Review: World Enough and Time

There are some episodes of Doctor Who that contain unambiguously great stories. ‘Human Nature’ is one of them: its tale of a vulnerable, humanised Doctor is sweeping and simultaneously intimate; a vast tour de force of a man who is not the Doctor, and indeed who has stolen the Doctor’s body, and whom we nonetheless grow to love so much we’re reluctant to let him leave it. ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ is another: a strictly local skirmish that opens a window onto the life of a single, tragic figure, heading irreversibly towards the end of his life, inspired briefly by the encouragement of friends, but ultimately not enough to eclipse the pain. ‘Time Heist’ jumps to the scale’s opposing end, and delivers a tale that is light on characterisation but embroiled in a mystery that is sufficiently interesting to draw you in and keep you guessing.

Other episodes are what we might call Event Stories. ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ (and its immediate follow-up) might be a decent example: ‘The Wedding of River Song’ is another. Monsters and threats are all present and more or less correct, but the McGuffins serve the dramatic purpose of padding out the running time between the twists. Paradoxically these are usually the ones that people remember, because they are the game changers – the ones that kill, that resurrect, that shine a torch onto the identity papers of heretofore mysterious, enigmatic guest stars.

‘World Enough and Time’ is a classic case of an Event Story. This is not an episode that you watch for the meat, because by and large there isn’t any. Oh, there are Things That Happen. Many of the Things That Happen will have the fans talking: one, in particular, will cause the collective dropping of jaws. Simultaneously, the story is essentially a series of sudden peaks amidst periods of comparative inactivity. Much of the point is that time is passing much faster for Bill than it is for the Doctor and the remains of his crew, meaning that the Time Lord is sidelined for at least half the running time, captured in a series of frozen moments, as if in a pocket universe held in a painting (read: TV screen), while for Bill the years tick by. (We do not know, by the way, precisely how many years it is, although there are undoubtedly fans on the internet already doing the maths.)

Essentially what happens in ‘World Enough and Time’ is this: the Doctor begins to regenerate, a flash-forward that serves to tease the finale early. Then Bill is shot dead, the hole in her chest sudden and gaping, with Bill herself seemingly frozen in time in much the same way that her mentor will be later in the story. Five minutes later she is up and about, a synthetic heart installed in the same manner as the reactor that’s kept Tony Stark alive. She lives a sort of half life in a nightmarish, dimly-lit hospital, accompanied only by a heavily-accented janitor, Mr Razor, whose total absence from the cast list ought to be a clue as to his identity.

What’s curious is the manner in which the story actively mirrors ‘Utopia’ but also mimics both Classic Who and the spoiler-obsessed contingent of the viewing audience. There’s a scene in The Phantom Menace which I rather like (now there’s something I never thought I’d say out loud): as Qui-Gonn and Obi-Wan cross the hangar on their way to a fateful meeting with the Trade Federation, Qui-Gonn castigates his charge for failing to concentrate on the gravity of the current situation. “Master Yoda says I should be mindful of the future,” Obi-Wan protests, which prompts the response “But not at the expense of the moment.”

If anything, ‘World Enough’ actively fulfils this prophecy, taking a hammer to the fourth wall and spending much of its running time teasing the fans desperate to jump ahead, by introducing a character who will doubtless irritate many people simply because they’re waiting for the Master to turn up. It would be interesting to see how many people were angrily Tweeting at quarter past seven, annoyed as to why the much-anticipated return hadn’t happened yet, oblivious to the reality. Certainly Simm’s disguise is effective and his acting impeccable, and while many people will undoubtedly see through the ruse immediately there will be a great many more who don’t, even if they were around for ‘The King’s Demons’. This is one of those instances where false memory reigns supreme; watching the episode a second time – as I did, Thursday morning – it is impossible to not see it, and I suspect that there will be plenty of fans ready to lie about the fact that they did.

Certainly it’s not the only time. Missy’s early conversation with Bill and Nardole reeks of fanboy trolling – the morally ambiguous Time Lady, when asked why she’s calling herself Doctor Who, replies “That’s his real name”. It sounds precisely like the arguments I read (and frequently attempt to defuse) on Facebook, and Moffat knows it. Next week’s Tumblr prediction: an image of Missy dabbing, with this caption:

There. I’ve done it so you don’t have to. For reference: it is fine to call him Doctor Who if you want to, and it always has been. Such forms of address have been part of the show since 1963 – if it’s good enough for Peter Capaldi, it ought to be good enough for the rest of us.

For all its structural inadequacies, ‘World Enough’ gets an awful lot right. The hospital in which Bill spends the bulk of her time is dark and frightening, echoing the visual design of Silent Hill (the normal Silent Hill; the ‘other’ version would just be too much to cope with). The only thing that jars during these scenes is the fact that she seems so comfortable: it could be a mild form of Stockholm syndrome, but there is something implausible about her acceptance of the situation in which she finds herself, and something atypically mundane about her conversations with Mr Razor. If anything, the Doctor’s companion is perhaps a little too happy with her lot; perhaps it’s the presence of an artificial heart that’s caused her to basically lose her own.

Then there are the Cybermen: shadowy, shuffling and shambling, emerging from the darkness in cloth-covered stages of gradual exposure until the moment we see one of them up close for the first time (and, of course, it’s Bill). Most pleasing of all, the Speak & Spell voices are back, even at the prototype stage, the partially converted patients tapping away at buttons marked ‘PAIN’ like of those V-Tech laptops or talking phones my children have cluttering up the toy basket. The whole thing is a bit Stephen Hawking, and will undoubtedly alienate those fans who prefer the bland, metallic tones of Nicholas Briggs, but it looks like they’re probably back next week, so at least they won’t be whining for long.

Come the episode’s conclusion, the Master is back in the frame – reunited with what is almost unambiguously purported to be his future self (not that this will be enough to silence the naysayers) and Bill is a newly-converted Cyberman, weeping real tears instead of oil as she advances on the Doctor. It is a mistake that may not be undone, and that in itself is what makes it so terrifying, but it follows thirty-five minutes of meandering, punctuated by occasional flashes of brilliance. There are – once more – conversations about the Doctor’s eyebrows, although their supposed mightiness is thankfully left untapped. This is clearly an episode in which Moffat intended to drop several radical plot twists and decided that he add comparatively little of substance in between. The net result is not bad, in the way that, say, ‘Death In Heaven’ was – just rather disappointing after the character pieces we’ve had for the past few weeks. There is nothing to match the Doctor’s fire in ‘The Eaters of Light’, the fatherly reassurance he offers when Bill ventures into the TARDIS halfway through ‘The Pilot’, or his weary speech about moving on that provided the unexpected high point to ‘Thin Ice’.

