the teaser for Doctor Who's Aliens of London

TV For all the criticism it has received and it has received a lot of criticism in the years since it was broadcast, what’s often overlooked is how innovative the teaser for Doctor Who's Aliens of London is. This is a story about an alien invasion, and the natural assumption would be for an opening shot of a space ship crashing into the Westminster Clock, the rest of the adventure spilling on from there. Instead, writer Russell T Davies begins as he always does with character and the effect the Doctor has on his human friend, in this case shifting her world on twelve months while she’s just been away for a few hours.

Even if the main story is a tonal mess, jokes about farting mixed with the Harriet Jones horrified reaction, the very human fall out of the TARDIS landing just a single chronometer digit higher than expected keeps us interested and it’s perfectly paced too, the aftershocks threaded throughout the episode from Jackie bopping the Doctor to the revelation that Mickey was accused of his girlfriend’s murder. In previous years it was left to spin-off fiction to discuss the effects the Doctor subsequently had on his companions, but Davies works it into his series.

But it goes further than that still, because this teaser shocker would go on to effect the whole of the rest of his tenure and all three of the series he would run set in the Whoniverse. Putting together the chronology, it’s surprising how, with the exception of a single special (damn you, Planet of the Dead), everything fits together despite the discrepancy barely rating another mention on screen bar on-screen displays and spoken dates, even when in his final year Davies decided to pull it back again, The End of Time very definitely happening at the close of 2010.

At what point is it too late for the Doctor to do anything about it? When the TARDIS lands? When Rose meets her Mum? When he sees the missing poster? My assumption is that as soon as the time ship lands it becomes part of the events. But then if the TARDIS has landed at the correct time, would the Doctor have been changing events back again, creating a new timeline in which Rose returns quickly rather than the one we saw which would be deleted? Certainly we know the Doctor has the power to change history (cf, PM Jones).

With Aliens of London, the effects of time travel were confirmed as being relevant again in the televised Doctor Who, the TARDIS no longer just a space taxi (despite the logo), the first hint perhaps of what was to happen later in the Moffat stories and now the Moffat era in which wibbly-wobbly has become everything, the point of the story, a Saturday night audience subliminally having to deal with simplified versions of massively complicated elements of quantum physics, pre-destination paradoxes and the like. At least much of it is explainable I suppose, certainly more so than Bad Wolf.

Perhaps the Moffat version of Aliens of London would have discussed all of these implications in greater detail, but bar the conversation on the very fake looking roof (the more things change etc.), Davies is all about the human reaction. Rose doesn’t ask why the Doctor can’t simply take her back a year to save her mother the heartache of twelve months not knowing. Instead, the A-plot gets into full swing, as those of us looking forward to a massive invasion of Earth type story find ourselves eye to eye with a space pig.