Boom Town: Ranking - 81

             Boom Town

(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 4/6/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Joe Ahearne) 

Rank: 81

In an emoji: 🥚

   'You say I never look my prisoners in the eye? Well look around you, this restaurant is full of my other selves dining with monsters. There's my first self eating vitalite with a Sensorite. My second incarnation is enjoying an ice cream with an ice warrior. The 3rd Dr's forgotten about the nestene consciousness and is hiding under the table from the killer plastic forks. My 4th regeneration is chasing a Fendahl with table salt while munching on jelly babies. My 5th self is  sharing a stick of celery with a Tractator. My 6th self is enjoying a baked potato with a sontaron. The 7th Dr is having some liquorice allsorts with the Kandy Man. The 10th Dr is eating some face of Boescits with the big face himself. Dr 11 is staring at some weeping angel cakes. The 12th Dr is having a KFC boneless banquet with The Boneless. And the 13th Dr is having garlic with the Daleks'. 

 

In Boom Town (Cardiff to you!) the Boom Town rat-Slitheens have all left the sinking ship except for one and Margaret Slitheen does not like Mondays (I’m guessing this story takes place on a Monday for the purposes of the joke anyway). In ‘old’ Who DW flirted occasionally with the idea that the Dr couldn’t swan in and out of people’s lives forever willy nilly without having it come back to haunt him in some way – ‘The Ark’ restarts the story partway through to show a before and after the 1st Dr got involved and the 4th Dr causes the plot of ‘Face Of Evil’ and ends up being declared ‘The Evil One’. But more even than these stories ‘Boom Town’ looks at what happens six months after an alien invasion has been thwarted and the Dr has left – only to return. One of the best aspects of ‘Aliens In London/WWIII’ was the way in which Russell T Davies was at pains to point out that his first alien creation the Slitheen who were trying to take over the Earth weren’t all bad – we were just seeing one rogue family on the make that had grown up crooked (and every planet has at least one family like that – most of humanity’s just happened to be in power in that story, that’s all) and even they weren’t all bad, just opportunistic. Alas as episodes tick by Russell seems to forget this very Dr Who trait that not all monsters from outer space are evil – we get a string of people who want to murder us in our beds, from the Gelth to the Reavers to the Jagarafess not to mention The Daleks - but in this story we get a whole backstory exploring why the monster of the week a couple of months ago turned out the way she did. Here we return to WWIII’s most interesting character, Margaret Slitheen, and her attempts to hide in a human bodysuit in plain sight in Cardiff even after her evil plan’s been rumbled as she runs around making friends, keeping up her job and building nuclear power stations. Yes she still has a scheme to kill us all but she’s slowly losing heart as she goes native and discovers that the humans she mingles with are actual people with actual lives and not just vermin to be destroyed. And suddenly she’s not so evil now her nasty relatives are nowhere to be seen and corrupt her. She starts the story sparing a journalist after learning that she’s pregnant and has by now fallen in love with all the daft quirks of her adopted home world to the point where she’s carved out a new life for herself actually doing some good for the humans around her (give or take the nuclear power). The Doctor’s not having any of it at first – this is the more bruised, less merciful 9th incarnation after all – and for him and an equally sceptical Rose it’s only been a few episodes since Margaret Slitheen was killing people without a second thought. But time changes everything in this series and she really does seem to have genuinely changed with the space to get to know the people she was killing as friends rather than prey and with time to think over her actions. Whether this escaped convict still deserves mercy for changing too late in the day is up for debate though and that debate is right at the heart of this story, which asks all the questions Dr Who had never thought to ask before about things like the death penalty and the morals of how we treat our prisoners (Russell T Davies is a fierce opponent of capital punishment, believing in mercy for all and afraid of mistakes that happen with the justice system, a theme that’s cropped up in a few of his pre-Who shows. 

