Story 302: Wild Blue Yonder

In which the Doctor and Donna briefly meet Isaac Newton, before the TARDIS materialises on board a vast spacecraft...

Arriving up a tree in an orchard in the year 1666, the Doctor and Donna accidentally cause Newton to name the force he has just defined as "Mavity".

The TARDIS then arrives in a spaceship and the Doctor and Donna are forced to evacuate it, due to the damage resulting from her having spilled coffee into the console. For some reason, the TARDIS has blasted out some of the old wartime tune Wild Blue Yonder. The Doctor inserts his sonic screwdriver into the ship's lock, in order to trigger its automatic repair systems. They are just setting off to explore when it suddenly dematerialises, the Doctor having forgotten to override the Hostile Action Displacement System.

They are now stranded on this mysterious spacecraft until it comes back for them, and they need to discover what is so dangerous about it that the HADS was activated.

They find themselves in a long corridor. Random, alien, words are broadcast from a loudspeaker system, and each time they hear these parts of the architectural configuration of the corridor alter.

They come across a small robot, which at first appears stationery but is in actual fact merely moving very, very slowly.

They find a computer centre and the Doctor decides to carry out some adjustments. The pair split up to work in different rooms.

Donna notices a drop in temperature, and tells the Doctor of her worries about her family should they not be able to get back home. The Doctor's only response is to comment that his arms are too long, and she is shocked to see that his hands have grown huge and are dragging on the ground.

This is not the Doctor. He, meanwhile, has discovered that he has not been talking to the real Donna, as her limbs are also out of proportion.

The real travellers are reunited and run out into the corridor where clamber into a buggy. The doppelgangers - creatures who identify as the "Not-Things" who originate in the region outside the spaceship - give chase but cannot control their bodies. They grow to enormous size and get jammed in the corridor.

The Doctor and Donna reach the bridge and discover only a void outside. They are at the very edge of the universe, and the Doctor realises that the Not-Things must come from another dimension that lies beyond this one. They hear a strange knocking sound. The random words continue to be announced.

Opening a screen, they see the corpse of the ship's pilot hanging in the void, attached to a cable which causes it to knock against the hull as it orbits the vessel. 

The Not-Things attempt to get in, their bodies attempting to normalise - as though acclimatising themselves. The Doctor knows that they wish to copy then replace them both.

He finally works out what is going on here. The ship's captain killed themselves to prevent itself from being duplicated and replaced, but first set the craft to self destruct. It did this in slow-motion so that the Not-Things would not realise what was going on. The random words are really a countdown, and the robot is slowly moving towards the trigger mechanism.

The Not-Things now have the memories and intelligence of the Doctor and Donna, and so now also know what is about to happen.

The TARDIS returns, and the Doctor and Donna must race to towards it before the alien creatures can reach it first. The Not-Doctor is destroyed as the spaceship begins to blow apart. The Doctor gets into the TARDIS but is confronted by two Donna Nobles, whom he cannot tell apart.

He initially rescues the Not-Donna but then realises his mistake and swaps the real one for the duplicate, which is left to perish on the disintegrating spacecraft.

The TARDIS materialises back in London, and on exiting they are met by Wilf. He warns them that something terrible has been happening since they left, and they see people fighting in the street as an aircraft crashes into the city...

Wild Blue Yonder was written by Russell T Davies, and was first broadcast on Saturday 2nd December 2023. It is the second of the three 60th Anniversary Specials.

Apart from the rather pointless opening sequence with Newton, it is a two-hander for the most part, with David Tennant and Catherine Tate playing both the Doctor and Donna and their Not-Thing doppelgangers. We then get a brief appearance from Bernard Cribbins as Wilf at the conclusion, setting up the events for the final Special. Sadly this was to be his last screen role, and it is his only appearance in the trio of episodes. Filming took place at Camden Market in London, at the same time that the scenes for The Star Beast were recorded.

The episode was dedicated to him.

