The Giggle: Ranking - N/A (but somewhere around #90)

  The Giggle

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

Rank: n/a (but somewhere around #90) 

'I know a Toymaster whose shop is at the end of our street, his shop is full of toys and its really such a treat, He really is quite a sight from the top of his head to his silly feet, he’s a bit odd for a puppetmaster though, he’s always being cruel, and every time you go to buy something, he makes you out to be a fool, a never laughing comedian, he’s more serious than the worst teachers at school, Wahahahahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahahahahaha! Woohoohooohooohoohoohoo!’ 

Every generation’s been told that television would rot their brain. Now it turns out they were right! Some television is so good that it’s worth risking The Toymaker’s curse though and what better television can there be than Dr Who circa 2008 when Russell T Davies was in charge the first time, David Tennant was the Doctor and Catherine Tate was Donna? ‘The Giggle’ is like a greatest hits of the first Russell T Davies era. The main plot is ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ done properly, with a foe that’s been hiding out in our television screens since Logi Baird recorded the first ever image of a dummy. Via an evil sound that’s the catalysts for humanity’s worst aspects, just like The Master in ‘The Sound Of Drums’. There’s a modern Britain that’s been brought to a standstill just like in so many 9^th and 10^th Doctor stories. There’s a modern pop song soundtrack just for the hell of it. There’s even a get-out clause at the end with a ring that gets picked up by a lady with red fingernail polish, to be potentially brought back to life at a later date, just like The Master in ‘The End Of Time’. Repeats these days eh? They’re everywhere, each one infused with an extra dose of that maniacal Toymaker laugh. But, unlike this week’s starting point, Russell T Davies is no dummy. He absolutely knows what he’s doing and comes up with a story that’s the perfect bridge between the old eras and the new era that will please everyone – everyone the Giggle hasn’t infected anyway. This is a story that ties up a long arc that’s been running since at least ‘Midnight’ and ties it up into a big old bow with a happy ending that’s so right for these characters we know and love in 2023 (in a way that would have been dramatically unsatisfying in 2008-2010), before allowing Dr Who to run off into the sunset with a new face and a new attitude, ready for a new life on the Disney streaming service. And it’s glorious…mostly.

Wait, what’s that sound in my head?... Wait I feel an opinion forming… Oi listen to me, I’m right you know, I tell you my opinion matters! It’s flawed I tell you, flawed…Anyway, *cough* sorry about that, don’t know what came over me. The plot is caused by the Toymaker, nee Celestial, last seen all the way back in 1966, returning for a grudge match against the only person who ever defeated him (the Doctor having destroyed his world into the bargain). This time The Toymaker’s in our world, rather than the Tardis arriving in his, and he has a present for mankind: the gift of laughter. Only it’s a laughter that drives everyone mad, that’s been in every screen laughing away all the time and has been since 1925 when television was invented. As with ‘The Star Beast’ Russell’s been keeping a close eye on the inventions and changes in society since the last time he was showrunner and another of the big differences between then and now is the amount of screens that people carry around with them nowadays: phones, i-pads, i-pods, laptops, so many people carry mini-TVs around with them all the time that things have finally reached breaking point and mankind, always so easily led at the best of times, has finally been dosed so much that they’ve degenerated into an angry mob that’s always at each other’s throats.

It’s not hard to see what this sub-plot is about. Television has been dividing opinions since it was invented (and wasn’t as good as the ‘moving pictures’ at the cinema). People have always had an opinion. And why wouldn’t they? TV is a medium that’s personal in a way few others are – you basically invite people to sit in the corner of your living room and tell you stories and if you don’t like one you can channel hop to something better. Dr Who, though, is a series that has been creating divisive opinions and caused one of the most volatile followings around since the beginning. We get very proprietorial you see. This programme feels special, personal in a way few others ever do. We get caught up in it, look to it for messages, for a glimpse into our futures and a way to explain and understand our present, to absolve us of grief from the past. We lost it once, we’re not going to lose it again. Fandom is scared. It makes us do funny things sometimes (what other show would have a legion of fanzines slagging off the producer and trying to get him sacked, as happened with John Nathan-Turner in the 1980s?) That wasn’t really there so much the last time round in 2008. And now most of us have access to social media we can carry around in our pockets, close to our hearts, we can fire off an opinion quicker than ever before, however ignorant or uninformed or confused it may be. Back in 2005 there was a grumbling of discontent that it wasn’t like it was in the old days, but mostly fandom was right behind Russell because  following the wilderness years we were just grateful to have the show back at all. Russell was the BBC’s golden boy who could do no wrong, who’d revived the series because they’d given him basically free reign to do anything he wanted and he loved this series so much he re-built it from scratch even when the executives were convinced it was dead and could never be regenerated again.  We accepted it all, mostly, without question: Abzorbaloffs, burping wheely bins, Kylie Minogue and all. But then something shifted.

When Steven Moffat ended up in charge we got to compare, not just between the old days and the new, but between showrunners. With so many fans diving into past Who stories in the half-year of the 2009 specials there was suddenly so much Dr Who around that we could afford to be choosy. There began to be a slight backlash against the Russell T era from some of the plotlines (which could be solved a bit easily, with a ‘Russell et machina’ concept that came out of nowhere in a story’s final few minutes a common theme), the work practices that Christopher Eccleston has highlighted since leaving, John Barrowman and Noel Clarke’s questionable extra-curricular on-set antics to the representation or lack of it (because, even though it seems like yesterday, 2005 is a long way from 2023 in terms of an ever evolving society and how its reflected in programmes). Watching all that criticism unfold and not having a chance to respond to it directly must have driven an opinionated writer like Russell mad. This story then is Russell’s way of getting back at ‘us’, by showing that ever since the dawn of television there’s been an alien entity inside us all making us go ‘huh wasn’t as good as last week’. It’s not just mean though, like I feared from the titbits we’d been presented with. Let’s face it, Russell too is enough of a Whovian to understand this impulse too, to have done exactly the same, sitting round his bedroom moaning that the pink snake let down the Mara and the Myrka was just a pantomime horse and this show wasn’t like it used to be. How much worse must it have been for him though, watching his friends take over his favourite show that he’d brought back and had to give up, when he knew exactly how the show worked and how he’d have done things differently to avoid the pitfalls they fell into. It’s tempting to think of Russell in his bathrobe shouting and throwing things at the telly going ‘Ha, fish vampires, I’d never do something like that!’ or ‘That makeup in ‘Orphan 55 looks a bit suspect!’ The Giggle, then is inside all of us, even him. Not me though. Of course I don’t understand this need to inflict my opinion on everyone at all myself *cough* I wouldn’t do that at all ever no not me *cough* I don’t have an opinion about anything which is why I have three blogs *Cough cough*. Not me, no. Wait did you hear laughter just then? No? Me neither.

