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| "I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque..." |
...although now I have an idea for the sequel.
Anyway, let's get into the matter at hand: 42.
The first outing for future showrunner Chris Chibnall sees the Doctor and Martha landing on a spacecraft after picking up their distress signal. The temperature is rising, the two are separated from the TARDIS by extreme heat, and the ship's engines have failed with only forty-two minutes remaining before it falls into the nearby star.
Definitely some bad news bears if ever I've heard of them. However, this episode did help me realize a complaint that a lot of people have about the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who in particular - that the Doctor gets separated from the TARDIS in situations that would make the episode five minutes long. Now, it's understandable why this would the writers would do this, but it's more the way in which the Doctor is separated from the TARDIS that triggers the complaint from me. One would think that the Doctor, an alien with 900+ years of experience in traveling in the TARDIS, would have developed a way to call it remotely to him.
Say, by a Stattenheim remote control as established in The Two Doctors way back in 1985, for example. Just spitballing here.
In 42, though, I began to realize how often it actually came up. We saw it back in Father's Day with the Reapers somehow managing to throw the interior out of space and time in particular, we saw it because of the Devil in The Impossible Planet, and we'll see it a few more times later on. There are also plenty of instances where the Doctor somehow forgets that he/she has a time machine and decides to go the more mundane route, such as back in Gridlock.
It encourages the use of the Idiot Plot, a plot that only works because a character forgets something incredibly important or acts like a complete moron in spite of their usual nature. While this sometimes happened in the Classic Show, the Doctor was never portrayed as a moron...intentionally, anyway.
To swing back to the actual plot rather than my rant about a plot point, the Doctor gives Martha the same superphone upgrade he gave Rose way back in The End of the World, calling it a "Frequent Flyers' Privilege". The pair land on a spaceship that is roasting like a sauna and, stepping out, they meet the crew who tell them to get out before the heat vents through that area. This blocks the TARDIS off from them as I mentioned earlier. As the crew tells them that the engines have failed and they have forty-two minutes left, Martha looks outside and calls the Doctor over to see...a star that the powerless ship is now hurtling toward.
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| "We definitely aren't gonna go snog." "Aren't we?" "Shhhh!" |
The Doctor heads into an engine room that looks suspiciously like a redressed boiler room from last week's episode and picks out where they are, mentioning the ship's using energy scoops which he thought were banned by this point in history. The crew is skirts over the question and lays it out to them - forty minutes until they crash into the sun, their only hope is to get to the engines up and then get to the bridge.
The bridge is blocked off by a series of deadlock-sealed doors that cannot be overriden, only opened by answering the questions programmed into each door by the crew.
That's right. The Doctor now faces his most dastardly opponent yet! A POP QUIZ!
...or, rather, Martha does as she goes off with a crew member what with the job requiring two people. The Doctor gets called to the med lab along with Kath, the Captain. Her husband, Korwin, has been infected with some sort of virus that is causing his body temperature to raise uncontrollably. The Doctor sedates him and then the crew uses a stasis chamber to fight the rising temperature.
Martha and Riley start on the doors, Riley revealing the kicker - while the questions and answers were made by the crew, the crew has changed since the answers were made. The Doctor helps out with the answer, but it's clear they'll need more assistance. Luckily, Martha has the superphone upgrade! When the Doctor can't figure out whether Elvis Presley or the Beatles had more Number Ones pre-downloads, Martha calls up her Mother!
Francine tries to question her about the Doctor, but Martha keeps to the task at hand...largely because she's going to die with a time limit.
If this were not bad enough, it seems that Korwin's body is changing on a cellular level. The ship's doctor is burned alive by Korwin, who commands her to "BURN WITH ME!". For added fun, his eyes glow white-hot, too!
As Martha and Riley make it through the first door, Korwin dons a safety helmet (for reasons that are never really made clear besides giving him a cool visual) and goes off looking for trouble. The Doctor, Kath, and the rest find the burned remains of the ship's doctor and knows that something bad is afoot. The Doctor's never seen anything like this, which he finds particularly worrisome. He tries to question the crew on what has happened, but Kath is not at all helpful - understandably so with her husband having been infected. After an announcement to the crew, the Doctor still can't figure out why the thing that's infected Korwin is so interested in her...
Korwin also converts another member of the crew into a heat zombie, as I've decided to term them. Said heat zombie goes after Martha and Riley, who escape...right into an escape pod.
Oops.
