THE DOCTOR WHO RATINGS GUIDE: BY FANS, FOR FANS

BBC
Voyage of the Damned

Story No. 202 The Doctor and Kylie... er, Astrid
Production Code Christmas 2007 special
Dates Dec 25 2007

With David Tennant,
Written by Russell T Davies Directed by James Strong
Executive Producers: Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner.

Synopsis: The starship Titanic is doomed from the start. And this time, the Doctor won't be able to save everyone.

Reviews

Voyage of a Lifetime by Stuart Cottrell 17/1/08

Unofficial figures say that over 12 million people sat down on Christmas Day to watch the Doctor's latest adventure aboard the Titanic. It's not hard to see why.

Russell T Davies had surpassed himself this time, with a much darker, more mature storyline, brought beautifully to life by a stunning cast. I myself was extremely grateful for this. I am fourteen years old, and I know that a lot of writers, when writing for children, tone their work down in the most horrible patronising way because they think children can't understand things. Russell T Davies has shown great respect for the younger audience, by putting forward some very challenging issues, and the response I have seen and heard from children has been one of great excitement and deep thought.

The story begins where we left off, with the Titanic wedged in the TARDIS, and the Doctor yelling 'what' a few times. (Isn't it nice when he doesn't know something for a change?) A slight anti-climax as he sorts that out very quickly, but then, within 30 seconds, we are on the phenomenon that is the Titanic. A beautiful set, with amazing costumes on every extra. And then we look out the window, and see the Titanic sailing through space. Words cannot describe the brilliance of the art department. It looks stunning. And then everyones jigging up and down to the newly arranged theme tune, much funkier, but does lose a bit of the TARDIS sound to it. And then, there she is. A quick flick, and it's Kylie. Double take, yes, it is her. The Doctor meets her very soon as well, and soon the two of them are helping each other in and out of scrapes already. (How does he click so easily).

Geoffrey Palmer plays an amazingly real charcter, who you can really understand. Everything that follows does so for a reason, and you can almost sympathise with him. (It's so hard to write this without spoilers). Because before long, the Titanic is sinking, having been hit by meteors. The Doctor, Astrid and their little survivor group are amazing. You have Bannakaffalatta, the little red alien (don't you just love alien good guys?), Morvin and Foon van Hoff, the most adorable couple who won their tickets, Mr Copper (Clive Swift), the slightly eccentric tour guide and the loathsome Rickston Slade. Just like traditional disaster movies, you can see charcters from different social backgrounds having to integrate, and respond to each other. In true Doctor Who style, not everyone survives, and just like life, it is usually the nicest people who die. There are moments when you really just want to cry, especially at the climax, where you can really feel the Doctor's hearts break again.

Having slightly sidetracked, the effects are amazing, definitely the biggest budget yet. The Heavenly Hosts are amazingly creepy, yet do not distract from the bigger picture, and Murray Gold's score is divine. The solution is so ridiculously funny, and you come away from it feeling thoroughly entertained. There will be a moment's pause from everyone as they finish watching it, as everyone sits back and takes it all in. Sadness, laughter, darkness, joyfulness... they all create a perfect Doctor Who.

And of course, the amazing Coming Soon trailer...

Your 903 year-old SUPERHERO, Good for Something on Christmas by Graham Pilato 24/3/08

It's a little tired and very depressingly familiar for it. More subtle continuity-bursting goes on. It's very, very, very pretty. And it's Shame about the lost opportunities.

When the Christmas Special is all there is of new Doctor Who in the many months between new seasons, it's easy to be both very forgiving and very frustrated about anything that bothers one due to the special nature of the Special.

And, dammit, this Special was pretty fucking special. It really irks one that it does irk so. So many little things bother me (and I'm sure they bother many other Doctor Who enthusiasts) about Voyage of the Damned that I think I may have to resort to some pretty rant-shaped comments. I hope this doesn't just become a long list of gripes with an eventual inevitable guarded recommendation at the end and the kind of apologist remarks I've already written for a rather embarrassingly kind-despite-the-faults Time and the Rani review. Hope not, but it's going to be very tough to stop exactly that from happening.

You know, the greatness of being a fan is that you don't have to apologize for hating things you love and making more contradictory statements than a socially conservative Republican running for president in the 21st Century. It's a relief. But I'm going to show a lot of my true colors here, 'kay? Not at all like a Titanic going down, it's not too pretty.

Now, getting into it: One line that's dead wrong... unless it's fixed eventually retroactively due to some sense actually being made from this... "903 years old"?!

