The Stolen Earth / Journey's End

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

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

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

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

Context:

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

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

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

Midnight

Chapter the 260th, Ecouter et répéter: Allons-y! Molto bene!

Plot:

The Doctor and Donna visit a tourist resort in the far future that, like all futuristic resorts in Doctor Who, see The Leisure Hive and Orphan 55, is a shielded bubble on a planet with a lethal atmosphere outside. He leaves Donna to go off with a touring party in a "space truck" for a day trip to a local beauty spot. The craft breaks down, having had to take a detour onto a path never travelled before. Something in this supposedly uninhabitable terrain knocks on the outside of the vehicle trying to find a weak point, then attacks destroying the front cabin and killing the pilots. It gets in and takes over one of the passengers, Sky. She starts to repeat what everyone says. Some of the other passengers want to throw Sky out through a pressurised exit door, and the Doctor doesn't have much luck persuading them to stop, as they are a panicky, accusatory and aggressive bunch under pressure. Sky's repeating starts to get closer and closer to the others' voices until she is saying the same words simultaneously. Then, having realised that he's the smartest, the creature inhabiting Sky stops copying anyone but the Doctor and then overtakes him: she's speaking first, and he's copying. The others argue about whether this means that the creature has passed into the Doctor or just stolen his voice. A majority think the former, and start to drag the Doctor to the door. As the possessed Sky eggs them on, she lets slip a couple of the Doctor's pet phrases "Allons-y" and "Molto bene". Realising the truth, the last remaining member of the crew, the Hostess, grabs Sky, and opens the exit door. They are both sucked out of the craft, and the door slams behind them. The survivors realise that they didn't even know the Hostess's name.

Context:

Watched from the DVD (part of the Complete Fourth Series box set) on a Sunday in late March 2023. It was a rare occurrence for an old Doctor Who (and I have to accept that Midnight is now an old Doctor Who - see First Time Round section below) in that all the family - the Better Half and three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) - were in attendance. This full house may be because the children have never seen the episode before. They were too young / not born when it first went out. Then, when they became interested in Doctor Who around the later Matt Smith / early Peter Capaldi years, and I started to share some older stories with them, the Better Half and I always thought this one was too scary. Once they'd watched it, they scoffed at the very idea that the story could be in any way scary when nobody got mutilated and there was no gore, and it was "just zombie possession". Kids today, what are you gonna do?! Before those comments, the main fixation was Colin Morgan featuring as the character Jethro, a role he got before playing Merlin for the BBC for many years. "Is this the one with Merlin in?" asked the BH at the start, followed by such comments from the children as "Ooh, look it's Emo Merlin" and "Emo Merlin is rude to his parents" and "Whose side is Emo Merlin on?".

First Time Round:

Watched on or near to its original BBC1 transmission on 14th June 2008 with the Better Half (we may have time-shifted it slightly to put our eldest - then only - child to bed). I did a calculation of one of those timey-wimey phenomena, as it's sometimes hard to believe that a story like Midnight that still feels recent to me was broadcast almost a lifetime ago. But my son has indisputably turned from a toddler to a lanky teenager in that time. Take the number of days between the 14th June 2008 and the present day at time of writing, and go back in time that many days from the 14th June 2008: one arrives in early September 1993. Doctor Who on TV had been cancelled, but old stories were coming out on VHS. Fans were gearing up for the 30th anniversary of the show, and to commemorate this a couple of Dalek stories were released in a celebratory tin. A two-part mini-story would be broadcast later in the year featuring all the still surviving Doctors, including Tom Baker donning the scarf once again. The equivalent classic series gap, if one should take a trip the same number of days back in time from there, would lead to late November 1978, when Tom Baker was the current Doctor. From 1978 to 1993, or from 2008 to 2023, is a length of time enough for the charismatic incumbent of the title role to bow out and be followed by three more Doctors' eras, then find himself back recording scenes in character as the Doctor again for special episodes to be shown in November to celebrate a big series anniversary. Wheel turns, civilisations rise, wheel turns, civilisations fall...

Reaction:

I think Midnight is one of the best new series stories, but I wasn't in any hurry to watch it this time. The reason is that I'm a bit of a scaredy-cat where horror is concerned, and Midnight is an effective little shocker. It uses many of the same techniques as low budget sci-fi horror films like Cube or Circle or Exam, and no doubt many others - even the short one-word title is in keeping. A small group of people in a single location are each put under pressure by a strange situation, and their characters and inter-personal reactions in that situation push the narrative to its grim conclusion. The Doctor Who production team hadn't run out of money or anything, it was just that head writer Russell T. Davies had to create a script from scratch fast to replace another that they decided not to progress, and he was keeping it simple. He had to work with some restrictions like not being able to feature the companion Donna in the main action, as Catherine Tate was off shooting the next 'double-banked' story, Turn Left. He turns this to his advantage, though, as the Doctor has nobody to vouch for him and so is distrusted by the others. Midnight doesn't have everyone getting killed off one by one as some of those films do, but this somehow makes it even more grim for me. At the end, everyone still living is a little bit diminished by the awful events that have taken place, even the Doctor. It's a particularly sad moment where they all realise that they didn't even know the name of the person that saved them from becoming murderers, and let's face it probably saved them from fates worse than that (if the creature inside Sky had got back to civilisation, it wouldn't be just seeking to learn more French or Italian, I'm guessing).

