Smith and Jones: Ranking - 132

   Smith and Jones

(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 31/3/2007, showrunner; Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Charles Palmer)

Rank: 132

  'Is this the reading room for the platoon of Judoon on the moon? They're not here yet but soon - this afternoon? No I'm not a rhino you big baboon! I'm an alien on my honeymoon, only I fell into a lagoon being chased by a raccoon in a typhoon and ended up here on the lunar surface in June. It's a giant egg you know' 

 

 

In which a platoon of Judoon are on the moon and things go boom– though regrettably none of them play a bassoon. It’s the kind of episode where they would though: this is a delightfully bonkers extraordinary Dr Who story set in the most ordinary of settings, the hospital. It’s a space that’s as close as most people watching at home come to being taken to the Dr Whoniverse: somewhere that you spend most of your life trying not to think about until you end up there, with a reminder of how hazardous life can be, in a place where your usual routines and motivations don’t apply and you put your life in the hands of strangers with no plan beyond survival. It’s the sort of place where weird unexpected things happen and you meet people you would never normally expect to see while your body is as sensitive to light and noise and stimulation as it will ever be. Possibly while out of it on heavy painkillers that make everything seem like a dream. Having a platoon of stomping rhinocerouses making too much noise isn’t that far removed from what happens during some visiting hours while you’re too out of it to care. It’s a surprise, in fact, that we only ever really had one story set in anything like this is classic’ Who and given that ‘The Invisible Enemy’ is more about an escaped virus in the shape of a giant prawn being chased by a robotic dog (no, seriously) it’s probably fair to say that it had never done a ‘just like Earth’ type of hospital setting.  Russell T Davies knows from his first TV work on long running kiddies soap ‘Children’s Ward’ that it’s the sort of setting with inbuilt jeopardy and emotional storylines that an audience can easily connect with – which is why he had already used it for his previous series opener ‘New Earth’ (which also features Adjoah Andoh, Martha’s mum. As a cat nun). That story was all about how like an Earth hospital it really was, despite being in outer space on an alien planet with people who weren’t ‘feline very well’ and how Humans in the future are scarily like us even when the morals are different; ‘Smith and Jones’ is a bit different though, about how people with ‘other’ morals can take us over even in a familiar setting we’ve been primed to believe is ‘safe’ and how being in hospital can feel as far away as The Moon sometimes. For here, instead of treating some clumsy DIYers or a string of Friday night winos, the Doctors and nurses are faced with alien Rhino policemen stomping down the corridors and taking over while a rogue alien tries to drain our blood (okay, so it’s not that different).

Did I say Doctors? Yes, for this is where Martha the new companion  joins and this is important for two reasons. One is she’s the first person since Grace in ‘The TV Movie’ where they’ve done the obvious joke and put a medical Doctor in the Tardis along the timelordy one (itself a joke that hadn’t been done since Harry in 1974). The other is that she’s only the second companion new Who has ever had and for youngsters who’d grown up on the series with Billie Piper it’s a shock that someone else is in her shoes. Will the series ever be the same without Rose? Russell has to act quickly and shows that it will. This is very much Martha Jones’ story, told in parallel to ‘Rose’ and seen through her eyes rather than The Doctor’s (the episode was indeed called ‘Martha’ until the last minute, when someone pointed out her surname and the Doctor’s John Smith pseudonym went well together – although they missed a trick not calling it ‘Aliens Smith and Jones’). Like ‘Rose’ it emphasises all the reasons why she’s the perfect companion: she keeps a calm head when everyone else around her goes to pieces, she’s intelligent enough to ask all the right questions and brave enough to protect The Doctor when his life is in danger. She’s different though in the fact that she’s sensible and disciplined rather than impetuous, trained to keep a cool head and not to panic, while her medical training means she’s used to seeing a wide range of the world (and probably has colleagues from half of it on the NHS) rather than the comparatively sheltered Rose: it’s not as big a leap to deal with other alien worlds and cultures, even if it’s not something Martha’s ever thought much about before. Given the talk that he’s just had with Donna about the importance of having someone around (in ‘The Runaway Bride’) it’s no surprise The Doctor takes notice of her cool head and assistance during his time undercover looking for the rogue Plasmavore. Martha leaves for very different reasons to Rose too: her predecessor was tired of her small life and her small job and the life laid out ahead of her with Mickey. The only thing that really made her think twice about going with the Doctor was leaving her mum behind on her own and it’s a guilt trip that follows her all the way into a parallel world. Martha is very different: she’s a career girl in the last year of a seven-year medical degree (so she must be at least twenty-five, despite the script saying she’s twenty-three) with a job she doesn’t want to leave, but which she will quite often practise on a bigger scale across the universe anyway. She is, however, more than happy to leave her feuding family behind and leaving them to their own devices, on the promise that she can return so that they won’t notice she’s gone (a promise the 9^th Doctor never seems to have considered in the case of Rose, oddly).

