Day 4710: DOCTOR WHO: Just a Moment

The Day of the Doctor (flashback):


In “The Curse of Fenric”, the Reverend Wainwright’s faith is broken not by German bombs, but by British ones. British bombs killing German children. Remember that.

The Doctor is a traveller in Time and Space. That’s where all this begins and where it always comes back to. But there are two ways to travel: never looking behind you, and there and back again. Over the (fifty) years, the Doctor has exemplified both modes, reflecting the mores of the production team of the time. They represent quite different world-views, different approaches to making “Doctor Who”, different ideas about what the series is saying, and what – and who – it’s for.

“Never look behind you” is innovative, risk-taking, “out there” in a Universe that is often a dark and strange place where light is a guttering candle; iconoclastic, it breaks continuity, changes things shakes them up, causes chaos, creative and destructive; this is “Doctor Who” typified by the likes of Verity Lambert or Philip Hinchcliffe, Mac Hulke or Andrew Cartmel. Let’s call this group “Explorers”.

“There and Back Again” is honour, tradition, moral strength, defending “hearth and home (counties)” from the weird and other, usually with the idea that “home” is somewhere “safe” to return to and worth defending; it builds upon what has gone before, strengthens and deepens, forges connections, brings order, reactionary and nurturing; it’s the “Doctor Who” of Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts, of Graham Williams era Guardians and space princesses and John Nathan-Turner’s middle years. I thought about naming this group “Nostalgics” but that seems pejorative, so let us say “Conservers”.

Change is said to be one of the keys to the enduring success of Doctor Who, so it’s important that we don’t say that one mode is “better”, even if each of us will certainly have a preference for one over the other.

Russell Davies, for all of the Barry Letts’ Era tropes that he revels in, lavishes his love on even, is clearly an “Explorer”. He pushes the Doctor into new places all the time: Platform One, planet Midnight; Jackie Tyler’s boudoir… His signature companion is Rose Tyler and the first and most important thing about Rose is that she wants to get out there, leaving her past behind. And when she leaves, she’s gone further than anyone else, to a whole new Universe, and she’s still going.

Steven Moffat, in spite of his reputation as Mr Terror, is just as clearly a “Conserver”. So much of his writing is about family and the threat to family and “home”. His signature companion is Amy Pond, who is defined by her absent family, and whose story is all about how she and the Doctor become family, how he “fixes” her (ugh) by un-orphaning her, and when she leaves it’s because the Doctor gives her a nice house and when she leaves again it’s to be with her husband.

The most telling difference between the two groups has to be their attitude to the Time Lords.

It should be pretty obvious that, as the television series “Doctor Who” developed, the Time Lords became a metaphor for Britain, just as the Daleks were a metaphor for the Nazis. It was pretty inevitable that the biggest, most important war ever would end up being between them. And that it would destroy them both. But, unlike the Daleks – there being obviously only one opinion to be held on the Nazis – Britain means different things to different people and therefore so do the Time Lords, whether it’s the stern, patrician, nay Reithian, but basically good intergalactic ticket wardens of Barry Letts or the befuddled, introverted, vain academics of Robert Holmes; the overseers of galactic order (and shipping lanes) under the supervision of the White Guardian under Graham Williams or the dark and enigmatic architects of a history that conceals their worst mistakes as conceived by Lawrence Miles.

And there is a very good case for saying that the Time Lords have always been gits. I know because Alex made it. After all, practically the first thing they do is execute the Doctor. But that’s not always been the perspective of subsequent writers and producers. Or even of co-writer of “The War Games” Terrance Dicks!

Britain, for good or ill – in fact, for good and ill – moulded the modern world, whether by Imperial conquest, or the conduct of the slave trade, or the economic influence of the East India Company, or the expeditious, even perfidious, promises of the territory of Palestine to at least four deeply antagonistic factions, torturing, maiming and murdering our way across five continents and four-hundred years all blindly convinced that technological superiority conveyed moral superiority and utterly deluded about our “basic British decency”, and the only remote claim to absolution being that maybe we were slightly less bad than other people at the time would have been, and maybe that we did it to stop people – Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolf Hitler – who would have been worse.

This completely schizophrenic view of our own past – that the British Empire was an appalling crime against humanity that at the same time was the only thing that saved the world from absolute despotism; whether we are, at heart, good or bad – informs the writing of the Doctor and the Time Lords. Is he fleeing from them, rejecting their decadence or corruption? Or is he upholding their principles even when they themselves fall short? Is he the renegade or the exemplar? Or is the Master?

And, I have to say, the conclusion of “Genesis of the Daleks”, where the Doctor – on behalf of his people – chooses to reject retro-genocide of the Daleks, in spite of all their evil, has long weighed upon me. Out of that evil, will come something good. What, really, does the Doctor mean by that? It can’t just be the future alliances brought about against the Daleks; surely those races could have become friends anyway. No, it’s something more than that, more fundamental really. My settled feelings came to be that the choice was never between Daleks and no-Daleks. Because Genocide of the Daleks would have made the Time Lords into the Daleks. So the choice was between a Universe of Daleks, and a Universe with Daleks and Time Lords. A Universe where there was only obedience and extermination, and a Universe where we even have a choice.

In a way this is the only way that “Remembrance of the Daleks” does not flatly contradict “Genesis” morally and logically. The Doctor gives Davros a choice. He may be tricking him, he may have set everything up to force Davros’ hand, he may know perfectly well that Davros is never going to choose to surrender the Hand of Omega or stop his quest for ultimate power, he may have goaded Davros to the point of frothing lunacy and wound him up past the point where he’s thinking rationally, but he still – just about – gives him the choice to do it or not to do it. At that point in Genesis, the point of exercising ultimate power – the “moment”, you might say – the Doctor paused. And because he paused, he realised that he could make that choice. Davros doesn’t, literally doesn’t stop to think. That’s the difference between Dalek and Time Lord.

And that difference, that there still is a difference between Dalek and Time Lord is one idea that runs deep in the heart of “The Day of the Doctor”. In the prologue piece “Night of the Doctor”, Paul McGann’s Doctor tries to rescue a crashing space pilot, Cass, and she refuses when she recognises him as a Time Lord. “At least I’m not a Dalek!” he protests. “Who can tell any more?” she retorts. But we can tell.

“Are you coward or killer?” demanded the Emperor Dalek, and Chris Eccleston’s Doctor replied “Coward every time.” And he was right. Every time.


Alex’s reaction to “The Day of the Doctor” – and he’s not wrong – was that Moffat has now succeeded in un-writing all of Russell; that, dear lord, it’s the Leekley Bible, with the Doctor on a hero’s journey to find his lost father(land); that Moffat’s taken the very heart of Doctor Who – the Doctor running away from Gallifrey – and turned it on its head, with a Doctor running to find his home. And of course that’s what Moffat has done: he’s a “Conserver”, he needs the story to be “There and Back Again”, the future must build on the past, the hero has to return home. He made his views on Britain – that plucky little island standing up to the Nazis – pretty clear back in “The Empty Child”, and nothing since has changed that. Britain stood against the Nazis; Gallifrey must stand against the Daleks. That’s the way the tide in the affairs of “Doctor Who” is running at the moment.

But then, as Simon pointed out, “The Three Doctors” unwrote the Doctor’s exile to Earth, took him away from the safe, cosy UNIT family and cast him out into the Universe, leading eventually to the great trinity of “Explorers” Baker/Holmes/Hinchcliffe.

Things change.

Perhaps I should actually review the episode a little bit. I think “The Day of the Doctor” succeeds far more as a tribute to fifty years of the Doctor than it does as a story. The Daleks, for all the show-offy Time War CGI were hardly in it except to blow up on demand, and would they really all shoot each other in a big circle? (Alex wanted me to call this review “Gallifrey Ducks”, and I’m mightily tempted.) Though I post-facto justify that by reminding him that Rose as the Bad Wolf – and let’s be honest, it’s pretty clear that the Moment and the Bad Wolf are one and the same here; though it’s rather lovely that the clockwork box evolves itself into a big red button that is clearly a Rose – annihilated every Dalek everywhere in Time and Space. So presumably that included all the Daleks surrounding the suddenly-missing Gallifrey (less any that actually did shoot each other!).

The Zygons – really? the Zygons? Even as a gift to Davy T? – were forgotten in the big resolution (I mean are they still locked in the Black Archive negotiating that treaty? And why was it necessary for Osgood and Osgood-Zygon to work out who was who by means of the inhaler when nothing came of that? It’s not like Osgood-Zygon was anice Zygon before). Nice transformation moment, mind you. And they did a good job of disguising the fact they only had one Zygon costume. And on second watching I spotted the moment Kate got replaced (having worried that she’d been a Zygon all along!).

It does, though, support my belief that the Doctor’s gabble to Ood Sigma at the start of “The End of Time” was him putting a spin on his reasons for not going straight to the Ood-Sphere from “The Waters of Mars” (though I still prefer my own theory that there’s a bit of non-linear storytelling going on and he goes and visits all his companions before he sets off to the Ood-sphere and is just remembering them all again as he staggers to the TARDIS about to explode. Okay, maybe allowing him one last visit to Rose).

The 3D – better mention the 3D since it was a big deal, and we went to the cinema on the Day-After-the-Day-of-the-Doctor so as to see it; a disaster all of its own, but that’s another story – the 3D was patchy at best. The helicopter stunt was pretty good; the “look we’re a movie now” style titles stood out very well, as you’d expect from lettering over a deep field background; the Time War was mostly a lot of coloured lights (and the first and only other time since “Remembrance” that the Daleks have fired bolts rather than beams, I guess to make the 3D work. Ish.) Bits of stone and rubble flying out of the screen as the TARDIS took out a squad of Daleks sort of worked. The best bit, as it happened, was a tree. As Elizabeth was chased by the former-horse Zygon, one branch really did the sticking out of the screen thing. And ironically, the 3D Time Lord paintings (great in concept, though what were they doing on Earth and how did Liz 1 get hold of them to stick into her Undergallery?) looked completely flat. Or at least no better than they looked in 2D, when the zoom and look round gave just as much impression of 3D as the silly glasses.

But none of that was important, because it opened in Totters Lane and Coal Hill School and had photos of past companions and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart name-checking her dad, and a joke about Cromer and another about UNIT dating, and a great big red countdown.

The three Doctors played it beautifully. I’ll join the chorus who say that Chris did us a tremendous favour by bowing out of the anniversary, missed though he was, as it gave us John Hurt as the War Doctor. This will almost certainly – barring surprises – be the only time we get to see John Hurt’s incarnation, and it goes without saying what a shame that is.

Moffat was spurred to write something clever (or fan-baiting) that allowed us to see the kind of Doctor who actually would fight on the front lines, while retaining the character integrity of Eccleston’s recently-regenerated post-Time War Doctor and McGann’s pre-Time War Time Lord (or the one who runs into the start of it; another neat nod there to the books, especially Lawrence Miles’ Faction Paradox works).

