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Freema Agyeman

The Sontaran Stratagem: Every Car on Earth

by Hutch Morzaria May 17, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

A returning companion, a returning classic monster, and a plot built entirely out of satnavs. “The Sontaran Stratagem” is a solid, workmanlike first half — it doesn’t have the ambition of the season’s best, but it moves briskly, it brings Martha Jones back in a way that respects where she was left, and it lands a genuinely uncomfortable argument about the Doctor and the military. Also the Sontarans are enormous fun, which covers a multitude of sins.

Martha Jones, UNIT Officer

Martha walked out of the TARDIS on her own terms at the end of Last of the Time Lords, and the show has been sensible about what she did next. She’s finished her training, she’s a doctor, she’s engaged, and she’s working as UNIT’s medical officer — and it’s she who summons the Doctor, on her own authority, because something on Earth needs him.

That’s a good look for her. The Martha who left was hollowed out by a year of walking a conquered planet and by loving a man who wouldn’t look at her. The Martha who comes back is composed, senior, and completely over it. Freema Agyeman plays the reunion with real warmth and zero yearning, and the show is smart enough not to reopen the wound.

The best gag in the episode is Donna and Martha meeting, with the Doctor visibly bracing for a catastrophe that never arrives — the two of them get on immediately and start comparing notes about him, which is his worst nightmare. It’s a small scene and it does a lot of work.

There’s a nastier thread running under her return, though. The Sontarans take a copy of her — a clone grown in a tank, loaded with her memories, walking around UNIT wearing her face and carrying her clearance. It’s a well-worn science-fiction idea, but the episode wrings one genuinely good chill out of it: the sight of Martha’s own body suspended in a growth vat while her duplicate carries on with her shift two floors up, and not a single person in that building noticing the difference. That’s the horror of it. She’s one of the most capable people they have, and she’s been replaced by lunchtime.

ATMOS

The threat is a nicely mundane one. ATMOS is a device fitted to four hundred million cars worldwide: a satnav that also reduces exhaust emissions to precisely zero. It’s cheap, it’s ubiquitous, it’s in every vehicle on the road, and — as the Doctor points out with the weariness of a man who has seen this a hundred times — nothing that good is free.

Two things are wrong with it. The satnavs have started driving people into rivers, killing anyone who investigates the company too closely, which gives the first act a decent thriller pulse. And the emissions system is doing rather more than filtering. There’s something genuinely modern about the paranoia here: a piece of consumer technology, willingly installed by hundreds of millions of people, quietly turned into a global weapon by the company that supplied it. The show doesn’t labour the point, but it’s there.

The opening death is the best-directed thing in the episode: a man alone in his car, doors locked by a system he paid for and trusts completely, being driven calmly into a river by a pleasant female voice reading out directions. No monster, no ray gun, no warning — just a machine following its instructions while he hammers on the glass. It’s exactly the sort of small domestic horror this show does better than almost anyone, and it establishes the threat far more effectively than any amount of fleet-in-orbit spectacle manages later.

Sontarans and a Clever Boy

The Sontarans themselves are a delight. Squat, potato-headed clone warriors who bellow “Sontar-Ha!” in unison, who genuinely cannot conceive of a fight not being glorious, and who are lethally vulnerable to a well-aimed tennis ball at the probic vent on the back of the neck. General Staal — “Staal the Undefeated” — is played with tremendous relish, and the writing gets the joke exactly right: they aren’t stupid, they’re just so completely governed by their own warrior code that it can be used against them. A species that cannot resist a duel is a species you can manipulate.

Their human collaborator is Luke Rattigan, a teenage genius with a private academy full of gifted students and an ego the size of a small country. He’s an effective creation — a boy so convinced of his own brilliance and so starved of actual respect that a race of alien soldiers telling him he’s special is enough to buy his entire planet. He’s insufferable, which is the point, and there’s real pathos underneath it: the Sontarans obviously despise him and he can’t see it. His academy is a good detail as well — a country house full of brilliant teenagers he has personally assembled and cannot relate to for thirty consecutive seconds, every one of them visibly sick of him. Rattigan wants to be worshipped by people he’s decided are beneath him, which is precisely the lever the Sontarans use to pick him up and carry him about.

