Who Reviews Boom Town by Tony J Fyler

 

Boom, boom, Tony’s shakin’ the room. 

A lot of the stories in the first season of revived, 21^st century Doctor Who were designed specifically to move away from the somewhat casual Classic style of storytelling where there were no long-term consequences. 

Tardis errors lead to Rose being reported missing for a year and her boyfriend Mickey being the chief suspect in her murder, for instance. The plan of the Slitheen leads to a change of government in the UK, and so on. 

Boom Town more than most though is a tale of the consequences of the Doctor’s rather lazy approach to tidying up until now. 

Six months after the Slitheen-in-Downing-Street debacle, one of the family is left both alive and free to start another chapter in her life. Blon Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen – better known by her human alias, Margaret Blaine - has become mayor of Cardiff, and has plans for a new power station. It’s an intentionally flawed plan, which will open up Cardiff’s space-time rift, turn the planet into slag and allow her to power a kind of space surfboard out of Dullsville, Milky Way. 

In the fundamentals of its plot, it’s deeply ropey – perhaps understandable as it was a Davies replacement for another story by a different writer that got SNAFU’d by a scheduling conflict. Intensely plotted, it is not. There’s also rather too much comedy teleporting at the front end of the story, which becomes tedious in a hurry, especially as the Doctor and Rose have picked up Captain Jack Harkness since they last met the Slitheen, and Mickey Smith’s along for the ride too. Crowded Tardis alert, despite Mickey’s attempt to draw Rose off for a hotel bunk-up. 

But here’s where having a genius running your show pays off. 

Because while the plot elements are sketchy and mostly recycled, Russell T Davies manages to turn Boom Town into an intense, sweaty, claustrophobic examination of good and evil, upbringing and free will, while also bringing in the responsibility to deal ‘humanely’ with people who, if extradited, will be killed. It stops short of expanding into discussions of the rightness and wrongness of a state death penalty, but for the majority of Boom Town, Davies more or less plays 12 Angry Men And 1 Slitheen. 

The genius about that is that you start off more or less expecting to know the moral ins and outs of the case, and your position on it. But Eccleston’s Doctor is perhaps more of an angry man than you might be expecting, and he is relatively unsympathetic to Blon’s position as a child of a family of thieving, disreputable space-gits. Siphoning some hardcore Sixth Doctor moral indignation into his post-time war persona (a trend which of course continued with David ‘one chance’ Tennant’s Tenth Doctor), he feels more inclined than many viewers would be immediately comfortable with to lay a sentence on Blon which, while keeping his own hands technically clean, amounts to death at the hands of her peers on Raxacoricofallapatorius. 

As the long night trapped in the Tardis continues while the time machine refuels, various viewpoints are chipped in by all the Tardis travellers – making the most of the full Tardis scenario by at least giving them something useful to do within the claustrophobic micro-drama. Blon herself is a strong advocate for mercy, but also a strong example of desperation – taking every potential advantage, trying every potential tactic – including seduction, flattery, the moral high ground and venom-injection. Slowly, the tone shifts. We begin to see Blon in the light of some criminals in our own society, who are not mad, but just habitually, incorrigibly bad as a result of their upbringing, circumstances or just because they like it. What do you do with people who will absolutely take compassion as weakness, show you no mercy and would happily kill you if the chance arose? Does their fundamental ‘badness’ make it alright to extradite them to a place that will absolutely kill them? Would they always have been bad, irrespective of their upbringing and circumstances? 

That’s a question that ends up being important, because of course, in a science fiction show you can sometimes dodge having to actually answer the hardest questions you pose for yourself. After a long, dark and somewhat uncomfortable night of the sole for all concerned – especially the people who want to believe the Doctor is a force for good, always, in the universe – what we get as an answer is a slightly cop-out reset button, with Blon being returned to her foetal stage as an egg, and given the opportunity to grow up all over again, with a different family, not the Slitheen. 

In itself that creates an interesting idea for a second sequel, but eleven series later, we have yet to revisit a grown-up one-time Blon in her second life, so we’re left more or less to assume she’s been saved from the programming of her family, and allowed to live a healthier, less planet-destroying life on Raxacoricofallapatorius. 

Is Boom Town the best Doctor Who story ever? No, there are very few fans who would claim it as even really in their top ten. But what it does deliver is a tight examination of various moral positions over life, death, crime and punishment. As such, it draws us in and makes us come to better terms with several members of the 2005 Team Tardis. Most crucially, it allows us an unusual amount of time sitting still with the Doctor, and interestingly probes his positions on all these fundamental questions in this incarnation. This incarnation, which is still scarred following the time war, is quicker to jump to judgments than either earlier or later Doctors, and more ready perhaps to justify his harsher stances than might be comfortable for some fans. 

The whole Ninth Doctor era is the story of the healing and rehabilitation of the traumatised Doctor under the improving influence of Rose Tyler. By the time of Boom Town, he’s become less rigid in his positions than he was, for instance, in Dalek – but it will actually take all the way until The Parting Of The Ways for him to realise how healed he is. In Boom Town, we see him still not taking any nonsense – but perhaps, given the ending, prepared to accept that not all things that rub him the wrong way are nonsense, and that even if he still thinks they are, they’re worth trying because they make the people around him happier. The Doctor who’s learned how to dance again, how to take joy in simple things with Rose, and even Jack, is beginning to unbend his rigid moral judgments by the end of Boom Town – and he’s becoming noticeably more like a Classic Doctor as he goes.