Revisiting Doctor Who - Series 1, Episode 9 - The Empty Child

Revisiting Doctor Who - Series 1, Episode 9 - The Empty Child

A quick apology before you begin reading - the actual recap of the episode is longer than usual, because so much is happening during it that needs to be mentioned. Sorry for taking up so much time before you get to the analysis!

The TARDIS flies through space in ‘Mauve’ (universally recognised colour for danger) emergency mode, chasing a spaceship that appears to be out of control. As sparks fly from the console, The Doctor tells Rose that it’s travelling through time, trying to lose them, and it’s about 30 seconds from the centre of London.

Cue title sequence…

Stepping out of the TARDIS, The Doctor and Rose begin their search for the spaceship, which could have landed months ago due to the whole time travelling thing. We keep cutting to a shot from the point of view of some binocular or goggles or something lens-based, watching the two of them move around as they continue their search. Rose wants him to give her some Spock, which apparently is meant to be asking him to use some alien tech to solve the problem rather than just asking, although as she’s already talked about spanking in a previous episode, who knows. The Doctor wonders about Rose’s choice of a rather loud Union Jack t-shirt, as Rose hears a child calling for its mummy from a nearby roof – cue scary music and OMG THAT CHILD HAS A GAS MASK ON AND HAS BEEN CALLING FOR IT’S MUMMY AND THAT’S REALLY FREAKY chills. The Doctor, however, has made his way through a door into a nightclub, which has a 1940s theme. Rose climbs the roof to rescue the child, which you wouldn’t get me to do without a fireman as they’re trained for this sort of thing and have ladders and gas masks of their own, as The Doctor climbs on stage in the club to ask if anything has fallen from the sky recently. Cue hilarious laughter from the club (you’d almost think it really WAS the 1940s, and bombs had been falling). 

Back on the roof, the little boy is a level up from Rose, when a length of rope falls down, which she climbs onto. As The Doctor hears an air raid siren and notices a Hitler poster, he realises that it IS the 1940s. Rose, meanwhile, gets carried over London by the rope, which is attached to an airship. Bombs go off all around, and planes fly towards her, and she probably regrets investigating a creepy child wearing a gas mask on a dark rooftop all alone. Although he did want his mummy, so it might have been a bit harsh not to at least try, I suppose. Maybe in those circumstances, I would have tried even without the fireman helping me.

The Doctor realises that Rose isn’t with him, and tries to find her, lamenting to a nearby cat that he’s still yet to meet someone who gets the whole ‘don’t wander off thing’, when the TARDIS telephone rings. This isn’t meant to happen, but before he can answer, a girl appears and tell him not to. She says it’s not for him, and to trust her. He turns back to look at it, pointing out it’s not a real phone and isn’t connected, but she’s gone when he turns back. He answers anyway, to hear a small child asking ‘are you my mummy?’ Creeped out by this, he runs off to find Rose. Locals run to their air raid shelters, amusing The Doctor no end, and then he sees the girl from outside the TARDIS sneak into a nearby house, where she takes some food.

Rose is still strafing bombs and planes with her air balloon, and it doesn’t look like the comfiest ride she’s ever taken. We cut to a view of John Barrowman looking at her through binoculars on the balcony of a big house, and we rejoice because it’s Barrowman. A soldier calls him ‘Jack’, and hints that he’s in the RAF, but he’s more interested in zooming in to look at Billie Piper’s bottom, which is apparently excellent. I don’t know why Barrowman is going by the name of ‘Jack’, but it’s definitely him, confirmed when he tells the soldier that he too has a lovely bottom. He’s obviously undercover though, so I’ll call him Jack to protect his identity. He leaves, telling the solider that he’s off to meet a girl.

In the house, the girl is still sneaking around, and realising that the dinner table is set for a huge roast dinner she whistles outside , which summons some children, who call her ‘Miss’. They’re obviously very well trained. Up in the air, Rose slips off the rope, but gets caught in a tractor beam that has Barrowman’s Jack’s voice. He asks her to stay calm, keep her arms inside the tractor beam, and turn off her phone as it interferes with his instrument (well played, Jack, well played) as he is trying to program the beam for her descent. Inside his ship, Jack hears his computer tell him that Rose isn’t from this time period, and then he brings her into the ship, straight into his arms. Rose swoons as she regains her senses, but to be fair I think I’d do the same if I was caught by Barrowman, looking into those deep eyes, hearing his soft dulcet tones, imagining myself snuggled up on a cold winter’s day His flirting is so intense, it causes her to faint, and Jack puts her into his bunk bed to recover.