I have a soft spot for thoughtful hard-working Martha. She gets a bit lost and forgotten in between the smiley Rose and the obstreperous Donna, being less overtly emotional than either of them, but most of the time she’s of more help to The Doctor  and there are certain stories, especially this one, where she shines. Just look at her optimism after The Doctor warns her that she might die (‘we might not’) and her quick thinking with the windows being badly fitted and yet everyone is still able to breathe, calming people down. Or her scene where she breaks from The Doctor’s side to tend to patients he’s walked past (and his look of recognition back, still thinking about Donna’s warning from ‘Runaway Bride’ about needing someone to remind him of the bigger picture). Like Rose, Martha is put in a life or-death situation very quickly and watching her keep her cool as everyone else around her cracks up. Throughout Martha does sensible things we’ve never seen a companion do before in a sort of professional low-key way that’s very different to Rose. She’s shown straight away as someone who can keep perspective and see the bigger picture, containing her feelings in an emergency. Even Judoon. ‘Smith and Jones’ has all the hallmarks of medical soaps – death, crisis, an ‘investigation’ that offers compensation for medical neglect, even a couple of kisses– but the death is caused by a bloodsucking alien known as a Plasmavore, the crisis is the hospital has been transported to the moon, the ‘investigation’ is by police rhinos and the kisses are Martha performing CPR on The Doctor and The Doctor performing a ‘genetic transfer’ on Martha to keep his alien-ness quiet. Even the ruse of hiding The Doctor from the aliens mirrors the usual ‘sneaking patients out to see visitors even though it’s against the rules’ plot common to medical dramas while there’s the traditional ‘shock result after having an X-ray’ scene (which in this case is the shock that The Doctor has somehow condensed radiation into his left shoe, something we’ve never seen him do before – and which makes something of a mockery of how David Tennant regenerates into Matt Smith in ‘The End Of Time’ too, but that’s another review for another day).

Unfortunately other writers this year won’t write for Martha nearly as well as her creator (it doesn’t help that of the other stories this year a handful started life as series two rejects written for Rose and a two-parter is based on a 7^th Doctor ‘New Adventures’ book with Benny as the companion) and even Russell seems to forget how to write for poor Martha by the series end. She’s also saddled with a plot arc that doesn’t do her any favours, of the broken love triangle between her pining for a Doctor who barely notices her and The Doctor still pining for Rose. It’s a mess. While you can understand both halves of that arc after travelling with Billie Piper for so long and after The Doctor gives Martha that kiss, it’s uncharacteristic for The Doctor not to back up and explain what’s going on, especially this comparatively social and flirty incarnation. It’s a real shame, as Martha proves her worth and her independence and adultness multiple times in this story and would indeed have coped perfectly well without The Doctor there, but ends up being someone who follows The Doctor around like a lost puppy in a way Rose never did (and Donna never would). To quote this Doctor’s closing speech she could have been much more, so much more. It makes you wonder what was in that kiss and what timelord pheromones are like given that Martha doesn’t show the slightest bit of romantic interest before it (worth pausing here to remember that we never saw The Doctor kiss anyone until the 8^th in ‘The TV Movie’ and we never hung around long enough to see what that did to Grace, while Rose wasn’t kissed until another sort of ‘genetic transfer’ at the end of ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’. She only ever kissed Dr 10 on screen when Cassandra was in his body, so the great irony is that Martha’s already two ahead by ‘accident’ this story alone). As for Freema Agyeman, she’s great in difficult circumstances: she had impressed Phil Collinson with her range as part of the tough job of playing Adeola, who snuffs it within a single scene in ‘Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday’  but perhaps more importantly had just been seen as a Doctor trying to maintain order in difficult circumstances in an otherwise wretched  recent remake of Terry Nation’s ‘Survivors’ (you can sum up the two series by the fact that Martha is the heroine in both shows but snuffs it early on in ‘Survivors’ where life is cruel and random, unlike the karma and justice’ feel of Who). Auditions for Billie Piper’s replacement were so secret that Freema thought she was auditioning for the role of Gwen Cooper in Torchwood before being taken aside – a jittery and relatively inexperienced Freema wasn’t sure she was up to it, but found a kind note from David Tennant in the dressing room they parked her in saying that he knew from the other episode how good she was and what a great job she would do. It was that. as much as anything else, that made her stay rather than walking out. She ‘gets’ this Martha instantly too – it’s the later, soppier version she’s not always sure how to play. 

