The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood

Chapter the 312th, which depicts the war between the land and slightly under the land.

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory land in a Welsh village in 2020 that is somehow populated only by one family (it's probably something to do with Covid restrictions, it being 2020). A nearby drilling project has penetrated to a record-breaking depth, but this seems to have woken up something under the ground. The father of the family Mo has gone missing, and based on the Doctor's investigations he was sucked down below the ground. Soon, Amy disappears this way too. Rory and the Doctor protect the others - Mo's son Elliot, Elliot's Mum Ambrose, Ambrose's Dad Tony, and Tony's colleague on the drill project Nasreen - when a group of creatures travel up from below and attack. Eliot is taken, but the Doctor and Rory manage to trap one of the creatures. It is a Silurian - one of the original inhabitants of the Earth from prehistory - called Alaya. The Doctor and Nasreen travel in the TARDIS to the Silurian city under the ground to negotiate a hostage exchange. They find a vast colony, most of whom are in suspended animation. Mo and Amy have been held there by a scientist Silurian Malohkeh, but manage to escape. They find Eliot in suspended animation, but can't release him, then catch up with the Doctor and Nasreen.

Silurian military commander Restac, who is a relative of Alaya's, wants to kill all the humans, but Malohkeh wakes up their leader Eldane who prevents this. Elliot is released. Meanwhile, on the surface, Tony is ill from a Silurian sting; this, plus fears for her missing son, leads Ambrose to torture and kill Alaya. Amy and Nasreen negotiate with Eldane on behalf of Earth. But Rory, Ambrose and Tony arriving with Alaya's body puts a bit of a dent in those proceedings. Tony has set the drill to destroy the Silurian underground city, but the Doctor sends a timed energy pulse to destroy the drill. Eldane agrees - a bit too readily - to put his people back in suspended animation and wait 1000 more years, with the humans agreeing to spread the word down the generations to prepare for an amicable solution at that time. Restac goes on the attack, killing Malohkeh. Eldane sets off toxic fumigation to force the Silurians back into hibernation, so Restac is without her army. Tony decides to stay and go into hibernation too, so he can be cured of the Silurian venom in a millennia's time. Nasreen stays with him. The others race to escape before the drill explodes. As they reach the TARDIS, they see the mysterious crack that's been following them around the universe. The Doctor risks pulling a piece of shrapnel out of the crack to see if he can work out what caused the explosion that fractured reality. Restac staggers into view, dying from the toxic fumes and shoots Rory. He falls near the crack, and the time energy escaping from it erases him from existence. Amy forgets him. After dropping Mo, Ambrose and Elliott home, the Doctor examines the shrapnel - it's a piece of the TARDIS door.

Context:

Watched from the disc in the series five Blu-ray box set in early October, with a week's gap in between the episodes. I was accompanied by two of my three children, boy of 15 and girl of 12 (the eldest is now living away from home at university, and we miss him). Both of them were tickled by the 'futuristic' setting of the year 2020, and made comments about nobody in the narrative wearing masks or socially distancing (but it could be set in January or February 2020, of course). The youngest proudly told me before the first episode that Doctor Who had featured in Heartstopper (characters are seen watching David Tennant in The Runaway Bride in the latest run of that Netflix series).

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. Another domino falls, as this post marks the completion of eleventh Doctor Matt Smith's entire televisual Doctor Who era. This makes a total of four Doctors done so far (the seventh, eighth and fourteenth Doctors having been completed before Smith). This post also marks the completion of another season, the 29th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 2, 4, 5-7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I always have trouble remembering my first impressions of Matt Smith stories; don't know exactly why. It's probably a combination of factors - it's a while ago now, the series wasn't as much of a novelty as the early period after the 2005 relaunch, and I had more going on in my life. What I have done in the past if I came up short was to use the First Time Round section to tell a completely different anecdote, mostly from the wilderness years when the show wasn't on TV as a regular series: nearly dying on New Year's Eve 1985, watching Blakes 7 videos with my school friend Paul, reading Doctor Who Magazine back copies rather than revising for my A-levels, interviewing for a university place in Durham, not attending a Doctor Who convention in my first week at university, being accused of shoplifting, attending a Tom Baker book signing, and what it felt like to be a fan in the slump between the years 2000 and 2003. I've run out of those anecdotes now, so will have to rack my brain for something that was going on in May 2010. Oh, of course, it was the beginning of the end of my country. A few weeks earlier (just before The Vampires of Venice) a general election in the UK had returned a hung parliament, so there were a few days of negotiations. Then, just before Amy's Choice, the leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, had made a speech from the Rose Garden behind 10 and 11 Downing Street. They had formed a coalition government, allowing the Conservatives (the majority partner) to systematically dismantle anything and everything good. Policies would have started to be announced around the time of the Silurian two-parter, including the Fixed Term Parliament Act, which mandated that there would be minimum five years before there was a chance to get them voted out. Maybe this is why I struggle to remember the period - at some conscious or subconscious level, I don't want to.

Reaction:

The problem with reviewing any story featuring Malcolm Hulke's lacertilian legions is what to call them. At various points they have been known as Silurians, Eocenes, Earth reptiles, Homo Reptilia and probably a few more handles I've forgotten. I will stick with Silurians; even though it is wrong, it was what they were first called. Another problem with the Silurians is that they are a great concept, but a difficult fit for Doctor Who stories. Their backstory is more complex and lengthy than some other villains, which is not the best for filling in new viewers with on the fly during an action adventure storyline. The Doctor dumps all the info over the audience in a speech in the second part of this story. In two times 45 minutes of story, why was there no opportunity to tease this information out more gradually? Well, most of the first episode withholds the Silurians' identity and appearance to ramp up the tension and excitement. I wouldn't necessarily want it done differently, as the first part is rather good. The scenes of characters being sucked under the Earth, the siege scenes with Silurians barely perceptible, zooming past the camera as a blur, the distorted POV of characters being experimented on by a Silurian in a surgical mask. It's all great. Sooner or later, though, if the concept is going to be treated appropriately, the horror movie has to turn into the more sedate drama of people sat round a table negotiating. Trying to meld those two halves together in a coherent way is difficult. The original Silurians story from 1970 is essentially the same, horror and action adventure at the start and end, negotiations in the middle. It probably seems more harmonious as a whole than the more jarring changes in the Matt Smith story only because the length (seven episodes) smooths out some of the joins.

