Planet Of The Dead: Ranking - 253

 Planet Of The Dead

(Easter Special, Dr 10, 11/4/2009, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writers: Gareth Roberts and Russell T Davies, director: James Strong)  

Rank: 253

''It looks like the 200 bus failed to turn up again, wonder what planet it's ended up on this time? I would get the time-travel bus but chances are three will turn up at once again and then detour me to blooming Skaro. Oh here it is - a single universe-explorer-master please...'

Nowadays DW can be off the air for a year or more and nobody thinks twice about it, but the announcement that for 2009 we were getting four specials spread throughout the year up to Christmas rather than the usual 13 part series was met with horror by us fans who remembered the 18 month hiatus in the mid-80s that led to a full cancellation by the late 80s. Would the time off air kill our favourite show just when it was at the peak of its popularity? Would the quality drop? Thankfully not in either case, but the first of these specials - billed as the first ever Easter special, though in the olden days DW stories used to run through the Easter period most years - didn't help much in either respect. It also hinted at why we got that break when we did. Russell T Davies was preparing to hand over running the show to Steven Moffat and David Tennant was making way for Matt Smith and the whole story has the feel of one that got overlooked in the shuffle. Whisper it quietly, but don't you think it looks a bit tired? Still packed full with strong ideas and great lines but going through the motions a bit? We'd had worse episodes since the Who revival certainly, but they tended to fall apart because they were trying something bold, new different - and wrong. 'Planet' feels like lots of other episodes cobbled together. David Tennant has lost his usual bounce and is clearly missing Catherine Tate as much as his character misses Donna. The writing is as close to numbers as two of the series' most inventive and talented writers can get. This week's monster, The Tritovore, feels like a rummage through the costume box for leftovers (the Vespiform, with hints of Hath) rather than a fully fleshed out creation. Even the music and direction fall a bit flat. Meanwhile the one big new addition, one-shot companion Lady Christina De Souza turned down by the Doctor for full-time travel because she's well dodgy (so the Doctor finally learnt after Turlough not to open the Tardis doors to just anyone then?), is irritatingly smug throughout. Given how similar she is to plans for Andrew Cartmel's plans for a post-Ace companion in the 1990 series that never was, maybe we dodged a bullet there. Goodness knows what she'd have done if she'd become a full companion - nicked something off the Bowie base and called The Master a right geezer, or something like that probably.All this is a shame because the bits of this special that work really stand out. The sight of an everyday London bus in the desert sands of an alien world is prime DW, merging the ordinary and the extraordinary, even if it caused horrific problems on set when the bus got damaged in transit (causing a quick re-write about it being damaged by its journey). RTD often shines when writing for crowds of contrasting strangers and while these Humans aren't perhaps as well drawn as the ones on 'Midnight' he still possesses of sketching in a person in a handful of sentences that makes them seem like they've lived an entire life before we meet them. had this story been made years earlier when everyone was still excited and with Rose, Martha or Donna as the companion this story could still have been a real favourite. Like many an Easter present, though, it ends up feeling a bit hollow, its treats buried away under too many layers of sugar.

Positives + This story was based on Gareth Roberts' New Adventures story 'The Highest Science', which is one of the range's best. All the good bits of this story come from there, tweaked, although in the earlier version the bus is a strain, the companion is Bernice Summerfield (that Cartmel companion, whose basically an upgraded Christina) and the baddies are the Chenolians, a far more interesting group of mutant and presumably teenage alien tortoises with X-ray vision who were sadly too expensive to reproduce on screen. This episode has more problems than most, but none of them are in the book, just in the way the book had to be translated to television.

Negatives - Michelle Ryan was a big name at the time after some high profile roles in Eastenders, The Bionic Woman and the ever under-rated Merlin (she plays a witch in at least 1 of these series, possibly 2). After being in everything at once her career crashed and burned after this, much like the London bus when she left Britain to make a name for herself in Hollywood and burnt most of her bridges. It's not that she's bad (her dialogue and character are a bigger problem than her acting) but she plays Christina with very broad strokes and practically winks at the camera when she's up to something, which is out of place when everyone else is aiming for the feel of a rugged kitchen sink drama.

The Two Doctors: Ranking - 254

  The Two Doctors

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri and Dr 2 with Jamie, 16/2/1985-2/3/1985,  producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Peter Moffat)  

Rank: 254

''Food glorious food, tender Terranians and custard! Wait, why is that baked potato alien shooting at me?!'

This story isn't bad by any means, but it wastes a lot of the things that could have made it really special. Bob Holmes is back writing for Dr Who again at last after six years away...a story that's quite unlike his usual style. We get the return of the 2nd Doctor!...Who after spending episode 1 totally nailing the part he's only played twice in 16 years then has to spend most of the story out of character as a 'part Androgum'. He's back with Jamie...who turns savage partway through and barely says a word. Bob Holmes writes for his most famous creations The Sontarons for only the second time...under heavy protest at having to have a monster at all, so they might as well not be here too (also, how come the Androgums don't at least try to have a nibble if they like Human flesh so much? I mean, Humans don't look tasty but the Sontarons resemble baked potatoes on legs). There's a great and nuanced cast headed by John Stratton and Jacqueline Pearce (a Blake's 7 baddy stronger than any humanoid we see in Who, except perhaps Roger Delgado's Master) ...Who are given a script that all but encourages over-acting and throws subtlety out the window. We get a lot of location filming in Spain...But for all the difference it makes to the script it could have been filmed in Croydon (the original plan, to film in New Orleans, made a lot more sense, but the budget got cut and the script re-worked at the last minute). Like many a Bob Holmes story, this one is based around one of the bees in his bonnet, but his conversion to vegetarianism doesn't lend itself to a DW story as well as his pet peeves bureaucrats and tax inspectors. The idea of what would happen if Humans were seen as nothing special and just another group in the food chain by an alien species gives the Androgums a whole new clever reason for coming to Earth, but it also makes for a really gruesome little story where everyone wants to kill everyone else, most of the time in sets resembling giant kitchens with slabs of meat hanging from hooks. Even the Doctor gets in on the act, killing Shockeye with cyanide - it's hard to imagine another story where he would even think of doing that, even if it is in self defence while badly injured. I can just about imagine a 'normal' 6th Dr story in this setting, as its not that far removed from the 'video nasty' theme of 'Vengeance on Varos' which worked really well and gave Colin Baker a chance to get on his high horse a lot, the moral outrage his doctor does so well. But the 2nd Dr is completely wrong for this sort of story - a cuddlier, funnier yet underneath it all a subtler and often a more manipulative Dr - is just the wrong setting for him to come alive. This Dr quickly becomes a passenger caught up in circumstances and that's something he never was in the 1960s (or indeed till Peter Davison came along). This is one of the grimmest stories DW ever did, with the two Tardis crews eating or being eaten or being converted or badly injured, yet unlike the other grim DW stories (mostly the Eric Saward war epics) there's a lot of humour here too, with a lot of funny lines and philosophising between the action scenes that's pretty much unique to this series. Though there are lots of good moments and some great ones, I'm not convinced it works - this is the sort of story that will tell you off for eating meat, then linger on every gruesome detail of the cast about to be skinned alive and eaten, then throws in a joke to make you laugh. Definitely not one to watch over dinner in other words; you need strong stomach and a wicked sense of humour to get the most out of this one, for all the many things it gets right.

Positives + The best bits by far are the all-too brief interactions between the two Doctors and two companions. Colin Baker and Patrick Troughton were old friends (Colin was once room-mates with Pat's son David) and their affection and easy chemistry lights up the screen, though their banter is spicy and icy even for a multi-Dr story. It's impressive how completely Pat Troughton revives his character and the start in black and white could easily be taken for a 1960s episode give or take the odd wrinkle. Jamie and Peri make a great double-act too and its interesting to see how despite being two very different characters from entirely different centuries they both end up resembling each other: loyal, brave, but slightly clueless. The downside is hat it takes so much of the plot before they meet and then how quickly afterwards the 2nd Dr gets converted into an Androgum, complete with orange eyebrows.

