Ten Years of the Tenth Doctor: The Waters of Mars

doctor who the waters of mars russell t davies phil ford graeme harper review

November 15, 2019December 26, 2019 ~ alexmoreland ~ Leave a comment

For a long time now, I thought I was just a survivor, but I’m not. I’m the winner. That’s who I am. A Time Lord Victorious.

See, the thing I just don’t believe about this is that it aired on a Sunday. I know, technically, that’s true – ten years ago, 15th November was a Sunday, sure, and it’s on Wikipedia, so I can hardly argue with that. But I don’t remember it at all! That really feels like the sort of thing that would’ve stuck – a massive disruption of everything I knew to be correct and right in the world!

Apparently not, though, because I have no recollection of that at all. Maybe I was more relaxed about that sort of thing as a child. Actually, thinking back, the only thing I remember about this one from the time is being a bit confused by Ood Sigma, and feeling very validated that the Master was in the next time trailer, because I’d been going on about that to anyone who’d listen for ages. (I haven’t changed.)

Anyway, The Waters of Mars. We’re starting to get towards the end of these now, which is strange to think – I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it when I end up watching The End of Time (characteristically, though, it’s unlikely to be of any particular insight), but it was quite striking watching this and starting to feel like Ten Years of the Tenth Doctor is starting to wrap up. I’ve been doing these things, on and off, for about six years now – essentially the entire time I’ve been writing. A lot has changed in that time. Started out because I figured it’d be a good way to get some tumblr notes and grow the brand a bit; now, it’s a little side thing I post chiefly out of stubborn refusal to miss an anniversary, even when I have essentially nothing to say about an episode. Easy to feel a bit reflective about that. If I’d spent more time on this, maybe I’d have tried to construct some clever parallel between, like, Adelaide’s legacy, and fixed points in time, and blah blah blah. It wouldn’t have been all that clever, I suppose.

Still, no need for any of that now. That isn’t important! I’ll get to that in a few weeks time, when things actually do finally wrap up for good. For the moment, we’ll stick with The Waters of Mars.

The Waters of Mars is another one of those episodes I’ve seen relatively few times over the years – as much as I’ve always had a relatively positive opinion on it, I’ve never been inclined to rewatch it. I always assumed, I think, that it’d be a fairly grim one to go back to – exactly the sort of serious, ‘gun’ story I’ve never quite liked as much as I might want to.

What was nice, though – and what’s always nice about going back and rewatching different episodes as part of these reviews – is actually just how pleasant it is to go back and rediscover all the little things I’d forgotten. Like, wow, Gemma Chan is in this! The latest in a long line of actors who’ll go on to do genuinely really cool stuff, in a pretty thankless role here. (Base under siege characters always are, but almost particularly so here – you’d have thought, given the ending, they might at least have been at the level of their Sanctuary Base 6 or Penhaligon counterparts, but, no, these poor explorers were even more flat than their predecessors.) Or, hey, aren’t the cutting-edge-for-2009 CGI models really cute, actually? As is Gadget – naff, sure, especially the go go Gadget superspeed bit, but hey, it’s fun.

Admittedly, I do often find myself in the position where I just don’t particularly have a lot to say about these episodes. They’ve been covered so much, by so many, that I rarely feel like I’ve got anything in particular to add – especially while I keep trying to fit to this basic format. I just went back to look at the Planet of the Dead review, because I remembered it being a bit lightweight – but no, actually, that’s a solidly okay criticism of that story’s aristocracy fetish. Not quite the same here. I would recommend watching The Waters of Mars! It is a pretty well put together episode of Doctor Who, and I had a lot of fun watching it, and indeed rediscovering it. Lindsay Duncan is great, David Tennant is great, the water aliens are a pretty fun idea, it’s all good! (Well, no. The score is borderline oppressive at points, that isn’t so good. But outside of that: fun!)

Coming so close to the end of the Tenth Doctor era, I think it’s a necessary story – the hubris that comes to the fore here had been bubbling away in the background for quite a long time, so it’s worth examining it again.

Does it work? For the most part, yes, although I must admit I have a few qualms. Genuinely clever though it is to do a fixed points story about a fixed point in the future, I’m still not actually all that convinced these stories ever properly work – and, again, there’s a lot of ‘Great Man of History’ stuff going on that I don’t particularly like, and never do. Plus, I am also not all that convinced that Adelaide’s decision in the end is wholly justified – an absolutely huge moment, and a necessary one, absolutely the right narrative choice for the story, but the moment is undercut slightly because of how quickly it happens. I’m not sure what the fix would be – excise two of the crew members to make a bit more space for Adelaide? – but it’s hard not to wish there was just a little more to it.

But, hey, look at what does work – that’s a genuinely effective monstering of the Doctor, all those positive traits cast in a completely different light. Even “it’s bigger on the inside” becomes a note of horror and confusion, rather than the usual awe and wonderment. It’s also a pretty neat pay off to everything RTD has been writing, in the background, about religion, and gods, and the gods we make. Nice to have got that in there at the end.

I liked this! I liked it a lot. I have also just had a much better idea for this review. I wouldn’t normally do this, but, hey, it is a time travel episode.

Hold on…

8/10

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Ten Years of the Tenth Doctor: Journey’s End

doctor who journey's end review tenth doctor david tennant donna noble catherine tate rose tyler billie piper russell t davies graeme harper daleks davros

July 5, 2018July 28, 2018 ~ alexmoreland ~ Leave a comment

It’s been good, though, hasn’t it? All of us. All of it. Everything we did. You were brilliant.

Again, I want to start with a fairly simple, straightforward declaration: I love this one. I love every part of it, even the silly parts, even the bits I don’t like that much. It’s the apex of a particular version of Doctor Who, and when I watched it the first time, it was everything to me. So, there’s a degree to which I’m not really going to budge on that, now or ever.

Admittedly, that perhaps sounds like a preamble to an “admittedly…”, but no, I really do like this one a lot. It’s an episode that is, I think, easier to talk about for its questionable moments, and I obviously will talk about them, but that’s only really because of the nature of its strengths. It’s an episode that’s so bombastic and sprawling, so confident and sure of itself, that for a lot of it you’re left with little to do but point and gesture in wordless appreciation.

The review that follows – a particularly lengthy review, actually, because I wanted to try and do something hefty for what is a pretty significant episode, but also because I happened to have a lot of thoughts on it all – comes across, I worry, as being more negative about the episode than I actually feel. Like I said, it’s the sort of episode where the good things about it felt, to me, a bit harder to write about.

That said, though, I do just want to take a moment now to talk about my favourite moment of the episode: towing the Earth back home. It’s such a brilliantly sentimental scene, with one of Murray Gold’s best pieces of music from the Davies era, and I love what it represents. I love the way Freema Agyeman makes eye contact with the camera, too – it’s a strange, Blue Peter moment, and in a way it kinda threatens the integrity of the whole thing, as though it’s about to make it a joke. But, actually, it’s different from that, because it’s letting us in on the joke, including us, as though we’re piloting the TARDIS with them. I love the strange, crazy confidence to the way the scene just stops for an obscure Gwen Cooper continuity reference.

It’s really such a brilliant, brilliant moment. It’s actually the bit that makes it all worth it, to my mind; you could probably make some reasonable arguments that bringing all the companions together like this isn’t a brilliant idea – or at least you could try, because this scene shows how absolutely wonderful that is. I really, really loved it.

