Death Comes to Time

Chapter the 322nd, is like an alternative universe version of a favourite science fantasy franchise (but probably not the one you're expecting). 

Plot:

The Doctor and an android companion he's made for himself, Antimony, are sent a message (in a weird way) by another Time Lord, the Minister of Chance. Two Time Lords (the Time Lords don't seem to live on Gallifrey anymore and are only a few in number scattered around the universe) have been killed on Earth, and the Minister wants the Doctor to investigate. The Minister in turn will return to the planet Santine where the Doctor was previously, and help its people against the invading General Tannis, an evil Time Lord. Ace is a prisoner of Tannis but another Time Lord Casmus rescues her, and trains her to become a Time Lord. The Doctor and Antimony work with a UNIT operative Speedwell on Earth, discovering that two vampires are behind the killings of the Time Lords and some other massacres of innocent people in London. The Doctor kills one vampire by allowing him to drink a little of his blood after secretly eating some garlic (yes, really). The other is killed by Speedwell. The Doctor and the Minister then both separately help the rebels of Santine; well, that's the plan, but neither are very effective. Tannis is a step ahead of the Doctor and kills Antimony. The Minister in anger at the rebel leader getting killed lets rip with his superpowers (the Time Lords have superpowers now), destroying many of the invading troops. Tannis has already left, though; he's planning to invade Earth. Tannis finds and kills Casmus. Ace has been given a TARDIS to travel to a planet where she faces a test. She fails, but this is all part of her training. The Doctor meets her and they travel to Earth. The Brig, Speedwell and UNIT have spaceships now and are ready for the invasion. Tannis confronts the Doctor near Stonehenge. The Doctor uses his superpowers (see above) to destroy Tannis at the cost of his own life.

Context:

So, the blog is again veering away from the resolutely canonical, and therefore I must ask some questions of the next story up for consideration: Does it star the Doctor? Yes, he's a little bit sidelined but he's definitely there. Does it have visuals? Yes, they may be basic, but they are present. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. With a full house of correct answers, Death Comes to Time was cleared for viewing. I watched from youtube where all the audio episodes are presented with Lee Sullivan's accompanying art. This was over the course of a week in February 2025. I didn't try to get anyone else from the family to watch with me; the story is a bit too niche for that.

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 (which also might be the end of Doctor Who if you believe what you read in the tabloids!). Beyond the handful of blog posts like this one that cover notable spin-offs, I have completed eight Doctors' televisual eras proper (the third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 34 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

In 2001, I was an enthusiastic reader of and contributor to Doctor Who online message boards (see the Deeper Thoughts section of my 2024 blog post on The Scream of the Shalka for more details). The news that a pilot for a new Doctor Who radio series was being made was much discussed there (the driving force behind Death Comes to Time Dan Freedman who produced, wrote, and directed it, as well as his script editor Nev Fountain, were regular presences on the boards at that time). The news was received with much excitement and anticipation. The disappointment when BBC Radio 4 made the decision not to develop a series was short lived, if I remember correctly, as the announcement that it instead would be developed into a webcast on the BBC's Doctor Who website came very soon afterwards. In July of 2001, I struggled with the realplayer software and my dial-up connection and managed to watch all of the first episode. I thought it was okay; nothing that blew my socks off, but I held out on forming an opinion as it was incomplete. The rest of the story landed between February and May 2002, with chunks of episodes two to five becoming available weekly. The real player often crashed, or timed out; again, I may be misremembering, but I believe I then tried an option aimed at those like me with bandwidth challenges to stream the story audio-only. I found the story difficult to follow without the pictures, and I wasn't particularly enjoying what I was able to see or hear; so, I bailed on the webcast version. I tried again with the audio version when it came out on CD in October 2002. It was still a bit hard to follow everything that was going on, but I made it to the end on that go. I have not listened to or watched the story again until now.

Reaction:

At one point during Death Comes to Time, the words of Tim (as played by Simon Pegg) in the TV comedy Spaced where he says "Jar Jar Binks makes the Ewoks look like Shaft" came to my mind, which led to me thinking the following: Death Comes to Time makes The Phantom Menace look like The Empire Strikes Back. Unfair? Maybe a tad, but the comparison wouldn't leave my mind. This is probably because every moment of Death Comes to Time made it clearer and clearer to me that the mythology of Star Wars was its blueprint. The story is replete with space battles, rebels fighting invading troops and the like; those genre trappings are plentiful in many a Doctor Who story before and after Star Wars was invented, of course; Death Comes to Time, though, builds that material into the tale of the dying days of the final few Time Lords (Jedi), who have magical powers because of their connection to time (the Force), with one of their number Tannis (Vader) having turned to the dark side, but there is hope for a future generation as Ace (Skywalker) is being trained to become a Time Lord (Jedi) by old, beardy mentor Casmus (Obi Wan). There is no equivalent to Ewoks included, but this is a con not a a pro, I think, as some additional levity might have better offset the rather doomy tone. The story emerged from plans for a new Doctor Who radio series; as such, it should and did have free rein to be its own thing and not slavishly follow how Doctor Who had been done before. I've tried to bear that in mind when watching. It's complicated, though, by the inclusion of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred as the Doctor and Ace. They are a direct link back to a version of Doctor Who that came before with wholly different continuity, set-up, rules and tone.

Another complication is that rather than being on the radio for a mass audience where this break from the past might not have mattered so much, it ended up as a webcast on a website made for fans. Fans want Doctor Who to be like Doctor Who, because they like Doctor Who. It's disconcerting as a fan viewer therefore when Time Lords are depicted as a few nomadic souls wandering the universe, bound by a code that prevents them using magical powers; Time Lords were never ever like that. It's mildly irritating when the Doctor and other Time Lords use those magical powers to resolve plot complications rather than their ingenuity, because one key aspect of the Doctor's appeal is his ingenuity. The Doctor does a bit of investigating in the second episode, but at its denouement the villain essentially gives themself up. He does a bit of planning to rescue a child later in the story, but that comes to nothing as the tables are turned on him. The climax of the story and defeat of the Big Bad just involves the Doctor using a magic off-switch to end the plot; it's imbued with a significance that it doesn't deserve, as it's essentially a cheat, by the Doctor sacrificing his life with that action. This ending is another source of discombobulation to the fan viewer, as it means they have to mentally edit out the Paul McGann TV movie from existence. A lot of those fans didn't like the Paul McGann TV movie, and have likely been trying to mentally edit it out of existence since they first saw it; if it were an easy thing to do they would have done it long before. All this adds up to make Death Comes to Time difficult to watch; and, as mentioned above, the technology already presented something of a barrier, so the difficulties are compounded.

It's fascinating in its way too, looking at an alternate universe take on the show; but. it would only be worth the effort if this new take was truly original, or at least engaging. Unfortunately, it's neither. Breaking with the past sets up the expectation that we'll get something new not just a tired spin on Star Wars, and engagement is undermined by there being too much going on. The action is split between the Doctor and Antimony's bits, the Minister of Chance's bits, and Ace and Casmus's bits. The first two of those are populated with far too many characters, most of whom have silly names that aren't enunciated well as dialogue is usually in haste or with explosions happening over the top of it. The battle that's depicted through most of the story's running time is between the Saltines and the Canestens - is that right? That's what it sounds like, but they are a type of savoury biscuit and a brand of thrush cream respectively, so probably not. The third set of bits with Ace's training is terribly dull; nothing happens in that subplot until the final episode, but that doesn't stop the other action from being interrupted through the first four episodes to cut to another sequence of Casmus being gnomic and irritating. Sometimes, often when they were just getting interesting, a subplot disappears for a long period while the others become the focus; elsewhere, though, there are sequences that restlessly cut back and forth between them after only one or two lines of dialogue (this kind of intercutting is a tell tale sign that someone on the production was trying to make two dull sequences seem interesting by chopping them up). Unnecessary cameos by good actors (Jaqueline Pearce, Anthony Head and David Soul each pop up at different points, say a line, then disappear) further muddle things.

