Tony says ‘Wake up and
smell the spin-off.’
The Short Trips range of
Doctor Who stories from Big Finish are famous for taking sideways angles on
well-known Doctors and companions, giving us new perspectives on character we
think we fully understand.
The time of the Tenth
Doctor, played by David Tennant, ended with there being two versions of that
character; the one we all knew and mostly loved, who went on to turn into Matt
Smith, and a more human version, famously ‘born in war’ and so having a
tendency towards recklessness and blowing stuff up, but with one heart, who
stayed behind in a parallel dimension with Rose Tyler, her faithful mum Jackie,
and the rest of her family.
Flight Into Hull! by
Joseph Lidster is the second of two Short Trips to pick up the story of what
happened to that stranded Doctor, and how things went in the parallel world.
For Who-fans, these are precious things, little glimpses into a part of the
show’s story that have been closed to us for years. They’re also, of course, a
way of catching up with the wonder that is Jackie Tyler, played on-screen and
performed and read here by Camille Coduri.
In the first story, we
learn of a ‘Human Doctor’ who’s moody, shackled, not that happy with Rose and
trying to build his own Tardis to get the hell out of alternative-Dodge to roam
the stars and the time vortex like he somehow feels he should, while being ever
keen to blow stuff up (including himself) in a vaguely heroic attempt to ‘be’
the Doctor he thinks he should be. That story ended with the Doctor and Jackie
Tyler at serious, sulking odds, and her telling him to buck up his ideas and be
the Doctor she remembers – the one
who would give people a chance, the one who made people better, rather than tearing them to pieces from a rigid standpoint.
Flight Into Hull! takes
the story forward, with the Doctor and Jackie trapped on a Zeppelin flying to
Hull (there are reasons, just go with it), having a solid sulk at each other
until confronted with an alien threat. There are interesting elements to the
nature of that threat – imagine everything you know you could be if only you
applied yourself…and then imagine it turning up and arguing that it’s got more
of a right to your life than you have. Possibly a bit Red Dwarfy as plot
elements go, but here it’s used at first to seemingly confirm the Doctor in his
arrogance about Jackie Tyler and her ‘little human’ nature, compared to his own
potential – this was a Doctor, remember, whose progenitor, the mainstream Tenth
Doctor, was absolutely not above a sulk about his role in saving puny humans
and how he could ‘do so much more.’ That sense seems to be festering in the
blue-suited bosom of the Human (or Metacrisis) Doctor, trapped on one planet,
in one time zone, surrounded by humans who on the wrong day would, to be fair,
annoy the halo off many a human saint.
What comes in response to
that is a passionate, sometimes angry, sometimes brilliantly evocative speech
from Jackie about how not everyone can be
Mr Brilliant, can overleap the challenges of life and ponder on the Big
Questions. Some people have to face the crises of the everyday – the raising of
a daughter, the finding of money for a school trip when there’s no money to be
found, the establishing of standards when they seem irrelevant, and the care
given to everyone, big or small, important or menial, over the little things
that make life better and make the
world still want to go around. It’s gulp-giving stuff, and you may well find
there’s something in your eye by the end of it. In a way it’s also a heart-cry
for the ‘traditional’ companion, the human who can boggle and go ‘What’s that,
Doctor?’ The people who are ordinary, and who, in that very ordinariness, find
what’s special about themselves through exposure to the Doctor’s example, his
doing what can be done, his standing up against the bullies of the universe.
Ultimately, the alien
threat in this story comes down to a game of Chicken with a Doctor who’d rather
die than blink. And perhaps perversely, it’s in the wake of the alien threat, faced with certain death in a burning
Zeppelin, that the Doctor and Jackie have their moments of epiphany with each
other, and we get to hear what the Doctor actually thinks of Rose and Jackie
both.
Coduri is absolutely
faultless in a role she knows well, despite having last played it on screen
over a decade ago, and Lidster’s script does lots of cool things – takes us
into the Metacrisis Doctor’s emotional state, stands up for dinnerladies and
other caregivers the universe over, puts out the stall for equality of humanity
irrespective of brain, or job, or position in life…oh, and crashes a Zeppelin
into the Humber Bridge – this is still Doctor Who, after all.
It seems unlikely these
two Short Trips were commissioned with the idea of an audio series in mind, but
the combination of Lidster’s vision for the troubled alt-Doctor’s life, and
Coduri’s enthusiastic portrayal of the proud single mum that is Jackie Tyler
show the potential of what that series could be. Maybe, Big Finish? The Tylers
– Earth Defence? Seriously, it could work…
Pick up Flight Into Hull!
(and its predecessor, The Siege of Big Ben) today and go back in time and
slightly sideways for a new and inspiring take on the Doctor Who you think you
know.
No comments:
Post a Comment