Flux

Chapter The 216th, is the biggest chapter to date.

Plot:

[These are the most recent episodes of Doctor Who at the time of writing, so be wary of spoilers from this point on if you haven't seen the shows; there's also a lot of plot to recount.]

Many years ago, some Time Lords including Tecteun - the Doctor's adopted mother who took the Doctor when she was the seemingly abandoned Timeless child - formed the Division. This was a group that slowly came to recruit operatives from all races including Weeping Angels and Ood, who interfered in events in a way that the official Time Lords swear never to do. Early on, they created the Temple of Atropos on the Planet Time to imprison the chaotic and destructive time force that existed back then. Two Ravagers, brother and sister Swarm and Azure, powerful creatures who revere this time force as an anthropomorphised entity, later take over the temple and there is a siege. The pre-William Hartnell regeneration of the Doctor, who later was a fugitive on Earth in Gloucester, led a Division team that broke the siege, and captured Swarm and Azure. Both were imprisoned - Swarm fully conscious in a remote prison somewhere in space, and Azure on Earth in human form, unaware of her real identity. Tecteun, now in charge of Division, notices the current Doctor's investigations into the forgotten lives she had before she was an old man with long white hair. Wary that the Doctor will find out too much about the Division, Tectuen decides on a quite extreme way to stop the Doctor - destroying the universe. Tecteun is based on a vehicle outside our universe, poised to navigate to a new one. She releases the Flux, an energy wave that destroys matter. Just in case that's not enough, she also frees Swarm who then finds and frees his sister; they will want revenge on the Doctor, and will ensure complete destruction by mucking about with time too.

In 1820, Joseph Williamson is building his tunnels under Liverpool, and finds that some of them lead to other times and places (through rips in the fabric of time and space). From what he witnesses, he pieces together the danger that the Flux will mean in the future, and develops the tunnels to become a survival chamber for humans. On an unnamed planet, Bel and Vinder are life partners, and recent graduates of space pilot academy. They only have one night together before they are given separate postings. Vinder is given special duty as the personal guard of their ruler, the Grand Serpent. The Grand Serpent is corrupt, though, and abuses his position to threaten his political enemies. Vinder tries to blow the whistle, and finds himself sent to do a punishment duty in a deep space observation station, Outpost Rose. As he was sent there directly, he does not know that Bel is pregnant with his child. Vinder spots the Flux coming, and it destroys planets around him and finally Outpost Rose. It also unbeknown to him lays waste to his home planet. Vinder is transported to Atropos by the Ravagers as part of their plan to humiliate the Doctor. Bel travels off world to find Vinder.

The Doctor, helped by Yaz, has found an ex-member of the Division, Karvanista, a dog-like alien from a race called the Lupari. He won't tell her anything of her history, tries to kill both her and Yaz, and makes off for Earth. It looks as if he and the massive Lupari fleet are out to invade, but they are really trying to save the human race. Each Lupar is pair-bonded with a specific human. As he's ahead of his fleet, Karvanista is the first to pick up his human, arriving on the evening of October 31st 2021 and caging the human within his Flux-proof craft. This is Dan Lewis from Liverpool, who's very surprised to be on a dog's spaceship, and is even more surprised to then be rescued by the Doctor and Yaz. Eventually working out that Karvanista isn't exactly against her, the Doctor gives the Lupari a new plan, to configure the fleet into a Flux barrier encircling the Earth. The Earth is safe, but the Sontarans, exploiting possibilities offered by the Flux, sneak in before the barrier goes up. In the TARDIS, the Doctor, Yaz and Dan just avoid being destroyed by the Flux in space, and materialise in the Crimean War. The Sontarans have changed history and taken the place of the Russians in this conflict.

The Doctor is left alone when her two companions are transported elsewhere by the time disturbance. Yaz goes to Atropos and meets Vinder. Dan appears back in Liverpool 2021, meeting his Mum and Dad who explain that in the two days since he's been gone, the Sontarans have taken over the Liverpool docks. Helped by Mary Seacole, the Doctor defeats the Sontarans in the Crimea. Dan sneaks aboard one of their ships and communicates across time to the Doctor. The Potato-Heads' misadventures in the Crimean War are just a pilot scheme, and they plan to continue temporal warfare throughout Earth history. With Karvanista's help, still protecting his human, Dan destroys the Sontaran ships on Earth, and the time explosion reverts things to normal as if they'd never been there. Leaving Karvanista and the other Lupari in their ships still protecting Earth, the Doctor and Dan go in the TARDIS to find Yaz on Atropos.

Since the siege, the temple has been enhanced by incorporating time-sensitive lifeforms called Mouri that have the time vortex flowing through them as part of the temple circuit. Several of the Mouri have now been destroyed by Azure and Swarm sabotaging the system. The Ravagers wire in Vinder and Yaz to take their place, and are just about to switch on, which will kill both. To save them, the Doctor pulls herself, them and Dan into the unstable time vortex, hiding everyone in moments from their own timelines while she pieces together some of the backstory of what's happening, and persuades more Mouri to complete the temple circuit again. Once this is done, the Ravagers don't seem too bothered - they were just taunting the Doctor. They reveal that their attendants are Passenger forms, bigger on the inside prisons shaped like lumbering blokes in masks. Inside one is Diane, the person that Dan was set to meet for a date on Halloween night, who they've kidnapped. Again, they tell Dan this just for shits and giggles then they nick off. The Doctor drops Vinder off to search for Bel; Bel has by this time commandeered an abandoned Lupari ship and is searching the remaining areas of the Flux-impacted universe for Vinder. The TARDIS team are in the control room when a Weeping Angel, which Yaz had seen visions of in the time vortex, appears and takes control of the time ship.

Claire Brown lives in Liverpool in the present day and has psychic ability. She sees visions of the TARDIS, the Doctor and a Weeping Angel. On Halloween night 2021, she briefly met the Doctor and Yaz, and then got attacked by an angel, and zapped back to 1965. By 1967, she is in the village home of Professor Jericho who's investigating her abilities. The Weeping Angel brings the TARDIS to that village, and the Doctor finds Jericho and Claire. Meanwhile, Yaz and Dan are zapped back to 1901 by another angel. The angels attack Jericho's home. These angels are an extraction squad working for Division and want the angel from the TARDIS, who is now hiding in Claire's head, because it also previously worked for Division and has vital knowledge including information about the Doctor. The angels break in to the house. The Doctor, Claire, and Jericho attempt to escape but Jericho is zapped back to 1901 where he meets Dan and Yaz. The Doctor and Claire escape to find a stone vehicle that the angels used to get to Earth. The extraction squad angels are no longer interested in the rogue angel, they have a bigger prize now: the Doctor. Yaz, Dan and Jericho watch through a portal linking the time zones to see the Doctor turned into an angel and taken off.

Bel goes to the planet Puzano, one of the last remaining wrecks of planets surviving after the Flux, and where she and Vinder were planning to honeymoon. She finds that Azure is tricking refugees arriving there, promising to take them to safety but instead locking them up in a Passenger form. Vinder arrives on Puzano too, but after Bel's left, just missing her. Bel and Vinder both trace the source of the Passenger form signals, but Bel's Lupari spacecraft is called away to join the rest of the fleet round Earth before Vinder can catch up with her. He is captured by the Ravagers, who are exploding all the people they have abducted to generate power. They put Vinder in a Passenger form where he meets with Diane. Yaz, Dan and Jericho spend a few years of the early 20th century trying to work out when the final date for Flux destruction will occur, based on a recorded mission set for them by the Doctor. They don't get very far, but finally bump into Joseph Willamson, who shows them the portals within his tunnels. Meanwhile, still protected by the Lupari shields, with the Flux still active elsewhere in the cosmos, Earth becomes a target. The displaced Grand Serpent makes his way there, and infiltrates UNIT at its formation, then hopping through its formative years using time travel. In the present, Kate Stewart uncovers this, and gives him a warning; he blows up her house, so she goes underground. Karvanista boards the Lupari craft to wrest control of it back from Bel, just as the fleet is attacked by Sontarans. The Grand Serpent has done a deal with them, and has used his UNIT influence to weaken Earth's defences.

