Smith and Jones

Chapter The 182nd, where Martha loves the Doctor to the moon and back. Unrequitedly.

Plot:

Present day. Medical student Martha Jones goes to work at a London hospital while fielding multiple calls from her family about her brother's party that evening. A strange thin bloke in a long coat wearing sand shoes steps in her way on route and says something about his tie. When she arrives at the hospital for work, the strange bloke with the sandshoes is a patient, John Smith (actually the Doctor, but you knew that); he claims not to have been out of bed when Martha saw him that morning. Then, the rain falling around the hospital starts moving upwards and the whole building is transported to the moon, neutral territory where a group of rhino-faced alien police for hire, the Judoon, can search the hospital for an intergalactic criminal who's in hiding. This criminal is a Plasmavore, who is posing as a patient, a harmless looking old lady called Florence Finnegan. The Judoon are scanning everyone for non-human physiology, but as Florence has drained and assimilated the blood of a senior consultant, she registers as human. This leaves the Doctor in a difficult position as the only alien on the moon.

Avoiding capture by the Judoon, the Doctor and Martha track down Florence, who is upgrading an MRI machine into a weapon of mass destruction. The Doctor tricks her into draining his blood, meaning when the Judoon find her, and - at Martha's insistence - scan her again, she shows up as an alien and is executed. The Judoon troop off, not dealing with the out of control MRI machine or the lack of remaining air. Martha revives the Doctor with her medical training, and he stops the MRI. As everyone starts to collapse from lack of oxygen, the Judoon reverse the process and the hospital is returned to its original position back on Earth. Later, Martha leaves her brother's party to see the Doctor outside, standing next to a police box. He explains to Martha that it's a time machine, and pops back into her timeline and shows her his tie to demonstrate. Persuaded, she joins him for a trip...

Context:

Watched on a recent Sunday afternoon from the DVD accompanied by the whole family (Better Half, and three kids - boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8). Everyone stayed for the duration and watched intently without a peep. The story clearly held everyone's attention, young and old, as it was built to do. This means I have no amusing sarky comments to reproduce here, alas. Later in the week, the Better Half and I were prompted by this watch to discuss Tennant, and how during this period he had a performance tic of gritting his teeth a lot to demonstrate anger, defiance, frustration, you name it, but he doesn't really display that in Smith and Jones, and he's got over this habit in more recent years. So, essentially, we can't fault this story (try as we might!).

First time round:

I first saw this on its debut BBC1 broadcast on the 31st March 2007. I was taking a brief career break from the day job to work on screenwriting at that time, so was probably more relaxed and energised through not having to do the punishing commute to London every day. A few months later, I would return to that routine. This was necessitated by my not having a laptop with which to work from home, as that was something still very new, culturally and technically, in 2007. Later in that year I would get my first work laptop, which I had to share with other people on the team, as there were only a couple to go round. It's worthwhile to remember these details when considering the Doctor Who of the time. In some ways, it feels like David Tennant stopped playing the Doctor very recently, but Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the UK when Smith and Jones was broadcast. I noticed that some of the CGI work of the hospital on the moon was a bit ropey, but I have to cut the story some slack: there were barely smartphones or broadband in 2007, and working at home with a laptop was seen as the futuristic bleeding edge. The gap between then and now is the same as comparing the production values of a William Hartnell story like The Gunfighters to a late Tom Baker one such as The Leisure Hive.

In a break from the recent tradition, Doctor Who's new series was being shown the week before Easter in 2007 rather than launching on Easter weekend itself. Nonetheless, we had people staying over at our place in Hove. The family at the time consisted only of myself, the BH and the eldest (who was not yet a year old at the time). We were joined by a few people mentioned many times before on the blog, Phil, Alex and Rachel. I was, even by my standards, inordinately excited. I showed everyone a red button extra on freeview of a long season trailer, which had some tantalising glimpses from later episodes in the run, and all day Phil and I, before the others arrived, had done a marathon watch of one story per Doctor from 1 to 9 to build up to the broadcast. The story was as generally crowd-pleasing for our 2007 group as it was for the family's latest watch. 

Reaction:

The end of Smith and Jones is a lovely example of action adventure writing, with multiple elements that have been established during the story coming together to create an climax of escalating obstacles - the Plasmavore is defeated and the Judoon are leaving the moon because of the Doctor's cleverness but it's left him almost dead; Martha revives the Doctor, but the hospital's MRI machine has been set to overload threatening the Earth; he manages to avert this and the Judoon take off, but the hospital is still on the moon and everyone in it is running out of air. Setting up all these elements - all of them fun and wonderfully realised, and I'll talk about them individually in a moment - and having them interact and play out satisfactorily to this conclusion would be more than enough to keep the audience delighted, but author of the story Russell T Davies also finds time in 45 minutes to establish a new companion and their family, and reiterates the format of the show for anyone tuning in for the first time. At no time, though, does the action seem too rushed or the elements too bitty and not coherent. Writing Doctor Who is a very specific skill, and is quite hard to pull off even for a writer Davies's calibre. Having written many episodes, including the series openers, for the last two years, he's clearly getting better at it, as some of the flaws of those earlier stories have been eliminated.