The psychological horror in the story is created with minimalist staging. There is barely any significant visual effects work in the story, some CG establishing shots of the twinkly planet and that's it. Everything else appears to my eyes at least to be practical and lighting effects. It's also only right and proper to give kudos to sound recording and design to allow for the many stages of Sky's repeating dialogue: the virtuoso moment where the Doctor and Sky are talking simultaneously and then she starts to overtake him is both technically brilliant and hair-raising. The creation of conflict and menace, though ably supported by those departments, is mostly the responsibility of the actors, and they all meet the challenge. To facilitate this, the most old school techniques were put in to practice in Doctor Who again: the cast had much more extensive rehearsal that would be normal for this period, and they shot in story order. Essentially, they were creating a TV play, just like the people working in front of and behind the cameras on Doctor Who in the 1960s, and its heartening as a long term fan to know that those approaches can still have their uses. The result is an ensemble cast that are all delivering the goods. To pick out an individual for special praise, though, Lesley Sharp is phenomenal in this. After her possession, there's a moment where she turns and has become a different person before one's eyes, and a scary one to boot (no doubt there are some imperceptible changes in hair and make-up to help that transformation along, but it is 90% acting). I also like the lizard-like darting head movements as she takes in the people around her. Tennant's work in the story shouldn't overlooked; he evokes the frozen fear of someone trapped in their own body to remarkable and once again scary effect.

The story isn't overburdened with elements from series arcs. One of the characters researching the lost moon of Poosh (part of the plotline where the Daleks are stealing planetary bodies to power some big destructive gizmo) slots nicely in. Rose appears briefly on a monitor trying to break in from her parallel universe, which looked jarring to me, but the children - who'd never seen this story before and presumably have forgotten the wider context - took it in their stride. More interesting is the script utilising some of the tics and idiosyncrasies of the Doctor as a plot point; not just the "Allons-y"s and "Molto bene"s, but also the habit he sometimes has of admonishing his companions with a "No, don't do that". This is deployed to Donna at the end when she starts copying what he says, but it's no longer a joke. The script is wonderful in its economy. There's no TARDIS, interior or exterior (it's only mentioned in passing as part of the stream of consciousness when the Doctor is testing Sky's ability to copy anything he says) just straight into the new situation. The structure is a simple but devastating succession of story beats to ratchet up the tension, as the possessed Sky starts to copy everyone, then just the Doctor, then syncs, then overtakes. If it was a treatment document just listing those out it wouldn't seem like much, but it's written and played with conviction. It might just be Davies's best script for the show, though he makes it seem effortless as next up is Turn Left, and that also might just be Davies's best script for the show.

Great as they are, these stories aren't exactly laugh riots. If I have one criticism of Midnight it's that it's a bit too bleak. Turn Left is similarly a tale of the worst traits of humankind and grim things happening, but it's bleak specifically because the Doctor's not there. In Midnight, the Doctor is present but still can't help matters. This, plus - something very rare for Doctor Who - the lack of any explanation for what the monster was, makes it very dark. The creature was only stopped because of a fluke, and it assimilated the essence of the smartest person in the room (maybe even the smartest person in the universe) within a few minutes, while nobody else including the audience captured even the tiniest fact about it. Shivers! It's not so dark as to break out of the acceptable shape of a Doctor Who story (unlike Sleep No More, at least in my view), but the Doctor is supposed to be the hero. To have him powerless to help isn't a trick that can be pulled off too many times.

Connectivity:

In both Midnight and The Highlanders, there's a performance by one of the Troughton family, and in both stories the Doctor finds himself trapped inside a craft surrounded by hostile people.

Deeper Thoughts:

Made it through the wilderness: a book report on The Long Game by Paul Hayes. It felt like a while since I'd bought any Doctor Who product, and then a few things all arrived through the letterbox around the same time. First was the Blu-ray box set of Season 9 (Jon Pertwee's third year as the Doctor), which I will cover in more detail in a future blog post; alongside it was the latest Doctor Who Magazine special on all the 'Showrunners' of the series to date. The latter was an interesting read, though the team putting it together have had to stretch the definitions somewhat to be able to cover both classic and new series Doctor Who together (they count the 20th century producers including the TV Movie's Philip Segal as showrunners, when for most of those years the script editors had a lot of influence too, then cover lead writers / executive producers Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall for the 21st century). In the section on Davies, The Long Game by Paul Hayes, which tells "The inside story of how the BBC brought back Doctor Who" was quoted. This reminded me that I had meant to buy the book and read it when it came out recently. Somehow, in what felt like the blink of an eye, 'recently' has turned into about 18 months ago - the book was published in late 2021. How time passes. Anyway, it is still available to purchase online, so I got a copy delivered and dove straight into it after the Showrunners special. I thoroughly recommend it as the definitive guide to the second stage of the so called "wilderness years" of Doctor Who, from 1996 to September 2003.

The narrative starts after the US broadcast of the Paul McGann TV Movie. Even before it was shown in the UK, it had become obvious that the programme hadn't done the numbers stateside to kick-off a series there. Universal TV's option was extended a year to the end of 1997, but it was clear to everyone - both in the BBC and in fandom - that it wouldn't lead to anything more on the telly. There then follows a good summary of everything that happened from that point to the long awaited announcement of Doctor Who's return in the September of 2003, as a series that would subsequently grab everyone's attention and would star Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper and David Tennant, and eventually have last minute script scrambles and experimental episodes like Midnight (which coincidentally shares a title with The Long Game's final chapter). In the background was the activity of many a burgeoning "cottage industry" (each covered in its own chapter) of Doctor Who books, magazines, audios and the programme's online content like the Scream of the Shalka animation. Meanwhile, people were joining the BBC who would be instrumental in bringing the programme back: Peter Salmon, Mal Young, Jane Tranter, Julie Gardner, Lorraine Heggessey. The BBC, and particularly BBC One drama, was gradually pulled out of the doldrums of the late 1990s by the new intake, and by changes made to its structures and processes. Just like in many a big organisation, there were lots of different fiefdoms that sometimes pulled in opposing directions.