One of the things Russell assumed would be ‘controversial’ is the (mahoosive spoilers) bi-regeneration ending ,where the Doctor gets a split personality in the physical as well as mental sense. But honestly I’m not sure it’s as controversial as he fears, certainly less so than other ideas he’s had (I still haven’t got over Captain Jack ending up as the face of Boe yet!) It’s a welcome idea that serves the plot, gives the Tennant Doctor the perfect happy ending without being schmaltzy, gives Ncuti a big heroic debut and is the perfect timing for a show on the cusp of rebooting itself all over again. It also  tidies away lots of Who folklore, unlike the ‘Timeless Child’ arc that just destroyed half of it. In one go this move explains who the Curator of ‘Day Of The Doctor’ might have been, allows aging actors to play the same parts without having to worry that they don’t look the same (it explains ‘The Two Doctors’ ‘The Three Doctors’ ‘The Five Doctors’ ‘Timecrash’ and how we can have multiple ‘Shadas’) as well as giving us a hit of who ‘The watcher’ might have been (because Tom Baker got met by Peter Davison’s alternate self?) all in one go. Yes its stirred up a few rightwingers who think the show is too gay as it is, but really despite the name its just giving birth to twins and anyway hey they got representation too (as the gammon-coloured man shouting at a car in the opening scene!)
Better than that, it gives the Doctor – and its showrunner – closure. I’m convinced that the ending of this story is also about Russell and his relationship with this show, which inspired him to become a writer in the first place and which he was so desperately sad to leave in 2008. I’m convinced, writing in a run of earlier reviews of Russell’s 10^th Doctor-Donna stories – and I’ve begun to notice a few other people say this online since (hello my new friends!) – that this is the end of an arc that’s been around since 2008, when Russell’s husband Andrew Smith grew ill with a brain tumour. Russell was then at the peak of his powers and the height of his fame, having taken Dr Who from a broken programme into a worldwide institution. If he wanted to he could have run this series forever and nobody would have wanted or tried to stop him. His partner’s illness, though, came out of nowhere and took him off guard. He was in two minds about whether to slow down and look after his then-fiance or keep doing the job he loved. So for a while he did both, slowing down (with a year of just specials not a full series) writing out his angst in stories like ‘Midnight’ (where his words are used against him by fate as it mocks him and Dr 10 for thinking he was untouchable) ‘Turn Left’ (which imagines a life without the Doctor in it), ‘Stolen Earth-Journey’s End’ (one last celebration of an era before the Doctor is left alone at the end and Donna has her memories of her glorious run wiped as if it had never happened because that knowledge was too much for a human to bear, having to pick up everyday life all over again), ‘Waters Of Mars’ (where the Doctor is actively punished for trying to defy his fate and cling on to the show when he knows he has to let it go) and ‘The End Of Time’ (with David Tennant’s sad last words ‘I don’t want to go!’) He switches between writing himself as the 10^th Doctor and Donna (both mouthy, opinionated, full of life) depending what the story needs, but basically that’s his long unwanted tearful goodbye to the series that comes so naturally to him.

This trilogy, though, gives him a new chance to finish that story and update us with what happened following ‘The End Of Time’. After the scary walk into the unknown that was ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, where life felt distorted and ‘wrong’, ‘The Giggle’ gives us the happy end we all want. The Doctor literally splits himself in two with his ‘biregeneration'. He gets to both rest at home, to semi-retire and process and heal the way Russell got to for those years (sadly his husband died in 2018), while Ncuti gets to ride off into the future and start all over again, just as Russell is now. And it’s the perfect ending: the Doctor gets the family life he’s always dreamed of and his own Tardis for the odd jaunt into adventures when he wants to, but a stable base to come home to at last – the one thing he’s never had. He gets the time to heal, grieve, reflect, to lay down the burden and weight of all those adventures and all those damaged lives and souls lost along the way. But this time he doesn’t have to give up the best job in the universe because he gets to do that too, out there, somewhere. It’s the perfect end for a Doctor whose frazzled and running on fumes after a busy few centuries. The idea that the doctor subconsciously chose this face because he knew he could go ‘home’ to Donna is clever too, picking up on a Steven Moffat idea of how Peter Capaldi’s Doctor happened to share a face with the Roman Caecillus, saved from the ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ in, well, ‘The Fires Of Pompeii’, as a reminder that (at Donna’s prompting) he can ‘save’ people from disaster along the way without collapsing time, that his interventions do matter on a personal scale. Moffat even phoned his old pal Russell to chat it over and check that it was ‘canon’, to which Russell only too happily agreed; it’s sweet that this is Russell repaying the compliment (though goodness only knows why the 6^th Doctor chose the face of Commander Maxil who once tried to kill him – to remind the Doctor that some people find him irritating enough to shoot sometimes maybe?) We all thought it was going to be the Toymaker’s doing, but no - this particular doctor chose an old face because he needed a rest and a home and roots. This is the doctor who once said ‘I don’t want to go’, who would have done anything to stay, and now he doesn’t have to. Sublime.

 It’s not just the Doctor who gets a happy ending either. Just look at Donna – despite all the teasing about killing her across two stories now (in an era that nearly broke its author) she gets a far happier coda, coming out of it smiling with her memories of her glory days intact. In this story we see her with the husband who adores her, the child she loves and is so like her in all the best ways, her mum is kinder and has more respect for her, her Grandad is still kicking about somewhere, she gets her best friend back and a job at UNIT on a proper salary. Not bad for a lovable loser temp from Chiswick who was once manipulated by a giant spider. And she can nip out for a bit of space travel if she wants (I love the hint that the doctor’s been doing this behind her back with her family members but told them not to tell her – I so want a big finish spin off of him travelling with Sylvia!)
It’s an even happier ending for Russell, though. In ‘Stolen Earth’, his ‘moving on’ story, he left his surrogate with her precious memories wiped, all those glorious moments taken away, because to carry them around in his head now he wasn’t making this show was just too painful. But now, after a period of mourning, he’s back to full health and happy as much as she is. Coming back to this show at all must have caused more than a few sleepless nights about whether it was worth doing again. All that stress, all that worry, all that respoknsibility. And the ‘Giggle’ that gives everyone an opinion on what he does and a past to live up to makes it all the harder second time round. There’s a line early on in this story about how the Doctor admits to Donna ‘this time it might kill you’ and she replies ‘yes but what an adventure’ – that’s Russell going back to the show with his eyes wide open this time, despite knowing all the heartaches and stress and damage, because to not come back would hurt more. Because the lure of this series, which has been drumming away in Russell’s head all this life, is just too strong to break.
Along the way Russell gives the gift of retirement to all the Doctors – and maybe all the showrunners, script editors and producers of this series too. I love the idea, as hinted in Russell's commentary for this episode, that in this moment of biregeneration all the doctors became ‘twins’. I adore the idea that Hartnell’s doctor is lying on a beach sunbathing with his feet up somewhere getting his strength back after the events at the North Pole in ‘The Tenth Planet’, perhaps with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor there too or travelling with John and Gillian like in the comics, that Troughton’s Doctor is playing the recorder in an intergalactic peace orchestra somewhere while his other self runs around saving the universe, that a version of Pertwee’s doctor stayed behind to look after the Brigadier into old age, that the fourth doctor didn’t become absorbed by the watcher but is still out there being eccentric, that the Davison doctor and the Colin Baker and McCoy and McGann and Eccleston doctors all got to live longer, happier lives than we got to see (Russell, whose clearly thought this through, laughs at the idea of two doctors waking up on a morgue slab in ‘The TV Movie’). I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the idea of the Doctors sharing clothesthough – now it’s put the idea of two William Hartnells looking bewildered in their underpants in my head I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forget that image now, which is permanently seared in my head, in a ‘Giggle’ type way.

