Timeless Adventures
Page 25
Tennant’s semi-detached status would prove to be a problem for the next two hour-long specials, Planet of the Dead (filling the usual new series Easter launch spot) and the downbeat The Waters of Mars (airing in November). Despite the doom-laden title, Planet of the Dead plays things fairly light, befitting Davies’ traditional concept for a season-opener. The first ever episode to be produced in the new High Definition (HD) broadcast standard, it features Michelle Ryan (from East-Enders and Steven Moffat’s Jekyll) as the Lara Croft-like Lady Christina de Souza, a thrill-seeking burglar caught up with the Doctor and a bus load of passengers when the bus is sucked through a wormhole to the barren desert planet of San Helios. Once there, they must save the passengers from the fly-like Tritovores and a horde of flying stingray-like world devourers whose next target is Earth. Once back on Earth, the Doctor refuses to take Christina with him, as the loss of Rose still hurts. Davies co-wrote the episode with Gareth Roberts, but despite the location shooting in Dubai and the incongruity of a London bus stranded on an alien world, the episode disappointed, being something of a mix of styles with no clear ‘high concept’ for viewers to latch on to. Just over 9.5 million saw Planet of the Dead, but various critics viewed the episode as ‘hollow’, ‘predictable’ and ‘plodding’. Rather than being ‘special’, it seemed run-of-the-mill.
When The Waters of Mars arrived that November (immediately following the animated serial Dreamland), it was a far darker tale. With Tennant’s Tenth Doctor entering his final days, and Carmen – one of the passengers in Planet of the Dead – foretelling his doom (‘Your song is ending… he will knock four times’), the autumn special focused on the Doctor’s angst more than on thrilling adventures. The Doctor arrives at Bowie Base One, the first human colony on Mars, in 2059. He encounters Captain Brooke (Lindsay Duncan) whom he realises was an important figure in Earth history: the base personnel are due to die that day, but their sacrifice spurs humanity onwards in the exploration of space. Under siege by an ‘intelligent water virus’ trapped on the planet by the Ice Warriors, the crew struggle to survive while the Doctor must decide whether to leave them to their historically-dictated fate or to intervene and save them… This makes him an impotent figure, a protagonist who refuses to get involved, a bystander to ‘history’. Torn by their suffering, the Doctor declares himself to be ‘the Time Lord victorious’ – able to interfere with history at will now the other Time Lords are dead – and finally rescues Captain Brooke, returning her to Earth. When she discovers that his intervention should never have happened, she kills herself, thus setting history back on the right course. The Doctor is shocked, and realising he has gone too far, feels he must atone. The appearance of an Ood suggests his time has come, but the Doctor attempts to flee in the TARDIS.
The issue of the Doctor’s tendency to go too far had been briefly addressed previously by Davies in The Runaway Bride, which had temporary companion Donna telling him he should not travel alone as he needed a human perspective to temper his activities. The Waters of Mars felt more like a build up to the epic two-part The End of Time than a story in its own right, as its main purpose seemed to be to position the Tenth Doctor as a reluctant hero whose time was almost up, consumed with hubris before his fall. Around 10.5 million viewers saw the story, up on the previous episode probably due to the late-autumn scheduling. Critically it was fairly well-received, despite the perceived darkness of a tale that ends in suicide. The Guardian liked the depiction of ‘a side to the Doctor… we haven’t really seen before’, while The Daily Telegraph delved into ‘the murky waters’ of just what historical events the Doctor can and cannot interfere with. It was an award-winning show, however, scooping the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form (previously won by Steven Moffat in 2005 for The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, in 2006 for The Girl in the Fireplace, and in 2007 for Blink).
The departure of the actor playing the Doctor is always a big moment in Doctor Who storytelling, but there was none more overblown than the departure of the Tenth Doctor, David Tennant. As showrunner Davies was also leaving (along with other key members of the behind-the-scenes team), he pulled out all the stops to produce an epic twopart regeneration story portentously titled The End of Time.
