Timeless Adventures (36 page)

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 that, 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.

A four-month break followed
A Good Man Goes to War
before the series returned, so a lot of questions had to be answered and a dramatic hook provided to ensure audiences would return for the rest of the ongoing story. This was both the danger and the opportunity of the split-season scheduling that Moffat had no choice but to embrace in his storytelling strategies.

A Good Man Goes to War
sets up a new format for the show that would be explored further. It gave the Doctor a ‘gang’ of friends instead of one or two companions, comprising the Victorian Silurian crime fighter Madame Vastra and her servant Jenny, the Sontaran nurse Strax, and Dorium Maldovar, the rotund blue chap briefly seen in the opening sequence of
The Pandorica Opens
. Although that episode saw characters from earlier in the season collectively helping the Doctor, they never worked together, unlike those featured here and in the later
Dinosaurs in a Spaceship
(in which the Doctor openly declares ‘I’ve got a gang now…’). Moffat couldn’t have known the eventual popularity of Vastra, Jenny and Strax, leading to him re-using the characters frequently next season (in
The Snowmen, The Crimson
Horror
and
The Name of the Doctor
).

The ‘gang’ come together to help the Doctor rescue Amy from her incarceration at Demon’s Run, a fortified asteroid, where she is being held by Madame Kovarian (Frances Barber), the mysterious eye-patch lady. Throw in a brief appearance by the Cybermen and a Silurian army, and this episode presents a more cleverly conceived monster team-up than
The Pandorica Opens
achieved. Again, the aim is the budget-saving re-use of available costumes, but Moffat approached the challenge by creating a core group of characters that unexpectedly struck a chord with viewers.

Although full of action and incident,
A Good Man Goes to War
was actually about a fundamental change in the Doctor (one followed up at the end of this series and the beginning of the next). He comes to realise that his victories have resulted in him gaining a reputation, one that has caused opponents to preemptively strike at him. Kovarian and the Clerics have set out to create a human-Time Lord mix to give them a controllable weapon: the result is River Song, revealed at the climax to be the lost-in-time daughter of Amy and Rory. Born at Demon’s Run, the baby is kidnapped by Kovarian (suggesting the changeling myth in Scottish folklore or the kidnapped/abandoned children of many fairytales), raised in the orphanage seen in
The Day of the Moon
, who then escapes and regenerates into River Song (a scene revealed in the next instalment,
Let’s Kill Hitler
). Eventually, it is she who ends up in the Apollo-era space suit and is seen to kill the Doctor. This was Moffat talking his ‘timey-wimey’ storytelling to the max, and hoping that viewers would be able to keep up with him. Douglas Adams, script editor on the series in 1979, once described his job as making the show simple enough for adults and complicated enough for children. It was an approach with which Moffat concurred: ‘We haven’t actually had any complaints from the general audience at all,’ Moffat told the
New York Magazine‘s
Vulture website. ‘Not one single bit of audience feedback has even mentioned complexity.
Doctor
Who
can be complicated at times, it absolutely can be – but it’s supposed to be. You’re supposed to pay attention. I’m also addressing children, hugely the case in the UK, and children are demanding of complexity. I think we do some complicated stories, [but] we also do incredibly simple stories. I always think this: I don’t care if it’s complicated or too scary or too grown-up or too childish or whatever they are saying this week, so long as they never say it’s too boring. If anyone says “Oh, it was a bit dull this week” [that] is when the show will start to die.’

Just over 7.5 million saw
A Good Man Goes to War
, and the following instalment attracted 8.1 million to further discover the answers to Moffat’s complex and teasing questions.

The hook to bring viewers back to
Doctor Who
in the autumn of 2011 was what showrunner Steven Moffat termed the ‘slutty’ title of
Let’s
Kill Hitler
. The episode introduced Mels, a newly revealed ‘best friend’ of companions Amy and Rory: they’d all grown up together, as shown in an increasingly amusing series of flashbacks. Having accosted the Doctor in a cornfield, Mels announces ‘You’ve got a time machine, I’ve got a gun. What the hell, let’s kill Hitler’, explaining the title as the show launches into its regular title sequence.