An Hour of Who a Day

January 6: "The Empty Child"

And so, sixteen years after the show first dipped its toe into the waters of World War II with The Curse of Fenric (a story, you might recall, about vampires attacking a British army base in the northeast part of England while a small Soviet force tried to steal a computer), Doctor Who dives headfirst into the subject in "The Empty Child", set in London during the Blitz.

The child in the gas mask is looking for his mummy. ("The Empty
Child") ©BBC

Except...it doesn't. This is set during the Blitz, certainly, and we get some details here and there to support that, but Steven Moffat (who you might remember from Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death -- he's gone and done Coupling since then and thus at this point is also quite a big name in British television) is more interested in the Blitz as a backdrop rather than an event. Instead, we get a suspense-filled episode as a child wearing a gas mask goes around following people in London -- and those who've encountered him are terrified of him. That's really the main thrust of this first part: the Doctor does some investigating, which leads to the discovery that anyone who's come into contact with the boy develops the same symptoms -- physical trauma and a gas mask (why the gas mask gets fused to the body and not any of the other clothes is left unanswered). It's a really creepy idea that they do a good job of selling -- director James Hawes makes good use of angles and lighting to enhance his shots. But perhaps the most impressive part of this main storyline is the scene around the dinner table, where Christopher Eccleston shows just how good he is with children. We've never really seen this Doctor interact with kids before, but there's something magical about this moment, as he jokes with them but also gets information from them -- it gives you a look into why Eccleston took the job in the first place.

And while that's going on, Rose clings to an unmoored barrage balloon while a German air raid is happening, only to be rescued by a charming man named Captain Jack Harkness, who is emphatically not from 1941 (seeing how he has a spaceship and all). John Barrowman makes a strong debut as Jack, oozing charm and rakishness, and even though he reveals himself to be a con man and may have inadvertently caused the gas mask plague, you still can't help but root for him. Rose certainly seems taken with him -- and she seems more pleased with his actions (doing things like finding the Doctor by searching for alien technology) than with the Doctor's (asking around about things falling from the sky). (And her comments about "Spock" are the first overt references to Star Trek in televised Doctor Who.) Jack in fact seems here to be written as almost the opposite of the Doctor -- both "freelancers" but behaving in different ways. We'll have to see if they carry this through to the second part.

It's a very good set-up episode -- the empty child is incredibly effective in its eeriness, and his plaintive cries of "are you my mummy?" are deservedly memorable, a juxtaposition of the helpless with the deadly. The moment where Dr. Constantine succumbs to the plague is really quite horrific, and the final scenes in the hospital, where Jack finally meets the Doctor and describes the con, are also good -- and the cliffhanger is really effective as well. And look, they've moved the "next time" trailer to after the credits (supposedly at Moffat's insistence), to avoid spoilers for anyone who wants to remain ignorant of the next episode's events. (Although this trailer isn't nearly as "spoiler"-y as the one after "Aliens of London" was.)

January 5: "Father's Day"

This is something of a curious episode. On the one hand it wants to be a hardcore tearjerker, designed to pull long and hard on the audience's heartstrings and throw in a bit of SF to make it plausible. On the other hand it bends over backwards to achieve this goal -- often flying in the face of the rules it's just established.

Rose saves her dad's life. ("Father's Day") ©BBC

There's certainly nothing wrong with using SF as a means to tell a story like this (in fact, it's a fine old tradition), and Paul Cornell makes a number of clever decisions in his script. It's not the most surprising thing to make Pete Tyler rather less than the upright citizen his wife told Rose he was, but pushing this as far as Cornell does (he makes dodgy deals, he apparently fools around) is a good move -- and throwing a personality as explosive as Jackie's into the mix gives us even more opportunities to see just how rocky this marriage is. (On the other hand, Jackie's clearly a bridesmaid and thus presumably under a bit of stress, so maybe that's just getting to her.) Caught in the middle is Rose, trying (and largely failing) to not let on that she's Pete's daughter from the future, while the Doctor is furious at her for saving Pete's life and starting this all in the first place. That might actually be the best part of the whole episode, the Doctor's angry and disappointed conversation with Rose. "When we met, I said travel with me in space. You said no. Then I said 'time machine'," he says, and while Rose denies that it was premeditated part of you wonders how true that is. Nevertheless Cornell packs in the interpersonal relationships -- the Doctor telling the ready-to-be-married couple, "I've never had a life like that," his efforts to try and save the day without killing Pete Tyler, the way Pete and Rose interact -- with Pete realizing from Rose's descriptions of him as a father that he was actually meant to die earlier that day... In terms of interpersonal dynamics "Father's Day" comes out a winner.