Broadcast on Christmas Day 2009 and New Year’s Day 2010, the two episodes were the culmination of the year of ‘specials’. Most regenerations in the past had been sudden, unexpected events in the life of the Doctor and his companions. The only one that had made it a feature of the preceding episodes was Tom Baker’s swan song, Logopolis, in 1981: it was felt that, as the then-longest serving Doctor, something special was needed to mark his departure. Tennant had brought a legion of new fans to the show, especially among women and US viewers, and it was similarly felt that replacing him was more of a test for the reborn programme than even the shock departure of Christopher Eccleston.
Doctor Who took over BBC1 for Christmas 2009, with a series of themed station idents featuring the TARDIS, Tennant and some reindeer. That final story was something of a celebration of Tennant’s entire run, with copious shout outs to other eras of the series. Warned by the Ood that ‘time itself is ending’, the Doctor returns to Earth to confront a reborn Master (John Simm), accompanied by Donna’s grandfather Wilf (Bernard Cribbins). The threat is bigger than just the mad and feral Master. Carmen in Planet of the Dead had warned the Doctor that ‘It is returning’, which turned out to be a reference to Gallifrey (the only part of Davies’ initial grand narrative plan that had not been included in Journey’s End). Led by Rassilon (Timothy Dalton), the Time Lords escape the ‘time lock’ that isolated them from the end of the Great Time War. It was Rassilon who had implanted the sound of drums in the Master’s head, driving him mad, but also providing a link that allowed them to escape their imprisonment. In a final confrontation, the Doctor consigns the Master and the Time Lords back into the time lock. However, in order to save Wilf – one relatively unimportant old man – the Doctor must swap places with him in an isolation chamber that results in the Time Lord’s exposure to a fatal dose of radiation, kick-starting his regeneration.
Most previous Doctor Who stories would have ended there, but Davies and Tennant pushed the boat out, giving the Tenth Doctor an extra 10 minutes above the usual running time for the 2009 specials to go on a farewell tour of the universe saying an emotional goodbye to all his previous companions. It was an indulgence too far, and while it may have worked once in the context of Tennant’s departure, it does not stand up well to repeat viewing.
The End of Time, Part One was placed third in 2009’s Christmas viewing Top 10, just behind EastEnders and The Royle Family, with a consolidated figure of 11.57 million (slightly beating the previous Christmas special The Next Doctor’s 11.4 million). The second instalment – and Tennant’s big farewell episode – was placed first for New Year’s Day viewing, with a consolidated figure (including the HD simulcast) of 12.27 million viewers, with an additional 1.3 million viewing requests via the BBC’s online iPlayer, an increasingly important part of the show’s reach to time-shifting audiences.
The End of Time was fairly well received, although a lot of critics were clearly cutting the show some slack as festive viewing. Bernard Cribbins and John Simm came in for particularly good notices, and Tennant was praised (in The Guardian) for bringing ‘tragic force’ to his exit. The episode ended where the revived series had begun, with Rose (Billie Piper). In his Guardian review Mark Lawson noted: ‘The final line Davies gives to Tennant was a suddenly regretful “I don’t want to go!”, and it is likely that, somewhere inside, both actor and writer feel a little like that.’
So ended one of the most successful eras in Doctor Who’s history. As the Tenth Doctor told Wilf of the aftermath of regeneration in The End of Time, Part One, ‘…some new man goes sauntering away’. The slate had been wiped clean, and two ‘new men’ – showrunner Steven Moffat and actor Matt Smith – would take Doctor Who forward to even greater heights, especially in America.
The new Doctor arrived at Easter 2010 with a bang, literally, as the action of Matt Smith’s 75-minute debut episode The Eleventh Hour picks up right where The End of Time, Part Two left off. The new Doctor comes crashing to Earth in a wrecked TARDIS in one of the show’s most dramatic action sequences. He lands in the garden of a young girl, Amelia Pond – beginning the relationship that would define the majority of Smith’s tenure as the Doctor.