The Doctor is taken to Tecteun's base outside the universe and returned to her normal form. She has a converter attached so she can exist outside the universe. Tecteun and an Ood are controlling the Flux from here. Tecteun reveals that she has all the Doctor's lost memories in a fob watch, but neither the offer of this, nor an offer to spare the Earth from the Flux, persuade the Doctor not to interfere. With their needed power built up, Swarm and Azure are able to cross into Tecteun's domain, and kill her. They tease the Doctor with the memories from the fob watch, threatening to erase them, then roll back time, and erase them over and over again. The Doctor persuades the Ood to come to her aid, and rips off her converter device to return to the universe. Because of the time disruption, this instead splits her into three identical copies of the Doctor phasing in and out: one with Swarm and Azure, one with Karvanista and Bel, one with Yaz, Dan and Jericho. Between them, the three Doctors and her various helpers work to defeat the Sontarans. The Sontaran plan is to lure the Daleks and Cybermen to the area of space where the final Flux activity will happen, with a promise to use the Lupari shield to protect them; they'll then let both races be destroyed with the hope that all that matter being consumed will exhaust the Flux's anti-matter energy, leaving the Sontarans to rule over the remaining universe.

Kate Stewart arrives in the Williamson tunnels with the TARDIS (that UNIT retrieved from the abandoned 1967 village attacked by angels) and shares a plan that she's been developing to infiltrate the Sontarans. They are using humans with psychic ability to forecast where the final Flux activity will take place. The Doctor picks up Claire from the 1960s, and Claire and Jericho infiltrate a Sontaran psychic team, and come up with the desired coordinates. Diane and Vinder work out a way to signal to the Doctor, and she rescues them. The Sontaran fleet is destroyed alongside the Daleks and Cybermen, but not before they kill all the other Lupari except Karvanista. Claire manages to transmat away from a Sontaran ship before the Flux hits, but Jericho is not so lucky and dies. It's still not enough matter to halt the Flux though, but Diane has had the idea to use the Passenger form to suck up the remaining Flux energy, which works. Swarm and Azure summon their "Saviour" Time and offer up the Doctor. As the Flux has not destroyed Atropos, Time is still not free, so it destroys the Ravagers in punishment. It does not kill the Doctor, though, instead dropping a hint that her time is ending soon. The three parts to the Doctor come together as one and stabilise. The Grand Serpent is banished to an exile on a barren rock in space. Bel and Vinder are reunited, and go off with Karvanista. Everyone else is returned to their proper time and place. Diane is no longer interested in going for a date with Dan. The Doctor invites him instead to join the TARDIS team. The Doctor still has the fob watch, but decides not to open it for now, and hides it deep within the TARDIS.

Context:

I brought this on my self. About this time three years ago, in a blog post for the 12 x 25 minute episode story The Daleks' Master Plan, I made the following comment: "Unless Chris Chibnall were to take things in a very unexpected direction in 2020, Master Plan is going to be the longest story with which I will ever wrestle". Well, it took him until 2021, but he did indeed take things in a new direction, and created a story longer than that William Hartnell behemoth that took up three months of Saturday afternoons in the 1960s. Flux is composed of varying length episodes, three of 50 minutes and three of around an hour, so is the equivalent of at least 13 episodes of classic Who, making it the second longest Doctor Who story ever, measured in minutes. The winner, 14-episode The Trial of a Time Lord, doesn't really count to my mind, as it is composed of four discrete segments under an umbrella title. Each story is as separable as those that make up the Doctor's quest for the Key to Time, say, or various parts of more involved series arcs in 21st century Who like the Silence episodes in 2011. Not Flux though. If you cut out all the running subplots, you could make a standalone adventure out of Chapter 2 (War of the Sontarans) or Chapter 4 (Village of the Angels) at a push, but everything else is interweaved too tightly with the overall narrative.

There was nothing for it but to cover the story as one long piece. It troubled me a tiny bit to burn through so much of Jodie Whittaker's limited and precious stock of remaining stories, so I've decided I won't post about any of her three 2022 specials until they come up randomly, the better to make her era last throughout the remaining lifetime of the blog. Perhaps perversely, I also decided if I was going to use up six episodes in one go, I would use them up in one go. I would binge the lot in one five and a half hour marathon, with only the odd bathroom break on pause. I previously managed this for the relatively svelte 10-parter The War Games, but this would be even more of a challenge. I very nearly made it, but during Christmas holidays in a busy family house it wasn't possible to not have one meal break of half an hour. It at least took place between chapters four and five, so not interrupting an episode and following a cracking cliffhanger. I was accompanied throughout both shifts by the youngest (girl of 9) who was keen to watch it all again, and felt happier that some outstanding questions in her mind were answered by this re-watch. We viewed the story from my PVR recordings of the episodes rather than on the BBC iplayer, so we could get the surrounding idents, continuity and trails as part of the experience.

First Time Round:

I have often bemoaned my meagre remembrances of recent stories when covering them only a few years later here on the blog; many times I've suggested the keeping of a viewing diary, so as an experiment I tried it for Flux:

• 31st October. Chapter 1: The Halloween Apocalypse. Giving out sweets from about 5.30pm while the kids are out trick or treating. All sweets gone in half an hour, but that's not stopping people ringing the doorbell. Put up polite notice - 5 minutes to go before the broadcast, but kids not back yet. Start to watch live at 6.25pm, but feel guilty that I'm not waiting and give up at "Liverpool 1820" just after the beginning credits. When they get back, kids need to warm up with some soup. End up watching [from the start] with the two youngest (boy of 12, girl of 9) time-shifted using the PVR about 40 minutes later than live.
• 8th November. Chapter 2: War of the Sontarans. Missed the live broadcast as I was at the BFI for the Galaxy 4 animation screening, then with friends in London afterwards. Kids waited so they could watch with me. Put on the PVR recording the following evening after dinner with two youngest [they will be my only viewing partners throughout Flux]. Lots of chants of "Sontar-ha!" from both before they settled down to bed afterwards.
• 14th November. Chapter 3: Once, Upon Time. First episode we watched live as it went out on BBC1. Caught the obligatory last few minutes of Countryfile, waiting in anticipation. Youngest showed me that she was keeping her eyes wide open whenever the Weeping Angels were on screen.
• 21st November. Chapter 4: Village of the Angels. Slightly time-shifted (about 10 minutes or so) as we couldn't wolf down our supper fast enough. Youngest needed to play a game on my phone to distract herself towards the end as it was getting too scary, but didn't want to leave the room and kept occasionally glancing at what was on screen.
• 28th November. Chapter 5: Survivors of the Flux. Watched live including the last few minutes of Countryfile again. Youngest is feeling a bit poorly but didn't want to miss it. [This will turn out to be Covid and everyone in the family will get it before too long.]
• 5th December. Chapter 6: The Vanquishers. Tested positive the day before on a Lateral Flow Test, so could not be at the BFI again for City of Death as planned. Consolation is that we can watch the finale live. All three of us enjoy it.

