The Crimson Horror: Ranking - 176

 The Crimson Horror

(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. 

Manchester would be a more obvious setting for this sort of a story (it’s where Elizabeth Gaskell’s stories about the disparity between employers and employees are set) but a factory is a worthy setting all round, especially one of those creepy towns that were artificially constructed and treated workers like battery hens, keeping them all in one place next to their place of work. Though most people watching this story probably hadn’t been to one (unless, like the Doctor, they like gift shops) it fits with the ‘Paradise Towers’ theme of people being an afterthought for companies and there are lots of towns built in the middle of the 20th century primarily to get people into work quicker, all of which have the same artificial, melancholic, forgotten air about them, particularly after so many job losses in the 1980s meant a lot of these ‘last in first out’ workers got left behind . I live near one in ‘Skelmersdale’ which is the ‘overflow’ for housing Liverpool factory workers that’s falling apart from lack of care but there are plenty of others – Milton Keynes is the famous ‘London’ overflow one. Gatiss taps into the air of these places as being slightly unreal and not quite right. A factory where everyone is so desperate for a job they’ll do anything to look the other way also solves the perennial problem in Dr Who of why there isn’t an outcry when aliens arrive and start doing naughty things. Gatiss has a real feel for the Victorian era, a time so like our own in so many ways and so not in others and gets the hidden horrors and sheer misery and desperation of the poor, at a time when people have become disposable products and commodities, mixed with resilience and hope that means we were also at our most human. Like the best Dickens and his protégé Gaskell’s books you admire the sheer humanity of most of these people, especially those on the losing end of a cruel and inhumane tyrant and of all the Victorian settings in Who this one does the best job so far of understanding Victorian sensibilities instead of just being a place that’s like the 20th century with corsets. Better yet Gatiss bases Mrs Gillyflower’s callousness on a lot of real events that were in the news in 2013: this is the era when the Coalition government have been in power for three years and are still ‘dealing’ with the credit crunch with austerity measures (which, in actuality, meant cutting services and giving the money to their rich friends). One of these policies was an attempt to save on social care by housing disabled people in a single home and finding work for them to do: a policy that thankful got dropped after public outcry but not before it was seriously raised and budgeted. We were in an era, during a recession, when the Mrs Gillyflowers of this world were trying to find shortcuts to making money again even if it meant injuries to their workers and while I never heard about a company that had a boss married to a prehistoric red leech in this era, honestly it wouldn’t have surprised me either. Gatiss’ politics are usually spot on and surprisingly subtle given how barbed the rest of his scripts can be and this is one of his best. 

 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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