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Bye: The Doctors Revisited (Christopher Eccleston)

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It’s surprising how easily this era slips into history. On the one hand, there is nothing being said here that was not said in DVD commentaries and Doctor Who Confidential ten years ago, often by the same people. And yet there is none of the breathless self-promotion of Confidential, which is what this most obviously resembles. The imminent, thrilling need to celebrate the basic existence of Doctor Who is absent. Just as the tail end of the classic series was drained of all its conflict, this is drained of all its triumph.

For those who remember what the Eccleston series actually felt like as it happened – that is, classic series fans – this is slightly disorienting. Eccleston is basically explained as “he was a Doctor for the 21st century and not quite what anyone expected.” And yet the scenes shown are exactly the ones you’d expect, with no real oddities among them. In marked contrast to the McCoy era, where we spent bizarre amounts of time on Time and the Rani, here we get Eccleston’s Emmy reel.

The issue, one quickly realizes, is that this is essentially the first time these set pieces of the “Doctor Who Season One as vital text in television history” argument have been done without Russell T Davies, who continued his politely silent 2013. And, of course, Eccleston is absent as well. As with the McGann episode, there’s a hole in the middle of this narrative.

It is worth noting that there is actually some suspense at this point in time. This went out on September 29th, the day after it was announced that there would be a trailer soon for Day of the Doctor, but nearly two months after the announcement of Peter Capaldi. “What is Doctor Who these days” was an astonishingly relevant question, with, at that moment in time, essentially three Doctors besides the incumbent having some sort of active “what’s going on with” question, one who’d never appeared, and one who’d only had a minute of speaking time.

The result was a historical moment where there was a past/present line on what Doctor Who was that Eccleston was exactly on the wrong side of. Which was at the time useful. Doctor Who was not a young series – it was already into season numbers well higher than most shows get, and it was at the time highly visible that it was a half-century old. Finding ways to justify calling your “this is where you should start watching” point as recent as possible mattered. So declaring Eccleston to be history was an easy decision to make.

And he’s history by his own choosing, admittedly – we should remember that the entire landscape of Doctor Who would have looked different right now had Eccleston been in Day of the Doctor, or, at least, certainly this special would have. But no, right now the scale of Doctor Who is very much 2006-14. And all of this is bluntly literalized in the closing moments of Moffat’s introduction to Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways, when he mentions the fleeting appearance of David Tennant as a highlight.…

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Outside the Government 10 (Doctor Who Confidential)

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Let’s start with the end – the first season finale of Doctor Who Confidential, which culminates in a celebratory montage of the Ninth Doctor year arranged to Snow Patrol’s “Run.” To anyone with a passing familiarity with fan culture this, and a wave of similar montages across the preceding six-and-a-half hours of television is immediately identifiable as a vid, or fanvid. We could go down quite a rabbit hole here, but suffice it to say that fanvids are fan-made music videos that set clips of one or more films/television series to popular music. Many of these are just unabashed lovefests – four minutes of squee set to a Coldplay track. Others present new perspectives on the original text. Slash perspectives are of course common, as are reworkings to create new POV characters and other sorts of narrative commentaries.

There is, of course, nothing hugely innovative about this sort of thing. If we want to treat the end of Doctor Who Confidential as a fanvid then we have to allow the precedent to go back decades at the least. Putting the complete lack of effort into researching it that I want to, I can off-hand go back to the series finale of Seinfeld as having done a celebratory montage set to pop music. If we allow for sports programming to count then professional equivalents of fanvids are made to fill time on schedules on a regular basis.

Nevertheless, it sets the tone for Doctor Who Confidential. We should pause here to note that making a fanvid is bloody hard, doubly so if you insist on a measure of quality in the end result. Syncing events well to the music, getting the events selected to form a narrative, having clips long enough to be recognizable and intelligible but short enough to remain punchy and varied – these are hard things to do. And while there are no shortage of crappy vidders in the world, there are also ones who routinely demonstrate that they’re as good at editing as the professionals.