Reaction:

Chris Chibnall famously appeared as a young Doctor Who Appreciation Society member on BBC public feedback show Open Air to express his lack of appreciation of the most recently broadcast series of Doctor Who. It being 1986, that was The Trial of a Time Lord. It is amusing therefore that all these years later, Chibnall has used the key idea from that 80s epic (an entire season of Doctor Who as one long serial) and for the exact same reason (to make a benefit of a reduced episode count thrust upon the production team by factors outside of their control; Covid this time, rather than Michael Grade). To be fair to Chibnall, the structure of the series was never what he had a problem with, and he certainly wasn't the only one then or since to find the writing of Colin Baker's final year as the Doctor a little lacklustre. People now and in the future may well say the same about Flux. I always thought people were generally a little hard on Trial - it has some great moments, and hangs together reasonably well. I would think anyone being so sniffy about Flux was being massively unfair though. It's a magnificent achievement. Watching the whole thing in one go makes it clear that everything in the narrative is clearly explained and paid off. It's only confusing when you're meant to be confused, and is paced well overall across the six chapters - frenetic opening of multiple narrative strands, action story with a little bit of resolution, pause for the revelation of some backstory, chamber horror piece that ends of a big cliffhanger, confrontation and more explanations, big explosive finale.

Like many of the longer stories of 1960s Doctor Who, including the other major antecedent for Flux, The Daleks' Master Plan, the narrative keeps things interesting over its running time by hopping between many different locales. Every single one of these is beautifully realised. What is on screen is breathtaking in its scope (many CGI-rendered spacecraft whizzing through amazing starscapes), beautiful in its detail (the Samurai styling of Karvanista's Lupari technology, as just one example) and perfect in its design (the make-up and costume for Swarm and Azure is outstanding). These episodes were made during a pandemic, when the crew were working out as they went along how to operate within restrictions that kept changing. I can't think of any moment that lets the side down. There was some carping online that the Passenger masks were commercially available ones that hadn't been adapted, but this misses the point to my mind, and the point is: the Passenger forms looked really cool. Why mess with that? Just like Trial of a Timelord back in the day, the epic starts with a sequence that pushes the boundaries of effects technology (the Doctor and Yaz zooming around above a lake of acid), but this is then sustained. There's at least one amazing set piece in every episode, like the massed ranks of Sontarans versus British soldiers in the Crimea, or many of the moments involving Weeping Angels from the fourth episode including perhaps the most memorable image of the Doctor turned into an angel. This is the one episode that I think will come in for the most praise, but it was mostly quite derivative. Nonetheless, it was enjoyable and scary. It seems that no matter how many times you have statues advancing on people trying not to blink, it never gets old. In that story, the 1960s are expertly recreated, as elsewhere is the Crimean War, and various places in 1904, and the many 20th century moments in the formation of UNIT that the Grand Serpent gatecrashes.

More than times and places, though, the many people of Flux help propel it along, and keep the audience engaged. Chibnall clearly understands this, as he ends the first episode with an exciting montage of each featured character at the start of their journey. The cast is Flux's biggest asset and every performance is a good one, some great. Karvanista is the first of the recurring guest cast to be introduced, and he's an instantly complete and engaging creation: gruff, blunt, and very Northern, at times almost antagonistic, but always coming back however unwillingly to his basic moral code. He also looks like a very cute dog, which is a genius choice as it informs his character - it could've been rubbish and just seemed like a mask (though the handiwork is exceptional) but it's great because looking cute clearly annoys the character so much. The concept allows for some wit in the dialogue too; "I still have a human in this fight". He's also now stitched into the programme's lore as an old companion of the Doctor, and I'd love to see Craige Els return to portray him again. Vinder and Bel, as more straightforward action / romantic heroes, are not quite so interesting, but nonetheless are engagingly performed (by Jacob Anderson and Thaddea Graham respectively), and both have some good moments. Vinder's backstory as a punished whistle-blower in a corrupt regime is something a bit different, and it's great to see them reunited near the end after a series of near misses. Annabel Scholey as Claire Brown doesn't get much to do that doesn't involve reacting to moving statues, but makes the most of it; the scene where she looks in the mirror to see her reflection has stone angel wings (achieved in camera with physical effects work) is another standout moment.

Other guest actors shine in less extensively featured roles: Nadia Albina as the resourceful Diane, Jemma Redgrave returning as Kate Stewart, Sarah Powell perfect as Mary Seacole, the historical celebrity around which a lot of the second episode revolves. On first watch, Blake Harrison seemed a little wasted in the role of Namaca, but this time round I got that he's there to represent all of the refugees displaced by the Flux, who otherwise wouldn't have a voice in the narrative. Best of all the guest characters, even though he doesn't turn up until halfway through, is Professor Eustacius Jericho, haunted but indomitable, serious but with a twinkle. It was a treat when he continued to work with Yaz and Dan in episode five, as he looked set to be a one-off character specific to the Angels plotline. It's also nice that Kevin McNally gets to do another good performance in Doctor Who, but this time as part of a story that's not The Twin Dilemma. Also returning to Doctor Who after a reasonable time away is Dan Starkey, who along with Johnathan Watson plays the different Sontarans featured. They are both so good, and the slightly tweaked masks similarly good, that you almost forget that there are actors in there. This is perhaps the best Sontaran story ever - showing them actually getting to participate in a war, having one ride a horse, and putting them on a level with the Daleks and Cybermen as top-tier adversaries. Main villains Swarm and Azure are gleefully but also glamorously sadistic, and actors Sam Spruell and Rochenda Sandall are having enormous fun playing them. Best of all the baddies, and also well dressed, is Craig Parkinson as the Grand Serpent. Yes, he's playing an extra-terrestrial twist on a somewhat similar role he famously played in another series (I'm trying not to spoiler here, if you know, you know) but he's doing it so well. He's also still alive at the end, so potentially could return to face the Doctor again.

There's still room left for the regulars to shine. John Bishop arrives fully formed as Dan, and slots instantly into the team, bringing a down-to-Earth warmth and humour to a long-running team, but also a greater sense of wonder than the existing regulars who maybe take the adventuring a bit for granted now. A new companion, and long periods where the Doctor is separated from the others, allows Mandip Gill to shine as the experienced old hand, and even act as the Doctor surrogate at times: her having WWTDD (What would the Doctor do?) written on her hand is a lovely character touch. There's some great interplay between the two companions too; I particularly liked the following naturally funny exchange: "Dan, are you from Liverpool? Why have you never mentioned it?" "Alright Sheffield, keep your cutlery on!". Jodie Whittaker has never been less than excellent in any of her previous stories, no matter the quality of the material. Here, with a rollicking good set of scripts, she somehow steps it up a gear and is sensational. Too many memorable scenes to list them all, but some stand-outs include flirting with her self when split into multiple Doctors, many scenes with the Ravagers playing vulnerable as her secret past is teased but not revealed, and turning the tables on the Grand Serpent in the finale. Best of all are the sequences with Barbara Flynn as Tecteun, the Doctor confronting the mother she never knew she had, who has robbed her twice, once by changing the course of her life by taking her as a foundling (an assumption that the Doctor points out was not necessarily a sound one), and secondly by removing her memories. These are great scenes in a story stuffed full of them, and crackling with some great jokes and snappy dialogue.

