The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances

Are you my mummy?

Enter Steven Moffat. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is the Moff's first entry to writing for Doctor Who and it also is probably a pretty good summation of his overall view of the show and how he conducted thing as show runner: scary, funny and just a little too fearful to go overly dark. In the end, everyone lives and that is both the blessing and curse of the Moffat era.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Rose respond to a distress signal by an alien ship. The ship is caught in the time vortex and crashes in London in 1941 during the Blitz. The Doctor and Rose land the TARDIS about a month after the crash. The Doctor slips into a nightclub to see if anyone knows about the ship crash while Rose waits outside. There he learns of the time period to which they have landed.

While waiting for the Doctor, Rose spots a young boy in a gas mask calling for his mother on the roof of a building. She climbs up to try and help him but when climbing on the anchor line of a barrage balloon the balloon frees and she is carried away across London as the German planes approach. She manages to hold on for a bit but eventually slips off. Her fall is arrested by a tractor beam from the ship of a 51st century time agent named Captain Jack Harkness.

Captain Jack pulls Rose aboard his ship and believing her to be a time agent, proceeds to make an offer of sale for a crashed Chulan warship. Rose plays along, intrigued by Jack but tells him that only her partner is authorized to make payment. They then scan about looking for the Doctor.

The Doctor emerges from the club to find Rose gone. He is distracted by the phone in the TARDIS door ringing. He is warned not to answer it by a passing girl named Nancy but does so anyway, hearing the voice of a child asking for his mother. He follows Nancy into a home where the family is hiding in the air raid shelter and Nancy is leading a group of homeless children in partaking of the large set dinner table.

The Doctor asks about them but they are interrupted by the boy in the gas mask knocking on the door and calling for mummy. The children flee but the Doctor looks to help. Nancy again warns him before running and the Doctor is further alarmed as the child's voice comes over the phone and the speaker of the radio. He opens the door only to find the child gone.

The Doctor follows Nancy to her hideaway and asks further about the fallen spacecraft. She tells him where it is but tells him to see the doctor in the hospital near the crash site first. She also confesses that she does what she does as she feels guilty over the death of her little brother Jamie who was killed in an air raid when he followed her out.

The Doctor heads to the hospital, observing the crashed ship under guard of the British Army. In the hospital he finds hundreds of people in bed, all with the same injuries and all with gas masks fused to their faces. Doctor Constantine tells him of an original patient, a small boy and that everyone else was infected after touching him or one of the subsequent patients. Doctor Constantine also reveals that they are not dead but respond occasionally as he himself begins to transform with a gas mask face and the same injuries.

Rose and Jack find the Doctor shortly afterwards in the hospital. At the same time Nancy reenters the house to find more food and is confronted by the child in the gas mask, whom she recognizes as Jamie. Jamie calls out to her asking her if she is his mommy. This triggers the people in the hospital who begin advancing on the Doctor, Rose and Jack. The Doctor tells them off by telling them that he is cross and they need to go to their room. Both Jamie and the people accept this. The people go back to bed while Jamie heads out of the house.

At this point, Jack realizes that the Doctor and Rose are not time agents and he comes clean about the ship. It was an ambulance that he poached and was going to con them into buying just before it was destroyed by a German bomb. Annoyed by Jack and his carelessness (as he suspects the ship is the source of the plague) the Doctor heads upstairs to the patient zero room. They find toys and drawings of the child's mom. They also listen to a tape recording of the child asking for his mom.

Jamie, ordered by the Doctor to go to his room, enters the room and summons all the other infected people. The three flee through the hospital until they are finally able to barricade themselves into a storage room. Out of escape options, Jack teleports himself back to his ship and sends a signal via the radio that he will transport them once he's changed the ship's settings. The Doctor and Rose banter a bit until Jack pulls them out of the hospital and they head back to the scene of the crash.

Nancy is caught trying to escape the house but blackmails the husband into letting her go when she threatens to expose him for sleeping with the butcher. She stops by the group of kids and tells them that she is going to stop the attacks by the masked child. She then cuts her way through the military perimeter but is caught. She is handcuffed to a table under guard, but the guard is showing signs of transformation.

The Doctor and his party approach the compound and when Jack greets the captain in charge, the captain also begins to transform. They rush past him and find Nancy singing to the transformed guard, who has been lulled to sleep. The Doctor frees her and begins to examine the ambulance. Attempting to open it triggers an alarm and all the masked people begin to advance on them. The assemble but hold until Jamie arrives.

The Doctor confronts Jack, informing him that the ship was full of nanogenes, tiny medical robots. Upon crashing, the nanogenes found Jamie's dead body but didn't have a human pattern to work from so only brought him back to life in his state. His touch spread the nanogenes who rewrote the human DNA in favor of their repairs. Jack transports back to the ship to stop the German bomb from destroying the ship and spreading the nanogenes.

The Doctor looks at Nancy as Jamie and his hordes approach and realizes that Jamie is not her brother but in fact her son. Knowing this, he encourages her to go to him. She confesses to him that she is his mother and hugs him. The nanogenes read the parent DNA and correct their earlier mistake. Jamie returns to himself and the Doctor takes his mask off to reveal a normal boy underneath. He then sends out the nanogenes who repair all those affected by the earlier mistake, some to a point of improvement beyond their original condition.

