Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords

Chapter the 340th, which demonstrates that decimation's what you need if you wanna be a world dictator. 

Plot:

The Doctor lands the TARDIS in Cardiff to refuel with time energy from the rift. Captain Jack, who has been waiting near there to catch up with a chronologically-aligned version of the Doctor, runs towards the TARDIS, grabs hold and clings to the outer Police Box shell as the ship travels through the space-time vortex. Jack's immortal nature, bestowed on him by Bad Wolf Rose, sparks a reaction in the ship, and it flies forward in time 100 trillion years to the end of the universe. The Doctor, Martha and Jack find themselves on the planet Malcassairo. In a compound besieged by savage Futurekind, a band of surviving humans there await transportation to Utopia, their last hope of refuge. The Doctor helps the kindly Professor Yana and his assistant Chan-tho to get the rocket ready. While the Doctor and Jack are off fixing the rocket's power source, Martha notices that Yana has a pocket watch exactly like the Doctor's when he turned himself into a human. She runs to tell the Doctor. The rocket takes off, bound for Utopia. Yana - his attention finally drawn to the watch and breaking through its perception filter - opens the watch and becomes the Master. The Master turns on Chan-tho, killing her, but not before she shoots him. He regenerates and takes the Doctor's TARDIS, leaving him with Martha and Jack as the Futurekind break into the compound and surround them. The Doctor fixes Jack's vortex manipulator allowing the three of them to transport themselves back to contemporary London. The Doctor managed to lock the TARDIS controls before the Master escaped, meaning it can only travel to and from the last two visited locations, the far future and contemporary Earth.

Because of a margin of error, the Master has been on Earth for 18 months before they arrive, has styled himself as Harry Saxon, got married to Lucy, and become Prime Minister. The Doctor and his friends are wanted criminals. The Master has created a satellite network around Earth called Archangel, and has used this to hypnotise the populace into voting for him. The Doctor fixes his party up with perception filters linked to the network that allow them to go unobserved and investigate. The Master announces that he has made contact with an alien lifeform - the Toclafane, floating spheres with childlike voices - and they will arrive on Earth the next morning. The Master is aboard a UNIT skybase called Valiant when first contact happens. The Doctor, Martha and Jack come aboard the Valiant and discover the TARDIS there: it has been turned into a paradox machine. They go to the Valiant's bridge as the paradox machine activates, and millions of Toclafane arrive on Earth. The Master has been able to see through the Doctor's perception filters. He kills Jack and ages the Doctor into an old man. The Master orders the Toclafane to decimate Earth's population. While this is happening, Jack revives and gives his vortex manipulator to Martha so she can escape. The Doctor whispers something to her. She leaves, then spends a year walking the Earth, hidden from the Toclafane by the perception filter. The Master has spent the year using slave labour to build a fleet of ships to conquer the universe, and also torturing (in a low level camp way) the Doctor, Jack and Martha's family aboard the valiant. He ages the Doctor again, turning him into a tiny wee shrivelled form. Martha goes to meet with a scientist in the human resistance. They capture a Toclafane.

Opening it up, they find a human head - the Toclafane are the humans from the end of the universe. They never found Utopia, and instead turned themselves into decapitated heads in techno-spheres (as one does). The Master has promised that they can conquer the universe such that their desperate future will never come to pass. He took Lucy Saxon with him to see this bleak future, and this broke her mind. Martha lets slip to the scientist that her mission for the last year has been spent assembling a gun that can kill the Master. The scientist turns traitor and informs on her. It's all a bluff, though; Martha just wanted to be brought back aboard the Valiant around the time the Master is launching his fleet. The Doctor knew that he would not be able to resist a countdown, and he'd tasked Martha with spreading the word to everyone she's met in the year to think of the word Doctor during the countdown. This collective thought is amplified by the Archangel network, which the Doctor has spent the last year mentally tuning in to, and he's able - somehow - to use the mental energy to de-age himself and float threateningly towards the Master. Jack destroys the paradox machine. Time reverts to just before the Toclafane descended en masse, with only those on the Valiant remembering the year that never was. The Doctor plans to take the Master into his personal custody. Lucy shoots the Master, and he supresses his regenerative powers to avoid becoming the Doctor's captive. Captain Jack returns to his Torchwood team, Martha decides to stop travelling with the Doctor, and everyone goes on with their lives. Except for all the people in the year 100 trillion who die a horrible death as the universe ends, obviously.

Context:

As you'll see if you glance below at the Milestone Watch, I have very few stories left to blog; as such, why would I cover as one what some people - including the writer of the scripts, Russell T Davies - consider as two separate stories? I hate to disagree with Davies (but Doctor Who Magazine agrees with me, so there!) but I can't see it that way. Although a different director handles the first part, the three parts are tightly connected covering the return of the Master: there are plot questions left dangling in Utopia that only get answered in the other two parts, and there are many moments in those other two parts that only have meaning if one has seen Utopia. I considered binging all three parts in one go, but kept getting interrupted. In the end, I watched the three parts over the course of about a week, with irregular gaps in between. To my surprise, the Better Half joined me for all three parts. She very rarely watches Doctor Who of any era any more, but hadn't seen these episodes since they were first shown, and was curious how they held up. She made a few comments during the running time, but gave me instructions not to share them on the blog (instructions accompanied by a stern look, so I took them seriously). What I will share is that she was disappointed at the end that "John Simm didn't win". After watching the episodes, the fam went away for half term and stayed in a few places in the UK, meaning I couldn't write up the blog post immediately. One of the places we visited was Cardiff, and I finally found time to go to the bay, take a photo in Roald Dahl Plass (where the TARDIS materialises at the beginning of this story) and visit Ianto's Shrine (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post for more details).

Me at the foot of Torchwood Tower

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This story completes another season and another Doctor's set of TV stories. That makes it 13 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-14), and 39 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, seven now remain.

First Time Round:

I watched each of the three parts on their broadcast debuts on BBC1 in the UK, accompanied for each as I was on this watch by the Better Half. That was back in June 2007. I remember the blogs and message boards exploded into paroxysms of excitement over the final 15 minutes of Utopia, and then everyone online being much less enamoured of the other two parts. For Last of the Time Lords, friends Alex and Rachel (mentioned a few times before on this blog) joined us in our then home in Hove for the weekend, and watched live with us. I remember the Better Half and Rachel discussing the high 'eye candy' quotient of the episode with Simm, Tennant and John Barrowman all found to be visually pleasing to one or both of them.

Reaction:

Perhaps some fans like to split this three-parter up (see Context section above) because of the differences in general enthusiasm that met the episodes when they first aired (see First Time Round section above). They can mentally salvage Utopia at the expense of The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords. Utopia is directed solely by a hero of Doctor Who's production (old and new) in Graeme Harper. It has a barnstorming (albeit dramatically incomplete) ending. It avoids inclusion of a few camp, silly moments - of the kind that are usually anathema to the serious-minded fan - from the later episodes, including some aspects of John Simm's performance (it could be the Master that's enjoying himself a little too much, or it could be Simm - I'll come back to that in a moment). In the first part, the viewer mainly gets to enjoy Derek Jacobi's two contrasting - but both solid and traditional - performances as Professor Yana and then the Master. The former is a delightful balancing act with the script and the acting giving tiny hints at Yana's true identity so that the last 15 minutes of Utopia seem inevitable, though still surprising. The cherry on the cake is having the professor's loyal assistant character Chan-Tho, used throughout the episode up to that point as comic relief, become the Master's first victim on regaining his identity. The climactic sequence of Utopia is magnificent, and rewards multiple viewings: the reveal of the pocket watch Time Lords can use to transform themselves into humans, the revelation of what the Face of Boe's dying words mean, the Master's regeneration with John Simm's very Doctorish post-regeneration dialogue, and the cliffhanger with our heroes trapped without the TARDIS, stranded and surrounded. All of this underscored by urgent, driving Murray Gold magnificence.

