The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'Tooth and Claw'

Whatever the Bishop might think of the direction Russell T. Davies is taking with the new incarnation of Doctor Who, there’s really no getting around the fact that, in all but the most nostalgic respects, every new story is a cut above most of what’s come before. Here, finally, is one that isn’t.

'Tooth and Claw' is dull. To be tough (but fair—the Bishop always is), even the best original Who stories—with the exception, perhaps, of 'Inferno', 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' and 'City of Death'—were two parts imagination, three parts chore. 'Tooth and Claw' is lumbering in much the same way, and irritating to boot.

The tedium stems mostly from a patchwork story, as spurious as anything that might have been produced with Terrance Dicks behind a typewriter: it’s hard not to glaze over watching a yarn that makes this little sense. An alien werewolf* seeds itself in a sequence of victims, generation by generation, until, via some contrivance of planning that would make the American Iraq–exit strategy look cogent, it has the opportunity to infect Queen Victoria. It’s nigh on fucking invulnerable—why not just head straight to London and bite her? An unrelated confusion of Eastern and Western monasticism proves Davies has seen The Matrix, and leaves the rest of us waiting for an explanation as to why these monks can fly. The wolf is vulnerable to mistletoe, so MacLeish Sr and Prince Albert construct a light chamber that would leave today’s best physicists bamboozled, instead of investing in Poplar shares. (Just why did the wolf let on that it was vulnerable to concentrated moonlight—or give away its plans to its victim’s consort’s best friend?) And the whole thing with the diamond simply beggars belief. Albert, presumably, knew the diamond’s function, so why didn’t he mention it to Victoria—or anyone else? Were he and Sir Robert’s father expecting a stray Time Lord to come along and figure it all out? Then again, why would Albert suspect Victoria would ever be anywhere near the light chamber in the first place? Why didn’t he just tell Victoria to stay away from Torchwood and environs entirely?

Speaking of dull, advanced publicity suggested we were supposed to get excited over the presence of Her Majesty; Pauline Collins, obviously, didn’t. Flat and uncertain, she offered nothing toward the character, and didn’t look as though she was expected to.

David Tennant, thankfully, stops acting up in this one, but in doing so he seems to vanish from the screen. Post a good start in 'The Christmas Invasion', he does either too much or here, for a change, not enough (the Bishop pens this having seen 'School Reunion' and 'The Girl in the Fireplace', though not 'New Earth').** He augered every bit ideal for a Doctor in the Tom Baker–mould, but perhaps he is too ideal, too obvious in his eccentricities. Billy Piper is still fine, but Rose is a problem, re-envisaged as little more than the Doctor’s doting mistress—your humble cleric keeps waiting for her to offer him a blow job. And while, yes, friends (or couples, or fuck buddies, or whatever these two are) do hug occasionally, it’s getting tiresome to watch the two embrace in a frenzy of self-congratulation every time Davies thinks of something clever for them to say.

Even the effects underwhelm. The man in the cage is androgynously chilling, but the wolf looks like something pasted out of a Doctor Who sticker book. Don’t worry, Rose, the Bishop will happily say it: We are not amused.

*A creature of horror becomes much less horrible when some disbelief suspending explanation is required to justify its scientifically ‘plausible’ existence. ‘Lupiform hermivore responding to certain frequencies of light’ (surely the Sun gives off all the same frequencies; it is where the Moon gets its light from) is not a patch on ‘man cursed to take on the form of the wolf by the light of the full Moon’.

**This written prior to the previous entry on 'New Earth'. And after a large scotch.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'New Earth'

I’ve seen The Second Coming; I’ve seen Casanova; and there is no doubt in the Bishop's mind that Russell T. Davies is a TV writer of considerable skill. With ‘New Earth’, however, he does little more than take the piss.

Even in this story, there are moments of Davies flair. It isn’t so much Cassandra dying in her own arms that charms, it’s the way it’s foreshadowed: Cassandra, almost (but not quite) indifferently, watching a recording of her early, ‘human’, self; it’s the way in which it was the last night ‘anyone called me beautiful’; it’s the way the Doctor knew exactly what to do. It’s all very slick, of course, but it’s textbook slick, and Davies has read the thing from cover to cover. And speaking of textbook, the Doctor’s comment after the parting of the Face of Boe is postmodern deconstructive shtick worthy of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer—if, indeed, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer is the sort of thing that something else can be worthy of.

But apart from that and a lovely, almost balletic, turn by Sean Gallagher as the dying Cassandra (the dying swan?), there’s not a lot else here; at least not a lot worth taking any notice of.* Were it not for the budget, pacing, and a considerably higher dose of charisma, the story’s silliness alone would be enough to slot it straight into a convenient gap in season twenty-four (of course, your pastoral pontificator would be more than willing to lose, say, ‘Paradise Towers’ to create such a gap). Without dwelling on the fact that the supposedly disease-proof air does nothing to help the zombies, or that even the most virulent infections shouldn’t kill on contact—or that the zombies, infected with every illness known to man, should probably just keel over and die (plague carriers are always the last to go? Bollocks)—we have a resolution that would have stretched credibility if it had been offered as part of ‘The Mind Robber’. It’s not so much that you can’t just mix a whole bunch of different solutions together (while he was reading that textbook on slickness, Davies obviously skipped chemistry class); but that surely, if one did inhabit a world in which that sort of thing worked, you wouldn’t need the bloody Doctor to figure it out. And in a hospital full of doctors!

But wait, there’s more (or should that be less). Not content simply to challenge the old adage ‘No sex please, we’re Time Lords’, nor content even to rub the Doctor’s newfound sexuality in everybody’s faces, Davies has now made it the modus operandi of the entire sodding show.** ‘I LOVE travelling with you, Doctor.’ Hmm . . . I’m sure he was ‘great in bed’ last night, too. It’s enough to make an old fan sick to the stomach, I tells ya.

*Apart, that is, from Billie Piper's tits. The Bishop apologises for this oversight; how on earth could he forget?

**The Bishop writes this having seen ‘New Earth’ (obviously), where we learn that Rose is in love and Cassandra in heat; ‘School Reunion’, where we learn that Rose is in love and that the Doctor’s little sister, Sarah-Jane, may not have been his little sister after all; ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’, where we learn that Rose is in love and the Doctor gets a girlfriend; and ‘Rise of the Cybermen’, where we learn that Rose is in love and that the Doctor may have gotten over the loss of his girlfriend by nailing a waitress. Of course, that canny old bastard Davies might flip the whole thing on its head before the season’s done—apparently he’s very clever that way . . .