So, ‘Boom Town’ is Dr Who at its most hippie-ish then, like the days of the 1960s when the Doctor hung around Tibet and inspired six youthful revolutions before breakfast? Not quite. This story (originally called ‘Dining With Monsters’) is about second helpings but also just desserts. This doctor in particular is no mug (despite looking like a Toby Jug) and doesn’t buy anything Margaret Slitheen says to him across the story – rightly so given some of her obvious ploys but even when she’s obviously telling the truth. During the course of her ‘last super’ before the Doctor hands her over to her people to be executed she both plays on his sympathies with tales of what they actually do to prisoners (dissolve them in acid and feed them to the venom grubs from ‘The Web Planet’ while still conscious, the sort of fate too nasty even for certain politicians) and physically attacks him, but the Doctor sees every attack coming emotional and actual and just sits there with his best stony face on. Usually the Doctor leaves this sort of mopping-up operation up to other people (UNIT have their uses after all!) but here, for the first time in a long time, he has to look at one of the people he’s captured and look them in the eyes. Rose doesn’t get off the hook either and has to face the consequences of her actions in this story – it’s been a while now since she ran off with the Doctor and her mum and her ex have developed new lives without her, something she finds hard to take. But why should they live their lives waiting for her? Dr Who has always been at pains to point out that everyone is special and even the girl the Doctor chose to travel and fall for above all others is no more deserving of a full and proper life than anyone else. Rose left a void, but it’s a void that other people deserve to fill. This is a rare story in this first series when you side with comedy coward Mickey and narrow-minded mum Jackie over brave but selfish Rose and you get to see the universe through their eyes, trying to live their ordinary lives at a normal speed while Rose flits through it with tales of adventure but nothing solid for them to reach to. ‘Boom Town’ is, then, the quiet beating heart of the series, asking all the questions of the main characters they haven’t had to answer till now –in any era. That’s what I love about ‘new Who’ and the one thing it gets ‘right’ consistently over the ‘classic’ series: that idea of consequences, that even the Doctor in a space-time travel machine can’t escape the ripples of his actions. It feels as if the series has been set up to make this episode a pay-off for those thoughts. 

 So much so that this story, which returns to the scene of the first story filmed for new-Who (but shown 4th) feels like it was written decades later by a much subtler and thoughtful writer and all part of some grand Russell T Davies masterplan story arc, one where he would show us how nothing in the Whoniverse or our universe is ever quite as black and white as it seems on the telly and how the real moral of this show is to be kind to people when you don’t know what they’re going through, even when they’re not being kind to you; this is, after all, a rare series where the lead hero never acts out of revenge and doesn’t believe in an eye-for-an-eye, who never carries a weapon (bar a sonic screwdriver and the occasional tin dog), someone who offers mercy more times than not. It’s the perfect near-ending of the 9th Doctor’s story arc as he moves from angst-ridden wounded warrior with survivor’s guilt who hates the universe he sacrificed so many people to save in the time war to the sort of person who, mostly thanks to hanging around Rose, believes in second chances and that things can get better. Except ‘Boom Town’ was very much a last minute substitute, a deliberately low budget episode at the end of the season. Because, ah yes this is the infamous ‘difficult 11th episode’(though for some seasons such as series three, it’s the 10th): the one that’s always written in the schedules in pencil because of last-minute changes and cancellations and over-running stories, tucked away near the end of recording schedules as an afterthought. Something always seems to go wrong here (it’s same slot as ‘Fear Her’ Utopia’ and ‘Midnight', all of which had teething problems of their own). Originally this slot was meant to house a story from Stephen Fry (who not only dropped out unprofessionally late but then rudely slagged the series off in the press). Then it was a story by Russell’s friend Paul Abbott but that fell through too when ‘Shameless’ became his breakout hit (of all the writers who’ve submitted proposals for modern Who he’s the one with least idea of the series: he submitted a story proposal that undid everything Russell had carefully set up at a stroke by writing a plot that had Rose as an artificial construction bred to be the Doctor’s ‘perfect companion’. There’s a tale that Russell got the scene breakdown and rang up mock-angrily laugh-shouting ‘what the hell did you do to my creation?!’) For a while this story was what became ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ but Russell realised quickly that it would cost too much for this slot, which had to be dirt cheap with what was left over from the other episodes (which wasn’t a lot). Knuckling down to work Russell started a story that sounds a lot like what became ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, where the Doctor and Rose find themselves walking down corridors in a land so far in the future that the normal rules of science don’t apply, finding themselves revealing secrets about their guilty past as they walk – this was nixed because the technology wasn’t there to do it back then and it gave away a bit too much about these characters that other stories had already told better. Instead, with deadlines looming and time ticking, Russell wrote ‘Boom Town’ at more or less the last minute – his only script of that first year having seen how the series looked in the rushes and so was able to tweak it to the characters he saw. Most of Russell’s stories thus far had been in his head for years, even decades: this one’s turnaround from first draft to last was just weeks. 

