Doctor Who Series 8: Doctor In the Thick of It

The story so far: the first half of Grand Moff Steven’s reign has seen the Eleventh Doctor era begin full of promise but ultimately go to pieces, weighed down by a mixture of quirks and gimmicks that wore increasingly thin (Moffat writing somewhat for the TVTropes generation) and more problematic themes and recurring issues which became increasingly obvious as Matt Smith’s tenure dragged on.

The arrival of a new Doctor is usually the opportunity for the show to change its approach, so when Matt Smith declined to do an entire season based around the Doctor being stuck on Trenzalore, the Grand Moff was obliged to wrap the Eleventh Doctor’s plotlines up quickly, reconfigure the show, and bring in a new face in the form of Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor. Would this be a renewal or a further descent into the depths? Brave heart, readers, we’ll have to push on and see…

Capaldi’s first episode is the Moffat-penned Deep Breath. Like a goof, like a complete and total dunderhead, the Doctor’s regenerated with the TARDIS in mid-flight again, and just like the regeneration before this problems arise. We pick things up in the Victorian period, and a Tyrannosaurus has shown up having a splash-about in the Thames. It turns out it swallowed the TARDIS whilst it was mid-flight, and ended up being carried here through the Time Vortex. The Paternoster Gang take swift action to secure the TARDIS, and it’s a good thing – the Doctor’s got that post-regeneration goofiness going on and he’s having trouble with memory, object permanence, all of that stuff you really need a functioning brain to get to grips with.

As the Doctor recuperates, he feels really bad about leaving that poor dinosaur stranded far from her time of origin, and slips out to promise her he’ll take her home – only to witness her being consumed in flames. Meanwhile, a strange clockwork droid (Peter Ferdinando) is stalking London and harvesting body parts. It seems like there’s a task for the Doctor here after all – but can he handle it when he’s figuring out who he is and how the world works all over again from first principles?

Mini-Review: The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

It’s the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who, and Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy aren’t feeling celebratory. Grand Moff Steven’s shooting this Day of the Doctor thing and is using their likenesses from archive footage, but is he giving them a guest spot like Tom Baker? No. Is he giving them a fun little minisode like Paul McGann? No! This is rubbish, and something must be done – so the three spurned classic Doctors team up. If Moffat won’t even invite them to participate, they may as well simply gatecrash the filming and sneak their way into the production…

Whilst The Day of the Doctor marked the show’s 50th Anniversary with a continuity-heavy episode which leaned into the show’s mythology whilst also revising it, and An Adventure In Time and Space provided a hagiography of the original production team (and proved fresh for revision in its own way, with the final scene where William Hartnell has a vision of Matt Smith at the TARDIS controls being remixed to show Ncuti Gatwa in the most recent retransmission), The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot might be my favourite part of the anniversary celebrations. It’s a zero-budget, cheap little thing that’s full of heart, and that’s what those three Doctors’ eras were at their best, and whilst it could have gone very, very self-indulgent with the cameos, it actually uses them more artfully.

Peter Davison not only co-stars in this – he also wrote and directed it, and it was produced by Georgia Tennant, his daughter and David Tennant’s wife. This isn’t a Davison family love-in by any means, however – as well as bringing Colin and Sylvester along for the ride, Davison crams in cameos from a dizzying number of actors and behind-the-scenes contributors to the show from over the years, both from the classic era and the revival period, giving a heap of folk who weren’t participating in either of the bigger, fancier anniversary spectaculars a chance to be involved in some small way.

Most of the humour is at Davison, Baker, and McCoy’s expense; Davison is initially set up to be desperate to be involved because he told his younger children he would be, but it quickly becomes apparent that they don’t really care and so he’s only trying to get into The Day of the Doctor to serve his own ego. The dream sequence he has where Matt Smith, Jenna-Louise Coleman, and Steven Moffat all heap praise on him as he turns up to take part in the reboot, only for Janet Fielding to show up to tell him he’s fooling himself, is superb.

McCoy overhyping his part in The Hobbit (and Davison dismissing it as a “flash-in-the-pan $5 million dollar picture” and Colin Baker being openly catty about the whole thing) is similarly good – and he even managed to get Peter Jackson and Ian McKellen to film a bit for the special on the set of The Hobbit, which is probably the best thing shot on that set come to think of it. Colin Baker is a particularly good sport here, depicting himself obsessively trapping his family in the living room to endlessly rewatch the Vengeance On Varos DVD extras, but all three Doctors throw themselves into the joke where each of them is fixated on their past in the show.