We get to know her really quickly in a similar way to the montage that sped through Rose’s life at speed (though mercifully without the awful contemporary music to go with it this time), with Russell at his best in the opening scenes where he has her walking to work, forever interrupted by the chaos of her extended family (her dad and mum have divorced, her dad’s found a younger woman very quickly, her mum hasn’t moved, her brother and sister are sitting on different sides of the fence and Martha’s trapped in the middle). The banality of this sequence with all its trials and tribulations contrasts greatly with the relief she feels when she clocks into work, changes into her hospital gown and clocks on at work even though it’s the opposite of how we’re meant to think most Doctors are (like teachers, a part of you subconsciously thinks they lie at work and never go home). The fact that they didn’t was treated like a huge discovery across a wide range of medical soaps across the 1990s and 00, from ‘Peak Practice’ (which made a star of Sarah ‘Racnoss’ Parish so might well have been on Russell’s mind at the time he was writing this) to ‘Holby City’ (ditto Alex ‘River Song’ Kingston) and Russell’s own ‘Children’s Ward’. This story, more than most in the ‘comeback’ era, feels like the old days when Dr Who channel-hopped its way across the galaxy, throwing the Doctor at an existing genre and moulding it to the Dr Who format by throwing aliens at it and this time, thanks to Children’s ward’, it’s a genre he knows well. You get the feeling that Russell T is having fun doing all the things that the scifi fan wanted to do during his job on ‘Children’s Ward’ that he knew was what children ‘wanted’ but was never allowed to do – evaporating annoying patients, having the cause of an outbreak turn out to be nothing mundane but the result of a bloodsucking monster and interrupting the flow of daily hospital life with an invasion of space rhinos (it was rather a stuffy series, the sort of worthy thing you watched because it was better than doing your homework rather than because you couldn’t wait to see it). ‘Smith and Jones’ feels like all those suppressed feelings coming to the surface, like Russell’s had a fever dream doing his day job and suddenly started writing Dr Who episodes instead. There’s even the injoke of having the consultants in both series given the same name, Mr Stoker (something everyone thinks is a reference to Bram Stoker, creator of ‘Dracula’, given all the bloodsucking, but if it’s anyone’s joke it belongs to the ITV series: Russell only realised it on set when he saw the prop department putting ‘B Stoker’ as a sign on the door). No wonder, then, that this story is so child friendly given that writing about hospitals are associated in Russell’s brain with children, even though notably there are no children in this hospital at all. That’s why the Plasmovore uses a children’s straw (specified in the script as being just like the Humphreys, the ‘milk snatchers’ from 1970s dairy adverts) and why David Tennant reacts to being dosed with radiation by giving a mad little dance. 

