“The Long Game” is the seventh episode of the revived series, taking the Ninth Doctor, Rose and new companion Adam Mitchell to Satellite Five, a space station in the year 200,000 that broadcasts all of Earth’s news. The review covers the station’s strangely stagnant society, Simon Pegg as the Editor, the creature controlling the station from Floor 500 and Adam’s short, disastrous time aboard the TARDIS.
It enjoys Pegg and the episode’s ideas about who controls the news, but finds the messaging heavy-handed and Adam an unremarkable companion. It rates the episode 3 out of 5.
After the fear and horror of last week’s Dalek, “The Long Game” takes things down a notch and sends the Doctor and Rose into the far future again, their first trip that way since The End of the World, with Adam tagging along for his first trip. They land on Satellite Five, a massive space station orbiting Earth in the year 200,000, which beams out every piece of news the human empire watches. The Doctor is disappointed straight away, because this is supposed to be humanity at its peak, and something is clearly wrong. Nobody questions anything, nobody seems curious, and the whole station feels oddly stuck. It’s a fun setup with a good idea at its heart, even if it does hit you over the head with that idea.
Satellite Five
The station itself is a great bit of design, all food stalls selling kronkburgers and journalists lying back in chairs with the news being fed straight into their heads. People work their way up the floors hoping to be promoted to Floor 500, where the walls are said to be made of gold, and nobody who goes up ever comes back down. The Doctor notices that the top of the station is freezing while the rest of it bakes, and that there are no aliens anywhere, and he starts pulling at the thread. It’s a very Doctor thing to do, walking into a place and asking the one question everybody else stopped asking years ago. Rose, meanwhile, spends the episode showing Adam the ropes, and there’s a nice sense of her being the experienced one for once, a long way from the shop girl we met in Rose.
Simon Pegg is the best thing in it as the Editor, the man who runs Satellite Five on behalf of whatever lives on Floor 500. It isn’t just me either — Doctor Who fans keep singling him out as the episode’s saving grace, and he earns it. He’s smarmy, icy and very funny, the kind of manager who thinks the whole human race is a spreadsheet, and his scenes with Christopher Eccleston crackle. Eccleston gets to be deadpan and dangerous at the same time, which he’s brilliant at. The Editor’s master is the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe, a giant slug with teeth that clings to the ceiling and needs the cold to survive, and it’s a bit of a goofy creation, but the idea behind it, something vast and hungry quietly deciding what an entire civilisation gets to know, is a good one.
Floor 500 is where it turns properly creepy. When Suki finally gets her promotion and goes up, the room is freezing, the Editor is waiting, and the people working the computers turn out to be dead, kept going by the Jagrafess and staring at their screens under a layer of frost. Suki herself ends up one of them. It’s a nasty little image to put in a teatime show, and it’s the moment the episode stops being satire and becomes a horror story. I wish there’d been more of that and less explaining.
A companion who can’t hack it
The episode’s other big thread is Adam, and I’m afraid he’s just not very interesting. He joined the TARDIS at the end of last week’s episode, and here he gets his first proper trip. Instead of helping, he sneaks off, has a port fitted in his forehead so he can download information straight into his brain, and tries to send the future back to his answerphone at home. It’s human greed and short-sightedness, and the Doctor’s response, dumping him back on Earth with the door in his head still there, is gloriously unforgiving. It’s rare to see a companion fail this badly, and it’s a sobering reminder that travelling with the Doctor is a privilege. I just wish Adam had been a bit more fun before it happened.
The nurse who sells him the chip is a small joy, cheerfully dead-eyed and pushing upgrades like a mobile phone salesman, and the whole sequence is a neat bit of satire about wanting a shortcut. Adam’s plan also puts the Doctor and Rose in real danger, because the Editor uses the chip in his head to find out exactly who the Doctor is, which is the part I liked most, since Adam’s greed ends up costing everyone rather than just himself. When the Doctor takes him home and tells him he only takes the best, and that he’s got Rose, it’s a proper ouch, and Eccleston delivers the line like a door slamming.
What really saves the day isn’t the Doctor, it’s Cathica, a journalist who has spent years happily not asking questions and finally starts asking them. She’s the one who gets into the system and turns the heat up, and the Jagrafess, which can’t survive the heat, is destroyed. Rose helps, but it’s Cathica’s moment, and the episode is right to give it to her, an ordinary person who had switched her brain off being the one who switches it back on and saves everyone. There’s a whole message in here about the news and who controls it, and Cathica carrying it is what stops that message from just being a speech.
Heavy-handed, but it has a point
Where it falls down is that it doesn’t trust you to get the point on your own. The Doctor practically stops the plot to explain that people are being kept stupid by the news they’re fed, and the episode keeps making that point long after it has landed. It’s a bit heavy-handed in the messaging, and I’d rather the story had carried it than the speeches. Still, it’s got a lot more going on than a straightforward monster story, and those ideas about who gets to control what we know feel like ones that’ll stick around. Russell T Davies clearly had something he wanted to say about the news, the same thing he was poking at with the rolling coverage in Aliens of London, and I respect that even when he says it twice.
It’s also a reminder of how early in the new series this is. Seven episodes in, the show is still working out how silly it can be and how serious — The Unquiet Dead mixed ghosts with Charles Dickens jokes a few episodes back, and this one keeps swinging between silly and serious from scene to scene. The kronkburgers and the heat-vent jokes sit right next to dead workers under frost, and not every change of gear works. Even so, I’d rather it tried things than played it safe.
Rating: 3/5. It’s ok. Simon Pegg is great, Satellite Five is a memorable place and the idea at its heart is a good one, but the message gets hammered home and Adam is a flat addition to the TARDIS. A decent middle-of-the-series episode that I enjoyed more for its ideas than for its story.
