Celebrating the greatest show in the galaxy's 60th birthday, with a run-down of every TV story from all eras worst to best across 315 days up until the anniversary on November 23rd 2023 for all new fans arriving from the 'Whoniverse' on BBC i-player. Remember, a Dr Who story a day keeps the entropy away! Sister site to music review site 'Alan's Album Archives' (www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com) and sci-fi book series 'Kindred Spirits' (www.kindredspiritbooks.blogspot.com)
(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 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 its not the sort of thing anyone but a Who fan would put on
TV. This is as bonkers a story as any script for DW ever was in any
era, a future New York filled with Cat people where people can live
out their whole lives in the middle of a giant traffic jam and the
monster at the heart of the city turns out to be a giant crab, last
seen in an obscure DW story from 1967, all of which has been wiped
(not least because, as all DW viewers who saw it know, there’s no
such thing as Macra). Now this, this is what DW was created for: it’s
the Russell T Davies shopping list of ideas gone bonkers, combining
elements no other show would think to put together and somehow have
it come out the other end a convincing whole that makes a worthy
point about a modern way of life that would be too harsh if told
directly. 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, while if the traffic around our way
is anything to go by we’re only a few years away from this scenario
happening for real. More than just making a point though, ‘Gridlock’
feels like a real world. Every single family in ever ‘car’ we
pass seems real rather than just people there to move the plot along,
from the ones singing their own hymn of the skies ‘The Rugged
Cross’, 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 to the couple who seem to be using
their car as a love den, they’re all very believable world-building
details that help sell us on the concept. The Face of Bo’s around
too 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? If
life is that simple we can make things better through optimism then
why don’t we just hook ourselves up to, I don’t know, Ant and Dec
or Carol Smiley or Tigger and then we’d never have to worry about
elections, wars, climate change or covid again). We don’t yet know
that he’s the future incarnation of he-who-cannot-be-killed Captain
Jack as RTD hadn’t even thought of it yet, but somehow Captain Jack
in a story about avoiding getting ‘crabs’ makes perfect sense!
Alas 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 it self back to
the New New York of other episodes as it would have been better as a
standalone stuck in a queue. The cat nurses from before feel as if
they’ve had their claws clipped in more ways than one and we don’t
gain anything much from revisiting old sets. The Macra reveal also
comes frustratingly late and they don’t really do much at all –
although I guess there’s only so much you can do with a mute crab.
You also have to say that when you analyse it all this is one of the
simpler DW plots: basically its find and rescue Martha before she’s
lost forever, which had it taken place on the ground and between
alien planets and prison cells would be horrifically cliched. The
ending especially is a sci-fi cliche where everyone holds hands and
thinks happy thoughts and everything turns out OK. However it’s a
race not along corridors but up and down cars and it looks
impressively real on screen. It’s not the plot that matters anyway
in this story, it’s the nuances and characterisations that make you
believe in this world and want to spend more time in it. Would that
other traffic jams were so rewarding! Along the way you see David
Tennant dangling several feet in the air as he proves just how heroic
his Doctor can be sometimes, while his Doctor does very Doctory
things that aren’t even part of the main plot, literally opening up
the sky and bringing joy to everyone he meets (well everyone but
Martha at the story’s start anyway). Martha herself gets a nice lot
to do too and her empathy to alien races makes her the perfect
companion to be dropped into another culture like this (can you
imagine the road rage that would have ensued if it had been Tegan or
Donna that had been kidnapped?!) The guest cast are all strong too,
from Being Human’s Lenora Critchlow (whose likeable even as a
kidnapper) and Death In Paradise’s Ardal O’Hanlon (who makes for
a surprisingly good giant cat). The result is a nice quirky little
story, one quite unlike anything else ever seen in DW 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.
+
I still can’t get past how believable the hover-cars look, each of
them separate sets joined by CGI. Some of DW’s early comeback years
is beginning to show its 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 does.
-
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 what’s quite a jokey 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’.
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. 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!
(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, 11 with Amy and Rory, director: Hugh David)
+
We only have photographic stills to go on so I could be wrong
but...from what I can tell this story looks amazing. DW had only just
begun to do location filming a
few
stories before this and chose firstly
a quarry and then a
Cornish landscape 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 and
you really wouldn’t have got that from a TV set.
-
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’. It’s
a good job they gave the job to Patrick Troughton – in lesser 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.
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
the promising debut in ‘Power Of The Daleks’.
7 with Ace and The Brigadier, 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 memorable bits from past stories...The Myrka and The Kandy Man are out for a walk, 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 and the Kandy Man sticking to the pavement. 'Stop Don't move!' says the Doctor, pointing to the floor tiles of doom, before dangling from a cliff by his umbrella...'
The
Silurians are unquestionably
one
of the best alien
species
in all of Who. In
Malcom Hulke’s expert hands, for my money the best writer that DW
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; the only problem
was that story ended with the Humans blowing the Silurians up because
they couldn’t play nicely. Apart from a botched attack on an
underwater base in ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ which most fans have
agreed to forget they have never been seen again. So, even as
front-runners for a revival, how could they possibly come back in
New-Who? Well, that’s why this sequel is so far down this list
compared to the first story, as its basically that story in reverse,
with the Silurians the aggressors and that makes them more every
other DW monster rather than a race who are better than us. That
said, Chris Chibnall, on his second DW script long before he was
show-runner, at least understands why the Silurians work and, as will
so often happen with his revivals of old foes as opposed to his own
creations, handles them respectfully – more respectfully than
‘Warriors Of The Deep’ anyway. Woken up from their slumber by a
lot of heavy drilling our friends in green
decide to retaliate
not by blowing the Humans up but by kidnapping
one of their
children of the workers, which causes outrage to the Humans but makes
a lot of sense; as
with both their previous stories it’s
a neat metaphor for the tit-for-tat cold war polemic where America
and Russia used to see how much they could get away with before
starting an all-out war, something that’s suddenly more timely than
ever in 2023. It
does all the things DW does well: an intelligent race who want to do
more than just rule the galaxy, playing to their own internal rules,
with a base under siege that has to be handled with care by a
timelord who can see the arguments on both sides. So
why is this story so far down in the list if it’s so good? Well,
it’s a re-make pure and simple, the original 1970 Silurians story
with a bigger budget but less at stake, if only because we still
remember how that story ended and pretty much watch it play out again
the same way. The few bits that aren’t direct lifts from
‘Silurians’ are direct lifts from ‘Inferno’ instead, like the
drill burrowing into the crust of the Earth that wakes everyone up or
‘Frontios’, such as the ground swallowing people up. When DW was
announced to return I was scared it would all be stories that
recycled
the old ones without the heart or brains (that was, after all, the
plan had the Paul McGann TV movie been a success based purely off
viewing figures (would
you believe ‘The Web Planet’, the story with no humanoids and a
series of giant ants and butterflies, was due to be re-made early
on?) Thankfully, while some modern DW stories are indeed sequels,
‘Hungry Earth’ turned out to be the one that’s
closest to a pure re-make so far, so it’s never going to score as
highly to anyone who knows the originals. Interestingly a lot of
people who love
the original hate this story, while a lot of people who don’t or
came to it afterwards love it; me I’m in the middle. You have to
say it’s
a
story
made with love and care, getting all the things that made the
original so good about right so
that they are recognisably the same species and even improved in a
couple of places.
