A Town Called Mercy: Ranking - 265

  A Town Called Mercy

(Series 7, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 15/9/2012, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Toby Whithouse, director: Saul Metzstein)  

Rank: 265

'Ya gonna do something? Or ya just gonna stand around and bleed?!'

Welcome to the Wild West! Which turns out to be somehow less wild than you might think – especially given that there’s a cyborg gunslinger packing the biggest weapon ever seen in the series and a fugitive alien on the run. This isn’t one of those action packed Westerns though, despite the fact that there are arguably more and inarguably bigger guns than seen in any other episode of Who. Instead it’s more one of those slow talky moral ones where everybody talks but not much happens. Indeed only one shot is ever fired and only two people die, which even given that this is a Dr Who Western seems pretty slim pickings really. Having a Western at all was a brave move given that 1966’s ‘The Gunfighters’ is often (and erroneously) called one of Dr Who’s lowest moments. But at least things happened in that story, even if they happened to people talking in funny accents (‘Mercy’ has its share of those too) in a cramped corner of Lime Grove studios. Both stories even have the ‘Doc’ being confused for someone else going by the same name ‘from outta town’. Neither feel much like Dr Who, sticking out like a sore cybernetic arm-pistol in the rest of their eras. A small handful of fans love both for that reason. I'm one of them when it comes to 'The Gunfighters' (which people seem to miss is meant to be a comedy, a parody of the Westerns that were on around Who's timeslot back then, but doing the show's usual thing of making the people that would have been heroes on those other shows look human and silly).Whithouse was actually warned not to watch ‘The Gunfighters’ by Moffat, despite coming up with a story about mistaken identity and a local feud that’s remarkably similar in many ways (just thankfully without the songs- although we do get an unnecessary narration from Lorelei King, uncredited, that serves much the same plot function and might be even more irritating). But while ‘Mercy’ looks better, with vast swathes of beautiful countryside to gawp at, the wide open swathes in the plot leave a lot to be desired, being basically a standoff between two sides. For forty-five whole minutes. With no sub-plots. Not even a little one.

The story exists because of a newspaper comment. One wag of a reviewer, in a largely positive reviews, said that Matt Smith was the kind of actor who walked as if he was always sitting on an invisible horse. It’s a line that stuck, so Steven Moffat hatched the idea ‘what would happen if we really put Matt on a horse?’ So far so good, but where he went wrong was in thinking ‘hey wouldn’t it be great if we did a version of Westworld with robots?’ Even though there are a million other more interesting things that can be put in the story (and like ‘The Gunfighters’ Who was never going to be able to compete with a feature film budget; at least have a Westworld type story in a theme park that isn’t a Western if you’re going to do that). Even so, the story might yet have been salvaged and turned into something good, but for Moffat’s next move: he gave his idea about unfeeling robots to the most ‘Human’ and emotional of all new Who writers, Toby Whithouse. To say that this was not his natural wheelhouse is an understatement: the creator of Being Human is your go to person for a big emotional rollercoaster story, with the regulars put through the wringer in a debate about what it means to be Human. Whithouse wasn’t keen on Westerns and hadn’t got a clue what to do with a robot (phoning Moffat up early on and asking if he could at least make it a cyborg, so it was part sentient – the showrunner agreed).

First up, the good. Usually Westerns are stories about very obviously good guys shooting very obviously bad guys but this story is more nuanced and has The Doctor trying to work who exactly the good and bad guys are. The question at the heart of this story is whether a sorry criminal who thought he was doing the right thing is worthy of redemption or not.  It had been a while since Dr Who had done a story about one of the bugbears of the ‘classic’ series – whether wicked criminals can ever truly be rehabilitated and whether redemption is possible. It’s key to the plots of both ‘The Mind Of Evil’ and ‘Shada’ and turns up as sub-plots in plenty more. Mostly though it’s a blatant remake of ‘Boom Town’, about Margaret Slitheen in hiding in Cardiff, only with different scenery but that story ‘worked’ because it was in the aftermath of a story we’d seen and it challenged our own prejudice that surely she ‘must’ be up to something. There’s none of that here because we don’t know these characters. This time, too, The Doctor has himself been in such an impossible situation when mass murder seemed the only way out, in the ‘time war’ between the ‘classic’ and ‘new’ series which adds a whole new dimension to that idea. There’s an even niftier link to olden times too when the refugee Kahler-Jax turns out to have created what’s effectively the atom bomb and wiped out a planet (it might well be where Moffat got the idea of ‘The Moment’ for ‘Day Of The Doctor’ in early drafts about now), just like ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’s time destructor. The debate is that faced by those working on The Manhattan Project in 1945 and again by the Doctor in the time war: is it better to use a huge weapon that causes widespread devastation to bring an early end to war that will otherwise kill just as many if not more to die through prolonged fighting? Does that make Jax a mass murderer or someone acting kindly? Generally speaking in Dr Who the method is never excused by the motivation, but this story tries to be more nuanced. Is there any redeeming feature in Jax? Well, yes. On the run from the Gunslinger he’s made a new home for himself in the small Western town improbably called Mercy and used his advanced medicine to help protect the town from sickness and starvation. They’ve come to think of him as their friend, as a ‘Doctor’ who helps patch them up and helps them live longer. Even so, when the Gunslinger threatens the whole town if they don’t hand over a man wanted for murder they’re in two minds whether to do that or not.

