I’ve been watching and rewatching a lot of Doctor Who lately, partially because I’m hard at work on three separate Doctor Who related projects (nothing official, o’ course – just some fun fan stuff) but mostly because… well, I love the show. I grew up with it, with Tom Baker and Peter Davison. My earliest Doctor Who memory is of “The Mind Robber”, seeing Jamie McCrimmon’s face being jumbled up. It horrified me as a child. It still sends tingles down my spine, even today.
The fourth series of the revived show is probably the second-most uneven series of the show to date, right behind the second series, and yet both series contain some of my favourite episodes of the show. One such episode is “Turn Left”, an alternate-history episode that retells some of the events of the third and fourth series in a universe where the Doctor died. It’s a wonderful episode, brilliantly grim, if a bit over-the-top at times. However there’s one moment in the episode that I cannot take seriously:
Torchwood fans try to pretend Ianto Jones never died. Some Doctor Who fans deem the ’96 TV Movie to be non-canonical. Me? I would happily remove this single shot from the show’s 48-year history without a moment’s hesitation.
It’s a moment that is simply too over-the-top. It’s too silly, too ridiculous, too much after seeing London get nuked off of the planet. It’s not just the pointing, either. It’s the shaking of the head, the glare, the malice. It doesn’t work. It comes across as ridiculously cheesy, and in an episode as bleak as this it becomes unintentionally hilarious.
I wanted to know how the scene read on the page, on Russell T Davies’ original shooting script, and fortunately enough it’s one of the many Doctor Who scripts available to download from the promotional site for “The Writer’s Tale”. So I downloaded it and had a look:
It’s a nice piece of action text, but… well, it still doesn’t work. It tries to hammer home a point from an earlier scene – the Spanish maid can see the space beetle on Donna’s back – it’s too much. Too clunky. Too forced. If it were up to me, I’d remove the Spanish maid from this shot entirely. She’s superfluous, telling the audience something that they already know. No, it’s worse – she’s repeating it, so soon after having already reminded them of it.
Or, alternatively, can her presence in the scene be amended? Can her contribution to this moment be fixed? I at least thought it was worth having a stab at:
[CeltX added a line break into the second paragraph during the export process. No idea why.]
Is this any better? Well, no. I’ve tried to tone down the maid’s reaction, to make it seem more real, more human. But she still feels unnecessary. Her presence muddies the tone of the scene. What is supposed to be a tragedy, a disaster, is then punctuated by something awkward, shoehorned into the scene in an attempt to serve the overall narrative, and backfiring.
But then, that’s something of a calling card of Russell T Davies’, isn’t it?