World War Three is the fifth episode of the 2005 series of Doctor Who, written by Russell T Davies, and it concludes the story begun in Aliens of London. The Slitheen family have taken 10 Downing Street by wearing the skins of senior figures, and their plan is to panic the world into a nuclear exchange so they can sell the radioactive remains of Earth as cheap starship fuel to a galaxy in recession.
Trapped in the Cabinet Room with Rose and the backbench MP Harriet Jones, the Doctor has Mickey Smith use a Royal Navy password to launch a non-nuclear missile at Downing Street while all three of them are still inside the building. Harriet Jones, as the only elected representative in the room, is the one who gives the order.
Five weeks in, and this is the first time the new series has properly got under my skin. That is not what I expected from the episode with the farting aliens in it. “World War Three” picks up exactly where “Aliens of London” left off, with the Slitheen wearing the skins of half the British government and the Doctor, Rose and a backbench MP shut in the Cabinet Room while the world outside gets talked into a war.
I’ll be honest about where I was after part one. I thought it was a write-off. The burping wheelie bin, the flatulence gag played four times, a green baby-faced thing squeezing out of a fat suit while the actual Prime Minister’s body sits in a cupboard down the corridor. I’ve watched this programme since I was small and I have a fairly generous idea of how silly it’s allowed to be, and that first half felt like it had gone past the line and kept walking. Then the second half arrives and does something I genuinely didn’t see coming. It takes the same aliens, the same jokes and the same rubber, and drops them into a story about a government being hollowed out from the inside while nobody outside the building notices a thing. The comedy doesn’t stop. It just stops being the point.
The farting is the problem and it’s also the trick
Here’s what I got wrong. I’d assumed the silliness was the writer not taking his own monsters seriously, and it isn’t. It’s camouflage, and it worked on me exactly the way it works on the characters in the room. Nobody in Whitehall can bring themselves to treat these people as a threat, because the acting Prime Minister keeps giggling and breaking wind in the middle of a national emergency, and everyone in the room is far too polite and far too English to say anything about it. That’s the joke. It’s also precisely how they get away with it.
Because once you get past the noise, what these things are actually doing is horrible. They aren’t invading. There’s no fleet. They’ve killed a handful of specific people, climbed into their skins, and taken over the machinery of a nuclear power from inside, using nothing but paperwork and the right meetings. Then they set about panicking the United Nations into handing over the launch codes. And the reason for all of it is money. They want Earth’s nations to fire at each other so the leftovers can be broken up and flogged off as cheap fuel, because the galaxy is in a recession and the buyers are looking for a bargain. There’s no ideology in it anywhere. That’s colder than any of the megalomaniacs I grew up watching, and whether the mix of that and the fart jokes comes off is the thing fans argue about most whenever the Slitheen come up. I’ve now argued both sides of it inside a fortnight.
Annette Badland is doing the heavy lifting
Annette Badland is the best thing in this and it isn’t close. She plays Margaret Blaine, the Slitheen wearing the skin of a senior MI5 officer, and she’s the only one of the family who seems to be enjoying the job rather than just doing it. There’s a stillness to her that the others don’t have. The acting Prime Minister, Joseph Green, is played by David Verrey and he’s pitched as pure farce, all bluster and wind, which is the right call for what that character is for. Badland does something harder. She’s funny in exactly the same way as the rest of them and then she’ll drop it for a half-second and look at somebody like she’s working out the calorie count.
The bit that stuck with me is when she explains the plan. She isn’t gloating and she isn’t ranting. She’s a sales rep talking through a business case, mildly irritated that anyone would object, and she can’t understand why the Doctor is being so difficult about it. That’s a much nastier performance than shouting would have been. I’ve seen plenty of actors put on a rubber suit and visibly decide the whole thing is beneath them. She does the opposite. She commits to it completely, the flatulence included, and by the end of the episode she’s the only member of the family I could pick out of a line-up or would want to see again.
Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North
Penelope Wilton walks in as a backbench MP nobody has heard of, carrying a report about cottage hospitals that she cannot get anyone to read, and by the end of the hour she’s the most important person in the country. I loved her immediately. The running gag is that she introduces herself with her name and constituency to everyone she meets, including aliens, and it’s funny right up to the moment it stops being funny and becomes the whole point of her. She is the only person in that building doing her actual job, and the programme knows it, which is why it keeps letting the joke run. By the time somebody finally does read the cottage hospitals report, the country has no government left to act on it.
Then the episode does the thing that made me sit up. The Doctor works out there’s a way to stop this, and it means destroying the building he’s standing in with Rose inside it, and he won’t do it on his own authority. He asks. Harriet gives the order, because she’s the only elected representative left alive in the room and she knows that’s what the job means. She doesn’t agonise over it for five minutes of screen time either. She thinks about it, she says do it, and she wears it. Then the three of them climb into a cupboard and wait to find out whether they’ve killed themselves. There’s no clever escape, no last-second gadget, no reversal. Mickey pushes the button from a council flat in south London using a password the Doctor gave him, and a missile that the Royal Navy doesn’t know it’s fired takes the roof off Downing Street. I did not think this show was going to end an episode like that.
What it costs the people who stayed home
The other thing this two-parter has been quietly building is the bill that lands on the people the Doctor leaves behind, and I don’t remember the old series ever bothering with that. Jackie has spent a year believing her daughter was dead or had run off, and now she’s got her back and can see exactly what she’s running around with. The scene where she asks him straight out whether he can promise Rose will be safe, and he says nothing at all because he can’t, is the most uncomfortable moment in the episode by a distance. Mickey gets the same treatment from the other direction. He’s been accused of murder for twelve months over something he didn’t do, and he still ends up doing the most consequential thing anyone does all night, from a flat, on a laptop, with no thanks and no lift home.
Not all of it works. The effects are the effects, and the Slitheen look better standing still than they do running. But the writing and the performances carry it a long way past what the budget can manage, and I’d rather have this than something cheaper-looking that was too cautious to try. Five episodes in, the range on display is genuinely wide. “Rose” was a relaunch, “The End of the World” was a party at the end of everything, “The Unquiet Dead” was a ghost story with a nasty edge on it, and this is a political thriller with fart jokes in it that ends with the Doctor blowing up Downing Street. I came into part two ready to write the whole thing off. I came out of it counting down to next Saturday.