Timeless Adventures (34 page)

When
The Waters of Mars
arrived that November (immediately following the animated serial
Dreamland
), it was a far darker tale. With Tennant’s Tenth Doctor entering his final days, and Carmen – one of the passengers in
Planet of the Dead
– foretelling his doom (‘Your song is ending… he will knock four times’), the autumn special focused on the Doctor’s angst more than on thrilling adventures. The Doctor arrives at Bowie Base One, the first human colony on Mars, in 2059. He encounters Captain Brooke (Lindsay Duncan) whom he realises was an important figure in Earth history: the base personnel are due to die that day, but their sacrifice spurs humanity onwards in the exploration of space. Under siege by an ‘intelligent water virus’ trapped on the planet by the Ice Warriors, the crew struggle to survive while the Doctor must decide whether to leave them to their historically-dictated fate or to intervene and save them… This makes him an impotent figure, a protagonist who refuses to get involved, a bystander to ‘history’. Torn by their suffering, the Doctor declares himself to be ‘the Time Lord victorious’ – able to interfere with history at will now the other Time Lords are dead – and finally rescues Captain Brooke, returning her to Earth. When she discovers that his intervention should never have happened, she kills herself, thus setting history back on the right course. The Doctor is shocked, and realising he has gone too far, feels he must atone. The appearance of an Ood suggests his time has come, but the Doctor attempts to flee in the TARDIS.

The issue of the Doctor’s tendency to go too far had been briefly addressed previously by Davies in
The Runaway Bride
, which had temporary companion Donna telling him he should not travel alone as he needed a human perspective to temper his activities.
The Waters of Mars
felt more like a build up to the epic two-part
The End of Time
than a story in its own right, as its main purpose seemed to be to position the Tenth Doctor as a reluctant hero whose time was almost up, consumed with hubris before his fall. Around 10.5 million viewers saw the story, up on the previous episode probably due to the late-autumn scheduling. Critically it was fairly well-received, despite the perceived darkness of a tale that ends in suicide.
The Guardian
liked the depiction of ‘a side to the Doctor… we haven’t really seen before’, while
The Daily Telegraph
delved into ‘the murky waters’ of just what historical events the Doctor can and cannot interfere with. It was an award-winning show, however, scooping the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form (previously won by Steven Moffat in 2005 for
The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
, in 2006 for
The Girl in the Fireplace
, and in 2007 for
Blink
).

The departure of the actor playing the Doctor is always a big moment in
Doctor Who
storytelling, but there was none more overblown than the departure of the Tenth Doctor, David Tennant. As showrunner Davies was also leaving (along with other key members of the behind-the-scenes team), he pulled out all the stops to produce an epic twopart regeneration story portentously titled
The End of Time
.

Broadcast on Christmas Day 2009 and New Year’s Day 2010, the two episodes were the culmination of the year of ‘specials’. Most regenerations in the past had been sudden, unexpected events in the life of the Doctor and his companions. The only one that had made it a feature of the preceding episodes was Tom Baker’s swan song,
Logopolis
, in 1981: it was felt that, as the then-longest serving Doctor, something special was needed to mark his departure. Tennant had brought a legion of new fans to the show, especially among women and US viewers, and it was similarly felt that replacing him was more of a test for the reborn programme than even the shock departure of Christopher Eccleston.

Doctor Who
took over BBC1 for Christmas 2009, with a series of themed station idents featuring the TARDIS, Tennant and some reindeer. That final story was something of a celebration of Tennant’s entire run, with copious shout outs to other eras of the series. Warned by the Ood that ‘time itself is ending’, the Doctor returns to Earth to confront a reborn Master (John Simm), accompanied by Donna’s grandfather Wilf (Bernard Cribbins). The threat is bigger than just the mad and feral Master. Carmen in
Planet of the Dead
had warned the Doctor that ‘It is returning’, which turned out to be a reference to Gallifrey (the only part of Davies’ initial grand narrative plan that had not been included in
Journey’s End
). Led by Rassilon (Timothy Dalton), the Time Lords escape the ‘time lock’ that isolated them from the end of the Great Time War. It was Rassilon who had implanted the sound of drums in the Master’s head, driving him mad, but also providing a link that allowed them to escape their imprisonment. In a final confrontation, the Doctor consigns the Master and the Time Lords back into the time lock. However, in order to save Wilf – one relatively unimportant old man – the Doctor must swap places with him in an isolation chamber that results in the Time Lord’s exposure to a fatal dose of radiation, kick-starting his regeneration.