Negatives -This is such an oddly plotted story for anyone, but particularly by one of the most prolific DW writers and one-time script editor, a story that gives you horrible while you're still laughing from the previous scene and conversely something funny while you're still reeling in horror. Combining the two is what DW stand out from its peers, but its never been done quite as black and white as this before. Take Oscar, the pretentious insect collector - an obvious bit of comic relief with his penchant for quoting Shakespeare at inopportune moments and ideas above his station. He's the sort of character who always survives to the end then tells the authority figure what really happened while they don't believe a word of it. Here even he dies, a quite gruesome and gratuitous death, while still in character and coming up with pretentious quotes. The point being made is that, for all his high culture, to Shockeye he's just another piece of meat, but how are we meant to respond to that scene? Laugh or cry?

The Lazarus Experiment: Ranking - 255

    The Lazarus Experiment

(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 5/5/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Stephen Greenhorn, director: Richard Clark)  

Rank: 255

''You can't go out the house looking like that. With that CGI face. Not until you're older...'

Dr Who is a programme that has risen from the dead so many times across it’s sixty years Every time it’s critics have tried to bury it enough people have rallied around it to make it survive in some form, even when it’s not been on television. It’s a comforting thought now, what with the ratings in perpetual collapse and rumours of a Mickey Mouse deal with Disney only lasting until 2025, that this is a programme they’ve been trying to kill since it’s first story and yet it still lives on reborn, just with a new CGI-reconfigurated face. Over sixty years you’re going to have a few running themes going through a series and one theme that crops up a lot in its 20^th century run is the idea of immortality and the natural cut-off point for Human life at roughly four score and ten compared to the Doctor’s ability to regenerate and change. For timelords long life is a form of power and control, with a regenerational cycle of thirteen lives that they don’t ever seem to do much with, apart from the Doctor, who actively turns down the chance of immortality in stories like ‘The Five Doctors’ and ‘Enlightenment’ because he knows, to quote from ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ that it isn’t the years that matter but what you do with them that counts. It’s one of the last regular features of the ‘old’ series to turn up in the new series, redressed and remade for a modern audience and rather fitting for a series that had itself risen from the dead to be more popular than it had been in decades.IT’s also one of those episodes that seems to pretty split down the middle depending how old you were when it went out. If you’re young then it’s the first time you ever came across a thrilling concept, in which one man’s arrogance to extend his life-form leaves him as a husk of his former self, a monster that’s devolved rather than evolved and turned him into everything he once hated. If you’re the sort of fan who was old enough to have seen this series before then it was a pale mismash of past stories that did it better and deeper, like ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ and anything involving Eternals or the Celestial Toymaker. Everyone agreed that the CGI monster was a bit rubbish though and the story soon got replaced in fans’ affections by bigger brighter stories.

Is it worth reviving and seeing again though? Well, the central idea is a good one that asks questions of its audience and it’s at its barest here, so you don’t get distracted by any extra sub-plots like The Black and White Guardians or The Sisterhood of Karn keeping a candle alight in a cupboard. Would you like to live forever if you had to be genetically modified to spend part of your time as a scary monster? And does a timelord, who can live foreverish barring accidents and timewars, have the right to sit in judgement over someone who wants to live longer? (does the fact that the Doctor wears himself out each time doing good make him more deserving of long life, precisely because he takes risks that kill him every so often?) Where does the line between mankind striving for scientific perfection and being God, playing with laws of nature he doesn’t understand, lie? Should we sympathise when lazarus is hoisted on his own Cathedral-shaped petard, applaud him for trying to push the barriers or science or condemn him for putting people in harm’s way due to his own personal quest for a longer life? They say that youth is wasted on the young and that you only really know what to do with all that excess energy when you’re too old, tired and beaten up by life to have it anymore. If, as we keep on saying, that Dr Who started as a debate between generations then this is the ultimate extension of that and a plot so obvious it’s amazing they didn’t do it in the 1960s: a man who has the arrogance of changing from one generation to another, of actually being reborn with the gained wisdom of one age and the body of another. It’s the arrogance too of a generation who insist on living even while their youngsters are crowded out (alas the script doesn’t explore the ramifications of this experiment but they’re huge if it had worked: the Earth is already overcrowded, what would happen if the elderly never died and competed with the young for the same resources. Would the elder generation ever retire? Would the young be on minimum wage for decades? How would living amongst one ‘people’ when you were born with the angst another affect you? And I thought I was a curmudgeonly millennial!) The story skips those questions sadly but it does ask if is it a blessing that one of our greatest scientific minds has got his youthful zest back? Or is it a curse that he’s only doing it for selfish reasons and is hardly the sort of person who deserves long life, a monster long before he steps into his machine and precisely the sort of person who would never learn from his mistakes no matter how many trips back into youth he had? For, like many of the best Who stories, ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ is also about what life is really for, to grow and learn from and adapt: there’s no point being granted extra life if you’re just going to waste it all over again. It's the sort of big, sweeping existential topic this series has always excelled at, by taking it out of the realms of philosophical pondering and putting a real (well, CGI in this case) face to it and it’s never been done in Who in quite this bare-bones way before. Read the script and this is quite a moving story (if ever a modern Who needed a Target novelisation it’s this one, not flipping Eaters of Light or Robot of Sherwood). We needed another story about evolution and progress, like ‘Ghost Light’ but one that was actually comprehensible this time; alas ‘Lazarus’ goes the other way and it far too bare-bones to be interesting. 

There are too…problems with how this ended up on screen. It’s nicely poetic that most people missed the theme about getting younger without learning from your mistakes because they were too busy laughing at the hideous CGI effects monster which dominates this story, which replaces the rubber suits of old that people used to laugh at decades before. It’s truly awful, a candidate for the worst special effect of the 21^st century as of time of writing (I mean, the Devil in ‘The Impossible Planet’s not great either and David Walliams in ‘The God Complex’ is clearly not real and The Reapers in ‘Father’s Day’ and Krillitane in ‘The School Reunion’ are both generic monsters that are the weakest link of their respective stories, but none are quite as jarring as this). It’s as laughable in its own way as the Ergon or Myrka in the dim and distant past – worse, perhaps, because it doesn’t even look like a man in a suit whose trying but a fake being made by a computer code that couldn’t care less. Russell asked the Mill effects department to come up with something ‘cumbersome yet lithe’, one of his more confusing directions, and I guess he got one: this is a lumbering ungainly bulky type of monster with sudden bursts of unconvincing speed that just seem wrong to the eyes (nobody with those sort of legs and large bottom should be moving quickly). So far the new series has been using its effects sparingly, learning from the first story in production ‘Aliens Of London’ that less was more with the monsters only in a few scenes so you were too distracted to spot all the mistakes, that only had a few features to build and that CGI looked more convincing when monsters were standing still and not walking. Then along comes ‘Lazarus’ which spends a good half hour with a CGI scorpion running round some unconvincing sets and looking like it’s going to a fancy dress ball with a human mask. It’s a mask that doesn’t look remotely like Mark Gatiss, one of the members of the production team for whom there’d be oodles of photographs to use (and Mark’s the kind of actor wh’d come in on all his off days just to help the project along; after all he spent three hours in the makeup chair every day to play Lazarus’ older form, he could probably have spared an hour for some scale model photos). All that hard work on the script and it goes out the window the minute Professor Lazarus becomes a bug that clearly isn’t there, just like the old days. Oh Dr Who, you never learn do you?  

