| Episode: | 774 | | | Serial: | 216 | | | Writer: | Neil Gaiman | | | Director: | Richard Clark | | | Air Date: | 14-May-2011 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the second part of a surprise Neil Gaiman double bill! The surprise is that it got interrupted halfway through by a different episode of Doctor Who. Anyway, I already wrote about his episode of Babylon 5 last time and now I'm writing about the first of his two Doctor Who stories: The Doctor's Wife.
I'm a little early posting this one, as it originally aired on 14th May 2011. If I'd just waited a bit I could've put it up on its eleventh anniversary, which would've been kind of fitting for an Eleventh Doctor episode. I've already covered one Eleventh Doctor story, series 5's The Eleventh Hour, but that was a few years ago now and I'm jumping quite a bit ahead to series 6, episode 4. Fortunately I think I can remember most of what happened in between. Well, some of it.
This episode aired almost exactly three years after series 4, episode 6, The Doctor's Daughter, so the series didn't wait long before once again tormenting fans with the hope that they might finally get to meet some of the Doctor's family. The title 'The Doctor's Wife' is much much older than that though, as it was originally attached to the Fifth Doctor serial The Caves of Androzani back in 1984. It was never going to be used, they were just trying to pin down who was possibly leaking information.
Okay I'll be writing text under screencaps of the entire episode so there will be SPOILERS here. In fact I may spoil elements of earlier stories as well, though I won't talk about anything that comes afterwards. Well okay I will, but only very vaguely. For the most part I'm treating this like it's the 14th May 2011 and I haven't even seen the NEXT TIME trailer. I'm sure it looks exciting though.
Fans have been wanting an Idris in the series for ages, but they were hoping for Idris Elba. The Idris they got was played by Suranne Jones, who was maybe best known at the time for being in Coronation Street for five years, though she also played the role of Mona Lisa in The Sarah Jane Adventures.
Auntie and Uncle lead Idris to a corner of the room where Nephew will drain the mind and soul from her body leaving it as an empty shell. None of them seem all that keen on it but they're doing it anyway! They're apparently going to get her a replacement soul soon though... as a Time Lord's coming. So that's ominous. There's exactly one Time Lord left in the universe at this point, that we know of, and that's the Doctor.
Actually I've just replayed the line and I think he might be saying "King after all" not "King Arthur", though it's hard to tell. Either way he was apparently able to reattach the head, so no harm done! We actually got to see a different historical robot lose their head a few seasons later... or at least we would've done, but it was cut.
This is series 6 so they're in the second console room of the 2005 Doctor Who revival era, with the whimsical console and the weird layout that I've never been able to get my head around. It feels like the rarest of all the modern console rooms, but Thirteen's creepy crystal console room currently holds that record with a 30 episode run (assuming it shows up in the last special). This one did last the fewest number of years however.
There's a bit of a Fifth Doctor-era moment here, as Amy and Rory discuss the events of a previous episode for a moment (witnessing the Doctor's death 200 years from now in The Impossible Astronaut) before getting on with this entirely unrelated story that's just starting.
Turns out that it's a psychic message in a box from outside the universe. I think we got to see the Second Doctor make one of these way back in The War Games. It's from another Time Lord, one of the good ones called the Corsair, and it's possibly they're still alive! We learn two new Time Lord facts here, one slightly more important than the other: Time Lords lose their tattoos when they regenerate and they occasionally regenerate into a different sex! The second one's not entirely relevant to this story, but it'll be extremely relevant a few years down the road.
Gaiman originally intended to imply that the Corsair was the guy who inspired the Doctor to go wandering time and space in the first place, but showrunner Steven Moffat decided that it was wiser to leave that a mystery. He should've written that advice on a white board or something so that he could never forget it.
They land on a planetoid and immediately have reason to regret jumping into the situation blindly as the rest of their power starts draining. It's like the Matrix has disappeared! Not the giant computer system with a VR environment that you can connect to/travel into that was featured in Classic Doctor Who (and later borrowed by The Matrix), this Matrix is kind of like the TARDIS's soul. So they need that.
OPENING TITLES
It is next to a rift however (like the one in Torchwood), which is presumably where all this stuff came from. It just fell down here through the universe's drain. It seems like a lot of spaceships fall through rifts as I haven't seen a spaceship graveyard this big since The Brain of Morbius back in the Tom Baker era.
