Joy to the World

 

Chapter the 318th, in which, well, you know, a star *is* born. Literally.

Plot:

[It's an up to the minute episode, so beware spoilers ahead.] The year 4202; the Doctor has parked the TARDIS in a time hotel, which offers package deals for people to go through time windows and experience Christmasses on the first ever climb to the summit of Everest, or in World War Two, or on the Orient Express in the 60s, and so on. The Doctor sees a suspicious character at the hotel reception with a briefcase handcuffed to their wrist, and investigates. The briefcase can be passed from person to person, the new recipient coming under its hypnotic control while the old carrier dies. The Doctor tracks it to a room in the Sandringham Hotel, London in 2024, when it is attached to Joy. She is spending Christmas alone in the hotel. The Doctor opens the case and triggers a process that will kill Joy unless he puts in a code. Luckily, his future self turns up in the room and gives him the code. Joy rushes off into the time hotel with the future Doctor, who breaks the connection so the past Doctor can't follow. The Doctor hangs around for a year working at the Sandringham, and befriending the manager Anita, waiting for the following Christmas which will give him an opportunity to get back to the time hotel. After an emotional farewell to Anita, he gets back into the hotel, and enters Joy's room just in time to tell his past self the code and complete the loop. The Doctor and Joy leave, the briefcase taking control of Joy's mind. The Doctor has had a year to work it out and knows that the case contains a star seed, a quantum-contained chain reaction that will become a star.

The Villengard weapons corporation want Joy to use the hotel to put the seed in a time zone long ago, then in a more recent time-zone they can harvest the resultant custom-made star. Joy goes into one time hotel room, and the Doctor is deliberately mean to her to provoke emotions and break the conditioning. She explodes with rage about her Mum dying alone on Christmas Day during the Covid pandemic, and having to say goodbye on a iPad while elsewhere people with "wine fridges" were partying. The briefcase is no longer attached to her wrist. The Doctor is concerned that a star being born anywhere near Earth will destroy the planet, but thinks that Villengard must have got their sums wrong as they'd need to start the process 65 million years ago. Just then, they hear a dinosaur approach and realise the room they are in is about that far back. The dinosaur swallows the briefcase, and the Doctor and Joy flee. Back in the time hotel, the Doctor uses the sonic to track the signal of the seed, which is four and a half minutes from detonation. The seed is in a temple within a particular time hotel room. Joy joins herself to it, and tells the Doctor not to worry as she is not dying, only changing. She starts to turn into a star, zooming high up in the sky. The star shines down on various characters from the story, as well as Joy's Mum in her hospital room in 2020, and Ruby Sunday at home on Minto Road in the present day. The Doctor recommends Anita to become the manager of the time hotel. The time zone where Joy first became the star turns out to be Bethlehem in the year 0001.

Context:

As is customary in the period between Christmas Day and New Year (Twixtmus, Chrimbo Limbo, the Merrineum), I wanted to watch and blog a story. I've only a handful of Doctor Who stories left to do before I run out, plus probably the same number of oddball or off-piste items of less pure canonical status. There will also be at least eight new Ncuti Gatwa episodes broadcast, so he will dominate blog posts in 2025. Rather than grow next year's imbalances further, I decided to suspend random selection and blog the very latest Gatwa story, the Christmas special Joy to the World, as my final post of 2024. I watched from the BBC iplayer (we've not needed to get the aerial fixed in the last year, so everything we view or review is from a streaming service now) on the 29th December 2024.

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. This post marks the completion of all Ncuti Gatwa's stories and specials broadcast to date (at the time of writing), but as mentioned he has at least another season in the can planned for broadcast in 2025. As well as that, I have completed the televisual eras for six Doctors (the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh and fourteenth) and 32 out of the total of 40 seasons to date: classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4, 5-7, 9-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

This year, the In-laws came round on the 25th (the last few years before 2024, it had been Boxing Day), so we didn't watch Doctor Who, or indeed anything, on the big day. I caught up with it on the 26th from the BBC iplayer accompanied by two of the children - young man of 18, back from uni for the holidays, and middle child, boy of 15. We all enjoyed it without thinking it was anything massively ground-breaking. My initial thought on seeing the very final few frames before the end credits was that it was too much, and the programme shouldn't go near that topic. I felt that it was likely to cause complaints from religious people that a part of the bible story, the star of Bethlehem, was shown to have an extra-terrestrial origin. I googled to see if that had come to pass, but only found a couple of UK tabloid 'news' stories that Doctor Who was "woke" for criticising those in Government that had parties during Covid lockdowns. Apparently, it's less acceptable to risk annoying Boris Johnson fans than Christians.

Reaction:

As I usually do during Advent and Christmas, in 2024 I watched a number of old favourites of festive films and TV. Something leapt out at me this time in a couple of places. In a song in The Muppet Christmas Carol, there's the line "If you need to know the measure of a man, you simply count his friends"; and, in a note shown at the end of It's a Wonderful Life there's "Remember, no man is a failure who has friends". Although in both instances the texts had the best intentions, highlighting this metric as more meaningful in comparison to any counts of material wealth, I couldn't help but be uncomfortable about the sentiment being expressed that way. Some people, for whatever reason (for example, those that are neurodivergent), find making friends more difficult than others. Christmas films and TV often highlight that Christmas can be lonely. A Christmas Carol (in whatever version, but obviously the Muppet one is the best) has Scrooge isolating himself from others at the start; It's a Wonderful Life has George Bailey feeling alone with all his troubles. The endings of both stories, though, suggest that the solution is a pre-existing group of friends or family. If one doesn't have such a support group to hand, as Joy doesn't in this Doctor Who story, then even the most uplifting of Christmas tales could be depressing. It's therefore a good thing that Joy to the World does something different. It starts with two characters - as well as Joy, there's Anita working alone at the Sandringham Hotel - who are lonely not because they are misguided, or in despair, or in any way bad, but just because. And they find a way out of loneliness without the more obvious festive fallbacks of family or a large society of friends.

