Doctor Who (2005) 1-10: The Doctor Dances

Episode:

706

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Serial:

164

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Writer:

Steven Moffat

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Director:

James Hawes

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Air Date:

28-May-2005

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm back in 2005 writing about the second part of Doctor Who series 1's The Empty Child two-parter.

It's called The Doctor Dances, which has always seemed like a bit of a strange title to me. It's weirdly playful for a Doctor Who story, which are usually called things like The Mysterious Planet or Planet of the Daleks or Dalek Invasion of Earth. Or Earthshock.

Even if you know what happens in it, which I do, it's still weird that the title references dancing. The episode takes place in London during an air raid, but it's not exactly a ballroom blitz. And if you know what 'dancing' refers to in the story... well I bet Steven Moffat and RTD thought it was hilarious that they got away with it.

Alright, everything past this point will be safe for new viewers as long as you've seen everything up to this point. Otherwise, beware of SPOILERS.

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Previously, on Doctor Who:

The TARDIS arrived in London just in time for the Blitz, which was awkward as the Doctor was chasing a metal object that fell from the sky. The Doctor followed a girl called Nancy who's been helping homeless kids by breaking into houses and getting them food. She's connected to a mysterious Empty Child in a gas mask who has been following her, calling on nearby phones and asking everyone if they're his mummy.

The Doctor went to Albion Hospital on her advice, where Doctor Constantine gave him some exposition about the gas mask-face zombies lying in every bed, before succumbing to the plague and becoming one himself. Meanwhile Rose fell off a barrage balloon and met a time travelling con man called Captain Jack Harkness, who was eager to sell the object to her until he realised she wasn't a Time Agent and that something is going very wrong around its crash site.

They two of them caught up with the Doctor at the hospital just in time to be surrounded by gas mask zombies who will turn them in a touch. Meanwhile Nancy returned to house she stole food from and got trapped by the Empty Child himself: her brother Jamie.

And now, the conclusion:

And the cliffhanger is resolved by...

... the Doctor going into angry dad mode and sternly instructing the gas mask zombies to go to their room. The patients all go back to their beds and lie down. It even works on Jamie, who leaves Nancy alone and walks off down the street.

Damn, that was fast. The teaser lasts than a minute and that's all they needed to get out of trouble. It could've been even shorter but they threw in a joke at the end about how those would've been terrible last words. Personally, I thought they were pretty clever words. That solution actually made a lot of sense!

OPENING CREDITS

Nancy watches her brother Jamie walk off into the night, more sad than relieved.

But when she tries to leave she gets a shock as she runs right into the Empty Child! Actually it's the son of the people who live there and they are not keen on seeing a burglar running out of their house. The dad grabs her and shoves her back inside.

Back in the hospital, Jack senses that the Doctor's a bit angry with him. But he defends himself, pointing out that what he dropped here was just a burned out medical transport. It's harmless junk. Also it apparently wasn't what landed on Jamie, as he programmed it not to do that. So he's not responsible for hurting him.

Jack recaps the con he was running: drop space junk on Earth, convince a Time Agent that it's valuable, get 50% of the cash up front, oops a bomb landed on it destroying the evidence. He's apparently done this a few times, as he talks about Pompeii being another good location to run the con. So if the Doctor ever goes there on Volcano Day maybe he'll run into him there!

The Doctor brings them upstairs to the room Doctor Constantine told him to check out in the previous episode. Turns out that he forgot to mention that it's sealed like a bank vault with a thick metal door. I guess this is one of those hospitals that's built to treat super villains.

Fortunately the gang is equipped to get it open. Though the Doctor leaves his sonic in his pocket this time and gets Jack to use his sci-fi blaster to remove the lock instead.

It's a sonic blaster created in the 51st century by the weapon factories of Villengard... which the Doctor once blew up. This isn't a reference to the classic series, we never got to see the factories explode or the banana grove that replaced them. Though I can totally picture the Seventh Doctor doing it.

Inside the room they find a broken window, a child's drawings of their mother, and a tape recorder. Steven Moffat did the research here, as magnetic tape recorders were actually in use all through World War II. He just missed the part which said that the machines were used by Germany.

