Boom Town

Chapter the 263rd, is set in a city not a town. (Did people online in 2005 call this a plot hole, and ask for RTD to be sacked because of it? Probably, the silly billies.)

Plot:

The Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack travel to present day Cardiff to charge up the TARDIS using energy from the time/space rift that runs through the city. Anticipating being there for a couple of days, Rose contacts Mickey who comes from London bringing Rose her passport in case she needs it on her travels with the Doctor. While hanging out, the four of them discover the new mayor is Margaret Blaine, a disguised Slitheen family member who survived the destruction of 10 Downing Street. Her proposed plan to build a nuclear power station near the city centre is really a scheme to blow up the planet and power her extrapolator device (space surf board) to escape the planet. The Doctor takes her into his custody, planning to return her to her home planet (where, she says, she will be executed). Jack connects the extrapolator to the TARDIS to speed up the refueling. With the evening to wait, the Doctor takes Margaret out for dinner at a local restaurant, where she tries to persuade him to let her go. Rose and Mickey go out on a date, the passport request having just been Rose's ruse to get Mickey to come to see her. It ends up in an argument as he is tired of her leaving him behind. There's an earthquake; the Doctor and Margaret rush back to the TARDIS, as does Rose, abandoning a glum-looking Mickey. Margaret had booby-trapped the extrapolator - it has connected to another power source (the rift energy pumped into the TARDIS), and she is about to surf to freedom on a wave of destruction. This interference causes the TARDIS console to open and the telepathic vortex force released links to Margaret's mind and gives her what she wants, a second chance at life, by regressing her to an egg.

Context:

Watched from the DVD (single disc version alongside the following two episodes rather than from the giant TARDIS box-set of the whole season). I was accompanied only by the eldest (boy of 16); the Better Half and the other two children having better things to do seemingly. The eldest couldn't remember ever having seen the episode before, but he definitely has at least once. At the end, we both agreed that it had made us want to carry on and watch Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways (but we didn't, as we then had better things to do seemingly).

First Time Round:

The first series of the relaunched Doctor Who was broadcast in the UK after the Better Half and I got married (which was on a day in late August 2004 when production had just got underway and the earlier Slitheen episodes were being filmed in Cardiff). Our first year of wedded bliss, we lived in Gillingham, Kent where the BH was teaching, but our parents and a lot of friends were all still in the Brighton area where both of us had grown up. Late in 2005, we'd move back there, the better to have support when starting a family. Before that, without any dependents to worry about, there was a lot of travel around to visit people for weekends during 2005, and - me being me - usually watching Doctor Who on the Saturday with whomever we were visiting. During the course of Christopher Eccleston's season, we visited Worthing (twice), New York, Telford, and Brighton. This final visit was to stay with old friend Phil, mentioned often previously on the blog, for the weekend of Boom Town's debut on BBC1 (on 4th June 2005). Throughout the Saturday I remember feeling more and more poorly with a cold. Boom Town perked me up a bit, but then the three of us went out for dinner and I remember almost falling asleep in my first course.

Reaction:

A criticism of some of the early Doctor Who relaunch stories in Russell T Davies' first year as showrunner was that they had Deus ex Machina endings. What does that mean? Well, literally it means 'god from the machine', and links to a practice in ancient Greek theatre to introduce an actor playing a god into a play at the end using some kind of mechanical device (winching them up on a rope suspended above the stage, say), to decide the fate of all the other characters. It has come to mean an ending that comes from nowhere, not resolved by the characters themselves, cutting through the knotty complications of the plot in a way that makes things perhaps simpler for the author. I don't think there are any endings truly like that in the 2005 run, but Boom Town comes closest. It's hard to see it as anything but intended (probably playfully): I mean, there is a machine, and a glowing force with god-like powers comes out of it and decides what happens to Margaret. It looks at first glance that Davies has side-stepped the Doctor's moral quandary about whether he's responsible for Margaret's capital punishment if he delivers her unto it. A magical get-out has seemingly made things easy on him. But watch closely at how Eccleston plays it: it's clear that the Doctor is a few steps ahead of everyone else, and he is actively choosing to let things play out, allowing Margaret to get her wish. In the end, he's decided to let fate, in the form of the TARDIS, decide. It can see into her soul, after all, and knows even better than he whether Margaret could be rehabilitated.

