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 After the superb Dalek episode last week, were we to come crashing back down to Earth (or whichever planet we happened to be passing at the time) with a bang? Opinions seem to vary as to how good The Long Game really was, but if you watch it NOT expecting another Dalek-quality story, then I think you'll find it was actually rather good.
Every so often, Doctor Who takes a sideswipe at someone or something. At times, this is very subtle & you don't even realize it. At other times it is, to quote Douglas Adams, like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. TLG falls somewhere in between & draws comparisons to stories such as Vengeance on Varos & The Sunmakers. It also boasts one of the best guest star casts of the season, with highly respected thespians Simon Pegg (he of the Confidential narrative, no less!) & Tamsin Greig joining Bruno Langley's Adam for this jolly jape in the year 200,000.
The Fourth Great & Bountiful Human Empire is where we're at apparently, although judging by appearances it ain't so Great & scarcely approaches anywhere near Bountiful. This is because humankind is now being controlled by the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe (or Max for short). Humanity's growth has been stunted by Max controlling the media, telling everyone exactly what to do & how. This sounds far fetched, but, having been to a Derren Brown show this week which encompassed the delights of subliminal advertising, I can fully believe how the whole planet could be affected by a single manipulative being in control of all that we watch & read. Herein lies the lesson, my children. Exactly how much are we all being controlled by what the media tell us? Just look at the facts. We are told what is fashionable & what is not. We base our opinions on the information we receive, and that information comes from the news, the papers, and magazines, the Internet. If the facts correspond between two or more sources then we believe unequivocally what we are told. So if ALL the information received comes from the same source...
It makes you sit up & think, just like Cathica was forced to do by the Doctor's questioning of exactly what was going on. The only problem is that the Doctor came into the scenario of Satellite 5 in the year 200,000 with a certain amount of empirical knowledge. From the minute he & Rose stepped out of the TARDIS, Rose noticed the temperature was too high. Adam's questioning of the absence of any alien life forms alerted the Doctor to the fact that things were not as they should be.& once he begins to think like that, we all know that he will get to the root of the problem, except that here it wasn't so much as a root, more a canopy! Such was the programming that humanity had undergone that Cathica hadn't even given any consideration to the fact that Satellite 5 was too hot, consisted of just humans, that floor 500 maybe, just maybe, didn't have walls made of gold. Neither did she, nor anyone else, question why nobody ever returned from floor 500. Not until the Doctor placed sufficient doubt in her mind that she popped up to check things out for herself, only to discover an enormous mass of alien blubber stuck to the ceiling in the editing suite. Only then, with the Doctor & Rose held captive by the Editor & the Timelord managing to talk to her without anyone else noticing, did she realize the quandary that humanity was in. Once she began to think for herself, she was freed from the constraints of the Jagrafess' programming & by using her initiative & the accurate knowledge given to her by the Doctor, she was able to.in a nutshell.reverse the polarity of the neutron flow & send all the ventilators into reverse, pushing all the heat back up to where Max was, causing him to go pop.
Max, heat, misinformation. Do you notice the subtle hints dropped into a story, which send out a very sensible message? Don't automatically believe everything you hear. Question what you're told & never stop thinking for yourself, for that way lies stagnation & dragons. Max, although an Alien/Jabba hybrid & representing the media in general, is clearly designed to be a particular Max, i.e. Max Clifford, a man who has openly admitted to bending the truth if it makes a better story. Freddie Starr ate my hamster indeed! Heat.could that be a thinly veiled dig at Heat magazine, a celebrity-gossip rag so popular in this day & age? So if you send Heat back where it came from, then Max Clifford will explode & the world will be ok again!!! You get the general idea by now, I'm sure. Where Vengeance on Varos told us not to be controlled by television in general & to not accept the violence we see therein, The Long Game's message is even more pertinent. It also gives us a neat subtext, which dovetails beautifully with Father's Day.
