42: Rank - 281

         42

(Season 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 19/5/2007, showrunner:  Russell T Davies, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Graeme Harper)  

Rank: 42

(no only kidding, 281)

‘Right, we need to get down into the engines and solve a pop quiz, all our lives are depending on me knowing the answer…How many Spice Girls song were there? How am I supposed to know that?!? The only alternative to burning up and dying a miserable death is if I take the Tardis back in time and listen to them all in order…You know what? Burning up in the heart of a sun it is’

Chris Chibnall's first script fooled all of us at the time who assumed it would just be tits tanks 'n' teleportals like his work on most of spin-off series Torchwood. It's fooled many a fan whose worked backwards since he became showrunner too, when his episodes tend to be either mega-complicated or slow, thoughtful and character-driven. Instead '42' is one of Dr Who's most breathlessly action-packed stories, one that spends precisely thirty seconds of the plot either side of the action when people’s lives aren’t in mortal peril, with one of the few times anyone in outer space actually uses the Tardis like humans used to police telephone boxes, sending a distress call and asking for help. What’s enough of a danger to call in help from a perfect stranger? There’s a spaceship on a crash-course for the sun that’s about to explode in 42 minutes' time, more or less in 'real timey-wimey'. By 2007 showrunner Russell T Davies was looking into scenarios from the olden days they hadn’t done with the news series yet and realised that although they’d had a number of space stations they hadn’t done a story set on an actual spaceship yet. Given that Chibnall had been running Torchwood more or less unsupervised Russell didn’t load him with any more than that – unlike most writers he farmed his ideas out to – his only stipulation being that there should be possessed humans with ‘glowing red eyes’. Unlike some writers who pushed Russell’s ideas and took stories into places he had never expected to go that’s pretty much what he got: ‘42’ is a runaround in a spaceship away from people with glowing red eyes and not a lot else, in the same way that ‘Dinosaurs On A Spaceship’ is about dinosaurs on a spaceship and a lot of his own stories as showrunner can really be summed up by their titles (Oh look, ‘Spyfall’ has a spy, falling and ‘Demons Of The Punjab’ is about demons of the Punjab, while when I first heard about the title I seriously wondered if ‘Ascension Of The Cybermen’ was just going to feature some metal giants climbing some stairs). So we end up with ‘42’, one of the most straightforward Who stories that stood out for its lack of twists and turns even in one of its most straightforward years (with everything between ‘Gridlock’ and ‘Human Nature/Family Of Blood’ easy to guess from their opening few minutes). There isn’t even the gratuitous violence or clumsy sexiness Chibnall was known for in ‘Torchwood (Indeed it’s hard to believe that McConnell and Korwin even know each other never mind that they’re husband and wife; this is one of the most chaste romance in the series). 

 Now there’s a section of the fanbase who like to have their Dr Who simple and straightforward entertainment, in which case this one will be right up your alley: the effects are quite brilliant, the sets believable, the plot sort-of makes sense (if you don’t think about it too hard) and there’s plenty of action going on, with barely a pause for breath. I’ve certainly seen films emptier and worse-looking than this do well at the cinema. ‘Sunshine’, for instance, a George Clooney film with a hundred times the budget of this episode and a plot even more bananas and basic about a spaceship heading into the sun did really well, despite being one of the daftest things ever committed to celluloid; by chance it was released a mere month before this was and most of the people who saw both reckoned Dr Who did it better (the trail caused quite a rush in post-production in fact, with a sudden name change as both ships had used the name ‘Icarus’, from the Greek myth about the man who flew too close to the sun in his hubris at catching up with God, so that his wings melted – something which surely must be the single least suitable name for a spaceship heading towards the sun ever named. Why that’s like naming a starship ‘Titanic’ or something! Oops…Why does nobody in the following few centuries seem to remember the myths and legends that have survived millennias intact to our time? ) The question really is whether mindless exercises in running around is what Dr Who is for. This is a series format with such elasticity that having an episode that seems like every other action series around, without the imagination of 99% of other scripts, feels like a bit of a waste. There’s nothing to ponder or ruminate on here, no hidden message to think about, nothing to change how you view the world (despite a last minute twist that – spoilers – this particular sun is ‘alive’, a twist so mind-bogglingly out of keeping with everything we know about the rest of the series and science in general we’d really rather not have had it). The result is one of Who’s least imaginative and most brainless stories – although the good news is that at least it’s a well made bit of brainless television, big on drama, danger, spectacle and (by Dr Who standards) budget. 

 The most interesting thing about this story is the title. Chibnall took Russell’s offhand comment about having a countdown to disaster and ran with it, figuring that it could be the Dr Who equivalent of the series ‘24’, a big hit at the time with the hook that it was a series that unfolded more or less in real time, across twenty fours of a single day (but broadcast an hour at a time). The Dr Who version though, had to be shorter and in much more of a hurry to tell the story: ‘42’, the same number backwards, by chance happens to be the number of minutes is the usual length of an episode if you discount the opening and closing credits. On another level its set in the 42nd century, a time we’d visited in the series a few times before. It’s also a sneaky clever reference to one-time Who script editor Douglas Adams and ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ where ‘42’ is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything (ironic, really, that this is one of the few Who stories that isn’t about those things and indeed is one of the least Adamsy of all modern Who stories, with the sort of plot Douglas would have parodied: indeed there is a sequence at the end of the first book in the trilogy of five-and-a-half books just like this one, where the stolen spaceship the Heart of Gold is on a crash course for the sun, something solved by the use of an improbability drive that causes it to shift out of time and space and then when it’s about to be attacked by a series of missiles the same drive turns them into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias. No, seriously: if Douglas had written it thirty years later everyone would have assumed he was laughing at the Davies era’s unlikely sudden plot resolutions coming out of nowhere). Just to ram the point a home this story even recycles a lot of the sound effects used in both radio and television versions: mostly doors shutting. That real time sense is cleverly done adding a real breathless urgency to everything in this story, a ticking timebomb about to go off and even though they chicken out of having the timer up on screen the way they do in ‘24’ (partly because they have to fudge it: technically this story has 39 minutes of plot while the timer runs and the updates in the dialogue don’t always match the actual time left since the button was pressed, because of cuts in editing as much as anything else, but that’s a less interesting number anyway) you do get enough of a sense of the time pressure for that to work. This remains probably the only Who story definitively told in ‘real time’, which is a clever and neat trick, an original gimmick that does something the series had never done before while also making this episode feel very contemporary (‘24’ caused quite a rush of dramas doing things like this though it was by far the best: ‘Homeland’ ‘Reacher’ ‘Prison Break’ ‘Archer’…Heck it’s a surprise we didn’t get a spinoff about the Elton and Ursula tracking down The Abzorbaloff in real time). 

 Mostly, though, it feels like lots of different Dr Who stories stuck together. Say what you will about Chibnall but he knew his Dr Who perhaps better than either Davies or Moffat: certainly he’d been more involved with the fandom than either of his colleagues and written more about Who (as opposed to stories set in the Whoniverse) than either of them and his first chance (for all he knew his only chance) to write for his favourite series is full of allusions and repeats of earlier episodes. Some would call this a sweet gesture to fans, others cheap recycling, but whatever it is there’s a lot of it and it makes a lot more sense here than when Chibnall tries it later: at the time the thrill of seeing things from the old series carried to the new ones was still new. Russell had gone out of his way to make series one a fresh start for newcomers and only admitted for definite this even was a continuation not a re-write of the old series come the second year. So there’s a lot: The name of the ship, The SS Pentallian, a last minute replacement for the SS Icarus, is named after the drive that played such a crucial role in the plot of ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ (presumably both are named after a scientist in our future who plays a big role in space-travel). The spacewalk (which went on much longer in the original script before being cut for budget reasons) is straight out of ‘Four To Doomsday though, mercifully, without the cricket ball (as is the countdown to destruction, though characteristically the older story is at a much more leisurely pace with four days till impact when we first join). The idea of an entity that’s a sentient power source infecting people is just like the helix from ‘The Masque Of Mandragora’. The slow possession of a person just alive enough to be horrified of it is straight out of the ‘Inferno/Ark In Space’ invasions book, while the plot hotting up over the course of the story is a dead steal from that first story too. This bunch of petty law-breaking criminals are directly from ‘The Space Pirates’, another story about the lawlessness of space because its too wide for any one police force to patrol, while the idea of a ship that doesn’t quite work properly is featured in that story and ots of others from season six (notably ‘The Seeds Of Death’); while other series are utopian about technology on the future starting with Star Trek Dr Who has always taken the British assumption that it’s all going to be a bit rubbish still, just like it is now. The idea of the plot being solved by a character jumping out of an airlock clutching the baddy is exactly what happens to semi-companion Katarina in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’. More recently this very orangey story set in space is very like ‘Satan’s Pit/The Impossible Astronaut’, with David Tennant donning his distinctively coloured spacesuit again and stuck in the 42nd century, while Martha’s sudden horror at the thought nobody back home would know what had ever happened to her is exactly like Rose’s realisation in that story (and notably not a worry any other companion has ever had before or since). For a time the similarities were such that this was a full-blown sequel to the later story complete with Ood in the holding bays because Russell thought it might have been better with an actual monster in there somewhere. Martha herself might have recognised the scanner at the start of the story: it was the one she used on the moon in ‘Smith and Jones’. ‘The End Of the World’ too sees a sun burning up a world, even if in that case it’s our sun and planet Earth. Maybe this sense of familiarity is why the story was given to Graeme Harper to direct, the only one from the old series to be asked back for the new series (he’d been a youngster whose first job was in the McCoy era). The thing is though, those references back to the past are a double-edges sword: while thrilling for fans who pick up on this stuff and allowing this series to feel as if its taking place in the same universe, you have to have something new to say besides the parts recycled from past stories, some reasons for all these plot elements to be here in a different configuration to how they were used before. That’s where this story falls down: there’s nothing ‘42’ does any better than these stories except for the graphics and the only parts it does that are ‘new’ it botches up completely. 

