Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead: Ranking - 11

 

Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead

(Series 4, Dr 10 with Donna and River Song, 31/5/2008-7/6/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Euros Lyn)

Rank: 11

   'At night, when the books on the library shelves come to life, there's one section the others are all a little scared of: the Dr Who shelf. They all tried to be polite to this mysterious shelf, full of such wonder and amazement, but something always seemed to keep the shelf apart from the others. 'Would you like a marmalade sandwich?' asked Paddington but the Dalek shot a hole right through the middle of it. ‘Maybe they’re just full of creatures without any brains’ complained Pooh, as a Cybermen tried to steal his and discovered it was full of fluff. 'Don't go there' said a monster 'That's where the wild things are!' 'Curiouser and curiouser' said Alice as a white rabbit leapt out of her book crying 'This book’s overdue: I'm late!' 'Absolutely' enthused Azlan the Lion 'The nonsense they say too. Fancy having a space-time machine, that's preposterous - not like a door to a magical realm hiding in a wardrobe!'  'Oh just tell them to get lost' said 'Where's Wally' 'That’s what I always do'.

Thankfully not everyone was so rude: Dennis The Menace was having fun running round the motorbike section with Ace while Biggles took the Brigadier up for a joy-ride in his plane. As for the Drs, Dr 1 was having a chat with The Wizard of Oz, Dr2 was hanging round with The Cat In The Hat ('I would like a hat like that' he said, trading in his stovepipe), Dr 3 was studying karate moves fro a self-help guide, Dr 4 was checking the cross-knit section for how to extend his scarf, Dr 5 was lost in a (David/Jodie) Whittaker's cricket almanac, Dr 6 was poncing about talking about how he'd read every book in the library and could 'improve' them all if only he had the time, Dr 7 had his nose in a book on chess tactics, Dr 8 was looking up operas in the Groves dictionary of classical music, Dr 9 was chortling through a book on Big Brother, Dr 11 was reading a Beano annual, Dr 12 was trying to write his own pompous lecture on something important, Dr 13 had a book on the climate crisis open on her knee, Dr 14 was having a Giggle in a joke book and Dr 15 was reading a book on intergalactic pickup lines. And Dr 10? He was too busy chatting up the girls who had been saved to the library database. Starting with his future wife…'  

 

Ah, the library. That nice quiet boring safe little place where nothing ever happens, stocked (hopefully) with Dr Who books and Target novelisations, an escape into a place of safety when the real world gets too scary. Well not in Dr Who it isn’t! In one of my favourite examples of the extraordinary world of Dr Who crashing into our boring ordinary one, the tiny village library is a whole planet full of books rather boringly called ‘Library’ (and definitely my first port of call if I ever get the chance to travel in the Tardis for real) and a place that just happens to have been invaded by flesh-eating alien parasites that came from the books and live in the shadows waiting to eat your flesh. I think I got bed bugs from going to the library once (yet another reason to regret wasting eight hours of my life reading the novelisation of ‘The Monster Of Peladon’), but by and large trips to the library aren’t usually quite as, well, hazardous as this. What a simply brilliant conceit, utterly unlike anything the series had done before: libraries are worlds to get lost in and so are most Dr Who worlds, so to combine the two and make them a whole planet is one of my favourite inventions of the modern series. You see, most Dr Who fans are, like the Doctor, curious – about everything. So intertwined are Dr Who and reading that it’s a wonder we hadn’t had a story like this before (it’s a sort of combination of ‘The Mind Robber’, a universe full of fictional characters and the closest is ‘The Space Museum’, places full of artefacts that make the past come alive – museums being another place where Dr Who fans tend to congregate).

Unlike every other scifi franchise you can think of, this is a series that was designed from the first to snare a general family audience rather than an already scifi-literate one and make them ask big questions about life, death and their place in the universe, originally pitched as an educational series as much as an entertainment (that’s why a science and a history teacher were at the heart of the early days, so they could comment on the futuristic and historical stories). As much as the series changed pretty quickly Dr Who never quite lost that ethos that geeky nerds who know everything are something to aspire to rather than fear (just compare with how poor Wesley Crusher gets treated as the butt of all the jokes in Star Trek); admittedly when we got our own boy whizzkid in Adric he wasn’t that popular either but, as a general rule, learning in Dr Who is a good thing. Just take the Doctor: compared to all other super heroes and science-fiction protagonists you can think of he’s the one who travels through space and time in a box that happens to have a massive library (one which, judging by lines in ‘The Invasion Of Time’ ‘The TV Movie’ and ‘Tooth and Claw’ he’s spent as much time in as we have reading stories – it helps that he’s such a speed reader).  The average Dr Who viewer is traditionally quite the reader too with a mountain of books on our favourite series to read and quite apart from the colossal amount of ‘new’ adventures published since 1990 a majority of TV stories exist as book alternatives. You see, back in the days before video and UK Gold, when your weekly fix of your favourite show was restricted to Saturday teatimes, a lot of future Dr Who writers fell in love with this series as much from reading the novels as they did watching the TV series and there’s a reason that the Who novelisations have outsold basically every TV franchise going, to the point where 151 of the 155 ‘classic Who’ stories were novelised up to 1991 to varying degrees of success – the worst ones make cliched Dr Who B movie plots seem even more like cliched B movie plots, particularly some of the Peter Davison and Colin Baker books which border on the unreadable, but the best ones (‘The Massacre’ ‘The Crusade’ ‘The Enemy Of the World’ and ‘The Myth Makers’ to name just four) are classics of literature as worthy as anything by any great named author – and probably a few others too given that even I never quite got through reading them all (in case you were wondering the four stragglers were the two Eric Saward-penned Dalek stories which Terry Nation delayed signing off in his own lifetime and the two ‘finished’ Douglas Adams scripts which he always meant to get round to writing himself one day but never did, all completed in the 21st century after Nation and Adams’ deaths, along with the uncompleted Adams story ‘Shada’). The novelisations have continued scatter-gun, into the new series too: there are currently thirty-four of the things novelising stories from the 9th to the 15th Drs, although shockingly this story isn’t one of them: you’d think it would be an obvious choice reading a book about monsters that, erm, hide in books.

