Tag: Ninth Doctor

Timestamp #250: The Day of the Doctor

Michael Falkner16 Comments

Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor
(1 episode, 50th Anniversary Special, 2013)

Timestamp 250 Day of the Doctor

The big event in a cup-a-soup.

The Last Day

A soldier opens his eyes to find someone standing over him. The soldier is part of the army on Gallifrey and has been fitted with a headcam. The man explains the headcam’s use and function, including how the frightening images that keep popping up are hallucinations, not premonitions. The headcams are installed into the brain and record everything for the official record. The recording is censored, with violence and language deemed unsuitable for the soldiers’ families cut out, and anything particularly graphic gets tinted red.

These soldiers proceed to Arcadia, the safest place on Gallifrey due to the impenetrable sky trenches. If even one Dalek did get through, the city could be destroyed, so the soldier has to remain vigilant in his scans. As he is trained on the scanner’s use, he detects a Dalek.

That Dalek leads to many more. As the Daleks open fire, the soldier’s headcam goes blank. The last sound heard in the background is a chilling death cry of anguish.

Thus begins the Fall of Arcadia.

The Day of the Doctor

After opening on a familiar theme, we see a police constable patrolling near I. M. Foreman’s scrap yard and Coal Hill School. Inside the school, Clara finishes a lesson for her class as the bell rings. She gets a note to meet “her doctor” at an address on an open patch of road. There she spots the TARDIS and races toward it on her motorcycle.

The TARDIS lets her in without complaint and she snaps her fingers to close the doors. After a cheerful reunion with the Doctor, she jumps as the TARDIS shudders. A helicopter hauls the box away. The Doctor calls Kate Stewart at UNIT headquarters only to find out that she’s bringing the TARDIS. She had no idea that he was still inside.

She has the TARDIS taken directly to the National Gallery where she presents instructions directly from Queen Elizabeth I. The Doctor and Clara meet UNIT scientist Petronella Osgood – she has a nice scarf – and proceed into the gallery. There they find a Time Lord painting known as both No More and Gallifrey Falls. It depicts the Fall of Arcadia and appears in three dimensions. The Doctor is shaken by what he remembers upon seeing the painting, recounting the day that the previously unknown Doctor ended the Time War.

Inside the image, we find the last day of the Last Great Time War. As the Daleks rage and innocents die, the War Doctor takes a gun from a lone soldier. With that weapon, he carves a message into a wall near the TARDIS.

It reads “NO MORE”.

The Doctor escapes by plowing the TARDIS through a wall and a gathering of Daleks. As he flees, the High Commanders gather in the War Room to plan their next move. The Eleventh General dismisses the High Council’s plans since “they have already failed” and ponders the Doctor’s message. He also learns that there has been a breach in the Omega Arsenal of the Time Vaults. Among all of the forbidden weapons – many of which have already been used in vain against the Daleks – the Moment has been taken.

The Moment was the final work of the ancients of Gallifrey. It is a weapon so advanced that it developed a conscience to stand in judgment of the user. The General muses that only the Doctor would be mad enough to use such a weapon.

Sure enough, the Doctor issues a final warning as he walks the empty desert toward an abandoned farmhouse: “Time Lords of Gallifrey, Daleks of Skaro, I serve notice on you all. Too long I have stayed my hand. No more. Today you leave me no choice. Today, this war will end. No more. No more…” He uncovers a complex box that ticks and whirs, lamenting the lack of a big red button to activate it. He hears a rustling sound and investigates, returning to find a woman sitting on the box.

This woman appears to be Rose Tyler, a face that this incarnation does not recognize, but she eventually identifies as Bad Wolf, an avatar of the Moment. She mocks the Doctor in her judgment, wondering why he left the TARDIS so far away. Perhaps so the TARDIS couldn’t witness what he’s about to do. Meanwhile, the Time Lord refuses the right to be called Doctor. Even though the name resides in his head, he no longer feels worthy of it. The suffering of the universe is too great, and he must end it even though it means his death. The Moment decides that his fate and punishment will be to survive the holocaust and live with the consequences, counting the dead for the rest of his lives.

They are interrupted by a fissure that opens overhead. A fez falls out.

In the 21st century, the Eleventh Doctor opens the queen’s letter.

“My dearest love: I hope the painting known as Gallifrey Falls will serve as proof that it is your Elizabeth that writes to you now. You will recall that you pledged yourself to the safety of my kingdom. In that capacity, I have appointed you Curator of the Under Gallery, where deadly danger to England is locked away. Should any disturbance occur within its walls, it is my wish that you should be summoned. Godspeed, gentle husband.”

Kate leads the Doctor and Clara away to show them the next piece of the puzzle. As they leave, UNIT scientist McGillop takes a mysterious phone call and questions why he should move the painting.

The Doctor, Clara, and Kate arrive at a painting of Queen Elizabeth I and the Tenth Doctor, leading the scene to England, 1562. There, the Tenth Doctor and Queen Elizabeth I ride a horse out of the TARDIS where he presumably just gave her a tour of the time capsule. They later share a picnic, and after she remarks on the face that has seen war, he proposes marriage.

It’s a ruse to uncover a Zygon invasion of Earth. Unfortunately, even with his tracking device that goes ding, he misidentifies the queen as a Zygon. When the horse changes shape, the duo runs from the threat. They end up separated, and while the queen gets attacked, the Doctor threatens a rabbit before realizing that it is truly just a rabbit.

The Doctor finds the queen once again, as well as a doppelgänger. While he tries to figure out which queen is the real one, a time fissure opens and a fez falls out.

In the 21t century, Kate leads her group into the Under Gallery where the Eleventh Doctor is fascinated by stone dust. Kate orders Osgood to analyze it while they proceed deeper. The Doctor pulls a fez from a display case before coming to the reason why Kate called him here. Several 3-D paintings that used to show figures have had their glass broken out from the inside. The figures are missing.

The time fissure opens and the Eleventh Doctor faintly recalls seeing it before. He tosses the fez through before jumping across, landing at the Tenth Doctor’s feet. The two Time Lords realize who each other are, compare sonic screwdrivers, and bicker a bit before the time fissure crackles.

The Tenth Doctor sends the queens away with a pair of kisses as Clara communicates with the Doctors through the fissure. The Eleventh Doctor tries to send the fez back, but it never arrives in the Under Gallery. Instead, it lands at the War Doctor’s feet.

Kate leaves Clara in the Under Gallery as she calls her office to request the Cromier file – invoking a nod toward the “UNIT dating controversy” – unaware of the Zygon lurking behind her.

The Tenth and Eleventh Doctors attempt to analyze the fissure, canceling each other’s reversal of the polarity with their sonics. After a moment, the War Doctor jumps through and meets his successors, mistaking them at first for companions instead of Time Lords.

He also chastises them for pointing their sonic screwdrivers like water pistols.

The meeting is interrupted by the queen’s royal guard. The Eleventh Doctor tries to get Clara to pose as a witch through the fissure, but the guards and the War Doctor are not impressed. The Queen arrives and threatens to toss the Doctors in the Tower of London, which serves as Kate’s office in the future.

Once there, the Eleventh Doctor sets to work scratching at a pillar while the Tenth Doctor questions the War Doctor. Meanwhile, in the future, Osgood puts the pieces together and realizes that the statues are Zygons. She’s too late, however, and both she and McGillop are copied. Osgood is able to escape in short order.

Kate leads Clara to the Black Archive, a space where the deepest secrets are kept and everyone’s memories of visiting it are wiped. The archive is TARDIS-proofed to keep the Doctor out since he wouldn’t approve of the collection within. Kate shows Clara a vortex manipulator gifted to the archive by Captain Jack Harkness. The access code has been carved into a pillar.

Clara also finds out that Kate, Osgood, and McGillop are Zygons. In that confusion, Clara steals Kate’s phone and uses the access code to teleport away with the vortex manipulator.

In 1562, the War Doctor muses that he could program his sonic screwdriver to disintegrate the door, but the calculations would take centuries. He suggests starting on them while questioning the dread on the faces of his future selves. They discuss the Last Day of the Great Time War, and the Moment – only visible to the War Doctor – prompts him to ask about the children.

The Eleventh Doctor can’t remember the number of children on Gallifrey, but the Tenth Doctor can. There were 2.47 billion children, and the fact that the Eleventh Doctor doesn’t want to remember angers – no, infuriates – the Tenth Doctor.

The Moment fills in the blanks for the War Doctor: The Tenth Doctor is the man who regrets and the Eleventh Doctor is the man who forgets. She also points out that they all have the same sonic screwdriver at heart with different cases.

If the War Doctor can scan the door, then the Eleventh Doctor’s screwdriver could calculate the method of breaking the door. They confirm it but are amazed when Clara bursts through the door and claims that it wasn’t locked. The queen is right behind her, confirming that she was curious about what they would do.

In the modern day, the real Osgood skulks about the Under Gallery and finds Kate in Zygon stasis. In 1562, the queen shows her visitors what is going on, including how she implanted the Zygons in the Gallifreyan paintings using stasis cubes. They also learn that the woman is the real Queen Elizabeth I and that she killed her impostor in the forest.

After the Tenth Doctor and Queen Elizabeth I are married, the three Time Lords and Clara board the Tenth Doctor’s TARDIS. Detecting a potential paradox, the TARDIS compensates by shifting the desktops around a bit before Clara notifies the trio that they should head for the Black Archive.

The Zygons in the Black Archive are joined by their human counterparts, and Kate informs them that the Archive’s self-destruct mechanism has been activated. In five minutes, the nuclear warhead beneath them will detonate. The Doctors try to land the TARDIS in the Archive and fail, so the War Doctor suggests using the stasis cube instead.

When McGillop takes his call near the first painting, he gets an order to take the painting to the Black Archive. Once there, the Doctors emerge from the Fall of Arcadia and enter the Black Archive. They then use the memory modifiers to confuse everybody as to whether they are human or Zygon. If the participants stop the detonation and create a peace treaty – which is sure to be incredibly fair since the negotiators can’t remember which side they’re on – they will have their memories restored.

The countdown is stopped and the negotiations begin. The Osgoods figure each other out only by the nature of asthma. Meanwhile, Clara talks to the War Doctor about the Last Day, discovering that he hasn’t used the Moment. She expresses the Doctor’s regret about what he did that day, and the War Doctor makes his decision.

The Moment takes him back to the barn in the desert and presents him with a big red button.