Ah yes, slight digression there, but it’s hard to see past the end of this story it wraps up so much but there are lots of other things to enjoy. I love idea of the giggle making people so belligerent and nasty. Honestly, it explains a lot. The world is a much stranger, sadder, angrier place than it was when Russell left his job on New Year’s Day 2010. In many ways it’s nastier than ever, full of trolls with an opinion on everything and people whipped up into a frenzy of hate speech (I’m willing to bet there’s a double dose of ‘The Giggle’ on GB News). This is demonstrated quite brilliantly in the scene where Kate Stewart, the biggest authority figure we have in Doctor Who and known to be a decent un-corruptible sort of a character, turns off the machine she’s used to keep her mind protected to reveal what people are like with the Giggle in their head. Shee lets fly a crescendo of anger at the Doctor’s innocuous questions, spits ‘it’s a conspiracy!’ at Donna and Mel for being two redheads and yells at Shirley ‘Get out that wheelchair, I’ve seen you walking!’ It’s a very brave thing to do in a teatime show sort-of for children still and really brings the going home by having the Brigadier’s daughter, of all people, say it. Because people do say those things to strangers and even friends in a way they never used to, as a semi-disabled person who gets around by hobbling slowly I’ve been on the receiving end of it myself. You would never have got this in a Russell story the first time round because the world wasn’t like this in 2010. Mostly. Even the prime minister is in on the act: the original script has the stage directions ‘make the p.m. as much like Boris as possible’ (we know Russell’s not a fan, ever since his lockdown story where he turned Johnson into an Auton) and while he isn’t really that similar on screen, it’s a brilliant thirty second long bit of character assassination. I’m convinced there’s a covid dig in there too (the pandemic’s still ongoing, folks!): I’m super impressed at how many staff on the production team are still wearing masks on ‘Unleashed’, even granted that these specials were filmed a while ago now when people were more careful, everyone but writer and stars in fact. The line about how, even if they rushed a life-saving cure for the giggle out to people ’not enough would take it up’ really hit home as someone with a chronic illness forced to stay indoors because it’s just not safe out there with a pandemic still raging. Sigh…Anyway, the world turned ‘right’, just as Russell foresaw in, umm, ‘Turn Left’. I love the very Russell contrast too though that the people who do still care now care a lot more openly. Dr 10 was unable to tell anyone he was close to that he loved  them: Rose, Martha, Donna the first time round, that was a character fault that was his undoing in so many ways andf a guilt he carried around with him. Look at him now though, hugging himself (how utterly brilliant that the first thing this new Doctor foes is comfort the old one!), swapping tales of loved ones won and lost, the sadness as Drs 14 and 15 reflect on the loss of Sarah Jane and Adric (I still can’t believe they mentioned Mavic Chen though, that was my favourite line!) Much as I love the inter-doctor bickering in other anniversary stories I hope we get more of this lovefest in modern Who. One odd part though: how comes the Doctor gets all ranty and shouty about humanity at one point, about how the Giggle is exploiting our worst features? While I won’t deny its true, that the Toymaker is only exploiting what’s already there not inventing it, having the Doctor shout then and only then is an odd plot point: I thought he was about to be overtaken by the Giggle too, but no – all traces of it are gone by the next scene. Is this just Russell T letting off steam about how nasty our world has become? (There are a lot of past Who stories where Russell shows how unimpressed he is with humanity as a conglomerate whole, tempered by how much he loves individual humans).

I loved the Toymaster’s puppet show, which plucked the heartstrings while plucking the puppet strings in all the right ways. There we were, the fanbase, all poised for a multi-doctor regeneration story given that this is an anniversary and everything and what do we get? A puppet show version! The puppets are brilliant (please tell me we can buy them at a future date!) right down to the detail that they were all wearing the clothes the Doctor last saw them in. I’m not sure what happened to Martha (her ambiguous ending maybe doesn’t have the emotional whallop of Rose’s, Amy’s and Bills’ from a Toymaker point of view) while Nardole, Yaz and all sorts of companions from the past aren’t exactly untouched by their life with the Doctor either, but I love that the others were all there…sort of. I wish they’d gone further actually but honestly we’d be there all day (‘Katarina and an air lock – poomf! Sara Kingdom in the time destructor? Old. Adric? Kerbloom! Peri – bald!’) There’s a great episode in ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’(a series very much in Russell’s character-driven message-learning style) that spends a whole half hour with our heroes watching a bastardised, misunderstood replica of all their adventures in a low-fi way in a puppet show on stage and struggling to stay quiet about the awful way their characters are treated, a pithy comment on biographical dramas. I hoped for a moment that Russell was going there too. It wasn’t to be but I loved it all the same.
I adore the fact that the Toymaker marches into UNIT to the sound of the Spice Girls. You may have noticed a few jokes on this site about the fearsome fivesome (there are even more in my music blog and 39 books and counting!) and I’m beginning to feel a bit spooked now they’re a part of canon now too…For me they’re the moment civilisation started going downhill, when culture and music drifted from the left to the right, in a sea of mass-produced commercial fodder that was all based on a lie, that caused my entire generation to think they’d ‘invented’ feminism when I was already deep into my Janis Joplin and Grace Slick records (and even they got their inspiration from earlier musical figures), reducing important issues to a cheeky soundbite that just kills off the whole conversation. So much for girl power: the band’s songs were all written by their middle aged male manager, at least at first, while I’ll never forgive a band who had that much influence over the young laughing in the face of a tramp in one of their music videos and aiming an Ingrid Pitt-Myrka style kung-fu kick at one. For me The Spice Girls are a sign of everything that’s wrong with the universe, how far we’ve come out of whack with our sensibilities and moralities, the four horsemen of the apocalypse (plus a spare)…In short, they’re my nemesis, the antithesis of everything I hold dear. So to have them as the soundtrack of a celestial being intent on driving humanity crazy by making humanity righteous, belligerent and nasty makes the Toymaker’s dance scene in UNIT my new favourite Dr Who scene of all time. Even if it’s just like the one the Master did dancing to ‘Rasputin’ which I hated (its not quite as hypocritical as that sounds: The Spice Girls make more sense as the music of choice for the Toymaker than a disco song about a man who was actually kind and everything The Master is not). I’d hoped that Russell was on my wavelength here too, that he’d seen through the façade of everything awful The Spice Girls represent…but then in the ‘Unleashed’ documentary for this episode he commented that he picked it because it was just ‘a really belting pop song’. Hmm. I see The Giggle has been at work with him too, they’ve even brainwashed Russell!