The Eleventh Hour had a variety of tasks: introducing the new Doctor and the new companion Amy, played by Scottish actress Karen Gillan, while telling a story aimed at engaging as wide an audience as possible. New showrunner Steven Moffat was, like Russell T Davies, a long-standing fan of the old show who had carved an award-winning career in television encompassing children’s shows in Press Gang, comedy in Coupling, drama in Jekyll, and a blockbuster movie in The Adventures of Tintin (2011). His knowledge of the show meant he was well aware of previous Doctors’ debut episodes, so was determined to avoid howlers like The Twin Dilemma or Time and the Rani. Moffat used the new companion to introduce a season-long arc story based around a crack in time and space that manifests in Amy’s childhood bedroom. Prisoner Zero, an escapee from the alien Atraxi, warns the Doctor: ‘The universe is cracked. The Pandorica will open. Silence will fall.’ This lays the foundation for a story arc that would reach from The Eleventh Hour right up to the show’s 50th anniversary in November 2013 and to Matt Smith’s own regeneration story at Christmas 2013.
Moffat also took the opportunity of reinventing the series, reducing its logline to the basics of ‘a madman in a box’, essentially the Doctor travelling the universe in his TARDIS. The rebranding of the new era continued into a new title sequence, a new version of the theme tune, new series logo, and a redesign of both the exterior and interior of the TARDIS. In this way, Moffat put his stamp on the show, positioning it as both a continuation of the reboot begun in 2005 and a fresh start for a new team under new management.
The most important of these new elements was the most visible: Matt Smith. As the youngest actor ever to play the lead – only 26 when cast – and something of an unknown (he’d co-starred with Billie Piper in two Philip Pullman-based TV movies, as well as political drama Party Animals), he had a lot to prove. In The Eleventh Hour, thanks to Moffat’s writing and his own whole-hearted commitment to the role, Smith rapidly became the Doctor, erasing all memory of David Tennant for many viewers.
Moffat made the show new again by taking a fairytale approach, positioning the Doctor – who fell from the sky in a magical box – as an imaginary friend to the young Amelia Pond (Caitlin Blackwood, Gillan’s young cousin). This encounter defines his relationship with the adult Amy, to whom he returns after five minutes have passed for him, but 12 years have gone by for her. The ‘raggedy Doctor’, as she remembers him, has a major impact on her life. In creating a fable around Amy Pond, ‘the girl who waited’, and in his general take on the Doctor and the universe he now inhabited, Moffat adopted a dark fairytale approach, moving his Doctor Who in line with Philip Hinchcliffe’s pulp fiction-inspired period of the late-1970s. ‘For me, Doctor Who literally is a fairytale,’ admitted Moffat to The Guardian. ‘It’s not really science fiction. It’s not set in space, it’s set under your bed. It’s at its best when it’s related to you, no matter what planet it’s set on. Every time it cleaves towards that, it’s very strong.’
With the ‘crack in the universe’ arc plot in place, the next few episodes took the usual approach of featuring the new companion coming to terms with the Doctor and with travelling in the TARDIS. Amy Pond had an advantage over many of her predecessors in that she had known of the Doctor since her childhood encounter, while for the Doctor the relationship is still a new one.
The Beast Below projected the United Kingdom (minus Scotland, perhaps in a nod to the eventual 2014 independence referendum) into the far future, reconstituted as a space-faring society (albeit one with a retro 1950s Festival of Britain vibe) that lives on the back of a giant ‘space whale’, unbeknown to the majority of Starship UK (as they repeatedly vote to collectively forget about their exploitation of the creature). The social satire is clear, from Moffat (through Amy) asserting a traditional separate Scottish identity, to the spoof of the British electorate and their voting habits at successive general elections. The Beast Below sees Amy adapt and employ the Doctor’s methods to solve the problem of this society’s cruel reliance on a trapped sentient creature.