Reportedly, Freedman had planned a 13 episode season for radio; perhaps trying to condense down all the ideas he had for that length of run to five parts created some of the problems I've described. The best section is probably the majority of the second part set on Earth with the Doctor hunting vampires. It has no superfluity of characters (arguably, it has too few as it is very clear who will secretly turn out to be undead given that there are no other suspects); it has a nice, grounded character in Speedwell (he's one of a small number of characters in the whole story that's not a Time Lord, alien, vampire or robot). It sees an honest to goodness mystery, albeit a bit of a gory one, that the Doctor has to use his wiles to investigate and address. If it was standalone, was tweaked a bit to make the Doctor more active in the denouement, had Ace swapped in for Antimony, and didn't have such an overpowering tone of pretentious ennui, it would make a great pilot for new Doctor Who for either radio or online webcast. What actually got made is neither fish nor fowl, a duck-billed platypus of a story. If one wanted to avoid doing something traditional, then it should not have starred Sylv and Sophie. It could potentially have worked if it just had the Minister as protagonist, but changed his name: a story with Stephen Fry playing the Doctor is better than one with him playing someone a bit like the Doctor. It also might just have worked if Paul McGann had starred in it, and died handing the baton over to a newly appointed Time Lord companion or the Minister or both (I can't see McGann wanting to star as the Doctor once more just to get killed off, mind). Anyway, time has passed, Doctor Who's back on TV and Death Comes to Time is what it is. It's probably worth it existing just to have the late great John Sessions in Doctor Who. He is having so much fun, unlike any of the others in the doomy cast of characters, and many of his lines are deliciously evil.

Connectivity:

Death Comes to Time and Day of the Daleks both have titles of four words starting with a 'D', and both feature Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, plus other UNIT personnel who report into him. Both see significant elements of the series return after five years away from viewers' screens. Sylvester McCoy returned as the Doctor in 2001 after last having been in the series in the TV Movie in 1996, the Daleks returned in the 1972 story after last having been seen in Doctor Who in 1967.

Deeper Thoughts:

Seriously? After being an early adopter of online social communication (see First Time Round section above) I have now, as mentioned in posts passim, given up social media altogether. I occasionally google "Doctor Who" just to check I'm not missing any news about the show, and that recently led me to see an online article published in February 2025 on the Spectator's site, titled "Doctor Who fans - and its writers - need to grow up". Prepare your Max Max Fury Road GIFs because obviously 'That's bait', but I clicked on it anyway. It was a very slightly more thoughtful piece than the usual clickbait; it also wasn't banging on about Doctor Who being woke, as I'd half expected (for those unaware or outside the UK, the Spectator is a weekly news and reviews magazine that's aimed at a highly conservative segment of the market). The writer can't resist a mention of the programme's "woke agenda" but at least has rectitude enough to put the phrase in distancing quotation marks. Mostly, though, the comment piece is a rant about "trash TV" or "pulp TV" (the writer uses both phrases) being taken too seriously. It was prompted by interviews done for the announcement of new writers that worked on scripts for Ncuti Gatwa's second season due to air in spring 2025. One of these writers, Juno Dawson, was quoted saying "Scripting the best TV show of all time is truly a dream come true"; another, Inua Ellams that "[Doctor Who] invited me to dream, to live beyond my reality" and added, "Getting to write for the show felt like touching God". Without social media, I don't know if there was a backlash from the online fan community to the Spectator article (as might have been the intention, at least of the sub-editor creating the headline), but the piece doesn't talk much about fans, anyway. Blame is reserved for the BBC.

Long-term Doctor Who fans are used to articles written by people who don't understand why anyone would like Doctor Who. I don't agree with the editorial slant of the Spectator, but I at least have empathy enough to understand other people might enjoy reading it. There is a nice line in the piece where the writer says "Part of the art of living... lies in knowing what to ignore". He couldn't manage that in this instance, though, because he feels that the BBC as "our national broadcaster" should not present Doctor Who as "a pinnacle of contemporary culture" or "a major artistic achievement" instead of the "mediocre kids' TV show" he feels it actually is. "Not everything need be high culture" he adds. As is often the case, though, he doesn't give examples of high culture, or even of any TV that is not trash; he gives examples instead of children's TV, Top Gear and moments in an old Doctor Who story that are nicely irreverent, not falling into the trap of taking themselves seriously. He also states that "Entertainment is low culture" damning everything on the box, because who is making anything for broadcast - even in news and documentaries - that doesn't aim to entertain the audience at some level? If all TV, including expensive scripted drama like Doctor Who, is trash, then  - guess what - it's all of a level, so comparisons are pointless, a kind of lively arts communism that I didn't expect to see espoused in the Spectator. One could put one's head above the parapet and make an argument that Dickens or Shakespeare are high culture even though they were the popular entertainments of their day, but someone can always disagree and set the culture bar higher. Qualifying high culture becomes such a vanishingly small selection that it ceases to have significance. High and low culture labels therefore have no utility, and the discussion boils down to things that one likes, and things that one doesn't like.

That leaves the question about whether the BBC is right or wrong to hype up the quality of Doctor Who beyond its natural limits. The criticism here I think makes two fundamental errors. The first is to imagine that the content of a single BBC Media Centre press release (let alone the comments of a couple of excitable freelance writers commissioned to work on a series) is in anyway representative of the views or approach of the BBC as an entity, or the people who make Doctor Who as a team. It's a press release, hyperbole is de rigueur. If they could have found a Doctor Who writer willing to say for the press release that they were very excited to be hired to write for a mediocre kids' TV show as they needed the money, I think the Spectator wouldn't hesitate to use that as a different stick to bash the BBC. The second error is in imagining that the content of any TV story, or any dramatic work, is in any way consistent with the process of its making. Creating a comedy requires exactly the same level of seriousness and graft, perhaps more, than making a tragedy. Doctor Who stories (even Death Comes to Time, which was tonally quite dour overall) contain moments of levity and even frivolity. But the people making them can't be frivolous; the massive budget for Doctor Who (a big give-away to those in the know that it's not just a kids' show) and the sheer number of people involved mean everything needs careful, sober management. There's probably moments of fun involved, but never frivolity. One could make up one's own clickbait headlines like 'Overpaid Doctor Who production team needs to take things more seriously' that would spring up over right-wing media if there was ever evidence to the contrary.

  

An instructive example of this was also written about online in February 2025: the Doctor Who story Fear Her had a voice role rerecorded, so it could be returned to the corporation's streaming service, the iplayer. This was because the original voice over was done by disgraced news presenter Huw Edwards, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to three counts of making indecent images of children. The decision to do this was no doubt treated with as much seriousness by those behind the scenes of Doctor Who as any considerations by those looking at any one item of BBC news and documentary archive where Edwards was a presence. Arguably, though, a more delicate job needs to be done by the entertainers. As mentioned above in relation to Death Comes to Time, metatextual distractions that impact an audience's engagement with a drama risk killing the drama altogether. Factual archive will at least have the distance of time and eventually history to potentially ease the sting of what is currently a raw issue. Taking out one acting performance and replacing it with another is risky; the situation with Fear Her was at least made easier by Edwards's performance being rubbish (the new voiceover is better) but it wasn't something that could be done in an offhand manner. In summary: Doctor Who's content should be - and is - relatively light and occasionally irreverent, but that can only be achieved if the people who make it treat it very seriously indeed.

In Summary:

A duck-billed platypus of a story, but not as fun as that sounds.

Day of the Daleks

Chapter the 321st, which - if you think about it - features two separate days of the Daleks, with the Daleks time-travelling from one to the other (but that's not as snappy a title, obviously). 

Plot:

The dire political situation of the 1970s or maybe 1980s (depending on the dating protocol) makes a third world war seemingly inevitable. Sir Reginald Styles is arranging a peace conference at Auderly House, a government owned country pile. Before the conference, a guerrilla soldier appears from thin air as Styles is working there, raises a gun as if to shoot him, then disappears again "like a ghost". UNIT investigate while Styles leaves to ensure the global delegates attend the conference. Evidence found suggests the guerrilla came from the future. The Doctor and Jo spend the night in Auderly, and in the morning three more guerrillas arrive and threaten the Doctor, thinking him to be Styles. They have come from the 22nd century to kill Styles as their history states that he tricked those attending the conference, then blew up the house killing everyone including himself. This started years of wars, then the weakened Earth was invaded by Daleks. Realising they have the wrong man, the guerrillas send one of their number to get new orders, but he does not return. Jo accidentally operates one of their personal time machines and is sent to the 22nd century. Ogrons, back from the future, attack the house. The Doctor chases after the fleeing guerrillas and travels with them to the 22nd century. He is captured and reunited with Jo and meets the local controller, a human who does the Daleks' dirty work. The guerrillas rescue the Doctor and Jo, and ask them to go back to the 20th century and kill Styles. The Doctor realises that it was the remaining guerrilla not Styles who blew up the house, as a last ditch effort to complete his mission. He and Jo go back, and evacuate the house. The Doctor persuades the guerrilla to instead use his explosives to destroy the Daleks and Ogrons who are attacking the house. UNIT fall back and let the invading aliens in. Auderly promptly goes boom, righting the timeline.

