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. 

Plot:

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!

Torchwood: Children of Earth

Chapter the 339th, where other members of Torchwood discover they don't know Jack. 

Plot:

One day, across the world, all children suddenly stop moving for a few minutes. Later, they do the same again, but this time they go on to speak, in unison. This keeps happening; each message they speak is eerier and eerier, warning that something is returning. Some force is controlling them, and a branch of the UK government (represented by civil servant John Frobisher and technician Dekker) seems very clued up on it. They start making preparations for a visit by aliens known to them as the 456 (a number relating to the frequency they broadcast on). The government did a deal with the aliens in the 1960s, giving them twelve children under threat of the release of a virus that would have wiped out millions. One adult is also controlled by this unseen force, and speaks along with the children. This is Clem McDonald. He was the only one of the twelve who managed to escape. Captain Jack was one of the handlers delivering the children back then. An order is given by Frobisher to kill him and the rest of Torchwood as part of a cover-up. Gwen and Ianto manage to get away before the Torchwood Hub in Cardiff is destroyed. Jack is blown up, but his remains are taken away, as his death-defying abilities cause him to slowly reform. Gwen and Ianto (assisted by Rhys) break his rebuilt self out of where he was being held, and (assisted by PC Andy) they collect Clem too. In hiding, they work with a political aide Lois Habiba whom they've recruited to use Torchwood tech to infiltrate and record the government's dealings with the 456. The aliens demand ten percent of the world population of children. Lois records discussions between politicians on how to choose which children to be handed over.

As part of negotiations, it is revealed that the 456 hook themselves up to the children to imbibe certain chemicals from them, for their narcotic effects. Using the threat to release the recordings as a bargaining chip, Jack and Ianto talk their way into the room in Thames House where an ambassador of the 456 is based: they confront the alien and it releases a lethal virus. Jack is resurrected, but Ianto is dead. The 456 also kill Clem, who they refer to as the Remnant, by remote control with a sonic signal. The government starts to round up children from poorer families, with a cover story of a mass inoculation programme to stop the children from coming under alien control. Gwen, Rhys and Ianto's sister and brother-in-law help some children to evade the army who are gathering up the kids. The Prime Minister informs Frobisher that his children are also to be given to the 456 to demonstrate that it is not just ordinary families that are making the sacrifice. To avoid this, Frobisher shoots his wife, two children and then himself dead. Jack realises that the 456 killed Clem as otherwise he might have provided an opportunity for them to be killed. He needs to send a signal but needs a child that's hooked in to the 456's control. He uses his grandson, the child of a mother who was herself the issue from a decades old dalliance. The solution works, and the 456 leave Earth, but Jack's grandson is killed and his mother swears she will never see Jack again. Consumed by guilt, Jack decides to leave Earth and travel the galaxy.

Context:

It was mid-September 2025, and my eldest (young man of 19) was a week away from returning to university for his second year. He's a huge Peter Capaldi fan, mainly from his work in The Thick of It, but from his performance as the Doctor too. I mentioned that I was about to blog a story that featured Capaldi and that the actor was very good in it; he was persuaded to join me. The two of us watched the five episodes stripped across a week, one episode per evening, just as it was originally broadcast. I'd wanted to blog a Torchwood story (and thought I may as well blog the indisputably best one) as I'd covered at least one story from all other Doctor Who spin-off series. The only issue was that it failed the very first of my canon test questions: Does it star the Doctor? It stars an actor that would later go on to play the Doctor, but that doesn't cut it. Given that I will in future, just for completeness, cover the as yet unaired spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea - which now looks to be coming in 2026 rather than 2025 - and that won't feature the Doctor either, I will have to tolerate a very occasional relaxing of this rule. The character anyway has something of a presence in Children of Earth just because of his absence. The rest of the canon questions were fine. 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.

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 spin-offs like Torchwood: Children of Earth, the tally stands at 12 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-9 and 11-14), and 38 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 10 now remain.

First Time Round:

As I've mentioned when covering stories from 2009 for the blog before, Doctor Who's so-called 'gap year' (2009 was the first year since the 21st century return of the show that a full series was not broadcast) was really nothing of the sort: there were several goodies for Doctor Who fans spread across the year that meant only ever a few months' at a maximum elapsed before one could see something new. In July, this Torchwood story was one such goodie, broadcast an episode per night across a week (matching the narrative structure of each episode being set over the course of a single one of five consecutive days). I watched each one live as they went out on BBC1. I think it's fair to say that the strength of reaction surprised a lot of people; the story was a steep step-up in quality from the previous two seasons, and it attracted a reasonably large audience. That was nothing, though, compared to the size and surprise of the fan backlash regarding the death of series regular Ianto Jones; the main memory I have from first time around is, alas, all of that nonsense (more details in the Deeper Thoughts section below).

Reaction:

Let's start with Peter Capaldi, whose presence in the cast was one of the major reasons I picked this story to watch. His performance as John Frobisher - an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary situations, a man who goes to extraordinary lengths for somewhat tawdry aims; a man who's ruthless and determined but weak, and yet aware of his own weakness - is not just the best performance he's ever given in any 'Whoniverse' story, but might also be Capaldi's best work in anything ever. I know this is a bold claim, but just watch him over the course of these five episodes. Every expression, every twitch, every tiny movement of a muscle, all are completely under his control and finely calibrated. Sometimes he's giving this acting masterclass without even appearing to be moving; it's like his skin is able to act independently of any other body part. He embodies the role, in every sense of that word. It's not as showy as this sounds. The prevailing tone of the piece is fairly realistic, but this is no kitchen-sink drama. It's Torchwood: there are pyrotechnics and car chases and aliens. Capaldi's aligned with that overall tone, but grounded enough that one never sees - not from his first appearance all the way up to the character's devastatingly tragic final moments - any Capaldi on screen, only John Frobisher, worrying himself to death as he tries to do his job while gradually running out of options. This wasn't a rehearsal for playing the Doctor (no doubt there are some fan-fics out there that posit it, but its very hard to reconcile that final scene with John Frobisher being the twelfth Doctor in disguise); the actor had already played a guest character in the main show, and now was doing the same in a Who spin-off, he probably thought this was his last roll of the dice. It was lucky that the show carried on long enough that he could play the main role eventually.