The nature of such a long story with many facets is going to attract a particular criticism. When I reviewed similarly epic The War Games I described it as the Doctor Who equivalent of The Beatles' White Album. Could Flux then be the long medley from Abbey Road? In other words, it's lots of bits and bobs put together with only a semblance of coherence. I'd take exception to such a reading, as the whole is well integrated and more than the sum of its parts (actually, you could say that about side 2 of Abbey Road too, I suppose). Sure, any one of the story threads could be unpicked and lumped together to create more modular individual episodes, but the whole would suffer. You could, for example, take all of Steve Oram's moments as Liverpool tunneler Joseph Williamson out of chapters one to five and just have him in the finale, but him popping up and meeting characters at unexpected moments, being weird and portentous, is much more fun. Any other flaws I've seen levelled are minor ones, or ones I can't accept as flaws at all. Yaz, Dan and Jericho spend a globe-trotting episode achieving naff all, but it's so much fun to be in those characters' company. The Sontarans vulnerability at the end because they have become addicted to chocolate is no bum note, it's a sort of crazy genius. The universe is so changed by the end that the show might have to reset, but that's true towards the end of any showrunner or Doctor's era. The next episode on the 1st January features Daleks who were seemingly all eaten up by the Flux, so they're already ignoring it anyway. The story might not be very deep; unlike previous Jodie Whittaker seasons there are no political or ecological themes, just an exploration of lore. Some people might think this is a good thing, of course.

Connectivity: 

Both Flux and A Christmas Carol feature a Doctor paired with two companions, one male one female, and both see them assisted by a wider group of people, some of whom travel in the TARDIS. Both stories feature scenes set around a notable day of the religious calendar (All Hallow's Eve and Christmas). Both see the Doctor flying through the air in a somewhat unconventional manner. Flux contains lots and lots of elements from Doctor Who's history, but it couldn't find room to include any flying sharks, alas.

Deeper Thoughts:

Everything's in flux. The 2021 story / season was an enjoyable event as it went out weekly, and stands up well when watched as one very long - Peter-Jackson movie length - special. I think it's fair to say that nobody on December 31st 2020 could have predicted that Chibnall would provide us with the 21st Century's version of The Daleks' Master Plan or Trial of a Timelord in the following year. So, it's probably a pointless exercise to look ahead to next year and speculate; but, I like pointless exercises, so here we go. Whatever else we guess about what 2022 has to offer, we know it will have one of the most exciting moments for a Doctor Who fan - the final story for a Doctor. Jodie Whittaker has three more stories left for 2022: a festive special on January 1st, and then two more specials in Spring and Autumn. In the final one, no doubt some of the questions about the Doctor's past left unanswered by Flux will have been answered, but the smart money would be on it not being all of them. Some mystery is likely to remain. I'd also bet that Sacha Dhawan will return as the Master and Jo Martin as the Division Doctor, but it's not certain. The only thing we can be 100% sure of is that the lead actor will bow out (Jodie's finished all her filming) and the character will regenerate. Beyond that, anything could happen. It's not completely unprecedented for the regeneration to end on a cliffhanger without revealing a new Doctor and actor, but it's not been done for a long time and only happened once (Jon Pertwee did not appear in Patrick Troughton's finale). Large sections of the audience would be very miffed to not have resolution and confirmation of the new Doctor, but that doesn't mean returning showrunner Russell T Davies won't do it.

I think it's more likely that someone will be cast as the Doctor next year and announced before the final special airs. It would be lovely for it to be a complete surprise and revealed only at the end of that story, but I don't think it's realistic. Any actor and their agent is going to want to keep the casting secret for only so long; professionally, it would need to be known that the person has the kudos of one of biggest roles in television (as well as clarifying that they won't be able to take on any other work for a bit). When the 2023 episodes start filming, it would be very likely to leak anyway. It's exciting, though; it means that sometime in the first three quarters of 2022, we should find out. According to a recent interview, Davies and team have not cast anyone yet (but he has been known to lie in interviews to ensure surprises). He also confirms that he has already written more than one episode, and the first one will be broadcast in November 2023 around the 60th anniversary of the show. This means that there will definitely not be a festive special on January 1st 2023, so 2022 could see the end of that tradition (or the schedulers and Davies could move the special back to the 25th December and there'd be one before the year is out). It's always nice for the profile of the show that Doctor Who is on over the Christmas period, but maybe all the possible stories set sometime between the 24th December and the 1st January have been told now, so I wouldn't be that sad about it ending.

Aside from the new, there's also the new old. One animation of a 1960s missing story has been confirmed for 2022; this will be 1967's The Abominable Snowmen. There's no date confirmed yet, but it's likely to be in the first half of the year if it's already being talked up. There are now two teams regularly tackling the creation of pictures to accompany stories where only the audio survives intact. So, providing the budget's still there to commission both, the other team should be working on something (it certainly seemed that way when they appeared at the BFI showing their last project The Evil of the Daleks). My guess, which will undoubtedly be wrong, is that they'll do The Wheel in Space next and it will be released late in the year. This will complete season five (Patrick Troughton's second year) on shiny disc, and will make it feasible to release that season as a Blu-ray box set sometime in the future. With regard to the Blu-ray sets, they returned to their pre-Covid release frequency in 2021, with three limited edition box sets (as well as some re-releases of older box sets in standard packaging). From social media mentions from some of the people that work on them, more are definitely in the works, and I'd expect another three in 2022. I'll speculate again, and no doubt be wrong again, and guess that the releases will be season 13 (Tom Baker's second year, a fan favourite, and there seems to be a one Tom set per year rule), season 22 (Colin Baker's first full year), and season 2 (William Hartnell's second year, which would be the first black and white season set, and would likely have photo reconstructions of the only two missing episodes in the season).

The previously mentioned RTD interview tied in with the Guardian's annual countdown of the 50 best TV shows of the year. I looked through the list and - as usual, and doubtless as intended - disagreed with a lot of it. Flux does not make the list, which maybe shows more about a long-running consistent programme such as Doctor Who being taken for granted rather than necessarily anything about the quality of the episodes themselves. Having paid for a month of Disney Plus to watch the Beatles documentary Get Back (number 27 in the Guardian's list), I was finally able to see WandaVision (the Guardian number 16), one of the fantasy shows to which Doctor Who has been compared unfavourably of late, and... it's only okay; wildly overrated, to my mind, and nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. I am still to watch The Mandalorian or Loki; I'll report back if they rock my world. I much preferred the new seasons of a couple of US shows that I first watched during last year's lockdowns: Superstore and Ted Lasso. The latter made the Guardian list (at number 14) , the former didn't. As good as Lasso is, Superstore's emotional final season was slightly better for this viewer. Best of all for me was discovering the UK comedy series Ghosts (a US remake also premiered this year, but I haven't seen that yet). It only made number 34 in the Guardian list, but it was top ten for me. At some future date, when they finish telling the story of Button House, the entire Ghosts creative team would be a great pick to become showrunners of Doctor Who (though they might fall out between themselves as to which of them gets to play the Doctor). Of course, the next showrunner Russell T Davies happens to be the writer of the Guardian's number 1 show of the year, It's a Sin. It was shown early in the year, but it was such an intense, upsetting, invigorating and unforgettable drama that nothing shown since could top it. A worthy winner. It's very exciting to see what the writer of It's a Sin (who's maybe a slightly different man to the writer The Second Coming all those years ago) will make of Doctor Who next. But that's 2023, and we have 2022 to enjoy first. Any minute now...