The SF side of things is more problematic, as "Father's Day" sets up some basic rules for the Reapers and then largely ignores them. "The older something is, the stronger it is," we're told, but the Reapers seem to take out an adult pushing the young Mickey on a swing and not Mickey himself. Stuart's dad is one of the first people we see grabbed, but Stuart, Sarah, and their friends are left untouched. Baby Rose makes it through the whole thing. The Reaper that gets into the church has no problem devouring the Doctor, even though he's likely older than the church itself. (And, compounding the issue, the Doctor announces right before he's eaten that "I'm the oldest thing in here", but it doesn't seem to do him much good. Then there's also the related problem of why we never see the Reapers ever again -- you'd think they would have shown up in something like "The Wedding of River Song" or even "The Fires of Pompeii" -- but we can't really blame Paul Cornell for other writers ignoring what happens here.) And then there's the car that keeps circling the block, appearing and vanishing. It's not at all clear why that's happening in the first place (other than to provide a solution to the problem) -- no explanation is given as to how the universe is intelligent enough (for lack of a better word) to keep trying to kill Pete with that car, or why that would even fix everything, given it's happening at a different time and place. It seems the universe is more concerned with who lives and who dies, rather than the actual events and how they play out.

If you're willing to play along with the episode and get immersed in all the character moments, and if you're willing to accept the story's basic message of "everyone is important, no matter how insignificant they may seem", then "Father's Day" is full of great scenes and lots of good drama. It certainly knows how to play up those moments, and the basic idea of the paradox really helps sell the episode. It's only when you start to think about the details and how this is all actually meant to work that things start to fall apart. How much you like "Father's Day", therefore, is directly proportional to how much you agree with the message and can ignore those nagging problems, and it's not hard to see how viewers might come down on either side of that fence. I personally rather like it, but it's definitely not without its problems.

January 4: "The Long Game"

Typical. You wait your whole life for someone with the same name as you to travel with the Doctor, and then when one does he's held up as the epitome of a bad companion.

Supposedly the main plot of this story (the bit with the media and such) started out as an idea Davies submitted to the Doctor Who production office back when Andrew Cartmel was the script editor. Davies dusted the idea off and combined it with a storyline designed to show that not everyone could do what Rose did (this element had the working title "The Companion Who Couldn't"). And you can sort of see how this might have worked in the late '80s/early '90s (if Doctor Who hadn't gone on hiatus), with the rise of Rupert Murdoch and his efforts to get as much of the media as he could get his hands on under his control -- something that happened in both the UK and the US. But this particular satire is one that's, if anything, improved with age, as the media becomes increasingly polarized thanks to the efforts of Murdoch and those like him. It's not a terribly subtle satire (so you can see how it would have fit right in on Cartmel's Who), but it still works.

The Editor refers the problem of Rose and the Doctor to his boss,
the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe.
("The Long Game") ©BBC

Casting Simon Pegg in the role of the main villain thus has a slight feel of inevitability about it -- after all, if you're going to get someone with a line on slightly smug characters, who better than Pegg? But he really does a nice job with the material he's given, making him highly entertaining to watch. His is probably the standout performance; the rest of the cast are good, but none of them really make you take notice. Well, except for Bruno Langley as Adam Mitchell, who does a good job of being somewhat duplicitous and selfish as the failed companion, and the regular cast, who do their usual fine job. I particularly love the moment where, after Adam wonders where all the aliens are, if this is the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire in the year 200,000, the Doctor distracts him and Rose by telling them to go have fun: "You can't just read the guide book, you've got to throw yourself in. Eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get charged double and end up kissing complete strangers. Or is that just me?" But then after they leave, his happy grin quickly changes to a more serious look -- something's wrong and he's going to find out what.

