Pop Vultures

With season 4 already kicked off in the UK (and about to start in the US), it seemed like a good time for Anna to look back at the season that was.

It seems so long ago. Back in 2005, when the BBC relaunched Doctor Who after an absence of more than a decade, few could have predicted that, just a couple of years later, the departure of a cheesy former pop star from the show would make headline news. But that’s just what happened when Billie Piper jumped ship at the end of the second series. In just two years, Billie had gone from has-been to beloved household name, and when her character Rose Tyler ended up leaving the Doctor, some fans (often, it must be said, those who had never seen the programme in its earlier incarnation) wailed that Doctor Who had strapped on the waterskis and would soon be sailing over that shark.

And yet, it didn’t happen. In fact, in many ways, the third series of Who v.2.0 was the best one yet. From the moment he first appeared, beamingly announcing his intention to go to Barcelona, I much prefered David Tennant’s dazzling Doctor to Christopher Ecclestone’s more dour version, and he came into his own in this series. But he was helped by his new companion, medical student Martha Jones. The Doctor and Martha meet when evil aliens take over the hospital where she works and transport it to the moon. In a building full of wildly overacting extras, Martha is basically the only person who keeps her head, and joins forces with the doctor to defeat the evil vampiric leader and return the hospital to London before all the air runs out.

She also, of course, falls in love with the Doctor, but as he is (a) David Tennant and (b) snogs her as part of their hospital-saving plot, who can blame her? Alas, the whole Martha-loves-the-Doctor thing, while responsible for some of this series’s most affecting moments, is, as I said in my Christmas Special round-up, part of an increasingly annoying theme in the new Who. Although I felt for Martha in her attempts to get the Doctor to really notice her, I couldn’t help wishing she could just get over it. Still, despite mooning over the Doctor, Martha did get to save the world. And she was, in many ways, a more satisfying companion than Rose. She was older, she was more practical, she was, well, a grown-up.

And she was also lucky enough to take part in some of the new Doctor’s most thrilling – and moving – adventures to date. Unlike the first series, in which we were kind of bashed over the head with all the “bad wolf” references, the ongoing references to a mysterious politician called Mr Saxon, which began in the 2005 Christmas Special and continue throughout the third, were more subtle and unobtrusive. And although this series was never less than entertaining, several episodes stand out as some of the best science-fiction television the BBC has ever produced. Even the sillier episodes – like the ‘Daleks in Manhattan’ sequences, in which the Daleks returned to Depression-era New York, where they created a human-Dalek hybrid as well as a tribe of mutant pig-people – were entertaining in a ridiculous sort of way. Within a few episodes, Martha had met Shakespeare (in ‘The Shakespeare Code’, the first episode to acknowledge the potential difficulties a non-white companion could face while time-travelling), and floated off towards a black hole in a little pod (‘42’).

But four of this series’s episodes in particular – ‘Human Nature’, ‘The Family of Blood’, ‘Blink’ and ‘Utopia’ – were so good they made me wish I could pay the licence fee (note to anyone who thinks I am a licence-dodger or, heaven forfend, an illegal downloader: I’m Irish, so I have perfectly legal access to the BBC but for obvious reasons do not have to pay a UK licence fee). ‘Human Nature’ and ‘The Family of Blood’ were a two-parter in which the Doctor is pursued by a deadly enemy and must hide himself as a human in 1913. As John Smith, a teacher in a boarding school, the Doctor has no memory of his life as a Time Lord, apart from regular disturbing dreams. Martha, however, is looking after his Timelordian essence, so to speak, which is contained in an engraved pocket watch. She’s undercover as a maid, and has to watch miserably from afar while “John Smith” begins a romance with the school matron (Jessica Hynes). Of course, when the evil Family of Blood turns up and starts creepily taking over the bodies of various people in the neighbourhood, Martha knows that the only person who can save the day is the Doctor – but he doesn’t want to come back. When the Family attacks the school, the boys, who have been in the school cadet corps, have to man the barricades to fight them off, in a deeply moving scene that anticipates the horrors that most 1913 public schoolboys were going to experience over the next few years.

