Wild Blue Yonder: Ranking - N/A (But Somewhere Around #290)

 Wild Blue Yonder

(60th Anniversary Special, Dr 14 with Donna, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Tom Kingsley)

Rank: n/a (But somewhere around #280) 

‘Off we go into the wild blue yonder, Climbing high into the sun; only there’s no light outside and all of civilisation has gone. The only thing we have to shoot at is ourselves so put down your gun. We live in fame or go down in flame, the result is mixed as to which actual one. And its hard to work out where this story is coming from…’

Eighteen years ago Russell T Davies gave us a big budget second episode that was the sort of thing fans had been dreaming of: not just because he splashed the cash in a way that 20^th century ‘classic’ Who could only dream of but because in an era where dystopias were the norm we saw humanity have a future, where the end of the Earth was spent amongst friends, by and large (even if the last Human was a natural extension of what was happening in the current world, obsessed with appearances and plastic surgery). For the second episode of his comeback Russell T goes one better by going to certainly the edge if not the end of the universe itself with a bigger budget than even fans of the comeback could ever dream of thanks to new partners Disney – but in a story that has a very different feel to it indeed, with nota friend in sight and our heroes all alone. We’ve heard the title ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ kicking around for a while  now without knowing what it was like and we expected something similar to the episode ‘The End Of The World’ with lots of aliens and exploration and species. Only no: this episode is a two hander, bar the very beginning and very end, more about inner space than outer space, even if this being Dr Who there are two sets of Doctors and Donnas and one of those sets has really big hands indeed.  

In context this grim and grisly story seems to come out of nowhere, but it makes more sense if you see it as Russell T trying to get to grips with world and series developments since he left in 2010. One of the biggest developments in  the ‘real’ world since then is the format of ’escape rooms’, the actually more Moffat-ish idea of  being trapped in a tiny space with friends or strangers and having to use your combined talents and intelligence to work out how to get out. It’s such a Dr Who concept that there’s even a Dr Who themed edition, which is one of the most popular of the ‘themed’ rooms around. You can see why this would appeal to Russell.The Doctor is, of course, always working stuff out and using his wits to solve problems, but especially the 9^th and 10^th incarnations who existed under his stewardship (‘Wolf and Claw’ and ‘Silence In The Library’ both makes references to the fact that the Doctor has read every book in the universe he can get his hands on, from all species) so what better place can they send him in a story? Honestly it’s more of a surprise Moffat didn’t beat Davies to it. Only this being Dr Who the twist is that instead of being smaller on the inside this ‘escape room’ is an impossibly big spaceship and the threat isn’t being locked in till lunchtime but monsters trying to kill him and Donna. It’s unusual to see the Doctor not knowing something (especially one who at least looks like the 10^th Doctor, even if he isn’t strictly) and the joy of this episode comes from seeing him work stuff out in real time, without the usual shortcuts. Only this puzzle isn’t simple and even by the end there are more questions about what we’ve seen than answers. Not least the question for us viewers over whether this adventure is a symbolic one or not, like the days of old when we were invited to read between the lines (this story has the same hazy surreal quality as ‘Warrior’s Gate’ with the melancholy of ‘Logopolis’ and an added dash of the self-referential ‘Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ in it) or whether it just turned out weird for the hell of it (like the middle of ‘The Deadly Assassin’ or the end of ‘The Ultimate Foe’). Is this one of the cleverest Dr Who stories or one of the dumbest? I still can’t decide.    

It might be significant that we’re so far out into the edges of spaces, further than the Doctor’s ever been and as all good scientists (and Susan in ‘An Unearthly Child’) will tell you going far out in space also means doing weird things with time. Now, in a different time they would have burned Russell T Davies as a witch or treated him as a soothsayer, depending what era his own particular Tardis would have landed in. One of the hallmarks of the Russell T era is that his future stories are all as grounded in reality as his historical: he can see the future, based on what’s happening now, taken to a logical extreme. Easily the best of the series he went and made after leaving Dr Whop is ‘Years and Years’ , a drama that starts off rooted very much in the present day and then predicts the future, year on year, discovery by discovery, until the future seems very different even though every step itself is small and logical. ‘The End Of the World’ was absolutely coming from that same place: we shouldn't threat about the small 21^st century stuff because humans are indomitable and survive anything. Only the world of 2023 doesn’t feel like the world of 2010. Like this story it’s darker, scarier, more uncertain place to be. Nobody really knows what’s coming next and the few people who do (climate scientists, health experts) everybody stopped listening to long ago: having all the answers doesn’t mean people listen to you, it means people distrust you. This story feels like Russell returning to the idea of ‘The End Of The World’ but how he’d do it now, with all the extra information he’s gained about planet Earth, but now it’s bleak indeed, a dystopia not a utopia. ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ is a description of how Russell used to think of our future, but while it’s still wild it’s no longer blue but dark, without any stars to navigate by any more. The only things he sees in our future now are grotesque distortions of the people we used to be (where fake news means that it’s hard to tell what’s real or not and even our friends only resemble themselves but aren’t who they used to be) and where the pilot, the only person who knew where we were going, sacrificed themselves for the greater good a long time ago and their corpse is drifting in space.

