The Stolen Earth / Journey's End

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

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

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

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

Context:

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

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

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

Fugitive of the Judoon

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

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

Context:

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

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

Smith and Jones

Chapter The 182nd, where Martha loves the Doctor to the moon and back. Unrequitedly.

Plot:

Present day. Medical student Martha Jones goes to work at a London hospital while fielding multiple calls from her family about her brother's party that evening. A strange thin bloke in a long coat wearing sand shoes steps in her way on route and says something about his tie. When she arrives at the hospital for work, the strange bloke with the sandshoes is a patient, John Smith (actually the Doctor, but you knew that); he claims not to have been out of bed when Martha saw him that morning. Then, the rain falling around the hospital starts moving upwards and the whole building is transported to the moon, neutral territory where a group of rhino-faced alien police for hire, the Judoon, can search the hospital for an intergalactic criminal who's in hiding. This criminal is a Plasmavore, who is posing as a patient, a harmless looking old lady called Florence Finnegan. The Judoon are scanning everyone for non-human physiology, but as Florence has drained and assimilated the blood of a senior consultant, she registers as human. This leaves the Doctor in a difficult position as the only alien on the moon.

Avoiding capture by the Judoon, the Doctor and Martha track down Florence, who is upgrading an MRI machine into a weapon of mass destruction. The Doctor tricks her into draining his blood, meaning when the Judoon find her, and - at Martha's insistence - scan her again, she shows up as an alien and is executed. The Judoon troop off, not dealing with the out of control MRI machine or the lack of remaining air. Martha revives the Doctor with her medical training, and he stops the MRI. As everyone starts to collapse from lack of oxygen, the Judoon reverse the process and the hospital is returned to its original position back on Earth. Later, Martha leaves her brother's party to see the Doctor outside, standing next to a police box. He explains to Martha that it's a time machine, and pops back into her timeline and shows her his tie to demonstrate. Persuaded, she joins him for a trip...

Context:

Watched on a recent Sunday afternoon from the DVD accompanied by the whole family (Better Half, and three kids - boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8). Everyone stayed for the duration and watched intently without a peep. The story clearly held everyone's attention, young and old, as it was built to do. This means I have no amusing sarky comments to reproduce here, alas. Later in the week, the Better Half and I were prompted by this watch to discuss Tennant, and how during this period he had a performance tic of gritting his teeth a lot to demonstrate anger, defiance, frustration, you name it, but he doesn't really display that in Smith and Jones, and he's got over this habit in more recent years. So, essentially, we can't fault this story (try as we might!).

First time round:

I first saw this on its debut BBC1 broadcast on the 31st March 2007. I was taking a brief career break from the day job to work on screenwriting at that time, so was probably more relaxed and energised through not having to do the punishing commute to London every day. A few months later, I would return to that routine. This was necessitated by my not having a laptop with which to work from home, as that was something still very new, culturally and technically, in 2007. Later in that year I would get my first work laptop, which I had to share with other people on the team, as there were only a couple to go round. It's worthwhile to remember these details when considering the Doctor Who of the time. In some ways, it feels like David Tennant stopped playing the Doctor very recently, but Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the UK when Smith and Jones was broadcast. I noticed that some of the CGI work of the hospital on the moon was a bit ropey, but I have to cut the story some slack: there were barely smartphones or broadband in 2007, and working at home with a laptop was seen as the futuristic bleeding edge. The gap between then and now is the same as comparing the production values of a William Hartnell story like The Gunfighters to a late Tom Baker one such as The Leisure Hive.

In a break from the recent tradition, Doctor Who's new series was being shown the week before Easter in 2007 rather than launching on Easter weekend itself. Nonetheless, we had people staying over at our place in Hove. The family at the time consisted only of myself, the BH and the eldest (who was not yet a year old at the time). We were joined by a few people mentioned many times before on the blog, Phil, Alex and Rachel. I was, even by my standards, inordinately excited. I showed everyone a red button extra on freeview of a long season trailer, which had some tantalising glimpses from later episodes in the run, and all day Phil and I, before the others arrived, had done a marathon watch of one story per Doctor from 1 to 9 to build up to the broadcast. The story was as generally crowd-pleasing for our 2007 group as it was for the family's latest watch. 

