Maureen Flynn - Author
This is one of the RTD era who two-parters that everyone talks about. Actress Nicola Walker once said this was amongst her favourite of all New Who. Hers and many others, including best of lists. I hadn’t re-watched this one in years and had forgotten…
Me and my hair have a special relationship. As a child my mother made sure I valued my long, thick, wavy, almost black locks. I hated the idea of cutting it or of bleaching it for some colour. Even through university (that time of hair…
I hadn’t seen this episode in years and nor had Ben. Ben didn’t remember it at all. I had fond memories. I knew it was *the* Pete Tyler episode but not a lot else. So what goes down? Rose begs The Doctor to take her back in time to the scene of her father’s death by car collision, but when she tries to change history time (and aliens) intervene. It’s up to Rose and The Doctor to make things right.
Pre title sequence
Ben: The pre title sequence this week started sweet. Rose is a bit sad, thinking about how she never really got time with her dad before he died, and asks the Doctor if they could see him before he dies. And then it veers off into the realm of creepy, with the Doctor trying to be flirty and responding with “your wish is my command”.
Maureen: I found the ‘… but be careful what you wish for,’ part stranger frankly. Why did The Doctor allow Rose to go back in time if he knew something bad could reasonably come of it? Or does he mean that seeing her own father’s death in real time will upset Rose? In which case, why not talk her out of it, Mr Flippant. Why do this at all? (Don’t say because plot needed an excuse to unfold. Worst excuse in the book).
Ben: It was a pretty flat opening, really, and is such a dramatic change in gear from the ending of the last episode where the Doctor and Rose cheerily left Adam to his fate (why RTD why?).
Maureen: My opinions on the opening are a lot less thoughtful than Ben’s. I wrote in my notebook of the opening credits, ‘dad dead exposition. Thanks Rose.’ The perils of being a writer (albeit not a screenwriter) is suddenly you notice devices like someone narrating a story at you because plot.
The Companion
Ben: Rose goes through the wringer this week in this companion focused episode. She gets to see her parents get married, and immediately realises reality is very different to how she imagined it, remarking she thought her dad would be taller. Moments like that happen a lot this episode, where Rose realises reality is starkly different to her imagination, to the image of her dad she had worshiped at for all these years. The drama of it all is a bit soapy for me.
Maureen: I think Ben you need to remember how new this episode felt at the time. Yes, now we’ve seen many sci fi and fantasy stories mess around with time and perception in this way, but back then not so much in the mainstream. I found myself noticing the many similarities between what happens to Rose and her image of her father in Father’s Day and what happens in the season one arc of Life on Mars (UK) to Sam Tyler with his father. Given that Sam Tyler was named after Rose and Life on Mars was partially seen as an adult Doctor Who, I wouldn’t be surprised if this Who episode had a massive influence.
Ben: Your mileage may vary. I found the soap too much in general. The soap rears its ugly head when, after Rose saves Pete’s life and breaks the rules of causality, Pete starts to hit on her. It happens again when Pete admits he’s not really a “businessman” and is just making it up as he goes. It happens again when Jackie comes along and they all have a massive row. I think it’s also really telling that after her parents make up and Rose sees the Doctor running towards her in a panic, she immediately puts on her “come hither” face. She’s still living half in her imagination, where her parents are the perfect couple. It isn’t until they’re all trapped in the church and people are dead that Rose snaps back to reality.
Maureen: I admit, Ben, that I’ve never been sold on Jackie Tyler actress’ acting. I thought the guy playing Pete was great, as was Billie. What didn’t work for me with the family dynamics was that aside from Pete, I didn’t care about anyone enough to invest in the story as I did with Life on Mars and Sam Tyler. This is not Billie’s fault at all, but I simply don’t find Rose all that relateable. When I was her age I read everything I could get my hands on, spent a lot of time online and writing and didn’t care much for boys. As for Jackie, she’s my worst nightmare. If I met someone like her in real life, they’d get flayed by my tongue pretty fast and I wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out with them.
Ben: Can we agree that the Mickey thing was weird?
Maureen: Yep. It didn’t bother me as much as it did you though.
Ben: Moving on then: Rose really starts to get closure with Pete when he realises he’s her dad, and he realises he should have died. Ultimately, Rose gets to do what she set out to do at episode beginning. Pete sacrifices himself and Rose is by his side as he dies. It’s something of a positive outcome, in that it changes the story Jackie tells baby Rose; her dad didn’t die alone in a senseless hit and run. Instead, the poor kid driver got to watch helplessly as Pete ran in front of the car. Real fairy tale stuff.
