The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances: Ranking - 155

   The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances

(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 21-28/5/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Steven Moffat, director: James Hawes)

Rank: 155

'Are you my Mummy?' 'No, I work for Sutekh the Destroyer, I'm just a collection of bandages' 'Are you my Mummy?' 'No, I'm a Movellan, a robot with a Boney M haircut' 'Didn't we do this gag for Pyramids of Mars too?!' 'Who are you, my mummy?!?'

The revival of Dr Who in 2005 had gone better than we fans could ever have hoped in our wildest dreams, but the moment that I knew the series was a hit with the general public rather than us lot (and thus sustainable again longterm) was when I passed a school and heard half a playground all shouting the refrain from this story as one: ‘Are You My Mummy?’ The first half of series one was a big hit with cult scifi fanatics and curious lapsed fans watching it with their children, but there was something particular about this story that caught the public mood that made Dr Who a colossal hit again for the first time since the mid 1970s. The bigger question though is why: I mean, this isn’t a story set in 2005 but 1941, although that in itself adds a whole new toy to play with inside the Dr Who dressing up box and is perfect timing for a series broadcast on the anniversary of VE Day (‘The Curse Of Fenric’ got there first in 1989 of course, but most people had stopped watching by then), or is it the John Nathan-Turner style stunt casting that actually worked this time (blimey, Richard Wilson’s really good in a serious role – no wonder he got a lead role as the ‘Doctor’ style wizard Guyus in the under-rated BBC drama ‘Merlin’ shortly after), is it the introduction of Captain Jack (a flirty bisexual alien? That’s, like, proper modern that is!), the gloriously frightening ‘monster’ that causes a sea of human faces to ‘grow’ gas masks out of their mouths that’s the first time modern Who has been properly behind-the-sofa scary, or the sight of Billie Piper in a Union Jack t-shirt hanging from a barrage balloon? Or, my best guess, only the second cliffhanger of the revival and one which is right up there with the very very best, the ‘monster’ having converted half the supporting cast who all move in on the Doctor and Rose with no possible chance of escape. Having to wait a week to see what happened, in an age when everything else was becoming instant, meant everyone was talking about Who even if they’d somehow missed it the two months it was on before. Soon everyone was coming up with their own theories as to how they were going to get out of that one and for once (something that isn’t necessarily true about a lot of modern Who two-parters) the resolution is every bit as clever, creative and eccentric as befits a proper Dr Who episode (spoilers: What do you do when confronted with a half gas-mask, half child? You tell it to go to its room of course). Properly scary, properly nuts, properly doing things no other series could do, with a decent budget behind it this time: this was the moment when the Dr Who comeback went from being the surprise hit of the year to the TV success story of the 21st century so far and it’s the crest of a wave the series has been riding ever since. 

This story, the first ‘straight’ Who tale written by Steven Moffat six years after parody charity special ‘The Curse Of Fatal Death’, made the writer a hero with Whovians whose default setting were the hammer horror Phillip Hinchcliffe years with Tom Baker who liked their series to make them scurry behind the sofa. This story was so successful it made Moffat all but certain to be the next showrunner when Russell T hung up his typewriter (even if, *cough*, us ‘Press Gang’ fanatics already knew how great he was) despite being nothing like any of his future scripts for the series. That, perhaps, is because it’s actually one of Russell’s ideas, the showrunner having worked out already which stories slotted where in Who’s comeback year which, for all anybody making it knew, might be the only series they get to make. Moffat was his friend already from crossing paths around television centre and as soon as the series was fully commissioned for thirteen episodes Russell was emailing Moffat asking him to take part (there’s a sweet story that the first writers officially hired for the comeback series and keen Whovians all – Moffat, Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell and Robert Shearman - met up for a celebratory supper at the Chula Indian restaurant in London next to TV Centre to toast their success and messed around making up monsters based around the dishes being served; you might notice that ‘Chula’ is the name of the race whose ship causes all the trouble in this story). Russell wanted a story set in WW2 because it was just close enough to the then-present to be believable and just far enough to be exciting. He knew that most British children had come across enough about the war to know the basics, either from hearing their grandparents and great-grandparents talk about it or from school where it was a staple of the history curriculum in between the Romans and The Victorians on constant repeat. The war was also a time that Who had never properly explored given that, even in the 1970s, it was considered a bit too close to the real thing to end up being turned into ‘fiction’. Moffat himself hadn’t studied the war and knew little about it, so he set off to the Imperial war Museum for research, being struck by the children’s gas masks and how ‘wrong’ it seemed to have childhood innocence twisted into something so dark (including ones designed to look like Mickey Mouse that to modern eyes just look deformed and to modern eyes seem far more terrifying than anything Hitler does). It’s a quirk of his writing style that he also liked to write to music based on the period or style he’s writing about, which means that after becoming showrunner he’ll get very sick of Christmas carols, but for now spent several months with all the re-drafting going slightly bonkers with Glenn Miller on repeat, music which also crept into the script. Given that Moffat was, by 2005, best known for the romantic comedy series ‘Coupling’ (a sort of 21st century update of ‘Men Behaving Badly’ via ‘Friends’ – the former of which was produced by his own mother-in-law Beryl Vertue) Russell gave his friend the ‘romantic’ story, asking him to draw from the ‘living in the present, ships passing in the night’ theme of many a War film. Only Moffat was bored with writing romances and comedies and the Dr Whos he remembered from his past had all terrified him (almost all of Moffat’s childhood anecdotes begin with ‘this gave me nightmares…’ So he turned in a script very different to what Russell would have been expecting, full of apparent killings rather than kisses. 

