Gridlock: Ranking - 172

                                                          Gridlock

(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 14/4/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Richard Clark)

Rank: 172

'Sorry your taxi driver's a bit late, I took the intergalactic B-roads through New New York again. The traffic's murder this time year you know. I blame them giant crabs, always grabbing vehicles they are and munching them, we're a sitting buffet for them here. Still, you should see what happens to those who take public transport and the bus lane...Governments are always kinder to motorists aren't they? Not sure why. I mean, it's not like anything ever happens to good reliable busses like ending up on alien planets or anything. I think they should just open another lane myself, even if it has to detour right through Skaro. I mean, if it shaves five minutes off the destination time then its worth battling the most evil creatures the universe has ever seen during your commute I say...Anyway, strap in, we should make your destination round the corner in about...ooh...twenty years? Now what's on the radio? Oh no, not 'Abide With Me' again...' 

I was actually worried, when I first heard that Russell T Davies was taking over the show, that it might become too ‘mainstream’ and lose all its quirkiness. I mean, there he was, creator of prime-time dramas about serious sensible people doing actual serious sensible things, even if some of his characters were Dr Who fans and played by future Dr Who alumni. How could he possibly understand the joy of watching the sheer lunatic imagination of DW at its best? Did he even know the series? Was it just a good career move? I knew I was wrong to worry as early as the first episode but ‘Gridlock’ is the one story that sold me that RTD probably knew more about this show than even I did, as it’s not the sort of thing anyone but a Who fan would ever come up with, never mind put on primetime TV. For some Dr Who stories are inspired by tragedy, some by loss, some by death. Many have important things to say about war, about famine, about plague, about all the many ills that we have in our society that we should long ago have outgrown. Some look to the future in fright of what we might become. Others look at deeply brutal moments of our past and ask if we would really do things differently. Yet more look at our present and all the ways we are secretly damaging ourselves politically, socially or economically. And then there’s ‘Gridlock’, a story about being stuck in a really bad traffic jam. 

 This is as bonkers a story as any script for Dr Who ever was in any era, a future New York on a new filled with Cat people where people can live out their whole lives in their vehicles trying to reach the promised land of, ooh, a few miles away only to be attacked by giant crabs, one of the most obscure Dr Who monsters of the lot last seen in 1967 in a story that’s since been completely wiped – and not one of the really popular wiped stories either but one that’s left very few reminders amongst the general public (not least because, as all the Dr Who viewers who saw it or more likely heard it or saw the telesnap reconstruction or read the quite difficult to find novelisation know, there’s no such thing as Macra). Now this, this is what Dr Who was created for: it’s the traditional Russell T Davies shopping list of ideas gone bonkers, combining elements no other show would think to put together. While most Russell T stories follow the same basic pattern as the Tom Baker stories (run around madly, have big emotions then solve the plot in a whirlwind finale) with occasional strays into Pertwee territory (there’s an alien on the doorstep and he’s being mean!’) this one very much follows the Hartnell pattern: explore a new planet, get to know the people who eventually get round to letting on about the plot and have the danger be not that somebody might die but that they might be cut off from the Tardis and never be able to go home ever again! Yet somehow, despite the stupidity of the idea, despite the sheer inescapable weirdness of it all, despite the fact that at it’s core it’s basically a whole episode of running around from up-and-down (to make a change from an episode of running left to right) somehow it comes out the other side as a coherent story that packs a worthy punch about our modern life and what we’re doing to ourselves, vegetating in our vehicles, living lives we don’t really want and waiting for the sky to open us up one day so we can escape, a story that would be too harsh if told directly but works in metaphor. We spend so much of our lives thinking about the destination that we lose sight of the journey and we’re all just going in circles in our own way, until the crabs come and kill us and our lives are over. 

This is, at the heart of it, another Dr Who story about class – though that isn’t obvious at first, distracted as we are by giant crabs and the frantic rescue mission to find a kidnapped Martha. All these people in cars are trapped in their ‘lanes’, allotted for them based on who they are and how many people are in their family (this is the era when the British government reduced a ‘child benefit’ tax so that you only got extra funding if you had one or two children, something that happened so suddenly it left a lot of families destitute: trust Russell to do this in reverse so that the more children you had in the car, the more passengers, the better off you were. Although it’s a mystery why Brannigan and his missus don’t get preferential treatment for their litter of kittens). The motorway works much like ours, with fast lanes and priority lanes, but most people are stationary, trapped where they are, while the underbelly of society gets eaten by the monster lurking at the bottom…and nobody even notices! Everybody in this story wants to be at the top, where the air is clean and they are free to travel (i.e. they live a life with money) but very few people get there. Instead everyone acts horrified when the Doctor travels down looking for Martha: they’re all ‘social climbers’ looking to the sky and are confused why anyone would voluntarily go downwards. 

 Though class is very much a British type of plot device this is also the era when Dr Who was trying hard to break into the United States and the first of three episodes in a row set in some variant on New York past or future (it seems very odd to me how these episodes are sandwiched together when they have nothing in common except their sort-of setting: usually Russell’s a master of programming a season, but series three seemed to give him more headaches than the others). Weirdly the Dr Who team hadn’t visited the States – a bit of filming for the ‘Dr Who Confidential’ episode based around ‘Daleks In Manhattan’ (borrowed for some scenes in the actual episode) was the first time the series had ever been (a planned excursion to New Orleans for ‘The Two Doctors’ was replaced with Spain at the last minute, for budgetary reasons – much to writer Bob Holmes’ confusion given the amount of references he’d carefully worked into his original script) though the Moffat era team spent a great deal of time there at conventions and premieres. Russell seems to have looked around for something New Yorkers could identify with and come up with horrific traffic jams: as someone whose been to the Brooklyn junction sort-of references here I can agree that the traffic is horrendous and that the idea of travelling 5 miles in 12 years doesn’t seem all that far fetched (though there were no giant crabs). The constant references to air conditioning, polluting the planet as part of the desperate need to, erm, get clean air – is also a very American and particularly New York concept. While previous visits to ‘New New York’ were in many ways a love story dedicated to mankind’s resilience and staying power, notably this one is much crueller all round: the sight of pedlars offering drugs (or ‘emotions’ as they’re called, which as medical student Martha points out amounts to much the same thing) to blot out pain is very much from the old fashioned idea of what New York was like back in the 1970s and 1980s before the city was cleaned up: it’s rather sad to find the planet named after the city seems to have ended up back in much the same dark place again (and that’s unusual for Russell, who tends to be hopeful about humanity’s future in his scripts, a few individual megalomaniacs aside). It’s rather an odd thing to be doing to this new lucrative market that was just beginning to open up, reminding Americans of all their worst traits a year after making New York the centre of the universe and important enough to rebuild. A lot of American fans I know tend to skip this one while being quite fond of predecessor ‘New Earth’ (or maybe they just have an allergy to cats?) As an aside, notice that at some point in the next few million years the New Americans go back to driving on the correct (i.e. ‘left’) side of the road. A deliberate jab? Or, being British, did no one in the production office actually notice?!

 Another serious point this story makes is about the demarcation of society. Russell knew from the moment that series two was commissioned that he wanted to return to the same place as his first ‘travel’ story, returning to it every few years to see how it changed and had a heap of ideas that he ran out of time to discuss in ‘The End Of The World’ and ‘New Earth’. With Zoe Wannamaker not available to reprise her role as Cassandra Russell decided that he wanted to look elsewhere at New New York and see parts of the world we hadn’t seen before. Figuring that the inner city with the hospital was for the ruling classes he decided to go down to see what was happening in the lower classes, the ordinary people who kept the city moving. Unusually for Who, where the working classes usually know what’s really going on, nobody seems to have a clue: they’re either stuck in traffic or wiping out their memories with drugs (a perhaps literal desire to get ‘high’ and reach the upper city, which the Doctor makes null and void by lifting up the roof of the motorway so everyone can be a social climber regardless of what motorway lane they were born into). Things aren’t the way we left them in the city last time: an outbreak of the drug ‘Bliss’ (first introduced by Gareth Roberts the year before in his Who novel ‘Only Human’, a sort of cross between ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ and ‘Ghost Light’) means that most of the city is dead and everyone else is in denial or had their memory wiped by the drugs, so that they’ve forgotten the horror they lived through. Seriously if they’d released this story 15 or so years later it would be an obvious covid parallel especially now that everyone is acting as if the biggest medical issue of the past hundred years hadn’t happened and had gone away (when it hasn’t: it’s somehow very New New York that our politicians decided one day it was costing us too much money to keep people off work so they just pretended it had gone away when it was killing and disabling people in the hundreds of thousands). Only in 2007 Russell’s more interested in what would happen if we woke up one day to find the people that were meant to be running the world had all died and abandoned us and how, without anyone in charge, we ended up stuck. It all comes down to a returning theme of his era of Dr Who: how do we learn to live in our real world without the Doctor there to save us? Can we really help ourselves? Even though the idea of people who live their whole lives in their cars not going anywhere seems far-fetched this is, like many a Davies story, about how quickly things become ‘normal’ so that people no longer think to question anything. Really, though, everyone is in denial, or ignorance, unable to do anything except wait and hope for deliverance. 

 Which leads to another theme, of religion and it’s another unusual thing for this story to do. Ironically enough, while censorship other blood and gore and sex and especially swearing have all lightened up since Who’s original 20th century run other things have got tighter, especially religion. Whereas stories in the 1960s could debate openly whether the knights in ‘The Crusade’ were being proper Christians in invading Muslim countries, the 1970s could laugh at the Renaissance Christians for getting so much wrong (‘Masque Of Mandragora’) and the 1980s saw a vicar questioning their own faith and being eaten by Haemavores for being an ‘unbeliever’ (‘The Curse Of Fenric’) modern-day depictions of religion on TV have to be passed by the BBC censor to make sure they don’t upset any demographics. ‘Gridlock’ is, to date, the kindest depiction of religion in the series (any religion, though at times ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ does look like a promo video for The Sisterhood Of Karn). So many of the people we meet in this story have blind faith that something will come along to save them and they even have their own communal singalong hour (again, very like the Dr Who tweetathons during the covid pandemic). ‘The Rugged Cross’ and ‘Abide With Me’ are used without question: the first because of its significance during World War One when it brought soldiers far from home comfort (as a 1912 hymn it was brand new in the early stages of the war) and the latter because it’s one of Russell’s favourite pieces of music (it’s a late replacement for a Murray Gold instrumental that just wasn’t working in the edit), heard when New New York comes back slowly to life at the end of the story. In the olden days such un-questioned belief from a people who could just park up their cars and walk out of their difficulties would have been a prime candidate for biting Whovian satire, but instead it’s all played out as a perfectly natural thing to do and even the Doctor and Martha look moved by it. The believers aren’t wrong either, even though their divine deliverance from up high really comes from the combined efforts of a timelord, a cat and a big old face in a jar. 

