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yeonchi · 2 years ago

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Doctor Who 10 for 10 Part 3/10: Series 3

Doctor Who had become a household name again in the UK following the success of the first two series of the revival. With Billie Piper having left the TARDIS at the end of the last series, the production team had the task of finding a new companion, which would be Martha Jones, played by Freema Agyeman, who had only just played a character named Adeola Oshodi in Army of Ghosts (which was later revealed to be Martha’s cousin in the novel Made of Steel). Also returning was Anjoa Andoh, who played Sister Jatt in New Earth.

Following the Daleks and Cybermen in previous series, Series 3 would bring back another classic villain as part of a story arc involving events that were already set in motion before this series. To explain more, let’s jump into the retrospective for Series 3.

1. New looks and new ways

Following on from the events of the previous series in the 2006 Christmas Special The Runaway Bride, the Doctor farewelled Rose only to find that Donna Noble had appeared on the TARDIS on what would have been her wedding day. During this encounter, the Doctor confronted the Empress of the Racnoss and flooded her ship in the centre of the Earth, drowning her children before the Empress was killed on the orders of a “Mr Saxon”. At the end of that encounter, Donna told the Doctor that he should travel with someone because he needs someone to stop him like she did.

Apparently, the scene of Donna appearing in the TARDIS was filmed twice given how the TARDIS lighting changed following the filming of Doomsday and the change of cinematographers that occurred. The first filming was done in secret with a skeleton crew during the wrap party for Series 2 before Catherine Tate’s involvement in the special became public following the premiere of Doomsday on 8 July 2006, when they had done the second filming.

During Series 1 and 2, the TARDIS set was located at Unit Q2 Imperial Park in Newport, but from Series 3 onwards, it was moved to its new home at Upper Boat Studios, where Torchwood was also being filmed. The Doctor Who logo also received a change, making it look more colourfully vibrant and less bronze.

Putting aside the obvious for now, this Christmas Special began the tradition of one-time companions played by special guests in subsequent specials. This is something that is, of course, broken in the Chibnall era because the Doctor’s companions carried themselves over to the New Year’s Specials and the special guests in them were boring.

2. The rebound girl

In Smith and Jones, the Doctor meets Martha, who ends up saving him (with a kiss) and the Doctor offers her a trip in the TARDIS as thanks. Though he denies that she is replacing Rose, the Doctor ends up taking Martha to New Earth, the same place he took Rose before, compares Martha to Rose at one point and fails to notice her affection for him nor does anything to address it. Luckily though, the Doctor does seem to acknowledge this when he meets Donna again in Partners in Crime. This theme continues throughout the course of Series 3, with Martha’s unrequited love for the Doctor being highlighted in several episodes.

3. The mystery of the Face of Boe

In Gridlock, the Doctor and Martha head to New Earth (stretching the definition of one trip) and Martha is kidnapped by a couple wanting to drive in the fast lane on the Motorway, unaware of the devolved and savage Macra lurking below. While attempting to chase after Martha, the Doctor bumps into Novice Hame, who takes him to see the dying Face of Boe, who was using his lifeforce to keep the Motorway running. In the end, he uses up the last of his lifeforce to allow the Doctor and Hame to open up the Motorway and let everyone out. Boe’s last words to the Doctor are, “You are not alone,” something which would be relevant towards the finale. Martha reassures the Doctor that he is not alone because he has her, but a dense Doctor says that it isn’t what he meant.

At the end of the finale, as Jack Harkness prepares to go back to his team, he mentions that he was the first person on the Boeshane Peninsula to sign up for the Time Agency and that they called him “the Face of Boe” because of it, which leads the Doctor and Martha to believe that Jack could eventually end up becoming the Face of Boe. Although Julie Gardner apparently confirmed as much at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con, RTD said in 2011 that it was just “conjecture”, though he seemingly confirmed it as well in 2020 for Doctor Who: Lockdown. Personally, I don’t think this is the case and if it was, let’s say Jack was beheaded by the Headless Monks and stayed alive, like what happened to Dorium Maldovar.

