The Robots Of Death: Ranking - 111

                   The Robots Of Death

(Season 14, Dr 4 with Leela, 29/1/1977-19/2/1977, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Chris Boucher, director: Michael E Briant) 

Rank: 111

  'The robot butler did it. Well, sort of. Well, not exactly. Well, ish'. 

 

 Another Doctor Whodunnit next and arguably the best of the handful of murder mysteries the series has done, not least because what we’re tracking down isn’t just the murderer but the android they used to kill with. Though, like many a Hinchcliffe era story, this one borrows heavily from other sources (Frank Herbert’s’Dune’ and Isaac Asimov – not just the more famous ‘I, Robot’ stories but the ‘Black Widowers’ series, which is a bunch of scifi murder mysteries just like this one) the way Chris Boucher’s story weaves these two plot strands together and throws some Agatha Christie-isms in there too makes this one of the more memorable cases of DW recycling. This is a story that’s always shifting gears and a story that’s as deep as you want it to be and all things to all people: it can be just another DW action in space if that’s what you fancy, with lots of crazy space sets and costumes (oh the costumes!) to look at if that’s what you like best; it’s a pretty decent crime story for other fans who get more caught up in whose going round bumping off Sandminer workers than they do, say people getting killed off by potted plant Vervoids or giant wasps; if you’re big into the Doctor and Leela then this is a story all about them trying to prove their innocence when they naturally fall under suspicion, arriving just as people are dying (great timing there Tardis!); there are lots of scenes exploring this new world and mankind’s far future with its quirky characters and class system;while on another level this is a deep allegorical story that asks that age-old DW question of what throwing robots into a human world would do to them – and to us. At times the Humans are much more like the robots than the Vox and the Dumbs, robots with different degrees of intelligence, scheming and distant towards their companions. On the other hand the robots themselves have their own society that feels as real to us as anything the Humans have. While some of the other Hinchcliffe stories are all about the horror and having fun with the source material and twisting it to fit a DW concept, this one feels ‘real’ – of all the 1970s writers Boucher had one of the best eyes for human observation and these people feel plausibly like us despite the differences of the age and times. You really do care when these characters die, or are hurt, or how they feel when the Doctor points out the lies they’ve been living their whole lives. Boucher’s trump card as a writer is not just making other worlds come to life, which a lot of DW writers do well, but in making three-dimensional characters you understand even when you don’t agree with them – he does it by making the baddies sympathetic here and its surely a big reason why Dalek creator Terry Nation ‘poached’ him for ‘Blake’s 7’ the following year, when we end up totally on the side of bandits murderers and thieves for four series. Often the future in DW can look ridiculous and some of these costumes do look a little on the silly side (mind you, if thick eyebrows and orange tans can come back into fashion again whose to say crescent moon hats won’t be all the rage in a few millennia?) but by throwing a few ‘old’ designs in there too (notably the art deco designs coming back into fashion again) this one seems more plausibly futuristic-real than maybe any other in DW, realising how every age borrows from the past rather than ramming headfirst into the future; it’s certainly more memorable than yet another stainless steel spaceship that looks like a hospital. If there’s a downside, well, its the whodunnit angle. With such a small cast and so many of them getting bumped off there’s only a small number of people the killer can be – and two less than the characters realise given that we know it can’t be the Doctor or Leela. After (spoilers) Poul is revealed to be the future equivalent of an undercover cop (suffering from robophobia – here named ‘Grimwade’s Syndrome’ as a Tom Baker in-joke after production assistant and future DW director Peter Grimwade complained that every story he worked on seemed to involve robots somewhere) the suspect is even more obvious. Bigger spoilers: It’s Taren Capel, a scientist who believes robots are superior to humans. Which you should have guessed because he’s practically the only one left, And the person in charge of all the robots. And because he’s seen full screen in episode three in a truly ridiculous reveal (hardly a three-pipe problem for budding Sherlocks that). A few tweaks and the whodunnit aspect could have worked nicely – certainly the motivations of the people involved ring true, even the ones you can rule out - but you can’t help but feel that Boucher just isn’t interested in that aspect – he wants to explore this world and the dynamics of a world where everyone thinks robots can’t hurt humans, but mistakes, complacency and paranoia can do funny things to their programmers. Most interesting of all is what this does to the robots themselves – D84 has a true existentialist crisis and its surely no coincidence Douglas Adams is writing his first draft of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy’ when this story goes out (and will be DW script editor himself not long after); he’s the serious version of ‘Marvin’ and what happens to robots who understand how futile their role in life is and how few rights they have. What with AI opening up many of the same questions, ‘Robots’ feels if anything more timely now than when it went out. This is Leela’s second story and as her creator Boucher gets her character spot on and her mixture of action and intuition, working off instinct and body language in a world where robots don’t have any and humans are covering up all sorts of secrets, makes for a worthy contrast against the robots and the soppy humans who’ve become used to robots doing everything for them. Her dialogue is littered with maxims from her homeworld and she’s even more of a pupil to the Doctor’s teacher than ever – albeit a reluctant one (her reaction to the scene where the Doctor tries to describe the dimensions of the Tardis and how it works – ‘that’s silly’ – is priceless and always turning up in clips compilations). Tom Baker isn’t quite right this story though: he’s in one of his cross-patchy moods and is, unusually for him, lowkey and all but wiped off the screen by the other actors (maybe its because his is actually the most ‘normal’ costume on screen for once?!) In fact its the acting all round doesn’t quite match the script, though David Collings (that’s Silver in ‘Sapphire and Steel’ to you – and indeed me) is excellent as ever and the robots are all first-class (err, whatever their class) the other humans are a hammy lot this week, often on the verge of hysterics, tears or fits. Although even that somehow works: this is the first (of many as it turns out) DW stories set in the future where, far from being traditional action heroes or clinical scientists getting on with their work calmly, they’re just like ‘us’ at home but in space, the constant sea of robotic faces making humans ever more emotional and less robotic. Its the sign of a writer whose done a lot of thinking about his world before he ever put pen to paper – I just wish they’d done a bit less of it, that’s all. For the most part though ‘Robots’ has it all – arguably the best robots in DW in design and character complexity, one of the better modern day sets, a plot that’s simple but is a useful launchpad to asking difficult questions and some cracking dialogue. So much so that even some of the people in my life that hate DW quite like this one and don’t ‘throw hands’ in horror every time I watch it. – even the ones who ‘throw hands’ at me for watching it don’t blow the fuses they normally do. Which might explain why its the one non-anniversary/Dalek story that was picked for early release for both the video and DVD markets, a useful entry point to the series even if no other story quite goes where this one does.

+ The robot designs are gorgeous. Forget your bog-standard supermarket brand own faceless drones seen in other stories, the art deco masks and the gold hues make these seem like the deluxe models. Combined with Gregory De Polney’s acting skills you’ll care for this robot more than any other in scifiland. After K9 and Marvin the Paranoid Android anyway. Allegedly one of the reasons it all looks so good is that producer Phillip Hinchcliffe was told during the making of this story that owing to the pressure from Mary Whitehouse he was going to be taken off the series and replaced by Graham Williams, so decided not to worry about money anymore and make his last stories look amazing, letting his departments splash out knowing that they couldn’t fire him twice. Though unconfirmed, certainly this story and ‘Talons Of Weng Chiang’ look a lot more impressive than most other 4^th Dr stories – and its notable just how cheap the following season looks by comparison.

- ‘Robots Of Death’ is, for the most part a serious story – the tension builds up across three and a half episodes precisely because it feels as if this story and the outcome is important. And then we get that ending where (spoilers) the villain is defeated by flooding the room with helium gas so Taren Capel can’t give orders to robots and talks in a squeaky voice. Then in the joke at the end Leela starts talking in a squeaky voice too and everyone laughs, like we’re in one of those bad sitcoms from the 1980s with tag excruciatingly smug tag scenes rather than a high class scifi drama.

The Haunting Of Villa Diodati: Ranking - 112

   The Haunting Of Villa Diodati

(Series 12, Dr 13 with Graham, Ryan and Yaz, 16/2/2020, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writers: Maxine Alderton and Chris Chibnall, director: Emma Sullivan)

Rank: 112

  'Hello I'm the Doctor and I'm here to tell you my ghost story, all about a being on the planet Sarn who was brought to life by a mad scientist and...Wait, no, oops, Mary Shelley present, forget I said that. How about this planet full of Vampires, these pale-faced eternals who can't die except for a stake being driven through their heart and...wait, no, I can't do that one either. My bad!'

