Timestamp #297: Fugitive of the Judoon

March 6, 2024July 22, 2024 Michael Falkner5 Comments

She’s the Doctor, but not the one you were expecting.

In Gloucester, 2020, Ruth Clayton awakens on her 44th birthday and makes breakfast. Her husband, Lee, heads out to buy a proper cake while Ruth asks the day to do its worst. She works as a professional tour guide, but business is slow. She later gets a coffee and the barista, Allan, shows her a dossier about her husband. Apparently, there’s something fishy about him.

Meanwhile, a Judoon spacecraft arrives in orbit and starts scanning the surface. At the same time, the TARDIS hurtles through the vortex as the Doctor tries to scan for the Master. The companions are concerned about her periods of deep thought and solitary explorations. Their discussion is interrupted by a Judoon signal that Earth has been isolated Earth due to a fugitive search.

The Judoon teleport enforcement patrols to the surface and begin scanning people. Ruth is scanned and cataloged, but her friend Marcia is vaporized for defying the patrols. The TARDIS arrives and the Doctor warns everyone (including Allan and Lee) to shelter in place. The team rushes out to face the threat, but Graham is teleported away. The Judoon find Allan’s dossier and execute the baker for touching one of the aliens.

The Judoon set their sights on Lee as the Doctor confronts the captain. Posing as an Imperial Regulator, she negotiates a stay to arbitrate a solution. While they work, Graham wakes up on the deck of a strange ship and meets Captain Jack Harkness. He mistakes the companion for the Doctor as he plants a kiss on Graham. The quantum scoop he used mistook Graham for the Doctor, but Jack has a message to relay: The future of the universe is at stake. Jack is also excited that the Doctor is now a woman.

The Doctor talks with Lee and Ruth, finding they’re both completely human. They find a box with an alien signature. Lee asks the Doctor to hand it over and offers everyone else a chance to escape. Yaz and Ryan stage a diversion and invite the Judoon captain inside before they are teleported away. Lee surrenders to the captain after sending a text message and the captain presents him to a new arrival named Commander Gat. The item in the box was a service medal from an intergalactic army, and Commander Gat fulfills her duty by executing Lee.

Jack mistakes Yaz for the Doctor, realizing too late that the Doctor is now traveling with three companions. The Judoon enforcement field is preventing accurate readings. When the ship’s systems begin to fight back against him, Jack tells the companions to warn the Doctor about a lone Cyberman before sending them home.

Ruth receives the text message – “Follow the light. Break the glass. Happy birthday” – and sees brief visions before the Judoon track her down. They identify Ruth as the fugitive and she spectacularly subdues the captain. She rips off the captain’s horn and the platoon teleports away. Ruth doesn’t understand how she was able to do what she did, but the Judoon have left the planet. Unfortunately, the change in tactics doesn’t bode well, especially after Ruth dishonored the captain. The Doctor offers to help her follow the activation message that Lee sent. It leads to a family lighthouse where Ruth claims to have grown up.

The Doctor and Ruth chat about her life as they travel. The lighthouse was left to her but she’s never wanted to return. Ruth has more visions as they pull up, and while Ruth gets a fire started, the Doctor investigates and searches for clues. Her search leads her to Ruth’s parents’ gravesite where a blank headstone marks the site.

Ruth finds a fire alarm marked “Break Glass” and does so, releasing a burst of regeneration energy. She changes clothes and finds a rifle while the Doctor digs up the gravesite and finds a TARDIS. Ruth arrives…

…and introduces herself as the Doctor.

The Fugitive Doctor teleports them into the TARDIS control room, a beautiful retro mix of modern and classic elements. The Thirteenth Doctor introduces herself in a struggle to catch up, and the Fugitive Doctor states that she is a past incarnation of the Thirteenth, but neither remembers the other. The Fugitive Doctor doesn’t recognize a sonic screwdriver but has access to the Chameleon Arch technology that shielded her.

The Judoon and Commander Gat tractor the TARDIS onto their orbiting ship. Gat confronts the Fugitive Doctor and disarms her. The Thirteenth Doctor steps in with a curve ball, introducing herself and causing discord with the Judoon. Gat reveals that she is also from Gallifrey and is shocked to find that their home has been destroyed. Gat doesn’t believe them and tries to kill the Doctors, but the Fugitive Doctor had previously sabotaged the rifle and it backfires. Gat is vaporized and the Judoon are forced to retreat as the ship enters intergalactic space.

