John Riddell

The title is the pitch and the pitch is the episode. There are dinosaurs. They are on a spaceship. If that sentence makes you grin, this will do nicely for forty-five minutes; if it makes you sigh, nothing in the next forty-five will change your mind. “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” is Doctor Who in full romp mode, unbothered and unashamed, a complete change of gear after Asylum of the Daleks opened the season on a divorce, and it is much better company than it has any right to be. It also contains one scene that is startlingly cold, and I’m still not entirely sure the episode knows it.

The gang

The Doctor, having decided this is a job for a team, assembles one: Amy, Rory, Queen Nefertiti, a big-game hunter called John Riddell, and, entirely by accident, having been collected off a stepladder while cleaning a gutter, Rory’s father. Brian Williams is the reason to watch. Mark Williams plays him as a man of absolute practical calm who has been abducted into deep space and has decided the sensible response is to keep his trowel in his pocket and see what happens. He carries a thermos. He carries sandwiches. He is unimpressed by the TARDIS and deeply impressed by a well-built ark. And by the end he is sitting in the open doorway of a time machine with a flask of tea and his boots dangling over the Earth, which is a lovely image and an even better character note: some people don’t need to be transformed by wonder, they just need somewhere to sit and enjoy it.

Having him there changes what Rory is for, too. Darvill gets to be exasperated and proud in the same breath every time his dad opens his mouth, and the two of them make the TARDIS feel like the family car for once, which is a different texture from the usual companion-and-Doctor banter. The Nefertiti and Riddell material is thinner. She’s written as imperious and flirtatious, he’s written as a roguish colonial throwback the episode gently disapproves of, and the two of them are largely there to fill a corridor. It’s fine. It’s not why anyone is here.

The ark

The ship is a genuinely nice bit of world-building: a Silurian ark, launched to save the species before humanity inherited the planet, carrying dinosaurs as cargo and the sleeping crew in stasis. If you only know the Silurians from the Welsh village in Cold Blood, it’s a pleasant surprise to see the species given something this gentle to do. Except the crew are gone. Solomon, a trader, boarded it, found the Silurians in their pods, and jettisoned every one of them into space so he could sell the dinosaurs. He’s been drifting ever since with two comedy robots and a pair of legs he can’t use, having been mauled by a raptor for his trouble. David Bradley is excellent, a whining, self-pitying, entirely transactional man who assesses everything he sees, including people, in terms of resale value. He does this to Nefertiti explicitly, and the episode is clear-eyed that this is the real horror in it: not the dinosaurs, but a man who looks at a queen and sees stock. The dinosaurs themselves are well done for the money, and the triceratops in particular is charming, snuffling after Brian’s golf balls like an enormous dog, while the pterodactyl chase down a beach is exactly the kind of nonsense the show should attempt more often.

Solomon’s robots are the episode’s one real misjudgement. Voiced by David Mitchell and Robert Webb as a pair of bickering, put-upon office drones, they’re funny in isolation and completely wrong in context, because they spend the episode being amusing about the fact that their master murdered a ship full of sleeping refugees. Every time the story starts to build a sense of what Solomon actually is, a robot arrives to do a bit about paperwork. It’s a tonal choice the episode makes repeatedly and never quite recovers from. Which is a shame, because the Silurian backstory is quietly the best thing in the script. This is a species who saw what was coming, built an ark, loaded their world onto it, and went to sleep trusting the vessel, and the vessel is now a haulage problem being argued over by a man with a calculator. The episode never dwells on it, but there’s a whole tragedy sitting in the empty stasis bay, and the one moment where the Doctor stands in it and works out what happened is the only time the story goes properly quiet. I’d happily have swapped ten minutes of the corridor business for another minute in that room, and read Den of Geek’s review if you want to see how the same episode plays for someone who’s less bothered by the tone.

The shape of the thing is the other problem. It’s an hour of people walking down corridors toward a plot, and for a story called Dinosaurs on a Spaceship it keeps the dinosaurs surprisingly far from the foreground. The raptors turn up, there’s a chase, a triceratops gets a scene, and then it’s back to Solomon and his robots. I wanted the ark to feel crowded and dangerous, a place where the cargo could get loose at any moment, and instead the dinosaurs mostly behave like set dressing that occasionally bites. That’s the shapelessness I mean in the rating, and it’s why this stops at three and a half.

Amy gets her own strand

Amy’s material is better than the episode’s reputation suggests. Separated from the Doctor and left in charge of Nefertiti and Riddell, she runs her own strand of the story as a sort of junior Time Lord, deducing the ship’s purpose and issuing instructions and being visibly pleased with herself about it. It’s a nice acknowledgement that all that time with him has actually taught her something. And there’s one exchange that isn’t a joke. She asks him, lightly, whether the gaps between visits are getting longer, and whether one day he simply won’t come back. He deflects. She lets him. But the episode has quietly established the thing this season looks set to be about: these two now have a life that runs on without him, and the visits are becoming something they schedule around rather than something they live inside. It’s two lines in a comedy about dinosaurs, and it’s the most ominous thing in the episode.

The thing at the end

And then the Doctor kills him. Not in a fight. Not in self-defence. He transfers Solomon’s transmitter beacon onto Solomon’s own ship, straps him in, and leaves him there while Indian Space Agency missiles, locked on to the beacon, close in. He walks away, and the ship goes up, and that’s that. It is a genuinely startling beat, and the Eleventh Doctor has done something a good deal harder than his face suggests. He’s not tricked into it. He isn’t out of options. He makes a decision that a man who murdered a species’ worth of sleeping refugees does not get to be handed to the authorities, and he executes it with a very small, very cold expression.

What makes it land harder is who’s standing next to him. Brian has spent the whole hour as the decent, ordinary man in the room, the one who greets a dinosaur like a neighbour’s dog, and the Doctor’s decision happens a few feet from that decency without anybody turning to look at it. Rory’s father is exactly the sort of person who’d have wanted a trial. I’d have loved one beat where somebody said so, even if the Doctor ignored them, because the episode has spent forty minutes building a world where ordinary people matter and then makes the one call that skips them entirely.

The episode doesn’t dwell. It cuts to a joke about a triceratops. And I have some sympathy for that, since this is a romp and stopping to interrogate it would break the thing, but it’s the same problem the show diagnosed properly in The Waters of Mars, where a Doctor with nobody to answer to decided he was entitled to rewrite a fixed point. That episode understood it was watching something go wrong. This one drops a summary execution into the middle of a dinosaur comedy and cuts to a punchline, which is either brave or careless, and I genuinely can’t decide which.

Rating: 3.5/5. I’d happily leave the Brian scenes running on a Sunday afternoon, and I’d skip the robots every time.

Was the Doctor right to leave Solomon to the missiles, or did the episode let him off too lightly? Tell me in the comments.