John Smith takes command, and in this scene and throughout the episode we see that he is a very different person to the Doctor we know and love. He is a man of his time, who dishes out corporal punishment without a qualm and can’t understand how a black woman can see herself as his equal. But he is not a fundamentally bad person, and when he realises that the world needs him to become the man he’s been dreaming about, he eventually does it – but not without a huge amount of pain, and the accompaniment of an incredibly moving vision of what his human life would be like if he stayed (seriously, if you weren’t in complete floods by the end of that scene, your heart must be made of stone. Stone, I say!). It’s an ode to being human, a theme that ol’ Russell often hammers into the ground, but which is handled here by Paul Cornell (who also wrote the Dr Who novel on which these episodes are based) with grace and skill. We see the hard, unforgiving side of the Doctor when he consigns the Family to hellish fates (one is trapped in every reflection – we’re told that if we ever see something in the corner of a mirror, it’s her; another is frozen and made to live as a scarecrow). These scenes are genuinely chilling, and seemingly designed to give children nightmares.

Speaking of episodes designed to give children nightmares, there’s ‘Blink’, which managed to be funny, sweet, bewildering and downright terrifying – and the Doctor’s hardly in it at all. The heroine is Sally Sparrow, played by the always delightful Carey Mulligan, whose best friend’s brother, Larry, discovers a series of cryptic messages from the Doctor in a DVD’s hidden “easter eggs”. Sally doesn’t take too much notice of this at first – she’s more freaked out by the strange statues of angels weeping, hands covering their faces, that seem to be cropping up all over the place. It turns out that the angels are creatures who feed off the energy of potential lives. If they touch you, you’re sent back in time, and they live off the energy of the life you would have led in the present. But the most scary aspect of the angels is the way they can only move if no one is looking at them. This leads to some fantastically creepy moments – characters glance away and look back to find that the angels have moved just a little bit closer, and there’s an absolutely brilliant scene in which Sally and Larry are being menaced by the angels and have to try not to blink, because every time they do the angels advance. By the time they’re down in the cellar, where a flickering lightbulb keeps plunging the room into total darkness, I was practically hiding behind the sofa. To cap it all off, once the mystery has been solved and the angels have been defeated, thanks to Sally’s quick thinking, we flash back to the Doctor’s DVD message telling us viewers to keep watch for the angels, and “don’t even blink!”, followed by shots of well-known statues in public places. Cue infant paranoia! It’s a perfect story – a truly ingenious time-travel adventure and a brilliant horror story.

If all this wasn’t good enough, there’s ‘Utopia’. I was spoiled for this episode by stupid Heat magazine, but even though I knew from the start that kindly Professor Derek Jacobi would turn into evil Master John Sim, I had absolutely no idea that he was unaware of his true timelord nature. Professor Yana is living at the end of human history, working on a project to send the last remnants of humanity to a heavenly utopia beyond the stars. His plan succeeds, thanks to the Doctor and Captain Jack, who makes a welcome reappearance. Why is John Barrowman so great in Doctor Who but so crap in Torchwood? It’s a mystery. Anyway, the poor old humans are sent off to a bright and shiny future, but what’s that in the Professor’s Pocket? Could it be a strangely carved pocketwatch, the same device the Doctor used to store his Time Lord essence? Yes it could, and as soon as I saw it I was practically shrieking with glee. The object starts asking to be opened, and when the Professor’s terrified assistant asks what’s wrong and addresses him by his title, he shoots her, saying he’s not the Professor – he is…”the Master”, at which point I cheered. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, he steals the Tardis and turns into John Sim. Televisual bliss.

The Master heads back in time and becomes, of course, Harold Saxon. By the time our brave heroes get back to earth in a whole new episode (”The Sound of Drums”), he’s the new Prime Minister and is on TV with his seemingly zombified wife and, scarily enough, Ann Widdecombe. “What the world needs right now,” he says, grinning magnificently at the camera, “is a doctor!” And even those who don’t actively look out for slashy subtexts would find it impossible to deny the slashiness of the Doctor/Master relationship. The Master is trying to track down our adventurous trio, and one phone conversation between him and the Doctor is so full of sexual tension it’s surprising it managed to get on screen at 7 on a Saturday night. Sadly, this tension is not consummated, and the poor old Doctor ends up captured and aged by about 800 years, while the Master unleashes an army of terrifying flying murderous orbs, the Toclafane, and takes over the world. John Sim, it has to be said, has an absolute ball playing the Master, turning him into the most entertaining villain to grace our screens in a long time. But along with the blackly funny moments (like the Master gassing his entire cabinet while giving the thumbs up sign), Sim invests the character with genuine menace, and the result is irresistible.