In this period, two areas both saw Doctor Who as a property that could serve their requirements. BBC Films with BBC Worldwide wanted to make a Doctor Who movie; BBC Drama and Programming wanted to create an ongoing series on BBC One Saturday nights. Conflict between these two caused a false start chronicled in the book. From 1999 to 2000, Russell T. Davies, having established himself as big name with Queer as Folk, made it clear he would work at the BBC but only on Doctor Who, and was in discussions with contacts there who wanted him to do it. Ongoing negotiations related to the movie stymied this, but then those negotiations came to nothing anyway. It's unfortunate that but for this the return of Doctor Who might have been a few years earlier. Maybe it wasn't the time, though. Two years later - with the movie no closer to being a reality - the critical mass appeared to be forming. Four or five different groups were all pitching - at varying stages of conversation with the BBC - to return the show to TV. There was a "bid" from Dan Freedman, who had previously got a radio pilot made, which was then retooled to become the first online Doctor Who story Death Comes to Time. There was a bid from the trio of Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman, partially as a reaction against what they feared Freedman would do with the show. Matthew Graham had his hat in the ring, too, and maybe others who have now been forgotten. From reading the book, though, Davies was the only contender who had a chance at the prize. Still nothing progressed, though, because of "rights issues".

It's always interesting to read the inside story of history one witnessed from the outside. In the First Time Round section of The Vampires of Venice blog post last year, I talked briefly about the barren feeling of those first few years of the new millennium for a Doctor Who fan. In the book, my thoughts are somewhat echoed by Stephen Cole and Gary Gillatt (BBC Worldwide Doctor Who range editor and Doctor Who Magazine editor of the time, respectively). They felt, after all the disappointments and raised hopes of the past, that it might have been a relief if Doctor Who was just left alone. During that period, part of the misery was hearing often about those "rights issues" as a stubborn stumbling block. It turned out, though, that they didn't exist. There was a perception, held in good faith by many people within the BBC, that the rights issues for bringing back the show were intractable; but, once there was someone in a position to research it (from the BBC Cult website team, ensuring they were fine to produce Scream of the Shalka, and also to be able to answer the frequently asked questions on this topic from fans), it boiled down to just contention with BBC Worldwide, who still wanted to make that movie. By 2003, senior people in the BBC believed they'd had enough of a chance, and Davies et al finally got the go ahead. Paul Hayes structures all this history into an engaging page turner, talking to most of the main players in new interviews, and using extensive archive material too. As we approach the beginning of Russell T. Davies's second stint of running the show, it is a timely read to find out what happened to make the first one a reality. I urge everyone to get a copy, if they haven't already: it even has a happy ending.

 

In Summary:

Sparkly but dark.

Voyage of the Damned

Chapter the 251st, where a disaster movie featuring a famous face or two is perfect for the Christmas TV schedule.

Plot: 

The Doctor arrives aboard the Starship Titanic, a luxury cruise ship from the planet Sto run by the Max Capricorn company, in orbit around Earth in the present day. He befriends a waitress Astrid, who joined the company to see alien planets but has never had the chance. Using the psychic paper, he gets himself and Astrid down to London with a handful of other passengers in a landing party. When they return, the Titanic is hit by meteoroids. The Captain has been paid off by someone to cause the disaster, and the ship's robot servants, the Host, are programmed to kill any survivors. The Doctor, Astrid and the others in the landing party make their way to the bridge where the one remaining crewmember Midshipman Frame is holed up. They battle the Host, and the extreme environments of the damaged ship, and many of the group are killed. The Doctor works out that whoever is controlling the Host is in a secret compartment on one level, and confronts them. It is Max Capricorn himself; he is attempting to destroy the company's reputation after being kicked off the board, by causing the Titanic to crash into the populated Earth. Astrid saves the Doctor from Max's attack, but at the cost of her life. After saving the Earth by pulling the ship out of its plummet just in time, the Doctor realises that because she was wearing a teleport bracelet when she died, he can bring Astrid back. But he can't make her become fully corporeal, so has to let her go. The Doctor takes the tour party leader Mister Copper to Earth; Copper had lied about his credentials and worried about any investigation. The Doctor tells him that he's rich based on Earth/Sto currency exchange rates, and wishes him a merry Christmas..

Context:

I have finally bowed to the inevitable. Tired of having to keep buying knock-off generic remotes for my very old (but still trusty) Blu-ray player, I bought a new player. Just for the remote. During a cost of living crisis. Who am I, Rockefeller? Anyway, I am now 4K ready for when I have to upgrade the very old (but still trusty) TV, and I hope that's not for a long time. This meant that I could watch this story from the DVD in the new series 4 box set. I was accompanied by the three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) who were all enthusiastic. We've been watching various Christmas specials and films all through December, this Doctor Who offering being just one of them. Before the main event, I put on Time Crash, the short made for the Children in Need telethon that was shown a month before the 2007 Christmas special's broadcast in December. It's a sketch featuring David Tennant meeting Peter Davison's Doctor. The children hadn't seen it before, and found it mildly diverting. It was interesting to note how many ideas and jokes that its writer Steven Moffat reused when he did a full-on Doctor meets his old selves story in 2013, The Day of the Doctor. We then preceded to watch Voyage of the Damned. The youngest particularly liked the character of Bannakaffalatta, and was so annoyed when he was killed off that she almost stopped watching. The eldest kept mentioning that the Host were a rip off of the robots from 1970s story The Robots of Death, and he's right - they are. Although, I think it's meant to be a homage (French for rip off).

