The Next Doctor
(Christmas Special, Dr 10, 25/12/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Andy Goddard)
Rank: 169
How the meeting between Drs 10 and 14 might go. 'Hey I know you - and I certainly know those teeth - you're a biostamp! I mean you look just like me, an older version of me...And you've just regenerated into someone who looks just like David Morrissey. What? What? What?!?'
By the time we get to the specials at the end of his run Russell T Davies was notorious for playing with fan’s heart-strings and leading people down cul-de-sacs with hints and plot twists to keep us on our toes. Nothing to what came when Steven Moffat took over as show-runner and took it to extremes, making the game-playing with the audience one of the main focal points of the series, but after the straightforward plot arcs of the 20th century it was a sea change and us older fans didn’t quite know how to cope. We all thought we knew what was happening from the official announcements: instead of a fifth series in 2009 there would be four specials, the last of them a two-parter, where David Tennant would bow out, but we didn’t know the details of quite how or why. Suddenly Tennant is off playing Hamlet on stage, a really tricky demanding part with so many lines to learn, and the auditioning process for Matt Smith is taking part in secret. Like The Doctor we knew that the winds of change were blowing but we didn’t quite know when it was about to become a storm or who or when would be standing at the end of it. Even when the casting for the episode was a announced and featured David Morrissey playing someone called ‘The Doctor’ and the actor himself had been specially coached in how to give ambiguous replies to the press that didn’t give the game away but told us nothing, and we were really confused. For all we knew the 11th Doctor was going to be David Morrissey, a much loved actor that in 2008 was at the peak of his fame. Why not? DW had had dafter castings after all and a Christmas special, with the eyes of the world watching, was the perfect time to spring a surprise. So when everyone sat down to watch ‘The Next Doctor’ at Christmas 2008 there were only maybe fifty people in the world (those on set for the ending for the second half of this story) who truly knew what was going on and unlike some other secrets in Who over the years this was one they managed to keep successfully. Still, they wouldn’t catch us unawares like that and let one of the most popular Doctors go just like that...would they? For half the episode that’s what you’re meant to think and it’s a magic trick that worked really neatly, for one brief shining half hour, at the end of 2008.
It’s hard to imagine another series having such fun at fans’ confusion. It’s hard indeed to imagine another setup that could even think of teasing fans in the same way: usually when a leading role is re-cast the production team want to hide it not celebrate it (can you imagine multiple James Bonds meeting up and discovering a ‘fake’ one? No you can’t, each casting is meant to ‘replace’ the old one, not ‘regenerate’ them). It’s such a clever idea to try that here though, at a time when the fanbase is vulnerable and didn’t know what was going on, one last power play from a showrunner before retirement. And this is the era of speculation in a way there had never been beore, thanks to the internet and fan forums that discussed these sort of things at length – Russell really enjoys knowing something they don’t, laughing merrily in our faces as we try to work out whether Morrisey’s Doctor is someone we’re going to have to get used to or just a passing trick. It helps that The Doctor himself is with the audience for a change, clueless as to what’s really happening and curious as to why this story isn’t working out the way regeneration stories usually do, with at least one of them remembering the other (and he knows it isn’t him). It’s quite poignant, too, if you know your folklore from ‘The Deadly Assassin’ that timelords only ever have thirteen lives: given what we now know about ‘The War Doctor’ and the regenerated hand (see the previous story ‘Stolen Earth’) that makes him number twelve, so this interloper has to be the last Doctor, there’s no one else (he isn’t to know that ‘Time Of the Doctor’ will grant him a miracle and more lives and let’s not even start with ‘The Timeless Child’ arc). I particularly love the scene where the 10th Doctor notices Jackson’s fob watch and along with the audience goes aha, he’s a Doctor in hiding and his identity is hidden in this fobwatch, only to find its just ‘decoration’. It’s all very clever, with David Morrissey superb in a role he only took at the last minute, halfway between being just like all the other Doctors (the actor enjoyed watching the first four Doctors as a child and modelled himself on them) and just enough himself (with an ebullience and bonhomie The Doctor still hasn’t had in any of his regenerations yet). It’s all good enough to be convincing because you can totally imagine a series where this is the next Doctor and that a production team that’s always been sneaky with its teasers and ‘deliberate leaks’ would actually do this. It’s a clever, clever conceit in a clever clever story that’s exactly the sort of thing the Cybermen would do and which allows Russell, on his way out as showrunner, to both parody and celebrate his era, coming up with the sort of crazy plotlines he knows children are conjuring in make-believe up and down the country and what might be remembered of his time in charge in the future when his audience grow up and have little Dr Who fans of their own and his era is as forgotten and half-remembered as the ones from his childhood.