 Ah yes, The Face Of Bo, comeback Who’s earliest success story and a fan favourite who became the standout star of the second episode despite barely saying a word and sharing screen time with more obvious stars like talking trees, a piece of stretched skin and Jimmy Vee painted bright blue. This is his last of three appearances and you can’t go wrong when his big ol’ face is on the screen, even if his death is an easy way out of solving the rest of the plot (I mean, why can his ‘energy’ put everything right? My only guess, though they don’t spell this out on screen, is that being kept ‘pure’ in his tank he hasn’t breathed in the fumes of the rest of the planet stuck in traffic and can thus restore the world to its old ways, but surely the city itself is free from the fumes).I mean, opening a lever isn’t a very dramatic plot device is it? By coincidence Russell wrote the Face of Bo’s death around the Doctor opening up the top of the motorway and letting everyone travel ‘up’ to freedom, two years after writing the Face of Boe’s biography for the earliest comeback cash-in Dr Who guidebook ‘Monsters and Villains’ that had a line about how when he died ‘the sky cracked asunder’; the books’ editor Justin Richards saw the episode and congratulated Russell on how cleverly he’d interwoven this piece into his script and how clever a writer he was, to which Russell admitted he’d forgotten all about it and it was a complete coincidence! It’s an odd ending all round though: we talk a few times in this book about the fan phrase ‘Davies Et Machina’ for how the writer will suddenly come up with a solution out of nowhere but this is one of his worst: it isn’t sign-posted in advance for clever fans to work out ahead of the Doctor at home and there’s no reason why BoFace couldn’t have done this on his own decades before The Doctor came along. We don’t yet know that he’s the future incarnation of he-who-cannot-be-killed Captain Jack, as the thought only occurred to Russell when he was scribbling the first draft of ‘Utopia’ a few months later and saw a link, as a reason why Boe would have a heads-up that the Doctor is ‘not alone’, the message he gives with his dying breath. It would have helped the series arc a lot more if this element had been inserted a bit more carefully though: what strikes you most in retrospect is that the Face of Boe doesn’t come right out and tell the Doctor who he is or warn Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor about ‘Bad Wolf’. 

 And no sooner does Captain Jack turn up than does the matter of crabs (!) One of the other things Russell seems to associate with New York is the old myth that there are alligators down the sewers, giant mutated ones that once lived in a zoo. Though it’s not mentioned on screen his idea for this story is that, at some time after ‘The Macra Terror’ the ginormous crabs devolved to become ordinary (if large) animals and were put in the zoo for everyone to gawp at. The collapse of society thanks to the virus caused by ‘Bliss’ saw them escape and tunnel down to the city’s depths where they fed on passing motorists unlucky enough to speed into the wrong lane. That seems an odd thing to do to a race who, by Dr Who monster standards, were rather clever last time out: originally Russell was trying to invent a different kind of animal before figuring that if he was going to invent something ‘like a crab’ he might as well name-check some old friends. It may well be that writing a story about the locals being in denial that things had gone wrong reminded him of the Macra mass hypnotism that ‘there’s no such thing as Macra’ even though there blatantly is (it’s hard to hide whern you’re a six foot crab), though if so it’s odd that element didn’t make its way into the script: the Macra aren’t responsible for the memory loss, the drugs are and the Macra are innocent (if hungry) victims of everything that goes on in this story every bit as much as the Humans. I rather like how they turned out on screen though: from what we can tell from the scant surviving photographs and moving footage The Macra were scarier on audio than in person, giant fibreglass unmoving monsters the size of a mini that didn’t do much physically except snap their claws – the CGI version looks just enough like the original to be recognisable but at the same time feels much more lifelike, darting across the screen like a real predator would. It’s one of new Who’s better goes at a returning monster, certainly far more in keeping with the spirit of the original than what they did to the Cybermen. Best of all, though, is the element of surprise this story gave us moving forward. I mean, if even the Macra could return then what next? Milo Clancey from ‘The Space Pirates’ selling sentient fangled rubbishy solar toasters? A Voord disguised in the Royal family? The Elbows Of Axos? The Vardans covering the Earth with tinfoil? A tipsy Terrileptil? Suddenly all bets were off. 

Where ‘Gridlock’ really impresses, though, is the way in which ‘New New York’ feels like a real world. Every single family in every ‘car’ we pass seems real rather than just people there to move the plot along, from the ones singing their own hymns, praying that they might enter the fast lane someday, to the couple so desperate to leave the motorway queue they kidnap Martha to make their car a priority of three (who can use the ‘fast lane’ – a relative measure) to the couple who seem to be using their car as a love den (and the first naked people seen on screen since a tattooed Doctor took a shower in ‘Spearhead From Space’!), they’re all very believable world-building details that help sell us on the concept. It really does feel as if each of them have grown up in these cars, resigned to the idea of only getting out years in advance and maybe not ever, and Russell has spent a lot of time thinking about his world building: there are ‘car spotters’ who take up the hobby of logging all traffic (something that’s useful for the plot), they have their own equipment for exercise while sat in their cars, they can recycle their waste into food (much to Martha’s horror) and they have a communication system that allows them to feel attached to a world they can no longer inhabit. Milo and Cheen (an excellent early appearance by Leonora Critchlow, the ghost in ‘Being Human’) Martha’s kidnappers (and kidnapping is another thing Russell seems to associate with New York, which seems an odd thing to remind your new potential market about) are particularly true to life: ordinary people pushed to extraordinary measures who are apologetic about being desperate enough to kidnap Martha, who just happens to be in the wrong place when their car is travelling past (very very slowly – slowly enough for them to hop out). They’re having a cross between a fun road trip filed with the anticipation of the destination and the existential dread that they might never get there. I’m less sure about Brannigan, Who fan Ardal O’Hnalon somehow convinced to dress up in layers of prosthetics to look like a giant cat: the idea of a human and cat having (literal) kittens seems more than a bit unlikely genetically speaking and the scene where one says ‘mommy’ with the help of CGI might just be the daftest thing in a story that’s often unbelievably silly. His lines are all clichéd Irish patter, Russell’s usually genuine sounding words sounding odd and overly dramatic delivered in Ardal’s distinctive style (a lot of New Yorkers do have Irish ancestors so maybe this part’s more accurate than the rest and a comment on refugees coming in all shapes and sizes and species, but if so it’s a bit clumsily handled). He looks good though: Russell based him on the very 1990s CGI creation ‘Ratz’ which haunted me through my childhood, the ‘pet’ of Saturday morning kids show ‘Live and Kicking’ with a ginger face, hat and goggles; John Barrowman was, for a while, a co-presenter and seemed almost muted by comparison. For all those who love pointing out Russell’s gay agenda’ take note of the car with the married women Alice and May, the first (knowingly) homosexual couple seen in the series…as late as episode thirty-one of the comeback. Alice is played by Bridget Turner who in real life is married to director Frank Cox, responsible for two Dr Who stories that were on the air even longer ago than ‘The Macra Terror’ - 1964’s ‘Edge Of Destruction’ and ‘The Sensorites’. 

That story has a speech by Susan that’s taken almost verbatim for the Doctor’s description of his homeworld Gallifrey (the ‘burnt orange skies’) and is the longest speech we’ve had in a couple of years about the time war, along with references to other parts of Who folklore: the glass dome around the main city (never mentioned in a story but a part of the masthead for the letters page in Dr Who magazine for so many years that’s how many fans came to think of it), the distinctive smell of the grass (a detail added in the Paul McGann TV movie), the mountains capped with snow (where the hermit lived in ‘The Time Monster’) and a new detail added by Russell that the planet has two suns (it’s a wonder he isn’t shivering every time he comes to rainy England). In a story about how a whole planet of people can avoid the truth of what’s really happening it’s a clever idea to have the Doctor freeze up when talking about his home planet when Martha sticks her foot in it by, quite reasonably, asking if she can go to the Doctor’s home world and a neat mirror, when the main plot has been solved, to have him finally open up and admit that it burnt down to the ground in a time war (though he neglects to mention, mostly because Steven Moffat hasn’t written ‘Day Of the Doctor’ yet, how he was partly responsible for it). The way the rest of the story handles the Doctor-Martha dynamic is rather clumsy though: she already trust him implicit based on their first two stories, until she doesn’t, then she does again (admitting to the humans she’s just asked to put their faith in the Doctor that she doesn’t know him very well). At least she manages to keep her character trait of keeping a calm cool head in the most impossible of situations (can you imagine the road rage that would have ensued if it had been Tegan or Donna that had been kidnapped?!) He’s a moody sod, seemingly going backwards from how he acted towards her in ‘The Shakespeare Code’ and won’t give her true companion status yet. Sure he’s pining for Rose and isn’t after a girlfriend yet, but surely as a companion she’s worthy? I mean, Martha’s kept a coo head and played a big role in saving the world twice already. What more can he ask her to do? And if he really wanted to be alone so badly why did he invite her along in the first place? Given that this is only their third story we badly need to see them together, to understand this relationship (or lack of it) and how it differs from Rose but Russell splits them up early, having Martha kidnapped and the Doctor seemingly resulting her more out of guilt than because it’s the ‘right’ thing to do. Honestly it’s not that great a story for either: Martha’s too whiny, the Doctor’s too grumpy and though David Tennant and Freema Agyeman are such a great paring (probably my favourite of the modern series) they make any script sparkle this one doesn’t so either of them any favours. Russell, by now in the thick of writing scripts on a production line, is far more interested in writing for his incidental characters and it shows, bar some nice action scenes that have the Doctor dangling from car to car (a real shame this isn’t a two-parter purely so we can get a literal ‘cliff-hanger’). 

 Alas, too, the bits away from the motorway are the bits that don’t quite work and drag this story down from great to merely very good: it’s a shame in a way that this story has to keep linking itself back to the New New York of other episodes as it would have been better as a standalone stuck in a queue. The cat nurse Novice Hame, now sentenced to look after the Face of Boe for all eternity (though how much looking after a face in a jar takes is a mystery: does she change his tank like a goldfish? Windscreen wipe his tank?) feels as if she’s had her claws clipped in more ways than one, losing the edge that made her so memorable the last time out. She was Russell’s starting point for the story, as he wanted to see how she turned out but the answer seems to be: dead boring; there isn’t a scene, for instance, where she tries to claw the Doctor for causing her so much trouble all that time ago. Other than Bo Selecta setting up the big finale there’s no reason to set this story on New Earth at all and it’s a bit weird the Doctor should choose to come back here so soon after losing Rose (sure he wants to remember happier times, but there are far more suitable places like Victorian London or World War Two, where the two actually had fun, as opposed to the place she got taken over by a bitchy trampoline and nearly died). As well as being unspeakably rude towards Martha (a real blindspot for this regeneration, who otherwise is usually one of the friendlier and more amenable ones) it just doesn’t fit how this Doctor works: he mopes, then moves on; he doesn’t look back unless forced to. The Macra reveal also comes frustratingly late in the day and they don’t really do much at all – poor Macra, there you are waiting forty years for a second shot at world domination and it’s all over inside a few minutes - although I guess there’s only so much you can do with a mute crab it would have helped the story a lot if there had been a sense of danger early on, as opposed to the more existential dread that runs through the story’s first half. Honestly, I could have done without the schmaltzy ‘Abide With Me’ singalong too; ‘The Rugged Cross’ is a much better and more suitable song (Murray Gold’s finest hour?) and I don’t care if ‘Abide With Me’ has been around centuries – that’s the one that will last long into the Earth’s future, not that Anglican dirge! Especially as the Doctor mentions getting his coat from Janis Joplin, we could have had her brilliant music on the soundtrack, showing the folks at home who don’t know what the ‘original’ practitioner of girl power sounded like thirty years before The Spice Girls walked around thinking they’d invented it. Although that in itself raises so many questions (Janis wasn’t big but she wasn’t as skinny as David Tennant!) Plus wouldn’t it have been great if we had a space-age motorway services going to pot, with food served by Androgums and giant Racnoss spiders down the broken-down loos?! 