Maureen: I’ve always found it odd no other writer has explored this trope again. I mean, this kind of thing must happen around The Doctor A LOT.
The Doctor
Ben: I didn’t particularly like the Doctor this week. Right off the bat he’s acting happy and flirty, not noticing (or maybe just not caring) that Rose is acting out of character. Wanting to be there when your dad dies so he’s not alone is a noble gesture, but the Doctor should have approached the situation with a bit more… humanity. And then when Rose freezes (I guess seeing your dad get hit by a car is a pretty emotional moment) and doesn’t get to comfort him as he dies, he agrees that they can go back and try again! Even though he knows this is a really, really dumb idea!
Maureen: I think the implication though is that The Doctor knows it’s a dumb idea but does it anyway. Why? Because he loves Rose in his alien, angry way. Still, he immediately demands Rose say sorry afterwards and calls her a stupid ape which I agree is a bit much. He didn’t exactly warn Rose about the possible consequences of what could happen in revisiting such a traumatic event. It’d be like McGonagall giving Hermione the Time Turner without telling her the rules of how to play with it safe, and then giving her detention when she stuffs up. It just seemed unreasonable and emotionally manipulative (again) to me.
Ben: The Doctor really is out of his emotional depths this episode. It’s only after Rose saves Pete and refuses to admit she’s done anything wrong that things really heat up. When the aliens start killing he gets to do his dramatic Doctoring for a bit, sees the car stuck in a loop and immediately decides to try and keep Rose’s dad alive instead of doing the right thing. Which is a noble gesture and all, but if he wasn’t in love with Rose this whole thing could have been solved much earlier. He does get a nice scene with the couple to be where he doesn’t call them stupid apes and listens to their troubles; it’s a shame Rose didn’t get this Doctor at the start of the episode or this whole mess could have been avoided.
Maureen: I liked the way The Doctor treated the soon to be wed couple, even if it contrasted to how he treats Rose (maybe he’d fooled himself into holding Rose to a higher standard?).
DOCTOR: How did all this get started?
STUART: Outside the Beatbox Club, two in the morning.
SARAH: Street corner. I’d lost my purse, didn’t have money for a taxi.
STUART: I took her home.
DOCTOR: Then what? Asked her for a date?
SARAH: Wrote his number on the back of my hand.
STUART: Never got rid of her since. My dad said.
SARAH: I don’t know what this is all about, and I know we’re not important.
DOCTOR: Who said you’re not important? I’ve travelled to all sorts of places, done things you couldn’t even imagine, but you two. Street corner, two in the morning, getting a taxi home. I’ve never had a life like that. Yes. I’ll try and save you.
Alien of the Week
Ben: The big bad this week was very confusing. For starters, it all begins on some pretty shaky grounds. Why does having the first set of Rose and Doctor see the second Rose cause a huge wound in time? And if it was such a risky maneuver in the first place, why did the Doctor even allow it? (answer, he wasn’t thinking with his head) I mean, the car wasn’t even going that fast in the first place, so it wasn’t a convincing death either. The whole red hunting vision of the mysterious baddies was some pretty dodgy special effects work, and on top of that, why is the TARDIS now a regular phone box? Why is a song on the radio playing that isn’t out yet? And what was with the Watson phone call?
Maureen: I can help you there, Ben. I thought The Doctor said that time had been more or less broken because of Rose saving Pete and so anachronistic events were happening (such as songs playing from a later era on Pete’s car radio and people hearing Alexander Graham Bell).
Ben: Whatever. It’s just all very poorly done. The focus was on the drama centred on Rose, rather than a good sci fi plot. Then, the second time we get the red hunting the aliens manage to vanish a whole playground of children in about 15 seconds without any of the screams we got from the first round of attacks. And THEN, when they finally reveal these horrible CGI constructions of aliens, their attacks are loud and messy and not stealthy at all! There was just such inconsistency around these aliens. The church is old therefore it’s strong and they can’t get in? What about the massive stained glass windows? If, as the Doctor says, these monsters are here to sterilise the wound in time, surely they’d only need to go after either Rose, the Doctor, or Rose’s dad? Or perhaps the car that’s stuck in a loop? That’s never fully explained either. And why does the whole Earth have to be sterilised? And how are the aliens going to sterilise plants, bacteria, animals under the water? The TARDIS still being active doesn’t make sense. If it’s inside got pushed out by the wound in time, won’t it just get pushed back out when the Doctor tries to summon it? And what happened to the outside of the TARDIS? When it starts to appear in the church it’s whole again. At least after Rose’s dad sacrifices himself the aliens vanish, everything goes back to normal and it’s like the whole episode never happened. Which is how I’m going to live my life after finishing writing this review.
