New Earth

Chapter The 140th, which is reassuringly familiar.

Plot:

The newly regenerated tenth Doctor takes Rose on another trip to the year 5-billion+ era, following a message received on the psychic paper from the dying Face of Boe. After the events of The End of the World, another planet has been colonised to become New Earth. They land there, near the city of New New York, and visit a hospital run by Cat nuns. Meanwhile, their sparring partner from that previous story Lady Cassandra - the last 'pure' human, who's prolonged her life with unnatural amounts of cosmetic surgery until she is just a flap of skin and a brain - traces the TARDIS travellers, with help from a cloned assistant, Chip, and her metallic spiders. She kidnaps Rose and transplants her brain contents into Rose's using a psycho-graft, then rejoins the Doctor operating Rose's body. The Doctor's suspicions have been aroused by the Cat nun's medicine, which is centuries ahead of its time. They break in to the 'intensive care' area to find it contains cell after cell, thousands of humans being grown to be a lab rats, infected with every disease in existence. Cassandra-Rose reveals herself and tries to blackmail the cats not to reveal the grim edifice their success is built upon, but inadvertently releases all the lab rat humans, who swarm the hospital, killing everyone they touch. The Doctor manages to mix up a miracle cure and save everyone, slightly hindered by Cassandra body-swapping into him, back into Rose and even into one of the infected people at one point. The crisis over, Chip willingly lets Cassandra take his body, but it is rapidly dying; Cassandra accepts her fate, and the Doctor takes her to her last fond memory, where she dies as Cassandra-Chip, in the arms of her younger self.

Context:

The family is going through one of those phases, which happen occasionally , where they are just not interested in Doctor Who; no matter whether it's ancient or modern, regardless of Doctor or monster. Even though it was a David Tennant one, and he's very popular in our house, I could not tempt them to watch with me. So, I viewed this one on my own from the DVD (haven't invested in up-scaled blu-rays of the early new series episodes as yet, but may when they're cheaper).  

First time round:

I watched this live on its BBC1 broadcast in 2006, while also taping it onto a blank VHS tape for future re-watching. Talk about one foot in the past (and I will talk a bit more about how New Earth has one foot in its - more recent - past in due course). As a viewing experience, this had more in common with how I consumed the later 1980s stories, like The Curse of Fenric (more on that later too), than how I viewed the majority of the 21st century Doctor Who episodes. The year 2006 superficially doesn't feel that long ago to me, but New Earth came before the launch of the BBC iplayer, and before our purchase of a recorder with a hard-drive, both of which revolutionised the way television was watched. I still dutifully save each new episode to a folder on the PVR, only deleting them once I've bought a Blu-ray copy much later, but it's more out of habit than anything else: the episodes are available all year round to stream at the touch of a button.

Thinking more about those times, I realise just how long ago 2006 was - we'd only recently got broadband. We'd moved in to a new place late in 2005 (we being just the Better Half and me, no kids yet at that point), taking the opportunity to set up a more 21st century internet package. We'd only been in that place for a matter of weeks when we celebrated our first Christmas there, and watched the first ever Doctor Who Christmas special of my lifetime (The Christmas Invasion). I remember after the broadcast in the evening playing the interactive Doctor Who game Attack of the Graske, revelling in my new bandwidth. This means that the 2006 run was the first ever series I watched after leaving the dusty relics of the dial-up era behind. The ability to watch streamed content without buffering, as well as creating the circumstances where something like the iplayer would thrive, also allowed me an unimpeded watch of the "Tardisode" that went online in the run up to New Earth. These were an experiment: one short online teaser scene per story, and they were pretty unremarkable. I only remember the first few, so I may have stopped watching them altogether later on.

