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Is This Death? (The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords)

152

Oh well.

It’s June 23rd, 2007. “Umbrella” remains at number one for the last portion of Season Three, while Enrique Iglesias, Kelly Rowland and Clarkson, and the White Stripes also chart. In news, heavy rains and flooding continue across the UK, with thirteen people dying in total. A burning car crashes into Glasgow Airport, with, reportedly, one of the people responsible being arrested while on fire. And Tony Blair resigns from Parliament to divide his time between being a special envoy to the Middle East and tending to some lovely hills in the the southeast of England, finally clearing the way for Gordon Brown.

While on television we have Downing Street hijinks of a different sort. The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords is generally seen as the failed Davies-era season finale. This isn’t quite unfair, but the actual grounds on which it fails are, on the whole, narrow. There are in effect two scenes that doom it – both cases where what looked sensible on the page turned ridiculous in practice. The first is when the already strained decision to have David Tennant slathered in latex to look old is replaced with the absolutely appalling Dobby the House Doctor CGI effect, leading to what was previously a quite well done sequence to collapse in a crumpled pile of bathos. The second is the reversal of that scene, in which Flying Magic Jesus Doctor descends upon the Master in a beam of badly misjudged light. Unfortunately, these are two major turning points in the episode, and instead of carrying the dramatic weight they’re meant to do they’re bathetic train wrecks.

But look, neither one fails to communicate the show’s intent – they just do so in a way that is difficult to take seriously because of the intense desire to burst out laughing. The errors stuck out like sore thumbs on broadcast, and this harmed the episodes’ reception, but broadcast was already a while ago. Already the story’s reputation seems to be shifting. So let’s say no more of two misjudged effects shots beyond that Davies is neither the first nor the last person on Doctor Who who has misjudged what the BBC could manage in the way of effects. Everybody believes their bubble wrap, at least.

Let’s start by observing the size of the task. Of all the things Davies tried to revamp within Doctor Who, this is perhaps the hardest. The Cybermen may be the rubbish second rate villains, but for the most part Davies had the good sense to use them that way. They were the villains you went for when the Daleks were the wrong choice but you still needed an “oh no it’s the” villain. But the Master… there’s not even a consensus list of what the best Master stories are. Say what you want about the Cybermen, but at least there’s a general consensus that Tomb of the Cybermen and Earthshock were both really good. (Never mind that I have little patience for either.)…

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Just One Of My Oldest Enemies (Utopia)

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Seriously? That’s how they drew me in Scream of the Shalka?

It’s June 16th, 2007. Rihanna and Jay-Z remain at number one with “Umbrella,” with Calvin Harris, Enrique Iglesias, Timbaland, and Hellogoodbye also charting. In news, the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the government cannot actually detain people indefinitely as enemy combatants. Chinua Achebe wins the Man Brooker prize. Zimbabwe announces that it will take and redivide the land of all remaining white farmers in the country, and Bernie Ahem is reelected as Taoiseach of Ireland.

While on television The Sopranos ends. Oh, and Doctor Who airs Utopia, arguably the first part of its three-part season finale. Or it’s a standalone story before a two-part finale. There are debates to be had. For our purpose, obviously, we’re doing a separate entry on Utopia. But then, we did separate entries on An Unearthly Child and 100,000 BC. The threshold for one entry or two is what makes the most sense from an essay-writing perspective. Utopia has a bunch of themes that are present but tangental in The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords, and vice versa. So while talking about Utopia on its own requires referring forward more than sometimes, it still makes more essay sense, and really, I care a lot more about that than I do about the “what counts as a story” game. Though we may bring the “what counts as a story” game up later. Just for fun.

Utopia is possibly the bleakest number Davies ever wrote. It is, of course, not about Utopia – a concept we learn does not even exist. Rather it is about that most enduring feature of utopia: the snake in the garden. Or so it seems at first blush. But this is not merely about an individual snake. Yes, in amidst the apparently heartwarming story of indomitable is the Master, who seems at first blush to be the most sympathetic of characters. The Master is, in this rendition, treated as the image of the Bad Seed – the inherently evil figure for whom redemption is simply impossible. And so kind-hearted Professor Yana has, within him, a void. An evil heart that will someday inevitably be released, to the ruin of everyone around him. This is the vision of utopia – its absolute and horrific collapse in the face of the irreducible phenomenon of evil.

