Doctor Who is a great concept for a TV show, and often it's truly a great show. A spaceman who calls himself The Doctor (yup, just 'The Doctor') lives in a blue box called the TARDIS, and gallivants through time and space with a loyal Earthling companion, on a mission to right wrongs, battle monsters, save the universe, and crack jokes along the way.
This is my endless Doctor Who rewatch, and now playing is the show's very, very long fourth season, which started on Christmas 2007, and ended on New Year's Day in 2010.
S04E00: "Voyage of the Damned"
"I'm just a traveler. Imagine it — no tax, no bills, no boss, just the open sky."
This was the show's 2007 'Christmas special,' an idea I'll always oppose on principal — The Doc's a space alien, agnostic, and once mentioned that he took the last room at the inn on the night Christ was born. But several very good episodes have come from the Christmas specials, and here's another.
Pop star Kylie Minogue plays a waitress serving cocktails aboard the Titanic, but not that Titanic. This one's an interstellar cruise ship named after the most famous vessel in Earth's history, though nobody seems to understand why the original Titanic was famous.
Geoffrey Palmer (As Time Goes By) plays the captain of the New Titanic, which is, of course, doomed. As the ship wrecks in space, we're introduced to a half a dozen passengers and staffers, all given enough time and space to become memorable. There's a rotten bastard capitalist, an expert on Earth history who knows nothing of Earth history, a fuzzball alien named Bannakaffalatta, and a lovable fat couple portrayed as intelligent, even heroic, and not always looking for a sandwich.
True to what's best about the show, some of these ordinary people rise to heroics, while others perish in futility. How do ya suppose you'd respond if a meteor storm was closing in but the shields were off-line?
Despite all the death (and there's plenty), it's an episode more
interested in having a good time than taking itself seriously. And it's a
good time, indeed.
"I'm the Doctor. I'm a Time Lord. I'm from the planet Gallifrey in the Constellation of Kasterborous. I'm 903 years old and I'm the man who is going to save your lives, and all six-billion people on the planet below. You got a problem with that?"
No, sir. No problem at all.
S04E01: "Partners in Crime"
Catherine Tate returns as Donna Noble, now The Doctor's new companion. They're on Earth, investigating an anti-fat pill that's not merely a swindle like most weight loss gimmicks, but also part of an alien plot. Take the pill once daily for three weeks, "and the fat just walks away"… because it jumps out of your belly and becomes a living space-alien baby.
This is lighthearted but not lightheaded, and perhaps more social commentary than science fiction. The CGI'd fat-babies are impossibly cute, even waving at the camera. The whole episode is simultaneously preposterous, weird, smart and endearing, which is often how Doctor Who works.
Donna immediately makes an excellent companion for The Doctor; she's smart, short-tempered, and these two characters play off each other comedically (including a game of charades, which is one of the funniest scenes ever on the show). She's a woman who speaks up sometimes louder than is warranted, which earns laughs, sympathies, and respect. It's also a welcome relief that Donna is some years older than previous companions Rose and Martha, and that there's explicitly zero romantic sparkle between The Doctor and the new companion.
S04E02: "The Fires of Pompeii"
Let's visit Pompeii on Volcano Day. There's a well-rendered CGI fire monster, creepy cultists who can read The Doctor and Donna's minds, and a smoking mountain uncomfortably nearby.
This is well-written, with plenty of action and scenery, and it was filmed in Italy, which is remarkable for a show with Doctor Who's long history of cheapskate budgets. It looks terrific, and it is.
Tate is a comedian by career, so 'funny' comes easily for Donna, but she becomes seriously furious when The Doctor explains that Pompeii is a "fixed point in time," so he can't change what will happen — 20,000 people will die, and
must die. To you and I and The Doctor it's history, but Donna is right there the shadow of the smouldering mountain, incredulous that The Doctor is going to let the city be buried in lava.
Their argument is passionate, plausible, and important to the show, making Donna effectively The Doctor's conscience. After all, without a touch of compassion, what is The Doctor — a time tourist? And if he intervenes, what is he then — a god?