Soldiers

The most interesting thread is the Doctor and UNIT, and it’s genuinely prickly. He works with them and he does not like them. He bristles at the guns, at the salutes, at Colonel Mace calling him “sir,” at the whole apparatus of an organisation that solves problems by shooting them. Mace, to his credit, pushes back — these people are defending their planet, and the Doctor’s disdain for how they do it is easy to hold when you can leave whenever you like.

There’s no neat resolution offered, and the episode is better for it. Given what we watched him do to the Family, and the flames he stood in during The Runaway Bride, his squeamishness about soldiers is a rather more complicated position than he’d like it to be.

Meanwhile Donna goes home, and it’s the warmest material in the hour. She sees her mother, who is as deflating as ever, and her grandfather Wilf, who is thrilled. Since Partners in Crime the show has quietly been building the Nobles into the most grounded family the series has had, and Donna’s realisation that she can pop home whenever she likes — and that she’s been away three months by their clock — is a lovely, human beat.

Which makes the cliffhanger land properly. The ATMOS devices activate worldwide, gas pours out of four hundred million exhausts at once, and Wilf is sitting in a locked car in his own driveway with the doors sealed and the fumes rising. Somewhere in there is a Martha who isn’t Martha. And an entire Sontaran fleet is in orbit, delighted.

What The Sontaran Stratagem Leaves Us With

Efficient, entertaining setup with one genuinely thorny idea. Here’s what it plants:

Martha, recovered. Back with a job, a rank and a fiancé, treated by the script as a professional rather than a loose end. Her exit is honoured rather than undone.
The Sontarans, done right. Absurd and lethal in equal measure, with a warrior code that’s both a joke and a genuine weakness. Best classic-monster revival since the Cybermen.
Consumer tech as the weapon. A free gadget in every car, installed voluntarily, weaponised remotely. Uncomfortably plausible.
The Doctor versus the army. A real argument the episode refuses to settle, and one that’s harder for him to win than he thinks.
The Nobles. Wilf and Sylvia keep the season’s feet on the ground, and putting Wilf in that car is a very effective way to make a global catastrophe personal.

Rating: 3/5 — Sturdy rather than inspired, with some clunky dialogue and a middle section that marks time. But the Sontarans are a joy, Martha’s return is handled with care, and the cliffhanger is a good one.

Four hundred million cars pumping poison into the sky, an old man locked in his own Vauxhall, and a fleet of very short soldiers who could not be happier about any of it. Part one done.

May 17, 2008 0 comments

Last of the Time Lords: The Woman Who Walked the Earth

by Hutch Morzaria July 21, 2007

written by Hutch Morzaria

Series 3 ends with a finale that is one part triumph, one part misfire, and one part genuinely great character writing — and the great character writing wins. “Last of the Time Lords” picks up a full year after The Sound of Drums left the Master ruling a conquered planet, and it spends most of its running time in a genuinely bleak place before fumbling its own resolution and then recovering with two of the best scenes of the season. A frustrating, fascinating, ultimately moving hour.

The Year That Never Was

The jump is brutal and brilliantly done. A year has passed. The Master has ruled unopposed. A tenth of humanity is dead, the survivors are enslaved building a war fleet in shipyards on every continent, and the planet is a labour camp. The Doctor, aged past the point of anything recognisable, is kept in a birdcage as a pet. Jack is chained in the engine room, killed and revived over and over for sport. Martha’s family serve their captor’s meals aboard the Valiant.

It’s genuinely nasty stuff for teatime television, and the show commits to it. The Master’s rule isn’t a cartoon dictatorship; it’s petty, personal, and cruel in ways designed to humiliate specific people. Simm keeps the manic energy but there’s real sadism underneath it now, and the sight of the Doctor reduced to a wizened thing in a cage is hard to shake.

Martha Jones Walked the Earth

And then there’s Martha, who has spent that year on foot.

This is the payoff of everything the season built. She walked out of the Valiant with a broken teleport and no plan, and she has spent twelve months crossing a conquered world alone — through camps and ruins and occupied cities, hunted the entire time — telling everyone she meets about the Doctor. She has become a legend. People know her name. Freema Agyeman plays the returning Martha as harder, quieter and entirely without the eager brightness she had when she was a medical student answering a distress call in Smith and Jones. The year has cost her, and it shows. It isn’t the first time this season has asked her to endure something alone and unthanked — she spent three months as a maid in 1913, swallowing abuse and guarding a fob watch, in Human Nature — but twelve months walking across an occupied planet with a price on her head is an entirely different order of thing. She came through it, and she came back for everyone else.

