The Rings Of Akhaten: Rank - 293

  The Rings Of Akhaten

(Season 7, Dr 11 with Clara, 6/4/2013, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Neil Cross, director: Farren Blackburn)

Rank: 293

What the different Doctors saw at the Queen of Years concert:

1^st Doctor – Madama Optera

2^nd Doctor – The Magic Recorder

3^rd Doctor – Brigoletto

4^th Doctor – Dalekibor

5^th Doctor – Peter Davison Grimes

6^th Doctor – Il Tractatortore

7^th Doctor – Car-Cyber-Men

8^th Doctor – Le Loup Garoux

9^th Doctor – Der Rose and Kavalier

10^th Doctor – Tennhauser

11^th Doctor – The Perfect Fool

12^th Doctor – Nessun Doctor

13^th Doctor – TuranDoc

14^th Doctor – La Face Of Boe-Heme

15^th Doctor - Sontaron Boccanegra

Am I allowed to put a story so far down my rankings because of how disappointed I was rather than how bad something was? Well, it’s my list and my rules I suppose so here we are. If you’ve come to this website or series of books from my other alarmingly detailed website ‘Alan’s Album Archives’ then you’ll know that music is my other love. My dream episode one day is to have a crossover of my two loves with an alien ‘Woodstock’, where different monsters from around the universe club together to save the Earth (and its music) out of peace and harmony and rock and roll, about music’s power to cross boundaries of space and time and species and be our universal language. For one synopsis and one trailer I thought I had that episode: an alien concert in space! With lots of new exotic looking species we’ve never had before! On an exotic looking planet! What an award winning concept! Only we didn’t get that episode. Instead it turns out to be one of those boring stuck-up classical concerts where nothing ever happens and everyone shushes at you for interrupting. What’s more it’s an amateur concert, led by a nervous little girl who would rather not be singing at all (and who – not to be mean but the little girl’s a big star now and a really good adult actress so I doubt she’ll care – spends the episode hitting notes with all the accuracy of a bunch of renegade Daleks badly CSOd in ‘Day Of The Daleks’). The rest of the episode is then about sacrifice and the importance of memories as a currency. Which is a worrying vision of the future for what Ticketmaster will probably be like in a couple of centuries. While we don’t actually spend much time on this alien planet at all, because we swap halfway through for the inside of a gloomy pyramid. While the only awards this story would win is for being the single schmaltziest episode in this book.
To be fair to everyone, it’s a worthy try at doing different – nothing gives an alien planet a greater feeling of realism than giving them culture, religious festivals and/or children: the only thing missing from the ‘four easy ways to create an alien world’ handbook is ‘food’ and there’s plenty of that around on the market stalls too (much of it painted blue). Only it’s all squandered when ‘Rings’ reverts back into being a generic ‘Doctor Who’ story with a clumsily written and sketched in back story about immortal Gods eating planets (another of my bugbears in this series I’m afraid). It was also made in something of a hurry: showrunner Steven Moffat had used up a lot of budget and ideas for the first half of series seven (the one where Amy and Rory leave) and had pencilled in a lot of cheaper budget-saving stories across the second half of the run (the ‘Clara’ episodes). Moffat had deliberately left the second story of the run blank so that he could both see how much budget was left and work out better how to dangle the mystery of Clara in front of viewers without repeating himself across other stories. I would imagine he planned to write this story too, but after getting writer’s block badly when trying to write ‘The Snowmen’ and struggling with ‘The Bells Of Saint John’ he decided to hand the script over to someone who’d just impressed him with the speed and originality of another episode ready to go, ‘Hide’. Neil Cross wasn’t expecting to be asked back so soon and was busy with the third series of ‘Luther’ at the time but, Whovian that he was, he didn’t want to turn the commission down and so made space in his schedule for a story that he was promised could have extra budget (to make up for the self-contained low budget ‘Hide’) – that then got taken away, draft  by draft, as other episodes in the eyar sailed over budget so that most of the really good ideas got whittled away. One of the things that we did get was Cross’ request for a CGI planet with rings (as Who had never done one before) – which really does look good it has to be said - and then had to come up with an idea for a story set there. He decided to start by creating a culture that was based around a religion (a traditional ‘classic’ Who theme that had only ever been done once in modern Who, jokingly, for the traffic jam dwellers in ‘Gridlock’) and began thinking about a church choir of aliens who would be singing to their God.  