Whether subconsciously not the war setting also continues a long running thread of the earliest Who stories that acted as a debate between parents and their hippie baby boomer children as to whether wars could ever be justified. Now, however, it’s a discussion between grandparents and children – and grandparents tend to be much more indulgent of their grandchildren’s views than their children’s. By now the collective trauma of the war has become another story to slot alongside the others in Britain’s long history rather than the deep wound that hadn’t healed by the time Terry Nation started picking at it with his Dalek Nazis. That’s this story’s biggest strength and its biggest weakness: if ever there was a time when Britain needed a Doctor to heal it then it was here and Dr Constantine fulfils that role before ‘our’ Doctor gets here. The ending gives a healing balm of salvation, Nancy’s relief at finding out that the Allies win the war and all these sacrifices actually mean something so the world can survive into the future is a huge moment I wish they’d made more of, on a par with Vincent Van Gogh finding out his work is loved after his death (‘Vincent and The Doctor’) but bigger, because it matters to everyone alive in 1941. A time when the world was in such upheaval that the ordinary became extraordinary and vice versa (a lot of the writers who worked on this series’ 1960s stories were war children who’d played in bomb sites and scavenged for food in derelict houses the way Nancy and her charges do here) and when alien things were dropping from the skies so often nobody would have spotted a spaceship, it’s the perfect place for Dr Who to do its thing. Had they done this story with the eye for detail and characters that the likes of David Whittaker did in the past this story would be an even bigger classic than it is. But this is the 21st century historical, when the past becomes another backdrop to have the same adventures in, where everything gets re-set at the end so nobody really feels anything lasting. There’s no death in this story, no danger except the scifi elements and you can tell I think that Moffat had no firsthand knowledge or much interest in the war, having to research it all on the job as it were. You actually get a much better idea of the war from watching ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ and Terry Nation’s phobias about a Nazi invasion of Britain than you do watching this story. And after forty odd years of waiting for a story like this, it’s a bit of a waste that it so quickly ends up just another runaround. 