The big problem though is how simple it is. I mean absolutely this is a story that, like the motorway, works on different levels depending how deep you want to go, but as shown on screen without your thinking cap on this as bland a capture-and-rescue story as Dr Who ever had. The Doctor gets involved in this world so he can rescue Martha and that’s it. While Martha talks a good talk, with some biting acerbic comments, ultimately she’s a peril monkey who doesn’t do anything except be captured and refuse to like it. Even the scene where she gets everyone to have faith in the Doctor (foreshadowing her role in the big finale ‘The Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Timelords’) is more out of desperation than firm belief. Had this story taken place on land instead of in space-cars and had it featured Martha trapped in a prison cell rather than a cubicle on wheels we would find it all terribly boring. The ending especially is a sci-fi cliché where everyone holds hands and thinks happy thoughts and everything turns out OK, not worthy of Russell’s usual high standards and dangerously close to being twee. Even so there’s something about the decoration of this story that makes it work despite its many faults: Russell’s ability to create a believable character with a full life lived off-camera is never better than in this story where he creates a dozen of them, the fact that we’re not running up and down corridors but jumping from car to car is genuinely something Dr Who has never done before and it all looks terrific, from the cars themselves, lost in a CGI maze that’s more convincing than normal, to the Cat makeup to the Macra. This is a world that you can easily get lost in quite happily and the background is fascinating, whatever’s going on in the foreground. It’s not the plot that matters anyway in this story, it’s the nuances, the hymns and new types of drug and the general sense of despair mixed with hope that make this story ‘work’ and want to spend time in it, even if the story isn’t quite up to Russell’s best. Would that other traffic jams were so rewarding! The result is a nice quirky little story, one quite unlike anything else ever seen in Dr Who that pushes the show’s boundaries to its limits. Not one of the deepest or one of the overall best most plotted stories, necessarily, and the sort of story we fans keep to ourselves to go ‘awww’ at then hide from a general public who most likely wouldn’t get why we’re so fond of a story about alien cats trapped in a car by a giant alien crab, but a good story all the same. It certainly passes the time: this is a good one to save for long road trips, to laugh at during traffic jams and to bond over choruses of ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ with, while suffering from the same existential dread that the traffic has stopped and everyone in charge must, surely, have died to form such massive queues. 

POSITIVES + The hover-cars are such a great idea! By series three the budget was tight so what Russell really needed was a story with only one main set (the Face of Boe’s pad, which yet again is Wales’ ‘Temple of Secrets’ hall) and not much more. Creating hover-cars, each one six feet by six feet, and then having the computer special effects team The Mill depict them floating in space is such a clever move. I still can’t get past how believable the hover-cars look, each of them separate sets joined in the editing by CGI. Each one was shot using the same car, but re-decorated each time to look like another vehicle: it’s perfectly in keeping with the nature of this story that ever hover-car is identical on the outside, while inside the people are very different but forced to be the ‘same’. There was only room for one crewman to shoot at the time and camera angles were difficult to get, but all that hard work was worth it (the actors stuck inside for hours on end seemed to bond for life as a side effect!) Some of Dr Who’s early comeback years are beginning to show their age just a little (it was 18 years ago after all in some cases and nothing dates faster than special effects). However this sequence looked like magic then, looks like magic now and I’m willing to bet still looks like magic in another 50, 100,1000 years – the way the first walk into the Tardis from 1963 still does or the Edwardian fleet of space-ships in ‘Enlightenment’ from 1983 still do. 

NEGATIVES - All the ‘but I’m the last of the timelords and they all died out and did I ever tell you about my best friend Rose?’ malarkey seems very out of keeping with the rest of the episode, almost as if RTD had only just worked out what his finale with the Master was going to be and wanted to pepper his other scripts with ‘clues’. I mean, there’s a time and a place to talk about your home planet and this really isn’t it. Poor Martha has to suddenly put up with the Doctor’s moodiness out of nowhere when she was promised a few quick happy jaunts in space and time and I’d rather spend time living with Macra than this regeneration of the Doctor in one of his darker moods. He really is very cruel to her: when the face of Boe says ‘you are not alone’ she suggests that’s because she’s with the Doctor now and he shouts ‘no’ and looks cross – besides, for all he knows she’s right. 

 BEST QUOTE: Valerie on the Doctor: ‘He’s completely insane!’ Brannigan: ‘Yes. That and a bit magnificent’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The last part of a loose ‘Face Of Boe’ trilogy along with ‘The End Of The World’ and ‘New Earth’ 

 Previous ‘The Shakespeare Code’ next ‘Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks’

The Highlanders: Ranking - 173

  The Highlanders

(Season 4, Dr 2 with Ben, Polly and Jamie, 17/12/1966-7/1/1967, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writers: Gerry Davis and Elwyn Jones, director: Hugh David)

Rank: 173

'Oh the Doctor's love is for a red red Rose

Pursued by the Judoon

She was stung by the Crimson Horror

While in the Highlands in June

The Doctor's first visit with a bonnie lass

was in 1746

When he just missed the battle of Culloden

But still got himself in a fix

They were very nearly trapped

Till all the Sea Devils gang dry

But lived to fight another day

Thou extermination seemed nigh

He gained a Highland Piper

a bonny highlander

His kilt will confuse many on his future travels

And cause quite a stir

But that's all in the future

When things turn out fine

For a moment in this adventure

It seemed like auld lang syne'

Robert 'Pyrovile' Burns

Och aye the noo! The last Dr Who story set in Scotland for a decade ‘The Highlanders’ makes the most of every cliché about life North of the border it can including kilts, dirks, thistles, young men shouting ‘Craeg An Tuire’ (‘The Boar’s Rock’, actually the rallying call of the clan McLaren rather than McCrimmon in real life, where the soldiers used to rally and hold speeches) and Hannah Gordon, TV’s go-to Scottish actress for the next fifty years (unlike ‘Terror Of The Zygons, however, there is no haggis and no loch ness monsters). ‘The Highlanders’ is the last of the 1960s historical stories too, with a gap of eight years till they try something like it again with ‘The Time Warrior’ (though that starts a run of very different scifi-based stories that just happen to be taking place in the past), ending an unbroken run of alternating-past-and-present-bar-sideways-oddball stories that stretches right back to the show’s caveman days (in a manner of speaking). Made by a production team under duress who wanted to make science-fiction and a lead actor who was already sick of appearing in bit parts in history dramas it’s something of an anomaly, an outlier in the way the viewing public thought Dr Who was for in 1966. That, coupled with the fact that all four episodes were wiped from the BBC archives (depressingly early, in 1967, as so few TV stations round the world were interested in taking Dr Who on in this era) and only snippets, the soundtrack and a few photographs exist, means that ‘The Highlanders’ often gets overlooked, the second ever Troughton tale not quite like the Hartnells before it but not really like the ‘base under siege’ era to come either. It is, if you will, a highland fling during a time when the series was at its most ‘English’, a short affair that gets overshadowed by the great romance with hairy beasties to come.  

The story goes that the production team of producer Innes Lloyd and script editor Gerry Davis happily axed the historicals as soon as they could, which - after a bit of admin, ‘The Smugglers’ held over from the previous year and one last finale for Hartnell  with ‘The Tenth Planet’- started when Patrick Troughton did. Only head of BBC serials Shaun Sutton, who took an interest in Dr Who, wangled his way to getting Elwyn Jones to agree to write a story for them: at the time police drama ‘Z Cars’  had made him something of a star in the world of television and getting him was a real coup, by far the highest profile writer Dr Who had working for it back then who hadn’t been made a star through working on the programme. Only Jones had no interest in scifi and said he wouldn’t have a clue how to write it: he asked if instead he could have the Tardis go back in time and write something historical; after a lot of gnashing of teeth Gerry Davis suggested a programme based on the battle of Culloden (because he liked Robert Louis Stevenson and thought a Dr Who variation on ‘Kidnapped’ would be fun, rather than any boring historical knowhow). The only issue now was how to go about it: though Davis had worked on a handful of historicals inherited from his predecessor Donald Tosh he’s mostly let the writers get on with it and only helped with the dialogue. He didn’t have Tosh’s sense of fun that was determined to make history more visual and less boring than school and he didn’t have original script editor David Whittaker’s drive to make the past come alive and seem as real as the present. Instead ‘The Highlanders’ came out a bit of a hybrid. 

On the one hand it is as true to life a reconstruction of a real event as a TV drama made 300 years after the fact possibly can be and is as brutal, in terms or character and motivation, as Dr Whos ever come, with no attempts to dress up what really happened or make things cosier for children. There are some powerful discussions of the rather grim way the English put down Scottish rebellions in 1746 (just after the battle of Culloden, which has ended right before the Tardis arrives) that’s as dark and sombre as any in Dr Who’s catalogue, past or present, as out of place at times as if someone’s drizzled blood on a tin of Scottish shortbread. The English and Scottish here truly despise each other after all and for good reason: this was the last gasp (and the fifth major battle in forty years) of the Jacobite rebellion,  a fight to the death between two different Royal lineages but more than that it was a fight to the death over religion, the death of the heirless William and Anne leading to the German family of Hannover competing with the descendents of the Scottish King James II (or VII of Scotland). The Scottish lot had history on their side, having actually been on the throne before and were much closer relatives so it seemed as if they were a shoo-in for the throne; however the English were even more adamant they wouldn’t have a Scottish King than they were a German one and there was great fear about what a Catholic succession to the throne might mean (this was, after all, not that long after the Gunpowder plot – Catholics weren’t to be trusted in a mostly Protestant land, or at any rate not as much as they were before Henry VIII got in a tizzy and uprooted English religious traditions because he wanted a quickie divorce). ‘The Highlanders’ doesn’t shy away from any of the bad feeling between the two sides: prisoners are hanged, others are shot, poor Ben ends up in the middle of a mass deportation to the colonies (which back then basically meant an extended death through starvation) and everyone hates each other’s guts. Soldiers are threatened with the lash, others are knived and there’s a scene of multiple men being hanged that might be one of the most shocking moments of 1960s series. So much for the jolly romps of ‘The Romans’ or ‘The Gunfighters’ – this is a world that would have any right-minded time traveller running back to the Tardis sobbing.  

