The Lazarus Experiment

When you mix together a lot of ingredients, you are going to get a dark brew, and this is what The Lazarus Experiment turned out to be. I am not sure if I know the exact recipe, but I think that first you add a healthy dose of Robert Louis Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, together with a dash of David Cronenberg's The Fly. Then you give the whole thing a classic biblical setting straight from the eleventh chapter of St. John's Gospel, and you throw in some obtuse quotes from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. You sprinkle the whole thing with some nifty CGI, some effective makeup and promising new characters just waiting to be developed in future episodes, and you have got a very entertaining episode six.

Doctor Lazarus is a mad scientist in search of the fountain of youth. Unfortunately for him, it does not come as easy as it does in Oscar Wilde's great novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In that great decadent Victorian work, Gray does not actively seek youth by scientific means, it just comes to him one day via art and the kind of artifice that verges on magic. In The Lazarus Experiment, the title villain works towards similar results by using the time-tested traditions of sci-fi mad scientist research. For both Gray and especially for Lazarus, eternal youth carries some dire results, plenty of drawbacks, and the kind of side-effects that should make any rational thinking man of science throw out his bunsen burner and dedicate himself to less dangerous work. Lucky for us and humanity, the Doctor happens to be in attendance at the unveiling of Doctor Lazarus's creepy way-back machine, and he is able to thwart the horrible side-effect mutation that creeps into Dr. Lazarus's existence in the very same way in which Mr. Hyde often usurped the body of his literary better half.

The entire episode, like Wilde's literature, has an inescapable end of the century moldy air to it. It starts with the great old man makeup that transforms actor/writer Mark Gatiss (he is the author of one of my favorite Dr. Who episodes: The Unquiet Dead) into a seventy-six year old ready to be reborn. Throughout the episode we feel that we are nearing the end of something, but we are not quite sure what it is. The TARDIS's return to Martha Jones's apartment, at the start of the episode, for instance, is described as "the end of the line," and the show's denouement concludes at dark, empty, centuries-old Suffolk Cathedral with a monstrous Dr. Lazarus falling from the bell-tower ? the fall of Lucifer ? to the strains of a pipe organ, with all the stops pulled out that turns out to be the not too convincing deus ex machina of the story. By the way, this quasi-musical tour-de-force banging on the organ's keys and pedals is played by the Doctor with the kind of aplomb that would make the Phantom of the Opera really envious.

This episode delves further inside the relationship between Doctor and new companion, by exploring Martha Jones's family. We are introduced to her sister, who works for Dr. Lazarus, and we also get to meet Martha's brother and her mother. Mrs. Jones, portrayed by Adjoa Andoh, is one tough lady who, right from the start of the episode, seems to have made up her mind that the Doctor is just no good for her baby. In addition, a mysterious man named Harold Saxon, whom Mrs. Jones meets at Lazarus Laboratories, manages to completely poison her mind against the Doctor by revealing to her a secret that culminates in Mrs. Jones attacking the Doctor's face with an old-fashioned slap. The Doctor's precious comment about mothers as he rubs his sore cheek was the comedy highlight of this dark show.

The Lazarus Experiment turned out to be a heady, neo-baroque concoction that will surely set the stage for the upcoming episodes that will follow. By the looks of it, the episode that will air in two weeks promises to be one of the most memorable of this remarkable season.