Kindred Spirits: The Future Starts Here

 

Prepare yourself for a book series that takes you 'out of this world' - all you have to do is open up a book or a kindle! 

We have lift off! Those of you who have been following my site for the past few years may know about my scifi-romance-action-comedy-philosophy series 'Kindred Spirits'. It's a book series that will (eventually) cover the next thousand years of intergalactic contact, with twelve very different (and very alien) alien species trying to get along and the flashpoints in history when things go awry. Some of you have even been kind enough to read it. Well if you haven't (or if you have read your old copies so many times you've worn them out!) then fear not because they've never looked so good. The first seven volumes are being re-issued in Kindle and paperback formats with brand new illustrations bringing the aliens to life properly for the first time (not forgetting that the kindle editions are free to Kindle Unlimited readers, while books 1 and 5 are available in special 'colour' paperback editions!) 

There are 8 books in the series so far: Book 1 'Endurance'

 Romeo and Juliet. With Clandusprods. Only she’s already dead – and he’s dying.

A match quite literally made in Heaven? Divine intervention? The last great exploration of humanity? Or characteristic bad luck? Lizzie ends her life, only to find it has only just begun, stuck in the mind of a species she has never met before. But is the person she was put with the one she was always born to be with or just another of many mistakes in her life? Will the discovery of each other’s planets be good or catastrophic in the future of their two species? Will they endure and go on and win? Is cooperation and collaboration the answer? Or are they both doomed to a life of failure after all? More than just another novel, ‘Endurance’ is a mad house, a love song to the act of writing and a hope that one day it might just save us all.

                                                                 Buy it by clicking here

Book 2 'Insurgence'

War and Peace. With Mrasianarts. Only she’s on an alien planet – and someone wants her and her fellow off-worlders dead.

A hundred years after the events of ‘Endurance’ and the ten intelligent species in the known galaxy all outwardly respect each other – but some of those in charge on those ten planets are having a hard time accepting this brave new world and are still caught up in their petty global affairs. When just existing is enough to start an act of rebellion, being an off-worlder playing in a peace orchestra seems to be enough to start a revolution. That’s what worries the Mrasianart authorities who turn the deep-thinking world of Mras on its head with petty fears and injustices through their glorified telepathical internet, ‘the universal’. Earth girl Eleanor’s long journey across the galaxy from Earth to her new home is far more exciting than she ever expected, full as it is with love for a local named Auberon, violence, cultural tests, exams, knitting Clandusprods, corruptible Belobrat peace delegates and giving birth to the universe’s first ever humrasian. Together the Peace band find themselves socking it to the man – or in this case one particular alien – in a desperate fight to avoid deportation or worse. It’s all quite an adventure; one Eleanor isn’t sure she wants to take after what happened to her back home but which leaves her never quite the same simple Human again. ‘Insurgence’ is, like prequel ‘Endurance’, another mad house, a love song to the art of music this time and a hope that one day it might just save us all.

    Buy it by clicking here

Book 3 'Province'

The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire. With ten sets of friendly aliens and one ferocious enemy from outside the known universe

A hundred years on from ‘Insurgence’ and Humrasianart Eleron is the new president of The Intergalactic Peace Organisation. He should be happy – he has the perfect wife, the perfect job and lives in a near-perfect universe where nothing has gone wrong for years. However, the newly terraformed planet Decreeta is more likely to induce war in Eleron and his colleagues. That’s especially true when a new breed of species named Agrosians from the unknown side of the universe come across an Earth shuttle with a mysterious disc full of music and quickly turns his plans for peace and diplomacy upside down. Only a race against time around the ten existing planets and enlisting their co-operation stands between the newly formed peace organisation and the Agrosians ruled by their merciless Queen Calixta enslaving our half of the universe. Will everyone learn to work together in time? Just what is the mysterious Belobrat ex-head of the IPO up to? Will Eleron get to rescue his Mrasianbrat wife? Will his military general stop squeaking and come out from under his desk? Will vice-president Horace ever wake up and do some work?!? And if Eleron gets back home will things ever be the same for him again? More than just another novel, ‘Province’ is a mad house, a love song to the act of, erm, politics (what?!?) and a hope that one day it might just save us all.

Buy it by clicking here

Book 4 'Ensconce'

Swallows and Amazons. With eleven species unsupervised in interstellar space.

A hundred years on from ‘Province’ and peace feels much easier. Even The Agrosians have become less aggressive. Well, slightly. The discovery of red weed, a new substance mined from all eleven inhabited planets, by unscrupulous adults spells bad news though – for the universe in general but specifically for the group of eleven children who have been sent to a new international school on Orpheus. They all seem to have something wrong with them, but not everything was meant to be cured and some things can never be, certainly not with red weed. New girl Robin fears her dyspraxia will stop her getting any friends, but when her friends are an introvert invertebrate Camalosian who never speaks, an insecure Belobrat, a cynical Habridat, a Glabdiharbit with multiple phobias, a Doosbury Giant with an eating disorder, a polite Agrosian, a co-dependent Clandusprod, an unbeliever Mrasianart, a Maggrumph bully and a Mekkion who keeps blowing emotional fuses she feels less out of place than she did on Earth. Though their teachers want to keep them enclosed in their Great Hall the children want to explore the universe, starting with the first ever International Games that’s just taking place on Decreeta. Will the children learn to get along? Can they trust any of the adults who seem to get stranger every day? Who will listen to them if they can find out what’s going on? Will they survive corruption, shuttle-flights, ice planets, burning buildings, bombs, pyramid sellers, Doosbury Operas, their own teachers and the scariness of approaching adulthood in one piece? More than just another novel, ‘Ensconce’ is yet another mad house, a love song to childhood and the hope that one day if adults actually stopped moaning and listened to their off-spring then it might just save us all.

Buy it by clicking here

Book 5 'Abundance'

Space comes in fifty shades of black. Twelve aliens, six couples, one dating service and one reality TV series both in desperate trouble.

Buster the Belobrat thinks he knows about true love so can’t understand why viewers are leaving his new reality TV show ‘Love Planet’ in droves. Nova the head of the Human branch of the Intergalactic Dating agency knows exactly where he’s been going wrong and sets out to teach him using six examples from her company’s history; six couples made up of the twelve species that exist in the known universe: An argibraffe pet who falls in love with a Spice Girls tribute singer in a tale of treachery, deceit and sleeping Habridats. A Camalosian actor in a long running science fiction series who falls in love for his maggrumph colleague while both run up and down corridors with everyone’s favourite Time Rodent. An Agrosian and a Belobrat who are meant to be signing their divorce papers but who end up with several second chances instead. A clumsy Clandusprod and a faulty Mekkion who start long distance and end up as close as any couple can be. The voyages of ensigns Yoko Glabdihardit and Hamish Habridat, new trainees on the Well Fed-eration’s mission to boldly track down recipes where nobody has tracked them before. A Mrasianart ‘Medium’ who deals in futures and his ‘Extra Large’ Doosbury Giant friend who lives for the present, where neither of them want to remember their past. But is Buster all that he seems? For that matter is Nova? And why are there two pages of sponsorship advertisements?!? This collection of six short stories makes a date with twelve of these beings and how love changed all their lives – and in the Doosbury Giants’ case their lunches - forever. For what could be more universal in such a varied universe than love? More than just another collection of short stories, ‘Abundance’ is yet another mad house, a love song to love and the lengths that the universe goes to in order to put the right people together at the right time and that might yet save us all.

Buy it by clicking here or the slightly pricier but way more colourful edition here 

 

Book 6 'Obedience'

Are we doomed to repeat our past? Or will Dotty find the reset button, despite being ‘only’ a pet?

Dotty the spotty pet argibraffe thinks she knows what the future holds: walking round the park, a bit of digging in the flower-beds, doing what she’s told (mostly) and living in the moment. However she has a secret obsession when her Human owners aren’t looking: the history broadcasts on the holovision. Soon Dotty finds that her life has changed, that she’s been enrolled as the first argibraffe student at Clandusprod Community College under the dotty Mrasianart Professor Edulearn, that the park is on an alien world and the dig is on an abandoned planet full of mysterious remains. A combination of events involving a crazed Human tyrant with a device that can turn whole worlds upside down, a talking crystal skull that only Dotty can hear and the attempted murder of her and her new friends means that soon Dotty isn’t just studying history but making it. In an era when even humanity has stopped taking humanities can a sentient pet really obtain a degree – especially when other species are kicking up such a fuss about it? Can Dotty trust her new and often, well, alien flatmates and be truly independent without her owners? How will Dotty’s team fare in the intergalactically-admired TV Quiz Universally Challenged with Maggrumph host Jeremy Paxgrumph? Can Dotty ascend just when the rest of the universe is descending into chaos? Will the twelve intergalactic species ever break free from a cycle of destruction and rebuilding, learning the lessons of the past so as not to repeat them in the future? Can someone who wasn’t even allowed on the furniture a week ago really save the entire known universe? And just where do a lost civilisation of cosmic dinosaurs fit into all this? The sixth volume in the ‘Kindred Spirits’ series, ‘Obedience’ is another mad house, a love song to history and how our ever present past can lead us to answers in our future, even when asking questions we never thought to ask.  

Buy it by clicking here 

Book 7 'Experience'

It is never too late for true love - even if takes a few centuries!