Probably the most enduring creation first showcased in this story are the Judoon. Since Smith and Jones they have become a recurring monster for the series, popping up most recently in a couple of episodes of the 2020 Jodie Whittaker series. They are visually interesting, in a deliberately immediate and obvious fashion: space rhinos! The mask and the facial movement are impeccably done too. Beyond that, they have an interesting motivation as police for hire. They aren't exactly bad guys, just a bit aggressive and heavy-handed. The nearest the series had come to such a monster before was probably the Ogrons, who featured in some Jon Pertwee stories, but they were mercenaries who just fulfilled the role of henchmen, a much more common genre favourite. The Judoon are something different, tapping into the fear - at least for Brits, anyway - of police from another country who have actual guns and follow slightly different rules. In Smith and Jones, a couple of UK character stereotypes you can imagine appearing drunk interacting with the local police in a documentary about Brits in Ibiza or the like - the slightly posh ineffectual man, the hot-head - fall foul of these cops from another galaxy. There's also scope for some nice jokes about bureaucracy, like Martha getting a form to claim compensation for wrongful arrest.

As the main alien monsters aren't exactly baddies, this leaves room for there to be other villains in the piece. The Slabs (solid leather creatures that look like black-helmeted motorcycle couriers) fulfill that Orgon henchmen role admirably - though the joke about them being from Planet Zovirax, based on a TV commercial of the time, has not dated well - but the Big Bad here is Florence the Plasmavore. Another of Doctor Who's many takes on a vampire creature, the script uses the blood-drinking in service of the plot to allow for a couple of reversals where Florence is able to pretend to be something she's not and avoid detection. What raises the role from just being plot device is a magnificent performance from Anne Reid. There's just so many great choices I couldn't list them all, but to pick one, there's the delicate and precise way she lifts her hand up to the light and admires the mark the Judoon has put there meaning she's in the clear. Any actor playing a genre villain in something like Who is treading a fine line, and it's easy to fall into something that is too broad or too camp; Reid walks the line, clearly relishing the challenge, and never strays too far from it. The other main guest star is Roy Marsden, who also does good work in a more thankless role, an element of misdirection. He's supposed to look like an imposing menace in counterpoint to Reid's little old lady, only to be revealed to be the victim. Before he dies, though, he gets a nice little moment looking through a window at the surface of the moon and musing on his life.

Other small roles are done well; the creature performers are excellent, and Tennant is on good form. The weakest link is unfortunately incoming new regular Freema Agyeman. She's a good performer, but just not quite strong enough to take on such an important role. The series had got very lucky with Billie Piper, and the following year would cast an experienced actor in Catherine Tate; the companions in this era are, like it or not, joint leads, and so the person cast has to be capable of carrying the show on their own. Freema is not. It's a shame, as the characterisation is interesting on paper. It might, though, have been hard for any actor to pull it off, as a questionable choice has been made to make the relationship between Martha and the Doctor one of unrequited love on her side, and complete obliviousness of his friend's feelings on his. It doesn't do either character any favours. Without having the time to establish a proper meaningful attraction, her feelings just seem to come out of nowhere. Without a confidant for Martha to talk to the Doctor about, the only way to keep foregrounding her feelings is for her to drop obvious hints to the audience. All told it's not one of the best decisions made during this period, and the pair of them are at their best when it's forgotten about as it mostly is in this first story; when Martha's being a resourceful person helping out the Doctor, auditioning for the companion role, it works. One other thing that you can level at the story is that there's no heft: it isn't tackling any weighty themes, but then that wasn't the intention. Davies always made his series openers light romps, and they're all the better for that.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature an alien race whose members are anthropoid versions of Earth creatures (rhinoceroses in Smith and Jones, scorpions in Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror) and each race's spaceship(s) visit a celestial body nearby to Earth (the moon and Mars respectively). It's a bit of a cheat, but Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror also features Judoon (in the trailer at the end for following story Fugitive of the Judoon).

