Vampires Of Venice
(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 8/5/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Toby Whithouse, director: Jonny Campbell)
Rank: 258
''So sweetie, what star sign are you? Oh, aquarium OK... fancy a stroll down the beach? Oh, in the sea I'm alright with that...You know, your teeth are like stars. They're coming out at night. Wait...That's not right....Aaaaagh!'
Welcome, dear readers, to the single silliest story premise in Dr Who! Yes I know what you’re thinking – there was the one with the talking butterflies, the one with the box with long arms trying to use Human brains for their organic soup, the robot made out of sweets, a housing estate filled with cannibal old ladies and multiple version of Atlantis, each sillier than the next. But hold on to your hats for a story of lusty busty fish vampires from space who have taken over Venice as alien mum is using it as a dating service for their children, sending multiple humans to their deaths in the sea so that her 10,000 boys can have them to create lots of new babies. There are so many things to say about this fishy tale, not least the peculiar incestuous ending where mum throws herself into the sea but where The Doctor nevertheless leaves the little ones still there, munching away in 1580. Yet unlike every other Who historical that tries something similar there is no myth or legend to pin this on, no rumour of nasty things happening under the waters, no sight of a boyfriend looking green around the gills, nothing. You’d think someone would mention something, with folklore of sirens or mermaids or both, not to mention the dozen grieving parents who’s offspring have all grown fangs and stopped reflecting in mirrors. Yet, nothing. The whole story, too, seems an elaborate pun on the idea of ‘catfishing’ (the art of pretending to be more beautiful than you really are, as befits a race of fish with a perception filter that makes them look like beautiful Humans), only in this case it’s vampires who turn out to be real catfish. If ever there was a Dr Who story made that couldn’t possibly have happened in our real world it’s this one.
Yet in other ways
‘Vampires Of Venice’ is so of the real world in 2010 it hurts. This is the era
of Twilight, of pale-skinned goths sucking the life out of each other, with
third film ‘Eclipse’ released around a month after this story aired so a tale
about vampires was the single biggest inevitable story this whole season. At
least Dr Who goes in a different direction by making them part fish, something
Twilight would never do (even if the lead is a bit wet) but you only need
compare this to the last vampire craze in Dr Who to see what’s gone wrong. In
‘State Of Decay’ vampires were the only race (at the time) as old as timelords,
with such immense powers of evil that they’d been banished to e-space leaving
only a half-myth in ‘our’ universe, a lingering memory of pale-faced creatures
who lived off human blood and never aged. Did I mention the ones in ‘Venice’
were lusty busty fish vampires? The idea is silly, they act silly and the
little bit of CGI we see of them as fish is very silly, while the sight of
pale-skinned beauties bearing their teeth at The Doctor as if he’s judging a
beauty pageant is incredibly silly.
At the same time, though,
it’s all a bit adult for that watershed at that time, not a bodice ripper
exactly but a bobtail snipe eel ripper. I don't know what they put in the water
on this episode but there's something...fishy about just how hormonal all the
characters seem to be in what's not only the most Twilight but also the most
Mills and Boon of Dr Who stories. Amy flees her wedding night, only to be
offered to 10,000 virgins with teeth. The vampire girls dress extra sexily and
the camera takes every opportunity to stare at their heaving bosoms (that’s one
hell of a perception filter, not least because in their natural fish form they
don’t have bosoms at all). At one point the female vampires talk about ‘filling
you up…with our blood’ and ‘sucking you dry’ in a line that’s surely never been
heard at 6pm on a Saturday teatime before. This is also the only story in Dr Wh
history where the baddy’s plan is to get Humans pregnant (though stagnant might
be a better term, given that they’re dragged into the water the way they are). It’s
a wonder the Humans aren’t all wearing cod-pieces. The thing is though it doesn’t
work because fish just aren’t sexy. Well, only to other fish I suppose.
