The Snowmen
(Christmas Special, Dr 11 with Clara (sort of), 25/12/2012, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Saul Metzstein)
'Seeing as it's a Christmas episode here's a Dr Who Christmas cracker joke for you. Why did the post-Yeti Great Intelligence turn down an invitation to a Christmas party? He had no body to go with!'
Ranking: 203
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There are some episodes I really struggle to know where to put in my rankings. Should I mark them the way I felt when I first saw them or now I’ve come back for a re-watch? Of all the 335 Dr Who stories out there ‘The Snowmen’ is the hardest one to rank and one I feel kind of bad giving the ‘cold shoulder’ to. You see, I really enjoyed it when it was on: it was very different in feel, very funny and very dark in a way we hadn’t had since Donald Cotton was writing for the show in the 1960s. It gave us breathing space after the loss of Amy and Rory in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ and set up the new half-series to come up with a clever run of twists and turns that only showrunner Steven Moffat could come up with. Its only later - ironically in the cold light of day - that the delights of the snowmen melt, once you’ve sat through other stories that pull off a similar feel (‘The Crimson Blood’ ‘Deep Breath’), while unlike the plot running through series six the ‘Clara’ arc seems less clever when you know all the answers and go back to see all the pieces fit. Watching in retrospect you can see all the mechanics on show that have led to you to be emotionally manipulated in some way rather and that you’ve been ‘tricked’, even though they felt genuine at the time. Now that we have all the stories ‘The Snowmen’ is something of a melted puddle of mush, not intended for re-watching (Moffat is the one modern Who writer who should have been around in the pre-repeat, home video era when audiences could only be shocked once). Watching it back feels rather like watching a magic trick after the illusion has been revealed: part of you wants to applaud, but part of you is annoyed with yourself for being tricked in the first place.
‘The Snowmen’ still has its moments though, no matter how many times you watch it, returning Dr Who to the Victorian era that everyone always says suits it so well – partly because it’s the age of the first stirrings of science fiction (H G Wells and Mary Shelley), partly because we used to get one story per decade set there in the 20th century and all are seen as relative or outright classics: ‘The Evil Of The Daleks’ ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ ‘Ghostlight’. Originally there was a cut line with Clara arguing that she didn’t know what ‘Victorian’ meant (as we’re still a little too early, with Victoria still in her early twenties and not yet the long-lived colossus of legend) and Clara asking if The Doctor thinks she’s Australian, from New Victoria. There’s a specific reason we’ve got a story set here though – for the first time since Douglas Adams in 1979 we have a showrunner/script editor trying to do two day-jobs at once. ‘Sherlock’, co-written with Mark Gatiss, had been the surprise hit of the decade. There have been as many interpreters of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s Baker Street detective as there have been Dr Who by now, but what made the Moffat-Gatiss version stand out was that it was set in the present day, with all of the characters given a ‘modern’ twist but none of the trappings of the Victorian era of their birth. While modernising the series is nothing new (the Basil Rathbone films updated the stories to WWII) this is the first one to remove all the trappings associated with them ever since Sherlock first appeared in ‘The Strand’ magazine, with illustrations of deerstalkers and capes by Sidney Paget (never actually referred to in the text). By now Moffat is deep at work on series three and increasingly aware that he can’t give both his full attention (which is why series six is effectively split in two and why Sherlock has a gap year between years two and three).The workload is too much and for the first time in his life Moffat gets proper full-on writer’s block. Which is a problem when you’re meant to be writing a Christmas special that needs to be filmed and edited in time for the big day (it’s the one deadline you have to hit because they’re not going to move Jesus’ birthday for anything, even TV). So what Moffat does is rather clever: he effectively gives up writing a Dr Who story and writes a Sherlock one instead, with The Doctor’s usual warmth and moral outrage toned down and his cleverness and observation skills turned up, in a story that uses all the Victorian trimmings he’s been reading about but hasn’t been able to use yet. There’s one story in particular (‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’, not one of the best mostly because Watson’s missing) that Moffat leans into heavily, where the Great detective gives everything up to keep bees (yes just like Goronwy in ‘Delta and The Bannermen’) but comes out of it one last time. He also near-enough writes this same story twice, recycling bits for my own favourite of the Sherlock run, Christmas special ‘The Abominable Bride’ (the two titles even go together once you’ve worked out who the ‘villain’ is!) where Sherlock goes back in time to solve a case (and Martin Freeman as Dr Watson finally gets a Victorian moustache!) Which is also, incidentally, what Douglas Adams did, writing lots of crossover jokes with ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ cropping up in stories like ‘Destiny Of the Daleks’ and ‘The Creature From The Pit’.
