9.3: The Unquiet Dead
In which someone should perhaps have given more thought to signs and signifiers.
Broadcast: April 2005
Watched: July 2021
“My books. Do they last?” “Oh yes.” “For how long?” “Forever.” The first iteration of the story we’re going to see again in Vincent…, An Adventure in Space & Time, and probably elsewhere, too.
So trad you can see the cliffhangers in the four part version, but it’s very well done. It’s quite small in scale compared to the historicals to come, or even to the two episodes we’ve already seen: one crowd scene in the theatre, some people in bonnets in the street, but otherwise really just half a dozen people in a house.
Odd how it’s a zombie one - Sneed literally dies and switches sides - but we don’t think of it that way in the way we do with, say, Oxygen.
Lot of decent infodumping going on. The Doctor tells us time is in flux, and can change; Gwyneth’s psychic powers let us know that Rose is thinking about her dead dad. The Gelth drop some helpful hints about the Time War, and we see the Doctor’s alien-ness in the fact he’s so willing to let aliens take over a bunch of Victorian corpses.
Good things:
Callow is bloody brilliant.
I like the conceit of doing a Christmas episode in the middle of a series, in April.
I really like that Dickens is tired and bored and discovering there are more things in heaven and earth etc. gives him a new lease of life. So much cleverer than “...and Frankestein was actually a cyberman.”
Sneed is hilarious. LOVE Rose yelling at him until he talks (“And don’t think I didn’t feel your hands having a quick wander”).
Ah, the first of the in-jokes mocking Cardiff.
Bad things:
It is not massively obvious when Gwyneth died or why she can move afterwards. The “more things in heaven and earth” bit is sort of a cheat’s way out.
In that infamous blog, Lawrence Miles wasn’t wrong that the Gelth narrative is accidentally anti-asylum seeker, mind, even if it’s cock up not conspiracy. And the bit where they physically turn from angels to devils the moment they reveal their intentions is a bit OTT.
Weird things:
“He’s more alive now than he’s ever been, old Charlie boy” feels like a TV in-joke.
Seeing Eve Myles as someone who isn’t Gwen Cooper.