Something awful is happening at Coal Hill, and it's not that the school has now adopted Academy status: a sixth-form student has gone missing, and nobody's talking about it. A gang of wholly original pupil characters not like any others ever written - jock, prim do-gooder, nerd, posh one, gay one - notice weird shadow creatures following / attacking them. The posh one turns out to be an alien prince, and the pupils' somewhat aggressive teacher his unwilling bodyguard. They were enemies on their planet, but are now both fighting the Shadow Kin, who infiltrated their world and killed everyone else. A time traveller called the Doctor brought them to Earth where they could lie low. Unfortunately, the Shadow Kin have tracked them down, arriving at the school through a tear in space-time. The teacher isn't able to wield a gun, thanks to the Doctor's interference. She had earlier got the missing pupil to shoot one of the Shadow Kin for her; unfortunately, the gun that destroys the shadow also disintegrates the person firing it. With the school's Autumn prom for sixth-formers in full swing, the Shadow Kin attack en masse. The jock (a footballer) loses his leg, and his girlfriend gets killed. The prim do-gooder ends up linked to the Shadow Kin King through a shared heart. The others manage to get the non-speaking prom attendees out of the school, but then get locked in. The Doctor arrives and saves the day, gives the jock a futuristic false leg, and leaves the teacher as the pupils' protector as a further penance for getting the missing pupil killed. The Shadow Kin were seeking a super weapon that the alien prince has, powered by the souls of his fallen people. He claims that the box is empty, the souls thing a myth, but - big twist reveal at the end - he's lying about that.

Context:

As I'm spinning off again, I need to ask my standard set of questions of For Tonight We Might Die, opening episode of the 'Doctor Who adjacent' series Class. Does it star the Doctor? Yes; there's a surprise appearance by Peter Capaldi towards the end that's highlighted by a whopping great "And Peter Capaldi" in the credits at the start. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. It even has pictures, thought I recently relaxed that rule. With the questions successfully answered, I watched this episode from the BBC iplayer one evening early in April 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. When not covering spin-offs and the like, I have completed ten Doctors' televisual eras (the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth Doctors) and 36 out of the total of 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing - the 41st having just begun): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

Doctor Who was off air for a whole year between its 2015 and 2016 Christmas Day specials. As in previous 'gap years', a spin-off series provided a distraction for fans starved of episodes of Doctor Who proper. Previous staples Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures had both stopped airing a few years earlier, so 2016 got a completely new spin-off. Class was a series on BBC3, a channel with a target demographic of 16 to 24 year olds; at the time it was digital only (which mattered a lot more back then, now it's hard to tell the difference). I still watched the episodes on my TV (through an application running on a Sony Blu-ray player connected to the screen) accompanied by the Better Half. It's a hazy memory now, but I'm pretty sure I was intrigued enough to watch the first episode as soon as it landed, the 22nd October. It was one of two episodes that dropped that day, with the remaining six appearing weekly thereafter; the series completed in early December, a few weeks before Peter Capaldi returned as the Doctor in the main show on the 25th. Class got a tepid reaction from fandom in general, I think it's fair to say, and no second series was commissioned. At the time of first watching the series, I was mostly concerned with where my DVD of the newly animated The Power of the Daleks had got to; I'd attended the BFI screening of the first three episodes of Power in early November, the ticket price of which included a copy of the DVD to be mailed out soon afterwards. Unfortunately, it was delayed. A 50-year old story seemed more exciting to me in 2016 than anything Class had to offer: would I feel the same on this latest watch?

Reaction:

The thing that leapt out at me most on this watch was how odd the set-up is for the intended audience. BBC3 programmes generally didn't and don't get set in schools. Audiences don't tend to associate strongly with characters younger than them, so the cast being a bunch of sixth-formers - at the lower age end of the target audience - is a risk. The sci-fi twist that one of the sixth-formers is actually an alien prince feels like it would fit better in a CBBC show than a BBC3 one. One of the main cast is even younger, as she's been advanced a couple of school years (something that almost never happens in the UK school system, thus damaging the already shaky verisimilitude). Further to this, UK sixth forms don't have Autumn proms at the start of a school year, and don't have special classes for over-achievers seemingly untethered to any specific A-level topic. These all, mind you, are things that have happened in American series set in American schools. The creator Patrick Ness has dual citizenship, and the show was intended to be accessible to US Who fans, so perhaps it's forgivable that it has a mid-Atlantic milieu. It doesn't feel real, though, and that's an issue when the series is going to counterpoint the every-day with the fantastical. The characters also don't feel like real people, but instead twisted versions of John Hughes teen flick archetypes. The most interesting person is the fake teacher and unwilling bodyguard Quill, played with relish - and a very cool look - by Katherine Kelly. Unfortunately, she's introduced in scenes with a nasty edge. In fact, everyone is introduced with material that makes them seem like an idiot or arsehole or both. There are also inconsistencies: Quill and prince Charlie both arrived on Earth at the same time, but he has to google every pop culture reference that comes up, whereas she knows what Care Bears are and uses idioms like "Potayto Potahto".

In the episodes that followed, as each personality and backstory got more fleshed out, things improved. Even when something has an eight episode commission in the bag, though, the first episode has to act as a pilot in order that people might come back to watch the rest. With the characters not necessarily engaging from the off, the plot is left to be the attraction for audience. Unfortunately, the set-up is complicated (a side effect of setting a science fantasy series in the unlikely precinct of a school), so there's many sections of exposition dumping. This doesn't leave much room for a story of the week, and the skirmish with the Shadow Kin is therefore very slight: they appear, they attack the prom, they're seen off. The other thing that happens - which again is investigated in the remainder of the series - is the inadvertent linking of the leader of the Shadow Kin with do-gooder April. This means that there are two pairs of characters unwillingly linked to each other in the story, the other being Charlie and Quill, which feels like at least one pair too many. The stuff with the gun is also not very clear. Quill can't use a gun, so encourages a pupil to instead - tendrils extend from it wrapping round the shooter's arms (quite a cool visual) and then they can kill the Shadow Kin, at the expense of their own life as the gun shoots backwards too. This is suggested, in breathless snatches of easy-to-miss dialogue, as the only way to kill a Shadow Kin. Later, though, Charlie has a gun he shoots repeatedly at the Shadow Kin, but it doesn't do the tendril thing, and doesn't disintegrate him. Is it a different gun, or does it behave in a different way because it's being used by an alien? It's very muddled.

