It certainly deals with the Rory problem (for now) and having had him never exist at all meant there was no obligation for Amy to lower the mood in the next few episodes by being depressed about her lost love. Doctor Who has had a tradition of killing off its main characters (although never the Doctor or an assistant). But even so, the abrupt exit of Rory provoked quite a shock.
The critics had their say. Gavin Fuller was not quite as fulsome as usual, pointing out that it harked back to Jon Pertwee’s Who in the Seventies, when he had also faced the Silurians, and finding it lacking compared to the original. But it had its moments, he said. ‘The most noticeable thing about the episode in general was perhaps how it was the women who were the deadlier and stronger creatures for this episode, with Alaya, Restac, Amy and Ambrose proving the gutsier moments, brandishing weapons and being responsible for all the killings while the menfolk reacted with disgust,’ he wrote. ‘Plus the sudden swerve at the end, with the return of the crack in the wall and the shock demise of Rory – although I have a sneaking suspicion that all is not what it seems there, allowing for strong performances from Matt Smith and Karen Gillan as Amy comes to terms with the loss of her fiancé, and the revelation at the end of the episode that it appears to be part of the Tardis that the Doctor retrieved from within the crack, making it ever more intriguing as to how this ongoing thread will be resolved.’
Simon Brew, on cult TV and movie website Den of Geek, thought it worked. ‘If you were one of the many, like ourselves, who felt that last week’s Doctor Who had a distinctly old-style tinge to it, then for much of the duration of “Cold Blood”, you’re going to feel exactly the same way,’ he wrote. ‘For, to some degree, this was Doctor Who how it used to be. Expecting last-minute interruptions to dastardly plans? Running around corridors? The Doctor negotiating and being reasonable with alien races? You get it in abundance here, and that feel of the old Pertwee adventures of old is present and correct. And you get the Silurians too, albeit in greater number than we saw with the story opener, “The Hungry Earth”. Not too great a number, to be fair – the Excel spreadsheet is still a little bit of a dampener on ambitions. But not for the first time this run, Doctor Who manages to get a lot out of not too much.’
Dan Martin at the Guardian also pointed out the parallels with the past. ‘Your enjoyment of “Cold Blood” would seem to hinge entirely on whether you’ve seen a Silurian story before,’ he wrote. ‘That was certainly the case in my house. With a reptilian gap in my own archive I was all “coo” and “squee”, while my older, more encyclopaedic buddy had seen it all before. It’s true that all the story’s main twists and revelations – humanity’s reputation as “the vermin race”; humanity doing terrible things to reinforce that reputation; the Silurians having just the same political divisions as we do – are all present and correct. You have to think of it through the eyes of a child. And I loved this tense, mad and thoughtful story. Especially the bit when they run (again, like giraffes) over the bridge at the end.’
All of this, especially the revelation that the Doctor was holding on to a charred piece of the Tardis, was a clear sign that an apocalyptic end to the series was in sight. However, the next episode, “Vincent and the Doctor”, was considerably lighter in tone, and again was written by a very big name in British television and film indeed. Richard Curtis was the man who was to bring together the Doctor and Vincent van Gogh, and he managed to do so in a way that harked right back to his Four Weddings and a Funeral best.
The Doctor and Amy are at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where another Richard Curtis favourite, Bill Nighy, acting a curator called Dr Black, is holding forth about Van Gogh’s genius. He is also, of course, mad, and it is this madness that allows him to see what others cannot. Peering at a painting called The Church at Auvers, the Doctor realises that, just visible in one of the windows, is a painting of an alien. There is no time to be lost. Our heroes get to the Tardis and head back to 1890.
Landing in Arles, the duo finds Vincent, bad tempered, lonely and shunned by all his neighbours; fortunately, however, Amy’s womanly charms soon win him round. He certainly needs their help: there has been a spate of recent and mysterious deaths, and it is Vincent himself who is being blamed.
