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!

Friday, 31 January 2025

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith

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

Plot:

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

Context:

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

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. Beyond the handful of blog posts like this one that cover notable spin-offs, I have completed seven Doctors' televisual eras proper (the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 33 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

Thursday, 18 July 2024

The Giggle

Chapter the 304th, is having a laugh, isn't it?!

Plot:
The Doctor and Donna return to Earth to find everyone driven out of their wits. London is a battle-zone with everyone attacking everyone else, believing only they are in the right. UNIT come along in helicopters and take the Doctor and Donna to their new skyscraper HQ; Mel is working for them now, and is reunited with the Doctor, having travelled back to Earth somehow. When a new satellite network was recently connected up, it started broadcasting a signal that affected people, but UNIT have developed a bracelet that gives the wearer immunity. The Doctor traces the source back to 1925, the first ever television picture captured by John Logie Baird of a vent's doll called Stooky Bill. The Doctor takes Donna back to 1925 and they find the toyshop where the doll was bought, and confront the Toymaker, old foe of the Doctor's. After a bit of roaming around the Toymaker's realm, the Doctor and Toymaker play another game against each other, but the Doctor loses. That makes it 'one all' after the Doctor's defeat of him years before. The Toymaker wants to have the best of three rematch in 2023 and disappears. The Doctor and Donna race back after him to UNIT HQ, where he arrives lip-syncing and dancing to the Spice Girls, and killing people. A big powerful superweapon has been used to destroy the new satellite and cancel the giggle signal, but the Toymaker takes it over and zaps the Doctor, as he believes that the third game must be played against a new Doctor. A rare thing happens, though: bi-regeneration, and instead of changing, the Doctor splits in two. The two Doctors beat the Toymaker at a game of catch, and he is imprisoned in UNIT HQ (bound in salt). The new Doctor manages to duplicate the TARDIS. He goes off for new adventures, while the old Doctor stays on Earth with Mel, Donna and the other Temple-Nobles as his surrogate family.

Context:

On the 4th July 2024, there was a general election in the UK. As mentioned too many times to count in this blog over the years, I am a politics nerd, and will usually stay up into the wee small hours watching news coverage of the results coming in. It was no different this time. On a previous occasion - see here - I watched a Doctor Who when there was a lull (after the exit poll and a couple of initial counts, there's usually a gap before the results come thick and fast). I planned to do the same with The Giggle when it had come up for the blog (a tale about conflict between people who each believe only they are right and everyone else is wrong seemed apt somehow). As it turned out, though, the eldest (young man of 18, who'd voted that day in his first ever election) wanted to join me for the coverage. He wasn't keen on seeing The Giggle again so soon, so instead we watched episodes of political sit-coms The Thick of It and Parks and Recreation. A few days later, The Giggle became the first Doctor Who I watched for the blog under a new Labour government; I watched it alone from the BBC iplayer one evening.

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 second completion of an entire Doctor's televisual era, that of the fourteenth Doctor (as portrayed by David Tennant) following the recent completion of Paul McGann's eighth Doctor. People may not think this counts, for two reasons. First, the fourteenth Doctor is played by the same actor as the tenth Doctor and so some might lump them together (and I haven't finished blogging the tenth Doctor's stories yet); second, if you separate out the second incarnation played by Tennant, that incarnation only appears in three stories in total, so perhaps referring to it as a "televisual era" is a bit grand. The narrative in those three stories, though, is at pains to define him as different to the previous Doctor, albeit with the same face, so I'm taking it. Two down, thirteen to go...

First Time Round:

Watched with the whole family (Better Half and three kids, two boys and a girl) on its live broadcast on 9th December 2023. The decorations were up in our house, the Christmas playlist was in full swing, and we were starting to get just a little bit festive. The Giggle was the third of a set of three early Christmas gifts for that year. Unfortunately, it marked the end of the season of goodwill for the Better Half and the series. It's one of those unfortunate twists of fate: Ncuti's performance is exactly like a bloke at work that she doesn't get on with, right down to the use of "Honey" and "Babes" when talking to people (which I find harmless, but I can see how it might not go down well with various generations of feminists who'd just about won the battle to get certain older males to stop calling them "Love" and "Darlin'"). There isn't much that can be done; it's just one of those things. She gave it another couple of chances, persevering with the Goblins Xmas story and Space Babies, but has bailed on anything after that.

