The Virgin New Adventures: Nightshade To Deceit

The story so far: after kicking off with the Timewyrm saga in 1991, the Virgin New Adventures novel line spent early 1992 with the Cat’s Cradle trilogy, in which the TARDIS was damaged due to a crash with an early Gallifreyan time machine. At the end of Witch Mark, the final Cat’s Cradle novel, the repairs were completed using demonic protoplasm – causing the TARDIS to become corrupted, with consequences for the Doctor due to his symbiotic relationship with it. By the end of the chunk of novels I’m going to cover here, that problem will be resolved. Will this new plot arc turn out to actually be prominently relevant over these six novels, developed according to a consistent and thought-out plan? Or will authors just pay lip service to it whilst writing the book they want to write anyway, like they did with the previous seven books? Place your bets now…

Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

With the TARDIS mended, you’d expect everything would be fine – but just as a speck of contamination has made its way into the fabric of the machine, a kernel of discontent is nagging at the Doctor’s psyche. In fact, he’s outright snappish and irritable, to the point where Ace is shaken by one of his moments of bad temper. The Doctor realises it’s high time he and Ace slow down and did some mental stocktaking, so he lands the TARDIS in December 1968, near the sleepy Yorkshire village of Crook Marsham; elsewhere the Sixties are getting really exciting, but here they’ve almost entirely passed the village by. As they take in the surroundings, the Doctor discloses to Ace that he’s feeling his age, and badly misses the people from his past (when he loses his temper at Ace it’s because she’s messing with some of Susan’s stuff), and he’s seriously contemplating retirement. (He will, of course, eventually get around to acting on that in The Giggle.)

Meanwhile, Edmund Trevithick is trying to make the best of his own retirement. With his wife having died and his daughter having dropped out of society, Edmund now resides in the local old folks’ home. From 1953 to 1958, Trevithick was known up and down the country as Professor Nightshade, star of the science fiction show Nightshade – a Quatermass-like affair in which the heroic Professor investigated strange enigmas and thwarted alien monstrosities. With a chap from the BBC coming up to interview him in conjunction with the repeats currently airing, Trevithick is quite enjoying being back in the limelight again. What he doesn’t enjoy is people breaking his window late at night – people who call him by the name of Nightshade…

Trevithick is not the only local to be haunted by the ghosts of the past right now – nor, for that matter, is the Doctor with his maudlin thoughts of Susan and the other companions he’s left behind. And with these ghost encounters turning fatal, it’s clear that there’s something here for the Doctor and Ace to look into. The only prior association the village has with ghosts hails from strange stories about the old tumbledown Norman castle that used to loom over the village – long since destroyed in the Civil War, in a story which has its own peculiarities. Yet the site of the castle has now become home to a large radio telescope – and the research group there, led by Dr. Christine Cooper, has started receiving readings which they cannot make head or tail of. Clearly, the Doctor’s going to head down to the radio telescope (brushing aside his Post-Logopolis Stress Disorder) and get involved again – and perhaps this time he’ll be able to count on Professor Nightshade’s help!

Doctor Who: Big Finish’s Big Debut

If you’re looking into Doctor Who tie-in media, the elephant in the room is Big Finish. Much as you can divide televised Doctor Who into the classic series and the revived show, you can divide the expanded Doctor Who canon into two eras. Prior to 1999, you had an era when novels were the biggest deal in expanded media – the Target novelisation series was the only way to experience many classic stories before home media, particularly when it came to lost serials before audience-taped audio had at least partially filled the gaps, and then you had the Virgin New Adventures providing the most prominent trickle of new stories during the wilderness years. Sure, the Pertwee audio adventures were landmark moments, but there was only two of them – for much of the wilderness period, new novels were coming out frequently and formed the most substantial and exciting bit of expanded media.

Everything changed in July 1999, when Big Finish released The Sirens of Time. Big Finish had previously been making audio dramas based on the adventures of Bernice Summerfield – a space archaeologist who had been a companion in the Virgin New Adventures, and who the New Adventures line had reconfigured around after Virgin lost the tie-in novel rights in the wake of the TV movie. Having established themselves, they then pulled off a licensing coup by convincing the BBC to let them produce their own line of full cast Doctor Who audio dramas, featuring whichever classic Doctors wanted to take part. Tom Baker, legendary curmudgeon that he is, wouldn’t return their calls, but Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy were ready to don their question mark-patterned underpants and return to the TARDIS.