  

 

 Could it be? A Chris Chibnall era story that’s actually...good all the way through (more or less?) Ironically it takes a story that’s (sort of) about ghosts and hauntings to add enough flesh on the bones of the plot and the Tardis crew to have a story that would have been an excellent story when dropped in the middle of any other Doctor’s run (as opposed to being a better example than normal of this Doctor’s run). This story takes the unusual step of being both a horror and an out and out comedy - and against all odds succeeds pretty well at both, my candidate as both the scariest and funniest of the Whittaker run (at least until ‘Eve Of The Daleks’ anyway, which again mixes both; they should have tried this mixture more as it seems to work). Writer Maxine Alderton has done her homework and really captures the gothic-romanticism of a meeting of friends, lovers and poets in 1816, the famous ‘holiday’ when Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and a couple of friends and partners spent a particularly rainy Summer indoors telling ghost stories to each other (this is where the first draft of ‘Frankenstein’ was written, a book which has as good a claim as any to being the scene of the first scifi story, so it feels only right that DW should re-write this event as a book inspired by a scifi event – you sense Mary Shelley would have approved, unlike some other more grounded celebrity historical figures we’ve met in this era whose great gifts were all ‘inspired’ by something equally scifi). We haven’t visited the Georgian era much in DW and we should: its at least as interesting in a ‘they’re just like us but oh so very different’ way as the Victorian times we seem to be in every other week and aren’t all that much further ago that they seem like the far distant past either; the Doctor can legitimately twiddle something in this era and have the ripples still affect our own (unlike Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, the Stone age, etc). After all,DW fits in nicely with the romanticist notion that the universe was weirder, darker and scarier than any mortal could comprehend, while the 8^th Doctor practically dressed like a romantic poet to begin with. What’s more its a plot that, like ‘Unicorn and The wasp’, was based on a real mystery - 1816 really was known as the ‘year without a Summer’ and while the scientific explanation is the explosion of a volcano, Mt Tambaru, that sent a cloud of ash into the skies over Europe that lasted months, I’d be quite happy to buy the scifi explanation that it was all the fault of the Cybermen. Legend has it that Percy Shelley really did go missing and returned with amnesia, unsure of quite where he’d been – whose to say he hadn’t been attacked by a rogue time-travelling metal man from Mondas? All five writers portrayed here are as close to their ‘real’ selves as you can be in a bit of fictionalised TV and what I particularly like is that they’re all at least semi-famous before the Tardis even turns up – its not another of those ‘they only became great because they met the Doctor’ tropes that have become so tiring and so, let’s face it, rude; you understand that these people aren’t just of their time but somehow beyond it, something a lot of DW historicals struggle with (because let’s face it, you’re either meeting Royals and nobles or people who change the past in some way and so are somewhat above it – not the stinking peasants who best represent the era, by and large). It’s not just the poets who are well written for though – Alderton understands this Tardis crew better than any other writer in the Chibnall era. She gets their mutual very 21^st century suspicion mixed with a friendliness and desire to accept other people on their own terms – she instinctively knows that the 13^th Dr is a hyperactive puppy whose desperate to be everyone’s friend but has also learned to trust the intuition that makes her bark, Yaz is a no-nonsense policewoman whose seen enough of the world to be suspicious of it but still carries the kind heart that made her want to help people in the first place, Ryan is a young man desperate for adventure whose beginning to realise it isn’t all fun and games and Graham is the weary dad rediscovering his zest for life after heartbreak. They feel like they belong together this week these four, rather than four strangers who squabble, with some great comedy lines that really are funny and a sign that they’ve grown and developed from when we first met them because of all they’ve gone through. I particularly love the scenes of the 13^th Doctor trying to fight the cybermen by being really really irritating – it’s easily Jodie Whittaker’s best work in the role, using her constant babble to confuse and disarm as she waits for ideas to come to her. The witty script spends a lot of time doing a ‘Russell T’ and having the Tardis regulars converse with the Georgians and find lots in common about life in their eras – with the very Shelley/Byron conclusion that human nature never changes, it just dresses up in different clothes (a very DW message if ever there was one). It’s not just the dialogue either: everything looks so good this week, from the Villa itself all dark and shadowy to the period costumes (the Tardis crew come dressed for the era for once and never looked better), to the shuffling skeletal hand to the ‘traveller’ ghost effect, which could have been faux Addams Family but work well. Everything seems highly believable this week too, without having to give excuses for time or budget or bad ideas. At least until the lone cybermen comes in (following a warning given by Captain Jack a few episodes earlier, so its not the surprise it might have been – why does he bother to pass on this information? ‘Go and abduct Rasputin – he’s The Master’ would surely be more help) and things go back to being normal everyday DW with a clunk. The lone cybermen, oddly enough given a name for once – Ashad – which doesn’t fit with the 19^th century vibe of the rest of the show – has time-travelled here because Percy Shelley discovered a bit of cyberium. Fair enough as far as it goes – if anyone’s going to pick up a strange alien substance its going to be a curiosity-driven romantic poet – but how come it came to Earth at all? And what are the odds of it being picked up by someone famous? Who just happens to be going on holiday with four other people who are more or less as famous? We assumed at the time that we were going to get all the answers about why this all really happened the following week when the cybermen return en masse except...we don’t. Not really. This plot strand is just tidied back in the box and forgotten about, making the end of this story a damp squib compared to the rest of it and I’m not the first fan to suggest that Chibnall gets his co-credit on this episode for those scenes because they feel as if they don’t belong in this story at all. Oh well. We got 90% of the way to having a great story this week and that’s still a lot closer than I’d dared to hope after such a run of duff stories in a row. I’m still haunted by ‘Haunting Of Villa Dedosi’, not just because it feels like traditional DW again but done in a new and refreshing way, or even for getting the basics of storytelling right, but because it made it feel as if this series was finally going to make the most of all the many things going for it, right the mistakes that kept dragging it down and get everything right from hereon in. It won’t happen – the following ‘Timeless Child’ two-parter is the show’s nadir in so so many ways – but that feeling of promise, that for a week made me feel this show could do anything again and do it well, was enough to let me score this one highly.

+ For a while there it looks as if this is going to be a proper ghost story in a proper haunted house and everything. Believe it or not we’ve never had one of those in DW before – the closest was ‘Hide’ but that was filled with scientists and turned out to be two loved-up aliens from another dimension. This is the one that has all the haunted house cliches and they come over really well on screen, a logical extension both of the Georgian interpretation of what the cyberman is and as the sort of plot five writers like this would get involved with where other people would run away screaming.

- While most of the regulars raise their game this week to match Lili Miller, whose excellent as Mary Shelley, some of the other performances are more...gothic horror than gothic romance. Percy Shelley should be full of mystery and romance, a complex tortured soul driven by things his imagination stirred up that he doesn’t understand but feel compelled by and yet he mostly comes across as a hopeless drunk. John Polidari is, in so many ways, the most interesting character here and to me the best writer of the quintet (he wrote the world’s first vampire story called ‘Vampyre’, and its a lot better than ‘Dracula’ that came out shortly after and stole its thunder) but he’s nothing like as interesting on screen as he was in real life. Byron isn’t so bad, but even he isn’t even close to as complex and fascinating as he was in reality – the sign of a great DW historical of old was that they sent you running to the library to look people up, but only Mary Shelley makes you want to do that this week. Normally I’d just blame the script but actually there’s a lot of gothic layers there for actors to, erm, get their teeth into if you read the scripts, it just comes over all flat from the delivery. Unusually the regulars act everyone off the screen.

The Creature From The Pit: Ranking - 113

  The Creature From The Pit

(Season 17, Dr 4 with Romana II, 27/10/1979-17/11/1979, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Douglas Adams, writer: David Fisher, director: Christopher Barry) 

Rank: 113

In an emoji: 🕳

  'What Erato was really saying:

Ee lads, there's some right trouble down t'pit on Chloris so there is. I've been stuck down this pit, boy and monster, for so long now and all I did was come to talk t'the lady of the 'ouse about some financial negotiations. Ah don't like the way they keep calling me 'creature' instead of 'Sir', I mean I didn't spend five years in diplomat school to be treated like your common or garden monster. The local life forms are really fragile, I think I just squashed one by accident. Not very diplomatic I know - oops - but then if they will keep me down here with nowt so much as a loaf of Hovis a monster's gotta do what a monster's gotta do. Eh up, a bloke with a long scarf has just chucked himself down, wonder what he wants? See thee later!'  

I’ve often wondered why this fine 4th Doctor story, a re-telling of ‘Beauty And The Beast’ where the beauty is an ice-cold villainess and the beast is a shapeless amorphous blob that looks like a weather balloon, doesn’t get the love that other ones do. Is it the constant jokes? The rather rude looking alien? The fact that most of it features another alien mute creature hiding down a catacombs, like the Peladon stories all over again? Is it because it followed an acknowledged classic in ‘The City Of Death’, a story that (thanks to an ITV strike) won Dr Who a whole new audience? Or because the ITV strike meant that the channel threw everything at their comeback the night ‘Creature’ went out? Or is it simply that ‘Pit’ is one of the most misunderstood of all Dr Who stories? You see there came a time, when the first Who guidebooks were being written and Dr Who Magazine first started, where this story became a shorthand for everything that was wrong about the series and the direction that it was taking – that it was sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, that it didn’t take itself seriously enough, that Dr Who had become silly, a parody of itself and all science-fiction, too busy being smart to be scary or political. 

But being silly is oh so very different to being funny. I love Dr Who when its genuinely funny and this story is so often incredibly funny with a gag practically every scene. Writer David Fisher has a natural bent for comedy anyway, but combine that with Douglas Adams as script editor embellishing the dialogue and Tom Baker at the height of his powers improvising wildly on top of that and you have some of my favourite lines from the series: ‘Our researchers divide into two categories. The ones who have got close enough to find something out about it – and the ones who are still alive’ ‘Did you examine the body of the creature?’ ‘ ‘No – I was too busy trying to avoid it examining mine!’ and the moment the 4th Doctor is down the pit and gets a copy of ‘climbing Mount Everest’ out of his pocket to climb upwards, then curses as its in Tibetan – and then gets a book on how to read Tibetan out the other pocket. That is far from being silly though: all these jokes are absolutely in character and all part of both the Doctor and Romana’s attempts to wrong-foot the very serious villain, who clearly hadn’t anticipated two wise-cracking timelords and their robotic dog coming along to subvert her all too serious plans. In their hands comedy is another weapon wielded carefully to knock a villain who gets her own way all the time off her feet. There are still moments of terror too though: the moment the Doctor leaps down the pit to what we (and even Romana) thinks is his death, when he’s just a plot-beat ahead of us and knows he’s safe, is one of the great DW cliffhangers of the 1970s. 

