| Original Transmission
Cast
Crew
The episode begins with the Doctor and Donna leaving the TARDIS and entering what the Doctor takes to be Rome in the 1st century AD. However, when Donna points out that there is only one smoking hill and not Rome's famous seven, the Doctor realises they have actually arrived in Pompeii the day before it is to be destroyed. The Doctor is quick to want to leave the inevitable disaster, but Donna wants to help evacuate the city. The Doctor insists that he cannot interfere in established events, which Donna is unwilling to accept. However, their departure is stalled when they find that a nearby stallholder has sold the TARDIS to Caecilius as a piece of "modern art". Meanwhile, a member of the Sibylline sisterhood reports back on the arrival of the "blue box", which they find is a fulfillment of a Sibylline prophecy.
At Caecilius' house, the Doctor attempts to procure the TARDIS, only to be interrupted when the town augur, Lucius Dextrus, steps in. He is there to retrieve a marble slate with a circuit board carved into it. Upon seeing the Doctor, both he and Caecilius' prophetically-gifted daughter Evelina reveal several personal details about Donna and the Doctor, including their places of origin, knowledge they claim to have gained from the fumes of the hypocausts in the city. Lucius also tells the Doctor that "she is returning", and Donna has "something on [her] back". When Dextrus has gone, Donna finds that Evelina's skin is turning to stone whilst the Doctor is shown the hypocaust system, which is powered by hot springs from Vesuvius itself. This system, he is told, was installed after the 62 AD earthquake on Dextrus and the other soothsayers' instructions. From that time onwards, the soothsayers have been inhaling rock dust from these hypocausts and all their predictions have been entirely accurate. The Doctor and Evelina's brother Quintus break into Dextrus' house, finding more marble circuit boards which come together to form an energy converter. When Dextrus confronts them, the Doctor rips off his arm, revealing that it has turned to stone like Evelina's skin. Dextrus sends one of the "underworld gods" to pursue the Doctor.
Meanwhile, Donna learns that Evelina cannot prophesy the eruption. She tells Evelina about the eruption, which Evelina psychically passes onto the sisterhood. They and their high-priestess decide it is a false prophecy and that Donna must be killed. The Doctor and Quintus burst in a few moments later, followed by a humanoid creature made of stone and magma bursting from the hypocaust. The Doctor distracts the creature while Donna and Quintus get water to throw on it. In the confusion, Donna is kidnapped by the sisterhood. Quintus throws water on the creature as requested, which causes it to die. The Doctor realises Donna is missing, and confronts the sisterhood to rescue her. Conversing with their high priestess, he finds she has completely turned to stone. She reveals that she is being used as a host by one of the Pyroviles, stone aliens who crashed to earth, shattered into dust, and were re-awakened by the 62 earthquake, psychically linking to the humans of the town (one of their adult forms is the creature they saw at the villa). The Doctor is, however, unable to find how they are psychically seeing through time.
Donna and the Doctor escape down the hypocaust, making their way to the volcano's core. As they run, Donna attempts to convince the Doctor to stop the Pyrovile from causing Pompeii's eruption, but he again refuses, as it is a fixed point in history and must happen. Dextrus and the cult of Vulcan take the circuit boards to the mountain. In the centre of the mountain, Donna and the Doctor find an escape pod. Dextrus informs him that the Pyroviles intend not to launch a rocket back home via the eruption (their home planet of Pyrovilia having been "taken"), but to remain on and conquer Earth. The Doctor and Donna then lock themselves in the pod, where they find the Pyrovilians are using Vesuvius's power to set up a fusion matrix to convert millions of humans into Pyroviles — this will stifle the eruption, which is why the soothsayers have been unable to see it. The Doctor will be able to switch off the Pyrovilian circuitry and thus save the world, but in so doing he will cause the eruption and the deaths of himself, Donna and 24,000 people. They choose the latter as the lesser of two evils, and the eruption rockets the pod a fair distance away, allowing them to escape to the TARDIS. On their way, the Doctor ignores the Caecilius family's pleas for help and de-materialises the TARDIS with himself and Donna on board. He is confronted by Donna, who tearfully tries to convince him to go back and save the town. The Doctor refuses, replying that history is back on track and everyone will die; even if he wanted to change history, which he does, he cannot, just like he cannot bring back Gallifrey. Donna insists that, at the very least, he could save the Caecilius family, to which he complies. They and the family watch the eruption from the surrounding hills — the Doctor explains that Evelina's visions were caused by a rift in time made by the explosion, echoing back into the Pyrovilian alternative future, and that rift is now closed. He promises that Caecilius and Pompeii will be remembered, and Caecilius coins the word volcano for the first time. The Doctor and Donna leave, with him acknowledging that she was right in that "sometimes I need someone" to stop and humanise him. Six months later, the Caecilius family is in Rome, with Caecilius back in business, Evelina a healthy and happy teenager once again, Quintus having given up his dissolute ways to train as a doctor, and Donna and the Doctor worshipped as the family's household gods, with the TARDIS as their temple.