More children head towards the house with the feast, but we start to fear for them as we realise that the child with the gas mask is heading towards the house as well. At the dinner table, the girl scolds one of the boys for making jokes about the meal being bought on the black market. She’s in full on mothering mode, making sure the children all have a slice of meat and that she can see them chewing, and then suddenly The Doctor is thanking them all and helping himself. He questions them about why they’re all there, as they should all have been evacuated, but most of them tell him that they came back because they didn’t like the homes they were sent to. We learn that her name is Nancy, and he praises her for helping the homeless (I think he does anyway. He says it in a roundabout way). He tells her he wants to know how a phone that isn’t a phone can ring, and that he wants to find a blonde in a Union Jack. He’s in trouble though as he took two slices of meat, and Nancy tries to get rid of him, but he makes sure that he asks them about whether anything had fallen from the sky recently first. The camera zooms in slightly on Nancy, which is a pretty good indicator that she knows something, when we hear a knocking and ‘Mummy? Are you in there Mummy?’ from outside. The Doctor pulls back the curtain to see the child wearing the gas mask. Nancy runs to make sure the door is shut, and then tells all the children to flee, although The Doctor knows there is something else up, and tries to question the child. Nancy lobs a vase though to stop the child putting his hand through the letterbox, and says that the child is empty, and can make the telephone ring remotely, which it then does. The Doctor answers again, but Nancy hangs up, so it turns the radio on to talk again. He puts his hand through the letterbox, and we notice it has a huge scar on its hand. It tells The Doctor it is scared, and The Doctor agrees to open the door to let him in, but the child is gone when he does so.

Rose wakes up on Jack’s ship, and he introduces himself as Captain Jack Harkness of the Royal Air Force, American volunteer. Rose, however, recognises his ID as psychic paper, because The Doctor uses it, and what she actually reads off it is that Jack is single and works out (can’t let your mind wander when using psychic paper). He then reads her subconscious thoughts off it, and we fear a little bit more for Mickey’s future with her as it lists her as ‘available’. She also tells him that he’s very ‘Spock’, which is clearly a flirting term I’m going to have to employ with my wife, if only to see her reaction. As he heals the burns on her hands, Jack tells Rose that he knows she’s a Time Agent, as he’s been expecting them to catch up with him for a while. He takes her out for a drink on top of his invisible ship, which is parked directly outside the face of Big Ben, as you do.

Nancy is running around a railway line, returning to an abandoned carriage which appears to be her shelter. The Doctor, of course, has followed her. Although they joke around together for a short while initially, he then gets down to business, rhetorically asking her about whether the thing he is looking for fell about a month ago, the same time the child with the gas mask turned all creepy. She gives him a location, but doesn’t want to take him because of the soldiers and barbed wire guarding it. She tells him that he needs to see The Doctor first, which sounds strangely familiar.

Rose and Jack are still wandering around on top of the ship, and Jack tells her that he has something that the Time Agency wants that he’s willing to trade. Rose, playing along, says she’ll need to speak to her companion, and Jack tries to speed things up my flirting more heavily than normal – we’re talking hands on hips and kisses on hands and everything. She doesn’t cave, so he tries dancing his way to what we wants, explaining that he has a fully functioning Chula war ship hidden in London, and he knows where it is, which he’ll sell to the Time Agency for the right price. In two hours, he says, a German bomb will land on it and destroy it forever. He has to repeat himself, because Rose has been staring into his eyes the whole time and ignoring his voice, and seems to love the fact that he might be a criminal. To find her ‘companion’, Jack does a search for alien tech, which is apparently ‘Spock’ enough for her to exclaim ‘finally, a professional!’.

The Doctor uses some fancy binoculars to survey the bomb site which the soldiers are guarding. The ‘Doctor’ is situated in a hospital just behind, which Nancy assures him he should go to first, as he might not want to find out what the bomb is afterwards. Before she heads back to look after the kids, The Doctor tells her he knows she lost someone, which is why she helps the other children, and she tells him it was her brother Jamie, who died the night the bomb fell when she left the house to find food. He inspires a bit of British pride by talking about the UK standing up to Germany, and then sends Nancy on her way as he heads for the hospital. The child in the gas mask appears suddenly, following Nancy up the stairs. The Doctor sonic screwdrivers’ the hospital gate, and enters. Inside, which is one child-in-a-gas-mask short of being the creepiest horror movie location ever, he enters a ward filled with bodies asleep in beds. Searching elsewhere, he discovers more of these wards, and we see that the bodies have gas masks on too. The ‘Doctor’ appears behind him (I don’t believe it! It’s Richard Wilson!), introducing himself as Doctor Constantine, and The Doctor tells him that Nancy sent him. Constantine tells him that none of them were caught in the blast, and that The Doctor should examine them, but not to touch the flesh. The Sonic Screwdriver reveals that one of the patients has head trauma, chest trauma, a scar on the back of the hand (like the child), and the gas mask is fused to the skin but that he can’t find the edge. Examining more, they’re all the same, which should be impossible. Constantine reveals that when the bomb first dropped there was just one victim, who was dead (at first), from horrific injuries. The following morning, every doctor and nurse who had touched him had the same injuries, as did the patients within a week, as if the physical injuries were a plague. The cause of death was none of these injuries, as they aren't in fact dead. He wakes them all with a bang to prove it, but says that they’re harmless, and have no life signs. The Doctor asks why no-one has done anything, and Constantine says he tries to make them comfortable, and has stopped the army blowing up the hospital and blaming it on a German bomb, which The Doctor says would be too late anyway. Isolated cases are breaking out over London, and as it looks as if Constantine is about to fall victim himself, he tells The Doctor to go to the top floor where the first victim was taken, and to find Nancy who knows more than she has let on. Constantine does indeed develop a gas mask face, asking if The Doctor is his mummy as he does so.