Moana was still a baby when the ITGang television show decided to use him in a series commemorating the first children born into an intergalactic world after the shock of interstellar contact, throwing him into a whirlwind of yearly television appearances meant to promote intergalactic brotherhood and friendship, with nine readymade pals to call his own. But, being a Maggrumph, Moana doesn’t make friends easily and feels the odd one out and the viewers don’t really take to him either. While the other children of all the other species are doing really well with their lives Moana feels stuck: he has no family, no career, no exciting prospects – just a life of drudgery on the restrictive world of Maggrumphus. Moana doesn’t think he’s anything special and maybe he isn’t, but that doesn’t mean his life is empty. He’s right at the heart of all four flashpoints in the universe’s connected intergalactic history: by an accident of birth forever linked with the time Enwin and Lizzie revealed to the universe the presence of life on other planets, the riots led by the Intergalactic Peace orchestra on Mras that led to the death of Auberon, the Agrosian wars fought by President Eleron and the discovery of the poisonous red weed created by unscrupulous companies by the children of Orpheneous. And he’s far from the grump everyone thinks he is: he’s a poet, a romantic, in something there’s not a lot of call for in a world of grumpy Maggrumphs. But things change when he meets a Clandu-hybrid. Will they change quick enough to make up for all those years of solitude though? Will Moana’s other dreams ever come true? Will he get the life he craves and find the fulfilment he always dreamed of, with the love of his life and their nine very different adopted children and pet argibraffe on a whole new planet, or will life just get in the way? More than just another novel, ‘Experience’ is yet another mad house, a love song to ordinary life and the hope that one day we can all manifest what we’re looking for.

Buy it by clicking here

Plus, even if you've read the whole bang lot, there's a new volume in town never begore published. Book 8: 'Experience'

Can Sparky the Mekkion face her fears, dry her deadly tears and re-programme her peers?

Sparky can see the whole of her life laid out before her for the next millennia – that’s how Mekkions like it after all, with a really good job overseeing update ‘patches’ on the intergalactic translation service the Universal, a routine to keep her safe from surprises and a universe that a thousand years on from interstellar contact seems at last to be settling down. She’s as grounded as they come, not least because her wheels cause her to sink lower to the floor than most Mekkions and more interested in profits than prophets. But when her new Boss, an uncaring uncouth Doosbrat named Melon Rusk, takes over her precious ‘Universal’ that’s brought such peace and community and starts using it to attack the new-oldcomers in the universe, the Space Dinosaurs, Sparky discovers her new calling and it’s one that lies in an unseen dimension of faith rather than her reliable logic. Will she be able to save her new friends from persecution? Can she work out what Melon’s plan really is? can she stop Maggrumph Ronald Grump from taking power? Will she ever work out that her pterodactyl boyfriend has feelings for her? Will she ever discover the memory she had removed and feel the feelings she’s suppressed for so long? And will she ever find her life’s porpoise? (Not a typo!) More than just another novel, ‘Maintenance’ is absolutely another mad house, a love song to spirituality and how we are all more than just cogs in a machine, offering hope that one day if we listen to what’s in our hearts and souls rather than seeing the world that’s right in front of us it might just save us all.

Buy it by clicking here

Or if you prefer things in Doosbury Giant XXXL size why not buy the lot in two handy omnibus editions 'Convergence One' (available here) and 'Convergence Two' (available here) - in Kindle only I'm afraid (that would be a forest in terms of paperback pages!) 

So why not find yourself a nice cosy beverage (Clandusprod tea?) and some nice playlists (Jefferson Starship's 'Blows Against The Empire' is a good start or why not check the heck out the Kindred Spirits playlist at the Alan's Album Archives channel on Youtube? https://www.youtube.com/@AlansArchives) and escape into a series of new worlds (Because this one really isn't much fun at present!) The future starts here...Again! 

To stay updated visit the Universal intergalactic translator service...Whoops no that hasn't been invented yet...For now just visit our sister site www.kindrespiritbooks.blogspot.com  

Joy To The World: Ranking - N/A (but #170 ish)

 

 

"Joy To The World”(15th Dr, 2024)

(Christmas Special, Dr 15, 25/12/2024, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Steven Moffat, executive producers: Steven Moffat, Julie Gardner, Jane Trantor, Joel Collins and Phil Collinson, director: Alex Sanjiv Pillai) 

Ranking: N/A (#170-ish) reviewed 26/12/2024

O Little town of Bethlehem

How still we see thee lie

Until connected to the time hotel

When the starseed will bloom and the flesh will rise

Yet in thy darkest streets shineth

And everlasting blue light

As the Tardis tears through all the years

And comes to set things right

Lo! The sages rise

At a signal from the skies

You’re in hotel room 1305

As Joy is all left to arise

Brighter than the brightest gem

Bringing joy unto all Silurians and to all men

In a past we won’t have back again

As in the skies we have a friend

(You don’t get this on Dragon’s Den!)

‘Tis the star of…Bethlehem

 

 Well, I haven’t written one of these reviews in a while. Six months ago in fact, when ‘Empire Of Death’ went out, which already seems like a whole epoch ago in this fast-changing modern world we live in: multiple wars, shock election announcements and real (maybe) alien drones in the sky ago in fact (my guess is that they’re aliens recording our disintegration in real time and al previous ufo sightings were them recording our important moments. Which hopefully means they also recorded the missing episodes of ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’ and episode four of ‘The Tenth Planet’). Last Christmas seems like even longer ago as indeed does ‘Last Christmas’ and all the other Steven Moffat-written festive episodes out there. It must have seemed even longer for Steven Moffat, whose back in the writer’s seat on a Christmas special for the first time since handing up his sonic screwdriver as showrunner at the end of 2017 and yet it’s as if he’s never been away. ‘Joy To The World’ is as Moffaty as Christmas stories come, with all the hallmarks of his era good and bad – some fantastically imaginative ideas, a brilliant use of time as an ‘extra character’ and lots of the underlying melancholy that lies underneath the Christmas season as we remember all the things we were going to do, all the people we were going to be and all the people we lost along the way. In a way the second of the Disney-era Christmas specials is a lot more traditional than the first, ‘The Church On Ruby Road’ (no singing goblins for starters) – and yet in other ways it’s also a rather controversial story that takes unnecessary risks (two big ones), is often clumsily paced with the actions kept for the beginning and ending, which raises big questions it doesn’t have time or space to truly explore and which throws in a schmaltzy ending that undoes much of its good work. Just like old times in fact. 


Seeing as it’s Christmas let’s start with what this story got right: the idea of a time hotel, with different eras hidden behind different doors, is exquisite and so very Dr Whoy. It’s actually an idea that had been created years earlier in the first Russell T Davies era but one which was dropped for being too similar to other ideas (my guess is the ‘parallel universe’ strand that weaves its way through Rose and Donna’s story arcs both). Moffat always liked the idea and wanted to write it, but never got round to doing it in his era (not least because Toby Whitworth came up with a similar idea independently, which became the fears-behind-hotel-rooms ‘The God Complex’ in series six in 2011). When Russell tried to revive the script for series fifteen/Disney 1A (or whatever we’re calling the Ncuti era now) he became stuck, though, and sensibly got in touch with his old friend and asked if he wanted a bash: after all a time hotel is such a Moffaty idea everyone would just have accused Russell of trying to be like his successor anyway (there are similar idea from the ‘wilderness years’ too of course - notably the missing story ‘The Crystal Bucephalus’ where a space restaurant has different courses in different timezones, but few Dr Who stories are 100% original and there are so many spin-off books and audios almost everything feels as if it’s been done by someone, even a little bit. Besides, recycling at Christmas is normal or we’d never fit in our houses come Boxing Day). 


What Moffat brought to the table was the very Dr Whoy sense that another more brilliant, magical, scary and big universe exists just outside our peripheral vision if only we’d learn to look up and away from our little lives. The idea of something as mundane and ordinary as a hotel containing extraordinary gateways to different eras is totally Dr Who in every way, while the impossibly mind-bogglingly long time it takes to ‘cook’ a star is the blink of an eye for a story that deals in time and space readily. The idea of a real life ‘mystery’ that can be solved by something Dr Whoy also reaches a hilarious peak with the fact that hotel rooms so often have locked doors: in reality of course it’s because rich guests can buy more than one room and the doors separating the suites can be unlocked to give them double the space nd then locked up to suit more individual paying guests, but Moffat’s timey wimey explanation works just as well in context as an ‘alternative’ reason and helps root the story in the real world with something the audience can see for themselves quite easily and be scared by (just like a gargoyle becomes a weeping angel statue or a library is full of creepy shadows and ‘things that hide in books, with an alien version of silverfish). The idea of reducing something as glorious as all of Human history to a package tour for aliens (shades of ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ there too) is a great riff on doing this in reverse too, of how something big and monumental for us becomes just another holiday event for extra-terrestrials. It leads to several brilliant sight gags easy to take in even between nattering relations and getting up to check on the Christmas lunch: the stone door for the stone-age, the elaborate one for Mesopotamia and the leaning door of Pisa (presumably there are iron doors for the iron age and bronze doors for the bronze age too!) We don’t get to see many of these doors in action but we get just enough to make us feel that there are other worlds out there just a door away – the building of an elaborate set for the Orient Express and the snow-capped peaks of Everest might not be the best or most frugal use of the extra Disney budget but they do lend a sense of scale and scope that’s been missing from a lot of the recent stories. The dinosaur towards the end too is a great Dr Whoy surprise, as a possessed Joy finally tracks down the ‘right’ room which turns out to be from 65 million years ago and even though it’s screen time is all too brief (far briefer than it seemed from the ‘Children In Need’ preview a month ago when it was hinted the T Rex would be a major part of the story) it’s well handled, with some of the best CGI work in the series to date (in fact it makes the already pretty decent one in ‘Deep Breath’ from a decade ago look like the rubber models in ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ by comparison). Few writers can juggle as many ideas from different timezones as Moffat can and even though the idea might have been Russell’s the execution is pure Steven. If this does end up being Moffat’s last script (which he says it will be – although I remember him saying that before. At least twice) then it’s another really great way to go out, another summary of his time on the show only a smidgeon behind ‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’ (and less messy than ‘Twice Upon A Time’). 


