164 The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances

Watched 12-Jun

Off the Bluray on the big screen.

This is special.

The dialogue is sparkling and well written throughout. The new characters of Jack, Constantine, Nancy are fresh and exciting to watch.

But the triumph is the Empty Child himself. Innocuous horror. This looks like something we've seen before in a movie. It's something that is unusual (a young preschool child in a gas mask in a 20th century city being bombed from the air... sympathetic, cute and yet unnerving...) but turns out to be something that is even more scary but not necessarily malign.

Steven Moffat turns in a masterclass in DW writing... with jokes. ("It's brilliant. I'm not sure if it's Marxism in action or a West End musical")

There's a little UK exceptionalism happening which looks a bit ridiculous more than anything. (The t-shirt, the quip about 20 years to rock n roll. )

Chris is very good as the investigating Doctor and the lucky day Doctor. John Barrowman is outstanding as the sophisticated, far future fugitive con-man Jack Harkness. Richard Wilson (previously TV's Victor Meldrew) is outstanding in what is little more than a cameo role.

There is a slight problem with the term "nanogenes". A DNA base pair is about 340 pm wide (that's 10 to the power of -12 metres). Nanogenes are presumably some kind of autonomously A.I. machines that work at 10 to the power of -9 metres... they may need to be "pico-genes" or even "femto-genes" to achieve what is portrayed in this story.

But hey ho. It's a quibble that I can live with.

The scene late in the second episode where Rose tells Nancy about the future is spine chillingly great even after 15 years.

It's simple and honest and played very skilfully by Florence Hoath and Billie Piper.

(As the patients leave the hospital, Rose mends the cuts in the barbed wire. Bombs fall on London again.) 

• NANCY: Who are you? Who are any of you? 
• ROSE: You'd never believe me if I told you. 
• NANCY: You just told me that was an ambulance from another world. There are people running around with gas mask heads calling for their mummies, and the sky's full of Germans dropping bombs on me. Tell me, do you think there's anything left I couldn't believe?
  
• ROSE: We're time travellers from the future. 
• NANCY: Mad, you are. 
• ROSE: We have a time travel machine. seriously! 
• NANCY: It's not that. All right, you've got a time travel machine. I believe you. Believe anything, me. But what future? 
• ROSE: Nancy, this isn't the end. I know how it looks, but it's not the end of the world or anything 
• NANCY: How can you say that?? Look at it. 
• ROSE: Listen to me. I was born in this city. I'm from here, in like, fifty years time. 
• NANCY: From here? 
• ROSE: I'm a Londoner. From your future. 
• NANCY: But, but you're not
  
• ROSE: What? 
• NANCY: German. 
• ROSE: Nancy, the Germans don't come here. They don't win. Don't tell anyone I told you so, but you know what? You win.
  
• NANCY: We win? 
• ROSE: Come on!

This story won the first of new Doctor Who's hat trick of Best Drama Short Presentation Hugo awards in 2006.

And the series won the 2006 BAFTA for best TV drama. Russell T won the Dennis Potter Outstanding Writing Award as head writer and freely admits that he never changed a word of Steven scripts...

This is a huge hitter in great DW stories.

If  Head Writer RTD ever decides to move on..... they could give this Steven Moffat a ring too....

ABM Rating 3.75+3.74/4.00
LJM Rating 4.78+4.76/5.00
SPJ Rating 9.80+9.80/10   

No. 2 (out of 166) and 3 (out of 167)

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