Here’s a gimmick that could have been unbearable and instead works beautifully: “42” takes place in real time. Forty-two minutes of story, forty-two minutes of episode, a countdown ticking in the corner of the screen and a cargo ship falling into a star at the end of it. It’s Doctor Who doing a pressure-cooker thriller, and while it’s not the most memorable hour of the season, it’s easily one of the tensest.
Forty-two minutes
The TARDIS answers a distress call and lands aboard the SS Pentallian, a battered working freighter with dead engines, a skeleton crew and a sun filling every window. The heat is already rising. The hull is already groaning. Nobody has time to be surprised that a police box has appeared in their airlock, which is a nice touch, because this crew are far too busy dying to care who these two strangers are. The Pentallian itself is a nice piece of design, not a gleaming starship but a grubby industrial hauler full of exposed pipework and sweat stains, with the general air of a place where corners have been cut for years. The crew match it: tired working people in overalls rather than uniformed officers, bickering, underpaid, running a vessel that should have been serviced a decade ago. It makes the disaster feel less like bad luck and more like something that was always going to happen eventually.
The countdown is the whole architecture of the episode, and director Graeme Harper wrings it for everything it’s worth, with handheld camerawork, sweat, red emergency lighting, and people shouting over alarms. There’s no room for the Doctor to stroll about being clever. He arrives, assesses, and starts running, and he doesn’t stop for the rest of the hour. The central obstacle is a lovely bit of design. To reach the engines the crew must pass through a long chain of deadlock-sealed doors, each one opening only to the answer of a randomly generated trivia question, a security system some long-departed crew member thought was hilarious. So Martha and Riley end up sprinting through a burning ship answering pub-quiz questions about happy prime numbers and Elvis chart positions, which sounds absurd on paper and plays as genuinely nerve-shredding. It’s also a neat way of making the ship’s own history complicit, because the crew are being killed by their own carelessness at every level. That’s where Martha ends up phoning her mother from a spaceship to ask a trivia question, which is both very funny and, as it turns out, not entirely harmless. Francine takes the call at home, where somebody is quietly listening in.
Burn with me
The threat itself is the best idea here. The crew have been scooping fuel straight out of the heart of the star on the cheap, without scanning it first. The star is alive. It has been alive the whole time, and they have been mining pieces of a living thing to keep their engines running. So it takes them. Possessed crew members become walking furnaces, visors down, molten light pouring from their eyes, reducing anyone they touch to ash and repeating the same terrible line: burn with me. It’s a simple, primal image, and the show plays it as pure horror. Korwin turning on his own wife, Ashton stalking the corridors, the sun’s voice using human mouths to say it wants its property back.
The sequence everyone will remember is the Doctor’s. He gets infected himself, and rather than shrugging it off he comes apart, sobbing and terrified, begging Martha to freeze him in a stasis chamber before he kills someone. Tennant is superb here, and it’s genuinely upsetting to watch: the man who always has an answer reduced to pleading with his friend to make the pain stop. Doctor Who very rarely lets him be this frightened, and it resets the danger of everything around him. If he’s this scared, nobody is safe. It also puts Martha in an impossible position and lets her be magnificent. She’s the one holding him down, working the controls, doing the thing he’s asked her to do while he screams. After being dropped home like a taxi fare a couple of weeks ago in The Lazarus Experiment, she is now unmistakably the person keeping him alive. It’s a straight line from the CPR she performed on a dying stranger back in Smith and Jones, except that time she was saving a man she’d known for an hour, and this time she’s holding down someone she has come to care about a great deal too much. The show understands the difference, and so, visibly, does she. There’s a fine set piece built out of it in the middle of the episode, too, when Martha and Riley are jettisoned in an escape pod on a direct course into the star, and the Doctor, half-possessed and barely lucid, has to claw his way back to himself in time to haul them in. Watching her drift toward a sun while he fights his own head is the best use the episode makes of its own countdown.
What it costs
The resolution follows the logic properly: you can’t out-fight a sun, so you give back what you took. The stolen fuel has to be vented, returned to the star, and the price of that is paid by Captain McDonnell, who walks her possessed husband out of an airlock and goes with him. It’s a grim, dignified ending for a character the episode has been quietly building as the one responsible, because she cut the corners and authorised the mining, and she settles the bill herself. There’s a good, uncomfortable environmental parable running under all of it. A crew strip-mining something living because it was cheap and convenient, insisting they didn’t know, and discovering that not knowing was itself the choice. The show doesn’t belabour it, which is why it works. The shape of the thing owes an obvious debt to the base-under-siege stories the series does so well, and the isolation and dwindling crew of The Impossible Planet are all over it, though where that two-parter was slow creeping dread, this is forty-two minutes of continuous panic. Different flavours of the same poison.
The coda matters, too. The Doctor gives Martha a key to the TARDIS. After all the “one trip” hedging, that’s the real promotion, not a speech but a key pressed into her hand. And then she phones her mum again, and Francine is sitting in her front room with strangers listening to every word, and the smile drops off the episode entirely.
The stasis chamber scene is the one that stays with me: a terrified Doctor, and seeing him beg is more unsettling than any monster this season has managed. Martha is the steady one through all of it, and by the end she’s earned every bit of the key he finally hands over.
Rating: 3.5/5. Relentless, well-directed and anchored by a superb Tennant performance, even if the supporting crew are thin and it fades from memory faster than it should. As a piece of sustained tension, it’s a real success. A ship falling into something alive, a captain who paid her own bill, and a Doctor begging to be frozen before he burns someone. And back on Earth, someone is sitting in Martha’s mum’s living room, taking notes.