Good as this story is for Freema it’s an even better story for David Tennant, who in addition to that dance gets lots of opportunities to do everything we’ve come to expect from this regeneration in one place: run around madly, ask lots of questions, do a bit of flirting, crack some jokes, gets huffy at the aliens and be really sad  about Rose. Rather than simply moving straight on this story is still about Rose even in her absence: it’s about how different the world is without her there, just as ‘The Christmas Invasion’ was all about how different things were for her without the Doctor. Even the fact that he starts this story ‘in hospital’ is a natural place for The Doctor to end up given the grief we saw at the end of ‘Doomsday’. Dr 10 is lost, going through the motions without anyone to spark off and even when he meets Martha and strikes up an instant rapport it’s the conversation of two people with mutual respect rather than best mates at work. It’s a real shift from this being a straightforward ‘buddy’ series in space (and time) and all part of the emotional realism Russell T brought to the show– the Doctor’s never been seen to dwell on absent companions for very long before and even grand-daughter Susan was rarely mentioned two weeks after she left. In time the Doctor’s obsession with one companion when he’s known so many will get silly, but here you really feel the weight on the Doctor’s shoulders, even in a plot that would otherwise be, well, a bit silly.

Like ‘Rose’ ‘New Earth’ and ‘Partners In Crime’ the plot is deliberately simple, sketched in so that audiences can pick up on the ideas at speed and can spend more time on the new characters. Like those other stories it leans towards the childish, with its one-dimensional monsters and feels more like the old TV Comic Dr Who cartoon strips than the old series, as if the showrunner is trying to hook a new generation of kids with something that appeals to them before going darker in the series once they’ve been hooked (it’s hard to think we’ll be in ‘Human Nature/Family Of Blood’, one of the darkest deepest of Who stories, just two months after fun with space rhinos). After all the Judoon are tracking down a Plasmavore, a blood-sucking creature who sucks out their victim’s blood with a straw, an idea which had it appeared in fan fiction or even a Big Finish audio or missing adventure novel would have been roundly mocked. The scene of Anne Reid sucking David Tennant’s blood with a straw is, reportedly, the modern Dr Who scene that took the longest to film purely because of giggling – and you can see why you might notice it’s trimmed tighter than, dramatically, it ought to be, because Tennant is already beginning to corpse again). That’s also true of The Judoon, law enforcing giant space rhinos who talk in minion-type nonsense rhyme who are – like the ‘Autons’ before them – a bit too simple and one-note to work as a big all-powerful epic monster species (though Chris Chibnall gave it a good go in ‘Fugitive’ I have to say) but are perfect for an episode where the threat has to be sketched in very quickly so we can get on with the real business of watching the Doctor watching Martha at work. They’re a great little creations, plausible space policeman who are bureaucrats gone mad, oblivious to the amount of damage they’re causing in their main quest that will have to be cleaned up afterwards too. There’s a great joke in there too, forgotten on all other appearances, of them offering compensation for such things as being transported to the moon and being destroyed for fighting back – perfect for the era of ambulance chasers and ‘injured at work?’ claims. You’re meant to see them as terrifying when we first meet them, but really they’re thick rather than evil, Russell’s distorted take on the pen-pushers he used to write in ‘Children’s Ward’ who used to wake poorly kids up to get parents to sign things. I love the way they’re so like modern-day police/solicitors though, arriving in high budget state-of-the-art spaceships but saving money by using humble marker pens (it’s a wonder we don’t have a scene of them eating doughnuts in the hospital’s little shop). Luckily they’re seen little enough so that their rhyming scheme doesn’t get tiring and David Tennant copying their style at speed makes for one of the laugh-out-loud moments of the series. They’re also the modern equivalent of the joke from ‘The Time Warrior’ 1974 when we meet our first Sontaron, who removes a helmet revealing his head is…the exact same size. It’s nice to have them as ‘actual’ monsters too, animatronic men in costume rather than CGI for a change as well. For the most part they work well.  

