Knock Knock: Ranking - 192

   Knock Knock

(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill, 6/5/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Mike Bartlett, director: Bill Anderson)  

'New flat to rent. Wanted: nice, tasty Humans to live in old family house. It's a bit rustic with creaky floorboards and dry rot, but the rooms are really big and rent is cheap. Oh and do ignore the noises in the tower, I have a noisy family. Remember, in this house you're never alone, there's always someone with you on the other side of a wall, maybe closer!'  

Ranking: 192

 

 Now to a story that’s stands out like a wooden thumb, one that’s impressively different not just to the rest of season 10 but DW as a whole. We’ve had character stories and surrogate families before on Who many times, but this feels new: Bill isn’t getting married or working as a nanny or even discovering the parent who died in childhood in a parallel universe but moving in with her uni flatmates, finding her independence after several episodes where the Doctor has given her the confidence to find her independence. Now it’s rather underplayed on screen here (timing cuts? Trying to look cool? ) but this a way way bigger deal for Bill than it’s made out to be here, after so many years of being adopted and being pretty friendless. Bill is clearly excited to move out of her loveless home and wants to share the moment with someone – it’s a really sweet moment that she chooses the Doctor to help deliver her things and be her ‘family’ to be like her flatmates, even though he ends up being the ultimate embarrassing parent from hell: insatiably curious, unstoppably chatty and downright weird with no understanding of human etiquette or what people do at this age in this generation at all. Poor Bill: it’s like ‘The Lodger’ all over again, only this isn’t a stranger he’s moved in with, it’s his companion and her mates he just won’t leave alone. And it’s hilarious. Equally, once the story gets going, we’ve had scary stories before but they tend to be from shadows and ‘other’ things from outside, not trapped inside the house with you as they are here. DW has had no end of alien insects too, from Zarbi ants to Menoptera butterflies to Mentor slugs to Vespiform wasps to Giant Maggots, but never anything quite like the woodlice (sorry, Dryards) that aren’t just living in this house but to all intents and purposes living off this house. Put it all together and you have a story that’s every bit as creepy, funny and dramatic as DW often is, but in a whole new way as we explore contemporary life and problems for the first time in a while (and not through a council estate for a change but trendy students) but simultaneously feel panic as Bill watches her flatmates get picked off one by one (the scuttling woodlice are one of the most naturally horrible since the giant maggots in ‘The Green Death’). Against all this Peter Capaldi’s Doctor is brilliantly alien, his natural brusqueness given free reign without Clara there to stop him and you really feel for poor Bill as the two worlds she’s desperate to keep separate keep colliding (Pearl Mackie is really developing her look of exasperated pain this series). The explanation isn’t obvious either and needs the likes of Poirot on hand to solve it, only as it happens David Suchet is playing the baddy, a landlord with a family secret, under-playing a role that could easily have tipped over into parody. The resolution is really sweet too, continuing the modern series’ belief that alien invasions and deaths are caused more often by misguided love than fear. Had this been a standalone story from a different universe or even a pilot for a new one I’d have loved it. The problem is trying to fit it into DW canon. It really is quite unbelievable that so many students can go missing from the same house across so many years under the care of a landlord who never gets any older and still nobody ever notices or does anything about it. It’s way more of a coincidence that of this particular year’s intake one of them just happens to be good friends with a timelord who knows about alien infestations. It’s really stretching things on top that somehow Bill manages to be one of the few flatmates to avoid being eaten. What’s worse, though, is that there’s no pay-off or consequences to this story in the Whoniverse. Bill never mentions the events again (understandable perhaps, if it’s given her PTSD as some of her flatmates die quite horribly) but you would have thought that this story would have been enough to see her drop out of uni, unable to face the empty seats in her lecture halls where her friends would be, not to mention being interviewed by the police. You would have thought that this would all be huge news around the university too: I mean, gossip and scandal travel quicker there than anywhere. I mean, my friend got hypnotised into believing he was a duck in a student bar in fresher’s week and strangers were still talking about it at graduation three years later. She should at the very least be sadder than she is that her new friends have died, but Bill seems to be less concerned by them than she is at the deaths of random aliens from the future or giant alien fish from the past (to be fair, I felt the same way about my uni flatmates too, who were all quite definitely alien, but it’s still out of character). Not to mention worried that she’s lost yet another place to live. I mean this isn’t just a year’s digs for Bill: it’s the first place for her that’s a real ‘home’ (give or take the Tardis); losing that would have been devastating for her in a whole other level above Rose (who had Mickey), Martha (who was still just about tolerating her family), Donna (ditto) or Amy (who had Rory), but of the old companions only Vicki and Ace were quite this family and friendless. I was totally expecting the ‘coincidence’ to be explained or at least referred to in some future story, but it never is. Another thing too: when Bill dies/converted into a Cybermen/gets turned into a giant floating puddle in space, presumably she never goes back to the whichever home she does end up living in and presumably too her other surviving flatmates who never find out what happened to her (unless the Doctor nips back and tells them off screen). The poor things must have had a few sleepless nights and been digging up the floorboards thinking ‘oh no, the landlords back and the Dryards have eaten Bill!’ It’sa nice house too, located in Wester Drumlins, Newport: david Suchet commented on the first day of filming that it seemed familiar and a few days later suddenly remembered why: he’s rented it for a family Christmas reunion a couple of years earlier! The result then is a story that’s different, quirky, properly scary, deeply funny and a little bit mad, though also far-fetched and a little implausible which uses up most of its bag of tricks a bit early rather than building in suspense the way a good horror movie should. Even so, I can’t knock ‘Knock Knock’ too much; it’s part of a definite swing upwards in the 12th Doctor era with a lot about it to love. I hope they do another story like it some day, knock on wood.

+ The dryad/woodlice effects are somehow obviously CGI and yet also more realistic than the ones you see in real life and/or I’m A Celebrity. The way they crawl is very realistic and the way they rise up and ‘eat’ people by converging on top of them sent more than a few fans behind the sofa (where, if they were unlucky, they found more woodlice of their own). Additionally, one of the creepiest moments in all DW is the moment Pavel gets absorbed into the wall bit by bit. 

-          Some of the human performances are more wooden than the woodlice. To be fair none of the students get much screen time so it’s not as if we get to know them well, but watching an episode like this one back to back with one from the RTD years really shows up how Russell The Davies could make a character come alive in a sentence, whereas none of these students seem quite ‘real’ after whole monologues (except Bill of course). They’re all kind of an older person’s idea of students from after their era too, as anachronistic and unlikeable as all the Coal Hill school students in the earlier Capaldi. Did nobody in the DW production office know any actual young people at all in the Moffat era? The only realistic one in the whole run is the young Amy Pond.

The Sontaron Stratagem/The Poison Sky: Ranking - 193

   The Sontaron Stratagem/Poison Sky

(Series 4, Dr 10 with Martha, 26/4/2008-3/5/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Helen Raynor, director: Douglas MacKinnon) 

'Directions: Turn Left into Zygon avenue. Avoid the bumps! Next head onto Mondas Way. Be on the look out for Cyber-men-at-work. Stay in the New Earth gridlocked traffic for approximately seventy-two of your Earth years. Head onto Skaro Road and exterminate as many sleeping policeman as you can. Be careful to avoid the Ice (Warriors) on the road at Mars. Next, take a right past the milky way to Earth in the 1970s. Or is the 1980s? Anyway, watch out for The Doctor driving Bessie at dangerous speeds. The wipe those stinking Rutans out of the sky on behalf of our glorious empire. Sontar-ha!' (what the Sontaron sat nav should have said).  