Steven Moffat asked
writer Toby Whithouse for a ‘big romantic story’, giving him carte blanche to
go anywhere and do anything. At first Whithouse chose ‘The God Complex’, a tale of Amy and
Rory trapped in a corridor and realising their lover for one another, but for
some odd reason it was rejected (because it was ‘too similar’ to ‘Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’ officially,
a story that doesn’t actually resemble it at all). So Whithouse went for the
most obvious romantic date he could think of (though I for one would much
prefer The Doctor’s other suggestions, the first Olympic games or doing the
can-can at the Moulin Rouge). Moffat explained that he wanted a story that
followed on from his own love triangle, where a dangerous situation had made
Amy oddly horny for a generally asexual Dr Who companion and run into the arms
of The Doctor even though she had a fiancé she was about to get married to. A
sensible idea given that Whithouse tends to be stronger at character and
emotion in the middle of daft circumstances than anything else (he worked on
this story in between seasons one and two of ‘Being Human’, which is all about
vampires, werewolves and ghosts trying to live a normal life in abnormal
circumstances). Only of course this is a Dr Who love triangle where Rory is
trying to get married to a girl who’s just run off with her imaginary friend
from her childhood. The Doctor is utterly oblivious to how Rory is feeling,
crashing his stag do and accidentally letting out what a great kisser his life
is while Rory finally wins the girl in Dr Who’s silliest fight, tackling a fish
vampire with a broomstick (resulting in Dr Who’s longest on-screen kiss: it
wasn’t supposed to be that long but Karen Gillan forgot she was the one
supposed to give the cue to end so carried on and it seemed so in character
they let the cameras roll). Everyone is at it in this story that tries hard to
be sexy but really just comes off as silly: There's the female vampire fish
from outer space trying to find human males to mate with. The chief vampire
fish having the hots for the Doctor. Amy and Rory getting it together during
their first trip in the Tardis, though Amy still not-so-secretly has the hots
for the Doctor. This is the only Dr Who story to have ‘The Stripper’ on the
soundtrack, The Doctor replacing poor Lucy at the last minute. For a while it
looks as if the Doctor has the hots for the alien fish too. It’s the sort of
story where everyone needs to take a cold shower and most unusual for Dr Who,
not least for oldtimers who’d spent the first twenty-six years without any
suggestion of romance at all.
It’s a story that’s
absolutely bonkers, utterly unrealistic, doesn't have a lot to say, has a plot
goes as far as any plot with vampire alien fish can go and its riding the
bandwagon for sexy vampires so obviously I think it got a speeding ticket,
while a lot of the sexiness seems forced and OTT. However, even if the main
plot is too silly and unsexy for words there are lots of things Whithouse gets
right which push this story above the bottom of the pile. It’s our first chance
to see Rory as a character rather than a love rival. He’s very much a less
nerdy Larry Nightingale (from Moffat’s ‘Blink’),
an odd mixture of comedy relief and romantic lead, slightly goofy and out of
his depth, but with a capacity for bravery he’s not even aware he has in
everyday life. He’s very much Harry to Amy’s Sarah Jane in fact, a point I don’t
think enough fans pick up on, the reliable old-fashioned centre that allows her
to take risks because she can always depend on him to rescue her. Arthur
Darvill does a lot to make him likeable, three-dimensional despite being the
butt of all the jokes and believable as someone who has just enough gumption about
him for Amy to want to be with him. While future stories will be all about Amy
having a foot in both camps, Rory’s offer of stable ordinary life and The
Doctor’s dangerous but extraordinary world (next story ‘Amy’s Choice’ in
particular) this one is all about Rory’s confusion at even having a love rival.