The hint is that humanity (horseity?) civilisation never survived long enough to explore this far out, that we killed ourselves before ever getting to the edges of everything there was to explore. The only life that existed out here travelled from the past so now all that exists are the usually formless, shapeless beings that want to go back and take us over too, seeing the tardis as a means to do so. In ‘The End Of The World’ good people (well, sentient tress mostly I suppose and a big ol’ face in a box) sacrificed themselves for the greater good and everything was made better, eventually. At the end of the universe, though, there’s nothing left except the guilt and panic and anxiety of our heroes, as they’re chased down a character by distorted versions of themselves. Last time he tried this the world ended in a colossal explosion, but it was natural = something to be mourned, but humanity had already moved on to pastures new by then. This episode is different; things end, not in some huge explosion, but with a slow motion countdown that even the Doctor doesn’t see until it’s nearly too late. The difference between the Russell of old and the Russell of now is that nothing seems quite ‘right’ anymore: the universe has stepped out of balance, the humanity he wanted to reflect in word and offer hope to have become distorted versions of themselves, parodies who speak the same phrases without understanding what they mean, nastier versions of ourselves with bared teeth and rectus grins and who are rather literally heavy-handed. The universe has shifted from hope into chaos, with fake Donna (humanity’s representative) so close to herself that she’s only a few millimetres out by the end – enough for the Doctor to get the ‘wrong one’ when the Not-Things impersonate her, but still not herself at all: the ‘real’ Donna is stuck facing a fireball that’s coming straight at her (at least until some last minute heroics) . This right here is why Russell came back, to bring that light in space back again and light those stars, to put us back to being who we really are before reality became distorted, but first he has to reflect to us how dark we’ve become.

Well, maybe. There’s certainly something…odd about this story. Unsettling. Nightmarish in a way Dr Who only has been sporadically before: even ‘the third Matrix episode of ‘The Deadly Assassin’ and the last confused re-written part of ‘The Ultimate Foe only did this in bits though; ‘Yonder’ stays wild until the very end. I wish I did know more about where this surrealist story was coming from. It takes more than Cambodian flat mathematics to understand this story and Russell, someone who usually can’t keep quiet to save his life and can talk about everything, at speed, is not giving us any real clues. Of all the TV Russell’s made dating back to ‘Children’s Ward’ this is notably one that he hasn’t discussed at all; sensibly before it given that this story came as a complete surprise to all of us and it needed to be: if you’d read the description of this one before it went on it would take away the whole surprise, such as it is. I’m sad he hasn’t talked about it since though, on the new-look ‘Doctor Who Confidential ‘Doctor Who Unleashed’ (where his only interview was about missing Bernard Cribbins, of whom more later). So many of Russell’s stories (including last week’s ‘Star Beast’) are about his own relationship with this series that just won’t let him go, even after he walked away for so long. ‘Yonder’ feels like the sort of real nightmares a man with as vivid an imagination as Russell would come up with: time doesn’t work in the same way, things aren’t quite right, its full of guilt and regret and remorse and before you know where you are you’re running for your life down the biggest corridor in all of Dr Who chased by a distorted dream-version of yourself that doesn’t look quite right. We said in our reviews for the end of Russell’s original go, stories like ‘Midnight’ ‘Turn Left’ and ‘The End Of Time’ that Russell and via him the 10^th Doctor had grown too full of themselves and now were being haunted by entities that even used their own words against them. Well here it’s their image as well as their words: everything they stood for is all intrinsically wrong, as if the writer can feel the dark nothing that’s plaguing the rest of humanity stalking him too, turning him into someone he doesn’t want to be. In other words, was this was a real nightmare that Russell woke from and instead of thinking ‘I’ve been working too hard’ the way the rest of us would thought ‘that would make a great Dr Who story one day that would’.