Ranking: 193

 

 Despite their small number of appearances in the original series (four) and their even smaller stature the Sontarons are big in the DW world for lots of good reasons. Whereas the Daleks are ruthless xenophobes, the Cybermen creepy adaptable survivalists, the Ice Warriors noble strategists and The Master a madman in a suit, the Sontarons are more like the sort of monster race seen in other scifi series, a relentless army always up for a fight who see the rest of the universe as being beneath them. This being DW, though, the joke is that they don’t look like natural warriors at all, tending to be shorter and stouter than the rest and looking like the kind of kid the playground bully picked on rather than the bully themselves (it helps that they have an impressive arsenal of weapons. Who would win in a massive DW aline fight? Well, probably the Daleks but I’m putting the Sontarons through to at least the semi-finals). They think they’re civilised because they’re so technologically adept, but the joke, at least in their first appearance ‘The Time Warrior’, is that by using the technology and progress purely for fighting then they’re no better than the barbaric cultures of Britain’s Medieval past. There’s a lot of dramatic tension to get out of that in the old series, particularly the idea of a clone race who are unstoppable in numbers rather than as individuals, and a lot of comedy too from their straightforward nature, something that modern Who has leant towards in their growing number of appearances (mostly, I suspect, because of how naturally funny an actor Dan Starkey is, the go-to Sontaron of the 21^st century). This is their first appearance in modern Who and we see a lot of their culture on screen that had only been talked about before: the actual cloning process and the sort of mass army the old DW budgets could only dream of. Unlike the modern Cybermen the Sontarons look really good too, with better masks than before but the same classic joke that their heads actually fill their big round space helmets. The Sontarons have everything this story…except a real reason for being there. The main plot centres around one of those annoying millionaire yuppy brats DW like putting on screen every few series and car sat navs gone wonky; both worthy plots and very DW plots in their own right but neither seem like an obvious fit for the opportunistic and straightforward Sontarons, being too subtle and sly. During the course of the story the gas is kind of explained as ‘clone-feed’, the thing needed by the Sontarons to create lots of little Sontarons for battle, but its never really explained what this gas does or why Earth is the best place to develop it. And why put it in a car instead of just gassing the planet? I mean, how do Sontarons even know about cars? There weren’t any in their other invasions of Earth (‘The Time Warrior’ came too early and ‘Sontaron experiment’ too late, while we didn’t see any in the countryside of Spain in ‘The Two Doctors’ – equally Timelords didn’t have cars in ‘Invasion Of Time’) and they’re not the sort of alien race to do meticulous research like the Kraals or the Silurians. Realistically they’d dismiss vehicles as some puny weak Human device because their legs aren’t strong enough; utilising them to kill Humans by gassing them is more something a sneaky, under-handed species like The Zygons or The Great Intelligence would do. The sat nav plot is a good one though (sat navs suddenly arrived out of nowhere a few years before this story went out and led to us trusting our lives to new technology we couldn’t explain, something so outside our natural day to day knowledge it could quite plausibly be the work of aliens – therefore as logical a thing for the modern DW series to build a plot around as holiday camps and airports in the 1960s, plastic in the 1970s and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s), it just doesn’t belong in a story with the Sontarons. Similarly Rattigan, the public schoolboy who thinks he’s superior to everyone and gets a deserved comeuppance, is a true DW villain, ignorant of the beauty and possibilities of the world in his quest for more of the money and power that kept him secluded and lonely – it’s just that he’s the wrong collaborator to work with The Sontarons. They’re a universe apart, in so many ways, yet both similarly stubborn, arrogant and undiplomatic. How this union lasted beyond the opening credits without one betraying the other is beyond me. There are though a lot of strong and memorable moments in this story: the cliffhanger when Wilf is trapped in a car with a Sontaron-activated sat nav taking it over and gassing him, with no Doctor around to help; the quieter moments when returning companion Martha gets to compare notes with Donna about how being in the Tardis changed her life, which makes both of them uncomfortable (she’s a lot tougher than she ever was as a regular, scaring Donna with what might happen to her, while Martha is a little spooked how easily someone else can fall into her shoes and be swept away by the adventure of it all); Donna’s attempts to go back to normal with her family and sensing how much she’s changed and how little they have (I suspect these are RTD additions these scenes, saying a lot in a few words that other writers of drama series would never think to include but which make his character seem real); Christopher Ryan’s General Straal is a worthy Sontaron leader, every bit as well written and well played as the great Sontaron leaders before him (certainly it’s a lot better than his first appearance as a sort of space slug in ‘Mindwarp’) and basically any scene with David Tennant shines brightly (whose on top manic shouty pouty form in this one). Like Helen Raynor’s other DW work though (‘Daleks In Manhattan’) it’s a script that wastes a decent monster by putting them in a setting that makes no sense and then having to build up a plot around it which also makes no sense if you stop and think about it and a second two parter which loses its way badly in the second half after a promising start. All that said, though, this is still a good little story with some great little moments - it just lacks the greatness of DW at its best. Sontar-h/A minus!

+ DW’s latest stately home used for location filming is Margram Country park in Port Talbot, an adapted monastery now owned by the council and open to the public. It’s gorgeous and exactly the sort of place a dude like Rattigan would hang out, not because he appreciates how beautiful it is but because he wants people to appreciate that he can afford it. I suspect Elon Musk’s house is pretty close to this. Probably a lot of Conservative MP’s houses too.

- What’s happened to UNIT? They used to be Dr Who’s family, well, unit – the Human face of soldiers who, more stories than not, understood that aliens could be benevolent and that they were there to protect the Earth from harm, not go on the attack. This lot are just nasty boy soldiers, without an ounce of compassion who couldn’t organise a piss up in a Guinness factory after defeating the Cybermen there. What’s worse is that they’re in the process of doing the same to Martha, whose become hard and cold, not to mention brainwashed into taking orders. Where’s the Brigadier? Or Bambera? This lot need sorting out – goodness knows how Kate Lethbridge Stewart got UNIT in line before their next appearance.

Colony In Space: Ranking - 194

  Colony In Space

(Season 8, Dr 3 with Jo,10/4/1971-15/5/1971, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Malcolm Hulke, director: Michael E Briant) 

'Dear Interplanetary Mining Corporation, we believe that you recently bought a mining colony on Uxarieus. Unfortunately that mineral has now been outlawed on Earth where, after coming into contact with anything in the atmosphere and some jiggery pokery with the sonic screwdriver, it turns into a copy of 'Time and the Rani'. Good luck paying off the loans you took out to scare away the miners! Love, Dr Mysterioso. 

Ranking: 194

In an emoji: 🦎

Or ‘A Doctor’s colonoscopy in space’ as one of my medical friends genuinely thought this one was called when she saw the spine of my DVD and asked me why anybody would create such a thing. No, thankfully it’s not that, it’s another of those misunderstood but very Pertwee-ish Pertwee stories and another morality tale by the expert of the genre Malcolm Hulke, perhaps the leftiest writer on the most leftiest of series. This one has rather fallen through the cracks though and been forgotten compared to the brighter, bigger, bolder stories alongside it maybe because, like so many Hulke stories, it has no monsters except what humans do to other humans (and no, an imaginary twenty-foot lizard designed to scare off colonists doesn’t count!) and nothing to make it instantly memorable the way the best Dr Who stories are. Which is different to saying its bad: like so many Pertwee stories it makes for an absolutely fabulous book and one of my favourite novelisations (renamed ‘The Doomsday Weapon’), full of pithy lines, back stories, colourful characters, lots of twists and a plot that grows, and indeed glows, by the page. On screen, alas, it’s a padded six parter where stuff happens kind of randomly and everything seems terribly brown and bland, from the supporting cast to the backgrounds. It’s also, I think it’s fair to say, a disappointment to viewers the first time round who’d been waiting two whole years to see what the Doctor’s first trip into space since exile to Earth might be like – and discover the Tardis has just landed in a quarry. Again. 

 That said, though, the fact that this is the first trip into space for a while is kind of the whole point and fittingly for a story that uses the ‘bigger on the inside’ phrase for the first time there’s a lot more going on in this story than meets the eye. Hulke was the biggest critics of the ‘exiled to Earth’ format and has been pushing script editor and close mate Terrance Dicks for some time to finally be allowed a trip back to the stars. And now he gets one. The year is 1971 and its two years since man first landed on the moon, with another year of lunar voyages to go. Apart from the hiccup of tragedy and ingenuity that was Apollo thirteen man’s greatest most ambitious step into space is in danger of looking routine, like an everyday trip to the shops (so much so each new landing wasn’t even making the top of the new anymore). Scientists are already casting their eyes forward to the next big giant leap – a colony somewhere away from Earth, probably Mars – and even though, like the Tardis, everyone knows it might not be for a while yet surely it’s coming sort of soon (nobody watching this story could have guessed that half a century on we still haven’t managed it yet). For many people watching they’re imagining a golden future for themselves away from Earth, without pollution, interfering governments, living in ‘rabbit hutches’ and all the other things settler Mary lists in her grievances in this story. There is, indeed, a whole new stream of utopian scifi being written in this time about how mankind finally gets his act together somewhere in the stars leaving difficulties on Earth (just check out the superlative Jefferson Starship record ‘Blows Against The Empire’ which was even nominated for the scifi Hugo prize for its plot). However in Hulke’s eyes leaving Earth solves nothing if mankind is just going to carry their problems around with them and he turns this story into a repeat of the Wild West, American cowboys appropriating Indian land and where idealists get swallowed up by the system anyway, bought out by big corporate conglomerate companies like the IMC (Interplanetary Mining Company). The script makes a reference to the colonists feeling like ‘battery hens’ on Earth – the alternative, though, is going free range and having no supervision, risking being killed by the elements as the price for freedom. On a smaller scale, you see, that’s what’s happening to the Doctor too: all this time he’s wanted to leave his Earthy problems (i.e. red tape and shooty soldiers, as personified by the Brigadier) behind, but they’re such an intrinsic part of Western culture now that he’s now on a planet full of Brigadiers keeping tabs on the money and bringing him down to Earth (even though technically I suppose it’s down to Uxorious). 

