The 2012 Christmas special The Snowmen was more relevant to the on-going storylines of the series than most (in fact, the most relevant since the first Christmas Special, The Christmas Invasion). Not only did it re-introduce ‘new’ companion Clara (and promptly kill her off again), but it also re-introduced a long-dormant antagonist, the Great Intelligence. Not seen since the series’ fifth year on air (Patrick Troughton’s second season), the Great Intelligence was portrayed as an disembodied alien evil that acted through others. It first appeared in The Abominable Snowmen, using robotic yeti in Tibet, and again in The Web of Fear, the sequel that same season, in which the yeti invaded through the London Underground.
In The Snowmen, Moffat created both a sequel and a prequel, bringing back the Great Intelligence (voiced by Ian McKellen, with Richard E Grant as its human puppet, Dr Simeon, the embodiment of the cold-hearted Victorian capitalist) and providing it with an origin story set in Victorian London. Having isolated himself after the loss of the Ponds, the Doctor is a recluse living in the TARDIS hidden on an invisible cloud high above the city (yet more fairytale elements), despite the entreaties of Madame Vastra, Jenny and the Sontaran Strax. The Doctor encounters Clara, a Mary Poppins-style governess (also mirrored in the dead governess that the Great Intelligence intends to use as a DNA template for its ice army) who occasionally works in a bar. He is initially unaware of her resemblance to Oswin (only having heard her voice). They are all caught up in the plan of the Great Intelligence to use psychic ‘memory snow’ to create an army of snowmen to conquer the planet. It is only after the defeat of the Great Intelligence and the death of Clara that the Doctor realises he has encountered her before.
The Snowmen also introduced a brand new version of the title sequence and the theme music that would run throughout the series’ 50th anniversary year of 2013. These new titles were a deliberate and triumphant celebration of everything that had gone before. Presented as a journey through time and space, the titles incorporated the TARDIS, clouds and galaxies of the Hartnell and McCoy titles, planets and nebulae in a swiftly spinning tumble, the Doctor’s face forming from the clouds (like Troughton’s – Matt Smith’s inspiration), and the logo breaking apart to unleash an up-to-date CGI version of the classic Tom Baker slit-scan time tunnel (albeit in red hues). It was an effective encapsulation of the show’s potential, capturing perhaps for the first time the true time and space traversing nature of Doctor Who.
The episode also introduced a new console room interior for the TARDIS, the third since the new series began. Unlike the previous two that adopted a whimsical attitude to the controls, the new version (from new production designer Michael Pickwoad, whose father had acted in the Hartnell serial The War Machines) reverted to the original style for the console established by designer Peter Brachacki in 1963. Looking more like a functional machine than at any time since the series was revived, the interior of this new TARDIS would be more fully explored in the episode Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.
The mystery of Clara was followed up in the first episode of the second part of season seven, broadcast in the traditional ‘new season’ Easter slot in early 2013. The Bells of Saint John reintroduced Clara as a contemporary character in a story about wi-fi and internet usage ripped from contemporary headlines (the first in quite a while to be so direct about its relevance to the contemporary lives of viewers). As worries about the time spent online by children and adults alike increased, and the growing reliance of people on the internet to conducted everyday tasks from grocery shopping to paying bills, became ever more evident, so Moffat wrote a contemporary thriller based on the concept that ‘there’s something lurking in the wi-fi’. Moffat’s departure from Twitter after complaining that it took too much time away from his scriptwriting duties may also have been an inspiration.
An organisation – led by guest star Celia Imrie – run from one of London’s newest iconic buildings, The Shard, is harvesting minds via the wi-fi and internet, but they are defeated when the Doctor and Clara turn their ‘spoonhead’ remote robotic technology against them. The Great Intelligence (briefly portrayed by Richard E Grant) is behind the plot and accepts defeat, but comments ‘I have feasted on many minds. I have grown’, setting the character up as a recurring antagonist once again.