I’m assuming all that’s coming. Certainly the trailer for next week indicates a maelstrom of mayhem and explosions and, I daresay, at least one scene where the Doctor stares at Bill and says “I know you’re still in there”. Whether Bill will actually emerge from her shell, perhaps tearing at the bandages like Jack Napier does in Batman, or whether the Doctor will somehow be able to open the armour, or whether the whole thing will simply be retconned somehow remains to be seen. ‘Redemption’ is mentioned as part of the Twelfth’s closing character development: does this mean saving her later? Is it too much to ask that Bill might actually endure the most horrific of fates without its instant undoing at the behest of the chief writer’s handwavium?

Then there’s ‘Spare Parts’. If we had the time we could find a way of making it fit, but it really doesn’t, and we might as well avoid that argument now, along with the whole question of whether or not Big Finish is canon. There will be some for whom the rewritten backstory is nothing short of sacrilege, but that’s the problem with an origin story that was committed to audio before it was televised: do you ignore it, as Moffat has done? Or do you work in a narrative that half the audience won’t have encountered and risk landing in Ian Levine territory? (Paradoxically Ian doesn’t like Big Finish anyway, so I can only assume that he will view tonight’s retcon with the sort of ambivalence that is liable to make your head explode. Well, we can dream.)

The bottom line (he he. ‘Bottom’) is that Moffat really didn’t have a choice, unless he’d told an entirely different tale – and I’m starting to find the whole ‘urinating on the legacy of Doctor Who’ argument fiercely dull, despite being, until recently, one of its most embittered advocates. Because everyone puts their own stamp on Doctor Who: you’re just a little kinder to the stuff that happened before you got the chance to watch it. No one questions the rewritten Time Lords in ‘The Deadly Assassin’, or. the notion that two Doctors can appear together at once. We shouldn’t question this. I just wish it had been within the confines of an actual story, instead of a collection of vignettes and moments, stitched together into a Frankensteinian whole, much like the shambling abominations that haunt the corridors of the Mondasian spacecraft.

Have I Got Whos For You (part 76)

There is no God Is In The Detail post this week, folks. I’m sorry. I really can’t spare the time.

However, here’s some alternative artwork for episode 11, ‘World Enough And Time’ – and yes, the BBC acknowledged that it was a deliberate homage to ‘Day of the Doctor’, but I wondered what would happen if you combined them:

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Elsewhere, this recently discovered deleted scene from ‘Forest of the Dead’ goes a long way towards closing up some narrative loopholes.

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Talking of Nardole, the inspiration for that costume, when you look at it, is obvious.

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Anyway: while I was doing all this, my eight-year-old removed the front from his Yoda torch, and inadvertently turned it into Alpha Centauri.

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Normal business resumes next week.

Review: The Eaters of Light

You have to feel a bit sorry for Rona Munro. There she is, making history – the first Classic Who writer to pen an episode for the new series, and the first story we’ve had from a woman since…well, ‘Survival’ that wasn’t either half-baked or utterly dreadful. For anyone who had doubts (and there’s no reason for you to have had doubts, but I will momentarily allow you that luxury), this week ought to be enough to dispel them utterly: women can write great sci-fi and they can write Doctor Who and ‘The Eaters of Light’ proves it in abundance. And what’s everybody talking about? Bloody John Simm.

Even I did it. Five hours after my episode 10 deconstruction I scheduled another Metro post that discussed the new promotional image for the series finale. There are YouTube clips from the Tenth Doctor’s confrontation with Rassilon, and quotes from Andrew Marvell. You go with the Twitter trends. I did, at least, decide that I’d make up for the shortfall in here. Because Rona’s tale of loyalty, empire and monsters in the darkness turns out to be one of the best episodes of Doctor Who this year, and possibly in a long time.

‘The Eaters of Light’ is one of those times when Doctor Who puts its own spin on an unsolved riddle. Agatha Christie, the Great Fire of London and the Mary Celeste have all had similar treatments (although really, spin-off material aside, why haven’t they done JFK yet?). And yet its windswept opening shows how much Bill has developed as a companion, given that the Doctor is, for once, letting her lead: she’s determined to find out what happened to the missing Ninth Legion, which may or may not have vanished in Europe some time in the second century, with the Time Lord taking the role of reluctant designated driver, in the manner of a father escorting a group of excited children to a Disney screening. From the outset to the conclusion, and all Tumblr-baiting monologues aside, we’re never in any doubt that Bill’s in charge: if this were a musical episode, she’d be singing ‘I’ve Got A Theory’, and Nardole would publicly admit his debilitating fear of squirrels.

It’s an interesting reversal: typically episodes open with a companion lamenting the fact that they’re on yet another grimy spacecraft, while the Doctor leaps around expressing enthusiasm for the workmanship. On this occasion it’s Capaldi’s turn to be grumpy: Aberdeenshire (all right, the Brecon Beacons) may be beautiful but the Doctor, you sense, is less than thrilled to be here. “It’s Scotland,” he harrumphs when Nardole complains about the weather. “It’s supposed to be damp.” Nardole, meanwhile, is stumbling over the rocks in his dressing gown like someone attempting an awkward Arthur Dent impression, but seemingly manages to ingratiate himself into the tribe within seconds of the Doctor stepping in to explore the cairn (although it’s been two days for everyone on the hill). Time passes much slower inside the portal than outside, acting as a neat forerunner to next week’s story.

In the meantime, Bill is making friends with what remains of the missing Ninth Legion, and is disturbed to find herself in the company of a bunch of teenagers: it’s like watching a sixth form caving trip gone horribly wrong. They’re hiding out in the woods, with low supplies and a visible sense of cabin fever, and despite some outward displays of bravado Bill is the Wendy they’ve clearly needed for quite some time. (I have an old friend who, in the aftermath of divorce, decided to go travelling; she seems to spend a lot of time hanging out with random twenty-somethings she meets in the hostels but in Thailand she ran into a group of male students who more or less adopted her for a bit, and watching Bill with Lucius and the others was not unlike how I imagine it was for her.)

