In the Forest of the Night

Chapter the 272nd, where the Doctor can't see the good from the trees.

Plot:
The Doctor lands in central London in the present day, but is confused because all around him is forest. Meanwhile, Clara and Danny Pink have been accompanying some Coal Hill School kids on an overnight stay at the National History Museum, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Cardiff. They attempt to leave and find that trees have sprouted up overnight surrounding the building. People everywhere wake up to find the same thing has happened across the world, including the mother of Maebh Arden. Maebh is one of the children on the school trip, and she has - unbeknownst to Danny and Clara, as they are clearly the worst schoolteachers ever - already left the museum and run into the Doctor. Maebh is neurodivergent (it's not fully spelled out but that's the hint), and since her older sister went missing the previous year, she seems to have gained some kind of psychic powers. Everyone meets up and wanders around the empty forests (Londoners have been asked to stay in their homes, and for the first time ever seem to have complied) and avoids escaped zoo animals. Creatures that look like fireflies communicate to the Doctor through Maebh; they've created the forests to protect the Earth from a solar flare as they'll create an oxygen forcefield. They have similarly saved Earth several times before in history, but always made the humans forget (except for some residual memories that crept into fairy tales with dark, twisted forests). Danny discovers that Clara has been lying to him, and she's still travelling with the Doctor. Maebh and her Mum are reunited with Maebh's sister, who comes back home.

Context:

Watched on a Sunday in mid-July from the Blu-ray disc in the Complete Eighth Series box set. I was accompanied by all three children (boys of 17 and 13, girl of 11) none of whom could ever remember having seen the story before. They watched it without sarcastic remarks nor signs of restlessness, and at the end all agreed that "It was alright" (there isn't really a higher level of praise from them at this stage in their lives). Only one moment garnered any other comment during the runtime, and that was because one of the background artists playing a non-speaking kid had the same backpack that the eldest had at around the same time the story was first broadcast. It's the blue bag with a monster mouth design; I didn't care enough to get a screengrab, sorry, and its appearance in the narrative is very fleeting, but have a look for it if you ever watch In the Forest of the Night again. After this watch, will I honestly be encouraging you to watch In the Forest of the Night again? Let's see.

First Time Round:

Watched on the day of its debut BBC1 broadcast on the 25th October 2014, probably slightly time-shifted into the evening but likely not by much. The pattern in those days was for the Better Half and I to view the episode before the children on the Saturday night, and then I would watch again with them (if it wasn't too scary, they were all quite young at the time) the following Sunday morning. This one was deemed acceptable, though a couple of others in Capaldi's first year were not, as I remember. One thing I recall from around this first watch was something approximately a week later; at least one online wag commented after the cliffhanger of following episode, Dark Water - first of a Cyberman two-parter - that we didn't need to worry about Cyber-invasion because the trees would surely rise up and save us. Ho ho. A bit unfair, though, as In the Forest of the Night goes to great lengths to explain that the creatures that are able to make the trees appear overnight do so only to protect against cosmic-scale natural disasters. At the time of watching, though not so waggish about it, I was disappointed in this story. Would this latest watch cause me to reappraise?

Reaction:

Frank Cottrell-Boyce is a ridiculously prestigious writer to have contribute to Doctor Who. In executive producer of In the Forest of the Night Steven Moffat's tenure, special guest writers were often invited to contribute a script or two before and since this story: hit playwrights, writers of well-loved sitcoms, bestselling fantasy authors, founders of Comic Relief. Only Cottrell-Boyce, though, already had on his CV a once-in-a-lifetime thing like being a major creative force behind the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, as well as many other major credits in UK film and television, and a dozen novels. He clearly wanted to do something a bit different in this story, something much more fairy tale in its narrative and its aesthetic than Doctor Who had attempted for a good while, perhaps ever. He just had the bad luck that his story was positioned three weeks on from a story where the moon turned out to be an egg. Kill the Moon and In the Forest of the Night get bracketed together, I think, as the silly ones / stinkers of the year, but that's probably not entirely fair on the latter. Unlike Kill the Moon (see here for more from me on that story), In the Forest of the Night has been constructed to be singular in its nature, tone and intent. There's a girl in a red hood running from a wolf in it; there's a tiger in a forest that's arrived overnight in it. It even explains fairy tales in its narrative - they are the race memory of previous events with the trees from Earth's history. Unlike the story shown three weeks before, it doesn't lurch from one style and genre to another before ending on a scientifically implausible note - it's committed to the bit throughout.

