Amy’s Choice saw Rory and Amy deal directly with their perceptions of reality as the Doctor battled the Dream Lord (Toby Jones), a dark aspect of his own personality (an echo of Michael Jayston’s Valeyard, the villain of the epic 14-episode The Trial of a Time Lord in 1986). The pair are presented with a series of alternate realities (happily married and Amy pregnant, but pursued by monsters; or freezing to death in a seemingly inert TARDIS), with Amy forced to opt for one: but which one is genuine?
Simon Nye’s script emphasised relationship issues between Amy and Rory (a focus of the series going forward), played out against a generic Doctor Who peril. The Dream Lord is a trickster figure able to articulate the things the Doctor would never say, and he focuses immediately on the uncertainties between Amy and Rory. Rory’s perception of Leadworth as their preferred reality (their ‘dream’, a ‘nice village and a family’) is disrupted by their regular returns to the possibilities of the TARDIS, and Amy’s reluctance to subscribe whole-heartedly to Rory’s idyll. The core of the episode is Amy’s ultimate decision to abandon any reality that no longer has Rory in it, clearly prefiguring her similarly motivated decision at the conclusion of The Angels Take Manhattan, their final episode.
The following two-part tale The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood saw the series return to the eco-concerns of the 1970s with an effective restaging in Moffat’s dark fairytale form of the Third Doctor tales The Silurians and Inferno. A drilling experiment in near-future Wales is disrupted by the re-awakening of creatures hidden below the Earth (like fairytale goblins or gnomes). The newly revived Silurians, believing themselves to be under attack, kidnap a young child – Elliot – and Amy by dragging them through the earth.
The different look of the modern Silurians (represented by two related characters embodied by Neve McIntosh, who’d go on to portray the Silurian character Madame Vastra) is explained by the Doctor as them being ‘a different branch of the species’. The story concerns and those of writer Chris Chibnall are the same, however, as the 1970s originals. The ecological threat represented by the drilling project is augmented by the attempted peace brokered by the Doctor between the humans and the Silurians, echoing real-life events between Israel and Palestine.
The end of the story brought the ‘crack in space’ arc front and centre once more, as the crack claims the life of Rory, erasing him from history and so from Amy’s memory. On top of that, the Doctor retrieves a piece of ‘shrapnel’ from the crack, discovering it to be part of the TARDIS, suggesting it is somehow related to the explosion that created the cracks in time and space. This is a fuller development in the use of arc stories and themes than those achieved during the Davies era (Bad Wolf, Torchwood, Mr Saxon/the Master), and it has a major impact on central characters like Rory, Amy and the Doctor.
The announcement over the end credits of Vincent and the Doctor of a helpline number for anyone affected by the ‘issues’ dealt with by the episode indicates how different it was. Written by Richard Curtis, what starts as a jolly jaunt by the Doctor and Amy to visit painter Vincent van Gogh (where they also save him from a marauding monster) becomes a meditation on mental illness, using van Gogh’s well-known depression (depicted with feeling by actor Tony Curran). The result was an appropriately impressionistic (rather than strictly historically accurate) portrayal of the artist, and an unusually moving episode allowing van Gogh to see the acclaim his work is met with in the future. However, there’s more than one ‘invisible monster’ stalking the artist, and while the Doctor can deal with the alien Krafayis, there’s little he or Amy can do to help van Gogh cope with his mental anguish.
The serious message was conveyed with a lot of humour and lightness of touch in Vincent and the Doctor, an approach even more to the fore in the following ‘sitcom’ episode, The Lodger. Amy is trapped in the TARDIS while the Doctor poses as ‘an ordinary human’, moving in with Craig (James Corden) while he awaits the resolution of the ‘materialisation loop’ that has engulfed his time-space machine. This gimmick put Matt Smith’s distinctly alien Doctor into a normal domestic situation, while also having him deal with the incursion of a rogue ‘time engine’ that has caused his own TARDIS to be thrown for a loop. Based on a comic strip from Doctor Who Magazine that had featured Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, Gareth Roberts’ script for The Lodger played up the comic culture clash possibilities in the scenario, and was a further indication of modern Doctor Who’s willingness to play games with audience expectations. It proved such a successful diversion that a sequel appeared the following year, reuniting the Doctor with Craig in Closing Time.
