The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit

Chapter the 280th, which features David Tennant and a demon (not as a demon).

Plot: 

The Doctor and Rose arrive on a Sanctuary base, a futuristic mining operation on Krop Tor, a planet that is somehow in orbit around a black hole. There is a powerful gravitational force in the centre of the planet that the crew are hoping to exploit. The team is eight people, plus legions of Ood, who act as servants. An earthquake causes the section where the TARDIS landed to collapse, and the Doctor and Rose are separated from the ship. An evil force takes over archaeologist Toby Zed, and then all the Ood. Meanwhile the Doctor and science officer Ida Scott travel down into the shaft that has been mined in the planet, and find evidence of an ancient civilisation. The possessed Ood go on the attack, killing many of the base crew. Rose and two other crew members make it to an escape shuttle, along with Toby Zed who appears to be back to normal but is secretly still possessed, and take off. The force that inhabits Toby was previously in the giant beast that the Doctor finds chained at the bottom of the pit. This beast looks like the very Devil and may be the original exemplar upon whom all the other similar entities in the universe were based (or it may not, the script has it both ways, really). The ancient civilisation placed it in the ultimate trap. If it is freed, the gravity force will switch off, and the planet and the Beast will be sucked into the black hole. By projecting itself into Toby, the Beast presents the Doctor with a dilemma. If he switches off the gravity force, the shuttle - including Rose - will disappear into the black hole. If he does not, the Beast will reach Earth. He switches it off, having faith in Rose to work something out. Rose realises Toby is still under the 'fluence and ejects him from the shuttle. The Doctor finds the TARDIS underground, dematerialises and tows the shuttle to safety. He picks up Rose and drops off Ida. He couldn't save the Ood, who all went down with the planet.

Context:

Watched from the BBC iplayer via an Amazon Fire Stick on the big living room TV. I didn't want to eject the current Blu-ray disc and watch the DVD as I was midway through one of the extras on the Snakedance disc of the Season 20 Blu-ray boxset at the time. I was accompanied by all three children (boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11) who are still humouring their Dad by watching old episodes with him on weekends so he can capture their reactions for the blog. Reactions might have been a bit tricky, though, as every one of them started the episode watching another smaller screen (iphones for the eldest and youngest, a Switch for the middle child). I admonished them for this, but that didn't have any effect; interestingly, though, once the story got underway, they all dispensed with their other devices and concentrated on the larger screen in the corner. The Impossible Planet is obviously doing something right. Only the younger two joined me a couple of days later for the second part The Satan Pit, but that might have more to do with the eldest being busy with coursework and revision for A-levels at the moment, rather than any reflection on this story.

Milestone watch: This completes another season of Doctor Who for the blog, the first David Tennant series and the fourth new series run completed (after Matt Smith's series 6 and Jodie Whittaker's series 11 and 13). It is 15th done out of a current, at the time of writing, total of 39 ( the classic seasons 3, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25 also having been completed).

First Time Round:

The original airing of this story (on the 3rd and 10th June 2006) marks an interesting personal point in my appreciation of Doctor Who: it was the very last time that I in some stupid way fumbled the recording of a story onto a home VHS tape. Since my family got their first VHS recorder late in 1985, I had badly recorded many a classic story after that, either on first broadcast in the 1980s or as repeats during the 'wilderness years' when the programme wasn't being made, and up to the first two years of the returned programme. Late on in the 2006 run, I bought a PVR that would record TV to a hard drive (though I still to this day think of it as 'taping' TV - old habits die as hard as that hard drive). That was in time to record Fear Her. Love and Monsters was captured onto tape the week before without any faults. But I missed off the very end of The Impossible Planet, and The Satan Pit was bedevilled (pun intended) by interference - in the South East, there would be many times that analogue TV signals would degrade in certain types of weather. Anyway, it didn't matter so much that the recordings were blemished as I was watching them live anyway (accompanied by the Better Half), plus there were bountiful repeats on BBC3, and the DVDs would be out very soon afterwards. It still irks me, though, even to this day - this is what being a fan is like!

Reaction:

This is the origin story for the Doctor's orange spacesuit. He is given a Sanctuary base suit to wear when descending beneath the surface of Krop Tor with Ida, and is still wearing it when he reaches the TARDIS towards the end of the story. It seems like he keeps it as David Tennant's Doctor then wears the suit or something very similar in 42 and The Waters of Mars. Since Tennant handed over the role, first time round, it has become a rite of passage for everyone thereafter cast in the star role to get their own moment in the suit during their tenure: Matt Smith wears it in Hide, Peter Capaldi in Kill the Moon, and Jodie Whittaker in the most recently broadcast story (at time of writing), The Power of the Doctor. A nice recurring in-joke, perhaps; or, perhaps, there was a subconscious desire to keep remaking this two-part Ood story as they didn't quite get it right first time. This story is a prototype; it's the first - but would not be the last - time since its return that the series did a futuristic action story where a small group of humans in an isolated outpost are at risk from an alien menace, and are picked off one by one. Aspects had been tried in different stories leading up to the The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, but they'd not been all brought together in that precise formula. And it's definitely a formula for both Doctor Who and for the wider genre world (e.g. John Carpenter's The Thing). In this first try, though, the formula isn't quite mixed to perfection.

There were rumours at the time of its broadcast that the story had script problems necessitating extensive rewrites by author Matt Jones and / or Russell T Davies. I don't know how true they were, but the finished product does have some significant pacing issues. For example, the sequences early on where the Doctor and Rose are welcomed by the crew are much too quick and easy, no suspicion seems to have been aroused at all by their mysterious presence; but, the explanation of the planet being in orbit round a black hole is much more long-winded and overly spelled out by comparison. It also takes too long for the Doctor to grasp the 'trolley problem' he's faced with at the end - prevent the villain's escape but sacrifice Rose (and himself). The audience is well ahead of him and precious minutes of screen time are wasted as he catches up. Generally, the creepy moments and the action moments are fine, but all the bits in between drag on too long. Those moments of creepiness are one of the things the story is best remembered for and are mostly effective. I'm not sold on the voice of Gabriel Woolf warning against the act of turning round - it veers towards being humorous, though this type of horror does walk that fine line. But the other scenes with Will Thorp playing the possessed Toby Zed - his skin suddenly tattooed with ancient symbols and his eyes blood-red, his standing outside the base and yet still being able to breathe, his slowly beckoning toward another character - all make the hairs on the back of one's neck stand up.

