Who’s there?

Bill, her friend Shireen, and their four new housemates Felicity, Harry, Pavel, and Paul go househunting. Due to their small budget, the available accommodations are sparse, but they find a man named John who has the perfect place for them. The rent is cheap and the tower is off-limits, so Bill overcomes her skepticism and signs the contract.

Pavel moves in first since he lost his student hall space. As he starts up his record player with Bach: Sonata #1 by Itzhak Perlman – specifically, G Minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1001 – 1. Adagio – he finds something horrifying.

The next day, Bill moves in by using the TARDIS as a moving van. The TARDIS materializes over her stacked possessions and the Doctor is surprised at how few things she owns. She learns about the Time Lords, their flamboyant collars, and (a hint of) regeneration as the TARDIS moves to the new house. The Doctor is questioning of the house and its draftiness, offering to help her move her stuff inside to get a better look. After meeting the rest of her housemates, Bill passes him off as her grandfather, then shows him out.

As Bill moves up to her room, Pavel’s continuing music is passed off as a personality quirk; he’s known to hole up in his room with his music for days. That night, the housemates (except Pavel, obviously) gather around take-out meals to discuss oddities about their new residence. Felicity doesn’t like the lack of a mobile phone signal and Harry talks about footsteps and tapping. A strange noise summons them to the kitchen where Bill finds the Doctor investigating with his sonic screwdriver. The Doctor notes that nothing has been updated since the 1930s, including the lack of washing and drying machines. The Doctor tells Bill that the trees are screaming but there is no wind to make them creak. The housemates return to the living area and are surprised to find the landlord.

The landlord fields their complaints but seems untroubled by them. He also reacts with a sinister nature to questions about the tower. The Doctor questions the landlord about the Prime Minister and when the landlord cannot answer, the Doctor’s suspicions are raised. The landlord departs and vanishes without a trace.

Bill suggests that the Doctor should leave, but he decides to stay up with Felicity and Harry. As Bill, Shireen, and Paul head to bed, the Doctor recommends checking on Pavel. Paul asks Bill about a date, but Bill lets him down easily by revealing that she’s gay. Paul closes his door and begins to scream. Bill and Shireen laugh this off as another joke, but they soon realize that something more sinister is at work.

The Doctor, Felicity, and Harry discuss music before realizing that the house has trapped them inside by closing the doors and shutters. Felicity panics and grabs the shutters before squeezing out through a window. Once outside, she is attacked by a tree.

Bill and Shireen check on Pavel only to find that he’s been absorbed into the wood paneling. He’s able to warn them against turning off the music, but the landlord appears and stops the record, claiming that “hope is its own form of cruelty.” The wood absorbs Pavel completely, supposedly at peace with the house, and the women run after being told that it’s time for them to pay.

Bill and Shireen find access to the tower while the Doctor and Harry investigate the wood downstairs. The Doctor finds a woodlouse-like creature with glowing antennae, but the single insect leads to a raging infestation. The Doctor and Harry find refuge in a dumbwaiter that takes them to the basement. Meanwhile, Bill and Shireen find a music box and a woman asking about her father. The woman is made of wood and introduces herself as Eliza.

The Doctor and Harry find evidence that past groups have gone missing from the house. In fact, it seems to be once every twenty years. It is evident that the landlord finds groups of young people to feed the insects. When the landlord appears, the Doctor confronts him and learns that the elderly man made a deal with the insects to save his daughter’s life. When Harry tries to run, he is consumed by the insects. The Doctor suggests that he might be able to help Eliza.

In the tower, Bill and Shireen try to leave peacefully, but when Shireen is consumed when she stomps on one of the bugs. The landlord and the Doctor arrive soon after. The Doctor examines Eliza, learning that the landlord had brought the insects to amuse his bedridden daughter. They learn that high-pitched sounds attract the insects, and Eliza’s music box accidentally revived the initial wave that transformed the girl.

But, in a twist, the landlord is revealed as Eliza’s son. The insects were a gift from a curious son and they preserved Eliza’s age as she was transformed. The landlord asks for forgiveness, aware that his attempts to keep the insects (and his mother) alive were wrong, and Eliza decides to release him. She realizes that she can control the insects, and after thanking the Doctor for his help, she allows the insects to devour herself and her son.

With Eliza gone, the house begins to crumble. As Bill and the Doctor run, they find the rest of the housemates alive and well as the house releases them. The Doctor tells the group to return to the estate agents as they gape at the site of the destroyed house.

