Utopia
(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha and Captain Jack, 16/6/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Graeme Harper)
Rank: 161
'They always said the only thing that would be left at the end of the world would be cockroaches. I didn't expect them to giant talking blue ones though'
Al-‘Utopia’ often gets lost coming between two real heavyweights but it’s a good example of what Dr Who can do that other series can’t-an. Al-Despite it’s name this story is clearly not perfect and is more of a slow burn, it doesn’t have the intelligence of a ‘Blink’ or the full-on epic thrills and spills of ‘The Sound Of Drums’ and it’s the sort of episode where not a lot happens when you stop to think about it – but it doesn’t happen quite beautifully-an. Al-The general rule of thumb with the modern showrunners goes that if you want plot you go to Moffat, if you want a lecture you go to Chibnall and if you want characters you go to Russell T-an. Al-‘Utopia’ is perhaps the best example of this as, in a few sentences and a handful of characters and a mere forty-five minutes we get an entire world, Malcassario, that feels as if it’s existed for centuries that we’ve only just happened to tune into – and funnily enough it has, being the end of human civilisation-an. Al-It’s Chantho-though who steals the episode, a Malmooth whose a sort of giant walking cockroach whose been bred to be polite and what constitutes politeness in her society is starting every sentence with the first half and ending everything with the second half of her name-an. Al-This should become really irritating really really quickly (and I’m sure it is for you so I’ll stop doing it soon I promise) but in context it makes perfect sense; the RTD years aren’t about epic moments and saving the universe the way it is with so many other eras of Dr Who so much as it’s about exploring it, of accepting other customs and societies on its own terms just the way they are. Al- Chantho is designed from the first to be sweet and unlikeable, different to every alien race seen in the series since The Ood and totally the character you expect to live a long, happy life after the end credits-an.
Only it all goes wrong,
in a story that seems like it’s going to be the usual sort where The Doctor
breezes in and saves the day but where everything comes unstuck. The end of
humanity is dark and depressing, mankind trapped in a dark corner of the
universe having been split in two, between the last few stragglers trying to
build a rocket out of odds and ends and the ‘Futurekind’ who have turned into a
feral cross between werewolves and zombies.
Poor Chantho dies a horrible death, the cruel words of the only person
she ever loved ringing her ears. The last of humanity, trying to take off in a
rocket from a dying corner of the universe, are destroyed (only to come back in
new killer form next week). Even that nice kid with the clipboard Martha takes
a shine to will die, turned into a killer Toclafane. The Doctor runs around
this story a lot, boasting more than normal, but this is Russell’s equivalent
of ‘Logopolis’ and to all intents and purposes he loses, watching humanity take
off in a sabotaged rocket while his friends are attacked by the Futurekind and
an old enemy has walked off with his Tardis. Utopia wasn’t meant to be like
this: the title alone suggest a nice happy-go-lucky episode, while the much
trailed return of Captain Jack trips us up: surely they can’t put an immortal
character in mortal peril? Heck, this is even the story that features a Blue
Peter completion winner (John Bell doing a fine job, praised by David Tennant
for being ‘more professional on set than the rest of us and going on to be an
actor as an adult. He’s in one of the Hobbit films and is one of the few people
who’ve been in Dr Who and have a model for a different part. He’s Bain the
teenage Prince if you want to add to your collection. It’s less remarked upon
but the kids who came second and third both get non-speaking walk on parts as
extras) and yet poor Sneed, the kid with the clipboard that Martha takes a
shine to, dies alongside everyone else. It’s not just this world that’s in
darkness, this is Russell T Davies’ darkest story too in so many ways, where
humanity’s last days are spent not in surviving and being ‘indomitable’ (the
line the 4th Doctor said in ‘The Ark In Space’ and which the 10th
Doctor repeats here), but as the pawn in another of (spoilers) The Master’s
tricks.
Yes – The Master, the
biggest villain that hadn’t been brought back in the modern series and who was
an obvious choice after season finales involving The Daleks and Cybermen. If
you were paying close attention to the tabloids then a few of them actually got
something ‘right’ for once and guessed it (despite Derek Jacobi being credited
only as Professor Yana and John Simm listed on callsheets as ‘The Enemy’) even
though Russell was on record this same year trying to make fans look the other
way and saying The Master wouldn’t work as a character in the modern series,
citing the ‘TV Movie’ as an example.