It’s an interesting debate this, worthy of a Dr Who story and the timing is probably not a coincidence: we’re two years after the death of disgraced DJ and TV presenter Jimmy Savile and one year after the – literally – hundreds of accusations of sexual abuse (see ‘The Two Doctors’ and ‘A Fix With Sontarons’ in the ‘sequels’ column for more on Dr Who’s brief and unhappy involvement in his career. Incidentally I had a friend who wrote to Jim’ll Fix It wanting to duet with Gary Glitter and was distraught not to get a reply. He’s quite grateful he didn’t now). In his lifetime Savile was seen as a hero, an eccentric who did so much good with his work raising money for Stoke Mandeville Hospital and running marathons to raise money for lots of good causes. There are people alive today literally because of the money Savile raised. It turned out, though, that he had done all of that to enable his sexual perversions – many of them to disabled children in the hospital he helped raise money for (where he was given his own ‘honorary key’ he used to his own advantage). Nobody raised official complaints in Savile’s lifetime because he was a famous adult known for being ‘good’ and they were all children – and isolated children, who for the most part thought they were his only victims. Savile had his knighthood and all his charity awards stripped from him posthumously and he quite rightly came to be seen as a monster. However the fact remains: a lot of the money he raised, even for bad reasons, ended up doing good. We have a similar debate here, even if Jax’s crimes were more desperate and less wilful: he was in an impossible situation that had no easy answers and has done good with his time on the run, helping people. The crux of ‘mercy’ is this: does doing some good make up for doing lots of bad? That’s a worthy debate for a Dr Who story, not least because by having this character called a ‘Doctor’ and having him an alien from out of town with a huge secret makes things awkward for ‘our’ Doctor who ends up in the position of dishing out justice. Is he hypocritical for thinking of handing the fugitive over? Is it better than one guilty life dies to spare eighty innocent lives?

Unfortunately the ugly: we never fully get to the bottom of this debate. The Doctor stands around looking moody and thinking hard but he never actually solves anything. In the end Jax takes the issue out of his hands by (spoilers) taking his own life instead. But is that a satisfactory ending? Why is suicide a better option than murder? It’s a copout ending that robs us of The Doctor being forced into making a real decision and seeing what side he will come out on. What’s more there’s no sign of it before it happens: Jax is written very poorly. In his first ten minutes he’s as nice as the inhabitants of Mercy seem to think he is, but after that  he’s a character impossible to like or care about, smug in his discussions with The Doctor, holding a gun to Amy’s head in an opportunistic move to try and escape, not showing any remorse even when local sheriff and all-round nice guy Isaac takes a bullet for him. It’s as if he’s trying hard not to be liked – and to work the story desperately needs you to be rooting for him to live. Things are even weirder when it comes to the companions, who are on opposite sides of the fence and yet which doesn’t ring true at all. Traditionally Rory has been the voice of reason this series. he’s a nurse who will do anything to save someone’s life, even when it was someone just holding a gun at him or someone he loves, who’s first instinct is to be kind and caring and compassionate. He sends half this story running around with Isaac hearing stories about all the good things Jax has done for the town and risking his life in acting like a decoy. He’s the one character in this era you can trust to have empathy and think from someone else’s perspective, yet the second he hears the Gunslinger tells his story he’s all for throwing Jax out to him to murder then and there. Eh? What changed his mind? Amy, meanwhile, has a cruel and sadistic streak. It only comes to the surface when somebody does something really evil (particularly to someone she loves – see her torture-killing Madame Korvarian in ‘The Wedding Of River Song’ for one) but it’s there alright. If Amy sees suffering she has no qualms about making things ten time worse for the person causing the hurt. Yet suddenly she’s all for Jax and thinks The Doctor and Rory are monsters for even considering letting the alien go to his death. Eh? Just to rub it in, Jax even talks to her about being able to tell she’ s a ‘mother’ because of how ‘kind her eyes are’ (eh? In Dr Who mothers tend to be the scariest of characters – see Jackie Tyler and Sylvia Noble in particular) not to mention ‘protective’ as she would do ‘anything’ for her child (which isn’t quite what we see in other stories with Amy and River but never mind); there are any number of reasons people can act protective without being parents. Especially as this comes after a scene where if she’s being protective of anyone it’s The Doctor – an alien time traveller son in law who’s hundreds of years old.

