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Date 14th Apr 2007
The Doctor - David Tennant Brannigan - Ardal O'Hanlon Macra created by Ian Stuart
Black
Crew
Plot outline by Wikipedia The Doctor returns to a much grittier New Earth with Martha. People are selling moods on the street and Martha is kidnapped by two people and put in a vehicle. The city has now been turned into a deadly trap, and when they find the streets being ruled by the sinister Pharmacists, they must brave the ordeal of the mysterious Motorway in order to discover the terrible secrets at the heart of the city. But what monsters lurk below the surface hidden in the fog?
Blade Runner meets The Fifth Element and I Robot on New Earth. All three of those visions of the future struck me watching this episode. But the resemblances are superficial. This is a unique and original Doctor Who world. A world where everyone lives in an eternal traffic jam. And the people living in the jam were a fantastic mix. The Irish cat and his Human wife, with their litter of kitten, the elderly pair or lesbians in their chintz and lace car, the nudist couple, the red people… All that make up and set dressing enriching the story as the Doctor makes his wonderful journey down through the levels of the multi-layered motorway, passing through all of the cars until he reached the bottom level.
And at that bottom level! A surprise for us. Russell T. Davies hinted a while back that an old monster would return. About seven seconds before The Doctor said it I thought of the Macra. Giant mutant crabs that crush cars in their pincers. Until we saw them, the tension and the build up, the fear of the unknown was beautifully built up. The rumours, the urban legends fed that fear beautifully. In the old days the cliffhanger would have come just as the pincers reached out for the car with Martha and the young couple aboard. The hymn singing – Even the most cynical viewer must have found that scene inspirational. The views of each of the cars we had seen so far, with people singing The Old Rugged Cross in or out of tune, the pull out to the wide shot of thousands of cars with all the people singing together, was beautiful. And Russell T. Davies calls himself an atheist? I don’t believe that. Somehow every week Doctor Who manages to be more inspiring than anything I see or hear in church. Which is a problem the church needs to address, because I think it SHOULD be the other way about. But until it does, at least Doctor Who never fails to uplift me each week.
The Doctor’s solution to the problem of the thousands of people trapped in a never ending M25 style circular motorway, is relatively simple. He rigs the computers in the dead Senate Building so that they finally re-open the roof and allow the people to drive up and out, away from the Macra, and presumably killing the Macra, since The Doctor said that they feed on gas and fumes. The only problem was that the only power left was that which kept The Face of Boe alive. He sacrificed himself in the end to free those he had protected. Remember the hymn… Where the dearest and best, for a world of lost sinners was slain….. Perhaps that was coincidence, but it certainly struck me as appropriate. Inbetween saving the people of New Earth, The Doctor was coping with the recurring issue of the planet he couldn’t save, his own. He had his moment of denial when he pretended to Martha that Gallifrey was still there. But he was forced to tell the story again. It was the same story, with almost the same words, that The Ninth Doctor told to Rose in End of The World, and comparisons are inevitable. David Tennant’s Doctor is meant to be a happier, lighter one than Christopher Eccleston’s, and he often is. But sometimes he has to come back to the same deep grief that made the Ninth Doctor so much darker. David Tennant CAN do dark. He can do grief. And it is unfair to suggest that he can’t. And a new pile of dark has been heaped on him with The Face of Boe’s ‘secret’. “You Are Not Alone.” What that means we can’t begin to speculate – though we certainly will. It was contradictory. The Face already told The Doctor that he is the last of his kind. But we were all thinking, including The Doctor himself, that it meant there WAS another of his people around. Two rumours have circulated for a long time. One, that the Master was back, and the other, that The Doctor has a son somewhere in the universe. Either would fulfil that prophecy. But then, so would The Doctor realising that he HAS a lot of friends of all species and races, and he doesn’t have to FEEL alone if he lets them into his soul.
Just one issue I have to take with the script. Yes, Gallifrey has been described as having a burnt orange or yellow sky in the past. But episodes set on it have always had green grass and ONE sun. I don’t think introducing a second sun and red grass is a good idea, although it SOUNDS utterly beautiful in the description The Doctor gave to Martha as he finally talked about his home properly.
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