Ethically, there are bits of it that are a little sketchy. Well, that’s perhaps the wrong way of putting it (if nothing else, it creates the impression I’m talking about something else) – rather, I suspect the moral quandary supposedly at the heart of the story is somewhat ill thought out.

One of the things that Journey’s End purports to grapple with – it doesn’t really; the idea is abandoned reasonably quickly – is this idea of the Doctor as a very dark figure, the Destroyer of Worlds. Not someone who emboldens and elevates those around him, shaping their lives, inspiring and empowering them to be better people, but instead moulding them into soldiers, weapons first and foremost rather than travellers or people or Doctors themselves. In and of itself, that’s debateable; certainly, I wonder how much, outside of this episode itself, that interpretation is actually supported by the Davies era anyway. Undeniably, there’s elements of it, and it’s more obvious with characters like Martha, but… well, is it true? I’m inclined to compare it to the Capaldi era, as I so often am, where the companions were left to become Doctor figures in their own right; I wonder if perhaps that’s the same as what’s happening here, but it’s a fundamentally different vision of the Doctor here than in the Capaldi era. That’s an interesting idea to grapple with – immediately the counter argument that they’re becoming, in effect, failed versions of the Doctor, missing the point, not the full version of such, which has an interesting resonance of its own – but I think befitting its own essay rather than a few stray paragraphs here.

More to the point, though, I think it’s worth considering what the companions are turned into soldiers against: the Daleks, the ultimate robot fascists. It is… difficult to argue, to be honest, in any meaningful sense that killing Daleks is wrong particularly. Certainly, in prior contexts – the Time War, or The Parting of the Ways – the point was not about the morality of killing Daleks per se, but killing Daleks while leaving massive collateral damage. That’s definitely the case with Martha’s final solution, but that’s not really emphasised in the text, and it doesn’t seem to be a factor with the warp star or… whatever it is TenToo did with the Crucible at the end. Instead, it does seem to be a fairly basic “killing Daleks is wrong”, which strikes me as questionable. It feels mainly like a broader version of the whole punching Nazis thing – yes, that is ethically fine. Just as it is, you know, ethically fine to blow up a Dalek.

And that… not complaint, exactly, but certainly that little curio feeds into some wider points about the episode’s spine. Well, no, I’m reluctant to call it a spine exactly, because I don’t think it is – as I’ve said above, it’s dispensed with fairly quickly. It’s more that it’s just the subject of Davros’ rant, because if the villain is going to have a rant at all, it needs to be something with a lofty ethical point to be made.

I think I’d have preferred it if, on some level, there was an effort to refute that. I think it might have held the episode together a little better thematically if… well, if at any point the Doctor had been able to turn around and say “actually, we are so different, you and I”. Or, not like that exactly, but I think taking the broader point, about the impact the Doctor has on people, and showing it actually hasbeen a positive, that he actually is different, so on. I think it’s interesting to look at Sarah Jane’s line about how the Doctor has the biggest family of anyone on Earth, because actually, it’s debateable how much the episode itself actually seems to believe that; after all, the note that’s emphasised at the end is him, alone, crying in the rain.

More on that later, though, because what I want to talk about instead is TenToo. A lot is made of the suggestion that he’s this very dark figure – born in battle, full of bloodlust, all that jazz – but I’m not wholly convinced that rings true across the episode. Certainly, he seems broadly more cheerful and adjusted throughout than the brown-suited version of the Doctor does; you can chalk bits of that up to knowing Donna isn’t dead and the TARDIS wasn’t destroyed, so TenToo certainly has reason to not be as angsty, but even then. I think a big part of this, though, is that I’m still not especially convinced that killing the Dalek empire like that is an especially difficult decision; TenToo did the right thing, and Sarah Jane’s suggestion wasn’t wrong either. Martha is a bit more questionable, but at least that’s got an element of the trolley problem to it. (My hot take: Journey’s End would’ve worked better with the Slitheen, in that regard at least.)

What I do think works, though, is TenToo leaving with Rose at the end. Certainly, it’s a difficult scene to get right, and you can understand why Russell T Davies deliberated over it so much in The Writer’s Tale; very easily, it could have been a weaker rehash of the version from Doomsday. What’s impressive, though, is the way it’s doing something much more complex; where the last version was about Rose, this is about the Doctor – he’s manipulating her and pushing her away, essentially, making a choice because he thinks he knows what’s best for her. Actually, thinking about it, there’s an interesting connection to what he does to Donna later.

Of course, there’s also the question of Donna. I’ve been deliberating over exactly how to handle this for some time now. To be honest, I was tempted to not bring it up at all; certainly, that would have been truer to my experience of the episode the first go around, because it was years and years before I realised there was anything to discourse about at all. For the longest time my thoughts on the subject began and ended with “that’s a tragic ending, I wish there had been some way for Donna to remember” – which, to be honest, I suspect was also the beginning and end of Russell T Davies’ thoughts while writing it.

But, equally, it’d feel too much like an unspoken elephant in the room if I didn’tmention it, and that doesn’t feel like something I can go without talking about. Particularly, actually, given that my beloved Capaldi era addressed this ending directly – more than once, actually, but most obviously with Clara, my favourite companion. So, it’d be a bit dishonest not to.

For anyone who’s not aware, the discussion centres around the Doctor mindwiping Donna; the – critique feels too mild a word, and perhaps misrepresents the strength of feeling of some of those who object to it – objection (not much better) regards how he ignores her wishes, disregards her autonomy and takes something from her without her consent. Part of the contention, too, is that it’s not really problematised within the narrative enough; the focus is largely on the tragedy, and how sad it is for the Doctor, as opposed to depicting it as a horrific violation of consent. That’s… I was going to say “That’s not an unreasonable interpretation, even though it’s not what the episode intended”, which manages to be both true and missing the point; whether it’s what the episode intended or not, that is essentially what’s on screen. I’m inclined to disagree heavily with certain sections of the debate, largely those that compare it to rape; I understand where they’re coming from, in terms of it being a violation of consent, but… it doesn’t sit well with me, for myriad reasons too extensive to really delve into here.

I think it’s probably best understood as a medical procedure; even then, there’s questions to be asked, but I think that’s a better model from which to approach it. (I also think it’s worth noting, in terms of comparisons to the Capaldi era, in Hell Bent and The Pilot, where the selfish, patrician nature of the act is emphasised, it’s not to save a life, which is manifestly different to what’s going on with Donna. Just to complicate things further!) It’s not a companion exit that sits with me entirely well admittedly; it’s cruel in a lot of ways, bleakly cynical in a way that sets it apart from the tragedy of, say, Doomsday. But… it also doesn’t, in a significant way at least, diminish the episode. At least not for me. I don’t know.

One thing that did strike me as interesting is how easily this episode could have functioned as a series finale to New Who as a whole, if the specials hadn’t been commissioned.

Granted, you’d want a few changes made throughout; the version of this episode that was an actual ending would, I think, leave Donna as the DoctorDonna – the Doctor would finally have a companion and friend who really could travel with him forever (at the same time he gave Rose a Doctor who really could live with her forever, which would’ve been neat). Also, you’d kinda want there to be more of an effort to address Davros’ accusations, as I mentioned above; Journey’s End is interesting because it feels like it comes quite close to, or could have come quite close to, addressing the whole survivor’s guilt thing, and ultimately saying “actually, no”, but then ultimately eliding that in favour of a sad ending.