In Summary:

It's fluxing great. Happy New Year!

A Christmas Carol

Chapter The 215th, is this where the Doctor Who Christmas specials finally jumped the shark? (No.)

Plot:

It's Christmas Eve in an unspecified future era. A spaceship with over 4000 people on board, including Amy and Rory in the honeymoon suite, is imminently going to crash into the planet Steampunk. The planet has a thick cloud belt of ice crystals where various examples of sea life (sky life?) swim (fly?), and this is interfering with the ship's instruments and whatnot. The only person on the planet that can control the cloud belt and save the ship is Space Scrooge, Kazran Sardick, using a machine built by his father that only works for Kazran (although legend has it that singing can calm the sky too), but he refuses to help. The Doctor senses that there is some compassion buried in Kazran, and tries to inspire him to save the ship using a plan based on the Dickens story A Christmas Carol. The Doctor travels to Kazran's past and meets him as a boy; they both have a close encounter with a flying shark that bites the Doctor's screwdriver and swallows half of it. The shark is grounded and will die if they can't find a suitable container to keep it alive for a TARDIS trip into the clouds. The young Kazran shows the Doctor a chamber in his home that contains rows of coffin-like boxes. In each one is a person in suspended animation; anyone to whom Kazran's money lender Dad has given a loan has had to provide a family member as security and they're all kept on ice.

Kazran chooses one casket with a girl called Abigail in it, and they unfreeze and release her. This is lucky as she has a great singing voice, which mollifies shark when it wakes up. They transport it to the sky, and have a Santa's sleigh-like ride, having hitched a small carriage to it. When they return Abigail to her ice casket, Kazran promises that they'll come back to her every Christmas Eve, which they do for the next six years. They have comic adventures in time and space, Kazran grows up, and he and Abigail fall in love. They even visit Abigail's Bob Crachit-alike family for a festive meal. After each Christmas Eve, though, an ominous counter on Abigail's casket ticks down closer and closer to zero. On the last of these regular trips, Abigail tells Karzan a secret (she's suffering from an illness that means she's going to die next time out when the counter goes from one to zero). This turns Karzan cold again, and he stops the Doctor from visiting.

The older Karzan will still not be moved to save the ship even when a holographic Amy (as Ghost of Christmas Present) shows him all the people on the ship, who are singing carols in the hope of affecting the cloud belt. Finally, the Doctor shows Kazran the future in an unexpected way: he brings the young Kazran to the present to see what he turns out like as an old man. That finally wins him over, but he can no longer use his father's machine - he's changed so much that in this timeline, his father never programmed the machine to respond to him. The Doctor figures out that with his half of screwdriver able to signal to the half swimming around in the cloud belt they could broadcast a frequency that they know resonates there: Abigail's singing. This means that the older Kazran has to release her, and finally spend Christmas Day with her before she dies. With the ship and everyone on it saved, the old Kazran and Abigail have another shark ride in the sky.

Context:

I took a random selection of the remaining Christmas specials I haven't yet blogged, and this one came up. On an evening in late December 2021, I popped it on from the new series 6 Blu-ray box set (though I bracket it in my head with series 5 as it followed on more or less directly from that run, showing Amy and Rory on honeymoon after they got married in previous story The Big Bang). I was - for the first time in a while for an old episode - accompanied. The youngest (girl of 9) sat down to watch the whole thing; the eldest (boy of 15) wandered into the living room a few times but didn't stick around. Most remarkable of all, the Better Half, who hasn't watched any Doctor Who new or old for months, came in half way through, watched for a bit, and then stayed put (it's a bit tragi-romantic, and she's a sucker for stuff like that). The youngest said right at the beginning "Are you sure this is Doctor Who and not Star Wars?" which must mean the CGI work for the crashing space ship was pretty good; in the later scenes with the shark, she went full on Panto with repeated "Behind you!"s, and after the credits rolled she watched the trailer for series 6 and screamed "I wanna watch all of that!!!!!". I got the BH up to speed with the first half of the plot, but just could not help her to get her head round the Steampunk aesthetic. The conversation went round in circles something like this: "Why are they wearing Victorian clothes if they're from the future?" "It's steampunk - science fiction stories with historical trappings." "But why are they wearing Victorian clothes if they're from the future?"

First Time Round:

Watched on the evening of the 25th December 2010, after its BBC1 broadcast on the big day. I can't remember specifics of that particular Christmas, but based on the usual pattern from around then, we'd have had the Better Half's family round for lunch and into the evening. They would have gone home around eight p.m. after the kids (only two at the time, and both under five) had been put to bed. The Better Half and I would have then watched the story from the PVR. Looking at the BBC schedule for the day, I can't see anything that brings back any clear memories. It was nice to see that the then recently broadcast Death of the Doctor episode of spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures, guest starring Matt Smith and Jo Grant actor Katy Manning, was repeated on BBC1 early on Christmas day - it was perfect festive viewing for that slot. I don't think any of the family tuned in, though.

Reaction:

Anyone literate in television (which certainly describes Steven Moffat, writer of this story and showrunner of Doctor Who in this era) would hesitate putting an airborne shark in their programme. Getting close to anything that approximates to sharks and jumping is asking for trouble from the headline writers. Moffat is ever bold though, and was perhaps at his boldest in 2010, planning story arcs to play out over the next three or four years. He clearly went into the scripting of his first Christmas special making no compromises. In A Christmas Carol, he breaks a general piece of wisdom I've heard shared regarding the writing of science fiction or fantasy: only ask your audience to make one imaginative leap. A planet and its populace that has developed to be similar to Victorian London is one leap (see above for how hard the Better Half found it to accept the logic of this); someone on that planet very closely matching the circumstances of the fictional Ebeneezer Scrooge is probably another half a leap too; but then there's clouds made of ice crystal, and there's fish that swim through the air, and there's flying sharks that you can hitch a cart to as if they're horses. It's a very weird selection of elements to present to an audience that's liable to include the less forgiving given the festive slot, and it could end up alienating them. A challenge is being made, similar to Russell T Davies with The End of the World, but that wasn't shown at Christmas and was a very simple storyline - Moffat throws timey-wimey stuff into the mix too. To paraphrase some comments by Dalek creator and Doctor Who writer Terry Nation, it's Moffat's planet, and if he wants to make the rocks talk or give everyone twelve eyes, he has that freedom within Doctor Who's format. When I first heard Nation say that in a documentary, I did think it sounded a bit presumptuous. The writer has to take the viewers along for the ride. Moffat does this with aplomb in A Christmas Carol, but how he manage this?

One thing that helps is borrowing a near bulletproof structure from Charles Dickens. The redemption arc in three acts reviewing a character's past, present and possible future has been used and reused and abused so many times in different stories since Charlie Boy built it in a moment of exquisite creativity in 1843, and I don't think it's ever broken. It's simple but effective, and far ahead of its time in its alignment with science fiction, particularly a time travel show. Moffat manages to work in a couple of nice twists on the concept, both of them stand out moments in this show, and some of my favourite moments in the whole of Doctor Who. First is when the Christmas Past section starts and Kazran is watching a home movie of himself as a child that the Doctor has dug up. The Doctor leaves him, and a few seconds later - by the power of TARDIS - appears in the background of the projection of the still running film. The second moment is so clever, but also appropriately emotionally charged. This is Moffat's take on the glimpse into the Christmas yet to come. Taking the older Kazran to see his own death would have been possible, but probably a step too far away from the programme's usual time-travel ethics (and the Doctor is already somewhat gleefully rewriting an individual's timeline in the story without any worries about the consequences). Instead, in a dramatic reveal, the younger Kazran has been brought to see the present day Kazran that he'll become and mistakes his older self for their abusive father. This also vaults over the one potential flaw in the Dickens structure, that the Christmas Future section can take too long, when one wants to get to the redemption. Instead, this climactic section zips along.