Talking of Douglas, when
he too was up against it writing his two series he proposed a story where The
Doctor would do the thing he most wanted him to do in that moment: retire. The
story then ran that so many things happened to The Doctor in retirement he came
back to work for a rest! That story was seriously considered before producer
Graham Williams talked him out of it, fearing that it looked like a send-up of
the series and was eventually replaced by ‘Shada’ (the irony being that, if
they’d tried to make the retirement story, it’s that one that would have been
left unfinished after an industrial strike, which would have been fitting
somehow). Eric Saward sort of tried it for ‘Revelation
Of The Daleks’ too (although only for half an episode and mostly to get him
out the way while Eric set up all his supporting characters). Moffat though
thought it a very clever idea and had it in his back pocket if he ever needed
an idea in a hurry and a place where it would fit. He found one after Amy and
Rory’s exit, using the Christmas special as a ‘buffer’ for The Doctor to mope
in the same way ‘The Runaway Bride’
helped The Doctor come to terms with the loss of Rose. The only problem came in
writing it. Moffat did all the things he usually did when writing Christmas
stories in the Spring: booze in festive mugs, Christmas carols, snowy pictures
stuck on the wall: somehow none of it worked. Moffat, usually so quick on his
feet when writing first drafts, kept getting stuck and couldn’t understand why,
until this story ended up being as close to the wire of a deadline as any
modern Who story came (it’s a wonder he didn’t take a lot of baths as he seemed
to be channelling Douglas’ spirit in another way and the shooting noise
deadlines made when they whizzed past his head).
I think I see why.
There’s a very clever, typically intricate storyline at the heart of this story
that manages to juggle several things at once: the Doctor’s grief, Clara
turning up again with a different face (and a slightly different voice) after
dying in ‘The Asylum Of The Daleks’, the need to comfort fans who’ve been hurt
by the loss of Amy and Rory and the general Christmas audience who can’t cope
with continuity and just need a good ol’ knees up. Juggling all those is hard
enough for any writer, but Moffat’s not helped himself in that this is a story
with all the usual festive warmth and emotion removed. The reason Moffat made ‘Sherlock’
a present day series is partly that everyone acts like a thicker version of
Sherlock to modern eyes: distant, aloof, cold and Dr Who is a series that
demands warmth. The theme of ‘ice’ keeps cropping up, but it’s not just the
Snowmen who are ‘cold’ in this story. We’re deep in Victorian times when
emotion was frowned upon, something that’s a key part of the plot with the
theme of ‘ice’ and the similarity
between characters being their normal reserved Victorian selves and taken over
by Snowmen. Usually when Dr Who comes to the Victorian era the Doctor is warm,
but here Matt Smith’s incarnation is in mourning, ice cold himself. Forget
Christmas being ‘halfway in the dark’ from last year, this time the Doctor’s
all there. You’d normally rely on the companion to be the warm emotional moral
compass (as Jamie, Leela and Ace all very much are in the three respective
stories) but Moffat’s written himself into a corner with the Clara ‘mystery’.