It feels like the most
brazen and arrogant move Russell T Davies ever made, and yet behind the scenes
this story was beset by more doubts and second thoughts than ever before. By
now Russell’s partner Andrew Smith was sick, really sick, with ideas for the
specials scribbled down in between hospital meetings and home care. Russell
himself got sick, worn down by five years of constantly thinking writing and
problem-solving leading to long bouts of bronchitis and chickenpox. The
deadline for ‘Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’ whistled past, with the final script
delivered scarily close to production. The first drafts for this story were
later still even though it needed to be in production straight after, with
worries that there might not be a script at all, which for someone as
meticulous and organised as Russell usually was seemed unthinkable. Usually
when in trouble Russell’s quick brain gets him out of trouble but he was too
distracted to think properly and kept second-guessing himself. At first we were
going to get a straight repeat of ‘The Voyage Of
The Damned’, an idea dropped when all Russell could come up with was the
jokey sequel of ‘Cheryl Cole trapped on The Hindenberg’ (thank goodness that
didn’t happen!) Next the 10th Doctor was going to travel alone
across these specials, then there was going to be a story with Donna’s memories
returned to her, then it was back to the Doctor alone again. Desperately
searching for current ideas that would prove popular Russell got really far
with a script about The Doctor saving author J K Rowling from a ‘real’ universe
full of witches and wizards and goblins, with a class full of trainee warlocks
out to save her so she could write the much-anticipated final Harry Potter book
and ‘restore the timelines’, something dropped when the producers gently asked
Russell what he was going to do if she said no and David Tennant, for the only
time in their working relationship, asked worriedly if the idea wasn’t a little
too ‘parody like’ (given who J K turned out to be I rather like the idea that
she got ‘replaced’ by a story where a girl becomes ‘Trans’ by becoming a
Cyberman and, temporarily at least, rather likes it). Then it was a story about
Hans Christian Anderson’s festive story ‘The Little Match Girl’ turning real
but that idea didn’t have any legs (well, only matchstick ones). For a while
this was a plot about Christmas at the time of Henry VIII, before a bit of
preliminary research made Russell realise how much of Christmas is a Victorian invention,
brought to Britain from Prince Albert’s when he moved from Germany, and how
little past Christmasses would look like ‘ours’ (we still haven’t had a
Christmas story set any further back in the past than this one). A sleepless
and recovering Russell then found himself far away from home promoting
Torchwood Series Two in America, without his usual team around him, staying in
a really huge hotel and confused when he walked round it and found the place
nearly deserted, imagining that it was a ‘sign’ from the universe about what to
wrote next: a story where The Doctor and one lone stranger were in a hotel that
was taken out of time and stranded on an alien planet (elements of this turn up
in ‘Planet Of the Dead’), dropped when Russell’s usual imagination couldn’t get
him to the end of the plot (it may also have been uncomfortably close to Gareth
Roberts’ ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ episode ‘The Wedding Of Sarah Jane Smith’
where the 10th Doctor himself arrives in a hotel slightly out of
synch with everyone else).
