The Doctor lands the TARDIS in Cardiff to refuel with time energy from the rift. Captain Jack, who has been waiting near there to catch up with a chronologically-aligned version of the Doctor, runs towards the TARDIS, grabs hold and clings to the outer Police Box shell as the ship travels through the space-time vortex. Jack's immortal nature, bestowed on him by Bad Wolf Rose, sparks a reaction in the ship, and it flies forward in time 100 trillion years to the end of the universe. The Doctor, Martha and Jack find themselves on the planet Malcassairo. In a compound besieged by savage Futurekind, a band of surviving humans there await transportation to Utopia, their last hope of refuge. The Doctor helps the kindly Professor Yana and his assistant Chan-tho to get the rocket ready. While the Doctor and Jack are off fixing the rocket's power source, Martha notices that Yana has a pocket watch exactly like the Doctor's when he turned himself into a human. She runs to tell the Doctor. The rocket takes off, bound for Utopia. Yana - his attention finally drawn to the watch and breaking through its perception filter - opens the watch and becomes the Master. The Master turns on Chan-tho, killing her, but not before she shoots him. He regenerates and takes the Doctor's TARDIS, leaving him with Martha and Jack as the Futurekind break into the compound and surround them. The Doctor fixes Jack's vortex manipulator allowing the three of them to transport themselves back to contemporary London. The Doctor managed to lock the TARDIS controls before the Master escaped, meaning it can only travel to and from the last two visited locations, the far future and contemporary Earth.

Because of a margin of error, the Master has been on Earth for 18 months before they arrive, has styled himself as Harry Saxon, got married to Lucy, and become Prime Minister. The Doctor and his friends are wanted criminals. The Master has created a satellite network around Earth called Archangel, and has used this to hypnotise the populace into voting for him. The Doctor fixes his party up with perception filters linked to the network that allow them to go unobserved and investigate. The Master announces that he has made contact with an alien lifeform - the Toclafane, floating spheres with childlike voices - and they will arrive on Earth the next morning. The Master is aboard a UNIT skybase called Valiant when first contact happens. The Doctor, Martha and Jack come aboard the Valiant and discover the TARDIS there: it has been turned into a paradox machine. They go to the Valiant's bridge as the paradox machine activates, and millions of Toclafane arrive on Earth. The Master has been able to see through the Doctor's perception filters. He kills Jack and ages the Doctor into an old man. The Master orders the Toclafane to decimate Earth's population. While this is happening, Jack revives and gives his vortex manipulator to Martha so she can escape. The Doctor whispers something to her. She leaves, then spends a year walking the Earth, hidden from the Toclafane by the perception filter. The Master has spent the year using slave labour to build a fleet of ships to conquer the universe, and also torturing (in a low level camp way) the Doctor, Jack and Martha's family aboard the valiant. He ages the Doctor again, turning him into a tiny wee shrivelled form. Martha goes to meet with a scientist in the human resistance. They capture a Toclafane.

Opening it up, they find a human head - the Toclafane are the humans from the end of the universe. They never found Utopia, and instead turned themselves into decapitated heads in techno-spheres (as one does). The Master has promised that they can conquer the universe such that their desperate future will never come to pass. He took Lucy Saxon with him to see this bleak future, and this broke her mind. Martha lets slip to the scientist that her mission for the last year has been spent assembling a gun that can kill the Master. The scientist turns traitor and informs on her. It's all a bluff, though; Martha just wanted to be brought back aboard the Valiant around the time the Master is launching his fleet. The Doctor knew that he would not be able to resist a countdown, and he'd tasked Martha with spreading the word to everyone she's met in the year to think of the word Doctor during the countdown. This collective thought is amplified by the Archangel network, which the Doctor has spent the last year mentally tuning in to, and he's able - somehow - to use the mental energy to de-age himself and float threateningly towards the Master. Jack destroys the paradox machine. Time reverts to just before the Toclafane descended en masse, with only those on the Valiant remembering the year that never was. The Doctor plans to take the Master into his personal custody. Lucy shoots the Master, and he supresses his regenerative powers to avoid becoming the Doctor's captive. Captain Jack returns to his Torchwood team, Martha decides to stop travelling with the Doctor, and everyone goes on with their lives. Except for all the people in the year 100 trillion who die a horrible death as the universe ends, obviously.