It's not a significant story and it's unlikely to be at the top of anyone's list -- it's a bit too understated and quiet for that -- but nonetheless I quite like "The Long Game". It's got its own charms, and it's nice to see a small story doing its own thing -- which makes it something of a shame that the final story of this series is going to retroactively make "The Long Game" more important than it otherwise would have been. I prefer to think of it as that charming little story between bigger events: the return of the Daleks last week, and Rose's dad next week...

January 3: "Dalek"

This episode ultimately had one goal: to reintroduce the Daleks to the British public, and to do so in a way that made them unquestionably scary again. That's a goal that Rob Shearman delivered on in spades. But what's perhaps more impressive about "Dalek" is everything else going on in this story.

Making the Daleks scary again wasn't automatically an easy task -- after all, they'd spent the last couple decades being the butt of jokes about their inability to climb stairs (because, again, no one watched Remembrance of the Daleks) and the uselessness of their plunger arms. They'd also spent a lot of time in the show's later years either playing second fiddle to Davros or getting blown up (usually spectacularly). But here we're presented with a single Dalek, and it's treated like the deadliest thing we've ever seen. It's also nice how Shearman systematically takes every comment about the Daleks and their appearance and abilities and turns them into a weapon for the Dalek. The plunger becomes a universal appendage that can absorb power, information, manipulate controls, and kill a man by crushing his skull. A shield protects it from gunfire, and its central "turret" section can rotate 360 degrees. Even the "bumps" serve a purpose, acting as a self-destruct mechanism. (Well, maybe; there's a school of thought that this Dalek doesn't actually kill itself but instead transports to the future to set up its own empire and become the Dalek Emperor; this would explain why all the reality shows we see in "Bad Wolf" look like early 21st-century shows -- they're what the Dalek knows about after downloading the Internet.)

The levitating Dalek sets off the sprinklers. ("Dalek") ©BBC

But what's equally impressive is how cunning this Dalek is. It's able to kill a large group of soldiers with three blasts -- one to set off the sprinklers, one to electrocute everyone standing in puddles on the floor, and one to electrocute the people on the scaffolding. It's able to trick Rose into touching it (in what looks like a massively out-of-character scene -- "But I am glad that before I die I have met a human who was not afraid" -- until you realize that the Dalek is simply being manipulative) so that it can be regenerated, and it's also quite good at taunting the Doctor. "You would make a good Dalek," it tells him after the Doctor's spittle-flecked rant at it ("Why don't you just die?!"). "Dalek" takes one representative of the Daleks and turns it into one of the most fearsome enemies ever seen on Doctor Who.

That alone probably would have been enough, but Shearman also takes the time to examine each of the four main characters: the Doctor, Rose, Van Statten, and the Dalek itself. He takes the Doctor, the champion of goodness and justice, and turns him into a bigoted, hate-filled man, who despises the Dalek and everything it stands for -- because it turns out the Daleks were the ones fighting the Time Lords in the last great Time War -- and is willing to sink to its level ("We're not the same! I'm not— No, wait. Maybe we are. You're right. Yeah, okay. You've got a point. 'Cause I know what to do. I know what should happen. I know what you deserve. Exterminate") to destroy the Dalek. The Dalek is the Doctor's opposite, dedicated to exterminating everything that's different from it -- and, as the episode makes clear a number of times, it's a razor-thin line between love and hate. Van Statten is greed, looking to acquire things without considering their true worth -- note how he becomes completely uninterested in the alien musical instrument once he knows what it is -- and he's willing to do anything to hold on to his things. He's more concerned about damaging the Dalek than the fact that it's killing all his people. "They're dispensable," he says. "That Dalek is unique."