What makes this staggeringly pessimistic is its position at the end of the universe. It’s one thing to make bleak statements about how people screw everything up. That borders on the banal. It’s quite another to position this as the ultimate fate of humanity. Utopia sets up a choice between the joyously eternal nature of humanity and the idea of an inevitable moral rot, and ultimately embraces the latter. All of humanity’s dreams and hopes come crashing down, and there is only dark and cold and the cackling madness of the serpent. This final sting in the trap, confirmed in Last of the Time Lords, is horrific in a way Davies has never really managed before, nor will he ever again.…

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The Image Of An Angel (Blink)

114

In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a bit of crown
moulding. 

It’s June 9th, 2007. Rihanna (and Jay-Z) are at number one with “Umbrella,” while Beyonce and Shakira, Maroon 5, Timbaland, Akon, and Twang also chart. In news, Scooter Libby is sentenced to thirty months in prison, although the sentence will be commuted by President Bush, and immigration reform fails in the US Senate due to failing to pass a cloture vote.

On television, meanwhile, it’s Blink. As we’ve already discussed, Blink is not the reason that Steven Moffat is now showrunner of Doctor Who. Just writing good episodes is insufficient, or else Paul Cornell, who in 2007 had almost as many and as brilliant Doctor Who episodes under his belt as Moffat did, would have been a sincere contender. And he wasn’t, not because he’s not one of the most brilliant and influential Doctor Who writers ever (Moffat’s been open about how much his take on Doctor Who owes to Cornell), but because he’s not a television showrunner and entrusting him a brand as big of Doctor Who would be absurdly risky. Moffat was the heir apparent because he was the only safe choice.

This is distinct from why he was the popular choice, though, which did mostly have to do with the fact that he wrote very, very good episodes of Doctor Who. And Blink was very good – good enough that the period in which Human Nature/Family of Blood was the obvious Hugo contender for Doctor Who lasted about a week. Its general reputation is as the holy grail of Doctor Who episodes. And fair play, as everything about it is, in fact, absolutely brilliant. It belongs on lists of the best Doctor Who episodes ever, its reputation is wholly deserved, and it’s one of those rare pieces that are so good that the hype of their reputation doesn’t actually diminish their impact. Jekyll may be why Moffat got the job, but Blink is the story that defined expectations of the job. And so it is worth looking at in that context – as the fantasy of what the Moffat era could achieve if (as was always impossible) he could hit these heights with rock-solid reliability.

First, of course, are the Weeping Angels. With two more stories featuring them, I’ll minimize my comments here, since later stories embrace the alchemical/mystical themes involving them more readily. For now let’s look at them as what they are within the context of Blink, which is a terribly clever monster. All monsters, of course, are systems of rules. This is why the Daleks, with their absolute and single-minded fixity, are the ur-monsters of Doctor Who – because they represent a single and absolute rule. But it’s true of any monster – they’re defined by the narrative role that they can never move past. The Silurians are defined by presenting a reasonable moral case for their own villainy. The Cybermen by their unrelenting nature. When the new series has revamped monsters, it’s often as much about revamping their rules as anything; the Sontarans are now eternally conquering warriors, the Ice Warriors are caught in the subtle distinction between honor and morality.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 69 (Jekyll)

, 17

Over the course of 2007, the future of Doctor Who became clear. It was to nobody’s particular surprise that Tennant and Davies walked away from the program they did; it was about the length of time people spend in jobs like that. But what was going to happen to Doctor Who after Davies left was always a question mark, and cancellation was always a viable answer. Until 2007, at which point everybody on the planet knew what was going to happen. The next showrunner became self-evident. Of course it was going to be Steven Moffat. There was no real decision making process. It’s just that everybody realized the same obvious fact around the same time. There were two basic causes for this. The first, of course, is Blink, which we’ll deal with on Monday. But Blink merely demonstrated what we already knew: that Moffat could write really good Doctor Who scripts. Sure, it demonstrated it more emphatically than it had ever been demonstrated before, but it was nothing new. No, the real game changer was Jekyll.