‘Lazarus’ wouldn’t be the first Who script to be scuppered by a bad effect though and it’s not the only thing that goes wrong in this story, which feels as if it’s going to be better than it is and sets up a lot of cheques it just can’t cash, the philosophy giving way to the Doctor running around madly pointing his sonic screwdriver at things. Usually when stories do that I blame the writer for either writing in a hurry or trying to do the bare essentials in order to get paid but I have a lot of sympathies with writer Stephen Greenhorn. More of a dramatist by trade, he’d worked with Julie Gardner on a series named ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ in which Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’ arose from the dead to be told in a more ‘modern’ way, from a slightly different perspective (Rochester’s wife, the one hidden in the attic). Julie, having only been hired to make one series of modern Who, had set it up as future work before hastily coming back to work on series two and Greenhorn paid her lots of compliments about how good the revival was and what a big of the original show he was (Julie, who’d taken some convincing from Russell T Davies that a generation of people had secretly grown up as Whovians, was shocked to find just how many people she’d worked with seemed to love it). Greenhorn was a natural to be asked to write for the series and was as big a fan as any who worked on the show, bursting with ideas. However one downside with the way Who was being made in the 2000s compared to 19something was the way Russell came up with all the ideas himself, farming them out to the nearest available writer. Greenhorn is a writer whose good at realism, Russell-like in his ability to make characters feel real and flawed yet likeable only Russell had taken most of those story slots for himself: he asked Greenhorn to write something like a comic, big and bold and bright involving a mad scientist and super-powers (‘Dr Octopus’ was one of the names mentioned). Some fans, who grew up on Who comics, would have jumped and run with that but Greenhorn was confused. He did however come up with the basic story with a few added sub-plots to make it more interesting, with Lazarus’ experiment causing The Thames barrier to flood and lower the age of Londoners even while one man was extending his and whether that was ever a fair compromise: Russell sheepishly admitted that he’d already written the Thames flood barrier into a  then-unbroadcast script hat became ‘The Runaway Bride’. Next Greenhorn tried to go down the route of ‘The Fly’ with a humble insect (whatever was most CGI-friendly) that had got into the Lazarus machine with its creator; Russell sheepishly told him that a lot of that year’s ‘Torchwood’ had played around with gigantic insects already. The writer was then sent away and asked to include two new elements Russell had been working on: Martha’s family and a coda with a mysterious Harold Saxon who was going to turn up in the series finale. Greenhorn went ahead with his script, latching onto the Biblical themes of rising from the dead and setting up the big denouement in St Paul’s Cathedral, recognising it as a spirit of human perseverance (somehow escaping any direct hits from bombs in World War 2) and  remembering it from ‘The Invasion’ where an army of Cybermen matched past it. St Paul’s were contacted and only too happy to work with the production team (after all, a fair percentage of their visitors are curious Dr Who fans re-creating the Cyber-invasion) and Greenhorn wrote an intricately woven plot about Christopher Wren’s design being influenced by the Doctor, who knew he might need it one day to see off such a life-form as a giant scorpion. Only at the absolute eleventh minute someone from St Paul’s finally read the script and was horrified to read that the finale involved a monster falling from the balcony, fearing that some of the public might try to re-create it for real. So they axed it, with barely days to re-write the script while the production team hastily rang around other Cathedrals in London (Southwark was, apparently, right at the bottom of the lost otherwise they’d have been totally screwed).

A lot of people who missed the opening credits just assumed it was a Mark Gatiss script. It had that feel about it: a larger than life character in a straightforward rehash of Dr Who’s  biggest source material ‘Quatermass’ (specifically the third film ‘The Quatermass Experiment’ – note the similar title and a similar finale in Westminster Abbey; Gatiss had just starred in a live re-make of the long wiped but influential original alongside a pre-Who David Tennant. The parts in this story not nicked from that series come from ‘Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde’ ‘The Fly’ Russell’s own ‘The End Of The World’ where Cassandra ‘the last human’ extends her lifespan to literal breaking point and ‘Star Trek: Next Generation’ episode ‘Genesis’ in which a literal bug gets into the teleporter machine; unusual to have ‘our’ show ripping off ‘their’ show for a change). Oh and the fact that Gatiss is in it, with the juicy part of Professor Lazarus himself. Actually Gatiss was too busy with other projects and never did have an episode in series three (it’s the only series up to the Chris Chibnall years of new Who that he didn’t write at least one script for, although ‘Victory Of The Daleks’ was written for series four and not made until series five) but it was a lifelong wish to actually be in a story in a series he’d loved since childhood. The production team had long been looking to make use of the writer-actor, a big name after ‘The League Of Gentleman’ and various horror one-offs, but wanted to give him a proper part rather than a cameo: Lazarus seemed made for him on paper, the sort of arrogant conceited despicable Humans he’d made his name playing - most of Gatiss’ best known parts are grotesques, eccentrics who have been distorted from nicely batty to perverse and wicked. But he’s not quite right for the part: Lazarus needs to be a wisened old man with more money at his fingertips than sense and arrogance to keep his gain for himself still powerful and charismatic even  on his deathbed, an Elon Musk or Steve Jobs in old age, not the feeble yet gloating 73 year old, the best the prosthetics can manage (as unconvincing as it always seems to be when Who tries to age actors, in any era) and he needs to turn back into a boy genius, not Gatiss’ middle-age (he was forty during filming: not old exactly but the experiment would have more impact if he’s gained 50,60,70 years of life not a mere 30. Lazaruis is exactly the sort of man who’d keep twiddling knobs until he was a teenager again. I mean, talk about a mid-life crisis!) He’s got where he’s got out of false promises and charm, getting money out of people he’s promised to help but secretly despises, like the Delgado Master: everything should be glowering under the surface. Instead Gatiss plays him as an early version of Mycroft Holmes from the series he co-wrote with Steven Moffat about his brother ‘Sherlock’ (though in Mycroft’s eyes it’s clearly a series about him): an arrogant pompous brainy man who doesn’t do anything with his brains except look down on other people. Lazarus as a character is too ordinary for Gatiss’ over-the-top rendition though: he’s not a psycho scientist like Dr Solon in ‘Morbius’ or one under duress like Professor Kettlewell in ‘Robot’ or Professor Watkins in ‘The Invasion’ and he’s not a corrupted misguided idealist like the lot in ‘The Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’. There’s not even any sign that he’s a scientific genius: it takes the Doctor pressing the right buttons to avoid an ‘obvious’ catastrophe and no mention of his past successes. He’s just arrogant as if that’s enough of a character trait to have caused everything else. A lot of this story relies on Lazarus being wicked beyond measure, using his experiment to cause harm, but most of the deaths he causes seems to be by accident. There’s a deliciously evil moment where Lazarus refuses to kiss his benefactor Lady Thaw, turning her down because she’s old to him now and he’s young and thinks he can do better, but it’s a the only truly cruel thing he does and the rest is mere preening: Gatiss plays the part as truly thoroughly evil, picking up the clue from the script that he’s a predatory monster (we’re still a few years away from the Jimmy Savile scandal becoming public knowledge but that’s what it feels like: the man with the charming smile known for eccentricity who sees everyone as a potential victim). But he goes overboard a little, adding bits that simply aren’t there on the page, perhaps because of all those interminable rewrites and, what with the character being so central to the plot, it rather falls apart because of this. Professor Lazarus would work better had he been either painted as a real monster, with a load of victims protesting outside at how he treated them, or left as a professor who was trying to do the right thing by mankind and got it wrong. Making him a bit vain and pompous is too in the middle.

All that might explain why ‘Lazarus’ feels as if it has a whacking big hole in the middle of it where the plot should have gone and why so much of it feels like vamping, filling in time between the big set pieces. As it turned out on screen it’s really oddly paced, with an opening section with Professor Lazarus himself that feels rushed, with little back story and the whacking coincidence that he just happens to have hired Martha’s sister for the pr in the exact same 24 hour period (on Earth at least) that Martha was left stranded on the moon and met the Doctor – and yet never told her (is Martha's family unlucky or what? Her 'cousin', also played by Freema Agyeman, was killed on-screen just a few episodes ago too). Just to rub it in Martha’s mum even leaves her a cryptic message right at the same time the Tardis brings Martha home. We don’t know really knows why Lazarus is trying to live longer or what his motives are: the first five are nicely ambiguous about whether this is a mere vanity project (as it proves to be) or whether Lazarus is genuinely trying to help out his fellow man (a lie he tells his financial backers). Even Lazarus seems confused as to what he really wants: he’s guarded enough to not give any of his science away but vain enough to call a giant press conference in a pricey part of London in front of all the press; equally he seems arrogantly sure his experiment will work yet hasn’t done the usual baddy-in-Who thing and tested it out on a protesting underling first (he’s going to look mighty stupid if he’s called all those newspaper people there and it doesn’t work, but I guess that’s in keeping with his arrogance too). There’s a moment, halfway through the story, where the plot seems to end: the Doctor’s talked to Lazarus and shown him the error of his ways and Lazarus vows revenge, only for him to leg it to the Cathedral next door and wait for the Doctor and Martha to find him all over again, a sign of something major going missing from the story. They should have used some of that extra time to better set u the opening – or indeed the ending, which is one of the crassest copouts of all Dr Whos: the Doctor plays Beethoven really loudly on Southwark Cathedral’s organ really loudly and makes the monster fall to his death. Of all the ways to go in Dr Who death by Beethoven must be one of the stupidest (I mean, it’s not even Clementi, the composer who can kill at ten paces with a single trill).Well, Russell T did ask Greenhorn for a comic strip story I suppose. The story, at least on screen after bits were taken out, desperately needs some sub-plots too: it seems to be a rule of thumb that my least favourite Who stories can be summed up in a single sentence and ‘scientist wants to live longer but his experiment turns him into a scorpion’ is one of the most basic and silliest summaries.