The Doctor establishes that there's gravity and the air's breathable... which is the kind of thing you should probably check for before you go wandering around outside. In his defence, their TARDIS is out of power so there likely aren't any active screens he could've checked stuff on. It'll probably recharge itself from the rift energy though.
Just then Idris comes running over, accusing the Doctor of being a thief. In fact she says he's going to steal her. Or has stolen her. She's struggling a bit with words. We already know what's up with her, but the Doctor has no clue what's going on. Or why she thinks "The little boxes with make you angry". She also throws in a fact about the word 'petrichor', saying that it means the smell of dust after rain.
There's lots of very Moffat-style dialogue in this scene by the way. Like after Idris bites the Doctor for no reason she says "Biting's excellent. It's like kissing. Only there's a winner". It's making it kind of awkward for me, as it's giving me lots to write about. Here's a question though: are any of them wondering how they can understand what everyone's saying without the TARDIS translating?
Rory also catches Idris when she passes out and checks on her, as the episode never forgets that he's a nurse. It hasn't forgotten about Nephew the Ood either, though he's being very quiet.
The original plan for Auntie, Uncle and Nephew was that they'd all be obviously Frankenstein'd together from parts of different aliens, but they had to make compromises due to their Doctor Who-sized budget, and ended up with two humans and an existing monster... which Gaiman decided to make an Ood.
Anyway the reason Nephew's so quiet is that his translation ball is broken, so the Doctor gets that fixed... and it starts playing a bunch of messages at once. Multiple overlapping cries for help, from multiple Time Lords. So that's strange. Especially as Auntie claims there's only the four of them on the planet. Well, aside from House, but he is the planet.
It turns out that House talks with the voice of Michael Sheen, which is weird because he's talking through the mouths of Auntie and Uncle. He claims they fell here through the rift and he fixed them. He also claims that many Time Lords have visited over the years, though the Doctor's the only one here now. The Doctor informs him he'll be the last Time Lord he meets, as he's the only one left. Uh, I'm not sure that's how time travel works, but I guess the Doctor would know more than me. He still hasn't given up on there being other Time Lords in peril here though so he goes off investigating - with House's permission. House seems like a surprisingly polite asteroid, considering he's so isolated from any kind of civilisation. How does a creature like him evolve anyway?
Meanwhile Idris is still locked up in a cell, being confused by lines from conversations she hasn't had yet, and a big sad word in particular that's been on the tip of her tongue. Well it's not sad now, but it will be. The poor woman should go talk to the Prophets on Deep Space Nine, I bet they'd have some interesting conversations. She also says a line that sounds like total gibberish when it's played forward, but if you reverse it... it still sounds like total gibberish.
She's onto the fact that he wants to be forgiven and he replies "Don't we all?" Then he gets rid of her by sending her to the TARDIS to look for his screwdriver. It's unclear exactly why, maybe he just wants to be able to talk to the other Time Lords privately. She's worried though, as when the Doctor gets emotional like this, that's when he makes mistakes.
Rory's told by both of them to look after the other and he decides to obey... the Doctor. His desire to look after his wife outweighs his fear of being shouted at.
Amy gets on the phone attached to the console (which still works) and calls the Doctor to ask him where his supposedly missing screwdriver is. The Doctor already has it with him though and he uses it to lock the TARDIS door remotely (it's got a good range to it). He doesn't get to feel smug for long though, as he opens a door and discovers what sent the messages he heard through the Ood's translator.
We don't learn how the other Time Lords died, but it turns out they were donors for the people living here, with Auntie and Uncle getting the Corsair's arm, spine and kidneys. Man, now I'm trying to imagine a malevolent planet doing spine replacement surgery and my brain just can't process that concept.
There's a bit of tension here, seeing as the Doctor's just found evidence that these people are serial killers that target Time Lords, and he's a Time Lord, but he's not in the mood to be scared right now. In fact he's furious that they gave him hope and tore it away and gives them his "basically, run" line. So he's not going to be killed by them! That's a relief. He might be killed by Amy though, who phones up to express her irritation with him lying to them and locking them in the TARDIS.
He's suddenly preoccupied by a thought however: back when he met Idris she told him that "The boxes will make you angry", and now he wants to know how she could possibly know that. Uh, she lives here? I think everyone on the planet could've predicted a Time Lord would be a little pissed off to learn that they've been luring them in and murdering them. You don't need to precognitive to see that coming. Though she is.