I don't fault the writer Chris Chibnall or director Ashley Way. The flaw is built in to the central concept, which tries to have its cake and eat it by presenting the Silurians as both a set of horror monsters, and as a group of people with legitimate claims. For example, Alaya - the first Silurian we are presented with in the story - is aggressive and prejudiced against humans to a ridiculously heightened degree. She makes the race seem less than empathetic, undermining the second part; but, she has to be nasty enough to be killed by a human; if she isn't, then there wouldn't be any dramatic tension in that second part, where her death undermines any chance of a peaceful solution. The two conflicting halves cancel each other out. Even if Chibnall hadn't given Alaya the taunting and manipulative dialogue, she looks like a monster, so inevitably would appear to be one in the visual grammar of Doctor Who. Obviously, the one addition to Silurian biology made in this story, a whiplash tongue with venom sting, isn't helping matters either. Many would say that Alaya's just one of a species that are infinitely varied just like humans; but, one of the more peacenik Silurians is scientist Malohkeh, played by Richard Hope, and he experiments on people. Why spend the first episode framing him as Doctor Mengele if you want him to be sympathetic? For the thrills, obviously. When the potentially more sensible negotiations section starts, it has two randos representing Earth. This seems to stem from having so very few characters in the story, probably for reasons of narrative or production economy (or both). If the Silurians agreed to terms, though, how in hell would Amy Pond and Nasreen Chaudhry have then persuaded the nations and governments across the globe? It's silly, and glaringly obvious from the outset that things will go back to the status quo with the Silurians hibernating again, and the issues side-stepped.

This is problematic because of the real world analogues of this fictional conflict. It doesn't need much spelling out: "We have a claim to this place extending far back in time", "Yeah, well you haven't been around for a long time and we live here now", "We will retake this place, it's our historic birthright", "No way, where would we live?", "Not our problem, you need to make way for our settlements", "Not without a fight", etc. etc. These sort of conflicts have occurred throughout history right up to the present date, and therefore need to be treated sensitively. It's troublesome to interrogate such issues in dramatic form if one side are dressed as lizard people. Even if we could put aside the risk of crassness - it's only a fantasy show aimed at a family audience after all, not meaning to offend - what is the best we could discover? The morality of such conflicts is complex, and the best we are likely to end up with after 90 minutes is philosophy at approximately the level of Culture Club's The War Song. If we dispense with the backstory, we would just have Silurians doing traditional Doctor Who monster stuff; to be fair, that's what their creator Malcolm Hulke ended up doing. In the follow up to his first Silurian story, The Sea Devils, the earth reptiles are reformatted to just be action adventure antagonists with the moral complexity largely ignored. Similarly, Silurians have made many returns to Doctor Who after this 2010 reintroduction, but there haven't been any more land claim negotiations included in those stories. That aspect seems to have gone into permanent hibernation. At the time of writing, though, a Doctor Who spin off is in production featuring the Sea Devils, which from the title - The War Between the Land and the Sea - might just be dabbling in that moral complexity again. Perhaps over a five episode mini-series that doesn't have to be Doctor Who exactly it can be made to work.

Other points of note: the moments from the wider series arc are much more successful than the Silurian story. The mysterious crack turning up in the end is very unexpected and dramatic; Rory's death scene and the scene where Amy tries to hold on to her memories of him but fails were both well played and emotional. The reveal that the shrapnel the Doctor has pulled from the crack is a part of the TARDIS exterior is nicely intriguing. The new design of Silurian make-up is effective. The regular cast are all on good form, particularly Arthur Darvill as Rory. It's got a phenomenal guest cast. Neve McIntosh gets the most interesting material to work with, and makes an indelible impact in both of her two roles. She got to return regularly to play a more nuanced Silurian in future stories. Everyone else is wasted to a greater or lesser degree bringing life to dull characters. Enough time has now gone by for Meera Syal and Robert Pugh to come back to the series playing other roles; it's too late for Stephen Moore, alas. There was definitely mileage in a claustrophobic chiller with a small group of people trapped with a violent and manipulative Silurian; there was probably mileage in a grander, more epic story of two races trying to find peace; trying to do both dragged the resultant story down.

Connectivity:

The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood and Survival are both themed around the dangers of conflict; both feature sequences set underground and races that are anthropomorphised versions of creatures found on Earth (cheetahs in Survival, non-specific lizards in the Silurian 2-parter).

Deeper Thoughts:

From reptile scales underground to musical scales underground: Part 2 of The Happiness Patrol BFI events write-up, Q3 2024. At the end of the first part of this epic - see the Deeper Thoughts section of the Survival blog post - an email had arrived. A week after the wrong version of The Happiness Patrol was shown, the BFI contacted attendees including yours truly to generously and unexpectedly offer free tickets to a rescheduled event where the new special edition version would be showcased, definitely and for reals this time. As it was inserted into the schedule at the last minute, the new screening was at an awkward time, 4.30pm in the afternoon on a Sunday, 29th September (about a month after the initial screening); three of us (me, Chris and Alan) were still able to attend. The later than usual start made travelling up less frantic, and we met for a spot of Sunday lunch before the screening, then ambled along the South Bank to the BFI and took our seats in the NFT1 theatre. Hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy made merry with the unusual situation from the off: "Welcome to the monthly screening of The Happiness Patrol" said Johnson, with Fiddy joking that in a month's time they would be showing an 8mm black and white version. Turning serious for a brief moment, Johnson gave appreciation to everyone, audience and panel members, that had made it back for this rescheduled slot, but then added of Sheila Hancock that "She's been banned from today's event; she spoke too much". The first item on the agenda was the social media round-up, with Johnson suspecting that some people were now making comments in the run up to BFI events deliberately to get read out, as with the tweet saying that fans who attended both times could "say that they've been double-Dicked". Johnson deadpanned that he was "horrified" that anyone would think he ever used Dick's name as a double entendre.

NFT1

After the quiz, with a final jokey and rhetorical question ("What is the name, address and phone number of the person at the BBC that sent the wrong files?"), there was the first instance of what Fiddy jokingly called "Deja Who". Pete McTighe, a major creative force behind the Blu-ray range, instrumental in creating the special edition of The Happiness Patrol, was invited to the stage to whet the appetites of the assembled about what they were about to see. In other words, to give the same interview he had given a month before. He revealed from his pocket a Blu-ray of the correct version of the story that he'd brought "just in case", and again talked about the insertion of cut material and restructuring of the narrative that had been done to what he feels is an "underrated gem" featuring two stars of the show "at the height of their powers". Again, he highlighted that the intention was to build up the world of Terra Alpha more than could be done with the original budget of "20 quid and a ham sandwich". After McTighe, there was another returning guest: model-maker and puppeteer Stephen Mansfield. This time he hadn't brought the Fifi puppet with him, as it had been assumed that the same people would be attending as had done the previous month, so all would have seen it already. A quick poll of the audience with a show of hands demonstrated this view was only half right: the audience was about 50/50 split between single and double-Dickers (any free tickets that hadn't been claimed by original attendees were put on general sale). Mansfield came up with a few new comments for those of us that had been before. A crucial moment for him was Fifi's death scene, which comes at the end of the story but was shot early on. It is a "tall order" to expect a puppet to be convincing all the time, and he was worried until he saw the emotion that could be wrung from a good actor such as Sheila Hancock working with his co-creation. He relaxed after that.