Maureen: To be honest, most of what you point out didn’t occur to me, though you make valid points. The TARDIS thing did feel silly and I have no idea how The Doctor survived the alien attack. I guess I didn’t care so much though because I was concentrating more on the relationship between Pete and Rose, which I thought was lovely. I’m glad Pete gets to come back.
On a non-alien or anything else related note, I remember having butterfly clips like Rose was wearing in the late 90s and early 2000s. The weird scene where Billie was backlit against the dark church was super odd as an art direction choice. It threw me right out of the story. Finally, how Muriel’s Wedding was that almost-to-be-wedding?! Oh Thatcher England.
Final Thoughts
Ben: I had a lot of problems with this episode, in particular with the plot holes around the paradox. There were some good lessons about how the past is looked at through rose tinted glasses. Rose bore the brunt of those lessons, but the groom this episode also had a few good moments, reminiscing about his recently deceased dad. Overall though, I really struggled to look past how poorly the time wound/paradox was done, and the drama with Rose and her parents was overdone. This episode might have been breaking new ground when it first aired, but watching it now in 2018 it’s safe to say this has not aged well. This concept has been explored much better by other people, e.g. Terry Pratchett’s book Mort. I’m going to give it a 4/10.
Maureen: Gees, that’s a bit harsh. I didn’t think it was any worse than the series pilot, Rose, so I’m giving this 6/10. I rated this a lot higher as a teen but times change I guess.
Next week: Please Santa Moff don’t let us down. I can’t take much more underwhelming Who.
This is one of the episodes I haven’t re-watched in years. I knew it involved Simon Pegg, an alien in a ceiling, and very little else. I thought I liked it quite a bit. Whoops. Maybe I did back in the day, but this re-watch……
Before I write any more of this review, I need to remind everyone of this: Rob Shearman wrote this episode. Yes, THE Rob Shearman. That guy who wrote two of the best Doctor Who audios ever recorded for Big Finish; Jubilee and The Chimes of…
Sorry guys for the lateness of this write-up. Ben was on time, but I’m in Canberra for the 2018 Hardcopy manuscript development program and now is the first chance I’ve had to upload words to this blog. Aliens of London/WW3 is RTD’s first two-parter and to keep things manageable for Ben and I with these re-watches, unless it’s a finale, we’re reviewing two-parters together.
So, how did this one hold up? I originally rated this one pretty high on a re-watch a few years back on livejournal. Alas, this time round the fart jokes, the fat shaming and the strange character beats were not so appealing for this little birdie. On the plus side, we get introduced to Harriet Jones and the second episode has some interesting and funny moments.
Pre-Title Sequence
Maureen: I liked the opening to Aliens of London. It set the tone (perhaps a little misleadingly) for a fun adventure romp on earth with The Doctor and Rose and continued the theme of The Doctor driving the TARDIS poorly. Suddenly, the series 5 River/Doctor about River driving the TARDIS better is a whole lot funnier… the second episode had little original in its opening to commend itself to me.
Ben: For a two-parter that ended up being inconsistent in quality, we had a hell of an opening in this first episode. After a short recap of Rose, Mickey and Jackie’s adventures so far, we land back on Earth so that Rose can visit her mum. The Doctor assures her that it’s only been 12 hours since she first left with the Doctor, however the Doctor can’t drive the TARDIS and it turns out it has in fact been 12 MONTHS. Whoops. Cue title sequence!
The second episode’s pre-title sequence was mostly a recap, but I did appreciate the smooth transition into the episode proper, literally picking up where they left off last episode with the Doctor and the other alien experts being electrocuted. I guess it is a good thing Rose didn’t get in to the meeting, or she’d be toast. Luckily for the Doctor, Time Lords are made of sturdier stuff, so he’s able to pull off the electrocution lanyard and turn it on to the Slitheen. Aaaand, cue title sequence. It’s nothing special…
The Companion/s
Maureen: Now that we’re back on earth, RTD moves beyond Rose as companion to add in a companion who never was (but could have been) in Harriet Jones, as well as the Mickey and Jackie team (I like to imagine that the whole River/Amy/Rory team was a response to how poorly these two were handled by RTD). There’s a lot of people to juggle when you throw in the alien of the week and The Doctor too, but for the first ten minutes of Aliens of London and most of World War Three, RTD pulls it off.
