Outside the Government 12: The TARDISodes
The “TARDISodes” were a set of online shorts promoting individual episodes of Series Two, written by Gareth Roberts. They were among the early experiments with “Internet versions of television” that were going on in the mid-aughts, which is to say done cheaply and mostly as an experiment. As befits mini-episodes, then, mini-entries, written in sequence, each one done without watching any of the subsequent TARDISodes so as to provide a micro-blog of the season.
New Earth: It’s a particularly big challenge to kick these off – how do you establish what a mini-episode should be like? How do you make them differ from the trailer? Roberts picks a savvy approach here – where the trailer is mainly about the visual concepts, here he lays out in thirty seconds the basic mystery of the story: how can this hospital cure any disease, and what’s its dirty secret? Notably, the mini-episode does not attempt to explain the premise of the story. It throws in cat nurses with no real context, clearly marking this as something for a more dedicated flavor of fan. Note also that the specific mystery teased is one of the first ones encountered – though only in one plot thread (this being one of the most traditional “split the Doctor and the companion up when they get to the planet and keep them apart until the end” episodes ever), thus being a significant tease but not a major spoiler.
Tooth and Claw: There’s a real challenge in keeping these from all being basically the same structure: here’s a world, oh no, there’s a monster. The decision to start with a meteor crash is thus a reasonably clever strategy to keep things lively. Also clever is the actual use of the werewolf in the final shot, especially given that Davies had to carefully count his werewolf shots and allowed for one to be used over here. The chase from the werewolf’s point of view suggests that we’re not going to actually see the monster, so the “money shot,” as it were, is cheeky. Try, on the other hand, to ignore the fact that the random Scottish werewolf bait looks for all the world like he tripped and fell out of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, unless it really happens to amuse you, in which case, don’t worry about it.
School Reunion: Again there’s a pleasant bit of focus here. The decision to hold Mickey back until the third one of these makes it a bit of a thing – it wasn’t clear prior to this that “real” cast members would be appearing in the TARDISodes. But equally, Mickey is a particularly interesting choice for this episode given that to anyone obsessive enough to watch the TARDISodes the real story was obviously Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, who aren’t even hinted at here. The teasing of Torchwood immediately after Tooth and Claw is similarly savvy, showing that there was real effort taken with these to make them tie in with the overall public narrative of the series.…