The issue is that the singular genre Cottrell-Boyce chooses is not just one with fairy tale trappings, it's a full-on fairy tale: tree sprites sense an oncoming disaster and rise up to save the Earth. The script makes reasonable stabs at doing it in a Doctor Who way, don't get me wrong: the sprites appear to be undiscovered lifeforms with powers to accelerate the growth pattern of trees, as well as control oxygen in order to repel fire. I can accept all that as consistent with Who's level of scientific rigour (i.e. within wide but sane boundaries without being necessarily super accurate). When the trees disappear at the end, though, they just sparkle gold and glow and disappear. It's too much like magic. If the tree lifeforms grew these forests overnight, and all the stuff in the script about the different rings seen in cross-sections of tree trunks strongly suggests that this has happened, then I can accept that they can reverse that growth too. If there were signs of that happening, or at least some potholes left afterwards, it would be tangible and have some reality. If they can magic away the trees, though, then why not just magic them into place in the first place? The lack of even the slightest interaction with tangible reality harms the story. It also doesn't help that there's a lack of threat. There's escaped animals seen briefly, but that's it. What it needs is more people showing up in the forest than just our heroes - it needs looters, and the displaced, and the despairing, and the crazed; it needs more than just one mother searching for their child: it needs extras. Presumably it was budgetary factors that meant the forests of central London were left suspiciously under-populated.

With neither a sense of reality nor a sense of threat, the story is a bit weightless, liable to float off like a soap bubble and pop. What helps a little to keep it grounded are fine performances all round. The regulars give good value as always - Capaldi is still in grumpy mode, Jenna Coleman and Samuel Anderson, as Clara and Danny, have a little material to get their teeth into with a subplot about trust in their relationship. The child actors are all good too, and they're given (and give rise to) some great dialogue. "When I get stressed I forget my anger management" was a favourite for me. The kids' reaction to Clara and Danny kissing was played well too, and I liked all the stuff about how they would rather be safe with their Mums than witness a one-off cosmic event. Anything that's real amongst the mainly unreal elements of the story is welcome; this is perhaps why the strange cameo from Missy (put in to keep up the intrigue about the season's arc plot, the finale coming up next) doesn't fit. The ending where Maebh and her mother are reunited with the teenage runaway sister would count as a note of reality too, if it had been staged better. As it is, it looks like she's been hiding in a shrub in the front garden for the year, as the decision has been made to have the magic disappearing foliage reveal her behind it. Presumably, the director or Cottrell-Boyce thought it would look cool. It does not. Added up, I think I've been a mite unfair in my disregard for this story in the past. It's not a total failure, and is instead a valid attempt to do a Doctor Who fairy tale in a realistic contemporary setting. It's not ultimately a success either, but it needed only a few tweaks (and a bit more budget) to be so. 

Connectivity:

Similarly to The Power of Kroll, In the Forest of the Night features the TARDIS landing in an environment that's very green because of an abundance of plant life.

Deeper Thoughts:

Searching for the next segment (part 2). Five new Target Doctor Who novelisations were released in mid-July 2023. This is becoming an annual occurrence since the range was restarted in 2018 after many, many years on pause. It may even become a more frequent occurrence; no sooner were these five out than it was announced that the three TV 60th anniversary specials, still months away from being broadcast at that point, would be released as novelisations less than six months later in early January 2024. We've never had it so good! Capsule reviews of three of the current five can be found in the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post here. The fourth of the five is an adaptation of a Peter Capaldi story, from the year after In the Forest of the Night. The Zygon Invasion is the prose adaptation of Peter Harness's screenplay for the TV episode of the same name plus the second episode The Zygon Inversion, which Harness co-wrote with Steven Moffat. A reminder of the plot of the TV version, and my thoughts about it, can be found in its blog post here. Harness is the first author to adapt a story comprising two modern 45-minute episodes; with those to provide the basis for the novelisation, the challenge of expansion faced by those tackling one-parter stories is not there. The challenge is perhaps instead how to provide enough depth for a prose retelling without having to cut or change anything beyond the bounds of what would be acceptably faithful. If so, Harness manages this, I think.

He does this by the inclusion of humour and wordplay without inserting any lengthy new scenes; for example, there's a formal joke about the habit of Target books back in the day to have footnotes nudging the reader towards other books in the range. He also manages to smooth over plotting that seemed a bit jagged on the TV, explaining better the resettlement and subsequent radicalisation of a splinter group of Zygons. One addition that I think is a stroke of genius is a flashback including a cameo from Danny Pink (I won't spoil it). The Doctor's speech at the end is less overblown when written down too. The book version doesn't solve all of the problems I highlighted in the blog post from 2019, but the story overall is much improved. The use of they / their pronouns by and in reference to the character of Osgood (who is resolutely non-binary, on the human / Zygon axis) is a nice touch too. The next and final book of the five is a Kerblam! adaptation by Pete McTighe, based on his 2018 script for Jodie Whittaker's first season as the Doctor. McTighe doesn't slow the pace with too much inner dialogue of his characters, but picks his moments during the narrative to inject some relatively short flashback scenes to illustrate backstory and motivation (including a cameo appearance by a couple of characters, which I also won't spoil).