Reaction:

There's a lot packed in to this story's running time. Russell T Davies writes as someone who knows he's got one of the most (if not the most) popular Doctor actors in David Tennant for only a short and rapidly diminishing time, and doesn't want to waste a second. The pre-credits scene (like that of the previous special) takes us briefly back in time to inject a small amount of historical setting into the trio of specials that are mostly contemporary or spacey. The setting of 1925 and John Logie Baird's first experiments with television is an interesting one, inspired by research Davies did for the series Nolly that he made just before he took up the Doctor Who showrunner gig again, with the same actor John Mackay as Baird. The very first images ever shot on television were of a creepy doll that looks like something out of a scary Doctor Who episode; it's a gift. The moment where the dummy, burning under the lighting required to capture an image, falls forward and its mouth opens is a great jump scare. Once the idea of a puppet villain was in his head, that sparked the idea of a puppet-master that led Davies to the 1960s vintage Who character of the Toymaker. That decision made, there's very little Stooky action required in the episode ultimately, the repeated image of the face is enough. There's also one wonderful scene of Catherine Tate as Donna attacked by dolls, which displays some wonderful marionette work by the behind the scenes puppet-masters and allows Tate to shine. The story keeps moving on to the next thing, though; the horror changes from Chucky to The Purge: the giggle associated with that early TV image is beamed out by a recently completed satellite network to bring out the worst of humankind. Early scenes of carnage as London fights are very effective, and accompanied by a great and giddy score by Murray Gold. Then UNIT helicopters turn up, and we're already on to the next bit.

This fast movement probably takes us whizzing past any worries that some things don't add up on first watch, but upon rewatching they might give us pause: the Toymaker has godlike powers, can turn people into balloons and bullets into flower petals with just a touch; so, why did he need to wait for the launch of some satellite and connection of some network? Maybe we can chalk this up to the Toymaker's sense of fair play. He can only use our own technology to effect this change as this is all about showing humanity itself. This next section allows for some satire (the politician broadcasting how little he cares about the populace - "No change there, then" says Donna sardonically), some fan service (2000s regular cameo newscaster Trinity Wells is back, shame she's the equivalent of an anti-vaxxer in the world of this story), and drama. This last is provided by Jemma Redgrave as the redoubtable Kate Stewart going feral when she turns off her control bracelet and succumbs to the giggle. It is a tour de force, but it makes me feel slightly uneasy: are we really one dose of anger away from becoming reactionary and bigoted? I hope not, but Davies often does like to present the darker side of humans en masse. The Doctor ("Hating each other? You've never needed any help with that.") and the Toymaker ("And then there are the mind games, oh, the dating and ghosting, the deceit and the control") both get very critical of the human race. Not much time to dwell on this further, though, as the Doctor and Donna zip back to 1925. Almost in passing in this section, Davies also manages to introduce some new UNIT characters (The Vlinx! A handsome soldier!) and reintroduce the character of Mel, finally giving Bonnie Langford's character something of a proper backstory too.