The Fugitive Doctor takes the Thirteenth Doctor back to her TARDIS. Thirteen struggles to sort things out since she knows her own history, but the Fugitive Doctor is definitely from her past. She reunites with her companions and learns what Jack had to say.

The Doctor knows that something is coming for her and tells the companions that they have no idea who she is. They tell her that they know her now, the best person they know, and they’ll stand by her side no matter what trouble comes.

The balance of mystery and tension while wrinkling what we know about the Doctor’s history is fun. On the surface, the story is a pretty simple fugitive mystery racing alongside the defense of Earth against the overbearing Judoon. But then we get the twist, and if there’s one thing I love about Doctor Who, it’s how willing it is to rewrite its own continuity.

Doctor Who‘s continuity (and canon, for that matter) has never been consistent. In fact, it’s been pretty wibbly-wobbly depending on the story that writers and producers want to tell.

Note the distinction: Canon (in the non-religious sense) is the principle or behavior used as a guide, where continuity is the flow of all those trivia bits like the Doctor’s age. The Doctor Who canon began as a history show for children in a sci-fi wrapper, but it quickly evolved into something more.

Forty-four years before this story aired, The Brain of Morbius wrapped up with an explicit suggestion that the Doctor had incarnations before the First Doctor. According to then-showrunner Philip Hinchcliffe, the original intention was that the faces shown in that episode were meant to be pre-Hartnell incarnations, but fans of the time chose to ignore it.

Her reaction to the sonic screwdriver answers the question of where the Fugitive Doctor fits into the timeline. The First Doctor didn’t recognize such a device in the time around The Tenth Planet/Twice Upon a Time, but the Second Doctor used one in Fury From the Deep, The Dominators, and The War Games. The Third Doctor first used his own version in The Sea Devils without any hint of it being a strange device. We can also match that with the Third Doctor’s first appearance in Spearhead from Space, where he fell out of the TARDIS in the Second Doctor’s clothes.

Sure, the Time Lords could have orchestrated everything to place the Fugitive Doctor in the “Season 6b” space between Troughton’s and Pertwee’s incarnations, but Occam’s razor suggests otherwise.

It was good to see Jack Harkness again, particularly after how Torchwood concluded. I also love how the Doctor and the companions are starting to bond in the aftermath of Spyfall. The Doctor routinely visits the graveyard that is Gallifrey without her friends, and they’re helping her to heal from something they cannot comprehend.

I wonder if she ever tries to travel to a time before the Citadel and the Time Lords were destroyed.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Praxeus

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.

Timestamp #225: A Good Man Goes to War

June 9, 2021June 7, 2021 Michael Falkner12 Comments

Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes to War
(1 episode, s06e07, 2011)

Demons run when a good man goes to war.

Prequel: Brain Trafficking

Dorium Maldovar meets with three cloaked figures. He tells them that his agents have procured the exact security software they have requested, extracted from memory – the literal brain – of a Judoon trooper. He exchanges it for a bag of sentient money.

Dorium doesn’t understand why they are doing all this to imprison one child, and he’s astonished at the child’s identity and relationship to the Doctor. He warns them: “God help us if you’ve made him angry”.

A Good Man Goes to Wars

On the Demons Run base, Amy consoles her new daughter, Melody Pond. She promises that help is on the way and is distraught that she has been unable to care for Melody since she was born.

Elsewhere in the cosmos, Rory and the Doctor have been hunting for Amy. They lay waste to an entire Cyberman fleet, news of which reaches the troops on Demons Run. Soldiers “The Fat One” and “The Thin One” – together, the Thin-Fat Gay-Married Anglican Marines – converse briefly with Cleric Lorna Bucket, a woman who has once met the Doctor in the Gamma Forests. Lorna sews to pass the time and was the only Cleric to show empathy for Amy’s plight. While The Thin One and Lorna discuss the Doctor, The Fat One is led away by the Headless Monks, the cloaked figures who met with Maldovar, and asked to make a donation into an appropriately head-sized box.

In London, circa 1888 AD, a Silurian named Vastra returns home after dispatching Jack the Ripper by her blade. Her maid Jenny informs her that the TARDIS has appeared in the drawing room, and Vastra knows that it is time to repay an old debt.

At the Battle of Zaruthstra in 4037 AD, Command Harcourt and Madame President Eleanor are ready to leave an infirm child as they retreat, but the child is saved by an unlikely nurse. A Sontaran named Strax tends to the child, then leaves as the TARDIS arrives.

