The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

Written by: Russell T. Davies
Directed by: Andy Goddard
Starring: David Tennant, David Morrissey, Viele Tshablala, Dirvla Kirwen

1. Plot:
The Doctor appears to have had the TARDIS set to land at a random location, as he arrives in 1851, with no idea when or where he is.  However, within seconds of arriving he hears someone screaming his name, calling for assistance.  He rushes down a back lane and finds a damsel in distress.  Unfortunately, he is not the Doctor that she was expecting.  A man appears and informs all present that he is The Doctor, the original and the best.  Doctor#10 instantly assumes that he has crossed his own timeline and he has encountered a future version of himself.  Things don’t quite add up though.  Doctor#10 tags along, and it soon becomes apparent that the Next Doctor is not all he appears to be.

Elsewhere in London, a funeral is taking place.  The governors of all the workhouses in Central London are present to pay their last respects to Reverend Aubrey Fairchild a well loved local clergyman who died under mysterious circumstances.  Miss  Mercy Hartigan, matron of Saint Joseph’s Workhouse arrives at the graveside in a bright red dress.  She causes a stir, but not as big a stir as the Cybermen, who kidnap four of the mourners and kill the rest.

Using the power supply of an alien Infostamp device, Doctor#10 and the Next Doctor narrowly escape the Cybermen hidden in the late Reverend Fairchild’s house. They go back to where the Next Doctor has set up his base and parked his TARDIS, the Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style, a hot air balloon.

Doctor#10 has worked out who and what the Next Doctor is.  He tells the Next Doctor that Jackson Lake had moved to London to start a new job.  Unfortunately the basement of his new house was at the entrance to a Cyberman base. They killed Lake’s wife but before they could kill him, he used an infostamp powercell to destroy the cyberguards and escape.  In his greif he absorbs all the information from the infostamp that had killed his tormentors, information all about the Cybermen’s greatest enemy, The Doctor and his mind snapped.  He became the Doctor and Jackson Lake died.

Lake remembers who he is, but it is too late, the Cybermen are moving.  Children from four local workhouses are marched to the Cyberbase, where they toil away powering up a giant starter motor.  The Cybermen have betrayed Miss Hartigan and installed her as the central processor of the Cyber-King, a dreadnought class Cyberwarship.  However, Hartigan’s mind is more powerful than the Cybermen could have imagined, and she uses her intelect to take command of the Cyber-King and all its crew of Cybermen.

The Real Doctor must now use the Fake Doctor’s T.A.R.D.I.S. balloon to destroy the Cyber-King.

2. Thoughts:
Another cracking Christmas Special, but for some reason, I felt a bit empty after it had been broadcast.  It was just as cinematic as previous year’s specials, but there was something about it that did not quite gel.  I still love Voyage of the Damned, think The Runaway Bride is unbeatable, and enjoyed The Christmas Invasion. I suppose it is because I am now used to a big fat dose of Doctor Who on Christmas Night and my expectations for this story were set way to high.  Never the less, there was so much in this story to enjoy.

One of the big selling points of this story was the identity of the other man calling himself The Doctor.  Was he really the next incarnation of The Doctor, who had somehow jumped across the timelines, was he a conman I speculated back in November or was he just a screaming nut-job.  Well, as it turns out, my speculation was completely wrong, he was not a conman he was infact a man who in a moment of extreme pressure became a charactature of The Doctor to hide from the horrors of the real world.  In many ways, this makes this story closer to the Big Finish’s Doctor#8 Audio play Minuet in Hell than their Doctor#6 Story The One Doctor.  (Although fortunately this story left ot the atrocious fake Deep South accents from that particular audio production). David Morrissey’s performances were without fault, whether  as a man who through tragic circumstances become a parody of The Doctor, or the broken and greiving man given hope to rebuild his life.  I still believe that he would be great if cast as the real Doctor#11, but after seeing this story it now seems very unlikely.  However, if the character of Jackson Lake were to become a regular recurring character, with at least one story per year, for the foreseeable future, set in the 1850’s, lets face it, the Doctor’s upcoming regeneration gives rise to at least  possible story where the new Doctor and Lake have to rebuild the rapport that developed in The Next Doctor.