Reaction:

The end of Smith and Jones is a lovely example of action adventure writing, with multiple elements that have been established during the story coming together to create an climax of escalating obstacles - the Plasmavore is defeated and the Judoon are leaving the moon because of the Doctor's cleverness but it's left him almost dead; Martha revives the Doctor, but the hospital's MRI machine has been set to overload threatening the Earth; he manages to avert this and the Judoon take off, but the hospital is still on the moon and everyone in it is running out of air. Setting up all these elements - all of them fun and wonderfully realised, and I'll talk about them individually in a moment - and having them interact and play out satisfactorily to this conclusion would be more than enough to keep the audience delighted, but author of the story Russell T Davies also finds time in 45 minutes to establish a new companion and their family, and reiterates the format of the show for anyone tuning in for the first time. At no time, though, does the action seem too rushed or the elements too bitty and not coherent. Writing Doctor Who is a very specific skill, and is quite hard to pull off even for a writer Davies's calibre. Having written many episodes, including the series openers, for the last two years, he's clearly getting better at it, as some of the flaws of those earlier stories have been eliminated.

Probably the most enduring creation first showcased in this story are the Judoon. Since Smith and Jones they have become a recurring monster for the series, popping up most recently in a couple of episodes of the 2020 Jodie Whittaker series. They are visually interesting, in a deliberately immediate and obvious fashion: space rhinos! The mask and the facial movement are impeccably done too. Beyond that, they have an interesting motivation as police for hire. They aren't exactly bad guys, just a bit aggressive and heavy-handed. The nearest the series had come to such a monster before was probably the Ogrons, who featured in some Jon Pertwee stories, but they were mercenaries who just fulfilled the role of henchmen, a much more common genre favourite. The Judoon are something different, tapping into the fear - at least for Brits, anyway - of police from another country who have actual guns and follow slightly different rules. In Smith and Jones, a couple of UK character stereotypes you can imagine appearing drunk interacting with the local police in a documentary about Brits in Ibiza or the like - the slightly posh ineffectual man, the hot-head - fall foul of these cops from another galaxy. There's also scope for some nice jokes about bureaucracy, like Martha getting a form to claim compensation for wrongful arrest.

As the main alien monsters aren't exactly baddies, this leaves room for there to be other villains in the piece. The Slabs (solid leather creatures that look like black-helmeted motorcycle couriers) fulfill that Orgon henchmen role admirably - though the joke about them being from Planet Zovirax, based on a TV commercial of the time, has not dated well - but the Big Bad here is Florence the Plasmavore. Another of Doctor Who's many takes on a vampire creature, the script uses the blood-drinking in service of the plot to allow for a couple of reversals where Florence is able to pretend to be something she's not and avoid detection. What raises the role from just being plot device is a magnificent performance from Anne Reid. There's just so many great choices I couldn't list them all, but to pick one, there's the delicate and precise way she lifts her hand up to the light and admires the mark the Judoon has put there meaning she's in the clear. Any actor playing a genre villain in something like Who is treading a fine line, and it's easy to fall into something that is too broad or too camp; Reid walks the line, clearly relishing the challenge, and never strays too far from it. The other main guest star is Roy Marsden, who also does good work in a more thankless role, an element of misdirection. He's supposed to look like an imposing menace in counterpoint to Reid's little old lady, only to be revealed to be the victim. Before he dies, though, he gets a nice little moment looking through a window at the surface of the moon and musing on his life.

Other small roles are done well; the creature performers are excellent, and Tennant is on good form. The weakest link is unfortunately incoming new regular Freema Agyeman. She's a good performer, but just not quite strong enough to take on such an important role. The series had got very lucky with Billie Piper, and the following year would cast an experienced actor in Catherine Tate; the companions in this era are, like it or not, joint leads, and so the person cast has to be capable of carrying the show on their own. Freema is not. It's a shame, as the characterisation is interesting on paper. It might, though, have been hard for any actor to pull it off, as a questionable choice has been made to make the relationship between Martha and the Doctor one of unrequited love on her side, and complete obliviousness of his friend's feelings on his. It doesn't do either character any favours. Without having the time to establish a proper meaningful attraction, her feelings just seem to come out of nowhere. Without a confidant for Martha to talk to the Doctor about, the only way to keep foregrounding her feelings is for her to drop obvious hints to the audience. All told it's not one of the best decisions made during this period, and the pair of them are at their best when it's forgotten about as it mostly is in this first story; when Martha's being a resourceful person helping out the Doctor, auditioning for the companion role, it works. One other thing that you can level at the story is that there's no heft: it isn't tackling any weighty themes, but then that wasn't the intention. Davies always made his series openers light romps, and they're all the better for that.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature an alien race whose members are anthropoid versions of Earth creatures (rhinoceroses in Smith and Jones, scorpions in Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror) and each race's spaceship(s) visit a celestial body nearby to Earth (the moon and Mars respectively). It's a bit of a cheat, but Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror also features Judoon (in the trailer at the end for following story Fugitive of the Judoon).

