We left the Doctor standing in his console room while the prow of an ocean liner smashed through the wall, which is a difficult thing to follow. “Voyage of the Damned” follows it by going enormous: a luxury spaceliner, a cast of doomed passengers, golden killer angels, and a disaster movie played almost entirely straight. It’s the biggest, glossiest thing the show has attempted, and it’s uneven, but its ending is one of the saddest the series has done, and it lands a point about the Doctor that’s been building for a while.
All aboard
The ship is the Titanic. Not that Titanic, but a replica pleasure cruiser named after it, because the owners liked the sound of the name and evidently didn’t look it up. That’s the joke the whole episode is built on, and it’s a good one: everybody aboard is sailing on a vessel named after the most famous catastrophe in human history and nobody has thought this through. The Doctor is travelling alone, and that matters enormously here. After the year that never was and Martha’s departure at the end of Last of the Time Lords, he has nobody, and he spends the episode collecting a substitute family out of strangers because he cannot help himself. Donna told him as much, flatly, on a snowy street at the end of The Runaway Bride: that he needed somebody with him, somebody to stop him. He’s had a whole companion and a year of hell since then, and he is right back where she left him. The episode keeps quietly pointing at the empty space beside him.
They’re a decent bunch. Astrid Peth is a waitress who has spent her life on one planet dreaming of others, and Kylie Minogue plays her with a lovely, unforced wistfulness. Morvin and Foon Van Hoff are a sweet, broke, cheerfully unglamorous couple who won their tickets in a competition and are having the time of their lives. Bannakaffalatta is a small red cyborg with a secret he’s ashamed of. Mr Copper is the ship’s official Earth historian, and his cheerfully confident nonsense about the natives of Great Britain worshipping the god Santa is the funniest running gag in the special. And Rickston Slade is a spectacularly obnoxious rich man, which becomes relevant later.
The Host
Then the ship’s owner drives it into a meteoroid storm on purpose, and the fun stops. The Host are a genuinely inspired monster: tall golden angelic robots in flowing robes, designed to serve drinks and answer questions, whose halos detach and fly. When they’re reprogrammed to kill, they do it with unhurried, beatific calm, announcing “information: kill” in a pleasant customer-service voice while decapitating people. Angels as murder weapons at Christmas is a properly nasty image, and the design is beautiful. What follows is a disaster movie: a small group of survivors climbing through a broken ship over a widening drop, and dying, one at a time. Morvin falls. Foon, unable to face going on without him, throws herself after a Host with its own lasso to buy the others time. Bannakaffalatta burns out his own power source to save the group and dies apologising for what he was. The show is unsentimental about the arithmetic, because the Doctor keeps promising he’ll get everyone out and he keeps being wrong.
The climb itself is well staged: a buckled corridor hanging over a drop straight into the engines, one narrow gangway across it, and Host closing in from both ends. It’s the most straightforwardly action-movie this series has ever allowed itself to be, and it’s shot like one. If the characterisation is thin in places, the scale absolutely is not, and this is the show spending its entire Christmas budget in plain view and, for the most part, getting away with it. Den of Geek called it a rollicking old-fashioned adventure, which is fair, and it’s worth remembering it pulled thirteen million viewers on Christmas Day, more than any episode of the revived show before or since.
Who gets to survive
The villain, when we reach him, is the episode’s sharpest idea. Max Capricorn, head of the cruise line, ousted from his own boardroom, and now nothing but a head on a life-support trolley, has arranged all of this so the Titanic will crash into Earth, wipe out a planet, ruin the company that removed him, and let him retire comfortably on the proceeds. Six thousand dead and a world nearly extinguished, over a corporate grudge. It’s petty on a genuinely cosmic scale, and the show is right to be disgusted by it. Astrid stops him, and she does it by driving a forklift truck into him and taking them both over the edge into the ship’s engines. It’s a proper hero’s death, and the Doctor’s attempt to save her afterwards is where the episode earns everything. He tries. He has the technology, almost, and it isn’t enough. What’s left of her is too scattered to bring back, and all he can do is let her go, releasing her into space as a drift of stardust to see the universe she always wanted. Tennant plays it raw, and it hurts. What makes it worse is that Astrid never got the thing she was actually promised. One trip, he told her. One proper look at another world. What she got was a burning corridor, a forklift truck, and about four hours.
And then the bill: Rickston Slade, the awful one, walks away richer than ever, delighted with himself. The good ones died. The git lived. The episode makes an unusually blunt point out of it, that survival isn’t a reward and the Doctor doesn’t get to choose who gets it. He saves the Earth, again, on Christmas, again, and he does it having failed the one person he most wanted to keep. It’s worth noting how routine this has all become, too. The Sycorax came for the planet in The Christmas Invasion, the Racnoss the year after that, and now a spaceliner is falling out of the sky toward Buckingham Palace. The running gag has quietly curdled into something eerie: London empties itself every December because the population has worked out that Christmas is when things arrive. There’s a warm coda for Mr Copper, who gets to retire to a small house on the planet whose history he spectacularly failed to understand, and it’s a needed bit of kindness after all that. But the Doctor leaves alone, which is where he started.
What it leaves behind is the Doctor without anybody, building a makeshift crew out of strangers within an hour of boarding because being alone is the one thing he can’t do, which is the loneliest we’ve seen him. It leaves the Host, serene golden angels with flying halos killing politely, one of the best-designed monsters of the era. It leaves failure plainly stated, since he promises to save everyone and doesn’t, and the episode refuses to soften it, because Astrid dies and no amount of cleverness fixes it. It leaves the fact that survival isn’t merit, with Rickston Slade walking away untouched while the kind people die, a deliberately sour note the special is stronger for holding. And it leaves Christmas again, a third year running of Earth nearly being destroyed in December, where the running joke is doing real work: this planet is a magnet, and he keeps arriving just in time.
Rating: 3.5/5. Overstuffed and a bit shapeless in its middle, and the disaster-movie structure means several characters exist mainly to die on schedule. But the Host are superb, Kylie is genuinely affecting, and the last fifteen minutes are as bleak and moving as anything the show has done at Christmas. A ship named after the most famous shipwreck in history, a waitress scattered into stardust above the Earth, and a man who saved an entire planet and couldn’t save the one person he actually wanted to keep. He needs somebody with him. He’s needed somebody for a good while now, and I don’t think he’ll admit it until someone forces the issue.