This is a story where, like so many a Hulke script, no one wins. I love the idea at the heart of this story about who has the most right to planets and natural resources, a tale of the ages that will sadly always be relevant whether it’s a whole planet as here or your country, your county, your street or your house. In this tale of Cowboys and Indians Hulke’s heart goes out to both sides. Primitive the local natives might be, with their war paint and their spears and Uxorious definitely not luxurious, but they have a right to this land and were here first, by a matter of a few million years. They’re kind of happy as they are too, even if they don’t have much in the way of creature comforts. You can tell Hulke sides with the settler farmers cowboys too though, the pioneers who spent all their savings and risked everything for a better life away from the shackles of Earth, although their long-sought for freedom turns out to be super hard work, barely sustaining themselves in the process. I love the way that the spaceships – such glossy sleek things of scientific beauty on the news bulletins of 1971 – are more like settler’s wagons or garden sheds, crammed full of objects (though not named on screen the model was called ‘The mayflower’ after the first European ship – err…maybe anyway, given the Vikings at least seemed to get there first if not the Knights templar or Egyptians - to colonise America). Really the two sides have more similarities than differences: they’re small communities that have come to rely on each other and which have rejected building up any great industry in order to be free. 

Of course what happens the minute they start to make some money? In comes a corporation the IMC, with more finances than sense to take it for themselves and when they can’t buy the colonists out for all their hard work and time they try to frighten them off instead and get the planet for free. ‘What’s good for the company is good for the planet’ say the newcomers, mirroring what general Motors used to say about America, but it’s blatantly not true: the soil loses its resources, the people end up as slave labour for a pittance and the same problems happen all over again on another planet till another colonist ship breaks free and flies away. The hint, too, is that after all the talk about how the humans had to escape the Earth due to pollution in their time the same thing is just going to happen over again now the companies have got involved and that one small step forward is just going to end with us going round in circles, repeating old problems we haven’t learned to solve. Hulke spares his wrath for the corporations that follow the settlers out there, who’ve (spoilers) discovered a rare mineral in the ground and want to have it for themselves, scaring the settlers off and ruining their crops. They have none of the imagination, none of the vision, none of the courage – and all of the money, which is what allows them to get away with this trick again and again across the universe, in just the way the bureaucrats and government officials always get in the Doctor’s way on Earth too. What’s more it’s a daft strategy longterm: they make more of this in the book than on screen but the company fuels its spaceship by using a metal named duralinium. And what do they do with this duralinium? They, err, go round planets digging up duralinium ending up back where they started. It’s more than that though: for Hulke the days of cowboys and Indians were romantic and a tale of survival, where in the early days most of the time the land was big enough for both of them – it’s when the money got involved, the gold-rushes and industries, that mankind took a wrong turning for all their greater comforts (and just look at how plush the IMC spaceships are: they’re an executive office in a rocket without the personality of the settler spaceship and you suspect all the IMC rockets out there in space look exactly like this). In a sense, too, this is a story about agriculture versus the industrial revolution: life is hard for peasants in all eras, but in very different ways: is it worth selling out your soul and freedom for creature comforts? The moral of this tale, as in so many Dr Who stories, is to be explorers, not pirates – to discover what’s out there and accept it at face value rather than trying to exploit it. 

Stirring things up and with his own, admittedly rather confusing, reasons for wanting to explore the planet is (more spoilers) The Master, which in some ways is a bit of a shame (the story was moving on without him quite nicely and turns into a replica of all those other Doctor-Mast battles) and in other ways is great (I mean, those Doctor-Master battles are excellent, some of the best things about this era of the show). Roger Delgado switches quite brilliantly from the sort of smiling fawning diplomat who’d charm the pants off you and the psychopath who’d steal your underwear after just for fun, ingratiating himself with the IMC like he built the place. Some fans think this plot strand doesn’t work at all and it is something of a surprise but it kind of works: if The master is truly the Doctor’s nemesis and opposite then he needs the weight of a faceless company behind him, to challenge the Doctor’s individual eccentric. I still think Roger might just be the best actor who ever appeared in the series, somehow managing to be warm and cosy yet cold and threatening, so very human yet so distinctly alien, in every scene he’s in. He’s at his silky best here, a believable baddy who nevertheless has a range and an intellect that makes him a bigger, wider threat than a xenophobic Dalek or a single-minded Cyberman. The revelation that he’s behind it all ought to be one of the biggest surprises in the series, given that he’s not usually in things for such Earthly reasons as money, except that a) they don’t keep the reveal for a cliffhanger the way they ought to but show it a few minutes into episode four b) They hadn’t included an opening scene of timelords discussing The Master at the very start of the story (though admittedly, seen at the rate of an episode a week, you have kind of forgotten by then) and c) The Master turns up in every story somewhere in season 8. Incidentally listen out for an in-joke in episode one: when discussing where The master might be Jon Pertwee jokes that ‘last week they even arrested the Spanish ambassador thinking it was him’. Something tells me producer Barry Letts added that joke as he first met Delgado when he was playing an extra opposite Roger’s Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, in the 1962 drama ‘Sir Francis Drake’ – Patrick Troughton was in the cast too but, sadly, not the same episode. Before Dr Who it’s the role that most people would have recognised Delgado from most. 

 The Master’s masterplan isn’t anything so home-grown though: he’s after the doomsday weapon, a device of impossible power that was left behind by an ancient brilliant race on Uxorious. In a delicious twist (yet more spoilers) it turns out that the ancient brilliant race are the descendents of the primitives who were the smart ones all along. There are still some ancient masters hidden away in the caves overseeing the nuclear weapons, but they long ago rejected over things technological because of exactly the problems the humans face here: technology is a curse as much as it’s a blessing and he Uxarions long ago decided to reject it all because they didn’t feel safe or free, choosing to go forwards by going backwards. When we first land on this planet we assume they’re our past – but it turns out that they’re our future, having made lessons the hard way when the corporations control our trips into space and our problems follow us out even to the final frontier. It’s also quite prescient: we’re a full twenty years from the fall of the Soviet Empire but this story is very much reflected in the tales of all the countries overthrowing Russian rule in the early 1990s who find nuclear weapons easier to pick up than bread and crops. This is a civilisation that got its priorities all skewed and so, all things considered, have we. Alas we don’t really get to see what the doomsday weapon can do exactly, despite the detail that the crab nebula, which looks from earth like it has been in a big explosion, was shattered after it was first used, which is very Who (officially it’s because a sun turned supernova in the middle but, hey, Who’s to say Who didn’t get it right?) 

 The real problem though is that, not for the first or last time, all those cleverly worked out plot details and nuances in the script with complex characters battling difficult situations, a chess match of tension and skulduggery that builds up to a gradual climax on paper, ends up on screen as a boring boxing match, a lot of actors spouting exposition and occasionally shouting at each other. Hulke’s scripts tend to be the one with lots of talking but this one, especially, feels as if it only consists of talking – yes there’s a wrestle in the mud in part six, a buggy car chase in the middle (which Pertwee took for a spin between takes and dented, before a ballast prop fell apart and dented a wheel, costing the BBC a whopping £74 in repairs), a (projected) menace (which was left out in the rain and cost £60 to repair – so much for this being the cheap’ story of the season!) and five (rather repetitive) cliffhangers but none of them make much of an impact and still leave about twenty minutes per story for standing around talking. It would help if the characters were better formed but by Hulke standards they’re not: the cast are excellent (especially John Ringham as Ashe, whose so different to the last time he was in Dr Who, as hunchback killer Tlotoxl in ‘The Aztecs’, there’s only a certain look about the eyes that helps your recognise him at all) but there’s just nothing much to get your teeth into – there’s no sense of the homes they left behind or the homes they hope to create here, just bickering about the hardships of the present. The IMC bunch are weak too, without the gravitas the Doctor needs to fight against although they were meant to be more interesting. Director Michael E Briant (who also voiced the computer in the first episode) thought that the script was weak for female parts (unusual for Hulke) so switched Morgan the leader round to being a female, basing her on the first female naval recruits that were going onboard merchant navy ships in the early 1970s extra-macho to survive in a masculine job, going so far as to cast Susan Jameson in the part to play her as a sort-of Servalan from Blake’s 7 (she’s best known nowadays for being Brian’s long-suffering wife Esther in ‘New Tricks’ but back in 1971 played a similarly tough role in Take Three Girls’ which is kind of a 1960s prototype version of ‘Friends’ without the awful laughter track and made Pentangle famous with their catchy theme tune ‘Light Flight’). It would have been quite a coup for the series at the time when her star was in the ascension, but head of drama Ronnie Marsh got worried about having a tough female in a suit in charge of a lot of boys and made the director change it round again – to this day Jameson is the only guest actor paid in full for a performance they didn’t get to make in the series because someone changed their mind on casting (as opposed to someone having to pull ut because of changed dates and industrial strikes). Tony Caunter (an actor Briant got on well with when working as floor manager on Who story ‘The Crusade’ seven years earlier – Bernard Kay playing Caldwell was hired for the same reason, while one of the blonde colonists in the final episode is a cameo by Briant’s wife Monique) got promoted into the role from lower down the cast list but hard as he tries he’s not a natural for the part. It’s a real shame: as it is none of these characters really stand out as being different to one another and the one who does (Mary) sets feminism back about ten years as it is. 