When Torchwood (an earlier BBC3 Who spin-off) started it was muddled in its own way too, with the most difficult aspect being tone. Figuring out how to make Doctor Who-style adventures but for an older audience led to some awkward and often risible lurches into both sexual and violent content. It took them a year to find the right balance. Class settled down quicker, but some of the lessons haven't been learned here in the first episode: there's a weird cameo from the magnificent June Hudson who apropos of nothing starts talking about finding her husband "fiddling with himself on the stairs", and there's some very gory action during the battle sequences. Clearly this wasn't enough to prevent the Doctor from appearing in Class (it was a consistently adhered to rule that the character was never to appear in Torchwood). I don't think the cameo works particularly well, but it's still the best part of the episode. One does wonder why the Doctor doesn't pop back every week to help out, as the Coal Hill gang face much worse challenges later in the series; this is a central flaw of any Doctor Who spin-off, though, so it's not fair to blame Class for it. There's good moments without Capaldi too, like the spooky chase scene at the start. It's nice to see Nigel Betts return as Coal Hill's headmaster, who appeared in a few stories in Capaldi's first year, and there is a nice reference to Clara Oswald and Danny Pink, former teachers / former companions (though how does the school know Clara's dead?). All in all, there's a lot of promise there, despite the flaws, but the first episode has too much set-up material to be seen as a standalone story.

Connectivity:

Both For Tonight We Might Die and Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children feature a character revealed to be more than the ordinary person they may seem to be, and are instead a key figure from an alien planet (Charlie is a prince, and the Doctor is the original template for her people's special power); in both stories, the Doctor doesn't do much in the story until the end (this is by accident for Whittaker but by design for Capaldi).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Never Ending Story? John Higgs book event, Ropetackle Arts Centre, 8th April 2025. I've gone to quite a few Doctor Who events in London that I've written up and shared here on the blog, but this time I had an opportunity to go to one closer to home. On the sunny evening of the 8th April 2025, I took a short journey along the coast from home to an arts centre cum venue in Shoreham-by-Sea, accompanied by the Better Half. City Books, a very lovely independent bookshop in Brighton, runs regular book tie-in events at Ropetackle; this was the first one I'd ever seen advertised that was Doctor Who-related. I don't know any local fans, but my judgement of the crowd based on T-shirts and the odd Tom Baker scarf was it was about 60% fan to 40% arty bookish types that might have had more interest in Higgs than Who. My internal split was about 50/50: Higgs is a cultural commentator and scribe who covers his subjects - in the past, he's covered William Blake, Bond, the Beatles and the KLF amongst others - with a playful, sometimes mystical, storytelling style. My holiday reading last Summer included his book The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds, which I very much enjoyed. That holiday I was continually being reminded of Doctor Who (as retold in the blog post for The Ice Warriors, which I watched while I was away). I didn't have room in that post to mention that as well as the many other reminders, including the foam machine used in a pool party, the KLF book contained multiple references to my favourite programme too. It was clear than Higgs was something of a fan. I was very intrigued to see how he would approach a book about Doctor Who, a topic much more extensively covered than the KLF or William Blake (and probably even more than Bond or the Beatles).

The stage is set (with question mark umbrella and jelly babies)

Higgs gave an illustrated talk, speaking for just over an hour with a few slides of images projected behind him (he very properly gave a spoiler warning before revealing the final one, an image from Ncuti's second series trailer). He started with an anecdote about an event that became his inspiration for writing the book in the first place, which is also mentioned in the book's introduction (I'd purchased the book from the City Books stall while waiting for the event to start - thrillingly a couple of days before it would be generally available - and had a read of the first few pages). Higgs was having a post work drink in Fitzrovia, London with Tom Baker sometime in 2007 - Baker having been providing voiceover work on a children's series that Higgs was directing. There was another man at the bar of an age such that he would have watched Doctor Who when Baker was in the titular role. Higgs witnessed the moment this man clocked his childhood hero drinking nearby, and saw an expression appear on his face of genuine awe. This stayed with Higgs; so few things are truly awe inspiring in this world that he needed to write about this one. His talk, as well as Simon Guerrier's review that I subsequently read, convinced me Higgs had pulled off the almost impossible task of saying something fresh about a topic covered by so many other writers and tomes over the years. At Ropetackle, he covered everything from the character's genesis to fill an absence (both in the Saturday night schedules and in the cast of characters in a series planning document) to the Doctor as trickster, and all the way up to the recent tabloid knife-sharpening by hacks anticipating Doctor Who's demise. Higgs, though, does not think Doctor Who will ever die, believing it has become an ever-lasting myth that will continue forever in some form or other. Given that it has given rise to spin-offs like Class, and that even those continue on (Class stories are still being made by Big Finish on audio) suggests that he's on to something.

Swag

Audience questions followed his talk. An early one touched on what stories he would use to introduce a newbie to Doctor Who; he chose some good 'uns: The Curse of Fenric, Pyramids of Mars, Evil of the Daleks, "there ought to be a Pertwee ... Carnival of Monsters", and finally added "The next one". In response to a question about Star Wars versus Doctor Who, he said that he believed the UK show could only compete with the US franchise by doing something completely different. He was asked about the fear factor of the programme and said that he thought it was healthy, and that viewers would never be truly scared, "because they know that the Doctor's there". I had a question, but didn't ask it as it was not really about his views on Doctor Who, which everyone else wanted to hear about. I got to ask Higgs when I spoke to him briefly as he signed my copy of the book. It struck me that his book about the KLF was almost a fictional story about real characters, whereas his Doctor Who book sounded almost like a real biography of a fictional character; given that, I put to him "Are your books tricksters?" He thought about this for a moment and said "Perhaps, but perhaps all books are." This good answer, plus his musing on which Pertwee story to pick and coming up with Carnival of Monsters (quietly the best Pertwee, and up there with the best stories in the history of the show, in my humble), plus this excerpt online from later in the book than I've currently read covering similar (and quite niche) ground to my Deeper Thoughts section of The Wedding of River Song post from this here blog, many years ago, and the swag that I got with my copy including stickers and a badge (I'm easily pleased) - all of these predisposed me to feel warmly about the book. I'm a few chapters in, and it's so far as good as I thought it would be - that's already enough for me to urge you to get a copy. Enjoy!

In Summary:

Class report: could do better.

Saturday, 18 January 2025

Dark Water / Death in Heaven

Chapter the 319th, where the afterlife attacks!

Plot:

Danny Pink dies in an accident. A grieving Clara tries to force the Doctor to go back and change time to save him. Instead, the Doctor connects her to the TARDIS telepathic circuits to materialise the ship in the most likely place to find Danny again. This is the 3W Institute, run by Missy and reportedly set up by a founder that discovered that the dead can talk to us through television static, and they are all somehow still connected to their corpses. The Doctor thinks this is all a con to prey on people's fears. The rich people's minds are uploaded to a floating hard drive, which the Doctor recognises as Time Lord tech, while their bodies are kept in protective exoskeletons. Danny finds himself in what appears to be the afterlife, where an administrator called Seb greets him. Someone else there also wants to meet him: this is a boy that Danny accidentally killed when he was a soldier. Seb asks if Danny wants to use a service they provide where they can remove his painful emotions. Too late, the Doctor realises that the 3W exoskeletons are Cybermen, and that Missy is a regenerated Master. The Cybermen emerge in the St. Paul's area, and they and the Doctor and Missy are surrounded by UNIT, led by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Osgood. The Cybermen fly up to the sky and explode, forming a cloud, and rain starts to fall. This rain contains 'Cyber pollen' which turns dead people into Cybermen. In the Institute, Clara bluffs some Cybermen that she is actually the Doctor to buy some time. A rogue Cyberman arrives and takes her away.