Eccleston is great at commanding a scene by doing very little, and the writing, perhaps responding to the way he's played earlier stories before, works with him. Future Doctors would be more active, and the endings would get more obviously un-Machina, but there is something interesting and strong about this Doctor who tends to influence people and events around him indirectly. We know that Davies wrote this knowing something of how Eccleston would play it, as he's on record saying that the story exists only because, when they were filming the earlier Slitheen story, Eccleston and guest actor Annette Badland as Margaret worked well together, but didn't have much shared screen time. Boom Town exists to give them the multiple two-hander scenes when the Doctor takes Margaret out for a 'last meal'. The surrounding material (implausible plans for nuclear power stations, local government cover-ups, brief pyrotechnics as Cardiff gets shaken up by the extrapolator and the rift) is just window dressing surrounding those scenes. And they are great, the two actors riffing off each other comedically and dramatically. Margaret's rejoinder "Only a killer would know that" is one of the great lines of this period, and another small hint about the background character arc of the Doctor's survivor's guilt over his destruction of his own planet and people. As well as that, there's the biggest reference to the "Bad Wolf" series arc tease, and the wonderfully grounded scenes of Mickey and Rose arguing about his hooking up with Tricia Delaney from the estate, a counterpoint to the unearthly goings-on.

Seeing this story in isolation probably does it less favours than the last story blogged The Lie of the Land. While that story worked better in many ways as a stand-alone, Boom Town might be a bit anti-climactic without progressing directly on to the big finale of Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways. Davies was here creating on the fly a format he'd reuse in future years, a more quiet and intimate prelude just before the big events kick off. Boom Town risks being a bit too quiet and intimate, with only one significant guest speaking role and lots of talky scenes. Director Joe Ahearne, supported by the crew, makes up for this by getting great performances out of everyone, and shooting things in an interesting way. The Slitheen costume (used sparingly in Davies's script, again learning the lessons from earlier in the season) looks positively scary in its appearances in Boom Town. The vistas of Cardiff are attractive, and nicely accompanied by a lovely score by Murray Gold with lots of mournful motifs played on the oboe, or probably on an oboe sample anyway. Boom Town is one of a very special set of episodes, the first season of Doctor Who's magnificent relaunch. With this blog post, I only have the one left to write about; Eccleston stories are precious and scarce. While this might not be the biggest or most showy of them, it's never less than watchable, and has some moments of greatness. It's also good to see the new series, only 11 episodes in, confident in revisiting its own recently-created mythology and doing something different with an established character.

Connectivity:

Boom Town, like the Lie of the Land, is a story that follows on from two earlier episodes in its season, with action taking place six months after the events of those previous episodes. Both involve aliens in a position of power over humans, using a false narrative about being a benefactor while they plan for their own nefarious ends.

Deeper Thoughts:

Fame! He's going to live (well, regenerate) forever! Around the beginning of April 2023, there was a spirited social media discussion about the relative fame of the different actors cast in the role of Doctor Who over the years. Someone (or maybe more than one person, I didn't necessarily catch the very beginning of it) stated that as he is a globally known star (I believe the term 'megastar' may even have been used), Ncuti Gatwa must be the one with the highest level of fame on first getting the job. This was around the time that the full trailer of Hollywood film Barbie, in which Gatwa appears, had been released. A lot of people disputed this professed opinion, with various levels of annoyance or rage; indeed, I suspect that tweets like this are designed to provoke such responses. There's no foolproof way of gauging relative fame, of course, particularly not across the changing TV and film landscape of the six decades the programme has existed. Nonetheless, I think it can be said with authority that the professed opinion is wrong. Gatwa is well known to those that like the only significant thing he's been in that's actually out and viewable, Netflix series Sex Education. It's hard to know the show's exact global reach as Netflix isn't fully transparent with its success metrics, but it's definitely done well with a certain demographic and not just in Gatwa's home country. Beyond that demographic, though, people did not know his name or his face, and if they do know either now it's likely because he's been cast as Doctor Who, not because of Sex Education. This isn't a bad thing: he's still very much the relative newcomer, and is young and talented - his future's bright.