There's another level of their philosophical dispute that plays out too, but I won't even hint at what it is. I will say, it's resolved smartly, and in only their third episode together it binds The Doctor and Donna as friends and partners perhaps more completely than any other Doctor and companion on the show.
A few years later, Karen Gillan would play The Doctor's next companion, Amy Pond; here Gillan plays one of the cultists. She's mostly lost in the crowd, though, with her face hidden under creepy makeup.
A few years after Amy, Peter Capaldi would play The Doctor; here he plays a local granite-merchant and family man, a small supporting role but he's terrific.
In his character's most dramatic moment, the camera aims right at Capaldi's face, and there's a booger in one of his nostrils. Look closely, or click the image to make it bigger.
How they missed it in post-production, why they didn't just CGI the booger away, I dunno. It adds to the authenticity, I guess — filmed on location in Peter Capaldi's nose.
S04E03: "Planet of the Ood"
The Ood are an odd-looking race of spaghetti-faced servants, first seen in the very good second-season two-parter "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit." This episode is set on the Ood home planet, where they're farmed and packaged by Ood Operations.
The planet is a beautifully-realized world of ice and snow, and the story gently makes political points along the way. The Ood are manservants, allegedly natural-born to follow orders, but what were they before capitalists began harvesting and marketing them?
"A species born to serve could never evolve in the first place. What does the company do to make them obey?"
Taking a stand against slavery seems easy, but the episode is successful because it's so damned earnest and heartfelt. We hear the painful song of the Ood, and see through Donna's eyes the horror of how they've been handled, warehoused, and sold.
The company's CEO, balding from the stress and constantly complaining about it, could've been played for comedic effect, but smartly isn't. And the story's liberation of the Ood is not brought about by The Doctor and Donna — they help, certainly, but it's mostly an Ood uprising, which is far more satisfying.
S04E04: "The Sontaran Stratagem"
and S04E05: "The Poison Sky"
When Earth is invaded by space aliens in
Doctor Who (which happens quite often), the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT) springs into action, defending the Earth.
UNIT is a dumb idea — a military operation, on a show that's resolutely non-military — and there's never yet been a better-than-average episode with UNIT soldiers running around.
This two-parter is average: A smart but morally-challenged boy genius teams up with baked-potato-head Sontaran aliens, who are planning the end of Earth. So here comes UNIT — soldiers with guns, whose job is to loudly die, accomplishing nothing as the Sontarans advance and The Doctor figures out how to stop them.
Martha, The Doctor's companion in the third season, is now an officer with UNIT, and it doesn't make her more interesting or more sympathetic. She's still kind of a zilch, but I blame the writing more than the actress.
On the plus side, the boy genius is enjoyably hateworthy, the baked potatoes are amusing, and the story has self-driving cars that kill their passengers, just like Teslas. Despite UNIT, I'll grudgingly concede that it's a fun albeit lightweight story.
S04E06: "The Doctor's Daughter"
This episode opens on a planet embroiled in perpetual war, humans against a gargling species called the Hath. Within mere moments, The Doctor is locked into a sampling machine, which clones him and spits out a new soldier — code-named Jenny, she's (arguably) the Doctor's daughter, and immediately calls him 'Dad'.
Georgia Moffett plays Jenny, and Ms Moffett's father is Peter Davison, who played The Doctor from 1981-84. She's literally "The Doctor's Daughter," because on either side of the Atlantic, nepotism is at the heart of everything, almost as much as money.
The story's rather trite point is that war is bad. The Doctor has a few revelatory moments, Donna gets to be brilliant (albeit about a dumb plot element), Martha (still tagging along) helps keep things moving, and Jenny is a chipper blank slate, but likable enough.
There's nothing meaty or thoughtful about any of it, but there's plenty of action and running, and it's another average-to-adequate episode.
S04E07: "The Unicorn and the Wasp"
The Doctor and Donna have landed in 1920s England, just in time for cocktails and a dinner party with Agatha Christie.
Of course, there will be murders to be solved.
Every detail of the episode captures the era, the dialogue sparkles like a spoof of mystery movies, the actress playing Ms Christie couldn't be more Ms Christie if she actually were Ms Christie, and in the question-and-answer scenes after the murders, the difference between the alibis offered and what's shown in flashback makes for a long series of chuckles.