The Silurian masks, for instance, are a triumph: they seem like the
Pertwee ones but are less rubbery and give more of a flavour of the
actors behind them. The
Silurian actors are all well chosen and do well considering they
mostly have only their voices to work with. Cutting
a 175 plot to 100 minutes is about right lengthwise too, without the
interminable capture-rescue sequences of the last few episodes of
the original.
All that said, though, there’s very little of the rich dialogue and
few of the believable characters we got in Hulke’s hands. In
his words everyone felt like an individual worth risking everything
for; these
Humans are just a generic drilling operation and the
emotional strings of their
stolen children feel overplayed and syrupy. Good
as Matt Smith is at the comedy 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 ending is kind of messed up too, with he drama of ‘I
can’t believe the Brigadier actually blew them up!’ replaced by
‘gee they just went back to sleep again, that was easy’.A
nice little story then, with a lot going for it and
a worthy way of re-introducing one of DW’s best monsters to a new
audience with all the things you can do with a bigger budget and
greater computer effects at the production team’s disposal,
but one whose
successes arguably
owed more to Malcolm Hulke than Chris Chibnall and ultimately you’re
still better off watching the original.
+
At last, we got Stephen Moore in DW and in a mask too, playing the
elder, nobler Silurian. Moore is a brilliant actor who, amongst many
things, played
Marvin The Paranoid Android in the radio and TV versions of
‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’. The Marvin spin-off
singles are the best music-scifi crossover hits around too by the
way, beating the likes of ‘Doctor In Distress’ ‘Whose Doctor
Who?’ ‘I Want To Spend My Xmas With A Dalek’ and ‘Doctorin’
The Tardis’ hands down and
well worth checking out.
- 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 he falls
into the crack into the wall (something that could have happened in
any story, not necessarily this one). There seems no rhyme or reason
to it here and worse because Amy’s memory of him is wiped and
the Doctor doesn’t want to bring it up nobody
ever speaks about it again for three whole
stories.
Which is just weird for
an audience who wee getting quite fond of him.
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.
(Season 26, Dr 7 with Ace and The Brigadier, 6-27/9/1989, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Ben Aaronovitch, director: Michael Kerrigan)
Rank: 175
In an emoji: ⚔
'Each week in 1989, September to September
Doctor Who gave us a story to sit back and remember
Of Camelot
Or not!
Ask every person if they've heard the story,
When Ace was Ace and Brigadiers brigged
When everyone beat Morgaine by doing the things they did
Of the Doctor and his question mark umbrella
Destroying the destroyer and that other fella,
It really is quite a story
Ending with a fleeting wisp of glory
Or not!
Though the weakest of the four
At least in terms of plot
Remember that at the end, for one brief shining season
Once again Doctor Who was hot!'
There’s a difference, I think, between when a ‘good’ production team gets a story ‘wrong’ and when a ‘bad’ production team gets something ‘wrong’. Something like ‘Timeless Children’ ‘The TV Movie’ or ‘Time and The Rani’ are a series of concepts that were never going to work in a month of Saturday tea-times, but a story like ‘Battlefield’ is a number of near misses where you can see what everyone was shooting at, even when none of those arrows come close to hitting their target. On paper this story is a mess: there are so many plots going on yet none of them quite meet up, there’s characters who come and go, plot points hammered home with all the subtlety of a pistol in a swordfight and there’s some fudged notion that The Doctor is ‘more than just a timelord’ and spent a lifetime as Merlin in Ancient Britain that comes out of left field, isn’t explained and really doesn’t fit with anything else we’ve ever been told (this story ha a lot more in common with ‘the Timeless Child’ than most fans accept, although at least has the decency to hint that our missing gaps in knowledge come from the Doctor’s future not the past we’ve seen). This is the closest Dr Who has ever come to swapping scifi for fantasy and while the ever-elastic format ought to have at least one swords ‘n’ sorcery tale in there somewhere it’s not the most comfortable of fits (although it makes much more sense in the wake of ‘Merlin’, the under-rated BBC drama that came the closest to any filling in the Saturday family viewing audience of the new-Who slot which featured many Who alumni including our ‘discovery’ Colin ‘Jethro In Midnight’ Morgan and John ‘The War Doctor’ Hurt stealing scenes as a grumpy dragon). You only need to look at the last time Nicholas Courtney and Jean Marsh were in a Dr Who story together (‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’) to see how far this show has fallen in 23 years, where the former brother and sister Bret Vyon and Sara Kingdom, both killed in a dark and powerful epic story that did something new every week, now stand around and gurn a bit while stuff happens around them not to them. The Brigadier’s return after six years away is wasted, ‘The Destroyer’ this week’s big bad being behind all this turns up at the very end for a few minutes cameo and the link to King Arthur is skirted around rather than explained (besides this is all filmed in the wrong place: Camelot was Carlisle in all the earliest legends and poems, most of them French, before the Cornish tourist board got busy, so I’m even more puzzled Clara and the Doctor hate it in ‘Hide’ with all that history). No it really doesn’t work and the viewing public stayed away in droves, with part one getting the lowest viewing figures of the entire original run of Who (3.1million), a low only beaten in all the years since by the 2.2million that sat through ‘Legend Of the Sea Devils’, although admittedly that was partly because most people didn’t even know the show was back on; even the ever loyal Radio Times only plugged it on the children’s page and the show had long ago stopped being for children. Erm, me excepted). The few people who did tune into John Nathan-Turner’s last season opener just saw a most creaky opening scene with two old dears hobbling round a garden centre (showing that he hadn’t learnt all that much from his first, a two minute panoramic shot of deckchairs in ‘The Leisure Hive’).