It’s a magnificent thing for a companion to have done, and the episode is right to treat it as the spine of the whole story. Whatever else this finale gets wrong, it understands that Martha Jones saved the world by walking across it.

Who the Toclafane Really Are

The reveal is the cruellest idea the show has had in years, and it retroactively guts an episode I loved.

The Toclafane are humanity. Specifically, they’re the people from Utopia — the last few thousand survivors at the end of the universe, who boarded that rocket and travelled to the refuge they’d been promised, and found nothing there at all. No Utopia. Just cold and dark and the end of everything. So they cannibalised themselves down into these giggling chrome spheres to survive, and the Master brought them back through his paradox machine to slaughter their own ancestors.

That’s horrifying on every level. The hopeful, desperate people we watched queue for that rocket are the childlike voices carving up the Earth, and the last thing they ever did as human beings was give up. It also makes the Master’s plan genuinely obscene rather than merely villainous: he showed them the future, let them see there was nothing in it, and weaponised their despair.

The Word, and the Problem

Which brings us to the resolution, and I’ll be honest — it doesn’t work.

Martha’s gun turns out to be a decoy. Her real weapon is the Archangel Network: for a year she has been telling every person on Earth to think one word at one precise moment, and when six billion people simultaneously think Doctor, the psychic energy pours into him, undoes the ageing, and restores him. He rises into the air, glowing, arms outstretched, forgiving his enemy from mid-air.

The idea underneath is sound and rather lovely — the Master’s own instrument of control turned into an instrument of faith, and Martha’s year of talking to people being literally what saves everyone. But the execution tips over into something faintly ridiculous. A beatific floating Doctor haloed in golden light asks the audience to accept an awful lot on very little, and after an hour of grounded, ugly, specific misery it lands like a different programme entirely. It’s the one genuine misstep in the finale, and it’s a big one.

Forgiveness, and a Pyre

And then the episode recovers, twice.

First: Jack destroys the paradox machine, time snaps back, and the year unhappens for everyone except the handful of people who were aboard the Valiant. Only they remember. That’s a haunting idea in itself — an entire planet’s worst year erased from every memory but a dozen.

Second, and far better: the Master’s death. Cornered and beaten, he is shot by Lucy, the wife who stood beside him through all of it. And he refuses to regenerate. He could survive — he simply won’t, because surviving means the Doctor keeps him, and he would rather die than be forgiven. The Doctor, who has spent two episodes saying he only wanted his oldest friend back, holds him while he goes, and then sits alone on a burning beach beside the pyre. Tennant plays it beautifully. For all the shouting, the last of the Time Lords is now genuinely the last, and he chose none of it.

There’s an odd final beat, too: a hand reaching into the ashes to lift a ring out of the fire. Nobody explains it. I’ve no idea what to make of it, and it’s been bothering me ever since.

Martha Leaves

The best scene is saved for last. Martha packs her bag and gets out.

Not in tragedy, not torn away like Rose — she simply looks at the situation clearly and decides she’s had enough of loving a man who won’t love her back. She tells him about a friend who spent years waiting for someone who never noticed, and then says plainly that she’s not doing it any more. She has a family to put back together and a life to get on with. And she walks out of the TARDIS on her own two feet, on her own terms, promising she’ll see him again.

After a season of being second-best to a ghost, that’s a superb exit — the healthiest, most adult departure a companion has been given, and completely in character for the woman who walked the Earth.

What Last of the Time Lords Leaves Us With

A flawed finale with a great heart. Here’s what it plants:

Martha’s year. The single most impressive thing any companion has done, and the show gives it the weight it deserves.
Utopia’s terrible answer. There was no refuge. Humanity’s last act was to eat itself, and the Master turned that despair into a weapon.
A Master who won’t be saved. Refusing to regenerate rather than accept forgiveness is the most character-revealing choice the show could have made for him.
The Doctor, alone again. He wanted his friend back more than he wanted to win, and he lost anyway.
An exit on her own terms. Martha chooses herself, which is a genuinely rare and welcome thing for this show to allow.

Rating: 3.5/5 — The floating-Doctor resolution badly undercuts an otherwise bleak and gripping finale, but the year-that-never-was, the Toclafane reveal, the Master’s death and Martha’s departure are all excellent. Series 3 has been a strong run, and it ends on more highs than lows.

