The Fires of Pompeii

Chapter The 236th, wherein we see the events of volcano day. 

Plot:

The Doctor and Donna arrive in Pompeii in 79 AD on the day before Vesuvius erupts. The TARDIS is bought as a piece of modern art by local marble vendor Caecilius; tracking it down to make their escape, the time travellers meet Caecilius and his family at their villa, and realise something is very wrong. Many people in Pompeii have precise precognitive powers acquired from breathing in the volcano vapours coming out of Pompeii's hypocausts, and this is turning them to stone. Nobody, though, can foresee the events of the next day, almost as if it is blocked from their view. Aliens called Pyroviles, giants made of magma and rock, live in the volcano after having crash landed many years before. An earthquake 17 years earlier woke them up, and since then they have been influencing anyone with latent psychic ability. The family and the Doctor defeat a Pyrovile that attacks the villa by throwing buckets of water over it, but a local Sibylline sisterhood kidnap Donna in the confusion. The Doctor rescues her, and they both use an entrance in the sisterhood's temple to descend into the volcano. They find a local bigwig Lucius delivering a stone circuit board that he commissioned Caecilius to complete. It is an energy converter that will use the power from Vesuvius to convert all the humans on the planet into Pyroviles, meaning the volcano will never erupt. The Doctor has to make the eruption happen and kill all the residents in order to save the rest of the world and correct history. He and Donna escape in the TARDIS, but Donna persuades him to go back and save just Caecilius and his family, who in gratitude adopt the TARDIS crew as their household gods.

Context:

This story came up randomly a little while ago, but I held it back until now to tie in with the publishing of the Target novelisation (see Deeper Thoughts section for more details). I first thought I'd watch it late in the evening on the hottest day of the year in the UK so far, July 19th 2022; unable to sleep for the third night running, I was looking for something to distract me. It is after all an apposite if unnerving watch when the ambient temperature is high. I remembered, though, that the children - who were all in bed by then - had expressed an interest a few days earlier in watching a Doctor Who story, so I held off. The following Sunday afternoon, I watched the story from the disc in the Complete Fourth Series DVD box set accompanied by all three children (boys of 16 and 12, girl of 10). All of them were surprised to see Peter Capaldi appear as Caecilius - "It's two Doctors in one!" said the middle child, who I later had to show the clip from Capaldi era story The Girl Who Died as he was intrigued to see the explanation of why the Doctor models a regeneration on this Pompeiian he once met. This child, who's the most like his Dad in terms of enthusiasm for genre TV and propensity for binge watching, mentioned in passing that Loki had done Pompeii too (and encouraged me for the nth time to watch said series on Disney+). When the Doctor was facing his cruel decision, I asked all the children of what this was an example, and they all chorused "The Trolley problem!" like the good moral philosophers that they are.

First Time Round:

I watched this go out live on its BBC1 debut broadcast in the UK on 12th April 2008, accompanied by the Better Half and my - at the time - only child (a boy of nearly two years old then). The show was on a little earlier on Saturday nights that year, so the boy was still up, and we'd tried a tentative experiment the previous week with the Adipose story. He'd responded well to that one, but when giant magma monsters growled through the TV screen at him, he burst into tears. We knocked such family watches on the head at that point, and didn't try again until he (and each of his two siblings who came along later) was much older. At the time, I was a lowly UK screenwriter and screenwriting blogger and vaguely 'knew' the writer James Moran as a fellow blogger. I don't know if he ever saw it but in a post a few months later talking about this first watch of The Fires of Pompeii, I wrote "Who do you think you are scaring my innocent child, Mr. Moran?". This was not actually a criticism, but a very obscure Doctor Who reference, to an article by a journo called Jean Rook in the Daily Express in the 1970s that took pot shots at Robert Holmes, script editor and writer and genius. Essentially, I was saying that Moran was in exalted company. So febrile was the online debate at that time that I felt I had to add a disclaimer in the post explaining this, else someone might think I was having a pop at him. As I've mentioned on the blog before, there was a lot of negativity in his comments section after his Doctor Who story went out, and I didn't want to add to that. It was nothing, though, to the ire that was unleashed by the unthinking the following year, when Moran's co-written episode of Torchwood killed off a well-loved character. I've only seen positivity online about his latest foray into the worlds of Doctor Who, this time in prose form (see Deeper Thoughts section below), so maybe things have improved in the last 13 years. Maybe.

