The Fires Of Pompeii: Ranking - 147

    The Fires Of Pompeii

(Series 4, Dr 10 with Donna, 12/4/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: James Moran, director: Colin Teague)

Rank: 147

'Yes Doctor, I see your future...It involves snogging, a lot of snogging. A crack in a wall. A wife whose the daughter of your future best friends. A final battle at Trenzalore (except the other final battles of course).An impossible girl born to keep you safe. A thousand years walking round a castle talking to yourself when Gallifrey comes back. Time in flux. And a talking frog. No, seriously. Oh and did I mention that I saw you looking older...not just older in this lifetime but this lifetime back again? Playing catch ball for the state of a world while a man dances to The Spice Girls. Wait that can’t be right can it?!?' 

It’s volcano day! And Dr Who is back doing what it always used to do best – pinching bits from two separate popular sources and sticking them together. One of them is the pompous documentary series ‘Rome’ that was at pains to point out how much better we were in the olden days and had a plot so up itself it barely fitted inside a toga and whose twenty-two episodes crawled by at such a snail’s pace of rising and falling that watching it felt a little like watching the Roman empire in real time. However it looked gorgeous, with a lavish set re-creation actually in Italy itself (not Pompeii itself but the Cinecitta studios in Rome) and for those (gulp) twenty-two hours Ancient Rome felt every bit as real as anything in the present day. And then on the other side there’s the excellent ‘Horrible History’ TV series based on the even more excellent Terry Deary books, which took a modern scalpel to the past, revealing it for all its truths, puncturing up the pomposity and reverence for past times and demonstrating how all eras are filled with rapscallions and idiots and how mankind never changes from era to era. The funniest thing on Tv in the 21st century until Dr Who came along, its irreverence and wit made it a must-watch even if it was obvious at times that it was being made on a similarly shoe-string budget of your average BBC children’s telly programme. Russell T Davies has long admitted, too, that one of his biggest non-Who influences growing up was Uderzo’s and Goscinny’s blisteringly funny series ‘Asterix’, which turned one small French Gaulish tribe’s attempts to defeat The Romans or ‘The Man’ with as many modern-day allusions as possible into an art form. Dr Who historicals have tended, till now, to have one foot in either of those camps, with serious attempts to bring times past to life in stories like ‘Marco Polo’ and ‘The Massacre’ along with jokey stories like ‘The Myth Makers’ and, yes, ‘The Romans’. Where ‘The Fires Of Pompeii’ scores highest is when the tectonic plates of two approaches collide and the episode truly erupts into something special – when we care even for the caricatures we’ve just been laughing at, who are just like us for us to be sympathetic and just enough like strangers for the story to feel like real history. Then by the end this historical begins to resemble a third way of doing things, being part of the ‘Time Meddler’ school of combining the science fiction with the established fact. The result is a wise-cracking story that won’t take anything seriously, until an ending which is as serious and emotional as any since the comeback. 

