Take that ending. With the sonic screwdriver – for once a key component of a story, rather than a quick plot device to get from A to B – resting on the diary, the Doctor’s discovery that he’d modified it to hold the kind of data ghosts that had been creeping us out for two weeks was an ingenious way to save a character. It certainly put the survival of Jenny a few weeks earlier into the shade, and turned a good ending into a very good one (although you could hardly have argued had the credits rolled with the camera fixed on the diary). Then there were the shadows themselves, the Vashta Nerada hunting out fresh prey. Easily one of the most sinister foes we’ve met in the show since the 2005 revival, they not only continued to provide real menace, but were also beaten by, of all things, a bit of bargaining. This shouldn’t have worked: after all, last week we saw them eating the flesh off people in a couple of seconds. Yet the Doctor’s “look me up” line was sublime, and superbly negotiated a stand-off between himself and the Vashta Nerada that avoided some contrived ‘fight’ between the two. The only penalty of this, to be ultra-critical, is the more you got to know about them, the less fearsome they became. River Song, meanwhile, even while the swines won’t tell you who she is yet, clearly has left a mark on the Doctor. How does she know the Doctor’s real name? What was the one occasion where he would have told someone that? Are they married? Is she another Time Lord? An assistant? Something to do with Jenny? You can speculate all you like, but that was one answer they weren’t willing to pony up. They did, nonetheless, build up a convincing emotional attachment between the two, even if you’re still not quite sure why. It’d be nice if they could throw us a few more clues before the series is over, though. Still, the episode did weave together the majority of answers from last week. CAL, for instance, turned out to be the little girl. As simple as that, and in one moment this also changed a character who looked like a stereotypical corporate bastard into someone simply trying to protect his family. I think it’s fair to say that most of us had guessed that the girl was something to do with the hard drive of the library, and that Doctor Moon was tied into that too, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t satisfyingly logical. Same too for the library being the forest of the title: it’s clever, simple and works. That includes next week’s episode, which looks positively dull by comparison. Here’s hoping the previews prove that one wrong, while this writer goes back and checks out the Forest Of The Dead again. Television this good demands to be rewatched… Martin liked this episode a bit less. Check out Simon’s review of the previous episode, Silence in the Library here, and Martin’s take on it here.
title: “Doctor Who Series 4 Episode 9 Review Forest Of The Dead” ShowToc: true date: “2025-08-17” author: “Joseph Huffman”
Is the huge effort that has been made to de-sexualise the Doctor/Donna relationship actually a path-clearer for a broad romantic arc involving the heretofore aloof Gallifrean? I fear so. Well, since he started out in the Hartnell era travelling round with his grand-daughter and seems to have avoided liaisons since the one that led to her birth, perhaps our time-travelling friend is due for some action.
The resumption of the story from Silence constituted a jarring, almost Prisoner-like mindfuck, drawn heavily from the Philip K. Dick data banks (particularly from Ubik and The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch), as it began to transpire that Donna had been teleported into the same digital half-life as the other 4022 ‘saved’ denizens of the super-library (is it just me, or is 4022 a pretty low population count for an entire planet?).
The idea of preserving a halfway-teleported person in stasis as an emergency measure has periodically cropped up in various versions of Star Trek, including a notable episode of TNG where Scotty (James Doohan) was preserved in the buffers of a transporter beam for a century after his ship was critically disabled.
The ‘Girl In The Computer’ echoed somewhat Moffat’s The Girl In The Fireplace from series 2, and an agenda is slowly emerging in Moffat’s previously rare writing – he seems to want to pair the Doctor off (as he did with Sofia Myles’ Madame de Pompadour in Mirror) and he seems to share Dickens’ obsession with ‘lost’ or disembodied females (in Dickens’ case, due to the premature demise of his beloved sister-in-law).
Not all of Forest’s repeats were Moffat-isms, as Donna once again (again!) got to emote at the loss of tossed-in characters, this time her own fictional children. Catherine Tate played the scene very well. Again.
You know what, Steven, Russell…? Sometimes people die. Sometimes half the people are saved. Or three. Or twenty – it’s not just all or none. And the playing back of this pattern of human life and death in stories – even (hell, especially) in fairy stories – carries not only the resonance of the reality of our lives, but also the reaffirmation of the value of life. If you’re going to let your characters survive, great – but please stop rubbing those electric paddles together as a cheap trick in these Who scripts. Because it is a very, very cheap trick indeed.
The ‘snap opening’ of the Tardis is just plain embarrassing, as were the acres of RTD-style Doctor-mythologizing that preceded it. Must Doctor Who recap the status of its hero in this way every episode in the service of those who have never watched and are giving the show ten minutes just to see if they like it? If The Doctor does heroic things, we get it. And he does. So why all this showboating, season after season? It actually diminishes the effectiveness of the character.
In Forest, the music has been turned up back to its familiar deafening pitch, and the pacing restored to 78rpm, as per usual. Was Silence In The Library written as a two-parter to ease us in from old to new Moffat, where the future of Who is far more focused on story arcs (and ones that will span not just seasons but years) than getting a good tale told in one or two episodes? Is the future going to be a lot like the past? I suspect it is, by now.
Since the start of season four I have been typing evil portents about this series’ morbid interest in the Doctor’s real name, and indeed that name was spoken in Forest Of The Dead, whispered inaudibly into the Gallifrean’s ear by River Song when she needed to quickly convince him that he will trust her in a future that is already in her personal past. The Doctor went fairly grey at this, and so did I. Who cares? Whatever build-up there is to the revelation of the Doctor’s ‘real’ name (and even on Gallifrey they always called him ‘Doctor’) can only be heading for anti-climax. I still wish the words ‘Endeavour’ and ‘Tiberius’ had never penetrated my lug-holes. What on Earth – or anywhere else – is the point of this?
So it has been disappointing for me to see Moffat depart so wildly in Forest from a character-driven story rich in invention to a smorgasbord of soap-style teasers. Sometimes, you don’t need a Tardis to see the future. And I’m not so sure about the future of Doctor Who now.