(Spoilers unless you’ve seen season finale ‘Name
Of the Doctor’): If each ‘splinter’ of Clara is the same person as they
might be has they been brought up in a different environment then this is Clara
with the emotions down low and intelligence up high (much like The Doctor):
she’s a much colder, authoritarian fish than we saw with Osgood and which we’ll
get to see when she arrives in the series proper. They’ve ‘Victorianised’ her
for lack of a better word, giving us a Clara who is ‘not amused’ beyond the odd
eye twinkle. Then there’s the return of the Paternoster Row gang: a Silurian
who’s big on dry humour and a Victorian Human housemaid who’s equally reserved.
Even the children, the most emotional characters here, are cold fish by Who
standards. As for the baddy, Richard E Grant plays Dr Simoen with all the
coldness of a snowflake, doing the opposite to most Dr Who actors and cooling
things down rather than hamming things up. Even the children are cold and
distant (and very unlike real children, of any era – Moffat really struggles to
write for anyone under twenty, a real problem when the ‘real’ Clara ends up a schoolteacher
and they keep tagging along in series eight). That leaves just Strax the
Sontaron, a character who prides himself on removing his emotions but is
clearly very bad at it. Even so there are only so many scenes Dan Starkey can
be in: for the most part ‘The Snowmen’ is full of ice-cold characters in a
story where most people are saying things without saying them, without any
access to what they’re thinking or feeling, without the warmth we come to
associate with Dr Who. Only when Clara (spoilers) dies do we get any real
emotion and that’s a real downer for Christmas Day, even in a series that’s
spent Christmas Days in the past on the run from Daleks, crashed a spaceship
and as recently as last year saw a girl die (albeit in once a year intervals). In
short, it’s a story where everyone (bar Strax) is acting like Sherlock for most
of it. And that must have been very hard to write. Unfortunately it’s kind of
hard to sit through at times too.
The ice governess is
clearly based on ‘The Snow Queen’, a representation of everything we see as ‘wrong’
with past parenting, back in the days when it didn’t pay to get emotionally
attached to children who had a statistically high chance of dying. But she
never melts. There’s no moment when the ice governess is brought back to life
and realises that there are bigger monsters in the world than seven year old
children. If anything the fact Clara dies proves a point: it is pointless
getting attached to humans with such short lifespans. That feels really odd in
a Dr Who story, where love is the answer (in all the stories when it isn’t a
weapon anyway). Equally there’s no moment when Mr Latimer sees how close he
comes to losing his children and thaws, vowing to bring them up properly from now on. Even The Doctor
doesn’t thaw out for the ‘right’ reasons, getting his mojo back not through his
new friend’s sacrifice or his old friend’s support but through his curiosity
being piqued feels wrong somehow, as if he hasn’t learned the lessons that keep
getting him into trouble (see ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ especially but pretty
much any regeneration story). Moffat’s super clever at writing in the ice-cold
feel, from attacking snowmen to the characters within, but he’s missed out on
the contrasting warmth we need to go with it. Otherwise this story is just a
bunch of people being cold and distant for an hour. That’s what you escape from
on Christmas Day, depending what mood your relatives are in, not what you watch
by choice.