That said, the 'big reveal' that explains why there's a wasp the size of an Oldsmobile is rhetorical nonsense, and the episode would be better without any wasps or monsters at all.
And yet, the big buzzing wasp is certainly weird, and kinda scary. And the episode seems intended as full-fledged comedy, and it's funny, so let's call it a success.
It doesn't add up to much, though, so for the fourth episode in a row, everything's lightweight but adequate.
S04E08: "Silence in the Library"
and S04E09: "Forest of the Dead"
"I'm sorry. I am so, so sorry, but you've got two shadows."
There's a lot going on in this excellent Doctor Who double feature, with a half-dozen fresh ideas all cleverly interconnected and dangling off each other like a mobile in a breezeway.
It's by Steven Moffat, who wrote several of Doctor Who's best early-season episodes, including "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances," "The Girl in the Fireplace," "Blink," and certainly including "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead."
I'm tempted to write too much about this story, one of my favorites, but the more that's said, the more's the risk of revealing too much. So here are a few memorable elements, but I'll leave you clueless how they connect together:
• The Doctor and Donna visit a library that's so huge it fills an entire world. "We're near the equator," he says, "so this must be biographies. I love biographies." But they're the only patrons of the entire planet-wide library. Where's everyone else?
• Vashta Nerada are shadow monsters. As The Doctor explains, they're "the shadows that melt the flesh," lurking not in every shadow, but in any shadow. Then the lights in the library start flickering out.
• A 52nd-century archaeologist arrives, accompanied by several others on an expedition. She's River Song (Alex Kingston, from ER), an old friend of The Doctor, but he's never met her before. That's because she's a time traveler like he is, and time travelers tend to live their lives out of sequential order.
• The story intermittently switches to a young girl undergoing therapy sessions with a kindly-seeming shrink, and he explains, "There's the real world, and there's the world of nightmares. That's right, isn't it? You understand that?" Yes, I know, says the child, so the psychiatrist continues: "What I want you to remember is this, and I know it's hard. The real world is a lie, and your nightmares are real."
• Recognizing the dangers of the shadows in the library, The Doctor sends Donna back to the safety of the TARDIS, but on the way she's yanked out of existence and into a sanitarium. She's a patient, not a prisoner, undergoing therapy with that same kindly shrink.
• One of the men on River's team is the wealthy financier of the expedition. As the money man, he is of course rude, self-centered, and unhelpful. He won't answer The Doctor's questions about the mission's purpose unless The Doctor and Donna sign non-disclosure agreements. Which they, of course, refuse to do.
And that's enough, I think, to give you a feel for what's in play here. Perhaps it sounds like a storytelling mess, but it's the opposite — a delicately thrilling concoction that's one of The Doctor and Donna's grandest adventures. It is seriously frightening, occasionally funny, and profoundly sad.
When everything works like this, Doctor Who is definitely not a children's show, possibly not even a 'family' show. This is science fiction for grown-ups.
"Hey, who turned out the lights?"
And a few leftover thoughts strike me on every rewatch:
It's a profound reaction, spread over a few pages of the script, as Donna comes to understand that River is from the future, and knows The Doctor even though The Doctor doesn't know River. More ominously, River knows Donna's name but she's never met Donna. "So why don't you know me? Where am I in the future?"
And River's team has two men named Dave. One's called Proper Dave, while the other is Other Dave. This is one of the story's least significant details, never explained, but what interaction occurred between the Daves, that left one accepted as 'proper', while the other was relegated to 'other'?
"Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead" are exponentially better than almost anything that might be playing in the cinemas or streaming on Netflix. Some night when you're up for a movie, watch these two episodes of Doctor Who instead. They'll make you as big a nut for the show as I am.
S04E10: "Midnight"
"Taking a big space truck with a bunch of strangers across a diamond planet called Midnight? What could possibly go wrong?"
Well, everything.
This is another remarkably good episode, and a favorite of mine, because it was my first look at the new Doctor Who.
I'd been dimly aware that the show had returned, but had no interest, because I'd seen the old, el cheapo Doctor Who from the 1960s-'80s — a show that looked so tacky, it was difficult to take seriously.