To take away our ‘safe’ space then and fill it with monsters is, in many ways, the most Dr Who thing any Dr Who writer has possibly ever done. Steven Moffat is, of all the showrunners, producers and script-editors who’ve ‘run’ Dr Who, one of the most happily bookish and nerdy going and with an enthusiasm for literature that’s spanned most of his other series (‘Sherlock’ and ‘Jerkyl’ are also based on books he probably started reading at the library, while ‘Press Gang’ is a series all about writers – though I suspect most of these delinquents probably got thrown out of their library at one time or another, with the exception of Sarah and Kenny who are the epitome of nerds who spent all their spare time there. Colin probably bought up more than 50% shares but has never been beyond the reception in his life). As a regular reader of (probably mostly) secondhand books Moffat has surely experienced, as I have and no doubt most of you have, the curious problem of silverfish. Sadly they’re not actual fish (though I can’t speak for what happens to the ones that nest inside bath books) but insects that find books the perfect hiding places: they’re dark, tend to live on bookshelves that aren’t disturbed by humans all that often and unless you happen to have very quick eyes are tiny enough to hide away amongst the small print without you noticing, giving you a real jump-scare if one happens to move suddenly when you’re engrossed in a book. What a natural leap, then, to the Vashta Nerada who are some of the scariest of Dr Who monsters (‘the piranhas of the air’ as the Dr memorably calls them), micro-organisms that live in every book, but in small enough numbers on Earth so we don’t notice them – left unchecked on the planet Library, though, gathering in colossal numbers, they’ve swarmed into a collection of flesh-eating monsters. Perfect: every Dr Who fan at home who owns a book (which, hopefully, is everyone) has a ready-made pet monster of their own to love, even if its benign and too small to see. Who said reading was boring eh? 

Creating a true flesh eating monster would have been a sight too far even for one of the scariest eras of the series, however, so what Moffat does is combine them with another pet interest of his, putting the victims inside space-suits with tinted visors that hide faces, so you can’t quite see what’s going on until the hapless victims have been consumed and turned into skeletons (they resemble the ones from ‘Ambassadors Of Death’, which is one of the better novels out there, even if squashing seven episodes down to a fixed word count is a bit of a challenge even for Terrance Dicks). Even so, this effect, with a skeleton suddenly appearing out of the darkness, is one of the single most terrifying images in all of Dr Who past present or future (or so I presumed until I went online after the story was on and found half the people making fun of it and half were terrified out of our tiny minds; never has an effect split the fanbase more – for the record, I say it’s properly scary). Moffat ups the ante by throwing in another more existentially scary threat, by having the space suits ‘trap’ a person’s dying thoughts in a brief timeloop before they fade out of existence, a whole tapestry of a person’s personality stripped away to a few stray words as they realise they’re dying and get stuck there (Moffat is particularly good at creatures who don’t simply kill you outright but pose bigger questions about identity and who we are – the Weeping Angels, taking people out of time and away from the lives they’d built up for themselves, pose a similar threat).

