Thin Ice

Chapter the 281st, has all the frost of the fair.

Plot:
London, 1814. The Doctor and Bill visit the final great Frost Fair, a festival of amusements held on the icy surface of the frozen Thames. They investigate strange lights that can be seen moving under the ice, and bump into a gang of street urchins who have been paid by a dock worker to drum up interest in the fair. The TARDIS travellers witness one of the gang, Spider, surrounded by the lights, then sucked under the ice to his death. Investigating, including using some ancient underwater suits that the Doctor has in the TARDIS, the two of them find that a massive creature is chained up under the Thames, being fed people like Spider - the lights were pilot fish living in symbiosis with the larger creature, bringing it food. The creature then excretes a substance that can be used as a powerful fuel. This is being collected by wealthy industrialist Lord Sutcliffe. When Sutcliffe is racist towards Bill, the Doctor punches him out, but the two TARDIS travellers don't have the upper hand for long - the dock worker and other Sutcliffe goons tie them up in a tent on the ice next to barrels of explosive. They are set to explode at noon, breaking the ice and plunging all the revellers into the water to feed the creature. The Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to free them both; Bill and the gang members get people off the ice, and the Doctor moves the explosives below the water, so when Sutcliffe detonates it breaks the creature's bonds and frees it. It swims off, breaking the ice and Sutcliffe falls to his death; everyone else gets to safety. The Doctor forges a will, leaving Sutcliffe's house and fortune to the street gang.

  

Context:

Watched unaccompanied, from the BBC iplayer. I didn't get the Blu-ray disc down from the shelf as I am still working my way through the season 20 Blu-ray box set, and wanted to leave the Terminus (I'm up to Terminus now!) disc in the slot to better pick up from when I left off later. Is it just me? There are so many extras on these sets, I can't keep up with them unless I work my way through them linearly. Anyway, this was on a day in late October 2023, and it gave me an opportunity to remind myself about using iplayer in preparation for November 1st 2023 when a lot of Doctor Who content is landing on the platform. From the way it was trailed, I'm thinking there will be some interesting material on there that even a completist fan like me won't have seen. Aren't we fans lucky to be getting all this stuff in the anniversary year?!

Milestone watch: This completes another season of Doctor Who for the blog, the first Peter Capaldi series I've managed to complete, and the fifth new series run altogether (after David Tennant's series 2, Matt Smith's series 6 and Jodie Whittaker's series 11 and 13). It is 16th done out of a current, at the time of writing, total of 39 (the classic seasons 3, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25 also having been completed). As I also have covered the festive special Twice Upon a Time featuring Bill, this means I have completed all her stories now.

First Time Round:

The whole family (me, the Better Half and our three children) watched this go out live on BBC1 on the 29th April 2017, the Saturday of a bank holiday weekend. The BH had became tired of Doctor Who the previous year and hadn't watched all the stories, but showrunner Steven Moffat's soft reboot with the introduction of the character of Bill tempted her back. To me, the stories of 2017 do seem fresher and more engaging than the stories of 2015 and the story of 2016, and a lot of that is to do with Pearl Mackie's inclusion as Bill Potts shaking up the dynamic. It somewhat mirrors the situation approaching November 2023. The BH is pretty cold on the Doctor Who stories of recent years (she still hasn't seen any of Flux, for example), but I have a feeling that Tennant and Tate being in the 60th anniversary specials might just bring her back.  

Reaction:

Watching the stories of collected Who in random order occasionally throws up something surprising. It's often that a story one looked forward to turns out to be disappointing on this current watch. How gratifying it is, then, when it's the other way round. I can't remember the last time I watched Thin Ice, but it was certainly at least a couple of years ago, and it is fantastic. It's tucked away at the beginning of the season, but not quite the very beginning, in its unassuming way, perhaps overshadowed by the opening and closing episodes and the trilogy of linked stories in the middle; having just watched it, though, I think it's one of the best stories of the year. A lot of this comes down to the chemistry between the two leads, who are both working hard but making it look effortless. Peter Capaldi as the Doctor is leaning into the slightly tweaked role in this season as a teacher, with Pearl Mackie as his student. This gives her character free reign to fulfill the brief of someone to ask the awkward and interesting questions; Mackie gives the character such charm, warmth and vulnerability that this never becomes irritating. Even if it was ever going to edge towards that, Capaldi's gentle sarcasm (toned down from previous years, but still a part of the character) would cut through that. There's a great sequence early on where Bill, on her first trip back in time, is wondering about how to avoid changing history, and the Doctor winds her - and the audience? - up that they've been accompanied up until that point by someone called Pete, a friend of Bill's that must have stepped on a butterfly or similar and wiped himself out.