For the first time in a
long time Russell was stuck. Even after he came up with the basic idea of ‘The
Next Doctor’, with Cybermen in Victorian London (an idea that came after watching
the DVD of their origin story ‘The Tenth Planet’ and admiring the way they
walked through the snow of a South Polar Winter) he worried constantly in a way he never
usually would: was it too close to ‘The Unquiet Dead’? Would Cybermen in the
past work? (There was much debate as to why humanity never remembered a mass
cyber invasion that wasn’t on a lonely ‘base under siege’ cut off from the rest
of civilisation but in the heart of London; Steven Moffat helped explain this
away with the ‘crack in time’ in series five after a child wrote in and asked
that very question). Even as late as the commentary track recorded just before
broadcast he was still coming up with an alternate sending where the baddy
sacrificed herself so that The Doctor wouldn’t effectively have to use a ‘big
gun’, something he’d promised himself he’d
never do. Still he worried it wasn’t working until the sudden brainwave
about having another sort of Doctor in there to tie it all together as a story
about hanging on to your identity in a world of aliens trying to take it away
from you, making it a story that was more from the heart: Jackson Lake (mega
huge giveaway lookaway spoilers) really wasn’t The Doctor at all but someone
going through trauma who’d got a bit carried away playing make believe for a
while and lost his own identity in the sheer fun of it all. It was only when
Russell stopped trying to write the perfect Christmas special, from the point
of view of what his audience might expect to see, and allowed his subconscious
in and allowed himself to write from the heart, that ‘The Next Doctor’ came
together.
The best parts of ‘The
Next Doctor’, you see, aren’t the ones about Cybermen trampling round London.
Russell was right to worry that those looked a bit suspect, especially when
they do things we’ve never seen Cybermen do before that ended up a bit suspect.
On the one hand Cybermen in Victorian London seem aesthetically right: they
feel as if they belong in the same world as the Industrial Revolution,
uprooting the lives of innocent families and turning them upside down, with the
script making much play about comparing them to the ‘heartless’ factory owners exploiting
children (there’s a scene where all the workhouse bosses are turned into
Cybermen that will have you rooting for the baddy like never before). It’s all
very Dr Who to stick two things together that shouldn’t go (Dr Who invented
steampunk!) On the other hand it makes
no sense given the Cybermen’s back story. We’d never had Cybermen time
travel despite their use in parallel worlds: by and large we follow their
timeline in order since their first invasion set in 1986 in ‘The Tenth Planet’
and it’s only when The Doctor visits their far future (in stories like ‘The
Tomb Of Cybermen’ and ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’) or later their early history
(‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’) that things get confusing; for the
most part though The Cybermen have their stories in order, upgrading each time.
That doesn’t happen here and there’s no real reason given for it or why The
Cybermen pick this time and place (they should have gone back to ancient times
when humanity was more dispersed and conversion would have been easier) or why
indeed they simply don’t go back in time and save Mondas from extinction (maybe
they just figured Earth was nicer). If The Cybermen really can time travel they
should be a much bigger threat than they turn out to be yet The Doctor doesn’t
even seem to think of that. There’s a lot the Cybermen can’t physically do and
there was a feeling that the cybermats from the past, though loved, were a bit
silly and impractical, so Russell came up with ‘cybershades’, beings that have
converted animals into cyberdogs and cybercats, which is way sillier as both
concept and a realised ‘monster’, especially when they starts walking on their
hind legs like humans (Russell might have had the cute Daggett from ‘Battlestar
Galactica’ in mind, a real monkey dressed up in an alien suit that moved like
an animal in a way a human extra never could, but animal welfare charities had
outlawed that sort of thing on UK TV with the PG Tips Chimps adverts in the
1980s). The big finale, with the Cyber King (why not a Cyber Queen if we know
he comes from a girl? That was another question put to Russell he admitted he
couldn’t answer) transforming into a, well, a Transformer and stomping around
the streets of London like the demon at the end of Torchwood series one (or,
more unflatteringly, the puffball ghost from the end of ‘Ghostbusters’) might
well be the single most inept thing seen in his run of Who (it’s between them,
The Abzorbaloff from ‘Love and Monsters’ and the scribble monster from ‘Fear
Her’ anyway). By Russell’s standards it’s a very one dimensional plot, too
easily solved, without the back story and weight he would usually give his
characters.