Why are people in spacesuits inside a library? Well, it’s kind of like the future equivalent of the Marie Celeste, only not caused by Daleks this time (see ‘The Chase’), with trillions of life-forms disappearing overnight in what, we discover a lot later, is an event that happens hundreds of years before the explorers arrive. One person, Lux (no, not the God of light, another one) is particularly keen to understand what happened and (spoilers) he turns out to be the grandson of the library founder, who is now in late middle age himself and desperate to find out what happened to his family. Not least because, as it turns out, his aunt is responsible for most of it: she died as a little girl and was put into the library’s computers through technological jiggery pokery so that she could get the kind of afterlife all Dr Who fans dream of: an existence running around in a library the size of a planet, with all those books from all those different civilisations to read. And she’s the one who turns out to have ‘saved’ all the visitors that day, keeping them safe from ending up fish food for the Vashta Nerada. Only we don’t find that out until right near the end – what’s so clever about this story is the way that mysteries and clues are dangled in front of us, luring us on, each explanation delayed by another question until we haven’t got a clue what’s going on but the plot all makes sense by the end credits: the opening shots of the story are a tiny electronic ball floating through space, quickly followed by a little girl being attended by her own ‘doctor’ who watches events on her television – we’re so used, by now, to 21st century Who throwing lots of different plot-strands at us one after the other in the modern stories (perhaps the biggest change in storytelling from the ‘classic’ series) that it takes an agonisingly long time to work out that the two are actually one and the same. Charlotte Abigail Lux is one of the great Dr Who characters even though we don’t see much of her: she’s kind of like ‘us’ at home, sitting down to watch an episode of Dr Who and caring enough about the people she sees that she wants to ‘save’ them and give them life beyond their own short lifespan (pretty close to what happens whenever we read about a character in a book, including Who ones). She also has her own personal ‘Doctor’ come psychotherapist leading her on too - a pretty good metaphor for our doctor, as he seems to have all the answers and all the knowledge but is also concerned with her safety and trying to get her to see the ‘truth’ (I’m sure I’m not the only fan to wonder if this was some future incarnation of the Doctor we hadn’t met yet, so the joke was on me when River Song turned out to be a future companion we hadn’t met instead. Although Moffat did say, in a 2020 interview,  that he wondered if Dr Moon was a future Doctor who meets the same fate River does and that they’d get their sort-of afterlife together). But no, at least for now until Dr Who ends with that cliffhanger one day: Dr Moon turns out to just be a hit of computer virus software designed by Charlotte’s family to keep her company and look after her and keep the monsters out. A pretty good metaphor for ‘our’ doctor too now that I think about it! 

A plot like that would be nonsense in anyone else’s hands; Moffat is one of those writers who’s always so good at guessing what I’m thinking and then laughing at me for it that it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s really a bit of computer software himself. It’s such a clever cyclical plot because you’ve been trained by so many different past Dr Who stories to trust no one and The Doctor is as sceptical as we at home are.  But no: as it turns out this is a plot driven by kindness, with everyone bar the flesh-eaters doing things for the right reasons. This archaeological team really are trying to uncover survivors. The shady-acting Strackman Lux, who tries to get people to sign waivers to protect his ‘patent’, really is protecting family. Even that mad woman with the curly hair who keeps treating the Doctor as if he’s her boyfriend really is telling the truth, for all that he can’t remember her. You assume, too, that this is going to be one of those Dr Who stories where everybody dies, not least because you’ve seen them ‘eaten’ more or less in real time, but the plus side of modern libraries is that they have computers to ‘save’ things to. Which is another great shift in our understanding of this story, as the threatening messages about being ‘saved’ (which made the library sound like one of those occasional Dr Who cults that wants us all to die to save our souls, ‘K9 and Company’ style, is actually about the way Charlotte has uploaded all the visitors to the computer software alongside her for safe-keeping, transformed into library computer binary code until the threat of the Vashta Nerada can be solved (the resolution of the story is a pun! No wonder I love this story so much…) For all the magnificent plots he came up with during his time as showrunner, I still think this is Moffat his cleverest but also his story, one with lots of sub-plots that don’t seem to tie together but do perfectly by the end. Like many a Moffat story to come it’s a very different experience watching it again when you know the ending, but somehow this is his most rewarding when you can see all the bits that went into it and can ‘mark his homework’.

Moffat’s clearly been thinking about the changes to the library since his day to better fit a modern audience and the single biggest one is that almost all libraries have computers now (so the ‘enemy’ of more than a few Dr Who stories has now invaded his ‘safe place’ but turns out to be benign after all, aiding research rather than destroying reading); it’s a logical Dr Whoy leap from there, too, to having literal ‘human interfaces’ who are, well, human faces ‘borrowed’ from people who’ve died and had their bodies donated to the local library the way we do park benches today which really adds to the scares too. Moffat becomes quite fond of swivelling heads, writing them into ‘The Beast Below’ and ‘The Bells Of Saint John’ but they work best and make the most sense here I think. Perhaps the scariest thing in one of Dr Who’s scariest stories is the way these cod-librarians read out people’s last messages of terror and fright at being chased down by the Vashta Nerada in the same monotone voices as, say, a typical librarian or a Cyberman (or a Librarian Cyberman: now there’s a sequel I‘m dying to see!) It’s easy to see how a writer as close to his inner child as Moffat has naturally gone back to remembering key moments from his childhood, sat in a library reading Dr Who books, maybe slightly scared of the unfeeling librarian who didn’t wish to be disturbed turning round to glare at him, frightened by the un-natural hush that descends in a library, wishing he could put the book down and become part of the action himself (by contrast Russell T Davies read his Dr Who novels on long car journeys and made up Dr Who stories of his own if he ran out of pages before he got to his destination - he gets his equivalent of this story in the mad rush through traffic in ‘The Runaway Bride’ and given that the two were firm friends even before the comeback series it’s not inconceivable that Russell mentioned this to Steven as one of his biggest memories, setting Moffat off thinking how he used to read Dr Who). That title about ‘Silence in the Library’ is so clever too, even though it was a last minute moment of desperation (these two episodes went through more titles than most: ‘River Run’ ‘Cal’ ‘The saved’ ‘Cjhildren Of the Library’ ‘Heart Of The Liberary’  ‘Darkness In the Library’ ‘beneath The Library’ ‘Rise Of the Forest’ ‘A River Song Ending’…Forest Of The Dead’ still isn’t quite right mind you, given that books are no longer trees and nobody dies but hey ho, it’s still better than ‘The Deadly Assassin’).