I have issues too with
the returning baddy. Moffat’s favourite villain from the ‘classic’ series was
the Great Intelligence, one-time whisperer in monasteries and invader of the
London Underground (with a sly reference from Madame Vastra that her sleep was
disturbed by them building it, dating this story to 1863 despite the hints that
it’s the 1890s), but he thought the robot yetis were silly and wanted his era of
the show to move away from ‘lumbering’ monsters. I’m amazed we didn’t have
him/it (what are the pronouns for a disembodied voice? They’re not really
someone I want to get on the wrong side of!) earlier, given how easy it would
be to re-cast and how simple yet creepy the premise is, a ghostly whisper
controlling an unseen object from afar. Having the Great Intelligence take
over, not ‘Abominable Snowmen’ but ‘Snowmen who are Abominable’ is the sort of
pun I can really get behind and evil snowmen are a great idea (indeed, it’s
amazing that it took eight Christmas specials for someone to come up with
this). Given that the Great Intelligence was a cold-hearted meanies it makes
some kind of sense. However, take the idea of controlled disguised robots away
and all you’ve really got is a whispering voice: not the most threatening
villain. We’re presented with Dr Simeon as if he’s the worst baddy ever,
because Moffat knows what the Great Intelligence used to be, but we don’t
really see any sign of it here – he seems like a pushover, quite frankly,
compared to villains of the past. Alas
none of this aspect really comes off: if you know the original then it’s just a
pale copy and if you don’t then it just looks like one of our famed British
actors has turned into a snowman whisperer for no good reason. There’s also the
very obvious point that snowmen are just as impractical and arguably sillier
than yeti, who were ‘right’ for roaming the Himalayan mountains and even if
they seemed a bit silly in the Underground were nevertheless hiding in a ‘sensible’
place where people wouldn’t look for them in the heart of a major city. In ‘The
Snowmen’ we have an invading force who only make sense for a few days a year,
who seem to be invading the outskirts of town if the Latimer’s mansion is
anything to go by (this is not the smog-filled heart of the city with slums on
every corner but somewhere more gentile and out of the way). For someone
calling themselves ‘The Great Intelligence’ her ain’t half thick sometimes. The
script also lacks a good pay-off, no doubt because Steven Moffat turns that
into a second series arc that won’t be solved for another year, yet another
reason why this story really isn’t made for repeat viewing now all the goodies
have been let out of the box. Plus have you seen how the CGI Snowmen move? I’d
take lumbering anyday. While it’s hard to be scared of a monster you can melt
by simply lighting a fire.
I can’t work out exactly
how I feel about Clara’s arc, which is simultaneously the cleverest and dumbest
thing the series ever tried. On the plus side having that sense of mystery back
in the show again is a clever hook, one that keeps us watching and plays with
our expectations (stage directions: ‘The camera lingers on Clara. You might
recognise her from ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’ –
but that’s another story!’) It was open knowledge Jenna Coleman was the next
companion and – courtesy of the long gap in the series break – she was cast
much earlier than would be normal. Rather than keep the actresses’ identity a
secret (something modern Who had tried before and failed) instead it’s a clever
device to build that mystery into her character. Clara being introduced as
Oswin in ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’ before we’d been told was a very clever plan: everyone
who saw Jenna filming that early assumed it was for ‘her’ series proper.
Killing her off in the same story is a masterstroke. However doing it all again
in this story starts to feel artificial and having to introduce three
characters to the idea of Dr Who, time travel and aliens in a row becomes
wearing. Having ‘this’ particular Clara so much like Amy (feisty, grumpy, brave,
argumentative, flirty) so soon after losing the ‘real’ one also feels a bit odd
(the later Clara gets around this by wanting to be The Doctor’s equal in a way
Amy never did; this one arrogantly assumes she is; the DVD commentary suggests
Moffat was thinking more of Nancy from ‘Oliver Twist’ but other than being a
bigger child than the children and then being more ‘adult’ than the other
adults - with hints that Clara’s a governess by day but a prostitute at night
to pay the bills - this aspect doesn’t really come across). It was an open
secret that both Davies and Moffat wanted contemporary companions, because ones
from the past would mean getting them up to speed with things the audience
already knew and having companions from the future meant having them know
things we ‘don’t’. Having a Victorian Clara so different to Oswin (who was
likeable and warm – this one not so much) and killing her off again feels like
a trick too far: there was an awful moment there when we thought the second
half of series six was going to have different Claras each time. How can this
possibly be the same girl he’s just seen inside a Dalek in the future living
under a different name? The answer when we get, after another whole series-long
arc of clues and hints, is a great one and there’s no reason to spoil it here,
but what’s clever is how open-ended the script is. For all we know this Clara
could be an ancestor of the other one (or at least, that’s what I had money
on). It’s only when you know the answer ‘The Snowmen’ is a bit of letdown and
with so much of this story given over to the mystery rather than a properly
thought out plot (why does the Great Intelligence want snowmen?) that cheapens
it a little. Nevertheless Jenna Coleman is already great, finding a whole new
way to play someone whose obviously the same character but in a different
period starting, less flirty and more starchy as befits well any of us who’d
lived our lives in the Victorian era I suspect. It made perfect sense when,
after leaving Who, ITV cast Jenna as Queen Victoria alongside her real-life
boyfriend of the time Tom Hughes as Prince Albert, who she plays much like the
Victorian Clara, sort of secretly amused. One nice touch by the way: according
to Clara’s gravestone she shares a birthday with Dr Who, November 23rd.