Watching this sandwiched between the other two stories makes me wonder if its Russell’s own take on grief as shown in Moffat’s ‘Hell Bent’? In a way ‘The Star Beast’ is Russell’s past (why he got into the show wrapped up in characters he created in 2008) and ‘The Giggle’ is him as he is now (as healed as he can be after difficult times). This is his recent past, the time spent away from Who when his partner was very very sick and having to come to terms with that illness and the resulting loss. As anyone whose been through grief will tell you it makes everything in everyday life seem distorted, even the bits the loss shouldn’t touch, but does. It makes you different too, a distorted version of yourself. You don’t’ actually get longer limbs but heck, its no stranger than anything else that goes on. The idea of walking down a long corridor, not sure where it will get you but knowing that its probably somewhere scary, is also a really good metaphor for grief and loss. The moment when Donna, Russell’s spokesperson, so very nearly dies in the flames and is left screaming that the ‘wrong one’ was taken – that’s all true to life for anyone whose ever lost someone close and suffered survivor’s guilt too. Even by ‘Hell Bent’ standards though (and I know I’m in a minority of fans who wasn’t that keen on that episode) it’s all done very clumsily though.    

I wonder too if Russell’s been sitting down as a viewer these missing thirteen years to watch the Dr Whos made by his mates Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall and going ‘ooh look at that, I wish I’d done that’. Two, maybe three of the acknowledged top five classics since he left the show have been very Russell T style stories, big on emotion and character, that push the regulars to extremes and have them cut off from home and safety. The difference is that stories like ‘Amy’s Choice’ ‘The Girl Who Waited’ and especially ‘Heaven Sent’  do so in a very different way to how Russell works. He’s a genius at creating characters who seem real really quickly and delivering big ensemble casts as humanity struggles alongside each other, but those three stories are very spare and less outward, more inward. All three basically have the regulars going through some deep emotional crisis without contact with an outside world, whether it be through DreamLord, a wrong button or the 12th Doctor talking to himself while grieving for Clara. Personally I’m not that keen on any of those stories, which are heavy-handed doses of emotion in a series that’s usually more sparing, reserved and, well, British about how its characters feel. I’ve always wondered, though, what an episode like that done by Russell T, a master of emotion but never in a format quite like those, would be like. And now I know: the answer is very very weird I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason Russell hasn’t spoken about this story, despite talking non-stop about the rest, isn’t just to spare us a surprise but because this one was written in a pique of jealousy, frustration that ‘his’ programme that wouldn’t have comeback without him was being written by his friends with the same big swashes of emotion he always prided himself on, in episodes that became even more popular than anything he wrote. Maybe if he could write one too he would be just as revered? It might not be a surprise that this tale of alien repeating your words and your body is a neat double of what’s generally taken to be Russell’s most popular Dr Who script ‘Midnight’ as if to say ‘look I can do it too!’ Well, once again, maybe: this is one of those stories that gives you such little to go on and yet is clearly about…something so we’re almost invited to speculate about it. Even in a series that’s always been full of symbolism for other things happening it’s all very meta. Anyone whose read my other reviews will know I usually like meta, but this is all meta. There’s nothing else really to go on. It’s a story Whovians like me will have way more fun debating out loud than actually watching I suspect. 