One thing I loved which I wish there’s been a bit more about was the creation of television, because that’s such a clever idea. The idea that the first ever thing to be put on TV got hurt, burnt up by the studio lights, is a great metaphor for what TV does to the people who make it, something Russell’s been looking at on and off since series 4 too. As much as this story ran in parallel to the one in ‘Idiot’s Lantern’ (and Moffat’s ‘Day Of The Moon’ arc with The Silence adding images to the moon landing footage) it’s such a great idea that there’s enough room for a sequel (or two) and we really should have seen more of Logi Baird and his hapless assistant.  The Stookey dummy was the script’s starting point: Russell was researching a drama about the history of television that never came to anything (possibly for last year’s BBC centenary, in which case that’s because he became busy with Dr Who instead), saw a picture of the scary original puppet (which looked much how it does in this story) and went ‘woah: there’s a Dr Who monster right there’. The Toymaker, who always seemed an odd choice for a baddy to bring back (only a quarter of his episodes exist and only half of his panned stories were ever made after all and he’s quite a controversial character within fandom) was then picked purely because he’s the most obvious ‘puppet master’ in Who (and not, sadly, because the rest of the story had been returned to the archives as I’d hoped; after all its surely no coincidence Moffat brought back The Great Intelligence the same year ‘Web Of Fear’ arrived back at the BBC).

It’s not all fun and games, though. (well, it is in a way I suppose…) This is a very comvoluted sort of a story, one that doesn’t flow that well, lurching from scene to scene without Russell’s usual grace and precision to paper over the cracks. There are some odd and surprisingly clumsy moments that are surprisingly tone deaf for a story that’s all about being kind. Donna’s gag ‘Do you come in all colours?’ when the Doctor biregenerates is well out of character and deeply unnecessary, the sort of thing the viewers of 2066 will be looking back on with horror the way we do now at 1966. The scene of heavy innuendo, where the Toymaker chucks balls at the Doctor who just stands there catching, beats anything Chris Chibnall actually did in my list of ‘worst scenes of all time’. I cringed during the entire opening scene – even though I know I’m meant to, nevertheless it was hard to sit through in 2023. 

Ah yes. One thing that didn’t work for me was the toymaker himself, which is a shame because he was rather integral to this episode after all. Russell says in the behind the scenes that he didn’t want to shy away from the Toymaker’s racism, saying that a mass murderer would be more than happy to upset people this way and yes I can see that. This regeneration just happens to be a cod-German, the way the ‘old’ one was (controversially) cod-Chinese, with a fun gag about ‘truly becoming celestial’ in a cosmos sense along the way, but here’s the thing. This story opens with five minutes of the Toymaster being racist and bullying Logi Baird’s assistant for the colour of his skin. Perfectly in keeping with what the Toymaster stands for (even though the racism of the original is a bit overstated; Michael Gough didn’t attempt a Chinese accent or make racial slurs, he just wore Chinese fancy dress). Even more in keeping with this story. But for interested new fans who don’t know the lore (and why would they? A good proportion of the fanbase or general viewers who haven’t yet looked out an obscure story from 1966 where only one episode exists) and don’t stay to see the rest of the story just get to take away five minutes of some of the most squirming TV in years. They could have at least moved it down the episode a bit. Honestly, too, that accent is more uncomfortable in 2023 than it needs to be. Dr Who is always picking on Germans (when its not picking on the French). Surely a much better, kinder, idea would have been to have the Toymaker picking on everyone and changing his accent from scene to scene, taking in Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Scouse, Cockney, Brummy brogues, everything, so that  we could see the Toymaker is racist against every race, not just the ‘easy’ targets. It feels wrong, ina way I’m willing to bet Michael Gough’s Toymaker didn’t in 1966.  

It’s more than that though. I love Neal Patrick Harris to pieces but he’s not right for this role. As a character he’s just John Simm’s mad Master all over again, with no difference except the casual racism. The actor looks uncomfortable at times having to act so outrageously and OTT, while at others he looks as if he’s having a bit too much fun unleashing his inner bigot. He’s basically a larger than life Avengers type villain, right down to the playing cards, and Dr Who is a series that’s closer to real life than it’s rotten one-time ITV competitor. That accent undercuts every line he says, so The Toymaker never gets to have a ‘big’ epic speech the way other Who villains do. The other trouble is after casting (producer Phil Collinson’s suggestion)it was re-shaped even more for Neal Patrick Harris, not the character we saw in 1966. The Master can regenerate. The Cybermen can update. There’s no reason why the Toymaker should be any different to how he was last time we see him, cool, calm, unruffled and far more threatening: he is, after all, a being who can live forever and who has an ego the size of a planet: he doesn’t think he needs to change at all. Honestly, too, we’re told about his powers but never really get to see him. Yes he makes the world angry at each other, but it was heading that way already believe you me (covid infections don’t help –genuinely, its minor brain damage, the virus inflames and damages the brain pathways that regulate danger and stop you sending that angry text that makes people upset. Apparently Russell has been reading the same medical journals I have). Otherwise the most the Toymaker does is set a bunch of dolls on Donna (a genuinely creepy moment, but one Steven Moffat did hundreds of times before, usually better – horror is not Russell’s forte as you could see in last week’s largely forgettable episode), hide behind a bunch of doors and be challenged to a game of…catch . ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ story was never my favourite, a great idea quickly descending into a bunch of cheap parlour games, but at least the Toymaker himself was a credible threat, pushing the Hartnell Doctor to his limits and challenging him with his mind (even the Doctor finds ‘The Trilogic Game’ a challenge, as well he might – it’s probably the hardest ‘game’ there is). A game of catch is not the same at all. The toymaker’s domain too was properly scary and threatening , full of televisions inside robots, clowns, ballerinas and the sense of something not quite right. All we get here is two minutes of David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa throwing balls at a man dressed up like a half-clown, half-magician. All those years on and they still don’t realise what makes for good television is more than just seeing people play games. With all that Disney money they could have used this big showdown is hugely disappointing: I was hoping for a game of ‘battleships’ with real battleships or ‘hangman’ with an actual noose or ‘Hungry Hungry Hippos’. With actual hippos! As for the resolution, well, it’s pitiable in all of Russell’s worst ways: this greatest threat in the universe, who is such a sore loser last time the Doctor beat him he destroyed his whole kingdom in an attempt to take the Doctor down with him, simply gives up and literally folds under the pressure, ending up a tidy little box. There’s a great Toymaker story to be made one day and one I’ve waited a long time to see, but this still isn’t it. The closest, by the way, is still ‘The Nightmare Fair’, the story written for Colin Baker’s unmade season 23, written by one-time 4^th Doctor producer Graham Williams, which had a showdown over some computer games in Blackpool (it’s a most excellent novel and Big Finish audio).  