Some fans I know can’t stand this story’s silliness, but for my money ‘Smith and Jones’ does a slightly better job than all the others at juggling the daftness with deftness, adding just enough peril between the obvious jokes. For all that she’s a blood-sucking vampiric alien cracking jokes about the difference of taste from Human to Human as if she’s tasting different drinks at the bar, The Plasmavore is really quite the threat – it takes a lot out of The Doctor to fight her. There’s a moment when Martha (and us) really think The Doctor’s dead and she has to contemplate being stranded on the moon forever that really hits hard. The irony that (spoilers) the nice little old lady that no one suspects is the killer rather than the scary looking space rhinos is an irony worthy of other Dr Who episodes too. Even so, one comes away from this story feeling that maybe the wrong things were emphasised and it would have made an even better two parter or come later in the season. The idea of taking a hospital and transporting it to The Moon (because The Judoon can’t interfere with life on earth apparently – though the writers of all the spin off books, audios and The Sarah Jane Adventures’ seem to ignore that part) is, briefly, a far more interesting moment of pure horror than the comedy setting it turns out to be. Germany, not understanding British surnames, renamed this episode ‘To The Moon – And Back’ which does rather sum up the easy way everything gets resolved at the end. We should have spent more time with Martha’s sister Trish, staring out at the hospital wondering if her sister is alright. We could have spend time with the other Doctors, usually so in command and control, trying to cope with the fact that everything they knew has been uprooted. We should have spent more time with the people staring out the windows at the Earth, seeing their home anew and wondering if they’ll ever get home again. We really should have seen more impatient patients who are already scared or nervous or awaiting an operation they don’t really want to have? Hospitals are scary at the best of times and most people are on edge and nervous about the future, but throw some Judoons and a trip to the moon in there and they should be terrified. This is, after all, a very different kind of alien invasion: The Slitheen got people’s attention in ‘Aliens Of London/WWIII’ by flying into Big Ben but they were a family; equally when the Sycorax invaded (in ‘The Christmas Invasion’) they stayed up in space and sent half the population to stand on rooftops ready to jump. But this is different: aliens have physically kidnapped Humans. Not just scientists (‘Shada’/’Mark Of the Rani’/‘The Time Warrior’), not just astronauts (‘The Ambassadors Of Death’), not just soldiers (‘The War Games’) but ‘ordinary’ people. If they can take a hospital into space nowhere is safe. This is a game-changer for Dr Who, but The Doctor only really interacts with Martha. There’s not enough danger here. After what you’ve seen him do in past stories you know the Doctor’s going to solve this one with a wave of sonic screwdriver without breaking a sweat and even seen through Martha’s newbie eyes she’s probably seen a lot scarier things doing an A and E nightshift on a Saturday night to be honest. We also don’t get to see much of the moon which is a waste as, despite all the fuss in the introduction about the hospital being transported there, it might as well be anywhere for all the relevance it has to the plot (and why aren’t people bouncing around or commenting on the lower gravity? It’s almost as if Russell set it the story somewhere that rhymed with ‘Judoon’. Oh well, at least the moon didn’t turn out to be a giant egg as per ‘Kill The Moon’. weird to think that ‘The Moonbase’, solved with a drinks tray blocking up a hole, is still the most scientifically accurate of the three Dr Who stories set on the lunar surface). The Tardis can apparently cross timelines ‘for cheap tricks’ but not saving his friends apparently (see ‘Angels Take Manhattan’). It’s also news to me that performing CPR is a cure for blood loss, even in timelords – and while you or I might panic and try everything, Martha’s a trained Doctor who would instinctively know this. Don’t even get me started on The Doctor’s sudden ability to channel radiation, something that would have prevented him regenerating in ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ and changed the course of quite a few other stories too  (Russell really should have remembered it for his own flipping story ‘The End Of Time’).