He knows now that his successors are extraordinary men, but that they will only become so if he follows through. The Moment talks to him about the wheezing and groaning of the TARDIS, a sound that brings hope wherever it goes. At the same time, two TARDISes materialize behind him and his successors arrive.

They were able to arrive in this time-locked space because the Moment allowed it.

The two Time Lords talk about how they’ve treated their memory of the War Doctor. They explain that he was the Doctor on the day that it was impossible to get things right, and they offer to help him push the button today. Not out of fear or hatred, but because there is no other way. In the name of the lives that they cannot save.

The Eleventh Doctor stays his hand at Clara’s face. She could never imagine him destroying his own people. The Moment shows them the Fall of Arcadia, adding a moment of conscience to the act. Clara judges them: The Warrior, the Hero, and… what is the Eleventh?

She reminds him of the promise of the Doctor – “Never cowardly or cruel. Never give up; never give in.” – and tells her Doctor what to do. They have enough warriors, and any old idiot can be a hero. He should be a Doctor.

The Eleventh Doctor disarms the Moment and explains. He’s had lifetimes to think about this, and these three have a stasis cube. While the War Doctor thanks the “Bad Wolf girl” – the Tenth Doctor is taken aback – the Time Lords put their plan into action.

On the Last Day of the Great Time War, the Doctors send a message to Gallifrey High Command: GALLIFREY STANDS. They explain their plan to the Eleventh General, and even though the general finds the idea absurd, the Doctors explain that they’ve been working on it all their lives.

In an extraordinary moment, the three Doctors are joined by their other ten incarnations, including the one they will eventually become. The thirteen TARDISes take position as the Daleks intensify their firepower. The general tells the Doctor to go ahead. The planet Gallifrey disappears into a pocket dimension and the Daleks destroy each other in the crossfire. A single Dalek pod spins off into the void, foreshadowing their eventual return as the Cult of Skaro.

Gallifrey stands.

Back in the National Gallery, the Doctors muse on whether or not they succeeded. The mysterious painting remains an enigma, but they agree that it was better to have failed having done the right thing than succeeding in doing the wrong. The War Doctor bids farewell to his successors with a special nod to Clara, and they address him as Doctor, fully worthy of the title. He won’t remember this adventure, however, because the timestreams are a mess, but the Eleventh Doctor and Clara will. His legacy is safe with them.

As the War Doctor departs, he begins to regenerate after surviving the Time War. He hopes that the ears will be less conspicuous before transforming into the Ninth Doctor.

The Tenth Doctor takes his leave, asking the Eleventh Doctor where he’s going next. The Eleventh Doctor relents and reveals that they are destined to die in battle on Trenzalore. The Tenth Doctor is glad that his future is in safe hands, but expresses a desire to change their final destination. After all, he doesn’t want to go.

Clara leaves the Eleventh Doctor to sit and look at the painting for a little while. As she steps into the TARDIS, she mentions that the gallery’s curator was looking for him. He muses that he would be a great curator, and a deep voice agrees with him. The Doctor is astonished to see a very familiar face as the Curator arrives, looking very much like the Fourth Doctor.

The Curator suggests that the Doctor may revisit a few of his old faces before turning to the painting. He points out that everyone screws up the title of the painting: It is neither Gallifrey Falls nor No More, but rather Gallifrey Falls No More.

Gallifrey survived, and now the Doctor is tasked with finding it. The mission is now returning it and all its people to the universe.

Later on, the Doctor speaks of his dreams. In a vision, he walks through the TARDIS doors to join his previous incarnations as they stare at the planet Gallifrey above. He is destined to go home, even if it takes him the long way around.

First and foremost, I adore this episode. It is littered with nods to the franchise’s mythology, but more salient, it tackles some important concepts with the Doctor’s character.

During the revival era, the Last Great Time War has hung over the Doctor’s head. The Ninth Doctor was fresh from that conflict and obviously suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from the magnitude of his choices. The Tenth Doctor and the Eleventh Doctor carried this weight as shown in this story.

The beauty of this story is that it retains the show’s history – the Doctor’s incarnations before now do not remember saving Gallifrey, so none of the motivations or choices made have changed – but absolution and redemption are offered for everyone involved, especially the Eleventh Doctor. Even though it is temporary, the senses of forgiveness and relief are important for the War Doctor and the Tenth Doctor and definitely shed a different light on the episodes we’ve seen to this point.

I love how the destruction of Gallifrey was driven by Clara, thus allowing a sense of humanity to temper the decisions of the Time Lord. This has been a constant over Doctor Who‘s history and was used to great effect here.

I do question how every incarnation of the Doctor knew to calculate the salvation of Gallifrey. Earlier, the sonic screwdrivers drove the point that the shell may change but the software remains the same, but those calculations were started by the War Doctor and matured with the Eleventh Doctor. In reverse, the idea to save Gallifrey seems to propagate from Eleven to War to Ten, a path that is far from linear. In fact, it’s wibbly-wobbly, which describes the Doctor to a tee.

Speaking of, I am so glad that the writers were able to give the War Doctor such brilliant insights into the revival era’s use of sonic screwdrivers. They’re not magic wands or water pistols, and the Doctor’s not going to assemble a cabinet at an enemy. I love his view on these scientific instruments.

Shifting gears, as much as I love the War Doctor and John Hurt, I really wish that Steven Moffat hadn’t needed to introduce him.

I get the reasons why: Christopher Eccleston did not want to return after how he was treated in the role, and he was less than impressed with the script when it was sent to him. What I don’t understand is why Paul McGann couldn’t have filled the same role.

Yes, I also love The Night of the Doctor, but it was developed as part of this whole story arc. Realistically, the Eighth Doctor could have been the incarnation that engaged in the Time War after seeing how Cass Fermazzi was willing to sacrifice her own life to avoid traveling with a Time Lord. This would effectively avoid the Stuffed into the Fridge trope (since Cass isn’t a loved one being used to motivate the hero) and could give us far more screen time for Paul McGann than just a TV movie and a webcast short.

It would have avoided the thirteen lives complications that developed from introducing another Doctor (which we’ll obviously cover during The Time of the Doctor) and would have still avoided the need for Christopher Eccelston’s involvement.

Everything else in The Day of the Doctor could have remained the same.

As much as I adore John Hurt and his performance here, the War Doctor needlessly complicated things, which apparently stemmed from Steven Moffat’s desire to have a “complete set” of regenerations before his departure. From what I can tell, that’s a rumor, but… yeah.

No look at the fiftieth anniversary special would be complete without a look at the mythology.

I have linked a good number of the mythological callbacks, but there are still quite a few favorites that jumped out in the course of this celebration. One of them is the set design, particularly the roundels (“the round things”) in the War Doctor’s TARDIS and in the Curator’s gallery. The War Doctor’s TARDIS design is a fun mix between the classic era (not counting the TV movie) and the coral motif that kicked off the revival era. The Curator’s gallery adds the hexagons to the roundels, tying the classic and revival eras together.

The Brigadier’s space-time telegraph made a notable appearance in the Black Archive. It was prominently featured in Revenge of the Cybermen and Terror of the Zygons, the latter of which was our last meeting with the Zygons. That portion of the story also showcased one of my favorite Osgood moments as she and her doppelgänger share their identities over her asthma inhaler.

The Day of the Doctor marks the last salvo fired in the Last Great Time War, a confrontation that began in Genesis of the Daleks. Russell T Davies stated in an episode of Doctor Who Confidential that the origins of the war that he envisioned began when the Time Lords struck first – the attempted genocide of the Daleks – in the Fourth Doctor’s era. This idea was repeated by RTD in Doctor Who Annual 2006, and was adapted in Hunters of the Burning Stone, a 2013 comic story published in Doctor Who Magazine as part of the 50th-anniversary celebration. The comic was written by Scott Gray and served as a sequel to An Unearthly Child, though it was the Eleventh Doctor in the lead with Ian and Barbara.

The Black Archive pinboards hold tons of photo references to the franchise’s history, including: Susan Foreman; Barbara Wright & Ian Chesterton; Vicki Pallister; Katarina & Sara Kingdom; Steven Taylor; Dodo Chaplet; Ben Jackson & Polly Wright; Victoria Waterfield; Zoe Heriot; Liz Shaw; Captain Mike Yates; Harry Sullivan & Warrant Officer John Benton; Leela; Romana I; Romana II; Adric; Nyssa; Tegan Jovanka; Kamelion & Vislor Turlough; Jamie McCrimmon; Peri Brown; Melanie Bush; Brigadier Winifred Bambera; Ace McShane; Grace Holloway; Adam Mitchell (why?); K-9 Mark III; Lieutenant General Sanchez; Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart; UNIT Captain Erisa Magambo; Donna Noble, Martha Jones, Mickey Smith, Rose Tyler, & Wilfred Mott; Jo Grant; Jack Harkness; Craig Owens (again, why?); Sarah Jane Smith;
Amy Pond & Rory Williams; River Song; Kate Stewart; and Clara Oswald.

Finally, that moment. The all thirteen moment. The moment that made me jump out of my seat and cheer. The moment that makes me grin from ear to ear every time I see it.

It was amazing to see all of the Doctors on screen, interacting with each other to save their home. Since many of them are no longer with us, it was also fun to see exactly where the producers sourced the footage to bring this moment together.

  • The First Doctor’s footage came from The Daleks (specifically “The Dead Planet”), and his voice was newly recorded audio by John Guilor (who also voiced the First Doctor in the reconstruction of Planet of Giants).
  • The Second Doctor’s footage came from The Tomb of the Cybermen and The Mind Robber, and his audio came from The Seeds of Death.
  • The Third Doctor’s footage came from Colony in Space – the re-used footage was flipped from the original – and the audio came from The Green Death.
  • The Fourth Doctor’s footage came from Planet of Evil – again, the re-used footage was flipped – but the audio (“Ready.”) has yet to be identified.
  • The Fifth Doctor’s footage was sourced from Frontios and the audio came from The Five Doctors.
  • The Sixth Doctor’s footage and audio were sourced from the same story: Attack of the Cybermen.
  • The Seventh Doctor’s (flipped) footage and audio came from Battlefield, but the producers also used some footage from the TV movie.
  • The Eighth Doctor’s footage came from the TV movie. The audio (“Commencing calculations.”) hasn’t been identified.
  • Finally, the Ninth Doctor’s footage came from Rose and The Parting of the Ways (“And for my next trick…”), along with some footage from Aliens of London.

The sheer amount of work and research required to make this climactic scene come to life amazes me.

Finally, I want to take a look at three smaller items before closing this out.