This reveal is very different though: back in 1996 newbies were asked to take
it on trust that The Master is a big bad who was The Doctor’s equal (even
though we never saw evidence why) and had the power to randomly turn into a CGI
snake. Here we’re lulled into a false sense of security: Professor Yana has
been living out his days in disguise from the time war (they don’t make it too
clear on screen but he’s basically a draft dodger. Even suicide didn’t stop the
Timelords reviving people to fight The Daleks. Although you also have to wonder
which side The Master would be on given that he’d worked with team Skaro in
‘Frontier In Space’ and has no great love for his own kind. Though The Daleks
did assassinate him in the ‘TV Movie’ so there is that). Professor Yana is sold
to us as being very like The Doctor, a harmless eccentric do-gooder who’s done
great things with very little, building a rocket to help save humanity. He even
has a companion who’s oh so similar to Martha: polite, responsible and from an
ethnic minority (she’s bright blue!) Yana is very like the Peter Cushing film
version of The Doctor in particular and his laboratory is very like the Tardis
in the two Dalek movies, home-made and held together with bits of string. He
even dresses the same way, in an Edwardian style our Doctor hasn’t worn since
he was Jon Pertwee. The Master is also even more like Quatermass than The
Doctor is, an eccentric Professor heading up a rocket group (that series casts
such a shadow over Who, perhaps less so in the 21st century but it’s
still there: Mark Gatiss brought it back just before the 2005 comeback and
David Tennant was in it after all). His seemingly clumsy back story (discovered
abandoned as a child) makes you wonder if he’s going to be some future Doctor,
but no: Martha sees the same fobwatch the Doctor used to hide (in ‘Human Nature/The Family Of Blood’)
and puts the pieces of the puzzle together quicker than The Doctor: he’s a
timelord! But which one? Well, there was only going to be one leading candidate
I guess (and like many a fan I wish we could hae seen a Master ‘journal of
impossible things’ with random memories where he’s dressed as an oriental Michelin
man, watching The Clangers, being turned into a CGI snake or wearing a variety
of funny hats). It seems odd in retrospect that The Doctor assumes it is
another timelord rather than a future self (because as far as he knows he’s the
only timelord alive. As the series have gone on, though, there turns out to be
lots of them all running around). After all, Yana is being nice and helpful
(this episode and the next two hint that The Master would be as kind and good
as The Doctor if it wasn’t for the sound of drums planted in his head, making
him a ‘victim’). You’d think he’d show more joy too at not being the only one,
but he’s nervous because who is it who keeps coming back? It’s a gut punch when
that nice Professor Yana turns nasty, murdering Chantho in cold blood and
abandoning humanity to die (you have to hope that the other stragglers in ‘Frontios’ survive longer), one of Russell’s
best story arcs as we’re kept properly in the dark right up until the last
minute (unless you read the tabloids anyway). It’s a glorious reveal. Though of course like all reveals you can only do it once and re-watching just makes you wonder where the rest of the plot ended up.
Talking of being in the
dark, what we see of Malcessario is strong too. Russell has done his homework,
or at any rate read an infamous Wikipedia article on ‘a timeline of significant
events in the universe’ which had made the news around the time this story was
being written. A group of scientists had been asked to work out the date when
different things happened in the universe and the general consensus was that
life would be impossible around the year 300 trillion (The Earth would have
been eaten by our sun long before then, something Russell had already borrowed
for the dating of ‘The End Of The World’). The
most likely cause of the end if humans don’t blow themselves up first? The
spread of dark matter, a substance of mass that as the name implies absorbs
light and makes life impossible to exist. We know that dark matter is slowly
expanding across the universe and will eventually take over everything, though
of course not before ‘eating’ all suns and preventing any current known sustainable
way of growing food. While you can debate about where exactly Yana’s rocket is
hoping to go if this is the last patch of life left (and why things are so
different here compared to both ‘Frontios’
and ‘Hide’, which also claim to show
near enough the end of the universe, though ‘Utopia’ does more homework than
either of them) it’s well handled, with a pitch black sky where all the stars
have been ‘eaten’. I also adore the joke that the only thing left at the end of
civilisation will be a cockroach – a big talking blue one!