First Time Round:

I remember a lot of hype in the build-up to the first UK broadcast of this story on BBC1, Christmas Day 2007. The family (which was just me, the Better Half and eldest child, one year old at the time) had just moved into a new place, our current home, a month before. A couple of weeks later the Christmas Doctor Who Magazine celebrated Kylie Minogue's guest appearance with a now rather famous cover of her posing with a bronze Dalek while wearing a bronze-coloured dress. I had been out one evening in London for the day job's Christmas party, at a Teriyaki restaurant, and was slightly merry from drinking a bit too much saki. As my subscription copy hadn't yet arrived, I impulse bought the issue at the train station to read on the train home, as I wanted to keep myself awake. In my state of festiveness there was a good chance that I'd fall asleep and find myself waking up at the end of the line in the early hours of the morning. It's no reflection of the content of the articles within, which as I remember were most engaging, but I fell asleep and found myself waking up at the end of the line in the early hours of the morning. I had to get a cab home, and found that the driver didn't know the area where I lived. As I'd only recently moved, I didn't know the area where I lived either.

I got the driver to go along the seafront road until I could see some landmark through the window that I recognised where he could drop me off. Finally, I saw it - a low bridge I remembered walking under near the train station. It turns out though, as I discovered after he'd driven away, that there is more than one low bridge in the area, and all low bridges look the same. This is why, in the wee, small hours of an early December day, I found myself wandering around suburban roads in the dark, searching for my home, clutching a magazine with a glammed-up Kylie and Dalek on the front as if it were a charm to ward off the cold. I did finally find my new home, and got in before I died of hypothermia. The lesson is: don't drink too much Saki. Anyway, a couple of weeks later on the big day I was safely inside in the warm. Of the relatives who were visiting us that year, only the Better Half's grandmother was watching with me. She stayed silent throughout except for the moment when a certain spiky, red faced alien was dying after a noble self-sacrifice. She said simply and loudly: "Who thinks of these horrible things?" and then lapsed back into silence again. I took this to be a rhetorical question, so did not reply with the full nerdy detailed answer that I could well have given.

Reaction: 

The viewing figures for Voyage of the Damned in the UK were 13.31 million viewers with a peak of 13.8 million. This still is, and is likely to remain, the highest number for any 21st century story, and is up there with the biggest audiences the show ever got from 1963 to 1989 (when, lest we forget, there were larger audiences in general for top charting programmes). It was the second biggest audience for a TV programme in all of 2007. Purely based on this quantitative data, including chart position, it's the biggest Doctor Who story ever in terms of getting bums on seats compared to other entertainment on offer. Why would this be? There was still a large captive audience for TV on Christmas day 15 years ago, with a mass of people wanting to watch something without the alternative of streaming services that they have now. That's clearly a factor, but the previous Christmas specials in 2005 and 2006, though getting very respectable numbers, were not so stellar. Was it just down to having an extra special star guest in Kylie Minogue (who played Astrid)? Not only was Minogue incredibly popular as a pop star, there was the additional interest generated by her return to acting after a long time away. It may have been that this was something of a draw, but how much? The following Christmas special in 2008 got almost the same audience numbers (13.1 million), and - with all respect to him as an incredibly good actor - David Morrissey does not generate the kind of guest star publicity as does Minogue. I think the big draw of Voyage of the Damned is David Tennant.

Tennant is stunningly good in this story; he'd really found his groove in the role by this time. He had also built a fanatic (but deserved) following through his first two series and two Christmas specials. This, his third yuletide offering, saw him enter a sustained period of intense popularity - large audiences, high chart positions - that only ended when he left the role (by which time he was appearing in the Christmas idents in front of every programme). They could have paired him with the talking cabbage that Tom Baker always joked that he wanted as a companion, and Tennant might still have got 13 million people watching in December 2007. This is not to say that Kylie's presence isn't welcome. Some have criticised her acting in Voyage of the Damned, but I think that's unfair. It's not supposed to be a showy performance, and I think she delivers what's on the page well, with a couple of nice flirtatious moments with the Doctor. Of course there's only one way that introducing a character that wants to travel to the stars and is enamoured of the Doctor, but who's played by someone who has touring and recording commitments such that they are never going to become a series regular, plays out. Astrid's tragic demise, and the Doctor's desperate and doomed attempt to bring her back to life, is one of the best moments and acts as a nice counterpoint to the disaster movie action elsewhere.