The escape pod gets jettisoned despite Riley's attempt to override and the Doctor stepping in to try and help. While the Doctor manages to stop the heat zombie, the pod is already gone and we get a shot of the Doctor staring out through the window of the ship as Martha stares back through the window of the pod.
Korwin, meanwhile, confronts Kath and reveals the truth - this is all her fault.
The Doctor mobilizes the rest of the crew to strike back, trying to get the pod back. Inside, as they fall toward fiery oblivion, Martha restates her faith in the Doctor. Riley asks her if she has anyone at home, and she tells him about her family. The revelation hits that if she dies here, then they'll never know what happened to her. Riley encourages her to call.
Kath, meanwhile, tricks Korwin into the medlab and uses the stasis chamber on him. Given that the chamber is primed for almost three hundred degrees below zero, one would think that her arms would freeze off trying to force him into it. Alas, no. While this fails, he is later subdued by Kath and seemingly killed...
The Doctor, meanwhile, takes to a space suit to try and pull the escape pod back to the ship by remagnetizing the hull.
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| I don't have a joke here, I just like the design. |
Martha calls her mother and they have a much more amicable conversation, watched over by a blonde Sinister Woman (as she's both called in the script and credited as) who listens in on the call. Francine tries once more to get her to talk about the Doctor, but to no avail.
The Doctor journeys out and manages to do the impossible...but not before he gets a nice, far beyond healthy dose of sun exposure. He gazes into the sun and, as a certain Earth philosopher can be misquoted as saying, the sun gazes back into him. He realizes that the sun is, in fact, alive. Kath rushes to assist with the air lock to find the Doctor with his eyes scrunched shut and doubled over in pain...when Martha checks on him, his eyes are burning.
The sun has possessed the Doctor, but he fights it. He's worked out what's happened - the ship used the energy scoop to take fuel from the sun. They manage to get the Doctor to the med bay. Korwin reawakens at this point, getting his helmet back on...
The Doctor starts to run Martha through the process of regeneration, though Martha cuts him off before he can get into too much detail. We aren't getting Matt Smith a few seasons early, alas, but everything in its own time. Martha activates the chamber and begins to freeze the Doctor.
The heat shields drop to 5% as Korwin cuts the power. As the Doctor protests, Kath goes off to confront Korwin. Riley and the other crew member, Orin, manage to get through more of the doors. The Doctor tells Martha to dump the fuel so it can return to the sun.
Kath, meanwhile, lures Korwin back to the escape pod after admitting that - yes, this is her fault. She seals them in, blasting them both out of the airlock and into the flames.
Anyway, to wrap up, right under the wire the fuel is released. The Doctor doesn't die horrifically and become Matt Smith prematurely, and nobody burns to death as they're able to fly away from the sun at the last minute.
Not before we get a really creepy bit of the Doctor commanding Martha "BURN WITH ME!!!!"
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| Unfortunately, no one had the heart to tell David Tennant that he was fifteen years too late to be in Ghostwatch. |
42 isn't a bad episode at all. Just your standard monster of the week with only a few Series Arc bits drizzled in to intrude on it, and even that isn't so bad that it drags the episode down like it does in some others. Besides my minor complaint in the beginning that wasn't actually a complaint about the TARDIS being squirreled away for the duration, this is pretty good. The premise works for Who, it pretty well explained, and the acting isn't poorly done and the crew is more of less likable for the time that we have them - since we already know that only the Doctor and Martha are gonna follow on from this.
The ship, despite my earlier crack about it looking like a boiler room, seems to have been designed with more a blue collar look in mind, so that works more to the episode's credit than its detriment. Even the design of the heat zombies is nice, the jumpsuits with the mining helmets that is. The sun itself doesn't physically interact with the ship and its crew beyond heating them, but it is alive...and this isn't the last time we'll see a sentient star on Doctor Who, either.
But, yes, 42 is pretty good as a stand-alone. Next, we come to Human Nature, the first part of a two-parter based on a novel of the same name by Paul Cornell. Paul Cornell also wrote Father's Day, but I won't hold that against him because this two-parter is actually really good.
And no, for the record, I haven't read the novel. I have heard people endlessly bitching about how the episode is just an inferior copy of the novel, but I really don't care.
Next time, the Doctor becomes human, he and Martha hide out in the 1910s, and we get the first truly gloriously hammy actor in the Revived Series. Yes, I know I've pointed out a couple of people, but Son of Mine reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally takes the cake and it is glorious!
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
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