The two squaddies that work for security chief Jefferson - each played by a supporting artist without any dialogue - don't get names. This is fine for the end credits, but Ida makes a point of introducing everyone in the crew to the Doctor and Rose, but she doesn't include them. This is a major problem that suggests that somewhere in the writing process a full grasp on the world of the story has been lost - there are eight humans alone on a base, and they are still recovering from the loss of their captain; there's no way any one of those eight would not be seen as important enough to be included in introductions. It's annoying as it would be very easy to fix. It also makes it fairly easy, if it wasn't already, to guess that neither squaddie will be making it to the end alive. There are moments that fail to convince with individual characters too; Ida is the scientist on the base, and has been waiting throughout a long and dangerous mission to find out the secrets in the pit, but then for some reason just stands back and let's the Doctor (someone she's known for about five minutes) venture into the unknown instead of her - why? The story also gives in to a periodic temptation for Doctor Who over the years to create a giant monster for the Doctor to confront (as the Doctor confronts the massive beast in the pit here). But from Kroll in the Power of Kroll to the Sun God in The Rings of Akhaten, the problem is the same: the Doctor is obviously just yelling at a green screen; the final face-off can never be tangible because protagonist and antagonist can never be realistically felt to be together in the shot. Problems are compounded in all these examples because none of the creatures can speak, so the Doctor at the climax is reduced to talking to himself.

As if all of these points weren't enough, there is a stifling atmosphere of smugness about the lead characters at this period of the show's life. This is epitomised in the opening gag where they both laugh at the very idea of getting back in the TARDIS in case there might be trouble ahead. Their laughter is very fake, and it's a little bit cringe. This makes me care a little less about the moments where the plot relies on their strong but unspoken love for one another. The guest cast perform better than the regulars here, sometimes despite the script. Claire Rushbrook playing Ida, Shaun Parkes as acting captain Zachary, and Danny Webb as Jefferson, are all doing sterling work throughout. Best of all, and probably most likely to be overlooked, is Silas Carson as the voice of the Ood, a role he's played ever since. Some brief musings on religion and the nature of evil are passingly interesting, I suppose. You can't beat the creation of a great, new recurring Doctor Who creature, though. The Ood are the best thing about these episodes, and it was obvious that they would appear again (and again) in future. Every detail of design and conception is perfect, including Carson's voice work. All the scenes with them, plus the action scenes and creepy moments mentioned earlier, manage to save the story, and make it more than the sum of its parts, despite all those many flaws.  

Connectivity:

Two David Tennant stories in a row that feature his Doctor visiting a base and interacting with characters of both a scientific and military bent.

Deeper Thoughts:

Tunes of past and future: a review of Doctor Who @60 A Musical Celebration, BBC Sounds. Watching a relatively early story after Doctor Who's return to TV like this Ood two-parter, the die-hard fans had not had time yet to take composer Murray Gold for granted. The music for The Impossible Planet condensed into a 3-minute suite of the same name on his first ever Doctor Who soundtrack CD is very powerful, with a mournful viola line giving way to more lush and stirring strings at the end. That release was a compilation of music from the first two series of the relaunched show, and anyone buying it when it first came out - like me, for instance - would probably not have expected Gold to still be composing music for the eight series after those two, as well as many specials in between. Music he made towards the end of that first tenure is amongst his best stuff too. This was demonstrated at the anniversary concert in Hoddinut Hall in Cardiff on 28th September 2023, when the track chosen to be the final number (bar the obligatory encore of the Doctor Who theme music) was The Shepherd's Boy, the magnificent climactic cue from the late Peter Capaldi episode Heaven Sent. This concert - featuring the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBC Singers conducted by Alastair King - was billed as a celebration of 60 years of Doctor Who, but mostly covered Gold's work, which has been used for many a concert and prom before, so was well prepared for another live outing. Many favourites of those events were played again here (I am the Doctor, All the Strange Strange Creatures, This is Gallifrey, Doomsday, The Long Song, Vale Decum, and more).

I wasn't there in person, alas, but BBC Sounds had the full concert available from the 12th October 2023, and BBC Radio broadcast it on Sunday the 15th of that month. Unlike the previous proms and concerts, this was smaller and focussed more on the music, without creature performers walking amongst the audience or appearances from stars of the show. There were though still interviews between performances, with presenter Jo Whiley talking to various people who worked behind the scenes on Doctor Who in different eras. Murray Gold was one of those, and got the biggest laugh of the night from the assembled audience by answering Whiley's question about whose idea it was initially to have musical motifs for characters with "Er... Wagner's?!" It wasn't quite all about Murray's music and mirth, though. The classic series years were represented by a medley performed by the Radiophonic Workshop's Peter Howell and Mark Ayres with orchestral accompaniment, It covered similar - if not perhaps exactly the same - ground as did the pair's performance at the concert for the 50th anniversary, including amongst others Space Adventures (the 1960s Cyberman theme), snatches of The Sea Devils score, and music from City of Death, Howell's The Five Doctors, and Ayre's magnificent final cue from The Curse of Fenric; it's always a rare pleasure to hear that one performed by an orchestra. Music that came after Gold's first tenure was represented by a suite of Segun Akinola's cues for the thirteenth Doctor Jodie Whittaker's era. This was the first time that any of this music had a concert performance, and it sounded great. I hope we don't have to wait another ten years to hear either of these non-Gold selections live again.

Three showrunners with Jo Whiley

Howell, Ayres and Akinola were all interviewed on stage during proceedings, and it was nice to hear from all of them. Akinola was accompanied by Jodie era showrunner Chris Chibnall. All three showrunners of the 21st century were on stage at different points. Steven Moffat expounded on the differences between his two Doctors: Matt Smith's Doctor could do any terrible action and would still be forgiven, Peter Capaldi's Doctor could be given any number of jokes to say and he'd still seem fearsome. It was once and future showrunner Russell T Davies that was the most interesting, though, as he holds secrets of what's to come. Whiley tried to tease these out of him, a game she admitted she's been playing for many years without success, but he and Gold had come with a few previews for us nonetheless. For the first time were heard three pieces of music that will be featured in stories in 2023 and 2024: new companion Ruby Sunday's theme "The Life of Sunday", Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor's theme "Fifteen", and the 2023 reworking of the main Doctor Who theme. The first and last of these seemed to be harking back. The new main theme seems to pull together elements of every theme tune arrangement used in the last 60 years, appropriate for an anniversary year. The Life of Sunday echoes some themes, particularly from early on in Davies and Gold's time on Doctor Who. It's a waltz, like Gold's theme for Cassandra used in the second 2005 episode, The End of the World; assuming the orchestration is going to be the same, it features a prominent piano melody early on, exactly like Rose's theme from the start of the relaunched show, and there are definite similarities with Martha's theme too. It ties Ruby musically to that companion lineage.