Davies always throws some grit in the oyster, putting some dark or even potentially problematical material (I'm thinking of Elton's love life at the end of Love & Monsters, for example) into a knockabout romp. He doesn't hold back even at Christmas. It's interesting to compare this to Steven 'Everybody Lives!' Moffat, who essentially pulls the same trick at the end of his Library 2-parter story in the following year's run. Moffat has Tennant's Doctor go through with saving River Song as a ghost in the data, whereas Davies positions it as a cruel fate. Both choices are valid, and both create memorable moments in their respective stories. Davies can do happy, too. Clive Swift had an off day with a Doctor Who Magazine journalist on set, and the snippy interview that resulted was printed in full. This maybe overshadowed how good he is in the story, and how much Mister Copper is the heart of the piece: a person keen to learn, keen to live, with a bumbling tendency towards being endeared. He may be a metaphor for all of us; I hope he is. The final scene where he gets his reward is another stand-out moment. Such moments wouldn't work if the action movie material wasn't solid too, but it definitely is that. After many subsequent years from 2007 to date of Doctor Who pushing the envelope with its visuals, this story is now looking slightly less spectacular by comparison, but at the time it popped out of the screen. Before the disaster, the Titanic looks suitably opulent, inside and out. After the meteoroids hit, there are interesting, grand spaces for the plucky band of survivors to fight their way through.

Beyond Minogue and Swift, that plucky band of survivors are all perfectly written, cast and played: Clive Rowe and Debbie Chazen as Morvin and Foon Van Hoff, Russell Tovey as Midshipman Frame... everybody's great, there's no point in listing them all. This goes for villains too (George Costigan as Max Capricorn is overplaying it to a finely calibrated and delicious degree) and bit parts (Bernard Cribbins appearing as a newspaper vendor and being so good he'd be back as a regular before too long). And Geoffrey Palmer; good gracious, Geoffrey Palmer is so good in this. It's an embarrassment of riches. There's lots of great humour, but it's finely balanced with the thrills and the scares. A lot of the latter comes from the Host ("Information: you are all going to die"). Though they may be something of a Voc robot tribute group (see Context section above), they're still effective. There's obviously some deliberate in jokes about The Robots of Death thrown in (like one getting its hand lopped off by a door); when they remove their halos to use as killer frisbees, though, that's pure Russell T Davies.  There's some deft world building, e.g. discrimination against cyborgs on Sto, and some nice fun stuff like the cameos for Nicholas Witchell and the Queen. There's barely a blemish - maybe some of the hero shots of Tennant grandstanding (at one point the eldest said: "He looks like a bloke in a perfume advert"). Believe me, I hate agreeing with the hard-line Christian group that complained about it, but the image of the Doctor being borne aloft by angels is a bit much. These are tiny things, though. I challenge anyone not to break in to at least one massive grin by the time they reach "Allons-y Alonso!" (a punchline to a joke set up 18 months before). It's a Christmas cracker.

 

Connectivity: 

Voyage of the Damned features a spaceship and robotic adversaries (just like the last two stories blogged). In both this story and The Wheel in Space, the second billed character is a companion played by someone who is a recording artist as well as an actor (though Frazer Hines' musical career was a little more fleeting than Kylie Minogue's, mind you).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Year of Three Doctors. It's not quite over yet but I think it's safe to say that 2022 was a very interesting year for Doctor Who. It felt for a lot of the time like there were two separate and distinct series happening simultaneously. It will always be a bit like that when a new production team is starting to film while the old one's episodes are still airing, but it was more pronounced this time. Perhaps this was because the current production and the people associated with it, Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall, seemed to disappear from view early on. Multiple factors no doubt dictated the scheduling of the three Doctor Who stories shown in 2022, and the result was a big gap in the middle of the year. Eve of the Daleks, which I very much enjoyed, was made to be shown on the first day of the year to maintain Doctor Who's presence in the festive period schedules. Legend of the Sea Devils, which was okay but a bit slight, came not that long afterwards at Easter. Finally, The Power of the Doctor had to be aligned to late October to fit in with the BBC's centenary celebrations. Chibnall's approach to publicity has always been more minimalist than Russell T Davies's anyway, and in between those latter two stories, there wasn't a peep of publicity related to the current Doctor's era. There was loads, though, related to shows that would be shown more than a year later. The campaign was clever, using distinctive cryptic combinations of emojis in social media posts in advance of press releases. Any campaign can only be as good as the product, and - though we've only seen glimpses so far - the Doctor Who 2023 product looks like it has some very interesting and powerful features. An old Doctor returns, reunited - somehow - with a companion he once travelled with but whose memory has been wiped so she doesn't know of his existence. That scenario has a lot of potential, and it's just a prelude to a new era with a new Doctor.

The most exciting moment this year was inevitably the announcement of Ncuti Gatwa as the next-ish Doctor. The brief moment of him in the trailer after The Power of the Doctor was enough to get everyone excited about his take on our favourite Time Lord. I've not seen him act in anything yet, and am holding off from watching Sex Education so that his performance as the Doctor is as surprising and fresh to me as it can be. Not being a Coronation Street watcher, I also find Millie Gibson, cast as companion Ruby Sunday, to be an unknown quantity. The picture of these two future stars of Doctor Who in costume released recently was great to see. They're a youthful (Gibson wasn't born when the relaunched 21st century version of Doctor Who went into pre-production) and exciting new team, and it does feel like a big new start for the show after what will be a bit of nostalgia in the anniversary year stories with David Tennant and Catherine Tate. Talking of looking back, with less new stories on TV, the older back catalogue releases could have filled the schedule, but there were fewer of those releases too. The Blu-ray collection sets have maintained the great level of quality established in previous years, so it was a shame to only get two of them in 2022. The box-set for Colin Baker's first full season 22 was another opportunity to see lots of behind the scenes material that was kept from that time, as well as new documentaries. A highlight was Matthew Sweet's three linked 'In Conversation' interviews with the series' heroes Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, and its biggest villain, Michael Grade (who as the controller of BBC1 in 1985 tried to cancel Doctor Who). At the other end of the year, the first ever black-and-white set came out with the William Hartnell-starring season 2. Seeing these old episodes on Blu-ray is a minor miracle in itself, but the extras are good too (I'm still working my way through the set at the time of writing).

