Tag: BBC1

Promising her a single trip through time, the Doctor takes Martha to London in 1599, the TARDIS landing within walking distance of the Globe Theatre and William Shakespeare himself. But the Bard behaves oddly at the end of a performance of “Love’s Labours Lost”, making a sudden promise to his audience that the sequel, “Love’s Labours Won”, will debut the following night…despite this being the first that any of his loyal troupe of actors have heard of it. The Doctor introduces Martha to Shakespeare, and then the sudden deaths begin, always near Shakespeare. The Doctor gradually learns that the play isn’t the only thing at the Globe – the unusually designed venue may have a more sinister purpose underlying its design. With a little bit of toil, the Doctor uncovers a lot of trouble – three alien “witches” are planning to wipe out humanity to claim Earth for their own exiled race…and the key to their plan will come from Shakespeare’s own pen.

written by Gareth Roberts
directed by Charles Palmer
music by Murray Gold

Guest Cast: Dean Lennox Kelly (Shakespeare), Christina Cole (Lilith), Sam Marks (Wiggins), Amanda Lawrence (Doomfinger), Linda Clark (Bloodtide), Jalaal Hartley (Dick), David Westhead (Kempe), Andree Bernard (Dolly Bailey), Chris Larkin (Lynley), Stephen Marcus (Jailer), Matt King (Peter Streete), Robert Demeger (Preacher), Angela Pleasence (Queen Elizabeth)

Notes: In City Of Death, the fourth Doctor claimed that the handwriting on the original manuscript of “Hamlet” was his, not Shakespeare’s, so presumably – earlier in the Doctor’s life, but later in the Bard’s – the two met up again. The first Doctor and friends observed Shakespeare at another pivotal point in his history via the Time-Space Visualizer in The Chase. Depending on whether or not you include the novels in your personal Doctor Who canon, this may not the first time that the Doctor has had only one heart beating in his chest; Sabbath, an agent of the “time traveling voodoo cult” Faction Paradox, left the eighth Doctor with only one heart for a time in the BBC novels.

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

The Doctor, despite his initial promise of only one trip in the TARDIS, takes Martha to the distant future, returning to New Earth in the year 5,000,053, some time after his last visit there. But instead of towering cityscapes, the time travelers find slums, where humans tolerate the bleakness of their existence with chemical help from a thriving network of drug-dealing “pharmacists.” Martha is kidnapped by a couple and dragged into an airbus, leaving the Doctor behind. When he tries to enlist the help of another airbus pilot to track Martha down, the Doctor discovers that traffic moves at the rate of mere meters per year – New New York is trapped in a permanent traffic jam worthy of its namesake, and vehicles and their occupants have been disappearing at the lowest altitudes, never to be heard from again. And Martha may soon share that fate when the Doctor’s rescue mission is abruptly cut short.

written by Russell T. Davies
directed by Richard Clark
music by Murray Gold

Guest Cast: Ardal O’Hanlon (Brannigan), Anna Hope (Novice Hame), Travis Oliver (Milo), Lenora Crichlow (Cheen), Jennifer Hennessy (Valerie), Bridget Turner (Alice), Georgine Anderson (May), Simon Pearsall (Whitey), Daisy Lewis (Javit), Nicholas Boulton (Businessman), Erika MacLeod (Sally Calypso), Judy Norman (Ma), Graham Padden (Pa), Lucy Davenport (Pale Woman), Tom Edden (Pharmacist #1), Natasha Williams (Pharmacist #2), Gayle Telfer Stevens (Pharmacist #3), Struan Rodger (The Face of Boe)

Notes: The mysterious Face of Boe first appeared in The End Of The World, and returned during the Doctor’s first visit to New Earth, which also introduced the humanoid Cats. The crab-like Macra threatened the second Doctor and his friends 40 years ago in the 1967 story The Macra Terror; he is quick to observe that they appear to have devolved into mindless beasts. (They also appear to have grown considerably in size – either that, or someone made a macro error in judging their scale of this particular Macra terror.)

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

Martha is crestfallen when the Doctor brings her home, announcing that this is where their travels together end. When she sees her sister in a TV press conference, however, Martha is intrigued. When he hears Professor Richard Lazarus announce the unveiling of an invention that will “change what it means to be human,” the Doctor decides to investigate. He and Martha go to the public demonstration of Lazarus’ new invention, which – after a near-overload is averted by the Doctor before it can destroy the entire building – apparently regresses the elderly inventor to his youth. But the Doctor, examining Lazarus’ DNA, discovers that the transformation is only just beginning, and when the first corpse is found, the Doctor believes that Lazarus is mutating into something that feeds on living flesh. He sets out to put Lazarus’ evolutionary experiment to an end, but can’t do so without putting Martha in mortal danger. And that’s when Martha’s mother – who has apparently received confidential information about the Doctor directly from the office of Harold Saxon, a candidate for Prime Minister – decides that Martha’s TARDIS travels must end.

written by Stephen Greenhorn
directed by Richard Clark
music by Murray Gold

Guest Cast: Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Tish Jones), Reggie Yates (Leo Jones), Adjoa Andoh (Francine Jones), Mark Gatiss (Lazarus), Thelma Barlow (Lady Thaw), Lucy O’Connell (Olive Lady), Bertie Carvel (Mysterious Man)

Notes: Actor Mark Gatiss has written several Doctor Who stories (including The Unquiet Dead and The Idiot’s Lantern) for television, Big Finish’s audio adventures, and numerous novels, and has lent his voice to such characters as the Master in Big Finish audios as well. The Doctor seems to have some experience as an organist, as he demonstrates both here and in 1985’s Attack Of The Cybermen. Harold Saxon doesn’t appear here, but is mentioned in The Runaway Bride and Smith & Jones; “Vote Saxon” signs were seen in the backgrounds of those episodes, and even in the Torchwood episode Captain Jack Harkness. On its original UK broadcast, The Lazarus Experiment concluded with an extended trailer showing scene from much of the remainder of the season, since there was no “next week’s episode” – the series took a one-week break to be pre-empted by the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest.

