Doctor Who (2005) 2-10: Love & Monsters (Quick Review)

Episode:

720

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Serial:

175

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Writer:

Russell T Davies

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Director:

Dan Zeff

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Air Date:

17-Jun-2006

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the 20th anniversary of Doctor Who series 2 episode 10: Love & Monsters!

Here's a pointless fact for you, Love & Monsters aired 448 days after Rose, the story that kicked off this era of Doctor Who.

Another fact: if you start at the air date of An Unearthly Child, the first episode of classic Doctor Who, and go forwards 448 days, you'll land on episode one of The Web Planet, my least favourite story of the whole show, possibly television in general. It's that one with the dancing moth people (I don't like it when the series gets too silly).

Has history repeated here? Is this the worst episode of the RTD era? You've probably made your own mind up about that already, but just in case you haven't seen this yet I'll warn you about SPOILERS. I won't spoil anything from the episodes that come after this, but I may talk about earlier stories if something gets referenced, or if I feel like going on a rant about The Web Planet.

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RECAP

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Elton Pope makes a video about the time he met Ursula and joined a group investigating the Doctor. He recalls seeing him when he was a kid and it's haunted him. The group bonded, found they had other interests, they even performed Electric Light Orchestra songs. But then Victor Kennedy arrived and things got serious.

Victor sent Elton on a mission to get to Rose through her mother Jackie, though she was the one who made all the moves on him. After realising how sad she was he abandoned the plan, however she figured him out and confronted him, making him realise he'd already gone too far.

He decided that Ursula was who he cared about and they decided to quit, but Victor had been secretly absorbing the group into his alien body and he got her too. He chased Elton but the TARDIS arrived exactly where and when it needed to for Rose to come out and tell the guy off for bothering her mum. Victor counted on the Doctor sacrificing himself to save Elton, but instead he inspired the people he absorbed to fight back so Elton could snap the sci-fi cane keeping him together.

Afterwards Elton learned that the reason the Doctor met him as a kid is because a monster had killed his mother. And it turns out the Doctor had been able to preserve Ursula's face on a paving stone.


REVIEW

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Love & Monsters has a very different format to your typical episode of Doctor Who. The way it starts off, with Elton talking to camera and filming his old house, makes it seem like it's going to be a bit of a documentary or found footage story, but it's not that. Instead it's a story told to a camcorder.

2006 is an alien planet to me now, so I don't know who he's recording the video for. YouTube did get started in 2005 though, and I suppose there were other sites... I'm sure it made sense to viewers at the time. This video quality seems suspiciously good for a camcorder or webcam though. It's almost like he's filming this with the exact same cameras they used for the series!

Anyway, there has actually been a Doctor Who story told with flashbacks and video footage before: the Sixth Doctor serial Trial of a Time Lord. But the big difference here is that it's not about the Doctor, it's about this dude. A completely regular guy. The script is very clear on that.

The episode's edited like it's a video Elton made himself, with the exciting bit first to hook viewers, and flashes of future events, but the footage we're seeing was never filmed. It's an interpretation of events painted by his slightly unreliable narration. I mean I'm sure he encountered the Doctor and Rose in a warehouse, but they didn't do a Scooby-Doo chase scene with a monster. 

Incidentally, this chase was all in the script, the director just did what it said.

To be honest, I think scenes like this did some real damage to Doctor Who's image. Sometimes I'll recommend the show to people and they'll say "Oh, that series is for kids isn't it?" It took me until the Matt Smith era to finally start watching it myself, because every time I saw a clip it was a burping wheelie bin or a farting Slitheen trying to ride a space surfboard, or the Doctor curing every disease in the world at once, or people with their faces in televisions, or... okay fine I suppose this clip isn't misrepresenting the RTD series that much.

The Web Planet

And yeah classic Doctor Who could be a bit ridiculous at times as well, though that was more because they had the ambition to shoot for the stars, despite having considerably less than NASA's annual budget to work with.

Though in the Web Planet's case it was more like they were drawn towards the brightest, hottest flame.

Anyway, cringey stuff makes me cringe.

One thing I do like about the episode is how it shows what Elton was doing during the times the Nestene, the Slitheen and the Sycorax attacked London. I always like it when a series remembers past stories and builds on them (as long as it doesn't necessarily expect me to remember as well). I also appreciate that they remembered that there was a time jump and the ship crashed into Big Ben a year after the mannequins came to life.