I’m not sold on the actress playing Jackie Tyler, but I sympathized with her concern for Rose, who on earth has essentially become a missing person case with Mickey, the black boyfriend prime suspect. It’s a shame RTD couldn’t leave this story open-ended a little longer, as it would have been an interesting theme to explore over multiple episodes, but as it is, it feels pretty surface level. I did love Jackie stitching The Doctor with a well-aimed slap and that we saw her trauma and sadness over Rose vanishing with a strange man without warning. In World War Three, she is a vehicle to remind us of the dangers of travelling with The Doctor when she asks him if her daughter will be safe. The Doctor never answers…
Mickey fairs less well in the two-parter, but especially in the first episode. I don’t know that it’s the actor’s fault, but Mickey sounds whiny when he says The Doctor ruined his life (probably because we never see how Mickey’s life has changed sans Doctor in the story). At least Mickey found UNIT (even if they seem a little rusty on dealing with alien invasion despite their numerous cases in classic Who) to gain some agency back and shows presence of mind to run away from The Slitheen when he sees they are outnumbered (sometimes being a coward is useful). In World War Three, I found myself more sympathetic towards Mickey mainly because he does more. Despite Jackie’s year of suspicion toward Mickey, it is he that saves her and promises to protect her no matter what (showing he genuinely cares about more than just Rose as someone to bonk), he gets a picture of The Slitheen that attacked Jackie and sends it to The Doctor for identification and formulation of an actual plan and hacks the Royal Navy to destroy Westminster.
Random aside: Moffat is known for riffing stories, especially previous Who stories, and I noticed the way The Doctor said ‘Mickey the idiot. The world is in your hands. Fire’ is reflected in The Eleventh Hour in the below exchange between Eleven and Jeff:
DOCTOR: Listen to me. In ten minutes, you’re going to be a legend. In ten minutes, everyone on that screen is going to be offering you any job you want. But first, you have to be magnificent. You have to make them trust you and get them working. This is it, Jeff, right here, right now. This is when you fly. Today’s the day you save the world.
JEFF: Why me?
DOCTOR: It’s your bedroom. Now go, go, go.
Nine tears people down because he is all ego and trauma and pain. Eleven builds people up and gives them agency to fly. God, how I wish Eleven had met Mickey.
In the end, Mickey is offered a space in The TARDIS at least, but he turns it down, claiming coward to the end. I’m not sure I bought this. He has shown himself to be no coward, but maybe he feels responsibility to earth and protecting it from the aliens he knows are now out there (whether through UNIT or someone else) or maybe he knows he needs to let Rose go.
And what of Rose? She doesn’t do much this two-parter, with Harriet Jones getting the best ‘aha’ moments. Still, Rose is the one who figures out how The Doctor, Harriet and her can survive Mickey’s bomb blast. I wasn’t a fan of her violent responses to the alien invasion or flippant weight loss joke (and nor was Harriet) and I hated her false statements to Mickey about missing him and caring for him (come on, Rose. You clearly don’t.)
And at last I get to Harriet Jones. God, how I loved her. I truly felt like she was so fully realised she could have been a companion. I love that she’s a small town MP with brains and heart and the persistence of an old school investigative journalist. I love that she tells Rose where to get off. I love that The Doctor passes his alcohol vial to her before Rose. I love that somehow she finishes the story as PM.
Ben: Okay, there’s a lot to cover here with companions. First Rose, then Mickey, then Jackie, then Harriet Jones. But really, Mickey got all the good bits in these episodes.
Rose is something of an observer for most of these episodes, with everything happening around her. Mostly it’s her mum having a very understandable reaction to her only daughter vanishing for a year and then not telling her where she’s been. She really is caught between a rock and a hard place there, I’m not sure what I would say in her situation at all. But once the alien spaceship crash lands in London she doesn’t really do much other than argue with Jackie and Mickey. World War Three opens with her and Harriet being chased by a Slitheen, only to be quickly reunited with the Doctor. From then on, all she does is emote and react to the events occurring around her.
