Wednesday, 6 September 2023

The Doctor's Wife: Ranking - 74

 

 The Doctor's Wife

(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 14/5/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Neil Gaiman, director: Richard Clark)

Rank: 74

   'Yes Rory, the pretty one. Mostly though your strays all come in threes. Let's see, there's been shouty, pouty and louty (Tegan Nyssa and Turlough I think you called them). Cutey shooty and Duty (Benton Yates and the Brigadier). Wheezy Teasy and Touchy-Feely (Osgood, Clara and Captain Jack).Not to mention Pure, Demure and Whore (Leela, Romana and Adric)'  



 


You may have noticed a lot of 1st Doctor stories are in my top 100 dear reader. There are many reasons for that: William Hartnell’s mesmerising but nuanced performances, the likeable Tardis teams who have space to do things that don’t directly refer to the plot and thus seem more like ‘real’ people than plot conventions, the rich dialogue, the way the monsters look so good in monochrome, the idea that the series is about the nuances of exploring worlds and learning from other cultures and finding a meeting point in the middle rather than running away from shooty shouty monsters, than the sheer enthusiasm for a series that’s not got stuck in a rut yet and can literally go anywhere and anywhen in time and space, before different production teams get different ideas about what works and what doesn’t and prune the concepts back. One of the biggest reasons I love it, though, is the Tardis: yes its appeared in all stories in the 60 years, give or take the seasons when the 3rd Dr was stranded on Earth, but the Tardis is really special in the first three years. It’s much more than just transport as it so often becomes later: it’s not a car, it’s a home, a temporary safe haven against the evils of the universe, wrapped up in an enigma surrounded by a riddle and completely unlike anything else any other series has to offer. And best of all its alive: we’re teased with the idea that the Tardis can think for itself as early as third story ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ and the Doctor’s relationship with it outlasts every other one he ever has by a number of decades. A few authors tried to write stories round the Tardis again in later years (‘The Enemy Within’, a cancelled story by Christopher Priest that became ‘Earthshock’) while others were pruned back from what they were originally supposed to be (‘The Invasion Of Time’), partly because there was no way on the old budget the 20th century, they could do justice to a free-thinking invisible being with impossible powers. 


 In the 21st century, though, it’s a different story. I thought we were bound to get a story about the Tardis in the comeback, if only to explain to a whole new generation exactly what it was (Russell T seemed to followed the formula of the first season pretty accurately otherwise: a getting to know you story, a warning from the future story, a trip to the past and a Dalek adventure). Especially because a good 80% of the people working on modern Who were exactly the sort of fans who’d want to see something like that happen. But no: the Tardis just travels from A to B, or sometimes Q to F, and there’s no attempt to show us things we hadn’t seen before bar a new control room, not even a scene inside a swimming pool. Until now, when - even though they could make the Tardis seem impossible after all this time - they go the other way and make it ‘Human’ in a way it never had been before. Which is why I love ‘The Doctor’s Wife’: it’s a story so unexpected, so out of the blue with what’s come before, that so stretches the elastic even of this format that it feels like a Hartnell story anyway. Only this story does what the Hartnell era could only have dreamed of: it really does turn The Tardis into an actual character and had the Dr fall in love with her. You could say this is a story that ‘thinks outside the box’, which is quite fitting given that it’s all about the personality of The Tardis leaving the outer shell and entering into a humanoid, while something evil enters the Tardis interior (one of the things the Doctor worried was happening in ‘The Edge Of Destruction’). The story even starts in a junkyard, just like ‘An Unearthly Child’ (only this one’s in space not Totter’s Lane, London). It’s basically the age-old tale of a boy so besotted he talks to his favourite vehicle, only with the very Dr Who twist that the said vehicle can talk back! How many times have we fans said to ourselves ‘if only the Tardis could speak eh, what a story those 44444444 walls would tell?’ Well, now she can. 