 Russell was fascinated by the time period and particularly Pompeii, the only time in history man was faced with a natural disaster that instantly turned everyone to ash. The idea of people being frozen in time in what they were doing at their very moment of death, killed by something they didn’t even understand (as the Doctor points out the word for volcano didn’t exist yet) and being lain forgotten for 1500 years sounds just the sort of thing Dr Who should be doing, the mundaneness of these people’s lives turned into such a fascinating record of the sort of everyday Roman life that wasn’t written down in the textbooks that it really brings the past to life in a way no other historical event can. The statues we see might be plaster casings taken of the vacuum created by where the human bodies were when the ash fit, but staring at them really is like staring into the eyes of real people who lived and bringing the past to life is exactly what the past was for. Russell was very keen to have a historical story in his comeback year (which for all he knew was his only year in charge of his favourite series) and included a story about Pompeii in his initial pitch to the BBC. It helped that The Romans is the one time period the children at home watching were guaranteed to have studied at some point, alongside The Victorians (who had already been done with ‘The Unquiet Dead’). However when the costs of other episodes came in it became clear that he had a choice: to either do a rush job on the cheap now or risk doing it properly in a later that might never arrive when costs from other episodes could be tweaked to pay for this one. And finally in 2008 he got his wish, with the cancellation of ‘Rome’ (the series, not the empire), getting touch with Cinecitta to ask them to leave the sets up. Even so the costs for this episode is still one of the highest in any era when you adjust for inflation: Russell joked during the tone meeting that the budget for the year was ‘busy being set alight and going up in smoke along with the volcano’. Busy with other episodes Russell then handed the episode over to James Moran, a writer who’d impressed him with Torchwood episode ‘Sleeper’ (another archaeological story, although in this case the discovered body is that of an alien in slumber for thousands of years). Moran had his own reference points: Caecillus, Metella and Quintus were all names borrowed from the family who talked about their life in the Cambridge Latin Course textbooks which were the go-to guidebooks for the last generation to be taught Latin as a matter of course (though some of our posher schools still do). Caecillus for one was known to be a real Roman figure, a bust of his head being one of the first things recovered in Pompeii (though he looks nothing like Peter Capaldi, being your traditional bald regal looking Roman) and his family were known to have perished in the ash clouds (though the Latin textbooks have Quintus surviving to narrate the tale). Russell was tickled: he’d studied Latin too in the early 1970s and remembered Caecillus being presented as an ‘everyday’ Roman, encouraging Moran to play up the similarities with everyday people than and now in his script. 

 So what we end up with is a hugely entertaining story shot in the same lavish way as the serious series itself, with three days of location filming on the same sets were ‘Rome’ was filmed, with an attention to detail that still found time for some anachronistic jokes. It all feels very new and struck audiences as very ‘now’ (or at least it did in 2008). So far the Who historicals since the comeback had been reverential, centred round a historical figure everyone in the audience knew whether it be from school lessons or banknotes battling aliens, but ‘Pompeii’ is a little different being based around an actual event that we in the audience understand better than anyone in it. This could have been boring – after all, it’s hardly a ‘spoiler’ that the big money shot in this one is going to be a blooming great volcano erupting – but the script still manages to keep us on our toes by throwing in twists and turns, with mysteries like the ancient Romans with the gift of prophecy who know all about the Doctor and the merchant carving circuit boards in his spare time. 

 This story seems to have a joke every other line, most of which hit the bullseye (TK Maximus! No way – Appian way! The Doctor and Donna telling everyone that they are ‘Spartacus’, just like the film) although the constant playing up of the teenager with the hangover and the grumpy dictatorial parents is perhaps a little overdone. Quintus’ sulks go a bit too far too, although there’s a neat joke that’s he’s spent all day at the ‘thermopoloum’ gorging on fast food (a real Roman thing; given the tone of the rest of the script I’m surprised it wasn’t named Maximus Donalds). One of the funniest is the opening where Caecillus buys the Tardis which has landed in the market stall as a ‘work of modern art’ is Moran’s sly reference to his favourite Who story ‘City Of Death’. The very funniest is the Doctor’s comments about meeting the ‘real’ soothsaying Sybil in an unseen adventure (‘truth be told I think she had a bit of a thing for me. I said it would never last. She said I know. Well she would’). Some of the humour is so subtle you miss it first time too, such as Lucius’ full name being Petrus Dextus (or ‘Stone right arm’ in English). The slapstick is pretty good fun too, such as the Doctor defeating the monster of the day armed with nothing but a water pistol he seems to have kept in his jacket all these years just in case he ever needed one, an incongruity that’s very Dr Who (good job the water hadn’t evaporated during trips to volcanic planets really). Yes some of it seems a bit unlikely (would a Roman merchant really use the phrase lovely jubbly’? Plus in the carving of the Tardis at the end the words ‘praesidium arc’ don’t really mean ‘police box’ but ‘committee box’, the closest they could find) and the performances can be a bit broad but for all we know until we successfully translate every single Roman text might well be true and there are so many gags in this story that even when a few don’t land there’ll be a really funny one along a few seconds later. 