Reaction:

I remember at the time it was fairly obvious, and I believe it has since been put on record, that the idea for having a Christmas story at the end of 2005 was a relatively hasty addition, and had come about after the series had been mapped out. The original plan was for the first two episodes of new series 2 to therefore be a contemporary Earth invasion story with Jackie and Mickey appearing, followed by a trip to the year five point five slash apple slash whatever, to see lots of fun aliens. In other words, an exact re-run of the way the 2005 series began. You can even see the point where the 15-minutes of Christmas-themed material have been grafted on to the front of the Sycorax invasion story, after that point it ceases to be particularly Christmassy at all, and reverts to what presumably would have been the plot had it been shown at Easter. The effect this has, as was certainly intended, is to reassure with the familiar while the audience gets used to the new bloke playing the Doctor. It was lucky that they hadn't just planned the one story dwelling on the recent past, as there had been a few months elapsed since Christmas before the new series started, so any doubters - or those that might have missed the Christmas show - still got their reassurance.  It might though have pushed a bit too much responsibility onto the shoulders of New Earth - in many ways it is a slight and comic creation, a palate cleanser to sit between more dramatic or exciting episodes rather than a big explosive season opener.

This era of Who loves picking up on threads on previous shows, anyway. New Earth is only the twelfth story since the return, but it's by no means the first sequel: Boom Town continues the Slitheen tale of Aliens of London / World War Three, and Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways picks up from the the plot of The Long Game. The rationale for each of these first two 2005 sequels were different: in the latter it was writer and showrunner Russell T Davies trying to deepen the events depicted and add more of a sense of scale by constructing a lightweight mythology as a framework around the series. He does that a little bit here too, with the Face of Boe's inclusion just to set up a slightly portentous prophecy which will pay off the following year. Boe doesn't even deliver the prophecy here, just talks about it, which does make the whole plot thread seem a bit of a con. Though I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a little frisson hearing dialogue like "It's said he'll talk to a wanderer, to the man without a home - the lonely God". But that wasn't the main reason for doing the New Earth story; it was more like the reason for Boom Town. The production team wanted to work with a particular actor and character again as they have more potential to exploit. In that case it was Annette Badland as Margaret Slitheen, in this it is Zoë Wanamaker as the Lady Cassandra.

This is very much Cassandra's show, but interestingly Wanamaker's hardly in it, though her performance informs the whole story - this is because of one of the more contentious aspects of New Earth: the 'body swap' humour. It's not true body swapping, of course, it's only one way - though having Wanamaker in the CGI skin frame playing the Doctor or Rose might have been fun, it would have been effects heavy, and the production team clearly want to get rid of the need for that expensive CGI as soon as possible. So, the stars of the show get to ham it up and show us their comic chops as Cassandra zaps into them throughout. I can see why it put some fans' teeth on edge, but generally, it's perfectly good, well played and doesn't in any way deflect from the drama of the piece. In places, it's laugh out loud funny ("I'm a chav!"), and you'd have to be very stony-hearted not to at least smile at Billie Piper as Cassandra as Rose doing her Eliza Doolittle cockney. Tennant is not quite so successful playing Cassandra to my mind, but he still has great timing as the Doctor. After Cassandra-Rose snogs him (another contentious moment), when he adds quietly "Yep, still got it", it's another laugh out loud moment for me.

If one sits down to watch this expecting it to be a serious, sombre piece about a horror scenario in a hospital, one is going to be disappointed, but did it ever even pretend to be thus? In another echo of Boom Town, the main Sci-fi mystery plot is just window dressing. It's broad and conceptually simple (not quite high concept, but close to it) and over very quickly. Like many other great writers, Davies does not care for withholding information from the audience; clearly, he believes the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. The intrigue about what the Cat nuns are up to lasts for - what - five minutes? - then the real dramatic question, teased out in a wonderful moment with sympathetic cat Novice Hame's justifications, is how they can live with themselves. I remember some people online hating the ending of this plot with the Doctor mixing up a cocktail of drugs which then get sprayed onto the infected humans using the lift disinfecting mechanism. Like many other great writers, Davies finds endings hard, and this was better than the endings from his Doctor Who scripts in 2005, which sailed close to deus ex machina territory - in that he'd seeded the separate elements (including the lift, used earlier in the story as a gag) much better. It doesn't really matter, though, as it isn't the real ending.