Which is, to a large extent, what Doctor Who Confidential is about: demonstrating the artistry involved in Doctor Who. Which is by no means inconsiderable. The vastness of the paratext surrounding the first six series of Doctor Who, across Doctor Who Magazine, Doctor Who Confidential, and DVD commentary tracks (every episode of the Davies era has a commentary track on the DVD sets, and after Series One every episode has a second commentary track available as a BBC Radio 4 Podcast) mean that Doctor Who in the Davies era is documented with a level of detail that is mind-wrenching. And one of the things that really comes out as a product of all of this is that an absolutely staggering amount of thought goes into a given episode of Doctor Who.

This is something that presents a critical complexity. One of the frequent debates about my readings and views on Doctor Who is the eternal question of whether I’m “reading too much into” things.…

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I Wasn’t The One Holding a Gun (Bad Wolf)/A Fighting Hand (Parting of the Ways)

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This entry should appear as two columns. If it is appearing incorrectly or unreadably, a simplified version is here, but does not provide the intended reading experience and is not recommended. Thanks to Anna Wiggins for formatting assistance.


The Anne Droid purifies a leaden contestant to gold.
We play the contest again, Mr. Whitaker.
It’s June 11th, 2005. Crazy Frog is at number one with “Axel F.” Foo Fighters, Coldplay, Gwen Stefani, the White Stripes, Akon, and the Gorillaz also chart, the latter with “Feel Good Inc.” News, fittingly, is a near-total blackout. Seriously – I can find next to nothing in the news for this week. It’s June 18th, 2005. Crazy Frog’s “Axel F” is at number one. U2, The Gorillaz, Jamiroquai, Foo Fighters, and the Black Eyed Peas also chart, the latter with “Don’t Phunk With My Heart.” The only real piece of news is John Sentamu becoming the first black Archbishop when appointed Archbishop of York.
I guess there’s The Guardian running a Pass Notes on the whole “Bad Wolf” idea, which technically happened after this episode, but which is ultimately more related to the episode called Bad Wolf than to the finale where that concept is revealed in full. (After all, following Bad Wolf the meaning of the phrase seems apparent – it’s a trap laid by the Daleks. It’s not until next episode that this gets complicated.) But its existence reflects the degree to which “in the news” in fact, this week, consisted of this episode itself. Doctor Who was the news, not just televisual background radiation, but a massive, central part of British television. What happened in Doctor Who was considered news. For anyone who had lived through the wilderness years the very idea is completely ridiculous. So, television then. For all that The Parting of the Ways is a grand bit of “event” television – an episode self-consciously crafted as a Moment, if you will, it remains the case that, ironically, this got the lowest ratings of the season. Its attempted event – the shock regeneration of Christopher Eccleston – flopped, revealed three months ahead of time in the papers such that this episode led to inevitable climax instead of the most giddily impish shock of all. It’s completely wrong to suggest that Parting of the Ways fizzled – it didn’t at all. But it’s also wrong to suggest that it’s the climactic moment of Doctor Who’s first series is, in a cultural sense, simply wrong. The climactic moment was Rose, with everything else just being the consequences of that success.
But it’s actually even stranger than it seems. It’s not just Doctor Who being a big deal – it’s the particular nature of what the deal was. “Bad Wolf,” after all, is as culty as cult can be – a bit of television designed only for obsessives. And not obsessives of the sort at whom Boom Town was aimed, but ones who are going to obsessively analyze episodes for fleeting lines and visuals.
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 61 (Big Brother)

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I could never have written this post as well as Richard Jones, and so I asked them to step in for a guest post. This is one of the best decisions I have made in the course of this project.