 For all that, though, ‘Pompeii’ is not a silly story; writer James Moran takes great pains to use the comedy to make you feel closer to the people in this story, not removed from them so that you feel it when they are put in danger by story’s end. It’s a repeat, of sorts, too of ‘The Aztecs’ and the 1st Doctor’s pleas to Barbara ‘that you can’t change history, not one line’ with a past that’s set I stone – literally in this case. We at home all know that the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is a fixed point in time that can’t be changed and so does the Doctor, but the bigger surprise is that the Doctor blows his top more than the volcano at having to keep the timelines as recorded history knows them (does he envision a reaper-filled future as in ‘Father’s Day’?) Distraught at nobody listening to her advice to leave Pompeii for the day, Donna finally getting him to save the family we’ve got to know as a consolation prize for not being allowed to alter history, just like the olden days. As much as Donna wants to save the people she’s come to know (if not necessarily love) the Doctor ends up being the one to cause the eruption himself, as the lesser of two evils when the whole world is threatened by the Pyroviles. Russell’s Dr Who is often about forcing the Doctor to choose between two impossible situations but this is perhaps the most blatantly like those old ethical dilemma questions raised in psychology lectures: is it murder to let fate take its course when you could have done something to stop it, or is it worse to tweak fate so that a statistically smaller number of people die. Even if you save more people though how do you feel at still being a killer, responsible in a way you wouldn’t have been if things had been left to nature? It’s like a mini repeat of the time war when the Doctor actively intervened to stop The Daleks even though it meant killing his own people in a fireball just like this and we’ve seen for three and a bit series now how much that choice has been hanging over him. So, despite the 10th Doctor being such fun for most of this story, running around with a water pistol, out running out gunning and especially out thinking everyone at high speed, the ending has him as detached and alien as we ever see this regeneration. At this point Donna was too new to be seen on screen beyond her debut in ‘The Runaway Bride’ so Moran writes in a similar ending all round, where Donna switches from being sarcastic comedy relief to the Jiminy cricket on the Doctor’s shoulder, reminding him to be merciful and kind. Just as with the Racnoss, the Doctor gets carried away with the burden of being a timelord without anyone to stop him and Donna has the sort of companion meltdown at his refusal to save anyone not seen since the days of Steven in ‘The Massacre’ or Jamie in ‘Evil Of The Daleks’. 

 Romans are hard to do on screen, even when you have a readymade set built for you – their regimented, capitalist-driven culture is, of all the ancient societies, the one closest in feel to ours and yet it has several key beliefs that make it very different too: slavery, circuses, emperors and Gods. The scripts makes strong play on the first three of these, with slaves workers who are really just on no hour contracts, threats of circuses that are like social media pile-ons and emperors who are just like today’s politicians (Davidus Camerus should have been quaking in his sandals when this went out). It’s the Gods that are the key difference to the story and the idea that every household had its own God and the daughter of the family we visit who can actually talk to them is the key difference. There’s a neat subplot here too about beliefs, that does the old 1980s trick of portraying such a believable, ‘normal’ world that throwing a panicking manic Doctor in it citing psychobabble makes him seem the crazy one – even when he’s right. Ancient Rome was superstitious, to them their Gods are very real and to be believed in to such an extent that it looks like a form of madness to us today and so at odd at with their reputation as the practical people of the ancient world who brought concepts of straight roads, baths with heated water and sewage systems to the countries they conquered. They don’t believe the Doctor though and Donna’s own attempts at warning everyone are equally doomed to failure. After all, it’s all a matter of perspective: to the Romans the Gods are at work keeping them safe so they feel protected, whilst they have no term for volcano because they’ve needed one before – that rumbling is just the God having a tantrum and maybe they should slaughter a few more pigs to keep it happy. The minds of Rome weren’t changed in a day and the Doctor and Donna simply run out of time to make everyone take them seriously, even when the local soothsayers have all picked up foreknowledge of events to come (though, as it happens, events to come if the Doctor doesn’t meddle with fate). It’s a clever time-travel twist to give at least some of the people here the gift of second sight, to have historical characters who can see a part of the future despite not having a time machine of their own, although their price for it is slowly being turned to stone ironically, rooted to the spot so that their present becomes rigid. Could it be that Moran is also making a comment here about how having insight into big events to come makes the Doctor metaphorically feel the same, powerless to change anything? We’re such a long way from the carefree days of the 4th Doctor who was happy to change events when the timelords could put everything right again when they went really wrong, but this time he feels the responsibility of being the only one. 