The Doctor starts the tape and I suddenly feel like I'm playing a video game and listening to an audio diary. It's a recording of Doctor Constantine talking to Jamie, who keeps asking if he's his mummy. This is actually a sad moment, or at least that's what the music's telling me. It makes a convincing argument.

Back in the house, the dad, Mr Lloyd, tells Nancy that the police are coming and expresses his annoyance at her walking off with things he earned with the sweat of his brow. She turns the tables, pointing out that he's got more food than everyone else because he's having an affair with the butcher. So now she's seeing the sweat on his brow.

That's a nice play on words there and I love how cocky she is when she reveals she's got the upper hand, but it feels awkward to me that the gotcha is that he's gay.

She gets him to give her some tools and to let her use the bathroom, which makes this one of the few times in Doctor Who history that a character has gone to use the toilet. Not that I've been keeping count, though I'm sure there's a video on YouTube somewhere by someone who's done the research!

Back in room 802, the Doctor realises that the tape finished a while back and the voice they've been hearing is the Empty Child there in the room with them! I guess he does sound a bit pre-recorded with that gas mask on.

This is some proper Steven Moffat writing. Not just the 'that noise you've been hearing repeated in the background is more sinister than you know' reveal, but the way the solution to the cliffhanger comes back to bite them in the ass later in extremely logical way. He told them to go to their room, and this is his room!

Jack jumps into action, pulling out... a banana. The Doctor secretly swiped Jack's squareness gun, probably because he didn't want him pointing it at the kid, and he uses it to make them an exit. Plus it's got a "digital rewind" feature that closes up the hole afterwards, which seems a bit... magic. But okay.

It can also function as a sonic blaster, a sonic cannon, and a triple-enfolded sonic disruptor, and I'm going to assume at least one of those modes shoots dubstep at an enemy until they explode. Either way they all sound very useful; a lot more useful in this situation than a sonic screwdriver at least.

The gas mask zombies start slowly swarming into the hallway, surrounding them, and the Doctor loses his cool. Mostly because Jack keeps yelling at him to say what sonic weapons he's carrying and he's too embarrassed to say "screwdriver". It's kind of out of character for the Doctor maybe, but the scene amuses me so I shall allow it.

Incidentally, there's a gas mask zombie in a wheelchair, which confuses me a bit because we were told that the victims had identical injuries. I assumed that meant that any existing injuries were healed.

It's Rose that gets them out of this crisis by grabbing the gun and shooting the floor. Well, actually it drops them into another room full of gas mask zombies, but at least this one has an exit.

The dialogue's turning into proper banter at this point, with the Doctor defending his invention by saying he was bored and had a lot of cabinets to put up. And at least the Doctor's screwdriver still has power, unlike Jack's gun which got drained by using the special features. Over all the decades of Doctor Who I don't think he's ever needed to change the batteries on that thing.

They get themselves trapped in a store room and assess their assets, with Jack snarkily pointing out that they have a banana and the Doctor can put up some shelves.

The episode finally answers the question of why escaping through the windows isn't an option: there's a seven storey drop on the other side. The hospital didn't seem so big from the establishing shot, but that's true in real life as well. They filmed the exterior at the Cardiff Royal Infirmary and that place is a lot more massive than it seems to be from the front.

Jack continues ranting for a bit and then disappears, leaving the heroes hopelessly trapped.

The episode cuts to where the homeless kids are living, and tries to pull that 'there's a sound you're ignoring that's actually something to be scared of' trick again.

First time it was the recording of the Empty Child, and here it seems like one of the kids is using the typewriter, until it's revealed to be typing "ARE YOU MY MUMMY?" all on its own. Maybe this works for people, I don't know, but for me it's an early example of one of Moffat's biggest flaws as a writer: using the same ideas over and over.

Though to be fair, this scene was apparently a late addition to the episode, added to fill up time while the main cast were busy filming Boom Town. And it feels like it.

I don't know how Nancy has been dealing with the creepy kid situation for all this time, maybe the Empty Child only got out of the hospital and found her again recently, but she knows that she can't stay here with them as wherever she goes, it follows. It's a bit like in that horror movie It Follows.