Once the mystery of Jackson Lake and who he really was solved, it was as if a switch was flicked and the less interesting Cyber-Invasion plot moved up a gear and took centre stage.  It was fairly obvious from the start that the Cybermen would double-cross the deliciously evil Miss Hartigan.  Following in the footsteps of Tracy Ann Oberman as a woman who beat the Cybermen at their own game is Dervla Kirwen  playing the villainous Miss Hartigan with just the right amount of arrogance and insecurity.  It seems to be a trademark of Russell T. Davies that he creates strong willed women who are able to resist the might of cyber-conversion and hold their own against the metal monsters.   Indeed, Davies implied in the podcast commentary for this episode that Miss Hartigan’s background had damaged her to such an extent, that even Cyber-conversion was not great hardship.  Hartigan was already insane, which is why she made her Faustian deal with  the Cybermen in the first place, and it was that insanity that lead to her being able to over-rule the cybertechnology in which she found herself ensnared.  It is not until The Doctor breaks the link between the Cyber-King and repairs her damaged mind that Miss Hartigan can see clearly what she has done and what she has become.  She destroys herself and her court of Cybermen, leaving the Doctor to dispose of the hulking dreadnought that could do so much damaged to the web of time.

At first I thought that the appearance of a giant robot on Christmas Morning 1851 was very silly, as after all the Doctor Who Universe is supposed to be almost identical to our own, and in the presense of alien tech in the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign would cause a massive divergence.  Which is why it had to magically disappear, this is not some cop-out ending as some critics have claimed, it was a vital part of the story.  In Remembrance of the Daleks Doctor#7 asks his companion Ace if she “remembered the Yetis in the Underground or the Zygon gambit with the Loch Ness Monster?”.  When Ace replies in the negative, The Doctor states that Human Beings have a remarkable talent for self deception.  Jackson Lake states that the events of this story will enter into history,but again he is mistaken.  More apparently rational reasons for the events of 25th December, 1851 will be dreamt up.  Excuses that better fit the zeitgeist  will take the place of the truth, and anyone who remembers the truth will be labeled a lunatic.

Which brings us back to Mr. Jackson Lake and his relationship with young Rosita.  Russell T. Davies cleverly plays the social structure of the age with these two characters.  When she thought that she would be dealing with The Doctor and travelling in space and time far away from the World she knew, the she was on first (albeit strange first) name terms with The Doctor.  Once she realised that he was simply Jackson Lake, a man from the same place in time as herself, but so much higher up the social ladder, then she started refering to him as “Sir” and became far more subservient.    It was exactly the same with Mr. Lake, as when he thought he was The Doctor, then she was his companion because he was the egalitarian hero, once he realised who he really was, then Rosita was instantly demoted from the position of friend to that of servant, merely a potential nursemaid for his son.

I’m not exactly sure why the Cybermen needed all those children from the various London workhouses.  And why did they need them for such a short period of time.  The only reason I can think of is so that there was a big set-piece rescue towards the end of the boring cyber-invasion sub-plot to make The Doctor and friends look good.

The thing that I disliked most about this story was the way that The Doctor was dealing with the rump of the Cybus Cybermen from the alternative Universe Rose now lives in.  The fact that they had a dreadnought Cyber-King was is a bit of a problem, because it does not fit neatly with what we know about the Cybus Cybermen.  They were a newly created creatures, who were rapidly building up their numbers when the Doctor foilled them in the alternative Universe, these Cybus Cybermen were then royally thrashed by the Daleks and locked away in the howling void between universes.  There is no way that that the Cybus Cybermen  could have build the sort of vehicle that was displayed in The Next Doctor.  However, if they were Cybus Cybermen, then this has to be the Grand Unifying moment that connects the Cybus Cybermen with the traditional models.  Imagine if Jackson Lake got it wrong, and the Cyber-king did not disintegrate in the Vortex, but travelled through it before crashing on the Planet Mondas, which at the time was making its way back to its parent Solar System.  The sick and dieing indigenous people of Mondas saw Cybus upgrades as a way of surviving and growing strong in their harsh world, and the Cybermen that we know from the original run of Doctor Who were born.