 
In 2009 everyone was hard at work writing blog articles in anticipation of ‘The End of Time’, the grand finale to Doctor Who’s Davies era. io9’s contribution took an interesting approach, offering a list of the errors the production ran the risk of making.
“Though there’s absolutely no denying Davies has successfully forged a massive popular (and, to a slightly lesser extent, critical) success with his revival of Doctor Who,” wrote Alasdair Wilkins, “I’m sorry to say that I’m still not entirely convinced he’s all that good at writing episodes of Doctor Who.” Yet hope remained. Perhaps Davies could learn from the mistakes the article identified and seize this last chance to convince? A key point on this syllabus of errors was the way Davies’ Big Climactic Epics interacted with pop culture. The article made it clear that it didn’t “have anything against Richard Dawkins having a cameo on Doctor Who” but that it’s “kind of a shame that Christopher Eccleston’s final appearance will forever be linked to Big Brother.”
For Wilkins, timelessness and obtrusiveness were what made Dawkins okay and Davina not, but for some who find Big Brother’s role in the 2005 finale to be a thing of shame there may be a few more cultural value judgements weighing down. Many fans have a lot invested in the idea that Doctor Who is one sort of television and Big Brother is another. For them to be occupying the same space so brazenly is a challenge. This is the Ninth Doctor’s regeneration story. This will be in lists. This grants “a Dalek plot involving Big Brother” the same eternally iconic status as “falling off a big telescope.” What are we supposed to do with this?
The BBC have on three occasions obtained the rights to broadcast shows using the Big Brother format. Two of them made it very clear how they felt about it. Extras was tediously and hypocritically anti, while Celebrity Big Brother was so uncritical that it found itself reabsorbed as an enduring stand of Big Brother, the fact that it was once a strand of Comic Relief quietly forgotten. If the very thought of Big Brother makes you angry then you’re going to get on fine with Extras and have no truck with Celebrity Big Brother. But what are you supposed to make of ‘Bad Wolf’?
It feels like it should be a showdown. The ratings demolition of ITV’s Celebrity Wrestling is such a part of the 2005 season’s industry mythology that it almost feels like that’s the arc here. Scripted Family Drama returns to a broadcasting landscape dominated by Reality TV! Scripted Family Drama casts down the Wrestley Champion sent by Reality TV to oppose it! Scripted Family Drama arrives at the Castle of Reality TV to do final battle with Big Brother, UNHOLY SIRE OF THE DARK POWER THAT HOLDS THE LAND IN THRALL!
…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 23 (Only Human)

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When the writers for the first series of Doctor Who were announced, they were a fairly sensible lot. It was, by and large, a particular social circle of Doctor Who fans who entered television writing in the years immediately following the series’ cancellation. All had written either for Virgin or Big Finish, and they were all only one or two degrees of separation from each other in terms of being close friends or colleagues. They reflected, in other words, a particular generation of Doctor Who creators. For the most part they were of the Virgin generation, although, as noted, all but Moffat and Davies himself had written for Big Finish as well (and Moffat had been invited to write for Big Finish, but declined because he didn’t want to write past Doctors). But for the most part they represented the writers on the good half of the Wilderness Years, and their departure as the major creative figures in Doctor Who coincided with the post-TV Movie decline.

Given all of this, there was a name whose absence from the first series writing credits stuck out a bit: Gareth Roberts. He was, after all, one of the acclaimed figures of the Virgin years, had a number of high profile Big Finish audios, many with regular co-conspirator Clayton Hickman, and, more to the point, had worked with Davies previously on Springhill and had scads of television credits to his name. But for whatever reason he wasn’t. He’s said in interviews that this saddened him, and that he took on writing Only Human for the New Series Adventures line in part to show that he should have been asked to contribute.

The first thing we should say, then, is that it worked. Roberts wrote a raft of auxiliary material for the second season, including the interactive Attack of the Graske and the prequel TARDISodes, before managing the feat of getting tapped for a script in five consecutive production years of Doctor Who – a streak only equalled (not surpassed) by Russell T Davies himself. If Only Human was his audition piece, it was massively, phenomenally successful.

The second thing we should say is that this is tragically unusual. Gareth Roberts is the only person to have written for both the New Series Adventures line and the television series. This fact means that the New Series Adventures are not able to function in one of the most obvious ways that they could function, which is as a sort of minor league where new talent can be cultivated. We talked with The Monsters Inside about the relative purposelessness of this line, and how it existed seemingly without an audience, for the relatively cynical reason of selling stuff to young Doctor Who fans, or, more accurately, their parents.