Another factor pulling the different elements of Moffat's A Christmas Carol together, and keeping it moving at a good rate, is the consistently sparkling dialogue. Basically, every line is a gem, but I have to call out some. The Doctor and the older Kazran's exchange: "Better a broken heart than no heart at all." "Oh, try it. You try it." The Doctor's advice on a first kiss: "Well, try and be all nervous and rubbish and a bit shaky... you're going to be like that anyway, might as well make it part of the plan..." very quickly followed by "It's this or go to your room and design a new kind of screwdriver - don't make my mistakes!; "Time can be rewritten..." "...People can't"; the nice gag that the Doctor being described as mature and responsible is a lie so big it breaks his psychic paper; everything to do with the Doctor and Marylin Monroe accidentally getting married (Smith looks very dapper in his sharp 50s togs). There are great visual moments also, like the Doctor's entrance coming down the chimney, or the old Kazran suddenly realising he's wearing a bow tie. Lots of in-jokes too. The confidence that this new set of regulars are now established shows with the moments like the words "COME ALONG POND" appearing on the spaceship screen, or Amy and Rory revisiting old costumes for some honeymoon fun (given that this took a year to set up and linked in to specific plot points in the previous series, it's presumably only a coincidence - and not a Steven Moffat masterplan - that the Ponds are spicing up their love life in precisely the same way as Rodney and Cassandra in a Christmas episode of Only Fools and Horses from a few years earlier. There's also a Tom Baker scarf and a joke about Isomorphic controls (cf. Pyramids of Mars) in there for old school fans.

Despite all the crazy stuff going on, this is as heart just a story about two people (plus their Time Lord matchmaker), so a lot depends on casting. Michael Gambon is, probably unsurprisingly, excellent, but Katherine Jenkins in her first ever acting role comports herself well too. Obviously, her skills as a singer are well utilised, and there's a belter of an original song from Murray Gold for her to perform at the end. The two actors playing younger versions of Kazran are good too, as is the whole cast, regular and guest. It's not really a romance as such, but pulls a trick that many stories that are really self-actualisation plots do, of using a strong romance subplot to help bring the protagonist's inner journey to life. This is happening less in the genre of late, though, as it is problematic if a relationship (usually with a woman) is treated as a reward for the protagonist (usually a man). Abigail is literally a piece of property in the narrative, and doesn't get to choose her own last day of life. There's a sort of sleight of hand at the end to give her agency as you don't see Kazran open the ice casket; he's mulling it over, talking aloud, when she steps out and finishes his sentence, making it clear that she agrees to embark on her last romantic day (or, if one is more detached, assisted suicide). This is fake, though; she can't open the casket from the inside, so it isn't her choice. It's also a bit convenient that her fatal illness is such that she can be one day away from dying without any ill effects to her motor functions, beauty or ability to belt out an aria. How much you give the story a pass for these flaws depends on how much it's won you over, and I was pretty much won over. There's certainly many a rom-com that's done worse. As a Doctor Who fan, what got to me more was seeing the older and younger versions of Kazran touch each other without shorting out and causing a big explosion (google "Blinovich Limitation Effect" if you're confused, or maybe don't!).

Connectivity: 

Both A Christmas Carol and Planet of the Ood have a big song towards the end. 

Deeper Thoughts:

And so this is Christmas and how many more have you got left before you're done. When I first started this blog, I went in with a reckless enthusiasm, not doing any sums to work out how long it would take me (I rapidly realised and did those sums, and it was quite a shock). It is somewhat unbelievable to me that I'm imminently going to enter the blog's eighth year, and that I've now blogged 215 stories. I have one more story that I aim to complete and post about before the end of 2021. Without giving too much away, it's not really a random section - it's a mammoth undertaking that it wouldn't be feasible to do at a time when I didn't have some holiday from the day job, so I'm choosing to cover it in the Chrimbo Limbo period. I'll say no more. With that story identified, though, I can crunch the numbers and look at what is left. Including the final three Jodie Whittaker specials to be broadcast in 2022, and based on my own convoluted way of splitting episodes into stories and numbering them, there are 88 stories remaining of classic and new Who to blog. Based on my average rate of posts per year, and assuming that Russell T Davies doesn't massively up the number of episodes being produced and shown from 2023 onwards, that's enough to keep me going until round about the end of 2024. Three more years. I only have three more Christmas specials left (Voyage of the Damned, The Snowmen and The Time of the Doctor). Unless Davies wants to get the festive special moved back to December 25th, I'll have to ration them so I can have one to blog every December.

Of the 38 stories blogged this year so far, including this one, there was a reasonable spread across all eras. Every Doctor had at least one story covered (except Paul McGann, whose entire era - one story - was completed in the first year of the blog's existence). The odds are that the Doctors with few stories left won't get picked as often by random selection, but nonetheless there was a story apiece this year from the Doctors with dwindling remaining stock, Colin Baker (three stories remining after this year), Sylvester McCoy (four) and Christopher Eccleston (three). There were two Peter Davison stories blogged this year, which only leaves him with five. Any one of those four would be a good bet to be the next Doctor whose era will be completed, but one can only guess as to when that might be. Patrick Troughton only had one story covered (a partially missing but now animated The Evil of the Daleks), but he has a few left in the bank - seven stories. Jon Pertwee had two stories covered in 2021, and also has seven stories remaining. There was a three way tie at second place with four stories blogged for the two most recent Doctors, Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker, as well as the very earliest, William Hartnell. Hartnell's crop was three complete stories and one that is wholly missing that was enjoyed as an audio presentation. He has eight stories left. Capaldi has the most stories left to blog, eleven in all, but Jodie will match that total once her final three specials have been broadcast.

 

There's another three way tie for first place, each with six stories covered in 2021: David Tennant and Matt Smith (who both have 10 remaining stories) and Tom Baker (leaving nine to go); getting the prodigious Tom Baker total down to single figures is definitely a milestone. This year leaned a bit more heavily towards new Who rather than old (a 21:17 split), but the remainder are pretty evenly divided (even with all Jodie Whittaker's 2022 stories included, it's only 51% new to 49% old). There should be a reasonable spread between eras through the years to come. Very few individual seasons have been completed; this year, the final outstanding season 8 (Jon Pertwee's second run) story was ticked off, making a total of only two seasons to date (the other being Colin Baker's Trial year, season 23). Without wanting to give too much away about that next story I'm going to blog, there is a very strong chance doing that one will mean the total of completed seasons goes up to three. It's all subjective, but looking at the titles remaining, it looks like an even split between classics and clunkers too; sometimes a fresh watch can surprise me, though, and change my previous opinion of a story one way or the other. Of the black and white stories left, there are still seven which have some or all of the video missing from the archives; audio exists for everything. With animations hopefully continuing to match new images to those soundtracks (we know at least that Patrick Troughton story The Abominable Snowmen is coming soon in cartoon form), that makes less of a difference. The remaining stories with gaps are disproportionately in Patrick Troughton's era. Hartnell only has two remaining stories with bits missing left to blog, Troughton has only two of his left which exist in full.