But then the story goes all wonky, throwing a recently regenerated and still quite manic 2nd Doctor into the mix and most of the humour comes from him. The Doctor isn’t scared, not for himself or his friends: he’s quite lackadaisical about health and safety (certainly compared to Hartnell) and thinks this big fight to the death is ridiculous: just another phase in human civilisation that the descendents of the people fighting will have forgotten all about in, ooh, 300 years or so? Throughout this story the Doctor doesn’t drive the story by trying to keep out and let history happen the way it should, as the 1st regeneration did – instead he’s right in the mix getting in the way, making fun of authority, dressing up in multiple disguises, at one pretending to be German for no apparent reason while with the Scots and Scottish (fior slightly moe reason) when with the English: absolutely the last person anyone should be trying to be in a world where the stakes are so high on getting caught out. This Doctor isn’t afraid  and he doesn’t react as if this is a cut-throat world of life and death – he’s having fun, treating history as a theme-park the way Tosh sometimes did, and trying out an increasingly daft array of hats. Some of the people we meet, meanwhile, are pure caricatures: the brutish Englishman, the English gent whose meant to be in charge of battle but has no stomach for fighting, the pretty and pretty innocent Scottish lass and the clan of Scots who are every cliché going: brave but a little dense and careful with their money, their resources and their lives (even Jamie – perhaps, in this story at least, especially Jamie). History was never like this, even in Dr Who before now: is this real, the viewer ends up asking themselves, or is it pure fantasy? But if this was all make believe like in the stories, then why do so many people spend this story in so much pain? And if it’s real then why is the Doctor making so many quips and treating it like a fun day out?  

‘The Highlanders’ feel in some ways like a Donald Cotton story, lurching from pure drama to pure farce, but the difference is that instead of a fun three episodes leading to a blood-soaked finale the two strands are going on at once. Gerry might have been working from Cotton’s template (the historicals he’d worked on most closely) but he does it his own way. This ended up being 90% his work, written at high speed when one by William Emms (who wrote ‘Galaxy 4’) fell through at the last moment and Elwyn Jones, who’d written the outline and a bit of the first draft, had to drop out for his own script editing duties on ‘Z Cars’ (Jones and Davis will work together again on ‘Doomwatch’ though, a series of contemporary concerns which is so different to this story in every single way it shows what an oddball ‘The Highlanders’ is and how far out these two men’s comfort zones it was). Legend has it that Davis, who used to hang around on set in case any re-writes were needed at the last minute, was so behind he took his typewriter with him to filming, pausing his clackety-clacking only when a take was actually being made and that time was so tight he was still working on this story’s later parts when the earlier ones were being filmed.  As a result there isn’t much thinking going on: ‘The Highlanders’ feels like a guttural script, written from the heart and memory, without any need for any greater plot than survival. 

As with ‘The Gunfighters’ this story makes more sense to viewers of the 1960s than it does now, as the BBC had only just finished airing a big historical drama about Culloden three years earlier, one delivered by RADA trained actors in an approximation of Scottish accents in what was, given the reviews, a very English-orientated view of the battle. Basically the English were pre-destined to win because the future had to turn out like this. Without their victory we might not, sob, have had a British empire! Because it’s also a family show shown at teatime there’s not a lot of bloodshed and the English are all heroic and dashing and nice, while the Scots are brutes. Now Davis was himself an English lad (born In Sussex) but he’s hung around other cultures and done enough reading round the subject to know this wasn’t true; Jones, meanwhile, wasn’t Scottish but was born in Wales – another country increasingly marginalised by English influence that secretly wants to bring down their posh cousins a peg or two. Notably ‘The Highlanders’ is very different to ‘Culloden’ in two ways: one is that it takes place right after the final battle, where that series ended and asks increasingly awkward questions about what happened next, when valiant soldiers who’d put up a fair fight and been the English army’s equal in so many ways were massacred by ‘Butcher’, ‘The Duke Of Cumberland’ (and himself a relative of the King he wanted to put on the throne). There was no Geneva Convention in those days, the treaty signed in 1949 and still a talking point when ‘The Highlanders’ was on seventeen years later (should we be merciful or seek revenge on people who fought us?), especially between the parents who’d fought in WW2 and their children who were adamant about never ever fighting again. The other is that, far from being noble fighters, the English are manipulators and schemers, as cruel as any Dalek and as prepared as any Cybermen. To The RedCoats the Scots are sub-human, irritating rodents who got what was coming to them; to the Scots the English are absurd in their red coats that made them stand out so much in the battlefield (red because it covered up the bloodstains and so was better for morale), poor victors who won because of their greater numbers and weapons rather than because they had any right to. Even though the battle is over with a clear victor when the Tardis lands Davis and Jones make it a much tighter battle, with the sense that it could easily have gone the other way. As even as it sort of is, though, ‘The Highlanders’ is firmly on the side of the Scottish even though practically everyone working on the story was English (even Frazer Hines playing the new Scottish companion); indeed, aside from Ben and Polly, who are the very definition of English pluck, most of the English in this story are either cruel or cowardly or both, rich wimps who can’t stand the sight of battle.

In fact class and money is the sort-of second theme of this story. Gray, the closest to a villain in the story (and the only figure in the story who actually existed, bar the off-screen Kings) is, ironically, enough, a black-and-white thinker who cares nothing for people’s lives or wellbeing if he can grab hold of more money. He’s an 18th century Davros, happy to sign over the lives of the people under him if it means his own survival. Slave trader Trask, too, doesn’t have the decency to be appalled by his trade (the way Romans sort-of were in, umm, ‘The Romans’) as long as he gets the moolah. Even lower down the tree the Doctor comments of one guard that he would ‘sell his own Granny if the price was right’ – this is an era when living was tough and the only chance for the working classes to earn a decent wage was to become a soldier – any soldier, on any side. They can’t afford to have morals: if they don’t carry out orders they lose their job and their family starves, while equally if they let the enemy kill them first they’re no good to their family dead either. The ‘real’ enemy here are the rich who keep both sides fighting, at least to 20th century eyes. We all knew such men existed for the world to be the way it was back then but it’s another to see it on screen – and you can bet neither of these men or people like them were in the sanitised ‘Culloden’ TV version . So far until smugglers and this historicals have been about discovering our heroes were flawed and their enemies weren’t the villains they were portrayed to be, that life was more nuanced. Here everyone seems evil and driven by money and the few not touched by its evil hand are fools easily outwitted. That’s all very un-1960s, an era when money was as low down in people’s core life values as it has ever been in living memory (when money can’t buy you love). Bear in mind that this was broadcasting the suddenly more class-conscious 1960s, a collection of teenagers who finally have money for the first time ever and a sense that Britain is back on the right economic path after a difficult twenty-odd years post-WW2. All the war leaders in this story are in charge because they’re the ones with all the money, who don’t need to get their hands dirty – not because they’re the best at strategy or fighting and certainly not because they care for the men under them. We’re a year away from the ‘One World’ satellite broadcast of ‘All You need Is Love’, when loving your neighbours is ‘in’ – the enemy are the elders, of all countries, who have more money than sense and are busy making penniless youngsters sign up to the armed forced to survive and conscripting others to fight in Vietnam and Korea. To the children of 1966 fighting because your King asked you to fight another King, both of whom thought they had divine right to rule direct from God, was ridiculous – almost as ridiculous as being asked to fight communists on behalf of capitalists (because most of the kids being conscripted were very much on the wrong side of capitalism): both sides were stupid and fighting for no reason. To the viewer of course its all for nothing: nobody really remembers this battle or who won or what it was for – and so, by association without actually saying this out loud,it is for conflicts around in 1966: the Vietnams, the Koreas, all will end up in a history book and a documentary-drama on TV one day and that’s that, with gaining land not really gaining anything at all and losing so much. 

 Of course it didn’t seem that way to the people of the time, when this battle was a literal matter of life and death for which you gladly risked your lives, which is where Dr Who historicals bringing the past to life come in, yet Davis for one seems to agree with the people watching in a way David Whittaker for one would never have done: this war was indeed all for nothing and barely remembered two hundred years later. This is all at one with how Dr Who had been progressing across the later Hartnell years, as a discussion between parents and children about what the future might look like when the war generation head for retirement and the baby boomers take over: despite being a 1740s story rather than a 1960s one this very much feels like a story saying ‘you know what? You adults have been doing it your way, with wars and skirmishes, for far too long – it’s time we had some peace and healed the conflicts with or neighbours’. It seems odd to call ‘The Highlanders’ a ‘generation gap’ story, given that the people here are the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the people at home watching on first transmission but just look at how the people in charge of these battles on both sides are all ill-suited, afraid to do themselves what they expect the youngsters under them to carry out. The youngsters, Ben and Polly included, are all far braver and tougher than their elders give them credit for, but the adults in this story are all wimps. Even Ffinch, the one adult here whose close in age to the others but whose a figure of ffun and a young adult clearly better suited to more creative pursuits than life in the army. The Doctor, meanwhile, is treating this like a colourful romp straight of a Monkees episode, where outrageous things happen and the adults are the butt of all the jokes (a series that was just about to start in America but wouldn’t make it to Britain for another year, when it was usually shown just before Dr Who) – the only difference is that, in Dr Who, people do get hurt and it isn’t always a joke. Then again, Polly is kind of posh herself (the most upper-class of all Who companions, bar Victorian lady Victoria, Traken noble Nyssa and, possibly, time lady Romana, who ight not be all that posh by timelord standards, we don’t really know) and calls Kirsty a ‘stupid peasant’ in her frustration at one point, so perhaps not. 

There’s another interesting quirk of the characters in this story too, Jamie and Hannah Gordon’s Kirsty aside: no one seems to have any feelings for anyone or think about how their actions affect anyone else. War, it appears, breeds contempt for those not like you and pushes you into thinking of yourself as the only way to survive. The irony is that they call the Scots King ‘The Young Pretender’ but he isn’t pretending – nor is anyone else in this story to whom everything is very real and desperate; the only person pretending is the Doctor; honestly everyone’s lives would be easier if they weren’t fighting and putting each other to the sword but simply gave in and were good prisoners for a scene or two. Even Jamie is almost unrecognisably like his future self: brave, sure, but hot-headed and angry, a warrior uncomfortable in defeat and at peace. It takes the warmth of the Tardis trio (especially Polly) to start making these people think about things from a bigger perspective (and even Polly is far more callous and cruel than we ever see her again, mostly to Kirsty for sobbing her way through the story – to be fair her tears do get quite irritating).It’s as if Davis, two stories on from co-creating The Cybermen, is writing a sort of back story, working out how we could ever reach the point where we (or the Humans from our twin planet Mondas) could possibly become unfeeling cyborgs: the answer is you just can’t afford the luxury of feelings at times like these, when you’re pushed past your extremes and will do anything to survive. Not for the first or last time a Dr Who historical digs beneath the bones to what life would have really been like rather than the mythical heroic past of the documentary, full of cowards, thugs and chancers – much like every other time period in fact (the costumes change in Dr Who but people rarely do, in past present or future – particularly 1960s Dr Who). Forget the cosy drama: this is what the real battle of ‘Culloden’ was probably like, a world of people who’ve learned not to trust fighting another bunch of people who’ve learned not to trust, both sides refusing to bend and meet in the middle somewhere (there are many later Dr Who stories that have the timelord step in and negotiate, ‘The Zygon Invasion/Inversion’ being a good example: notably the Doctor doesn’t do that here, almost as if he knows without trying that it won’t work).  

