DISCO INFERNO

Inferno vs. The Church on Ruby Road

Now someone tell me what the hell is going on here

I’ve been rewatching Doctor Who in a randomised order, and writing this blog, for nearly a year and a half now, so I thought I should take a moment to reintroduce myself to any new readers who have started following me since the last time I tried to summarise what this is all about. There only a few of you – a few readers recorded on the blog for each new post I write, and my very-much-appreciated followers on Substack (please recommend me, and please subscribe if you don’t already) – but that’s a few more than there were for the first few months, so thank you. I’m really grateful that you take the time to read what is essentially a pretty self-indulgent blog, and I hope that you find it interesting.

Doctor Who Randomised is my attempt to rewatch all televised Doctor Who stories, old and new, and to write a little a bit about what I think of them and what they make me think about. I didn’t fancy watching them in broadcast order, and hoped it would be a more interesting experience to watch them in an order decided by a random number generator. Which it is! I really like not knowing what’s going to come up next, and try to delay pressing the button to select the next story until I have finished watching the preceding one – just for the cheap thrills.  I choose one ‘classic’ story (twentieth-century Who) paired with one ‘new’ story (twenty-first century Who each time, write some words on each story and then try to make some connections (sometimes serious, more often spurious) between the two.

If you read my posts on the Substack newsletter and would like to read some more, please do check out my blog site, www.dwrandomised.com, which hosts all the reviews posted to date. (NB. The first seven blog posts appear to have a rather shorthand format because I wrote them in paragraphs of no more than 140 characters so I could post them as threads on Twitter … but I gave up on that idea before too long.)

Why am I doing this? Well, I’m a Doctor Who fan and this ‘rewatching marathon’ thing seems to be something a lot of other fans have done at some point in their lives, and said is very satisfying, so I thought I’d give it a go. Similarly to the blog I write on British comics of the 1970s and 1980s, www.greatnewsforallreaders.com, I like not only to appreciate/critique these great works but also to consider them as influential upon those of us who watched them, especially as children, and what they make me think about today.

I also decided to try and make the blog a little bit autobiographical – not ‘this is the story of my life’, but ‘these are some of the important things that happened to me along the way’ – as much for my children as for anyone else, should they ever be bothered to read it. I asked my parents a couple of years ago if they could write some sort of record of their lives, and it made me think that I should try to do so too in my own way, for when my kids feel a similar need in the future.

It’s all going to take me a while. This post covers only the 61st and 62nd stories I have watched (out of more than 300, and still rising). It’s the writing that takes the time; work and the rest of life don’t allow much opportunity for this sort essay-writing. But I’ll keep going for as long as my enthusiasm lasts and hopefully I’ll get there in the end!

Inferno vs. The Church on Ruby Road

I need to get on with this latest couple of reviews … and it’s a strong pair of stories: steamy Third Doctor tension-builder Inferno, written by Don Houghton and first broadcast between 9 May and 20 June 1970, and the Fifteenth Doctor’s first full episode The Church on Ruby Road, written by Russel T. Davies and first broadcast on Christmas Day 2023. It’s a genuine coincidence that the random number generator gave me Ncuti Gatwa’s first story to watch in the week leading up to the launch of his first full series, and coincidental too that it’s a story about coincidences. That’s the joy of the Randomiser!

Inferno

Inferno is a great watch. There are aspects of it to dislike, and I’ll mention those in this blog, but overall it ranks high in my reckoning of classic Doctor Who stories. It’s certainly one my favourites – possibly the favourite – of Third Doctor adventures. It’s a tale well-crafted by writer Don Houghton, and it spreads itself well across seven episodes without ever losing momentum or interest. The drama is tense, bleached with an unsettling sense of impending doom expertly realised by the production team and a convincing cast of characters. I feel that I could return to Inferno as often as I might choose to rewatch a favourite movie (and there’s only a small number of those that I really want to see again and again and again).

It's a story of eco-peril, of humanity exploiting our natural environment and the planet fighting back. ‘I wonder if it [the substance leaking from the Earth’s core] screeches’ is a powerful, memorable line from the Doctor in Episode Two. This is not a set-up unique to Doctor Who, especially at this point in its history, but on this occasion it’s complicated (pleasingly) by the introduction of a parallel Earth storyline. Was this the most sophisticated science-fiction concept Doctor Who had broadcast to date? Possibly. I can’t think of anything quite as intellectually ambitious as this from the show’s first six seasons (although I still don’t quite understand what Inside the Spaceship was supposed to have been about).

