The Power Of Three: Ranking - 44

 

The Power Of Three

(Series 7, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 22/9/2012, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Douglas MacKinnon)

Rank: 44

   'How that invasion played out across the rest of the DW universe... 

'Look Barbara, a cube from outer space. Do you suppose its bigger on the inside?!' 

'I don't understand Sgt Benton, there I was halfway up the Amazon when this ruddy great cube fell on top of me and Cliff and nearly sank our boat! I don't suppose the Dr's been in touch at all...Any of them?!'

'Well I've blown myself up seventeen times trying to get this cube open. Good thing I can't die. Well, let's give it a go for an 18th time...' 

'Mr Smith I need you...No wait, monitoring these cubes is taking too much power. I'll have Luke do it instead, keep him out of my hair' 

'Brave heart Tegan...Especially when so many people's hearts seem to be stopping. I wonder what weird being The Master's dressed up as for this invasion?! It's bound to be him, he's probably compressed somebody hiding inside it!' 

'I don't understand Sophie, what do you mean these aren't Stormageddon's building blocks but a load of alien space cubes...Where's the Dr? If he takes my spot on this year's football team too now we've just gone up a league I'll murder him!' 

'No class, we will not be leaving English class early. An alien invasion of cubes is no excuse to fail your English lit exam. Although if the arriving alien is dishy I might be persuaded to put leave marking for another night...' 

'Typical of my luck - finally get a job as a cleaner at uni and now all the students keep leaving these weird cube things everywhere. There's thousands of them!'

'This is p.c. Yasmin, we've got a pile of cubes that have just materialised out of nowhere, getting reinforcements. Sheffield is over-run with cubes, repeat Sheffield is over-run with cubes...'  

 

 And so DW enters it’s cubist period, with an alien invasion quite unlike any others seen in the show’s long history: small black boxes that slowly count down to zero. Now, if you’ve been following along since the first three months of the year it might surprise you that I was one of the fans looking forward to Chris Chibnall’s time as showrunner. While I didn’t think an awful lot of ‘42’ ‘Dinos on a Spaceship’ or the Silurian two-parter I genuinely loved this story, which seemed to offer a whole new approach for the series. Perhaps a good 90% of the other DW stories are about making the ordinary extraordinary, of following our human representatives as they enter the Dr’s mad world and face alien cultures invading our own world or other planets that are remarkably like ours but with one scifi thing particularly out of whack.‘The Power Of Three’ though has the extraordinary become ordinary, as the Dr is trapped in our world for so long that he all but has a nervous breakdown at trying to live our life along with us, just for a little bit. We’ve already seen how frustrated the Dr was at being stuck on Earth in the UNIT days, but at least then he was lucky (fated?) enough to end up on our planet at the time in our history when we were being invaded left, right and centre every week (err, whatever period that was). Even the ‘Lodger/Closing Time’ duo from the two previous 11^th Dr seasons have a good old-fashioned alien invasion at their heart somewhere, even if the crux of those stories are about Matt Smith learning to bend in with humanity. This story goes further than ever though: before we even met him the Dr was running away from a ‘normal’ life back on Gallifrey, so terrified of the rigid life waiting for him that he stole a Tardis and ran away, even when he knew it meant (semi)permanent exile. How much worse for him, then, that he ends up being stuck on our far more boring planet waiting for an invasion that arrives only in slow motion. 