Future stories will go out of their way to prove his undying love for her but
we don’t know that yet and Rory’s never been in this situation before. Till now
he’s been able to ignore The Doctor and pretend it isn’t happening, while the
run of stories at the start of series six prove how long he’s been by Amy’s
side without a rival (not least because their romance is obvious to everyone
around the pair but them), but now he’s confronted with The Doctor’s world and
feels he can’t compete. Even his stag do is upstaged when he finds out about
Amy having the hots for someone else on the eve of their wedding night. The
Doctor thinks he’s being kind by cooling Amy down and whisking the lovers away
on a romantic trip but for the most part it does more harm than good: Rory
stands at the side, glowering, as The Doctor and Amy share an excitement he
knows he can’t possibly show Amy and instead of The Doctor playing gooseberry
to them it’s Rory left on the sidelines. Yet we also see that Rory is genuine:
the opening scene of him phoning up Amy to tell her he loves her ‘because it’s
been seven hours since I told you and that’s a scandal’ softens what could have
been a nasty scene about a fiancé leering after a stripper (while it’s totally
in character for Amy to have a hen night Rory seems like the last person who’d
want a stag do and Amy seems like the last sort of girlfriend who would let him.
Presumably one of his mates organised it for him. He has a surprising lot of
them too, given how much the other stories emphasise his shyness and how much
his life revolves around Amy. None of them look like natural hospital
co-workers). You feel for Rory and see why he begins to resent The Doctor
before the end, when being in danger makes Amy reach out for him instead. It’s
a shame they didn’t run this love triangle for longer actually as its new for
Who, but the very next story will make it clear to her just how much she would
choose Rory every time. ‘Venice’ also makes clear that there is true love from
two people who care deeply for each other (with a foreshadowing of Rory’s days
spending 2000 years protecting her as a plastic Auton – or a Eunuch, which is
what the Doctor’s psychic papers says), while what Amy felt for The Doctor was
animal lust of a type like the fish vampires.
There are other little
bits that work quite brilliantly too. The Doctor does everything he can to give
the vampires life (and a cut scene even has him taking the children to a new
planet via the Tardis – with great difficulty given the story originally ended
with him explaining to Rory ‘you know how you take goldfish home from the fair?
Well, this will be nothing like as simple as that!’) and give Rosanna second
chances to explain herself, but loses it when she can’t even remember the
victim we see taken in the opening few minutes. He knows all her talk about the
sanctity of life is wrong. While Rosanna is your typically drippy baddy (and a
long way from the guilt-ridden haunted vampires of ‘Being Human’ who are
addicts, terrified of death), one who doesn’t really do much, her final speech
to The Doctor haranguing him for committing genocide and how she hopes she
haunts his every waking moment is a powerful one that clearly haunts him. Rory
too gets in a heartfelt speech about why The Doctor’s dangerous, not because
he’s evil but because he makes good people want to impress him and take risks.
He has a point given how much Amy, who still feels abandoned by her ‘childhood
friend’, desperately wants him to stay even though she has a life now. You feel
for The Doctor too, who is only trying to do the ‘right’ thing, both by the
people of Venice and by giving his companion a romantic date (he should have
stuck with giving tokens!) and is clearly stung by the truth in both instances (it
might well be what kickstarts the guilt behind ‘Amy’s
Choice’ in fact). Most other stories across season give will be from Amy’s
point of view, her creator Steven Moffat using her as his mouthpiece (shouty,
Scottish, feisty and modern but in a subtly different way to Rose Martha or
Donna) but this is a rare story this year where events revolve around her and
she’s seen from other people’s points of view by ‘outside’ writers. Whithouse
is the first person this year to write for these characters and a lot of what
we think of as their ‘traits’ really stem from him, such as Rory’s undying love
for Amy (no sign of it in ‘The Eleventh Hour’) and Amy’s struggle to make
decisions. On that score this story works really well, giving us a much greater
feel of the Tardis trio that sets up all the emotional plot-beats to come.