The Doctor returns to the university with takeout food for Nardole. He takes up guard duty at the vault as the mysterious occupant plays Für Elise on piano. Nardole departs and the Doctor begins to relay the night’s adventures to the prisoner. Upon explaining that people were consumed by a house, the occupant plays Pop Goes the Weasel, and an amused Doctor opens the door to give his prisoner some dinner.

I enjoyed the combination of the haunted house and monster-of-the-week motifs alongside some decent character development for Bill. While we don’t see any time travel in this story, we do get some good suspense and drama coupled with a nice twist in the villain.

Everything in this story points to the landlord being the baddie, and the woman made of wood in the tower isn’t a huge surprise. What I appreciate, though, is the twist that reveals the “creature” as the landlord’s mother. Of course, the landlord’s actions are still bad, but it complicates matters since they are also driven by good intentions.

The road to hell and all that, right?

I’m also a big fan of the minimal body count. It would have been so easy to kill off every one of Bill’s friends, but the story goes the extra step to save Bill from that darkness.

There’s not much more to this story aside from the subtle hints about who is in the vault. We’ll get there soon enough.

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Oxygen

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Going ice skating with monsters.

Picking up immediately after the previous adventure, the Doctor and Bill rush back into the TARDIS to discuss their landing on the frozen Thames. They’ve landed at the site of the last great frost fair on February 4, 1814. The TARDIS is steered by reasoning with her, and she has decided that they are needed here.

The Doctor wants to explore but Bill is afraid that she’ll stick out since slavery is still legal. The Doctor points her to the TARDIS wardrobe as a creature rumbles beneath the ice. The travelers, now appropriately dressed, venture into the frost fair while the Doctor teases Bill about temporal causality. Bill has the time of her life trying (most nearly) everything while remarking that Regency London is a lot more racially diverse than she sees in the movies. The Doctor replies “So was Jesus. History’s a whitewash.”

Along the way, Bill notices green lights racing under the ice. To her relief, the Doctor has seen them as well. On the outskirts of the frost fair, those green lights end up leading to the death of a drunk man. Elsewhere, a pickpocket lifts the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver and the travelers give chase until the lights break the ice under the kid’s feet. The sonic is left behind as the ice refreezes, leaving Bill beside herself as the Doctor is unable to save the boy.

Later, Bill asks about the Doctor and his history with death. She learns that the Doctor has killed before, but she doesn’t learn how many lives he’s taken. The discussion is interrupted by one of the pickpockets asking about what’s under the ice. The Doctor and Bill eventually learn that someone is paying the orphaned children to work the fair, and the Doctor feeds them with stolen pies before telling them a story beside a warm fire. They soon learn that the man they’re looking for has a tattoo of a ship on his hand.

After dark, the travelers don diving suits and search for the lights beneath the ice. Soon enough, Bill is taken below and the Doctor dives in after her. They find a giant sea creature chained to the river bottom and return to the surface through a fisherman’s hole. The fisherman was the pie maker, and the pies are made from the angler fish that produce the lights. They get another lead from the pie man and use the psychic paper to gain access to a dredging camp. They eventually come to Lord Sutcliffe after learning that he’s in command of the dredging teams who are excavating the sea creature’s very powerful bodily waste. The Doctor notes that it could be used for interstellar travel.

Visiting the manor of Lord Sutcliffe, the Doctor recommends that he do the talking since Bill is easily angered. Under the guise of Doctor Disco of the Fairford Club, he confronts Sutcliffe but loses his own temper in the face of sexist, classist, and racist remarks. After sucker-punching Sutcliffe and knocking him out, the Doctor determines that he is indeed human. The travelers are captured by Sutcliffe’s minions and learn that the sea creature is a family secret that can freeze the ice. Sutcliffe lures people to the ensuing frost fairs and propels industry by feeding innocent people to the creature. The Doctor chastizes Sutcliffe for not seeing the value in human life, but Sutcliffe decides to accelerate his plans.

Sutcliffe takes his prisoners to the river where he has explosives planted. He plans to blow the ice and feed the creature a veritable buffet, including the elephant. Once the captors leave the tent, the Doctor and Bill try to use the sonic screwdriver to escape. The sonic draws the lantern fish as one of the guards takes it away. The guard is eaten and the travelers are freed.

