The Next Doctor

So it turned out that Series Four wasn't quite the end for David Tennant's Doctor - but the moment was being prepared for. Or was it that we were being prepared for the moment?

Is it coincidence that the forthcoming Christmas Special - with its provocative title announced on the sly in the pages of RTD's book The Writer's Tale, published September 2008 - also raised questions about the demise of the Tenth Doctor and prompted speculation about who might take over? Was there a plan to get the audience used to the idea that this highly popular incarnation would not last forever?

No, I don't think so. I think if anyone needed to adjust to the end of the RTD era and the passing of the Tenth Doctor, it was Davies and Tennant themselves. Both long term fans of the show, they had found themselves in positions they had dreamt of since childhood, and worked like slaves to make Doctor Who the best thing on television. Surely neither of them wanted this to end, but both knew it must. The planning for the final specials, and for the handover to a new production team, were already underway during the writing and production of Series Four. It should come as no surprise that eschatological ideas should filter into Journey's End and The Next Doctor.

In October 2008, in between the biological metacrisis and the Cyberking, Tennant received Best Actor at the National Television Awards and used his speech to announce he would be leaving Doctor Who.  At the time we was unable to say exactly how long he would remain in the role - the schedule for the Specials had yet to be finalised - but the long goodbye had begun.

I'd never say that Tennant outstayed his welcome, but this exit strategy had an unfortunate and unforeseen consequence. Press and public speculation generated by the almost-regeneration in Journey's End had been fever pitch and this announcement, along with the title of the The Next Doctor, allowed this to bubble along for the rest of the year. Every newspaper, and almost everybody, had theorised about who should take over, and the search for the Eleventh Doctor was actively under way. On the 3rd of January, just days after The Next Doctor aired, Matt Smith was unveiled in a surprise one-off episode of Confidential and the new era began to take shape in the minds of the public. But a whole year would have to pass before the Tenth Doctor would eventually succumb to the inevitable - and it would be another three months after that until the Eleventh would get to eyeball the Atraxi.

When The End of Time came, the moment had perhaps been a little over-prepared.

And The Next Doctor? Well, watched shortly after Journey's End it does feel a little odd that both Donna and Jackson Lake should end up with the Doctor inside their human heads, but Jackson's story is really rather touching. David Morrissey serves up his ersatz-Doctor with real gusto (William: "Ugh, he's so fake.") and there's pleasant camaraderie between him and Tennant, both before and after Lake's human nature is revealed. The scene with the fob watch is a beautiful moment and a clever bit of writing: Time Lord grandiosity suggests that Lake's Doctor alter-ego might reside inside, but instead there's a comic deflation as the ordinary innards fall out. The truth is that these tumbling cogs show us Lake's real identity: his life has fallen apart and is in bits.

The Next Doctor is enjoyable Christmas fare, full of warmth and heart - but it is undeniably another disappointing Cybermen story. Talk of Cybershades and images of Cybermen in a twilight, snow-covered Victorian graveyard, made me excited that we might see a return to the spookier, silent silver giants of the Troughton years. Sadly, although the scene in the churchyard is great, the snow does not soften the leaden thump of the Cybus boots and the Cybershades turn out to be some sort of shambling bear in a mask. Worst of all the Cybermen themselves are reduced to mere flunkies, lining up behind the villainous Miss Hartigan. Dervla Kirwan is very good and Hartigan is a fun villain, suitably vicious and vibrant but with a chilling back story that seeps through the Christmas cheer. But such a character can't help but take centre stage and as a result the Cybermen lose their voice, just as Davros pulls focus from the Daleks. The CyberKing is nothing more than some outlandish fun, but really the Cybermen could have been removed from this story entirely and it could have stayed much the same, perhaps with Hartigan as an evil Ada Lovelace-type building steam-punk robots. Either way, the real story belongs to Jackson Lake.

Chris liked him a lot and appreciated how he coped with becoming the Doctor. "When he realised he wasn't the Doctor, he lost his courage because he knew the Doctor could do all those cool things and he was worried that he couldn't. But then he found his own courage and became happy. I liked his balloon TARDIS too and it was nice of the Doctor to appreciate Jackson's efforts - he could have been very rude. Ten out of ten."

William was once again incredulous that the Cybermen didn't use their arm-mounted guns, but he too enjoyed the interaction between Jackson and the Doctor. "The Doctor seemed happy to meet himself, just like in Timecrash. I expect he'll get on well with the Eleventh Doctor too. I can't imagine the ninth Doctor being happy in that situation. Jackson's story was sad though."

It is interesting to think about how the Tenth and Eleventh will cope with each other. The Doctor's comments here to Lake suggest that The Day of the Doctor should take place after this episode as far as the Tenth Doctor is concerned, which raises questions about exactly how Rose will be involved. But then who knows what wibbly-wobbly explanation we'll get this time?


NEXT TIME...