Previous years have had animated story releases as well as box sets of old and new seasons, but in 2022 that came to an end (or at least a pause). The final one was The Abominable Snowmen released in September, which I was lucky enough to see at the BFI Southbank in London (see the blog post here for more details). I got to enjoy similar events there for the aforementioned Colin Baker set (blogged about here) and the preview of the 4K restorations of the 1960s Dalek films (see the Deeper Thoughts section of tangentially connected TV story The Chase). I missed the recent event to tie into the Season 2 boxset in October as I had clashing commitments during half term. I hope to be able to go to more such events in 2023, though the lack of animations may reduce the opportunities somewhat. The reason the animations ceased was because a proportion of the budget was put in by BBC America. Recently, announcements gave the reason why: BBC America would no longer be showing Doctor Who as a deal had been done with Disney+ for them to be the home of Who outside the UK. Reportedly, there is going to be a more generous amount of funding flowing from the House of Mouse for extra-curricular activity (spin-offs have been talked about, for a start). Does this mean the animations could start up again soon? I'd like that very much. In the wider world, this was the year that saw a UK prime minister come within a whisker of leaving power before a single Doctor Who story was broadcast during their tenure, which would have been the first time it had happened since the show began. It's a while before the next stories will be broadcast, so we may see that happen to the next guy, who knows? I also had a holiday in the filming location for Gallifrey in Hell Bent, which was nice. Aside from Blu-rays I haven't really bought much in the way of merchandise, but there's not many sleeps to go until Christmas now, maybe I'll find something in my stocking on the big day. Merry Christmas!

In Summary:

Incidentally, a Happy Kylie-mas to all of you on Sto!

The Fires of Pompeii

Chapter The 236th, wherein we see the events of volcano day. 

Plot:

The Doctor and Donna arrive in Pompeii in 79 AD on the day before Vesuvius erupts. The TARDIS is bought as a piece of modern art by local marble vendor Caecilius; tracking it down to make their escape, the time travellers meet Caecilius and his family at their villa, and realise something is very wrong. Many people in Pompeii have precise precognitive powers acquired from breathing in the volcano vapours coming out of Pompeii's hypocausts, and this is turning them to stone. Nobody, though, can foresee the events of the next day, almost as if it is blocked from their view. Aliens called Pyroviles, giants made of magma and rock, live in the volcano after having crash landed many years before. An earthquake 17 years earlier woke them up, and since then they have been influencing anyone with latent psychic ability. The family and the Doctor defeat a Pyrovile that attacks the villa by throwing buckets of water over it, but a local Sibylline sisterhood kidnap Donna in the confusion. The Doctor rescues her, and they both use an entrance in the sisterhood's temple to descend into the volcano. They find a local bigwig Lucius delivering a stone circuit board that he commissioned Caecilius to complete. It is an energy converter that will use the power from Vesuvius to convert all the humans on the planet into Pyroviles, meaning the volcano will never erupt. The Doctor has to make the eruption happen and kill all the residents in order to save the rest of the world and correct history. He and Donna escape in the TARDIS, but Donna persuades him to go back and save just Caecilius and his family, who in gratitude adopt the TARDIS crew as their household gods.

Context:

This story came up randomly a little while ago, but I held it back until now to tie in with the publishing of the Target novelisation (see Deeper Thoughts section for more details). I first thought I'd watch it late in the evening on the hottest day of the year in the UK so far, July 19th 2022; unable to sleep for the third night running, I was looking for something to distract me. It is after all an apposite if unnerving watch when the ambient temperature is high. I remembered, though, that the children - who were all in bed by then - had expressed an interest a few days earlier in watching a Doctor Who story, so I held off. The following Sunday afternoon, I watched the story from the disc in the Complete Fourth Series DVD box set accompanied by all three children (boys of 16 and 12, girl of 10). All of them were surprised to see Peter Capaldi appear as Caecilius - "It's two Doctors in one!" said the middle child, who I later had to show the clip from Capaldi era story The Girl Who Died as he was intrigued to see the explanation of why the Doctor models a regeneration on this Pompeiian he once met. This child, who's the most like his Dad in terms of enthusiasm for genre TV and propensity for binge watching, mentioned in passing that Loki had done Pompeii too (and encouraged me for the nth time to watch said series on Disney+). When the Doctor was facing his cruel decision, I asked all the children of what this was an example, and they all chorused "The Trolley problem!" like the good moral philosophers that they are.