Don't mess with the timelines or you could do untold damage. In this instance, the culprit is Adam, the most misguided TARDIS traveller since Turlough, but whereas Turlough soon learned the error of his ways & became a loyal companion (not that he was ever truly bad anyway, more misguided), Adam doesn't get the chance. The Doctor is highly critical of the boy's meddling & the potential effect it would have on history, so he dumps him back home somewhat unceremoniously. There is, however, a small criticism here. If he is concerned about the ramifications of Adam's introducing technology from the future to today's society (or, to be strictly accurate, tomorrow's society, since Adam came from 2012) then why does he place a person with a remote-controlled door in their head in a situation where he can be so easily discovered? As we soon find out, Adam will find it nearly impossible to hide his surgery from the world, so why didn't the Doctor ensure that the trigger for the access panel to Adam's brain be changed to something less everyday as a click of the fingers. Maybe this is a thread we are to pick up at a later date, certainly the whole Adam storyline has been left open for this possibility.
Moving on to the visual & performance aspects of The Long Game, firstly, top honours to Simon Pegg as the Editor. Not an evil man in himself, but very self-absorbed, as was Cassandra, as was Van Statten. The Editor has secured himself the position of Top Slave within Max's Great & Bountiful empire, although this requires living in a (very big) fridge & being drooled on by a giant chocolate pudding with teeth, but at least he has free will, as demonstrated by his swift & ultimately unsuccessful attempt at resignation once he realizes that all is lost for the Jagrafess. Not quite the true evil genius we all love to hate, but fleshed out quite superbly & played marvellously by a consummate actor. Christine Adams as Cathica gets a lion's share of the screen time & also gives us a very convincing performance, from her sneering at the travellers' ignorance as to where they are at the start of the story, to her toadying when she believes the Doctor may hold the key to her much-desired promotion, to her disgust as one of her underlings gets promoted above her (something I'm sure many people out there could empathize with), to her confusion as the Doctor unravels the puzzle, then her denial at the potential trouble she could find herself in, through to her dawning realization that humanity has been taken for a sap & her determined retribution using the very tools by which Max had sublimated them all in the first place. Anne Maxwell-Martin as Suki showed us a sharp contrast between the bumbling, jolly, enthusiastic worker & the hard, all-business freedom fighter, reduced in the end to a walking cadaver (another thread that seems to run throughout the season. First the inanimate Autons, then the Gelth controlled corpses, then the supposedly dead augmented pig, even the presumed extinct Dalek & the living dead of The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances still to come, not to mention Rose's dead father in the next episode!) & a chillingly real one to boot. Tamsin Greig isn't given a lot to do & her role seems vaguely reminiscent of her Green Wing performances, but it is till good to have actors of her & Pegg's calibre gracing this season's stories. Of the regular cast, Billie Piper isn't really to the fore in this tale, although she still does a good job with all her scenes & it is Rose who is the first to spot anything amiss in the space station. Bruno Langley is very convincing as Adam, being less of a coward in this story, but showing that selfishness ultimately doesn't pay. I feel that we may well not have seen the last of this young man. As for the Doctor, Chris Eccleston is magnificent in every scene where the Doctor isn't effusing enthusiasm & grinning like a Cheshire Cat. Indeed, the scenes where the grin is instantly replaced by a darker scowl truly hit home & the Doctor's steely resilience is highlighted. It is easy to see why this actor gets mostly dark & moody roles, because he is just so effective at them.
The SFX on The Long Game are not overplayed. The 'spike' effect is simple, but works well & the shots of the satellite spinning in space are superb. The observation deck looks hugely reminiscent of Platform One, although much darker & the shots of an Earth with cities & buildings visible from space is wonderful, if not a little scary! 96 billion people living here! There's already too many today!!!
All in all then a very satisfactorily well told take, with a good solid central message & some nice under threads running throughout. We even get mini-cameos from The Face of Boe, the psychic paper & the Earth of today. I doubt that TLG will be the highlight of the season, but it was a well thought out story, which fitted very nicely into it's running time. It was, I must confess, the only story this season I hadn't been gripped by from the trailer we were given at the end of the previous episode, & this remains true now, with the expectations rocketing skywards for Father's Day once more, which I predict may give Dalek a run for its money in the popularity stakes at the end of the season.
» Review by Miles Northcott, Copyright 2005.
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