The dialogue from writer Sarah Dollard positively sings throughout the running time, but it's particularly good at the start when the two leads are just hanging out together having fun and exchanging lines like the following - Bill: "So the Tardis has dresses and likes a bit of trouble? Yeah, I think I'm low-key in love with her"; Doctor: "Me too". The two characters were allowed a bit more time to interact in the last story Smile too, all part of Steven Moffat's 'repiloting' to introduce the show fresh to the newbies tuning in for the first time. Unlike in that story, though, there's a greater sense of urgency here because a loose plot thread from the story proper is made visible, with Bill seeing mysterious lights below the ice. There's also a nice touch that the Doctor, who she's tried to alert to what she's seen several times, is way ahead of her and lets her know this in an offhand way with an "I assumed we'd get to work eventually". The rest of the plot is straightforward but carefully constructed. Thin Ice, unlike Smile and the story before that The Pilot where the menace was from forces that were misunderstood or misunderstanding, has an honest-to-badness villain in the contemptible Lord Sutclifffe. Playing him, Nicholas Burns has very little screen-time, but it's not a character anyone who's seen the story is likely to forget. Obviously, the series normally treats the mores of the past and the morality of navigating them carefully, and it usually promotes non-violent solutions. There's nonetheless something satisfying about watching the Doctor punch a racist.

There's a good marriage of plot to place and time - Sutcliffe's plan involves more people being on the Thames than usual, hence the fair, and it allows him the rationalisation that people are aware of the dangers of walking on the ice, but take the risk anyway. The creature under the water affects the temperature, meaning that when it is free the Thames will no longer ice over, so this is destined to be the last ever fair. The baddie being the owner of a dark, satanic mill is on point for 1814 too. The inclusion of a gang of ragamuffin street kids feels a bit more Dickensian than Regency (you do expect them to burst into Food Glorious Food at points), but I've no doubt its historically accurate that there were such kids out there at that point. Their inclusion gives the Doctor and Bill people who are vulnerable to protect, and also gives rise to a great scene. Bill sees Spider go under the ice, the first person she's ever seen die, and argues with the Doctor about his lack of emotion over such things. In a few minutes, Mackie gets to run the gamut of emotions, and it's great to watch. The ending is a dilemma similar to scenarios seen before in Doctor Who stories with giant creatures (Kill The Moon, say, or The Beast Below): risk freeing the creature which might put more people in danger or leave things as they are. It's handled with economy compared to those other stories that tended to take too long over explaining things. Thin Ice is more effective for keeping things brisk. This story has it all: thrills and jokes, an elephant and a wresting match - what more do you want?!

Connectivity:

Both Thin Ice and The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit feature the Doctor accompanied by one other person travelling down below a planet's surface while wearing a special suit, then discovering an over-sized creature there.

Deeper Thoughts:

Never cruel or cowardly or carnivorous?! Should the Doctor be a vegetarian? Thin Ice's plot touching on ideas about the exploitation of animals and the value placed on all life suggests this question, which comes up periodically in fan analyses over the years. It's difficult to track with accuracy the Doctor's relationship to food; we're talking about a science fantasy adventure show, so scenes of people eating are few and far between and don't normally have too much of a fuss made of them relative to the rest of the narrative. Right at the beginning, though, we can be reasonably sure that - in his own gaff at least - the Doctor has a meat-free diet. The TARDIS food machine is introduced in the second ever story The Daleks and according to the Doctor synthesises food in blocks blending flavours "like primary colours... you blend two to achieve a third". We don't see the raw materials the machine has fed into it, mind; it could be forming the dispensed food bars out of mashed up guinea pigs for all we know. Assuming that they're either vegetable or mineral, though, we can see - at least when he's in his mobile home - the Doctor isn't eating animals. At this stage, though, he's an explorer who visits various different times, without being able to fully control his ship. He also often spends extended periods separated from the TARDIS in historical periods, and has to go native. As such, logistics probably precluded any strictness about dietary requirements. If he had to eat meat in the Cave of Skulls in his first televised adventure, or when travelling with Marco Polo's caravan for many months, or when staying at a villa in The Romans, then it was not entirely through choice.

The second Doctor enthusiastically tucks into plates of seafood in The Underwater Menace with no qualms, but for later Doctors there isn't as much on screen confirmation one way or another. None of them are vegans, seemingly. The third Doctor's happy to tuck into cheese when guarding Sir Reginald Styles's mansion from ghosts, and the fourth definitely consumed a lot of gelatin in the form of jelly babies over the years. The events at the end of The Two Doctors would tend to suggest that he hasn't been a vegetarian before his sixth incarnation, as he makes something of a big deal about changing his ways at that point. At the start of the story, he's fishing and waxing lyrical about recipes for preparing his anticipated catch. After having to deal with the machinations of a race of aliens that treated humans as food animals, though, he gets some perspective and tells companion Peri that "From now on it's a healthy vegetarian diet for both of us". There's a reference a couple of stories later to the Doctor making nut roast (the quintessential 1980s vegetarian dish, at least in the popular imagination of the time) so he clearly stuck to it for a while. He's seen during the second segment of the Trial of a Timelord to eat fish, but that could be falsified evidence, or it could just be that the Doctor was acting out of character after being 'mindwarped'. For the rest of the classic series, there's again nothing depicted that would confirm things either way. Extended universe texts in the 'wilderness years', though, suggested the Doctor had remained a vegetarian (and confirmed a lot of other characters seen in the classic series were veggie too, like Jo Grant and Mel Bush).