 For instance that plot, which is one of the most unfeasible in the history of the series, with so many holes you begin to wonder if Chibnall wrote it while suffering from heatstroke. The plot revolves around a spaceship crashing into a sun, but the sun isn’t a static object like a planet or a meteorite: it’s a whacking great big thing that comes in layers. Even in the future, with huge advances in technology, there’s no way a vessel would crash into the sun rather than simply burn up on the edge. This crew really have tobe thick not to have realised they’re on a ‘crash-course’ before this: I mean the sun’s quite big and hard to miss out the windows and there really isn’t any sign of panic until the story starts (even the text prequel has people realising they’re in danger a mere few minutes before we start). Even if their whole plan is to scoop the sun’s corona to use as fuel, so they need to be close, if my life was on the line you can better believe I’d be keeping a better eye on the controls of where exactly the ship was before this. Typical reckless sun-ray drivers! The whole idea of (spoilers) using the sun as fuel is an odd one too. Yes we have solar panels on earth to heat homes, to convert that light into different uses like heat and energy, but to have a machine hanging in space convert it into the necessary fuel needed to run seems impossible even for the future; surely the sheer amount of power the ship would need to defy the sun’s gravity would overpower any fuel it would actually gather; you’d always be on the losing end that way. It’s like driving from your house to a petrol pump with a leaky fuel tank that loses petrol every time you move and expecting to get home in one piece again, when you’d have been better off staying in one place. This lot take petty rule-breaking to a new level too: fusion energy scoops are banned outright, apparently to stop things like this happening, and yet while the people on board the Pentallion know all about the rule they’re breaking they don’t seem to know what it was there for. That’s like people ignoring the smoking ban and lighting up cigarettes without having stopped to think what the ban is there for, that cigarette smoke is harmful to health of you and the people around you. At the very least you’d think the Doctor would know about iut given that he usually knows everything, but this law seems to have passed him by: he’s as genuinely clueless as everyone else what’s causing all the problems, working it out after even most of the audience are screaming ‘it’s the Sun wot dunnit!’ That’s without the sheer weirdness of having a sun, a point of light and heat in space, be ‘sentient’. If that were even vaguely true it would change how we think about the universe forever, but we know it isn’t from the suns nearby to us and why would suns far away work to a different evolutionary structure (plus how would they possibly fuel a brain in a ‘body’ that big?) Riley says that you can’t afford to get close to people and have family in a job like this one, even though his two bosses are flipping married to each other! Even on a smaller level the Doctor screams himself hoarse in the empty vacuum of space shouting ‘I’ll save you!’ to Martha over and over. Why doesn’t he just phone her? This wouldn’t be so much of a problem had this story not featured two whacking great lengthy scenes about the Doctor souping up Martha’s phone and her calling her mum. And even if the Doctor’s somehow forgotten to take his own phone with him we’ve seen him use his sonic screwdriver to call Rose in the past. Maybe the sun spots are interfering with the signal, but in that case – how come Martha can hear her mum from another century with no problems at all? If you have any answers please phone in… 

 It’s just…odd this story. Part of that is probably down to the revisions made at more or less the last minute, which changes the structure of the story while leaving a lot of the same plot beats. Originally this wasn’t’ s rogue spaceships sticking their straws into Capri-sun drinks in space but a research station wondering why this one particular sun was different, with whole generations of scientists living and dying on board without working out why. Russell changed this partly to get away from having another space station but also because he thought the scientists would have to be pretty thick not to have worked out what was really going on; at least in this story these are opportunists more than they’re scientists, after fuel not knowledge, but even then they’re unbearably thick not to have worked this out before now. Really the humans being greedy for ‘promethean fire’ and the sun turning nasty when its already given them so much and the sun taking people over to have people yell at the people concerned is a very clunky way of giving the age-old Dr Who morale of co-existing with nature. It’s very heavy-handed and obvious as a metaphor for what humanity is doing to our planet and even that’s not given enough time to sink in: the Doctor looks horrified and yells at everyone when possessed for being stupid but he doesn’t tick people off when the story’s all over, nor does he tell the survivors to go home and tell their story so that nobody is ever stupid enough to risk a plan like this ever again. The ending is rushed all round: everyone goes home, even though they’re still pretty darn near to a sun belching fire that can kill everyone, still seconds away from danger in a ship that might be dragged back any second (the Doctor seems to put an awful lot of trust in a sentient star that’s still kinda red hot with anger). 

As the first Dr Who script Chris Chibnall wrote it’s interesting to note just how much and yet how little it has in common with his era to come (in the same way that ‘The Empty Child’ sort of dictates the Steven Moffat era, but not really). That whacking great moral message that feels like a lecture, even to those of us who agree with what its saying, is the most obvious giveaway (and yes there are plenty of moral messages in Russell’s stories too but he likes giving hope and solutions with the message for why humanity’s bigger and better than this, while Chibnall’s stories end with making us feel small). The most common accusation with the 13th Doctor stories is that they’re all quite talky with nothing very much happening. That’s certainly not the case here: ‘42’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t have much time to breathe and given that the jeopardy is all there from the start we don’t have time for these characters to actually talk to one another (they shout instructions at each other for the most part). Most Chibnall stories are very much Earth-bound in different eras, so having him write about space is quite something and he’s actually good at it, or at any rate that feeling of isolation and emptiness, that there is no one out there to come to the SS Pentallion’s rescue, that these people are far from home with no chance to escape. It is, in that regard, the most ‘Troughton base under siege’ of the Davies episodes, something that as a rule Chibnall steers well clear from during his time in the boss’ chair. There is a brief interlude that feels a bit Jodie Whittakery and in many ways it’s the best bit, when Martha is in an escape pod and separated from the Doctor, when we go from the sheer chaos of the shuttle itself, all bleeping sirens and panic mode, to see the stillness and silence from her point of view. The way the plot stops so Martha can go through domestic issues, calling up her mum to sort-of say goodbye for what seems like hours, is also very Chibnall, an emotional moment that doesn’t feel earned (honestly Martha’s mum is such a nasty piece of work she makes Jackie Tyler and Sylvia Noble look like saints; why doesn’t she call up her brother and sister? She’s way closer to them). Some of the actors too: Chibnall remembered Vinette Robinson’s blink-and-you-miss it part as Abi here and casts her as 'Rosa' Parks the minute he becomes showrunner. His is also the start of a long tradition of Chibnall naming characters after people he knew: Riley was his Godson. 