A year erased, a friend burned on a beach, and a woman who walked across the world and then walked away. And then — because this show cannot help itself — a ship’s prow smashes through the TARDIS wall with the name Titanic on it, and that’s where we’re left. Of course it is.

July 21, 2007 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

Utopia: The End of the Universe and the Watch on the Desk

by hutchm July 7, 2007

written by hutchm

Every so often a season quietly loads a gun in episode three and fires it in episode eleven. “Utopia” is that shot. It starts as a fairly straightforward last-outpost-of-humanity story, spends forty minutes being perfectly good, and then executes a reveal so well-prepared and so beautifully performed that I actually said something out loud at the television. This is where Series 3 stops being a run of adventures and becomes one story.

Refuelling in Cardiff, Landing at the End

It opens with a lovely piece of housekeeping: the TARDIS putting down on the Cardiff rift to refuel, the same crack in the world the Doctor was tinkering with back in Boom Town. And sprinting across the plaza toward it comes Captain Jack Harkness, who grabs the outside of the ship as it dematerialises and hangs on.

Jack’s return is handled beautifully. He’s been waiting a very long time — abandoned on the Game Station at the end of The Parting of the Ways, brought back to life by Rose when she held the time vortex, and left behind. He is now unable to die. Not hard to kill: unable. And the Doctor, it turns out, ran from him — the TARDIS bolted to the end of the universe trying to shake him off — because a man who cannot die is a fixed point, and every Time Lord instinct the Doctor has finds him wrong.

That conversation is the best character material in the episode. Jack is owed an apology and doesn’t get much of one; the Doctor is honest about his revulsion in a way that isn’t flattering to him at all. And the affection underneath survives it. John Barrowman slots straight back in, and the three-hander of Doctor, Martha and Jack has an easy energy the season hasn’t had before.

Utopia

They land on Malcassairo in the year one hundred trillion, and the setting is magnificently bleak. The stars have gone out. The universe is running down. What’s left of humanity huddles in a concrete silo, hunted across the wastes by the Futurekind — feral, filed-toothed people who used to be human and have given up on it.

The imagery is genuinely striking. This isn’t the heat death of a physics lecture; it’s a black sky with nothing whatsoever in it, a rust-coloured wasteland, and the last few thousand people alive queuing in a concrete bunker to board a rocket aimed at a rumour. The show has done far-future stories before, but never this far out and never this hopeless. There’s something close to unbearable in a civilisation reduced to hoping that a signal nobody can decode is coming from somewhere better than here.

In the middle of this ruin is Professor Yana, working with salvaged junk and string to launch a rocket toward a signal called Utopia, the last rumoured refuge at the end of everything. Derek Jacobi plays him as gentle, apologetic, a little defeated — a brilliant man who has spent decades doing impossible work with inadequate tools and no thanks, kept company only by Chantho, an insectoid assistant who begins every sentence with “Chan” and ends it with “tho,” and who is quietly, hopelessly in love with him. Chantho is a small gem, and the episode affords her far more dignity than a comic speech tic has any right to carry. Her scenes with Martha — two women comparing notes on the business of being devoted to a brilliant man who hasn’t noticed — are gently funny in the moment and, in hindsight, quite brutal. Martha recognising her own predicament in somebody else’s is one of the better quiet beats of the season.

It’s a genuinely warm portrait, and the episode takes its time with it. Yana is delighted by the Doctor. He’s overwhelmed to finally have someone who understands his equations. He’s the most sympathetic guest character of the season, and Jacobi plays him with such decency that you spend the whole hour rooting for him.

Which is, of course, the trap.

The Watch on the Desk

The clues have been sitting in plain sight. Yana has been troubled all his life by a sound in his head: a relentless four-beat drumming, since childhood. He was found as a boy at the edge of the Silver Devastation with nothing but a battered fob watch, which he keeps on his desk and has never opened, because he’s certain it’s broken and it makes him uneasy.

And Martha — who spent three months in 1913 guarding an identical object in Human Nature — sees it, recognises the circular Gallifreyan engraving, and makes the connection out loud. That’s a wonderful piece of construction: the audience gets there roughly half a second before she says it, and the horror arrives with the understanding.

Then the season’s other loose thread snaps taut. The Face of Boe spent his dying breath in Gridlock telling the Doctor four words with no context: you are not alone. Not a prophecy. An acronym. Y-A-N-A. It has been sitting in the season since April, and I never once saw it.