The idea of the TARDIS being alive and intelligent was introduced all the way back in Edge of Destruction, the third serial of season 1. It's a very strange story and I'm not sure I'd recommend it. In all the time since the Doctor hasn't actually been able to have a conversation with it though, so this is new.
Suranne Jones does a great performance by the way; she's very Doctory. You can tell the two of them have spent too much time around each other.
She's still trying to remember that sad word as well, plus she's surprised that humans are so much bigger on the inside. That was an idea for the episode title by the way, 'Bigger on the Inside', but they were concerned it'd give the premise away. In any other season 'The Doctor's Wife' might have given it away as well, but this was the time that the series was hinting that the Doctor marries River Song (the season finale's actually called The Wedding of River Song), so I think they probably got away with it. Sucks for all the people who were looking forward to a game changing River Song story though!
Auntie tells the Doctor that it's his fault for telling House that there's no more food coming. Now he's gone and abandoned them here to die so he can go off to their universe and find more TARDISes to munch on. Auntie and Uncle don't seem that broken up about the idea of dying though, and without House around it happens to them very quickly. Oh plus Idris is going to die soon too as she'll 'blow the casing' of her fragile human body.
Meanwhile House wonders why he shouldn't just kill Amy and Rory. Rory suggests that he needs someone around to suffer, like Auntie and Uncle did, and House agrees, telling them to run. Things are getting kind of bleak! I like how the stakes are so personal in this one though. The heroes are just trying to save themselves, not the entire universe.
Idris is a bit sad looking out at a field littered with the corpses of her dead sisters, but the Doctor's mind is on his plan: they're going to pull a Scrapheap Challenge and make a working TARDIS from this collection of spare parts!
These corridors actually do lead somewhere, I know because I've seen rooms show up in earlier episodes. Logopolis and the 1996 movie featured the Cloister Room (where the bell's located), The Christmas Invasion showed off the wardrobe, and The Invasion of Time revealed the swimming pool. Unfortunately none of them are going to show up here, partly because of cost and partly because Karen Gillan couldn't swim.
Meanwhile Idris and the Doctor are having a bit of an argument about how he never follows the instructions (in fact that's basically his defining character trait now that I think about it). As an example she points out how there's a sign on the TARDIS door that says "PULL TO OPEN", yet he always pushes the door in.
Hang on I got a good look at that sign earlier.
Anyway now that the Doctor and his TARDIS are actually able to talk to each other he takes the opportunity to finally confront her on being so unreliable. He's gotten much better at piloting the TARDIS in recent seasons, but for a long time it never went where he wanted it to go.
I remember this line pretty much blew my mind the first time I watched the episode. 50 years of the Doctor coincidentally ending up in a crisis every episode, explained in one perfect sentence. Big revelations like this are kind of hit and miss for me, there's one huge retcon in the Chibnall era in particular that I hate, but this line explains so much and spoils nothing. Plus it reveals that the TARDIS is actually on the same wavelength as the Doctor. He's a madman with a mad box, and they're both dragging each other around to save people. I love that.
Though right now the only people here left to save are themselves. They've got 18 minutes until Idris's body fails and then the temperature of this universe will drop to absolute zero a few hours later.
Back on the planet formerly known as House, the Doctor is ready to install the time rotor onto his makeshift console and we actually get a shot from inside the console looking at it being dropped in.
The Doctor and Idris chat a bit more about how they first met. She wanted to see the universe so she stole a Time Lord and ran away. Or at least left her door unlocked when a mad Time Lord was looking for a way to run away.
The console looks a bit makeshift, as it was built from household objects and created by a literal child, but then they usually do these days. It was designed by a 12 year old who won a Blue Peter competition. You'd think that kids would've been scared away from Doctor Who contests after the whole Abzorbaloff thing in Love & Monsters, but they got their work in a good story this time.
Meanwhile Amy catches up with Rory again, to find that some more time has passed for him.
Amy and Rory have had two themes going on during their time on the series: one of them being left waiting for something and Rory dying. Amy had to wait years before she could go on adventures with the Doctor, Rory had to wait two thousand years for Amy to emerge from the Pandorica - waiting is practically a Doctor Who monster at this point, and it's just gotten Rory.
This is a proper horror moment as he talks about how 'they' come for him every night and hurt him, and how he's furious with her for leaving him. And then they end up separated again.