One theme that’s sort of half there and was probably lost when the rewrites happened is the theme of religion and worth. ‘Lazarus’ is such an apt name for a Professor if not quite coming back from the dead then at least going back in time (so much so you’d think it would be all the media watching on would comment on) and is taken wholesale from the Bible. Jesus revives a goodly faithful man four days after he died, to the point where he interacts with Jesus’ followers and lives another long and happy life as a convert. It’s never quite stated (nothing in the Bible is ever quite stated) but the hint is that he was chosen as Jesus’ ‘miracle’ and proof of being the son of God because Lazarus was a good man: the Earth benefitted from him walking on it. The thing is though: had Lazarus’ experiment worked and not turned him into a scorpion it would have been open season for all of Humans to use. Longer life sounds like a gift but it wouldn’t solve any of our problems. It would be, well, playing God/Jesus to only give it to a few ‘deserving’ types and whose to say who the deserving people would be? The only fair thing to do is to give it to everyone – and that includes the people who deserve it. Lazarus symbolically devolves rather than evolves, because man isn’t meant to go any higher than this. The fact the story ends in a Cathedral, with Lazarus defeated with the sounds of sacral music, is a sort of judgement on high that mankind isn’t ready for such a decision. Instead it gets a bit lost in the final edit: it’s simply music that kills the monster. Not his arrogance, not his unsuitability, just a timelord improvising quickly. And that’s a shame: ‘Lazarus’ might look half-hearted and silly but it would have helped the story a lot if it had been given a suitable ending that actually answered some of the bigger questions at the heart of it.

Talking of silly: this is Dr Who, science fiction, where a lot of things aren’t real. We fans aren’t daft, we know enough to give a show artistic license when it’s trying to tell a moral story or entertain us. However sometimes the science in a story can be so whacking wrong that it pulls you out of what a story is trying to say. This is one of those times. Just supposing that the Lazarus machine was real and actually could re-set your DNA, accidentally triggering some benign ‘junk’ DNA that all of us carry around in our bodies even though as Humans we no longer need it. Humans don't turn into primeval monsters if you mess around with their genes, honest - in reality doing what he's doing Professor Lazarus would lose a few IQ points or more likely collapse and die. Even if it did work Lazarus would be a monkey. He’d maybe grow a tail, perhaps lose his opposable thumbs, he’s certainly lose a lot of his brain capacity and would probably have a hankering for bananas. Unless a future story comes along to contradict it no Human, in the real world or Whoniverse both, has ever descended from a Scorpion (unless this is an astrological machine that devolves people into their birth chart and Lazarus is a triple Scorpion and had another professor had come up with the idea London would be surrounded by a flying pair of scales, a centaur or a deadly Virgin. It might explain what The Macra and Fish people are: a bunch of snappy Cancerians and dance-loving Pisceans. No? Alright, please yourselves). I also seriously doubt that you can turn your bodyclock back with ‘soundwaves’ of all things too: it’s almost as if they’ve written the finale in a Cathedral with a whacking great organ and need an excuse to use it. Nobody ever quite explains properly how the machine works either – goodness knows there’s a lot of running around that could have been cut down for a full explanation – as if even the Dr Who team are embarrassed by how wobbly the science is this week. Something tells me that science wasn’t Greenhorn’s best subject at school (perhaps this story is a subconscious response to being made to play God and dissecting inects?)      
There are only two parts not related to this main plot. One is Martha’s family. Compared to, say, Rose, Donna and Rory they don’t get nearly enough screen time – Martha was only a companion for a single year after all - and only turn up in three stories (and then not all of them); this is by far their longest amount of screentime and it’s where Greenhorn shines. Martha’s relationship with them is refreshingly spiky and honest. She’s the ‘responsible’ one in the family, the one trying to make the most of her life with a doctor’s degree and the others are fed up of her turning down social invitations to concentrate in her studies. They’re most surprised to see her with a bloke, though far less surprised when he turns out to be a science geek they think she met on her course. Tish, her sister, is the opposite of Martha: she’s bubbly and sociable and way more emotional, gloating at her big career opportunity that’s made her the ‘chosen one’ in the family that can step out of her sister’s shadow: the big emotionally charged scene in this story isn’t the one where the monster falls to the strain of organ pipes but where Martha has to tell her sister her job’s a fake and the famous professor whose been flirting with her and making her feel special is a predatory monster, in more ways than one. They’re both keen to please their mum Francine, who is one of life’s natural critical: nothing is ever enough and there’s always something to find fault with. Even her daughter training to be a Doctor doesn’t impress her and she’s the sort of mum who secretly thinks she could have done better given a similar break in life (in a parallel universe she’s a natural Dr Who fan!) Actress Adjoa Andoh was hired at Russell T’s insistence, after he admired her work as Sister Jatt, one of the cat nurses in ‘New Earth’ and he wanted to see her face: both are very ‘catty’ parts, but in impressively different ways. Younger brother Leo seems to be more of a spare part, there apparently just for the extra publicity of having radio 1 DJ Reggie Yates in the show, but he’s recognisable too as the peacemaker and glue that’s used to holding this family together recovered, now off doing his own thing and trying to keep out of family rows. This is the sort of family Who does so well in that they feel real, the sort of people you see rolling their eyes at the other three in public when they think no one else is looking, which in itself neatly mirrors the main plot theme of arrogance and assuming you know best. The other part, though, really doesn’t work: Russell T throws in so many references to Harold Saxon it’s not funny. Like many a series arc Russell only cme up with it near the end when writing the finale, then went back to sprinkle’ clues’ across different scripts: It’s a sign, perhaps, of how little is going on inside this script that so many were stuffed here compared to the others. Lazaru, needless to say, supports Saxon with a mysterious promise of money going both ways to the crooked prime minister. Saxon is mentioned by name by three characters: Lady Thaw, Francine and Lazarus himself. Plus Lazarus’ lab is laid out in the same circular way as Saxon’s ring in ‘The Sound Of Drums’ so that quick-eyed viewers can spot it at once (I confess I didn’t spot this till several re-watchings later).All very clever and all, but then Russell ignores these clues for multiple episodes, with the added twist that Francine’s been warned that the Doctor’s trouble and Martha should stay away, that’s meant to feel like a big ending but isn’t (not that shocking: I mean, her two daughters have just been attacked by a giant CGI scorpion).

Overall, then, ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ is a mess that few people rate very highly, a story recycled from too many other ideas that’s never sensibly seen to fruition that throws away the promise the idea had in favour of running around from unrealistic CGI monsters: the very worst of Who all in one handy place to be skipped on your episode re-runs. However this is more one of those unfortunate stories that got torpedoed by circumstances rather than a story that wasn’t worth trying and was never going to work in a month of Palm Sundays. There’s a good story in here somewhere about man’s greed and how some of the people who get furthest in society are the least deserving: had they spent more time turning the Human Lazarus into a monster and less time on the unconvincing CGI monster this story would have been a lot better. Had they included something to distract us from all the running around and let Greenhorn do the character dialogue he’s best at (see his other script ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ for a better example of a character-led story with the plot in the background) then it could, should have worked. Had this story been given to a different qwriter altogether, with Greenhorn asked to come up with his own ideas, we might have got two great stories for the price of one. There are lots of reasons to think that, in some parallel series three somewhere, children still talk in awe about this episode and are haunted by the super convincing  CGI monkey with Lazarus’ face whenever they go to sleep. But of course we can’t go back in time – that’s the whole moral of the story after all – and we have to take this story as it is, one of those new Who stories where everything seemed to go wrong and where nobody comes out of it well. If you were young enough to never see Dr Who turn a humanoid into a monster before your eyes (yes, amazingly new Who hadn’t done this by 2007: monsters were all from outer space oer mad Humans) and had never seen a scifi story ask deep questions about the concept of aging and the idea that one lifetime will never ever be enough to do everything you want to do then this story was enough to blow your tiny little mind, even with fake CGI monsters; for those of us who’d lived too long and were jaded by the concept and then watched it being done this badly most of us simply thought ‘life’s too short for this nonsense’ and went back to sleep.