4. Rise of the human-Daleks

Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks saw the return of the Cult of Skaro in 1930’s New York City, where they were conducting genetic experimentations to create a new Dalek race. After their first attempts to create new Daleks failed, they created a plan to create human-Dalek hybrids by fusing their DNA, with Dalek Sec merging with a man called Diagoras as a test, claiming that they must sacrifice their Dalek purity to survive. Sec’s assimilation caused him to begin feeling human emotions and its success impressed the Doctor so much that he was willing to help them with the rest of their Final Experiment and fulfil Sec’s request to give them a new home so they can start again. However, the rest of the Cult, unimpressed with Sec’s behaviour, turned on him and converted their experiments into hybrid Daleks. Sec ended up being exterminated, then the hybrid Daleks turned on Jast and Thay due to the Doctor’s sabotage. The Doctor went to Caan to give him another chance, but he escaped with an Emergency Temporal Shift.

The Doctor’s actions seemed questionable given the nature of the Daleks, but he was willing to set that aside when faced with the possibility that the Daleks would be able to change who they were, however, the Dalek primary directive prevailed that day, resulting in the genocide of the hybrid Daleks and the near-genocide of the Cult of Skaro and the Pig Slaves (though the latter was self-defence on Martha’s part).

5. A human nature

In the two-parter Human Nature and The Family of Blood, the Doctor and Martha are chased by the parasitic Family of Blood who were hunting the Doctor for a longer lifespan since they could only live for three months. The Doctor used the Chameleon Arch to turn himself into a human, fabricating his backstory as John Smith so he could hide as a schoolteacher in Farringham in 1913. Since some traits of the Doctor still remained in Smith, he had dreams of the Doctor’s adventures which he chronicled in a journal and was able to use a cricket ball to save a mother and baby from being crushed by a falling piano.

Near the end of those three months, John Smith and his co-worker, nurse Joan Redfern, fell in love with each other, something that he didn’t warn Martha about (because rebound). When the Family of Blood attacked the village looking for Smith, the school was forced to defend itself against the scarecrows sent by Son of Mine, with the boys armed on the front line while Smith does not fire at anyone. This was meant to be an allegory to the Great War (World War I), where boys their age would be conscripted to fight for King and Country the year after and ordinary people would be caught in the crossfire, both on and off the frontlines. On top of this, the apparent attitudes of the era regarding race and gender were also shown in this story as Martha finds herself a fish out of water; not just being a woman, but a woman of colour no less.

In the end, John Smith becomes the Doctor again and tricks the Family of Blood into destroying their own ship before dealing his own punishments unto them, fulfilling their quest for immortality. He goes back and invites Joan to travel with him as his companion, but she declines. Tim Latimer, one of the boys who is also the main focus of the story, is given the Doctor’s fob watch that he used and is visited by the Doctor and Martha years later at a Remembrance Day ceremony.

People say that this is the best episode of Doctor Who for the Doctor and Martha, but I’m not a fan of it or Chameleon Arch stories in general. To directly quote myself from my review of Fugitive of the Judoon, I think that if you (forcibly) conceal yourself as a lesser species despite having superior powers, abilities and knowledge, then it demeans who you really are and makes you look like a bit of a coward. John Smith put it best in this two-parter when he was struggling over whether to open the fob watch and become the Doctor again as it meant that this John Smith wouldn’t exist anymore. In the end, he didn’t stand up and insist on staying John Smith, thus making him a coward either way. Although, I do suppose that was the point of this story.

Paul Cornell, the writer of this two-parter, adapted it from his Virgin New Adventures book of the same name featuring the Seventh Doctor in 1995. While I wouldn’t really care for the guy, his “contributions” to the fandom during Doctor Who: Lockdown were not good and all in all, made him look like a bit of a dickhead. In short, he’s the Matthew Guy of Doctor Who, blocking people including those who have never interacted with him (probably through using blocklists) or people who disagree with him about the Timeless Child (not surprising considering that he wrote during the wilderness years in the 90’s, when the Other was a considerably less-worse thing).

