Doctor Who (2005) 2-07: The Idiot's Lantern (Quick Review)

Episode:

717

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Serial:

173

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Writer:

Mark Gatiss

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Director:

Euros Lyn

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Air Date:

27-May-2006

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the 20th anniversary of The Idiot's Lantern, an episode from Doctor Who's second series.

It was directed by Euros Lyn, who had already done a few episodes this season and would be back to do more, but it was writer Mark Gatiss' only script for this series.

In fact it was Gatiss' last script for the whole Russell T Davies era. He did series 1's The Unquiet Dead, then this, and then he was done until Steven Moffatt took over the show. Though he did cross over to the other side of the camera in series 3's The Lazarus Experiment, making him one of the few Doctor Who writers to also be a guest star. In fact I think at this point there may have only been one name on the list, Glyn Jones, who wrote The Space Museum for the First Doctor and then appeared in Fourth Doctor story The Sontaran Experiment.

Okay, I'll be going through the episode quicker than usual, but there'll still be plenty of SPOILERS. Only for this and earlier stories though, nothing that comes later.

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RECAP

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London, 1953. Television shop owner Mr. Magpie is struggling financially, but a lightning storm brings an electrical entity into his TVs, who talks to him with the face of the announcer. The Wire doesn't actually help him with his money problems though, in fact she gets him to sell cheap televisions to as many people as possible.

The Doctor and Rose arrive to see Elvis, but realise they're a few years too early, and in the wrong country, so they investigate the people being taken away in mysterious circumstances instead. They chat with Eddie Connolly's wife Rita and son Tommy, and find that he's hidden his wife's mother upstairs due to her missing face. The police arrives to take her away, punching the Doctor out, but he's soon on their trail. Meanwhile Rose sees red electricity around Eddie's TV, and goes to see Mr Magpie.

The Doctor finds that Detective Inspector Bishop has been hiding the faceless victims under instructions to protect London's image during the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and Rose is the latest victim. He gets Bishop and Tommy to come help him, though when they confront Magpie in his shop the Wire tries to eat their faces, and gets Bishop. The Doctor realises Magpie is taking the Wire to Alexandra Palace's broadcast tower so she can steal everyone's faces while they watch the coronation. So he builds a gadget to contain the entity and chases Magpie up the tower, with Tommy fixing a broken valve to get the device working in the nick of time.

In the end Magpie got disintegrated, the Wire got taped to Betamax, everyone got their faces back, and Eddie got kicked out of the house, which actually belonged Rita's mother. But Rose convinces Tommy to go talk to him.


REVIEW

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I love the behind the scenes shots you get when someone's wearing shiny glasses and a shiny helmet while riding a shiny TARDIS-blue scooter on camera. I'm pretty sure we've never seen him pull a scooter out of the TARDIS before, and we won't be seeing this one again as he gives it away at the end for some reason.

Anyway, The Idiot's Lantern is the second pseudo-historical this season to start with the heroes failing to visit a concert. In Tooth and Claw they arrived 100 years too early to see Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and here they're 3 years too early to see Elvis perform on the Ed Sullivan show. They don't even get to see a historical figure like Charles Dickens or Queen Victoria this time, though Queen Elizabeth II does play a bit of a role.

The episode's set in 1953, just a couple of years before Back to the Future takes place. You'd think that'd make the '50s an ideal time for a time traveller to visit, but as far as I'm aware Doctor Who had only come here once before, in the Seventh Doctor story Delta and the Bannermen. I guess it was too close to the present day for a series that started in 1963.

He's a random fact that my brain just did the maths on: The son in the story, Tommy, is about 16 years old in 1953, and the series 1 story The Doctor Dances was set in 1941, 12 years earlier. That means that Tommy is roughly the same age as Jamie, the Empty Child himself. 

Tommy's dad, Eddie, is one of the antagonists of the episode. Not because he's got an evil plan, he's just a bastard. Plus the police are kind of antagonistic with how they kidnap people and knock the Doctor out. But the real villain is the Wire and her lackey Mr Magpie.

I'm not really keen on the Wire as a concept, as Mark Gattis did dead aliens who've been turned into gaseous entities that possess people in his last story and now he's given us a dead alien who's been turned into an electrical entity that possesses TVs. And eats faces.

But as a character she's pretty good, with Maureen Lipman doing a great performance as a posh 1950s TV announcer with the heart of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors and the TV screen of Holly from Red Dwarf. Her use of received pronunciation and lingo from the time was genius. Though for some reason the episode has interpreted 'black and white' as meaning 'really obviously blue'.

Rose is pretty good in this one as well, as after half a season of taking a back seat to Mickey, K-9 and Cassandra (in her own body), she's back as the Doctor's partner, actively solving the mystery. She doesn't just join in when the Doctor puts Eddie in his place, she's the one who realises there are an unusual number of antennas on houses, she spots the lightning around Eddie's TV, and she realises it has something to do with Magpie's shop. In fact she finds the Wire on her own just 20 minutes into the episode, getting there 10 minutes before the Doctor does. Unfortunately this means the episode turns into a companion-light story, as the Wire takes her face off, leaving her as another one of the faceless ones.

So now Rose doesn't have a face. Or a mind, as the Wire 'ate' that too (even if it's still present within the TV). The episode has a bit of sciency dialogue here, with the Doctor mentioning that there's scarcely a neural impulse left, just enough to keep her body alive. Plus Tommy at least points out that they can't eat without a mouth. No one mentions anything about how they breathe though, so we're just not supposed to think about that obvious issue.

