9.10: The Doctor Dances
In which, for the avoidance of doubt, Doctor Who would like you to know that Doctor Who is now a grown up, sophisticated man, who has sex and does sexy things.
Broadcast: May 2005
Watched: July 2021
“Well I’ve got a banana and in a pinch you could put up some shelves.” Actually, the whole banana conversation is brilliant (“Don’t drop the banana!” “Why not?” “It’s a good source of potassium!”).
“Go to your room” is a perfect cliffhanger resolution: it’s funny, it makes sense, it says something about the story, and then a few scenes later it backfires.
I sort of like the way you can tell Jack is important because the narrative sort of warps around him, it’s a very Doctor Who trick. Also, the fact he selfishly escapes but then gets the others out – twice – is a good character note.
I love the way you can see the Doctor working out the truth long before it’s communicated to the audience.
The bit where Rose tells Nancy the Germans lose the war (“You win!”) is far more powerful than the version in the previous episode. It’s what I’ve come to think of as the Vincent & the Doctor trick: being able to tell someone in the past that something will turn out alright.
The last act goes on for *ages*. Not in a bad way, it’s brilliant, but we got to the final showdown and I realised there was more than a third of the episode left. A function of a properly structured two parter I guess.
Anyway, the ending is brilliant, obviously, and I felt it more now than I have before? Maybe I never quite understood it before, maybe it’s just that after covid the way Nancy’s acceptance of her child is communicated through the physical contact she’s been avoiding for 90 minutes is more powerful. Also I never got that metaphor before. Idiot.
Other things:
I hate the episode title, sorry. I hate “Doctor” episode titles, mostly. Lazy.
The most extensive references to gay sex so far (two different couples!) and they come from Moffat, not RTD.
Strikingly well directed this, lots of nice visual tricks – zooming in on the child, showing the second transformation from side not front, the close up shots used to disguise the fact the leads have been teleported to a new location, the bit at the end where the camera pulls back from Jack’s spaceship through the TARDIS doors to show he’s being rescued.
As well as being an entire episode about the fact that the Doctor bangs now, this one contains the first confirmation that the Doctor shaves (“When he’s stressed he likes to insult species”). Also that conversation is used to distract us from the fact the tape has run out and the child is now in the room...
...also, the blurring between a recorded conversation and a real one is a trick that Moffat comes back to in Blink, isn’t it?
“So where’d you pick this one up then?” the Doctor asks. To be fair, Rose’s flirting is repeatedly used to advance the plot this season.
The Doctor’s “give me one day like this”... is it mad to wonder if this inspired the 2008 Elbow song in some way? Probably.
The kid typing a letter to his dad is about to turn 30.
Final thought: I think, because he ends up running the show for eight years, Moffat’s version of the show is sort of embedded in my mind as the natural order, from which the last couple of seasons have diverged. But seeing its first appearance again has got me thinking about how it differs from what came before, or what RTD does, come to that.
I think it’s that the show had often had funny bits, and RTD clearly gets that’s an important part of the mix... but Moffat is the first to write the whole thing with that tone. Obviously there are moments that don’t include jokes, but the jokes aren’t an extra, they’re sort of structural. And that is different from anyone else who’d written for the show before, I think: RTD writes funny Doctor Who; Moffat writes Doctor Who that’s fundamentally a comedy.
Thoughts - I think the line is 'give me *a* day like this', and then later 'Just this once, everybody lives', which I think makes the Elbow inspiration more unlikely 😜
I like 'The Doctor' titles generally, especially when the story is good. I think they also fulfil what *I think* was an RTD ambition, though it could've been a Moffat one, which is to have slutty titles that make you want to watch and pique your curiosity. If the title alone isn't making you do that then something's probably gone a bit wrong. It's arguably cheap, but I think any Doctor Who episode title with 'The Doctor' in it is arguably a slutty title because it implies we're going to learn something new about The Doctor themselves - even if it's not necessarily what we think it is, based on said title. Admittedly 'The Doctor Dances' is probably the weaker of these compared to later offerings, such as 'The Doctor's Daughter', 'The Doctor's Wife', 'The Name of The Doctor', but I think the principle still applies.
A further point about that typewriter scene - fun fact, that scene is written by RTD to pad the runtime, as the episode was apparently underrunning and they needed something inconsequential to act as filler. What I think is really interesting about this is, in the RTD era we always kind of thought of Moffat as the one that wrote the scary episode(s), and then Midnight is kind of the first example I can think of where RTD tries his hand at a scary episode, which up til then had been Moffat's forté.
But in writing that scene for The Doctor Dances then RTD is showing his ability to write properly scary Doctor Who, 3 years before Midnight.
Further to my point above about Moffat writing the scary episodes, though - the fact that I think he developed that reputation obscured the fact that, as you say, Moffat writes Doctor Who as a comedy. It's what in his exit interview with The Fan Show he called his 'sitcom twitch' (incidentally, if somehow you haven't watched said three-part interview with Moffat, you really should, it's fascinating and comprehensive - not least because some of the theories and ideas he expands upon in that interview that underpinned, but weren't always specifically explored, in Doctor Who, formed the backbone of his current adaptation of The Time Traveller's Wife).
But Moffat's sitcom twitch is ever present in Doctor Who and it says something about how he carved out a niche prior to running the show that we don't consciously think of the level of comedy in Doctor Who as a Moffatism.