Here's an example of how repeating the same trick can work, as Jack calls the Doctor and Rose on a radio in the same way that the Empty Child does. In fact this whole scene is an example of clever writing.

• Jack says he can't beam them out without bypassing his ship's security, establishing a limitation that'll be important later.
• To tell them this he uses a trick we've seen the villain use, talking through a radio speaker. This shows that the Empty Child is using technology, and it's the same 'Om-Com' tech as Jack's ship. Big clue!
• Rose asks if he can phone them, which sets the Child up to surprise us by chiming in with "And I can hear you. Coming to find you!" Which is kind of terrifying, and reminds us he's searching for them.
• Jack plays Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade" to block the kid's signal (the same song he and Rose were dancing to on his spaceship in part one).
• Now Rose and the Doctor have reason to think that they'll be rescued, but they'll have to wait for a bit and there's music's playing, so they're all set up to dance.
  

The conversation's been set up like a row of dominoes, each line falling in just the right way to start the next one moving. Exposition leading to a clue, leading to a scare, leading to a song, all in just 50 seconds.

So fortunately it turns out that Jack is a con man with a heart of gold after all. He just needs time to get the teleporter to work on them. Hang on, isn't it usually called a 'transmat' in Doctor Who?

I can believe that the process is going to take a while, as this cockpit is a mess. They definitely went with the 'cover every inch of space with glued-on bits of junk' approach when designing this set. It's a bit more chaotic than I'm used to from recent episodes, though it does have glowy bits and screens so that's pretty modern.

It's around this point that the Rose drags the Doctor away from his escape plan so they can do a bit of dancing.

The Doctor was busy resonating concrete, which sounds like the most boring and feeble excuse a person could have to avoid dancing with someone. He wasn't having much success though (he gets better at it in later seasons).

Rose explains that she has faith in Jack because he's like him, except with dating and dancing, and the Doctor takes offence. He's danced before! He's been around for 900 years, there's no way he hasn't "danced" at some point. I'm sensing some extra meaning encoded in the word 'dance' here. It's a bit of a double-entendre.

The Doctor (up until Paul McGann at least) has traditionally been a character that does not dance with his companions, or anyone else for that matter. The show wanted to make it very clear that despite every TARDIS team including at least one beautiful young woman, the word 'companion' does not indicate a sexual relationship.

The Doctor and Rose end up staring so deeply into each other's eyes that they don't even notice that they're surrounded by glowing sci-fi panels now, thanks to Jack getting the teleporter working.

The Doctor's not completely unobservant though. He noticed that Rose's hands are fine despite hanging from a rope, meaning that they must have been fixed by the medical nanogenes on Jack's ship. Also this is a Chula spaceship and that was a Chula medical transporter that Jack dropped on London, so they'll be using the same tech. That's another clue for the audience.

Jack mentions that he used to be a Time Agent, but they stole two years of memories from him and he has no idea what he did during that time. Maybe he is a bad guy, he doesn't know. We won't be finding out what happened by the end of this episode, that much is certain.

The heroes have escaped, but Nancy's gone and gotten herself captured.

She used those tools she borrowed to break into the restricted area around the 'bomb' site, and was doing really well until all the lights came on. Then she got dragged in here and handcuffed to a table by Jack's friend Algy from part one.

The gas mask zombie plague is a hard thing to sell people on so she doesn't even try to explain why she really doesn't want to be chained up next to this guy. Jenkins is clearly feeling a bit ill and she recognises the wound on his hand.

Funny how the soldiers don't recognise it, seeing as they're right here in the middle of the situation, next to both the Chula ambulance and the hospital. Somehow they're basically the last people in the story to know what's going on.

Fortunately the heroes arrive at the restricted zone in almost the nick of time.

Rose wants to seduce Algy as a distraction, but Jack knows that she's not his type and goes off to do the distracting himself. This really seems to throw Rose, who doesn't seem like she's heard of bisexuality. The Doctor explains it to her like it's a concept from the distant future, saying that in the 51st century guys are more flexible when it comes to dancing. The human race meets new life and civilisations and boldly goes out with anyone.

