The Crimson Horror

I'm going to go play with my grenades.

There was a great deal of talk in Series Six and Seven about a possible Paternoster Gang spin-off show. The Crimson Horror was in many ways, a closet pilot for this thought. I don't know how serious the idea was but the format of this particular episode is so markedly different than others in the series that I can't imagine that Mark Gatiss didn't write this up with an eye towards how the public would react to a story that featured the gang more front and center than had ever been seen before.

Plot Summary

A man named Edmund is fished out of a river in Yorkshire, his skin stained red. His brother collects his body and takes photographs of it to Madame Vastra, whom he hires to investigate his brother's death. Madame Vastra is especially intrigued when photographs of the eye of the dead man show an image of the Doctor.

The Paternoster Gang travel north and have Jenny slip enter a meeting hosted by a Mrs. Gillyflower. Mrs. Gillyflower rails against the evils of modern society and predicts its collapse. She offers sanctuary to the best people at a factory commune called Sweetwater, near where Edmund's body was fished out. Jenny travels with a group of new recruits to Sweetwater while Vastra examines a sample of the red coating recovered from the bodies fished out of the river. She recognizes it from something from the prehistoric era.

Once in the commune, Jenny slips away and discovers that the factory is an illusion. People are collected and dipped in vats of a red fluid which puts them in stasis. Any that don't adapt are killed by the fluid. Jenny further investigates and discovers the Doctor, having survived a dip into fluid, kept locked in a room by Mrs. Gillyflower's blind daughter Ada. The Doctor guides Jenny to a steam vent and puts himself inside. This washes the poison out of him and he returns to his normal self.

The Doctor and Clara had landed outside Sweetwater when another body was fished out. They met Edmund who was trying to investigate the factory and decided to help him. Posing as a married couple, they were accepted by Mrs. Gillyflower into the commune. They observed preserved people in giant bell jars, are grabbed and dipped into the same red liquid. Clara was put in stasis but the Doctor, not being human, rejected it and survived. Ada, recognizing that the Doctor was different, spirited him to a cell rather than throwing him in the river and kept him. Edmund eventually broke in to look for the Doctor when he failed to return and fell or was pushed into a concentrated form of the poison. He crawled out and made to the Doctor's cell before dying, hence the image of the Doctor on his eye.

Meanwhile, Ada discovers the Doctor's escape. While she is crying over his disappearance, Mrs. Gillyflower finds her and learns of what she has done. Fearful, she orders the acceleration of the plan. Ada appeals to her to let her come as well but Mrs. Gillyflower kicks her away, noting that only the perfect specimens will be taken.

The Doctor and Jenny discover Clara in a bell jar and break her out. They take her to the same steam vent as the Doctor for detox. While they are waiting, they are discovered by a group of Mrs. Gillyflower's attendants who are preparing the final plan. Jenny attacks them and knocks several of them out. They are joined by Vastra and Strax who disable or drive off the others. Clara comes to and is introduced to the group, much to their curiosity as the last time they had seen Clara (The Snowmen) she had died.

The group discovers that Mrs. Gillyflower is loading a rocket in the smokestack with a pure form of the venom. Vastra informs the Doctor that the venom comes from a creature called a red leech that was a plague to the Silurians back in the Mesozoic era. The Doctor leaves Jenny and Vastra to deal with the rocket while he and Clara go to take care of Mrs. Gillyflower. On their way, they discover Ada weeping in the hallway. The Doctor reveals himself to her and encourages her to come with them.

Mrs. Gillyflower uncovers a secret control panel and prepares to launch the rocket. The Doctor and Clara confront her and discover the red leech (Mr. Sweet) attached to her chest. She feeds him and he secrets the poison for her. The Doctor accuses her of blinding Ada with the leech's venom and she acknowledges that as true. She has preserved perfect specimens of humanity and will launch the rocket with the pure form of the venom. The explosion will spray it over the whole area, killing the townsfolk and letting her create a new "golden age" for her purified humans. Ada overhears all of this and attacks her mother in a rage. Clara, taking advantage of the opening, picks up a chair and smashes the rocket launch controls.