Because I have to say that, even though 98ish% of my timeline seem to love this story and think it’s big and bold and daring, giving it – if you excuse the pun – a big hand, I’m not sure it works that well, if at all. The premise is a strong one: after Donna dropped coffee on the Tardis last week, in the way only Donna could do, it’s a clever idea to have the Tardis spiral out of control and go where it’s never been to before, the danger bring out the worst and then the best in our characters, he resentful that she’s messed up his ‘brand new’ Tardis before he had a chance to fly it properly, she resentful at being dragged through time and space despite being brave enough to say ‘no’ initially before getting talked into it. I love the idea that these two old friends, who usually only get to talk about their deepest feelings in snatched bits of conversations running down a corridor, now have nothing to prevent them from having some much-delayed conversations about difficult stuff, because this longest of long corridors is pretty much all there is (beating previous record holder ‘The Sunmakers’ which was filmed in Camden Town Tube Station which had the longest corridors in Britain at the time – these are a ‘cheat’ being all green screen). It’s very Dr Who, too, that these two characters who just won’t stop talking (and who I’m convinced were both Russell substitutes back in the days of series 4, with an opinion on everything) finally get a word in edgeways to admit how they feel – only to find out the person they thought they were talking to isn’t really them at all but a monster substitute. It’s sad that this episode ends up being just another Dr Who runaround after that – so are most Dr Who stories somewhere I know, but this one especially is working to so many different rules it’s a shame and it feels as if they’re on the cusp of saying something deep and important to each other and we don’t have much time left for them to say it before the Doctor regenerates again. There are lots of little bits that work well. The robot shuffling to a slow motion countdown is very Dr Who, doing what other more clichéd series would do but in a sort of reverse. The big emotions these characters are feeling – her wondering about her family, he wondering about the guilt of stories past are well handled.  The image of the Doctor surfing the Tardis to Donna is the one scene in this story that’s an unbridled joy. I’m super impressed that, after not playing as safe as we expected last week, the idea of safe has been parked right at the end of the universe for a story that’s as bold and rule-breaking as Dr Who as ever been. I have to say, though, of all the story-types I hoped might be done with a bigger budget, ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ (Dr Who’s other ‘escape room’ story with just the regular cast) wasn’t one of them.

For all its courage, though, it never quite hangs together as a story. For every scene that’s genuinely creepy and unsettling (overgrown Dr-Donnas running down the corridor on their hands and knees) there’s another that’s just daft (David Tennant’s head sticking under his legs as he scuttles back and forth like a crab). One of Russell’s greatest strengths is his plotting and that’s been set aside for a story that’s basically one long chase sequence. We learn frustratingly little about these creatures and where they come from – not bad in and of itself as we never actually learn much about the alien in ‘Midnight’, but the Not-Things don’t even get that much background: this isn’t a planet, it’s a spaceship and one that isn’t even theirs. Too much of this story goes for jumpscares and weirdness over character and storytelling. You can sort of do that in  a long-running series one you’ve ‘earned’ it, but this is the second story of a comeback set of three specials and ‘special’ is the word: we know we haven’t got very long with the 15^th Dr and Donna and to lose so much of that to watching them run rather than feel things feels like a waste. Those other stories Russell might have been copying, too, have a resolution strong enough to make them worth sitting through the repetition and oddness for (although I still don’t think the resolution in ‘Heaven Sent’ is quite as clever as people seem to make out it is): there isn’t one in this story. Yes we get the added drama of the Doctor taking the ‘wrong’ Donna and a neat scene where the new Tardis ramps has to get rid of her and pick up the ‘real’ one just before a fireball carries her out, but that’s no substitute for an ‘oh, so that’s what it was all about’ resolution. In comparison a surprisingly mafia image of a horse’s head drifting in space (symbolically to the audience a warning, perhaps, of our imminent destruction if we carry on down the path we’re travelling down?) is no substitute for ‘an alien thing that draws off your subconscious’ ‘a world where time works in two different timestreams’ and ‘because the Doctor’s trapped in a Gallifreyan ‘confession dial’ that just happens to be shaped like a castle’. These beings just are like that, apparently, because we’re so far out the way to where we normally go that the normal rules of size and scale and dimensions don’t work (which just sounds like a copout of storytelling to me). Perhaps an even more obvious parallel is with ‘The Edge Of Destruction’, another story-puzzle that only featured the regulars, but that story was one of the best because the clues are there for everyone to find and we learn a lot about the regulars as they work their slowly to a resolution.