I was surprised to find myself liking Mickey in these episodes! It’s clear he’s had a rough year, Jackie accusing him of Rose’s disappearance is no easy thing to shake off. Yes he was a bit of a dick to everyone in the first episode, but I think that’s a fair reaction all things considered. Plus the Doctor is still being a dick to him for no good reason. He really comes into things during World War Three, first trying to protect Jackie, and then being the Doctor’s man on the computer. He gets a bad case of the technobabble, but what’s a Doctor Who episode without some nonsense scifi talk. Mass murder aside, he’s become a much better character by the end of the episode, you can see more of the Mickey that joins Unit and less of the whiney boy. Plus, coming to an understanding with the Doctor means hopefully they can move on from the ridiculous name calling.
Similarly, Jackie didn’t do much after the first 15 minutes of Aliens of London. She got to ask some very pointed questions about where Rose has been for the last year, and who in the fresh hell this Doctor is. (YOU HAVE A TIME MACHINE, JUST GO BACK 12 MONTHS AND SAVE YOURSELF THE TROUBLE) Then in World War Three after being saved from a Slitheen in a bit of an odd scene involving pickled foodstuffs, her primary role is to worry about Rose, whether she is safe and whether the Doctor can keep her safe. Which, as Rose’s mum, are very reasonable questions to ask. What is very ominous and foreboding is the Silence (heh) the Doctor responds with. We also get to see how fiercely protective she is of her only daughter when she threatens to stop Mickey launching the missile because there’s the risk Rose will get hurt. By the end of the episode she’s begging her daughter to stay, promising to go back to school and get a job in the hopes of keeping Rose on Earth. Not to be down on Jackie, but I think I’d choose travelling space over every day life on Earth too.
Finally, Harriet Jones. She really was my favourite thing to come from these episodes. She didn’t do a great deal besides observe proceedings along with Rose, but her no-nonsense attitude, intelligence and charisma were great on screen. Also of note, Harriet had one of my favourite lines of the episode in “you pass to the left first” when the Doctor goes to pass her a decanter of alcohol so she could have her last drink. I look forward to seeing more of her in episodes to come! She truly was the sanest companion of the lot!
The Doctor
Maureen: Aside from the first ten minutes of Aliens of London where The Doctor was funny and adventure-filled (shown in the ‘did you know this was gonna happen? Nope’ exchange, the joy on The Doctor’s face as he steered alone in the TARDIS and the ‘never put a man in front of a lift’ quote), I spent a lot of time disliking him. He emotionally blackmailed Rose constantly to continue journeying with him, insisted on calling Mickey Ricky for no good reason, continued to call Mickey an idiot and demean him in front of others, especially Rose, and generally was a bit of a dick.
Another Moffat riff I noticed comes from this episode. In the Series 10 finale, Twelve makes this speech to The Master:
Twelve: I’m not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, because I hate someone, or because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun. God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works because it hardly ever does. I do what I do because it’s right! Because it’s decent! And above all, it’s kind!
Compare to Nine speaking to Rose and Harriet as a dreadful decision must be made…
Nine: It’s not fun. It’s not smart. It’s just standing up and making a decision.
Final note on The Doctor: Thank God he finally lays off mocking Mickey by two-parter’s end! I get the sense he has learnt to respect Mickey, even if he’ll never like him.
Ben: I oscillated a lot between like and dislike over these episodes when it came to the Doctor. For starters, he constantly treats Mickey with disdain until he has a use for him. I’m not sure if it’s because of Rose related jealousy, but this behaviour just isn’t cute. At least by the end of the episode they reach something of an understanding, but that involved turning Mickey into a mass murderer by having him launch a missile into 10 Downing Street.
We get a lot of scenes of the Doctor investigating and problem solving and just generally being the Doctor, which were fine, but not particularly inspiring. The investigating the alien body which turns out to be a transformed pig only seems to happen as an excuse to get The Doctor to leave without Rose, furthering the conflict between Rose, Mickey, and Jackie. Things pick up in the second episode when he locks himself, Rose, and Harriet in the Cabinet Room, and we get some good banter, great emotional moments, and some excellent Doctoring moments. The part where he admits he can’t keep Rose safe was a really But do the good Doctor moments of World War Three balance out the mostly bad Doctor moments from Aliens in London? What really sealed it as a no from me is when, right at the end of the episode when Jackie is begging Rose to stay, he pulls some cheap emotional manipulation to make sure she comes along with him.
Alien of the Week
Maureen: I noticed a couple of things about the aliens of the week to comment on. The less said about the fat shaming and the fart jokes the better…
1. Their ultimate plan is quite similar to Cassandra, also a villain from an RTD penned episode. The Slitheen want to destroy earth to sell it for fuel. Ingenious. What this says about RTD’s neuroses I’m not sure.