It’s the sort of loving imaginative story that could only really be made by a true Tardis-blue fan, which is why it’s so unexpected. Because we didn’t know it’s author Neil Gaiman was: yes he’s talked about his love for the series since this story’s been on the air but I don’t ever remember it being mentioned before. His books don’t scream Dr Who or even science-fiction either (instead they find a niche market that are halfway between fantasy and thriller) and as far as I know the first time he ever mentioned Dr Who as an influence was in the publicity for this story, but he did know his stuff and indeed wrote a very good biography of one-time Who script editor Douglas Adams that I’d happily had on my shelf for decades before his first fiction book. Gaiman clearly understands this series much more so than his own books if I’m honest - there’s an internal logic and lightness of touch here that’s missing from ‘The Sandman’ and ‘Good Omens’. This is, too, a very Dr Whoy story as opposed to one that simply uses Dr Who concepts: this story understands what makes this series special not just in the main plot but all the little details: the ‘hypercubes’ that timelords use to talk to each other last seen in ‘The War Games’ the story that ‘invented’ them, all chattering away in space and luring the Doctor to this mysterious asteroid. The characters who resemble the jumbled up approach of ‘The Brain Of Morbius’, of the greatest brains of their age stuck in the most randomly assembled bodies (one of which has two left feet!) They’re Whuzzles basically, cobbled together from species that shouldn’t fit. The fact that Idris ‘stole’ the Doctor and ran away with him to see the stars after all these years of assuming it was the other way round! The fact that Idris took the Doctor where ‘he needed to go’ rather than where he wanted finally answers so many questions about her unreliability and stories like ‘The Space Museum’ and ‘Warrior’s Gate’ that deal in the idea of fate and pre-destiny. And of course that title, which was notorious in fan circles for a while: back in 1984 producer John Nathan-Turner was becoming increasingly paranoid that someone backstage was stealing all his production secrets and selling them to the fanzines, who would be outraged and annoyed and upset before a story even went into production (and JNT had good reason to fear for his job - we’re eighteen months away from the eighteen month hiatus here). As a ruse he stuck a fake note about last story ‘Caves Of Androzani’ up on his notice-board with the most lurid, controversial title he could think of, ‘The Doctor’s Wife’. And it worked too: lots of fanzines printed the name as fact, who were promptly kept out of his office from then on! Who in 1984 though would have guessed that, twenty-seven years later it would become a real story? 


 I certainly wasn’t expecting a story this original from Neil Gaiman, with such imagination that was utterly unlike any story that we’d had on TV, not least because he’s a writer who – how to put this politely? – has lots of very good ideas in his books, some of which he even came up with himself. This space age story about recycling seemed like just an excuse to cobble lots of other stories together. And lo and behold there is indeed a Dr Who story very similar to this one – a deeply obscure one so rare and hard to find even I hadn’t come across a copy until this show had been on the air, a comic strip named ‘Nenevah’ from 1989 that was part of the ‘Incredible Hulk Presents’ series sold in America (barring imports). In this the 7th Doctor (travelling alone) is lured to a junkyard by mysterious forces by something called ‘The Watcher Of Ninevah’ who ends up letting the Doctor go because he’s only ‘middle-aged’ and he wants a Doctor nearing the end of his regenerations (spookily, given that with the War Doctor and the 10th Doctor’s hand, this is the 13th and final regeneration right here until ‘Time Of The Doctor’ does something complicated to get him out of trouble with continuity). 


