Boom

Chapter the 313th, where the Doctor puts his foot in it (well, on it).

Plot:

[This is a relatively recent story of the streaming age, so be warned that there are spoilers ahead.] Kastarian 3, the future. The TARDIS arrives during a war between Anglican cleric soldiers and the Kastarians, an enemy the humans have never seen. The Doctor steps on a smart landmine. Balancing on one leg, he cannot look down for fear that the mine will explode. Ruby confirms what he suspected: it has sensors to confirm a live target, whereupon the green lights surrounding the edge of the mine will join up and the mine will explode. There is currently a small gap, but it is slowly closing. Ruby brings the Doctor something to use as a counterweight, so he can put his foot down. It is the auto-compressed remains of a soldier, John Vater. A holographic AI of the dead man emanates explaining that he was killed by a robotic battlefield ambulance, as he was injured and no longer fit for combat. Vater's daughter Splice turns up on the battlefield looking for him. Another soldier Mundy Flynn follows her, and an ambulance approaches. Worried that any attention it gives the Doctor could set off the mine, Mundy gives her gun to Ruby and asks her to shoot her in the arm; this will mean the ambulance will focus on healing Mundy instead. Another soldier Canto arrives, misinterprets what's happening and shoots Ruby. The ambulance will not help the dying Ruby as she is not in the army. The Doctor advises Mundy to surrender: there are no Kastrians, and the war is only being kept going by the military hardware's algorithm that sustains any conflict with an acceptable casualty rate to keep up demand for weapons. Mundy demands evidence, so the Doctor sends the Vater AI into the ambulance's systems, but it is attacked as a software virus. Canto tries to override this, but he is electrocuted and dies.The gap closes and the bomb's countdown goes to zero, but it does not go off. The Vater AI has taken over, and instructs the ambulance to revive Ruby, who recovers.

Context:

Watched on the BBC iplayer in late October 2024, on my own. The Better Half is still avoiding watching any further Ncuti stories, and both the two children still living at home (eldest, 18, has gone off to university) felt they had watched the story too recently to watch it with me again.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. Without much else for the random process to select, the 2024 season of seven Ncuti Gatwa stories have been gobbled up quite quickly. This is the sixth of the seven to be blogged, with only the two-part finale left to complete the run. Beyond those, I have completed four Doctors' eras and 29 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 2, 4, 5-7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I watched this just after midnight on Saturday 18th May 2024, accompanied by middle child (boy of 14 years of age then, 15 now). Later on that day, I took the youngest (girl of 12) and her friend to Worthing for a day out, as it had recently been the youngest's birthday. In the evening, she watched the story too. Both of them liked it.

Reaction:

Boom saw the writer Steven Moffat returning to the series for the first time since the long period when he was showrunner (from 2010 to 2017), invited by his old friend Russell T Davies to come up with story ideas. He thus searched his mind for something he hadn't done in the many scripts he'd written for the series over the years, and decided upon a story of suspense. In an interview that was used as part of the BBC's media centre press for the story, he was quoted saying that the Doctor usually "kills suspense because he's funny and in control, which quickly ends any suspense". So, what is suspense? Alfred Hitchcock, long ago dubbed the Master of Suspense, described it - and how it is different from surprise - thus: "Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table... Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it... In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters... 'There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!'". If you substitute Time Lord for table, that's pretty much a description of Boom (and Hitchcock even anticipated the title in the quote, which is from an interview he gave to the American Film Institute in 1970), except that Moffat can't let the audience be further ahead than the Doctor (because of the super-heroic way Moffat sees the Doctor's character). So, audience and characters alike know the bomb is there, but nobody knows exactly when it will explode. Although, actually, maybe we do...