 Mostly though this feels like a Chibnall script in that not a lot actually happens and there are no great little character moments that makes us care for the people that nothing is happening to: this is as faceless and generic a bunch of supporting characters as we ever have in the Davies era. The heart-tugging we’re meant to feel every time one of them snuffs it feels unearned too: there’s some belated angst as McConnell listens to her converted husband Korwin blaming her for everything that happened to him, but unless you were paying close attention at the start you don’t even know they are husband and wife – they never share romantic glances, or care about the other beyond saving the whole ship, there are no shared memories of better times or hopes for families back home, nothing. As for the rest of the crew they don’t even get that much: you learn far more about these characters from a few lines of text on the BBC website than you do watching the actual episode. And while the suspense in this story is well done and the threat very real and the ticking clock makes a big difference in how caught up you get in the story ultimately you only really care for the Doctor and Martha. The intrusion of the overall series arc, setting up the finale five whole episodes early with someone working for Mr Saxon having captured Martha’s mum, also comes out of nowhere and really doesn’t fit this story at all: it’s confusing, more like the impenetrable Moffat series arcs to come and just yanks you out of the story. This is quite an interesting story in their relationship. The BBC admitted to Russell late in the day that they were resting Dr Who for a week to make way for the Eurovision Song Contest which lead to a change in the scheduling and a re-think. Realising that ’42 was the best episode for a soft re-launch of the show, picking up action after a gap, Russell decided to make this the show where Martha is a full-time companion not a ‘guest’. The story starts with her getting a copy of the Tardis key and the Doctor souping up her mobile so she can call home: a big deal at the time, as the first person to get them after Rose (in the olden days only Romana and occasionally Susan ever had their own keys and they were timelords themselves). The Doctor trusting Martha is a big moment, even if by rights she’s saved his scrawny hide moiré times than Rose ever did. Chibnall struggles to write for both these characters though: to date he’s only ever nailed the 11th Doctor-Amy-Rory dynamic and on paper the 10th Doctor and Martha just talk the same way that the 13th and various companions do to each other. They don’t share much chemistry or any real bond, there’s no sense of trust that the other is always going to get them out of trouble, no sense of responsibility on the Doctor’s side for putting Martha in harm’s way again. equally, while there’s a single scene where Martha tries to be a Doctor, she’s notably a lot less calm in this crisis than she was when we first met her in ‘Smith and Jones’. Thankfully though the difference is David Tennant and Freema Agyeman who make even this story’s poor and bitty dialogue become at least half-sentient. He’s excellent in a very un-Chibnall/Jodie part, rushing around at the heart of the action and ending up being possessed by the second half, with burning red eyes and the burning anger issues that go with it. There’s a measure of thought within fandom that maybe Jodie Whittaker might have been brilliant with a different showrunner: she might well have been (I’d love to see Russell write for her) but this story is proof that Tennant can raise his game even with rubbish dialogue (and it is awful: ‘Burn With me’ is the silliest catchphrase yet and makes even ‘Eldrad Must Live!’ ‘The Quest Is The Quest’ and ‘There’s No Such Thing As Macra’ sound good). Freema’s part is more subtle: she’s literally cut off from everyone for most of the plot but she’s the quiet heartbeat of the series, our link to normality and she spins a human face on the events unfolding, thinking about the people who’ll never know if she was missing and sharing a sort of war-time liaison with Ashton. It’s a very World war two story all round in fact, the Doctor shouting early on ‘where’s that Dunkirk spirit?’ and having people pushed to their extremes finding out that they’re tougher than they think they are. Had Chibnall played that aspect up at a fraction of the big set piece danger scenes then ‘42’ might have been more memorable all round. 

 Instead the things that linger in the mind from this story aren’t the plot or the dialogue but the whole look of the story. The lighting gradually gets more and more orangey-red the closer we get to the sun (no practical reason for it, except that the set designer told everyone to ‘think of red fire engines’, but it works aesthetically: it’s dripped into our subconscious that red means danger) and the cast are covered with more 'fake sweat' (actually water) scene by scene until the climax is almost painful to watch. Baby oil was plastered in people’s hair too, making them look all greasy: poor Freema was found to be deeply allergic, coming out in big red rashes, so blusher was used on her face instead. You wouldn’t know it from what ended up on screen but the location shooting was actually bitterly cold and they had to work hard to take the shots of everyone’s breath misting up in post-production; you especially have to pity poor Michelle Collins (at the time one of the biggest guest stars names in the comeback series after her lengthy stint as Cindy Beale on ‘Eastenders’, the highest profile regular cast member of still the only official series to cross over with Dr Who – sadly she wasn’t in ‘Dimensions In Time’ in 1993): she’d just come from holiday in Bali and here she ws across January-February in Wales (she got sick straight after shooting something her Doctor said was probably caused by the extreme difference in temperatures). An old saw mill (St Regis paper Company to be exact, in Sudbrook, Caldicot) might not seem the most obvious place to film the inside of a futuristic spaceship but it ‘works’: the stainless steel base (shot on the ground, underneath where the rollers were, which must have made camera angles a nightmare) really has the feel of the sort of clinical design we might have in the future and the props department works overtime bringing n control panels and the like. Best of all, unlike some Who stories of years past, it looks lived in, battered and bonked as if people have been rubbing shoulders out here for years before we join the action. All the more impressive, too, given that the production of this story was as rushed as the writing, sent into production before it was quite ready after delays on another project meant that Derek Jacobi wasn’t quite ready to film ‘Utopia’ and that story had to be switched around in production order with this one. Unlike the writing, though you can’t tell: if ‘42’ has a selling point it’s that space looks better and more believable in this story than maybe any other Dr Who story (‘The Ark In Space’ maybe, but even that’s a step below this one even adjusting for period technology; ‘The End Of The World’ too looks gorgeous on screen but that’s just the bit of space around earth: this is ‘space’ space). 

 The result is, sadly, still a bit of a mess all round, a story that is a little too obviously rushed in writing and equally rushed in production, leaving you with an impressive adrenalin rush and a sense of urgency but not in need of a rewrite (or three). The real trouble though is that everyone’s rushing around madly to stop a countdown at all times. That’s it, for 42 minutes. There are no subplots, no scenes getting to know this world we’re on properly to see these characters before they’re under pressure. There’s no metaphor here, no allegory like the best of Who, no sub-plot where the companion gets to find out what we’re saving while the Doctor actually saves it. A lot of stories in series 3 tend to be slower, to be talkier than those in series 1 and 2, but this one goes the other way and is all action. Good as it is when its on, you don’t take anything away from it afterward: there’ nothing to remember, no dialogue to stick in the mind, no conundrums to ponder (unless you’re seriously counting al the hardold saxon references before the big finale). It’s not that these 42 minutes are bad – certainly they’re eminently watchable and with the sound turned down it’s very atmospheric. With the sound on, though, you can hear how daft the plot is, how empty the characters feel and are reminded of many times we’ve heard bits of it before in better stories. This story is 42 minutes of your life you’ll never get back again and to some extent they’re wasted on a story that teaches you nothing and has no impact on how you feel about the universe, while it doesn’t add anything much to the two characters we’ve been following and caring for either. There are most definitely more misguided Who stories out there, ones that get far more wrong than this and one thing in its favour is that ’42 is never ever boring, perhaps the biggest crime a Dr Who story can commit (other than stories that cast Kylie Minogue or starts taking pot shots at pacifists anyway). Somehow though, despite the endless action and the shouting and the ever ticking clock, it still ends up being a kind of boring: you know exactly how this story is going to turn out and while everyone is madly running around at high speed in a spaceship hurtling towards the sun somehow it’s never exactly moving. Hot stuff it might think it is but most of ‘42’ leaves me cold. If anything this story seems better to us now we know it was a one-off that the series never tried again and any scenes with tenant at the peak of his powers is welcome. At the time however, at the end of a run of three out of four or five of the weakest stories of the comeback so far, it seemed as if Who was on a collision course with disaster, all its good ideas used up. Thankfully a classic is just over the horizon, so impact is again averted. For now… 

 POSITIVES + A spaceship in space heading towards a whacking big sun. Sounds simple doesn’t it, but it’s so hard to pull off – as, indeed Hollywood blockbuster ‘Sunshine’ discovered. But how do you make a light source be present in the story without shining in everyone’s faces so much you can’t see what’s going on? The answer is you do it with lighting, giving everything a glow without being so bright it hurts your eyes. Sometimes it goes a bit awry (there’s no way anyone that close to the sun would go space-walking without a visor: they’ve done that so we can see David Tennant’s sparkly eyes but scientifically it’s a no go) mostly though the lighting is, you could say, the shining light of the entire production. Practically all the atmosphere in this story comes from that decision to have the sunlight as a presence growing (and indeed glowing) throughout the story without making it blindingly obvious, as it were. 42 stars to the lighting team right there. 