Our hosts

The house lights then went down, and the first two episodes of the story (in the correct new edition, no doubt to many gasps of relief) were shown. I was skeptical going in, but what has been achieved in these updated episodes is miraculous. The CG backdrops can never have quite the detail or feel of physical sets shot on video, and yet there are seamless sequences where the camera pans from one to the other, or they both share the same frame. McTighe's world building aim has definitely been achieved. The narrative has more time to breathe, with additional scenes inserted of the Doctor and Ace exploring. Lesley Dunlop's Character Susan Q seemed to suffer most from the drastic editing for time that was done on the original, and there are many more sequences featuring her now. There's also much more humour, like the moment where the Kandyman says "I don't give interviews" or a character from this very bureaucratic world tells another that "You need a permit to hide here". There is some reordering of material, but nothing jars and things flow along nicely. It wasn't just the episodes that were new on this day in September; the BFI had done a good job in providing some new onstage content too. After the two-thirds point of the story had been reached, there was a brand new onstage panel focussing on the sonic aspects of the Happiness Patrol. This featured Dominic Glynn (composer of the incidental music for the Happiness Patrol), Adam Burney (the harmonica player featured on the story's soundtrack) and Mark Ayres (audio restoration whizz for the Blu-ray range, amongst many other things). Ayres commended the new edition version that we'd just seen, describing The Happiness Patrol as "a lost classic, hopefully now being able to shine a bit".

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, McTighe

Glynn thought the story was a "wonderful gift" as music was built into the script; plus, the styles required varied wildly from awful lift muzak to the soulful harmonica motifs. Burney, who was only 19 when he performed said motifs, explained that all his work took place after the TV studio sessions. Like many an auditioning actor ('of course I can ride a horse'), Richard D. Sharp, who played the harmonica player Earl Sigma in the story, had said he could play. On watching the footage it quickly became clear that he couldn't. Burney had to shape what he was playing to best match Sharp's movements: "I think we got away with it". Ayres explained that as part of his remastering job, he noticed there was one brief moment of Sharp's performance still in there, which came as a surprise to Burney. Sylvester McCoy's live Television Centre performance of the spoons is still intact on the original recordings, and survives to the new edition. To extend Glynn's original set of cues to cover the new material of that edition, Ayres used every trick in the book, stretching, looping, even playing some backwards. Just before the panel ended, Glynn mentioned that he'd also scored the last ever classic story Survival: "So, as I always like to say, I killed it off." "That was my job," shouted McCoy from his seat in the audience. The lights then went down again, and it was time for episode three. It wouldn't be possible to fix every issue with the script (see my original blog post on the story to see if you agree with me on what those issues are), but McTighe has managed to smooth over some things. The fact that there seems to be no audience in the forum, for example, is explained by there being a curfew in place that is highlighted in some of the CG additions. The death of the Kandyman is built up much more, and there is new model work and explosions to up the dramatic ante. The final frame after the credits is an "In Memory of" slide for the late writer of the story Graeme Curry, which was a lovely touch.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Mansfield

Pete McTighe came back onto the stage, this time accompanied by Chris Thompson, who had marshalled the new effects work we'd just seen. The chat with the two of them had been planned for the previous session, but couldn't take place once the wrong version of the story was shown. This was particularly tough on Thompson who lives in Belfast, and had to fly over twice. He showed the audience the new miniature of Helen A's escape craft, having made this - from many Kenner Star Wars toys stuck together - and many similar new models for new editions of the stories of season 25 for the box set. He had brought more of them over for the first BFI event, but unfortunately not this time as they'd been damaged in transit first time round: "The combined might of the Daleks and Cybermen was nothing compared to easyJet baggage reclaim". McTighe explained that a lot of the material reinserted came from early ('71') edits of the episodes that had been retained in the archive. Thompson also illustrated how ambitious McTighe had been in pushing for the scope of what could be changed in the story; Thompson had originally presented a plan with 20 new special effects shots; McTighe asked if they could have "an extra 40". Speaking for all of us, Johnson told them both that they had worked wonders. After a brief and nice moment of applause for the normally unsung BFI staff who were setting the stage up with more seats, the final panel of the day got underway. The panel a month earlier had been the biggest I'd ever seen at a BFI event; this one was was even bigger. Onto the stage, to much applause, came designer John Ashbridge, director Chris Clough, script editor Andrew Cartmel, guest actor Rachel Bell (who played Priscilla P), plus the star duo of Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Glynn, Burney, Ayres

There wasn't a single repeated anecdote from this final panel. The organisers of the event from both BFI and BBC deserve kudos for getting the key players back, finding new people to attend too, and keeping it fresh. Initial questions went to the two people who hadn't been present a month before; Bell had enjoyed seeing her younger self and loved the special edition, adding that she was "going to have to watch the original"; "Some of us did that quite recently," replied Johnson, to much merriment from the audience. Ashbridge gave a dramatic pause on being asked what he thought of the new version before replying that he thought it was "absolutely stunning"; "Phew!" said Johnson; more merriment. "If only Chris [Clough] and I could have done that first time". Clough explained that the 'fondant surprise' death of the Kandyman couldn't be shown in full in the original as it would have been impossible to have so much liquid in the studio. Later, Clough was asked how they achieved the fluid seen flowing into pipes in the Kandy kitchen: "God knows". Johnson talked to McCoy about some comments he'd made at the previous Happiness Patrol event, about the show being a vehicle for politics, that had subsequently made the news. McCoy was unrepentant, of course, and mentioned in his reply that his one stipulation on getting the part was that the Doctor never use a gun. He said that the Doctor would always "use this" pointing to his head, and added that this constituted good acting "as there's nothing there". Picking up on the drama with messages theme, a couple of the panel pointed out that there is a line in The Happiness Patrol about banning demonstrations, "And that's now, isn't it?!".

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, McTighe, Thompson, Escape ship model

Bell reminisced about taking her two children (aged seven and nine at the time) to the studio, and also a separate time when all the Happiness Patrol trooped in together to the canteen, where their short skirts were reportedly popular with some of the diners. The shortness of the skirt also led to a floor manager's comment relaying instructions from the gallery, which Bell retold: "Can you tell Rachel to put her legs closer together, please?". McCoy thought on first seeing the guest cast assembled "Oh my God, it's the Royal Shakespeare Company". Aldred remembered that before her first ever studio session, she didn't know where Television Centre was, so asked Bonnie Langford ("I figured she'd probably been there [while] in the womb"). Ashbridge had recently watched all the Doctor Who stories he'd designed for an interview by Doctor Who Magazine, and decided that The Happiness Patrol was his favourite - as it was studio-based, he had full control over the look, even though there were huge challenges equating the vision of the script with the resources and technical ability available. When Bell was asked if she was ever remembered by anyone for Doctor Who she said no, but added that this was because she's not recognisable as her younger self. She related the sort of exchanges she now gets with the public: "I know you?" "Oh?" "Yes. Don't you work in M&S?". Everyone loved the design of the Kandyman, though Cartmel said his first thoughts on seeing it were "That's fantastic - they're going to get sued"! McCoy thought that David John Pope had such poor vision in the Kandyman costume that he was lucky not to cut his own finger off in the scene when the character does the same. During a discussion about the proclivity of 80s TV to feature gunge (like the fondant surprise in Happiness Patrol), the TV show Tiswas was mentioned; "Ooh, I was in Tiswas" said McCoy somewhat wistfully.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ashbridge, Clough, Cartmel, Bell, Aldred, McCoy 