It’s here that we’re forced to endure a ghastly vignette about equality and lesbianism – Bill, you see, is expecting a cacophony of awkwardness when she admits to Lucius that she bats for the other team, only to find that Lucius bats for both, and considers himself ‘ordinary’ – “I think it’s really sweet,” he adds, “that you’re so restricted.” We can see where they were going with this: ‘Ha ha,’ the BBC are saying, ‘look at you millennials, with your political correctness and cultural appropriation and so called enlightenment. You’re not the generation who invented sex, or non-binary.’ I’m not disagreeing, but that doesn’t mean it works dramatically – it sticks in the throat, a bitter, insoluble pill that you failed to swallow.

Thankfully that’s the only duff moment. Everything else just works. This is a self-contained narrative that is sure of its own identity. It is well-constructed and frightening when it needs to be, with decently-realised set pieces. Even the finale, which feels rushed and madly convenient (oh look, it’s the self-sacrifice trope again) is reasonably good. And Murray Gold – presumably on retainer at the moment – seems to have actually composed something of substance this week, with some pleasant enough New Age Celt things.

It helps that director Charles Palmer takes his visual cue from Nick Hurran by showing us the monster only sparingly. A single establishing shot of the Pictish beast racing towards the cairn (and a couple of illuminated flashes inside it) is about as substantial as it gets: the rest is all flourishes in the dark and wriggling tentacles. It is the ground itself that appears to have come to life: this is, of course, not the case at all, but it’s hard not to be a little unnerved when Bill is running through the woods with certain death right behind her. It’s notable that, like its spiritual companion, ‘Eaters’ suffers a little from a slightly tacked-on epilogue, but there has been a great deal written about that elsewhere and it’s not something I’m inclined to explore until I’ve seen exactly where it’s going.

Supporting cast are the usual mixture of affable, headstrong and irritating, but it’s the leads – and particularly the Doctor – who excel. Sidelined to an extent during ‘Empress’, Capaldi is in full flow this week, tossing his moods between scornful P.E. teacher and the dark sage we met at the end of ‘The Zygon Inversion’, although with considerably less shouting. It’s curious that in his two key scenes he’s addressing the same person, with varying degrees of contempt. “You got a whole Roman legion slaughtered,” he says to Kar about halfway through, “and you made the deadliest creature on this planet very very cross indeed.” It’s not the sharpest dialogue in the world, but it’s a moment where Capaldi sounds so incredibly like the Seventh Doctor you can picture McCoy sitting at home, saying “I could have done that. Actually I basically did, didn’t I?”

Still, it’s later (and not much later) that the actor really gets his chance. “Are you sulking?” he says. “When you want to win a war, remember this: it’s not about you. Believe me, I know.” It is whispered and understated, with Capaldi’s native Scots perhaps even more pronounced than usual, the way that newly repatriated residents often find their accents slipping back towards the native when they go home. It’s a stunning scene, worthy of the best of Tennant, but you sense that of the newer actors only Capaldi could really have pulled it off. If this series doesn’t win him a BAFTA, there is no justice.

Doctor Who episodes are too often rather hastily appraised. Much of the unsavoury reputation attributed to ‘Fear Her’ is down to its proximity to ‘Love and Monsters’; likewise I tend to view ‘In The Forest Of The Night’ with some disdain because ‘Do nothing’ is the solution to the problem twice in almost as many weeks. Similarly, there’s a very real risk that the good stories are being overshadowed this year because of headline-grabbing departures, regeneration rumours and long-anticipated character reappearances. What Munro has created this week is poetic and beautiful, but it will almost certainly be ignored in the weeks to come while excitement about the Master reaches fever pitch. It’s no secret that most fans seem more preoccupied with the words ‘Give us a kiss’ – and what that kiss might MEAN, BECAUSE IT’S IMPORTANT – than anything the Doctor said or did this week.

Because the inconvenient truth is that ‘The Eaters of Light’ is, at the moment, once more consigned to the undergrowth from which it came until the buzz dies down. For many fans it is a narrative hurdle, a story that was good fun but in which John Simm failed to appear. For still others there was resentment: where, I was asked more than once, was Rory the Roman? Why couldn’t we get a cameo? At least a nod? And I lament that this is how we do things now; that it is somehow expected that writers cater to the whims of fans simply because the fans now have an easy way of making their feelings known in advance. Never mind the fact that they had a legitimate excuse as far as the Telegraph was concerned, given that someone erroneously hit the ‘publish’ button six or seven hours before the episode went out. Are we really now at the stage where Doctor Who fans think they’re stakeholders in the writing process? (It is at times like this that I miss Points of View. At least you could only complain about stuff when it had already been broadcast.)

So much for fandom. Will end-of-series retrospectives and future rankings judge Munro’s masterpiece more kindly? Or is this a squandered opportunity, a story that will forever be resented for the things it chose not to do – and with good reason – than for the many things it did brilliantly? And good reviews don’t count. I want to see enthusiasm among the community. I want the audience to be jumping up and down and seeing this story the way I saw it, rather than with the nonchalance I witnessed on Sunday from those who thought it was ‘filler’, or ‘dull’, or ‘a good episode, I guess, but I’m stoked for the finale’. That’s not good enough. I want them to see it the way I saw it – to see that this is one of the best stories in years, and certainly one of the best the current series has offered. Can we get there? Against all odds, can we get there?

Time will tell. It always does. But sometimes they’ve already cancelled your show.

 

God is in the detail (10-09)

Something a little different today.

Let’s be honest. This week’s Doctor Who was not about the visual stuff. Most of it was caves. There were shots of tea. But there was nothing you might really call substantial. Nothing that gave us the IMPORTANT CLUES AND SIGNS that we’ve become accustomed to.

But something strange and wonderful happens when you examine the script. Specifically, certain portions of the script. Even more specifically, every twelfth word (for reasons that ought to be obvious). In fact, I went through the script and wrote down every twelfth word – that’s spoken dialogue, you understand, not stage directions – and here is the final list, in handy chronological order.

Thanks, Chrissy.

So far, so bewildering. But you can rearrange those words to form…well, have a read. Note that this is not the entire collection: twelve words were kept back as a tithe to appease our Time Lord masters. It should be obvious what’s going on – but if it helps, imagine two battle-weary soldiers, in the still of the night, looking out over battlements under a strange alien sky.

