Saving Doctor Who: Conclusions

The BBC is putting out Doctor Who to competitive tender. As production companies prepare their bids, and the BBC prepares to assess them, the most important question they need to address is "what do viewers want from Doctor Who?"

Since the last few years have been so divisive, that question may seem a bit harder to answer than it should be. It may well seem that everybody wants something different, and that some of them are looking for a fight with people who don't want what they want. But hopefully there's one thing we can all agree on.

We want great stories.

We want stories that have space and time to develop, and come to a satisfactory conclusion. We want stories that explore the universe, take us to richly detailed worlds, and invite us to see our own through fresh eyes. We want stories with believable characters, who we can get to know, and who we can see grow and develop. We want stories with strong moral themes, that make us think but never preach, patronise, or court controversy for its own sake. We want a Doctor with strong and consistent values. We want stories that inform and educate, but never forget to entertain.

We want stories that we could be part of. We want them to take place in a universe that's consistent with itself and with ours. To that end, some of the more incoherent elements of recent Doctor Who need to be quietly forgotten about. We may wish to suggest that, like Scream of the Shalka or the Virgin New Adventures, they may have taken place in an alternative timeline, but since we want to reunite a divided fan community, it's wisest to let people make their own minds up about that.

We want stories told by a creative team that shares resposibility for making Doctor Who the best it can be, rather than concentrating all the power in one man's hands.

The story must always come first.

Saving Doctor Who: Behind the Scenes

Since 2005, Doctor Who has had a showrunner. This is soembody who has overall creative control of the show. He acts as a combination of executive producer, chief writer, and script editor. He casts the Doctor and companions, plans story arcs, writes the majority of the scripts and edits everybody elses, caand basically has a finger in every pie.

This model comes from the American TV industy, and is popular there, since it's thought that there should be somebody who owns the artisitic vision of a show. However, apart from Doctor Who and its various spinoffs, the showrunner system hasn't really caught on in the UK, and I think there's a good reason for this.

It gives one person too much power.

To see why, let's look at one of the most notorious stories of the 21st Cenury, Love & Monsters. There are many problems with this story, but the biggest one is that it ever got made at all. Why didn't somebody read the script and say, "This is terrible! We're not making it"?

Because Russel T Davis wrote it.

This is a frequent pattern. Clunkers usually have the showrunner's name on them. Writing most of the episodes makes it more likely that they'll write a bad one - not just statistically, but because they're likely to be spreading themselves to thin. Added to this, their episodes aren't subject to independent quality control.

The showrunner's power can also go to their heads. We see this as early as the first season, with the conflict between RTD and Chris Eccleston that lead to Chris leaving after only one season. Russel had refused to Chhis's ideas about how he wanted to play the Doctor. When Chris Chibnall became showrunner, he dispensed with the entire established writing team, reconned the show's entire history, and pursued what seemed to be a petty grudge against Steven Moffat, undoing the 50th Anniversary Special apparently out of spite.

Because the role is so high-profile, showrunners will be tempted to do what they think will please the crowd. However, they'll generally be listening to most vocal elements of the online fan community. Many of their ideas come from the world of fanfic, where there's no quality control and anything goes. The idea of genderflipping the Doctor, or giving him a hithertoo unknown mysterious past as the source of the Time Lord's powers, come from the same type of forum where you'll find Captain Kirk in bed with Mr Spock. In fact, the same type of fanfic-inspired nonsense has afflicted recent series of Star Trek, one of which has as it's protagonist Spock's fully-human adoptive sister, who led the only mutiny on a Starfleet vessel, which was later hushed up. Another element of this was a desire to generate publicity by courting controversy.

When RTD returned for the 60th anniversary, it quickly turned out that he had used up all his good ideas the first time round. Many of his stories drew heavily on his previous work, Lux took its solution from Tooth and Claw, while The Well was a sequel to Midnight. Neither were as good. His main idea seemed to have been "Let's get lots of money by making a deal with Disney!" But all we got for that money was two series of expensive-looking nonsense.

The final problem with the showrunner system is that one man is doing too much. This is why the number of episodes has declined from 13 in 2005 to 8 in 2025. The showrunner is overworked, the audiene are short-changed.

In the 20th Century, the roles of producer and script editor were seperate. The producer was responsible for putting the writers' ideas on screen, and the script editor for applying quality control to them. Technically, a script editor was not supposed to be writing scripts himself, but Douglas Adams sometimes worked round this by writing under a pseudonym.

The new production team should follow this more collegaite structure. As well as a producer and a script editor, there should also be a head writer, who should recruit the writing team, and plan any details such as character development that need to flow from story to story. However, unlike a showrunner, they should be first amongst equals on the writing team, and need not write more scripts personally than anyone else. It should be possible for aspiring writers to submit story outlines, and if they show prommiss, the writers could be invited to develop them further. This would be one way of diversifying the writing pool.

The script editor should review the scripts, suggest any rewrites that are necessary to improve the story or ensure consistency with other stories, and have the power to reject any scripts that aren't good enough. On quality control, the script editor's word in law. Since the script editor isn't one of the writing team, nobody's bad script gets made just because they wrote it.

Once the scripts have been chose, the producer is responsible for getting them on screen. They appoint directors, oversee the rest of the crew, and cast the leads. (Casting guest characters is a job for individual directors).

When it comes to casting the leads, showrunners have generally chosen actors that they personally want to work with. Sometimes it works well - Peter Capaldi, David Tennant. Sometimes it doesn't - Chris Eccleston (as previously mentioned), Jodie Whittaker (all other things being equal, if Chris Chibnall had cast a man as the Doctor, he'd have cast the wrong man). However, Matt Smith was chosen by an open audition. Like Tom Baker, he was pretty much unknown when he was cast, but in 45 minutes of The Eleventh Hour he went from Matt Who? to Matt Doctor Who. Open auditions are, I think, the way to go, for both Doctors and companions.

I'd like to give the leads some creative input. Tom Baker could be a nightmare to work with, but his ideas did bring about improvements to some stories. Famously, in The Face of Evil, he refused to threaten another character with a knife, and add-libbed the classic line "Take me to your leader, or I'll kill him with this deadly jelly-baby! Choose the best actors you can find and then trust them.

Whenever there's a change of personnel on Doctor Who, the press are always speculating, who should the new Doctor be? Who should the new showrunner be? To the first question, my answer is always "the best man for the job" and to the second, my answer is nobody.

Saving Doctor Who: Visual Effects

Special effects are like magic. They only work if you can't see how they're done.

20th Century Doctor Who was notoriously cheaply produced, but many of the effects stand up surprisingly well. Let's compare two such effects with their modern equivalent.

The original regeneration effect in The Tenth Planet was done by cross-fading from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton with a broken fader. This caused the first Doctor's face to flare out and then fade back into the second's. It still looks good now, and must have been even more impressive at the time, when the audience had never seen a regeneration before and didn't know what do expect. It was meant to imply that something mysterious and eerie was happening to the Doctor. The fountain of golden light effect used in 21st Century Doctor Who looks flashy, and seems to be intended to give an impression of enormous power.

