Army of Ghosts

In "Boom Town," Margaret Slitheen accused the Doctor of riding into town, stirring up trouble, and then riding on out again before he ever has to deal with the consequences of his actions. While the Slitheen wasn't exactly an entirely trustworthy or unbiased source, we had an uncomfortable feeling then that she might have had a point. After all, hadn't the Doctor already ridden out of town after "World War III" without a thought to how those he'd left behind would pick themselves back up--not to mention, without making sure all the Slitheen were really dead? And her words would ring truer than ever in the very next episode, "Bad Wolf," when we found out that the Doctor's intervention to kill the Jagrafess and stop the news network's control in "The Long Game" led to a century of darkness and an even worse form of evil insinuating itself.

And now it's proven true one more time. The Doctor didn't hang around in the Cybermen's alternate universe for the long-term work of making sure the cyber-threat was truly neutralized. He thought they were finished...but "it's not the first time he's been wrong." And for the third time in two seasons, his failure to stick around and make sure is coming back to bite him in the arse. And the consequences for his companion may be even worse.

In a season that has seen more than its share of brilliant episodes (in particular, "Tooth and Claw," "The Girl in the Fireplace," and "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit" come to mind), "Army of Ghosts" stands out as one of the best. While some fans online decry it as blatant fan-sploitation and the result of a childish fanficky pre-occupation with "versus" battles, the episode is written very nicely and directed with just the right sense of timing. While there are a few moments of silliness, the episode presents an equal number of brilliant moments to make up for them. And all this in an RTD-written ep, yet!

A bit on the silly side is the first TV montage where channel-flipping brings up nothing but ghosts, ghosts, ghosts. Some fans decry this as rubbish, and at first it does seem a trifle overdone. But on the other hand, we've just been presented with a very disturbing sight: blurry ghosts walking about and nobody finding anything odd about it. We need the comic relief for catharsis, so we can laugh uneasily and relieve the tension those creepy ghosts have just brought out. And it does make an interesting contrast with "Aliens of London," where Rose suggests watching TV to learn more about the alien crash landing. Now it's the first thing the Doctor does.

Equally silly is the Ghostbusters riff...but again, this silliness is about to be balanced out by Jackie's "not human anymore" speech to Rose, so we sort of need that silliness so things don't get too heavy for too long. In fact, all through the episode you see the moments of levity alternating with the moments of spookiness pretty consistently--and pretty brilliantly. After all, if we're going to see someone get upgraded to Humanity 1.1 one moment, we'd darned well better get something like the Doctor stepping out of his Tardis to a standing ovation the next. It doesn't do to let us get too scared--or too amused. The direction in this episode, by classic Doctor Who hand Graeme Harper, is top-notch. (Harper also directed the other Cybermen 2-parter earlier this season, which was another excellent piece of work.)

There are some truly brilliant pieces of characterization in this episode, starting from the very beginning when we see Rose at several times in her life, mentally narrating that she thought she'd be with the Doctor forever, but this is the story of how she died. RTD certainly knows how to grab the viewers' attention. We're left wondering just what we're supposed to make of Rose thinking this to us while she's standing on a desolate Welsh beach looking bereft. What does she mean by "how she died"?

And then there's her mother, Jackie. It doesn't seem too promising at the beginning, with Jackie casually accepting the ghost as being her dead father (why not Pete instead, one wonders?) and Rose thinking she's gone off her rocker. But then we get Jackie's "not even human" speech to Rose--not the usual "I worry about what you're doing, gallivanting around the galaxy with a strange man" speech she's made in the past, but more of an "I worry about who you're becoming." This speech seems to have more of a resonance than Jackie's usual worries, because it's a lot harder to resent someone worrying about what you are than about what you're doing.

And then there's Jackie's "kidnapping"--which, her indignant protest to Yvonne Hartman notwithstanding, seemed to me to be rather intentional on her part; after all, she wasn't exactly waiting by the door trying to get out. No, Jackie had been dealing with the ghosts for two months that the Doctor hadn't even been there, and she'd blindly accepted one of them as being the spirit of someone close to her. She must have felt entitled to some answers--and no matter what she thought of the Doctor (and she seems to have warmed to him considerably, given her rather enthusiastic greeting), she would have known that tagging along would be the best way to get them.

When Jackie is grabbed by the Doctor and pulled out and introduced as Rose (one wonders if this was intentional on the part of the Doctor, so that Rose would have more freedom to operate--though given that he didn't even look inside before pulling her out, one also wonders if he was just being quick on his feet), you have to give her credit. she doesn't go to pieces--she stoicly plays along and, as far as banter with the Doctor is concerned, gives as good as she gets. (She has some great dialogue even before that, in fact--her deadpan threat about ending up on Mars is one of the episode's best lines.) For all that Jackie is often considered annoying, Camille Coduri has great comic talent to be able to play her that way--and great dramatic talent to make Jackie occasionally sympathetic when she has to be, in spite of all that.