The Ncuti Gatwa "Fifteen" theme meanwhile seems to be looking to the future. It is subtly different to my ears than anything Gold has written for Who before, certainly as the main character's motif, using the whole orchestra percussively to provide a relentless driving rhythm. Broadcaster and Doctor Who fan Matthew Sweet tweeted about it being similar to something Michael Nyman might have composed, and I can hear that. Respondents to Sweet's tweet also highlighted what I'd thought about the melody that plays over that rhythm, that it is reminiscent of the theme to an exciting 1960s ITC film show like Ron Grainer's theme for The Prisoner. It's an instant favourite and leads to some exciting speculation: Ncuti's Doctor feels like he's going to be a force of nature. Davies teased a little in his onstage interview; he may have been joking, but talked confidently about an idea for an episode for a fourth, i.e. 2027 series, saying that the third was already planned out (the first is in the can, and the second according to Davies quoted elsewhere is more than half scripted). Other interviews recently have seen him talk about his and the BBC's grand ambitions for Doctor Who, and the increase in budget it's getting. I'm reminded of the theory I've expounded upon before (see the Deeper Thoughts of The Mysterious Planet and Spyfall posts for more details) that the new series followed a superficially similar progression to the classic series but at an accelerated rate. If Jodie Whittaker's era was the equivalent of Sylvester McCoy's (new direction breaking from the past before embracing some old monsters from the second year, involving more socially conscious writing from a mostly new set of writers, less popular than it had been), then are we approaching the point where the cycle starts again? A period where the show's been off air, followed by a Russell T Davies re-launch with more budget available to it than previously? Certainly sounds familiar. Not long to wait now.

In Summary:

When it's G-Ood it's devilishly g-Ood.

The Idiot's Lantern

Chapter the 265th, where London police detain people who've committed no crime to protect the image of a coronation (could never happen in real life, of course).

Plot:

The Doctor and Rose travel to north London on the 1st June 1953, the day before the coronation of Elizabeth II. In a terrace street, they notice that too many households have TV aerials for the time, and then witness a police raid, where someone is forcibly removed from their home and bundled off in a car. They talk to a family living near to the raid, the Connollys. The family are clearly hiding something, and the Doctor and Rose sense that the mother and teenage son, Tommy, want to talk, so they distract the husband by attacking his values from the lofty vantage point of their more modern assumptions. Ha, ha, look they're gratuitously undermining what they know he holds dearest, and telling him he's named the UK flag wrong (he calls it a Union Jack, which Rose says he's not allowed to unless it's flown at sea, but actually she's incorrect). Anyway, it turns out people - including Tommy's Gran - have been rendered faceless and catatonic by forces unknown. The police arrive and cart Gran off; the Doctor pursues. Rose notices a crackling force emanating from the Connolly's TV set, and investigates the nearby shop that provided it, Magpie Electricals. An alien entity called the Wire that lives in the TV signal has taken over Mr. Magpie, and is using his television sets to eat people's brains and also faces (somehow).

The Doctor tracks down the hapless police inspector ordering the raids, and finds he has no real plan and is just keeping the blank-faced people in a holding pen to avoid any disruption to the coronation. Another victim is brought in; it is Rose. The next morning, the Queen is on her way to Westminster Abbey, and the Wire is planning to feast on everyone watching the ceremony on TV. The Doctor goes to the Connolly's house again, and Tommy agrees to help him. Tommy's Mum kicks the Dad out of the house when she finds out that he is the one that has been informing the police of new victims of the Wire and getting them taken away. Tommy and the Doctor go to Magpie's shop with the inspector. The Wire attacks, blanking the inspector, and Magpie disappears off with the Wire stored on a portable TV that Magpie has made under instruction from his extra-terrestrial master. The Doctor uses his sonic to free himself and Tommy, and they give chase to the nearby Alexandra Palace transmitter. They defeat the Wire before it can boost itself into everybody's home. All the blank-faced people return to normal. The Doctor and Rose attend a street party, and encourage Tommy to make peace with his Dad.

Context:

I overrode the usual randomised method of picking the story this time. In the UK, the King's coronation was fast approaching (the day Chas gets a new hat, as I was calling it). I didn't want anything to do with the event, and had no plans to watch. I'm resolutely anti-monarchist, though I know some people appreciate the pageantry or the history of such events. I don't like the cost to the public purse, and particularly don't like the police state tendencies such events bring out (beloved local institute the Metropolitan Police tweeted in the run up that their "tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low" and on the day - as they'd just been given powers to stop and search anyone if they believed that person was even thinking of protesting - their bar for what constituted disruption proved to be even lower, the charming and worthwhile bunch of people). Anyway, Doctor Who Magazine did a cover cashing in on the royal event for its current (at the time of writing) issue, which reminded me there was a coronation-themed Doctor Who story, and one I hadn't yet blogged. Enter: The Idiot's Lantern. I could watch this on the 6th May instead of the nonsense dominating the live TV schedules that I wasn't interested in. I proceeded to do just that from the DVD, accompanied by all three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) in the afternoon, after the actual crowning but when the TV was still full of post-match analysis that nobody in the household was interested in. All three children had a lot of questions about the plot, which I think is a sign that there are script issues (will go into that in a bit more detail in the Reaction section below).

First Time Round:

I watched this live on its debut BBC1 broadcast on the 27th May 2006 accompanied by the Better Half, who was in the later stage of pregnancy with our first child at the time (he'd be born a month later). I remember thinking that this story and the two Cyberman episodes before it had seen a bit of a slump in quality from the show compared to the earlier stories that year, which themselves were slightly less good than those shown the previous year (Doctor Who's relaunch with Christopher Eccleston and its first modern Christmas special introducing David Tennant). I put this down to difficult second album syndrome, and trusted it would get better (and it did). The Idiot's Lantern was probably my least favourite story of the year, alas. Yes, I liked Fear Her and Love & Monsters much more, sue me!   