Meanwhile, Rose is caught in the middle, with no preconceptions about Daleks, wondering why the man she's come to trust because of his goodness is filled with such hate toward something. "Rose, get out of the way now!" the Doctor tells Rose, ready to blast the Dalek to pieces. "No, I won't let you do this," Rose replies, standing between the Doctor and the Dalek. "That thing killed hundreds of people," the Doctor says. "It's not the one pointing the gun at me," Rose responds. It's through Rose that the Doctor is able to come through to the other side, to let go of his hate, letting the Dalek kill itself out of pity for it rather than shooting it out of anger. Van Statten, on the other hand, can't let go of his greed and pays the price at the end, deposed by his assistant. "Two hundred personnel dead, and all because of you, sir," she tells him.

It would have been enough just to make this Dalek a deadly killer again -- the redesign (which keeps all the right parts in the right proportions (other than a slight size increase so that it can look Rose in the eye) to maintain that iconic look while just beefing it up a bit) is a winner, and Joe Ahearne's direction makes this feel like an action movie. That alone would have made this a standout episode. But Rob Shearman takes it that step farther, to give us a reason to care about these characters, to see what happens when they interact with each other. This turns "Dalek" into one of the highlights of the entire series. We now know that the Daleks will be back again -- but they'll never be quite as dangerous, as terrifying, and as intense as a lone Dalek was here.

January 2: "World War Three"

The Doctor and the Slitheen confront each other. ("World War
Three") ©BBC

There's some action at the beginning and a big explosion at the end, but what's striking about "World War Three" when you stop to think about it is how much the middle is just talking. But it's not a case of our heroes talking to the villains -- they really only have two conversations, and neither of them involve the Doctor trying to convince the Slitheen to stop. Instead this is more concerned with exploring the effect the Doctor has on the people he travels with, and how he can convince people to be greater than themselves.

It's the first point that's most obvious in the episode. Jackie asks the Doctor point-blank if Rose will be safe on her travels with him, and the Doctor either can't or won't reply. But then when the solution to the Slitheen problem involves endangering Rose's life, the Doctor hesitates because of Jackie -- even though the alternative is the destruction of the planet. "This is my life, Jackie," he tells her. "It's not fun, it's not smart, it's just standing up and making a decision because nobody else will." Although when Harriet Jones orders him to do it, he grins happily -- perhaps because he knows that the decision to do the right thing is no longer his. Jackie really doesn't want Rose to keep traveling with the Doctor, though, and Rose's reassurances about it being a time machine (in a scene quite close (albeit probably unintentionally so) to the end of Scream of the Shalka) don't hold up.

But for me at least, the more interesting character arc is Mickey's. He's clingy and fearful when we last see him in "Rose", but since then he's started boning up on the Doctor and the sorts of things he gets involved with. He's become useful -- certainly enough so that the Doctor is willing to rely on him to help save the day. And at the end the Doctor has come to respect him enough -- despite calling him "Mickey the Idiot" -- to invite him aboard the TARDIS. Mickey declines the offer, but you can see how he's grown over that year.

This episode isn't just about character moments though. The Slitheen are still there to provide a comical yet deadly threat, and while their scheme is basically the same one as in The Dominators, with some capitalism thrown in (more people motivated by money, rather like "The End of the World"; interesting, that), it's a hell of a lot more exciting here than it was in 1968. Nice move, by the way, on making "Slitheen" a family name rather than the name of the entire race -- it lends a feeling of diversity to the inhabitants of Raxacoricofallapatorius (which feels like the sort of name Douglas Adams might have come up with to annoy the secretary tasked with typing up copies of the script). Shame the CG versions of the creatures don't quite feel like the practical costumes -- it's the movement differences between the two that are really apparent. But the Slitheen still look good, and their giddy, child-like behavior ("Oh, look at that! The phone is actually red!") as they wait to bring about the destruction of the planet is highly entertaining.

This two-parter is occasionally uneven in tone -- it wants to be a serious examination of how the Doctor's lifestyle affects the families and friends of those who travel with him, but it also wants to have wonderfully grotesque aliens that are nevertheless highly dangerous. Paradoxically this unevenness is something of a strength; it's hard to imagine any other show trying for so many different registers at once, but here they absolutely go for it, in a combination we don't really ever see again. No subsequent story is domestic AND international AND comedic AND grotesque AND dangerous in quite the same way as "Aliens of London" / "World War Three".¹⁶⁷ When this was all we had to go on, the results felt a bit off; now that we know there won't be anything else like it, this story's virtues become very apparent. It's not brilliant, but it is worth savoring.