But Jack does not expect Algy to do the Empty Child head tilt and ask if he's his mummy.

This gas mask transformation sequence is still really good I reckon. 20 years old on a British TV budget and it rivals anything they can do these days with their sacks of Disney+ money.

Having your face transformed into a gas mask doesn't seem to be much fun though. Oh the plus side, they're always ready for a chemical weapon attack! Though they will have to change the filter afterwards.

Speaking of airborne threats, the nanogenes are in the air now and there's nothing keeping the heroes from being infected too, so the human race is basically doomed. Also the air raid siren is going off again and they already know this place is definitely going to get hit by a bomb tonight.

Fortunately Nancy has survived her captivity by sending her zombified guard to sleep with a lullaby and the Doctor gets her out of her cuffs.

So the heroes are now united at last. Unfortunately the gas mask zombies are arriving as well, summoned by the ambulance's security system, so Rose and Nancy need to run off and fix the barbed wire Nancy cut to get in here. Setting 2,428-D on the sonic will do the job and I'm amazed that Rose is able to remember that.

Hey the sonic screwdriver finally gets to be useful at the end! It's more useful here than a sonic blaster would've been at least.

Fixing the wire is pretty much Moffat finding an excuse to put Rose and Nancy together for a scene, but it's a really nice scene so I'm not complaining.

As they're working Nancy talks Rose into revealing where she comes from, so she admits that she's a time traveller from the future. Nancy accepts the time traveller part, she's seen enough weirdness, but the idea of the country having a future seems far-fetched. So Rose gets to tell Nancy that the Nazis are defeated and that she wins. Poor Nancy looks like she has no idea what to feel about that.

The group gets the ambulance open and finds that it's empty like Jack said, or so it seems. But the Doctor gives Rose (and the audience) a bit of a push so they can solve this one themselves: it's Chula medical technology, so... it contained nanogenes! Jack dropped a box full of microscopic robots onto London without even realising it.

The first human the nanogenes found was Jamie, lying dead with a gas mask on. They weren't calibrated for humans, didn't know what he should look like, so they fixed him the best they could and then when they were satisfied he became the template. Now the nanogenes are going around healing everyone in the world so that they're just as injured as Jamie. Oh, plus they're military medical nanogenes, so they're set up to give Jamie Om-Com capability and network him with his soldiers.

It all makes sense! All the supernatural weirdness we've been seeing has a reasonable explanation! Well, except for the telekinetic typewriting and the monkey toy turning on, but whatever, it's Chula tech, it does all kinds of stuff.

Nancy says that this is her fault and the Doctor puts it all together. She's older than she looks, old enough to have a son and pretend it was her brother!

It's pretty impressive that the episode only has one female character who could be the Empty Child's mummy and it still does a decent job of hiding the twist. It was plausible enough that we'd never see his mother, as all the other kids Nancy's been looking after are on their own. Also Nancy told us he was her brother, but it doesn't feel like the episode's cheating, because as a teenage single parent in the '40s she had a good reason to lie. Even to her own son.

They're surrounded by the Empty Child's army and the German bomber is on its way. The episode's already established that Jack can't teleport them out without spending ages bypassing the security, so he gets to safety and leaves them.

And Nancy goes to tell the child that she's his mummy.

It's funny how this comes right after the episode Father's Day. The two stories are very different, but they're both about someone accepting their role as a parent and sacrificing themselves for their child. Though Nancy isn't actually turned into a zombie.

Poor Jamie's too damaged to understand what she's saying, but the nanogenes get it. She's the mother of the template they've been using, so they scan her to get accurate information. It's lucky she was such a good example of a healthy human being really.

They repair Jamie properly this time and we get to see what the kid looks like under the mask!

The Doctor's switched the story's genre from horror to heartwarming, and he's the happiest we've seen him this series. He picks the kid up, and tells him he's got 20 years until pop music. Which is true. He'll be listening to the Beatles "Love Me Do" by late 1962, and Elvis was already making crowds go wild in the late '50s.

There's still that bomb to worry about, but Jack swoops in and grabs it with his ship's tractor beam about half a second before impact. Wait, I'll figure this out properly. No reason to half-ass my estimate.

