...that was for the Classic Who fans in the audience.
I have to admit, had I been particularly clever and started this retrospective a few weeks earlier, I could be doing The Christmas Invasion right now and be that much closer to getting through the episodes that feature Rose...and into episodes where Rose is there despite not actually being there. But I'll get to that complaint in a minute. Fortunate for us, The Unquiet Dead is a Christmas episode! ...well, an episode set during Christmas at any rate.
This is New Who's first offering from writer Mark Gatiss, who would come to prominence far, far more when Steven Moffat takes over the producer's chair and would write a total of nine episodes for the series as a whole. And while he and Moffat are off doing their Dracula reboot, I do hope he'll come back and write a few for Jodie Whittaker's Doctor. You hear that, Chibnall? I'm giving you a freebie here!
This episode forms the third part of a sort of trilogy with Rose's first adventures with the Doctor. As I've said before, Russell T. Davies wanted to show off the potential that the show had. Rose is set in the present, The End of the World in the future, and The Unquiet Dead in the past. And I do have to applaud Russell for that, it's a stroke of genius!
Don't get used to me saying that, you won't hear it a lot. Less so as we go on.
The pre-credits teaser depicts a funeral home in the late 1800s, where a young man is mourning the death of his grandmother...who promptly sits up after glowing blue and strangles him to death! You know...for kids! But it seems the funeral director is very much aware of what is going on and tries to prevent the woman from leaving...without success. As the woman trudges out into the snow, an unearthly howl brings us into the unearthly howl of the main credits sequence. Small side note here, since I believe I did mention it before, I do like Murray Gold's variation of the theme for the Ninth and Tenth Doctor's, even if it is a bit too orchestral. Of course, my personal favorite variation is always going to be the one used for Sylvester McCoy's Doctor, but that's a story for another day.
Picking up from where we last left them off, the Doctor takes Rose into the past. There's a moment I love where the Doctor offers Rose the year of 1860, she asks what happened then, and his response with a wide grin is "I dunno, let's find out!". To me, it's exactly how the Doctor should be. I know a lot of people didn't really care for Eccleston's Doctor, but I love him to bits and I think more time would have really helped to crystalize him as the Doctor.
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| "Hang on, we have to do the thing Russell T. Davies thinks makes an arc!" |
Unfortunately, though, the TARDIS problem of not landing right where the Doctor tries to go rears its head, and the pair end up in Cardiff in 1869. There, the funeral director, Mr. Sneed (Alan David) and his assistant Gwyneth (Eve Myles, better known later for Torchwood) discuss the situation that has apparently been going on for quite some time before going out after the woman.
After giving Rose some directions to the TARDIS wardrobe that she could not possibly remember long enough to follow, the pair head out and some cheap shots are taken about where the New Series is shot while Gwyneth uses her psychic ability to track down the woman to none other than...Charles Dickens (Simon Callow)! Included in this story because Russell T. Davies wanted a historical figure to show up...his placement here is actually kind of weird. Don't get me wrong, I like Simon Callow and he does a magnificent job as Dickens...but there's really just no reason for him to be in this story except for a later joke in Series Four.
But the old woman interrupts a poetry slam by Dickens that brings the Doctor, Rose, and the funeral folks in. Sneed and Gywneth start hauling off the old woman and Rose tries to stop them...for...some reason? Regardless, she gets kidnapped. Of course, if that didn't happen, we wouldn't have a plot, so the Doctor heads off with Dickens and they go after her following the Doctor smoozing his way into Dickens' good graces.
Rose, meanwhile, wakes up in the funeral parlor with the bodies of the old woman and her grandson, which get possessed by the blue energy and try their hardest to prevent the three seasons of what is to come. Alas, we aren't so lucky, as the Doctor and Dickens arrive at the last minute. The Doctor then interrogates the presences within the bodies, who declare that they need to have the Rift opened.
Yeah, the Rift in Cardiff becomes a big thing in the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who. More on that way later.