 NEGATIVES - Alright, get comfy because I have a real bee in my bonnet about one aspect of the story. Apparently they don’t have passwords in the 42nd century (did people keep on forgetting them? Did Cyber-Putin hack into everyone’s accounts? Did the Cryons get into encryption? We just don’t know) so every important decision that can risk life and death is hidden behind…trivia questions. Eh?! If people can hack into passwords they can certainly look up information that’s freely available to everyone (and I’ll bite that the internet maybe doesn’t exist as a resource in this era, which might be why out of the whole ship only Martha thinks about phoning her mum up for help, though why she phones her mother of all people, someone not exactly good at listening or being helpful at the best of times, is yet another mystery). It’s daft, too, because the trivia questions are by their very nature unanswerable for definite, ever-changing goalposts that keep moving. The first answer involves quoting happy prime numbers: fair enough you’d think as they’re a never changing source. But our greatest computers have never yet been able to calculate every happy prime number definitively: there are just too many calculations to make. That’s one of the reasons behind Douglas Adams’ punchline of ‘42’, the belief that if computers can run long enough we’ll get a pattern of numbers that can solve the answers of how the world works. There would be no way for the people programming this spaceship to include every right number. Then there’s the music trivia question: who had more number ones, Elvis or The Beatles? It’s the sort of thing that might sound like an obvious case of counting up singles from a list…but it really isn’t. Even I, as a Beatle fan whose written four whole books on the band and their solo records, can’t answer this question with any conviction because the answer is so debatable, never mind the fact that the computer systems would need to be re-written every time a posthumous single gets released for either. The history of the record chart is far more convoluted and questionable than non-music fans might think. For a start the question doesn’t pinpoint which country and there still has yet to be such a thing as a global chart. Elvis is American, but the Beatles are British, so that rules out being the ‘home countries’ chart and there are wildly different statistics for both (feel-good Beatley song ‘Eight Days A Week’, for example, was never even a single in Britain while America only joined in with ‘I want To Hold Your Hand’, with later re-issues of ‘Please Please me’ She Loves You’ and ‘From Me To You’ all charting lower in the charts precisely because ‘Hand’ was still at #1 at the time. There was a week, in February 1964, when the Beatles had all five of the highest charting records in a single chart and on three different record labels too). The answer changes, too, depending which chart you use: until 1958 there wasn’t one ‘official’ chart in either country(which cuts out some of Elvis’ biggest hits) and in Britain there were four potential ‘official’ charts tight the way up until 1968 9whn both acts had already had nearly all their hits), each one compiled in a different way (physical sales, record orders, word of mouth spot checks, stock takes in record shops) all of which had a slightly different answer: the ‘Record Retailer’ chart, for instance, which is the one the Guinness Book Of Hit Singles used as their guide reckons that ‘Please Please me’ was a #2 hit, but the NME chart which tended to be the most respected at the time says it was a #1). That’s without including the fact that the goalposts keep changing: The Doctor panics as to whether the remix version of Elvis’ ‘A Little Less Conversation’ counts as a #1, while we know that since this episode went on air The Beatles have scored another #1 with the execrable ‘Then and Now’ the ‘final Beatles song’ which is neither final (Paul, George and Ringo recorded the far superior and still unreleased ‘Grow Old Along With Me’ later the same day) Beatles (it’s a Lennon demo that Harrison did record a part for in the 1990s, which McCartney replaced in 2023) nor much of a song (Paul didn’t like John’s middle eight and cut it out, leaving the song lopsided and empty). Oh and what do we do with double ‘A’ sides? Does ‘We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper’ and ‘Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby’ (were there ever two more different songs on one slab of vinyl?!) count as two hits or four? The production team try to cover all of this with a general throwaway line about ‘pre-downloads’ but think about it: this is the 42nd century, downloads is probably an archaic term everyone lumps in with record buying anyway by now and who in their right mind is giving a trivia question of such high importance with a debatable cut-off point nobody can quite agree on sometimes from a century 2200 years ago? It’s madness. Plus that’s, of course, if we’re even using an Earth chart: for all we know The Korvanista took Elvis to their hearts after hearing ‘Hound Dog’ so made all his singles get retrospectively to #1 on their chart or maybe The Garm fiddled with the timelines so a re-recorded ‘Let Me Be Your Teddy Garm’ spent an entire century at #`1 in the e-space charts, or maybe Alpha Centauri had such a good time bopping to ‘twist and Shout’ they bought up a cartload of records to spread across the Intergalactic Federation? The 'correct' answer, as far as I can tell, is indeed Elvis but it’s questionable, certainly to questionable for a security question on which life and death rely…and by the time I'd debated all that to myself I would have been burnt to a crisp. 

 Also, the Doctor takes time out from running for his life to make a pun about ‘here Comes The Sun’ but fails to mention the even more ironic ‘Good Day Sunshine’ or the words to ‘rain’ (sunshine is just a state of mind) or mention the open-goal that Elvis was once on ‘Sun’ records. Oh and of all the things in this story that seem impossible the biggest is that someone from the 42nd century won’t know how to pronounce the name ‘Beatles’. They’re going to be famous and live forever, you see if they don’t. 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘That sun's alive. A living organism. They scooped out its heart. Used it for fuel and now it's screaming!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Uniquely in the Russell T Davies era ‘42’ gets a text-based prequel rather than a website or red button telly one, published on the BBC website in the week between ‘Lazarus’ and ’42’. It features events from minor character Erinna Lassek’s point of view (she’s the one who only gets a single scene, sarcastically muttering ‘kill me now’ before a mutated Korwin attacks her). This story gives a bit more insight into events before the SS Pentallian’s distress call with Erinna the new recruit whose only been on the ship a few days before, the hint being that she takes her job because she secretly has the hots (pun intended) for Riley, the one that Martha gets to snog instead (presumably Riley never finds out but this would make things worse if he did: he spends half the episode moping he never got to find anyone who was interested in him and she was under his nose all along). Erinna’s a little rich girl desperate to show that she’s as hard working as anyone else but is beginning to regret it as she gets all the rotten jobs, which fills in a lot more character of the moment where she dies, resenting becoming the station’s cleaner. Really, though nobody says it, she’s the heroine of the hour: if she hadn’t noticed the ship was too close to the sun and forced the others into sending a distress signal (against their will) nobody would have got out of this alive. Events quickly overwhelm her when the clock starts ticking down, from 45 minutes and 48 seconds, the Doctor and Martha turning up three minutes later. The short piece doesn’t really give much away and is more of an introduction to the characters as much as anything, but the piece has just enough flavour of the finished episode to make you want to watch (with the classic conclusion ‘to be continued…on TV!’) Written by Joseph Lidster, who did a lot of the Dr Who website text back then, rather than Chris Chibnell who wrote the episode it’s something of a desperate last minute plan to give Whovians something to tide them over when the show was delayed a week by the Eurovision Song Contest (in case you’re wondering it’s the year Serbia won with ‘Moltiva’, with the lady who looked like a middle-aged Harry Potter and sang like one too, though she was certainly far less daft than the UK entry that year, Scooch’s tongue-in-cheek ‘Flying The Flag’, a song so bad it made crashing into the sun in a supernova like something to look forward to rather than avoid). 

 Previous ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ next ‘Human Nature/The Family Of Blood’

Resolution: Rank - 282

 Resolution

(Although fans always call it 'Resolution Of The Daleks'!, New Year's Day Special, Dr 13 with Graham Ryan and Yaz, 1/1/2019, showrunner:  Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Wayne Yip)

Rank: 282

In which something nasty is discovered buried under a town centre. And no, it's not Richard III (who was actually one of our nicer Kings but who had a really really bad p.r. manager)...

  Chris Chibnall didn't want the pressure of writing a Christmas special so, for the first time, we got a New Year's Day special instead. Now, unlike Xmas, New Year's is only special due to an accident of time, habit and quite possibly alcohol. Fittingly, then, this special is only really 'special' due to a combination of time slot, habit and quite possibly alcohol. Or so I've heard from fans who reckon this episode is better drunk. Notably it's slower than usual, less whizz-bang-whallop like most festive specials and more like a hangover than a pub crawl - which is odd but does at least mean the plot is easier to follow. The plot is based around archaeology, something which isn't often used in DW even though its the closest us mortals can ever really get to time travel and uses it well, so a big tick for that. Also, we've never really spent time with the Daleks outside their famous exterior shells and this episode makes strong use of just how creepy a mutated blob is when its trying to possess you, so big tick there too. The problems come with the cast: there's a dumb soap opera sub-plot about Ryan's dad suddenly turning up despite not being at Grace's funeral and having never even been mentioned before (when did they even have time to give Grace a funeral? They've been whizzing through time and space all series!) As if that wasn't sickening enough the main sub-cast are having a romance of their own, over the incredibly romantic setting of an ancient dig, although at least this romance feels plausible which is one up from a lot we've had this year. This does happen a lot lately though doesn't it? Romantic subplots are to 2010s Who what splitting up and getting lost was to the 1960s, possession and mind control were to the 1970s and ventilation shafts were to the 1980s. The result is the weakest Dalek story, a convoluted watch that just isn't special enough for New Year's Day and yet one that I still prefer to most of the rest of the Chibnall era, with nothing that goes terribly wrong either.

Positives + Against all the odds, after some seriously limp monsters in season 11, Chibnall turns out to be one of the better writers specifically for the Daleks. Here he makes them properly scary and dangerous again, capturing their sheer desperation and Brexity need to be pure at all costs no matter who it hurts - even when its them.

Negatives - Oh look, we're back in Sheffield again, that's convenient. Why are the Daleks suddenly interested in where the Dr crashed into and found her companions, even though they don't know that. Bit convenient isn't it? Anyone would think it was just so random relatives of Ryan could suddenly start showing up and keep him and Graham occupied!