And then, given what we got on screen, stopped. The production team aimed to show "the best alien planet" ever seen on Dr Who. They failed abysmally. Yet ‘The Rings Of Akhaten’ isn’t one of those stories that’s terrible because its misguided and should never ever have been made (like ‘The Timeless Children’ or ‘The Dominators’), or because it was ruined by casting (‘Voyage Of The Damned’ ‘Orphan 55’). It’s one of those stories that sits at the bottom because, like ‘The Monsters Of Peladon’, it’s only half a story dragged out ad infinitum when its an idea with so many ideas going begging that just aren’t used. It has a lengthy scene at the beginning with The Doctor and Clara, takes a leisurely stroll across an alien market (it is Clara’s first trip to an alien world after all), has her discover a crying little girl and then – at the point in the middle where an episode usually gets properly moving, with a chase or a battle sequence or a showdown between heroes and villains – stops for a concert that feels like it goes on forever. Then it’s a ten minute rundown with a surly God we’ve never heard about before where the scariest thing that happens all episode is that The Doctor might get crushed by a door. There’s no tension, no excitement, nothing interesting beyond the different species in the market place (none of whom we get to know properly sadly). Just a load of Godawful singing and a monster who barely speaks. Fans always complain that episodes like ‘Underworld’ and ‘The Sensorites’ are boring, but at least something happens in those and we see some point to them. All we get in this story is an irritating little girl from an irritating species singing irritating songs in front of an irritating God, without much explanation for what’s happening.

It seems for a second, when Merry is meant to be really scared, as if they’re going to go down the route of child sacrifice, that this is a ‘backwards’ tribe like the Aztecs, Incas or Mayas, where a people hand over their children to sacrifice the few to save the many (‘The Krotons’ did a similar thing with adults, while ‘Logan’s Run’ got there first with children, sacrificing them all when they turn eighteen and are old enough to question). Instead it’s a bit underwhelming when it turns out that the child, Merry, is just scared of missing her lines. The thing is, though even that starting point was a good one. A lot of the best Dr Who stories take something that worries children in the real world and enlarges it to a cosmic scale to better help the viewers deal with it. One of the things that scares both adults and children is public speaking, getting up in front of a crowd of your peers and performing, when you’re nervous enough to forget everything you’ve been practising. The fact that your planet gets eaten by an angry God if you get something wrong is a typical Whovian exaggeration that still has enough of a ‘ring’ of truth to it to make it more than just pure fantasy. This story could have had a real message, about parents pushing children before they’re ready and living their lives through them, even when it comes with constant pressure, but it’s an opportunity the episode squanders so that the music comes off as so much singing rather than a chance to say something. ‘Rings’ could still have worked, but to tell that story you need to know why this concert is so important and what the stakes are if the little girl gets it wrong. After all, they say music is the food of Gods: trust Dr Who to make that an actual thing  not a metaphor. But we don’t find out where this ‘Queen Of Years’ festival (very like our pagan festivals with little girl May queens) started or why everyone keeps singing. If ony we knew what a big deal this was, not just for the girl but her planet and all the pressure on her shoulders, we’d care more. How many years has she been in training? Has she scarificed her whole life for this one moment? Who was her teacher (Merry doesn’t seem to know anyone at the concert, no mum or dad to turn to or class to cheer her on grumpy teacher folding their five pairs of arms in disgruntled silence). You also need to make the girl ‘one of us’ – to have her be an audience identification person we’re rooting for. Alas the script does neither of these things: it’s hard to say what they do in the allotted time but most of it seems to consist of random aliens barking, the Doctor eating weird blue fruit and Clara –a governess no less, even if she isn’t a teacher in this series - talking as if she’s never met a child in her life and can’t remember what it was like to be one. The ending ought to be thrillingly tense, as we root for Merry and gasp as things go wrong, but we only find out what’s going to go wrong when we’re in harm’s way already and that’s too late – especially when the scary God seems to be half asleep in a chair and the sort of threat The Doctor usually defeats with his hand tied behind his back.