And yet…I have a real fondness for this story that goes beyond anything that actually made it on screen. The idea behind this story is lovely and – though nobody making this story would have had anything but the slightest inkling at the time – this is the perfect story to start our four-story long goodbye with. There’s a sad air of a changing of the guard to this story, the feeling that no matter how many battles you fight and win time gets everyone in the end, even in a series about change and regeneration, perfect for the funeral air of a show in its last days. Writer Ben Aaronovitch, whose the closest Dr Who had to a breakout writing star who went on to better things after the series ended (as opposed to other brilliant star writers who all but ended their careers with the series) had submitted this story as his first go for a story, before script editor Andrew Cartmel needed someone to write ‘Remembrance Of the Daleks’ at pretty much the last minute. ‘Battlefield’ was a natural re-submission given how well ‘remembrance’ had gone down with fans, but it makes more sense as Ben’s first go for the series. He had been a huge fan of Dr Who in the UNIT era of the early 1970s but had lost touch with it and was surprised when his agent suggested submitting a script to the Who production team: he thought the series had gone off the air decades ago. Andrew Cartmel was, of all the many script editors down the years, the one keenest on hiring new talent and loved Ben’s sample work so sent him a bunch of videos to work from, one of which happened to be ‘Mawdryn Undead’. Aaronovitch was horrified by what that story had done to his favourite character, The Brigadier, reducing him from being in charge of the most important military patrol in Britain to a forgotten and fading teacher at a boys’ school (to be fair Cartmel didn’t know when he sent the tape out but he was a last minute replacement for Ian Chesterton, who dropped out so late in the day they didn’t have time to change much).
Aaronovitch’s first draft, with the far more memorable and Whoy title ‘Storm Over Avallion ’, was a story that can’t quite believe this show is still going, a dark story about ageing and lost opportunities, leaning on that famous Neil Young phrase ‘is it better to burn out than it is to rust? and about a fading UNIT facing a centuries-old battle when an ever-youthful Doctor turns up to help one last time. Realising that Nicholas Courtney was available (actually he wasn’t but he loved this show so much he cancelled a production of ‘Madame Butterfly’ in the West End built round him as the star to make this) The Brigadier got added into a second draft to give the story more of a ‘face’ and aiming to give him a better farewell than ‘Mawdryn’. By now the Brigadier is retired and happy, having settled down with wife Doris (a second tape Ben came away with was ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ where she gets a single throwaway line – which confused Courtney, who’d long considered her a joke about the brig having a ‘bit on the side’) but with that fire still burning inside him waiting for one last battle. But he’s not fully retired: he might tell Geneva to get lost because he’s too busy ‘enjoying’ retirement, but he still has his uniform and his revolver and perks up greatly when he hears the Doctor’s name mentioned. In the original second draft the battlefield isn’t so much between UNIT soldiers and the aliens of the round table but between his two characters: the retired soldier whose done his duty and wants a stable but happy life and the man who never grew old and has been restless without the sense of adventure in his life. It’s much more like Amy’s character arc in series 4-6: is she better off as a domesticated wife with extras and various responsibilities as an adult or travelling in the Tardis as a big kid? The contrast with the Doctor, whose never had to retire or grow old and who keeps changing his face and regenerating every time he gets close to getting old, would have made the contrast between the two even more striking. And then in this second draft. The Brigadier pays for his bloodlust and refusal to give up his old ways even after they gave him by dying, in one last heroic sacrifice to save the Doctor’s life. Courtney was up for it (he sensed this might be his last appearance in a show the BBC seemed to be trying to kill) and everyone was keen to make this a great last battle, but then JNT got cold feet about the backlash of killing off a beloved character and the whole gist of the story got toned down.
That’s a real shame. Not just because what we got in the foreground instead is a lot of silly medieval imagery and that daft sub-plot about the Doctor being Merlin from the future/parallel world (now we’ve had the biregeneration it’s much much easier to make sense of this plotline: it must be another 7th Doctor who woke up in the San Francisco morgue in 1999 and had their brain scrambled by the cold, setting off to have all-new adventures or maybe one of the others who came later?) But because the bits of the plot left in by that change are the best things here. There’s the constant theme of archaeology, of digging up a past that’s best left buried in a series that’s always worked best when it’s looked forward not back, of how what’s left behind in the ground or in memories is a pale shadow of what it once was. No one personifies that more than The Brigadier was always old school, even in the 1970s (or whenever the hell the UNIT stories are set, a confusion they keep going in this story: note that beer costs £5 in whatever year this is and doesn’t even cost that now). But now he has to cope with seeing his replacement is a black woman who has very different ‘modern’ ideas to him. You can feel his stiff upper lip wobble, even though he’s too much of a gentleman (and too open-minded after his run-in with the Doctor) to say anything (I bet his parallel world self from the ‘Inferno’ world would have been furious, though, if their Professor Stahlmann hadn’t blown them all up first). His bust–up comes with Ace whose everything he isn’t: young, undisciplined, bolshie, a woman who knows her own mind and I not only happy to flout authority but considers it the most important thing she could be doing. A lot of the best scenes of this story are Nicholas Courtney and Sophie Aldred squaring off against each other, before coming to the inevitable conclusion that they have a lot more similarities than differences; they both love an adventurous life, are both courageous to an extreme and both would give up their lives for the Doctor in a heartbeat. The real crux of this story isn’t anything to do with Excalibur or Camelot, it’s the moment the Brigadier retires (again) praising Ace that he knows now that the Doctor is in safe hands, having also found common ground with Brigadier Bambera and returned to prune his roses. Even if the story is crying out for that sacrifice, it’s still a strong ending for one of Who’s most beloved characters (give or take a very final appearance in The Sarah Jane Adventures which was set to become a regular role before the actor grew too ill and a truly wretched one where his corpse turns into a Cybermen and makes another last sacrifice in ‘Death In Heaven’).
Elsewhere ‘Battlefield’ is, well, it’s different that’s for sure (even if, again, it borrows heavily from Quatermass: the writer’s jokey working title was ‘Quatermass and the Lake’). This story feels the closest Dr Who ever came to putting one of its comic strips on TV (note that I wrote this when ‘The Star Beast’ was just a rumour!) perhaps no surprise that Marvel comic strips were one of the influences Cartmel and Aaronovitch bonded over, during informal writing sessions in the script editor’s back garden (there’s an X-Men series called ‘Excalibur’ that’s basically the super heroes as UNIT, defending a present-day Earth invaded by mythological creatures from yesteryear). Comics don’t care as much for reality or canonology by and large, they just want to tell a bright bold colourful and often impossible story and that’s what this one does, based on a far-fetched premise (the Doctor is Merlin?) told in big dramatic set pieces and epic battles that’s too bold to ever have worked fully on TV with a BBC budget (you can tell that this story is a sort of folklore memory of UNIT rather than based on one of the actual UNIT stories themselves, back in the days when there were only a few Who videos on sale to the public, because none of them looked anything like this except in memory or in novelisations). Yet this is also one of those rare Dr Whos where it doesn’t matter so much how nonsensical the plot is because it’s not trying to be realistic. This is the ‘near’ future, where the Doctor carries strange alien coins to pay for his drinks, where people dressed in armour carry swords and where the only ‘root’ to normality the entire story is the Doctor planting flowers. Indeed, when this story does start trying to be at least vaguely realistic (in a number of half-hearted battle sequences) it comes the most unstuck. ‘Battlefield’ is meant to be a sort of crazy dream, where UNIT is now so old it’s become a sort of myth itself told as a legend rather than a bit of continuity.