With such a powerhouse performance from one member of the cast, it's perhaps surprising that Capaldi doesn't stand out that much. He's just one of an incredibly strong guest cast, none of whom equal him, but many come close. There's too many to mention them all but a few to pick out: Nicholas Farrell as slippery Prime Minister Brian Green, the real villain of the piece; Ian Gelder as Dekker, the amoral techie with a keen sense of self-preservation; Paul Copley bringing the pathos, as well as the humanity, as Clem McDonald, the only adult affected by the 456's control; Cush Jumbo as Lois Habiba, the slightly unwilling rookie recruit to Torchwood. Then there's a pre-Ghosts Katy Wix as Rhiannon Davies, Ianto's sister. The scenes of Ianto and his family are some of the funniest and most real that Torchwood ever had. Every member of the guest cast in whatever role, big or small, is taking the excellent material in the script and making it even better. A good example of this is the chilling COBRA scenes, where politicians and civil servants sit in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A and discuss the vast Trolley problem scenario with which they are confronted. Nicholas Briggs, who's usually heard but not seen on Doctor Who as he voices Daleks, Cybermen and many other creatures, has a rare in-camera role, and shines with only a few lines of dialogue. All this talent is a good buffer protecting the regular cast. The narrative sees the Torchwood team isolated and mainly working on their own (they barely interact with Capladi's Frobisher, for example). Without meaning to be too negative, this is possibly a reason why this story tends to be more well thought of than other Torchwood tales. The - somewhat arch and fabricated - dramatic world of the regular characters does not dominate the running time, and we continually cut to other characters to keep the action grounded in reality.

With no offence meant to them or any of their fans, the actors playing the surviving members of Torchwood (John Barrowman as Captain Jack, Eve Myles as Gwen Cooper and Gareth David-Lloyd as Ianto) don't have great range. What they can do they do well: they can do action, they can do sass, they can do standing and staring mysteriously into the middle-distance as they contemplate what action or sass is just about to happen. It's a stretch to expect much more than that (and it is generally enough, to be fair). There's a couple of times that Barrowman is asked to go beyond this into grief and anguish, and the moments don't quite convince; neither do Myles and David-Lloyd's depictions of the betrayal of Jack turning out to have been involved with an earlier grubby scheme to placate the 456 from decades before (but this shouldn't have come as much of a surprise to them if they stopped to think about it - why else would the government want him killed?). Doing much better are the semi-regulars of Torchwood, Kai Owen as Rhys Williams and Tom Price as PC Andy, who both get given softball comedy material (and - to give both of them their due - knock it out of the park). It doesn't really matter too much, as the story has so many groups of characters to cut to, all of them being put through the ultimate in dramatic twists and turns. Kudos is deserved for Russell T Davies and the other writers: what's on the page is so strong that any cast would have looked good delivering it; that it's a top drawer guest cast, and pretty likeable set of regulars, elevates this to a special level.

One of the key strengths of the script is the simple but effective ideas that drive it: every scene of the possessed kids acting and talking in sync is instantly and eerily effective, and doesn't trouble the effects budget. Apart from some body horror based on the indestructible Jack reforming after being blown to bits, the terrors of Children of Earth are pretty low tech, and all the more striking because of that. This extends to the conception of baddies the 456 on page and on screen. It's a straightforward analogue: they are gangsters who deal in drugs pulling a protection racket; unknowably more powerful than the human race, they have us at their mercy. The visuals of the creatures are also perfect: shrouded and mysterious in clouds of vapour, expressing themselves with thrashing alien limbs and splats of expectorated goo. That motivation for an adversary, and the scary visuals, would not have been possible to do in the more family-friendly main show; with this story, Torchwood is finally utilising its post-watershed status effectively to work for the drama, rather than just add sex and swearing to sci-fi tales. Children of Earth is bleak, with many reprehensible characters surviving to the end without any comeuppance. Ideas and visuals are perfectly framed by the structure, the relentless nature of each episode covering a day brings the audience in inevitable increments, closer and closer, to the dilemmas and compromises inherent in the story's basic premise: what would - what could - any of us sacrifice for the greater good? Ultimately, Frobisher and Jack are shown as the only ones brave or ruthless enough to sacrifice their own progeny, the former to escape a terrible fate for his family, the latter to save the world at an awful cost.

The devastating ending somewhat makes up for the only weak point of the narrative, the ending of the fourth episode. The violent retribution of the 456, including Ianto's death, is effective at upping the ante, but it involves both him and Jack acting out of character: they meticulously plan infiltrating the government meetings using all technology they have to use; but, they abandon all that once they get into a room with the 456; it seems suicidally remiss of them to have given no thought to what they would do once they have confronted the baddies. The shock of a regular character getting killed off covers this up on first watch, but with each repeat viewing this gap in character logic makes the event seem more and more pointless. It is most uncharacteristic of Torchwood of all teams to go off half-cocked. This is a minor flaw in the scheme of things, though, and the rest of the story stands up there with the best that Doctor Who and all its spin-offs have to offer. It's certainly odd, though: one of the greatest stories in the Whoniverse is a Torchwood story; who would have guessed that before the story aired? It seems unbelievable even at the time of writing, 16 years on.

Connectivity:

Both Torchwood: Children of Earth and Exploration Earth: The Time Machine are Doctor Who spin-offs with the word Earth somewhere in the title.