There are also five earlier instances of the Tardis becoming a person and usually female: the novels ‘Alien Bodies’ (1997) where she’s called Marie, ‘The Shadows Of Avalon’ (2000) where she’s called Compassion, ‘The Ancestor Cell’ (2000) where she doesn’t get a name, ‘The Lying Old Witch In The Wardrobe’ (2003)- a 4th Doctor story from the ‘Short Trips: Companions’ volume which explained how Romana was forced to regenerate - plus ‘Omega’ (2003), a Big Finish audio where she’s named Glinda like the Good Witch in Wizard of Oz, while the plot of ‘Unregenerate’ (another Big Finish from 2005) is about the Tardis being too big for any one being to control so it’s spread out across an entire population. I’m not saying that Gaiman just stole his ideas I hasten to add; at worst he assimilated lots of different ideas subconsciously the way all Dr Who fans turned writers have, at best he wrote this story without having heard of any of them (because they really are very obscure – even the Big Finishes aren’t the ones they push in sales every five minutes like some of their other early stories). Let’s face it a lot of the comeback series, particularly early on, is writers rushing to do things on TV that had only ever been done in books or audios during the ‘wilderness’ years when the show was off the air so if any pilfering had gone on its no worse than ‘Father’s Day’ or ‘Rise Of The Cybermen’. If anything I’m still amazed at how inventive this story is, with all the best moments ones that genuinely haven’t been on any Who story before. But this story has slipped slightly from the top fifty story it would surely have been when I first saw it is that this isn’t quite as original as it seemed when this story went out and felt like the single biggest twist to the formula since Rose became ‘Bad Wolf’. 


 Like ‘Nenevah’ this isn’t the first Tardis to arrive on this particular asteroid – other timelords before The Doctor were lured here to their deaths and the local inhabitants have been put together, Frankenstein style, out of timelord body parts. The Tardises have been left for scrap, but the matrix escapes through complicated timey-wimey plot shenanigans and ends up in the body of a local named Idris, whose name is a suspiciously close cousin of Tardis as it is (this isn’t really a plot that makes sense, another reason it feels like a Hartnell). Idris is a great character: she’s far more like The Doctor than other supposed ‘soulmates’ like Rose, River Song or The Master, curious and brave and rebellious and kind, just with the eccentricity and surprisingly even the flirting rates turned up much higher, part sultry sexy woman, part dog living off instinct. Their bickering is great fun and far more convincing than when the Doctor does it with River Song, making them seem like a married couple who’ve been together centuries, which in a way they have: after all theirs is a partnership that’s outlasted any we’ve seen the Doctor have with anyone else. Amy’s comment when she finds out that the Tardis has now become a woman says it all: ‘Did you wish very very hard?’ This is all the Doctor’s dreams at once, being able to talk to his oldest friend and his sheer delight is wonderful to behold. I particularly love the way that Idris is portrayed as being super clever just inexperienced, still getting to grips with language and saying the opposite words by accident as well as getting her tenses muddled up (well, she is a time machine after all, there’s no such things as past present and future to her) and ‘archives things that haven’t happened yet’, a clever detail that makes this unlikely scenario convincing. The Tardis at last gets to comment on the Dr’s actions too that’s she clearly been holding in all this time of being less than sentient: the line that the Doctor always ‘bring home strays’ in his companions that she’s having to put up with is one of the true laugh out loud lines of the series. For those of us fans who’ve travelled so far on this long journey seeing The Doctor talking to The Tardis the way he always does, but hearing her talk straight back and admitting she ‘stole’ him as much as he ‘stole’ her, is really special: we learn that the Tardis is more of a driving force than we ever realised, making sure the Doctor arrives where he’s most needed and even doing a bit of companion hunting (which explains a lot about Dodo and Tegan’s rather odd entries into the Tardis in particular, though she thinks Rory is the ‘pretty’ one, not Amy – well time and dimensions and beauty are all relative). The Doctor has spent far more time with his ship than any of his companions and you feel his joy at being able to actually talk to ‘her’ – and (spoilers) feel his pain when he loses her all over again. Even if this had been done before it’s arguably done much better and more convincingly here, in a script that really makes the most of the premise. 