Moffat, too, benefits from the guiding helping hand of his old friend, with an opening ten minutes that has Russell’s fingerprints all over it, a character piece about lovable loser Joy, a part custom made for actress Nicola Coughlan fresh from one of Davies’ current favourite shows Brigerton. What seems written as a deliberately different part (gone are the ballgowns and lushness and grace and poise; in are the seedy hotel background and the sense of loneliness and isolation) is still plainly written for her and within seconds she feels like a fully-drawn out character. Joy’s awkward misunderstanding at the reception desk (‘Single?’ asks Anita. ‘Does it show?’ Joy says, aghast, her bubbly demeanour giving way to embarrassment before Anita follows up with ‘no I meant your room?’) is pure RTD, giving us character and back story in the form of a revealing gag and making us feel for Joy already before we properly know who she is yet. The curious decision to release the first five minutes from this episode as a ‘trailer’ straight after ‘Empire Of Death’ six months early (by far the longest we’ve had to wait between extract and episode) fools you into thinking we’re going to get a very different (and frankly better) episode to the one we did get, a ‘Runaway Bride’ style episode about a standalone companion being totally out of their depth full of jokes about them being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the dazzling Whoniverse reduced to a single hotel room. The opening with Joy feels the most ‘alive’ and well thought out part of the story by far, an every woman alone at Christmas far away from everyone so she can hide from…something. What’s interesting about that, though, is that for the longest time it was meant to be Ruby in the hotel room: that’s how she stayed for Russell’s half-draft and Moffat says that’s the way she stayed for half the episode of his first draft too, before getting the news Millie Gibson had left the series and had to be written out (in what seems like a suspiciously hurried manner after just nine episodes). 


Once Moffat takes over, though, he treats this part of the story as a brief ‘episode one’ which he just has to change in ‘episode two’, the way he always did in two-parters of old, turning everything we thought we knew on its head. Joy, a character with such promise, is largely sidelined till the big finale, possessed by the Villengard military outfit and press-ganged into searching for their hidden star with the very ruthless baddy idea of being blown up to hide the evidence of the nasty little scheme if she fails to find it in time. Joy doesn’t speak ‘normally’ again until the Doctor prods her to make her angry (the same way the 7th Doctor used to do to Ace, only it doesn’t work as well because Ncuti is a happy charismatic friendly kind of a Doctor, with a burning anger he does well but none of the ruthlessness and hidden layers of his younger self). By which time the story’s too late: Joy sacrifices herself in a hideously shamaltzy ending where she effectively becomes a star to be with her dead mum and, despite the strong work of the first few minutes, we simply don’t know her well enough to care (was this the original plan for writing Ruby out? The pay-off after ten episodes would be a lot stronger than having her run off to be with her own mum – weird how mothers has ended up being a big thing in this era - and killing the elder Sunday off at the hands of Sutekh would have made the end of ‘Empire Of Death’ a lot more powerful too). Having the big ol’ star turn out to be the Star of Bethlehem which kick-started 2000 years of Christianity is also so obvious an idea it’s one of those things you wish they hadn’t gone for (it also doesn’t make a lot of sense when you sit down and think about it: the room Ruby was left in is an Aztec-style South American temple that clearly post-dates the birth of Jesus by more than a few centuries. Equally why is there a balcony 65 million years ago? Is there a dinosaur equivalent of ‘Bob The Builder’ out there? ‘Bob the Brachiosaur’ maybe?) 


It also leads to two, shall we say…questionable decisions we haven’t had the likes of since ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ turned the Brigadier’s corpse into a Cyberman and told the nation’s kiddies their dead loved ones who chose cremation are all screaming in agony in some afterlife. Few Dr Who stories dare go near religion, the one great no-go area where censorship has actually become tighter in the 21st century rather than looser (you wouldn’t get The Master conjuring up the devil today the way he did in ‘The Daemons’ although ‘The Impossible Planet’ had a good try). Even stories set in a past when lives fully revolved around Christianity tend to see it as a background detail if it’s mentioned at all (‘The Time Warrior’ ‘Masque of Mandragora’ ‘The Shakespeare Code’ ‘The Haunting Of Villa Diaodati’ to name just four of many). ‘Joy To The World’ doesn’t skirt around the issue at all but gives us a great big whacking ending that involves the Whoniverse directly with the Bible, saying that the star that brought the three magi out to see the infant Jesus wasn’t the creation of God but the side effect of a failed military takeover by an alien life-form turned sentient by a 21st century woman mourning her mum. It doesn’t quite come out and say the two can’t co-exist but clearly if the wise men were inspired by something other than divine intervention alone that does raise some rather awkward questions (particularly for an episode that goes out on Jesus’ birthday). I’m kind of surprised there hasn’t been more fuss about it to be honest. Oh well, Christianity survived intact enough for Christmas telly to dominate the TV schedules so I doubt it’s going to fall just because of a throwaway reference at the end of a Dr Who story somehow. 


More worrying is the ongoing discussion of the still ongoing covid pandemic. I’m sure you all thought I was daft banging on about it across most of my reviews of the 2024 series but it’s truly unavoidable here and the writers of the new series are clearly still working through the after-effects of the biggest  plague in a century. The first ‘actual’ mention of lockdown in the series (though a few of the Chibnall era stories hinted at it) comes when Joy breaks down at the end of the story as the Doctor gets her mad: she spends her yuletide holidays alone in an anonymous hotel room because she lost her mum on Christmas Day during the pandemic and just can’t cope with all the memories alongside other people (would she have been home alone anyway? She doesn’t mention a single outside character besides her mum no friends family or work colleagues who would miss her when she turns into a celestial entity at the end). Joy’s angry that the draconian rules of lockdown meant she couldn’t say goodbye to her mum in person and still (rightly) incandescent with rage at Boris Johnson and his cabinet’s lockdown parties that broke all the rules of distancing they themselves set. So far so good: that’s enough to put anyone off Christmas. But it’s the way it’s handled and the language used that worries me. For a start we were never actually in full lockdown in Christmas 2020 and in fact weren’t in full lockdown past the start of July that year despite the way people bang on about it now: worried that they weren’t selling enough papers the Murdoch media empire leaned heavily on the government not to cancel Christmas and whipped up a frenzy about ‘government interference’ with their readers that still lingers to this day, whilst the business deals the politicians had cooking on the side meant they were afraid of losing money if people couldn’t meet up and buy presents. So instead there was a flimsy rule reducing meeting up in crowds with police encouraged to look the other way for the most part anyway for ‘morale’. But morale matters nothing if it’s to keep people safe and tens of thousands of people died because of that decision in this country alone, while many more remain sick with long covid after catching it during those holidays, possibly permanently (while others, who either thought they got away lightly or were asymptomatic, continue to be sick, unaware of the damage covid does to your insides. Seriously think to yourself how many times you’ve been sick with anything since 2021 compared to pre-pandemic years. That’s not normal or because of three months using masks but evidence that a known dangerous disease has weakened your immune system). There’s been a pushback the past few years that the lockdowns were over-zealous (they didn’t go far enough back when covid was new and at its deadliest), that covid is just a cold (it’s the biggest killer of humanity in one go in a century, since the Spanish flu) and that the rules were a ‘nonsense’, a word that keeps coming up time and time again. Joy even says that word here (though it’s ambiguous whether she means ‘nonsense’ in the colloquial sense that covid means everything is all a bit of a mess and topsy turvy).
 
The thing is though that while covid isn’t as deadly anymore, thanks to a vaccine (that reduces the symptoms but doesn’t cure them – it can’t yet, until we have time to catch up, as covid mutates too quickly to fully get a hold of yet by the time vaccines can be made en masse) and those months of lockdown early on, it still kills: it’s thought 11,000 Britons died of it in 2024 and the last few figures of the year aren’t even in yet – this despite the fact so many doctors are reluctant to diagnose it and that covid exacerbated existing conditions that people would have lived with happily for years or decades without it and yet which tended to be the ‘main cause’ that went down on existing death certificates. As with ‘Boom’ I can’t help but feel that Moffat and Davies have different views of covid: in that story Moffat laughed at the idea of humans being treated as if they were a bomb about to go off and he mostly does the same here, with the lines about the Doctor making Joy angry ‘because that’s the way you wake up’ (language used by many a lockdown and vaccine sceptic who resented government interference on principle, even when it was genuinely keeping them safe and every other government round the world was doing the same, bar a couple whose death rates exploded without restrictions in place) and the idea that it’s the past and we need to move on and we should stop isolating in our rooms and ‘go and find a friend’ particularly…difficult to take for someone still forced to isolate because I’m statistically first in the queue to die from covid next. 


