The Unquiet Dead
(Series 2, Dr 9 with Rose, 9/4/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Mark Gatiss, director: Euros Lyn)
Rank: 108
'Well young man, you look as if you're surprised to see me, hmm? I can't think why you of all people should be surprised that a Doctor of Christmas past has turned up to see how you're getting on after your, ah, most unfortunate circumstances the last time we met. I'm sorry to hear your gas bills have all gone up now the Gelth have vanished, but a small price to pay for peace on Earth, yes indeed a small price to pay! I myself am having a rather odd Christmas. Susan's gone off playing charades with the Sensorites and I'm stuck here listening to Chatterton Chisterson whatever his name is talking to me about the Coal Hill school tie I bought him. How was I to know they'd changed the design only a century on, good gracious me such un-gratitude! As for Miss Wright she's sat reading a history textbook and pointing out all the mistakes. We shall be stopping for The Queen's Speech in a minute. Victoria's naturally. Well, cheerio my boy and good luck!'
'Hello Charlie, just a flying visit from your Doctor of Christmas present. I've just stopped off to send this message in the middle of a Christmas lunch I'm having with a Slitheen - would you tell them to keep off the brussel sprouts please Rose, they have enough digestive issues as it is - while Captain Jack opens all his Christmas presents, which seem to consist mostly of mirrors. Hope you're having a great Christmas, that one we had together was...fantastic! Oh and if you could sign a copy of your new book over to me: Dear Doctor, from your biggest fan...No you're my biggest fan'
'Geronimo! Nothing like a Doctor of Christmas future to get the festive season rolling! You know I rather like the Victorian era, I think I'll retire here one day, put my feet up. Of course I can't do that with Amy and Rory kicking around - especially with the pressie I've just bought them for Christmas. A dapol doll of me! Isn't it great? Well, it doesn't have the right number of arms. And it's wearing the wrong clothes. And I've had to add a bow tie and a fez because bow ties are cool. And thinking about it, I think it was meant to be a cyberman rather than me. Even with a nose, which cybermen shouldn't have. But anyway, wibbly wobbly pressie fezzie, it's a great present they're going to love it! Sorry gotta go...Rory's dad was having dinner with the Abozorbaloff and, well, I haven't seen him around for a while so I'd better check he's alright. Geronimo!'
I wonder sometimes what the ‘celebrities’ from our past would have thought about being ‘in’ Dr Who. I suspect the likes of Shakespeare and Churchill would have been dismissive, Agatha Christie and Mary Shelley confused, Nero Napoleon and Hitler aghast (even if old Bony would have been pleased at gaining about a foot in height), Marco Polo full of questions. I reckon Charles Dickens would have been one of the show’s biggest fans though: his writing is very much a direct descendent, his books play with past and present and future in a way that’s very ahead of their time (indeed some call ‘A Christmas Carol’ the first time travel book) and while his books don’t contain any of the scifi elements at Dr Who’s core his work is full of protagonists driven by the same sense of outrage and injustice as The Doctor. Charlie boy’s book readings, as shown during this story, suggest that he’d have been a big supporter of visual mediums like television too, especially TV’s levelling and the way it plays the same regardless of who you are in the class system, that it offers a whole new viewpoint to an audience who might otherwise never see it. The Dickens writing style very much fits the Dr Who mould where the good guys are rewarded and the bad guys punished, with a similar sense of being irked by humanity while loving individual Humans (they’re the best of species, the worst of species). So while it seems vaguely ‘wrong’ putting other celebs from the bank notes into a Dr Who story (especially most of the Royals, who would never understand it all) this one makes perfect sense. It’s also about as safe a ‘risk’ as it can be – and it is a risk, given that Dr Who had stopped having regular historicals as far back as 1966 and went for long period of the 1970s and 1980s without it (though they were coming back into fashion again: two of the four final stories in 1989 are set in the past, WWII and a Victorian stately home).
I reckon he’d have been
dead impressed at just how respectfully the first historical of the modern
series treats him too and especially the man playing him. Simon Callow was the
second really huge name to say yes to new-Who (after Zoe Wannamaker, long
before they or their agents knew if it was going to be a success or not) and took
the job not because he had any love for the series (reputedly he’s said to have
hated scifi and not bothered watching Who since the very first story) but
because he was so impressed with how Mark Gatiss had captured his hero, Charles
Dickens. Theirs had been a long and fruitful partnership: Callow fell in love
with Dickens as a boy, was thrilled to be hired by none other than ex-Who
producer Barry Letts to play the part of Micawber in a 1986 BBC adaptation of
‘David Copperfield’ (written by none other than Terrance Dicks!) and was then
hired for a BBC2 series in 1996 ‘An Audience With Charles Dickens’, before
taking the books on lengthy reading tours across the next thirty years,
re-creating the sort of celebrity ‘performances’ Dickens gave in the episode.