They still could have
done more with it, though. There’s no reason given on screen for why so many
people have transformed into ‘The Futurekind’, feral wolves with snarling teeth
and tattoos who hunt Humans (though whether for sport or to eat is never
explained). Are these people who turned back into animals when civilisation
collapsed? A mutation? A crossbreed with the ‘Host’ werewolf from ‘Tooth and
Claw’? Or did Humans mate with their dogs?) There’s no reason for them to be
here other than a big action chase sequence, while even in the dark if you
can’t tell between Humans and feral
wolves with fangs you need to hire better lookouts. The sense of desperation
comes over loud and clear, with humanity now refugees in time rather than space
with nowhere to go, but we don’t really get to know any Humans in this world
and see how they feel about this, what their backstory is, how desperate living
has been and how many just want to give up and die. This is usually Russell’s
bread and butter as a writer, the two minute scenes that fill is on a million
years in a few short lines, but we don’t get it (this story was over-running,
but it would be sad if such a poignant moment got cut for time). The biggest
problem with ‘Utopia’ is that it sets us up for a different sort of story all
about our possible future and instead dives backwards into Dr Who’s past,
abandoning that plotline once Yana comes to the fore. It’s a shame. Russell
tries to come back to the same point sixteen years later with ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, a story set even
further ahead in time where time runs backwards and the usual laws of physics
don’t apply, but drops the ball there too by having it be more about The Doctor
and Donna’s changing relationship and some bad CGI with some very long arms.
Neither story gets to the heart of what it means to be one of the very last
people alive – and next week’s episode forgets all about it anyway, making
humanity become a Master killing machine.
Then again Russell
struggled all round with this script, which caused him more sleepless nights
and abandoned drafts than any other until the 2009 anniversary special year
(when he had good reason to be distracted). Russell had left himself this story
to write knowing he needed to introduce The Master and Captain Jack but
couldn’t work out how on Melcessario to get them both in the same script. It
was only when he hit on the idea of having one cause the other, of having
Captain Jack leaping onto the Tardis and causing it to have a fit trying to
shake him off (typical Jack, though it’s the closest he comes to physically copping
off with a Doctor’s companion despite all the flirting!), landing in the
distant far future, that the story came together (and it leads into the opening
title sequence nicely too). Although it still feels like a sticking plaster: we
hear a lot from The Doctor that he’s nervous of Jack because he’s now immortal,
a ‘fixed point in time that shouldn’t exist’. But why does that make the Tardis
so snarky all of a sudden? The Tardis should feel more comfortable around
‘fixed points’ than when times are in flux. Then again, why does The Doctor?
Why did he run from Jack so fast at the end of ‘Bad
Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’? Yes he can’t die, yes the time-travelling Tardis
knows instinctively that he’s ‘wrong’, but he gave his life saving Rose after
all – it’s not like he betrayed all of humanity by handing over children to
aliens or something wicked (oh wait...maybe the Doctor had advance warning of
the future Torchwood series? But in that case, when did he find out – it wasn’t
when he was Christopher Eccleston or he’d have used any excuse to run a mile!) The
way David Tennant stares makes it seem as if he’s heard about what John
Barrowman got up to on set more than anything else. Even he admits he’s
basically ‘prejudiced’ because Jack ‘feels wrong’ but that’s not a reason; The
Doctor has strong instincts but always uses his brain over and above. He knows
that Jack exists as a side effect of saving him – he’s not a master criminal
with a grand plan to take over the universe. Jack, meanwhile, is very out of
character despite his best gag being in this series (Martha trying to give him
the kiss of life, ‘Was someone just kissing me?!’) Fandom had built up this
reunion so much in our heads that we thought there would be fireworks about
being abandoned on Satellite Five, that Jack might be working at Torchwood
purely to track The Doctor down for revenge. Not a bit of it: he’s oddly quiet.
