Timeless Adventures (35 page)

The two part
The Time of the Angels/Flesh and Stone
reintroduced the Weeping Angels from
Blink
and Alex Kingston’s River Song from
Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead
(in which she was uploaded to a computer ‘afterlife’). It built on the mythology of the Angels in the same way that James Cameron’s
Aliens
(1986) built on Ridley Scott’s
Alien
(1979) by multiplying their numbers and giving them new abilities. A ship, the
Byzantium
, carrying River Song and a Weeping Angel, crashes on the planet Alfava Metraxis, reviving a colony of dormant Angels. In an echo of the novel
The Time Traveller’s Wife
, Song and the Doctor are meeting out of order, she having met him many times already while for him this is only their second encounter. Her origin and relationship with the Doctor, Amy and Rory would be one of the driving mysteries of the next two years.

Rory – played by Arthur Darvill and introduced in
The Eleventh Hour
as Amy’s boyfriend – returned in
The Vampires of Venice
, a parable dealing with questions of immigration and cultural survival. The Saturnynes are fish-like aliens hiding out in Venice in 1580, the last survivors of their world ravaged by ‘the Silence’. They arrived on Earth to escape the ‘cracks in the universe’, and intend to rebuild their race, first by converting the locals (beginning with the girls in the Calvierri school) and then sinking Venice to create a suitable watery habitat. Rather than the vampire story suggested by the title (it is a ‘perception filter’ that gives the appearance of vampirism to the Saturnynes – the way things are seen or perceived is a recurring theme in Moffat’s
Who
),
The Vampires of Venice
raises the question about an incoming population’s right to thrive at the expense of the indigenous inhabitants.

This was ripped from contemporary news headlines in which immigration to the UK was once again a hot button topic. Just as the Gelth in
The Unquiet Dead
could be seen as refugee immigrants struggling for their survival, so too are the Saturnynes, a people severely reduced in numbers and driven to desperate acts justified (they believe) by their self-preservation. This is a theme played up in writer Toby Whithouse’s alignment of the ‘foreign’ invaders with vampire mythology, often itself read as a metaphor for sexually predatory foreign incomers, a ‘contamination’ entering the world from elsewhere. The episode originally aired just days following the 2010 UK General Election in which immigration had been a factor. The blood-sucking vampire is an old stand-in for the incomer who uses unearned national resources but refuses to adapt or integrate. The Saturnynes are not only intent on converting human women so that they are suitable for reproduction, they are also colonial in intent, aiming to adapt an entire area of Italy to suit their needs, regardless of those who already live there. With the increasing visibility of vampires – in the
Twilight
saga (2008 – 13) and on TV in Whithouse’s own
Being Human
(BBC, 2008 – 13) and the American series True Blood (2009 – 14) –
Doctor Who
takes the iconography of one of literature’s oldest monsters and moulds it to fit an up-to-date political issue drawn from contemporary concerns.

With Rory firmly on board the TARDIS, the series reverts to the two companions – one male, one female – format it had most recently with Rose and Mickey, but also featured back in the 1970s with Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan, and in the 1960s, primarily with Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Herriot. It has been one of the series’ most successful formats, second only to the Doctor travelling with a solo female companion.

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.