Okay, let's say the bomb was travelling 200 metres per second and it was stopped about 4 metres off the ground. So he caught it with 0.02 seconds to spare. Or maybe 0.32 seconds if you're counting frames.

This is another one of those scenes (like in The Long Game) where the Doctor's saved by the actions of someone else at the last moment, but this works better for me because the Doctor has a line about manipulating Jack into it. He had considered the bomb problem solved and was focusing on the other problem.

Jack teleports down onto the frozen bomb just to do a Dr Strangelove reference while he's having a chat. I suppose there aren't any speakers around to Om-Com with this time and he never did get Rose's phone number. After saying goodbye he teleports away.

Then he teleports back again to compliment Rose's union jack t-shirt. It was a success after all!

It's a bit hard to spot, but this is the Bad Wolf reference in the episode, written on the side of the bomb in German. Though "Schlechter Wolf" apparently translates as Substandard Wolf, not Nasty Wolf, which is what they were going for.

The Doctor shows Rose his moves, throwing over the updated nanogenes to cure everyone else. I don't know how he instructs them to fix the mess and switch themselves off, especially as I didn't see him use the sonic, but if anyone can do it it's the Doctor.

Though there's still one thing I don't understand. If the Chula developed airborne nanomachines that can reprogram people into zombies that follow the orders of an augmented leader, why did they even need soldiers? Just drop these things on the battlefield and soon everyone's fighting for you.

Even Dr Constantine is healed! Though all his patients just woke up in a disused railway station with all their illnesses cured, so now he's got to explain that somehow. Which leads to a great line where Constantine meets a woman who's got her leg back and asks if she miscounted (there is a war on after all).

I love seeing the Doctor so genuinely happy, especially as it's so well earned. The Doctor never gets an adventure where everyone lives, and this is the incarnation who just got through the nightmare of the Time War so he's seen a lot of death recently. Funny thing is, things would've turned out a lot darker if Jack hadn't dropped the Chula ambulance here, as the nanogenes wouldn't have cured the patients and Jamie would've been dead.

Rose says the Doctor's got a smile like Father Christmas right now, so he replies "Who says I'm not, red bicycle when you were twelve?" So now I'm wondering did he just make up something she would plausibly own as a kid? I mean if someone said that to me I'd have to think a moment about what colour my old bike was and when it was that I got it.

I think it was purple.

Hey, a spaceship shot! The episode keeps on giving.

The bad news is that the bomb is three minutes from exploding and anything Jack does to get rid of it will just set it off. I guess he's flown more than two minutes away from the nearest patch of empty ground by this point, so parking the ship and making a run for it isn't an option.

He's handling his inevitable death very well though. He orders a drink and has a chat with his ship's computer about the last time he was sentenced to death.

It does seem like Jack's on track for a redemptive death, seeing as he was the one who caused everything. But he never found out what happened during the missing two years of his past and the series isn't about to kill him off and leave that unresolved!

There's some great direction here, as the camera slowly pulls back from his cockpit, underneath the bomb that's about to kill him, through a set of doors... and into the TARDIS. I love it when they build a set that connects to the console room so people can just walk through without a cut.

The Doctor and Rose are just dancing (or trying to), completely unbothered about the explosion that's about to fill their console room in approximately 30 seconds. In fact it takes Jack those 30 seconds to get in and close the doors.

Ironically the episode which ends with a bomb about to go off is the only one so far this series that doesn't end with an explosion, not on screen anyway. Just this once, nothing explodes! Okay nothing exploded in Father's Day either to be fair.

It's a shame they couldn't have gotten rid of the bomb and then kept the Chula ship in the TARDIS's garage; it was a pretty handy vessel to have around.

Jack comments that it's much bigger on the inside and the Doctor replies "You'd better be." Damn, did Steven Moffat write this one or something?

The Doctor still can't dance very well, but just when you think there might be even a hint of failure in this story he changes the tune and gets his groove back. It's the same composer, Glenn Miller (the same year as well), but swing classic "In the Mood" is more his genre.

