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The Sarah Jane Adventures The Death of the Doctor |
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| Story No. | 21 | 
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| Production Code | Series Four Episode Three | |
| Dates | October 25-26, 2010 |
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With Elisabeth Sladen, Daniel Anthony, Anjli Mohindra, Alexander
Armstrong, Tommy Knight
Featuring Matt Smith, Katy Manning Written by Russell T Davies Directed by Ashley Way Executive Producers: Russell T Davies, Nikki Wilson. |
| Synopsis: UNIT summons the Doctor's former companions to his funeral. |
"Troll in the attic" by Thomas Cookson 23/8/15
I was undecided about doing this. I felt I'd said my last piece on RTD with The End of Time. The Snowmen gave me good feelings about things to come, and everything I'd needed to say about the 80's is done and dusted. So it seemed time to move onto greener pastures. To review stuff worth gushing about: The Girl Who Waited, Terror Firma, The Curse of Davros.
But here goes.
During Series 4, something changed with me. First, I got off my high-horse about RTD's fanbashing. But then I had visited the scary, unpleasant Leisure Hive forum, and realized that maybe Russell had been unduly generous about us.
Whatever the reason, during Series 4, I finally felt on the same page as those singing Russell's praise. He'd been deified for bringing the show back, but Series 4 might've been the first time for me that what he'd brought to screen actually felt like Doctor Who, with alien worlds, Sontarans, UNIT and an actual platonic Doctor-companion relationship. It was like Season 24 but done right and paced right. So its success was pretty vindicating. So I began to feel I understood and appreciated Doctor Who's light entertainment roots.
I'd have been very happy if RTD's era had started there. Likewise, I'd possibly forgive RTD's worst moments if Journey's End was his swansong. I'd have happily looked back on Journey's End and told myself 'he was one of us'. Andrew Rilstone tore the story apart for this, but I found seeing Russell being a big kid playing with his favourite toys rather charming.
Was I succumbing to diminished expectations, letting fan hyperbole finally indoctrinate me?
Perhaps The End of Time set me off again, or seeing how much better the show could be done under Moffat making me suddenly aware of how much of my time had been wasted enduring RTD's worst writing. It probably was The End of Time. I mean, we're talking about a head writer who made a visual gag from putting a car lock on the TARDIS. That's not something you just forgive.
Even Timelash would've been a better, more dignified regeneration story for Tennant than The End of Time. I would have happily not seen Russell as a villain, but once we got to that spiteful rant the Doctor made at Wilf, it was clear Russell didn't want to let me see him as anything else.
And worse, he still wasn't through.
I should probably get to the story at hand. There isn't much of one. The Shansheeth are typical of RTD's lack of imagination. When he thinks aliens, he thinks animal heads. He also clearly hasn't thought their culture through at all. They're a culture that's based on the familiarity of death and bereavement. A culture that should be attuned to this as a cold hard fact of life. But suddenly they're going against that and using the Doctor's TARDIS to undo all deaths ever (like that's possible, and surely they're not so stupid as to realise they're only delaying the inevitable), to the point of resorting to kidnapping and other nefarious means. It's another ridiculous leap too far that exposes how pitifully little integrity the concept of them has. They just do whatever Russell wants them to do.
So he's taking an image and idea that's benevolent and not at all threatening and trying to suddenly make it threatening. RTD seems to think they're like The Dark Crystal's Skeksis, but they're far too placid, fluffy and awkward. Their angry streak comes off as false. Also their masterplan to weld an exact copy of the TARDIS key from Sarah and Jo's mind is so unbelievable it clunks like nothing else in the show.
The idea of a UNIT turncoat who, after the devastation and death of her comrades in Journey's End, has turned bitter, lost hope and gone rogue is interesting, but she becomes so underdeveloped that all she conveys is spitefulness.