The Stolen Earth / Journey's End

The boys call this one 'Red Dalek', which I think is a rather super title, although perhaps not for this story. I'm often surprised by the extent to which they engage with and are affected by the emotional content of these episodes, but they are still eight and ten year old boys and really, it's all about the hardware.

I don't know how many times I've watched these two episodes, but I still don't really know what to make of them. Even after several years, there's still so much to take in: we've seen some grand and incredible Doctor Who stories, but this is the only one, so far, that truly deserves to be called an epic. RTD throws in Daleks, Davros, Torchwood, Sarah Jane, Donna's apotheosis and Rose's second send off. Oh, and we also get Martha, Mickey and Jackie, and a fake regeneration. And a second Doctor. And the attempted destruction of the entire multiverse. That's quite a lot and you'd be forgiven for thinking this monster mash-up should never have even been attempted; that it holds together at all is a remarkable achievement. That it is even any good is just incredible, but it is often brilliant.

It's by far the most satisfying of any of RTD's finales, although, I don't like all of it, of course. More than once the joyous exuberance bubbles over into preposterousness and there are several moments that I would be happy to excise entirely.

Let's start with the Good:

• Lis Sladen. Nothing sells the threat of the Daleks like Sarah Jane crying into Luke's hair. Barrowman is trying to do the same thing for Ianto and Gwen inside the Hub, but he doesn't even get close. Sladen's greatness was her ability to absolutely convince us that any nonsense on screen was not only real but terrifying, and her performance here is a masterclass. What's more, Sarah Jane is a wonderful link back to the show's past, as demonstrated here when Davros recognises her from Genesis of the Daleks. Suddenly this isn't a one-off adventure but an installment of a fifty-year serial. Goosepimples.
• The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It doesn't take up much screen time, but this is one of the best invasions we've yet seen - considerably more impressive than the one in The Parting of the Ways, which was represented by a computer outline of Australia changing shape. Here instead we have CGI Daleks streaming across Manhattan and pouring over the Valiant, like ants over an elephant. And all this is before they even reach the ground. Later on we will be treated to the sight of them floating through the forest, screeching in Germany. "Exterminieren! Exterminieren!" The Daleks are proper scary throughout, and for once Davros isn't in charge. The Reality Bomb becomes the ultimate expression of the Daleks' fascist intolerance.
• The Harriet Jones Joke. It should be awful. It should make me cringe. But it isn't and it doesn't. It's always funny and never more so than here when we hear it for the last time, delivered by the Daleks themselves. It's funny because they are not joking, and through their ring modulators the stupid gag suddenly sounds like sinister and ruthless preparation. 
• Donna. What a character, what a companion. What an ending. Her Doctor-Donna persona is wonderful, and her sudden appearance, right at the end, provides one of the best and most enjoyable reversals of fortune in the modern era. Daleks spinning, Sarah Jane and Martha grinning as they push them around, Donna in the middle just revelling in her new capabilities. Losing her, and her losing herself, is extremely sad, easily the most depressing departure of a companion since (well, I was going to say Jamie and Zoe, because of the memory thing, and I never got over Romana leaving, but, realistically) Peri's shock exit - either of them. But even before the biological metacrisis takes effect, Donna has been exhibiting Doctorish qualities, just watch her at the Shadow Proclamation, rationalising and explaining: she has become a bit Doctorish all by herself.
• Cribbins. Just wonderful. Every time. 
• The Regeneration. What an ending to The Stolen Earth. Surely the greatest cliffhanger in the show's history (which is not necessarily the same as the best). Once again the nation was beside itself for a whole week as newspapers filled page after page with speculation and pubs, workplaces and playgrounds were awash with theories about what would happen. This is a trick you only get to pull once, and it was done pretty well. But the wellspring of all this feverish excitement was the underlying thought that the Doctor might actually properly regenerate. Deep down, I realised that was what I wanted. It would be worth bringing Rose back if her Doctor would then immediately die to be replaced by a different indifferent man. I am a mean person. Of course, when considered in the cold light of day, that was never going to happen. Whilst a surprise regeneration or a mid-story regeneration might be a huge coup, there's no way that the new Doctor wouldn't be shown at the end of part one. So really, we all knew that Tennant was staying on, for now. The question remained, how clever was the resolution going to be? 

Now the Not-So Good.

