Off-Hours: The 2007 Doctor Who Christmas Special

Episode

• Doctor Who (new) 4.00 “Voyage of the Damned”: The Doctor must save the passengers of an alien luxury space cruiser orbiting Earth on (you guessed it) Christmas Day.

I comment on the season four trailer in this post, so if you don’t know who the returning companions or classic-series monster are for the upcoming season, you might consider this information “spoilery” and will probably want to avoid the remarks on the trailer.

Remarks

The Episode

1. There’s a school of thought that says that Doctor Who is at its best when it’s exactly like something else, only plus the Doctor. (Or so the About Time books tell me.) So here we have a Who story that’s got the same narrative structure as the distaster spectaculars of the Seventies, something in the vein of The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno. Kylie Minogue’s casting makes a lot more sense in this light, and if anything what “Damned” needed was a couple more stunt-casting decisions like that.
2. Kylie was actually pretty good here, and we’ll get to Astrid in a few, but overall it’s a bravura cast and I have a hard time singling any specific cast member out. It’s great to see Jimmy Vee actually get some lines and do stuff after four years as the token Midget Monster Guy (he was the Moxx of Balhoon in “The End of the World” and the Graske in a number of things, including the Sarah Jane story “Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?” in which he came close to stealing the production from pretty much everyone). It’s always nice to have Clive Swift around (last time we saw him, he was being out-acted and indeed out-everythinged by Jenny Tomasin in “Revelation of the Daleks”) and I’m sure a lot of people are very sad that Mr. Copper won’t end up as even a Harkness-style backup companion.
3. I wouldn’t mind seeing Rickston Slade come back in a future episode, either.
4. So…overall, good episode, better Christmas special than “The Christmas Invasion” or “The Runaway Bride”. Let’s get to the nitpicky stuff.
5. When Russell T Davies finally leaves the series, his tenure’s going to have two lasting aesthetic facets, and one of them is going to be the alien invasion or paranormal event broadcast on live TV (we’re specifically talking every season finale, every Christmas special, and the entire run of The Sarah Jane Adventures, in addition to “Aliens of London”, “World War Three” and “Smith and Jones”…not to mention all that Torchwood shit I can’t be bothered to remember). The “deserted London” scene early on in the episode, when several Titanic passengers teleport down to London to find the town more or less empty on account of the Sycorax and Racnoss incidents of previous years, is a priceless parody of this.
6. The other lasting aesthetic facet is going to be villain(s) motivated by naked financial/business greed (specifically see anything involving Cassandra or the Slitheen). We’ve got that here as well.
7. Okay, it’s time to talk Astrid. RTD has finally presented the audience with a scene in which the Doctor and the companion (or companion-surrogate) kiss, and there’s no teasy ironic sci-fi explanation for it (such as “it doesn’t count because he was drawing the time-space vortex out of her” or “it doesn’t count because he was affecting a genetic transfer” or “it doesn’t count because she was possessed by Zoe Wanamaker at the time”). In fact, there are two such scenes. So RTD has finally become comfortable with the fact that fandom can see these things and not want to burn him at the stake. (Mind you, I’m the strongest advocate of the McGann/Ashbrook kiss that I know.)
8. And one of the kisses…Kylie spends the episode wearing those boots, and still needs to stand on a first-aid suitcase to be tall enough for the kiss. First observation, either David is taller than I thought or Kylie is shorter. Second observation, awwwww…that’s so cute.
9. No, seriously. I found that incredibly cute. I’m a cold-hearted, misanthropic bastard who doesn’t believe in love and hates all of Richard Curtis’s films, and I found it cute.
10. And then Astrid goes and sacrifices herself. Russell T Davies, you bastard!
11. Okay, so you’ve got this spaceship rocketing towards Earth and threatening the planet’s population with extinction, yeah? So:
    a s t r i d
    a d r i c
    Is that deliberate? I’m just wonderin’, is all.
12. Speaking of references to the classic series…I couldn’t help noticing that the Host voices were a bit…shall we say, reminiscent of the robot voices from “The Robots of Death” (seriously, pay close attention to the way they say “kill”). Again, I have to wonder if the production team and designers had this in mind when they decided that one of the most distinctive features of Deck Thirty-one should be the characters D31 painted in large letters on one wall.

The Music

1. After nearly thirty years of realizations and arrangements of the Doctor Who theme that at their worst were unlistenable pieces of aural shit and at their best still weren’t as good as “Doctorin’ the TARDIS”, someone not named “Delia Derbyshire” has finally come up with a version of the Doctor Who theme that can be listened to without vomiting. It’s still nowhere near as good as Orbital’s “Doctor?”, let alone Delia’s original, but at least we’re getting somewhere.
2. I don’t have the Series Three soundtrack yet, so can someone confirm this for me…was that actually “My Baby Put the Devil in Me” that was being sung? ‘Cos if it was…honestly, it’s not a patch on “Love Don’t Roam”, which itself wasn’t a patch on “Song for Ten”. Oddly, as the Christmas specials get better the songs get worse.
3. And why does Kylie not sing “My Baby” anyway?

The Season Four Trailer

1. Most of the footage seems to be from the episodes we already know about: “Planet of the Ood”, “Partners in Crime”, “The Sontaran Stratagem”, the Agatha Christie episode, the Miss Foster episode, and the Pompeii episode. That’s assuming that Miss Foster is the blonde lady in the stiletto heels, and that “Partners” is a separate episode from either the Miss Foster or Agatha Christie episodes. (You have to admit, “Partners in Crime” is the perfect name for the Agatha Christie episode.)
2. The poignancy of Astrid’s death in “Damned” is tempered by the fact that, as fans, we all know that Donna fucking Noble is going to become the lead companion starting with 4.01. Never in my life did I ever think I would (figuratively) say, “Martha! Boy, am I glad to see you!” (Jonesy will be re-joining the TARDIS crew midseason, reportedly during the course of “The Sontaran Stratagem”.) Thanks, Rusty.
3. I’ve said it on my Livejournal and I’ll say it here as well: if the Doctor and Donna do kiss, I’ll hang myself on live television.
4. Also, a decent shot of the Sontaran redesign would have been nice. The publicity shots on the BBC site look like David, Catherine and Freema are posing, not with Chris Ryan, but with a life-size Character Options action figure.