Context:

As you'll see if you glance below at the Milestone Watch, I have very few stories left to blog; as such, why would I cover as one what some people - including the writer of the scripts, Russell T Davies - consider as two separate stories? I hate to disagree with Davies (but Doctor Who Magazine agrees with me, so there!) but I can't see it that way. Although a different director handles the first part, the three parts are tightly connected covering the return of the Master: there are plot questions left dangling in Utopia that only get answered in the other two parts, and there are many moments in those other two parts that only have meaning if one has seen Utopia. I considered binging all three parts in one go, but kept getting interrupted. In the end, I watched the three parts over the course of about a week, with irregular gaps in between. To my surprise, the Better Half joined me for all three parts. She very rarely watches Doctor Who of any era any more, but hadn't seen these episodes since they were first shown, and was curious how they held up. She made a few comments during the running time, but gave me instructions not to share them on the blog (instructions accompanied by a stern look, so I took them seriously). What I will share is that she was disappointed at the end that "John Simm didn't win". After watching the episodes, the fam went away for half term and stayed in a few places in the UK, meaning I couldn't write up the blog post immediately. One of the places we visited was Cardiff, and I finally found time to go to the bay, take a photo in Roald Dahl Plass (where the TARDIS materialises at the beginning of this story) and visit Ianto's Shrine (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post for more details).

Me at the foot of Torchwood Tower

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This story completes another season and another Doctor's set of TV stories. That makes it 13 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-14), and 39 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, seven now remain.

First Time Round:

I watched each of the three parts on their broadcast debuts on BBC1 in the UK, accompanied for each as I was on this watch by the Better Half. That was back in June 2007. I remember the blogs and message boards exploded into paroxysms of excitement over the final 15 minutes of Utopia, and then everyone online being much less enamoured of the other two parts. For Last of the Time Lords, friends Alex and Rachel (mentioned a few times before on this blog) joined us in our then home in Hove for the weekend, and watched live with us. I remember the Better Half and Rachel discussing the high 'eye candy' quotient of the episode with Simm, Tennant and John Barrowman all found to be visually pleasing to one or both of them.

Reaction:

Perhaps some fans like to split this three-parter up (see Context section above) because of the differences in general enthusiasm that met the episodes when they first aired (see First Time Round section above). They can mentally salvage Utopia at the expense of The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords. Utopia is directed solely by a hero of Doctor Who's production (old and new) in Graeme Harper. It has a barnstorming (albeit dramatically incomplete) ending. It avoids inclusion of a few camp, silly moments - of the kind that are usually anathema to the serious-minded fan - from the later episodes, including some aspects of John Simm's performance (it could be the Master that's enjoying himself a little too much, or it could be Simm - I'll come back to that in a moment). In the first part, the viewer mainly gets to enjoy Derek Jacobi's two contrasting - but both solid and traditional - performances as Professor Yana and then the Master. The former is a delightful balancing act with the script and the acting giving tiny hints at Yana's true identity so that the last 15 minutes of Utopia seem inevitable, though still surprising. The cherry on the cake is having the professor's loyal assistant character Chan-Tho, used throughout the episode up to that point as comic relief, become the Master's first victim on regaining his identity. The climactic sequence of Utopia is magnificent, and rewards multiple viewings: the reveal of the pocket watch Time Lords can use to transform themselves into humans, the revelation of what the Face of Boe's dying words mean, the Master's regeneration with John Simm's very Doctorish post-regeneration dialogue, and the cliffhanger with our heroes trapped without the TARDIS, stranded and surrounded. All of this underscored by urgent, driving Murray Gold magnificence.