“You do look busy.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“OK. Isn’t Alice here?”
“Yes. Sarge is receiving the Vikings.”
“Sergeant. Rhino warriors?”
“Human. Trapped in a Sarcophagi under the surface of Mars.”
“Quite a game with mankind. Taking over a British company…”
“A gouged carapace.”
“Swing your board at it.”
“Your will is my command.”
“Please yourself.”
“Got to. This Friday is oh, so long.”
“This is temporary. There’s no life.”
“Isn’t that a thing? This bio-mechanical world…for all God’s riches…tired, dead. No grass.”
“Like you knew.”
“I need a woman.”
“Our little blue monarch. Didn’t you make plans together?”
“Oh, details. This…first question…”
“Don’t speak of it. You show that to be unwise.”
“My pleasure.”
“There’s a service this Friday.”
“Here?”
The execution of the War Doctor. He was here.”
“Doctor Who?”
“Go hang. He hears you. We’re obliged to that poor beggar.”
“They could have asked me for help.”
“Yet you never ask.”
“No can do. I will miss the TARDIS though. I value war but want to stop.”
“You and your patriotic manner.”
“I liked gold. Seems we jump out twice minted. Everybody who is kind gave.”
“And so they sent you down.”
“Dawn. First thing…five.”
“For you take from here.”
“These forms…well, rope is right. This way is ever just. Though we used to…”
“Up to him, son. Been getting him down. Or us.”
“One here, one going. So come.”
“Yes. Hold here.”
“Forgive me. I had forgotten the munificence of the indigenous warriors.”
“It has taken you forward. You really must board the rocket.”
“Ice came to everything…and to us.”
“And a whole new theme in ice. I’ll survive. All things considered, I will survive.”

With calculations primed, as Mars is awoken, the Doctor is going home.

—

Roll credits.

Have I Got Whos For You (Election Special)

Friday morning? This was where we were.

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Don’t get me wrong. A coalition of any sort isn’t a great result. It’s the one we deserve, but not the one we need right now. Prediction: four years of squabbling while the rest of the country sits in limbo, followed by a narrow victory for Labour in 2020, assuming their leader manages to hang on. And if he doesn’t, all bets are off. Economically, politically, ideologically, this is not a good place to be.

Nonetheless, I gained a certain satisfaction in watching a nasty, embittered party push itself to breaking point as it embarked on a series of personal attacks (“the last refuge,” writes Edmund Burke, “of the scoundrel who has nothing left to say”) on Jeremy Corbyn, while its leader became increasingly panic-stricken. It’s hard not to look at both the election and the decisions that were made in its immediate aftermath as the standard political gambit of retaining power, although you can’t blame Theresa May entirely. You have no frame of reference, and neither do I. There’s a scene in series 6 of 24 in which a weary, chastened Noah Daniels – thrown in, much as May was, at the deep end, inheriting a presidency that had suddenly become vacant – says “It’s easy to think you’ve got all the answers, when none of the ultimate responsibility lies with you, but sitting in this chair…until you sit in this chair, you don’t know anything.”

The irony is May is probably quite pleasant if you meet her in real life. But power corrupts. You don’t have to listen to your advisers. And hence we woke on Friday – in the small hours, as Emily and I scrolled through BBC news feeds at four in the morning, scarcely believing, in the wake of my rampant pessimism, what we were actually seeing – to discover a country that had hit back, and a voting populace who had surprised me. Alan Sugar insists that the Corbyn-advocating twenty-somethings were “not experienced in life” and “didn’t know what they voted for”, and there’s probably a ring of truth to that – but the same could surely be said of Brexit (of which Sugar was also not a fan, although his political allegiance has shifted towards the Conservatives in recent years).

Still, it was great to finally discover what DUP actually stands for, right?

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I jest, but this is the sort of thing we’ve seen happen quite a lot in Doctor Who: humans who genuinely believe that they can ally themselves with dark forces and get what they want. The idea that said forces might betray them genuinely doesn’t occur to them. It’s the sort of Faustian pact that has you screaming at the TV – “DON’T TRUST THEM!” is the soundbite of choice, “THEY’RE DALEKS!” – but unlike us, none of these people watch Doctor Who. I watched the second Ninja Turtles movie with the boys the other week and we were pleasantly amused by the irony that Shredder utilised the talents of Baxter Stockman and promptly betrayed him, only to find himself receiving exactly the same treatment at the hands of Krang. It’s the kind of thing he really should have expected. (We don’t have time to unpack this properly, but I wrote a lengthy article on human-Dalek collaboration for the Doctor Who Companion, if anyone is interested.)

To be fair to the DUP, they’re not quite the monstrosity they’re painted as in the press. Creationist? Unfortunately. Pro-unionist? Certainly. Anti-abortionist? You bet. So is half of Ireland. This is not the same as being anti-women. Arlene Foster is a woman, for crying out loud, although I would point out that I’ve never seen her in the same room as Paul Merton. They’re also welfare-conscious: their members are right-wing Christian, but many of their supporters are on the breadline. Essentially they’re a party run by evangelicals; this may be seen as backward-thinking but they’re possibly a good deal more altruistic than many atheists. And in a best-case scenario, they’re going to be a thorn in the side of Theresa May’s benefit cuts, forcing the tempering of policy and a recognisable shift back towards the sense of compassion that all but vanished once the last coalition evaporated in the wake of 2015. Realistically this turn of events is not likely, but stranger things have happened.

Still, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that this may end up breaking the Tories: I’m no political pundit but surely they run the risk of losing the support of the moderates by getting into bed with the fundamentalists? However you look at it, this is a simple power grab, just as it was for Labour – and people seem to be waking up to that. And hence, this.

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May retained her own seat, of course – although it wasn’t without stiff opposition from Pat McDonald, Tony Hill, and…well, a man with unusual headgear. This is the sort of thing that benefits from a man in Havana; luckily my brother lives in Maidenhead.

“Admit it,” I said to him, by text. “You’re one of the two hundred and fifty who voted for Lord Buckethead, aren’t you?”
“Got me,” he replied.
“I knew it.”

Anyway, I spent much of Saturday trying to work out Lord Buckethead’s cosplay lineage, and –

Sutekh. Definitely Sutekh.

Review: The Empress of Mars

I was at primary school with a kid called Steve. We all called him Spud, presumably because his head was unfortunately potato-shaped. He didn’t mind. Steve was a polite, if academically disadvantaged young man, and we were good friends. His parents divorced before we’d finished year 6, which was a bigger deal back in 1988 than it is now. He was a latchkey kid with access to the fridge and borderline unsuitable reading material. It was a different world.

One afternoon we were in the kitchen sharing a Diet Coke when I noticed his father was watching the end of something. The two of us looked round the door of the lounge: an actor, stabbed in the chest, staggering across a platform, evidently milking his death scene for all it was worth. He raised his face to the heavens and bellowed the single line of dialogue my brain recalls from that afternoon: “ODIIIIIINNNNN!!!!”