What about the the 30 minutes before the climactic sequence, though? Yana and Chan-Tho aside, there's one nice character / long-term continuity moment with the Doctor and Jack's conversation about what happened to make him immortal, how the Doctor instinctively reacts to that, and Jack's explanation of what he did next to end up on contemporary Earth waiting out the Doctor's reappearance. The rest of Utopia is not as memorable: the final humans awaiting their trip to Utopia are a dull bunch, and the Futurekind are a pretty uninspired 'monster', looking as they do like a musical theatre punk gang. It also harms the reveal of the Toclafane's true nature later on to feature another tribe of antagonists who were humans but who've degenerated into savagery. What Utopia still has by the end is hope. Alas, for all the camp - and there's quite a lot of camp - in the latter two thirds, by the end of part three there's not much hope left for humanity. It's very bleak, and so probably needed those moments, such as the Master dancing around to a Scissor Sisters song, to lighten the mood. 100 trillion years into the future, the last surviving humans have their final hope dashed, become trapped with the universe collapsing around them, cannibalise themselves, and regress to childishness and psychopathy. That is Doctor Who's canonically established final fate for the human race. Not only that, but a human from our time (Lucy Saxon) is made to witness this and loses her mind and her soul in consequence (it's only on this latest watch that I fully realised how well Alexandra Moen's performance captures all that). If the Master keeping the Doctor in a dog kennel or turning him into a house elf rubs you the wrong way, just consider how depressing this story would have proved if played more sombrely.

John Simm's performance as the Master has come in for some criticism over the years since this story; love it or not, though, his take on the character has become the standard approach for the 21st century. Those that followed him in the role all accentuated the manic rather than the more suave antagonism that was the template for the 20th century. To answer the question I posed earlier, I do think it is the character rather than the actor having the fun in all the many scenes of Simm's screwball villainy. This is the portrayal of someone who's been imprisoned for decades in the body and mind of a different personality (one the Master considers a hapless dope); seen as depicting the Master's behaviour after such captivity, the choices Simm makes seem believable to me. There's also a certain desperation in the character's actions: he's practically begging for the Doctor to notice and engage with him (and this is very consistent with how the character acted in the classic series too). Plus, of course - and this is again in line with what had come before - he's crazy. Davies adds to the character's mythology by suggesting he's been driven mad by hearing a constant drumbeat in his head. I was a bit dubious of this when I first watched the story, but the subsequent explanations in David Tennant's finale The End of Time made it work for me retroactively. The moment in that later story where Simm and Tennant react in shock realising the noise in the Master's head is tangible and not just a symptom of madness is so wonderful that it's worth all three parts of the Toclafane story just to set it up. His interplay with Tennant, and lots of little moments - the big thumbs up to people as he's killing them with poison gas, the in-joke where he appreciates some kids' TV (Teletubbies here, calling back to a scene where he watched The Clangers in a 1970s story) - make him one of my favourite Masters of all.

To take on some other criticisms: the 'reset' at the end - where time is wound back for everyone but the Saxons, the Doctor and his friends - is not a cop-out, but is carefully plotted and earned. The Toclafane are destroying their own past, and the paradox can only be sustained with TARDIS shenanigans, as is underlined repeatedly. The dramatic question is how will the Doctor reverse all this, not how the planet will rebuild itself, and that's clear before the Master operates his paradox engine and before he starts decimating people. The aged Doctor's CGI form is a bit silly, but that's about the execution not the concept; if Doctor Who started playing it safe and not overreaching itself regarding what it can depict on screen, it wouldn't be Doctor Who anymore (and besides the Dobby Doctor is very cute). The device of everyone chanting the Doctor's name and him using the psychic energy of that through the Archangel network to rejuvenate himself makes sense, just about. The network being connected to people's perceptions and therefore able to channel psychic energy is well seeded; it's only that energy being able to be absorbed and used by a Time Lord that's a bit of a leap and we've certainly seen Time Lords do stranger things over the years. I'll grant that, once restored, the Doctor does get a bit messianic (it's a theme of this period - in the next story he's carried aloft by a couple of angels). This is more than made up for by the scene of the Master's death in the Doctor's arms, the former refusing to regenerate despite the pleading of the latter.

I'm not saying it's perfect by any means, just that I don't see that much of a difference between Utopia and the final two parts: both are at the same high level of quality for me (and for those fans that can't rate any work as highly as that directed by Graeme Harper, please note that he did uncredited work on the latter two parts when their director Colin Teague was injured during filming). One issue is that there's almost nothing for Captain Jack to do in the final part: he's kept chained up in a side room for swathes of the running time, like Nicola Bryant in Timelash. This isn't just bad for the character, but it also highlights another flaw: why doesn't he go with Martha at the end of The Sound of Drums, rather than sending her off on her own. We've seen that his time travel bracelet is capable of carrying more than one person at a time, and he's got to be more use with her, as the man who can't die, than he is imprisoned by the Master. Dramatically, it's because Martha needs to be on her own, of course (though she's ably supported by strong performances from Tom Ellis and Ellie Haddington in the final part). Freema Agyeman is a very capable supporting actor, but not a lead; nonetheless, the final episode works reasonably well structured around her (her bits are better than the somewhat pointless 'loop scene'' where the Doctor and the others attempt an escape from the Master, only to be foiled and end up exact where they started). Balancing out these small flaws, though, are the moments that give loads of pleasure throughout all three parts: the look on Jabobi's face and the little turn of the head he gives to show us he's transformed (and the way Harper frames the shot), the first ever glimpse of Time Lords and Gallifrey in a new series flashback accompanied by Murray Gold's transcendent cue, all of Gold's music, including some rock guitar during Utopia, loads of funny Captain Jack lines ("Was someone kissing me?") and lots more.

Connectivity:

Both this three-part story (yes it is!) and Torchwood: Children of Earth feature Captain Jack and have scenes set in Cardiff and London. Both feature scenes where the UK government's cabinet meet in Downing Street rooms, and the Prime Minister at the heads of both those governments is villainous, to a greater or lesser degree.

