, and this time he agrees. It’s the moment she stops being a stand-in and becomes a companion in her own right, and it’s been earned across six episodes.

There’s a colder note underneath the happy ending, though. Francine has spent the night being briefed against the Doctor by a stranger at the party, a well-dressed man with an interest in her daughter’s new friend and some very pointed warnings about how dangerous he is. His employer, it emerges, also happens to have funded Lazarus’s work: a Mr Saxon. That name turned up out of nowhere in The Runaway Bride too, authorising tanks over the Thames. Twice is a coincidence. I’m starting to think it isn’t one.

Rating: 3/5. Efficient, well-acted and sound in its argument, if a little routine in its middle stretch and let down by effects it can’t quite afford. The Martha material and Gatiss’s performance lift it above the average. An old man who wanted to be young, a monster in a cathedral, and a mystery benefactor taking an unhealthy interest in the Doctor’s friends. Martha’s in the TARDIS properly now, and somebody out there clearly isn’t happy about it.

42: Forty-Two Minutes to Fall Into a Sun