• The Fake Regeneration. Even watching this again on DVD, William was nervous. "I know he doesn't die, but I can't remember how he does it?" I asked him what he expected. "That it'll be a cheat and that it won't really make sense." So on we ploughed with Journey's End and a few seconds later I checked with him again. "It was a cheat, but I liked it," he said. What about, I asked, if Matt Smith had turned up at this point instead? "Oh that would have been completely awesome," came the instant reply. This is pretty much how I feel about it too. It's a good trick, but the resolution, that the Doctor can fizz the 'excess' regeneration energy into a 'handy biometric receptacle' feels like a cheat. We knew the hand was for something, but we didn't know that could happen. It's all dealt with a little too quickly, a little too neatly. But, I'm not really complaining - if this hadn't happened, we wouldn't have ended up with the Doctor-Donna, and we wouldn't have had Matt Smith cast as the Eleventh Doctor and I'm not prepared to give up either of those. 
• Destiny. I know that writing a long running story in installments like this must be a mix of forward-planning and making-it-up-as-you-go. I don't have a problem with that. I don't mind when thinking ahead comes unstuck (the duck pond with no ducks in The Eleventh Hour?) and I don't mind when earlier bits of a story serendipitously happen to connect to whatever idea the writer has just had. What I don't like is the habit RTD seems to have of pointing out these happy coincidences and attributing them to some vague sense of destiny. We get it here with Donna and we will get it again with Wilf. "Oh," says the Doctor, "it's more than that, as if the universe was binding us together, as if this was always going to happen, to lead to this moment and echoing back through time." I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist and I don't like it. It's a personal thing, but you can't start messing about with ideas of destiny (and therefore also free will) in a show about time travel, surely? Why can't it just be coincidence that Donna bumped into the Doctor again? To suggest otherwise puts extra weight on events that are already, in the words of Marty McFly, pretty heavy.
• Prophecy. Once again, just like Rose's hyperbolic pronouncements at the beginning of Army of Ghosts, we get prophetic statements that don't do anything other than pretend things are going to be worse/more exciting than they will turn out to be. Throughout the story Caan ("crazy drunk Dalek dude" according to William) keeps chuntering on about "one of them [the Doctor's companions] will die!". No, they don't. Unless Rose being in a parallel universe is a 'death' (it was last time), or Donna's amnesia is the same as dying. Either way, it's much less interesting than the prophecies of Pompeii, where the concrete certainty of the seer was undermined by the mutability of events.  
• Davros and the Daleks. Oh, Davros is pretty good here actually, albeit a bit more bonkers (giddy even) and a bit less calculating than of old. But the chief problem with Davros is that, whether or not he is in charge of the Daleks or their 'pet', once he is on screen, the Doctor stops talking to the Daleks and they fade into the background. And while I appreciate that something pretty climactic has to happen when the threat level has been ramped up to include the entire multiverse, I am getting bored of the Daleks being utterly destroyed down to the last atom every time they turn up (Emergency Temporal Shifts aside) and then magically returning, a million strong, a few months later.
• Towing the Earth back. Is it cool? Or stupid? It's deeply stupid, although I'll put up with it just for the grin that Martha delivers straight down the camera. As for the TARDIS needing six pilots to be flown properly, I can just imagine River's response to that: "Or, sweetie, you could learn to multi-task?"
• I'll never get over the Shadow Proclamation being an organisation rather than a document. I can cope, just about, with it being an organisation based on a document ("At the UN Charter in New York today...") but we never even get given that fig leaf. 
• Rose. Oh, of course she should be here with everyone else. But the fact that she is here just shows how she throws the programme off-balance. The love-story with the Doctor makes her too important for ensembles and this elevated status (compared with the other companions) means so much must be pushed aside for her to be accommodated. Having said that, I did like it when Martha turned up on the Subwave screen and Rose had no idea who she was. In your face, Tyler. So we get all the slow-running and the gooey-looks and then, bleurghhh, we are back on Bad Wolf Bay. I didn't like this the first time, but I can't believe we have to do this again. Even worse, this time Rose gets given her own play-Doctor. Oh well, if it means that's the last we see of her then it's a price worth paying but, to be fair, if it wasn't for Rose's infatuation, would we have ever got River? Also, missing London and turning up in Norway is worse than hitting Aberdeen instead of Croydon.

It's silly, isn't it, the things that bug you when you're watching something you love. Ah well, as always, the brilliant things are more numerous and more important that than the bits I would change - not that I'd ever be in a position to change them anyway. 

When the credits eventually rolled (love that ending, the Doctor, alone, empty) the boys collapsed back against the sofa and, in unison, breathed one word.

"Epic."

And then they said a ton of other stuff, some of which I wrote down.

"I liked both episodes," said Chris. "In the first one, I liked how they didn't show Davros for ages and ages, even though we all knew it was him. It kept it mysterious. And I liked how it was just an ordinary Dalek that killed the Doctor, that makes them all seem more dangerous than if it was the Red One. I'd say that was one of the most memorable stories ever. The second one was amazing, I liked how everyone worked together and how Jack, Martha and Sarah Jane all had weapons to fight the Daleks."

"Both ten out of ten, obviously, but it was really sad how Donna left," said William. "She was a good Doctor and it was really unfair how she had to lose her memory when Rose got her own Doctor, like a reward. But both of them had to go, because neither of them would have left if it was just up to them. I want to know what the other Doctor said to Rose on the beach though."

"I dread to think," I said, accidentally out loud.

"I think it was 'You were brilliant'," said William, ignoring me. 

"No," said Chris, "I think it was 'I love you.'"

Then they looked at each other. 

"Ewww!"

NEXT TIME...