Speaking of previous episodes, Elton tried to find out about the Doctor the exact same way Rose did back in her first story, by searching the internet. First she tried "Doctor" and got 17,700,000 results, then she narrowed it down from there by adding more terms until she found Clive's website.

Unfortunately Clive's dead at this point and the Doctor gave Mickey a virus to wipe all references of himself from the internet. But Elton searched for "The Doctor", got what looks like 368,000,000 results, and then immediately clicked on "My Invasion Blog". Which is how he met Ursula and the other Clives.

I'm cautious about reading too much into a story and making assumptions about what it's a metaphor for and what its messages are... but I don't think it's too wild to say that L.I.N.D.A. (with an I) is basically a Doctor Who fan club.

Also I feel like there was going to be a twist that explains Elton's contrived name for the group that we never got. He was so keen to use 'LINDA' that he made the 'N' stand for 'and'. Hang on, why isn't the episode called Love 'n' Monsters?

So if this is how RTD saw Doctor Who fans back in the day, then his mental image of them was a bunch of regular people of different ages and sexes who use a common interest as an excuse to get together. They're different kinds of fans, one's into analysing things, one's an artist etc. but none of them are treated like social outcasts who should be laughed at. The episode's a comedy, but it doesn't get humour out of mocking its own fanbase. In fact it mostly seems to be mocking Doctor Who's own tropes, like the running around and the monsters.

It turns out that the group finds they have other common interests, like music and cakes. The Doctor isn't their all-consuming passion. But then an obsessed fan without sense of humour arrives and ruins all the fun by being a authoritarian killjoy. I have a feeling this was based on a true story, or at least a specific true fan.

Speaking of real people, I was curious and looked up a bit about the actors playing L.I.N.D.A. Moya Brady has been in 161 episodes of Hollyoaks. Ursula actor Shirley Henderson played a small role in a fairly well known genre movie... Babu Frik in The Rise of Skywalker. Simon Greenall does a lot of comedy and voice acting. And Kathryn Drysdale was recently in Bridgerton.

Oh, plus Marc Warren has starred in a few series... and was once Baron Von Richthofen in Young Indiana Jones.

And Victor Kennedy is played by famous stand up comedian Peter Kay, who seems to think he's in a comedy. He's basically right.

The funny thing is, the story about a group of people forming a social group and it getting spoiled by one asshole is pretty much all told in the first 15 minutes. After that point their sanctum looks more like a school room, everyone's doing allocated tasks and homework, and Elton's being talked into stalking a celebrity's family. Uh, I mean a companion's family. Though when we see all those photos of young Rose in Jackie's house, that's where my mind went to. He's basically an obsessed fan working his way into an actress's life through her mother.

The middle 10 minutes is about Elton trying to get closer to Jackie, and this was the strongest part of the episode for me. This is the bit that works.

Jackie immediately flirts with him, doing his own espionage tactics on him before he can even build up the courage to make a move, then she tricks him into coming over to fix her constantly breaking appliances, and spills wine on him to get him to strip. It's the most 'Jackie' she's been since... well, ever.

But then she gets a call from Rose and the mood shifts. The episode's actually about something here, how her life has been derailed by her concern about her daughter, and how she's determined to protect her. There aren't many actors on Doctor Who I would say are bad, and Camille Coduri is nowhere near that list.

Then there's the last 15 minutes of the episode, where it turns out behind that normal looking newspaper, Victor Kennedy is actually an 9 year old's idea of a Doctor Who monster.

Also hey, they threw in the arc word for season 3! I don't think I ever noticed that before. I wish I was able to get a clearer look at it without the fuzzy text, mostly because I want to do the sudoku puzzle.

Even fans of the episode often think it goes a bit off the rails when the Abzorbaloff shows up. He's a big disgusting naked Doctor Who monster with a woman's face on his butt who likes to fart. You know how many years Doctor Who managed to go without a farting alien? Then RTD shows up and they're an annual event!

The Abzorbaloff was the winning design in a Blue Peter design-a-monster contest for young children, so it was always meant to be a bit... childish. I found out recently that the kid who created him 20 years ago is now a Doctor Who YouTuber himself called Channel Dog aka Channel Pup aka Pup. He does a lot of videos about Sonic the Hedgehog and Spider-Man (and sometimes Doctor Who).

To be fair, I've actually seen this concept of a horrifying monster that absorbs people into its body done elsewhere and it kind of worked. Though that was in a comic book universe with explicit magic, where people could just be turned into other things, so the rules of the universe allowed for it. This is just gross and dumb and I don't like it!!