And then, having honoured his past, Moffat throws forward to the future by introducing River Song as one of the archaeologists exploring the library – someone who already knows the Doctor intimately even though he doesn’t know her at all yet. We’ve never said hello and goodbye to a long running character in the same story before, something only Dr Who could do! This story would have been the first Steven would have written knowing that some day, one day soon, the DW job might be his – and as things turn out, with Russell half-retiring through a run of ‘specials’ across 2009, it’s the last time Moffat gets to write for DW before becoming showrunner. So fans were ready to pore over this story for clues as to what might happen next but Moffat teases us there too by giving us a companion who already knows everything to come, yet can’t tell us. River Song’s favourite catchphrase is ‘spoilers’, referring to all the things she can’t tell the Dr yet, but what many fans miss is that she’s a whacking great big spoiler herself, a tease for all the directions the series might go in when the new showrunner takes over one day. I would have laid money on the future mysterious 11th Dr meeting River again in his first story and the pair going on adventures together, although that’s not how things turn out. River’s the opposite of the constant reliable every-episode companion we were expecting but a fireball who comes in and out to shake up The Doctor’s life. River is another brilliant creation, the closest The Doctor has ever come to having a wife, even though typically this is not your average relationship and she’s not the average wife. She’s remarkably good despite being effectively two past characters stuck together: Moffat’s own creation Captain Jack (flirty, shooty and slightly bonkers – they even have the same distinctive square gun, with the writer figuring off-screen she probably found it in the Tardis where he left it at the end of ‘The Empty Child’) and ‘New Adventures’ companion Bernice ‘Benny’ Summerfield, older sarcastic and closer to being the Doctor’s equal (especially in this story where, for the only time, River’s an archaeologist). River’s a hard character to write for, a combination of dumb and smart, hard and soft, a natural villain who through The Doctor turns into a heroine, which might be why she’s used so sparingly: her three best stories by far (admittedly some of them multiparters) are the ones based round her: the mystery of who she is (‘The Impossible Astronaut’ and the four linked episodes that follow which are sort of signposted here with the astronaut suits, her ‘first’ adventure from her point of view and ‘last’ from ours ‘The Husbands Of River Song’ – which for her has taken place right before this story -  and particularly here, her ‘first’ adventure from the Dr’s point of view and last from hers). Stick her in a story about something else and she never quite fits, if only because one of them knows how the story is going to turn out. It’s a fascinating idea, borrowed from one of Moffat’s favourite books, Audrey Niffenhogger’s ‘The Time-Traveller’s Wife’ (which he’ll go on to adapt for TV after leaving Who, a bit of a disappointment partly through casting and partly because Moffat was told he’s have multiple series so used the book’s ideas and his own sparingly, finding out too ;ate it got cancelled after one season). Every spouse has probably wondered if they would have loved or even liked their partner if they’d met a younger version earlier. That goes double for timelords, River complaining ‘Dear God, you’re hard work when you’re young!’ She’s a glimpse into a future we haven’t seen yet, the time barriers between seasons imploding, which is a very Dr Who idea well handled.

As much as we come to think of River as being a companion of the 11th Dr, the Mrs Robinson whose both older and younger than his impossibly youthful looking yet impossibly old alien, I think River works best with the 10th Doctor. Her playful teasing and flirting is very much the sort of thing he’s used to doing to other people, usually when knowing a lot more than they do, so to see the tables turned and have that passed down to him, while David Tennant gets to use his best perplexed look, is delicious (I wonder, too, if this is Moffat thinking out loud and realising he has to deliver a very different kind of Doctor when he takes over, but not wanting to throw out what made the revival of the show so successful decides to move a lot of the character into River as a sort of substitute 10th Dr; note too that her archaeological team refer to her as ‘The Professor’ which is what Ace used to call Dr 7). Honestly River’s never as interesting again as she is here, when she’s a whacking big mystery and as genius as the later bit of writing that reveals who River is might be, the mystery is never as interesting when its unravelled. For now she’s one of the best surprises Dr Who has ever delivered and all the more so because, like the Dr, we had no idea she was coming with, ironically enough, no ‘spoilers’ anywhere until she burst onto our screens. The fact that she saves the Dr, who in turn saves her, thus cementing their entire relationship to come on first meeting, is also so clever: the Doctor can never tell her how close she comes to death, yet in true Moffat style he gives her the gift of an eternal afterlife where she never truly dies (and, when we come to know her as a sort of Doctor substitute with multiple interests and careers, there’s no better place or her to end up than in a library). At first Russell tried to get his ‘discovery’ Kate Winslet to play the part again (she’d been plucked from obscurity as a teen for his pre-Who series ‘Dark Season’) but turned him down again. Instead Alex Kingston is an inspired bit of casting and is never more comfortable in the role than when playing River as a sort of futuristic Indiana Jones (it’s a real shame they drop the archaeological professorial angle after this as its one of the most interesting things about her). She’s amazingly good considering the weirdness of having to play a character so comfortable and confident with her place in the Dr Whoniverse when no one knows who she is and she’s never met any of the cast and crew before. Luckily, as the biggest Dr Who fan in the cast in the Matt Smith era she ‘gets’ this series in a way few actresses would.