There are some great
little gags scattered across the episode too including some of the best of the
Moffat era, something Whithouse is always so good at. It seems a little late
given the plague died out three years earlier but I’ll buy that Venice is still
under quarantine and keeping ‘aliens’ away – all except the alien fish using
perception filters as it turns out. When she discovers The Doctor is a timelord
Rosanna quips ‘you should be in a museum – or a mausoleum’. Amy tries to
improvise her way ut of trouble by telling the vampires ‘I’m from Ofsted’, in
her nervousness forgetting the school inspection team won’t be invented for
centuries yet. The Doctor improvises by ordering the vampire fish to ‘tell me
your whole plan!’ before running away sighing ‘one day that’ll work!’ Rory
finally has it out with The Doctor about kissing his wife and demands ‘I’m
getting married in 534 years, I have a right to know’ and asks if The Doctor
kissed her back. His answer (‘No, I kissed her mouth’) an old music hall joke
that nevertheless is brilliantly in character, a misunderstanding that
infuriates Rory. There’s a great scene where The Doctor tries to think and puts
his fingers to his companion’s lips like a primary schoolteacher, even going so
far as to get Rory to stretch his arm out and do the same to Guido. The Doctor
needs his identity at one point and whips out a card from Shoreditch Library –
rather wonderfully if improbably, it still has William Hartnell’s face on it
(presumably this is from when he and Susan spent five months at the nearby-ish
Coal Hill School). Rory even gets in a ‘yeah – and your mum’ gag when he’s
trying to get Francesco’s attention by insulting Rosanna. Plus that great quote
when Rosanna turns her charms on The Doctor ‘I’m a timelord, you’re a big fish,
think of the children!’ Sadly they cut another of my favourite jokes to get
this story to time, as Rory does the old ‘but we must win because I know the
future hasn’t changed’ time traveller routine and The Doctor comments that for
all they know everything’s changed ‘and the home secretary isa fish!’ (Funnily
enough future prime minister Theresa May had just taken the job two days before
transmission and looks very like a fish!) ‘Venice’ gets a lot of the little
things right even when it messes up the big things like plot and tone.
One big thing it gets
right too, is the glorious location filming. Dr Who had planned to set a story
in Venice for years – ‘The Two Doctors’
was set there for a draft, in fact. The idea had been dropped as it was just a
bit too far away to be worth the cost and given that Venice is a tourist
hotspot all year round they were never going to shut the streets just for a
film crew and there was just no chance at crowd control. However the Venetians
got around, taking their architecture with them and one of the places they made
it to was Trigor in Croatia in the 14th century. So Dr Who went
there, filming ‘Vampires Of Venice’ back-to-back with ‘Vincent and The Doctor’
(as France built a few buildings too, a little further in town than the coast
seen here). It was a masterstroke in both cases: while a lot of 20th
century location filming in Dr Who was wasted in the sense that the stories
could have been set anywhere you need to see actual Venice streets in this one
and the CGI re-creations of gondolas punting past are well handled too. There’s
plenty of extras too, locals who had never ever heard of Dr Who (it’s never
been transmitted in Croatia and anyone searching for it in that country would
be taken straight to the World Health Organisation Doctor’s page!) but curious
about the cameras milling about and you really get the sense of a community
living there (check out the lady with the goat early on: the location manager
Gareth Skelding spotted her from the plane the week before filming when he went
on a recce and offered her a wage to come back for the shoot). Both stories go
as well as they do partly because of the help from the Embassy film company,
who handled all the translation recommended locations and handled most of the
contracts on the condition Who came in the Winter when it was quiet (most of the story was filmed in November and
December 2009, when David Tennant is still The Doctor on-screen, and was much
colder than it looked, with a constant drizzle that made the fight scene particularly
hard to film and with Matt Smith taking lots of takes to walk down the stairs
without slipping). It’s a real shame Dr Who has never been back (they have
Roman and Byzantine Empire architecture too!) Although it’s not all Croatia: you might
recognise certain backgrounds from our old regular Caerphilly Castle, while
other parts were filmed in Castle Coch, Tongwynlais, Cardiff, the three
locations seamlessly slotted together. Rory’s stag do is in Owls Terrace Inn,
Cardiff, if you want to have one there yourself.