Cornell has deleted his Twitter because he was butthurt from Elon Musk buying it, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t include links or screenshots. Before the tweetalong of the two-parter on 24 April 2020, Cornell expressed that he wanted the event to be about “the whole community” (coming from the Matthew Guy of Doctor Who lmao) and also said this about the canon of Doctor Who:

I think the idea that Doctor Who has a canon was already lying in bits at the side of the road, but I hope tonight will help to wash the concept gently into the gutter.

I can understand Doctor Who contradicting canon because of all the extended universe material and other inconsistencies, but to say that Doctor Who shouldn’t have a canon is pretty stupid given that you’re creating new things out of what came before (refer to my canon/land analogy in the Series 13 review epilogue). At this point, people can say that Doctor Who canon is whatever they want it to be, but no matter what they think, TV is god.

For the event, Cornell wrote two minisodes, Shadow of a Doubt and The Shadow in the Mirror, which attempted to canonise the original novel with the two-parter (even linking Daughter of Mine to one of the villains from the novel) and had the Thirteenth Doctor free Daughter of Mine because of “mercy” without the latter showing remorse for her actions, completely undoing his own story and neglecting why the Tenth Doctor did what he did to her and her family in the first place. Maybe they wouldn’t live for long if they were to be freed, but what’s stopping them from seeing immortality again? Like I said in my post about Doctor Who: Lockdown, “it’s like The Timeless Children gave writers a free pass to make the Thirteenth Doctor a Mary Sue.”

6. Meeting you in the future when the future is the past

Steven Moffat’s contribution to Series 3, Blink, is a well-known episode that introduces the Weeping Angels, sentient statues that would become recurring villains in the series. This episode also served as the double-banked Doctor-lite episode for the season, being filmed alongside the Family of Blood two-parter.

Based on his Doctor Who Annual 2006 short story featuring the Ninth Doctor, What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow, the resolution to this story is an ontological paradox; Sally Sparrow learns about the Weeping Angels and how to deal with them from the Doctor through messages at an old house and Easter eggs on 17 DVDs that she owned. As Sally “converses” with the Doctor through the Easter egg, Larry Nightingale writes a transcript of the conversation, which Sally would later give to a past version of the Doctor after she and Larry send the TARDIS back to him in 1969. In turn, the Doctor, having received the transcript, would be sent to 1969 alongside Martha and he would leave those messages for Sally before retrieving his TARDIS and leaving. Later episodes would continue to show examples of similar paradoxes.

7. Vote Saxon

We didn’t see a lot of domestics with Martha’s family in this series compared to Rose with Jackie and Mickey in the last two series, although their involvement ties into the running series arc, namely the Harold Saxon arc. Examples of Saxon influence have been placed late in Series 2 and in one episode of Torchwood Series 1, leading to the climax of the arc in this series.

In The Lazarus Experiment, the Doctor manages to return Martha to her flat, 12 hours after she initially left, before they attended an event held by Professor Richard Lazarus to show his new genetic manipulation device, which was built with funding from “Mr Saxon”. Following the encounter, Martha decided to officially join the Doctor as his companion.

For now, we’ll skip ahead to the three-part finale, starting with Utopia. The Doctor is reluctantly reunited with Jack Harkness after a brief stop in Cardiff, ending up 100 trillion years into the future on the planet Malcassairo, where they met Professor Yana, who had been suffering from a drumbeat of four in his head for as long as he could remember (a subtle retcon). With the Doctor and Jack’s help, the remnants of humanity launched towards Utopia, but during the events, Martha inadvertently drew Yana’s attention to a fob watch he had in his possession, which led him to open it, allowing him to revert to his true identity - a Time Lord known as the Master. Apparently, the Master had been resurrected for the Time War (elaborated adventures in Big Finish dramas), but following an incident where the Dalek Emperor took control of the Cruciform (extended media says that it’s a location but I believe that it was a weapon or a ship), he escaped into the far future, sent his TARDIS away and used a Chameleon Arch to turn himself into a human baby, who would later grow to become Professor Yana.