(Actually, personally, I think much more telling than the actual consent violation/mindwipe aspect is the fact that Donna isn’t allowed to keep her memories once she becomes a Doctor figure – a successful Doctor figure, in marked contrast to the others, beating the Daleks by tricking them into their own trap and hoisting them by their own petard rather than an aggressively militaristic figure. But where the others are failed Doctor figures who live, Donna is… not punished, exactly, but regresses. That, I think, is the difference between Donna and Clara; where “being the Doctor” is something anyone can do in the Moffat era, “being the Doctor” is a much more singular burden to bear in the Davies era. Again, that’s another idea worth returning to, particularly because I think Moffat’s conception of what it means to be the Doctor is one of the most interesting ideas of his tenure, and it’s actually probably one of the best ways to get to the heart of the whole lonely god idea in the Davies era.)

Anyway! Gosh. When this is finished it’s going to be over 2000 words, possibly approaching 2500; certainly, the longest of any of the X Years of the X Doctor posts I’ve done over the years. Actually, no, it could well be the longest single piece I’ve written full stop. It’s probably too critical in a lot of places, and doesn’t flow the way I’d like it to; equally, though, to repeat the usual refrain, these are often just the thoughts off the top of my head after watching an episode. A lot of the thoughts above are ones I’d like to elaborate on in future, though.

So. Journey’s End. I enjoyed it massively; I think that impression might not come across from this review, much as I would’ve liked it to, because so much of it dwells on the problem areas of the episode. That’s what got me thinking, I suppose.

I did have a slightly more elegiac conclusion in mind, but I’ve just remembered that next week I’ll be doing a general Series 4 overview. So I’ll save that for then!

10/10

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Ten Years of the Tenth Doctor: The Stolen Earth

June 28, 2018July 28, 2018 ~ alexmoreland ~ Leave a comment

I came here when I was just a kid.

I love this one.

I also love the next one (arguably more, though I don’t tend to think of these two in discrete parts), but we’ll get to that in time.

I used to have all these Doctor Who action figures – no, collectibles – nah, action figures. A couple of David Tennants, quite a few of them missing hands; Rose from New Earth and Rose from Rose, a strange thing that looked like it was about to start a fight most of the time; Daleks, invariably missing their manipulator arms (alright, plungers) or guns or eyestalks, each one totally broken by the siblings and never by me. (That’s not, like, an attempt to talk around it or laughingly suggest it was me and I pretended it was them; it was them and they know it.) Judoon, Slitheen, Captain Jack from The Empty Child and Sarah Jane from her Adventures, complete with a little Graske, Martha from Smith and Jones and Mickey from Army of Ghosts, complete with half a Cyberman.

But, anyway, I collected them over the years, and played with them, obviously. Always ridiculous, over the top narratives, with exterminations and resurrections and epic, galaxy-spanning stakes, and, of course, every companion ever. (Well, no, not every companion ever, because I never had a Donna figure.)

You can, I imagine, see where this is going. The Stolen Earth is Doctor Who as it always existed in my imagination, writ large across the screen. It’s sprawling and excessive and fun, Doctor Who taking joy in simply being Doctor Who. There was no way I wasn’t going to love it. Watching it at nine years old (probably) it was, genuinely, event television in a way I’d never really experienced before. Watching it ten years later, there’s still such a rush of giddy joy to it all. Across these reviews I’ve written about how I sometimes worry my opinions are based too firmly on how I first watched it, but with this one, I’m not worried about that. I know it, and I don’t care – this was the most amazing episode of Doctor Whoever then, and in more ways than one it still is now.

There’s still, I think, a kind of… conversations about Doctor Who are still basically lead by the same types of people, and arguably in some cases the same people full stop. It’s people who grew up in the 70s, talking about Weetabix and Target novels and Tom Baker pants, and then being terribly ashamed of it all in the 80s and 90s (and in some cases still, bizarrely, carry the imagined weight of that around with them).

Less common – and to me, more interesting – is accounts of people talking about growing up under the revived series. Probably the obvious reason for that, I suppose, is that they’re mostly just not old enough yet; we’re still kinda at the point where it’s people who were teenagers when Rose aired are talking about it, as opposed to the 7 and 8-year olds. Maybe in a few years’ time we’ll start to see the stories of Cyber-strawberry frubes and Totally Doctor Who and David Tennant pants, which I would just like the record to state that I always found kinda weird and never had. Anyway, though, we’re definitely getting there. It’s something I’d like to have a go at myself one day, I suppose.

If, and when, people start getting around to it, I suspect The Stolen Earth will loom large in those accounts. It feels difficult, now, to quantify quite how big it was at the time. I remember that it was one of the last episode titles to be revealed; at that point I was following production news and stuff, albeit mainly through the Doctor Who Adventures magazine, and listing the title of episode 12 as CONFIDENTIAL (or TOP SECRET or what have you) – alongside, I think, what became The Sontaran Stratagem – really set me off. The anticipation! (Mind you, I was always pretty confused by the theory that Harriet Jones was the Supreme Dalek, though I’m pretty sure I found out about that after the fact.)

And, I mean, I’ve already said how much I loved this episode at the time. That picture of all the companions assembled together, ‘The Children of Time’, that was my computer background for years. It was then, and in many ways still is, such a wonderfully intense episode of Doctor Who, and one that’s really quite deeply bound up with the ways I watched Doctor Who at the time, the way I experienced Doctor Who, and, sure, the way I lived it.

It still stands up today, I reckon.

The oft-repeated refrain when I write about the first part of any two-parter is, you know, that that’s quite difficult for all these reasons, which I recount mainly to fill up my own arbitrarily set wordcount, and as a bit of a caveat for the fact that I’ve not really said anything. Admittedly, a lot of this review is me talking around the fact, discussing what The Stolen Earth is and represents as opposed to anything that actually happened in it. On the flip side, though, it is mostly set-up and OMG moments and the cliffhanger of modern-Who, still yet to be topped, so maybe that’s not so bad.

Still, though. There’s a lot of great moments. The obvious bits, like any moment where Bernard Cribbins is on screen, have been rightfully discussed, but what stood out to me about this episode most of all was Elisabeth Sladen. It feels odd to say it, but she’s a much, much better actress than I ever realised – not that I ever thought she wasn’t, or anything, but it really struck me that every emotional beat of the Dalek invasion works because of her. It’s her fear of the Daleks, at Davros, and for Luke, that makes it work – it’s genuinely the most impactful performance of the episode.

It’s quite the episode, The Stolen Earth. Quite the episode.

These days those action figures are all neatly displayed on my shelves – lovingly displayed, in fact. (I’d have to concede they’re actually maybe not that neat, and they pick up dust like mad.) I feel like maybe I should try and construct some metaphor out of that, that the things you love as a child start to hold a different place in your life as you grow up or whatever, but nah, that’s nonsense. Or it’s nonsense here, anyway.

I just wanted to tell you about them. I really love those things

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Ten Years of the Tenth Doctor: Turn Left

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June 21, 2018August 1, 2018 ~ alexmoreland ~ Leave a comment

What are you? What will you be?

[THE FOLLOWING IS A TRANSCRIPT FROM A VIDEO UPLOADED TO YOUTUBE ON 21^ST JUNE 2018, ENTITLED “Turn Left???”]

