The Next Doctor

There is a lot to like about the Next Doctor. The biggest thing is David Morrissey. He really feels like he could have played the Doctor well and must have had people guessing when this originally aired. It's a good mystery I found quite entertaining on the whole, with a pretty well done resolution to it, if you ask me.

The giant Cyberman doesn't look great and even the sets feel a little cheap, but I think the acting and serviceable story make this a good enough treat.

Interestingly, I missed this episode completely the first time around. I think it wasn't on Netflix's normal run order back when I first watched the show, and so I watched this much later on while getting through Matt Smith's time on the show. It was great in that regard, a nice return back to an era I thought I wouldn't be getting any new content from again. It's not unlike the specials from this year, in that regard.

One of the biggest missed opportunities in Doctor Who. Jackson Lake just being a regular guy is the blandest and most predictable answer to the mystery as to who this Doctor is - and the truth gets revealed far far too quickly to have any real sense of payoff and tension. You literally just had a fake out regeneration in the last story, how cool would it have been for David Morrissey to have been the actual Eleventh Doctor, but echoing from a timeline where the Stolen Earth regeneration completed?

Man, Morrissey just deserved to be an actual Doctor. When the message is "anyone can be brave enough to be the Doctor", which is commendable enough, it doesn't quite work when the real Doctor gets all the cool heroic moments later on - saving the boy, confronting the Cyber-King - whilst Jackson only just watches on. A pity.

I’ve reached what is almost certainly my least watched David Tennent episode, and the only Doctor Who story which I’ve fallen asleep to on its original transmission. Perhaps I’d woken up too early, excited about presents.

The 10th Doctor himself continues to shine without any of his companions, but it has to be said that the production suffers from the lack of a second regular character. David Morrissey’s Jackson Lake and his companion Rosita do not have nearly enough sparkle or natural oozing confidence in their roles to make up for Donna’s absence, or Martha’s or Rose’s. After overdosing on companions in Journey’s End the difference feels especially stark.

There is a genius, emotive concept at the heart of this story. What happens when an ordinary father loses his memory and wakes up living the fantasy of being The Doctor. We learn that he has suffered the trauma of losing his wife and child. But where does Rosita fit in? She’s introduced as a pseudo-companion to Morrissey’s pseudo-Doctor but we never get a sense of their closeness or why she is working with him. What is it that they do together? It would have been exciting to start the story from the perspective of Morrissey’s Doctor, completing one of his adventures, confusing the audience through not *quite* being The Doctor. A rare opportunity for the show to parody itself before our real Doctor bundles into the story.

Miss Hartigan’s dress and brolly is fab but I don’t get a sense of her as a character either. Doctor Who seems to specialise in slightly arch, restrained, inexplicably sexually charged women. I don’t know what it was about that graveside that was getting her so excited.

The truth is that while there are some great story beats here, it feels like a 45 minute adventure stretched over an hour. And another in the long line of limp Cyberman stories - it’s surprisingly difficult to make them pop as monsters in the 21st century. The lumbering Cyber King is not the answer, but it did bring to mind scenes from Robot.

When everything wraps up and Jackson Lake is reunited with the least charismatic child actor in existence, things come to a clumsy, heartwarming end. This whole guest cast is a very rare (the only?) example of Andy Pryor not quite getting things right.

It’s clear from the Doctor Who Confidential that accompanied this episode that a huge amount of hard graft went into it - especially from director Andy Goddard. However, after listening to The Next Doctor BBC website commentary (which was used on the BBC3 red button service) with RTD and Julie Gardener I have to comment on how dissatisfied they seem with this story despite their positive, peppy personas. Although they were wowed by some elements, it has the most amount of nitpicking of any commentary I’ve ever heard (though they do acknowledge this and note that this commentary came after a very long day!)

They are still arguing the toss about which elements should be added in where and what the Doctor knows at each point. And, without being critical of anyone, they are dissatisfied with several of the visuals. Shot as the 15th story in the same run (which started with Voyage of the Damned). The production team were on their last legs when this was filmed.

The Next Doctor was an especially difficult shoot because of children’s filming hours, nightshoots, period dressing and over a thousand people watching exterior scenes in Gloucester, (which impacts health and safety, and police presence, and spoilers!)

In addition to this RTD says: “writing a mystery is not my natural state… by 30 minutes we're into a completely different story… if you were writing this properly you’d sustain the mystery until 50 minutes in. But I wouldn’t believe it. I couldn’t be bothered.”

Here’s a quote from RTD in DWM 404: “There's clearly some terrible history of abuse with Miss Hartigan. As a result of all that damage, she can't help but sexualise everything. It's how she sees the world, or how she's been forced to see it. 'Yet another man, come to assert himself against me in the night’, she says, which just brings with it an awful draught of darkened rooms and powerful men. She's a workhouse matron; her job would involve institutionalised violence, and she's been the recipient of that too. So it informs everything she says, whether she's conscious of that or not. "For example," he adds, "she's the only person who clearly and immediately recognises Rosita as a prostitute. She's even flirtatious at the graveside, just before she begins a massacre. Something's gone very wrong in her head. And that's why she needs forgiving, in the end - that's why the Doctor can't kill her, only set her free. So, yes, there was a lot to talk about there, just to bring out the subtext.”

Now. All respect to RTD but none of that subtext makes it on screen for me - and I’m not 100% I’d have wanted it to, or whether it would have made the character better.