What about the the 30 minutes before the climactic sequence, though? Yana and Chan-Tho aside, there's one nice character / long-term continuity moment with the Doctor and Jack's conversation about what happened to make him immortal, how the Doctor instinctively reacts to that, and Jack's explanation of what he did next to end up on contemporary Earth waiting out the Doctor's reappearance. The rest of Utopia is not as memorable: the final humans awaiting their trip to Utopia are a dull bunch, and the Futurekind are a pretty uninspired 'monster', looking as they do like a musical theatre punk gang. It also harms the reveal of the Toclafane's true nature later on to feature another tribe of antagonists who were humans but who've degenerated into savagery. What Utopia still has by the end is hope. Alas, for all the camp - and there's quite a lot of camp - in the latter two thirds, by the end of part three there's not much hope left for humanity. It's very bleak, and so probably needed those moments, such as the Master dancing around to a Scissor Sisters song, to lighten the mood. 100 trillion years into the future, the last surviving humans have their final hope dashed, become trapped with the universe collapsing around them, cannibalise themselves, and regress to childishness and psychopathy. That is Doctor Who's canonically established final fate for the human race. Not only that, but a human from our time (Lucy Saxon) is made to witness this and loses her mind and her soul in consequence (it's only on this latest watch that I fully realised how well Alexandra Moen's performance captures all that). If the Master keeping the Doctor in a dog kennel or turning him into a house elf rubs you the wrong way, just consider how depressing this story would have proved if played more sombrely.

John Simm's performance as the Master has come in for some criticism over the years since this story; love it or not, though, his take on the character has become the standard approach for the 21st century. Those that followed him in the role all accentuated the manic rather than the more suave antagonism that was the template for the 20th century. To answer the question I posed earlier, I do think it is the character rather than the actor having the fun in all the many scenes of Simm's screwball villainy. This is the portrayal of someone who's been imprisoned for decades in the body and mind of a different personality (one the Master considers a hapless dope); seen as depicting the Master's behaviour after such captivity, the choices Simm makes seem believable to me. There's also a certain desperation in the character's actions: he's practically begging for the Doctor to notice and engage with him (and this is very consistent with how the character acted in the classic series too). Plus, of course - and this is again in line with what had come before - he's crazy. Davies adds to the character's mythology by suggesting he's been driven mad by hearing a constant drumbeat in his head. I was a bit dubious of this when I first watched the story, but the subsequent explanations in David Tennant's finale The End of Time made it work for me retroactively. The moment in that later story where Simm and Tennant react in shock realising the noise in the Master's head is tangible and not just a symptom of madness is so wonderful that it's worth all three parts of the Toclafane story just to set it up. His interplay with Tennant, and lots of little moments - the big thumbs up to people as he's killing them with poison gas, the in-joke where he appreciates some kids' TV (Teletubbies here, calling back to a scene where he watched The Clangers in a 1970s story) - make him one of my favourite Masters of all.

To take on some other criticisms: the 'reset' at the end - where time is wound back for everyone but the Saxons, the Doctor and his friends - is not a cop-out, but is carefully plotted and earned. The Toclafane are destroying their own past, and the paradox can only be sustained with TARDIS shenanigans, as is underlined repeatedly. The dramatic question is how will the Doctor reverse all this, not how the planet will rebuild itself, and that's clear before the Master operates his paradox engine and before he starts decimating people. The aged Doctor's CGI form is a bit silly, but that's about the execution not the concept; if Doctor Who started playing it safe and not overreaching itself regarding what it can depict on screen, it wouldn't be Doctor Who anymore (and besides the Dobby Doctor is very cute). The device of everyone chanting the Doctor's name and him using the psychic energy of that through the Archangel network to rejuvenate himself makes sense, just about. The network being connected to people's perceptions and therefore able to channel psychic energy is well seeded; it's only that energy being able to be absorbed and used by a Time Lord that's a bit of a leap and we've certainly seen Time Lords do stranger things over the years. I'll grant that, once restored, the Doctor does get a bit messianic (it's a theme of this period - in the next story he's carried aloft by a couple of angels). This is more than made up for by the scene of the Master's death in the Doctor's arms, the former refusing to regenerate despite the pleading of the latter.

