Doctor Who Series 3 Episode 3 - Gridlock - Review

Starring: David Tennant, Freema Agyeman, Ardal O'Hanlon & Anna Hope

Written By: Russell T Davies

Directed By: Richard Clark

 

Ahhhh... the joys of rush hour traffic. Whether you find yourself stuck in it every day or you're lucky enough not to have to deal with it, we're all familiar with it. But why I am talking about traffic in a Doctor Who review? What's that? Doctor Who's making a satire of it? Well, it's original...

 

Deciding to show Martha some of the future as well as the past, the Doctor brings the TARDIS to the year 5,000,000,053 on the planet New Earth. The last time the Doctor was here, he saw the dazzling city of New New York, but this time arrives in the undercity where the citizens are living their lives trapped in their cars on the motorway. When Martha is kidnapped and taken on the motorway, it's up to the Doctor to find her again. But time is working against him and the car in which Martha is trapped is on the fast lane … where something is alive and hungry in the fog. Meanwhile, the Doctor's old friend The Face of Boe has learnt of his arrival and its time for him to share his secret...

 

I'm not going to lie: I was originally apprehensive about the fact that Gridlock saw us return to New Earth, especially given that the last time we saw it, we ended up with one of Series 2's weakest entries. However, what I found was a welcome surprise and we had plenty of new stuff to be getting on with while also rounding off plot points that were brought up last time. Rather than spending time in the pristine and glistening future city that we saw last time, the New Earth we get to explore is noticeably different, instead going around the slums of the undercity – complete with fog-shrouded motorways and people getting drugged up on “moods”. At the same time, there's still enough here to say that this is the New Earth we saw before and not a completely different planet. For one thing, the Face of Boe returns for his third appearance in the show and this time he shares his great secret with the Doctor. (Spoiler Warning!) In a surprisingly moving scene, the Face of Boe's dying words to the Doctor turned out to be “You are not alone”. While there was sadly no appearance of the Michael Jackson song of the same name (I love that song!), it seems we might now have a new story arc on our hands. Surely it has nothing to do with the mysterious Mr Saxon?

 

Something you'll likely pick up on soon after watching Gridlock is that it was laced with both action and charm throughout. In probably the most unexpected return ever, Gridlock even gave us the return of the Macra, last seen in 1967's The Macra Terror. After seeing the Daleks and Cybermen brought back to the revived series, having the Macra as next on the list (or on the list at all for that matter) was certainly unexpected. I suppose that you could have brought back any old beast, or simply made one up, but it was a very nice bit of fanservice. While the Macra don't get that much to do here, its understandably so, and they do still end up adding to that sense of abundant charm in this episode. In fact, just from seeing all the supporting characters live their lives in the individual cars, to that wonderfully hopeful and uplifting ending that sees all the cars return to New New York, this episode is just undeniably charming! If you're still not convinced, just watch the scene where the Doctor quickly jumps from car to car to see what I mean. At the end of the day, I think that's how Gridlock will probably be best remembered: a delightful and fun forty-five minutes that's a worthy entry to the series.

 

My only gripe with this episode isn't something that its necessarily done wrong, but rather something it has done enough of. All of the characters here are rich for storytelling and it would have been nice to get to know more about them. Milo, Cheen, Brannigan, Valerie etc., none of them are bad characters and it's impressive the amount of people that have been worked into the script so well, but I just want to know even more. I know a fair amount about how they live in the cars, such as recycling waste into food, but it would have been nice to see this rather than being told – though it is understandable why we weren't shown, given the time constraints. The same goes for this episode's social satire of things like rush hour traffic, and even a slightly more serious satire of the police – it's all there but it would have been nice to see more. Looking at it positively, I suppose that's the mark of a good writer when they're able to make you want to learn more about the characters they've created, and character building, particularly regular human characters, is Russell T Davies' greatest strength.

 

Gridlock also played well to the Doctor and Martha's individual strengths as characters and splitting them up gave us the chance to see them at their best. Martha is taken away from the Doctor and forced to spend most of the episode with her kidnappers, having to think fast and be resourceful against the Macra. In some ways, Martha steals the show this week and gets my favourite line of the episode: “You've got your faith, you've got your songs and your hymns... and I've got the Doctor”. Thankfully there was no mention of Rose this week, and as much as I enjoyed her time with the Doctor, can you imagine how much worse she'd have been in that same situation? As for the Doctor, Gridlock treated us to angrier side to the character, something David Tennant excels at. Here he has to cope with the guilt of both lying to Martha as well as losing her, meaning he's angry at himself but also unintentionally angry towards others. But he's not all doom and gloom though as he does get to spend a lot of time with Brannigan, his wife Valerie and some cute kittens!

 

I also love the look of this episode and the superb attempts at creating the heavy motorway traffic. It could have been a big problem to realistically show thousands of the motorway's cars on screen all at one... especially when you only have one car to actually film with, but at no point in this episode did it feel like that. As I've already said, the look and feel of this episode is very different to what we saw in Series 2's New Earth, and it all looks stunning. I absolutely believe that we are in a cramped and barely moving motorway, and the same goes in later scenes that see Martha's car having to survive Macra attacks – which incidentally is a sequence fantastically directed by Richard Clark.

 

Overall, I think I can be fairly confident in saying that this is the first Doctor Who episode for a while where I can't say there's anything necessarily wrong with it. Everything works here and on all fronts – characters, story, action, looks etc. The only thing that stops this episode from being a true classic is that there isn't quite enough of it. Maybe that's me being greedy or unfair, but I even look at that as something positive because it proves Russell T Davies and the show's production team are definitely on the right tracks.

 

 

Gridlock



8/10