The Unquiet Dead: Ranking - 108

 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 DW. 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 DW’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 and all the many works of his since 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. Which makes him the perfect choice for a new series that’s also trying to balance being all things to all fans in its comeback year, doing new things that aren’t so far removed from the old that they scare loyal followers away. I reckon he’d have been dead impressed at just how respectfully the first historical of the modern series treats him too: Simon Callow was the second really huge name to say yes to new-Who (long before they or their agents knew if it was going to be a success or not) and a Dickens expert to boot, so Mark Gatiss’ script has to make doubly sure of being historically accurate to win him over. Callow is excellent too, giving Dickens the veneer of being a subversive nerd behind the stiff Victorian gentlemen persona (as befits someone in the public eye with that complicated a love life in 1869). What you take away from this story most compared to the old days is how incredibly plausible it all is, the story more like the historicals of the black and white era where we explore ‘their’ world, rather than the 1970s and 1980s when our world interrupts theirs: Victorians in 1869 were still wary of the new-fangled invention of gaslight and treated it like it came from outer space. And so it does, accidentally sort-of, with the Gelth DW’s first gaseous monster, with hints that it inspired Dickens’ beloved ghost tales along the way. While we don’t get to explore them in as much detail as some monster races, the very 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 DW before) gives them a whole new ‘feel’ to any other monster. As a story in its own right too ‘The Unquiet Dead’ is a solid success, with 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 (and in that sense this story is more like the DW colour historicals than the black and white ones, as if a cross between the two approaches). It’s the first time you see Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor properly scared and its his re-action that in turn terrifies Rose, leading 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 (Eve Myles sacrificing herself as servant Gwynth, a character who seems way more ‘real’ than the similarly named Gwen in Torchwood did after four series, though you can see why she got the role after her stellar performance here).’Dead’ has just the right balance of action sequences and character touches and a whacking big scene with lots of extras being attacked by CGI ghosts in the book reading sequence. As the third part of the new comeback series though its even better, being just as brilliant as the first two stories but in an entirely different way and following the original series’ alternating trips in the present, future and past with a solid story featuring new monsters in familiar surroundings. It also offers extra development for Rose, who learns every bit as much about the people in this world as the Doctor does but in a more kindly, sympathetic way (her best character feature is that Rose talks to the servants and treats them as people, not the lords and ladies) and gives Eccleston a good balance of angst and comedy to get his teeth into. The result is easily the best of the many (many) returns to Victorian London we’ve had since and also arguably the best Mark Gatiss’ script (having the distinction of being the first writer to give the new show a voice outside Russell), even if fans seem to knock it now – I don’t know why (maybe the ‘controversy’ that the Gelth are immigrants that come over here and steal our corpses through the Doctor’s misguided generosity is a DW constant – there’s an equal number where they’re treated with suspicion but turn out to be nice, whilst the corpse-stealing is a lot more sensitively handled than in ‘Dark Water’. And I mean a lot more sensitively: they don’t cause the corpses eternal suffering for a start. Rose ticks the Doctor off for being OK with the Gelth possessing dead bodies at one point). This is also one of the very best DW Christmas stories – even though it was shown in April (nobody had any idea if the new DW would be successful and Christmas episodes were a never a thing in the past so no one’s even given a thought to keeping this one back for the big festive timeslot but it seems obvious now – there’s snow, Charles Dickens reading ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ghosts, while its all set on Xmas Eve). 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, their plans too full of hot air even for creatures who run off gas. 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. 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 (and hints at what might have happened in the unfinished ‘Mystery Of Edwin Drood’ had Dickens lived to finish it, inspired by all he sees here) – 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. Is there anything this new era of the show can’t do? (Well, yes, farting monsters in downing street as we’ll find out the following week but even that one’s better than it sounds).

+ It looks gorgeous like no other DW 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 of 2005 looks so like the Cardiff of 1869 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 new inventions that 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 but here is tailor-made for the ‘forthcoming season’ preview trail that needed to prove so much that the DW revival had all the ambition of the old days but the money to match it at last. It’s hard not to applaud.

- 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. 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 strikes.