But that's not the main appeal here. The main appeal is Jo. In a strange way, Jo was so much a part of the Pertwee era that it almost makes sense that we never saw her again. Not even in The Five Doctors where we saw everyone else. She might even have been the companion that got the most perfect goodbye. By which I mean she had a happy ending and there was no need for a followup. Whereas Susan, Sarah and Romana's departures all left a vague feeling that something was left bitterly unresolved and that it'd be a damning injustice if we didn't see them again one day. Hence why The Five Doctors is ultimately essential, and would have been the perfect hat on the classic series. Even the original premise of Mawdryn Undead suggests there was a need to see Ian's later years, and how the experiences of being almost the first companion affected him.
Now normally when the Sarah Jane Adventures goes for something a bit more fannish, the man to call is Gareth Roberts. Phil Ford's The Last Sontaran may seem fannish but continuitywise it has a completely New Who sensibility. Likewise Enemy of the Bane was never originally meant to feature the Brigadier, but serendipitously it did when Freema Agyemen proved unavailable and they needed another character with UNIT credentials.
But The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith was laced with Gallifreyan mythology and references to the Key to Time. And it seamlessly brought the Doctor into the show. So really, Gareth Roberts should have been the man to write this. Why he didn't might have something to do with the fact that, like many who hung in Paul Cornell's clique, he wasn't really a Pertwee fan. Or indeed a fan of much of the show either side of the Tom Baker era. I kind of understand this because, well the day I say Peter Davison was underrated is the day Satan skates to work. Likewise, perhaps by the time Gareth got round to discovering Pertwee, he was just a bit too old for it. We fall in love with Doctor Who at an impressionable age, and he probably wasn't at that age anymore when he started discovering Pertwee on video. Would he have the same childhood affection for Jo as he did for Sarah or Romana? Unlikely.
So who else would be suited to writing it? Gary Russell perhaps? Or now that I think about it, I'm a bit surprised School Reunion's Toby Whithouse has never written for the show, given that he was largely responsible for its genesis.
Maybe the fan writers had spent so long making the Pertwee era unfashionable that no one else but RTD was suited for the job. Except perhaps for Lawrence Miles who they weren't going to hire, for obvious reasons.
So it fell to RTD. And on that score... No sorry I can't do it. All the things I like about Jo in this story seem to all stem from Kay Manning's performance. And if not for her performance, RTD's writing could have come off as obnoxious. Her introduction with her (surely adopted?) grandson in which she interrupts the funeral by breaking a vase and gossiping away whilst ignoring being repeatedly told to show respectful silence, is on paper typical of RTD's tastelessness and use of humour at its most inappropriate and bullish.
It's everything that was wrong with Aliens of London. The way the suspense of the confrontation with the Slitheen has to be put on hold just so the characters can have a long comedy routine that makes you suspect the threat would wait a year for them. Just like here where the indulgent scene plays out regardless of the reality of the situation in a way that makes the characters seem obliviously, detestably self-involved. Or how RTD keeps rubbing in the 9/11 references to grounded flights and having to 'watch the skies' like he's poking cheeky fun at a real life act of mass murder and the hysteria it provoked. The kind of 'laughing at a funeral' type humour that you'd associate with someone with a head trauma who might momentarily mistake a televised racing car accident for hilarious 'slapstick'.
But the way that Katy Manning plays it makes the scene a sweet moment in spite of this. A moment where the Doctor's death has brought people together, and because it's the characters we know of as the Doctor's friends, it sells the idea that this is what the Doctor would have wanted at his funeral. I did wonder though if maybe Jo had turned lesbian when first meeting Sarah. Might have been an interesting character twist.
A shame the Brigadier couldn't be here.
Jo establishes herself so well it wouldn't have been unthinkable to continue the show with Sarah said to be away (on an intergalactic mission even) and Jo being trusted with looking after the house and babysitting Sky while she's gone.
Her grandson never really came alive for me. He seemed more like a character you'd find in an advert for ecologically-minded products or charities. Not a real character at all. And I've been on several climate camps.