For decades Who wouldn’t touch the war because they didn’t want to offend viewers who lived through it by being insensitive and because Hitler was a bigger monster than anything they could write. It was considered in fandom by the 1980s that once the show did the war that all bets would be off and there would be nowhere else to go (and that sort of happened two stories after ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ so they might have had a point). They don’t have that problem in 2005, but they do have a different one. The trouble with doing a setting like this as opposed to, say, previous Who historicals set around ‘The Crusade’ or ‘The Massacre Of St Bartholomew’s Eve’ is that the one thing the writers can guarantee everyone knows is the ending, that we won. The fact that this story was transmitted in between multiple documentaries celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of victory in Europe only gave extra spoilers away how things turned out. We’re no longer in an era when over half the people watching lived through this time and so remembered the doubt of the stability of the past being ripped away from you, the uncertainty of what was going to happen to you and your loved ones in the present and the fear that your side might lose the war and you might end up in a concentration camp while your children were ordered to speak in German. So WW2, despite being the single scariest place in Earth’s past that the Tardis could go in so many ways, is one of the most sanitised. We get sirens and air raids and children running round looking for food but there’s no reference to Anderson shelters, or people being terrified out of their wits, or bomb sites full of body parts, or Lord haw-haw going haw-haw about how Britain was going to lose, or all the opportunistic sex that was going on at a time people didn’t expect to live nine weeks never mind nine months. There isn’t even a proper blackout given that amount of lights that are on in this world, the only soldiers are standing around doing nothing except lock up trespassing teenage girls and the only mention of rationing is a sort of fudged reference to the rich geezer with all the extra food he isn’t entitled to. Compare this back to back with ‘Human Nature’, set on the ee of the First World War when everyone is terrified out of their mind at the future and even the humanised Doctor gives in to his libido because he thinks he has no future, and the differences are colossal: nobody is scared in this story of anything except a zombie boy in a gas mask. WW2 ends up looking cosier than our trip to the relatively stable 1950s in ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ or Victorian Cardiff. WW2 is by now a rose-tinted memory, a moment when we were fated to win, with all the uncertainty, doubt and terror of not knowing the future removed. Children can handle much more than adults seem to think they can: my introduction to WW2 came from the superlative Radio 4 series ‘Cat’s Whiskers’ (desperately in need of repeats or official releases) and the radio drama ‘When The Sirens Wailed’, where the only thing between children like me and certain death was Nicholas Courtney as a retired Colonel (some things never change!) Some Who historicals distort the truth but this one feels pretty accurate in one sense too: these people aren’t collaborators or killers, but they’re not heroes or warriors either. Instead we see them as what they in all likelihood were, scared children making do as best they could in difficult circumstances. In that sense it works. However, this was a great chance to make the past come alive for a whole new generation who only thought of it as a list of dates and take exams on, rather than something people like them actually lived through, and in that sense, in the long awaited first ‘proper’ WW2 story, this is a disappointment. 

 That said it is one of the scariest Who stories around for different reasons – ones that were all Moffat’s invention and not in the original outline at all. The ‘creature’ at the heart of it, whose part innocent little boy and part monster of unstoppable force, really tugs at the heart strings (and naming him ‘Jamie’ and having the Doctor run around after him while he gets into trouble, also brings back memories of 2nd Doctor stories!) Moffat had been a Who fan for long enough to know that monsters were scariest when they weren’t obviously men in suits and didn’t run but instead loomed, with blank faces you can’t read. Everyone in this world thinks they know how to defeat Hitler, by keeping a stiff upper lip, but you can’t keep one of those when your face is being bodily converted into a gas mask. Moffat may well have been scared by the Doctor’s own phobia, the gasmask man running around the matrix in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ and allegedly taken from his own greatest fears. Other monsters might want to blow us up but this one is only searching for its mummy. The memorable image of the gas mask, something so common in this period of time and yet so wrong, is very right for a ‘monster’, the ordinary of a time period that now seems extraordinary to us (no child should ever have to spend their childhood terrified of being gassed). You feel for Jamie, even as you’re afraid of him and the way that he can make everyone look like him. The terror and build up towards the end makes this one of Dr Who’s tensest horror stories because the Doctor doesn’t know how to solve it; tyrants are easy to confuse with greed and armies can be defeated, but a child looking for its mother with great powers is an unstoppable force. Rare for a ‘war’ story, that there is no ‘baddy’. The revelations keep coming in the last few minutes in a clever finale like, all the stories in this first year, avoid resolving things through guns or explosions or a wave of the sonic screwdriver: Jamie died in an explosion but some nanogene alien technology released by Captain Jack’s ship (maybe AI in a few years’ time) tried to recover him and make him ‘right’ along with other Humans killed in the war, only they failed to understand that the gas mask he was wearing wasn’t a part of the human anatomy and they’ve been getting it ‘wrong’; that Nancy isn’t Jamie’s sister but his mother, a fact so scandalous (yet plausible) in 1940s England that it was kept quiet; best of all, that in a series where the body count is usually so high and a war where we know it will be ‘everybody lives!’ (only Moffat could write a WW2 story where nobody dies!) In time all this will get overused, to diminishing returns. We’ll get a straight repeat of alien technology fixing things in ‘The Curse Of The Black Spot’ while Moffat’s phobia of death when he’s showrunner will get silly, to the point where even the people who can’t possibly get out of trouble survive. Here though, this once, it works: The Doctor’s sheer delight at having something go his way so soon after the time war when he lost everything, is infectious and the idea of saving not only a child but everyone he touched is delightful. No wonder this story was the talk of the playground. I’m still talking about it now. 