Similarly, in Victory of the Daleks (the following episode, a trip into history), it is Amy’s humanity and her heartfelt description of unrequited love that defuses the cybernetic Bracewell (who has become a Dalek bomb). Summoned by Winston Churchill (Ian McNeice), the Doctor and Amy arrive in 1940 to discover that the Daleks (described as ‘Ironsides’) are masquerading as allies in the British war effort against Hitler (a reworking of Patrick Troughton’s debut story The Power of the Daleks, which also featured deceptively ‘friendly’ Daleks). Bracewell (Bill Patterson) is a scientist who claims to have developed the Ironsides, but the Doctor suspects a different agenda. As soon as he identifies them as his enemies, their plan kicks into a higher gear. With his acknowledgement of their nature, these Daleks access the ‘progenitor’ – a store of pure Dalek DNA – and launch a revitalisation of their race, the ‘New Paradigm’. This introduced a bold new colourful Dalek redesign, but the multi-coloured ‘bumper car’ look failed to catch on, and by the 2012 season opener Asylum of the Daleks, old and new are happily mixing in the ‘parliament’ of the Daleks (a way for the production team to stage a graceful climb down and quietly re-introduce the ‘classic’ look).
The two part The Time of the Angels/Flesh and Stone reintroduced the Weeping Angels from Blink and Alex Kingston’s River Song from Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead (in which she was uploaded to a computer ‘afterlife’). It built on the mythology of the Angels in the same way that James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) built on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) by multiplying their numbers and giving them new abilities. A ship, the Byzantium, carrying River Song and a Weeping Angel, crashes on the planet Alfava Metraxis, reviving a colony of dormant Angels. In an echo of the novel The Time Traveller’s Wife, Song and the Doctor are meeting out of order, she having met him many times already while for him this is only their second encounter. Her origin and relationship with the Doctor, Amy and Rory would be one of the driving mysteries of the next two years.
Rory – played by Arthur Darvill and introduced in The Eleventh Hour as Amy’s boyfriend – returned in The Vampires of Venice, a parable dealing with questions of immigration and cultural survival. The Saturnynes are fish-like aliens hiding out in Venice in 1580, the last survivors of their world ravaged by ‘the Silence’. They arrived on Earth to escape the ‘cracks in the universe’, and intend to rebuild their race, first by converting the locals (beginning with the girls in the Calvierri school) and then sinking Venice to create a suitable watery habitat. Rather than the vampire story suggested by the title (it is a ‘perception filter’ that gives the appearance of vampirism to the Saturnynes – the way things are seen or perceived is a recurring theme in Moffat’s Who), The Vampires of Venice raises the question about an incoming population’s right to thrive at the expense of the indigenous inhabitants.
This was ripped from contemporary news headlines in which immigration to the UK was once again a hot button topic. Just as the Gelth in The Unquiet Dead could be seen as refugee immigrants struggling for their survival, so too are the Saturnynes, a people severely reduced in numbers and driven to desperate acts justified (they believe) by their self-preservation. This is a theme played up in writer Toby Whithouse’s alignment of the ‘foreign’ invaders with vampire mythology, often itself read as a metaphor for sexually predatory foreign incomers, a ‘contamination’ entering the world from elsewhere. The episode originally aired just days following the 2010 UK General Election in which immigration had been a factor. The blood-suc
king vampire is an old stand-in for the incomer who uses unearned national resources but refuses to adapt or integrate. The Saturnynes are not only intent on converting human women so that they are suitable for reproduction, they are also colonial in intent, aiming to adapt an entire area of Italy to suit their needs, regardless of those who already live there. With the increasing visibility of vampires – in the Twilight saga (2008 – 13) and on TV in Whithouse’s own Being Human (BBC, 2008 – 13) and the American series True Blood (2009 – 14) – Doctor Who takes the iconography of one of literature’s oldest monsters and moulds it to fit an up-to-date political issue drawn from contemporary concerns.
With Rory firmly on board the TARDIS, the series reverts to the two companions – one male, one female – format it had most recently with Rose and Mickey, but also featured back in the 1970s with Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan, and in the 1960s, primarily with Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Herriot. It has been one of the series’ most successful formats, second only to the Doctor travelling with a solo female companion.