This is, however, a great story. Even if it’s not a great ‘Toymaker’ story.  It’s a more than worthy end to the David Tenant arc, giving that whole era of the show a sense of closure that feels natural and doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It really sets up the next era of the show nicely (Ncuti absolutely owns the screen from the second he arrives in his underwear: not many actors could carry that off, especially acting up against Tennant, but watching this you can see why they knew from the opening seconds of his audition that the was right for this part). While the special effects of the Doctor being pulled in two are a tad suspect (they had a few goes at it in post-production apparently but still don’t quite get it right) the scene of a Tardis being divided in two is fab. There are some great lines sprinkled throughout as is Russell’s want, just the right balance of drama, comedy and action sequences. Some fans are bitterly disappointed this isn’t more of an ‘anniversary’ special with no cameos from anyone (so for once those actors weren’t lying when they said they hadn’t done anything…) and yes I am a little bit too.  But heck, we got the 14^th Doctor turning into the 15^th Doctor alongside the companions of the 7^th and 10^th Doctors, fighting an enemy of the 1^st Doctor with the UNIT setting of the 3^rd Doctor and a continuation of the 3^rd Doctor tale about the planet of the aliens who only talked by using their eyebrows started in 1970 (a sweet return to ‘Spearhead From Space’, the story whose plot was lifted for the tale where it all began for Russell, ‘Rose’, back in 2005 – we still don’t know if he’s joking or serious). That’s a lot of heartwarming stuff to be getting along with, especially alongside the short but sweet ‘Tales From The Tardis’ introductions on i-player (which I really did think might get linked to this trilogy more, but never mind). This is a story that packs a lot into its sixty minutes (one for each year of Who!) – a bit too much at times, as we zip through scenes we could have done with more of (Stookey Bill, the Toymaker’s threat, the opening chaos, the final showdown which is over in the time it takes to chuck a few balls in the air). By contrast  I could have done without the ten minutes of tedium as the doctor and donna chase the toymaker round a set of doors, chased by Goblin puppets that would have looked cheap in the original 1960s story. I still think that ‘Star Beast’ was a more rounded, celebratory, proper Dr Who anniversary like the old days but with updates style episode and I wish the other two had followed on a bit more from that. I wish the whole Toymaker thing had been handled better. I wish Martha hadn’t been forgotten again (it’s not fair Rose and Donna both get a Doctor and she doesn’t, with Mickey no substitute at all!) I wish there were more plotholes wrapped up: we still don’t know who The Meep’s boss is and it seems odd that we spent a whole story getting to know new Rose and her own job as a Toymaker without that being in this plot somewhere. I wish Flinx had been more than just a token comedy robot for a few scenes. I wish we’d seen Wilf one more time (though its great he’s still alive in the Dr Who universe and the Doctor gets one last gag giving his moles a force-field, even if shooting anything seems very out of character for an old soldier who understands the value of life). I wish the three specials had tied in together better. I wish…I wish...I wish…But that’s probably just The Giggle in my head talking, never satisfied and always wanting more. I loved it really. Heck, its Dr Who, I love it all, even the bits that don’t work (like last weeks’ episode). This story is a great reminder of that, how even when its bad there’s no other show on television that can do what this one does and how we have a man in charge who knows that too, with every fibre of his body. Greatest of all ‘The Giggle’ clears the decks of nostalgia for what comes next, while leaving the door open to come back again for a future anniversary or maybe a spin-off series. It’s the best of all possible endings, giving hope to the fans who want to see the show move forward without resting on its laurels and those who just want to stay in yesterday. Most of all, though, this is a brilliant ending to an arc that’s been running fifteen years now, a moving warm hug from showrunner to fans and Doctor. Flawed as it may be (and the toymaker is a really big flaw) this story has all the heart of Russell at his best. Unlike 2010, when cruel was the right way to go for emotional impact, giving everyone a happy ending is just right for 2023. We need a show like Dr Who to give us hope again and make us kind, in a world that keeps trying to make us tough and harsh. And ‘The Giggle’ does that ever so well.      

POSITIVES + I love the UNIT helipad. After being wiped from existence in a throwaway line by Chris Chibnall the Earth’s greatest military extraterrestrial outfit is now back front and centre the way they should always have been, the extra money from Disney really coming in handy for the effects. Funnily enough the plot doesn’t need to be on a helipad at all but, hey, Russell can splash some cash and as fans of this era of the show were feeling most unloved of all the past few years it’s great to have that money spent on them.

NEGATIVES – Why was Mel there exactly? Nice as it is to see Bonnie Langford get a story where she actually gets to be a computer programmer (something she talked a lot about in the 1980s but a skill she was never actually seen to use) the plot had no reason for her to be there, except Ingrid Oliver (Osgood) is busy getting married to TV presenter turned crime writer Richard Osman (Oliver, not Osgood, although that is a lovely image!) and there was a vacancy. Mel gets almost nothing to do, except point out that the Doctor likes redheads (you wait till Donna finds out about Amy!) Sadly the script originally gave her more to do – its such a shame they cut the bit where she gables during the regeneration about how it happened before in ‘Time and the Rani’ with both Doctors glaring angrily at her for stealing their ‘moment’ (cut in editing for being too obscure we’ve for Whovians, but a neat character bit!)  Many fans have been asking why Mel at all? Well, she’s another part of the Russell T Davies story. Back in his first job, when he was still a TV presenter rather than a writer, he was working on strangely serious and old-fashioned retro children’s TV series ‘Playschool’ in 1987 (the series that made a star out of Brian Cant despite the world seeing him wearing massive shoulder pads in ‘The Dominators’) when they happened to share a rehearsal room with the Dr Who team making what turned out to be the TV story ‘Paradise Towers’. Russell looked over from his staid serious work colleagues at the amount of fun the Dr Who team were having, especially Bonnie’s mad laughter (you see, we’re back to giggling again), and thought ‘I’m with the wrong people – those are my people’. Back in his original run there wasn’t too much nostalgia as Dr Who rebuilt itself (Sarah Jane aside – and that was a spinoff show so it was the future too) so Russell never got a chance to have Bonnie return the first time round, but now he can. I just wished he’d used her more (hopefully the shots of Bonnie sharing a moped with Ncuti in Dr who magazine suggest there’s more to come).

BEST QUOTE: Donna ‘I’m already running!’

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?’

