“The Unquiet Dead” is a Christmas episode the same way Batman Returns is a Christmas movie, Gremlins is a Christmas movie, and of course Die Hard is a Christmas movie. So it’s our Christmas episode, and who better to start the adventure with than Charles Dickens?
We’re working through Series 1 of the 2005 reboot because, come to find out a while back, Mrs. Know-It-All hadn’t seen it. That’s been wonderful. I’m seeing it again through her eyes, and I’m getting to relive these episodes and discover a whole new Series 1 I feel like I’d never seen before.
One piece of housekeeping from the week this went up: next week isn’t a review. It’s a very special Christmas episode of Doctor Who that I wrote, an audio drama I wrote with a friend of mine and that we produced together, with a visual side to go with the audio. I hope you enjoy it.
The setup, for the record. The dead are roaming the streets of Cardiff in 1869 when the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler arrive just in time for Christmas. They team up with Charles Dickens and run into the Gelth, creatures pulled through the Cardiff rift from the other end of the universe, their home lost to war. Surely inhabiting dead bodies is wrong, though. Can both sides be helped, or are these gaseous creatures not to be trusted?
Rose’s First Real Trip Into the Past
The second it clicked what was going on, it was oh my gosh, Charles Dickens. It’s Christmas, so we’ve already watched a million versions of A Christmas Carol, and here’s the guy.
This is also Rose’s first true experience of time travel, meaning actually being in the past. She’s hopped around a bit and seen some alien stuff, but she hasn’t gone back like this, on this scale. So the Doctor tells her to go to the wardrobe and find something, and she comes out looking absolutely amazing. She asks, aren’t you going to change? And he says yeah, I changed my jumper.
They still look like they’re from where they’re from, and they’re not exactly blending in. Her shoulders aren’t covered, which in that time frame would’ve made her basically almost naked. This is a period where showing your ankles is bad. That dress is more like what a woman working the saloon in a Western would wear.
Eve Myles, Before Torchwood
This is the very first time we get to see Eve Myles, who later goes on to play Gwen Cooper in Torchwood. Here she’s Gwyneth, a young Victorian era maid who works for the undertaker, the guy who owns the funeral parlor. Come to find out she has a little secret. She’s so great, and of course it’s Cardiff and Wales.
One of the stiffs at the undertaker’s gets up and leaves, and when they stop her, her face glows. Gwyneth can tell, telepathically or psychically, where the lady’s gone.
I asked Mrs. Know-It-All if anything stood out to her about how they handled the possession, and she thought it was pretty creative. How are you going to introduce a gaseous alien race without animating it? Her answer was that it’s kind of brilliant to make them zombie-like without being zombies, because everybody loves a good zombie, and these weren’t ugly zombies either. She liked that the last thing the dead woman had was tickets to go see the great man, Charles Dickens, so that’s where the body was going to go. And she liked it when all hell breaks loose in the theater.
Dickens at His Wits’ End
The actor who plays Dickens does a brilliant job. He’s very much a man who’s been doing this so long that he’s tired of it. He’s at his wits’ end with everything he’s written, and he’s going to go out there one more time and give it his best, but he’s worn out. He’s not reaping the rewards of being as talented as he is.
The one thing he says is, have I seen everything there is to see? Obviously you’re watching Doctor Who, so that’s all setup for him realizing that no, he in fact knows very little. There’s nothing like the Doctor showing up to pull back the curtain and say, by the way, here’s craziness you have no clue about.
In the theater, Dickens is literally asking what’s going on. At first you get it. Then he keeps doing it, and finally the Doctor’s pretty much, oh, just shut up already. Why don’t you believe your own eyes?
He was reading A Christmas Carol at the time, which, if you know anything about Charles Dickens, was originally supposed to be a scary story. It got lumped in as a Christmas story about redemption.
That’s one thing I love about Doctor Who, and it does it consistently. It gives you a haunting, and the haunting turns out to be alien and explainable, because with the Doctor there’s never anything supernatural. You still get it at face value as a horror story or a ghost story.
The Rift, the Seance and the Time War
Mrs. Know-It-All noticed they figure everything out pretty quickly in this one. She watched a lot of Doctor Who from way after this, where it takes a minute to discover what’s really going on. Here they get to it fast, and then there’s the amount of care they want to show this alien race before we realize anything else is going on.
They do a seance. The Doctor’s already of the mind that something’s going on, he doesn’t fully know what yet, and the seance is really just an opportunity to use Gwyneth as a conduit, because of her ability, to whatever this energy is coming through the rift. You find out in this episode, and later on in Torchwood and other things, that Cardiff is built on top of a rift in time and space. Things wash up there all the time, like the ocean.