 And it really does. I love the way that Idris is presented to us, at first, as being mad, locked away in an asylum. As it turns out madness is simply seeing things in another extra dimension to other people, of having all of time and space inside your head so that you can’t function in a simple daily existence. That’s powerful stuff: Dr Who doesn’t often touch on madness and when it does it’s only in a very loose, B-movie kind of a way. Had they set the pre-credits sequence back in time and made that more of a story ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ would have been back in my top fifty for sure. The opening ten minutes is by far the best all round in fact with the Tardis somehow getting post in mid-air (something that ought to be impossible in a space-time machine, I mean what class post do you even use? And which Royal of Royal Mail is on the stamps?! Hock horror, does the Doctor even pay a TV licence to help fund the BBC?!? Paying bills must be very difficult all round). The idea of creating a second Tardis from all the odds and ends in the junkyard is a lovely idea that ties so many old plotlines together returning us back to the first episode where the Tardis was only one trinket amongst many (and is brilliantly designed by Blue Peter competition winner, then-12 year old Susannah Leah who beat 2000 other entries including other age winners which were garden solar lights and a farmhouse that looked like a viewer’s Nan’s barn when she stayed overnight) – and even became a big selling toy in its own right. The details are fabulous and very Dr who in the way ordinary household objects become extraordinary: there’s a coat hanger starting handle, a shower head, a pen torch roughly where original was in the 1960s, a self-playing piano, a galaxy sat nav, a mirror, skipping rope, deodorant that melts metal (Ace so would have approved), a rusty old radio used to pick up alien signals, a pen with invisible ink, karaoke microphone (handy if the seaweed from ‘Fury From The Deep’ ever comes back again), telephone wires filled with tea and milk and hair curlers to use heat or light. The design is a thing of beauty Ray Cusick himself would have been proud of. Forget the Abzorbaloff and the Aqua Robot, now that’s how you run Blue Peter competitions, for props not monsters! 


The story brings out the best in Matt Smith, who gets a fellow eccentric to outperform against and gets to show off his full range of comedy, sadness and anger (usually his blindspot, but the Doctor’s quiet but escalating rage is well handled here). The ending scene, when the Doctor has to say goodbye, features some of his best acting and is far more emotional than the farewell scenes to Amy and Rory, even though of all the character deaths in Who this one is surely the most signposted (I mean, we can’t have Idris surviving into the next story or there would be no Tardis to leave in and have adventures with ever again!) Suranne Jones is superb as Idris: utterly mad in all the best ways and alternating between having the wisdom of being several thousand years old and being a newborn in a new body she doesn’t know how to control yet, imbued with the power of the greatest race in history while being a hopeless child. She’s far more convincing than she was as a real life Mona Lisa in ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ and acts like Missy long before there even was a Missy. The pair together make for a formidable double act Robert Holmes would have been proud to write and make a formidable team. I wish this story had been a multi-parter just so they could have spent longer together. They also make good use of the Russell T era Tardis, which had been mothballed since Moffat took over and changed it for Matt Smith, deliberately leaving it up in a corner of Cardiff taking up precious room just so they could use it in this story one day – it’s great to see it again, though it’s a shame that we couldn’t have more ‘old’ consoles too (the budget wouldn’t stretch to it alas – still the hint that they’re all still there, archived, including ones we haven’t even seen yet, warms a fan’s hearts). 


 It’s the rest of this story that doesn’t quite work, a lot of it left over from an aborted first draft back in the days when this was meant to be a series five story until budgetary problems led to it being replaced by the far more down-to-Earth ‘The Lodger’. The episode started life as ‘The House Of Nothing’, which for a draft was about The Great Intelligence before Steven Moffat confessed his own plans for using the villain not seen since the 1960s. In this version House was a spore that had fallen through one of the cracks in time of series 5 and acted more like The Celestial Toymaker, capturing the Tardis and challenging the Doctor and Amy to a game (she picks Monopoloy but ends up playing a version of Hide and Skee much like the one she endures searching for Rory, who isn’t in this draft, his character being dead in the slot where the story would have been). Aunty, Uncle and Nephew had much more to do in this version, being picked by House to keep him company, while Idris was a new arrival who turned up at much the same time as the Tardis. On screen all these ideas got shoved to one side when the character of Idris grew and there’s just not enough time to develop them – we never get a full flavour for what happened to these characters or what their lives were like and no real sense of who House is: he’s just a disembodied voice mocking Amy and Rory from inside the Tardis. Aunty Uncle and Nephew are little more than grotesque caricatures, oddly feeble considering their power at being able to draw timelords off-course (a power The Daleks, for instance, would only dream of). The sudden arrival of an Ood is, well, odd simply there so that House has some way of speaking to us directly (Gaiman wanted to invent his own race of monsters but they went very over budget so he settled for an old favourite: honestly they should have gone with the Sisterhood of Karn or something more linked to the planets around Gallifrey and avoided the cost of a monster costume altogether). 


