The Infinite Quest: Ranking - 232

  The Infinite Quest

(Animated Special, Dr 10 with Martha, 2/4/2007-30/6/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Alan Barnes, director: Gary Russell)  

Rank: 232

'This is Brigadier K calling The Doctor! We have a new mission for you, DW, and your assistant Perifold. Apparently Doctor Who's been trapped in a parallel dimension crossover with animators Cosgrove Hall. Where's Jamie and his magic kilt when you need him?!'

 

 

Caw! Doesn’t everyone look animated all of a sudden? Oh wait, that’s because they are! The middle of three specially commissioned original Dr Who animated adventures (as opposed to the handful of re-animations of  missing episodes that always seem to give everyone 5 o’clock shadow including the girls and Cybermen; why can’t we have a set of telesnap reconstructions on DVD instead? They’re much more interesting) is proof of just how popular Dr Who was circa 2007. After all animations take time and investment. You have to cast the voice actors and record their voices long before any of the actual animation comes along (poor Freema Agyeman has to create Martha’s personality on the hoof) and you can’t simply re-tweak the ending or re-shoot something if it doesn’t quite work out. ‘The Infinite Quest’ has a very different feel to the last time this was tried out, for 2003’s ‘Scream Of The Shalka’. Back then it was a last throw of the dice to get Dr Who an audience at a time when the show had been off the air for fourteen years and an entire generation had grown up without it, a desperate attempt to win over a new audience and breathe new life into a franchise that seemed dead, a last gasp across a finishing line to give fans who’d been holding out since the Paul McGann TV Movie in 1996 something to cheer. Ironically that attempt was killed off not because it was bad or because Dr Who doesn’t weork in animation but because Russell T Davies charmed the BBC into bringing Dr Who back on television. Suddenly we didn’t need the cul-de-sac of a low budget animation the BBC were sure wouldn’t work and tried to hide so as few people saw it as possible (even though it’s actually pretty good). ‘The Infinite Quest’ is a lap of honour, a celebration that they somehow managed to pull this off so that anything with the Dr Who name on it – even a pricey animation included as three minute episodes (ironic really, given the infinite name, that these are easily he shortest eps in dr who history, shorter even than the five minute parts of previous record holder, the radio series ‘Slipback’, which it also very much resembles) in the middle of a behind the scenes show for kiddywinkles – is guaranteed to be a hit. It’s totally different, brimming with ideas and confidence, because Dr Who’s trajectory is totally different now.

So was its parent programme ‘Totally Dr Who’, the sort of show I’d have killed for when I was seven but got hit by the series being cancelled instead – a sort of cross between ‘Blue Peter’ and ‘Why Don’t You?’ but much more exciting because it had aliens and monsters and people who actually worked on the show coming on as guests. A sort of junior version of ‘Dr Who Confidential/Unleashed’ it seemed totally unlike the traditional ways of doing Dr Who, with its two smiley friendly polite presenters gushing over the latest episode and acting like big kids who said ‘totally’ every other word (one of them, Barney Harwood, totally turns up as the ‘control voice’ and gets to spend an episode filming behind-the-scenes, included on the DVD) but it totally made sense when you looked into Russell T’s background in television. Although it was the (often very) adult dramas with which he made his name and won over the BBC enough to trust him with a ‘dead’ franchise Russell actually started in the early 1990s on children’s telly. Before he wrote ‘Queer as Folk’ and ‘Bon and Rose’, even before he wrote for ‘Children’s Ward’, Russell started his career on make-do-and-mend programmes like the latter and ‘Play School’ (where in 1987 at the age of twenty-three he started life as a presenter, albeit just for one deeply uncomfortable morning, before realising he was far more comfortable behind the cameras rather than in front of them – it still exists and makes a regular appearance, so I’ve heard, at wrap parties and birthday parties when people want a good laugh). One of the big themes of the Davies era of Dr Who is that the young audience at home should feel like they have the power to do anything when they grow up and ‘Totally’ was a way of encouraging them to write stories or paint pictures about their favourite monsters and Humans and to get an insight from the people actually making the show, to encourage them to be in television. On that score it worked brilliantly too: a lot of people working on the second Russell era and even the end of the Moffat and Chibnall eras were the children who totally watched ‘Totally Dr Who’ every week and totally got the bug for making a career on television just like Russell did. Admittedly some of the interviews went a bit wrong, what with the gushing presenters fawning over confused monosyllabic special effects teams or actors who didn’t get why such a small part of their CV was suddenly such a big deal  and there was, most infamously, Noel Clarke crowing over winning a competition over Dr Who knowledge with a little girl and making her hand over her special model, before watching her sniffle and hastily handing it back to her along with his own ‘prize’. Mostly, though, ‘Totally Dr Who’ worked a treat by letting children have an extra dose of their favourite show and bring them up to speed about it in an exciting way that was made purely for them, unlike confidential where us old-timers sitting there and scoffing ‘but of course in my day the Cybermen looked better…’

