“Boom” — Doctor Who and the Legacy of Quatermass
Doctor Who reaches back to the past to pave the way to the show’s future.
You wouldn’t know it from the current “Season One” re-launch of Doctor Who, but it has a history that not only goes back to the 1963 premiere of the show, but also to its direct precursor, Nigel Kneale’s classic Quatermass serials which premiered on BBC television in 1953.
Kneale’s obsessive boffin, Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Rocket Group, is so much an influence on Doctor Who that the show would occasionally lift plots from Kneale’s writing — simply substituting The Doctor for the Professor — and would even reference Quatermass as a person who exists in the Whoniverse.
“I wish Bernard was here”
“British Rocket Group’s got its own problems” — Remembrance of the Daleks (1988)
But why are we visiting the work of the late, great, Nigel Kneale in order to talk about the most current episode of Doctor Who, Boom? It’s because the modern Who writer who most attempts to emulate the great Kneale in plot and theme is this episode’s writer, Steven Moffat.
Kneale tended to put his rigid scientist characters in situations that would bloom beyond the boundaries of their studies. In his most famous, and greatest, story, Quatermass and the Pit (both a terrific television serial and later, movie, by Hammer Pictures), the Professor finds connections between ancient aliens from space, insects, and the human understanding of The Devil. Moffat does something similar, he takes understandings of science — or Doctor Who-like pseudo-science — and pastes metaphors, often very emotional metaphors, over them and then spins the whole thing to see if it will hold together.
In “Boom” it does hold together, but only just.
The story has a self-inflicted limitation: The Doctor must spend almost the entirety of the episode standing on a landmine and not getting excited lest it explode, while in the middle of a war zone. From there Moffat weaves a story made of questions about religious faith, gun control, war, family, mercy, and loss. It is as if, by forcing this extremely kinetic Doctor to stand perfectly still and stare straight ahead, Moffat could take each of these issues and hold it in front of his/our eyes and force a thoughtful consideration of each as he spins it gently in front of him/us like an ornament.
Some of these issues are presented with a compelling, but fairly simple, take: the murderous “ambulance” robots (with the face of actor Susan Twist who appears in every episode of the show since November’s “Wild Blue Yonder”) flashing “Thoughts and Prayers” on their video screens after they, themselves, have killed someone says everything you need to know about Moffat’s opinion on gun rights. Other pieces of this puzzle are treated with more complexity: religious faith, for example, as shown in a combat military staffed by Anglican priests, but who also maintain and display an extraordinary sense of compassion for each other and innocents on the battlefield is treated with a delicacy that keeps the whole thing from becoming dogmatic.
“I thought you didn’t like faith much, Doctor.”
“Just because I don’t like it, doesn’t mean I don’t need it, Mundy.”
Ultimately these Kneale-like overlays — Organized Religion on Armed Combat, Familial Relations on Computer Networks — add up to provide a rich story worth savoring, and if it’s expecting a little too much from the extension of the metaphor to have the power of parental love magically able to navigate corporate computer networks, well, I found it as easy to let go as I do Captain Kirk blowing up a computer with a logic puzzle.
There’s way too much good stuff here to get hung up on something like that.
Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson are again a burst of joyful energy with Gatwa showing us something we’ve never seen before, a Doctor falling into overwhelmed sadness and grief. This may be the first time we’ve ever seen a Doctor cry. It works.
Varada Sethu makes her first, but not last, appearance this season as Mundy Flynn and one can easily see why she’ll be a regular soon as she brings a world-weary pragmatism to balance out the two exuberant leads.
Easily the best episode of the season so far, Steven Moffat makes a triumphant return to Doctor Who with this tense, suspenseful, counterbalance to the two, far more camp, episodes prior. The range of adventures for our new Doctor is showing promise with an encouraging and rich depth and, as Nigel Kneale’s work so often did for his Quatermass, I hope it continues to push the boundaries of what makes good Doctor Who.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times