Nicola Coughlan is great playing the one-off Christmas companion role, with a deft mix of feistiness and vulnerability. The most affecting scenes for me, though, were those between the Doctor and Anita, played by Steph de Whalley. The Doctor befriends her during the year where he has to stay in the hotel; there are no big adventures to be had to help them bond, just kindness and conversation. This seemed to me to be the heart of the piece. Writer of Joy to the World Steven Moffat has written many a timey-wimey narrative in the past; indeed, he invented the term. Such tricks here are not for their own sake, though, but to add to the overall meditation on human interaction. The near future Doctor's sudden appearance providing his past self with crucial information seems to be a narrative curveball at first, but once he's spent a year waiting to become that Doctor, it's a throwaway piece of business. The Doctor knows the code to give to himself, because he remembers being told it first time round - it's the bootstrap paradox (as riffed on in many a Moffat script, and as made famous in a story from the period of time when he was Doctor Who showrunner). It doesn't matter how the Doctor comes to have the information, the only point is that he spends a year with Anita. It does also give us a great scene where the Doctor gets to upbraid himself about how irritating his faux enigmatic schtick is for everyone suffering it. The opening sequence - where the Doctor visits many different timezones attempting to deliver room service - wouldn't suffer from only being run through the once when the viewer knows what's going on, but it does give the story an arresting opening (a mild shame, then, that it was a bit thrown away by being used as a sneak peak clip earlier in the year).

Is the kind of trickery in repeating scenes from different POVs the story's own faux enigmatic schtick? Perhaps, but it works to keep things interesting during a sleepy, postprandial broadcast slot. Some reviews I read said that the story was still too confusing, so perhaps showing some sequences more than once was necessary (how much more confused would those reviewers have been if only seeing them once?). Still, what stands out most is the selection of lovely character moments brought to life well by the performers. It seems odd to say that about something that is clearly trying to dazzle with non-chronological storytelling and other narrative devices, but what I remember best from the story are the fun moments with Joel Fry's Trev, or the proud moment where Jonathan Aris's Silurian talks about working his way up to be the time hotel's manager. Given that such nice characters get bumped off with such regularity, one probably foresees a terrible fate in store for Joy as soon as the briefcase attaches itself to her. She goes out on her own terms in the end, though. The scenes of her righteous anger at people who did not follow the rules, when she was not able to say goodbye to her mother in person during Covid lockdown, is another great moment. It's a brave choice to make Covid a thing that happened in the Doctor Who universe, as the series has assiduously avoided it before now. It feels like the soonest point - four years on from the pandemic - that the subject could be broached, though, and it is handled sensitively (despite it apparently upsetting some in the right-wing media).

It's a bit odd that the Doctor comments a few times about being alone and not adjusting well to his companions leaving, when it was his idea for Ruby to stay behind to get to know her birth mother. There's no real reason he couldn't phone her at least once during the year with Anita (that's why I feel it was a good choice for them to have Millie Gibson cameo at the end). I still feel that the revelation that the star seed (was it just me that had to hear that said out loud four times before he realised the characters weren't talking about the Stasi?) has bloomed into the Star of Bethlehem was a sticking point, but it was a little less sticky second time round. The ending has to be big to top the emotional climax of the Doctor and Anita subplot happening at the halfway point. Also, this time I noticed that the Doctor's funny line early on when hearing that the time hotel offers rooms at all the most significant moments in human history, "No wonder there was no room at the inn", nicely tees up that final revelation. It's just one of many great gags in the script - the in-joke for people in the UK of a certain age that the time hotel's outfitters is called Mr. Benn's was cook's kiss (Mr. Benn was a kids' show in which the character donned a different outfit at a costume shop every week, then emerged into a different time and place for an adventure, with the episode where he put on a toque and apron was called The Cook rather than The Chef). There's no real logic I can see as to why Joy's Mum's life force at the point of her death appears to join with the Joy star, nor why everyone entranced by the Villengard tech would talk about how "the flesh will rise" when that only has meaning as part of Joy's very non-Villengard plan at the end. It's Christmas, though, and everybody wants the happiest ending possible, I'm sure.

Mr Benn as 'The Cook'

Connectivity:

Both Dalek and Joy to the World are stories broadcast in the first full year of a Doctor that was a 'season one' relaunch of the show exec-produced by Russell T Davies; both were penned by commissioned writers to provide a specific boost to the year (a mid-season 'tent pole' story in the former, a festive special for the big day in the latter). Both stories feature an appearance by a single member of a recurring alien species that hadn't been seen on TV for a good few years (the Silurian hotel manager in Joy to the World is, I think, the first one seen in Who since Deep Breath in 2014, over a decade earlier).

Deeper Thoughts:

Predictions for the space year 2025. In the last few years I've taken to making predictions for the coming year in the Deeper Thoughts section of a blog around the New Year period; as if that wasn't foolhardy enough, I've also made a point of looking back and checking how well my predictions turned out. I'm quite proud of one I made in the blog post at the end of 2023. It's nothing to do with Doctor Who, though. In the Deeper Thoughts of that post for The Church on Ruby Road, prompted by online discussions of the performance of The Goblin Song when it was released as a single, I predicted that Last Christmas by Wham would be the UK Christmas number one forever more. In 2024, just as in 2023, it did indeed make the festive top spot. I still can't see anything that will stop it being number one for the Christmas week in 2025 and thereafter, short of a change in how the chart is put together. The number of streams a song gets far outweighs any other measure in dictating a song's chart position, and Wham's song gets streamed a lot in the UK over Christmas. A concerted boycott would be impossible, it's on every Christmas compilation and playlist out there; indeed, as I mentioned last year, it is a song that many people do actively try to boycott individually - but to no avail - in the Whamageddon game. I also made the following statement when musing about the UK Christmas number one becoming boringly predictable: "At least we will have a Doctor Who special annually to make up for it". I was more certain of that statement in 2023 than I am in 2024, but I'll stand by it. Whether the co-production deal with Disney+ endures or not, I think Doctor Who will still continue, and even if it's not on TV any other time it will be on at Christmas. Joy to the World was sixth in the top ten of the day's programmes based on overnight ratings (i.e. not including streaming, where Doctor Who tends to pick up more viewers). It's earned its festive schedule spot, and I hope it keeps it for many years yet.