But after some exposition from Sneed, we get the Bad Wolf reference for the episode (which I'll get to when it becomes relevant in the finale for Series One) and Charles Dickens having a bit of disbelief at the situation (with Eccleston having a really good moment as the Doctor) before the Doctor convinces Gwyneth to use her psychic powers to séance the heck out of ghosts. The "ghosts" are in fact, the Gelth, a race of beings that fought in the Time War and lost their corporeal bodies. They want to possess the bodies of the recently deceased in order to function...or so they claim. Yeah, the obviously evil beings that possessed a woman and killed a person are obviously evil. No sugar coating it there.
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| "FOOLED YOOOOOU!!!" |
After a brief discussion on the morality of it by the Doctor and Rose, they have Gwyneth open the Rift to let the Gelth through...and shit hits the fan in a big way. They reveal themselves to indeed be incredibly evil beyond evil and plan to kill off the entire human race. Needless to say, the Doctor picked a whole bouquet of oopsie-daisies on this one. He and Rose get trapped while Dickens declares "Screw this, I'm outta here!" (but in a classy, Victorian way) before discovering that indeed, the Gelth are dependent on the gas.
So, as true to Doctor Who form, Gwyneth remains behind to blow up the house...or does she? The Doctor later tells Rose that she was dead from the moment she opened the Rift...so who was it who closed it? A rogue Gelth? Her spirit? I think Dickens puts it best, reminding the Doctor that "there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy". After we get an Edwin Drood joke, the Doctor and Rose give Dickens one last surprise by disappearing in the TARDIS. Dickens walks into the snow with a new lease on life...which sadly won't mean too much seeing as he dies in 1870.
This episode is a bit of a mixed bag for me. It opened the door for a few things in New Who, namely the Cardiff Rift. While this episode would only be specifically referenced in a couple of later episodes (particularly one later this season and the whole of Torchwood up until The New World), it was a cornerstone episode for the series in more than just showcasing the past aesthetic.
As for bads...well, what the episode could have been is far, far more interesting to me than what it became. Mark Gatiss originally wanted an overall much darker story that would have involved more of Gwyneth's backstory with a deceased brother, as well as a scene in homage to The Pyramid of Mars where the Doctor shows Rose an alternate future where the zombified Gelth have overrun the Earth. That last one, sadly, was cut due to being too expensive to film.
I'm sad to say it, but the Doctor's greatest enemy always has been and always will be budget. The classic show had plenty of instances where reach exceeded grasp as far as presentation went, and that was largely due to the BBC being very stingy about giving them any money.
Also, this has nothing to do with anything, but the part of Mr. Sneed was originally written for David Tennant. Just something for you to marvel over.
As for other problems, I do actually like the design of the Gelth, I just wish that they were better developed and explained. What were they before they were ghostly figures? On whose side did they fight in the Time War, if at all? Given that the Doctor doesn't immediately want to destroy them, I would assume not the Daleks, but he doesn't show any indication that he knows who they are or where they're from. My personal headcanon is that they were from the earliest days of the War before the Doctor joined in following the events of Night of the Doctor.
As for the Gelth themselves, I really hope they get developed more at some point, I'd like some more explanation.
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| He's seen what's coming. He knows it's not good... |
The Unquiet Dead, however, is not a good episode. It's also not a bad episode. It's just average. Going with Rose and The End of the World, it basically serves as a baseline for how stories set in its era - namely the past - would be done. Would it have better if Gatiss had had the budget he'd wanted to for it? We'll never know, but I think it would have been. A far darker story than what was touched on here would have been a nice contrast to the over the top alien-ness of The End of the World.
But while we've had an average, an average, and an average episode back to back to back...it's now finally time for the first legitimately bad episode of the revived Doctor Who. There's a sort of alien invasion of Earth, the "Rose Tyler is a Awful" Counter goes way, way up, and it's a two-parter! I know you're all just as excited as I am.
Doctor Who is the property of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
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