David Tennant, too, is clearly enjoying having a new character with as much depth as his own to bounce off and gets to show off his full range from manic running around to sympathetic sullen silences to sheer bafflement rather than just being smugly confident and in control as per usual. As brilliant as Russell is at writing for the Dr he created and as brilliant as Drs 11 and 12 that Moffat goes on to create too, I’ve always felt that Moffat ‘got’ the 10th Dr better than anyone and that he ‘got’ him better even than his own Doctors: this is an enthusiastic regeneration who thinks life is one great big adventure but whose secretly running away from himself the whole time, trying to get lost in other things as a distraction from the weight he carries on his shoulders (something finally made explicit in ‘Day Of the Doctor’ but is entirely in keeping with how Moffat always wrote for him). Other writers, even Russell occasionally, make this Dr all light or all dark, but Moffat knows you can’t have light without shade so makes him both simultaneously (and shadows are a key feature of this story thanks to the Vashta Nerada). Moffat deliberately didn’t tell him, or indeed anyone, of who River was, leaving the cats to come up with their own conclusions. Tennant decided in rehearsals that River must be a future Doctor and played it that way; as a result she’s about the only female character he doesn’t flirt with!

Above all else, though, this is a great story for Donna. Moffat needs to get her out the way quickly so he can have fun with the Doctor-River action, but the sub-plot he gives to Donna, having her ‘saved’ (which for the longest time we think means ‘dead’) is an inspired way of giving her something separate to do. As well as giving us a chilling cliffhanger back in the days when we only had a handful of them a year so they had to be good (Donna’s face being picked by the computer to relay messages of warning; Moffat said ‘it was the worst possible thing I could think of to do to Donna so therefore, as a writer, I had to do it’) the sub-plot of Donna’s parallel life in an alternate reality does all sorts of things: it explains without explaining the mystery of where all the people has gone, it sets up the finale for what happens to River Song and best of all it gives Donna more character than she’s had in any story so far, giving her the perfect life she’s always dreamed of before snatching it away again in such a heartbreaking way (again, Moffat ‘got’ Donna better than anyone outside her creator Russell too – he sees the desperate longing for an ordinary family life and stability underneath all the shouting and mouthing off, picking up from ‘The Runaway Bride’ that Donna craves marriage and a supportive family more than anything else in the universe to the point where she blinds herself to anything that might shake that faith. She even wears the exact same wedding dress from that story). Having had the idea for a library for some time (Moffat discussed in an ‘unofficial’ email with Russell at the end of 2004 about what they might do next if the show was okayed for a second series) Russell must have groaned when Catherine Tate came back: of all the companions in Dr Who she’s probably the one that’s read the least amount of books in her lifetime (possibly Jack, though I wouldn’t put it past him to spend his eternal lifetime reading every book in the universe so his voice is everywhere! Katarina and Jamie, of course, are exceptions being from the past and barely literate but you bet they would if they could). But Donna’s story makes perfect sense to the plot: her life is a story, one written just for her to keep her happy. It’s not real, but then nor are any of the books on the fiction shelves. It’s so sweet seeing Donna fall in love (with her ‘dream husband’ – a man with a stutter who won’t interrupt her!), before it isn’t, Donna slowly and angrily learning to see the cracks in her (literal) computer simulation world. In the first draft her husband Lee turns out to be the imagined avatar of an overweight bubbly girl who hated the way she was, but with so much going on in the story it got pruned back, Moffat realising that audiences might not have followed his way of thinking. Having Lee turn out to be ‘real’ but his stutter meaning he’s too late to stop Donna was a heartbreaking substitute. Donna’s house is in Llanduff, by the way, opposite where Tosh’s house is across Torchwood series one and two.  