First, The Last Day: It was a quick and easy prequel story. The biggest thing that came from it was a desire to know more about the soldiers and the headcams.

Second, the visual salute to Christopher Eccleston’s legacy in the regeneration. Steven Moffat didn’t want to include an image of Eccleston in the regeneration sequence because it would have been “crossing the line” by implying that he had been on set. So, there are hints as John Hurt morphs into Christopher Eccleston, but the camera cuts away just in time to give us the impression of what comes next. Of course, as implied by the novelization of this story, the Ninth Doctor broke every mirror in the TARDIS just after regeneration because he couldn’t face himself. That adds a new dimension to his first glance in the mirror in Rose.

The last is the novelization of The Day of the Doctor. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, pick it up. It tells the story of the TV episode but breaks the chapters into narratives by the War Doctor, the Tenth Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor, Petronella Osgood and the Zygons, the Twelfth Doctor, and even the Thirteenth Doctor. It expands a lot of the characters and scenes, and it also adds a few additional insights and inside gags, including some time with Peter Cushing’s Dr. Who. While I don’t generally lean on the expanded media for information, this is written by Steven Moffat so I consider it a bit more authoritative. Chapter 9 (“The Truth of the Doctor”) is a hoot.

It’s a quick read and well worth the time.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

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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 #248: The Name of the Doctor

Michael Falkner7 Comments

Doctor Who: The Name of the Doctor
(1 episode, s07e13, 2013)

Timestamp 248 The Name of the Doctor

The prophecy of Trenzalore comes to call.

Clarence and the Whispermen

Locked away in a jail, serial killer Clarence DeMarco shouts at whispering inhuman creatures. He insists that they are nothing more than voices in his head and asks them to stop. The Whisper Men vanish, then reappear inside the cell, demanding to find the Doctor.

The Whisper Men project Gallifreyan symbols in the air, forcibly impressing them into his mind with an instruction to bring the message to the reptile detective. They are part of the Intelligence and promise that if Clarence cooperates, he will be pardoned and will live a good long life only troubled by dreams.

He cries to be left alone. The creatures pass by him.

She Said, He Said

The story is divided into two parts: “Clara” and “The Doctor”.

Clara’s monologue walks down memory lane about her adventures with the Doctor and what it has done to her. She’s forgotten to ask who he is and why he runs. Then she found out at Trenzalore.

The Doctor’s monologue focuses on Clara’s impossibility and his meetings with her, from the Dalek Asylum and Victorian London to his current run with her.

Each part acts as a tribute to the other… as well as a warning about the darkness in the relationship and its secrets.

The Name of the Doctor

In a workshop, two engineers respond to an alarm. A supposed idiot, the First Doctor, is trying to steal a faulty TARDIS from the capital city of Gallifrey, and Clara Oswald tells him that he is making a big mistake.

Clara falls through a golden vortex. She does not know where she is but remembers one thing: The Doctor. She has appeared at various points in his life but few of those incarnations ever notice her. The Eleventh Doctor is an exception when she calls to him in Victorian London.

She blew into this world on a leaf and doesn’t believe she’ll ever land. She’s the Impossible Girl and she was born to save the Doctor.

In Victorian London, Madame Vastra visits Clarence DeMarco at his jail cell. He murdered fourteen women and is sentenced to death, but he bargains for his life with information about the Doctor. The Doctor has a secret that he will take to the grave, and it is discovered.

Later on, Vastra consults with Jenny, explaining that Clarence will live until she understands what he told her. They make preparations for a conference call to investigate further. Jenny hears a strange whisper from outside as Vastra wonders where Strax has gone. The Sontaran has the weekend off, much to Vastra’s displeasure at his chosen locale.

In Glasgow, a familiar Sontar-Ha is heard as Strax fights a large Scottish man. They are interrupted by a boy carrying a telegram, summoning Strax to the conference call. Strax apologizes to Archie, his opponent, for not being able to finish the match, then asks to be rendered unconscious. He drops into the trance-like conference call, an astral projection of sorts, of which Jenny complements the new desktop.

While working on a soufflé on April 10, 2013, Clara gets an invitation to the conference call. The letter has come from Vastra and drugs her so she enters the dream state. The final participant, River Song, pops in soon afterward, and the meeting commences with introductions of the Doctor’s wife to his current companion.

Vastra presents Clarence’s message, a grouping of Gallifreyan symbols, which River identifies as space-time coordinates. They are the location of the Doctor’s greatest secret, his name, which River knows. Vastra shares the single word from Clarence: Trenzalore.

Outside of the conference call, someone skulks around Jenny. Unfortunately, her form fades away as she is murdered by the Whisper Men. River forces everyone to wake up as the face of Dr. Simeon appears, stating that the Doctor’s friends are lost forever more unless he goes to Trenzalore.

When Clara awakens, she finds the Doctor blindfolded, playing Blind Man’s Bluff so they could sneak away to the cinema. The Doctor is annoyed but then realizes that Clara is troubled. They discuss the call over tea and the Doctor is brought to tears over Trenzalore. He runs to the TARDIS where Clara finds him under the console. The Doctor connects Clara to the TARDIS so she can telepathically transmit the coordinates she saw to the time capsule.

“When you are a time traveler, there is one place you must never go. One place in all of space and time you must never — ever — find yourself.” Trenzalore is the Doctor’s grave, and it is the one place he must never go, however, he owes his friends and they must be saved.

The Doctor sets the course but the TARDIS rebels, fighting the transit while he forces her onward. The TARDIS refuses to land on the actual site, so it parks in orbit and the travelers take a look upon the torn and battered planet. The Doctor shuts everything else down and forces the TARDIS to plummet to the surface, cracking the exterior glass in the process.

They find a battlefield graveyard. Some headstones are larger than others, based on the importance of the warrior. On the summit ahead rests the TARDIS, abnormally outsized as the “bigger on the inside” qualities start to break down and leak beyond the shell.

The TARDIS is the Doctor’s tomb.

River contacts Clara as the Doctor climbs on, an echo of the conference call which River left open. The Doctor cannot see her but spots her gravestone among the others. As he ponders how it can possibly be here, they are approached by the Whisper Men as River and Clara work out that the gravestone is the entrance to the tomb.

Inside the TARDIS monument, the Paternosters awaken and Strax revives Jenny from death. They are approached by the Great Intelligence and the Whisper Men, who welcome them to the final resting place of the great tyrant known as the Doctor.

Clara and the Doctor navigate the catacombs as River explains her death to Clara. The duo is pursued by Whisper Men. They are driven to the Paternoster Gang where the Intelligence proclaims that the Doctor’s final battle was not as large as the Time War but he has blood on his hands. He also remarks that the Doctor will be known by names such as the Beast and the Valeyard.

Clara has flashbacks to climbing through a wrecked TARDIS, an adventure that she shouldn’t remember. The Great Intelligence demands the key that will open the Doctor’s tomb, hissing that it is the Doctor’s real name. He threatens the Doctor’s friends with death if the Time Lord does not comply. The Great Intelligence keeps asking The First Question until the tomb opens.

The TARDIS can still hear River’s projection, so she supplied his name to keep the secret safe.

Inside the doors lies an overgrown control room. Where the time rotor would normally rest is a flowing beam of blue-white light. That is the Doctor’s mark on the universe. Rather than his body, his travels in time have left a scar representing his personal timeline, past and future, and everything that resulted from it.

The Doctor collapses from his proximity to it. When he points his sonic screwdriver at it, the voices of his previous incarnations flow from it. The Great Intelligence approaches the light, intent on rewriting the Doctor’s history and turning all of his victories into failures. The act will scatter him across the Doctor’s timeline.

As the Intelligence steps into the light, the Doctor writhes in pain as his very existence is rewritten. Vastra declares that a universe without the Doctor will have consequences. She flees outside in terror and sees the stars go dark as entire star systems are erased from history. Jenny, once saved by the Doctor, is erased as Strax turns hostile and must be vaporized.

Despite protests from River and the Doctor, Clara decides to act. With the phrase that has pursued her since the Doctor met her – “Run, you clever boy, and remember me.” – she jumps into the light and is split into millions of copies throughout history, each one setting right what the Great Intelligence has put wrong.

She even tells the First Doctor which TARDIS to steal. After all, a broken navigation system will be much more fun.

With Clara’s influence fixing the timeline, the Doctor decides to rescue her, using himself as Clara’s advantage. River protests, but the Doctor tells her that he can always see her even when no one else can. There is a time to live and a time to sleep, and while he has a hard time saying goodbye, it’s only because he doesn’t know how.

With her help, he tells her goodbye with the promise that they’ll see each other again. She also reminds him that, since she was telepathically linked to Clara, then she cannot truly be dead. To tell him the details, however, would be a spoiler.

As River dissipates, the Doctor enters his own timestream.

Clara falls to the ground inside the timestream and she wonders what’s left for her to accomplish in the Doctor’s timeline. The Eleventh Doctor’s voice guides her through the figures of his previous incarnations, telling her to focus on the sight of a leaf as her guide. Using it, she is reunited with the Doctor.

Beyond their embrace, Clara sees a shadowy figure. The Doctor shows intense fear at the sight, explaining that the figure is him, but Clara doesn’t understand.

The name Doctor is a promise, but this figure broke the promise. He is the Doctor’s secret. The figure defends his actions as Clara collapses, but the Eleventh Doctor turns away.

This new man is the Doctor… but not one we were expecting.

Clara’s mystery finally comes to a head here as her various incarnations are explained. All three of them were her, just in different splintered ways. This is the big part of Clara’s run that I really enjoy. The other is her initiative, which has been highlighted over her run.

This relationship proves to be an ontological paradox – a causal loop – since the Doctor might not have invited the modern-day Clara Oswald to travel as his companion had he not encountered Oswin and Victorian Clara, however, if she had not traveled with him, those echoes would have never existed.

She’s been with the Doctor since the beginning of his travels – key dialogue here was taken from The Web Planet – providing some degree of influence at key moments. Of those moments, we get callbacks to The Five Doctors (Second and Third Doctors), The Invasion of Time (Fourth Doctor), The Arc of Infinity (Fifth Doctor), and Dragonfire (Seventh Doctor). Clara also seems to have influenced The Aztecs and The Web of Fear in her removal of the Great Intelligence’s interference.

This also marks the end of the Great Intelligence from the perspective of the show itself. The entity was splintered into infinite pieces across the Doctor’s timeline but then was systematically eradicated by Clara. The difference is that no one came to guide the Great Intelligence out of the Doctor’s timestream, so we have no reason to believe that it survived.