Having thoroughly made fun of himself and his co-conspirators, Davison has room to take a few pops at others. The joke where they call Tom Baker only to call the Fourth Doctor midway through Shada (at the same instant he and Romana are snatched away during The Five Doctors) is particularly good, because on the one hand, you can read it as praising Tom for being more authentically Doctor-y than any of them, but on the other hand you can read it as razzing him for not taking part in The Five Doctors.

The best jokes, however, are those directed at the showrunners. Moffat at his desk playing with his action figures is about as devastating a slam on his stewardship on the show as you can hope for, and he’s going along with it happily here with all the lack of self-awareness of someone who doesn’t realise how accurate the joke it is. Moffat having a nightmare in which a host of companion’s faces swirl around, like the Fifth Doctor’s dying vision in The Caves of Androzani, is also chuckle-worthy, particularly with the way Matthew Waterhouse/Adric prompts him to jerk awake like it’s a nightmare, and having the final scene showing the Grand Moff in the process of editing The Day of the Doctor and cutting to credits when he says “cut it” is a neat Vengeance On Varos nod.

Moffat isn’t the only showrunner to get it in the neck; the gag where RTD phones up towards the end and it turns out he’s just as desperate to appear in the spoof as the Doctors are to be in The Day of the Doctor is lovely too, as is the shot of action figures on his desk. (It’s even funnier now he’s showrunner again – talk about playing the long game!) Still, at a point when the show under Moffat had lost the sense of effortless fun it had formerly enjoyed, something like The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot was just what was needed to bring things down to Earth a bit.

According to McCoy, the BBC said no to a sequel for the 60th Anniversary, but really that’s fair enough – between cameos in The Power of the Doctor and episodes of Tales of the TARDIS focused on them, the Fifth to Seventh Doctors have been getting a fair bit of love recently, so the schtick wouldn’t work. Besides, a better comedy concept presents itself – Mark Gatiss has been talking up the idea of doing a sequel to An Adventure In Time and Space chronicling the 1985 hiatus and The Trial of a Time Lord, and that has scope to be an even better farce. Unless and until that happens, this is the Doctor Who equivalent of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace or Cruise of the Gods, in terms of being a comedy about the people behind a beloved show – except this time the show is real.

Doctor Who Series 7: The Doctor Should Be Louder, Angrier, and Have Access To a Time Machine

The story so far: after a patchy first season, there were some signs in Matt Smith’s second season that Grand Moff Steven was righting the ship, albeit with an unfortunate emphasis on convoluted plot arc stuff and an overfondness for using “Doctor who?” as diegetic dialogue. We begin Series 7 with the Doctor having discovered that the Silence – the second of the multiple big teamups out to destroy him he’ll face over the course of his run – were trying to kill him because it was prophesised they’d be destroyed if the Question – “Doctor who?” – were answered on the fields of Trenzalore.

We’ll eventually get there… kind of. But fair warning: this is going to be a bit of a slog. We have a full thirteen episode season, divided in two with a Christmas special in the middle, and then a 50th Anniversary special before the final Christmas special. And for the first time since the revival show began, there’s no multi-part stories, so I have an eye-watering 16 stories to cover here. Pack a lunch, we’re going to be here for a while.

Oh, and content warning: there’s some sexual assault stuff coming up and the Doctor’s responsible this time and I rant about it a lot because, well, it’s the Doctor sexually assaulting people (yes, people, it happens multiple times). It’s not cool.

We kick off with the Moffat-penned Asylum of the Daleks, in which the Doctor is captured by the Daleks, as are a freshly-divorced Amy and Rory, and the trio are dragged before the Dalek parliament… But not for execution. Instead, it turns out that the Daleks want the Doctor’s help, since a crisis has arisen which is well beyond their ability to deal with via the methods they have to hand. Specifically, something’s gone south on the Dalek asylum planet – a place where they dump all the Daleks who are too twisted to be controlled but the Dalek authorities don’t want to simply execute. (Apparently the insane Daleks are so full of hate the other Daleks consider them sacred.) A rogue transmission has been emanating from the planet – the opera Carmen, which it makes no sense for any Daleks to be transmitting.