Reaction:

In the 1970s Tom Baker story Pyramids of Mars, which is set in 1911, companion Sarah Jane Smith asks one of those key questions on behalf of the audience that companions are put there to ask: why can't she and the Doctor just leave rather than defeating the baddie of the week (Sutekh), as they know that the world doesn't end in 1911? A sequence then follows where the Doctor takes her to the future as it will look if they don't defeat Sutekh, and it's a barren wasteland. This little bit of ironing, pressing out the wrinkle of why it's okay for the Doctor to interfere sometimes but not others (usually because naughty aliens have been playing fast and loose with established history), what's "meant to be" and what's in flux, is one that Russell T Davies, the showrunner of the first few years of twenty-first century Who including The Fires of Pompeii, wanted to emulate. There was a desire to include a Pyramids of Mars style scene as early as the third story (the first one set in the past), but they couldn't quite make it fit. I'm glad they didn't, as in the end they - whether they realised they'd done it or not - commissioned James Moran to make a whole story out of that question, and it's a cracker. Consider the climactic sequences: the painful decision the Doctor has to make, with Donna with him so he doesn't have to face the decision alone, the dark spectacle of the recreation of Pompeii's final moments, and the emotional moment that Donna, in floods of tears, persuades the Doctor to go back and save someone, anyone; seeing these, you might be fooled into thinking this was a season finale but it's just episode two of thirteen. It was a very strong run, Donna and the Doctor's adventures from 2008, and this story is one of the best of them.

In the style of a comedy like Blackadder, the story makes the past more immediate by including characters (the family) that behave in a modern way within a historical setting. It's quite broad and sit-com with its "Don't tell my Dad" and "You're not going out wearing that" and so on, but it works. This relies a lot on the individual performances, and the casting here is exemplary. There's a lot of plot crammed in to the approximately 45 minutes of action, and this leaves little time for everyone to shine, so getting the right actors to have an immediate screen impact - and make you care at the end when their characters face death - was crucial. It means one's left wanting more, though. Capaldi is great as Caecilius, as are all the members of the family; they could power an entire series of knockabout Roman adventures (I love the Mary Poppins homage where they have a standard family procedure to catch any valuable ornaments when the volcano rumbles, "Positions!"), but they only get a short amount of screen time when one adds it all up. Capladi and another member of the cast (Karen Gillan as a soothsayer) got to come back in major starring roles, of course; but it would be nice to find another role in Doctor Who in future for each of the Phils, Cornwall and Davis, as they essentially have cameos here. For Phil Davis this is a particular shame; Lucius Petrus Dextrus (a bit of a spoiler if, unlike me, you were taught Latin, as it means Lucius Stone Arm) is the nominal baddie of the piece, and Davis talks a good baddie game, but there isn't room for him to do very much - he serves the plot only by delivering a MacGuffin to the real villains. The scene where Davis, and the daughter of the family, ominously reveal that they know all about the Doctor and Donna's real identities is very good, mind.

The visuals of the story are excellent throughout. Monsters made of stone and fire hadn't been done before (at least in the new series era - if they had turned out to be the Krargs from Shada, finally appearing in the series properly, that would have been nice), and the CGI works well enough (it was certainly realistic enough to scare my infant son - see above). Utilising the sets from another Ancient Rome based series in the Cinecitta studios in Italy gives the story an expensive sense of scale, and the location work matches this high standard. Murray Gold's music is nice, if not particularly memorable, and the dialogue is good. The comedy quotient in the script is larger than usual, even for this era. This can vary in groansomeness (maybe it's just me, but Donna's idea about where Pompeiian teens go shopping "T K Maxximus" is a very fine gag; the Doctor asking the Pyroviles not to get themselves "in a lava", not so much, and Caecilius thinking that San Francisco is a restaurant in Naples is somewhere in the middle) but most jokes land. There's also the running gag that the TARDIS translation of talking in Latin to Latin speakers comes out sounding Welsh, and the Doctor wielding a water pistol like James Bond. It is just balanced enough not to impact on the more serious musing on the central moral quandary when that needs to come to the fore. Ultimately, that's what the story is all about. A minor gripe about the more serious stuff would be that - after a big build up to the crucial explosive moment where the Doctor and Donna push the lever that makes the volcano erupt - they escape somewhat conveniently, with the object that they are in turning out to be an escape pod that throws them exactly the right distance clear such that they can outrun the lava and get back to the TARDIS. I'll forgive this, though, as there are greater horrors to come for them because they survive, and then ultimately some small moment of redemption.

Connectivity: 

Aside from them both being recently published as books (see Deeper Thoughts section), The Fires of Pompeii and The Stones of Blood each have mention of ancient gods or goddesses, a group of robed worshippers and creatures made of stone. The plot in each instance hinges on a backstory where a spaceship arrived on Earth thousands of years previously.