One thing that could alleviate that – and not just in the sense of “giving the line a non-cynical reason to exist” but in the sense of making it a line that people write non-cynically for – would be if it were meaningfully possible to go from writing for it to writing for the television series.…

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A Galactic Yo-Yo (Boom Town)

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So my choice is “or death?”

It’s June 4th, 2005. Crazy Frog is at number one with “Axel F.” Coldplay, Akon, Gorillaz, Oasis, and Gwen Stefani also chart, the latter with “Hollaback Girl,” one of the most wonderfully awful things ever recorded. In news, Vanity Fair reveals the identity of Deep Throat, Bob Geldof announces the Live 8 concert to coincide with July’s G8 summit, and Scottish Gaelic is given formal recognition in Scotland.

The recognition of Scottish Gaelic was part of a general trend under Blair’s New Labour government towards devolution of powers towards Scotland, Northern Ireland, and, most importantly for our purposes here, Wales. The creation of devolved legislatures and a new push for use of their native languages were only facets of a larger tendency towards national pride in the countries.

In Wales, at least, another facet was the expansion of the existent BBC Cymru Wales. The BBC always had a Wales-specific arm that offered regional programming, including Welsh-language programming, and did in-house drama productions like the BBC’s longest-running soap opera Pobol y Cwm. But with the rise of the Welsh National Assembly it became terribly politic to bolster drama production at regional facilities (in no small part because doing so gave the BBC a wider base of political support). And so BBC Cymru Wales was used to produce an increasing variety of English-language programming for broadcast outside of Wales.

This process coincided neatly with Julie Gardner getting headhunted from London Weekend Television in 2003 to become Head of Drama at BBC Wales. Gardner brought with her Russell T Davies’s Casanova project, which had been kicking around at LWT. Julie Gardner was the Verity Lambert of her day – a tremendously skilled television producer who combined a knack for getting along with just about everybody ever with an absolutely obsessive love of the medium. In particular she was a devoted fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a fact that gets put in every description like this out of the not entirely mistaken belief that Buffy was the model for the new series version of Doctor Who. (A statement that is certainly part of the story, but as we’ve seen over the past month, only part.)

Meanwhile, over at BBC One, Controller Lorraine Heggessey finally clawed the internal rights on Doctor Who back from BBC Worldwide, which was continuing to be spectacularly inept at making a film. She and BBC Head of Drama Jane Tranter approached Julie Gardner, seemingly out of a combination of a desire to put a high-profile drama in Cardiff and the knowledge that Gardner was already working with Russell T Davies on Casanova. Gardner was a tremendously hands-on Head of Drama on Doctor Who, serving as an executive producer and working closely with Davies. The two of them had tremendously shared taste in many things, Buffy included, and the result was that they largely adopted the US showrunner model where a head writer is also in the thick of day-to-day production and served as a primary auteur on the television series.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 22 (Eccleston Comics, the 2006 Annual, Doctor Who Magazine)

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Let us pause for a moment to consider the survivors of the Wilderness Years in the general case. Big Finish, of course, was relatively untouched. We covered much of their future at the tail end of the Wilderness Years, and will check in on them a few times more (off the top of my head I can think of at least six Big Finish essays on post-2005 material that I intend to write, some as book-exclusives, some here), but the basic arc is sensible enough: they got their license renewed fairly soon after the new series started, largely through the personal intervention of Davies, who actively kept the issue from crossing Mal Young’s desk. They were forbidden from making any new series references, and in fact occasionally had characters taken away from them when the TV series wanted them, but they quickly developed their niche of the classic series.

The book line, as we’ve seen, fared rather more poorly, a final victim of the decision to take the license away from Virgin. Under a third party license they could well have survived in the same way that Big Finish did, particularly if, like Big Finish, they had a bunch of respectable and upstanding people involved with them. (e.g. Rebecca Levene) But having been taken in house they were a victim of the BBC’s Great Leap Forward, cut off as part of a sensible but nevertheless painful decision to thoroughly rebrand Doctor Who as a show of the present instead of the past. It’s the worst sort of decision. On the one hand, it’s next to impossible to argue with as any sort of a business move – only the most blinkered fan would seriously suggest that the new series would have been more successful if it had played up the forty-two years of prior continuity more. On the other, for anyone who loves that history it’s a body blow.

