So, unabashed squee from me for the second and third of the Fourteenth Doctor’s three episodes. A real feeling that the grownups are back in charge, wanting to make a show that is fun to watch and accessible, while also being much less shy about its past than it was in 2005. (It was not until Christmas 2006, in Catherine Tate’s first episode, that the word “Gallifrey” was even mentioned.)
I watch Wild Blue Yonder with a couple of fellow fans in the USA last weekend, and was really impressed at taking a fairly simple story (which has been done many times before, including by RTD in what I still think is his best single episode, Midnight) and making it come alive again. It’s rare to have a Doctor Who story that depends so much on the principals, though of course it was first done in The Edge of Destruction in 1964. The special effects show the money that Disney has thrown at it. The Isaac Newton bit was sheer humour, combined with a poke in the eye for bigots by casting a non-white actor in the role, but I don’t see any harm in either of those objectives. And of course lovely and emotional to see Bernard Cribbins again at the end.
The Giggle brought back the Celestial Toymaker, from a story shown in 1966 of which only one episode survived, for a grand confrontation that was suitably climactic. I thought the scenes of the Toymaker creating havoc inside UNIT came close to missing the mark, with comedy violence against women characters and a rather peculiar reference to American Beauty, but otherwise I really loved it.
Catherine Tate got a bit less to do here, apart from a great lost-in-corridors scene, but that’s because we were also introduced to Ncuti Gatwa a bit earlier than most of us had anticipated, with him emerging from David Tennant’s body wearing half his clothes (a gag also used in James Hadley Chase’s Miss Shumway Waves a Wand) and then joining forces with Tennant to defeat the villain – in a simple game of Catch, though that is very well filmed. Neil Patrick Harris was great too; of course real Germans don’t talk anything like that, the whole point is that the shop-keeper aspect of the Toymaker is a fake.
Some sensitive souls have complained that one of the central messages, that people are too often unkind on social media and it would be a bad world if we did this to each other in real life, suggests that it’s wrong to speak your mind frankly. Personally I think it’s reasonable to regret that so much public discourse is polarised these days, and also to acknowledge that RTD has been targeted for grossly unfair online criticism for his Doctor Who work since at least 2005, and you can’t expect that not to sting. I also thought the subtle commentary on television as a force for barbarism was nicely subversive of the very medium we were watching.
The return of UNIT (in a much nicer building than the one that got blown up last year) was not a huge surprise; some were surprised by the return of Bonnie Langford as Mel Bush. I was not. Why not? Because Mel was the only other character present at the final regeneration of Old Who, when the Sixth Doctor was transformed into the Seventh Doctor by BBC internal politics. Having her witness the regeneration from Fourteenth Doctor to Fifteenth Doctor confirms the message that we are saying goodbye to the first era of New Who and moving on to something new.
And I must say that the idea of the Fourteenth Doctor, representing all his predecessors, can settle down to a nice retirement with friends after sixty years, is tremendously moving for those of us who are also closer to sixty than to our youth. Perhaps something got in my eye at the end there. Anyway, I loved it.
Afterwards F and I rewatched the final episode of The Celestial Toymaker. The lore is that The producer of the day (John Wiles) had actually planned to make this what we would now call the first ever regeneration story. The First Doctor spends the second and third episodes invisible as a punishment by the Toymaker (and to accommodate William Hartnell’s holiday schedule); the idea was that when he returned to visibility it would be in a different body. But the BBC higher-ups moved to prevent this, the producer resigned and William Hartnell got another six months in the role.
The episode is manifestly made on a much smaller budget than any 21st century Doctor Who, and the pace is glacial. But the moments of confrontation between Hartnell and Michael Gough, playing the Toymaker, are well done, and the Doctor’s dilemma of how to play the final move in a game that will destroy their pocket universe when it ends is a good plot device (recycled in The Three Doctors and elsewhere). And we have this prophetic exchange at the end:
As Elizabeth Sandifer has written, this is a very problematic story (though see also here), and it was interesting to see it being reinvented in a very different way last night.
It isn’t over for the Fourteenth Doctor as far as this blog is concerned; I have three novelisations and a comic strip to report back on in due course. But that will do for now.