 This particular story was inspired by two things: one is that Russell had been given the chance to act as a stand-in on Who’s first recording session (he was ‘being’ Christopher Eccleston while they set the lighting rig, although even Eccleston isn’t quite as tall as Russell) opposite Annette Badland and found himself apologising for how wasted she clearly was in a part that gave her little to do and that he would write her a bigger one next time. The other is that Wales isn’t just ‘the cheapest and most easily available place willing to make Dr Who’ anymore – it’s become a home, the place where Dr Who regenerated. So far this year we’ve only seen Cardiff standing in for London or as various alien planets with the exception of ‘The Unquiet Dead’ but even that was how the city appeared in the 19th century. Here Russell uses every trick in the book to show off his new home city at its best, repaying the favour the city took by giving Dr Who a home and being so welcoming and so proud of the series made on their doorstep, a place so wonderful even aliens fall in love with it and find themselves reformed. There’s a lot of Wales in this story – officially because it was the nearest place to film and Russell knew the area well after a year there filming, but also you suspect because he’s fallen in love with the country that had so taken to having DW made there for the first time. Among the buildings we see prominently are The Glamorgan Building, home of the city council who had been so helpful with filming requirements and Millennium Centre Square (the place where the Tardis lands) which Russell could actually see from his home writing desk. I also wonder if this story is a Russell T in-joke about the famous Pertwee quote (in a Radio Times interview no less) where he rather defensively said of the Earthbound format of the 1970s that ‘it was scarier to come across a Yeti on your loo in Tooting Bec’ than in outer space; here we start the story with a Slitheen actually on the loo in Cardiff – not Cardiff pretending to be somewhere else, but very much the actual Cardiff. Watch out too for the brilliant and heartfelt dig put in by Russell after 26 years of DW being such a London-centred series almost always made in the nation’s capital: Margaret Slitheen can hide in Cardiff because ‘London doesn’t care – the South West Coast could fall into the sea and they wouldn’t notice’ (this is the moment she realises ‘God help me, I’ve gone native!’ So native she even apparently lives in the same block as flats as Owen from Torchwood: how bad at alien hunting is he?!) A lot of people Russell had worked with that year were saying much the same to him and how pleased they were to house a series that would put them on the map that normally would be made in London automatically. Re-using an actress who’d been a proven hit and a local setting that was cheap were also big plusses for what was the lowest budgeted episode of the series (and therefore the whole of the ‘reboot’ series so far, given the extra money Who got after this). 