‘The Snowmen’ is far from
a disaster, then. Indeed, there are many pure Dr Whoy moments that I adore in
this one. It’s good fun seeing Dr Who as it would be were Paget illustrating
its adventures in the Strand, complete with all the clichés Moffat has refused
to have in his ‘other series, complete with cape and deerstalker hat (are they
the same ones from the Tardis wardrobe the 4th Doctor wore in ‘Talons’?)
The Doctor parking his Tardis out the way on a cloud, so he doesn’t have to
look at it anymore and can be ‘above’ the humanity he oversees and Clara
following him up there, discovering all the wonders and magic, is perfect. The
Victorian age was good at writing magic (the 20th and 21st
centuries are far too cynical) and you get a lot of that Frank Baum/H G Wells/C
S Lewis/John Masefield sense of wonder in this story, that anything could
happen. By contrast the shots of Matt Smith in silhouette with that distinctive
walk hidden in the dark, shoulders slumped, are something the series has never
tried before: we’ve seen The Doctor sad but this is truly depressed. Indeed we’ve
not seen him this alien and acerbic since the pilot episode before Ian and
Barbara knocked the rough edges off him (he needs people, does the Doctor). The
fact that this is happening to in many ways the most exuberant and sociable of
Doctors only makes the irony all the greater. Matt’s slightly less convincing
when he talks, but even so you really get the feeling of a Doctor with the
weight of the universe on his shoulders and his alien-ness, at odds with a
world he’s merely adopted because his home one burnt. There’s a gorgeous bit of
comedy with Strax and a memory worm, which makes little sense (how can
something like that evolve? Does it forget every time it’s just mated with
another? In which case the baby memory worms must be something of a surprise
each time. Not to mention the fact having one would have sped up so many other
stories. While entrusting Strax with it and expecting things to go well might
just be the biggest thing that doesn’t make sense of all) but is hilarious,
especially when Strax thinks he’s
trapped underneath a carriage. There’s a fun chase through the Latimer house,
with The Doctor hiding in the most fitting place, a Punch and Judy show, with
memories of Patrick Troughton in ‘Box Of Delights’ (not a Dr Who story but a
sort of honorary one in feel, tone and cast; odd that there are only two punch
and Judy shows in the entire Dr Who catalogue and they’re in stories together.
By which I mean ‘Snakedance', though
I’d love to see one as one of the ‘Sontaron
Experiments’ driving Humans out of their mind. I suspect there would be
more Punch than Judy). While it’s a bit odd Madame Vastra restricts Clara to
one-word requests, nevertheless it’s a very clever red herring scene where she
says the word ‘pond’, leading us to think she knows something about Amy and
Rory, whilst being the only thing likely to snap The Doctor from his stupor.
Though the misery is perhaps a little overdone (the Doctor wasn’t this sad
giving his own grand-daughter the heave-ho!) the brief moment when The Doctor
is having so much fun with Clara he ‘forgets’ his misery is a magical moment,
making it all the sadder when he loses her all over again (a moment that all but forces you to watch the
main series to see what happens next: on one basic level the Christmas stories
are basically a big trailer to hook general members of the public into watching
and on that score this story works better than most). That’s the heart of this
story: the joy is watching Matt Smith turn from Scrooge to Father Christmas
back to Scrooge again, all buttons re-set in time for the series the following
year. Perhaps best of all, it’s a Christmas story that actually feels
Christmassy: it’s not just the snow but the cold, the Dickensian feel, the ‘halfway
out the dark’ motif that runs throughout this story that reminds us to make the
most of our loved ones, that makes this perhaps the single most festive Christmas
story of the lot.