It’s also a bit clumsy. For instance, this is a story all about working out when someone has ‘crossed the line’ and the bad they’ve done isn’t redeemable that’s signified by The Gunslinger literally drawing a line that Jax has to cross. While in mercy he’s free but once he’s outside it’s goodnight Vienna. At least until the deadline when The Gunslinger crosses the line anyway (so it’s  not a forcefield then but more like a moral code). Even so the question remains, why doesn’t the Gunslinger simply march in and shoot Jax? Judging by the size of the gun he’s packing he can shoot down the jail easily. What’s stopping him? Equally if there is something stopping him then why not have Jax stay in the town and die from old age? It’s a plothole that Whithouse never quite solves. Another minor plothole: everyone’s reaction to The Doctor’s sudden appearance and name is ‘throw him to the gunslinger’. But we see through the course of the story that most people like Jax and are protecting him. So what do they think is going on? Do they think Jax has changed his face? Do they think The Doctor is a second renegade alien murderer on the run? In both instances though The Doctor wouldn’t have walked into a saloon and started wittering about being an alien (whether this is Jax or a second interloper surely they’d be hiding in shadows or running free?) It’s as if Whithouse came up with this promising start then couldn’t get the rest of the plot to fit so changed it, but kept this beginning anyway. One other issue: why doesn’t The Doctor simply whisk Jax away in the Tardis to save the town? He could drop him off at a hospital to work out a form of ‘intergalactic community service’ (which, if Jax is genuine, he gladly would have done). Instead The Doctor stays awake all night and his plan seems to be…not hand him over and that’s it? The Doctor? The timelord with ideas springing out of his head left right and centre? We’ve also had a plot very similar to this in ‘Smith and Jones’ where the supposed police (the Judoon in this case) cause more trouble than the people they’re trying to capture.

The worst of it all though is that nothing happens. ‘This has gone on long enough!’ says the Doctor two-thirds of the way through. ‘You are right’ agrees the Gunslinger. ‘Too blooming right!’ says the audience who are ready to give up and turn off. You see the problem is that while the central debate is good it can’t sustain half an episode never mind a whole one. It’s like watching ‘Trial Of a Timelord’ all over again: debate for the prosecution, debate for the defence, everything null and void after ab garbled ending anyway. At least when ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ asked similarly deep meaning questions it was a powerful five minute a scene inside a bigger story. This time it’s the whole story. There’s no colour or shade here. There’s a nice scene where the scared villagers try to raid Jax’s cell, in a scene based on the similar one Whithouse loved in the film ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ and The Doctor comments that he’d rather have a Dalek than a scared Human mob any day – their panic makes them scarier (it’s like Twilight Zone episode ‘The Monsters On Maple Street’ all over again). There’s a goodish scene where Isaac dies in place of Jax, though really this makes no discernible difference to the plot and merely extends it by another twenty minutes needlessly. There are some shots of Rory and Isaac running across the desert in disguises. There’s an unfunny comedy one of The Doctor trying to break into Jax’s spaceship and setting it off like a car alarm (though as always Whithouse is excellent at dialogue: the computer’s farewell line ‘helping you self-destruct for the last 3000 years’ is a wonderfully Dr Whoy way of making the ordinary seem extraordinary). That’s it. Every other scene is moody staring into space with the odd bit of dialogue.