There were a fair few comments about the flimsiness of the Police Box prop that was taken on location to perform as the TARDIS. McCoy also noted that people used to use the interior as a public convenience. He acted out being inside it holding his nose, desperately waiting for a cue: "Please say action"! It was such a chatty panel that there probably wasn't a need for an interviewer, although Johnson did need to shush them when they were nattering away while an audience member was waiting to ask their question. A great audience question asked was about who should be cast if ever there was a docu-drama of the making of 1980s Doctor Who. After it was confirmed to him that the suggested person was still alive, McCoy put forward TV astrologer from years gone by Russell Grant to play producer John Nathan-Turner. Kit Harington was suggested for Andrew Cartmel. A person to play McCoy proved harder. As Clough put it: "Sylv's unique". After briefly suggesting himself "I'd do it again", McCoy thought Johnny Depp could play him ("He's a bit dodgy though"); Sophie mentioned Ben Whishaw to play McCoy. One of the last audience questions compelled Rachel Bell to say "Were there any sexual problems?", which I'd say only about 10% of the audience understood, but I was one of them (google "Dear John UK" if you are similarly in the dark). Then, it was all over, and we decamped to the bar. Johnson said at one point of the special edition that it was definitely worth a month long wait, and he's right. As testament to this, Chris - probably the most difficult to please of our group of regular BFI attendees - loved it. At the time of writing, there's only a couple of weeks before the box set is released, and I can't wait to see what has been done with the special editions of the other three stories in the season.

In Summary:

War, war is stupid and people are stupid, and love means nothing in some strange quarters...

Warriors of the Deep

Chapter The 207th, the start of a new series of Doctor Who, but probably not the one you were expecting.

Plot:

The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are looking to visit the near future of Earth, but the TARDIS overshoots and they end up in 2084. It's a time of cold war tensions between two international power blocs, when it is common to have underwater military bases with missile strike capability. The TARDIS trio find themselves in such a base.There are two enemy sleeper agents in the crew committing sabotage; that is just a side show, though, as the real danger is an attack by Silurians and Sea Devils (not their real names, but they seem to have adopted these handles now), reptiles who were the dominant species on Earth millions of years before man evolved. They want to launch the base's missiles to provoke a nuclear war that will destroy all the humans, allowing them to take back the planet without directly being responsible. Luckily, the Doctor found a kind of Chekhov's Gas on the base in episode 1 that's lethal to reptile life. After a fruitless search for alternatives, the Doctor regretfully disperses the gas into the base's air supply. All the reptiles are killed, but not before they - and their pet sea monster the Myrka - have killed everyone else except the TARDIS team. The Doctor is regretful that a more peaceful solution couldn't be found.

Context:

I put this on during the kids' half term break, when I also had time off from the day job. It was watched at the rate of two episodes a day over two days, from the DVD. All three children (boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9) joined me for the first half; none of them returned for episodes three and four. Whether this had anything to do with the Myrka moments in the cliffhanger to episode two (which I'll get on to in the Reaction section below), or whether they had just got bored anyway, I couldn't say. In the first half, they all seemed fairly well engaged, asking how far into the future the story was set, wondering if Mark Strickson's Turlough was "still evil", and discussing and agreeing between themselves that the Doctor couldn't have drowned at the end of episode one, as he otherwise "would have turned into another Doctor". The youngest particularly liked the gag early on where both the male regular characters strain to push open a door, before the female character steps forward and slides it open with ease.

First Time Round:

January 1984. I had first watched Doctor Who just over two years earlier and had rapidly become a fan. Warriors of the Deep episode one was the start of the third new season of Doctor Who that I had sat down to watch from the outset on its BBC1 debut broadcast; maybe this only counted as the second time really, as every other episode of  Davison's first season clashed with my weekly session of cubs (including the very episode that year, Castrovalva episode one). The big celebrations of November 1983, Doctor Who's 20th anniversary, including the broadcast of The Five Doctors special, were still relatively fresh in my mind, so I was filled with fan enthusiasm and expectation. I'd read the snippets of preview of Warriors of the Deep in Doctor Who Magazine issue 85, the cover of which I can still recall in detail from memory (it was now titled The Official Doctor Who Magazine, presumably to differentiate it from the many many unofficial Doctor Who magazines that weren't lining the racks of newsagents at the time). There was a fighting chance I'd have read the listing in the Radio Times too (in the early 80s, my family only took that publication at Christmas and New Year). My anticipation levels were high. This all sounds like I'm setting up to say the story was a crushing disappointment, but this was not the case. I enjoyed it unreservedly as an eleven year old in 1984; I enjoyed it watching in 2021 too, even though I had a few more reservations this time out.  

Reaction:

Let's get it out of the way up front: the elephant in the room (or sea monster in the studio) of Warriors of the Deep is the Myrka. It's one of only a handful of occasions in the classic Doctor Who era (26 years long, remember) where the visualisation of some part of the script is so egregious that it tends to leap to one's memory way ahead of anything else in the story that was more successful. Every aspect of the Myrka is wrong: it's unwieldy; its head looks misshapen; its design and build are not clever enough to disguise the way it is powered (by two performer / puppeteers, pantomime horse-style); the way those performers move the creature is clumpy and risible. Even after it's dead, and a couple of characters collide with its corpse with a rubbery bounce, it's letting the side down. The build up to the cliffhanger of episode two sees various non-speaking Sea Base 'red shirts' manoeuvre themselves into its path so they can get killed, as it would have no chance of getting anywhere near them otherwise. Tegan is then trapped under a similarly rubbery fake door, struggling to make it look like she couldn't escape by just loudly sighing, while the Doctor pushes and prods at the flimsy door so tentatively or else he'd ruin the illusion, such as it is. The Myrka advances clumsily, and the front-end performer does a gesture with the front limbs that looks something like Henry Winkler as the Fonz whenever he appeared on set in Happy Days. This all then gets reprised at the start of the following week's episode, so we can endure it again. It would definitely be 'jump the shark' territory, if it weren't that the Myrka only appears in a limited number of sequences, and even with the reprise only takes up a scant few minutes of the run time; the rest of the story is perfectly good and well realised.

The brief, consciously or subconsciously, seems to have been to do Earthshock with Silurians. Earthshock was the big hit of Peter Davison's first year as the Doctor, but for some reason wasn't used as a template for a while. Davison's second year stories were much more lyrical and thoughtful, but from this point on the action mini-movie style becomes more prevalent (this season's later stories Resurrection of the Daleks and The Caves of Androzani definitely fit the mould, and many others after that). Like Earthshock, the story brings back old monsters that hadn't been seen for a number of years, with a snazzy makeover. Both Silurian and Sea Devil costumes look great; not quite as effective as the Cybermen's new look, but very good nonetheless. The Samurai style uniform for the Sea Devils is particularly apt, and the script is clever to define them as the warrior caste of the Earth reptiles. They score one point less than the 1970s versions, though, as the mouth of the mask doesn't move, meaning that the creature performers have to make their head movements and gesticulations a little larger than life so you know which one of them is speaking. As such, I'm fine with the decision to make the Silurians third eye flash in time with their conversation, as the originals had to similarly do lots of head wobbling without this visual cue. The voices too are updated but nicely in keeping with what went before. It may just be me, but the voice treatment makes Silurian Icthar addressing Sauvix, sound like he's actually saying 'Cervix'. That was a little distracting.