Callow was used to being asked to play Dickens in all sorts of things by 2005
and generally turned them down, finding that they only ever got to the
‘surface’ level of Dickens, as either a slightly pompous showman or a moral
crusader. He loved Gatiss’ script because he captured all dimensions and
contradictions of Dickens: the moral crusader out for justice and kindness who
abandoned his wife for a younger model, the brash egotistical performer who
adored praise but also had self-doubt, the world-weary sceptic who thinks he’s
seen everything the world can throw at him who’s still a little boy at heart
who wants to believe in magic. We see his whole range in a short space of time
as Dickens is flattered, angered, saddened, shocked and thrilled by everything
going on around him, as well as being brave and clever enough to save the day
when even The Doctor can’t (it’s a rare lapse for him not to see that gas
monsters might be stopped by gas). Callow makes the most of him too, giving
Dickens the veneer of being a subversive revolutionary nerd behind the stiff
Victorian gentlemen persona (as befits someone in the public eye with that
complicated a love life in 1869).It seems wrong to call a living breathing
person a ‘character’ but if he counts as one then he’s Gatiss’ greatest
character, the most rounded of all his creations.
So is the script, still arguably
Gatiss’ best despite writing another dozen for the show since. The
actor-comedian-writer was an obvious choice to bring back for the comeback
series, having been involved in the show in the ‘wilderness years’ when most
celebs wanted nothing to do with it, writing novels (including one, ‘Last Of
The Gadorene’, that shares more than a few similarities with this one, as
another alien race comes to Earth as refugees after destroying their world) and
Big Finish audios and contributing ideas for a (randomly timed) 1999 BBC Dr Who
theme night, as well as suggesting a Dr Who reboot himself a couple of years
before Russell T Davies. Weirdly their paths had never crossed before the first
meetings for the show, where Russell organised semi-regular meetings at an
Indian restaurant across 2004 (the ‘Chula’ club, with Steven Moffat and Paul
Cornell) but from his first pitch to the BBC about the comeback Russell had
been keen to have a story set in Victorian London with Charles Dickens and
Gatiss had seemed an obvious person to write it. Gatiss was thrilled: he adored
all things Victorian but especially Dickens and it had been a family tradition
to re-read ‘A Christmas Carol’ once a year during the holidays. He also had a
feel for horror, a genre that Russell had never written for, which helped give
the 2005 season variety too. So it was that Gatiss became only the second
person in the 21st century to put words into The Doctor’s mouth on
TV.
Naturally, this being a
story about Dickens, there are lots of ghosts but Gatiss throws in other things
that no other series except one about time travel would be able to do, for this
is a story where the ghosts turn out to be aliens in disguise and make the dead
turn out of their graves like zombies. It’s the perfect setting: the reason you
don’t see any Zombies in Victorian fiction is that nobody had thought up the
idea yet (it’s generally credited to the 1934 Bela Lugosi film ‘White Zombie’
that came up with the name) and yet it fits this very Dickensian view of
Victorian Cardiff, where people rub shoulders without ever really looking at
each other and might as well be dead. All Dickens novels are very much about
class and how unfair it is that good men (and women) should die young and often
in poverty when greedy rich people waste money they will never need. His view
of the Victorian era is one where different sides simply don’t mix and where
people suffering are sent away to places to never be looked at again, whether
it be the workhouse or the poorhouse or the mental asylum. It is, you could
say, a ‘rift’ that runs through all his works, that good people try to close
and bad people try to exploit, mirrored in this story by a physical ‘rift’ that
opens up in Cardiff and allows aliens to break through. But Dr Who is a series
where you can’t shove things under the rug forever and it makes perfect sense
that the dead, tidied away into coffins, come back to life (notably all the
corpses we see are poor people). Death is rarely the end in Dickens books (any
of which have plots based on wills and legacies and revenge from generations
past) and the characters in this story are all haunted by ghosts long before
they start rising up out of their graves (including Dickens, haunted by the
mistakes of his first marriage). Even The Doctor is haunted by the time war,
mentioned in the first two series but given a ‘proper’ name here when the
baddies mention it.