Other predictions were in the Deeper Thoughts section for the first blog post of January 2024. I correctly thought that Gatwa's first series would mostly concentrate on the new, but there would be a couple of appearances from the established UNIT family. I correctly suspected that there would be more supernatural antagonists, and also that there would be a return of a foe from the past. I namechecked Daleks and Cybermen, but Russell T Davies managed to return a less predictable old foe in Sutekh, without falling back on those mainstays. I mentioned a rumour about a spin-off with an eight word title; in 2024, that was officially confirmed to be The War Between the Land and the Sea, which will air in 2025, and will also feature the return of an old foe and the UNIT regulars. Will Gatwa's second series be able to avoid the temptation to feature Daleks or Cybermen? The point of these annual Deeper Thoughts is to go out on a limb, so I will: I think at least one will feature in 2025, probably Skaro's finest. On the home video front, I correctly predicted both Blu-ray collection boxsets for 2024, which were season 15 (Tom Baker's fourth run) and season 25 (Sylvester McCoy's second). This wasn't clairvoyance, I'd just picked up whispered rumours about both earlier in 2023. The Blu-ray team surprised everyone by branching out to cover Blakes 7 releases, no whispers about that had reached my ears. I have similarly heard nothing about the Collection releases next year. One Doctor Who box set has already been announced for 2025: Jon Pertwee's first year of stories, the 1970 season seven, will be released early in 2025. I expect we will also see Blakes 7's second season too. That will probably mean only one other Who boxset, but which one will it be?

With season seven slated for release, there are nine seasons of the classic series left for the Collection treatment. The number of black and white seasons left is outnumbering the colour ones for the first time, five to four. I think that it's unlikely that we'll get a monochrome set, though. The only season from the first six B&W years released to date has been William Hartnell's second run from 1964/65; that year has only two missing episodes that form 50% of a single story; the remainder of the season comprised of eight other stories made up of 35 extant episodes. As such, representing two out 39 with reconstructions (using the soundtrack and offscreen photographs) was barely a blip in the scheme of things. All the other 1960s seasons have more missing episodes than that, and those missing episodes form larger gaps in their stories (most seasons having at least one story that is 100% missing). It is theoretically possible for, say, season five to be released nonetheless, with two-thirds of story The Wheel in Space represented by four reconstructed episodes; but, the subsequent box set would then have an odd mix of animation and reconstruction used to plug the gaps, as other stories in the run have had some or all of their episodes animated (as is the case with each of the five remaining monochrome seasons). As such, I think that it's more likely that the next season will be a colour one, with the other seasons kept back until there is animation to consistently represent all their missing episodes. There's only a choice of four colour seasons for which I could plump; only three, if one assumes that the BBC wouldn't want two Jon Pertwee sets in a single year. I'll guess from those remaining three that it will be season 13, Tom Baker's second run, that will be next.

Going back to animation, I incorrectly predicted that a second animated story (joining the already announced The Celestial Toymaker) would be released in 2024, and that it might be The Smugglers (based on earlier speculation in a UK newspaper). I was wrong on both counts: no other story was released, but one was announced for 2025 - it wasn't The Smugglers, but The Savages (a similar enough title to suggest that that speculation might just have been based on a mishearing). I've picked up, very late, a pattern in the stories being selected for animations. Since the full story animations started in 2016, none of them have been purely historical stories (and even before that, only two episodes of a historical story have ever been animated). The sci-fi tales that were instead converted to cartoon were likely less problematic to animate, and more marketable. I think the trend will continue. From the trailer, The Savages animation looks to have been done by the team that worked on 2023's The Underwater Menace, meaning The Celestial Toymaker's team is free to be working on another story. It might not be released in 2025, but I'm guessing it will at least be announced. My guess is that the story will be The Space Pirates, meaning that a box set of season six, with The War Games in colour as an extra, would be a contender for 2026. In my previous predictions, I guessed that the 'In colour' re-edit and colourisation treatment would be applied to The Tomb of the Cybermen. I didn't think that anyone would have the silliness / courage to edit 10 episodes of story into 90 minutes (and pretty successfully, at least in my opinion). I'll guess that they want to stick with relatively significant stories, and will alternate between Hartnell and Troughton, so The Dalek Invasion of Earth will be next, on TV around the 23rd November 2025. How clownish will my guesses turn out to be? Time will tell; it usually does.

In Summary:

Never mind the narrative - or stellar - pyrotechnics, this is really about people being nice to one another. As such, I feel I must maintain that spirit, and wish you the Happiest of Happy New Years!

Dalek

Chapter the 317th, a singular Dalek adventure.

Plot:

Answering a distress call, the Doctor and Rose arrive in an underground complex in Utah where tech billionaire Henry van Statten keeps his private collection of alien artefacts. He has one living exhibit, which he's never been able to get to speak, no matter how much his staff torture it. Finding out that the Doctor has alien knowledge, he lets the Time Lord enter the 'cage' in which the creature is kept in chains. The Doctor panics and asks to be let out when he sees that the creature is a Dalek. It's weaponry is non-functional, though; the Doctor attempts to kill it by electrocution, but Van Statten's security guards intervene. Rose has meanwhile been talking to Adam, an employee of Van Statten's from the UK. Adam hacks in to the cameras in the cage, and Rose sees the Dalek being tortured. She goes there and talks to the Dalek, and it plays on her sympathy. When she touches its dome, it suddenly comes back to life having absorbed her DNA, and breaks free from its chains. Adam and Rose run for it. The Dalek absorbs energy from the local grid, renewing its battered and aged armour. It then proceeds to kill every person it comes across. The Doctor closes bulkhead doors to trap the creature, but Rose is left on the wrong side when they close. The Dalek does not kill her; it is starting to change because of the influence of her DNA. The Doctor arms himself with a big space gun from Van Statten's collection and confronts the Dalek. The Dalek shoots a hole in the ceiling to let in the sun, and opens its casing to bask in the light. It then kills itself, not wanting to live as an 'impure' mutation. The Doctor and Rose leave, Rose having persuaded the Doctor to let Adam come with them.