Myra Frances is excellent as Lady Adastra in a part that could easily have become a joke had she sent it up the way the leads are, but she’s the still haughty rock around which they dance, the Margaret Dumont to their Marx Brothers, the still centre that demands to be taken seriously – which only makes their jokes hit all the harder. It’s a deliberate ruse to upset her, because the only thing you can do to tyrants to take them down is either to match them (which really isn’t the Doctor’s style) or laugh at them. She has no imagination, no poetry in her soul (by contrast the Doctor and Romana both spend their first scene of this story reading ‘The Tale Of Peter Rabbit’ and even K9 seems to be getting something out of it. Oh and incidentally, for all my comments on finding a political allegory, note how close the plot of this story actually is to ‘Peter Rabbit’: Chloris is basically an alien version of Mr McGregor’s Garden and all Erato wants is a carrot: they’ve got plenty, it’s not like they’re about to starve and the land doesn’t technically belong to any one individual anyway). Take the moment when Romana asks what the whacking great hole in the middle of the ground is and is told ‘we call it the pit’. Lots of fans say this line is evidence of the stupidity of the plot and the way it’s laughing at scifi, but for me its just evidence of how narrow-minded Adastra is, that she doesn’t have the imagination to see anything beyond her own nose (she has the entire run of Chloris and owns most of it but still can’t see clearly – whereas Erato has been chucked down a pit and still has a bigger vision than she does). Nevertheless Adastra is a true threat precisely because of this narrow vision, as sadistic as any villain we see in this series and the Doctor and Romana both know it – indeed she’s the first baddy since Davros that feels like a true threat against the Doctor from the first. And no wonder really – ‘Adrasta’ means ‘Queen’ in Latin (Adams changing the name round in editing slightly just in case it gave the plot away too much), a dictator through and through. Fisher based her on one of his Great Aunts he remembered from childhood that he used to dread visiting, being haughty and insufferable, and had great fun conspiring to kill her off! 

 She is also, surely, Margaret Thatcher in space: yes some guidebooks doubt this, given that it’s 1979 and she’s only been in power five months at the time this story was transmitted (never mind written), but people forget that Maggie had been head of the opposition for several years and had talked about what she was going to do if she got in so this story is at least what people were afraid she would be like. Far from being silly, David Fisher is one of the few writers in Who that has created an alien world by sitting down and really thinking about it. Chloris is, despite the name, not the sort of planet that looks like a swimming baths but one that’s covered in mass vegetation, in planets taking in energy by photosynthesis, through chlorophyll. It’s a planet where the plants are pumping oxygen constantly into the atmosphere and the people on it are just along for the ride, not giving anything back. At the same, though, this is a planet without metals of any kind except those that have fallen from the sky: no one has ever invented weaponry and no one has thought to cut the trees down. Adastra, then, is an ‘Iron Lady’ with no iron, a false leader. Lady Adastra rules the planet by controlling the mine which is the only source of income on the planet Chloris – and if whacking a great alien monster down at the bottom to eat people who disobey on her orders isn’t a form of nationalisation I don’t know what is. There is a giant pit in town but it’s not used for mining anymore and all the miners on this planet have turned into bandits in order to scrape together a living – instead the pit is where Adastra has been flinging undesirables and anyone who disagrees with her. Given that Thatcher has been talking openly about shutting down the mines when she gets into power, ending jobs that have existed for centuries and multiple generations, is this story a forewarning of what might happen when she takes command for good? For the pit, the mine, has been turned into a battleground where enemies get eaten. After all for Adastra and Thatcher, both, the enemies of this world are communities and trade unions, the idea that people might stop being scared long enough to club together to stand up to her. Why won’t alien planets ever stick our politicians down a big pit, eh?! 

It’s not like that on nearby planet Tythos, they’re a democracy of amorphous blobs who live on a planet over-flowing with metal but who don’t have any trees left. In one of the greatest twists of any Dr Who story (mega huge spoilers) the creature turns out to be Erato, a planet ambassador, sent to make a deal with the people of Chloris – only because they don’t have any vocal chords and they look so big and ugly everyone assumed it was a monster. Adastra knows the truth but trade isn’t a word in her vocabulary so she sent it down the pit to scare people. Now everyone is looking the wrong way scared of the ‘monster’ down below ground rather than the one above it. Which is just how Adastra wants it. (bit early for it to be an Arthur Scargill union boss metaphor but that kind of works too, even more so if you see the unions as a leaderless blob). Everyone is scared of Erato but the only people he kills is by accident, from accidentally rolling on top of them (because that’s what Tythonians do as a greeting?) Its hard to be a diplomat when you squash people every time you move. Something they should remember in embassies around the world (OK, maybe it isn’t Arthur Scargill and I really don’t want that image in my head. Forget I said anything). The solution should be easy: both planets want what the other has, but greed gets in the way. In that sense ‘Pit’ is a story not just about the present but about the past repeating itself again, medieval Europe when countries went to war with each other over greed and hoarding resources. Instead Chloris has gone backwards, resembling our Medieval world, even though they’ve clearly had great technology on the planet at some stage. Like many a Dr Who story this one asks ‘just think where we might be now, how far out into the stars we might have travelled, had we not stopped to fight each other along the way?!’ For any success in dictatorships is fleeting and who remembers a dictator kindly one they’re gone? 

Far from being a fellow dictator, Erato is a humble employee and a nice one at that, a giant green featureless blob with appendages only a mother could love (if Erato has one: Fisher wrote dozens of notes for his two planets that never made it on screen: one of which was that Tythonians live to be 40,000 years old and because of this only births are limited and only thirty are allowed to be alive at any one time. No wonder he can’t comprehend Adastra’s short-term greed given that he lives so long). He has no nose or indeed eyes or mouth. How does he smell? Like a cerebral membrane. Dear Erato. For some fans he’s another poor costume choice. For others he’s a joke too far, with a very err phallic looking trunk that the 4th Doctor is called upon to blow down – to the point where some have wondered if it was a deliberate comment on gay rights (had this been in new Who then very much it would have been, but chances are it’s just another of those weird DW costume decisions you get from time to time – both Fisher and Adams would have been a lot more subtle than that in getting their points across). And for other people he turned out to be every bit the ‘monster’ he was painted out to be by Adastra’s propaganda. The only thing Fisher was asked was to write a ‘different sort of monster’ so he thought along the lines of something big and possibly gassy. As it happens the special effects team were thinking more along the lines of ‘Rover’, the weather balloon from ‘The Prisoner’, but were asked to make it big and ran out of time and money, the usual problem. The entire cast and crew saw it for the first time at camera rehearsals and were on the floor laughing. The special effects team then got into a huge spat with the director over unreasonable demands that became one of the most heated rows in Who history; thankfully it calmed down, eventually. But there are still grown men who cry thinking about how they so nearly lost their jobs over this monster. Erato makes sense to me though: chances are an alien race out there somewhere would grow to be that large and featureless and keeping it trapped down a pit means that it doesn’t have to move and spoil the effect, the way the pantomime Myrka did (it helps that there isn’t an actor inside it as such – it’s a bag of hot air controlled by five technicians). He’s sweet too: as much as you’re told to be terrified of him for two and a half episodes, in a very Dr Who twist he turns out to be a big softie once the Doctor finds a way of communicating with him through his own vocal chords. It’s a running joke in Dr Who that all aliens seem to speak perfect BBC English and even people from other countries in the past seem to as well (explained away, eventually, by the invention of the Tardis telepathic circuits’) but surely not every life out there develops vocal chords naturally: Fisher’s been thinking harder than most writers coming up with this world and this alien, which for me makes up for any defect in how the Tythonian looks on screen. In another great twist too, no one knows what the mysterious object is that arrived at the same time as Erato. Given that we’re a scifi literally audience and the people of Chloris aren’t we feel all smug that it must be a spaceship – but the kicker is that it turns out to be a giant egg that just looks like a spaceship. Now that’s funny! So is the fact that ‘Erato’ is another Latin word by the way. It means ‘lovely’… As for the complaints that we have yet another pit, well, where else would you keep a monster trapped so he doesn’t eat people except the ones you want him to eat? At least there isn’t yet another labyrinth this time. 

 Another thing that Fisher’s been thinking about is how these people might treat the idea of aliens, given that they don’t have the metals to build rockets. The fact is they don’t: their view of the stars is closer to astrology than astronomy and Fisher builds up a whole world here too, with a group of star signs peculiar to this planet that nevertheless sound just enough like ours for viewers to get the joke: ‘Caprius’ ‘Ariel’ ‘Aquatron’ and ‘Prato’ (the Doctor remarks, possibly truthfully possibly jokingly, that on Gallifrey he was born under the sign of the ‘crossed computers’). The astrology angle really helps sell this story’s metaphors too: ‘as above, so below’ is what the Medieval scholars used to say and as it happens every prediction we get on this planet comes true, not least Adastra’s come-uppance, although the joke when we first meet him is that this great seer didn’t see himself being thrown down the pit. The put-upon astrologer we meet, Organon, is a wonderful character too, played by Geoffrey Balydon in his only actual appearance in a series he had several links with (he did this story back to back to appearing as the all-seeing impossibly old timelordy Crowman in ‘Worzel Gummidge’ opposite Jon Pertwee, while his most famous part as Medieval wizard ‘Catweazel’ was as closer as ITV came to creating their own ‘Dr Who’ pre-‘Tomorrow People’ or ‘Blake’s 7’, while he was on Verity Lambert’s shortlist to play the first Doctor if they couldn’t get William Hartnell and, finally, he played a ‘parallel world’ Doctor in Big Finish’s ‘Unbound’ series). He’s excellent, as eccentric as the Doctor and able to see through Adastra’s narrow vision of the world, a Nostradamus who can see all the awful things in the planet’s future but politically is unable to say anything in the present or it will see him thrown down the pit (as indeed he is), the messenger shot for his message not being what Adastra wants to hear. He’s another example of how blinkered Adastra is: is she had the imagination to see more than her immediate present and make use of his predictions she might have flourished further still but o, she won’t listen to criticism or contemplate not winning. Organon is one of those passing characters I really really wanted him to join the Tardis at the end of this story (and to those reading these reviews in transmission order thinking a feeble old man whining would be a hindrance, wait till Adric turns up next season). 