Deeper Thoughts:

Ianto, we hardly knew ye. At the time of writing this (2025), the internet is ever prone to go into meltdown; it barely takes a whisper. In 2009, before the mass adoption of social media, it was less common; nonetheless, 2009 saw a meltdown take place related to the events at the end of part four of Torchwood Children of Earth. I could have put lots of spoiler warnings above about Ianto's death at that point in the narrative, but it would have been pointless. There's a shrine. There's a f**king shrine, for chrissakes. Almost immediately after the broadcast of the episode, fans started to leave flowers, photos and messages in the Cardiff Bay location where the entrance to the underground Torchwood Hub was fictionally based. And they haven't really stopped since. The shrine is still there after all these years; it's become a tourist attraction of sorts and has its own Tripadvisor entry and wikipedia page. It is one of the manifestations of fandom mentality that I most struggle to understand. For a start, these offerings aren't being placed at the site of the character's demise - he dies in Thames House in London, so really the shrine should be there. Wherever these fans choose to do it, though, they are paying tribute to a person who doesn't exist. Clearly, the character meant a lot more to many than he did to me; he must have meant more to people than the characters of Tosh and Owen (regulars who were killed off in the series the year before Children of Earth and got not even a single bloom left for them anywhere in the Cardiff area). People buy or pick flowers, write or draw, bring photos and even merch and go some distance out of their way to travel to a dockside wall, all to commemorate the life and death of someone who doesn't exist. Believe it or not, though, this is not the strangest reaction people had to Ianto's passing.

In 2009, I knew James Moran - co-writer of one of the episodes of Children of Earth - a tiny bit. He was the most successful of a group of screenwriting bloggers, of whom I was also a (much less successful) member, a friend of a friend, and I'd socialised with him briefly in person at a screenwriting festival in 2008. He was not a bosom buddy, nor even much of an acquaintance; so, perhaps it was presumptuous of me to take a tiny bit of personal offence at the torrent of hate that was directed at him online after Children of Earth's fourth episode aired. Given that Moran is a real human being, and the people directing hate at him were taking a huge chunk of personal offence about the fate of an entirely fictional person, I feel I should be forgiven for my presumption in this instance. It was just horrible. As I said at the start of these thoughts, there's been many a virtual pile-on in the years since, some of which probably make 'Ianto-gate' look like a tea party; nonetheless, it was the worst I'd witnessed up to that point (I was a web savvy Doctor Who fan too, so I wasn't unaccustomed, alas, to online bile). To summarise for those unaware of the history: immediately after the tragic end of Ianto aired, Moran was bombarded on twitter and in the comments section of his blog by fans expressing in strong terms their unhappiness at the events of the episode. He was accused of misleading, manipulating and mocking fandom, and much else besides. He had to suspend comments on the blog and disappear from the web for a while. If the shrine was the more positive side of the overreaction, this was the ugly side. It's worth pointing out that Moran didn't write the fourth episode, he co-wrote the third in which no beloved characters die. He just happened to be the only one of the writers with an online presence, and hence was the only person available to whom the baying mob could vent their ire.

There was more activity beyond the shrine and the online whine; there was a Save Ianto Jones campaign that demanded that the character be brought back somehow and encouraged readers of its website to inundate the BBC with complaints (they also raised a large amount of money for charity, let it be noted). Why was it Ianto that inspired such feeling? He had something of a status as an LGBTQ+ Who icon, because of the plot arc threaded through Torchwood before and including Children of Earth about his attraction for and relationship with Captain Jack. A number of commentators in the immediate aftermath of the character's death mentioned that destroying a same sex relationship in such a dramatic way was disappointingly heteronormative (some even reportedly said is was homophobic / biphobic). I've got a small amount of sympathy with this point of view, but as mentioned it wasn't exactly rare for Torchwood to kill characters off. From its very first episode, it was made very clear that Torchwood operated in a part of the Whoniverse that was a lot more dangerous and less cuddly than Doctor Who's snug corner; people - off all ages, colours, creeds and orientations - were likely to die. Nobody was calling for the old guy or the young lad killed off by the 456 to be brought back (and nobody knew anything definitive about their sexuality). No, I suspect the concerns about Ianto's status as an LGBTQ+  icon were a post facto rationalisation; the disproportionate reaction came first. It's a mystery. Torchwood fans obviously adored him, and maybe even they themselves didn't fully know why. That's no excuse for attacking people online, of course. Ianto was never 'saved' but he'll never be forgotten: the shrine remains as an enduring reminder of the character and that moment of fan excess.

In Summary:

One of the greatest stories in the Whoniverse is a Torchwood story - go figure.

The Stolen Earth / Journey's End

Chapter the 300th, Multiple ex-regulars and spin-off personnel - Assemble!

Plot:
The Earth has disappeared from its usual position in space, and the Doctor and Donna cannot find it. On the planet, Sarah Jane Smith and her son Luke use their alien supercomputer Mr. Smith to investigate what's happened; also investigating are the Torchwood Cardiff team of Captain Jack, Gwen and Ianto, and UNIT New York where Martha Jones is working. They all come to same conclusion by looking out of the window: the Earth has been moved across space. This has been done by the Daleks who quickly descend on the planet. All hope seems lost, but the different groups are brought together on a hidden subwave network Zoom call by former prime minister Harriet Jones. The only person who can't connect is Rose, who has come over from her parallel universe and met up with Donna's family. The Doctor and Donna travel to the Shadow Proclamation for help, then find the tracks of bees fleeing the planet Earth before it was moved, and follow them. They still can't find the missing planet until the subwave network sends a signal. This allows the Daleks to track Harriet Jones and exterminate her. The TARDIS finds the Earth and 26 other missing planets that the Daleks have arranged as a cosmic engine. Doctor talks to the others on the subwave network, but then Davros breaks into the chat and taunts the Doctor. The TARDIS materialises on a London street, and the Doctor and Rose see each other from afar. They run towards each other, but a Dalek moves out of the shadows and zaps the Doctor. Captain Jack uses a personal teleport to travel to them, and destroys the Dalek. Jack, Rose and Donna get the Doctor into the TARDIS and he starts to regenerate.

