"Boundless souls dreaming of skies to conquer"
Last week's special, The Star Beast, was based on a 1980s Doctor Who Weekly comic and this week's, Wild Blue Yonder seems to me to show the influence of the Doctor Who Monthly comic strips of the Interregnum with, perhaps, a little Virgin New Adventures added for good measure. These specials appear to act as a creative manifesto for RTD's return to the series and he’s explicitly drawing attention to his vision for the show going forward. Without looking too hard it's possible to additionally see the influence of Robert Holmes (The Ark in Space?). What could have been quite a frightening and morbid episode - the villains are more or less cosmic horrors from beyond space - is executed cartoonishly: from the spinning TARDIS that lands comically in Newton's tree, through the Doctor-Donna bickering and banter to the grotesque humour of the physical and intellectual distortions of the doppelgänger Not-Things monsters.
What that struck me while watching Wild Blue Yonder was that the Doctor was dealing with issues of boundaries and transformations. RTD likes to take the Doctor to the extremes: the end of the Earth in The End of the World, the end of (time in) the Universe in Utopia and now the end of the physical universe itself. During RTD’s absence, the show has also pushed the Doctor to the boundaries of his own identity (which was also addressed in this episode in the distress the Doctor feels about not knowing his origin). Again, allusion to a mysterious aspect of the Doctor’s identity is very New Adventures. Much of this episode involves things transforming into their other things: primarily the Not-Things into Doctor and Donna and the space ship into a bomb.
Visually, the episode was a treat. Other than the awkwardly cartoonish spinning TARDIS, everything else looked wonderful. I thought Jimbo, rusty three-eyed robot had a great design and would love to see it return (as a character? A Kamelion for Fifteen?)
You have to be careful criticising the sillier aspects of a RTD script as it’s entirely likely that what could be considered a throwaway joke could return later in the series as an important plot point. The opening scene of this episode featuring the TARDIS perching in the branches of a particularly hunky Isaac Newton’s apple tree causes Newton to mishear gravity as “mavity” and later Donna casually refers to mavity suggesting they’ve changed history. (This seems to contradict the Fourth Doctor’s account given in The Pirate Planet.) I also had the sense that there were other things in this episode that might be drawn on later in the series: the nameless demonic creatures from beyond the universe, the Doctor’s use of superstition to cause confusion (he even mentions that it gave him a bad feeling) - even the skeleton of the space ship’s captain could prove to be important later on. Why doesn’t the Doctor question WHY a spaceship is travelling into the nothingness beyond the universe?
Something that I had trouble with was the way in which both the Doctor and Donna so easily emotionally pivot. One moment Donna is grieving the potential prospect of never seeing her family again and the next she’s shouting “We go and kick its arse!” Maudlin exchanges cause parts of the episode to drag and contribute nothing to character development or plot (though you could argue that the conversations work well when the Not-Thing doppelgängers are first introduced). For instance:
DONNA: You ok?
DOCTOR: I will be.
DONNA: When?
DOCTOR: A million years.
Exchanges like this aren't necessary (we already know that the Doctor is unsettled by thinking about the Timeless Child). I wouldn’t mind so much if characters maintained their emotional states for even five minutes, but both of them seem to flit about emotionally. Again, this could be an aspect of RTD’s interest in boundaries and extremes and I wonder if he’s addressing the fiery, chaotic way that the Doctor (and Donna) thinks. “If we’re slow, they can’t read us” the Doctor understands that the Not-Things become doppelgängers through observation of thought (and emotion) and he realises he needs to stop his mind flitting about - which he can’t do. This theme of not thinking is evident when the Doctor and Donna first arrive on the ship and consider that it is in some “neutral” state. Ultimately, the Not-Things are defeated by racing to prevent Jimbo from destroying the ship (so it’s actually the space captain who saves the day).
I DID like the Doctor’s imagining of the TARDIS being discovered and then having a civilisation built about it. There's a poignant bottle episode in the future.
Despite me moaning about the cartoonishness, there is a grim nihilism underneath all the spectacle. I wonder if one of the touchstones of the episode is Event Horizon (again, some of the most successful classic episodes drew from very obvious cultural SF and horror references). The Doctor and Donna arrive on an immense empty spacecraft consisting of one long central bay, a bridge and some corridors behind the rearranging walls. That the ship is s-l-o-w-l-y reconfiguring itself as a bomb using poor Jimbo the three-eyed rusty robot as the trigger. When the Doctor looks out into the void they are in he is both fascinated and horrified (“Nothing at the edge of creation. Absolute nothing.”). The skeleton of the ship’s captain - with it’s horse-like skull - floating in the void and intermittently clanging against the hull is pretty creepy. Other moments of horror: the strange words that announce the ship’s transformations, the Exorcist-y contortions of the Not-Thing Doctor, the dissolving Not-Thing Donna, even the the Not-Things body distortions. Things are all too well-lit to become horrific and, instead, end up being funny. Only one scene, where Donna is in a claustrophobic darkening corridor, was for me the only point I thought the production managed to be scary. Perhaps, at the end when the Doctor has time to reflect on what happens, he realises the actual nature of the Not-Things and this is what unsettles him (“We came from the Nothing” the doppelgängers informed him). The title of the episode, drawn from an old US airforce song, gets played in a sinister, subversive fashion as the TARDIS dumps the Doctor and Donna on the spaceship and then spews flames before dematerialsing and leaving them stranded.
Unless the next episode shows that the Doctor’s old face and everything we’ve seen in The Star Beast and Wild Blue Yonder turns out to be manipulated by the Celestial Toymaker (or some worse "boss"), I found the deus ex machina of the TARDIS arriving at exactly the right moment to rescue the Doctor and Donna disappointing. Let’s hope the show-makers don’t abuse this plot device in the way of the sonic screwdriver. Nothing beats the Doctor getting himself out of life-or-death situations narratively.
This episode’s cliffhanger is the return to Camden Lock, reuniting with Wilf, explosions, brawling and a aircraft falling from the sky.
Next week: The Giggle.
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