And yet this story is
also, at times, one of the most passionate, personal things he ever wrote,
along with ‘Midnight’ ‘Stolen
Earth’ ‘Waters of Mars’ and ‘The End Of Time’
part of a cycle of stories written when Russell knew that he was going to have
to give up the job he loved and which he’d worked so hard for. Like many
empathetic writers Russell’s always been aware that, when The Doctor speaks,
it’s with his voice to an extent (especially the 10th more than the
9th): that they share his values, do what he would do given timelord
powers and believe much the same things he believes. At first the 10th
Doctor is unstoppable, developing an ego problem partly because so many people
are telling Russell how wonderful he is and how he saved their favourite
programme. These days, though, he’s starting to feel a fraud as the complaints
begin to pile up and he finds his creativity blocked. The real problem, of
course, is that he’s trying to work while still in shock, with that first wave
of grieving that comes in when somebody you love gets sick: you feel bad
because they’re not gone yet and you might be worrying about nothing, while
believing that if you can just theow yourself into work things will go back to
being normal, only they won’t no matter how hard you work. Above all, after
four years of ‘being’ this wonderful impossible character who can do no wrong
and a tiny small part of himself believing that, Russell’s found that its all a
lie and he’s as powerless in his personal life as everybody else. He’s not
David Tennant’s heroic Doctor anymore but Jackson Lake, a wannabe who just
thought he was The Doctor for a while because to believe in fake powers was
easier than being brave and facing up the truth of grief and loss. Because
Jackson Lake isn’t really the Doctor, he just thinks he is, after stumbling
across a ‘bio-stamp’ (basically an interactive Wikipedia entry) left by a
damaged Cybermen at a point of grieving, diving headlong into a fantasy world
because it was easier to deal with than real life. Jackson, you see, is
traumatised after at least thinking he’d lost his wife and child in a Cyber
attack. He’s desperate to be anyone but himself when he stumbles across the date, turning the knowledge the Cybermen held
about The Doctor into a very Earthbound version of his stories. And it feels
like Russell going back to when he used to write (well more usually draw) Dr
Who stories as a child, where all those ordinary things Dr Who touched with
being extraordinary ‘replaced’ them in his imagination: that ordinary
screwdriver is secretly sonic and makes a noise (if you bang it against
something hard); the Tardis is a passing hot air balloon, a ‘Tethered Arial
release Development In Style’. And in that moment Russell stops ‘being’ The
Doctor and reminds himself that, all along, he’s just been writing for him
that’s all. There is, at least a happy ending as Jackson not only takes his
place back in the real life but discovers that his son, at least, is alive and
well. I wonder, too, if this story – the first to be written after Davies
formally asked Moffat off the record if he could be interested in taking over
as the new showrunner – isn’t Russell practicing at having to watch someone
else ‘be’ The Doctor and wondering how painful that will be, having ‘his’ Doctor
watch a different Doctor and having adventures without fully being a part of
the action (until he is). When Moffat and Chibnall left the show both were
burnt out and needed a rest, but like his Doctor Russell really doesn’t want to
go and feels he could have done more – so much more!
For this is a story all
about grief and what it is does to your identity, with lots of people reacting
to trauma in different ways. Jackson we’ve dealt with: he avoids his trauma by
pretending to be someone else, with the added boost of cyber technology making
it seem ‘real’. The Cybermen might have come first but they’re the perfect
choice to mirror what happens to Jackson.