Deeper Thoughts:

It's a Sin-gular achievement. At the time of writing this, Russell T Davies's latest TV mini-series It's a Sin has just finished its weekly UK broadcast run, and has just launched in the U.S. If you haven't already seen it, I thoroughly recommend giving it a go. The series is still available to stream on All4 (all five episodes landed on that service after the first had been broadcast on Channel 4 and broke all sorts of streaming records). I've watched the whole thing three times now, and I think it is the best thing Davies has ever written. It's a Sin (named after the Pet Shop Boys song) is the story of a group of young people sharing a flat in the 1980s, and how HIV/AIDs tragically impacts their lives. Davies is not a perfect writer, of course; there's no such thing. In previous work there have always been flaws - a tendency to favour emotional logic over real word logic, abrupt and somewhat arbitrary endings - but they are absent here. It's also a historically more important subject than usual (although in the last few years he has covered the dangers of populism, abuses or power, homophobic violence, and done a big Shakespeare adaptation, so he's not exactly been 100% focussing on the frivolous). As ever, Davies's strength lies in creating fun, funny characters and establishing an energetic dynamic between them, before letting the darkness poke through the colourful and happy surface.

He does this though while crucially establishing that the colourful and superficial are equally as important and real as the dark and dramatic. I think this is why some people - a very vocal minority online during his tenure as Who Showrunner and since, but also some more traditional commentators too - don't think his Who stories were any good, as they have this false impression that when things are fun or funny it means they can't also be serious. This may be a knee-jerk defensive reaction to the fact that they are online applying literary criticism to a daft family TV show (and I know I'm one to talk!) or it may be broader than that. It is a common mistake wider than Doctor Who to think dark = important. I can't see any other adequate reason, other than this dislike of a particular tone, for quite the level of criticism of Davies's work when he is demonstrably and incontrovertibly the biggest and most important TV writer to ever work on Doctor Who. I don't think there can be any doubt. Every new project Davies creates is an event, and this was true before and after he worked on Doctor Who. He took a big risk with his career working on the programme, and it paid off for him and for us, but it wasn't something he needed to do. He could have gone on as he was creating big and bold authored series or adaptations like The Second Coming or Casanova, but he took an unprecedented decision in 2003. At that time, it was as if Stephen Poliakoff had stopped writing his own stuff to do a reboot of Terrahawks, or Paul Abbott bringing back Juliet Bravo.

Even though I think it's self-evident that Davies is the biggest and most important TV writer to ever work on Doctor Who, let's look at the competition. The people who script edited and wrote Doctor Who from 1963 to 1989 were very talented and produced some great work for the show, and a few of them (Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks) are heroes to me and a lot of fans. They were, though, journeymen of the established episodic television of the time and outside of fan circles their names would not have been known, and they certainly weren't in a position to have an ongoing career authoring their own material. Terry Nation became a big name after working on the show, but wasn't established before working on it in same way Davies was; Nation was a genre man, so - rightly or wrongly - is seen as less prestigious that those working in the echelon of TV that Davies operates within. Similarly, Douglas Adams was a rising star at this time he worked on Who, but only became famous afterwards, and not for TV. There's plenty of objective evidence to suggest that Adams wasn't very good in a televisual medium. In the new series, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss were doing good work before contributing to Doctor Who, but hardly anyone would have known their name and it wasn't 'above the title'. It wasn't 'Steven Moffat's Coupling', for example. Again, both have subsequently become much more well known since contributing their first scripts to the series.

The only person who is in the same league as Davies is possibly Richard Curtis. His reputation, though, is built on work primarily outside TV. Besides, he only wrote one Doctor Who episode once the relaunched show was a firmly established hit, and, at least in the opinion of this reviewer, it wasn't very good. I think sometimes we fans get too close to our favourite programme and need to step back. Russell T Davies writing Doctor Who in the 21st century is the equivalent of Dennis Potter doing the same in the 20th (side note: it's long been a rumour, but may be apocryphal, that Potter did indeed pitch a story to the Doctor Who production office in the early 1960s). Even if you're not convinced, I do urge you to watch It's a Sin. There's some interest for Doctor Who fans in there. One of the main characters, Richie (played brilliantly by Olly Alexander) is an actor and one scene in the fourth episode shows him filming a Doctor Who story in the late 1980s, vaguely based on Resurrection of the Daleks. This isn't Davies putting in an Easter Egg from his favourite show (as he did with the glimpses of K9 and Pyramids of Mars in Queer As Folk for example), it has a real world resonance. As Davies told the Independent earlier this year, it is a tribute to Dursley McLinden, an actor who appeared in a Doctor Who story with Daleks in the late 1980s, and then sadly died aged 30 of AIDs-related illness. Davies: "He became very wonderful in his AIDS activism when he was ill. But to me, he was that boy from Remembrance of the Daleks. That's why I knew I had to write a Dalek scene in It’s a Sin."

In Summary:

Great fun, if a little lightweight (but everything weighs a bit less on the moon, of course).