The Doctor, Missy and the TARDIS are put aboard a UNIT plane, but flying Cybermen attack it in the air. Missy kills Osgood. Kate falls from the plane. As if that's not bad enough, a UNIT character played by the wonderful and talented Sanjeev Bhaskar is criminally underused before he too is killed off. The Doctor skydives from the plane, catching up with and entering the falling TARDIS. He materialises near Clara in a graveyard where many Cybermen are coming to life. The rogue Cyberman turns out to be Danny Pink. Missy arrives and tells the Doctor that the Cyber-rain will fall again, converting all the living people. She offers the Cyber-army to the Doctor, thinking that his self-righteousness will make him accept and the power will corrupt him. The Doctor refuses, and passes the control bracelet for the Cybermen that Missy has given him to Danny. Danny leads the Cybermen to fly up and destroy the clouds. Missy is shot by another Cyberman that turns out to be a reanimated dead Brigadier, who had previously caught and saved Kate when she fell from the plane. The bracelet allows Danny to bring back to life the boy he killed, who arrives in Clara's home. The Doctor uses coordinates that Missy gave him hoping to find the missing Gallifrey, but there's nothing there. He visits Clara, and both of them lie thinking that they need to protect the other's happiness (the Doctor thinks Clara is reunited with Danny, she thinks he's been reunited with his people). She stays on Earth; in the TARDIS, the Doctor is surprised to find Santa Claus knocking on the door, telling him he can't leave things that way.

Context:

This was viewed from the BBC iplayer in mid-January 2025, the first and second episode separated by a couple of days. For the first episode I was accompanied by all the children (young man of 18, boy of 15, girl of 12). The eldest was home for the last day before returning to university, and he was only interested to see Chris Addison playing Seb in the story, as he's a big fan of The Thick of It. He was a little disappointed that Addison didn't share any scenes with Capaldi (the scenes in the aforementioned comedy where Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker and Addison's Olly Reader interact are many and celebrated). There was a surprising amount of enthusiasm from the younger two to keep going and watch the second part immediately after the cliffhanger, but I didn't have the time at that moment. When I did, their enthusiasm had waned and I watched the second part alone.

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 Doctor's televisual era; Peter Capaldi's twelfth Doctor joining the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh and fourteenth, making seven Doctors completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season making it 33 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

Early November 2014, just over ten years before the recent rewatch, I saw these episodes when they were first broadcast on BBC1 in the UK. The pattern of the time was to timeshift each episode a little, watching it later on during the Saturday evening after it had gone out, accompanied by the Better Half. If we both thought an episode was suitable for the children, whose ages ranged from 2 to 8 years old at the time, I would watch it with them the following Sunday morning. Capaldi's first year had proved more scary than any season before, at least in our assessment, and three of its stories had been held back from the children; the two-part finale, though, was not one of those stories, despite some questionable moments that I'll pick up on in the Reaction section below.

Reaction:

In a scene in Dark Water, the 'three words', hinted about in the name of the institute around which a lot of the action revolves, are revealed. The words are 'Don't cremate me' and they are cried out in anguish by the supposed voices of the dead picked up from the ether. It's played realistically, and is therefore quite a chilling scene. I could see how another parent or child would react differently to how my children and I did on first watch. The Doctor has some dialogue to state that it's all a con, that there is no link between the corpses of the dead and any continuing spirit or soul; it's quick and easy to miss, though. Elsewhere, Danny Pink's spirit / soul is visually depicted. The script suggests - to those that can follow the technical bafflegab - that it's actually a computer simulation of him based on his memories; but the visual, scene after scene, is him walking around in an afterlife. This overpowers any technicalities: the story is weighted heavily - in some places, pretty much explicitly - towards a suggestion that people live on in some way after they die, in pain. There's multiple references to Danny's feeling cold, and this is stated to be because his corpse is still linked to him somehow, and it's being kept somewhere cold. That's quite an unsettling thing to suggest to younger members of the audience, and the programme fumbles the scientific explanation that may provide reassurance. Danny Pink, dead or alive, is never shown to be connected to any futuristic computer or such. He just magically appears in what is presented as an afterlife, but is actually - we find out later - some form of cyberspace. In the first episode, the Doctor says "We're here to get your boyfriend back from the dead", so he must believe it is possible in some way (though he has no knowledge of the use of the nethersphere tech at that point).

Why do the minds that have been uploaded to the nethersphere need to have a virtual afterlife to exist in, anyway? If all they are planned to be is the consciousness of an army of Cybermen, then can't they be put on standby until they're required to rampage? Would Missy really need anyone's consent to remove their emotions? She has a computer that stores dead people's brains, she can edit them to her two hearts' content. Why would she need to provide afterlife aftercare, and subtle manipulation, in the form of Seb? It makes sense that Missy is amassing an army of Cybermen by using fear to drum up trade for the 3W Institute. It makes sense that a rich punter might arrange before they die for their brain to be uploaded into her nethersphere, and their body to be put in a Cyber-suit / exoskeleton, based on their fear of the three words con. It doesn't make sense, though, that elsewhere Missy's shown as perfectly able to upload anyone to the nethersphere, whether they've engaged the Institute or not. it doesn't really make sense that loads of bodies in graves are converted into Cybermen by magic rain. The 'Cyber pollen' could contain the instructions for creating a new Cyberman, but where's it getting the raw materials? This is science an order of magnitude more advanced than that seen in the 3W Institute, which makes a mockery of the idea that Missy needed all those old, rich millionaires' money to fund her research. With only the slightest thought, it becomes clear that the story doesn't need the Institute front at all. It could be one episode long and start with Missy using some Gallifreyan tech to make people rise up out of their graves. The Cybermen reanimating dead bodies is, after all, a great idea, and enough to sustain a story on its own.

