If the Moffat era of
Doctor Who is renowned for anything, aside from the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey
storytelling and the Whoification of America, it’s the use of prequels and
‘minisodes’ to give treats to slavering fans, as well as to actually advance
the storyline of his arcs. Series 6 had five of them, from the phone call to
President Nixon where we got our first, out-of-focus glance at a Silent, to the
creepy child-song teaser which put the Silence in water tanks and went eyepatch
crazy. Series 7 went even more prequel/minisode bonkers, including a few which
actually changed the whole dynamic of the show. Pond Life, for instance, took
the reasonably happy Ponds we had known and tore them apart ahead of their date
with the Asylum of the Daleks. The Fiftieth Anniversary of the show gained
enormously from two of Moffat’s minisodes – The Last Day took us to Gallifrey
for the initial incursion of the Daleks, and Night of the Doctor brought a wave
of squealing fangasms around the world, as Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor returned
to the screen, and then made way for the newly-invented ‘hidden incarnation,’
the War Doctor, who’s been delightfully messing with the chronology of what we
call our Doctors ever since.
But Moffat also used his
minisodes to take great leaps forward in terms of one other group of characters
– the flotsam of his own invention, pressed seemingly randomly into service
when, for once in his lives, the Doctor needed a fighting force. The Silurian
Lady Vastra and her human companion Jenny, and the very odd Strax, the Sontaran
doing penance as a battlefield nurse, appeared in A Good Man Goes To War as
random friends of the Doctor’s, having never been even hinted at before.
While the events of A Good
Man Goes To War appeared to kill the Sontaran off, Dan Starkey’s performance,
and the inherent potential of a lone Sontaran for ongoing comedy, meant the
enormously Moffaty decision was taken to resurrect him, and to form a
time-and-space-specific ‘gang’ that could be used in the Doctor’s adventures,
or their own, going forward. The thing people forget about the Paternoster
Gang, as they grew to be known, is that between the end of A Good Wan Goes To
War, and the opening of The Snowmen, their entire dynamic is established in
three Moffat minisodes.
In The Battle of Demon’s
Run (Two Days Later), Strax is brought back to life, we learn that Vastra and
Jenny live together in 1880s Earth, and that the future looks to have lots of
dresses in it.
In Vastra Investigates, we
get much more detail on what they do there – they solve crimes, and they love
each other. And in The Great Detective it’s made clear to us that the Eleventh
Doctor, having lost the Ponds out of his life, is a world-class sulker. He’s
retired to Victorian England himself, and wants nothing more to do with the
whole world-saving business. The Great Detective, like many of Moffat’s
minisodes, manages to take us enormously forward in a very condensed space of
time – it tells us in a voice-over that Vastra was known as the Great
Detective, or the Lizard-Woman of Paternoster Row, that the household was
composed of Vastra, Jenny and Strax – already established as a kind of
manservant in the house - and that occasionally a shadowy extra member of the
team was called upon to help out with some of the worst and most perplexing
cases.
The Great Detective though
is really a study in grief and friendship, a tiny jewel showing the lengths to
which people go to buck up a mate who’s had their heart broken and get them
back into the world, get them back to some kind of normality. The Doctor,
sporting Victorian velvet and a fantastic new hat, is skulking round the
streets of London, feeling sorry for himself and sorry for the people he’s let
down in his long life. And the Paternoster Gang do their utmost with an
increasingly fanciful series of potential cases to investigate, trying, oh so
hard, to whet the Doctor’s appetite. It’s clearly not the first time they’ve
met like this, offered him adventurous sweetmeats to break him out of his
depression. And in the space of a handful of heartbeats, all the players are
given their moments – Neve McIntosh as Vastra shows the heart of Silurian
compassion in the relief she expresses when the Doctor turns up. Catrin Stewart
as Jenny does good work as she realises her cases are ridiculous, but more than
that, her heart too seems to break as she realises the Doctor’s rebuff is
serious and final. Dan Starkey as Strax threatens to steal the scene with his
declaration of war against the moon, turning the sequence instantly comical and
diverting the thrust from the united front to try and entice the Doctor to a
bantering squabble, the lizard-woman and her human wife arguing against the
idiocy of his efforts. And Matt Smith – holy Hannah, Matt Smith. In a way that
was always there in his performance but had rarely had a chance to come through
with such slablike, genuine, depressive certainty, he tells them there is no
point to their attempts to divert him, that he’s retired, that he doesn’t do
this any more. This is the Doctor as we’ve rarely seen him before in fifty
years. A Doctor defeated by the weight of his own life and history, the
crushing certainty of his own occasional failure. It signals to us that not
only will the Christmas Special probably be set in Victorian London, but also
that it will feature a Doctor who still needs breaking out of his existential
funk, the potentially universe-threatening sulk that is what happens when A
Good Man Fails To Act.
As a tiny vignette into
the lives of the Paternoster Gang, it’s a moment of joyous, if never joyful
perfection – it’s the kind of moment that swept the fandom up in demands for a
Paternoster Gang spin-off – and it’s rather delicious that of all the mad and
invented and straw-clutching cases the Gang throw out there to try and pique
the Doctor’s interest, it’s Strax, with his seemingly absurd Moonites, who
eventually is vindicated when the Moon turns out to be a space-dragon egg
filled with creepy unicellular spiders. #JustSayin.
The Great Detective shifts
the very nature of the Matt Smith era’s storytelling, giving him friends and a
bolthole, genuinely ageing his Doctor in the first loss of his eleventh life
(or twelfth, rather – Grr, War Doctor!). Every Doctor who survives long enough
has to deal with this – the Tenth Doctor went into a kind of mourning for Rose
that had its repercussions in the life of Martha Jones. The Twelfth Doctor
would eventually break the laws of time to keep Clara Oswald alive and safe,
and do an insane amount of penance to try and atone for her death. The Great
Detective shows us how the Eleventh Doctor grieves, chastises and hurts. And it
also shows us the desperation of his friends to try and set him free, set him
right again, to get him past his grief for the first face his face saw. It
also, from our external perspective, acts as a palate-cleanser between the Pond
era and the Oswald era in terms of the energy of the show. When The Snowmen
arrive, we’ll see an Eleventh Doctor different to anything we’ve seen before.
The Great Detective is the pause, the respectful farewell moment that prepares
us to take that journey, having been tied into the energy of the Doctor and the
Ponds since that very first Geronimo. It’s heartbreaking, and fun, and
meaningful and sweet all at once, and it changes the tone of what we understand
Eleventh Doctor Who to be like forever.
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