Context:

I watched this one afternoon close to Christmas Day 2024, in a bit of a rush as I'd realised how close it was getting to the big day. I wanted to get a post written up and published before the 25th. I viewed it alone from a DVD copy, the individual disc release of episodes 4 - 6 of the new 2005 series that came out before that series had even completed on television. When I'd finished and took the disc out of the player, I noticed it was looking very scratched after all these years. Should I invest in the upscaled Blu-ray boxset of the new series stories originally broadcast in SD (the first four seasons plus specials)? Maybe in the new year I'll have a look for it in the January sales. Are there still January sales?

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. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era, the ninth Doctor joining the fourth, seventh, eighth, eleventh and fourteenth in the 'Done' pile. It also marks the completion of another season of Doctor Who; I have in total completed 32 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4, 5-7, 9-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

In the UK, there was a public holiday for May Day on Monday May 2nd 2005; in the long weekend this created, I - along with the Better Half and friend Phil, mentioned many times before on the blog - travelled up from the south to Shropshire to visit long-term fan friend David (also mentioned many times before on this blog) and his Better Half. One of the things we did, as all of us were fans of the recently relaunched series, was sit down to watch a TV Dalek story (the first for 17 years). It had been very much hyped, but nonetheless exceeded expectations. It was enjoyed by everyone. Over that weekend, I remember we all went to a Birmingham cinema to watch the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie that had just come out. This was not enjoyed much by anyone. The other thing I remember was my being extensively and frustratingly poor at the board game Ticket To Ride, and not getting any better no matter how many times I was resoundingly defeated playing it. This was enjoyed by everyone (except me).

Reaction:

This viewing of Dalek came shortly after my watching the season 25 Blu-ray boxset (which came out in late October 2024). The first story on that set, Remembrance of the Daleks, has a scene towards the end where the Doctor confronts a lone Dalek and persuades it to kill itself. I know that essentially Dalek does a plot with those same basic beats over the course of 45 minutes, but the scene and the 2005 story could not be more different. Remembrance is one of the very best Dalek stories from the classic era, but it still includes a scene of a lone Dalek wobbling and fretting, rather than being a scary evil force. Many Doctor Who stories featured moments like this, or worse scenes where the Daleks were mocked; and, Remembrance aside, the inclusion of Davros in all their latter classic era stories tended to relegate them to fulfilling a role as henchmen rather than top-billed villains. Plus, there were many sketches and adverts sending them up (the last time the Daleks had a mass audience on TV before 2005 they were flogging chocolate biscuits). Dalek exists to empathically change the perception of the Daleks in the minds of the audience, annihilating any sense that they're pathetic, and reinvesting them with menace and import. Though it wasn't the most festive story written by Robert Shearman that I watched in December 2024 (see the Deeper Thoughts section to see what was), it was still somewhat apt. The story's raison d'etre is to roast some old chestnuts: each aspect that might seem silly about the Daleks - the sink plunger, the bumpy hemispheres on the skirt section, their seeming inability to go up stairs, etc. - is used to dark or murderous effect in the story.

A key way to do this that costs less but is more effective than effects work (though there's no slouching in that department, with great moments like the 'bullet time' scenes where the Dalek's forcefield stops a spray of rounds aimed at it, or where it effortlessly elevates itself floating up multiple flights of stairs) is to deploy the story's not so secret weapon, the intense and brilliant acting powers of its leading man. Christopher Eccleston is so good in this story that he burns through the TV screen. The Dalek prop is expertly given voice by Nick Briggs, in his first of many times behind the ring modulator doing vocal duty for Skaro's finest. But, it is how Eccleston reacts to Briggs that sears this story into one's imagination. Eccleston incendiary work is supported by sympathetic but still showy direction from Joe Ahearne. It's obvious why Ahearne was invited back to direct so many times in this season; every moment is framed expertly, from all the magnificent close-ups to set pieces like the Dalek dispatching dozens of security guards by setting off the sprinklers and letting the water conduct his electrifying shots. As I've said before on the blog, nobody can capture moving images of Daleks as well as Joe Ahearne. The script is also giving Eccleston a boost; the sprinkler scene and its aftermath alone delivering some of the best dialogue of the year, from the Doctor noting of the Dalek that "It wants us to see" the devastation it is wreaking, to the Doctor's tirade urging the Dalek to end its own life "Why don't you just die?!" followed up after a beat with the Pepper-pot's devastating "You would make a good Dalek".

As well as delivering a big dollop of the time war backstory that had been hinted at in the first few episodes of the series, the story also focusses on the Doctor's duality, the aforementioned war having left him more like a Dalek that he'd like to admit. This gives Billie Piper's Rose some good material too, calling him out regarding the unthinking hatred that the metal meanie has brought out. The moment where the Doctor thinks she's been exterminated hammers home the bond that exists between these two characters. Given that it's already obvious that the two of them together are something special, it isn't necessary to introduce Adam to highlight this by failing in the companion role (as I detailed in the 2020 blog post for following story The Long Game). That's not an issue in this tale, though, so the only real criticism I have is that the budget doesn't quite match up with the material; if the story had been the following year, it would have a full orchestra performing the wonderful score, rather than just Murray Gold's synths and samples, for instance. Mind you, if it had been the following year, it wouldn't have starred Eccleston, and I don't think Tennant - or indeed anyone - can do the Doctor's anger quite as well as Eccleston. The Dalek having bonded with Rose when it took a sample of her DNA to revivify itself, and hating the changes this brings on in it, its end is a quiet one rather than being in the heat of battle. There are excellent practical effects showing the mutant feeling the sunlight shine upon it before it dies. Exciting and clever, emotional and thoughtful, but with lots of action: watching Dalek in December made for a nice little early Christmas gift.

