Well. This is the strange one. After the hellfire and dread of the Satan Pit two-parter, Russell T Davies hands us “Love & Monsters” — an episode where the Doctor barely appears, the whole thing is narrated to camera by an ordinary bloke with a webcam, and the monster is a big green blob with people’s faces in its belly. It is, by a distance, the oddest hour Doctor Who has attempted, and depending on who you ask it’s either a misfire or a small stroke of genius. For me it’s genuinely both at once, sometimes in the same scene.
The Doctor’s Fan Club
Our narrator is Elton Pope, a warm, slightly awkward everyman who’s spent his life on the fringes of the Doctor’s world — he glimpsed him once, as a boy, on the worst night of his childhood. That memory is the episode’s quiet engine — a small boy, a strange man moving through his house, and a grief Elton has spent his whole life only half understanding. It gives his cheerful webcam narration a melancholy undertow, the sense of a man still circling the night everything changed. So when he stumbles into LINDA, you understand at once why he holds on so tightly: here, finally, are other people who felt the same brush of the impossible and never quite got over it. As an adult, Elton falls in with a little band of like-minded souls who’ve also brushed up against this mysterious traveller, and they form LINDA: the London Investigation ‘N’ Detective Agency, a club dedicated to tracking the Doctor down.
Except the loveliest thing about the episode is that they mostly stop bothering. LINDA drifts, gently and beautifully, away from its stated mission and into something better — friendship. They cook together, they talk, they start a band and cheerfully murder some Electric Light Orchestra covers, and the pursuit of the Doctor becomes an excuse for a handful of lonely people to find each other. Davies clearly adores these characters, and the episode’s first half is a genuinely charming ode to fandom and community, to the way a shared obsession can quietly become a family. There’s a sweet, halting romance brewing between Elton and the funny, forthright Ursula, too, and you find yourself rooting for the whole daft lot of them. The group is a lovely little gallery of British eccentrics — the would-be novelist Mr Skinner, gentle Bridget, sparky Bliss — and the episode gives each of them just enough life that what happens to them later genuinely stings. For a good twenty minutes “Love & Monsters” is less a Doctor Who episode than a warm, shaggy comedy about a support group that quietly forgot what it was supporting, and it’s a real charmer.
Enter the Abzorbaloff
Then the rot arrives, in the form of Victor Kennedy — a supercilious, glove-wearing stranger who muscles into LINDA, kills the warmth stone dead, and drives the group back to hunting the Doctor with a nasty new urgency. Kennedy is, of course, a monster: the Abzorbaloff, a lumbering green creature that consumes people by touch and keeps them alive, half-digested, as tormented faces stretched across its bulk. One by one, the members of LINDA start to vanish — absorbed, screaming silently from inside the thing’s flesh — and the cosy club becomes a picking-off ground.
Here’s the honest problem: the Abzorbaloff is naff. Famously designed by a child through a Blue Peter competition — a lovely idea in principle — it lands on screen as a rubbery, farting, pantomime lump that the story keeps insisting is menacing while it visibly is not. The absorbed faces trapped in its body are a legitimately disturbing concept, but the creature carrying them is too silly to earn the horror, and the tonal whiplash between the tender first half and the goofy monster movie of the second is where a lot of viewers get off the ride. I don’t entirely blame them.
The Trouble (and the Heart) of Love & Monsters
And yet. When “Love & Monsters” reaches for something real, it grabs hold. The best material isn’t the monster at all — it’s the subplot with Jackie Tyler. Elton befriends Jackie to get closer to the Doctor, and the episode turns that into an unexpectedly aching portrait of a lonely woman left permanently on the outside of her own daughter’s extraordinary life. Ever since we met her back in Rose, Jackie’s been the one who stays home and worries; here she gets a spotlight, and Camille Coduri is quietly heartbreaking in it. There’s a scene where Jackie, lonely and a little tipsy, makes a clumsy pass at Elton and then, catching him out as a liar, turns fierce in defence of her daughter — and it has more truth in it than the entire monster plot combined. This is a woman who handed her child to the stars and got left behind with an empty flat and a phone that only rings when something’s gone wrong. It’s of a piece with the show’s ongoing interest in the people the Doctor leaves in his wake — the Sarah Janes and the Mickeys, the ones touched by wonder and then left to get on with ordinary life, which the show explored so movingly back in School Reunion.
The Doctor and Rose do finally turn up to sort the monster out, and the resolution is a scramble — Elton smashing the creature’s cane, the absorbed victims turning on their captor — that ends with the Abzorbaloff dissolving into the pavement. But the real ending is Elton’s closing monologue, and it’s a beauty: a rueful, glowing little speech about how the world is stranger and darker and madder and so much better than the grow-up-get-a-job-get-a-house script we’re handed as kids. Coming right after that stranded, wistful “domestic approach” conversation in The Impossible Planet, it plays like the show’s mission statement delivered from the cheap seats.
It’s a shame, then, that the very last note is the notorious business with Ursula — saved from total death but reduced to a living face in a paving slab, complete with a cheeky innuendo about their love life that most of us could have done without. It’s the episode in miniature: a genuinely touching idea undercut by a gag that doesn’t know when to stop.
What Love & Monsters Leaves Us With
An experiment that swings wildly and connects maybe six times out of ten. Here’s what it plants:
- A love letter to fandom. LINDA at its best is a gorgeous tribute to the way shared enthusiasm builds community — and a sly, affectionate wink at the show’s own devoted following.
- The view from the edges. By putting an ordinary man at the centre, the episode asks what it’s actually like to live at the border of the Doctor’s world, thrilled and marked and mostly left behind.
- Jackie, seen at last. The season’s most human scenes belong not to a monster but to a lonely mum, and the show is all the better for noticing her.
- Tone is a tightrope. The lurch from tender character study to rubber-monster farce is the episode’s great weakness, and a cautionary tale about mixing your registers.
- “So much better.” Elton’s closing speech is the warmest articulation yet of why anyone would want this mad, dangerous life at all.
Rating: 3/5 — Your mileage will vary more wildly on this one than anything else all season. The ideas are lovely and the Jackie material is superb; the Abzorbaloff and that final gag are not. A fascinating, frustrating, oddly moving misfire that I can’t quite bring myself to dislike.
A fan with a webcam, a band that loves ELO, and a monster that (quite literally) only a child could love — “Love & Monsters” is Doctor Who taking its biggest, weirdest swing of the season and connecting with maybe half of it. Ambitious, uneven, and unlike anything else on television. Here’s hoping normal service resumes next week.