The plotting of Warriors of the Deep is much more solid and more coherent than Earthshock's was. This is not just a stringing together of action set pieces. This is handy, as the action sequences are a bit flat, with director Pennant Roberts not able to get much dynamism into the scenes made in a Television Centre studio. The climactic sequence of the Doctor cancelling the missile launch includes the base commander getting fatally shot, but I had to rewind it to see where that happened as it is staged so poorly. The fight and stunt fall into the water from episode one, filmed at Shepperton, is much better. The sets for the sea base come in for a bit of flak for being dull and over-lit. I don't think this is fair; each part of the sea base, including some split-level sets, looks fantastic to me, and there's a feeling that this a connected real space. The bright lighting also counterpoints the gloomy undersea sequences of the Silurians and Sea Devils before they come to the base: these are moodily lit, and shot well, but nobody ever gives any credit for this. The shell suits that the base crew wear are very 80s, but are also perfectly serviceable, and the model work is uniformly good. With only that one very big exception, Warriors of the Deep looks amazing, as well as having interesting story material at its heart: there's almost moral complexity in the reptiles working around their moral code, and the Doctor desperately trying to find an alternative to the inevitable destructive conclusion. There's even a couple of jokes. And it's all underlined by a fine score by Jonathan Gibbs.

The cold war nuclear tension theme and the spy subplot are very much of the time. Writer Johnny Byrne puts a futuristic spin on things, establishing that the technology and security protocols of 2084 require an individual who has been cyber-augmented, a Sync Ops, to control the missile firing computers. (Well, one has to assume there's some cyber augmentation, and it's not just that the Sync Ops has had a socket drilled into his head.) This is an interesting part of the story (despite the subplot not having anything much to the main Silurian plot at all), as it gives us some honest to goodness empathetic moments of emotion, which is rarer than you'd think in Doctor Who stories of this vintage: the Sync Ops Maddox's anxiety about the responsibility of having to fire the first shot in a nuclear war, and then being controlled by the enemy agents and made to betray his base, and kill his friend. It's good stuff. One of the sabre-rattling cold war politicians in the wider world of the time was UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and - as it turns out - she was the one most responsible for the disastrous nature of the Myrka as it finally turned out. By calling a snap election in 1983, which then had an impact of BBC studio allocation prioritising election-related programming, she drastically reduced the prep time before Warriors of the Deep went before the cameras. This meant that there was insufficient time for special effects to build the costume, and no time at all for the performers to rehearse while wearing it. If you were looking for someone to blame, I don't think you could find anyone better.

 

Connectivity: 

No cheating involved, I promise: the random number generator plumped for Warriors of the Deep, the sequel to the last story blogged, The Sea Devils. (Both it and The Sea Devils are also sequels of Doctor Who and the Silurians - over a decade had passed since those earlier stories, though, so it would be a stretch to say Warriors is the third part of a trilogy). There are therefore lots of connections such as bases underwater, ships being destroyed, the build up to a missile launch, the Doctor trying to keep the peace between trigger-happy humans and Earth reptiles, etc. etc. No string vests in Warriors, though; or, none that can be seen at any rate - Turlough could be wearing one under his school uniform for all I know! 

Deeper Thoughts:

The Continuity of Philosophy. What exactly is the Silurian credo? The Doctor says that "Everything you Silurians hold sacred forbids" genocide. They themselves state that their law forbids all but "defensive war". There's been some continuity retrofitting, or perhaps just plain continuity error, from what was established in the earlier two stories about these Earth reptiles (more on that in a moment), but if we take what's presented in Warriors of the Deep at face value, they have changed tack from trying to find a peaceful solution to the dilemma of both themselves and the humans having a claim upon the same planet. They have stormed a sea base belonging to one of the two international power blocs, and they are going to hack the base's systems and then set off a missile attack at a target or targets in the other bloc. This is expected to be interpreted as a human act of aggression, which will mean retaliation, and eventually mutually assured destruction of both blocs meaning the death of all the humans. The reptiles will then be able to take back the planet, having not directly caused the genocide. As the Silurian leader Icthar puts it: "We will harm no one - these ape primitives will destroy themselves. We, Doctor, will merely provide the pretext." They are convinced that this new plan fits within their overall value system. Now, I've learnt a bit about moral philosophy (and yes, this was mainly from watching episodes of The Good Place on Netflix), and I'm finding it difficult to pin down exactly what school of thought underpins the reptiles' plan in this story.

Whatever philosophy they believe in, it can't be basic consequentialism, which would measure the morality of an act on the consequences that arise from that act. If the consequence is genocide, the act is clearly immoral. Maybe they believe the opposite of consequentialism. I googled it, and the internet came up with Kantian deontology, but that opposes consequentialism not in allowing any consequences altogether, but instead in changing the area of consideration for how to judge the act. Instead of measuring the consequences, one has to judge whether the act itself is right or wrong based on a set of rules. Given that the creatures have expressed that they have laws defining 'just wars'  as being defensive wars only, they do seem to lean more towards the philosophy of Kant's rules and obligations. They are, though, directly responsible for firing the first shot in the proposed human war. This is not a defensive act, so would break their explicitly stated law. Let's say they have the benefit of the doubt, and that the first missiles were aimed at unpopulated areas (this is a bit of a stretch given the need to set one bloc against another, and the destructiveness of the weaponry mentioned in the narrative, even if they are never specifically identified as nuclear weapons). Even then, though, how can they be excused from the raiding of the base and killing of almost everyone within it? It's a military target, and those actions constitute an act of (offensive) war. The only way would be to not count the humans as sentient beings at all (they do talk about humans as if they are animals); but if they are happy to make that moral descent, then they don't need any pretext at all.

Utilitarianism? The reptiles' actions can only be seen to be for the greatest overall good if one again doesn't count humans or their feelings. Virtue ethics? You can't kill multiple people and claim that you are acting with inherent virtue. The only teachings that might justify their plan, trying to find a just and moral seeming cover for unethical actions, are the teachings of Machiavelli. So, though it seems momentarily that the reptiles in Warriors of the Deep have a more interesting ethical outlook, it doesn't take much examination to reveal that they are pretty much the same as all the other Doctor Who baddies. This isn't a problem, though, as they always were like this. Icthar - who, if he's supposed to be the same Silurian leader seen in the story with Jon Pertwee, has changed his name - has dialogue thus: "Twice we offered the hand of friendship to these ape-descended primitives". This isn't true, though. In neither of the earlier stories did a peaceful solution go any further than a hypothetical discussion with the Doctor, but the stories did see the Silurians try to wipe out humanity with a plague, and see the Sea Devils blowing up boats and attacking a naval base. Warriors of the Deep was made in a period where the producer had an unofficial continuity adviser, but I don't think we can blame that person for this. The writer clearly saw an interesting story about a third party manipulating a nuclear stand-off similar to the one between the US and the Soviet Union in the 1980s; the continuity and the ethics were just window dressing, and considerations about them were not allowed to get in the way of the story, which is as it should be.