Oh well, there are stories with far worse flaws out there. Much as guidebooks like mine like pontificating about Dr Who hinting at darker issues not every DW story is meant to be deep and ‘Smith and Jones’ wears its comedy better than most with an energy and buzz that lights up even the daftest scenes. Having a hospital setting is ‘new’ enough to be interesting (a very different one to ‘New Earth’ or indeed ‘The Invisible Enemy’) with two separate hospitals used for different scenes of the fictional but cleverly named ‘Royal Hope Hospital’: mostly it’s the University of Glamorgan’s hospital training centre that were on their Summer holidays when Dr Who went there (it’s still a tradition for students there to re-create the Judoon march during fresher’s week!), with a few scenes recorded in Singleton Hospital, Swansea, while apparently it’s where St Thomas’ Hospital is in real life (by the Thames, in a shot taken from ‘Aliens of London’ and tweaked with CGI; the verandah scene was back in the studio; After leaving Dr Who Freema joined the cast of ‘Law and Order’, where an episode was written by future showrunner Chris Chibnall and set in ‘Royal Hope Hospital’ as a fan Easter Egg). There are some great moments throughout, from the confusing out-of-sequence moment of The Doctor undoing his tie (not commented on for ten minutes and a clever way of re-introducing time travel to viewers jumping on here), to the surprise reveal of The Doctor in a hospital bed, to Anne Reid having the time of her life drinking people’s blood to the scene where David Tennant gets to act like a panicked Human (‘I only came in for my bunions!’ It’s the scene in Who where he most channels Campbell Baines, his manic depressive from his breakthrough role in ‘Taking Over The Asylum’) to the clever switcheroo climax where the Plasmavore, successfully hiding her alien-ness from the Judoon, is fooled into drinking The Doctor’s blood. It’s the little details that make this work though: we all know the ‘collaborator’ who was selling everyone out to the Judoon in the first ten minutes boasting to the emergency services about how he told the Judoon to go back to their own world in the last ten, while the cover up (‘they were all on drugs!’) after the brilliance of so many heroes and heroines is Russell’s cynical response to humanity as a whole following his pride in the actions of individual Humans (much more of this when Conrad gets going in ‘Lucky Day’) . Even if ‘Smith and Jones’ is more a sequence of great moments than a great story per se, it manages to juggle the difficult problems of introducing Martha, re-introducing The Doctor and indoctrinating us that life without Rose is going to be business as usual without just slavishly copying what came before. It’s a good little re-set button for fans who’d been starved of the show for the three months since Christmas and a solid reminder of everything that makes this show so special before the series can run off and do deeper, darker and in some cases better things. However, you have to walk before you can run and by walking down hospital corridors first ‘Smith and Jones’ makes the other stories this season all the better for it.  

POSITIVES + Anne Reid, an actress Russell T has worked with a lot before and since, is having the time of her life as the Plasmavore. After a career playing fussy little old ladies (including in plasticine as Wendolene in the later Wallace and Gromit films and in more human form in Russell T’s own excellent drama series ‘Years and Years’, a show that was meant to predict the Earth getting more and more out of control in the future – which as things turned out wasn’t anywhere near as scary and ridiculous as the real future proved to be) she’s the last person the audience expects to be the alien and is having a whale of a time playing against type as a ruthless alien whose bloodthirsty in every sense of the word. Now this is what the stunt JNT guest casting of the 1980s should have looked like! It’s also ironic that she’s masquerading as a patient after her last Dr Who appearance (in ‘The Curse Of Fenric’) had her playing a nurse (from coping with Dr Judson to coping with a Judoon, that’s quite the career!)

NEGATIVES - One of the great strengths of Rose was the family around her we saw on screen, for almost the first time (give or take Susan, obviously, or Tegan’s constant supply of one-story family members): the lonely mum, the dead dad, the scaredy-cat boyfriend, all of whom grow and develop every bit as much as she does across two series. Martha isn’t so lucky. Her mum’s a bigger bloodsucker than any Plasmovore without the redeeming features of fellow companion mothers Jackie Tyler (whose biggest crime is being a protective single mother whose lonely) or (by the end) Sylvia Noble (who loves her daughter Donna dearly, but finds it easier to never ever express that). Martha’s sister is even worse. Her brother’s an utter wimp. Her dad is having a noisy midlife crisis, oblivious to the drama he’s causing (could he really not have two separate birthday parties with his two different families?) Their collective reaction to their daughter/sister becoming a junior doctor is to put her down and their reaction to her being in trouble and being a hero is to turn the story back round on themselves. How the heck did Martha end up the way she did with those genes and growing up in that environment? It takes a heck of a lot of effort to be a Doctor and anyone who does so needs a firm support network to get through the gruelling hours and low pay – Martha has none of these things. In reality she’d have dropped out long ago or had a breakdown or cut herself off entirely for her own wellbeing. You do wonder why Martha still continues to do so much for a family who all need their heads banging together. Amazingly, the Jones family get even more unlikeable in ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ to come.