Turn Left

A very strong episode, and one that received high praise at the time. It's undeniably good, another excellent story in a very strong series, but I've never liked it quite as much as I thought I was supposed to. Partly that's me being contrary, but there are things about this that I was never going to like.

We'll come to those in a minute, because it can not be denied that this is a powerful emotional drama working on a scale seldom seen in Doctor Who. There can't surely have been anyone left to win over by this point, but once again Catherine Tate proves why she was such an excellent, albeit unexpected, choice for companion. We've watched Donna's gradual development over the course of Series Four, but here we get to see her do it all again in just forty-five minutes as one Doctor-less crisis after another reduces Britain to chaos. It's a reminder that the companions don't necessarily need the Doctor in order to achieve their potential. Yes, Rose arguably locums here and pushes her to make the right decisions, but the overall progress (from Runaway Bride loudmouth to Journey's End saviour-of-the-universe) is Donna's achievement.

I'm not sure that watching so much Doctor Who so close together is such a good thing. It's good to run some episodes together (I love being able to watch The Eleventh Hour straight after The End of Time), but most stories deserve a little space afterwards to let them sink in. On the other hand, binge-watching is great for Turn Left: it's the most ridiculous continuity-fest, but having all these previous adventures and calamities-that-weren't fresh in the mind makes it more intense and helps knit things together. My favourite callback is the newsflash that announces the Adipose have struck America: it's funny and dark and contrives to be a surprise - we had all forgotten about the little Adipose, and transplanting them to the country that serves cheese with everything is a masterstroke.

Best of all is the terrifying and wonderfully underplayed moment when poor Mr Colassanto and family are dragged away to the labour camps. Doctor Who rarely gets this dark, but the hints of genocide and xenophobia still fly straight over the kids' heads. I wonder if that's a bad thing? History repeats itself because the original impact of the awfulness recedes over the generations - maybe we should make a point of horrifying the children with the facts as soon as possible? But then we wouldn't get this beautiful horrible moment: a look, shared by Wilf (Cribbins, you legend) and Colassanto. The old men can do nothing else but remember.

And then there's Rose. You won't be surprised to learn that I'm not pleased by her return. The more I think about it, I realise that my problem isn't with her (although she's still way down my list of favourite companions), but with the effect that she has upon the Doctor. She can be as lovesick over him as she likes - that at least makes sense - but I'll never understand why he feels the same way about her. His absence from Turn Left postpones the inevitable weirdly drippy reunion but Rose's Doctorless reappearance still doesn't quite ring true. To be blunt, this isn't the Rose we remember and, whatever the reason (is it Piper's performance? direction/production decisions? all the ADR?), she's oddly vacant here, a shadow of her former vivacious self. It's a shame and lessens the impact of having her back.

The episode ends with an unexpected cliffhanger as everything turns Bad Wolf. It's dramatic and exciting and I can't help but love it and the impetus it provides as we move towards the series finale - but, at the same time, it just doesn't make any sense and that infuriates me. I seem to remember that in the Confidential for this episode, David Tennant, on set for these scenes, teasing RTD, repeatedly asking "Yeah, but what does Bad Wolf mean?" He didn't get an answer. It's just a flourish: wonderful and exciting, but ultimately meaningless.

Of course the boys LOVED it, William so much that he forgot not to comment. "Wow," he said and walked off. Chris sat there open-mouthed, trying to collect his thoughts.

"One simple choice," he breathed, his head spinning, "and the course of EVERYTHING changes! And Rose and Donna had to work together to save the whole universe. That is so cool."

And he's right, and RTD is right, and I am just old Mr Grumpy Face.


NEXT TIME...

Midnight

At the time, I think this was my pick of Series Four. It's not quite as amazing as I remember, and I think the reputations of The Fires of Pompeii or Silence in the Library have risen higher since, but it is still very good indeed.

As we've seen, later episodes in a series can garner low expectations and there has sometimes been a sense of a series holding back, gathering resources for a finale. With its single set and claustrophobic atmosphere, Midnight gave the impression that it might be a cheap, inconsequential story after all. But that original transmission was electrifying.

One of the key moments in my love of Doctor Who was a BBC Two run of repeated stories called 'The Five Faces of Doctor Who' that began in November 1981. I had never seen any of the previous Doctors before and I was enthralled by the murky black and white images and the spooky music of the Hartnell and Troughton episodes. These days, neither 100,000BC (or whatever we are calling it these days) or The Krotons are perhaps as suspenseful as they seemed to me at five years old. But at that early stage the idea became fixed in my mind that a crucial element of a 'proper' Doctor Who story should be an oppressive sense of mystery, and to this day I am delighted by any story that makes me gasp "What the hell is going on?" as I watch it. Moffat's scripts aside, it's not a terribly common feature in the RTD era of the show. But Midnight delivers it in spades and that's why it's brilliant.