In many ways what is most striking about Jekyll is what it isn’t. If it were made today, it would almost certainly be produced out of Cardiff with numerous names familiar to Doctor Who. Instead we have a production done in relative isolation from Doctor Who, in England, whose major interaction with Doctor Who was that it forced Moffat to drop out of writing the opening two-parter in favor of taking the Doctor-lite slot later in the season, where he apparently handed in his script dreadfully late and they basically shot the second draft. Sure, Douglas Mackinnon, who directed the first three, went on to direct for Doctor Who, and assorted actors (Meera Syal, Michelle Ryan, and Fenella Woolgar) worked their way over, but other than Moffat and a brief acting cameo from Mark Gatiss, this is very much something going on in its own corner of the world.

Which is not to say that its existence doesn’t owe much to Doctor Who. It clearly does, at least inasmuch as Steven Moffat only got handed this project on the strength of having done a successful episode of Doctor Who – something he’s admitted opened doors for him. But what we have here is in most regards Moffat trying to establish himself as a credible producer of genre material on his own, separate from Doctor Who. This process is obscured by the fact that Moffat was announced as the next showrunner of Doctor Who within a year of this, and by the fact that BBC Cymru Wales came to devour all the oxygen in terms of drama production in the UK. Nevertheless, that’s clearly what Jekyll is meant to be – the show with which Moffat establishes himself as a viable showrunner for genre material.

In that regard it succeeded. Jekyll, in point of fact, is quite good. But in many ways what’s most interesting about it in hindsight are its hesitancies and shortcomings. It’s a very good piece of television.…

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There’s Another Way: Throw Away Your Guns (The Family of Blood)

, 63

Harry Lloyd watches the Red Wedding episode and realizes
Viserys got off easy.
I’ll Explain Later
Human Nature is possibly the New Adventure needing the least introduction: it’s the book from which Paul Cornell’s two-parter in Series Three is adapted. As one might expect, it’s somewhat acclaimed. At the time, Craig Hinton called it “the finest Doctor Who book to date.” Lars Pearson calls it “a must-not-be-missed bold experiment.” It’s at number one in Sullivan’s rankings with an eighty-eight percent rating. And, you know, it’s good enough that they made a TV story out of it. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry. Original post.
——
It’s May of 26th, 1995 2007. Rihanna and Jay-Z Oasis debuts at number one with “Some Might Say Umbrella.” They remain get knocked out a week later by Livin’ Joy, who also enter the charts at number one with “Dreamer,” a rerelease of their 1994 single. They’re unseated a week later by Robson and Jerome, making a debut at number one with “Unchained Melody/White Cliffs of Dover.” Unlike the previous two songs to enter at number one, they actually stay there for more than a week all story. Bjork, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Maroon 5, Akon, Snow Patrol, and the Manchester United 1995 Football Squad Booty Luv also chart.
In the news, the Cutty Sark caught fire while under repairs in Greenwich, in what was believed (but not proven) to be an act of arson. The Crown Prosecution Service decides to charge Andrei Lugovoi for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. AC Milan defeat Liverpool in the UEFA Champions League final. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives approves a bill funding the Iraq Jacques Chirac is elected president of France. The Dalai Lama picks a fight by naming the eleventh Panchen Lama. Three days later the six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, is detained by the Chinese authorities, and Afghanistan wars, with progressives failing to get a timetable for withdrawal included, while the Supreme Court issues its ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which declares that one cannot sue for discriminatory pay disparity if the initial decision was made more than 180 days ago. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, dissenting, makes the rare decision to read her dissent from the bench, and the Court’s holding is consciously reversed in 2009 by Congress. A has not been seen in public since. A year later the People’s Republic of China names their own Panchen Lama. Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down in a horseriding accident. Japanese police arrest Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo sect, over the sarin gas attacks in March. attempt to lift the commercial moratorium on whaling fails, not that this stops them from whaling, since they just claim that it’s “scientific research.” And Scotland Yard determines that Bob Woolmer died of a heart attack and was not, as some suspected, murdered.
 
While in books on television, Human Nature/The Family of Blood. Ah. A big one. The book is better than the movie.
…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 25 (Made of Steel)

, 25

After its initial release by Gareth Roberts, which was marked by a strange ambiguity of audience, the Quick Reads set of Doctor Who books settled into a more familiar pattern recognizable as one of the most basic and longstanding tactics in writing a line of Doctor Who books ever: just hire Terrance Dicks to do it. This is, in many ways, impossible to object to. Whatever one might think of various moments in Dicks’s later career, the basic charm of having him write a Tenth Doctor book is irresistible.

