| Original Transmission
1: Silence In The Library
2: Forest Of The Dead
Cast The Doctor David Tennant
Crew
Electricians Steve
Slocombe Clive Johnson Ben Griffiths
Matte Painters
Simon Wicker Charlie Bennett
The Doctor and Donna arrive in the 51st century at a planet-sized book repository simply called "The Library", summoned by an anonymous request for help on the Doctor's psychic paper. However, they find it completely devoid of humanoid life, and the Library's computers even claim as such, though when the Doctor widens the search for non-humanoid life, the Library's computers claim over "a million million lifeforms" exist. A Node, an information drone which presents a donated human face to the user to facilitate communication, warns them to count the shadows, which appear despite the lack of objects to cast them. As they try to search for answers, they meet a team of explorers, led by archaeologist Professor River Song, who have come to ascertain the meaning of the Library's final communication, which states "4022 saved, 0 survivors". River Song seems to know the Doctor, has a diary with a cover matching the Doctor's TARDIS, and even possesses a sonic screwdriver. She also later displays knowledge of the TARDIS' "emergency program one". She only admits that she will know the Doctor in his relative future, refusing to disclose more for fear of "spoilers". Professor Song also recognises Donna's name, but avoids explaining why Donna was not present when she knew the Doctor.
The Doctor organizes the team to make sure the area is well lit as he explains that they are surrounded by Vashta Nerada, microscopic carnivorous creatures that disguise themselves as shadows to hunt and latch onto their prey. He notes that they are usually nowhere near as aggressive or numerous as the ones here seem to be. Before he can fully explain, however, one of the explorers wanders off and is stripped to the bone in moments. The Doctor and Donna learn that the exploration team wears communication devices which link to their nervous systems for thought-based communication. As a side-effect, these devices tend to pick up an imprint of the user at the moment of death, creating a short-lived "Data Ghost" of that person's consciousness.
Curiously, the Library's operations seem to be tied to the imagination of a young girl; she sees the Doctor and Donna through the eyes of a security camera when they first break into central room, the exploration team appears on her television when the Doctor attempts to hack the Library computers, and books fly from the shelves when she fiddles with the television's remote. The girl is under the observation of Dr. Moon, a child psychologist, at the request of her dad, but Dr. Moon insists to the girl that what she imagines in her nightmares is in fact real, while the "real" world is a lie. He also states that there are people in her library who need to be saved.
The team's investigation is interrupted when a shadow of Vashta Nerada latches onto the pilot, Dave. Although the Doctor attempts to save him by sealing him inside his suit, the creatures manage to get inside, eat him alive, and then animate his suit in order to chase the other explorers. The Doctor attempts to teleport Donna back to the TARDIS while he leads the rest of the team to safety, but something goes wrong with the teleport and Donna fails to materialize properly. As the team races away from the possessed suit, the Doctor is horrified to find a Node with Donna's face on it, which claims that Donna has left the Library and has been "saved".
The Doctor and the exploration team manage to escape the Vashta Nerada and take refuge in a well-lit room. As they work out a plan, the Doctor is concerned about how he can trust River Song, so she whispers a single word in his ear which convinces him: his real name. Meanwhile, Donna finds herself at a hospital, where a Dr. Moon is treating her. He introduces her to another man, Lee, and is later seen visiting the married Donna and her family. However, Donna keeps noticing that something is wrong: she seems to skip from one place to another at a whim, only to be reminded of the journey by Dr. Moon.
In the library, the Doctor discovers that the moon is sending out electromagnetic signals that are interfering with his sonic screwdriver. Strackman Lux explains that the moon is a virus scanner for the planet-side computer core. By interfering with this, the Doctor appears in Dr. Moon's place next to Donna: Dr. Moon is quite literally the moon. The Doctor understands that the message "4022 saved" didn't mean they were rescued, but that their teleport patterns were saved to the library's hard drive. They are found once more by the Vashta Nerada suit and forced to flee, but the Doctor stays behind to reason with it. Through the communicator on the suit, the Vashta Nerada explain that the library is their forest; the paper of countless books in the library was made from trees filled with Vashta Nerada spores, from which they hatched after being shipped to the library. They manage to kill Anita and Other Dave after resuming the chase.
In the computer core, the truth of the situation is revealed to Donna by none other than Miss Evangelista, whose Data Ghost was captured by the library's wireless internet. However, she is not a proper copy of herself; whilst the 4022 patrons had their teleport patterns properly stored, Miss Evangelista was just a degraded Data Ghost, and a transcription error has "melted" her face but greatly increased her intelligence. She points out that all the children are merely identical copies, and gets Donna to remember the library. However, the young girl, watching from her television, does not want Donna to know, and uses her remote to injure one of Donna's children. Donna leaves Miss Evangelista behind, but her acceptance of the simulated reality is nevertheless shaken, and her invented children disappear when confronted with the fact that they don't exist. The little girl, increasingly frustrated by events, eventually throws her remote to the floor, which causes the library to activate its self-destruct mechanism.