The real ending, like the story, is all about Cassandra, and it is one of the finest moments of the series up to that point.The older Cassandra, in Chip's body, has accepted that her life must come to an end, and is brought back to a moment we've witnessed earlier, when Cassandra is a lady of a certain age, just at the point in her life where things became "such hard work". This circular but emotionally charged time travel trick is reminiscent of La Jetée (an inspiration for the film Twelve Monkeys), particularly with the little hint that in the future Cassandra models Chip on her "favourite pattern", i.e. the last person in her life who was genuinely nice to her. Wanamaker and Sean Gallagher as Chip both play it perfectly, with generosity  - and intensity - from Tennant and Piper playing the still, silent observers. Once you see that this scene is the main point of the narrative for its author, then all the other campy, rompy fun can be taken as just that, and overall the story can be seen as a winner on its own terms.

Connectivity: 

Both New Earth and Terminus take place in medical institutions harbouring a dark secret; both take the maybe tasteless approach of using a group of unwell people as a 'monster' in the story, who shamble around like zombies after fearful characters who flee so as to avoid getting infected. In both stories, everyone ends up being cured in the end. New Earth has cat people, Terminus has a dog man.

Deeper Thoughts:

Not not-not-not-not-not not-not-not-not-not not-not anything to do with New Earth: BFI Showman and Curse of Fenric screenings, November 23rd 2019. The concept of this blog is to watch the stories in a random order. So, whenever a new box set comes out, and there is a tie-in BFI screening, I use a chance factor to decide whether I will blog a story from the set or not, and if so which one. When the season 26 set was announced earlier in the year, I'd already just watched and blogged The Curse of Fenric, and previously had covered Battlefield and Ghost Light; this meant only one story from the set remained, the finale, Survival. I flipped a coin, heads meaning I'd blog Survival; but, it came up tails. The recent BFI event was worth writing about, though, and I didn't want to wait until another Sylvester McCoy story came up as that might be months. As New Earth didn't spark off any deeper thoughts, it may as well go here. It is a little bit apt too, as many people during the course of the day in NFT1 did cite the theory that aspects of the final few Sylvester McCoy stories (introducing a more capable companion who became more the focus of the plots, filming on council estate tower blocks) gave rise to the style of the series when it returned in the 21st Century.

Chris Chapman, centre of stage

A growing band of fan friends is regularly attending these events, but when I arrived after getting an eye-wateringly early train up to the Big Smoke for a Saturday, it was only to meet one to begin with: Chris. He and I were the only two who could get there early enough to watch a late addition to the BFI's Saturday schedule: a screening of Showman, the feature length documentary on 1980s Doctor Who producer John-Nathan Turner. It was less packed than normal, probably mostly to do with the early hour, but maybe also the more niche aspect of the piece. The audience did though contain a number of people interviewed, including Peter Davison. An introduction came from director Chris Chapman, who explained that they has only intended at first to do a 50-60 minute film, but  were gathering so much good material that they lobbied for additional budget to take it up to the 80-90 minute mark, and were given the go ahead. It's definitely a worthy investment: a great albeit tragic narrative arc, and some very affecting sequences.

"Dick!!!"

There was only the briefest gap in between the end of Showman and the start of The Curse of Fenric, so we hastily sought out the rest of that growing band of fan friends in the throng: David, Trevor. Dave, Tim and Alan joined me and Chris for the main attraction. Things started with Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy doing their customary quiz, where any audience member that thinks they know the answer to the fiendish trivia questions has to "Shout for Dick" and Fiddy comes to them with roving microphone and prize. After asking the audience to practise shouting "Dick" at the top of their lungs, Justin joked that it was appropriate as it was close to panto season, only for a large group behind us to shout back "Oh No it isn't!". I love Doctor Who fans.  This quiz was notable as for the first time ever - despite usually knowing most of the answers - I actually shouted for Dick. I already have the new Series 4 box set, but I couldn't sit by while person after person got the director of Survival wrong (it's Alan Wareing, by the way). It didn't make any difference, as Dick took his microphone to someone else no matter how loud I shouted, and someone else got the prize I didn't care about, and the kudos that I did. Never mind.