The episode cuts back to Amy's adventure on the House-possessed TARDIS, as she runs into some unusual graffiti.
This is obviously absolutely horrific to Amy and probably a lot of people watching as well. The episode's not messing around here! Fortunately Amy cheers up a bit when Rory walks over and lets her know that House is only messing around here. He's not playing with time, he's just playing with their heads. So that'll take a lot of the danger out of these scenes going forward.
We never do find out what Rory was tormented by while they were separated though. Nothing that fazed him all that much it seems.
This thing has telepathic circuits allowing them to get a message through to Amy and Rory, which will be important soon as they need the TARDIS's shields to be down in order to materialise inside. Idris sends a message to 'the pretty one', which turns to be Rory, giving him the route to an old control room he can use to let them in. Fortunately the guy's holding it together extremely well and he's on the case. Though he's a bit delayed when he's knocked out by Nephew the Ood! Turns out he's on the TARDIS with them... unless he's another illusion.
Amy's a bit blind right now due to House making her think that it's dark, but Rory just wakes up again and pulls her off to the room they need to get to. Which is locked.
Fortunately Idris gets in telepathic contact again with the code for the locked door. It's "Crimson, eleven, delight, petrichor". But saying it doesn't get the door open. Amy's been fairly useless all episode but this is her time to shine as she's the one that figures out that it's a telepathic lock, meaning that they need to think the code.
It's a simple storytelling trick, having someone say something early on in a story and then revealing its importance at the end, but it works. The pass key works too, opening up the doors and revealing the old control room.
Gaiman had apparently wanted to use one of the classic series era control rooms for this scene, but this works just fine for me because it's such a big surprise that the set still exists. They kept it intact all this time because they knew this story was eventually coming up. In fact the episode was supposed to come in season 5, but they replaced it with The Lodger and finally got it filmed near the start of season 6 instead.
Nephew's still creeping closer, but he's not actually their main threat right now as with the shields down the junk TARDIS is going to materialise somewhere nearby and if they're in the way they'll be atomised. Fortunately it's Nephew that's hit when the junk TARDIS appears, so that solved that problem.
The bad news is that the TARDIS is moments away from burning out her borrowed human body, the even worse news is that they're at the mercy of House who feels like he'd be better off just killing them all at this point.
So the Doctor gets House to promise not to kill them in exchange for him revealing how to escape into their universe. House makes a very insincere sounding promise and the Doctor tells him to disintegrate some rooms. This gives House an interesting new way to dispose of them and he can't resist taking it. Then we're left waiting, staring at empty rooms for a whole 15 seconds, as all the heroes appear to be dead.
The trouble with the Doctor's plan is that it relies on things about the TARDIS we have no way of knowing about, so it's not very satisfying. Maybe Amy could've had a line at the start of the episode, asking what would've happened if they'd been in one of the rooms that the Doctor had deleted. Just to put the question in the viewers' minds, it wouldn't have necessarily needed to be answered then.
Though I liked the Doctor's response to House saying "Fear me. I've killed hundreds of Time Lords". He just quietly replies "Fear me. I've killed all of them," like he didn't even intend for House to hear him.
So Idris had her soul ripped out, Auntie and Uncle both keeled over, Nephew was atomised, House just got torn apart by a far more powerful entity, and the Corsair was dead before the story started... I think that's pretty much everyone. Every single character except for the Doctor and companions are now dead. I haven't seen all of Doctor Who, but I've seen enough to know that doesn't happen very often.
It turns out that the big sad word she's been trying to remember all episode is 'alive'. Well, it's sad when it's over. She also says "Hello, Doctor. It's so very, very nice to meet you," and that's it for Idris. This was the time that the Doctor and the TARDIS talked, and now it's over. Man that was an extremely Moffat-era conversation and it was great.
It also means that the TARDIS has basically lived a full Time Lord regeneration in one episode. She started off a bit loopy and unused to her new form, then she pulled herself together and helped save the day, then she changed body again at the end with a sad goodbye.
Rory has been a very intelligent and level-headed character all episode so it's a bit weird that he picks up two random cables and puts them together, causing a massive blinding spark. If you're going to do that you at least need to be wearing a pair of welding goggles like the Doctor has!