The Lodger was only a pause for breath before the threads of the season were pulled together in the two-part climax, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang. In not only uniting the diverse elements of the past season (featuring brief returns in the pre-titles sequence for van Gogh, Churchill, and Queen Liz from The Beast Below), this epic two-part conclusion explored the back story of Amy, provided a new heroic aspect for the returning Rory, and involved the enigmatic River Song. It rewarded viewers who’d watched the entire season, while also attempting to remain accessible to occasional viewers.
Moffat’s script also resolved a long-standing Doctor Who question: why do the Doctor’s enemies rarely co-operate in order to out-manoeuvre him? In the 1970s, the Master had attempted various ill-fated alien alliances. Russell T Davies had brought the series’ two most famous monsters, the Daleks and the Cybermen, together (as mutual antagonists) in Doomsday. For his episodes, Moffat created a grand alliance of enemies who have put aside their differences to manufacture a trap, believing that the explosion of the Doctor’s TARDIS caused the cracks in space.
This monster mash was a budget-saving move in that it allowed the reuse of a variety of creature costumes, while confronting the Doctor with a formidable array of enemies. It is also a pay off for the fairytale approach that Moffat took: the ‘most dangerous being in the universe’ is the Doctor himself (as far as his enemies are concerned: he did tell Elliot in The Hungry Earth when he asked if the Doctor was scared of monsters, ‘No, they’re scared of me!’), and they have drawn on Amy’s memories to construct their trap (the Roman gladiators and the Pandorica itself come from her childhood reading). The Doctor tells the story of the Pandorica in fairytale terms: ‘There was a goblin, or a trickster. Or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it or… reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.’ Little does he realise that he is the goblin-trickster-warrior he is describing and the Pandorica is a trap awaiting him. The monsters’ alliance and battle with the Doctor has an epic feel, but it also suggests the dark world of fairytales, helped by setting much of the episode in and around Stonehenge (where some actual filming took place, as well as at a partial replica built for the show).
The apocalyptic climax (the end of the universe) follows a series of dire situations: the Doctor is sealed in the Pandorica by his enemies; Amy is killed by the Auton duplicate Rory; and River is trapped in the self-destructing TARDIS. As the stars and planets wink out of existence, the only hope for resolution are the words ‘To Be Continued’ and the knowledge that there is one more episode to go.
The almost hour-long The Big Bang was a low-key follow-up to the epic The Pandorica Opens. It reintroduced the young Amelia Pond, in a universe slowly contracting due to the TARDIS explosion. Just as Amy’s memories had been used to build the trap for the Doctor, so her memories of the Doctor would ultimately restore him. In between, an out-of-time Doctor gives Roman Rory (dubbed the fairytale-like ‘the last centurion’) the means to free him from the Pandorica, swapping places with the wounded Amy: the stasis field of the Pandorica keeps her alive until she is in turn freed by her younger self during her visit to the museum in which the mysterious box eventually comes to rest. After River is freed from the exploding TARDIS, the Doctor pilots the Pandorica into the TARDIS explosion where the same
‘restoration field’ that saved Amy reboots the entire universe, with the cracks in time closing but trapping the Doctor on the other side.
Memory and remembering were fairytale themes running through this series, and it all comes together with Amy’s recollection at her wedding of ‘something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue’ bringing back not just the TARDIS (the ancient-modern blue box time machine that the Doctor ‘borrowed’ from the Time Lords), but the Doctor himself. In The Pandorica Opens he told Amy: ‘Nothing is ever forgotten, not completely. And if something can be remembered it can come back.’ It was the Doctor who, as his own timeline unravels, sowed the seeds of Amy’s recall, travelling back through important moments in the series (including an odd scene already shown in Flesh and Stone). There’s a pleasingly meta-fictional moment when the Doctor is talking to the sleeping Amy: ‘You’ll remember me a little. I’ll be a story in your head… but that’s okay, we’re all stories in the end…’
While these fairytale elements are deliberate and run through Moffat’s approach to Doctor Who stories, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang also used the audience’s expected familiarity with a new strain of television popular science to get across some of its more outlandish moments. At the forefront of this movement was physicist Brian Cox, whose series Wonders of the Solar System aired early in 2010. His populist approach to complex ideas prepared British television audiences for the quantum theory notions that Moffat included (Cox would even go on to make a brief appearance during Smith’s third series in The Power of Three). While the science of The Big Bang might be fanciful and outlandish, the work of Cox and other science communicators had paved the way for a general audience to take on board the kind of ‘wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey’ complexities, conundrums and paradoxes that Steven Moffat had a taste for.