The Dalek extermination effect used up to Genesis of the Daleks involved overexposing the image of the victim until it solarised. That was meant to give an impression of overwhelming power, and it works. It still looks genuinely scary now. By contrast, the effect used in 21st Century stories, where the victim turns into a glowing skeleton, looks incredibly fake.

One key reason that neither of the 21st Century effects look as good as their 20th Century predecessors is that they're both obviously CGI. CGI has been overused, not just in Doctor Who but in other shows, to the extent that everybody can spot it a mile off. By contrast, in the 20th Century, production teams just had to get creative with what they had available.

This doesn't mean that the effects used in the 20th Century were always better. The Invisible Enemy looks pretty ropy, especially the giant prawn costume, and the stop motion dinosaurs in Invasion of the Dinosaurs were contracted out to a company that over-promissed and under-delivered. It seems that in the wilderness years, the things things didn't work were remembered more than the things that did, and Doctor Who's reputation for being cheap and shonky became somewhat exagerated. So when the show came back, the producers wanted to say "We've got a budget now, and we're not afraid to use it!", and make sure we saw the money on screen. As well as the overuse of flashy and obvious CGI effects, this led to things like the fashion parade of irrelevant aliens in The End of the World. The trend was only exacerbated by the money from the Disney deal, and fueled RTD's unfortunate tendency towards style over substance.

This doesn't mean that CGI doesn't have its place - for example, it could be used to create aliens like we've never seen before - but it has to be used subtly, and the visual effects team should think carefully about what will work best and look most natural in a particular scene.

Getting creative with what you've got still works. The production team needed to save money on Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead because other stories had run over budget. So the "I'm sorry, you have two shadows" effect was done simply with lighting.

My advice to the next production team is that the effects have to serve the story, and that it's not the money we want to see on screen, it's the creativity.

And maybe you should have a conjuror on your effects team.

Saving Doctor Who: Worldbuilding

For a show that can go anywhere in time and space, 21st Century Doctor Who is strangely parochial. Its concerns are those of a WEIRD culture - Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic. Our own planet has far more ways of seeing the world that Doctor Who is showing us, let alone the rest of the Universe.

In The Star Beast Donna asks The Meep what its pronouns are. This assumes that The Meep's native language has the same type of sex-based gender system as English, and that The Meep has the same sort of hangups about that as Russel T Davies. But only about a third of human languages have sex-based gender systems, and over half have no gender system at all. In some languages, the correct pronoun is determined by things like age, social status and formality. Some languages hardly use pronouns at all - either because the information is marked on the verb, or because you omit anything that can be understood from context. Speakers of languages with sex-based gender systems often take the attitude that gender just part of the way the language works, no big deal. If you ask an alien what its pronouns are, a reasonable answer is "What the heck are you talking about?"

One 20th Century story that depicted a fictional society particularly well was The Robots of Death. The story is confined to a single location, the sandminer, but the costumes, the dialogue between the crew members, their job titles, and Uvanov's backstory paint a vivid picture of the wider society of Kaldor. Kaldor, we learn, is a society ruled (often corruptly) by the First Families, where elaborate headdresses and face-paint are used to show status and office. Someone from outside the First Families can rise to command on talent, but risks being made a scapegoat if the First Families want to cover something up. They are dependent on robots - robots might even be employed to bring up an orphaned child - but often uneasy about this and still value human insight. Its economy revolved around using mobile sandminer vehicles to harvest valuable minerals from desert sandstorms. Their unease about their dependence on robots sometimes develops into full-blown robophobia. The explanation given for this, "It's like being surrounded by walking, talking dead men," is psychologically plausible - it's what we call the Uncanny Valley Effect.

This brings me to one of my greatest disappointments with 21st Century Doctor Who. For a science fiction show, it doesn't actually seem to care about science. In Gridlock, the cars are all using each other's exhausts as fuel. That's a perpetual motion machine, and if you have any knowledge of physics at all, it breaks suspension of disbelief. OK, so things like the TARDIS are definitely Sufficiently Advanced Technology, but basing the technology seen in the show on sound scientific principles wherever possible could lead to stronger stories - the more you care, the better you write. When the show first began the "Educate" bit of "Inform, Educate and Entertain" was an important part of its brief, and to that end they had a scientific advisor to ensure that science depicted made sense. His name was Kit Pedlar, and he devised the Cybermen.

As RTD leaned more and more into outright fantasy, he wrote weaker and weaker stories as a result. An example of this is the Pantheon of Discord. In a Pantheon story, a godlike being turns up, along with a "harbringer" (who does nothing), giggles inanely, announces that he's the God of Something, causes havoc, and sets the Doctor an arbitrary puzzle that he has to solve to defeat him. I don't think any idea has ever been overused more quickly.

Another area that Doctor Who originally sought to educate people about was history. 21st Century stories with a historical setting are usually "The Doctor Meets Famous Person" stories. One problem with this is that the famous historical person has to be given a simplified, broad strokes treatment that ignores their real flaws and complexities, and the second is that it tends to implicitly support the Great Men view of history, which most historians consider old-fashioned at best. Seeing the lives of ordinary people in history has potential. The most successful historical character there's ever been was Jamie McCrimmon, an ordinary Scot who fought on the losing side of the Battle of Culloden, and went on to become the Second Doctor's companion.

Pure historical stories were abandoned by the BBC after the first few years of Doctor Who because audiences found them boring compared to science fiction stories. Aliens invading in the past can work better - The Visitation is a good example. However, getting the balance between the science fiction and history right can be tricky. Rosa and Demons of the Punjab both felt that they'd have worked better if you took all the science fiction elements out of them - incuding the Doctor.

Another setting we need to think about is contemporary Earth. I feel that this should be used sparingly (not more than one per season), and that when it is used, it should feel like the world we live in. Since Rose, RTD set stories in an alternative present, where alien invasions were increasingly common knowledge, ending up with UNIT having a huge skyscraper base with a helipad in the middle of London. Part of Steven Moffat's motivation for the Cracks in Time story arc was go get back to the feeling that Doctor Who could be set in our world. It's much more involving if you can make believe that one day you could meet the Doctor in the street, get mixed up in his latest adventure, and be invited for a ride in the TARDIS.

Character development is an important part of making a story feel real, and unfortunately, 21st Century Doctor Who has often skimped on this. According to The Writer's Tale, RTD likes to delineate a character in three words. As a result, his characters tend to be shallow and static. In his first term as showrunner, the only companion he gave significant development to was Donna, and he ended her story the first time round by undoing all her character development. At least he tried to right this in the 60th Anniversary specials. Steven Morrat's companion characters, Amy, Rory and Clara, were much better developed. We got to know them, we saw where they were coming from, and what their lives outside the TARDIS were like. We learnt how travelling with the Doctor changed them - sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Clara's inherent compassion and her growing recklessness made her death in Face the Raven a shockingly logical end for her character.