To stop the countdown, the Doctor, River Song, and Lux make their way to the main computer. Here, Lux reveals the meaning of CAL: Charlotte Abigail Lux, his aunt, who was uploaded into the computer as a child because she was dying. In this manner, Charlotte could live forever with the sum total of human knowledge to pass the time. However, the strain of maintaining 4022 unique personalities has driven her mad, and the only way to set things right is to reintegrate them in the library. As CAL cannot do this alone, the Doctor prepares to wire his own mind into the system as extra memory, though it will surely kill him. As he works, he is confronted by one of the Vashta Nerada suits. He insists that in exchange for getting to keep their forest, he will get to save the people in the computer core. They initially refuse, but when the Doctor tells them to search for his name in the library's archives, they promptly change their tune and give him a day to clear the planet. River, unwilling to let the Doctor die, which would rewrite history and erase their time together, knocks him out and takes his place, rescuing those trapped in the computer at the cost of her life instead of his.
As the rescued humans are teleported home, Donna meets up with the Doctor. Having been unable to find her husband from the virtual world, the pair walks to the TARDIS, unaware that he is in the next group being teleported out. As the Doctor mournfully leaves River's diary and her sonic screwdriver in the library, he realizes the reason why his future self gave her the sonic screwdriver in the first place: it holds a communication device with a Data Ghost. He uses it to bring River back to life inside the computer, where she is greeted by Charlotte, Dr. Moon, Josh and Ella (the children from CAL's world), Anita, the two Daves, and Miss Evangelista, her face restored, their Data Ghosts having been saved by Charlotte and brought into the computer for eternity.
Everyone had high expectations for this episode, by Stephen Moffatt – everyone except the couple of million viewers who decided to watch Britain’s Got Talent, anyway. And they missed a classic episode that only the most begrudging could criticise. With a full ninety minutes to play with, the first half of the story was allowed to build slowly – though never in a dull, boring way. In true tradition of Doctor Who, we didn’t even know what the threat actually was until a whole half hour had gone by. We were too busy wondering just why Professor River Song calls The Doctor “sweetie” and who exactly Doctor Moon is and what is interest is in the little girl who has some kind of link from the real world to the library.
Or does she? Which was the real world? Just because the girl lives in a house with a television and phone doesn’t necessarily make that more real, and one of the most chilling statements ever made had to be when Doctor Moon told the child ‘your world is not real. The library is real’ – the opposite to what everyone had been telling her up until then. The Vashta Nerada are one of Mofftat’s cheapest and most effective monsters, yet. They are simply the dark, the shadows. And as The Doctor points out, everyone in the universe is already scared of them. I just wonder if kids still play games of trying not to step on each other’s shadows in the school playground, because if they do, as they did when I was at school, now they know why. Simple, effective, brilliant.
Not quite so simple, but also brilliant, was the way the ghost of the dead was held onto in the voice box in their space suits. It made for one of the saddest moments yet achieved about the death of a character we don’t even really know all that well – even more so than the death of Scooti, the girl in Impossible Planet. There was a similarity to that story in that a lot of the people were going to die before the end, and nobody knew who. In our house, we were all wrong because we put our money on the annoying Mr Lux!
Then her world got sinister when she met the strangely deformed Miss Evangalista and learnt the truth. Again, something simple – all the children in the playground are the same two children repeated, like a template – because it saves disc space. Everyone who does any kind of computer design knows that, of course! And if you hadn’t guessed before then you start to realise this is a computer simulation. All the ‘real world’ is inside the computer. And so are all those missing people.
The Doctor seemed to take a long time to work that out. He was also quite slow to figure out why the Vashta Nerada think the library is their forest. Wood – paper – books, wake up, Doctor. It’s good to see him making mistakes, though. Wouldn’t he be annoying if he was ALWAYS right. After that, it was always going to be about resetting the computer, getting everyone home, and some kind of resolution for those already dead. Some of the critics have sniped at the happy ever after for River and her crew, but why not? Leave them alone.
The Doctor and River Song has spawned enormous speculation on the internet. And it really has to stop. We have to realise that the producers and writers all sit and laugh at the daft, wild, downright silly solutions some people come up with. So let’s just put it to bed. Yes, sometime in the future, in another life, he will marry her. THAT is the one time he would have to tell somebody his real name, if it really must be a secret. One thing it DID do, though, was sent thousands of people to google and the other search engines, looking for The Doctor’s name, and a large proportion of them ended up on my fiction site, where I gave The Doctor a name three years ago. Several discussion forums now have people who are happy that The Doctor’s name is the one I made up for him. So if the BBC do have any plans to name him, which I don’t think they do, they really need to see me first.
But honestly, there is too much fuss made about these supposed ‘story arcs’. Give it a rest, guys. Just enjoy the episode and don’t worry about what it presages. The first half had more of the mystery and suspense. That stands
to reason. The second half was the resolution of it. As a result,
they do have a very different feel to them, but watched together,
it feels like a 90 minute story with some simple ideas - fear of the
dark – and a bit of less simple philosophy Descartes –
I think therefore I am – and wound it into a pretty darn good
Doctor Who story. Yes, the critics can nitpick, but when they get
down to it most of them are left moaning about the music being too
loud. And they just need to adjust the dolby surround on their TVs.
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