Live-blogging Doctor Who, Season Two: The Christmas Invasion

The strangest thing that has happened today: wasps built a nest behind my copy of Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The strangest thing about that, for me, is that the book is a paperback.

“Go back to where it all began,” ABC? Oh, poor Christopher Eccleston. Why doesn’t he qualify for your description of the reboot of Doctor Who?

Of course, the episode hasn’t started, yet. That’s why I’m filling the space with unnecessary rambling about wasps. (Seriously, they love our study. I’m always finding nests behind odd books. Last time it was Leslie Stephens’s Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century. At least that was a hardback.)

I’m really glad I don’t live in South Australia right now. Despite the humidity here, it’s better than temperatures well over forty.

Ah, here we go—after this mysterious crime writer talking.

And that looks like the Earth to me; I think we’re going to zoom into London. Yep, there we are, Jackie decorating the Christmas tree and putting out presents for Rose. Aw, she breaks my heart, sometimes, Jackie.

And Mickey—but he can hear something. Sounds oddly like the TARDIS. Jackie hears it, too. And they both go running out into the quadrangle. But they can’t see anything—until the TARDIS comes screaming in for a very poor landing indeed.

And there’s David Tennant! Not his first appearance as the Doctor, but one of his earliest. He’s still wearing Christopher Eccleston’s clothes.

“Merry Christmas!” he says and then keels over.

Nick’s so completely uninterested in this blogging that he doesn’t even have his iPhone to hand. He doesn’t even know that I just wrote that. Well, that’ll teach him.

Now the Doctor’s in bed, with Rose and Jackie [in retrospect, I should have said “with Rose and Jackie looking after him,” but you know what I meant]—Rose won’t take the Doctor to hospital because of the high risk of his being dissected. But she knows he has two hearts, and she checks they’re both beating strongly.

ROSE: He’s got two hearts.
JACKIE: Oh, don’t be stupid.
ROSE: No, he has.
JACKIE: Anything else he’s got two of?

Cheap laugh, but funny. Ouch—my coffee’s really hot.

And here’s Rose’s psychological breakdown at the idea of regeneration. She’s really hung up on the whole “human” thing, isn’t she?

I love Jackie’s soliloquy about why Howard sleeps over now—beautifully delivered. And there’s Harriet Jones, Prime Minister! Aw, bless, Harriet. I think they treated you badly—narrative wise—but you’re a sweet woman, really. And you do well for yourself in a kind of . . . really tragic and horrible way.

Have I mentioned Guinevere One, yet? Because it’s about to come face to face with some sort of mysterious floating space rocky object. I won’t say what, because of spoilers.

Rose and Mickey, wandering down the street listening to Christmas carols.

MICKEY: TARDIS this, and TARDIS that.
NICK: This one time, at TARDIS camp.

Ah, Nick’s just read something on my blog. I wonder what that was?

Ooh, creepy Santa masks—I wouldn’t trust those guys, Rose. And, sure enough, they’re an explosive brass band. Well, you should have known that that would happen, what with the creepy plastic masks. Or are the masks metal? Either way, they’re creepy masks.

I do like action scenes: they allow me to catch up on the dialogue.

More of the glowy yellow stuff comes out of the Doctor’s mouth—I forgot to mention that before.

Ooh, a mysterious new Christmas tree has turned up on Rose’s doorstep and has now become homicidal. There’s something unusually horrifying about a homicidal Christmas tree—especially when you’re trying to manhandle an unconscious Time Lord out of the apartment.

Think of something else, Rose. Ooh, sonic screwdriver! That’ll work. That always works. I bought one for my nephew last Christmas, and he spent the next week opening doors for his mother.

Ah, and now the Doctor’s conscious. Hang on, I should hit “save” at this point.

Creepy Santa robot things! Nick’s ranting now about how there’s a steely side to this Doctor that you don’t see much of later—which I think is rubbish. I think this Doctor is far too steely and determined.

This dialogue with the Doctor and Jackie where he’s trying to explain what he needs makes me laugh, but I’d not noticed before how similar it is to the detox scene in “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” which also made me laugh.

“Harvey Wallbanger?”

The Doctor’s looking a lot worse for wear, now—which is a problem, since he managed to reveal that the creepy Santas were only pilot fish, which means there’s a shark up there somewhere. And yet no-one associates this with the disappearance of Guinevere One? Except that one guy talking on the telly who, as Nick points out, is a terrible, terrible liar.