Also the Wire didn't take her face, it replaced her facial features with smooth skin, like when a cartoon character gets their face erased. Where did the skin come from? Why isn't there a gaping bleeding hole? Why did the Wire even need to take their faces in order to take their minds? Why do they all suddenly get their faces back when she's defeated?

The whole thing is complete bullshit, working on a Looney Tunes level of biology. It's less rigorous in its scientific accuracy than an episode of DuckTales. And when a story goes full space magic like this, it's always going to lose points with me.

But there was a lot I liked about the episode too. Like this scene where the Doctor turns the tables on Detective Inspector Bishop. He starts off being interrogated, but by the end he's the one doing the interrogation and the conversation flows so naturally that it makes perfect sense. (I also like the dude in the background checking to see if the Doctor's right and you can't wrap your hand around your elbow).

The episode's full of moments where a character thinks they're in charge, until someone else stands up to them. There's the Doctor and Rose quickly analysing Eddie and figuring out exactly how to get him to do the housework while they talk to the others, there's Rose cornering Magpie in his shop... and him locking the door behind her, and there's Rita kicking Eddie out of the house at the end. Great acting in every case, by the way. In fact the only performance I wasn't 100% sold on was Bishop, who hams it up a little when his role in the episode becomes 'guy who is amazed at televisions being portable and in colour'.

There's also a theme of characters covering something up for the sake of keeping up appearances. Eddie's got a reputation to protect so he bullies his family and rats on his neighbours. London's got an image to protect so the police have to hide the faceless victims, until after the coronation at least.

Plus I noticed a lot of scenes where the background falls into blackness while the actors are brightly lit.

Maybe they were supposed to appear a bit like the disembodied faces staring out from the television screens, maybe the director just wanted audiences to be able to see their performances. After seeing how a lot of modern TV is lit, I'm happy either way.

I was surprised to learn that this was directed by Euros Lyn, one of the series' regular directors, as there's something a bit irregular about this direction. The camera is never horizontal, it's all Dutch angles, which is used when a situation is meant to seem a bit unnatural or creepy. It puts unease in the viewers.

Also the scenes in Eddie's house (well, Rita's house by the end) are occasionally shot from above. As if the gran upstairs is looking down on them (even though she's gone for most of the episode). It really shows off that rug and the very '50s looking decor. I don't actually know how accurate it is to the time period, but I'm assuming the production designers did much more research on the subject than the guy in charge of determining if people can breathe without a nose and mouth.

Eddie is a real monster in this, yelling at his kid, ordering his wife around, getting the gran taken away because she's a "filthy disgusting thing", agreeing that he should beat his kid for being a 'mummy's boy', and just generally being a threatening domineering presence. And the actors all really sell it.

The guy's a relic of an older era, and not a particular good example of it. The funny thing is, he's pretty irrelevant to the main plot, as the Connollys are just one of the families affected by the Wire's face-snatching. But by putting so much focus on him, the story becomes at least partly about how society was changing in the '50s. The country had a new queen, the British Empire was in decline, families were getting television sets, women were becoming more independent, kids were listening to Elvis Presley. 

Mr Magpie just wants things to go back to how they were, but that can never happen. Granted he was mostly talking about going back to before the malevolent entity came to steal his face and soul, but still.

The Wire is a problem the Doctor can deal with though, which means this is the third episode this season to have an exciting action scene where he climbs a ladder! New Earth, The Age of Steel and now this. Series 1 had lots of lifts, series 2 has lots of ladders.

He also had to somehow build the device to stop the Wire while he was running to the tower, which is a clever trick. It's a good thing he brought hundreds of metres of cable as well, as there's a huge distance between the gadget in his hands and the box that Tommy's minding back in the building below.

I'm always happy to learn a bit of actual history in a Doctor Who episode, and this one's teaching people about the birthplace of British television, Alexandra Palace. Also about Betamax video, which is what the Doctor records the Wire onto at the end. No one can accuse the episode of being dated by its technology, as Betamax was pretty much dead by the mid '80s. Though DigiBeta was still in use in 2006, and was actually what this episode was taped on I believe.

At the end the Doctor quips about taping over the Wire to erase her forever, which is about the cruellest thing he's ever suggested. So many Hartnell and Troughton era villains have been lost forever after being taped over, it's not something to joke about.

But despite all the other flaws, I've heard that what really kills this episode for a lot of fans is the ending, where Rose convinces Tommy to go talk to his dad. People are concerned that it's a really bad message for the audience, and that poor Tommy's now going to be stuck in a cycle of abuse he could've broken out of.

Personally I thought it was a bit of a questionable way to end, mostly because it goes unquestioned. No one's even concerned that this could end badly. It's extremely in character for Rose to tell Tommy to go save him though, as her whole thing is wanting her dad back, and the Doctor is always going to try to make peace and heal people.

As far as the episode's concerned Eddie has been defeated, with no power over his family, and the only respect he has left to worry about now is his son's. I don't know about the message, but I'm not worried about Tommy. And maybe there's hope for Eddie too.


RATING

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Different people have different ideas about what kind of series Doctor Who is supposed to be, and personally I think a magic face-stealing electricity ghost is a couple of steps too far into cartoonish fantasy. It's not the kind of Doctor Who series that I want to watch, at least.

But the episode didn't lose my attention and it didn't bore me. In fact I liked it more than Mark Gatiss' last story, The Unquiet Dead, not that it's a particularly high bar. And it does kind of hold together under its own weird internal logic. So I'm going to be really nice and give it...

  6/10

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NEXT EPISODE

Next time Doctor Who is going to straight into another two-parter, starting with The Impossible Planet.

What did you think about The Idiot's Lantern, by the way? Did it work for you? Do you remember it at all?