Vincent and the Doctor: The Good Things and the Bad Things

I don’t think this show has ever done anything quite like “Vincent and the Doctor.” It has an invisible monster in it, and a chase, and a sonic screwdriver, and none of that is remotely what it’s about. Richard Curtis has written an episode about depression, and about what art is for, and about the limits of what even a man with a time machine can fix, and it is by some distance the best hour of Series 5.

A face in a window

It opens in the Musée d’Orsay, where the Doctor has brought Amy to cheer her up, and where a marvellously fussy curator, Bill Nighy, uncredited and clearly having the time of his life, is talking about Van Gogh. And in the window of The Church at Auvers, painted in 1890, there is a face. Something with teeth, looking out. It’s a lovely hook, a monster hiding inside a real painting you can go and look at, and it gets them to Auvers-sur-Oise in the summer of 1890 without a word of throat-clearing. Vincent van Gogh, when they find him, is broke, filthy, mocked by the village, and cannot give a painting away. He tries to buy a drink with a canvas and is refused. Tony Curran plays him with a Scottish burr and an enormous, exhausting warmth, funny and generous one minute, hollowed out and unreachable the next.

The episode’s great achievement is that it refuses to make his illness a mystery to be solved. He isn’t sad because of the alien. He isn’t cursed, or possessed, or being drained by something. He has an illness, it comes and goes on its own schedule, and no amount of time travel touches it. There’s a scene where he simply cannot get off the floor, having been perfectly cheerful an hour before, and the Doctor and Amy stand in the doorway with absolutely nothing useful to offer. That’s an extraordinarily honest thing to put in a Saturday teatime drama, and it’s a surprisingly sensitive script from a writer better known for froth. What Vincent does have is the ability to see what nobody else can, and the show ties that to the painting rather than to the illness. The sequence where he lies in the grass and describes the night sky, and the field around them dissolves into The Starry Night, is the most beautiful thing this programme has ever put on screen. The relationship between him and Amy is the quiet engine underneath all of it. He is immediately and uncomplicatedly taken with her, and she, grieving something she cannot name, is unusually gentle with him in return. There’s a moment where he tells her, in a single breath, that she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen and that she is terribly sad, and she has no idea at all how he could possibly know the second half of that sentence. Neither does she.

The invisible monster

The Krafayis is deliberately the least interesting element, and I think that’s the point. It’s an invisible beast that only Vincent can see, abandoned by its own pack because it was blind and they had no use for it, blundering about a French village lashing out at anything that comes near. It’s a decent monster with a very neat mirror built into it, a creature nobody else can perceive, alone and frightened and violent because of it, hunted by a man who understands all three of those things intimately. When Vincent kills it, accidentally, defending them, he doesn’t celebrate. He kneels beside it while it dies and grieves for it, because he knows exactly what it was. You could argue the monster and the illness pull the script in two directions at once, but the Krafayis works precisely because it’s disposable: it’s the thing the Doctor can kill, standing next to the thing he can’t.

The museum, and what doesn’t change

Then the episode does the thing everyone remembers. The Doctor takes Vincent forward in time, to the Musée d’Orsay, and walks him into a gallery full of his own paintings, rooms of them, crowded with people who have come from all over the world just to stand in front of his work. And then he asks the curator, in Vincent’s hearing, where he’d rank Van Gogh. The answer is the greatest painter of them all, and one of the greatest men who ever lived. Tony Curran plays it almost silently, and it wrecked me. A man who could not sell a single canvas, who has been told his whole life that he is a failure and a burden, standing in a room and being told the truth about himself by a stranger who has no reason to lie. It is the kindest thing the Doctor has ever done, and it costs nothing.

And then the episode does something genuinely brave: it refuses to let that be enough. They take him home. And Amy, who has been glowing all the way back and is certain that they’ve fixed it, runs into the gallery expecting rooms of new paintings, decades of work, a long happy life. There’s nothing. The exhibition is exactly the same size it was. Vincent van Gogh still died a few months after they left him, by his own hand, at thirty-seven. The Doctor’s explanation is the best speech of the season and one of the truest things this show has ever said: the good things don’t always soften the bad things, but the bad things don’t spoil the good things or make them unimportant. Life is both, together, and adding something wonderful doesn’t cancel the rest. That refusal to grant a tidy victory is what elevates the whole thing. A lesser episode saves him. This one just gives him one perfect afternoon and admits that it wasn’t enough, and that it mattered anyway.

Matt Smith is very good across that final stretch as well. His Doctor spends most of the episode being fractionally too brisk with Vincent, impatient and over-cheerful, treating a man’s despair as a problem with a solution somewhere at the bottom of it, and by the closing scenes he has visibly learned something he didn’t know at the start. The man who, an episode or two ago, would have insisted on fixing this stands in a gallery full of sunflowers and quietly admits out loud that he couldn’t. There is one change, and it’s small enough to be almost unbearable: Sunflowers now carries a dedication. For Amy. And Amy, all through this, has been crying without knowing why, because a man she chose over everything was erased out of existence in Cold Blood and the crack took the memory with him. She drove a van into a wall for Rory Williams in Amy’s Choice barely a month ago, and she cannot now remember that he existed. The episode never explains her tears. It doesn’t need to.

The gallery trip is the Doctor’s kindest act in the whole run of the show, and it still changes nothing beyond one man’s afternoon. That’s the honest version of the story, and it’s why the line about the bad things never spoiling the good things lands as hard as it does, delivered to a young woman who has just learned that saving someone isn’t always on the table.

Rating: 5/5. Beautiful, humane and quietly devastating, with a central performance that deserved every award going. The monster is beside the point and the episode knows it. Essential. One perfect afternoon in a museum, a dedication on a vase of sunflowers, and a woman weeping for a man she can’t remember. This is as good as this programme gets.