The Doctor-Romana interplay was never better than here too – they’re not a master and pupil anymore or Romana doing Doctory stuff while the Doctor gets all the jokes, they’re a double act, two best friends having fun confusing conmen and tricking tricksters both because it’s the right thing to do and because it’s fun. Some fans think that it’s the era when Tom Baker is too big for his boots and spending more time tossing jokes into the script than saying the words that are there but they never go too far (for now). Lalla Ward hits the ground running: this was the first story she filmed as Romana (though her third Dr Who story transmitted – its complicated) but she breezes through it as if she was born to it, with a carefree joy the first Romana never had while being still recognisably the same character. She was, famously, deeply unhappy with both the characterisation and the costume, both of which are still clearly modelled on Mary Tamm and she hasn’t quite found the middle ground between smugness and playfulness but she’s working on it fast – and it makes sense that Romana’s fashion sense hasn’t quite regenerated along with her body (after all the Doctor can spend a whole adventure in the ‘wrong’ clothes before changing sometimes). K9 too is better catered for than usual, getting lots to do that doesn’t just involve him shooting things or resolving the plot and he gets some of his best lines too – the Doctor has, apparently, programmed him with sarcasm to go alongside his new voice (in reality because John Leeson had left to have a bash at doing other things; David Brierley can’t compete but at least he still very much feels like K9 who just happens to have a new voice because that’s what computers do from time to time – it was probably another of those irritating windows updates - rather than an imposter). 

 Look out, too, for a couple of the minor parts: Eileen Way makes her third and final appearance in the series after playing two of the most important roles in the series – the ‘old woman’ of the Tribe of Gum’ in first ever story ‘An Unearthly Child’ and the matriarch of the Sisterhood of Karn on ‘The Brain Of Morbius’. She was, reportedly, one of the few actresses Tom baker was genuinely in awe of and deserved a fat bigger part than just Adastra’s handmaiden (she could have played Adastra for starters). Check out, too, Adastra’s engineer Tollund whose played by the director Christopher Barry’s distant cousin Morris Barry who was himself a director – of Dr Who stories ‘The Moonbase’ ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ and ‘The Dominators’. It’ a sad farewell, too, to terry Walsh whose had a hand in practically every one of the 1970s stories and worked as both Pertwee’s and Tom Baker’s stunt doubles in fight scenes: he gets one last fight here but also some lines for the first time, in the part of Doran who dies in part one. 

 Of course this isn’t perfect by any means. Everything seems super pushed for time (which it was: this week’s industrial strike: the whole BBC closed down the first day of shooting after an employee had their contract terminated without notice illegally: the irony, a story partly about the strength of unions all but shut down by one). The ‘miner’ characters are minor characters indeed and manages to be clichéd offensive stereotypes that hve been much criticised and rightly – not bad going for a group of people who only get a few minutes screen-time anyway. Chloris seems to consist of a pit, a palace and a shack, none of which look all that convincing on screen: there’s no sense of how this world works beyond that, how many people live on this planet or how they lived before Adastra came along (never mind how she led a creature that large down a pit that small without it rolling on top of her; to be fair there’s lots in the novel and the author had clearly thought a lot about it, it’s just a shame more of that didn’t end up on screen). For such a well thought out planet it’s a real shame we don’t see much of it beyond a pit, a shack and a mansion, none of which are all that convincing it has to be said. There are at least three too many supporting characters running about there to make up the numbers rather than do anything that really impacts the plot. The killer ‘wolfweeds’ (i.e. tumbleweeds) make sense given the nature of this planet and all the plant-life but just look silly when crowding round K9 and squashing him to death. The model shots are all pretty hopeless, despite being re-shoots (because the strings were visible the first time round). As good as Fisher’s central idea is that’s pretty much all he has too: there are no real sub-plots beyond the main mystery and like many a 1970s story ‘Pit’ runs out of steam halfway through without enough of substance to keep the drama going once the Doctor works out what’s going on, the middle episodes desperately vamping and the fourth all but ending halfway through when Adastra (spoilers) snuffs it at the hands (err, protuberances?) of Erato. Then there’s the much-mocked ending where the Tythonians try to blow up Chloris and the Doctor stops it by wrapping a neutron star in aluminium. Which sounds like a joke but came from more research than most writers; Fisher wanted jeopardy so rang up a class of science undergraduates at Cambridge (Douglas was himself a pupil as you’ll be seeing in ‘Shada’ at the end of the season) for their advice about something plausibly big and threatening as well as how to solve it. They came up with the neutron star ‘the size of London’ and said that the best way to stop it would be to ‘wrap it in foil’ to absorb the energy; apparently it’s accurate science and not being a scientists I wouldn’t know, but I surely can’t be the only fan who read that and thought ‘surely the students were just pulling the writer’s leg?’ As much as I always come away loving this story, which is one of my go-to comfort Who stories when I need cheering up for its sheer joy and laughs (yes I have a pile of them for different moods, doesn’t everyone?!) I also come away feeling that there should have been a little something more going on. In that respect then yes, the final point that people always make about this story is valid: compared to ‘City Of Death’ ‘Creature’ does seem like a step backwards, without the variety or the complex ideas while yet another boring marsh is no substitute for Paris. 

 However not many stories could compete with ‘City Of Death’ and ‘Creature’ comes closer than most. Far from being frivolous it’s one of Dr Who’s toughest, most cynical and political scripts, just done with a joy and verve that makes it different to the ‘other’ political stories out there such as the black humour of ‘The Sun Makers’ and ‘The Happiness Patrol’Yes things go wrong, some of them spectacularly, but I do feel that fans have spent so much time watching the disasters that they haven’t appreciated the things this story gets right and thankfully there are a lot of them. Not least what this story is doing that Dr Who had never done before: given that its 1979 and nobody was doing this sort of thing yet (‘The Sunmakers’ is more barbed but in a less specific way politically) the allegory at the heart of this story is impressively brave, a bit of fortune-telling itself for the things that will happen in the 1980s that Organon would have been proud of. Throw in some of the series’ funniest jokes, most sympathetic monster and one of the best baddies and I’m sold, even with the comedy supporting cast, muddled ideas and the struggle to make how things look on screen anywhere near as good as they read on the page (or in the rather good novelisation). One of the most under-rated 4th Dr stories of them all. Oh and incidentally I appreciate the irony: time and time again I’ve been telling you all that a Who story has nicked a certain element from the 1950s ‘Quatermass’ serials. Well, this is one of the few that doesn’t – even though everyone whose half-read the synopsis and title think it’s a re-tread of third story ‘Quatermass…And The Pit’ (which is actually the plot from ‘Web Of Fear’ instead). 

 POSITIVES + I can’t keep putting ‘Tom Baker’ in my positives list but nevertheless he deserves the accolade here in particular. Had this been a story with most any other Doctor they’d have been acted off the screen by the baddy, but Tom is magnificent in every scene – sparring against Adastra and pairing up with Romana or Organon. He’s the best mix of his particular regeneration’s range of parts, being effortlessly alien, dark and deep and brooding, with an anger and disdain for tyrants who don’t see the universe as a chance to make life better the way he does, but with a flippancy that shows he still thinks he’s smarter than they are. This is the period when people began to get worried that the star was dominating the show (this is, indeed, the first story recorded since the big showdown between star and producer with the head of the BBC technically over pay but really about control; Baker was given a pay rise then patted on the head and told to let Graham Williams get on with his job, with the compromise that Lalla Ward was hired following her time playing Princess Astra in ‘The Armageddon Factor’ as she and Tom had already got on well) and in time the joking will get in the way of the plot but not here, not yet – this and ‘City’ are Tom Baker’s zenith as the Doctor and, far from sending the show up, the Doctor’s brooding bursts of anger between the joking seem all the more real somehow. A good half of this story is so watchable purely because of what the 4th Doctor is up to in any one scene and the story grounds to something of a halt in the scenes when he’s not there. 

 NEGATIVES - Yeaaaah, the one really big mis-step that’s every bit as bad as people say it is is giving us a plot that demands we care about the locals of this world and then have them turn out to be petty comedy bandits that act like they’re extras from the cast of ‘Oliver!’ It was John Bryans, playing lead bandit Torvin, who realised in rehearsals how close the part was to Charles Dickens’ Fagin, a part he’d played himself on stage once (and which is played now, in surprisingly gritty CBBC drama series ‘Dodger’, by Christopher Eccleston) and hams it up. The script makes Torvin out to be desperate not greedy but the actor plays him as a stereotypical Jewish man on hoarding money ()on an alien world where he has no reasoj at all to talk like that): he really really really didn’t understand the script and it was borderline offensive at the time – it feels shockingly wrong now; director Christopher Barry on the last of his many Who stories, is usually good at this sort of thing and really really really should have stopped him. After all, these are meant to be ‘us’ or our equivalents – the miners and working classes who’ve worked hard all their lives but are now living under a tyrant and her bandit-eating pet who doesn’t value their lives at all. Seeing them squabbling amongst themselves, nicking things and being obsessed with money just plays right into Adastra’s hands. Horrible. This lot need a better union... 

BEST QUOTES: Organon: ‘Astrologer extraordinary. Seer to princes and emperors. The future foretold, the present explained, the past apologised for’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: One of the weirdest ‘extras’ is a five-minute piece Tom Baker did, in character as the Doctor, for the children’s TV programme ‘Animal Magic’ recorded on the last day of filming (with his hands still in the stocks for the scene they’d just been recording…with no mention made of this at all!) ‘Animal Magic’ is an odd mixture: it features the imaginary thoughts of real animals, as provided by presenter Johnny Morris, so to have a fictional character talking about fictional Dr Who creatures as if they’re real is truly surreal! The Doctor doesn’t pick the obvious ones either: he talks about the Shrivenzale (the lizard thing from ‘The Ribos Operation’), the sentient plant The Krynoid (‘The Seeds Of Doom’), The Wirrn (‘The Ark In Space’) and The Fendahl (‘Image Of The Fendahl’) with such anecdotes as the Shrivenzale squeezing coconuts with its tiny claws despite being a carnivore that ate up to two wheelbarrow loads of coconuts and the Wirrn’s ability to kill an elephant within five seconds. A mad reminder from the days when Dr Who was so big it was everywhere and a last hurrah to its beginnings as a series that resembled a different programme every week. Oddly they never mention Erato. Included in the ‘Creature From The Pit’ DVD and season 17 blu-ray. 

