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"

The spaceship crash is all over the news. ("Aliens of London") ©BBC

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.

The Gelth appear through Gwyneth to ask for help. ("The Unquiet
Dead") ©BBC

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.

December 30: "The End of the World"

So now that they've established the basic format of the show, it's time for the production team to flex their muscles a bit and take us to the far future -- further, perhaps, than we've ever gone before ("perhaps" because both The Ark and Frontios seem to be set after this event¹⁶⁵, and also we have no way of knowing when some of the adventures set on other planets (like, say, The Krotons or The Armageddon Factor) took place).  And so we get to see the end of planet Earth, up close and personal, five billion years in the future.  This looks like Doctor Who setting up its stall and saying, "Look, it's not just alien invasions on modern-day Earth; we can go anywhere, anywhen."

The Doctor tries to find out who sabotaged Platform One.
("The End of the World") ©BBC

The end of the world is certainly a good hook, and the cavalcade of alien visitors on Platform One, there to watch Earth burn, is a nicely varied bunch.  (Although there's the moment where Rose, experiencing culture shock, remarks, "They're just so alien. The aliens are so alien."  Which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that they all look humanoid, with two arms, two legs, one head, etc., except for the Face of Boe and, ironically, Cassandra.)  And we get the introduction of the newest way to speed up the plot, the slightly psychic paper that lets the Doctor get in most anywhere he wants -- useful when you're regularly making stories half as long as they used to be.

But even though we're invited to gawp and stare at each alien arrival, the best parts of "The End of the World" are the character moments.  We get Rose being overwhelmed at everything she's being shown (with, entertainingly, Soft Cell's cover of "Tainted Love" playing over her growing realization of where she is) and trying to explain herself to the Doctor.  We also get the really sweet, quiet chat with the maintenance worker, Raffalo, which suggests that there are still some constants in the universe, even this far into the future.  (You might be surprised to learn that this was an extra scene included when it was discovered the episode was running under length.)  And we get the Doctor's steadfast refusal to answer questions about who he is and where he's from, which leads to the happy-go-lucky facade this Doctor's been affecting slipping for a moment.  "This is who I am, right here, right now, all right?  All that counts is here and now, and this is me," the Doctor barks angrily at Rose.  And we see that while the Doctor pretends to be fun-loving and caring, he can be cold too; he's willing to let Cassandra die, apparently in retribution for Jabe's death.  "Everything has its time, and everything dies," he says.  (Note, too, how happy he seems to be when he realizes something is going wrong on Platform One.  "That's not supposed to happen," he says with an intrigued smile.)

The actual plot itself is nothing too special -- although, pleasingly, the motivation behind sabotaging Platform One isn't about making a statement or a political act, but is instead about money.  But they sell it really well, with lots of cracking glass and scorched marble as the raw unfiltered sunlight starts breaking through.  And it's a good move to make the culprit Cassandra, rather than one of the aliens.  And while the scene with the ventilation fans is incredibly dumb (and introduces some sort of special power for the Doctor that we never see again), the moment before, where Jabe tells the Doctor that she knows who he is and she's so sorry, and a tear falls from the Doctor's eye, is excellent.

Of course, that's setup for the big reveal at the end: that the Doctor is the last of the Time Lords ("There was a war and we lost"), thus becoming that old cliché the Lone Survivor.  (Clearly something happened between the TV Movie and "Rose" that we don't know about yet.)  But to their credit they make this work; Eccleston sells it really well, this moment of letting his guard down and letting Rose in, just a bit, and so it doesn't seem as hackneyed an idea as it could have been.  Plus it gives the audience something to wonder about.

In many ways this is as calculated a piece of television as "Rose" was, only here the goal is to get the audience to accept "future" stories with strange-looking people, rather than the idea of an alien who saves the world from other alien invasions in a special machine.  And like "Rose", this is an entertaining episode -- but "The End of the World" has the advantage of also feeling like it's telling its own story, rather than jumping into the middle of a different one.  It's also nice to see a villain motivated by greed rather than a simple desire for power -- something we don't see enough of on Doctor Who.  There are a couple less-successful moments here and there, but "The End of the World" shows that the revived BBC Wales version of the show is more than just a one-trick pony.








¹⁶⁵ A problem: the Doctor dates the events of The Ark as roughly ten million years in the future, which is a far cry from five billion.  So either there was an impending Earth death that was avoided at the last minute (er, except we see the Earth burning up on-screen in "The Plague" (The Ark 2)...), or the Doctor is just really far off on his guess.  (Which wouldn't be the first time -- see, for instance, his assertion in The Dalek Invasion of Earth that the events of The Daleks occurred "a million years ahead of us in the future", and then compare with comments in Planet of the Daleks (presumably contemporaneous with Frontier in Space -- so 2540 -- in order for the plot to have any hope of making sense) that the Doctor's journey into the Dalek city occurred "generations ago".)