That’s kind of it though:
considering this is a story about fish it doesn’t go anywhere particularly deep
and it’s all spectacle without lingering on what anybody might be thinking or
feeling as their town are given over to the fish people. There’s no greater
message here, no metaphor the way there is in so many Who stories (unless you
seriously want to make a point that men are from the fishpond, while women are
all vampires), no subtext, no subplot, no parallels. It’s a story that lacks
bite, which is ironic really given how many teeth are on show in this episode. Rosanna
doesn’t really do much and her motives are weird: she goes from being powerful sexual
lust object in ‘Servalan’ mode to concerned helicopter mum remarkably quickly.
Her son Francesco is even worse – even Amy can defeat him, fangs and all, by
calling him mummy’s boy and distracting him. Any real ‘threat’ is over inside
the first few minutes when Guido’s daughter goes ‘swimming with the fishes’ but
all we really see of those are bubbles. It’s weird, then, that this of all
stories should get into trouble for violence this year, as a result of which Dr
Who is later pushed back later in the timeslots again. There isn’t any, at
least not seen but it’s not one of those plots that lingers on what happens
either. Which is possibly just as well given that the fate is to be sexed to
death by a fish.
This is a story that
mostly lives or dies based on how you feel about lusty busty vampire fish from
outer space, a lot that even a low budget 1950s B movie would think twice about
making, never mind Dr Who. This race are from the planet ‘Saturnyne’, a word
that spelt as ‘saturnine’ means ‘dark and mysterious’ but may also have been
borrowed from the DC Comics where ‘Saturnine’ was a regular character, not
quite a hero, not quite a villain, but a survivor trying to protect her
omniverse from being wiped out, ‘silver and blue with a cold appearance’ who
always looked as if she’d just stepped out the shower. It’s easy to see where
Whithouse would have got Rosanna from. Even for what the plot is they could
have done a lot more with it too, for underneath everything this is a story
about how far families go for their children. Rosanna is prepared to kill for
hers, to emigrate to another planet but that’s contrasted with Guido who’s
trying to do the same for his daughter. We get a scene, the one that first gets
the Doctor’s interest, where dad is desperately trying to hunt for his
daughter, lifting up shawls while the vampires laugh at him and Guido takes over
The Doctor’s plan, blowing the vampires up in revenge for what they did to his
daughter.
But what happens before
then? There’s no real sense of rage, Guido doesn’t pour out everything about
his love for his daughter, he doesn’t even seem surprised that some outsiders
walking round in funny clothes have offered to help him when all the locals who
presumably know him well are too scared (Venice is allegedly in quarantine so
he ought to be shocked that there even are visitors, never mind Amy’s outfit
and Rory’s stag do jumper, an anachronism if ever there was one). That’s what
the emotional climax of this story should be, not Amy choosing Rory or The
Doctor blowing up a baddy who gives him a guilt complex. It’s weird too that
only Guido seems prepared to fight back. After all, Rosanna has cut Venice off and
marooned them, under quarantine laws: she’s lied to a population and fed them
to the fishes yet only Guido wants to fight back. You’d think, too, that a more
obvious thing to do with a Venetian setting would be to go back further, to
before it was a floating city’ and when it was created out of marshland by a
group of refugees, to explain why people decided to build a city here (because
the locals kept falling in love and walking into the sea, until their mums and
dads decided to keep an eye on them by raising their town out of the waters
where they couldn’t be reached. It would have saved the expense of that extra
bit of CGI to make everything look as if it was floating too). Instead we get a
story that works only because the writer says it does. It all contributes to
the fact that this story never feels quite ‘real’, as if we’re watching ‘perception filter’ of how a real Dr Who
story would normally work. The ‘series arcs’, the crack in the wall and ‘The
Silence’ also seem more artificially added in than normal, the story ending
with a close-up of the Tardis keyhole for no reason except it looks a bit like
a crack, which is just weird.
