Timeless Adventures

by Brian J. Robb

  A four-month break followed A Good Man Goes to War before the series returned, so a lot of questions had to be answered and a dramatic hook provided to ensure audiences would return for the rest of the ongoing story. This was both the danger and the opportunity of the split-season scheduling that Moffat had no choice but to embrace in his storytelling strategies.

  A Good Man Goes to War sets up a new format for the show that would be explored further. It gave the Doctor a ‘gang’ of friends instead of one or two companions, comprising the Victorian Silurian crime fighter Madame Vastra and her servant Jenny, the Sontaran nurse Strax, and Dorium Maldovar, the rotund blue chap briefly seen in the opening sequence of The Pandorica Opens. Although that episode saw characters from earlier in the season collectively helping the Doctor, they never worked together, unlike those featured here and in the later Dinosaurs in a Spaceship (in which the Doctor openly declares ‘I’ve got a gang now…’). Moffat couldn’t have known the eventual popularity of Vastra, Jenny and Strax, leading to him re-using the characters frequently next season (in The Snowmen, The Crimson Horror and The Name of the Doctor).

  The ‘gang’ come together to help the Doctor rescue Amy from her incarceration at Demon’s Run, a fortified asteroid, where she is being held by Madame Kovarian (Frances Barber), the mysterious eye-patch lady. Throw in a brief appearance by the Cybermen and a Silurian army, and this episode presents a more cleverly conceived monster team-up than The Pandorica Opens achieved. Again, the aim is the budget-saving re-use of available costumes, but Moffat approached the challenge by creating a core group of characters that unexpectedly struck a chord with viewers.

  Although full of action and incident, A Good Man Goes to War was actually about a fundamental change in the Doctor (one followed up at the end of this series and the beginning of the next). He comes to realise that his victories have resulted in him gaining a reputation, one that has caused opponents to preemptively strike at him. Kovarian and the Clerics have set out to create a human-Time Lord mix to give them a controllable weapon: the result is River Song, revealed at the climax to be the lost-in-time daughter of Amy and Rory. Born at Demon’s Run, the baby is kidnapped by Kovarian (suggesting the changeling myth in Scottish folklore or the kidnapped/abandoned children of many fairytales), raised in the orphanage seen in The Day of the Moon, who then escapes and regenerates into River Song (a scene revealed in the next instalment, Let’s Kill Hitler). Eventually, it is she who ends up in the Apollo-era space suit and is seen to kill the Doctor. This was Moffat talking his ‘timey-wimey’ storytelling to the max, and hoping that viewers would be able to keep up with him. Douglas Adams, script editor on the series in 1979, once described his job as making the show simple enough for adults and complicated enough for children. It was an approach with which Moffat concurred: ‘We haven’t actually had any complaints from the general audience at all,’ Moffat told the New York Magazine‘s Vulture website. ‘Not one single bit of audience feedback has even mentioned complexity. Doctor Who can be complicated at times, it absolutely can be – but it’s supposed to be. You’re supposed to pay attention. I’m also addressing children, hugely the case in the UK, and children are demanding of complexity. I think we do some complicated stories, [but] we also do incredibly simple stories. I always think this: I don’t care if it’s complicated or too scary or too grown-up or too childish or whatever they are saying this week, so long as they never say it’s too boring. If anyone says “Oh, it was a bit dull this week” [that] is when the show will start to die.’

  Just over 7.5 million saw A Good Man Goes to War, and the following instalment attracted 8.1 million to further discover the answers to Moffat’s complex and teasing questions.

  9. HALF-CENTURY HERO

  The hook to bring viewers back to Doctor Who in the autumn of 2011 was what showrunner Steven Moffat termed the ‘slutty’ title of Let’s Kill Hitler. The episode introduced Mels, a newly revealed ‘best friend’ of companions Amy and Rory: they’d all grown up together, as shown in an increasingly amusing series of flashbacks. Having accosted the Doctor in a cornfield, Mels announces ‘You’ve got a time machine, I’ve got a gun. What the hell, let’s kill Hitler’, explaining the title as the show launches into its regular title sequence.