The Gelth are one of
Gatiss’ most interesting creations too, even if he could have got more out of them, shimmery gaseous beings (but in a
different way to the Slitheen thank goodness!) who have come to Earth in search
of a body and look like ghosts or angels, translucent and sweet. The fact that
the Gelth are beings of pure energy who can control the local gas supply and
the methane given out by decomposing bodies (more than plausible for alien
origins but never tried in Dr Who before) gives them a whole new ‘feel’ to any
other monster. The Doctor tries to save their race from extinction by offering
up the dead in Cardiff, much to Rose’s horror, but it’s all a ruse and soon the
Gelth are cooking with gas, glowing red and talking about taking over the
Earth. It’s a simple plot, right on the balance of old and new: it’s ‘The Claws Of Axos’ all over again for a future
generation but instead of an elaborate
plan that humanity accepts and only The Doctor sees through it’s The Doctor
who’s been fooled by a kind word, leading into a far more emotional story in
keeping with the biggest change Russell wanted to make between ‘then’ and ‘now’
(this is a show about characters and their feelings and emotions rather than
pure plots, something the old series didn’t do that often). Now there is a school of thought that
Gatiss is, well, playing with fire by having a tale of refugees pretending to
be nice but secretly being bad. Basically that they’re coming over here,
stealing our jobs taking over our world and even our bodies and
after we were so nice to them too! Who luminary Lawrence Miles caused quite a
stir with a damning review of this story that set the internet forums ablaze
the week of transmission and on the face of it the Gelth do seem to work
against the usual Who policies of being kind and understanding to outsiders.
However I always saw the story the opposite way on first transmission: surely
this is a ‘lefty’ story not a ‘righty’ one. Quite apart from the fact that you
have the leftest writer that ever lived front and centre surely the Gelth are
the right exploiting the poor by exploiting the dead for political gain and
spouting a lot of hot air? The Gelth are the Rupert Murdochs of the modern
world and the millionaires of theirs, people taking advantage of people’s
kindness with false promises. The Doctor isn’t ‘wrong’ to trust them – the
Gelth would have lived if they’d asked for help as they claimed rather than
conquering. Charles Dickens isn’t ‘wrong’ to want to help the poor, even if a
few of them take advantage to get rich and be as bad as their overseers. You
can be betrayed by being kind, mistaken in who can offer help to, but you are
never ‘wrong’.
Talking of irony, was
this entire story written around a bad pun? This story is set in 1869, right at
the crossover point between gaslight and electric light (the ‘turning point’
when a majority had electricity installed at home generally reckoned to be when
The Savoy Theatre, where the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were performed,
turned electric around 1881 and the masses could see it firsthand instead of
hearing about it). The first half of ‘The Unquiet Dead’ has lots of characters
talking about society being set in stone and things never changing, but of
course to those of us watching in 2005 (and after) we know that isn’t true. We
know that the poor won’t always be quite as trodden down or starving as this,
that women won’t always be as badly treated as Gwyneth (and even Dickens isn’t
immune to guilt over his treatment of his wife), we know that things will be
better: even Gwyneth sees it when she ‘reads’ Rose’s mind (though it’s weird
that someone living in a busy city like Cardiff should consider 21st
century traffic noisier than endless horse and carts). Yet the Gelth are the
‘old guard’. They destroyed their home world and want to take over another
without learning from their experience or changing, simply taking over the
Earth the same way again. They’re the gas, hanging onto principles of hot air
in a world that’s quickly changing over to electricity (and expensive as it has
always been, it’s cheaper and thus moe of a leveller than gas). The Gelth are
the old guard, literally ‘gas-lighting’ people by making out they are the
‘victims’.