The Star Beast: Ranking - N/A (although somewhere around #80)

 

The Star Beast

(60th Anniversary Special, Dr 14 with Donna, 25/11/2023, showrunner; Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Rachel Talalay) 

Rank: N/A (but around #80 if I had to pick)

 ‘Baby you can drive my shuttle-car, yes I’ve come from a far-off star, and poor Meep doesn’t know where he are…Meep meep, meep meep, kill!!! [evil cackle]'

You wouldn’t think there would be space for nostalgia in a programme that was all about change and regeneration, that reinvented itself every few years, but there is. Dr Who is a programme that worms its way into your heart and mind so that once seen you carry parts of it with you for life and going back to those times can be a wonderful thing when done right. Russell T Davies knows that better than anyone: he brought back this show the first time round, against all the odds, because he loved it and wanted other people to love it too. And he knows how much people love his era, especially the fourth year with Catherine Tate’s Donna alongside David Tennant’s 10^th Dr, particularly – that there’s been very nearly almost long enough now for the children who got hooked on this show in the 2005 comeback to have children of their own now old enough to be introduced to that series. So for the first fruits of Russell’s comeback as showrunner, something we never thought in all of time and space we’d ever see again, fans get all the heart-warming things we thought we’d never get to experience new again, most of them within the opening few minutes: a newscaster giving updates on the plot just like the olden days, the clever mirroring of how the Dr and Donna meet again and his reaction to the name ‘Rose’, allonsys, multiple what?’s, references to Nerys, the Doctor being whalloped by a mother-in-law, being trapped by plastic screensan forced to make a sacrifice, even (massive spoilers alert) the return of the Doctor-Donna: you name it - if it’s a bit of folklore that people remember about the 10^th Doctor era then it’s here somewhere.As classy as Steven Moffat was at writing for the 10^th Dr in the 50^th anniversary specials nobody’s words fit this doctor’s new teeth as well as Russell T Davies. One of the most impressive things about ‘The Star Beast’ is that it feels as if actors and writer both have never ever been away. You could beam the plot beats and most of this dialogue back through a wormhole to 2008 and nobody would notice the change: there’s all the joy, all the intelligence, all the emotion of old. And it’s wonderful.

 
This isn’t the same doctor who left in 2010 though, but a whole new regeneration whose lived that bit longer and is more in touch with his feelings (it happens with age). Russell T Davies had been busy regenerating too. After all, the Earth isn’t the same way it was thirteen years ago. We’re divided more than ever, especially the younger generations, between people who care more than they ever used to and people who couldn’t care less and Russell knows which universe he likes better. This is an era when we’re heading closer to the fascist parallel world of ‘Inferno’ than ever before, with right-wing governments arriving in power all around the world (including Holland just this week), the frustrations of modern day living splitting people apart and setting communities on another. This is a fanbase who notoriously won’t agree on anything never mind politics, so despite being a series that’s promoted inclusivity and togetherness in 99% of episodes and delivering ecology tales about green maggots and stories about 1960s revolutions and endless tales about being kind in its early days, when the series was let’s not forget made by the first female producer and black director at the BBC, there’s been a growing backlash against the perceived ‘wokeness’ of the Chris Chibnall era, as if that’s a bad thing (and even though that era had ‘Kerblam!’, the most openly right-wing pro-Capitalist Dr Who story since The Dominators’ back in 1968). Russell could have chosen to do the easy thing, told himself that he was after Dr Who being big and family and mainstream again with the new backing by the Disney corporation (surely the most family-orientated business on the planet) and that he couldn’t afford to ruffle feathers. Especially in an all-important first episode. Every other showrunner would have sat on the fence and waited. But Russell knows that all eyes are on him with this one for the first time in a long time and he might never get an audience this big again. And so he says it anyway, because that’s what Dr Who is for: fighting these social battles in public and giving a voice to marginalised voices who just don’t get seen on mainstream television (at least not without their gender or their sexuality becoming the whole character, rather than an incidental detail the way it is with straight  white middle-aged men). As much as this is a show about time travel, its always been the job of Dr Who to reflect the full range of society that watches it and has since the beginning (it was the first show to have a black man on telly in a heroic role after all, as an astronaut and a show that, when everyone else was doing blackface as a matter of course, painted Mavic Chen to make him blue). Russell’s one big regret the first time round s showrunner, as is clear from his interviews, is that he didn’t include as much inclusivity as he should have done and, while his big ambition was to put more gay characters into Dr Who to give people like him and his friends someone to seen television like themselves, he stopped there and didn’t help the other marginalised groups out too. Every era fights its own battles on its way to things become seen as ‘normal’ and accepted in society and one of the biggest battles over the past few years has been Trans rights, with disability a little way behind. Russell could have gone the other way: after all, we know from his first era that he worships at the altar of J K Rowling storytelling and could have followed her attacks on the Trans community and he wouldn’t be the first person in the gay community to pile on an easy target (indeed, he wouldn’t be the first person in the gay Dr Who writer community). But instead Russell goes the other way, puts the character of Rose, Donna’s daughter, front and centre and makes one of the most beloved characters in all of Dr Who a proud and protective mum proud of her. He even makes Rose’s non-binaryness part of the plot so that it can’t just be dismissed (spoilers again), riffing on the lucky coincidence that the Doctor-Donna’s last words in a completely different context in 2008 were ‘binary’ and having Rose’s non-binaryness become effectively a scifi superpower that saves the day (‘I’m neither, I’m more’ Rose, referring to her gender, the line that’s most got fans in a tizzy).Russell’s risking a lot to say something that matters. And that’s even more wonderful and Dr Whoy.

The same with UNIT’s new scientific advisor Shirley, who has weapons smuggled in her wheelchair and who gets to make barbed comments about being one of the most important people in the world needed to keep us safe who can’t even access most rooms, because disability access is so poor (even the Tardis has disability ramps now). Because Dr Who is for everyone, whatever half the fandom might tell you. This series should be a safe space for everyone to watch without feeling attacked – you know, in between the constant alien invasions. After all, nobody knows what it means to see someone like you on telly as much as a boy growing up gay in the 1970s and 1980s and Russell has never forgotten the power of television to shift perceptions and make what to people who don’t see something every day seem odd and strange and scary be perfectly normal and acceptable. And the Doctor’s seen everything in his travels: he doesn’t bring the ethics of the generation of viewers but something bigger and more accepting. I love the scenes of him recognising a kindred spirit in Rose who feels like an alien and an outsider because of who they are and the comparisons made to a timelord who flip-flops between genders and so is effectively non-binary too. Whereas the Chibnall era paid lip service to certain ideas some would call ‘woke’ but is really just good manners (such as giving Ryan dyspraxia and making the Doctor a woman) he never followed through (Ryan’s disability came and went, sometimes in the same scene, whereas there’s nothing Jodie Whittaker does that’s more feminine than her predecessors unlike, say, Romana) and things like that ended up as just window dressing in there for the sake of it – this is how you do inclusion properly, Rose’s gender confusion and Donna’s fierce protectiveness a part of their characters (I’m so pleased Donna didn’t end up like her mum despite her genes, dismissive and cold, but uses that big heart to fight alongside her daughter – and that even Sylvia’s trying these days, softened by the events of 2008). As much as these scenes are kicking up a fuss in fandom, they were designed to – and I’m all for it (not so sure about meddling with the past and retconning Davros out of his wheelchair that’s actually a life support mechanism mind, especially now there’s a strong good character in a wheelchair for disabled kids to point to, but that’s another issue for another review). Dr Who was always the bravest show on television. After a slight wobble, it still is. One other quick thing that’s changed since 2008 too: the truth is no longer honoured in the news the way it was. Note how this reporter is hauled away before he can discover the truth – something that never happened to Trinity Wells, but then didn’t happen to anyone in real life back in 2008 back when hurting a journalist would be seen as the worst possible thing you could do as a new regime or terrorist group (or alien invader) but would totally happen and be covered up in our age of ‘fake news’.