The companions’ sub-plot, which makes Amy feel as if she’s going mad by changing her perceptions and seeing an aged Rory angry at her for abandoning him (in a recycling of what happened to Amy in ‘The Girl Who Waited’) is a little too close to other stories we’ve had recently, particularly the Dream Lord of ‘Amy’s Choice’ while stories are always trapping this pair away from the Doctor. Trapped in the body of the Tardis while the Doctor flirts with its mind (!) they spend most of the story running up and down corridors like a bad parody of Who, seemingly include as action sequences to break up the talky plot with the Doctor and Idris, but it doesn’t feel that scary or that memorable (‘Journey Into The Centre Of The Tardis’ doesn’t do much better than this story but we at least saw more of the interior than the same corridor over and over). Even here, though, there’s a clever twist in that for once rather than chasing down corridors for once the corridors seem to be chasing them! They should have kept them all together I think: an Amy and Idris double act, one impossible and one down to earth and cynical, could have been better yet than pairing her with the similar Doctor. Oddly enough it’s Rory who comes out best, even though he wasn’t in the drafts until the last minute, comparing the disembodied voice that wanted to see him suffer to his old p.e. teacher. This aspect of the story made a lot more sense in earlier drafts too, with two scenes cut for budget reasons: one of Amy running down a corridor made out of mirrors (just like ‘Snakedance’) and Rory floating in the gravity of the zero room, unable to reach the door handle to get out (a sillier version of a scene in ‘Castrovalva’!) Michael Sheen is an odd choice for the disembodied evil voice too, even if he’s unrecognisable with all the electronic treatments to his voice (and it seems odd that David Tennant’s sparring partner from ‘Staged’ and Neil’s own ‘Good Omens’ hasn’t turned up on screen for real yet). That said, it could have worked a treat had the script played up the madness element and contrasted this with Idris herself: ‘House’ is the dangerous level of mad, while Idris is just privy to too much information for one head to hold. Later drafts, re-titled ‘Bigger On The Inside’ (a title dropped for giving too much away, though it works better than ‘Doctor’s Wife’ I think) were more like the end of ‘The Invasion Of Time’, complete with a long sequence in the Tardis swimming pool (dropped when the production office checked with Karen Gillan and found out she couldn’t swim). 


 It feels for half an episode there as if this story is going to be an important one full of big revelations that will change the trajectory of the series, especially when it goes against the ethos of the Moffat era and kills everyone except the Doctor and companions off for the first time since ‘The Horror Of Fang Rock’ (so much for ‘everybody lives!’), whereas the second half simply tidies everything away again and it ends up feeling like a minor one. Still, not every story can be big and this is a very enjoyable minor one that still breaks more rules and features more imagination than most Who stories whichever stories got there first. I guess, like Idris, its a story that’s bigger on the inside and won’t make much sense if you’re not a committed fan, but if you are a fan then it ticks all the boxes – and in the right way, being as imaginative, adventurous and bold in exactly the right way for this series. Though it could have been just a gimmick there’s a lot of heart and a lot of love in this story, which expands our knowledge of the series, the characters in it and does something very very new that hadn’t been tried in 48 years of time-travel, and what’s more does it really really well. You really feel for both the Doctor and Idris and the timelord watching his best friend turn back into an inanimate object is the Dr Who equivalent of ‘The Snowman’, utterly heartbreaking. A lot of this story is about how, to Idris, all time is happening at once, past present and future all muddled; usually it’s the Doctor who pities ‘us’ at having to live our lie in one dimension but here it’s him who has to plod through life in five dimensions while Idris gets to experience all six. It’s a measure of this story’s power that, despite appearing in all those other stories, it’s only this one that feels as if we got to fully understand the Tardis and she will never feel quite the same way again following the events of this story, which is quite something given how well we thought we knew it already. Of all 327-ish Dr Who stories only ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ makes better use of the Tardis, perhaps the single greatest invention the series ever came up with. Even with the similarities to other stories I’m still amazed that one of the least original writers came up with one of the most original Dr Who stories. Like the best Hartnell stories I came away from this one with the feeling that anything was possible in this series again and that I really didn’t know what was coming next, just as Dr Who was falling into something of a rut (as it happens next week will be one of the most traditional Dr whose of them all, ‘The Rebel Flesh’). Yes it doesn’t quite make the use of all the parts and there are sub-plots that fall apart and not enough budget to do it justice, but they made a Tardis an actual central character again and for that I’ll forgive anything. Given the strength of this story I wish JNT had written a few more fake stories up on his notice-board for future writers to play around with! 