What it does mean is that Troughton’s more mercurial, less straightforward Doctor compared to the Hartnell incarnation can do things in this world that no one else can. He’s the only one smart enough to consider disguise, saving the lives of the Scottish clan by having Jamie play the bonnie prince who needs to be captured alive (taking advantage of the fact that in the days before photographs, when paintings were more flattering than accurate, nobody knew what anybody else looked like bar a vague description; Jamie being a piper unused to direct fighting also means he has ‘soft hands’ like a King’s), dressing up as German Doctor ‘Von Wer’ (German for ‘Who’ – the second and last reference to the fact that ‘Who’ might be his real name, just as in ‘The War Machines’ and the comic strips), a Jacobite and, most infamously, a washer woman. By becoming someone else, by dressing up and putting on a different character, the Doctor can run rings around all these rigid people who don’t expect him to do half the things he does in this story (such as locking tyrant Gray up in a cupboard and whacking dutiful Perkins’ head repeatedly on a table); everyone is expecting a straight fight, not someone cunning and playing with the truth. This is a Doctor who thinks the battle is a bit daft so can take the mickey out of it, crying ‘long live King George’ in a moment his new friends think means he’s betrayed them – when all he’s really doing is testing an echo (and doing a bit of inappropriate teasing).  It’s hard to imagine Hartnell doing any of this: he was always immovably himself, even in situations when it might have been better to disguise himself, but this new kid is happy to be the clown, to dress up in drag, to be anyone the situation needs him to be (and it’s a sign, too, of just how different Troughton’s background as a ‘character actor’ had been compared to Hartnells, who more or less played the same authoritarian parts his whole life, with varying degrees of absurd twinkle in his eyes). This early on even his chief creator Davis doesn’t know who the 2nd Doctor is yet so he gets round that problem by allowing him to be a bit of everyone in turn: different accents, different personalities, even different genders.  

The story is certainly ambitious but doesn’t quite carry it off. Because the Doctor’s basically acting weird, to the point where we at home don’t know if we can trust him, it leaves Ben and Polly, in only their fifth story, as the reliable pair of hands. They’re a team who actually get to explore this dark and dangerous world the way we would and the story works best when they’re on screen. Alas they get split up early on for sub-plots that don’t really go anywhere and which don’t necessarily feel true to their characters, traditional wimp Polly suddenly turning all gung-ho and macho as she urges the Jacobites to rebel (again) and Ben suddenly developing Doctor-like powers of survival as he survives certain death by drowning from tricks picked up by Houdini; the only part of this sequence that rings true is that he doesn’t panic in the water (this is the only story that makes good use of the fact that Ben is a sailor: you’d think ‘The Underwater Menace’ up next would but he barely gets his feet wet in that story). Michael Craze and Anneke Wills are excellent though, somehow making these additions seem like extensions to their character rather than contradictions and some of Polly’s very 1960s baiting/flirting with her poor posh victim, spoilt rich kid Algernon Ffinch who doesn’t know what’s happening and basically gets beaten up by two girls, is one of her defining moments as a character. Ffinch is, oddly enough, more out of place here asa rich Englishman who just wants a quiet life and can’t find it in battle than the so-1966-it-hurts Ben and Polly who are at their best here, resilient and prepared to risk everything for people they’ve barely met and who quickly understand the Scots they meet as people like them in funny clothes; they can’t see why the English think of the Scots as alien monsters who are beneath them when their needs of shelter food and safety are just the same as theirs, especially after their recent brushes with Daleks, Cybermen and War Machines. 

Unlike the Doctor they actually interact properly with the people who live in this world too, getting to know them properly. One of them is a young lad named Jamie and while he’s far from the best character here (Kirsty gets all the best lines) he does show promise and it’s a good thing they hurriedly re-wrote the ending of this story and put him on board the Tardis too, even if his presence gives less and less to Ben to do in future. The legend goes that overwhelmingly positive response to Jamie meant they hastily put him in the Tardis isn’t quite true: for one thing they were a couple of weeks head of transmission so two episodes of ‘The Underwater Menace’ with Jamie had been filmed by the time the end of ‘The Highlanders’ was transmitted. Even so Davis’ instincts were right: Frazer Hines has a charisma that shines out even from murky telesnaps and his straightforward reliable dependency makes him the perfect foil for the 2nd Doctor in a way the more traditional Ben and Polly couldn’t be. Hines and Troughton were already good friends, which helped: they’d worked together twice in  and ‘Smuggler’s Bay’ in 1964 (which is kind of like ‘The Smugglers’, unsurprisingly)and a production of ‘Moonfleet’(also kind of like ‘The Smugglers’ if we’re being homnest). It was, however, a late addition to add him to the Tardis: they actually filmed Jamie waving goodbye with Kirsty at the end before travelling all the way back to location to shoot the sequence again with Jamie onboard; Frazer himself was only asked about staying on very late in the day (to spare him nerves and the need to impress, so the actor said, though it might simply have taken Davis and Lloyd that long to make their minds up). Note that Jamie has a very different voice in this story, a far more accurate Scots burr, which he changed for the next story to something closer to a ‘Scottish’ version of his real voice because he realised how hard it would be to keep up across a full series (you can really hear it on the soundtrack released on CD in the 1990s with Frazer as himself doing the linking narration). Jamie is, though, ‘better’ than the rest to viewers of the time because he isn’t a soldier – he’s a piper who plays music while other people fight, which is as 1960s as it gets. Weirdly we never see Jamie, part of the MacCrimmon clan famous for their piping, play the pipes across the series (although he was meant to, in the script for ‘Fury Form The Deep’, where it stuns the sentient alien seaweed in place of Victoria’s screams); odd too that he doesn’t rush off from the Tardis to grab his pipes or have them on him, as they would have been as s econd nature as carrying a pen or a laptop is to us; you think he’d at least ask the Doctor for another set when he discovers just how much junk there is in the Tardis. Even so, if you come to this story fresh without knowing what happens next Jamie’s departure is a surprise: he hasn’t really done anything the others in his clan don’t do and Kirsty is a much more promising character – like Victoria will be, a maiden in distress, but slightly less wet. Hannah Gordon, in one of her first TV appearances, is already a clear star of the future and is a lot better than the part should be on the paper. It’s a wonder they didn’t re-shoot the last scene and have her on board The Tardis as well.  

In some ways it’s a good thing the historicals ended here. Just listen to the dialogue – almost the only thing on this story left now and once the saving grace of all the Dr Who historicals – and despair: practically every line is an argument between two people opposed, even if it’s light banter, and there are no epic speeches or poetic lines. Where did all that David Whittaker influence go? And yet there’s nothing a little more care and time and budget couldn’t have put right: the costumes, the setting, the idea are all sound (it’s about time we had an Earth story that wasn’t set in England for instance: only ‘Marco Polo’ had been elsewhere so far and let’s face it Marco himself couldn’t have been more English if he’d been smoking a pipe and holding an umbrella).There are some great ideas in here and I so wish we could see it  because, if nothing else, ‘The Highlanders is exciting – if in more of a ‘breathless rush’ kind of a way than out of a complex plot. I love the way the plot quickly gets us on side with the Highlanders where other series in 1966 would have been condescending and makes us question the history books (almost all written by the English’ the Scots couldn’t write), which is exactly what Dr Who is for, redressing old imbalances and giving voice to those who were denied it for so long. 

Of course that also means that its not that accurate and there’s also a surprising lack of information about the Jacobite rebellion: there’s no sense here, for instance, that we’re forty years into an on-off war that was probably being fought by these younger characters’ grandparents or that the vast majority of people, English and Scottish alike, couldn’t care less about who was on the throne just could we please get back to normality now? Most surprising of all there’s no fighting the whole story: people are outnumbered and captured, or outsmarted, but there isn’t a single fight scene anywhere, which seems odd for a story about a battle – even a battle that’s over. Had Davis had longer to perfect this story (so he could actually do some research for it), had they worked out who the 2nd Doctor was meant to be so he could join the party too instead of faffing about with hats and dressing as washer-women (it will take another couple of stories before he calms down) and had we actually seen more of Culloden than its aftermath this could have been a classic; alas it’s more a jumble of good scenes than a really good story with a plot that ebbs and flows rather than one that directly leads where it needs to go. Without that memory of ‘Culloden’ semi-fresh in our minds to watch ‘The Highlanders’ gets a bit lost in translation I think and is a hard story to get a hold of given that only a few fragmented seconds of it exist in the archives: one minute it’s a pantomime, one minute it’s a serious drama as if, the last semi-historical for nearly eight long years, it’s a compilation of every angle the production team has tried: history as something that can’t be changed, as something better than the time the show was made in, as something worse than the time the show was made in, as a chance to meet long forgotten heroes, as a chance to meet real forgotten people who never make the history books, as entertainment, as education, as a sign of how pointless the past was to the present, as a sign of how relevant the past still is. Hoots mon, that’s a lot of weight for a four parter to carry! Ultimately this first trip to Scotland (there’s still only ever been three, which really isn’t many in sixty odd years given that Scottish viewers pay the TV license fee that funds the BBC as well as English ones) is more of a highland fling rather than a chance to really delve deeply into Scottish history. Still, ‘The Highlanders’ has some great ideas and is highly under-valued and under-rated. I suspect if its ever recovered a lot of people will start loving it a lot more.

POSITIVES + We only have photographic stills to go on so I could be wrong but...from what I can tell this story looks amazing. Dr Who had only just begun to do location filming properly a few stories before this and chose firstly a quarry and then a Cornish landscape for ‘The Smugglers’ that was chocolate-box pretty, but here for the first time it really feels as if the Tardis has landed in a whole other time, with Frensham Ponds in Surrey doubling really effectively for the Scottish Highlands. You really get the sense of a vast bare land that isn’t providing enough to eat and is making the people who live on it desperate, every bit as desolate and cut off as the land. The hillsides, with added bracken and conifers and dry ice to suggest gun smoke, looks beautiful but battle-scarred. It could have been so very pretty, all wide rolling hills and bird song. But the sound of war is never far away (the soundtrack is almost all we have) and signs of conflict are everywhere. The feel is of a very beautiful place in a very ugly time in history with hills wounded by signs of battle that haven’t healed yet, just like the people, the sort of ugly mess where the birds stopped singing a long time ago but which is just a few years of peace away from being beautiful all over again, with nature far smarter than man about these things. 

