Day 712: Tooth and Claw

Tooth and Claw. It's a story with two main driving forces behind it, character and plot. Both work well, and at least one sets out the tone for what will be the rest of the series.

Looking at plot, it's fairly basic. A brotherhood of monks who worship a werewolf have conspired to kidnap Queen Victoria to turn her into a werewolf. How the plot chooses to present itself, then, is by presenting what is a quite well done action movie. The first half, aside from a well-choreographed pre-titles sequence, is a fairly slow affair, letting tension build up around the wolf. This tension is then let loose in the second half, with a series of scenes where characters run down corridors and try to escape the fairly impressive CGI wolf. This is all very well directed by Euros Lyn, who presents a lot of it as quick shots, keeping the pace and making the wolf a palpable threat. Similarly, Murray Gold, the composer, makes the wolf into something truly epic with his excellent score, and the Director of Photography, Rory Taylor, imbues the story with a certain darkness, with everything feeling slightly grey, misty, and frightening. All in all, a well produced story of Doctor Who that's entertaining, but not much else.

But that's slightly wrong. Because the characters of the Doctor and Rose within this story are almost unbearable. They're joking about, laughing in the face of danger, even as other people are dying, and seeming to not take everything completely seriously. And what's important is that they're called out on this behaviour. Queen Victoria exiles them from the British Empire and sets up an entire institute dedicated into sorting out problems from alien worlds, known as Torchwood, explicitly as a warning to the Doctor. The Tenth Doctor with Rose is a dangerous pairing because they have become slightly too smug, slightly too happy with the way in which they work together. And this is becoming a problem, and even more notably, this is becoming a problem in their first proper story together (Tennant was missing from half of The Christmas Invasion and they spent much of their time together in New Earth with one of them possessed by Cassandra). Clearly, this series is going to be focussing on their relationship together, because it's not quite OK and something will need to happen to change things for them, possibly with disastrous consequences.