December 29: "Rose"

Just to refresh your memory: in 2005 Doctor Who had been off the air for sixteen years, and while it was sort of fondly remembered by some for others it had been the brunt of a lot of criticism (it was cheap, it was silly, it wasn't very good, it was only for "sad" hardcore fans and people who already watched "cult" (aka SF/fantasy) shows and didn't have anything to offer anyone else).  In other words, incoming showrunner Russell T Davies (at that point one of Britain's hottest writing talents) had his work cut out for him, to remind people why Doctor Who had at one point been the UK's most successful family show ever, and to prove that family viewing in general wasn't dead, contrary to the prevailing wisdom.

So that's probably why "Rose" sometimes looks like an incredibly calculated piece of television.  It's designed to slowly ease you into the world of Doctor Who, rather than just drop you in it.  Comparing it to the TV Movie (which is ostensibly doing the same thing) just highlights the changes: whereas the TV Movie started by dropping you into strange situations with alien names -- in effect highlighting its approach as a piece of genre television -- "Rose" instead begins with an ordinary girl working in a department store, living an ordinary life, and slowly introduces the unusual elements one at a time.  She meets Autons (never named as such onscreen, but called that in the credits), and then a strange man called the Doctor who blows them up, and slowly but surely she's sucked into this new world that she never knew existed.  This story is explicitly from Rose Tyler's point of view (the actual invasion plot -- essentially a remake of Spearhead from Space -- feels like it starts at the part three point of a 20th-century story and is generally relegated to the background, other than as motivation for the Doctor), and it's better for it.

Rose is mad at the Doctor for forgetting about Mickey. ("Rose") ©BBC

So yes, it's carefully calculated to slowly bring the general audience into a new and different world (rather than throw them into the deep end and expect they'll swim), but the thing about "Rose" is that it's also a very entertaining piece of television.  There's an energy and infectious quality to these forty-five minutes that you can't help but get wrapped up in.  Billie Piper surprises by being genuine and believable -- she's not mugging at the camera but is treating this all as being in deadly earnest.  And Christopher Eccleston is something of a revelation -- there are multiple layers in his performance, a veneer of (occasionally forced) cheerfulness masking a darker, more serious aspect that occasionally breaks through.  This makes him incredibly watchable as he veers from happy to intense in scenes, without it ever seeming like a break in character.  It's also worth noting how different he seems from his predecessors -- the hidden depths, but also the look in general (short haircut, simple leather jacket with a shirt and dark pants), which suggests that this incarnation of the Doctor is trying to blend in, rather than being deliberately eccentric.  It's also designed to not seem off-putting to a casual audience.

But this all also works in terms of Doctor Who.  As has been pointed out many times before, the basic focus of this episode (essentially, something strange mixes into a domestic setting in contemporary London) isn't a million miles away from the last story of the original run, Survival.  You can thus envision "Rose" as on the same trajectory as the series it's continuing on from without too much difficulty -- as it should be; this shouldn't seem like a sharp break with the past.  And in fact, there was a slight sense of dread for many people (myself included) before "Rose" aired -- it could have been terrible, either a self-parody or something that didn't remotely seem like the Doctor Who that had gone before.  But fortunately Russell T Davies, executive producer Julie Gardner, and producer Phil Collinson have the right sensibilities.  Davies and Collinson are old-school fans (Davies even wrote one of Virgin's New Adventures, Damaged Goods) and know what the spirit of the show should be like, while Gardner, a recent convert, knows what will still appeal to a broader audience (not to say that Davies and Collinson don't; this is putting it very broadly).  The result is impressive, and even if it's a bit too transitional to stand up on its own (once again, this is about introducing the show and its core ideas to Rose (and therefore the audience), not about telling a self-contained story in its own right), it nevertheless hits all the right notes.  There are a lot of introductions, even for the fans (a newly-regenerated Doctor (well, that's what that scene with the mirror seems to suggest), a new companion, a new completely redesigned console room, forty-five-minute episodes that are largely self-contained, a new logo¹⁶³, a new video format (16:9 and frame-removed video¹⁶⁴)...), but far and away this is an episode that is designed to make those introductions in an explosively entertaining way.  Doctor Who is back.