All in all, I'm looking forward to wherever the randomiser takes me in 2022. But 2021 isn't over yet...

In Summary:

Incidentally, a Happy Christmas Past, Present and Future to all of you at home!

Planet of the Ood

Chapter The 214th, a snowy story as we get close to Christmas.

Plot:

The Doctor and Donna visit Ood Operations, a company that trades in the noodle-faced slave creatures; its base is on the snowy planet Ood-Sphere in the year 4126, and various long-running plans are coming to fruition there. Doctor Ryder is a member of Friends of the Ood, an organisation set up to end this slavery. Over the previous ten years he has infiltrated Ood Operations to a high enough position on the scientific staff to get access to the mysterious Warehouse 15 where a giant central Ood brain is kept locked away. Surreptitiously, he lowers the dampening force emissions surrounding the brain that keep the Ood controlled and docile; this causes outbreaks of red-eye and rabidness in the Ood and people get attacked. The company boss Klineman Halpen discovers his treachery, and kills Ryder by throwing him into the giant brain in its deep pit, but Ryder dies knowing he has instigated a revolution that will free the Ood. Halpen's personal aide, Ood Sigma, has been broken free of his conditioning for a while, and has patiently been working on revenge. He substituted a hair tonic drink that Halpen regularly imbibes for a suspension of Ood-iness, and once Halpen has been in the presence of the giant Ood brain for long enough, it turns him into an Ood. The revolution frees the Ood, who drive the humans away from their home. The Doctor doesn't do anything at all to help until the end, when he diffuses some bombs that Halpen had set around the brain, so it doesn't get destroyed. Donna does nothing at all. The Ood promise that they, their children, and their children's children will forever sing the song of thanks to the Doctor and Donna. Ryder doesn't even get a mention. Ungrateful gits.

Context:

I suffered a small disappointment in early December. The day before I was due to travel up to London to attend the BFI screening of City of Death (to tie in with the soon to be released season 17 Blu-ray boxset) I tested positive on a lateral flow test. I was lucky enough to only get Covid mildly (I'd thought I'd only had a cold, which is being reported as a common misunderstanding with the latest cases, so don't take chances - get yourself tested if you're unsure). This put paid to the trip, and indeed any social event I'd had planned for the end of the year. At a loose end, I thought I would use my time in self-isolation to break my blogging record (yes, it was a bit boring not being able to leave the house). The most posts I've managed to publish in a year previously was 38 in 2018. Including this one, I'm up to three posts for December 2021, and 37 for the year to date. Just two more and I'll achieve a personal best. Having watched a few stories in short order (including Planet of the Ood, on DVD from the New series 4 box-set, and unaccompanied by any of the family again), I'm planning next to pick a random Christmas special to blog before the big day, and then to squeeze in another story before December 31st. Might not manage it, but that's the plan.

First Time Round:

I first watched Planet of the Ood on the evening of its debut BBC1 transmission on the 19th April 2008, timeshifted on the PVR; I was accompanied by the Better Half, after we'd put our then only child down to bed. Doctor Who had an earlier broadcast slot for that year, and the boy was nearly two years old, so we had experimented with the first couple of stories of the series letting him watch live with us. The Adipose one was fine, but the following week The Fires of Pompeii's lava monster was a bit too much. So, it was back to waiting until after bedtime for the rest of the stories starting with the Ood episode. I vaguely knew the writer of the Pompeii story James Moran as we were both screenwriting bloggers at the time (he much more successfully than me, of course) and I made a joke in a post on my old blog along the lines of "Who do you think you are, James Moran, scaring my innocent child?" but I had to edit it to make clear that it was an arcane classic Who reference (referring to an article about 1970s script editor Robert Holmes by a tabloid journalist Jean Rook) and that I wasn't having a pop at James. This was because he was then getting a lot of flak from arse-hat Doctor Who "fans" as one of the few writers in those days - this being before social media became widespread - to have an online presence. I remember someone telling him he was an elitist scumbag for putting in-jokes related to a Latin textbook into the story (James replied that he didn't study Latin at all, and they had been suggestions by Russell T Davies). When he later wrote an episode of Torchwood that killed off a major character, he got even more and even worse abuse. I subsequently met James at a screenwriting festival, and he came over as a very nice guy indeed. Some Doctor Who "fans" really don't deserve nice things.

 

Reaction:

I mentioned in the Dragonfire blog post earlier in the year that the Raiders of Minimization episode of US comedy The Big Bang Theory highlighted that Indiana Jones does not contribute anything material to stopping the bad guys' plans in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. If the story of a big Hollywood film (thereafter loved by audiences for decades) can make the mistake, then I suppose we have to forgive a little 45-minute segment of Doctor Who too. For in Planet of the Odd, the Doctor and Donna are just observers. One might not even notice this at first, as they both do lots of Doctor and companion stuff - getting chased, getting captured, piecing together the backstory by investigating. In this story, they work out the physical and mental make-up of Ood society and how it is being manipulated to make them subservient. I'm not sure that this stands up to much scrutiny if you think too hard about it after the credits have rolled: creatures with tiny vulnerable "hind-brains" that they have to carry around in their hands? It doesn't seem like a viable mutation. Maybe there were no predators on the Ood-sphere (there's no evidence of any in the story, except for humankind, of course), but the natural environment still seems a bit harsh for the Ood to have survived there. This kind of thinking didn't occur during my first watch of the programme, though, so I think the story gets away with it during its running time. Piecing all this together, whether or not it persuades the viewer, doesn't make a jot of difference to the plot. The Doctor can't use the information, as others - who presumably have pieced it all together long before him - already have an endgame in play.

Perhaps this slight lack of engagement of the main characters in writer Keith Temple's script is the reason that the normally entertaining pairing of David Tennant and Catherine Tate as Donna don't have as good a go of it in this story compared to others in the series. Some jokes don't land, some exchanges and bits of business feel a bit forced. The director is the normally dependable Graeme Harper, who delivered some great stories in the classic and the new eras, but this is not one of his best. Where he does excel is in the scenes of Ood carnage. The trick of the calm creatures suddenly going on the attack with eyes flicking to red had already been done in the two-part Ood / Satan story in Tennant's first year, but it doesn't get old when its done again and again here. The ante is upped with the rabid Oods, and the explosive scenes of Ood versus security guard fights. Some of the industrial locations are quite impressive, but the CGI-enhanced snowy vistas look a bit fake. The interiors of the posher areas where clients are being wined and dined don't look that classy too, particularly in comparison to The End of The World, the story I last blogged, which was made three years earlier at New Who's beginning when everyone knew less about how to put the show together. Perhaps Planet of the Ood just had a bit less money spent on it than others. The big action sequence - Tennant being pursued by a giant grabber claw - is fine, but doesn't have much to do with the events of the story; it feels like it was (and maybe I've read somewhere that it definitely was?) an idea the production team had for an action sequence that was just waiting for a story for it to be crowbarred into.

Best of the performances, and maybe not coincidentally in all the scenes where the plot is truly moving forward, is Tim McInnerny as Klineman Halpen. He's very good at doing the oily, pinstriped CEO, but there are flashes of vulnerability in moments where he dwells on his childhood or lack thereof (Slave trading of Ood is a family business, which he's been prepared for from a very young age), and McInnerny does very well at showing us a man teetering on the edge of coming apart, literally pulling his hair out with stress in some scenes. It's witty of the script to then show him physically as well as metaphorically coming apart at the denouement, when he turns into an Ood in a gruesome splattery sequence. Through the story, though, McInnerny keeps Halpen the right side of being a villain, we can't ever fully sympathise with him and his fate does not seem undeserved. Ayesha Dharker as PR person Solana Mercurio gets one knockout scene, as she struggles between what we're given to suspect she knows is the moral thing to do versus keeping her job, and chooses wrong (then gets killed to punish her for this mistake). Other actors are not as well served, with Roger Griffiths as Kess, for example, struggling to find much depth in the one-note henchman role as written. It sounds like I didn't like the story as much as I did. It's perfectly okay, just not much more than that. 

