Mark Gatiss’s second script of the season 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 it also pulls a cheeky trick with its opening that pays off beautifully.
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, the show trusting three supporting characters to carry the first act and trusting the audience to enjoy watching a mystery from outside the usual perspective. 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 will select who survives it, and Diana Rigg plays her with total, unembarrassed relish, the accent, the sermons, the sheer appetite, in a masterclass of how to be enormous without being silly. There’s a real vein of Victorian moral certainty running under the performance, because she isn’t cackling, she’s convinced, and the sermon she gives about the coming purification is delivered like a woman who thinks she’s being reasonable. Her power source is Mr Sweet, a red leech from the Jurassic that she found in the river, which lives attached to her chest and produces the venom, and it is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds and the episode never once apologises for it.
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, over-saturated sepia silent film, complete with jump cuts and hand-tinted colour. It’s a genuinely funny piece of pastiche and it solves a real problem, because the audience needs twenty minutes of backstory and dropping it in as a Victorian magic-lantern show means it plays as a set piece 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 a conscience-piece, 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 daughter and the two of them have never acted together 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 a walking stick, at some length, and the episode lets her.
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 episode 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 1893 Yorkshire, the show’s decision to play it as unremarkable rather than as a Subject is the right one, and Neve McIntosh and Catrin Stewart have enough chemistry to make the domesticity land as texture rather than as a point being made.
The rocket, and the silliness
The plot mechanics are frankly nonsense. There’s a rocket in a chimney. Gillyflower intends to disperse the venom worldwide and repopulate the Earth with her preserved elect. The Doctor and Clara stop it by climbing scaffolding and swapping a canister. 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 shoots her own daughter’s chair, or holds a room hostage with a detonator and 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, particularly the horse, 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, with the episode wisely giving her the job of being the only person present who finds a leech-powered doomsday preacher slightly odd.
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 Victorian London, in 1893, in places and centuries she has never been. They found them online, they think it’s a joke, and they use them to blackmail their way onto the TARDIS. It’s forty seconds long and it drops the season’s mystery from a slow simmer into 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.
Rating: 4/5. Fast, funny, handsomely designed and anchored by a guest performance that could carry twice the plot. The mother-and-daughter material gives it a genuine cruelty under the fun, and the opening act is a clever piece of construction. The rocket-in-the-chimney business is disposable and Strax is overcooked, but this is the most enjoyable forty-five minutes of the season. A mill town where nobody leaves, a preacher with a leech on her chest, and a blind girl with a walking stick who settled it herself.