Deeper Thoughts:

Target Acquisition - part 2 of 2. The latest batch of new Doctor Who novelisations on the resurrected Target imprint were published recently. These four books group neatly into two pairs, and not just because the first two (covered in the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post) are classic Who stories, and the two I will cover here are post-2005. The first two were both by the same author, David Fisher, and both featured in the Key to Time Tom Baker series in the late 70s. This second two are both (presumably coincidentally rather than by design) set within the imperial era of ancient Rome. Whereas Fisher was encouraged to create alternative versions that meant removing things as much as adding, for these latter two - each based on a single episode story of around 45 minutes running time (so about half the length of the 1970s tales) - it's the addition of material that is more the challenge. As we'll see, mind you, even though they are more expanded than alternate versions, there is still some material as broadcast missing from these latest two. With these additions and deletions, and with tweaks to tone and emphasis, you can get a very different adventure (in the case of The Eaters of Light) but I'd still say overall that this brace are more faithful. I think I prefer a faithful approach. Obviously with any new series Doctor Who episode available at the touch of a button, a novelisation isn't required as historical record or aide memoire, but there's a risk in straying too far that you lose what's good from the TV version. Fisher, for example, dispenses with the renowned kiss-off line from The Androids of Tara's villain Count Grendel "Next time I shall not be so lenient!" I love that line, and I'm not the only one; the story feels incomplete without it. No such liberties are taken by James Moran in his new prose version of The Fires of Pompeii.

Of the four, Moran's book is the most like an old school Target novelisation of the 1970s and 80s. He expands out the narrative with moments of backstory and internal monologue of Donna - whose voice he captures particularly well - and the guest characters, adding the odd moment or new piece of dialogue to smooth things out for the new medium, but with no major new or altered scenes. The dialogue from the original TV version is almost 100% intact (Moran only removes some references to the arc plots of 2008 like Rose returning to our universe, and Donna having something on her back). The original story goes at such a break-neck pace that this extra material here and there on the fly doesn't create too much drag, and the story is still brisk and engaging. Moran keeps the humour mostly in the dialogue; in a recent interview in Doctor Who Magazine, he cited Douglas Adams as a hero and The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel as an early fave, but there's no attempt to emulate Adams's descriptive style (unlike at least one author novelising classic Doctor Who stories for Target in the 1980s) and it's all the better for that. The minor issues I mentioned above about the story are still present; Lucius is more rounded on the page, but he still contributes very little, and the Doctor and Donna still get very lucky in escaping the volcano when it goes boom, even though there's a tiny bit of prose sticking plaster over it. They are really minor, though, and far outweighed by the great material all around. What I suspect might have been the most challenging section, expressing the explosive visuals where ash and terror are raining down on Pompeii, is even better on the page. This reader must have had a little volcanic ash in his eyes or something, as those eyes were a bit wet whilst reading the sequence where the family huddle together and talk to one another while they wait for the inevitable.

Moran clearly is comfortable with the somewhat flippant style of humour that was the house style of Doctor Who in 2008; based on the book of The Eaters of Light, it's likely that Rona Munro is not so wedded to the equally flippant humour of the show under a different showrunner in 2017. Though the basic story is the same as on TV (see the blog post here for more details), the dialogue of Munro's novel is a page one rewrite; gone are quips about the Doctor being a vestal virgin and the like, and the subject matter is taken much more seriously, though not over-seriously. Unlike Moran's packed story, the plot of The Eaters of Light is much more slight. It is propelled by details of characterisation and backstory, references to the immediate events of a battle that happened just before the aftermath we are shown, but what then takes place is very simple - two groups of enemies have to come together, helped by the Doctor and his friends, to defeat the alien threat. The structure of the novel is to split these actions in the 'present' in twain to form sub-books one and three, then insert between them a book two section that flashes back and introduces the key characters from each of the two warring factions, Kar (on the Pict side) and Lucius (on the Roman side), explain how they came to be in this battle, and show the battle itself. There is skillful work to round out these characters and show that the two groups are not so different as they appear, both having lost people they love in the battle.

Apart from this major addition, Munro also expands out the simple televisual moment when Kar chases Bill and she falls down a hole into the Roman's hide-out to include a ceremonial bull chase and an underwater sequence that would have busted the series budget. A couple of things that are removed are a bit more of a wrench. As in the other book, scenes from the TV series arc plot would have got in the way and not been adequately resolved, so they have to be removed. Thus the beautiful moment where the villainous Missy sheds a tear on hearing the music echoing through the ages near the site of the cairn is sadly gone. Also missed by this reader is a scene that stood out on the telly where Bill is shocked to find in her conversations with the Roman survivors that the sexual mores of her time are not necessarily more enlightened than theirs. As a key part of Lucius's story is the love he has for his fallen comrade Sextus, it would have seemed out of place to still include a more light-hearted reference to his homosexuality. Bill doesn't have quite as prominent a role in the book, as her interactions with the Romans are generally simplified to focus only on listening to Lucius telling his story. Overall, despite the changes, this is a superb book, and builds on a story that on television was solid but a little slight. I'd recommend both of these titles, if you haven't picked them up yet. The Eaters of Light is probably the better book, but The Fires of Pompeii is the better novelisation, and both are interesting retellings of new Who stories.

In Summary:

The Fires of Pompeii is so hot right now.