Doctor Who has a long, complex and sometimes contradictory history, and has always worn its continuity lightly. However, it's important to retain some sense of coherence, and to this end writers should respect the work of their predecessors. You shouldn't contradict previous stories unless they're really terrible. Artibrarily retconning the Doctor's entire backstory, as Chris Chibnall did with the Timeless Child story arc, added nothing. An ordinary Time Lord who ran away and got involved in the wider universe is a better backstory than a mysterious immortal being who the Time Lords got their powers by experimenting on. And what did it give us? A mess of contradictions, a character who claims to be the Doctor but has none of the Doctor's values, and an episode that consists of one third the irrelevant life story of a boring Irish policeman, one third the Master giving a pointless infodump, and one third the worst Cybermen story ever made. The Timeless Child belongs in the same bin as "I'm half human on my mother's side."

It's a big, strange, scary, wonderful universe out there, and we've got a TARDIS. Let's go and explore it.

Good worldbuilding makes good stories.

Saving Doctor Who: Tone, Morality and Politics

Science fiction has always been a genre that engages with moral and political issues. It uses aliens and other worlds to show us our problems through different eyes. Doctor Who was inspired by the foundational works of HG Wells, whose The War of the Worlds is one of the classics of anti-colonial literature. The Doctor is generally protrayed as an anti-authoritarian figure, and his greatest enemies, the Daleks, are Nazis. The best stories of the 21st Century are typically the ones with the strongest moral themes, such as Oxygen, in which the villain is a corporation that puts profit above human life. The BBC's mission is to Inform, Educate and Entertain, and there's no good reason why Doctor Who shouldn't do all three.

However, to do so successfully, the show needs a consistent moral framework. During Steven Moffat's time as showrunner, the Doctor would often say that he was "Never cruel and never cowardly". However, The Interstellar Song Context, which trys to cover the same themes as Oxygen undermines its message with a scene in which the Doctor tortures a character in cold blood. In fact, RTD's writing in his last season seems to have developed a nasty streak of cruelty. We had a scene in which the Doctor cuts off the power to a hospital, one in which robots vapourise a cat, and one in which the villain is reduced to an egg and a sperm and then hoovered up by a floor-cleaning robot, all played for laughs, in the space of a single episode.

Part of the problem is that RTD's moral thinking has become shallow and simplistic. The frantic pace of his episodes rarely allows for any message deeper than "This stuff's bad, OK?" which comes off as patronising at best. Also, he seems to think that morality consists entirely of cheering for the right people. One problem with that is that you're deciding who's good and who's bad based on who they are, not what they do. Another is that people who don't count as the right people end up being villfied. Any what do people do when the feel villfied? They push back. If you portray all straight white men as evil losers, as RTD did in his last season, a certain proportion of them will think, "Stuff you, I'm voting for the Daleks!"

Moral messages should be offered to the audience to be taken freely, not forced upon them. Showrunners doing deliberately contentious things and saying, "If you disagree with me, you're a bad person!" achieves nothing but raising hackles and dividing the crowd.

Moral messages also need to form a natural part of the story. If you have to finish with the Doctor preaching a trite little sermon, as many 13th Doctor stories did, you've failed. In Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor's dilemma about how far he can go to thwart the rise of the greatest evil power in the Universe without becoming like them himself is the very heart of the story. One of the key themes of the Third Doctor's era is the conflict between the Doctor's anti-authoritarian values and the Brigadier's military mindset, and how they manage to work together for a common purpose and even be good friends despite this. Inform, educate and entertain, but remember that in Doctor Who, you have to entertain first, and let informing and educating come along for the ride.

The last two showrunners have both attempted to make points with the identity of the Doctor. This doesn't really work. We have a lot of baggage about certain things because of our history, but the Doctor is an alien and shouldn't have those issues to start with. In Star Trek, which was first broadcast while the Civil Rights Movement was ongoing, it was important to show a black woman Lt. Uhura, as a senior officer on a star ship. However, the Doctor doesn't belong to that type of command structure, and he comes from a planet where the Atlantic slave trade and segregation never happened. He should be able to treat our baggage about skin colour as a load of pathetic nonsense. In The Story and The Engine, the Doctor goes to Nigeria because he says he feels at home there as a black man. But Ncuti Gatwa had always played his version of the Doctor as queer, and Nigeria is a shockingly homophobic country. I felt that the episode should have been called The Elephant in the Room.

Injustice always has a historical context. I found it depressing that the villain in Rosa, who was trying to thwart the Civil Rights Movement, came from 50000 years in the future. Go that far in the other direction and living in caves was an exciting new innovation. Why would the lies that slave traders told to excuse their crimes still be believed that far in the future? The unintended message seems to be that people never improve. There's not much point trying to tell people to be better if you're going to imply that they can't.

A show with time travel could use that to explore the historic roots of injustice. Suppose we have a story where one guest character seems suspicious of another for no apparent reason. A companion asks why, and he replies, "You can't trust people from Kalthur, everyone knows that." Later, the character from Kalthur does something heroic, and we see that the other's prejuduce against him was unjustified.

In a later story, we visit Kalthur in the distant past, and witness the terrible events that led to the city getting its evil reputation - long forgotten by the time of the original story.

If I have one piece of advice for the writers of future Doctor Who stories on how to handle moral issues, it's don't tell people what to think, just make them think.

Saving Doctor Who: Pace and Structure

Doctor Who was better in the 20th Century.

To see why, let's look at Rogue, one of the weaker episodes Ncuti Gatwa's first season. There were two strands to the plot - in one, the Chuldur, a family of shape-shifting alien Bridgerton fans come to Regency England and infiltrate a society ball, intending to Cosplay the planet to death for no particular reason. In the other, the Doctor has a brief, doomed romance with Rogue, a Captain Jack style bounty hunter who is trying to catch them.

Unfortunately, neither of these strands had enough development. The Chuldur and their plot were slight and insubstantial. We never got to know any of their victims, so none of them seemed to matter, except for the bait-and-switch with Ruby (who was obviously going to survive the episode). Meanwhile, Rogue didn't get enough character development to explain why the Doctor would fall for him so suddenly, or why we should care about him - especially as he obviously wasn't going to survive the episode. There simply wasn't enough time to make any of the story's elements work.

The problem lies with the first and biggest mistake that RTD made when he revived the series - one he made before writing a single line. This is the single episode format that has dominated Doctor Who since 2005. Many episodes seem rushed. Either the plot and characters are underdeveloped, or the pace is breathless, or the writer tries to cram so much stuff into 45 minutes that it becomes hard to follow, or there isn't time to set up a satisfactory conclusion, so we end up with deus ex machina. It seems that Russel T Davis was subconsciously aware of these structural problems as early as The Parting of the Ways, in which Doctor doesn't have time to finish his anti-Dalek weapon, and only the literal deus ex machina of Rose looking into the heart of the Tardis and making a wish saves the day.

So why did RTD chose this format? A clue can be found in the following line from Rose.

I got the Bronze.

Russel followed the format of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which had been popular in the years preceding the revival. A season would consist mainly of self-contained episodes, but build towards a final confrontation with a boss villain at the end of the season. This is the format that Doctor Who has followed (with a few variations) since.

