Voyage of the Damned: A Sinking Ship and a Doctor Alone

We left the Doctor standing in his console room while the prow of an ocean liner smashed through the wall, which is a hard 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 tried, and it’s uneven, but the 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 now, which is that he really shouldn’t be doing this on his own.

All aboard

The ship is the Titanic. Not that Titanic, a replica pleasure cruiser from the planet Sto named after it, because somebody liked the sound of the name and evidently didn’t look it up. That’s the joke the whole thing is built on, and it’s a good one, everybody aboard sailing on a ship named after the most famous catastrophe in human history and nobody having thought it through. The Doctor’s travelling alone, and that matters. After the year that never was and Martha walking away at the end of Last of the Time Lords, he’s got nobody, so he spends the episode collecting a substitute family out of strangers because he can’t help himself. Donna told him as much on a snowy street at the end of The Runaway Bride, that he needed somebody to stop him. He’s had a whole companion and a year of hell since then and he’s right back where she left him.

They’re a decent bunch, the strangers. Astrid Peth is a waitress who has spent her whole life on one planet dreaming about others, and Kylie Minogue plays her with a lovely, unforced wistfulness. The best moment she gets is early, teleported down to London on shore leave and finding the street completely empty, and she’s thrilled anyway, because it’s concrete and shops and no stars in the sky and it smells, and it’s a different planet. Other Doctor Who fans picked out that same energy in her, and it’s what cheers the Doctor up. Morvin and Foon Van Hoff are a sweet, broke couple who won their tickets in a phone-in competition (Foon dialled five thousand times, it turns out, which is its own small tragedy). Bannakaffalatta is a little red cyborg hiding what he is. Mr Copper is the ship’s Earth historian, and his cheerfully confident nonsense about the natives worshipping the great god Santa is the funniest running gag in the special. And Rickston Slade is a spectacularly obnoxious rich man, which matters later.

The Host

Then the shields go down in a meteoroid storm, which turns out to be on purpose, and the fun stops. The Host are a genuinely inspired monster, tall golden angel robots in flowing robes built to serve drinks and answer questions, whose halos come off and fly. When they’re turned to killing they do it with an unhurried, beatific calm, announcing “Information. Kill” in a pleasant customer-service voice. Angels as murder weapons at Christmas is a properly nasty image and the design is beautiful. It’s been a good year for angels as monsters, what with the statues in Blink, and these are the opposite trick, all movement and polish where those never moved at all. Copper gets the best line about them too, when the Host glide down on the survivors from above, that everyone had forgotten the traditions of Christmas and angels have wings.

What follows is a disaster movie. A small group of survivors picking their way through a broken ship over a drop straight into the engines, and dying, one at a time. Morvin goes first, a bit of beam giving way under his feet, and Foon screams at the Doctor to bring him back because he promised, and he can’t. She won’t go on without him, and a few minutes later she jumps over the side and drags a Host down with her. Bannakaffalatta finally shows everyone what he is and burns out his own power to short-circuit the Host, and dies asking if he did good. The show’s 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 gangway hanging over the nuclear storm drive with Host closing in from both ends. It’s the most straightforwardly action-movie the show has ever let itself be, and it’s shot like one. The characterisation is thin in places, and some of these people plainly exist to fall off something on schedule, but the scale isn’t thin at all. This is the show spending its whole Christmas budget in plain view and mostly getting away with it. Well over twelve million people watched it on Christmas Day, which I gather is the biggest audience Doctor Who has had since the seventies, and I can see why, it’s a rollicking old-fashioned adventure for most of its length.

Max Capricorn’s retirement plan

The villain, when we get to him, is the episode’s sharpest idea. Max Capricorn, head of the cruise line, voted out by his own board, and by now just a head on a life-support system, has arranged all of this so the Titanic crashes into Earth. Two thousand people aboard, a whole planet roasted, and the company that pushed him out finished by the scandal, while he sits safe in an impact chamber waiting to be collected and retire somewhere sunny. It’s petty on a cosmic scale. The Doctor calls it what it is, a retirement plan, and the show’s right to be disgusted by it. And it’s Astrid who stops him, driving a forklift truck into his life-support unit and taking the pair of them over the edge into the engines.

That’s a proper hero’s death, and the Doctor’s attempt to undo it is where the special earns everything. She was wearing a teleport bracelet, and the bracelet’s emergency setting has held on to what’s left of her, so he tries. He gets an image of her back, saying she keeps falling, and he keeps on pushing past the point where Copper is telling him she’s gone, shouting that he can do anything. He can’t. There’s not enough of her left, and all he can do is let her go out through a window into space as a drift of stardust, flying instead of falling. Tennant plays it raw and it hurts. What makes it worse is she’d only just asked if she could come with him, and he’d said yes.

Who gets to survive

And then the bill. Rickston Slade, the awful one, the man who called the Van Hoffs Mr and Mrs Fatso on the gangway, walks away richer than ever because he sold his shares just before the crash. The good ones died and the git lived. Copper says it straight out, that Slade isn’t who you’d have chosen, but if the Doctor got to choose who lives and who dies that would make him a monster. It’s an unusually blunt thing for a Christmas special to say out loud and I think it’s stronger for leaving the sour taste in. The Doctor saves the Earth, again, at Christmas, again, having failed the one person he most wanted to keep, and he promised Foon too, and that’s two people in one night he told to trust him.

The Christmas thing has quietly gone somewhere eerie, too. The Sycorax came for the planet in The Christmas Invasion, the Racnoss the year after, and now a spaceliner comes down out of the sky and misses Buckingham Palace by inches, with the Queen thanking him from a window. London’s empty because the newspaper seller’s worked out that Christmas is when things arrive, and honestly, fair enough. There’s a warm coda for Mr Copper, whose Earthonomics degree turns out to be from a university that’s also a dry cleaner’s, and who gets a new life on Earth with a million pounds he’d assumed was spending money. It’s a needed bit of kindness after all that. But when Copper asks what happens now, the Doctor tells him he travels alone, it’s best that way, and I don’t believe him for a second.

Rating: 3.5/5. Overstuffed and a bit shapeless in the middle, and the disaster-movie structure means several characters are only there 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. It’s the loneliest I’ve seen him. 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.