I don't mean to express judgement saying Gatwa is not a globally recognised name, as I don't think anyone who's ever taken on the role of the Doctor has been a globally recognised name. John Hurt and Hugh Grant are the only possible contenders to my mind, and they both were cast as one-off rather than ongoing versions (and the latter in a skit for Comic Relief rather than the show proper). It's not that sort of part, I don't think - you don't want a megastar, you want a good actor who most people will see and think "Oooh, it's him / her". Having said that, a couple of the classic series Doctors were star names on taking the role, but in the UK rather than across the world: Peter Davison, definitely, and Jon Pertwee. Maybe William Hartnell falls into that category too. He'd had a long and prestigious career in UK films and TV before being cast as the first ever Doctor Who, but usually in supporting character roles, a little way (but not too far) down the billing. It probably depended on the household, but it was more likely than not that he was a household name to those watching in 1963. It's well before my time, but it strikes me that Patrick Troughton was well respected in the business, and audiences would have recognised him, but not necessarily known his name. Colin Baker had some renown based on a showy turn in a series called The Brothers, and Sylvester McCoy would have been known by younger audiences as he'd done a lot of children's TV, but probably wouldn't have been known to adults unless they had been fans of the Ken Campbell Roadshow.

It's only after the series paused in 1989, when Doctor Who ceased to be made as a multi-camera studio affair, that anyone would be cast in the lead role who had more global presence. Paul McGann when cast was regularly getting lead roles in UK TV programmes and had done a couple of Hollywood films. Matt Smith was young and had been in a few UK TV series, but wouldn't be getting Hollywood work until after he'd played the Doctor. Capaldi was similar to Hartnell but a bit more international, having done lots of good work over a long period of time in both films and TV. Jodie Whittaker was successful in UK film and TV (and theatre too, of course - I don't mean to diminish anyone's theatrical profile, including Gatwa's, but it doesn't really factor any longer into global fame, for whatever that's worth). Having considered all this, I think the most globally famous actor at the point of taking on the Doctor role is probably the star of Boom Town, Christopher Eccleston. When he started shooting the relaunched Who, he'd just finished a decade of high profile work, with leading roles in UK TV and parts in internationally seen films (starting with Shallow Grave, but including many, many titles like The Others, 28 Days Later, Gone in Sixty Seconds, Existenz, Elizabeth). The parts were of different sizes, but he was always recognisable, often burning through the screen with intensity. There's your answer.

If not the most globally famous, Ncuti Gatwa probably is the most up-and-coming. He's been cast in a hit series and a small role in a big Hollywood movie before Doctor Who, and everything looks nicely lined up for him to make a big impression playing the universe's favourite Time Lord. He's also young and exciting, and clearly has the potential to move on to greater things (hopefully not too soon). The previous Doctor actors he's most like in terms of profile are probably David Tennant and Tom Baker. Tennant took on the role when he was doing good work and had just had his first big TV role in Casanova, plus a small but important appearance in a major movie with international reach (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). Sounds familiar. Baker was older than both the other two, but hadn't broken through, even though he had appeared in a few movies and TV shows. He needed something that was a good fit for his mercurial genius, and Doctor Who came along and proved to be just that. There's no foolproof way of gauging these things, but a lot of people would agree that Tom Baker and David Tennant are the most popular Doctors there have ever been. That may be a big thing for Ncuti Gatwa to live up to, but I think he's more than capable of meeting the challenge. I can't wait to see it.

 

In Summary:

Boom shake shake shake the Cardiff Bay area.