Joy being yelled at by The Doctor for ‘following the rules’, even in an attempt to wake her up from her conditioning, also feels way too harsh in context: it wasn’t the rules that were the problem – they clearly saved thousands of lives whichever way you look at it, even with suicide figures and people who missed cancer screenings and operations taken into account – it was the fact the people who set them couldn’t take them seriously that caused the problems and led to the majority of the population collectively shrugging and ignoring them. Lockdown was always a good solution, the only solution in so many ways and the caring compassionate Doctor I know would have been all for it. After all it’s all very well Joy symbolically sacrificing herself so she can die and be reunited with her mum so that ‘others might live’ and that she’d have been happy to die from infection and seen her mum on her deathbed, but the emphasis on how this is a ‘noble’ choice skirts dangerously close to the idea that ‘some sacrifices were worth it if life returns to normal’. I for one would still quite like to stay alive and be there to see and review any and all future Dr Who stories thankyouverymuch (and besides it wouldn’t take much to stop covid without the need for another lockdown now we know how it spreads: putting air filters in all public buildings would do so much good for such little effort). There’s also the carefully interwoven idea about how we have to keep moving on and not look back to our past which works in the context of grief and Joy not being able to move forward, but not in the context of a deadly epidemic (all those lives saved in lockdown are for nothing if we put ourselves in danger needlessly). However thankfully that’s not the whole story. Russell has always been of the other extreme when it comes to covid. Watch any ‘Unleashed’ episode of the making of series one (though not this episode interestingly) and you can see that everyone involved in TV production under Russell is still masking, long after every the industry (except the ones where millionaires gather) gave up, whilst his stories that touch on covid (notably ’73 Yards’) are much softer in that regard, with covid a shared trauma to process rather than something to move on from. I could well be wrong here but I sense his calming presence in the Doctor’s line that being stuck in a hotel room in isolation for a year ‘wasn’t really so bad’ if it meant that lives were saved and that ‘there’s no bad way to save a life’ (though admittedly for all I know it’s the other way around and it was Moffat’s influence that changed Russell’s ideas on his own scripts). 


However this is still very much Moffat’s story and in more ways than might be apparent. Back when he was showrunner and writing his own Christmas specials he got into the habit of holing himself up in a hotel room around Spring-Summertime, hanging up some bits of tinsel and decorations and playing some Christmas Carols to get in the mood. Even if he didn’t actually do that this time around (he no longer has to travel to conventions as the ‘current showrunner’ and live out of a suitcase) it’s easy to see why after so many years of working that way hotels would become associated with Christmas in his mind. You can just imagine Moffat’s attention being interrupted from his work by the mystery of a locked door right next to his computer and his subconscious brain working overtime: how come he’s in yet another hotel room next to yet another locked door?... As for the plot it’s a direct steal from the traditional carol ‘Star Of Bethlehem’ (not ‘O Little Town Of Bethlehem’ or ‘The Star Carol’ but another far more obscure one that features the line ‘joyful let us quickly rise, still the signal in the skies’; the episode title then refers to a direct carol altogether!) as if Moffat got the idea after paying close attention to one carol in particular. Despite all that, though, ‘Joy To The World’ is still oddly un-Christmassy as Dr who festive specials go. Sure it’s set on not one but two Christmas Days (possibly three with the 4202 dating at the start that kicks everything off: note that it’s ‘2024’ in reverse) and ends with the nativity star on or at least around the very first Christmas Day, but it’s an unusual episode in that it features very little else in terms of festive trimmings: no Slade for once or indeed any Christmas music at all, no references to the date in the dialogue beyond Joy’s memory of her mum dying, no killer snowmen or robo Santas or even snow (I could be wrong but am I right in thinking this is this the first ever Who Xmas special without snow in there somewhere?!) What’s odd is that it would be easy enough to add, especially with the Disney budget: the dinosaur could easily have been in snow, or they could have out the Silurian in a Christmas hat or filled the time hotel full to bursting with festive decorations. Apparently this story started life as just another series episode before the two writers saw the ‘potential’ of having this as a Christmas story but in that case, why?  What about this plot screamed Christmas to them?     


The links to the writer himself don’t just end there though. A lot of this story is about loss and grief, a theme that ran through so much of Moffat’s work from the 11th Doctor losing Amy and Rory to the 12th forgetting Clara to the death of Danny Pink. Many characters in Moffat’s work across all series have their lives shapes by death and have to learn to adjust to a life that’s different to the one they thought they were going to live, something that allows him to weave his theme of time travel in quite cleverly. Many of his characters remain stuck in the past by choice, unwilling to move on into a scary future, while nothing alters your scale of time more than grief when usual routines don’t help and none of the old stuff you used to do seems to matter anymore. Steven lost his mum late on in his run as showrunner (oddly like Russell’s partner getting sick at the end of series four actually), revealing after leaving the show that he was writing his first draft of what was his eventual last story as showrunner ‘Twice Upon A Time’ at her bedside (and regretting not being able to give it his full attention – one of the reasons he’s come back for his two story ‘coda’). Christmas is a time that accentuates your life circumstances, making good times better and hard times sadder and this is a rare Christmas special brave enough to admit that not everyone enjoys the holidays. That line from The Doctor about how mums never stop saving you ‘even when they’re gone’ feels like a last rueful tribute, as Joy losing her mum gives the end of the story the drama it needs to get out of a plothole and on to the big finale. Even The Doctor is feeling being alone again, with a melancholy we haven’t seen this regeneration wear before which works up to a point but does seem to come a little out of nowhere (the two Ncutis yelling insults at each other that ‘this is why nobody likes you’ feels forced, especially as the ‘older’ Doctor has had a year off to calm down and begin to move on from Ruby who after all is still alive and could be picked up in her future anytime they liked (again was the original plan to kill her off?); also the line about how the Tardis ‘never has chairs’ is a particularly dumb thing to say the same week as the colourised version of ‘The War Games’ went out, showing Patrick Troughton regenerate into Jon Pertwee while sitting in one!)  


One of the best aspects of the story, even though it glossed over it too quick, was the idea of The Doctor being stuck in the hotel living ‘the long way round’, a hallmark of the Moffat era when it happened three times (which The Doctor seems to have forgotten: ‘The Lodger’ ‘Closing Time’ and ‘The Power Of Three’), as well as other examples (the 1st Doctor and Susan have been hanging round Coal Hill School for some time in the very first story ‘An Unearthly Child’, the 8th Doctor series ‘Stranded’ has lasted for multiple series and Big Finish are still making them, not forgetting the entire exiled-UNIT era of the 3rd Doctor. Listening to Dr 15 talk here you’d think he’d never ever done it before, which is a bit odd, rather than simply groaning ‘oh no not again!’ We know from his days as the increasingly grumpy wing-clipped 3rd Doctor how much it kills this timelord – and probably this exuberant enthusiastic ‘Tigger’ regeneration more than most – to be stuck in one place, so that sacrifice of staying put on Earth for a year is a big one and it’s wasted by turning all of that frustration into one brief scene about ‘waiting’. The way the Doctor fills the time in is sweet though and leads to some more great sight gags as The Doctor becomes a hotel employee (the mops working on their own, the oven that he makes ‘bigger on the inside’, the satnav that like the Tardis ‘takes you where you need to go, not where you want to go’, the ’accidental’ mind-reading of pudding for a guest whose on a diet) which are all some of the funniest things seen on the show in years. The simple friendship with employee Anita, as they do such Earthly things as play board games and natter while looking at the stars, is very movingly done too. Christmas isn’t just a time of meeting with friends who are there and mourning those who are dead but thinking about the ones lost along the way, who are no longer in our lives regularly for whatever reason (bit who we still appreciate enough to send Christmas cards to every year) and Moffat gets that melancholy feeling of ships that pass in the night well. Anita herself is a great character, totally unruffled even when she walks in on a Silurian in a hotel room, the perfect unruffled shrug of a retail worker who always sees odd things happen in the shifts before Christmas and finds it best not to draw attention to them. 