The Doctor and Amy go to stay with Vincent, where it become apparent that he has no idea of the scope of his talent, and is very near to despair. He also is the only person in the vicinity who can see a marauding and malevolent beast. The beast then attacks Amy, so Vincent paints a picture of it: it turns out to be a Krafayis, a vicious pack predator that has been left on earth. There is an altercation: the Doctor and Amy say they will deal with it and go; Vincent breaks down because everyone leaves him in the end.
Still, he manages to pull himself together for long enough to help them confront the creature. First the Doctor enters the church, followed by Amy and Vincent; the beast attacks, at which point the Doctor realises it is blind. That is why it has been left behind. It makes for Vincent, who defends himself using his easel: the Krafayis impales himself upon it and dies.
Vincent is able to understand it now: it was fear that led the creature to behave as it did. The trio go outside and gaze at the starry, starry sky, from which Vincent is to derive so much inspiration; the Doctor and Amy then get ready to go. Vincent tells Amy to come back and marry him should she ever tire of the Doctor: the Doctor, meanwhile, has an idea. He bundles Vincent into the Tardis and takes him back to the future, in the Musée d’Orsay. Vincent is overwhelmed to see his pictures hanging on the walls, and even more so when he hears Dr Black describing him as ‘the greatest painter of them all’, a Richard Curtis touch if ever there was one. He kisses him on both cheeks, before being taken back to his own world, greatly cheered.
But Vincent does not escape his fate. Amy and the Doctor return to the present – and discover that Vincent still kills himself, at the age of 37, a year after their encounter. Amy is distraught, but the Doctor comforts her, saying that there is both good and bad in life. Meanwhile, the face in the painting has done – and another painting, Vase With 12 Sunflowers, now has an inscription. ‘For Amy’, it says.
Richard Curtis’s involvement ensured that this episode got an even wider reception than usual.
‘There’s no gainsaying a lump in the throat, though, however treacherous you feel it to be,’ wrote Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent. ‘And this time it wasn’t the Doctor who was hauling on the heartstrings but Vincent van Gogh and, behind him, Richard Curtis, writer of an episode that was at first ingenious and then decidedly poignant … Curtis – having danced a bit of a two-step around the difficult issue of Van Gogh’s suicidal depression – gave life to a charitable fantasy that must have occurred to virtually everyone who loves his paintings. The Doctor – unwilling to meddle with history to any large degree – did feel able to take Van Gogh on a temporal joyride, bringing him into 2010, so that he can see the crowds admiring his paintings and hear Bill Nighy’s art expert wax lyrical about his undying genius. And in Tony Curran’s tender performance of Vincent as he absorbed this fact there was something very touching – one of history’s injustices corrected, if only in fantasy.’
Keith Watson, in Metro, was similarly affected. ‘What would Vincent van Gogh make of the fact that, though he died penniless and unrecognised, he’s now regarded as one of the world’s greatest artists?’ he asked. ‘That sounds like the starting point for some kind of earnest talking heads discussion, but no, this was Doctor Who time travelling into surprising territory. Taking us into an impressive imagining of Van Gogh’s world and his starry, starry night, Richard Curtis’s story mixed arch jokes (“Sunflowers? They’re not my favourite flower.”) with a dark voyage into a tortured life that gambled on a feel-good twist and, against the odds, pulled it off.’
Peter Bradshaw, in the Guardian, was also impressed, although in his case, he commented that it was Doctor Who giving a much-needed boost to the career of Richard Curtis, rather than the other way round. ‘Richard Curtis is
back with a bullet, his mojo apparently restored by one of our great small-screen institutions, and if you haven’t yet seen it, then settle down to his terrifically clever, funny, likeable wildly surreal episode of Doctor Who: “Vincent and the Doctor”,’ he wrote. ‘In it, the Doctor – played by Matt Smith – notices a strange creature tucked unobtrusively away in one of Van Gogh’s paintings … He travels back in time to meet the great artist, played by Tony Curran, and helps him battle this same scary monster. Curtis induces the soufflé to rise without apparent effort and makes it all look very easy. There are some very tasty Curtis moments. The Doctor exchanges badinage with Bill Nighy’s art expert about bow ties. And when he meets Van Gogh, the Doctor becomes very droll and floppy-haired in a way that somehow … reminds me of someone …? There is instant comic chemistry between the dapper Time Lord and the shaggy, lairy, wild-haired artist who could almost be played by Rhys Ifans – although Curran is very good.’