POSITIVES + Well, almost everyone. Martha is, for me, the great unsung companion of the revival, proving that there was life after Rose Tyler without having to carbon copy her, and Freema sells every line here, even the bad ones, with lots of extra screen time where the plot would normally be so that we get to know both her and how she turned out the way she did from her family. Her chemistry with David Tennant is more than up to Billie Piper's and their scenes together in this story are some of their best.  Never have you wanted a monster to shut up more just so they can get more screen time together. Three scenes really sell this story though: the one where the Tardis materialises in her flat and she’s deeply embarrassed at her crush seeing her underwear drying, never expecting to meet a boy and bring him back home, sort of, when she left for work that day (the Doctor, characteristically, doesn’t notice and couldn’t care less), the middle where she has to sympathetically tell her sister of her bad romance choice even though she knows it weill break her heart and see Martha turned into a scapegoat ‘monster’ (Clearly something that happens a lot with Tish) and the finale where Martha puts her foot down and asks to be a full-time companion, not a trainee student 9she more than proves her worth this story after all, acting as ‘bait’ for the monster and getting people to safety: two of the biggest things on the ‘companion tickbox’ sheet the Doctor seems to carry around in his head. According to ‘Totally Dr Who’s companion academy if nothing else). She also gets the best line in the story: ‘I heard an explosion and knew it would be you, Doctor’.

NEGATIVES – Not only does this feel like a recycled script but the sets and props are recycled to, a give away that this is the ‘cost saving’ episode of the series. That’s a tweaked version of The Doctor’s tuxedo from ‘The Age Of Steel’, Lazarus’ scientific prop is the elevator from ‘The Impossible Planet’ and we’ve been in this location a few times too,  so that even by series three it looked old hat: Lazarus’ experiment is filmed in a combination of Cardiff Museum, The Senedd building used by the Welsh Parliament and St William’s House in Cardiff. To be fair the scenes shot in Southwark Cathedral (the outside) or Wels Cathedral (most of the inside) look gorgeous and make good use of the fact it’s being filmed in a ‘set’ far bigger than Who can usually manage. Those are some particularly impressive pipes. And the church organ’s not bad either. The ‘tower’ is the best set in the episode too: it feels like a natural extension of the cathedral itself rather than a mock-up created in a TV studio.  

BEST QUOTE: ‘Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty. It's not the time that matters, it's the person’.

Previous ‘Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks’ next ‘42’

Last Christmas: Ranking - 256

   Last Christmas

(Christmas Special, Dr 12 with Clara, 25/12/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Paul Wilmshurst)  

Rank: 256

''This episode makes all the characters feel as if they're losing their sanity' 

'Well, no wonder it stars Sanity Claus then!' 

If ever there was a moment when Dr Who jumped a shark, or at any rate dodged a reindeer, it was ‘Last Christmas’, another episode in which the series tries to cash in on the fame of a big name celebrity famous worldwide that everyone knows without really having much of a story to go with it. And that person is of course…Father Christmas. Ho ho and indeed ho! If you weren’t there the point in time when we got the trailer for this festive special at the end of 'Death In Heaven' then, well, you missed quite a moment, one where every fan went ‘what the?’ in unison and one of those bits of television where everyone remembers where they were when they first saw it (mostly sitting in stunned silence at the fact they’d had the audacity to turn the dead Brigadier into a Cyberman). We were still digesting an episode that was hugely emotional (if not always in a way it was supposed to be), a gruesome tale where every spirit in the afterlife feels the pain of what happens to their body, and figuring that this was Dr Who was now, a very adult series designed to shock you, when in comes Nick Frost dressed as Santa Claus at the North Pole chasing alien crabs. It was, for us Whovians, akin to the shock of Watergate, 9/11 or indeed finding out that (childhood-ending spoilers) Father Christmas doesn’t really exist. The response of most of the fanbase was mostly unprintable but mostly centred around the idea that Steven Moffat had been on the eggnog a few months early and that the strain of writing the Christmas specials in early Summer, in time to get them made on time (something he always admitted was hard work) had ended up frazzling his brain.

A hallucination maybe? A red herring? A disguise? Except no: the 'promise' made to us: this isn't a cheat, he's not an alien or a robot and we really are at the North Pole. Speculations abounded for the next seven weeks, ranging from holograms to The Master having a really bad day at the outfitters, but no: as it turned out the answer is still quite a lot of a cheat but against all the odds (and indeed common sense) it does end up being more satisfying than you might think. Not enough to be a classic or anything, but better than we feared it would be at the time, making sense in a very confusing Steven Moffat type way. For (major spoilers) - we really are at the North Pole and everyone at the latest DW base did indeed experience Santa. Only it’s an invasion by a race known as the Kantofarri, crabs that latch onto your face and feed off you in a rather kind and benign way, by lowering your pain receptors and sending you into a huge deep sleep. Only your subconscious keeps you fighting and who are you going to turn to as a hallucination for help as a hero to keep you safe, someone that deep down you still believe in and trust, especially when it’s Christmas time?

Well, for most fans of course that would be the Doctor, but as events in this dream-within-a-dream story show he’s got his face full at the moment. Is Father Christmas really that far removed though? William Hartnell liked to say in the show’s early years that the part was a ‘cross between The Wizard of Oz and Father Christmas’ (gaining a wig of long white hair to add to the illusion) and the script emphasises the similarities between the two: the ‘sleigh’ that’s bigger on the inside, the impossible age, the super-powers that seem like magic, the impossible age and the love of children and all things good. He’s also a character whose worn many different faces, each one slightly different and with different personalities to match depending which face he’s wearing: this Santa, for instance, is a tough nut with a love of sarcasm (he’s one of those department store Santas who secretly hates children but really needs the work and not as schmaltzy as I feared he would be). Best gag on this theme: Clara saying she doesn’t believe in fairtytales, only for the Tardis to suddenly appear out of nowhere (while later she tells the Doctor that she does believe, but her Santa looks ‘different’). Santa’s being there oddly makes the 13^th Doctor more grumpy than normal (perhaps he fears the competition?)  and there’s a little too much of the pair bickering over and over whether Santa can exist or not while the plot stands still. To be honest, it's a surprise it’s such a big deal: mythological creatures that shouldn't exist turn up in Dr Who all the time, especially from timelord mythology (plus he’s met Santa a fair few times by now in the comic strips, of which more below). The big difference between the two is that the Doctor is at least supposed to be rooted in science, with an explanation for everything that happens even when it makes no actual sense, while Father Christmas can simply turn round and call everything ‘magic’: the best moments in this special by far come from when the two get their personas mixed up the wrong way and Santa suddenly starts banging on about scientific gobbledegook or the Doctor suddenly becomes an expert on dreams. For, in keeping with a lot of science fiction, is science from a future when we don’t understand it really that different from magic? Best to just accept that Santa’s there and say no more.