Reaction:

One question that each one of the kids asked during the final act of The Idiot's Lantern was some variation on the theme of "Where's the Dad?". It's a question that writer Mark Gatiss might not have thought anybody would be asking; compels me though. Eddie Connolly is thrown out of his home at a moment when everyone else is inside intently watching the coronation, so he can't exactly drop in on anyone else, and the streets of Muswell Hill are presumably deserted. Saving face is important to him, so what does he do? Were the pubs open, and would he have dared show his face in the local anyway? Maybe he just wanders the streets, or heads south towards Westminster Abbey to join the crowds. It's not a great sign that this was a more intriguing question to those watching than anything about how the Doctor and Tommy would defeat the Wire and get Rose's face back. What could be the reasons for this? Well, the Dad is presented for the first two-thirds of the running time as being a key character (the actor playing him, Jamie Foreman is second credited guest star) and he's the only one of Tommy's family not in jeopardy. Will he redeem himself by saving them? Well, no, he won't, he'll just disappear completely for a long period, turning up only after the story climax. The author presumably intended the character to be unsympathetic such that nobody would care what had happened to him. Unfortunately, the script pulls its punches (perhaps literally) about Eddie's behaviour to the point that he doesn't do anything that bad.

The scene where the Doctor and Rose barge into Eddie's home, not knowing whether he's done anything wrong, and proceed to humiliate him in front of his family, makes them look like the smuggest of smug gits. The whole season has them guilty of exuding smugness, but it's at it's absolute worst in this story. It's particularly annoying that Rose's pedanticism about the Union Flag is flat out wrong (it's perfectly acceptable to refer to the UK flag as the Union Jack whether one is on land or sea). Connolly Senior's attitudes towards his wife and child are only ever demonstrated to be, if anything, a little softer than would be the average attitude of a man in his place and time. He's overbearing and a bit patriarchal, yes, but it's 1953. The big accusation from the script is that Eddie has been informing on his neighbours and getting them taken away by the police. This is highlighted as something akin to Stalin's Russia, but it's not. One hapless police officer was just doing something to avoid panic during the coronation, and that police officer - the one who actually was forcibly removing the affected from their homes and locking them up - is presented much more heroically, and gets to team up with the Doctor to confront the villain. Simply put, the Eddie that is on screen doesn't deserve the treatment he gets, and the script eventually acknowledges this with the 'have cake and eat it' end where the Doctor and Rose encourage Tommy to make peace with his Dad. Jamie Foreman turns in a slightly duff performance probably because what's on the page doesn't add up, and the theme has to be hammered home with the far too on-the-nose speech from Tommy about fighting against fascism.

As the intention of the story was to show the impacts on one family's domestic set-up, the family story being fumbled in this way damages everything around it catastrophically. If the family story had worked, it wouldn't matter that the villain is static and scenes featuring her are talky. Maureen Lipman is good as the Wire (at least when she's being calmly menacing, it all goes a bit too large when she gives it the "I'm Hungry" bit), but because of the nature of the character, she can't interact properly with anyone else. It really needed the Ringu moment of her character emerging from the TV into the real world, corporeal at last. The nearest the story gives us is her going briefly from black-and-white to full colour, which is a nice moment but doesn't help the character become more tangible a threat. The modus operandi of the Wire doesn't make any sense either. Feasting on the electrical impulses from the brain leaving people catatonic, that fits, but why would that leave people with faces without any features? And why would the faces end up on TVs in the Magpie Electricals shop (as good a visual as that is)? Another thing that the eldest kept asking throughout was why there were so many dutch angles, and I have absolutely no idea. It doesn't evoke the era depicted either as it would have been captured in reportage or the cinema of the time. I can't help but think it was an attempt to make the somewhat lacklustre material seem more interesting. A misfire then, and a bit of a shame, but the stories would get better as the season progressed (yes, including Fear Her and Love & Monsters - sue me!).

Connectivity:

The villains in both The Idiot's Lantern (The Wire) and The Invasion of Time (Vardans) can exist as wave forms and travel by broadcasting themselves. The investiture of the Doctor as Gallifrey's president in the Tom Baker story is very like a coronation, with the Doctor having the Matrix circlet placed on his head ceremonially.

Deeper Thoughts:

Musical Who. The original idea for the story to fill this slot was more aural than visual. The equivalent to the Wire would have transmitted itself through a catchy 1950s song, rather than a TV picture, and Magpie would have run a record shop rather than an electrical store. Lead writer and exec producer Russell T Davies put this idea to Mark Gatiss as 'Mr Sandman', and Gatiss did at least one draft (named 'Sonic Boom') before things were reworked and early TV, Ally Pally and Elizabeth II's coronation were introduced. A vestige of this idea remained in what made it to screen with the Doctor and Rose at the start in their 1950s outfits talking about Elvis and Cliff Richard. There's also an echo in a later Gatiss script, Sleep No More, which uses the song Mr Sandman to underscore the transmission of a villainous signal from mind to mind (but that's more to do with a sleep acceleration process than the song itself, which is just an extra bit of creepiness layered on top). Aside from that, the idea of a more music-focussed episode was lost. Over the years, Doctor Who has sampled almost every kind of genre and fashioned them into effective stories; it's never, though, done a full-blown musical. Well, it's never done a full-blown musical on TV, I should say. It's done a musical on audio (Big Finish's The Pirates is a riff on Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, HMS Pinafore particularly) and on stage (The Ultimate Adventure, a late 1980s touring production starring first Jon Pertwee then Colin Baker featured a few tunes). On TV, though, there have been flirtations but the series has never gone all the way.

As with all Doctor Who's TV subgenres, the experimental and adventurous storylines of William Hartnell's era got there first. As something of a trial for a story using musical interludes, there was The Gunfighters in Doctor Who's third season towards the end of Hartnell's tenure. It frequently punctuates the action with a song that complements the non-musical action in presenting the plot. It's one song rather than a variety of different ones, but the lyrics do keep changing. It's usually not sung by any of the characters, instead sounding out as a voiceover by a narrator performer who does not appear elsewhere in the action. The companion characters of Steven and Dodo do sing it in one scene, but naturalistically, tthe characters really performing a song to other characters in the scene. There seems to be a barrier that the series cannot transgress about showing characters break out into song super-naturalistically, when the song may be representative of thoughts or a conversation, or maybe representative of an in-story world where everyone does break out into song occasionally and nobody bats an eyelid. This is a musical theatre mainstay, but seems a step too far for Doctor Who. This may be because the show already incorporates a lot of artifice by its very nature, and incorporating a true musical theatre style on top of all that may push things over the edge, or over the top. It could though just be because The Gunfighters wasn't a particularly popular story, and so nobody wanted to do something similar again. The nearest the classic series came was many years later with the music heavy 1950s-set story Delta and the Bannermen, which had some naturalistic musical performances of era contemporary songs, and one original non-diegetic song.