Except when he’s flirting and even that’s a bit strange. Rose could spar off
him because she was naturally flirty herself but poor Martha is just the wrong
character to be chatted up by a time-travelling bisexual mercenary and the
Doctor doesn’t step in to help her out (also while it was fun to see the 9th Dr
squirm next to him, the 10th Dr is quite flirty and Jack-like himself so the
contrast’s just not there). Jack’s more fussed that Rose is alive, admitting
that he went back to the Powell estate to see her, without any recriminations
that it was she who saved him and made him immortal (it’s most odd of all that
Jack doesn’t tease the Doctor that Rose was really saving him and The Doctor
just got lucky). The whole ‘being immortal’ thing comes in handy for an odd
sequence with wires but he’s otherwise a spare part in this episode and the
next two, making you wonder why he was brought back at all. Even that’s a bit
wrong: as Russell’s own scripts for Torchwood series three ‘Children Of Earth’
shows his immortality doesn’t work like that: he doesn’t just close his eyes
and open them again, he goes through all the pain of his cells repairing
themselves. He should be in tiny pieces after being flung through the Tardis
vortex, not sitting up and cracking jokes within seconds.
‘Utopia’ then ends up
being a series about trust, about putting your faith in someone not to let you
down and even The Doctor struggles with that this week, trusting Yana
implicitly and taking him at face value, while distrusting Jack for being ‘wrong'
(maybe The Doctor has found about Jack’s background in Russell’s future script for
Torchwood: Children Of Earth where he traded children’s lives to keep aliens
away?) He doesn’t even trust Martha that much, while he in turn all but loses
hers by talking about Rose as if she’s, well, Utopia instead of seeing what’s
in front of him. It’s the people of Utopia The Doctor really lets down though:
he swans in, promises to help them and largely does, but off screen they
probably head to their deaths assuming The Doctor has betrayed them. Chantho,
meanwhile, is sold by The Master, the only person she ever trusted. Even at the
end of the universe mankind id still discovering thing about itself it seems
and it’s a tangled web this story, full of people keeping secrets and the
innocents (creed, Chantho, even Martha a little bit given what happens to her
and her family as a result next time out) paying the price for it. A shame we
didn’t have a bit more of that though: a scene showing or telling us how The
Futurekind were Humans who ‘sold themselves out’ for an easier life would make
it even sharper and give them more reason to be here. There’s another
half-developed theme they run out of time for too, about whether it is better
to live in hope or face reality, no matter how hard things get. The story has
it both ways so never has a final answer: on the one hand the rocket works
against all odds simply because by chance and Captain Jack-power The Tardis
happened to land here; then it doesn’t work because by chance The Master wakes
up and sabotages his own plan. Such is life.
Perhaps the biggest shame
is that we didn’t get to spend more time here because the half hour of ‘Utopia’
that feels as if it’s heading in an entirely different direction is time well
spent, the sort of thing you’re glad they do every so often but also leaves you
a little underwhelmed and (ironically as it turns out) leaves you looking at
your watch. The twist with The Master is strong too and one that you really
don’t see coming. Even when you come back to watch this story again it isn’t
like some of the Moffat episodes that have nothing to do them once you’ve
answered all the questions and solved all the plot arcs either: you can still
watch it for Derek Jacobi’s sterling performance, noting the steel behind the
eyes and the slow bursts of anger that are quickly covered up, the hints of the
real Master coming to the fore. Jacobi is clearly having a whale of a time in
the part and it’s a tragedy we don’t get to see more of The War Master (at
least on TV. Jaocbi also played The Master over on Big Finish and years earlier
in a webcast ‘Scream Of The Shalka’ but his
lines about being discovered as a baby make it unlikely they’re the same ones –
even apart from the fact that Russell hated the animation and ignored it as
much as possible. Mind you, David Tennant plays a caretaker in that and yet The
Doctor never stops to talk about the similarity of his voice). Ever since Dr
Who had comeback it was a running joke that one of the big name guest stars
would be asked for a part and request to play The Master, so Russell knew that
only a big name would do. By chance around the time they were casting Phil
Collinson, Dr Who producer, bumped into Derek Jaocbi having dinner on a nearby