Clara’s adventure reveals the continuation of events from The Night of the Doctor, establishing a previously unknown incarnation between the Eighth and Ninth Doctors. It perpetuates a continuity re-write – far from the first in the franchise – based around the unfortunate behind-the-scenes drama of the Christopher Eccleston era. This change in continuity will come to a head in Day of the Doctor.

There’s certainly a lot of world-building in this single story, both in terms of resolutions and groundwork for the future. I found it all quite enjoyable, and remember it to be quite shocking when I first saw it.

With the rest of the Timestamps Project for context, I certainly appreciate the attention to detail in portraying the Doctors. Not only do we have twelve incarnations sharing the same airtime (a record number to this point), but we also got to see both versions (to this point) of the First Doctor in William Hartnell and Richard Hurndall.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Clara and the TARDIS & Doctor Who: Rain Gods & Doctor Who: The Inforarium

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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: Series One and Ninth Doctor Summary

Michael Falkner19 Comments

Doctor Who: Series One and Ninth Doctor Summary

 

The return to the TARDIS was, to quote the Doctor, absolutely fantastic.

There are always rumblings in fandom about the differences between the twenty-six classic years and the TV movie/revival years. Sometimes you get statements that the classics are unwatchable and sometimes you get statements that the revival era Doctors don’t hold a candle to the mythology and precedent of the classics.

I believe that the former, personal preferences aside, can be easily disproved with continued projects like Earth Station Who, The Watch-A-Thon of Rassilon, Next Stop Everywhere, Who’s The Doctor: Talking Outside the Box, and the Timestamps Project… to name but a few.

The latter? I wholeheartedly disagree!

Sure, the Ninth Doctor is a break with the ideal of the Doctor doing whatever it takes to defeat evil and save lives. Across the classic years, the Doctor lamented loss of life when there was another way to solve the problem, and that’s the ticket here. Something happened in an all-out war between the Time Lords and the Daleks, an event that has been brewing since the two sides met all the way back at the beginning of the journey, and the only solution was to extinguish the fire permanently.

That extreme measure was traumatic, especially for a being of peace and love like the Doctor, and it shows in the arc of the Ninth Doctor’s life. The Doctor goes on a journey from Rose to The Parting of the Ways, trying to heal from post-traumatic stress as the sole survivor, and learning to live again in a changed universe. Rose Tyler was key in that therapy with her innocence, wonder, and empathy, and watching the Doctor rebuild in this manner was a fascinating character study.

It was a reconstruction of the franchise, and a regeneration of the character from the roots up. The power and performance from Christopher Eccleston make me wish that we had more stories with him in the lead role, but his conflicts with the BBC are an understandable reason to not come back. No one should be expected to live in a toxic situation if they don’t need to be there.

As I noted in the later entries from this series, I also really enjoyed seeing what happens to those left behind. Rose is the center of the universe for both Jackie Tyler and Mickey Smith, and her selfish decision to remove herself from those equations severely rocked their worlds. It’s great drama and great television.

So where do we stand now? Series One comes in at an average of 4.3, which is third all-time for the Timestamps Project. It comes in behind the Ninth Series and the Eighth Doctor’s run, and just ahead of the Eleventh Series.

 

Rose – 5
The End of the World – 4
The Unquiet Dead – 4
Aliens of London and World War Three – 4
Dalek – 5
The Long Game – 3
Father’s Day – 4
The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances – 5
Boom Town – 4
Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways – 5

Series One (Revival Era) Average Rating: 4.3/5

 

 

 

Following tradition…

The First Doctor was a wise grandfather, the Second a sly jester, the Third a secret agent scientist, the Fourth an inquisitive idealist, the Fifth an honorable humanitarian, the Sixth a squandered cynic, the Seventh a curious schemer, the Eighth a classical romantic…

…and the Ninth Doctor is a hopeful healing veteran.

 

Series 1 – 4.3

Ninth Doctor’s Weighted Average Rating: 4.30

 

Ranking (by score)
1 – Eighth (4.50)
2 – Ninth (4.30)
3 – Third (4.00)
4 – Second (3.67)
5 – Fourth (3.67)
6 – Seventh (3.54)
7 – First (3.41)
8 – Fifth (3.20)
9 – Sixth (2.73)

Ranking (by character)
1 – Second Doctor
2 – Ninth Doctor
3 – Eighth Doctor
4 – Third Doctor
5 – Fourth Doctor
6 – Seventh Doctor
7 – First Doctor
8 – Fifth Doctor
9 – Sixth Doctor

I should note that those top six spaces (on both lists) are really, really, really close. I was tempted to make it a tie for first place since I would gladly watch any of those stories at the drop of Tom Baker’s fedora, but it’s far more challenging to actually rank them.

 

Next up, it’s my Doctor.

 

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Born Again and Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion

 

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 #171: Bad Wolf & The Parting of the Ways

Michael Falkner27 Comments

Doctor Who: Bad Wolf
Doctor Who: The Parting of the Ways
(2 episodes, s01e12-13, 2005)

 

Going out in a blaze of glory.

Following on a century after the adventure on Satellite Five, the Doctor finds himself falling out of a transmat and into a house. Specifically, the Big Brother house on Channel 44000. The Doctor is not amused. Elsewhere, Rose wakes up in a dark studio and is helped to her feet just in time to compete on The Weakest Link. Finally, Captain Jack wakes up on a table where two androids give him a wardrobe makeover in the vein of What Not to Wear.

The Doctor starts looking for a way out of the house, making friends with a fellow resident named Lynda. He remembers that they had just left Raxacoricofallapatorius and then visited Kyoto, Japan in 1336. Their transit was intercepted by a transmat beam, but no ordinary transmat could penetrate the the TARDIS. The Doctor faces the camera and vows to get out, find his companions, and then find those responsible.

Rose plays The Weakest Link – we get a reference to something called Torchwood – and is observed by the engineers in the control room. She realizes that they’re not playing a game when Fitch, the weakest link in the round, is disintegrated. Another player tries to run, but the rules are “play or die,” so the runner is vaporized. A similar fate plays out in the Big Brother house as one of the housemates is evicted by disintegration. The Doctor is immediately motivated by this twist and disables the camera.

Oh, and Jack? He avoids a literal face change by producing a blaster (from where, you don’t want to know) and destroying the androids.

Rose finds out that the company running the games is the Bad Wolf Corporation, and she connects the dots over her adventures with the Doctor: Gwyneth told her about it in Cardiff 1869; it was the call sign for Henry van Statten‘s helicopter; it was the nuclear power plant project on the Cardiff Rift; it was tagged on the TARDIS in 2006; and it was a news channel on Satellite Five in the 2001st century.

Meanwhile, the Doctor forces his eviction from the house, but the disintegration is overridden. He uses his sonic screwdriver to open the door and rescues Lynda from her captivity. He discovers that they are back on Satellite Five, and as he and Lynda look for a way out, she reveals who is in charge. The Bad Wolf logo gives the Doctor pause. He gets it too.

The programmers reveal the security problem to a woman hardwired to the system, but the Controller dismisses them before alerting them to an incoming solar flare.

Jack builds a gun out of the robots and their defabricator beam and goes in search of the Doctor. The Doctor, to his horror, realizes that when he shut down the satellite before, the human race stopped instead of building the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Jack reunites with the Doctor as Rose fights for her life in the last round of the game. As Rose loses the game and faces disintegration, the Doctor breaks in, but he is too late to stop Rose from being vaporized. The enraged Doctor, Lynda, and Jack are arrested by station security, but quickly escape and make their way to Floor 500 with a lot of firepower.

Jack seals the doors as the Doctor interrogates the programmers (after tossing them his gun). The TARDIS is located nearby, and Jack finds something startling within. The Controller calls for the Doctor, revealing that the solar flare is blocking her masters from reading her mind. The masters have been hiding in the shadows and shaping the Earth for centuries. They also fear the Doctor.

The flare passes, the Controller resumes her trance, and Jack reveals that the disintegrator beam is really a transmat. The Controller is transmatted away, landing in the same place as Rose. Rose is chased by a familiar visage and the Controller is exterminated. The Doctor traces the signal to a fleet of saucers.

The masters are the Daleks. There are half a million in the fleet, and they have survived the Time War.

The Daleks open a channel to the Doctor, demanding his surrender in exchange for Rose’s life. The Doctor defiantly counters: Without a plan, he promises to save Rose Tyler and eliminate the Daleks. The Daleks respond by declaring war on the Doctor.

And here we go.

The Daleks demand that Rose predict the Doctor’s actions, but she refuses. They open fire on the TARDIS but the Doctor materializes it around Rose and her Dalek guard. Jack makes short work of the Dalek and the Doctor sets to analyzing the remains. He explains the Time War to Jack – “I thought that was a legend!” – and then confronts the Daleks under the protection of a force field. He discovers that the Daleks survived thanks to the Emperor Dalek and a crippled starship that tumbled through time in the war’s aftermath. The Daleks know the Doctor as The Oncoming Storm, and they fear him, but the Emperor Dalek explains how he rebuilt the Daleks out of the corpses of humanity. These Daleks are of mixed DNA, but the Emperor considers them pure.

These Daleks are more of a cult than an empire, driven mad by their own flesh. The stink of their humanity. The hate of their own existence.

The travelers retreat to the TARDIS and the Doctor takes them back to the satellite. Once there, he begins his defense of the planet below. As the fleet advances on Earth, the Doctor begins to rewire the satellite – a giant transmitter – so he can broadcast a delta wave. You know, something that tends to barbecue any brains in its way. That would normally take three days, but he has to get it done in twenty-two minutes.

As Rose helps the Doctor, Jack rallies the remaining programmers and citizens to defend the satellite. A select few join the captain’s cause while the rest are warned to stay quiet and remain below Floor 494. Rose and the Doctor also have a fantastic discussion on the morality and the nature of time travel, one that inspires the Doctor to cross his own timeline in order to speed up the process. It ends up being a trick though, as the Doctor remotely sends the TARDIS and Rose away to protect her.

A holographic message informs her that he’s fulfilling his promise to keep her safe. It will take her home and then die on a street corner. Before the message fades, it tells her to have a fantastic life. The TARDIS lands and Mickey finds Rose, wrapping her in his arms in consolation.

The Doctor continues to work, but the Emperor reveals that the delta wave cannot be refined in time to prevent it from killing everything in Earth’s orbit. The Doctor has the weight of the world on his shoulders. He confronts the Emperor about the Bad Wolf message, but the Dalek knows nothing about it. Something else is driving events.