I'm not saying it's perfect by any means, just that I don't see that much of a difference between Utopia and the final two parts: both are at the same high level of quality for me (and for those fans that can't rate any work as highly as that directed by Graeme Harper, please note that he did uncredited work on the latter two parts when their director Colin Teague was injured during filming). One issue is that there's almost nothing for Captain Jack to do in the final part: he's kept chained up in a side room for swathes of the running time, like Nicola Bryant in Timelash. This isn't just bad for the character, but it also highlights another flaw: why doesn't he go with Martha at the end of The Sound of Drums, rather than sending her off on her own. We've seen that his time travel bracelet is capable of carrying more than one person at a time, and he's got to be more use with her, as the man who can't die, than he is imprisoned by the Master. Dramatically, it's because Martha needs to be on her own, of course (though she's ably supported by strong performances from Tom Ellis and Ellie Haddington in the final part). Freema Agyeman is a very capable supporting actor, but not a lead; nonetheless, the final episode works reasonably well structured around her (her bits are better than the somewhat pointless 'loop scene'' where the Doctor and the others attempt an escape from the Master, only to be foiled and end up exact where they started). Balancing out these small flaws, though, are the moments that give loads of pleasure throughout all three parts: the look on Jabobi's face and the little turn of the head he gives to show us he's transformed (and the way Harper frames the shot), the first ever glimpse of Time Lords and Gallifrey in a new series flashback accompanied by Murray Gold's transcendent cue, all of Gold's music, including some rock guitar during Utopia, loads of funny Captain Jack lines ("Was someone kissing me?") and lots more.

Connectivity:

Both this three-part story (yes it is!) and Torchwood: Children of Earth feature Captain Jack and have scenes set in Cardiff and London. Both feature scenes where the UK government's cabinet meet in Downing Street rooms, and the Prime Minister at the heads of both those governments is villainous, to a greater or lesser degree.

Deeper Thoughts:

A Master for All Seasons. The Master is a character often in search of a raison d'être. This might have something to do with how he was originally created. 1970s producer and script editor team Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks wanted to create the Doctor Who equivalent of the Moriarty character in Sherlock Holmes stories. The character was always envisaged to be a recurring foe, not just a single story adversary (unlike, say, the Daleks who had only originally been intended to feature once). So, the Master's villainy did not arise from a specific circumstance. Letts and Dicks added the character to every one of the five stories of his first season. During that span, the Master allied himself to Autons, Axons and Daemons, tried to hijack a missile, successfully hijacked a prison, created mischief on a colony world, tried to locate a superweapon, and much more besides. What underlying motivation could marry up all these different nefarious activities into a coherent plan? None, obviously. Generally, production teams have explicitly or implicitly favoured one of two slightly lame explanations. One is that all these activities are just seen by the character as game playing with the Doctor, trying to score points or get his attention. The other is the usual fallback for any genre villain with inadequate motivation: he's cuckoo bananas. The Toclafane 3-parter hints at the former, but more explicitly plumps for the latter. In the early days, the character was a lot calmer and so it's difficult to believe that he's being driven insane by a drumbeat in his head (but as that only starts to happen when the Master's personal history is altered by the Time Lords during the Time War, it's perhaps logical to think that hasn't happened to any of the pre-Simm Masters anyway).

