Mr Sweet

“The Crimson Horror” is a completely different animal from Cold War. Where that was a disciplined submarine thriller, this is a full-throated Victorian penny dreadful with a mad preacher, a poisoned utopia, a prehistoric parasite and a great deal of shouting. It should be a mess. It’s one of the most purely entertaining episodes of the year, largely because it has Diana Rigg in it and knows exactly what to do with her, and I came out of it grinning, which I really wasn’t expecting from a leech-powered doomsday plot. It also pulls a cheeky trick with its opening that pays off beautifully. I should say up front that I’m not a fan of every Victorian romp the show has done, so it says something that this one won me over so completely. It commits to the tone from the first minute and doesn’t blink, and that confidence carries it through a lot of plot that really shouldn’t hold up.

The episode opens on the Paternoster Gang working a case, and simply gets on with it. Vastra, Jenny and Strax investigate a series of corpses found bright red and hard as wax, dumped in the canal. Bodies in the morgue. A dead man’s eye holding an image of the Doctor. Jenny going undercover into a mill town that nobody leaves. The Doctor doesn’t properly appear for a quarter of the runtime, and when he does he’s a red, immobile, groaning thing chained up in a cupboard. It’s a genuinely fun structure, three supporting characters carrying the first act while we watch the mystery from outside the usual perspective, and I loved it. Jenny’s rescue of him, and the moment his face unfreezes mid-word, is played for laughs and gets them, and Catrin Stewart is very good throughout and finally gets something to do beyond standing behind Vastra.

Sweetville

The setting is the best thing in it. Sweetville is a model community, clean housing and honest work and moral improvement and no drink, of exactly the type Victorian industrialists genuinely built, and it’s populated entirely by beautiful young people carefully selected as worthy of salvation. They are also, on inspection, dipped in poison and sealed in glass like preserves. Mrs Gillyflower is a chapel-thumping visionary who has decided the world is due a cleansing and that she’ll select who survives it, and Diana Rigg plays her with total, unembarrassed relish, the accent, the sermons, the sheer appetite, and she’s enormous without ever being silly. There’s a real vein of Victorian moral certainty running under the performance, because she isn’t cackling, she’s convinced, and her sermon about the coming purification is delivered like a woman who thinks she’s being perfectly reasonable.

Her power source is Mr Sweet, a red leech from the Jurassic that lives attached to her chest and produces the venom, and it’s exactly as ridiculous as it sounds and the episode never once apologises for it. Everybody in the village is a little too clean and a little too cheerful, and I loved how quickly the show lets you feel that something’s off without ever saying so out loud. It’s the sort of unsettling that only works when the person running it is completely sincere, which is exactly why Rigg is so good. The backstory, when it arrives, is delivered in the episode’s best flourish: the Doctor’s account of how he ended up in the cupboard, told as a scratched, faux-silent-film flashback in grainy sepia, complete with jump cuts and hand-tinted colour. It’s a genuinely funny piece of business and it solves a real problem, because we need twenty minutes of backstory and dropping it in as a Victorian magic-lantern show means it plays like a treat rather than a stall. More episodes should steal this.

Ada

Underneath the fun there’s a genuinely nasty story, and it belongs to the daughter. Ada is blind and scarred, and she got that way because her mother tested the venom on her. Gillyflower keeps her close, calls her a monster, uses her as a servant, and has convinced her that the disfigurement was an accident and the fault was hers. Rachael Stirling plays it with real hurt, and the casting is a lovely piece of business, since she’s Diana Rigg’s real daughter and the two of them hadn’t acted together on screen before this, so the scenes where Ada realises what was done to her, and by whom, have a charge that a stranger in the part wouldn’t have found. Her ending is the right one, because it isn’t the Doctor who deals with Mr Sweet. Ada does it herself, with her cane, and the episode lets her, which I loved.

Vastra and Jenny get their best material here as well. Their marriage has been a background fact since they arrived, generally handled with a raised eyebrow and a joke about the veil, and this time the show simply lets them be a couple working a case together, bickering about method, covering each other, entirely unbothered about who’s watching. Given the setting is Victorian Yorkshire, playing it as unremarkable rather than as a Subject is the right call, and Neve McIntosh and Catrin Stewart have enough chemistry to make it land without anyone having to point at it. The last time I saw the three of them together was The Snowmen, and I’d honestly watch an entire series of just the three of them solving cases. It’s a pleasure to see them given room to breathe.

The rocket, and the silliness

The plot mechanics are frankly nonsense. There’s a rocket hidden in a chimney. Gillyflower intends to spread the venom across the whole sky and repopulate the Earth with her preserved elect. Clara smashes the main controls, Vastra and Jenny have already drained the poison, and by the end the whole thing’s pointless. None of that matters, because the episode isn’t pretending: this is a Gothic melodrama with jokes in it, and it moves fast enough that the plot is really just a rail for Rigg to walk along. When Gillyflower holds a gun to her own daughter’s head, or holds a room hostage with a sermon, you’re not watching a science fiction resolution, you’re watching a villain enjoy herself.

Strax remains the one thing pitched wrongly, since the Sontaran-as-comic-relief has stopped being a joke about a warrior in the wrong job and become a straightforward buffoon, and a couple of the gags go on well past their welcome. Clara, it should be said, is used rather well as a straight woman here, dropped into 1893 with no briefing and a borrowed dress and spending the episode being competent, unimpressed and quietly delighted by all of it. It would have been easy to leave her standing around waiting for the Doctor to be rescued, and instead she’s the one who smashes the main controls, which gives her real work to do. She’s the only person present who finds a leech-powered doomsday preacher slightly odd, and that suits her. Gillyflower’s own exit, shot by Strax and tumbling over a stair railing, is exactly the theatrical end a villain like that deserves, and I was glad it didn’t try to make her sympathetic at the last minute. It’s a big, loud, ridiculous finish for a big, loud, ridiculous villain, and it fits the tone the episode has had since the first scene.

The photographs

The coda is the sharpest thing in the episode and it has nothing to do with the plot. Back in the present, the children Clara nannies show her photographs of herself: in the haunted house in Hide, in the submarine from Cold War, in Victorian London, in places and centuries she has never told them about. They found them online, and they use them to force their way onto the TARDIS. It’s forty seconds long and it takes the season’s mystery from a slow simmer to something urgent, because for the first time somebody other than the Doctor has noticed, and the evidence is sitting on a laptop in a suburban kitchen. Clara can’t explain any of it away, and she doesn’t recognise one of the pictures at all, which is the part that kept nagging at me afterwards. After forty-five minutes of pure silliness it’s a lovely cold splash at the end, and I’d say that’s the cleverest thing the episode does.

Rating: 4/5. I had a great time with this one, and it’s the episode I’d hand to a friend who says they don’t like Doctor Who. Mrs Gillyflower alone would be worth the price of admission.

Did Ada’s ending land for you the way it did for me, or would you have wanted the Doctor to step in? Tell me in the comments.