Doctor Who – Wild Blue Yonder

What’s The Show? The second of RTD’s Fourteenth Doctor specials, “Wild Blue Yonder”.

What’s It All About, JG? After a brief stop-off to visit Issac Newton for a limp joke, the coffee-defeated TARDIS crashes on an alien spaceship. While repairing itself, it vanishes (thanks to the always-rubbish HADS) and leave the Doctor and Donna stranded in a very long corridor that sometimes reconfigures itself randomly and with an ancient robot slowly making its way down. While exploring the ship, they discover they are on the very edge of existence and that they are sharing the ship with the no-things. They are creatures who slowly take the form of those around them until they can mimic them perfectly. Once the process is complete, they plan to swarm into the universe and plunder. The captain of the ship worked out how to stop them and set the ship on a very slow self-desctruct – hence the robot – while the no-things copy the Doctor and Donna in a bid to escape their captivity in the creepiest way imaginage. The Doctor speeds up the self-destruct to stop them, the TARDIS reappears at a convenient moment to save the day and Donna almost dies after the Doctor takes the fake one on board but then is rescued. And on returning to London safely, Wilf is waiting for them but the world has gone to pot.

Is It Any Good? It’s a curious one, this one. I mean, the straightforward answer is “yes”, it’s bloody brilliant but then again I love Doctor Who when it’s at its most abstract and “Wild Blue Yonder” certainly falls into that category. What’s most obvious about this episode is just how good Catherine Tate and David Tennant are as actors. Because this is basically a two-hander between them, with them playing both the Doctor and Donna and the two no-things that impersonate them. And both of them are spectacular.

It’s so easy to forget what a good actor David Tennant is when he’s being all affable and Doctorish and though the Fourteenth Doctor is distinct from the Tenth, there’s still more than enough overlap to see all the familiar tics and approaches in place. That’s not meant as an insult – Tennant is great at both Doctors – but contrasting that with his no-thing alternate when he’s being cold and ruthless really brings home how strong a performer he can be. The way he plays cold is genuinely (forgive me here) chilling and just incredibly effective. The same goes for Tate, flipping between Donna’s increasing panic and state of scared incomprehension and the no-things vicious side. We’re so used to her being bolshy but vulnerable that to see her shift onto the much nastier creature the no-thing is can’t help but be unnerving and Tate matches Tennant’s performance every inch of the way.

As has been pointed out in many places, “Wild Blue Yonder” is, in many ways, simply “Midnight”-but-you-see-the-monster. While this is certainly not an unfair criticism, the creatures here are subtly different, not least because these ones have actual motivaions. In “Midnight”, we never really find out what it is that creature wanted – here we undoubtedly do. Now sure, the motivation is still pretty much the standard Doctor Who ah-hah-we’re-the-bad-guys that a lot of monsters get stuck with but it’s effective here simply because of how minimalist everything is. These creatures are disconcerting partly because of the mimicry (which is a direct holdover from “Midnight”) and partly because of the environment they’re in. This is the best spaceship Doctor Who has done in ages and it feels like a properly discombobulating environment, with walls that shift for no apparent reason, little that lends itself to understanding, and a language that can’t just be handwaved away with some convenient translation. It all builds brilliantly effective tension and it’s that disturbing environment that the no-things slot into perfectly.

Still, “Midnight” isn’t the only source being drawn on too, as anyone who’s ever seen the movie Event Horizon will attest. There’s the same sense of cosmic dread, the same alienness that lacks traditional explanations – even the Big Corridor Of Doom looks the same. And, closer to home, this also has a clear antecedent in “Warrior’s Gate” (particularly the sense of abstract space and being somewhere the Doctor has genuinely never been before) and “Waters Of Mars”, which also features lots of running down a big corridor, a cute-looking robot that saves the day, plenty of existential dread, and a threat that doesn’t come in the form of a traditional Doctor Who rubber-suit monster.

What makes “Wild Blue Yonder” work is that it isn’t just a redux of all these sources, but rather draws on elements of them to produce something unique from all of them. There was a lot of pre-broadcast hype about this episode being something Doctor Who has never done before – that’s not really accurate (though it was effective hype, one of RTD’s greatest strengths) but what can definitely be said is that this is Doctor Who doing this type of story as good as it has ever done it. Everything is pulling in the same direction here, the design, the lighting, the script, the production, the acting… it all combines to make something really special.

Many have pointed out that is effortlessly the best thing RTD has written for Doctor Who since “Midnight” – that’s true but he’s not actually written all that much Doctor Who since then (and the following episode is “Turn Left”, which is every bit as good, albeit in a completely different way). But more than that, it’s simply one of the best episodes that RTD has written full stop. There’s a grasp of concept, form, and type here that last week’s “The Star Beast” almost entirely lacked. Sure, that was a romp, but it was also fundamentally disappointing because it was so completely unremarkable. “It”The Star Beast” could have been set anywhere since Eccleston took over and it wouldn’t have made much difference. This, however, is the exact opposide – it’s special in pretty much every way and it requires these two characters because the story is as much about how they interact with each other as it is about stopping some evil from the edge of the universe.