Context:

I was lucky enough to get tickets to the latest BFI Doctor Who event (see Deeper Thoughts section below). It does require a lot of luck. For the uninitiated, it involves being a member of the BFI (well worth the money, if you are even vaguely geographically close to London) but also wrestling with the BFI's website. When the monthly programme opens for members, all events in that programme - not just Doctor Who ones - sell out quickly. For those few minutes, the website gets hammered and sometimes responds in quirky ways. For the February programme's launch, the website for the first time had added rate limiting / queuing functionality; this meant that visitors that morning were shown a holding page until tickets became available, then were added to a queue. The weird thing was, it added people to a queue in a random order, rather than first come first served. The amount of luck required to get these tickets therefore increased even further. Even though our queue position was supposedly 6000+, two tickets were bagged; if the photos look further away than usual and from an awkward angle, though, this is why. This blog is all about using random factors to pick the next story. The box set schedule and the mad carousel of the BFI website had to be chance enough; I had no choice but to then blog Day of the Daleks, as it is the final Jon Pertwee story remaining to align with the write-up of the event. I watched the special edition version of Day (originally made for DVD in 2011) from the Blu-ray an episode an evening during a week of early February.

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; Jon Pertwee's third Doctor joining the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth, making eight Doctors completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season, the 34th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

In February 1988, both Spearhead from Space and Day of the Daleks came out on VHS and I bought them (from W. H. Smith in Worthing) and watched them for the first time. In fact, the date of the BFI event was exactly 37 years to the day of the VHS release date of Spearhead; Day of the Daleks came out a little later on the 15th February in 1988. In those days, I had no idea what was coming out when, so walking into a shop and finding new tapes on sale was an unexpected pleasure. Before that, my Doctor Who collection was only four tapes, one of them another Jon Pertwee Dalek four-parter (Death to the Daleks) and one of them a definite crowd-pleaser (Pyramids of Mars). These new releases in February (The Robots of Death came out at the same time as Day), though, felt like a real step up in quality and excitement; plus, seven tapes felt like more of a collection than four.

Reaction:

It was a very hard choice whether to watch the as transmitted version or special edition of the story. When I first saw it in 1988, it didn't occur to me that anything in Day of the Daleks needed to be fixed; I didn't notice anything wrong with the Dalek voices, nor the climactic sequence of the attack on a country house. I still don't think the latter is that bad: yes, there are only three Daleks involved, but one could chalk that up in the story universe to each Dalek being so powerful that that's all they need (rather than the paucity of props that was the real reason). The filmed additions the special edition makes (shot using the same type of cameras used by the original crew) to that and other action sequences are done fairly seamlessly, anyway. No, it was the Dalek voices that swung the decision for me. Over the years since my first watch, I've seen all the other Dalek stories, such that the very different approach taken by the voice actors in Day have stuck out more and more. The story was made many years after the last Dalek had featured in Doctor Who, and nobody on the production knew exactly how to achieve their discordant delivery. The tendency in Day is for the dialogue to be done slowly, haltingly, without the shrill aggression, so it gets a bit boring (particularly as secondary alien foes the Ogrons also deliver everything slowly). New series voice actor Nicholas Briggs recorded new voices for the edition in 2011 that are much more in keeping with the other Dalek stories of the 1970s, and with those switched on I was able to watch without being distracted from the action quite so much. I won't cover any of the other changes or new material here, but will concentrate on the majority of the story material that is in common to both versions.

There are a few things that could do with fixing in the story that the special edition couldn't address. It can't just be me (though a quick google search doesn't find anyone else bothered by it at least enough to post somewhere online), but isn't the exterior footage quite soft? Maybe bordering on out of focus in places? I don't think (though I've not got an expert eye by any means) that this has been created by transfer of the film to video before broadcast, it looks to have been burnt in when the film was originally shot. It's a shame, as the locations used (both for the house and its grounds, and the gone-to-seed vistas of the future Earth) are good enough to want to see them with pin-sharp clarity. It was possibly a deliberate choice, as presumably was the decision to include the 'sting' from the end credits in the recap of the cliffhanger of the following parts (when I first got the story on VHS it was a stitched-together omnibus version losing all the interstitial credit sequences, and when I heard the end theme start to play for a few seconds over the action, I assumed it was somebody's editing error). Some of these aspects might be down to the inexperience of new director Paul Bernard. He does, though, get some good performances from the regulars and the guest cast playing the guerrillas (particularly Anna Barry as their leader Anat). Aubrey Woods as the Controller makes some more questionable choices. He's very theatrical, with some deliberately exaggerated physicality. Again, this may have been deliberate on the part of actor and director, the better to counterpoint those cooperating in the Daleks' Vichy regime against the more naturalistic freedom fighters bringing that regime down. I can't think of any other reason why the technicians working for the controller speak like they're hypnotised zombies.

The storyline could be said to be generic Pertwee, playing a lot of the beats that had been established in his first two years (a conference under threat, an obstructive government representative, a couple of UNIT action sequences), and it has a good few 'moments of charm' humanising its military-scientific squad (the Brig early in the morning needing coffee, Benton on the search for some food only for it to be taken by Yates because "Rank Has It's Privileges", the Doctor and Jo on ghost watch in a supposedly haunted house). Some visual moments are created at the expense of logic: the guerrilla's time travel devices behave a little differently each time they're used, depending on the needs of the plot. A lot of the scenes of world building are a bit too leisurely in their pacing. But none of the quibbles matter; the story as a whole is protected by the strength of the underlying plot of people travelling back in time to try to change the future, only to end up creating it. It's wonderful and innovative, and the moment the Doctor reveals the twist ("Styles didn't create that explosion and start the wars - you did it yourselves") is goosebumps central. Yes, in 1972 a few viewers may have known of such a story structure from an SF short story, but for the vast majority this would have been something brand new. Even in 1988 when I first saw Day of the Daleks, it was new to me and I'd guess many others buying that video (1984 film The Terminator, which uses exactly the same plot 12 years after Day, was not as well known in 1988 as it would be a few years later when its sequel came out, and I hadn't seen it at that point). The biggest selling point of the story is of course that it features the Daleks, but they are just icing on the cake (the original drafts of Louis Marks's script did not feature them). This one serves up big timey-wimey.

Connectivity:

After two stories which didn't (really) feature the Brigadier comes one that empathically does, with Nick Courtney's character not away in Geneva or Peru, or stuck inside a cyber-suit, but fully present instead in the South East of England where all the alien action happened in those days. Other than their both at least mentioning the Brig, and featuring lead characters that first appeared on Doctor Who in the 1970s, Day of the Daleks and The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith also both have denouements that feature an attack on a big and mostly unoccupied building in its own grounds.

Deeper Thoughts:

From one Jon Pertwee season opener to another: BFI Spearhead from Space event, 1st February 2025. It was a crisp, bright February morning as I walked along the South Bank to the BFI. As well as myself, others of the usual crowd that come to these events in attendance were Alan, Chris, Dave and Tim. The NFT1 screen's auditorium was packed out, as is usual for these Blu-ray box set tie-in events, and the hosts as ever were Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. The former started proceedings by welcoming Doctor Who fans back to the BFI after four months, and telling us that he was "Very happy not to be presenting The Happiness Patrol". "Well, fingers crossed," added Fiddy. Jokes about the snafu at the BFI event for that story in August 2024 (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details) seem to have replaced jokes about Fiddy's first name as go-to gags for warming up an audience. Later, we were still encouraged to "Shout for Dick" if we thought we knew the answers to the quiz, and as an aside Fiddy asked fans to stop shouting the same at him during conventions as the hotels involved didn't like it. Before that, Johnson read a few of the more choice comments related to the day's event on twitter. There was the obligatory tweet from a fan planning to trawl the event for cute guys (the feeling of our hosts was, not in exactly these words but definitely in their spirit, 'good luck with that'). Another regular favourite was a post from a person wearing a tie-in item of clothing; this time it was a gentleman in our row who was wearing a Silurian jumper. There were quite a few cosplayers dressed as Jon Pertwee's Doctor too. My favourite online comment read out was from someone who said that the event would be scary because "I have to be around other Doctor Who fans for hours".