There’s a sense of genuine progression from McGann’s weariness at fighting the injustice of the Universe (in the later Big Finish as well as “Night of the Doctor”), to Hurt’s ground to dust Doctor who says “No More” and breaks into the Omega Archive to steel the Moment. (Did the Hand of Omega let him in, do you think?) Hurt is perfect as the Doctor straight away, from the way he hides his shame from the TARDIS, to the way he can be acerbic to his older selves, right to the joy expressed when they think their way out of the trap of the last day. The way he can be wise, but not quite wise enough.

And he speaks on behalf of the Twentieth Century series when, almost baffled, he confronts his Twenty-First Century selves for all that they’ve become. And to be fair, Moffat can wax lyrical when he tries: the man who regrets and the man who forgets being beautifully little vignettes of David and Matt as the Time Lord. Better than “skinny” and “chinny” anyway. The badinage between Doctors ten and eleven (or is that eleven/twelve and thirteen, now?) was clearly fashioned after the “The Three Doctors” and yet came across as more like friendly ribbing between siblings than the sniping between Troughton and Pertwee. But the two new series Doctors were much more than the comic relief. Fair play to David Tennant: he restrained his occasional habit of overplaying the anger and the suffering, to turn in one of his finest turns as the Time Lord, by turns funny, self-satirising, angry and sad. And bonus for befuddled on hearing the words “Bad Wolf Girl”. And Matt, Matt was as always wonderful. Some particular emoting nicely mirroring the extreme close up of half his face against half of Hurt’s. Impressive to see them go toe to toe and the younger man keep up with the old master.

And I had genuine tears of joy when the three Doctors were joined by his other selves to make the twelve Doctors… and then my heart leapt even higher for “all thirteen”. Peter Capaldi stole the show with only his eyebrows. And then I was misting up again when Tom returned to our screens to steal the show right back; enigmatic, wise, cryptic, bonkers, Who Knows? Past self or future, or just eternally the Doctor. Along with the wonderful Paul McGann mini-episode it truly made this a proper anniversary. And it’s impossible not to think that Sylv, Colin and Peter D were there too, under those shrouds as the statue -impersonating Zygons.

(Thoughts on the Five-ish Doctors: brilliant, best of the celebration; Moffat forced to play a scene where he deletes his own Victory Daleks from the anniversary special; Peter D, choosing to delete Russell’s voice message just as the Grand Moff had deleted the Doctors’ messages earlier with an expression on his face that says – a la Space Commander Travis, a joke only Blake’s Seven aficionados will get – “oh yes, I’m a Moffat too”.)


This is something I wrote in about 2001, after “The Ancestor Cell”:

The Doctor dreams. Something that he can't quite grasp, gone but not forgotten, in a universe in a bottle, a place of last resort, a redoubt, somewhere forgotten, forgotten that he'd forgotten. A place within a place, worlds within worlds, even if all was lost they wouldn't all be lost, or lost but not all gone, not gone but forgotten. They're not gone but forgotten. He wakes.

In “The Curse of Fenric”, the Reverend Wainwright’s faith is broken not by German bombs, but by British ones. British bombs killing German children.

In “The End of Time”, the Doctor’s faith is broken by the High Council of the Time Lords’ decision to abandon the Time War against the Daleks, to let Arcadia fall, and to wipe out all of History in order to ascend, escape, run away to a higher plane.

Moffat’s writing, mawkish, sentimental, won’t somebody think of the children though it may be, is a reminder of what the Doctor, in his long despair, has forgotten. In “The End of Time” the Doctor confesses that his stories of the Time Lords are always about how good and wonderful they were, but that that is how he chooses to remember them; that at the end, they became as bad as the enemy they were fighting. But that’s not necessarily true either; that’s how he really remembers them, from his darkest day, from the choices of the few – admittedly a Nuremburg Rally-full of the High Council, but few compared to 2.47 billion children – that drove him to despair. But the Time Lords are not the Daleks. They are not all the same. And they can choose.

Gallifrey Falls. Or Gallifrey Rises. Those are the choices the Doctor takes into the moment. But he’s the Doctor. He’s always about being given two choices and finding the third. Gallifrey Stands.

In “The Curse of Fenric”, Ace says to Wainwright: “Have faith in me”.

In “The Day of the Doctor”, Clara and the Bad Wolf remind the Doctor of who he is, and through faith in them, he restores his faith in himself.

Don’t get me wrong; I still agree with Alex. By rewriting the Last Day of the Time War, Moffat has turned “everybody dies” into “everybody lives”; he’s taken the ultimate message of Russell – “consequences” – and made it meaningless.

And yet, and yet…

I must confess, I felt the loss of Gallifrey deeply, a Universe without Gallifrey – without a Britain – was like a wound, it was to be unhomed.

So good and bad, right and wrong, Explorer and Conserver, like the Time Lords, like Britain, like all of us, “The Day of the Doctor” can be both at once and all at the same time.

After all, it’s “Doctor Who”.

Next Time… It’s Christmas. We’re promised Daleks and Cybermen and Weeping Angels. Oh My. And Silence, finally, will fall. Back to Trenzalore, then, in search of some answers. Why did the TARDIS explode? What was the endless bitter war? When will the Grand Moff stop tweaking fandom by the tail? He’s taking on the Doctor Who curse, by putting “Time” in the title, and settling once and for all the question of what happens after the Doctor’s twelve regenerations in “The Time of the Doctor”

Day 4535: DOCTOR WHO: Matt Finish

Saturday:


We are sad because Matt Smith has announced that he will be handing on the mantle of The Doctor.

It feels too soon.

It shouldn’t. By the time he goes, he’ll have appeared in thirty-nine stories over forty-four episodes, which is either slightly more or slightly fewer than David Tennant (who did thirty-four in forty-seven), and his three seasons will have covered four years, much as David’s three-years-plus-specials did.

But perhaps it’s the way the split seasons felt like cheating, maybe it’s that the Ponds stuck around so long, but something about the eleventh Doctor feels like unfulfilled potential.

Is the lifespan of a Doctor measured in numbers of companions rather than screen time? David went adventuring with three companions – Rose, Martha and Donna – and travelled alone after, giving a distinct sense of three or four “eras” of the tenth Doctor. Matt’s eleventh Doctor clung on to Amy for longer even than Rose, and River Song has hung on even longer. A second – and full – season with Clara would have felt more balanced. As it is, the eight episodes this year feel more tacked on than the start of a new era that they deserve to be.

Or do we measure Doctor’s by the number of “classics” that they appear in? Alex said he was still waiting for Matt to be given the string of great stories that his performance as the Doctor deserved, and he’s right.

Billy sets the bar high from the very first episode, “An Unearthly Child”, and has “The Daleks”, “Marco Polo”, “The Aztecs”, “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, “The Crusade”, “The Daleks’ Master Plan” (and maybe “The Massacre” if only we could see it); Pat has two Daleks stories, “Tomb of the Cybermen”, “The Web of Fear”, “The Mind Robber”, “The Invasion” and “The War Games”; Jon can point to “...and the Silurians”, “Inferno”, “The Dæmons”, “The Curse of Peladon”, “Carnival of Monsters” and “The Green Death” among others; Tom has “Genesis of the Daleks”, “Pyramids of Mars”, “The Deadly Assassin”, “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”, “City of Death”, “Logopolis” and (as K-9 K-Tel would say) many, many more. Even Chris has “Dalek”, “The Empty Child” and “Parting of the Ways” on his list from one too short a season, while David can lay claim to “Human Nature” and “Blink”, and arguably “Doomsday” and “Last of the Time Lords”, with “Tooth and Claw”, “Gridlock”, “Turn Left,” “Midnight” and “The Waters of Mars” all bubbling under. These eras all feel “big”.

Conversely, Peter only feels like he’s getting into the swing of it with “The Caves of Androzani”, and although Sylv has “Remembrance of the Daleks” and “The Curse of Fenric”, Colin and Paul have to wait for the invention of Big Finish for any decent stories at all.

Judged on that scale, Matt has had stories that have been crying out to be magnificent that just kind of haven’t been. “The Time of Angels” is almost awesome, but then “Flesh and Stone” starts buggering around with the Angels unique shtick, and begins the confusion over what “erased from time” actually means; “The Pandorica Opens” is let down by the WTF reboot of the universe in “The Big Bang” (and the too-colourful presence of the Tellytubby Daleks); “The Impossible Astronaut”/”The Day of the Moon”... in fact the whole of 2011 yearns to be a grand epic, but it’s deeply undermined by Steven Moffat’s impenetrable, over-extended story arc and a touch of light genocide; by the time we get to “A Good Man Goes to War” and “The Wedding of River Song” the arc is collapsing under its own weight of expectations – largely set up by the Grand Moff’s teasing – and we’re showing off our set pieces, forgetting to tell actual stories in their own right.

So although there are some cracking stories along the way – “Amy’s Choice”, “Vincent and the Doctor”, “The God Complex” and “The Crimson Horror”, even Moffat’s own “Asylum of the Daleks” or “The Snowmen”, not to mention the fan-pleasuring “The Name of the Doctor” – their highs are muffled by the disappointment of story arcs that don’t pay off, seasons without the unity that Russell (or Cartmel, or Bidmead, or Holmes, or Dicks) used to bring, and let’s face it a few real duffer episodes along the way.

And, do you know, thinking about it, I do wonder if it doesn’t all come down to the total disaster that is the last fifteen minutes of “Victory of the Daleks”... just as everything seems to be going brilliantly... THEY appear and suddenly no one is taking this seriously any more.

(And defeating a planet busting bomb with the power of lurve is pretty unspeakable too, and a sign of the direction this series will be heading under Moffat, and unlike the Dalek design decision, that probably is Gatiss fault.)

Would we have been more forgiving of the eleventh Doctor’s first season if we hadn’t already seen the New Paradigm? Did the decision to redesign the series’ iconic villain – and how badly wrong they got it – burn up all of Moffat’s benefit of the doubt? Particularly the way that it was sold: “yeah, we’re changing everything else so we thought we’d redesign the Daleks too”, with hindsight perhaps the braggadocio of a desperate man who’s seen what they’ve made and is having doubts, but coming across as the arrogance of someone who thinks he knows better.

Well, no. It’s not just that.

The errors do compound. A reliance on magic thinking rather than plot logic; a habit of throwing in another “ingenious” idea or another set piece rather than developing the story; a juvenile approach to the sexuality of the lead character (that Amy might react to a trauma like “The Time of Angels” by wanting sex is quite sophisticated; the Doctor responding like a goosed John Inman is not); a conviction that you can bring anyone back from death (especially the endless deaths of Rory Pond)because “it’s science fiction”, when death should be the most serious thing – “nobody dies” was supposed to be “just this once”, not every damn week; a failure to explain in clear terms how major plot threads actually resolved – why the hell did the TARDIS blow up and crack the Universe? Is Madam Kovarian actually dead or did that timeline not really happen? Why were the Silence at “war” with the Doctor? How did he convince River she didn’t want to murder him in “Let’s Kill Hitler”? – and finally a lack of emotional awareness, of understanding that terrible events have consequences, more than anything that baffling decision to make the crucial follow-up to the emotionally charged revelations of “A Good Man Goes to War” an episode of comedy Nazis, indeed a farce, of all things...

Russell wrote a lot of stories that didn’t make a great deal of sense when you looked at them later, or where he pulled a solution out of his hat, but where you felt there was a solid reason why they played out the way they did.