  Although the TARDIS crew arrive in Berlin 1938, the encounter with Hitler is brief and comic (and allowed Rory to cement his new hero status by knocking him down with a single punch – similar to the treatment meted out to the dictator in US wartime comic books, such as on the cover of Captain America#1 in March 1941). The war and its real-life consequences are not a topic for this show. Instead, Hitler is relegated to a cupboard for the rest of the episode, as the narrative latches on to the far more interesting story of Mels regenerating into River Song (the weapon Kovarian has bred to kill the Doctor), and her role in saving her ultimate target. Here the show is playing with some of its core ideas in depicting another regeneration (the newly regenerated River goes through the same inspect-appearance/select-costume routine as every new Doctor), and builds on the idea from Journey’s End that ‘regeneration energy’ can be used to save the poisoned Doctor. The episode also features the Teselecta, a humanoid robot piloted by a miniaturised crew that dispenses justice to war criminals. As a get out to explain the death of the Doctor witnessed at the opening of The Impossible Astronaut, the Teselecta couldn’t be more obvious (although Moffat had already seeded ‘the flesh’ as an alternative explanation).

  Fatherhood and relationships were the theme for the next three episodes: Night Terrors, The Girl Who Waited, and The God Complex. In Night Terrors the object of the Doctor’s aid is a frightened little boy called George, eventually revealed to be an alien cuckoo in the nest (a Tenza), but one still in need of his father for protection. Along the way, the Doctor, Amy and Rory find themselves trapped within a doll’s house, haunted by clothes peg dolls. It’s a surreal fairytale image, an approach extended further when the trio are hunted by a minotaur (explained as a relative of the Nimon, last seen in 1979’s The Horns of Nimon) in the hotel setting of The God Complex. Similarly, The Girl Who Waited featured Moffat-style time warped storytelling (Amy and Rory enter a medical facility and find themselves on different time tracks, so she ages more rapidly), but still depends upon the relationship between the pair for its emotional climax. Their marriage – seen in The Big Bang – is central to their remaining time on the show, an unusual depiction of a long-term romantic and domestic partnership on Doctor Who (and the nearest concession Moffat makes to Davies’ previous ‘soap opera’ approach). The hotel in The God Complex features rooms containing each individual’s ‘greatest fear’: Amy’s sighting of a Weeping Angel in one room is a neat foreshadowing of her (and Rory’s) eventual fate.

  The sentimental conclusion of Night Terrors has Daniel Mays, as George’s father, express his love for the alien boy, thus saving the day. Similarly, the penultimate episode, Closing Time (the sequel to last season’s The Lodger), has Craig defeat the Cybermen through the power of his love for the son he’s previously failed to bond with. These family and relationship dramas (the group trapped in the hotel in The God Complex have to work together to survive) reflect Moffat’s status as a father with young children.

  The season reached its climax with The Wedding of River Song at the beginning of October 2011, an episode that had much to do in terms of wrapping up disparate running stories. It revolved around the enigma of River Song (Alex Kingston) and her out-of-sequence relationship with the Doctor. In this one all of history appears to be happening at once (resulting in, among many other things, Charles Dickens – Simon Callow from 2005’s The Unquiet Dead – appearing on Breakfast TV promoting his Christmas special, a neat series injoke). Ian McNiece was back as a Roman emperor-style Churchill, ruling over a historically mixed-up Britain in which the Doctor (‘the soothsayer’) is held prisoner. This reality is a consequence of River attempting to prevent the Doctor’s death in Utah, so causing time to stop and history to become confused. />
  Thanks to the crack in time manifested in her bedroom, Amy still remembers the Doctor, even if she’s fuzzy on who exactly Rory is. Along with captive Silents, whose stated aim is to destroy the Doctor, Area 52 holds Madame Kovarian, who masterminded the assassination plot using Amy and Rory’s child, Melody/River Song. The surprise is that although this all sounds incredibly complicated, picking up on story strands that stretch not only back to the start of the season but beyond to the previous year, the episode itself is a fast-moving and entertaining piece that connected with the viewing audience, as indicated by the final figure of 7.67 million.

  The Doctor cannot escape his death as it is a ‘fixed point’ in time and therefore unalterable – however, he is able to cheat a little. Using a Teselecta in the shape of the Doctor, he is able to meet his destiny, fool the universe into believing he is dead, and continue his travels in space and time unhindered. There’s one catch: there’s a prediction from the still-living severed head of Dorium Maldovar of the Doctor’s future. ‘On the fields of Trenzalor, at the fall of the Eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer a question will be asked – one that must never be answered. And Silence must fall when the question is asked.’ By the end of the episode it is clear that the question is that which has haunted the series from its very beginning: ‘The first question! The question that must never be answered! Hidden in plain sight! The question you’ve been running from all your life! Doctor who?’ The answer would be central to the finale of the following series, tantalisingly entitled The Name of the Doctor, and would be the cue for the regeneration of Matt Smith into his replacement in the 2013 Christmas special.