Deeper Thoughts:

A Master for All Seasons. The Master is a character often in search of a raison d'être. This might have something to do with how he was originally created. 1970s producer and script editor team Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks wanted to create the Doctor Who equivalent of the Moriarty character in Sherlock Holmes stories. The character was always envisaged to be a recurring foe, not just a single story adversary (unlike, say, the Daleks who had only originally been intended to feature once). So, the Master's villainy did not arise from a specific circumstance. Letts and Dicks added the character to every one of the five stories of his first season. During that span, the Master allied himself to Autons, Axons and Daemons, tried to hijack a missile, successfully hijacked a prison, created mischief on a colony world, tried to locate a superweapon, and much more besides. What underlying motivation could marry up all these different nefarious activities into a coherent plan? None, obviously. Generally, production teams have explicitly or implicitly favoured one of two slightly lame explanations. One is that all these activities are just seen by the character as game playing with the Doctor, trying to score points or get his attention. The other is the usual fallback for any genre villain with inadequate motivation: he's cuckoo bananas. The Toclafane 3-parter hints at the former, but more explicitly plumps for the latter. In the early days, the character was a lot calmer and so it's difficult to believe that he's being driven insane by a drumbeat in his head (but as that only starts to happen when the Master's personal history is altered by the Time Lords during the Time War, it's perhaps logical to think that hasn't happened to any of the pre-Simm Masters anyway).

There's an argument to be made that a villain being a villain just for the sake of it doesn't hurt the sort of genre stories Doctor Who deals in - it may even help. Heck, even all Letts's and Dicks's Moriarty talk is somewhat overblown compared to the character's actual genesis. What seems to have happened is that they thought it would be a good idea to cast Roger Delgado as a villain, and - quite frankly - that was already more than enough: he proved them right in his every appearance. When relaunching the character, the 21st century production team again killed it with the casting. Coming straight off Life On Mars, a time travel show in which he was the lead, John Simm was exactly the sort of person that one could see getting cast as the Doctor one day, and this created a very slightly different conception of the character: he's just like the Doctor, but bad. Simm's debut hammers this point home by having him accompanied by his own companion, wielding a (laser) screwdriver, and even offering someone a jelly baby at one point.  It's tapping into something that's been there from the beginning in an unspoken way (cf. Delgado in the final episode of Claws of Axos, helping UNIT arguably more than the Doctor does in the same story) and always would be to some extent. All that really changed was the casting as successive teams over the years found the right person to pair with whoever was playing the hero at that point; sometimes the look or performance of the Master was counterpoint, but often it was more a dark reflection. Just as some Doctor companion pairings work better than others, there's a chemistry in specific Doctor and Master pairings too. Delgado with Pertwee, of course - one white-haired, one dark, one wearing colourful dandyish clothes, the other wearing sombre suits. They started things off so successfully, the role of the Master looked like it might not ever be recast.

When Delgado's tragic death robbed the series of the character, it took a good few years for a return. Even then, the character had been remodelled as a monstrous walking cadaver - the Master in name only - and featured in just a single story during nearly a decade following Delgado's passing. It was only as Tom Baker was handing over to Peter Davison that time enough had passed, and - in a three-part relaunch just as would be done in 2007, across stories The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis and Castrovalva, the Master played by Anthony Ainley emerged to become the principal returning nemesis of the early 80s. Although he appeared with other Doctors, it was Ainley with Davison that was the key pairing. There's a picture (see above) of them both that exemplifies this: one fair, one dark, with their costumes mirroring this. Paul McGann and Eric Roberts both got to play the characters for one night only; again, they are paired well, with Roberts getting a costume change so he can do fabulous camp as well as the Terminator-inspired black leather jacketed look. Simm - though he also returned later with another Doctor - is perfectly paired with Tennant. The next - and, to date, final - two pairings used the gender-swapping possibilities of regeneration to create counterpoint: a male Doctor in Capaldi paired with a female Master (or Missy, but given that the villainous handle is deliberately an academic title like Doctor, then of course Missy can go on calling herself the Master) played by Michelle Gomez; then both roles swapped gender and Jodie Whittaker's Doctor was perfectly paired with Sacha Dhawan as the Master. Both these versions of the Master dressed - and acted - a lot more colourfully than their corresponding Doctors, which is an interesting development. What will happen next? Now that the future of Doctor Who has been confirmed, it's fun to be able to speculate again...

In Summary:

Not perfect, but not nearly as bad as its reputation - all three parts of it!

The Shakespeare Code

Chapter the 276th, which features the Greatest Hits of Shaky.

Plot:
The Doctor and Martha materialise in Southwark, London in 1599, near the Globe theatre. They go to see a performance and meet Shakespeare. The Doctor is intrigued that a famous lost play of the Bard's Love's Labour's Won is being performed the following day. Martha and the Doctor stay the night and some strange things happen: unexplained deaths, and Will finishing the play without remembering exactly what he wrote in the final speech. Martha sees a witch on a broomstick escaping from Will's London digs. The Doctor investigates and finds suspicious things about the construction of the Globe theatre; the architect Peter Streete went mad after it was built, babbling about witches. The TARDIS team, accompanied by Shakespeare, visit Streete in Bedlam. The Doctor pieces together that the witches are actually Carrionites, creatures whose science is based on words rather than numbers. They plan to harness Will's imaginative power when the words of Love's Labour's Won are spoken, amplified by the design of the Globe. When the final speech they have bewitched him into adding is read out, it will open a portal and all the rest of their kind will fly through to the Earth, and destroy all humans. A Carrionite arrives and kills Streete. Our heroes escape, with Shakespeare going to try to stop the play, and the Doctor and Martha to confront the Carrionites. All are unsuccessful, the plays final words are spoken, and the portal begins to open. The Doctor and Martha arrive at the Globe and tell Shakespeare to improvise his own words to undo the damage. He does, and the portal closes, pulling in every copy of the play so it is never seen or performed again.

Context:

Late August 2023, I decided to watch this one on my own as there was never a free moment to watch it with any of the family. I dialled it up on iplayer on my laptop and watched it one evening. I decided to view a streamed version rather than get the DVD box set down from the shelf as I wanted to double-check that The Shakespeare Code and all of new Who 2005 to 2022 was still available there (just because I was going to look a little at streaming and availability in the Deeper Thoughts section, see below).

First Time Round:

I watched this story as it was broadcast live on BBC1 in the UK on the Saturday of the Easter weekend in 2007. For some reason, the third run of the new series had started the week before Easter rather than on the holiday weekend itself, which was the usual form in those days. This meant we were lucky enough to be visited by friends two weeks running: Alex and Rachel, mentioned a few times before on this blog, came down to our old house in Hove after having visited us the previous week for the start of the season. That house was home for the family of three that we were at the time: me, the Better Half and our eldest who was not quite a year old. As I remember it, everyone around that day who was aged more than one year watched and enjoyed the story, while the little one enjoyed a kip.