The situation had definitely changed for Christopher Eccleston's Doctor, as in Boom Town he ebulliently orders steak and chips. I haven't heard the interview, but Russell T Davies reportedly said in a podcast that this was a deliberate choice to make the Doctor more relatable to an audience. I'm not sure I agree that vegetarians aren't relatable (I'm married to one, after all), but he was the boss; so, those who were following the bigger story had to accept that the Doctor had lapsed. A possible reason came in Matt Smith's first story The Eleventh Hour. The newly regenerated Doctor - while trying lots of different foods in little Amelia's kitchen, including bacon and fish fingers - explains that every time he changes, his tastebuds do too. Most who hoped for a plant-diet Doctor, though, thought he should take the decision because of morality rather than taste. The twelfth Doctor talked a good game, admonishing Clara in Deep Breath when she mentally separated slaughterhouse from restaurant: "You weren't vegetarian the last time I checked". He was pointing out that the actions of the Half-faced man killing creatures for survival wasn't so different from eating animals. In World Enough and Time, he tells Bill that her bacon sandwich "had a mummy and a daddy". Yet, he appears to be enthusiastic about eating meat in Thin Ice earlier in the season. Is it enough to be aware of morality but not change one's actions? Something to chew over there. Doctor Who stories by Russell T Davies are just about to return to TV at the time of writing. Will the Doctor be on the steak and chips again, or has what is relatable to an audience changed in the two decades, give or take, since the Doctor was eating out in Cardiff? Will food just not be mentioned at all? We'll find out soon.

In Summary:

Cracking!

The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit

Chapter the 280th, which features David Tennant and a demon (not as a demon).

Plot: 

The Doctor and Rose arrive on a Sanctuary base, a futuristic mining operation on Krop Tor, a planet that is somehow in orbit around a black hole. There is a powerful gravitational force in the centre of the planet that the crew are hoping to exploit. The team is eight people, plus legions of Ood, who act as servants. An earthquake causes the section where the TARDIS landed to collapse, and the Doctor and Rose are separated from the ship. An evil force takes over archaeologist Toby Zed, and then all the Ood. Meanwhile the Doctor and science officer Ida Scott travel down into the shaft that has been mined in the planet, and find evidence of an ancient civilisation. The possessed Ood go on the attack, killing many of the base crew. Rose and two other crew members make it to an escape shuttle, along with Toby Zed who appears to be back to normal but is secretly still possessed, and take off. The force that inhabits Toby was previously in the giant beast that the Doctor finds chained at the bottom of the pit. This beast looks like the very Devil and may be the original exemplar upon whom all the other similar entities in the universe were based (or it may not, the script has it both ways, really). The ancient civilisation placed it in the ultimate trap. If it is freed, the gravity force will switch off, and the planet and the Beast will be sucked into the black hole. By projecting itself into Toby, the Beast presents the Doctor with a dilemma. If he switches off the gravity force, the shuttle - including Rose - will disappear into the black hole. If he does not, the Beast will reach Earth. He switches it off, having faith in Rose to work something out. Rose realises Toby is still under the 'fluence and ejects him from the shuttle. The Doctor finds the TARDIS underground, dematerialises and tows the shuttle to safety. He picks up Rose and drops off Ida. He couldn't save the Ood, who all went down with the planet.

Context:

Watched from the BBC iplayer via an Amazon Fire Stick on the big living room TV. I didn't want to eject the current Blu-ray disc and watch the DVD as I was midway through one of the extras on the Snakedance disc of the Season 20 Blu-ray boxset at the time. I was accompanied by all three children (boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11) who are still humouring their Dad by watching old episodes with him on weekends so he can capture their reactions for the blog. Reactions might have been a bit tricky, though, as every one of them started the episode watching another smaller screen (iphones for the eldest and youngest, a Switch for the middle child). I admonished them for this, but that didn't have any effect; interestingly, though, once the story got underway, they all dispensed with their other devices and concentrated on the larger screen in the corner. The Impossible Planet is obviously doing something right. Only the younger two joined me a couple of days later for the second part The Satan Pit, but that might have more to do with the eldest being busy with coursework and revision for A-levels at the moment, rather than any reflection on this story.

Milestone watch: This completes another season of Doctor Who for the blog, the first David Tennant series and the fourth new series run completed (after Matt Smith's series 6 and Jodie Whittaker's series 11 and 13). It is 15th done out of a current, at the time of writing, total of 39 ( the classic seasons 3, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25 also having been completed).