Steven, on the other hand, writes intricate constructions from ideas, not always all his own, with dialogue either wittily clever or poetically moving, which are spectacular but hollow.

e.g. When Russell writes the stars going out, he ties it directly to the nihilistic insanity of Davros, this man who hates everything else so much that he’d rather annihilate it all than suffer it to continue to exist.

When Steven writes the stars going out, it’s the result of a convoluted series of events orchestrated by someone we don’t actually in order to blow up the TARDIS for reasons that we don’t understand and never get explained.

(The most likely candidates remain the Silence, who blow up the TARDIS to stop the Doctor reaching Trenzalore, and the entire Universe was destroyed only by accident. Which has to be embarrassing, even if the whole purpose of your cult wasn’t, apparently, to stop the Doctor reaching Trenzalore in order to, er, prevent the entire Universe being destroyed.)

More bluntly, Russell wrote some great stories with rubbish plots; Moffat has the reverse problem.

Except, he is getting better.

People seem to have wearied of Moffat’s bag of conjuring tricks recently, unfortunately just at the point where he seems to have been pulling out of his rut. The 2013 series seems to have come in for unwarranted heavy criticism, from the professional critics as well as the usual fan assassins, and I seem to be in a definite minority in thinking that the stories this year have shown a marked sense of improvement over the lacklustre 2010 and horrible mess of 2011. Whether it’s because Caro Skinner was good for him behind the scenes or because the (maybe I’m reading too much into it) apparent decision to theme an episode for each of the “classic” Doctors gave them some extra impetus to the “movie of the week” style he said he’d adopted for season seven, they’ve all felt much more like stories that had a reason for telling them, moreso even than the five episodes in 2012.

They’re still hamstrung by the shortness of the running time, and if I were producer I’d be pushing for more not fewer (or no!) two-part stories, or at least an extra quarter of an hour each episode (even if it meant only ten episodes in a series. You know, like “Game of Thrones”, which doesn’t do too badly, I understand). And Clara still seems to have no character (which is a shame because I’ve liked Jenna-Louise all along). But even when they’re getting it wrong – “Akhaten”, “Journey...” – at least they’re now getting it wrong for the right reasons: ambition of storytelling exceeding the running time or resources available.

And “The Name of the Doctor” is very nearly right. Sure, it’s still a bit stringing set-pieces together, but there’s a lot more science stuff injected into the fairytale: time travel on the astral plane and a conference call by telepathy, these feel like the sorts of things Doctor Who used to do; and the idea that the Doctor’s travels are a scar on the face of the Universe, that his death is a wound that allows access to all of history, specifically his history (which surely includes the dreaded Time War), these aren’t just conceptually intriguing, but they’re the sort of thing that used to allow us to have the Doctor’s good and bad angels (Clara and the Intelligence) fighting for his soul over the length of his lifetime. And it’s actually about something: “The Name of the Doctor” is about the name of the Doctor being “The Doctor”, that it’s a choice and how and why that is important, to him and to us.

It’s a tragedy that, at least until “The Name of the Doctor”, “The Eleventh Hour” was probably Matt’s best overall story. “The Eleventh Hour” promised so much, and Matt delivered, he’s been terrific every single week, but we are left still waiting for a story that is as great as he is.

Do you hear me, Mr Moffster? The fiftieth anniversary show had better be BLOODY good!

Matt Smith: saluté!

PS:
...and the other sad thing is that this will be the end of the eleventh Doctor’s theme tune. No, not the current tortuous reworking of Ron Grainer: Murray Gold’s lovely eleventh Doctor anthem “Every Star and Every Planet” (“I Am The Doctor”) which is as engrained in this era as “Dance of the Macra” (“All The Strange, Strange Creatures”) was in the tenth Doctor’s, possibly even more so.


Coming Soon...If I ever manage to find some time, I hope to be doing reviews of the two episodes of 2013 I didn’t get around to – “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” which I disliked and “The Crimson Horror” which I adored – and a couple of those classics I mentioned above: Tom Baker in “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” and Jon Pertwee in the beautiful new restoration of “The Mind of Evil”. Before that, one of the best bits of Doctor Who you’re likely to come across this year... it’s a book, and obviously the Doctor isn’t in it. Obverse Books’ new Faction Paradox novel: Lawrence Burton’s “Against Nature”. Seriously, go read it!

Day 4521: DOCTOR WHO: The Hurt Doctor

Saturday:

A History of the Time Lord, as recounted by Lawrence Miles, Kate Orman & John Blum, Paul Cornell and Kate Orman again:

"Once Upon A Time, the Doctor died, and because he was a time traveller, perhaps the most travelled time traveller ever, his body, or rather his "biodata", the "time DNA" of his journey through eternity, was a source of incredible energy, a fountainhead of information, a weapon of unspeakable power. And, by a quirk of fate, the Doctor crossed his own timeline to discover his body and fight his enemies to stop them taking advantage of it...

"Once Upon Another Time, the Doctor nearly died when he was in San Francisco, and this little death left a scar on the surface of the Universe. And the Doctor was travelling with a perfect companion, too perfect a companion, who was everything he wanted in a friend and assistant, and was impossible. And one day they came to San Francisco again and in order to save the Doctor's life, his companion jumped into the scar and was rewritten...

"And Once Upon A Time Again, Ace died on the Moon – having mistakenly believed it to be Norfolk – and found herself inside the Doctor's mind where she met with versions of his earlier selves who dwelt there now that they were passed...

"And Once Upon One Final Time, the Doctor, living in fear and dread that one day he should fall and become the dark future self he had witnessed, the Valeyard, denied a part of his own past, a part of his own memories, a part of his own self, and walled up his earlier incarnation in a Room with No Doors, and in doing so became the thing he feared, for although he was Time's Champion, he had become ruthless and calculating and without the passion for life that had made him that earlier self, and so he set his foot upon the path that led to the Valeyard, and healing came only with sacrifice and opening the Room with No Doors, and only in realising there are not three Doctors or Five Doctors or Seven or Eleven, that he is and always was and always will be the One Doctor."

"Alien Bodies"; "Unnatural History"; "Timewyrm: Revelation"; "The Room With No Doors" (and most of the rest of the New Adventures).

(And I'm not even going to mention that a certain blogger might once have suggested that the Doctor's name was such a big secret because it was used to lock away the Medusa Cascade...)

Why is it that when Mark Gatiss copies the tropes of Universal or Hammer Horror, of ITC drama or The Avengers, or borrows from Conan Doyle or even Who's own long history we call it "pastiche" and applaud in delight, and when Steven Moffat does this it feels like stealing?

That's not to say that it's not done exceeding well, pleasing both to fans who get the references and to the public who are impressed by the spectacle. And although it's almost all lifted from, particularly, Miles's "Alien Bodies", Moffat has a gift for translating those ideas to the screen and even adding a thing or two of his own – I'm thinking specifically the dying TARDIS grown to enormous size as the internal dimensions leak out (which Marie did in "Alien Bodies", if less grandly) and the bits of his relationship with River (even if she is herself stolen from the Time Traveller's Wife).

For once Moffat delivered on the promises made, with a real "reveal" of the Doctor's secret. Typical of Moffat, it was a smoke-and-mirrors reveal of a different secret to the one he was leading you to expect: not the Doctor's name, but a Doctor you never knew about, and because that Doctor didn't live up to the name of "The Doctor". (He even takes the trouble to foreshadow this twist with the wordplay double-meaning of "The Doctor has a secret he will take to the grave, and it is discovered".)

And it is a genuinely satisfying answer to the puzzle of the Impossible Girl, and this time around it appears to have been worked out properly in advance, i.e. knowing what the answer will be and fitting the questions together to frame it, rather than trying to stick a "solution" that she never needed onto River Song, or frankly closing your eyes and saying really hard "I do believe in fairies" to unkill the Doctor in "The Big Bang".

(Although... does this retroactively mean that "The Snowmen" is a paradoxical alteration of the Doctor's past by the Intelligence as Dr Simeon going back and creating the events that lead to it adopting the guise of Dr Simeon? Worse, is the present day Clara a paradoxical echo of herself?!)

There are hugely moving moments along the way: Madam Vastra's tears for Jenny; the Doctor's tears for himself; the fate of River Song; or of the TARDIS, with her dying console room dressed as the "Logopolis" cloisters too; most of all the clips and look-a-like extras of the earlier ten Doctors. Whoever it was doing Colin (...could it be Sylv in the wig again?), they get the walk exactly right, just the pace and arrogance; the one doing Tom is ever so very nearly on the money too, with just about the right sort of bounce to the run and swish to the scarf. And of course the colourised Hartnell is a delight, no matter how imperfectly the colour is done. (Least said about the poorly rotoscoped-in second Doctor the better, though.) The clips used ("Dragonfire" aside) appear to be from stories set on Gallifrey – "Invasion of Time", "Arc of Infinity" and "The Five Doctors". Is that significant? There's also probably some sort of gag to be made about mining "The Five Doctors" for past-Doctor footage; sadly no one clipped the clip from Shada and photoshopped Clara onto the Clare bridge in Cambridge.

It's actually quite a thin story, though: in danger of being, like the Great Intelligence's Richard E Grant-shaped avatar, fruity on the outside and hollow on the inside. The Paternoster Gang are lured into a trap by some, excuse me, "intelligence" about the Doctor from a condemned murderer, and then kidnapped to Trenzalore (and how? and when did the Intelligence obtain Time Travel? or Space Travel for that matter? Isn't it still stuck on the Astral Plane?), and the Doctor comes to get them. Cue intriguing explanations of what the tomb is, and what's inside, and why it's a really bad thing that the Intelligence does next. But ultimately it comes down to the Intelligence stepping into a special effect, and then Clara stepping into a special effect which we're told cancels the Intelligence out, and finally the Doctor going in after her, and rescuing her from a BAFTA anniversary montage.

Where was the real sense of threat? Yes, we see the stars winking out (again) – surely more of a reference to Moffat's own "He's saved every planet in the Universe at least twice" speech in "Curse of the Fatal Death" than to Russell's season four "The Darkness is Coming" arc – but even if we hadn't seen that before (twice, nod to "The Big Bang" as well) it's still a distant and anaemic threat of disaster. And other than that, we get the Doctor writhing on the floor going "arrgh arrgh". Which, to be fair, does happen quite often as well. (Perhaps if his regenerations had unpeeled and he'd vanished in a poof, it might have been different... Though it would have denied him the agonised "no, don'ts" as Clara contemplates sacrificing herself for him. And it might have been nice to have an idea of how she changed from the girl who needed double-daring to go ghost hunting in "Hide" to being the sort of companion who'll die literally in a ditch for him.)

I could probably have done with at least one more story this season with the Great Intelligence getting its plans for universal domination thwarted, and – since it was the one I didn't particularly like – I'd have stuck it in where "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" was. It seemed pretty phlegmatic about its set-back in "The Bells of St John", rather than the vengeful/suicidal character expressed here; I'd have liked something more to get from there to here, to set this up as a real grudge match – Buffy structured its seasons that way, with a "Big Bad" introduced at the start, getting a major plan beaten in the middle and then their apocalypse gambit for the finale. Also, where did those "whispermen" come from? And do the "whispermen" and the "Silence" have anything to do with one another?