 Previous ‘City Of Death’ next ‘Nightmare Of Eden’

Planet Of The Ood: Ranking - 114

 Planet Of The Ood

(Series 4, Dr 10 with Donna, 19/4/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Keith Temple, director: Graeme Harper)

Rank: 114

  'The Song of the Ood translated...

IWe..We love the colourful orb she holds

And the way the sunlight plays upon her folds

Through telepathy we hear the sound of a gentle word

On the wind of the aid conditioning we had installed

We're picking up Ood vibrations

The voice in our head giving us excitations'

 

 I love the Ood, they’ve got to be my favourite ‘monsters’ of the modern series – precisely because they’re not monsters, well only when in the hands of the real monsters: humans. ‘Planet Of The Ood’ is the closest modern Who has come to repeating the ‘morality’ stories of the Pertwee era – the Malcolm Hulke ‘and this is how humanity forgets to be humane’ type stories which were always my favourite. Technically this is the sequel, but its all handled one heck of a lot better than in ‘The Impossible Planet’ where they were a nice idea that was never really used properly (they were, after all, sharing screen time with the devil). This time though their story is central to the plot and this story looks not at where the Ood ended up but where they began, as slave labour for a species too lazy to do stuff themselves. It’s all too sadly plausible that, having explored space and found a friendly and feeble lot of aliens, mankind’s first thought is to sell them into slavery. Mankind is told so many times across so many years that Oods are less than human don’t feel any pain that everyone has come to believe it – but they’re all wrong. The Ood just bear the pain stoically, doing what they need to in order to get by but enjoying their own culture at night when the humans can’t see. A series like DW, that promised to update us on the changes in culture that had taken place since the show went off air in 1989, just had to do a series like this sometime and they handle it well for the most part – they could have made the Ood out to be weak and pathetic but instead you’re rooting for them from the moment we follow them; equally they could have made all the humans out to be monsters but instead they’re just not thinking for the most part – it takes Donna, as our eyes and ears, being uncomfortable to make them feel that anything is wrong about a part of society they grew up with and never thought to question. The great DW twist is that even while we’re told the Ood feel nothing and even while their mannerisms resemble slightly stiff Victorian butlers with impeccable manners their appearance screams untamed wild beast, with the look of a deranged toddler that’s spilt spaghetti all over themselves and lots of evidence that not only do they feel they feel a lot. Far from being monsters, left to their own devices the Ood are sweet, polite, desperate to please, a universe away from the Daleks and Cybermen, with the fan-pleasing references to their close cousins The Sensorites – creatures from 1964 who couldn’t handle bright lights or loud voices. Not every alien race are conquerors – some are conquerees – and for once in the modern series the humans are aggressors. For DW old hands that’s maybe not so much of a surprise (for the first ten years of its life the series was doing this sort of thing every other story) but if you were little in 2008 and were used to the more generic sort of scifi then this sort of concept was mindblowing and exactly what this series was for. The Ood are also interesting because they’re not strictly individuals but parts connected to a giant hive brain via telepathic powers– something that’s relatively easy to take over as it happens – but for all the representation of them as a replica species they still feel like they have real personalities beyond being just another ‘clone race’. The scenes of the Ood singing in captivity, with their minds the only place they’re free to roam and their spirits the only thing that can’t be extinguished, are incredibly moving. And then they get revenge, developing glowing red eyes and a taste for human flesh, making this one of the properly scary stories of modern DW, even though this is one of those rare DW episodes that has you cheering them on every time. From the moment the Doctor and Donna arrive you know where all the plot beats are going to go – that things are going to be put right by the end – but even so its very satisfying to see all the right people get their comeuppance and peace restored, just like the good ol’ days of DW. Mostly this is a charming episode, one very much in the grand old tradition but with the budget of the new series delivering things the olden days could never have dreamed of: there aren’t just one or two Ood for instance but dozens, while the winter base actually looks as if it has real snow. I do have a few small questions about this story that prevent it being truly top tier though. This is an ice planet but nobody ever seems to be cold, even outside in the snow and the sun is visibly blaring in every scene (does snow in the future have a higher melting point or something?) The heating bills must be astronomical – why not transport the Ood to a warmer human climate and take the big brain of goo with them rather than keeping them here? (Surely somebody must have tried that –I mean, its not as if these humans are at all worried about inconveniencing the Ood if it can possibly help them in some way). I’m not the first person to point out that a race like that wouldn’t have evolved on an ice planet either – of all the aliens in DW the Ood are the ones with the most flesh on show, as it were; unless their DNA is ridiculously different to every known species they’d freeze quicker than we would unclothed and as a species we’re pretty feeble in the cold. Telepathic species are also, surely, the last people who ought to be repressed: they can organise a resistance without the fear of being overheard. The Friends Of The Ood seem to be doing more harm than good too- as anyone with any knowledge of colonial history will tell you, there’s no good freeing one or two slaves if they’re got nowhere to go or their owners will just take them back and/or make things worse for the ones left behind. At the end everyone seems to know when the Ood have gone back to being peaceful again and the Humans stop their mass slaughter because the script needs them to – even though, in reality, the Oods would surely all have been murdered ‘just in case’ they went rogue again, Doctor intervention or not. It’s a shame, too, that the Human characters aren’t delivered with the same love, care or attention as the Ood as many of them are just one-dimensional bad guys, doing questionable moral things because they have questionable morals, rather than good people who just go along with the status quo because fighting it is too much work and they’re desperate to make money or fear of being treated the same way as an enemy of the state (which is how most evil regimes are propped up, after all). It is all, dare I say it, a bit simple compared to the more complex plots we’ve been getting used to by 2008. There is, though, far more to love about this story than not: the Doctor is brilliantly Doctorish, Donna is already a much calmer, gentler presence than in her first three stories with more signs of the big heart she hides behind her big mouth when she comforts a dying Ood (a scene that could have been silly but is genuinely touching), the Ood themselves are extraordinarily good in design and performance, their mass speaking and takeover greatly chilling and a daft action sequence towards the end breaks up what’s quite a talky episode nicely and gives Tennant something to do rather than stand around raging or pouting. In other words its very very ood episode indeed

+They could have left this as one of those metaphorical ‘you figure out what we really mean’ stories but no – they’re actually brave enough to come out and say it, without actually quite saying it. Donna is appalled at the thought of people sweating away working for people they’ll never meet because they’re forced to and quietly smug they don’t have slavery in her own time, unlike the past and future. Then the Doctor points out that the clothes she’s wearing were stitched half the world away in a sweatshop for pennies. The parallels with the way that Earth is picking up free Ood slaves and don’t ask questions about how they got them (because ‘they don’t want to know the answers’) is one of those moments new Who covers no other series could get away with but which really needs to be said.

- Murray Gold’s musical score is a bit loud this week even compared to normal and often gets in the way. I SAID MURRAY GOLD’S MUSICAL SCORE IS A BIT...Oh What’s the use? I’ll stick the subtitles on.

Terror Of The Zygons: Ranking - 115

     Terror Of The Zygons

(Season 13, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane, Harry and UNIT, 30/8/1975-20/9/1975, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Robert Banks Stewart, director: Douglas Camfield)

Rank: 115

  'Hoots mon, I'm McZygon and I got left behind in human form when the Doctor came along and blew up the spaceship. I strated a new career in advertising: I came up with the slogan 'Drinka pinta skarasen today' before it got changed by the milk marketing board. I live by loch ness now with my pet skarasen living alongside the locals and doing the few Scottish cliches that didn't make the episode: yes that's me doing the Highland fling while eating shortbread. Would you like to hear me play mah bagpipes?'

 