First Time Round:

I watched this go out live on its BBC1 debut broadcast in the UK on 12th April 2008, accompanied by the Better Half and my - at the time - only child (a boy of nearly two years old then). The show was on a little earlier on Saturday nights that year, so the boy was still up, and we'd tried a tentative experiment the previous week with the Adipose story. He'd responded well to that one, but when giant magma monsters growled through the TV screen at him, he burst into tears. We knocked such family watches on the head at that point, and didn't try again until he (and each of his two siblings who came along later) was much older. At the time, I was a lowly UK screenwriter and screenwriting blogger and vaguely 'knew' the writer James Moran as a fellow blogger. I don't know if he ever saw it but in a post a few months later talking about this first watch of The Fires of Pompeii, I wrote "Who do you think you are scaring my innocent child, Mr. Moran?". This was not actually a criticism, but a very obscure Doctor Who reference, to an article by a journo called Jean Rook in the Daily Express in the 1970s that took pot shots at Robert Holmes, script editor and writer and genius. Essentially, I was saying that Moran was in exalted company. So febrile was the online debate at that time that I felt I had to add a disclaimer in the post explaining this, else someone might think I was having a pop at him. As I've mentioned on the blog before, there was a lot of negativity in his comments section after his Doctor Who story went out, and I didn't want to add to that. It was nothing, though, to the ire that was unleashed by the unthinking the following year, when Moran's co-written episode of Torchwood killed off a well-loved character. I've only seen positivity online about his latest foray into the worlds of Doctor Who, this time in prose form (see Deeper Thoughts section below), so maybe things have improved in the last 13 years. Maybe.

Reaction:

In the 1970s Tom Baker story Pyramids of Mars, which is set in 1911, companion Sarah Jane Smith asks one of those key questions on behalf of the audience that companions are put there to ask: why can't she and the Doctor just leave rather than defeating the baddie of the week (Sutekh), as they know that the world doesn't end in 1911? A sequence then follows where the Doctor takes her to the future as it will look if they don't defeat Sutekh, and it's a barren wasteland. This little bit of ironing, pressing out the wrinkle of why it's okay for the Doctor to interfere sometimes but not others (usually because naughty aliens have been playing fast and loose with established history), what's "meant to be" and what's in flux, is one that Russell T Davies, the showrunner of the first few years of twenty-first century Who including The Fires of Pompeii, wanted to emulate. There was a desire to include a Pyramids of Mars style scene as early as the third story (the first one set in the past), but they couldn't quite make it fit. I'm glad they didn't, as in the end they - whether they realised they'd done it or not - commissioned James Moran to make a whole story out of that question, and it's a cracker. Consider the climactic sequences: the painful decision the Doctor has to make, with Donna with him so he doesn't have to face the decision alone, the dark spectacle of the recreation of Pompeii's final moments, and the emotional moment that Donna, in floods of tears, persuades the Doctor to go back and save someone, anyone; seeing these, you might be fooled into thinking this was a season finale but it's just episode two of thirteen. It was a very strong run, Donna and the Doctor's adventures from 2008, and this story is one of the best of them.

In the style of a comedy like Blackadder, the story makes the past more immediate by including characters (the family) that behave in a modern way within a historical setting. It's quite broad and sit-com with its "Don't tell my Dad" and "You're not going out wearing that" and so on, but it works. This relies a lot on the individual performances, and the casting here is exemplary. There's a lot of plot crammed in to the approximately 45 minutes of action, and this leaves little time for everyone to shine, so getting the right actors to have an immediate screen impact - and make you care at the end when their characters face death - was crucial. It means one's left wanting more, though. Capaldi is great as Caecilius, as are all the members of the family; they could power an entire series of knockabout Roman adventures (I love the Mary Poppins homage where they have a standard family procedure to catch any valuable ornaments when the volcano rumbles, "Positions!"), but they only get a short amount of screen time when one adds it all up. Capladi and another member of the cast (Karen Gillan as a soothsayer) got to come back in major starring roles, of course; but it would be nice to find another role in Doctor Who in future for each of the Phils, Cornwall and Davis, as they essentially have cameos here. For Phil Davis this is a particular shame; Lucius Petrus Dextrus (a bit of a spoiler if, unlike me, you were taught Latin, as it means Lucius Stone Arm) is the nominal baddie of the piece, and Davis talks a good baddie game, but there isn't room for him to do very much - he serves the plot only by delivering a MacGuffin to the real villains. The scene where Davis, and the daughter of the family, ominously reveal that they know all about the Doctor and Donna's real identities is very good, mind.

The visuals of the story are excellent throughout. Monsters made of stone and fire hadn't been done before (at least in the new series era - if they had turned out to be the Krargs from Shada, finally appearing in the series properly, that would have been nice), and the CGI works well enough (it was certainly realistic enough to scare my infant son - see above). Utilising the sets from another Ancient Rome based series in the Cinecitta studios in Italy gives the story an expensive sense of scale, and the location work matches this high standard. Murray Gold's music is nice, if not particularly memorable, and the dialogue is good. The comedy quotient in the script is larger than usual, even for this era. This can vary in groansomeness (maybe it's just me, but Donna's idea about where Pompeiian teens go shopping "T K Maxximus" is a very fine gag; the Doctor asking the Pyroviles not to get themselves "in a lava", not so much, and Caecilius thinking that San Francisco is a restaurant in Naples is somewhere in the middle) but most jokes land. There's also the running gag that the TARDIS translation of talking in Latin to Latin speakers comes out sounding Welsh, and the Doctor wielding a water pistol like James Bond. It is just balanced enough not to impact on the more serious musing on the central moral quandary when that needs to come to the fore. Ultimately, that's what the story is all about. A minor gripe about the more serious stuff would be that - after a big build up to the crucial explosive moment where the Doctor and Donna push the lever that makes the volcano erupt - they escape somewhat conveniently, with the object that they are in turning out to be an escape pod that throws them exactly the right distance clear such that they can outrun the lava and get back to the TARDIS. I'll forgive this, though, as there are greater horrors to come for them because they survive, and then ultimately some small moment of redemption.

