An Hour of Who a Day: January 1, 2015: "Aliens of London"

January 1, 2015: "Aliens of London"

Now that they've got the time travel basics out of the way, it's time to come back to the present for the first two-parter (so like an old-school four-parter) of the 21st century. (It's also, coincidentally, Doctor Who's 700th episode.) I like the first few minutes, where we learn that the Doctor got the time wrong and Rose has been away for 12 months instead of 12 hours. It's also an interesting look into how the family of those who travel with the Doctor is affected by their absence. Really the only ones in a similar situation are Tegan (whose family dynamics are already strange) and Ace. There's some exploration about Ace's disappearance in Survival (Sgt. Paterson berating Ace for not phoning her mum and Ange's comments about how she thought Ace had died -- "or gone to Birmingham"), but nothing on the scale here -- partly because in the 20th century the Doctor's companions tended to be either orphans or independent adults without much in the way of family. But here they make a virtue of their "near-future" setting¹⁶⁶ by exploring the effect of Rose's absence on her mother and her boyfriend -- who aren't pleased, as it turns out. "Nine hundred years of time and space, and I've never been slapped by someone's mother," the Doctor says indignantly (which leads to the whole "what's up with the Doctor's age?" question for long-time fans, as he was already 953 in Time and the Rani).

This "domestic" setting also gives us the advantage of a base for the Doctor to view the game-changing events from, as he can't get close enough to the heart of the action, where the spaceship and the alien body pulled from the wreckage are. There's something rather wonderful about seeing the Doctor forced to view events on the television, and some touches (like the Blue Peter "make a spaceship cake" segment) are inspired.

The plot in this first half is also nicely complex. It starts out looking like a simple crashed spaceship, and what the effect of such an encounter would be on the population, but then Davies starts adding layers. The crash is too perfect and the "alien" is actually some sort of enhanced pig. But, as Mickey notes, "Funny way to invade, putting the world on red alert." And it does seem like something more sinister is going on at 10 Downing Street. This is when we get another inspired moment: it's hard to imagine any other show giving us farting aliens, and if any other show did do that it would be in a comedy context. But here we get aliens that are both farting (and, as we see at the end of the episode, with rather cute baby faces) and a serious danger to everyone around. In a show that's trying to grab as wide an audience as possible, this is a bold move, one that appeals to children and can be appreciated by adults. Well, sort of; the farting doesn't seem to have gone down well with a lot of people. But there's something canny about the mixing of styles here -- we get "funny" farting aliens (one of them even says, "I'm shaking my booty!" as she breaks wind) who nevertheless kill at least two people that we know of (the Prime Minister -- presumably Blair, judging by Harriet Jones's "Babes" comment -- and General Asquith, who Jones watches the aliens murder) and wear the skins of a number of others as a disguise. (The zipper on the forehead is also a nice touch.) It's the blend of the farcical with the macabre that gives this element such a wonderfully grotesque feel.

The moment where the Doctor is shown to be well-known by the authorities (he even gets his own alert code) and is taken in to help is a good move, and the cliffhanger at the end ("If aliens fake an alien crash and an alien pilot, what do they get?" he asks the room of assembled alien experts. "Us," he realizes. "They get us. It's not a diversion, it's a trap"), where the Slitheen electrocute all the alien experts while Rose and Harriet Jones are threatened by a Slitheen in the Cabinet room -- and Jackie attacked by a Slitheen formerly disguised as a police officer too! -- is a good one. Nice to see the show can still give us enjoyable cliffhangers (even if the "Next time..." clip right after ruins it somewhat by showing us some moments from the immediate aftermath of the cliffhanger).

¹⁶⁶ You can tell Russell T Davies and company want to evoke the feel of the old Pertwee UNIT stories (also set in the near-future) as well as suggest that these are events that could happen, just not right this moment. They want to avoid the controversy over assigning dates to the UNIT stories by explicitly setting the present-day stories one year in the future -- hence the "12 months" bit. But while they try to stick to the "+1" dates (most notably in "The Sound of Drums", which has a US President-elect -- making the intention late 2008/early 2009), the incidental anomalous details start piling up, which makes assigning dates to these stories often just as difficult as the original UNIT problem they were trying to avoid.