The event did not have a panel per se. There are so few people to invite, as most involved in the story from both behind and in front of the cameras have passed. Instead, there were a series of one person interviews on stage. The first, before any episodes screened, was with Mark Ayres. Billed as "Sound Impresario", Ayres is responsible for restoring the audio of stories for the Collection Blu-ray box sets. He joked that the story we were about to see "follows on directly from The War Games In Colour". The recent version of the final Patrick Troughton story, now with added regeneration into Jon Pertwee, was also worked on by Ayres. Spearhead from Space is the only classic series story made in a format, 16mm film, that is compatible with HD standards. As such, it has already had a stand-alone Blu-ray release, over a decade ago. For the box set, audio restoration started again from scratch. The restored audio was described by Ayres as a "patchwork quilt" made from various sources. The original 16mm sound mags disintegrated long ago, but there are safety copies (though they were also mostly unusable) and CD copies in the archive, and all of these were reviewed. Ayres is given a rough cut of the video to work with and takes its audio track as a guide, using the best sources he has and a lot of skill to produce a restored version. He mentioned that he'd just received the guide videos for the episodes in the next box set; Johnson asked him what season that was, but Ayres would only say that it was "Season X ... or season XX". One early scene of the Brigadier and Liz Shaw had a lot of echo on the vocals, and Ayres did a lot of work to reduce that, and hopes people will now have nothing to complain about. Johnson joked that they'd probably complain thus: "You've not taken off the echo effect for God's sake?!!!".

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ayres

The first two episodes were shown next. I don't think you can go wrong with Spearhead from Space, really, and the story seemed to go down well with the audience. There was applause when Caroline John first appeared as Liz Shaw, and her first dialogue scene is now completely devoid of any distracting echoes. Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well is present and correct on the second episode's soundtrack (rights issues have meant it has appeared and disappeared from home video releases over the years). People laughed in all the intended places, and some unintended ones: the wheelchair chase at the end of episode one garnered some titters, but I think it is a rather good example of some dynamic editing. What came over most was the high quality of the characters and the dialogue. When the lights went up after the end of episode two, a cast member was invited onto stage; Robin Squire had portrayed uncredited an Auton, so hadn't got to display much character, and certainly no dialogue. He was an engaging interviewee, nonetheless. Squire's real job on the series was as assistant script editor, and he had also been mucking in on location for the filming of Spearhead as a driver, picking up and conveying actors to where they were needed. The person originally booked to play the Auton had "freaked out" on being presented with the costume and head of the creature, so Squire mucked in again. His abiding memory of playing the role was of refreshment breaks during the filming wearing a head without any mouth hole, and pining about "what it must be like to have a nice cup of tea". He got to stay with the cast and crew in the hotel on location, asking Jon Pertwee one day over breakfast to run through all his famous funny voices.

Squire (R)

Squire recalled that the shoot in October 1969 had been blessed with marvellous weather. He also remembered Caroline John coming up to ask him, having been sent by producer Derrick Sherwin, what polymer chains were (these are mentioned by Liz Shaw in dialogue). Squire didn't know why Sherwin thought he would have a clue, and assured John that as long as she was pronouncing the words right it would all be okay. His tenure as assistant script editor was relatively short. He got to see the recording of a Patrick Troughton story when he'd just started and was surprised by the tattiness of the sets; it was explained to him that "in black and white, the tattiness doesn't show". Later, he'd pitched a story idea - presumably for Inferno - but didn't get to write the screenplay, "They used a proper writer, who'd worked for Hammer". In later life, he has returned to writing, penning a non-fiction book "The Life and Times of a Doctor Who Dummy", and very recently a screenplay which he is hoping will be filmed soon. Squire left the stage, and the final two episodes were shown. There were many more unintended laughs in the second half, some of which I didn't really share in. The total destruction effect - where film is played backwards and then sharply edited to show a person imploding and then vanishing - looks a bit Monty Python, I suppose, but the moment where Channing appears distorted through the glass of a door got a big laugh too, and I think that's an effectively creepy visual. The Nestene creature - felt by most commentators over the years to be rubbish - got off lightly by comparison. After the story ended, the person responsible for the visuals looking as good as they did was interviewed. This was Peter Crocker, who billed himself as "The Emperor of Pixel Wrangling".

Crocker (R)

Crocker is to the video as Ayres is to the audio; he confirmed on stage what Ayres had also hinted at: season 7 was the most tricky season to clean up for a box set so far, as the archive holdings are relatively poor. Spearhead presented the least issues, as it had been worked on for the stand-alone Blu-ray release in 2013. The technology available improves; also, as Crocker explained, all such restorations are time limited and so are never exhaustive. There was still more clean up to do this time, and he'd also noticed when watching the episodes shown that day some things that had still been missed; he said they would likely get fixed " the next time it comes out, in 2035". He confirmed in answer to a question from Johnson that whatever small issues remain, the Blu-ray versions will be much better than anything seen on a TV in 1970 ("We know this from recordings done at that time"). After a brief introduction of the Colour Recovery process, Crocker showed on NFT1's big screen a fascinating four-way comparison. The same clip from The Ambassadors of Death played in four different versions in each corner of the screen: top left was the black and white film version, top right was an off-air US colour video tape version, bottom left was the raw colour as created by the recovery process, and bottom right was the final restored version. It was an extreme example, but still highlighted the amount of effort that goes into this work. The colour in the bottom left section was patchy, and in the top right was barely there at all. Through technology and graft the bottom right version, which looked splendid, was created. Crocker believed that final version should pass muster with everyone barring pedants and BBC engineers (though he did concede that the former group will contain a lot of Doctor Who fans).

Next to be shown was a selection of sneak peaks at the Value Added Material: as usual it ended with a humorous selection of responses from the Behind the Sofa watchers, this time viewing season 7's finale Inferno; before that there were clips from documentaries about writer Malcolm Hulke and actor Nicholas Courtney, a clip from a Robin Ince fronted documentary on contemporary science's impact on Who, an emotional John Levene In Conversation, and a clip from a documentary about Who's relationship to suburbia. Matthew Sweet, involved in the last two on that list, was the next guest. He's often in the audience for these BFI events, but I've never seen him on stage before. He was as entertaining and humorous an interviewee as he is interviewer, though he couldn't help turning the tables a couple of times: "So, how did you two get together?" he asked of Johnson and Fiddy at one point, and later in a tiny lull smilingly barked "Come on then, ask me a question?". When it was suggested that the clip of John Levene showed a gamut of emotions, Sweet hinted that we hadn't seen anything yet, "The gamut goes on". He outlined his theory that Doctor Who is one of the most researched things there's ever been; when future alien archaeologists reflect on evidence they've found on Earth, he expects they'll think that Who "must have been ... as important as America." There was particular focus on the detail of his approach for his ' In conversation' interviews with Doctor Who alumni. There is a limit to how much time they will spend with any interviewee, as the one-to-one interview is an exhausting experience, so it's important to create a space where people feel comfortable to share. From the vantage point of age, interviewees seem to be more free to speak, can be more reflective, and less worried about speaking about some topics.

