Wild Blue Yonder sets out to demonstrate the flexibility of Doctor Who as a storytelling device, and the capabilities of its current leads. It succeeds in both, while leaving unsettling notes and a dose of fatalism as the audience approaches the next episode anticipating the fourteenth Doctor’s doom.
There’s a note throughout this episode of play. The Isaac Newton prologue juxtaposes verisimilitude (an establishing shot of Newton’s House at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire) with dressing-up (Nathaniel Curtis, with browner skin than Newton had, in rather clean and formal mid-seventeenth century costume for sitting in the garden) and a joke about the gravity of the situation which might have appeared in one of the more self-aware strips in the IPC or DC Thomson comics of Russell T Davies’s childhood. The perpetrators of this pure corn escape before Isaac Newton can compose a retort. The scene survives its cringeworthiness because of the conviction of the players (the revelation that Curtis never shared a location with Tennant and Tate surprised almost everybody) and the evidence that the mania of the Doctor and Donna is a reaction to a serious crisis within the TARDIS.
The ‘not-things’ who haunt the Doctor and Donna are play-creatures too, in an altogether nastier way. They recall Davies’s earlier Midnight, with the added horror that the copying is physical; they are creatures of plasticine or slime animated by Someone Else and determined to take over your life. There’s particular force in Donna’s predicament because her counterpart would take over her family in such a way that they would never notice. It’s a very playground fear, that someone could copy you to such an extent that your parents would take them home at the end of the day and you would be left in the liminal space of the empty school.
Here, though, we are inside the spaceship – and Inside the Spaceship (1964, known to almost everyone as The Edge of Destruction now, but Doctor Who Magazine style still I believe holds out), one of the many stories to have inspired Davies with its suggestion that the TARDIS might be inhabited by a hostile force. For a while, I thought that the Not-Things might be products of the spacecraft’s defence mechanism, possibly having gone rogue at the edge of the universe and eliminated the crew. Instead, they are entities from outside the ship, owing something to the absorbing/copying entity from The Quatermass Experiment driven as much to find out about the life forms of Earth as it is to feed and reproduce. These creatures don’t seem to know about eating; they understand life differently from us, drawing strength from the very intellectual activity historically championed by Doctor Who. The Not-Donna and the Not-Doctor are arguably forms of very toxic fandom.
Returning to school, there’s something terrifyingly childlike about the Not-Things. Their initially unstable size and shape recalls a sponge, as if they are becoming knowledge-logged. The oversized arms and double knee could have been exercises from primary school music and movement lessons. Nevertheless, they mature to a point where the Doctor can be taken in. At times of crisis reminders of the Doctor’s fallibility can be unsettling, especially with the short-term nature of the engagements of David Tennant and Catherine Tate. All bets seemed briefly off.
My father said that Wild Blue Yonder reminded him of an older way of telling Doctor Who stories, and it’s not difficult to imagine a version told on a multicamera studio set, with perhaps more sparing (or more obvious) use of doubles, and CSO or (in monochrome days). I couldn’t tell how much or how little of the spaceship was CGI – though more practised eyes from the video game age have been able to do so – and was impressed by the revelations of a greenscreen corridor and heavily redressed sets in Doctor Who Unleashed and Doctor Who – Behind the Scenes. (Bliss it is in this dawn to be alive and in the UK, with two distinct making-of strands made for different platforms.) The aesthetic blended contemporary – as others did, I found this spacecraft a larger sibling aesthetically to 2018’s Tsuranga (from The Tsuranga Conundrum) – with older strands of spaceship interior. I could imagine Tarrant and Dayna exploring the backlit service tunnels in later series of Blake’s 7 – or the Doctor and Donna turning a corner and finding themselves in Terminus (1983), though here the pilot is not trapped in slow time, but has committed suicide. (Instances of suicide in Doctor Who, anyone? It’s happened before, but this is a bleak era.)
I said last week that The Star Beast set out with an awareness of mortality. Wild Blue Yonder ended with one, even if this wasn’t the original intention. The relief we feel on seeing Wilf again is tempered by the knowledge that Bernard Cribbins has died between recording and transmission. It’s a realisation which fits well with what follows as we become aware of the chaos unfolding across Camden. The game is well and truly afoot and lives are being lost. It’s an appropriate end for an episode where reality and identity have been shown to be fragile things and oblivion has steadily crept in around the edges.
Matthew Kilburn 