 Though it’s a big surprise to the people of Pompeii to us Whovians it’s no surprise that this voice turns out to be an alien – and that’s the point where a largely excellent story goes downhill, with the scifi invading real history and this week’s monsters the Pyroviles turning up so near the end of the story that they don’t really get a chance to be properly sketched in. We don’t learn what happened to them except that they’ve been buried here a long time and need some circuitry – having Lucius as their voice isn’t much good when he doesn’t understand their backstory to begin with. They’re disappointing in how they behave, too, being basically a combustible Gelth, which makes sense I suppose given the closeness of fire and gas but doesn’t make them feel the most original monster and we’ve seen better CGI effects too. The ‘real’ villain for most of this story is Lucius Petrus, a Roman whose a worthy opponent for Tennant’s Doctor and the ‘clues’ towards what’s really going on are well handled (the discovery of a circuit board masquerading as an exotic tile pattern is a neat touch, each one created by a different artist so that nobody has a bigger picture as to what’s going on). 

 There’s another heavy reference too with a similar, earlier Big Finish story ‘The Fires Of Vulcan’ that got there eight years earlier and had the 7th Doctor and Mel trying to warn people about the imminent explosion too (though the 10th Doctor days nothing he might be trying to work out how not to kill his younger self or destroy his Tardis with his actions here). Another story with a flame-haired volcanic assistant, it’s one of the best of the early Big Finishes and the first one that did things that hadn’t already been seen on TV. It very much feels like the stepping stone between the old series and the new in a way that most of the other first batch of Big Finishes don’t, with a plot that weaves itself round the companion, a big emotional testing climax and lots of use of time travel, with the Tardis uncovered at an archaeological dig in the 20th century trapped under layers of ash. It would be very in character for the 10th Dr to have just forgotten about this earlier adventure, but I like to think it’s happening just out of shot in this story, as there’s nothing here that contradicts it: the Doctor might be checking the dates not so much for the eruption as to make sure he doesn’t run into his younger self and get in his own way. The radio version is better in some ways: the sound effects on Big Finish are always very good, while the script has a feeling of doom that runs all the way through that isn’t interrupted by the humour (fun as it is) and the lack of alien monsters is highly welcome. 

 That said, this TV version has a lot of things going for it to. The modern series’ first location filming is sensibly chosen, with the move to Italy really giving an extra dimension of realness to this story. There’s an excellent cast too, including Phil Davis as Lucius (perfect casting as The Devil in ‘Being Human’, the BBc series Toby Whithouse during downtime from working on Who in a few years’ time) and two actors who’ll become very big in Who under the next showrunner Steven Moffat. Peter Capaldi is of course now known best as the 12th Doctor and at the time had just been announced as the star of Russell’s Torchwood series ‘Children Of The Earth’ (his best part, as the troubled civil servant Frobisher) but is a lot more natural here as a comedy Roman. Capaldi’s better at the comedy than the rudeness and scowling Moffat often gave him to play (as you can tell by the final rather clichéd line about coining the word ‘volcano’ where he goes all tense and dramatic). How do they get around the similarity of his appearance here? ‘The Girl Who Died’ reveals that it was a subconscious desire to remember the need for the mercy the Doctor (finally!) shows at the end of this episode, which does make you rather wonder why the 1st Doctor wanted to be reminded of The Abbott Of Amboise, the 2nd evil dictator Salamander and the 6th shooty timelord guard Maxil! Karen Gillan, meanwhile, is doing her first TV fresh out of drama school after working as a model and gets precious few lines as the soothsayer but still makes quite an impression waving her arms about and doing most of her acting with her eyes (which are, erm, painted on her hands). Spookily Karen’s first filmed episode as Amy Pond also saw her being turned into stone in ‘Time Of The Angels’. Funnily enough with David Tennant as well they make three Scottish actors with quite broad accents in real life all speaking cod-English, which makes the lines about the stallholders assuming Donna is Celtic and talking to her as if she’s Welsh particularly funny. We all know by now how good David Tenant can be and he is: whether manically grinning, staring in anger or filled with puppyish excitement this is a script that gives him a lot to work with and he makes the most of it. In context it’s Donna whose the surprise: so far her two stories have been jokey ones and she starts much the same way at the beginning of this one: even in the rather unnecessary and brief sub-plot about her being kidnapped and about to be sacrificed she’s far from a helpless victim unlike most other times it happens to companions in Dr Who getting all the best lines while in a position of helplessness. However it’s the switch at the end that process that Catherine Tate is an actress as well as a comedian: her distress at the Doctor’s actions and thinking she’s been left behind by her best friend relies on more than mere comic timing and laughs. Tate gets better and better during her year in the series and will give greater performances still (in Turn Left’ particularly) but here is the turning point where she went from being better than we feared to beloved companion. Francesca Fowler, too, does well with a bad part as the Roman daughter, going all method by getting food poisoning during filming (she does look especially gaunt and pale). 