Sweet (R)

Sweet was asked what it's like as interviewer and long-term fan when an interviewer gets details of their long ago activity wrong; he recalled having to gently remind Michael Grade three times - for the interview on the Season 22 box set - that Grade hadn't cancelled the programme, merely taken it off the air for a few months. Sweet had differing responses to some comparisons about his interviewing style (Russell Harty was fine, but he was not so keen on Piers Morgan). There was an amusing but off topic reminiscence about interviewing Norman Wisdom at his house ("We called it an interview but it was more like a hostage situation"); then, finally he touched on what Doctor Who means to him ("I consider myself profoundly afflicted... it's in my DNA... in my dreams"). Once he'd left the stage, another guest was introduced who could also make the claim that Doctor Who was in their DNA. Daisy Ashford is the daughter of Caroline John, who played companion Liz Shaw in season 7, and Geoffrey Beevers, who had a smaller role in season 7 and later played the Master in the series. Now, Ashford plays the character her mother originated in Big Finish Doctor Who audios. I think I've met Daisy briefly: as recounted in the blog post for Spearhead linked a few paragraphs above, I once met John and Beevers (with family members, one of which I'm sure was their daughter) waiting for the lift at a Doctor Who convention. Ashford asked the audience for a show of hands of who had met her mother, and I was able to put my hand up. She also recounted John's leaving the show thinking she hadn't done well in the role, as I touch on in the Spearhead post. It took joining the convention circuit, starting with one in Manchester in the 1990s, to persuade her otherwise; "Being back in the fold meant a lot to her".

Ashford (R)

Ashford thought the newly restored episodes she'd seen that day were "beautiful" and "stunning"; she has had to view the season as a whole previously in preparation for the Big Finish role as Liz. "How many people here know Big Finish?" she asked. Almost all hands shot up. "You're speaking to the right audience" said Johnson. When she was offered the role, she instantly said yes (and imagined her late mother saying "I'm going to sort out some acting work for you"). The responsibility of what she was doing only hit her once she was in the studio, but Tim Treloar (who plays the third Doctor for audio) and Jon Culshaw (who was a guest actor in her first audio) helped her adjust. She understands what a privilege it is, and enjoys how it's a connection to her mother. She talked a bit about what her mother was like as a person and an actor, including an anecdote about seeing her on stage at the National Theatre catching a bee that had been buzzing around the actors, and releasing it away from the stage, all the while staying in character. Ashford confirmed that she had been a Doctor Who fan as a child, her era was Sylvester McCoy with Sophie Aldred as Ace, but she didn't "connect the dots" to her mother's era, "It was like a different show". One audience question related to the feminist angle of Liz Shaw's character, something Ashford appreciated in the 1970s stories, thinking that her mother's character was " a trail blazer" who "had to defer to men somewhat, but didn't do it willingly". She recounted how her mother had met female fans who had been inspired to become scientists because of Liz. Of the season 7 stories, Ashford's favourites are the Silurians story and Inferno (both see "The good guys being not that good, the bad guys not being all that bad").

How did these two get together?

After Ashford's interview, the box set trailer was shown, and the event was over (apart from the obligatory few post-screening drinks in the BFI bar). The next event at the end of February 2025 is a screening of the animated version of The Savages, and I'm lucky enough to have a ticket to that one too, so all being well should be able to share a write-up of it here in a few weeks.

In Summary:

An innovative plot, which has been used elsewhere so much since 1972 that we don't give Day of the Daleks the credit it deserves.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith

Chapter the 320th, where we imbibe a little Tennant extra. 

Plot:

Sarah Jane Smith's adopted son Luke wonders what his Mum is up to after she lies about where she's going a couple of times. He has Mr. Smith the computer track her. It turns out that she's dating handsome silver fox Peter Dalton. A few weeks go by, when Luke, Clyde and Rani have to hide a few extra-terrestrial shenanigans from Peter. He then proposes, and Sarah Jane says yes. The engagement ring once on her finger seems to exert a power over her: she mothballs Mr. Smith, and focusses on the arrangements for a wedding in less than two weeks' time, rather than on saving the world. Luke is very happy, but Clyde is suspicious. He and Rani go to Peter's house and find it empty, with evidence that it has not been lived in for some time. On the day of the wedding, Clyde smuggles K9 into the venue. The guests sit, the bridal party arrives, and Sarah Jane walks to the front to join the officiating registrar and Peter. Before anyone can say 'I do', the Doctor rushes in to stop the wedding. The Trickster appears and most of the wedding party disappears. Sarah Jane and Peter are trapped in one space/time trap, the Doctor, kids and K9 in another, in the same place but stuck in a different second of time. The Trickster uses the others as hostages to coerce Sarah Jane to agree to wed Peter. This has been arranged by the Trickster to make Sarah Jane turn her back on protecting the Earth and plunge things into chaos; Peter should have died some weeks back in his home, but the Trickster intercepted him at that point; Peter thinks the Trickster is an angel and was tempted by a chance to find love. With artron energy that Clyde absorbs from the TARDIS, plus Peter's self-sacrifice, the trap is broken, and the Trickster banished.

Context:

As usual when straying a tad beyond the strict boundaries of Who canon, I asked myself a set of questions about this Sarah Jane Adventures story. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Does it have visuals? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. With a full house of correct answers, the decision was made to blog the story. Despite the evidence of this blog over the years making it look like I'm an obsessive completist, I have never ever purchased any of the Sarah Jane Adventures home video releases, so I had no choice but to watch this from the BBC iplayer. I couldn't interest the Better Half or the kids in such a curio, so watched it alone one afternoon towards the end of January 2025.

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. Beyond the handful of blog posts like this one that cover notable spin-offs, I have completed seven Doctors' televisual eras proper (the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 33 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

2009 was Doctor Who's first so-called gap year since it had relaunched for the 21st century. The previous four years from the relaunch in 2005 onwards had each seen a full series of 13 episodes plus a Christmas special aired, but that momentum couldn't be - or at least wasn't - maintained. It later became a much less big of a deal that Doctor Who wasn't being shown much or at all in a particular year; for this first time, though, those that made the programme clearly felt they had to do something extra. At that point, of course, a couple of Doctor Who scripted spin-offs were in production (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more on this). They and the main show did a few special things to span the year, so that Who or Who-related content didn't disappear for that long: an Easter special episode of Doctor Who was shown in April, Torchwood's third series was a big event with its episodes stripped across a week of BBC1 broadcasts in July, the third season of The Sarah Jane Adventures had a guest appearance from David Tennant as the Doctor in October, then more special episodes of the main show followed in November and in the festive period at the end of the year. Broadcasting in a children's TV slot, and airing just before bigger and more memorable episodes like The Waters of Mars and The End of Time, The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith was the easiest to miss and probably the most forgettable even if you didn't miss it. I can't remember that first viewing with any clarity, but it would have likely been with the Better Half, watching the episodes from a PVR recording made while I was at work. I don't think that either of our then only two children were old enough to appreciate the show (they were three years old and two months old at the time).

Reaction:

The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith is not just an example of a spin-off, but also of a slightly different beast, a crossover. This had happened in the opposite direction the previous year, with the main show featuring appearances from Sarah Jane, K9 and Luke Smith, as well as members of Torchwood, in The Stolen Earth / Journey's End. There was a policy decision that the Doctor, a children's hero, would not appear in the post-watershed Torchwood, but the favour could still be returned in the other spin-off aimed at younger audiences. From viewing The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith again, it feels to me that, once the decision to feature David Tennant's Doctor in a crossover appearance in The Sarah Jane Adventures had been made, nobody thought that they needed to do much more than that. The first episode is a lot of individual scenes, almost sketch-like in places, marking time until the wedding ceremony. The second is mostly just the Doctor hanging out with younger members of the cast. This becomes almost meta; in the scene towards the end, are the young characters excited to be allowed into the TARDIS, or is it that the actors are excited about visiting the set? Maybe it's a big bit of both. The script calls for Tennant only to bring his generic set of Doctor tics - rushing around, gritting his teeth, saying Allons-y, waving his sonic around, and so on - not to do anything innovative or stretching. The most fun moment for him is near the end of the first part, and must have proved irresistible for the writer: the Doctor runs in to stop the wedding (appearing for the first time after having been teased by the sound of the TARDIS popping up on the soundtrack throughout the episode leading up that point) just after the officiant has asked if anyone has just cause and impediment why these two people can't be wed, etc., etc. 