As well as rushed storytelling, another consequence of this is that the leads have to be on screen almost all the time. This gives them a gruelling shooting schedule, and, to provide them with breaks, it's necessary to have a "Doctor-Lite" episodes - not so much Doctor Who as Doctor? Where?

Over the course of 21st Century Doctor Who's run, seasons have become shorter and shorter, from 13 episodes in 2005 to a mere 8 in 2024. This leaves fans feeling short-changed, especially when both 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble were Doctor-Lite episodes. Furthermore, because of the need for the season finale to be an event, each season finale has tried to outdo the last, leading to stories where spectacle overwhelms logic.

How did 20th Century Doctor Who do things better? Back then, stories were typically four episodes long, sometimes 6. This allowed them time to breathe. Settings could be explored, characters developed, villains given motivations, ideas fleshed out. At its best, this led to classics like Genesis of the Daleks, which had a depth of storytelling that no 21st Century story has ever approached.

When Doctor Who returns, the new production team should revive the original format. The BBC and its partners should commit to making 4 four-part stories per year. The greater depth and scope of these stories would allow us to feel that we were exploring the Universe with the Doctor, and remove the need for any one story to serve as a season finale. The pace of the action could vary from episode to episode within a story, and from scene to scene within an episode. As more time could be spent developing secondary characters, the scenes focussing on them could be sheduled together, so as to give the leads regular breaks from filming without having to take them out of a whole episode.

Doctor Who is the show that can go anywhere and do anything, but to truly reach its creative potential, it needs more than 8 single-episode stories a year. And for those of us who watched Doctor Who as children in the 20th Century, what was it we talked about in the school playground on Monday morning? The cliffhangers...

Saving Doctor Who: Introduction

Doctor Who seems to have dematerialised for the forseeable future. The Disney deal fell through, Russel T Davies is no longer involved, and the next Christmas Special has been cancelled - or rather, once the news of RTD's departure came out, he was forced to admit it had never been commissioned in the first place. Worse still, the last few seasons hadn't made the slightest bit of sense, and the last episode wrote the story into a corner that RTD's successor will have great difficulty writing their way out of. (Presumably RTD was not expecting the Disney deal to fail or the BBC to lose patience with him when he wrote that). It looks like the show will be off air for some considerable time - RTD hinted as much in an interview with Newsround after the Disney deal fell through, in which he said

The viewers of Newsround will grow up.

It's likely that he already knew he was going at that point (a drama he'd written for Channel 4 came out just before it was announced that he was leaving Doctor Who, that didn't happen overnight, and he wouldn't have done it if he had other commitments) , and he seems to have been envisioning a gap of at least 5 years before the BBC tried to revive the show again. But what should Doctor Who be like when it does return? The last few seasons have been as divisive as they have been incoherent. How can it become a show that matters again? Can it regenerate into a show that people love? What do we want from Doctor Who? I've got my own ideas, and over the next week or so I'll be putting them forward in a series of articles. Each will address a different aspect of the making of Doctor Who, and I'll try to analyse what went wrong with it, how it has been done right in the past, and what I think should happen going forward. I'll be referring a lot to 20th Century Doctor Who, which I think generally had better stories. The esssays I'm planning are:

1. Pace and Structure
2. Tone, Morality and Politics
3. Worldbuilding
4. Visual Effects
5. Behind the Scenes
6. Conclusions

Together, they will comprise my manifesto for how to recreate Doctor Who better than ever. I welcome feedback, as long as it aims to improve my ideas, not shoot them down. As the fan community is so divided at the moment, I can't expect everyone to agree with me, and some of the things I think were mistakes are likely to have vociferous defenders. I'm also aware that the more divisive storylines of recent years have attracted knee-jerk reactions from the more obnoxious elements of the fanbase. However, just because there are people who object to something for stupid reasons, it doesn't mean there are not intelligent reasons for criticising it. If I get sufficient constructive feedback, I'll add a postscript discussing the points raised, but I won't engage with people who accuse me of prejudice, or claim to agree with me for prejudiced reasons.

Why I Hate Genderflipping

My daughter, who was originally the one of my family most in favour of a female Doctor, once said, "You know, I feel sorry for Jodie Whittaker, because I've seen her in other things, and she can actually act."

Now, Chibnall's writing is mediocre at best, but that wasn't the only problem. There's an intrinsic problem with genderflipping. I've seen a couple of other productions that used it, and found them problematic.

Twelfth Night is my favourite Shakespeare play. In a subplot, the pompous steward Malvolio offends some other characters by spoiling their fun. In revenge, they forge a letter from his employer, the Countess Olivia, claiming that she's in love with him, trick him into wearing yellow stockings and cross garters to impress her (he looks ridiculous, and she hates that style to start with) and convince her that he's gone mad. (Note, Malvolio claims to be a Puritan, the Puritans wanted to close down theatres, Shakespeare's audience would have seen him as the bad guy).

I saw a production of Twelfth Night at the National Theatre, with Tamsin Grieg as a genderflipped Malvolio. Portraying Malvolio as a woman made the prank come across as unpleasantly homophobic. Worse still, the yellow stockings and cross garters became a yellow corset with propellers on the nipples - not merely stupid but degrading.

I also saw a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which Lysander was portrayed as a woman. Again, Egeus' opposition to Lysander marrying Hermia became implicitly homophobic, not merely putting his paternal authority over his daughter's happiness. The production couldn't resolve that problem, because it was never in the text - they had created it themselves.

So back to Doctor Who. Chris Chibnall presents the 13th Doctor as a great leap forward for the representation of women, but that's sheer hypocrisy coming from him. Steven Moffat wrote compelling female characters - Clara, Amy, River. But 13 is a vapid chatterbox who spouts inane platitudes and corporate slogans, Yaz is just bland, and Grace was fridged in the first episode. Chibnall has always been a mysogynistic writer - his writing for Torchwood and Camelot shows that, so he doesn't get to call anyone else sexist when they criticise his worthless gimmick.

If you want good female characters, write them as women from the outset. It worked for Dana Scully, it worked for Emma Peel. If you want good male characters, write them as male from the outset. It worked for The Doctor. But if you gendeflip an established male character (nobody would suggest doing it the other way round) you're just replacing a good male character with a poor female one, plus some awkward subtext.

The Trouble With Chris Chibnall

Chris Chibnall's writing for Doctor Who has generally been of poor quality. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was basically silly. It was never explained why The Doctor would want to get together a posse including Nefertiti and a big game hunter (people who kill for pleasure aren't The Doctor's usual choice of friends), nor why Nefertiti would chose to elope with the big game hunter (who seemed the sort of man who'd treat a woman like another trophy) at the end. The Power of Three started with an interesting premise (the Slow Invasion), but ironically the ending was rushed - The Doctor just waved the Sonic Screwdriver at a control panel and everything was all right. 42 revolved around a gimmick and doesn't stick in the mind. Even his best story, The Hungy Earth / Cold Blood was a by the numbers Silurian story (human activity awakes the Silurians, they want to reclaim their planet, The Doctor attempts to broker a peace, negotiations are botched, Silurians forced back into hibernation) with no original ideas in it.