For the most part ‘The
Unquiet Dead’ is a simple story – a plot that like so much of the Russell T
Davies era spends the first half making you care about the people you meet,
then a second half agonising as you watch them slowly get bumped off. Basically
the baddy gives empty promises, get found out and are blown up by the maid
(just why do the Gelth reveal their plan at the point they do? They’re winning
and must sense that The Doctor can still undo their handy-work if they gloat
too much. It’s almost as if they know there’s only a few minutes left in the
story!) However it’s the parts in between that live long in the memory, the
sort of scenes you didn’t tend to get in ‘classic’ Who of characters discussing
their feelings. The Doctor-Rose relationship is kind of stormy for most of this
episode (she doesn’t seem to have forgiven him for spending time with a talking
tree yet!) and there are some nicely fiery scenes about their different
viewpoints. Rose thinks that the dead should be treated with reverence, that
they have no say over aliens taking over their body, even though to her all the
people in this story are bodies long before she’s born – the Doctor sees the
bigger picture, he’s timeless and rootless in a way Rose isn’t. The bodies had
a full life, why shouldn’t they be recycled? It’s an interesting debate that
raises a lot of interesting questions that’s never fully answered: Rose is
‘right’ in the sense that the Gelth don’t mean what they say, but if they were
telling the truth The Doctor’s claim has a point. This
is also of course the era of ‘body snatchers’, Hare and Burke digging up graves
to sell bodies for science, which is either good or bad, depending how you look
at it (assisted by David Tennant as the village idiot over on Big Finish in the
6th Doctor story ‘Medicinal Purposes’!) Certainly the body snatching is treated
a lot more carefully/sensitively than it
will be in ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ . It’s also the first time you see Christopher
Eccleston’s Doctor properly scared and it’s his re-action that in turn
terrifies Rose in a way we haven’t seen before. It’s a new dynamic: Rose has
been in danger before but she seems to take this own personally because The
Doctor went against her wishes and he in turn seems to realise for the first
time that he has a duty to care to her and has put her in danger. It seems odd
to longterm viewers that Rose hasn’t thought through the fact that, as a time
traveller, she might die before she was even born but then she is having a very
trying day!
This all leads up to an
ending that’s already playing around with formulas by having the Tardis pair
saved not by their own action but by inspiring the guest cast to come good. Rose’s
opening speech about everyone being dead and the past only happening once
(‘except for you, Doctor’) is a particularly powerful way of selling
historicals to an audience that might never have thought of these things before
too; it’s something David Whittaker especially was getting at across Who’s
first year in the early days, about time being a number of fixed but related points,
but Gatiss writes it well (‘Those days are dead and gone – to everyone but you,
Doctor’). The scene that really ought to be filler, of Gwynneth and Rose
swapping stories about boys, is also key to a story that’s trying hard to make
the public think about the concept of going back in time: these two teenagers are
very similar in character it’s only in dress and language and how much Rose is
prepared to say without the thought of someone being ‘shocked’ that makes them
different. Once again, it’s a reminder that times change and the people of 1869
won’t be stuck forever, that a new world of electric light and (relative)
social freedoms is coming, eventually, if everyone just hangs on a bit longer.
There are some lovely scenes with Dickens too, a world-weary old man who’s
suddenly given new life (and an ending just like ‘A Christmas Carol’): unlike
Shakespeare and Agatha Christie or even H G Wells (in ‘The Shakespeare Code’ ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’ and ‘Timelash’) this isn’t someone young
before their biggest achievements being shaped by what happens to them with the
Doctor, it’s someone at the end of their life who thought they knew it all
having their eyes opened.
There’s even the first time we get a Who standby template, a person famous in our time asking The Doctor if their work will last, though for Gatiss it’s a single line rather than an entire story (as ‘Vincent and The Doctor’ is), not realising that their work is so timeless they’re even being played on television 136 years later. At first Dickens is sad and thinks he’s wasted his life but by the end of the story he’s thrilled: things can change and maybe he wasn’t as ‘wrong’ as he thought. Like I say, Dickens would totally have been a Dr Who fan (although maybe the Gelth accelerated his demise? He was dying of syphilis without knowing it – making the decomposing bodies the Gelth use all the more poignant - and only lied a few months more, without the chance to write down his alien ending to ‘The Mystery Of Edwin Drood’ apparently!
‘The Unquiet Dead’ went
down well with fans who admired it’s mixture of old (monsters with a decent
backstory, careful treatment of history with celebrities, an old fashioned tale
of betrayal) with the new (the extra emotions, the CGI, the emphasis on
character over plot). It’s worth pausing here to see how much has changed since
the olden days, in a series that’s still oh so ‘new’, to see how different things
are to the last time Dr Who did this sort of thing. Amazingly this is only six
stories on from ‘Ghostlight’ when we
were last back in Victorian Britain) and yet the sixteen year gap and the
changes in how TV is made makes it seems like an entirely different show. The
pacing, particularly, is very different: ‘The Unquiet Dead’ rushes from scene
to scene, with people telling The Doctor things rather than him working them
out and every step of the way is laid out. It’s a much more enjoyable,
immediate watch than ‘Ghostlight’, far more viewer-friendly, but nowhere near
as clever or deep. The Gelth, especially, have a much simpler plan than Light
ever did and are here purely to invade, not to study. That’s not necessarily a
bad thing as this story was helping re-introduce a whole genre to the series
and an audience who might not have copes with this sort of thing before, but by
Dr Who standards this story is as simple as it gets and at times even at this
hectic speed the plot struggles to keep things moving without falling apart. It
really is a coincidence, for instance, that The Doctor just happens to choose
this night to watch Dickens when the audience get attacked by gas monsters (and
why have they left Mr Sneed the undertaker?) and that he just happens to take
Dickens’ cab (the writer must have legged it to the side-door).