Of course it totally didn’t take long before Russell had turned ‘Why Don’t You?’ from a programme about taking things apart to see how they worked into being a drama. Officially the BBC didn’t make many dramas for children because they were a) costly and b) something children weren’t thought to be into anymore, in the late 1980s days of interactive arts and crafts shows, but Russell found a way to do it on a shoestring and tripled the viewing figures, with a long running story about (of course) a super-computer trying to take over the world and the teenage presenters trying to stop it (basically it’s ‘The War Machines’ with Ben and Polly all over again). Equally it didn’t take Russell long before he totally figured he wanted a bit of drama to be totally in ‘Totally Dr Who’ too, but rather than just film something along with the other stories (when the production crew were already stretched to breaking point) he turned to the idea of animation, with thirteen three-minute episodes that were totally made for children not adults: bright colourful, full of adventure and noise and mayhem and the sort of imaginative brilliant things Dr Who was crying out for that couldn’t be done on TV. Only of course the BBC didn’t have an animation department – it would have to be an arrangement with another animation company.

The obvious link was with ‘Cosgrove Hall’; the famous animation company that had made ‘Scream Of The Shalka’ (despite his criticisms of the story and acting Russell liked the animation) and had just completed work on an animation for the missing episodes of ‘The Invasion’ (the one where everyone walks like scarecrow Thunderbird puppets, pull expressions like they’re impersonating Dick Emery every other line and Jamie seems to be wearing a skirt rather than a kilt). It’s also the home of all sorts of children-friendly series which all feel like source material for the new-look series: the colourful animated bits in Rainbow’ (with John ‘K9’ Leeson as Bungle and Roy ‘Dalek voices’ Skelton as George and Zippy), the rush of adrenalin of ‘Danger Mouse’, the horror and laughs of ‘Count Duckula’ (when this collaboration was announced I had money on a Count Duckula-‘State Of Decay’ crossover!), the eccentric Englishness of ‘The Wind In The Willows’, the imagination of ‘Chorlton and The Wheelies’, ‘Cockleshell Bay’ (which is like ‘The Smugglers’ but without all the deaths), ‘Creepy Crawlies’ (which is like ‘The Web Planet’ without all the Vaseline-smeared camerawork) and ‘Jamie and His Magic Torch’ (which worked just like a sonic screwdriver; sadly there never was a sequel called ‘Zoe and Her Magic Psychic Paper’). They actually turn in a really good animation, one that’s inviting and warm compared to the moody shadows of ‘Shalka’ (where it’s sometimes hard to work out what’s going on) and ‘Dreamland’, the following animation made by an entirely different animation company two years alter (where it’s always hard to work out what’s going on’).