 Whithouse, so good at having people talk and open up, simply doesn’t do that this story. Even though this story is all about the importance of talking: only by listening to the two sides can The Doctor work out where the uncomfortable middle ground is, but there’s relatively little dialogue here and most of it is noises off keeping the townsfolk quiet. We never fully get to sit with what the weight of what The Doctor is carrying – instead we’re meant to take it for granted as he slouches his shoulders and looks defeated. I know Westerns aren’t the most dialogue-heavy genre,  but dialogue is Whithouse’s strength. So why isn’t there more in this story? The lack of sub-plots too (not even a tiny one) means that this is all we get, relentlessly, for 45 minutes and it gives Amy in particular nothing to do except stand around, as close to being a pure ‘peril monkey’ as she ever becomes. It’s a waste. Put Amy on a horse and have her learn about The Gunslinger’s background (all we know is that Jax built it – but there’s no sense of how that must feel for the Gunslinger, with a Freudian idea of having to kill its own parent) while having Rory spend time getting to know Jax then have them absolutely go hammer and tongs at each other with their different views, while The Doctor desperately tries to keep peace in the middle (alright so since writing this I’ve learned that Karen Gillan has a phobia of horses. But either put a stunt double of Amy on a horse or have her walk. It looks a nice sunny day). Have a scene where Jax does something good in front of our eyes rather than taking it as hearsay, like having him escorted through the town past the townsfolk with their pitchforks to save the life of a dying child. Perhaps most of all have a big ol’ shoot-out of townsfolk versus Cyborg, perhaps with jax in his cell pleading to be let out to give his life to save them one last time. I mean, if you’re going to have a cyborg with a gun that big at least let him shoot it more than once. There are so many ways the plot could have gone, but they took the easy simplest cheapest way out and kept it static.

The tone is also a bit wrong. Sometimes it’s a Sarah Jane Adventures story, about a big moral dilemma portrayed in simple terms for people to understand. At others it’s a supposedly more ‘adult’ story about wars and big guns more akin to ‘Torchwood’. Never does it ever feel quite like ‘Dr Who’. Once again Whithouse is generally good at this: ‘being Human’ is one of the laugh out loud funniest scifi series ever made and yet the humour never takes away from how dark some of those stories are – indeed it only adds to how important the small everyday life things are,  even in the midst of all hell breaking loose. But here ‘Mercy’ veers awkwardly from laughs to the serious stuff and both take away from the other (once again ‘Mercy’ is more like ‘The Gunfighters’ than people realise in that respect, but at least Donald Cotton kept the dark stuff to the final episode). It’s hard to take a story seriously that has Matt Smith breaking and entering into a spaceship badly like he’s Harold Lloyd (surely turning off an alarm is an easy thing to do – and in plot terms this really matters, lives are at stake at the time) or telling us that, as with ‘The Girl In the Fireplace’, he can speak ‘horse’ and his big butch steed prefers the name Susan to Joshua (though I for one totally buy the detail that horses wear a lot when they whinny). Characters seem to spend a lot of this story making quips to each other and the smirks are still on the actor’s faces when something bad happens. It’s also a bit, well, daft. Admittedly Jax has been here for a while but the Cyborg is new and yet nobody in this Western town – that’s only just had electric light – bats an eyelid. Nobody is afraid because Jax is an alien. This must be the most accepting place on Earth. Jax can’t exactly hide either with one of the silliest makeup jobs in Who, two blue swirls round the side of his face. What happened in this neighbourhood, where everyone carries guns and is extra jumpy at the idea of outsiders, the first time he arrived? Even if he was bearing food and had treated sick kids you’d think somebody would have tried to kill him out of fright and would be holding as vigil on the jail steps. Even more so when the dude with the big gun turns up asking for him to be handed over: most Americans back then wouldn’t have thought twice (a lot of Westerns are characters who just want a quiet life, either on the run from the law or wanting to rebuild their life after a tragedy, caught up in someone else’s ego trip gunfight). And what of the ending when the Cyborg stays behind to keep Mercy safe. Eh? Why is this fact not in recorded history? Hiding an alien for six months and vowing to keep him quiet is one thing, but the Gunslinger is the new Marshall and the point of reference for all visitors to the town (unless he shoots them all. But even then there would send search parties and a legend about a scary looking dude made out of bits left over from a horse and cart).  Presumably The Gunslinger is either still there or is a big pile of rusting bolts; either way you’d have thought UNIT, Torchwood and/or historians would be all over it. There’s also no town that has ever been called ‘Mercy’ in Nevada or anywhere else (though there is a ‘Mercury’), which I guess isn’t that unusual in Dr Who given the amount of fake English village names we have but the voiceover especially seems to be going to town with how this is a ’real’ story.

