Aliens of London is the fourth episode of the 2005 series of Doctor Who, written by Russell T Davies, and it is the first half of a two-part story. A spacecraft clips Big Ben and comes down in the Thames, and Britain finds itself handling the first confirmed alien contact in its history on live television.
The Doctor returns Rose to the Powell Estate believing she has been away twelve hours, and discovers she has been gone twelve months, with Jackie having reported her missing and Mickey having spent the year suspected of her murder. The episode ends on a three-way cliffhanger, with the Doctor, Rose and the backbench MP Harriet Jones all cornered separately.
A spaceship comes through Big Ben and goes into the Thames in the first five minutes, and I’ll admit the shot got me. This is a programme that spent most of my childhood shaking a camera at a quarry, and here it is knocking the clock tower about on a Saturday teatime. After the far future in “The End of the World” and Victorian Cardiff in “The Unquiet Dead”, we’re back in present-day London, and it turns out that’s where this version of the show is most interesting.
What I didn’t expect was that the spaceship would turn out to be the least interesting thing in it. The crash is the hook, and the trailer shot, and the thing everyone at work talked about on Monday. It is not what the episode is about. Strip the alien plot out entirely and there is still a very good forty minutes here about a girl coming home and finding out what her disappearance did to the two people who loved her. That is the bit I keep turning over, and it is the bit I would not have predicted from the title.
Twelve months, not twelve hours
The Doctor drops Rose home and tells her she’s been gone twelve hours. She’s been gone a year. Her mother has spent it putting up posters, and Mickey has spent it being pulled in for questioning by the police five times over a girlfriend who vanished off the face of the earth. That is the single best idea this show has had since it came back, and it’s the one thing the old series never once bothered to think about. Companions used to step off the TARDIS and back into their lives like nothing had happened.
Camille Coduri gets the scene of the episode and it isn’t close. Jackie slaps him. Then later, sitting in a kitchen full of missing posters of her own daughter, she asks the Doctor straight out who he is and what he’s doing with her, and there’s no clever answer available. Noel Clarke does something quieter and just as good. Mickey has been treated as a joke by everyone including me since “Rose,” and this episode quietly points out that the joke has cost him a year of his life. He asks Rose whether she’s staying. She isn’t. He already knows. I came away from the first act genuinely uncomfortable, which is not a thing I expected from the one with the crashing spaceship in it, and it’s the reason I’d have called this the strongest episode of the run so far if it had stopped there.
The pig
Then there’s the pig, and I still don’t know what to do with it. The body recovered from the crashed ship turns out not to be dead, gets loose in the hospital, and what runs down the corridor is a pig walking upright in a spacesuit. It’s terrified. It’s squealing. A soldier panics and shoots it, and the Doctor stands over the body and says it was scared and it was trying to run away and somebody killed it for that. Eccleston plays it completely straight, and for about ten seconds the episode is properly sad about a pig in a jumpsuit.
It’s also the tell. The whole crash is a set-up, and the pig is what somebody cobbled together to sell it. That’s a genuinely nasty idea once you sit with it, because it means an animal was cut about and put in a suit and flown into a clock tower purely as set dressing. The trouble is that the episode wants me to find the pig funny in the corridor and tragic thirty seconds later, and I don’t think it earns the turn. I laughed, then I felt bad about laughing, then I wasn’t sure the programme had actually meant either of those things. Every time this episode gets somewhere real, it reaches for a gag, and the gag isn’t always as good as the thing it interrupts.
What saves the scene is Eccleston. He doesn’t play the Doctor as amused by any of it, and he doesn’t play him as above it either. He’s angry in a very controlled way, at a room full of people who were frightened of something smaller than they were and dealt with it by shooting it. There’s a hardness under this Doctor that I’m still getting used to. He’s funny and he’s warm and then something like this happens and you remember the war he keeps not talking about. A month ago I’d have said nobody could follow the Doctors I grew up with. Four episodes in, I’m not sure I want anyone else doing it.
Something is wrong in Downing Street
The other half of this is a government thriller, and it’s better than it has any right to be. The Prime Minister has disappeared. A backbencher nobody has heard of called Joseph Green is suddenly acting PM. Two other senior figures have gone quiet. And the only person who notices any of it is Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North, who is in the building trying to get somebody, anybody, to read her report on cottage hospitals.
Penelope Wilton is wonderful in this and I want much more of her. Harriet isn’t brave in the way television usually means it. She’s persistent, and slightly embarrassed about it, and she keeps introducing herself with her full name and constituency to people who plainly don’t care, and it’s very funny right up until it’s the reason she’s the only one asking the right questions. She hides in a cupboard and takes notes. That’s the whole character and it’s perfect. Meanwhile the experts on alien life are all being gathered into one building at once, which anyone who has read a single thriller can see is a bad idea, and the Doctor walks into it anyway because the alternative is not being in the room. The episode is at its best when it’s doing this: ordinary institutional procedure being used against the people inside it, with everybody far too polite to say the obvious thing out loud. Nobody storms anything. The takeover happens through memos, badges and a list of names, which is far more unsettling than a fleet would have been.
And then it starts breaking wind
Here’s my problem. Everything I’ve just praised is undercut by the fact that the villains cannot stop farting. It’s not one gag. It’s the running joke of the entire second half, delivered by grown actors in a room where several people have just been murdered, and by the fourth time I’d stopped finding it cheeky and started finding it tiring. Then a wheelie bin burps. I sat there thinking about the corridor with the pig in it, and about Jackie in her kitchen, and wondered why the same episode wanted to do this instead.
I know what the defence is, and I’d probably make it myself on a better day. It’s a family show, the target audience is eight, and the eight-year-olds will love it. Fine. But the run so far has been managing both at once without any trouble, and this is the first time it’s felt like the programme doesn’t trust the serious half of its own script. The cliffhanger is a good one, mind. Three of them at once, actually: the Doctor cornered, Rose and Harriet cornered, Jackie cornered in her own flat, and no obvious way out of any of it. It’s the first two-parter of the new run and it has absolutely earned my attention for next week. I’m just not sure yet whether I’m looking forward to it or bracing for it. On the evidence of the first half, it could go either way, and I’d have said that about none of the three episodes before it.