Thursday, 12 November 2026

What's Wrong With... The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances


Other than the second episode having one of the silliest episode titles of all time, that is...
There are issues with the blackout for a start. We are introduced to Captain Jack standing on a balcony with the windows wide open and the lights blazing in the room behind him, after the air raid siren has gone off. His colleagues - military men - seem a little slow to respond to the siren, and none of them challenge his behaviour. People are actually still sitting, finishing their drinks.
Later on, Jack will light up Big Ben just to impress Rose, despite the all clear not having been sounded.
The pair are outside the spaceship for some time - yet the clock remains at 9.30pm.
The streets seem unusually bright throughout the air-raid, as the lights appear to be on. There are lights showing at the hospital as well.
The crash site also has a ruddy great searchlight beaming down on it, so it's no wonder it is targeted by a German bomb...

More wartime stuff, but "Dig For Victory" was a big thing on the Home Front. Food was rationed, so throwing away perfectly good vegetables was a strict no-no. (Note the veg in a box next to the TARDIS). Even rotten ones would have a use as compost or fed to livestock if not too badly decomposed. 
The dodgy butcher, Mr Lloyd, would have given his garden entirely over to a food crop, rather than take up valuable growing space with flowers.
Mr Lloyd's household seems to comprise just him, his wife and his son - so why so much food for a single meal? Nancy has a dozen sitting around the table. 
Even if he was fiddling the rations, he would still not want to gorge his family like this every night - especially if there is every likelihood that you're going to be interrupted by an air-raid. The family don't appear to take any of it with them into the shelter.
We do see sticky tape on the windows of the hospital - to prevent them showering people with shards of glass if blown in - but there is a distinct lack of sandbags, as there would have been around any public building.

Nancy says she's going to use Mr Lloyd's bathroom - even though she must know that he has an outside toilet, and no East End girl would call the loo a "bathroom" in the 1940's.
Another anachronism is the tape recording. This scene was voted most scary TV moment at the time, but the magnetic tape machine shouldn't be there. This technology was developed on the continent and only made its way to Britain and the US after the war, as part of the scientific looting of German scientists and their technology - an operation which would eventually put a man on the Moon.

The first American pilots who were allowed to join the RAF only did so in August 1941, which is months after the London Blitz. Even then, Jack would not make the rank of Captain that quickly.
Since he's an alien from the future, there was no reason to have him an American. They could simply have had him pretend to be Canadian if they wanted the accent. (In hindsight, there isn't a single instance of Jack's adopted American nationality having the slightest relevance to a single storyline he features in, whether it be in Doctor Who or Torchwood).
Why does Jack park his spaceship at Big Ben, when the thing he's interested in lies way over east at Limehouse? Tower Bridge would be a much closer landmark, if he does want a fancy temporary address.

The Doctor saves himself and his companions by ordering the child to its room - then he and his companions make straight for that room...
How can he not know that he is landing in the middle of the Blitz until he hears the air-raid siren go off? He has been tracking the Chula capsule and even knows that it has arrived a month before the TARDIS, in the centre of London. He later glances at his wristwatch and sees the date - so why didn't he do this earlier? There is hardly any urgent rush to find the capsule the second he leaves the TARDIS if it has already been lying about for weeks. Why could he not pilot the TARDIS to the actual date of its landing anyway? (And if the army have been shining a big searchlight on it for a whole month, why haven't the Germans targeted it sooner?).

Onto the title character of the first episode now. We can get that the Om-Com works on anything with a speaker, but the boy also seems to be able to magically work a manual typewriter at distance - something he may never have seen before, let alone know how to use - as well as lock and unlock doors and operate a clockwork toy. Can he even read or write?
He keeps calling for his mummy - but as far as he's concerned, his entire life, Nancy is his sister. He should be going round asking "Are you my sister?".
If his sole mission is to find her, why does he seem to be stalking the Doctor and Rose at times, even when Nancy isn't around? (What was he doing up on that roof for a start? If he was following Nancy, what was she doing up there?).
The nanogenes may be able to repair human DNA, but how does this stretch to the plastic and glass of gas-masks?
Why aren't all the gas-mask zombies wearing school uniform if they are replicating every aspect of the boy?
It gives an old lady her leg back, but doesn't restore Dr Constantine's hair...
If the nanogenes are designed to repair wounded people so that they are fit to return to fighting, why alter perfectly healthy people and actually give them injuries?

The gas-mask zombies go to their beds when ordered to their rooms, so why doesn't the zombified Dr Constantine head for the nearest bus stop or Underground station to go to his home? (The only way round this is that his home was bombed and he sleeps in a room in the hospital for now, but he should have gone to that instead. He can't live in that chair on the ward all the time).
Albion Hospital is at Limehouse, yet only a couple of episodes ago it was the nearest one to the river and the crashed Slitheen spaceship at Westminster - despite both St Thomas' and Guys being far more central and both neighbouring the Thames - so we're already contradicting earlier stories in the revived series.
"Schlechter" doesn't mean 'bad', as in evil. It's more 'worse', so it could read more like 'not as good at being a wolf'.

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