At Stormcage, as River is breaking back into her cell, she meets Rory in his Centurion garb. She’s just returned from a birthday celebration with the Doctor in 1814 and Rory is summoning her to Demons Run. River explains that the Battle of Demons Run is when the Doctor will finally know who she is and that she cannot be there until the very end. During this event, the Doctor will rise higher than ever before, but will fall so much further.

At the Maldovarium, the Eyepatch Lady confronts Maldovar. She is known as Madame Kovarian, and Maldovar explains that the Doctor is raising an army. He also explains the origin of her base’s name: “Demons run when a good man goes to war.” When Kovarian leaves, the TARDIS arrives for Maldovar.

Back on Demons Run, while Colonel Manton rallies his troops, Lorna tries to present Amy with a prayer leaf. It’s a fabric token embroidered with Melody’s name in Lorna’s native language. They discuss the Doctor’s status as a legend and how each of them met the Time Lord. Amy accepts the gift and the apology.

Lorna returns to the colonel’s rally just in time for Manton to reveal the true face of the Headless Monks. Of course, the Doctor is masquerading as one of the monks, and as everyone in the crowd draws arms against him, the lights go out and the Doctor vanishes. The Clerics and the monks start shooting each other until Manton reestablishes control over the assembly by having all of the Clerics disarm themselves. Meanwhile, Vastra and Jenny have taken the control room in order to monitor the situation.

The assembled troops are suddenly surrounded as an army of Silurians and Judoon materialize. Commander Strax holds Manton at gunpoint. Manton claims that his fleet will come to help if Demons Run falls, but the Doctor counters: The fleet won’t know to come if Demons Run can’t call for help. The Doctor uses the Dalek-upgraded Spitfires, courtesy of Winston Churchill, to disable the communications tower.

Madame Kovarian readies her ship with young Melody in tow, but she’s thwarted by Rory with help from Henry and Toby Avery. Kovarian and Manton are brought before a barely restrained Doctor. He wants Manton to order his troops to “run away” so that he’ll be remembered by it for all time. Kovarian eventually yields and orders Manton to give the word.

Rory, with help from a sonic screwdriver, frees Amy from her cell. They both weep over their baby and the reunion. The Doctor soon joins them and their reunion is complete with a bout of humor. The Doctor speaks baby after all, and Melody has a lot to say.

Madame Vastra reports that the Clerics are leaving without any bloodshed. When she gloats that the Doctor has never risen higher, Rory remembers River’s warning.

The group gathers in the hangar. The Doctor doesn’t want to leave until he figures out why the base was used in the first place. The Doctor also produces his baby cot so Melody can settle down for a nap. Vastra calls the Doctor away, but before he goes he explains how Amy was split between the Ganger avatar and Demons Run. As the Doctor leaves, Strax brings in Lorna as a prisoner.

In the control room, the Doctor finds out that Melody has a mixture of human and Time Lord DNA. Presumably, it happened as a result of conception while exposed to the Untempered Schism, just like how the Time Lords began. Vastra is concerned that their victory was too easy.

In the hangar, Lorna claims that she’s a friend who only wanted to meet the Doctor. She also claims that he’s a great warrior, hence his name. Unfortunately, they soon fall under siege from the Headless Monks. While Vastra and Maldovar return to the hangar, Kovarian contacts the Doctor as he thinks back to the child in the astronaut suit from 1969. Kovarian explains that the child represents hope in their endless, bitter war against the Doctor.

A force field snaps into existence around the TARDIS and the hangar is sealed. The Headless Monks advance with their attack prayer and Amy retreats to safety while everyone else prepares for battle. Maldovar tries to reason with the monks, but he is cut down.

As the battle is met, the Doctor connects the dots. Kovarian has replaced Melody with a Ganger. The child is still lost. The Doctor arrives moments too late. The monks have been defeated, but Lorna and Strax have paid the price. The Doctor and Jenny try to comfort Amy. He also speaks briefly with Lorna before she dies, promising that he remembers her just like he remembers everyone he meets.

The Doctor is ready to give up on his quest against the Silence, but channels his anger toward the newly-arrived River Song. He wants to know where she was, but River says that she could not have turned the tide of the battle. She warns him that his name, which means healer across the universe, could become just like the people of the Gamma Forests know him: Mighty Warrior.

Demons run when a good man goes to war
Night will fall and drown the sun
When a good man goes to war

Friendship dies and true love lies
Night will fall and the dark will rise
When a good man goes to war

Demons run, but count the cost
The battle’s won, but the child is lost

The Doctor demands to know who she is and she leads him to the baby cot. The answer is inscribed on the cot in Gallifreyan and the Doctor’s mood shifts dramatically. He rushes to the TARDIS, asking River to get everyone home safely, before flying away to find Melody.