 Somewhere around part three you simply stop caring, so tired are you of yet another colony inter-squabble and another betrayal from within – and that’s the moment you realise with a crushing weight that this is a six parter. Hulke made even seven parts of ‘The Silurians’ fly by but there just isn’t enough to sustain this story fully and - Master aside and perhaps the ending - you can see all the plot twists coming, from the IMC scaring people off with twenty-foot lizards that somehow fit inside six foot doors to the insider ‘betrayal’ sabotaging their equipment. It would help a lot if this was just four parts not six but, well, that’s BBC budgets in the 1970s for you – they had to spread the costs of that spaceship somehow (the novel notably cuts a lot of the middle padding section and a good job too). 

It would help too if there was more to look at between the rowing, more spectacle and colour, but the production team have equated mining planets to mining towns on Earth and made this planet the most dull and grey Dr Who globe of them all - and that’s just the studio filming, never mind the usual Dr Who quarry they used on location (well, technically it’s Old Baal China Clay Pit in Carclaze, Cornwall and far more dangerous than the usual gravel pit – so much so the whole cast and production team were given a lecture on the dangers before starting filming, although mercifully the worst injury was to pride, when the production portaloo blew away in fierce winds when Katy Manning was using it! – but it looks just like the usual quarry seen on screen). For an audience starved of trips into space it must have been galling – even sitting through it today, when you can watch it out of sequence, it’s a struggle. A lot of the effects are poor, too: the lizard, the first animal seen in the series for real since Monica the elephant in ‘The Ark’ five years earlier and borrowed from London Zoo, but it was far worse behaved than the pachyderm and spent the entire session trying to bite the production team so very little of it is seen in the final episode and then not properly. The doomsday weapon itself, a mobile nuclear weapon of impossible size and scale in the novelisation, consists of a single panel and some flashing lights (while in keeping with the idea of nuclear codes being kept in a briefcase on earth, to better make this an allegory, it’s still a disappointment given how much they’ve built up its properties across the story). Even the costumes are a disappointment: for all the settlers’ talk of how weird Jo’s clothes are and how fashions must have changed on Earth since they left a year ago they’re basically in dungarees like they’re on ‘The Good Life’ (a show that’s very in keeping with the mood of this story but won’t be on for another four years yet – well, they are digging I suppose). At least they’re in individual clothes, however – the corporation have special suits but even these are all too clearly jumpers with hi-vis stripes like they’re working at the council. The sets are boring to look at too, if a bit more functional: I love the way the colonist dome is built round simple plastic triangles that slot together like Lego, which the colonists might have taken with them a piece each, the way the settlers in the Wild West carried their resources with them on their back then put their wagons together at night for extra protection and safety. As for the Uxarions, primitives and rulers both, they’re the sort of dodgy special effect in Who that non-fans laugh at, all too obvious masks and wigs over fake looking costumes and as close to Who creator Sydney Newman’s fears of the show degenerating into a B-movie about green bug-eyed monsters as it ever came (at least in his lifetime). 

There are, it’s true, some really lovely moments here. Especially those moments shared between the Doctor and Jo. Alas there aren’t that many of them. Once again the Doctor is the face of reason against people who won’t listen to him on all sides, the only person who can see the bigger picture. Pertwee gets lots of chances to do what he does best: huff and puff and moralise and sweep in heroically, before finding that the solution isn’t quite as simple as he thought it was, before solving it in the end anyway. Incidentally if Pertwee seems a tad shell-shocked during this serial compared to normal that’s because it was while making this story he ended up on ‘This Is Your Life’, in a show that went out in between episodes 1 and 2 of this story. All the production team and most f the cast were in on it: Pertwee thought he was being asked to do some extra pre=-filming for this story as a test for new experimental cameras and was grumbling about it before Eamonn Andrews pulled up in one of the buggies used in this story! 

 Meanwhile Jo is our eyes and ears in space even more than she was back on Earth, suffering culture shock during her first trip in the Tardis – she really struggles to take in that the Doctor can travel through space and time, despite all the things she’s seen in her first two stories, and is the first ‘accidental’ traveller we’ve had since Ben and Polly (she makes way more fuss about it too – on the plus side she is the first person to mention the Tardis being ‘bigger on the inside’, a seminal moment if ever there was one). Unfortunately the culture shock seems to rub off on her and she’s never quite the same plucky thing of her first two stories (where she could do action sequences with the best of them, break into locked doors and get the Doctor out of trouble): this story needs her to be as out of her depth as ‘we’ would be, which means she mostly sits around looking sad and asking daft questions; sadly it’s this aspect of Jo that future writers will pick up on rather than her resourcefulness. It’s such a shame: in Robert Holmes’ hands she’s a plucky but naïve innocent abroad who means well. For Don Houghton she’s almost an equalto the Doctor, using her own initiative and standing uyp to The Master. For Baker and Martin she kind of gets left behind but is also the sane rational voice the Doctor turns to when he needs it. Here she’s just a peril monkey constantly in danger or doing the washing up. This story is the start of her character ending up the butt of all the season’s jokes and I don’t like it. Even here I don’t like it: Jo is at her best when with the Doctor and this story splits this pair up quite early on too and they don’t get to share much screen-time together, given that they both explore different side of the story on different sides of the planet, which robs us of the single best thing about this era of the series. 

The result is a story that feels as if it ought to work better than it does. Usually stories fall apart in Who because of something flawed in the script itself but here it’s not the script itself that’s the problem – although that said the ending (which kills the innocent Uxarions minding their own business as well as the bad guys) is a tad disappointing after six weeks of waiting for something to happen. Equally other stories have managed to be better and more rewarding despite dafter special effects and bigger mistakes, Nobody talks about the Uxarions the same way they do the Ergon or Myrka or Abzorbaloff, for instance – it’s just an idea that didn’t quite come off rather than something that makes or breaks an episode that has other problems to contend with. The real problem with ‘Colony In Space’ is that it does too good a job of putting the hardship sand repetitive monotony of such a life on screen: there aren’t many surprises, very little to come along and interrupt the flow and arguments between settlers we don’t know aren’t a substitute for, say, the constant explosions of ‘Claws Of Axos’ the story before. Sometimes this series can be too erudite for its own good and sadly this is one of those times, with parts of this story a real slog. Just for the book alone, though, I can’t bring myself to put this one any lower in the rankings because Hulke is still one of my favourite writers telling a tale that needed to be told and the seeds sown in this story are exactly the sort of morality tale Dr Who should be telling particularly in this era. In idea, dialogue and character it’s one of the most colourful Who stories of them all in fact; it’s just the translation of it on screen that makes it seem so beige and doesn’t allow the crops to take full bloom. 

 POSITIVES + The Doctor and The Master have already crossed swords a few times (this is The Master’s fourth story) and will often in the future, sometimes (as in ‘The Sea Devils’) quite literally. This is one of their best confrontations though that says so much about their differences despite their similar status as intellectual timelords far from home. The Doctor stands for justice, fairness, hope, the rights of the civilisations he meets to be themselves without restriction and the belief that people should be allowed to do what they want to do with their natural freedom. The Master wants to control the universe so that everyone does what he wants them to do and doesn’t care at all for who they are or what they’ve done, just as long as they support him. It all comes down to a single conversation: as The Master tries to get The Doctor to rule the stars with him and he refuses, in one of those scenes that sums up this series so well and really ought to be better known than it is, used in every clip show going (see ‘quotes’ below). It’s clever too because it’s a mirror for what’s going on in the story: no wonder The Master is working for the company, while the colonists are paying their way like the Doctor, exploring the universe and only taking what they put in. 

