Doctor Who: Boom Town

“Dinner in bondage. Works for me.”

I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly here, but a short while before this Marathon started- and what a scarily long time ago that was- there was a thread in the old forum about what we were expecting to happen. I can’t remember what I put, but I rather suspect I’d have been expecting most of all to slag off The Keys of Marinus and to mount an impassioned defence of Boom Town, the most underappreciated gem in all of Doctor Who. And once I’ve finished writing this I’ll have done them both. How time flies.

This blew me away in 2005 and it blew me away again earlier this evening. Which might seem a little odd given its reputation as a cheap and silly bit of lightweight fluff. Certainly I remember not being impressed with the trailer at the end of The Doctor Dances. Actually, I’m very curious about how other Marathoneers have rated it (I don’t read the threads until just after I post my own review)- I’m guessing rather higher than its general reputation if not necessarily that highly overall. It’ll be interesting to see if I’m right.

I may not have realised before I reached this stage of the Marathon that I was going to rate every single story so far 5/5, but it’s safe to say I’m not particularly surprised that this season is looking really quite likely to be my favourite. And Boom Town is absolutely vital to this best of all seasons, in fact the heart of it. Set just before the non-stop action of the season’s climax, this is where the season stops to examine its themes in ways which look both backwards and forwards.

The early scenes are very silly, of course. And yes, technically there are problems with the plot logic. How can Margaret Blaine become Mayor of Cardiff without ever having been photographed? How on Earth can a proposal to demolish Cardiff Castle and replace it with a nuclear power station stand any chance of being reality? How can so many absurd and suspicious deaths not cause someone in authority to raise an eyebrow, however much London may not care if all of South Wales falls into the sea?

But all these things are supposed not to make sense. It’s part of the joke. I can understand how a lot of people would object this type of comedy device being used, of course. (I don’t- I have a weakness for self-referential humour, and I accept this sort of thing as part of the wonderful diversity of styles in Doctor Who) But it’s funny; when Margaret replies to journalist Cathy Salt’s question about the fate of the European safety inspectors with “But they were French!” and regrets that the signs saying Danger: High Explosives were only written in Welsh, the dialogue is signalling that this part of the episode is following the narrative rules of sitcom rather than drama; it’s allowed to have dodgy plot logic as long as it knows that and makes a joke of it.

There’s one very important serious scene in this part of the episode, mind; Margaret decides not to kill Cathy, which will be referred to later on. But essentially the entire section with Margaret and the nuclear station is just a bit of light-hearted preamble, albeit well-crafted, and it’s the serious stuff later on that’s the real meat of the episode. This is paralleled with the regular characters, too; their lighter scenes are put at the beginning before things get serious later, so we get a bit of fun, a bit of banter, a bit of exposition about the rift being a good refuelling spot, and, bizarrely, a brief allusion to the events of An Unearthly Child. But there’s stuff bubbling under, of course; Mickey’s relationship to the three time travellers is fascinatingly ambiguous. On the one hand he’s now being welcomed socially into the group and even takes part in the plan to capture Margaret. But he’s still something of an outsider amongst his maybe-girlfriend and two alpha male types. Jack, meanwhile, gets to be the action hero before taking a back seat for the rest of the episode.

It’s not long before Margaret is captured and the episode proper can begin. After one last great comedy line (“Oh, I sound like a Welshman,” says Margaret, in a line which was of course scripted by a Welshman. “God help me, I’ve gone native.”), the TARDISeers decide to take Margaret back to Raxacoricopalafatorius(?). And with a single line- “They have the death penalty”- the episode suddenly turns on a sixpence. As Margaret explicitly states, the Doctor now has to face the consequences of his actions, and this of course foreshadows coming events in which the aftermath of The Long Game will play a central part. But it also looks back to the consequences of the Doctor causing Rose to be missing for a year (the consequences of which are still being played out in this episode)- in fact, the consequences of the Doctor’s wanderings are a central theme of the season, and this is the episode where we stop to explore it. Throughout the season RTD has been deconstructing the tropes of the programme, and this is the ultimate example of that.

Of course, it’s great for other reasons, too. The dialogue between Margaret and the Doctor before and during their “date” is great not just for the gripping discussion of ethics but for her obvious manipulation of him, for Margaret’s comedy assassination attempts, and for the Doctor’s triumphant reoccupation of the moral high ground as he points out that occasionally sparing the odd someone is how a murderer like Margaret can live with herself.

