| THE EMPTY CHILD/THE DOCTOR DANCES by Steven Moffat |
| Story 8 Synopsis: The Doctor tracks an object which falls to Earth. Rose is soon trailing after a strange child, and latches onto a barrage balloon. When she falls, she is caught in a tractor beam, leading down to a spaceship, belonging to Captain Jack Harkness. The Doctor is spooked by the TARDIS phone ringing, and is warned not to answer it. He traces his warnee to an evacuated house. It's London, 1941, but a gang of homeless kids are being organised by a woman called Nancy. The strange child comes to the house, and the kids scram. The Doctor follows Nancy, realising the child is connected to the missing object. She tells him to see the doctor, taking him to Albion Hospital. The doctor is Dr Constantine. The ward is full of people with identical injuries, wearing gas masks. Constantine also changes. Jack and Rose arrive, as the ward patients awaken. The strange child tracks Nancy down - it used to be her brother. The Doctor manages to buy some time, but the reawakened plague victims chase he, Jack and Rose around the hospital. Jack teleports back to his ship, then manages to bring Rose and the Doctor there, too. The Doctor realises Jack's ship is also a Chula ship, containing nanogenes. At the crash site, Jack proves his object was a harmless ambulance, but the Doctor realises it contained nanogenes that repaired Nancy's brother, and is now re-engineering every human it meets, into Chula warriors. Jack returns to his ship. The Doctor realises the child isn't Nancy's brother, but her son. When she embraces him, the nanogenes are able to correct their mistake. The Doctor uses the nanogenes to cure all the plague victims. Jack uses his spaceship to prevent a German bomb landing on the Chula ambulance, and the Doctor then programs the ambulance to self-destruct. The Doctor rescues Jack from his craft before the bomb explodes. |
| Review:- The Second World War isn't over after all... as a con gets out of hand, can the Doctor save Earth from an unthinking enemy? With a lot to do, it's good that this is a story with 2 episodes to do it in. And yet, even the padding seems to serve a purpose. I have been dismissive of Steven Moffat's work before now (all of it, in fact), but he's let nobody down here - this is a straightforward tale of a mistake that gets out of control, rescued by simple humanity. Is this as good as it can get? The 1941 setting seems pretty arbitrary, to allow the backdrop of the Blitz, and the reason for the accident that starts all the trouble. But it works very well, as BBC set designs and costumiers go to town with things they can understand. Captain Jack is the trigger of the drama here, as he learns he has unintentionally unleashed a biological disaster onto London. The ambulance pod used for a financial sting is a credible set-up, and the idea that it got out of hand also makes sense. Everything stems from there. The main new characters are Jack and Nancy. She is initially acting as guardian to a flock of dispossessed children (but cunningly, they call her Mum from the start, which is a neat clue), and warns the Doctor to not answer the phone. She leads him to Albion Hospital, where the scale of the crisis comes to light, with wards full of patients with identical injuries and gas-masked faces. She later returns to face up to the child who has been causing the trouble. Having hidden her association with the child by claiming it was her brother, it is her journey to accept the child as her own son that leads to such a powerful conclusion to the drama. Jack is a rogue, a silver-tongued conman, although not devoid of decent behaviour. He quickly grows to realise the Doctor is more than he seems, leading to tension between them, especially where Rose is concerned. His comments about having two years' of memories erased is suggestive of something bigger to come, and his character arc concludes when he uses his ship to remove the German bomb, at the expected loss of his own life. That Rose gets the Doctor to save him may be as big an error as her insistence that the Doctor shouldn't kill the Dalek. But again, time will tell. Rose gets some good stuff early on, investigating the cries of the child, then hanging onto a barrage balloon, but after rescue by Jack, she seems to regress. Her belief that she is better than the Doctor gives Jack the wrong idea, and her blase attitude at Albion Hospital doesn't help. Even her reassurance to Nancy that the Germans don't win WW2 is a touch reckless. But perhaps nemesis awaits... The Doctor really goes through the mill here, carelessly infiltrating a club to ask for information, then infiltrating Nancy's group of kids, always protecting, always searching for the truth. He is slightly testy with Jack, but the latter does save his life, and there is a sense of acceptance of Jack. His link of Jack's Om-Com tech, to that of the child leads to his link of the Chula ships and the problematic nanogenes. It is only by chance that Nancy prevents apocalypse, but as with Jack, it is the Doctor's gentle persuasion that leads people to do the right thing. His ecstatic cry of "everybody lives!" is a bit OTT, but no more than the rather silly dancing subplot that screams "padding" at the viewer throughout the second half of the story. The guest star Richard Wilson is surprisingly minimal really as Dr Constantine, getting a few creepy lines in part 1, and a few comedy lines in part 2. Unlike Simon Callow, this is far from a domineering role, and he has no trouble pulling it off. The Bad Wolf references were so minimal as to be almost unnoticeable, too. On the whole, an excellent story, enlivened by some very good acting. |
| Disclaimer: I have watched this story. |