 The end result turned out to be a lot more reverential of what is after still a mass gravesite than I expected. Well of course, I remember saying when the episode titles of series four were released, Catherine Tate’s explosive Donna is returning so of course they’re going to stick her in a story where an explosive red-head blows its top. After all, that would have been entirely in keeping with a modern Dr Who historical trend for big set pieces set around big explosive moments in history, most of which have been caused by aliens. To my surprise first time round ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ is more of a character-piece, one that’s less about the eruption of Vesuvius than it is about the people who lived there in AD79 and its Donna whose the calming influence, the humanist whose compassion has a bigger effect on the 10th Doctor than he quite realises yet. There’s a great scene-setting opening and an explosively emotional finale; it’s the middle bit that sags a bit. Suddenly all those wisecracking jokes aren’t setting the scene anymore but getting in the way of the plot, while the plot descending into your average Dr Who runaround gets in the way of this fascinating new world we’ve walked into. How does it compare to the ‘other’ time Dr Who did Romans in 1965? Well, that episode is ‘cuter’ all round, but if anything the comedy is even more slapstick than here – the sense of jeopardy and exploring worlds was much stronger back then though, when the only real plot was getting the right people in the right places again by the end of the story; ‘Pompeii’ by contrast feels as if it’s trying a bit too hard to come up with a story set around a big focal point and can’t quite lose the archness behind some of the jokes. 

 The end result is a clever, complex, funny story with lots of great individual scenes that made me laugh and cry both in alternating scenes – that along makes this a strong Who piece. I can’t help wishing, though that the story had been given just a little more room to breathe (ironic, really, given the subject matter): the switch from high farce to sobbing tragedy somewhere in the middle is too blunt and there’s not enough time to get the back story of the Pyrovile or the full impact of what the erupting volcano means. In AD 79 the rumblings from Vesuvius had been going on for a full seventeen years: the tragedy is everyone had plenty of warning had they had access to what our scientists know now, but the inhabitants paid a heavy price for our civilisation not getting that far yet: nobody seems to think that through; Donna, for instance, doesn’t react to every rumble with panic as if its going to be the big one – she just watches everyone calmly catching loose objects the way they do in ‘Mary Poppins’. Everyone should be a lot more horrified than they are, not treating each rumble as a big joke. For a start they should be terrified that they’ve upset their Gods too many times and be doing a lot moe praying and sacrificing; I’m surprised, given the jokes in the first half, that the parents aren’t blaming this all on the young for making the Gods mad in their ignorance. One of the reasons they didn’t move is because volcanoes are really good for the topsoil before they blow, thanks to all that extra heat: a morality tale about man’s greed meaning people don’t get up and go before its too late was right there on the table and it’s not taken. The idea of something utterly alien to the inhabitants of Pompeii that they don’t understand yet live right next to needed to be in the script more for it to, well, rise above the ashes. That coda with the Caecellus family moving on is sweet but it’s no substitute for what we could have had: four whole cities disappeared overnight, in an age when news travelled slow and most people couldn’t have gone to gawp for themselves. There were lots of folk tales about what happened, despite there being enough eye-witnesses to recount the reality. This should be a family scarred in a country that’s scarred; instead in keeping with this optimistic new-look series we see the family all healed and recovered, one of them even learning to become a Doctor so he can save people just like the person who saved him. As far as this story goes in describing the horror, further than they needed to go in many respects, this might have been a better story still had they gone that bit further and followed everything through that bit more. Instead the only suffering we see as the volcano goes nuclear (with a force a thousand times greater than the atomic bomb) is one small nuclear family of four and as well drawn as they are that’s not enough spectacle for an eruption that killed 2000 people not just in Pompeii but smaller surrounding cities Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae. At the time 2000 people was a lot: even now it’s a large village’s worth, all gone. 