NEGATIVES - While everyone else is taking everything earnestly seriously and genuinely scared of the hangman’s noose or deportation there the Doctor is, treating everything as a big joke, using the confusion of Culloden to confuse the enemy, talk in cod German accents, dress up in a variety of costumes, shout 'down with King George!' to test an echo on impulse even though it could have got lots of people killed and ‘comedy’ scenes where he knocks his jailor’s head on a table then asks him if he’s suffering from ‘headaches’. Worst of all this Doctor’s suddenly war-mad, demanding weapons at one point to fight the redcoats in a way we’ve only ever seen happen with Doctors when someone they love is in danger (as per ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ or ‘Caves Of Androzani’): here, though, it’s the Doctor’s main plan not his defensive desperate one. It’s a good job they gave the job to Patrick Troughton – in lesser skilled hands it might have been awful; even so it’s still pretty bad and you almost dread the Doctor turning up to interrupt the action. Especially in his ‘German Doctor’ character (with an outrageous accent almost exactly like the ‘Mexican’ one Troughton uses as salamander in ‘The Enemy Of The World’!) There are flashes of steel and hardness, though, which also make him less unapproachable than Hartnell, a casual callousness that takes you by surprise: in the future you only really see this aspect of the Doctor when his back his against the wall and he thinks he has no choice and even then he agonises over it afterwards). I suspect, had I been around in 1966, I’d have been longing for William Hartnell to come back after this and ‘Underwater Menace’ back to back despite Troughton’s promising debut in ‘Power Of The Daleks’; thankfully he’ll settle down by the time of ‘The Moonbase’ and then give one of the single greatest performances of any of the Doctors in the show’s history. 

BEST QUOTE: ‘What wicked times we live in, lieutenant’. 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The 3rd Doctor returned to the land of Redcoats for one of the more ‘normal’ Dr Who comic strips printed in TV Action for ‘The Glen Of Sleeping’ (issues 107-111, running across the whole of March 1973). The Doctor is enjoying a rare holiday from UNIT, going for a spot of fishing (wonder if he caught any gumblejacks like the 6th?) when he spots a group of archaeologists digging up a mysterious artefact in a nearby field and his curiosity gets the better of him (well, it is the 3rd Doctor). Surprisingly (spoilers) it’s all a trap laid by the Delgado Master, in what turned out to be his only appearance in the TV Action strips – having paid for his likeness the comics may well have panned to use him more before the actor’s untimely demise just three months later. The Master’s typically bonkers plan is to summons a mystical being from Earth’s past known as ‘Red Angus’ who has been ruling over a clan of unstoppable Scottish clansmen, who The Master then intends to use to take control of a nuclear submarine and use that to make the Doctor give his Tardis over (it’s never explained what’s happened to The Master’s). How does all this tie in to ‘The Highlanders’? Well, in a bonkers final reel it turns out that (more spoilers) Red Angus is a time-travelling alien known as a Chronon, the Doctor dating its arrival in Scotland to 1745, travelling there in The Tardis. He doesn’t meet Jamie sadly (‘The Highlanders’ is set in 1746 so the lad wouldn’t recognise him anyway) but there is lots of kilt-on-kilt action before the aliens are dispatched and The master is stranded. Craig-au-teure!  

Previous ‘The Power Of The Daleks’ next ‘The Underwater Menace’

The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood: Ranking - 174

 The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood

(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 22-29/5/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Ashley Way)

Rank: 174

'Oh I see how you do New Who, you select random bits from past episodes and turn them into new ones. So here's my submission for episode one next year, made up of all the most, ahh, memorable bits from past stories...The Myrka, The Ergon, Erato and The Kandy Man are out for a walk (it’s a really big road), swapping round which one of them is disguised as Mel to confuse the newly regenerated Doctor. Only they're interrupted by Professor Zaroff grappling with an over-sized octopus and Brian Kant in a skirt. 'Novink in ze vorld an shtop me now!' says Zaroff 'Except that' and he points to Kathleen Jenkins as Abigail, Kylie Minogue as Astrid and that annoying brat from 'The Rings Of Akhaten who start singing as a trio, making everyone clutch their ears and fall to the floor. The 15th Doctor then tries to run away with his new companions, something made difficult by the Myrka tripping over its feet, The Ergon laying an egg, Erato getting stuck in an underpass and the Kandy Man sticking to the pavement with chewing gum. In the background an alien wheely bin burps, menacingly. 'Stop Don't move!' says the Doctor suddenly, pointing to the floor tiles of doom, before finding himself on a cliff and dangling from a cliff by his umbrella... This is what fans want, right?’

 

The Silurians are unquestionably one of the best alien species in all of Who and long overdue a comeback. In Malcom Hulke’s expert hands, for my money the best writer that Dr Who ever had, they don’t just have a claim to planet Earth they have a better claim than we do: it’s just that they’ve been asleep for a few thousand years and somebody forgot to set the alarm clock. They’re more than a little alarmed to see so many overgrown monkeys walking around thinking they own the place and are right to be angry about how their ‘pets’ re-act to them waking up. Their self-titled debut in 1970 is a masterclass in scifi, with the twist that Humans turn out to be the accidental invaders of Earth for a change, a story that says so much about human arrogance and the need to play nicely with our neighbours if either of us are going to survive. Recorded at a time of cold war escalation and growing tension between two very different ways of life enjoyed by two actually very similar people, it’s the kind of thing Dr Who was made for. The only problem with the original story was the need to go so slowly (seven episodes to eke out the budget) and that their creator killed them all off at the end (because the Humans couldn’t play nicely) which meant that these popular monsters never quite got the recognition or the amount of comebacks they deserved. Apart from a botched attack on an underwater base in ‘Warriors Of The Deep’, which took a sledgehammer to the same themes and which most fans have agreed to forget so we can keep our sanity, so much of that story was never explored the first time round. In short they were one monster race from the ‘classic’ series I was dying to see brought back.

Timewise, too, their revival is perfect. Eleven days before ‘The Hungry Earth’ went on air Britain officially had its first Coalition government since World War Two, an uneasy pact between bitter Conservative and Liberal enemies, who could find no common ground except for the fact they both wanted to destroy Labour. It’s a similar story: shaved apes with ideas above their station forced to work for power against arrogant cold-blooded reptiles who were millennia out of date and still walked around like they owned the place.  I’m just surprised they didn’t have a TV debate in this story about their rightful claim to Earth and the catchphrase ‘I agree with the pet monkey’ as a catchphrase to go alongside ‘I agree with Nick’ (Labour, of course, are the Cybermen: they used to be Human once but sold their souls for survival. The Greens are The Vervoids. And Nigel Farage and whatever party he happened to be calling it back then is Davros pure and simple). The production team would have known nothing about that election at the time of course but so it is with creative endeavours: they would surely, have been smart and intuitive enough to pick up on some of the air of defeat in the UK around 2010 when the credit crunch was biting, our leaders were clueless and everyone seemed to be turning on each other. It wasn’t quite the perfect cold war analogy of old, but it was getting there. What we needed was a Doctor to sort this mess out. Instead we got a Dr Who story about sorting our mess out ourselves. You could, if you so wanted, see this as an ‘immigration’ story too, with the twist that the late-comers coming over ‘ere, taking our jobs and building nuclear reactors and hospitals and schools are the Humans. The fact that so much of this story is set on a multicultural base in Wales, full of so many ethnic minority workers, only adds to the sense of ‘outsiders’ (famously the Welsh consider you an ‘outsider’ if you moved to the country fifty years ago; as welcoming as they were to the Who production team as a whole a lot of crew and cast commented on this in the new series) as well as the sense that one day none of this will seem ‘weird’ at all: Humanity integrated in the past so why not again? One day the Welsh football team will be playing Silurians United at the football and meeting up to celebrate holidays like St David’s Day and dance round the annual ‘The maypole of the Myrka’ and be the best of friends. You could even see this as a begrudging ‘United Kingdom’ story: Wales and England were once bitter enemies diametrically opposed and look at us now, working together against a common threat! Honestly I wish there’d been even more of that in this story, as that’s the whole point of the original after all (and a point we never fully get to see thanks to the original’s shock ending) but at least it’s there.

On paper ‘Hungry Earth’ should have been perfect. It had the right aliens (an ‘underground’ cult amongst Whovians if ever there was one, dying out for a revival) in the right kind of story (which again was about the negotiations and compromises needed to make the world a better place) on at the right time to give us exactly the right emotions. And yet there’s something oddly…cold-blooded about this story that means it never quite takes off.  For some reason Steven Moffat, who adored the Silurians as much as I do, decided not to write this story himself and gave it to his pal Chris Chibnall. The writer was, at this point, semi-retired from Who: the lifelong fan had got the Dr Who TV story ‘42’ on air and had handed over the reigns of spin-off series ‘Torchwood’ back to its creator Russell T Davies having reached the natural end of the arc of tales he wanted to tell. Chibnall already had half an eye on detective series ‘Broadchurch’ (the one with a post-Who David Tennant and Arthur Darvill, a pre-fame Jodie Whittaker and Prisoner Zero in Human form Olivia Coleman) and was most surprised to get the call to write a two-part story. He was even more surprised to get the one-word plot detail to develop in an e-mail from Steven: ‘Silurians!’ Urged to make his story reflect the original that he hadn’t seen in years, Chibnall holed himself up with Hulke’s Target novelisation (for some reason re-named ‘Dr Who and The Cave Monsters’, one of the very best in the range) and set off to write a similar story.

That’s the trouble with ‘Hungry Earth/Cold-Blood’ though. It’s too similar (even though, weirdly, Hulke is the only writer of the ‘classic’ series not to get credit for a ‘monster’ they invented: Terry Nation gets the credit for the Daleks every time they’re used for instance, ditto Davis/Pedler for the Cybermen and Holmes for the Sontarons). So far revival Who had managed to avoid becoming what I’d most dreaded it would be, a remake of classic era stories that were already perfect but of their day with more money and less sense or heart. That is, after all, the entire plan for the 8^th Doctor if the ‘TV Movie’ had been a hit in 1996: would you believe a note-for-note remake of ‘The Web Planet’ was in preparation as one of his first stories (because it was one of the highest viewed Who stories of all – even though most of the 13 odd million of people who saw it did so out of a state of pure befuddlement).  So far comeback Who has been made by enough devout fans who know that the answer to making the old stories sing again wasn’t to simply do the same old arrangements all over again but to put the same notes in a new context, to mix the stories around and see how different Doctors re-act to similar threats. Chibnall, though, is too reverential and ends up telling almost exactly the same story never quite as well (no reflection on him, this week anyway: Davies or Moffat would have struggled to match Hulke at his most passionate and inspired). Once again the Humans wake up a city of Silurians by accident (a sub-set who overslept even compared to 1970: the story is filmed for their 40^th anniversary but set in 2020, that story’s 50th anniversary), kill one of them by accident and have to work out how to make things up to their rivals and show that we can actually be trusted to work side by side with them, honest.

