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’ 

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