table and sounded him about the series – Jacobi leapt at the chance, saying he was
a big Whovian (he’s tried to get work in 1980, back when he was Hamlet and
Lalla Ward was Ophelia back in the days she was still Romana on TV) and had
only two ambitions left (he still hasn’t done the other, Coronation Street,
yet, but did have a very fanworthy conversation on the Tardis about how much it
looked like a house on the soap, nicknamed ‘The
Underworld’, which little did he know had been part-created by Who writer
Gareth Roberts and named after a Who story). Tennant was thrilled too: in his
drama student days he’d queued for hours in the rain to get Jacobi’s autograph
once and raises his own game to match. As great as John Simm is as an unhinged
Master, the joker to the darker Doctor’s Batman, Jacobi’s Master feels more
like the real deal, with the manners masking the rarely suppressed rage of the
Roger Delgado original. Indeed he’s nicer than The Doctor is for the first half
of the story given that he’s on one of his ego-trips and deliberately written
to seem more obnoxious than usual. It’s, if you excuse the pun, a masterful
appearance and a shame we don’t see him in the role for longer (he turns into
Simm partly for the cliffhanger but mostly as Jacobi wasn’t free to film all
three episodes). Certainly we’re a long weay from the days of 1996 when Dr Who
was so unpopular that the only person they could get to play The Master was
someone most famous for being Julia Roberts’ brother and who came with a long
list of crazy demands. Having the setup come a few episodes earlier, with a
story about The Doctor hiding in a fob-watch so viewers are up to speed, is
clever too. It’s just a shame that the revelation overshadows and dilutes
everything else that had been working so well. It’s frustrating, too, that the
rest of the story isn’t hashed out on Melcessario: that would have been a
better bit than the sometimes OTT season finale back on Earth.
It’s having the one
overshadow the other that’s the problem. I’m still not quite sure if I’m
pleased with that ending or not - it’s a brilliantly shocking one that shows
you can’t take your eyes off this show for a minute and one of those rare
secrets the production team actually managed to keep quiet and the revelation
is a great one, setting up a finale that couldn’t possibly live up to this
episode. However I was a real fan of the slower pace and gentleness of it all
too (even if, to stave off that revelation, this story sags in the middle worse
than an Abzorbaloff) and I’m rather sorry we didn’t get to follow that through
to the end. There was another, possibly even better story that gets buried here
and humanity’s rocket gets left behind rather. It’s also frankly daft that The
Face of Boe gives The Doctor such a cryptic warning as ‘You Are Not Alone’
spelling out Yana’s initials rather than going ‘when you see a professor with a
blue cockroach, run and whatever you do don’t mention you’re a timelord!’ (You
might well ask, too, why Captain jack doesn’t react when Martha mentions The Face
Of Boe, who turns out to be Jack himself in two episodes time and who comes
from the Boe Peninsula. But the simple fact is that Russell hadn’t thought up
that twist yet when they were filming this story). The Doctor never even stops
to think about them in his haste to stop The Master. Instead the best moments
come in the small parts when this story is working the way a ‘normal’ Who episode
would, especially when Martha’s in the room as our eyes and ears. There’s a nice
giggly scene where she chats with Chantho without even batting an eye that she’s
talking to a blue cockroach and discussing how hard it is being ‘invisible’ in
front of the one you love (although her giggling and trying to get Chantho to
drop her sentence structures and be ‘rude’ is far more like something Rose
would do). Martha’s realisation of what the fobwatch means and the fright in
her eyes when The Doctor yells at her, biting the messenger’s head off because of
the message. Even the moments about her jealousy over Rosem which have become a
bore elsewhere, make more sense now Jack is back too: watch Martha roll her
eyes when The Doctor and Jack talk about her – ‘Oh she was blonde as well, was
she?- and a marvellous line, sadly cut, ‘Great she gets to be all powerful and
absorb the vortex and I’m left here pressing buttons!’ Even though most of this
story is about how different the two are: Rose changed the universe to keep The
Doctor from harm but Martha is stopping to help strangers while The Doctor
copes with the bigger picture. Freema Agyeman was always best at playing
kindness and softness rather than when she’s made to get teary or do action but
gets precious little of that space past her debut.