Richard E Grant's lugubrious performance as the Intelligence was not given the screen time that it richly deserved (and along with the sort-of Eccleston looky-likey and that reveal at the end, was this the episode with the three Ninth Doctors?)

However, the Eleventh Doctor is really coming into his own, with Matt Smith out-Tennanting Tennant (and in a good way) in the moment where he learns he has no choice but to travel to Trenzalore. Implicitly mirroring the end of "The End of Time" where the tenth Doctor throws a stroppy fit when death and destiny come to stare him in the face, here the eleventh weeps for himself but faces the inevitable with a determination to do his duty.

Meanwhile, Alex Kingston gave us a more subdued River Song than before, a post-mortem River who seems ready to drift away, if only she could say goodbye to the Doctor, if only he wold let her. Does it seem that Moffat is resiling from his earlier "nobody dies" ending to the Library story when he has the Doctor tell River's (data) ghost that she's only an echo? It seems like the right moment and the right way to let River go, although not without some regrets; I had wanted to see her develop her relationship with at least one other Doctor, not least because her remarks to Ten in the Library implied she was familiar with several faces, and that she really ought to be able to sort out the order if she only actually knows two of him.

Is Trenzalore, ruined and burnt, actually Gallifrey? (And in which case, is Moffat robbing Craig Hinton's "The Crystal Bucephalus" too?)

Does this episode fulfil the prophecy of Trenzalore as imparted by Dorium at the end of the previous season? Maybe. Arriving on the planet by falling from orbit might count as "the Fall of the Eleventh". We might not have guessed that the "Fields of Trenzalore" would be lava fields. And River's silent answer to the Great Intelligence's question might satisfy "Silence must fall when the question is asked". But how does the Doctor manage to get out of "When no living soul can lie or fail to answer"? And why were the Silence so damn keen to shut him up before he could get there and (not) answer?

The fact is, the battle, the tomb and above all the Doctor's remains all prove that the Doctor must return here again.

And Moffat's been setting up the mystery of the Doctor's name for a long, long time, ever since "The Girl in the Fireplace". It could have been just a bit of chicanery to add some deeper-seeming mystery, but he's kept on coming back to it. This may be all the explanation we get. He has, after all, got form for stumbling on the dismount. But it seems to me that there is still more of this story to tell, and that he's probably keeping it for when he, or Matt, choose to call it a day.

So is he planning on doing "Curse of the Fatal Death" with live ammo? That is to say, using up all of the Doctor's remaining incarnations and outright killing him?

Let's start by asking which Doctor that John Hurt is playing, then? The dialogue and the costume (Eccleston's leather jacket over McGann's waistcoat) surely point to Hurt playing the Time Lord who fought in the Time War, although you can make a case for him being a future incarnation, with Clara claiming to have seen all the Doctor's eleven faces and the – unexpected and pleasing to my fan heart – namecheck for the Valeyard. There's also the possibility that he might be a pre-Hartnell incarnation.

And perhaps without intending it, Moffat has opened this possibility up, solving the contradiction of the "Morbius Doctors", those eight mysterious faces (also known as "the production team") that appear during the mind-bending contest in "The Brain of Morbius" between the eponymous once-President and our hero. How can there be "pre-Hartnell" incarnations? And is this not flatly contradicted by the (faux) Hartnell incarnation's own statements: "So there are five of me now," and "The original, you might say," in "The Five Doctors" (themselves engineered by Nathan-Turner to "correct" the earlier "error" of the Hinchcliffe production team). Well, now it's clear that they could be earlier incarnations of the Time Lord who later calls himself "The Doctor" but he doesn't acknowledge them as among his proper selves as they had not yet chosen that name.

Having said that, the accusation against Hurt's incarnation was that he broke the promise implicit in choosing the name of "The Doctor" not that he'd never made the promise yet. Still, the possibility that the "first" Doctor was fleeing Gallifrey because he'd just regenerated after doing something truly terrible must exist. (In fact, I used to toy with the idea that the Valeyard in the future was doing what he was doing because he was the only incarnation to remember what the pre-first Doctor had done in the past and was trying to put it all right.)

Wherever he goes, though, Moffat has now managed to use up twelve of the Doctor's supposedly thirteen lives. And answering the question of "What happens after thirteen" is very likely something that appeals to him. Having mentioned the Valeyard (and "the Storm" and "the Beast") the possibility of a "dark" incarnation as the literal "final enemy" might be one that appeals to the adaptor of "Sherlock", or another possibility that was raised was that the Doctor actually burned up a regeneration in "Journey's End" (an example of, consequences, the things Russell usually got right but failed so terribly on there, ironically to be fixed by Moffat who never has any?), meaning David Tennant was actually the eleventh and twelfth Doctors, and Matt is the thirteenth and potentially last.

I've raised before the possibility that the Doctor was infected by Dalek nanogenes during "Asylum of the Daleks", and on top of that the way that the Doctor killed Solomon (as referred to by the Great Intelligence this week) and his behaviour in Mercy. Season 7b seems to take this even further, with each episode this half-season alluding to the idea of "The Doctor as Monster". Literally in the case of "The Crimson Horror", where Ada calls him "Monster" while Matt Smith does the "Frankenstein thing" with the arms (actually from "Ghost of Frankenstein", even though the Monster and blind person is from the original "Frankenstein"). But in "The Rings of Akhaten" we drew parallels between the Doctor as Grandfather and the Mummy that was called "Grandfather"; in "Cold War" the Doctor is reflected in Skaldak, the Ice Warrior who lost his world and his granddaughter; in "Hide" the Doctor himself says "Every lonely monster needs a companion"; in "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" Clara says he's scaring her more than anything in the Ship, and he's destined to become a time zombie; while in "Nightmare in Silver" the Doctor is literally being turned into the monster in the form of the Cyber-Planner.

None of this gets paid off. Yet. But could still be taken as an indication that Moffat (a) knows what he's doing after all and (b) is aiming for Matt to go all Dark Side on us before the end.

And if the question "What happens after thirteen" appeals to Moffat, then the answer "We get a woman Doctor" – see "Curse of the Fatal Death" – is also one that doubtless appeals to him.

Whether that means calling in "the Doctor's daughter" or handing the TARDIS keys over to River Snog, or to Clara or creating a new female character (or letting his successor do so... as if!), I would not be at all surprised if that was his game plan.

The 2013 series has done a lot to redeem Moffat's reputation from the unsatisfactory and unfinished arc of 2010 and the morally-bankrupt convolvulations of 2011. Although episodes, particularly early on, have suffered from perhaps too few redrafts, a "that'll do" attitude, and perhaps the forty-five minute format being just too short for a one-off movie of the week every week, more thought seems to have been given to the series as a whole piece, with it feeling more unified and with an arc that was actually answered, and a Doctor who was a little less likely to commit whoops genocide. (Even if he does then permit the blowing up a planet-full of Cybermen!)

Next Time... Rose wakes up and finds the Tenth Doctor taking a shower and... what? What? WHAT?

PS:

Obviously, his name is actually Doctor Whotraveleswithsusanianandbarbaravickistevenkatarinasaraoliverdodobenandpollyjamievictoriazoedrelizabethshawalistairjojograntsarahjaneharryleelaknineknineagainromanasharonadricnyssategansirjustinturloughkamelionperierimemfrobisherevelynhenrygordonandgeorgegrantmelaniedorothycalledacebennysurprisesummerfieldrozandchrisdrelizabethkleincharleyluciesamfitzcompassionanjitrixizzyfeykrotondestriirosejackjackiemickeymarthadonnawilfamyroryriversongandclaraoswinandlovesthemallalungbarrow. The Second.


(Hat-tip Andrew Hickey via Facebook for the graphic.)

Day 4514: DOCTOR WHO: Nightmare in Silver

Saturday:

Neil Gaiman's second episode for Doctor Who, in spite of doing everything humanly possible to touch the fans' buttons and warm the cockles of their cold hearts, seems to have produced something of a backlash, at least among those fans whose opinions I've been reading. Despite polling in the same mostly-about-8-out-of-10 range on the forums as the last few episodes, people voicing their thoughts have been a touch, er, negative about it.

Well, as this week's guest star Warwick Davis might put it, life's too short for the haters, so here are ten reasons I thought this was brilliant:

1. A properly constructed story with beginning middle and end. I know that that really only counts as "competence" but after several stories this year that have overdone, mistimed or generally cocked up one part or the other, this shows how decent it can be when you actually getting the mechanics right.
To take you quickly through it, in the traditional four parts of a Doctor Who story we are:

part one – introduced to the planet-sized fun-park of Hedgewick's world, reintroduced to the Cybermen and told that they're all dead, have it heavily flagged for us that Warwick Davis' character "Porridge" is – spoilers – emperor of the universe, and muse a little on the price paid for defeating the Cybermen a thousand years ago...

part two – guess what, the Cybermen aren't dead after all and we do some cool new stuff with Cybermites (a logical and yet ingenious and very creepy evolution of the Cybermats) and introduce the main threat – which evolves nicely from those musings in part one – that the humans will react to the presence of Cybermen by destroying the planet as very nearly a first resort. Unfortunately, the platoon of troops we thought would be useful turn out to be rubbish and the two children in Clara's charge have been possessed by the Cybermen...

part three – to make matters worse, so has the Doctor, and we get a face-off between the Time Lord and the invading Cyber-Planner inside his mind, while Clara and the punishment platoon try to secure Sleeping Beauty's castle...

part four – the full Cyber-army emerges from their tombs and march on the castle but the Doctor reveals that he's way ahead of the Cyber-Planner after all and springs his trap, allows the Emperor to set off the bomb and saves the day.

2. Robert Holmes used to construct stories "in the shadow of great events", so – for example – "The Ribos Operation" sees the Graff Vynda-K after he's lost his empire or "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" sees Magnus Greel's last stand after fleeing from a World War in the year Five Thousand. Obviously the model here is "Revenge of the Cybermen", script-edited and largely re-written by Holmes, where the base under siege events on the Nerva Beacon and Voga are a sequel to the unseen story of the Cyberwars.

Gaiman does much the same here, sketching in for us a Universe-spanning human Imperium which defeated the wonderfully-named Cyberiad of the Cybermen in a terrible war and at a terrible price: the destruction of the entire Tiberian Spiral Galaxy. Simon, incidentally, reads this as the destruction of the Cybermen's home galaxy, but I rather thought that the implication was that the Cyber-army was lured into a trap in a human-occupied galaxy which was then destroyed to wipe out the Cybermen en masse.

(Or, if you prefer, after the Cybermen where annihilated from our galaxy, a surviving ship managed to escape to intergalactic space. They are, after all, always establishing "new" homeworlds.)