  

In Summary:

It's mostly good, like an underwater Earthshock; the bad moments - like most bad moments in the 1980s - are all the fault of Margaret Thatcher.

A Good Man Goes to War

Chapter The 114th, which includes much sound and fury, but signifies not a lot.

Plot: 
An order of religious soldiers led by the eye-patch wearing Madame Kovarian have a major beef with the Doctor (we'll much later find out that it's because he might bring back the Time Lords through a crack in the universe, but right now it is not explained). They have kidnapped a pregnant Amy at some point off screen, replacing her with an identical avatar. How they knew she was pregnant with a baby conceived in the TARDIS, and how they knew this gave the baby unique powers is, erm, very easily explained, erm... oh look, some Cybermen! Amy gives birth to the child, whom Kovarian wants to turn into a weapon to use against the Doctor. At around this time, the Doctor realises that the Amy aboard the TARDIS is a fake. He sets about calling in every favour he can with people scattered throughout the universe to find and liberate the real Amy. Kovarian has set all this up as a trap, though, so waits around for four weeks, instead of just leaving with the baby. But she can't just leave with the baby because the trap is going to kill the Doctor. Oh no, sorry, she doesn't expect to kill the Doctor as otherwise she wouldn't need the baby in the first place, would she?

The Doctor easily infiltrates the base and frees Amy and the baby (named Melody Pond), but then the trap is sprung. The baby is also a fake avatar, and Kovarian has just left (only just left!) with the real Melody to a place of safety, which she could have retreated to any time in the last few weeks, and she wouldn't have had to put herself at risk or humiliate her army of allies to do so, but she didn't because of, erm... oh look headless monks! And the Doctor can't track her to whatever new hide-out she's in - as he did pretty effortlessly first time - because, erm... oh look River Song's arrived. River explains that she is Melody grown up. The Doctor realises that young Melody / River is the mysterious girl that they were tracking in 1969 America, so Amy and Rory have little to no hope of being reunited with their child, but he gives them false hope anyway and rushes off in the TARDIS, because, erm... oh look, To Be Continued.

Context:

The randomiser settled upon this story only a day after my youngest child (girl of 6) asked me, while I watched another in the seemingly endless early Davison stories from the Blu-ray boxset that I am still slowly working my way through, "When are we going to watch another of my favourite Doctor?!". Her favourite Doctor is Matt Smith. Not sure why, exactly. She was too small to watch any of his episodes on first broadcast, so Peter Capaldi would be closest to 'her Doctor'. It's because Matt's young, I guess. Anyway, at the first opportunity I watched this story from the Blu Ray Series 6 box set, accompanied by her and her brothers (boys of 9 and 12). They all enjoyed it, but didn't seem that blown away. The youngest was a bit scared towards the end when the headless monks started their "attack prayer".

First-time round:

First seen on its BBC broadcast in 2011. I was visiting my very good friend Phil, who I've mentioned a few times previously on this blog. We watched the episode in the front room of his home near Steyning, which he'd just moved into with his fiancée. I was there to discuss his stag night as he'd just asked me to be his best man. The viewing is thus kept in my memory by being associated with those wider happy events, and otherwise - just based on the story itself - I might have forgotten about it. It was the first time that 21st Century Doctor Who had broken a transmission run into two with a mid season break. A big deal was made in pre-publicity that this meant a 'game changer' cliffhanger that they couldn't have left people a year wondering about. Perhaps inevitably, it disappointed - the revelation that River is Amy and Rory's daughter had been speculated upon everywhere on the nerd-net since Amy's watery surname was first revealed (which presumably was in a press release sometime before David Tennant regenerated). It would have been more of a surprise if the reveal had been anything else.

Reaction

There are so many hours of extras on the aforementioned Davison Blu-ray box set that I feel like I've been watching nothing but Doctor Who all month. A recent watch was the Making-of documentary for the story Kinda. Its script editor Eric Saward moans a lot in said doco about the lack of logic in the writer's script, but Kinda clearly has a consistent albeit dreamy logic; what Eric meant, I think, was it lacked explanations. It's all the better for that, in my opinion. But how would a story fare that was the exact opposite, that was all explanations? Enter: A Good Man Goes to War.  I've now covered all five parts of the series 6 River Song arc (this includes, as well as A Good Man Goes to War,  the Silence / Moon landings two parter, Let's Kill Hitler and the Wedding of River Song finale), and - though there's some exciting spectacle in all those five - you'd be hard pressed to find much in the way of actual story beats.

Does any character change during the overarching plot, either in their values or emotions? I don't think so. Amy and Rory really should, as they lose their baby in a horrific moment; but, the script glosses over that, and the performances of both actors appear as if this has not made so much as a ding on their hard outer shells. This is the fault of the original conception, I think: one can intellectualise about how this isn't exactly an ordinary pregnancy, so might not cause an ordinary reaction, but the visuals are so emotive - their baby turns to goo in their arms - that no amount of writing or performance could have squared it. It's emblematic of the other flaws in the piece. A cool visual or tempting gag is thrown in even if it doesn't fit with - or even worse, actively works against - the story. There's an epic battle, reuniting the Doctor with lots of characters, but it is all meaningless: the battle is a diversion, so none of the heroics mean anything. After the battle, the Doctor's anger getting the better of him (in the 'Colonel Runaway' segment) also seems very dramatic as it's unfolding, but has no long term consequences. He looks crestfallen for a while that he's lost the baby, but then he finds out that the baby is River, and is let off the hook. His own personal history has already shown him that he could never have saved the child (she couldn't have been imprisoned in Florida later in her personal timeline otherwise).

Except for these missed opportunities, there is no emotional impact of the stories at all (nor of the whole season arc for that matter). It is just about the slow dissemination of exposition, with the action set pieces spread out to deflect from this rather mundane purpose. In this particular story, we find out that someone is another couple of characters' long lost daughter. It's not a game changer, as their relationship remains exactly the same as it was before. We find out that she's got some superhuman abilities and has been trained to kill the Doctor. But, if we've been paying attention, this has all been already made clear. Later in the season we find out more detail about the religious order(s) and exactly why they want to kill the Doctor. None of this is story, it's backstory. And backstory is not as good as story, which is why any narrative grinds to a halt if it needs to take a big info dump to clue in the audience. The best writing avoids this.  If you don't believe me, just think of the obvious historical precedent of a SF franchise deciding to make a set of big narratives out of some backstory that could have just stayed as scribbled notes. The Series 6 River Song stories are the Doctor Who equivalent of the Star Wars Prequels.