One aspect that's good that I haven't mentioned is a clue to how Planet of the Ood was just a stepping stone for later overarching plots: Murray Gold's music, and in particular the choral work for the song of the Ood. This will develop (and probably it was mostly unplanned at the time and only retroactively made to fit, but that's showbusiness) into themes - both plot-wise and musically - for David Tennant's final stories as the Doctor. We will see the image of an Ood in the snow again before too long.     

Connectivity: 

Both Planet of the Ood and The End of the World are from the (first) Russell T Davies showrunner period of new series Doctor Who, and both feature alien creatures invented by him. In both stories there are scenes of rich people partying in expensive surroundings as well as more industrial locations elsewhere. In both, the Doctor takes his female companion for her first trip into the future, and they have a minor tiff where the companion accuses him of taking cheap shots. Both stories feature a speech about humankind thriving and spreading despite pessimistic contemporary worries abut the race dying off (both scripts specify global warming as one 21st century worry). 

Deeper Thoughts:

Early Christmas Gifts (of Peace in all Good Faith) - Part 2. The story so far is that certain circumstances arising in 2021 have rekindled an obsession for completion in my Doctor Who Target books collection, which I thought I'd left behind nearly 30 years ago. I have bought the final three books I don't own to complete the collection, and I have done this late in 2021, so I can draw a line under this madness! With luck, and the sober January chill of a new year incoming, I won't be tempted to find new categories of book to collect - it is an expensive habit. These final three are a short-lived offshoot from the main range, covering adventures of 'The Companions of Doctor Who' after their time with the Doctor. The first book was about Turlough, and my feelings about it, in all their gory detail, can be found in the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post. The second one, originally published in September 1986, is Harry Sullivan's War by Ian Marter. Marter had of course played Sullivan with Tom Baker in the 1970s, but more recently had become one of the regular writers of Target novelisations of broadcast Doctor Who stories, including many that he'd starred in back in the day. As such, he was more than qualified to write an original story about his fictional lookalike. Not that it's a wholly original story, being an espionage action-thriller very much in the mould of a James Bond book. I don't remember ever seeing the book anywhere to buy when it came out. The only memory I have of it from back then was a letter from Marter in Doctor Who Magazine complaining about accusations of plagiarism.

I'd started picking up the magazine again after a gap as Doctor Who was back on television (with Colin Baker's Trial of a Timelord season) so had missed the book review, and only saw Marter's reply to it. The main thrust was that the author had never seen the 1985 Bond film A View to a Kill, so the resemblances to his novel - including situating climactic events atop the Eiffel Tower - were coincidental. The novel and the letter were sadly the last examples of Marter's Doctor Who writing to be published before he died terribly young a few weeks later (on October 28th 1986, his 42nd birthday). At that point, he'd delivered two manuscripts of novelisations (for The Reign of Terror and The Rescue) that would be published posthumously over the next couple of years. Working that far in advance, it's possible Harry Sullivan's War had been written before A View to a Kill even hit cinemas in mid-1985; but, in general it is clearly inspired by Ian Fleming's work, and the Bond film adaptations (particularly the Roger Moore starring ones that were current at the time of writing). The book sees Harry 10 years after his travels with the Doctor doing top secret government work on anti-toxins. He starts to get attempts made on his life by members of an anarchist organisation who are opposed to chemical weapons. There ensues many chase scenes with sports cars and helicopters, investigations, double-crosses, code breaking, fights, escapes, and a little bit of globe-trotting (action takes place in England, Scotland and France, and visits landmarks like the National Gallery and the Forth Bridge as well as la Tour Eiffel).

It's hard to know whether some of the flaws are down to Marter, or are mainlined direct from Fleming: in the first couple of chapters, there's the questionable characterisation of a West Indian bodybuilder henchman, for example; it's dodgy, but you could say that about characters featured in the relevant Bond books and films too. There's sexism, of course. A couple of female characters, described in physical terms when introduced, throw themselves at Harry. As the writer looks exactly like the character, this made me a little queasy - is there a male fantasy or two being played out here?  It is clear that Marter is not trying to subvert this genre, but is wholeheartedly celebrating it, but for all the flaws it's infinitely more enjoyable than Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma. There are flaws that are definitely Marter's too, such as two major plot holes. First, why are the baddies trying to kill Harry at the beginning if their plan is to use his knowledge on anti-toxins for their own ends? Second, how come the secret service turn up at the end to arrest the many wrongdoers that are still left alive? Harry never told anyone he was going to Paris. There are less significant loose ends too. There's a big fuss about the initials labelling the tapes that have been made from the anarchists bugging various places. Harry works out what one means, but there's never an explanation of the others and it doesn't have any bearing on future events. If I was supposed to work it out, I couldn't (be bothered). There's the massive coincidence where a good character just happens to turn up at a dead drop - on a remote island - that the baddies are using, to throw suspicion on her as a red herring. It stretches credibility that she'd happen to be there for other reasons.

Overall, it's fairly good and never boring. Harry makes an endearingly bungling spy, and there are nice cameos from the Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith in there. It was certainly a better foundation for a continuing series of original companion stories, with lots of contenders that could have been featured (Jo Grant, Tegan, Susan, etc.). Unfortunately, it was not to be. The only other contribution to the range was not an original story at all, but a novelisation of the TV spin off K9 and Company by the original writer Terence Dudley, published in 1987, nearly six years after it was broadcast. My feelings on the story are recorded in my blog post about it here. The book suffers from not having some of the only things about the story that are fun (the theme music, the beginning credits sequence, some of the performances) but it does give Dudley a chance to smooth over some of the more odd plotting decisions. Motivations and emotions are much clearer when we get insights into the characters' thoughts. There's only so much that can be changed though, as there was a definite expectation from the readership that the novelisations would be generally faithful to what was on TV. The only significant difference in the text is the locale; events have been moved from a fictional town in Gloucestershire to a fictional town in Dorset. My guess as to why is that Dudley was more familiar with that neck of the woods, the better to describe it accurately in prose. I don't think there's any bearing on the plot (unless witches' covens are more likely to still exist in Dorset, perhaps?). Ultimately, this is K9 and Company in all its dubious glory, and whether you enjoy the book or not is entirely dependent on how you feel about the TV version.

Since 1987, though there have been many ranges of original stories featuring Doctors new and old, a series of original novels featuring companions has never again been created. A couple of one-off novels have been published over the years since the show came back; like Harry Sullivan's War, these both had the distinction of being written or co-written by the actor that portrayed the main featured character. A Torchwood novel Exodus Code by John Barrowman and his sister Carole came out in 2012, and Sophie Aldred penned At Childhood's End, featuring Ace, which was published last year. That's it for now, though there may be more one-offs in future. I'm not collecting those two, or any other books. The Targets are done, and I have to draw a line. (Obviously, if I crack, change my mind and start collecting all the Virgin New Adventures, say, I'll let you know here!)

In Summary:

It's fairly G-Ood, but not that g-Reat.