"Tiberian" suggests the river Tiber, on which of course Imperial Rome was founded, and into which Roman traitors were thrown after execution, particularly by the Emperor Tiberius – though for Alex it suggests not the Cybermen's home but the Empire's, with the Emperor sacrificing his own people and home to destroy the enemy before running away because he can't deal with guilt of double-genocide. It makes Porridge an explicit mirror of the Doctor (and tragically suggests not just a mirror of Season 2005 but a prefiguring of next week: Porridge / Emperor has been running but must in the end return to face up to his responsibilities, just as the Doctor / [insert name here; no, don't do that] must go to Trenzalore…?), just as 'Nightmare in Silver' suggests a "dark dream mirror" all over, and the Doctor mirrors himself as the Cyber-Planner, and indeed the Cyber-Planner Doctor starts mirroring earlier Doctors. Badly.

Are the chess game and wonder-world for children from "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Clara Found There"? If the Cybermen are dark mirrors of ourselves, we see through the looking-glass darkly a lot.

And Jason Watkins' look manages to suggest a dishevelled, disreputable version of the Doctor, Willy Wonka, the Mad Hatter and (sigh) the Great Intelligence, all at the same time, which is quite impressive multiple mirroring.

It also suggests James Tiberius Kirk, and having a galaxy named after him would fit.

What this cleverly hinted-at backstory enables Gaiman to do, though, is to establish that the human empire is huge and powerful and so take the threat from the Cybermen to the next level.

3. Making the Cybermen actually dangerous in a way that they have only really ever been in "Earthshock".

Ever since their first home planet of Mondas blew itself to bits in "The Tenth Planet", the Cyber-race has been on the verge of extinction and basically a bit rubbish. Their ranking as Number Two monster in the Whoniverse (see "Doomsday" for who is definitely Number One) has always been a bit of a mystery, compared to galaxy-crushing foes like the Sontarans, the Rutans or, er, the Dominators and their fearsome Quarks (look, BAFTA thought so!). Skulking in the shadows became their modus operandi for the rest of the Sixties, as they tried various hare-brained schemes to survive by taking over the Earth before they finally buried themselves on Telos. "Revenge of the Cybermen" explicitly describes the few we see as the last survivors – and the Doctor goes out of his way to tell them how rubbish they are. "Attack of the Cybermen" sees them desperate at the end of the Cyberwars, stealing time technology and blowing up Telos. The Cybermen in "Silver Nemesis" are a bit of an anomaly: everything about them suggests the very last survivors of Telos, escaped in the stolen timeship (which Ace blows up), until they pull a cloaked Cyberfleet out of their handles. Post-facto justification, if not logic, suggests that these must be ships from "The Invasion" rather than a whole new foe from the future.

Thanks to the invention of CGI, the new series has seen the Cybermen adopt the Dalek tactics of creating a huge army out of nowhere only for them all to get killed again. (Perhaps a strategy bought in from Skaro along with using imaginative, creative children for their battle computers.)

"The Age of Steel" saw the Doctor end the Cyber-threat to a parallel Earth almost before it began by making their heads go pop, and then, when they tried to invade our Universe, he vacuumed them into the void not once but twice, and their bonkers Cyberking with them. This, however, did not stop them attending the Party at the Pandorica or crash-landing a Cybership under Colchester (can we appeal to "The Invasion" again?). And they crashed another ship into the actually-not-bad "Blood of the Cybermen" downloadable game.

But if a man is judged by the quality of his enemies, then a Cyberman is even more so. Having set up the great and bloody powerful human empire, if this universe-sized empire is so threatened by the Cybermen that they resort to blowing up planets the minute they know the Cyber-threat has arrived, then you know that the Cybermen are now quite hard bastards.

The far-future setting allows for some hefty evolution of the Cyber-species along the way, and giving them some seriously dangerous new powers such as the ability to adapt and survive very quickly and to begin conversion of downed enemies via Cybermite at a touch. The fact that if you don't kill them fast enough they will, first, become immune to your weaponry and, second, then come and turn you into one of them finally gives them the tools to become a universal threat.

And anyone complaining that this also makes them too like the Borg should remember the recent Star Trek/Doctor Who comic crossover from IDW which saw the Borg allied to (and then, obviously, betrayed by) the Cybermen. Stealing Borg technology from an alternative universe is a very Cyberman thing to do.

The new Cyber-suits were sleeker and more menacing than their Cybusman predecessors, and I liked some of the movement, particularly the attack where one snatched a mace out of Clara's hands. And the baby-faced look was, I thought, a sign of them upgrading to psychological warfare too, since humans are known to have difficulty killing anything that looks like a baby.

As the Cybermen might say: clever, clever, clever.

Their plot: to bury a new Cyber-tomb underneath a pleasure planet and pick off the – as the Doctor says – "Spare Parts" that they need from the visitors is reminiscent of Paul Cornell's "Love and War", which sees similar abuse of the dead of two empires on the idyllic memorial world of "Heaven". And the irony that the Doctor himself triggers the reawakening by bringing children to the planet is recognised as the second time – after Marc Platt's near-perfect Cyber-genesis story "Spare Parts" – that the Doctor has been hailed as saviour of the Cyber-race.

(May 13th is, as it happens, the anniversary of "Rise of the Cybermen" which, as it happens, is not very based on Marc's "Spare Parts" but does at least give him a credit in the titles.)

So much for the opposition; how about the heroes.

4. A strong guest cast included, in particular, Jason Watkins as the seedy but sympathetic Mr Webley and also as the sinister Cyber-Webley when he falls victim to his own Cyberman exhibit. It's one of the better uses of the "horror of conversion" themes that underlies the Cybermen since the shock Jackie Tyler conversion in "The Age of Steel", and it takes an actor of Jason Watkins' calibre to make you warm to Webley in the small amount of screen time before he gets "turned", and so regret his subsumption into the Cyber-collective.

In fact this "horror of conversion", while allegedly central to the Cybermen's character, is rarely touched upon by the TV series, and notably when it does – "Attack of the Cybermen" – it's accused of going too far. Russell's "scoop and serve" version, that sees the Cybermen reduced to tin suits with a human brain stuck in, is visceral and yet oddly clinical. Big Finish audio have played it up more, perhaps because you can go further on audio, in particular in Gary Russell's "Real Time", but the real go-to book on conversion is Steve Lyons Virgin "Missing Adventure" "Killing Ground", where we get the full convertee's eye view of the process. Eew!

The members of the punishment platoon don't get a lot of screen time to make their presence felt, and consequently some seem to have found them disposable, but I like them. And Tamzin Outhwaite as their Captain manages to squeeze quite a few moments out of what she's given. It's pretty clear that she's worked out who Porridge is, and what it probably means. And it's nice too that she's a do-the-right-thing soldier rather than just following orders, so she tries to give the Doctor and Clara time to save the kids but when it comes down to it, she's going to set off that bomb anyway.

The real kudos, though, has to go to an outstanding performance from Warwick Davis as the world-weary Emperor who has just run away in search of a quiet life, who also has the cheek to (King Peladon-like) ask for Clara's hand in marriage once it's clear he has an empire and a Temple of Peace -shaped flagship to offer her.

Porridge's sadness for the poor bloke who had to push the button is clearly self-pity, by the way, but also forms a bond between himself and the Doctor.

The story is a little bit fast and loose about how long ago the Cyberwar was; Webley suggests a thousand years, but the ongoing paranoia suggests either a more recent conflict or that Cybermen have continued to pop up in the centuries since "the big one". It's therefore not completely certain that Porridge isn't hinting that he himself was the one to push the button, or whether it was an ancestor of his, but that he empathises as the responsibility should it happen again will fall to him. As indeed it does, and he isn't found wanting.

Mind you, that far into the future humans living for a thousand years might be commonplace.

And yet, in the light of all that, Matt still manages to top that by giving us...

5. Two Matt Smiths for the price of one. The Cybermen have clearly bitten off more than they can swallow when they try to turn him into their new Cyber-Planner. And Matt shines as he turns in a Superman III -esque contest of Doctor versus evil-Doctor.

The view from inside the Doctor's head, reminiscent of Tegan's trippy trip into the Wherever where the Mara dwell, is done beautifully, with the left side (the left brain?) all golden regeneration-energy fairy-dust in Time Lordy swirls and circular writing, while the right side is all cold steel-blue dots joined up into an electric network. It's a perfect representation of the conflict between the Doctor's creative energy and the Cyber-hive mind. It also suggests that Time Lords are the highest culture and the Cybermen are still at the level of dot-to-dot in comparison.

Back in the real world, the fact that the Cyber-Planner seems positively berserk – Matt turning it up to, er, eleven – is a nice recognition of the way that the Cybermen have no experience of and no preparation for dealing with emotions. The fact that this drives them nuts goes all the way back to "The Invasion" and it's nice to see it referenced here.

Matt as the Cyber-Planner is quite deliciously evil, revelling in cruel deceits and taunting Clara, and by proxy the Doctor. And also dropping hints about this year's "big story arc", which sits rather nicely with him being an out-of-control version of the Doctor's personality, wanting to tell Clara and at the same time thinking "secrets keep us safe". And it tricks her into bringing the detonator for the bomb within its reach. Destroying the detonator is, of course, part of escalating the peril. It's a "rule of three" - we know the Cybermen will be killed by the planet bomb, but first the unfortunate Tamzin is shot, so she cannot detonate it; then Clara looses the detonator here... but we've already been shown how (third times the charm), there's still a way to win.

Alex though, asks if destroying the remote activator is about saying 'This stick-shaped-tech-thing you're carrying as a magic wand to solve the plot? Not so much.' Which is a criticism / more mirroring from Neil that he quite likes.

If there is a weakness to the episode, it's that the Cyber-Planner, as performed by Matt, has the same effect on the Cybermen that Davros has on the Daleks, namely he is so interesting and so charismatic that it reduces the titular villains to extras in their own show, and makes them seem more like dumb robots. They aren't, but the bias of the short screen time robs them of some of the necessary balance and layers to show that properly. What we were missing, I think, was a Cyberleader to interact with Clara and give some (entirely logical, of course) personality to the serried ranks of troops.

Of course, the Cyber-Planner may like playing the Doctor – nice that Clara sees through it; nice the way the Doctor later passes her test for being himself again – but it isn't as in control as it thinks it is, as evidenced by the way the Doctor plays...

6. The Curse of Fenric gambit of "I bet you can't work out how I'm about to beat you at chess". And, as in "The Curse of Fenric" the Doctor's winning move is to, er, alter the rules.

The chess motif suggests that the anniversary celebrations that have so far seen a first Doctor type story in "The Rings of Akhaten", a second Doctor monster-era one from "Cold War", a third Doctor Quatermass crossover in "Hide" and then allusions in dialogue to fourth and fifth Doctor's eras (while arguably getting the actual stories the wrong way around) in "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" and "The Crimson Horror" have – alas poor Colin – skipped ahead to a story for the devious seventh Doctor.

(Or is the Sixth Doctor hiding in plain sight, another Valeyard?)

Rule One is that the Doctor lies, and it's a bit of a screaming clue when the Doctor says that the Time Lord and the Cyber-Planner allegedly control exactly the same share of his brain when he makes his chess-based challenge. The Cyber-Planner may not smell a rat (Cybermen have no noses) but I do.

Obviously he's got another motive, and like Sylvester McCoy's grandmaster on a thousand boards, he's thinking many moves ahead. He knows that the humans are going to blow up the planet as soon as they realise that the Cybermen are in charge. Plus he's recognised the Emperor. (It's not just a case of if Angie can do it, so can he; he drops hints repeatedly to Porridge that he knows the true situation.) So he can safely deduce that the Cybermen are not his real problem; Porridge will destroy the planet and because he's Emperor all human survivors will be transmatted to safety.