Where were we? Our heroes have found the Toymaker. As the villain of the piece, Neil Patrick Harris is never not outrageous, but never not sinister. He does voice work, costume changes, juggling, puppetry, lip-sync and dancing - it's a very demanding role, and he rises to the challenge. There's physicality in the performance, but also control. The confrontation scene of the Doctor and Donna in the 1925 toy shop is sublime: the Doctor works out who he is facing and worries for his companion, but she won't take any crap from the Toymaker or anyone. The cherry on the cake is the moment of memory where we get a couple of brief colourised clips of William Hartnell and Michael Gough from the story of the Doctor's previous run-in with this god-like gamester. The story as a whole is a gang show with a big cast of UNIT regulars, but these moments of Tennant and Tate together, facing off to the baddie, are the ones that I'll really treasure, with some memorable dialogue ("Dice don't know what the dice did last time, games don't have a memory"). There's more fan service when the Toymaker puts on a puppet show to get Donna (and any audience member) up to speed with the Doctor's recent history. It's not long, though, before the plot and our heroes are on the move again. The dialogue even picks up on this break-neck shuttling ("I'm already running" says Donna with exquisite timing as the Toymaker's realm collapses around them). Back to 2023, the Toymaker attacks (accompanied by the Spice Girls' Spice Up Your Life). The giggle plotline is switched off by a great big plot-device / gun, but the Toymaker takes control of it, and shoots the Doctor. We viewers are wrong-footed; we knew that this was coming, but it's too soon - there are still 19 minutes to go, so it can't be time for Tennant to regenerate quite yet, can it?!

The final section gives Davies the chance to play regeneration as a happy ending for the first time. We don't have to mourn the old Doctor because he splits into two: one David Tennant, and one brand-new Ncuti Gatwa version. It's a novel-ish idea (the Doctor splitting into two versions of himself after a regeneration happened in one of the big Tennant stories in his first time around, after all). But it gives a chance for the two Doctors to interact, and what could be more Doctor Who anniversary special than a multi-Doctor story?! The risk is more that Gatwa is going to get overshadowed than Tennant, I feel, but he holds his own with aplomb. I'm not so sure about the decision to split the clothes between the two Doctors such that Gatwa spends the rest of the story running around in his boxer shorts. Gatwa only getting half a costume in his first episode is made up for by him having the most costume changes of any lead actor in his stories thereafter, I suppose. The Doctors challenge the Toymaker to a game of catch in a well-shot sequence. They defeat the bad guy, split the TARDIS into two (ridiculous of course, but fun) and then the pace slows down to explain why things have been so hectic up to now. This is the Tennant Doctor's chance to retire. He's been rushing around and wearing himself (and herself before that) out, and he needs to stop. There's an interesting idea buried in here that he must have been successful in this, because the Gatwa version is so well adjusted (having done "rehab out of order"). There's also a bizarre section where lots of significant and not so significant moments in the Doctor's history are namechecked (Mavic Chen was a puzzling choice of foe to come to the Doctor's mind at this moment). The Doctor is able to settle down with a family of sorts, the Temple-Nobles, Wilf and Mel, while Ncuti goes off into the Space-Time vortex to new adventures (accompanied by Gold's boisterous and wonderful theme for the fifteen Doctor).

Tennant's last line "I've never been so happy in my life" shouldn't leave a dry eye in the house. The set-up presents problems for the future, though, as every time Ncuti goes back to UNIT HQ in contemporary London, Tennant is out there somewhere and there's no logical reason why he shouldn't be called in to help out. This goes double for Tate who we see during The Giggle haggling for a job at UNIT (in a very funny scene). There's a few other minor blemishes: they make the best of it that they can, but it's very obvious that Bernard Cribbins isn't in the episode; he sadly passed away after filming the scene for Wild Blue Yonder; it's nice to get a reference to Sabalom Glitz in 21st century Who, but if he dies aged over 100, then how old is Mel supposed to be now? It seems odd to make a thing of the TARDIS finally being wheelchair accessible but then not letting Shirley go in. Donna's line asking the post bi-regeneration Doctors if they come in "a range of colours" feels like a microaggression to me, and should have been cut. The negatives are a small fraction compared to all the good stuff crammed in there, though.