3. Stars:
4 out of 5

The unofficial overnight ratings for Christmas Day have shown that the BBC has once again wiped the floor with the opposition.  I said  earlier in the month that I thought that the BBC had a pitch perfect line up for the biggest television watching day of the year.   I hve been proven right, as nine of the top ten watched programmes were from the BBC.  The latest Wallace and Gromit animation A Matter of Loaf and Death was the most watched programme of the day, with an average rating of 14.8 million and an audience share of 58%, and once the final figures are in, it looks as if it will be the most watched programme of the year.  The festive Doctor Who offering came in second with an overnight rating of 11.7 million and an audience share of 51%.  The only ITV programme to dent Aunty’s dominance was Corronation Street, which was number 8 in the overnight charts.

This year, there is going to be a little touch of Nigella at my Christmas Dinner.  I  help my mother do the family dinner and we both wanted to try some of the things we saw on Nigella Lawson’s cookery programme this week.  So we will be cooking the Brussels Sprouts, my favourite vegetable, with chestnuts and bacon, and  preparing a Gingerbread Stuffing to be served with the king of birds, the Turkey.  Our bird will be glazed with butter and maple syrup, but we decided to draw the line at soaking the bird in brine overnight before roasting.

However, despite the fact that nearly all the food for Christmas has been bought and is stored ready for the big day, a few things still need to be purchased.  For instance, I need to get some Massalla  for the sprouts.  Also, where do I get the vacuum packed cooked chestnuts that Nigella was raving over.

And so, the second radio show has been broadcast on Radio CwmNi, before it went off air again.    This week, I did a quick look forward  to the highlights of Christmas television for this year.

The song Shooting Star by the band Dollar was played during the original broadcast, which lead to the discussion of I’m  a Celebrity… which was not one of the  programmes I planned to discuss.

Here is a cleaned up version for your delectation.

Week 6

Dw i’n mynd i’m dosbarth Cymraeg olaf  cyn Wyl y Nadolig ar nos Fawrth.   Dw i’n mwynhau’r dosbarthau yn fawr iawn ac mae’r  bobl yn gyfeillgar.  Dw i’n gobeithio cofio popeth o hyd ym mis Ionawr.

I am going to the last Welsh lesson before the Christmas Holiday on Tuesday Night.  I am enjoying the lessons and the people are friendly.  I hope I remember everything in January.

Yes, I know it is nine whole months since Week 4, but Radio CwmNi is still a fledgling organisation, and it takes time get things moving.  This time,  Radio CwmNi is being broadcast over the Internet instead of over the airwaves.  My feature is still part of the 4pm to 6pm Drive Home Show, however, this time around it is presented by Andrew Rutledge and it was broadcast on Thursday afternoon at 4.15pm.

The programmes covered this week were Survivors and Strictly Come Dancing.

Week 5

The final television schedules for Christmas Day has now been published by the BBC.  Behold the pure unsullied perfection that is the BBC ONE schedule for Christmas day:

14:00 Top of the Pops
15:00 Her Majesty the Queen’s Christmas Message to Britain & the Commonwealth.
1510 FILM: Shark Tale
16:30 FILM: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit
17:50 BBC News
18:00 Doctor Who: The Next Doctor
19:00 Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special
20:00 EastEnders
20:30 Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death
21:00 EastEnders
21:30 The Royle Family
22:30 Blackadder Rides Again
23:35 BBC News
23:45 FILM: Bend It Like Beckham

Not a single dud note between 2pm and close down.  Something for everyone, (the must be someone who likes the annual Liz Windsor Show).  Highlight of the day for me has to be the Doctor Who Christmas Special, The Next Doctor at 6pm. All I know about the ITV1 Christmas day schedule is that once again Emmerdale is the competition for Doctor Who, and once again the Yorkshire based soap is going to get slaughtered in the ratings on Christmas Day.  But as Doctor Who Forum user ProsperoSmith so eloquently put it :

“That BBC1 schedule does look pretty unmissable. As for 6pm, Emmerdale would need to have its entire cast slaughtered live, like pigs, and by the Royal Family and Amy Winehouse, with blunt scissors, while the cast of High School Musical dance in front of the action and X Factor hopefuls immolate themselves in the wings in order to beat Doctor Who.”