After reverting to his true identity, the Master attempted to destroy his own work as Yana, but his assistant shot him. He managed to regenerate in the Doctor’s TARDIS before using it to escape, however due to the Doctor’s manipulation, he could only travel to within an 18-month window from when he last landed. Landing sometime in (presumably) late-2006, the Master assumed the identity of Harold Saxon (an anagram of “Master No. Six”), fabricating his past and performing various actions, such as creating the Archangel Network to make humans trust him and hide his presence from the Doctor (given how he said he could notice another Time Lord I’m willing to believe that’s a throwaway line that got disregarded later on). He also married a woman called Lucy and manipulated Martha’s family into distrusting the Doctor through his agents, allowing them to become pawns in his ultimate plan that would come later on.

By the time the Doctor, Martha and Jack managed to come back from the far future in The Sound of Drums, the Master won the general election and was elected Prime Minister before proceeding to gas the entire Cabinet, calling them all “traitors” for abandoning their parties and jumping on his bandwagon.

In the last instalment, I talked about how Pete’s World was a satire of the “New World Order”, something that is ridiculed by the right and wilfully ignored by the left. In this instalment, I show the opposite - Harold Saxon, his “party” and his “election campaign” feels like a foreshadowing satire to third/minor parties, particularly “freedom parties” that have risen in the past few years as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, though the same can be said for “green” or “socialist” parties as well. In most Western countries, elections are mostly based around two major parties representing either the liberal/progressive or conservative sides of politics, and most people are either politically ignorant or have been indoctrinated to vote for either one of the two major parties (in the case of the former, they tend to donkey vote or vote for the existing candidate). As such, a third/minor party suddenly gaining enough influence to form government is really wishful thinking unless subtle brainwashing is involved, hence the Archangel Network.

8. The Year That Never Was

Now that Harold Saxon became Prime Minister, the only finishing touches he needed for his plan was to bring the Doctor, Martha and Jack to the Valiant by having Martha’s family brought to it. Having converted the Doctor’s TARDIS into a paradox machine, he brought the Toclafane, which were the converted remains of humans from the far future who had arrived on Utopia only to find that it wasn’t what they expected it to be, into the present day and allowed them to slaughter their ancestors without remorse.

After being forcibly aged a hundred years by the Master using his laser screwdriver, the Doctor gave Jack’s vortex manipulator to Martha, who used it to leave the Valiant and travel the world, using her TARDIS key as a perception filter while the Master enslaved humanity to have them build weapons in preparation for war against the rest of the universe.

A year later in Last of the Time Lords, the Master aged the Doctor another 900 years as a warning before confronting Martha and bringing her back to the Valiant. At the exact one-year anniversary of the Toclafane’s arrival, Martha revealed her plan to have everyone around the world think of the Doctor while he tuned himself into the Archangel Network, allowing him to be restored to his original age and leaving the Master a whimpering ball as the Doctor tells him the one thing he never wanted to hear: “I forgive you.”

Following a confrontation between the Doctor and the Master, Jack destroyed the paradox machine and Earth was returned to normal before the arrival of the Toclafane, with only those on the Valliant remembering what happened in that year, The Year That Never Was. The Doctor intended to take the Master into his custody, seeing as he was the only other Time Lord apart from himself, but Lucy shot him after the way he treated her over that year. The Doctor told the Master to regenerate as he held him in his arms, but he refused and let himself die, something which he would never do if he hadn’t had a plan in place beforehand. The Doctor burned the Master’s body on a funeral pyre, but his signet ring was recovered by a then-unknown female.