Time and The Rani: Rank - 283

 Time and The Rani

(Series 24 (20th Century), Dr 7 with Mel, 7-28/9/1987, producer:  John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writers: Pip and Jane Baker, director: Andrew Morgan)

Rank: 283

In which the Dr bumps his head on the Tardis console and has a bad dream before playing the spoons, while an old Galiffreyan rival steals the intelligence of leading scientists and dresses up as his companion... 

While we're on the subject of dodgy debuts...It seems strange to think that this episode was the baseline for everything that could go wrong with DW back when I started being a fan and yet here we are nearly at the end of January before reaching it. Anyway, anyone whose ever seen it will know why this universally hated story is near the bottom of the list: That script! (particularly the dialogue). The incomprehensible plot! Those lurid colours! The acting! Kate O'Mara impersonating Bonnie Langford! (that one alone might just be the most misguided in all of 20th century Who). And then there's poor Sylvester McCoy, dropped in at the deep end on a production team in disarray and a TV executive who was trying hard to axe the show completely and made to regenerate wearing Colin Baker's and a terrible wig because, understandably, the actor they'd just axed didn't want to come back for just one scene/story. Never mind having to speak lines written before anyone had the first clue what the new Dr might be like, never mind who was cast in the role. This is one of those stories where it was always going to go wrong because nobody felt fully in charge: not the actor just hired, the new script editor who arrived after it was commissioned nor the producer who thought he'd left the show only to be brought back at the last moment. It's the sort of story where nothing goes right and everything goes slightly wrong, the one that more than any other fans watch to make fun of and then hide from the general public in shame. For all that, though, there's nothing quite so ridiculously wrong with it as many of the lower ones on the list. It actually makes more sense than either of Pip 'n' Jane Baker's previous scripts and Kate O'Mara tries hard to make things work as the baddy. There are parts I actually like a lot. For 1987 Lakertya really does look like an alien planet with its computer bubble traps are some of the best of the 1980s. There's a fair bit of promise here that a more confident production team would have ironed out - but of course nobody was confident in DW anymore in 1987 after a suspension year and a sacking and the future of the show still in doubt. In other words if there's a reason this story doesn't work its the fault of Michael Grade, who still has the audacity to show this story as a reason why it should have been 'rested'.

Positives + McCoy is far from his best here, playing a wildly comic ditzy version of his stage persona as a circus performer as everyone tries hard to stop him being like Colin baker without actually knowing what to make him like. You can see why so many fans hated him on the spot after the first episode when he's extremely irritating, misquoting axims and playing the spoons. But Sylv, an improvisational comic whose TV experience had mostly been on children's Tv before this, learns on the spot how to shrug off all the people giving him notes and learn and grow into the role. by episode 4 he's nailed the darker, moodier Dr we'll come to know more. In the context of what was going on behind the scenes the wonder isn't that he messed up episodes 1-3 but that he got there in the end.

Negatives - It's a longstanding complaint that people in Drip 'n' pain Baker's scripts don't talk the way people do. Any people. This really shows in this story's big emotional scenes where people are trapped or scared or - God help us - impersonated by a renegade timelord in a girly squeaky voice. There should be a lot of moving stuff in this plot but it ends up just being pantomime.

The Woman Who Fell To Earth: Rank - 284

 The Woman Who Fell To Earth

(Season 11, Dr 13 with Graham, Ryan and Yaz,  7/10/2018, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Jamie Childs)

Rank: 284

It's the debut of Jodie Whittaker's Dr and Chris Chibnall's time as showrunner, not to mention 4 varying companions (one of which they kill off here) on a story not really much like the era to come that might more accurately be titled 'Space Oddity'... 

Re-watching this one after the end of the Jodie Whittaker run is a very different experience to watching it at the time, now that we can see which bits were quirks of this particular episode and which were of the series as a whole. At the time I might have put this one right at the bottom rung of the ladder, given that it lacks the 'special' feel of all the other DW debuts - a lowkey start to a new era with a bonkers but pathetic new enemy, no links to the past beyond the name (not even the Tardis) and post regenerative trauma that makes the Dr quite unwatchably bonkers for long periods. Most of all though the chance to see the universe through a whole new showrunner's eyes is reduced to wandering around the uglier parts of Sheffield in the dark. Watching it again though lets you enjoy the things that the rest of the Chibnall era didn't really do. Keeping so much of it to the 4 regulars (plus Grace) gives them all more character than they'll ever have again, in time we'll get so bored of old monsters returning Tzim-Sha doesn't seem so bad and it'll end up being quite rare staying in the present day for quite so long as this. Oh and that post regenerative trauma? Actually it's gone within a few minutes and this regeneration of the Dr is really going to be like that for 30 whole episodes. Still, you can't win them all. Thankfully the preaching here is kept to a minimum and even the speech about gender equality we feared might come after the Dr changed gender was handled nicely with 'why are you calling me madam? Wait I'm a woman? Really? Busy day!' one of a few great lines this episode. Like the era that follows its a bump watch, with a big finale set on a crane particularly something of an anticlimax following 'Rose' and 'The 11th Hour' et al. At times though it does take off and that fall to Earth is in style.

Positives + Grace is great. She's sassy, naughty, rebellious and has all the best lines. I'd have been more than happy to see her as a regular, particularly compared to the three drips we got. So of course she's the one who has to snuff it before the end credits. One of many confusing writing decisions that sum up the era.

Negatives- Ryan, for instance, is very poorly handled. As a dyspraxic I can't tell you how much the scenes of him trying and failing to ride a bike made me wince. Even undiagnosed I knew at 8 that riding bikes just wasn't going to be a thing for me. Ryan is 19 and knows why he can't ride one. Presumably the scenes of him trying and failing over and over again are meant to make him seem determined and for it to seem endearing. But it doesn't. So he can't ride a bike? No problem - he's 19, everyone's out in cars by then anyway. Had they made his dyspraxia make him fail his test I would have believed it more. The 'struggling to climb stairs' scene also hints that Ryan can overcome his co-ordination problems if he really tries hard enough. Trust me, you can't. Dyspraxia is a fault of the brain where the synapses don't line up properly. All the wishful thinking in the world ain't going to put that right. What's worse is that future episodes will have Ryan doing the most ridiculously accurate co-ordinated things with no mention of his dyspraxia. We don't get much representation on TV; it matters when they get it this wrong. What makes it worse is that Chris Chibnall says he got the idea after knowing a relative with the condition - yet he clearly didn't understand it at all. They had all the right intentions and could have done so much good and they blew it! Ultimately its that aspect of this episode that's going to sum up the era more than anything else.

The TV Movie: Rank - 285

      The TV Movie

(Special, Dr 8 with Grace,  27/5/1996 (UK premiere, a fortnight after the USA and Canadian premiere), producer/showrunners: Phillip David Segal, Alex Beaton, Jo Wright, Peter V Ware and Anthony Jacobs, writer: Matthew Jacobs, director: Geoffrey Sax)

Rank: 285

It's time to drezzzz for the occcashun as the TV movie aka that weird American McGann thing is here!...

He was finally back! After a 7 year absence! And - to quote the best thing about it, the promotional tagline - it was about time! Oh and it was American too, the only time DW has ever been made outside the UK (though like many things American it was actually filmed in Canada where it's cheaper, for some reason). The build up to this was colossal and so was the budget, at least in relative terms to the BBC. Things seemed so promising too: a long list of high profile names were auditioned and the process seemed to go on for so long it felt as if time had stood still (I long for a parallel universe where I can watch Tony Slattery, John Sessions or Michael Palin. Though frankly I'm grateful it wasn't Rowan Atkinson or Michael Crawford). In the end it went to Paul McGann, who looked bemused the whole way through (then again, so would I if I was made to wear his wig). The result was...odd. It all felt small somehow, inconsequential, despite all the fuss and big effects. So many decisions were just wrong. The casting for a start: McGann is a really good Dr now he's had time to adapt the part to his strengths as a more battle-scarred emotional quirky Dr, but as a kissable Edwardian Brit standing on a box to make himself look taller and not much to go on in the script he's totally lost. A lot of fans like Julia Roberts' brother Eric as the latest Master but for me he's worse a strange mixture of an ice-cold presence who still hams up every word he speaks. As for Grace it's great to have another Dr in the Tardis but seeing as her character traits seem to consist of being haughty, loving opera and random kissing she's not exactly a great character either. As for the plot it's another one that re-writes all of DW history. The idea of the Dr being half-human 'on his mother's side' is rightly mocked by fans, but the idea of the eye of harmony powering the Tardis is actually a pretty neat idea (if too easy a solution at the end). In other words it's a near unmitigated disaster that, as such a high profile episode, killed the franchise off for another 9 years. Fans speak of it in hushed tones nowadays, if at all (it doesn't even have a name we all agree on. 'That weird McGann thing' is how most fans know it; 'Grace:1999' my favourite nickname). For all that, though, there's...something there. Writer Matthew Jacobs is clearly a fan (his dad was in 'The Gunfighters' episode in 1966 after all and once took him on set; a lot of Wild West tropes end up here too). McCoy's departing Dr is well written for (well, before and after they kill him off anyway), the millennium setting is fun, there's a nie lot of action between the talking and there are some clever one liners too. Had this gone to series, with the (many) problems wrinkled out I'm one of those fans who reckons this might have worked out. Yes, even the remake of 'The Web Planet' from 1965 with its giant ants and butterflies they were talking about doing. As a 90min one-off though it just had too much to do and got too much of that wrong.