It’s all great when you’re
watching – indeed, it’s a clever way out of writer’s block, with Moffat leaning
into his two series and finding a clever way of effectively writing them both.
Having The Doctor as Sherlock for an episode is fun (it’s only when they try it
again with ‘The Crimson Horror’ soon
afterwards the novelty wears off, while you’re sick of it by ‘Deep Breath’) and as with most trips to
the past in modern Who it all looks stunning, with all the resources of the BBC’s
historical drama department on show. It makes good use of locations we’ve had
before (Cardiff’s Coal Exchange in Mount Stuart Square, the warehouse seen in ‘Blink’ and ‘The Impossible Astronaut’
and streets in Bristol laid with artificial snow in a boiling hot August),
along with ones we haven’t, Fields Park House (a Victorian manor house in
Newport as the Latimer’s) and Llandough Castle (Madame Vastra’s pad). All three
are superb, while you’d never guess that the ‘Sherlock’ style side street is
actually a BBC studio set. The acting is mostly superb, with Matt Smith finding
new ways to play an old part (and looks good in a top hat: this is his only
episode without a bowtie for most of it) and Jenna Coleman finding a new part
to play that will be dropped before it has a chance to get old. It’s only later
you realise that your Christmas present has run out of batteries and is a bit
of a knockoff compared to the days of old, while repeated watchings beyond Christmas
reveal how weird it is at times (and not in a good way), with pacing all over
the place, a nonsensical ending, an all too meta moment when The Doctor himself
refers to himself as ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (yes we got it thankyou!), a clumsy
moment where Clara casually asks if the Tardis has a kitchen so she can make a soufflé
(It would help if the later Clara mentioned it more than once), an odd looking
revamped Tardis (made to look less like a ‘home’ and more like a ‘machine’) and
a threat that never actually comes to pass. At the time it was almost
deliberately weird and sad, with a depressed Doctor, a lowkey baddy and a ‘companion’
who dies, with fears the series to come was all going to be as dark as this. In
the end finding out it was all an anomaly, a red herring and a bit of Sherlock style
misdirection, leaves you a bit cheated. With
time you can see more clearly how you’ve been manipulated into feeling feelings
that aren’t quite earned so that the emotional stakes can be upped again
artificiallyIn the end all the goodwill evaporates after this story has
finished, like snow turning to water, so that all you’re left with is a carrot
and some buttons. Oh and the memories of course.
POSITIVES +The
Paternoster gang are a great creation, a trio who came together to help The
Doctor during the battle of demon’s run (‘A Good Man Goes To War’) and hang
around ad a support group that helps him at times of his greatest need. A
Silurian, a Sontaron and Human, they
sound like the punchline to a joke but the only bars they walk into are the
ones Strax accidentally drops. Ouch! They feel as if they’d been having
adventures long before the Doctor arrived and all have very different talents:
Vastra is the brains, Jenny the empathy and Strax the brute strength: they’re a
sort of Dr Who variant of Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson and Inspector Lestrade respectively
(he was the butt of all the jokes too). Strax wasn’t in the first draft – he was
added after an interview Dan Starkey gave in Dr
Who Magazine that asked him what he thought the character might do after
war and he mentioned he would feel in debt to Vastra in some way like ‘some
sort of grumpy butler’, an idea the writer thought was so good he nicked it! Many
fans have wondered why the Doctor only ever seems to travel with Humans – the
boring answer is that it gives the audience at home someone to identify with,
that they can relate to (though the likes of Leela, Romana and Turlough show
that they don’t have to be all Human all the time) without putting someone
through a million years in make-up every day for years. There was serious
consideration given over to a Paternoster spinoff solving crimes in Victorian
London, which got as far as a submission to the head of serials (who gave an
enthusiastic yes) and we might well have got one had Moffat not already been
overstretched with Sherlock (certainly it’s a much more intriguing spin-off
than what we got with ‘Class’ a few years later). Had it all been like this,
minus the moping Doctor, I’d have been all for it, although the inevitable Big
Finish releases aren’t amongst their best ranges so far.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The
Great Detective’ was a ‘Children In Need’ ‘minisode’ (Jenna disputes the word!)
prequel to the Christmas episode broadcast a month before the main feature, introduced
by Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman (our first proper sight of her behind the
scenes after they kept her appearance in ‘Asylum
Of The Daleks’ such a secret). The opening is a lovely
homage to the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes titles, as we see Victorians going
about their day in Baker Street, just with aliens (though ‘Commander Strax’s
countenance was too abominable to be photographed’ according to the voiceover).
