The Bells Of Saint John's
(Series 7, Dr 11 with Clara, 30/3/2013, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Colm McCarthy)
Ranking: 197
In an emoji: đ˛
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 â something that reflected the âmodern ageâ we were living in during the early 2000s. Always one for a writing challenge I came up with âThe Worldwide Web Of Fearâ, 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 Iâd 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, itâs such a very Dr Who concept: something you canât 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 didnât 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 âdatacloudâ that stores people not documents: and yes, I donât 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 âA Teaspoon And An Open Mindâ 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 couldnât 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 âAlanâs Album Archivesâ blog instead, before taking it down in a panic when the BBC started going for copyright infringes on amateur websites (although itâs probably still around on a wayback machine, or even better a space-time travel machine, if you know a hacker with Claraâs 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, Iâm not surprised (and no I donât think for a second that my humble, ignored blog is where Steven Moffat got the idea â 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 âGreat Intelligence uses dumbed down social mediaâ 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 thatâs everywhere? Whatâs more Dr Who than that?!) To be honest Iâm 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 weâre 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 itâs 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 âSnowmenâ 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 âbells of Saint Johnâ keep ringing: you expect they mean a religious bell but no â âbellsâ is also an archaic word for a ringing telephone and âSaint Johnâ 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 â presumably just the Tardis in a mood). When Clara rings the Doctor complains that itâs â1207â and she canât possibly be ringing him about the internet. She looks at the clock and comments that itâs half past three for her: âAre we in different timezones?â she asks. âYou could say thatâ says the Doctor scowling from under his monkâs robes. The Doctor referring to the Tardis as a âsurprisingly mobile phoneâ is another all-time favourite gag (I had it changing its appearance as it changing a phone casing in a draft of mine). Iâm very fond of the line âItâs a time machine â you never have to wait for breakfast!â When Mahler, Miss Kizletâs underling, comments on tracking down the Tardis he comments that âare we sure this time? Earlâs Court is an embarrassmentâ (the site of Britainâs lone original police telephone box from the pre-Who days!) Thereâs 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 canât use that excuseâ every time they run into trouble. And one of the greatest most Doctory lines of them all: âI canât tell the future â I just happen to work thereâ. Delightful. Line by line, word by word, âSaint Johnâ 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 â and heâs 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 âBlack Mirrorâ episode (Charlie Brookerâs 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 âhotspotâ icons coming up on his laptop every time he changed states â without knowing what any of these alien sounding names were. The idea that thereâs 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 âBrian Of Morbiusâ style: production secretary Scott Handcock, brand manager Edward Russell, Midnight Oil â the company in charge of organising stray props involving bits of telly or photos like this â employee Matt Andrews. Thatâs 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 thatâs 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 âAn Adventure In Space and Timeâ 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 heâd 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 âWelsh Entertainment Spectacularâ).
Itâs worse still for the humans left behind, who watch their loved ones being turned into âSpoonheadsâ 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 childrenâs 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 youâre left having to rebuild your life fifty, sixty, seventy years after your identity was taken is one of those Who ideas thatâs more terrifying than outright death (presumably The Great Intelligence somehow hacked Miss Kizlet as part of the early army internet trials, given the years). Thereâs another great creepy scene where the Great Intelligence doesnât just hack peopleâs phones but people, having a very surreal conversation with the Doctor in a coffee shop where heâs 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 âThe Eleventh Hourâ). All very effective, although we have had something similar in Dr Who before (âThe Idiotâs Lanternâ did much the same thing, just with televisions instead of the internet) and I do have to question why everyoneâs 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 âwhite void a la âWarriorâs Gateâ or âThe Mind Robberâ.
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 âThe War Machinesâ, 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 âwow, this could all be real!â 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 Londonâs 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 itâs 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 Londonâs wifi hotspots and security cameras, aiming to âuploadâ as many people as possible. Itâs a scene straight out of âThe Demon Headmasterâ (the bits that come after taking over the prime ministerâs brain â all of which was done already in âAliens Of London/World War Threeâ 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 weâve never seen him ride a motorbike before, in a scene where Matt Smith laughs about coming last in the âanti-gravâ Olympics. That definitely wasnât in mine â even I thought something like that too ridiculous and thatâs me saying that!) Itâs one of the daftest sights in modern Who, not least because actually thereâs nothing to stop him simply using the lift. AlsoâŚwhy? 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 itâs a trap for the Doctor by taking Clara and getting his attention, well, heâs not very god at it is he? I mean heâs 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 doesnât need.