There's an argument to be made that a villain being a villain just for the sake of it doesn't hurt the sort of genre stories Doctor Who deals in - it may even help. Heck, even all Letts's and Dicks's Moriarty talk is somewhat overblown compared to the character's actual genesis. What seems to have happened is that they thought it would be a good idea to cast Roger Delgado as a villain, and - quite frankly - that was already more than enough: he proved them right in his every appearance. When relaunching the character, the 21st century production team again killed it with the casting. Coming straight off Life On Mars, a time travel show in which he was the lead, John Simm was exactly the sort of person that one could see getting cast as the Doctor one day, and this created a very slightly different conception of the character: he's just like the Doctor, but bad. Simm's debut hammers this point home by having him accompanied by his own companion, wielding a (laser) screwdriver, and even offering someone a jelly baby at one point. It's tapping into something that's been there from the beginning in an unspoken way (cf. Delgado in the final episode of Claws of Axos, helping UNIT arguably more than the Doctor does in the same story) and always would be to some extent. All that really changed was the casting as successive teams over the years found the right person to pair with whoever was playing the hero at that point; sometimes the look or performance of the Master was counterpoint, but often it was more a dark reflection. Just as some Doctor companion pairings work better than others, there's a chemistry in specific Doctor and Master pairings too. Delgado with Pertwee, of course - one white-haired, one dark, one wearing colourful dandyish clothes, the other wearing sombre suits. They started things off so successfully, the role of the Master looked like it might not ever be recast.

When Delgado's tragic death robbed the series of the character, it took a good few years for a return. Even then, the character had been remodelled as a monstrous walking cadaver - the Master in name only - and featured in just a single story during nearly a decade following Delgado's passing. It was only as Tom Baker was handing over to Peter Davison that time enough had passed, and - in a three-part relaunch just as would be done in 2007, across stories The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis and Castrovalva, the Master played by Anthony Ainley emerged to become the principal returning nemesis of the early 80s. Although he appeared with other Doctors, it was Ainley with Davison that was the key pairing. There's a picture (see above) of them both that exemplifies this: one fair, one dark, with their costumes mirroring this. Paul McGann and Eric Roberts both got to play the characters for one night only; again, they are paired well, with Roberts getting a costume change so he can do fabulous camp as well as the Terminator-inspired black leather jacketed look. Simm - though he also returned later with another Doctor - is perfectly paired with Tennant. The next - and, to date, final - two pairings used the gender-swapping possibilities of regeneration to create counterpoint: a male Doctor in Capaldi paired with a female Master (or Missy, but given that the villainous handle is deliberately an academic title like Doctor, then of course Missy can go on calling herself the Master) played by Michelle Gomez; then both roles swapped gender and Jodie Whittaker's Doctor was perfectly paired with Sacha Dhawan as the Master. Both these versions of the Master dressed - and acted - a lot more colourfully than their corresponding Doctors, which is an interesting development. What will happen next? Now that the future of Doctor Who has been confirmed, it's fun to be able to speculate again...

In Summary:

Not perfect, but not nearly as bad as its reputation - all three parts of it!

Monday, 14 July 2025

Shada (Webcast version)

Chapter the 333rd, Flash animation - ah-ah! And the Doctor saves the universe...

Plot:

The Eighth Doctor visits Romana and K9 on Gallifrey (she's now the president, it was a Big Finish thing, don't ask). He's wondering about a time when he was in his fourth body and she and he visited Cambridge. They were taken out of time (by the black triangle in The Five Doctors, continuity fans!) and so never got to answer the summons of the Doctor's old friend Professor Chronotis. They visit this retired Time Lord and old friend of the Doctor in his rooms in St. Cedd's College. He asks them to take a book he borrowed from Gallifrey back for him, as it has special powers and could be dangerous. But Chris Parsons, a young science postgrad, has already borrowed the book, and is examining it with his colleague Clare Keightley. Also, Skagra - a villainous clever-clogs, armed with a mind-stealing sphere and backed up by an army of Krarg creatures and an invisible ship with a sultry-voiced computer - wants to steal the book too. When he gets his hands on it, Skagra kidnaps Romana and steals the TARDIS, using the book as the key to take him to the Time Lord prison planet Shada. Skagra needs to steal the mind of an old Time Lord villain imprisoned there, Salyavin, to help him turn everyone in the universe into one connected mind, controlled by him.The Doctor stops him and saves the day, everyone has tea and biscuits, then gets arrested by a policeman.