Back to Time and the Rani for a second. Totally fannishly, sorry, as this is perhaps the little niggle that gets me most annoyed the at the second: The last time on the TV series that the Doctor actually revealed his age was right there, back in 1987, with cartoony Mel at his side and in the clutches of the cartoony Rani. He says that 9-5-3, the combination for a doorlock, is the same as his age, and the Rani's. Fans took permanent note twenty years ago. We thought. But RTD was a Pertwee/Tom Baker fan, and David Tennant is an out-of-the-closet Davison fan. Guess they didn't notice. And the Tenth is undoubtedly a good deal older than the Seventh. Say that it's so.

I don't know who was going to point out to RTD that the Doctor turned 1,000 in the novel Set Piece -- brilliant as that NA was, and surely during the period of Russell's awareness of the novels, seeing as he wrote one around that time -- or that the Eighth Doctor lived for at least a century and a half or so more in the later novels. I don't even care that much if he's ignoring all the novels' continuity, he's certainly not ignoring the existence of the established Seventh and Eighth Doctors thus far, as they did turn up in the Human Nature journal in drawings and the Tenth is admitting himself that he is the "Tenth". The 900 year-old Time Lord bit was something that could easily be glossed over previously because it was strictly a case of pointing out the alien, but this time it's not simply an unspecified 900-something years-old bit of alienness. It's a rather striking moment of "I'm your superhero" that just barely works if one is able to keep from thinking about "903 years old."

This is a case in point of a detail that has not been thought through at all well yet by a busy team of producers and writers trying to make magic all the time. And the most frustrating and forgivable thing about it, the "bitch of it" as they who do say do say, is that this is a detail that can easily be overlooked as long as it's not a part of a greater problem, which, on the face of it, it's not. But, in the guts of it, it is. Dammit. This is a key to a show that is being lovingly recreated and exalted on British television without the kind of intelligent detail that really matters when it comes to filling up the imagination and the continuity. And let's face it, you can't ignore all of the massively long series continuity. Who would want to, anyway? Certainly, it need not be paid worship every moment, but I'd hope that someone could at least have mentioned to Russell that his proper Doctor Who fandom might need a backup of sorts; some experts in the necessary details could be employed without pay, surely?

It's the creeping sense that this is a really strangely warped ordinary superhero we're looking at now, who wants to be that and do that, a Spiderman with no secret identity left, getting called in to save the day. It's the moldering of a hero that never would have had this presence in the past. It's a kind of betrayal that this is a guy with exactly three years of experience since he was last announced to be 900, not something like it, but it. A kind of shrugging admittance that what you see is exactly what you get, now that we can show you anything we want with our big new shiny hit show with the money.

Did that make any sense? I'm saying that I think forgetting about the age of the Doctor is about as small and glaring an error as misspelling your own middle name on an exam. You didn't have to put the middle name there, but you did, and you got it wrong. You really suck.

Regarding expectations not lived up to, though: nice they aren't Axons. I'm talking about the robotic hosts. And it's clear from the previews what the fans are being expected to think these guys are. Just like the Titanic misdirection from the end of the third season, these guys are so obviously not what we were thinking. Everything in the first three minutes of Voyage of the Damned is utterly divine in that respect. It's as beautiful as the ads made it look and here were all of the shiny weird dramatis personae on display. It started so well.

Too bad they're inferior to the Voc robots, or the "Robots of Death" -- well, inferior because they're less creepy by far than what was created in one of the truly classic Doctor Who stories of the mid-seventies. And this means that we get another opportunity to look at the new series as inferior when it's riffing on some earlier greater things, eating its own tail, chomping at the business of making a good story for the sake making a familiar one. The moment-for-moment recreation of a couple of scenes from the 1976 original comes off not a little awkwardly, though, as the disembodied hand just doesn't seem to be half the horror here, nor does the "kill the humans" bit. We're looking at certain doom for most of the ship, for certain, and it's all in the title that we've known about for months.

These folks are eponymously "damned" and the robots and their cyborg counterparts are surely into creating disasters, but what exactly is going to happen when the golden discus comes? Plot. These robots do whatever weird stuff they need to be able to do, and it doesn't half destroy their mystique. Of course they can fly. Yet again, Russell T. Davies pushes his limited ingredients to the impossibility point for the sake of making wacky Doctor Who. It's never 50,000 when it can be 5,000,000,000 with him. And we love him and hate him for it.

Let's call for a moratorium on all characters ever again who are cute and say things without verbs, like "me Tarzan", "you cute", or "Bannakaffalatta proud!". It's not cute if you keep thinking that the character should be able to say a verb and is just choosing not to because it looks cute. It's frightfully annoying.

How about that midshipman healing from that bullet? Maybe a little line of dialogue -- already asked for at this point, surely -- describing the alienness of these so very human looking aliens could have justified this miraculous oddity of survival of the most-needed characters for Plot. But no, I don't think there was even one. Despite so much damned groaning on the part of our little good guy young middy.