Back in her century, Rose doesn’t know how to go on, even with Mickey and Jackie trying to console her. Near the TARDIS, she finds the words Bad Wolf written everywhere, and she assumes that it’s a link back to the Doctor. She and Mickey enter the time capsule and Rose decides to communicate with the heart of the TARDIS. Her efforts to open the console fail, and Jackie tries to help her move on, but Rose reveals the truth about her father’s death. The revelation spurs Jackie to borrow a tow truck to provide enough force.

In the future, the Daleks arrive at Earth and begin their assault on the satellite. The defenders make a valiant effort, including using the Anne Droid from The Weakest Link, but the Daleks make short work of them. They massacre the gathered citizens in the floors below the defenders, and they decimate the Earth’s surface. Jack’s last line of defense makes some headway, but the Daleks find Lynda from her position as defense coordinator. Soon enough, Jack is the last man standing between the Daleks and the Doctor, but then he is exterminated as well.

The tow truck gambit works and Rose is exposed to the heart of the TARDIS. The time capsule propels itself forward in time as Rose absorbs the energy in the console. On the satellite, the Doctor finishes his work, but he cannot push the button despite his bluster. He cannot commit another mass genocide. As he faces his execution, the TARDIS materializes and reveals a super-powered Rose.

She looked into the TARDIS. The TARDIS looked into her. She is the Bad Wolf. She created her own message throughout time and space. She can see all of it at once.

With her power, she turns the Daleks to dust. All of them. Once the threat is removed, she restores Jack to life, but refuses the Doctor’s request to relinquish her powers. When the pain becomes too much, the Doctor kisses her and absorbs the power. The Doctor returns the energy to the TARDIS before leaving with Rose, stranding Jack on the satellite.

As the TARDIS flies through the vortex, the Doctor watches his hand glow and laments the adventures he meant to experience with Rose. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have time. He explains that this life is at an end. He is about to regenerate, but he won’t be the same afterward. He tells Rose that she was fantastic.

You know what? So was he.

And then he regenerates.

 

This is the big culmination of everything we have learned since Rose. The opening was deliberately confusing and a great introduction to the building tension leading to the big reveal at the end of Bad Wolf. The second half, Time War Round Two, was an impressive balance of the Ninth Doctor’s redemptive arc and the Tyler family drama.

This finale doesn’t let up for a second, but it still finds time for the character moments. At the risk of overplaying the meme, it was absolutely fantastic.

 

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

 

UP NEXT – Series One and Ninth Doctor Summary

 

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 #170: Boom Town

Michael Falkner12 Comments

Doctor Who: Boom Town
(1 episode, s01e11, 2005)

 

Second chances all around.

Six months after the attempted Slitheen invasion, a scientist is pleading with Mayor Margaret Blaine to stop construction of a nuclear power plant lest it destroy the city. With a little bit of gassy rumbling we know who she really is, and she shows the scientist moments later as she unzips her head and devours him.

Mickey arrives in Cardiff by train and finds the TARDIS. He meets Jack and then reunites with Rose to deliver her passport. Rose explains that they are using the Cardiff Rift to recharge the TARDIS. One lesson about the chameleon circuit and the history of the TARDIS later, they head into the city for a little fun.

Mayor Blaine introduces the nuclear power plant – the Blaidd Drwg project – at a press conference. Afterward, she encounters a reporter named Cathy Salt who challenges the mayor about random deaths and the dangers of the plant. Cathy is nearly killed by the mayor in the ladies room, but the revelation that the reporter is pregnant stays the Slitheen’s hand. While at lunch, the Doctor spots a newspaper with the mayor’s photo on the front page. His day is ruined by the news that the Slitheen still lives. The team converges on City Hall with a divide-and-conquer strategy. The Doctor flushes the mayor out and the team corners her. While on the run, she assembles a transmat device from her jewelry, but the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to negate the effect.

The travelers and Mayor Blaine look over the model of the plant, revealing that it is hiding a tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator – a pan-dimensional surfboard, of sorts – to escape the explosion that will destroy the planet. The Doctor finally connects the dots on the Bad Wolf label (Blaidd Drwg in Welsh) that is following them through time. That’s a mystery for another day, since he also learns that if he takes Blaine – better known as Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen – back to Raxacoricofallapatorius, she will be executed. She uses that to her psychological advantage as they wait for the TARDIS to recharge.

Mickey and Rose use the interlude to catch up, especially considering that Rose didn’t really call him to bring a passport. They leave for a night on the town while the Doctor and Jack have a conversation with Blon. The Slitheen makes a last request: A final meal at her favorite restaurant. Jack offers a pair of bracelets that will shock her if she tries to escape, so while he tries to wire the extrapolator to the TARDIS console, the Doctor and Blon dine. She tries to kill the Doctor multiple times, but he deflects each attempt. She details her pending execution in attempt to dissuade him, but the Doctor notes that if he shows her mercy then she’ll just start again. She decries him as a vengeful god – we’re back to the literal deus ex machina theme – and then the night goes sideways.

Meanwhile, Rose and Mickey walk around the bay, and Mickey reveals that he’s tried to move on. Rose tries to deal with the news, but ends up confronting Mickey over it. Mickey is distraught because Rose is gone all the time, and even though it will tear him apart, he promises to wait for her. Rose, rightly, is chagrined.

That’s one thing that I have really enjoyed about this series of episodes: It has addressed those who are left behind.

But, let’s get back to the sideways: The night is shaken apart by an earthquake.

The energy from the extrapolator is using the energy from the TARDIS to tear open the Cardiff Rift. Everyone returns to the TARDIS and Blon takes Rose hostage. The Slitheen reveals that this was her plan, relying on an advanced technology to find the extrapolator and destroy the planet through the Rift. Unfortunately for her, the heart of the TARDIS is opened beneath the console. Blon is transfixed by the beauty within the living machine, and with heartfelt thanks, she disappears. After the TARDIS is shut down and the crisis is averted, the Doctor finds an egg inside the skin suit. The TARDIS telepathically communicated with Blon and granted her a second chance by helping her revert to her youngest form.

Rose tries to say goodbye to Mickey, but he sees her and leaves before she finds him. With that, the travelers set course for a hatchery on Raxacoricofallapatorius.

 

The mythological ties are strong in this one, reaching all the way back to 1963. Between the discussion of how the TARDIS ended up stuck as a police box and the concept of the Heart of the TARDIS – alluded to in the third story, The Edge of Destruction, physically seen in Terminus, and discussed in the television movie – it’s apparent that writer and producer Russell T. Davies did his homework for this episode.

This story also continues the series thread of redemption for the Doctor. He wants to do the right thing in taking a serious criminal home to answer for their atrocities, but knowing that she faces execution is a huge wrinkle. This is a Doctor who has a lot of blood on his hands, and it’s apparent that he doesn’t want any more. After all, he was overjoyed last week that “just this once” everybody got to survive an encounter with him.

As previously mentioned, this series has also been simply fantastic at exploring the lives of those left behind, especially Jackie and Mickey. Doctor Who usually focuses on the adventure in the TARDIS, but if the companions leave family behind when the Doctor throws the switch, there is plenty of drama to explore. It makes the scenarios that much more humanly believable.

Finally, the Bad Wolf is coming to a head. The Doctor and Rose have been seeing the meme following them from place to place – notably, all of which have been on Earth this series (except for the off-screen adventures that Rose effuses about, breaking the guideline of “show, don’t tell“) – but the Doctor sets the idea aside for another day. It’s the bigger issue at hand, but not the most pressing in the face of Earth’s pending doom.

Something tells me that we’ll learn more during the next adventure.

 

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

 

 

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Bad Wolf and Doctor Who: The Parting of the Ways

 

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 #169: The Empty Child & The Doctor Dances

Michael Falkner19 Comments

Doctor Who: The Empty Child
Doctor Who: The Doctor Dances
(2 episodes, s01e09-10, 2005)

 

“You’ve never been bored? Never had a long night? Never had a lot of cabinets to put up?”

Rose and the Doctor are chasing a metal cylinder through space and time – they’re under mauve alert, which is apparently misunderstood by humans to be closer to red, complete with “all that dancing and misunderstanding” – before landing in London, 1941. They’re a couple of months behind the crash landing of the cylinder, and as the Doctor jimmies the lock on a door, Rose chases a kid in a gas mask who is calling for his mother.

The Doctor finds himself in a makeshift cabaret, and after the singer finishes her number – It Had to Be You – the Doctor uses the microphone to ask if anything has fallen from the sky recently. All he gets in return is laughter and an air raid siren. It is World War II after all, right in the middle of the London Blitz. Speaking of, Rose finds herself dangling from a rope under a barrage balloon, witness to a flight of bombers coming straight at her.

The Doctor returns to the TARDIS, comically telling a stray cat that one day he’ll find a companion who won’t run away. The phone in the TARDIS door rings, an event that shouldn’t happen because that phone has never worked, and he’s warned by a strange woman not to answer it. When he does, a boy’s voice asks if anyone has seen his mommy. He hangs up and pursues the woman, who he finds raiding a kitchen after the occupants have run for their bomb shelter.

On a balcony, an RAF officer named Jack uses a futuristic set of binoculars to spot Rose as she drifts through the skies of London. He notes her remarkable posterior, flirts with another soldier, and humorously rescues her with a light beam. In the house, the woman invites a group of homeless children to join her for an abandoned but warm dinner. They’re joined by the Doctor who deduces that they are homeless, however they should have been evacuated some time ago. The woman is Nancy, and she finds them food since they were all returned to London under various circumstances. The Doctor remarks that it’s either “Marxism in action or a West End musical.” When he asks about the cylinder, their dinner is interrupted by the creepy child in a gas mask looking for his mommy. Nancy tells him that the child is empty, and anyone he touches ends up just as empty. The voice – “Are you my mommy?” – penetrates the house, and the Doctor notes a scar on the boy’s hand before opening the door to reveal an empty stoop.

Rose awakens to meet Captain Jack Harkness, an American volunteer with the Number 133 Squadron RAF who also has psychic paper, nanogenes to heal Rose’s rope burn, and a cloaked ship. He believes that Rose is a fellow Time Agent and invites her for a drink and Moonlight Serenade on the top of the ship. He offers something that the Time Agency might want to buy if she has the ability to negotiate, and she suggests that they should talk to her “companion.” The item is a fully equipped Chula warship, the last of its kind, but it will be destroyed in two hours by a German bomb. Jack scans for alien tech in order to locate Rose’s companion.

