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| The Toymaker (Neil Patrick Harris) wants to play. Be afraid. |
1 episode. Running Time: Approx. 62 minutes. Written by: Russell T. Davies. Directed by: Chanya Button. Produced by: Vicki Delow.
THE PLOT:
The world has gone mad.
The Doctor and Donna return to 2023 to find chaos in the streets. Everyone, everywhere in the world, has suddenly decided that they are absolutely right in any given belief and absolutely entitled to anything they want. The result is exactly what you'd expect: widespread violence and destruction.
With UNIT's help, the Doctor pins down a signal embedded in every broadcast in every screen on Earth - a giggle from ventriloquist's dummy Stooky Bill during the first-ever television transmission in 1925. A quick trip in the TARDIS takes the Doctor and Donna to the toy shop where the dummy was purchased and to its owner:
The Toymaker (Neil Patrick Harris)!
The Doctor barely survived his first encounter with this immortal gamesmaster. Now his old enemy wants a rematch: a final game, with the prize nothing less than the future of the human race!
CHARACTERS:
The Doctor: It's not often that the Doctor shows real fear, which makes it all the more effective when he realizes who the Toymaker is. He barks at Donna to return to the TARDIS and is horrified when she behaves as usual and follows him. He encounters one of the Toymaker's victims, now a literal puppet on a string, begging for help - and he recoils, knowing that there's nothing he can do and also knowing how easily this could become himself or Donna. Fear gives way to anger when the Toymaker goads him with his failures: the successive deaths of Amy, Clara, and Bill. When the Toymaker starts talking about the Flux, the Doctor finally snaps, cutting him off by challenging him to a game.
Donna: "I saw you, Doctor. I got a glimpse inside your mind, and it's like you're staggering. You are staggering along... You're wearing yourself out!" At the end of the last episode, she very seriously asked if he was all right. She already knows the answer: He is anything but "fine." She refuses to let him shunt her off into the category of someone to be rescued, pointing out that much more is at stake than just her. She also refuses to let him give up. When he worries that the odds of winning a second time are low, she refuses to accept that, countering with her father's wisdom: "Dice don't know what the dice did last time... Every game starts from scratch."
Mel: After a brief appearance in The Power of the Doctor, Bonnie Langford returns for a more substantial role. Mel's character traits are basically the same as in her 1980s run. She's smart, absolutely loyal to the Doctor, and relentlessly positive in her attitude. The difference is that she's now written as a full human being. She's almost always smiling, but there's sadness when she talks about having no one on Earth to return to. It proves what Langford's Big Finish audios had proved already: There was never anything wrong with the casting or the character brief. It's just that the people making the show in the '80s couldn't look past "Bonnie Langford" to write for the character of Melanie Bush.
Kate Lethbridge-Stewart: When she needs to demonstrate the effects of The Giggle to the Doctor, she does not ask any of her subordinates to do this, instead taking that task on herself. She removes her protective "Zeedex" so that she succumbs to the signal. There's some excellent acting from Jemma Redgrave as Kate's posture shifts ever so slightly before she begins a paranoid rant, directed first at the Doctor and then at her scientific advisor, wheelchair-bound Shirley (Ruth Madeley). Once the Zeedex is reapplied, Kate seems to collapse in on herself. Then she apologizes - not to the Doctor, but to Shirley. At the end, when the crisis has past, among her first orders is to get the names of all the staff who died.
The Toymaker: Neil Patrick Harris goes in the opposite direction of the original story's Michael Gough. Where Gough was contained and sinister, Harris goes gloriously over the top. He puts on an ever-shifting accent and behaves like a child at play. This could have gone horribly wrong, but Harris finds the creepiness in the revelry. Even when he's at play, there's no joy in him. The only time he shows any real emotion is when he takes the Doctor to task for his past carelessness, waving away each explanation with an increasingly sarcastic and angry, "Well, that's all right, then!" Outside of that scene, his eyes are eternally cold. He invades UNIT by dancing to a Spice Girls song, taking first Kate and then Mel as dance partners. Both bits end violently, with him twirling Kate into a wall and spinning Mel roughly to the floor... very much as if, finding no fun in romping, he needs to do something malicious in order to feel.
THOUGHTS:
"This world is the ultimate playground. All of the sport, the matches, the medals, the gambling, and the anger and the children shackled to their bedrooms with their joysticks and their buttons... the dating and ghosting, the deceit and the control. You make me dizzy!"