This is Dr Who the way you always dreamed the comic strips would look like on television, a wild ride, full of big ideas, larger-than-life characters and an explosion every three minutes, a whirlwind tour of planets covered in snow, giant metallic birds with whirring cogs, a baddy made out of spare parts, a world with three suns that doesn’t look like a fake computer generation, underground prisons (the most impressive of the lot, like the scene with all the doors in ‘Monsters Inc’, still a relatively contemporary film back then), huge derelict spaceships floating in space (the weakest as they just look like every other Dr Who spaceship) and a multi-legged oil rig robot firing laser beams. It’s all completely, utterly, brilliantly mad, the closest yet to how Dr Who looks in your imagination when you’re seven and wondering why the series doesn’t always look like this, without any budget costs at all to take into account  (moving images at least: it depends on your imagination for the audio stories, comic strips or novels, of course). In terms of the series ‘The Infinite Quest resembles ‘The Pirate Planet’ most, not just in the pirate/treasure theme and mechanical bird (who looks a bit like the polyphase parrot should have done) and is quite Douglas Adamsy in places, in its imagination and absurd logic tipped on its head, although you suspect that had Douglas gone with the old ‘quest’ scenario he’d have also slipped in a few jokey barbed lines about how we’ve all been here before and how boring quest stories are (‘If you’re supposed to be the superior race in the universe then how come I beat you inside three minutes by creating my own stairs?!’) sadly it’s almost the most ‘Star Warsy’, full of big broad brushstroke aliens that don’t really do much and who never feel quite ‘real’ doing things people would never do in real life, set against impressive dessert backdrops and special effects.  Which is the opposite of Dr Who’s traditionally great characters and plots on a shoestring budget. Watching it can make you feel like a ‘dirty birdie’, as if Dr Who has sold out in some way (for instance how much better would, say, ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ have been if they’d kept this money back and spent it on decent CGI?)  

The thing is, mostly by virtue of only having three minutes to play around with, the script’s a bit bird-brained and very bitty, like ‘The Keys Of Marinus’ on fast forward, with a new location every other minute and so many characters not only coming and going but changing motivation that it’s hard to keep up. ‘Quest’ stories tend by their very nature to be episodic and this is no exception, with plots that get resolved in the blink of an eye and others that are left hanging as baddies suddenly become goodies, goodies are secret baddies and baddies are undercover goodies, with the need for a sudden revelation or emotional climax every time the script settles down. I mean, here’s that plot: Balthazar, one of those eye-rolling shouty tyrant types, wants to turn humans into diamonds and has sent his pet mechanical bird   out to fool the Dr and Martha into a four-part quest so they can search for an ancient spaceship. Only the ship itself is magical and grants wishes, one of which a captured Martha uses to wish the doctor was there and save the day. Along the way we meet a pirate and a quite literal skeleton crew made out of skeletons (a joke first done on ‘Superted’, a rare 1980s animation not by ‘Cosgrove Hall’ but with Jon Pertwee as Spottyman and the single biggest series made entirely in Wales in the 20^th century, so everyone working on Who knew it), a planet of giant insects known as the Mantasphids (the first time the ‘new’ series had dared do insects, once such a staple of the ‘classic’ series, and here very much a dry run for the ones in ‘Planet Of The Dead’ with a hint of ‘The Web Planet’ in there too) and a prison (where the Doctor is imprisoned for, among other things, thousands of library book fines and seventeen counts of overthrowing governments). That’s hard to follow in the compilation version, broadcast the morning of series three finale ‘Last Of The Timelords’ (and the only episode of the year not to get its own ‘Totally Dr Who’ tie-in): trying to follow this the first time round, at the rate of three minutes a week, was impossible (and the fact that you had to watch the entire thing again to see the ending, with the final three minutes never broadcast on ‘Totally’, was a right pain and feels less like a master plan to get people watching than a cock-up in how many episodes of the series were commissioned, given the BBC assumed no one would care in a ‘behind the scenes’ on an episode that had already gone out). That’s not just my poor old addled adult brain either (though, arguably, it was that too) every kid I knew that was totally caught up in Dr Who totally loved the chance to have extra adventures with the Doctor and Martha but totally wished they’d slow down just a little bit.