No, the Doctor's problem is that the two children he's brought with him, Angie and Artie who Clara is helping to look after, are currently under cyber control and will be left behind by the Imperial flagship.

Of course, he's made a monumental error of judgement by leaving them in Webley's Emporium rather than sending them back to the TARDIS, because tucking them up among the scary exhibits is really such a good idea – and it is a shame that Gaiman had to delete the scene where the Doctor explains that he's paranoid about letting children into his ship because they "push buttons".

So the whole business with the chess match, indeed quite likely the only reason he allows himself to be infected by Cypermites in the first place, is in order to fool the Cyber-Planner into releasing Angie and Artie.

And as soon as it's let the kids go, the Doctor "Fenrics" it out of his cranium with extreme prejudice.

Think about it: is it remotely logical for the Planner to make the offer to release the kids?

I realise that the Planner isn't being logical, but even in its warped, sadistic way it has nothing to gain from this. So why do it? Unless it's not the Planner's idea at all, but one that the Doctor has cunningly slipped into its mind, and it's so dizzy with the pleasures of emotions that it doesn't realise that it doesn't really make sense.

7. Gold of course has never really made sense as the Cybermen's Achilles' Heel – except that, alchemically, it feels right, in the "gold beats silver" sense.

In fact, the New Adventure "Iceberg", written by David "the Cyberleader" Banks, has it that this is a vulnerability that the Doctor himself added to the Cybermen when they were seeking to, well, upgrade themselves following their defeats in "The Invasion" and "The Tenth Planet", and this would certainly help to explain why it's their software that reacts badly to interaction with gold (something that makes more sense than it plating their respirators, especially when in "Earthshock" they seem quite happy to survive in the vacuum of space but retain they old gold weakness.)

Here the Doctor gets a wonderful moment of ingenuity, turning the Willy Wonka reference that he's been waving under our noses since the start of the story into an instant patch to disable the Cyber-Planner.

8. Clara gets to go totally baddass, leading the troops of the punishment platoon like a pro, improvising defences and seeing through the deceptions of the devious Cyber-Planner, even if it still manages to get the trigger for the bomb off her.

It's actually quite a dramatic shift in her character – I mean it's really good to see her in full-on Sigourney Weaver from "Aliens" mode, and it's definitely Sigourney Weaver from "Aliens" not Sigourney Weaver from "Alien", and Jenna-Louise Coleman rises to the challenge of making her strong and just a very little bit cold – but you have to admit that it's not quite where she's been at so far. It's almost as though she's adapting to be exactly the companion that the Doctor needs.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but what with the Cybermen upgrading all over the place, it did strike me as a subtle in a blatant-if-you-think-about-it way of Clara the perfect companion "upgrading" to be perfect here too.

9. References to classic series Cyber-stories that I spotted include: regeneration ("The Tenth Planet"); bouncing on the surface of the moon, and explicit mention of a moon base ("The Moonbase"); the tombs of the Cybermen ("guess", but the design incorporates some nice touches to allude to the design work of the Sixties classic; mind you, it also resembled the galleries of "Attack of..."), also a single Cybermite / Cybermat left at the end; the destruction of an entire galaxy ("The Wheel in Space"); the Cyber-Planner doing all the talking the Cyber-arm largely silent, and the reaction to emotion ("The Invasion"); the last of the Cybermen, gold (see above), and bombs that fragmatise – is that even a word? – a whole planet ("Revenge of the Cybermen"); bombs that destroy a whole planet (again), and "My army awakes", with three columns of Cybermen advancing on the camera ("Earthshock"); the Cybermen get their own "Raston Warrior Robot" moment, moving faster than can be seen ("The Five Doctors"), which makes sense as they'd upgrade to defeat an future Raston warriors they encounter (lord knows how they'd deal with Raston Lap Dancers ("Alien Bodies")); partial Cyber-conversions, in particular the way half Webley's face gets covered ("Attack of the Cybermen"); the secrets of the Time Lords, chess (see above) and silver in the title ("Silver Nemesis").

You can work out for yourselves if there are nods to new series stories "Rise of the Cybermen"/"The Age of Steel", "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday", "The Next Doctor" or "Closing Time", but...

10. "The Silver Turk" by Marc Platt was the opening story for Big Finish's 2011 series of adventures for Paul McGann's Doctor with Mary Shelley. Yes, that Mary Shelley. (And we've already had a "Witch from the Well" reference in "Hide", which leads us to wonder if the "Army of Death" might have something to do with Trenzalore next week.) Apparently no one knows how the historic Silver Turk automaton really worked, although a dwarf concealed under the table is one of the more popular theories.

And, as a bonus, Marc's "Spare Parts" gets a name-check slipped into dialogue.

Alas, no place to slip in a mention of the excellent (sorry) sort-of-trilogy "The Reaping", "The Gathering" and "The Harvest". And couldn't Briggsy have persuaded the Emperor Porridge to name his flagship the "Sword of Orion"?


So, I've now written three-and-a-half thousand words of good things about this episode and only skimmed the surface, and the fact that there is so much to write about surely, surely is the real sign of just how great, how packed with ideas and whimsies and things to make you think this was.

I think the 2012 half of series seven was, in spite of a couple of episodes not quite ending well, a marked improvement on the convoluted disappointments of series six, and the 2013 half, in spite of a couple of episodes not quite ending well, an improvement on 2012, and – a wobble for "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" aside – getting better week on week ,with these last two episodes real triumphs.

What could possibly go wrong now?

Next Time... As Alex and I keep singing when we watch the Prequel "She Said He Said", didn't we have a loverly time the day we went to Trenzalore... Much is promised. Will it be delivered? Or will it be "A Good Man Goes to the Wedding of River Song" all over again? If his name turns out to be "St John" I will scream. Time for the answers? And everything that's been done in "The Name of the Doctor".

PS:

There has been what can only be described as a bit of a FLUFF up, and the BBC's American distributor has sent out copies of Series Seven Part 2, including the series finale, a week early. Fans are being advised to spend a week in a medically induced coma to avoid spoilers.

So I doubt anyone is reading!

Day 4493: DOCTOR WHO: Hidden Gems

Saturday:

Sorry for the delay. Sometimes you just end up stuck for what to think.

"Hide" is a really terrific spooky story that, even on repeat watchings, plays with the tropes of the haunted house mystery to stay tense and scary even though you know what is coming. And boy does that make a difference because, right at the last minute, it pulls the most astounding, genre-smashing hand-brake turn.

It was that ending that left me, mouth flapping open like a fish, without a real handle on the episode. It's just so... outré! And yet very, totally, brilliantly Doctor Who.

To wind you up to fever pitch and then plant a big soppy kiss on you was... weird. And I can see why people have reacted as though the ending is somehow "wrong", but actually it's completely part of the story, resolving what would otherwise have been plot holes (how do the creepy effects affect anyone in the house if the "monster" is actually stuck in a whole different universe?)

The Doctor's right: it was a love story all along.

"Sometimes love lasts forever," was already flagged up early in the episode, and a lot of the story is about the pull of love against barriers, social, emotional, even temporal, with the implicit attraction between the two guest leads and the pseudo mother-daughter bond that arguably rescues the time traveller from her fate. And of course the in-story physics of the bubble universe that lasts three minutes in its own time, but the whole length of the Universe from our perspective is perfectly symmetrical with that: the monster-that-isn't-a-monster, called "the Crooked Man" in the titles, really does have a love that lasts for the whole of time.

And why should every alien be an enemy? Indeed, it was getting to be a problem of the Russell era that for all the Doctor's talk – or all of Sarah Jane Smith's monologues – about life out there being wonderful, it seemed that every non-human who turned up was out to destroy the world. So Neil Cross is to be mightily commended for having the alien not equate to evil (again! – Akhaten's alien inhabitants were not hostile either).

The thing that Alex particularly noticed is that this is very much the third Doctor tribute story, after "Cold War" had taken us back to the Monster Era of Patrick Troughton and with the exploration feel and the reference to Susan and grandfathers, "The Rings of Akhaten" had had the air of a Bill Hartnell.

(Not so much for "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" as a fourth Doctor story though, in spite of the "Invasion of Time"/"Logopolis" referencing exploration of the Ship's interior, and asides about conceptual geometers, and the presence of the Eye of Harmony.)

What's really clever though is the way that this is almost entirely an "arc" story episode, hidden (as it were) in plain sight. There are (at least) four big developments: "Don't trust the Doctor"; "We're all ghosts to you!"; "You really are a cow!"; and "She's just a normal girl". And they all arise very naturally from the story.

Is there something actually wrong with the Doctor?

Emma Grayling, the empathic psychic played by "Call the Midwife" and soon to be "An Adventure in Space and Time" star Jessica Raine, warns Clara that "there is a sliver of ice in his heart".

That's quite a scary departure from "never cruel, never cowardly" without actually being a contradiction of it. But it's also, I'm sure you know, a reference to the fairy tale "The Snow Queen", and the detail there is that the ice sliver was stabbed into a boy who was otherwise good, and when the ice was removed or melted, then the boy's goodness was restored. So is this suggesting that the Doctor has been "got at" in some way? Obviously, this brings us back to "Asylum of the Daleks" – a frozen planet, by the way – where the Dalek nanogenes "deducted love and added hate". At the time, there were concerns that the Doctor had exposed himself to the nanogenes when he gave his protection to Amy, but there seemed to be no consequences. Or so we thought...?

Having said that, of course, this is also the same Doctor who committed jolly genocide against the Silence back in "Day of the Moon". And old Kazran Sardick in "A Christmas Carol" was likewise a man with a sliver of ice in his heart, (and Clara is doing that "ghost of past, present and future" thing too) so it may be that Moffat has been setting up this material for quite a while. Or is it that he just keeps writing the same shtick?

It's not original, of course, as the early New Adventures (specifically from "Witch Mark" to "Deceit") feature an arc where the Doctor and the TARDIS are infected with a speck of malign protoplasm, exaggerating his, er, more ruthless qualities, which results in driving Ace away (by using her boyfriend to blow up the Hoothi – it was that sort of a year).

Know anyone who's been going rather too far recently?

The sequence of photographs as the Doctor travels the length of Earth's history – much to Clara's developing horror – is again doubly ingenious.

On the one hand it serves as an original – and terribly clever – answer to the "where do ghosts come from?" question, and one that is smoothly in keeping with the "ghosts from the future/ghosts from the past" vibe of the third Doctor era (see in particular "Day of the Daleks" for the way that time creates ghosts). It's a rather better abstract of "Narnia" than Moffat himself used in the other Christmas special, "The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe", with a real "Wood between the Worlds" vibe to the pocket universe. If you recall your CS Lewis, "The Magician's Nephew" sees the eponymous Digory jumping into pools (or "wells" perhaps) to travel between our world and others, including doomed Charn whose pool disappears when the world ends. Lots of themes there having resonances within "Hide", without anything so crassly obvious as just lifting a wood within a magic box. Ahem. The Witch even escapes from Charn by clinging onto Digory's ankle, just as the Crooked Man tries to do to the Doctor, or indeed as the Doctor does do to the TARDIS.