So anyway, there I am, channel-hopping, and there’s this show on I’ve never seen before. Looks vaguely interesting – it has Catherine Tate in it, and she’s quite funny, so sure, why not. Let’s give it a watch. I’m not really doing anything else, after all, and I’m dimly aware of this show – I think some of my friends used to quite like it about a decade ago or so?

Something called doctor who.

And then I figured, hey, here’s an idea: why don’t I make a video about it? I know my videos aren’t normally about television, since I don’t watch a lot of it, but this was on my mind I guess, so I figured why not? Plus this show is kinda popular, or it used to be – my friends all stopped watching it when they cast that Benedict guy, but I know everyone was pretty excited last year when they cast Johnson from Peep Show, so maybe it’ll be popular again next year – and I figure maybe a few enwhothiasts might wanna like this video or share it around or something.

Admittedly I didn’t entirely understand the beginning of it – I suppose they must have been on some alien planet, or something? Or was it, like, China in the future? I don’t really know what that was about, because I’ve never really seen the show, but I thought it was kinda neat that they included that instead of just having another sci-fi kinda thing. I suppose it must have meant that this show had a lot of scenes with sort of representation of other cultures, and particularly Asian cultures, so this was just another in a long line? It’d probably be a bit dodgy if it was the only one I guess, I don’t know.

… What was I saying? Oh, yeah, yeah. So one of the things I did know about this show was that they time travel a lot, which is pretty neat – if you click on this thingy here you can see a video I did about a year ago, which was all about the top five different places I’d love to time travel to if it were possible – but I was kind of a little bit confused when it happened with the beetle thingy? I always thought it was in one of those phone box things from the 1960s, like a great big blue one that’s bigger on the inside.

But, anyway, yeah. I got the impression this was all, like, referring back to past episodes of the show, which is probably pretty exciting if you’re an enwhothiast. The idea of changing your past, or someone else changing your past which I guess is actually what happens here, is pretty interesting to me. Like, I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I didn’t do my vlogs, you know? I’ve been doing my little videos for nearly five years now – actually five years exactly tomorrow! – but what if, like, I’d done a blog, with writing and words and stuff instead? I remember my friend Rose suggested I make one ages ago, but I never did. Or I guess on a bigger level, there’s questions of, like, what if Hillary Clinton hadn’t beaten Jeb Bush in the election last year, or Ed Miliband becoming Prime Minister?

Sorry I just got distracted! What was I saying?

Oh, yeah, I know. Anyway. Catherine Tate is properly amazing in this episode – it’s genuinely such a great performance, the way she moves from being a more sort of comic character at the beginning, a bit like her character in her own show, but then gradually becoming a much more tragic figure. A lot of that is because of that kind of rise of fascism and stuff, that sweeping force that’s going on in the background and affecting all their lives.

I think – though obviously, not really being involved in any enwhothiast communities or anything, I don’t know for sure – that probably one of the most talked about scenes of this episode is that one where it’s Mr Colasanto being taken away by the army, and Donna gradually realises that he’s being taken to a concentration camp. Like, it’s definitely a really powerful scene – Bernard Cribbins sells it so well, it’s a great performance – but perhaps what’s more notable is the way that, in the next scene, Donna is still going to the army to try and find a job.

It’s a moment of quiet defeat, that, and it feels like it’s perhaps the episode’s most incisive observation about the nature of fascism. You can argue, perhaps fairly, that one of the big flaws of the episode is that the thing that finally motivates Donna to step up isn’t one of the small human moments, but the existential mythic threat of the stars going out, but I’d argue it actually ties back to that moment where Donna goes to the military for jobs, a comment on the same sort of apathy.

Soo, yeah. I hope you liked this video! Please don’t forget to like and subscribe and leave a comment below – I could do some more Doctor Who videos if you enjoyed this one! Maybe a series? Like, I could start them next year for the anniversaries, eleven years since the episode was done or something like that.

Wait, what’s that noise…?

[TRANSCRIPT ENDS.]

So, Turn Left.

It’s an episode that’s all about an alternate reality – a world where a significant event didn’t happen, and the repercussions that has, the tornado caused by the beating of a butterfly’s wing. A reality without the Doctor, or a reality without watching Doctor Who; a reality where fascism is on the rise and internment camps are built, and a reality where fascism is still on the rise and internment camps are still being built, except also I have a blog instead of being a vlogger.

I don’t know, mostly I thought this was a funny little gimmick. It’s perhaps not as insightful as it might have been – hey, when are they ever? – but it struck me as a broadly funny idea. Probably one that would have been better if some actual time and thought had gone into it – if I’d had the idea early enough, I totally would have done an actual vlog, or at least made sure the “character” of vlogger Alex in the above transcript was a little more consistent throughout.

Still! Turn Left. A pretty brilliant episode. Possibly, admittedly, a little too dark in places – the death of Sarah Jane, Luke, Clyde and Maria was quite upsetting – but it works throughout. A fantastic script from Russell T Davies (it’ll be interesting to see him return to some of these ideas with Years and Years in 2019) and, as the other Alex mentioned, a wonderful performance from Catherine Tate. Arguably her finest hour, in fact.

Can’t wait for next week!

9/10

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Ten Years of the Tenth Doctor: The Unicorn and the Wasp

doctor who the unicorn and the wasp gareth roberts agatha christie tenth doctor david tennant donna noble catherine tate fenella woolgar

May 17, 2018July 26, 2018 ~ alexmoreland ~ Leave a comment

Can we return to sanity? There are no such things as giant wasps!

So, I had this review structured slightly differently, but it was bothering me, so I performed a bit of a quick cut and paste job. Leaving us, then, with this.

The Unicorn and the Wasp is pretty much the first episode of the new series to just unambiguously and straightforwardly play the whole thing as a comedy. And it works! It is a funny episode. There are lots of good jokes. I was particularly entertained by Colonel Mustard’s double layered flashback, that entertained me.

But I find comedy almost uniquely difficult to write about. A lot of that, for sure, is down to my own – numerous – limitations as a writer, but I’ve never quite been able to review comedy without essentially just descending into putting together a bullet point list of all the funny lines. At that point, it starts to beg the question as to why you don’t just go and watch the original piece, you know? And I’m finding largely the same issue with The Unicorn and the Wasp; accordingly, this is probably the closest I’ve ever come to just giving up and writing a fairly simple, one-line piece affirming my enjoyment. “Yep, that was pretty entertaining”.

Nonetheless, though, here we are. And I’m increasingly reminded of my need to reposition these reviews as something a little more intelligent, and not half collected thoughts put together immediately after watching the episode, in a rush so as to not miss a self-imposed deadline. Still, though, I’ve not managed to make the switch this week, so we’ll stick with it, and see how much – in this typically disorganised fashion – I can actually make of The Unicorn and The Wasp.

(I also feel the need to note, incidentally, that Gareth Roberts is absolutely vile. This was not something I said when I wrote about The Shakespeare Code, because it didn’t entirely feel relevant. Now I’m much less concerned with relevance, and feel like it’s worth noting anyway, because he really is quite awful.)

Anyway. What is there to be said about The Unicorn and the Wasp?