Without the nethersphere stuff, we would lose the subplot about Danny Pink's death, and that allows for some emotionally rich material. The sequence of Clara threatening the Doctor, urging him to go back and change time to save Danny, is one of the best of this period: it involves wonderful performances and great visuals, playing out near an active volcano; it has a great reversal, and ends with the killer line of the Doctor's "Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?" The story also wouldn't have its ending. Putting aside the monumental silliness that Missy has done this whole convoluted global plan just to make a rhetorical point about the Doctor's capacity to become a dictator, the scenes where Danny's humanity and love for Clara overrides Cyber programming and he saves the day are very satisfying. The Doctor realising that he himself is not a bad man, just an "idiot" trying to make things better does tie together the themes of the season as a whole (just about). In the slightly overlong coda, though, all the earlier issues with Doctor Who establishing an essentially real in-universe afterlife are brought back again. The bracelet that Missy's used to travel back and forth to the cyberspace realm allows someone who has been dead to come back to life. But Missy had a living body when she used the bracelet. When the boy is brought back at the end, where's his body come from? Only his dead mind was in the nethersphere, and he's been dead a long time. Also, how's Clara going to track down his parents, and how on Earth are they going to react? Worse than all that, though, is the implicit endorsement of the earlier idea that if you cremate your loved ones they can feel it. It's grim, as well as confusing. Sometimes fewer ideas work better.

If one can manage to switch one's brain off, though, the story is very enjoyable. There are some great action scenes like the Cybermen recreating the classic scene of them stomping around near St. Paul's Cathedral, then surprising everyone watching by zooming into the sky, newly able to fly. The reveal of Michelle Gomez's Missy as a regenerated Master is lots of fun, and her manic, murderous scenes throughout work well. Poor Osgood is given hope in the middle of an episode by the Doctor that she can join him as a companion, which the savvy audience member will know is a surefire sign that she won't make it to the end credits. Jenna Coleman as Clara has some great material. The character shows wonderful chutzpah in playing for time with the Cybermen after the cliffhanger, pretending to be the Doctor. The decision to reverse the order of the names in the second episode's beginning title sequence and show Clara's eyes rather then the Doctor's takes it too far though, another example of a bad habit of writer and producer Steven Moffat's where he pretends there's a big twist when there isn't. The action, and some creepy horror scenes like Cyber hands emerging through the earth of graves, are well realised by director Rachel Talalay and it's no surprise watching this story that she was invited back to do every Capaldi season finale thereafter. She handles the emotional scenes well too, as in the moment at the end where the Doctor and Clara part with an awkward hug, both lying to the other about how well they are doing. Towards the end there's another moment that is of dubious taste. The beloved character of the Brigadier is brought back from the dead. Long term viewers are forced to imagine that Nicholas Courtney, who had died a few years before this story, is a corpse encased in one of Doctor Who's ultimate evil baddies. Even with the character, as with Danny Pink, overriding Cyber-programming and helping to save the day, it's still a bit icky. (But, then, what do I know? See the Deeper Thoughts section below for more musings on that theme.)

Connectivity:

Both Joy to the World and Dark Water / Death in Heaven are Steven Moffat penned Doctor Who stories that boldly (inadvisably?) touch on religious topics (the star of Bethlehem, the afterlife). Additionally, there's a lone Silurian working in the time hotel in the Christmas story, and it is established by later stories that the version of Osgood seen in Dark Water / Death in Heaven might be a disguised Zygon; so, both stories potentially feature friendly single members of classic series monsters with jobs. There's also a festive connection, with Santa Claus appearing in the very final moments of Death in Heaven, as a lead in to that year's Christmas special, Last Christmas, also written by Moffat.

Deeper Thoughts:

Going too far? A rant about Mary Whitehouse. Dark Water / Death in Heaven has one or maybe two moments that in my opinion went too far; that is to say, they went beyond my own personal perception of what is acceptable for a family audience. As mentioned above, I nonetheless thought it would be okay for my young children to view it. When their impressionable young minds first engaged with the material, they immediately started imitating what they saw, setting up their own company to facilitate an alien invasion by preying on people's fears about death. No, of course they didn't, and yes I'm being flippant and glib. An underlying point remains, though: what standards of acceptability do we apply to TV drama, and who am I - who is anyone? - to enforce them for anyone except themself (or perhaps for their kids, if they have parental responsibility). Everyone - adult or child - is different. It seems very presumptuous to speak for a wider audience even just about the qualities of a particular piece; to go beyond that and try to dictate what can or can't be shown, or who can or can't see it, takes that presumption and compounds it. Some people have no qualms with taking presumption and raising it to a higher power. One such person, who many a Doctor Who fan knows too well, was Mary Whitehouse. Whitehouse was a political lobbyist in the UK who focussed on media standards related to obscenity and the depiction of violence. She was active from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, and during that time Doctor Who occasionally became the subject of her activism (because of depictions of violence, not - as far as I'm aware - anything related to hanky-panky in the TARDIS). The most high profile Who-related incident was her complaint about the cliffhanger ending to The Deadly Assassin's third episode, where she succeeded in getting the BBC to re-edit the sequence for future repeats.

I will reiterate my description of Whitehouse as a lobbyist and activist; that was what she was. She was not an ordinary member of the viewing public just doing her small bit out of a feeling of duty. Many people might have thought it was useful to style her as such, but it was patently not true. She called her organisation the National Viewers and Listeners Association, but it was not representative of the average viewer or listener of the nation - she no doubt spoke for some people, but they were a special interest group with views that could be described as extreme. And she was very successful. If one is tempted to see that as a positive thing, one should ask oneself whether there are any other successful lobbyists one feels good enough about to champion. As a calling, lobbyism is not one that is usually acclaimed; but, maybe - as is said of dirty work - somebody has to do it. Whitehouse played a significant part in the creation of a couple of pieces of UK legislation that most people would find unquestionably good, the Protection of Children Act 1977 and the Indecent Displays Act of 1981. She also believed that homosexuality was a perversion, and used legal processes to persecute individuals. The most egregious example of the latter was the case that she instigated concerning a play put on at the National Theatre, The Romans in Britain. The play included a scene of a simulated male-on-male rape, which Whitehouse took objection to (after it had been reported to her - she never saw the play, indeed she refused to ever see it). When they could not make a case for this being an obscenity, Whitehouse and her counsel brought private prosecution against the play's director Michael Bogdanov based on an offence under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, based on what was shown on stage amounting to his "procuring an act of gross indecency".