Not least because it’s a story that’s less black and white than usual, with everyone trying to do what they think is right and getting on each other’s toes by accident not design. The soldiers follow orders, on both sides of the magical realm even though nobody really knows what’s going on (even the Doctor this week, who falls into his own booby-trap at one stage). Note, though, that the people who get on best in this story are those who adapt to the situation. The Brigadier has respect for his replacement not because he becomes any more used to her but because she does what he used to do – listen then make a decision based on the best thing for everybody. Ace is at her best when both working off her own initiative and listening to the warnings of the Doctor. Even Morgaine isn’t your 100% villain: she pays for her drink in the pub with a rare moment of kindness that utterly makes the character, restoring the pub landlord’s blind wife’s sight. As for the Doctor, he’s the way he always used to be, in the middle, sympathising with both sides the way he always used to, UNIT’s conscience more than their scientific advisor seeing things from a bigger perspective. Even The Destroyer is just doing what gigantic creatures of incredible natural powers are born to do, nothing personal planet Earth. If there’s anyone you can’t quite trust or pin down its the Doctor, even though we’ve known him so well or for so long an idea that works really well and breathes new life into Who’s final year. Mostly, though, UNIT don’t belong in the world as it is in 1989 because we’re not in that sort of a world anymore of point-and-shoot to solve all our problems. You can’t have a normal everyday UNIT story in 1989 Who any more than Hartnell would have lasted more than 5 minutes stuck on earth with only the Brigadier for company. The world has moved on. Even if some of the people in it haven’t.
And even if some of the people haven’t moved on to what they will be yet and what they will be comes a surprise. Though they’ve played it up before it’s this story where the ‘Cartmel Masterplan’ of gradually revealing more about the Doctor’s origins most take flight: Sylvester McCoy is mercurial throughout, switching allegiances at the drop of an umbrella and playing for bigger stakes than anyone else can see. He’s come a long way from the clown of his first year and really comes into his own across this story, playing the part in a way no one envisioned when he first got the part, least of all himself based on his fairground background, but which suits him to a tee. As with ‘Remembrance’ Aaronovitch really gets the 7th Doctor better than most: he’s elusive, evasive and distant, yet also warm-hearted and brave, visibly confused for most of this story but never allowing himself to lose control. Ancelyn, meanwhile, gets forgotten but he’s an intriguing character, a rare character (a first character?) who knows more about the Doctor than he himself does (something tells me Steven Moffat was a big fan of this story as he borrows from its fairytale feel and idea that a future Doctor can leave his younger self clues heavily during his time as showrunner!) There are no less than four really strong female characters walking round too, with four very different takes on women’s lib unusual for a story that’s otherwise so macho and army-heavy (so much so that JNT joked about changing one of them into a man!) None more so than Bambera, the kind of tough streetwise no nonsense but fair 1990s career woman whose as suspicious of The Brig’s very 1970s attitudes as he is of hers. She’s cold and harsh and has become masculine to compete in a man’s world. Then there’s Morgaine, a timeless being who really isn’t fair at all and makes men quake back in her century, err whenever that is (Jean Marsh plays her as Cruella De Vil with armour, a villainess whose so used to getting her own way it hasn’t even occurred to her someone might say no to her). Then there’s Ace, streetwise, streetsmart, so different to the companions of old (just check out the contrast of her using Liz Shaw’s old UNIT pass in the first episode where she ‘pretends’ to ask the sort of questions her predecessor did and quickly ends up in a discussion about blowing things up, blowing their cover at the same time). Back in the 1970s, as strong as many of the companions were, the 3rd Doctor saw it as his duty to keep an eye on them and rescue them as a matter of course; for Ace protecting the Doctor is her ‘job’ in these adventures, getting on with the destruction while her beloved professor does the thinking. And then there’s Shou Yuing who gets roped into this story after sharing drinks and a giggle with Ace down the pub: she’s a woman to Ace’s teenage girl, less triggered, more adult (she has alcohol while Ace is on lemonade), standing up to everything that comes her way with bravery of her own but without the same love of destruction and making people scared of her. She doesn’t need to be tough or masculine or scary. A lot of fans ask why she’s even there, given that even the writer admitted he had one too many characters to juggle in this story, but I for one am glad she is: she’s where every other female character else in this story wants to be, comfortable in her own skin instead of looking over her shoulder the whole time. Had she ended up on the Tardis in some parallel dimension, as the calmer level-headed Nyssa to Ace’s boisterous Tegan, I’d have been more than happy with that. Contrast all this with Doris, whose the archetypical prim and proper ‘silent generation’ wife, fussing over her husband and disagreeing with him but not willing to stand up to him and supporting him wherever.
There’s another, all too brief sub-plot too, about nuclear missiles, making this Dr Who’s last in a long long line of anti-Cold war stories. The production team weren’t to know that Communism was on its last legs and the Berlin would fall less than a month after this story went out, so we have one last great bit of riffing about how a stupid it is for two superpowers to be in a stalemate holding weapons that can destroy the earth over each other. Especially in a story where magic people from another land can just swan in and abuse them, with a destroyer who turns up at the end who can destroy everything without such desperate measures. The nuclear missiles are painted as a relic from a distant past that humanity shouldn’t have in this day and age, as archaic and out of touch as the Brigadier.
Of course ‘Battlefield’ is mostly remembered for a scene that was a bit too real for comfort. There’s a cliffhanger at the end of episode two where Ace has walked into a booby-trap and finds herself trapped inside a glass tank when water fills inside. During recording the glass buckled and Sylvester McCoy (who was nearest) saw it and screamed at the stagehands to pull her up before it cracked and exploded, before urging the cast and crew to leg it to safety (this being a typical TV recording studio there was no end of cables on the floor; that’s genuine footage of this you can see in the story, of Sophie Aldred being hauled up by her armpits, because they weren’t going to risk this take again). It turns out that it was a bit of a miscommunication between the production office and the contractors hired to build the tank: they hadn’t known that it was actually going to be filled with so much water and hadn’t made the glass strong enough for the extra weight; for years this clip was used in BBC training videos about ‘what not to do’ in scenes involving water and cables. It could have been nasty all round; luckily no one was hurt. How perfect that it should be in this show that the Doctor becomes a ‘hero’ for real (although I guess it would have been even more fitting if it was Nicholas Courtney – who wasn’t in this scene).