 Time to let bygones be bygones – even with Zygons. As much as I moan from time to time (especially the stories reviewed back in January) I really do love everything about this series, even the ‘bad’ bits. Most times I’d still rather watch a poor DW that is at least trying than some anonymous soulless bit of modern scifi. There are a lot of bits in ‘Terror Of The Zygons’ that resemble the parts I’ve spent the past 7 months moaning about: monsters that take over Human form mostly to save on a recognisably flimsy budget, yet more companion possessions, peculiar motivations for taking over the world that are never properly explained, sets that don’t look anything like real life, models that don’t even look like models never mind real life, not to mention wee stereotypical locals that border on insensitivity, hoots mon! There’s something about this story though that takes all the things that would make lesser DW stories fall apart and yet wrap them up in a whole that still puts a big goofy smile on your face. ‘Zygons’ is one of those real DW comfort stories, one that’s absolutely bonkers without the realism or depth of the best stories but is just so much fun. It takes a creative script from Robert Banks Stewart that takes every cliché under the sun but somehow creates something that feels new and imaginative and a cast doing everything to make the most of every twist and turn on the way. Take The Zygons – they ought to be terrible B movie creatures from their names on down, the sort of thing DW doesn’t usually resort too, but they have a look and sound all of their own. Orange blobby walking foetuses that look as if they’ve fallen in a vat of spaghetti hoops and baked beans, they look quite unlike any other alien race in any scifi series never mind DW and seem the most believably from another world outside the Daleks. Why do they work when the orange blobbed axons and gel guards are hilariously bad? Couldn’t tell you, they just do. Maybe its because the Zygons sound quite unlike anything else in DW too, with their husky voices and their overly-dramatic prose and its almost a shame the Doctor has to blow them up when they’re such, well, fun. Their motivation for taking over Earth are more interesting than most too, starting off being a recovery mission after their spaceship crashes and strands them, so they have to acclimiatise into the local population and fit in by, uhh, stealing human’s identities - which is, as alien invasions go, fair enough I think. There’s actually quite a few humans out there that being possessed by a giant blobby orange fiendish thingy would make nicer. Only later do we find out that they start making changes to the Earth to make things more suitable for them even when it kills off the local wildlife (i.e. us), which is going just a bit too far really. I still half-blame the Zygons for global warming – I mean let’s face it, if the current government revealed that they were really orange blobby Zygons trying to kill us off, the only thing about that sentence that would surprise me is that they weren’t actually Slitheen after all. Whatever, while the main plot is just the usual how-will-the-Doctor-staop-them-this-week? Plot we’ve had maybe 200 times elsewhere the story behind it leads to all sorts of interesting discussions about trust (how do you tell who’s really a Zygon in disguise?), the environment (the Doctor ticks us off for living off oil and you half expect him to start throwing orange confetti around the Scottish oil rigs– this was back in 1975) and whether different cultures can live together in peace (it turns out they can’t in this story, but thankfully the even better ‘Zygon Invasion-Invasion’ puts that right and its not often I get to say that about a new-Who episode compared to an old one). We even get an explanation for the loch ness monster that, well, it’s as plausible as any – and for once it isn’t this week’s big monster but the only case of a monster taking its own animal, a sort of cross between the Zygons’ nurse-maid and pet (the Zygons are one of the few mammal aliens seen in DW and a lot is made about their need to drink milk to live – so much so I was expecting the end of the story to involve a milkman and an intergalactic cow). That’s a move typical of this story, which you gives you all the usual cliches but then throws in some extra detail they didn’t have to. The regular cast all do alien brainwashing very well, especially Harry in his penultimate appearance whose gloriously blank and frightening the only time he’s possessed/doubled by a baddy (a shame as he’s really really good – and Harry, being one of the nicest and gentlest of companions, only makes the conversion into a psychopathic assassin seem worse somehow), while John Woodnutt is utterly brilliant in his double part as chief Zygon Broton and the Duke of Forgill (what with his regular appearances as Merlin in Knightmare he was one of my favourite actors from my childhood). What’s less impressive is the way that our old friends from UNIT are mucked about with – there’s some hilarity as the Brigadier turns up in his family kilt, but otherwise he’s barely in the story at all (this is his last appearance for eight years which makes it doubly sad) and poor Benton doesn’t even get that much. For some reason fans always lap up the Scottish stereotypes in this story too, even though if anything they’re crasser than the ones about Wales in ‘The Green Death’ – Angus is so full of Scottish stereotypes that he doesn’t surely resemble any real Scottish person that ever lived (some of them are like that some of the time, but never all the time – and no I don’t know every Scottish person that ever lived but I do know quite a few). I mean, his first scene sees him ordering haggis over the radio while discussing his inner superstition and then being stingy. Oddly enough this makes the Brigadier seem more stereotypically stiff-upper-lip English than ever, despite the fact that he’s wearing a kilt. In case you’re wondering which part of Scotland this is by the way, nope – it was filmed in West Sussex (and doesn’t look much like Scotland at all). Oh and yes some of the model shots in this one are truly dire, with Tom Baker standing in front of a blow-up photo of the skarasen while he throws things at it (although its not as bad as, say, the model dinosaurs or the action man toy tanks from series past). Perhaps the biggest problem with this story though is that the Zygons are all talk and no trousers, even when they’re erm being humans in kilts – we hear a lot about what they can do but other than attacking Sarah Jane with a pitch-fork (dressed as Harry) none of them does anything close to being threatening. Just seeing something of what they could do on screen would have made this tale a whole lot scarier and made the stakes an awful lot higher. Oddly what’s lacking most from ‘Terror of the Zygons’ is the terror, at least compared to similar 4^th Dr menaces. Still, its a charming story this one (give or take the Scottish bits) and I have a real fondness for the Zygons, who were top of my monster wants list for the new series after they brought the ice warriors back. Big babies that seem more grown-up than most DW villains, they’re what makes this story more than just another DW runaround, while the clever writing and cast take what could have been a very silly story and somehow make it gripping drama. Full of the worst excesses of DW it might be, but somehow this story turns most of them (perhaps not the model shots) into a strength.

+ The ‘tunnelled’ camera effect when we see things from the Zygon’s point of view, overlaid with heavy Zygon breathing, is an excellent effect that stays long in the memory. The zygons then watch back whatever one of their ‘bugs’ or zygons-pretending-to-be-human see on their own crystalline TV in their organic spaceship, something more aliens ought to do. A nice little touch. I wonder if they get the DW repeats on UK Gold? (The Cybermen’s least favourite channel).

- Most fans accept that the ‘madam’ the Brigadier is talking to over the phone is then-leader of the opposition Margaret Thatcher four years before she held the prime minister office for real. Certainly that’s what the production team were aiming for at the time – UNIT stories were all meant to be just a little into the future after all, even if no two writers ever seemed to agree just how far. This is a depressing thought. No wonder we barely saw UNIT again after this story; Thatcher probably privatised them and cut the budget. This might explain why England keeps being invaded as frequently as it does in future stories.   

Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday: Ranking - 116

      Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday

(Series 2, Dr 10 with Rose, 1-8/7/2006, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Graeme Harper)

Rank: 116

In an emoji: 💥👻

  'That's odd - that ghost over there doesn't look human and it seems to be in a wheelchair, with only one hand. Is it Davros?And over there, that shape can surely only be the Emperor Dalek. So whose that in the Genesisarc then? Wait, they're Cybermen.We must be in some parallel universe where the Dalek and Cybermen plans got switched over. Apparently in this one the baddie's played by Tracy Ann Oberdalek'

In contrast to the sudden ending given to ‘Parting Of The Ways’ when it turned out Christopher Eccleston wouldn’t be staying on as assumed up to the last minute, Billie Piper had given lots of notice that she was leaving at the end of series two and Russell T had plenty of time to build an epic to see her off. Many wondered if Dr Who would last without her – Rose had become a huge part of the reason for the show’s success, surprising many (including me, I admit) with just how good an ex-pop teenage heart-throb could act. For many new fans brought up on lesser series that either went downhill or ended after a couple of years anyway it seemed like a final end. But Dr Who is a series that’s all about change and bigger than any one person and as much as this two-parter is about waving goodbye to an era and tying up loose ends, it’s also very much about how life goes on. In many ways this is Russell T Davies taking the hand of all the viewers who aren’t used to such big changes in a series and remembering his own grief at Jon Pertwee changing into Rom Baker and saying ‘don’t worry, change is an inevitable part of life’. This is a story, after all, that starts with the tension of the Doctor and rose coming home to the Powell estate, little realising its their last Tardis trip together, horrifying Rose’s mum Jackie about how much she’s changed since the last time she came home. It’s not just in a space and time travel danger sense either: Dr Who is a series about how all of us impact on the people around us even when we’re human and this is about young people growing up and becoming independent, taking on the characteristics of their friends as they have new experiences and see new worlds, even if it’s just the inside of a different building that isn’t school. As much as people think of this story as the one that’s Dalek v Cybermen action the real heart of it comes in an emotionally charged scene in the Tardis where Jackie wonders if any of ‘her’ Rose will be left when she’s dead and buried and her daughter no longer has any excuse to come home. Jackie is oike many anxious parents, but also she’s like most anxious humans, wanting things to stay the same – which is why she’s so pleased when their ‘Grandad’ comes to visit in the form of a ghost (because death is the ultimate journey, the ultimate parting, the ultimate change). And it’s that gullibility the Cybermen have been relying on for their plan because, while stories about them being superior for having no emotions are two a penny in Dr who, this one is about how Cybermen are superior because they’re not nostalgic. They aren’t tied down by family and friends the way Rose is, they can just plunder the universe and never look back and don’t mind what world they wake up in. There is change by the end of course – Rose leaves the series at the end – but ultimately it’s not as big and scary and horrific a break as new-time fans might have been expecting: by the end of the story we’re in a parallel world that’s much the same as the old one, where most of the same things still apply. This really is a very clever script – one of Russell T’s best in that sense of being rounded – and it’s a story that he’s clearly been thinking about hard (this might well have been his original plan to end his first series till it was re-commissioned and Christopher Eccleston decided to leave, inspiring a very different sort of script). 

 Unusually, actually uniquely for modern Who until as late as series seven, this finale isn’t something that’s been set up multiple episode in advance, although it helps if you’ve seen the Cybermen two-parter and Dalek stories before it. For a while it starts like so many other Russell T episodes with a comforting familiarity to it: the Doctor and Rose return to the Powell council estate full of big stories and adventures of where they’ve been and find one has been happening without them: ghosts have arrived around the world. At the time it seemed unlikely that so many people could have been brainwashed into wishful thinking over some blurry lines that (spoilers) turn out to be the Cybermen from a parallel world trying to get back into this one, but having lived through a pandemic since then, well, let’s just say that might just be the most believable part of the whole story now – people will just believe what they want to believe if they’re told it enough times, even when all the evidence points to something else. Yet again, while Russell has high opinions of individual Humans and enough faith in good people being turned great by difficult circumstances, he has a very low opinion of humanity en masse: we’re easily duped, confused and all too ready to believe a pretty voice that tells us what we want to hear. Before long this amazing impossible thing, the dead coming back to life (sort of), has just been absorbed into popular culture and turned ‘normal’, with some very clever uses of Russell’s characteristic cameos: French and Japanese news bulletins, a new advert for Cillit-Bang style ‘Ecto-Shine’ designed to make ghosts seem less blurry (even though that seems to be all wishful thinking), TV interviewer Trisha Goddard (Britain’s equivalent of the usual fictional American Who TV presenter Trinity Wells), ‘Cash In the Attic’ presenter Alistair Appleton’s new fictional TV series ‘Ghostwatch’ with a very cute weather map filled with pac-man ghosts for sightings, ‘Most Haunted’s psychic medium Derek Acorah (sadly his best line got trimmed: ‘I guess I’m out of a job now…I give up!’) and the biggest in-joke, Eastenders’ Barbara Windsor as Peggy Mitchell telling a spooky shape she thinks is Den Watts to ‘get out maaa pub’ (the in-joke being he was shot dead by his wife the year before, a character played by this episode’s villain Tracey Ann-Oberman, an early clue as to what’s really going on – which makes sense given the close ties between the two shows but makes the fact-fictional borders of 30th anniversary story ‘Dimensions In Time’ all the weirder it has to be said). In another gaga a ghost is ‘elected MP for Leeds’ – in case you were wondering that was a borough without a majority in the 2005 election so they were safe to make that joke without treading on anyone’s toes (though it’s very much in keeping with ‘Aliens of London’ that a white blur is still better than your general politician). 