I’ve never really been able to say this for years, but the Series 3 finale isn’t one of my favourites. Aside from the obvious deus ex machina used to resolve the story (which I’m kind of OK with), I’m not really a big fan of villains driving protagonists to the brink the way the Master did. Maybe it’s the way that it’s presented as everyone turning against them, because I’ve written storylines where the protagonists are driven to the brink and everyone else is in danger and I kind of prefer those. Also, there was the Chameleon Arch thing I talked about earlier, which acted as a key element for the story.

9. The end of the rebound

With everything back to normal, the Doctor prepares to leave again, but Martha decides to stop travelling with him, giving him her upgraded superphone while telling him a story as a metaphor for her experience as his companion, merely being the rebound girl the Doctor never paid much attention to.

Martha had quite a bit of involvement in the show past Series 3. In Torchwood Series 2, Martha appeared in three episodes, now as a UNIT officer cooperating with Jack and his team. She appeared again in several Series 4 episodes, where she had been engaged to Tom Milligan, a character who appeared in Last of the Time Lords before making a final appearance in The End of Time, where she had married Mickey Smith instead. There were plans for Martha and Mickey to appear in the third series of Torchwood and the finale of SJA Series 2 or 3 respectively, but scheduling difficulties from being cast in different shows resulted in only Nicholas Courtney returning as the Brigadier in the SJA Series 2 finale, his final role before his death in February 2011.

My thoughts on Martha as a companion - she’s okay, I guess. Most of her character growth took place during The Year That Never Was, which finally made her realise the futility in pursuing a relationship that was never going to happen. Even if she didn’t have a lot of development throughout Series 3, it was nice to see her again over the next couple of years.

10. International free-to-air distribution in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan

Not gonna lie, it was hard trying to find some behind-the-scenes content to fill up some spaces for this instalment. I almost thought I wouldn’t be able to get 10 until I split what is currently 1 and 2 into what they are now. Anyway, just so I could have something, I’m going to talk a little bit about the titled topic because sometimes I’m interested in seeing shows I like being broadcast in my favourite countries/territories.

OK, spoiler alert, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan never broadcast every series. aTV World in Hong Kong broadcast Series 1-3 from 2006 to 2009, then CTS in Taiwan broadcast those same episodes (without the Christmas Specials) over January 2009 weeknights at midnight (whether it was dubbed there I have no idea). IPTV channel Elta Drama would broadcast Series 5 and 6 in 2015 while BBC Entertainment would broadcast Series 9 episodes hours after the UK premiere.

In Japan, Series 1 and 2 (including The Christmas Invasion) were dubbed and broadcast with dual audio options on NHK’s satellite service, BS2 from September 2006 to March 2007 and on its second free-to-air channel, NHK Educational TV, from August 2007 to March 2008. Those episodes would be repeated on the cable channel LaLa TV over two weekends in March 2011 before premiering Series 3 (with subtitles only) from December 2011. For the most part, subsequent series would be confined to streaming or home media. Series 3 and 4 would not be dubbed, then the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi episodes would be released by Kadokawa under the titles Doctor Who: New Generation and Doctor Who: Next Generation respectively.

As for the Jodie Whittaker episodes, only Series 11 was released in Japan under the title Doctor Who: Reborn. No further series were released after that, though if you ask me, Kadokawa dodged a missile given what we got in Series 12 and 13. Trust me, Japan, unless you’re a hardcore Whovian, it’s for the best.

Series 3 continued riding the highs of Doctor Who’s success as fans would begin to explore the classic series, initially brought on not just by returning villains, but by returning characters such as Sarah Jane Smith, the Master and the Fifth Doctor in a Children in Need sketch, Time Crash, written by Steven Moffat. The stigma of the classic series had all but gone and the production team felt more comfortable with paying their respects to it, even if they had no intention of picking up certain loose threads that had gone unanswered (ie. the Rani or the Valeyard).

This instalment mostly ended up being a recap of Series 3 rather than an insight behind-the-scenes, but I have a feeling I’ll have more to say in the next instalment, so stay tuned for Part 4 as I give my 10 takes on Series 4.

#doctor who #doctor who 10 for 10 #doctor who series 3 #tenth doctor #david tennant

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