Amy demands to know where he’s gone and who she is. River shows her the prayer leaf and explains that Melody Pond in the language of the Gamma Forests translates to River Song. “The only water in the forest is the river.”

River Song is Amy and Rory’s daughter.

The Battle of Demons Run: Two Days Later

Strax awakens two days after the Battle of Demons Run, having been healed by alien technology. Vastra and Jenny tell him that they are the last to leave and invite him to join them in London. After all, Jenny has been ostracized from her family for her sexual orientation, Vastra is presumably the last of her kind, and Strax is all alone. There could be a future for them all together.

Strax refuses at first, but once he learns that London will involve crime-solving and plenty of adventure, he agrees to accompany them.

This story serves multiple purposes and it serves them well. Primarily, it ties off the thread of Amy’s abduction and opens the story of a war against the Doctor with Melody at its core. Second, it presents a cliffhanger to close out the first half of the season and tease the direction of the second half. Third, it offers a springboard for the team of Vastra, Jenny, and Strax.

That team is an intriguing combination of a Silurian, a human servant, and the unlikely Sontaran nurse. All three are outcasts of some sort, and that characteristic provides the glue to bind them. Strax provides a wonderful parallel to Rory through their mutual professions and Vastra offers a connection to the Doctor, the man who saved her at some point in his on-again-off-again guardianship of her species.

We get a beautiful inadvertent tie back to The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang with the Cybermen. In that Timestamp, I mused about the status of the Cybus and Mondasian Cybermen at this point in the franchise. The Cybermen in that story were Cybus models, survivors of the Battle of Canary Wharf, and had either built or assimilated into a fleet. The Mondasian Cybermen, last seen in Silver Nemesis, still had to exist but I had wondered if the two could co-exist.

Obviously, they can to some degree, as the Cybermen seen in this story were obviously Mondasian – they didn’t have the Cybus C on their chests – but have evolved (or assimilated into) the more bulky Cybus body time. I’m excited to see their return.

The other blink-and-you’ll-miss-it note surrounds River Song. On the surface, it seems like the River that Rory visits in Stormcage is the same River that arrives after the Battle of Demons Run, but the context clues point in a different direction. River at Stormcage had to consult her diary, which means that Demons Run has already happened for her. The River at Stormcage was from a later point in her timeline and she knows what happens to the Doctor. A minor addition is a reminder that River once remarked how the Doctor could make whole armies turn and run.

In a smaller callback, we see the Church again, previously met in The Time of Angels.

All told, this was a great story, a wonderful springboard, and a terrific cliffhanger.

Since the Timestamps Project is proceeding (for the most part) in airdate order, the next stop on this journey is a return to Torchwood. At some point, the streams will cross for a brief period as Doctor Who continues Series Six.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Torchwood: The New World

Timestamp #184: Smith and Jones

July 24, 2019July 24, 2019 Michael Falkner15 Comments

Doctor Who: Smith and Jones
(1 episode, s03e01, 2007)

It’s a coincidence, but what a fitting story to chronicle just after Apollo 11’s fiftieth anniversary.

Martha Jones is on her way to work when her mobile rings several times, each caller talking to her about her brother’s twenty-first birthday. In the midst of all these calls, she’s interrupted by a certain Time Lord who demonstrably takes off his tie. Once at the hospital, Martha bumps into a helmet-clad motorcycle rider in black, changes clothes, and tends to her patients as a medical student.

After dealing with a patient experiencing a salt deficiency, she spots two more motorcycle riders before moving on to her second patient: John Smith. The man has two heartbeats and is complaining of abdominal pain. Martha examines him and each of the medical students talks about the rise of static electricity as they move on to the next patient.

Later on, Martha talks to her sister on the phone and discovers that the storm outside is focused directly over the hospital. As John Smith walks by, the rain changes direction – straight up! – and the building rumbles as lightning strikes. Looking outside, Martha discovers that the hospital has been moved to the surface of the moon.

That cause a bit of consternation among the occupants. Okay, more like a riot.

Martha and her co-worker, Julia Swales, take stock of the situation. As Martha remarks that the building isn’t airtight – they should have died from asphyxiation long ago – John Smith congratulates her on her intuition and invites her to join him. They stand on a balcony in the Earth-light, breathe deep, and discuss extraterrestrials on Earth. From Big Ben to the Christmas invasion and the Battle of Canary Wharf (where Martha lost her nearly identical cousin, Adeola), Martha believes in aliens. John Smith introduces himself as the Doctor and apologizes for not saving Martha’s cousin. That event is still fresh in his mind.