Thirty years on, I still haven’t seen The Vikings. But Bill has – and I’d be willing to bet that Mark Gatiss has as well. And as it turns out, that isn’t a bad thing.

There are writers who strive to forge ahead – for whom the most important thing is to tell new stories, or find new ways of telling those stories. And then there are writers who take their cue from the past. Gatiss has always struck me as one of those: a man whose Who-related work is rooted in the 1970s, in a self-conscious manner that flits between mind-numbingly tedious and tremendously enjoyable, depending on the episode. The criticism he receives is somewhat mystifying, given that a great deal of it seems to come from the very same component of the fanbase who actively petition for David Tennant’s return: a stilted, insular, nostalgia-driven quadrant, for whom the only way to fix a show that’s well past its prime is to make it exactly the same as it was, which misses the point so drastically I don’t have the willpower to unpack it.

I first learned to love Mark Gatiss around the time ‘The Crimson Horror’ first hit: in a pondering, occasionally tedious series (and in the wake of an absolute clanger of an episode) it was a breath of fresh air, a story that wasn’t ashamed of its legacy and that eschewed self-importance in favour of…well, fun. It’s an underrated commodity. Stories like ‘Robot of Sherwood’ seldom make the top ten, but they’re fun. Sometimes we forget that Doctor Who is supposed to be fun, so consumed are we in telling everyone how important and groundbreaking it is. One of my favourite moments in the Harry Potter series occurs at the end of Goblet of Fire, where Harry finds a convenient use for the blood money he’s earned from the Tri-Wizard tournament, by investing in the Weasley twins’ joke shop business venture. “I don’t want it,” he says, “and I don’t need it. But I could do with a few laughs. We could all do with a few laughs. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need them more than usual before long.”

What to say about ‘Empress’? It’s not profound. It makes no real political point, save the kind of digs at the British Empire you typically see on Horrible Histories (a show in which Gatiss has appeared, along with his League of Gentlemen co-stars). It has a lot of stuff about queen and country, including a pleasing Pauline Collins reference. It has an amusing, if fairly derivative cold open – excuse pun – that is enough to draw your interest, even if it does not quite reach the hyperbolic praise that Moffat ascribes to it (“The best pre-titles idea [he’d] ever heard”, according to Doctor Who Magazine, which rather overstates its supposed brilliance). It has a bunch of gung-ho British soldiers speaking an indecipherable language (‘rhino’ is mentioned; I honestly don’t know whether this is colloquially accurate or whether Gatiss is just making this shit up). And it has a new form of squareness gun: it literally folds people up in a sort of fatal compression, useful for packing suitcases. (Gatiss describes this as “a new way of killing people”, suggesting that he’s never read The Twits.)

More to the point, it has Ice Warriors. The throaty voices from ‘Cold War’ are back, but you don’t hear an awful lot of them: there is but one grunt, a tea-brewing local who is mostly silent, leading you to wonder at first whether we’re back in ‘Doctor’s Wife’ territory. The episode is also graced with a brand new Ice Warrior, the titular Empress, frozen in carbonite and equipped with a distinctive, Predator-style helmet that presumably comes with its own feed of 1980s action movies, beamed straight to the eyepiece. She moves a little like Eldrad and growls like Sarah Parish in ‘The Runaway Bride’, with a similar mindset. Not that Iraxxa is irrevocably genocidal, of course – like the most rounded supporting characters her mind can be swayed, although she only listens to reason when Bill pleads with her to stop the fighting. Do we take this as a feminist-tinged political commentary on current foreign policy? If so, would that make Bill Diane Abbott, Emily Thornberry or Nia Griffith? Is this a conversation I really shouldn’t have started?

While all this is going on, Nardole is stuck on Earth, in a seemingly malfunctioning TARDIS, which has obviously put its brakes on for a reason, whether the forces implementing it turn out to be internal or external. There’s a certain amount of cast-thinning going on here; Mars is crowded enough and it’s no great secret that Nardole’s presence in the episode was somewhat last minute – we’re back in Nyssa and Jamie territory – so the solution Gatiss (or, come to think of it, most likely Moffat) adopts is to temporarily maroon him. The subsequent appearance by Missy is functional but unnerving, suggesting something else is going on, and the episode’s abrupt conclusion indicates another scene that might have been dropped. It doesn’t work, but one suspects that Gatiss’ hand was forced for the state of the arc.

There are film references galore – Bill’s response to strolling around the caverns of Mars is to liken it to the movies she’s seen, which some may seem as irritating but which is really just a reflection of how contemporary culture works. Relatively contemporary culture, anyway – I was going to write that it was a wonder that she didn’t try and Instagram a selfie with Friday, but the truth is that every film on Bill’s list is at over thirty years old, and it is left to the Doctor to drop in a reference to Frozen. This token nod to the millenials aside, the story is, like much of Gatiss’ best work, not so much a product of its time as much as a product of somebody else’s (or, as someone put it on Facebook last night, “Gatiss’ stuff was great when other people wrote it first in the 70s”).

That turns out to work. ‘Empress’ has ‘filler’ stamped all over it, but there is nothing wrong with a decent filler. It doesn’t do anything particularly profound, but it has enough in there to hopefully pique the curiosity of newer fans who have yet to encounter the Ice Warriors properly, without completely destroying anything that was good about the original. Indeed, the appearance of Alpha Centauri, two minutes from the end, was enough to make me jump out of my chair – it is reckless, crowd-pleasing shoehorning, there for no other reason than to appeal to the more experienced fanbase and up the hit counts in the Classic Who groups, but I can live with that, even if most newer fans were probably wondering who on Earth that squeaky-voiced bug-eyed alien was, and why their parents were getting so excited. (At least they have an excuse: the Telegraph, in a review which has subsequently been amended, genuinely thought it was Pauline Collins. I can live with the show being reviewed by non-experts – but seriously, how hard is it to read the credits?)

Some episodes of Doctor Who are destined to set the world alight. Gatiss’ latest will not, but that’s not the end of the world. If its supporting characters could do with a little more depth, that’s a by-product of the forty minute structure (and something which, when Chibnall comes to the table, could do with a serious rethink). The leads acquit themselves more than adequately, even if the Doctor has little to actually do this week except react. And it has Ice Warriors doing Ice Warrior-ish things, in a self-contained narrative that, while popping the odd seam in its bag of containment, manages to just about stay inside it. Profundity can wait: this is fun. Really, what more do you want on a Saturday evening?