We’ve never really talked about the sheer scope of Terrance Dicks’s contributions to Doctor Who. Strictly in television terms, he came on as script editor in the 1960s, while Patrick Troughton was the Doctor. He coauthored Troughton’s regeneration story, The War Games, script edited the entirety of the Pertwee era (and thus in practice wrote several stories when things went terribly wrong), wrote three Tom Baker stories including Baker’s debut, and co-authored a four with Robert Holmes, and wrote The Five Doctors. This alone makes him one of the most longstanding writers of Doctor Who – the range of his contributions rivals Terry Nation and Robert Holmes, and all told he contributed to thirty-five of the hundred and fifty-four classic series stories. Which is to say that if you watch a classic Doctor Who story, there’s nearly a one in four chance Terrance Dicks worked on it.

This would seem impressive were it not for the Target novelizations, a range to which he contributed a staggering sixty-four books, including novels for all of the first six Doctors. These books in many ways form his real legacy – they’re the reason he’s affectionately known as “Uncle Tewwance” among fandom. Dicks is responsible for a vast number of terribly important novelizations: Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, for instance, which kicked off the Target line, and a variety of classic missing stories like Doctor Who and the The Abominable Snowmen and Doctor Who and the The Web of Fear. He novelized An Unearthly Child, Genesis of the Daleks, and a host of other stories. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this – it wasn’t until the 1990s that home video became the easiest way to watch past stories. For decades the Target novelizations were the enduring versions of Doctor Who. They were the only way that anybody could revisit past stories. And the default Target style was Terrance Dicks.

This was not a style defined by flash, or by complex, intricate prose. Dicks’s writing is the very definition of functional, and he demonstrates why that word is straightforwardly a virtue. He can sketch a character quickly, knows how to build excitement, has a decent ear for dialogue, and keeps the plot moving. One rarely stops and drinks in the brilliance of Dicks’s writing, but the reasons for this are simple: one rarely stops with Dicks. It’s not that he doesn’t have an ear for a good phrase – his opening sentences are fantastic, and he’s got a knack for memorable descriptions, even if he does, occasionally, overuse one to the point of mild comedy.…

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Ha Ha! He Got It Wrong On The First Line! (42)

82

Sparkle with me.

It’s May 19th, 2007. McFly are at number one with “Baby’s Coming Back/Transylvania.” Akon, Linkin Park, the Manic Street Preachers, and Scootch, the latter with “Flying the Flag (For You),” their suitably disastrous entry in Eurovision 2007, which also explains why we have two weeks of news to cover. The Kerguelen Plateau, a sunken island off of Antarctica that used to be a part of India, is discovered. So is the largest supernova ever. Tony Blair announces that he’ll step down in June, finally clearing the way for Gordon Brown. Nicolas Sarkozy becomes President of France. And Chelsea defeat Manchester United 1-0 in the FA Cup final, the first game played in the new Wembley Stadium.

On television, meanwhile, 42. On one level, this is the most straightforwardly sensible matching of brief and writer imaginable. Take the writer who did the big action scripts of Torchwood and match him with the pastiche of a big dumb American action show. And on the other, there’s a level on which this script falls agonizingly short of its promise.

For all the hate Chibnall gets, his Doctor Who work on the whole isn’t all that bad. The Power of Three is marvelous until the ending. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is exactly what an episode with that title should be. The Silurian two-parter flounders, yes, but that’s actually the only time he turns in a story that just doesn’t quite work on a storytelling level. Because 42 does exactly what it sets out to do – it’s an efficient action piece that pulls off the actually fairly difficult “real time” structure. It hangs together logically, sets up its conclusion well at the start, and while it has a few ideas that deserve to euphemistically be called bizarre when what we really mean is “mind-wrenchingly illogical,” this is Doctor Who, and if it doesn’t do a sequence of doors sealed by an evil pub quiz then really, what show will?