With such a tragic subject as the destruction of Pompeii as the backdrop for this episode, I really expected a more serious treatment than last week. The first fifteen minutes of the story, however, were a cross between Up Pompeii, Astrix the Gaul and Eastenders, with a dash of Only Fools and Horses. Having established that the TARDIS translates Latin to English, and that if Donna speaks Latin she sounds Celtic (Welsh) there is a comedy of puns and injokes in which the market sellers of Pompeii use expressions like ‘lovely jubbly’ and a father berates his son like a character out of a modern soap opera.
And it works. It ought to be an affront to Doctor Who fans to see the programme poking fun at itself. But the literary term is post-modernist irony. Serious plays are written and performed by ‘serious’ actors in just this sort of style and are praised for their bold commentary on our society. Why shouldn’t Doctor Who do the same? Those who understand the concept of post modernism will read a great deal into this treatment of the story – more possibly than they need to. Those too young to understand will enjoy the fun. Incidentally, older Doctor Who fans will know that The Doctor DID help start the Great Fire of Rome by burning a map of the city and putting the idea into Nero’s mind of burning the city and restarting from scratch. He accidentally started the Great Fire of London, too. But that’s another story.
After the first fifteen minutes the story takes a sinister turn, with the strange prophesies of Evelina and the machinations of the creepy Lucius Petrus Dextrus. Not that there aren’t laughs, too. Some of them of a post-modernist kind. When The Doctor defeats a lava monster with a cheap plastic water pistol it is an ironic reminder that The Doctor is a pacifist and would never use a real gun, as well as proving the old adage ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall’ when his apparently ineffectual weapon proves effective after all. But the real dramatic climax wasn’t about the lava creatures as such. It came down to a fabulous piece of interplay between The Doctor and Donna as he is faced with the choice of saving Pompeii or saving planet Earth from the Pyrovile. Of course, he knows what the choice must be. He knows that Pompeii has to be destroyed. What he didn’t know was that it was his choice to destroy twenty thousand people. Especially by such a means. His own people died in a planet wide inferno. To condemn the people of Pompeii to such a fate was hard for him. But he had to look at the bigger picture.
That hard decision was made easier for him by Donna. When she put her hands over his and shared the responsibility of pressing the lever, she shared his burden. And that was exactly what he needed, has always needed, from a companion. In that moment, Donna became a companion in a way no other companion before, not EVEN Rose, for all she meant to him, had ever been. But no doubt the most severe critics will only see her yelling coarsely at the Sybillites when they were trying to sacrifice her. Some people will always miss the point. The real fans are the ones who were moved by that beautiful moment between The Doctor and Donna.
Of course, Vesuvius had to blow. The city had to be destroyed. But could The Doctor really leave behind people he had got to know, Caecilius and his family? A few years ago when I started writing Doctor Who fiction, I used the idea of Emotional Detachment, a lesson The Doctor was supposed to have learnt as a student. To remain emotionally detached, it is necessary to remain uninvolved with the victims of – for example - the Titanic, seeing them only as numbers of dead, statistics. Knowing their names, their faces, is an attachment. Here, The Doctor had got to know that family, and he just couldn’t let them die. Maybe in Torchwood, they would have died. But in Doctor Who, there are endings like that.
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