Their back story, after all, is pretty traumatic itself, as a dying race tried to remove their emotions in order to better survive, taking over humans from their twin planet Earth as the next logical people for their army. They are, in a way, a race of beings in trauma and denial, covering up their emotions the way Jackson does here so they don’t have to think about who they were and what happened to them and the people they couldn’t save or convert into Cybermen. It’s something that most Cyber writers since their creators Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis had forgotten about and even their return in the modern series in ‘The Rise Of Steel’ never really gets across the fact that the single-minded monsters we meet used to be real people with individual quirks. They’ve avoided trauma by numbing themselves to feeling because it hurts too much to feel. As for the baddy, Miss Hartigan, we only get hints at her back story but what we do get is pretty horrific. She’s the lowest of the low, in an era when society was cruellest to people at the bottom of the food chain (you had far more chance of being looked after by your community back when people toiled the fields but Victorian society is capitalism gone mad and if you can’t pay your way you’re stuck in a workhouse to punish you for daring to still want to live, which is very Cybermen when you think about it). Russell can’t go that far on TV but there are hints, from the way Miss Hartigan turns on the posh people of London when she has them at her mercy, that she didn’t just sleep on the streets but on the corner of them, touting for business as a prostitute, doomed to her ‘job’ for her gender and class despite being so much smarter than the posh male ‘customers’ she hates. Her turning into a ‘Cyberman’, being ‘one of them’ is about power as much as anything else, to become the gender she can’t be. How did she survive such abuse? By numbing her feelings in a Cyberman way and trying not to think. Until the Cybermen offer her a chance to take revenge on everyone who ever hurt her, when the trauma she suffered turned her into a human monster (it’s the story’s weakest aspect that we don’t really her from her point of view the way we nearly always do with Russell’s baddies: she only has one scene with The Doctor, for instance, and most of that is mutual gloating. You can tell, I think, that those last scenes were written at the absolute last minute without the luxury of being tweaked; Moffat might be the more instinctive showrunner writer but Russell’s the greatest ‘drafts’ showrunner, getting better with each one). And into this comes The Doctor, alone again, still mourning having to wipe Donna’s memories and missing his best friend. But the difference is The Doctor has been through grief before and knows to avoid these same traps: he doesn’t try to be someone he isn’t, he doesn’t numb the pain, he doesn’t seek revenge, he just tries to save other people from hurting the way he does.
All those parts of the
story, the jostling for power struggles and the big emotions at the heart of
this story, work wonders. Basically whenever Jackson lake’s on screen this
story gets a top hundred placing easily, with lots of room for drama whether
it’s the Doctor’s confusion and confronting his own mortality or Jackson’s
gradual realisation that something awful happened to him. It’s everywhere else
this story feels undercooked. One is that this isn’t very Christmassy and has
less festive dressing than any of the other yuletide specials: the story tries
to redress this by having a heavy fall of snow and a cute denouement where the
two ‘Doctors’ get to share Xmas dinner together, but there are no killer
snowmen, Ebenezer Scrooges or killer Christmas trees and it doesn’t ‘feel’ like
that particularly homely sort of lesson-filled festive celebration so much as a
sor t of giddy school’s-out-for-Summer end of termitis. Other than snow and the
funny opening lines mirroring ‘A Christmas Carol’ (‘You, boy, what year is
this?’ ‘Are you thick or something?’!’ ‘Oi!’) there’s no reason for this to be
set on Christmas Day at all. Even Miss Hartigan never gives a reason why she
wants this invasion to happen when it does (it would help if there was a reason
for it, that made us get to know her more, like never being able to afford
presents and envying everyone who did to the point of rage). Although the
costumes and set dressings are as bang on the money as almost all Who
historicals somehow this never really feels like Victorian London. We see a
factory (actually the Torchwood hub set re-dressed) and the outside of a
workhouse but there’s no time to get to know the supporting characters and ‘The
Unquiet Dead’ did a much better job of summing up this place and time, caught
on a knife-edge between superstition and science, reserve and emotion, justice
and inequality, a people who can conquer half the world but can’t prevent their