There aren't many characters in this story, which effectively operates as a whodunnit, and fleshing out one (the computer System of Kerblam itself) does sacrifice one suspect and a little bit of mystery in favour of depth. I still think that someone who hasn't seen the TV version could be surprised by the revelation of the villain. The one big thing that the book version of Kerblam! is denied is the magnificent visuals: the costumes and masks of the various creepy fixed-smile robots that work in Kerblam! and keep tabs on the 10% organic workforce, plus the physical performances and voices, contributed to a sinister atmosphere. McTighe works hard on the prose to recreate this; understanding that his robot Postmen have to seem cheery to be chilling, he gives them a prose-friendly catchphrase. Whenever they appear, it's with a sing-song "Ding Dong!" greeting. This is great apart from my inability - shared I suspect by anyone of my generation, including perhaps McTighe himself - to hear it in any voice other than the suggestive tones of Leslie Phillips. One thing I was anticipating reading the book was exactly how faithful the ending would be. I've seen a bit of a backlash against the story from younger fans online in the years since its broadcast, as it reads as siding with the corporation rather than the individual. Though some minor details are changed, that's still the thrust. Kerblam! might become a more caring company and hire a few more people, but that's as radical as it gets.

The one question that isn't answered, or even asked, in the TV or book version is who's making the money? Why isn't that wealth being distributed in such a way that the impacts of automation are mitigated? It's interesting to compare and contrast the books of Kerblam! and Planet of the Ood in this regard, both dealing with corporations making money from misery, with very different results for the corporations involved. All five of the books are worth buying for different reasons. Two, as mentioned, are interesting companion pieces. The Zygon Invasion is an improvement on a solid Doctor Who tale; Warrior's Gate and Beyond is an interesting take on old material, plus some newer material included as a bonus. And The Waters of Mars is The Waters of Mars; Phil Ford has effectively captured in prose what made the story an explosively good watch back in 2009. It's my personal favourite of the bunch, but I'd recommend collecting them all.

In Summary:

If only the performances - one of the best parts of this story, to be honest - were rubbish then I could do some joke about things being wooden. But I can't, so I won't.

The Power of Kroll

Chapter the 271st, Kroll Kroll Kroll!!!

Plot:
Seeking the fifth of six segments of the Key to Time, the Doctor and Romana arrive in the TARDIS on the third moon of Delta Magna, sometime in the future when Earth-people are colonising planets. They leave K9 in the TARDIS as he'd be no good on the swampy terrain, and immediately get involved in local politics. After having turfed the native Delta Magnans (Swampies) from their home planet and rehoused them on this moon, humans then discovered voluminous methane deposits in the swamps of the moon, and set up an experimental refinery to process them. The commander, Thawn, now wants rid of the Swampies altogether so he can expand his operations, but faces opposition, not least from the anti-colonialist Sons of Earth movement. Thawn engages a gun-runner Rohm-Dutt to sell the Swampies faulty weapons for an attack on the refinery, purporting to be donations from the Sons of Earth. This will then be Thawn's pretext for wiping the Swampies out. Romana is almost sacrificed to the Swampies' god Kroll in a pre-battle ceremony. Kroll emerges from the Swamp, woken by the refinery's operations, and turns out to be a giant squid (and the source of the methane). Most people, humans and Swampies alike, are killed by Kroll. The Doctor pieces together from some ancient texts that Kroll's size was caused by its swallowing the fifth segment, disguised as a religious artefact; he bravely goes out armed only with the tracer and converts the segment, destroying Kroll in the process. He also stops a malfunctioning automated process in the refinery blowing them all up. Then, the quest continues...

Context:

I watched from the DVD an episode every evening on my own in early July 2023. This is another story that completes a season of Doctor Who's blog posts. Bit by bit over eight years the blog has collected every segment of the Key to Time season in random order, starting with the final piece by posting about season finale The Armageddon Factor, only my fifth story blogged, way back in 2015. Like the Doctor when he completed his quest for the Key, I can't pause for long before I resume my random wanderings. I have now completed 11 out of the current 39 seasons of combined classic and new Who (3, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25, and new series 6 and 13). In the same way as when collecting the novelisations and the videos over the years, there's an excitement in slowly closing the gaps. A huge swathe of Tom Baker stories from The Masque of Mandragora continuously through to Meglos are now completed, and I only have three more of his to go. When I reach the last of Tom, I'll no doubt be a bit bereft. Of course, a history of collecting teaches one that you can always put off completion by hook or by crook. For example, around the time of writing, a new novelisation of a Tom Baker story has been published, despite his era having been comprehensively covered in book form for a while now (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details).