That may seem harsh, and certainly the characters are better conceived and played than in The Phantom Menace and its two follow-ups. The action too - despite being an order of magnitude less well budgeted - is more exciting and fun. But this just makes it worse: there are some very heroic moments, e.g. Matt Smith's first appearance being held back to almost half way through the episode, as he pops up in a shock reveal and that assured line: "Amelia Pond - get your coat!". But it's all for nothing. Some nice new and old characters are introduced. Vastra, Jenny and Strax all arrive fully formed, and it was great that the death of the Sontaran was later reversed so they could all come back again. The "getting the old band back together" vibe of the beginning is something new for Doctor Who. But once everyone's together, they don't achieve anything. Oh well. One other aspect that's better than The Phantom Menace (the very definition of faint praise, I realise): I've now blogged all the parts of the Series 6 River Song arc, but have not had time and space until now to mention how good Frances Barber is. She knows exactly how to pitch a larger-than-life baddie, and is magnetic to watch, lifting every moment she's on screen. She might have been even better in a story with some actual story.

Connectivity: 

Another story, like Resolution, which sees the Doctor operating with a large group of people brought together to defeat the bad guys / bad squiddy thing.

Deeper Thoughts:
Shuffle play, or The Great Curator. At the start of every year (which I realise we're a little way past now, but it's still January, so I think I can just get this in under the wire) I resolve to embrace more modern music. As a Smash Hits reading teenager, and when transitioning to the NME and Q as a college student, and throughout my 20s and early 30s (by which time I was reading The Word magazine as befitted my increasing age), I was keeping up more or less. In all that time, I never wanted to end up one of those blokes listening to the same old songs, ossifying along to a soundtrack of my faded youth. Sometime around the birth of my first child and the folding of The (wonderful and late lamented) Word magazine, though, I became out of touch. This is brought home to me every December when my children and I watch the Christmas Day Top of the Pops. None of the songs speak to me, and I can't even tell some of them apart (a real old codger thing to say, I know, but nonetheless true). It was no different this year to any other year.

There's great new music out there, for definite, but it was a long shot to expect the Christmas Day Top of the Pops to serve up something I would enjoy. The nature of such a selection - the programme showing only the biggest selling hits of the year - is too narrow. The sort of people who contribute to the yearly placings are very different from me, and they all seem to favour songs that sound like particularly uninspiring Craig David album tracks, with only something like George Ezra's Shotgun cutting through by dint of being slightly irritating. Help came from Tracey Thorn's column in the Christmas number of the New Statesman. She nominated her favourite tracks from the year, and - of course - some kind soul had turned them into a playlist, which I found online and listened to between Christmas and New Year, and very much enjoyed.

I hadn't realised how much the playlist sits at the heart of one's enjoyment. I always think of it as a recent invention, coming along with itunes and Spotify, but it's always been there. Top of the Pops curated a playlist every week using the criterion of record store sales. In my formative years, this regularly provided me a diverse set of songs, some I'd already heard, and some of which would be new discoveries, some of which I'd love, some of which I'd hate. Would it work this way now if Top of the Pops was still on every week? Possibly not. The cost and difficulty of obtaining music is so low now as to be effortless, and is barely distinguishable from the act of streaming a song for nothing - as such, the act of purchasing doesn't have so much significance.

The issue then is - like most mid-life challenges I find - one of free time.When I became that NME-consuming student, and Top of the Pops was no longer providing me the playlist I needed, I had the time to research what I might like (I possibly should have been doing some studying at the time, but somehow I had hours and hours to devote to reading about music and searching through CD and tape racks). Now, I'm too busy and need a guide. Tracey Thorn won't be there every time I want to cross the road (with my headphones on). A DJ perhaps? The opportunities for going clubbing are limited for a middle-aged fart with three kids, so we're only talking about the radio variety. But I never get on well with music radio - sooner or later the music stops for someone to blather. The price of getting an expert to curate an interesting playlist for me is the interruptions with opinions, weather or travel. Curation by algorithm? No matter how good the AI is, that's ultimately only going to serve up things similar to what I already like, and the chance to be surprised by something new is essential.

I'll keep looking for a solution. In the mean time, to take my mind off my ossification, I will at least put the same old songs from my faded youth on shuffle, so I get them in a somewhat surprising order. It has certainly helped me when rewatching all the old Doctor Whos I've seen a zillion times before to view them again in this way.

In Summary:

Better than The Phantom Menace, at least.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

Chapter The 104th, in which there are some dinosaurs. On a Spaceship. Exactly what it says on tin.

Plot: 
The Doctor is called in by the Earth authorities of the future, as a mysterious object is hurtling towards the planet. He has only a few hours to investigate before it is blown up by missiles, so he assembles a team to help him comprising Amy, Rory, Queen Nefertiti, and a big game hunter. Rory's Dad, Brian, is brought along too by accident. They all materialise aboard the object, a huge Silurian spaceship that left Earth millions of years previously. It was designed to contain the escapees from a catastrophe on prehistoric Earth - including the last remaining dinosaurs - in suspended animation; but, while the dinosaurs are now roaming free on the ship, the Silurians are nowhere to be seen. Instead, inside the vast space of the ship's interior, is a second smaller spaceship.

On this second ship is a trader, Solomon, who's been injured after a dino encounter. He threatens the Doctor's friends to compel the Doctor into healing his wounds. Solomon proves to be not very nice at all: he has ejected all the Silurians into space, to steal their expensive Jurassic cargo. He's not able to steer the ship, though, so it has reverted to its point of origin. Solomon loses interest in the dinosaurs, even killing a Triceratops, when he realises Queen Nefertiti is even more valuable. He makes to flee with her in his ship, but Nefertiti escapes, and the Doctor traps Solomon in with a signalling device which draws off the approaching missiles. Solomon's ship gets blown up.  The Doctor settles the dinosaurs on a new planet, Siluria. Rory's Dad, Brian, enlivened by his adventure gets over his reluctance to travel, and goes off to see the world.

Context:

I watched this from the Blu-ray with my three kids (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6) one evening during half term; it went down well with everyone. The dinosaur effects on screen didn't blow the children's minds, they just took them completely for granted. This is probably an even better response, thinking about it  - they all assumed they were real rather than just realistic. The only comment that the dinosaurs did elicit was a chorus during the engine room scene of "Christmas Pterodactyl!!!" from the two youngest. You'd need to have watched a Christmas episode of a particular comedy show a few too many times to understand that reference. In general, the children are excited about Doctor Who again after a little while, with the massive presence of the ongoing Jodie Whittaker series being the main reason. In the past week, we've passed a Doctor Who billboard, and seen a Doctor Who trailer at the cinema. It's like a mixture of 2005 and 2008 all over again.  Also, one of the pro-am dancing couples on Strictly did a dance to the Doctor Who theme, with one dressed as Thirteen and the other as a Cyberman. Such a thing has never before happened, even back in the days of David Tennant's imperial pomp. As good a fit as the Doctor's new Sunday scheduling is, it was nice to see the TARDIS back on Saturday night TV just for a few minutes.