 This story, for all its monumental budget (‘Destruction’ was easily the cheapest Dr Who story ever made, with just one set and four characters), doesn’t tell anything like as strong a story and can’t manage to be as genuinely unsettling and creepy too.
The resolution doesn’t explain much at all really: if the people on this ship died out some years ago and these alien beings don’t need eyes in our usual sense, who turned all the lights on in this spaceship? And how are they still going after all this time? Shouldn’t the Tardis have landed in the dark? Also what’s all the fuss about the song ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’ and why is the Tardis randomly playing it? This feels as if it’s going to be important (and maybe it will be next week) but for now one of the single most uncharacteristic things we’ve seen Donna do is stop running for her life to talk about the olden days when her teacher used to tell her off for singing the song like she was going to war when ‘it’s meant to be happy’ (it’s a generational thing: yes the song was written to be a joyous celebration of exploration, but then the navy adopted it as an unofficial song so now it’s the thing sailors hear before setting off to war to boost morale). That might be significant. But it isn’t yet. And if it is a Moffat-style clue for what comes next it’s not a clue done as sharply or cleverly as he would have inserted it. And why the bit about the salt that doesn’t work and how the Doctor fears inducing a superstition at the end of the universe where ‘the walls are thin’ will have repercussions? It’s a very un-Doctor thing to do, given the countless stories where he’s berated other people for being superstitious – unless he thought it was the Fendahl that had survived to the end of the universe. Even if that line ends up linking to next week’s story too it’s very out of place inside this one. Most odd.

 
That’s the real trouble with story I think: it’s Russell T adopting a Moffat style of scares  and horror with a tiny cast that just doesn’t play to his strengths. It’s a puzzle, an escape room, not an exploration of humanity and people. He’s best at pace and tone and mad epic plots full of explosions balanced with dialogue. He’s not so good at this sort of shapeless story about shapeless entities. Much as Russell might want to play around with the toys his successors have added to the toybox since he left (and there are a lot of mentions of what happened at the end of ‘Flux’ and the ‘Timeless gild’ arc surprisingly, given that even Chibnall had stopped thinking about both of those things by the end of his run) and much as he might want to tie this series together, showing us this isn’t just the 10^th Dr rebooted but a Doctor who lived through the last three regenerations since, it’s not his playground and he doesn’t understand the rules. It was the same whenever Moffat looked over the fence and went ‘gee I wish I could write like Russell’ and came up with a character-heavy story like ‘The Beast Below’ or ‘Deep Breath’: he can’t do with character what Russell does (while Chibnall’s stories worked best when he kept things simpler than either in both plot and characters, which took him a whole year to work out when he tries to keep copying the styles of both). It’s empty, with some good lines from the Doctor and Donna here and there and their usual great chemistry to half-save it, but nevertheless its fifty-five minutes of not much at all that feels like a waste because nothing really happened (and why is it such an odd running time? I could have hacked ten minutes out of it to make its standard length easy and for me more is almost always better, as you can tell by the length of these reviews). There are audience pleasing mentions of the HADS Hostile Action Displacement System (from ‘The Krotons’ in 1968) but all other links to the past have been cut, which is dangerous indeed for an anniversary special. This isn’t even the 10^th Doctor we knew but a newer, more touchy feely Doctor carrying round a second lot of angst (and I’m not sure the guilt over the Flux ending part of the universe really works as another time war, not least because the 13^th Doctor wasn’t as fussed as this at the time it happened - the same with the ‘I wasn’t born on Gallifrey’ aspect from ‘The Timeless Child’; he saw the Time war he was only told about who he is that’s not the same thing in dramatic terms at all. And frankly he’s carried enough weight and guilt around with him by now).Without the many layers and clues of a Moffat story a lot of ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ just ends up being deadly boring. And if an escape room hasn’t caught your attention, well, that’s a shame because there’s nothing else going on to look at except the puzzle.  

Most strange of all, the special effects aren’t that special, not given this series’ new budget anyway. While the long corridor itself is astonishing, the closest Dr Who has come to having that glossy feel of American scifi series that have more money than sense, the CGI Dr and Donna haven’t actually improved that much since the days of ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ and are a real let down, looking fake and unbelievable. The prosthetic limbs worn by David Tennant and Catherine Tate are good, but you can tell when they go back to being computer animations and it rather ruins the creepy effect. This wouldn’t be the first Dr Who, even in the modern era, to be let down by a special effect but it matters more than ever here because the monsters are pretty much all we have. Dare I say it, for a story that was filmed a full seventeen months ago and has been left in a cupboard since then, it’s all a bit rushed and feels as if it needed longer to gel, particularly the post-production but in many ways the writing too, a few scenes short of what it should be.