First Time Round:

Having recently rediscovered a box of my old diaries (see the First Time Round section of the recent Cold War post for more details), I first checked there to see if I had recorded anything from around the time I first saw this story (which was when the VHS tape was released in 1995). I kept a diary for the first few months of the year, but seem to have given up in late March, just before the first tapes of the Key to Time stories were released, and long before the 5th June 1995, when The Power of Kroll (and The Armageddon Factor) came out, completing the overarching story. What I usually say here, remembering this period of my life, is that I would have bought them in Volume One in Worthing on the day of release, probably after work but maybe at lunchtime, taken them home on the bus as soon as work allowed, and watched them straight away, one after the other. It was probably something like that, but looking at the entries around early February and March when other videos came out, I see that it was not always that simple. I spent a week early in February looking every day for releases before realising that I'd got the date wrong and they wouldn't be out until the second Monday of the month. On the 6th March, Volume One had sold out apparently, so I had to get the couple of titles released then on the following day, presumably from somewhere else but I don't specify where. I do remember when I finally watched The Power of Kroll, whenever it exactly was, I found it quite good compared to its preceding reputation.

Reaction:

Many a clever commentator on these kind of things over the years has pointed out, as part of some treatise on how differing approaches to material can produce wildly divergent results, that poll-topping fan favourite story The Caves of Androzani contains very many plot elements in common with the same writer's earlier story The Power of Kroll (a very much poll-bottoming fan unfavourite story). The writer, Robert Holmes, does indeed include in both a couple of factions and gun-running funded by an unlikely person with Machiavellian intent, all based on a smaller inhabited world in the shadow of the society of a larger nearby planet. These superficial similarities, though, may disguise how much a talented pro writer like Holmes is in control of tone. Androzani is not more serious than Kroll just because of different (better?) direction and production design. Holmes constructs his earlier script to be more of a fun knockabout story not taking itself too seriously. His gun runners in the later story are a nasty bunch, and this is showcased in some dramatic scenes. Rohm-Dutt, the gun runner from the Kroll story, is deliberately written to be a much less serious character, and is therefore showcased in more comedic scenes such as some verbal sparring with Romana. In both, Holmes is working with a different script editor with different requirements. The Caves of Androzani was made when the production team was establishing a pacey action-oriented template; The Power of Kroll was made at an earlier time when the series wanted to accentuate the lighter and the comic, steering away from the violence and horror; as such, it was - for that time - just what the Doctor ordered.

The superficial similarities between the two stories could well be a subconscious offering from Holmes. The Androzani story was the writer's return to broadcast Doctor Who after five years away, the last script he'd had produced for the show being The Power of Kroll. Perhaps that brought gun-runners and such back to some part of his mind. Many, including Holmes talking about himself, have accused him of being 'Who-ed out' by the time of Kroll, after having written at least one script per year since the 60s, and having been script editor for a long period too. I don't feel watching it that the story betrays any exhaustion or lack of ideas. Maybe the execution has some issues, but the script is fine. Well, the script is fine except for one ruinously ambitious component, and that was insisted on by the production team. Saying the giant squid monster is the elephant in the room of this story doesn't do it justice: it's the giant squid monster in the room. Still, it's not that bad; the split screen superimposition of the model over the location footage has a very obvious dividing line, but there have been worse effects in Who's history. Arguably, the Magma creature in the Androzani story is less forgivable - what's in the script is much easier to realise than a giant squid, and the finished article is as bad as anything in The Power of Kroll. I'm happy to forgive both. The tentacles we see interacting directly with the cast in live action scenes and the model Kroll attacking the refinery are hard to reconcile with one another as they appear to be different scales; again, though, it's a minor issue, and more to the point - giant squid monster! I think a Doctor Who that attempted this is much more fun and rewarding than one that didn't.

The Swampies are actors painted green with green wigs, yes, but I think they look okay. The night filming of their sacrificial ceremony, all chanting and formation jogging on the spot and spear waggling, is great. The sets are a bit drab, but the performances are solid. John Lesson, not voicing K9 but still under contract, is a fresh and bright presence on camera; someone as good as Philip Madoc is playing second in command (reportedly accidentally accepting the role as he thought he was getting Neil McCarthy's role as Thawn); another guest actor that kept coming back to Who John Abineri plays lead Swampie Ranquin with aplomb. There's some expert world building with Robert Holmes creating the Sons of Earth, a movement in conflict with the authorities, in very few lines of dialogue. A hovercraft zips about on location. The Doctor larks about in the climactic struggle to defeat the giant monster (Tom famously said in the Tom Baker Years video interview that he was "making a meal of it" but it's lots of fun), and the script has another surprise when the danger isn't over and an explosive orbit shot still needs to be dealt with. The colonialism theme is a bit heavy handed, but different Swampies are at least allowed differing opinions rather than being presented as a monoculture, and there's a nice open ending where Fenner's fate (as the only colonial left with the natives) is left to one's imagination. Long recaps for episodes two to four maybe show that the scripts were underrunning a bit, but that happens with Doctor Who stories fairly frequently. It also seems a bit off that there's long scenes of build-up of the refinery staff seeing hints on their monitors that something big is coming after the monster has been revealed to the audience. These are minor quibbles, though.

