After a fortnight of Daleks in the sewers, “The Lazarus Experiment” is a much smaller, tidier sort of episode: one building, one monster, one very bad idea. It’s a proper old-fashioned mad-scientist story dressed in black tie, and while it never quite reaches the top rank it does two things very well. It gives Mark Gatiss a wonderful part to chew on, and it finally settles the question of what Martha Jones actually is on this ship.
Back where she started
The episode opens with the Doctor doing something faintly cowardly: dropping Martha home, back to her bedroom, on the same night she left. The “one trip” he insisted on in Smith and Jones has stretched to several, and rather than address it he simply returns her to where he found her, all breezy thanks and no commitment. Martha’s face says everything. She’s been to New Earth and 1930s Manhattan, she’s saved his life more than once, and she’s being dropped off like a taxi fare. What saves her from that indignity is her family, who are having a night of their own. Her sister Tish works in PR for Professor Richard Lazarus, and the man is unveiling something extraordinary at a black-tie gala. The Joneses are all there, mother Francine on the warpath and father Clive with the younger girlfriend in tow, and the domestic bickering gives the episode a nice, grounded texture before anything starts eating people. It’s a smart use of a supporting cast the show has been quietly building since episode one.
The man who wanted more time
Lazarus himself is the reason to watch. Mark Gatiss plays him as a silky, vain, utterly persuasive man of seventy-six who has built a machine to reverse his own ageing, and who steps into it in front of an audience because of course he does. When he emerges decades younger, the room applauds. It’s a fantastic scene, because the triumph is real and the horror hasn’t arrived yet, and Gatiss plays the newly young Lazarus with an appetite that is immediately unsettling. He wants food, he wants attention, he wants a woman on his arm. He has been given his youth back and his first instinct is pure consumption. The catch is standard-issue but well executed. The process hasn’t stopped. It has switched on dormant possibilities buried in his DNA, and he keeps changing, convulsing and mutating and eventually erupting into a scuttling, skeletal, scorpion-tailed thing that drains the life out of anyone it catches and leaves a husk behind. The design is decent, the CGI is doing more than it can comfortably afford, and the sequence where guests in evening dress flee through a gleaming laboratory atrium works nicely. There’s a genuinely effective piece of body horror in the transformation itself, too, with Lazarus doubling over mid-conversation, bones visibly shifting under his skin, trying to hold a charming smile together while his own body openly rebels against him. Gatiss plays that losing battle beautifully, and the episode is wise to let the change arrive in stages rather than all at once. By the time he’s fully monstrous, you’ve watched a man be dismantled by his own success.
Underneath it is the episode’s actual argument, and the Doctor makes it well. Lazarus quotes poetry at him and talks grandly about defeating death, and the Doctor, who has watched more people die than anyone alive, isn’t remotely impressed. Extending a life isn’t the same as filling one. As he puts it, it isn’t the time that matters, it’s the person. Coming from a man in his ninth century who has buried everybody he ever cared about, that lands with real weight, and it’s a neat inversion: the immortal telling the would-be immortal that he’s got the whole thing backwards. It’s also a rare instance of the Doctor talking about his own age without ducking into a joke. He’s spent most of this series deflecting Martha’s questions about what he actually is, and here he tells a dying man the plain truth about what a very long life costs you, with the camera making a point of showing Martha listening to every word. The episode doesn’t underline the moment. It doesn’t need to, because she’s just heard him say out loud the thing he won’t say to her.
The thing in the cathedral
The chase ends up in Southwark Cathedral, which is a lovely choice, with Lazarus, dying and monstrous, crawling back to the church where he sheltered as a boy during the Blitz. There’s a flash of the man inside the creature there, frightened and small, and the episode is better for the sliver of pity. The Doctor’s solution is properly Doctor Who: he climbs into the organ loft and uses the cathedral’s pipes as a weapon, blasting sound at the thing until the resonance scrambles it into falling from the bell tower. It dies as it lived, reverting to the withered old man he was trying so hard to stop being. Simple, tidy on its own terms, and it makes good use of a genuinely atmospheric location.
Martha does well throughout. She’s the one who works out what the machine actually did, she keeps her head while people are being drained around her, and she and Tish get a decent sisterly thread out of it. It helps that Tish isn’t written as a damsel. She’s ambitious, faintly starstruck by her charismatic employer, and utterly mortified once she grasps what she’s been promoting. Her horror at having spent weeks selling this man to the press gives the Jones family something to do besides bicker, and it makes the danger feel personal in a way a ballroom full of strangers never would. At the end, Martha plants her feet. She refuses to be dropped off again, tells the Doctor plainly that she isn’t a passenger, and this time he agrees. It’s the moment she stops being a stand-in and becomes a companion in her own right, and it’s been earned across six episodes.
There’s a colder note underneath the happy ending, though. Francine has spent the night being briefed against the Doctor by a stranger at the party, a well-dressed man with an interest in her daughter’s new friend and some very pointed warnings about how dangerous he is. His employer, it emerges, also happens to have funded Lazarus’s work: a Mr Saxon. That name turned up out of nowhere in The Runaway Bride too, authorising tanks over the Thames. Twice is a coincidence. I’m starting to think it isn’t one.
Rating: 3/5. Efficient, well-acted and sound in its argument, if a little routine in its middle stretch and let down by effects it can’t quite afford. The Martha material and Gatiss’s performance lift it above the average. An old man who wanted to be young, a monster in a cathedral, and a mystery benefactor taking an unhealthy interest in the Doctor’s friends. Martha’s in the TARDIS properly now, and somebody out there clearly isn’t happy about it.