The rest, of course, is history. Big Finish have produced a lot of material – their main range ended up putting out at least one Doctor Who story a month for nearly two decades, and if anything their pace has only accelerated in recent years, now that the central range has been abolished and a confusing array of series has taken its place. Their output is simultaneously a sign of their success and a big red flag; they’re now producing an absolutely absurd amount of stuff, to the point where it’s hopeless to even attempt to keep up, and their Doctor Who-related lines alone represent more material than any sensible person would ever want to plough through. Significant creative problems have arisen, some of which are clearly side-effects of the increasing tendency towards shovelware, some of which are not. Elizabeth Sandifer has offered convincing criticisms of the state of present-day Big Finish here and here.

However, it’s one thing to provide a glut of spin-off material in a time when there’s lots of other spin-off stuff being made and we’re regularly getting new Doctor Who on television, and quite another to provide an oasis in the desert in a time when there’s no televised Who on the horizon – and it was through that that Big Finish became beloved and carved out a niche which, thanks in part to a lenient attitude by RTD early on in the revival show, it has largely kept to this day. By virtue of having the Eighth Doctor mention his Big Finish companions in The Night of the Doctor, but not any companions from novels or comics, Grand Moff Steven implicitly elevated Big Finish above other strands of tie-in media. This may be somewhat unfair to the novels and the comics – but at the same time, it is kind of an acknowledgement that, if your main lens for Doctor Who is the television show (and for most people it will be), a good audio drama feels a bit closer to “proper” Doctor Who than a novel or a comic does, especially when it includes Doctors and companions you know and love from the show.

We’re not in the Wilderness Years right now, of course… but we’ve got to wait until May until the show comes back. May! It’s enough to make those four months feel like eighteen. Perhaps it’s time to go back to the roots of Big Finish and start sifting for gold – especially when much of their early material is readily and legitimately available through various channels on a highly reasonable basis. Don’t expect this occasional review series to be anywhere near as rapid as my TV watch-through, mind – or at all completist, since there’s a lot of stuff Big Finish put out I have no interest in. I will leave it to other hands to do a complete overview of Big Finish, and I absolutely reserve the right to skip over material I don’t find appealing, ignore entire product lines, or just plain stop doing these if they stop being fun.

In particular, I am not particularly enthused by the idea of product lines like the Companion Chronicles, which are more like audiobooks with an in-character narrator than audio dramas – akin, perhaps, to the Nest Cottage Chronicles – or audios which cast impersonators as their Doctors, and I am much more interested in those product lines focused on Doctors who I feel got short-changed on television, either because their eras had horrid quality control or because their stint in the show was cut short or both.

Doctor Who Series 10: Doctor Giving Tuition

The story so far: after a bumpy first season, the Twelfth Doctor’s second season ended up being one of the best the revived Doctor Who has had to offer. For the next season, change was in the air – not only did the departure of Clara necessitate a new companion lineup, not only was Capaldi going to exit by the end of the season, but Grand Moff Steven himself would be giving up the showrunner’s throne to none other than Chris Chibnall…

First off this season we have a Christmas special – The Return of Doctor Mysterio, penned by Moffat. Once upon a time in New York, the Doctor had a Christmas Eve encounter with a boy named Grant Gordon (Logan Hoffman), a big comic book fan who’s thrilled by the encounter but thinks the Doctor’s tech looks a bit cheap. He gives the Doctor the name “Doctor Mysterio”, on the basis that that’s what he’d be known as in a DC or Marvel comic book, and then swallows an alien power source the Doctor hands him to look after because he thinks it’s cold medicine.