Yana opens the watch, and Jacobi’s face changes, and the kindly old professor is gone. What’s left introduces itself with three words and a smile: “I… am… the Master.” It’s a masterclass in performance — the same actor, the same room, an entirely different person — and Jacobi is so good in his brief window as the villain that it’s almost a shame he doesn’t stay.

He shoots Chantho, who shoots him back as she dies, which forces a regeneration into a younger, wilder man who takes one look at the situation, laughs, and steals the TARDIS. The Doctor, Martha and Jack are left locked out at the end of the universe, hammering on the door while the ship dematerialises without them.

What really sells the ending is Tennant. The Doctor has spent three series defining himself by a single fact — last of the Time Lords, sole survivor, the one who was left behind. Watching that fact come apart in front of him is not, it turns out, any kind of relief. He goes white. He starts pleading through a locked door, using the old man’s name over and over, trying to reach whatever might be left of the professor in there. It doesn’t work, and the expression on his face as the ship fades out is the first time all season he has looked genuinely, helplessly frightened.

What Utopia Leaves Us With

A superb piece of long-game plotting and one of the great reveals. Here’s what it plants:

The acronym. “You are not alone” has been a mystery since Gridlock and turns out to be a signpost. Seeding a reveal eight episodes ahead and having it land this cleanly is genuinely impressive.
Jack, and the cost of immortality. A man who cannot die, abandoned by the person who made him that way, and told to his face that his existence is repellent. He deserves better and mostly takes it with grace.
Jacobi’s Master. On screen as the villain for a matter of minutes and completely unforgettable. The switch from kindly to malevolent is done with almost no makeup and pure performance.
The drumming. Four beats, constant, since childhood. Nobody explains it. It’s clearly the key to something.
The Doctor, stranded. No ship, no way home, at the literal end of time, while his oldest enemy walks off with the only means of escape. That’s a cliffhanger.

Rating: 4.5/5 — A slow, sad, beautifully acted build that detonates in its final fifteen minutes. It loses half a mark only because so much of it is setup for what’s coming; as a piece of season architecture it’s close to flawless.

The universe is dying, the Doctor is locked out at the end of it, and something very old has just woken up and remembered its name. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted the next episode this badly.

July 7, 2007 1 comment

Doctor Who Television

Evolution of the Daleks: The One Who Wanted to Change

by Hutch Morzaria May 19, 2007

written by Hutch Morzaria

Last week ended with a squid-headed creature in a Dalek casing declaring itself the future of its species, and I said I couldn’t tell whether that was brilliant or ridiculous. Having watched the resolution, I can report: it’s both, and the proportions aren’t in its favour. “Evolution of the Daleks” has one of the best ideas the show has ever had about its oldest enemy, and it surrounds that idea with a muddle. Picking up straight from Daleks in Manhattan, this is a frustrating hour — genuinely thoughtful in places, faintly embarrassing in others.

The Dalek Who Felt

The good stuff first, because it’s very good. Dalek Sec, having folded a human into himself, starts changing — and not in the way he planned. He wanted human resilience and human cunning. What he gets is human feeling. He begins to hesitate. He begins to sympathise. He looks at the plan to hollow out a thousand people and finds, to his own horror, that he no longer wants to do it.

That’s a magnificent idea, and it puts a proper tragedy at the centre of the episode. Sec isn’t redeemed exactly — he’s a war criminal having a conscience installed against his will — but he becomes something genuinely new: a Dalek arguing that his species must stop being what it is in order to deserve to survive. Eric Loren plays him with a weary, halting sadness that sells it far better than the costume has any right to allow. His pitch, when he finally makes it, is genuinely unsettling coming out of that mouth: a Dalek standing in a sewer arguing that a race incapable of love or doubt or hesitation has already lost, and that the only way forward is to become partly the very thing they’ve spent a million years exterminating. Strip away the tentacles and it’s a decent argument, honestly made. Which is exactly what makes what happens next so grim — there is nobody in that room capable of hearing it.

It also rhymes beautifully with the last time this show put humanity inside a Dalek. Back in Dalek, a lone survivor absorbed Rose’s DNA, felt something for the first time, and found the contamination so unbearable that it destroyed itself. Sec goes the other way — he embraces it, and argues for it — and the result is no less fatal. Either way, the show’s position is consistent and bleak: a Dalek that feels cannot go on being a Dalek, and its own kind will not permit it to be anything else.