Reaction:

As is probably inevitable, this episode is a showcase for the (condensed) greatest hits of Shakespeare. The opening shot in the pre-credit scene contains an allusion to Romeo and Juliet; there's regular quotes from his plays included in dialogue as a running gag (not as ostentatious as the similar inclusion of characters inadvertently mentioning Agatha Christie book titles in the same writer's story for the next season, The Unicorn and the Wasp); there's a reference to Hamlet and the similarity of that name to the Bard's dead son Hamnet; and, Will having an eye for Martha as his muse is a reference to the dark lady of the sonnets. The obvious big reference, though - as obvious as a story with Charles Dickens and he's surrounded by ghosts at Christmas - is the three witches from Macbeth, here played by three Carrionites. The story looks to be shaped like these sci-fi shenanigans will end up giving Will the inspiration for his Macbeth featuring three witches. Either by accident or design, though, Will never has a scene where he witnesses all three of them together doing witchcraft things around a cauldron - only the audience sees those scenes. Will sees one witch in the Bedlam cell, and the three Carrionites are together at the Globe during the climactic sequences. At that point, though, Will is on stage and they're up in the gods, and there's a distracting great portal to another dimension whipping up a storm between them. Did he ever clock them as a trio at all? Maybe this was a deliberate choice, to indicate that Shakespeare was creative enough to think of his own ideas without prompting. I can't help but think, though, that it was instead a loose bit of the story structure, that might have been fixed if it had been spotted before the final draft.

The other big historical Shakespeare inclusion is the famous 'lost play' Love's Labour's Won, and an explanation of why no copy of it has ever been found. This is a satisfying and fun addition (even though - spoilsport alert - it is most likely that Love's Labour's Won, as recorded in a couple of historical sources, is just an alternate name for another surviving play like The Taming of the Shrew or Much Ado About Nothing). Again, though, the script for the story reveals a lot more about this mystery than one might expect to the audience, with the characters playing catch-up. By approximately 10 minutes in, the viewers watching know that the Carrionites are using Shakespeare and his play to do some evil act. With five minutes to the end, the play is performed and the evil begins. In the 30 minute section in between, the story is treading water really, with not a huge amount going on except Shakespeare, the Doctor and Martha working out what we already know, plus uncovering the minor mechanics of how the plan works (the globe having 14 sides being significant, and so on) about which we don't really care. What keeps the action moving in that time is not really a set of well-ordered story beats, but rather a collection of different colourful or characterful moments that don't necessarily have much connection to the plot. There's moments of history / biography (the Bedlam visit, Peter Streete, Will talking about his son's death), the odd good idea (the Carrionites' science being based on words rather than numbers) or good gag (the physical business with Martha hitting the Doctor to restart his heart after he's attacked by witchcraft).

The other major engine the story has to propel it are the performances. Aside from the regulars, there are really only two significant roles, with everyone else appearing essentially in a cameo; these are Dean Lennox Kelly as Shakespeare and Christina Cole as the main Carrionite Lilith. Both give modern, sparky takes on the traditional idea of their characters. There are nice little touches like Shakespeare's being intrigued by the Doctor and Martha, and working out exactly who they are and where they come from; Cole too gets a nice confrontation scene with the Doctor and Martha. It's early on in the new dynamic between the David Tennant Doctor and new companion Martha as played by Freema Agyeman, so it's only right that there's a lot of focus on the two of them together. The Doctor being insensitive to Martha's feelings for him and his bigging up of Rose sticks out when watching now; it's a bit out of character for the Doctor to be quite so oblivious, and a little cruel of the writing to stick the knife quite so deep into Martha's emotions. It made more sense at the time to put something in there for fans of Billie Piper as Rose to show she'd not been forgotten: she'd only recently left the series, at a time when she was arguably more of the star of the show than Tennant. Perhaps that could have been done in a way that was kinder to the characters, though.

Other moments I liked: everyone in the Globe clapping once the sci-fi weirdness is over, thinking it was just very clever stagecraft; a Shakespearean style line from a 1960s Who story ("the eye should have contentment where it rests") being smuggled into the text of Love's Labour's Won as an in-joke; Elizabeth the First's reaction of seeing the Doctor, the time traveller somehow having upset her in the future of his personal timeline (a loose end that will be woven into Doctor Who's great tapestry in a few years' time); and finally, the rollickingly good trailer for Gridlock just before the credits, demonstrating that even the fun more throwaway stories at the start of a run can be stone-cold classics, and that this run of stories got better and better as it went along.

Connectivity:

Two stories on the trot that feature a real historical person, and the Doctor and other TARDIS travellers stopping over at least one night during the course of their adventure.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Very Missing Adventures. Doctor Who, unlike other similar TV science fictions shows like Star Trek, Blake's 7 and many others, is not complete - there are bits missing, as the show's archive was for a long time not seen as having value any longer, so a lot of it was junked. The full background to why this happened is too complex to go into here, and has anyway been definitively covered in Richard Molesworth's book Wiped (which I urge you to read if you have not already). We fans are lucky as various people have worked hard to find, restore or recreate those missing episodes. Nonetheless, we are used to scarcity and incompleteness, it's part of being a Doctor Who fan. It's probably paradoxically the reason why a lot of us fans are so obsessed with completion. We want everything to be available to us, every video, every audio, every book, CD, toy sonic screwdriver, you name it. Even if such an aim isn't fully possible, we live in hope like every collector. At least we can console ourselves that what exists is out there and available, and actions like the junking of old episodes could never happen again. Or could they? Though all of TV Who has been made available on different physical media over the years, and almost all of it is available on streaming services (Britbox / ITVX for classic series, BBC iplayer for new), it can't be guaranteed that this will remain the same forever, and there's much less guarantee when it comes to extended universe and tie-in material. Titles go out of print, or get deleted, and - though it's not happened yet with Doctor Who - sometimes episodes are removed from streaming services.

I'm sure there are people who are very angry about some comments made on gender issues in the past by the writer of The Shakespeare Code, and they may feel that his Who stories shouldn't be available for people to see on current streaming platforms. Anyone's free to hold this view, though it's not one with which I agree; it's not up to me, though. Companies and corporations can be sensitive about giving offence, and this can lead to decisions to exclude material. What if there was a call to remove The Talons of Weng-Chiang from Britbox because of its making-up of a white actor to look like someone from another ethnic group? Lots of different episodes and shows featuring the use of blackface make-up were pulled from streaming services when Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd were in the news in 2020. Maybe this was the right decision for the companies and corporations involved, and maybe it was even something BLM protestors wanted (though I somehow doubt it was where they'd have chosen to start). In one case in particular, though, it looked like a knee-jerk reaction that hadn't taken into consideration the actual material. The comedy series Community's second season episode Advanced Dungeons and Dragons contained a comedic use of non-realistic blackface (it's brief, and it's called out multiple times in the narrative by characters including being referred to as a "hate crime") amidst a wider anti-bullying story (incidentally one of the very best episodes of Community IMHO). That episode is gone from Netflix with the numbering even altered as if it never existed. I don't think that was the right decision - maybe they should have just added a warning up front - but, again, it's not up to me.

This isn't another case of a middle-aged white guy ranting about cancel culture, I assure you. I have the Community episode (as well as The Shakespeare Code and The Talons of Weng-Chiang) on physical media. But what about those who don't? And what about other things that don't get physical media releases at all? It's a "tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear" type question: if something exists but there's no way to view it, is that really any different from it being junked? I can think of three significant examples of intriguing Doctor Who products that have never been released (and that's just off the top of my head, there are probably more). The first I was reminded of by reading Doctor Who Magazine 594: a pop record of Doctor Who related music by bands such as Saint Etienne and 808 State. It was prepared around Who's 40th anniversary, and a three-track sampler CD was given out to attendees of the Panopticon convention in 2003, of which I happened to be one. I still have the sampler, but the album never saw the light of day. A reorganisation in the BBC stopped the project, though a full album was recorded and exists in an archive somewhere. The second was from 10 years later, a new audiobook version of An Unearthly Child, the first ever Doctor Who story, written by Nigel Robinson and narrated by William Russell. It was delayed by the distributor AudioGo going into administration, and then caught up in rights issues, and has never been heard (except by British Airways travellers when it was briefly and mistakenly included in their in-flight entertainment catalogue in 2013).