Cut to the modern day. The Doctor and Nardole return to New York in the present to investigate the mysterious Harmony Shoal Institute, they run into crack Daily Chronicle reporter Lucy Fletcher (Charity Wakefield), who also smells a rat. Meanwhile, the adult Grant (Justin Chatwin) still lives in New York, and works as a live-in childcare provider. Yet the crystal has done its work on him well – and granted him the powers of a superhero, because that’s what it thought he wanted. Dubbing himself the Ghost, he’s trying to live up to the standards of his beloved old-school heroes. The Doctor’s a mite perturbed – he didn’t think the powers would last this long. And this setup Grant has where he’s specifically Lucy Fletcher‘s nanny, looking after the child she had by his dirtbag best friend who skipped out on her whilst nursing an old high school crush on her, is one hell of an unhealthy dynamic…

Doctor Who Series 9: Doctor vs. Angry Birds

The story so far: after the Eleventh Doctor era saw the show descend into tropey self-parody, the first Twelfth Doctor season saw Grand Moff Steven arresting its downward spiral. Moffat seemed to go off multi-part episodes for a while there – there weren’t any in Series 7, and only one in Series 8. Here in Series 9, however, there’s three two-parters, and even the episodes which aren’t strictly speaking two-parters tend to have significant bits of continuity flowing from one to the next.

The first story, however, is a genuine two-parter: The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar. We open on a retro-futuristic battlefield – a place where clearly war has been grinding on so long that a disparate range of new technologies and repurposed old kit has been brought into play, so you have biplanes firing laser bolts and whatnot. A child (Joey Price) blunders into a minefield using deeply unconventional mines, based on what are clearly some manner of biotechnological horror. The Doctor shows up, tosses the kid his sonic screwdriver, and tries to talk him through getting out of the minefield. In the process, he asks the child for his name; it turns out the boy is Davros…

We jump to another time. A Sith Lord called Darth Maul Colony Sarff (Jami Reid-Quarrell) is looking for the Doctor. No, seriously, I’m not kidding, not only does he dress like a Sith but all of the locations he goes to are set up to look as Star Wars-y as possible – a wretched hive of scum and villainy, a Shadow Proclamation HQ which has something of the ornate decor of the Old Republic about it, an area of Karn which looks a bit like Tattooine whilst the Sisterhood are doing a passable impression of Jedi, there’s even scene transitions reminiscent of the wipes from the Star Wars movies and so on. Sarff has a message: Palpatine Davros is dying, and would like one last chat with the Doctor, presumably about that awkward childhood encounter.

Meanwhile, Missy is also looking for the Doctor, and gets in touch with Clara – for Missy has received the Doctor’s confession dial, which is the Time Lord equivalent of a last will and testament, and she’s worried that the Doctor will be mean-spirited enough to die of something not her doing. The Doctor himself doesn’t expect to get out of his confrontation with Davros – so he’s having a bit of an anachronism party before he goes to meet his nemesis. But sooner or later it’ll be time to stop riding into a medieval prizefight playing guitar solos on top of a tank and get serious…

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?

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 Series 3: Doctor, Allons-y!

The story so far: after emerging from the wake of the Time War, the Doctor found a new lease of life after regenerating. In Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, he had to fight simultaneous invasions of Earth by the Daleks and the Cybermen; by the end of Doomsday the Doctor had lost Rose but hit on “allons-y!” as a catchphrase, and also encountered a random woman in a bridal dress who’d somehow appeared on the TARDIS whilst it was mid-flight…

The Christmas special which precedes Series 3 proper is The Runaway Bride, penned by RTD and directly addressing that enigma. It turns out the titular bride is Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), and she has no idea why she is here either – she got teleported in right in the middle of her wedding ceremony. Donna is outraged because she thinks the Doctor’s kidnapped her – the Doctor’s confused because someone teleporting into the TARDIS when it’s in mid-flight is very weird indeed, and it’s unprecedented for an ordinary human without whizzy technology or an unusual power source to do it. Can the Doctor and Donna figure out what’s going on and get back to the church in time to finish the ceremony?

Tate’s wonderful here – it’s no surprise they brought her back as a full-time companion for Series 4. Donna’s emotional tenor is different from most companion we’ve seen before – she’s more outraged and annoyed to be whisked off on this bizarre adventure than she is thrilled by the possibilities, which is new for the revived show and was only rarely the case in the classic show (Tegan, Barbara, and Ian spring to mind). The difference is that Tate made a splash as a comedian before she was cast here, so she can play that for laughs the way previous companions couldn’t. She can play scenes more seriously when necessary, but whenever a scene is meant to be funny she enhances it a lot, and since the RTD era leans into comedy more than any since Douglas Adams was script editing this is a major asset.