Something goes weird partway through though: if you’re an old-timer then you know without anyone saying so that The Silurians are a noble and respectable race working out of self defence. In this story, too, they have reasons to be angry and belligerent given the way a bunch of frightened Humans react to them (shooting Silurian Alaya in ‘Cold Blood’, a clever title for the episode that makes the Humans crueller and the Silurians kinder). Ask one of the younger fans who first knew The Silurians from this episode though and that message seems to have got a bit lost in the wash. They don’t remember The Silurians’ noble side: they remember them boasting about being able to pick off Humanity easily and the new whip-lash tongue that comes out of their head and stings us to death. They’re suddenly behaving like a warrior race, like every other Dr Who monster who ever had a bone to pick with Humans and while they have a better reason for it than most that’s not what The Silurians were created for. It’s a waste, quite honestly. I mean, in a battle I’m not going to hide behind a Silurian, armour or not, when there are Daleks and Cybermen around. A monster I’d trust to talk me out of a tricky spot though? Clearly that’s a Silurian. Moffat, though outwardly as enthusiastic and supportive of this script as I’ve ever seen him (there are sweet interviews where he talks about getting Chibnall’s scripts through as e-mails a few scenes at a time and calling out to his young sons trying to go to sleep because they were all desperate to know what happened next) seems to have realised this and written in Madame Vastra soon after, as if to show how Silurians should be handled (as lovers, not fighters: as much as old-fashioned fans moaned about it for being ‘woke’ I like to think Hulke would have regarded the Silurian-Human Vastra-Jenny love affair as a natural spin-off from his original scripts about collaboration and mutual respect).

That said it’s not terrible. Chibnall at least understands why the Silurians work and handles them respectfully – more respectfully than ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ anyway. They’re viewed here not like Hulke’s Russian armies, with a very different but equal way of viewing the world, but as tit-for-tat terrorists. The Humans break their boundaries without knowing: they do the same. The Humans take one of their kind – they’ll do the same. They never quite come out and declare open warfare. Best of all it casts the Doctor in the role he should always be in, as an intermediary who is above such petty things as control of the Earth and who can see things from both sides: The Silurians (a script that uses Hulke’s own joke from ‘The Sea Devils’ that his research got the epoch wrong and they were more likely to be ‘Eocenes’, before letters from archaeologists told him that wasn’t right either, the Doctor settling for ‘Earth..lians’) have a decent claim, but then so does Humanity. I mean they left a vacuum when they went to sleep and it wasn’t ‘our’ fault their alarm system misunderstood the formation of the Moon and saw it as a comet. Matt Smith has never been more Jon Pertwee-like, a firefighter running around trying to put out tiny fires that keep springing up everywhere and tearing his hair out over the antics of both sides. He’s spent a lot of this regeneration learning to become more ‘Human’ after the 10^th Doctor got a bit too carried away with his own self-importance and differentness and it’s good to be reminded that the Doctor is, first and foremost, an alien. ‘Earth/Blood’ is a story that still does all the things Dr Who does well: where American scifi is all too often about ridding the Earth of alien scum this one has a softer, gentler approach and asks important questions about who really gets to control the land we live on.

There are certain bits, too, that are pure Chibnall that Hulke would never have considered which at least adds a few extra things the original story didn’t do and which seem ever more obvious re-watching this story after he was showrunner. This is isn’t just a bunch of random workers who are in trouble, the way they were in 1970, but a family. We follow Elliott a lot this story: sometimes he’s the bravest one in the room, better able to adjust to the old newcomers than his parents or grandparents. Sometimes he’s more scared, without the experience of having to negotiate and hold his own with respect the way adults learn to do. And sometimes he’s just a pain, running off home to get his headphones when everyone’s in great danger (I mean, I’m never without my headphones and even I wouldn’t run home to get them with shouty shooty reptiles on the loose: the Doctor is many great things but he’s a truly hopeless babysitter as it turns out). Just for added ‘aww’ value Elliott has a learning difficulty randomly added in, with Chibnall seeming to know just as little about dyslexia as he does about dyspraxia when Ryan turns up (seriously there’s nothing Elliott does in this story that needs this piece of information, it’s not like the fate of the universe rests on him reading the Silurians a bedtime story; one of Chibnall’s worst aspects as a writer is throwing in details like this because he thinks it makes characters more ‘real’, then ignoring any impact such details have on how real people would react to the world because of them). Chibnall’s worst trait as a writer all round, in fact, is creating characters who never feel quite real but are just there to serve the plot and get in trouble and here, even more than usual, you get the impression that Chibnall just doesn’t understand people: to Davies everyone is different and frequently beautiful (unless they’ve been turned bad in which case they’re beautifully ugly); to Moffat people are a puzzle and a conundrum he can never quite work out; for Hulke they’re a bunch of kids (even the adults) trying to cope with ideas their brains are too small to handle. For Chibnall, though, people are a block of people who all tend to think alike. The Humans all move as one in this story (even Rory for the most part): they try to do the right thing, they feel threatened, then they react, together. Nobody tries to argue anyone out of anything the way even the Silurians did in the original. In this story The Silurians, too, are of one (even their scientist Eldane, the most ‘Human’ one of the lot, isn’t really that different to the rest). Humans go one way, the Silurians the other and they meet in the middle, head on, the way their two drills nearly do in the story’s best scene (when the Doctor gets the Humans to cut their drilling and yet you can still hear it because someone else has woken up…)

Ah yes, the drilling. Chibnall does shake up the plot of ‘The Silurians’ around, but mostly by borrowing from another two Who classics: the intense digging of ‘Inferno’ and the nightmarish idea of bodies being pulled from underground seen in ‘Frontios’ (if nothing else Chibnall has impeccable taste: all three of stories are amongst my all-time favourites).  Officially Chibnall was inspired for the drilling sequences after reading up about the ‘Kola Superdeep Borehole’, a project from 1970 that also inspired ‘Inferno’, when the Russians drilled deeper into the crust of The Earth than anyone had ever gone before (12 kilometres) after a quarter century of near constant drilling. The project was only abandoned indefinitely in 2008, around the time when Chibnall would have been working out his story breakdown. Why did the Russians do it? Because they could for one thing and scientific curiosity on the other. One of their big discoveries was that water existed a lot lower down in the ground than anyone had ever realised, almost as if an underground civilisation were using it. Perfect for a Dr Who story of course, not least a Dr Who story partly based on a Silurian ‘young scientist’ whose really a young Russian looking to spread knowledge around; you sense that had the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks production team been around in the era of ‘series arcs’ they’d have somehow incorporated the Silurians and Inferno stories as part of a conglomerate whole caused by the same thing (with the Primords the Silurians’ pets). I’m convinced there’s another influence though fracking. Officially fracking started in Britain in 1965 (around the time of ‘The Crusade’, err in a manner of speaking) but it was a big part of the Conservative manifesto: all those fossil fuels just waiting under the ground ready to be broken up, what could possibly go wrong? A lot as it happens: Britain is, generally speaking, about the most earthquake-free country of all thanks to being slap back in the middle of the European tectonic plate. Well not anymore: self-induced minor quakes were everywhere and even though the companies behind them were obliged to wait twenty-four hours every time the shaking reached 2 on the richter scale this just meant you had to pick your wheely bins up several days in a row instead of just one. It seemed like a Dr Who story in waiting, about mankind’s greed tapping into natural resources we knew nothing about. Of course it ended up in the series (although I don’t think any of fracking’s biggest critics in real life considered that it would wake up a bunch of sleeping reptiles).  For the most part the idea works well in the story: its not as tense or as well-portrayed as in ‘Inferno’ but then there’s less room for that plotline and the idea of ‘accidentally’ encroaching on a boundary we didn’t know was there (by drilling down, rather than invading from side to side) is a good hook for a story. I’m less sure about the bits nicked from ‘Frontios’: there’s nothing in the original Silurian story that points to them having this sort of technology and it’s all a bit clumsily done, with poor Karen Gillan getting the short straw standing on boxes and being lowered gradually through soil dug into the raised set. For all the extra money of 21^st century Who this part somehow looks sillier than it did in 1983. 

That might be more, though, because 1) it happens to Amy (a companion we know can survive anything and everything: seriously, she’s indestructible, even in situations that kill other people) and 2) because we don’t care about the other characters this happens to – indeed you don’t really are about anyone much in this story. That’s the real downside of Chibnall’s writing: you’re more likely to cheer when one of his walking caricatures snuffs it rather than getting emotional, the way you do in any of the three stories Chibnall pilfered from. Meera Syal, fine actress and genuine Whovian, would be perfect casting for most roles but she seems ever so out of place in charge of drills (mis-casting is another hallmark of the Chibnall years to come). She’s an actress who excels at subtlety, of bringing ton life characters with layers, but there are no layers here to get her teeth into: as much as Chibnall makes Nasreen a ‘substitute companion’ with Amy gone and Rory off doing Rory things, it never feels as if we really get to know her and her driving force (‘what have they done to my child?’) only tells us that she’s a mother and saving her son because that’s what mothers do in Chibnall scripts: there’s no sense that she’s cared for him, of their shared bond, that she’s worrying about what he must be going through. There’s no anger, no worry, no fear even, just mild acceptance that never rings true. The other Humans are worse. One of them needs to crack and shoot Alaya but Chibnall tries so far to make all of them ordinary people (even Rory) to make us feel that it could be any of us pushed too far and pulling the final trigger on an unknown taunting enemy that the moment falls flat. Ambrose does it because the Silurian hurt her colleague Tony, but they don’t act like people who’ve ever met before across this story. Had they made it Rory, panicked and put in charge with keeping the base safe (and killed him off later not by a random act but through ‘karma’) it would have made more sense because at least we ‘know’ him.