I understand why for reasons of cost but if they’d had Vesuvius lurking in the background shots of most scenes, getting bigger and bigger, the jeopardy would have been stronger still (a still blow-up picture would have done) – instead we don’t even properly see it till story’s end when it’s marred by a poor CGI shot of an escape shuttle pod heading directly into the camera. Funny as all the jokes are I’d sacrifice them all for more drama and emotion like this and with them everything feels slightly too hollow, too false, to care about as much as by rights you should. And even then, right at the end when despite everything you do care because Donna’s screaming and the Doctor’s looking sad, in comes a particularly pompous Pompeii choir from composer Murray Gold that makes everything seem false and unreal all over again. However, that’s my blow-my-top I-always-wanted-to-see-Pompeii-in-Dr-Who-and-this-is-probably-my-only-chance head on. More magma-nimously ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ still does a cracking job of making Ancient Rome come alive again every bit as much as the ash sculptures of people’s remains that are still being studied two thousands years later. There’s a really moving story buried under the clouds of jokes and even the jokes are clever and funny, with more gags per line than maybe any other Who story: it’s the two together that doesn’t quite work. For half a story this episode is on fire, like properly ground breaking – while at others it just kind of fizzles out disappointingly. In other words I like it a lot but don’t lava-it like the very best Who stories. 

 POSITIVES + No, it wasn’t really filmed in Pompeii and Vesuvius itself is a CGI creation (with bits of cork substituted for ash), something which surprises a lot of people given how believable everything looks, even to people who know their stuff. This story was, however, mostly filmed in Rome in a TV studio there and it was well worth the extra travelling money to give this story a real feel of history being all around us and giving us as close-as to the sights and sounds that the real Italians would have experienced as budget and archaeological rights would allow. Of all the foreign location shoots in Dr Who history this might well be the best; it’s certainly the most relevant and gives an atmosphere to this story that you really couldn’t have got in a BBC studio in Wales, however well made. All the more impressive, then, given that the BBC only had three days to film and the pre-planning for those was interrupted by a fire just before the team arrived; mercifully it didn’t affect the bits they needed but it was a big one, caused by an electrical short, that killed four people and left the owners in disarray. What with everyone being delayed twenty-four hours in Calais at customs (that must have made them feel a little like the Doctor and Donna in this story; ‘but of course I’m filming a scifi drama about an eccentric timelord in the ruins of Pompeii in which I play a hundred foot Pyrovile alien belching smoke who gives the gift of second sight) this was one of the more fraught shoots on Who but you can’t tell from what appears on screen. The scenes in Caecelluses’ house were, yet again, filmed in Cardiff’s Temple of Peace, perhaps the most re-used location in Who. 

 NEGATIVES - The pyroclastic Pyroviles sound great on paper: creatures made of magma that can turn Humans to ash in seconds just by breathing funny that are incredibly tall and look just enough like Roman soldiers to fit the episode aesthetic. In practice they’re a bunch of Transformers wannabes with rocks between the ears, too obviously a CGI creation that isn’t really there. It’s telling that they’ve never yet made a comeback despite the amount of plots they could be put in (‘The Day Popocatepetl Popped!’ ‘Krakatoa goes Kerblaam!’ ‘Mount St Helens? You Wish!’) They’re not the worst looking Dr Who monster by any means but they are disappointing after such a build-up and their motivation is confused at best (a spaceship of theirs crashed into Earth, where their particles were sucked into Vesuvius and breathed in by the nearby population which gave some of them fortune-telling visions but a side effect where their limbs turn to stone...Yeah, I’m surprised that sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time to be honest: only Dr Who would do a story where aliens have turned the people of Pompeii to ash even before the volcano erupts). 