Connectivity:

Both The Power of Kroll and Fugitive of the Judoon feature a gun going off in its user's face (due to decrepitude of the weapon in the former, and booby-trapping in the latter).

Deeper Thoughts:

Searching for the next segment (part 1). Only for its first ever home video release on VHS did the Key to Time recreate its collecting quest narrative for the consumer; each story was released separately, and could be hunted down to form the whole. Subsequent DVD releases were always a full box-set, and no doubt an eventual Blu-ray release will be the same. It's a shame not to capitalise on this time in the Doctor's history where he became a completist collector like his fans. It's not, though, as if there aren't many other opportunities for collection open to the Who connoisseur. The original Target novelisations, for example, at the end of the classic era had covered almost all the broadcast stories: there was scope for the collecting to continue, as it eventually did in more recent years with the publishing of books to close those remaining gaps, and to novelise some stories from the new series too. Recently, with the gaps all closed, the focus has moved to new series stories, though a couple of titles have been re-novelised, with completely new adaptations of the original TV stories released. This has happened again in the tranche of books released in July 2023 (all available as smartly designed paperbacks with covers by Anthony Dry). Five titles have been released in all, and one is a reworking by the original screenwriter (and, though he was using a pseudonym back then, the original noveliser too) of the story Warrior's Gate, Steven Gallagher. To refresh your memory of the plot of the story, see its blog post here.

The changes Gallagher makes are interesting in that they are not made in significant areas of the narrative, nor in sweeping fashion: there's an exciting opening not seen on TV where a pilot deliberately shoots the slaver ship in such a way that it will end up in the void where the story is set; this, though, was part of the original novelisation that Gallagher wrote in the 1980s (which I dug out for comparison) too. The new changes he's made instead are multiple smaller ones to the order of events, or which character meets with whom and when, slightly restructuring things, as if it is a version based on an earlier draft of the original TV screenplay. It's also much longer than the original book, Gallagher having written more material back then but not having been granted an increased page count; he's able to reinstate it in this new version. Comic characters Aldo and Royce, renamed in the TV version and faithfully monikered thus in the original novelisation, return to being Aldo and Waldo as per Gallagher's original conception. Some aspects from TV and the original novelisation - like the giant MZ gun used in a futile attempt to destroy the gateway - are dropped altogether. It all adds up to a different but similar story in the spirit of the original. Only if you're wedded to very specific moments (for example, missing is a favourite moment of mine when the Doctor knocks over an overfilled cup of wine and says "This is no way to run an empire") will you be in any way disappointed.

The book is called Warriors' Gate and Beyond because also included are two short stories. The first is a prose version of an audiobook released in 2021, The Kairos Ring, a story of Romana, K9 and the Tharil Laszlo fighting an army of the undead. The second is exclusive to this book, The Little Book of Fate, and features the Paul McGann version of the Doctor investigating a traveling carnival in the North of England between the wars, and finding a Tharil featuring in its freak show. Both are interesting curios, and it's good to have them collected together in one bumper volume. The next novelisation in this batch by broadcast order is from nearly 40 years later: Keith Temple's adaptation of his 2008 Tenth Doctor story Planet of the Ood. Temple is adapting the shortest programme of all of the five; turning a 45-minute episode into a 160+ page book has posed a challenge to many authors in the last few years as new series stories have been published. How to add additional material without impacting the story's pacing? Temple does this in the most traditional way to date, diving into the internal dialogue and history of characters to flesh out individual moments shown on screen (much like Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke did before him in the early years of the Target range). This slows things down a bit, but that suits the story, which underneath the trappings is a pretty traditional tale. One of the sales rep characters (all Ood fodder without many or any lines on TV) is named and gets a backstory and memorable death; plus, an extra scene is added that beefs up the Doctor and Donna's contribution to the denouement.