We never see the 'thing'. There might not even be a 'thing'. If there is an outside influence and this all doesn't just rise up out of Sky Silvestry's mind, we never learn what it is, and it is never given a name. The voice games and repetition may suggest playground pursuits, but their execution here, thanks to some hard work from the cast and the sound engineers, is unearthly, almost unbearable. The unexplained, unknowable nature of the threat makes Midnight scarier and more interesting than any prosthetic or CGI alien design could have done. Christopher disagrees: when Sky becomes possessed but sits with her back to the passengers, he expected her to turn around to reveal a visual shock, a skull-face or something; but for me the joy of that moment is that Lesley Sharp's face has been transformed, albeit subtly, and the Sky that we briefly knew has gone. In fact, Chris didn't really appreciate the mysteriousness at all, and docked a point because we never got to find out what had been going on. But I think that just reinforces my point: we don't like not knowing and that makes this story scarier.

You might think that the scariest thing in Midnight is not, however, the unknown but the all too familiar humans: RTD delivers a beautifully observed display of all the ugly impulses, the pettiness and the brutality that we are capable of when we give in to fear - the Daily Mail factor, perhaps. The other passengers are terrifying: deluding themselves and being deluded, angrily turning on one another and resorting to extremes of violence and murder to try and save their skins. But even this scenario can't avoid the standard loophole of morality in Doctor Who - in order to save the Doctor, somebody has to kill, and sacrifice themselves in the process. In this instance it's the unnamed hostess and I don't think it is a coincidence that she was the first to suggest the idea of throwing somebody out the airlock, back when things started getting unpleasant. At the time the Doctor shouted her down, condemning her for her base instincts, but once again a story needs somebody to murder so that the Doctor can survive. Perhaps it is just a convention of story-telling, but it does sometimes feel like these endings undermine the Doctor's principles, and make him look naive. As a result, stories like The Empty Child and Silence in the Library feel all the more significant because they show the Doctor defeating violence itself (and death too), rather than just villainy.

I'm not trying to pick on Midnight by raising that point here - the deaths of Sky and the Hostess make the story work, especially with the Doctor incapacitated and in danger himself, and it is this state in which he finds himself that is the other great thing about this episode.

We're used to the Doctor being in command, earning the respect of those around him and issuing orders. We know he's clever, we know he's experienced - these are both reasons why we like him so much. Here all this is turned on its head and his arrogance (which we have seen previously, although it has almost always been played for laughs before) becomes a weakness, just as his intelligence and his eloquence begin to work against him. It hasn't been done before (the closest would be Power of the Daleks or Snakedance, where he is derided as a prophet of doom) and the effect is genuinely unsettling, helped by another brilliant performance by David Tennant.

There's another, more traditional, character flaw of his on display too. When he saunters into the cockpit of the stalled bus, the Doctor begs the crew to open the shutters for just an instant so he can see the landscape of the planet, as yet unobserved by human eyes. His curiosity has always been getting him into trouble, but is it actually the catalyst here too? There's nothing to suggest that the bus hasn't just developed a mechanical fault - what if it was the Doctor's insistence that the shutters be opened that caused the thing to turn its attention on Crusader 50?


NEXT TIME...

Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead

Is it normal for television to deliver actual shivers of delight? The Doctor stands before his TARDIS in an ancient room. He snaps his fingers, and the room fills with light as the doors fly open. Stepping inside, he turns to face us, we who are left behind. Donna at his side, he stares out dispassionately before clicking his fingers once again. And the TARDIS doors close, like the pages of a book.

This is a wonderful pair of episodes. The Vashta Nerada, although not quite as successful as the Silence or the Weeping Angels, are nonetheless an instant classic: a spooky combination of lurching, zombiefied space suits and darkness itself, rendered with piranha-like ferocity. The reveal, that it was their forest that became the books of the library, is a characteristic piece of Moffat plotting that relies on something we already know but have not had time to consider, in this case that paper comes from trees. What's more, there's a surreal, transformative quality to there being a forest inside a library, just as later we will see a forest in a bottle in a ship in a cave, or fish swimming in the fog.

The Library is a brilliant idea, executed with considerable flair: a great mixture of sweeping CGI wide shots and clever location work (including the beautiful Brangwyn Hall in Swansea) create a vast and imposing world that is still full of dark corners and intimate spaces. The result is that this strange world feels like a real place.

It helps that the people in it are so believable. We've seen our fair share of disposable supporting characters over the years, but this small team of explorers must be some of the most likeable. Dave, Other Dave, Anita, who faces death with such dignity, and Miss Evangelista, whose cruel demise provides the chief emotional moment of Silence in the Library; each of them a tiny part that becomes a real person thanks to some great writing and a wonderful guest cast. The others aren't bad either: Colin Salmon as Dr Moon, beautifully urbane and reassuring, is a particular coup and Eve Newton is remarkably good as the young girl/super computer CAL, who sits in the mysterious space we think of as our own, watching and responding to the Doctor's adventures on her television. Key points in this story depend on her performance and she doesn't disappoint.