 NEGATIVES - In the book the Uxarions, the ‘real’ owners of the mining planet, are incredibly powerful, magical and awe-inspiring, a lost civilisation whose scientific powers rival anything seen in the series. No wonder The Master wants the weapons they created – and no wonder that ultimately (spoilers) they’re smart enough to have made the weapon not quite what it seems. What do we get on screen to represent this momentous discovery? A very unconvincing puppet. While other scifi series on a budget did this sort of thing all the time (looking at you Blake’s 7!) this is the only time in Dr Who’s long history that we have a puppet playing a ‘person’ (as opposed to an’ animal’ like a drashig or a dinosaur). It’s a mess. There’s no human eyes to look at, no great acting and it all looks incredibly fake – even a person in a costume would have been more impressive than this. Usually I can live with Dr Who’s poor budgets but this, this is a real low. 

BEST QUOTE: Master ‘Just look Doctor, all those planetary systems can be under our rule’ Doctor: ‘But what for? What’s the point?’ Master: ‘One must rule or serve. That is the basic law of life. Why do you hesitate? Surely it's not loyalty to the Time Lords, who exiled you to one insignificant planet?’ Doctor ‘You'll never understand. I want to see the universe, not to rule it’

 Previous ‘The Claws Of Axos’ next ‘The Daemons’

Smile: Ranking - 195

 Smile

(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill, 22/4/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Frank Cotterall-Boyce, director: Lawrence Gough) 

'✋☺👍👌👂👌👀👍👈👉👽👽👽👽👽👾✊💢💣💥😍😱🙏'(the review of this story from this website's 744th edition, downloaded from the year 4563 via a black hole) 

Ranking: 195

 

 Bill’s first time on an alien planet is a memorable one, a re-launching for the series following the new look and a clearly budget-bound debut that reminds me a lot of ‘The End Of The World’ – a statement of intent of just how big and epic DW can look and how wide the possibilities are. ‘Just look at what we can still do that we’ve never done before’ seems to be the motto and Steven Moffat throws everything at this story after a more subdued opener: some of the best location filming in the show’s history (in Valencia, where ‘The Two Doctors’ was filmed, but this story makes far better use of the location, notably the impressively futuristic City of Arts and Sciences building), a great tracking shot across an alien field (DW is really getting the hang of what CGI can do in this era and it really sets the scope for this being an alien world) and emojibots (of course emojis are going to be the official universal language of the future, it seems so obvious in retrospect!) Even though it looks new though in script terms it’s a lot of tried and tested DW standards from the ‘old’ series that surprisingly hadn’t really been tried that often in the new series: an Earth colony in the future cut off from the rest of civilisation where something has gone wrong that the Doctor and Bill have to solve for Humanity to survive, at least out here; it’s ‘The Ark’ with emojirobots as a more high-tech replacement for the Monoids and ‘The Ark In Space’ with a plague filling in for parasitic insects. There are two things those stories never had though - beautiful atmospheric scenes where this world is empty and silent and alien and an emphasis on seeing this new world from Bill’s eyes, someone who’d accepted she was never going to see more of life than a university canteen just two stories ago. We also see how how being with her – a more subordinate, less worldly wise pupil compared to the near-equal Clara at least tried to be – changes the Doctor, bringing out both his more  protective and lecturery sides. Neither fully trust the other yet and seeing what the future does to humanity, both as a species and to individual people’s morals, is as scary for Bill as ‘The End Of the World’ was for Rose, while reminding us that the Doctor is an alien whose as comfortable here as he is in ‘our’ time, with one of Peter Capaldi’s better blends of dashing hero and grumpy old git. For the most part I like this one and the mystery at the heart of it an awful lot, it’s just the resolution that turns my Smile upside down. The Doctor and Bill are so good together and the empty environment such a change of pace that it’s a real shame when other colonists start to wake up and fill the place with their stilted chatter, while the deaths we see on screen don’t have much of an impact because with only a few minutes of running time left we don’t get to really know anybody. Oddly the stakes were higher when these future Humans were strangers, not extras. The Vardy, robots who’ve got out of control and interpret their orders of being told to keep people ‘happy’, that they should kill them if they’re not (an emoji has never been so scary!) are also just a re-tread of ideas from ‘Curse Of The Black Spot’ and ‘The Girl Who Waited’ too, even if their emoji faces give them an extra twist the more ‘repair’ robots didn’t have. (spoilers) ‘Re-setting’ the machines so colonists and newly sentient robots gets to live together in peace is a very DW solution, made without war or bloodshed, but one that feels a little too pat and simple too. I mean, I don’t know about you but if an alien was trying to kill me, even for good reasons, I’m not sure I could fully trust it again; heck I’m reluctant to turn my laptop back on after it’s been in one of its moods in case it electrocutes me. That doesn’t stop this being a nice little DW episode with a lot to offer, mind – it’s just with so much competition it’s enough to stop it being a truly great one higher up the list. 

  
+ I’ve long wondered which DW companion most resembled who I would be if I was taken across time and space. At different times I’ve considered Harry (perpetually clumsy), Rory (comic relief often out of his depth), Peri (alternating bouts of sarcasm and weariness) and Vicki (giving cute nicknames to ugly looking monsters about to eat me). I really think that it’s Bill though: she’s mostly one step away from a breakdown, constantly bewildered by real life never mind life with the Doctor and her fellow Earthlings often feel more alien to her than the aliens she meets. This could so easily become irritating, but Pearl Mackie somehow manages to make Bill adorable, fearless, loyal and empathetic rather than just lost and wet. Because of the way the handover between showrunners was made (Moffat getting an extra year he really wasn’t expecting because Chris Chibnall wasn’t ready in time) Bill only got one season in the Tardis and less time on-screen than any other modern Who companion bar Martha and Dan, but even by her second story she feels like a real rounded believable credible character we both recognise and can sympathise with.      

- I’ve loved him since his breakthrough role in ‘Two Pints Of Lager and A Packet Of Crisps’, he’s one of the best DI’s in ‘Death Of Paradise we’ve ever had and I’d long hoped Ralf Little would be in DW one day maybe even as the Doctor but…well he’s not at his best here, mis-cast as a Human colonist and and struggling to shine in a role that gives him precious little to do. They should have saved him for a better part.  

The Sontaron Experiment: Ranking - 196

 The Sontaron Experiment

(Season 12, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane and Harry, 22/2/1975-1/3/1975, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, writers: Bob Baker and Dave Martin, director: Rodney Bennett) 

'Well Marshall, the great Sontaron masterplan ordered by the Grand Strategic Council of getting a puny Earthling to watch and rank all Doctor Who episodes in order is complete and about 4/11ths of the way to being uploaded for your perusal. Based on first evidence of Human limitations we will be subjecting all future earthlings to viewings of 'the Timeless Child' 'Orphan 55' 'Voyage Of the Damned' 'The Paul McGann TV Movie and 'Time and the Rani' in a continuous loop until their brains rot.  Sontar-hahahahaha!'

Ranking: 196

 