Context:

This definitely has to be cheating, right? Well, let's see by answering my standard canon questionnaire for any spin-off or oddity I want to watch in between Ncuti episodes to try to keep up the random nature of the blog. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or 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 - it did end up as an extra on a DVD eventually, but when it first came out, it was the main attraction. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? Hmm... I have covered the story Shada before in a post from 2017, and I did briefly mention the 2003 webcast then, but I didn't go into any detail. The 2003 version has an almost completely different cast, including a different lead actor playing the Doctor, and little bits of new material. That's variance enough, at least in my mind, to warrant a separate blogging. Anyway, to watch it at all required a lot of effort, so I felt I should write it up to make that effort worthwhile: I had to dig out the 2013 Shada DVD from storage, and download an open-source Flash emulator (Flash hasn't been supported in web browsers since 2021) to get the thing to play at all. I watched on my laptop an episode a night over six nights in July 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up: aside from sideways trips into spin-offs like this, the tally stands at 11 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14), and 37 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 15 now remain to be blogged.

First Time Round:

This was the third of four webcasts made available on the BBC's Doctor Who website in the early 2000s; stretching the rules of the blog for this one has allowed me to post about the full set. The BBC staff who worked on the website in those days, many of them fans, saw an opportunity to create something new. This started with the salvaging of a rejected radio pilot. For the follow-up, they turned to Big Finish who had been creating audio Doctor Who stories for a few years by that point. The images that accompanied the audio were animated in a rudimentary style, but they grew in sophistication with each attempt. Big Finish also produced Shada, and the fourth of four that followed later in 2003 was a fully animated story by Cosgrove Hall Studios. The technology of the time could not keep up with the ambition, so the technicalities of viewing each webcast were challenging. Shada was the first one I watched in full online; a story by Douglas Adams was rewarding enough to persevere with the lagging and stop-start nature of such an activity in those pre-broadband days.

Reaction:

The majority of what shapes this version of the story, for good or ill, comes from the original script. A Douglas Adams Doctor Who script is a hell of a gift, containing as it will so many original ideas, surprising plot reversals and witty dialogue. It doesn't come without flaws, though. There's a lot of to and fro between space stations and spaceships in the second half of the story, for example. This 2003 version uses backgrounds that help orient the viewer to where exactly in space each scene is taking place. This works better than does the 2017 version, which was hidebound by the need to be faithful to the original designs. There, the animation had to sit alongside the original footage; with no such restriction here, and no worries about budget, artist Lee Sullivan is able to go wild and create some striking new designs for the Think Tank, Skagra's ship, Shada, and - best of all - the Krargs. Despite the limited nature of the animation, Sullivan's Krargs are more dynamic and scary than the ones from 1979. Where the 2003 version is perhaps too faithful is in the words rather than the pictures. The one clever addition to the original is the prelude scene explaining why Paul McGann's Doctor is appearing instead of Tom Baker. This is classic Gary Russell (the writer who adapted the scripts for audio); often in his original work he creates imaginative connections from one piece of Doctor Who continuity to another: in the 2003 Shada, he takes the reuse of Shada footage in 1983 anniversary romp The Five Doctors and weaves it into the canon tapestry, twenty years on. When the fourth Doctor and Romana were taken out of time in the Peter Davison era story, it aborted the Shada adventure, and now McGann's Doctor wants to return and finish it. The fictional world mirrors the real world, with Shada incomplete in both, and being revisited and finally finished after many years. It's low-key genius.