-The Toymaker exults at the endless competitiveness of the human race.
The Toymaker first appeared in 1966's The Celestial Toymaker, presiding over a realm outside of reality. That story's reputation has gone through several turns. It was not particularly well-received on broadcast; then it became known as a "lost masterpiece"; then, as it became more accessible thanks to audio releases and reconstructions, its reputation fell again. For myself, I liked the concept and the first and last episodes... but so little happened in the repetitive middle parts that I remarked in my review that if Part One were ever found, you could justifiably release it and Part Four as a complete story.
The Giggle benefits from a much stronger script. Like the canceled 1980s story The Nightmare Fair, it brings the Toymaker to our reality, to play his games in the real world. Unlike The Nightmare Fair, the Doctor and the Toymaker meet early in the story, and the Doctor is genuinely disturbed by their reunion. That makes it far more effective, particularly with the Toymaker so powerful that his mere presence badly disrupts the real world.
The pace is well judged throughout, fast but never rushed. There are bursts of activity, such as the Spice Girls dance, but also plenty of moments that slow down. In between games, puppet shows, and people being gleefully and horrifically transformed, the episode finds time to explore the Doctor's mental state, planting the seeds of the ending.
There's a surreal sequence in the middle of the episode, as the Doctor and Donna get lost in a maze that is a single, recurring hallway with locked doors on all sides. They get separated and each has an individual encounter with a Toymaker creation in scenes that might have come straight out of a horror movie. Crucially, the Doctor is afraid - and that tells the audience that maybe they should be afraid as well.
THE REGENERATION:
As the last of the David Tennant specials before Ncuti Gatwa takes over, it was always a given that the regeneration would happen in this episode. It does... with a twist. I was spoiled before watching, and my first reaction was that it sounded like a dumb idea. It actually ends up working in context, though. In a story that operates off of "dream logic," what happens actually sort of fits.
Also, Russell T. Davies needed to do something other than the usual this time. After all, the Fourteenth Doctor's run was a whopping three stories (well, and one televised skit). The viewers may love David Tennant, but it would be pretty tough to wring strong emotion from the "death" of an incarnation we basically just met. Something extra was needed, and I largely like how the idea ultimately plays out.
THE FOURTEENTH DOCTOR - AN OVERVIEW:
As I mentioned in my review of The Star Beast, I was not particularly looking forward to these specials. The Tenth Doctor may be the fan favorite, but he was never my favorite. I therefore approached the return of Russell T. Davies and the Tennant/Tate specials with wariness - which only increased when The Star Beast's final Act seemed to gather together all the worst traits of the first RTD era.
Then the other two specials happened. I thoroughly enjoyed both Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle. More than just enjoying the episodes, though, I thoroughly enjoyed David Tennant's Fourteenth Doctor. The differences in characterization between his two Doctors are minor: Fourteen is less self-righteous and a lot less smug than Ten, but otherwise this just feels like an older version of the same incarnation. But Davies also delivered a full character arc across the three specials, one that wove effectively through the stories and resolved in a satisfying manner.
I also genuinely think Tennant's performance is better, with more layers than were present fifteen years ago. A lot of that is the writing. But I also think that Tennant's simply matured as an actor, something that I think is borne out by his non-Who roles.
All of which is to say two things: (1) After bracing myself for these specials, it turns out I wouldn't have minded twice as much of the Fourteenth Doctor as I actually got; and (2) while I'm still not 100% sold on RTD's return, the last two specials have taken me from "wary" to "cautiously optimistic."
Optimism that's helped by Ncuti Gatwa's debut. Davies gives him a bit more time than is standard to make a first impression - and based on his scenes here, I think he's going to be good in the role.
OVERALL:
The Giggle is a fine finale to this mini-season's arc, while also doubling as a sequel that surpasses the 1966 original.
Performances have been a strong suit of all three specials, and that continues to be the case here. Tennant and Tate are terrific, Bonnie Langford gets a chance to show Doctor Who television audiences how good she can be with decent material, and Neil Patrick Harris perfectly straddles the line between ridiculous and frightening.
Of the three stories, Wild Blue Yonder remains the standout. Still, I liked this one more than I expected to, and I'm pretty sure I'll give it another viewing in the none-too-distant future.
Overall Rating: 8/10.
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