There is probably an interesting line of criticism derived from just how, exactly, Doctor Who tends to engage with artists of history. With Dickens, Shakespeare, Christie and later Van Gogh their enduring appeal is grounded and talked about largely in terms of the fact that their works sold a lot, or continued to sell a lot, essentially forever. It’s easy to argue that there’s something more than a little capitalist about that, and quite uncomfortable as a result – distilling the worth of art down to its monetary value, as opposed to any other intrinsic value it might possess. That said, I don’t think that’s entirely what these stories are going for; more accurately, it’s about how they continue to be consumed. People continue to want them and engage with them and, in the case of Agatha Christie, buy the books. In that sense, it feels decidedly in line with Davies’ more hedonistic embrace of art, because it’s a stand in for continued enjoyment.

But of course, for all that there are lots of people who very much enjoy Agatha Christie novels and will continue to buy them for a billion billion years, I am not actually one of them (so far), because I’ve never read a single Agatha Christie book. No particular reason for it, I just sort of… haven’t.

It’s not an obstacle to my enjoyment of the story, though, which largely treats Christie as a set of symbols and archetypes to engage with – it’s the Agatha Christie story as a genre, more than anything else, and that’s very easy to recognise even if you’re not intimately familiar with the actual stories themselves. A game or two of Cluedo is basically enough to get the joke.

And it’s a good joke, as it goes. We’ve already established it’s funny. Catherine Tate makes it work really, really well. It’s probably a stretch to call it a good episode for Donna, but it’s definitely a great episode for Catherine Tate, one of the first times she’s got to flex that comedy muscle in quite a while.

The only other thing that jumped out at me, I suppose, is the ending. Since reading The Writer’s Tale, I’ve been watching these episodes largely in light of what that book discusses, and the changes made to The Unicorn and the Waspdo strike me as quite interesting.

So, the original ending to The Unicorn and the Wasp had the Doctor run the Vespiform over in one of those 1920s cars – knocking it into the river, I think, as opposed to leaving a big squashed wasp in the middle of the road. That was filmed, but changed because David Tennant pointed out, rightly, that essentially that was the Doctor committing murder. Which isn’t great, obviously.

Whenever I read that, though, I could never quite remember how the episode itself ended. So it’s interesting to notice that they basically swapped the Doctor murdering the Vespiform for Donna doing it – which doesn’t strike me as much of a solution at all? Perhaps if this had been much earlier in the series, and we’re meant to read it as being a crucial point in her development where she realises aliens are people too, even the ones who don’t really look like people, it might have worked then. But I don’t know. It’s a weirdly misjudged moment – especially considering that, at one stage, they’d planned to have the body of the vicar float up to the surface, like some kind of reminder that the Vespiform had spent all those years living as a person anyway.

It’s the one weird moment in an episode that had, for the most part, always controlled its tone quite well. This feels decidedly different from all the comedy murders we’ve seen so far – it’s outside the joke of the genre, after all, and it’s just decidedly uncomfortable.

I don’t know. I suspect this was a fairly substanceless review, even by the standards of these fairly weak posts. I’d try and make it into a commentary on a substanceless episode, but that’s perhaps unfair. I don’t know. It didn’t inspire a great deal of thought in me. It was fine. A fine episode. You know. I just sorta struggled to bring myself to care about this one, though I did basically like it.

6/10

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Ten Years of the Tenth Doctor: Planet of the Ood

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April 19, 2018July 13, 2018 ~ alexmoreland ~ 1 Comment

It’s not so different from your time.

In a sense, Planet of the Ood was always going to be necessary. Following their introduction in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, the Ood demanded a follow up; indeed, one was initially planned for Series 3, in the episode that became 42.

The reason it was necessary is simple, if not necessarily obvious. It’s not the fact that the Ood have a distinct and memorable design, though they do; it’s also not a case of budgetary limitations and the need to reuse props, though I imagine that did play a part. Rather, it’s because the fundamental concept of the Ood demands consideration and deconstruction as soon as it’s raised, and that’s not something they found the time for in their original story.

At first glance, we were told that the Ood were a race of natural slaves, a servant race who need to be given something to do – ‘employing’ the Ood, as it were, was a kindness more than anything else. It’s not difficult to see the parallels between that and historic justifications of slavery; when those parallels exist, and as overtly as they are in the case of the Ood, it’s important to take them and respond to them. If ignored, it’s an uncomfortable lapse at best, and a damning flaw at worst – look at the House Elves in Harry Potter, for one thing. (Of course, there’s a lot of things like this in Harry Potter if you look back on it in hindsight.)

So, yes, Planet of the Ood – an episode dedicating to questioning and deconstructing the assumptions made during the Ood’s first introduction – was necessary. Arguably especially necessary in something like Doctor Who, in fact, given that a big part of the series is about, at least nominally, helping people, questioning authority, and standing up to injustice. That’s a poor encapsulation, admittedly, but it’s the basic idea – certainly in an episode where humans have been enslaved by funny looking aliens, you’d expect the plot to be about freeing the humans. So, yes, of course it’s necessary to do an episode about helping the Ood.

That having been said, though, the most interesting part of Planet of the Ood is how it’s very pointedly not about ‘helping the Ood’.

It looks like it is, certainly. There’s definitely a sense of active involvement; it follows the same broad shape of most Doctor Who episodes, and between the chase scenes, action set pieces and eventual confrontation with the villain, it feels like the Doctor comes in and saves the day.

Instead, Planet of the Ood actually avoids that – sure, the structure obscures things, but for the most part the Doctor and Donna are actually just observers, just watching a revolution from the outside. In doing so, Planet of the Ood very neatly refutes the white saviour concept that can, in fact, be read into a lot of episodes of Doctor Who. The Doctor doesn’t wade in and save the day, because there’s actually not a need for him to; it’s not his place to. But there’s another smart thing going on here too, advancing that idea further. The episode doesn’t just position the Doctor and Donna as observers, but up to a point, they’re arguably complicit. Certainly, there’s a very pointed critique of how the Doctor acted in The Impossible Planet, and the way he just accepted the suggestion the Ood are naturally docile, naturally servants. He might be an observer, but he’s not outside the system.

In turn, it’s worth looking at Donna, and her role in the story. If there was still any expectation that Donna would be a silly, comedic companion, this would surely have disproved it entirely; this episode has some of Catherine Tate’s best work in the role. What’s particularly notable is that for all the past few years of Doctor Who have been about opening companions eyes – Rose’s speech about “a different way to live” springs to mind – this is the first time the show has really delved into that. Listening to the song of the Ood is much more of a different way to live than simply walking in a time long since past or breathing in the alien air. It’s a far more nuanced and considered portrayal of how TARDIS travel can change perspective than we’ve seen so far, and it’s something I hope we’ll see again in future.

Admittedly, it’s not perfect – there’s one particular flaw that springs to mind.

The ending feels a little easy, almost as though it’s missing part of the point of the wider episode. By that I don’t mean the moment where the Doctor turns off the psychic dampener affecting the Ood brain – though one does sort of wish Sigma had been allowed to have that moment – but rather the line about how all the Ood will be returning home soon. It’s less than convincing, a line that seems to aim more for a neat conclusion that trying to ring true particularly; if you look back in real life, it’s never really that simple. Even after slavery was made illegal, it still continued for the next few decades – and that’s even before you get into the whole “who do you think made your clothes” sort of thing. It’s difficult to believe that everyone would simply go “well, better send the Ood home now” – arguably, it feels like a blindspot that would prompt another story in the same sense that The Impossible Planet’s claim the Ood were a natural slave race prompted this one. Indeed, you can easily imagine a Jodie Whittaker story set on a mining base a year or two after this story, with a corporation taking advantage of illegal Ood labour they’re simply not mentioning.