That’s a near calamity in a story that otherwise falls just the wrong side of it. There’s just too much going on in a plot that seems silly until you dig deep (like all good archaeologists) and has too many characters running round doing ‘magical’ and unlikely things. And yet, underneath, there’s treasure, with this story only a re-write or too from greatness rather than one that’s out-and-out hopeless. There’s an altogether too much of a copout ending too: Morgaine is effectively given a life sentence in prison: erm, how’s that going to work exactly? She’s practically immortal! The meek way she just gives in to it suggests that, like The master, she’s already plotting her escape and yet The Doctor lets her, most odd. There are just too many things like this that get in the way to let this story soar. Had these characters properly met in battle, had Morgaine had more of a showdown with The Doctor, had there been any true explanation as to what was going on in the days of King Arthur beyond a scifi-bow and Excalibur, had everyone had more faith in The Destroyer than hiding it away at the end for a few minutes where traditionally only the worst Dr Who monsters go, had the Brigadier sacrificed himself for the Doctor and asked Ace to look after him then this could have been one of the best things Dr Who ever ever did, with real people facing real obstacles in a supernatural setting that shows how mysterious the universe is beyond the everyday. Especially when tied in with the bits this story gets oh so right: the Brigadier being the same in a changed world where even his best friend has a new face and us surrounding himself with a different sort of companion, where time distorts the truth into myths and legends so they’re easier to deal with than the harsh and disappointing realities of life, that we’re seeing the aftermath of a battle that’s often the cause of more hurt and suffering than the battle itself. Not to mention that fine cast with Nicholas Courtney, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred all as great as ever and Jean Marsh gamely trying to be despite the lines she’s been given to say. This is a much much much better send off for the brigadier than ‘Mawdryn Undead’ or ‘the Five Doctors’ would have been, as he gets a lot of screentime and sounds much more like his old self, even if this is actually one of the worst stories he actually appeared in all the other ways (‘Mawdryn’ is just a tad lower at #198 in my ranking, otherwise it’s ‘Claws Of Axos’ at #152). Alas when the war is over and the final toll is taken ‘Battlefield’ is a list of good points that just miss, a plot that doesn’t quite meet up and weakened by the pantomime aspects that never should have been allowed in, a battle if you will between everything that was good and evil in the series in 1989. No ‘Battlefield’ doesn’t quite work, but the emphasis there is on the word ‘quite’ not the ‘no’ and, honestly, compared to where we were even two seasons ago that’s a huge step forward. The final season of ‘classic’ Who will only get better from here too…
POSITIVES + The Destroyer Of Worlds mask is one of the best of the pre-CGI era, a triumph for the prosthetics department and a rare Dr Who monster that comes in a shade of blue (traditionally the colour that was hardest to do in the ‘old’ days when it was the colour that was easiest to mask out using the colour-separation-overlay technique common from the 1970s up until the mid 1990s that swapped one ‘picture’ for elements of another. The destroyer was immune to this purely because it was an actor wearing a mask without any other technical jiggery-pokery. It’s not just how it looks though but how it acts: unlike some other aliens that don’t quite cut the mustard in the 1980s this one really does feel like an all-powerful creation that can destroy humanity without a single thought. Even if he doesn’t actually do all that much on screen, it feels as if he can do anything and it deserves more than the few minutes of screen-time we get. It’s almost as if the production team just assumed they were going to get a shoddy monster and decided to hide it away before finding out how great it looked.
NEGATIVES - I could have done without the comedy bits in merrie old England, where Ancelyn doesn’t quite understand Morgaine’s plans or the bits in modern day England when Ancelyn is scared by all the changes in humanity since. In fact, why is Ancelyn there at all? Morgaine’s totally the sort of person to talk about her plans out loud to the ether, she doesn’t need a companion. The Doctor wins in this story mostly because he’s surrounded by people like Ace and the Brig and Shou who are prepared to give their lives to defeat evil. Morgaine has even greater powers than the Doctor but the best henchman she can come up with is a comedy sidekick who doesn’t quite believe in her powers? If you’ve ever seen The Gummi Bears (which started the year before this show was on air and might have been an inspiration, of sorts – weirder things have happened) and which is also set in a mystical Britain that’s as near as close to it as King Arthur’s time as Disney could get away with, then you’ll never see this pair again without thinking of Duke Igthorn and Toady. This would make the Doctor a combination of reluctant grumpy action hero Gruffy and absent-minded mystical Zummy, which is as close a description of the 7th Doctor as I’ve ever seen. Ace is clearly Cubby, the child who wants to all the dangerous things her elders are up to and Shou is a good match for preening teenage bear Sunny, though that leaves the two Brigadiers as Tummy and Grammy and though I’d have fun debating which one is which even I can’t quite make that work.
BEST QUOTES: ‘The point of archaeology is to carefully discover the past – not disintegrate it!’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS:
Brigadier Bambera makes her only other Who appearance in the ‘New Adventures’
novel ‘Head Games’ (1995) by Steve Lyons, when she helps the 7th
Doctor defeat an even more unlikely foe,
Jason, the former Master in ‘The Land Of Fiction’ who can conjure up
imaginary armies at will. And she thought she was having a bad day in
‘Battlefield’!
Confusingly the Doctor meets Merlin twice in the comic strips ‘The
Neutron Knights’ (1981) and ‘The Tides Of Time’ (1982) but on neither occasion
do they give any hint that they’re his future self as per this story!
Previous ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ next ‘Ghost Light’
(Series 7, Dr 11 with Clara, 4/5/2013, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Mark Gatiss, director: Saul Metzstein)
Rank: 176
In an emoji: 🟥
'I can deduce without leaving my armchair that Mrs Sweetville is not a kind and passive charity goer at all but has been taken over by a red leech native to another planet that is determined to take over the planet via a rocket ship disguised as a tower. It's elementary, my dear Watson'.
'Good Lord Holmes, what gave it away? Was it her shifty eyes, her impenetrable gaze or the fact that she kept her daughter locked up and scared?'
'Gracious no, I looked it up in the Radio Times. Plus red leeches are taking over the world - there's one crawling up your leg right now old chap! Now for the next case: The Karvanista of the Baskervilles'
First up, a joke to liven up anyone watching what’s rather a grim story: What’s black and white and red all over? A version of this story from the 1960s when the Doctor becomes poisoned with the juices of a red leech!