BEST QUOTE: Doctor: ‘We might die’. Martha: ‘We might not’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The return of the Judoon not come enough soon and feels as if they only come on TV in a blue moon? Fear not because the intergalactic space rhinos have had a surprisingly busy time of it in the spin-off media, where sometimes they’re the ‘goodies’ and sometimes they’re the ‘baddies’, but more usually they’re the goodies who end up causing more destruction on Earth than the baddies they’re trying to capture. ‘Revenge Of The Judoon’ (2008) is a return adventure for The 10^th Doctor and Martha , released just before the start of series four (a few weeks before Martha’s return to the series, though clearly set before it  in season three as there’s no Donna). On the plus side it’s a welcome chance to see how an old hand writes for the new monsters as Terrance Dicks nails the style of yet another Doctor and yet another alien race first time, capturing the 10^th Doctor’s mercurial energy versus the Judoon’s immovability and stubbornness well. The bad news is that this is part of the ‘Quick Reads’ range aimed for younger children and has a page count that makes the Target novelisations seem over-generous, barely making a hundred. Understandably the plot’s a bit basic as a result, as the Tardis arrives in Balmoral in 1902 and the Doctor and Martha befriend Henry Carruthers and accompany him to visit his pal King Edward VII only to find someone has destroyed Balmoral Castle. The Doctor enlists the help of a passing Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle (Steven Moffat must have been miffed he wasn’t the first writer to create a crossover between the Dr Who and Sherlock universes) but it’s hardly a three pipe problem, given that the Judoon like blowing things up (and the fact they’re on the cover and mentioned in the title). A fun, if frivolous read. 

The Judoon had two separate adventures in 2009. ‘Judgement Of The Judoon’ is a 10^th Doctor novel by Colin Brake from his ‘gap century’ travelling alone where he’s avoiding the Ood’s call to his death by visiting mankind in the far future. He’s landed on Elvis Spaceport, part of New Memphis, where Terminal 13 has just been opened to cope with more traffic but is already shut due to rumours that the notorious ‘Invisible Assassin’ is in town. Your favourite space rhinos are on the case, along with a teenage Human detective named Nicki Jupiter for the weirdest ‘buddy cop’ movie you’re likely to read (she’s a charmer, he wants to destroy all humanity). For the most part it works with a decent Whodunnit mystery at the heart of all, but be warned that it’s not the most serious of Dr Who books – it’s more an excuse to make lots of jokes at the expense of the fact that Elvis didn’t die and got beamed into space instead! The kronkburgers from the New Adventures and ‘Gridlock’ make a return appearance in a colourful story that feels more like a comic book than prose at times.

‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ didn’t feature many monsters from the main series but one except was ‘Prisoner Of The Judoon’ (2009), a typical SJA story in that it takes a very simple idea and weaves quite a complex emotional character piece around it. Judoon Captain Tybo is  tracking down a shapeshifter named Androvax and follows him to contemporary London; Sarah Jane and co are on the case, realising that what everyone else says is a ‘meteor’ crashing to Earth is really a spaceship, but they quickly become aware that the arresting officer is causing far more chaos than the prisoner. There’s lots of the usual running around and possession (the Androvax’s giveaway is his long Reptilian tongue. Which makes for some fun gags when it takes over our heroes and heroines) but beneath that are lots of thoughtful debates about capital punishment and freedom and how you cope with two alien races that just don’t want to negotiate and don’t care about the damage they cause. The true highlights though are the really sweet character moments, when these characters realise what danger they’re in and begin to panic or the catastrophic moment when Rani’s (no, not the timelord one) parents walk into danger right in the middle of everything. 

The ‘Decide Your Destiny’ series – basically the ‘Choose Your Own Adventures’ for the 21^st century kids – also had their own Judoon entry ‘Judoon Monsoon’ by Oli Smith. The concise storytelling needed for the multiple choice story really suits the Judoon and its one of the better in the – gulp – sixteen entries in the range. As for the plot, well, it’s as generic as you can get really, with alien insects invading the planet Betul – a weird planet where the countries keep moving and there are ghosts everywhere - while the Judoon stomp around getting in the way. The thrill, though, comes from seeing how the 11^th Doctor handles them differently: he doesn’t take charge the way Dr 10 and the Judoon easily dismiss him for not being a threat, but he runs rings around them all the same. As with all these stories the tension comes from seeing how well you’d cope based on your decisions if you were the companion. Judging by this book if the world ever comes to rely on me that way, apparently we’re all doomed.  

