Doctor Who (2005) 1-11: Boom Town (Quick Review)

Episode:

707

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Serial:

165

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Writer:

Russell T Davies

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Director:

Joe Ahearne

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Air Date:

04-Jun-2005

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching another episode of the endless first season of the 2005 Doctor Who revival. 13 episodes, man; it just keeps going and going.

The writer this time was showrunner Russell T Davies himself, back after a three-episode break to land the season personally. Though those three episodes by other writers were Father's Day, The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, so the bar has been raised a bit.

RTD had actually brought in acclaimed writer Paul Abbott to script this one, but he had his own show, Shameless, and he was ultimately too busy. It would've had an entirely different story so I'm not sure how that would've affected the season finale.

Anyway I'm not talking about the finale right now, because this is only going to contain SPOILERS for this episode and earlier stories. If you're watching for the first time you've got nothing to worry about from me.

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RECAP

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The TARDIS parks in present day Cardiff to refuel using the rift from The Unquiet Dead, and Rose gets Mickey to come over with her passport. Unfortunately their day is spoiled when they spot the Slitheen disguised as Margaret Blaine in a newspaper photo, alive and about to build a power plant.

They capture Blon pretty easily, but she convinces the Doctor to have dinner with her first before taking her to be executed. Once there Blon argues for her life while repeatedly trying to kill him. Meanwhile Mickey reveals to Rose his frustration with how selfish she's being.

Suddenly the TARDIS starts to tear open the rift due to the extrapolator they confiscated from Blon. She planned this all along, intending to destroy the Earth and then surf away on the extrapolator. But instead the TARDIS turns her into an egg, giving her a fresh start.


REVIEW

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Boom Town basically has two plots.

There's the Mickey and Rose plot and there's the Blon the Slitheen plot, and the only thing connecting the two is that they both show off how pretty modern day Cardiff is. This is the Doctor Who revival finally taking off the costume and revealing where it's really filmed, with RTD giving Wales a chance to play itself for once.

Though the series had already visited the Cardiff rift back in The Unquiet Dead, so there's some more serialisation for you, on top of the return of Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen aka Margaret Blaine.

The last time we got Mickey and the Slitheen in the same episode, it was was actually the regular human drama that held my attention and not the alien scheme to destroy the world. Those straightforward scenes of Rose talking with a distraught Jackie and Mickey about why she disappeared for a year lifted the whole episode up a level for me.

Unfortunately I couldn't give a damn about them this time. Mickey hasn't given up on their relationship yet, but I definitely have.

They've seen each other twice in the last 18 months and Mickey was a murder suspect for most of that, but he can't move on as long as there's a chance of Rose coming back or phoning him. Meanwhile she fell for Adam in Dalek and Jack in The Empty Child, bringing them both onto the TARDIS. She even told Jack she was "very available". Sure she was only thinking it and not saying it, but I think she got the message across!

Neither character comes out of this episode looking good, with Rose dodging every attempt from Mickey to get some confirmation that they're still a couple, and Mickey apparently making up a girlfriend to try to get a reaction from her. Plus he freaks out when she runs towards a disaster to try to help. "It's always going to be the Doctor. It's never me!" he whines.

I don't know Mickey, maybe when you're shooting lightning out of your head and causing earthquakes you'll be the priority, but at this moment there's clearly something more urgent going on! She should've gone with him and let the world get destroyed just to make a point.

I can appreciate that RTD was trying to make their relationship realistically messy, but I just wasn't getting anything out of the two of them behaving like this. It just feels like drama for the sake of drama. Or for the sake of a later episode maybe, considering how unfinished the plot feels. 

Also the rest of the episode is a cartoon for young children, so I don't know who this plot is even here for.

The episode picks up six months after the dramatic events of Aliens of London, which featured Downing Street being destroyed by a missile to prevent the Slitheen that had murdered a chunk of the government from nuking the planet. And none of that made any difference to the world at all! The episode's all about how the Doctor doesn't stick around to see the consequences of his actions, but there were no consequences.

Though Blon survived and she's the mayor of Cardiff now. Her whole gimmick is that she can disguise herself as the people she murders, but she's just sticking as Margaret Blaine and telling people not to take photos. Mostly because RTD thought Annette Badland did such a great job he wanted to bring her back.

They spared her from being blown up by a missile by retconning that she teleported out, on her own. This actually works I think as her despair over losing her family has actually made her more empathetic than vengeful.

Blon's story moves through about four different phases, starting with her trying to cover up how dangerous her new power plant project is by killing off (almost) everyone who sees anything wrong. This is played for comedy because it's impossible to take seriously.

The reporter talking to her wasn't even really trying to investigate her. She just connected some dots and realised that things were a bit odd. And by 'dots' I mean 'suspicious deaths'. Lots and lots of them. The European Safety Inspectors were blown up, the government's nuclear adviser got decapitated, the Heritage Committee got electrocuted in a swimming pool, and she even 'accidentally' killed someone with her car.

You can't just avoid safety inspections by repeatedly murdering all the inspectors and killing a reporter to bury the story seems likely to just draw more attention.

Though Blon doesn't actually go through with it! When she learns that the reporter is pregnant she decides to let her live. Losing her own family has given her some empathy it seems. Though her plans all end with the destruction of the world and everyone on it, so the woman's not going to live much longer either way.