Deeper Thoughts:

It's a Sin-gular achievement. At the time of writing this, Russell T Davies's latest TV mini-series It's a Sin has just finished its weekly UK broadcast run, and has just launched in the U.S. If you haven't already seen it, I thoroughly recommend giving it a go. The series is still available to stream on All4 (all five episodes landed on that service after the first had been broadcast on Channel 4 and broke all sorts of streaming records). I've watched the whole thing three times now, and I think it is the best thing Davies has ever written. It's a Sin (named after the Pet Shop Boys song) is the story of a group of young people sharing a flat in the 1980s, and how HIV/AIDs tragically impacts their lives. Davies is not a perfect writer, of course; there's no such thing. In previous work there have always been flaws - a tendency to favour emotional logic over real word logic, abrupt and somewhat arbitrary endings - but they are absent here. It's also a historically more important subject than usual (although in the last few years he has covered the dangers of populism, abuses or power, homophobic violence, and done a big Shakespeare adaptation, so he's not exactly been 100% focussing on the frivolous). As ever, Davies's strength lies in creating fun, funny characters and establishing an energetic dynamic between them, before letting the darkness poke through the colourful and happy surface.

He does this though while crucially establishing that the colourful and superficial are equally as important and real as the dark and dramatic. I think this is why some people - a very vocal minority online during his tenure as Who Showrunner and since, but also some more traditional commentators too - don't think his Who stories were any good, as they have this false impression that when things are fun or funny it means they can't also be serious. This may be a knee-jerk defensive reaction to the fact that they are online applying literary criticism to a daft family TV show (and I know I'm one to talk!) or it may be broader than that. It is a common mistake wider than Doctor Who to think dark = important. I can't see any other adequate reason, other than this dislike of a particular tone, for quite the level of criticism of Davies's work when he is demonstrably and incontrovertibly the biggest and most important TV writer to ever work on Doctor Who. I don't think there can be any doubt. Every new project Davies creates is an event, and this was true before and after he worked on Doctor Who. He took a big risk with his career working on the programme, and it paid off for him and for us, but it wasn't something he needed to do. He could have gone on as he was creating big and bold authored series or adaptations like The Second Coming or Casanova, but he took an unprecedented decision in 2003. At that time, it was as if Stephen Poliakoff had stopped writing his own stuff to do a reboot of Terrahawks, or Paul Abbott bringing back Juliet Bravo.

Even though I think it's self-evident that Davies is the biggest and most important TV writer to ever work on Doctor Who, let's look at the competition. The people who script edited and wrote Doctor Who from 1963 to 1989 were very talented and produced some great work for the show, and a few of them (Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks) are heroes to me and a lot of fans. They were, though, journeymen of the established episodic television of the time and outside of fan circles their names would not have been known, and they certainly weren't in a position to have an ongoing career authoring their own material. Terry Nation became a big name after working on the show, but wasn't established before working on it in same way Davies was; Nation was a genre man, so - rightly or wrongly - is seen as less prestigious that those working in the echelon of TV that Davies operates within. Similarly, Douglas Adams was a rising star at this time he worked on Who, but only became famous afterwards, and not for TV. There's plenty of objective evidence to suggest that Adams wasn't very good in a televisual medium. In the new series, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss were doing good work before contributing to Doctor Who, but hardly anyone would have known their name and it wasn't 'above the title'. It wasn't 'Steven Moffat's Coupling', for example. Again, both have subsequently become much more well known since contributing their first scripts to the series.

The only person who is in the same league as Davies is possibly Richard Curtis. His reputation, though, is built on work primarily outside TV. Besides, he only wrote one Doctor Who episode once the relaunched show was a firmly established hit, and, at least in the opinion of this reviewer, it wasn't very good. I think sometimes we fans get too close to our favourite programme and need to step back. Russell T Davies writing Doctor Who in the 21st century is the equivalent of Dennis Potter doing the same in the 20th (side note: it's long been a rumour, but may be apocryphal, that Potter did indeed pitch a story to the Doctor Who production office in the early 1960s). Even if you're not convinced, I do urge you to watch It's a Sin. There's some interest for Doctor Who fans in there. One of the main characters, Richie (played brilliantly by Olly Alexander) is an actor and one scene in the fourth episode shows him filming a Doctor Who story in the late 1980s, vaguely based on Resurrection of the Daleks. This isn't Davies putting in an Easter Egg from his favourite show (as he did with the glimpses of K9 and Pyramids of Mars in Queer As Folk for example), it has a real world resonance. As Davies told the Independent earlier this year, it is a tribute to Dursley McLinden, an actor who appeared in a Doctor Who story with Daleks in the late 1980s, and then sadly died aged 30 of AIDs-related illness. Davies: "He became very wonderful in his AIDS activism when he was ill. But to me, he was that boy from Remembrance of the Daleks. That's why I knew I had to write a Dalek scene in It’s a Sin."

In Summary:

Great fun, if a little lightweight (but everything weighs a bit less on the moon, of course).