Through this whole episode, we see that there really is more to Jackie than her shallow exterior lets on. We've seen flashes of this in "Aliens of London/World War III," "The Parting of the Ways," "The Christmas Invasion," and even "Love and Monsters," but "Army of Ghosts" is where we start to see our Jackie Tyler really come into her own, much as Mickey did in "Age of Steel." She may not be as quick on her feet and adaptable to new situations as Rose, but she's fiercely loyal and knows when to let her heart override her head.. She may babble on in social situations and misunderstand questions put to her (such as talking about the noise her neighbor heard in the basement when the Doctor asks her when it started), but she also knows when to remain quiet. Even many of the things she does say elicit more information from Yvonne. ("There's isn't a British Empire." "Not yet.")

Perhaps much of the babble and shallowness is protective camouflage. The way she goes from man to man (even vamping Eccleston in "Rose"), her badly-hurt feelings after Elton turned out not to be who she thought he was in "Love and Monsters," and her desire to believe that ghost could be her departed father--all of these bespeak a desperate sort of vulnerability and loneliness, especially since Rose has left the nest. But even with that vulnerability, at heart Jackie is one tough lady. She had to be, to raise Rose all by herself. You can see the contrast in the alternate Jackie from "Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel"--not tempered by having lost Pete and having had to raise a child alone, that Jackie is much more of a spoiled brat, even at the age of 40. Rose finds this out when she tries to relate to alt-Jackie as she would have related to her own mother, and gets yelled at for her troubles. You can bet that "our" Jackie would never have been caught by those Cybermen.

I wonder if Jackie and alternate-Pete will get together in episode 13, each seeing in the other someone like the person they've lost. It would provide a sort of closure--and closure seems to be one of the themes of this episode, beginning as it did with that recap, complete with the planet earth shot that opened "Rose," a shot of the Eccleston Doctor to remind us with whom Rose first fell in love, and "The Christmas Invasion." One way or another, Rose's story comes to an end with this two-parter. Mickey is back, and perhaps other familiar faces will be too. Old enemies are returning to settle the score. It's all coming together.

As for new characters, Tracy-Ann Oberman plays Yvonne Hartman with great gusto. This is not a truly evil person. Patriotic, even borderline fascistic, and a touch amoral, yes--but not evil. She's just management--much the same sort as the Editor in "The Long Game," though a bit more benign and less smugly secure. She's a "people person" who believes in knowing everyone's name and believes that group applause and feel-good platitudes make a team work better. Like so many other Doctor Who villains, going all the way back to "Tomb of the Cybermen," she believes that what she is doing will make the world a better place. However, unlike those others, she is at least willing to listen to what the Doctor has to say--even if it's too late by the time she does.

And speaking of "Tomb of the Cybermen," there are some great references to that and to other classic Doctor Who adventures here. The way the Cybermen slice through the plastic sheeting is just like the way they sliced through the polythene sheeting to emerge from their cryogenic cells in "Tomb." The Doctor refers to the Eternals, the immortal race from "Enlightenment." There are even links back to earlier Tennant episodes such as "The Christmas Invasion," where Yvonne admits to shooting down the Sycorax ship, and "Tooth and Claw," where Queen Victoria declared the Doctor an enemy of the crown. Even as small a touch as Rose exiting the Tardis with the same backpack she took inside in "New Earth" reminds viewers of what has gone before.

And then there's the return of the Doctor's oldest, best-known foe of all, for what promises to be the who-would-win (or "Who would win"?) fanfic battle royale of the century. Small wonder some are calling it fan-sploitation. (Well, actually they're using a somewhat coarser word, but I don't want there to be any problem with Outpost Gallifrey publishing this review.) Some fans are saying that RTD has sold out for ratings, that the script is full of cliches, and worse. All I can say is, I don't care--if they could exploit this fan that way more often, I'd be a very happy camper.