There is a really good story in here, one with a lot of very Dr Whoy things to say that had only been said in the ‘classic’ series – the theme of treasure and wishes, for instance, is taken wholesale from the end of ‘The Five Doctors’ where immortality is not all it’s cracked up to be. It takes a few re-watchings to notice but every character in this story is searching for a different kind of treasure: to greedy Balthazar it’s diamonds (and he has a backup plan to turn Humanity into precious jewels if he doesn’t get what he wants) purely for power, to Caw it’s also treasure but not so he can spend it but because he can eat it (he finds money delicious!), for the pirates it’s petrol to power their sailing ships, for Gurney the prisoner-turned-prison-officer it’s freedom and for the insects it’s dung (because it seems to be an established fact that every series made for children in the 21^st century has to have a joke about poo in there somewhere). In true Dr Who fashion all of them have access to the things they need already and the few that don’t would be better off trading rather than wasting all that precious food and fuel and money (and, err, toilet waste) trekking halfway across the universe for a datachip. You don’t need a magic maguffin to make a wish on (and it’s never made entirely clear how the spaceship ‘The Infinite’ can grant these wishes either – is it all a hallucination, a natural anomaly, science we don’t quite understand or the work of one of Dr Who’s demi Gods?): everything you ever wanted can be yours if you work for it and be nice to people. The message is this: the Doctor and Martha get what they need by inspiring the best in the people they meet, befriending the people trapped by the pirates or the tyrant or the prison guard himself: they save lives, give what they can and make friends for life – even (spoilers) at a cost of Caw’s life as the mechanical bird swoops in to save their lives (and leave them his son inside a gift he gave to Martha, in one of the biggest sudden ‘Davies et machina’ twists of them all). The most interesting part of the story in many ways is the end, when Martha saves the day unknowingly by wishing very hard that the Doctor was with her (apparently evaporated half the universe away for…plot reasons) and her embarrassed start when she works out that it’s a wish fulfilment but then the real Doctor is standing behind her looking confused. It’s a lot more interesting than any of the main series’ heavy-handed hints at how much Martha wants to be with the Doctor as part of a couple (though it would have been better still had we actually seen the Doctor’s wish fulfilment: he claims it ‘doesn’t work on him’ but his eyes still tinkle in a very animated way as if they do – given the 2007 dating it would have been entirely in keeping for an animated Rose to turn up and sadden Martha further, but then it would have meant more money animating and getting the rights to Billie Piper’s likeness so I can see why they didn’t. Still a lost dramatic opportunity though!)

That’s a nice rounded plot, but it rattles along at such speed lurching from so many sudden twists and turns that you never really know what’s going on at any one time and it’s hard to see the patterns and mirrors of behaviour whether spread out across twelve weeks (it’s hard to remember!) or the full forty five minute compilation (it’s exhausting!) By the time you get to the end it feels a lot longer than it really is – not necessarily because there’s so much story going on but more because of how tiring it is trying to follow. We never spend long enough with any of the interesting characters we meet for them to make an impression, despite the dazzling array of voice actors who are all good and actually a lot better than they needed to be. Anthony Head (returning from ‘School Reunion’) makes the one-note bully Balthazar into something approaching a real person, while the animation of a man with a gas mask with green test tubes coming out of his face (just like the Hath in ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ to come) is nicely behind-the-sofa scary. Caw! is voiced by Toby Longworth, better known for his Star Wars animation voices and what should on paper be a dub person’s idea  of K9 who can only speak in clipped sentences (‘Dirty birdie!’ being his most memorable) somehow feels real too enough to make you mourn for his death at the end far more than you do, say, Clara in ‘Hell Bent’ or Danny Pink in ‘Dark Waters/Death In Heaven’. Stephen Grief marks the first time since 1984 that we had a star of Blake’s 7 turn up (when we had two at once what with Paul Darrow in ‘Timelash’ and Jacqueline Pearce in ‘The Two Doctors’; listen out for the gag line ‘Maximum Power!’, Servalan’s catchphrase) and he’s a lot more interesting as Gurney than he ever was as Travis, especially when you learn the prison warden’s full story (having left prison he returned to it as an employee because no one else would give him a job with his track record!) The pirates are less interesting, but do at least give David Tennant what sadly turned out to be his only chance to unleash his inner pirate (he’s a lot more comfortable than Matt Smith or Jodie Whittaker are in ‘Curse Of The Black Spot’ and ‘Legend Of The Sea Devils’ respectively). Only the insects disappoint voice and personality wise and they still look mighty fine in animated form, entirely natural yet entirely alien and the shots of them swarming en masse might well be the best bit of Dr Who animation around.