Mutiny in the Sewers

Which is exactly what happens. Thay, Jast and Caan watch their leader develop a conscience and diagnose it, correctly by their standards, as a malfunction. The Cult of Skaro was created to have imagination, and the moment imagination produces something that isn’t ruthless, they revolt against it.

The mutiny scenes are the best in the episode — Daleks debating heresy in the dark, deciding their commander is no longer pure enough to lead, chaining him up like a prisoner. When Sec finally dies, it’s throwing himself in front of a blast meant for the Doctor, and the Doctor’s reaction is the right one: not triumph but real grief. “You were the only one of them who could change.” An entire potential future for the species, shot by its own side for the crime of hesitating.

Lightning on the Empire State

The plot around all this is where things wobble. The gamma strike arrives, the Empire State Building’s mast does its job, and the Doctor — in a moment of glorious nonsense — clambers up and grabs the conductor at the critical instant so that his own Time Lord DNA gets swept into the mix. It’s a huge, silly, wonderfully Doctor-ish gesture, and it pays off in the episode’s best conceptual beat: the resulting Dalek-human army, ordered to kill, stops and asks why. Free will, smuggled in via a lightning strike. Daleks undone by a question.

Martha, it should be said, has a very good episode. She’s the one who works out what the mast is actually for, she improvises the way to get everyone up to it, and she spends a long stretch of the hour organising frightened people while the Doctor is somewhere else entirely. The self-reliance she found alone in a stolen car in Gridlock has hardened here into something closer to command, and the show barely pauses to remark on it — which is precisely the right call.

Unfortunately the hybrids themselves are a hard sell — men in period suits doing stiff Dalek voices, gunning each other down in a stairwell — and the climactic battle never looks like anything other than a handful of people in a corridor. The episode’s ambitions keep outrunning what it can actually put on screen.

The one part of the ending that lands without qualification is Solomon. Facing down the Daleks, he tries the only thing he knows: he steps forward, unarmed, and appeals to them as one living thing to another with a genuinely moving little speech about shared humanity. They kill him mid-sentence. It’s brutal and completely correct — a decent man’s decency counting for precisely nothing — and Hugh Quarshie makes it hurt.

Thay and Jast are destroyed, and Dalek Caan, alone and cornered, throws himself into an emergency temporal shift and vanishes. The last Dalek in existence, again, gone to who knows when. The Doctor lets him go, and there’s something tired in the way he does it, like a man who has had this exact conversation too many times to believe it’s the last.

It’s worth noting how differently this Doctor handles them now. There’s no gloating and no grandstanding, just an offer made flatly and without much hope, and a weary shrug when it’s refused. Whatever the Time War took out of him, the part that used to relish beating the Daleks seems to have gone along with it. He isn’t hunting them any more. He’s simply tired of them, which is somehow a bleaker place for the show to have arrived at than any amount of shouting.

There’s a warmer coda for Laszlo, whose half-converted body is failing until the Doctor improvises a fix, and who gets to walk back into Hooverville with Tallulah and be accepted by the people there. After an hour of grim arithmetic, one man getting to keep his life is a decent note to end on.

What Evolution of the Daleks Leaves Us With

Terrific ideas, rickety execution. Here’s what it plants:

A Dalek with a conscience. Sec is the most interesting thing the show has done with the species in years, and killing him off with his own side’s blessing is a genuinely tragic move.
Purity as a death sentence. The Cult would rather die as Daleks than survive as something else, which is both entirely in character and the whole reason they keep losing.
Free will as a weapon. The Dalek-humans refusing an order because they can now ask “why” is a lovely, elegant resolution — better than the fight it triggers.
Solomon’s death. The bleakest beat of the two-parter, and the one that earns its emotion outright.
Caan, still out there. One Dalek left, running again. The show can’t seem to finish with them, and by now that feels like the point.

Rating: 2.5/5 — Carries the season’s most interesting single idea and fumbles nearly everything around it. The Sec material and Solomon’s death are genuinely strong; the hybrid army, the stairwell shootout and a good deal of the dialogue are not. A two-parter I admire more than I enjoyed.

A Dalek who learned to feel and was executed for it, and a man in a shanty town who died talking about peace. There’s a very good episode buried in this one. It just keeps getting interrupted by men in suits shouting “exterminate.”