From 2005 on, the regular composer for the new series years Murray Gold got into the habit of writing one or two songs a year as well as every episode's incidental music. They were always presented as diegetic and naturalistic, though. They might be played in by a DJ (Love Don't Roam in The Runaway Bride), or a band (The Stowaway in Voyage of the Damned) or as a full-on Broadway number, albeit within the universe of the story (My Angel Put The Devil In me in Daleks in Manhattan). When Matt Smith took over from David Tennant as the Doctor, things edged towards stepping over that naturalistic line (the character played by Katherine Jenkins in A Christmas Carol sings Abigail's Song, but who in the world of that story is performing the stirring orchestral accompaniment?). The closest the new series has come to a full-on musical is probably the story The Rings of Akhaten, the plot of which revolves around performing a big production number involving a chorus of pretty much all the guest cast. In more recent years, things have tailed off. Peter Capaldi's Doctor often used to strum an electric guitar, but Gold wrote no original songs for him to play; then, the composer for the Jodie Whittaker era Segun Akinola seemingly had no inclination towards songwriting. With Gold returning to the series from this years specials onwards, has the time finally come for Doctor Who to go the whole hog with a musical episode? Buffy, a major inspiration for the new series when it returned in 2005, famously blazed a trail with the episode Once More With Feeling, and that was over 20 years ago now. Musical stars Jinkx Monsoon and Jonathan Groff have both been recently announced as appearing in Ncuti Gatwa's first series. Could it be? Only time and time signatures will tell...

In Summary:

Some TV maybe does rot your brain!

Tooth and Claw

Chapter The 222nd, where things get a bit hairy for the Doctor and Rose.

Plot:

The Doctor and Rose are aiming for Sheffield in 1979, but instead arrive in Scotland in 1879. Immediately, they run into Queen Victoria and her military escort who have been forced to cross country by coach because of a tree on the railway line. The TARDIS team accompanies them to the nearby Torchwood house, where the Queen will stay the night. The house, though, has been taken over by a local brethren of monks, who worship a werewolf alien that crash-landed on Earth hundreds of years ago, and has passed from host to host since. The monks want the Queen to be the next host, the Empire thereby to fall under Wolf control, and have contrived that she should be there on the night of a full moon. They take everyone else hostage to pressurise lord of the manor Sir Robert MacLeish to keep up the pretence; he shows the Queen, Doctor and Rose around the house. His father was a good friend of the now dead Prince Albert, and they often talked about the local legends of the wolf. Meanwhile, the monks have drugged all the soldiers, and release the creature. It stalks its prey for a bit, picking off members of the household and finally Sir Robert, who buys the Doctor time. Sir Robert's father and Albert had believed the legends to be true, and had contrived the means to destroy the wolf in the house. The observatory's telescope plus the Koh-I-Noor jewel that the Queen carries with her can be used together to focus moonlight on the creature and destroy it. Once the Doctor has done this, the Queen knights him and Rose, and then banishes them. She vows to set up an institute named Torchwood, after the house, to protect her empire against aliens.

Context:

A Friday night after a week of work, a glass of wine in hand and the new series 2 volume 2 DVD in the player, I watched Tooth and Claw on my own (though each one of the children wandered into the living room at points during my watch, none stuck around). I can't remember now why I only bought the individual 'vanilla' DVD releases of this particular series (brought out with three or four stories to a disc periodically through the summer of 2006, with the big series box-set with extras coming out in November, ready for Christmas). The previous year, swept up in the excitement of the return of Doctor Who, I had got both the vanilla volumes and the big box-set (though the latter was a Christmas present, I had heavily hinted to the Better Half that it was my yuletide desire); from 2007 onwards I waited and just got the box-set each year. Was I expecting to get series 2 as a Christmas present again, but was disappointed? Or was I just conscious of saving pennies as we had a baby to look after by late 2006? Alas, I just know one day I'm going to crack and buy it, just to complete the collection. 

First Time Round:

Watched live on its debut BBC1 broadcast in the UK on 22nd April 2006, with the Better Half (that was the whole family back then, our now gangly 15-year-old eldest was but a bun in the oven). We were in our old house in Hove (we'd move out the following year once the family got larger), watching a bloody enormous cathode-ray tube widescreen SD TV, while taping the story onto a VHS tape in an honest to goodness video recorder. Smartphones, the cloud, on demand streaming services, even owning an HD TV: all these things were almost science fiction concepts to us back then. It is nearly 16 years ago, I suppose, almost as long as the previous gap between Tooth and Claw and the final Sylvester McCoy episodes of the classic era. The only thing I remember of the first watch from all that time ago is thinking, like everyone else at the time no doubt, that the opening scene of the red-robed monks doing formation high kicks and jumps looked like the latest in the BBC's 'Rhythm and Movement' idents that accompanied the continuity announcements before programmes in 2006. These would always include multiple people in some balletic display and would always feature red elements, usually in the costuming. If it wasn't a deliberate nod by the programme makers, then it was a very silly choice!

Reaction:

There's a moment three quarters of the way through this story where the on screen image is as a split screen effect; the Doctor is in close up on the left-hand side of the screen, and the werewolf the other side of a wall appearing on the right. Maybe this was to compare these two aliens, to show that the Doctor - just like the beast - has a divided nature, with as much darkness as light, and with those two forces in a constant fight against one another. Or it could just have been put in because it looks cool. This is the difficulty for this particular story; it's one of the first few stories at the beginning of the series, which - the template set even at this early stage after the show had returned - tended to be the lighter and fluffier stories; but, it's also putting in place wider overarching narrative elements of the show by looking at some quite dark and mature themes. The main objective is the setting up of Torchwood, which will be the running theme for the series, but also then for a spin off show in the making, with a rationale of imperial xenophobia. This puts the Doctor in a difficult position in any future conflicts, as he - in a very true-to-life fashion that would become more politically relevant in the UK a decade later - is mistrusted by authority due to his 'foreigner' status, even when acting as an ally. Not much is ever made of this, though. In the finale of the series, there's a bit of conflict between Torchwood and the Doctor, but it's soon forgotten when Cybermen and Daleks start appearing, and it's never resolved in a satisfactory manner.

