Who Reviews The Unquiet Dead by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s neither quiet nor dead

There are many ‘types’ of Doctor Who story. The contemporary Earth in danger of invasion or destruction. Outer space drama. Base under siege.

And there’s the Hinchcliffe-style story, the horror-tinged, supernatural-creatures-revealed-to-be-alien story.

The Unquiet Dead absolutely fits into that category, with angels and demons and walking corpses in Victorian London.

Dickensian London.

Because that’s another thing – there had been rare occasion in Classic Who when the Doctor and friends came close enough to famous people to qualify as a ‘celebrity historical’ story – Hello, Mark of the Rani, mmm, not quite, City Of Death – but The Unquiet Dead feels like a deliberate attempt to stamp celebrity historicals into the DNA of New Who. If you have a time machine, after all, why would you not meet your heroes?

There’s so much that’s tonally joyous about The Unquiet Dead – Dickens on tour, in Cardiff, in a story of gaseous ‘spirits’ and their impact for good or ill on the lives of the living. Gwyneth, the psychic servant-girl who determines to give her angels the bridge they need to come through from their wraith-like existence into our world. The tension between Rose Tyler, who believes letting aliens inhabit human corpses is fundamentally wrong, and the Doctor, the alien with an unsentimental approach to life and death, who sees the corpses as simple resources, lifeboats for a species who are drowning, the results of the war between the Daleks and the Time Lords. His view of the universe is bigger than Rose’s, but it’s also tinged with survivor-guilt, with the oppressive sense of responsibility that brings with it, the determination to do anything he can to appease his species’ responsibility for the displacement of the Gelth.

There are classic chills in the form of screaming old dead ladies full of gas-creatures and the almost vampiric ‘dead rising from their coffins’ sequence, and no less an actor than Simon Callow follows in the footsteps of Zoe Wanamaker, bringing series dramatic chops to Doctor Who, in the way the show always used to do, but updated for the 21^st century – John Nathan-Turner would absolutely envy Russell T Davies’ ability to secure star names in major Doctor Who roles, the difference possibly being that where JN-T frequently relied on celebrities to bring viewers to the show, Davies regularly gave them crucial things to do, crucial arcs to follow, which not only attracted actors on the basis of the acting challenge, but made it actively interesting to watch them as characters, rather than as simple pawns in a game of celebrity-bingo (Kenn Dodd, Hale and Pace, we’re looking at you. Nicholas Parsons, not so much). Wanamaker was the chief villain of her story, and Callow steps into the shoes of Dickens to give us a human story of a man unsure he had anything left to give, unsure he had any stories, any capacity to believe in the goodness of humanity left. In fact, he’s on record as saying he took the role in the story because he believed the Dickens role was written as truly to character as could be given the circumstances. That was a mark of what was to come in New Who – character, plot and adventure would take precedence over stunt casting.

Well, OK, Kylie Minogue, but even then, she was given a real role to play.

The Unquiet Dead mixes aliens-as-supernatural-horror, Dickens, the new Doctor’s survivor-guilt and above all, the performance of relative newbie Eve Myles as Gwyneth, who’s no genius, who has few advantages in life, but who embodies the capacity of people to show compassion to those unlike themselves, to reinvigorate the tired old man with a sense of hope and humour, and the impossible made real. And while we fear, early on, that the Doctor’s alien perspective in this story is tinged with guilt and that he may be wrong in giving the Gelth the chance to use human corpses, that he may be letting his instincts for saving people cloud his judgment of motives, and while that fear of course is ultimately justified, there’s something that resonates between Gwyneth’s simple human compassion and his complex alien version, and gives us hope.

Compassion, self-sacrifice, and the ability to be surprised by the world, the universe and its people all thrum through The Unquiet Dead, either in spite of or in tandem with its creepy space-possessing gas-zombies, misty Victorian streets, and the obvious red-blue, demons-and-angels deception. In essence, it both eats its cake and has it, scaring the younglings with a credible horror narrative, taking the Doctor and Rose back in human history and letting them meet a celebrity, giving that celebrity a strong narrative of evolution in his own right, and showing the difference between guilt-based compassion and the simple urge to help the homeless souls who ask for aid. It’s a stunning balancing act, and more than either of the first two stories in Series 1, it highlights the level of storytelling that viewers could expect of this new version of an old favourite – storytelling that includes sophisticated moral lessons, silliness, character arcs, sacrifice and the power of compassion and acceptance to change both people and the world around them.

And importantly, it worked. It worked so well that celebrity historical stories have become a regular feature of New Who – from Dickens, through Queen Victoria, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill and on to Rosa Parks, Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan, to Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, celebrity historicals could have died a death with The Unquiet Dead had it been less great than it is. But instead, it proved that the Doctor bumping into famous people and having adventures with them, solving problems with the help of some of history’s best or most complicated human beings, could restore at least some of the show’s initial 1960s ethos of both entertaining through science-fiction and educating its young audience on particular episodes or periods in history.

The Unquiet Dead stands up fifteen years after broadcast because it’s written, like the best of the Classic era, as Doctor Who for children, not in the sense that it condescends, but inasmuch as it teaches the lessons that can help children become better, more engaged, compassionate adults.

Plus, y’know – Dickens!