And now Rose too sees that something is wrong—which isn’t hard, what with the screaming alien face on the television screen.

Ooh, serious men in dark cars and dark suits. This is worrying, unless it’s UNIT, of course. Nothing wrong with UNIT. And there’s Mr Llewellyn, the man with the beard on television, the one who is the bad liar.

Is that the first instance of “Harriet Jones, Prime Minister”/“Yes, we know who you are”? Of course, Harriet isn’t fazed—she’s seen aliens before.

LLEWELLYN: Maybe they’re not actual Martians.
RANDOM OFFICER: Of course not. Martians look completely different.

Poor Llewellyn—is he the only one who hasn’t met aliens before? And now the aliens are speaking—it’s an odd but strangely convincing language, though I think it’s highly unlikely that translation software would be able to translate that language after only a few lines. After all, you should see what translation software does when you run a John Keats poem through it. (Oddly enough, do it with Led Zeppelin lyrics, and they become more comprehensible.)

“Our longest night”? That rings a bell, but I can’t put my finger on it. Ah, now that’s the first reference to Torchwood, after a brief reference in “The Long Game.” But this is the real spinning off, the introduction to the new programme.

And now the translation software has given a translation of the Sycoraxes’ message—and they seem mighty sure that they haven’t got their personal pronouns mixed up. I wonder how they can be so sure.

Rose is still freaking out, indicating that this Doctor is nowhere near as cool as the old Doctor, that this one is ineffective compared to the ninth regeneration.

The Sycorax don’t like being threatened, apparently—and now dozens of apparently unconnected people are wandering away from their homes and jobs, with mysterious circles of blue light flashing up around their heads and necks. Guess the translation software didn’t get that personal pronoun wrong, after all. These would be the “they” that the Sycorax threatened with harm if Earth didn’t surrender.

It’s a useful threat, though—there’s something sincerely creepy about these people just standing silent at the edge of high buildings. Two billion of them? Wow.

Rose, for goodness’s sake. Can you not pull yourself together? She’s now insisting that there’s nothing we can do, that there’s no-one to help them.

(Torchwood is missing a third of its staff? Which third? Because Captain Jack is always standing on the edge of high buildings, so there’d be nothing new about that.)

Nick wonders why they’ve put a plaque about humanity on Guinevere One (even excluding the blood sample, which seems odd) when the probe is supposed to land on Mars. As he points out, that’s usually reserved for craft that are leaving the Solar System.

Now Harriet is calling for the Doctor to come and help humanity, which will be a little difficult if he only has one heart beating. Rose has completely broken down, now. Man, I hope I’m never ill in a situation where Rose is my only hope of nursing.

Should I be sympathetic at this point? Nah. She can cry after the crisis, not during.

Glass shatters as the Sycorax ship hits the atmosphere.

NICK: I reckon at least half a million people just fell off their buildings.

I like the ship design, though. (Hey! They rebuilt Big Ben!) And I like these scenes of people just standing in the street stunned, staring up at the ship as it passes. So plausible, if depressing. We are a species of rubber-neckers.

The Sycorax are calling for the world leader to stand forward, and Harriet does so. (Seriously, Doctor Who is the only programme on Earth in which the Americans aren’t allowed to control things in the case of alien invasion. Well, and Torchwood.) She is transported aboard the spaceship, along with others—including Llewellyn, who steps forward to talk to the Sycorax leader, with an oddly sycophantic speech for mercy, but it doesn’t matter overly much, since he and then the random officer whose name I don’t think we ever hear are both killed with what I can only describe as a glowing electrical whip.

The Sycorax want Harriet to surrender on behalf of the world or they will kill the one-third of the population who are standing on the rooftops (the ones with AB+ blood).

Rose, Jackie, Mickey, and the unconscious Doctor, meanwhile, have disappeared into the TARDIS, as a safe place for them to hide. But the Sycorax can recognise the TARDIS technology, now it has been activated by Rose and Mickey’s presence (Jackie has been left outside)—and Rose, not knowing that they have been transported to the Sycorax spaceship, steps outside, screams, and is followed out by Mickey, who drops his Thermos of tea by the Doctor’s head.