So RTD's writing the Eleventh Doctor. And it seems all RTD wants Smith to do is reminisce on his predecessor's final 20 minutes. I guess RTD still never reached catharsis over that. Oh and despite Jo's perfect happy ending, she's still sour and weepy over why the Doctor never visited her before. And it turns out the Doctor spent far longer than 20 minutes seeking out all his old companions whilst dying of radiation.
Anyhow. The 507 line.
There's still fans who say the regeneration limit problem needed addressing and that Russell's "507" solution was genius out the box thinking, saving the show from a future dilemma.
Utter nonsense. The solution to the regeneration limit was to ignore it until time comes to cast the 14th Doctor, and let fandom decide they'd probably rather have more Doctor Who at the price of a changed premise. Most would. Apart from those who thought Curse of Fatal Death killed the show, but they're a minority. This is not ignoring it, and it's done to piss off more than a minority. It seems designed to piss off every Robert Holmes fan, making the plots and character motivations of The Deadly Assassin and Mawdryn Undead invalid. Has RTD just become so bad at plotting he's taken to trashing better plots of better writers?
This cheapens New Who too. Remember in Rise of the Cybermen when the Doctor gave away 20 years of life to repower the TARDIS? That was poignant back then, but that sacrifice no longer means anything but peanuts now. And was Tennant honestly having a hissy fit that he was going to be one down of 508 lives?
RTD has so many fans still singing his praise, seemingly brainwashed into believing the show still needs him and is in trouble without him. I'm baffled where RTD's desire to bait fandom comes from. I've always hated that petty malevolence about him. Even during my spiritualist phase in University, I wondered why he delighted in needlessly breeding so many angry, negative vibes that are corrosive to people's collective spiritual wellbeing. Maybe he's got nothing better to do. You can say fans who react melodramatically to this are sad, but is childishly, desperately seeking out that reaction any less pathetic?
I'm eluded and nauseated how Russell gained such massive good will from fandom whilst demonstrating none.
Then again, the show's 80s-continuity obsession is associated with feeding only wastrel life of humourless obsessive fans, so fans see this as RTD's better brand of continuity that's designed to enrich and warm hearts.
Wait, Ian and Barbara never aged? Why?
The continuity trolling here only leaves me grateful that this show is marginal enough to disassociate with Doctor Who's canon. This charming show that gave me my favourite Tennant moments and Elisabeth Sladen's finest acting now means so much less to me.
Well done Russell.
"Five hundred and seven" by Jason A. Miller 28/5/24
I'm here because of Genocide, an Eighth Doctor Adventure novel from 1997 which featured the return of Jo Grant. And because I'm not happy.
Look, I read the EDAs during their initial releases. The books were allowed to be dark and nihilistic. Those were bad times for fandom. Doctor Who had been off the air seven years, came back for one night for one low-rated TV movie and then disappeared again, staying off the air than even longer than it had been before the movie. Fandom was decaying, so it made sense, I suppose on paper, for the ongoing books to ruin or murder beloved old characters. Heck, even Sarah Jane got killed off.
But then Doctor Who came back and lived, still lives. Sarah Jane returned in the New Series and got her own long-running spinoff, which ended only when Elisabeth Sladen died. Katy Manning is still around. I don't think I've ever been to a Doctor Who convention that didn't have her as a guest, and, not only that, but the Season 8 Blu-ray trailer dropped a new minisode: Dr. Clifford Jones and Mrs. Jo Jones battling the Autons. This is a gorgeous trailer, Stewart Bevan and Katy Manning literally still passing for a married couple; heck, the trailer by itself was better than a lot of Chris Chibnall episodes.
Whoops, I'm wandering off course here.
The point is, how could any author ever mistreat Jo Grant or Sarah Jane Smith, when the actresses were so full of life? When RTD turned the revival of Doctor Who in 2005 into a celebration of the past, all the darkness of the novels instantly became irrelevant. Who wants to read about what a horrible adult life Jo had, when you could have Stewart and Katy still married in a DVD trailer and battling monsters while talking to their grandchildren on Zoom?
