Merry Christmas, all you at home! Ahem. I’ve got to start reviewing these things a bit faster.

Anyhow. A few months back, it was Christmas, and Doctor Who brought us its fourth Christmas special. It was called ‘The Next Doctor’, and it starred David Morrissey as ‘The Doctor’. This was back before we knew about Matt Smith, so it was all a bit more interesting than it sounds now.

But only a bit. Perhaps wisely, ‘The Next Doctor’ doesn’t play for too long with the idea that Morissey could really be Doctor #11. When the Doctor lands in Victorian London at Christmas, he meets another man who calls himself the Doctor, and who seems to have watched a lot of Colin Baker episodes. The resulting confusion is milked for some excellent jokes, but is resolved quite quickly when it turns out that the real danger is the Cybermen — fallen through some crack in reality again, as they do. It’s one of Davies’ shopping-list episodes, but sadly not all the pieces really fit this time. There’s a fake Doctor, he’s interesting. There’s a villainous woman in a red dress, who’s well acted. There’s a bunch of Cybermen, and they stomp well, especially in the snow. There’s a balloon. But it doesn’t all come together as neatly as a similarly odd collection of elements did in ‘Tooth and Claw’.

Part of the problem is the connection between the heroes and the villains, or lack thereof. Both the Doctors know of the Cybermen, after a fashion, but let’s face it; there’s not much emotional connection between a human and a Cyberman. It’s why they always bring along a nasty human in the first place, like Miss Hartigan. But the Doctor doesn’t know Miss Hartigan. Jackson doesn’t know Miss Hartigan. Some characters do, but they get killed quite quickly. By having both Doctors fixated on the Cybermen, it makes her feel a little surplus to requirements.

But aside from feeling a little hollow, the episode has some marvellous set pieces. The first conversation between Doctor and not-quite-Doctor is excellent. There’s a cute montage of the previous Doctors. As I previously alluded to, the Cybermen marching through the snow is glorious. And there is something pretty impressive about the Doctor in a balloon over London fighting a giant cyberman — even if the cyberman in question is somewhat above-average implausible.¹

The core of the story is David Morrissey’s Jackson Lake, a man so desperate to escape his tragic past that he’s entered a fugue state and forgotten it all. Morrissey’s performance, once the Doctorishness subsides, is suitably emotional, but Jackson quickly becomes just a little too pathetic; partly due to the script not granting him a last gasp at heroism to save his son,² but letting the Doctor do it instead. It’s arguably realistic, but it felt wrong, in such an otherwise cheesy tale, not to give the poor man his moment in the sun.

I always feel a bit of a scrooge complaining about Christmas specials. This one isn’t bad, as such — it just feels kind of messy and disconnected. But it does have a giant robot, so it’s not all bad. Who doesn’t want a giant robot for Christmas?

1. The Cyber King seems, frankly, too awesome to have belonged to those scrappy Cybus Cybermen. Clearly they’ve been up to something. Actually, from a nerdy point of view, the whole script would have worked better if the Cybermen were proper, normal Cybermen from the classic series. Then they wouldn’t have had to suggest that the Cybes had stolen all their information on the Doctor while in the Void. It seems odd that they’d have the chance to nick all the Daleks’ Doctor Who DVDs whilst existing in a no-place gulf between dimensions. ↩
2. His poor son, captured by Cybermen and forced to wear ridiculous amounts of eyeliner. ↩

This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Saturday, April 18th, 2009. It concerns such pressing issues as Doctor Who, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.