¹⁶⁷ Unlike the Hartnell stories, which all now have generally agreed-upon titles, there's no such consensus for the BBC Wales multi-part stories -- and there doesn't generally seem to be a working title for the whole story of any of them. Occasionally you'll get portmanteaus of the individual episode titles (e.g., Bad Parting for "Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways") or references to things like "the 'Aliens in London' two-parter". Some people will refer to the whole story by the first episode's title, but while that works for things like The Impossible Planet it's a bit of a damp squib for other stories (as, say, "Evolution of the Daleks" is a significantly better name than "Daleks in Manhattan", but it's the name of the second part). Or you can just do what I'm doing and list them both out -- unwieldy but effective.

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.

December 31: "The Unquiet Dead"

Present, future... and now past, in the first episode of the revived series not written by showrunner Russell T Davies. Instead we get Mark Gatiss (a member of The League of Gentlemen and the author of four Doctor Who novels) to give us a look at Victorian Cardiff.

So in some ways, we're again looking at another calculated episode, designed to show off the programme's format. But unlike the previous two episodes, "The Unquiet Dead" doesn't make this a focal point for the audience -- instead it chooses to place an alien element in the past and play with that. We're not a million miles away from stories like The Time Warrior or The Visitation here. So we get talk of time rifts and how they're responsible for ghost sightings and people with "the sight" (just like Image of the Fendahl -- and don't think Gatiss didn't know that), standing in for the unknown and the new, and on the other side we get Charles Dickens, taking the side of skepticism and rationality until he's forced to believe otherwise.

And yes, this is the first instance in the BBC Wales series of the "celebrity historical", where we travel back in time to meet a famous person. This had happened a few times in the 20th century version (e.g., Marco Polo in, er, Marco Polo and George Stephenson in The Mark of the Rani), but now it's going to become a staple of the show. It's nice that this first time out is so successful -- Charles Dickens is portrayed with great care by Simon Callow (who had already devoted part of his career to doing just that), and we find ourselves rooting for him even when we know he's wrong. This also gives us some great moments, such as the Doctor enthusing to Dickens about his work, declaring himself to be Dickens' "number one fan" or Dickens' renewed joy in life at the end of the episode.

This episode also succeeds in giving us an interesting look at the Doctor and how alien he actually is. The way he shuts down Dickens' skepticism ("If you're going to deny it, don't waste my time. Just shut up") is surprisingly brusque, and his attempts to justify using bodies as temporary hosts for the Gelth are really nice too. "It's a different morality," he finally tells Rose exasperatedly. "Get used to it or go home." And nice to see an episode that isn't trying to convey just how "damaged" he is -- some guilty looks when the Gelth mention they're victims of the Time War and that's about it. Plus it takes the time to dwell on Rose's first step into the past, which is also a good move -- there's a sense of magic about this moment.

Of course, because they only have forty-five minutes to tell this story, some things get truncated. Far and away the worst casualty is that once the Gelth activate Gwyneth to use as a gateway, they turn evil and start talking about their plans to take over the planet, because there are only about seven minutes left. It's ludicrously perfunctory (as well as a bad move in terms of internal logic -- if you're going to trick people into helping you, why would you start gloating about that at the first sign of aid?) and, worryingly, there's a subtext present suggesting that "nice" immigrants will turn on you as soon as they can -- an awfully xenophobic position for a series that's long been about experiencing other cultures on their terms and not judging by appearances. Gatiss has said that this subtext wasn't intentional and he simply wasn't aware of it (it turns out not paying attention to the deeper implications of his work will be something of a running theme in Doctor Who...); however, intentional or not, it's still there, with all its unpleasant implications.

But Gatiss likely wasn't aware of that because ultimately "The Unquiet Dead" is designed to be a pastiche of Victorian novels and television, and in pastiche the form is more important than the actual text. In this regard "The Unquiet Dead" succeeds -- it does feel like a piece of Victoriana, and there's certainly enough here to keep both casual and dedicated viewers entertained. This story demonstrates that the production team are just as comfortable in the past as they are in the present and the future.