Mostly, though, it’s just
too stupid to be believable. Having a story about sexy vampires in 2010 was so
obvious you feel a bit ashamed of Who for going there. Nowadays it’s dated
fairly badly compared to its sister episodes, a product of its time in the same
way that every mid-1960s base from the future had psychedelic light displays
and the 1970s always seemed to be bright orange, with a lot of '50 Shades of
Gray' in there as well as ‘Twilight’. Making them sexy fish vampires is just
stupid. The reasoning that only one gender has survived the journey is never
explained and what’s more is clearly a load of plankton given that mum survived
the journey too. Why did they leave in the first place? Too many sharks in the
dating pool? Why did they pick this planet? Why not just head straight to the
seas and lure people from the shore the weay mermaids or sirens do (they’d be
far sexier). Why not head to Atlantis where there’s a ready made race of fish
people waiting to mate? Why don’t the sons of the water just elope with whales
or dolphins, given that they probably have more in common with them genetically
than Humans anyway (surely much more to their taste than hairy land-walking
apes)? If Whithouse wanted a story set in Venice so badly why not make the
baddies mermaids, or if he wants vampires so badly why not set it in Romania,
where it would explain the traditions that started there (in reality because of
ruler Vlad the Impaler spiking people but with flexibility enough for a Who
plot). Putting the two together just doesn’t work at all. This is one of those
story ideas writers come up with for a joke, expecting them to be rejected and
which most authors have the sense to drop when they start writing and realise
how much they’ve backed themselves into a corner, but not this time and the
explanations we get just make everything worse. Whithouse is too good a writer
to make this totally unworkable and throws every great gag and character piece
he can at this story and the gorgeous location certainly helps, making it
surprisingly watchable for a dumb story about fish vampires from space. Yet
dumb it remains, perhaps the dumbest storyline in the entire catalogue, and no
amount of dressing can make up for that or shake off that feeling when it’s
over, ‘well, that was a silly one’. It’s the closest Dr Who came to jumping the
shark and breaking all links to normality, a minnow of a story even with all
the Dr-Amy-Rory relationship exploration and there are far bigger fish to fry.
POSITIVES + Matt Smith
is often the best thing in the stories that make up his three series as the
Doctor and rarely more so than here. He somehow manages to be totally
convincing as the object of so many people's affections, yet genuinely alieny
oblivious to it all not to mention hilariously funny (again while being
oblivious to it), endlessly enthusiastic and, when the occasion demands it,
violently outraged. He’s brilliantly unromantic too, even in the face of
multiple buxom women hurling themselves at him, a joke which reaches its climax
the following season when he’s still to date the only Doctor to get married
(well sort of: see ‘The Wedding Of River Song’).
It helps that he has such chemistry with Karen that they instinctively know how
to play each scene and that he knows Arthur from days of old (in a stage play
called, I’m not kidding, ‘Swimming With Sharks’). His best scene though is when
he’s ordering Amy back to the Tardis against her will and the shared
conspiratorial wink with Rory: he doesn’t take his words lightly and wants to protect
her, even though you can tell he feels vulnerable at being left all alone
without an audience. You so buy into the Doctor's feelings in this story that
you almost forget he's ticking off a bunch of alien fish people. Almost.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The
second of two ‘Meanwhile In The Tardis’ episodes (2010) was created especially
for the series five DVD sets and is set directly before ‘Vampires’. Though
always written as a standalone piece unlike most of the rest this year it feels
like a cut scene that makes more sense of the parent episode, a nice bit of
character without relation to the main plot that’s more than mere filler. Amy
is complaining that The Doctor is a ‘typical bloke’, always ‘tinkering with his
motor’ as the Tardis has gone wrong again (just wait till the Tardis becomes a
person in ‘The Doctor’s
Wife’!) The Doctor complains: he’s not typical at all!
