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 20th 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 21st 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’.
Previous ‘Daleks
In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks’ next ‘42’
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