And there are moments of the story that are quite good. Putting the Doctor through this sort of wringer is absolutely marvelous – his screaming and saying that he’s scared is  genuinely unsettling in a way the series hasn’t really managed since Sutekh’s dominating of Tom Baker. Martha’s attempt to make a last call to her mother, where they talk at cross purposes, is wonderfully heartbreaking. “Burn with me” isn’t quite “are you my mummy,” but you can still properly freak someone out with it.

Most obviously, of course, it’s directed by Graham Harper, so we get a ton of interesting camera angles and well-executed visuals. The scene of the Doctor and Martha staring out the windows at each other as the escape pod separates is an absolutely phenomenally shot scene. “The Doctor and the companion get separated” is one of the absolute oldest and most bog-standard tricks in Doctor Who, and under Davies there’s been a particular focus on stressing the physical distance between them (The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, Gridlock, and, of course, Doomsday), but the shot of them physically receding from each other, watching each other drift away, and trying desperately to communicate across the silent void is absolutely breathtaking.…

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Next Thing You Know It’s a Hundred Years Later (The Lazarus Experiment)

36

Yeah, but at least my head isn’t covered in penises.

It’s May 5th, 2007. Beyonce and Shakira are still at number one, with Avril Lavigne, Ne-Yo, Mika, and Gym Class Heroes also charting. In news, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation acquires the Wall Street Journal, the Labour Party gets whacked in local and regional elections, and on the day this story airs, Floyd Mayweather Jr. defeats Oscar De La Hoya in what is apparently the highest grossing boxing match ever.

Clearly something in the air, because Doctor Who decides that what it really needs is a story that’s basically all action sequences. With Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks there was at least enough going on that we could play the quasi-entertaining game of simply ignoring quality entirely. With The Lazarus Experiment this becomes harder – there is simply not a heck of a lot going on in this story. At around the fifteen minute mark it switches into action set pieces, and it stays there until the end with almost no scenes doing anything else. This is not an episode that has much in mind beyond spectacle.

Structurally, we have another case of “let’s update one of the non-classic Doctor Who formats.” By legend, Malcolm Hulke, in complaining that the earthbound structure of the Pertwee era was a bad idea, claimed that there were now only two viable Doctor Who plots – aliens invade, and mad scientists. As it turned out only one of these had much in the way of legs – the UNIT era became known for alien invasions, which became a classic approach that Doctor WHo is obliged to go back to periodically. Mad scientist plots, meanwhile, basically dropped out of the series – there are basically no “pure” mad scientist stories – i.e. ones with no aliens – after Robot (yes, you can make a case for counting Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel, but I don’t want to).

So The Lazarus Experiment is basically The Mind of Evil without creepy racism. And, you know, with the prison raid stretched out to half an hour. Fair enough – it is indeed an odd discarded subgenre of Doctor Who. The problem is that there’s nothing much more than “ooh, let’s do this genre” here. It is, as mentioned, a staggeringly vacant episode, its purposes seeming to be esoteric.

First among them is giving Mark Gatiss a 40th birthday present (literally – it filmed on his birthday) and letting him appear in a proper episode of Doctor Who. It is, in many ways, the part he was born to play – Gatiss is an extremely mannered actor, and clearly revels in the opportunity to do various standards of the well-regarded art of Doctor Who acting. He’s particularly good at “I am turning into a monster” spasms and that ever-important Doctor Who standard, the “I have just eaten somebody” face.

But he doesn’t have anything that can accurately be called a character here. There’s a bunch of effort to give him a bunch of World War II memories, but they all come after the point that he’s been obviously established as a villain, so it’s frankly tough to care by that point.…

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Adapt Themselves To The Planet (Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks)

71

I am a human Dalek. I am your future. My head is covered
in penises.

It’s April 21st, 2007. David Tennant’s joy is over, and not just because of the story we’re talking about today. Timbaland have made it to number one with “Give It To Me.” There are no other significant changes to the charts, but a week later Beyonce and Shakira take number one with “Beautiful Liar,” and Arctic Monkeys, Enemy, Mark Ronson, and Natasha Bedingfield also chart, the latter with the rather impressively titled “I Wanna Have Your Babies.”

In news, the Virginia Tech massacre takes place, about which I find myself wanting to say little more. Boris Yeltsin dies. The first of the 2008 US Presidential debates takes place, which should provide lots of flavor and color in these sections in the days to come. And Mary McAleese, President of Ireland, calls a general election.