The prelude's idea is so good that one almost wants to explore it through the rest of the story, but that can't be done: if the remainder deviates too much from the original script, then the viewer isn't getting Shada as conceived, but instead someone else's take on it. That would defeat the point. Unfortunately, in places the original script can't be made quite to fit: the porter at St Cedd's having recognised the McGann Doctor from various visits over the years doesn't work - it needs to be Tom Baker, as that is who originally intended to visit, and who was already a friend of the professor at that stage in his lives; as president of the Time Lords, Romana has much more authority, responsibility and power to recover the book than the Doctor, so shouldn't be letting him take the lead; indeed, she could call in any number of Time Lords to sort out the situation rather than go with the Doctor's more home-spun approach. One just has to let these go, and accept that the original dialogue had to be sacrosanct. There are but a few cursory mentions of Romana's status and the Doctor being pleased at being reunited with K9 to remind us that we're watching a slightly new take on the old tale. Other changes are because the story needs to act as both webcast and audio only. People whose bandwidth couldn't cope with the flash animations, or those who bought the story as a CD from Big Finish afterwards, need to have some things vocalised. This means some action is simplified with explanatory dialogue of the 'Look out for that sphere just behind you!' variety. It's mostly unobtrusive, but it does lead to an in-joke being smothered to death for webcast viewers. When Skagra gets a lift, the drawing shows the car is a Ford Prefect (a reference to a character from Adams's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy). The drawing was only picking up on a gag in the audio, though, so the driver character then bangs on about how much he loves his Ford Prefect car, which belabours the point a bit.

The artist gets a couple of other visual Hitch Hiker in-jokes in later though: a drinks machine is labelled Nutrimat, and - this one a real freeze-frame job - a Shada background shows two convicts trapped inside their prison pods; one has two heads (Zaphod Beeblebrox) and the other is wearing a dressing gown (Arthur Dent). There are a few other minor changes: Think Tank scientist Caldera is a purple alien rather than an old bloke, and there's a minor subplot added where Claire worries about the bike that she lent the Doctor. There are a couple of Tom Baker ad-libs removed - calling Chris 'Bristol' and "What's it powered by K9?"/"Insufficient data"/"Aren't we all?!" - probably because they were too characteristic of the fourth Doctor's style. Mostly, though, change comes from the different performances by the new actors. Andrew Sachs is a good baddie, a more clipped and sneering version of Skagra than the TV version's more suave and aloof take by Christopher Neame; James Fox does a slightly different calibration of absent-minded professor in the role of Chronotis - he's not quite as doddery as Denis Carey in the original, which maybe takes a little away from later revelations of the plot; Melyvn Hayes and Hannah Gordon do very well in small comic roles - it was a coup to get such a strong cast together to give voice to this story. Sean Biggerstaff and Susannah Harker as the two students tagging along are both perhaps giving under-powered performances compared to the actors in 1979, but both of them feel more like postgrad students than did Daniel Hill and Victoria Burgoyne. They look more like students too (the animations are modelled throughout on the new actors' looks). McGann, Ward and Leeson are great, as usual. It all adds up a nice tribute to Adams (whose tragic premature death happened only two years before this webcast) and to 40 years of Doctor Who.

Connectivity:

Both Shada and Lucky Day have sequences set in contemporary UK places that are not London, Sheffield nor anywhere in Wales, which is fairly uncommon. They both contain an appearance from at least one other Time Lord besides the Doctor, and both feature an organisation called Think Tank.

Deeper Thoughts:

"You've looked into alternative time." It's less rare than you'd think that a Doctor Who story exists in more than one alternate version. For a start, every one of the classic series stories, and a growing number of the new series ones too, exist in prose form as Target novelisations. Often these were very close to transcripts of the TV episodes with added descriptions, but a great many diverged, often in significant ways. The first ever novelisation in the 1960s was Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, an adaptation of second ever Doctor Who story The Daleks from 1963/64. The book was published in 1964, whereas the very first story An Unearthly Child was not novelised for decades afterwards (as it only has cavemen and no Daleks). David Whittaker, the script editor of the first ever season that included both stories and the author of the Dalek book, created a brand new introduction for the main characters on the page. The aim was to make the book self-contained and get to the Dalek action as soon as possible, and Whittaker took quite a few liberties: Ian is a scientist rather than a science teacher, Barbara is Susan's private tutor rather than her school history teacher, Ian and Barbara don't know each other before the story's start, and they see the mysterious police box on Barnes Common rather than in Totter's Lane. For similar reasons, Jo Grant is given a completely new introduction in the 1974 book Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (an adaptation of TV story Colony in Space, Jo's fourth story). It's pretty much impossible to reconcile these different televisual and prose versions; of course, someone might have said the same about the 1979 and 2003 versions of Shada. I'm sure Gary Russell could give it a good go; parallel universes might well be involved.