Before he changes, the Doctor aborts the process by transferring the regeneration energy into his lopped-off hand in a jar, which he keeps in the TARDIS. Martha teleports to Germany using a UNIT prototype to prime a superweapon. Sarah Jane leaves Luke behind and goes out onto the streets where she almost gets killed by the Daleks. She is saved by Mickey and Jackie, who arrive from the parallel universe. They allow themselves to be gathered up with other humans that are taken onto the Dalek's mothership. The TARDIS is forcibly brought there too. The Doctor, Rose and Jack step out, but Donna is still inside when the Daleks attempt to destroy the TARDIS by dropping it into the reactor that powers their ship. Hearing a heartbeat in her head, Donna reaches out and touches the lopped-off hand. It glows with energy and grows into another Doctor, with only one heart, who puts on the main Doctor's spare blue suit. The Daleks test their reality bomb; the 27 planets are powering a device that will unravel all matter in the universe, leaving only the Daleks as survivors. To stop them, the Doctor's companions threaten the Daleks. Sarah-Jane has a bomb that will blow up the Dalek ship; Martha can destroy the world to disable the engine powering the reality bomb. Davros taunts the Doctor some more about how he has fashioned his friends into killers, and the Daleks transmat all of the companions to them, neutralising any threat. Blue-suit Doctor and Donna materialise with plans to stop the Daleks, but they too are stopped, with Donna zapped by Davros and knocked to the ground.

The countdown to reality bomb detonation begins, but when it reaches zero nothing happens. Donna now has the Doctor's intelligence and has deactivated the device. The 'metacrisis' that created the second Doctor also made her half-human half-time lord, leaving the powers latent until her body got the shock of Davros's attack. The Doctors and Donna work to return the planets home; they manage to do this for all except Earth, but they can use the TARDIS to get the planet to its proper place. The blue-suit Doctor, much to the brown-suit Doctor's displeasure, destroys all the Daleks. Working together, with help from Torchwood, Luke, Mr. Smith and even K9, everyone pilots the TARDIS back to Earth's proper coordinates towing the planet behind them. Mickey decides to stay on Earth with Jack and Martha. The Doctor returns Rose and Jackie to the parallel Earth, and Rose stays there with the blue-suit Doctor. Left alone with the brown-suit Doctor, Donna starts to break down. A human brain cannot cope with time lord knowledge, so he has to wipe her memory of all her adventures with him to save her. He takes her home and leaves her with Sylvia and Wilf to look after. He leaves, sad, in the rain, and Wilf salutes him.

Context:

Watched these two episodes from the iplayer accompanied by two of the children (boy of 14, girl of 12) over two weekends in May 2024. Various events in our lives meant there was a whopping great two week gap between watching the first and second parts. This didn't bother either of them unduly; if were me, I'd have been desperate to see the next episode after that cliffhanger (more on that moment in the Deeper Thoughts section below).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another season, the 25th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing), classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

This still felt new to me, despite it being a lifetime ago (literally in the case of my eldest child who was a toddler when this was first shown but can vote in his first election in 2024). The first David Tennant and Catherine Tate era (the 2008 season starring them as the Doctor and Donna respectively, following Tate's one-off guest appearance in the 2006 Christmas special) was fresh in the mind because of their return for the 2023 specials. Everything resolved in The Star Beast was set up in Journey's End, 15 years earlier. At that time, the Better Half and I would have put the aforementioned child (our only one at that time) down to sleep, then watched The Stolen Earth go out live on BBC1. In between the two episodes, I was at a screenwriting festival in Cheltenham. I remember that at the end of this event, two day's before the broadcast of Journey's End if memory serves, I was sitting with a group of screenwriters in the nearby hotel bar waiting for taxis to arrive and discussing how that cliffhanger would be resolved. Later the same day when I was back home, I went online to a forum called Roobarb's and clicked on a message with a spoiler warning (don't do this, kids!) in which someone had posted leaked details that not only laid out exactly how the cliffhanger would be resolved, but also gave away the details about the new Doctor growing from the lopped-off hand, and Rose going off with that new Doctor at the end.

Reaction:

As the latest new Doctor Who is now a streaming show first and foremost, one of the peripheral pleasures / pains of online fandom, worrying about ratings, is denied. Yes, tabloids will gripe about viewing figures plummeting based on the incomplete picture of overnight UK ratings, but it remains true that some of the metrics upon which Who is now being judged will not be publicly available. The second part of the saga of the Daleks stealing the Earth, Journey's End, was the first Doctor Who story ever to top the ratings charts in the UK. The BBC's iplayer was still a relatively new invention in 2008; Netflix had only launched its streaming service the year before, its primary business remained mail-out DVDs. Disney+ was nothing back then bar the daydream of a futurist. Television was still all about sitting on the sofa and watching something at a specific time, and Doctor Who was owning that. We won't know how well things are truly going with the Ncuti Gatwa era of Doctor Who until a recommission is announced, and as its already commissioned for a run in 2025, that could be a while. There might be another way to tell sooner, though - if Doctor Who gets any spin-off shows. Another signal of 2008 Who's success was that there were no less than two long-running dramatic spin-off shows (Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures) being broadcast alongside the parent show. Before coming back to the showrunner role, Davies went on record that he felt Doctor Who should have an extended range of spin-off shows in the mold of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; it's easy to see why, as he'd done it on a smaller scale himself when he first ran the show. As he himself said, that was perhaps ten years too early: Iron Man had only just been in cinemas when Davies was putting out his own version of Avengers: Endgame.