Gwyneth too is just a sketch,
a shy peasant girl helping out her posh-ish boss when she hears voices and
though she’s popular within fandom (with Eve Myles giving a far better
performance than she’ll give as Gwen Cooper in Torchwood) her loss at the end
would be far more powerful if we knew more about her, the people who would miss
her or against that the fact that she has no one and feels she can sacrifice
her life (she doesn’t even leave a note confessing all to the butcher’s boy,
which is why you think the plot is going after Rose’s words with her). Mr
Sneed, too, is such a caricature even Dickens would have hesitated to have
written him: he’s a chancer who sees an alien invasion as an opportunity to
make money and doesn’t act ‘normally’ once or plead with The Doctor to help (although
it’s thankfully a sign of the different times that at least they don’t make him
another Fagin Jewish stereotype as per ‘The
Creature From The Pit’ or indeed Christopher Eccleston on the other wised of
the tracks in CBBC series ‘Dodger’).Comedian Alan David tries hard but there’s
no meat to this part and, much like the Gelth, nothing to hang on to (even
David Tennant wouldn’t have been able to make anything out of this and Gatiss,
his good friend, actually suggested him for the part). Perhaps a bigger problem
is that the production team are still trying to get the balance between
children’s TV and high drama right; there are certain ‘comedy’ scenes that fall
flat, when the show becomes more Chuckle Brothers with coffins than the
high-thinking thought-provoking drama it tries hard to be elsewhere. The Gelth
too are hardly subtle as baddies, which I guess makes sense in a story about
Dickens (who loved caricaturing the evil in Victorian London in broad brush
strokes) but when contrasted against such strong complex ‘goodie’ characters
leaves the story feeling a tad uneven. The one part that doesn’t quite work
when transferring from script to screen too is the way the disembodied corpses
talk with the ‘voice’ of the Gelth mouthing like some big karaoke machine – to
those from the generation after this, brought up on Youtube video mash-ups, its
too silly to take seriously; even at the time what we saw and what we heard
never quite matched up well enough for this to work. Some of the dialogue too
is a bit dodgy: the best of it matches Dickens for unlikely wordplay and
combining words that have never been put together before (‘Oi you, follow that
hearse!’ and Charles’ cute take on ‘what the Dickens’ which is now ‘Shakespeare’
– although the phrase doesn’t come from the author, as Dickens was actually a ‘demon’
in Medieval English) but some of it, especially a lot of what the Gelth says,
falls into cliché.
Still, those are minor
complaints – far from being a ‘Bleak House’ this story surpassed even my ‘Great
Expectations’ with some neat ‘Oliver Twists’ along the way. This is the first
time the new series has been able to do a historical on a modern budget and
while past historicals often looked more lavish than the futuristic stories
(the benefit of having a costume and props department who made other costume
dramas but didn’t make many other scifi programmes) the fact this one manages
to look better than even ‘Rose’ or ‘The Unquiet Dead’ is miraculous to fans
used to seeing sets held together with its of string. The Cardiff setting is
deliberate, with this story a love song to the city that’s become Dr Who’s
adopted home and two stories after it was filling in as London – it’s set in
the Llandaff region, as a nod of the head to Terry Nation who was born and
starting making up stories in a bomb shelter. Indeed the rift, the blue light
that allows aliens to invade a ‘fragile’ part of the time-space continuum (and
why Torchwood establishes a base there), might well be a ‘homage’ of sorts to the
writer who said in ‘The Dalek Pocket Book’ that he was visited by aliens in his
garden there who passed him on knowledge about Skaro in a ‘blue light’. As it
happened, though, they fond after the script came in that there weren’t many
suitable buildings so a lot of what you see was actually filmed in Swansea,
Russell’s home town (little did he know as a boy walking round these streets
that one day he would see his boyhood hero talking to Charles Dickens on a
street corner, in a script he oversaw!)