Positives +Poor McCoy had a thankless job. He's effectively fired here after 9 very interrupted years, dies in the least heroic way possible (of all the Drs its this one that forgets to check the scanner during a gun battle?!) and has the indignity of his (even) smaller co-star standing on a box. He doesn't even get many actual words. And yet still he shines, outclassing all the more famous actors and actresses here.

Negatives - Nobody talks about it with so many other higher profile mistakes going on but creepy comedy morgue attendant Pete is my candidate for the single word, or at least unfunniest, Dr Who character ever. I can kind of see why things went wrong with every other aspect of this episode, made it was a by a whole new production team, but how did this part go so very wrong?

Praxeus: Rank - 286

              Praxeus

(Season 12, Dr 13 with Graham Ryan and Yaz,  2/2/2020, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writers: Pete McTighe and Chris Chibnall, director: Jamie Magnus Stone)

Rank: 286

Plastic not fantastic! A party political broadcast on behalf of climate change combined with a properly scary, moody story...

It's quite eerie in retrospect how much this episode, made in 2019 and broadcast in Feb 2020, foreshadowed covid and perfectly imagines an unsettled world suffering from an unseen virus caused by a climate change and made worse by disinformation. Now this is Dr Who we're talking about so the virus in the microplastics that litter our planet are being used to evil ends by an alien mastermind but the principle's much the same. It's legitimately scary too in a way that most of the Chibnall era isn't, with everyone taking this story seriously for once. Best of all there are some action scenes in between the dialogue - ones that are integral to the plot too. It just...doesn't feel like DW somehow. It's uncharacteristically joke-free and sombre, the use of voiceovers is (largely) new and the alien might as well have been Human given that they look just like 'us'. There was an outcry at the time about DW doing a story about climate change, presumably from people who'd never seen 'The Green Death' in 1973. It feels like exactly the sort of thing DW should have been doing. I just wish it felt more like DW when it was doing it, with everyone acting oddly out of character.

Positives + It's one of those rare DW stories set on earth but outside Britain, with some clever location filming in South Africa standing in for all sorts of countries and giving this episode real scope and makes the threat feel worldwide.

Negatives - Unfortunately, while worthy, it goes way overboard at times and is DW at its preachiest, with some scenes unwatchable. Even when it's right I hate the way Chibnall era DW assumes that I'm part o the 'problem' not the 'solution'.

Kill The Moon: Rank - 287

  Kill The Moon

(Season 8, Dr 12 with Clara,  4/10/2014, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Peter Harness, director: Paul Wilmshurst)

Rank: 287

Hey diddle diddle 

Courtney's been to Lidl 

And after that she went to the moon 

It's nothing to brag on 

But she helped hatch a dragon

In a story that made us all feel like a loon

There are some Dr Who episodes that are high stakes drama where saving the universe from a threat is seriously tense, others that are big set emotional pieces involving characters that we’ve come to know and love,  others – even the ones involving aliens – are symbolic of what it means to be human and place you in a situation where you think about what you would do in a certain situation, others are just pure escapist entertainment. And then there are stories that try to be all four at once, which are generally the very best ones. For this to work, though, you have to be invested in the scenario on offer to think that it might happen – if not to us right not then to somebody real, at some point in their lives, in a possible foreseeable future. With all the will in the world you can’t sit down and watch ‘Kill The Moon’ and think ‘how would I react in a situation like this? And how will my heroes get ut of it?’ because you know the moon? That big thing hanging there in the sky? Earth's only satellite that's been there as long as the Human race? The thing that has been subjected to more rigorous scientific tests than any other celestial body that isn’t Earth? That's an egg that is. Laid by a moon dragon. That suddenly decides to hatch. This isn't in some distant planet or in some parallel dimension either, nor even the distant future, nor the distant past. It hatches in 2049, thirty-five years after broadcast (which in Dr Who terms is nothing). That isn’t being lunar. That’s just being loony.

Now, I’m not really as mad as these reviews make it seem. I know that Dr Who is a fictional series that isn’t actually happening (give or take the bits of fortune-telling that the show gets right from time to time: watch ‘Inferno’s take on fracking or Harold Saxon’s rise to be prime minister through lying and gassing his opponents in ‘Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Timelords’ and shudder). I know that there aren’t really timelords from a planet named Gallifrey wandering the universe righting wrongs (I mean, frankly things would be a lot better than they are right now). At the same time though one of Dr Who’s biggest selling points as a franchise is that it could be happening: this isn’t some dumb noisy American space flick about invading aliens who can’t possibly exist but a universe teeming with such varied life that some of its guesses at least have to be right. Had this been the moon of another planet, maybe even one of the ones in our solar system we haven’t got to yet (Saturn has more than a few that act…weird and unlike anything else we thought we knew about how planet satellites work, especially ‘Hyperion’ which looks as if it’s been squashed and squished and orbits in a unique way totally contradictory to how every other planet satellite in our solar system works – I could totally believe a Hyperion dragon laid that) then ‘d have been all for it. But our moon? That thing in the sky humans have been gazing at for billions of years, the moon which someone somewhere must always have been looking at every single second of every day since human history began, which our best scientists have studied through telescopes, that our astronauts have walked on jumped on and played golf on, that have given us more samples to test in laboratories than any other celestial body except the one we walk up and down on? All that time and nobody's guessed. I mean, maybe you would have thought Apollo 11 would have cracked it open by sticking a whacking great flag in the crust? Wouldn't one of our scientists have noticed a heartbeat or the traces of an alien creature? Wouldn’t this species have died out after such a long incubation period? (How does the mum moon dragon even know to fly to its child at the end – where’s that been lurking all our lives?) Even though the alien quickly lays another moon (weird in itself) you would have thought this would have had some impact on humanity in future episodes but no one ever mentions it before or since. Not even the Cybermen who invaded a base in 2070 there but no one ever mentioned needing an egg whisk! Or the Judoon who stomped all over the moon in ‘Smith and Jones’ and aren’t exactly the sort of species who’d be careful round eggshell! Erm, I don’t think so – this is the sort of one-off joke fans love laughing at in annuals and cigarette cards, never mind on TV. At first when the Doctor talks about alien life being on the moon we assume he’s joking because it’s just too absurd, they couldn’t possibly write into the plot something so obviously provably wrong as a moon being an egg would they? But they really do – rarely in Dr Who have we ever had a plot so…so…scrambled!   

Even some half-hearted references to this being the ‘other’ side of the moon, the dark side we can’t see from Earth and which Pink Floyd wrote about in 1973, don’t cut it – because we’ve orbited the moon so many times now that we know it like the back of our hand (three craters, a mole and half-moons, since you’re asking). ‘Kill The Moon’ kills the idea that you’re watching a series that could happen and reminds you, with an annoying thud, that you’re only watching a TV programme, one where they can turn the moon into an egg because why not? It’s only a TV programme. And if it’s only a TV programme why bother to get invested? Why care when the Doctor turns it into a choice for Clara to choose between being scared of the new unknown creature and killing it or letting it live?  Why bother to think what you’d do during Clara’s ad hoc ‘referendum’ asking human beings for help? Because it’s only a TV programme. Don’t bother thinking about it too hard. Don’t let the repercussions keep you up or night or have you scuttling behind the sofa. Just change the channel. I would even go so far as to say that this story, in the middle of a season that wasn’t exactly big on reality the whole way through, is why people stopped watching Dr Who in such numbers and chose to go away and watch something else. ‘As far as the science goes, I don’t worry too much about that’ said the writer when interviewed in Dr Who Magazine. No kidding! And, err, maybe you should worry if you want to be part of a long running franchise that, at least most of the time, really does care about getting this stuff right?