L to R: Johnson, Briggs, Fiddy 

In advance of the screening, Justin spoke to writer Ian Briggs. Following on as it did from the Showman screening, the interview's first question was inevitably about John Nathan-Turner. Briggs had spent quite a bit of time with him - they were the two that stayed in the hotel longer, as they weren't needed immediately on location - and confirmed he was as 'larger than life' as he appeared in the interviews of the documentary, and the loss when he died in 2002 was heartbreaking: "Those who knew him really really miss him; [Doctor Who] survived because of him". Briggs also talked about how spoiled he'd been getting to work on Who as his first TV job, and how it compared unfavourably to his later gigs on shows such as Casualty and The Bill, where the show was not writer-led and writers weren't encouraged to think big and put all their hearts into a script. He talked about how much he enjoyed creating the character of Ace, and how - once he'd written the character's debut story Dragonfire, and the final decision was made to keep her on as a regular - he'd written a brief character outline for future writers, and added a note to script editor Andrew Cartmel reading "It feels like I'm giving up my only child - please look after her". I'd never seen Ian Briggs interviewed before, and he came over as passionate and thoughtful.

L to R: Fiddy, Ayres

What was then shown was a spruced up version of the 2003 extended feature-length omnibus Fenric. My more detailed feelings about the story are here. Of the added scenes, one thing that stood out was in the scene about thought experiment The Prisoner's Dilemma; this version extends the doctor's line as broadcast by five words as highlighted: "Based on a false premise, don't you think, like all zero sum games". Now, The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't a zero sum game, that's the whole point of it; so, it's irritating (probably only to me, mind) that a mistake avoided in the original has been reintroduced in the newer version. Watching with an audience usually highlights more comedy than you notice when watching alone, but even with that boost the sombre Fenric doesn't have them rolling in the aisles. The only big (and probably unintentional) laughs were for all Janet Henfrey's lines as Miss Hardaker. I hadn't seen it as quite as 'large' a performance before, and it did seem a little unfair, but I'm glad people got their yucks where they could! Mark Ayres was interviewed by Dick once the story finished, and went into the history of the various special edition versions of the story. Far too much material was shot than could be used, and the eventual broadcast version was cut and rearranged mercilessly. Ayres - who as the composer of the show worked closely with director Nick Mallet and knew his original planned edit - had the idea in the early 1990s of making a VHS omnibus version which reinstated the material and put everything back into script order. John Nathan-Turner, who worked on the VHS range at the time, wasn't sold on the idea, and the half-way house episodic and slightly extended version was the result. Finally, in 2003, the DVD version was made, which fulfilled the original intention. MArk said that he resisted the temptation to "do a George Lucas" and, apart from upscaling it to HD, has only made two or three minor adjustments.

As is usual, there followed a compendium of clips from the box set's Value Added Material, and it all looks great: the marvellous trailer in full, and excerpts from Behind The Sofa, the Writer's Room and the Fenric Making Of. Best of all was the edit of all the funniest bits from the archive studio and location footage. Similar snippets were assembled for previous box set previews at the BFI, and it would be nice to have these selections available on the discs as well as the longer, full archive footage extras. The big Q&A with Ace actor Sophie Aldred and script editor Andrew Cartmel followed. They were both as engaged and informative as you'd expect, with Justin and the audience's questions covering a wide range of topics. They were also asked about Nathan-Turner. Cartmel said that "John took a chance on people - sometimes it went wildly right, sometimes it went wildly wrong"; Sophie said that he was instinctive, but that his instincts were usually on the money. Cartmel added that John had something of a love hate thing going with Doctor Who: he had been offered other things, but turned them down, perhaps because he couldn't give up his "mini-Walt Disney empire". He would sit in his office, not able to stop himself reading bitchy fanzines, even though it was making him miserable. The BBC never cared about Doctor Who, which meant they could get away with much (like Fenric's soviet communism over Christianity sedition, which an audience member highlighted), but it also led them to think that nobody else cared either. According to Sophie, Sylvester McCoy is still really surprised meeting people that like his Doctor.