I think Forest of the Dead is the slightly better of the two episodes. Donna's side trip into the wonderland of CAL's imagination is just one of many curveballs Moffat pitches along the way, but it is marvellous: mysterious, funny ("But I've been DIETING!") and deeply unsettling. He creates a landscape out of the visual language of television itself, using cuts and edits to mask the gaps in Donna's reality. But the distortion of Miss Evangelista's face is simply an updating of the traditional gothic heroine's disfigurement, and at the centre of this fabricated reality are real human emotions. Donna's relationship with Lee is undeniably real even if, like their children, it is a fabrication. CAL, watching the Doctor, might be so scared she has to switch over to another programme, but for any adults (let alone parents) in the audience, the gut-churning moment where Donna's children tell her they are afraid that they are not real, and then disappear from their beds in the blink of an eye, is surely the most terrifying and awful moment in the whole of Doctor Who. Catherine Tate has been incredible in this series, and this story is another very high point.

Tennant is extremely good as well. When River whispers in the Doctor's ear, Tennant shows us, for a few fascinating seconds, a broken man, suddenly unsure of everything. She turns away and we can see him rebuilding himself, reconstructing the persona of the Doctor until he is able to snap back into action. Once he's recovered, the Doctor gets to be rather wonderful, saving everybody, even River, and turning back the Vashta Nerada by showing them his entry in Who's Who? There's more to say about the legendary interpretation of the Doctor, but for now, this feels like a very cool trick, albeit one that can't be used very often. 

But it isn't enough that these episodes are brilliant; they are also important, a lynchpin, that connects the Tenth Doctor to the Eleventh, the RTD era to that of Steven Moffat.

As soon as we saw the Next Time at the end of The Unicorn and the Wasp, we were extremely excited. I hadn't given it much thought in advance, but the imminent arrival of River Song felt like a massive event. It's no surprise that hindsight (or foresight, it's difficult to tell) changes the way that we watch her episodes now, but I was unprepared for the full impact of her appearance in the library. She is a harbinger, a John the Baptist figure, heralding the future of Doctor Who itself.

There was a slight sense of this at the time, with her references to her future-Doctor, but with Moffat having been announced as RTD's replacement only days earlier it felt chutzpah on his part to be using this script to tell us how wonderful things were going to be when he took over. Not that I ever doubted that the Moffat era would be anything other than brilliant, of course, but River's appearance here seemed designed to deliberately raise everyone's expectations - a rather cocksure gambit.

Now we know: if it was arrogance, it was utterly deserved. The brilliance of this story is that Moffat delivered on those expectations, exceeded them even. To watch this story now is to swap the original thrill of anticipation for the glow of recollection. We've seen the crash of the Byzantium; we know and love the Doctor who can open the TARDIS with a click of his fingers; we've watched River be born, get married; we've met her mother.

The incomparable genius of it all is that this story serves as a fitting and perfect finale for River Song. On transmission, we didn't, couldn't, know that she would return, that we would see her whole story. In that sense Silence in the Library didn't promise anything. The rest of her story that came after, woven through subsequent series, delivers in ways we could never have anticipated and unexpectedly makes this two-parter so much more powerful, so much more important, and so much better than we ever realised.

I know there are some viewers, some fans even, that don't like her or, at least, prefer it when she's not around, but as far as I'm concerned River Song is the most startling and ingenious addition to the series since the TARDIS, and her higgledy-piggledy narrative is the best piece of extended storytelling in the whole run. If it wasn't part of Doctor Who, if River's story had been conceived as a separate show in its own right, told out of sequence over five years, it would be lauded, considered the most audaciously brilliant piece of television in years. Instead here it is, beginning and ending in these two episodes where, for the first time, the show about time travel takes a trip into its own future.

Christopher's favourite bit was when the Doctor dived down the swishy-blueness, a wonderful moment which you think would be worth a ten out of ten all by itself. He held a point back until I could explain how all the other dead people could join River in the Libraryscape, but we finally ended up with a ten, which is, in my opinion, the very least this story deserves.


NEXT TIME...

The Unicorn and the Wasp

The Unicorn and the Wasp is pure fun. It's so much fun, in fact, that it feels like a guilty pleasure, like a cream bun: undeniably delicious, but it wouldn't do us any good if Doctor Who was like this every week.

Each to their own, but crashing a 1920's posho garden party would be fairly high up my time-travelling bucket list. First stop: Venice in her pomp, of course, but very soon after that I'd be up for Pimms and croquet, I reckon. Still, the chances of finding a party as fun as this one are slim. Not only is it hosted by Felicity Kendall, for crying out loud, but a rather famous guest is self-consciously wandering across the lawn towards the Doctor and Donna.

"Agatha Christie," she says, sticking out her hand.

"What about her?" asks Donna.

Slightly embarrassed in that beautifully English way, the woman replies, "That's me."

Donna can't help herself. Her mouth falls open and her eyes gape. "NO!" she gasps, half-incredulous, half-exhilarated. "You're kidding!"