 The Doctor isn’t fooled though of course and quickly works out that the signal is coming from Canary Wharf, the most alien and extraordinary looking part of London, this series’ biggest link with our ‘ordinary’ world (so it’s a wonder it hasn’t featured in the series before this). After some and games where Jackie gets accidentally kidnapped (because the plot needs her later), giving us a last burst of comedy before things get serious (David Tennant’s insults that she looked into the eye of harmony and aged 57 years while Jackie splutters ‘but I’m 40!’ is one of Russell’s funniest lines) we end up in Torchwood – the English one. It’s all a bit get sup for the Welsh Torchwood spin-off series that began three month after these episodes were on and for now, at least they’re basically Britain’s Area 51, full of stolen weapons and gadgets. Though it’s a bit of a steal from the museum setting of ‘Dalek’ Russell is far more acerbic in his bitching in these lines: that was the collection of rogue American collector Henry Van Statten whose a tyrant in the Trump mode long before the orang-u-tang ran to be president (he was though known from the American ‘Apprentice’ – Canary Wharf is where the British version is ‘set’ according to the opening credits, although it’s actually a little down the road). They’re everything the Doctor isn’t, hoarding alien artefacts and shooting down aliens that invade their airspace because they want to get an edge over other countries and make Britain great again (this story’s best gag: ‘We’ve taken them for the British Empire’ ‘But Britain doesn’t have an empire’ ‘Not yet’). They’re not explorers and pioneers like Rose, the epitome of someone who should be travelling because of how much it broadens her mind, but pirates, who see how big and wonderful the universe can be and then view it through a vision narrower than a 1982 Dr Who viewfinder, only seeing what’s right in front of them for profit and greed. 

At Torchwood Rose bumps into a returning Mickey back from the parallel world of ‘Age Of Steel/Rise Of the Cybermen’ whose been investigating something suspicious the way the Doctor would. So far so normal, but then the signal is traced to something called a ‘Genesis Ark’, a device that by name recalls two beloved DW stories of old (‘Genesis of The Daleks’ and ‘The Ark In Space’) and suddenly all bets are off as everything goes mental for the cliffhanger as we get a story that goes from being humdrum to being epic. Russell had really set himself a challenge topping the Dalek army and regeneration of the end of series one – after all, for all he knew when he was writing it this would be the last bit of DW that was ever made so he’d pulled all the stops out already. The solution for the end of series two is a masterstroke: not only do you bring back the Dalek army you throw a Cybermen army at them too! Which seems like the most obvious thing for Dr Who to do ever, but had never actually happened before: indeed until 2006 it couldn’t. A bit of context for that now. Terry Nation, Dalek originator in our world the way Davros is in the series, was as wary and distrustful as you’d expect the creator of the universe’s biggest xenophobes to be, although he also had access to lawyers the Daleks could only ever dream of. Terry feared that one day his invention would end up just another Dr Who monster making up the numbers, a supporting character to some lesser modern foe that wasn’t worthy of polishing its baubles, so it was actually written into his contract that the Daleks would never appear with another race without the permission of him or his estate and it was something he never gave during his lifetime (he died in 1997, a year after the McGann TV movie). Worried about losing the rights to the Daleks altogether the production teams of old Who always kowtowed, to the point where the few times more than one enemy appeared more often than not it was the other way round and the only time they do share the screen with anyone it’s either the dumb heavies The Ogrons or 1973 creations The Draconians ended up being the patsies for the Daleks. For a while the modern series was blocked from using the Daleks for months until they could check the Who revival was worthy of the name (see ‘Dalek’ for how they would have got round this problem with the similar but not copyright infringing Toclafane) the BBC and Terry Nation’s family are now on much friendlier terms all round and, no doubt, eager to capitalise on the sudden spike in Dalek merchandise toys. So we get the big Cybermen versus Dalek battle we’d all played using our toys down the years (em I did, what do you mean you didn’t?!) but which we had always assumed could never be. Russell, of course, kept this development to himself so that it was a genuine thrill for fans in the know when they both turned up sharing screen time together. Suddenly the Doctor and Rose take a back role to an epic if all too brief CGI battle where the Daleks and Cybermen actually taunt each other, like they’re head of rival gangs of bullies looking to duff up the Doctor and steal his lunchbox. In the end it doesn’t have all that much to do with the plot, but its a fabulous moment – a celebration of how big this series has become, written and filmed safe in the knowledge that Dr Who is the biggest it’s been in thirty years and how everyone at home is geek enough to at least know somebody who can tell them what the hell is going on. The revelation is one of my favourite memories as a fan even in a series that’s full of them – an unexpected treat from a production team that knew just what presents we wanted. 

 Rose’s departure is almost an afterthought by comparison, but its well handled as it goes: she loses the Doctor because of course she refuses to leave his side even when he’s tried to trick her into being safe one last time (because that’s their whole relationship in one scene) and she gets sucked into a parallel world when Daleks and Cybermen are being hoovered up by something technical the Doctor’s set up. Luckily for Rose its the parallel world she was in a few episodes ago – a world that just happens to be missing a Rose (and, after she’s converted into a Cybermen in ‘their’ world, a Jackie too). She gets a whole There’s no way Rose could ever leave the Doctor willingly and killing her off would really go against the optimistic tone of this new-look series, so as a substitute she gets the nuclear family she craved for in ‘Father’s Day’ all together and safe (and in Norway – a rare example of some big central point in time that doesn’t happen to be in the British isles). It’s a clever solution, giving Jackie her daughter back and Rose the nuclear family she always wanted, while Mickey looks cheered up no end at being back together with Rose again too, but of course it’s not what Rose really wanted and it’s very much not what the Doctor wanted. Rose is effectively ‘grounded’, unable to travel the stars, but at the same time she gets back everyone she’d started out with when we first met her, along with two years’ worth of time travelling experience and knowledge so that you know that she’s going to do more with her life than end up in a shop and eat chips this time around (even before she returns to the series and gets an even more suitable ending with a ‘human’ Doctor in ‘Journey’s End’). 

 It’s as big and emotional a goodbye as you’d hope, this two parter, so beloved by fans and a more general public that it was voted ‘best scifi moment ever’ in a 2014 poll by sFX Magazine, even though it features little to no scifi elements at all. I wouldn’t quite go as far as that (I mean, it’s either the cliffhanger at the end of the first Dalek story or the revelation in episode one of ‘The Space Museum’ for me) but it’s certainly powerful as we say goodbye to a character we’ve come to know so well, our main audience identification person (until she stopped being one and Mickey took that role). This is also our last chance to see Jackie and Mickey and that’s almost as sad as saying goodbye to Rose herself – they’ve really grown so across these two series. Mickey is no longer the coward but is now a fully three-dimensional character putting himself in harm’s way to do the right thing because he can see further than his tiny life and needs and the ‘pretence’ that Jackie is Rose but ‘prematurely aged’ while the Doctor gets his own back for multiple episode’s worth of digs at him while she strops in return is one last great comedy Jackie moment, one she’s gladly put up with to have her daughter back. It’s worthy too that Pete is the one who gets to save Rose, returning from a parallel world long enough to catch his daughter as she gets sucked into the void. There was a lot of debate amongst the showrunners/producers over who this should be: Russell wasn’t sure if it should be Pete or Mickey and there was debate that went on weeks about who it should be. Which seems odd to me: Pete is the obvious choice and it’s the perfect resolution for their ‘story arc’ – he always refused to accept that he had a daughter in another parallel world and Rose has spent the last two years running around with the Doctor as a sort of surrogate father figure as well as a boyfriend; she always wanted her dad to be there to protect her (against her mum as much as anything) and finally he does. 

 Of course it’s not quite as neat as it seems when you watch this story lots and aren’t caught up in the moment, with one of Russell’s weakest scripting in there too. Russell has a tendency to wrap things up in a neat bow in the last few minutes out of nowhere (some of us fans affectionately call it a ‘Davies Et Machina’ after the Greek phrase ‘Deux Et Machina’ where a plot device is abruptly solved that you couldn’t have guessed minutes before it happens, a phrase I wish was mine but isn’t) and the ‘void’ is one of his worst: if there really was a method of sending space travellers into what’s effectively ‘hell’ then you think he’d have done it long before now. Setting this up via ‘time travel’ energy that can only be seen through 3D glasses frankly comes too late in the day for this to be a ‘thing’. It’s an odd plan that relies solely on metal clamps to get him out of trouble and you have to say the Doctor has a lot of faith in the people who constructed the walls of the canary Wharf branch of Torchwood versus the power of the void (you also have to wonder if there are some rogue Daleks and Cybermen hanging to walls somewhere when the void is closed too; we know of at least ne, the partly converted ‘Cyberwoman’, who’ll end up starring in one of Torchwood’s sexiest i.e. dumbest plots during their first year). The Doctor, too, either second-guesses that Rose will ignore his attempts to keep her safe and send her back in the Tardis or gets very lucky in the fact he brings two wall clamps with him so she can have one too. This entire scene stands as one of the daftest in the modern series when you stop and think about it, not to mention the fact that parallel world Pete manages to have super-powers enough to both know where he’s standing to catch his daughter when she falls and isn’t sucked through into the void too the second he passes through. Russell’s written a better plot resolution than just ‘the Doctor pulled on a lever and opened up a sinkhole and sucked all the baddies out into the ether’ – on paper that’s as hollow as his writing ever gets. Even so, that’s the sort of thing you only pick up on after repeated watches. At the time the drama is enough to keep you blubbing, especially the post-climax when the Doctor and Rose are holding onto the opposite ends of a wall, a split-screen making it seem like they’re together artificially one last time as they say goodbye. For once even a writer as powerful as Russell T has run out of words and the silence between them is a golden moment, two characters who’ve been amongst the series’ chattiest now without their constant companion. It’s the perfect end, slightly negated by the post-scene when the Doctor burns up a star to half say goodbye to Rose in her new life in ‘Bad Wolf Bay’ in Norway, where he doesn’t quite get to say ‘I love you’ (though Russell is adamant that he didn’t actually know what the Doctor was about to say when the rift ended), which feels more like emotional manipulation by comparison. Still got me when the Doctor-projection turns round to look Rose squarely in the eyes because he knows where she’s likely to be standing this far into the speech though, one last connection between them we weren’t expecting). 

