CONTEMPORANEOUS
NEXT
16TH NOVEMBER 2007
(7-MINUTE MINI-EPISODE)
In spite of
Sarah Jane Smith’s second coming; a flood of references to Skaro,
Gallifrey, and the Axons; the adaptation of a New Adventure; and
even the return of the Macra, in my head I still perceived a very clear
divide between the Doctor Who of today
and the Doctor Who of
old. But just like the Titanic demolished the walls of the TARDIS’
console room, Steven Moffat’s Time Crash tore down the walls that
I’d constructed.
“Today is to come.”
I was keyed up
enough when two years ago – also courtesy of Children in Need - we
were given the chance to meet David Tennant’s Doctor a month early, but to
have Tennant’s tenth Doctor actually meet Peter Davison’s fifth is in
another league entirely. And who should it fall to to write this very
special episode but Moffat, writer of not just three of the revived
series’ finest episodes to date, but also Doctor Who’s 1999
Comic Relief special, The Curse of Fatal Death. And on balance,
I don’t see how any other writer could have done a better job with this
brief two-hander.
As one would
imagine, the internet has been rife with speculation as to where and when
this little episode would be set and whether – unlike The Curse of
Fatal Death – it would form a proper ‘canonical’ part of the show.
Well I don’t think that anyone could have predicted how seamlessly this
episode would slot into the closing moments of Last of the Time Lords
– it certainly explains a thing or two about how the Titantic penetrated
the supposedly impreg-nable TARDIS. Having forgot to put up the TARDIS’
shields after making repairs, the tenth Doctor’s TARDIS collides with the
fifth’s, and the tenth Doctor finds himself face to face with himself,
several centuries younger. With a hole in the universe “the size of
Belgium” at stake, the two Doctors must work together to resolve the
paradox of their meeting…
“Mind you, bit saggier than it ought to be. Hair’s a bit greyer.
That’s cos of me though. Two of us together has shorted out the time
differential.”
If you watch the
recent episode Human Nature carefully, lost amongst Smith’s scribblings
in his Journal of Impossible Things you might just
catch a fleeting glimpse of some of the Doctor’s former incarnations. It
makes me feel very old indeed to think that for the children who watched
that episode, those greyscale drawings of incarnations as relatively
recent as those played by Peter Davison, Colin Baker, or even Sylvester
McCoy will have seemed as remote and as unthinkably ancient to them as
those played by William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton once did to me. But
just as The Five Doctors did for the children of the 1980s
on
Children in Need night all those years ago, Time Crash brings a
Doctor from long ago into the present to infuse a new generation with the
enduring magic of Doctor Who.
Of course, with
the best will in the world, Davison doesn’t look quite as he once did. For
those like myself who regularly follow his ongoing adventures through Big
Finish’s series of audio plays, it’s easy to forget that the youngest
actor ever to play the Doctor is now in fact older than William Hartnell
was when he first took on the role back in 1963. But I’m glad that Moffat’s script deals with Davi-
son’s looking
older in a blithe,
jocular way,
rather than try and
cover it up it
with CGI or ignore
it altogether
(as the production
team did with Patrick Troughton
and Jon Pertwee when
they both appeared in multi-Doctor stories, each looking substantially
older). It’s hilarious to see Tennant play with Davison’s jowls and mock
his thinning hair, not to mention the coat that won’t fasten anymore or
the gargantuan trousers (originally made for the bulkier Colin Baker for
his post-regeneration scenes in The Caves of Androzani).
“Fair play to you, not a lot of men can carry off a decorative vegetable!”
What I really
love about this mini-episode though is how it manages
to affectionately
make fun of the Doctor Who of old, yet at the same
time treat it
with great reverence, much in the same way that The
Curse of Fatal
Death did. The banter between Tennant and Davison
is an absolute joy
to listen to; I actually watched the episode with my
fiancée - who is not
over-keen on Doctor Who, to put it kindly - and
she laughed the
whole way through it. For me though, it was doubly
humorous as all
the jokes about the fifth Doctor being “handsfree”
and wearing
“brainy specs” weren’t lost on me. The line about the
console room’s
“desktop theme” was absolutely inspired!
I also like how
Ten has to convince Five that he is indeed his future self; it fits in
wonderfully with the whole “Eighth Man Bound” lore. And as for the fifth
Doctor, the tenth seems to rem-ember him being from around the time of
Arc of Infinity and Snakedance, mentioning both Nyssa and Tegan
to him and even having a bit of a laugh with him about the old Master’s
“rubbish beard” as well as the new Master’s wife. As such, Ten’s
memory of this meeting does beg the question as to why the ninth and
tenth Doctor’s couldn’t remember that they were not in fact the
last of the Time Lords, but at the end of the day such things really were
not intended to
stand up to such neurotic scrutiny.
“You know, I loved being you. Back when I first started, at the very
beginning,
I was always trying to be old and grumpy and important, like
you do when you’re young. And then I was you. And it was all dashing about
and playing cricket and my voice going all squeaky when I shouted...”
Where I think
the episode truly excels though is in how Moffat cleverly uses the
theme of recursion to form the core of his story. Simply put, whilst the
fifth Doctor is panicking about the paradox that he finds himself in, the
tenth is completely nonchalant. Why? Because he can remember it all
working out alright. He remembers watching his future self manipulate the
TARDIS controls to create a supernova, cancelling out the black hole
caused by the paradox. And so he does just that. Sorted. Not only
is this plot wholly relevant to the fifth Doctor, considering that the
theme of recursion formed the basis of his opening serial,
but it’s also
simple and spellbindingly obvious.
“‘Cos you know what Doctor, you were my Doctor. All my love to long ago.”
The ending is funny and charming, but above all else, remarkably
poignant. At the very end Tennant does a bit of a Hartnell (back in The
Daleks’ Master Plan) in that he breaks down that imaginary fourth wall
between the actors and the audience, addressing Davison as himself rather
than addressing the fifth Doctor as the tenth. Beautiful stuff.
And so despite
the show’s looming hiatus, it’s as exciting a time to be a Doctor
Who fan as ever. The series remains as popular as always with Tennant picking up yet
another National Television Award for most popular actor, the series
itself winning most popular drama pro-gramme for the third consecutive
year, and shops being jam-packed full of Dalek Sec voice changers and
build-your-own-TARDIS kits. Christmas is just around the corner,
bringing with it the Titantic and Kylie Minogue, and from there it won’t
be long until Series 4 begins. The Sontarans, Pompeii, Unicorns,
Wasps, maybe even Davros… Roll on spring!
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