So the Doctor finally does something to impress Rose, while Jack's left standing on the sidelines. But he will be sticking around! He's already pulled an Adam and almost screwed up time by doing something stupid, so they can skip that story and get straight to the adventures. It'll be a more crowded TARDIS but the maximum number of regular companions is 3, and there's always room for someone who isn't a young woman from modern day England for a change.


CONCLUSION

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The Doctor Dances does indeed feature the Doctor dancing, so it's not a let down in that regard. It lives up to the somewhat humble expectations engendered by its title. But is it a worthy conclusion to the story began in The Empty Child? Well, looking at the scores on the internet it seems that basically everyone says yes and I think they're probably right.

It's definitely not a flawless Doctor Who serial, as there are artefacts of changes made during production. A line about a plan that no one made, a semi-redundant scene with the child typing "ARE YOU MY MUMMY?" on the typewriter. Also it looks like it was recorded on a SD digital camera in 2005! The production design, cinematography, lighting, costuming is all great, they really put the effort in to place the viewer in a slightly spookier WWII era London, but it does look a bit fuzzy.

I should mention that Murray Gold nailed the soundtrack this time, while I'm listing things that are good. They really cut back on the visual effects in the second part but they were still pretty good too. Bananas are good, plenty of potassium. Also the writing was good. I'm sure Steven Moffat's smart-ass style isn't for everyone, but it's hard for me to complain about smart characters solving problems in a smart story, especially when they're just as entertaining when they're being idiots. And you can actually work out the mystery yourself at home, because it makes actual sense and all the clues you need are there. I love it when things make sense, because the click when it all comes together is so satisfying.

I thought all the stuff around Nancy and her son worked really well. She's resourceful and compassionate and tormented, and she grounds the story. The tiny moments of comedy she gets only serve to humanise her more and it's her mystery that's at the core of the story. She is the Empty Child's mummy and she has to accept this to save him. Her performance is so good that I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that Florence Hoath had been a child actor for 11 years by this point, and this was near the end of her acting career, not the beginning. These days she runs a YouTube channel for kids called ZinniPops, so she's still looking after children.

But the episode's not called The Secret Mummy, it's The Doctor Dances. The heroes were split up for most of part one, but here Rose and the Doctor are reunited and they get the focus as they deal with the mysterious stranger that's won her heart. Jack's sonic is a blaster, he scans for alien tech, he does dating and dancing, he's a beautiful man... probably, and he ultimately proves that he is bigger on the inside, so it's no wonder Rose is a bit infatuated with him. I expect half the viewers were infatuated as well, depending on demographics. 'The Doctor feels threatened by a sexier space hero, so he learns how to dance' doesn't necessarily sound like the premise of an all-time classic, but it mostly just spices up the banter, and the Doctor pretty much does what he always does: listens to people, thinks about the problem, spots the clues, works out a way to save the day. And it's really nice to see the moody traumatised Ninth Doctor get an absolute win for once. The solution was to hug the monster and talk to the plague, that's what was needed, no bombs, no ray guns, and by the end Jack's the one who's impressed with how the Doctor operates. That sounds like the premise to an all-time classic.

Not a lot of top Doctor Who episodes have ultra-happy endings. A story generally needs a reasonable amount of tragedy to reach those upper echelons, but this got there with joy. In fact Steven Moffat earned Doctor Who its first ever Hugo Award win here, beating Battlestar Galactica. Then he came back for series 2 and 3 and upgraded that to three consecutive wins. He could've made it to four wins, but he got beaten by Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (it took until 2013 for something without 'Doctor' in the title to get a win, and then the series never won again).


RATING

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I gave the first part 9/10, so I suppose it would be weird if I rated this any lower, or higher. It's a slightly different kind of story with the gang all together, but it doesn't just nail the landing, it also throws in a couple more tricks on the way down.

 9/10.

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NEXT EPISODE

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the end of Doctor Who's third second season as I write about The Reality War! It sounds really epic, but by the look of that sign it's apparently just the name of a street in London.

Anyway, let us know what you thought about The Doctor Dances, why you liked it, why you didn't. It's statistically improbable that one of the 0.7% of people who hated it will leave a comment but you never know.