First Time Round:

The original airing of this story (on the 3rd and 10th June 2006) marks an interesting personal point in my appreciation of Doctor Who: it was the very last time that I in some stupid way fumbled the recording of a story onto a home VHS tape. Since my family got their first VHS recorder late in 1985, I had badly recorded many a classic story after that, either on first broadcast in the 1980s or as repeats during the 'wilderness years' when the programme wasn't being made, and up to the first two years of the returned programme. Late on in the 2006 run, I bought a PVR that would record TV to a hard drive (though I still to this day think of it as 'taping' TV - old habits die as hard as that hard drive). That was in time to record Fear Her. Love and Monsters was captured onto tape the week before without any faults. But I missed off the very end of The Impossible Planet, and The Satan Pit was bedevilled (pun intended) by interference - in the South East, there would be many times that analogue TV signals would degrade in certain types of weather. Anyway, it didn't matter so much that the recordings were blemished as I was watching them live anyway (accompanied by the Better Half), plus there were bountiful repeats on BBC3, and the DVDs would be out very soon afterwards. It still irks me, though, even to this day - this is what being a fan is like!

Reaction:

This is the origin story for the Doctor's orange spacesuit. He is given a Sanctuary base suit to wear when descending beneath the surface of Krop Tor with Ida, and is still wearing it when he reaches the TARDIS towards the end of the story. It seems like he keeps it as David Tennant's Doctor then wears the suit or something very similar in 42 and The Waters of Mars. Since Tennant handed over the role, first time round, it has become a rite of passage for everyone thereafter cast in the star role to get their own moment in the suit during their tenure: Matt Smith wears it in Hide, Peter Capaldi in Kill the Moon, and Jodie Whittaker in the most recently broadcast story (at time of writing), The Power of the Doctor. A nice recurring in-joke, perhaps; or, perhaps, there was a subconscious desire to keep remaking this two-part Ood story as they didn't quite get it right first time. This story is a prototype; it's the first - but would not be the last - time since its return that the series did a futuristic action story where a small group of humans in an isolated outpost are at risk from an alien menace, and are picked off one by one. Aspects had been tried in different stories leading up to the The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, but they'd not been all brought together in that precise formula. And it's definitely a formula for both Doctor Who and for the wider genre world (e.g. John Carpenter's The Thing). In this first try, though, the formula isn't quite mixed to perfection.

There were rumours at the time of its broadcast that the story had script problems necessitating extensive rewrites by author Matt Jones and / or Russell T Davies. I don't know how true they were, but the finished product does have some significant pacing issues. For example, the sequences early on where the Doctor and Rose are welcomed by the crew are much too quick and easy, no suspicion seems to have been aroused at all by their mysterious presence; but, the explanation of the planet being in orbit round a black hole is much more long-winded and overly spelled out by comparison. It also takes too long for the Doctor to grasp the 'trolley problem' he's faced with at the end - prevent the villain's escape but sacrifice Rose (and himself). The audience is well ahead of him and precious minutes of screen time are wasted as he catches up. Generally, the creepy moments and the action moments are fine, but all the bits in between drag on too long. Those moments of creepiness are one of the things the story is best remembered for and are mostly effective. I'm not sold on the voice of Gabriel Woolf warning against the act of turning round - it veers towards being humorous, though this type of horror does walk that fine line. But the other scenes with Will Thorp playing the possessed Toby Zed - his skin suddenly tattooed with ancient symbols and his eyes blood-red, his standing outside the base and yet still being able to breathe, his slowly beckoning toward another character - all make the hairs on the back of one's neck stand up.

The two squaddies that work for security chief Jefferson - each played by a supporting artist without any dialogue - don't get names. This is fine for the end credits, but Ida makes a point of introducing everyone in the crew to the Doctor and Rose, but she doesn't include them. This is a major problem that suggests that somewhere in the writing process a full grasp on the world of the story has been lost - there are eight humans alone on a base, and they are still recovering from the loss of their captain; there's no way any one of those eight would not be seen as important enough to be included in introductions. It's annoying as it would be very easy to fix. It also makes it fairly easy, if it wasn't already, to guess that neither squaddie will be making it to the end alive. There are moments that fail to convince with individual characters too; Ida is the scientist on the base, and has been waiting throughout a long and dangerous mission to find out the secrets in the pit, but then for some reason just stands back and let's the Doctor (someone she's known for about five minutes) venture into the unknown instead of her - why? The story also gives in to a periodic temptation for Doctor Who over the years to create a giant monster for the Doctor to confront (as the Doctor confronts the massive beast in the pit here). But from Kroll in the Power of Kroll to the Sun God in The Rings of Akhaten, the problem is the same: the Doctor is obviously just yelling at a green screen; the final face-off can never be tangible because protagonist and antagonist can never be realistically felt to be together in the shot. Problems are compounded in all these examples because none of the creatures can speak, so the Doctor at the climax is reduced to talking to himself.