This case is covered well by a BBC radio documentary called 'Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse' first broadcast in 2022 that is still available in the UK at the time of writing, on the BBC Sounds app. It was produced by Simon and Thomas Guerrier (Simon blogs about it here) who have both worked on many Doctor Who projects of different kinds over the years. Linked from that blog post is another blog post by another Doctor Who commentator Jonathan Morris, reproducing the text of an article he wrote for Doctor Who Magazine in 2003. I remember encountering both when they first were available, and bristling that both seemed to be attempting to rehabilitate Whitehouse's reputation with Doctor Who fans. Perhaps aptly, or perhaps ironically, this offended my moral sensibilities. Whitehouse put Michael Bogdanov through hell just for directing a play that she didn't like. Whitehouse's counsel gave up the prosecution after three days of the trial, and she ended up liable for Bogdanov's legal costs. Whitehouse spun this as being done as a kindness, not having wanted to criminalise him at all, just wanting to establish that the Sexual Offences act applied to the theatre. I don't believe that; I believe that the case was abandoned as they suspected they weren't going to win. I also don't think the behaviour towards Bogdanov was very Christian. I feel sure that Whitehouse believed it was Christian, though. She had embarked on a previous case against Gay News, who had offended Whitehouse by publishing a poem that she thought was blasphemous, because in her words "I simply had to protect our lord". To my mind, this is not a healthy or proportionate attitude for anyone to have.

In many years of study, nobody has ever demonstrated conclusively that violent or sexual media content influences long-term behaviour, and some people have really tried hard to make that stick. Of course, someone who's just been to their Gran's cremation might get triggered by Dark Water / Death in Heaven's scene of (fake) voices from a hellish afterlife, but you can't write drama - or define laws - based on not offending anyone no matter what's going on in their circumstances. My kids were young at the time I gauged the story's acceptability; some of them understood exactly what the ramifications of the voices scene were, meaning they were mature enough to handle it; some did not, and it sailed right over their heads. This is mostly how it works in my experience. Guerrier in his blog picks out a scene in The Crusade, which hints that characters may need to kill themselves to avoid a fate worse than death if they're caught; he believes it may be something that wouldn't be shown in a family drama today. There's nothing graphic or even spelt out in the scene, though, so I think it would self-correct in the same way; if you understand, you accept; if you don't, it won't disturb. Morris thinks that 1970s Who had only itself to blame for getting Whitehouse's attention, because it pushed at the boundaries of the BBC's guidelines of the time, and maybe overstepped the mark occasionally. But how else do guidelines ever adapt? Tom Baker stories look tame compared to TV now. Doctor Who is self-evidently not responsible for any criminally violent behaviour; violence is much more complex than that, and pretending otherwise is usually a sign of a hidden agenda (like the promoting of a radically conservative interpretation of Christianity, for example).

Mary Whitehouse's crusading zeal undermined itself. Her low threshold for offence meant that she searched everywhere for obscenity and found it. This made her definition of the obscene so broad and indiscriminate that she bracketed together homosexuals with paedophiles, Doctor Who cliffhangers with porno mags in newsagents. This was shameful, and undoubtedly harmful. The poisonous legacy of that overshadows any potential good she may have contributed along the way, its radioactive half life so long that I feel any attempt at rehabilitating her should not be happening now, or at any point during my lifetime. There's also a hollow irony in Whitehouse's association with John Smyth. He was the lawyer that had worked with her on a number of cases, including initially on The Romans in Britain prosecution. The late Smyth, who died in 2018, was the serial abuser of children central to the former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby's decision to resign his position towards the end of 2024 (Welby accepted that he had not done enough to ensure that the details of the abuse were communicated widely enough, and appropriate action taken, when he first became aware of the situation in 2013). Whitehouse saw threats to children everywhere except in someone close to her. The radio documentary speculates that, had she found out during her lifetime, it might have fundamentally changed her outlook. I don't think I can find enough charity in my heart to agree, but here's a thought: rather than my getting angry or offended about a piece of media I don't agree with, or trying to supress it, why don't I instead encourage you to listen to it? You could also read the blog posts linked above. Then, make up your own mind. That isn't so hard, is it?!!

In Summary:

If you can switch off your brain, and your sense of decorum, its a fun and emotional season finale.

Thursday, 29 February 2024

The Girl Who Died

Chapter the 293rd, which is Rio Bravo meets Eric the Viking, plus angst and immortality.

Plot:
The Doctor and Clara escape from their last adventure in a big space battle, and arrive in the past on Earth where they are captured by vikings and taken back to a village as prisoners. The Doctor pretends to be Odin to try to escape, but someone else has had the same idea: a giant face appears in the sky claiming to be Odin and invites the warriors of the village to join him in Valhalla. This is really the leader of the Mire, one of the deadliest warrior races in entire galaxy. All the warriors are transported up to the Mire spaceship and harvested for adrenaline and testosterone, which the Mire consume. Clara and a village girl Ashildr are accidentally scooped up too, but they get away; unfortunately, Ashildr in the heat of the moment declares war on the Mire. Both Clara and Ashildr are returned to the village, but the next day the Mire will arrive to challenge everyone to combat. The Doctor has only until the next day to whip the remaining villagers into fighting shape. Luckily he discovers the vikings keep some electric eels, which gives him a plan. Harnessing the power of the eels they capture the helmet of a Mire battle suit, and plug Ashildr into it. Her imagination makes the Mire think they are being attacked by monsters, and the Doctor and Clara persuade them to leave or they'll release footage of this, which will destroy the Mire's reputation. They then discover Ashildr's mental exertions have proved fatal. The Doctor, remembering saving the Dad of a family in Pompeii whose face he now shares, uses Mire technology to resurrect her, but makes her immortal in the process.

Context:

The best laid plans of Mire and men gang aft agley and all that: towards the end of February 2024, I had to be in central Cardiff for a couple of days for the day job. It's a long train journey from the homestead down South, so I went up and stayed over the night before the event. This gave me a few hours potentially to explore the area. The last time I went to Cardiff for work, it was too whistle-stop a visit to do much in the way of sightseeing (see this blog post for more details). I left my hotel room with a plan to travel over to Cardiff Bay and see where exteriors for many Doctor Who and Torchwood stories were filmed, take a selfie at Ianto's Shrine, see Roath Lock Studios, that sort of thing. As I entered the lift in the hotel, though, a senior director from the day job was in there and invited me to go to the restaurant with a group of colleagues who were also in town that evening. I couldn't really say no, and it was obviously a nicer prospect than dining alone (even if I might have been at a table for one in an establishment where Christopher Eccleston and Annette Badland had once been). I hope to be back to the capital and its bay area before too long, when either business or leisure takes me in that direction. I'd downloaded onto my phone the next randomly-selected story The Girl Who Died, which was filmed at Roath Lock, so watched it on the BBC iplayer app in the hotel room when I got back after the meal.

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 21st season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

It was not long after I started this blog that Peter Capaldi's second season, new series 9, was shown on BBC1. I have many times before wondered why I didn't start a viewing diary then and there to help with these entries in years to come, but I alas did not. Based on what little I can remember, the Better Half and I would have watched this on the Saturday night. On the following Sunday morning, I and probably the BH too would then watch again with the children if deemed suitably kid-friendly (as this one was).