 In their other stories Bob Baker and Dave Martin tended to bring the more child-friendly fare to the Who table: K9, orange-coloured Axons, big giant hands in nuclear power stations, that sort of thing. This little two-parter, though, is one of the most gruesome in the DW canon and makes the universe suddenly seem a far less cosy or safe. Usually DW writers tend to be optomistic about the future, give or take the bureaucracy and the odd (and I mean odd) leaders, but here Earth 10,000 years in the future has been ravaged and left a deserted wilderness except for a few straggling astronauts who are incredibly unlucky to end up back on this planet just in time for an invasion. For some reason the Sontarons still fancy a go at colonising the Earth even though it’s basically a pile of rocks and rather than invade en masse they’ve been busy conducting experiments into the Human body and discovering all sorts of nasty details about how fragile they are in preparation for their full plan. Throughout the course of this story Humans are chained up, tortured, starved, waterboarded, deprived of sleep and attacked by weapons. The only thing they aren’t put through is listening to The Spice Sontarons, the girl group from the future: ‘If you wanna be my lover you gotta kill all my friends the fight against the Rutans never ends…’ It’s like Guantanamo Bay, only it’s the whole planet wide and we’re all the prisoners and – what with ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ next up in transmission order – suggests that the production team had been paying a little too much attention to the 1970s trials of convicted Nazis for their ideas for comfort. The result is quite different to every other Sontaron appearance, particularly now they’re mostly used as comic relief, but you can also see where it came from: in Robert Holmes’ hands Lynx talked a lot about being merciless and his low opinion of humanity during ‘The Time Warrior’ but actually the people who did most of the fighting were either Humans or timelords; for this story Baker and martin pick up on his words rather than his actions. It’s pretty different to most other DW stories too. Now torture is a part of life and war and action series and is an inevitable part of any scifi/fantasy/was/action franchise eventually, it was always going to turn up sooner or later in a format as elastic as DW’s. There are fans who like this sort of thing and hold up the Phillip Hinchcliffe eras and season 12 in particular as the zenith of DW. I can’t say I’m one of them; there are many many things that DW does brilliantly and horror is not my favourite of them and while few stories are really that horrible given the teatime slot and family viewing tag, this one does get a little too grim for comfort at times. ‘Vengeance On Varos’, a future story that spoofs viewer’s enjoyment of violence on TV, had stories like this one in mind when it showed families taking sadistic delight in watching pain and suffering. All that said, if you have to see torture on daytime television this is the way to go about it. None of its gratuitous and there’s no blood or sawn-off limbs, just good acting; also it’s not done for sport but for character: it’s exactly how the Sontarons think as, of all the alien races in Who they’re the most naturally warlike and committed to vitory at all costs. And it’s not just the Sontarons who are coming up with cruel experiments either: this is a two parter entirely shot entirely on location (still the only DW to have no shooting on a studio set whatsoever) during gruelling filming in the wilds of Dartmoor, which gives it a feel quite unlike other DW stories. The bleakness of the rolling hills is the perfect setting, adding a feeling of danger and desperation you would never have got on a studio set (though plenty of hazards in real life too; Tom Baker fell and broke his collarbone and had to be airlifted to hospital while still in costume which really confused the nurses in the days before his stories had been transmitted; the scarf hid the brace he was put in for the rest of the shoot). The acting is first rate with Kevin Lindsay also going through hell and risking his already declining health to play his second Sontaron, General Styre. This also leads into another of my favourite bits of DW trivia: as walking down the hill to the catering van or taking off the layers of make-up was too much of a strain for his heart Lindsay sat on his own during breaks reading the paper on a stool. A dogwalker passed by, the Sontaron forgot he was in costume and nodded ‘morning’ and she ran off screaming. Elsewhere the astronauts are great too, particularly Glyn Jones who (ranking spoilers) wrote my favourite ever DW story and is here doing his only turn in the series as an actor – he was the only person in DW to write/speak lines in front and behind the camera in DW till Mark Gatiss in the modern series. Given that this story only has fifty minutes to play with it covers a lot of ground too, with perhaps more jeapordy per minute than any other story of the 1970s. The conclusion, when the Sontaron gets what’s coming to him after a rare Tom Baker tussle, is hugely satisfying even if it comes too late for most of the poor Humans. A great, if bleak, script pushes this one up several notches too. Indeed the only thing that’s less than stellar is the rather flimsy Sontaron robot, which seems a little too basic for both the might of the Sontaron empire and filming on a bleak Dartmoor hill. By and large, though the experiment pays off, when everything is said and done, though, while it’s a very well made bit of television it’s still a well made bit of television about torture. Which is a bit uncomfortable to watch. Sort of the point I guess. Not the sort of story I can truly say I love then, even if I still admire it a lot.

+ The Sontaron’s spaceship is a brilliantly inventive design, quite different to the usual flying saucer shapes and looks like a golf-ball. Honestly, that’s probably the most aerodynamic design an alien race could have, losing all the square edges and taking all the short cuts (Sontarons are nothing if not efficient and practical – no superfluous flashing lights and bossters for them) and adds to the classic gag in the first Sontaron story about their heads being as round as their helmets.

- The Sontarons become the first alien race in DW to use what we would nowadays views as a video or a skype call rather than a radio or a walkie-talkie. What’s wrong with that you might ask? Well, they’re the one DW race that doesn’t need one. The Sontraons are a clone race. They don’t need to see what each other look like because they all look the same. Just to rub it in Kevin Lindsay plays both Sontarons in this story in exactly the same way…

The Bells Of St John's: Ranking - 197

  The Bells Of Saint John's

(Series 7, Dr 11 with Clara, 30/3/2013, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Colm McCarthy) 

'Pokers and tongs

Say the bells of St John's

The feast of St Steven

and Dodo was crisp and even

Avoid the curfew

On the eve of St Bartholemew 

Or time it will foister

On the Tardis bells of cloister

The bells of Wycombe High

Say...Beware of the wifi!!!'

Ranking: 197

In an emoji: 📲

A long time ago, in the year before Christopher Eccleston was the Doctor and The Spice Girls were only on their fourth comeback, I was challenged to write a Dr Who script of my own – something that reflected the ‘modern age’ we were living in during the early 2000s. Always one for a writing challenge I came up with ‘The Worldwide Web Of Fear’, in which the Great Intelligence try to take over people using their computers and phones via their wireless. It was loosely based on a story I’d had as a child, about aliens hiding in Ceefax and infiltrating an actual story (which, if nothing else, shows how old I am). After all, it’s such a very Dr Who concept: something you can’t see, that back then was so new it seemed to come from another planet altogether and which was alien and strange but was already so everyday that people didn’t really think about it. Also the internet is always being hacked by Earthly entities so why not alien ones too? This story adds an idea I never thought of about a ‘datacloud’ that stores people not documents: and yes, I don’t know how those work properly either(aliens I tell you!) I happily won my share of a bet over whether Dr Who could ever possibly work in the present day, uploaded it to the Dr Who fan fiction site ‘A Teaspoon And An Open Mind’ and sat back, waiting for fame and fortune to follow. I mean, it had been years since that Paul McGann thing and Who desperately needed a showrunner and anyway, I couldn’t do worse than that monstrosity… could I? The website turned it down. They said it was too far-fetched and not at all what Dr Who was about. So I stuck it up on an early version of my ‘Alan’s Album Archives’ blog instead, before taking it down in a panic when the BBC started going for copyright infringes on amateur websites (although it’s probably still around on a wayback machine, or even better a space-time travel machine, if you know a hacker with Clara’s skills). So imagine my shock when, perhaps a decade later, not only is Dr Who back on air but they are doing my very story! I have to say though, I’m not surprised (and no I don’t think for a second that my humble, ignored blog is where Steven Moffat got the idea – although scouring the internet for ideas on how to write a Doctor Who story about the internet would be suitably meta). Not even by the fact that they had the same villain as me so they could re-use the ‘Great Intelligence uses dumbed down social media’ ploy or that Moffat despite the similarities Moffat weaved an entirely different story to mine about such a subject so incredibly ripe for Dr Who (I mean, invisible technology that’s everywhere? What’s more Dr Who than that?!) To be honest I’m more surprised that it took until 2013 to get there in a story that takes the ordinary and mundane-ness of social media and makes them extraordinary.

I must confess there were a lot more jokes and puns in mine, even though this story still has far more jokes than we’re used to seeing from Moffat. This story gets bonus points for some of my very favourite gags in all of Who in fact. Clara phones up the Tardis thinking it’s an internet helpline (having been handed the very rare number by Missy, not that we find that out for another year and a half), the Doctor having spent the time since the ‘Snowmen’ Christmas special secluded in a Cumbrian monastery in the Middle Ages and mourning not only Amy and Rory but two separate versions of Clara. The monks complain that the ‘bells of Saint John’ keep ringing: you expect they mean a religious bell but no – ‘bells’ is also an archaic word for a ringing telephone and ‘Saint John’ is the ambulance who once had a first aid kit in police telephone boxes for real and who still advertise the fact on the Tardis doors (or at least they do for the 1st, 3rd, 11th and 12th Dr Tardises, with no explanation for why the label comes and goes – presumably just the Tardis in a mood). When Clara rings the Doctor complains that it’s ‘1207’ and she can’t possibly be ringing him about the internet. She looks at the clock and comments that it’s half past three for her: ‘Are we in different timezones?’ she asks. ‘You could say that’ says the Doctor scowling from under his monk’s robes. The Doctor referring to the Tardis as a ‘surprisingly mobile phone’ is another all-time favourite gag (I had it changing its appearance as it changing a phone casing in a draft of mine). I’m very fond of the line ‘It’s a time machine – you never have to wait for breakfast!’ When Mahler, Miss Kizlet’s underling, comments on tracking down the Tardis he comments that ‘are we sure this time? Earl’s Court is an embarrassment’ (the site of Britain’s lone original police telephone box from the pre-Who days!) There’s a classy dig at the media treatment of the 2011 London riots (unemployed youngsters in a credit crunch being ticked off for not being pro-active enough looking for work when there were thousands of applicants for every job and the Coalition government had just cut funding to every single thing that made living in England back then bearable, treated as some sort of opportunistic treason) and how the Great Intelligence can’t use that excuse’ every time they run into trouble. And one of the greatest most Doctory lines of them all: ‘I can’t tell the future – I just happen to work there’. Delightful. Line by line, word by word, ‘Saint John’ is one of my favourite stories. 