Connectivity:

Both Dalek and The Legend of Ruby Sunday see the Doctor accompanied by a single female companion visiting a base that has equipment beyond the capabilities of technology in the rest of the world at that time. In both stories, the Doctor is fearful at being confronted by a lone - and massively destructive - survivor of a race he'd previously encountered and thought was wiped out. 

Deeper Thoughts:

The Shear brilliance of the man: a quite timely but really not timely at all review of The Chimes of Midnight. Robert Shearman, the writer of Dalek, comes to many of the BFI Doctor Who screenings that I attend. He always hangs around after the screening in the bar and talks to other fans (he is a fan himself, as he's made clear in many interviews and writings). He was in the BFI Riverfront bar after the first of the two BFI events for The Happiness Patrol this year; there, my friend Scott embarrassed me slightly by informing Shearman that I wanted to tell him about how much I enjoyed something he'd written. The reason Scott particularly wanted me to be brave enough to tell him, and therefore forced my hand, was because the thing I enjoyed that he'd written had nothing to do with Doctor Who. It was a radio play called Forever Mine that Shearman wrote for broadcast in 2004 (on the BBC's radio 4), which starred Richard Briers and Pauline Collins. I only listened to it once, but its themes, plus some moments in the narrative and the mental images they provoked, have stayed with me since. A darkly comic play constructed around the difficulties that remarriage would present to widower and ex if the afterlife turned out to be real, it is haunting in its dramatisation of love and relationships, memory and identity. People at BFI events praising Shearman's Doctor Who work are probably ten a penny; I hope it was at least refreshingly different for him to meet someone extoling the virtues of an example of his other work. He certainly seemed a little surprised (maybe even bemused?) that it was Forever Mine in particular that had taken my fancy.

Shearman and friend

I couldn't, though, tell Shearman how good was his body of Doctor Who work, because - Dalek aside - I had never experienced any of it. Shearman came to prominence in Doctor Who circles because of his work for audio adventures company Big Finish. Long term readers of the blog will know that I've sampled only something like 0.001% of Big Finish's output, none of that smidge including any of Shearman's stories. Until very recently, that is. Wanting to listen to an example of his Big Finish work, I had seven audio plays to pick from, which he penned for the company between the years 2000 and 2007. All of them were well regarded at the time and to this day. One of the seven was Jubilee, the story that he adapted to create Dalek. To pick that one would, of course, have been most thematically aligned to this blog post, but instead I went for a story that was apt in a different way. The Chimes of Midnight, though it was first released in February (of 2002), is a Christmas ghost story. It may be Shearman's most popular work for Doctor Who audio. People are still talking about it: the 2024 Christmas edition of Doctor Who Magazine, issue 611, included an article on Big Finish's Christmas stories that didn't include Chimes because "people bang on about that one all the time". Perhaps the journalist imagined every Doctor Who fan had listened to it by now, but I had not. To rectify that I bought and downloaded Chimes, listening to it - rationed to one episode a day - in a week of late December 2024. The story sees Paul McGann's Doctor with his first audio companion Charley Pollard arrive at a house where some Sapphire and Steel style time anomalies are occurring.

The Original CD cover

The story deserves its reputation, it's got the whole package: intrigue, chilling scenes, and the same haunting quality that Forever Mine had: some of the moments where people within a somewhat artificial reality are altered as their memories are manipulated are very similar to the radio play, and similarly effective. It's also very Christmassy. The feel of the piece samples greatly from 1970s series Upstairs Downstairs, or half of it at least: the Doctor and Charlie can't ever get to the Upstairs and spend their time dealing only with the servants of the house, all of whom are beautifully written and performed (and a couple of which are in-jokingly named after the 1970s series' cast or crew). There's a repeated refrain that is used for both funny and increasingly eerie effect, "Christmas wouldn't be Christmas" without the cook Mrs. Baddeley's plum pudding, as many characters aver. Reportedly, Shearman indulged himself a little by making each cliffhanger moment a callback to previous 'rock star' classic series cliffs, part one ending like the first episode of The Space Museum, then the subsequent episode endings harking back to Kinda episode three and Horror of Fang Rock three. If that makes it sound like it would be clunky or artificial, I can tell you that the writing is sophisticated enough to perfectly assimilate any such material, no matter how geeky. Everything pays off, and a contained story with few characters and locations turns out to be even more bounded than it first appeared. It's good that the 0.001% of Big Finish audios I'd experienced before included the first 'season' of Eight and Charley audios (this story is from the second) as a little knowledge of her backstory is useful for the ending to have the weight that it should.

An online listening party for the story took place in 2020

Even though Shearman never wrote a story for Doctor Who on TV again, The Chimes of Midnight shows that his Who work for other media is just as imaginative and excellent. I may be wasting my effort with this quick capsule review, however: the chances are if you're reading this that you - unlike me - listened to the audio in question ages ago. If not, though, then I hope this seasonally apt but 20+ years late write-up has persuaded you to give it a listen. Merry Christmas! 

In Summary:

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without an obligatory "Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home!". (And, presumably, you don't need me to tell you that Dalek is great.)

The Legend of Ruby Sunday / Empire of Death

Chapter the 316th, where the Doctor takes a dog / god for a walk.

Plot:

[This is a relatively recent story of the streaming age, so be warned that there are spoilers ahead.] The Doctor and Ruby visit UNIT HQ in the present day. He wants their help in the cherchez of deux femmes - the mysterious woman whose faces keeps appearing everywhere he goes in the universe, and Ruby's birth mother. The former is easy as she's already on UNIT's radar: it's Susan Triad, the only nice tech CEO in the world. She's doing a big launch speech that very day, and Mel is undercover as one of her media team. The latter femme search requires a time window that UNIT have kept secret since the 1970s - and presumably rebuilt from scratch every time they've moved HQ. Feeding this room-size device with a CCTV tape of the night Ruby was left at the church on Ruby Road allows The Doctor and Ruby to be back there to see if they can ID her mother. But something else appears, a dark swirly force that seems to have the TARDIS police box within it. UNIT Archivist Harriet's surname turns out to be Arbinger: she's the Harbinger of the 'One Who Waits', the head of the pantheon: the swirly cloud resolves and it's Sutekh, who has survived in the space-time vortex by clinging on to the TARDIS (and become a larger and more doggy-faced god in the process). The Doctor and Mel are at Susan Triad's launch, and Triad also turns out to be under Sutekh's control. She releases dust that dissolves anyone with whom it comes into contact.