The Doctor’s struggling all round this episode, for convoluted reasons meant to make Clara come into her own with her own sacrifice at the end of the episode, which is just bonkers. The monster doesn’t feed off people literally (like a cannibal) or metaphorically (like our government), or even off people’s emotions/adrenalin (like the Shreek), it lives off the sacrifice of an object. How does that work in evolutionary terms? Did the God wake up one day and start chomping its parent’s belongings? How does it possibly digest the objects it’s given and turn them into the energy it needs to live? Far better, surely, to have it like one of the old Gods, physically taking a person’s essence. Even so, that’s what the plot so we’ll run with it. Only this series is all about a character who has the perfect back story for what the Gods need, full of roads un-travelled and directions not taken and a thousand odd years of objects he can use. Moffat and Cross really want it to be Clara who delivers that sacrifice though, so that the audience at home can start rooting for the companion, so they make The Doctor suddenly unable to go back to the Tardis and, say, retrieve his 500 year old diary. Surely this isn’t the one time he’s walked out with nothing in his pockets (a few sharp-eyed fans spot that he’s still carrying Amy’s glasses from ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ – maybe he can’t bear to give them up but he really ought to discuss that with Clara first). Yet suddenly it’s okay for Clara to hand over her own objects that mean a lot to her: her mother’s ring (so that the ‘rings’ in the title can be a double pun, geddit?) and a leaf. Yes, you read that right, a leaf. For in one of the weirdest bits of Who lore it turns out that Clara’s parents met through a leaf that blew in his face and knocked him into a road in the path of a car, which might just be the single most unlikely development in Dr Who (tell me, have you ever heard of this happening to someone else? And if it happened to you would you stay still where you are, safely on the curb of the pavement, or flail into the road with your arms flapping the way Clara’s dad does? It would make some sort of sense if they turned him into a clumsy dad character, like Rory’s dad Brian, but no: he’s quite a stern soul given the shots of him at his wife’s funeral barely comforting his daughter…who looks older than he does despite putting Jenna Coleman in an alice band. Incidentally, the date on Clara’s mum’s gravestone is the same date Dr Who returned and the same date as the Auton invasion in ‘Rose’, but if that’s how she died Clara never mentions it: you’d think that would give her a good motivation to travel with the Doctor righting wrongs and saving planets). The leaf scene looks like its from a really bad comedy, one of those ‘arch’ ones where the actors and audience are both meant to be in on the ‘joke’ but which is just lazy writing for ‘we don’t know how to make something seem realistic’ (Mrs Brown’s Boys’ is an obvious example). You see an arm coming out to save him and think it’s the Doctor – but no, it’s Clara’s mum, with this the start of their relationship. It’s a nice idea on its own, playing with the very Dr Who idea of fate and luck, as its only by the narrowest of chances than any of us are born when our parents, grandparents and all the generations before them all had to meet one day, some day, by chance. Typically of this episode, too, Clara originally had a rather good speech when she handed it over that got cut in editing so they could fit in more awful singing: ‘It’s full of the things I love the most, the days I haven’t had yet. The places I’ve never been. All the things I really wanted, the things I saved up for the future. Things so precious I never mentioned the to anyone. All the days still to come, all the good things I ever wished for. So come on. They’re yours’. So the leaf becomes important – important enough for the monster to feed off as a sacrifice that keeps hi fed for decades. But why does Clara carry the leaf around with her? What happens to her dad (shouldn’t it belong to him?) Why does she hand it over so readily? And how does the monster know that it’s an ‘important’ leaf rather than just a ‘leaf’? And why does The Doctor simply stare on and let her? (more something the 13^th Doctor would do than the 11^th). And how come something so central to Clara is never heard of again? In case you couldn’t guess the leaf part was a late addition – originally it was Clara’s mother’s ring, which ended up being switched over to the motorcycle fee instead to keep the title pun. Plus the entire episode has been set up as a young girl facing her fears and being brave – but because the script needs Clara to make the sacrifice Merry’s plot function is over once she steps inside the pyramid and it’s her ‘substitute parents’ who walk in and solve it for her. That’s just not what this story should have been about and it’s a real shame it got intercut with Clara’s story the way it does. 