The result is an
under-rated minor gem, not the greatest episode of Dr Who there ever was or
will be and one that would have benefitted from being another episode longer so
we could properly invest in Yana’s story and properly see what happens to
humanity in their last days. Most of all I want to find out how on Earth an old
gramophone has ended up here, despite vinyl being so fragile it scratches as
soon as you touch it. You’d think they’d be on MP-900s by now.Talk about vinyl
making a comeback! (Please tell me The Spice Girls don’t exist at the end of
the universe or that really is a dystopia!) Indeed this episode over-ran quite
badly so a lot of interesting things got cut, such as a sequence of The Doctor
and Martha exploring Cardiff while waiting for the rift to re-power the Tardis
(on-screen it takes seconds, compared to the day it took in ‘Boom Town’. In the
original Jack runs because he sees the Tardis from Torchwood hub rather than
hears it materialise). I wish we had longer so we could get to know how these
characters feel and what they’re thinking, rather than simply re-act in the
moment (take Martha for instance, what a day: she discovers her new best friend
has another companion he abandoned who also happened to fancy her blonde
predecessor. Then she finds out that humanity are doomed. Then the friend she’s
made on this planet is murdered by someone who turns into the prime minister
she’s just left back on Earth. No wonder she takes a long walk to mull things
over at the end of the following episode!) We ought to know more about how this
all works too: it seems mighty odd that, even in a disguise with your memories
wiped, The Master reverts back to being a child and grows up the usual Human way,
unlike every other timelord we see bar the special case of River Song in ‘Day of the Moon’ (and she isn’t a timelord,
just conceived on a timelord ship).Does this mean that, if the Tardis hadn’t
arrived here, then Yana would have lived into Human old age and died without
knowing he was a timelord? In which case nice going Doctor, Jack and Tardis –
the next two episodes and a whole year of in-story time is all your fault. Presumably
The Master’s Tardis is still parked out there where he left it too in ‘The Silver
Destination’ (surprisingly it’s never been heard of again, not even in the
spin-off books, though it had already been mentioned in ‘The
End Of The World’ and ‘Bad Wolf’).
It all feels a little rushed, the sketched outline there but without the usual
colouring in. The usual Russell T Davies strengths of character and plot don’t
apply as much here, as sign perhaps of how much he struggled writing it.
It’s still a strong story
though, in a different way to anything the writer had pulled off before, a
story that fools us into thinking it’s about something entirely different and
hiding in plain sight that takes everything that’s usually light and makes it
dark. In its own way is every bit as daring and courageous as the all-singing
all-dancing episodes around it that get all the attention, a clever magic trick
that diverts our attention while hiding the big story in plain sight and one of
the best the series ever pulled. In fact it pulls off a magic trick twice: you’re
so busy reeling from The Master’s identity that you’re not ready for him to
regenerate so soon. It’s just a shame that the trick itself dilutes the rest of
the story and it becomes less about mankind’s survival than The Doctor fighting
an old foe (again). Even before then there are some nice biting bits of
dialogue though (the best being The Doctor looking abashed when someone points
out that he can’t be a hermit if he has friends and he babbles about meeting on
‘Hermits reunited’ and The Doctor asking Jack if he’s had work done, to which
he retorts ‘you can talk’!) I’m really fond of Chantho too and wish we’d seen
more of the Malmooth and heard their back story, not least because those
prosthetics look as if they cost a packet (though really it’s Chipo Chung – the
same actress who played the fortune teller in ‘Turn Left’ – who sells the part,
full of wide-eyed innocence). Even her speech is a fun quirky species trait
that makes a sort of sense (Humans care a lot about their language, so why not
sentient cockroaches?) rather than irritating like it could have been, although
Collinson for one didn’t see how it could work (when he got the script he thought
it was a formatting issue and actually emailed Russell to say something was up
with his computer and where he might be able to update his software!) Full
marks too for being brave: there’s a
rather odd re-writing of history amongst fandom of late that the Russell T
stories were ‘cosy’ and ‘safe’ but they very much weren’t. Few go quite as far
as this one though, especially five minutes before the end – the moment The
Doctor generally saves the day – when we have one of the best cliffhangers in
the series, his Tardis gone, his friends under attack and humanity doomed, with
nothing left but a time travelling ‘space hopper’. In short, it’s hard to diss
Utopia, not least because really it’s a dystopia, a story that takes Dr Who’s
usual optimistic view of our future and paints it black. The result is a story
that looks as if it fails, given that the first half isn’t finished and the second
half leads into a poor season finale, but it would be wrong to criticise ‘Utopia’
for their losses; it makes the best of a difficult job and it’s gripping enough
to send you heading into the finale. It’s only later you realise that Utopia
isn’t perfect.