There’s no way even Fry, one of our celebrated intellectuals, could have come up with a script this clever: ‘Boom Town’ feels like Russell, the two-part finale finished, writing the last episode for what might be his one and only shot at writing for Dr Who (which had only been commissioned for a single series at the time) and making the most of this unexpected chance to ask the big questions that have been puzzling him all his years as a fan: what happened when the Tardis left at the end of a story? Did things go back to normal? Were the baddies changed by their experience? Was the Doctor? Would all of them have done the exact same thing if they’d known how everything turned out in the end? Being one of the more empathetic and character-driven writers for the series in any era, it’s no surprise he’s the first writer to ask out loud ‘what happens to everyone when the Dr leaves?’ It may well be writing ‘Long Game’ as a set-up for the ‘Bad Wolf’ series finale set Russell off thinking down these lines as there, too, it’s the vacuum left by the Dr’s interference that causes all the problems. That story’s a Dalek trap though, left because they know one or other Doctor will come along and try to put things right; this story returns to a tale that was deliberately written to feel very much like a traditional Dr Who story and isn’t a trap so much as an accident; Margaret Slitheen thinks she’s gotten away with her crimes and thinks she’ll never see the Dr again. It may be, too, that Russell was inspired by this story’s namesake, a 1940 Western: two men from out of town down on their luck hatch up a plan to steal drilling equipment and make their fortune by stealing from the locals, only to find the plan takes so long that they fall in love with the place and become locals themselves, desperately trying to cover up their guilty secret of why they first came into town (the story ends with the being accepted and turning their money over to the locals, before being given equipment legitimately so they can start all over again and make their own fortune). In that sense the title works as a triple pun: it not only references the film but also the earthquake that shatters the restaurant windows and Russell’s plan to put Cardiff on the tourist map and make it a ‘boom town’. 

 A lot of fans dismiss this story as the runt of the series one litter – this is, after all, the one story this year with monsters we’ve seen before in a Cardiff setting that’s become as familiar as our own back yards by episode 11 (even if meant to be somewhere else) and on a sheer spectacle level its clear how much excitement levels have dropped since we got crowd scenes of monsters in episode two when all we get is one big blast, a little bit of running and a lot of talking. But that’s precisely what I love about this story: there’s no special effects to hide behind, no big monster to be the ‘shock absorber’ that lets everyone get away with a subpar plot, no incidental character to get all the good lines. Instead it’s just a cracking script full of wit and character that goes to places no Dr Who story before or since bothered to visit. Arguably we learn more about the 9th Dr in this than his other 12 episodes put together now Russell has seen how Eccleston plays him on screen, as a tough man forever trying to break into a smile before he remembers what he’s been through. He’s deeply in love with Rose by this time and she’s brought out his compassionate side, even while Captain Jack brings out a very human streak of jealousy we’ve not seen from him before and the Slitheen brings out his callous ruthless side to boot, triggering his merciless angry side. We also see the darker flashes hinted at in ‘Dalek’ (which clearly surprised Russell when Robert Shearman came up with them but which he loved, judging by the Radio Times preview and his emails to Dr Who magazine), with the Doctor clearly stung by Margaret Slitheen’s pot-shots that the Dr’s no different from her, becoming the unelected judge and executioner of so many baddies (best put down when he talks to her about how letting some people go doesn’t automatically make her good – ‘only a killer would know that’). This is a doctor who once killed strangers at the press of a button in the time war who now has to look his enemy in the eye and you can see that it haunts him in new ways all over again, as he thinks about all the people whose eyes he didn’t see who still went through the same agonies. One of the biggest surprises in Christopher Eccleston’s brief time in the Tardis was how good this famously dark and brooding drama actor was at the comedy (he’s kind of the opposite of Jon Pertwee and Sylvester McCoy, who were hired for the laughs and ended up making their Drs more serious and darker-edged – Eccleston’s CV practically had ‘gritty kitchen sink northerner’ all over it); Russell’s clearly taken that on board and written him a comic tour de force here which he sells to perfection. The scene in the restaurant for the convicted Margaret Slitheen’s ‘last meal’ (look out for the girl dining who screams when the glass shatters by the way – that’s Billie Piper’s series double Kim Garritty in her only on-screen appearance) where Mrs Slitheen tries every trick in the book on him where he just nonchalantly stops her poisoned darts and poisoned breath without glancing up from the menu is one of the funniest Dr Who scenes of them all and a perfect example of how comedy works at its best in this series, complementing rather than subtracting from the drama and horror. This is, after all, a person so desperate to stay alive they’re resorting to desperate measures, even if they’re measures the Doctor sees coming a mile away. Only at the end does the Slitheen give up tricking him and beg for pity – and then we see a whole different side to this Doctor, one that he thought the time war had taken forever but which, mostly being around Rose, he begins to re-open up. 