First-time round:

I've thought about digging out my old journal from 2012 for reference, as there's only so many ways to write "I have no strong memories of watching this one"; but, I've tried that before, and found that I didn't usually write anything down about Doctor Who. Maybe I was living too exciting a life to dwell on the latest episode of my favourite show, but I doubt it. Anyway, I would have seen this first on or very shortly after the Saturday of its debut broadcast on BBC1. I seem to think that my area of the South-East had finally got BBC1 in HD through the Freeview box by the time of this short run of Matt Smith episodes, so I'd have been watching this story in crystal clear high-def. I remember liking the story very much, and thinking the five stories shown that Autumn were something of a renaissance for the show.

Reaction

This story is an absolute joy. It starts at a fair lick, packs in some great jokes as well as exciting moments, then keeps barrelling along, never letting up - with the narrative clock of the impending missile strike ticking all the while - to its conclusion. It's not in any way an intricately plotted construction, nor is it thematically deep, but it isn't aiming to be. It is unashamedly a straight-ahead adventure for children of all ages. So straight-ahead is it, in fact, that it announces its title just before the credits. What you see is what you get, but that's more than enough as the spectacle on offer is superlative: terrible lizards of which Invasion of The Dinosaurs - the last Doctor Who story that attempted to depict such creatures, in 1974 - can only dream.

At the end of the story, I very nearly pressed play to watch it over again. The characters and situations are larger than life, but it works, with almost all of the guest performances shining. Rupert Graves has lots of fun playing the lovable rogue, Riddell: I love his larking about, pretending to lose his balance while creeping through a room full of sleeping dinosaurs. Riann Steele more than matches him playing Nefertiti. David Bradley, in his first of many Doctor Who-related roles, excels as a very nasty villain. It's almost - but not quite - enough to make the Doctor's bloodthirsty dispatching of Solomon seem acceptable. The character of Brian Williams slots nicely into the by now well-established dynamic of the three regulars, disrupting it just a little, but enhancing things overall. Mark Williams is perfect casting too: watching him and Arthur Darvill standing side by side, you really do believe that Brian and Rory are father and son. The presence of a family member instantly makes Rory a more believable and rounded character too. The overriding impression is of a great cast having fun sinking their teeth into an enjoyable script. It's just a shame that Sunetra Sarker is wasted a bit, in a slightly 'meh' part.

Apart from Rory, the other two regulars are also well served. Matt Smith is effortlessly charming throughout - I love the bit where he kisses then slaps Rory - but able to turn on a sixpence into simmering anger when confronting Solomon.  Amy, a character hard to warm to and never previously well used, is found a perfect function: she becomes the secondary back-up Doctor (this was a role that Romana, as played by Lalla Ward, occasionally fell into in the late 1970s / early 80s episodes, and it worked then too). She has grown too far from little Amelia after years of time crack energy, rebooting the universe, giving birth to a time-baby, being turned to goo, etc. The only option is for her to drop any pretence of being an audience identification figure, and step up. The script is explicit about this with the dialogue such as "I will not have flirting companions" and "I need you sober" and the like.

There's a few niggles; the plot contains a couple of major contrivances: before he knows exactly what he's up against, the Doctor has luckily gathered up a big game hunter who can shoot tranquiliser-blasts at dinos, and he just happens to have got himself a father and son who can use the DNA-locked spaceship dual controls. The fey robots are a one-joke concept that are quickly overused. But it's churlish to pick holes, when the story is so enjoyable and light.  

Connectivity: 

Both this story and The Mysterious Planet feature a warrior queen, a rogue trader, two robots and at least one double act.

Deeper Thoughts:
A tale of two Chibnalls. It was casting my mind back to Dinosaurs on a Spaceship that first made me hopeful that its author Chris Chibnall would make a good showrunner when he took over. He made a significant contribution to the 2012 mini-season (the first part of series 7, which continued with a second - and, to my mind, less successful - run in 2013, which Chibnall had no part in). Chibnall wrote two of the five episodes, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and The Power of Three, plus the series of short online season prequels collectively called Pond Life. Each focused on Rory and Amy, and how their normal lives on Earth in the Doctor's absence were balanced or unblanced with their intermittent otherworldly adventures alongside him.  After having sat through a lot of convoluted timey-wimey bobbins in the couple of years before this, I found much appeal in such a theme; it had a resonance that the sci-fi superheroics could never have, and finally made the Ponds into more rounded characters.

A lot of this was down to Steven Moffat as well, of course - it was on his watch; but, as it covered  stuff he was not usually too interested in for his own scripts (he'd not given Rory any family before this point, and had given Amy only an unrealistic couple of fairy tale characters for parents who cameoed and then were never seen again) it seems likely that Chibnall was the one bringing this to the mix. I was hopeful something similar would be part of the show when he was running it too. Now that the Chibnall era is well underway, and Bradley Walsh is breaking all but the stoniest of hearts with his majestic but understated performance of Graham's grief and loss, it's obvious to see that Chris Chibnall specialises in real grounded characters with a full life beyond their adventures in the TARDIS. It was also interesting to compare and contrast other aspects of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship with the episodes of series 11 that have aired to date.

The obvious similarity is the Doctor operating with a 'gang'. Although Chibnall was probably running with an idea of Moffat's from the previous year (when the story A Good Man Goes to War saw the Doctor calling in favours owed to bring together a team to rescue Amy), the focus is much more on people using realistic skills, more than trying to be The Avengers assembling: Rory's moment where he talks about collecting nursing supplies wherever he goes, is a similar plot function - and character moment - to Graham in the current series using his bus driver knowledge. It's a world away from the same character threatening Cybermen dressed as a Roman centurion, as Rory does in A God Man Goes to War. The Dinosaurs story is a straightforward adventure narrative, of the kind much favoured currently; it contains a villain just as nasty as Tim Shaw with whom the Doctor gets to have a nice confrontation, and display some righteous anger. The story contains strong female and minority ethic characters.

The differences are key too: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship's characters are larger than life, and spout glib one-liners rather than grounded dialogue. This fits in with the style of the time, but now looks a little false when compared to the still enjoyable and memorable but much less shallow dialogue and characterisation on display in the 2018 episodes. Most interesting of all, the backstory of the 2012 story is only fully understandable if you have knowledge of some specific Doctor Who lore: who are the lizard people that built this ship? What is their relationship with the Earth in its prehistoric times? Why would they have needed to escape from the planet at some point in the distant past? None of these points are explained in the narrative. The show assumes you've been watching for a few years; in contrast, everyone feels welcome to 2018 Who: no special knowledge is required.

At the time of writing, there have been four stories broadcast of Jodie Whittaker's debut series - each one of them of a very high quality, and none using any previous element from Doctor Who stories past. If they manage a whole season in the same vein, which Chris Chibnall has stated is the intention, then this will be the first time the show has managed such a feat for 40 years (the Tom Baker Key to Time season, which started broadcasting in Autumn 1978 has no kisses to the past). It's very exciting. If, by the time you read this, it's turned out that was all shameless misdirection and there's a big Dalek story on the air, then that will be exciting too, of course.

In Summary:
I'm still loving these m****r-f***ing dinosuars on this m****r-f***ing spaceship.