There was a feeling, by the end of Matt Smith’s run, that the creative spark that made the series so inventive was running a tiny bit low and the backlash to the occasionally incomprehensible storylines of series six meant that all the stories were seeming a little bit simple and similar, following the same formula where the Doctor loses a companion, gets emotional, rescues them from certain death and finds a bigger mystery at the heart of it all when detecting who the baddy is. Dr Who had done well to stay out of a formula or a rut like the ‘base under siege’ or ‘hammer horror’ years of the past since the comeback of 2005 and remaining a series where the only thing you could expect was the unexpected, but suddenly after the highs of the 50th anniversary year people just weren’t talking about this show anymore and if you missed one story, well, never mind, it was probably only a little like last week. ‘The Crimson Horror’, though, stands out in amongst a run of these sort of stories like a, well, red faced leech and shows just how inventive even the less creative eras of this show can be.
Originally Steven Moffat came up with this story for himself, wanting to further explore the mystery of who Clara is by taking her back to the scene of her second appearance and the Doctor not being any the wiser as to who she is, while giving more screen-time to the ‘Paternoster Gang’ of Silurian Madame Vastra, human Jenny and Sontaron Strax solving problems in Victorian London just like Sherlock Holmes. Only, ironically, having two series on the go at once (the other being the modern updated version of ‘Sherlock’) meant that Moffat was falling behind the deadline he’d set for himself and problems trying to get the tone of the all-important Christmas special (‘The Snowmen’) right meant that he reluctantly handed this to his friend and Sherlock co-creator mark Gatiss to write. Initially Gatiss pitched a story that would have Sherlock author Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle turn up as the latest ‘celebrity historical’ character, Gatiss poking gentle fun at their other series and finally writing for the Victorian London settings of the books (something he ended up doing for my favourite Sherlock story ‘The Abominable Bride’, a 2016 Christmas special that really does have the familiar characters back in Victorian London, albeit only imaginary ones and only for an episode). It sounds like fun, it worked out OK when Star Trek did it and if anybody was going to put one of our greatest authors on screen faithfully its these two, some of his biggest fans, although I’m probably only saying that now - to be fair we were a bit Sherlocked out in 2013 if I remember. Only that story wasn’t working: Conan-Doyle kept being shunted out to the edges of the action more and more until he was barely in it. Gatiss admired Doyle too much to have him in the ‘Dr Watson’ role always asking the questions too, so sat down to have a re-think. Ditching the Sherlock angle altogether he read a book on Victorian workers and was struck by the idea of ‘phossy jaw’, the illness suffered by matchstick girls who worked long hours in factories making matchsticks using phosphorous, a chemical that was known to dissolve the skin over constant use. It was exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to a horror fan with a political conscience (the poor girls were usually sacked by their employers for looking unseemly, despite wrecking their health for their work) and started writing a script that was more about the political conscience of the age that left people to suffer and die horribly for capitalism. Only, hard as he tried, the idea wouldn’t fit into a Dr Who format: it was much more like a Sherlock one, while the idea of characters suffering pain was too gruesome for Dr Who (at least until Moffat ups the ante later in stories like ‘Dark Water’ and ‘World Enough and Time’). Abandoning yet another draft, Gatiss then had a bash at combining both.
Now, one of the many things the Sherlock phenomena created was the idea of ‘fan fiction’. In the Sherlock books Dr Watson was forever dropping the names and brief details of other cases into his introductions, to help sell the illusion that the detective had many many cases in between the ones that were written down and printed in ‘The Strand’. Many Sherlock writers official and unofficial have had a bash, including Gatiss himself in his and Moffat’s series. Leafing through the Sherlock short story ‘The Golden Pince-Nez’ from 1904 he was struck by Dr Watson mentioning ‘the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby the banker’ (that’s it, that’s the entire entry) and was struck by how much this sounded like an imaginative ‘Who’ story rather than a factual plausible ‘Sherlock’ one. With despicable factory conditions still in mind Gatiss wrote a story about a red leech from primeval times that had latched onto a callous Victorian factory owner as the absolute worst person he could have found: they were the absolute person for the alien to find, he figured, if they were rich enough to be one of those business empires that crated whole towns for their workers that could then be cut off from the outside world, places like Bournville (chocolate) Port Sunlight (soap) or Saltaire (textiles – there’s even a street named after the boss’ daughter Ada) where employees lives in the shadow of their workplace. Gatiss then bounced Mrs Guillyflower over from his other draft, putting her in charge of a matchstick factory (but dropping the phossy jaw element) and giving her a daughter who was blind to better show the callous way that the Victorians treated the sick. And rather than have Conan Doyle investigate Dr Who or the Doctor investigate a Sherlock Holmes story he brought the paternoster Gang to the fore, looking at this story through their eyes as a case to solve, delaying the Doctor’s entrance till fourteen minutes through the story (which I think is a record, the special cases of ‘Blink’ and ‘Love and Monsters’ aside) and easing the workload for Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman into the bargain. Notably, too, the setting for this story is 1893, a date in the Sherlock chronology when the great detective has apparently fallen to his detah in the Reichenback falls before public demand and money problems meant Conan-Doyle resurrected him a decade or so later – equally you think for a lot of this story that the Doctor has snuffed it (again).
The result is a story that’s pretty much unique, especially in the way the Doctor and Clara’s half of the story are only told in flashback, the story starting after they are already in trouble. Generally Dr Who-lite episodes like ‘Blink’ or ‘Turn Left’ are very much about the Doctor even when he’s not there, but here it isn’t the Doctor or even his companion taking the lead but a giant alien Lizard, her lesbian Human maid and a potato-headed warmonger. This is very much Madame Vastra’s show in which the Doctor ends up being a bit player and Nerve McIntosh is never better, owning the screen despite being behind a lizard mask – so much so that it’s almost a shame when the story reverts to being more of a Doctory story in the second half, the gang having nothing to do once they’ve got the Doctor and Clara out of trouble (how much better this story might have been had she stayed the focus with the Doctor flitting in and out). This story, which deep down is about how much people need each other, is the right one to try this sort of ‘buddy cop’ thing with. Having the Doctor so ill, red and unable to speak (the most incapacitated we’ve ever seen him, give or take pos-regenerational trauma and the odd coma) really adds to the horror and stakes of this story, although at the same time the Doctor is acting very un-characteristically dumb. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Doctor outwitted by his companions by any means but notably it happens twice in this story which is uncharacteristic to say the least: Jenny avoids the traps the Doctor falls into when he’s poisoned by a prehistoric red leech (did she put it in the jammie dodgers?) and later it’s Clara who points out that Mrs Gillyflower’s ‘rocket ship’ might have something to do with the chimney that isn’t breathing smoke. Ooh, is his face red! Oh wait…it is. We’re used to this from other Doctors (the references to Tegan, the ‘stroppy Australian’ mentioned in the opening scene and the ‘Brave Heart’ line make me wonder if Gatiss has been watching a lot of Peter Davison era stories lately) but not generally the 11th, who usually has all the answers and is never usually the victim like this. Even so, giving more room to the incidental characters is a clever one and most of the best moments come in the first half between Vastra, Strax and particularly jenny, who gets more screen-time than before or since as she breaks into the ‘Sweet’ factory.