May 19, 2007 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

Gridlock: Hymns on the Motorway

by Hutch Morzaria May 5, 2007

written by Hutch Morzaria

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 has turned into one of the most quietly moving hours the revived series has produced, and paid off a mystery that’s been hanging around since Series 2. It’s strange, sad, oddly spiritual, and it finally lets the Doctor be honest with Martha about who he is. 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, crawling forward at a rate of a few yards a year. And it has been like this for twenty-four years.

The world-building here is superb and very funny before it becomes 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 the fact that his journey to the next junction has taken twelve years. There’s a radio station broadcasting to the whole motorway. There are elderly couples like the Cassinis who have spent their entire marriage in a car. Nobody questions it. The jam is simply the condition of life, and everyone has made a life inside it anyway.

Martha, of course, gets carjacked almost immediately, bundled into a vehicle by a young couple 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 genuine danger with no guarantee he’ll reach you in time. It’s a useful corrective after a couple of weeks of breezy adventuring. In Smith and Jones she saved his life with her own two hands; here she spends most of the hour entirely alone in a stolen car, with no sonic screwdriver and nobody to reassure her, quietly working out that she’ll have to be her own rescue until he turns up. She turns out to be very good at it.

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.

It’s a startling, beautiful scene. Davies plays it completely straight: no irony, no undercutting gag, just a community of people who have 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 genuinely moving rather than naive is a real swing, and it lands. When the hymn comes back at the end of the episode, it earns every note.

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 descend: the Macra, vast crustacean horrors dragging vehicles down into the murk. The lovely touch is what they used to be — an intelligent species, once, now degenerated into mindless appetite, scavenging in the poison at the bottom of the world. It’s a grim little idea sitting under all that singing. There’s a nice piece of series history buried in it, too, for anyone who cares to dig: the Macra are dredged up out of the black-and-white era, brought back not as a nostalgic victory lap but as something that has rotted in the intervening centuries into a mindless mouth.

The City Above Is Dead

The reveal is the episode’s masterstroke, and it recontextualises everything. There is no fast lane out. There is 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. The Motorway wasn’t a jam at all; it was a tomb that someone sealed to save the people inside it. And the someone is the Face of Boe, who shut the tunnels, and has 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 has been slowly burning himself out to keep a few thousand strangers breathing.

That’s a gorgeous piece of writing. The comic traffic jam turns out to be an act of enormous, unglamorous mercy, sustained in silence for a quarter of a century. When the Doctor throws the roof open and lets the cars rise into daylight for the first time in decades, it’s a genuine cheer moment.

“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 would speak with his final breath, saved for their last meeting. Here it is, and it is four words long: You are not alone.

That’s it. No context, no explanation, nothing to do with anything we’ve just watched. The Doctor is left standing there completely thrown, and so was I. He’s spent every episode since The Parting of the Ways defining himself as the last of the Time Lords, the only survivor of a war he ended, and an ancient creature has just spent its dying breath telling him that isn’t true. I have no idea what it means. It might mean nothing. It has been rattling around my head ever since.

What follows is the best scene in the episode, and the reason Martha’s season really starts here. Sitting in a bar afterwards, 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, the mountains of Solace and Solitude, all of it gone. He’s spent two episodes deflecting her with charm and talking around another woman. Here he treats her as someone who deserves the truth, and their partnership properly begins.

What Gridlock Leaves Us With

A comic premise that turns into a hymn about hope. Here’s what it plants:

The Face of Boe’s message. Four words with no explanation attached, aimed squarely at the thing the Doctor believes most firmly about himself. Whatever it means, it’s now the biggest question in the series.
Mercy nobody sees. Boe’s twenty-four-year sacrifice is the moral heart of the episode — an enormous kindness performed quietly, with no audience and no reward.
Faith, played straight. The hymn sequence is the boldest tonal choice the show has made in ages, and it’s genuinely stirring rather than saccharine.
The Doctor levels with Martha. He stops treating her as a passenger and tells her about his dead world. It’s the moment she stops being a substitute and becomes a companion.
A world with a rotten floor. The Macra lurking in the fumes give a warm episode a properly horrible underside, and turning a classic monster into degenerate scavengers is a lovely touch.

Rating: 4.5/5 — Odd, ambitious and unexpectedly profound, with a reveal that reframes the whole hour and a final message that detonates quietly in the background. One of Davies’ very best scripts.

A traffic jam, a hymn, a dying god 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?

May 5, 2007 0 comments