Contemporary fears about the interface between technology and the personal – from Facebook privacy controls to ‘big state’ snooping on emails – inform The Bells of Saint John (the title is a reference to the TARDIS telephone, which rings for the first time since Moffat’s The Empty Child). Miss Kizlet’s (Imrie) control over her employees through hacking their personalities (she can increase or decrease their paranoia, obedience or intelligence – among other attributes – at the slide of a finger) highlights worries about decreasing worker rights in the ‘new Victorian’ age of austerity under the coalition government. In technological terms, there’s also the issue of how big business reduces people to mere data. Other sly contemporary references slipped in include the summer riots of 2011, and concerns about cattle and Burger King that coincidentally followed recent news about horsemeat in burgers. Additionally, the power of ‘crowd sourcing’ and the surveillance possibilities of the internet are co-opted by Kizlet to find the Doctor and the TARDIS.
Re-encountering Clara once more makes the Doctor determined to solve her ‘mystery’, feeling her repeated existence through time and space and her multiple deaths make her ‘impossible’. The next few episodes would, as well as being stand-alone adventures, revolve around the Doctor’s search for answers about Clara’s true nature as ‘the woman twice dead’.
Neil Cross – a writer new to Doctor Who, but known for Spooks and Luther – was responsible for The Rings of Akhaten, and although it was his second script for the series it was screened first. It fell to Cross to provide some backstory for Clara, with the opening few minutes depicting her parents’ history and her early years, under the watchful eye of a curious Doctor. By the end, Cross has cleverly used the leaf that provided the ‘meet-cute’ moment for Clara’s parents.
The challenging The Rings of Akhaten was disliked initially by many fans (although a significant number seemed to revise their opinions after rewatching). It was an example of the kind of format-breaking ‘oddball’ story that populated the Sylvester McCoy years when Andrew Cartmel was script editor. It’s that rarest of beasts, a Doctor Who story driven by music. In an echo of The End of the World and The Beast Below, the Doctor takes his new companion somewhere exotic to display the possibilities of travel in the TARDIS, in this case a fractured planetary system known as the Rings of Akhaten. Amid a menagerie of bizarre creatures (more than have ever been seen in a single Doctor Who episode before), Clara hooks up with Merry (Emilia Jones, daughter of singer Aled Jones) who is due to sing at a huge public event to pacify a legendary god. Cross explores the foundations of religion in myth and legend, while depicting a parasitic ‘god’ (perhaps modelled by Cross on Marvel comics’ Galactus, Devourer of Worlds) that feeds on memories. This echoes the strange barter system of the planet, where goods and services are swapped for items of sentimental value, imbued with meaningful memories. When the song is interrupted, the ‘angry god’ is awakened. The Doctor confronts it (it takes the form of the system’s sun), but even his copious experience fails to sate its hunger – only Clara’s leaf, containing as it does not only her memories of her late mother, but the ‘infinite potential’ that her mother failed to live, destroys the menace. With a pyramid, an ancient mummy, sun worship and a planet name based on pharaoh Akhenaten, it is clear Cross drew much of his inspiration from Egyptian mythology. Several times in the episode Clara states her disbelief in ghosts, but Cross’s next script, Hide, would bring her face-to-face with one.
The return of a classic monster has been a frequent hook for Doctor Who since its return in 2005. However, having tackled the Daleks (successfully in their ‘bronze’ variety, unsuccessfully with their Victory of the Daleks revamp), the Cybermen, and the Sontarans mo
st of the ‘core’ monsters (those remembered by casual viewers, as opposed to fans) had been done. Second tier creatures – the Silurians and Autons – had also been reinvented for modern viewers. Even some more obscure creations had featured, such as the Macra in Gridlock. Two returns had been long awaited: the Ice Warriors and the Zygons (who would crop up in the anniversary special).