But that’s one flaw in a story that has a lot to like going on within it. Russell T Davies described this story as being quite grim, and he’s not wrong exactly, but equally – Planet of the Ood is a pretty effective model of ‘mature’ Doctor Who. It’s still got a certain humour and levity to it, but there’s a very thoughtful, very conscious through line to the story; this is the sort of story to aspire to, rather than big battle scenes and threatening aliens.

Ultimately, then, it’s a very strong episode – the best of Series 4 so far, and I suspect were I ever to try and rank them, I’d consider it amongst the best of the Tennant era full stop.

9/10

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Ten Years of the Tenth Doctor: Utopia

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June 16, 2017July 14, 2018 ~ alexmoreland ~ Leave a comment

End of the universe and here you are. Indomitable, that’s the word. Indomitable!

Russell T Davies has long been one of my favourite Doctor Who writers – if not, indeed, my favourite.

In a way, of course, that makes a certain degree of sense; he was the architect of the vision of Doctor Who that I was first introduced to, and so in turn a lot of the things I love about Doctor Who are things that came from him. (Obviously over the years I’ve grown to love a lot of what Steven Moffat has brought to the show, and I’m sure the same will be true of Chibnall’s tenure – eventually I’m sure I’ll have an even more eclectic vision of the show, drawing from all sorts of different places. And then I’ll inflict it on you all, and you’ll all grow to love my version of it. Hopefully.)

Regardless, though, it’s Russell T Davies’ vision of Doctor Who that I first fell in love with. His book, The Writer’s Tale, is basically my bible – I’d attribute a lot of my desire to write to that book. Not solely to it, of course – it had been a longstanding ambition prior to that – but it solidified the desire in a much more meaningful way. (Steven Moffat said once that if you read the book and still want to be a writer, you probably will be. I hope he’s right!)

Of course, the book isn’t just personally inspiring in that way. It’s also a really great look at Russell T Davies’ writing process; how he approaches the scripts, the way he thinks about them, what he thinks is important. There’s a huge amount of it that’s instinctual; there’s an anecdote in there about Utopia, where Davies explains how he wrote the script in about three days, after weeks of delaying, and it all just slotted into place.

In a way, you can see that in Utopia itself. It moves along at great pace, and structurally, it’s… well, it almost entirely rejects a lot of the traditional structural rules. It’s doing a huge amount of lifting for the rest of the series, establishing lots of different ideas and concepts that are going to come into play for the next few episodes. It’s a collision of different set pieces and ideas, a lot of which don’t necessarily mesh together very well – one of the more obvious ones is the fact that, to introduce the Doctor’s hand, Martha needs to have been nosing around in Jack’s bag for some reason! Yet at the same time, they’re all remarkably well put together – every little detail is paid off down the line. One of the things that stood out to me, for example, was the introduction of the livewire used early on in one of Jack’s deaths, before using it again as the Master kills Chantho; it’s a subtle detail, but it really ties the piece together.

All of which is to say that I think Utopia is remarkable in displaying one of Russell T Davies’ greatest abilities as a writer – making it up as he goes along, improvising the hell out of it, and making it all work brilliantly. In a way it’s because he’s never really cared about simple plot mechanics; a lot of the reason why this hangs together so well is because of his attention to character and to theme. An episode like Utopia works so well in part because of its panache and its confidence – there’s a sheer, effortless skill on display here.

Utopia isn’t Davies’ best episode; it’s not my favourite of his episodes. It’s not even my favourite of this series, to be honest. But I think it might the one that I would point to were I to try and explain why I think he’s such a good writer.

Of course, that’s a remarkably ‘me’ opening to write, focusing as it does on the script of the episode (and, characteristically, fawning over Russell T Davies). So I think it’s also worth focusing on another aspect of the episode, which is something I wouldn’t necessarily comment on – the direction. Utopia, of course, is directed by Graeme Harper – you can tell from his signature ‘shot through blurry thing’ trademark, and you can probably also tell from my description of such how poor I am at discussing visuals. Nonetheless, though, Harper is oft regarded as one of the best directors to have worked on Doctor Who, alongside the likes of Nick Hurran and Rachel Talalay; while I’m not sure this is an episode people would point to as his best, per se, it’s certainly an impressively directed piece.

On an idiosyncratic level, one reason why I really like the direction of Utopia is because it gives us – for my money, anyway – one of the best quarry planets of Doctor Who history. Really! Much as I know it is just a quarry at night, there’s a certain bleakness to it; it comes, I think, from just how dark it is. There’s a real feeling here that every light in the sky has gone out, and this is the end; it’s perhaps the most nihilistic night sky ever put to screen. The setting has a certain power to it, then, and it comes from how well directed these scenes are. This makes for a nice contrast against the refugee camps at the silo – that juxtaposition there, from the emptiness to the scenes bustling with life, really sells those lines about the human race being “indomitable”.

Another aspect of the episode that demonstrates how well directed it is is the mounting tension throughout. That can be quite difficult to pull off, really – and I suspect it might have been made more difficult given the less traditional style of Davies’ build up to the climax of the episode. But Harper acquits himself admirably – as you’d expect – and as such the episode is quite an effectively made, taut piece. There are some excellent chase scenes early on in the episode, but beyond that it’s a real master of tone; the confidence of Davies’ script can be seen translated to a similar confidence in the direction, with an easy, even effortless, conviction in how to handle each scene. There’s something quite alluring about that, and it gives the episode even greater strength as a drama.

Of course, Utopia is one of those episodes where the cliffhanger entirely overshadows the rest of the episode – this is known as the one where the Master comes back.

It’s probably worth questioning, given that this is in part a personal history of my relationship with Doctor Who, whether or not I knew the Master was coming back. After all, every analysis of this episode – and indeed this series – basically works from the assumption that the entirety of the audience was, to some extent, aware the Master was coming back. That’s just what you do after the Daleks and the Cybermen, right? The surprise wasn’t his return, it’s the fact that he came back as Tony Blair. But then, those analyses are all written from the perspective of the fan audience – the type of person I am now, I suppose, who pays deeper attention to clues and foreshadowing and knows about the classic series. (Series 10 is totally going to bring back Susan. Obviously.) What would it have looked like to an 8-year-old obsessive?

Well, sadly this is one area where my memory is somewhat shakey. I would have known who the Master was at that point; I also remember an article from Doctor Who Adventures magazine hinting at a possible return from a Time Lord. I suspect that I would have cottoned on to who Yana was just before the actual reveal, or been left reeling after the line itself; it was probably quite an effective twist. Hmm.

Even so, Professor Yana is actually a pretty great character, and in a way provides an apt microcosm of just what makes the Master work at his best. Here, he’s a direct parallel to the Doctor – the kindly and self-sacrificing scientist, a genius trying to help others, even with his own companion in Chantho. The idea continues with John Simm’s portrayal, of course; the Master as a twisted mirror of the Doctor, specifically paired to that incarnation of the Doctor. (It’s why Missy works so well alongside the Twelfth Doctor – she’s a Master firmly for that Doctor – and why it’ll be so interesting to see the Twelfth Doctor alongside a Master who, in effect, ‘belongs’ to a prior incarnation.)

Ultimately, then, Utopia is a great piece of television. I’ve always loved this episode, really – I suspect I would have rewatched it far more often than the two episodes that accompany it. Hence the score I’m giving it – totally and utterly undeserved, really, apart from in the sense of my own personal enjoyment, and indeed deep respect for it. But what can I say? All these numbers are quite subjective anyway.