RTD was, for once, smart about keeping the big surprise a secret. Or at least almost smart. The trailer for last week's show had a shot in it--the Dalek extermination kill effect--that implied Daleks might be coming back. Fortunately, I managed to miss noticing that when I viewed the trailer myself. Apart from that, they did a remarkably good job of keeping a lid of secrecy on the cliffhanger--including blanking out the final scene from the preview copies they distributed. And what a payoff! They edited it just right--the shot with the foggy shapes emerging from the light, the cut back to Rose, Mickey, and Dr. Singh for just long enough for Mickey to say those aren't Cybermen and for your hindbrain to begin to recognize the blurry shapes... And then the cut back to the shapes as worst suspicions are confirmed, and icy chills running down your spine as the implications sink in...marvelous. I had thought that the episode was blowing the opportunity for surprise by revealing the Cybermen as early as it did--but as it turned out, it was a red herring--a distraction to keep the true surprise in abeyance. And thus we are left with what may be the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) cliffhanger in all of modern-day Doctor Who. Masterfully done, RTD.

Another clever moment is the failure of the psychic paper to produce the desired results. We already knew that someone familiar with it could recognize it when someone else was using it (from Rose and Captain Jack in "The Empty Child"). It only remained to see it fail to work on someone else to complete the circle. (Though I would give a great deal to understand how it was able to affect a mechanical lock.) The Voidship was an interesting concept, too, tying in nicely with the Tardis's inadvertent side-trip to the Cybermen's home universe. And Torchwood...Torchwood is a fascinating organization. The idea of an entire organization, over a century old, entirely dedicated to obtaining and reverse-engineering alien technology and keeping tabs on The Doctor is an interesting one. Yes, people will complain that it's a blatant retcon since they never appeared (or existed) prior to this series, letting the Doctor carry on his work during the UNIT years without any problems. But if we let that become an issue, we would then have to throw out all the other Doctor Who stories that were supposed to happen in a future year that is now a past year. The thing about time travel stories is you just can't think too hard about them or they fall apart.

Acting on the part of the regulars was excellent. Tennant was as much the Doctor as he ever has been, complete with little idiosyncrasies like running around setting up alien gizmos, walking the wrong way down corridors, and peering at things through 3D glasses. He is by turns contemplative, worried, dramatic, angry, even embarrassed on occasion...as well as "so very sorry." When he is met at the Tardis door by a squad of armed soldiers, even when he is explicitly told he is a prisoner, he is not fazed and indeed he carries on as if he were perfectly free and glad to be there. He knows that just because they say he is a prisoner does not necessarily make him one, and this is where he needs to be right now anyway so he might as well not kick up a fuss over it. And his theatrics--the broken glass analogy, the placid acquiescence to going ahead with the ghost shift--are perfectly Whovian. It's as Yvonne said, he does like to make a mess.

Rose is ever her plucky self--except in the pre-credits teaser, where she is more subdued. Fans are still arguing over the meaning of the flashback scenes--whether the fact that she's walking on a beach as she speaks her voiceover about this being how she died means that she's still alive after all, or whether what we're seeing is just another flashback, or what. In spite of that, she really isn't given that much to do in this episode, overall. She has a couple of scenes, but the spotlight for this part is mostly on the Doctor and Jackie. I expect we'll see a good deal more of her in "Doomsday," though.

It's good to see Noel Clarke again as Mickey, even if this 2-parter is likely to mark his swan song from the series as well as Rose's. It's interesting to see his new, hardened, "Rickyish" attitude, too. He's got more confidence in himself and more determination; he's been battle-tested and knows what he's made of. I wonder where that gun came from--the Torchwood warehouse, or the Cybermen's homeworld? And rounding out the cast of important characters is Raji James turning in a decent performance as Dr. Singh, a determined if frustrated Torchwood scientist who has "disposable extra" practically written all over him in felt-tipped marker. If he survives more than thirty seconds into the next episode, I will be very surprised.

Speculation is running fast and furious on the Doctor Who newsgroups as to exactly what Rose's "death" means. The fact that she herself is narrating it (as well as standing on a beach looking doleful during the voiceover) suggests that she must still be alive in order to be narrating it, as Doctor Who hasn't tended to go in for the existence of a life after death by which she could be narrating having died. But with RTD at the helm, anything is possible. Clinical death followed by resuscitation, faked "death" and relocation under a witness protection program (or even into the Cybus alternate dimension), getting turned into a Cyberman, regenerating as a result of her exposure to the Time Vortex last season, or even emotional trauma so debilitating that she "died" inside. Or it could very well be "the real thing." Who can say? One thing's for sure, this cliffhanger has gotten a lot of people talking.

"Doomsday" will hopefully answer a lot of unanswered questions raised by this episode. I look forward to it with trepidation, as RTD has allegedly promised to end Series 2 with a huge cliffhanger (though whether he referred to the cliffhanger on "Army of Ghosts" or another one on "Doomsday," I'm not quite sure). One thing's for sure: if Doomsday ends with a cliffhanger as bad as this one, which will have to wait 5 months for the Christmas special to resolve, I swear I am going to do mayhem to somebody.