Then they meet the Judoon.

Huge cylindrical ships land nearby and an army marches on the hospital. Meanwhile, the lady with the salt deficiency introduces Mr. Stoker, the medical student supervisor, to her friends in the motorcycle helmets. She also uses a bendy straw to start drinking his blood.

The Judoon storm the hospital, revealing themselves as rhinoceros-faced aliens, and use a universal translator to learn English. They catalog everyone they meet as human, complete with an X on each captive’s hands. Meanwhile, the Doctor tells Martha that the Judoon are police-for-hire, and if they find a non-human criminal hiding in the hospital, they will execute everyone inside as an accomplice. One patient tries to stop the Judoon with a vase to the head and he is immediately executed for assault.

Justice is swift.

The Doctor, being non-human, skulks away with Martha and tries to hack the computer system with the sonic screwdriver. He tells Martha that he spotted alien power cores a few days back and checked into the hospital as a patient to look around. Martha decides to ask Stoker for help in finding anyone with unusual symptoms, finds Florence enjoying her blood beverage, and the chase is on.

The Doctor and Martha take refuge in a radiology suite and the Doctor ambushes one of the motorcycle gang with an X-ray machine. He blasts the creature – a Slab, leather through and through – with 5000 times the radiation of a normal X-ray. He absorbs the rest of the roentgen (gamma) radiation and dumps it into his shoe, then ditches the other one to balance himself out. Barefoot on the moon, the Doctor finds that his sonic screwdriver has been destroyed before realizing that Florence can now pose as human thanks to her hemoglobin smoothie.

Sure enough, she’s soon cataloged as human.

The other Slab searches for the Doctor and Martha while she asks the Time Lord about traveling companions. They’re ambushed by Judoon who catalog the Doctor as non-human – Martha is truly surprised – and they run to the floor below. Since the Judoon are methodical, they won’t revisit a floor they’ve already audited. The pair find the exsanguinated Stoker, discover that the oxygen supply is starting to dwindle, and separate as the Judoon (surprisingly) storm the floor. The Doctor kisses Martha before running for the MRI suite where he finds Florence modifying the imager to fry every biologic within 250,000 miles. She’s intent on using the Judoon ships to escape.

The Doctor poses as a human and verbally spars with Florence. He mentions that the Judoon are changing their scans so Florence refreshes her disguise by drinking the Doctor’s blood. The Judoon barge in and scan the Doctor, declaring him deceased. Martha scans Florence, revealing her as non-human. Florence, a plasmavore, sets her MRI plan in motion before being executed (along with the Slab) and the Judoon leave.

Meanwhile, the hospital is about to explode.

Martha returns to the Doctor and performs a modified version of CPR, bringing him back to life. With oxygen levels critically low, the Doctor stops the MRI by pulling the plug and then carries Martha to a window as the Judoon lift off. Before they clear the moon’s gravity, they reverse the teleport process and return the hospital to Earth.

In the chaos that follows later, Martha watches as the Doctor enters the TARDIS and dematerializes. She goes home and gets dressed for her brother’s party, an event where Martha is mocked for her moon story – the public cover story is that everyone was drugged – before her family storms off. She spots the Doctor and follows him to the TARDIS. He offers Martha the chance to join him and she eventually joins him.

The “bigger on the inside” moment completely blows her mind.

The Doctor mentions his former companion, Rose, and tells Martha that she is definitely not replacing her. Martha replies that, despite the earlier kiss, she’s only interested in humans. The Doctor sets a course and the TARDIS hurtles away through the vortex.

The thing that impresses me most about this episode is the chemistry between Freema Agyeman and David Tennant. The spark is immediate and coupled with the pacing and the dialogue, this story is just fun. Martha is likable and smart, and she plays well with the Tenth Doctor’s zaniness. The downside, of course, is that the hints of a future romantic relationship are far too strong. We just left that party in Pete’s World.

The whole Saxon thread is back with this story after being teased in The Runaway Bride and Captain Jack Harkness. This season’s “Bad Wolf” gives us the added benefit that the mysterious stranger believes in life among the stars. We also get some callbacks as the Ninth Doctor’s sonic is destroyed – the last time we lost a sonic screwdriver like that was in the Fifth Doctor‘s era, and it was like losing “an old friend” – and the Tenth Doctor muses about his love of bananas.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Code

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