The bitty first episode is there to establish the budding relationship between Sarah Jane and her beau Peter Dalton (played by Nigel Havers who, like Tennant, is just being asked to do the thing he always tends to do with no straying outside the boundaries). To keep things engaging, there has to be some conflict, but the story can't decide at what level to pitch it. Is this a comic farce where Luke, Clyde and Rani have to prevent Peter from seeing anything extra-terrestrial that might put him off? Well, yes, every third scene is like that, including the moment that Luke pretends K9 is a high-tech toy, or the scenes with the CGI slug that Sarah Jane buys on ebay so that she can send it back to its home planet (the CGI for the creature being, alas, some of the worst ever scene in the Whoniverse). Is the conflict more at the internal or inter-personal level, where the threat of the change to their lifestyles that Sarah Jane settling down will mean causing upset to the younger regular characters? Yes, it's that too, with a couple of good scenes along those lines (Tommy Knight's slightly desperate need to have a Dad is really well-played and creates some nice moments between him and Daniel Anthony as the more suspicious Clyde). Finally, is the conflict more along the lines that there is clearly something more to this romance, and that it all could be a con? Yes, it's that too. It's difficult to reconcile these different levels of conflict in a coherent way, so the story instead just shuffles them in with one another, each new scene and the next cutting between these different approaches. It damages the romance that should be central to the piece: is it real or is it based on some hypnosis done by the Trickster?

The engagement ring glows and seems to control Sarah Jane's behaviour, confusing the issue. There's a quite nice scene with Peter reminding her that she fell in love with him before the ring went on, but is such a papering over the cracks really needed at all? The story would be much more powerful if no such glowing inducement was required, and Sarah just started to neglect her saving the world sideline as she's preoccupied with real life falling in love stuff. That would present a real sacrifice at the end, as the happiness would be genuine, but she'd nonetheless have to pass it up, as she needs to be on duty to stand up to the Trickster or baddies like him. There are a few issues with doing that plot, though. First, it wouldn't really leave room for the Doctor to return; second - and don't hate me for bringing this up, majority Doctor Who fandom, as for some reason you don't want to see this, but - Lis Sladen is too limited an actor to do emotion well enough to sell that she's really in love (sorry, but it's true); third, a straight plot would be too similar to previous Sarah Jane Adventures stories. The script already hangs a lantern on this by suggesting that this is the Trickster's M.O., but having Sarah Jane responsible for cutting short the magically extended life of someone who should be dead is exactly what happens in Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? by the same author from the first series, and Sarah Jane being tempted by a situation that's contrary to the laws of time is exactly what happens in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith by the same author in the second series. Without the need to shoehorn Tennant in, it might have proved to be the emotional finish to that trilogy; but without him it would probably not be felt to be as special as it is in its final form.

Connectivity:

Both Dark Water / Death in Heaven and The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith pointedly don't feature Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier; he's represented - even typing this now, I still can't fully believe it - by an extra in a Cyberman suit in the Capaldi story; for the Sarah Jane story, Courtney was unwell and couldn't be part of proceedings as originally planned, so he was written out with a line stating that the Brig is in Peru.  

Deeper Thoughts:

The Revised and Updated History of Spin. The previous time I covered a story from a Lis Sladen-starring Doctor Who spin-off featuring K9 (in this blog post from March 2019), I mused in the Deeper Thoughts section on the history of Doctor Who spin-offs. In summary, despite some ideas and attempts, the sum total of TV spin-offs in the classic era was one pilot episode that was never developed into a series. Obviously, the time wasn't right back then; it didn't take too long after the relaunch of the programme in 2005, though, for records related to Doctor Who spin-offs to be smashed again and again. From the off in March 2005, there was Doctor Who Confidential, a making-of documentary series that aired on UK channel BBC3 immediately after the latest episode of Doctor Who aired on BBC1. A year later, the launch of the second run of the relaunched series was additionally accompanied by a weekly Who-themed magazine show aimed at younger children called Totally Doctor Who. Six months after that, the first dramatic spin-off started; Torchwood, also debuting on BBC3, was aimed at a post-watershed viewing audience, and featured Captain Jack (who was in five episodes of the 2005 Doctor Who series), Tosh (who was in one episode of the 2005 series), plus a few other regulars, one played by Eve Myles (who was in one episode of the 2005 series playing a different part). Before Torchwood finished its first run, a second scripted spin-off debuted with a pilot episode, this one aimed at younger audience members. This was, of course, The Sarah Jane Adventures, featuring Sarah Jane Smith and K9 (who were both in one episode of the 2006 series, and loads of episodes in the classic era). For a short, fecund period, there were four programmes (two scripted drama, two factual) running in parallel to the main programme.

This didn't endure, but it was fun while it lasted. Totally Doctor Who ran until 2007, the other three all continued up to 2011. The Sarah Jane Adventures would have continued longer if not for the death of Lis Sladen (the team that made the show went on to create another for Children's BBC called Wizards versus Aliens to plug the gap, and that ran for three years). The main show still continued, but then found itself at the start of a long period where there were no regularly running brother or sister shows alongside it, but there were very occasional forays into the extended story universe. As part of the 50th anniversary celebrations in 2013, a docu-drama was created about the very beginning of the classic series, An Adventure in Space and Time. When Doctor Who embarked on its second gap year - with no Peter Capaldi stories bar a Christmas special airing in 2016 - there was another spin-off created and shown. This was Class, set in the Coal Hill School that had been the character Clara's workplace in the 2014 and 2015 seasons. The series focussed on a set of sixth-formers dealing with extra-terrestrial activity. It was pitched at a Young Adult audience somewhere between the ages of The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood's key demographics, a tricky set of TV viewers to reach, let alone to satisfy. Despite being the brainchild of award-winning YA author Patrick Ness, it wasn't deemed to be successful enough to get a second series. Throughout Jodie Whittaker's time as the Doctor, there were no TV spin-offs, though there was an audio drama series called Doctor Who: Redacted that ran for two series and is still available on BBC Sounds in the UK. I've still not got round to listening to it, but I will sooner or later.

There was a feeling from many fans that when Russell T Davies returned as showrunner there would be an explosion of new spin-offs. This was perhaps based on Disney+ money being involved, the streamer already hosting a plethora of shows connected to the Star Wars and Marvel franchises. Additionally, Davies had made comments stating that he felt Doctor Who should have a similar franchise presence on streaming services, with multiple spin-off shows available. Those fans waiting for a Paul McGann starring Time War series or similar are still waiting, but Davies did achieve something like what he'd suggested; he just didn't do it on Disney+. A sister making-of show in the Doctor Who Confidential mould immediately returned called Doctor Who Unleashed, with an episode created per story of the main show. There were also a couple of strands that presented classic era stories in new ways, the 'In Colour' re-imaginings of black and white stories, now colourised, plus Tales from the TARDIS. This second strand involved new material with stars of the original productions (and Daniel Anthony reprising the character as Clyde from the Sarah Jane Adventures in the one for The Three Doctors). All these new things, plus most of the stories and spin-offs from 1963 to 2022 came together as 'The Whoniverse', a section of the BBC iplayer that hosts that multi-show streaming franchise that Davies knew could exist. Most of that material can't be shown on Disney+, though, as they don't have the rights. The first spin-off they have funded is one that's currently being made, The War Between the Land and the Sea, with broadcast date unknown (though recent comments from Davies suggest it's a good way off). Whether it will be the only spin-off or the start of something bigger depends on whether Disney+ decide to continue their relationship with the BBC and Davies. Time (and money) will tell...

In Summary:

It's a fun crossover, but it's not much more than that

Dark Water / Death in Heaven

Chapter the 319th, where the afterlife attacks!

Plot:

Danny Pink dies in an accident. A grieving Clara tries to force the Doctor to go back and change time to save him. Instead, the Doctor connects her to the TARDIS telepathic circuits to materialise the ship in the most likely place to find Danny again. This is the 3W Institute, run by Missy and reportedly set up by a founder that discovered that the dead can talk to us through television static, and they are all somehow still connected to their corpses. The Doctor thinks this is all a con to prey on people's fears. The rich people's minds are uploaded to a floating hard drive, which the Doctor recognises as Time Lord tech, while their bodies are kept in protective exoskeletons. Danny finds himself in what appears to be the afterlife, where an administrator called Seb greets him. Someone else there also wants to meet him: this is a boy that Danny accidentally killed when he was a soldier. Seb asks if Danny wants to use a service they provide where they can remove his painful emotions. Too late, the Doctor realises that the 3W exoskeletons are Cybermen, and that Missy is a regenerated Master. The Cybermen emerge in the St. Paul's area, and they and the Doctor and Missy are surrounded by UNIT, led by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Osgood. The Cybermen fly up to the sky and explode, forming a cloud, and rain starts to fall. This rain contains 'Cyber pollen' which turns dead people into Cybermen. In the Institute, Clara bluffs some Cybermen that she is actually the Doctor to buy some time. A rogue Cyberman arrives and takes her away.