The mystery centres around a utopian charity run by a supposedly benevolent mother and daughter team who do so much for good purposes – not your natural baddies, though we already sense that things are not what they seem. Then (spoilers) in one of the better twists of the modern series, the ‘monster’ we keep being warned about whose being isolated for everyone’s safety turns out to be…The Doctor. Like many a story in this era it revolves around a mystery much closer to home: it’s propelled by an image of a dying man retained in their retina (like the old gypsy legend which the Doctor himself says is fact during ‘The Ark In Space’ when it’s a vision of a giant wasp…don’t ask) only its an image of the Doctor. Or is it? We at home have been burned before. They can’t possibly kill the Doctor off this time either so it must be a trick like series 6 all over again: you’re meant to be a sleuth yourself as you work out if he’s a doppelganger, a Teselecta robot, a Zygon shapeshifter, an Auton replica or something else. Instead the twist is that there is no twist: he really has been left for dead. That’s possibly the best use of a mystery the whole Moffat era, because it’s one that isn’t playing games with us and subverts what we expect, while it still works on re-watches after you know what’s happened (because Gatiss is a bit better at letting us fill in the gaps instead of telling us stuff). Less interesting is the side-plot of who Clara is, again: the Doctor deliberately takes Clara to Victorian London (where she ‘died’) to see if she gives anything away (which – spoilers – of course she doesn’t because it’s only events in ‘Name Of the Doctor’ that ‘creates’ her other splintered selves). Only the Doctor gets it wrong – because of course he does - and ends up in Yorkshire, making this the first time the Doctor’s been oop North for a while (a short stay in a Cumbrian monastery aside). Weirdly the Doctor never explains to his friends that Clara apparently isn’t the person they all saw die at the end of ‘The Snowman’ – and you’d have thought a master sleuth like Vastra would have noticed that this Clara is way too 21st century in her poise, character and speech.
More than that, though, this is a personal story about generational trauma and the very Dr Who theme of how our past present and future are all very much intertwined, so that hardships caused to people make them in turn act out and hurt the people around them(the working title, which they should have kept, was ‘Mother’s Ruin’). Mrs Gillyflower has a daughter, Ada, that she doesn’t know how to care for – so, it’s hinted, because nobody knew how to care for her. Ada’s (now dead) father told her that she had a ‘black heart’ while her mother uses her for experiments with the red leech before having her shut away for being blind and a ‘disgrace’ to her. The red leech, Mr Sweet, is in many ways the stepdad from hell: he ingratiates himself into a broken family, poisons the mum with red leech-juice, blinds the daughter and then gaslights everyone around her. She’s become blinded to the truth, made to feel it’s all normal: the key scene of this story is when she screams ‘die you freaks!’ to Ada, the Doctor, Clara and co, even though she’s the one with a red alien leech hanging off her neck. The great irony of this story is that only Ada can see the ‘truth’ (even the Doctor can’t see everything or he wouldn’t have been turned red) and she’s the one whose blind: if it wasn’t for her kindness in saving the Doctor, when she noticed he was still alive, then everyone in this story would be doomed. It’s when she helps the Doctor (portrayed on screen as a ‘relationship with a man’, like a Victorian maid from a book), someone who could potentially puncture the little world of illusion Mrs Gillyflower’s created for herself, that mum loses it totally. As ever with Dr Who it’s good to be kind – kindness sets you free, often more times than merely being brave or being right.
The leech also works as a more symbolic gesture too though, the shadow side of people’s natures that makes them go against their true selves: the more the leech - the love of greed and power – attaches itself to Mrs Gillyflower the more harsh and cruel she becomes. For the most part Ada is subservient, despite everything done to her, because daughters were supposed to be to parents back then (a running joke with the Paternoster Gang is how people react more to the idea of two strong female characters breaking social conventions than the fact she’s an alien) and you really cheer her on when she fights back at the end, smashing the leech with her cane. Ada, though, doesn’t look for revenge and isn’t interested in the family riches: she tells the Doctor at the end about wanting to move on instead. An extra frisson in tis comes from the fact that the actresses playing these two parts are mother and daughter in real life: Mark Gatiss was a family friend of Diana Rigg and was appearing in a play ‘The Recruiting Officer’ with her daughter Rachael Stirling, who was already part of the Big Finish Who family (she appeared in what’s actually a very similar story all round, the 4th Doctor tale ‘The Trail Of The White Worm’ about the emaciated master from ‘The Deadly Assassin’ stealing a legendary sentient alien worm from Roman times that’s meant to have great healing properties- yep it’s one of those Big Finish stories…This is how he ends up as the Melkur in ‘Keeper Of Traken’ incidentally. Rachael plays the worm!) Gatiss asked if they’d ever acted together and if they’d liked to. They hadn’t, Rigg commenting how much they’d like to and how much she’d enjoy the chance to be a baddy so mark wrote the story with both of them in mind. Luckily their relationship in real life was really close and Rigg had great fun delivering the line ‘my daughter is of no consequence’ while she listened round the corner!
The result is a story that has a lot of good points. Bute in Caerphilly, which was turned into Sweetville, is exactly what the script needs: creepy Victoriana that looks lgeitime as both a place built by an eccentric millionaire to wow his workers into submission and a place where creepy things could happen at any moment. The Paternoster Row gang are always good fun and at their best here with so much extra screen time, Silurian common sense and Sontaron bravery and Human impetuousness meeting each other head on while the Human ends up doing most of the actual work. Much like I suspect things would be in real life if Earth was on the intergalactic stage. The sheer bravery and surprise of keeping the Doctor out of his own story is a worthy try to do something a bit different too. The backdrop is creepy, Diana Rigg does her best to be scary in a role clearly inspired by Jimmy Saville, then in the news a lot (a bad person driven to do evil things who covered it up with good work and the help of important people who wanted to be associated with such charitable causes) and the twist (when she tries to kill her daughter – not in real life, mind, her character) is suitably nasty, but there’s something about this story that doesn’t feel ‘real’ so the scares never quite sears its way into the brain the most horrible DW moments do. Mr Sweetville, the name given to the red leech, really isn't that interesting even though red is a nice underused colour for a Who monster (there's been a definite lack over the years - even the Ice Warriors from the 'red planet' Mars aren't red). Matt Smith is great when he’s zombiefied (even if he recovers remarkably quickly) while Clara looks good in a bonnet (for some reason she really suits this period and it’s no wonder her first big job after leaving Who was as Queen Victoria in the under-rated ITV series ‘Victoria’ with her real-life boyfriend Tom Hughes an excellent Prince Albert; sadly the series was cancelled prematurely after they split up just as it was getting great: Sarah Jane Smith’s ‘son’ Luke, actor Tommy Knight, was in it too). There’s also one single great gag where Gatiss has the Doctor get directions from a street urchin named ‘Thomas Thomas’ – ‘Tomtom’ being a modern-day GPS company that gives directions digitally. The name ‘Mr Sweet’ was a more obscure joke, journalist Matthew Sweet being a good friend of Gatiss’ and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Victorian London which came in handy when the writer was coming up with ideas for ‘The Unquiet Dead’. Although it’s unrecorded what he thought about his friend turning him into an alien red leech!