There is a neat half-theme here, too, about responsibility perfect for what’s effectively a war film where you hang on to little rules all the more – partly because disobeying them gets you killed and partly because it’s the last part of British civilisation Hitler can’t take away from you. The Doctor panics when he thinks he’s lost Rose in wartime Britain. He made a promise to her mother to keep her safe but she’s disappeared on is watch because they were too busy having fun and in WW2 having fun, taking your eyes off the skies, gets you killed. Nancy is the last line of responsibility to the orphans of London that no one else is looking after, becoming their surrogate mum despite having ditched her responsibilities to her own son (the hint, never fully played up in this story, is that Jamie would never have wandered outside had Nancy been giving him full attention and that’s partly why she’s as guilty as she is). Jack is a freelancer who has no responsibility to any ne or indeed anywhen, hopping about at random cutting deals on the side, but even he learns it by the end (Davies picks up on this in ‘Parting Of The Ways’ when Jack is asked to be brave a second time and says to the Doctor ‘I preferred it when I was a coward’). There are also references to the welfare state to come, the collective decision that enough was enough and the misbegottens damaged by the war needed someone to look after them, Briatin finally taking responsibility for its own. This story seeks to comfort all children scared and alone in war bunkers up and down the country – one of whom, of course, ended up writing for Dr who and inventing the Daleks. It’s a clever theme that allows this story to paper over the cracks and make the sub-plots of this story fit together better than most Who multi-stories with sub-plots. 

 This story is best remembered for one of them, the debut of Captain Jack who is actually a Russell character, though his brief page outline isn’t much like the version that ended up on screen (there’s a single word about Jack being ‘pansexual’ in a list of other details that for some reason Moffat seized on and ran with; I always find it fascinating how little Russell wrote for the first male character to have sex with other men, even though everyone used it as evidence of a ‘gay agenda’ that just wasn’t there). Originally he was an alien named ‘Jax’ until it was pointed out that three aliens wandering around 1940s London was a bit of a stretch and the series already had a ‘Jacks’ in Jackie. ‘Jack Harkness’ is one of Russell’s ‘good luck’ names and is to him what ‘Tarrant’ was to Terry Nation: a fall back name that sounded descriptive when you couldn’t think of any others. Davies found the name in a ‘Fantastic Four’ comic where she’s a witch in the Salem trials who livers forever (with no explanation as to why!) Russell then wrote in the ‘Harkness sisters’ in his 1993 children’s series ‘Century Falls’ (a very ‘Daemons’ like story about a God being raised from the dead in a sleepy English village) and Esme Harkness as a serving maid who falls for a wealthy aristocrat in his 1997 series ‘The Grand’, about a Manchester hotel in the gangster-riddled 1920s (which starred Paul McGann’s brother Mar in a role that seems born for Christopher Eccleston to play). Who story ‘The Mind Robber’ also features a ‘Jack Harkaway’, just for added Whovian points. Captain Jack will become a great character as soon as this series’ finale but here he’s just a smarmy git, too obviously an ‘American GI’ in space who acts like a heroic soldier but is really just a spiv. It’s a one-joke character who comes out of nowhere and takes a really strong episode into a whole other area that’s just not as well made or funny. Rose, a character whose best trait is getting on with any aliens from any time without being naive and still seeing through people’s real motivations very very quickly, falls for Jack like a complete sucker. If she really had been around in the 1940s she’d have ended up getting pregnant by the first GI Joe to land in Britain, with an endless supply of chewing gum, knicker elastic and stockings – and while that stereotype fits her mum to a tee it’s not our Rose at all, she’s usually really good at seeing through to the truth of things. Worse, Rose uses her frisson of romance to wind up the Doctor no end, even though one of the best features of this first series is how unbreakable the Doctor-companion bond is and how much they would do for each other; that’s not Rose either and it’s certainly not this hard-nosed, more cynical Doctor (who, in any other episode, would just tell her to grow up, not get involved with innuendos about sex and dancing). 