As if all of these points weren't enough, there is a stifling atmosphere of smugness about the lead characters at this period of the show's life. This is epitomised in the opening gag where they both laugh at the very idea of getting back in the TARDIS in case there might be trouble ahead. Their laughter is very fake, and it's a little bit cringe. This makes me care a little less about the moments where the plot relies on their strong but unspoken love for one another. The guest cast perform better than the regulars here, sometimes despite the script. Claire Rushbrook playing Ida, Shaun Parkes as acting captain Zachary, and Danny Webb as Jefferson, are all doing sterling work throughout. Best of all, and probably most likely to be overlooked, is Silas Carson as the voice of the Ood, a role he's played ever since. Some brief musings on religion and the nature of evil are passingly interesting, I suppose. You can't beat the creation of a great, new recurring Doctor Who creature, though. The Ood are the best thing about these episodes, and it was obvious that they would appear again (and again) in future. Every detail of design and conception is perfect, including Carson's voice work. All the scenes with them, plus the action scenes and creepy moments mentioned earlier, manage to save the story, and make it more than the sum of its parts, despite all those many flaws.  

Connectivity:

Two David Tennant stories in a row that feature his Doctor visiting a base and interacting with characters of both a scientific and military bent.

Deeper Thoughts:

Tunes of past and future: a review of Doctor Who @60 A Musical Celebration, BBC Sounds. Watching a relatively early story after Doctor Who's return to TV like this Ood two-parter, the die-hard fans had not had time yet to take composer Murray Gold for granted. The music for The Impossible Planet condensed into a 3-minute suite of the same name on his first ever Doctor Who soundtrack CD is very powerful, with a mournful viola line giving way to more lush and stirring strings at the end. That release was a compilation of music from the first two series of the relaunched show, and anyone buying it when it first came out - like me, for instance - would probably not have expected Gold to still be composing music for the eight series after those two, as well as many specials in between. Music he made towards the end of that first tenure is amongst his best stuff too. This was demonstrated at the anniversary concert in Hoddinut Hall in Cardiff on 28th September 2023, when the track chosen to be the final number (bar the obligatory encore of the Doctor Who theme music) was The Shepherd's Boy, the magnificent climactic cue from the late Peter Capaldi episode Heaven Sent. This concert - featuring the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBC Singers conducted by Alastair King - was billed as a celebration of 60 years of Doctor Who, but mostly covered Gold's work, which has been used for many a concert and prom before, so was well prepared for another live outing. Many favourites of those events were played again here (I am the Doctor, All the Strange Strange Creatures, This is Gallifrey, Doomsday, The Long Song, Vale Decum, and more).

I wasn't there in person, alas, but BBC Sounds had the full concert available from the 12th October 2023, and BBC Radio broadcast it on Sunday the 15th of that month. Unlike the previous proms and concerts, this was smaller and focussed more on the music, without creature performers walking amongst the audience or appearances from stars of the show. There were though still interviews between performances, with presenter Jo Whiley talking to various people who worked behind the scenes on Doctor Who in different eras. Murray Gold was one of those, and got the biggest laugh of the night from the assembled audience by answering Whiley's question about whose idea it was initially to have musical motifs for characters with "Er... Wagner's?!" It wasn't quite all about Murray's music and mirth, though. The classic series years were represented by a medley performed by the Radiophonic Workshop's Peter Howell and Mark Ayres with orchestral accompaniment, It covered similar - if not perhaps exactly the same - ground as did the pair's performance at the concert for the 50th anniversary, including amongst others Space Adventures (the 1960s Cyberman theme), snatches of The Sea Devils score, and music from City of Death, Howell's The Five Doctors, and Ayre's magnificent final cue from The Curse of Fenric; it's always a rare pleasure to hear that one performed by an orchestra. Music that came after Gold's first tenure was represented by a suite of Segun Akinola's cues for the thirteenth Doctor Jodie Whittaker's era. This was the first time that any of this music had a concert performance, and it sounded great. I hope we don't have to wait another ten years to hear either of these non-Gold selections live again.

Three showrunners with Jo Whiley

Howell, Ayres and Akinola were all interviewed on stage during proceedings, and it was nice to hear from all of them. Akinola was accompanied by Jodie era showrunner Chris Chibnall. All three showrunners of the 21st century were on stage at different points. Steven Moffat expounded on the differences between his two Doctors: Matt Smith's Doctor could do any terrible action and would still be forgiven, Peter Capaldi's Doctor could be given any number of jokes to say and he'd still seem fearsome. It was once and future showrunner Russell T Davies that was the most interesting, though, as he holds secrets of what's to come. Whiley tried to tease these out of him, a game she admitted she's been playing for many years without success, but he and Gold had come with a few previews for us nonetheless. For the first time were heard three pieces of music that will be featured in stories in 2023 and 2024: new companion Ruby Sunday's theme "The Life of Sunday", Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor's theme "Fifteen", and the 2023 reworking of the main Doctor Who theme. The first and last of these seemed to be harking back. The new main theme seems to pull together elements of every theme tune arrangement used in the last 60 years, appropriate for an anniversary year. The Life of Sunday echoes some themes, particularly from early on in Davies and Gold's time on Doctor Who. It's a waltz, like Gold's theme for Cassandra used in the second 2005 episode, The End of the World; assuming the orchestration is going to be the same, it features a prominent piano melody early on, exactly like Rose's theme from the start of the relaunched show, and there are definite similarities with Martha's theme too. It ties Ruby musically to that companion lineage.

