December 27: Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death Parts One, Two, Three, & Four / Scream of the Shalka Episodes One & Two

North American VHS
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So after the TV Movie came to nothing¹⁶¹, Doctor Who started to fade from the public consciousness -- not completely, as sales of the video versions had always been healthy and you might find some of the novels in a bookstore, but without a continuing programme the show started to become a memory.  And it was largely as a bit of nostalgia that the show returned for a comedy sketch in 1999, this time for a different charitable cause from Dimensions in Time.  That had been for Children in Need; this was for something called Comic Relief.

But unlike some of the spoofs that had gone before, with lame jokes about wobbly sets and Daleks that can't climb stairs (because no one saw Remembrance of the Daleks), Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death (to give it its original broadcast title) is an affectionate parody from a fellow fan and professional television sitcom writer named Steven Moffat.  And you can sense the love Moffat has for the show.

It's set after the TV Movie -- Rowan Atkinson is explicitly the ninth Doctor -- and in twenty minutes it both makes some pointed jokes and reminds you why the show was so popular in the first place.  Atkinson looks like he's playing out a dream role; his Doctor is played with serious intent and he comes across as a very credible choice for the Doctor -- which makes all his deadpan jokes even funnier.  Julia Sawalha is fun and charming as the Doctor's companion Emma, and Jonathan Pryce steals the screen by playing the Master incredibly OTT, trying to retain his dignity every time the Doctor punctures his self-inflated ego.

It's full of jokes (including a time travel one that in hindsight looks like Moffat flexing his muscles) and some fabulous performances -- including some wonderful cameos as the Doctor keeps regenerating.  So we get Richard E. Grant as the tenth Doctor, Jim Broadbent as the eleventh Doctor, Hugh Grant as the twelfth, and Joanna Lumley as the thirteenth (in a nod to the suggestions that the Doctor could be a woman), and each of them make their mark in only a relatively short time, establishing each as different but the same.  It's really wonderful to see.  And then we get Daleks too!  (Probably because Terry Nation's agent at the time he created the Daleks, Beryl Vertue, is Steven Moffat's mother-in-law.)

It's a cheeky but loving poke at a nostalgic favorite, pitched at just the right level, with jokes for both casual viewers and hardcore fans.  Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death is wonderful.

But obviously that wasn't meant to start a series up, and nothing seemed forthcoming for the next couple years.  There had apparently been a proposal or two in the meantime (a rising television writer named Russell T Davies pitched a low-budget version of the show around 2000 or so, and a producer named Dan Freedman had created an online audio story called Death Comes to Time in 2001-2002 and was clearly angling to start making real Who in the near future), but nothing had really come of any of it.  So, with the show continuing to fade, the BBC website (called BBCi at that time) decided to create the official ongoing adventures of the Doctor as a webcast.  Their debut story, scheduled to take advantage of the 40th anniversary in 2003, was called Scream of the Shalka.  But unlike the previous webcasts (Death Comes to Time, Real Time, and Shada with Paul McGann), which had been audio stories with still pictures, Scream of the Shalka was a fully animated story (from Cosgrove Hall, who you may remember from the animated episodes of The Invasion).

In some ways Scream of the Shalka seems to be avoiding mistakes made by the TV Movie -- we get a brand-new Doctor (this time played by Richard E. Grant -- yes, the same one as in The Curse of Fatal Death -- but sounding an awful lot like Paul McGann for some reason) but no time is wasted with regeneration sequences or anything like that; instead new elements (like the TARDIS mobile and the new look of the console room) are introduced as they come up, tantalizing the viewer rather than clubbing them over the head with it.

They're also really trying to make this Doctor seem as different as possible from any others.  He seems incredibly sarcastic and extremely unwilling to help -- he repeatedly rails at the sky about being forced to assist the humans and tries to only do the bare minimum.  It's something of an off-putting characterization, but deliberately so -- one wonders if they'll soften this at all in the subsequent episodes.

The actual storyline feels generic (alien invasion) but with interesting bits (the Shalka are a special type of "goo" that live in volcanic rock and can control people with sound -- the eponymous scream), but with two short episodes it's hard to get a good grip on it yet.  Still, there are tantalizing bits and enough unanswered questions (such as, most obviously, why are the Doctor and the Master now friends and traveling together?) to keep you intrigued.  I'm curious to see where they go from here.







¹⁶¹ Well, nothing in TV terms.  In the world of merchandise the TV Movie led to the establishment of the eighth Doctor as the current one, which meant that he was now the Doctor featured in Doctor Who Magazine's comic strip and was also the star of his own line of novels published by BBC Books (having taken the licence away from Virgin Publishing right around the time the McGann film came out).  But those weren't the sort of things the general public were really aware of.