The Doctor, Missy and the TARDIS are put aboard a UNIT plane, but flying Cybermen attack it in the air. Missy kills Osgood. Kate falls from the plane. As if that's not bad enough, a UNIT character played by the wonderful and talented Sanjeev Bhaskar is criminally underused before he too is killed off. The Doctor skydives from the plane, catching up with and entering the falling TARDIS. He materialises near Clara in a graveyard where many Cybermen are coming to life. The rogue Cyberman turns out to be Danny Pink. Missy arrives and tells the Doctor that the Cyber-rain will fall again, converting all the living people. She offers the Cyber-army to the Doctor, thinking that his self-righteousness will make him accept and the power will corrupt him. The Doctor refuses, and passes the control bracelet for the Cybermen that Missy has given him to Danny. Danny leads the Cybermen to fly up and destroy the clouds. Missy is shot by another Cyberman that turns out to be a reanimated dead Brigadier, who had previously caught and saved Kate when she fell from the plane. The bracelet allows Danny to bring back to life the boy he killed, who arrives in Clara's home. The Doctor uses coordinates that Missy gave him hoping to find the missing Gallifrey, but there's nothing there. He visits Clara, and both of them lie thinking that they need to protect the other's happiness (the Doctor thinks Clara is reunited with Danny, she thinks he's been reunited with his people). She stays on Earth; in the TARDIS, the Doctor is surprised to find Santa Claus knocking on the door, telling him he can't leave things that way.

Context:

This was viewed from the BBC iplayer in mid-January 2025, the first and second episode separated by a couple of days. For the first episode I was accompanied by all the children (young man of 18, boy of 15, girl of 12). The eldest was home for the last day before returning to university, and he was only interested to see Chris Addison playing Seb in the story, as he's a big fan of The Thick of It. He was a little disappointed that Addison didn't share any scenes with Capaldi (the scenes in the aforementioned comedy where Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker and Addison's Olly Reader interact are many and celebrated). There was a surprising amount of enthusiasm from the younger two to keep going and watch the second part immediately after the cliffhanger, but I didn't have the time at that moment. When I did, their enthusiasm had waned and I watched the second part alone. 

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; Peter Capaldi's twelfth Doctor joining the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh and fourteenth, making seven Doctors completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season making it 33 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

Early November 2014, just over ten years before the recent rewatch, I saw these episodes when they were first broadcast on BBC1 in the UK. The pattern of the time was to timeshift each episode a little, watching it later on during the Saturday evening after it had gone out, accompanied by the Better Half. If we both thought an episode was suitable for the children, whose ages ranged from 2 to 8 years old at the time, I would watch it with them the following Sunday morning. Capaldi's first year had proved more scary than any season before, at least in our assessment, and three of its stories had been held back from the children; the two-part finale, though, was not one of those stories, despite some questionable moments that I'll pick up on in the Reaction section below.

Reaction:

In a scene in Dark Water, the 'three words', hinted about in the name of the institute around which a lot of the action revolves, are revealed. The words are 'Don't cremate me' and they are cried out in anguish by the supposed voices of the dead picked up from the ether. It's played realistically, and is therefore quite a chilling scene. I could see how another parent or child would react differently to how my children and I did on first watch. The Doctor has some dialogue to state that it's all a con, that there is no link between the corpses of the dead and any continuing spirit or soul; it's quick and easy to miss, though. Elsewhere, Danny Pink's spirit / soul is visually depicted. The script suggests - to those that can follow the technical bafflegab - that it's actually a computer simulation of him based on his memories; but the visual, scene after scene, is him walking around in an afterlife. This overpowers any technicalities: the story is weighted heavily - in some places, pretty much explicitly - towards a suggestion that people live on in some way after they die, in pain. There's multiple references to Danny's feeling cold, and this is stated to be because his corpse is still linked to him somehow, and it's being kept somewhere cold. That's quite an unsettling thing to suggest to younger members of the audience, and the programme fumbles the scientific explanation that may provide reassurance. Danny Pink, dead or alive, is never shown to be connected to any futuristic computer or such. He just magically appears in what is presented as an afterlife, but is actually - we find out later - some form of cyberspace. In the first episode, the Doctor says "We're here to get your boyfriend back from the dead", so he must believe it is possible in some way (though he has no knowledge of the use of the nethersphere tech at that point).

Why do the minds that have been uploaded to the nethersphere need to have a virtual afterlife to exist in, anyway? If all they are planned to be is the consciousness of an army of Cybermen, then can't they be put on standby until they're required to rampage? Would Missy really need anyone's consent to remove their emotions? She has a computer that stores dead people's brains, she can edit them to her two hearts' content. Why would she need to provide afterlife aftercare, and subtle manipulation, in the form of Seb? It makes sense that Missy is amassing an army of Cybermen by using fear to drum up trade for the 3W Institute. It makes sense that a rich punter might arrange before they die for their brain to be uploaded into her nethersphere, and their body to be put in a Cyber-suit / exoskeleton, based on their fear of the three words con. It doesn't make sense, though, that elsewhere Missy's shown as perfectly able to upload anyone to the nethersphere, whether they've engaged the Institute or not. it doesn't really make sense that loads of bodies in graves are converted into Cybermen by magic rain. The 'Cyber pollen' could contain the instructions for creating a new Cyberman, but where's it getting the raw materials? This is science an order of magnitude more advanced than that seen in the 3W Institute, which makes a mockery of the idea that Missy needed all those old, rich millionaires' money to fund her research. With only the slightest thought, it becomes clear that the story doesn't need the Institute front at all. It could be one episode long and start with Missy using some Gallifreyan tech to make people rise up out of their graves. The Cybermen reanimating dead bodies is, after all, a great idea, and enough to sustain a story on its own.

Without the nethersphere stuff, we would lose the subplot about Danny Pink's death, and that allows for some emotionally rich material. The sequence of Clara threatening the Doctor, urging him to go back and change time to save Danny, is one of the best of this period: it involves wonderful performances and great visuals, playing out near an active volcano; it has a great reversal, and ends with the killer line of the Doctor's "Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?" The story also wouldn't have its ending. Putting aside the monumental silliness that Missy has done this whole convoluted global plan just to make a rhetorical point about the Doctor's capacity to become a dictator, the scenes where Danny's humanity and love for Clara overrides Cyber programming and he saves the day are very satisfying. The Doctor realising that he himself is not a bad man, just an "idiot" trying to make things better does tie together the themes of the season as a whole (just about). In the slightly overlong coda, though, all the earlier issues with Doctor Who establishing an essentially real in-universe afterlife are brought back again. The bracelet that Missy's used to travel back and forth to the cyberspace realm allows someone who has been dead to come back to life. But Missy had a living body when she used the bracelet. When the boy is brought back at the end, where's his body come from? Only his dead mind was in the nethersphere, and he's been dead a long time. Also, how's Clara going to track down his parents, and how on Earth are they going to react? Worse than all that, though, is the implicit endorsement of the earlier idea that if you cremate your loved ones they can feel it. It's grim, as well as confusing. Sometimes fewer ideas work better.

If one can manage to switch one's brain off, though, the story is very enjoyable. There are some great action scenes like the Cybermen recreating the classic scene of them stomping around near St. Paul's Cathedral, then surprising everyone watching by zooming into the sky, newly able to fly. The reveal of Michelle Gomez's Missy as a regenerated Master is lots of fun, and her manic, murderous scenes throughout work well. Poor Osgood is given hope in the middle of an episode by the Doctor that she can join him as a companion, which the savvy audience member will know is a surefire sign that she won't make it to the end credits. Jenna Coleman as Clara has some great material. The character shows wonderful chutzpah in playing for time with the Cybermen after the cliffhanger, pretending to be the Doctor. The decision to reverse the order of the names in the second episode's beginning title sequence and show Clara's eyes rather then the Doctor's takes it too far though, another example of a bad habit of writer and producer Steven Moffat's where he pretends there's a big twist when there isn't. The action, and some creepy horror scenes like Cyber hands emerging through the earth of graves, are well realised by director Rachel Talalay and it's no surprise watching this story that she was invited back to do every Capaldi season finale thereafter. She handles the emotional scenes well too, as in the moment at the end where the Doctor and Clara part with an awkward hug, both lying to the other about how well they are doing. Towards the end there's another moment that is of dubious taste. The beloved character of the Brigadier is brought back from the dead. Long term viewers are forced to imagine that Nicholas Courtney, who had died a few years before this story, is a corpse encased in one of Doctor Who's ultimate evil baddies. Even with the character, as with Danny Pink, overriding Cyber-programming and helping to save the day, it's still a bit icky. (But, then, what do I know? See the Deeper Thoughts section below for more musings on that theme.)