L to R: Cartmel, Aldred, Johnson 

Sophie talked of her wonderful on screen chemistry with Sylv ("Funny that, as I can't stand him!" she joked at first), and put it down to them being similar: neither had gone to drama school, they both had the same political leanings, had both done the Working Men's Club circuit early in their career, and even shared the same birthday. She commended his enormous generosity as the leading man, in letting her be the focus of stories. This allowed the character to flourish to the point where she became the template for the companion in the new series, and was big enough to have had her own spin off show (someone suggested this in the room and it got a long round of applause). There were quite a few anecdotes about the making of Fenric: Sophie thought it was a gift for her, as she got to do everything: fall in love, seduce a soldier, be rude, fighting, running... She even got to do her own stunts, including diving into the water at the end. The lines the two vampire girls had about it being warm in the water were cruelly funny as "Lulworth Cove is the coldest place in the world". Both Cartmel and Aldred had experienced JNT's stunt casting of people they'd never heard of but whom John worshipped (Stubby Kaye and Dolores Gray were the names mentioned) but both agreed Nicholas Parsons was fantastic in the role of Fenric's haunted vicar. After one take of Ace climbing over the roof onto the side of the church that focused a bit too much on her derriere, there was a call of "Cut!" followed by JNT saying "Merry Christmas VT.

There was so many other goodies that I haven't got time to cover in detail. For example, towards the end, Sophie talked about recently meeting Russell T Davies, how she'd been hesitant to contact him at first but he'd replied to her message within a few minutes with "Squeeee!". When they'd met, he'd wanted to hear all about... John Nathan-Turner. That brought the event full circle. Previous BFI events have sometimes turned into a collective appreciation of one person - Patrick Troughton at The Power of the Daleks, say, or Douglas Adams at Shada - this one was closest to that for JNT, and it's about time he got some love, quite frankly. The screening was rounded off with a couple of trailers (including the new Jodie Whittaker one) followed by the customary cocktails in the BFI bar afterwards. On Doctor Who's 56th anniversary, it was nice to raise a glass and think about JNT, and everything he did for Doctor Who.

In Summary:

New Earth is great, Showman is great, The Curse of Fenric is great; it's almost Christmas, and all is happy (at least until Friday 13th December, anyway).

Gridlock

 

Chapter The 86th, which oo-ooh sends me, takes me to the rush hour.

Plot: 
The Doctor and Martha visit New New York in the year 5billion-and-a-bit. Since he was last here with Rose, everyone but those living in the undercity ghettos have died from a virus. The remaining residents have been unaware of this - or at least fiercely in denial of it - for decades, assuming that the government is still around because of some automated systems, and have taken to the motorway in their flying vehicles to escape to a better life. Traffic is so bad that cars take years to travel even one mile, and so the motorists are all unaware or at least fiercely denying that they're going round in circles and will never get to anywhere.

Meanwhile, the cars' choking collective exhaust fumes are feeding savage Macra creatures in the fast lane way down the bottom of the multi-level 'road' system, and they like to destroy any cars that come down that far. The Doctor and Martha get separated and stuck in this system, but the Doctor is transported out by cat nun Novice Hame, and manages to open the motorway roof so all the vehicles can fly up and out, and everyone can repopulate the city. The Face of Boe - who has been keeping things running using his life force - dies, but not before telling the Doctor cryptically that he might not be the last of the Time Lords after all.

Context:

I was feeling knackered in the middle day of the - very sunny - May Day Holiday weekend. Usual pattern for such weekends is as follows: Saturday, go out somewhere, full of enthusiasm; Sunday, stay in watching TV hiding from the sun and other people; Monday, do some gardening, full of rue. This one proved no different. For the middle day, I usually plump for a comfort food watch, an Inspector Morse or Hickson Marple perhaps, or a film like The Princess Bride, but sometimes a Who is what the Doctor ordered. Gridlock probably wouldn't be my automatic choice - the random number generator I use to pick which story to watch next is a useful device, but lacks true discrimination - but it was pleasant enough way to spend 45 minutes. Yet again, though, I couldn't interest anyone in the family to join me as I viewed from my DVD copy.