Phil Ford takes somewhat of a similar approach in the prose version of his and Russell T Davies's The Waters of Mars (broadcast in 2009), but the inner thoughts and history of the characters are kept relatively short to retain the TV version's velocity. Some of the material around Ed Gold's relationship with his CO is softened, and the ambiguity of his final words (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the Waters of Mars blog post) reduced. Ford slows things down only in the middle, before the eruption of carnage, by including some new material. This comprises a much longer flashback sequence of the 10-year old Adelaide Brooke during the events of earlier story The Stolen Earth, expanding the Dalek cameo seen on TV, and a scene integrating the history of the Ice Warriors (previous inhabitants of Mars in Doctor Who lore) with the Flood infection. They are both essentially fan service continuity-fests, but nonetheless enjoyable. Nothing much could harm The Waters of Mars, anyway. No offence to Warrior's Gate particularly, and the other three stories, but The Waters of Mars on television - in this chronicler's humble opinion at least - stands hands and shoulders above them as one of the best Doctor Who stories made to date. That wasn't guaranteed necessarily to translate to prose, though, so it will be interesting next time to see how The Zygon Invasion and Kerblam! are transformed when converted to the written word. To be continued...  

In Summary:

Listen not to the unbelievers! It's intended to be a fun story, and it - mostly - succeeds in being just that.

Fugitive of the Judoon

Chapter the 270th, which takes quite a turn, and then even more of a twist.

Plot:
The TARDIS registers that the Judoon are operating outside their jurisdiction in present day Gloucester, and the Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz materialise to sort the situation out. The Doctor is rapidly separated from her friends when Captain Jack Harkness beams them aboard a stolen ship he's piloting, and passes on a warning message about the Cybermen's imminent return. Meanwhile, the Judoon surround the house of a seemingly ordinary couple, Ruth and Lee. They have something to hide, with Lee having kept a non-Earth artefact in his house. The mysterious Gat, who knows the couple from some previous life in a shadowy organisation and has hired the Judoon to track them down, confronts Lee and he is killed. The Doctor sneaks Ruth out and gets her to the safety of Gloucester Cathedral. A message sent by Lee before he died awakens some memories in Ruth, and she makes short work of the Judoon that come looking for her there, using unarmed combat moves. Following a clue from Lee, the Doctor and Ruth go to a disused lighthouse where Ruth remembers growing up. The Doctor investigates an unmarked grave in the grounds, digging to reveal a TARDIS disguised as a police box. In the lighthouse, Ruth breaks the glass of a fire alarm and her memories are restored - she is the Doctor, and had used a Chameleon Arch to hide out on Earth. Both Doctors are in the TARDIS when it is dragged up to an orbiting spaceship by tractor beam. Gat confronts the Doctor she recognises, and is tricked into shooting herself with a booby-trapped gun. The fugitive Doctor leaves in her TARDIS, leaving the other Doctor brooding on why she has no memory of being this particular incarnation.

Context:

I watched this from the disc in the Complete Twelfth Series Blu-ray box set, which I notice I got in steelbook format. I don't collect the steelbooks like some, just get them occasionally when a different packaging format doesn't come up initially to pre-order. To be honest, they're always a bit irritating to remove discs from, as they're designed to be elegantly thin and therefore have multiple discs on one spindle. It interests me that owning something that's a source of obsessive joy and satisfaction to one Doctor Who fan could be meaningless (or even irritating) to another, even though the two are already united in a - let's face it - fairly niche pursuit. More of these grumpy old man style musings in the Deeper Thoughts section below.

First Time Round:

I first watched this story live with the whole family on the Sunday night of its debut on BBC1 in the UK, 26th January 2020. I enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine with the viewing, at the end of a busy weekend. The key moment I remember is hearing John Barrowman's distinctive voice from off camera returning to the series after a decade and thinking "Is that? It is!!" and exchanging a look of surprise with the Better Half. They had kept his return and all the other surprises in the narrative secret, and I'd seen not even the tiniest of leaks. I watched the story again on my own on the Monday evening as I couldn't remember the end. Don't get me wrong, I remembered all the big revelations, but after that it was hazy. What had happened with Captain Jack? What had happened with the fugitive Doctor? There was some stuff with a spaceship and a gun, but what had happened after that? I put this down at first to the glasses of wine making me a bit fuzzy. But nothing really happens with Captain Jack, he just disappears. And, despite all those earth-shattering revelations, the end of the fugitive Doctor story is a bit of nonsense with a spaceship and a gun, and after that she disappears too. Could such a shocking and explosive story really have finished on an anti-climax?

