The middle anniversary special was kept secret before broadcast, and now I understand why. There’s nothing to spoil except the fact that it’s very good. No returning monster, no cameo, no continuity fireworks, just two actors, one enormous empty spaceship and something out there copying them. I loved it, and it’s easily the best thing the show has done since the Capaldi years.
The setup is stripped to nothing. The TARDIS dumps the Doctor and Donna at the edge of the universe and then flees without them, leaving two people in a corridor with no exit and a robot slowly walking the length of the ship toward a self-destruct button. It opens on a broad gag with Isaac Newton and an apple, so I assumed I was in for a romp, and then the tone drops through the floor. After the first ten minutes there are no jokes that aren’t nervous ones. Everything that follows is character.
The Not-Things are a superb monster
Whatever is on this ship has never met life before, and it learns by copying. It starts with shape and gets it wrong, so the early glimpses are of arms that are too long and faces that don’t sit right, and the effects are restrained enough to be genuinely unpleasant instead of silly. Then it learns properly, and the horror shifts from body to identity. There are two Doctors and two Donnas, and neither the characters nor I can reliably tell which is which. The show plays entirely fair about it, too, because the tells are behavioural and you can spot them if you’re paying attention.
The reason it beats most duplicate stories is that the copies aren’t hostile at first, they’re curious. They want to understand what these creatures are and they’re prepared to ask questions to find out, which turns the middle act into a run of conversations where the wrong answer gets somebody killed. Tennant and Tate play four parts between them with almost nothing but posture and timing to tell them apart. Tate deserves as much credit as Tennant and gets less because the showier scene is his. She makes the copy of Donna slightly too helpful and slightly too keen to agree, and when the truth comes out you can go back and see exactly where you should have noticed.
What the copies learn
The best idea in the special is what the Not-Things do with what they learn. To copy someone properly you have to know them, so they read the originals, and everything the Doctor and Donna say to each other becomes something the copies can use. That gives the one quiet confession in the hour a horrible edge. The Doctor finally tells Donna what’s happened since she last saw him: that he isn’t who he thought he was, that half the universe was lost to the Flux, and that he’s been carrying all of it alone. Tennant plays it as a man saying it out loud for the first time, and then the show reminds me that something else was listening.
It matters that this lands in the anniversary run. Sixty years of a character who talks constantly and gives away almost nothing, and the special’s answer to “who is this person” is a tired man admitting how frightened he is, with a copy of himself standing in the dark taking notes. That’s a far more interesting way to mark the occasion than a montage of old faces, and it costs nothing but two actors and a good script. Donna gets her moments too, quieter and just as sharp, about her family and the years she spent not knowing what she’d lost. The special uses horror as a way into character rather than as decoration, and that’s the difference between this and most bottle episodes.
Underneath, this is the same trick as Midnight. Confine the Doctor, take away his tools, and let something use his own words against him. That’s still the most reliable way to frighten me with this character, and it’s good to see the show remember it. Midnight did it with a stranger’s voice and this does it with his own face, which is a nasty little escalation.
Small, and shot like a film
The ship is vast, white and almost featureless, and the camera uses the emptiness properly, holding wide shots long enough that I started scanning the frame for something that shouldn’t be there. The sound does most of the rest. It’s also a good bit of design thinking: a single enormous vessel built to carry something dangerous away from everything else, with a self-destruct that takes years because nobody was in a hurry. All of that comes through the architecture instead of a briefing, and you work out what this place is for just by looking at it. There’s a lovely lull in the middle where the two of them sit and talk about nothing much, the sort of scene the show almost never has room for.
What strikes me most is the restraint. This was the middle special of a 60th anniversary, the point where the show could easily have wheeled out returning monsters, old faces and a multi-Doctor sequence. It does none of that, and spends its anniversary hour on two people in an empty room being frightened of each other. The Daleks would have made this worse, and a cameo would have broken the spell. The ending is the one wobble, wrapped up a little too neatly after everything before it, and Bernard Cribbins appearing in the last minute is genuinely moving but belongs to a different episode.
Rating: 4.5/5. Loved this. Two actors, one set and the most frightening hour the show has managed in years, built entirely out of performance and restraint. The confession scene is a career-best moment for Tennant, the monster is a properly good idea, and it proves the anniversary didn’t need a single cameo. Only the slightly tidy resolution keeps it off a five.