That all suggests you’re in for a really deep and character-filled story, but alas you only really find all this out if you’re prepared to dig deep, like the pirates after their treasure – and even though there is treasure when you dig it’s not necessarily worth the effort of sifting through all the noise and chaos and bluster. There are more plotholes than normal: some planets are pure science, others are pure fairytale without any link between the two. You have to wonder why Balthazar is so keen on turning Humans into diamonds when he has so many carbon-based lifeforms nearby who would be a much easier to conquer. The idea of a mechanical bird chewing money is great, until you stop to work down the logistics (how does he digest it? And why not just eat the metals they’re made from?) And you have to  be a pretty dumb set of pirates to travel round the universe at random using up fuel to, erm, look for more fuel. Goodness only knows how the datachips and Infinite ship were created – this isn’t the sort of story that cares too much about backstory but even so it’s pretty weird that a character like the Doctor isn’t asking more questions about this world than this.   

What newcomer writer Alan Barnes could and probably should have done is used less characters to tell a deeper story and make the overarching plot of being careful what you wish for, more obvious so we had something to keep us hooked across the weeks. Instead it gets a bit lost and the overall device, of following datachip across the universe, never really comes off as anything more than an excuse to see lots of different worlds. The best ‘quest’  stories have some sense of urgency to them and, much like ‘Marinus’ and the ‘Key To Time’ season, you don’t feel that here – there’s no sense that one thing happening in one place while impact another. Everything here is rushed, bitesize chunks that aren’t cooked properly. Particularly the opening (the weakest episode) which starts with the Doctor and Martha already trapped by Balthazar and escaping in a most unlikely and cartoony of ways, which makes you feel as if you somehow missed a week. If you’ve come to this story directly after one of the Chris Chibnall era stories (as I just have) then the difference is huge: forget standing around while the plot is explained to the Doctor at length here Dr 10 never stands still for a second until about five minutes before the end (and then only because he’s a ghost). As brilliant as ‘The Infinite Quest’ is an animation (and it really does look good, each planet having a different style and feel Who could never have afforded to have put on TV, not with all the Infinite-produced treasure chests in the universe) you long for a novel or an audiobook, just so you can be less distracted by all the things happening.