Not only is this a triumph of an episode, it shows just how much Doctor Who and RTD is still capable of.

Would You Recommend It? Oh god, yes. It it, to pick a word not-exactly-at-random, fantastic. There’s just so much attention to detail here that makes the whole episode sing. Whether it’s the Doctor getting the wrong Donna in the TARDIS (and there’s a real hint he does this deliberately, which makes the Fourteenth Doctor an absolute bastard for leaving the real Donna believing she’s about to be killed) or the “my arms are too long” line that plays out through the episode, everything here simply works.

Well, almost everything. There’s also the curiosity of the Isaac Newton opener. As a rule, I loathe the “the Doctor secretly inspired [insert historical character here]” trope (see, especially, “The Shakespeare Code”, though there’s plenty of others). This one is slightly different, producing the “mavity”, let’s say, joke that runs through the episode. This opener is curious for two reasons. Firstly, it’s not clear if this is just a lame gag for this episode or whether it’s suggestive of something that will be revealed in the final of the three specials. And secondly, whether the ahistorical casting of a non-white person as Newton is simply a way of trolling bigots or whether it, too, is suggestive of something we’re not yet aware of. If it’s just for the sake of the mavity joke, that’s a pity, since it’s not remotely funny, not even once, and while I have no problem with RTD bigot trolling, if that’s the only reason for it, it seems like a lot of effort for relatively little return. Watch this space…

One of the other great things to note about this episode is that, for all that this story does require the Fourteenth Doctor and Donna, in strictly plot terms it doesn’t actually require them at all – or indeed anyone. It takes us a long time to figure out what the no-things are and even longer to work out how the Doctor can defeat them. Except, in this case, they’ve already been defeated by the captain of the ship they find themselves on, we just haven’t got to the punchline yet.

That, too, feels like a really novel twist. The idea that the captain of the ship figured out what the no-things are, figured out what they do, and figured out how to stop them at the expense of her own life comes across as a genuinely unusual way of resolving the story. The episode isn’t undermined by the fact that the Doctor doesn’t need to do anything except survive (because the epsiode is mostly about how the Doctor and Donna see each other) but at the same time it’s just great to have an episode that doesnt rely on either bafflegab, the Doctor’s pre-existing knowledge, or a flourish of the sonic screwdriver.

And what of the nods back to Jodie’s era? Most welcome, indeed. Firstly, it’s good to get a little clarity on the Flux and the fact that it did impact the Doctor in some way. It’s almost always to the benefit of the show when one era is able to reference events in another and so it is here. I’m generally more foriving than most when it comes to the Chibnall era but the failure to address the impact of the Flux was a noticable – and unnecessary – failure of the era, so it’s good to see some mention of it here.

There’s also a Timeless Child reference, which is slight (and slightly unexpected) but equally welcome. One – well, actually, the only – benefit of the Timeless Child plot is that in some ways it puts the Doctor back to what they always were at the start of the series, simply a lost wandered whose origins we don’t know turning up in places to help out. Assuming you ignore all the secret-history-of-regeneration stuff, of course. It will be interesting to see if either event gets mentioned further down the line but if not at least this is a nice acknowledgement of those events without simply throwing Chibnall under the bus and writing it out (not, however much some fans might have wanted it, that Davies was ever going to do that – they were colleauges for years across two different shows and are by all accounts good friends. Davies just doesn’t treat people like that and rightly so).

But in the end, what this is really about is the Doctor and Donna, and what they mean to each other. This Doctor – the Fourteenth – may have plenty in common with the Tenth but he’s also most assuredly not the Tenth and that distinction is really important here. The question of why this face came back is raised again, as it was in “The Star Beast” but here, with creatures literally stealing his face, it takes on a whole new relevance. These questions are generally raised without any specific answers being given but that feels effective rather than evasive (except in that final TARDIS scene, where the Doctor is about to answer some questions but then the TARDIS lands so he gets out of it, an approach I can’t stand).

And Donna – oh, Donna has come so far. She’s still the same Donna we love from Season 4 but at the same time she’s absolutely not. She has a confidence about here that’s new, she’s not thick and isn’t self-depricating or convinced of her own nothingness (appropriately) but is still allowed plenty of humanising moments that make her recognisably the same person we’ve always known. Tate is, without question, brilliant at playing this but it really is amazing how effective she is playing scary as well. Throughout this, Donna continues to evolve and grow in front of our eyes and Tate is perfect at showing her. Even the terror at being pretty certain she’s about to die as an explosion rockets towards her (handy those charges were set off sequentially rather than simultaneously, eh?) is convincingly realised, as is her absolute horro that the Doctor has taken the wrong Donna on board the TARDIS. She is, simply magnificent.

So there we have it. If the first special was anything but, the second is something truly special. This is exactly the sort of episode that justifies RTD’s return – let’s hope that it’s not a one-of and that next week’s The Giggle can maintain the same standard.

And we get Wilf’s final scene of course. What sweeter ending to an episode could there b?

Scores On The Doors: 9/10 Point docked for the avoid-the-conversation TARDIS landing and the lack of clarity over the whole Newton thing. If the Newton thing goes somewhere I’ll revise the score up half a point.