 There are other little things that prevent this story from being the perfect finale too. Tracey Ann Oberman is one of Dr Who’s lesser human baddies (many fans wondered if her name was an Anthony Ainley style ‘clue’ the Cybermen were involved again but no, that really is her name). She’s a one-dimensional character trying to be ‘rough’ without any layers beneath that, Russell basing her on a TV producer he met earlier in his career who wished she was a ‘people person’ and was one of the coldest people he’d ever met; a combination of the script not giving her much to do and Oberman being mis-cast means she just falls flat though, unbelievable as the boss of Torchwood never mind one of the most evil people we meet in the series. I wonder too if Russell had someone like Alan Sugar in mind, given the Apprentice location, before changing his mind (it’s a shame he didn’t throw in Sugar’s love of bad puns and occasional rants, which would have given her more character). Torchwood itself isn’t properly explored: all we really see are two big rooms, one filled with computers run by brainwashed ‘experts’ like the end of ‘The Demon Headmaster’s first series; there’s not even the scope or gadgets of Van Statten’s collection. It feels a bit too much like a promotional video for the series to come, a little too cute (by contrast you can tell ‘School Reunion’ came long before ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ was a thing, even though it’s ostensibly a pilot episode for how that series turns out). Freema Agyeman gets an early cameo as one of these people before her stint as companion Martha the following year, in a character that’s retconned later as her ‘identical cousin’ Adeola (Russell said once one of his biggest regrets was missing this taping session, so he hadn’t seen how good Freema was and they’d filmed her death scene by the time he came to write Martha, otherwise having her character survive this story would have been a great bit of continuation to fit with the episode’s overall theme of change), but other than to audition she might as well not be there: she’s in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets converted by chance, dispatched in a couple of scenes just as an interesting love story seems to be growing (although it goes without saying that, as these are Russell-written scenes, she still feels more like a ‘real’ person than Yaz did after three series). The script could have made a lot more of that – and the idea of ghosts that turn out to be Cybermen, which is a great idea that just gets forgotten. I moan a lot on here about Steven Moffat two-parters and how the second episode ignores most of what happened in the first episode, but in many respects this is worse: the ghostly Cybermen idea was strong enough to have taken up far more of the plot but it’s barely explained, just an excuse for the Doctor to go investigating and we don’t really get the ‘feel’ of how this invasion by stealth has changed the world, the way we usually do with Russell. Fun as the cameos are they don’t really cut it this time: long lost relatives returning from the grave and proving the existence of life after death would surely make a bigger ripple than this but we barely see anyone in this story outside Rose’s family. The ‘Genesis Ark’ too is rather flimsily explained; it’s just an excuse to keep Daleks out the way until the cliffhanger, with a most odd explanation for how they survived the events of ‘Parting Of the Ways’ at all (and talking of Davies Et machinas, that one’s a doozy…) It has to be said, too, that a lot of us invented a far better second half to this story after seeing the first: as clever as this story is at giving us something unexpected, it might have been better yet to see the Doctor and Rose parted in the middle of a big Cyber-Dalek war, something that feels like the biggest threat we’ve ever faced in the series but then gets tidied back into the playbox with ease (frustratingly we never see whose ‘winning’, perhaps deliberately so Terry Nation’s estate aren’t cross and Gerry Dais/Kit Pedler’s estates don’t start asking awkward questions too. Though I’d loved it if an opportunistic alien like the Sontarons had turned up in the middle when both sides were weak and taken them both over, which is almost sort-of what they do in ‘Flux’). 

 Still, for all the nitpicking, for all the faults, for all the slightly disappointing ending, this is still one hell of a strong story. They saved a lot of the budget from the series to make this one (Russell even writing the ‘cheapo’ episode ‘Love and Monsters’ himself to make sure there was enough left over for the finale) and it looks as spectacular as you’d think, with huge sets, explosions and CGI Dalek-Cyber battles galore. Watching this back to back with the 60th anniversary specials you’d think it was this one that was made with Disney money – it is, arguably, the most expensive Dr Who story made until ‘The Star Beast’ adjusting for inflation, either episode. It’s only when you see stills from this episode, rather than see it moving, that you can tell the Daleks aren’t really flying over London after all; ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of the Ways’ looked amazing too but these two parts look even better. However the effects never get in the way of the story and the one at the heart of it, the age-old old tale of two lovers being parted (impossibly old boy meets girl, saves her from shop window dummies, loses her to a parallel world in an epic Cyber-Dalek battle, you know the usual) is exquisitely told by a master craftsmen at his best, acted by regulars at the peak of their game. One of the reasons Rose’s departure is oh so sad is that, after starting well, the David Tennant-Billie Piper pairing have reached new heights of chemistry and believability. This is a worthy and magical end to a particularly magical and worthy era of the series, one that has just the right amount of action, comedy, thrills, spills, battles and human moments to make this story as great as the rest of the series, while being that little bit extra special. As much as Russell tries to cushion the blow, as much as this is a story about how life flows on within you and without you even after awful life-changing events and how change is the one constant in all our lives, he’s just too good a writer to make me accept it all. In the Doctor’s words from ‘The End Of Time’ ‘I don’t want them to go’. Would that those days would come again. Maybe, with Russell back in charge, one day they will? 

 POSITIVES + They actually mentioned ‘Shiver and Shake’, one of my favourite weirdo comics only weirdo English kids would buy, which repeated the fake rivalry of ‘Whizzer and Chips’ without the same great characters but far worse puns. For the record the Doctor says that he sees himself as ‘Shake’ and Rose as ‘Shiver’ – for anyone that doesn’t know, that means he’s an accident prone elephant whose always getting in the way and she’s a smart-alecky ghost. The best strip was ‘Soggy The Sea Monster’ though, whose always trying to help humans but who gets in a muddle over his size. He looks like one of the Skarasen from ‘Terror Of the Zygons’, but cuter.

 NEGATIVES - One thing that always puzzled me about this story is Rose’s misleading voiceover at the start of this story that ‘this was the day she was going to die’. She doesn’t. I mean, in ‘our’ world she’s officially listed as being dead, but that’s different to actually dying and anyone who cares about her knows the truth anyway. What’s more, she hasn’t died yet in anything official in the Dr Who universe. She just ends up in a parallel world without the timelord she loves, which is bad enough but not death. Why, then, is she saying this directly and to whom? It’s only the third time anyone in Dr Who breaks the ‘fourth wall’ and I can kinda sorta excuse the others (in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ the Doctor’s wishing an ‘incidentally, merry Christmas to those of you at home’ because he knows people might be watching him on the space-time visualiser and, well, he’s drunk – it’s completely in the ego of the 1st Doctor that everyone’s watching him, as indeed they are a few stories later in ‘The Savages’, while I can kind of fudge that Rose in ‘Father’s Day’ is either talking to herself or her future family) but this one? Why would she lie to us? And what for? It’s a manipulation too far and wholly unnecessary, because nobody seriously thought they were going to kill her off. I was fully expecting a reveal at the end of the story that an elderly Rose at the point of death was gathered round a campfire telling some last stragglers of humanity of her time with the Doctor and to stay hopeful the way she always learned to be with him before she pegged it, with this a story of ‘how I died…here’ or even just writing in a journal, but nothing. The only people’s she’s with are her parents and Mickey and they know her story so she can’t be telling them. Is she saying this story to ‘us’ then? If so then how – and why has she never assumed she’s being followed by TV cameras before? Another thing about that ending: how does parallel world Pete feel about grieving his wife being turned into a Cyberman and then getting a parallel world version that’s different in so many ways? How does our Jackie feel about being reunited with her sort-of dead husband? How does Mickey feel about getting Rose back safe and sound but still pining for her timelordy ex? Russell has done so much work to make us care about the supporting characters this series and then rather dumps them at the end, onlookers to Rose’s last tearful goodbye to the Doctor (which does go on a bit it has to be said, like many a Russell T ending). Oh and how come the Doctor’s suddenly so hesitant to tell Rose that he loves her? He’s never had problems before and he knows time is running short given that he’s burning up a star to even say as much to Rose as he does say. This is the 10th Dr after all, no stranger to emotion even in the calmest of stories, not the flipping 12th!

 BEST QUOTE: ‘Daleks have no concept of elegance!’ Cybermen: ‘This is obvious!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The last of the ‘series two’ Tardisodes intended to create long-standing followers via mobile phone subscriptions, although in the end the quick changing tech market meant that they cost a fortune and most people watched them for free on the Dr Who website instead. These 2 x minute long Gareth Roberts Tardisodes feature a reporter getting the scoop on Torchwood and discovering that it goes all the way back to Queen Victoria, before interference means her article is spiked and she’s very nearly spiked too, instead being sent to an asylum; plus an emergency broadcast after the Cybermen have invaded where a reporter giving the news is invaded live on air, only to reveal that it’s a fleet of Daleks instead who compete over whether to delete or exterminate her. In my heart of hearts I like to think this was GB News and that they’ve all secretly been over-run by Cybermen

Previous ‘Fear Her’ next ‘The Runaway Bride’