Most previous
Doctor Who
stories would have ended there, but Davies and Tennant pushed the boat out, giving the Tenth Doctor an extra 10 minutes above the usual running time for the 2009 specials to go on a farewell tour of the universe saying an emotional goodbye to all his previous companions. It was an indulgence too far, and while it may have worked once in the context of Tennant’s departure, it does not stand up well to repeat viewing.

The End of Time
, Part One was placed third in 2009’s Christmas viewing Top 10, just behind
EastEnders
and
The Royle Family
, with a consolidated figure of 11.57 million (slightly beating the previous Christmas special
The Next Doctor’
s 11.4 million). The second instalment – and Tennant’s big farewell episode – was placed first for New Year’s Day viewing, with a consolidated figure (including the HD simulcast) of 12.27 million viewers, with an additional 1.3 million viewing requests via the BBC’s online iPlayer, an increasingly important part of the show’s reach to time-shifting audiences.

The End of Time
was fairly well received, although a lot of critics were clearly cutting the show some slack as festive viewing. Bernard Cribbins and John Simm came in for particularly good notices, and Tennant was praised (in
The Guardian
) for bringing ‘tragic force’ to his exit. The episode ended where the revived series had begun, with Rose (Billie Piper). In his
Guardian
review Mark Lawson noted: ‘The final line Davies gives to Tennant was a suddenly regretful “I don’t want to go!”, and it is likely that, somewhere inside, both actor and writer feel a little like that.’

So ended one of the most successful eras in
Doctor Who’
s history. As the Tenth Doctor told Wilf of the aftermath of regeneration in
The
End of Time
, Part One, ‘…some new man goes sauntering away’. The slate had been wiped clean, and two ‘new men’ – showrunner Steven Moffat and actor Matt Smith – would take Doctor Who forward to even greater heights, especially in America.

The new Doctor arrived at Easter 2010 with a bang, literally, as the action of Matt Smith’s 75-minute debut episode
The Eleventh Hour
picks up right where
The End of Time, Part Two
left off. The new Doctor comes crashing to Earth in a wrecked TARDIS in one of the show’s most dramatic action sequences. He lands in the garden of a young girl, Amelia Pond – beginning the relationship that would define the majority of Smith’s tenure as the Doctor.

The Eleventh Hour
had a variety of tasks: introducing the new Doctor and the new companion Amy, played by Scottish actress Karen Gillan, while telling a story aimed at engaging as wide an audience as possible. New showrunner Steven Moffat was, like Russell T Davies, a long-standing fan of the old show who had carved an award-winning career in television encompassing children’s shows in
Press Gang
, comedy in
Coupling
, drama in
Jekyll
, and a blockbuster movie in
The Adventures of Tintin
(2011). His knowledge of the show meant he was well aware of previous Doctors’ debut episodes, so was determined to avoid howlers like
The Twin Dilemma
or
Time and the Rani
. Moffat used the new companion to introduce a season-long arc story based around a crack in time and space that manifests in Amy’s childhood bedroom. Prisoner Zero, an escapee from the alien Atraxi, warns the Doctor: ‘The universe is cracked. The Pandorica will open. Silence will fall.’ This lays the foundation for a story arc that would reach from
The Eleventh Hour
right up to the show’s 50th anniversary in November 2013 and to Matt Smith’s own regeneration story at Christmas 2013.