The Ncuti Gatwa "Fifteen" theme meanwhile seems to be looking to the future. It is subtly different to my ears than anything Gold has written for Who before, certainly as the main character's motif, using the whole orchestra percussively to provide a relentless driving rhythm. Broadcaster and Doctor Who fan Matthew Sweet tweeted about it being similar to something Michael Nyman might have composed, and I can hear that. Respondents to Sweet's tweet also highlighted what I'd thought about the melody that plays over that rhythm, that it is reminiscent of the theme to an exciting 1960s ITC film show like Ron Grainer's theme for The Prisoner. It's an instant favourite and leads to some exciting speculation: Ncuti's Doctor feels like he's going to be a force of nature. Davies teased a little in his onstage interview; he may have been joking, but talked confidently about an idea for an episode for a fourth, i.e. 2027 series, saying that the third was already planned out (the first is in the can, and the second according to Davies quoted elsewhere is more than half scripted). Other interviews recently have seen him talk about his and the BBC's grand ambitions for Doctor Who, and the increase in budget it's getting. I'm reminded of the theory I've expounded upon before (see the Deeper Thoughts of The Mysterious Planet and Spyfall posts for more details) that the new series followed a superficially similar progression to the classic series but at an accelerated rate. If Jodie Whittaker's era was the equivalent of Sylvester McCoy's (new direction breaking from the past before embracing some old monsters from the second year, involving more socially conscious writing from a mostly new set of writers, less popular than it had been), then are we approaching the point where the cycle starts again? A period where the show's been off air, followed by a Russell T Davies re-launch with more budget available to it than previously? Certainly sounds familiar. Not long to wait now.

In Summary:

When it's G-Ood it's devilishly g-Ood.

Dreamland

Chapter the 279th, here come the men in black, lanky 3D renders.

Plot:
The Doctor arrives in Nevada in 1958 and meets Cassie and Jimmy Stalkingwolf in a diner, where the two of them seem to just be sitting around waiting for a Time Lord so they can become his temporary companions for a few hours. Also in the diner is displayed an alien MacGuffin, supposedly a component that had fallen off a flying saucer that came down in the area many years before. The Doctor's examination of the component causes an alert and various characters - robotic Feds, US soldiers, and Viperox, warlike insectoid creatures - chase the three of them around various locations - desert, the nearby Area 51 base nicknamed Dreamland, a ghost mining town called Solitude - for it. The soldiers capture the Doctor and his new companions and try to wipe their memories with a prototype gas, but our heroes escape. Hidden in the Dreamland base is a Roswell Grey alien, and the local native Americans are harbouring another, the life partner of the first. The MacGuffin turns out to be a genetic superweapon that will wipe out all the Viperox, designed by one of the Greys (they do have names, but they're a bit silly, so I'm not going to mention them here). The Doctor uses the weapon, which would be significantly uncharacteristic if it weren't for some tweaks he's already made that mean the Viperox are driven away in pain, but not killed. The two Greys are allowed to leave in a spaceship, and Cassie and Jimmy Stalkingwolf hold hands, as if they've just been waiting around to have a short adventure with a Time Lord before they can express their love for one another.

Context:

I watched 'Dreamland: Invasion der Area 51' as it is titled on the German Blu-ray set I have (where it is paired with another animated Tennant story The Infinite Quest) in omnibus format. This was with English audio, as my viewing companions (the children - boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11) and I do not have good enough German to follow it dubbed into that language. There wasn't much of a peep from the little ones, probably because the velocity of the story's action stays at a fairly relentless pace throughout, not leaving much room for comment. The eldest did state at one point that he has the same shoes as animated David Tennant (he loves his Converse does our kid), and the two boys found the traditional 'Grey' look of the alien trapped in Area 51 to be so 'on the nose' as to provoke mirth. Apart from that, though, they were quiet and stuck around to the end.

Milestone watch: This marks the blog covering the final one of the original David Tennant 2009 specials that came after his last full season and led up to his (first) regeneration handing over the role of the Doctor. It also is the last of all the specials from throughout his first tenure (including Christmas specials and animated specials) blogged. Of course, at the time of writing, it's only a few weeks before three new 2023 specials featuring Tennant for the 60th anniversary are added to the 'To Do' pile.

First Time Round:

After four years of full Doctor Who seasons, 2009 was Doctor Who's first 'gap year'. Unlike in later years when the series pulled something similar, where there would only be a festive special, in 2009 an effort was made to offer quite a bit more. As well as four special episodes shown between Easter 2009 and New Year's Day 2010, there was a Tennant-starring serial in that year's series of spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures, and an event series of other spin-off Torchwood stripped across a week in the Summer. And there was Dreamland, an animated story shown episodically from November of that year as a red button extra, then compiled into one story and broadcast on BBC1 in the UK in December 2009. I have no clear memories of my first watch. I know I saw it then, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have waited for the TV broadcast omnibus version - I would instead have watched the episodes as they became available on the BBC's red button service, but I can't remember any reaction to the story or the animation. I could barely remember any details of the plot before this rewatch except that it began with the Doctor visiting a diner in the Nevada desert and it featured the robotic Men in Black characters that also featured (before this or after?) in a Sarah Jane Adventures story.