The Doctor asks Bill to decide the fate of the creature. Bill eventually settles on saving the creature, enlisting the street urchin gang to help clear the frost fair attendees from the river. The Doctor moves the explosives to the chains holding the creature down, and as Sutcliffe triggers the explosives, he falls into the river and is eaten. The creature, now free, heads toward colder climates.

Later on, the Doctor and Bill welcome the street urchins to Sutcliffe’s manor. Bill feeds the kids while the Doctor alters Sutcliffe’s will to make a boy named Perry the next lord of the manor. The travelers return home to be criticized by Nardole for going off-world as Bill reads about their exploits in the newspaper.

The Doctor and Nardole flip a coin to determine if he can continue going off-world. Nardole sulks over losing the flip by checking on the vault. He’s surprised to hear a knocking from inside, but refuses to let the occupant out.

Here we see an adventure that asks the companion to decide the fate of a creature, but it does a much better job of having the Doctor guide the companion to the right answer than stories like Kill the Moon and Cold Blood did. Along the way, Bill gets to learn more about the Doctor and the choices that he has to make in his lives.

This adventure also doesn’t pull any punches regarding classism, sexism, and racism. In fact, it hangs a lampshade on racism within the first few minutes, and it draws a hard line for the Doctor’s tolerance of such atrocious views.

The Doctor Who universe has been pretty progressive in the fight against human racism over the years, notably in stories like Human Nature & The Family of Blood, The Shakespeare Code, Captain Jack Harkness, Lost in Time, Remembrance of the Daleks, Battlefield, and Ghost Light. (It’s worth noting that the Doctor was far more dismissive of Martha’s concerns in The Shakespeare Code than he is here.) By nature, the show is inherently progressive when using aliens as metaphors for racism – the Daleks are the most obvious narrative vehicle – but the show has also stumbled a couple of times as well, most notably in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (yellowface and Asian slurs), The Daleks’ Master Plan (in which the Doctor engages in Orientalism), The Tomb of the Cybermen (in which the only Black character is an intellectually-challenged villain who sacrifices himself), The Evil of the Daleks (in which Kemel mirrors the mute strong Black man trope, but in Turkish), and The Celestial Toymaker (in which a racial slur is quoted in a nursery rhyme and the villain is coded in Orientalism).

Sexism plays a lesser role in Doctor Who history, popping up most notably in The Five Doctors and some of the First Doctor’s attitudes towards Tegan. Otherwise, the fights against sexism and classism are spread throughout the franchise’s history.

We get a few callbacks with this adventure. First, Martha was concerned about the butterfly effect in The Shakespeare Code, which was also a trip to London in the past. Second, parallel universes are mentioned again, nodding to their existence in Inferno and Rise of the Cybermen & Age of Steel. Third, the Doctor reminds us that humans are keen to ignore the bizarre happenings around them, such as with Remembrance of the Daleks and In the Forest of the Night. Last but not least, “Doctor Disco” makes a return, dredging up the off-hand joke from The Zygon Invasion.

What I really like about this adventure is the creature feature aspect with the companion saving the monster from torturous captivity. It’s an exercise in finding the best in humanity, giving us hope for the future that is reinforced by themes that (unfortunately) are still relevant today.

That’s the mark of good science fiction.

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Knock Knock

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

The importance of understanding emotion.

Bill prepares for her first proper trip in the TARDIS, musing about how the seats are too far from the console and how difficult it seems to drive it. She’s impressed that the Doctor stole the TARDIS instead of buying it, and their back-and-forth is interrupted by Nardole who chastizes the Doctor for considering a trip off-world. The Doctor dismisses him by requesting to put the kettle on for tea.

Between the vault and the Doctor’s office, before the kettle boils, the Doctor takes a trip to the future.

On a planet with vast expanses of wheat, colonists are waging a battle with their robots. If the robots detect emotions other than happiness, they murder the colonists with a wave of tiny drones. Sometime later, the Doctor and Bill arrive and take a self-guided tour of one of Earth’s first off-world colonies. They are fitted with translation devices while the emoji-bots stalk them from the windows above. One of the emoji-bots meets the travelers and offers them badges that reflect the wearer’s emotions. The emotions are not visible to the wearer and are worn on the back to facilitate transparency.

The robot serves Bill a meal of processed algae as she notes how skeptical the Doctor is about the empty city. She’s also amazed by the Doctor’s dual hearts, which he mentions during an excited monologue about how the city was built. He later finds a necklace on the ground and his theory changes regarding the residents of the colony. He verifies it by locating the source of a greenhouse’s calcium-based fertilizer.