The final one of the three is Big Finish's 2021 Torchwood audio Absent Friends, which reunited John Barrowman's Captain Jack with the Tenth Doctor David Tennant. When news reemerged of some historical bad behaviour by Barrowman - see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details - the release was shelved indefinitely. The Torchwood range has continued without Barrowman, and it seems unlikely the story will ever now be released, even though it contains a performance by one of the most popular Doctor actors in the show's history. These are rare examples, and it's not evidence of any wider pattern in the worlds of Doctor Who product, but there are worrying signs in the wider industry. Projects canned after work has started but not been completed (like Mike Schur's Field of Dreams series for Peacock where they'd actually built the famous baseball field, even though the funding didn't come), stories that are finished and then written off for financial reasons with footage destroyed (Warner Brothers' Batgirl movie), or finished and put on streaming services but without any physical release, so availability only remains at the whim of that streamer. I suspect if you're reading this that you may be the same as me and have a long backlog of things you want to catch up on. The Sex Pistols series 'Pistol' by Craig Pearce and directed by Danny Boyle was on mine. Unfortunately, it wasn't close enough to the top. Pistol is gone from Disney+ after only a year, and is likely never to come back. It feels to me that this is a repetition of that historical mistake of underestimating the value of archive, the exact opposite of what I hoped streaming would provide. If there's a moral here, it's hold on to your physical media where you can, and watch a lot more telly. And to people who work or have worked for BBC Audio and Big Finish, a one word entreaty: bootlegs!

In Summary:

Such stuff as lightweight, throwaway Doctor Who stories near the start of the season are made on.

The Infinite Quest

Chapter the 267th, which may not even count.

Plot:

The far future. The Doctor and Martha defeat a space pirate called Baltazar and his robotic parrot, Caw, but the pirate gets away. Martha insists that the Doctor free Caw, who they meet again a couple of years in the future. He gives Martha a present of a bird-shaped brooch in exchange for saving his life, and warns the Doctor that Baltazar is searching for four data-chips that will lead him to the Infinite, a mythologised artefact that once found will reputedly grant one one's heart's desire. Caw gives them the first data-chip, but warns them that Baltazar has a copy. Caw is still in the thrall of his old owner, though, and this is just a ruse to get the Doctor to locate the Infinite for Baltazar. The quest leads to three different people on three different planets, each possessing the next data-chip: Captain Kaliko on the desert planet Boukon (where the Doctor and Martha deal with piracy), Mergrass on the swamp planet Myarr (where they deal with a war between humans and giant bugs), and Gurney on the ice planet Volag-Noc (where they deal with a prisoner rebellion).

At the end of each mini-adventure, they find each of the three people mysteriously killed, so they can collect the chip from their cold, dead hands and move on. Once they have all four, Baltazar appears - he's the one that's been killing everyone - and takes Martha hostage. Caw dies protecting Martha, and the brooch turns out to be another robot parrot, Caw's son Squawk. Having got the Doctor to programme the TARDIS coordinates for the location of the Infinite, Baltazar goes off in the time ship with Martha leaving the Doctor in the cold. The TARDIS arrives at a wrecked spaceship on an asteroid. Martha finds the Doctor, but it's a mirage - she's seeing a vision of her heart's desire. The real Doctor arrives having got a lift from Squawk, and explains that the vision is because of some last vestige of whatever power used to exist on the ship. Baltazar sees myriad riches, and won't be talked into believing that they are not real. The Doctor uses his sonic to vibrate the ship and asteroid, destroying it. They get to the safety of the TARDIS, and Baltazar is scooped up by Squawk and taken to the prison on Volag-Noc.

Context:

I had started wondering about branching out and covering episodes of spin-offs and the like for the blog (see Deeper Thoughts below for more details on this, and where and how one can draw the line). It was then that it occurred to me that there were at least two stories I'd forgotten about which had at least some call to be included. They weren't spin-offs, they were real Doctor Who with the theme tune and credits and starring the Doctor of the time and everything; they were the two animated David Tennant stories The Infinite Quest and Dreamland. I went online and purchased a Blu-ray containing both stories; a German disc being the only such option. With all the children (boys of 17 and 13, girl of 11) I watched the earlier of the stories - Auf Der Suche Nach Der Unendlichkeit as it is titled in German, translating to In Search of Infinity - on a Sunday afternoon during half-term at the end of May 2023. I thought they'd find it an interesting curio, and they did for the most part, though the youngest - closest to the CBBC demographic the story was originally aimed at - bailed before the end. The eldest, a big Peep Show fan, recognised the voice of Paul Clayton (Sophie's Dad in that sit-com) playing Mergrass. The middle child pointed out something that helped me understand a slight uneasiness I was feeling watching the story, so I'll save that and share it with you in the Reaction section below.

First Time Round:

At this period, a couple of years in to the relaunched new series, the Doctor Who brand seemed to be everywhere. From day one, the show had its own companion documentary series Doctor Who Confidential on BBC3 showing the making of each new episode. Then in 2006, two new spin-offs started. Torchwood was there for an older audience (having just finished its first run on the first day of 2007), and the younger audience were served by a CBBC children's magazine show Totally Doctor Who, a Doctor Who version of the similar long-running UK show Blue Peter; so, 'Who Peter', if you will. Like the Confidential show, it ran every week when the main show was broadcasting. It had some fun strands, but what wasn't there in its first year was any scripted drama aimed at the CBBC audience. That was rectified in the 2007 series by including a three-minute segment in each Totally Doctor Who of the animated serial The Infinite Quest. I watched these and found them fun, but crucially - unlike the main show - I didn't record them for future, didn't have any urge to buy them on disc at the time, and never watched them again until now. It was fun, but it was disposable fun. There was no Totally Doctor Who from 2008 onwards, and the Doctor Who CBBC drama itch was scratched instead by another spin-off whose pilot had aired at the beginning of 2007, and would have a full series later in the year, The Sarah Jane Adventures. It is amazing that in one year there were broadcast 13 episodes of the main show, and no fewer than four spin-offs, one including its own sub-spin-off mini animated series. I wonder, with all the Disney+ money reportedly coming in, whether we'll see anything like that in the show's future.

Reaction:

What my middle child said after watching was that this story wasn't true Doctor Who as the Doctor wouldn't be so callous as to just abandon the dead bodies of the executed owners of the data-chips where they lay. "I mean, it was a bit too, you know, heartless - he would have buried them at least". He was inclined to disallow the story because of its content not its medium. Of course it was the medium that dictated that specific content decision, at least partially: animating the Doctor and Martha digging a grave would have been too difficult (would still be too difficult now, 16 years on). Even just cutting to a scene where the poor souls were buried was clearly thought to be too time-consuming. The writer Alan Barnes was challenged to construct a narrative in three minute bursts. The Infinite Quest was spread over thirteen episodes each of roughly that short duration. Some thought must have been given to how they would come together as a whole (in toto, they make up roughly the usual duration of a regular episode of this period with credits at beginning and end). If every three minutes there's got to be some distinctive danger, it doesn't leave much room to do anything but rush from one element to another, and the quest plot became therefore a good choice to make this cohere into a satisfying whole. But when everything is stitched together, what's lost is a bit of heart. The Doctor just has to rush on and never dwell.