Not that Clara’s character arc is any more satisfying. This story is a typical ‘second episode’ in that it whisks a new companion off to space to see how they fare differently to other companions (this story is similar not only to ‘The End Of The World’ but also ‘The Beast Below’ and ‘Smile’, a quirky story in a futuristic setting with something we can recognise as benign turned evil, like a tree a whale or emojis, just with singing). It’s designed to show off how good the companion is and how right the Doctor was to bring them along. Except that Clara isn’t cooked yet and Moffat is keen to make her ambiguous, to keep up the ‘mystery’ of who she is. So we get a lot of ‘clues’ that end up making us look in the ‘wrong’ direction, so we don’t guess the (actually really good) explanation at series’ end. What you’re meant to think, the first time round, is that the leaf that begins the story becomes significant in Clara’s story beyond her being born and having some currency to buy a motorbike, but it’s a red herring of the sort that get dropped a lot across series seven. This is Clara’s second/fourth episode depending how you look at it and we’re deep in the mystery of why she keeps popping up with different faces and names, something that won’t be solved until the finale ‘The Name Of The Doctor’. We’re deep in the thick of the mystery, so we have lots of extra shot of The Doctor keeping an eye on her, trying to find out why she’s ‘special’.  The thing is, though, its unsettling: The Doctor is stalking her as a little girl in a way that’s quite uncomfortable. He tries to be inconspicuous (he stares at her over the cover of the 1981 Beano summer special – reprinted the week of transmission with a message from the editor that ‘it’s not just the Doctor who gets the chance to time travel’; he should have popped up in different eras reading different Beanos!) but of course this is the 11^th Doctor so he’s not very good; soon he’s having footballs kicked at him and talking to toddler Clara (another of this episode’s cut lines that beat anything in this episode, a bit of foreshadowing as her dad calls her a ‘little tyke’ who’s ‘reach exceeds her grasp’. A neat summary of her ‘death’ in ‘Face The Raven’. Not that it’s been written yet). It just feels a bit creepy, especially in an episode that’s already having us gawp at performing children. It also makes a mockery of the plot in the sense that he’s convinced that she’s trouble enough to follow her around from birth, yet he’s quite happy to let her walk away and ‘explore’ the Tiaanamaat market on her own unsupervised on her first time away in time and space (he only did this with Rose in ‘The End Of The World’, a similar episode all round with its group of monsters and futuristic setting, to help save a sentient tree. No, seriously). Along the way we find out that the Tardis ‘doesn’t like her’, added by Moffat to this story after working out the ending in ‘Name’. But that leads to a contradiction: why does the Tardis take off at all with her onboard then? It could just say no (and save us this entire story to boot!) The Doctor still can’t work out who Clara is so there’s a rather clumsy confrontation in the Tardis where he admits she reminds him of ‘someone who dies’ and she reacts to being compared to a ghost as if her boyfriend has compared her to an ex. It’s all a bit weird and, like many a Moffat set of ‘clues’, absolutely worthless come season’s end, while slowing down future re-watchings. All stories across this half-year do it to some extent, but ‘Rings’ does it the most clumsily and with the least relevance to the plot. It doesn’t help that Jenna hasn’t got the ‘voice’ for Clara yet and has decided to randomly make her cockney this episode; it maybe wouldn’t be so obvious in any other story but in one that’s all about the importance of sound it really stands out. She’s not very good at it. The real trouble is, this is the episode they have to make Clara ‘ordinary’ after three stories now of her popping up in weird places with different names, but they make her too ordinary, too generic, too bland. I suspect this episode is the reason so many fans don’t like Clara (though she does get better, at least in my eyes). What’s annoying is that, in the draft script, Cross gets Clara right more than most: that scene of her being excited at first stepping onto an alien world originally ran much longer, as she keeps her eyes closed saying she wants to savour the moment and asks The Doctor if he has the power to make time stand still. His reply is rather beautiful and easily better than anything that made it to the episode while touching on the major themes of memories: ‘Nobody can do that, time moves in one direction, memory moves in another. But you will always remember’. There, see, put that bit in!