As well as honouring the nation’s confused youth, Russell honours his own, right down to the ‘Tuna Madras’ of his childhood (a cuisine he swears his family served him all the time, even though nobody else thinks it’s a real thing). We said in our review for Steven Moffat’s series four story ‘Silence In the Library’ that this was Moffat thinking about becoming showrunner himself in the near footage and going back to his first memories of Dr Who: reading the target novels in the library. Russell’s equivalent already sort-of made it on screen, the Tardis-travelling-down-the-motorway-as-seen-by-kids ride in ‘The Runaway Bride’, which came from Russell’s long car journeys as a child, whiling away the time by imagining the Tardis travelling alongside the car and what adventures it might get up to. There’s another source though away from the TV series: the comic books. The original version of ‘The Star Beast’ wasn’t the first Dr Who comic strip, they’d been running in the ‘TV Action’ comic since pretty much day one, when the 1^st Dr travelled with his ‘grandchildren’ John and Gillian (who were a lot less wimpy than Susan, if a bit bland, the illustrators not willing to pay the extra money for the likenesses of the real Tardis crew – even the William Hartnell profile is a bit questionable at times). But it was when Dr Who got its first magazine in 1979 that most fans got to read one rather than a  general audience and ‘The Star Beast’ was one of the first regular strips, back when the Dr was still Tom Baker. The first comic strips for the magazine, then still out weekly not monthly, are the best: they get all the most important comic artists from Marvel back when it was trying to launch the publication and get it taken seriously (before realising there was enough of a regular readership to buy the thing anyway so they could use it to train new talent for their other franchises) but with a continuity-free lightness of touch that meant it went to places the series couldn’t touch.  Back in the days before regular repeats, BBC i-player Whoniverse, home videos DVDs or Blu-rays, it was the only place fans could go back to stories over and over and we already know how Russell was stuck on long car journeys for much of his youth with nothing else to do but read and dream. Of course something like this would have made an impression. Particularly this story, which is the first since Susan left to have a proper bona fide child involved in the Doctor’s world and a setting recognisably like contemporary Britain (Sharon, the girl who finds the Meep in the story being technically the first black companion, twenty-five years before Mickey and twenty-seven years before Martha depending which one you count on screen – and another smack in the face to people who say Dr Who has gone all ‘woke’ including people of colour on screen; and don’t think I didn’t notice the Indian UNIT captain too while we’re about it). One of the ‘other’ people this strip surely inspired is Steven Spielberg, as 1982’s ET nicks the whole idea (including a first draft, when the film still had half the plot of ‘Poltergeist’, where the alien hiding amongst a child’s soft toys turns out to be secretly evil – they got changed to ghosts and separated into two films, with ET made sweet and cuddly throughout). For fans of Russell’s age, this episode is nostalgic in a whole other way on top of the 10^th Dr era, a fitting choice for an anniversary and a throwback to when Dr Who inspired him (and let’s not forget Russell was never showrunner during an anniversary before: this is his first chance to do something he could never have done during a ‘normal’ story).

‘The Star Beast’ isn’t quite the best of the comic strips (‘The Iron Legion’, from a parallel world where Rome never declined, is even better) but it is a good and worthy one, Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons delivering a very Who-like morality tale that could still only ever be told in the comics (back in the ‘classic’ series budget days anyway) with a cute monster discovered by two schoolchildren, Sharon and Fudge. This ‘furry little cheeky’ with the big eyes and floppy ears is as cute as cute can be and is being chased by ugly hulking brutes The Wrath (who look not that different to Davies’ own Hath) in green metal casings. However, in a twist that wouldn’t have been out of place in 1^st Dr stories like ‘The Sensorites’ or ‘Galaxy 4’, everyone’s got things the wrong way round and (mega huge spoilers) it’s Beep The Meep that’s evil. If you’re a new kid watching this series for the first time then the Beep is the perfect introduction, making the viewer go ‘aaaah’ then ‘aaaaagh’ in quick succession (just as you think this show’s turned soft it goes properly mad and scary) and he/she/it (I love the gag about Rose asking for its pronouns: another thing that would never have occurred to Russell fifteen years ago and the Beep choosing ‘the definite article’, my books have a gag about alien argibraffes identifying as ‘its’ so there’s something in the air) is well realised on screen, just as cute and cuddly as the comics, even if the human-like hands are a bit odd and I miss the comic strip’s internal monologue, as the Meep promises to murder in cold blood all the people that are stroking it adoringly and treating it like a big fluffy child. Miriam Margolyes can be a bit dodgy in other things, but she’s having great fun unleashing her inner monster in a story that’s about being careful about judging by appearances throughout. The story is nicely respectful to the source material too, with the original characters Sharon turned into Rose and Fudge a name-less child who has a couple of scenes. Of course the plot is all tidied away a bit quickly, sorted in 35 minutes so we can go back to the Dr and Donna and the Meep turns evil before even that, which is a bit of a shame (it lasted for seven whole issues back in 1980) but you can see why, in a special, with so much to do, there just isn’t time to do everything. As an aside, one of the stories that had just been on TV a couple of years before the comic strip came out was ‘Stones Of Blood’ which features a similar scene to this story of the 4th Dr getting a wig out of his pocket and becoming judge and jury, but not executioner, a good joke recycled.  

So, what we have is Russell’s childhood memories on screen (he’s almost exactly the same age as Dr Who…the series I mean, not the character, that would be rude), updated for modern-day children who are maybe seeing this show for the first time and want to see ‘their’ world they live in on television not some dusty relic from the past, with nods to the fans of the 2000 era and the 1980s, all juggled pretty much successfully. David Tenant and Catherine are line-perfect, as if they’ve never been away, though the scenes are really stolen by Jacqueline King as Sylvia, Donna’s mum, who has gone from being Donna’s biggest critic to her biggest protector. One thing Russell always did better than his successors was the sense of family life, of characters who exist before and after the cameras stop rolling, and that’s never more true than here as we see a family who’ve grown and changed with the times too. Even Donna, whose big tragic story the last twice we saw her was that she’s had her memory wiped and gone back to the abrasive nobody she used to be before she met the Doctor, but who has just enough Doctoryness to make her good (her very Dona-ish response, in the middle of a London invasion, that the Dr’s goodness made her give away her lottery winnings, something he totally would have done, is priceless – and it also gets the series out of a hole by making Donna recognisably ‘one of us’ again and proving that the likeable Shaun is with her out of love, not money: Donna does know how to pick them after all, given her first near-husband tried to feed her to a giant red spider). Hopefully we’re getting Bernard Cribbins’ final scenes as Wilf in a future special (the Tardis does have a disability ramp after all), but it’s a joy to hear that UNIT have been looking after him in his old age.  We don’t get to see Rose do much yet (that’s probably still to  come too. I’m surprised she wasn’t on the Tardis with Donna at the end) but I like what I see. The detail of her being a ‘toymaker’ (maybe a Celestial one? Or influenced by one perhaps?...) inspired by the Dr’s adventures and selling things she makes on etsy (another thing that wasn’t a thing in 2008) is a lovely detail too and a great way to see lots of  old monsters, if only in furry form (I so want a home-made Judoon!)