The sad fact, too, is that Matt Smith can’t do sudden bursts of anger and this script calls on him to have a lot of them. He can do everything else – including slow burning anger – but ask him to yell and lose his temper and he looks like a small child having a tantrum. Plus why does he lose it in this story anyway – he’s dealt with mass murders before. You’re meant to feel that dr is a moral being pushed to his limit. But we’ve seen him prodded and poked more than this without breaking. Matt gives it his all as he always does but, second only to ‘Nightmare In Silver’ this story is not built to this actor’s strengths and even his comedy is a bit suspect this week. The rest of the cast is weak too: Adrian Scarborough works hard at making Jax two-faced but there are no levels to his performance so we never find out for certain which the ‘real’ Jax is, the opportunist who uses his sadness to make people lower their guard or the kind hearted man in an impossible situation who’s learned to be guarded. It doesn’t help that they’ve saddled him with one of those distorted voices they give UFO witnesses to protect their identity in dodgy paranormal documentaries and asked the actor to mime to it – badly as it turns out. Only once does the performance ring true, when he gives a bit of back story and talks about how his people have a myth about carrying al the people they’ve wronged on their backs into Heaven and how afraid he is at what’s waiting for him (now this is the sort of thing Whithouse is generally so strong at. Why isn’t there more scenes like this one?) Andrew Brooke’s Gunslinger doesn’t even get that much characterisation: even for someone half-robot his is a very one-note performance, without any sign that actually The Gunslinger learns a lot during the course of this story and that revenge isn’t as simple as it seemed when he was programmed. I have my sympathies given that he spent three hours in makeup every day and only had one eye to act with fully, but there really is nothing there to go on; for all the emotion this character displays he might as well have been a full robot. Ben Browder’s Isaac too is totally unlike any other sheriff in history: he accepts Jax at face value, does the same with The Doctor and gives his life without even questioning. It would make so much more sense to the story if Jax had saved one of his children and made this a personal crusade. As for the rest of the town they’re every Western cliché under the sun: the preacher, the barmaid, the scared youngster, the lady. All we’re missing is the blacksmith. Whithouse has said that her wanted to write what the ‘real’ West was like rather than the sanitised version we usually got on TV, how scratching out a living in a desert was a daily struggle rather than glamorous, but other than a mention of failing crops there’s nothing here to suggest that. Instead this is the most well behaved starving frightened ‘mob’ on TV. I see more panic than this on my walk to the shops.

Now the ugly: there isn’t any. Actually this story is downright beautiful with some of the best location filming in the series. It’s not in the real Wild West alas (that’s a bit too far and pricey to go even on a new Who budget) but it is the next best thing, the Oasys theme park in Almeria, Spain (also known as ‘Little Hollywood’), built for location filming in ‘The Good The Bad and The Ugly’ in 1965. Realising that those gorgeous sets were going to be left empty, rather than destroy them at extra cost the production team on that film got together and formed a new company renting it out to other productions. In fact it was one of the extras who became in charge of the company and he expanded it into a theme park (there are fairground rides and a zoo just round the corner from some location shooting; indeed it’s said to be one of the big influences on ‘Westworld’ which is where we came in). It looks stunning: we get lots of gorgeous panned views, which do a lot more to set the scene than any amount of dialogue in this story does and you really get the feel of this as a desolate near-deserted town cut off from everyone. They sue it well too with scenes written specially for the jail and the street (the only thing we don’t see is a gallows). Dr Who would never have been able to afford such a mockup back in Wales and it really does make all the difference in making this place seem believable. The gunslinger costume is kind of okay too and really does look like a ‘Frankenstein’s cyborg’, even if it’s the most self-consciously ‘cosplay’ Who ‘monster’ of all time: grab a mask, make a big cardboard gun, throw in a Stetson and an Indiana Jones playsuit and you’re away!