Mrs. Gillyflower grabs Ada, holds her hostage with a gun and slips through a door. They run back to the silo and find the two climbing the stairs. Mrs. Gillyflower shoves Ada down the stairs at the Doctor and launches the rocket with a secondary control panel. After it passes, Jenny and Vastra reveal themselves having removed the jug of venom from the rocket. Mrs. Gillyflower tuns the gun on them but Strax fires at her from the top of the silo, knocking her off the stairs to the floor below.

Mr. Sweet detaches himself from Mrs. Gillyflower and begins to crawl away. Ada approaches her mother and refuses to forgive her mother, much to Mrs. Gillyflower's amusement. She then dies and Ada uses her stick to smash the leech, killing it. Afterwards, Clara and the Doctor depart, the Doctor refusing to reveal the mystery of Clara to the Paternoster Gang. He drops her off at the house where she is confronted by Angie and Artie, who have discovered her time travelling antics, wanting to tag along on her next adventure.

Analysis

This is a story that benefits highly of either watching it a second time or going into it with the foreknowledge that it is meant to be an action-comedy in the vein of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Knowing that greatly increases the enjoyment of the episode rather than leaving folks annoyed as was the general case the first time around. In fact, isolating it and treating it like the pilot for a spin-off series does put it in a rather unique category for viewing and the viewer in a different mindset about it.

Because of the nature of the story and it's focus on the Paternoster Gang, the story is something of a Doctor-lite story. It's certainly a Clara-lite story. But even in that limited capacity, the Doctor is still very entertaining. He is manic and energetic but also still takes those moments of tenderness with Ada. He also has the good grace and sense to stand aside and let others take point, even if it means open killing. He does not reprimand Strax at any point, it is Vastra that calls him off from killing the people who attacked the Doctor and Jenny. Similarly, the Doctor offers no objection or remorse when both Mrs. Gillyflower and Mr. Sweet are killed. It's just something that happened and will stop things from continuing.

All the gang is enjoyable in this story with an interesting balance between Jenny and Strax. Strax gets all the full blown jokes, even the groaners like the bit with Thomas Thomas, while Jenny takes point in all the proper investigating and most of the action. Vastra only has a couple of scenes where she is figuring things out but most of her work is done off-screen. I don't have a problem with this, although I would have liked Jenny to have a bit more personality. Whenever she was on-screen, it was too easy for another character to steal the scene. Even the scene where she was in line and talking with the woman with the bad teeth, Jenny is the straight woman while the other infuses all the comedy.

I liked Ada a great deal with her blend of loyalty, desperation for love and eventual anger at those who wronged her. Mrs. Gillyflower on the other hand, I thought was a bit overplayed. I enjoy Diana Rigg as an actress but she works best in a more subdued manner. The manic and hammy villain she played here got a bit grating in large doses. She worked best as more of a background presence of evil but when in the foreground, the role got a bit mustache twirl-y. That might have been somewhat unavoidable as she was clearly supposed to be insane, but I still found her grating and a little too cartoonish for my taste. I also think the Mr. Sweet puppet was a bit silly, but again, closet pilot for a younger audience show.

One small thing that I wish they had found a way to do away with was the launching of the rocket from inside the silo. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no way that everything inside that silo would not have been instantly incinerated when that rocket was launched. The story was written with Mrs. Gillyflower on the tower so that the heroes could avoid the liability of actually killing her (Disney style) but it should have been done on a platform outside the silo because it's just dumb to have them all watch as a plume of rocket exhaust goes by.

I did enjoy the very stylized set, direction and camera work used here. There was a near constant state of mist that lended to the heavy Victorian vibe of the story. I know some fans didn't care for the old film style of the Doctor's flashback but I thought it worked within the playful context of the story. The whole thing just had a playful tone, even while being set in a Victorian thriller novel with a heavy dose of comedy.

Overall, I liked this story. You do have to go into it with a certain mindset, much as you do with something like The Chase. If you can start with that and let it play out as the comedy it was meant to be, it is a fun ride. There are some bumps within that fun ride that would probably be overlooked by the true target demographic of the story but take an older person like myself out of the story just a bit. Still, it's an easy one to go back to just to have some fun.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5