The German bomb is released by Jack catches it in his tractor beam and puts it in stasis. The Doctor and Rose head back to the TARDIS to celebrate. They then rendezvous with Jack's ship which is about to be destroyed as the bomb is losing it's stasis field. They take Jack with them and all three have a dance in the TARDIS.

Analysis

This story is Steven Moffat in miniature. About the only thing missing from it is anything that is "timey-whimy." But the simple horror elements are there, along with drama and emotional manipulation. You also have the saccharine and a few pacing problems as well.

The best part of this story is the child himself and the Doctor's reaction to him. The child is both creepy and also very sympathetic. When he calls out to the Doctor through the door of the house in The Empty Child, you both hear and feel a lost, scared child who you should bend over backwards to help. That you are also afraid of this child creates an odd dichotomy in your brain that you wrestle with. I personally felt even worse when the Doctor told him to go to his room. He is looking at Nancy and as it registers, you see his head droop and you can almost feel the sadness welling up inside him as he doesn't know why he is being punished.

Nancy and the rest of the kids were also fine but I felt Nancy was a bit stiff at times. Some of that might have been trying to pull the stiff upper lip and all, but her confession regarding Jamie seemed like it should have been a bit more emotional for her than it was. The other children didn't have much time to be more than children, which is exactly how it should be. Too much time with children and their lack of acting experience starts to show and that can hurt a story.

I quite enjoyed Jack. He skirts the line with his cockiness and it is very close to descending into cliché at times, but he is still a very enjoyable character. I actually like him even better when he is less sure of himself and begins to cow to the Doctor a bit, although that's a good payoff solely because of the dick measuring going on between them. The Doctor's embarrassment over the sonic screwdriver relative to Jack's squarness gun is quite funny and one of the few times the Doctor is put on his heels with regard to it.

Rose on the other hand, is not that enjoyable. She never seems to come across as particularly serious in this episode. You would think that flying over London in the Blitz would temper her a bit but she goes along with it and is all pally and flirty with Jack. I do like that she gets called out with regard to Mickey and how she is more or less using him to make herself feel better but is always looking to drop him. Her one decent moment is her quiet talk with Nancy and the reassurance she offers that the Allies win the war. It is a nice moment and reflects how low the spirits of the British people must have been given that Nancy takes it as a given that the Germans will eventually win and that Rose is lying, not because she has reservations about time travel, but because Rose isn't German.

The overall look of the story is pretty good. The only real point where they didn't quite pull things off was in the scenes from the Blitz where Rose is hanging from the balloon. The CGI is pretty thick there and it gets a bit of a cartoon-y look the longer Rose is up there. I understand the idea, but they don't quite pull it off. You can definitely see how far the show is come by pulling that scene next to a similar sequence in Victory of the Daleks. But other than that, the production looks pretty good. The transformation of Doctor Constantine being an excellent example of a well done CG effect that helped a great deal with the horror element of the story.

Aside from the niggles noted above, there are three points of the story that didn't really work for me. The first was the pacing, especially in The Empty Child. The cutaways to Rose and Jack didn't do much for me and they felt like distraction and filler. The tension was with the Doctor and his interactions with Nancy and Jamie. That built the scariness and any cut away from that felt not like relief but instead like a distraction. I didn't care about champagne on the roof of a cloaked ship. I cared about the Doctor's unease.

The second was the Doctor's over enthused reaction to everybody living after the nanogenes correct their mistake. He is saying this in the middle of a German air raid where potentially thousands of people are dying. Doctor Constantine also pointed out that none of the people infected were dead anyway. They were alive but transformed. So it wasn't like they were brought back or that they were in danger of dying. Yet many people are dying around him. It is an out of place moment that just clangs. It feels like an extra load of syrup on what should be a normal happy ending and it just gags.

The third thing that bugged me was the dance discussions between the Doctor and Rose. Unlike a lot of fans, I don't have a problem with a sexual Doctor. He obviously had a relationship with Susan's grandmother and several other females in the past to say nothing of what he would do in the future as the Tenth Doctor. But what starts as a little bit of coy innuendo just gets beaten to death as the episode goes on. I don't care much for Rose bringing it up in the first place as it adds to her very cavalier attitude towards the situation they are in. But to take something that should have stayed in that room and dragged it out across the whole rest of the story just got tiring. I think Moffat thought he was being clever but it just seems overly silly.

As an aside, I noticed while watching this one that Moffat was able to slip his traditional "Doctor Who" joke in. Nice to know that some things always stay the same.

Overall, I think the goodness of the episode is spread well and it covers the more negative aspect of this story. I was a little surprised at how balanced both stories were. I generally expect one episode to be stronger than the other, but this one was fairly well balanced. I knew I was going to have a favorable opinion of the first episode as I enjoy the scene between the Doctor and Doctor Constantine so much, but I had forgotten that the second part didn't go downhill as I misremembered it doing so. This is another reason why I'm making a point to go back and rewatch these early stories and not relying on my own faulty memory. In the end, I'd say it's definitely worth watching multiple times. It may not be the apex of the First Series that other fans are inclined to think of it as, but it is one of the higher points.

Overall personal score: The Empty Child - 4 out of 5; The Doctor Dances - 4 out of 5