 The character still kinda works mostly because John Barrowman makes it work. This is, you could say, a perfect fit for him (not least because, while born in Glasgow he was brought up in Illinois before moving back to England in his twenties, hence the accent) and makes perfect sense if you’d seen him in anything else (I knew him from ‘The Movie Game’, a weird children’s quiz and by chance I also caught him in one of the better Andrew Lloyd-Webber musicals ‘Sunset Boulevard’ at the West End, both in the early 1990s – yes there aren’t many but that’s one – and you could tell from both parts that he was going to be a breakthrough star in something; the surprise was that it took another decade). For all the criticisms of his conduct flying around he’s a fine actor and future episodes will expand on Jack, giving him a weight and responsibility he doesn’t possess just yet (it’s weird, actually, how unlike his ‘Torchwood’ self he is in his first appearance: he’s a loner here not a boss, a conman rather than the moral compass by which everyone else works and the only mystery here is how he thought he could ever get away with what he’s been up to, not a truly shady past bordering on genocide. This Jack is a boy – that Jack is a man (and later Jack will be an impossibly old and wise figure that’s a face in a jar). . Yes he gets brought back from the dead in ‘Parting Of The Ways’, which is always going to make you rethink your life choices, but there’s nothing on screen that really demonstrates why there’s been such a colossal change). Alas for now the whole story seems to take a long nap midway through to accommodate this new character, even though he seems to be there mostly to save Rose from hanging off a zeppelin in a bombing raid when the Doctor’s busy elsewhere. 

Needless to say for a BBC historical drama production, it’s as close to flawless as telly gets. The location filming on Barry Island really makes the war come alive (it’s opposite the holiday camp used for location filming in ‘Delta and The Bannermen’. If you turned the camera round from the train tracks at the army encampment you would see it, it’s that close; funnily enough that story is the only previous adventure in which we see the Doctor ‘dance’- by which I mean using his feet, not the oddly juvenile euphemism for sex – what is it about Barry Island that makes people horny?!) Moffat isn’t quite as good as Davies at writing in characters who feel as if they’ve lived lives long before we met them and most of the incidental characters stay very much incidental in this story. Nancy, though, is well drawn: clearly based on the ‘adopted mum’ of ‘Oliver Twist’ by Charles Dickens down to the name (Moffat must have read the script or maybe even seen the rushes for ‘The Unquiet Dead’ – funnily enough Christopher Eccleston is best known to a younger generation of fans as Fagin in the children’s series ‘Dodger’, with an even more outrageous ‘Jewish’ accent than Ron Moody’s) she looks after the city’s orphaned homeless children partly out of love and partly out of guilt for having children so young and out of wedlock. It’s clever and Florence Hoath is well cast: you can tell Nancy has a secret she’s keeping close and she does seem as an actress much older than her character so the revelation makes sense but also it isn’t obvious enough for you to see it coming (though that’s not unusual: Lily in ‘The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe’ seems a decade too old and had me suspecting a similar twist first time round watching that story). You can also see the parallels between her and Rose who are of a similar age: this could easily have been Billie Piper had Mickey got a bit too touchy-feely one night in an era without condoms and we’ve already seen that, like Nancy, she was making do in an uncertain time in her life rather than in love with her soulmate. As for the Doctor, he too gets a parallel with Dr Constantine, whose lost everyone he ever cared for but still carries on trying to save people and put himself in danger because that’s his job. Richard Wilson was a revelation for many who only knew him as caricature Victor Meldrew in grumpy comedy ‘One Foot In The Grave’ and it’s a great example of a bit of Who casting that worked out all round: he was a big name who committed to the series early when the comeback series was still a gamble and few other star names were but it also gave him a chance to escape decades of typecasting that sent his career off in an entirely new direction. He’s badly underused though, apparently ‘dead’ for 44 of episode two’s forty five minutes and you have to say a lot of his character’s impact comes from the actor not the script. The lad playing Jamie’s voice, too, really rises to the occasion: initially the voice was the same as body actor Albert Valentine, but he was sweet rather than scary. After an aborted try with various actresses playing young Who’s sound editor Paul McFadden nominated the son of a friend of his, Noah Johnson, saying that when his lad’s friends were round they scared the bejesus out of him; Noah’s sweet and sour tones, right in the middle between innocence and creepiness, is exactly right.