Well, you certainly can’t accuse this series of tasking things easy, that’s for sure. Dr Who is still finding new things to do even sixty years on, journeying out into the ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ of what’s possible in science-fiction. Should it be doing things quite this hard though? Perhaps the biggest crime of this story is that it didn’t give us what we were hoping for: we wanted a ‘Journey’s End’ style celebration of this series in its anniversary year, with or without cameos from other Doctors. Reducing the scope of sixty years of storytelling to two characters and then not really doing much with either of their characters wasn’t on any fans’ birthday wishlist. However clever this story is, however brave it is, it’s a story written with the head (and perhaps the jumpy nervous system) in mind: oddly for Russell there’s not much heart. This is the first time he’s had the chance to write an anniversary story (given that the show was off the air for the 40th anniversary and was very much Moffat’s baby by the time of the 50^th) and we expected something like Russell’s usual emotional, moving, heartwarming, uplifting works but times, well, sixty. Instead we get a story that would have been a headscratching curio at any time, but none more than now, in an era that’s trying to consolidate what came before and build up a new audience all over again. If even fans like me, who love the weirder end of the Dr Who canon, are going ‘what the?’ instead of ‘yippee!’I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing, even if it is better than standing still or going backwards.

Part utterly forgettable, part so haunting it will follow me in my dreams for weeks to come, ’Wild Blue Yonder’ veers so far from ‘The Star Beast’ in style and tone I think I just got spaceshuttle whiplash. Usually the second story of a showrunner’s time establishes what their run is going to be like (far more than the first story, where they’ve sweated buckets over and designed to have the broadest appeal). ‘The End Of The World’ successfully demonstrated just how bold and brilliant this series could be again and set the tone for much of what was to come. The difference with this story is I rather hope that ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ just ends up being a rather odd one-off because I’m not sure I could go through a story like this again, a story that broke all the rules – including ones worth keeping. Funnily enough this is the second Dr Who story to be partly set in 1666, but ‘The Visitation’ is this story’s opposite: an oh so bland walking Dr Who cliché where aliens cause the Great Fire Of London that feels as if it was written by committee. You could never accuse this story of being that, but just because you’re setting off to explore the unknown that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll find something worth waiting for when you get there. A real puzzle, in all senses of the word, a story that's ultimately not about the Not-Things but nothing.  

POSITIVES + There is, at least the glorious sight of Bernard Cribbins at the end, all too briefly if word is true that he only got to film this one last scene before falling ill last year. It seems odd that Sean and Rose would leave his side while the Earth falls into chaos, but if this was all they got time to film and they had to fit it in somewhere I can forgive that for the heart-warming sight of our friends together again, however briefly.  Plus its good timing for the Tardis to have a wheelchair access ramp at last!

NEGATIVES - The beginning is just daft. Even allowing for the fact that we needed some comedy somewhere in this story given how dark and grim it gets, the pre-credits teaser with Isaac Newton seems very out of kilter with what’s to come and (so far anyway – I might have to eat my words if it’s all explained next week) unnecessary. The idea that the Doctor gave Isaac Newton the idea for gravity by appearing in his apple tree and knocking some apples on his head would be a funny scene in, say, The 2024 Dr Who Annual but it seems odd if we’re supposed to take this as canon now. And even odder that Isaac Newton not only looks nothing like his paintings but is a totally different skin colour. Yes they can take artistic license in a fictional series (and yes, as many fans have pointed out, Jesus is always shown to be white, even though he’d have been born with dark skin), but why is this scene making such a point of something so inconsequential to the plot? This wouldn’t be the first time Dr Who has done something like this (the versions of Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare in ‘The Chase’ weren’t exactly dead ringers for the drawings we have of the real people, while I’m still not sure who the ‘Royal’ in ‘Silver Nemesis’ was supposed to be, despite having read it was Elizabeth II, because it sure didn’t look like her) but it still seems odd that they seem to have gone out of their way to find someone as utterly unlike the real thing as possible. Dare I say it, maybe Russell just idly promised his ‘It’s A Sin’ cast member Nathaniel Curtis a job in Dr Who and had no other places left for him? Oh and how come the word ‘gravity’ has been re-named ‘mavity’ in this world. Is that canon now, that everyone is meant to use? Or is it a change enough to re-shape the universe into the absolute chaos we seem to be promised next week? Either way, to mangle a joke, it seems out of sorts with this week’s story, a pun that misses the, well, mavity of the rest of the episode. 

BEST QUOTE:Donna: ‘There's something on this ship that's so bad the TARDIS ran away?’