POSITIVES + The effects
of the missile taking the Humans to (apparent) safety is very very good, better
than any of the similar designs in modern Who (like the similar one carrying
Mondas’ survivors in ‘World Enough And Time’
for instance) and right up there with the bigger budgeted Hollywood
blockbusters.
PREQUEL/SEQUELS: The
beginning of ‘Utopia’ sees the Tardis landing in the Cardiff time rift and
Captain Jack running from outside the Torchwood hub and grabbing on to the
police telephone box for dear life. In a neat bit of continuity the last
episode of series one of ‘Torchwood’, Chris Chibnall’s ‘End Of Days’, leads
directly into it with Jack abandoning his post just after he’s helped save
Cardiff from The devil (don’t ask: it’s a dumb story even for Torchwood and
makes its close cousin ‘The
Impossible Planet’ look as if it’s wearing sensible shoes).
It’s a case of ‘speak of the Devil’ in fact as Jack’s basically just saved
everyone by opening the Cardiff time rift and when Gwen asks him how he thought
of it he says he learned the tip ‘from the right kind of Doctor’. Suddenly The
Doctor’s severed hand (from ‘The
Christmas Invasion’ and kept in the Torchwood lab) starts
glowing and Jack runs off with a manic grin on his face, leaving the rest of
his team to do all the clearing up (as per usual, typical boss). Gwen walks in
with coffee, asking everyone where Jack is as he was there just a minute ago
and seems to have vanished: the answer of course is that he’s at the end of the
known universe. You could be forgiven for forgetting all this plot detail
though as ‘End Of Days’ went out on New Year’s Day 2007, a full six months (and
nine Dr Who episodes) before ‘Utopia’.
There’s also what was intended originally to be a
standalone ‘War Master’ release ‘Only The Good’ (2017), which became a box set
instead and is an unexpected treat from Big Finish released on the tenth anniversary of ‘Utopia’.
There are four stories in the box set, all of which tell the tale of how The Master
ended up in hiding at the end of the universe. My biggest problem with this set
though: perhaps because they were hoping for more volumes the stories don’t
directly tie into the stories or the events that bookend it. For instance we
never see The Master when the time war breaks out; instead the story starts
with his escape capsule recovered in the ‘Viscoid’ waters on an alien planet named
Gardeeza. The story only really gets going when The Daleks appear although even
that’s a bit disappointing: we still haven’t had a decent Dalek-Master
crossover after the botched go with the finale of ‘Frontier In Space’,
even though it’s an obvious pairing in so many ways. The Master then moves on
to the medical planet Arckling where the fortunate few who survived the time
war (including his sort of companion with the unlikely name of Cole Jarnish) go
to treat their wounds (it’s notable that the time war is now seen as a more
physical war rather than the abstract battle where weapons can pierce your
armour and take time away from you in Russell T Davies’ spin-off media, even
though ‘Utopia’ is a Russell episode). The Master recovers only too well, using
the special healing powers of the planet and their Dr Keller (no, not that one)
to create a weapon. ‘The Sky Man’ has The Master working out where to go next
to remain undercover: he considers running a vineyard on Earth weirdly, before
choosing a more primitive ‘Survival’
style world to shape in his own image. The story then ends, not with ‘Utopia’,
but with another stopping off point in Stamford Bridge in the 1970s where a
hidden timelord research laboratory is disguised as an ordinary house. It’s not
hidden well enough though, with The Master taking it over. Like the ‘War
Doctor’ sets this one has some great moments but overall it’s something of a
missed opportunity: it’s great to hear the Jacobi Master getting a whole story
to himself but the writers (four of Big Finish’s most experienced and
distinguished regulars) can’t find enough for everyone to do, the end result a
little on the boring side.
Previous ‘Blink’ next ‘The
Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Timelords’
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