The story so far: Chris Chibnall presided over one of the most woefully misconceived eras Doctor Who has ever offered up on television, ruining the run of the first female Doctor. As ratings spiralled downwards and the fanbase began losing all hope, suddenly a beam of light shot down from Heaven, and a giant Welsh man some twelve feet tall descended to Earth hand in hand with Mickey Mouse to save Doctor Who yet again. Yes, Russell T. Davies had come back to act as showrunner, with his production company Bad Wolf co-producing the show with the BBC and Disney stepping up handle international distribution. If Missy comes back, she’ll now be a Disney princess!
The Doctor’s fresh off his latest encounter with the Daleks, and has arrived in London. A chance encounter with Donna in the street, along with her daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney), prompts the Doctor to remember the difficult circumstances of Donna’s departure in Journey’s End. The Doctor should really keep away for the preservation of Donna’s life, lest her memories of her time as the DoctorDonna come rushing back and kill her. Fortunately, there’s something for the Doctor to distract himself with – an alien ship that crashed nearby. When its inhabitant, the Meep (Miriam Margoyles), shows up in Rose’s crafting shed, the Doctor is left with no choice but to come back into Donna’s life – mere minutes before UNIT and the terrifying Wrarth Warriors invade Donna’s street…
This is a mashup of three distinct ideas. The first concept is a fairly direct adaptation of The Star Beast – originally a Fourth Doctor comic by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. The second is to provide a televised debut adventure for the Fourteenth Doctor (RTD, remember, is treating Liberation of the Daleks as canon on a par with the televised stories), who spends the story trying to puzzle out why he’s regenerated into an approximation of the Tenth Doctor. The third idea is to offer a reintroduction to Donna, a catch-up with how she and her family are doing, and introduce Rose, who is trans (and by the end of the episode appears to have realised she is also nonbinary).
This latter element gives RTD the opportunity to directly tackle trans rights in an unambiguously supportive way, which coming from the BBC mere months after the Prime Minister and Home Secretary spent the Tory conference lambasting trans rights is just what was wanted. It does verge close to being exotifying, or implying that trans status is special space magic, mind, but in a political moment rife with unabashed bigotry a hearty and unambiguously well-intentioned and benign message like this going out is badly needed.
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.
The story so far: after a season with Rose, a season with Martha, and a season with Donna, the Tenth Doctor’s revolving door of companions is about to come to an end, along with his life – for Russell T. Davies and David Tennant are leaving Doctor Who, and a new Doctor and new showrunner are incoming. Yet despite the Series 4 finale being called Journey’s End, the Tenth Doctor has been given a stay of execution; as the next showrunner draws up his plan of campaign, RTD and Tennant spend a run from Christmas 2008 to New Year’s Day 2010 offering up a sequence of special episodes to round off the Tenth Doctor’s story. In terms of total running time, this ends up a shade less than that of the classic seasons from season 23 onward – indeed, there’s four stories told by these specials and the last four classic seasons told four stories each – so we may as well give them an article of their own.
Note that all of the specials are written or co-written by RTD, which on the one hand kind of makes sense but on the other hand I feel sets a bad precedent – surely there’s scope for Doctor Who to occasionally put on special episodes which don’t need the showrunner to write or co-write them? It’s never happened, and I think RTD has needlessly crafted a stick for his own back and that of other showrunners by doing it this way.
First up is the 2008 Christmas special – The Next Doctor, penned by RTD by himself. The Doctor lands in Victorian London, where he soon discovers that the Cybermen are up to no good. Encountering a gentleman who calls himself “the Doctor” (David Morrissey) and his companion Rosita (Velile Tshabalala), the Doctor wonders if he’s blundered into a future incarnation of his. He hasn’t – but experience, the mechanism of how Mr. Jackson Lake came to believe he was the Doctor, and how Lake behaved when the Cybermen’s conception of what the Doctor is like was imposed upon him afford a major invitation for the Doctor to mull over who he is and who he might become in the future.
Of course, this also gives RTD a chance to mull on directions not taken with the new series. Jackson Lake, being essentially a Victorian adventurer with a dress sense to match, is basically the sort of Doctor you’d get if you looked at Hartnell or McGann’s costumes and the surface trappings of the classic show but didn’t really go much deeper than that. There’s an arrogance and paternalism to him which fits the Victorian adventurer mould but is really what Doctor Who needs to steer away from, despite it having slipped at points during both the classic era and the revival.
The idea of the Cybermen having to adopt a more steampunk approach due to working with Victorian technology is grand, and it feels like you could do a really solid Victorian Cyberman story, framing them as the union of industrialism, materialism, and Darwinism (biological and social). Unfortunately, I think RTD drops the ball this time. For one thing, the Cybermen are for the most part just generic Cybermen, in the generic costumes – it would have been more flavourful seeing them having had to replaced damaged parts with steampunk-styled components of the sort we only really see on their beastlike pets. The biggest “steampunk Cyberman” we get here is the CyberKing, which is basically a CyberKaiju. It’s fun, but it feels like the possibility to tell a more nuanced and clever story is passed up in favour of flashy spectacle, and that’s exactly the reverse of the choice I want to see Doctor Who making.
