The
response to the opening paragraphs of Monsters and Angels was overwhelmingly
in agreement about one thing. They were the scariest lines in any Doctor
Who story, simply because that scenario of a little girl riding her bicycle
and being pursued by a stranger in a van, could happen anywhere and at
any time. The realism frightened people. Some people said it was a sort
of realism you wouldn’t GET in a Doctor Who episode. And that is
probably true. The episode Fear Her, which dealt with missing children,
didn’t dwell too much on the real gut-twisting fear that comes with
child abduction. The closest, really, was Jackie’s reaction to Rose
reappearing after being missing for a year in Aliens of London.
But
that isn’t to say that it can’t be done as a Doctor Who story.
And it WAS universally agreed that Vicki’s cry ‘Daddy help’,
given who her daddy is, was the best thing a child could say at such a
time, and that the appearance of that familiar blue box, the safe place
in the universe, was a sweet relief from the sinister, horrible goings
on.
The
fact that life in the 23rd century has a huge disruption across
it forty or more y
ears
before when the Dalek invasion took place has come up before in the stories,
but in less devastating ways such as the fact that the jelly baby factory
was blown up by the Daleks and so they have to be bought in the 21st
century. This time I wanted to really get across just how much social
disruption it caused with the fact that police records don’t go
back beyond the invasion. The whole social infrastructure was lost and
people had to begin again. This, I think, is perfectly feasible. The same
problem faced a lot of
The
scene where the Doctor goes into the 1974 police station has been compared
to the TV series, Life on Mars, in which a modern policeman found himself
time warped to that year and found the job very different. I picked that
year because it was the earliest date that type of Ford Transit was around.
Before then there was a markedly different style of van. But it is certainly
true that The Doctor would have had a harder time getting into the custody
suite in later years and would not have been left alone with the prisoner.
At least not unless some rules brought in to ensure the safety of prisoners
were being seriously compromised. It WAS, in that sense, a similar exploration
of the way police work has changed to Life on Mars.
This
story had some very dark moments. The Doctor faced things he wouldn’t
want his children to know about, that he would be ASHAMED for his children
to know about. But he also kept his integrity. He didn’t kill the
child abducting alien. He, instead, put him into a mental hospital where
he would live out his life in misery. A similar idea, in fact, was shown
in The Family of Blood, in 2007, when The Doctor found different ways
of making the ‘Family’ live forever but in ways that were
worse than death.
The
scene in the TARDIS when The Doctor had all the kidnapped girls together
and was taking them home did bother me a little. These were girls who
had been hurt and scared by a man, and now had to put their trust into
another man. But as Tom Baker once said, Jesus, Father Christmas and The
Doctor are the exceptions to the rule ‘don’t talk to strangers’
and The Doctor in this case was the one they could trust. I don’t
think some of the girls hugging him and even kissing his cheek in thanks
for the ride home was too over the top.
I did
have the idea that the girl kidnapped from ten years before his own present
date might have turned up as a young adult, and come to work at Mount
Lœng House. But I decided that didn’t really fit, and I didn’t
REALLY need any more members of the domestic household being brought in
as characters in their own right. The butler, Grahams, and his wife are
occasional characters, but the maids tend to be nameless and generic.