He was even worse as the showrunner on Torchwood, the "adult" (as in very, very childish) spin-off from Doctor Who which followed the misadventures of an alien-hunting squad so top secret that everybody in Cardiff knew who they were, apart from the heroine's boyfriend. Said heroine was granted immunity from character development, as this was a terminal disease in Torchwood. The show never really found a tone that worked. Two episodes written by Chibnall personally made you wish you had a vial of Retcon handy. Countrycide was a nasty cannibal hillbillies story, transferred to Wales. Cyberwoman's premise contained a massive plot hole - Ianto Jones has supposedly smuggled a cyberconversion unit containing his partially-converted girlfriend (this was before Ianto was gay) into the Torchwood Hub without anybody noticing. Even worse, while Doctor Who consistently portrays cyberconversion as a painful and dehumanising process, Torchwood portrayed it as fetish.

WARNING: YOU CANNOT UNSEE THIS

I did warn you.

Chibnall's defenders will say, "But Broadchurch was good." Well, it was if you like relentlessly depressing contemporary crime dramas. But in terms of tone, story, setting and intended audience, Broadchurch has nothing in common with Doctor Who. It seems that what he's best at writing is stuff that's nothing like Doctor Who at all.

More relevant is Camelot, which I don't think was a great success. I only saw one or two episodes, but the writing on it didn't seem that great. One thing I do remember is that one character (I think it was Guinevere) was introduced in a dream sequence in which she was seen dancing naked on a beach for no readily apparent reason.

So, when this second-rate writer, with a history of objectifying women, is made showrunner on Doctor Who, what does he do to make people love him? He resorts to gimmicks, of course, and his chosen gimmick in the unfortunate Josie Whittaker. She faces the prospect of having to carry an impossible burden of expectations while struggling with ropy scripts and misjudged tone, and possibly an inappropriate costume. It seems like the Tardis is taking us back to 1984.

When Colin Baker took the role, he wanted to portray a dark and edgy Doctor, something along the lines of Peter Capaldi's portrayal. However, the writing team at the time weren't up to the job, and interpreted it as brash, unlikable, and prone to dangerous mood swings. The Twin Dilemma is one of the few stories that can claim to be anywhere near as bad as Love & Monsters. Few of Colin Baker's stories were any good, but instead of laying the responsibility for this with John Nathan turner, where it belonged, the BBC made a scapegoat of Colin Baker, and sacked him. It didn't really help, and while some better writers came along later, Doctor Who was cancelled in 1989.

That's why I've started a petition to remove Chris Chibnall. Please sign it.

Conscripts on Doctor Who

As mentioned before, my interests in conlanging and Doctor Who don't overlap as much as I'd like, due to Tardis telepathically translating everything. This apparently goes for writing too - in The Impossible Planet the Doctor realises that they're in a particularly dangerous situation when they encounter a script that the Tardis can't translate.

However, something odd has been going on this season. Amidst the rumours of the Hybrid, the theme of Truth of Consequences, the story of Ashildr, and the build up to the death of Clara, there's been another, more subtle theme in the background. In Under the Lake / Before the Flood, the Fisher King scratches this on the wall of his hearse.

The Doctor can't read it, and has to get Cass to lip-read what the ghosts are saying before he can work out what it means. The reason that the Tardis can't translate it is that the writing is intended to plant a message in the mind of the reader. Also, in that story we have the use of British Sign Language, which the Tardis can't translate because The Doctor's forgotten it.

In The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion we see this where the Zygon rebels have been active.

Neither The Doctor, Clara nor the Tardis is present in these scenes, and whatever the poster says doesn't come into the story.

In Sleep No More, we see this Indo-Japanese script (apparently a hybrid on Kanji and Devanagari) on Le Verrier Space Station.

In this case it's not translated because what we're seeing has been hacked from the visual cortices of those who experienced the events, most of whom could read the script to start with. As in Under the Lake / Before the Flood, Ramussen's broadcast is meant to be a vector for mental malware.

Finally, in Face the Raven, we get this.

This is a bit of an oddity. It's the Aurebesh script from Star Wars, which is simply a cipher for the Roman alphabet (Star Wars never having cared about plausible languages). It says Delorean, which is presumably a Back to the Future reference. It looks like this is just an in-joke.

So, is this leading up to something? Might Doctor Who be about to start using conlangs? And if so, please can I make one?

Alan Fridge

"From now on all rumours must be attributed to Alan Fridge!! BBC mole, Cardiff insider—Alan Fridge!!!"
—Steven Moffat (personal friend of Alan Fridge), Outpost Gallifrey Forums, 6 August 2007

Last year, a tabloid newspaper published a rumour that Jenna Coleman (who plays Clara) was leaving Doctor Who. It was, of course, complete rubbish, Jenna was quick to make it clear that she wasn't going to answer the question either way, since it was a goldmine of free publicity - something that the rest of the cast, crew and publicity department got on board with. Just before Christmas, when the fact that Jenna was staying couldn't be kept secret any longer, the rumourmonger tried to save face by claiming that she'd had a last minute change of heart, and that the ending of _Last Christmas_ had been hastily rewritten to accomodate this. However, the ending certainly didn't look tacked-on.

So who is Alan Fridge? My theory is that he's a low-ranking member of the production team, a runner or somebody like that. He's around a bit during filming, and picks up things like the row between Clara and The Doctor in _Kill the Moon_, or the old Clara scene in _Last Christmas_, but he doesn't have the big picture. He leaks information to the tabloids to make himself feel important, and probably for a kickback.

Orpheus in the TARDIS

As The Doctor noted in Dark Water, almost every culture has legends of an afterlife, and throughout this season we have seen Missy and her assistant Seb welcoming various characters to it. But which culture's afterlife is it? Despite Missy referring to it as "The Promissed Land" or "Heaven", it's not any contemporary religion's paradise. "The Nethersphere" is a more apt name, as it seems to based on the ancient Greek Underworld.

The plot of Dark Water parallels the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice. Clara takes the role of Orpheus, trying to recover Danny from the Underworld. In some versions of the Orpheus myth, Orpheus is unwittingly responsible for Euridice's death, as the fact that his music tames all wild beasts has left Euridice unafraid of snakes. Clara is unwittingly responsible for Danny's death, since her phone call distracted him while he was crossing the road. Volcanoes are often portrayed as gateways to the underworld.

There were various rivers in the Underworld. The most famous was the Styx, which was notably murky (stygian) - it was dark water. Having been bathed in the Styx was what gave Achilles his famous invulnerability - a power he shares with the Cybermen. Another of them was the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Those who drank from the Lethe forgot their former lives, and could then be reincarnated. The chance to forget his former life is what Seb offers Danny, although he doesn't explain that he's planning to reincarnate Danny as a Cyberman.