The Doctor and Mel escape on Mel's Vespa and race back to UNIT HQ as thousands of Londoners are dissolved by a growing cloud of dust. Most of UNIT's personnel are similarly dissolved; the Doctor and Mel rejoin Ruby in the time window chamber. Sutekh controls the TARDIS, but the version within the time window (from when it visited 2004 in The Church on Ruby Road) becomes solid from the power of their memories, and the trio escape in it. Across the universe the dust cloud rolls out; Sutekh has created a version of Susan Triad on every planet the TARDIS has ever visited, and each of them spreads the dust. The only reason the Doctor is still alive is because Sutekh is tortured by not knowing what significance Ruby's birth might have. Using a spoon he was given by a kind woman on an almost deserted planet - the memory TARDIS needing something real to fully function - the Doctor materialises the TARDIS in 2046, and uses the DNA database set up by villainous Prime Minister Roger ap Gwilliam to successfully trace Ruby's mother. Luring Sutekh with the possibility of that knowledge, the Doctor manages to hook intelligent rope round the dog god's collar, which he then attaches to the real TARDIS. The Doctor takes off, dragging Sutekh behind the ship. Pulling Sutekh like this through the vortex undoes the damage and restores the universe. Everyone comes back to life. Reluctantly, the Doctor cuts the rope and Sutekh floats free in the vortex and is killed. Ruby is reunited with her birth mother. The Doctor leaves her behind on Earth, but says he'll see her again.

Context:

I watched both episodes from the Blu-ray back to back on an evening early in December 2024. I was briefly tempted to try pausing Empire of Death at the probable point during the action that the Doctor explains to Ruby about his previous altercation with Sutekh, to watch the whole of the Pyramids of Mars Tales of the TARDIS (see First Time Round and Deeper Thoughts sections for more details) before resuming Empire of Death again. It was getting too late in the evening for me to stay up for another 76 minutes, though, and besides it was a pretty silly idea. Nonetheless, next time I watch this story, I'm sure I'll again consider doing it that way.

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. This post marks the completion of another season of Doctor Who, meaning that I have in total completed 31 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 2, 4, 5-7, 9-11, 13 and 14); I've also completed five Doctors' televisual eras (fourth, seventh, eighth, eleventh and fourteenth).

First Time Round:

As with most of the series, I watched both The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death just after midnight when they landed on the BBC iplayer, accompanied by middle child (boy of 15 years old, 14 at the time), on the 15th and 22nd June respectively. In the following days afterwards, I watched both again with the other two of my children (young man of 18, girl of 12). In between the episodes on the 20th June, I watched the aforementioned 'Tales of the TARDIS' version of Pyramids of Mars - which gave the uninitiated relevant backstory in an edited omnibus of the 1970s Tom Baker story where Sutekh first appeared - on its broadcast on BBC4. I could not interest any of the family in watching with me, but I enjoyed it very much. After I'd watched Empire of Death, I witnessed a strongly negative reaction from some fans I know, and many others online. I didn't understand this at all. It was like they had seen a different show to me; I will go into this more in the Reaction section below.

Reaction:

As usual when watching back episodes for the blog that I know have proved contentious on broadcast, I watched Empire of Death waiting for the moment when it all started to go south such that I would see the flaws many other people had seen... and, as is often the case in these circumstances, I waited and waited and the moment never came. I enjoyed it as much on this watch, if not more, than the previous times. Now that the dust has settled on the finale, and the season as a whole, it's clear that one of showrunner and writer Russell T Davies's aims was a slight Marvel-ification of Doctor Who, with the creation of its own set of Titans, albeit characters still weaved from Who's own past. Having given us a few of the pantheon (the Toymaker and Maestro, both of whom are namechecked in the Harbinger's speech at the climax of the first episode, as was another old monster the Mara, alongside a few others that we haven't - yet - met), the big bad "The One Who Waits" is revealed to be memorable 1970s villain Sutekh. Davies brings the character back from the dead: last seen in the vortex, Sutekh has endured clinging on to the TARDIS, invisible and intangible but feeding off time energy. It's an inventive way to bring back an interesting villain, adding the oomph a finale needs without resorting to the usual fallbacks of the Daleks, Cybermen or Master (who've perhaps become overused in recent years). The villain seducing the Doctor's TARDIS to the dark side is another great idea, leaving the Doctor without his greatest protection. Maybe a tiny flaw of Empire of Death is that it doesn't explore this as much as it could - the Doctor gets another TARDIS very quickly. What he gets (the memory TARDIS) is another magnificent and original concept, though: a just-about working space-time machine constructed from remembrances. Without impeding the action, it provides ultimate fan service, with long-term viewers straining to spot its every visual reference to stories gone by.

I read complaints online about how the seduced TARDIS subplot shouldn't have been done as it contradicted Matt Smith story The Doctor's Wife (where the TARDIS is personified as a woman who sees past and future, but who doesn't give the Doctor the nod that one day she'll be taken over by an fake Egyptian deity). Do people seriously think Davies should have abandoned his plotting because he can't go back in time to change a story from 2011? People may not have wanted the rematch, but that's what the writer has written; it seems silly not to engage with it on its own terms (particularly as 'being with godlike powers blocked the personified TARDIS from seeing these moments of its future' is a perfectly plausible filler for the continuity hole, and doesn't need spelling out). Another frequent complaint I saw online was how obvious it was, as soon as lots of regular characters got killed at the end of the first part, that there was going to be a reset at the end. People said this killed the tension, but I don't believe they felt that watching it; I just think they want other people online to know how clever they are. Sutekh is ultimately going to be defeated, that's a given - so should any spectacle, even if temporary, be toned down? The same people would complain that the stakes were too low, if so. Or should everyone have stayed dead? This is redolent of the imdb.com reviewer mentality: any episode of anything where a regular gets killed rates higher on imdb.com. It feels like a slightly adolescent urge for the show to be gritty, angsty drama again just like it was .. well, never, except maybe in the imaginations of adolescents watching first time round (oh, and in the Virgin New Adventures novels of the 1990s, I guess). To my mind, the quiet scenes in the memory TARDIS - Mel's battling against Sutekh's control, the Doctor's sadness at his adventuring having caused the calamity befalling the universe - speak more of the cost of this battle than leaving people dead.