The Doctor pursues Nancy to her hideout and surprises her as she unloads the tins of food she stole from the house. He makes the connection between the cylinder and the empty child: A bomb that wasn’t a bomb landed near Limehouse Green station a month before, and in order for them to bypass the soldiers guarding it, they need to go see “the doctor.” They end up near Albion Hospital, and the Doctor discovers that Nancy’s brother Jamie died in an air raid, driving her to take care of those unable to defend themselves.

The Doctor enters the hospital and finds the wards filled with people in gas masks. The doctor in question, Doctor Constantine, shows the Doctor that each victim has identical injuries to their skulls and chest cavities, and the gas masks are fused to their faces. They all have identical scars, as does Constantine, and they all came from touching the single victim of the bombing. They also are not dead, as Constantine demonstrates by rapping his cane on a pail, causing all of the bodies to sit up for a moment. Constantine offers the Doctor advice: The army plans to destroy the hospital to stop the tide of the infection, and he directs the Doctor to Room 802 before evolving into one of the masked undead.

Ye gods, that was downright creepy. Points to you, Doctor Who.

The Doctor meets Rose and Jack as they arrive at the hospital, and the Doctor finds out that Jack in conning them: He threw the cylinder at them, pursued them to London, and tried to convince them that it was valuable. Quite the cheeky and scurrilous cad, no?

Nancy returns to the abandoned house but is ambushed by the masked child, who is actually her brother Jamie. When he discovers Nancy and advances on her, the bodies in the ward also awaken and converge on the time travelers. The Doctor steps up and scolds the lot, telling them crossly to go to their rooms. He’s surprised when they retreat, glad that they weren’t his last words.

The Doctor talks to Jack about the con, which Jack remarks is a great scam for a time and place like the London Blitz or Pompeii. The Doctor notes that cylinder, which Jack claims was a burned-out medical transport, is the source of this virus. They proceed upstairs to Room 802 – Jack opens the door with his 51st-century sonic blaster, and the site of the factory where it was built is now a banana grove – to find what’s left from the first victim, Jamie.

At the all-clear signal, Nancy is captured by the family who own the house, but she talks her way out of the charges by noting how much food they have in a period of rationing, and demands wire cutters, a torch, food, and a visit to the bathroom before she leaves. She returns to her hideout to find the assembled children. They want to stay with her because she keeps them safe, but she points out that the empty child is coming after her, not them. Nancy leaves them and heads to the bombsite.

As Jamie returns to Room 802, the time traveling trio run from a horde of masked people – the banana and sonic device jokes are a hoot – before ending up in a storeroom. As the Doctor looks for a way out, Jack vanishes. He calls them from his ship using Om-Com technology, a transmission that can communicate over any speaker. The infected also use this technology and jump into the transmission, but Jack jams with Glenn Miller’s Moonlight Serenade. The Doctor starts to work on breaking them out, asking why Rose trusts Jack so much. Rose says that Jack reminds her of the Doctor, but with more “dating and dancing.” The Doctor is offended at the notion that he doesn’t dance, and when Rose offers him the chance, he notes that her hands have been healed. They start to dance when they are transmatted to Jack’s ship, which the Doctor recognizes as a Chula spacecraft. The nanogenes heal his hand, which was burned when the TARDIS console sparked, and he asks to go to the bombsite. Jack reveals that he was once a Time Agent, but he left the Agency when they stole two years of his memories.

The bombsite’s commander, Algy, apprehends Nancy when she infiltrates the area. They lock her up next to an officer named Jenkins, who has been infected, and after they leave Nancy watches in horror as the man painfully transforms. As the time traveling trio approach the site, Jack recognizes Algy and shoots down Rose’s plan to distract the commander since she’s “not his type.” Unfortunately, Algy is in the middle of transformation, and the Doctor recognizes that the virus has gone airborne. They find Nancy, who is singing lullabies to the transformed Jenkins to keep him docile, and free her before examining the cylinder.

Jack tries to open the cylinder but trips an alarm instead. As the masked horde descend on the bombsite, the Doctor sends Rose to reassemble the barbed wire with his sonic screwdriver. Rose comforts Nancy by explaining time travel and the bright future ahead when the Allies win the war. The return as Jack opens the cylinder, and the Doctor reveals that it contained nanogenes. Programmed to heal any wound, the first thing they found was a dead child wearing a gas mask, so they used that as the template to heal everyone they could find. All of them are now hysterical four-year-olds turned powerful Chula warriors awaiting orders, ready to tear the world apart to save their mommys. Jack is suitably chagrined.

The Doctor discovers that Nancy is not Jamie’s brother, but is instead his mother. That’s the reason that he keeps chasing her, and the Doctor implores her to reveal the truth to the boy. She embraces the boy and tells him the truth, and the nanogenes use the moment to analyze her DNA and restore Jamie to his former self.

In the interim, Jack as transmatted to his ship and returns just in time to stop the incoming bomb, the Schlechter Wolf, before rocketing away. After Jack departs, the Doctor forces the nanogenes to fix everyone – “Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives!” – and pins the results on Doctor Constantine’s expert medical knowledge. After everyone leaves the bombsite, he sets the cylinder to self-destruct, and they return to the TARDIS. Sadly, Rose learns the truth about Jack’s fate.

As Jack races through space, he is unable to jettison the bomb before it explodes, so he settles in with a martini to meet his death. He turns to see the open doors of the TARDIS and he scrambles aboard. The Doctor welcomes him aboard, and as the TARDIS head to the next adventure, the Doctor and Rose dance through the cosmos.

 

This story marks the return of Steven Moffat to the franchise and his trademark pace and tropes are on full display, from the romantic angle between the main characters to his fourth-quarter twists in the story. His script was delightfully creepy and scary, and the direction and production only helped to amplify it. The twist at the end – Nancy is the mother, not the sister – is quite touching.

Captain Jack Harkness is a fan favorite, especially in our household. We’ve seen so much of John Barrowman over the years at Dragon Con – take that as you will, knowing his convention performances – so dialing back a decade or so to his first Doctor Who appearance was fun.

Finally, I simply adore how the Ninth Doctor has evolved. He wants to be analytical about this mystery, and the action pace sets him back on his heels. He virtually explodes as all the pieces come together, and his joy at being able to save everyone is both palpable and exhilarating.

 


Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

 

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Boom Town

 

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 #168: Father’s Day

Michael Falkner7 Comments

Doctor Who: Father’s Day
(1 episode, s01e08, 2005)

 

Time can correct itself, but the consequences are deadly.

Rose reminisces about her father, Peter Alan Tyler, who died in November of 1987. She asks the Doctor if they can travel to see him and the Time Lord agrees with a caveat: “Be careful what you wish for.” They watch their wedding, where her father nervously messes up Jackie’s name during the vows, and then travel to the day of his death so he won’t die alone.

They stand on the roadside as Peter Tyler drives up – “Bad Wolf” is scrawled on a poster on a wall – but Rose cannot stand the sight of the hit and run accident. She asks the Doctor for another chance, an event that crosses their own timelines, and saves her father from death. They accompany Pete back to Tyler flat where Rose joyfully looks at her father’s belongings before being upbraided by the Doctor for changing the timeline. He demands the TARDIS key back and leaves, unaware of the eyes in the sky that kill three people in rapid succession.

Pete tries to console Rose over her boyfriend troubles, but she rebuffs his advice before escorting him to the Hoskins-Clark wedding. Meanwhile, the Doctor arrives at the TARDIS to find it an empty (and normal) police box. He runs after Rose, who is currently riding in a car (and getting Rickrolled like we all did back in the day) before hearing an anachronistic song on the radio. She picks up a message on her superphone – “Watson, come here, I need you.” – and narrowly avoids being hit twice by the same driver who nearly killed her father before.

They arrive at the church to meet Jackie and baby Rose, and a spat between Rose’s parents reveals her father’s infidelity. Nearby, a young Mickey watches everyone on the playground disappear before running to the church. The Doctor arrives just in time to save Rose and most of the wedding guests from dragon-like creatures. Everyone hides in the church – the older something is, the stronger it is against the rupture in time – and the Doctor reveals that the creatures are there to sterilize the wound by consuming those involved.

The Doctor watches as the hit-and-run driver makes another loop in time and Pete puts the pieces together. They tearfully embrace and talk about time travel as the creatures try to enter the church. The Doctor continues his rounds in the church, meeting the bride, groom, and their unborn child. Witness to their ordinary lives and potentially happy future, something he has never had, he promises to save them.

Jackie looks after Mickey as the Doctor watches baby Rose. The Time Lord is still angry about the paradox, for which he has no solution, and prevents Rose from comforting her younger self lest it add to the problem. Rose apologizes, the Doctor forgives her, and they realize that the TARDIS is (literally) the key to the problem. The Doctor uses an ’80s mobile phone battery and his sonic screwdriver to charge the key as Rose tries to console her father with false memories, but Pete knows that what she’s telling him is a lie. The TARDIS begins to materialize around the key and it becomes a race against time to save everyone in the church.

Unfortunately, Jackie picks that moment to confront Pete over Rose. The baby gets handed to Rose in the altercation and a creature materializes in the church from the new twist in the timelines. The Doctor tries to protect everyone but he is eaten by the creature, which then flies into the materializing TARDIS and stops the process cold. All avenues for success appear to be cut off. Rose mourns the Doctor as the world grows darker, and Pete makes a fateful decision about the looping hit-and-run driver.

Pete shows Rose to Jackie, who finally understands who the Doctor’s companion is, and says farewell to the daughter he barely knew. He grabs the vase that was broken in the correct timeline, leaves the church, and steps in front of the car. His sacrifice restores the Doctor and the timeline, and presents Rose one last chance to comfort her father before he dies.

History has changed slightly, but the fixed point in time – Pete’s death – has been restored. With this deeper understanding of the nature of space and time, Rose solemnly accompanies the Doctor back to the restored TARDIS.

 

This is a muddled story, and would otherwise be average (or less) as a result, but the confusion and unease that it inspires adds to the atmosphere. We don’t know why Pete Tyler’s death is a fixed (unmovable) point in time, but the mysteries surrounding it in this base-under-siege story infuse the poignancy with a degree of anxiety. It also adds more dimension to Rose and her awakening to the universe beyond her front door.

The Doctor still has some anger issues related to the Last Great Time War, but he’s also healing as we can see from his impassioned argument against fixing parts of personal timelines. He could stop the genocide, but the results could be catastrophic.

This isn’t one of my favorite stories, but it does the job well.