In the Orpheus myth, it is scepticism that proves Orpheus' downfall. Unwilling to trust Hades (who has never given up one of his subjects before), Orpheus breaks his promiss not to look back, and thus loses Euridice forever. Clara, encouraged by the Doctor to demand proof of Danny's identity, allows him to goad her into cutting off the conversation (ironically by repeating what she was telling him when he died), because he does not want her to risk her own life. We end the episode with the threat that Clara may lose him forever…

Why Doctor Who needs a Scientific Advisor

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke

A plot hole isn't something that's not explained. It's something you can't explain.
- Steven Moffat

Where does she get the milk for the soufflés?
- The Doctor Asylum of the Daleks

Kill the Moon was a weak episode. The theme of whether one should be prepared to do evil in the pursuit of a perceived greater good is a favourite one with Doctor Who, explored famously in Genesis of the Daleks, and more recently in The Beast Below and The Day of The Doctor. The Doctor's motives for leaving Clara and Courtney to make the crucial decision could have been better explored - a line to the effect of "I trusted you to do the right thing. I didn't trust myself," would have made far more sense of his actions. But the big problem is that the premisses of the story just didn't make sense.

We have a pretty good idea what the Moon is made of and how it was formed. If it were the egg of a giant space creature, the Apollo astronauts would have noticed. Even if it were, it wouldn't suddenly become heavier when it hatched - conservation of mass is one of the most basic laws of physics, so if something gets heavier, the extra mass has to come from somewhere. Bacteria are the size they are because their simple prokaryotic metabolism won't scale up. An oversized spider has to be a multicellular, eukaryotic organism. Even if a giant dragon could hatch out of the Moon, it couldn't fly away by flapping its wings in space - wings need an atmosphere to work. And if it did fly away, the gravitational effects of such a large thing doing so would seriously perturb the Earth's orbit. And no organism could lay an egg larger than itself immediately after hatching.

OK, this is a show about an alien who travels through time in a ship that's bigger on the inside, but even in that context these errors break suspension of disbelief. There's a difference between asking, "What if time travel were possible?" and just not caring about basic physics. The Doctor Who production team needs someone to consult about the scientific plausibility of a story, someone who could tell writers when something didn't work, and what they could do to improve it. "Either you need another way to set up your ethical dilemma, or we can work out something else that could be wrong with the Moon."

The worst story this century could have been vastly improved by a bit of scientific advice. "The monster could be a giant intelligent slime mould that engulfs its prey, and absorbs their knowledge as it digests them. It adopts the likeness of previous victims as camouflage. After The Doctor notices that it avoids one particular woman, who wears a distinctive perfume, he realises that vanilla contains a hormone that will cause its component cells to disperse harmlessly."

Doctor Who did employ somebody in this capacity once. That was Dr. Kitt Pedlar, co-creator of the cybermen.

Even the most fantastical universe has to make sense.

Reverse Conlanging

As regular readers will be aware, I like Doctor Who and conlanging.
Unfortunately, these don't intersect much, as the TARDIS has telepathic circuits that can translate any language. However, here's an exception

Venusian lullaby

The Curse of Peladon was written in the days when, if you wanted an alien language, you made up some gibberish and hoped for the best. However, this is coherent enough to make some sense of it. Using the Doctor's translation Close your eyes my darling, well three of them at least! I've worked out the following so far

klid

child

kloklid

diminutive, used to express affection

klida

1st person posessed form, used to express kinship

kloklida

My dear child

pɹaθ

eye

paɹθa

paucal, used for more than two, but not necessarily a complete set, for which the plural would be used

men

you

mennin

your

klatʃ

close (hortative)

One thing that might be harder to explain though, is why it's sung to a slowed-down version of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.

Ranking Doctor Who stories and writers

What with the 50th Anniversary last year, I thought it would be fun to sort the Doctor Who stories of the 21st Century into my personal order of preference. I wrote a Python script that repeatedly asked me Is Story A better than Story B? and used my answers as the basis of a binary sort that put the stories in order. The following is completely subjective, and I probably wouldn't even get the same result if I did it again, but here it is anyway.

1. Blink by Steven Moffat
2. The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances by Steven Moffat
3. The Girl in the Fireplace by Steven Moffat
4. Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead by Steven Moffat
5. The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon by Steven Moffat
6. The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone by Steven Moffat
7. The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People by Matthew Graham
8. The Crimson Horror by Mark Gatiss
9. The Doctor's Wife by Neil Gaiman
10. The Day of the Doctor by Steven Moffat
11. Cold War by Mark Gatiss
12. Midnight by Russell T Davies
13. The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood by Chris Chibnall
14. A Town Called Mercy by Toby Whithouse
15. Human Nature / The Family of Blood by Paul Cornell
16. Night Terrors by Mark Gatiss
17. Asylum of the Daleks by Steven Moffat
18. The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit by Matt Jones
19. Hide by Neil Cross
20. The Name of the Doctor by Steven Moffat
21. Nightmare in Silver by Neil Gaiman
22. The Time of the Doctor by Steven Moffat
23. The Bells of Saint John by Steven Moffat
24. The Angels Take Manhattan by Steven Moffat
25. The Wedding of River Song by Steven Moffat
26. The Eleventh Hour by Steven Moffat
27. The Girl Who Waited by Tom MacRae
28. A Good Man Goes to War by Steven Moffat
29. Let's Kill Hitler by Steven Moffat
30. The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang by Steven Moffat
31. The Unquiet Dead by Mark Gatiss
32. 42 by Chris Chibnall
33. The Power of Three by Chris Chibnall
34. Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS by Steven Thompson
35. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship by Chris Chibnall
36. The God Complex by Toby Whithouse
37. The Doctor's Daughter by Stephen Greenhorn
38. Planet of the Ood by Keith Temple
39. The Vampires of Venice by Toby Whithouse
40. The End of Time by Russell T Davies
41. The Waters of Mars by Russell T Davies and Phil Ford
42. The Stolen Earth / Journey's End by Russell T Davies
43. The Fires of Pompeii by James Moran
44. Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords by Russell T Davies
45. Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel by Tom MacRae
46. Amy's Choice by Simon Nye
47. The Snowmen by Steven Moffat
48. The Curse of the Black Spot by Stephen Thompson
49. Victory of the Daleks by Mark Gatiss
50. The Rings of Akhaten by Neil Cross
51. The Unicorn and the Wasp by Gareth Roberts
52. The Sontaran Strategem / The Poison Sky by Helen Raynor
53. The Beast Below by Steven Moffat
54. School Reunion by Toby Whithouse
55. Vincent and the Doctor by Richard Curtiss
56. The Lodger by Gareth Roberts
57. Tooth and Claw by Russell T Davies
58. Dalek by Robert Shearman
59. Closing Time by Gareth Roberts
60. The Shakespeare Code by Gareth Roberts
61. Planet of the Dead by Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts
62. Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks by Helen Raynor
63. Rose by Russell T Davies
64. Smith and Jones by Russell T Davies
65. Army of Ghosts / Doomsday by Russell T Davies
66. Partners in Crime by Russell T Davies
67. A Christmas Carol by Steven Moffat
68. The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe by Steven Moffat
69. Turn Left by Russell T Davies
70. The Lazarus Experiment by Stephen Greenhorn
71. New Earth by Russell T Davies
72. The Next Doctor by Russell T Davies
73. Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways by Russell T Davies
74. The Idiot's Lantern by Mark Gatiss
75. Gridlock by Russell T Davies
76. Father's Day by Paul Cornell
77. The Runaway Bride by Russell T Davies
78. The Christmas Invasion by Russell T Davies
79. Fear Her by Matthew Graham
80. Aliens of London / World War Three by Russell T Davies
81. The Long Game by Russell T Davies
82. Voyage of the Damned by Russell T Davies
83. The End of the World by Russell T Davies
84. Boom Town by Russell T Davies
85. Love & Monsters by Russell T Davies

As you can see, there's a lot of Steven Moffat stories at the top, and a lot of Russel T Davies at the bottom. Also, many of Steven Moffat's best stories were written before he was showrunner - a showrunner has to write more episodes, so they're not always going to be his absolute best. I also sorted the writers in order or the median rank of their stories, and got the following results.