What this story doesn’t have so much is that real sense of horror and foreboding we were promised in the trails, usually Gatiss’ hallmarks. Nothing in this story makes you scurry for the back of the sofa and the leech itself is cute and cuddly, a worrying first go at the P’ting, a threat only to the characters we see on screen – never to us. They try a bit too hard to suddenly turn Jenny into Emma Peel (Diana Rigg’s character from the worst TV show of the 1960s ‘The Avengers’) and while it’s great to see her get more screentime and actress Catrin Stewart is excellent that’s not who this character is at all. In the end it feels too disjointed to come alive, too dark and shadowy and unreal to be crimson and bloodlike and too cartoonlike to truly move you the way it should. The horror element and the ending both (where the factory turns out to be an alien ship) is ripped off wholesale from ‘State Of Decay’ (the single most Marl Gatiss Who story that he didn’t’ write) and the main plot is very much ‘The Green death’ but red and with leeches rather than giant maggots (the second single most Gatiss Who story he didn’t write), which I guess is fair game for a story that’s all about a leech in the first place but given how original Gatiss’ scripts generally are it’s still something of a copout. The very ending, meanwhile, where Clara’s charges work out that she travels through time is also deeply weird and all but forgotten one story later (though see ‘Nightmare In Silver’ for the real horror story about ‘Brats In Space’). There’s an awful lot of talking too, perhaps inevitably given that the Doctor is all tied up for half the story and Silurians and Sontarons aren’t exactly known for rushing around at high speed. Ultimately there’s also not really much of a mystery past the first quarter hour: the Doctor’s worked it out before we arrive (by his standards it’s hardly a four-pipe problem) and once he wakes up nobody really investigated anything, they just run around madly doing things which isn’t the same thing at all. Far from being one of those intricately plotted, meticulously logical, incredibly real Sherlock Holmes stories, in fact, this is a Victorian ‘penny dreadful’, high on shock value and eminently readable, but not great literature. There are no stand out moments, beyond Matt Smith looking like an oompaloompa and staggering around mute, no great standout lines and even the big showdown isn’t quite the emotional cathartic release it ought to be.
That doesn’t make it bad though: there’s a place in Who for sillier more cartoony stories and if this story is daft in so many ways at least it has fun being as outrageously daft as it can being Who at its most delightfully stupid in many ways. As a standalone episode it’s pretty great – it’s only the series-long arcs of who Clara is and the nonsense at the end leading into next week that really lets it down. The problem is more that lost potential, the nagging sense that there was even better more serious more horrible and more, well, angry story lurking at the heart of this one that never got out. That would have been a top-tier classic; what we have here is still very good, but it’s curio rather than a game-changer. Still, even flawed, it’s a brave try at something different they didn’t have to do which breaks up a repetitive season really well and like Mr Sweet you’ll find plenty to get your teeth into.
POSITIVES + Who is the Crimson Horror? Well, via an alien leech, it’s Matt Smith painted red! This scene, of him coming to life as a mute zombie after a failed ‘preservation’ technique went wrong because he wasn’t the ‘Human’ his captors thought he was, could have been the silliest moment of the episode. Instead it’s by far the creepiest. The Doctor – our Doctor – is nearly always invincible and seeing him this weak and feeble, his ability to talk his way out of anything reduced to grunts and groans, must have been how first time viewers felt seeing Tom Baker aged and torn apart in ‘The Leisure Hive’ or Jon Pertwee screaming in ‘Planet Of The Spiders’. If something can make even a hero this strong fallible what the hell can it do to humanity?! This episode has taken so many other chances and liberties, they can’t make this permanent or have him regenerate…can they? I mean, we also know that Smith is leaving pretty soon and in this sort of a rule-breaking story anything goes. Of course everything gets put right by the end this time, but there’s enough doubt the first time you watch this to make you wonder if they’re really going to pull something radical off.
NEGATIVES - The actual plot, as opposed to all the more interesting bits around it when everyone tries to work out what’s going on, which might be the silliest since the Daleks tried to take out the Earth’s core and replace it with a motor engine to pilot it round space. You see, there’s a red leech from prehistoric times that’s suddenly become sentient and attached itself to Diana Rigg, making her go a bit loopy. Soon everyone in the Sweetville utopian complex is affected and the red leech wants to preserve them in a forthcoming apocalypse when the rest of humanity is poisoned so they can do all the hard jobs the leech can’t do. Oh yeah and for good measure the complex is hiding a space rocket which doubles as a chimney where the big showdown takes place. Even though logically, with my Condan-Doyle hat on, the plan is hopeless: the Earth is a mighty big planet for one tiny leech and a handful of followers to run, these humans clearly chosen for close proximity rather than suitability given that they’re mostly charity cases (most of them don’t look as if they’ll last the night). Wouldn’t they be better off inhabiting, say, the whole of London rather than a bunch of poorly matchstick makers? And what does the leech want with Earth if they kill most of the Earthlings anyway? It’s not a very interesting planet and not exactly built with leeches in mind. Instead the plot feels like what it is: a lot of ‘aha!’ moments cobbled together into a script that papers over the cracks. Exactly what mystery novels used to be, inf act, before Conan Doyle came along and broke the mould. Maybe it’s better he wasn’t in this story or his ghost (and as a famous believer in mediums and spiritualism and life after death you bet if any ghost comes back from the dead it’s his) would have turned full poltergeist on Gatiss.
BEST QUOTE: Vastra: ‘I think I have seen these symptoms before, a long time ago’ Amos: ‘Oh aye? How long?’ Vastra: ‘About 65 million years’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Paternoster Gang’ have had their own Big Finish series since 2019, with two franchises containing four box sets with three stories each adventures told in four parts so far (so 32 stories in total) that are much like this one i.e. incomprehensible and downright weird, but also good fun, with the gang taking on cases like Sherlock Holmes. It’s also very clever the way famous Victorian inventions and new inventions are used in the plots, the same way that new concepts like satellites, the BT tower, computers, plastic surgery and the internet have been used in the series proper as something new and scary (the series starts with the motor car then moves on through photographs, mediums, Spring-Heeled Jack, circuses and Christmas).
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