own kind dying from starvation, a world where its considered impolite to wear a
top hat or dare to be hungry and treats both as equal crimes. Every other time
The Doctor has the time to feel outraged about something, whether it be poverty
(‘Mark Of The Rani’) or racism (’Thin Ice’) and it would have been easy enough
to tie that into the plot of a nation suffering but it’s a missed goal. That
goes double for Rosita, a character who seems as if she’s going to be
important, rescuing Jackson from various problems in a blunt practical way
(Russell commenting on how, despite being poorest, she has more sense than both
Doctors put together) and a neat mixture of Rose, Martha and Donna in character
(caring, practical and feisty by turn…she should have been called Rosarthonna)
and with a similarly tough background (she heals trauma by simply getting on
with things and trying to make her life better) but then she’s parked in a
corner and forgotten about. The Cybermen too are under-served, getting relatively
little screen time and do very little but stomp around, get bossed around by
the latest Human to work with them (a woman this time), continue to both look
and sound silly as all 21st century Cybermen do (there’s even a joke inserted
into the script about how come nobody ever seems to hear them coming). As
Russell himself admitted the ending is badly botched, a long rant with silly
CGI effects that goes on too long and is far too easily solved (where did the ‘dimension
vault’ suddenly come from? And what’s to stop the Cybermen regrouping and fighting
again? Indeed, Neil Gaiman said that’s where he thought the Cybermen from ‘Nightmare
In Silver’ came from). Miss Hartigan reveals that her first name is ‘Mercy’ and
it feels as if the script is pushing at her to show some at the final hour when
it’s clear The Cybermen have betrayed her and The Doctor shows her what she’s
become, but she just suffers and dies which doesn’t work as an ending. Even the
sweet scenes of The Doctor staying long enough to have Christmas dinner aren’t
enough to wipe the slightly bitter aftertaste from your mouth.
The result is a hybrid, like we’ve caught this story midway through cyber conversion from poignant emotional masterpiece and money-making lowest common denominator filler. Half of ‘The Next Doctor’ is a masterpiece, a story made by people with a sure touch that know exactly what they’re doing, commenting on how they usually do things from the point of view of a team who are doing this for nearly the last time, with The Doctor postmodernly becoming his own ‘companion’ and watching a Dr Who story. The result is kind of like that ‘Sherlock’ Christmas episode Moffat and Gatiss went on to write inside a mind palace where everything that usually goes on happened in the past with no explanation to the end (which everyone hated but I loved), turning the usual tropes inside out and seeing what the Doctor would be like if he really did live in Victorian London but was an ordinary mortal not a timelord with science far ahead of our time, crossed with the ‘puppet’ episode, the best episode of ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ where the main characters get to watch other people acting out the story of their lives and having to keep quiet even though everyone keeps getting it wrong. It’s all really sweet, Tennant’s joy at thinking he has a future after meeting another incarnation turning to sadness at the thought that one day his life might be over, to relief that isn’t, to empathy for the other ‘Doctor’ when he finds out the truth of what really happened to his family (which is really moving, despite the distracting OTT Murray Gold orchestra demanding we be sad). I love the way we have a sort of pseudo ‘multi Doctor’ story where, for once, they actually get on and admire each other (the Doctor seems to get on well with his fake self but not his real ones!) while it adds a lot to the 10th Doctor’s character in his final days: after all there’s nothing to make you stop and think about your legacy than watch someone be confused with you and see the outpouring of love; this must be the way celebrities feel when their deaths are announced prematurely on social media. I love that it is a story where someone actually stops The Doctor to thank him for saving the day, giving him a round of applause that ought to feel self-indulgent given how Russell and David both are about to leave the series but instead it feels earned. The filming looks great, further away from ‘home’ as usual in this era, making good use of Gloucester Cathedral and the surrounding streets even if this, too, was a problem given how the production team were swamped when trying to film location scenes there (the atmospheric graveyard scenes are closer to home in Woolos Cemetery in Newport and o a much better job than the replica scenes in ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’).