As for the dialogue, it’s everything Moffat will ever do lumped together in a giant clash of styles: some bits are genuinely funny (Jack warns Rose she might get a bit dizzy but, not wanting to be outdone Rose quips ‘What about you? You’re not even in focus!’ before fainting), other jokes fall flatter than Cassandra (The lady who came into hospital with a missing leg to find it grown bag ‘There is a war on, is it possible you miscounted?!’, anything involving bananas). The scene with Rose hanging from a barrage balloon in the middle of the Blitz, somehow manages to be both simultaneously. Some lines are really good at sketching in character and others are tone deaf. They really haven’t got the tone of the series quite right yet: like Russell T Davies’ scripts this first comeback year Moffat is trying too hard to write for a family audience, so we get lots of innuendo and racy jokes together with slapstick fun with bananas and silly running up and down corridors (they solve this problem from the second year onwards by basically ignoring the children audience altogether, but for now there’s no ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ or ‘Torchwood’ to satisfy the different ends of the viewing spectrum so we get the two extremes squished together). The endless euphemisms about dancing and sex are the foundation of ‘Torchwood’ to come and aren’t any more palatable than they were in the spin-off series, not least because of what they do to the Doctor and Rose’s relationship, which has been romantic and sweet but from now on becomes sexually charged (Davies has written the 9th Doctor as a socially awkward hero who doesn’t have time for romance till Rose sweeps him off his feet just when he’s given up hope – not unlike his own life story, according to documentaries, when until realising he was gay he shied away from sex and stayed in front of the TV watching Dr Who and other childhood favourites, assuming that life wasn’t for him, until it was. Moffat, however, sees him as one of the geeky nerds who never get laid because they’re hopeless, who feature a lot in his shows: he’s Kenny from ‘Press Gang’, the sort of person people go to when they break up to feel better. Kenny, by the way, was as Moffat has since admitted him writing himself into his own series). As for Rose, she goes from besotted teen, who’d follow her much older and more experienced lover to the end of the Earth (and indeed does) and who would never disobey him because he’s her mentor even though she’s more than happy to tease him (it feels very like Billie Piper’s real-life relationship with Chris Evans at times) to someone who runs away when the Doctor’s back is turned to have independent ‘adventures of her own and flirt with strangers. 

 These characters don’t feel at all the way other writers made them across the first series. Davies commented later how the Moffat scripts were the ones he always left alone, while rewriting everyone else’s to keep the same ‘tone’ across a series. It seems odd, though, why he didn’t just tweak this one slightly to make the 9th Doctor and Rose more in line with how he saw them. This story relies a lot on the goodwill of previous stories that have made us care about these characters: come to this story cold and Rose is obnoxious and a right old stirrer, while the Doctor’s all over the shop, a control freak except when Rose is wrapping him under her little finger. What did Captain Jack to do everyone? To be fair to Moffat he had no stories he could sit down and watch when writing this story but it’s interesting that how different they are to the characters Moffat outlined to him: the damaged soul still trying to save the world and the ordinary teenage shop-girl who contained an essence of that spark that made him believe in life again (you could argue the same about the partnerships Moffat will invent, as its like 11th Doctor and Amy at times, while this is the reason the 12th Doctor and Clara pairing became too much to take for some sections of fandom; weirdly, though Moffat nailed the 10th Doctor and Rose in ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’, a story that finally made good o the brief to ‘write a romance’, and the 10th Doctor and Donna in ‘Silence In The Library’,. Interestingly both have the Doctor in a sort-of love triangle with another stranger who turns up to disrupt things).Had this been episode two or three it might have made sense, but it comes out of left-field: we’ve never seen Rose jealous even when the Doctor’s been knocking round with sexy Trees (no seriously: see ‘The End Of The World’) and we’ve never seen the Doctor that bothered. A lot of the episode’s problems too are down to how quickly times have moved on from 2005, which makes this story seem nowadays like as much of a relic as the black and white stories. We’re sick to the back teeth of war stories after so many decades of them Captain Jack is a walking innuendo machine whose part rescuer, part conman, part stalker and who hints at all sorts of non-consensual fun. In 2005 this made Jack out to be a slightly dangerous rebel who was a breath of fresh air in a series that was cancelled in 1989 partly because people had stopped seeing it as ‘edgy’; to modern eyes he looks like a predator. Even there, though, the scene where he’s in his ship, having been fooled into being the hero and fully expecting to die, is a very touching moment that points to the deeper soul lurking behind the charm. This story relies more than most, then, on its actors to get it out of trouble though: it might be significant that Piper and Eccleston missed the read through for ‘The Empty Child’ half of the story when shooting for ‘The Long Game’ over-ran and had to get stand-ins. Moffat fell into a great depression when he heard it, figuring his script didn’t work at all and was the worst thing he’d ever written, falling into a deep depression at how he’d wanted to write for Who all his life and thought he’d blown it; he felt that way all the way up to the final rushes when he got to see it properly and it turned out so much better than he feared. 

