Written: Russell T. Davies
Director: James Strong
Starring:David Tennant, Kylie Minogue, George Costigan, Clive Swift, Geoffrey Palmer, Bernard Cribbens, Gray O’Brien, Russell Tovey, Debbie Chazen, Clive Row, Jimmy Vee and Paul Casey
Featuring: Jason Mohammed, Nicholas Witchell and Jessica Martin as the voice of H. M. Queen Elizabeth II
1. Plot:
The Doctor has been rebuilding the TARDIS, and whilst the shields are down, the prow of a ship comes crashing through the wall of the console room. The Doctor finds a life preserver with the name “Titanic” written on it. The Doctor repairs the damage and lands the TARDIS aboard a ship in orbit over the Earth. This is a recreation of the infamous vessel for aliens from the Planet Sto, who have some very strange notions about the Planet Earth.
The Doctor meets Astrid who is a waitress aboard the ship. Astrid wants to see the galaxy, but Max Capricorn Cruises is too mean to pay the insurance premium that would allow the crew to visit the planets they orbit. He wangles is way onto a shore excursion down to London and takes Astrid with him. She is overjoyed to be visiting another World.
Unfortunately, the trip is cut short by a power failure aboard. This intrigues the Doctor, who discovers that the ships shields have been switched off and that there is meteorite storm on the way. Up on the Bridge, Midshipman Frame witnesses the Captain deliberately set in motion the sinking of his ship. Admitting to the young officer on watch with him, that he is terminally ill The Captain says that by crashing the spaceship, his family will receive a large amount of money. He shoots Midshipman Frame.
The Doctor has been trying to get in contact with the Bridge and warn them of the impending disaster. This reveals his stowaway status and he is arrested by the stewards. As he is taken away, he tries to warn the passengers, but is taken away into the heart of the vessel. A group of friends and rich businessman Rixston Slade follow the Doctor and the Stewards and are therefore saved when the meteors hit.
The robotic “Heavenly Host” servitors have been reprogrammed by an unseen force and are now single minded killing machines, determined to kill any survivors they encounter. The Doctor has to try and make his way to the Bridge with his group of friends, whilst avoiding the Host in order to put thing right.
The Doctor discovers that the Host are being controlled by something on Deck 31, and goes down to investigate.
2. Thoughts
In the past Doctor Who was well known for borrowing heavily from the plots classic movies, usually the Hammer Horror films, and repackaging them in its own unique way. This year, Russell T. Davies has returned to that tradition, by taking all the elements of the classic disaster movies of the 1970’s and and mixing them up into something new, and to be perfectly honest, quite wonderful. OK, so it was not the deepest of plots ever to feature in Doctor Who, but it is exactly what works on Christmas Night with the episode receiving an average rating of 12.2 million viewers, an exceptional figure.
The ship was called the Titanic, although considering the plot of this story it was should have been to the Poseidon. Although to be fair, having the prow of the Titanic burst through the TARDIS was more dramatic as that ship is probably more prominent in the memory of the viewers than it fictional counterpart.
The people of the Planet Sto are obsessed by the Earth, but they only have a very garbled knowledge of the planet. I suspect that what they do know is from garbled radio signals picked in deep space and from scientific probes sent to the planet, and that this is the first major tourist trip from Sto to Earth. I don’t find this obsession at all surprising, imagine if the Human race discovered a planet inhabited by a species that looked and acted so much like us, but were alien in so many other respects. This produced one of the best characters in the story, Mr. Copper, the ship’s experts on all things from Earth, expertly brought to life by Clive Swift. The fact that Mr. Copper actually knew next to nothing about Earth could be easily disguised by the fact that neither did anybody else.