First-time round:

When Gridlock was first broadcast in April 2007, it followed an FA Cup semi-final on BBC1; if the match had gone to extra time, then Doctor Who would have been postponed to the following Saturday. I remember feeling a small amount of worry that this would come to pass, and relief when it didn't. This demonstrates that I was still watching live, and still very much engaged with every individual show at that point. Our first child (boy, who at the time was still under 1 years old) can't have required putting to bed during the Doctor Who slot as he would the following year; it was in that following year that time-shifting became the default for us, and around this time too that the BBC iplayer launched, and BBC3 was repeating modern Who episodes in heavy rotation. So, the new series 3, Tennant's second year, including Gridlock, was our (and possibly many other people's) last point of regularly watching live as it went out.

Reaction:

Let's get it out of the way at the start: Gridlock doesn't have lots of plot holes, it is one big plot hole. It's really hard to reconcile how - except at the allegorical level at which the story operates - any of the character's behaviour makes sense. How can anyone believe there is still a functioning society in place outside the motorway? If the cars can communicate with each other why not the outside world? If so, why can't the Face of Boe or Novice Hame get a message to the trapped motorway dwellers? Or, even better, open the doors so they can fly out? It shouldn't need them to wait for the Doctor to arrive to sort it all out - what if he'd never come back to New Earth? None of this spoils the story, though, as the production integrates so well - in plot, performance and all aspects of design - to achieve the story's central visual metaphor: we're all trapped in our little boxes, going round in circles, in denial about whether or not there's anything beyond.

The comparable story from later would be Heaven Sent (and Eric Saward's abandoned script for the final episode of The Trial of a Time Lord bears some similarities too); maybe something about the stressful idea-consuming week-in week-out grind of writing Doctor Who inspired these repetitive circular narratives. In Heaven Sent, the circumambulation is a single-occupancy hell escaped only by the unstinting perseverance of the heroic individual, whereas Gridlock is a comment on the society stuck in the system. The motorway residents are joined together across differences - race, class, sexuality - through hope. Yes, it may be a delusional hope, but it's a hope nonetheless. The scene where everyone in the cars stops and sings The Old Rugged Cross, was justly praised at the time, and is still electrifying to watch. It silences the Doctor in his full blown self-righteous rant, trying to wake people up to their situation, but it's not really a pro-religion moment, more a humanist one. This is why it was crucial to have an actor like Ardal o' Hanlon who personifies warmth and friendliness, even under wads of fur and latex.

The consolations of denial are not lost on the Doctor either - there's a fine parallel drawn with his actions in the scenes with Martha bookending the piece: he too lies to his companion (and maybe himself) just so he can wish away an awful truth, the destruction of his planet and people in the Time War. In both scenes, and throughout, Tennant is excellent, bedded in nicely now after his less certain first year. The sequence of him breaking out of the side-to-side tyranny and traversing downward through different cars (accompanied by some great Murray Gold music) is Doctor Who as Ferris Bueller, anarchically making a short cut by jumping over garden fences. This sequence also allowed cheap and efficient world building - a redress of  the single car interior set, and a different set of cast members each time, giving brief intriguing glimpses into the corners of this odd place. Writer Russell T Davies finds a new text for Doctor Who, a voracious consumer of influences over the years, to rip off: the Future Shocks of UK comic 2000AD. It's definitely an interesting new texture. The Macra fit nicely into that world too, and it was a fun gag to bring them back.

It's a shame that this was the final part of a loosely linked trilogy of stories, as it would have been nice to revisit this world again; but, less is more. The show was getting better at using loose sequels and trilogies, plus running dramatic elements, to improve the season arcs and move away from the "Where's Waldo / Wally?" style of the first two years with mentions of "Bad Wolf" and "Torchwood" smuggled in. This third year culminated a lot of hints and plot elements in its 3-part finale, where the meaning of the Face of Boe's dying words was explained.

Connectivity: 

Both contain a talking appendage in a jar disconnected from any corresponding body, and in both stories this appendage falls out of its jar and onto the floor. The cat nuns were a sort of sisterhood too, although there's only one still around by the time of Gridlock.