 That’s ‘The Empty Child’ all over: I can totally see why so many parts of itself lodged themselves in the national psyche as well as they did. This remains one of the scariest stories Who has ever done, with a much copied monster you feel sorry for, a historical setting filled with futuristic ideas that mixes the past present and future in a way that only Who can, a truly classic cliffhanger up there with the very best and it’s a really neatly written story without much padding where all scenes naturally lead into another, without the jump cuts and ignored plot revelations of future Moffat epics. At the same time, though, there are scenes that are unbearably twee, deeply unlikely, hugely silly and overtly sexual and out of place with everything else, all mingling together. It’s like a nanogene has come along and stuck parts of different series together without understanding the natural boundaries between them and why, say, children’s telly doesn’t belong next to racy movies. Ironically, for a story that keeps playing extracts from ‘In The Mood’, it just won’t pick one and stay with it. Looked at in the cold light of day, when Whovians are no longer so starved of our favourite show we gladly accepted oxygen from any source, it looks weirder than it ever did at the time. Only Steven Moffat could write an episode set during World War two and have it be the one where ‘everybody lives!’ (something that seemed cute and different at the time but is irritating after eight whole years of a showrunner who treated all stories like this one). There are plotholes galore: the child that dies is really looking for its big sister not its mummy and hasn’t got a clue that the two are one and the same, while the idea of the nanogenes fixing everything as an ‘airborne virus’ means that Rose, at least, should be susceptible to it even if the Doctor and Jack aren’t. There’s no reason at all why Jamie should have been granted so many special powers by the nanogenes: you’d think they’d be able to look at how the human brain works and realise our limitations as a species, which certainly don’t include ringing up people on phones that aren’t plugged in and making typewriters clack. By and large Who historicals to come go for the nitty gritty and try to tell it as it is, despite the fairytale way they often present the main guest celebrity; this story is different – there is no celebrity and instead the plight of a teenage mother in war-torn Britain is handled as realistically as can be, while the war itself is presented as a fairytale where no one gets hurt. That’s why Rose can hang from a barrage balloon in a Union Jack t-shirt in the middle of the blitz and not get shot at while every house in London seems to have its lights turned full on (I like to imagine a cut scene where warden Hodges from Dad’s Army has a breakdown shouting ‘pout that light out!’) 

 Parts of this story truly are brilliant. Other parts are awful. In short, I can see why so many fans consider it a masterpiece, even if for me it’s here in the middle of the list’s ‘very very good yet slightly flawed’ pile (which is, nevertheless high praise – this is the best TV series in all of time and space after all). On balance it still works, with enough good scenes to overcome the parts that it gets wrong, but it’s one of those stories that’s been surpassed by future ones that have done similar things better, held together better than it has any right to be with a lot of love, hope and that cliffhanger. Had they tried this in any other year but 2005 we’d have found it wanting, but this story came along at just the right time, in a series that had already given us emotions, scares, comedy and flirting in individual moments but had never thrown them altogether into the same mix at once before. It’s not the sharpest or best thing Moffat ever wrote by any means, but ‘The Empty Child’ is perfect for this first stage of the comeback series, delivering everything people thought Dr Who could never do all in one place and having just enough emotion and power underneath the scifi plot to make people care. It’s a re-boot button every bit as much as ‘Rose’ is that widens the series horizons all over again (a working title was ‘An Empty Child’ rather than ‘The’, in a mirror of ‘An Unearthly Child’, but dropped for being a bit too self-reverential for a series that wanted to find a new audience of non-Whovians ut in retrospect I wish they’d kept it). It’s not this story’s fault that other episodes to come stand on this story’s shoulders and achieve even more than this one does. 

