Timeless Adventures (39 page)

That the solution to what appears to be a supernatural problem (a ghost) turns out to be science fiction (a time traveller) should be no surprise to viewers of
Doctor Who
, or fans of Nigel Kneale whose
Quatermass and the Pit
(BBC, 1958-59) took a similar stance. The rise of ‘parascience’ in so-called ‘reality’ TV shows such as
Most
Haunted
(2002–13) would have appalled Kneale, but it is through the context of such shows (or hit movie series like
Paranormal Activity
) that most viewers experienced
Hide
, even if the 1974 setting puts the events in a pre-digital world of magnetic tape and photochemical film.

The TARDIS itself became the focal point of
Journey to the Centre
of the TARDIS
, an area ripe for exploration during the show’s 50th anniversary year. The activities of the Van Baalen Brothers salvage crew, determined to extract anything of value from the Doctor’s disabled space-time machine, recalled news reports of metal thefts during the economic downturn. Beyond that, the episode is a love letter to the Doctor’s vehicle, albeit in a very different style to Neil Gaiman’s
The
Doctor’s Wife
. There’s more than a hint of
Alice in Wonderland in
Clara’s recursive wanderings of the TARDIS corridors. From its first appearance in
An Unearthly Child
the TARDIS had been a point of fascination for fans and general viewers alike. While occasional dialogue would explain attributes of the vehicle or would anthropomorphise it, very few episodes dealt with the ship as a focal point.
The Edge of
Destruction
was the first serial to explore the TARDIS and its nature in any depth.
The Time Monster
and
Logopolis
both featured the TARDIS as central to their stories, and companions’ living quarters were a recurring element of the ‘soapy’ 1980s episodes, while
The
Invasion of Time
depicted much of the interior as an unimaginative 1970s leisure centre (where the story was actually shot, due to industrial action at the BBC). For
Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS
, the production were able to depict more diverse rooms than ever before, not only the swimming pool and library (both referenced in
The Eleventh Hour
), but also a dramatic re-imagining of the Eye of Harmony (featured in the 1996 Paul McGann TV movie) and the heart of the vehicle itself.

While some of these vistas were fan-pleasing and spectacular (such as the tree-like ‘architectural reconfiguration system’ and the Apple-iMac style blown-apart engine room), in the end the episode fails to fulfill its promise, despite raising questions around fate and identity. Audio quotes from past characters are lost in the noisy sound mix, while the characters of the scavengers were underdeveloped (with even the reveal that the ‘android’ of the trio is no such thing falling flat). The ‘monster of the week’ time zombies were also explained in a rush, and – perhaps worst of all – the story adopted a ‘magic reset button’ (literally labelled as a ‘big friendly button’) to eliminate almost all that happened, although elements would later be recalled by Clara…

The next episode –
The Crimson Horror
, the new series’ 100th instalment – was the second this season from Mark Gatiss and a riff on some classic
Doctor Who
settings and characters. For the first time, someone other than showrunner Moffat got to write for the Victorian ’Paternoster gang’ of Silurian Madame Vastra, housekeeper Jenny and Sontaran ‘butler’ Strax, and the first 15 minutes almost function as a pilot for a spin-off series as it takes that long for Matt Smith’s Doctor to appear. Investigating a strange idyllic community established in Yorkshire in 1893 by Winifred Gillyflower (Diana Rigg), the Doctor has managed to get himself immobilised as a victim of ‘the crimson horror’. Exploiting the ‘deplorable excesses of the Penny Dreadful’, Gatiss conjures up a mock Victorian world familiar from many
Doctor Who
episodes.

In an episode verging on Steampunk, Gatiss spoofs the Victorian ‘social improver’ in Mrs Gillyflower, who has developed Sweetland (a new Jerusalem – they even sing the hymn) in the mould of real world Victorian model villages like New Lanark in Scotland, where workers lived next to the factory (although the one here consists of nothing more than gramophone records playing sound effects) in a crude form of theoretical utopian socialism. Her evangelising on the coming apocalypse has provided a steady stream of recruits, but only the best survive the ‘preservation’ process (and are stored under giant bell jars awaiting reawakening). The rejects – those seen by the area’s mortician as suffering from the inexplicable ‘crimson ’orror’ – are cast into the canal, stiff and red skinned. It’s in this form – but still alive – that the Paternoster gang discover the imprisoned Doctor.