Curran was, in fact, excellent, so much so that his performance was singled out for praise by almost everyone who reviewed the show. More than that, ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ was feted for other reasons as well: it had put the visual arts at the centre of one of its episodes, and it had dealt with the very tricky issue of mental health. When the BBC pulls the stops out, there is no other organisation that can provide better drama. In a series that was already winning plaudits, had introduced a phenomenally popular new Doctor, and was just getting more and more inventive with every episode, this was an unqualified triumph.
CHAPTER 6
THE FINALE APPROACHES
As Matt Smith’s first series as the Eleventh Doctor neared its end, the verdict was close to unanimous: he had pulled it off to magnificent effect. David Tennant was about as hard an act to follow as there could be, but Matt had done it; he’d made the role unmistakably his own. But it was a triumph for Steven Moffat, too. Russell T Davies wasn’t exactly the easiest writer and executive producer to follow, but Steven had taken the series from strength to strength.
For Doctor Who to succeed, there must be a certain amount of enchanting barminess, and this was certainly the case in the episode just before the two-part finale, ‘The Lodger’, when yet another big name in British entertainment made an appearance. This time it was James Corden, who played Craig, both the somewhat unlikely love interest in the episode and, for a short time, the Doctor’s flatmate – for the Doctor’s real challenge in this episode is to pass himself off as a normal human being. Luckily for the viewers, he didn’t quite manage it.
It was becoming a running joke in this latest series that the Doctor kept managing to land the Tardis in the wrong place, and so it was to prove again. The Doctor and Amy are heading for the fifth moon of Sinda Callista, and instead end up in Colchester (which, let’s be honest, required slightly less expensive sets), where problems emerge. The Doctor is flung out of the Tardis, but it cannot land, and Amy is trapped inside. And that isn’t the only problem. In a nearby house, passersby are being lured inside by a voice asking for help through the intercom: that is, needless to say, the last that is seen of them. Lights flash, and there is a lot of screaming. A mystery has emerged.
As fortune would have it, the flat downstairs in this mysterious house has a spare room, which the Doctor moves into and where the pretence at being human begins. He is managing to talk to Amy through an earpiece; she in turn tells him how to behave. In the meantime it transpires that Craig is in love with his friend Sophie, who in return is in love with him. However, neither realises the other has such feelings, and both are getting along, rather reluctantly, as platonic friends. Sophie then, to Craig’s great dismay, decides to go off to explore the world.
The Doctor starts to become aware that something a little odd is happening in the flat upstairs. A dark stain has spread across the ceiling but the Doctor doesn’t want to use his sonic screwdriver to find out what it is in case it sets off an alarm, so he starts to build a rather complicated contraption in his room.
Craig then, rather unwisely, touches the damp patch and is poisoned. The Doctor looks after him, which involves going to Craig’s place of work, a call centre, where he does the job remarkably well. He then goes off to play football with Craig’s friends – a scene that must have been a particular thrill for Matt, who had been set for a career as a footballer himself until an injury put a stop to it (of which more later) – finally provoking Craig into a huge fit of jealousy. The Doctor is popular, clever, likeable and able, and worst of all, Sophie seems to like him. Craig asks him to move out.
While the Doctor and Craig are arguing, Sophie turns up at the house – and is lured upstairs to the mysterious flat. The Doctor is forced to reveal his true identity to Craig – he does this by way of a head butt – at which point, the two hear screams from upstairs and realise Sophie is in terrible danger. At this crucial moment, Amy reveals an oddity in the building’s plans: it has only one storey. The flat above shouldn’t be there at all.