Reaction:

Dreamland comes from a time of experimentation for Doctor Who as an animated prospect. There'd never been an official animated version of Doctor Who in the first 40 years after the series started in 1963 (so, all the classic series and a major part of the subsequent 'wilderness' years). For the 40th anniversary, the first ever properly animated story was made. This was Scream of the Skalka, and was intended to be the start of something. There might have been many animated adventures for the new Shalka Doctor in subsequent years. Fate, though, dictated this was not to be. Before it was even shown, the announcement was made that Doctor Who was coming back to television in live action in 2005, so an ongoing animated series running in parallel starring a different Doctor would not be possible. The trail having been blazed by Shalka though, there was then the possibility of other animated one-offs in future. A few years afterwards, with the TV series established, there were the next new animations, one each for the classic and the new series. One was a new version of a couple of missing episodes of classic series story The Invasion to complete the story for DVD release, and the other was The Infinite Quest, an animated outing for the current Doctor David Tennant. The former eventually led to ongoing classic series releases for the home video market, first of missing episodes, then of whole missing stories, that still continue to this day. The Infinite Quest only led to Dreamland, and that was that. It makes sense to me. Why would there be a market for current Doctor animations - which no matter how much love and care is put into them are always going to be inferior to live action - when he or she's living and breathing and being heroic in real life footage elsewhere?

Even though it was the last current Doctor animation, Dreamland was also an experiment. The other animated stories before it were 2D, but Dreamland's done in a 3D CG-model style. This technique would be used in animations thereafter, so Dreamland was also blazing a trail. In later years, the style would be used sparingly, though. It's better at rendering vehicles and machines, like the pick-up truck and Roswell spaceship seen here, but for the humanoid characters it doesn't work so well. There's no logical reason for this, it's just one of those 'uncanny valley' type emotional responses: the 2D animations of Tennant and others are just as much abstractions of reality as are the 3D models, but the former seem more acceptable aesthetically. This might just be to do with familiarity, but there's something about how the 3D characters' limbs look and move particularly that makes the figures in Dreamland look like visualisations of puppets of people, rather than of the people directly. There's also something odd about their teeth, they seem too prominent during dialogue (again something I've noticed with some animations over the years). One gets used to it through the running time, but it's no coincidence that - while it's been used in concert with a 2D style since for animating spaceships and vehicles, and many, many Daleks - only one 25-minute episode since (The Web of Fear 3 in 2021) has been wholly animated in a 3D-modelled style, and it didn't prove universally popular by any means.

It would perhaps be less of a problem how the characters look if they were fully rounded, interesting individuals, but Dreamland isn't that sort of story. Intended to be seen like The Infinite Quest in small chunks, writer Phil Ford opts for an extended chase structure in place of the quest of the previous Tennant animation. This similarly allows for a fast pace and the inclusion of different environments and characters, and similarly comes at the cost of depth and meaning. In a way, it's a shame that Tennant is not accompanied by a regular companion, as it would mean that there would be two characters rather than one in whom we are already invested. There isn't time to provide backstory for the two companions of the week, Cassie and Jimmy, so despite good vocal performances - by Georgia Moffett and Time Howar respectively - they are ciphers. Great vocalisations but thin characters covers everyone: not even the mighty David Warner can make much of the Viperox commander. Does he really need to, though? This is a high-speed, knockabout adventure story where the Doctor gets to visit Area 51 and save a captured alien. It doesn't need to have pretensions beyond that, perhaps. Writing this less than a week after watching Dreamland, though, I know for example that there was a big reveal that Warner's Viperox commander was in league with the US base commander, but 've already forgotten why. The internet tells me that this was the big part one cliffhanger when watching episodically, so supposedly had some significance. It didn't leave much of an impression on the overall story or on my mind, though.

Connectivity:

Dreamland and Genesis of the Daleks both feature a genetic scientist that has created something that could wipe out other forms of life.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Art of Leaving Gaps. When Patrick Troughton appeared in The Five Doctors (fresh in my mind as I'm currently watching the Season 20 boxset that has no less than three different versions of the 1983 anniversary reunion special) a narrative hand wave was required to explain why Pat's Doctor was travelling alone. At no time during his tenure as the Doctor did this ever take place; he's always accompanied by companions, and can't control his TARDIS to take any of them to, or retrieve them from, a specific place. Additionally, various details of dialogue, narrative or costuming dictate that each Troughton story links into the next. Tennant's solo adventures in 2009 conversely allow many gaps in which can be slotted extended universe adventures to be made in future. The Day of the Doctor later used one of those gaps to tie up some continuity mentions from a couple of stories about the Doctor and Queen Elizabeth the First, which was fun for the long term fans who'd been paying attention. This happened in between The Waters of Mars and The End of Time. Dreamland itself could also sit in that gap - i.e. exactly the same place in the Doctor's personal chronology as it takes up in the order of broadcast stories, even though The Waters of Mars ends on a cliffhanger, or it could fit anywhere in 2009. Could the specials just possibly have been designed deliberately to open up options for future producers, or owners of tie-in franchises like Big Finish audio to fill these gaps? Once and future showrunner Russell T. Davies is very aware of the importance of those extended universe stories; did he - knowing David Tennant would definitely be up for returning to the role, but being less sure of Billie, Freema or Catherine, perhaps - create the opportunity for that to be easily explained. Almost certainly not, but it's a nice thought nonetheless.

