Doctor Who Season 27 (Episode 3, "The Unquiet Dead")



I’m way behind on reviewing new Doctor Who episodes. I’ll probably try to zoom through the new series with some random thoughts and opinions before the final episode airs on Saturday.

I’ve really been supping from the All-U-Can-Eat Doctor Who buffet recently. Besides the new BBC series I’ve been reading Russel T. Davies' New Adventures novel Damaged Goods, listening to some of the Big Finsh audio stories including Doctor Who - Minuet in Hell and the Dalek Empire series, and I picked up the recent collection of some of the old Dave Gibbons/Doctor Who Weekly comic book stories in Doctor Who – Dragon’s Claw. In any case, on to episode 3 of the new Doctor Who series…


"Mr. Dickens, are those real?"

The Doctor and Rose land in Cardiff, 1869. The local funeral home is having a problem with the corpses of the recently dead coming back to life and wandering off, a fact that the owners are desperately trying to hide. (Shades of Brain Dead and Dellamore, Dellamorte.) When one of the dead people crashes a talk given by Charles Dickens (Simon Callow, who has played the author often enough that he was probably able to provide his own costume), the Doctor decides to help the “ghosts” that are controlling the bodies, actually gaseous aliens who call themselves the Gelf.

Of the episodes I’ve seen I think “The Unquiet Dead” suffers the most from the new faster pace of the series. The story would have been four episodes back in the Tom Baker years, but compressed into the space of two some important plot points get lost. Chief among them is that it isn’t at all clear why the Doctor is so quick to trust the Gelf. We see a Gelf controlled corpse kill someone so we more or less know they are hostile right away, but the Doctor accepts their statements about being on the edge of extinction at face value.

This aside, “The Unquiet Dead” is witty and exciting. Simon Callow’s performance is wonderful and is a perfect reintroduction of the concept of the Doctor meeting famous people from the past.

Posted: Thu - June 16, 2005 at      

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