Moffat’s fairytale take on Doctor Who exploited a range of childhood and child-like anxieties, often confronted in the guise of children’s literature. Classic literature was also the source for the 2010 Christmas special, which wore its influences on its sleeve with the title A Christmas Carol. Michael Gambon starred as a miser whose life is reshaped by the Doctor in a Steampunk-tinged imaginative fantasy adventure that relegated the show’s science fiction heritage (which in this episode includes cryogenics, and a spaceship flight deck modelled on that of Star Trek) to mere background.
Doctor Who was back once more with the first half of Matt Smith’s second year in the title role between April and June 2011. In an unusual move, the season was split into two, with seven episodes running from the usual Easter start date, but the remaining six held back for an autumn run. The same would happen with Smith’s third season, with an autumn 2012/spring 2013 split. While Moffat attempted to make the best of this stop-start approach to transmission in episodic blocks, it seemed apparent that the scheduling was driven by BBC cutbacks, essentially stretching two years of production over a three-year transmission period. Instead of the 2009 ‘gap year’ strategy pursued by Davies, the Moffat years saw fewer episodes scheduled more regularly but in shorter blocks.
Moffat argued that the new structure gave this run of episodes twice as many launches and twice as many ‘season finale’ events, building on Davies’ own approach to ‘event television’. Now in its sixth year on air (considered ‘old’ by modern TV standards), Moffat realised that Doctor Who needed to be kept fresh, so he cleverly structured each batch to emphasise the episodes that gained the show media attention. Unusually he opened the season with a complex two-part tale set (and partly filmed) in America – in itself a hook for a news item. The Impossible Astronaut opened with the apparent death of the Doctor at the hands of a mysterious figure in an Apolloera space suit, before an earlier Eleventh Doctor gets involved with the Silents/Silence and the 1969 moon landings. Amy, Rory and River Song having witnessed the Doctor’s presumed ‘death’ struggle to keep the information to themselves. There are other mysteries, such as the status of Amy’s suggested pregnancy and the appearance of an eye-patch wearing figure observing her.
The Silents (connected to the ‘Silence will fall’ voice) were another ingenious Moffat monster creation. The gimmick was that if you see them, you instantly forget, making their covert infiltration of mankind possible. Thematically they fitted well with the ongoing theme of ‘remembering’, and proved to be a formidable opponent, difficult to combat if their very presence is instantly forgotten.
The complexities surrounding the Doctor’s apparent death would not be resolved until the autumn, so it was a deliberate ploy to follow up a dense pair of episodes with two somewhat lighter stories. The Curse of the Black Spot took Doctor Who into Pirates of the Caribbean territory (with the fourth movie in the franchise, subtitled On Stranger Tides, released shortly after this episode aired), playing out both as a traditional tale of pirates and their treasure and something more like science fiction (even if the eventual reveal that the menace here is simply an automated system gone wrong echoes past stories such as The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and The Girl in the Fireplace, all written by Moffat).
Doctor Who has done pirates before, whether in 1966’s The Smugglers (featuring the same real-life Captain Avery as this episode), or the space variety in The Pirate Planet, or even the Tennant-starring animated spin-off The Infinite Quest. What should have been a fun, stand-alone light romp was undermined by the need to include the series-long arc elements (eye-patch lady reappears) and a heavy-handed father-son relationship, something Moffat (himself a man with a young family) has brought to the show (a motif later repeated in Night Terrors).