In 2016 Big Finish ran a shortlived but popular range of ‘classic Doctors’ from the 20^th century paired with ‘new monsters’ from the 21^st; one of the better pairings was the 6^th Doctor and everyone’s favourite space rhinos in ‘Judoon In Chains’, which saw the return of Captain Tybo from SJA and is easily the deepest darkest Judoon-related story in the list. Outraged by his treatment in ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ Sixie has been inspired to help out other hard-done by prisoners and chooses to defend Captain Kybo after he gets into a spot of trouble causing mayhem in Victorian England. You can hardly blame him though: the victim of a crash landing, he’s rescued by a circus and paraded as a ‘freak’; as a former exile on Earth himself The Doctor knows how easy it is to lash out when you’re trapped. The Judoon is mortified: a stickler for rules he’s harder on himself than he should be. Of course The Doctor’s going to defend him, but equally his case isn’t helping by arguing they lock him up and throw away the key. An actually pretty serious story about self care and being judged by people who don’t have all the facts, it’s an interesting story that makes the Judoon seem almost, well, human and points to the beating heart behind that thick hide.
‘One Mile Down’ (2019) from Big Finish’s much anticipated ‘Tenth Doctor Adventures’ saw David Tennant encounter the Judoon again, this time alongside Catherine Tate’s Donna. You can just imagine her reaction to space rhinos and it doesn’t disappoint! Technically she meets them in ‘Stolen Earth’ and is every bit as amazed, but a bit of wiggling in the continuity and Russell T himself says that Donna’s amazed reaction in the series four finale is because The Doctor can talk Judoon, something he never quite gets a chance to do here! The Judoon are the unlikely heavy-hooved guardians of fragile archaeological world Vallarassee where an ancient civilisation was destroyed in a flood. There’s a dome that’s been built around the city but The Doctor notices it’s leaking and that a whole planet of tourists needs to be evacuated pronto. The Judoon, of course, are having none of it and keep getting in his way, used here as representatives of every slow-moving bureaucracy ever. A small-scale story this one, without the usual epic feel of a 10^th Doctor story, but on the plus side we gets lots of Dr-Donna banter to make up for the fact that the basic part of the story is The Doctor arguing with a rhino for an hour. 

Equally beloved but slightly longer lived was ‘Stranded’, a Big Finish series where the 8^th Doctor and his faulty Tardis find themselves stuck on Earth in the year 2020, having to adapt (often rather badly) to living a simple Human life, taking up residence in Sherlock Holmes’ house in Baker Street. The opening series of series three, ‘Patience’ (2021), finds him being tracked down by a Judoon intent on arresting him. That’s just one story running in parallel though: it’s also about the friends The Doctor has made on Earth who end up stranded on two separate alien planets, one desert-like and one covered in water, in tandem with The Doctor climbing a mountain trying to save his friends from The Judoon with a ‘story’, much like the one Martha tells in ‘Sound Of Drums’. It’s a bit odd and disjointed, with the Judoon more of a cameo part really, although Paul McGann keeps getting better and better as The Doctor the more of these audio stories he does.       

Oh and in case you were wondering about The Doctor’s comments on meeting Benjamin Franklin, that’s in the rather off Big Finish ‘Companion Chronicles’ story ‘Founding Fathers’ (2015) in which an unusually careless 1^st Doctor locks himself out of the Tardis and borrows a kite from Franklin to create an electrical current, thus accidentally kick-starting his career! As for Emmeline Pankhurst, The Doctor met her when he was Paul McGann in the ‘8^th Doctor Adventures’ novel ‘Casualties Of War’ by Steve Emmerson. This is a weird and rather gory ghost/zombie story set in a hospital for traumatised WWI soldiers that comes with a frivolous aside that The Doctor helped chain the suffragette to Downing Street himself. No mention of her pinching his laser scanner.

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