Of all the actors to have played the Dr Matt Smith is surely the best at physical comedy, with a body that makes him seem like a centuries-old alien in a young human frame that hasn’t properly learned how to walk yet and he’s at his best in this story which gives him plenty of leg-room to indulge in that humour. The scenes of him moving in with Amy and Rory are some of the funniest in all of DW, as he fills his time with being busy to the point of ridiculousness, exploring our world at top speed because to live through the drudgery day by day the way we have to is too much to bear: his pained expression, at having re-painted the Ponds’ fences, mown the lawn at high speed, hoovered, spruced up the family car and played keepie-uppie for 5million shots, only to find a mere hour of time has passed, is one of my favourite DW scenes of them all. Closely followed by the shot of the alien cubes finally kicking into life just as he’s playing ‘Tardis tennis’ on the Wii (surely the ‘Who’?!) the way we all used to fill in time over at the Dr Who website (where it was easily the best of the online BBC games, however little it actually had to do with DW). Even the Dr’s not bored enough for twitter though, in a line improvised by Matt Smith, whose famously allergic to social media (not like us lot then eh? We don’t have any other luxuries of passing the time in our dreary lives. Or is that just me?) As brilliant as ‘The Lodger’ was (and kudos to that story for doing it first) back then we still saw some of the wonder of the Dr as we saw him through Craig’s eyes; here, though, Amy and Rory have spent so much time round the Dr that he’s gone from super-timelord with impossible gifts to someone they treat more like a pet, getting on with their ordinary lives as they have to, while trying to house-train him as best they can, vainly hoping he won’t cause too much damage to their furniture. To an extent the Ponds are the ‘three’ behind the title, as the Dr comes to realise the worth of this (Amy aside) most ordinary of families, but it also cleverly refers to the idea of cubes in mathematics, a ‘problem squared’ if you will (and if there’s one thing I love more than comedy in DW, its a title that delivers a good pun!There is one person who views the Dr with awe though: Rory’s dad Brian, with this the last of his all too-short time in the series and he’s very much the way Rory was when we first met him; a reliable, practical, down-to-earth man whose still in shock at being shown the existence of other planets beyond ours. It’s a cracking bit of writing, reminding us just how quickly even the impossible life in the Tardis can become boring when you’ve become accustomed to it and Brian breathes new magic into the series again, eagerly embracing even the slowest and most boring of invasions as the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to him. You can tell the Dr is haunted by memories of being trapped on Earth when we see UNIT on screen for the first time in a few years, complete with a Lethbridge-Stewart to annoy him, only its the debut of the Brig’s daughter Kate (and, amazingly, the first appearance in DW by a member of one of Britain’s most famous acting dynasties, the Redgraves). As time goes by Kate will get less and less to do and will become a caricature of English unruffledness (much the way her dad did, but over a much longer seven year period of time – Kate ends up there inside less than seven stories) but here she’s at her best: the Dynamic Dr needs someone to anchor him and take this threat seriously and having all that history haunting him adds to the Dr’s misery.) 

It’s not all fun and games though: this is still an alien invasion and a scary one at that, as a one-off race called The Shakri are behind the cubes and are one of the few alien species that plan to wipe out humanity altogether in one go, rather than enslaving us or invading us one base at a time. I love the idea of an alien species that’s doing its homework, using the cubes to scan what life is like for us before invading, mapping our internet (hello any future Shakri types reading this!), monitoring our biology and recording our behaviour patterns, before working out where best to strike. I also have a sneaky suspicion that if the Earth is ever invaded by aliens this is the closest to how they’ll do it, by stealth, with humanity adjusting to it so slowly that the very method of their destruction is treated as just another everyday item after a few years (with some nice throwbacks to the Russell T era with all the cameos of famous names featuring the cubes on their shows). A lot of the threat comes because, for once, the Dr is as clueless about this alien threat as the rest of us – we learn at roughly the same speed he does and Chibnall raises the tension brilliantly by adding the idea of a ‘countdown’ timer on each cube, with no idea what will happen when the cube reaches zero. We do see threats though: the idea of an invisible gas that causes cardiac arrests at random so we don’t know who will be hit (with some more epic physical comedy from Matt Smith as one of his hearts stops) is another new invasion technique we’ve not seen before that seems worryingly plausible for an alien race with sophisticated technology beyond ours. This story has a very different feel to it than the others then, with an entirely different template to every other DW story and, coming 48 years into a long-running show, that in itself is impressive. What prevents this being amongst the very top tier of DW stories is that the ending, when it does arrive, is botched – and for once that’s not Chibnall’s fault. The making of this story was fraught with problems, up there with the broken bus on ‘Planet Of The Dead’ and the hurried creation of ‘Edge Of Destruction’ for things going wrong, to the point where its a wonder it didn’t become a modern ‘Shada’ abandoned partway through (and as the last story of the season to be filmed there was no time lefty to re-mount anything; these are the last scenes Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill ever shot for the series). Only this time the problems came down not to a strike or an accident but a shocking bit of unprofessionalism (or so the rumours and hints from the cats and director have it). Steven Berkoff, playing the Shakri, wasn’t needed until the very end of the shoot and appears to have resented every minute of his time filming, clashing with the director, refusing to say particular lines as written and deliberately disrupting filming of others to make them unusable. In the end the final few garbled scenes had to be pieced together with the bits that were useable, taped camera rehearsal footage and a few extra scenes filmed with the regulars after the rest of production had officially wrapped. 