So, that’s The Doctor being irritating in the way he behaves round Clara and not saving the day in his usual way. Clara being irritating by being both a mystery and having the most patronising adult-to-child conversation in the history of the series (‘I know you’ll be fine’ she coos, oblivious to Merry’s distress). Merry herself is pretty irritating, more because of character than acting (she doesn’t do much except whine and sing flat). The Mummy God is irritating, purely because we don’t get a decent back story (how did it end up here when there are so many worlds to conquer? Why the hell does it need a choir every time it wakes up? Was the original plan to have them sing it lullabies and hope it went back to sleep?) ‘You’re not a God, you’re a parasite’ snarls the Doctor at one stage and you think oh good, we’re going to learn that they’re part of the Wiakkawakka alien tribe who go through the cosmos leeching off planets and other people’s lives because they’re too lazy to have one of their own. But nope, it’s just another of this story’s lines that don’t go anywhere. This is one of those lazy Gods that doesn’t do anything – including speak for the most part; we sort of belatedly hear it has the powers to kill, but it’s one of those monsters where we hear how terrible they are rather than actually see it. For all we know we’re on a planet made up of myths, legends and songs – the people here could all be lying and/or mistaken. After all, it is presented to us as a religious cult – and, generally speaking, in Who those spell trouble (see ‘The Abominable Snowman’  ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ ‘K9 and Company’ and a whole bunch more). We’re primed not to take this sort of story at face value, so suddenly expecting a Dr Who audience to believe every unlikely word is asking for trouble. At least it looks good though, the costue designers picking up on the theme of ‘sacrifice’ and loosely basing it on the ‘Tollund Man’, the 4^th century BC remains found whole in Denmark in 1950 that had been perfectly preserved by the peat bog he’d fallen into.  