Another gripe people had was that they felt conned. A great mystery had been set up through the year suggesting that there was something significant about Ruby's untraceable biological mother, only for it to be revealed that she is just an ordinary - magnificently ordinary - person. In a way, the drama was showing us ourselves: Sutekh's fatal flaw was that he thought like a fan, obsessing over details and imbuing them with more significance than they deserved. Viewers waiting for Ruby's Mum to be revealed to be the Rani, or whoever, missed the grounded and real and much more important story: a young Mum giving up her baby, and a girl growing up always wondering. That's where the real drama resides. Objections to this were similar to those raised against Star Wars sequel The Last Jedi (and those reactions were a direct influence on Davies when writing his finale, as he has mentioned in interviews). Star Wars franchise storytelling has always reflected ancient myths - or, if one is less charitable, terrible soap operas - where everyone turns out to be long-lost relatives of everyone else; Doctor Who, on the other hand, has always counterpointed the extraordinary with the ordinary. Ruby's birth parents being just a normal couple of teenagers (people are still holding out hope that her Dad is going to turn out to be the Master, or whoever, but I doubt it'll happen) is in keeping with Who's style. The phenomena witnessed around Ruby through the season (echoes of the day of her birth such as Carol of the Bells and snow falling) are all explained if one's paying attention. The combination of the TARDIS, Sutekh's power and the time window made it possible for memories to become matter. In The Devil's Chord, Maestro has the following dialogue tying it together: "Power like him... the oldest one... on the night of her birth, he can't have been there."

Maybe people didn't like the subtext that they were similar to the villain of the piece, that they'd missed the true emotion of the story to focus on side issues. There is definitely some fan baiting in the story: gloriously, in the first few minutes of The Legend of Ruby Sunday, the script blows out of the water the two main theories that fans, including me, had been painstakingly documenting through the season (Triad's forename is Susan like the Doctor's granddaughter, 'S Triad' is an anagram of TARDIS); that was all too obvious. Instead, the menace is hidden in a different way: SUE Triad TECHnologies = Sue Tech = Sutekh. This was a fun moment, except for pedants like me who feel physical pain at the Doctor's line "It was the wrong anagram". Arggh! It's not an anagram. Its not even a hidden word clue, it's two concealed homophones in a longer phrase. I accept that "It was the wrong wordplay" wouldn't be as strong a line; anyway, I didn't immediately go online to complain about it (I saved it until now). It's also true that Ruby's teenage mother's choice of winterwear (sinister hooded coat) is pushing the misdirection maybe a little too far, but I am oblivious concerning the teenage fashion choices of 2004, so what do I know? The scenes with Ruby's mother - Ruby seeing her in photos for the first time, Ruby ignoring the Doctor's caution to go and meet her, Ruby approaching her in the coffee shop, and the realisation when the barista calls out Ruby's name - more than make up for those minor quibbles, and Millie Gibson is terrific in all of them. There's also very effective links back to mid-season story 73 Yards, retrospectively explaining more of that earlier story and propelling the finale's narrative forward; the moment where Ruby knows exactly how many yards 66.7 metres equates to gave me goosebumps, and dangerous politician of 2046 Roger ap Gwilliam inadvertently contributes to Sutekh's downfall.

There's so many riches: Lenny Rush gives a fun performance; I particularly liked when he used the inbuilt machine guns in his Segway. Susan Twist, finally in a full proper role, is great. Anita Dobson is fantastic, funny and sinister in equal measures. The scenes of Mrs. Flood and Cherry Sunday are great: "He waits no more". Shivers. There's a great quiet scene in the first episode between the Doctor and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart where he talks about his family. The effects work in the time window scenes is exemplary. It's a brilliant cliffhanger between parts one and two (quibbles about anagrams notwithstanding). The Vespa chase sequence is exciting and well realised (both in terms of practical and visual effects work). The scene on the planet Agua Santina with Sian Clifford giving the Doctor a spoon was nice, and very reminiscent of the Flux episodes (I liked the Flux episodes). Nothing's perfect, of course: for example, it's nice to see Yasmin Finney back as Rose, but there is literally nothing for her to do. Perhaps Sutekh should have been powerful enough to work out Ruby's parentage sooner, but his fatal flaw would probably have meant he refused to believe the simple truth of it anyway. Besides, if he had, he'd have won and Doctor Who would have finished. Maybe that's what some fans want. The final scenes of the Doctor defeating Sutekh proved controversial, but I loved them. Sutekh as a dog on a lead - albeit an intelligent lead, a nice callback to the Christmas Goblins story - being pulled along by the TARDIS to undo his former damage to the universe is silly but fun. If one doesn't want silly but fun, but instead yearns for dark and gritty and angsty, Virgin New Adventures novels are available in second hand bookshops and on ebay.

Connectivity:

It's frustrating; More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS features clips of Pyramids of Mars, but none of them include Sutekh, so there's no link there. Unless I blinked and missed it, there's no clip featuring Bonnie Langford as Mel either. On the other hand, both the documentary and The Legend of Ruby Sunday / Empire of Death include new material featuring people who work for UNIT, returning companions and villains from the show's past, and a malevolent force invading the TARDIS.