Later in the same interview, Hitchcock made it clear that "The bomb must never go off" or otherwise "You’ve worked your audience into a state and then they’ll get angry because you haven’t provided them with any relief". Everyone watching knows on one or more levels that Ncuti Gatwa has a long-term contract, so he's not going to get vaporised in the third story of the season. Moffat's script therefore is a tightrope walk; as well as all the other restrictions he's set himself (unity of time and place, limited number of additional characters) he has to avoid the un-explosive ending being an anti-climax. For what could be more dull than the end of a tightrope walk, where the acrobat dismounts safely on the other side? Moffat succeeds, while managing to keep things from looking too much like a challenging writing exercise. He does this through the use of efficiently sketched-in emotional subplots: Mundy and Canto both like one another, but neither of them has realised it of the other (and then Canto's killed off); even in a holographic AI form, John Vater still loves his daughter Splice (and he's reduced to that form because he's been killed off). The propensity to kill characters off suddenly is one way that Moffat avoids the emotion turning into sentimentality. When Vater's AI overrides the algorithm to stop the bomb from going off and get the ambulance to save Ruby, it's very close to a 'power of love conquers all' ending; I'm sure some viewers took an almost allergic exception to it for that reason. I was fine with it, but then found that the moment later, where the hologram turns and waves to the Doctor and Ruby as they leave, was a bit too much. The main plot takes an unswerving line cutting through the emotional subplots. It's a masterclass in the effective gradual release of information to the viewer, with significant changes in the situation happening every couple of minutes.

It's a minor gripe, but the plot is a bit linear; the one reversal - that the humans are fighting no enemy, it's all been caused by the algorithm running a war on automatic for profit - is so telegraphed from so early on that I don't think it was supposed to be any kind of twist. This satirical intent of the script also mirrors some stories from Moffat's time as showrunner (it's the same basic plot as Oxygen, but for war rather than heavy industry) This is just one of many aspects that were very familiar from all of Moffat's work, almost like he was giving us his greatest hits. This isn't a problem, and might not even be deliberate. When it was pointed out in an interview that the forces of antagonism in this script were exactly the same as his first Doctor Who script The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances (technology connected to a battlefield ambulance ruthlessly pursuing its programmed remit even at the cost of human lives), the coincidence came as a complete surprise to him. Beyond that, there's mentions of the Villengard munitions company (also first mentioned in the Empty Child 2-parter), military clerics, a dead character still repeating a catchphrase over and over ("Kiss kiss"), a mention of fishfingers and custard, and the involvement of a character played by a child actor. The last on the list is probably the weakest link; it's not the performance exactly, it's just that the actor is too old to realistically be saying any of the dialogue they're given: they look at least 10 or 11 years old, whereas the script seems to be pitching a much younger child, who can't tell the difference been a real person and a hologram, of something like 4 or 5 years old. That aside, though, this is a triumphant return for the grand Moff with director and crew visualising his work using innovative technology in the studio.

Connectivity:

A third story on the trot, following Survival and The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood, about the dangers of conflict. The threat in both Boom and the Silurian 2-parter comes from below the Doctor's feet (or foot for the first section of the Ncuti story), and in both stories the backdrop of events is on a planetary scale but the story only features a few speaking parts.

Deeper Thoughts:

Scot freebie. As seen in both the BFI events recently described here (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the last two blog posts for more details), where panels of people were grilled about a single TV production that they were part of 36 years earlier, Doctor Who never truly leaves you. It's a show that makes people happy, and generations of fans remain forever enthusiastic to talk about it in detail, and celebrate those connected to it, both from in front of and behind the cameras. It therefore probably surprised Doctor Who fans less than others (like TV professionals, say) that Steven Moffat returned to Doctor Who as a jobbing writer when he'd once run the whole show. Moffat is a fan himself, and if he has a good idea for a Doctor Who story (as Boom definitely was, and as Joy to the World is anticipated to be - the Moffat-authored Christmas 2024 special is still to come at the time of writing) he will want it to be made. He presumably would feel a certain emptiness if it weren't. Besides, a Doctor Who story written by Steven Moffat is going to be better than anything else written by Steven Moffat, however good it might be (sorry Sherlock fans, but deep down you know it's true!). The big question that remains is whether he will ever be tempted back in future. There's got to be a good chance, I think. As long as Moffat is still writing and Doctor Who is still going, they will be at some level interlinked. Just look at the long-lasting relationship with the show of another Scot. Frazer Hines played companion Jamie alongside Patrick Troughton's Doctor from 1966 to 1969, and since then has continued to be actively associated with the show, including brief returns to play the role on TV in 1983 and 1985. The series didn't even need to still be going - he's appeared at many a Doctor Who event and been interviewed for many a Doctor Who feature or documentary, including in the years when the show wasn't on TV.