On the other hand, it also establishes that the Doctor "walks in Eternity", that he has, from time to time, a very alien perspective on life the universe and everything. That he does this without even thinking is, in some ways, even more shocking. And his response to Clara's assertion that we mean nothing to him, "You're the only mystery worth solving" is not terribly comforting, either. He may be thinking it's quite profound, but it could be taken as reducing his companions to organic Rubik's Cubes to keep him occupied as he wheels through the cosmos.

Cleverly, this reinforces Clara's paranoia, already stoked by Emma's cryptic warning not to trust the Time Lord.

And then we add to the mix whatever the hell is going on between Clara and the TARDIS. When she couldn't get into the TARDIS in "The Rings of Akhaten", it was a bit odd – because we don't know if she had a key at that time, but she didn't try to use one and just seemed to expect the doors to open for her. But now it's clearly a "thing". (You might even add in the HADS escape from the sub in "Cold War", leaving Clara to potentially drown.) There's certainly some mixed messages here: one minute, the TARDIS is locking Clara out even though the Doctor is in danger and lecturing her using the holographic display; the next she's allowing Clara to fly her! (Probably leading to the flying lessons that lead to so much trouble at the start of "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" too.)

No one else, aside from River, Romana and, under the Master's direction, Adric (though Tegan thought that she was doing it) has flown the TARDIS. (And Leela does it, in the same story where the authors mock her for being 'stupid', showing how stupid they are…) This at the very least would suggest that Clara is pretty darned special. And in spite of the Doctor's fairly extensive researching of her past, people (and maybe he) are determined to come up with theories: is she a surviving Time Lord? Or River's daughter? Or River in a different not-seen-before incarnation? Don't forget Clara's reference in "The Bells of St John" to a "woman in the shop" (probably River) who somehow gave her the TARDIS telephone number as "the best helpline in the universe".

Or is she the Doctor's daughter? Or even the twelfth Doctor? I'm intrigued by the Pharos boys' suggestion that she might be a humanoid TARDIS, a surviving Type-103 that escaped the Time War. Or even going the Compassion route: Clara is going to become a TARDIS as a child of the TARDIS. (Mining Lawrence Miles for plot ideas: the gift that keeps on giving!) But actually, I think that's a bit obscure for the telly.

All of which tends to play against Emma's assertion that there's nothing up with Clara at all.

Well, it could just be as simple as Emma is lying to the Doctor. She's already told Clara not to trust him, so she may, with the very best of intentions of protecting her friend, be telling the Doctor outright porkies.

There's also the possibility that Emma isn't actually psychic at all – that her connection with the "ghost" isn't parapsychological but because of the sort-of time paradox of being her however-many-greats grandmother. (Arguably, the events of November 25th 1974 bring Emma and Dougray Scott's duffle-coated Alec Palmer together without which their descendent Hila Tukurian won't exist... but they might have got together anyway.) It would certainly explain why Emma can't recognise the fact Alec fancies her even when he's waving it under her nose.

Mind you, the Doctor believes her to be psychic and he can usually tell, as Professor Clegg found out to his somewhat fatal cost in "Planet of the Spiders".

Ah yes, that Metebelis crystal. My Alex wonders if this isn't a sly dig at Mr Pertwee's habit of, ah, liberating souvenirs. We know that all of the blue crystals ended up in the Great One's web – we know that because the spiders made such a fuss about the one last crystal that the Doctor nicked on his first visit, and that was why they came to Earth in the first place. And weren't they all exploded by the feedback loop as the Great One tried to increase her mental power to infinity?

So imagine the third Doctor, staggering back to the TARDIS, dying of radiation from the cave of crystal, but still taking a moment to snatch up one of the blue shards that have just recently exploded all over the planet when the Great One's web went up.

I guess he didn't learn his Buddhist lesson after all.

Still, the headdress is rather more fetching than the very Seventies earmuffs that Clegg gets to wear in the UNIT lab (themselves half-inched from BOSS the year before! See! He must have picked up those from that smouldering wreckage! Though I suppose in a "green" story, he'd say it's an ethical act to reuse and recycle… I'm drifting).

Kisses to the past aside – and there are Stone Tape and Quatermass references to be found too – the archaeology of the episode shows in a couple of moments, notably where the Doctor refers to the pocket universe, just once, as "the hex" and in the allusion to the "Witch from the Well", both apparently, from former titles for the story: "The Phantoms of the Hex" and "The Witch from the Well", as well as the (very Lovecraft) "The Hider in the House" which eventually became just "Hide". Hide as in "hide and seek", I guess, briefly suggested by the Doctor as the Crooked Man's modus operandi; although hide as in "skin" might also be plausible given the skeletal appearance of the "monster" and the "getting under the skin"ness of the tale; you could even have hide as in "a unit of area sufficient to support a household", given the house and its environs and/or the tiny area of the "hex".

And what is it with "The Witch from the Well"? It's the title of a (fairly good) Paul McGann adventure from Big Finish too. It sounds like it ought to be a quote or a reference, but somehow isn't.

Alex suggests an Arthurian nearly-connection. Caliburn is Arthur's other sword, the Sword in the Stone, which he breaks in an unchivalrous act (as Excalibur, the Sword in the Lake, is Ex – after – Caliburn). "The Witch in the Well" is nearly-but-not-quite "The Witch in the Wood", the original title of the second volume of T H White's "Once and Future King", to which the first volume was, of course, The Sword in the Stone.

Back to the point. If Emma is right, though, and there really is nothing wrong with Clara... is this, along with each of the other points raised, pointing the finger back at the Doctor? A grand case of "It's not you, it's me", if it's the Doctor that's somehow wrong and splintering Clara across time something to do with him not her.

Every lonely monster needs a companion. So he says. And then very quickly pulls his arm away from hugging her. Which is probably more of Matt Smith's slapstick. But might mean something more than that.

Interestingly, lovely though Matt's work is – especially in the wood between the worlds, confessing he is afraid – he's at the more Scooby Doo end of his spectrum for a lot of this story, something shown up by the rather more subtle performance of Dougray Scott, who is rather wonderful as the diffident Professor Palmer.

(What's that? A spy called Palmer in the Seventies? Interestingly, he is easily convinced that the Doctor is a "Man from the Ministry" and goes on to describe the "type". The man he describes is... John Steed.)

The scene between Matt and Scott in the darkroom, where they discuss Palmer's past, his wartime activities, is a beautiful performance. On both parts, in fact. And of course it's really about the Doctor's wartime past too. Going on living after so much of the other thing is, after all, what both of them have to do. And it's what's brought them both to Caliburn House on this dark and stormy night.

Jenna-Louise is given more time and space to give Clara a bit of depth this week, and it helps, particularly the "we're all ghosts" outburst. There's also a nice exchange where the Doctor expects her to come looking for the ghost with him and she initially turns him down. It adds up to a sense that "typical feisty Moffat girl" is actually a front that she's putting on, and deep down she's scared out of her wits by this strange and almost threatening man who had dragged her off into who knows when and where.

The suspicions set up here lay the groundwork for conflicts that spring up next week and, who knows, the rest of the season arc. We've had suspicious companions before – well, Turlough – but aside from maybe Ace in the New Adventures, not a companion who has reason, good reason, to be suspicious of the Doctor, though perhaps Amy should have been.

Where, as Buffy might sing, do we go from here?

Next time... Everything gets torn apart – in more ways than one – in the story I have to confess I've been most anticipating this year, but will it be another "Logopolis" or another "Invasion of Time" when we "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS"?

Day 4486: DOCTOR WHO: Ice Hot

Saturday:

At last Mark Gatiss delivers on years of promise, turning in his best Doctor Who story since the glorious early New Adventure “Nightshade”. Perhaps not quite as rich in character as the ripe and fruity Dickens of “The Unquiet Dead”, but without the unfortunate accidental “bogus asylum seekers”. And, in the setting of a Cold War warship, who’s going to notice the (companion aside) complete absence of roles for women.

There’s actually much less plot, much less creativity to explore, than in “The Rings of Akhaten”, but – hooray! – we get to run up and down some corridors!

There's a tonne of “fan lore” about the Martians, a lot of it straight out of the New Adventures, where NA companion Benny Summerfield was a (kind of) Professor of Archaeology specialising in the excavation of the Red Planet. And she had one or two Ice Warrior mates as well. It was in the New Adventures that we were introduced to the idea that the Ice Warriors' armour and "clamps" was attire, something previously only inferred from the divergent forms of the “Warrior” and “Ice Lord” classes seen from "The Seeds of Death" onwards. I must say, I was tickled by Grand Marshal Skaldak's long, skinny fingers – hinting that at least this much of the Martians physiognomy is shared with the War of the Worlds Martians (’50s movie and sequel TV series version, of course). And then, blow me, if he doesn't take his helmet off and turns out to be another New Adventures stalwart: a Chelonian, a bionic giant tortoise.

Actually we can run through a whole list of other monsters that the Ice Warriors “are”:

Like the Daleks they can come out of their shells;

Like the Cybermen they're cyborgs because their world was slowly freezing to death

Like the Rutans they dissect their enemies to find their weaknesses;

As well as the Chelonians, like the Selachians from Steve Lyons’ BBC books (and a Big Finish or two) they're actually skinny little things inside of their big, butch armour

And, like the Silurians, they're reptiles awoken from a long slumber by inferior “apes”. And in fact, had this been set in 1984 rather than 1983, it would have been an even better re-tread of 1984’s “Warriors of the Deep” – it could even have had that title – done, as everyone always says, “right”, by turning down the lights and having the monster lumber through dark and dank and confined (well a bit) corridors...

(One theory that Mark doesn’t “borrow”, though it’s not contradicted either, is the one where the Ice Warriors are, like the Sea Devils, another offshoot of the Silurian species, one who – rather than burying themselves in survival chambers – took to the rockets to escape the believed-impending doom of elder Earth and flew off to colonise Mars. Thus allowing the Quatermass continuity – which sees Mars home to an insect species who, maybe under the influence of the Fendahl, wipe themselves out in a frenzy of civil war – to fit into Doctor Who canon, as implied by “Remembrance of the Daleks”.)

None of that detracts, however, as these characteristics – and a sense of honour (I’d have added the Draconians to that list, but this is more the Star Trek Klingons’ idea of martial honour than the Japanese-in-drag system of chivalry to which the Draconians conform) – add up to a complex and credible yet alien civilisation, which is exactly what we expected of the Ice Warriors after their more nuanced turn in “The Curse of Peladon” and its sequels in books and audios. And of course that's entirely right in this setting where the Russians are a complex yet alien civilisation.