That night there was nothing better on the telly, though, so I shrugged and settled onto the couch to watch, and instead of sucking, this new Doctor Who quickly sucked me in.
The Doctor and Donna are on a resort planet full of sparkling diamonds and rubies and exotonic sunlight (whatever that might be, it's presented as scary). The Doc has signed up for a tour to see the sapphire waterfalls, but Donna decides to lounge around the pool instead, so she's mostly absent for the dramatics.
The Doctor rides a bus with a handful of other tourists, the driver, a mechanic, and a bored stewardess tending to passengers. And then there's an odd noise, the bus stops, there's a knocking sound…
One of the passengers suddenly can't speak, except to echo back whatever anyone else says. Lesley Sharp (
The Full Monty, Naked) plays the echo-voiced passenger, and makes it frightening indeed.
Written by Russell T Davies, directed by Alice Troughton, and acted amazingly by all, the passengers react like people would — with ordinary human fear, anger, confusion, and eventually hatred and violence. It's a breathtaking thriller, still goosebumpy no matter how many times I rewatch it.
Roger Corman would love this episode — there are nearly no pricey visual
effects, almost all of it takes place on one set, and we
never see the monster that's lurking outside. But damn, it works.
S04E11: "Turn Left"
Here's another wondrous episode, fourth in a row — it's a nightmare set in the universe of
Doctor Who, written again by Russell T Davies, and it might be his best episode.
The Doctor and Donna land on Planet Chinatown, where they're separated in a market crowd, and Donna wanders into a fortune-teller's booth to hear "Your future predicted, your life foretold." Ah, but the shop is a ruse, and the fortune-teller's only interest is making Donna confess a moment when her life changed.
In a flashback to something she'd forgotten from years earlier, Donna is driving a car, being nagged by her mother to "turn right" at an intersection, to go meet a friend who might offer Donna a job. She's stubborn, though, likes the job she has, and turns left instead.
It's the pivotal moment in her life, because that's why Donna was at the job where she met her future would-be husband, leading to her ruined wedding, and the events of Donna's first episode, season three's "The Runaway Bride."
From that, this becomes a sci-fi remake of It's a Wonderful Life — Donna relives the moment but this time she turns the car right instead of left. Next come a series of flashbacks from earlier adventures with The Doctor, but Donna's not there, and neither is The Doctor, and in clip after clip events go far worse, until everything in the world turns catastrophic.
We're shown the nuclear destruction of London. We're shown the CGI'd fat-babies from "Partners in Crime" killing 60,000,000 overweight Americans. Other disasters accumulate, and then in a few deftly-scripted scenes we're shown the harshest and most cruel anti-immigrant policies I've ever seen on TV.
Rose, The Doctor's companion through the show's first two seasons, pops in like Clarence the Angel, to explain that by never meeting The Doctor, Donna has doomed the world.
Everything about "Turn Left" is bleak and then bleaker, and with very little or no humor it's gotta be the most pessimistic episode ever, but sweet jeebers it's a masterpiece.
"There's something on your back."
If there's a problem here, it's the set-up at the start, with a devious hex from a fake fortune-teller who's Asian, and thus stereotypically 'mystical'. I'm inclined to let it slide, though. My guess is, Britain has far fewer Asians than America does, and thus there's less awareness of such mildly offensive tropes.
S04E12 "The Stolen Earth"
and S04E13 "Journey's End"
Each season of
Doctor Who ends with a big splashy multi-part story, and this is the biggest and splashiest yet. Whether it's enjoyable depends on whether you're willing or able to suspend your disbelief on such a scale. Frankly, I can't do it.
Earth has been relocated elsewhere. Twenty-six new planets appear in the heavens, stacked atop each other. Daleks are back, led again by the ultimate evil Dalek, a tentacle-faced monstrosity named Davros whose stated goal is the destruction of reality itself, though it's never explained what's to be gained by ending reality.
Daleks have always been sci-fi reinventions of the Nazis, at least symbolically, but here for a moment they actually shout "Exterminate! Exterminate!" in German. It's a bit much, ain't it?