Especially when one of the archaeological team, Evangelista, comes back to tell her all about it (a superb turn from Talulah Riley, the unfortunate ex of Elon Musk in real life so has lots of experience in coping with bullies, who in two separate episodes triggers our prejudices against her as a blonde bimbo we find as irritating as the rest of her archaeological team, then she earns our sympathy as Donna talks to her, then she earns our respect as the computer ‘shifts a point in her IQ’ and she’s brave enough to show Donna what’s going on (not like most computers then – I swear mine’s lost me a few IQ points down the years). Once again it comes down to kindness. I love the fact that Moffat writers for Donna’s softer, gentler, sweeter side, making her the only person sympathetic to Talulah when everyone else is shouting at her, because Donna is more than just her caricature (even more than the Doctor, who’s too busy rushing round saving lives to care for the ones he’s lost) – which is why Evangalista comes to Donna first. As great as Catherine Tate is in her other stories she’s at her best playing this more vulnerable caring Donna than the shouty version, with the look of glee on her face as she tucks her children in at night and her horror when she finds out they aren’t ‘real’ the highlight of her time in the Tardis (so far). Those children, by the way, are named Josh and Ella after Moffat’s own son and his best friend of the time who was Dr Who mad, as a ‘thankyou’ for their creative solution to a problem in episode two when he’d got stuck, of how Cal could communicate with the library (they were messing around with the remote control and discovered a set of buttons dad had never comes across before – a perfect means of communication (probably my favourite moment of the whole of ‘Dr Who Confidential’ is Moffat taking the pair to filming one of the scenes they inspired).

Having a computer that’s really a child (rather than the other way round) is such a clever idea. Although you do have to wonder why CAL is spending all her time watching the CCTV on the television when she has all those books to read. Maybe she’s read them all, but given we’re talking all knowledge in a library the size of a planet and it’s only been a century she must be a mighty fast reader, even more than The Doctor. Or maybe she only reads the Dr Who books? There’s a drawing of a blonde girl that looks like Rose and a ‘bad wolf’ on the wall behind her as she watches TV). The links between the computer and the little girl seem obvious when you know what’s going but seem unsolvable first time round. The way the clues are laid out are superb: Cal has her tantrum on a rug the exact shade as the ‘access denied’ screen, while her remote buttons make books fly off shelves (an unusual computer feature that, but I’ll buy it as a software glitch caused by a computer having a tantrum). If you look closely the CCTV cameras even have ‘angel wings’, pointing to the fact that their owner is in a sort-of ‘Heaven’. Admittedly the 51^st century has very 2008 looking Apple computer keyboards but they would be hard to change with the audience still knowing what they are (maybe they come back into fashion? Weirder anachronisms have happened in Dr Who future stories).

‘Library’ then is a superb story, as clever as any Dr Who script out there, but it’s not the cleverness that you remember. The Doctor and River’s relationship really hits you emotionally even before you quite know who she is. Donna’s tragic story makes you feel for her more than ever before. The archaeological team are all perfect too, with Moffat at his most Davies-like with the ability to sum up lots of people and give them all believable back-stories in just a few lines. Some Moffat stories can feel like logic problems but this one has his biggest heart too: you feel for all these characters, who are trying to do the right thing in their own way. They all feel like ‘real’ people, with the very real detail of having a ‘proper Dave’ and ‘Other Dave’ because the expedition had two people with the same name. You feel for each one in turn as they all face death in slightly different ways, stoic or scared or resigned. Steve Pemberton is superb as Strackman Lux: another friend and work colleague of Mark Gatiss from ‘The League Of Gentlemen’ we expected him to play the role with the same knowing wink to camera as his comedy shows, the way Reece Shearsmith and even Gatiss himself do in their parts in the show (‘Sleep No More’ Twice Upon A Time’). But no: he nails a character who’s written to be ambiguous believable as both the hero and the villain; it helps that he also knew Tennant well after they were both in the series ‘Blackpool’ together. It’s Tallulah who steals the show in the supporting cast though, believable and likable as both the ‘thick’ and ‘clever’ Evangalista. You would think that being ‘smart’ would make her happier, but being clever comes at the cost of being able to see the truth that other people are happy to deny, while the story plays with prejudice in how people react to her differently depending on her IQ. It’s a very clever thought about intelligence in a story that might seem out of place in another plot but works for one set in a library (though it’s a shame we don’t get more of the archaeological team hard-drive ‘reunion’, with an apology thrown in).  Colin Salmon is really good as Dr Moon too, right in the middle of being kind and threatening, playing it so that you’re not sure which he is right up until he glitches and The Doctor replaces him.

The library might be the most unusual place to have a ‘base under siege’ type Dr Who story but it’s one of the best examples of the genre, the script is emotional and scary and full of great lines and big themes with some great gags (Donna, always one to miss the bigger picture, responds to finding out she’s in a dream world is to complain ‘but I’ve been dieting!’) The one big problem is that so much of this story revolves around mysteries – that of the Library and River’s – so, as brilliant as it is watching this story the first time, you can never again feel quite as involved with it when you know all the answers. This is a rare Who story that gets worse on re-watches, where instead you get to notice more of the story’s faults (the repetition of the astronauts getting caught in the shadows and speaking their last thoughts over and over, the uneven length it takes people to die depending on how much plot is going on, the weird way that Charlotte is painted out to be a curious child who loves reading who spends all her time watching TV, the way Dr Moon is super cryptic even when he doesn’t need to be). In that sense its weirdly enough the opposite of the Target Dr Who novelisations that inspired it, that re-made Dr Who stories in a new format and made them worth experiencing all over again in a different format - and one that’s even more frustrating in the DVD and Blu-Ray age when we can re-watch as many times as we want. Instead this is a story to be savoured, to be seen intermittently (unlike other favourite stories which you can go back to over and over).