For this is, after all, a dream world, or rather multiple dream worlds within another, which might not have worked in any other era but fits in beautifully with the general ‘nightmarish’ feel of a lot of the Moffat stories. It makes the story feel less jarring with where we came from than it seemed in that preview trailer too: ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ is a story about a long sleep, of waking up in death to find that your life had all been a sort of dream. ‘Last Christmas’, too, is a story that for all the jolly japes is all about death and yet another story primarily concerned with grief, surprisingly hard-hitting for a story that went out on Christmas Day where the usual Who laws of depth and emotion don’t apply. It’s a relief that Clara gets time to grieve Danny rather than simply being sent into the bright and colourful anti-sceptic world we feared and her scenes with a ‘dream world’ version of her boyfriend work best (even if they are overly sentimental and a bit over long). At the time this scene was pretty irritating (didn’t we just say goodbye to him at length, like, a month ago?)  but now that we know that this really was his last appearance it’s a good one and gives Coda a ‘coda’ past the instant shock of his death that she knows she’s lucky to get and really appreciates this time. You feel Clara’s pain as her imaginary Danny turns up and shares the perfect Christmas Day she always wanted but which they never had a chance to have, only for the Doctor to turn up in the middle of it like an unwanted guest and tell her that none of it is real. For the most part Clara has been rushing out on her commitments on Danny to have fun with the Doctor, much to his annoyance, but here the tables are turned and she gets quite angry that the Doctor interrupts the last moments she never thought she’d have. You feel her pain as she just wants to sleep and live forever in this dream world, because it’s so much better than the reality of living in grief. Moffat cleverly taps into that uneasy feeling you get when you wake up from a dream where someone you love and miss is suddenly alive again: you feel guilty for waking up and disturbing the peace, of ‘carrying on’ your relationship with them without their permission, the horror that ‘dream you suddenly forgot that they were dead (one of his best lines is Danny imploring Clara to ‘miss me for five minutes a day – I want to see proper tears – but then get on with the rest of your life’). Waking up from those dreams, of being hit over the head that the person you love is no longer there, is more of a nightmare than any Daleks or Weeping Angels and all very Moffaty (although, as with quite a few stories from 2014, you have to ask…Is everything alright at home? No series/special was ever used as a script editor/showrunner/producer as therapy more than series eight).

 While most Christmas specials are happy through and through this one is sad, like the song it’s named over with the touch of melancholy that life is all about change and that every Christmas is precious because it might be the last one you enjoy all together and all alive. The Doctor, for instance, knows that grief is real while fantasy is not and while I’m not quite sure I buy the metaphor that grief burns your insides the same way that eating ice cream straight from the freezer does (it’s more like the shimmering effect an Ice Warrior gun has on your heart that turns your world upside down, with the ‘negative’ blast of a Dalek raygun). I can see where the writer was going. It’s by far Moffat’s cleverest way of getting round his annual problem, of setting up a big emotional finale to a series designed for a committed fanbase who know these characters inside out, then writing a happy-go-lucky family audience over Christmas who might not have seen the show in a year, if ever (while the UK audience viewing figures were down on every previous Christmas special more people saw this story than any of series eight, while weirdly enough growing interest across this year and constant networking and promotion there meant that more Americans saw this story than any other in the show’s history for a first broadcast).

There’s another theme here too, of lies and truths and fantasy and reality, of how even control freak Clara can’t manipulate life into granting her wishes and how the Doctor doesn’t have super powers to always put things right. Both she and the Doctor ended the last story having lied to each other in an effort to spare the other a difficult decision and give them what they think the other most want: the Doctor gets to run off in search of Gallifrey (even though it isn’t really there – he’s just giving Clara the space to be with Danny and make a life without him where they’re both safe) and Clara gets to grieve Danny in private (while the Doctor gets to run off without looking back or worrying about her and his effect on her). As it turns out both friends really need each other in that moment and would have been better off being truthful. The web of lies has big repercussions, each folding inside another like a dreamworld, with both characters trying to make sense of what reality is. The other characters on this base too – none of whom really work at the North Pole and who are all losers back home in some way rather than the heroes their subconsciousness wants them to be – are all in a similar position lying to themselves: we see Bellows for who she really is, no longer a dynamic bossy hero but a frail elderly lady in a wheelchair depending on the whims of the family around her and Shona, a character who seems to have it all together in the dreamworld, back on her messy sofa in her messy flat with a list of jobs for the Christmas period (including the poignant message ‘make it up with Dave’, suggesting she’s heartbroken in another way). But which are the real ‘versions’? The people they want to be or the people life has shaped them to be? In this context, of a world that’s topsy turvy and where everything that seemed to be certain turns out to be fragile and delicate, that wasn’t anything as like as certain as it felt it would be when you became an adult and had all the answers and would understand how the world worked, Santa might as well exist too.     

It’s certainly a far better place to leave Clara than the unsatisfying ending to ‘Death In Heaven’. The one question all the media had been asking across 2014 was how long Clara was going to stay and, unusually for a production team who generally gave details like that far in advance, nobody was saying anything. At the time this was greeted as a ruse, a marketing ploy to keep fans guessing for the first series in two years that hadn’t seen either a Doctor or companion leave, but the truth was more prosaic. Jenna Coleman had loved working with Matt Smith and figured her job would never be the same without him, staying on a year to help the newboy settle in then leaving in the series eight finale. Moffat had duly written the scripts accordingly: a heartbroken Clara, lying to spare the Doctor’s feelings, lets him go off in search of Gallifrey while she can grieve in private, Danny still dead. Only as the year went on she’d found herself enjoying her job more and more, becoming close to Peter Capaldi too. The actor begged her to stay so she went to Moffat to defer her decision, which he was only pleased to do. The question was, should she go in the Christmas special or commit to a full year? She still wasn’t sure so two endings were written, one where the Doctor and Clara essentially pick up where they left off, their truths now spoken and another with Clara an old lady who hasn’t seen the Doctor in 62 years, their lies having taken them too far apart. I’m so glad this turns out to be just another ruse, for it would have been a terrible way to go: Clara is lonely, having broken up with several suitors who never matched what she had with Danny or The Doctor, a frail old lady who once has the universe at her feet who can now no longer has the strength to pull a Christmas cracker on her own (a mirror with the previous Christmas special ‘Time Of the Doctor’ where it was Clara helping the 11^th Doctor do exactly this). It’s a tough watch and easily the worst scene in the story, arriving when the special’s already gone on a bit too long as it is – not just because you care for the character but for the awful prosthetics and ugly clunky dialogue, with the Doctor telling Clara he ‘hadn’t noticed’ she’d aged while she’s far too smart to fall for any more obvious untruths. All while we get the gifts of Murray Gold’s Frankincense choir going way OTT (please, no myrrh!) It’s an ending that as it is nearly sinks the whole story, so it’s a good job Santa turns up and puts things right again, the sugary message for the audience being that it’s never too late to forgive people in your life and spend time with them because time is precious.

Time was certainly short for Shona who was originally written to be the new companion and shares, with Penny the journalist in ‘Partners In Crime’, the feat of somehow surviving to the final draft even though their plot function was replaced by another person. That’s a shame because, in many ways, she’s more interesting than Clara, especially once the riddle of how she was had been undone: she’s every bit as smart and feisty and courageous but with a vulnerability the sometimes arrogant Clara never had and a better line in sarcastic retorts too. She’s a cross between Benny Summerfield from the ‘New Adventures’ novels who sort-of became River Song) and future companion Bill, for whom Moffat recycled a lot of this notes when he realised he was going to have to create a new companion out of thin air in a hurry when it became clear Chris Chibnall wasn’t quite ready to take the show over yet. She’s by far the most interesting character in the story and Faye Marsey plays her well in what feels at time like a series of mini-auditions calling on different emotions in quick succession, especially in the opening minutes: offering to fight Santa, dancing round to Slade while trying not to think about monsters and being the only person in the room terrified as much as they ought to be by brain-sucking crabs. It’s actually quite sad that her plea for all the base people to meet up in real life doesn’t happen (not least because this is, presumably, how the Doctor would have tracked her down again) only for her to wake up in her flat, alone. She’s also a sort of cross between Amy and Rory too, doing things that the two of them had already done in the series. Talking of which…

It feels like a bad pastiche of Moffat’s usual writing, which brings me on to another point: a lot of this story feels like Moffat laughing at himself, doing what he normally does then having the characters comment on it and poke fun at it. Of all the ‘official’ stories in the Dr Who canon this is the one that most feels like his first ever script for the series, the sketch ‘The Curse Of Fatal Death’ for the BBC’s 1999 Dr Who night in which the Doctor regenerates four times, goes back in time to prepare for every plan The Master has, laughs at Dalek ball bearings looking like boobs and replaces his deadly traps with ‘a sofa of reasonable comfort’. It’s easy to imagine the writer trying to write yet another Christmas special (after struggling to write ‘The Snowman’ and ‘Time Of The Doctor’ to deadline) and getting badly drunk, reading all the comments about his work on fan forums and writing them all in. A base under siege? Here we go again. The daft and unlikely monsters that barely move? Check. The supporting characters who are easily labelled and seem to turn up in most of his stories? (‘The old one’  ‘the sexy one’ ‘the funny one’ ‘the feisty one’)  The Doctor actually comments on it. The characters only having a loose understanding of their jobs? It turns out that none of them can remember how they got to the North Pole. The big battle that they can’t afford to show? It happens off screen. Again. And the Doctor even comments on how there was no possible way they could have survived it. The way every Christmas special features that same sodding festive song by Slade? It’s here, in a scene where a character dances to it to blot out their real thoughts (the way it’s used in many a Dr Who festive story; it was actually a last minute replacement when ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’ proved to be still in copyright and too costly: it would have been a better fit though: ‘You better not run, you better not hide…’ Was the original plan to base a lot of this plot around the song?) The sort of mistake that lots of fans will point out (that there are four manuals for four living members of the base, because the writer forgot another four had died) It becomes a plot point. Even the opening titles are a spoof: they’re close to the standard ones but the time vortex is now blue and icy and the Tardis is covered in snow, which dissolves, while the actor names come up in giant snowflakes. Best gag: Moffat’s usual interminable scene of exposition telling us quickly who these people are and what they’re doing which, uniquely, is told to us by Santa and two elves. Well, at least that’s new!