The Silurians are no better. The joy of Hulke’s original script was that he didn’t just create a monster race but a group of individuals who were more different than the (mostly UNIT and army based) Humans were. Some argued for peace, some argued for war, some just wanted to go back to bed and sleep in but they felt like an entire society that clashed and negotiated and  sulked the way Humans did. Chibnall seems to have missed that part in the book.  Weirdly enough, while we see a lot more of them (thanks to non-speaking extras) there are far less talking parts. Two of them are even played by the same actress Neve McIntosh (and neither of them her later character Madame Vastra) using the same mask. She’s clearly the same actress from pure body language, no matter how much she change her voice and make Alaya more warrior-like than Restac. The production team clearly could create more masks for the extras (even with most of them ‘war masks’) so why start saving the budget here? The whole point of this re-make was to do things the original never could.  It could be that Chibnall was making a comment about ‘outsiders’ and how to the prejudiced people from another race all look alike even when they act differently – but if so the point was a bit mangled. I mean, I know this story really well and the Silurians still look alike. And it’s not like The Sontarons where they’re all clones: Eldane couldn’t look more different to Alaya or Restac  (he is, after all, played by the brilliant Stephen Moore, the original ‘Marvin The Paranoid Android’ from the ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ radio series whose, erm, the least svelte Silurian we’ve ever seen in the series). Yet change their lines around and I doubt anyone would notice. In this story we have a full Silurian city (in deliberate contrast to a typical Welsh Village, ‘Cwymtaff’, Welsh for a ‘Human Hamlet’ and a river that runs nearby in the Brecon Beacons) to better compare the idea of ‘community in both places – a lot of the drama comes from people trying to protect their own from ‘interlopers’. There are some nice details, such as Nasreem running the local ‘wheels on meals’ and naturally wanting to help others. The location filming itself is lovely: most of it is in the mining town of Llanwynno, with some scenes shot in the Bedwellty pits in Tredegar(that were closed in 1935) and the giant ‘The Temple Of Peace’ Hall in Cardiff already seen in so many of the comeback Who stories. It’s treated a lot better than the one in ‘The Green Death’, that’s for sure. However, despite the expense of building a whole city (and even giving it an orange ‘glow’ from the ground to suggest an alien form of technology powering it all) we nerve fully see it and it feels as if ultimately we see less of the Silurians than we did in 1970. They’re not that scary, not that powerful (at least not compared to their first appearance) and yet not that friendly and wise compared to ‘us’ either, falling between two stools (as a reptile used to being on the ground all day surely would). None of them feel…I nearly said ‘Human’ then but ‘real’ would be a better word in this context. One thing I do like is the names though: as much as I suspect Malcolm Hulke would have grumped about this episode nicking all his best bits and doing them clumsily before adding bits that missed the point I reckon he’d have been tickled to be remembered as ‘Malohkeh’, the grumpy cynical one with a heart of gold who expects the worst short-term but reckons long-term everyone is capable of true lasting peace. ‘Restac’, too, is a less obvious compact version of script editor Terrance Dicks’ names: always there front and centre to solve a crisis and keep things on the straight and narrow, that’s a pretty fair tribute too. ‘Alaya’ though doesn’t seem to be related to anyone (surely as a young buck desperate to make their mark and start a war they don’t know how to finish she should be ‘Terrnation’? And instead of ‘Eldane’ surely the elder Silurian everyone secretly looks up to in order to hold their world together should be called ‘Barrletts’?!)

The Silurian masks, too, are middling: they’re a lot better than the revived Cyberman but nowhere near as good as the new-look ‘Ice Warriors’. You can see why the costume department took every decision they made: these Silurians look a lot less like humans in rubber suits and have a far more streamlined Reptilian look about them, while the tongue is a worthy addition to the original. They move more like reptiles would, in sudden leaps forward, their ‘war masks’ (very like the Sycoraxes) are a nice budget-saving touch and best of all you can see the actors’ eyes when they talk. There’s no reason at all to get rid of so many things that made the originals unique though: there’s no third eye, that very useful gadget that opened doors and hypnotised people and basically acted as a built-in sonic screwdriver that proved the Silurians’ true technological power (dropped because it was too ‘similar’ to Davros, which is just silly: it’s not like any youngster was ever going to confuse two such very different monsters and besides Davros hadn’t been in the show for four years at this point with no immediate plans to bring him back). The voices, too, are just the actors’ own, without the distinctive ‘wobble’ of the originals. They clearly couldn’t have gotten away with simply re-using the technology of the day again, given how far advanced TV has become in the forty years since, but surely there had to be something that did the equivalent effect but better? It feels as if nobody was quite sure what to do in post-production so they just left it as it was. If the main reason to do a modern take on ‘The Silurians’ was simply to do the same sort of thing with a bigger budget and more money then they largely failed on that score.

Worse yet, there’s none of the rich barbed dialogue Hulke was known for (although there is one great line, where the Doctor complains that he was ‘sonnicing and entering’ rather than ‘breaking and entering’). There are no great impassioned speeches, no twin worlds locked in a stalemate and ultimately no sense that The Silurians are anything special. Back in 1970 you were rooting for them to win and it was a colossal shock when (spoilers) the Brigadier gave in to his basest instincts and blew such an intelligent passionate race up. This story is just a tit-for-tat you-shot-me-so-I’ll-shoot-you skirmish that never gets properly resolved. You’re not invested in this fight and even the near-future setting (ten years ahead of broadcast, roughly the same amount ahead as ‘The Silurians’) can’t make you feel any added incentive for everyone to get it together. The ending is poor: basically the Doctor does what his 3^rd regeneration self would never have done and sends the Silurians back to sleep again, albeit only for a little bit till the Humans are more ready to negotiate. Notably the series has never ever mentioned this truce again, even though you’d have thought a world of Silurian-Human alliance in all stories set after 2020 would change a lot (clearly it’s something to do with that series-long crack in the wall arc re-setting timelines again. Which makes this story feel even more pointless, it has to be said). The story is oddly plotted too: you’d have thought that having 100 minutes to tell essentially the same story as the old one at 175 would have made for a tighter, tauter, more action paced thriller, but it doesn’t. The story largely goes to sleep once the right people are in the right places and stalls at the point where Amy and Mo are captured by the Silurians, Alaya is captured by Rory and the other Humans and the Doctor and Nasreem are in transit flitting between the two.  For all its problems stretching the original plot out to seven episodes, complete with detour into that old scifi standby a plague for the second half, ‘The Silurians’ is a lot more gripping, a lot more…modern in approach than this sweet shambles.

It is sweet, though. This story tries a little too hard to be reverential to a story the author clearly admires and while it trips up over its own reptilian tail sometimes trying to be worthy of the old tale without repeating every single plot point it does, at least, feel like a story that couldn’t have been told with any other monster. In an era when alien races were becoming interchangeable this is a breakthrough in itself.  At the time, with a new showrunner in charge, it felt as if we were going to get a run of these ‘pure’ re-makes of old stories: mercifully ‘Hungry Earth’ is still the closest to one we’ve had so far. As a result it was never going to score highly in the originality stakes and chucking in bits from other classic stories doesn’t exactly help this one stand on its own two webby feet. And yet it’s a pertinent one for the times, updated from a cold war parable to becoming a more ageless tale of two very different cultures wary of each other and the importance of negotiation and compromise even against your polar opposite. Coming to this story now it feels as if we’ve had that aspect told  better too (see ‘The Zygon Invasion/Inversion’ for the best of many attempts in the modern series) but it at least felt like the sort of story Dr Who should have been telling. And the things that made the original so powerful are still sort-of there. Interestingly a lot of people who love the original hate this story, while a lot of people who don’t for that one or came to it afterwards love it; me I’m in the middle. There are parts that work as well as the original and parts that miss by miles. A lot of the original ideas are in there, but the bigger budget doesn’t always help them (not least because they still cut so many corners: at least in 1970 they could afford cave-dinosaurs, even poor ones, but a whole sub-plot about armosaurs got dropped from the first draft of this re-make).

Chibnall ‘gets’ the 11^th Doctor better than he ever got the 13^th (although you do have to wonder how many of his lines this week are Moffat additions) and he gets all the best lines, acting as an overgrown child who just wants to play but keeps getting sucked into matters of responsibility because there’s no one else to do what needs doing (the way this Doctor should always have been played). Good as Matt Smith is at the comedy though he can’t do authoritarian and outraged the way Pertwee could (similarly Rory is no Liz Shaw; weirdly he gets most of the jeopardy storylines this week while Amy gets sucked underground and taken away from the action early on). The beginning is nicely action packed but the story loses its way in the middle and the ending of ‘gee they went back to sleep’ is no match for ‘fancy blowing them all up!’ Had the original never existed (or even had it been wiped from the archives) then this would  be a great story with an intriguing new race and some fascinating ideas: with it ‘Hungry Earth’ feels kind of pointless, like those Hollywood sequels made to remind people how great the originals were and get to spend some extra time with old friends with nothing really new to say, some new effects but none of the heart or bite of the original (it’s ‘101 Dalmations II’ only with half a dozen Silurians instead). A worthy way of re-introducing one of Dr Who’s best monsters to a new audience, then, that largely does the Silurians justice (at any rate more justice than they ever got in ‘Warriors Of The Deep’, misunderstood and undervalued as that deadline-crashing story is), but nowhere near as imaginative, bold or powerful as the original, a sort of reptilian copy of one that used to be warm-blooded and mammalian. Middling in other words.

POSITIVES + At last, we got Stephen Moore in Dr Who and in a mask too, playing the elder, nobler Silurian. Moore is a brilliant actor, one of the best that was ever in the series. He shines in a part that’s, well, not as good as it could be. Every Who fan surely knows how good he was as Marvin in the radio and TV  ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide’ series, but not enough know about his performance in the glorious spin-off singles that even saw him performing on ‘Top Of The Pops’. If you haven’t heard them  ‘Marvin’ ‘Marvin I Love You’ ‘Metal Man’ or ‘Reasons To be Miserable’ yet then you’re in for a real deadpanned treat that beat any of the Who-related music crossovers (the likes of ‘Doctor In Distress’ ‘Whose Doctor Who?’ ‘I Want To Spend My Xmas With A Dalek’ and ‘Doctorin’ The Tardis’) hands down.

NEGATIVES - Rory’s dead! In retrospect Moffat should have kept at least a couple of the Rory demises back, given how much he’s going to over use this trope by the end of next season and this one is the easiest to go, given that it happens right at the end of the episode when the already-defeated Silurians shoot him. There seems no rhyme or reason for it here in a story that gave Rory too little to do as it was; had they done it as part of the main plot saving Amy (and thus proving to the Silurians that Humans were capable of kindness and selflessness) then it would have been a strong driving part of the narrative but here, after everything has been sown up, it just feels as if everyone went ‘whoops, we finished five minutes too early, what else can we do?’ They didn’t of course: it was always planned that Rory should skip the next few stories and only come back for the finale, but as such you’d think it would be better integrated into the story. It’s a terrible ‘death’ too (at least for the month or so it seemed Rory was properly dead): the worst thing in Dr Who isn’t to die but to die unloved and un-mourned, unremembered so that nothing you ever did counted for anything. Seeing Amy forget Rory immediately is heartbreaking – but not always in a good way. Just look at the clumsy plot-writing device of having Amy see her future self, never fully explained in the script: first with Rory and then alone. What’s more most of the references to Amy’s feelings for Rory were cut so this aspect hits less than it would in almost any other story (for the record it’s in the first scene where she sees her ‘future’ self and walks with the Doctor while Rory ‘dawdles’, saying that he was always a dawdler and her shock that she is still with him in ten years’ time, asking the Doctor for advice as ‘it’s a bit difficult to control your nerves the night before your wedding – especially when it goes on for months’. The Doctor replies that he hasn’t got a clue about that, given that he was voted ‘most bewildering intergalactic bachelor’ 503 years in a row, but that he knows Rory is a good man and a good fit for her. At the time we genuine thought that was it for one of DW’s more likeable characters and his return felt like a bit of a cheat to be honest, an early sign of the emotional manipulation Moffat is going to put us through as showrunner.

BEST QUOTE: ‘You’re 300 million years out of your comfort zone’.

PREQUEL/SEQUEL: In case you somehow missed the points made in this review, ‘The Silurians’ told much the same story forty years earlier but with a different group of ‘Earth-liens’.

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