More than just a great idea, though, I think the idea of the Doctor being stuck in the mundane world, while knowing that the extraordinary one is taking place just tantalisingly out of sight, is a neat metaphor for being a retired showrunner. There he is, living one day after another in order, back in everyday life where the wonders of time and space are the playground for someone else, the exact same way Moffat has had to do since 2017. Just look at the way the Doctor has little models of the Tardis lying around (‘because there’s a lot of them for sale online for some reason’ – a knowing postmodernist wink to camera), little reminders of the life he used to lead now that he’s in the ‘slow lane’ (we know that Davies has a whole room full of models after putting it into his BBC contract in 2005 that he got a copy of ‘all of them’, little knowing what a success the franchise was going to be and how much they were going to take over his house; maybe Moffat does too?) A lot is spoken about how hard it is for actors (and actress) to adjust after being The Doctor, because whatever they do for the rest of their lives the first line of their obituary is already written and whatever they job it could never ever possibly be as wide and varied and let’s face it as brilliant as the one they’ve just left, but that goes extra for the writers, producers and showrunners who carry so many of these worlds in their head, part of their subconscious attuned to thinking up stories all the time. You can’t just turn that part of your creative brain off and the hurt frustrated look on The Doctor’s face, as he effectively passes the story on to another ‘future’ version and had to get on with making money and paying bills and gets left behind, is a neat metaphor for adjusting to life post-Who. Moffat has said that this is absolutely definitely his final episode this time and he’s not coming back, honest and I do believe he means it – now. But you and I know that time is relative, dear readers, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see him back again in the years to come, as this is a job that never ever lets you go even when you think you’ve moved on from it and want your life back (In fact breaking news: the latest interview from Boxing Day has Moffat saying that while he’s not involved in series two and has no plans to come back in the future ‘you never know’. Which in Dr Who terms basically means yes. Assuming the series itself is safe past a second series of course; Disney still haven’t said if it’s been commissioned either way and if we’re going to get a third series without a gap in transmission they really need to start recording it now). 


Assuming for now it is goodbye, though - for the writer not the series that is - Moffat neatly bookends his career again and throws in yet more references to where he began in ‘The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances’ with the throwaway reference to the Villengard, the military regime who were further explored in his first story as showrunner to be filmed ‘Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’, plus his ‘last’ goodbye ‘Twice Upon A Time’ and in much more detail at last in ‘Boom’ (and if you doubted that dig at Christianity was intendtional just look at that story where in the future the military have merged with the Church because they’re more or less the same thing!) This time around the Villengard are back to being noises off though and we never actually get to meet any of them, just their victims – the poor Silurian trapped into holding their boobytrapped starcase up the hotel staircases and Joy who takes the case from him (are there more casualties that happened before The Doctor arrived?) Alas this leads to a bit of a muddle that’s never properly explained: just why are the Villengard growing a star? How did the rather rundown organisation we saw in ‘Boom’ ever end up that clever? And why have they chosen Earth to grow it on rather than a dead planet where they’d raise less suspicion? As with a lot of Moffat stories we’re encouraged just to run with it and not ask too many questions, even though it leads to what’s a fairly botched ending. The same goes for Joy’s decision to ‘enter’ the star and be absorbed too: why would that stop the explosion at all, as a ruthless people like the Villengard would surely have set up a second defence for such an event? Plus how does that even work? Joy spreading hope through to all of us because we’re all ’starseeds’ is typical ‘deux ex machina’ we-need-an-ending nonsense (to be fair more a hallmark of Davies’ era usually than Moffat’s): we aren’t all seeds of that particular star and how can that possibly work when stars and atoms don’t have feelings? Surely even in a universe with so much empty space in it moving a star and putting it somewhere would cause repercussions (the gravitational field on the Earth as it’s moved out of orbit would have caused Biblical scale floods inevitably too? Now there’s an idea for a sequel...) Plus much as Joy’s name offers the suitably Christmas cracker pun in the episode title, wouldn’t it have worked best if she was called Hope rather than Joy? She doesn’t make people happy after all, just gives them hope in new tomorrows when they’ve felt like giving up. Alas the final rather laboured quarter of the story can’t cash in all the great ideas that have come before it, so that we never fully get the most of all those great ideas. Once again, it’s as if Moffat had never been away, with several rich cheques that were simply never cashed.  


Oh well, it is only a Christmas episode and the usual rules of the series don’t apply: this is a story to get lost in and go with the flow, for new or one-time viewers to enjoy without complicated backstory, to go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at over the turkey rather than dissect with the magnifying glass of usual. On that score ‘Joy To the World’ works well with lots of brilliant individual moments: the Doctor’s repeated silly attempted deliveries of a ‘ham and cheese toastie and a spiced pumpkin latte’ (destined to rank alongside fish fingers and custard in fan affections) to lots of inappropriate places, the opening scene of the Tardis arriving and The Doctor walking out to the buffet breakfast table in his ‘Arthur Dent’ dressing gown like every other guest, the larks with Joy early on, the dinosaur cameo, the Doctor ‘working’ at the hotel and the fun and oh so Moffaty gag of having the abstract concept of different timezones behind different doors linked by something as basic and simple as rope (something that also pays off what appeared to be a brief gag about Everest early on with customary neatness). Along the way there are some good characters (Trev was a decent support too, played with customary sleepiness by ‘White Van Man’ actor Joel Fry), a great central conceit and another strong performance by Ncuti who, for the second time in a row in Moffat’s episodes, dominates the running time and spends quite a bit of this story alone. Best of all are the varied gags which have some of the highest hit rate of any of the modern stories and are scattered liberally throughout from Joy’s exasperation at not being the ‘main character’ even in her own hotel room, to The Doctor’s quip that she’s being ‘mansplained by a talking briefcase’ to the sarcastic comment that ‘evil must logo’ to the laugh out loud line about ‘liking it when the clocks go forward’ (why has no writer thought up that one in sixty years?!) to the pithy line that ‘hotel rooms are you without the makeup’ shaped by what meagre possessions you own and the classic timey wimey ‘Sorry for the delay’ ‘But we haven’t ordered yet!’ which joins the great pantheon of classic Moffat dialogue. So yes, while this story features all of Moffat’s old traditionally irritating trademarks and is even bittier than usual it also features nuggets of pure gold rattling around in there too, his dialogue as sharp as ever and his ideas every bit as big and bold and imaginative as any seen in the series. Not a great episode by any means but one with lots of great bits in it, this special didn’t quite bring joy to my entire world exactly but was a good way to spend fifty-five minutes (an awkward running time that, longer than your average episode and a bit short for a Christmas one) and raised a lot of smiles along the way. Above all else, though, ‘Joy’ offered things you simply don’t get anywhere else: what other series would give you the sight of a Silurian in a hotel room being threatened with a hairdryer before an ordinary human gets turned into a star? That’s proper Dr Who that is. And what better praise could you give any Dr Who story than that? 
POSITIVES + The sets are amazing! There really do seem to be rows upon rows of doorways that stretch out just like a ‘real’ hotel, only more futuristic and interesting with rounded doors that aren’t like any hotel I’ve ever been in. 
NEGATIVES – Moffat is back to his old tricks again of never getting to the end of one thing before jumping straight into another and there are enough ideas for a full series, each one only lasting for a scene or two. We needed more  of Joy’s amiable hopelessness and the line Moffat said was his favourite (that she’s the sort of person whose smile was ‘the lid on a burning pot’) is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for her character. The Doctor stuck in one place for a year could easily have been the focus of the episode, but instead it’s a ‘hello’ scene, a ‘goodbye’ scene and a montage; there’ no sense of him being stretched to breaking point twiddling his thumbs or his relief at finally growing into the ‘future’ self who gets to run off with Joy anew. The poor Silurian snuffs it far too quickly and while it’s totally in keeping with this incarnation of The Doctor who has a big heart that cares for everyone his scene of mourning is far too long for a character who was barely on screen three minutes. The Villengard get pushed to the side too (most olden stories would have added a postscript of The Doctor running off to tick them off). Also the dinosaurs existed for millions of years. The scene with the T Rex only lasts seconds – even allowing for the expense of CGI there’s so much more they could have done with that. 
BEST QUOTE: ‘The starseed will bloom and the flesh shall rise’ (an impenetrable catchphrase which is to 21st century Who what ‘The Quest Is The Quest’ and ‘Eldrad Must Live!’ are to 20th Century Who!) 

Previous ‘The Legend Of Ruby Sunday/The Empire Of Death’ next

The Legend Of Ruby Sunday/Empire Of Death: Ranking - N/A (but #130ish)

 

“The Legend Of Ruby Sunday/The Empire Of Death”(15^th Dr, 2024)

(Series 14/1A episode 7, Dr 15 with Ruby and Mel, 15-22/6/2024, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Trantor, Joel Collins and Phil Collinson, director: Jamie Donoughhue)

Ranking: N/A (but #130ish) reviewed 23/6/2024

‘Hey Sutekh, you made it! Welcome to the 21^st century Dr Who party. I know it’s difficult to find your way round here at first, what with all the CGI and orange sparkly pixie-dust going on, but it’s a nice place when you get to know it and loads of your friends from the 20^th century are here – even the giant crab in the corner! And if you get in trouble, just give me a shout –this Silurian will be right over’

‘Yesssss Ssssssutekh, come and have a drink and tell usssssssss all about how you got here’

‘Oh but I’ve been here all along, waiting for my chance to get out. I’ve been all over the universe in part of that infernal blue box over there, hitching a ride through the time vortex. I’ve been on more adventures and journeys in timer and space than any of you – even that bunch of Daleks singing noisily over there in the corner’

‘That’s a dear, you don’t know what you’re saying, we’re all a bit disorientated when we get here, not ourselves – and believe me I know all about that being a Zygon! But why did you suddenly decide to wake up now?’

‘Erm…erm…erm…Is that a buffet table I see before me? I hope they do doggy bags’

‘Yes it’s right over there weakling God scum, right by my Sontaron flag and on top of the Auton is pretending to be a table with the presents on top of it. Tell me, what gift did you bring to the party?’