You also find out the Gelth lost their home world because of the Time War. Later on you understand more: the Time War happened between the bigger, elder races on a higher plane of existence, the Daleks and the Time Lords, and whole worlds burned. One of them was the Gelth’s. It burned and left them without physical form, but they still had the energy of themselves. That was the cool thing about this alien race. Their bodies were gone, they were still alive, and they were looking for a place to live.
The Doctor and Rose Bump Heads
So there’s this huge moral discussion. The Gelth are saying, you have all these dead bodies, why can’t we use them? Rose says no, you can’t do that. And the Doctor says, why not?
It’s one of the few times the Doctor bumps heads with his companion, or with earthlings so to speak, because normally he’s the one protecting them. His mentality is that we can let them in and let them borrow the bodies long enough for him to get them someplace else. That’s what he was ultimately trying to do, only to find out the Gelth have really turned bad.
Mrs. Know-It-All asked me, do you blame them? No. I understand they’re angry, especially since there’s a Time Lord talking to them. They’re very much, we don’t care anymore.
This is Russell T Davies giving us the aftermath of something. It wasn’t enough for him to give us a plot device that removed the Time Lords and left the Doctor to deal with that. He continually shows us the ripples of that decision, and it’s going to culminate in about three or four episodes with a really great reveal of what the true cost of the Time War has been. I don’t want to spoil anything. Not least of it is what the Doctor himself has had to do.
So he wants so bad to help. I can get you someplace safe, we can make this right. He wants to make right something you really can’t. It’d be the equivalent of an American during World War II doing their best to say, hey, Japanese people, I know we just dropped the bomb on you, but let’s help, I’ll make something better. You can’t make it up in that moment. That takes decades, if not longer.
Dickens Turns Up the Gas
Dickens runs away like a coward at first, and then he comes to a conclusion I thought was pretty smart, and it’s smart that Dickens is the one who does it. He runs through the house turning the gas on. More gas in the air means the Gelth don’t have to stay in the bodies. It forces them out, because that’s how they live. That gets them out of the ones attacking the Doctor and Rose.
The Doctor’s on the verge of giving up at that point, and I’m sitting there going, what? And Rose has to come to the conclusion that it’s possible for her to be born in one year and die 200 years in the past. It’s such a great realization. Time really is, the way David Tennant later put it, timey-wimey. I do kind of wonder sometimes why he doesn’t trip over his own feet more.
After Dickens rescues them, Gwyneth holds the Gelth in place. She can’t send them back, because she doesn’t have the strength for that. The Doctor touches her face and says okay, and you learn later that when he touched her face he knew she was dead. He tells Rose she probably died the moment she stepped into the archway and started this whole thing, but her consciousness was still there enough to do what needed to happen.
What It Was All For
In very Dickens fashion, Charles Dickens himself is renewed by the entire experience. He’s going to go do this, he has this story that needs a villain, he’s figured the thing out.
Rose can’t wait to see all the new things he writes. And the Doctor has to explain: yeah, no, he doesn’t do any of that. It’s all the same stuff. He dies. Normal stuff. And she asks, well then, what’s it all for?
This is the first of many times you’ll see the Doctor basically say, look, things happen, but we gave this guy a moment. He was happy and joyful and excited about life. He’s not dying the way he was living at the beginning.
Mrs. Know-It-All had always assumed Dickens died right after Christmas and that A Christmas Carol was his last story. It wasn’t, obviously, and this episode corrected her. He died in 1870. The episode takes place in 1869, so he dies six months later. Her ruling: so I wasn’t half wrong.
The Verdict
Doctor Who “The Unquiet Dead” is a 9 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
Mrs. Know-It-All has it at a 10, and she went first. Call it what you will, Christmas time fuzzies, but this is her 10 for right now. She knew who Gwen was because we’d watched Torchwood, so maybe that had something to do with it. She likes all that spooky ghost stuff, and she liked it knowing nothing in the Doctor Who world is supernatural. She liked how it all unfolded and she liked Rose.
I’m giving it a 9 on purpose, and this is one of the few times I’m going to do that. There’s an episode later this season that’s most likely going to be my 10, and I’m waiting until we rewatch it to know for sure. My 10 needs to be very well deserved. This was a beautiful, magical episode and I find no faults with it. I just have another one, about three or four episodes out, that I feel does a few things a little better.
It’s been an absolute gift to us, the attention and the love and the support you’ve shown us in the Doctor Who community and the fan community. Mrs. Know-It-All says you’ve been patient with her and welcoming to all of us, and it makes her really happy. No matter what your fandom is, make sure you hug somebody. Merry Christmas, and let’s face 2023 together.
Is “The Unquiet Dead” a 10 or a 9 for you, and is it a Christmas episode? Tell us which of us got it right. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