This is paralleled by the conversation between Mickey and Rose, where Rose finally has o confront the way she’s been treating him- she leaves him behind to go travelling but gets jealous when he starts seeing another woman. And yet she only has to call and he comes all the way to Cardiff for her. She’s forced to conclude that “He deserves better.”

The resolution may be a little overly neat, and perhaps over-reliant on the ever-increasing powers of the TARDIS, but it’s very satisfying as far as the themes and characters are concerned. And now that all that’s been dealt with we can finally get to the climax…



5/5. You guessed it.

Doctor Who: Father's Day

“The past is another country. 1987 is just the Isle of Wight.”

Oddly enough for an episode which I might as well admit I think is fab from the outset, it doesn’t get off to the best of starts. The opening dialogue from Jackie and Rose feels overly artificial, too obviously a framing device, and doesn’t feel at all naturalistic, which feels wrong for something rooted in the world of Jackie and the Powell Estate. Fortunately, though, everything else about this story is great.

Paul Cornell gives us a story completely unlike anything which Doctor Who has ever given us before, a drama which essentially focuses on relationships in a domestic setting and where the sci-fi elements, though important, are there to serve this. The result is something wonderful but also brave given the possible reaction.

We’re back in the Powell Estate, and it’s 1987. Wisely, the production team haven’t gone overboard with the ‘80s-ness as this would have distracted from the tone. The early scenes are brilliant; at first unable to move as she watches her father die, Rose convinces the Doctor to let her have another try, and I can’t help thinking of Day of the Daleks as they watch their earlier selves.

Rose does the inevitable, and the expression on Christopher Eccleston’s face is priceless. And the fact he proceeds to say nothing for ages speaks volumes, adding extra weight to his eventual outburst, questioning whether Rose is any different from Adam in The Long Game, using time travel for her own purposes. But the difference here is not only that Rose’s motives are rather different but that this is just as much the Doctor’s fault as hers, if not more.

The Doctor takes Rose’s key and goes to the TARDIS as though about to leave without her. We know he won’t actually do it, of course, but it’s quite effectively shocking when we discover he can’t. Rose’s messing with time will have consequences. Admittedly I haven’t a clue why the TARDIS should go all Wheel in Space, or why the phones and Pete’s radio behave as they do, but for once that sort of thing hardly seems to matter.

Before we get to the meat of the episode we get our first sight of the car that was to have killed Pete driving around like a ghost, and we get a scene in a park which seems strangely unlike the sort of thing I remember from the ‘80s. No woodchip or modern play equipment for us; every swing and every roundabout was a potential deathtrap, but we were happy. No trip to the park was complete without an exchange of gossip with the other kids about the last time someone had “cracked their head open”. Halcyon days.

Er, where was I? Yes, the meat. For a start, there’s Jackie’s hair. But there’s also Rose getting to understand that her parents’ relationship was never quite what she’d been led to believe it was. But perhaps it’s not quite as bad as it appears at first glance here either.

Suddenly, we get our first glimpse of the CGI bat thing, and the consequences of Rose’s act are looking very bad indeed. The CGI doesn’t exactly look that good by more recent standards, but that’s another thing which hardly seems to matter.

Everyone rushes inside the church for safety, and it’s not long before Rose and Pete have their inevitable chat. You can tell instantly that he’s worked out he’s Rose’s dad, and from this point it’s inevitable that before long he’ll realise exactly what’s going on. Shaun Woodward is brilliant here, but so’s the script. And it again demonstrates its brilliance very soon afterwards in the Doctor’s speech to the newlyweds-to-be.

Mickey as a kid gives us some comic relief, but things look very grim. The creatures have “sterilised” the whole planet apart from themselves and other small besieged communities, and the Doctor hasn’t even got a plan. The Time Lords would have been able to prevent this sort of thing but now there’s no one to do there job- a nice, subtle use of the season arc. But Rose says she’s sorry, and the Doctor forgives her. So he should; it’s as much his fault as hers.

The climax is perfect; Pete knows he’d been fated to die as soon as Rose tries to claim that he was always there for her: “That’s not me.” And then, catastrophe: just as the Doctor’s about to save everyone, Rose goes up to her younger self and, er, crosses the streams. And a Dad’s gotta do what a Dad’s gotta do.

5/5 again. Even I cried, dammit.

Doctor Who: Dalek

“You would make a good Dalek.”



