REVIEW:
Blu-ray review: Doctor Who – The Complete Third Series
(BBC/Roadshow Entertainment, PG)
Reviewed by Chris Gardner
Yay. Gallifrey is back for the first time in new Who.
From the Doctor’s (David Tennant) perspective in the third series it had been destroyed in The Last Great Time War but we now know, from the 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor, that the Doctor had in fact hidden it from the universe and forgotten where he put it!
However, it is not until the third series episode Gridlock where the Doctor even talks about his home planet in detail with his new companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman).
“It’s beautiful, yeah,” a damaged Docter iterates. “The sky’s a burnt orange, with a citadel enclosed in a mighty glass dome, shining under the twin suns. Beyond that the mountains go on forever. Slopes of deep red grass capped in snow.”
Later, in the episode, he explains it is no more over a choir singing the hymn Abide With Me. This is the brilliance of Russell T. Davies’ bombastic take on Doctor Who.
Some love it, others don’t.
I think it had its time, but I’m equally keen on current show runner Steven Moffatt’s more intelligent approach to the show.
“Just for a bit I could imagine they were still alive underneath a burnt orange sky. I’m not just a Time Lord. I’m the last of the Time Lords . . . there’s no one else. There was a war. A time war. The Last Great Time War. My people fought a race called the Daleks, for the sake of all creation, and they lost, they lost, everyone lost.
“They’re all gone now. My family. My friends. Even that sky. Oh, you should have seen it, that old planet, the second sun would rise in the south, the mountains would shine, the leaves were silver and when they caught the light every morning it looked like the forest was on fire . . .”
This is truly great writing.
It’s not until the Doctor goes up against his arch nemesis the Master (John Simm), in the penultimate episode of the series The Sound of Drums, that his home world is named and we finally get to see it (again if you watched the classic series).
“They used to call it the shining world of the seven systems. On the continent of Wild Endeavour, on the Mountains of Solace and Solitude, there stood the Citadel of the Time Lords. The oldest and the most mighty race in the universe, looking down on the galaxies below, sworn never to interfere, only to watch,” the Doctor emotes to the epic strains of Murray Gold’s score orchestrated by Ben Foster who is in Wellington