Which leads me onto another thing. More than anything else this is a showrunner returning to where he left off, in stories like ‘Midnight ‘Turn Left’ ‘Stolen Earth’ and ‘The End Of Time’, writing ‘about’ his time as showrunner and having to give up his dream job that he adored above any other (because, at the height of his fame and success, his husband Andrew Smith got sick and needed looking after – sadly he died in 2018). Russell’s never been able to let Dr Who go, much as he’s tried to do other things and had big successes with ‘Years and Years’ (a brilliant series about the world going mad and dystopian, that still ended up mild compared to real life) and ‘It’s A Sin’ (a more personal take on being a young gay man during the HIV outbreaks of the 1980s when nobody knew what it was, which even has its own Dr Who scene when the lead character we’re following becomes an actor and has a scene as an extra that looks remarkably like an outtake from ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’) there’s been a Tardis-sized hole in his heart. Donna’s lines about how, wonderful as its been, there’s something missing from her life is as heartfelt and direct as anything Russell’s written so far and an explanation as good as any for why he came back to the show that nearly wore him out (following a whole host of events after years away, including a covid lockdown tweetathon that reminded Russell just how beloved his era of the show was and the worry that the show might be axed before a big anniversary). There’s a part of this show that stays with you forever though and there are reminders of it everywhere in life. While the 10^th Dr started out as Russell’s mouthpiece and the person he longs to be (with a lot to say and a lot of mad dashing around) in time Donna became a more natural fit (she also has a mouth on her and ‘Turn Left’ is one long worry about how Russell might have turned out without this show to ‘save’ him, to make him feel heard and inspire him to find his calling as a writer, given over to Donna and her memory is wiped, because there’s no other way she’d ever just stop travelling in the Tardis she loves it too much). In this story he’s still Donna: her memory was wiped as he tried to move on and thin about other things, but he’s been writing Dr Who stories since he was seven and can’t stop, traces of Who-yness abounding in his other writing as a sort of folk memory. The people around him, who know how the pressures of the job nearly killed him last time round (well, properly tied him out anyway) have tried to keep him from it. Burt the lure is too strong (even if, sensibly, one of the dictates of Russell taking the job is to have less episodes to make and longer time to make them – it was having to do a Christmas special every year, on top of the twelve episodes as planned,  that nearly broke him). A little like Rose, Russell finds himself making Dr Who characters, without consciously thinking about it. All that scientific gobbledegook that’s been waiting in his brain to come out the whole time is still there, waiting. And even though he knows it might kill him, he has to come back – because even if its short, this is one hell of an adventure and nobody would give that adventurous life up if they had the chance. Note, too, that Donna is fiercely on Rose’s side,  offering protection after so much debate in fandom one way or another (it would have been easy not pick sides, but Russell can’t help himself). And has given away her millions because money is not what life is about whatever ‘Kerblam!’ said (There were accusations that Rusell took Dr Who over to Disney purely for the money -  hopefully those rumours have been put to bed now, as honestly he could have got more from them making a different series).

 Of course, its not perfect. As well as the good in Russell’s writing we get the bad. There are scenes that go on too long in the middle. These characters pick some very odd moments to start opening up about their lives. Donna suddenly becomes her old self far too quickly, inspired by the sight of the Dr running as much as anyone else (she’s already seen him running earlier in the episode and didn’t twig; wouldn’t, say, the sight of a sonic screwdriver or an accidental glimpse of the Tardis give it away?) As much as we’re being led to believe ‘there’s something pulling you and me together Donna’ that might get explained later, it really is a whacking coincidence that the Dr comes across Donna in seconds and that her hubby is waiting in a taxi nearby (if this is the Celestial Toymaker doing this he’s working overtime). And the ending is suddenly resolved, in a wibbly wobbly timey wimey way, that makes less sense the more you think about it (what some fans call a ‘Davies Et Machina’, a plot resolution that comes out of nowhere). This isn’t one of Russell’s very very best, although it’s a good starting point to build on (and better than his previous average I would say). For all that, it’s a great little story. It does what it needs to do, updating an era that’s been tarnished by accusations of sexism on set and not being multicultural enough (every era of Who gets a backlash 15-20 years on, its normal; it was the UNIT era when I was growing up) without losing the hearts of what this series always was or the feel of the olden days. Ultimately ‘The Star Beast’ doesn’t undo what came before, which is what so many of us feared. I mean Donna got the perfect ending – heartbreaking and awful in many ways but perfect from a writing point of view – but this story doesn’t dismantle it, it regenerates it.

Seeing our old friends on screen as if they’ve never been away is an absolute joy. There’s moments of high drama and high comedy, mixed really really well together (something Chibnall really struggled with, before finally getting with ‘Eve Of The Daleks’): the line about the sonic paper (so good to see that again!) still thinking the Dr is a woman because it hasn’t caught up yet is right up there with the series’ best gags. And Beep The Meep is adorable (until they’re not) a great character even if he/she/it/the isn’t one of Russell’s. The cast haven’t lost their touch. Nor has the writer. The director Rachel Talalay is an old friend too, sensibly chosen. Even Murray Gold’s musical score was one of his more unobtrusive ones with nice nods to old themes and just enough balance of new ones. After a few years of characters standing around talking to each other, without much action or only one big set piece per story, it’s a thrillingly breathless rush that seems much shorter than an hour (the last Dr Who I re-watched this week for the revised review is ‘The Timeless Children’ and that felt like it lasted for seven). The result is a triumph, up there with the other anniversary stories of the past and even if it doesn’t feel quite as inclusive or as special as the multi-doctor stories, maybe that aspect of the anniversary special season is still to come? The first Russell T era was special, beloved amongst most fans. On the evidence of just this one story it looks as if the RTD2 era is going to be just as special. How things change – but how they stay the same.

+ The Tardis interior! For the most part the promised bigger Disney budget has been relegated to fight scenes, but you can really see where the money shots have gone here and it’s the right place to spend it. The sheer delight on David Tennant’s face as he ran up and down its ramps (the actor’s idea – and something he reportedly regretted after eight takes had to be made) was matched only by the smile on mine. And of all the Tardis interiors we’ve had on screen for any length of time since the 1960s it’s the one that most matches the original and best interior. It already feels like home.

–The very opening, though, is horrible. Voiceover moments that break the fourth wall never work in Dr Who, a series that otherwise tries so hard to feel ‘real’ however fantastical the setting may be, but seeing these characters talking to us about past plot developments in a void is somehow worse and breaks the entire illusion for no good reason. I understand the need to remind viewers what happened the last time we saw Donna (thirteen years is a while after all) but what’s wrong with a ‘last time’ caption and a clips montage?

BEST QUOTE: Donna’s pithy comment that if she gets in the Tardis she’ll probably ‘end up on Mars with Chaucer and a robot shark’, Russell getting in the criticism about his bonkers combinations of ideas and ‘shopping list’ way of writing stories in before his critics can.