Donna's reaction is hilarious, feels very genuine, and helps set the tone for the episode. But I think it also exemplifies the spirit of the revitalised series. Look how much fun this is! The question has to be asked, why on Earth did the original show never do this? Why did we never get to pal around with brilliant people from history and have hi-jinks? We did meet Marco Polo, and HG Wells, but it wasn't fun, and we always just seemed to miss Leonardo da Vinci. In the new Doctor Who, the Psychic Paper becomes a pass to the roped-off, VIP areas of history. Once inside, the trick is to have fun with the famous guest stars, rather than at their expense. That's what Tooth & Claw got horribly wrong, and The Unicorn and the Wasp gets brilliantly right.

Yes, Christie chastises the Doctor, just as Queen Victoria did. But in Tooth & Claw, it came at the end of the story, like a judgement on the rest of the episode. Here it happens early on, and it works as a check on us and the Doctor, a reminder that, no matter how much fun we are having, people are dying and there is a real threat to be uncovered. But once delivered, we are all allowed to carry on enjoying the Whodunnit.

A lot of the fun in this episode derives from the playful way it adopts the conventions of murder mystery television. Every last morsel is wrung from the witness statements, with flashbacks within flashbacks, unreliable testimony, and the repetition of events we have already seen ourselves. The traditional I've-gathered-you-all-together scene gets a similar treatment. The 'moving finger' picks out each suspect in turn, revealing a different secret every time, but we also get Donna's commentary, munching popcorn as if she was sat on the sofa at home, trying to keep up with Poirot. With each fresh accusation (accompanied by a whiplash turn of Christie's head) Donna furrows her brow and asks "So she/he did it then?" It's lovely stuff.

Other trappings of the genre are served up more conventionally: a nice supply of red herrings; the below-stairs gossip; the POV shot of the murder victim; dinner, complete with power-cut and a knife in the back during the soup course. Doctor Who seems so comfortable with the format that it becomes clear that this could have been done completely straight and it would still have been very good. But it is undeniably better as it is: it needs the giant wasp, it needs the broad comedy of the Doctor's poisoning. These elements stop it getting bogged down in country house chat, and inject a dash of the fantastic. They remind us that Doctor Who is not only special but unique: there is no other programme on television that can tell a story like this.

It's episodes like The Unicorn and the Wasp that make me conscious that the show is being made by people of my generation. This blend of influences remind me of how television was when we were children: with a paucity of channels and very little choice, we ended up watching whatever was on. As a result we saw, and loved, all sorts of things that we would never have deliberately sought out for ourselves. BBC Two used to show silent movies in prime time for goodness sake! Harold Lloyd, and Laurel & Hardy! But we also got things like the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, Joan Hickson's Miss Marple and the Peter Ustinov Poirot films.

I know this makes me sound like a grumpy old Reithian in these multi-channel days, but I do think maybe television should give people what they need, rather than what they want. My boys not only have access (albeit limited) to dedicated channels of cartoons that run twenty-four hours a day, they also have Netflix, which lets them watch whatever they want, instantly. And so, in order to introduce them to something, I have to say, "Hey kids why don't you try watching this? It's really good." Sadly, nothing is as uninteresting as something your parents have recommended  (can you imagine your parents telling you to watch Monty Python? How can something be subversive if your parents have told you it's okay?), but I did get some traction with Charlie Chaplin once by telling them it was "a bit like Mr Bean."

The point of this is that my kids haven't ever been exposed to the works of Agatha Christie, and so they know nothing of the genre. But they absolutely loved The Unicorn and the Wasp.

"Ten out of ten!" said Chris. "It was great. I loved the detective stuff, how they had to ask questions, how it was a mystery."

"Yeah," chips in Will, "it was like that game, Cluedo!" (Okay, he didn't say Cluedo, he said Clue, because he lives in America, but we are going to pretend he said Cluedo.)

"Well," I said, "you know there are TV shows like this that are based on Agatha Christie books? With country houses and murders and detectives - would you like to watch one some time?"

"Sure!" they said.

And that is yet another reason why Doctor Who is the best TV show ever.



NEXT TIME...

The Doctor's Daughter

Intriguing episode titles have been used to keep audiences watching Doctor Who since The Cave of Skulls, but some are just downright provocative. There's nothing new about that either (see 1965's The Death of Doctor Who), but it feels like we've had more of them over the last few years. There's a connecting pattern as well: The Next Doctor, The Doctor's Wife, The Wedding of River Song, The Name of the Doctor - sure they might raise the eyebrow of the casual viewer, or grab the attention of a newspaper previewer, but theres a certain amount of fan-baiting about them too isn't there? Titles such as these hint that sacred cows are about to be slaughtered by a production team tinkering with the show's core tenets.

