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). 

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