Doctor Who 3.11: Utopia

[sir_guinglain]

I can't say much more than has been said already by other people, I think. I enjoyed this episode a lot, but - as Mark Wright has written in The Stage blog - it felt like something of a guilty pleasure. As soon as the Doctor dismissed Martha and Jack as "bloggers" I thought that this episode was going to be the most fannish so far, in the sense that it would foreground the internal mythology of the series in a way particularly addressed to long-term obsessives. So, I think, it proved.

I don't know enough about literary SF to comment with any degree of authority, but Russell T Davies's far futures - in which the TARDIS is projected so far into the future that speculation about how human societies might work is sufficiently redundant to allow for undisguised exaggerated depictions of contemporary concerns - owes a lot to Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time. The shrunken reality around Malcassario reminded me a little of the microcosm the last humans inhabit at the end of Moorcock's universe. Here, however, humanity can still hope, and it's the presence of this belief that leads the Doctor to recall his fourth self's speech from The Ark in Space. I liked the way this line was slightly fumbled as if the Doctor was searching for a memory, and while painfully self-conscious David Tennant now delivers his lines in a way that in recent episodes has started to work through understatement.

Philip Segal liked to point out the 'kisses to the past' pecked throughout the 1996 TV Movie. For a Doctor Who which has John Barrowman's name in its opening titles (about time; his absence from the credits of the final five episodes of the 2005 series was incongruous) kisses to the past are too decorous; the new series goes for something more explicit. Utopia turns out to be reworking one of the most successful devices used in the old series - reintroducing the Doctor's arch-nemesis by way of a kindly character who is sacrificed in such a way as to emphasise the Master's evil. In The Keeper of Traken, back in 1981, we had Tremas; this year's wordplay, over a quarter of a century later, is Yana. Presumably the next wave of revelations (and Lizo's preview over at CBBC's Newsround site indicates that there are more to come) will explain why the Face of Boe couldn't just tell the Doctor that the Master was out there. Nonetheless the early signs are that the reintroduction of the Master is being handled more effectively than it was 26 years ago. I've said before that the effect of the Master's return last time was to end Tom Baker's reign by creating a situation where the fourth Doctor was comprehensively mugged by someone left over from his predecessor's era. In this case the new Master seems much better adapted to the Doctor to whom he acts as a counterpart.

How much did Chanto know?
How much of Professor Yana's life story actually happened to him?
Was this episode actually a good idea, even though I enjoyed it?