God is in the detail (10-08)

Hail, brethren! The Monks may be gone, but do not weep, even though you have full cause of weeping. We shall discard the ephemeral and the propaganda and dig through the contents of ‘The Lie of the Land’ until we find THE TRUTH THAT IS HIDDEN. Because, as you all know by now, each episode of Doctor Who is replete with VERY IMPORTANT THINGS THAT WILL COME BACK LATER ON IN THE SERIES.

First, let’s look at a map.

You will note the cross, showing us the location of the Monks’ lair. In real world terms this translates to the Guildhall, marked below.

The connections here link back to none other than the Eleventh Doctor – by way of C.S. Lewis. First, note that the Guildhall is bordered by Gresham Street – referring to C.S. Lewis’ wife, Joy Gresham. Things become even more complicated when we consider the namesake Guildhall & Barrow Surgery in Bury St. Edmunds – referring both to Edmund Pevensie, core character in Lewis’ Narnia books, and also chapter eight of Fellowship of the Ring, ‘Fog on the Barrow Downs’ – written by J.R.R. Tolkien, friend of Lewis.

(As a brief aside, namesakes also figure elsewhere: Simon and Marek, the authors of The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who, appeared at the Guildhall Arts Centre, Grantham, on 22 September 2016. There is no obvious connection here except that 22 September is Billie Piper’s birthday. Why do I mention this? Just keep reading.)

Also note brief references to the Fourth and Tenth Doctors (Little Britain, top left, just above Postman’s Park; also Noble Street, a couple of blocks to the right). But the largest green space is occupied by the Festival Gardens…just below Paternoster Row.

We’ll just let that sink in for a moment.

This is all linked with Matt Smith, then. But why? Well, you’ll find out later. But in the meantime, here’s the interior of the Doctor’s office, on board the prison hulk.

First, examine the shelves: two racks, with four separate compartments on each. The decorative bottles are thus situated on compartments 1 and 9, thus referring to both Hartnell and Eccleston. Note also the appearance of said bottles: the first is cylindrical, a CLEAR AND DIRECT reference to the shape of the undisguised Type 40 TARDIS that Hartnell’s incarnation is seen pilfering in ‘The Name of the Doctor’, and the bubble-shaped appearance of the Ninth Doctor’s bottle, referring to the time-locked, self-contained war that he can no longer access.

Just out of shot: a bottle in slot 14. Ooh, Moffat, you TEASE.

Note also the statue of the Monk, pointing directly at the black box on the wall by the doorway: itself positioned horizontally above (and apart from) the bottles, and therefore connected with them without being directly aligned. It’s almost as if we’re looking for an alternate Doctor, who favours black.

Finally: Black and White guardians – long overdue for a return, and THIS IMAGE CONFIRMS IT’S HAPPENING! The switch is black, the bottles are white: that’s your first clue. But there’s more to it than that. Consider the contents of the Doctor’s desk: the book, the pen and the telephone.

A brief Google finds instructions on a craft website titled Chicaandjo for an upcycling activity that enables you to recycle a phone book into a pen organizer. I’ll say that again: recycle a PHONE BOOK into a PEN organizer.

So what? I hear you ask. Well, note the date on this entry: 24 February 2009. Ostensibly an unimportant day in the Whovian calendar, except that it happens to be the thirtieth anniversary of the Black Guardian’s first appearance, at the end of ‘The Armageddon Factor’ – part six of which was broadcast on 24 February 1979. Get ready, folks. An epic cosmic clash is coming.

Let’s move on and look at that radar.

This is, as you’d probably gathered, about the First Doctor. The position of the blip on the radar – at one o’clock – is testament enough, as is the fact that north is angled in the same direction on the compass. But that compass deserves special attention, chiefly because of the numbers that surround it – increments of 30, rising from 0 to 360.

But that’s surely just degrees, isn’t it? Well, not if you translate them into episode numbers:

30 The Aztecs: The Day of Darkness (Part 4)
60 The Web Planet: Escape to Danger (Part 3)
90 The Daleks’ Master Plan: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
120 The Savages: Part 3
150 The Moonbase: Part 3
180 The Ice Warriors: Part 2
210 The Dominators: Part 2
240 The Space Pirates: Part 4
270 The Ambassadors of Death: Part 7
300 The Daemons: Part 3
330 The Three Doctors: Part 2

Now: watch what happens when we notate the FIRST line of dialogue from each episode.

“Open this, Ixta. Ixta, please. Please open it.”
“The Doctor’s speaking to someone. Why can’t we hear what he’s saying?”
“He has a very strange sickness. Can you not help him?”
“Five point one. Zero. Five point six. Zero. Six point one. Zero. Six point seven. Zero. Seven point one. Zero.”
“Stand back. Stand back from that door.”
“Jamie!”
“Bring them inside.”
“Oh, Doctor, are you all right?”
“What are you doing?”
“Hold this!”
“Steady now, Sergeant. He knows what he’s doing. At least I hope he does.”

Which should tell you all you need to know, shouldn’t it?

Incidentally we did a little non-destructive testing on the numbers referenced in the Savages episode, but there is no significance in them. Even I have my limits.

Finally, here’s Nardole’s hand, resting on that map.

First and foremost, we need to examine the hulk’s equidistance between Orkney and Shetland, and the fact that Northlink Ferries runs a service between them operating out of Aberdeen, WHICH IS WHERE THE FOURTH DOCTOR DROPPED SARAH JANE AT THE END OF THE HAND OF FEAR. However, things get even more interesting when we examine two of the other marked places on Nardole’s map, notably Bergen and Stavanger: two cities approximately 124 miles apart.

This relates – as you’ve probably twigged – to the end of ‘Doomsday’, specifically the scene in which Rose explains that Dårlig Ulv-Stranden – or Bad Wolf Bay, as we call it – is located “about fifty miles out of Bergen”, ROUGHLY EQUIDISTANT BETWEEN THESE TWO POINTS. In other words (and you may find it helpful to look at the image again) if you head due east from here, you’ll bump into it.

Can I also point out that we heard this courtesy of Rose, and that I’VE ALREADY TALKED ABOUT BILLIE PIPER?

Now watch what happens when we add a line from the approximate position of Bad Wolf Bay to Aberdeen, connecting it to the ones that Nardole has already drawn. And tell me if a particular item of neckwear doesn’t instantly jump out at you.

We knew they were cool. We just didn’t know they were so important.