The Doctor is introduced as the ‘shadowy fourth member’ of the gang, Vastra
pleased to see him out of his cloud and telling him about a suspicious meteor
shower. The contrast between The Doctor’s permanent post-Amy frown and Matt
Smith being all giggly in the intro is palpable as the timelord strugglers to
come to terms with the loss of his friends, the Paternoster trio quite nervous of
him and his sullen silence. They know things are bad when even the promise of a
tearoom near the meteor shower doesn’t lure him out. Strax, meanwhile, declares
war on the moon (and it’s ‘unfair technological advantage’). ‘Why do you keep
doing this? What is the point?’ sighs The Doctor ‘I’ve told you, I keep telling
you, I don’t do this anymore – I’ve retired’ before slinking away, Scrooge
style. Yes and a merry happy fun Children In Need day to you too – remember
send in that dosh! In keeping with the Who theme, later in the night host Terry
Wogan, greeting Fearne Cotton as a host
joining him midway through the night, referred to her as ‘Bonnie Langford to my
Colin Baker’ (!)
There was also an unprecedented third prequel, explaining how Strax survived apparently dying at Demon’s Run, that made more sense listed under ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ given that it features that very battle, so if you want yet more, go and have a look for it there.
There was also a digital e-book prequel ‘The Devil
In The Smoke’ by Justin Richards, released in the run-up to Christmas Day as
part of the Dr Who ‘advent calendar’. A novella featuring the Paternoster Gang
it details Madame Vastra’s puzzlement at all these snowmen arriving all over
London and wondering whether she should go tell a grumpy Doctor about it or
not. In the end the decision is made for
her when she befriends a local boy named Harry, who’s puzzled why his
snowman has suddenly started bleeding. It’s a very short read, barely long
enough to get going, but it has its moments – especially a scene of a grumpy
Strax left to do the washing up!
To date Big Finish haven’t done a lot with the 11th
Doctor. Understandably Matt Smith’s been both too busy and his time as the
timelord too recent for him to join them the way all his living predecessors
have, whilst all his companions have been in pretty much constant demand too.
He is still represented on occasion though, such as the short trip ‘Regeneration
Impossible’ (2020) written by Alfie Shaw and read by Jacob Dudman. The story is
set right before ‘The Snowmen’, with the 11th Doctor still sulking
in his cloud and keeping well away from everyone. At least until he gets an SOS
he can’t refuse, apparently from a fellow timelord. Given that his home planet
has been destroyed The Doctor gets excited, only to find that it’s…himself. But
how can that be? He’s the last Doctor and he doesn’t have any memories of this
so it can’t be a past regeneration (actually this story slipped out a few weeks
after ‘The Timeless Children’
was appearing on TV, but Big Finish wouldn’t have known that at the time). Instead
it’s the 12th Doctor, dying round the corner in a graveyard which
turns out to be a trap, an ‘escape room’ designed to keep him in. Cleverly the
story rather apes ‘A
Christmas Carol’ as a future Doctor tries to inspire his
old self into helping by telling him of all the great things he’s going on to
do one day, an aspect of the story which works well – alas the escape room
itself is a bit flimsy and we never do properly find out who created it, as
it’s just an excuse to get the two very different regenerations to meet. It’s a
decent adventure if a bit short (it’s one of those ‘short trips’ that badly needs
longer than a half hour) but until these two meet on TV properly it fills a nice
hole in the collection.
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