Live-blogging Doctor Who, Season Three: "Gridlock"

Dear lord, I’m tired. I just thought I’d put that out there at the beginning of this episode, in case I pass out on the keyboard halfway through.

Or make some embarrassing typing errors.

Either, really.

Still, it’s been a productive day: I just wish I didn’t have night classes tomorrow night, since I would very much like to stay in bed all day.

But that’s enough about me. Why don’t we talk about the Doctor and Martha for a little while?

We begin with Sally Calypso bringing us the traffic news: all car-jackings and accidents, which terrifies the couple in the car, who are dressed as though they’ve just escaped from American Gothic.

Still, in the time it took me to find that link, they were killed by a mysterious creature, so that’s all right then.

Post-credits, we’re in the TARDIS with the Doctor and Martha. He tells her that he’ll stretch the terms of their agreement: one trip into the past and one trip into the future. Martha asks if they can visit his planet, and the Doctor tries to stall. As she pushes him further, he talks about Gallifrey for the first real time in the series: the Citadel enclosed in a glass bubble, with, beyond it, the mountains going on for ever, with deep-red grass and capped with snow.

I cry a little.

But the Doctor snaps out of it, and says no: where’s the fun for him? he asks. He doesn’t want to go home, so instead they’ll head to New Earth, to visit New New York.

Martha is not stupid: she knows that there’s something hinky about taking her to the same planets as he took Rose to.

But before they can thrash this issue out once and for all, and get over the tension, a series of vendors throw up their shutters and start trying to sell the Doctor and Martha suspicious-sounding wares.

Martha asks if they’re selling drugs, but the Doctor says he thinks they’re selling moods: “Same thing,” says Martha.

They watch a young girl buy “forget” to, well, forget that her parents have “gone on the Motorway.” But before they can do more than react to this, Martha is kidnapped by a young couple who, claiming that “they just need three,” drug her to sleep and shove her in a van before flying off as the Doctor chases after them, shouting.

Hey, it’s Annie! Now why didn’t I recognise her from Being Human, when I’ve already seen this episode before?

The Doctor dashes back to the vendors, and asks them to explain what just happened to Martha. They explain about the “car-sharing” policy: you get special benefits when you have three people in the car.

Though they answer all the Doctor’s questions quite happily and without pausing, he then tells them to cash up and shut down, because when he’s found Martha alive and well, he’s coming back to shut them down.

Martha wakes up, and finds the gun that her kidnappers used to take her, but Cheen (the female member of the couple) says that it’s not a real gun.

So Martha listens to Cheen explain that she and Milo are expecting a child, and so they’re heading out the suburbs. Once they get there, they’ll let Martha go. Martha’s keen on that idea, until she hears that the journey will take roughly six years.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is picked up by Thomas Kincade Brannigan, who is a giant cat person (like the nuns from season one) and his wife Valerie—and their kittens. Yes, literal kittens. They’ve been driving for twelve years, and have covered a distance of five miles in that time.

The Doctor tries to leap out, but Brannigan points out that they’ve passed the lay-by: the next one should be in another six months or so.

Martha learns about how one lives in a tiny little van for years on end.

The Doctor, meanwhile, tries to locate Martha. Valerie says that the motorway is completely enclosed: you can’t make outside calls. Brannigan says they can call other cars, as long as they’re on your “friends” list: he calls an elderly couple (he calls them sisters, to which one of them responds acidly that he knows they’re not sisters: they’re married). Fortunately, one of them is a car spotter, so at least she can put the Doctor on the right path.

Back in Cheen and Milo’s van, Martha hears a strange noise: Milo says it’s just the air vents, but Cheen repeats a horror story about monsters that wait for you to go astray and then destroy you.

Martha points out that, given the density of the fumes, it doesn’t look as though the air vents are working, but Milo—looking visibly shaken—insists that Cheen’s stories are just myths.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is destroying his travellers’ faith in their lives, asking them if they ever see police cars? Or ambulances? Or anything?

Unsurprisingly, they’re not thrilled by this interpretation, but, thankfully, at this point, Sally Calypso pops up again to initiate a motorway-wide singalong of “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Martha cries.

Cheen and Milo’s van finally gets access to the fast lane. But the Doctor, not noticeably softened by the hymn, says that if Brannigan and Valerie still refuse to take him down to the fast lane, he’ll find his own way.

He takes his coat off—telling them to take care of it, since Janis Joplin gave it to him and he loves it—then leaps out of the van, saying that he hardly knows Martha, because he was too busy showing off and, besides, he lied to her.