Certainly ‘Unquiet Dead’
won over even the few viewers who hadn’t been won over by the first two stories
and Russell has said since in interviews that the response to this story was the
point at which he truly believed the comeback series was a success. Especially
when the first complaints for the new series came in saying it was ‘too scary’,
just like the olden days! And even more when this story was a ratings winner
despite going out straight after another programme about a walking corpse and a
bag of hot air he thought would kill the viewing figures (another Royal Wedding,
if you hadn’t guessed). As brilliantly as this story re-creates the past really
it’s crucial to the show’s future and sets the tone for so much of it to come,
even more than Russell’s stories, with a central sympathetic but flawed
character and lots of big emotions. With its Christmas Eve setting, a big
colourful romp with a one-off villain and a celebrity playing a another
celebrity associated with yuletide that everyone
knows and all the snow you could imagine it also sets the template for all the
festive specials to come (even though it was on around Easter-time). If it ‘counts’
as a Christmas story then it’s the best by a snowman’s carrot nose, with big
themes of grief and betrayal, themes of forgiveness and celebration and the
chance to start again. As a standalone story it’s pretty decent, a mix of the
Quatermass and hammer horror that Dr Who always used to have in its DNA in a
new setting and with a new means. As the third part of the new comeback series
though it’s even better, showing that history is every bit as strange and
mysterious and unknowable as the future and giving us tried and true Dr Who
principles of taking each generation on its own terms by having The Doctor as
appalled at Rose’s response to body-snatching as she is at the sexism and
poverty she sees. Most of all its fab Dr Who and a great way to help re-launch historicals
in the series (it’s the first time we see the Tardis go back through the time
vortex, in blue rather than red for the future!), just as brilliant as the
first two stories but in an entirely different way, a third episode in a row
that uses every trick in the toybox to deliver a story that’s well written,
well acted and which looks amazing while showcasing why Dr Who is more than
just your average scifi series and has so many more strings to its bow. The
present and the future have been well catered for and now the past has too. Is
there anything this new golden era of the show can’t do?
POSITIVES + It looks gorgeous like no other Dr Who story before
or since. The BBC always excel at historicals but future ones sometimes cut
corners, safe in the knowledge that the viewing figures are secure enough to
number crunch. This one goes all out and the Cardiff/Swansea of 2005 looks so
like the Cardiff of 1869 from illustrations of the period that you feel like
you’re stepping directly into one of Dickens’ novels, far more so than any
actual Dickens drama adaptation I’ve seen. It’s not chocolate-boxy either,
which would be the ‘safe’ but wrong move: this is a world of great and ghastly
rubbing shoulders alongside each other, of rich and poor, of great comfort and
great insecurity, of brilliant daring new inventions that still can’t solve
humanity’s age old problems of inequality and the script and setting really
gets that across, just as Dickens’ books always did. The biggest difference
with other historicals though is that where you might get a handful of talking
roles in the correct period dress, here you get hundreds of extras milling
around. The street scenes are bold enough but then we go inside a theatre
that’s packed to the rafters with people - the sort of scene that would have
been cut for budget reasons in any other year. This one screams ‘look at how
bold this is!’ and seems tailor-made for the ‘forthcoming season’ preview trail
that needed to prove so much that the Dr Who revival had all the ambition of
the old days but the money to match it at last. Yet at the same time it’s money
werll spent, to enhance the script rather than waste or overpower it the way
some later Who stories do. It’s hard not to applaud.
NEGATIVES - The scenes
of Sneed, the undertaker with the wandering hands and the Victorian equivalent
of someone on a sex offender register today, have however dated far worse than
anything in Dickens’ own books (and as ‘odd’ to us in 2023 as anything in 1869).
No way would the likes of Amy or River Song allowed that to pass with only a
snide remark or a lazer pistol up the backside, yet The Doctor’s reaction is to
suppress a laugh.These scenes, which should be a horrible experience for Rose,
are just treated as another joke alongside the others and seen as ‘just another
one of those things a pretty young blonde girl faces across space and time’.
The #metoo movement now makes these scenes seem as out of date today as
Europeans playing Chinese roles in the 1970s or Tegan being told off for being
emotional in the 1980s and are the one really false chord this story – or indeed
this season – really strikes.
Previous ‘The End Of The World’ next ‘Aliens
Of London/World War Three’
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