I wouldn’t mind so much if they made a good story anyway, despite the absurdity. After all, I don’t really believe that there’s a planet full of lifesize spiders with supernatural powers (‘Planet Of The Spiders’) either and I know for a fact that The Cybermen didn’t invade the North Pole in 1986 like they said in ‘The Tenth Planet’ but I still really enjoy those stories. And we haven’t had a base under siege story for ages: what a great chance to see how Peter Capaldi’s Doctor differs to Patrick Troughton’s! There was a lot of murmuring behind the scenes about how scary this story was going to be (Moffat reportedly telling the writer to ‘Hinchcliffe the **** out of it!’, in reference to the producer of what many regard as the most frightening era of the series in the early Tom Baker years. Except…this isn’t frightening at all. We don’t actually see the moon dragon do anything and there are no invaders beyond a few insects, just morals that go on and on and on. You see the other big problem that kills ‘Kill The Moon’ stone dead is how boring it is. And it shouldn’t be: this is an expedition to the moon! We actually go back there some day! And there’s a creature living there we know nothing about! This should be…egg-citing! Only we don’t get that story – we get the one that has the Doctor, Clara and Courtney (Clara’s annoying pupil from ‘The Caretaker’ that’s never ever counted as a companion in guidebooks despite travelling in the Tardis more than Liz Shaw or the Brigadier because, well, it’s embarrassing) walking across the surface very very slowly, then bickering with the moonbase commanders (not a patch on the cosmopolitan ones in ‘The Moonbase’ from 1967) very very slowly then the Doctor polling off to let Clara, Courtney and base commander Lundvik (an off-colour Hermione Norris) decide what to do, very very slowly. 

Now, I’m quite loony for the moon landings (and not just the famous one). I’ve sat through as much of the real footage as I can get my hands (a difficult task, given Nasa’s original tapes were wiped so all we have left is what was broadcast on the TV). I’ve watched  interminable countdowns, flight checks, safety procedures and watched more collections of rock samples than I ever want to think about. Most of space travel and exploration isn’t heroic so much as sitting around waiting for something to happen and hoping it will. Yet throughout it all I was hooked: this is real history! Something man always dreamed of doing and never thought, until somewhere around the late 1950s, that he would never actually do and yet there we are, over-reaching our grasp, refusing to be locked into the sphere we were born on, trying to take out first steps out into space for real. And I was never as bored, at any point, as I was watching ‘Kill The Moon’. There’s no drama here, nothing to get a hold of, nothing really happening (unless you count more killer spiders, which are never explained – they’re just as unlikely as the moon being an egg after all – and aren’t in anyway creepy) unless you seriously want to become invested in whether a fictional dragon that can’t possibly exist and which has no personality lives or dies. Plus we had exactly the same plot with Amy in ‘The Beast Below’, when she made the wrong choice and ‘forgot’ about the space whale and made the 11^th Doctor disappointed in her – and I was quite caught up in that one (and yes, I know whales travelling through space aren’t exactly scientifically likely either but, you know, it was the far future and it wasn’t in a bit of space we know about yet). Steven Moffat went on record at the time as saying how ‘intense and emotional’ this story was and how he loved it more than almost anything else he’d worked on. Which just goes to show what a fine sense of humour the showrunner has when he wants it.

That’s a shame because this episode looks utterly amazing. I’ve seen Hollywood blockbusters with budgets in the quadzillions that don’t look a hundredth as good as this does with BBC money. They filmed it in Tenerife, on the recommendation of writer Peter Harness who’d been there on family holidays – partly because he was enough of a Dr Who fan to know about the location filming they did there for ‘Planet Of Fire’ (which doesn’t use the location filming half as wel as this story does). Harness knew how much the desert there looked like the moon, full of craters and sand and, by coincidence more than design, it really is where NASA trained their astronauts during the early 1970s because it most resembled the moon geographically. For a moment there  you seriously think they’ve got the budget to send the Tardis   up to the real  moon – even to a nut like me whose seen all that moon footage from the 1960s and 1970s it’s never looked as good or as ‘real’ as this. The sights of Peter Capaldi, in the orange spacesuit David Tennant always used to wear, stomping up and down the lunar surface with Clara feels so ‘right’ for his Doctor, in a way he never seemed quite at home on Earth. They really make the most of it too, shooting this in the half-dark (at some considerable expense) so that you really do get the feeling that we’re on a fragile ball hanging in space with the night sky lighting up behind everything (because Lanzarote has far less light pollution than Cardiff) and even going to the trouble of adding a CGI Earth in the background of some scenes that’s one of the best special effects in the series.  Even the moon dragon, seen in the distance so they don’t need too much detail, looks more believable than you’d think - a sort of cross between Elliott in ‘Pete’s Dragon’, Falkor in ‘The Neverending Story’ and the Night Fury from ‘How To Train Your Dragon’ (in case you haven’t guessed I’m quite potty about dragons too so this story should be right up my street).  How unusual then: a Dr Who story saved, to a certain extent, by the effects and let down by the writing!  

 
Except that’s what annoys me most of all about this story: Harkness is a great writer and more than that a great Dr Who writer. He knows and understands this series better than pretty much any of Moffat’s ‘new’ writers and indeed had been submitting scripts to the series off and on since 2011, as well as some excellent work on such series as ‘The Forgotten Fallen’ (an excellent drama from 2009 about people’s denial and slowness to act over the Spanish flu epidemic, which would have changed our current timeline since covid completely had more people watched it and heeded it’s warnings), ‘Wallander’ and the better of the M R James ‘Ghost Stories For Christmas’. He’ll go on to write the Zygon two parter, a story with as good a claim as many to being not just the best 12^th Doctor story but the most Dr Whoy 12^th Dr Who story. There are little ideas in this story, throwaway lines, that hint at how good this story could be: I love Lundvik’s comment that it took so long to go back to the moon because ‘people were always looking down at their i-phones refusing to look up’ and that humanity stopped being curious. There’s a great speech, by Danny Pink of all people, comforting an irate Clara that gets his character in one scene better than any other writer: he tells Clara that he recognises the look of conflict on her face because he had it himself in his army days when he was made to something he hated and it made him fall out of love with the job, but that Clara hasn’t reached the decision to leave yet because she’s ‘angry’ – and anytime you’re still angry about something is when you still care. There are a couple of really great funny lines too: Clara’s comment to NASA asking who the hell she is because nobody else has been on the moon for decades that she’s on a ‘school trip’ and Courtney uploading her moon pics to Tumblr, then still a fairly new and hip social media app used almost exclusively by youngsters, with Lundvik’s comment ‘oh my Granny used to do that! (it’s exactly the same joke as the one about space travel in ‘Seeds Of Death’ being old hat, at the same time we were landing on the moon: time moves on fast in this series). Clara telling the Doctor to tell her the truth ‘or I’ll slap you so hard you’ll regenerate!’ is also the sort of clever joke you’re amazed nobody in this series ever made before. It’s typical of this story, though, that what I think was probably the best scene of all ended up on the cutting room floor in favour of more walking across the moon slowly and debating back and forth: Courtney suffers ‘moon fever’ common to many astronauts when she looks back at home and asks Lundvik what it’s like going back to a broken Earth after being up in space because ‘It changes stuff yeah? Like – that down there is everything. Every moment of my life, my mum and dad’s life, every moment that led up to me being who I am and like I can hold it in my hand’. A few more limes like that, about what it really means to see the Earth as the fragile ball of life it really is, and I’d have adored this story; it says it all that this long speech was cut in favour of the single word ‘wow’. As if that’s going to cut it quite the same way. The best joke got cut too: by 2049 everything is owned by the conglomerate ‘Amagoogle’!  

In fact that’s the other real problem with this story: nobody reacts normally. This is one of those stories where, to save time, the Doctor and Clara swan in and – after mere seconds – are accepted without question while the people at the base explain the plot to them, at length, even though if they’re who they say they are they should both already know it. I get it: we need to learn this stuff at speed and it’s not like this is the only Dr Who story that suffers from it. But we’re on the moon! Where nobody has been for seventy-five years! Shouldn’t the astronauts be at least a little more surprised at two strangers walking up to say hi, given that they’re on the most isolated inhabited place in the solar system? (Give or take whether the Ice Warriors are asleep on Mars in this era or not). Their reaction to finding spiders and dragons on the moon, too, is one of ‘oh gosh, look at that’ not ‘my God, I’ve trained for this my whole life and I never knew, that’s amazing!’ I mean, these must be the least curious explorers ever – and I would have thought that curiosity, of discovering something hitherto unknown and getting excited about it, was quite a prerequisite or else why explore at all? Clara’s more used to weird things happening so it’s not as much of a surprise that she doesn’t skip a beat at such discoveries, even on the moon. And yet equally she’s been in life or death decisions where she’s asked to make quick decisions before and never resented the Doctor for it, while her own character arc has been all about wanting control and learning to act like the Doctor, independently. And yet she suddenly goes to pieces when the Doctor drops her in it and asks her to make a decision on behalf of her species – and then really resents him for it, to the point of tears. This is Clara we’re talking about here, someone who loves control so much she doesn’t dare let anyone see her in pain or vulnerable or even let them in to what she’s really thinking, ever (I mean, that was the whole point of her originally, so we at home could be fooled into thinking she really did have some impossible secret, rather than the secret being a future decision to rescue her friend in ‘Name Of The Doctor’). What with this and ‘Forest’ she must also be a candidate for the least responsible teacher ever: it’s the Doctor who cares for Courtney’s safety enough to get her out of trouble, but Clara never gives it a thought – admittedly I know more than a few teachers just like this, but think back to Ian and Barbara and how they risked their life for Susan over and over again even before they properly knew her because it was their duty of care, and weep. This is what’s wrong with schools in 2014: it’s not the pupils its some of the teachers. Then again the Doctor’s never acted quite like this before, basically disappearing in a huff to let humans sort this stuff out. It’s far more in character for him to stand at the back o shot, harrumphing and pretending not to be involved while secretly giving notes – he’s quite the control freak too, there’s no way he’d just leave Clara to make such a decision all by herself.