10/10

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Ten Years of the Tenth Doctor: 42

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May 19, 2017July 14, 2018 ~ alexmoreland ~ Leave a comment

Burn with me

I wonder if this is how it felt to watch The Empty Child back in 2009. I suspect not, admittedly, because The Empty Child was quite a bit better than 42.

It is somewhat similar, though – because, much like The Empty Child, 42 is an episode that’s taken on a lot more significance because it marks the Doctor Who debut of our next showrunner – Chris Chibnall. At this point, he’d already written a lot of Torchwood’s first two seasons, and was, functionally speaking, the showrunner over on Torchwood anyway. It’s that that got him the Doctor Who gig, essentially. I’m hoping, across the next few months – and certainly in the lead up to Chibnall’s first series of Doctor Who – to take a look through Chibnall’s back catalogue of Doctor Who, Torchwood, Broadchurch, and even Law and Order: UK, in an attempt to try and discern what Chibnall’s time as Doctor Who showrunner might be like.

For now, though, we’ve got 42. Admittedly, it’s not an amazing debut – certainly, it’s not The Empty Child. The benefit of hindsight means we know, of course, that Chibnall can and will do better, so this isn’t the end of the world – and even then, there’s something a little unfair about judging someone so harshly on a script that’s over a decade old. Indeed, a lot of the complaints I’d make about this episode (and will, in a moment) are ones that I know Chibnall can do better with – indeed, what’s lacking here proves to be amongst his best strengths on Broadchurch.

But even so, there’s something a bit disappointing about this script. I think it was Elizabeth Sandifer who pointed this out, though I’m sure lots of other people commented on it too – this is an episode that promises to offer a 24 pastiche by way of Douglas Adams, and then fails to live up to that potential. When it comes to that sort of possibility, to fail to meet it – well, there were times when I almost felt like they should have cut out all the references to the time and just renamed the episode The Fall of the Pentallion or something suitably mundane.

It’s competent and entirely average in terms of its quality. There’s not exactly any particular spark to this episode, nor any particularly interesting concepts (or, perhaps more accurately, no well utilised interesting concepts). And, I must admit, that’s my chief fear about the Chibnall era of Doctor Who – that what we’re going to get will be just about average, rather than anything special.

Still, though – that’s over a year to go at this point. For now, let’s focus on 2007 again.

The big thing I want to talk about is the real-time conceit. Is it particularly unfair to say it doesn’t work?

42 should have been the tensest episode of Doctor Who ever – by all rights, that’s the only way it can actually work. We need to feel the countdown with every passing moment; all the circumlocution and digression can’t just feel like standard ambling Doctor Who – it need to be deeply distressing, because they’re running out of time. That moment when Martha’s mum is struggling to plug in the mouse USB shouldn’t be annoying, it should be terrifying! The classic Doctor Who angle of making the mundane frightening – having to flip over the USB several times to make it fit the computer becomes the scariest thing in the world when every second counts! Right?

Well, no. It just doesn’t work. The real-time conceit is ultimately just a piece of throwaway fluff; you could edit out the few lines of dialogue that reference it and the occasional shot of the countdown clock and the episode would be entirely unchanged. It doesn’t use the concept of a real-time episode particularly well – in the end, it’s just a bit of set dressing, and very little more.

Admittedly, I’m not sure how to fix it. One of the big things that would have helped, actually, would have been a timer on screen – not so dissimilar to how Mummy on the Orient Express did a countdown for the Foretold attacks. The cuts to the countdown clock at random intervals are too disconnected, too divorced from the actual episode itself for them to work – and I’m not actually convinced they match up in real time anyway. Having an actual timer on screen would, if nothing else, really emphasise just how much time they had left – and stop it from feeling like just any old episode.

But then, there’s actually more to it than that, because 42 is written like it’s just any old episode. It’s paced as though they’ve got the same amount of time as usual; the characters aren’t really responding to how little time they have left. 42 should have been much more frenetic, and broken the characters up a bit more. It’s actually a real problem that we never got much sense of the geography of the place, and how easy it is to run from one area to another – how big is the ship? It should get to the point where the Doctor can’t just run to the medbay to help out there, because he doesn’t have enough time – that’s an interesting idea to create some tension, surely?

Unfortunately, though, it just doesn’t work. The episode isn’t terribly stunted for it, but it certainly isn’t as successful as it could have been for not fulfilling this potential.

Functionally, 42 takes the shape and format of a base under siege episode – and these are the sorts of episodes that live or die on the basis of their supporting cast. Which begs the question: is the supporting cast of 42 actually any good?

Well, um, no.

That’s largely down to Chris Chibnall’s writing, though – there’s not much of an attempt to particularly flesh these characters out. Some fare better than others, obviously; Kath and Riley, by virtue of being the ones that the Doctor and Martha play off of, get a bit more depth. Riley is interesting, actually, by virtue of being something of a romantic interest for Martha… which feels unearned, admittedly, and is only going to stick out like a sore thumb later on given that Martha’s interest in the Doctor is maintained.

On which note – the Doctor is a little insufferable in these episodes too, isn’t he? Well, I say a little, I mean a lot. I’m beginning to understand, in a very immediate way, why people don’t like the Tenth Doctor. I think it’s diminishing my enjoyment of the series, to be honest – and even just from my recollection of what’s coming over the next few weeks, I’m concerned about how much worse it’s going to get.

This feels like a bit of a stunted review. My own fault, admittedly; last week I was in a rush to finish it before going out in the evening, before realising I had an extra week because of Eurovision. And now, tonight, with a few more paragraphs to go, I’m finding myself largely out of things to say.

Perhaps that’s just indicative of the episode itself though. Perfectly functional, entirely competent… difficult to get much analysis from. I suspect that’s why it’s easy to criticise this episode, and indeed why I did – because the things it is good at are things that are difficult to write about extensively. It’s easy, though, to criticise the episode, even if that is essentially for being something that it’s not.

Certainly, it’s worth noting, if nothing else, that I did enjoy it. It’s perhaps unfair to ask more of the episode – but if we’re looking forward to years of “enjoyable Chibnall episodes that are difficult to write lots of words about”, this blog is in trouble!

6/10

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Doctor Who: Looking back on Doomsday, the Doctor, and Rose Tyler

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July 9, 2016July 17, 2018 ~ alexmoreland ~ Leave a comment

Inspired by Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, and wanting to provide a cataclysmic event that would keep the Doctor and Rose apart forever, Russell T Davies decided to leave Rose trapped in a parallel universe that the Doctor could never revisit.

Doomsday, then, saw the culmination of a two-year plot arc, and it is heartbreaking. All of us in the audience had watched these two characters travel together, and grow together, ever since the show returned; it was with the Tenth Doctor that we really saw the depth of feeling these two characters had for each other. Notably, however, their feelings had never really been expressed to one another on screen before; though we all talk about the epic love story between the Doctor and Rose, it’s actually far subtler and much more understated than that.

Expanding somewhat on my recent review, I’ve written a Yahoo article about Doomsday, talking about the Doctor and Rose’s relationship, the bond the two shared, and that final scene where they’re ripped apart forever. It’s great stuff, really; rewatching these episodes, I was quite keenly reminded of just how much I love Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who work.

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Ten Years of the Tenth Doctor: Doomsday

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July 8, 2016July 17, 2018 ~ alexmoreland ~ Leave a comment

Same old life. Last of the Time Lords.