 Steven Moffat was interviewed a few years ago and commented that comedy was an intrinsic part of Who and that without it the show might be too horrible to watch – and he’s dead right. Take the wise-cracking script away and this feels like an entirely different sort of story, more the sort of gut-wrenching 15 certificate technological psychological horror of a ‘Black Mirror’ episode (Charlie Brooker’s series also being n the ether having started in 2011). Moffat got the idea when travelling back from a convention in America on a train and watching the different ‘hotspot’ icons coming up on his laptop every time he changed states – without knowing what any of these alien sounding names were. The idea that there’s something alien lurking in your wifi waiting to eat you if you accidentally click on the wrong service provider is the sort of thing that will make adults hide behind the sofas (where the wifi is blocked) never mind children and the panicked desperation of the people it takes, trapping them apparently forever in some sort of alien datacloud, is horrific enough as it is (actually members of the production team with a handful of extras ‘Brian Of Morbius’ style: production secretary Scott Handcock, brand manager Edward Russell, Midnight Oil – the company in charge of organising stray props involving bits of telly or photos like this – employee Matt Andrews. That’s also the petty cash buyer seen being sucked up from Google Plus, the production assistant disappearing from Facebook, the art director and graphic artist dematerialising from twitter, the production buyer being captured from Flickr and the art department co-ordinator disappearing from Foursquare. In addition, if you listen very carefully to the radio playing in the background of some scenes that’s meant to be giving inane mundane chatter you can hear some in-jokey references: there really was a complaint made by assistant script editor John Phillips over his hotel neighbour production assistant Sam price and her love of playing Elvis records, Who drama ‘An Adventure In Space and Time’ script editor Orchard Cookson is quoted with a story about a dog correctly guessing the winners of a European football match which was an anecdote he’d once told over lunch and assistant co-ordinator Gabrielle Ricci is quoted as singing with her beloved pet horse as part of the fictional show ‘Welsh Entertainment Spectacular’). 

 It’s worse still for the humans left behind, who watch their loved ones being turned into ‘Spoonheads’ that turn them into zombies and have them turn round eerily with bits of their heads missing (something tells me that as a dad Steven Moffat is very strict with his children’s screen-time in case they all turn out to be zombiefied). One of the most powerful scenes comes right at the end when big baddy way Miss Kizlet (leading actress Ceilia Imrie really enjoying herself) has her mind returned to her by The Great Intelligence, reverting back to being a child when UNIT come into her office and find her: the idea that someone can just come along and hack your identity is such a Dr Who idea and the fact that you’re left having to rebuild your life fifty, sixty, seventy years after your identity was taken is one of those Who ideas that’s more terrifying than outright death (presumably The Great Intelligence somehow hacked Miss Kizlet as part of the early army internet trials, given the years). There’s another great creepy scene where the Great Intelligence doesn’t just hack people’s phones but people, having a very surreal conversation with the Doctor in a coffee shop where he’s buying cakes where the passers by all start talking to him (although, it has to be said, this is a scene already done better in ‘The Eleventh Hour’). All very effective, although we have had something similar in Dr Who before (‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ did much the same thing, just with televisions instead of the internet) and I do have to question why everyone’s brains uploaded to a data-cloud mean that we can still see them in the location they were taken, like their living rooms rather than some form of ‘white void a la ‘Warrior’s Gate’ or ‘The Mind Robber’. 

 The trouble is, as well as being smart and funny and genuinely creepy, a lot of this story ends up being silly too. The Who story that this one resembles most is ‘The War Machines’, a dark and brooding re-set button by a new production back in 1966 that wanted to make Who more of a psychological thriller and which introduced a giant computer that took ver the world from the newly built Post Office Tower (now the BT Tower). At the time this building was the tallest in London and loomed over the skyline, even though not that many people knew what it was actually for (the satellite radio antennae it used was futuristic indeed for the times). It was rare indeed for Who to be in contemporary London in this era and for many people watching it was the first time they could walk past a building that had been seen in Dr Who and go ‘wow, this could all be real!’ Moffat is after a similar idea as he re-sets the series again post Amy and Rory so he naturally turns to the same skyline. The Shard was a new complex that officially became London’s latest highest building when finished in July 2012, some eight months before this episode went on air, and similarly looks as if it was made by aliens, being all triangular and made out of glass, while few people watching could have told you what it actually does. In actual fact it’s a quirky combination of office space, residential homes, the main home of the Al Jazeera TV station and a business park, with additional space for restaurants open to the public and even a mini hospital of sorts (though no gift shop, which no doubt disappointed the Doctor no end). Here floor 65 (the tallest floor of flats in reality) becomes home to the Great Intelligence, who has a whole host of captured brainwashed people tapping into London’s wifi hotspots and security cameras, aiming to ‘upload’ as many people as possible. It’s a scene straight out of ‘The Demon Headmaster’ (the bits that come after taking over the prime minister’s brain – all of which was done already in ‘Aliens Of London/World War Three’ Not that the prime minister has much of a brain lately, any of them). The Doctor gains access by riding a motorbike up the sides, even though we’ve never seen him ride a motorbike before, in a scene where Matt Smith laughs about coming last in the ‘anti-grav’ Olympics. That definitely wasn’t in mine – even I thought something like that too ridiculous and that’s me saying that!) It’s one of the daftest sights in modern Who, not least because actually there’s nothing to stop him simply using the lift. Also…why? What is this grand plan? We just take it for granted that one of the, well, greatest intelligences in the universe is doing all this but we never find out what for. And if it’s a trap for the Doctor by taking Clara and getting his attention, well, he’s not very god at it is he? I mean he’s had hundreds of false starts already. And even in London over a period of years that many people going missing would just arouse suspicion the Intelligence really doesn’t need.

 Ah yes, Clara. All of this plot is really just a background detail for the Doctor to get to know his new companion – for the third time. This happens a lot in series seven but particularly here; Clara is handed to us as so much of a mystery, with a series arc dedicated to the mystery of who she is and what her arrival might mean for the Doctor, that Moffat forgets to make her into a character. Especially this incarnation. The first Clara, ‘Soufflé Girl’ Oswin, is cheeky and all-knowing, running rings not only round the Daleks but the Doctor. ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’ draws you in wanting to know more – and then kills her off in a devastating final scene. The Victorian nanny Clara from ‘The Snowmen’, too, is a great little character: she’s prim and proper as befits her time but there’s also something very modern and timeless about her and she, too, dies in a scene at the end that leaves us devastated. Poor Jenna Coleman has to find a third way to make a third Clara interesting and she just can’t. Moffat’s idea of making her different is to make her modern, a tech-savvy nanny with wanderlust who can find out anything from social media in minutes and can hack into cyberspace faster than the Doctor, but this Clara just doesn’t ring true. That mystery, which is finally unravelled in ‘The Name Of The Doctor’, also means that all of those long lingering pontificating scenes about the mystery of who Clara might be are all null and void now we know. And after knowing it just makes this adventure all the stranger: Clara’s oddly flirtatious in what is simultaneously both a scary and weird situation. Just look at this situation from her point of view rather than the Doctor’s: there she is, responsible for two children (one young, one seemingly too old to need childcare) when the internet goes out and creepy things start happening. The guy she’s just phones up to sort it all out turns out to be more ET than BT and hangs around her house spouting gibberish about time travel and demanding to know who she really is. Although at first Clara tells him to get lost, soon she’s hooked and getting involved, carrying on even after she’s zapped by her wifi and collapses, waking up on her bed, this stranger having broken into her house and put her there before retiring to stare at her bedroom window from a deckchair in her driveway– the stranger who was flirting with her a few hours earlier. If I was Clara I’d be checking if my drink was spiked and phoning the police. Instead Clara chooses this moment to start joking with him about his Tardis being a ‘snogging booth’ and trusting him. You accept it all at the time because you think that Clara really does know more than she’s letting on, but as things turn out she really doesn’t: at this point in her life she’s utterly normal in every way. And she doesn’t act normal in the slightest. She’s also a rubbish babysitter: she doesn’t check with her kids once or panic about what might have happened to them. Then again nor does the Doctor: of all the strange things that have happened that day why does he pick up on the leaf in Clara’s book and starting making that the ‘big mystery’ (as opposed to, I don’t know, Clara’s ability to hack computers when he can’t and her lack of surprise at any of this). 

 Too much of this story is taken up with her and the Doctor doing their weird variation of flirting, but it’s not something comfortable that comes to either actor and a lot of these scenes that try so hard to be funny feel more like the creepy half of this story. At the time the mystery was more annoying than ever in this story because it still isn’t solved by the end of it (Who is she? Is she a time-traveller? Is she a spy? Does she really know the Doctor and she’s lying?) and we’d already waited so many months since ‘Asylum’ to find out what it could be. We now know, from dozens of stories later, that Clara got hold of the Doctor’s number thanks to Missy but that part is just sort of ignored for now- why? This could have been a really big mystery that set the story moving further and it’s not like Moffat to ignore a mystery (it could be that he was having problems getting Missy right so didn’t bring her in till the following year, but it’s odd that the Doctor doesn’t march straight to the shop that gave out his number – if only to stop anyone else calling it). This Clara isn’t as well drawn or as interesting as the other two. Then Moffat chucks everything into the long grass again and we don’t find out anything more by the end of the episode. The real trouble with this story is, it’s all a big set up for stuff that’s to come and not a story in its own right. Which is especially irritating at a time when we were looking for a pay off to the mystery of clara that’s been running for so many months now. As clever as this story is, as well written as it is, this is where fan patience begins to wear thin. 