The two burst into the flat, which they discover is actually a time machine, which has been projecting a hologram – hence the various mysterious voices. It was a ship that had crashed and rebuilt itself, and was now seeking a pilot to fly it home. All the humans it had enticed inside had been destroyed in the process, but after the Doctor and Craig manage to rescue Sophie, the ship realises that in the Doctor it has at long last found its pilot. It tries to attach him to its energy hub, at which point the Doctor realises that it only seeks people who want to leave, which is why Craig was left alone. Craig and Sophie finally realise that they are both in love and hence want to stay; they touch the ship’s console, thus freeing the Doctor. They race out of the house in time to see the flat turn back into a ship and fly away.
Craig and Sophie give the Doctor a set of keys as a parting gift and he returns to the Tardis, which has now finally managed to land. He tells Amy to write a note to be left in a newsagents, directing the Doctor to the mysterious flat in which he has just spent such an eventful couple of days; as she is looking for a pen, however, Amy finds the diamond ring Rory – who she has now forgotten existed – gave her, and looks anxious. The mysterious crack in her bedroom wall appears again. But now it’s behind Craig’s fridge…
The scene was now clearly set for the series’ apocalyptic finale and Gavin Fuller, for the Telegraph, was impressed. ‘Since Doctor Who returned in 2005, episode 11 has tended to be one in which the show draws breath before the grand finale, latterly adding in some sort of setting-up for this in the process,’ he wrote. “The Lodger” looked as though it was primed to continue this trend, even to the extent of mirroring the concept of a threat contained in an upstairs room of a suburban house that was also present in 2006’s “Fear Her”. The trend was largely maintained, but, thanks to the deft hands of Gareth Roberts, it was done in a manner that made the episode a delight. Quite often, small-scale episodes can show Doctor Who at its best, and this was no exception, with the menace contained … to an upstairs flat and the focus of the episode primarily being on the Doctor’s impact on his temporarily enforced housemate Craig (a nicely cast James Corden) and Craig’s friend Sophie (Daisy Haggard) and showing how the Doctor can, through his perception and wisdom, change people’s lives for the better.’ It was an apt assessment of exactly why the episode had worked so well.
And so, finally, the big two-parter that was to round off the series approached. It was important for all sorts of reasons: for a start, a really good series of Doctor Who has to end so well it leaves the public desperate to see the Doctor back again. Then it was important to establish that Matt Smith was well and truly the new Doctor – not that there was much doubt about that – in a role that he had made entirely his own. Finally, of course, there were all the loose ends to tie up. There was the mysterious recurring crack, the hints of apocalypse – and, to put it bluntly, the audience’s appetite for a very strong adventure indeed.
The first of the two-parter was called ‘The Pandorica Opens’, and it was written by Steven
Moffat, clearly keen to leave his final imprint on the series he had made his own. Right from the beginning loose ends were clearly going to be tied up, with cameos from the various characters who had appeared in the series: here was poor Vincent van Gogh, crying out in his madness, attempting to get a message to the Doctor by way of a strange painting that no one can understand; there was Winston Churchill, gruff in the war rooms and working with an equally anxious Professor Bracewell, equally intent on contacting the only man who could save them all. Churchill tries to ring the Doctor, but his call is diverted to River Song, currently languishing in jail; by the clever use of a psychotropic lipstick, she kisses one of the guards and escapes. Next stop is with Liz 10, who is in possession of Van Gogh’s painting. It is of the Tardis being blown apart.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Amy are making their way towards an allotted meeting place. They travel to the oldest planet in the universe to find a message from River: it contains coordinates that send them back to Roman Britain, in 102 AD. River herself is there in the guise of Cleopatra to deliver her warning. The Doctor begins to realise that the destruction of the Tardis might be linked to the Pandorica, something he had previously dismissed as a fairytale and now, rather grimly, is beginning to realise might be real.
And so it proves. The Pandorica turns out to be buried underneath Stonehenge (‘Underhenge’) and is a prison, a locked room guarded by every conceivable type of lock. Rather worryingly, it seems to be opening itself from the inside; more worryingly still, it is transmitting messages across the universe. Confusingly, Amy declares her favourite story was always Pandora’s Box, while she has always been obsessed with Roman Britain.
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