I don't know if they improved the animatronics, but I think Blon's Slitheen costume looks a bit better than it used to. I can buy her as being an actual creature and not just an actor in an awkward monster suit.

Anyway, I think it was the right move to show us that she really did let the reporter go because it proves that she's telling the truth later when she tells the Doctor she spares people. It means that when Doctor says that he doesn't care and it doesn't change anything, he's actually tearing down Blon's real excuses.

But before then there's the second phase of the Blon plot, where the heroes teaming up to catch her.

This is pretty much all comedy with the Doctor shutting down Jack's attempt to take charge, the mayor's secretary stalling as she sneaks out of her office through the window, and Mickey sticking his foot in a bucket as he races down a hallway. It's fine I guess and I like the teleporter gag at the end.

It's fun having the four of them together, whether they're chasing the villain or just having a laugh while eating their food. It shows how Jack was a great addition to the cast and Mickey could be too if he'd get over Rose.

After that we get to the meat of the story with Margaret confronting the Doctor with the fact that he never sticks around to face the consequences, and that if he brings her home as a prisoner he'll be condemning her to a horrible death.

Though first there's some more goofy comedy, with Blon trying to kill the Doctor multiple times during dinner. I don't know why, as she's already planning to escape with the extrapolator. Maybe it's a clever plan to lull him into a false sense of security. Or maybe it's just a backup plan.

I can't complain about a scene which shows how the Doctor's stayed alive for 900 years of constant adventures (even if it is a bit... Curse of Fatal Death), so I guess I have to give this a pass as well. Though it would've been funnier if Blon had accidentally ordered something with vinegar and then exploded.

This is where the good dialogue is, with Blon trying to convince a person she just tried to murder to let her live. There's good acting too, with Annette Badland switching to a more serious gear and showing why RTD brought the actor back.

Blon tries to call the Doctor out on how he always escapes back into his box before he has to deal with the aftermath of his fun adventures. That's not a inevitable part of the Doctor Who formula, the series would work fine if he stayed a few days longer to help clean up the mess, so she's got a point. Though he points out that she's pleading for mercy out of the lips of a woman she killed, which is actually a pretty good line.

Every now and then she lets someone go to in order to ease her conscience, but he can't do the same with her because she's not a friendly pregnant reporter, she's a murderer that blows up planets. In fact, she'd already set up the destruction of this planet before going to dinner!

It turns out that she wanted them to take her extrapolator back to the TARDIS as she knew it'd open the rift and destroy the world.

This brings the episode to the final phase of the Blon plot: the one where she tells them that she's going to use the extrapolator as a space surfboard and ride the explosion to freedom. That's something a cartoon character would do and I'm not talking Arcane. I'm not describing an event you could've seen in Invincible. I'm not even talking Rick and Morty or Futurama. That is a Looney Tunes Marvin the Martian level plan. 

It is way way too absurd and childish for a series like this and it completely tanks the ending for me. "Surf's up!"

Look at the bloody thing, it doesn't even look like it's made for people to stand on. It looks like the base of a power plant model. You'd have to be a Lego man to ride that thing without falling off.

Though the actual ending is the Doctor just standing there and watching some light come out of the console which turns Blon into an egg. It's a complete deus ex resolution that's not based on any established feature of the TARDIS and doesn't involve any action taken by the protagonists.

Plus the episode promised us an exploding power plant and we didn't even get that.

Why would anyone hide the device inside a model anyway? I know she wanted it to be found, but this was such a dumb reveal.

We also got the Bad Wolf mention in this scene, as that's the name of the power plant project. Though even this part of the story doesn't work! And I'm not even talking about RTD trolling the audience by having the Doctor finally notice Bad Wolf written everywhere only to dismiss it as coincidence. I'm talking about how it's called Blaidd Drwg, because this is Wales, and Rose asks what it means. Is the TARDIS translator offline while it's refuelling or something? She should've been able to read that!

The funny thing is, I actually had a feeling that this was going to be one of my favourite episodes of series one, despite the return of the Slitheen. I remembered it had an interesting moral dilemma at its core and a surprisingly good performance from Blon.

Well it did have those things, but everything around them was either cheesy, ridiculous, or irritating, or all three. Even the music annoyed me this time.

There were good scenes, like Rose's delight when she was finally able to say Raxacoricofallapatorius (I just spelled it right on my first try too!), and I liked seeing the gang having a day off and enjoying each other's company. But this is a Doctor Who episode for young children who like relationship drama, so it really didn't work for me.

But it could've been worse...

Instead of a dumb comedy with pretty scenery, this was originally going to be something much more disturbing.

Paul Abbott's concept for the episode was going to be that the Doctor had messed with Rose's life in order to make her his ideal companion. I don't know whether that concept would've ever made it to the final script, but I hope not as that it is messed up. That would've ruined the Doctor as a character 11 episodes into season 1 and turned Rose from a regular ordinary teenager and audience surrogate to an engineered chosen one.

So Boom Town may have actually the best outcome for us! Though on the other hand, the other story might have explained the "red bicycle when you were 12" line from Doctor Dances.


RATING

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I have to be honest, some of the comedy in Boom Town actually works for me. That's why I'm going to be very very kind to it and give it...

5/10.

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NEXT EPISODE

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, The Reality War! I should've published it already, but it's taking forever to write.

But forget about that for now, what did you think about Boom Town? Is it your worst episode of the season or is something else more deserving of that honour?