 This is, at least, a great episode for Matt Smith. This Doctor is all over the shop: one minute he’s grieving, the next he’s been given a mystery (and this Doctor likes nothing more than a good mystery!) he doesn’t yet know what Clara is to him so doesn’t know whether to fear her or flirt, so her sort of does both. For the most part this confusion works: we’re so used to seeing this Doctor with all the answers that it’s a whole new part of his character. With Amy and Clara gone he’s now the main focal point and he’s rarely better in a story that calls on his full range from impossibly old alien to overgrown kid. He’s a terrific sulky monk in Cumbria, delivers one-liners with panache (the scene of him leaving a plate full of Jammie Dodgers for an unconscious Clara to help her recuperate is so very 11th Doctor – she got lucky not to end up with the fish custard!), has fun being a sort of cyberspy and has a great time squaring off against Ceilia Imrie. But it also leads to some very odd lines where matt smith has to act sexy. And he should never act sexy. It’s not too bad for now but in time this angle is going to lead to some very un-Dr 11 things coming out of his mouth. Even here it seems out of character for someone whose trying to be protective first and foremost. As it happens the Clara romance aspect is dead in the water but at the time there was a collective groan that we going to get yet another subplot of the dr falling in love in 21st century who. Most surprising of all is how at home he is as a motorbike hero (normally this Doctor can’t even walk in a straight line comfortably) and the scene of him driving a motorbike out of the Tardis doors, impossibly, is one of the era’s best (and must have stretched the computer team to their limits: actually it was an empty prop box Matt Smith simply drive through on location with the Tardis interior added). This story has one of the other of the era’s all-time greatest moments too: Clara’s first trip inside the tardis where the camera actually follows in one apparent full shot from her garden to the inside to a crashing plane in seconds flat, following her as the plane lurches downwards and starts crashing – it’s one of the greatest ‘look what we can do!’ shots in the entire sixty year run, up there with the very first Tardis reveal shot in 1963 and the panning model shot at the start of ‘Trial Of A timelord’. Only, instead of that being the show’s only money shot on which they blew all the budget or the year, they just keep on coming in this story. Unfortunately Moffat runs out of time to draw anyone else that well; Clara might share the screen-time but she doesn’t get any similarly great scenes and it’s a true waste of Ceilia Imrie and Richard E Grant both (was everyone busy and double-booked that week?!) 

The result is a really good promising Dr Who episode for the most part, with some of my favourite scenes, that still ultimately becomes a story I’m not all that keen on by the end. ‘Bells’ just loses it’s ap-peal and runs out of steam midway through after all the good ideas have been used up and it has to cram a solution into the second half, collapsing completely at the end when we switch from character to plot and have yet another showdown against a female villainess whose clearly modelled on Cruella De Vil in an exotic location base (and we’ve already had hundreds of those). After being treated to the ‘Twilight Zone’ style twists at the end of ‘Black Mirror’ this most Charlie Brooker of episodes just does the same old same old (although no Black Mirror episode would ever have come up with anything so Dr Whoy as a motorbike up the Shard or the Spoonheads). After such a build-up to finally meeting Clara and who she might be, with speculation reaching fever pitch after the unique break mid-series this year, it’s disappointing indeed to get what ends up being just another bog standard Who episode with characters who don’t have any depth to them. Not to mention one that recycles so much from past stories: not just ‘The Eleventh Hour’ and ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ but ‘Silence In the Library’ too (the Spoonheads are just the library interaction devices) and ‘The Empty Child’ too (as catchphrases go ‘I don’t know where I am’ is no ‘are you my mummy?’ either). The devious scheme, which seemed so solid just a few minutes earlier, is now ended because the Doctor basically hacks the hackers and turns their scheme on them (seriously, he calls himself The Great Intelligence and he didn’t see that plot twist coming?!). Such a great idea (and I don’t say that just because it was also mine!), so many great one-liners…and yet this story ends up ultimately being a collection of scenes that work really well interspersed with ones that don’t work at all, a story that ends up being disappointing because it wastes all that promise and doesn’t move the story arc any further on than it was before. When asked by Doctor Who Magazine for the 50th story poll to give an example of a story he thought ended up being ‘middling’ Moffat nominated this one an example of an episode he thought of straightaway – not a disaster, not a career high (indeed the story was one that was right in the middle of the whole poll and is not a million miles away from the middle of mine); that’s about right I’d say –a lot works in this episode but a couple of things drag it down and for all the clever inventive ideas thrown into this one there are a lot of bits and pieces recycled from other places that used it better too. Still, if nothing else it made Clara’s third debut very different to the other two, added some new twists and turns to the usual Who formula and made me scared to use my wifi the night it was on so, job done! In fact my internet’s playing up a bit now and has probably been taken over by alien monsters and ahdfgfgdkagdgfjkfgdkfghdklfklghbslfhfgh [DELETE! Exterminate! Kroll! The quest is the quest! There’s no such thing as Macra! Eldrad Must Live!] Do not be alarmed. Your book feed will return to normal shortly. We hope. 

 POSITIVES + Even weirder for me than predicting half the story is that it starts in a monastery near Carlisle where I used to live. Most cities aren’t named in Who and of those that are 90% are just London, where indeed the rest of this story is set. Spooky! Especially as the 12th Doctor and Clara end up being so rude about Carlisle in ‘Hide’ just three stories later. The scenes of Matt Smith mourning Clara a second time and wanting to stay away from everyone is some of his best work and a side of the 11th Doctor, the most puppyish and in many ways friendly of all his incarnations, we don’t often see. It’s great that we see the Tardis prop as a working phonebox again too – I’m always surprised writers don’t use it more, given that phoning for help is what a police telephone box was originally for (‘Logopolis’ and ‘The Empty Child’ are two earlier examples than do this, but three stories isn’t many out of 300-odd). 

 NEGATIVES - The execution of the whole datacloud thing is a bit clumsy and a little too close to the sea of faces on the TV in ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’. In fact the whole ending is clumsy and ripped wholesale from the superlative ‘Demon Headmaster’ books and TV series which did this sort of thing better years ago. The Demon Headmaster himself, Terence Hardiman, had only just been in Dr Who and ‘The Beast Below’ – he was one of the first people Moffat cast as showrunner in fact – so may have been on his mind (Terence’s wife played Liz Shaw’s mum over in the Big Finish Dr Whos too, practically making him family). 

BEST QUOTE: ‘Suppose there was something living in the Wi-Fi, harvesting human minds, extracting them. Imagine that. Human souls trapped like flies in the World Wide Web, stuck for ever, crying out for help’. Clara: ‘Isn't that basically Twitter?!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: A red button prequel where the Doctor sits on a swing and discusses his feelings of loss with a little girl. Asking her for advice, she says when she loses something she goes looking for it so he does the (spoilers) kicker being that it was Clara as a girl all along. One of the weaker prequels to be honest that doesn’t add much, seems very out of character and hangs on a whacking great coincidence; a lot of issues for something that’s only a minute long. 

Over in the novel end of the spectrum ‘Summer Falls’ is a short story credited to ‘Amelia Williams’ (Amy Pond) – really author Justin Richards under a pseudonym - that Clara reads in one scene of ‘Bells’. The story has little to do with Dr Who , being about a schoolgirl who discovers a plot to steal paintings (sadly no Mona Lisa or Jagaroths) but is a nice read, especially if you view the girl Kate as being like Amy’s 11-year-old self. The best thing about it is the fake credit to Amy on the back:  ‘The editor of the famous Melody Malone series of crime novels, and a bestselling author of several books for children. She lives in New York with her husband Rory and their young son, Anthony. They have a grown-up daughter, Melody, who works as an archaeologist’.

In addition, this story is very similar to ‘Lonely’, a short story in the ‘Transmissions’ volume of the long-running ‘Short Trips’ book anthologies written by Richard Wright in 2008. In this story a ‘biotechnical intelligence’ we’d nowadays recognise as an piece of AI software  named Iaml who uploads lonely people on internet chatrooms into a physical web of her own for company. Luckily the 8^th Doctor is on hand to fix everything and put people back again. Notably the people uploaded have the catchphrase ‘I don’t know where I am!’ just like ‘Bells Of Saint Johns’. 

 

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