Ah yes, Clara. All of this plot is really just a background detail for the Doctor to get to know his new companion â 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, âSoufflĂŠ Girlâ Oswin, is cheeky and all-knowing, running rings not only round the Daleks but the Doctor. âAsylum Of The Daleksâ draws you in wanting to know more â and then kills her off in a devastating final scene. The Victorian nanny Clara from âThe Snowmenâ, too, is a great little character: sheâs prim and proper as befits her time but thereâs 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 canât. Moffatâs 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 doesnât ring true. That mystery, which is finally unravelled in âThe Name Of The Doctorâ, 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: Claraâs 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 Doctorâs: 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 sheâs 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 sheâs hooked and getting involved, carrying on even after sheâs 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 drivewayâ the stranger who was flirting with her a few hours earlier. If I was Clara Iâd 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 âsnogging boothâ and trusting him. You accept it all at the time because you think that Clara really does know more than sheâs letting on, but as things turn out she really doesnât: at this point in her life sheâs utterly normal in every way. And she doesnât act normal in the slightest. Sheâs also a rubbish babysitter: she doesnât 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 Claraâs book and starting making that the âbig mysteryâ (as opposed to, I donât know, Claraâs ability to hack computers when he canât 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 itâs 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 isnât 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 sheâs lying?) and weâd already waited so many months since âAsylumâ to find out what it could be. We now know, from dozens of stories later, that Clara got hold of the Doctorâs 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 itâs not like Moffat to ignore a mystery (it could be that he was having problems getting Missy right so didnât bring her in till the following year, but itâs odd that the Doctor doesnât march straight to the shop that gave out his number â if only to stop anyone else calling it). This Clara isnât as well drawn or as interesting as the other two. Then Moffat chucks everything into the long grass again and we donât find out anything more by the end of the episode. The real trouble with this story is, itâs all a big set up for stuff thatâs 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 thatâs 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 heâs grieving, the next heâs been given a mystery (and this Doctor likes nothing more than a good mystery!) he doesnât yet know what Clara is to him so doesnât know whether to fear her or flirt, so her sort of does both. For the most part this confusion works: weâre so used to seeing this Doctor with all the answers that itâs a whole new part of his character. With Amy and Clara gone heâs now the main focal point and heâs rarely better in a story that calls on his full range from impossibly old alien to overgrown kid. Heâs 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 â 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. Itâs 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 canât 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 eraâs 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 eraâs all-time greatest moments too: Claraâs 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 â itâs one of the greatest âlook what we can do!â 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 âTrial Of A timelordâ. Only, instead of that being the showâs 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 doesnât get any similarly great scenes and itâs 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 Iâm not all that keen on by the end. âBellsâ just loses itâs 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 weâve already had hundreds of those). After being treated to the âTwilight Zoneâ style twists at the end of âBlack Mirrorâ 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, itâs disappointing indeed to get what ends up being just another bog standard Who episode with characters who donât have any depth to them. Not to mention one that recycles so much from past stories: not just âThe Eleventh Hourâ and âThe Idiotâs Lanternâ but âSilence In the Libraryâ too (the Spoonheads are just the library interaction devices) and âThe Empty Childâ too (as catchphrases go âI donât know where I amâ is no âare you my mummy?â 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 didnât see that plot twist coming?!). Such a great idea (and I donât say that just because it was also mine!), so many great one-linersâŚand yet this story ends up ultimately being a collection of scenes that work really well interspersed with ones that donât work at all, a story that ends up being disappointing because it wastes all that promise and doesnât 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 âmiddlingâ Moffat nominated this one an example of an episode he thought of straightaway â 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); thatâs about right Iâd say âa 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 Claraâs 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 internetâs playing up a bit now and has probably been taken over by alien monsters and ahdfgfgdkagdgfjkfgdkfghdklfklghbslfhfgh [DELETE! Exterminate! Kroll! The quest is the quest! Thereâs 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 arenât 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 âHideâ 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 donât often see. Itâs great that we see the Tardis prop as a working phonebox again too â Iâm always surprised writers donât use it more, given that phoning for help is what a police telephone box was originally for (âLogopolisâ and âThe Empty Childâ are two earlier examples than do this, but three stories isnât 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 âThe Idiotâs Lanternâ. In fact the whole ending is clumsy and ripped wholesale from the superlative âDemon Headmasterâ 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 âThe Beast Belowâ â he was one of the first people Moffat cast as showrunner in fact â so may have been on his mind (Terenceâs wife played Liz Shawâs mum over in the Big Finish Dr Whos too, practically making him family).
BEST QUOTE: âSuppose 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 helpâ. Clara: âIsn't that basically Twitter?!â
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 doesnât add much, seems very out of character and hangs on a whacking great coincidence; a lot of issues for something thatâs only a minute long.
Over in the novel end of the spectrum âSummer Fallsâ
is a short story credited to âAmelia Williamsâ (Amy Pond) â really author
Justin Richards under a pseudonym - that Clara reads in one scene of âBellsâ.
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 Amyâs 11-year-old self. The
best thing about it is the fake credit to Amy on the back: âThe 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 archaeologistâ.
In addition, this
story is very similar to âLonelyâ, a short story in the âTransmissionsâ volume
of the long-running âShort Tripsâ book anthologies written by Richard Wright in
2008. In this story a âbiotechnical intelligenceâ weâd 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 8th Doctor is on hand to fix everything and put
people back again. Notably the people uploaded have the catchphrase âI donât
know where I am!â just like âBells Of Saint Johnsâ.
Previous âThe
Snowmenâ next âThe Rings Of Akhatenâ
Previous âThe
Snowmenâ next âThe Rings Of Akhatenâ
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