The story so far: after a strong first season in the role, David Tennant’s tenure as the Doctor has encountered a little turbulence, in part because of Russell T. Davies more or less entirely wasting the potential of Martha Jones as a companion. Still, he’s got another full season in the role to go and then a sort of mini-season of specials running from Christmas 2008 to New Year’s Day 2010 – so we’ve got another couple of articles with him yet. (And then a while later we’ll deal with the suspiciously similar-looking David Fourteennant.)
Before we get to the meat of Series 4, of course, it’s time for another Christmas special – Voyage of the Damned, written by RTD himself. Martha Jones (and the Fifth Doctor) have literally just said goodbye to the Doctor, the TARDIS is in mid-flight, and the Titanic just bumped into it. Boarding the ship, he finds it’s not the originalTitanic, but the Starship Titanic, presumably because Russell T. Davies decided that if Chris Chibnall was going to import blatant Douglas Adams references he was going to do the same. The Doctor can’t get behind the name – apparently chosen because the Titanic was Earth’s most famous cruise liner – but he soon gets into the flow of things and starts to enjoy himself, chatting up Astrid (Kylie Minogue), one of the waitresses.
Not all of the serving staff are biological, however. Some of the more menial aspects of looking after the guests are taken care of by robots, dressed as angels, but they’re beginning to glitch out. Why, between that and the somewhat art deco-ish aesthetic of their face plates, these might not just be robots… they could be cousins to The Robots of Death! On top of all that, Captain Hardaker (Geoffrey Palmer) is apparently intent on engineering a collision between the ship and a rain of meteorites which will surely destroy it and kill off all the passengers. It transpires that Hardaker – terminally ill and promised ample payments to his family if he goes through with this – agreed to engineer this disaster. It’s down to the Doctor to help the survivors get off the ship alive, stop the ship crash-landing on Earth (since if its engines blow it’ll wipe out all life on the planet), and discover the reasons behind this hideous waste of life…
In other words, it’s “Doctor Who does The Poseidon Adventure“; once the meteorite strike happens the focus is largely on the Doctor trying to rally the survivors as one by one they fall victim to the perils of the broken ship and the stalking robots. This is fairly solid, standard stuff which is difficult to get wrong, and for the most part it’s entertaining in an enjoyable, unchallenging way which makes this pretty decent Christmas fare. There’s not much to complain about beyond a few more fat jokes than is really appropriate and some pacing issues.
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.
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).
The story so far: it has been some 15 years and 4 months since the last episode of Survival aired – or a bit over ten periods of eighteen months, which as we all know is too long to wait for a new Doctor Who season. Dimensions In Time, the TV movie, The Curse of Fatal Death, and odd experiments in radio serials and webcasts were attempted by the BBC during the gap, but none of that had sustained staying power; fandom consoled itself with, first, the Virgin New Adventures novel line, and then later the BBC Books novels and Big Finish audios. Hardcore junkies scored illicit hits off the likes of BBV. It was a dark time.
Behind the scenes, however, things were on the move. Russell T. Davies had penned Queer As Folk, one of the most successful dramas about the LGBT+ community to have aired on UK television and be pitched to mainstream audiences at that point, and as part of the series finale, he had a character decide which of two dudes he wanted to be with by challenging them to name as much Doctor Who trivia as they could. As RTD has recently explained, this came to the attention of Jane Tranter, who had been put in charge of commissioning drama shows for the BBC and had sneakily been plotting to bring Doctor Who back. In 2002, Tranter and Davies began drawing up plans, and after a few years these came to fruition in the form of a brand new season of the show, designated Series 1 to guarantee total confusion in episode guides going forwards.
The first episode is the RTD-penned Rose, in which we meet the titular, well, Rose (Billie Piper), a working class girl who works retail in a department store and is dating Mickey (alleged sexual harasser Noel Clarke). One day, after the rest of the staff have left, Rose has to go down to the basement, where the chief electrician’s office lurks, to hand in some money for the staff lottery. But Mr. Wilson isn’t answering her knocks, and as she explores the depths of the store, something’s increasingly off about the shop dummies stored down here, what with their tendency to animate and creep after her in a disturbing fashion. Fortunately, the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) is also exploring the basement, rescues her, helps her get to an exit, warns her that she should probably forget about all this and definitely not tell anyone because she’s liable to get them killed, and then blows up the store.
As Mickey and Rose’s mum Jackie (Camille Coduri) fuss over her in the aftermath of the explosion (well, Mickey’s being attentive, mum’s more interested in setting up interviews with the tabloids for a quick buck), Rose mulls over what happened. That Doctor fellow did just blow up her livelihood. On the other hand, those walking dummies did get very creepy. And with no job, Rose has plenty of time to think about it. When the Doctor pops by to check in on her, briefly admire his new post-regeneration face, get aggressively flirted at by Rose’s mum, and fight then confiscate the Auton plastic arm that Rose inadvertently brought back from the cellar, Rose insists on learning more about what’s going on. He brushes her off – but as Rose and Mickey start their own investigation and encounter Clive (Mark Benton), a conspiracy theorist who has been tracking the Doctor’s interventions throughout history, Rose starts to believe that there may be something to the Doctor’s claims. Yet is it really possible that Rose has encountered nothing less than a Spearhead From Space heralding the Terror of the Autons?
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 