1. Neil Gaiman

   Stories written

   2

   Best

   The Doctor's Wife (9)

   Worst

   Nightmare in Silver (21)

2. Matt Jones

   Stories written

   The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (18)

3. Steven Moffat

   Stories written

   21

   Best

   Blink (1)

   Worst

   The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe (68)

   Typical

   The Bells of Saint John (23)

4. Mark Gatiss

   Stories written

   6

   Best

   The Crimson Horror (8)

   Worst

   The Idiot's Lantern (74)

   Typical

   Night Terrors (16)

   The Unquiet Dead (31)

5. Chris Chibnall

   Stories written

   4

   Best

   The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood (13)

   Worst

   Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (35)

   Typical

   42 (32)

   The Power of Three (33)

6. Steven Thompson

   Stories written

   Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS (34)

7. Neil Cross

   Stories written

   2

   Best

   Hide (19)

   Worst

   The Rings of Akhaten (50)

8. Tom MacRae

   Stories written

   2

   Best

   The Girl Who Waited (27)

   Worst

   Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel (45)

9. Toby Whithouse

   Stories written

   4

   Best

   A Town Called Mercy (14)

   Worst

   School Reunion (54)

   Typical

   The God Complex (36)

   The Vampires of Venice (39)

10. Keith Temple

    Stories written

    Planet of the Ood (38)

11. Phil Ford

    Stories written

    The Waters of Mars (41)

12. James Moran

    Stories written

    The Fires of Pompeii (43)

13. Matthew Graham

    Stories written

    2

    Best

    The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People (7)

    Worst

    Fear Her (79)

14. Paul Cornell

    Stories written

    2

    Best

    Human Nature / The Family of Blood (15)

    Worst

    Father's Day (76)

15. Simon Nye

    Stories written

    Amy's Choice (46)

16. Stephen Thompson

    Stories written

    The Curse of the Black Spot (48)

17. Stephen Greenhorn

    Stories written

    2

    Best

    The Doctor's Daughter (37)

    Worst

    The Lazarus Experiment (70)

18. Richard Curtiss

    Stories written

    Vincent and the Doctor (55)

19. Helen Raynor

    Stories written

    2

    Best

    The Sontaran Strategem / The Poison Sky (52)

    Worst

    Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks (62)

20. Robert Shearman

    Stories written

    Dalek (58)

21. Gareth Roberts

    Stories written

    5

    Best

    The Unicorn and the Wasp (51)

    Worst

    Planet of the Dead (61)

    Typical

    Closing Time (59)

22. Russell T Davies

    Stories written

    24

    Best

    Midnight (12)

    Worst

    Love & Monsters (85)

    Typical

    Turn Left (69)

    New Earth (71)

A surprise at the top of the list - despite having written 7 of the top 10 episodes on my list, Steven Moffat only comes third on the writers' list. This is because his season opener and finale episodes from his time as showrunner tend to rank a bit lower (although still respectable). It also shows how difficult it is to make the comparison when the number of episodes written varies so much. RTD fans will no doubt be howling with rage that he comes bottom of the list of writers, but despite everything he did for the show, he just so happens to have written more of the episodes I find weak than anybody else. Midnight was very good though, and narrowly missed out on getting into the top 10. One thing that's not surprising is that Steven Moffat's weakest episode was a Christmas Special - Christmas Specials are generally weak. You're free to debate these lists as much as you like. However, please don't try to convince me that Love & Monsters has any redeeming features at all.

Wherein I Announce my Candidacy

I've spent most of the last two weeks job hunting. There's plenty going in my line of work (artificial intelligence and big data), but I do wonder if it would be a good idea to make a new start and try something completely different. As it, happens, a post's just become available that would be right up my street. Doctor Who There seem to be a lot of reasons why I'd be a good fit for the part. For one thing, I've only ever met one person who loves the show more than me. Second, I've got the right sort of English Eccentric vibe to me, and could pull off what, in honour of the fourth Doctor, I call Tomfoolery like nobody's business. My looks fit as well - nearly good looking but a little odd, with angular features and deep-set, bright blue eyes that give me an intense air. At 39, I'm not too old for the part. I have two children, so I can relate to the younger viewers. With an academic background in physics and experience of artificial intelligence, I can do the best technobabble in the known universe. I can not only reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, I could tell you how to polarize your neutron flow to start with. I even have the title "Doctor". My old college's motto was eadem mutata resurgo, "I rise again, the same but changed", which is very appropriate for The Doctor. Indeed, I can only think of one drawback to me playing The Doctor, and that's that my last acting experience was as Loony Bergonzi in a college production of Bugsy Malone 20 years ago. If you're reading, Mr Moffat, get in touch...

Some Original Reasons for Invading Earth

In some SF shows, it seems that Earth can scarcely get through a week without being invaded by aliens. The trouble is, the aliens are running out of reasons to invade. All the usual ones, enslaving the population, plundering the planet's mineral wealth, fleeing your doomed homeworld, converting the planet into a weapon of cosmic destruction, they've all been done. I'd like to suggest some alternatives for interplanetary despots in search of new reasons to invade.

Bragging rights

The guys back at home will be so jealous when they hear that we conquered Earth.

Turning the planet into a tourist resort

Beautiful scenery, fascinating cultures: Buy a SpaceTimeshare ® on Earth today!

Conceptual Art

This Happening challenges us to explore such themes as: What does it mean to be an alien? and Why do we really invade planets?

Dragées Those little silver coated sugar balls

used for decorating cakes. According to The Doctor, you can only get them on Earth. Have you any idea the price they fetch in Andromeda?

Doctor Who: The Almost People

The Almost People is a tale of humanity lost and found. As Jen, the Ganger we had most sympathy with last week is driven by her desire for revenge to become more and more monstrous, Cleeve, the human who was most monstrous last week, acknowledges her vulnerability and comes good. The other Gangers reluctantly agree to Jen's plan to destroy the humans, believing it to be their only chance of survival.