It's a shame, because the idea of an episode about people who get swept up in the Doctor's life worked well for production, giving them a chance to shoot two stories at once without literally cloning David Tennant and Billie Piper, and it probably could've worked for the audience as well.

Incidentally, their appearance in the episode is pretty weird, they spend the whole scene on their side of the alleyway, without sharing the shot with the others. This has to be the fastest the Doctor has ever sorted a problem out, as he defeats the Abzorbaloff in about a minute without even needing to step away from his TARDIS.

It's a bit of a deus ex machina ending, but seeing as the episode's all about trying to meet the god in question it's fitting. For a moment it seems like the Doctor's in trouble as the enemy knows his weakness: he'll sacrifice himself to save others. But really this guy's not making the Doctor sweat, and he doesn't even need to tell Elton that the cane is his weakness because Ursula gives it away.

The Doctor tells Elton that his mother was killed by a space monster, which he apparently forgot. I don't know if he means he forgot that's when she died, or if he forgot that she even had died, but hey at least he has closure now. He knows why a strange man was in his house all those years ago.

(I saw someone else make the observation that his memories of the Doctor as a kid lines up with when the series was last on TV, and then his interest is rekindled when new Doctor Who stories start happening around 2005. I wish I'd noticed that, because it's pretty clever.)

But I think the reveal of what happened to his mum would've had more impact if the episode had given me any reason to wonder. The episode sets up the mystery of why he saw the Doctor in his house when he was 3 or 4, but learning the truth about his mother here feels like getting an answer without a question. We don't even find out if she was called Linda!

It just adds to the episode's tonal whiplash. It goes from dumb comedy, to Jackie struggling with Rose's absence, to Ursula tragically getting absorbed, to Peter Kay in a giant rubber suit covered in faces chasing Elton down the street, to a sad montage of Elton's mother while ELO plays.

Then there's the reveal that Ursula been behind the camera the whole time, just like she was when they were filming his old house, and also she's a paving stone now. This leads to a serious speech about life being stranger and better than you imagine as a kid. The tone is seriously all over the bloody place.

So Ursula is now inflicted with the 'Curse of the Time Lords' mentioned in School Reunion, as she cannot age. But unlike the Cybermen in Age of Steel, she didn't explode when she realised how horrifying her new form was. They're a happy couple now and they even have a sex life... which is the line that really put the nail into this episode's coffin. RTD claims it's a metaphor for disability and how people still have lives after life-changing incidents, and I'd be more likely to believe him if he didn't find this kind of humour so funny.

I've heard they did this all with prosthetics instead of CGI, and whatever method they used works. She really looks like a head in a paving stone. Though this does raise some questions, like how does she breathe and talk? How does she still have a brain? What keeps her alive if she can't eat? How can she hear without ears?

I know the answer is just 'it's a silly sci-fi show for kids, get over it', but I think Doctor Who's generally better than this. And if it wasn't, people would've stopped watching a long time ago.

That said, this was actually the point where season 2's viewing figures started to climb again, after falling all season and hitting their lowest with The Satan Pit. If the numbers had kept dropping at the same rate then Doctor Who would've lost half its audience by the finale. Instead they picked up again and series 2 ended as strong as it started. 

Though it's weird how the episode right after The Satan Pit got 6.66 million viewers...

There is one other thing Elton says at the end "I keep thinking of Rose and Jackie. And how much longer before they pay the price." So that's a bit ominous... just as it was when Queen Victoria said something similar back in Tooth and Claw. Also when The Beast said Rose would die in battle in The Satan Pit. I get the impression we're supposed to be concerned.


RATING

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I think people still find things to like in Love & Monsters. It's got likeable characters, it's never boring, the scenes with Jackie are good, and it does a decent job of showing the lives of ordinary people who are aware of the Doctor but don't get to go on adventures. It's about them finding love and being found by monsters. It's a change of pace and an attempt to do something new with a 40 year old series with almost as many episodes as The Simpsons.

It's a goofy farce wrapped around a proper emotional core, and isn't that what Doctor Who should be? Nah, I don't think so. And it's the second lowest rated episode of the Tennant era on IMDb so I don't think I'm alone on this.

  5/10

Man, if this is only second lowest, what's the lowest?

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NEXT EPISODE

Next time the horrible gets even more horrendous, in Fear Her.

If you've got an opinion on Love & Monsters that you want to share, then you're 20 years too late. And also just in time!