 First time round, though, this is one of the greatest Dr Who stories of them all: smart, funny, with more surprises and plot twists per minute than any other story and full of action and horror and terror and emotions and characters and mystery. It looks fabulous too, filmed in the reference section of Swansea library that, by chance, was being refurbished in January 2008 right when they needed it for filming, being transformed from a multi-reference library to a specialist one. Dr Who had three weeks to film in amongst empty shelves (all the books you see are prop ones, organised by colour) with some glorious CGI to extend rows upon rows, with scifi corridors to run down (worthy recipient of a VES award, for the best CGI on TV in 2008). Hopefully the library didn’t needs the table The Doctor draws on! There are some great ‘Easter Egg’ in-jokes on the shelves too: The Tardis’ operating manual, the book on ‘The French Revolution’ Barbara lent Susan in very first episode ‘An Unearthly Child’, John Smith’s ‘Journal Of Impossible Things’ from ‘Human Nature’ , ‘Black Orchid’, ‘Everest In Easy Stages’ (consulted by the 4^th Doctor in ‘Creature From The Pit’) and not only script editor Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ but Oolon Coluphid’s book mentioned in both that series and Dr Who, ‘The Origins Of The Universe’ (The 4^th Doctor is reading it in ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’). There’s a lot of love and understanding of this show in this story and a lot for fans past present and, in River’s case, future.

Besides, running down a library corridor is something everyone has wanted to do isn’t it? Trust Dr Who to make a quiet safe and often boring space noisy and exciting! And not only gives us a story where ‘everybody lives’ but everybody gets the perfect afterlife, reading. Ironically it was all a bit too noisy outside: bad weather meant almost every word spoken without a roof anywhere (and even some with one) had to be re-dubbed later, while you can still hear the rain in the background of some shots. An awful lot of work went into this story against the odds by some very tale ted people and it could have fallen apart at any time, had this been one draft less than perfect, one casting decision out, one skeleton prop wrong. But it isn’t: what could have been a confusing mess instead is one of the most perfect stories of them all. It’s one of the few stories most of fandom (which never agrees on anything) agrees is perfect, tied with ‘Parting Of The Ways’ and ‘Doomsday’ as having the highest audience appreciation index of any Dr Who story in history (89% of people considered it excellent – not even good but excellent). If there’s a single better more creative and imaginative story than this one in the entire Library Planet, well, I’ll be amazed. One thought though: does the ‘Library’ planet have a science fiction section? And if so what could possibly be in it when the science fact if this world is so wonderfully weird and imaginative yet plausible as this one?

POSITIVES +Moffat loves giving his two part stories a different ‘feel’ per episode, resolving a cliffhanger in such a way that we’re still kept guessing what’s going on all the way through the rest of the episode. with more questions to answer. In time it will become ridiculous (particularly his Peter Capaldi stories) but this one is a classic: we see the opening shot of the first episode again, but from the point of view of the Doctor not the ‘unknown narrator’, seen afresh with all the extra information we’ve gained since. In one move we find out that the girl is related to the computer ball in some way and the Doctor’s response (sympathy and more of his typical ‘oh so sorrys’) before we’ve quite caught up with him only pushes the mystery further.

NEGATIVES – 4022 visitors really isn’t much for a library the size of an entire planet (Moffat may have chosen the number as a homage to Douglas Adams’ ‘42’); even if it’s a small planet (and if it has every book then it ought to be massive: I’ve written half a medium sized planet myself by now, never mind all the Dr Who books out there) the size of most countries you’d think there would be a few zeroes at the end of that number. Even then, when they’re all apparently ‘saved’ and returned back to life we only see the merest smattering of them on screen, all of them humans which seems odd (this is an intergalactic library visited by everyone after all and surely we can’t be the only species to read books. I’m sure there’s a corner of the library filled with Oods and Sensorites somewhere at the very least, with Androgums browsing the cookery shelves, while I reckon The Master has spent a long time in the ‘crime’ section too). Most of the extras are friends or family of the cast and crew, including the director Euros Lyn’s aunt and cousin as they lived nearby; by coincidence he had in fact studied for his A-levels in the same room in Swansea library). The story could have really played up the existential horror of people who just popped out for the day to read a book waking up to find out that its hundreds of years later and everyone they knew and loved is dead (a sort of ‘Weeping Angels’ trick in reverse), but Moffat never pulls that lever, instead being too concerned with River Song’s story. Yeah that story’s a good one too, but there are so many other lives changed in an instant that day and the Doctor doesn’t even pause to think about them or help them navigate their new lives in the future. Shocking – I’m surprised they don’t take away his library card! It’s a shame, too, we never got Moffat’s original idea, a library where each ‘door’ led to a different planet of writers (an idea he sort-of-but-not-quite returns to as a space hotel in ‘Joy To The World’).

