Curse of the Mummy

Well, the first half of the Doctor Who story The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances was very fine, I must say: funny, moody and at certain points downright bloody terrifying.

Once again the relaxation of the need to get everything sorted out in the space of 45 minutes led to much improved scope for parallel plotlines, quieter character moments and the piling-on of atmosphere (and what atmosphere it was). Stephen Moffat's dialogue was crisp and clever, and his pacing exemplary. All the performances were great (especially the consummate Richard Wilson), and even the child actors didn't spoil things too much.

By my reckoning (and I'm aware I rate The Long Game more highly than many) this makes four top-of-the-range episodes of Doctor Who in a row. This is not simply a record for the series -- it may even constitute one of the two verifiable miracles required to elevate Russell T. Davies to sainthood.

As anyone who's watched The Sixth Sense, The Ring or even Addams Family Values will be aware, small children can be very scary indeed. The same is true of gas masks. Most of the parents of my generation have stories about how their family had spare ones lying around after the War, or photos of them in books or magazines, which scared the living daylights out of them when they were small. The rest of us had to make do with The Deadly Assassin, but even so.

In combining the two images, Stephen Moffat risked a degree of overkill, but he wields the image with such deftness it creates a whole new nightmare. Certainly the Empty Child, with its plaintive piping of "Please let me in, Mummy, I'm scared of the bombs," would have terrified the pants off me as a kid.

The fact that Moffatt coupled this horrific image with the idea of contagion -- one of my personal pet phobias -- meant I wasn't too sanguine about it as an adult either. The thing I found most unsettling in the trailer was Wilson's sepulchral "physical injuries... as plague", and all the scenes in the hospital creeped me out excessively. In the episode as a whole, the two points where I was most seriously disturbed were in the house when the toy monkey started its slow-handclap, and around halfway through Dr Constantine's transformation when his eyes bulged out into goggles. (The fact that the obvious C.G.I. animation in the latter scene hadn't caused my disbelief to become instantly unsuspended shows just how drawn in I'd become by that stage.)

Of the two plot strands it was of course the one with the Doctor, Nancy, Constantine and the Child itself which was the most compelling. This worked excessively well, with events following one another with the tightness and inevitability which one would expect from the creator of the almost algebraic sitcom Coupling. Only the rather Dickensian meal-table scene threatened for a moment to tip things over into sentimentality, but fortunately the Doctor himself drew the necessary parallel with West End musicals, and all was well.

Rose's subplot was less successful, although not so much so as to spoil things -- its worst crime was to move rather slowly, and it's rare in this series for the luxury of that possibility to be available. I loved the image of her dangling helplessly in front of the Luftwaffe whilst wearing a Union Jack T-shirt -- a whole new order of companion peril -- but the fact that the scene went on so long without her being shot to pieces, together with the video-game feel of the C.G.I. air raid, made the whole thing seem a little farcical.

I had no problem with Captain Jack as a character, and I'll be interested to see how he develops. So far he's one-dimensional, a flash conman (and mooring your invisible spaceship to Big Ben is a pretty stylish trick, I'll admit [1]). The scenes of him and Rose flirting did go on rather long before reaching their conclusion, and, while I enjoyed Rose's dialogue as much as I do that in Coupling, it was a good deal more characteristic of Moffat's sitcom characters than of Rose herself.

Still, things came together nicely for the cliffhanger, and there are lots of lovely loose ends for next episode to take and tie back together again (something I have every confidence Moffat will do). If I have a complaint about the cliffhanger, it's just that, as with Aliens of London, the two simultaneous cliffhanging events (this time facing the Doctor and pals on the one hand, and Nancy on the other) were iterations of the same threat. Perhaps 45 minutes still isn't long enough to set up two credible independent perils.

I said last week that none of the stories during this series had been flawless. That's still true, but none has come closer than The Empty Child.

Being the untrusting cynic I am, and remembering how the sparkling Aliens of London was followed by the fairly dismal World War Three, I do find myself hoping rather fervently that the second episode doesn't balls it up. (The fact that the trailer showed us no locations other than the hospital and the bombsite does concern me rather. Confining the Doctor to a single room for more or less the entire episode was one of the bigger mistakes WW3 made.)

Still... for four weeks running now, Doctor Who has been outstandingly excellent. In the space of two weeks it's moved me as never before, and scared the life out of me. I really don't have a lot to complain about at present.

Bring on the dancing Doctor.


[1] Having been partially destroyed in Aliens of London, Big Ben is emerging as an icon of the series. It certainly figures prominently in The Clockwise Man, the first of the new series tie-in novels, which in only tangentially related news, I've nearly finished reading. It's not too bad, or at least less so than I feared. The "young adult" approach doesn't appear to have harmed Justin Richards' style notably, but then his prose has never been among the most complex in the range. The same's true of Jac Rayner, whose Winner Takes All is the third in the range: I'll be more interested to see how Steve Cole's more sophisticated style has changed for The Monsters Inside. A review may well follow once I've read all three.