Deeper Thoughts:

2024: A Divided Year. Now that it is December of 2024, it is probably time to look back at the events of the last twelve-month. A theme I've seen commented on already, and that I've also personally noticed, has been division. It was there in the politics; not just the extreme divisions of war as between Israel and Palestine or Ukraine and Russia, but in party politics pretty much everywhere. The UK had a general election where the two biggest parties looked more and more like polar opposites, and the second half of the year, when they had swapped places as parties of government and of opposition, did nothing to lessen that. The US in its presidential election was also split between Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Evil, and for some unfathomable reason chose the latter. Such division has been seen in miniature in Doctor Who fandom too, with Ncuti Gatwa's first season provoking extremes of reactions in either direction for different viewers. I get the feeling that this took some by surprise. The return of Russell T Davies to the showrunner role was seen as an unalloyed good when announced. His three David Tennant stories in 2023 offended nobody as far as I could see (and I scanned a lot of online reviews and discussions at the time). It was an anniversary, though, and the episodes saw the return of the most popular modern Doctor and one of the most popular modern companions; a certain amount of goodwill was to be expected. Come the actual season of goodwill and The Church on Ruby Road shown on Christmas Day 2023, and then throughout the eight episode run in 2024, things were different. The anniversary was over, Tennant was gone, and there seemed to be many more voices of disapproval. A reason this might have surprised is that Davies's first tenure (when running the show broadcast from 2005 to January 1st 2010) happened before mass market use of twitter.

The social media popular around that time were not as efficient at being the instant criticism engine that twitter subsequently became. Fans were still using online message-boards and discussion forums. I was one of said fans, and I can tell anyone who wasn't there, particularly the fans who were children then and have since grown up, that every episode of Russell T Davies' first tenure divided opinion, with as many declaring each episode the worst as the best. As such, I believe Ncuti's hit rate is going to be no better or worse than any other Doctor's. The online reaction will remain the same, though. Indeed, I think it always has, and only the medium has changed. If the 1970s Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe - whose era in charge was and is looked on by many as the high quality mark for Who stories - had returned to manage Doctor Who in the late 1980s, he would have got as much criticism in the fanzines as 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner did. I don't know why anyone would be masochistic enough to take on the Who showrunner role, as one's work only seems to be appreciated in retrospect; nevertheless, I'm glad that someone of Davies's calibre and experience decided to come back. He has given us an energetic new lead duo, and explored those characters effectively in a shortened run of stories. There's another season already in the can for 2025, and there will be a spin-off show The War Between the Land and the Sea shown in that year too. Even if there isn't a huge amount of merchandise in toy shops as there was in Davies's first period in charge (it would be rare for such a continuously long-running show to explode with that sort of public popularity twice) I think the series is in good health. A couple of stories (73 Yards, Dot and Bubble) were very strong indeed, and even those that didn't work as well (Space Babies) were doing different and interesting things.

On the home video front, 2024 brought the usual two Blu-ray box sets of classic seasons. I'd hoped for three instead of two, and got my wish in a way. The same team of restorers and special feature content makers did work on a third season for Blu-ray as well as Tom Baker's season 15 and Sylvester McCoy's season 25. It just wasn't Doctor Who, but instead was the first season of Who's 1970s rival / sister show Blakes' 7. More division: I have heard that this has enraged some fans who want the Who release rate to be faster, and would rather all the people involved concentrated on Time Lords only, without involving themselves with that ragtag bunch of freedom fighters fighting the oppressive Federation. I'm fine with the team diversifying, and will most likely pick up a copy of the Blakes' 7 set at some point. The new Tales of the TARDIS prompted by Sutekh's return on TV was an edited omnibus version of the last of the Osirans' first appearance in the series, Pyramids of Mars, topped and tailed by new footage of the Doctor and Ruby in the memory TARDIS. This was released as part of Ncuti's first season boxset. The only animation of a missing 1960s story was The Celestial Toymaker in June. It worked very well, the new style enhancing the original story. I hope the team that worked on it, and the other regular team (whose last known project was The Underwater Menace animation that came out late in 2023) are both working away on new titles for release in 2025. The other classic series release in 2024 was The Daleks in Colour, the first in a new line of re-edited and colourised 1960s stories. After a TV showing for the 60th anniversary in 2023, the Dalek story was brought out on disc early in 2024. The War Games has been given similar treatment for a TV outing over Christmas 2024, and will no doubt be available to own shortly afterwards.

The blog has covered 28 stories so far this year. As well as all seven of Ncuti Gatwa's 2024 stories, there has been at least one story blogged for each of the Doctors except Christopher Eccleston (but the year's not over yet). Colin Baker's entry was a webcast not a fully canonical TV story, and Paul McGann's was an even shorter webcast. They count, though, or at least I've decided that they do. Aside from Gatwa, the only actor to rack up more than two stories on the blog in 2024 is David Tennant with three, one from his first tenure, two from his second. I've also covered a few 'off-piste' adventures: a webcast featuring an alt-Doctor, an extended TV skit featuring an alt-Doctor, and a documentary with some new in-universe dramatic scenes. I went back to Gallifrey again for a holiday (see The Ice Warriors post for more details), and was lucky enough to get a ticket to every BFI Doctor Who event this year (and one Blakes' 7 event too, but I won't say any more about that for fear of upsetting any purists!). The write-ups of these events (except the Blakes' 7 one, natch) can be found in the Deeper Thoughts sections of the following vaguely connected or wholly unconnected posts (this is the problem with having blogged most of Doctor Who now, there's only so many places to provide a home for sharing these events): the screening of the Darkness & Light documentary and Horror of Fang Rock from the Season 15 Blu-ray box set was coupled with the Full Circle blog post; the showcase of newly animated The Celestial Toymaker went with The Sensorites; the first attempt to screen an updated The Happiness Patrol from the season 25 Blu-ray box set was paired with Survival; the second, successful attempt to screen an updated The Happiness Patrol is covered alongside The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood. I hope to attend more such events in 2025, but whether I'll be able to share them here depends on their scheduling, and how quickly I finish the very few stories I have left to blog.

In Summary:

I love it. So there.