VALERIE: He’s completely insane.
BRANNIGAN: That, and a bit magnificent.

The Doctor works his way down through various vans occupied by a broad range of aliens.

Down in the fast lane, Cheen and Milo are finding that all the Brooklyn tunnels are closed. Milo says they’ll just drive around and around, but a car some fifty yards behind them calls them on the radio, telling them that the tunnels are closed, they’re always closed, and that there’s something down here, something dangerous.

Cue the screaming, both from the car behind and from Milo and Cheen’s car.

The Doctor finally hits the bottom layer, and opens the hatch in the base of the car, looking down into the motorway. He wants to see what’s down there.

Back in Brannigan’s car, a nun jumps through their roof, demanding to see the Doctor.

The Doctor manages to trigger the fans, clearing the smoke, so he can see what’s below. It’s the Macra. Oooh, they’re old-school villains, they are—though, admittedly, they mostly look just like giant crabs.

In the interim, they’ve nearly managed to catch Cheen, Milo, and Martha’s van, but Martha suggests they go to silent running, as submarines do. Of course, Milo points out, they need to turn the engine back on if they want oxygen.

Just as the Doctor is explaining how the Macra once had a mighty empire based on human slaves, the nun leaps down into the van: it’s Novice Hame from the original New Earth episode. She transports the Doctor back up to New New York—and as he insists he needs to see the Senate, she says they’re in the Senate. She triggers the light, and we see the bodies everywhere.

They’re all dead, everyone in the city, and have been for twenty-four years, killed by a new mood called “Bliss,” which mutated to a virus that killed the world in seven minutes.

There was enough time to seal the world off and keep the people on the motorway safe.

Novice Hame said they did everything that they could to keep the system running, and the Doctor asks who “they” are?

Of course, as we know from earlier in the episode, it’s the Face of Boe, who has been giving his life force to keep the city’s systems running. The Doctor asks why they never called for help, and Novice Hame says that the Senate’s last act was to declare New Earth unsafe: the automatic quarantine lasts for one-hundred years. So the Face of Boe and Novice Hame have stayed to keep the only people left on the world, the people on the motorway, alive and safe.

In Milo and Cheen’s van, they talk a little about faith: Martha says they have their faith and their hymns, and she has faith in the Doctor.

They turn the engines back on, so now they’re frantically fleeing the Macra.

NICK: Oh, I don’t see how they can possibly get out of this one!

The Doctor’s trying to wire up the computers, but there’s a problem with the wiring, until the Face of Boe intervenes, to his own peril.

And, suddenly, the roof of the motorway opens up, so sunlight comes streaming down on the cars.

Then the Doctor pops up on the screens of the vans, telling everyone to drive up, so that they can clear the fast lane.

It takes a remarkably short amount of time for all those cars to clear out of the motorway, doesn’t it?

Martha’s faith has been rewarded, but, in a way, the general population’s faith has been rewarded, as well: Sally Calypso might have just been a hologram, but behind that hologram were two people who devoted much of their lives to keeping those people safe.

Well, the rest of their lives, in the Face of Boe’s case. Because the Face of Boe is dying. (Somehow, he’s much creepier out of the glass jar, just a giant face on the floor.)

The Doctor tells Martha he doesn’t know what the Face of Boe is: that legend says that the Face of Bo is billions of years old. And Novice Hame tells them that there’s another legend: that the Face of Boe will speak his last secret at the end of his life.

The Doctor tries to brush this off, but the Face of Boe says no: everything must die, and he is the last of his kind, as the Doctor is the last of his.

This comes as a shock to Martha.

Then the Face of Boe dies, saying, “Know this, Time Lord: you are not alone.”

Walking through the closed-down Pharmacy Town where they came in, Martha asks the Doctor what the Face of Boe was talking about. He tries to blow her off, as he always does.

But Martha sits and refuses to move, saying that the Doctor never talks, never says anything. (And, for the record, I like this pushing past the Doctor’s inhibitions.)

And, as they hear the new inhabitants of New New York singing a hymn in unison, the Doctor tells Martha that all his people are dead, that he is the last of the Time Lords.

Martha asks what happened, and the Doctor sits opposite her, and tells her that his people fought the last of the great Time Wars, for the sake of all mankind—and they lost.

The Doctor talks again about Gallifrey, and the rising of the second sun, the silver leaves on the trees—and his voice fades out against the back drop of the hymn.

David Tennant is crying when he gives that speech about the lost beauties of Gallifrey. (And so was I.)

Next week: Daleks!