 

 

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

 

 

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Empty Child and Doctor Who: The Doctor Dances

 

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 #167: The Long Game

Michael Falkner7 Comments

Doctor Who: The Long Game
(1 episode, s01e07, 2005)

 

All the Editor-in-Chief asks is for an open mind.

The TARDIS arrives on Satellite 5, in orbit around Earth during the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire, in the year 200,000. Rose and Doctor do their best to wow Adam, and the new companion responds by fainting in a most unimpressive way.

The trio stumble into a marketplace as the Doctor muses about the fine manners and cuisine among the 96 billion members of the human race. Unfortunately, every vendor is selling junk food. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to steal money from an automatic teller machine, sends Rose and Adam off for food, and meets a pair of journalists who tell him all about the station-wide news station that is Satellite 5.

The Doctor stealing money seems a bit off at first, but makes sense when you think about the non-materialistic and otherwise detached nature of the character. The Seventh Doctor broke a payphone once for cash, and there have been a few instances of the Doctor carrying various coins from across time and space to exchange for goods and services. I get the impression that the Doctor doesn’t care about their intrinsic value.

By the way, someone called the Face of Boe is headline news on BadWolfTV.

Adam is overwhelmed by his trip in time and space, so Rose offers him the use of her supercharged mobile phone. He calls home and leaves a message, but takes advantage of a distraction to pocket the phone. They rendezvous with the Doctor as he uses his psychic paper to pose as an inspecting manager. The trio watch as the journalists interface with a computer, using one of them as the central processor through a hole in her forehead. Adam is amazed by the technology but the Doctor feels that trouble is afoot.

The interface is monitored by a central security agency and a man known as the Editor. The determine that one of the journalists is a spy and promote her to Floor 500 (where the walls are supposedly made of gold). The revelation that once you go to Floor 500 you never come back piques the Doctor’s interest. Meanwhile, Adam takes some time on his own to decompress and Rose gives him a TARDIS key.

Oh, and Suki? She reaches Floor 500, which is freezing cold and covered in ice, finds a bunch of corpses, and is interrogated by the Editor as a member of the Freedom Fifteen anarchist underground group. She points a gun at the Editor, revealing that the Freedom Foundation has been monitoring the satellite and its corrupted signals. She’s then killed by the Editor in Chief, a creature living in the overhead of Floor 500.

The Doctor asks Cathica, the lead journalist on the current floor, about the station. She picks up that he’s not management, but helps him understand the nature of current events. The Doctor states that the Empire is stunted in attitudes and technology, and should have evolved far beyond this point by now. Something has been holding them back for the last 91 years.

Adam accesses a station terminal on the observation deck and learns all about the technology of the future. He tries to relay the information to his home via the supercharged mobile phone, but ends up getting routed to Floor 16 instead. He bluffs his way through an interview, uses the money that the Doctor got for him, and ends up having a chip installed to interface with the station.

The Doctor continues his investigation by accessing the station mainframe. The Editor continues to research the Doctor and Rose, but can’t find any information so he promotes them to Floor 500. Meanwhile, the Doctor, Rose, and Cathica determine that all of the station’s cooling is being directed into Floor 500.

The Doctor and Rose take the lift to Floor 500 and discover Suki’s dead body enslaved to the computer systems. They’re confronted by the Editor and are restrained by guards before meeting the Editor-in-Chief, a creature known as the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe. Or, Max for short. By manipulating the news, controlling the economy, locking the borders, and fostering a climate of fear, they have kept the human race controlled as slaves. Those who suspect the truth are detected by the chips in their heads and are eliminated. The Editor is funded by the banks and the satellite keeps the Jagrafess alive through the cold.

Cathica makes her way to Floor 500 and watches the interrogation. Meanwhile, Adam interfaces with the computer (transmitting the signal home through the mobile phone) and inadvertently offers the Editor all of the information in his head. The Editor plans to use the TARDIS (thanks to the key Adam has) and the information about the Doctor to take further control.

Cathica uses the interface on Floor 500 to override the Editor’s control and disrupt the Jagrafess’s life support system. The Doctor and Rose escape, and Suki prevents the Editor from leaving as the Jagrafess explodes from overheating. The Doctor leaves Cathica to put the human race back on track as he and Rose take Adam home. The Doctor destroys the answering machine, dresses down Adam, and leaves him with his new forehead port and the fear of being dissected if he is discovered.

As the TARDIS leaves, Adam’s mother comes home and celebrates his return after six months away. With an inadvertent snap of her fingers, she activates the port in Adam’s head and recoils in horror.

 

This story reminds me of Paradise Towers, The Sun Makers, and pretty much any other time Doctor Who has made a statement about totalitarian regimes that enslave their populaces and filter their knowledge. Remember, despite what certain fan circles tell you, Doctor Who has been political from the beginning: The Curse of Peladon and The Monster of Peladon dealt with two different political issues in the 1970s United Kingdom; The Green Death was overt about environmentalism; and The Mutants tackled colonialism. That just scratches the surface, and as we know, starting all the way back at The Daleks, we’ve had a recurring and iconic enemy that consistently pushes the point home about the evils of ethnic cleansing and cultural supremacy.

It’s the basis of science fiction: Metaphor that tells us about the human condition and how to be better people.

Here, the message is neither subtle nor particularly engaging, but it’s not one that irritates the viewer with a mallet bonking them on the head. It’s up front. Transparent and overt.

We also get the first (and only) televised companion to be kicked out of the TARDIS for bad behavior. We’ve seen companions left behind for their safety or well-being, but Adam was evicted (rightfully so) for greed, avarice, and most nearly mucking up the timeline. Amusingly, the Doctor left a future artifact behind with Adam’s head-port, but the impact of that may be minimal.

I also assume that the Doctor retrieved the superphone during the trip from Satellite 5 to Adam’s house.

 

 

Rating: 3/5 – “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.”

 

 

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Father’s Day

 

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 #166: Dalek

Michael Falkner13 Comments

Doctor Who: Dalek
(1 episode, s01e06, 2005)

 

Spoiler: This is one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who, and the context of the Timestamps Project has only made it better.

The TARDIS materializes in a dark room filled with displays after following a strange distress signal. As the lights come up, the Doctor recognizes the space as an alien museum. He and Rose spot moon dust, asteroid fragments, a Raxacoricofallapatorian arm, and the head of a Mondasian Cyberman, but after the Doctor touches a display case an alarm sounds and the travelers are surrounded by armed guards.

A helicopter arrives – callsign Bad Wolf One – and delivers Henry van Statten, the owner of the collection. He’s a power-hungry billionaire who flaunts his influence and easily disposes of employees who disagree with him. He looks over some new acquisitions with assistant Adam Mitchell and learns from the Doctor how to operate one of the more delicate artifacts before casually tossing it aside.

He’s a frustrating pain in the ass.

Van Statten invites the Doctor to see the one living specimen in the collection, a creature dubbed Metaltron. The billionaire has been torturing the creature in order to make it speak, but so far it has remained silent. The Doctor enters the vault and introduces himself, but is shocked when the creature repeats the name in a familiar voice.

Metaltron is a Dalek.

The Dalek tries to exterminate the Doctor, forcing the Time Lord to run for the sealed door, but the gun stalk does not work. Surprised, the Doctor turns hostile and confronts the Dalek. In turn, the Dalek asks for orders. The Doctor tells it that orders are not coming and that all of the Daleks are dead. The Doctor killed them all, along with the Time Lords, in the mutually assured destruction of the Great Time War.

As the last of their respective species, the Dalek concludes that they are the same. The Doctor hesitates for a moment but finally agrees and attempts to destroy the Dalek. He is removed from the room and escorted to an upper level by van Statten and Diana Goddard. The trip is filled with discussion of how the Dalek fell through time to Earth and was eventually retrieved by van Statten. The billionaire takes the Doctor to an examination room and forcibly scans the Time Lord, all the while gloating over his accomplishments due to alien technology. The Doctor pleads with van Statten for his release, but it does not come.

Elsewhere, Adam shows Rose his collection of artifacts. After some discussion on the nature of the universe and a little flirting, they turn on the cameras and watch as the Dalek is tortured. Rose and Adam rush to stop them, eventually interviewing the Dalek. It tells Rose that it is in pain, prompting Rose to reach out and touch the armor casing in sympathy. The Dalek absorbs part of her DNA and powers up, breaks free of its chains, and kills a tech with its sucker arm.

As the alarm sounds, van Statten releases the Doctor, but they are too late to stop the Dalek from breaking free of the vault. It recharges from the base’s power grid, downloads the internet, and regenerates its armor. It rampages through the base and slaughters the soldiers. All the while, van Statten worries about keeping the Dalek in pristine condition.

The Doctor and Goddard plan a method to stop it as Rose and Adam run up a flight of stairs to escape. Unfortunately, Daleks have learned how to navigate stairs by flying. This was impressive when I first saw this episode in 2008, but after having seen Remembrance of the Daleks, it became a fantastic callback.

Rose and Adam continue to run while the Doctor opens van Statten’s eyes to the horror they have released: The Dalek will cleanse the planet because no other being is pure enough to survive. Rose and Adam find safety behind more soldiers. The Dalek arrives, looks straight at Rose, and then exterminates the entire squad using the fire sprinklers to conduct shots like electricity from the gun stalk. The Doctor, van Statten, and Goddard watch in alarm before planning an escape route. The Dalek addresses the Doctor directly, explaining how the DNA of a time traveler regenerated it and lamenting the inability to receive commands. Without commands, it defaults to base programming: Exterminate everything. The Dalek and the Doctor go back and forth, igniting the Doctor’s fury, but the Time Lord is knocked back on his heels by the Dalek’s response: “You would make a good Dalek.”

Yes, this shell-shocked Doctor certainly would.

Adam and Rose run for safety, but van Statten is forced to seal the vault before Rose can escape. It’s just her and the Dalek alone, and the Dalek supposedly kills Rose. Fortunately for her, the Dalek cannot because it feels her fear through the DNA link, and the logical conflict is driving it insane.

Believing that Rose is dead, the Doctor directs his fury at van Statten. The Doctor promised to protect her, and now he has failed. When Adam arrives, the Dalek addresses the Doctor, reveals the deceit, and demands to be freed lest it truly kill her. The Doctor relents and raises the blast door before looking for a weapon to fight with.