Reaction:

On my first watch of this story, which I can't remember in much detail (see above), I must have had certain expectations based on its co-writer, Jamie Mathieson, who this time shared the writing credit with showrunner Steven Moffat. The previous year, he delivered two of the best stories of the season, Flatline and Mummy on the Orient Express. There was a certain anticipation at what he would bring this time, particularly in collaboration with the showrunner. Unfortunately, the story fell a bit flat by any measure, and compared to those lofty heights of anticipation it fell so flat it broke the ground beneath it and all its limbs. A story where some aliens and some vikings have a battle is a decent idea, as is the Doctor being forced into the role of whipping a ragbag band of misfits into shape so they can defend their village against attack. Vikings haven't been done that often in Doctor Who, so the setting is distinctive too. David Schofield, playing the leader of the Mire, is on fine form doing his best Tim Curry OTT villain impression. The monsters are a reasonably good design. Why didn't all that add up to something? Well, there's not much of any of that in the running time; instead from the - somewhat lengthy - introduction with the Doctor and Clara in the midst of a different adventure, and onwards, a theme is heavy-handedly highlighted: who can and can't the Doctor save, and what impact does that have on him? At first glance, this doesn't seem as fun as vikings versus spacemen, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt and go with it. Clara chides the Doctor when he's given up hope and is aiming only to give the villagers a chance to die in battle. That's not like him, we know that - we watch the show. We know he'll think of a plan, and he does.

Because of all the soul searching, there's not much time for the plan nor even the battle, so the defeat seems too easy. The vikings have a tank of electric eels, which is - if one is very generous - just about plausible: some historically unknown raiding party must have brought them back from somewhere in South America. There's no evidence for such a thing, but nobody can prove it didn't happen, just as nobody can prove vikings didn't ever have horned helmets as they do in this story. Many Doctor Who stories, of course, particularly those set in Earth's history, have been built on shakier foundations of accuracy. And the defeat of the Mire - using trickery, theatre and ridicule instead of violence - is fun in a light-hearted way. It's all instantly undercut, though, by the revelation that Ashildr is dead. Cue: more soul searching. It's a little bit sad, yes, but people die during the Doctor's adventures, and there's nothing to make this one particularly stand out compared to the deaths in the underwater vessel in previous story Under the Lake / Before The Flood or in the Zygon invasion 2-parter to come, or any other story. The script gives no reason for the Doctor to overreact, but he nonetheless does. It's momentarily exciting, because there's a flashback montage to the Fires of Pompeii story which featured Peter Capaldi in a guest role, and to scenes in his first ever story Deep Breath where he wonders why he's picked this particular face. It's startling because it's unexpected, but was it necessary to provide such an explanation? Anyway, it galvanises the Doctor into an uncharacteristic - and as it turns out hasty - action.

The reason given for his choosing his face is to remind him that he must save people (as the Doctor saved the character played by Capaldi and his family in Pompeii). But when exactly was he supposed to have forgotten that, such that he needs a permanent reminder? Just before acquiring this face, he spent centuries defending a bloody village from bloody aliens exactly as he does in The Girl Who Died. He saves people every week; he also loses people every week, however hard he tries. None of this is news, and there is no particular motivation for him to save Ashildr above anyone else. She's not that special. She's loved by the village, and is a storyteller, okay. But what else? If she'd perhaps been the mother of the baby that is referenced every so often throughout it might make more sense (the Doctor, who speaks baby, gets crucial clues from listening to the baby crying). Or if there was anything else in the script to make this death atypical in any way, but there's nothing, The only thing that's special about Ashildr is that she's played by a guest actor who's a bit of a draw because she appeared in another fantasy genre show (Game of Thrones). The story is damaged by insufficient motivation for the Doctor to save her at all, let alone do so in such a way as to make her immortal, which is something consistently shown in Doctor Who to be an issue (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details). The mini-cliff at the end hints at this, in a very well realised circling shot of Ashildr, who stays still while the days pass time-lapsed around her, and her expression changes, her stare becoming hard and cold. But I just didn't buy it. Unfortunately, the remainder of the season will develop Ashildr's story in an arc-plot, so I couldn't buy that either.

Connectivity:

Both The Girl Who Died and Wild Blue Yonder have a pre-credits scene that's unconnected to the main action, and both see the Doctor, and his one female travelling companion, separated from the TARDIS early on. The Mire's combat suits have a certain look in common with Jimbo the robot from the later story - rusted industrial chic, with big head / helmet.

Deeper Thoughts:

What - live forever, never die? That is what the word means... As I discussed in the blog post for the linked story that followed this one The Woman Who Lived, it isn't mandatory for a story about someone becoming immortal (or losing "the ability to die" as the Doctor puts it) to portray this as a miserable fate, but Doctor Who rarely strays from such an approach. Striving for immortality is definitely something risky in the Whoniverse. It's no picnic if you've always been immortal either. Beings like the Eternals or the Toymaker aren't shown to be miserable exactly, but they are both extremely bored with eternity and have to find often dubious pursuits to entertain themselves. The Time Lords too originally came into the same category. In The War Games, the story that first properly introduced the Doctor's people and some of their backstory, they were said to "live forever, barring accidents" (a piece of dialogue used again to describe Ashildr in The Girl Who Died) but they "hardly ever use [their] great powers". The Doctor grew bored of this and rebelled. Later, when Tom Baker had taken over the role, the introduction of a limit to regenerations side-stepped (at least for a while, anyway) any potential implications for the show's leading character. Elsewhere, immortality and immortals were generally shown in a negative light, so it was probably best not to dwell on the fact that our hero was one of their number. Likely it was not entirely deliberately, but The Brain of Morbius sets out the slightly amended approach comprehensively: "Death," says the Doctor in that story, "Is the price we pay for progress". He claims there's a big difference between Time Lords' regeneration and the longevity of the Sisterhood of Karn in that story, who use an elixir of life that leaves them unchanged, and so nothing on Karn ever changes.

It's probably no coincidence that the Sisterhood were brought back for the second Capaldi season of which The Girl Who Died was part, where immortality was going to be interrogated somewhat; but, it's anyway a topic that keeps coming up in all periods of the show's history. It's often used as a motivation of a character to clue us in that they're a wrong 'un (like Joshua Naismith in The End of Time attempting to use Vinvocci tech to help his daughter live forever, or Queen Xanxia in The Pirate Planet leaving a trail of devastated planets in her wake, trying to extend her life indefinitely), or it is gained as the result of foolhardy ventures and proves to be a prison and a torment (Mawdryn and his fellow scientists in Mawdryn Undead, Borusa in The Five Doctors). I struggle to think of any positive aspects of immortality expressed in the classic series (all 26 years of it). The new series was mostly a misery-fest too, but intriguingly it has used immortality in a not entirely negative way when writing companion characters out of the show. At first, this was only related to one character, Captain Jack Harkness. At the end of the first season of the revived show, he is resurrected by Bad Wolf Rose after being killed by the Daleks, and thereafter he cannot die. In his later appearances in the main show, he seems to have made his peace with this situation. That is mainly, of course, because he had his own spin-off show aimed at an older audience to be broody and tormented in. The final (to date) series of Torchwood had an arc-plot that explored the terrible ramifications of everyone in the world gaining Jack's ability, so it wasn't by any means a wholly positive take.