Most of all, though, it’s the music. Good grief it’s bad. And there are sixteen whole minutes of it, which is either a record or pretty near to one for a modern Who episode. Did anyone ever consider that maybe the God woke up to eat people to prevent that awful singing? I’d rather listen to the tummy lurchings of a Slitheen that sit through this. I seriously began to wonder if the story arc was that Clara was a robot because there’s no way a Human would be able to sit through this concert without wincing/laughing/running away. Why is it so bad? Now I’ve heard actress Emilia Jones sing and she’s usually so much better than this (you might know her dad sing too – he’s Aled Jones, of ‘Walking On The Air’ fame, so Clara’s not the only character her after a brush with ‘Snowmen’ – and talking of pushy parenting I’m amazed he let his daughter go through this when he still talks about the childhood trauma and bullying that came after the fame that went with his success); she’s in all sorts of things nowadays – you’re bound to spot her as she actually looks very like Clara these days. In every way, though, it’s depressingly ordinary and Earthbound. We are firmly in the middle of that peculiar five year period when the Crouch End Chorus sang on everything. And I mean everything. Every Glastonbury, every new rock and roll album, they’d be there, enunciating poshly to rock and roll (they completely ruined a Kinks Kovers album with Ray Davies, the first Kinks anything I actually loathe and ruining a then-perfect fifty year track record). They just sound like bored Humans, not exotic aliens. If you want to make something sound like it comes from an alien planet then why use Human voices at all? It’s utterly the wrong thing to do. Then again the music they’re singing doesn’t do them any favours. The real reason though is the music itself, as they gave Murray Gold carte blanche to do whatever the heck he liked with the score and he decided to write as if he’d never heard music in his life before and had forgotten how it worked. Now I’m not the biggest fan of this era’s composer (maybe I’m a Cyberman? We’re both allergic to gold) – Murray has written some beautiful haunting scores in his time (the 10^th Doctor’s goodbye to Rose, Clara’s theme, the music from ‘Gridlock’) but this is easily his worst half hour. The tunes are leaden and lumpy, low on melody and harmony and sound as if they’ve been written by computer to be honest. With a script like this giving him carte blanche to really go for it he was always going to go overboard and it makes for another of those annoyingly over-saccharine schmaltzy Dr Who moments. We’re meant to be uplifted by this music, which is powerful enough to soothe a God. Only the effect it had on me was make me understand the Dalek need to exterminate things. It’s a truly low moment for Dr Who.
So that’s a schmaltzy tune that made me want to throw up, soon after Clara lectured a kid on the importance of courage that made me feel sick, alongside the weird romance of Clara’s parents and her tearful sacrifice at the end. The moment that made me want to vomit the most? When Clara gives that cheesy story about being lost and her mum telling her she’s never truly lost and how she remembers that moment every time she is (puh-leese, that’s no practical help when you’ve lost your parents is it, whether in a shop or in life). That line has so much saccharine it would be too sweet for the Kandyman! Just to ram it home we get a lecture on the importance of sacrifice. This is the Disney version of Dr Who, before the show was even on Disney - but late period Disney from the period when we were meant to cry sugary tears every other line rather than be frightened (‘Bambi’) or fiercely protective (‘Dumbo’). Dr Who used to be a tough science fiction series with the emphasis on science. This is a spoonful of sugar and no medicine: nobody learns anything, nobody grows, nothing really gets solved (the God will only come back again and Clara’s still as much of an enigma at the end of it as she was at the start). It’s a series that used to like making us go away and think about what we’d just seen and dwell on it, made in multiple layers for different audiences. My biggest problem with all of ‘The Rings Of Akhaten’ is the way it hits me over the head and demands I cry my eyes out over people I couldn’t care less about. Is there anything this series gets right?

Well, the unsung hero of the episode is monster designer Neil Gorton, who on a low budget and with deadlines looking pulls off the impossible by giving us multiple alien races, none of which are from stock. While none of them are destined to live long in the imagination or get a rematch the way the Daleks or Cybermen do, they’re made with a lot more love and care than anything else this episode. What’s even more remarkable is that the majority of them were created not in worktime but in his sparetime, as Neil enjoyed designing monsters too much to stop. It’s a good job he did as there’s no other way they would have been able to cobble together so many aliens together in one room (and what would have easily been a record were it not for ‘The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang’ a few months earlier). They all looknsuitbaly alien yet all look suitably different to anything we’ve seen before and frankly they missed a trick not giving us more time to look at them (and less time staring at CGI swirls which look the sort of weird ‘song visualiser’ videos you get on Youtube). There’s an injoke too: after years of Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy pilfering from the Dr Whoniverse we finally get our own back by showing a Hoovaloo (referred to in the guide itself simply as ‘a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue’, just before ‘humans’ are ‘mostly harmless’). If there’s one thing ‘Akhaten’ does well it’s giving us a visual feast and making us feel that we really are on a world where lots of aliens rub shoulders together. I just wish as much care had gone into the backstory of how this planet came to be. You see, the problem is you don’t engage with these aliens or learn about their history, you just goggle at them like we’re in some intergalactic zoo. Or watching Star Wars, Cross admitting the ‘cantina bar’ scene with lots of aliens was a big influence (Again: see lots of ‘New Adventures’ novels and ‘The End Of Time’). The thing is, though, every single time they try to do Dr Who like ‘Star Wars’ it goes wrong. That series is all about effects, budget and thrills and spills, that spends so much time throwing money at the screen (in all eras) were’ meant to ignore the fact that the stories are weak and make no sense. Dr Who (usually) throws an interesting story at us and lets us believe in it so much through words that we don’t notice how little money has been spent on it. Doing Star wars on a Who budget, even a bigger modern Who budget, is just asking for trouble. It’s all down to Gorton that its not worse than it already is.