BEST QUOTE: Node One: ‘Additional. There follows a brief message from the head librarian for your urgent attention. It has been edited for tone and content by a Felman Lux Automated Decency Filter. Message follows: Run. For God's sake, run. Nowhere is safe. The Library has sealed itself. We can't... Oh, there're here. Arg. Slarg. Snick. Message ends’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Just as ‘Blink’ started life as a story for the Dr Who annual, so there are many similarities between ‘Silence In The Library and ‘Continuity Errors’, one of the first bits of Dr Who fiction Steven Moffat ever had published (and quite a coup at the time I remember, on the back of his success with ‘Press Gang’). A short story in the compilation ‘Declaog 3’ (1996) it’s a very Moffaty work involving time travel, big emotions and ‘ripple effects’, with several shades of ‘A Christmas Carol’ as the 7^th Doctor tries hard to win over the confidence of scary librarian Andrea over time in order to get her to save a planet from a giant catastrophe. The reason its tagged to this TV story, however, is that it takes place in The Library Of Alexandria, rebuilt in the 27^th century to take up the size of an entire planet. It’s described in much the same way as the one on TV (except with the lights on and filled with visitors). The 7^th Doctor and Benny have arrived there from the great ‘Dakroid Invasion’ and are desperate to stop their genocide of the Deltherons. Only The Doctor knows next to nothing about the species for a change and is desperate for all the information he can get - something that alas for him happens to be kept in the restricted section and the librarian just won’t let him see it because he doesn’t  have access (no wonder he got hold of the psychic paper!) He tries every trick in the book to be allowed in but Andrea knows about The Doctor’s reputation (she once attended a lecture about how manipulative he could be) and refuses to be blindsided by perception filters and mind manipulation. Benny takes over and uses her charm to discover Andrea’s sad backstory, that her daughter was injured in a tragic accident with killer plants years before which saw her husband leave her and left her deeply depressed, events which turned Andrea into the sceptical ice-cold librarian she is today. Only after a while of asking suddenly there is a man in her past who helped her get over the tragedy – suddenly she seems much more cheerful about life.  Even more so when she remembers that, actually, her daughter is still married – something made her son-in-law change his mind. Now her daughter is walking through the doors unaided and smiling, loving her job (in another sign of how much of a Moffat script this is she’s become an expert in nano-technology!) Yet the plan is still not working: Andrea’s smart enough to realise her memories don’t make sense anymore and have been changed by a certain time traveller. In desperation The Doctor tries again, this time tracking down the person badmouthing him at a lecture and replacing  it with a new speech about the importance of lending out books in order to maintain peace in the universe! A clever, intricately woven story about consequences and how easily people are swayed by propaganda, it’s evidence of just what a born Dr Who writer Moffat was is and always be in any space or time.

A mute shadow that kills is a great concept for a game so it’s no surprise that ‘Shadows Of The Vashta Nerada’ (2010) became one of the better loved computer games posted on the BBC website, the same week as ‘A Christmas Carol’. The 11^th Doctor and Amy find the Vashta Nerada in a London from the future that’s underwater, all the shadows escaping from books to avoid a watery grave. To up the ante the lights flicker, you have to escape shark attacks and avoid radiation as you locate the USS Elridge, the US navy ship allegedly used in the ‘Philadelphia Experiment’ (where it either turned invisible, wandered through to another dimension in a different year or an accident meant the sailors to the ship’s hulk, or all three, depending which ‘classified’ paper you read). I lost many happy hours to this game over the festive period when I should have been doing something more productive with my time (but then what could be more productive than saving the world, I argue?) They really should release all the Dr Who games on a disc or in streaming somewhere – there were as many bad ones as good ones but this one and ‘The Gunpowder Plot’ especially are the two best Dr Who computer games around from any era, including the high-falluting pricey ones. 

So far everybody’s favourite killer shadows have only appeared once in the extra-curricular Who back catalogue and even that’s a bit of stretch given that, you know, they’re skeletons. It’s a two parter too, no less, with ‘Night/Day Of The Vashda Nerada’ (2017) part of the second volume of Big Finish’s range ‘Classic Doctors, New Monsters’. ‘Night’ is a typical ‘base under siege’ story, with Tom Baker’s 4^th Doctor running around an amusement arcade-type of planet madly and trying to save people from their own shadows, good fun but not very deep. ‘Day’ is a much darker story with Paul McGann’s 8^th Doctor back on the same planet and not so much running as oozing. All those years and still nobody has learned anything and he’s losing his patience as people are still dying. Without the whole Library setting/River Song/Donna’s parallel life strands these stories both feel a little lightweight compared to TV, but they’re still both decent enough adventures that fill in a nice lot of backstory and the horror jump-scare feel works well on audio.  

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