“That's a funny kind of linen cupboard..."
Not all episodes of Doctor Who have to be classics; they just have to try and be, at least quite good. It's reassuring, then, that last year's slightly disappointing season is followed by an excellent special, a superb opening two parter which seems to change the rules and is then followed by an episode which is, well, quite good. This may be no classic, and may not be as good as Ed Hime's superb It Takes You Away from last season but, if this is the baseline, this season is going to be a considerable improvement.
This is a story of the week- give or take possible romantic implications for Ryan, which I'll come to in a bit. But in one sense this story is important. Last year the Amazon burned. Australia is burning right now. Global heating is no longer a background threat but is reaching a very real crisis point. It would have been unforgivable for Doctor Who to fail to address this, and I'm glad that it has done so with such force and emphasis, even in a story which may be only quite good. Even the Doctor's concluding monologue, fourth wall or no, packs an effective punch. This is, I think, Doctor Who's attempt at a Tharg's Future Shock- a type of story it ought to be able to do.
And let's just agree to ignore the increasingly tiresome crowd who object to Doctor Who getting political- it was ever thus. Environmental issues may have been done better in The Green Death and, indeed, as a subtext through the whole Pertwee era, but they're nothing new for the programme. There is, I think, a more interesting critique in that this feels closer than Doctor Who usually does to being hard science fiction- something which is not all that common in this science fantasy programme, and something which tends to foreground its political subtext.
It doesn't feel like hard science fiction at the start, though- I'm reminded of the junk mail robot at the start of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and, for much of the episode, of the entirety of Paradise Towers. It feels, for a great chunk of the episode, that fandom is going to have to resurrect the old term "oddball story". And the story slowly unfolds through some quickly sketched but quirky characters, none of whom have much depth but all of whom have enough personality traits to entertain. There's even, in Bella, a possible love interest for Ryan, who inevitably ends up occupying the narrative role of baddie but seems quite definitely redeemable- and is last seen snogging Ryan before facing a very uncertain fate. Will we, and Ryan, see her again? Or is this just a one off harbinger of romance for Ryan? Perhaps with Yaz? Time will tell.
But the big shock is the big shock of the reveal- they're in Novosibirsk, in Siberia, on Earth. It's a definite Ravolox moment, as I'm sure all of fandom has pointed out by now, echoing The Mysterious Planet. The story titl suddenly looks very Christopher H. Bidmead. Those fearsome alien baddies, like the xenomorphs in Alien, are us. And this world is a future Earth, its VIP's long since buggered off, rendered no longer habitable to anyone but monsters- and we, of course, should we allow this to happen, are the real monsters.
In-universe, the interesting thing here is that this fate, one of runaway global heating, mass migration, war and nuclear holocaust, is just "one possible future". It'd never been directly stated that everywhere the TARDIS lands isn't just one big continuity; plenty of stories feed into other stories, but here that supposition is thrown very much into doubt. What, I wonder, would Lance Parkin and Jean-Marc L'Officier say? Personally, yes, I raise an eyebrow. But, as the much-missed Terrance Dicks used to say, continuity should never exist in order to get in the way of a good story. This story may only be quite good, yes. But it's a story that needed to be told.
Oh, and another thing... Mrs Llamastrangler's YouTube channel is here. It's about coins. Be awesome if you could subscribe...
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