Moffat also took the opportunity of reinventing the series, reducing its logline to the basics of ‘a madman in a box’, essentially the Doctor travelling the universe in his TARDIS. The rebranding of the new era continued into a new title sequence, a new version of the theme tune, new series logo, and a redesign of both the exterior and interior of the TARDIS. In this way, Moffat put his stamp on the show, positioning it as both a continuation of the reboot begun in 2005 and a fresh start for a new team under new management.

The most important of these new elements was the most visible: Matt Smith. As the youngest actor ever to play the lead – only 26 when cast – and something of an unknown (he’d co-starred with Billie Piper in two Philip Pullman-based TV movies, as well as political drama
Party Animals
), he had a lot to prove. In
The Eleventh Hour
, thanks to Moffat’s writing and his own whole-hearted commitment to the role, Smith rapidly became the Doctor, erasing all memory of David Tennant for many viewers.

Moffat made the show new again by taking a fairytale approach, positioning the Doctor – who fell from the sky in a magical box – as an imaginary friend to the young Amelia Pond (Caitlin Blackwood, Gillan’s young cousin). This encounter defines his relationship with the adult Amy, to whom he returns after five minutes have passed for him, but 12 years have gone by for her. The ‘raggedy Doctor’, as she remembers him, has a major impact on her life. In creating a fable around Amy Pond, ‘the girl who waited’, and in his general take on the Doctor and the universe he now inhabited, Moffat adopted a dark fairytale approach, moving his
Doctor Who
in line with Philip Hinchcliffe’s pulp fiction-inspired period of the late-1970s. ‘For me,
Doctor Who
literally is a fairytale,’ admitted Moffat to
The Guardian
. ‘It’s not really science fiction. It’s not set in space, it’s set under your bed. It’s at its best when it’s related to you, no matter what planet it’s set on. Every time it cleaves towards that, it’s very strong.’

With the ‘crack in the universe’ arc plot in place, the next few episodes took the usual approach of featuring the new companion coming to terms with the Doctor and with travelling in the TARDIS. Amy Pond had an advantage over many of her predecessors in that she had known of the Doctor since her childhood encounter, while for the Doctor the relationship is still a new one.

The Beast Below
projected the United Kingdom (minus Scotland, perhaps in a nod to the eventual 2014 independence referendum) into the far future, reconstituted as a space-faring society (albeit one with a retro 1950s Festival of Britain vibe) that lives on the back of a giant ‘space whale’, unbeknown to the majority of Starship UK (as they repeatedly vote to collectively forget about their exploitation of the creature). The social satire is clear, from Moffat (through Amy) asserting a traditional separate Scottish identity, to the spoof of the British electorate and their voting habits at successive general elections.
The Beast Below
sees Amy adapt and employ the Doctor’s methods to solve the problem of this society’s cruel reliance on a trapped sentient creature.

Similarly, in
Victory of the Daleks
(the following episode, a trip into history), it is Amy’s humanity and her heartfelt description of unrequited love that defuses the cybernetic Bracewell (who has become a Dalek bomb). Summoned by Winston Churchill (Ian McNeice), the Doctor and Amy arrive in 1940 to discover that the Daleks (described as ‘Ironsides’) are masquerading as allies in the British war effort against Hitler (a reworking of Patrick Troughton’s debut story
The Power of the Daleks
, which also featured deceptively ‘friendly’ Daleks). Bracewell (Bill Patterson) is a scientist who claims to have developed the Ironsides, but the Doctor suspects a different agenda. As soon as he identifies them as his enemies, their plan kicks into a higher gear. With his acknowledgement of their nature, these Daleks access the ‘progenitor’ – a store of pure Dalek DNA – and launch a revitalisation of their race, the ‘New Paradigm’. This introduced a bold new colourful Dalek redesign, but the multi-coloured ‘bumper car’ look failed to catch on, and by the 2012 season opener
Asylum of the Daleks
, old and new are happily mixing in the ‘parliament’ of the Daleks (a way for the production team to stage a graceful climb down and quietly re-introduce the ‘classic’ look).