Full credit goes to how ‘The Infinite Quest’ handles Martha though, especially given that the animation would have been started long before anyone knew what she was properly going to be like. Freema has to create this character pretty much from nothing, using just her voice, having never done anything like this before (heck, she hadn’t done much TV by 2007) and the same for the writer – there was nothing to go on except for Freema’s brief appearance as Martha’s cousin Adeola in ‘Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday’ (where, as a carefree scientist, she couldn’t be less like warm-hearted medical student Martha). Yet Martha feels more ‘real’ here in animated form than she did for the vast majority of her TV appearances where she’s too often just a watered down Rose. Here she’s cheeky, loyal, kind and saves the day twice, pointing out solutions the Doctor is too inside his own head to see. In animation terms, too, she’s by far the best likeness of all three Who animations (or the ‘missing episode’ ones of Hartnell and Troughton and companions come to that): Cosgrove Hall captures her mannerisms, particularly her wide-eyed stare, perfectly (even if her skin is a tad pale: then again ‘Shalka’ made black companion Alison and ‘Dreamland’ made stand-in companion Jimmy a tad too dark, it’s a hard thing to get right, especially for English animators only used to drawing white Humans and green aliens). It’s no surprise Freema’s come back to read out so many BBC audiobooks since – radio is an artform a lot of TV actors don’t have but these two have got it. David Tennant looks a lot better than he does in ‘Dreamland’ but he’s not quite as right -  a bit too angular, a bit too thin, and uncomfortably like Kenneth Williams with sideburns. His voice is excellent though and he effortlessly slips into the sudden energy bursts of the Doctor: it’s good fun watching the behind-the-scenes extras of him in the voice booth getting into character and flailing his arms out while also trying not to knock his script over!

The result is a mix. Had ‘The Infinite Quest’ had the story of ‘Dreamland’ and the more adult-orientated jump-scared of ‘Shalka’ it would be perfect, rather than being a good-looking and brilliantly voiced bit of nothing. Even so, it’s arguably the best of the three: you can’t help but go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at the different worlds and character, marvel at the very different ways this large cast of different actors have of being sinister and enjoy the story, at least on paper when you stop and think about it if not always at the time. A lot of fans dismiss the animations altogether and even the BBC never seems quite sure what to do with them, given that they were released separately at the time (and only since collected together posthumously in 2019’s pricey ‘Animated Collection’ where they rub shoulders with animated lost story ‘The Power Of The Daleks’ weirdly, a deep and subtle, atmospheric script where not much happens and so thus is the utter polar opposite to ‘Infinite’ across all 327 and counting episodes!); you’d think, for instance, that ‘Infinite’ would be an obvious bonus feature on a series three box set. It’s in real danger of being forgotten, much like ‘Totally Dr Who’ which is a shame: they played a big role in the development of this series this pair, particularly if you were the right age to see both when they were on, and while it’s easy to be critical of the mistakes the enthusiasm and love for Dr Who is infectious, far more entertaining than the nuts-and-bolts approach of ‘Confidential’ (the current version ‘Unleashed’ seems to be an uneasy mix of the two series, a serious look at real people doing real jobs, hosted by a presenter who thinks he’s auditioning for Russell’s old job on ‘Play School’).  The end result is a nice 45 minutes of nonsense. You’re not going to lose out if you didn’t get to see it but it’s nice to have in the collection. If you’re late to the party and want to know just how big Dr Who was in the late 2000s then, well, to be honest you’re best off reading the ‘Dr Who Adventures’ comics and the impressive array of colourful tat that came with it every week, quickly followed by the amount of (often really good) fan fiction that grew up in that era, but after that Totally check out Totally Dr Who, a series that will remind you of just how exciting it was to discover the beckoning black hole that is was and always will be Dr Who, whatever age you are when you first discover it. On that score, on keeping the young audience interested and making Dr Who the biggest thing going on in their lives for the three months that series three was on the air, ‘The Infinite Quest’ is a colossal success.   

POSITIVES + I love the opening titles (included in the ‘compilation’ in between parts one and two) which recreate the actual ‘time vortex’ opening of season three but in animated form complete with an animated Tardis flying past. It looks really good, arguably better than anything else the whole episode.

NEGATIVES -   The ‘Enlightenment’ style pirates, that make Linda Baron seem subtle. Arrrr!

BEST QUOTE: ‘There are things out there in space, Martha, things that predate our reality, Relics from the Dark Times’ Martha: ‘Oh, a fairytale?!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The middle of a sort of animated trilogy following ‘Scream Of The Shalka’ (2003) and followed by ‘Dreamland’ (2009)

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