2. It’s interesting that The Slitheen take over key positions in UK society (PM, head of MI6, head of the military etc.) The PM, especially, is flippant and into bodily fluids and earthy feelings. He says he had a wife, a mistress and a farmer and that he wants to escape his body and get naked. Again, not sure what RTD was saying about politics or about sexuality here.
3. The Slitheen were much scarier in the second episode, as they stalked Rose and Harriet especially. The pig/human hybrid alien was just weird in episode one and I wasn’t keen on the electrocution scene.
Ben: The Slitheen really were a mixed bag, there’s not much else to say. They had a pretty good plan overall, turning the Earth into a nuclear slag to sell off as fuel. I feel like as an advanced alien species there would have been much easier ways to go about it though. If Mickey can hack into and launch a nuke (buffalo as a password, really?), I feel like the Slitheen could probably manage that too. What really weighed down the performances were the bad fart jokes, and over use of special effects. Less is more, BBC! They did have some moments of being truly intimidating, such as when one of them was hunting Rose and Harriet Jones in World War Three. But overall, they ended up being a bit more silly than scary. They had all this amazing technology, and the first part of Aliens of London really set them up well as being a real threat, this was an enemy who was able to set up significant diversions. But when it came to actually meeting the Slitheen… the follow through was disappointing. And in the end, no one actually checked to see if there were any Slitheen survivors before declaring the missile strike a success? Who knows, maybe they’ll make a return later on…
Final Thoughts
Maureen: I thought this was a kitchen sink mess for the most part, with many series regulars doing unlikable things and displaying unlikable attitudes, especially in Aliens of London which got a measly 2 stars from me. The second episode lifted its game, but not enough to salvage the truly awful first act with a solid 7/10 stars. Aliens of London/World War Three: 5/10 inky stars.
Ben: Look, it wasn’t a great two-parter, I really think they could have done better with the idea. I’m imagining a spy thriller of some form where they go back 12 months to correct the Doctor’s driving mistake and come across the Slitheen when they’ve just landed on Earth and are scoping it out/in the initial planning stages. Something more Animorphs-esque, perhaps. Anyways, I should quit before I write that whole thing out. At least we got another Bad Wolf reference? I give Aliens of London a 4/10, and World War Three a 7/10. Overall, 6/10 inky stars.
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Ah Mark Gatiss. What a love/hate relationship I have with your Who episodes. Still, I think this is one of your best. Gatiss is always at his best in a period piece story imo, and this one has a lot of fun with The Doctor meets famous historical figure (this time, Dickens) trope as well as a bunch of Victorian horror tropes; spirits, ghosts, vampires, seances, visions and zombies all get a kind of nod.
So what happens? Rose and The Doctor go back in time to 1869 and find all is not well in Cardiff where Dickens is performing A Christmas Carol. The dead are walking. A mysterious alien race is unleashed through a rift gate. Why have they been stranded and why do they need bodies? Watch the episode or read below to find out.
Pre-Title Sequence
Maureen: Though the opening titles weren’t quite as strong as last week’s, they were still pretty good. The period piece, walking dead ghost story opening is creepy, even given the old fashioned SFX and as Ben points out, the screeching sound is used to spine tingling effect.
Ben: This was another banger of a pre-title sequence, I mean, any scene that ends with a possessed body running screaming into the night gets a thumbs up from me. Upon rewatching (I’ve found watching the episode again whilst writing my review rather helpful) I noticed how prominent they made the gas a character; Sneed opens the episode lighting a gas lamp, and throughout the scene you can hear the hiss of the gas below conversation. And then you see the gas possess grandmama, kill her grandson and make off into the night! Along with the exasperated “oh no, not again” from Mr Sneed, they really give you all the threads of the story right away. Also of note – this is the first episode written by Mark Gatiss!
The Companion
Maureen: I’m loving the Rose/Doctor chemistry in this episode, and the absence of Mickey is bliss. Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston have great chemistry, evident right away when they spar back and forth about where the TARDIS toilet is and that Rose looks ‘blimey… beautiful… considering’ she’s human. I am a bit partial myself to good old Billie Piper in 19th century attire, even if the Rose is nineteen reveal makes the Doctor/Rose relationship a little icky for me. Doesn’t stop the quote below being lovely:
Rose Tyler: Think about it, though. Christmas 1860. It happened once. Just once, and it’s… gone, it’s finished. It’ll never happen again. Except for you. You can go back and see days that are dead and gone, a hundred thousand sunsets ago. No wonder you never stay still.