Connectivity: 

Aside from them both being recently published as books (see Deeper Thoughts section), The Fires of Pompeii and The Stones of Blood each have mention of ancient gods or goddesses, a group of robed worshippers and creatures made of stone. The plot in each instance hinges on a backstory where a spaceship arrived on Earth thousands of years previously.

Deeper Thoughts:

Target Acquisition - part 2 of 2. The latest batch of new Doctor Who novelisations on the resurrected Target imprint were published recently. These four books group neatly into two pairs, and not just because the first two (covered in the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post) are classic Who stories, and the two I will cover here are post-2005. The first two were both by the same author, David Fisher, and both featured in the Key to Time Tom Baker series in the late 70s. This second two are both (presumably coincidentally rather than by design) set within the imperial era of ancient Rome. Whereas Fisher was encouraged to create alternative versions that meant removing things as much as adding, for these latter two - each based on a single episode story of around 45 minutes running time (so about half the length of the 1970s tales) - it's the addition of material that is more the challenge. As we'll see, mind you, even though they are more expanded than alternate versions, there is still some material as broadcast missing from these latest two. With these additions and deletions, and with tweaks to tone and emphasis, you can get a very different adventure (in the case of The Eaters of Light) but I'd still say overall that this brace are more faithful. I think I prefer a faithful approach. Obviously with any new series Doctor Who episode available at the touch of a button, a novelisation isn't required as historical record or aide memoire, but there's a risk in straying too far that you lose what's good from the TV version. Fisher, for example, dispenses with the renowned kiss-off line from The Androids of Tara's villain Count Grendel "Next time I shall not be so lenient!" I love that line, and I'm not the only one; the story feels incomplete without it. No such liberties are taken by James Moran in his new prose version of The Fires of Pompeii.

Of the four, Moran's book is the most like an old school Target novelisation of the 1970s and 80s. He expands out the narrative with moments of backstory and internal monologue of Donna - whose voice he captures particularly well - and the guest characters, adding the odd moment or new piece of dialogue to smooth things out for the new medium, but with no major new or altered scenes. The dialogue from the original TV version is almost 100% intact (Moran only removes some references to the arc plots of 2008 like Rose returning to our universe, and Donna having something on her back). The original story goes at such a break-neck pace that this extra material here and there on the fly doesn't create too much drag, and the story is still brisk and engaging. Moran keeps the humour mostly in the dialogue; in a recent interview in Doctor Who Magazine, he cited Douglas Adams as a hero and The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel as an early fave, but there's no attempt to emulate Adams's descriptive style (unlike at least one author novelising classic Doctor Who stories for Target in the 1980s) and it's all the better for that. The minor issues I mentioned above about the story are still present; Lucius is more rounded on the page, but he still contributes very little, and the Doctor and Donna still get very lucky in escaping the volcano when it goes boom, even though there's a tiny bit of prose sticking plaster over it. They are really minor, though, and far outweighed by the great material all around. What I suspect might have been the most challenging section, expressing the explosive visuals where ash and terror are raining down on Pompeii, is even better on the page. This reader must have had a little volcanic ash in his eyes or something, as those eyes were a bit wet whilst reading the sequence where the family huddle together and talk to one another while they wait for the inevitable.

Moran clearly is comfortable with the somewhat flippant style of humour that was the house style of Doctor Who in 2008; based on the book of The Eaters of Light, it's likely that Rona Munro is not so wedded to the equally flippant humour of the show under a different showrunner in 2017. Though the basic story is the same as on TV (see the blog post here for more details), the dialogue of Munro's novel is a page one rewrite; gone are quips about the Doctor being a vestal virgin and the like, and the subject matter is taken much more seriously, though not over-seriously. Unlike Moran's packed story, the plot of The Eaters of Light is much more slight. It is propelled by details of characterisation and backstory, references to the immediate events of a battle that happened just before the aftermath we are shown, but what then takes place is very simple - two groups of enemies have to come together, helped by the Doctor and his friends, to defeat the alien threat. The structure of the novel is to split these actions in the 'present' in twain to form sub-books one and three, then insert between them a book two section that flashes back and introduces the key characters from each of the two warring factions, Kar (on the Pict side) and Lucius (on the Roman side), explain how they came to be in this battle, and show the battle itself. There is skillful work to round out these characters and show that the two groups are not so different as they appear, both having lost people they love in the battle.

Apart from this major addition, Munro also expands out the simple televisual moment when Kar chases Bill and she falls down a hole into the Roman's hide-out to include a ceremonial bull chase and an underwater sequence that would have busted the series budget. A couple of things that are removed are a bit more of a wrench. As in the other book, scenes from the TV series arc plot would have got in the way and not been adequately resolved, so they have to be removed. Thus the beautiful moment where the villainous Missy sheds a tear on hearing the music echoing through the ages near the site of the cairn is sadly gone. Also missed by this reader is a scene that stood out on the telly where Bill is shocked to find in her conversations with the Roman survivors that the sexual mores of her time are not necessarily more enlightened than theirs. As a key part of Lucius's story is the love he has for his fallen comrade Sextus, it would have seemed out of place to still include a more light-hearted reference to his homosexuality. Bill doesn't have quite as prominent a role in the book, as her interactions with the Romans are generally simplified to focus only on listening to Lucius telling his story. Overall, despite the changes, this is a superb book, and builds on a story that on television was solid but a little slight. I'd recommend both of these titles, if you haven't picked them up yet. The Eaters of Light is probably the better book, but The Fires of Pompeii is the better novelisation, and both are interesting retellings of new Who stories.

In Summary:

The Fires of Pompeii is so hot right now.