The story revels in the comic crossover approach of putting together combos: Rose with Wilf and Sylvia, Sarah Jane with Jackie and Mickey, Captain Jack and Donna. The structure of the fourth series of Davies's relaunched Doctor Who cleverly teed up the guest stars that would appear, even if one hadn't seen their previous episodes / other shows. It included episodes that featured Martha Jones and Rose Tyler before they returned here, and also namechecked the heroes of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. It set up the mystery of missing planets and missing bees that would be paid off here, and teased at the dark destiny for Donna that would be revealed at the end. Beyond all the year-long threads being weaved together, it still pulled some surprises related to plots from longer ago: Harriet Jones unexpectedly popped up in the first part, and Jackie and Mickey in the second.The show resolved dangling threads concerning characters from the very first episode of Who, with Mickey, Jackie and Rose all happily set up in their lives, the last of those paired up with a human version of the Doctor to grow old with. It neatly completes the ongoing arc plot about the Doctor's residual angst from the Time War. His blue-suited alter-ego born in turmoil once again chooses to commit genocide, destroying all the Daleks (the Doctor himself having come to realise this was the wrong choice when he was Christopher Eccleston) and gets to be healed by Rose once again. Featuring Davros (it's a lovely moment when Davies capitalises on the coincidence of a character, Sarah Jane, being present who appeared in Davros's first ever story) is the icing on the cake, and the Daleks could have never appeared in the series again, such is the closure that is established here.

It feels like such a complete ending to a full era that it took almighty cleverness from Davies to spin out the narrative threads sufficiently for a few more specials in 2009, and they do feel a little tacked on. He could have left after this story (and there was a rumour going around at the time that he had planned such a thing). If it was at any point expected to be his swansong, then it was apt that Davies showed us the Shadow Proclamation (another callback to the very first relaunch episode Rose in 2005) and featured one of his most popular monster creations, the Judoon (the Ood are also namechecked). There's a surprise cameo from K9 in there, and Bernard Cribbins having fun shooting a paintball gun at a Dalek's eyestalk ("My vision is not impaired"). With everything going on, it could have seemed too busy, but it never feels that way. My favourite moment is a relatively quiet scene when Martha has travelled to Germany, to find a station in which to use her doomsday weapon, the Osterhagen key. There's been an audacious and funny moment where the Dalek voices are translated into German ("Extrmineiran! Extrmineiran!"), but then she meets an old German woman. The woman talks, haunted and hauntingly, about the glamour of London when she visited many years before. Then, knowing what Martha's planning, and what the key does, the woman pulls a gun on the Doctor's companion. The exchange is not subtitled, but she accuses Martha: "You are the nightmare, not the [Daleks], you! I should kill you now". Martha fronts it out, and the woman cannot bring herself to pull the trigger. It's a beautiful scene, a nice character moment but building up the tension.

All the different companion plotlines come to nothing regarding the defeat of the Daleks, only there to showcase the Doctor's preponderance for making other people do his fighting for him. This is accompanied by more fan service, with a clip montage of characters since 2005 who've died in the Doctor's name (Yabe the Tree! Lynda with a Y! A bloke from the werewolf one!). The one who saves the day is Donna. In an echo of Rose in Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways, she attains superpowers at the risk of her own life. The sad fate of having her world view narrowed again, forgetting all the adventures she's had with the Doctor, is a signature note of melancholy from Davies, and the scenes of the family Noble at the end are some of the best material in the story. Wilf talking to the Doctor as he stands in the rain by the TARDIS is a wonderful moment to end this epic of hope and of sadness. It's 16 years on, and I have watched and enjoyed it again. Before streaming, Who had an extended life on DVD and Blu-ray, and video before that, and international (and less frequently, domestic) repeat screenings before that. Stories have always managed to work through a 'long tail'. It's rarely ever been purely about sitting on the sofa and watching something at a specific time. Heck, the next story I'm covering for the blog is The Monster of Peladon. If people like me are still watching that story 50 years on, then the current run of programmes isn't going to disappear either. The shot in the arm given to this patient by the relaunch and creation of all the different characters featured in The Stolen Earth and Journey's End shouldn't be underappreciated, but Doctor Who in some form will always endure.

Connectivity:

Despite the plethora of different elements in The Stolen Earth / Journey's End, there isn't much in common with The Devil's Chord; this is perhaps indicative of the desire of the showrunner and the production team to make the new era with Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor distinct from what came before. Nonetheless, both stories are written by Russell T Davies and feature a Doctor with a single female companion visiting an Earth that's been changed (spatially in the Tennant story, temporally in the Gatwa one). The surging choral number at Journey's End's end when the Earth is towed back to its proper place is something like The Devil's Chord's big closing song (but non-diegetic, of course).

Deeper Thoughts:

And on that bombshell... The Stolen Earth / Journey's End is full of big stuff, in fact it's all big stuff. The biggest thing to happen of all, though, is what takes place at the end of the first episode. I kid you not, at the time there were news articles with headlines along the lines of "BBC Confirms Doctor Who is Not Going to Regenerate" prompted by that gap between part one and part two. In my opinion, it's one of the best and certainly one of the most audacious cliffhangers in the show's history. This set my deeper thoughts going about why I'd never written in the Deeper Thoughts section about cliffhangers before. Doctor Who was conceived from even before its very beginnings as a series of serials. In the very first outline of the proposed sci-fi series that will eventually become Doctor Who, drawn up by C.E. Webber on 29th March 1963 after a meeting three days earlier, it's stated that the programme will last "at least 52 weeks, consisting of various dramatised SF stories, linked to form a continuous serial". This was before the Doctor or the TARDIS were dreamed up, when the show was briefly envisaged to be about a trio of Earthbound "troubleshooters". In a redrafted document the following month, Webber further details that the series will be made up of stories of six or seven 25-minute episodes each, and the episodes will end on a cliffhanger. By this point, "Dr. Who" and his "machine" are part of the outline, but cliffhangers came first. The shape is inspired by the Saturday morning cinema serials shown in the early half of the 20th century, and the serial fiction of writers like Charles Dickens before that. It's interesting to note that this structure remained unaffected in the series outline when everything else about the series changed. Those Saturday morning serials did range widely in terms of genre and subject matter.