Does he have to be in such a rush though? The Doctor believes he's in a race against time to get to the data-chips before Baltazar, but isn't he a bit of a schmuck for believing this? There's no evidence that Baltazar is around at all - they don't bump into him until the end - except for the deaths of the people in ownership of a data-chip. Crucially, though, they are found with the chips still on their dead bodies. The only explanation is that Baltazar is using the Doctor to lead him to the Infinite, and this should have been screamingly obvious to the Doctor, at least once the second body was found. Plus, the Doctor has a time machine, and Baltazar doesn't, so surely there's no need to rush, even if the Doctor hasn't worked out that it would be only by such equipment that these old artefacts could be decoded (Baltazar knows this, but the Doctor's oblivious - the latter clearly having an off day). If the script had more time to breathe, this could potentially have been made more plausible. The other plot point that didn't really ring true for me was that all three data-chip owners were in the same prison at the same time with Baltazar. It seems like a hell of a coincidence, and undermines the quest plot a bit to know that in the recent past all the chips were in the same place. It doesn't add much (just that Baltazar is driven by revenge on those who wouldn't team up with him as well as by greed) so they should have just snipped it out: Baltazar just found out about the Infinite on Volag-Noc and maybe murderously obtained the first data-chip, but the location of the others were a mystery, hence his need for the Doctor.

The vocal work is good throughout, with the regulars maintaining their on-screen chemistry using just their voices. The dialogue is of a good standard. Most of the gags land: I'm not sure about little moments like the Doctor listing Madame Cholet as one of the great chefs of Planet Earth, it would have probably have worked better in live action with Tennant's facial expression to sell it; describing the disguised brooch (really another of Baltazar's hench-birds) as an "accessory to murder", on the other hand, 'chef's kiss'. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but did Barnes spend a long time setting up the mechanical birds, who consume gold to power fusion engines in their bellies, just so he could crowbar in a Month Python's Life of Brian in-joke, when the dying Caw says he was blackmailed into helping Baltazar by promises of "all the gold I could eat"?! The various vistas created by the artists are all interesting, and the steampunk-inflected design approach works. Scenes of the AT-AT like oil tanker vehicles scuttling over the surface of a desert world would never be possible to achieve in any other medium. Something like the "skeleton crew" of animated bones in spacesuits would be done in an live action story a couple of years after The Infinite Quest, but those suited skeletons couldn't afford to wield light-sabres as their animated cousins do. All told, it's a good story if you're not looking for anything too deep (but then that wasn't the brief). If you've never seen it, and you're still waiting in anticipation for November 2023 and some new Tennant episodes, it's worth a watch to keep you going. 

Connectivity:

The Infinite Quest is possibly an inadvertent sequel / subconscious homage to Enlightenment, featuring as it does pirates with spaceships and many characters seeking a gnomically single-word named MacGuffin that grants one's every desire.

Deeper Thoughts:

But does it count? The concept of Head Canon. Where does Doctor Who begin and end? This is a question that I've been mulling over with regards to the blog. I'm close to catching up with Doctor Who currently being broadcast, as I continue on my mission to watch all of TV Doctor Who in a random order. Before watching this latest story, there were 39 of my original list of stories left to watch and blog. Adding the two Tennant animations puts that up to 41. Based on my blogging frequency, that's just over a year's worth. Plus there are three specials being shown this year for the 60th anniversary, another special to be shown in the festive period of 2023 (whenever that may mean), and an eight episode Ncuti Gatwa season in 2024. The problem is that there's no way to know when that 2024 run, currently being filmed, is going to be shown. A good guess would be a spring start at around Easter, but if it's any later than that, the risk is that I'll have run out of any other stories and will be forced to blog those stories boringly in order as there won't be anything else left. Alternatively, I could quit the whole endeavour completely, but it seems a shame to do that before at least some of Ncuti's episodes are included for the blog. I want to put off having to make such a decision as long as possible, so was casting around for possible additional bits and bobs I could watch to bump up the total. This meant I was going to again have to grapple with the tricky question of what is canon. As any fan knows, this is an infinite quest in and of itself; there are no answers to these questions that everyone would agree upon.

Some limits seem to naturally occur, but that might be just the tyranny of the majority. If one googles 'doctor who episode guide' what will be returned is almost certainly a list that doesn't include The Infinite Quest. But why? It was shown on TV on the BBC with the Doctor Who theme tune and beginning credits attached. It's arguably got more reason to appear in such a list than Shada (which was intended to be broadcast, but not finished, so has never been shown). Wikipedia's main Doctor Who episode guide pages list Shada, but not The Infinite Quest. Is there any defining logic there? In this blog, I can make up my own rules as I go along. I didn't intend to do blog posts for Shada or K9 & Company when I started out, but for the former a new and definitive semi-animated version was produced, and for the latter, the story was included in an official Doctor Who season box set. I can continue to do whatever I like, but it feels like there should be some guiding principles. If I am accepting animated stories, what about Scream of the Shalka, an animated online story for an alternate ninth Doctor? Once alternate ninth Doctors are fair game, what about The Curse of Fatal Death, a lengthy skit for Comic Relief? If an online-only airing is okay, what about Death Comes to Time, an audio story with illustrations released on the official Doctor Who website when there was a dearth of new material available? If audio only stories are allowed, what about Slipback, a radio programme starring Colin Baker? Or every Big Finish audio ever made? Clearly, there have got to be some boundaries, but maybe they can move with time.

I dived into the thorny area of canon once before in the Deeper Thoughts section of the blog post for Listen. I mentioned that the ultimate definition of canon was probably the stuff you can't wish away, even if you'd like to try. That was back in 2018, before the name for that concept, head canon, had as much traction. Now I see it used by fans everywhere. It's usually about the smaller details; to take a Doctor Who example, if a fan believes that Ben and Polly got married after their time with the Doctor and nothing is explicitly said to contradict that in the show thereafter, that fan can accept that as part of their 'head canon'. If an EU text (Expanded or sometimes Extended Universe) like a book or short story  suggests a different fate for them, then the fan either has to adjust their head canon or reject that text. This obviously becomes more difficult to do if the official-seeming TV series - with its official seeming wikipedia episode guide - kills off Ben or Polly, or marries them off to other people. Difficult, but not impossible. It's a time travel show, and it sometimes visits parallel universes, and there's lots of details that are still secret or that could be overturned in future. The imaginative leaps might need to be bigger, but one could go beyond the details to bigger things. If you don't like the whole timeless child mythology introduced during Jodie Whittaker's tenure meaning that William Hartnell isn't the first Doctor anymore, it wouldn't take much to rewrite it in your head. The Division somehow implanted false memories in the Doctor's mind, say, and brought the Jo Martin Doctor from a parallel universe to pose as an earlier version, to destabilise the Doctor so she would be less effective against fighting their Flux plan. That could work.