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

The Doctor is modifying Martha’s cell phone for “universal roaming” when the TARDIS suddenly picks up a distress signal. The call for help comes from the cargo ship Pentallian, whose engines have just died, sending it on a slow but fatal trajectory straight into the sun. The moment the Doctor and Martha announce their presence, pressure doors seal them off from the TARDIS – and when the Doctor tries to open the door to evacuate everyone with his timeship, he learns that the temperature in that area has risen dramatically. The ship’s auxiliary engines are controlled on the other side of the ship, and a crew member is suffering from an unknown infection. Martha and one of the remaining crew go to try to reach the backup engines, while the Doctor tries to get the main engines restarted, but the ill crew member soon proves to be even more important. Though heavily sedated, he proceeds to get up and utters the phrase “burn with me” over and over just before vaporizing the ship’s doctor. He continues to pick off the crew one by one, leaving them with little chance of escaping their fiery fate – and before long, he’s not the only one saying “burn with me.”

written by Chris Chibnall
directed by Graeme Harper
music by Murray Gold

Guest Cast: Michelle Collins (Kath McDonnell), Adjoa Andoh (Francine Jones), William Ash (Riley Vashtee), Anthony Flanagan (Orin Scannell), Matthew Chambers (Hal Korwin), Gary Powell (Dev Ashton), Vinette Robinson (Abi Lerner), Rebecca Oldfield (Erina Lessak), Elize Du Toit (Sinister Woman)

Notes: The fourth Doctor once mentioned a “Pentallian drive” in the story Revenge Of The Cybermen; it may or may not have been related to the ship of the same name, which was set further in the future than 42.

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

The Doctor and Martha are on the run from alien pursuers, who have the ability to track the TARDIS. The Doctor stores his own knowledge and personality in a pocketwatch fashioned from Time Lord technology – as well as detailed genetic information – and turns himself, both physically and psychologically, into John Smith, history teacher, a perfectly ordinary human (with odd gaps in his memory) teaching at a boys’ school in 1913, on the eve of the First World War. Martha is left to fend for herself, but stays close to “John Smith” in the guise of his maid and guards the pocketwatch containing his true essence with her life. In the process of discovering what it means to be human, the former Time Lord falls in love with a local woman who is attracted to his simplicity and gentle nature – but when the aliens come to Earth, discovering that they have done business with a Time Lord and trying to track down his regenerative DNA to save their dying race, “Doctor John Smith” must risk everything and everyone to protect his fellow humans.

written by Paul Cornell
directed by Charles Palmer
music by Murray Gold

Guest Cast: Jessica Hynes (Joan Redfern), Rebekah Staton (Jenny), Thomas Sangster (Tim Latimer), Harry Lloyd (Baines), Tom Palmer (Hutchinson), Gerard Horan (Clark), Lauren Wilson (Lucy Cartwright), Pip Torrens (Rocastle), Matthew White (Phillips), Derek Smith (Doorman), Peter Bourke (Mr. Chambers)

Notes: This episode and its second part, The Family Of Blood, were adapted by Paul Cornell from his own 1995 Doctor Who New Adventures novel of the same name. Numerous changes were made, including the omission of the book’s meeting between the Doctor’s companion and a “future” tenth Doctor (actually one of the aliens in disguise, and “future” since that book originally featured the seventh Doctor as played by Sylvester McCoy). In the original novel, the “family” didn’t take over human host bodies, but were instead shapeshifters called Aubertides. One carryover from the book is the metafictional mention that “Sydney and Verity” were Smith’s parents’ names, a nod to the creator of Doctor Who and its first producer, Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert. A book of sketches by “John Smith” reveals the faces of all of the past Doctors, though they’re not all clearly seen on screen; these sketches also put to rest the running fan debate about whether or not Paul McGann is “official” as the eighth Doctor (he is).

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

Martha manages to turn the tables on the Family as they try to force John Smith to change back into the Doctor. Smith, Joan, Martha and the other villagers run for the safety of the school, where the call to arms is sounded ahead of an attack by the Family and their army of scarecrows. Tim, the schoolboy with the pocketwatch containing the Doctor’s Time Lord essence, helps to distract the Family, and later, after Smith goes into hiding, brings the watch to him. With the English countryside under siege, even Joan is now convinced that Smith isn’t what he seems, and that he can help to save the day…but now that he’s found love and happiness in human form, will the Doctor’s alter-ego choose to become a Time Lord again?

written by Paul Cornell
directed by Charles Palmer
music by Murray Gold

Guest Cast: Jessica Hynes (Joan Redfern), Rebekah Staton (Jenny), Thomas Sangster (Tim Latimer), Harry Lloyd (Baines), Tom Palmer (Hutchinson), Gerard Horan (Clark), Lauren Wilson (Lucy Cartwright), Pip Torrens (Rocastle), Matthew White (Phillips), Sophie Turner (Vicar)

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green