A few years after Jack's resurrection, there's some echoes of what happened to him in River Song's final fate. Just like Jack, she appears to die bravely, but then is brought back to life, a life that will last forever, without any say in the matter. In Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead that eternal life is as a consciousness plugged into a computer-controlled dreamscape, which could be a fate worse than death if one thinks for any length of time about it. The character was at that point only intended as a one-off not a regular, though, and that's possibly why there were no qualms about presenting this as if it is a wholly happy ending. The writer of that story, Steven Moffat, then pulls the same trick later on for companion Clara and then again for Bill. The pattern is similar again: a regular character is killed, which the audience watching - presuming they're invested - does not like to see, so they're forgiving when an episode or two later, it turns out they haven't quite died at all, and in fact exist in their last extended second of life, or as a free-floating consciousness. Again, these were presented as happy endings, and again it wouldn't take much to see them as the opposite. Indeed, it didn't take long for the series to see a little negative there. In The Giggle, the Doctor is confronted by the consequences of his actions, and there's strong hints that he has some residual guilt about how Bill and Clara are now "living" "happily" ever after. Showrunner Chris Chibnall put a stop to endings where the Doctor's friends become immortal. Everyone who travelled with Jodie Whittaker's Doctor came home in one piece, and got to continue living a normal life-span. Who knows what fate is in store for Ruby Sunday, though? Only a couple of months to go before we start finding out...

In Summary:

Disappointing, probably because of a poorly motivated action that lies at its heart.

Saturday, 28 October 2023

Thin Ice

Chapter the 281st, has all the frost of the fair.

Plot:
London, 1814. The Doctor and Bill visit the final great Frost Fair, a festival of amusements held on the icy surface of the frozen Thames. They investigate strange lights that can be seen moving under the ice, and bump into a gang of street urchins who have been paid by a dock worker to drum up interest in the fair. The TARDIS travellers witness one of the gang, Spider, surrounded by the lights, then sucked under the ice to his death. Investigating, including using some ancient underwater suits that the Doctor has in the TARDIS, the two of them find that a massive creature is chained up under the Thames, being fed people like Spider - the lights were pilot fish living in symbiosis with the larger creature, bringing it food. The creature then excretes a substance that can be used as a powerful fuel. This is being collected by wealthy industrialist Lord Sutcliffe. When Sutcliffe is racist towards Bill, the Doctor punches him out, but the two TARDIS travellers don't have the upper hand for long - the dock worker and other Sutcliffe goons tie them up in a tent on the ice next to barrels of explosive. They are set to explode at noon, breaking the ice and plunging all the revellers into the water to feed the creature. The Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to free them both; Bill and the gang members get people off the ice, and the Doctor moves the explosives below the water, so when Sutcliffe detonates it breaks the creature's bonds and frees it. It swims off, breaking the ice and Sutcliffe falls to his death; everyone else gets to safety. The Doctor forges a will, leaving Sutcliffe's house and fortune to the street gang.

Context:

Watched unaccompanied, from the BBC iplayer. I didn't get the Blu-ray disc down from the shelf as I am still working my way through the season 20 Blu-ray box set, and wanted to leave the Terminus (I'm up to Terminus now!) disc in the slot to better pick up from when I left off later. Is it just me? There are so many extras on these sets, I can't keep up with them unless I work my way through them linearly. Anyway, this was on a day in late October 2023, and it gave me an opportunity to remind myself about using iplayer in preparation for November 1st 2023 when a lot of Doctor Who content is landing on the platform. From the way it was trailed, I'm thinking there will be some interesting material on there that even a completist fan like me won't have seen. Aren't we fans lucky to be getting all this stuff in the anniversary year?!

Milestone watch: This completes another season of Doctor Who for the blog, the first Peter Capaldi series I've managed to complete, and the fifth new series run altogether (after David Tennant's series 2, Matt Smith's series 6 and Jodie Whittaker's series 11 and 13). It is 16th done out of a current, at the time of writing, total of 39 (the classic seasons 3, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25 also having been completed). As I also have covered the festive special Twice Upon a Time featuring Bill, this means I have completed all her stories now.

First Time Round:

The whole family (me, the Better Half and our three children) watched this go out live on BBC1 on the 29th April 2017, the Saturday of a bank holiday weekend. The BH had became tired of Doctor Who the previous year and hadn't watched all the stories, but showrunner Steven Moffat's soft reboot with the introduction of the character of Bill tempted her back. To me, the stories of 2017 do seem fresher and more engaging than the stories of 2015 and the story of 2016, and a lot of that is to do with Pearl Mackie's inclusion as Bill Potts shaking up the dynamic. It somewhat mirrors the situation approaching November 2023. The BH is pretty cold on the Doctor Who stories of recent years (she still hasn't seen any of Flux, for example), but I have a feeling that Tennant and Tate being in the 60th anniversary specials might just bring her back.

Reaction:

Watching the stories of collected Who in random order occasionally throws up something surprising. It's often that a story one looked forward to turns out to be disappointing on this current watch. How gratifying it is, then, when it's the other way round. I can't remember the last time I watched Thin Ice, but it was certainly at least a couple of years ago, and it is fantastic. It's tucked away at the beginning of the season, but not quite the very beginning, in its unassuming way, perhaps overshadowed by the opening and closing episodes and the trilogy of linked stories in the middle; having just watched it, though, I think it's one of the best stories of the year. A lot of this comes down to the chemistry between the two leads, who are both working hard but making it look effortless. Peter Capaldi as the Doctor is leaning into the slightly tweaked role in this season as a teacher, with Pearl Mackie as his student. This gives her character free reign to fulfill the brief of someone to ask the awkward and interesting questions; Mackie gives the character such charm, warmth and vulnerability that this never becomes irritating. Even if it was ever going to edge towards that, Capaldi's gentle sarcasm (toned down from previous years, but still a part of the character) would cut through that. There's a great sequence early on where Bill, on her first trip back in time, is wondering about how to avoid changing history, and the Doctor winds her - and the audience? - up that they've been accompanied up until that point by someone called Pete, a friend of Bill's that must have stepped on a butterfly or similar and wiped himself out.