With such an approach, assimilating Scream of the Shalka, say, featuring a Doctor from a slightly different timeline, is a piece of cake. Heck, I could make a case that An Adventure in Space and Time the 50th anniversary docudrama about the early 1960s creation of Who, is an in-universe slice of Doctor Who proper where the Matt Smith Doctor briefly breaks into a parallel dimension where Doctor Who is a TV series made by people who all look slightly different to their counterpoints in our reality, and cheers up a sad old actor. When the blog looks like it's going to run out of material, I can transfer its mental energy and consciousness to some other head canon where Lenny Henry played the Doctor (twice) or where some of the planets visited looked very much like Crackerjack sketches. The blog need never die! Gosh, what a thought.

 

In Summary:

Disposable, but somewhat fun.

Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks

Chapter The 229th, where you can tell it in his accent when he talks, he's a Gallifreyan in New York - no, damn, I've used that already... Doctor Who in New York, so good they did it twice.

Plot:

The Doctor and Martha land in New York in the year 1930. The depression at its height, and lots of homeless people live in an encampment in Central Park nicknamed Hooverville. Hooverville residents are going missing, so the Doctor investigates. The Cult of Skaro, four experimenting Daleks, travelled to this time zone using an emergency temporal shift and are now stranded without power. They plan to use the aerial atop the newly built Empire State Building to channel energy from an imminent solar flare and create human-Dalek hybrids from the missing people, who are all stored in catatonic states in the Daleks' lair. A few humans have also been turned into half pig half human henchmen. Leader of the cult Dalek Sec experiments on himself and becomes a half-human hybrid, but the other Daleks start to distrust him as he acts more and more unpredictably. They depose Sec, and change things so that the missing people will be 100% Dalek. The Doctor - aided by Martha, a couple of Hooverville residents (one played by a future movie Spiderman), a Broadway chorus girl and her semi-pig boyfriend, Laszlo - sabotage the aerial. The Doctor mixes his DNA in by hugging the aerial at the crucial point (ssh... it's science!), and so the hybrid people do not follow orders blindly and eventually mutiny, destroying Sec and two of the other Daleks. Dalek Caan does another emergency temporal shift, which might well prove to be significant in future, who knows?! The Doctor stabilises Laszlo so he can live a presumably miserable freakshow Nightmare Alley existence for the rest of his life, happily ever after. 

Context:

Watched on two consecutive Sunday afternoons at the end of April / start of May 2022, from the disc in the Complete Third Series DVD box set, with a week in between the cliffhanger and the second episode, as nature intended. I was accompanied by all the children (boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9). I didn't realise until after we'd watched them that we'd just missed the dates, both weeks, when it would have been the 15th anniversary to the day of the debut BBC1 broadcasts in 2007; close enough, though. I was able to add a game-playing layer of engagement to the first episode. All three of the children have recently watched a Spiderman movie featuring Andrew Garfield, who features in this Dalek 2-parter. Before pressing play, I told them all that they'd recognise a big star who appears in the story, so they were on tenterhooks each wanting to be the first to spot whoever it was, and there was a chorus of excitement when Garfield finally popped up as Frank partway through; "Is that the Amazing Spiderman?" asked the middle child, who's nothing if not exact. All three children were miffed when Frank appeared to die when grabbed by the pig people, and elated when he showed up again later not killed.

First Time Round:

There's one clear memory I have of just over 15 years ago when this story was first shown, and it isn't from either of the episodes themselves, nor from my experience of watching them. It's of a picture on the front cover of a magazine and it sticks in the mind because it was a massive spoiler. The Radio Times UK listing magazine gave Doctor Who its front cover for the week of 21st to 27th April 2007, and it was available to buy in the shops the preceding Tuesday, the 19th April. The photo they used for the cover was a medium close-up shot of the Dalek Sec humanised Dalek; in other words it was an image of the final reveal of the episode yet to air, the cliffhanger moment. Russell T Davies signed off on it, reportedly; I think it was a rare black mark on his record of making and marketing the show in those days. I can remember exactly where I was when I first saw it; I was in reception of the BBC Television Centre. A few of the magazines were on a coffee table next to the sofa where I was waiting, and - after wincing at what was being given away - I turned them all face side down. In early 2007, I was on a career break from the day job to concentrate on the side hustle I had at the time, screenwriting. I had a lot of meetings in that period, but I was in Wood Lane that Tuesday for something a little less work-related. They ran guided tours in those days, and I wanted to see the centre before it closed and was turned into luxury flats (which seemed like it would be imminent at that point, but in the end it didn't happen until 2013). It was an enjoyable experience. A couple of days later I was in London again, in King's Cross for a Writers Guild of Great Britain panel discussion on use of the web. This prompted me the following day (the day before the first episode of the Dalek story aired) to create a screenwriting blog. That screenwriting blog then led indirectly to the creation of this Doctor Who blog. So, I've been spewing out nonsense online for 15 years now - cheers!!!

Reaction:

For the third season of the return of Doctor Who in the 21st century, of which this story is part, once and future showrunner Russell T Davies was for the first time planning a big finale that didn't include the Daleks. This left an opportunity to have a mid season tentpole story featuring the metal meanies, which had been done once before with much success with the story Dalek in 2005. That story was a single-parter but packed with sufficient twists and turns to have stretched to two. Alas, this Manhattan-set double number is the opposite - it's one episode's plot (and that's being charitable) padded out to fit into twice the space in the schedules. It must have seemed impossible at that stage in the show's development, with Skaro's finest being a big presence every year, not to give the mid-season two-parter over to a Dalek plot, but a focussed single episode story would have ultimately been much better. What happens in the story? A small group of isolated Daleks attempt to covert people into foot soldiers to take over the planet. That's about it. The first episode is mostly introducing characters that don't need to be there: Solomon, Frank, Tallulah and Laszlo, and their environs - the theatre, and Hooverville - add colour but could be excised and leave the plot unchanged. Even Mister Diagoras being merged with Dalek Sec to create a hybrid creature, a big subplot that makes up the remainder of the first part leading up to the cliffhanger, doesn't move things forward at all. It's obvious how it's going play out; a Dalek polluted with human will stop acting as a Dalek, and will eventually and inevitably cease to be an antagonist. This is, of course, exactly the same as what happened in that previously mentioned 2005 story, Dalek.

The second episode runs out of steam as, even with the paucity of plot movement in part one, there isn't enough material to keep things moving for 45 more minutes. The Dalek Sec subplot ends up exactly where expected. What looks like the climactic event - the rag tag band of heroes work to prevent the energy strike to the antenna at the top of the newly built Empire State building, as it's going to waken all the catatonic humans and convert them into Dalek-controlled foot soldiers (clearly a homage to James Whale's movie version of Frankenstein, which was roughly contemporary to the early 1930s setting of the story) - actually happens only three quarters of the way through the second episode, and there's still a number of scenes after that that limp along to the conclusion. The Daleks and the converted humans are lured to the abandoned theatre, and it's resolved in exactly the same way as the Dalek Sec subplot - the converts still have too much humanity, turn on the Daleks, and a brief battle ensues. This has been brought about by the Doctor introducing Time Lord DNA by hugging the aerial at the point of contact, which is scientifically dodgy even within the fantastic context of the story, but might have been easier to forgive if things had been wrapped up two minutes later, but alas instead we have scene after scene to dwell on why exactly hugging the aerial would do anything meaningful. During this, the Doctor resolves a subplot stabilising Laszlo's faltering hybrid body so he can live in Hooverville, Beauty and the Beast style, with Tallulah. This might be touching if it weren't for his pig-face prosthetics, which just aren't quite good enough to convince in well-lit scenes.