Overall, though, that’s not enough to keep you watching through some of the most excruciating and wretched scenes in all of Who, at least audibly. Frankly if I’d been Clara and my first trip in time and space had been to an opera this bad I’d never have gone anywhere ever again (I’ve been to too many boring concerts like this where it felt as if my soul was being eaten too). The real ‘moral’ of this story is never work with little girls or space choirs. Nothing quite comes off in this episode, which feels oddly amateurish for new Who, the sort of thing we oldtimers were all secretly dreading ‘Rose’ might turn out to be, a childish version of an adult series that hasn’t got the first clue what being a child is really like. What’s weird is that, on paper, they should have been so good at this: the Dr Who proms are exemplary at giving children culture in a way that won’t bore the pants off them or patronise them. It’s not just children or even Whovians who took to these proms; even amongst the sort of people who watch every prom regardless of what it’s about they’re appreciated for their approach to classical music for a younger audience and the way the people stamping around in monster costumes don’t detract from the sheer joy of hearing an orchestra in person. But this isn’t one of ‘those’ proms – it’s the versions of ‘Peter and the Wolf’ told by a CBBC presenter with wavy jazz hands and wild staring eyes and over-enunciating every line, before praising you at home for sitting through it all. Never has Dr Who been more for children and never has it so badly misunderstood the child audience (who are way more grown-up than they’re ever given credit for and generally prefer things to be more adult where possible, one of the things Russell T Davies understood instinctively from his years doing children’s telly when he brought back Who, despite the worries of some BBC executives that kids wouldn’t get this stuff, the odd burping wheely bin and Slitheen fart gag aside Just check out the scene of Matt Smith barking at the motorbike stall holder to see how far we’ve fallen and how childish the series has become).

We also have a long tradition of music in Who going right back to Susan playing John Smith and the Common Room or the 1^st Doctor watching The Beatles on his space-time visualiser (see ‘The Chase’). It can work. But not done like this. It’s one of those stories that ends up serving no purpose and when it ends makes you ask ‘what was the point of that then?’ (as well as ‘where are the paracetamol? I have a headache’). There are interesting stories to tell about this world: how did these aliens get together? How did the locals get those three-line scars on their foreheads? Is it genetic or mutilation for their Gods? Does it hurt when they get them? Now there’s a far more interesting story than the one we got, which is basically ‘what happens if you forget your lines at the school concert and the headmaster gets mad?’ There are other more misguided Who stories out there, ones with worse acting and worse scripts, maybe even worse music (have you heard the score for ‘The Sea Devils’?!) But ‘Akhaten’ is particularly frustrating for me because there is very much an episode to be made about the importance of music to the universe and how it overcomes barriers of time, space and species. Given how badly this story turned out I fear we will never get one now (‘The Devil’s Chord’ sort of touches on this but didn’t do it as well as it might have done either, being more about what happens with the absence of music rather than the healing power of its presence). Ultimately ‘Rings Of Akhaten’ is out of tune, with its singers, its discussion of Clara’s backstory and its keeping with the rest of the Dr Who canon all. The fact there’s a blooming great clue that the 1st doctor once visited this with Susan in the ‘before times’ pre-’An Unearthly Child’ and there still hasn’t been a spin off novel or audio shows how unpopular with general fans this story was, even if a few (possibly tone deaf) fans seem to love it. There’s nothing else in the Dr Who canon like it. Most of the time I add what a shame’ but this episode wants me to add ‘thank God – any God, even the sleepy mummy God that might be about to kill me’. Our tip is to watch it with the sound on mute, because it looks amazing, even if the dialogue and especially the music is dreadful. For all my scorn, though, this is such a good idea and so different to the usual run of the mill DW story that it gets bonus points for bravery. I just wish it had got some for execution too so it could have been a true classic. Oh well, at least it didn’t feature The Spice Girls anywhere I suppose (now there’s something to wake up and anger the Gods!)…