Many Target book authors, particularly in the very early and in the much later years, either side of a lean middle period, fleshed out their TV work with new characters, subplots, motivations, dialogue. It wasn't one way travel, either. By the early 1990s when stories to novelise were running out, original stories started to be made as novels (as well as in comics, short stories and audios). When the new series started in 2005, there were therefore quite a few ready-made candidates to turn into television stories. 2005's Dalek is based on Robert Shearman's audio adventure Jubilee, and the following year's Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel is loosely based on Marc Platt's audio story Spare Parts. They were perhaps changed enough that the two different versions could co-exist without too much canonical musing; the same, though, cannot be said of Human Nature / The Family of Blood, which was a much more faithful - though still different - take on Paul Cornell's 1995 novel Human Nature: it's hard to reconcile why the Doctor would choose to hide out pretending to be a human in a boy's school just before the First World War twice, in both his seventh and tenth regenerations. Creating similar difficulty, he had to indulge in an odd couple flat share comedy twice (in the TV and comic strip version of The Lodger) and interacted with unlikely messages across time with someone called Sally Sparrow as both his ninth and tenth self (in Blink and the short story it was based upon, What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow).

Contemporaneous with the explosion of original stories that would one day act as the blueprints for TV episodes, VHS was becoming the showcase for new versions of classic stories, such as the extended editions of The Curse of Fenric or The Five Doctors. This was just the start, with many new versions of stories following on DVD and Blu-ray to this day, recut with new effects and extra scenes. The Five Doctors had another special edition made in the 21st century, meaning there are now three variants. Which of the available versions of any story is the definitive one? Is there any such thing? Shada is a narrative multiverse all on its own. It existed in at least three versions beyond any officially licensed product, with two fan edits of which I'm aware, as well as an unofficial novelisation written by Paul Scoones. Officially, there was the narrated version of the story with to-camera inserts of Tom Baker released on VHS in 1992, and the script book of the story that was sold in the same package. There was an official novelisation published in 2012 (don't imagine any of these versions were consistent, by the way), There was the 2003 animated webcast as described in this blog post; as mentioned, this was also available as an audio only version from Big Finish, and that was expanded with additional material, so was different again. There was a 2017 hybrid of live action and animation, formed as an omnibus version; then, when that was released on Blu-ray in 2021, it had minor changes, and episode starts and ends inserted. Added up, that's ten different versions, seven official, three unofficial. If one counts Dirk Gently's Detective Agency (an original novel by Adams that reused a lot of the Shada material), it's eleven. Shada, like Doctor Who, like life, is definitively infinite, and I can't help but feel that that's exactly as Douglas Adams would have wanted it.

In Summary:

Douglas Adams worked on so few Doctor Who stories that you can't blame anyone - including your humble blog author (who begs your indulgence) - from covering Shada over and over again.

Friday, 21 February 2025

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 it 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.

Friday, 31 January 2025

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

Doctor Who - Done To Death

Saturday, 20 June 2026

Index: David Tennant

David Tennant's Tenth and Fourteenth Doctor Stories ...

Sunday, 7 June 2026

Index: Christopher Eccleston

Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor Stories ...

Thursday, 6 November 2025

Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords

Chapter the 340th, which demonstrates that decimation's what you need if you wanna be a world dictator.

Monday, 14 July 2025

Shada (Webcast version)

Chapter the 333rd, Flash animation - ah-ah! And the Doctor saves the universe...

Friday, 21 February 2025

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).

Friday, 31 January 2025

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith

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