Writer Mark Gatiss answered many of the questions about the Ice Warriors (originally created by Brian Hayles) arising from their four previous appearances. They’d been seen twice with the Second Doctor plus a brief cameo at the climax of The War Games, and twice with the Third Doctor following a similarly brief cameo in The Mind of Evil. A variety of spin-off novels and audio dramas had kept the memory of the iconic Martians alive for fans.
Gatiss had pitched the return of the Ice Warriors to Moffat several times, but the showrunner had constantly declined fearing they were (as Gatiss noted to the Radio Times) ‘the embodiment of the slow-moving [Doctor] Who monster of legend’. Pitching a story that trapped a lone-but-powerful Ice Warrior (an approach that had worked well to re-introduce the by-then much-mocked Daleks in 2005) on a 1980s’ Russian submarine, Gatiss had his story, but he also had to supply ‘something new’. That turned out to be an exploration of just what the Ice Warriors were like under their iconic reptillian armour (Hayles had provided some explanations in his novel of The Ice Warriors, but nothing had ever been seen on screen). Cold War gave the Martian marauders a new lease of life.
In 1983, a Russian nuclear-armed submarine has unearthed a frozen ‘something’, quickly thawed out (recalling Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World, 1951) and on a rampage. The Doctor and Clara, expecting Las Vegas but finding themselves trapped in Das Boot instead, take charge of the situation with the Doctor identifying the thing as an Ice Warrior, a preserved survivor of a once noble race.
The remainder of the episode essentially riffed on the 1979 Ridley Scott film Alien, with various crewmembers falling prey to the Ice Warrior – identified as Grand Marshall Skaldak, a warrior not unlike the Russian submarine commander. Skaldak escapes his bio-mechanical armour and is able to secret himself about the submarine, striking at will – and allowing modern CGI to show what the Ice Warriors look like under their armour (with a face resembling the Martians of The War of the Worlds, 1953, and claws that recall the ‘face hugger’ creatures of Alien).
With modern international tension as high as ever and a more complex geopolitical world, even though the cold war is only a memory, this episode showed that weapons of mass destruction were just as bad an idea in the 21st century as they had been in the 20th. At the time of broadcast in April 2013, it was North Korea that had taken the role of the world’s nuclear bogeyman, threatening the US with radioactive destruction. For all its nostalgia, both for the mid-1980s and for an old style of ‘base under siege‘ Doctor Who, Cold War revealed itself to be as chillingly relevant to the present day as any far-future set parable of mankind’s end.
Clara’s lack of belief in ghosts came back to haunt her in Neil Cross’s Hide. Channelling Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972), Cross adopted shades of Kneale’s Professor Quatermass for Dougray Scott’s Professor Alec Palmer. It’s 1974, and Palmer and psychic Emma Grayling (Jessica Raine, who would go on to portray Doctor Who’s original producer Verity Lambert in the celebratory drama An Adventure in Space and Time) are attempting to summon the ghost of ‘the witch in the well’. The Doctor discovers that the ‘ghost’ is a trapped time traveller whom he must rescue from a ‘monster’ menacing her in a pocket universe. When he becomes trapped there, Clara must commandeer a seemingly-reluctant TARDIS (the ‘sentient’ ship has been consistently difficult with Clara) to rescue him. The Doctor realises that the ‘monster’ in the house and its counterpart in the pocket universe are a couple, trying to be reunited. At the climax, the episode effortlessly switches genres from ghost story to love story. Only at the end is it revealed that the Doctor came to this time and place so that the psychic Emma could evaluate the ‘twice dead girl’, Clara Oswald.
That the solution to what appears to be a supernatural problem (a ghost) turns out to be science fiction (a time traveller) should be no surprise to viewers of Doctor Who, or fans of Nigel Kneale whose Quatermass and the Pit (BBC, 1958-59) took a similar stance. The rise of ‘parascience’ in so-called ‘reality’ TV shows such as Most Haunted (2002–13) would have appalled Kneale, but it is through the context of such shows (or hit movie series like Paranormal Activity) that most viewers experienced Hide, even if the 1974 setting puts the events in a pre-digital world of magnetic tape and photochemical film.