It’s a neat bit of character development we’d miss if this moment wasn’t there and the 9th Doctor simply regenerated a story later (and it’s vague whether Russell T knew this would be his last story for Christopher Eccleston or not). It’s been an unspoken rule that each regeneration of the Doctor has to ‘learn’ something before they can move on to the person they’re meant to be next, something which is underplayed in ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The ways’ because of the need to set up a really big potential ending point for the series. The first Doctor’s arc slowly moves him from self-preservationist to sacrificing himself for others. The second Doctor slowly learns the need to be responsible and doing the right thing, even when knowing what his own people might do to him (a far cry from where he starts, making jokes tooling on his recorder and trying on hats). The third Doctor learns that his curiosity gets the people around him into trouble. The fourth learns that even he can’t outrun fate and gravity forever. The fifth Doctor learns the high price of being such a given person and so on (things trip up because the 6th Doctor is effectively exterminated by Michael Grade before he’s ready – although this arc would have been the most explicit of them all had it gone the way Colin Baker and Eric Saward planned – while the 7th and 8th Doctor eras ended prematurely). This Doctor’s arc is in many ways the opposite of the 5th Doctor in ‘Caves Of Androzani’ – the time war made him a bitter, angry man afraid to feel for any other living thing in case it meant them dying too. But in the next story (spoilers) Rose literally saves him from dying (not just regenerating but dying, because there’s no way the Daleks would have stopped when he turned into David Tennant) because she cares for him so much. It’s here that Russell T shows the contrast most with who the Doctor is now compared to what he was when we first met him in ‘Rose’ and warning Rose off because he worked better alone – now he’s got a team around him and he’s ‘domesticated’ for lack of a better word, looking comfortable walking round a city in modern-day Britain with a gang and hanging around dining in restaurants. He’s healed, at peace with his actions as much as he ever can be (it wasn’t that long ago, in ‘Dalek’, he was scaring Rose with his darker side) so even the thing that would normally set him off and trigger him (Margaret pointing out that he’s a killer and not that unlike her deep down) doesn’t affect him anymore. Last minute substitution for a ‘bigger’ story ‘Boom Town’ might be but the series one arc wouldn’t work as well without it. 

 The Doctor bounces between all these many different sides in this series like an alien pinball machine and in the end, rather than be his usual decisive self, he leaves it up to the Tardis what happens next and she pops out an egg, ready to live her life all over again. The (spoilers) ending is seen by some fans as a trick and has been much criticised but I really like it: Russell’s been thinking hard about his stance on capital punishment and like many an empathetic soul before him can see where people go wrong isn’t always because of their nature but through nurture and the effect of the people around them. Freed of the need to impress her evil family Margaret Slitheen has discovered a whole way of thinking she never even knew existed and is worthy of a second chance – the ‘badness’ in her might be too ingrained to make a difference, but then she’ll end up meeting the Doctor all over again and facing the same fate. Until then the script cleverly keeps you guessing till the end whether the Dr’s really going to go through with sending Margaret Slitheen back to Raxacofalipatorious to be executed or whether he’s going to go ‘soft’ and let her go free. Indeed, of all the ending in Dr Who, this is one of my favourite: the Doctor isn’t judge jury or executioner but the bringer of hope that things will be different next time – and whether they are or not is up to you. I’m amazed, in fact, that the more Buddhist end of the Dr Who spectrum, writers like Barry Letts and Christopher bailey, hadn’t got their first. Yes it would have helped if we’d known the Tardis had this capability first, but then the Tardis should always be surprising us: it’s not like other machines and the way things turn out is entirely in keeping with the earliest Dr Who stories like ‘Edge Of Destruction’ that stress how much this is a machine that can ‘think’. 