  Riffing on well-loved stories once more, Moffat wrote the 2011 Christmas special The Doctor, The Widow, and The Wardrobe (loosely modelled after elements of CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), finally free of the arcing plot elements that had dominated the previous two years. The feel-good episode attracted 10.77 million viewers on Christmas Day, and in its smaller scale, the characters of the wooden king and queen, and its environmental message, it continued the fairytale focus of recent years.

  With the next season’s start delayed until Autumn 2012, and the first batch consisting of only five episodes before the next Christmas special, Moffat took the opportunity to wrap up the Pond story arc. Across the five episodes that made up the first part of the show’s seventh full series, he wrote out Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill’s characters – two of the longest running companions in the series history – while pulling off a major surprise with the early introduction of the Doctor’s next companion Clara (played by Jenna-Louise Coleman) in season opener Asylum of the Daleks.

  Selling the show with the publicity hook of ‘Every Dalek ever’ Moffat re-introduced the classic gold Daleks, pushing his own Victory of the Daleks iteration – which had gone down badly with fans and the public – to one side, as just one among many variants. It was only the fourth time that Doctor Who had opened with a story featuring the Daleks (Asylum aired 33 years to the day after season 17’s Destiny of the Daleks, while previous Dalek season openers had been 1972’s Day of the Daleks and 1988’s Remembrance of the Daleks – each of those returns had followed a significant period of time since the Daleks had last appeared). The other approach Moffat took to the new series was to downplay the fairytale tropes he’d been employing and instead adopt a ‘movie poster’ pitch for each instalment (the deliberate removal of two-part stories made this possible), with each episode accompanied by a stylish image incorporating the main characters, setting or mood.

  Asylum of the Daleks opened with Amy and Rory (their marriage having broken down) kidnapped, along with the Doctor, to carry out a mission the Daleks will not undertake themselves. They need the Doctor to infiltrate their Asylum planet (depicted almost as a fairytale haunted house) where they have imprisoned their damaged and rogue brethren. There he must deactivate the force-shield so the Daleks can destroy it. The trio discover Oswin Oswald (Coleman), a human prisoner who has been converted into a Dalek, although she has retreated into a fantasy world to preserve her own sanity. With Oswin’s help, the Doctor hacks the Daleks’ database deleting their knowledge of him. That leaves the Daleks questioning his identity at the episode’s end, with the phrase from The Wedding of River Song recurring: ‘Doctor who?’

  Moffat successfully gained the collusion of the press and preview audiences in keeping Coleman’s early appearance a secret after her casting had been announced to the press in March. Her character would not return until the 2012 Christmas episode The Snowmen, but the showrunner was clearly intent on building a mystery around her. An audience of 8.33 million viewed Asylum of the Daleks, so would hopefully be hooked by the on-going mystery of Clara…

  With Asylum of the Daleks meeting Moffat’s stated aim of making the Daleks scary again, the following episode was a straightforward populist romp. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, written by Chris Chibnall, did exactly what it said on the tin (with advanced CGI dinosaurs making up for the largely inert plastic models of 1974’s Invasion of the Dinosaurs). The Doctor and his ‘gang’ – this time consisting of Egyptian queen Nefertiti and the British big game hunter John Riddell – pick up Amy, Rory and (inadvertently) Rory’s dad Brian (Mark Williams) on the way to investigate a rogue asteroid threatening to crash to Earth. The asteroid is a disguised spaceship – a Silurian ark – that has been infiltrated by black market trader Solomon (David Bradley), who saw the value in the ship’s cargo of dinosaurs but had no qualms about killing its crew of Silurians. While fending off the dinosaurs, the Doctor causes the Earth missiles aimed at the asteroid to destroy Solomon’s fleeing ship instead. This is the best example of Moffat’s ‘movie poster’ approach, and it prioritises visual spectacle above any outward connection to real-world events. Despite that high concept approach, the heart of the tale is a variation of the father-son relationship, albeit a mature one between Rory and Brian.

  Shooting in Spain had afforded Asylum of the Daleks its snowbound location for the Dalek Asylum planet, but the main reason the cast and crew had travelled there was to use the standing Western set at Almeria (seen in many classic spaghetti Westerns, including A Fistful of Dollars, 1964) for the third episode, A Town Called Mercy. The episode was the first time Doctor Who had attempted a Western-themed instalment since the 1966 story The Gunfighters – which featured the series’ lowest-ever audience appreciation scores – and this one proved to be just as unsuccessful in execution, despite being the highest rated of these five autumn episodes at 8.22 million viewers.