On our side, there's an all-star team featuring every familiar good guy from modern
Doctor Who. Here's Rose and Martha, Jack Harkness from season one and the spinoff
Torchwood (along with the rest of that show's cast), and Mickey (Rose's ex-boyfriend), and Rose's mother, and Martha's mother, and Sarah Jane Smith (companion to the Third and Fourth Doctors in the 1970s), and even K9 the robot dog from that far sillier era. (Fictional) former Prime Minister Harriet Jones is back to help with the heroics, and from the real world, atheist-philosopher Richard Dawkins drops in (just for a moment, but yes, seriously). And of course, UNIT is heavily involved, so there's military weaponry to be fired, with loud hollering of futile orders.
For me it's too much, but these two episodes scored huge numbers and phenomenal ratings, and most fans of the show seem to love it.
I'd shrug and forgive it all as a season-ending wrap party that got out of hand, were it not for the ending, which — spoiler, consider yourself forewarned — deals Donna a phenomenally unfair adieu.
The show's three regular companions, Rose and Martha and Donna, all became inarguably better people through their time with The Doctor, and Rose even walks away with her own clone of David Tennant. But for sci-fi reasons as convoluted as the rest of this overblown two-parter, Donna's mind must be wiped of every memory of The Doctor, of all their adventures and everything they've done.
With those memories erased, Donna becomes again the rather whiny, borderline dim woman she'd been at the beginning of her first episode. That's a terrible thing to do to anyone the audience (and yeah, me) has come to genuinely care about. Donna's the best companion The Doctor has had, and this is what she gets?
Prior to these two episodes, I would've summarized the season as a victory for the show. Six very good episodes, several more that are enjoyable, with no out-and-out stinkers until the grand finale two-parter.
There's a subtle recurring theme that humans are at least as terrifying as the monsters, and that's the truth, ain't it? Sure, aliens are the enemy in "The Sontaran Stratagem," but it's their human ally who makes the menace far worse. In "Planet of the Ood," the Ood aren't a 'slave race' until they're enslaved by us. The bubble-breathing Hath in "The Doctor's Daughter" are warmongers, but only because humans make eternal war against them. And whatever monsters are behind the door in "Midnight," nothing's as monstrous as the passengers when they become an angry mob.
But fuck you, Doctor Who. Donna's story-line finishes with a cruel, dirty trick. There've been worse episodes than "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End," but it's the first time the show made me genuinely angry.
And then comes another misstep.
During the fourth season, it was announced that showrunner Russell T Davies and David Tennant, playing the 10th Doctor, were both moving on from the show. Star-scriptwriter Steven Moffat would replace Davies as the new man in charge of the series, and eventually Matt Smith was chosen to play the 11th incarnation of The Doctor. I have no complaints about these changes — Davies did a fine job reinventing Doctor Who, Moffat did a fine job continuing the show, and Tenant and Smith were both excellent as The Doctor.
For reasons unexplained, though, the fifth season of Doctor Who was postponed for two damned years, while Davies and Tennant made several 'specials', without a recurring companion for The Doctor. Most of these five 'specials' are competent, watchable, even rather good. None of them are particularly 'special', though.
That's because of what's missing, something the people running Doctor Who should've understood: The show's premise is that The Doctor has a long-term teammate, and together they have a series of adventures, preferably once weekly.
Without that comradery — when it's just The Doctor flying solo in 'specials', popping up alone and then disappearing for months before popping up alone again — that's Doctor Who at half power.
S04½E14: "The Next Doctor"
This was the show's 'Christmas special' for 2008, set in olde England in 1851.
The Doctor meets a man who claims to be him, who has a screwdriver that's not sonic and a 'TARDIS' that's a hot air balloon. This impersonation of The Doctor is fighting genuine Cybermen, though, so our real Doctor pitches in while trying to figure out what's going on.
The story is worth being told, and the real Doctor and The Doctor who's not The Doctor (David Morrissey, from Basic Instinct 2) both rise to heroics in the end. Also, these Cybermen are accompanied by furry little Cyberwerewolves, and everyone should have a pet.
What feels wrong about it is that The Doctor who's not The Doctor has a companion — a woman who helps him when he needs help, saves his life when it needs saving, hollers at him when he needs hollering, but isn't a romantic interest. And she's left behind in the end, as The Doctor who's really The Doctor leaves in his non-balloon TARDIS, alone.
