The Fires of Pompeii: Two Sets of Hands on the Lever

Two episodes into Donna’s run and the show has already justified her completely. The Fires of Pompeii drops the pair of them into the most famous disaster in Roman history the day before it happens, and then spends the hour asking a question the series usually dodges, which is what it actually costs to be the man who knows what’s coming and doesn’t stop it. It’s funny for a while. Then it stops being funny, and by the end it’s one of the most affecting things the show has done.

Volcano day

The TARDIS lands, the Doctor cheerfully announces brand new Rome, and Donna’s delighted, right up until she asks why the seven hills of Rome have turned into one bare mountain with smoke coming off it. The ground shakes, a market trader sighs “here we go again”, and they both get there at once. Pompeii. It’s the twenty-third of August, 79 AD, and it’s volcano day tomorrow. Before that there’s a lovely bit of messing about, Donna trying out Latin on a stallholder who thinks she’s speaking Celtic, and the Doctor finding a stallholder has sold the TARDIS to a marble dealer as modern art. It’s light and quick and Tate and Tennant are bouncing off each other like they’ve been doing it for years.

And then Donna’s reaction to what’s coming is the right one, and the show knows it. She wants to warn them, all of them, right now, starting with the family whose house they’re standing in. The Doctor tells her no. Pompeii is a fixed point, one of the moments history can’t lose without everything around it coming apart. He told Rose that time was in flux, changing every second, back in The Unquiet Dead, and it turns out that’s only half of it. Some things are in flux, he says, and some things are fixed.

Donna’s having none of it, and her refusal is the engine of the whole episode. She isn’t being naive, she’s being human. Twenty thousand people are going to die tomorrow and a man with a time machine is standing in their kitchen making excuses. Rose found out what happens when you rewrite a death you care about in Father’s Day, but this is the first time a companion has looked at the rule and just refused to find it acceptable. So you get an argument rather than a lecture, because they’re both right. He’s right that history can’t absorb it, she’s right that walking away from twenty thousand people on the strength of a rule is monstrous, and the show never tidies that up, it just makes the pair of them live inside it for an hour.

The Caecilius family are beautifully drawn, which makes all of it worse. Peter Capaldi is terrific as the marble merchant, all anxious social climbing and real warmth, his wife Metella frets about the neighbours, their son Quintus is a disappointment with a drinking habit, and their daughter Evelina has started making prophecies and has an arm that’s slowly turning to stone. Pleasant, ordinary, doomed people, and the episode makes very sure I liked them before it lit the fuse.

Prophets and stone

The mystery is a good one. Pompeii has an unnerving surplus of soothsayers, the Sibylline Sisterhood, hooded priestesses whose skin is hardening to rock, and augurs across the city whose predictions have suddenly started coming true. Something has given this town the gift of prophecy and it’s killing them by inches. The culprits are the Pyroviles, creatures of living rock who fell from the sky so fast they shattered into dust and slept under the mountain for thousands of years, until the great earthquake seventeen years ago woke them up. Now they’re rebuilding themselves out of human bodies and using the volcano’s own power to do it. The design is superb, towering magma creatures glimpsed through the steam though they’re the weakest thing in the episode by some distance.

The really unsettling stuff is the prophecies. The soothsayers see straight through both of them. Evelina knows he’s called the Doctor and that Donna calls herself Noble, and then that even the word Doctor is false, that his real name is hidden and burns in the Cascade of Medusa, that he’s a Lord of Time. Lucius calls him the man from Gallifrey and tells him his home is lost in fire, said as casually as if he were reading it off a shopping list. He tells Donna there’s something on her back. And he tells the Doctor, flatly, that she is returning. Who’s she? The Doctor asks, and nobody answers, and it sits there like a stone in your shoe. I have no idea what to make of it, and after that blonde woman on a London street at the end of Partners in Crime I’m not sure I like any of the possibilities.

The lever

Then comes the choice, and it’s brutal. The only way to stop the Pyroviles is to turn their own machine against them and set the volcano off, the eruption that’s supposed to happen anyway. Pompeii or the world. And the Doctor says the thing that makes this episode, that if Pompeii is destroyed it isn’t just history any more, it’s him, he makes it happen. There’s no clever third option and no reversal, he has to push a lever and kill a town. And he doesn’t do it alone. Donna, who has spent the entire hour arguing against him, puts her hands over his on the lever, they look at each other, and they push. That one image, two people sharing the weight of something neither of them wants, is worth more than any speech, and it’s the best thing this series has given me so far.

The eruption itself is superbly done, and the show doesn’t flinch from what they’ve just caused. The ash comes down the mountain, the sky goes dark, people run through the streets, and Donna’s shouting at them not to go to the beach. It’s genuinely upsetting. Every photograph of Pompeii I’ve ever seen is somebody who was standing there when this happened, and the episode’s just spent the best part of an hour making sure I knew a few of them by name.

Just save someone

The last part is where it all pays off. Back in the TARDIS, with Pompeii burning, Donna breaks. She isn’t asking him to undo it, she knows he can’t, and he tells her he’d go back and save them all if he could. So she asks for less. Just someone, please, not the whole town, just save someone. And he goes back and pulls the Caecilius family out of that house, and it costs history nothing, and it would never have occurred to him without her. Other Doctor Who fans picked out the same moment, Donna seeing one family where he could only see the big picture, and I think that’s exactly it.

That’s the whole argument for Donna Noble in one scene. At the end of The Runaway Bride, watching him stand there while the Racnoss drowned, she told him he needed someone with him, someone to stop him. This is the other half of it. She doesn’t just stop him doing terrible things, she makes him do the kind ones he’d have walked straight past. He even says it, in the TARDIS afterwards: she was right, sometimes he needs someone. Welcome aboard. After the way he was hedging about taking her at all in Partners in Crime, that’s a real shift, and “just save someone” might be the most useful thing anybody has said to this Doctor in a long time.

The coda’s lovely and a bit eerie. Six months on the family are in Rome, Caecilius chasing a marble contract, Evelina in a dress her dad doesn’t approve of, Quintus studying to be a doctor, and when Quintus kneels at the household shrine there’s a new carving on it. The Doctor, Donna and the TARDIS, the strange man and the shouting woman, turned into household gods. Capaldi and the rest got enough life that the eruption lands like a bereavement rather than a spectacle, which is why that last shot works.

Rating: 4.5/5. Gorgeous to look at, genuinely upsetting, and built around a moral problem the show commits to properly rather than dodging. The Pyroviles are the weakest element and it barely matters. The Doctor is measurably better for having Donna Noble shouting at him, and this partnership is going to be something.