As with a lot of RTD2's material since taking back the series, the roots are showing. In parts this resembles Midnight, and one is strongly reminded of the film Event Horizon - described at the time as a haunted house movie in space - and John Carpenter's The Thing (alien creature attempting to mimic but getting it wrong). The robot closely resembles the cinema version of Marvin the Paranoid Android.

When it came to advance publicity for the Specials, this concentrated only on the first and last of them. We knew that the first was a screen adaptation of the classic Doctor Who Weekly comic strip, and that the third would see the return of the Toymaker. The lack of any information about this middle episode resulted in all manner of speculation from fans - mainly revolving around a guest appearance by one or more previous incarnations of the Doctor, or the return of a popular monster.

The fact that it failed to deliver either, and proved to be a self-contained bottle-episode, did not go down well at all and it is regarded as the weakest of the three. As I said at the time in my review, it is unfair to blame an episode for not being something which it never once claimed to be.

However, there wasn't any reason for RTD2 to have withheld information about the episode. Scenes of the robot and the spacecraft could have been shown as part of the trailers without spoiling the reveal that that Doctor and Donna at one point are speaking to copies of each other.

Regarding that Isaac Newton sequence... The series long ago gave up on even trying to be educational. 

RTD2 clearly thought that getting the nation's schoolkids to start saying "Mavity" instead of "Gravity" would be a "hoot ", but the problem is that the schoolkids had long since given up on the series.

They've tried to prolong the "joke" but it quickly became an irritation.

The colour-blind casting of Nathaniel Curtis as the great scientist did not go down very well with many - partly through a general anti-wokeness viewpoint but also from those who simply think that real historical figures shouldn't be shown to be something which they were not. I tend towards the latter, on the grounds that it gives a skewed picture of history to children and glosses over the problems of the past. It's not as if we don't know what Newton looked like.

This sequence also features the first appearance in the series of Susan Twist, playing Newton's housekeeper, Mrs Merrydew. Naturally, this became part of the whole story arc for Series 14, as Twist appeared as different people across space and time.

Overall, it's actually a great little episode, held together by the two stars who get to play against each other - and themselves - without the distraction of lots of other characters. Dark and creepy for the most part, that unfunny Newton segment feels tacked on and totally out of place. It's a pity that they couldn't have found a better way for the Doctor to know who the real Donna was. On screen, it's something stupid like the length of a bone, but it would have been far more satisfying had it been something to do with her as an individual which provided the clue.

Things you might like to know:

• RTD2 did originally intend for an old Doctor appearance - the First. However, as time went by he elected to simplify the story so that it concentrated solely on the two stars.
• Not only does the Newton sequence spoil the continuity of the TARDIS initially blowing up with the coffee spill, and the reason for their hurried evacuation of it on the spaceship, but it also contradicts the Fourth Doctor's description of his meeting with him.
• RTD2 had written a lot more material for Wilf, including scenes for The Giggle, but it quickly became apparent that his involvement with the shoot would have to be kept to a minimum. He does feature briefly in the following episode, but it is a body double and some old dialogue of his that is heard.
• In an interview, RTD2 spoke of this episode as a sort of homage to the Season 15 story Underworld, in that much of it was filmed against today's version of CSO, green screen.
• DWM 597 played along with the secrecy for this episode by redacting three of the guest artists. Of these, only Wilf's appearance might have been any kind of spoiler. The other names were those of Curtis and Twist.
• Wild Blue Yonder is another name for a song properly titled The U.S. Air Force - adopted as their anthem by that service in the late 1940's.
• One of those fan rumours was that this episode would be set within the damaged TARDIS, where the Doctor and Donna would be threatened by evil versions of the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors - this despite Capaldi bluntly stating that he had no desire to return to the series.
• The HADS was first introduced in The Krotons.
• The robot, nicknamed "Jimbo" was operated as a puppet, and not as a man in a costume.
• The spaceship decor contains some hoof-shaped motifs, tying in with the equine nature of the dead captain.
• The Doctor invokes the old superstition that vampires and other supernatural entities can't pass a line of salt (see the TV series Supernatural for a lot of this). This invocation of a superstition is apparently the trigger for him to be plagued by the Toymaker and various other deities over the course of the next two series.