 BEST QUOTE: Doctor: ‘Some things are fixed, some things are in flux. Pompeii is fixed’. Donna: ‘How do you know which is which?’ Doctor: ‘Because that's how I see the universe. Every waking second, I can see what is, what was, what could be, what must not... That's the burden of the Timelord, Donna. And I'm the only one left’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Fires Of Pompeii’ was one of the last ‘Dr Who lockdown tweetalongs’ of the covid pandemic in May 2020.By now Who had used up all the big name guests willing to take part in the ‘post episode’ big event, but they still had writer James Moran and Francesca Fowler and Tracey Childs, the two actors who played Metella and Evelina, the mother and daughter from the Caecillus family that the Doctor saves from death by volcano at story’s end. They’re not the same characters but their descendents who, in a ‘Dodo/Anne Chaplet’ sort of a way (see ‘The Massacre’) hint that the family lived long and happy lives and had lots and lots of babies who ended up looking very very similar all round. If it seems somewhat ‘wrong’ to see such familiar faces grappling with zoom and skype it does at least reverse the joke of the episode, where the Roman family kept doing modern-day things without realising it (the family here mirroring their Roman selves in equal obliviousness with the dad an architect, the son a doctor, the mum a policewoman and the daughter a writer, repeating in cycles round and round). Of all the lockdown stories it’s the one least linked to the parent episode which confused a lot of people and will no doubt confuse a lot more the further away from the year of full lockdown we get but in many ways it’s the cleverest in terms of reflecting the odd, scary world we found ourselves in. There’s a really sweet moment where Eve talks about how much her brother loves being a Doctor but how worried she is for what he’s gong through, abandoned by a government who have no protective measures to give him (here’s hoping he didn’t get longus covidius) and another where they discuss the family folk tale that they were once saved by a ‘guardian angel’ (which is as good a description of the Doctor as any). Eve also has a screensaver of Pompeii, suggesting she visited there in the recent past… 

 As discussed Big Finish got there first with ‘The Fires Of Vulcan’, a 7th Doctor story from their main range written by Steve Lyons and released in 2000. This is an equally emotional episode but in a whole different way, centring round the Doctor’s desperate attempts to find a kidnapped Mel and escape Pompeii before the volcano finally blows – something made harder by the fact it’s been buried by lava. It’s a bit more complicated than that though, because – in a move that seemed outrageous at the time but makes a lot more sense since having Steven Moffat as showrunner – we also follow an archaeological dig in 1980 when a perfectly preserved impression of a destroyed Tardis is discovered in the excavations (all perfectly plausible given that even now only a fraction of Pompeii has been fully exhumed). The plot then becomes a ‘Space Museum’ tale of fate an pre-destination and how to avoid a fate that seems, if you pardon the expression, set in stone. There’s a tense and moving plot that centres on whether the Doctor can warn everyone around him in time of the coming crisis (whereas to them he sounds like a lunatic, talking about a mountain belching fire – a scene Donna sort of gets in the TV version instead, perhaps because the Doctor’s already tried it and knows changing people’s minds is impossible). Even before the TV version was on this was one of my favourite of the early Big Finishes (this is only the 12th Dr Who story the company released), the range’s first real story that touched on things much bigger than seeing old friends running around in a traditional Who setting and which pointed at just how ambitious the audio adventures could be. It’s one of Sylvester McCoy’s best performances in anything and a slightly more experiences Bonnie Langford on audio is so much better than her younger self on TV it’s sometimes hard to credit she’s the same actress. The volcano itself sounds pretty great too. Highly recommended, especially for fans of ‘Fire’ who think one trip to Pompeii just isn’t enough. Odd to think though that canonically there are two Doctors out there on the exact same day… 

 See also ‘The Romans’ for more Who hi-jinks in Italy in roughly the same time period. 

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