Hardback cover

The association continues to the present date, but its latest manifestation is something of a departure. Hines has turned author. He wrote (with ghost-writing assistance from two more seasoned Who novel writers) a new novelisation of 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks that was published in hardback in 2023. Both Sophie Aldred (who played Ace) and Bonnie Langford (Mel) have also co-authored Doctor Who books featuring their characters in recent years, but those were original stories. It's the first time a star of the show has written a novelisation. The story was previously novelised in the 1990s, but that version has long been out of print. There was also a neat reason for a second prose telling of the story to exist, as Evil of the Daleks is unique in being a Doctor Who story with an 'in universe' repeat. At the end of the story that introduced Zoe to the series, with her wanting to join the Doctor and Jamie on their travels, the Doctor gives her a demonstration of what she might be letting herself in for; he projects images of his memories as a complete story. There was then a brief bit of voice over of the Doctor and Zoe added to the beginning of the first part of the Evil repeat when it aired the following week. The rest of the story was then shown weekly to bridge the summer gap between Who seasons; there was even a reference back to the memory projection process in the first episode of the next season. As such, any collector of novelisations could slip this new book in between the novelisations of The Wheel in Space and The Dominators, even if they already had the 1990s version a few books to the left on their shelf. That could only happen for me if the book was brought out as a Target imprint paperback, though. I collect the paperbacks but not the hardbacks; plus, a lot of the TV stories were never released in novelised form in hardback, so for a full collection it has to be paperback.

DWM 609

I was therefore delighted but surprised to find that I wouldn't have to pay to get the paperback version of Hines' book. It was given away with Doctor Who Magazine issue 609 in October 2024 as a free gift, and I was already subscribed to the magazine. The book is elegantly put together, with the Target logo, and with a new cover in the house style of recent books. But it isn't available in bookshops; it's an exclusive to the magazine. I thought this was a bit odd, until I started reading the book. As I say, I don't collect the hardback books, but I've read enough reviews to know that Hines' hardback version of Evil of the Daleks is a full novelisation of the story as well as the additional framing device featuring Zoe. The paperback, though, is not a full version. Whether for reasons of space, or to maintain the hardback version's marketability (or, as I suspect, a bit of both) the Target paperback is abridged. Perhaps there was a worry that someone going out and paying for such a book would feel short changed, as a lot of material has been removed. The top and tail scenes featuring Zoe, written in the first person from Jamie's POV, are present and correct, but the chapters in between, written in third person limited style, condense the action drastically. Those that read my blog post on the story will know that I am in two minds about the amount of padding in Evil as transmitted. It's ridiculous how much of the action could be removed without impacting the plot, as the paperback novelisation demonstrates. It removes almost all of the first two episodes as they played out on the TV. There's no sequences in Gatwick Airport or in the Tricolour coffee bar; the action starts in Waterfield's antiques shop, with the Doctor and Jamie then rapidly transported back to 1866. The characters of Bob Hall and Keith Perry are excised completely, and Kennedy has a much reduced role.

Paperback cover

The remainder of the story focusses on the experiments in Maxtible's mansion to isolate the human factor, and the civil war on Skaro that results. Such focus is achieved by removing all subplots, and this again means that characters completely disappear from the narrative - there is no appearance from Ruth Maxtible, Arthur Terrall or Toby. There's a vestige of the hypnotism subplot left in there (Victoria can't remember how she got to be imprisoned, and Maxtible does get to practice his mesmerism once). As I said in the Evil blog post, the story's padding provides a lot of the colour and interest. Without that, the plot is very straightforward, and results in a story that probably would not be as well remembered to this day as is the transmitted version of Evil. The more visual sequences that remain, of Jamie and Kemel dealing with booby traps in the mansion, or Daleks fighting on Skaro, don't translate that well into prose. The focus on action also means there's less material showing the inner life of Jamie, his thoughts about the Doctor and the events of the narrative, which was a big reason to get Hines involved in shaping the prose in the first place. Without much of that (to be fair, there is still some left in the finished product) and with it not acting as a faithful retelling of the story as broadcast, it's hard to see a point to this version. In the final pages, though, whoever edited the book plays a blinder with an inserted bit of dialogue that can't have been in the hardback: Jamie asks the Doctor why he left out so much of the tale, even going so far as to namecheck the many characters that are missing. The Doctor explains that he didn't want to worry Zoe too much. So, the book therefore becomes its own thing, a third retelling of the same story in a different way. That just about nudges this into being an interesting curio rather than a failure, to my mind. At the time of writing, issue 609 of DWM is still available; so, if I haven't put you off, you could still get yourself a copy and see what you think.

In Summary:

Banging.