Courtney is the worst though and continues the feeling I had watching ‘The Caretaker’ and later ‘In The Forest Of The Night’, that nobody in the Dr Who production team in 2014 had ever met anyone under thirty. Courtney doesn’t act like any real teenager ever would and the joke is that she doesn’t learn anything from this story (or indeed, is ever seen again – even in ‘Forest’ where it would have been easy to write her in); she’s only there to be the punchline for jokes. Something big happens/ Courtney doesn’t see it, she was too busy on her phone. Shown the miraculous inside of the Tardis that is dimensionally transcendental? She gets travel sick. Angry at the world and rebelling against her teachers at every move (and, it’s hinted, being quite a bully on the school playground) she nevertheless goes to pieces because the Doctor says she isn’t ‘special’ (when what he actually says, in fun, is that ‘only special people are allowed past this point’ on the Tardis doors): I know bullies are secretly thin-skinned and act tough out of bluster, but good grief – she’d be even more likely to put a front on when the teachers are around, not admit that one hurt her feelings. This isn’t funny, it’s being rude to your core audience of teenagers and making out that all their generation are weak-kneed pansies who won’t exist for five seconds in the real universe and need to toughen up and aren’t they silly with their complaints and objections and over-sensitivity and i-phones? I’m not even part of this generation (I’m a curmudgeonly millennial, the official and yet alarmingly accurate description of my age) and even I’m offended on their behalf. Once again, no wonder Dr Who never found a new audience in this era – it was being made by people laughing at them. It’s the trouble with a lot of Moffat scripts –you only have to look at his execrable drama on at the moment ‘Douglas Is Cancelled’, starring Alex Kingston, Karen Gillan and Hugh Bonneville, and the way the teenage daughter is portrayed to see that he still thinks like this and hasn’t learned anything. There’s nothing clever about any of this either, it’s just lazy writing, a cheap joke because it’s easier than writing a proper person. For all that happens in the script, for all of the twist at the end that Courtney is special because she helped save the moon dragon (along with Lundvik and, umm, her English teacher) Courtney need not be here. Apparently there was originally a lengthy sub-plot about Courtney discovering that she grows up to be an astronaut named Blinovitch (yes, like the Dr Who ‘rule’ that you can’t meet your past self) who ended up re-written as Lundvik, inspired from a life of detention and dead-end jobs to work hard and become the astronaut she once met. Which would have at least given Courtney some extra character. Only Moffat thought that sub-plot was ‘interfering’ with the one about Clara so had it taken out – maybe that’s why the pacing for this story feels so all over the place and why the ending takes an eternity? Honestly, there was more than enough room in this story for both.

‘Kill The Moon’ still feels kind of empty, which is why so many people have treated it like an egg, with something below the shell to be cracked open. There was a thought that went round soon after broadcast, spread by people who think too much about these things (people…just like me!) that ‘Kill The Moon’ was a coded message about the abortion laws. This was a big topic of debate in 2014, when Donald Trump had just started talking about running for American presidential office for the first time and a shaky second term for Obama, hampered by a congress who didn’t seem to agree with him on anything, made it seem like the Republicans actually had a shot of winning. One of their big burning issues was overturning the Roe v Wade law from 1973, which effectively made abortion of foetuses legal up to 328 weeks old (a rule that was finally overturned in 2022). The decision, on whether to terminate an egg and blow it up with missiles before it hatches, seemed very familiar to those of us who’d been watching the news and the debates on both sides – about whether something should be allowed to live, even without an obvious parent to be with it and even when it could be ‘dangerous’ during the birth process. Notably it’s an agonising decision made by three women alone, with the Doctor (who’d not yet been a woman himself, remember, at least on screen) leaving them to it and not interfering (because of a woman’s rights to their own body), one that Clara finally makes during a sort-of referendum (a clever sequence with Earth turning off their lights or leaving them on so she can see from the moon) and then making a choice based on emotion despite the evidence and official data and everyone telling her to ‘kill’ it. A slam dunk for the pro-life lobby you’d think – except the writer was horrified and said the idea had never ever occurred to him, or anyone else making this story. Even when the director Paul Wilmshurst asked to speak to the writer about his ‘metaphors’ Harness protested there weren’t any, that this really was just a trip to the moon. Let me reiterate: this is rare. Sometimes I wonder if these writers are really as clever as me and fans like me make out, or whether they’re just good at leaving enough ambiguity for us to read what we want to into these stories. As far as I know, though, no writer ever came out and said ‘that theory’s wrong’ – sometimes they’ll nod and say yes and take all the credit, more often they’ll give an ambiguous answer that they might have done and it’s alright for us to see it that way if we want but they couldn’t possibly comment, more often than not they just ignore everything everyone says about anything. Except in this case. So no, ‘Kill The Moon’ is categorically not about abortion. It really is just a story about a dragon hatching from an egg.

That’s a shame because, honestly, what else is there to go on? ‘Kill The Moon’ is the silliest and most unlikely of stories, one that ignores practically all science in order to tell a story that really isn’t that interesting and which features two small jumpscares interrupted by a quarter hour of bickering and half n hour of pontificating, an adventure so hard to get a handle on that it runs through your hands like yolk. It’s not all  bad; indeed it’s something of a curate’s moon egg, given that the Tenerife night shoot looks so good and there are some really good, clever lines scattered through the eggshell. Even so, that’s not enough to make this good or even passable: truly it feels like the yolk’s on us for watching this rubbish (and especially on me for reviewing it at length) when really it’s just a B-movie with dumb characters acting weird and some dragons and spiders because why the hell not? It’s only Dr Who. And that, right there, is the phrase that always ushers in the worst eras for the show, that signify that the people making this are no longer trying to write art (or good drama, or political statements, or creative stories), they’re just trying to see what daft nonsense they can get away with. Sometimes Dr Who isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes it really is just a story about a dragon laying an egg and nothing more. And we’ve just wasted 45 minutes of your life watching  it. And I’ve just wasted another four hours writing about it. Usually writing these reviews leaves me feeling good, as if I’ve connected into something that’s bigger than me and made me feel better about the human race, as if I’ve just had some greater understanding of life. Not this one though, it just makes me feel really depressed. It feels as if all of us have somehow been left with egg on our faces after this story.

+ SUNNY SIDE UP: The Doctor uses a yoyo to detect the gravity readings on the moon, just like the 4^th Doctor always used to (in ‘The Ark In Space’ most obviously). He even uses the same yoyo he digs out of a back pocket (or as close as), after Capaldi insisted they get this right because he remembered it so well. It’s a great, very Dr Whoy scene of the ordinary and extraordinary hitting each other head on. Capaldi who’d never played with a yoyo in his life, had to get ‘extra coaching’ from his daughter’s boyfriend to make sure he got it right! 

  
- OVER EASY: Those space spiders are….what even are they? There’s one big scene with them jumping out at people (shot, like most modern Dr Who monster scenes in the dark, not the dusk where this sort of thing is creepy, but in the dark where we can’t see anything) then…they’re never mentioned again. What are they? Where did they come from? What have they got to do with the moon dragon – are they lick a tick that lives off the amniotic fluid in its shell? Are they food brought by mum to feed it when it wakes up? Or is it all a coincidence and there really are two creatures we’ve never seen before partying on the moon? They’re nothing special – better than the ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ spiders from 1973, it goes without saying, but not even as creepy as the arachnids in ‘Arachnids In The UK’ from four years later.

BEST QUOTE: Lundvik: ’You want to know what I took back from being in space? Look at the edge of the Earth, the atmosphere that is paper thin. That is the only thing that saves us all from death. Everything else – the stars, the blackness – that’s all dead. Sadly, that is the only life any of us will ever know’

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