Amy complains of ‘mixed signals’ – he whisks her out of bed in her nightie
‘which you make me keep on for…ages’ and takes her for a spin in his time
machine, only to then ignore her (‘That’s a signal that says get your coat, the
Doctor is in’). The Doctor’s confused: their relationship has never struck him
that way before. Amy says he’s a typical male so that must be his intention;
The Doctor then compares himself to an asexual ‘space Gandalf’ before offering
‘an involuntarily snort of…fondness’. The message doesn’t sink in: Amy is
appalled to find she’s ‘not the first’ and even more appalled to find out that
most of The Doctor’s past companions were, indeed, girls. The best line in the
piece: ‘Were they young?’ asks Amy. ‘Everyone’s young compared to me’ The
Doctor reasonably points out. Amy then tricks The Doctor into unlocking all
visual records of companions:she’s secretly quite impressed (‘Is that a leather
bikini?’ she says of Leela, while The Doctor tuts to the Tardis and says it
could have at least showed ‘the metal dog’). His next move: to surprise Rory at
his stag night, cue the deeply awkward start of ‘Venice’. It seems really odd
in retrospect that The Doctor doesn’t choose this moment to say ‘hey, I’m mixed
gender and sometimes I’m a girl – don’t take it personally!’ although at the
time it was just weird that The Doctor hadn’t considered Amy might react like
this given Rose and Martha are recent history at this point still. At all times
its incredibly weird given that Amy has this conversation on the eve of her
wedding night: at the time we wondered if hubby to be was some sort of monster
she wasn’t really in love with but it’s Rory and they’ve been a couple for
years by this point as it turns out; while its totally in character for Amy to
re-think her big life decisions it’s not in character at all to see her this
aggressively flirty and it’s a character point they mercifully drop after this
when Rory becomes a regular not a bit-player. It’s a bit weird all round
though, as if this was the first thing Steven Moffat wrote as showrunner back
when Rory wasn’t a character at all before realising he’d got the tone wrong
and starting again.
Though ‘Vampires’ was the only time the Tardis
visited Venice on screen The Doctor’s been there twice before in different
regenerations. ‘Empire Of Glass’ (1995) is a ‘Missing Adventures’ novel by Andy
Lane from the brief era when the 1st Doctor was travelling alongside
Vicki and Steven. The Tardis is drawn to Venice in 1609 and The Doctor is
thrilled to meet Galileo (not least so he can name drop him for so many of his
regenerations to come!) while Shakespeare is hanging round too (this is their
first meeting from The Doctor’s point of view, long before ‘Shakespeare Code’,
but not his – he asks if The Doctor has a younger brother! Full marks for
continuity that hasn’t happened yet, until Will ruins it by asking if he used
to have ‘curly brown hair’ and if he was taller?!) However, as in real life,
Christopher Marlowe is the undoubted star, heroically saving Steven at one
point. This is one of those novels you could never accuse of being boring:
there are flying islands hovering in the sky, a shifty timelord named Briaxetel
(maybe the Doctor’s long lost brother, maybe not) who’d already cropped up in a
few other Who books, an ‘Armageddon Convention’ a throwaway reference in ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’
that turned up here – I love the detail that the Daleks and Cybermen couldn’t
be bothered to turn up to Earth as they had bigger things to do - and alien flying crabs. Arguably there’s a bit
too much going on: a lot of the book feels over-written and there to shock
rather than tell a story, the main plot of which is hard to get a proper hold of. The best
moments by far are the little character ones as Lane gets this trio of
traveller’s characters so well by now – their friction and their friendship,
especially Vicki and Steven’s desperate needs to prove themselves to each other
(and both automatically assuming they know more than the other does). Venice
itself is a nicely picturesque backdrop, as long as you’re not looking for too
much period accuracy (this isn’t that kind of book!)
Previous ‘Time and The Angels/Flesh and Stone’ next ‘Amy’s
Choice’
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