POSITIVES +  The sheer amount of aliens! Pan-Bablovians (the Silurian looking dudes in grey – pan-babylonians were a German invention to explain away some tribes in Egypt that almost certainly didn’t exist but were accepted as fact for a time; perhaps they were aliens only visiting for a brief period?), the Lugaleracush (the one that looks like a Sycorax has been dipped in sand, then melted), a Lucanian (the ‘Roswell alien’ looking one, named after an ancient Italian tribe), a Eukanian (a pale pink Kraal that looks as if its been careless with its laundry reds but with a cuter face), a Terraberserker (lizards in monk habits with big wide shoulders), an Ultramancer (the Ice Warrior Lords if their helmets went all the way down their body), the hop pyleen back from ‘The End Of The World’ (the ones with round pockmarked faces that look like Maltesers) and the Hoovaloo (which looks like the Moxx of Balhoon crossed with a warthog and has big sticky out ears). We also see three un-named species: one is a ‘mass of energy’, one has four eyes and one has big tentacles a bit like the thing in ‘Spearhead In Space’.  

NEGATIVES – The most danger anyone seems to be in all episode is when a door nearly falls on The Doctor and he has to keep it upright with his sonic screwdriver for what seems like hours. Why? There’s a whole bunch of stuff lying around they could use to force the door open and how come the sonic, able to repel invading armies, can’t stop a door entirely? It feels as if it’s a moment put in to add some artificial jeopardy. Probably because it is.

BEST QUOTE: ‘I walked in universes where the laws of physics were devised by the mind of a madman. I've watched universes freeze and creations burn. I have seen things you wouldn't believe. I have lost things you will never understand. And I know things, secrets that must never be told and knowledge that must never be spoken. Knowledge that will make parasite gods blaze’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There were many low points in the covid lockdown: losing relatives, losing the ability to eat after a covid infection that forever changed my diet, the existential despair at the end of a chapter of civilisation, the burning anger at the officials who failed to live by the rules they set, the misery of seeing people suffering, losing hope that the world would ever get its act together and do something to rescue us all. The lowest ebb of all though? That was the lockdown singalong for ‘The Rings Of Akhaten’. Yes singalong, not tweetalong, you heard that right. What was, erm, not my favourite Dr Who story anyway became a quadzillion times worse when instead of the usual chatting to other fans The Dr Who Lockdown Choir performed Murray Gold’s song from the story over and over on a loop. As if that wasn’t bad enough there was a second video with Impressionist Jon Culshaw delivering the 11^th Doctor’s rambling speech in character as the 4^th Doctor and somehow manages to keep a straight face. Full marks to the technical team though as the audience singing from their own laptops in Tardis roundels is seriously impressive. The new version of the song was made available for downloading too. It wasn’t a hit in our universe but maybe on Akhaten it was top of the pops? As for the video it’s still available on the Dr Who Lockdown youtube channel. And in my worst nightmares I’s in my mind every time I shut my eyes...   

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