A lot of Christmas Dr Who stories poke fun at the series, Moffat’s especially, but this one feels more like a lot of postmodern gags aimed squarely at the author himself before the audience can get them in. Oh and there’s a Captain Jack-style joke in there somewhere about how more people get the unwanted present of crabs for Christmas, by not wanting to be alone over the holidays, but we won’t go there. It’s also an obvious rip off of all sorts of sources outside and inside the context of the series: Jenna herself called it a ‘cross between Alien’ and ‘Miracle on 354^th Street’ in the press which it is, quite blatantly, the Father Christmas who is Father Christmas not being believed while aliens attach themselves to humans on a base. Both are listed on Shona’s sheet of films to watch over Christmas, hinting that these are elements she’s added to her ‘dream’, something that again would have worked better if she’d been the new ‘companion’ but doesn’t quite come off with Clara there, along with that year’s breakout hit ‘Game Of Thrones’ and ‘The Thing From Another World’ weirdly (it’s not very Christmassy) . Bizarrely it almost certainly wasn’t nicked from what seemed on first viewing to be the most likely source, Netflix’s Black Mirror series (Twilight Zone’s hipper grandson with less twists but better technology) and it’s one and only festive special (to date) ‘White Christmas’ which is spookily like this one (a base that might be the North Pole! A ‘dream world’ that’s actually a computer!) although it was first released a mere few days before it. The story also reminds me very much of the ‘Press Gang’ finale ’There Are Crocodiles’, in which the office is burned down in a fire, the story playing with techniques it so often did about whether main character Lynda escaped from the smoke and is awake talking to ‘us’ via American boyfriend Spike or whether she’s asleep in the fire, talking to a hallucinatory one (he is uncharacteristically quiet after all!) ‘Last Christmas’ is, however, a blatantly obvious repeat of  the episodes ‘Amy’s Choice’ (where you’re not quite sure where a dream ends or begins) with ‘Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead’’ (Donna’s computer simulation perfect life, more believable than Clara’s) plus the run of stories in series six that feature ‘The Silence’ (who are basically the crabs with feet and even use the same sound effect). The problem with that is, though, that to repeat ideas you need to add to them rather than simply shuffle them around and combine them with other recycled ideas: nothing in this story is better than any of its source material, which leaves you feeling a bit ‘so what?’ about it all. 

Those parts are genuinely funny, but there’s still something deeply artificial about this story that means it never quite works. Moffat’s stories all have that feeling of not being quite real (it’s the biggest change from the Davies era, where everything was rooted in reality; one of the reasons the Chibnall era never quite worked was that it tries to have a leg in both camps and didn’t work as one or the other) but this story pushes the fantasy element that bit too far. The best Dr Who stories feel as if they could be happening for real, out there somewhere: this one clearly isn’t. I mean, it’s not even happening to these characters, so how can we believe in it and invest in it fully? It’s not just the dream setting either: for all its talk of the real feeling of grief the feeling you get is that you’ve watched a story designed to make people talk about it rather than one to enjoy. Moffat admits that he added Father Christmas partly because he was running out of Christmas novelties to include but partly because he could imagine the radio Times cover of Santa Claus arm in arm with the Doctor (something that really happened, but not the feted Christmas cover: Dr Who Magazine responded by spoofing their actual cover by having Santa Claus reading the magazine). He’s there for us to go ‘woah what’s going on?’ rather than have a story that could only work with Father Christmas there.  It’s an uneasy mixture of horror and comedy too: Moffat always struggled to get the balance right, compared to Davies anyway, and is generally at his best concentrating on one at a time rather than the other. In this story though we get both, with one extreme lurching towards another.  As a result a lot of the actually quite funny one-liners (most of them Santa being rude to the Doctor) don’t quite fly because they’ve come after something horrific and even though we know he’s an artificial construct  for whom the usual social rules don’t matter he still gets in the way at times when people are in shock or grieving. Equally it’s hard to fully take in what should be some of the creepiest scenes in the series, as crabs sit on people’s faces and suck people’s heads by coming out from the TV (something else done by Moffat before, remember, in ‘Time Of The Angels’) when you’re still busy laughing at elves debating whether calling someone an elf is racist now (‘especially when you’re not exactly tall yourself!’ they say to a shocked Clara, in the episode’s best line). It’s also way too long: by 2014 it was set in the stone of the TV schedules that all Christmas specials were an hour and thus ran 10-15 minutes longer than usual but this is one special that could have done with being shorter than the average length. It runs out of steam midway through, adds a reindeer sleigh ride for no apparent reason in plot terms (everyone could have ‘woken up’ from the base just as well) and at least three extra layers of ‘at last we’ve woken up…except this is still a dream isn’t it?’ when the audience are getting restless and bored, all goodwill of the season used up already. ‘Dream yourself home’ (we did say that this character was half Wizard of Oz didn’t we/) is as big a copout as ‘it was all a dream’. And anyway it was all a dream! Oh and so’s that! And that! And that! Oh and guess what? That too! Ho! Ho! No! Oh except Santa, who might or might not be real: the story goes out of its way not to break children’s hearts (even to the extent of the press interviews: Nick Frost said Father Christmas was his voice coach in one interview he knew children might read).

Leaving aside whether they should have tried this or not, though, Santa himself is good fun, less like the sanitised ‘Coca-Cola’ version and more of an equal sparring partner for Capaldi to square off against. The joke before the episode was on was that Moffat looked through a directory of names that ended in a Wintry word like ‘Frost’ to play Santa the casting of comedy actor Nick seemed ridiculous: he wasn’t old, he wasn’t fat (not that fat anyway) and he didn’t have that sort of a beard or hair. He’s also, how shall I put this? Not terribly convincing in the parts he normally plays as the same down and out bitter loser nerd, so how can he pull off jolly Mr Christmas? However this is easily the best the actor’s been in anything I've seen and he outclasses longtime friend Simon Pegg's Dr Who turn in 'The Long Game', really looking the part with snow and ice sprinkled into his beard (because he was doubling with another role and couldn’t just shave his real one off). He even does Capaldi better than Capaldi with his Doctory pastiche ‘everything’s a bit dreamy weamy!’ Frost, along with Pegg, had appeared in the curious half-CGI, half-real film ‘The Adventures Of Tintin’, the project Moffat left halfway through when the job of Who showrunner came up (that film doesn’t feel entirely ‘real’ either, fake in a way Herge’s drawings never were). Just as good are the elves, with Dan Starkey’s Christmas present from the Dr Who team after years of appearing as miscellaneous aliens (and specialising in Sontarons) the fact that he uses his real face and doesn’t have to spend hours on the makeup chair or sweat under prosthetics. It’s nice to see another Troughton in the cast list, this time Michael (son of Patrick, younger brother of David), a kind gesture from a production team to help boost his career after a long time away from acting when he became a carer for his wife after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, although in the end Professor Albert gets as little to do as all the other base members (good as Jenna Coleman always is there might well be a far better, more equal story there has Clara not been in it). The actors are giving this story their all  and treating it at face value, seriously, even Santa: it’s easy to imagine another universe, perhaps one where John Nathan-Turner was still alive and producing the show for a 31^st year, where  this show is an awful pantomime of brightly dressed characters overdoing all the punchlines and assuming Santa’s presence means its an out and out comedy (think ‘Time and the Rani’ with the sort of over indulgences you only get at Christmas and shudder).