The story does come in for a lot of criticism for its visuals, but this is mostly unfair. The pig slaves are fine when kept in shadow; yes, the humanised Dalek Sec is a bit outré (he wears spats, and the Daleks keep him on a dog collar and chain!), but it's nonetheless effective. The gaps that need to be filled where there isn't plot leave room for some fun set pieces; this is most obvious when action comes to a halt and one of the cast belts out a specially written show tune, but it is a pretty good song, and the sequence is well shot. Introducing the history of Hoovervilles (plural, they had them all over the states, not just in Central Park) meets Who's remit to educate as well as entertain. Having introduced the place and introduced the Daleks, it becomes inevitable that the latter will attack the former, and the set piece depicting this in episode two is good. I'm not sure it makes a whole heap of sense, though: the Daleks are still operating in secret and haven't yet activated the human soldiers, so why do an all-out attack where they hover over a populous city? The performances are very strong throughout, even those where the actor is fighting against the somewhat risible mask they are encased within. Andrew Garfield is magnetically watchable in a quite small role, so it was no surprise to see him go on to bigger things. Hugh Quarshie does the - pretty thankless - sensible leader character very well. Miranda Raison has fun with her broad New Yoiker broad. It's just a bit of a shame that there isn't really very much for any of them to do. In the end, the story's not a total disaster - it's probably the least successful Dalek story from the era, but it's a hell of an era - but feels like a major missed opportunity.

Connectivity: 

Both Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks and The Angels Take Manhattan, obviously, see the TARDIS land on the same island in the same city (the clues in the titles), and action takes place in the same decade, the 1930s, in both too. Filming for both actually took place in the Big Apple, though for the Tennant story it was confined to shooting background plates with the main action all being shot in Wales.

Deeper Thoughts:

Ncuti Doc Thing. I had planned, and indeed was a few paragraphs into, a different subject for this Deeper Thoughts section, but then events come along and surprise me (and everyone). On Sunday 8th May 2022, we all found out the name of the newly appointed actor to play the lead role of the Doctor, Ncuti Gatma. Gatma will appear in the series from 2023 (it's not been confirmed whether he will cameo at the end of Jodie Whittaker's final special yet, when she regenerates, but it's got to be a good bet), when Russell T Davies resumes his showrunner role. Like another appointee to this role during a period when RTD was running the show, the star of Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks no less, Ncuti is a proud Scot, but he's also Rwandan and a former refugee. For the first time, the Doctor is going to be played by a BAME man, and for the first time the lead actor in the series is an actor of colour. It's not - as many online comments mistakenly averred, and even more others righteously corrected - the first time the Doctor has been portrayed by a person of colour. Jo Martin's recurring role as an earlier version of the Doctor during Whittaker's tenure paved the way for this, as indeed did the casting of Whittaker herself, and the other Time Lord characters cast or shown to change gender or ethnicity when regenerating in recent years since Doctor Who returned in 2005, demolishing the established pattern that the Doctor - and any Time Lord - had to be pale, male or stale. Inevitably, some people will need time to adjust to this; any Doctor Who fan knows it's sad for a while, but ultimately happy, to say goodbye to one Doctor and hello to another.

The cryptic Instagram image of emojis that preceded the announcement

Sadly - but I don't believe inevitably by any means - there were also negative online comments about the 'wokeness' of this production decision. (Pause, while I throw up in my mouth just a little at having to type the word in the inverted commas - I was going to say the politics of the decision, but it isn't really a political decision, and I think that word is too grand to describe the naysayers' bile.) After Jodie Whittaker's casting announcement in 2017 (see Deeper Thoughts of this blog post from then), there was apparently a backlash, but I didn't see it, just the wave of defensive responses against the initial backlash. I don't know if I'm just more engaged with social media or if the algorithm has changed, but this time I did see the first wave. The most infamous comment was made by a - here come the inverted commas again - 'journalist' on a right-wing UK news channel; he tweeted then hastily deleted a comment that suggested that Ncuti's casting was a box-ticking exercise, as if someone who isn't white could not be cast on merit. There were many other similar comments from non-famous tweeters, who apparently think of themselves as Doctor Who fans but I can't help but think that they've missed the point of the show. Balanced against this were tweets with people suddenly interested in the show because of Ncuti's casting who hadn't watched before. An article in the Telegraph by Michael Hogan on this appeal to new, perhaps younger people had the headline "The choice of Ncuti Gatwa proves the BBC has given up trying to please 'legacy' Doctor Who fans" and put a few older fans noses out of joint. I glanced at the twitter response to the article but after two comments the discourse degenerated into anti-licence fee rants so I ducked out of that. One other seam of online comments I saw centred around people celebrating a non-hetero actor being the Doctor, only to then be corrected by people who rightly stated that Gatma has never made any public comments on his sexuality.

Gatwa with RTD at the Baftas on 8th May 2022

He is still an LGBT+ hero whatever because of his award-winning and multiple Bafta nominated portrayal of Eric Effiong in Netflix's Sex Education. I've not seen it, not because I'm put off by younger actors despite being increasingly 'legacy' - thank you headline-writing Telegraph editor - but because there's simply too many shows and not enough time. This is interesting on a personal level, though, as it marks the first time since I became a fan in the early 1980s that I have no experience at all of a newly announced Doctor's performances. Peter Davison I'd seen as Tristan in All Creatures Great and Small, and also in some sitcoms; Colin Baker had of course already had a role in Doctor Who before he was cast as the Doctor; Sylvester McCoy was a big part of my childhood as he appeared in 1980s CBBC programmes I loved like Jigsaw and Eureka. Paul McGann I had seen in Withnail and I and a few TV things over the years before he became our favourite Time Lord for one night only. I differ from Tom Baker, who was quoted before Doctor Who came back in 2005 to say he'd never heard of Christopher Eccleston, in that I was very familiar with Eccleston from Jimmy McGovern's work, and Michael Winterbottom's, and Danny Boyle's, and... seriously, lots of fans online at the time said they hadn't seen him in anything either, and I just can't believe they'd missed out on all that great stuff. Tennant I'd seen in Casanova, which is basically his audition for the Doctor role; Smith I had seen in the two BBC Sally Lockhart adaptations starring Billie Piper; Capaldi, in so many things from Local Hero onwards. I saw Whittaker in many things before she became the Doctor, but had no conception of how she'd play the role, as it was different from the sort of roles she had tended to do up to that point. For that reason, I may well hold off on that Sex Education binge watch. It might be nice to go in completely unburdened by preconceptions, and see something fresh, exciting and new.

In Summary:

The script's a bit of a mess, some of the visuals are edging towards being risible, but there are some nice characters and set pieces.