There’s more than a touch of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
in Mrs Gillyflower’s daughter Ada (Rigg’s own daughter, Rachael Stirling) and her naming of the captive Doctor as ‘my monster’ (and in Matt Smith’s distinctly Karloffian performance). Ada’s blindness (a result of her mother’s experimentation) relates to other notions of sight and seeing in the episode, from the optogram (the last vision preserved in a dead man’s retina), and the cod-silent movie flashback explaining the Doctor’s prior involvement with Sweetville, through to her mother’s vision of a new world in a ‘shining city on the hill’. This phantasmagoria of an episode turns on Mrs Gillyflower’s plan to poison the Earth by launching a rocket loaded with venom derived from her symbiote, Mr Sweet (a prehistoric parasite familiar to Madame Vastra), and repopulating the new world with her preserved morally upright recruits.

The Crimson Horror
is an unashamed grand guignol genre mash-up, drawing as much on Victorian archetypes (filtered through film and television recreations) as on
Doctor Who’s
own preferred form of storytelling in the past. Mrs Gillyflower’s mad scheme is just the kind of thing a
Doctor Who
villain of the 1960s or 1970s might have dreamt up, with her happily confessing that the weapon the red leech’s venom represents has indeed fallen into the wrong hands: hers. In its joyful excess, in storytelling and visual realisation,
The Crimson
Horror
is a throwback in more ways than one to classic
Doctor Who
(in a very different way to Gatiss’s
Cold War
), and a fitting episode to feature in the show’s 50th year on air.

The same could not be said for the return of the Cybermen in Neil Gaiman’s
Nightmare in Silver
, a disappointing attempt to trade on key icons from the past. While the Cybermen are suitably ‘upgraded’, it is only through the acquisition of old tricks, such as bullet time movements (from 1999’s
The Matrix
) and on-the-fly upgrading (from
Star
Trek: The Next Generation’s
Borg, first seen in 1989’s ‘Q Who?’, a Cyberman rip-off themselves). The story is set in a rather cheaply realised futuristic theme park called Hedgewick’s World (recalling the Dickensian ‘Fantasy Factory’ from
The Trial of a Time Lord
, episodes 13–14) which quickly falls – despite the presence of a platoon of military rejects – to an army of reborn Cybermen, while the Doctor engages in a battle of wits (expressed through a chess game, shades of
The
Curse of Fenric
) within his own mind against the Cyber Planner. The only really new element here is the reconfiguration of the old Cybermats (recently seen in
Closing Time
) into suitably miniaturised Cybermites. There are nostalgic shout outs to the Cybermen of the past in the Cyber Planner (last heard of in the Troughton story
The Wheel in
Space
) and in cleaning fluid (
The Moonbase
) and gold (
Revenge of
the Cybermen, Earthshock
, and
Silver Nemesis
) being fatal to Cybermen’s health. The sets in the Cyber-army’s lair recall those of
The Tomb of the Cybermen
much more directly than anything in the supposedly direct sequel
Attack of the Cybermen
. However, Gaiman’s reconfiguration of the Cybermen does much to remove their original role as a form of upgraded humanity, as explored in
Rise of the Cybermen
and
The Age of Steel
and in their original 1960s stories.

Instead, the story explores the relative morality of war (drawing on recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the ‘war on terror’ rhetoric) and the danger of becoming too like your aggressor in order to defeat them (an issue raised almost simultaneously in cinemas in
Star Trek Into Darkness
). Emperor-in-disguise Porridge (Warwick Davis) relates the history of the Cyber-wars and how trillions had to die to save billions. ‘I feel like a monster sometimes,’ he confesses, as he was the ‘poor blighter who had to press the button to blow it all up’. This theme takes precedence over any ideas of the Cybermen as updated automata or the occasionally uncanny nature of sideshows, circuses, freak shows and fairs represented in Hedgewick’s World.