Deeper Thoughts:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of thingummy doodah. A recent nerdy conversation I had (actually it was in January, where has the year gone?) discussed the inconsistency of Doctor Who episodes, and other genre fare. It's rare to find a season of anything without a few episodes one thinks of as duffers. With Who, it's almost part of its DNA: it started - and has mostly remained - as an ongoing series of stories in wildly different locales with cliffhangers leading from one to the next. Is there enough similarity in its overarching themes and characters that someone could like equally a tale of witches in Shakespearean England and a sci-fi allegory about people stuck on a floating motorway? Maybe, but what about the week after that? And the week after that? Sooner or later it seems likely it'll come a cropper. This is a curse of episodic genre television: variety brings with it risk, but the heightened aspects of the genre demand variety to an extent which a soap, say, doesn't have to face.

My exhibit for the prosecution, though, was Endeavour, the latest and current series within ITV's Inspector Morse franchise. It's a big favourite in our house, and I don't think there has been a single story in its five seasons to date that hasn't reached a high level of quality. You could argue that it doesn't face the same level of pressure to be varied that Doctor Who does, but I'm not so sure. It's at heart an adventure story with an intelligent non-violent protagonist, it's a period piece within a somewhat heightened version of reality, and it makes an effort to showcase a new locale each week; the latest series shown earlier this year featured, amongst others, stories set in a boy's public school, behind the scenes on a horror film, a railway station in the middle of nowhere, and an army base - any one of these could have been the setting for a Doctor Who, and some already have. The two key differences, though, are that Endeavour's seasons comprise a smaller number of feature-length stories, and they're all written by the same person, Russell Lewis.

From the early reports in 2003 and 2004, this is roughly the same structure I was expecting for the new Doctor Who. It was mentioned at points that the number of episodes hadn't been decided yet, and there was an impression given that a Russell (T Davies, in this instance) would be writing them all. I didn't expect feature length stories, but I thought there would be maximum 8 episodes, maximum an hour in length, so around the same commitment in minutes per year as the usual batch of episodes of Endeavour, or Lewis before it. The added value - 13 episodes and a Christmas special! - that we got from new Who was a nice surprise. For its latest season, though, Endeavour did 6 films, rather than its usual 4, of roughly 90 minutes each in length with the ad breaks removed. That's as close as dammit to the twelve 45-minuters in Peter Capaldi's last season. And - though it pains me to say it - Endeavour's run was significantly better.

Coincidentally, it was Endeavour's antecedent, the TV adaptation of Inspector Morse, that brought in the format in the first place; no pissing about with cramming a detective mystery into 50-minutes (like the roughly contemporaneous Poirot adaptations) nor of having multi-episode stories with cliffhangers (like the roughly contemporaneous Miss Marple adaptations), Morse from its debut in 1987, decided that each story was going to be a self-contained and feature-length film. Eventually, Poirot and Marple would follow its lead, as well as pretty much every other detective series and a large majority of dramas. If Doctor Who had still been going into the early 1990s, I don't think it would have remained as a multi-camera episodic show, it would have been done on film as 90-minuters with no cliffhangers (for its only outing during that decade, that was indeed its shape). Despite the small-batch approach, Inspector Morse was wildly inconsistent, both in tone and quality, particularly early on. But that was because it was still written and directed by different people each week, who were given a larger amount of freedom than now. Nowadays, protecting a brand is of higher value than giving talent (including quite a few newbies who worked on Morse) room to play.

Perhaps because of the success of Doctor Who since 2005, the Morse format has become less ubiquitous, and cliffhangers have had a bit of a renaissance. For example: in its later series, Morse sequel Lewis starting doing stories in two parts, separated by a week. It looked less like an artistic decision than a scheduling one, mind, and - particularly the first year they did it - the evidence pointed to them being made as feature-length, then chopped up. But, could it be done now? Could you restructure a Doctor Who season as a series of feature-length films? There's no reason why you'd need to jettison cliffhangers or overarching plots - Endeavour still retains vestiges of these - and it might help to keep things more consistent from story to story. But, you would lose something of the variety of locales, and a few people would get very upset that Doctor Who was on for fewer weeks of the year. That's happening a bit, anyway, though: Mister Chibnall's first year is going to be 10 episodes, but they're all going to be a bit longer than previously. Let's see how it goes when we get to Autumn. Exciting! (Why is this year taking so long?!) 

In Summary:
More fun, and more thought-provoking, than being stuck in traffic.