TV For the past week I've been fiddling around with a Spotify playlist of hit songs in their original iterations, most of which aren't typically known for being the cover version that they are. So we have Bonnie Tyler's If I Could Turn Back Time, I-Ten's Alone and Isley, Jasper, Isley's Caravan of Love. Some of them are theoretically better than their successors, others found their proper muse in the rerecord. While World Party's She's The One became Robbie Williams's passionless clone, Labi Siffr's It Must Be Love is fine but Madness made it a stellar undertaking for the ears.
Which brings us to tonight's Doctor Who and the revelation that the Doctor is the Doctor but that there was an earlier Doctor who might be from her past who is also the Doctor. The Doctor's reaction to this was rather the same as when we discovered that Torn by Natalie Imbruglia wasn't just a cover version, it was a cover version of about three different songs one of which is Danish and called Burned instead. It's The Grudge or Ringu of Scandipop. Confused? Imagine how my brain was as it parsed through the possibilities of who this new incarnation of the Doctor is and why she exists.
The franchise has toyed with the notion of pre-Hartnell Whos before. On television, greet all of the production team faces pulled from Baker T's consciousness in The Brain of Morbius, most often rationalised as being the previous lives of the antagonist, when what Robert Holmes et al were getting at is pretty clear. The Wilderness years promoted the idea of the Other who along with Rassilon and Omega founded Time Lord society and eventually became the Doctor after being "re-loomed". The Wilderness Years were a strange place. Even the Doctor seems to have forgotten she destroyed Gallifrey herself back then.
What if it's more complicated than that? What if we're entering Unbound territory and she's actually from an alternate reality? What if Jo Martin's incarnation is from a different dimension, or else that the Doctor herself and her family have entered that alternative reality at some point, perhaps in the aftermath of an earlier story, but just haven't noticed. Which would explain the dissolution of UNIT and Torchwood being a revelation to her and why this version of the Master seemed to run counter to what we know about the person and their fate at the close of Capaldi's final season.
But it's that kind of episode and how great that we've finally landed here with a story which finds the sweet spot of Daviesy Moffat revelation and question, stuffed with continuity references and a general sense of finally feeling like its part of the same show we've enjoyed since at least 2005, rather than the nervy disjointed stranger taking a fag break in the alleyway round back. A continuity dump chock full of more back references than a Big Finish McGann boxset perhaps, but it's entirely pleasurable to see Jodie actually being the protagonist of her own show again and more's the point being that Time Lord with its past.
Although the social media publicity beforehand said enough that we knew the Judoon would be a sideshow in tonight's story and that someone would be returning, to then offer up Captain Jack Harkness as a secondary red herring is really ballsy. Barrowman bloody loves this stuff so it's also a pleasure to see that he didn't do or say anything to invalidate James Goss's intricate audio continuity so it's entirely open as to whether this is happening during any of his sojourns off-Earth. I'll leave it to costume nerds to work their magic on any clues there. But Captain Jack's back and will no doubt be back again. Squee.
This is in danger of becoming a proper review of the kind I said I wouldn't write any more instead of a fangasm so I'd better stop in the next paragraph. There's dishes to wash and I need to get ready for visiting Lichfield tomorrow (which amounts to making sure my phone and iPod are charging and remembering to put my Arden 3 copy of King John in my bag to read on the train). I booked this trip during a atmospherically mild moment last November, little thinking that January would be this horrible. The only good news from the BBC Weather page is a 15% chance of precipitation. But the wind chill is 3 degrees centigrade. Brrr.
Anyway, it's just a pleasure to be able to sit in front of Doctor Who for once and it not feel like the franchise's equivalent of the liquid dispensed by Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser to Arthur Dent on the Heart of Gold. On the one hand it could be seen as a retreat from the grand experiment in Jodie's first season but on the other it's the sort of thing which brings in the punters. There's a reason Shakespeare's arguably most derivative play is called As You Like It. Enjoy the rest of the evening. Let me end on one final revelation. Young at Heart by The Bluebells was originally recorded by Banarama. The walls of reality are truly crumbling.
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