Perhaps I've not written much about them before because cliffhangers seem to me to occupy a liminal space in story theory; they are so ubiquitous as to seem important, but are fundamentally inessential. Indeed, they can sometimes be damaging. If you stopped at the most interesting part of an anecdote and told people to come back in a week to hear the rest, I'd forecast that you would not have a very happy audience. If a serialised story reaches a cliffhanger and forever stops there (which happens a lot in TV when programmes get cancelled), it can feel incomplete as a story. Books don't have to come in chapters, and plays don't have to come in acts, but they tend to do so. Why? All story theory proponents agree that any mainstream story's structure as a minimum has to have a beginning, a middle and an end; stories therefore tend to be structured in sections that follow a standard approach. Paraphrasing and combining many different experts' takes for the sake of brevity, these would be as follows: an event that throws the protagonist's world out of balance, increasing complications, crisis point, and finally resolution. To take a four times 25-minute Doctor Who story as a template, one might think that part one would cover the imbalance event, part two would be about the complications, part three the crisis point, and finally resolution in the last part. But these story structure sections are very rarely paced such that they fall neatly in to equally-sized chunks. Do you want to keep an audience waiting for 25 minutes before anything out of the ordinary happens to the main character? Could you really sustain the crisis point for a full 25 minutes, or the resolution?

It's always satisfying when an episode of any serial drama ends at a key story reversal, a big event where the fortunes of the protagonist fundamentally change as part of the overall story structure. This would be the so called game-changer cliffhanger. The most talked-up of these was the ending to A Good Man Goes to War in Matt Smith's second season as the Doctor. Scheduling decisions had meant that there was a mid-season break, and the writer of the story and showrunner of the time Steven Moffat took advantage of this to provide a big cliffhanger leading in to the gap, which he wouldn't have used if the viewers had to wait a year to discover the outcome. This turned out to be the revelation that River Sing was Amy and Rory's daughter grown-up, and - for this viewer at least - it was a bit disappointing. It doesn't change the game. I suppose it does fundamentally change Amy and Rory's lives, as it means they will never get their baby back (as history already dictates that River will grow up independently of her parents albeit under their noses). This isn't made clear until the following episode, though, and the emotion of it is never explored effectively. The biggest game changing cliffhanger is probably the end of The Tenth Planet part four, when the Doctor regenerates for the first time. Again, like with the Matt Smith, it's at the end of a serial, rather than in between episodes. The end of The War Games's penultimate part, with the Time Lords arriving on the scene, is probably the biggest game-changer cliffhanger within a story. Realistically, this sort will not happen that often; the reason why is built in to that original 1963 document. Doctor Who is an ongoing series where the regular cast move on at the end of one serial to start another: they can't be too radically changed or that format couldn't be sustained. If Amy and Rory truly faced up to the trauma of losing their child, would any of the usual weekly larks matter to them anymore?

What else, then, can a writer use to make up their cliffhanger quotient? The most common is the bisected action sequence from where the phenomenon gets its name. For the literal cliffhanger, the protagonist has fallen down a cliff but managed to grab on to something such that they are left hanging. The action sequence could then continue to show them do something very clever to climb back up to safety, but the sequence is cut in half: the audience is left to wait, asking themselves 'How will they get out of that?!'. There's an example of a literal cliffhanger in the second ever Doctor Who story: Ian is connected by a rope to a Thal who has fallen down an abyss, and the weight is pulling Ian closer and closer to the edge. Also literal but less successful is the end of Dragonfire's first episode. The Doctor is hanging over a cliff, hooked on by only his umbrella, but his grip on the umbrella is loosening and he's slipping down. It doesn't work for two reasons: first, it's directed badly such that there seems to be no obvious pressure exerted to cause him to get in the predicament; second, the following week it turns out that there's an unseen ledge below him where someone can help him down. Of course, it was a standard of the Saturday morning cinema serials to cheat the following week, so anything like this could be seen as a homage. The 'How will they get out of that?!' cliffhanger is the most commonly used in the series, though rarely involving actual cliffs. The end of The Stolen Earth definitely falls into the category; it also is resolved with a bit of a cheat. The Doctor uses a previously unmentioned talent to transfer the regeneration energy into the old lopped-off hand that he keeps in the TARDIS. 

There are a few other types of cliffhangers that Doctor Who has employed over the years, but I've run out of space here, so cue the Eastenders drums: doof doof doof-doof-doof doofer doofer - To Be Continued!

In Summary:

An excellent part of Doctor Who's enduring legacy, with an audacious cliffhanger in the middle.

Fugitive of the Judoon

Chapter the 270th, which takes quite a turn, and then even more of a twist.

Plot:
The TARDIS registers that the Judoon are operating outside their jurisdiction in present day Gloucester, and the Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz materialise to sort the situation out. The Doctor is rapidly separated from her friends when Captain Jack Harkness beams them aboard a stolen ship he's piloting, and passes on a warning message about the Cybermen's imminent return. Meanwhile, the Judoon surround the house of a seemingly ordinary couple, Ruth and Lee. They have something to hide, with Lee having kept a non-Earth artefact in his house. The mysterious Gat, who knows the couple from some previous life in a shadowy organisation and has hired the Judoon to track them down, confronts Lee and he is killed. The Doctor sneaks Ruth out and gets her to the safety of Gloucester Cathedral. A message sent by Lee before he died awakens some memories in Ruth, and she makes short work of the Judoon that come looking for her there, using unarmed combat moves. Following a clue from Lee, the Doctor and Ruth go to a disused lighthouse where Ruth remembers growing up. The Doctor investigates an unmarked grave in the grounds, digging to reveal a TARDIS disguised as a police box. In the lighthouse, Ruth breaks the glass of a fire alarm and her memories are restored - she is the Doctor, and had used a Chameleon Arch to hide out on Earth. Both Doctors are in the TARDIS when it is dragged up to an orbiting spaceship by tractor beam. Gat confronts the Doctor she recognises, and is tricked into shooting herself with a booby-trapped gun. The fugitive Doctor leaves in her TARDIS, leaving the other Doctor brooding on why she has no memory of being this particular incarnation.