Other highlights include the triumphant resurgence of Top of the Pops for a Christmas Day Special that the suits at the BBC said would never happen.  And of course Doctor Who will be followed by the Christmas edition of Strictly Come Dancing. Two of my favourite television programmes on in full on the same evening, it just does not get better than that.

Written by: Gareth Roberts
Directed by: Graeme Harper

Starring: Elisabeth Sladen, Tommy Knight, Anjili Mohindra, Daniel Anthony, Mina Anwar, Ace Bhatti, the voice of Alan Armstrong
Guest Starring: Rosanna Lavelle, Christopher Pizzey, Jimmy Vee, Robert Madge, Paul Mark-Davies, Georgie Glen, Andrew Bullivant and the voice of Philip Hurd-Wood

1.Plot:

Part 1:
In a deserted shop in a precinct on the edge of West London a rift in time opens up.  From it springs Oliver, a very frightened little boy. He runs terrified until he is cornered by Clyde and Rani.  Sarah Jane takes him back to the village of Foxgrove, the village that disappeared underneath the urban sprall of London in the 1960s; the village where she was born.

Despite telling her young entourage that she has no intention of visiting her past, the temptation is too great.  She tries to sneak back to her past, but Luke knows where she is going and insists on traveling with her.  They arrive in  Foxgrove on the day of the village fete.    Sarah Jane soon meets her mother Barbara and her father Eddie. They hit it off immediately.  She offers to help Barbara in the refreshment tent, telling her parents that she is Victoria Beckham from London Luke is her son is David.

Clyde realises that something is wrong when the ever punctual Luke failed to turn up at his house.  He goes up to the attic and asks Mr. Smith where Luke and Sarah Jane have gone.  Mr Smith tells him that he cannot trace either mother or son, and he suspects that they have gone through the rift to 1951.  Rani spots the Veron Soothsayer’s puzzle-box glowing amongst the other alien artefacts in the attic.  Clyde realises that the Trickster is somehow behind what is happening, and that they must go back to the rift.

Luke spots the boy Oliver, and tries to follow him.  He apparently vanishes, but in the process Luke discovers that they have travelled back to the day that Sarah Jane’s parents die. Sarah Jane wants to see what the World would be like if her parents had never been killed on that fateful day, so she sabotages their car.  On returning through the void, she finds herself standing on a devastated planet.  A planet ruled by the Trickster.

The Proud Parents

Part 2:
The Trickster tells Sarah Jane that making one tiny change in the Web of Time at that particular location has allowed him to enter the real world and cause havoc.  Sarah Jane and Luke return to 1951, to try and find a way of stopping the Trickster manifesting itself that does not involve the death of her parents.

Rani and Clyde have been protected from the change in the time line by the Puzzle Box.  They discover a version of Gita Haresh, a joyless loveless slave of the Graske who tells them that the World ended in 1951, when the Trickster manifested itself through the Abbot’s Gateway after deceiving the legendary Sarah Jane Smith.  They also discover that the Graske yearns to be free of his Faustian deal with the Trickster, and if he helps them defeat it, then they will free him.

Sarah Jane and Luke return to 1951, where things are going from bad to worse.  The locals have moved the Village Fete indoors, believing that they are only seeing a rapid deterioration in the weather.  Rani has been sent back to 1951. Unfortunately Barbara now knows Sarah Jane’s true identity. She is taken back to the Church Hall by Eddie, but everything they touch is now turning to dust.    As the Trickster manifests itself, they realise that they must sacrifice themselves for the good of the World, and drive off, leaving baby Sarah Jane alone in the Village Square.  With the Trickster once more banished to the Limbo Dimensions, the time travellers are free to return home.

In a restored 2009, Clyde honours his agreement with the Graske and hands him the box.  It teleports away as Sarah Jane, Rani and Luke arrive back.  It has been a bittersweet experience for Sarah Jane.  She finally gets to meet the parents she never knew, but in doing so it causes a great deal of grief for her.