  Couched as a moral debate around the Doctor’s actions when he comes between Jex, an alien war criminal, masquerading as a town doctor in the wild west and the justice cyborg send to kill him, the Toby Whithouse-scripted episode manages to waste decent guest stars like Farscape’s Ben Browder in disposable roles of little consequence. The location rarely comes across as little more than a relatively empty movie set, and the moral debate about whether the Doctor should abandon Jex to his fate seems like a leftover from an old Tenth Doctor story, rather than something fitting the newest incarnation.

  Any mis-steps taken by A Town Called Mercy were more than made up for by The Power of Three, the second of two great scripts by Chibnall (a writer who had previously rarely impressed on this show or Torchwood). Celebrating the relationship between Amy, Rory and the Doctor it chronicles ‘the year of the slow invasion’ when the Earth is inundated with billions of mysterious little black cubes (treated by the population as collectible consumer items, the latest must-have but useless high-tech gadget). The Doctor lives with the Ponds in order to observe the cubes. It introduced Jemma Redgrave as the Liz Shaw-like Kate Stewart, the daughter of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and UNIT’s current commander – and the character would make a return appearance in the show’s 50th anniversary special, so honouring the late Nicholas Courtney.

  As the episode dealt so well with the soon-to-be-departing companions, it can perhaps be forgiven (
more than the previous instalment) for a somewhat garbled and easy solution to the problem of the cubes (they’re analysing humanity to discover their weakness so alien ‘pest controllers’ the Shakri can eliminate them) and for doing little with guest star villain Steven Berkoff. The central concept and the character comedy it allowed powered the episode along, with Chibnall’s script recalling some of the tropes of the Davies era including the modernisation of UNIT (and their Tower of London HQ), and the use of famous faces (physicist Brian Cox, and Lord Alan Sugar from The Apprentice) and multi-media populist coverage to comment on the arrival of the black cubes. The meat of the episode, however, was in comparing the Ponds’ humdrum domestic home life with their exotic adventures with the Doctor, and how they were now mature enough to settle for the former. The hyper-activity of the Doctor, now confined to the ‘slow path’ taken every day by the Ponds, nicely contrasts with the mature commitment of Brian, Rory’s dad, in observing the cubes across days of inactivity. His observant nature is key in him realising that his son and daughter-in-law have actually been gone for some time with the Doctor during mere moments at a Christmas party. The Ponds’ three years or so of on-screen time with the Doctor has actually been about a decade in their ‘real life’ character time.

  That was simply preparing the way for the mid-season finale (all five of these episodes aired during September 2012). The Angels Take Manhattan featured the end of the Ponds’ story, and the return of River Song and Moffat’s trademark monsters, the Weeping Angels. After an atmospheric run-around in 1930s New York (partially filmed on location in the city, a move reflecting the increasing popularity of the Matt Smith series in the US, and including the Statue of Liberty as a giant Weeping Angel – an idea that doesn’t entirely make sense, but makes for a great visual), the story saw Amy resolve to follow Rory (who has been the victim of a Weeping Angel) back to a time-locked version of 1930s New York (caused by the interaction of the Angels and the TARDIS), meaning that the Doctor can never re-visit them. It is perhaps the ultimate happy ever after dark fairytale ending that Moffat has been building to since The Eleventh Hour. In choosing this exit strategy for the characters, Moffat wisely avoids killing them off, but also handily prevents their easy return (a criticism made regarding Billie Piper and Catherine Tate’s reappearances after their ‘final’ stories). It was a point reinforced by Karen Gillan in interviews: ‘I want the impact of the Pond era to remain strong. I don’t want to spoil it by coming back a few episodes later to say “Hello!”‘ Ending with a brief flashback to young Amy from The Eleventh Hour (truly, ‘the girl who waited’), the climax brings her story full circle and provided one of the most moving and satisfying companion departures on this long-running series. An emotional ‘postscript’ scene (entitled P.S.) that had been written but never filmed was released on the BBC’s official Doctor Who website depicting (through illustrated storyboards and an Arthur Darvill voice-over) Brian, Rory’s father, receiving a letter explaining their disappearance. The Angels Take Manhattan cleared the slate for a new take on the Doctor and the (re)introduction of a new companion in the Christmas episode, The Snowmen.