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Doctor Who: Love & Monsters (2006)
A daring experiment with unsatisfactory results
The hypothesis of the experiment is "can a story be told in Doctor Who in which the idea of The Doctor drives the plot but the character himself hardly appears" - there's nothing wrong with the hypothesis but the results of the experiment prove deeply inconclusive because the method was awry.
It's hard to say who this story is aimed at. At it's best Doctor Who aims itself at all audiences simultaneously - fans and casual viewers, adults and children, sci-fi geeks and goth horror aficionados, and with the new series those who like their drama a little more emotional and sensitive are also catered to.
When it works each audience is catered for simultaneously. Here however each of the target audiences is served in small doses and alienated for the most part. Served up for the kids we have slapstick humour and fart gags which are sure to set the adult audiences teeth on edge. For the adults we get sexual innuendo and romantic comedy that pays some homage to the Confessions series.
Served up for the fans we have a story about Doctor Who fans! They're not really Doctor Who fans, they're a bunch of conspiracy theorists united in their belief and interest in the existence of The Doctor. Scenes of stroking police boxes and in-jokes about the history of fandom (is Victor Kennedy a satire on Ian Levine?). We have refer-backs to various stories from 2005, all told from the perspective of a passer-by - all self-referential and quite dull for the uninitiated. Served up for the casual viewer we have a certain camp self-depreciation, reminiscent of the old series during the mid-eighties in which the production team seem to be giving us a wink to say "don't worry, we don't take this stuff seriously either" - one surefire way to offend fans who for the most part think that maybe they should.
Goth horror fans may be disappointed to find that despite having a promising monster concept of a beast who absorbs his victims and wears their faces beneath his gelatinous skin the horror of this is downplayed, firstly by making the character a light-hearted comic one, and by having the obviously cheap rubber suit that comprises the monster costume exposed in broad daylight, leaving no room to suspend disbelief.
Despite some pretence at romantic comedy the episode also displays gross insensitivity at times, particularly in the closing moments. Having given a tragic but noble death for the heroine this is subsequently ruined by the plot development that the Doctor restores her to life as a disembodied face contained within a paving slab; a disturbing image of what one can only imagine to be a miserable existence. To make the development more disturbing the "boyfriend" of this object (and since she is an object with no means of self determination, should we say "owner" rather than "boyfriend"?) assures the audience that they have a love life of sorts, while balancing the paving slab on his lap. An innuendo that may thankfully go unnoticed by younger viewers, but is inescapable to the adult viewers, the more sensitive of which may well find the implication repugnant. While Doctor Who has it's roots in the horror tradition it is usually the role of the Doctor to fight against horror and for human dignity, and yet here he seems to be doing the exact opposite.
For all it's negatives the episode does have some genuinely funny moments, and some genuinely tender ones. It's flaws however are too large to overlook, and it's a shame because the fundamental idea for the story is quite workable and had it worked would have made this a unique sort of Doctor Who episode.
Marc Warren turns in an excellent performance as the central character Elton Pope, and the semi-regular character of Jackie Tyler is given more depth than usual and played sympathetically by Camile Coduri. Peter Kay on the other hand is typecast and given little chance to stretch his acting muscles as his character is written around him and based strongly on his existing comedy personae.