Connectivity:

Both The Giggle and The Night of the Doctor were special Doctor Who episodes shown in an anniversary year that ended in a regeneration that was a bit unusual compared to the established norms of the process (bi-regeneration, or guided regeneration using the Sisterhood of Karn's potions).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Duckpond Factor. Serial TV drama, where sequences can get written and rewritten at a fast speed, and editing can leave scenes or lines on the cutting room hard-drive (the modern equivalent of the cutting room floor), will often contain the odd moment that accidentally or expediently doesn't get a clear explanation. Serial TV drama, particularly genre fare such as Doctor Who, increasingly is structured with arc plots that run over the course of one or more seasons, so will often contain moments without a clear explanation where that explanation is being deliberately withheld to pay off in future. For the viewer, and the amateur reviewer like what I am, this presents the challenge of knowing how to tell the difference. What looks like a plot hole might not be a plot hole, it might be something that's going to be covered in an episode's time, or a season's time, or many years into the future. Does one give a story the benefit of the doubt or not? Steven Moffat, showrunner of Doctor Who for most of the 2010s, presented the most difficulties in this regard; he clearly had a long-term plan that played out for the three seasons and specials starring Matt Smith, with questions being raised and answered throughout that time, right up until Smith bowed out in The Time of the Doctor. But he also left loose ends, like any writer. For all those years, certain fans were waiting for an explanation of a comment in the very first story of Moffat's tenure The Eleventh Hour, where the Doctor queries new friend Amy about why there are no ducks in her home town's duckpond. It could have just been a line of dialogue not meant to have any significance, it could have had a scripted explanation that later was cut, or it could have been meant to be left to the audience member's imagination (a popular theory is that the ducks - like Amy's parents - have been sucked out of existence through the crack in time in Amy's childhood bedroom; likely correct, but never confirmed).

When presented with moments in current episodes that have the 'duckpond factor', and knowing that there's at least another season of Doctor Who in the can that could furnish more information about what we've seen thus far, what is one to assume? And what about the extra complicating factor of recent Who embracing the supernatural in its storytelling (something that of course was thoroughly rationalised in the text of the show)? In a story like 73 Yards, for example, one isn't intended to ever fully understand everything that's going on, so it's even harder to know what one should worry about. Of course, some fans worry about everything, and maybe let that leads them to some unnecessary negativity. In an interview in July 2024, showrunner Russell T Davies mentioned that he will likely never reveal why Anita Dobson's recurring character from Ncuti's first run episodes Mrs. Flood keeps breaking the fourth wall, looking right down the camera and seemingly addressing the audience directly. He says: "That hasn’t been explained, and it might never be, frankly... It’s very interesting, within the Doctor Who offices, we know exactly why that happens and yet I’m showing no sign of putting that on screen." This has got a lot of people online hot under the collar, and I can't understand why. He doesn't say that he won't explain who Mrs. Flood is, only that he might not explain why she sometimes acts as a Greek Chorus. Steven Moffat was quick to defend Davies on twitter, explaining that it's something that has happened in Doctor Who consistently through its history (and of course in many a drama or comedy going right back to the ancient Greeks).

Once we know Flood's true nature, we will probably quite easily be able to join the dots for ourselves. In the same interview, and receiving the same online opprobrium, Davies explained that there had originally been a line in The Devil's Chord, explaining how some temporal feedback or similar phenomenon caused the big song and dance number to happen at the end of the story. The explanation was even shot, but they cut it as it was "boring". He speculates that the scene "probably would have made a lot of people happy", but I think he's wrong. If you don't like the song and dance at the end, you'd probably still dislike it even with a one-line fig-leaf to explain it; if you do like it, and you have any kind of imagination at all, you'll almost certainly have done your own mental housekeeping and assumed your own explanation along the lines of what was cut (as I did myself in my blog post for the story, written long before Davies's interview). At least he's explained it in an interview: it's more than the duckpond conspiracists got. The Giggle sees the fourteenth Doctor bow out without a definitive in-universe explanation for why his clothes changed when he regenerated from Jodie Whittaker; nobody seems as bothered by that, or any of the numerous loose ends throughout Who's history. Mind you, the story also contains the wonderful line from the Toymaker to the Doctor "I made a jigsaw out of your history" which could be used to explain literally anything that's happened before or since. Will this make Doctor Who fans satisfied? Probably not. Many fans complained that the other 21st century Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall's stories were over-explanatory. It's almost as if the Doctor Who showrunner job is an impossible one where you can't please people!

In Summary:

Well, that's alright then! (In fact, it was better than alright, it was very good.)

Sunday, 26 May 2024

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).

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.