The TARDIS itself became the focal point of Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, an area ripe for exploration during the show’s 50th anniversary year. The activities of the Van Baalen Brothers salvage crew, determined to extract anything of value from the Doctor’s disabled space-time machine, recalled news reports of metal thefts during the economic downturn. Beyond that, the episode is a love letter to the Doctor’s vehicle, albeit in a very different style to Neil Gaiman’s The Doctor’s Wife. There’s more than a hint of Alice in Wonderland in Clara’s recursive wanderings of the TARDIS corridors. From its first appearance in An Unearthly Child the TARDIS had been a point of fascination for fans and general viewers alike. While occasional dialogue would explain attributes of the vehicle or would anthropomorphise it, very few episodes dealt with the ship as a focal point. The Edge of Destruction was the first serial to explore the TARDIS and its nature in any depth. The Time Monster and Logopolis both featured the TARDIS as central to their stories, and companions’ living quarters were a recurring element of the ‘soapy’ 1980s episodes, while The Invasion of Time depicted much of the interior as an unimaginative 1970s leisure centre (where the story was actually shot, due to industrial action at the BBC). For Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, the production were able to depict more diverse rooms than ever before, not only the swimming pool and library (both referenced in The Eleventh Hour), but also a dramatic re-imagining of the Eye of Harmony (featured in the 1996 Paul McGann TV movie) and the heart of the vehicle itself.
While some of these vistas were fan-pleasing and spectacular (such as the tree-like ‘architectural reconfiguration system’ and the Apple-iMac style blown-apart engine room), in the end the episode fails to fulfill its promise, despite raising questions around fate and identity. Audio quotes from past characters are lost in the noisy sound mix, while the characters of the scavengers were underdeveloped (with even the reveal that the ‘android’ of the trio is no such thing falling flat). The ‘monster of the week’ time zombies were also explained in a rush, and – perhaps worst of all – the story adopted a ‘magic reset button’ (literally labelled as a ‘big friendly button’) to eliminate almost all that happened, although elements would later be recalled by Clara…
The next episode – The Crimson Horror, the new series’ 100th instalment – was the second this season from Mark Gatiss and a riff on some classic Doctor Who settings and characters. For the first time, someone other than showrunner Moffat got to write for the Victorian ’Paternoster gang’ of Silurian Madame Vastra, housekeeper Jenny and Sontaran ‘butler’ Strax, and the first 15 minutes almost function as a pilot for a spin-off series as it takes that long for Matt Smith’s Doctor to appear. Investigating a strange idyllic community established in Yorkshire in 1893 by Winifred Gillyflower (Diana Rigg), the Doctor has managed to get himself immobilised as a victim of ‘the crimson horror’. Exploiting the ‘deplorable excesses of the Penny Dreadful’, Gatiss conjures up a mock Victorian world familiar from many Doctor Who episodes.
In an episode verging on Steampunk, Gatiss spoofs the Victorian ‘social improver’ in Mrs Gillyflower, who has developed Sweetland (a new Jerusalem – they even sing the hymn) in the mould of real world Victorian model villages like New Lanark in Scotland, where workers lived next to the factory (although the one here consists of nothing more than gramophone records playing sound effects
) in a crude form of theoretical utopian socialism. Her evangelising on the coming apocalypse has provided a steady stream of recruits, but only the best survive the ‘preservation’ process (and are stored under giant bell jars awaiting reawakening). The rejects – those seen by the area’s mortician as suffering from the inexplicable ‘crimson ’orror’ – are cast into the canal, stiff and red skinned. It’s in this form – but still alive – that the Paternoster gang discover the imprisoned Doctor.
Timeless Adventures Page 28