‘Well I went to the chemists and they were all out of death so I bring you…Sutekh’s gift of Pringles and cheesy nibbles’

Well, here we are, at the end of the shortest season that was planned that way for thirty-six years (poor ‘Flux’ got the short straw thanks to covid) and yet a season that still raised so many mysteries and so many points of continuity that needed clearing. Does the two-part finale clear them all up?  Hell no: after years of seeing Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall invent finales out of thin air it feels as if Russell T Davies wanted a piece of the same and made everything up as he went along. Does that make this story the disappointing monstrosity the rest of the fanbase seem to think it is though? Actually no, for all its many faults I really enjoyed ‘Legend/Empire’ (despite the fact that both names make absolutely no sense in context) and felt caught up in it in a way that I haven’t been for a god half of this year’s stories. Given the extra space of two episodes it felt as if Russell had more time to  play to his strengths, of characterisation and big emotional set pieces, giving us time to properly know the two main characters we’ve been rattling round space and time in. The stakes were higher, the tension bigger and it felt more like Dr Who than a lot of the other more adventurous stories have been this year, the one episode in 2024 that feels recognisable if you come to it straight from classic Who (as many did after watching the ‘Tales From The Tardis’ version of ‘Pyramids Of Mars’). Whisper it quietly but I actually preferred this story to that garbled mess, a story that everyone always hails as a classic but for me is an even bigger case of making it up as you go along.

Everything here has only added to my opinion that Russell T Davies spent lockdown - the single biggest exterminator of humans in a century and easily the biggest thing to happen to the world since he was in charge of Dr Who - in isolation with his classic Who DVDs, looking for inspiration for the series of Youtube shorts and Dr Who tweetalongs organised by Dr Who magazine that united fans all over the world – quite possibly with a Marvels superhero film on in the background as inspiration. Before the world suddenly and confusingly decided to move on even though the pandemic hadn’t. There’s that same sense of scale and panic that the world is going wrong and needs to be put right that came from the youtube lockdown videos in 2020 along with a sense of comfort that if we listen to the science and listen to the Doctors, including our Doctor, we will all get through this (Just check out the ‘kind woman’ commenting on the shops being out of stuff and that she hasn’t seen anyone for days). Sutekh bringing his gift of death to the whole world is so close to the maps of the early pandemic showing the stats and figures of every country and the way it spreads from children to parents (because they left the sodding schools open as a mass super spreader!) is uncomfortably like the real thing. The idea that Sutekh’s ‘death’ is a ‘gift’, because the people who’ve died don’t have to grieve and carry on like the survivors, We know that lockdown was the moment when Russell re-connected to the series he thought he’d left behind and started thinking about becoming showrunner again, after hearing that Chibnall was thinking of stepping down and there was no obvious replacement in line, with tweetalongs to Russell’s stories ‘Rose’ ‘New Earth’ and ‘Gridlock’, as well as his enthusiastic participation in stories written by other writers under his watch, getting a bigger and more immediate response than anything he’d written in years. Was the original plan, perhaps to start tweeting along to older stories with modern showrunners writing prequels and sequels to those too? In which case ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ was an obvious place to start: we know from interviews that it was one of the first Dr Who stories that really gripped the mind of a then-eleven-year-old Russell and opened his eyes up to what Dr Who could be. Even though Sutekh clearly dies in the original he was a God. Surely a God would have a backup plan and find a way to survive? Russell was always too much of fan to want his Who to replace or reboot the old series: one of his big things he wanted to do as showrunner was make fans look to the episodes that he’d loved growing up and now here was his chance again. What’s more Gabriel Woolfe, the voice artist who’d done so much to make Sutekh come alive in 1975, was still alive and still acting, even at the age of 91. Russell had adored his voice, leaving instructions for casting director Andy Prior in many of his scripts that he wanted a voice ‘like Sutekh’s’ and being most amazed when Prior finally tracked him down to be the beast in ‘The Impossible Planet’. Had he had longer as showrunner the first time round, had Russell not been rushed off his feet and distracted by the terminal illness of his husband Andrew, then Russell might well have brought Sutekh back then. In other words having Sutekh, one of his favourites, return was high on Russell’s bucketlist – and after the world kicked the bucket in such a mass way the time seemed right.

I do wonder, though, about having demi-Gods in Dr Who. This is a series that puts so much emphasis on ‘science’ and how it can be ‘potentially real’ that when it starts sticking Gods with magical powers in there it all gets a bit silly. It’s a big and unlikely universe though and Sutekh’s back story (largely ignored here as ‘cultural appropriation’) as a God to Ancient Egypt gives him a better claim to being ‘real’ and believable compared to, well, The Beast actually plus The Toymaker and Fenric and The Gods of Ragnarok and the Fendahl and all those other beings who like to run around being immortal and all-powerful. The problem comes when they start messing around with the other planets. I mean, why bother? If I was a God I might enjoy being worshipped but human beings (not to mention Oods and Thals and Exxilons and all the other inhabitants of the planets mentioned during the course of this story) would seem like ants to me, hardly worth bothering with. Sure Sutekh is angry with the Doctor and wants to get his revenge on him and all the places he’s been to, but really why bother killing most of the universe in all timezones, just because you can? I mean, it’s going to get awfully boring with no one to gloat at or have worship you all day. Usually that’s explained away in Dr Who terms because a race like The Daleks or Cybermen believe in conquering the universe and making everyone like them – but Sutekh doesn’t want anyone to be like him. And of course the other trouble with a demi-God is how do you realistically fit them into a drama that’s partly about everyday life without the end looking a bit stupid? The fact is you can’t and Sutekh is being used here as an ‘insert bad guy here’ without any rationale as to why this would be Sutekh’s plan or indeed any of his characteristics in ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ (when he wants people to bow down and worship him, not die). The sight of Sutekh, a being with more power than perhaps anyone we’ve ever seen in this series, turned into a giant CGI dog and tethered on a rope dangled outside the Tardis like a dog out of a car, is one of the silliest the series has ever had, which is really saying something. The new-look Sutekh is impressively huge and Woolfe’s purring vocals are as deliciously dangerous as ever, miraculously undimmed by age, but turning him into a big dog is really not the way to go. It’s as if Russell spent lockdown watching old Dr Who DVDs, Marvel superhero films and Flux’ and saw the big Korvanista dog ands thought ‘what a swizz they made him friendly when they could have made him frightening – I could do better than that’. But for all the money and makeup and whizzbang technology Sutekh is still far scarier as a Human. I keep reading, over and over again on my timeline, how young children were scared by the Sutekh in ‘Tales Of the Tardis’ but weren’t scared of this one at all, even though he killed far more people in a far crueller way.

Even so, I still got wrapped up in the plot, which at 110 minutes in total didn’t feel as rushed or as diluted as a lot of Russell’s other scripts. He’s always been good at summing up characters and making them feel ‘real’ quickly and then seeing how they cope when the odds are against them and there are a lot of good examples of that this story. The second UNIT family are a bit odd at first glance (I mean, I know I’m getting older and all and the cast of UNIT look younger every time I see them but seriously: I know Rose Noble is the daughter of one of the Doctor’s most beloved companions and new scientific advisor Morris Gibbons is a genius, but they’re both teenagers who want to be at school – either UNIT is the height of UK technology and knowledge and full of danger, or it’s a place that does work experience for bright but inexperienced children; surely it can’t be both? And what happened to Shirley and Russell’s desire for inclusivity with the disabled?) but it’s nice seeing the Doctor have a base again full of people he trusts. Kate Stewart feels like an actual character  In Russell’s hands, rather than the Brigadier’s daughter the way she did with Moffat and Chibnall, struggling to stay strong in the face of ridiculous odds and skirting round the fact that UNIT have been messing around with time windows when they thought the Doctor wasn’t looking. Rose Noble got frustratingly little to do (I still want to see her a full time companion she’s got such potential) and Lenny Rush, who stole the show in ‘Dodger’ from Christopher Eccleston which isn’t easy to do, is one of Who’s best child stars so far, making the most of his few lines, though we badly need to see more of both to truly get to know them. When Russell kills everyone off it’s a big emotional moment – even when, yes, you know full well they’re not simply going to kill all life midway through an episode and leave it at that and they’ll all be brought back to life within about half an hour. Even the figure credited as simply ‘Kind Woman’, who doesn’t really need to be there at all for plot purposes, nicely sums up both the scale of the destruction and how, even when civilisation is crumbling, people can still be good and decent (she’s the person that gives the Doctor hope that the universe is worth fighting for and has the same sense of community spirit as people in early covid times, back when we were all in it together instead of leaving the elderly and vulnerable to cope at home alone). Mel, too, is a character with a long history with Russell T Davies: in case you missed the review for ‘The Giggle’ basically his first job in television, on children’s make-do-and-mend programme ‘Why Don’t You?’ shared a rehearsal room with the Dr Who of season 24 and Russell, already a huge fan, looked across at Bonnie Langford laughing and thought ‘these are my people – how do I join them?!’ It might be the fact fans have got used to her and the fact that Mel is now not so silly and squeaky as she was when she was young but she feels like a real person in Russell’s hands across three stories than she did in the 1980s across twenty weeks, with her weakness of gullibility and refusal to take no for an answers turned into strengths of never going up and believing that there is always a way out of anything. Her  comforting the Doctor when everything seems to be lost is a really nice moment and Bonnie makes for a great sparring partner with Ncuti. Ruby gets a lot of nice character touches too, from being the one to fool Sutekh at the end and discovering her birth mother, even if she weirdly says almost nothing for the first half of the second story (is she in shock?) We don’t quite get the huge emotional payoff Russell is clearly going for, if only because it doesn’t feel as if we know Ruby that well yet (she’s only been around for eight stories and nine weeks actually on screen, with her seven months as ‘the new companion’ the shortest since Sara Kingdom sort of was but really wasn’t in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’. And one of those stories, ‘Boom’, knocked her out for most of it). I know a lot of fans are disappointed that Ruby turned out to be just ordinary too but actually I’m all here for that twist, that even the most ordinary person in the world can still be the most important by keeping her wits about her and fooling Sutekh even when the Doctor has effectively messed up.