Granted, I watched Death of the Doctor with the foregone conclusion of "I loved it" already in my head even before I pressed "play", knowing that Thomas Cookson in his above review really hated this story, and for logical reasons based on RTD's storytelling choices.
I'm not going to agree with any of that, though.
For me, I'd never seen Death of the Doctor before, waited until more than ten years after it aired. But after Genocide, a fluffy two-part companion reunion was exactly what I needed.
Cookson doesn't like that RTD is writing for Katy Manning rather than Jo Grant. But, and I say this as someone who's met Katy at a convention, you can't write Jo without Katy. Katy (77 years old and still as vigorous as she was in 1971) is in real life exactly what Jo is in this two-part story. For all I know, the script is full of scripted dialogue for every character, except for the prompt [Katy, just do your thing] whenever Jo is supposed to speak. When a ridiculous young Finn Jones, pre-Game of Thrones, shows up as a floppy-haired cutie to whose arm Jo is clinging, your immediate thought is, "Is Jo dating someone 50 years her junior?", and then it turns out that Finn is playing her grandson, and yet she continues to flirt with him through the whole episode. That's Katy Manning. She lives life at only one speed, a hundred and ten percent, and if she's standing next to a 20-year-old actor who looks like Finn Jones, well, then she's going to flirt with him even if he's playing her grandson, and this is why Katy Manning is the most amazing person you will ever meet, and this is why Death of the Doctor is so, so joyous, and that is why for me it was the perfect response to Genocide.
Also, the revelations about Jo's life in Death of the Doctor, an in-canon episode scripted by Doctor Who's just-retired show-runner and starring the then-current Doctor, mean that Genocide is now out of the canon, doesn't exist, never happened, thank you very much.
So no matter how much Thomas Cookson loathed the story, because, reasons, trust me, nobody who ever read Genocide, nobody who ever met Katy at a Doctor Who con, would ever hate the story that brought Katy Manning back to Doctor Who.
The Shansheeth are not the greatest villains. Fine. They're designed that way just so someone can say "Smells like roast chicken" after one blows up. But the lead Shansheeth is voiced by David Bradley. This was 2010, but soon after that, David Bradley guest-starred on Doctor Who, played William Hartnell in a docudrama, instigated the Red Wedding on Game of Thrones (harming everyone except Finn Jones' character), and then played the First Doctor in-canon. How can you hate a story that is, canonically, David Bradley's first Doctor Who appearance?
The ending is a name-check of RTD's favorite companions. His exit scenario for Ace is now officially canon, brought to life in a Season 26 Blu-ray trailer and in a book (nominally) co-written by Sophie Aldred. He makes Ian and Barbara immortal, and he gives a eulogy for Harry Sullivan that literally had me running for the nearest box of tissues.
Death of the Doctor doesn't need to pass critical muster. It is an openly mushy, gushy, reunion episode, and it's Katy Manning coming back to Doctor Who, so she literally spoons with Lis Sladen on-camera (I swear I am not making that up), and it's got David Bradley, and it brings us up to date on companions, and, for all this, there is no reason to complain about plot illogic. It's RTD's worst excesses, but that's exactly what I needed, because RTD's worst excesses were the only possible cure for Genocide, a book that had Jo committing a war crime (or something).
This is RTD writing for the 11th Doctor, too, and about as well as Steven Moffat wrote for him. The throwaway line about 507 regenerations is an actual mythology-altering continuity reference disguised as a joke, but I'm watching this on the flip side of The Timeless Children (a bloated, ungainly script that seemed to exist only to explain a 45-second clip from The Brain of Morbius), and turns out that Matt Smith probably really was playing the 507th incarnation of the Time Lord now known as the Doctor. So even in the midst of all the ill-placed humor and the weird chicken aliens that sound like Walder Frey and the literal continuity fangasm, this is a tremendously important episode. With that 507 gag, you didn't even need Katy Manning or Jo Grant. But there they were.
Thank goodness.