The Doctor: Not a bad life.
Rose Tyler: Better with two.
There’s also a lovely parallel going on this episode between The Doctor/Dickens and Gwen (the servant girl with the sight)/Rose as companions. I love that in this episode, just like the prior one, Rose finds the downtrodden and listens to them actively in a way Nine never would. She talks to Gwen about her pay, about her schooling and about love in a lovely scene.
We also see a deepening contrast between Rose and The Doctor. Rose thinks about the human cost to The Doctor’s plan and advocates on behalf of having a heart. Nine is still damaged from The Time War, angry and bitter. But Rose is also a thoroughly modern companion, young and naive, and Gatiss isn’t afraid to remind us of that. Gwen calls Rose out, telling her she knows Rose thinks she’s superior, and that Gwen herself, has the right to a voice to choose.
Ben: Right off the bat, Rose is getting her flirt on with The Doctor! They really are laying the attraction on thick, although it could just be that the two of them have excellent chemistry compared to Rose and the wet rag that is Mickey.
In stark contrast to last week’s episode, you can tell Rose is truly enjoying experiencing an 1800’s Christmas. Well, she is for the five minutes before the screams start. What I’m starting to get annoyed by is this is now the third week where she becomes a damsel in distress; in this case being knocked unconscious by Sneed, kidnapped, and left in a room with two zombies to die only to be rescued by the Doctor.
She gets some great moments in the rest of the episode though, telling off Sneed and the sweet then creepy scene with Gwyneth in the pantry in particular. Also of note is the way she stood up to the Doctor when it came to Gwyneth, contrasting how Rose sees her as a (dumb) person who shouldn’t be getting into any alien business, and the Doctor sees her as something of a tool. A means to an end. Final point to mention – the scene when Rose realises her own mortality was excellent. It doesn’t matter they’re on Earth before she’s born, of course she can still die. This is real.
Secondary Companions of the Week
Maureen: I loved, loved, loved the actress playing Gwen and the brilliant mind reading speech she gave to Rose; both chilling and beautiful.
Gwyneth: And you’ve come such a long way.
Rose Tyler: What makes you thinks so?
Gwyneth: You’re from London. I’ve seen London in drawings, but never like that. All those people rushing about, half naked. For shame. And the noise, and the metal boxes racing past. And the birds in the sky… No, they’re metal as well. Metal birds with people in them. People are flying. And you, you’ve flown so far, further than anyone! The things you’ve seen. The darkness… The Big Bad Wolf.
Gwen is the second example (after Jabe) of a companion who never was, and like Jabe, she is a highly likable character.
Ben: As shown at the start of the episode, poor Mr Sneed and Gwyneth are very much in over their heads, but they’re trying their best to keep the living dead down. Luckily for them, Gwyneth has something of A Gift and is able to locate their stiff, but not before she’s made rather a commotion. The scene of her and Rose bonding in the pantry is pure magic, with the easy banter giving away to unease when you realise Gwyneth is actively reading Rose’s mind (giving us the second Bad Wolf reference of the season that I’ve noticed). She then proceeds to gives us the second-best séance scene in a tv show behind the séance in Penny Dreadful. Iconic stuff.
One of my main criticisms of this episode is how they never really explain how these powers came to be – how did she grow up on top of the rift if the rift is in the basement of a haunted house she only recently started working at? Why do the Gelth need to use a human as a gate? On top of that, how did she manage to close the gate, sacrificing herself and saving the day, if she’d already been dead for five minutes like the Doctor said? It’s all a bit too ill-defined for me. All in all, though, Gwyneth was a great character who added a lot to the episode.
And finally, poor Charles Dickens. At the start of the episode he is in something of a funk, blathering on about family and just being a general Debbie Downer. Getting interrupted by a blue screaming woman and accompanying ghost in the middle of his performance didn’t provide any relief, for reasons unknown to me. He does lighten up somewhat in accompanying The Doctor in his chase to recover Rose, but only because of some serious fangirling by The Doctor. The whole scene is rather silly, really.
He doesn’t do much for the rest of the episode except to move from dismissing it all as fakery to having the horrifying epiphany that there is much in existence beyond his understanding. He does provide some crucial assistance at the end of the episode though, realising they can use the gas to draw the Gelth out from their possessed bodies. When we say goodbye to Mr Dickens he’s back in good spirits. Having gone through the 5 stages of grief, he has come to accept the new world, and is excited to explore these new ideas in his books.