What I don’t get is why this series went to such a big deal about the mystery of who she was, only to swerve the answer at the end. For as well as demonstrating the best of Russell T this series also features him trying to do a Steven Moffat and turn series fourteen/1A (we really need a better name!) and turn everything into a massive puzzle like the ones that ran across series five-seven, one of the biggest innovations since Davies had hung up his showrunning shoes. Moffat inherited and borrowed quite heavily from Davies’ ideas and they’re actually very similar as writers, so its natural Davies should want to have a bash at this in reverse. Only he’s not very good at it. Back when Moffat was in charge there was fevered speculation about various clues and endless chats online as to what on Gallifrey could be going and the answers, almost always, were wilder and more interesting than anything we could have got: all that stuff about River Song’s origins and who Clara really was, a story very like Ruby’s but with a really clever resolution. Moffat has the sort of brain that must make him a chess champion: he’s always fifty moves ahead of you. Russell sees writing plots as more like a crossword: he has lots of ideas he wants to fit together and slot in and he’s good at papering over the cracks for them – but he fits them in retrospectively where he can rather than seeing an entire series as an organic whole. He thinks he’s teased us by making us look in the wrong direction with the tease of Susan coming back (because there’s always a Susan Twist at the end), a brief moment when it’s hinted Ruby might be Mel’s daughter (which is dropped straight away) and the anagram of ‘S Triad’ technology being the ‘Tardis’ and then actually makes it a cliffhanger plot point that ha ha ha it was all a ruse and meant ‘Sue Tech’ all along. Only we guessed that in the first week. And it was in fact, a throwaway joke in a book Lawrence Miles once had rejected, but which the author liked enough to tweet (I know because I saw it. And if I could see it then Russell could too). So much of this story spends so long looking over its shoulder to check we’re getting all the clues that it forgets to actually get on with telling a decent story. And If you’re going to land conundrums like this then you have to have a solution that tops anything the whole mass Dr Who fanbase can come up with on their own – and this just wasn’t. I know a lot of fans adored the big scary cliffhanger but honestly, as someone who saw the twist coming and isn’t that big a fan of the original Sutekh, it was one of the most boring ones going. And this is a season that’s demanded we look for a twist at the end – only for the twist at the end to be that there isn’t one, that everything is ‘normal’. That’s not a twist, that’s sloppy writing.

What’s more Russell has huge problems trying to tie his two mysteries together, Sutekh and Ruby. They just don’t go at all. We’re led to believe that Sutekh, the most powerful being in the universe, is so caught up in the question of who Ruby’s mum is that he puts his killing spree on hold long enough for his nemesis and current best friend to get away. Why is he so obsessed? He has the arrogance to think he can defeat anyone, never mind some random someone’s mother (although I do like the idea that an Egyptian God is sort-of defeated by a ‘Mummy’, which is sort-of the plot of ‘Pyramids’ after all, the Doctor wrapping up in bandages and pretending to be a mummy who wasn’t). And why does Sutekh arrive now? He’s been waiting for 49 years (Earth time, not Tardis time – goodness knows how long that’s been!) to appear and we’re led to believe he’s been waiting for Ruby. Only it turns out that it’s all a complete coincidence. They could at least have tied in the fact that Sutekh seems to have woken up again within the Tardis after Donna poured her coffee onto the console - or if not how come the Tardis has been crash-landing every time it’s materialised since ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ and not ‘The Android Invasion’? (The next story after ‘Pyramids Of Mars’). While I’m glad that Ruby turns out to be, basically, a nobody born to Earth parents for a change (although the dad’s weird name and possible links to the crooked politician from ’73 Yards’ might be setting up another twist for next year) it leaves so many unanswered questions about her. I’m willing to buy that her fifteen year old mum left her on the steps of a church for safe-keeping in 2004, but how did she conceal her pregnancy in a toxic family that, it’s hinted, were sexually abusing her and so knew to look out for such signs? What fifteen year old in 2004 dressed in a cloak? Why does the mum point to a street-sign, in the pitch dark, in such a menacing way when there’s no one around to see her  (and it’s a whacking coincidence that the  Church that took her in and handed her over for foster care seems to have named her Ruby too). How come this was such a crazy point in time that time itself started going weird even when using Tardis technology (and how come poor soldier Sullivan – a relative of Harry perhaps? – snuffed it during a simulation when Sutekh in the Tardis was nowhere near?) How come, after all those years of searching for her daughter while working in the NHS, with easier access to a genetic database than anyone else, the mum never found Ruby? How come, if genetic records are compulsory in 2046, they have no record of Ruby or anyone in her family in the future in ‘Boom’? How come Maestro knew about Sutekh coming back – has he been on the phone to her or something? How come ‘The Devil’s Chord’ told us that Ruby was ‘not right’ when actually she’s normal? What happened to Dr 14 and indeed all the other bi-regenerational Doctors, a lot of whom must be wandering round planets the Doctor has been visiting since 1975 and thus are in trouble too? What happened in all the multi-Doctor stories since 1975: was Sutekh on board the Tardisi of Drs 1-5 (in ‘The Five Doctors’) plus War and 10-11 (‘Day Of The Doctor’) waving to himself rather than going ‘you know what? There’s a whole bunch of me  now, I’m bringing the plan forward!’ What happened to Sutekh during the events of (here goes) ‘Logopolis’ (in which he’d have been shrunk to a titchy size and ended up inside The Master’s Tardis), ‘Planet Of Fire’ (where the Tardis is set alight), ‘Frontios’ (when half the Tardis was jettisoned – I mean what was Sutekh clinging on to), all stories with Kamelion inside the Tardis (when they must surely have encountered each other) and ‘Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis’ (when people kept falling into the eye of harmony in alternate timelines and being set alight) just to name a few obvious ones? Even the episode titles are unnecessarily misleading: it turns out Ruby isn’t a legend in a legendary sense and there is no empire, just death. Above all, why does it snow so often round Ruby when that had no bearing on the plot whatsoever? A lot of fans felt cheated by the ending, not because it was bad (although a lot of people are saying it is) but because it raised so many big questions and then answered them in the simplest and most boring way, as if Russell worked out his solution late on and then tried to add clues backwards, rather than having a fully formed plan from the outset.

Well, aesthetically I can at least answer the last one: Ruby makes it snow because she ‘is’ Russell, the same way Rose, Martha and especially Donna were all extensions of himself (seriously: ‘Turn Left’ is Russell’s love song to Dr Who and what his life might have been like if he’d never ‘met’ the Doctor and ‘Journey’s End’ has him preparing to leave the show, his memory wiped, to become an ordinary mortal again). Russell made it snow in ‘The Christmas Invasion’ on a whim, because that felt more Christmassey to him, and then so many people commented on it that he had to do it every year – and a few stories in between. It’s a neat metaphor: as a writer with power he can change the weather and snow is a good fit: he’s too optimistic about the human race to make it rain, too pessimistic to make it all sunshiney (besides, where would the drama  be?) but covering his characters in a blanket of snow that makes them shiver and which changes everything they thought they knew about their cosy little world, leaving tiny footprints as they come and go, is too good a metaphor not to use in some story somewhere. Sutekh launching onto the back of the time vortex and never letting go is a neat metaphor for Russell’s jumping on point as a fan (once you cling to the Tardis you’re on it for life!) The fact he climbs back to life now, at a time of death and destruction that so reminds him of Sutekh’s power in his childhood, feels like a natural part of his own ‘character arc’. After all, his first ever professional links to the series were when his Russell stand-in character Vince in breakthrough series ‘Queer As Folk’ sat down to watch ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ on VHS. It’s where Russell sort-of ‘came in’ as a fan and the idea that Sutekh has been sleeping in his subconscious for all that time waiting to get out is a neat metaphor for the story itself.