Comics scribe Neil Gaiman – a self-described Doctor Who fan – delivered a love letter to the series in The Doctor’s Wife. The title, provided by Moffat rather than Gaiman, came from a fake episode posted on 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner’s office notice-board as a way of tracing the source of leaks about upcoming episodes. Family (beyond friends and companions) had never been central to Doctor Who beyond the existence of his granddaughter Susan, but it had often been referenced or recreated in the revived series. The relationship between the First Doctor and his granddaughter was never explored in any depth, to the extent that she often became just another companion, the original model for the young female companions who followed. Although it has connections to the overall season story arc (Amy is still concerned about her foreknowledge of the Doctor’s death, while the future is hinted at when Rory is told that ‘The only water in the forest is the river…’), it integrates them with far more success than The Curse of the Black Spot. Littered with shout outs to Doctor Who‘s own on-screen history (Time Lord cubes, deleting TARDIS rooms, the ringing Cloister Bell, Artron energy), The Doctor’s Wife is built around one key conceit: the way the Doctor has often anthropomorphised his relationship with the TARDIS, frequently calling it ‘old girl’.
The TARDIS arrives upon a junkyard asteroid outside the known universe after the Doctor receives a Time Lord psychic message cube, suggesting there may be other survivors of the Time War. Upon arrival, the ‘soul’ of the TARDIS is removed and ‘downloaded’ into a young woman called Idris (Suranne Jones). The asteroid contains a malevolent intelligence called House that has been feasting on the Artron energy of captive TARDISes, killing the Time Lord occupants – it is now starving due to the demise of the Time Lords, so plans to use the Doctor’s TARDIS to escape into the ‘real’ universe.
The heart of the episode is the relationship between the Doctor and his now human TARDIS in the female-shaped person of Idris. Arguing like an old married couple, the TARDIS reveals that it was she who stole him from Gallifrey, and not the other way around – although Moffat’s later The Name of the Doctor complicates this matter… It is also suggested that what the Doctor took to be random wanderings that always landed him in trouble may have been, partially at least, guided by the TARDIS. All this was like catnip to long-term fans, but it also resonated with casual viewers, with a final consolidated rating of almost eight million.
Following th
at, the two-part meditation on identity The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People was a come down, even if, like The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood before it, it contained strong echoes of the Pertwee period in its make-up. Arriving on a remote island on 22nd century Earth, the Doctor, Amy and Rory become involved with the maintenance crew of a toxic acid factory where ‘Gangers’, or doppelgangers, of the real crew made of an artificial substance called ‘the flesh’ (a type of programmable organic matter) do all the dangerous work. A ‘solar tsunami’ disrupts the plant, and leads to the Gangers gaining sentience and a sense of self-preservation, causing them to rebel against their ‘creators’. While much heavy work is made of telling the real crew from their Ganger doubles, the story also throws in a Ganger double of the Doctor (allowing Amy to admit her knowledge of his impending death to the real Doctor under the impression she is talking to the Ganger) and a climactic revelation that the Amy who has been travelling with the Doctor and Rory is also a Ganger ‘flesh’ duplicate. The real Amy, whose pregnancy is well advanced, is held prisoner by eye-patch lady. The result is an uneven, artificially extended (at two episodes) tale that serves as little more than a background explanation for the presence of the duplicate Amy on board the TARDIS and a possible way out for the Doctor when it comes to his ‘death’ at Lake Silencio.
As well as the Pertwee era notions of pollution and the care and handling of hazardous chemicals, these episodes share some affinity with the Pertwee period plastic Autons. Issues of identity, memory and humanity all come into play, but none are developed enough to make the story compelling beyond a simplistic Frankenstein metaphor. There are echoes of big screen science fiction, such as the ‘skin job’ Replicants of Blade Runner (1982), the genetic ‘spares’ from Never Let Me Go (2010), or the disposable duplicate manual labourers of Moon (2009). Dominated as it is by the need to build to the cliffhanger as the lead-in to the mid-season finale of A Good Man Goes to War, the detail of The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People is all but obliterated, dulling its impact.
Timeless Adventures Page 26