Harriet is thrilled to see Rose, but less thrilled when she hears the Doctor isn’t with her. The Doctor, meanwhile, seems to be responding to the mixture of tea and the fumes that the tea is causing when it drips onto the TARDIS wires.

Rose, meanwhile, is spouting random phrases from her adventures with the Doctor—and, frankly, coming across as a little aggressive, for a spokesman to a warrior race.

Aha! The Sycoraz are speaking English! I wonder what that means? Perchance the TARDIS translation circuits are working again?

Oh, yes! It’s the Doctor, in his stripey pajamas and Howard from the market’s dressing gown. He’s not going to save the world, just yet, though, because he’s too busy going into a monologue and coming over all vain about his personal appearance—he rather wanted to be ginger. He’s also doing a little bit of explanation about how regeneration works and a little back story, but the Sycorax would really like the plot to start up again.

Now the Doctor goes into a fairly excellent monologue, but I really don’t think that I can transcribe it—and I couldn’t do justice to David Tennant’s articulation of “a great big threatening button.”

And did the Doctor really just eat that human blood? I’m not sure that’s hygienic, Doctor.

The Doctor presses the button. (NICK: But why did they move forward? They were already right on the edge!) But apparently, blood control—which the Doctor regards rather as though it were a tin monkey clapping tambourines together which he’s just found at a flea market and which he thinks would look fabulous in the living room . . . (Actually, where can I find a tin monkey?). Anyway, you can’t use it to kill people.

And now—barring a brief moment where the Doctor thinks he’s delivering a heroic monologue (he does love a monologue, this tenth regeneration) but then realises it’s a bit from The Lion King—the Doctor and the Sycorax commander are duelling, and the Doctor’s not doing so well. Plus, he’s in pajamas, which just looks silly.

And there goes his hand.

D’you know, I have a feeling that that hand might actually come in handy at some point in the future?

But the Doctor grows another one.

SYCORAX: Witchcraft!
THE DOCTOR: Time Lord!
ME: Those two items aren’t parallel!

But don’t listen to me. The Doctor wins, though he won’t fight to the death, of course. Instead, he forbids the Sycorax to ever return to Earth. (And namechecks Arthur Dent. But if he met Arthur Dent, do you not think he could have brought him back to Earth? Because we know Arthur wanted to come home—well, you know, once he realised that the dolphins had managed to save it by a process that I haven’t ever really understood.)

What? Oh, the plot? The Doctor has killed the Sycorax leader—after he cowardly attempted to stab the Doctor in the back—and warned the Sycorax off, which impresses Rose, Mickey, and Harriet Jones, Prime Minister.

Wow, this is a long episode. But now we’re coming to a climax, while Jackie hugs the Doctor, because Harriet has received a message from Torchwood—and tells them to fire at will.

And they do—a weapon that looks as though it were scavenged from the Death Star, which blows the Sycorax ship out of the sky and send its debris raining down over the Earth.

And the Doctor is not pleased—not pleased at all. Harriet has a good point, here: the Doctor may be the Earth’s champion, but he’s not there all the time. And the Doctor’s becoming truly self-righteous here. And here he does something that I’m not at all sure I approve of—when he goes wandering over to Harriet’s aide and mutters, “Don’t you think she looks tired?”

And while Rose, Jackie, and Mickey are all united in the Doctor’s support here, I’m not at all sure I am. Hasn’t the Doctor just brought down England’s Golden Age? He doesn’t seem too bothered, though—he’s in the TARDIS wardrobe room, wearing the fourth Doctor’s second scarf (the one all in shades of red, not the one with multi-coloured stripes) and Nick thinks he saw the third Doctor’s tartan cape in there, too—and he picks the outfit we know: the suit and tie, the Converse, the coat that we later learn he got from Janis Joplin.

And as they sit at Christmas dinner, we can see the effect of his words, as already they’re talking about a vote of no confidence in Harriet Jones. Well, we’ll see how that works out for you, Doctor.

Meanwhile, London is basking in and building snowmen from the remains of hundreds or thousands of dead Sycorax, while the Doctor and Rose have a really horribly believably awkward and adorable conversation about whether she’s going to continue travel in the TARDIS.

And, finally, the Doctor pulls something out from his previous regeneration, when he insists that his future travels are going to be “fantastic.” Well, we’ll see—next Tuesday, with “New Earth.” See you then!