And then there’s Doctor Who Magazine. Russell T Davies was a huge fan of the magazine, and upon taking over Doctor Who promptly approached them to cement the relationship between show and magazine. We have, of course, seen this before in the period where John Nathan-Turner saw the transformation of Doctor Who Weekly, a glorified Doctor Who comic book, into Doctor Who Monthly, a paratext to the series that elicited continual fan engagement. The results were, to say the least, mixed, in no small part because Nathan-Turner’s skill at publicity outstripped his skill at making television.

Tied into the problems, however, was what I have in the past referred to as the fan-industrial complex – the often toxic interplay in which prominent fans were tacitly bribed with access in exchange for their endorsement of the party line. This process led to deeply unfortunate moments like the canonization of the “fact” that John Nathan-Turner saved the program from the “crap” version that Graham Williams made, which we’ve discussed previously. Actually, let’s pause here for a moment and offer something of an addendum to previous blog posts, since there are several spots where, shall we say, new information has come to light that alters past stories.…

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The Impossible Dream of a Thousand Alchemists (The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances)

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Ouch.

It’s May 21st, 2005. Akon remains at number one for the week, though the next week Oasis takes it with “Lyla.” The Black Eyed Peas, The Gorillaz, Jennifer Lopez, and Kelly Osbourne also chart, the latter with the surprisingly non-awful “One Word.” Since the last story George Galloway, recently elected as an MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, testified in front of the US Senate over the Oil-for-Food program. On the 21st itself Arsenal celebrates the Glazer takeover of Manchester United by beating them on penalties in the FA Cup final, the first time that cup was determined by penalties.

Penalties, of course, mean that the final ran long, which nearly led to it crashing into Doctor Who, which had been moved forward half an hour to accommodate Eurovision (it was Greece with “My Number One”), and the result led to The Empty Child getting pummelled in the ratings. Actually, the entire tail end of the first season slumped in the ratings, without even a bump for the season finale. But The Empty Child, though not the series low, bore the brunt of it, becoming the only Doctor Who episode of the first three seasons to fall out of the top twenty.

These days, of course, we know it as a classic and the high point of the first series. Everyone knows that. Even still, there’s something odd about its popularity. The watershed moment for it was probably its winning of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award, although its triumph in the Doctor Who Magazine season poll has to be taken as meaningful. But we should highlight how strange it is that the episodes won the Hugo given that they hadn’t even been screened in the US, which dominates the Hugos (which are presented at Worldcon, an international con that is nevertheless typically held in America). And there’s something indicatively weird about the nominations, where Doctor Who got three nominations, none of them for Russell T Davies’s episodes (which admittedly also, save for the finale, lined the bottom of the Doctor Who Magazine poll).

And, of course, we have the irksome problem of Moffat lurking. Because let’s be honest, this is Doctor Who by the current showrunner, and there’s no way that the gravity of “let’s analyze the series as it is now” can be avoided entirely, especially four days after a season finale. But what’s interesting is less comparing this to Moffat’s future time on the series and more to his past. Because this is in no way the pair of episodes that anyone expected Moffat to turn in. He may be known as the master of horror in Doctor Who, but that’s not at all what his past career pointed to. He was a sitcom writer who’d had a successful children’s show way back (and Press Gang played into him getting Doctor Who as much as Century Falls did for Davies).

More to the point, the reason Davies hired him for these two episodes wasn’t to do creepy horror.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 21 (The Monsters Inside)

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The Monsters Inside is one of the first three books in what is unofficially called the New Series Adventures, although even that name seems, in hindsight, ever so slightly wrong. The name derives from the two other BBC Books lines that existed in 2005, the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Past Doctor Adventures, the former of which we covered from January through April, and the latter of which we looked at alongside each of the past doctors. And the name picks up on this, implying as it does that the New Series Adventures are going to exist alongside the other two lines.