Even the scenery gets boring after a while though and this ends up yet another of those B Movie Westerns where everyone saves their rooting tooting and shooting for the climax and spend the rest of the time moralising, with a good half hour in the middle where not much happens at all. That’s the problem with making a story about a standoff rather than a battle: people stand off, not doing much, which is more in keeping with the Dr Who ethos but incredibly boring to watch. Frankly, you’ve stopped caring long before the final decision which has nothing whatsoever to do with The Doctor anyway (he might as well not have been there for all he actually changes in this story, while Amy and Rory don’t even get to do that much). We’re meant to be involved in this story and see it as a fight between the lesser of the two evils (drawn out war versus destruction) and for the first half, setting up the pieces, this is a half-decent story big on atmosphere but it ends up wasting it all because we don’t find out enough about these characters to care. It doesn’t feel like the end of the world if Jax lives or dies and there are no real twists and turns to keep us watching for that reason either. In the end it’s more working out the more evil of the two lesser characters who never really feel ‘real’, either of them.  The best part of this story is the opening, with its atmospheric voiceover and tease that The Doctor (‘our’ Doctor) is under arrest suggests a far more entertaining story than the one we actually get. Only twice in short lines does the story match that for dialogue and that’s Isaac’s joke when Amy makes a mess with her gun ‘everyone who isn’t an American drop your weapon!’  and Amy’s rejoined to The Doctor who’s just been particularly irritating ‘But why would anyone want to kill you?...Unless o course they met you’ (like I say, Amy’s the tough hardened one, not Rory). But maybe I should show ‘Mercy’ more mercy. I mean the central is a good one, just not the execution. It’s an important story in terms of influence too, Moffat picking up on the best bits in his two specials at the end of the year but giving the roles over to The Doctor (it’s him faced with the touch choice Jax has in ‘Day Of The Doctor’ and saving a town in ‘Time Of the Doctor’). The scenery is lovely. But that’s not enough: there’s nowhere near enough story to keep this one going (lots of New Who stories need more time but this one needs far less and would have been a single episode in ‘old’ 20^th century money) and ultimately, compared to the stories nestled around it, this one is like bringing a feather to a world war being fought with atom bombs.

POSITIVES + Legend has it Steven Moffat came up with the idea for this one because he thought the idea of Matt Smith trying to be a Clint Eastwood cowboy would be hilarious. Indeed it is. Having The Doctor, with his old head on young shoulders, in place of the usual young punks fighting while the wise elders of the town who’ve seen it all before tut, is the sort of inversion of the expected that Dr Who always does so well.

NEGATIVES – Why are there so few people in this town? We’re told that there are eighty one people living here, but where are they all? It's busier in Ormskirk on a non-market day! We see maybe a dozen people total during the course of this story –n including the scene where the ‘mob’ tries to attack the jail. They’re all about to die: surely they’d be staring out looking for the Gunslinger or holding a church service at the very least. It’s ‘high noon’ for the crux of the story (of course it is) so they can’t all be in bed surely? Yes it costs money to ship extras over from ‘home’ but remember this is a theme park that’s used to having location filming and Dr Who was near its peak of popularity, known even in Spain. Surely there were more extras hanging round hoping for work than this? Oh and I don’t often comment on continuity errors and dating goofs because everybody’s human and they’re usually too small to make much of a difference but this story has one of the most blatant: ‘Mercy’ is set in 1870 (at least given references to events in the dialogue). Back then there were only thirty-seven  states in the American union, not fifty. Apparently one of the time-travellers in this story brought one with them to stick on the town flagpole when they arrived.  

BEST QUOTE:  ‘I see 'keep out' signs as suggestions more than actual orders. Like 'dry clean only.'

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: See ‘The Gunfighters’ for more fun in the Wild West. There’s a whole bunch of spin-off Western-related adventures listed under that story too.

The latest series five prequel is entitled ‘Making Of A Gunslinger’. Released exclusively on i-tunes and frustratingly absent from all the series seven physical releases, it’s a so-so two minute ‘advert’ for the Gunslinger and how his cyborg body came to be, more like the adverts for the robots in the ‘Westworld’ franchise than ‘Robots Of Death’ with moody blue lighting and a voiceover from Kahler-Jex. All the men selected are soldiers at the peak of fitness who think they’re serving the universe in peace-keeping missions that then turned out very differently, in what was most likely a period dig at the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, fused so that ‘soldier and artillery are one’. Kahler-Jex is ‘subject #6’ by the way, which begs the question what happened to numbers #1 to #5?!

At one stage The Doctor says to Amy ‘You know all the monkeys and dogs they sent into space in the 1950s and 1960s? You will never guess what really happened to them…’ Whether by design or (more likely ) coincidence 2013 also saw the release of  Big Finish’s ‘The Space Race’, part of a series of linked anniversary stories relating to the year 1963. The 6^th Doctor and Peri come to the rescue when the Vostok probe stops working but a mixup means the Russian cosmonaut is replaced by Laika, the dog! It’s all turned into the cover story in a sort of jokey version of ‘The Ambassadors Of Death’, only with barks and howls instead of silence and intense stares. Things turn more series in the last part when The Doctor uncovers a plot by the Russians to assassinate Kennedy and kick off a nuclear war, preventing the Cuban missile crisis in the nick of time, as per tradition. A solid middling story, the weakest part of what was a really strong trilogy. 

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