It’s not all about Donna – Davies works in some nice moments for the Doctor to feel his feelings about Rose, just enough to avoid the sense that he’s not simply got over there but not so many as to disrupt the flow. And of course there’s the actual plot – stuffed with secret Torchwood facilities, shafts dug to the centre of the Earth (avoiding the complications encountered in Inferno), and a great foe in the form of the Empress of the Rachnoss (Sarah Parish), a big scary spider mommy.

The demonic aesthetic of the Empress, combined with the imagery around her raising her people from the Earth’s centre with this being heralded by a wandering star in the night sky, smuggles a fun Hammer Horror Satanism spin to a Christmas special – complete with a wandering star heralding a malign second coming. The spider aesthetic makes the resolution (a spot of genocide, though as in The Age of Steel it’s directed against folk who were plotting a genocide of their own) a grand-scale retelling of Insy-Winsy Spider. And the final destruction of the Empress is not at the hands of the Doctor but the British military, ordered in by Mr. Saxon – who we’ll get to by the end of Series 3. RTD intertwines all of these thematic elements and makes the juggling act look easy, yielding the best story he’d personally written since Series 1.

Doctor Who Series 2: Doctor In a Tie

The story so far: Christopher Eccleston has shown up, been the Ninth Doctor, and then quit, spurring a petty bit of character assassination from the BBC press office in the process. Russell T. Davies has got a brand new Doctor to introduce to the world, and sufficiently good ratings for the BBC to give him a chance to do that; if he can sell the audience on the new boy, new-Who may have long-term legs after all.

Before we get into the season proper, we have the Tenth Doctor’s first special (and the first special episode of the revived series) – The Christmas Invasion, penned by RTD himself. The TARDIS crash lands near Jackie’s flat, and thrilled though Jackie and Mickey are to see Rose again, they’re perturbed to see that the Doctor’s transformed into David Tennant. He’s had a hard day, so it’s not surprising that he needs a bit of a nap whilst he detoxes from having all that TARDIS energy routed through him at the end of The Parting of the Ways. As Rose takes her mind off things by visiting a Christmas market with Mickey, the two of them are attacked by animatronic Santa Clauses with high-powered armaments. Realising that whoever’s behind this weirdness must be after the Doctor, Rose and Mickey hustle back to Jackie’s, where a freshly-delivered Christmas tree turns out to be part of the problem. There’s nothing like a bit of trouble to prompt the Doctor to spring into action – but when the attack turns out to be merely the first feint of a full-blown alien invasion, will he wake up in time?

Tennant spends about two thirds of this one in a coma as the invasion scenario gets worse and worse. This gives scope for us to spend a bit more time with Rose, Jackie, and Mickey before the Tenth Doctor comes online fully – at which point the character chemistry of the show is inevitably going to shift – and is also, perhaps, a bit of meta-commentary on how lucky it is that the show got renewed. It was by no means a sure thing that this would have happened. There was a real chance of Series 1 tanking in the ratings, the BBC writing it off as a one-off experiment, and Tennant’s brief appearance at the end of The Parting of the Ways being his sole televised appearance as the Doctor.

Having the special mostly be led by Rose until the Doctor wakes up is a testimony to how well Billie Piper and the writing team had established the character in the previous season; she can absolutely carry an episode by herself in that respect, something companions haven’t really been called on to do since William Hartnell kept having to take long stretches of time off during season 3. When Tennant does wake up he gets a wonderful scene where he’s near-monologuing, giving a big chunky showcase of his new personality as the Doctor is trying to figure out what his new personality is. Generally, he’s just as funny and witty as the Ninth was, but it seems a bit more genuine this time – with a touch less underlying depression, but with just enough grit to do stuff like kill off an opponent (but only after he’s beat them in a fair fight, got them to surrender, and then they try to stab him the back anyway and so demonstrate themselves as not worthy of a second chance).