Although it struck me that on the Planet Sto society mirrors that of Edwardian England, in that you are either obscenely rich or grindingly poor, with very little in between. It is revealed that the Van Hoffs would have to work for twenty years to pay off a debt equivalent to just £100. That Captain Hardacre was tempted into sinking his ship because he had been promised enough money to leave his family comfortably off after he died seems to me to be the actions of a man who knew exactly what deep poverty of his home planet was like and did not want to inflict it on his family. Also reinforcing the idea of there being very little social mobility was the fact that the Van Hoffs were treated like mud by the other passengers aboard the Titanic because they had won their tickets, and were not down in Steerage with the rest of the plebs.
I have never rated Kylie Minogue as an actress. Moving into the music industry was possibly the cleverest thing she ever did. It is therefore lucky that she was just one of the ensemble who gathered around the Doctor and survived the crash. To misquote the cartoon series South Park “Oh my God! They killed Kylie! You Bastards!”. Although the death of her character Astrid Peth came as no surprise to me. As soon as she returned to the Titanic and told the Doctor that she had fulfilled a lifetime ambition, I knew that she would not survive to the end of the episode, that she would sacrifice herself nobly to save the Doctor. The fact that she was a little too keen to join the Doctor in his travels also pointed to the fact that the character would be toasted sooner or later.
As The Voyage of the Damned was a homage to the great disaster movies of the 1970’s it was necessary to fill the Doctor’s group with people who survived the original disaster, but not to the end of the story. Most prominent were Debbie Chazen and Clive Rowe as the doomed but still charming Foon and Morvin van Hoff. These two character were presented so wonderfully, their deaths were massive shocks. Even though they had only had a few minutes of screen time, they managed to fill the screens with their presence magnificently.
There is no doubt that David Tennant is a good looking man, but it is obvious that the writers still having him thinking he is an aged grumpy old man, despite what he said in Time Crash. So the look on the Doctor’s face after Astrid said OK to seeing him in the mornings, when he twigs that he is attractive to women was absolutely priceless. David Tennant is now pitch perfect as the Doctor, just the right balance of eccentricity and heroism.
One of the main problem I have with this story is how perky Midshipman Frame is by the end. He has been shot in the stomach for goodness sake. I know we see him patching himself up a bit, but should still have been in agony. By half way through the story, he is acting as if there was nothing ever wrong with him. I know that he is not actually human, he is from the Planet Sto, but the Stoians look human, they have the same sorts of emotions as humans and have a society that is recognisably human in structure, so he should experience pain like a human.
It was nice to see that an old Doctor Who tradition of completely emptying London has been continued in this story. Ever since The Dalek Invasion of Earth back in 1964, that great metropolis has been emptied by the narrative to hide the fact that the crew were filming at some ungodly deserted hour. It is a pity that during the insert of BBC News containing genuine BBC Royal Correspondent Nicholas Witchell, a harassed looking businesswoman was seen walking in front Buckingham Palace in what was supposed to be an empty city. Although if the city was so deserted, exactly who was Bernard Cribbins’ character Wilf going to sell all those newspapers to, and were exactly did he get them from anyway? Needless to say Cribbins was a wonderful addition to the scene, his presence adding to the whole notion that in Doctor Who London is now not a safe place to be at Christmas.
3. Stars
5 out of 5
Thoughts on the Overnight Ratings
As usual, the unofficial overnight ratings, based on the initial returns from the BARB sampling system were released and it showed that Voyage of the Damned had been watched by an average of 12.2 million people. As the day wore on, the first breakdown of the figures showed that in the last five minutes, 13.9million people had watched the episode. A few days later, the Audience Appreciation Index of 86 was published, which would be excelent for any drama, but for one with such a large audience, it was outstanding.
So why should I be so excited about these figures. My mother summed it up best when she told my sister that for so many years being a Doctor Who fan left me open to so much ridicule, because the series had fallen so far from grace during the last few years of the original run. Now that the series is back and is so very popular, it has justified my faith in the series. I have followed it through thick and thin because I knew how good it was, and now everybody is seeing what I saw, and that is brilliant.