In any other story of the season they would have simply re-cast and slotted it in somewhere, but with deadlines so tight there was simply no other choice. Nobody is quite sure why: Berkoff has a very long and distinguished acting career including parts in other long-running franchises (he’s General Orlov in James Bond film ‘Octopussy’) and he isn’t known for being a ‘difficult’ actor – quite the contrary in fact. Maybe it was revenge for being considered for roles early on in his career in ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ and ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ and being turned down for both (though he got off with a lucky escape with the first one, a production where everything in the production except the acting went wrong). It’s a real shame because the threat that we’ve spent 40 minutes waiting for seems to be over really quickly (with a wave of the sonic screwdriver) and after such a build up we need to feel that this is an alien that can do anything, that we only just escaped by a whisker. For all that, though, what we do see of the Shakri is strong: the makeup makes him look both impossibly old and like the alien delegates from ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, while his back story as a ‘pest controller’ who viewed humanity as vermin, known to timelords with access to incredible technology, makes him a worthy foe different to anyone else. Even so, the ending doesn’t spoilt this story as badly as many fans have it: at the time of broadcast, before it had been leaked what had happened, it just seemed as if the story had set itself up so well that the ending was always going to seem like a let-down, rather than an obvious catastrophe. In a way maybe it helped: this sort of static invasion needs a static invader (even if it wasn’t the original intention to make the Shakri a ‘hologram’ that barely moved) and the hasty re-writes led to more scenes early on of the invasion, which is what makes the story so memorable. Even with the problems I would still take ‘The Power Of Three’ over almost any other 11^th Dr story: like all the best DWs its unique to this particular regeneration and does something very very imaginative and new that doesn’t betray the format. I really really hoped we’d get more stories like this in the Chibnall era rather than re-hashes of the breathlessness and incomprehensibility of ‘42’ and the ordinariness of ‘Dinos On A Spaceship’, but alas not all things a long time coming are worth waiting for. Mostly, though,’The Power Of Three’ is a treat: a new way of telling old stories that still feels like proper DW rather than just an ‘experiment’ and one that makes great use of the cast, one last chance to spend time with one of the most beloved Dr-companion teams of them all.

+ Mark Williams is one of those actors who’ve made a name for himself playing ordinary people in extraordinary settings so the wonder is that he hadn’t been on DW before (he’s a rather good eccentric-yet-normal vampire in ‘Being Human’ for instance, although his most famous role is as 1950s vicar-detective Father Brown). He’s superb as Rory’s dad, sharing the same goggle-eyed stare and practical tools to hand, but adding his own endearing innocence and utter joy at being in the middle of all the action after spending so much of his time Earth-bound with nothing to do since we last saw him (the Dr has this effect on so many people - the Ponds are two of the few companions to ever successfully have a life separate from the Tardis – that its rather fun to see the same effect played out on him for a change). Brian’s obsessive recording of what the cubes are up to, for nearly a full year long after the experts have given up and moved on, is a perfect bit of characterisation for this methodical enthusiastic soul. The only pity is that he wasn’t in either of the earlier two series as well.

- The whole ‘bring Amy and Rory back safe’ plotline, setting up season finale ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’, is a bit overcooked and obvious. While its natural Brian should worry about his son and daughter in law, he never seemed that fussed about the danger before, even when being slobbered on by a Stegosaurus in an alien spaceship. You just know that something bad’s going to happen – but then we knew that anyway given that’s its a series finale where Amy and Rory leave, its tone just seems wrong for what’s mostly a jokey comedy kind of a story. Plus, with all the wonderful characterisation of Brian this story, he’s not even mentioned again on screen after this - which from Brian’s point of view is the last time he ever sees his family. You would have thought that would have been a big part of the Dr’s guilt over the events in the next story, to the point where he’d visit and mourn (and that his dad would be Rory’s main concern, even over and above the Dr – with messages passed on in the same way, via River Song’s book).