There are some things which are pretty self-evident about Doctor Who, when it comes down to it. Ideas which, as soon as they’ve been brought up, practically beg to be incorporated into the show – in fact, not just beg, but need to be used. Of course the Time Lords would be the ultimate villains of the Time War (I’m getting ahead of myself there, though). Of course the Doctor is friends with all these different historical figures.

Of course the Cybermen and the Daleks should meet.

And of course they should fight each other.

Russell T Davies once described it as sounding like “bad fan-fiction” and… on the one hand, I can sort of understand what he means. There’s something very gratuitous about it; when you think about it, there’s not really any reason for the Daleks and the Cybermen to meet one another outside of the fact that they’re the two famous Doctor Who monsters. If it was any other pairing, it wouldn’t quite have the same weight (although I look forward to the eventual Ice Warriors vs Sontarans story).

Yet, at the same time, that’s exactly why it appeals – the reason why it has that fanfiction attraction. The sheer insanity it symbolises, to finally bring these two together; that’s fantastic, to steal from the Ninth Doctor. With this story, Davies is quite literally bringing to life the imagination of every fan. There’s something about Doomsday that consistently goes further, time and time again, to properly realise everything that we’ve always held in our heads; even Verity Lambert herself highlighted the spectacle of seeing the Daleks swarming across London in their thousands. In a way, there’s something quite special about that.

In many ways, I think Doomsday contains what I would consider to be the archetypical depiction of Daleks – cruel, scheming, and full of hate. Brimming with evil, and genuinely quite deadly. And yet, at the same time… just a little bit snarky. A cruel edge of sarcasm and smug superiority. For me, this is the definitive image of the Daleks – likely because, thinking about it, this would have been my first proper Dalek story. All others have been measured against this one.

And it’s rather impressive for a Dalek story, isn’t it? I’m very fond of the Cult of Skaro in particular, actually; they’re a brilliantly innovative concept. They do the wonderful trick of elevating the Daleks from monsters to villains – in this story and subsequent ones, that is, and I don’t mean to suggest it’s never been done before – which helps to make the interactions between Doctor and Daleks far more nuanced, and indeed far more compelling to watch.

There’s a lot else to like in this episode, of course; I’m going to take some time to highlight those things, because I don’t want to let the drashig in the room overshadow the rest of what makes this episode such a great piece of television – the final ten minutes are great, and they are iconic, but the rest of it is pretty damn brilliant too.

I always comment on Russell T Davies’ character work, because I do think it’s his chief strength as a writer; I’m going to be talking about that a lot in a moment, specifically in terms of the Doctor and Rose, but I think it’s worth taking a moment to look at all the other impressive character moments that are on display in this episode.

Principally, you’ve got Jackie and Pete; just as much as this is the ending of Rose’s story, it’s also the ending of their story. It’s nice, then, to be able to see the pair of them finally reaching a sort of happy ending together – it goes to show you just how effectively Doomsday acts as a series finale not just to the second series of Doctor Who, but also to the past two years of the program.

We also get the opportunity to see Mickey in hero mode; after Rise of the Cybermen and Age of Steel, he’d completed his hero’s journey, and now we’re looking at the end result. It’s fascinating to compare the Mickey we see here – self-assured, confident, and the “bravest human” Rose had ever known – to the jumpy, frightened young man of Rose. It’s a testament to those involved, then, that this evolution feels earned; you can understand the journey, and you can understand why Mickey is who he is now. (Incidentally, I’ve gained a lot of respect for Noel Clarke over the past few weeks, simply because I’ve found out a lot more about the rest of his career. He seems to do a lot of interesting things; definitely going to have to search out his Hood movies and watch those.)

Similarly, Rose’s own hero’s journey comes to a fore this week; she stares down the Daleks, she makes the final sacrifice, and she chooses Doctor-life over any other. Over on Pete’s World, she becomes a ‘defender of the Earth’ – the Doctor for a world that doesn’t have one. It really is very reminiscent of the journey that Clara went on; I know a lot of people draw parallels between Clara and Donna, but I definitely feel like Clara and Rose have a lot in common with one another.

One final aspect worth commenting on, though, before moving on to the main event: Yvonne Hartman. I mentioned last week how impressive I found her character – and now, this week, we get to see her tragic downfall. At the same time, though, there was something of a triumph to her tragedy; Yvonne is the only character we’ve seen with a resolve strong enough to resist the Cyber conditioning. It’s perhaps ironic that she gets her only ‘moral’ moment of the two-parter when she’s been converted; a parallel, maybe, with how Torchwood was always appropriating alien technology for its own benefit. Even in death, Yvonne is still doing what she’s always done.

(And I bloody love that single, solitary tear. It’s one of those defining Doctor Who images which has always stayed with me.)

Of course, there’s only really one thing that Doomsday is known for. That scene. Possibly one of the most iconic scenes of Davies’ Who, if not the entirety of Nu-Who as a whole. It is quite the scene.

For a Yahoo article a while ago, I wrote this about the scene:

It’s the culmination of a two-year plot arc, and it is heartbreaking. All of us in the audience have watched these two characters travel together, and grow together, ever since the show returned; it was with the Tenth Doctor that we really saw the depth of feeling these two characters had for each other. And yet, in the end, the Doctor and Rose were ripped apart from each – it was cruel, it was unforgettable, and it was wonderfully written by the fantastic Russell T Davies.

And, you know, that’s completely right. But it’s also a huge oversimplification of what’s really going on in the scene; that, admittedly, was because I was writing it largely from memory, without a proper understanding of the context of the scene.

It’s not just about seeing the depth of feeling this two characters have for each other – it’s the moment when they finally admit to each other how they feel. Because so far, they haven’t; I’ve pointed out over my previous reviews that the love story between the Doctor and Rose is, in fact, quite subtle. They weren’t ever really in a relationship together; it was never anything that complicated, or that mundane. It was just the Doctor and Rose, in the TARDIS. As it should be.

But that’s what really emphasises the tragedy of this moment – there was a sort of purity to it, because it was the first time that the pair of them expressed these feelings. The first time they chose to, because it was the last time they could. Which serves only to heighten the sheer cruelty of “Rose Tyler, -”, in the end – we know what he was going to say, but it’s just not fair that he didn’t get to say it. (All the more frustrating, really, that the pair of them wasted time on little small talk; in a way, though, that makes the moment all the more effective. These two inarticulate idiots, dancing around their feelings – and, in the end, denied even that one final moment together.)

Tennant and Piper are, frankly, perfect here. I’m inclined to say that Billie Piper does better here even than in Father’s Day, with her grief open and raw. Similarly, Tennant does an impressive job of just barely holding it together – wonderfully delivering the Doctor’s ever so slightly dismissive jokes, he really conveys quite how sad the Doctor is. It’s a poignant moment, and I must admit that it had me on the edge of tears. Russell T Davies really managed something special here, it has to be said.

Ultimately, Doomsday is a brilliant episode of Doctor Who. It’s a fitting resolution to the second series of Doctor Who, a wonderful ending to Rose Tyler’s story – and most importantly of all, it’s got a clever hook for the start of next year.

9/10

(This time next week, there will be an overall series review & retrospective, and the following week there’s going to be a general analysis on the Tenth Doctor in his first year.)

Related:

Ten Years of the Tenth Doctor Reviews

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