Reaction:

In an early Eddie Izzard stand-up routine, Eddie would pitch her idea for a story for Tales of the Unexpected, the long-running British TV anthology show, which showcased dramas with a twist in the tale. On stage Izzard would outline the story about a man concerned about his wife having an affair, who would take to following her. One day, he would see her go into a house, and would break in so he could see who she was with, would creep upstairs quietly, open the bedroom door, and then a pig would jump out and eat him. At the risk of dissecting the metaphorical frog, the point of the joke is that the unexpected nature of the story's end is not integrated with the rest of the narrative; the pig eating the protagonist does not resolve the story of his paranoia about the suspected affair. The two major twists in Fugitive of the Judoon - an old friend of the Doctor returns to give a warning but misses her, the Doctor discovers a past incarnation of herself that she has no memory of ever being - are similarly unresolved within the 50-minute runtime of the story. They would both get paid off by the end of the 2020 series, but would they amount to much?  Taking the Captain Jack cameo first, it certainly doesn't make any difference to the plot of the Fugitive story. It provides a very low-scale complicating factor to the main narrative by separating the Doctor from her companions, but Jodie Whittaker's Doctor barely even notices their absence. The warning that Jack delivers that the fam pass on is ignored in the later episodes of the season anyway. So, the sequences with Jack could lift right out, and all that would be gone was fan service and a bit of foreshadowing.

You can't lift out the twist that Ruth is an earlier version of the Doctor, though, right? Right? Let's play out how that would work, just in terms of its impact to this one 50-minute story. The Doctor is helping a woman Ruth who seems to have been wrongly identified as an alien by the Judoon; but mild-mannered Ruth turns out to be an alien with "Jackie Chan" style skills that had been kept buried. Despite her being a bit aggressive and waving guns around, the Doctor still helps her escape the Judoon and the shadowy organisation that 'Ruth' used to work for who have hired the Judoon to find her. Without the story beat revealing that Ruth is the Doctor, it still works in a Nobody / History of Violence way, the revelation of an assassin hiding so well they are overlooked by society.  There's not much of an ending, but again all you lose is foreshadowing. And does it matter that there isn't much of an ending? The story as it wound up doesn't have any ending. As I mentioned above, this bothered me at some level from my very first watch. The fugitive Doctor leaves, never to be seen again (Jo Martin will return in character periodically as a series as memories and hallucinations, but will never come back as the Doctor). Nothing's explained, fair enough, but nothing's resolved either. The writers (Vinay Patel with showrunner Chris Chibnall) do their best with a final scene where the fam reassure their Doctor that she is defined by her actions not her past, but it doesn't amount to a climax.

Ultimately, the story can't help but feel incomplete - it's part one of a multi-part story where the next part isn't coming straight away. As such, it's borrowing from the future, creating story debt that will need to eventually be paid off. This is par for the course in a series like Doctor Who, of course, and Chibnall's predecessor as showrunner Steven Moffat did it a lot. As an example, The Name of the Doctor, at the end of Matt Smith (and Moffat's) third season in charge, introduces a past version of the Doctor of whom the audience have been previously unaware, but who doesn't really do anything significant plot-wise, just like Fugitive of the Judoon. One could argue that Moffat pays off the debt better in The Day of the Doctor than Chibnall in The Timeless Children (the latter story really just raises more questions, deferring the debt repayment to another day), but that's in the future: the two set-up stories face the same issue, which is that they don't have an end. Moffat manages with some clever word-play related to the story title, and by holding back the mystery new Doctor revelation to the last seconds, to make it seem like his story is in any way climactic. It's a pretty cheap trick. Chibnall isn't as good at those clever-clever narrative sticking plasters. Instead, as mentioned, he and his co-writer rely on a character scene. It rings a bit hollow, though, as none of the fam have shared the story with the Doctor, and haven't witnessed the morally dodgy gun-wielding, "Jackie Chan" kicking antics of the Doctor's previous self. How can they know the Doctor isn't defined by her past, if they haven't seen it?

The other pitfall of a story like this is the borrowing it does from the present too. The Whittaker story is not as bad as The Name of the Doctor, the entire running time of which is multiple scenes of consequence-free nonsense just to set up for the casting reveal of John Hurt playing the Doctor. Fugitive's beginning scenes of Ruth's homelife are just misdirection. It's really good misdirection, and stands up to maybe a couple of views (nice little touches like it opening with her staring at her watch, or Lee being described as a "faithful companion") but maybe not more than that. This is despite it being well designed, well shot and well performed. A number of people I've seen commenting online since have sniffily suggested that it's a shame to only have a few minutes of Jo Martin's Doctor and then be stuck with Jodie Whittaker thereafter. I think this misunderstands the nature of acting. Martin is only able to shine because of Whittaker's hard-work and generosity acting in counterpoint to her previous persona's forcefulness. Martin's Doctor is great as an icon, and great doing pop-up appearances in later episodes, but I don't think the character as presented in this story would work on an ongoing basis, it would need to be softened. There's lots of other smaller stuff in here that's enjoyable, even if it doesn't really contribute to the plot; no space to go into detail about the all, but Michael Begley's performance as All Ears Alan is joyous, and his death scene very memorable for the astonished gasp the lead Judoon makes on being shoved - great vocal work from the unsung hero of new Who Nick Briggs.