Just after this, Jack and Rose show up in the hospital. The Rose tells The Doctor that Jack knows all about them being Time Agents, and that his name is Mr Spock. They head back into the ward, as we switch to see Nancy back in the house, scared as the child's voice appears on the wireless, before he steps foot into the actual house. I realise that this was mistake to be watching at half-midnight and downstairs on my own, and The Doctor manages to extract from Jack that it was actually a Chula ambulance that crash-landed, not a warship. Jack hoped to convince it was a warship and then sell it, only to blow it up, and admits that he is a con man. When he says he doesn't know what's going on, and Rose asks The Doctor if he has any answers yet, The Doctor replies that human DNA is being rewritten by an idiot. Why though? What's the point?

Nancy hides under the table as the child enters the room, trying to flee when his back is turned, but he hears her and uses telekenesis to shut the door and trap her. In the hospital, all the the patients on the ward suddenly wake up, and begin walking slowly towards the trio. The child, Jamie, does the same towards Nancy and the camera, and HOLY CRAP THAT IS SO CREEPY AND WHY DID I WANT TO FINISH WATCHING THIS BEFORE BED?!

Until next time...i

You'll often hear people say that they used to hide behind the sofa when something like the Daleks appeared in Doctor Who when they were younger. Now, I'm not a massive pre-Russell T Davies Doctor Who fan, but I'm certain that there was never anything this scary before now. The combination of a gas mask (why are gas masks so scary?) and a child calling for it's mummy in a dark setting is genuinely creepy. I jest slightlly when I make out that I'm honestly scared (I'm really quite manly, you must understand) but if it was dark and someone started to ask if I was their mummy in the same style, I'd be bricking it. There is no way you’ll ever again hear anything to do with ‘mummy’ without hearing the child's voice.

It might be a dark episode in general, both in terms of plot and setting, but there's some great humour in there. The opening joke about mauve being the universal colour of danger, and how confusing it makes things for other species, is great, showcasing how different (or alien) mankind really would be to the rest of the universe.Christopher Eccleston is also on fine form throughout, lamenting the companion's tendency to ignore his warnings to stay put 'I might finally meet someone who gets the whole "don't wander off" thing,' and perfectly straight-faced 'what am I supposed to do with a ringing phone?', which might be one of his best lines of the entire series. 

John Barrowman, of course, threatens to steal the episode in every scene as Captain Jack Harkness. He'll become more muted (to a degree) when he stars in Torchwood, but our first meeting with Jack is brilliant, seeing his thoughts wander to produce a very appraising view of Rose on the psychic paper, and causing Rose to go all gooey-eyed over champagne on top of his spaceship. Billie Piper is wonderful too as Rose falls victim to Jack's charms. 

I don't often notice things like the actual quality of writing in the script (I really don't have a clue how they pick the nominees for the Oscars), but I think this is a wonderfully written script - it's incredibly snappy in places, such as when Nancy and The Doctor talk about the size of his nose and ears.

It all adds up to a superb episode of Doctor Who. There's a fantastic mystery, a genuinely creepy bad guy (it seems wrong calling a child that's lost its mummy a 'bad guy', but that's exactly what it is), and the introduction of John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness. 

How It Fits Into The Series As A Whole

We meet Captain Jack Harkness, who would go on to run Torchwood 3 in Torchwood, for the first time. We also have the first instance of The Doctor using the alias 'John Smith'. 

Bad Wolf Sightings

I missed this, but it's quite obvious when you're told - Nancy, pointing out The Doctor's big ears and nose, is a reference to the Big Bad World.

Overall

The introduction of Captain Jack Harkness, the creepiest enemy on children's television (until the Weeping Angels arrive), and some great dialogue combine with a wonderful mystery to make this essential viewing. Can't wait to re-watch the second one.

10/10