One thing I wish had been developed more is the political satire that made ‘Aliens In London’ so memorable. Margaret Slitheen gets out of trouble repeatedly by effectively being a ‘politician’, hiding in plain sight amongst other human politicians who are just as corrupt as she is. Near the start the script throws in the fact that she’s been working on a ‘Bad Wolf’ nuclear station in the heart of Wales and conned everyone into thinking that it’s a good thing that she’s been cutting safety measures and checks. There’s even another Russell T Davies dig at the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ fiasco with the story’s best gag as a reporter challenges her about the nuclear safety test inspectors all coming to sticky ends like Dr David Kelly in real life (‘He slid on an icy patch’ ‘He was decapitated!’ ‘Well, it was a very icy patch’). I love the satirical side of Russell T’s writing, the best aspect of ‘Aliens In London’, but here it’s just another passing phase this story goes through before it turns into something else entirely and we’ve never really had it again since (well, not till lockdown when he turned Boris Johnson into an Auton anyway).

 Regardless ‘Boom Town’ is still the perfect near-end to a near-perfect series, one that delivers all the high drama, charm and comedy of the best of the returning series one but in a script that digs a little deeper than any have had the space to dig before in the newer, faster series (if this had been the olden days of four parters then this would have been the last part of ‘Aliens In London’). There are, admittedly, not as many fireworks or indeed booms and bangs in ‘Boom Town’ as in other stories, the Rose-Mickey sub-plot gets boring fast, Captain Jack needn’t have bothered to turn up at all (he’s there mostly so that he can learn about the time rift and thus launch the ‘Torchwood’ series from Cardiff in another year and a bit)and one Slitheen is maybe not as impressive as three or four. That said, though, for all the bigger budget in ‘Aliens Of London’ that story doesn’t get anything as right as this one: that’s story’s a sometimes uneasy mix of horror, politics and laughs with Slitheen who spend too much of their time farting and with arch jokes that don’t always connect and occasional dodgy effects; this is a character piece where the characters are deep, the writing is exquisite and the actors know what they’re doing that bit more and can bring so much more confidence. Even if this story gets forgotten and overlooked now, subtler than probably any other story of the five-year Davies comeback run, the rest of those stories wouldn’t be as strong without this episode there as his era’s ‘conscience’. Possibly the most under-rated story of the entire run of new-Who, this one is an under-rated gem, not the fine wine and dining of other stories perhaps but a gourmet meal on a budget that hits the taste-buds all the same. 

 POSITIVES + There have been many great actors and actresses playing the parts of Dr Who monsters down the years but Annette Badland is clearly one of the best. Russell obviously thought so too, picking up on how her Slitheen in ‘Aliens Of London’ was subtler than the other performances, a baddy who was opportunistic rather than cruel. Badland’s career was mostly spent playing sweet dotty ladies before this but she’s an excellent baddy – her sudden switches from self-pity back into cruel sneers and confident charm keep you guessing what side this Slitheen is on right till the last few minutes, but she’s also believable as a scared, sad, regretful alien too. There are very few acting roles in this story but all are excellent – a shout out to William Thomas as Mr Cleaver, becoming the first actor to appear in both ‘old’ and ‘new’ series along the way (he was the undertaker in ‘Remembrance Of Daleks’ who gives Davros a literal ‘helping hand’ and also played Gwen’s dad in Torchwood; even today there are comparatively few actors who’ve spanned both centuries of this series). 

 NEGATIVES - We said in our review of ‘Aliens Of London’ that the fart jokes smacked a little too much of children’s telly and as the first script Russell wrote for the new series seemed pitched at more of a children’s than a family audience. There are notably less fart jokes here (and less opportunities for Margaret Slitheen to undress from her human bodysuit) but these seem even more out of place somehow in what’s one of the series’ more grown-up scripts. I mean, the closest to this story in the ‘old’ Dr Who canon is ‘Face Of Evil’ and you can’t imagine Xoanon crowing ‘Who am I?!? You are the evil one Dr. Not least because you’ve taught me, a computer, how to fart!’ 

 BEST QUOTE: Margaret Slitheen: ‘This is persecution. Why can't you leave me alone? What did I ever do to you?’ Doctor: ‘You tried to kill me and destroy this entire planet’. Margaret Slitheen: ‘Apart from that!’ 

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