To be fair, I think the desire to be provocative is a healthy one and that the key objective is to prick journalists into action and to generate publicity. If I were in charge, I'm not sure I wouldn't want to tease the hardcore fans every once in a while either, but it must be noted that none of these stories ever actually do the terrible thing the title threatens to do, or reveal the terrible thing that must never be revealed. It should also be noted that it is fans of a certain age that tend to have conniptions about things like this - my boys, of course, have no preconceptions, and no notions that certain 'fact's about the Doctor are 'fixed', as if particular lines of dialogue could be given Grade I listed status; they are as likely to blithely accept The Doctor's Granny, as we were the Doctor's granddaughter.

When I discovered that an upcoming episode was called The Doctor's Daughter (I spoiled myself, idiot, clicking on a link when I should have waited for DWM to tell me), I thought to myself "Oh, they're going to do that are they?" and I was mildly disconcerted for a moment or too. But I was much more uncomfortable about having found the title out prematurely than I was about what it was. And then, when the time came, the 'mystery' of the Doctor's daughter was cleared up before the opening credits - no tortuous back story, no unnecessary revelations about the Doctor's original family, no how-did-you-escape-the-Time-War speeches - and I was able to simply enjoy the story.

It is mostly very satisfying. For one thing it is very neatly constructed, managing to make room not only for both Donna and Martha, but Jenny too.

Jenny and her relationship with the Doctor are at the centre of the episode, and their story plays out very nicely. Georgia Moffett is very good, and suggests that Jenny is learning and developing without ever making her appear childlike, sceptical and determined without ever becoming truculent or sulky. The Doctor makes a convincing parent, consumed by the normal nightmares: the agony of losing a child; the pain of seeing his own failings echoed in her behaviour. With much economy, but without ever being unconvincing, the episode uses the time it has to chart how these two gradually warm to each other. The beautiful sting in the tale is that, although Jenny's death always appears inevitable, her resurrection does not; her regenerative glow relieves the gloom that would otherwise make this episode really quite dark.

Donna, ever the human half of the Chiswick/Gallifrey hybrid, chivvies the Doctor along, a sort of emotionally literate Jiminy Cricket to the Time Lord Pinocchio. She teases and cajoles him, insists on naming Jenny and treating her like a person - but she does this all so gently, never pushing too fair, slowly enabling the Doctor to let himself feel the emotions he is desperately trying to hold in check. As with The Fires of Pompeii and Planet of the Ood, she is once more behaving as a missing but complementary part of his personality - the arc for this series is secretly playing out right in front of our eyes, hidden in plain sight. And whilst the Doctor is distracted by family problems, Donna gets to apply her office skills to the wider universe and unlocks the mystery of Messaline. I love that the mundane business of understanding timestamps, filing and archiving is a transferrable skill - it makes Donna so much more accessible to us than Zoe with her photographic memory, or Leela with her janus thorns.

Martha, meanwhile, carries half the episode all by herself: the only speaking character in the Hath side of Messaline. Surrounded by prosthetics and talking to herself, this could have been ended up rather strained, but Ageyman's performance is never unconvincing or unnatural and Martha's qualities (so competent, so likeable) mean that she wins over her captors, teams up with Peck, and navigates the perils of this alien world with some flair, if not ease. Even better, and unlike some previous companions (Mel the computer programmer? Peri the botanist?), she repeatedly utilises her medical training: fixing Peck's shoulder and rushing to Jenny's aide. Like Rose, like Donna, Martha feels like a real person, thanks to great writing and acting. Out of the three, though, Doctor Jones has easily the best music, and Murray Gold's theme for her is never better than at the end of the episode, where it rises in a potent bluesy farewell.

Martha is the first companion to get her second chance at leaving the new series, and both goodbyes are really good. They certainly both feel justified, or, rather, they feel to me like they are two halves of one protracted goodbye: the first is abrupt and somewhat incomplete; this, the second, leaves everything neatly wrapped up. It is very satisfying and, importantly, the series feels like it has regained the emotional reality that went out of the window during Last of the Time Lords.

You'd think there wouldn't be room in the episode for anything else, but there's still quite a lot! There's something really alien and mysterious about Messaline, thanks to some ingenious choices of location, some good design work, and some clever concepts. The whole scenario - the colonisation, the underground city, the generations of soldiers fighting a war over seven days - is exotic and intriguing in a way that we haven't seen in a long time. For all that, I'm not convinced it entirely makes sense - it's never explained, for example, why Cobb is so much older than everybody else (is he part of the original crew, manipulating the younger generations for his own ends?), and surely not everyone from the earliest generations has been killed within a week? Is there no one left who actually remembers the landing? I'm not enamoured of the Doctor's preachy shouting at the end either ( "a man who never would, except for when I blew up Skaro or gunned down all those Cybermen in the TARDIS") but he has just lost his daughter and I'm never actually going to complain when someone on television tells my children that guns are evil.

Despite the somewhat upbeat ending, William was wistful enough to comment for once: "I wish she had gone with the Doctor..." Chris could only give this an eight because Jenny "should have regenerated completely not just come back to life. Also I don't believe the Hand could bring the TARDIS there. It's a hand, it hasn't got magic powers."

Oh, just you wait.


NEXT TIME...