Alien resurrection
- Publication: The Guardian
- Date: 2005-03-28
- Author: Tim Dowling
- Page: G2, p. 18
- Language: English
All the publicity greeting the return of Dr Who (Saturday, BBC1) demonstrates just how much baggage comes with any new production of a cherished classic. From the start it had to confront harsh comparisons with the past, the merciless scrutiny of millions of fanatics and the cultish respect paid to the dated conventions of the canon. It was always going to have a lot to answer for.
Not to me, though. I've never seen a single episode of any series of Dr Who. Of course I've absorbed a few basic facts over the years through cultural osmosis - I know that the Tardis is really big on the inside and that Daleks can't climb stairs, and I could probably name at least two of the actors who've played the Doctor over the years, but that's about it. All in all I'm probably the last person who should be reviewing his much-heralded return to the small screen. But I checked the holiday rota twice, and it's me.
Then again, this new series, with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor and Billie Piper as his assistant Rose, ought to be able to stand on its own, unsupported by the affection built up over many years and nurtured during a long sabbatical. For reasons having to do with the holidays and family "togetherness", I was forced to screen episode one in the company of a five-year-old who was born a decade after Dr Who went off the air. What would he make of it? Without the cultural reference points, would it even make sense to him? Unfortunately he became fixated early on with a minor character named Wilson, an electrician who is named but doesn't actually appear on screen and is presumed dead within the first few minutes, and he never really picked up the thread of the plot after that.
I, however, was hooked almost from the outset. The whole thing was stuffed with in-jokes I wasn't sure I was fully getting, but I laughed anyway. The earth's shop mannequins, controlled by a "nesting consciousness" living beneath the London Eye and capable of animating plastic, were bursting out of department-store windows and attacking shoppers. I now know this to be a sort of homage to a famous old Dr Who episode that was never screened. Investigating the strange figure who has saved her from the dummies, shop assistant Rose, naturally enough, takes to the internet, searching on "Doctor Blue Box" (neatly sidestepping the problem of what would actually happen if you typed "Dr Who" into Google). She encounters a website that brings her to the house of a conspiracy obsessive, who tells her everything he knows about the mysterious alien time-traveller. The obsessive's wife is nonplussed by Rose's interest: "She? Read a website about the Doctor? She's a she?"
I don't know if scriptwriter Russell T Davies is a Dr Who obsessive, but he's certainly steeped himself in the lore. The script sends up everything from the Daleks - in a rather sly reference, one character is attacked by an actual wheelie bin - to the average sci-fi fan's credulous suspension of disbelief: at one point a sceptical Rose says to the Doctor, "If you are an alien, how come you sound like you're from the north?" The special effects are a pleasing combination of state-of-the-art CGI and the sort oflo-fi gimmickry Dr Who fans - I'm guessing here -would demand: people pretending to be choked by severed mannequin arms and the like. I was so caught up in the fun of it that I barely noticed my son shouting, "Where's Wilson? What happened to Wilson?" During the climactic mannequin attack he even hid behind the sofa, which is, I gather, the traditional response.
Billie Piper, it transpires, has a real gift for comedy. It's a delight to watch her as she fails to notice that her useless boyfriend has been turned into an evil plastic mannequin, even as he malfunctions while quizzing her in a pizza restaurant about the whereabouts of the Doctor. "I'm sorry," she says, "was I talking about me for second?"
There can be few things as irritating as watching Christopher Eccleston attempting to be impish, but from what I know of the Doctor character I believe he's meant to be a bit of an arse, and Eccleston manages a mix of glib self-satisfaction and transgalactic gravitas which should please the sticklers. Frankly, I don't care if it does. In the trailer for next week's episode they showed a lady who was nothing more than a piece of skin stretched on a frame with a face in the middle, and be damned if I'm going to miss that.
Caption: Fantastic plastic... Dr Who (BBC1)
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- APA 6th ed.: Dowling, Tim (2005-03-28). Alien resurrection. The Guardian p. G2, p. 18.
- MLA 7th ed.: Dowling, Tim. "Alien resurrection." The Guardian [add city] 2005-03-28, G2, p. 18. Print.
- Chicago 15th ed.: Dowling, Tim. "Alien resurrection." The Guardian, edition, sec., 2005-03-28
- Turabian: Dowling, Tim. "Alien resurrection." The Guardian, 2005-03-28, section, G2, p. 18 edition.
- Wikipedia (this article): <ref>{{cite news| title=Alien resurrection | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Alien_resurrection | work=The Guardian | pages=G2, p. 18 | date=2005-03-28 | via=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=16 March 2025 }}</ref>
- Wikipedia (this page): <ref>{{cite web | title=Alien resurrection | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Alien_resurrection | work=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=16 March 2025}}</ref>