Half of it is a mess,
hurried hackwork stitched together to get something on the air at all. And even
for the bits you enjoy you can never ever see this story quite the same way
again: it’s something deliberately created to be enjoyed at Christmas 2008 when
nobody knows who the next Doctor is – once you know the trick it’s like
watching a magician after you’ve joined the Magic Circle: you’ll never enjoy it
as a ‘trick’ and as one of the audience again, merely admire the way they
pulled the trick off. Because you know it’s a trick. Usually the jeopardy in a
show comes from how the Doctor is going to get out of it but in this story the
jeopardy is how The Doctor stays our Doctor and doesn’t turn into the Jackson Doctor,
until he doesn’t. There’s no way to put this genie back in the bottle. In 1963
they could get away with this in stories they knew would never be repeated, in
an age before home video and DVD and blu-ray, to be seen and enjoyed once and
never again. They can’t do that in 2008 in quite the same way. Even the repeat
on New Year’s Day seemed a bit suspect (even if you were out on Christmas Day
itself then you’d have heard the big giveaway online by then). Also the
revelation about who this Doctor is seems curiously handled, thrownaway after a
chance discovery in a warehouse when they could have kept the trick going much
longer (why not have the revelation come right at the end, Jackson throwing
himself into danger only to discover he’s mortal and fallible and the real
Doctor saving him, even as he saves Rosita?) It’s curiously lopsided this
script, starting with a welcome bang but ending up as half an hour of talking
and info-dumping with a fierce battle at the end that’s more of a damp squib.
It lacks Russell’s usual finesse and polish this story and this here is why
Russell only makes eight episodes a year and a year in advance since his
comeback: he knows he only just got away with this story and doesn’t want
something like that ever happening again. And yet the ticking deadline that
nearly broke the production of this story inspired many of the best bits of
writing, forcing him to tap into his inner emotions to work out how to solve a
story about the Cybermen. Still for all the many major problems with this story
there’s still a lot to love: the script’s witty in all the right places,
there’s a poignancy behind the laughter that means the jokes feel earned rather
than being self-indulgent, the acting is excellent (I’d have been most happy
for Morrissey to really be the Doctor, good as Matt Smith turns out to be),
there are lots of sweet little nods to longterm fans and the result is still one
of the better Who Christmas specials around, even if it isn’t that Christmassy
or one of Russell’s very best.
POSITIVES + David Morrissey
is sensational, breathing new life into Tennant’s incarnation of the Doctor,
just as Tennant himself is running out of steam a little (the pair were old
friends from the series ‘Blackpool’; Tennant was also good mates with Dervla
Kirwan who makes the most of her fairly small part as Miss Hartigan – the two
had worked together in the Russell’s written ‘Casanova’ where she played David
as Casanova’s raunchy mum!) Morrissey is an excellent mimic of his old pal and
yet isn’t just a bland impression: he’s a more reserved, more English version
of Tennant’s Scottish fireball but with
much the same energy and enthusiasm, even nailing the same cheesy grin and
sudden plunges from sunny delight to existential rainclouds and is quite
believable as a new alien timelord. It’s fully in character that the 10th
Doctor is so chuffed that a new incarnation inherits so many of his traits too
– his reaction to this new Doctor is notably kinder than his abrasive put down
of ‘Chinny’ and ‘Grandad’ in the 50th anniversary ‘Day Of The Doctor’. Maybe
the cyber thing just runs in the family, given that in real life David
Morrissey is married to actress Esther Freud, one of whose first jobs was a
Cryon Threst in ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ back in 1984! The amazing thing in all
of this though is that, in another sign of how much this production was plagued
by problems, Morrissey only joined up five days before filming after Martin
Clunes (who broke into TV through his role in ‘Snakedance’) dropped out for
unknown reasons (although my guess is that the script was running so late he
didn’t have a chance to read a draft before committing himself to the part. He’d
have been good, but something tells me not as great as Morrissey is). A quick
word too about the small part of the vicar played by Jason Morell, a rare bit
of casting Russell decided on himself as Jason was a good friend of his from
university whose dad Andre had even been in a Dr Who story himself (‘The Massacre’).
Previous ‘The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’ next ‘Planet Of The Dead’
No comments:
Post a Comment