Maureen: Ben covered a lot of ground, so I don’t have much to add, other than it’s interesting to note that Dickens is the first time New Who does the whole ‘go back in time to meet famous person’ trope. I think Vincent and The Doctor is a stronger episode, but perhaps some of its inspiration comes from this earlier episode. Dickens is inspired to change the ending to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but he dies a week later, as The Doctor calmly tells Rose. In Vincent, there are no more artworks because he commits suicide. The parallels are interesting.
The Doctor
Ben: My first observation is that The Doctor really is terrible at driving the TARDIS, and also interior planning. Why exactly does one have to go through a maze to get to the wardrobe?? And then we get The Doctor laying on some of his classic backhanded flirting, “You look beautiful, considering”. Smooth, Doctor. Real smooth. Then comes the second confirmation that The Doctor is a terrible driver: Not only is this not London(it’s Cardiff – a location which will show up repeatedly in the future), it’s not even 1860 (it’s 1869)!
When the screaming starts he’s moderately useless, getting distracted by Charles Dickens and the gas and letting Rose get chloroformed, but luckily, he arrives back at the funeral home just in time to save Rose and start figuring out what these gas beings want. I wasn’t a huge fan of how blindly and willingly the Doctor went along with the Gelth’s plan, but considering they straight up call him The Doctor, I suspect the reference to them being victims of the Time War was a deliberate act to get the guilt flowing.
Maureen: Unlike Ben, I quite liked the characterization of The Doctor in relation to The Gelth. This Doctor is seriously damaged, his whole race is dead and he firmly believed he played a part in his and other species destruction. He feels he must atone for his past transgressions, and here, right before him, are The Gelth ready to feed his ego and make him feel good about himself. When Nine says, ‘I trusted you. I pitied you,’ he sounds incredulous, unable to believe another species could manipulate him so coldly. It’s a near perfect character moment for me.
The Gelth, Gwyneth: We are so very few. The last of our kind. We face extinction.
The Doctor: Why? What happened?
The Gelth, Gwyneth: Once we had a physical form like you. But then the War came.
Charles Dickens: War? What war?
The Gelth, Gwyneth: The Time War. The whole universe convulsed. The Time War raged, invisible to smaller species but devastating to higher forms. Our bodies wasted away. We’re trapped in this gaseous state.
I am loving the drip feeding of Time War information we get every week!
I continue to enjoy Nine’s sense of humour too. I laughed out loud when he said of the morgue, ‘this is Bleak House,’ again in his conversation about being Dickens number one fan, and when he blythly said of Gwen that he ‘loved a happy medium.’
Aliens of the Week
Ben: We get a good few twists this week with the aliens – first off, they’ve possessed bodies of the dead, and are killing willy-nilly; then we find out they’re actually the Gelth, alien refugees who lost their physical forms as a result of the Time War and, trapped in a gaseous state, want to inhabit human corpses in order to survive.
I was a bit suspicious from the séance scene onwards, because of how thick their spokesperson laid on the “Pity the Gelth!” line. Unfortunately, Gwyneth has started calling them her angels at this point, so of course they’re getting rescued. You can’t get between a Godly woman and her angels. The final twist comes after Gwyneth opens the gate and we find out the Gelth are in fact a hostile species looking to conquer the Earth. It’s fitting then, that Gwyneth is the one that foils their plan in the end, but not before poor Mr Sneed dies and we get an excellent moment of the Doctor and Rose coming to terms with their mortality.
Maureen: The Gelth are probably the most morally ambiguous aliens New Who has explored thus far. Yes, they want to take over earth, but they have legitimate reasons to do so. They have lost their entire world after all! The final twist of how The Doctor and Rose resolve the ‘invasion’ felt a little too get out of jail free card for me, but I enjoyed the twists up until that moment, and the link between Gwen and The Gelth leading to her Sight made for some great spooky scenes.
So how did we rank this episode overall?
Maureen: I quite enjoyed this. I thought the ending was a bit silly, but otherwise a strong episode. 7/10 inky stars.
Ben: Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the first period drama episode of New Who, I’m giving it an 8/10.
Ah, the Sydney Writers Festival. That place of baby boomers and a strange distrust of genre fiction in the program. That place where I actually got told off in a session for live-tweeting by the person sitting next to me. Yes. Live-tweeting at a writers…