At the other end of the transmission is Oswin Oswald (Jenna Louise-Coleman), a surviving crew member from the starliner Alaska, which has crashed on the planet. That implies a major security problem: if the Alaska could get on, Daleks on-planet could conceivably get off. Oswin explains she’s been surviving onworld for a year or so, in part by hacking Dalek technology. The Daleks want the Doctor to go down and shut down the planetary force field so they can declare Exterminatus on the place, reasoning that the Doctor, as their nemesis, is just the man for the job. The Doctor just wants to get himself, his companions, and the Alaska survivors away safely. There’s two problems: something is badly wrong with Oswin, and an entire ward of the asylum is dedicated to Daleks with Post-Doctor Stress Disorder…

Doctor Who Series 6: Doctor Under a Death Sentence

The story so far: the Eleventh Doctor era has begun with a bit of a shaky season, in which Grand Moff Steven’s attempts to foreground the season arc more than it was in the RTD era (in which the “season arc” largely amounted to very brief phrases or hints at the existence of such rather than major plot dumps sprinkled throughout the season) let to mixed results. Still, Smith doesn’t seem bad as the Doctor, and after some hiccups the Amy and Rory companion team seem pretty excellent. Perhaps things will pick up with Series 6?

In a bit of a shift from the norm, the season opens with a two-parter – The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, penned by Moffat. After spending two centuries (from his perspective) travelling solo, the Doctor summons Amy, Rory, and River Song to a remote desert locale in the USA. He declares he’s going to take them to 1969 for a particular purpose, but before they take the trip he treats them to a lakeside picnic, during which someone in an Apollo astronaut spacesuit emerges from the lake. Telling the others to stay back and not interfere with what happens next, the Doctor approaches the astronaut – who shoots him dead, double-tapping him to prevent his regeneration. Shortly afterwards, the Doctor’s guests realise their invitation envelopes are numbered – and none of them have number 1. Returning to the diner at the rendezvous site, they encounter a younger version of the Doctor, who’s oblivious to what just happened.

There’s your season plot arc – “Who killed the Doctor and how does the Doctor get out of this one?” – and that’s an awesome setup in principle. In practice, there’s issues with running this story now. A “future version of the Doctor apparently dies” gambit was used fairly recently in The Big Bang, and that’s the sort of schtick you really need to let rest a bit before you use it again. Moreover, it’s going to turn out that the Doctor was shot due to the machinations of a big conspiracy that exists to stop the Doctor doing a thing which, as a result of them trying to stop it, eventually ends up happening, which is basically the same concept as the Series 5 season arc.

Still, the immediate story is fun! It’s got President Nixon (Stuart Milligan) troubled by strange phone calls, terrifying Grey-like aliens known as the Silence secretly puppeteering humanity from the shadows and editing themselves out of witnesses’ memories, and so on. It’s clear that Moffat loves this X-Files-adjacent stuff, and possible that he did a fair bit of research for this one; the idea that the Silence have ancient tunnels running under the ground and have been manipulating humanity for centuries is reminiscent of nothing less than the Shaver Mystery, the big paranormal flap that preceded the modern UFO movement, and if that’s not deliberate then Moffat has at least been discerning about picking out long-standing undercurrents in UFO conspiracy theory lore.

In addition, the older Doctor manipulating the others into witnessing his death, and River Song’s warnings that if they tell the younger Doctor what’s going to occur they risk significant cosmological damage to the universe, adds a pinch of interesting friction within the TARDIS crew, which isn’t a terrible concept. Dialling up the manipulativeness – which also ties into the conclusion of the story, in which the Dcotor broadcasts the existence of the Silence to the whole Earth and sparks off a mass genocide which humanity then immediately forgets they did – adds a big dose of Seventh Doctor to the mix, which in principle I am supportive of, though in this case I think the solution is more problematic than, say, the Doctor tricking Davros into blowing up Skaro in Remembrance of the Daleks.

Doctor Who Series 5: Doctor In a Fez

The story so far: after Russell T. Davies resurrected Doctor Who with the Ninth Doctor’s sole season and then had a massively popular and generally quite good run with the Tenth Doctor, he abdicated the showrunner’s throne. The incoming regime would be led by Grand Moff Steven, Moffat having earned his stripes writing some of the best episodes of the RTD era, and the figurehead would be the Eleventh Doctor, as played by Matt Smith.