 POSITIVES + Interestingly the single scariest scenes are the low budget ones added in desperation at the last minute when the story was under-running, with the typewriter and the Tardis phone prop suddenly working (a terrific gag not used since ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ in 1966). Moffat was on a pre-booked holiday when the panicked call came through that both episodes had come in too short and he had to write them, one per episode, while jetlagged at his hotel desk while pretending to his wife he was writing home (because she thought Dr Who was stupid and was already annoyed at how much extra workload her husband had taken on!) Perhaps it’s the benefit of hindsight and being able to see what else worked but both are tight, taught, dramatic and terrifying scenes a cut above everything else but the cliffhanger and point to Jamie’s extra new nanogene-led powers. This story is as well remembered as it is partly because of them. 

 NEGATIVES - I know we covered this but it’s a big one. I never quite agreed with the JNT principle that ‘there should be no hanky panky in the Tardis’ in the 1980s but, seriously, suddenly everybody is at it like horny rabbits in this story and it seems to come out of nowhere. So far Rose’s flirting with the Doctor this series has got as far as chaste-hand holding and buying each other chips, but Jack seems to turn her into a randy nymphomaniac who wants her men to compete for her while acting like Barbara Windsor in space, while the Doctor gets way more jealous than a being whose multiple centuries old with grandchildren of his own ought to be. Maybe Glenn Miller is a bigger aphrodisiac than I thought? Or maybe Captain Jack is secreting some sort of alien pheromones? That would explain maybe 90% of Torchwood too. Not one of Rose’s finest moments, though Billie Piper seems very comfortable with the idea and helps sell it – not like poor Christopher Eccleston who looks as if he’s about to be sick and, much as I’d love to call it great acting, the fact he chose not to re-sign for a second year round about here suggests he wasn’t big on all the innuendo that suddenly arrived alongside John Barrowman too. There is a place for sex in Dr Who and Moffat will get much much better at writing it in future stories (who would have thought he’d go on to write ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ next, a truly romantic Who love story), but not here, so suddenly, in the middle of a war epic. It’s all just so wrong. 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘1941. Right now, not very far from here the German war machine is rolling up the map of Europe. Country after country, falling like Dominoes. Nothing can stop it, nothing until one tiny, damp little island says ‘No, not here’. A mouse in front of a lion. You're amazing. The lot of you. Don't know what you do to Hitler, but you frighten the hell out of me’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: At one stage in this story the Doctor says that he once came to Rose’s bedroom dressed as Santa and leaves her a red bicycle. She assumes he’s joking. He wasn’t – not according to ‘The Red Bicycle’ anyway, a short story from the 2016 festive compilation ‘The Twelve Doctors Of Christmas’. Following the events of ‘Father’s Day’ the 9th Doctor takes advantage of Rose’s trip back home to go back and make life happier for her in the wake of her father Pete’s death. Only his trip to the shops is more difficult than you might imagine and he goes through quite a lot before finally leaving the bike under Rose’ Christmas tree. It’s a sweet if silly story from one of the better Who book anthologies (a must for every stocking).

‘Captain Jack Harkness’, the twelfth episode of Torchwood’s rollercoaster ride of a first season, has ‘our’ Captain Jack meeting the ‘real’ Captain Jack who died during a training raid in 1941, while he and Tosh investigate a time rift that takes them back in time. This being Torchwood of course they end up fancying the pants off one another after being in a bar-room brawl, although unlike our Captain Jack the real one is trying to solve it at the time.  He’s a walking contradiction, far more  complex than ours: he’s terrified of the war but unwilling to let on to his men, while hiding the fact he really likes boys by leading on lots of girls, only to break up with them when they get too close. This is one of the better, more thoughtful episodes in the series and for a moment Jack and Tosh really think they’re stranded in the middle of the Blitz, a particular concern for Tosh as a Japanese lady and the best scenes come from John Barrowman’s concern where he promises to keep her safe. There’s an odd treasure hint involving equations that relies heavily on Gwen, of all people, to be as clever as Tosh in finding the clues that’s written in her blood, while as per normal she does all the work while he stands around snogging the locals.   

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