The Eye of the Storm

2. Thoughts:
When I watched this story, my initial reaction was when was Sarah Jane Smith swapped with Sarah Jane Thick?  For most of this story, she behaves in a way totally at odds with the character we know and love.  She says that she knows she is facing a trap, but has to spring it because that is the only way that she will find out who set it.  Sorry dear, it does not work like that.  Mice are not enlightened about humans by eating the cheese that appears so temptingly for them on mousetraps.  Now it could be argued that the Trickster is pushing all Sarah Janes’ emotional buttons, and she is in such a state that she cannot really think straight.  However, she has Luke with her and in this story Pinocchio is acting as her Jiminy Cricket, constantly warning her of the danger she is in and the problems she could be causing.  All to no avail, the more Luke tells his mother not do something, the more determined she is to hush ahead with her plans.  Even after seeing the end of the World, she is still in denial, and it is as if all she learnt about time travelling with the Doctor counts for nothing.

On the subject of the Doctor, I loved the fact that Sarah Jane and Luke spotted an old Police Box, although it was perfectly obvious, even to the most casual viewer that this was not the TARDIS, its colours was wrong, and it appeared to be too small to be even a real Police Box. However, given the state of mind that Sarah Jane was in, it was obvious that she would delude herself into thinking it was the TARDIS.  Not that the Doctor would have any sympathy for the mess that Sarah Jane has got herself into.

The location filming of the Village Fete was done on some of the wettest days of the alleged Summer of 2008.  The special effects experts  at  The Mill have done a remarkable job in the colour grading of this story.  The grey unpleasantness of the Trickster manifesting itself was exactly how I remembered those dreary August days, and the bright but utterly natural colours before and after Sarah Jane messes up have been digitally added. The enhancing of what must have been dry but overcast shots added to the atmosphere of the story, this was the past as we like to remember it, with glorious summer days that seem to go on forever.

Some people have noted the similarities between this and the Doctor Who story Father’s Day by Paul Cornell.  Well, I am afraid that this is inevitable in a science fiction franchise, as there are only so many variations on a time travel story, and after all, the mother series had destroyed Atlantis using at least three different methods, so it is following a good pedigree.

In my review of Secret of the StarsI noted that Gareth Roberts seemed to be out of sync with the rest of the writers when it came to the character of Clyde Langer. Well it appears that the memo has now been received, as Clyde gets some of the best lines of the story, delivered with aplomb by  Daniel Anthony. With Luke away with Sarah Jane in the past, then  Rani had more than usual to do in this story, bouncing witty one-liners off Clyde and actually moving the plot forward instead of babysitting the boy genius.  She was perfectly single minded in her mission to find Sarah Jane, not caring one iota about the stir she was causing in the early 1950’s.

It was nice seeing some more of Sarah Jane’s back story filled in.  We have always known that Sarah Jane was an orphan raised by her Aunt Lavinia.  In the past that was all we needed to know, but as Sarah Jane is now the lead character of the series, then things have changed.  Although this does put some of Sarah Jane’s previous stories in a whole new light, as on at least two separate occasions, in The Planet of the Spiders and K9 and Companyher life has been threatened by villains trying to arrange for her vehicle to crash into a stationary tractor. Rossanna Lavelle and Christopher Pizzey were pleasant as Sarah Jane’s doomed parents.  They realistically portrayed a couple that had lived through World War Two, from another age who would think nothing of sacrificing themselves for the greater good.

I honestly think that the character of the Trickster is far more threatening when he is ephemeral.  When you see him in the harsh light of day, it looks like a man in a dark costume and a latex mask.  He needs to be seen only in the shadows and with an opacity that belies his extra-dimensional origins.

I do not think that this is the last we have seen of Barbara and Eddie.  Why was such a fuss made about the fact that they still sent each other little notes despite being happily married, and why  did the camera linger on the back of the upturned photograph, which until that point had been blank, but now had the words “Mr. Smith, I need you.” written in faded ink, as if it had always been there. This is after all science fiction, and as the cliché goes, anything can happen.

Oliver, the human disguise that the Graske adopted was a wonderful creation, switching at a drop of a hat from frightened child to malignant pixie.  Robert Madge is yet another name to add to the long list of excellent child actors that Andy Prior had found for all the series in the Doctor Who franchise.

3. Stars:
5 out of 5