The result is a bit uneven, half genuine ho ho ho and other parts oh no: parts of this story work really well (the scene of the elves turning reality on its head by saying ‘your mum and dad, one day out of the blue, decide to give you a big pile of presents because they love you so much? It’s a lovely story but time to start living in the real world!’ is one of the funniest examples of Moffat turning everyday logic on it’s head, Goon show style; sadly they cut one of the best gags where Shona asks how letters can get to Santa by going up the chimney and Santa compares them to emails disappearing into a ‘cloud’ and how the recipient still gets them), some character points work really well (dream-Danny is so much more likeable I wish he’d been a dream the whole way through series eight, while the character touch, both that Clara ‘remembers’ him taller than he really was and that the Doctor should notice it and try to score a point about it is much more natural than how both were portrayed for most of the year; I love the gag that Clara is ‘borderline’ for the naughty list too and wants travel books not hair products) along with other parts that don’t work so well (the crabs, the base, the entire last ten minutes which really does seem like the tangerine at the bottom of the stocking when you think you still have a present left). It’s all weirdly paced, with an explosive first ten minutes, a slooooow middle section that seems to last for hours then lots of quick scene false endings: some fans have wondered if Moffat was trying to go for the feel of a dream, where time works to different parameters, but to be honest it was probably just written like that.  It’s a typically uneven Moffat Christmas special then, yet somehow more so, like a turkey that’s raw down one side and burnt down the other made up of bits he re-wrote and hammered to death and the bits he could have done more with. The stuffing is good though: whatever you think about the cliché that ‘it was all a dream’ the way it’s done is very clever and enjoyable while it’s on if you don’t think about it too much. . Like the best festive episodes this one features the sort of things even this show couldn't possibly get away with in the regular series. On the downside though it's all very uneven, lurching from big emotional set-pieces to corny jokes in the blink of an eye. Although that's quite Christmassy too in a way: even if you didn't start the episode on the sherry you'll soon feel like you were by the end of it all! In the end it’s the most ‘Christmas cracker’ of Dr Who stories: every so often something will go bang and leave you diving under the table, before pausing for a bad joke and a novelty toy you can’t get at any time of year – not would you really want more than once a year. On the plus side ‘Last Christmas’ feels more genuinely Christmassey than most of the others do (some of which feel like ’normal’ episodes with Christmas decorations hung in the background and nothing more), full of 'magic', celebration, sentiment and that peculiar melancholy that comes from knowing you won’t get to do this again for another year and wondering what that might be like. In the right mood to be indulgent and silly though, with a box of tissues ready for the sad bits about grief, it has its moments: certainly a lot more of them than we ever dreamed would be possible given that trailer. It is, however, maybe a bit too bonkers for most fans to ever be comfortable (Moffat told the Radio Times ‘it’s certainly the most bonkers thing I’ve ever written!’ He’s not wrong…)

One last point before I go: the Doctor, knowing full well that Gallifrey isn’t really back, seems to have gone to sleep on Androzani Delta – even though it’s the very last place he should have risked going to sleep (see ‘Caves’ for why). Given that this entire story is a sequence of dreams-within-dreams suppose, just suppose, that everything that’s happened in the series since 1984 was a dream and that the Doctor went to sleep as Peter Davison and woke up as Peter Capaldi? (It would explain quite a lot, including the fever dream that was ‘Trial Of A Timelord’, although conversely it could be that everything since the Doctor went to sleep at the start of ‘The Mind Robber’ has been a dream!)

POSITIVES + The Doctor and Clara both find closure by acting out what they should have said to the other last time round and they get plenty of second chances to put things right again every time they 'wake up' and find life has all been a dream. And if its ever possible to have second chances then its at Christmas. In other words 'Last Christmas' is the most 'It's A Wonderful Life' of all Dr Who stories, about the power and importance of everyone whether they feel like a success or a failure and all the better for it. 

NEGATIVES – Vaendre Hall in St Mellons is nice and spacious but looks exactly like what it is: a large modern semi-detached house with a golf course outside. It never looks even remotely like a North Pole base, even a fake dream one, the sort of place where it never ever snows Sadly the plan, to film at least some of this story in Iceland, got axed early on when the budget was cut (in a similar money saving mode Shona’s flat was a quick hop onto a set for the Welsh-language soap opera Poboi y Cym being filmed next door). It’s a particular shame because the idea of a ‘dream world’ that we can see but these characters can’t would have been the perfect time to simply cut from one location to another: we could have had the characters in a different hall every few minutes, this is the one story that didn’t have to be all set in one place.

BEST QUOTE: ‘You know what the problem is with telling fantasy and reality apart? They’re both ridiculous’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: I knew this couldn’t possibly be the real Santa Claus…Because he never once said ‘hey Doctor, I know you – but didn’t you used to be an old man with long white hair? Ho ho ho’. For in the comic strip they’re old friends, thanks to the Doctor and grandchildren John and Gillian saving Christmas in a fondly remembered adventure titled ‘A Christmas Story’, first published in TV Comic issues 732-735 over the festive period 1965. The Tardis has landed on Christmas Island and found Saint Nick there, worried that he’s falling behind on his toy manufacturing (that year’s must-have present is a model Tardis rather sweetly!) Good job the Doctor can manufacture some more and help deliver them too! Only there’s another visitor out there in the snow, a ‘Demon Magician’ out to cause mischief who looks like a cross between The Grinch and a Munchkin. Why does he want to stop Santa delivering toys? Err, we never find out but there are some great scenes of Santa’s toys coming to life to fight his magic (the model red arrows are another must-have toy!), an evil Snowman (decades before they’re taken over by The Great Intelligence!) and when the baddy has built a giant wall and all hope seems lost the Doctor uses some magic of his own, turning a tiny squirrel into a giant beast everyone rides to safety. The magician is finally captured and sent into the skies in a giant rocket that presumably kills him (a merry Christmas to you too, Doctor!) and all the toys are delivered, while Santa’s gift to the Family Who are giant letters in the sky reading ‘happy journey to Tardis’ (Santa apparently didn’t read any of the grammar dictionaries he gave out that year). A sweet and typically bonkers TV Comic strip. 
The same feel of that story was recreated on audio for the 2^nd Doctor story ‘The Man Who (Nearly) Killed Christmas’, part of Big Finish’s short story anthology ‘A Christmas Treasury’ (2004). Due to a mixup Santa and his sleigh run right through the Tardis and end up inside it! The Doctor apologises and explains that he’s the same person Santa met before and just looks different now. Asking how his toy manufacturer is getting on the Doctor is worried that it will no longer have enough power now that Humanity is expanding out into the cosmos beyond Earth. The Doctor offers to take over the workshop to make it run better, only this being the 2^nd Doctor inevitably it makes things worse, until a replacement is found: lots of little robot elves! Frivolous but fun. 

The Doctor next met Father Christmas when he was the 3^rd Doctor, in ‘A Visit From Saint Nicholas, a short story in the anthology ‘Christmas Around The World’ (2008). Sarah Jane is bored by the UNIT Christmas party so they go off travelling in the Tardis, arriving at a mansion owned by the writer Clement C Moore in the 1820s. Father Christmas arrives on the author’s lawn in the middle of the night, watched by an astonished Sarah Jane, while a sleep-disturbed Moore sticks his head out the window and is inspired to write ‘The Night Before Christmas’. Another typically daft festive stocking-filler from Big Finish.
The Doctor met Santa Claus again when he was the 11^th Doctor, along with his nasty robo-form selves, in the weirdo 2011 comic strip ‘Silent Knight’, published exclusively in America. Weird not simply because it features the real Father Christmas (they’re becoming old friends by now) but because not a word is spoken until right at the end when, of course, Matt Smith says ‘Incidentally, a Merry Christmas to those of you at home’ just like the good old days of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’. A simple tale with lots of in-jokes (there are some familiar names from the Dr Who Magazine strips on Santa’s naughty list!) it’s the sort of thing you can only get away with over the holidays and ends the way it should, with the Doctor slipping some winning lottery numbers to some helpful orphaned children and receiving a new sonic screwdriver from Santa’s sack.

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