While on television it’s Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, a pair of beloved and well-regarded episodes that nobody has a bad word for. One of the things that starts to happen with Season Three, and continues throughout the new series, is that Doctor Who begins to attempt to update various past eras of the show. Having done most of its “the definitive X” ideas in the first two seasons, the series moved on to pilfering the past in a broader way. Gridlock was part and parcel of this – in many ways, it’s just Paradise Towers or The Happiness Patrol for the modern age. Which also clarifies the sorts of stories that this approach is meant to open the door to.

With Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, then, we get a combination of two old types of stories: the Hartnell-style historical, and the Hartnell-style periodic Dalek epic. It’s easy to forget that in Seasons Two through Four of the classic series, the Daleks were given twelve to thirteen episodes a year. Something between 20-30% of every season of Doctor Who in the first four years was consumed by Dalek stories. And so after two seasons in which the Daleks were mostly wheeled on as surprise villains, here we get Daleks treated as something ordinary – an obligatory, annual engagement. This is not bad so much as it’s different – certainly the Daleks have had that role before, and not just in the 1960s (there’s an annual Dalek story in all of Seasons Nine through Twelve).

This results in us having to re-evaluate the Daleks in terms of their basic function. They are no longer the apocalyptic “worst threat imaginable.” They’re a routine but perennial threat. The Doctor even acknowledges this, mocking the Daleks, saying, “time was, four Daleks could have conquered the world, but instead you’re skulking away, hidden in the dark, experimenting.” But this isn’t a devastating change as such. The Daleks become the occasions for celebration – excuses for a big popcorn-munching runaround. This also has to be taken in terms of the at times formulaic structure of the Davies era – the past/present/future trilogy of the first three stories, an action heavy two-parter with prominent monsters “for the kids,” a darker and more horror-focused two-parter, a cheap/Doctor light episode, and finally a big narrative collapse for the season finale.…

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Without Friends Or Protection (Gridlock)

136

Get it? Boe-tox?

It’s April 14th, 2007. David Tennant is still terribly happy. Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani, Fray, Fergie, Timbaland, Beyonce, and Shakira also chart, which feels like just about the most 2007 list of musical artists one can muster. Since Shakespeare wrapped things up, the Ministry of Defense allowed the fifteen sailors released by Iran to sell their stories to the press. This was immediately reversed for anyone who did not act on the first day. Johnny Cash’s home in Nashville burns to the ground, and Kurt Vonnegut dies.

While on television we have an unsung masterpiece – Russell T Davies’s best script of Season Three, Gridlock. There is a line of criticism against Russell T Davies that would suggest he is not particularly interested in science fiction. Instead he’s interested in visual spectacle and character bits, and happens to like the way science fiction things look and emotionally feel. But he’s spectacularly uninterested in worldbuilding – his oft cited line about not caring about Zogs from the planet Zog unless there are humans about is not just an observation about the importance of not making things too strange (after all, he did the “no humanoids except for the TARDIS crew” trick on his second script), but an observation about grounding stories in anything other than the day-to-day world of human experience. The creator of Raxicoricofallapatorius, the Moxx of Balhoon, and the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe is clearly not averse to the presence of overt weirdness. What he is averse to is doing a story that isn’t grounded in contemporary Earth culture. And so even when, at the start of the second season, Davies made his high profile “we’re doing an alien planet for the first time” story the alien planet is just New Earth. Davies, in other words, is almost pathologically opposed to alien planets unless he can ground them in day-to-day Earth issues: busses, hospitals, and, in this case, traffic jams. As a writer, he wants either human interaction or massive spectacle.

But in Gridlock we have an odd story in which Davies manages to hit on an approach that does the worldbuilding for him, without him having to actually engage in any of it directly. The basic mechanic of the episode – tons of different people in their cars – means that Davies’s usual trick of “lots of weird and outlandish images” crashes into his other usual trick of “depictions of ordinary people with domestic lives” to create something that Davies never really manages again in Doctor Who: lots of weird and outlandish images of ordinary people with domestic lives. The result is that for the first and only time in the Davies era we end up with a cross-section of an alien society. Because of the particular central image of the story – the act of driving on the highway – it’s possible for Davies to mash up S&M cats, elderly lesbian trainspotters, nudists, and dapper businessmen into something that feels like a sane, coherent world.…

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