So, do these aliens actually look like humans? Is this the first time the new series has done that particularly embarrassing cheat? I think it is. Did I miss some line of exposition about how this is how they look just when they're visiting Christmas? Wouldn't it be nice if RTD made these guys just a little bit like the Navarinos in Delta and the Bannermen, who simply turned into human-looking people for the fun of the trip, looking a lot more like giant purple blobs with pseudopods and eyes most of the time?

A beautiful opening and a wonderful first half, quick though it is to get to the predictable inevitable "iceberg", must not be forgotten. What a ride, in the end, like the last two slaphappy Christmas Who specials, this is. For the most part, let it be remembered, this is still such a pretty 70-something minutes of fun TV. It's just that it's so incredibly familiar a thing, this ride, that I think I may be missing something new that I thought might have been coming... but is just not here yet, not until this dashing Tenth is actually given a reason for being so damn enamored with fake snow and maybe it's coming. The acting on the part of the popular lead is still as good as it was last year.

The best bits are certainly all in the first half. Although, the bit when the Doctor gets flown up to the bridge via a pair of golden hosts was just mighty heavenly. Though, that awe didn't last as long as it was supposed to, as the whole will-they-collide-or-won't-they bit just comes off terribly cheesy, especially once the queen gets her remarks in. From the departure of most of the extras upon the big slaughterhouse section of the middle act of the story to the end, with the bizarre celebration of falling particles, and the chance to have a kitchen and chairs for an old alien fraud with quite the credit card, we get some truly weird and inexplicable themes. Well, the one theme being: you can't always save the ones you'd prefer. And that's solid, but so meaningless to a Time Lord who knows better. And it really makes one wonder what was the point of getting so inexplicably fixated on Rose in the second season... especially as that came off so poorly.

Prettier and far more cinematic than The Runaway Bride, this is, but a lot less fun to think about, actually; a bitter aftertaste sets in just moments after you begin to think about what in the world that was all about. Here's hoping the madness means something later, because I believe we have a great example here of a story pulled in many directions in theme, none too clear but one and that one is a retread. The pictures were so pretty and Christmas got its due adventurous representation here, just what does it mean?

Christmas itself is perhaps best not returned to by Doctor Who after this, at least not so literally. This story was all corn. The fantasy world of present-day RTD-era Who has finally turned the Doctor into the kind of superhero of comic book lore that I never associated with Doctor Who. He's getting to be well known and loved or hated by society just for the sake of humor and fitting a sort of traditional heroic mould. People on Earth do know him well, and his adventures. That Elizabeth I wants him dead, Victoria wants him exiled, and now Elizabeth II wants him to go on saving the world just makes me feel a little bit sick, actually. I don't want my Doctor to be famous, at least not in the present day.

I was still reeling from the weirdness of a present day that seems to keep getting hit by impossible-to-deny alien attacks that doesn't seem to change much at all when the maybe-silliness of this new "London Deserted" premise fell upon me. What do we do with that? Would we run? Who are these people in this London who hide from nothing?

Part of the problem of making huge changes to the "real world" of a story in sci-fi is that it automatically makes everything about the change from the norm that much more compelling to an audience, dwarfing whatever other pretty spaceships may be orbiting in the story for consequence. Once the Titanic doesn't kill everyone on Earth, I think we're looking at a huge potential unrealized and the more frustrating for it. We need to know what's going on here. Maybe it's more Torchwood's purview, but I don't expect them to get their heads out of their own scandalous asses for very long over there. Plus, they're in Cardiff.

God, I hope the fourth season of new Doctor Who can finally deal with the new world that it has made out of the present day. We've seen the profound impact of the Doctor on individuals in this new series -- with the likes of Rose, Mickey, Elton, Jackie, LInDA and Martha -- but we do need to know about the new world as a whole, I think. So far, the 21st Century -- the time when everything changes, according to Captain Jack on Torchwood -- is. Let's see what that means please. Change us.

We did have Rob Shearman's Dalek, where we learned that, like it was often suggested by Who in the past, e.g. John Peel's novelization of The Power of the Daleks, the alien technology being discovered and harnessed gradually by today's humans is having an impact on progress and responsible for so much advancement. That's happening already, and that's good, but what about all the wonder and the religious significance? Where is our Childhood's End moment? Will we have aliens teach us a lesson this coming year? Something worthy of the build up from so many disastrous Christmases?

And, finally, will Kylie Minogue, so very much another Rose stand-in, ever live up to the fact that we're all going to think of her as Billie Piper's inferior from now on? The less we get manipulated to cry about that best-forgotten Rose, I say, the better.

6/10