¹⁶³ If you look at all of Doctor Who's logos over the years, a curious pattern emerges: for the first 26 years of its life (plus the 16-year interregnum), the logos, while often changing dramatically in design, all follow a basic pattern: the word "Doctor" stacked on top of the word "Who".  But from 2005 on, the words are lined up side-to-side.
¹⁶⁴ The last "proper" serial, Survival, was shot on 625-line PAL video running at 50 fields (essentially half-frames) a second.  (The TV Movie was shot on 35mm film running at 24 frames per second -- not that you'd really know it from looking at the finished product, which looks like everything else on Fox from that time period.)  Since Survival, the visual grammar of television had changed -- film was deemed to look better than video, so video was given a "filmized" look (essentially removing frames to make it run at the same rate as film), which allowed it to look like film but still retain the advantages of video.  This is the format that Doctor Who was shot in, and the "film look" continues today even while the resolution has increased from SD to HD.  (Another reason why the modern HDTVs that interpolate extra frames to give a "smoother" look are a bad idea.)

December 28: Scream of the Shalka Episodes Three, Four, Five, & Six

It's interesting to see the parallels between what writer Paul Cornell and the rest of the production team do in Scream of the Shalka and what Russell T Davies is about to do in the revived BBC Wales version of the series.  Both teams want to shake the Doctor up, give him some dark past to brood about; the Shalka team go about it with references to some unseen story where the Doctor lost someone, BBC Wales gives him the Last Great Time War and everything that entails.

The Master and the Doctor in the TARDIS. (Scream of the
Shalka Episode Four) ©BBC

But what's curious is that both want to start the Doctor from a damaged place and then have him slowly warm up over time.  It's not quite clear why they're both starting from this point (and certainly they weren't influenced by each other) -- they must have both wanted an element of mystery to the character and come up with similar ways of achieving it.  Obviously they're not identical (there's no robot Master in the TARDIS in "Rose", for instance), but the similarities are intriguing.

One of the differences is that Richard E. Grant's Doctor comes to his epiphany quite quickly.  He's not completely there by the end of the story, but he's certainly made some progress -- the thought of losing someone else as he falls into a black hole (it makes sense in context) seems to lead him to reconsider some of his recent choices, and he's no longer completely unwilling to help humanity out.  This does help in thawing his character out over the course of the story, which is good -- even though he's still sarcastic and acerbic at times, he's recognizably the same character.  But Richard E. Grant still manages to make his mark on the character -- it's hard to imagine any of the previous Doctors resolving the story by singing showtunes and hitting the right pitch to incapacitate the villains, but Grant makes it seem like a natural part of his Doctor.

He's aided by a good cast -- Sophie Okonedo is really charming as Alison, giving us a brave and determined performance, and Sir Derek Jacobi is obviously wonderful as the robot Master, who seems to be friendly but with a suggestion of more nefarious motives.  And there's a quick cameo in episode five from David Tennant, who literally begged his way onto the production when he learned that Doctor Who was recording in the studio next to where he was.

So it's a decent script -- a tad traditional in its approach to Doctor Who, but as it's giving us a different Doctor you can see why they went this direction -- and a good cast.  In a way it's unfortunate that real-world events overshadowed Scream of the Shalka; the webcast was announced in July 2003 for November, but by the time November rolled around, the news had already been circulating for two months that live-action Doctor Who would be returning to BBC1 in 2005, and thus Shalka was doomed before it began, relegated to non-canonical status.  This is sad; as I said, there are some interesting ideas here and it would have been nice to have seen more.  But Richard E. Grant's Doctor would become little more than a footnote in the history of the show, a curious might-have-been rather than the definite article.¹⁶²  Far and away the most influential thing about Scream of the Shalka is that their efforts in untangling the rights issues in the wake of the TV Movie (where ownership was shared between the BBC, Universal, and Fox -- this is one of the things that delayed a region 1 release for so long) so that they could pave the way for their webcast was key in the approval of the BBC Wales version.

So we've spent the last three days seeing some of the ways in which Doctor Who lived on (or attempted to) after its indefinite hiatus in 1989.  But (with the qualified exception of the TV Movie, which really did try to spark something even if it followed the patterns of the others), these have all either been efforts to recapture a feeling of nostalgia or targeted at a smaller, more dedicated fan audience.  Fortunately, this approach would be discarded in 2005 in favor of an all-inclusive effort to gain as wide an audience as possible...







¹⁶² One of the advantages of Russell T Davies' "no previous knowledge required" approach to Doctor Who was that owing to the lack of any definitive evidence to the contrary (even something as simple as Eccleston mentioning he's the ninth Doctor, which doesn't happen), you could wind fans up online by arguing that Richard E. Grant belonged between Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston and that Scream of the Shalka was in fact canon.  It was an entertaining argument that you could make for a surprisingly long time (it wasn't really until "The Name of the Doctor" et seq., that this door was definitively closed).

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
release (from the
Amazon product page)

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.