The Doctor trusts his Ganger immediately, but Amy finds she can't. She does, however, confide in him about the future Doctor's death, possibly hoping that it was the Ganger who died. She also tells the Doctor about Weird Eyepatch Woman, although the Doctor initally dismisses this as "just a Time Memory". Rory finds two Jens, and a fight breaks out between them, ending with one of them falling into a pool of acid and dissolving, revealing her to be a Ganger. When the surviving Jen shows Rory the pile of discarded Gangers, we are reminded that the Gangers do have a genuine grievance against the humans, but then we discover that the real Jen is dead. Her Ganger, having created another Ganger of herself for the purpose of destroying it to trick Rory into helping her, has crossed a line even by her own standards.

Rory and one of the Doctors have been captured by the Gangers, and base is heading for destruction, with the remaining Doctor and the surviving humans strugging to contain the acid, when Adam's son phones for his birthday. Adam's Ganger goes to get his original, only to find him dying. Being the Human who found it easiest to identify with his Ganger, Adam then hands his life over to his duplicate. The other Gangers no longer support Jen, and help the surviving humans to escape.

At the end, some of the survivors are humans and some are Gangers. We discover that the Doctors had switched boots earlier, so presumably the real Doctor knows about his assasination now. Although the Ganger Doctor and the Ganger Cleeve were dissolved stopping the now completely monstrous Jen, the possiblity that they could reconstitute themselves is left open. But ther's a bigger revalation left to come.

You remember there was a thowaway line last week about how the Flesh could even duplicate clothes? Well, I'd been wondering for a while why Amy, who loves dressing up, had been wearing the same outfit all season. It turned out that since Day of the Moon, the Amy we've been seeing has been a Ganger, and that the real Amy was being held prisoner somewhere. This explains why the Tardis couldn't decide whether she was pregnant or not - the Ganger wasn't, the real Amy was. Now, she's about to give birth, while held captive by the Weird Eyepatch Woman.

By the way, did anyone else think that the episode titles should have been the other way round?

Doctor Who: The Rebel Flesh

The Rebel Flesh brought an unusual element of hard SF into Doctor Who. Programmable matter is an idea that nanotechnologists are actively working on. It's role in the story was to explore the familiar idea of artificial people - here, the "Gangers" (short for Doppelgangers were being used to undertake hazardous work (mining deadly acid) as a safety precuation for their human operators. The opening scene brought home how this could dehumanize the operators - when a Ganger falls into a vat of acid, his colleagues are more concerned about the loss of his protective suit than him - and at this point, we don't know that he's a Ganger.

The Doctor is clearly up to something - he's planning to drop Amy and Rory off for chips and deal with this one himself. It also becomes apparent later in the episode that he already knows something about The Flesh, and isn't telling anyone what. Having bluffed his way into the facility with the Psychic Paper (a device that's being used more sparingly of late), the Dcotor inspects The Flesh in its vat, and it inspects him. After the rather creepy sight of a Ganger being created, we get the solar storm that knocks everybody out, ruptures the acid pipes, and makes the Gangers independent of their originals. The Frankenstein reference is obvious, but it reminded me more closely of Short Circuit.

The Gangers now have all the memories of their human originals. As Rory gets to know Jen, we find that they are frightened and confused. So are the humans, who at first think of the free Gangers as nothing but a threat. The Doctor introduces the Gangers to their originals, and at first it seems that there's some sort of understanding developing between the Gangers and the humans. But as in The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood, somebody has to go and ruin everything - in this case it's Cleeve, the leader, who electrocutes one of the Gangers - I think. Since the Gangers look identical to the Humans at this point, it could easily have been a Ganger killing a Human, a Ganger killing a Ganger or a Human killing a Human. At this point, our sympathies lie very much with the Gangers, but as Ganger Jen, the one that we have most empathy with, encourages her fellows to rise up in revolt, the waters become considerably muddier. The humans try to barricade themselves into the safest part of the base, but Rory is left outside, and in with them is a Ganger... of The Doctor.

All the ingredients in this story are familiar - artificial humans, a base under siege, a conflict that The Doctor tries to prevent but can't, sympathetic monsters and unsympathetic humans, The Doctor being cut off from the Tardis, the duplicate of The Doctor. It's the way they've been mixed that comes off really well in this story.

One last detail... Amy saw the weird woman with the eyepatch again.

Doctor Who: The Doctor's Wife

The titleThe Doctor's Wife turned out to be a metaphor, but it was an apt one. You can well imagine hardcore fans debating who might be the greatest love of The Doctor's life. Was it Susan's grandmother? Was it Sarah Jane Smith? (RIP Lis Sladen) Was it Romana? Was it Rose Mary Sue Tyler? Was it Madame de Pompadour? Is it River Song?

No, it's the Tardis. Obvious when you think about it.

The episode has a sinister opening, with Uncle, Auntie and Nephew (an Ood) preparing Idris to have her soul sucked out and replaced with another one. Cut to The Doctor, Amy and Rory in the Tardis, bantering about past adventures. There's a knock on the door. They're in space. The Doctor opens the door and finds a message capsule from another Time Lord, "The Corsair". The message leads them to a junkyard world in a pocket universe, where the Matrix is sucked out of the Tardis.

It turns out to be a trap of course - while The Doctor searches for other survivors of the Time War, he sends Amy and Rory back to the Tardis and locks them in. He then discovers that House, the planet they are on, is a sentient planet that eats Tardises, and that The Corsair has been killed and his body parts used in House's patchwork servants. Meanwhile, House having heard from The Doctor that his Tardis is the last one left, has decided to hijack it and head for our universe in search of more food. But The Doctor has an ally - Idris, who has become a personification of the Tardis.

Neil Gaiman makes good use of Doctor Who's past in this story, pulling off the trick of using references to previous adventures in such a way that they add something if you know the reference, but don't take anything away if you don't. The Tardis comes across as pleasingly barmy, and the idea that she wanted to see the universe, so she stole a Time Lord and ran away is a neat symmetry. Best quote of the episode has to be the following exchange-

I just want to say, you know, you have never been very reliable.
And you have?
You didn't always take me where I wanted to go.
No, but I always took you where you needed to go.
You did!

Of course, we always knew that was how it worked, but now it's been said on screen.

But despite focussing on The Doctor's relationship with his Tardis, the episode didn't neglect Amy and Rory, and showed some real insights into their relationship too. Amy, who's normally full of mad bravado, was allowed to let the mask slip and be vulnerable. The quote "Hold my hand, Rory," when the Tardis took off under House's control was touching, and she was bought face to face with her greatest possible fear - losing Rory not only physically, but emotionally too. Then the real Rory turn up, and show us what she needs him to be - the reliable one, the one sane person in a mad universe. Rory had had a wonderful Genre Savvy moment earlier, when House asked, "Why shouldn't I just kill you now?" and he replied, "Because it wouldn't be any fun." Interesting that the Tardis thought that he was "the pretty one".

This week's cryptic bit - The river is the only water in your forest. River Song, perhaps? she did appear in Forest of the Dead, and also appeared in a forest in Flesh and Stone.

Note to Steven Moffat- ask Neil Gaiman back.