There’s maybe another thought of fancy going on in this story too: Sutekh tears down whole worlds in Dr Who, basically wiping out everything that’s happened in the series since 1975 and only hangs around the show and keeps it alive to they can try and solve the ‘big mystery’ of the year (in this case Ruby’s parentage) without caring for the characters. Ever since its second ever episode (no seriously, it was a review of ‘An Unearthly Child’ episode two) people have been saying that Dr Who isn’t as good as it used to be. Russell, as showrunner, was more immune to this than most: his era on the show has come to be seen as a ‘golden age’ when without him we wouldn’t have had Dr Who back at all. Even so there’s been some, err, interesting revisionism going on about his time in charge, a combination of a backlash against the 10th Doctor (who some see as smug and arrogant, even though that was his entire character arc, for which he paid for dearly in ‘The Waters Of Mars’ and ‘The End Of Time’) and the revelations about Noel Clarke and John Barrowman and how uncomfortable Christopher Eccleston felt on set. To a sensitive soul like Russell it must have felt as if fandom was trying to burn down everything he’d ever created. It would be apt, for the writer who once described toxic fandom in ‘Love and Monsters’, to give us an update and to make fandom not just a rogue shape-shifting monster who absorbs everything but a God who can wipe out the entire show if they persuade enough people to stop watching en masse. ‘Legend/Empire’, then, is Russell as Ruby, an ordinary person standing alone in front of a sea of critical voices trying to kill his entire world and not being sure what to do about it. The shots of Sutekh’s ties to the Tardis, the biggest single symbol for the series, and being flung into the time vortex to die feel like the wish of a weary showrunner wondering why he ever bothered, one who still loves the show passionately but not all the surrounding noise that gives with it. This is, also, of course Dr Who being brought back from the absolute dead when all the lights were going out (as the BBC were seriously considering cancelling it when Chris Chibnall left), the only thing keeping it going being the ‘rope’ that still ties Russell to the series that’s not left his brain since childhood. I love the scene of all the planets turning back on (a sort of mirror of ‘Journey’s End’ turning them off) as if they’ve all started living again inside Russell’s head. Death might be a ‘gift’ to the critics and fans who want this series to die, but Russell loves it too much to let it go if he can help it.  

Russell might well have thought twice about coming back though: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a relentlessly critical backlash to a single episode as I have with ‘Empire Of Death’ and I’m not quite sure why. I mean it wasn’t a classic and it was oddly paced: the whole thing with the rope coming out of nowhere –something Moffat would have made a plot point six episodes ago and made us forget about particularly. It was quite unevenly put together for a two parter too: the first half was all boring setup and the ending was rushed, with the big cliffhanger (the first of the new era since Russell took charge a second time) came at the wrong time, as if he’d forgotten how to do it: had they used the moment, ten minutes into ‘Empire’, when the universe was being wiped out and the Doctor looked broken, it would have been a far more natural and devastating break. Mucking around with a sub-plot about a ‘time window’ that went nowhere and sucked all the drama out of the story was a bad idea, while it felt like the part with S Triad only just got going before we were rushing headlong into Sutekh’s reveal. Even in the vastly superior second part we didn’t spend nearly enough time in 2046 (how come everyone is DNA testing now and how come the world population has fallen from some 8 billion in 2024 to a mere 76 million in 22 year’s time? (Is Russell, always covid cautious like a lot of people In TV, as anxious as me about how many people the pandemic continues to kill off every day and all the rare illnesses it’s causing people to develop?) and the sub-plot of Mel being possessed is the sort of thing we’ve seen so many times before it’s got old (and it robs us of more time seeing Mel as Mel: honestly after all the publicity build up I thought she was going to spend the entire episode riding Dr 15 round on a motorbike rather than a single short chase scene). What s the significance of the kind woman and her gift of a spoon (is it symbolic of the 4^th Doctor’s desire to travel ‘with a teaspoon and an open mind’, not a quote from ‘Pyramids’ but ‘The Creature From The Pit’?)  But re-watching the weird cut-down and CGI-treated ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ the other day (a lot better than the horrid colourised and re-edited ‘Daleks’ but not a patch on the original with its intrusive modern music and weird combination of shots) this story is no worse in terms of pacing than the so-called ‘classic’ that inspired it.

For there was a lot in this finale I liked: the mystery of Susan Triad and her lack of memory at who she was is a great idea that kept us on our toes: the Doctor desperately asking her about her dreams (‘have you ever been an ambulance?’ is a fan-favourite quote already!) when she hasn’t got a clue what’s going on, only to be a ‘trick’ to lure the Doctor in is a great idea and one we’ve legitimately never had before, not to the extent of building an entire character who keeps returning in stories. The ‘Kind Woman’ has confused many but she’s a very Russell style character, there to sum up how drastic a situation is rather than move on the plot – she’s at one with all his characters in times of stress who do the right thing and give him hope as individuals even when the massed public have got something badly wrong; it’s subtle but meeting here is the turning point that makes the Doctor think there is a chance of putting things right, somehow (although in the end his plan goes wrong and Ruby improvises her way to a solution instead, which is an even better ending). The fact that Sutekh, buried deep in the Tardis (and presumably sharing houseroom with the lost Sontaron from ‘The Invasion Of Time’), can only manipulate things using the Tardis’ perception filter at a distance of up to 73 Yards is a clever idea: it explains a little bit more about what happened in the story ’73 Yards’ too (well, sort of: presumably Sutekh was so angry at his grand masterplan being interrupted at the Doctor’s death he kept the Tardis ‘turned on’ and haunted Ruby for fun). The Doctor’s horror at the thought that his journeys since ‘Pyramids’ have put so many people in danger and caused such suffering through his recklessness is brilliant (and I‘m not just saying that because it was part of a story I submitted to the Big Finish writing competition in lockdown, which I lost: Russell made it into more of a story than me). The reprise from the one part of ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ I always found powerful, the sight of a destroyed world and what it would look like if Sutekh ‘wins’, is reprised here but not in some vague possible future but right here right now and the idea of stars going out (just like ‘Stolen Earth/.Journey’s End’), with references to lots of fan-favourite planets, is a really neat touch that sells the idea of just how big this threat is (only ‘Logopolis’ threatens this many planets and indeed destroys a lot of them: poor Traken, for instance, is destroyed by the Doctor’s carelessness twice now!) I love the Doctor’s subtle kiss of gratitude to the Tardis as he gets it back from Sutekh’s control, so under-stated (Ncuti has been getting better and better this year, although his latest scream of wild fury and defeat isn’t one of his best moments). I love the idea of the ‘Memory Tardis’ from ‘Tales Of The Tardis’ being turned into a continuity point, with a near-defeated Doctor, Ruby and Mel huddled together in the cold watching the universe die, utterly lost and helpless in the wake of the big bad. Most of all I love the fact that even a God as powerful as Sutekh can be tricked by Ruby smashing all evidence of who her mum is, just as he’s got the Doctor in a green-tinged death grip (go girl!)

Admittedly it could all have been put together in a better way – with a lot more Sutekh, given they’d gone to all that trouble to create him - and been surrounded by stories that didn’t keep promising us a four course banquet and then ending up serving up a plate of reasonably good sandwiches. I mean, they were nutritious and tasty enough and better than no sandwiches at all (a lot of fans forget just how much trouble Dr Who was in across 2021 before Russell got Disney involved and I’m the sort of fan who found things to like in ‘The Trial Of A Timelord’, I’ll totally take a sloppy and clumsy series over cancellation) but if you promise a brilliant mystery and then don’t deliver on it people are always going to be disappointed. I do think in time, though, that fans will come to appreciate this story more than they do now, when it leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste. After all, I for one enjoyed Russell going back to using his more detailed, subtle, complex and empathetic writing after a run of stories which I (mostly) really enjoyed but which did feel a little like cartoons, broad and big and colourful. And of course there’s still the chance that some mysteries might get solved at a later date: Mrs Flood, for one, looked furious at having her plans thwarted and being killed by Sutekh just as she was getting close to Ruby’s family so here’s betting she’s the big bad of next year (and my pet theory now so you can all laugh at how wrong I was in a year’s time: she’s a sort of Clara in ‘The Name Of The Doctor’ sent to keep an eye on the Doctor with elements of the people he most trusts: she’s dressed like Clara for most of the series but suddenly started wearing Romana’s costume from ‘The Ribos Operation’ during her fourth-wall break to camera at the very end). Plus…if all those destroyed worlds were brought back to life is this a sneaky backdoor way to getting Gallifrey to come back from the dead (again?!) As much as half the fanbase seem to be giving up on the show in droves this year there’s so much to look forward to with Who and I can’t wait to see you there, starting at Christmas…

+ POSITIVES The Tardis is possessed! Such a great idea that Who had never really done before and it looks like it too, with one of the best uses of CGI in the modern series as black swirling plumes of smoke intertwined it. As much as Sutekh just looked like an angry Scooby Doo who’d eaten too many Scooby snacks the sight of him twirling the Tardis round like a toy was really effective too. The sight of UNIT shooting bullets at it in desperation before finding it impervious and getting taken out one by one was very well handled too, making the most familiar sight in all of Who that’s been home across the past sixty-ish years somewhere scary and dangerous.   

- NEGATIVES That said, the plumes of sand overtaking the world were a CGI effect too far. They looked uncomfortably like the dust bowl from the twin towers on 9/11 and it’s always a bit dodgy when Dr Who starts copying real events that resulted I real deaths. Plus nobody reacts the way they should: yes we see one crashing car but there’s no panic, not much screaming, no real surprise. I mean, this is a tsunami of sand in a city street, you’d at least be surprised if nothing else. And why is Sutekh even messing round with sand? He seems to have given up on all his ‘Egyptian imagery’ for the rest of the story.

BEST QUOTE: ‘You made my life bigger and better Ruby Sunday and now – goodbye’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: In case you hadn’t guessed by now, this story has quite a lot to do with 4^th Doctor story ‘The Pyramids Of Mars’…

Previous ‘Rogue’ next ‘Joy To The World’