Highway to Mel 

Some other points in Doctor Who's history are similarly fertile territory, with gaps for planting new stories. The introduction of Mel (fresh in my mind as the character is featured prominently in,  including on the cover of, Doctor Who Magazine issue 595) is one example. Mel is the only companion featured in the series after its start whose introductory story was never seen; she is first shown when already travelling with the Doctor, meaning that the events of their meeting can be speculated on in other media, including a Big Finish audio called The Wrong Doctors and a Virgin book called Business Unusual. I've not caught up with either of them, and wonder if either closes what to me is the biggest gap about that particular character. Never mind how exactly the end of Trial of a Timelord fits with Mel's timeline (clearly the Doctor, who at that point earlier in his timestream has not yet met Mel on Earth, drops her off somewhere where she can rejoin his later self); no, the big mystery is - where does Mel earn a living as a computer programmer? She lives in Pease Pottage, which is a village of about ten buildings plus a Services off the M23. Nowhere in Pease Pottage in the late 1980s needed computer programming skills, and it's too early to imagine that Mel was telecommuting. So, it has to be somewhere in commuting distance of Pease Pottage, which includes Crawley and London, but to me feels more likely to be Haywards Heath or Brighton or even Worthing on the south coast. Presumably, producer John Nathan-Turner picked the village as he'd seen the prominent sign mentioning its name on the road as he did his own commute from his home down South to the capital where Who was made.

Services on the Highway to Mel

Mel could have worked in some innovative small software company, of course, but I can't think of any that were based around there at that time. Besides, the title of computer programmer feels more big business corporate somehow; so, I imagine her coding in COBOL at Amex's HQ in Brighton, more than coding games in BASIC for Sinclair or Acorn (the latter was based in Cambridge in the 1980s, which seems like a punishing daily commute - Mel would have no time on weekdays to tend her beloved garden complete with its compost heap). It's very easy to randomly pluck 'Computer Programmer' and 'Pease Pottage' from thin air when putting together a character biog that nobody's ever likely to read (despite all the details of characterisation, the document may as well have read "Bonnie Langford" for all the thought that went into the character underneath the quirks of characterisation). It's interesting, though, that such a small gap can get wider and wider to allow question after question to be crammed in, the more one thinks of it. There are many such aspects of the companions of Doctor Who that similarly open up such gaps. The audience never finds out Polly's surname for example, but do the other characters in the TARDIS ever know it? I can't imagine how the conversation would start. I don't think I've ever had call to ask someone what their surname is; I've either become aware of it somehow, or maybe they've ventured it. It depends on context, though. The other TARDIS travellers never need to send her a letter or look up her number in a telephone directory, and it's sufficient to yell "Polly!" rather than "Polly Wright!" if she's in danger of being grabbed by a Macra or whatever. (Yes, after much fandom research, it was discovered that the producers intended her to be called Wright, same as Barbara - again, someone could have fun writing something where they turn out to be related.)

We never find out Vicki's surname either, though fandom was much less bothered about that for some reason. She's just a normal human from the UK in the 25th century (unlike, say, Nyssa who comes from a different culture) but maybe we dispense with surnames by then, who knows? What else? Why exactly couldn't the Doctor go back and save Adric, since nobody (character or audience) has been given conclusive proof he was still on the spaceship when it hit the Earth? What would possibly tempt Liz Shaw to go back to research in Cambridge when she has the most exciting possible job defeating alien invasions every week? What is Leela doing during the events of Arc of Infinity and The Five Doctors? Sticking with that latter story, and going back to the first thought that prompted all this speculation, and might just give a reason why it's important: a continuity error in Pat Troughton's dialogue in The Five Doctors suggests that he is aware of the events of his own trial, always assumed before that to have been immediately before his regeneration into Jon Pertwee. Over the years, the 'season 6b' theory grew up to explain this. Troughton's sentence of regeneration and exile had not been served as it appeared to be at the end of The War Games. Instead, it was deferred, and the Doctor was freed to allow him to go on missions for the Time Lords, including the mission he's on in later story The Two Doctors. Extended universe stories have subsequently been written in a gap that didn't even really exist, except in the imagination of fans that broke through what looked to be solid continuity. Creativity can't be contained, it shines like light through the gaps and cracks, and let it ever remain so.

In Summary:

A diverting enough experiment, but after watching it's almost like one's received a dose of prototype memory wipe gas - nothing much sticks in one's mind.