Review: The Lie of the Land

I was sixteen when I first read 1984. It was one of those books that stays with you: a fable of hellish bleakness, in which there are no real winners, and where there are far worse things than death. In late summer 1994 (ten years after Orwell’s narrative had failed to come to pass) such a dystopian nightmare still seemed like a distant reality. It was only a few short years later that we found ourselves looking at echo chambers, fake news and always-on technology that monitored our every move, and wondered how reality had caught up with fiction without any of us actually noticing.

Nearly six decades after the publication of Orwell’s magnum opus, Ben Elton had a go. His version was called Blind Faith, and was similarly bleak, although it ended at the gallows, rather than a cafe. It was clunky, shallow, zeitgeisty and overstated its themes, but it was oddly prophetic, and I wonder if Elton still thinks of it fondly, or perhaps regards it with the same casual dismissal that John Lennon had when it came to his early Beatles songs. And I wonder, too, if time will judge Toby Whithouse’s series 10 offering with kindness or with cynicism – something that foreshadows a likely reality, or one of those right-on attempts at being topical without actually saying anything.

‘The Lie of the Land’ picks up some time after ‘The Pyramid at the End of the World’ left off, with a withdrawn, isolated Bill going through teabags far faster than any person living alone actually should do, given that she spends most of her free time having imaginary conversations with a woman she can scarcely remember. It sounds like the plot of a Talking Heads narrative, and indeed that’s almost how the episode starts, although it isn’t long before we abandon melancholy for intrigue. There is an element of humanity in this week’s story, but it is first and foremost a conspiratorial thriller, and Whithouse wears it like a badge of honour. This is a story in which you can trust no one, Mr Mulder.

Certain stylistic things grate. It’s largely down to the fact that dystopian narratives are generally aimed at an older audience – but this is Doctor Who, and consequently there is a need to explain everything. ‘The Lie of the Land’ is, to all intents and purposes, the Blade Runner of New Who, its voiceover cloying and unnecessary (it should be obvious that spot checks are frequent and dangerous in a totalitarian police state, without Bill having to give us the details). It is only in the final reel that its purpose becomes apparent, Bill’s mother becoming not just a convenient expository sounding board but also a crucial plot device: the whole thing is very Rings of Akhaten with the same wind machine they used in ‘The Pilot’ but you can, at least, understand why we’ve had to put up with half an hour of interior monologue.

The voiceover isn’t the only thing that jars: the structure is off, somehow, as if this were a very good two-part story crammed into forty-two minutes, because the Monks had taken up two episodes already and they couldn’t stretch to another. The society Whithouse creates is frightening and oppressive and reasonably convincing, and there frankly isn’t enough of it: fascist police states are encapsulated in single, cliche-driven boot-in-the-door scenes (first they came for the communists, and I did not speak out), where non-conformists are dragged away in full view of disapproving neighbours. How much more might we have benefited from a more comprehensive overview of those who rejected the Monks’ programming? The resistance movement, and the laughing men behind the guns that served under the Doctor? The figureheads in charge, kowtowing to the will of the Monks, struggling to remember a time when they succeeded or failed purely on the whims of political ambition? Even the Monks themselves, who linger in the background this week, motives untapped, barely uttering a word? How much better, indeed, might the story have been had it begun with the planet under a state of siege, with flashbacks to key moments from the Pyramid episode and all the ephemeral dialogue from last week scattered to the ashes and replaced with something a little more substantial?

Perhaps that’s too much to ask for, and places too much demand on an audience that already struggles with the narratives that are thrown its way. If there is one recurring sin that New Who commits it is that of needless exposition, but a glance through the questions that come up on social media show that the audience is often not as smart as it likes to think it is. And we’re not talking about the kids here; we’re talking about grownups who should know better or who at least ought to read more. Just the briefest of glances through any DW forum in the days that follow an episode is enough to make a grown man weep. At one extreme you have the conspiracy theorists who notice everything and analyse everything – something I outwardly parody on this site – and at the other extreme the people who genuinely cannot understand why the Eleventh Doctor was able to regenerate. I don’t for a moment believe that Who writers have the time to actually read any of this, but if there are accusations that New Who occasionally dumbs down, we might say that this occurs simply because on many levels its audience actively demands it.

Even the supposedly smart people have a go. “It’s horribly misjudged to show Bill turning a gun on the Doctor,” writes Patrick Mulkern in the Radio Times, “and firing not once but four times. We’ve seen nothing that would push her to such an extreme act. It cannot be rationalised or condoned.” Actually, it can. That we do not get to see her suffering does not mean that said suffering has not taken place. The very fact that this is not something Bill would typically do does not, in itself, mean that it cannot be condoned, or that indeed that it would never happen: it simply means that there is a narrative gap that the audience must fill on its own. Is that such a dreadful ask? Or are we now at the stage where even professional reviewers need to be drip-fed?

There is an awful lot of decent material this week, even if it isn’t always used as effectively as it might be. The opening montage, which openly parodies Forrest Gump, is nothing short of marvellous, particularly with the addition of Capaldi’s soothing voiceover, bookended by the most sinister of grins. Capaldi, indeed, is absolutely the best thing about this week, whether he’s comforting a suddenly remorseful Missy or – in the episode’s high point – explaining his apparent change of heart to an incredulous Bill with such fortitude that for a second you’re almost prepared to believe it. Unfortunately it’s a that scene concludes with a mildly ridiculous denouement, and a quite unnecessary regeneration from the Doctor – “A bit much?” he quips, mostly through the fourth wall, and thus confirming that the whole thing was more about deceiving the audience than it was about winding up Bill.

(As an aside, the version of the episode that Emily and I watched this week was really very different. We usually get something that’s close to final – although it sometimes has a time stamp, a watermark or the odd bit of dialogue that gets polished or removed entirely before the final broadcast. The preview version of ‘Lie of the Land’ was, we were informed, not quite finished, and was still awaiting a few key effects, notably during the regeneration, which was missing its trademark sparkly dust. We knew what was supposed to be there because we’d seen it in the trailer, but having a CGI-free Capaldi stand in that chamber, stretch out his arms to look at effects that hadn’t yet been added and then shout “YAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!” really was quite disconcerting, in an amusing sort of way.)

On the upside, the Doctor can see again, which makes certain things much easier for Nardole – although he’s largely reduced to hesitant glances and screaming like a girl when Bill threatens him with a dining chair. Mackie is typically marvellous, but we knew she would be, because she always is. The supporting characters are (sadly) once more ephemeral, consisting largely of Martyred Woman, Police State Nazi and Brainwashed Soldier: it is left to Gomez to provide what remains of the episode’s substance, which consists of sitting on a piano and crying over her victims. “You didn’t tell me about this bit,” she accuses the Doctor, in what appears to be a moment of genuine regret. It is most likely a ruse, because (as we have learned) we can no more trust Missy than we can the man who created her.