The final episode, ‘Last of The Time Lords’, doesn’t quite live up to expectations. A year has passed, the Master’s ruling the world from a spaceship hovering above Britain, the aged Doctor is being kept, disturbingly, in a tent and made to eat from a dog’s bowl, Martha’s family have been forced to become the Master’s servants and the unkillable Jack is kept in chains. Martha, however, escaped during the last episode and has been roaming around the world – the Tardis key, which she wears around her neck, is a perception filter which stops her from being noticed. She’s become a figure of hope among the world’s enslaved population, and it’s rumoured she’s the only one who can kill the Master. The latter has forced his slaves (ie everyone on earth) to build huge weapons which he plans to launch through his global satellite network in order to attack the rest of the universe. Back in England, she joins forces with a doctor turned resistance fighter, and when they examine a wounded Toclafane, they discover that the metallic orb creatures were originally the people Martha and the Doctor helped send off to space in ‘Utopia’ – they found no promised land, “only darkness”, and eventually turned themselves into these horrible amoral machines. The Master used the Tardis to bring them back in Time. It’s the obvious other side of Davies’ constant praising of the human spirit – these awful creatures are us, too.

Martha tells the resistance that she has a special weapon, the only thing that can kill the Master, but when she’s betrayed by a desperate freedom fighter, the Master destroys the supposed weapon and brings her to the ship. He’s about to kill her in front of the Doctor when she starts to laugh. What follows is hideously cheesy but damnit, when it aired I may have actually started beaming. You see, there never was a weapon. What Martha was doing on her round-the-world trek was telling people about the Doctor and how wonderful he was. She told them to all think about him at a certain time: the moment of the weapons launch. And thanks to the Master’s aforementioned satellite network, which the Doctor has been conveniently “psychically tuning himself in to” all year, the power of their hope regenerates him and he rises from the dead, and, in the manner of Jesus, he tells the Master that he forgives him. And, to be honest, for a self-avowed atheist, ol’ Rusty Davies is very, very obsessed with Christ-like figures. It’s getting a bit boring. Anyway, the Doctor tells the Master that he could do anything to the people of earth, but he couldn’t stop them thinking, and we see people all over the world just saying “Doctor!” Back in the ship, even the Master’s wife is saying it under her breath. This touching homage to the power of the human spirit may – MAY, I say – have made me go a bit teary, but it was against my better judgement.

Anyway, there’s a slightly homoerotic scene in a quarry between the two Time Lords before the Master’s seemingly dazed wife shoots her husband, presumably at his unspoken request. In yet another slightly homoerotic scene, he dies in the Doctor’s arms, refusing to regenerate despite the Doctor’s frantic demands, the latter knowing that now his last link to his homeland is broken, and he’s truly alone. Davies has always been pretty good at showing the terrible loneliness of the Doctor, what it means to be the last of anything. Of course, this tragedy is slightly undermined by the final scene in which, after the Doctor has cremated the Master on a funeral pyre in traditional Time Lord style, a female hand picks up the Master’s ring while maniacal laughter rings out in the background. This touching homage to the final scene in Flash Gordon is kind of awesome, yet also totally ridiculous (rather like some of the best bits of Doctor Who). Speaking of Flash Gordon, I’m slightly surprised Brian Blessed hasn’t turned up in Doctor Who yet. Surely it’s only a matter of time.

Anyway, back on earth, the Doctor finally acknowledges the brilliance of Martha. “Martha Jones,” says the Doctor happily. “You saved the world!” But sensible Martha decides she wants a normal(ish) life of her own rather than one spent mooning after the Doctor, and bids him and the Tardis farewell. Of course, we now know what happened next – Kylie. And soon, god help us, we’ll have the return of the awful Catherine Tate. But there is hope – Martha was recently seen kicking arse in Torchwood, and is set to return in several episodes of the new series of Doctor Who. And rightly so. She saved the world, after all.