The Dalek and Rose take the elevator to van Statten’s office. The Dalek confronts the billionaire over the torture sessions and nearly kills him, but Rose stops extermination in exchange for the Dalek’s freedom. She walks it toward the exit, but it unexpectedly stops and blasts a hole in the ceiling. Channeling the human DNA coursing through its body, it stands in the resulting beam of light and opens its shell exposing the organic Dalek to the sun. The Doctor arrives with a large gun, but Rose stands between the two mortal enemies as a bridge of peace.

She talks the Doctor down, forcing both of them to face their mortality. Both of them have started down a road of healing by contact with Rose, but the Dalek cannot accept what it is becoming because of the impurity. The drive of being a Dalek is just too strong, and it asks her to order its destruction. At first Rose refuses, but after the Dalek pleads with her for merciful relief she relents. The Dalek rises, generates a force field around itself, and self-destructs.

The last of the Daleks is dead.

In the aftermath, Goddard has van Statten taken away and mind-wiped. The Doctor and Rose head back to the TARDIS, and while Rose offers a bit of hope – if the Dalek survived, maybe another Time Lord did as well – Adam arrives looking for a way out. Rose asks if he can join them, and the Doctor tells her that Adam is her responsibility.

The three of them board the TARDIS and head off to the next adventure.

 

This entire season so far has been centered on a damaged Doctor. We have seen clues along the way, including haunted sadness, anger, and even deflection, but this is where his actions come to roost. The beauty of this episode, and the big reason why it is one of my favorites, is because it takes our hero through the paces: The Doctor’s anger pushes him back into darkness before pulling him back to face who he has become. He has to diagnose his injuries before he can allow them to heal.

The bridge between these stalemated warriors is Rose. Her compassion is something that the Dalek doesn’t have and the Doctor has forgotten how to use. The awakening forces both warriors to effectively lay down their arms, even to the point of humbling the Time Lord with the power of the people he has traveled for most of his lives.

The parallels with veterans, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the horrors of war are powerful. The arc of redemption compounds that power, and the representation that anyone can be the catalyst of that change, even a nineteen-year old department store employee, makes it that much more special.

 

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

 

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Long Game

 

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 #165: Aliens of London & World War Three

Michael Falkner24 Comments

Doctor Who: Aliens of London
Doctor Who: World War Three
(2 episodes, s01e04-05, 2005)

 

That one time that a family of fart monsters almost destroyed the world.

Rose and the Doctor return to her home at the Powell Estate, presumably a mere twelve hours after she left. When she runs up to the apartment, she’s surprised to find out that it’s been twelve months and that her mother Jackie has been searching the entire time.

The Doctor has never been a reliable TARDIS pilot.

As a tagger leaves the words BAD WOLF on the TARDIS, Jackie calls the police and berates Rose for her absence. I mean, she’s really running Rose through the wringer. When the Doctor takes responsibility for the missing time, Jackie slaps him before taking a moment with her daughter. Rose confides in the Doctor that she can’t reveal the truth and the Time Lord refuses to take Jackie on his travels. Their discussion is interrupted by a crashing spacecraft that sails over London, smashes through Big Ben, and splashes into the river. The Doctor and Rose run to the crash site but can’t get through due to the gridlock. The whole scenario is brand new to the Doctor, and Rose suggests that if they can’t see it in person, they can watch it on television.

The world is in emergency response mode, and as Jackie’s neighbors convene to watch live, the news reports that a body has been found and taken to Albion Hospital. It’s unknown if UNIT is still in operation, but the military has already arrived. General Asquith examines the body, noting that experts are on their way and that the Prime Minister is missing.

All sorts of important figures converge on 10 Downing Street, including Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North. In case you missed it the first time, she’ll remind you every time she says her name. The acting Prime Minister, Joseph Green, gets a hasty turnover while experiencing some gas problems, and once behind closed doors, he laughs with some associates in a mysterious (perhaps evil) manner.

The Doctor departs the Tyler apartment, leaving Rose a TARDIS key. Mickey Smith sees him enter the TARDIS and gives chase, but he doesn’t catch up before the TARDIS dematerializes. The ship gives the Time Lord a little trouble as he navigates it to the hospital. When he arrives, after a brief run in with a detachment of soldiers, he finds that the alien has awakened and escaped from the morgue. The Doctor spots the pig-like creature but cannot catch it before a soldier fatally shoots it.

Harriet Jones continues to work her way onto the agenda but is continually rebuffed. She sneaks into the Cabinet Room and takes a peek at the emergency protocols. She’s forced to hide in a closet when Green trio returns with General Asquith. The gassy trio unzip their foreheads, expose their true forms, and kill the general.

The Doctor examines the the alien corpse and determines that it is a fake. He takes the TARDIS back to the Powell Estate as Mickey finds Rose for the first time in a year. Mickey reveals that he was suspected of murder, and the word that the Doctor left shocks her. Rose, Mickey, and Jackie convene outside in time to see the Doctor return, which exposes Jackie to the truth. Rose invites Mickey and Jackie inside, but as Mickey and the Doctor spar, Jackie runs away. Moments later, she calls the hotline in fear and reports the Doctor to the authorities.

That sets off a whole new set of alarms.

As Mickey and Rose make up, the Doctor connects local radar signals to the console. They discover that the spacecraft originated from Earth and that the landing was faked. They also see that UNIT has been called in, but the Doctor decides not to contact them since they might not recognize him. Meanwhile, the aliens take over the general’s body before being alerted to the Doctor’s presence. The military surrounds the TARDIS and takes the Doctor and Rose into custody as Mickey escapes. Jackie is taken back to her apartment to be interviewed, but the official in charge is one of the aliens.

Rose and the Doctor are taken to 10 Downing Street to consult on the emergency. Everyone convenes in a briefing room except Rose and Harriet Jones since neither of them have clearance. The women uncover the truth about the aliens and their skin suits. The Doctor takes charge of the briefing and discovers the trap.

The police officer interviewing Jackie unzips his head. Rose and Harriet are confronted by Margaret Blaine. The Doctor watches Asquith and Green as they use the ID cards to electrocute everyone at the briefing and announce who they really are.

They are the Slitheen.

Since the Doctor is not human, the electrocution doesn’t work on him. He attaches his tag to the Asquith alien and the energy somehow affects all of the Slitheen. Rose and Harriet run, Mickey rescues Jackie, and the Doctor brings the soldiers to fight the threat. After Green stops the energy, he convinces the military to chase the Doctor instead. The Time Lord escapes into the elevator and the chase continues.

General Asquith orders the upper levels to be quarantined before escorting Green into the elevator, ditching their skin suits inside. They meet with the Margaret Blaine alien and nearly get Rose and Harriet before the Doctor rescues them. The Doctor stops the Slitheen with a bluff of port in order to interrogate the aliens, who are actually the Slitheen family instead of members of the Slitheen species. The Doctor notes that they are standing in the Cabinet Room, which was outfitted as a panic room. He triggers the blast doors and locks the Slitheen out, but in the process locks him and his companions inside.

More of the Slitheen (in skin suits) arrive at 10 Downing Street while Jackie and Mickey end up at his flat. In the Cabinet Room, the Doctor apologizes to the bodies of the Prime Minister and his assistant Indra Ganesh before looking for an escape. Rose discovers how the Slitheen fit into their skin suits – their collars generate a compression field (maybe something like the Master‘s technology?) that causes gas to build and escape – before receiving a message from Mickey on her souped-up mobile. While the Doctor ponders why Harriet’s name sounds so familiar, he helps Mickey access the UNIT database for information.

Harriet explains that the UK’s nuclear launch codes are in the United Nation’s hands, so the Slitheen can’t be looking for the missiles. The UNIT site reveals a signal coming from the North Sea, but the Doctor can’t interpret it before the police officer Slitheen invades Mickey’s flat. The Doctor, Harriet, and Rose use the facts to deduce the destination of the Slitheen signal – the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius – and help Mickey and Jackie defeat their invader with vinegar – the acetic acid reacts with the creature and causes it to explode.

Acting PM Green senses the death of his brother and speaks to the media, telling them a story of invading aliens to get access to the nuclear arsenal. The Doctor releases the blast doors and confronts the Slitheen outside, knowing that once the Slitheen decimate the planet’s surface with nuclear holocaust, they will sell the remnants for raw fuel. As the Doctor vows to stop them, he triggers the panic room once more, a sinister darkness crossing his face that shakes the Blaine alien.

As morning dawns, the Doctor reveals that he has one option, but he can’t guarantee Rose’s safety. Jackie pleads with the Doctor to keep her safe, but Rose knows that the world’s safety is worth more than her life. Harriet steps in as the only elected official in the room and orders the Doctor to act. The Doctor and Mickey access the Royal Navy’s systems and launch a Harpoon missile toward Downing Street.

The United Nations releases the nuclear codes to the Slitheen, but the incoming missile prompts the evacuation of Downing Street area. The Doctor, Rose, and Harriet ride out the ensuing explosion in the cupboard of the panic room, but the Slitheen are not so lucky. When the panic room door opens, Harriet takes charge, and the Doctor remembers how he knows her: Harriet Jones is the future Prime Minister, elected for three consecutive terms, and architect of Britain’s Golden Age.

Rose returns home to her mother as the Doctor returns to the TARDIS. Rose convinces her mother that the Doctor isn’t so bad after all, and Jackie offers to cook a proper sit-down meal for the three of them. The Doctor cancels the Slitheen signal and refuses dinner for the wonders of the universe. He extends the offer to Rose, prompting her to pack a bag much to Jackie’s dismay.

As the boy who tagged the TARDIS scrubs his handiwork away, the Doctor gives Mickey a virus to remove the Time Lord’s presence from the internet. Jackie accompanies Rose to the TARDIS, and Mickey turns down to chance to travel (for which the Doctor takes credit to save Mickey’s reputation). Jackie demands that the Doctor take care of Rose, and Rose says she could be home in ten seconds.

The TARDIS dematerializes and Jackie waits ten seconds, but they don’t come back. She walks away sadly as Mickey stands watch over the street.

 

This episode has a high body count, and while that’s not particularly great for Doctor Who, it does show us a hint of what darkness the Ninth Doctor is capable of. Especially when he’s backed into a corner. He’s still the Doctor, and we still get that sense of exploration and compassion that the show is known for, but we also get more clues here about how broken he is over the Time War.

I also want to highlight Camille Coduri and her portrayal of a worried mother. Jackie Tyler tends to fluctuate between compassionate and irritating, and here she absolutely sold the heartbreak over her concern for Rose’s safety. That last scene – ten seconds – was heart-wrenching.

The character moments alone keep this set of stories firing on all cylinders.

 

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

 

 

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Dalek

 

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.