Connectivity:

Both Joy to the World and Dark Water / Death in Heaven are Steven Moffat penned Doctor Who stories that boldly (inadvisably?) touch on religious topics (the star of Bethlehem, the afterlife). Additionally, there's a lone Silurian working in the time hotel in the Christmas story, and it is established by later stories that the version of Osgood seen in Dark Water / Death in Heaven might be a disguised Zygon; so, both stories potentially feature friendly single members of classic series monsters with jobs. There's also a festive connection, with Santa Claus appearing in the very final moments of Death in Heaven, as a lead in to that year's Christmas special, Last Christmas, also written by Moffat.

Deeper Thoughts:

Going too far? A rant about Mary Whitehouse. Dark Water / Death in Heaven has one or maybe two moments that in my opinion went too far; that is to say, they went beyond my own personal perception of what is acceptable for a family audience. As mentioned above, I nonetheless thought it would be okay for my young children to view it. When their impressionable young minds first engaged with the material, they immediately started imitating what they saw, setting up their own company to facilitate an alien invasion by preying on people's fears about death. No, of course they didn't, and yes I'm being flippant and glib. An underlying point remains, though: what standards of acceptability do we apply to TV drama, and who am I - who is anyone? - to enforce them for anyone except themself (or perhaps for their kids, if they have parental responsibility). Everyone - adult or child - is different. It seems very presumptuous to speak for a wider audience even just about the qualities of a particular piece; to go beyond that and try to dictate what can or can't be shown, or who can or can't see it, takes that presumption and compounds it. Some people have no qualms with taking presumption and raising it to a higher power. One such person, who many a Doctor Who fan knows too well, was Mary Whitehouse. Whitehouse was a political lobbyist in the UK who focussed on media standards related to obscenity and the depiction of violence. She was active from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, and during that time Doctor Who occasionally became the subject of her activism (because of depictions of violence, not - as far as I'm aware - anything related to hanky-panky in the TARDIS). The most high profile Who-related incident was her complaint about the cliffhanger ending to The Deadly Assassin's third episode, where she succeeded in getting the BBC to re-edit the sequence for future repeats.

I will reiterate my description of Whitehouse as a lobbyist and activist; that was what she was. She was not an ordinary member of the viewing public just doing her small bit out of a feeling of duty. Many people might have thought it was useful to style her as such, but it was patently not true. She called her organisation the National Viewers and Listeners Association, but it was not representative of the average viewer or listener of the nation - she no doubt spoke for some people, but they were a special interest group with views that could be described as extreme. And she was very successful. If one is tempted to see that as a positive thing, one should ask oneself whether there are any other successful lobbyists one feels good enough about to champion. As a calling, lobbyism is not one that is usually acclaimed; but, maybe - as is said of dirty work - somebody has to do it. Whitehouse played a significant part in the creation of a couple of pieces of UK legislation that most people would find unquestionably good, the Protection of Children Act 1977 and the Indecent Displays Act of 1981. She also believed that homosexuality was a perversion, and used legal processes to persecute individuals. The most egregious example of the latter was the case that she instigated concerning a play put on at the National Theatre, The Romans in Britain. The play included a scene of a simulated male-on-male rape, which Whitehouse took objection to (after it had been reported to her - she never saw the play, indeed she refused to ever see it). When they could not make a case for this being an obscenity, Whitehouse and her counsel brought private prosecution against the play's director Michael Bogdanov based on an offence under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, based on what was shown on stage amounting to his "procuring an act of gross indecency".

This case is covered well by a BBC radio documentary called 'Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse' first broadcast in 2022 that is still available in the UK at the time of writing, on the BBC Sounds app. It was produced by Simon and Thomas Guerrier (Simon blogs about it here) who have both worked on many Doctor Who projects of different kinds over the years. Linked from that blog post is another blog post by another Doctor Who commentator Jonathan Morris, reproducing the text of an article he wrote for Doctor Who Magazine in 2003. I remember encountering both when they first were available, and bristling that both seemed to be attempting to rehabilitate Whitehouse's reputation with Doctor Who fans. Perhaps aptly, or perhaps ironically, this offended my moral sensibilities. Whitehouse put Michael Bogdanov through hell just for directing a play that she didn't like. Whitehouse's counsel gave up the prosecution after three days of the trial, and she ended up liable for Bogdanov's legal costs. Whitehouse spun this as being done as a kindness, not having wanted to criminalise him at all, just wanting to establish that the Sexual Offences act applied to the theatre. I don't believe that; I believe that the case was abandoned as they suspected they weren't going to win. I also don't think the behaviour towards Bogdanov was very Christian. I feel sure that Whitehouse believed it was Christian, though. She had embarked on a previous case against Gay News, who had offended Whitehouse by publishing a poem that she thought was blasphemous, because in her words "I simply had to protect our lord". To my mind, this is not a healthy or proportionate attitude for anyone to have.

In many years of study, nobody has ever demonstrated conclusively that violent or sexual media content influences long-term behaviour, and some people have really tried hard to make that stick. Of course, someone who's just been to their Gran's cremation might get triggered by Dark Water / Death in Heaven's scene of (fake) voices from a hellish afterlife, but you can't write drama - or define laws - based on not offending anyone no matter what's going on in their circumstances. My kids were young at the time I gauged the story's acceptability; some of them understood exactly what the ramifications of the voices scene were, meaning they were mature enough to handle it; some did not, and it sailed right over their heads. This is mostly how it works in my experience. Guerrier in his blog picks out a scene in The Crusade, which hints that characters may need to kill themselves to avoid a fate worse than death if they're caught; he believes it may be something that wouldn't be shown in a family drama today. There's nothing graphic or even spelt out in the scene, though, so I think it would self-correct in the same way; if you understand, you accept; if you don't, it won't disturb. Morris thinks that 1970s Who had only itself to blame for getting Whitehouse's attention, because it pushed at the boundaries of the BBC's guidelines of the time, and maybe overstepped the mark occasionally. But how else do guidelines ever adapt? Tom Baker stories look tame compared to TV now. Doctor Who is self-evidently not responsible for any criminally violent behaviour; violence is much more complex than that, and pretending otherwise is usually a sign of a hidden agenda (like the promoting of a radically conservative interpretation of Christianity, for example).

Mary Whitehouse's crusading zeal undermined itself. Her low threshold for offence meant that she searched everywhere for obscenity and found it. This made her definition of the obscene so broad and indiscriminate that she bracketed together homosexuals with paedophiles, Doctor Who cliffhangers with porno mags in newsagents. This was shameful, and undoubtedly harmful. The poisonous legacy of that overshadows any potential good she may have contributed along the way, its radioactive half life so long that I feel any attempt at rehabilitating her should not be happening now, or at any point during my lifetime. There's also a hollow irony in Whitehouse's association with John Smyth. He was the lawyer that had worked with her on a number of cases, including initially on The Romans in Britain prosecution. The late Smyth, who died in 2018, was the serial abuser of children central to the former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby's decision to resign his position towards the end of 2024 (Welby accepted that he had not done enough to ensure that the details of the abuse were communicated widely enough, and appropriate action taken, when he first became aware of the situation in 2013). Whitehouse saw threats to children everywhere except in someone close to her. The radio documentary speculates that, had she found out during her lifetime, it might have fundamentally changed her outlook. I don't think I can find enough charity in my heart to agree, but here's a thought: rather than my getting angry or offended about a piece of media I don't agree with, or trying to supress it, why don't I instead encourage you to listen to it? You could also read the blog posts linked above. Then, make up your own mind. That isn't so hard, is it?!!

In Summary:

If you can switch off your brain, and your sense of decorum, its a fun and emotional season finale.