S04½E15: "Planet of the Dead"
On an ordinary night in our ordinary London of the present day, a leather-clad female cat burglar heists an ancient treasure from a museum, then makes her getaway on one of the city's doubledecker public buses.
By impossible coincidence, The Doctor is riding the same bus, and by an even impossibler coincidence a wormhole opens on the highway, and the bus and everyone on board breaks through to some unknown time and place.
This setting — a bus, stranded on a desolate planet, with only The Doctor and a few other passengers — seems oddly reminiscent of the much better "Midnight." This time, though, The Doctor is able to chat with UNIT agents via cellphone. They might be the same UNIT agents we saw in the very bad "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End," but if not they're interchangeable cogs, all wearing bright red berets.
On it goes quite predictably, with The Doctor saving the day, and the cat burglar being his one-time co-star. She's played by Michelle Ryan, known to me only from this and a failed 2010s reboot of The Bionic Woman. Her character seems excessively cutesy, flirty, overconfident, and increasingly annoying as the show meanders along. Also annoying are The Fly-like aliens who speak in clicks, and the story's impossibly Harry Potteresque ending.
And then The Doctor leaves in the TARDIS, alone.
S04½E16: "The Waters of Mars"
Here's another revisit to the premise of The Doctor popping in on an outer space workplace where things are about to go wrong.
This time it's the first Earthly outpost on Mars, which The Doctor knows will end in disaster. We meet the soon-to-die astronauts, and watch as an unknown contaminant in the water turns them into fountains with extremely chapped lips.
The Doctor is not supposed to rescue them, because these are historically important deaths — "fixed points in time," in the show's jargon. You might remember a conversation from "The Fires of Pompeii" where Donna and The Doctor argued about the ethics of letting the historically doomed die. Here, that argument is re-argued, this time between The Doctor and one of the astronauts who won't survive.
This is a moral quandary for The Doctor, and even the second time around it makes for interesting drama.
The Doctor is 905 years old, though. He's literally a grandfather, and routinely mingles with famous people from history while always knowing exactly when and how they'll die. Seems to me, whether to interfere is a matter he should've sorted out eons ago.
And when the episode's over, The Doctor leaves in the TARDIS, alone.
S04½E17 and E18: "The End of Time," parts 1 and 2
It's become traditional for space aliens to attack London on Christmas, and this is the 2009 'Christmas special', so you know that's on the list.
Bernard Cribbins, who played Donna's lovable granddad over several fourth-season episodes, is back as the special guest companion. Donna is back too, but it's the ruined Donna, with no memory of The Doctor, and nothing noble about her but her name. She's only here to remind you of what Donna herself can never remember — that she used to be great.
Almost as awful, The Master (John Simm) returns. He's the boringly repetitive very-bad guy who always kills people, aggravates The Doctor, then somehow escapes so he can return in future episodes to kill people and aggravate The Doctor again. As soon as Simm starts maniacally laughing, the episode is ruined if it wasn't already, and it's a two-parter so two episodes are ruined.
"The End of Time" is so bad I fast-forwarded through much of it, zipping ahead in time like I'm The Doctor. Life is too short to willingly waste two hours having no fun at all, and this is no fun at all.
I'll brief you on the basics, though, complete with spoilers:
The Master disappears at the end (so you know he'll be back) after a special effects-overladen battle with a madman Gallifreyan played by mega-ham Timothy Dalton (formerly James Bond).
David Tennant's Doctor dies, but before regenerating he takes a schmaltzy victory lap across all of time and space, saying goodbye to Rose, Captain Jack, Sarah Jane, Donna who still doesn't know him, and Mickey and Martha, who are inexplicably now married to each other and battling space aliens together.
It adds up to a medically-risky overdose of hooey, and when it's finished, The Doctor leaves in the TARDIS, alone.
After that, though, Steven Moffat takes charge, Matt Smith is the new Doctor, Karen Gillan plays his companion Amy Pond, and the very best of Doctor Who is yet to come.
Previously on Doctor Who:
1st season 2nd season
3rd season
2/17/2024
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