And perhaps that’s the lesson we take from this week’s story. As the Doctor and Bill share a coffee by an abandoned plinth – in a scene that smacks of the Moral Messages that would suffix every single episode of Masters of the Universe – we’re no closer to really knowing the truth about what we’ve seen, or why it’s happened, or why the Doctor had to put Bill through the wringer with quite so much vehemence. What’s left is a sea of fragments knitted into an enjoyable, if not entirely coherent whole. There is a monster who gives up too easily, and a story that raises more questions than it answers, but not in an open-ended, satisfying sort of way – rather (as I’ve already said) a brilliant two-part story shoehorned into a decent single installment. Still. ‘Decent’ is fine, even if we’re back in highs and lows territory this week – and even if, as we watch the Doctor stroll back to the Vault, we’re still not entirely sure what’s going on or who we can trust. The shortest distance between two points is usually a straight line, but that’s not the route that Moffat tends to take, and it’s hard to take anything at face value. Instead I’m reminded of Commissioner Gordon, watching Batman and Robin swoop off into the distance on the final page of the Knightsend saga, with its tales of false identity and duplicity and eventual redemption – as the Commissioner’s deputy assures him that, if nothing else, at least they can be sure that Batman is back.

“Really?” the Commissioner replies. “After all that’s happened, how can we be sure of anything?”

God is in the detail (10-07)

It’s half term, folks, and by the time you read this I’ll probably be on a beach in Swanage. It may be a perfectly pleasant experience, but more than likely I will be running away from an enormous bubble and insisting that I am not a number, I am a free man. Who can say? This is the price you pay for knowing too much. I pay it willingly, but sometimes things are hard. Oh, so hard.

But I’ve managed to prep a a slightly shortened version of this week’s conspiracy roundup and leave it here for you because THESE THINGS ARE IMPORTANT. So here are the clues and signs we managed to spot in ‘The Pyramid at the End of the World’, and some explanation as to what they might mean. I do not promise an easy ride. But then it was never about that, was it?

Here’s the Doctor outside the pyramid.

There are 16 visible or partially visible rows of bricks in this image. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT. Firstly, 16 is 4 squared – 4 x 4, in other words – and the notion of two fours is something to which we shall return later in this missive. But it’s the Monk’s entry point into the scene that’s really fascinating: the missing bricks it currently occupied are located, if we utilise the coordinates of a typical X / Y axis, at 1:15 and 2:16, referring respectively to ‘The Space Museum’ and ‘The Dominators’.

So what? I hear you ask. Well, consider the alien species the Doctor encounters – the Dominators and the Moroks – and then reflect upon the fact that ‘Dominators and Moroks’ may be rearranged to form ‘INDOORS TO MONKS DRAMA’, and also ‘MONKS AIRMAN ODD TORSO’ – both of which describe key points in the episode – and also ‘MONKS ORDAIN DOORMATS’, which seems to be an apt description of what we know of next week.

But we should also take a moment to reflect upon the pyramid itself. Consider the episode title – itself one of comparatively few Doctor Who episode titles that also contain other titles. Removing ‘The End Of The World’, we’re thus left with ‘The Pyramid At’.

Now consider the alphanumeric values of letters, assuming that A is 1, B is 2 and so on. Removing ‘Pyramid’ from the equation, we have:

T – 20
H – 8
E – 5
A – 1
T – 20

Total: 54

Now, exchange these leftover letters with ones from another pyramid story, and we get:

S – 19
O – 15
F – 6
M – 13
A – 1
R – 18
S – 19

Total: 91

So what? I hear you asking. Subtract 54 from 91 and you get 37. So what? I hear you asking again, while you scrape against the ropes holding you to that chair and see if you can fray them a little (don’t trouble yourself, they’re elvish and they’d restrain an Oliphaunt). Can I just refer you here?

You know, Subway 37? As featured in this Fourth Doctor story? Which, by the way, ALSO STARRED LEELA, WHO GOT A MENTION LAST WEEK?

Phone displays figured quite prominently in this week’s episode, but there’s one in particular that warrants a closer look.

To do this, we have to go back through the earlier episodes.

Those of you who have endured this column for years will remember that Moffat employed a similar stunt in series 9. The trick here is to examine the lines of dialogue that occur at THIS PRECISE MOMENT in each episode of the series up to this point, including (for reasons which will become apparent) ‘The Return of Doctor Mysterio’. Because when you do that, something amazing happens.

“Lucy.”
“Hello.”
“Good old universally compatible incorruptible maps.”
“Mud is one word for it.”
“He’s released. Mercy at last. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“They’re fixing the lock.”
“Cardinal Angelo? I could do with your help here.”
“I felt it. If you can help us, I consent.”

MIND. BLOWN.

Next we’ll take a look at Douglas’s computer screen, moments before it blurs.

We may break this down like this.

I need say no more.

Finally, let’s look at the numbers on that combination dial.

There are two things going on here. In the first instance, the choice of 3614 as the designated escape code is deliberate, given that it is a reference to Cher’s 1969 commercial failure 3614 Jackson Highway. Given that it was released in the year to which the Doctor and Martha were banished by the Weeping Angels there are at least a couple of references to ‘Blink’, notably in track 4, a cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You’, as well as track 12 on the 2001 bonus edition, ‘Easy To Be Hard’. You know, as in “You can’t kill a stone”. What did you think I meant?

However, we also need to look at the number above it: 4725, referring specifically to galaxy 4725, known as Comae Berenices, which can be rearranged to form ‘See Beacon Crime’, a CLEAR AND DIRECT reference to ‘The Ark In Space’. Note also the presence of two separate ‘4’s, which refers to the closing episode of ‘The Android Invasion’. Which you basically watched last week, only it was called ‘Extremis’ and it had the Pope in it. In other words, THE CURATOR IS SET TO MAKE A RETURN IN SERIES 11.

Finally, note that the third tumbler is in a state of transition – shifting between the 1 and the 2, and thus making a subtle reference to ‘The Tenth Planet’, the story that is set to be referenced in this year’s Cybermen-infested finale. And how many dots can you now see on those two digit markers? Sorry, how many was that? FOUR, did you say?

Anyway: my Yanni CDs are beckoning. I need to be somewhere quiet after all this excitement. Be seeing you.