In hindsight this is rubbish. Neither the Eighth Doctor Adventures nor the Past Doctor Adventures were going to survive the year. We knew that about the Eighth Doctor Adventures, actually, but as of May, when this came out alongisde The Clockwise Man and Winner Takes All to launch the New Series Adventures, the theory was that the Past Doctor Adventures were going to keep running indefinitely, with the Eighth Doctor range being folded into it. Indeed, in May the Eighth Doctor Range hadn’t actually quite wrapped yet, with The Gallifrey Chronicles coming out the next month, alongside Eccleston’s regeneration.

All of which is to say that while to the mainstream Doctor Who was a titanic hit that was coming back for a second season and was set to be one of the BBC’s crown jewels, to fans May of 2005 was a bewildering period in which there were in fact three incumbent Doctors, the Paul McGann era having yet to resolve, the Eccleston era ongoing, and the Tennant era announced. And the question of what the auxiliary merchandise for the series would be like was still very much an open one.

Because there were, in fact, a lot of ways the merchandise could go. It could, of course, target fans. That was what Doctor Who merchandise had been doing since the 1980s, after all. That’s why the Doctor Who Cookbook and $125 Doctor Who stained glass windows made for selling in America as pledge awards for PBS existed – because adult fans could be trusted to buy this crap. And certainly this type of merchandise still exists, as apparently there are people who want to spend fifty pounds for a box set of the Pandorica chair and a River Song action figure. Or, for that matter, thirty pounds for a Winston Churchill action figure bundled with a Dalek with tea tray accessory. (And that’s just the new series. You can also, these days, spend thirty-five quid for action figures of Peri and Sil from Vengeance on Varos)

A reasonable person might have expected this to be how all of the new series merchandise would work: high end collectors items for the undiscerning Doctor Who fan with an excess of disposable income. This was basically how the novels had worked in the wilderness years, with Virgin and then BBC Books pumping out two books every month in what was actually the biggest flood of new Doctor Who material in the series’ history, especially once Big Finish got in on the act with audios.…

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Crying Silently (Father’s Day)

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Technically more a Time Wyvern than a Time Dragon.

It’s May 14th, 2005. Akon has finally unseated Tony Christie, giving the new series its second number one hit with “Lonely.” Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Destiny’s Child, Will Smith, and Weezer also chart. In news, Manchester United is bought by Malcolm Glazer, which is by any measure a key event in the transformation of the Premier League into a heavily leveraged playground for the super-rich.

While on television, it’s Doctor Who as only Paul Cornell can write it: intimate and Anglican.

Where The Long Game struggled with the need to fit itself into a single forty-five minute capsule, Father’s Day is one that could only ever have worked as a single, contained episode. Its structure functions in part because of its claustrophobia – because there’s outright no way out of the church. By keeping us in the intimate scene without breaks we get a sense of confinement no six-part base under siege ever managed. Because the base under siege is the model of this story, once you go far enough under the hood. Monsters are closing in from the outside, the Doctor is desperately trying to come up with a plan, and deteriorating political factions within the base eventually endanger everybody. (In this case the slowly boiling fight between Jackie and Pete that eventually results in the two Roses touching.)

But we’ve never seen a base under siege like this quite before. The base is so ostentatiously small, such that we can trivially get wide shots of it to stress just how trapped everyone is. Instead of having three Ice Warriors in one room talking about the terrible things they’re going to do to the base we can see the monsters flying around the church, scraping at the windows, laying siege to it. This is partially a case of Cornell’s choice of settings – a church is rather a more intimate sort of base than, say, a space station. But it’s also down to how the new series works, shooting primarily on location and using CGI monsters such that having a bunch of wide shots of a church with time dragons milling about is, if not trivial, at least no harder than knocking up three monster costumes.

And given that, the forty-five minute structure is great simply because it prevents there from being any release from the pressure. And it does so without any significant rushing of the plot. Because, of course, the plot of this is terribly thin. There’s very little actual concept to this: Rose creates a paradox by saving her father, and only her father’s death can right things. Everything else is just a set of contrivances to keep the plot running – most notably the entire “reforming the TARDIS out of the key and a cell phone battery” thing, which exists virtually entirely to get the plot to forty-five minutes. But it’s not like those forty-five minutes are overly stretched, simply because the sci-fi plot isn’t the point here.…

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