This leaves little Tooth and Claw essentially to be a standalone exploration of the Doctor not taking danger seriously enough and conflicting with establishment forces. This it does quite efficiently. The reversal of Queen Victoria knighting and then banishing the Doctor and Rose is effective, and even somewhat shocking. Pauline Collins as the Queen plays it well, as she does throughout. The relationship between the TARDIS travellers and the Queen has been played mainly for laughs up to this point; the scene cuts through the complacency in the regular cast set-up; they do seem awfully smug in this story, but this is clearly intentional. Mind you, they seem smug in other stories too, where it might not be so intentional; I'm not sure that this story effectively creates a free pass for that. The Doctor and Rose clearly haven't learned any lesson, as at the end they're still laughing and joking away about the royal family being werewolves. Perhaps this is the pride that will lead to the fall of their separation at the end of the series in Doomsday; it works just about as part of the a foreshadowing of that. It's quite a bit of heavy lifting for a story that is essentially just reusing the template set by the previous year's The Unquiet Dead. Instead of Dickens in Wales at Christmas with ghosts, it's Queen Victoria in Scotland at full moon with a werewolf. If they'd rested on their laurels rather than tweaking things, the next year could have had Gladstone in Northern Ireland on Halloween night with vampires. Probably best we didn't see that.

Beyond the wider plotting, the episode itself is a nice runaround. The CGI on the werewolf is particularly good (full disclosure: this was worked on by someone who's a friend, Chris Petts, but I think the work speaks for itself anyway). The (practical?) effect of the werewolf host's eyes is very creepy too. All the performances are good, though nobody apart from Pauline Collins gets that much to do; Derek Riddell has a couple of nice moments, though the climax of his narrative arc where he sacrifices himself for the greater good would be more impactful if every other minor guest character didn't seem to be doing a noble sacrifice also. The score is one of the best examples of Murray Gold's early Who period. Sets, locations and costumes are all effective at creating period. The ending is satisfying too, utilising the different elements hidden in plain view around the house. There's some funny lines, and some nice quieter moments like the Doctor and the Queen talking about grief.

Connectivity: 

Both stories see the Doctor plan a trip to witness a specific moment (in Time Flight it's the opening of the Great Exhibition, in Tooth and Claw it's Ian Dury at the Top Rank Sheffield on the 21st November 1979), and both contain references to knights of the realm (Sir Robert MacLeish is one of the characters fighting the werewolf; Sir John Sudbury, a UNIT big wig who contacts Heathrow).

Deeper Thoughts:

Tea and scones with Liz Two. One might think that a UK television programme that started in the 1960s and that regularly visited past periods would have a lot to do with that typical school room history topic of the kings and queens of Britain and England. It's interesting to note, though, that this is only very rarely an area of focus for the show. In the first season in 1963 / 64, there were stories set in prehistory, post-revolutionary France, 15th century Mexico and one accompanying a European traveller in 13th century China. It was hardly a parochial approach, positively globe-trotting in fact, and though none of the periods were exactly obscure, it still went beyond the scope of the O-level curriculum. Into the second year of the show, the approach was similar, with stories set in ancient Rome and 12th century Palestine during the crusades, plus a brief stopover on the Mary Celeste in the 1800s. It was only in the final story of that second season that the TARDIS landed in the past of the British Isles. Though that story (The Time Meddler) was set in 1066 before the Normans conquered, and made a brief mention of King Harold, it was set far away from any royal court or encampment. The only King of England with a significant speaking role in the entire classic series is Richard The Lionheart (played by Julian Glover) in The Crusade, and the only queen was Elizabeth the First who appeared for a brief gag (watched by The Doctor on a time-space TV) in The Chase.

After this, the third season continued on as the first two had, with historical adventures in ancient Troy, ancient Egypt, the old West of America, and a visit to a more obscure period of French history (in The Massacre). From the fourth season, the historical settings fell out of rotation, and thereafter tended to just be used occasionally as window dressing for an adventure or sci-fi plot. This is how it remained in the 20th century. If a historical period was visited, it was almost certainly an out of the way place, far from anyone famous let alone anyone with power. I wonder why this should be? The new series has been a bit more willing to include monarchs in its historical 'celebrity' guest appearances, but even then it's been sparing: over the years, as well as Queen Victoria, there's been two appearances of Elizabeth the First, and one of King James the First. That's it. In all those new series appearances, the monarch is away from court, usually travelling with a smaller retinue so that too many protocols can't interfere with the adventure. Is it just that courtly intrigue isn't that interesting or compatible with Doctor Who? It's done quite well in The Crusade, but even then that was just for an episode; for the story as a whole it wasn't the main focus (which was sword fighting, really). The other attempt at showing the Doctor dealing with a monarch's whims and courting favour was The King's Demons, which wasn't 100% successful to my mind, and the King John depicted therein was a fake one anyway, so it doesn't fully count.

It's not just the historical stories that could feature a UK sovereign, of course. The current queen Elizabeth the Second has had a definite presence in Doctor Who over the years; despite being (rarely) featured, there's been lots of teases in scripts. Early on, though, a key factor of the show was that it couldn't reach the contemporary time zone, and when Jon Pertwee was brought down to Earth with a bump it was in a near future. So, it is only from Tom Baker onwards that Liz Two is included. At the end of Baker's first story Robot, the victorious Doctor is invited to dine with Her Maj at Buckingham Palace, but decides to scarper off into time and space instead. It's interesting that there was no attempt to suggest a King Charles in that story, to better indicate the near future setting; they had, after all, done this with Prime Ministers (forecasting a PM called Jeremy in Pertwee's time, and a female one in Baker's). Perhaps this felt disrespectful as it's not a job you get voted out of, or perhaps it's too risky to guess when an enduring monarch will no longer be on the throne (Battlefield predicted a king by the time of its 1990s-ish setting, and that obviously turned out to be wrong). There were visits to her coronation in The Idiot's Lantern, and her silver jubilee in Mawdryn Undead, there was a near miss where Sylvester McCoy's Doctor and Ace almost meet her (or someone who looks like her) at Windsor Castle in Silver Nemesis. She and the rest of the royal family were impacted by the blood control of the Sycorax in The Christmas Invasion, but the queen would nonetheless not leave Buckingham Palace two years later (although in the real world she doesn't spend Christmas there). This was in Voyage of the Damned, when she finally appeared and even got a line, thanking the Doctor and wishing him a Merry Christmas after he prevented the Starship Titanic from crashing into her.