Connectivity:

Fugitive of the Judoon, like Cold War, features an alien that's been stuck on Earth for a lengthy period. Both stories also contain a Doctor separated from their TARDIS, and a craft being pulled up from below the surface of the Earth by another craft's tractor beam. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Mainlining modern modular multi-media mythmaking. I don't understand Doom's Day. I didn't understand Time Lord Victorious either. For the uninitiated, both of these - the former launched this year, the latter was a similar thing from 2020 - are umbrella titles for multiple different connected Doctor Who tie-in stories across different media platforms. Taken together, they form a larger epic tale, but they - reportedly - stand-alone also. I understood more the logic of doing something of this sort in 2020. Covid lockdowns were keeping everybody at home; there'd only recently been a series of Doctor Who shown (Jodie Whittaker's second run, of which Fugitive of the Judoon is part, aired in the early months of the year and was finished before lockdowns started) and it currently wasn't possible to make a new one. A host of new stories to satisfy the needs of Doctor Who fans' expansive story appetites was probably right for that moment. Even so, I only ended up experiencing two of the many stories on offer. The first was a comic strip that I read because it was printed in Doctor Who Magazine, which I subscribe to and read anyway. I've read every issue of the magazine without a break from the mid-1990s, and with only a few breaks since the early 1980s, so it was essentially a freebie. The story was called Monstrous Beauty, I think, and featured the Christopher Eccleston Doctor and Rose fighting vampires... I think. It didn't leave much of an impression, but I'm sure it was fine. The other story was the animated Daleks! that was available to watch online for free, and which I covered in more detail in the Deeper Thoughts section of The Christmas Invasion blog post from December of 2020.

There was the odd unexplained moment, but it didn't matter much to appreciating them in isolation. Whether they were truly stand-alone, I don't know for sure. Similarly to Fugitive of the Judoon, as observed above, each of those two stories had accrued just a little story debt; the only way to see how that paid off would be to watch every different story under the Time Lord Victorious banner. TLV, to give it the abbreviation used at the time, sprawled a bit, though. There was even a T-Shirt that one could buy that contained a small amount of the wider story. I couldn't even keep track of all the different parts, let alone purchase and experience them all. That lesson seems to have been learned for this second similar event in 2023. Doom's Day - as hinted at in the name - comprises a more contained and affordable 24 sub-sections, each one a different hour of the titular Doom's... erm, day. Doom is a female assassin played by Sooz Kempner, and seems to me (and it might just be me) to be totally and utterly unengaging. She has to track down the Doctor for some slightly woolly reason, or else she'll die. So far, so so. Is that story special enough to be told in such a grandiose manner, though? As we've seen, the teasing reveal of an entire new lifetime for the Doctor only warranted 50 minutes of airtime in 2020. Time Lord Victorious dived into the Lore with a capital 'L'. Is Doom's story important enough? Let's examine the different parts of the wider tale. The first and last of the 24 'hour' chunks are online stories, free for all. There are also two parts that are going to be new levels on a phone-based Doctor Who game; again I think that involves no purchase, so will only cost you your time. For the rest you have to stump up some cash.

The remaining 20 hours divide into five groups of four, each provided by a different purveyor of Doctor Who extended universe material: an audio box-set by BBC Audio, another by Big Finish, a novel by BBC Books, and comic strips by Titan Comics and Panini. The last of these, comprising hours two to five in Doom's story came as a separate 20-page comic with issue 592 of Doctor Who magazine. I've read it, and it has some nice moments and decent art. It'll forever, though, be incomplete to me, as I'm not going to buy any of the other parts. I wonder how many people will. Who is the audience that this is aimed at and how large or small is it? I use myself as a yardstick of these things; I have been a Doctor Who fan for over 40 years; I have a collector's mindset and I have a reasonable amount of disposable income. I have bought products from most of those five names over the years, but - excepting Panini - I've not bought all or even most of their Doctor Who output - I'd be bankrupt if I had. And I've never bought a single thing that Titan Comics have ever produced. No offence to them, there's probably fans with all the Titan Comics that have never bought Doctor Who Magazine, or others that like the BBC audios, but not Big Finish's, or vice versa. Is there a significant number of mega-fans that collect them all? I doubt it. If I'm right in this, maybe Doom's Day's purpose is clear; it's to tempt people like me, who are easily separated from their money where Who is concerned, and who don't like not knowing how a story ends, to try out some ranges they wouldn't otherwise, and maybe they'll get hooked. It's the Doctor Who equivalent of drug pushing; I'm Just gonna Say No!

In Summary:

A story in debt: some expertly tooled surprises, but endings all put off until another day.