Context:

I watched this from the disc in the Complete Twelfth Series Blu-ray box set, which I notice I got in steelbook format. I don't collect the steelbooks like some, just get them occasionally when a different packaging format doesn't come up initially to pre-order. To be honest, they're always a bit irritating to remove discs from, as they're designed to be elegantly thin and therefore have multiple discs on one spindle. It interests me that owning something that's a source of obsessive joy and satisfaction to one Doctor Who fan could be meaningless (or even irritating) to another, even though the two are already united in a - let's face it - fairly niche pursuit. More of these grumpy old man style musings in the Deeper Thoughts section below.

First Time Round:

I first watched this story live with the whole family on the Sunday night of its debut on BBC1 in the UK, 26th January 2020. I enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine with the viewing, at the end of a busy weekend. The key moment I remember is hearing John Barrowman's distinctive voice from off camera returning to the series after a decade and thinking "Is that? It is!!" and exchanging a look of surprise with the Better Half. They had kept his return and all the other surprises in the narrative secret, and I'd seen not even the tiniest of leaks. I watched the story again on my own on the Monday evening as I couldn't remember the end. Don't get me wrong, I remembered all the big revelations, but after that it was hazy. What had happened with Captain Jack? What had happened with the fugitive Doctor? There was some stuff with a spaceship and a gun, but what had happened after that? I put this down at first to the glasses of wine making me a bit fuzzy. But nothing really happens with Captain Jack, he just disappears. And, despite all those earth-shattering revelations, the end of the fugitive Doctor story is a bit of nonsense with a spaceship and a gun, and after that she disappears too. Could such a shocking and explosive story really have finished on an anti-climax?

Reaction:

In an early Eddie Izzard stand-up routine, Eddie would pitch her idea for a story for Tales of the Unexpected, the long-running British TV anthology show, which showcased dramas with a twist in the tale. On stage Izzard would outline the story about a man concerned about his wife having an affair, who would take to following her. One day, he would see her go into a house, and would break in so he could see who she was with, would creep upstairs quietly, open the bedroom door, and then a pig would jump out and eat him. At the risk of dissecting the metaphorical frog, the point of the joke is that the unexpected nature of the story's end is not integrated with the rest of the narrative; the pig eating the protagonist does not resolve the story of his paranoia about the suspected affair. The two major twists in Fugitive of the Judoon - an old friend of the Doctor returns to give a warning but misses her, the Doctor discovers a past incarnation of herself that she has no memory of ever being - are similarly unresolved within the 50-minute runtime of the story. They would both get paid off by the end of the 2020 series, but would they amount to much?  Taking the Captain Jack cameo first, it certainly doesn't make any difference to the plot of the Fugitive story. It provides a very low-scale complicating factor to the main narrative by separating the Doctor from her companions, but Jodie Whittaker's Doctor barely even notices their absence. The warning that Jack delivers that the fam pass on is ignored in the later episodes of the season anyway. So, the sequences with Jack could lift right out, and all that would be gone was fan service and a bit of foreshadowing.

You can't lift out the twist that Ruth is an earlier version of the Doctor, though, right? Right? Let's play out how that would work, just in terms of its impact to this one 50-minute story. The Doctor is helping a woman Ruth who seems to have been wrongly identified as an alien by the Judoon; but mild-mannered Ruth turns out to be an alien with "Jackie Chan" style skills that had been kept buried. Despite her being a bit aggressive and waving guns around, the Doctor still helps her escape the Judoon and the shadowy organisation that 'Ruth' used to work for who have hired the Judoon to find her. Without the story beat revealing that Ruth is the Doctor, it still works in a Nobody / History of Violence way, the revelation of an assassin hiding so well they are overlooked by society.  There's not much of an ending, but again all you lose is foreshadowing. And does it matter that there isn't much of an ending? The story as it wound up doesn't have any ending. As I mentioned above, this bothered me at some level from my very first watch. The fugitive Doctor leaves, never to be seen again (Jo Martin will return in character periodically as a series as memories and hallucinations, but will never come back as the Doctor). Nothing's explained, fair enough, but nothing's resolved either. The writers (Vinay Patel with showrunner Chris Chibnall) do their best with a final scene where the fam reassure their Doctor that she is defined by her actions not her past, but it doesn't amount to a climax.

Ultimately, the story can't help but feel incomplete - it's part one of a multi-part story where the next part isn't coming straight away. As such, it's borrowing from the future, creating story debt that will need to eventually be paid off. This is par for the course in a series like Doctor Who, of course, and Chibnall's predecessor as showrunner Steven Moffat did it a lot. As an example, The Name of the Doctor, at the end of Matt Smith (and Moffat's) third season in charge, introduces a past version of the Doctor of whom the audience have been previously unaware, but who doesn't really do anything significant plot-wise, just like Fugitive of the Judoon. One could argue that Moffat pays off the debt better in The Day of the Doctor than Chibnall in The Timeless Children (the latter story really just raises more questions, deferring the debt repayment to another day), but that's in the future: the two set-up stories face the same issue, which is that they don't have an end. Moffat manages with some clever word-play related to the story title, and by holding back the mystery new Doctor revelation to the last seconds, to make it seem like his story is in any way climactic. It's a pretty cheap trick. Chibnall isn't as good at those clever-clever narrative sticking plasters. Instead, as mentioned, he and his co-writer rely on a character scene. It rings a bit hollow, though, as none of the fam have shared the story with the Doctor, and haven't witnessed the morally dodgy gun-wielding, "Jackie Chan" kicking antics of the Doctor's previous self. How can they know the Doctor isn't defined by her past, if they haven't seen it?