In Summary:

Tooth and claw is pretty sharp and biting for one in the slot that's usually for the fluffier stories.

The Girl in the Fireplace

Chapter The 194th, which features tragic star-crossed, and time-portal-crossed, lovers

Plot:

The Doctor, Rose and Mickey arrive on a spaceship in the 51st century; there's no sign of the crew, and the engines are running full pelt even though the ship is not moving. This is because they are powering various portals opened across the ship that lead to other times and places, space-time events along one specific individual's life; the person being Madame De Pompadour. The Doctor first enters her life when she is a young girl nicknamed Reinette via a revolving fireplace into her bedroom. A creepy clockwork robot is hiding under her bed, but the Doctor sees it off. After checking in with his travelling companions on the ship, the Doctor returns via the fireplace but finds that many years have passed for Reinette; she leaves for a pressing engagement but not until she's given the Doctor a big snog, and he works out that she is the famous historical personage, one day to become mistress of French King Louis XV. Underneath their masks, the clockwork figures that are stalking Reinette, and making life difficult for the TARDIS team too, are the ship's complement of wind-up droids. Their circuits a bit scrambled, they have repaired the ship using the only components to hand: the body parts of the crew who the droids have slaughtered previously.

The droids are wanting only one more part: the command circuit, i.e. the brain of Madame De Pompadour. Why her? The Doctor can't work it out, but he does know the droids are trying to find her when she's 37 years old as that's the same age as the ship. The droids disable all the portals to prevent the Doctor following, and attack the palace at Versailles when Reinette has reached the right age. The Doctor breaks in by crashing through the portal - a mirror - on a horse that had previously wandered onto the ship, and saves everyone. He's now stranded in the 18th century with no way back. Reinette shows him the original fireplace through which he first came into her life; she has had it transported to the palace years before, breaking its link with the ship meaning it was not disabled when the others were. The Doctor reactivates it. Through all their interactions, the Doctor and Reinette have developed some kind of mutual attraction, and the Doctor invites her to travel with him. Telling her to pack a bag, he - like an idiot - pops back to the ship. When he returns though, the obvious has happened: time has passed again and Reinette has died. He reads a letter she left him and is heartbroken. Leaving with his two 21st century friends, he misses that the name of the spaceship was the SS. Madame De Pompadour, explaining why the droids were focussed on her.

Context:

I watched this from the DVD on a Sunday afternoon with all the kids (boys aged 14 and 11, girl aged 9), with the Better Half coming in for brief stretches too. It's rare that everyone is present for a Doctor Who story any more, but this one has David Tennant who is usually a draw. It was generally a crowd-pleasing episode, with mostly hushed watching without comment throughout (always a good sign). The  scare near the beginning with the clockwork droid's arm snatching at the Doctor from under the bed made everyone - even the cynical teenager - jump. Everyone saw the sad ending coming; the youngest said "I think he waited too long - she's died" in advance of the scene that confirms this indeed to be the case. I believe the telegraphing is intended by the script, though: Reinette's death is presented as an inevitability to the audience, if not the Doctor.

First Time Round:

I first saw this the day after it was initially shown on BBC1 in May 2006. It was the first time since the series had returned the previous year that I had elected to miss the live broadcast of a new Doctor Who episode. I'd missed The End of the World, second episode of Christopher Eccleston's 2005 series, go out, but that was due to a holiday that was booked before the schedule had been published, and which I couldn't get out of (trust me, I tried). When The Girl in The Fireplace went out, I was having a nice meal in a London Pizza Express with the Better Half and another friend. The VCR (remember them?) was set to record, and dutifully did so. Back at home in our old place in Hove, the Better Half and I caught up with the taped episode the following morning. Maybe this was an early sign of the novelty of the newly returned series wearing off just a little bit, but I certainly watched live for the rest of the 2006 episodes; time-shifting only became more usual once we started to have young children to deal with (our first was "in the oven" and fairly well-done by the time of this Tennant episode; he was born between Fear Her and Army of Ghosts).

Reaction:

The Girl in the Fireplace brings together a lot of writer Steven Moffat's Doctor Who script preoccupations, many of them appearing for the first time: the Doctor meeting someone during their childhood then zipping forward in time to meet them when grown up and seeing his inadvertent impact, antagonists that appear to be evil but are just malfunctioning technology, visualisations of childhood nightmares including hands shooting out from under a child's bed, a temporally-twisted romance... They are still fresh here, and work so well that Moffat would revisit each of them a good few times in his subsequent years writing for and then running the show. The biggest selling point of the story is the fusion of all these points into an original and intriguing structure. Showrunner of the time Russell T Davies had given Moffat Madame Du Pompadour as a subject after learning a lot about her when researching Casanova; instead of doing the usual "celebrity historical" approach, Moffat instead creates an intricate construction linking together all these ideas and bridging the two contrasting locales of grimy futuristic spaceship and 18th century splendour; all that, plus memorable monsters and some great comic lines and moments.

With all that going on in 45 minutes, there isn't much room to go into anything about Pompadour's life or accomplishments (patron of the arts, patron of the philosophers of the enlightenment, etc. etc.) so Moffat resorts to giving David Tennant a big speech info-dumping some of that background in a few seconds flat, and the actor seems to find it difficult to make it sound real, which isn't surprising. It is one of a couple of small moments where Tennant overplays slightly, which are the only minor blemishes on an otherwise excellent production. Another big one is Tennant's drunk acting when he berates the clockwork droids for being "thickity thick thick". It's just the set up for a gag where, having revealed that the drunk act was a bit of misdirection so he could nobble the droids, they un-nobble themselves and he says "Ooh, that was a bit clever". Alas, the punchline is a bit too thrown away, so the set-up looks like what it is - someone play-acting as drunk unconvincingly and doing sub-Blackadder dialogue (Tennant could of course counter that it's the Doctor that's acting drunk unconvincingly not him). Elsewhere, though, he shines, particularly with the grandstanding moments that Moffat favours: crashing through the mirror on horseback and then winking; answering the question "What do monsters have nightmares about?" with a cocky "Me".