Turns out that House is even more evil than they thought as he deleted all the bedrooms. This does give Amy and Rory a chance to request a room without bunk beds this time though. The Doctor protests a little, as bunk beds are cool, but he relents. He never answers whether he has a bedroom though.
Oh, also Rory mentions that Idris told him "The only water in the forest is a river," so that's a clue for a later episode.
And the episode ends with him happily dancing around the console, hitting controls. He's the last of the Time Lords but he's never alone.
CONCLUSION
I think they made the right choice going with the title The Doctor's Wife as if they'd called it The One Where the TARDIS Becomes a Woman it would've given the fans time to fear the worst. Playing around with core elements of the series like this is very risky as there's a real risk you'll do something that will piss viewers off. A bad episode is just a bad episode and is easily forgotten, but a bad episode that makes a change to the premise will continue to echo through the show going forward. For example, Chris Chibnall's run later in the series included a good demonstration of a devastating retcon bomb that utterly divided the fan base.
The TARDIS possessing the body of a woman is a great and terrible idea and at first it seemed to be leaning towards 'terrible', with her going loopy and deciding to bite the Doctor. But once the Doctor came back from the cupboard of dead Time Lord cubes and had a chat with her in her cell her performance and writing really clicked for me. The weirdness Suranne Jones brought to the role was a good match for Matt Smith's eccentricity; I could really believe that these two characters are from the same world and had been hanging around each other for a thousand years or so. She's a TARDIS that's just as strange as her Time Lord.
This is basically a story about a man getting to meet his beloved car. The fact that the TARDIS is in the body of a woman isn't as important as the fact that she can finally talk to him, express her own feelings and explain things. The actual plot of the episode is kind of thin, but it does its job of getting the two of them in a place where they can have some proper conversations, and those are the moments where it shines. We learn that she likes to collect console rooms, that she's okay with the Doctor bringing home strays, and that she's sad about the other TARDISes dying. We also learn that the TARDIS hasn't been dragged around by the Doctor all these years, she actually wanted to be stolen by him, and has been choosing the destination a lot of time! This reveal that the TARDIS has been using her precognition and deliberately putting the Doctor into an adventure every week isn't just clever, it's basically the missing piece of the series' concept for me. It fixes decades of coincidences. Plus I love that the TARDIS isn't taking him where it's exciting, it's taking him where he's needed. It's a heroic TARDIS.
The episode also explores what a TARDIS is, as we get to see its soul walking around and talking like a human, we see a console that can fly through space on its own, and we see the maze of corridors on the inside. Unfortunately that's more or less all we see of the interior, just corridors and more corridors. The Rory and Amy plot literally doesn't go anywhere, at least until they reach the older control room. The Doctor's side of the story gets a bit less interesting at that point too, as there's not much drama you can get out of two people on a wild console ride. It was great to see the older set though and it makes the episode feel a bit more important somehow. I just could've done without the conclusion relying on the the audience being as clueless as the villain.
Overall though I really liked the episode. It earns its attention-grabbing title and it feels like a proper landmark in the Doctor Who mythology. It's also plenty emotional, swinging between horror, humour and tragedy and making them all work. Everybody dies and nothing much was achieved, but that one lever moving at the end makes it all worthwhile.
NEXT TIME
Anyway thanks for reading, please consider leaving a comment.
My theory is that House is a TARDIS matrix, maybe an old prototype that went mad and got banished to a pocket dimension by Rassilon. Sweeping problems under the rug is a recurring Time Lord trait.
ReplyDeleteHey, I can get behind the idea of blaming Rassilon.
DeleteThat works well.
DeleteOr perhaps Matrixes (matrices?) are living creatures that are shackled into TARDISes, which seems like a very Time Lord thing to do, and House is one of the natural predators of the original species.
Although I like him being a mad TARDIS better.
Seems more likely he'd be their prey considering how things go down at the end.
DeleteExplains why there's only one of him!
DeleteI would have called it "Bigger on the Inside" but I'm not a Doctor Who writer, and that's probably a good thing.
ReplyDeleteWe've definitely been under the console a couple of times in the Eleven era. There was a chest full of bits in one episode, although I forget which one that was.
I very much liked this episode, so I was a bit disappointed when Gaiman returned and gave us "Nightmare in Silver", because that was less good.
Yeah, I probably won't be going out of my way to write about that one.
Delete"The Bells of Saint John" is perhaps the episode I was thinking of.
Delete