The Doctor’s shift in mood is noted by the emoji-bots and they chase the travelers before the Doctor tells Bill to smile. The robots are programmed to ensure the happiness of the colonists and they have done so to a fault. The Doctor and Bill evade the robots and return to the TARDIS. The Doctor plans to leave Bill at the TARDIS while he destroys the death trap that is the city, but she is swayed otherwise by the sign on the TARDIS door: “Advice and assistance obtainable immediately.”

The Doctor is the universe’s helpline.

Bill returns to the Doctor’s side and he explains that the killer insect drones – the Vardy – are the literal bones and flesh of the buildings around them. At its core lies the original ship that the colonists arrived in, just like the Vikings who lived in their ships until they built their cities. As the travelers enter the ship, the Erehwon, the emoji-bots go on alert.

The Doctor navigates to the ship’s engine room with Bill’s help and a good old-fashioned deck plan. As the Doctor enters the engine room, the emoji-bots enter murder mode. Bill remembers that she can photograph the deck plan with her phone before following the Doctor’s path. She moves through stacks of artifacts and finds a room holding the remains of a recently-deceased elderly woman and a digital book filled with images of Earth’s history. She deduces that the colonists were the last humans evacuating from Earth.

Bill decides to rendezvous with the Doctor but finds a human boy. Meanwhile, the Doctor is ambushed by an emoji-bot. The Doctor meets up with Bill and the boy and he decides to disarm his makeshift bomb because the ship is a cryogenic colony ship filled with survivors from Earth. They meet Steadfast, one of the first to awaken, and the Doctor orders him to remain on the ship until told otherwise.

Bill takes the Doctor to the elderly woman whom the Time Lord identifies as a shepherd for this flock. She was the first to die, passing from natural causes, but the grief of her death passed through the colony like a virus. The Vardy identified grief as the enemy of happiness and started a cascade of death to stem the tide. Using the necklace, the Doctor recognizes that the grief cycle will continue, so he assembles the colonists to tell them the story.

The boy has left the ship and the colonists decide to wage war on the Vardy. When they fire on an emoji-bot, it experiences rage, and the Vardy attack the colonists. The Doctor realizes that the Vardy have become self-aware and stuns everyone in the city, effectively resetting the city into a symbiotic relationship where the humans are tenants in the Vardy’s new home.

Bill and the Doctor leave in the TARDIS as she muses about his role as an intergalactic policeman. The Doctor presumes that he can return them to the exact moment that they left, but they materialize in the wrong time as an elephant walks up the frozen Thames.

What starts as a monster-of-the-week story ends up with a Doctor Who twist as the supposed enemy ends up on top because it is simply misunderstood. Couple that with the theme of a new companion’s first real trip in the TARDIS and you have a winner.

The origin of this story makes me laugh: Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat don’t understand emojis, so they often had trouble understanding texts from Jenna Coleman (who uses a lot of them in her communication). Thus was born a story about miscommunication based around emotions.

The story’s moral, of course, orbits the concepts of miscommunication and toxic positivity and emphasizes the need to read and understand emotions in relationships. The Vardy only understand black and white when it comes to emotions – grief is the enemy of happiness – but humanity exists in shades of grey that are wide open to interpretation and analysis. We can make a lot of headway together by simply talking things through with transparency.

Following on from the wave of comic characters that exist in Doctor Who canon from The Return of Doctor Mysterio, Bill lets us know that Mister Fantastic of Marvel’s first family (The Fantastic Four) is another superhero in this continuity.

The show also returns to classic tropes with human colony ships (The Ark and The Beast Below, for example) and cryogenic suspension (The Ark in Space, for example). It’s also the second time that we’ve seen a human colony where unhappiness was a death sentence (The Happiness Patrol was the first).

I enjoyed the story of The Magic Haddock, which is a story about being careful about what you wish for. That in-universe parable is made up of two different stories: The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish is the source of the wishes in the haddock story, and The Monkey’s Paw is about an artifact that grants wishes at a deadly expense.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the colony planet was never named. It’s a literal “nowhere” colonized by people who traveled on a ship called Erewhon (“nowhere” spelled backward). (The planet is later called Gliese 581d and Earth 2.7 in different prose stories, but it is not identified in the course of this televised story.)

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Thin Ice

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.