Tennant also excels at the romance scenes', but he's helped by a magnificent performance opposite him by Sophia Myles as the adult Reinette. The script would succeed or fail as a story based on the casting of Madame De Pompadour, and it was luckily perfect. The lack of detail of her famous life is more than made up for by the scenes later on of Myles turning the tables on the Doctor during the mind meld he does on her (not something he'd been known to do before this story), and when she breaks through from her world into the spaceship, ceasing to be a passive observed part of history and literally stepping into a new world putting her on equal time-spanning footing with the Doctor. Performance-wise, this story boils down to a succession of two-hander scenes between the Doctor and Reinette, and nobody else gets much of a look in. King Louis and Rose get one scene each to do a little more than feed lines and exposition, that's about it. Angel Coulby is wasted in a cameo. As a whole, it works, though.

Surrounding these scenes are particularly fine production values and beautiful touches: great music, great dialogue ("Must be a spatio-temporal hyperlink." / "What's that?" / "No idea; just made it up - didn't want to say magic door."). The challenge Moffat set of depicting the Doctor on horseback breaking through the mirror is a tough one (and he's on record as having fought for it when it was threatened with being cut), but the production crew rises to the challenge and creates a great moment for the story. The design is great too: the clockwork droids are a particularly fine creation, the look of them, both with the scary masks and without, is excellent, the ticking noise they make, how they move. Obviously, they have a couple of design flaws. Presumably, when they were programmed, they were instructed to continually wind each other up before they powered down, but nobody thought to tell them not to kill humans to use for parts. One would think it would be fundamental: don't slaughter humans and harvest their organs.

Connectivity: 

Both The Girl in the Fireplace and Dragonfire include characters searching for someone to decapitate as they need to retrieve something from inside their head; both stories end with a character having their plans thwarted by time, followed by an emotional goodbye.

Deeper Thoughts:

Wibbly-wobbly twisty-wisty. One of my favourite authors Raymond Carver wrote in Fires, a book of his essays and short pieces "I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover", and added "Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing - a sunset or an old shoe - in absolute and simple amazement." It probably doesn't need to be said that Carver and Steven Moffat come from opposing sensibilities. I have, though, had just as much pleasure from Moffat's works as I have from Carver's. Moffat does give the impression of striving to be the smartest fellow on the block, and he loves his tricks: non-chronological narratives, puzzle-box story structures, twists. The Girl in the Fireplace withholds until the very last shot a key piece of information - look away now if you want to remain unspoilered - the name of the spaceship on which the Doctor and friends have landed. Interestingly, this information is only revealed to the viewers, and the TARDIS team never find it out. This is very rare; in a show where the central character is supposed to be super-intelligent, he or she usually is a few steps ahead of us mere mortals in the audience.

Another person with possibly contentious views on story is Robert McKee. I attended this famous / infamous screenwriting guru's seminar in London in early 2000, and he outlined in a Q&A his feelings on good versus bad twists. He compared two films that had come out relatively recently at that time, Fight Club and The Sixth Sense. He felt the former's twist was better than the latter. I'm not going to reveal what either of said twists are, just in case anyone reading this hasn't seen them yet; I'm still smarting from reading DVD reviews of each of these films in a single issue of Empire magazine which blew both films' surprises for this unsuspecting reader before he got a chance to see either of them. The Sixth Sense's twist, according to McKee, doesn't change anything about the narrative in terms of characters' values or emotions. It's just a piece of information that's been withheld until a late moment, and - in his opinion - was more about the filmmakers showing the audience how clever they had been in concealing it. In contrast, the twist in Fight Club - which arguably a different set of filmmakers have teased in just as clever-clever a way - does make a significant change to the emotions and values of the characters. On thinking about this, it seemed to me that storytelling is ultimately all about choosing the right moment for the reveal. Fight Club's key scene happens with about half an hour of running time left, i.e. the point in which the narrative is propelled into the final act. The Sixth's Sense's shock revelation comes right at the very end - it's too late for it to have much impact on the story beyond a resolution scene.

The same is true of the final shot reveal from The Girl in the Fireplace. It would make no difference to the emotion or values that change for the characters in the course of the story if the name of the ship was shown in the very first scene rather than the last. Maybe there's a case for saying it has thematic resonance: there are things we'll never be certain about in this universe, just like the Doctor will never be certain about what would have happened had he managed to get back to Reinette in time. It's a bit of a reach, and I don't buy it: I just think Moffat wanted an extra little sting to keep people guessing right to the end. This isn't necessarily that negative a thing; McKee described The Sixth Sense style ending as a "Mindfuck", but then added that it was still a fuck and so had to be somewhat enjoyable. But if the revealed information is not going to lead anywhere, but is instead only going to send audience minds racing backwards analysing everything they've watched up to that point, it's not as effective ultimately. McKee is probably being a little unfair to The Sixth Sense, as its final scene does bring some closure for one character, unlike The Girl in The Fireplace. Besides being somewhat unlikely (the Doctor manages to find out the ship's age, would he really have found no reference to its name too?), the narrative thread is left dangling at the end never to be picked up, even though the story had a loose sequel in Deep Breath many years later.

In long-running episodic television, unlike film, a twist at the very end of a story can be taken forwards in future episodes. The big 'game changer' endings throughout Who's history usually just tee up the very next story or get paid off very soon after that. So, the reveals at the ends of stories like The Tenth Planet, The War Games, The Keeper of Traken, Turn Left, and The Ganger two-parter amongst others lead in to the next broadcast shows, and the arc plots of The Key to Time and Trial of a Timelord seasons, as well as all the more recent new series linking themes, like Bad Wolf and Vote Saxon all the way up to the Timeless Child, pay off in a season's finale. These sort of tricks would no doubt have sent Raymond Carver running for cover. Writing short stories and poems is perhaps not the same as television, and some more leeway should be allowed. I anyway think that Carver's point about writers just gaping at things in amazement is not the best advice. Carver's best work is focussed, incisive and lean, and when he starts looking at the world in wonder he's not at his optimum. I'd say the same is true of Doctor Who; it doesn't often stop too long to dwell on the times and places and strange vistas the TARDIS team visits before the plot kicks in, and whenever it does it gets quite dull quite quickly. With starts as well as ends, and with twists and pay offs wherever they come between those two points, it's best not to keep people waiting more than the absolute minimum.  

In Summary:

A plot that fits together like clockwork.