The other pitfall of a story like this is the borrowing it does from the present too. The Whittaker story is not as bad as The Name of the Doctor, the entire running time of which is multiple scenes of consequence-free nonsense just to set up for the casting reveal of John Hurt playing the Doctor. Fugitive's beginning scenes of Ruth's homelife are just misdirection. It's really good misdirection, and stands up to maybe a couple of views (nice little touches like it opening with her staring at her watch, or Lee being described as a "faithful companion") but maybe not more than that. This is despite it being well designed, well shot and well performed. A number of people I've seen commenting online since have sniffily suggested that it's a shame to only have a few minutes of Jo Martin's Doctor and then be stuck with Jodie Whittaker thereafter. I think this misunderstands the nature of acting. Martin is only able to shine because of Whittaker's hard-work and generosity acting in counterpoint to her previous persona's forcefulness. Martin's Doctor is great as an icon, and great doing pop-up appearances in later episodes, but I don't think the character as presented in this story would work on an ongoing basis, it would need to be softened. There's lots of other smaller stuff in here that's enjoyable, even if it doesn't really contribute to the plot; no space to go into detail about the all, but Michael Begley's performance as All Ears Alan is joyous, and his death scene very memorable for the astonished gasp the lead Judoon makes on being shoved - great vocal work from the unsung hero of new Who Nick Briggs.

Connectivity:

Fugitive of the Judoon, like Cold War, features an alien that's been stuck on Earth for a lengthy period. Both stories also contain a Doctor separated from their TARDIS, and a craft being pulled up from below the surface of the Earth by another craft's tractor beam. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Mainlining modern modular multi-media mythmaking. I don't understand Doom's Day. I didn't understand Time Lord Victorious either. For the uninitiated, both of these - the former launched this year, the latter was a similar thing from 2020 - are umbrella titles for multiple different connected Doctor Who tie-in stories across different media platforms. Taken together, they form a larger epic tale, but they - reportedly - stand-alone also. I understood more the logic of doing something of this sort in 2020. Covid lockdowns were keeping everybody at home; there'd only recently been a series of Doctor Who shown (Jodie Whittaker's second run, of which Fugitive of the Judoon is part, aired in the early months of the year and was finished before lockdowns started) and it currently wasn't possible to make a new one. A host of new stories to satisfy the needs of Doctor Who fans' expansive story appetites was probably right for that moment. Even so, I only ended up experiencing two of the many stories on offer. The first was a comic strip that I read because it was printed in Doctor Who Magazine, which I subscribe to and read anyway. I've read every issue of the magazine without a break from the mid-1990s, and with only a few breaks since the early 1980s, so it was essentially a freebie. The story was called Monstrous Beauty, I think, and featured the Christopher Eccleston Doctor and Rose fighting vampires... I think. It didn't leave much of an impression, but I'm sure it was fine. The other story was the animated Daleks! that was available to watch online for free, and which I covered in more detail in the Deeper Thoughts section of The Christmas Invasion blog post from December of 2020.

There was the odd unexplained moment, but it didn't matter much to appreciating them in isolation. Whether they were truly stand-alone, I don't know for sure. Similarly to Fugitive of the Judoon, as observed above, each of those two stories had accrued just a little story debt; the only way to see how that paid off would be to watch every different story under the Time Lord Victorious banner. TLV, to give it the abbreviation used at the time, sprawled a bit, though. There was even a T-Shirt that one could buy that contained a small amount of the wider story. I couldn't even keep track of all the different parts, let alone purchase and experience them all. That lesson seems to have been learned for this second similar event in 2023. Doom's Day - as hinted at in the name - comprises a more contained and affordable 24 sub-sections, each one a different hour of the titular Doom's... erm, day. Doom is a female assassin played by Sooz Kempner, and seems to me (and it might just be me) to be totally and utterly unengaging. She has to track down the Doctor for some slightly woolly reason, or else she'll die. So far, so so. Is that story special enough to be told in such a grandiose manner, though? As we've seen, the teasing reveal of an entire new lifetime for the Doctor only warranted 50 minutes of airtime in 2020. Time Lord Victorious dived into the Lore with a capital 'L'. Is Doom's story important enough? Let's examine the different parts of the wider tale. The first and last of the 24 'hour' chunks are online stories, free for all. There are also two parts that are going to be new levels on a phone-based Doctor Who game; again I think that involves no purchase, so will only cost you your time. For the rest you have to stump up some cash.

The remaining 20 hours divide into five groups of four, each provided by a different purveyor of Doctor Who extended universe material: an audio box-set by BBC Audio, another by Big Finish, a novel by BBC Books, and comic strips by Titan Comics and Panini. The last of these, comprising hours two to five in Doom's story came as a separate 20-page comic with issue 592 of Doctor Who magazine. I've read it, and it has some nice moments and decent art. It'll forever, though, be incomplete to me, as I'm not going to buy any of the other parts. I wonder how many people will. Who is the audience that this is aimed at and how large or small is it? I use myself as a yardstick of these things; I have been a Doctor Who fan for over 40 years; I have a collector's mindset and I have a reasonable amount of disposable income. I have bought products from most of those five names over the years, but - excepting Panini - I've not bought all or even most of their Doctor Who output - I'd be bankrupt if I had. And I've never bought a single thing that Titan Comics have ever produced. No offence to them, there's probably fans with all the Titan Comics that have never bought Doctor Who Magazine, or others that like the BBC audios, but not Big Finish's, or vice versa. Is there a significant number of mega-fans that collect them all? I doubt it. If I'm right in this, maybe Doom's Day's purpose is clear; it's to tempt people like me, who are easily separated from their money where Who is concerned, and who don't like not knowing how a story ends, to try out some ranges they wouldn't otherwise, and maybe they'll get hooked. It's the Doctor Who equivalent of drug pushing; I'm Just gonna Say No!

In Summary:

A story in debt: some expertly tooled surprises, but endings all put off until another day.