Blimey. It’s been ages since my last review. And they probably won’t be all too frequent until the New Year, after which I’ll really get going. Anyway…

We’ve established the new format, with a story in the far future, a story in the past, some present day alien invasion hi-jinks, and a lot of rather clever and knowing deconstruction of the series and its tropes. Here, this time from Rob Shearman, we get what feels like our first “regular” story now that the format has been set up, but also one which develops the Time War stuff and the season’s arc.

The Doctor and Rose land in a museum of alien artifacts somewhere beneath Utah in 2012, where they find among other things the arm of a Slitheen and the head of a Revenge era Cyberman. Which would presumably be from the 29th century, but best not to dwell on such things. Anyway, they’re soon caught and taken to the museum’s owner, amoral tycoon Henry Van Statten. Van Statten is a fantastic villain, casually wiping the memories of people who annoy him and casually leaving them as homeless junkies on a street somewhere. He also owns the Internet, apparently, and also seems to somehow choose the President of the USA.

Van Statten has managed to capture a real alien creature, which he calls a “Metaltron”. This is of course a Dalek, and the moment the Doctor realises what else is in the room with him is, ahem, fantastic. Eccleston plays this very intensely indeed, and we soon discover that not only is this the last Dalek, but it was the Daleks the Time Lords were fighting against in the Time War. The Dalek and the Doctor are each the last of their kind, and both prisoners of Van Statten. This is a very different way of presenting a Dalek- not only is there only one, in a position of apparent vulnerability, but the whole Time War angle makes us look at them afresh.

Meanwhile, Rose goes off with Adam, Van Statten’s annoying underling, a character I couldn’t look at for more than two seconds without the word “Hollyoaks” occurring to me. This is not a good thing.

Adam spends his time cataloguing Van Statten’s artefacts, which automatically puts him in a lesser position to Rose, who’s experiencing the wonders of the universe in a rather better way than he is. She’s also better than him morally; Adam is willingly working for someone who’s more than a bit dodgy and doesn’t seem too concerned about the Dalek being tortured. But Rose is horrified, sympathising with the Dalek. They have a bit of a chat, and then Rose puts her hand on its dome. Oops. This is the sort of psychological Dalek cleverness we haven’t seen since the days of David Whitaker. I like it.

Even better, the Dalek then goes on to demonstrate exactly how cool it is, using its sucker to kill its former torturer Simmons (so that’s what they’re for!), downloading the whole Internet, and turning its mid-section right round to shoot behind it. And right through this the gun makes the same sound it used top in the ‘80s. This Dalek is pretty damn impressive. If I didn’t know better I’d suspect they were going all out to show just how scary a single Dalek is just so they can really freak us out by showing hordes upon hordes of them at the end of the season. Of course, it probably won’t happen.

We get the obligatory stairs scene, of course; it may not be doing anything Remembrance of the Daleks hasn’t already done, but it’s no less cool for that. And I loved the cold inhuman efficiency of the Dalek activating the sprinkler system and simply electrocuting everyone. This is Dalek behaviour circa The Daleks’ Master Plan.

The Dalek conversation with the Doctor is just as good, getting to the heart of the Daleks and the Doctor’s relationship with them. Without orders the Dalek doesn’t know what to do, so it simply intends to revert to its default behaviour and just kill everyone. But the Doctor’s outburst (“Why don’t you just die?”) raises some uncomfortable parallels.

Rose ends up trapped behind the closing door with the Dalek, seemingly doomed. This has particular resonance after Jackie demanded of the Doctor last episode whether her daughter was safe. Naturally, the Doctor takes this out on Van Statten, a total git who’s entirely deserving of the abuse, but the terrible guilt he feels is obvious. There’s quite a lot going on between this scene between Van Statten and Goddard, too, as power gradually drains away from the one to the other. Van Statten’s authority suddenly means nothing.

Of course Rose is alive, and has “contaminated” the Dalek with her humanity, not something which would be welcome to an absolute racial supremacist. And once we, the audience, know that, we get a bit of comic relief with the Doctor (“Broken. Broken. Hairdryer.”) And then the Dalek goes sunbathing. What else?

The ending is most satisfying indeed. Rose forces the Doctor to face what his survivor’s guilt has done to him as he’s the one pointing the gun at the Dalek, not vice versa. But then, on the other hand, Rose is made to be complicit in the Dalek’s suicide. In other news, Van Statten gets his comeuppance as Goddard takes over and wipes his memory. Finally, the obligatory Time War conversation finishes things off, as the Doctor confirms to Rose that he’s definitely the last of his people as it “feels like there’s no one.”



Well, that’s just got to be another 5/5, which means this season so far is doing really rather well. I’ll score a story less that 5/5 at some point, honest!