The 50th anniversary run of stories culminated in
The Name of
the Doctor
, a season finale truly wrapped up in the show’s own history (a dangerous area for the series after its failures of the 1980s). It opened with the instigating incident for the whole
Doctor Who
mythology in which William Hartnell’s First Doctor steals/borrows/liberates a TARDIS on Gallifrey. Cleverly reconstructed using CGI and colourised clips from the original series, the pre-titles sequence teases the mystery of Clara (whose ‘I don’t know where I am’ phrase is repeated from
The Bells of Saint John
, along with the leaf motif from
The Rings of Akhaten
) as she is seen to interact with several past Doctors.

The Doctor’s tomb (a giant version of the Police Box TARDIS) has been discovered on Trenzalore, and his friends have been kidnapped, so the Doctor must go where he should never go: the end of his own timeline. This somewhat sombre and funereal, rather than celebratory, episode was an unusual way to lead in to the show’s 50th anniversary special that November. The episode ties in to the Trenzalore warning delivered by Dorium in
The Wedding of River Song
(and she make a muted spectral appearance), and hints at the Doctor’s greatest secret. After the mystery of Clara is resolved – she’s been splintered in time, repeatedly ‘born to save the Doctor’ and to undo the damage done by the Great Intelligence when it (in the form of Richard E. Grant) has invaded the Doctor’s past, turning all his victories into defeats – the Doctor’s secret is revealed, kicking off a new wave of fan and viewer speculation. His ‘secret’ is a previously unknown incarnation, played by John Hurt, the guest star in the anniversary special rather portentously unveiled at the cliffhanger climax. Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor refers to him as ‘the one who broke the promise’ inherent in the Doctor’s choice of title. Hurt’s one line is the mysterious: ‘What I did I did without choice… in the name of peace and sanity’. Frustrated viewers would have to wait until November to have those new mysteries resolved.

However, a mere two weeks after transmission of the season finale came the sudden announcement that Matt Smith was leaving the series. With recent speculation about his increasing US profile and career ambitions – and given Dorium’s comments two years earlier that ‘…the fall of the Eleventh…’ would take place on Trenzalore – fans were perhaps not too surprised. Once again, media speculation became rife as to who would be cast as the Twelfth Doctor.

With
The Name of the Doctor
Moffat’s dark fairytale had reached its climax. The Christmas episode
The Snowmen
and the eight episodes aired in the show’s 50th anniversary year of 2013 each contained key elements of Moffat’s approach to
Doctor Who
as an imaginative fantasy for family viewing. While overnight ratings had fallen a little through the run, time-shifting (which continued to increase as the show was transmitted earlier and earlier on Saturday evenings) easily brought the overall average ratings up to the approximate 7.5 million viewers each year had reached since 2005.

The appearance of John Hurt at the conclusion of
The Name of
the Doctor
may not have been a complete surprise. His casting in the 50th anniversary special had been announced weeks before the episode aired, although his precise role was still a secret. The only clue had come from Hurt himself, who in a newspaper interview described his part as ‘an aspect of the Doctor’.

Moffat’s run on the series had done much to foreground the role of the Doctor as a character in a fairytale story or legend. Davies began it with Eccleston and Tennant, making their Doctors legendary figures which monsters should fear. Moffat turned the character into an imaginary friend for young Amy, and he’s brought back into existence through her remembrance of him as a storybook figure. With Clara, she is tasked with saving the Doctor by actually jumping into his ‘story’, his timeline, in
The Name of the Doctor
in order to save him and – in turn – be saved by him. Moffat’s meta-textual take on
Doctor Who
had reached its heights by the 50th anniversary, suggesting that the Twelfth Doctor might benefit from a ‘back to basics’ storytelling approach to the series.

To the disappointment of some fans, the 2013 anniversary special did not take the approach of previous anniversary shows
The Three
Doctors
and
The Five Doctors
in reuniting all the still-surviving actors to have played the series’ title role. Moffat’s solution had been the inclusion of past doctors in
The Name of the Doctor
.

With Christopher Eccleston having declined to take part, Moffat instead wrote an episode that revolved around Matt Smith’s current Eleventh Doctor and included the reappearance of David Tennant’s still popular Tenth Doctor, alongside Billie Piper as Rose Tyler. Both had only been absent from the show for three years, but the producers knew their return would attract additional viewers when the special aired on 23 November 2013, exactly 50 years to the day since the first episode of
An Unearthly Child
.