After appearing for a minute or so at the close of The End of Time, Matt gets to make his proper entrance in The Eleventh Hour. The Doctor only went and regenerated whilst the TARDIS was in mid-flight – a bone-headed move which I am sure we will never see him do again – leading to a certain amount of interior damage as he messily spaffed his regeneration energy everywhere. The TARDIS crash lands in the back garden of a little girl called Amy Pond (Caitlin Blackwood), who just prayed to Santa to send a policeman to her house because there’s a crack in her wall that’s weirding her out.

The Doctor finds the crack perturbing enough to require his attention – but the TARDIS repair process is ongoing, as is the internal process of his regeneration. Popping out to give the TARDIS a quick calibratory spin, the Doctor promises to be back in five minutes – but it’s more like 12 years. The now grown-up Amy (played now by Karen Gillan) has been troubled by the presence of the crack and the absence of the Doctor all that time, an entire room in her house has been commandeered by an alien force, and her boyfriend – Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill), a nurse at the local hospital – has been noticing coma patients bilocating around the village. When aliens show up demanding that Earth hand over “Prisoner Zero” on pain of planetary demolition, the Doctor has about 20 minutes to save the world…

This is largely an excuse for Matt Smith to showcase his style as the Doctor, and for Moffat to showcase his style as a showrunner. In Smith’s case he’s several notches weirder than Eccleston or Tennant ever were, more mercurial and prickly. Perhaps crucially, he pulls off the trick of being compelling without necessarily being charismatic – he’s great to watch and has these great monologues but he isn’t necessarily as loveable or endearing as Tennant was. As for Moffat’s style as a showrunner, we’ve got the Amy and Rory double act set up (reminiscent of Sally and Larry from Blink, as I mentioned when I reviewed that), we’ve got a fun alien concept (the “multiform”), and we’ve got a big sense of the mythic, with the Doctor being a fairytale figure and a childhood imaginary friend who turns out to be not so imaginary.

Moffat’s certainly got his quirks as a writer – he likes using the phrase “the Doctor in the TARDIS” a lot, which I think he thinks sounds mythic but to me just sounds like a KLF/Timelords reference. There’s also the bit at the end where he has the Doctor give that really smug speech to tell the aliens to leave. I realised watching this that I’ve been misremembering how that pans out; I’d misconceived it (as have others) as the Doctor solving the whole thing by simply smugly declaring he’s the Doctor, which isn’t the case because it’s just a bit of flair he does after he’s solved the crisis. On the other hand, doing that bit of flair is, in and of itself, kind of a big moment of hubris in its own right.

Doctor Who and the Distant Sports

The Doctor and Amy have received word that Freddie Force and his Antimatter Men are up to no good. In order to be in the right place at the right time, the Doctor decides to hook up with some old chums of his – the Terraphiles, a subculture of far-future history nerds who enjoy LARPing it up in as close a reconstruction of Earth as they can accomplish – though the only historical sources they have is an idiosyncratic collection of boys’ adventure fiction and sports stories from the 1920s. At Miggea, the Arrow of Law will be challenged for and won in a tournament, and the future of the cosmos relies on the Doctor and Amy ensuring the right parties win – and making sure that Captain Cornelius and the Pirates of the Second Ether weigh in on the right side.

This, then, is the premise of Michael Moorcock’s The Coming of the Terraphiles, his Doctor Who tie-in novel. The history of such novels is a long run; during the series’ original run, they tended to be brief novelisations of the televised serials, pitched at a reading level of around 9-12 in keeping with the series’ target audience. Rather than being directly published by the BBC, these were licenced products issued by Target Books. During the long hiatus after Sylvester McCoy’s tenure in the role came to an end, the book series found itself in the hands of Virgin Books after they bought out Target’s parent company; realising that in the absence of a TV show in current production the Who audience was aging, Virgin started putting out a series of books for older readers presenting entirely new stories – the New Adventures line continued the Seventh Doctor’s story and allowed the authors to bring some of the plot arcs seeded during the McCoy era to fruition, whilst the Missing Adventures line would tell brand-new stories of earlier Doctors.