The dialogue from writer Sarah Dollard positively sings throughout the running time, but it's particularly good at the start when the two leads are just hanging out together having fun and exchanging lines like the following - Bill: "So the Tardis has dresses and likes a bit of trouble? Yeah, I think I'm low-key in love with her"; Doctor: "Me too". The two characters were allowed a bit more time to interact in the last story Smile too, all part of Steven Moffat's 'repiloting' to introduce the show fresh to the newbies tuning in for the first time. Unlike in that story, though, there's a greater sense of urgency here because a loose plot thread from the story proper is made visible, with Bill seeing mysterious lights below the ice. There's also a nice touch that the Doctor, who she's tried to alert to what she's seen several times, is way ahead of her and lets her know this in an offhand way with an "I assumed we'd get to work eventually". The rest of the plot is straightforward but carefully constructed. Thin Ice, unlike Smile and the story before that The Pilot where the menace was from forces that were misunderstood or misunderstanding, has an honest-to-badness villain in the contemptible Lord Sutclifffe. Playing him, Nicholas Burns has very little screen-time, but it's not a character anyone who's seen the story is likely to forget. Obviously, the series normally treats the mores of the past and the morality of navigating them carefully, and it usually promotes non-violent solutions. There's nonetheless something satisfying about watching the Doctor punch a racist.

There's a good marriage of plot to place and time - Sutcliffe's plan involves more people being on the Thames than usual, hence the fair, and it allows him the rationalisation that people are aware of the dangers of walking on the ice, but take the risk anyway. The creature under the water affects the temperature, meaning that when it is free the Thames will no longer ice over, so this is destined to be the last ever fair. The baddie being the owner of a dark, satanic mill is on point for 1814 too. The inclusion of a gang of ragamuffin street kids feels a bit more Dickensian than Regency (you do expect them to burst into Food Glorious Food at points), but I've no doubt its historically accurate that there were such kids out there at that point. Their inclusion gives the Doctor and Bill people who are vulnerable to protect, and also gives rise to a great scene. Bill sees Spider go under the ice, the first person she's ever seen die, and argues with the Doctor about his lack of emotion over such things. In a few minutes, Mackie gets to run the gamut of emotions, and it's great to watch. The ending is a dilemma similar to scenarios seen before in Doctor Who stories with giant creatures (Kill The Moon, say, or The Beast Below): risk freeing the creature which might put more people in danger or leave things as they are. It's handled with economy compared to those other stories that tended to take too long over explaining things. Thin Ice is more effective for keeping things brisk. This story has it all: thrills and jokes, an elephant and a wresting match - what more do you want?!

Connectivity:

Both Thin Ice and The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit feature the Doctor accompanied by one other person travelling down below a planet's surface while wearing a special suit, then discovering an over-sized creature there.

Deeper Thoughts:

Never cruel or cowardly or carnivorous?! Should the Doctor be a vegetarian? Thin Ice's plot touching on ideas about the exploitation of animals and the value placed on all life suggests this question, which comes up periodically in fan analyses over the years. It's difficult to track with accuracy the Doctor's relationship to food; we're talking about a science fantasy adventure show, so scenes of people eating are few and far between and don't normally have too much of a fuss made of them relative to the rest of the narrative. Right at the beginning, though, we can be reasonably sure that - in his own gaff at least - the Doctor has a meat-free diet. The TARDIS food machine is introduced in the second ever story The Daleks and according to the Doctor synthesises food in blocks blending flavours "like primary colours... you blend two to achieve a third". We don't see the raw materials the machine has fed into it, mind; it could be forming the dispensed food bars out of mashed up guinea pigs for all we know. Assuming that they're either vegetable or mineral, though, we can see - at least when he's in his mobile home - the Doctor isn't eating animals. At this stage, though, he's an explorer who visits various different times, without being able to fully control his ship. He also often spends extended periods separated from the TARDIS in historical periods, and has to go native. As such, logistics probably precluded any strictness about dietary requirements. If he had to eat meat in the Cave of Skulls in his first televised adventure, or when travelling with Marco Polo's caravan for many months, or when staying at a villa in The Romans, then it was not entirely through choice.

The second Doctor enthusiastically tucks into plates of seafood in The Underwater Menace with no qualms, but for later Doctors there isn't as much on screen confirmation one way or another. None of them are vegans, seemingly. The third Doctor's happy to tuck into cheese when guarding Sir Reginald Styles's mansion from ghosts, and the fourth definitely consumed a lot of gelatin in the form of jelly babies over the years. The events at the end of The Two Doctors would tend to suggest that he hasn't been a vegetarian before his sixth incarnation, as he makes something of a big deal about changing his ways at that point. At the start of the story, he's fishing and waxing lyrical about recipes for preparing his anticipated catch. After having to deal with the machinations of a race of aliens that treated humans as food animals, though, he gets some perspective and tells companion Peri that "From now on it's a healthy vegetarian diet for both of us". There's a reference a couple of stories later to the Doctor making nut roast (the quintessential 1980s vegetarian dish, at least in the popular imagination of the time) so he clearly stuck to it for a while. He's seen during the second segment of the Trial of a Timelord to eat fish, but that could be falsified evidence, or it could just be that the Doctor was acting out of character after being 'mindwarped'. For the rest of the classic series, there's again nothing depicted that would confirm things either way. Extended universe texts in the 'wilderness years', though, suggested the Doctor had remained a vegetarian (and confirmed a lot of other characters seen in the classic series were veggie too, like Jo Grant and Mel Bush).

The situation had definitely changed for Christopher Eccleston's Doctor, as in Boom Town he ebulliently orders steak and chips. I haven't heard the interview, but Russell T Davies reportedly said in a podcast that this was a deliberate choice to make the Doctor more relatable to an audience. I'm not sure I agree that vegetarians aren't relatable (I'm married to one, after all), but he was the boss; so, those who were following the bigger story had to accept that the Doctor had lapsed. A possible reason came in Matt Smith's first story The Eleventh Hour. The newly regenerated Doctor - while trying lots of different foods in little Amelia's kitchen, including bacon and fish fingers - explains that every time he changes, his tastebuds do too. Most who hoped for a plant-diet Doctor, though, thought he should take the decision because of morality rather than taste. The twelfth Doctor talked a good game, admonishing Clara in Deep Breath when she mentally separated slaughterhouse from restaurant: "You weren't vegetarian the last time I checked". He was pointing out that the actions of the Half-faced man killing creatures for survival wasn't so different from eating animals. In World Enough and Time, he tells Bill that her bacon sandwich "had a mummy and a daddy". Yet, he appears to be enthusiastic about eating meat in Thin Ice earlier in the season. Is it enough to be aware of morality but not change one's actions? Something to chew over there. Doctor Who stories by Russell T Davies are just about to return to TV at the time of writing. Will the Doctor be on the steak and chips again, or has what is relatable to an audience changed in the two decades, give or take, since the Doctor was eating out in Cardiff? Will food just not be mentioned at all? We'll find out soon.

In Summary:

Cracking!