As an aside, I like the idea of the Martian civilisation occupying – and defending – the Solar System in the just-prehistoric past. With Earth in a busy part of the galaxy, surrounded by hostile alien Empires – Daleks, Sontarans, Rutans and the rest – it’s a wonder that we are not an occupied planet already, and a powerful Solar Empire would help to explain that. (Similarly, in the books, David A McIntee writes about the Tzun, your basic X-Files greys, whose Empire controlled our area of space but recently collapsed.) Perhaps 10,000 years ago would have been slightly better than 5,000, as that would push it back to before the start of human civilisation and, more importantly, into the last glaciation period of the current Ice Age – if the Ice Warriors abandon Mars due to the cold, it begs the question why they didn’t go all War of the Worlds and invade Earth. It would be a neat answer if the Earth had been a snowball at the time, and tie in with Varga, the original Ice Warrior, being frozen since “the last Ice Age”. (Although actually, I suspect that that 5,000 years is itself a fanboy’s nod to the supposed dating of “The Ice Warriors”.)

Pastiche and montage clearly work very well as tools for Mark Gatiss’s writing. His best includes: “Nightshade” (Quatermass with the serial numbers scratched off); “Poirot” and “Sherlock” (after Christie and Conan Doyle, obviously); and his M R James inspired “Crooked House” series. “Cold War” clearly takes much of its inspiration from “Dalek” and “Alien” (as well as the likes of “Das Boot”, “The Hunt for Red October” and “Grey Lady Down” obviously).

But there’s no shame in that. When hasn’t Doctor Who borrowed? Or indeed, received off the back of a lorry at midnight no questions asked. Gatiss manages to retell these stories with a new twist and extra polish, and that’s worthy of some praise in itself.

Yes, there is less plot, but you cut your coat according to your cloth (as the sixth Doctor almost certainly would not have put it). If you’ve got only got forty-five minutes, then I’d rather see those forty-five minutes used well, with less story spread more evenly over the episode, than have a well-developed opening spoiled by cutting straight to a rushed ending.

Which is, in précis, my complaint of the last two weeks.

In my review of “The Rings of Akhaten”, I talked about the lack of an “episode three”. Of course it’s more complicated than that; Andrew was quite right when he said “But the problem is actually that there’s no episode two or four either”. (Do go and read the rest of his piece, as he makes some very good points about how the modern conception of the series is forcing episodes to do triple time with “character growth” and “story arc” material on top of their own stories, overloading more into less story time.)

There was a series of excellent articles in Doctor Who Magazine – “The Adventure Game” (issues 296, 298, 300 and 302, if you want to track them down) – that set out how a serial could do worse than follow a template that runs: inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax, resolution, (aftermath).

Or in Doctor Who terms:

“episode one – where are we?”;
“episode two – what’s really going on?”;
“episode three – nozink in ze vorld can schtopp me now!”;
“episode three cliffhanger – scream in the key of F”;
“episode four – something immensely clever”;
(“end of episode four – I can’t stand long goodbyes”).

The “exploration” of an episode one was particularly important in the Hartnell era (think “The Dead Planet” or “The Web Planet” or, particularly, “The Space Museum”) and again in the second Baker era in a variation where the Doctor was often totally excluded from the main action for a long time in order to let the viewers do the exploring of the world he was about to collide with (especially “Vengeance on Varos” and notoriously “Revelation of the Daleks”).

The classic example of the “complications” would be “Enlightenment” where the episode one cliffhanger overturns all that we think we’ve learned and we virtually have to start again; similarly “Kinda” asks us to re-evaluate what we think we’ve learned about who is “sophisticated” and who is a “barbarian” over the course of the story; while “Carnival of Monsters” shows us two separate stories in part one and then cliffhanger reveals how they are related, allowing us to re-examine the relationship in part two. Or at the crass end of the spectrum, Terry Nation would introduce the Daleks at the end of the first episode. (Though, to be fair, this really works in both “The Daleks” and “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”.)

Here Gatiss goes through the stages swiftly, and with ruthless efficiency. His episode one: “we’re on a Russian submarine and it’s sinking” is overturned with the forgivably Nation-esque reveal that there’s an Ice Warrior standing behind the Doctor; his episode two see the Doctor delivering rapid-fire info-dump to bring the audience up to speed – essentially “we’re in a remake of ‘The Ice Warriors’ and you’ve thawed out an alien” (Matt delivers this very well and hangs a charming lamp on it with the “you see, I’m telling you all about them and there isn’t time!” line). But that’s just so we can get more quickly into the more interesting confrontation between Clara and Skaldak and the reveal – and she’s clever enough to spot there’s something wrong – that he’s slipped away!

(Come on, all those people complaining “why did he do that if the armour could break free on its own”: clearly he slips out and then loosens the chains so that the armour can come when called; it’s not rocket science.)

And the crisis arrives when the Grand Marshall decides he can end the world and has reason to do so.

Less does turn out to be more. Although the plot is thin, and there’s hardly any character development, there is this decent-enough conceit at the heart of the episode on which to hang a story: the “who blinks first” analogy between the superpowers’ stand-off and the final confrontation between the Doctor and the Ice Warrior.

This is, essentially, the “Morgaine gambit” from the end of “Battlefield” but (again) done right – i.e. appealing to an honourable enemy to behave with honour.

“Are these the weapons you would use” is a powerful argument, it’s just that in “Battlefield” – as Alex points out – coming from the Doctor who nuked Skaro to a crisp the year before and delivered to the Witch-Queen who just minutes earlier literally unchained the Destroyer of Worlds it is a bit:

“Are these the weapons you would use like wot I did?”

“Yes, weren’t you paying attention five minutes ago?”

“Oh bugger!”

Ka-BOOOOM!

I should like to add that Alex also suggested a particularly good refinement of this story: with the Martian’s making so much importance of Clan, he was sure Skaldak should have taken issue with the “Clan” of the Russians’, rather than mankind as a generic whole, with the intention of launching the missiles against Moscow specifically. Global annihilation would have followed anyway – the “just one launch would trigger a war” is heavily played up in the episode as is – so the threat level would have been the same, but the added piquancy of the Doctor saving the Russians – because he loves and defends all humanity – would have been played up. (Particularly apt in the week of Cold Warrior Mrs Thatcher’s funeral.)

The Doctor of course has a deeper empathy with Skaldak, appreciating the feeling of “he’s got nothing left to live for”, drawing on his own experience with a death-wish in his ninth incarnation. Along with the reference to the Time War in his big speech to the vampire planet last week, is this a sign that Moffat-age Who is now comfortably referencing the Russell years along with the rest of the classic canon? It turns out, in a nice twist, that Skaldak is not the last of his species (well, it’s a twist in story, though not if you recall the future setting of every other Ice Warrior story, and particularly the Peladon ones – especially since that reverses what the Doctor did to the Martian invaders in “The Seeds of Death”, and better not to dwell on that.)

Saving the word by appeal to an honourable warrior's honour works for me better than last week's power of lurve. The solution is emotional, but it’s the use of emotion as emotion and not as magic fairy pixie dust. Skaldak decides not to end the world because the Doctor appeals to him not to be a dick about this, and because Clara reminds him of his lost daughter. Yes, there’s another song, but any comparison between Clara nervously singing the half-remembered words of an old Duran Duran hit to give herself courage in the face of Armageddon and the sing-along-a-max love in at the end of “Akhaten” is clearly ridiculous.

With the plot already pared down to a minimum, there’s almost nothing to add to the season’s Clara-arc story this week, and all the better for it. No time is wasted having the Doctor picking her up again; we just go straight into the action with them travelling together. To Vegas, obviously. There are just a few slightly-odd moments in the scene between Clara and Professor Grisenko, where she seems to be appraising her own performance as a companion. Now it might just be a case of having a bit of a post-trauma shock, as it sinks in how incredibly dangerous it was to go in there with Skaldak, now that she’s seen what he leaves behind when he’s in a less-than-chatty mood. Or it could mean something about how “real” she is. Jenna-Louise continues to impress as the sympathetic and enthusiastic (too sympathetic too enthusiastic?) “perfect” travelling companion.

Lovely performances from David Warner, Liam Cunningham and especially Matt Smith – and a different voice for Briggsy – all add to the overall satisfaction.

Warner, in particular, has long been overdue in Doctor Who on the telly, as his many appearances for Big Finish attest (and also as Steel in their sadly no long in production “Sapphire and Steel”). His light and whimsical performance as the Professor is almost Doctor-like in the way that he wanders onto the submarine conn singing Western tunes or how he cheers and chivvies Clara in their scenes together, and shows what an awesome Doctor he could have been.

Alongside Richard E Grant’s Shalka Doctor, he’s another “alternative Doctor” (this one from two of the Big Finish Unbound stories: “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Masters of War”, both very worth checking out) to appear this year. It’s probably a coincidence: two others, Derek Jacobi and Arabella Weir have already appeared in the post-millennial series; and of course Geoffrey Bayldon and David Collings had already been in stories in the original series as had, self-evidently, Michael Jayston as the Valeyard; and Nick Briggs, of course, has been an alt-Doctor several times over, and is all over the new series. Including here! But it would be nice to think they’re including all the Doctors in the anniversary. Perhaps we could have Peter Cushing appearing by synthespian technology (cue “Daleks vs Mechons”).

It would be nice to see him return. There are hints that the Russians are not totally ignorant of extra-terrestrial affairs, as indeed, the West via UNIT are not. It would be intriguing and open up some new and interesting plot lines to have Grisenko “seconded” to a Russian UNIT.

Less to do for Liam Cunningham other than bring some world-weary solidity to Captain Zhukov, in contrast to his rather more apocalypse-eager subordinate Stepashin (Tobias Menzies – one of those actors we’re always seeing in things – from “The Thick of It” to “Eternal Law” to even “Casino Royale” – and going “oh it’s… him”; pity his story didn’t go further). You can catch both of them again in season three of “Game of Groans Thrones”.

And of course again Matt Smith, the best thing the series has going for it by a mile at the moment. I’ve already praised his delivery of info-dump, but I’d really like to single out the ending where he confesses that – this being a Troughton tribute episode – he lost the TARDIS because he reset the Hostile Action Displacement System or HADS introduced in the Krotons, arguably seen last in “Voyage of the Damned” when the Ship, cast adrift, headed off back to Earth under her own steam. Everyone else has a jolly end-of-episode Scooby Doo laugh... and the Doctor laughs along with them and then turns his back and starts grousing to himself about the stupid humans. Lovely touch.

There’s something very “old school” about “Cold War”, a flashback to the ’Eighties in more ways than one, and that’s possibly borne out by the comparison of the audience appreciation index, or AI, of 84 – still respectable, but actually down on “The Bells” and “The Rings” – and the ratings on Gallifrey Base where it currently polls an average 7.6 out of 10 slightly up on “The Bells” and substantially up on “The Rings”. And as a grumpy old-school curmudgeon, it probably explains why I like it too.

On the strength of those figures – and final ratings still comfortably in the 7½ to 8 million range that the series has enjoyed pretty much since it returned, exceptionally performing episodes, usually Christmas, aside – it’s still Moffat who has the knack of bridging the divide between what the public want and what the fans want. But, on the strength of this episode, and his Sherlock work, I’d be less wary of a future Mark Gatiss taking on the showrunner role. So long as he doesn’t cast himself as the twelfth Doctor.

Next Time... Another chance for Neil Cross to show us what his Who is made of. It’s actually his first go, but also it’s the one he actually wanted to pitch. From classic base under siege to classic haunted house, and it’s time for the scary stuff. Get ready to “Hide”.