 POSITIVES + Idris gets in some classic lines where she complains about the Doctor’s behaviour throughout the years – he has, after all, been rather slapdash with how to work her as we know from the days of the 4th Dr and Romana, complaining that he never reads instruction books. In her best dig she compares him to a 9 year old ‘building a motorbike in his bedroom’. My favourite is the revelation that the Doctor has always ‘pushed’ the Tardis door rather than pulled it, as the instructions on the front say (’Every single time. 700 years!’) He does too, more often than not, I checked!) 


 NEGATIVES - The title. It’s just so deliberately and needlessly provocative when the episode’s not like that at all – given that a future episode title had been given as ‘The Wedding Of River Song’ it felt as if we were being teased with a story arc that wasn’t there. ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ is misleading to say the least – they might bicker like an old married couple but really the Doctor’s relationship with Idris is more brother and sister, partners in crime, lifelong companions, perhaps even boyfriend and girlfriend, but they’re never married: there’s never a ceremony the way that there half-is for River Song. It gives completely the wrong idea of the story, clearly there for crude publicity value to get fans watching and chuntering just like JNT knew back in 1984. 


 BEST QUOTE: The Doctor ‘Alive isn’t sad’ Idris: ‘It’s sad when it’s over’ 


PREQUELS/SEQUELS: As a rule the only time we heard about deleted scenes being cut from Dr Who stories is Russell moaning in his editorials for Dr Who Magazine, in his excellent collected emails ‘The Writer’s Tale’ book or when something shot but cut ends up as a DVD extra. Neil Gaiman, though, is a constant blogger who liked teasing fans with little cut scenes from this story, none of which add a lot (and most of which seem to feature the Tardis food dispenser last seen back in the 1960s!) One sequence that he really wanted to shoot but which got cut for budget reasons was an opening where the Tardis trio would be saved from certain death by the sudden appearance of a hypercube not yet knowing what it was (replaced by a much cheaper shot of one simply knocking on the Tardis doors). This sequence, known as ‘Planet Of The Rain Gods’, was turned into a three page comic strip featured in ‘The Dr Who Brilliant Book 2012’. This went down so well with the fanbase that it was actually filmed for the series seven box set when it came out on DVD and Blu-Ray. Rather than being a linked story with Amy and Rory it’s a standalone ninety second sequence starring the Doctor and River Song (Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill having left the series by then) - to date it’s the only time someone other than Steven Moffat has written lines for River Song on screen (Big Finish is another whole kettle of space fish). The pair are much like an old married couple in Gaiman’s hands than Moffat’s flirtier teenage take on their romance! I admit I don’t really see what the fuss is: basically it’s two minutes of nattering while being surrounded by the sort of primitive cultures straight out of Blake’s 7/’The Power Of Kroll’, although there are some good lines (‘That’s not a plan, that’s just hoping!’) and the 11th Doctor characteristically missing the bigger picture and commenting on the ‘scientific evidence’ that sacrifice is good for crops before ding something clever with the weather. 


 Previous ‘The Curse Of The Black Spot’ Next ‘The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People’

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The Legend Of Ruby Sunday/Empire Of Death: Ranking - N/A (but #130ish)

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