But it’s even more than that. There’s an antiscientific seam within the story too. The clue is in the title: ‘Inferno’ references the fiery, subterranean depths of Hell. ‘You’re liable to wake up Old Nick going that deep,’ Greg Sutton warns Sir Keith Gold, when he’s told that the Stahlman project has already penetrated twenty miles of the Earth’s crust. This fusion of science and spirituality is typical of the Third Doctor era (see especially The Dæmons and Planet of the Spiders) a theme commonly attributed to the influence of producer Barry Letts who had a keen interest in both.

Thinking about Inferno in these terms, I wondered whether the story intentionally references some of the imagery and ideas of Dante’s descent into Hell: the Doctor falling into another reality (with some highly effective, face-warping visual effects) could be interpreted as Dante crossing the river Acheron; when he arrives in this parallel world – a form of personal hell for the Doctor, as none of his friends recognise him – he faces hairy beasts (both leonine and lupine in appearance, like two of the creatures that first face Dante in the dark wood), before encountering a series of increasingly desperate circumstances culminating in the catastrophic moment of the Stahlman drill reaching the centre of Hell. Along the way, all the wicked conditions of Alighieri’s nine circles of Hell are represented: limbo (how the Doctor described to Liz the place between worlds in which he was temporarily trapped), lust (Sutton’s pursuit of Dr Petra Williams), gluttony (Stahlman’s self-indulgent pursuit of his dangerous project, an addiction visualised by the insatiable, driving pain of his burned hand), greed (the political support behind the project), wrath (most people are angry in this world: Stahlman, Sutton, Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart, the Doctor, the Primords, the very Earth itself); heresy (in a world of ideologies supposedly opposed to those of our own, ‘normal’ world, the Doctor’s decency, humour and rationalism identify him as some sort of heretic), violence (the destructive, murderous nature of the Primords, ‘Do you want to end your lives fighting like animals?’), fraud (Stahlman sabotages the computer), treachery (Stahlman’s duplicity, Petra betrays him to side with Sutton). Some of these are perhaps a little stretched but I think there is enough in there to make a valid connection.

In Inferno the Doctor (again, like Dante, perhaps) is a lonely character, a stranger in a foreign land – and that’s before his odyssey to an alternate dimension. At the start of Episode One we see him arrive at the drilling plant in Bessie, alone. In years to come we might expect Jo Grant to be sitting alongside him in such a scene, but the Doctor doesn’t yet have such a close friendship with anyone. His relationship with Liz is amiable but still rather professional. He is far more concerned with tinkering with his TARDIS in his makeshift man-shed than with the UNIT task for which he has been employed. He doesn’t yet care enough for his regular companions to want anything more than to escape them.

Be careful for what you wish, though. There’s a clear sense of relief on the Doctor’s face when he returns to his own universe and sees the ‘real’ Liz and the Brigadier again, and an affectionate humour emerges once more (‘You know, you really do look better with that moustache.’). Clearly his experiences on the parallel Earth give him a far greater appreciation of what he has at home – which seems to be the take-away lesson of the story, and a nice note on which to end Season 7.

In retrospect there is a sad note to this closing scene as we know now that it was Caroline John’s last appearance as Liz. Letts had decided that her ‘equals’ dynamic with the Doctor was not what he wanted, and John had become pregnant so she may have chosen to leave the series anyway. It’s nice that the season ends on Liz laughing, but there were indications within the story that the character wasn’t completely happy with her lot in the UNIT set-up. Just before the Doctor reappears she and the Brigadier are snapping at each other. ‘No wonder the Doctor cleared off!’, she snaps. She knows she’s worth a lot more than she currently feels valued in this uniformed boys’ club.

Inferno provides another Doctor Who example of the sexism and patriarchal bias prevalent in British society at the time that it was made. For all the tension and excitement, the seven episodes surely feature enough male pissing contests to douse whatever fiery inferno erupts from the centre of the Earth. It starts in the fourth scene of the first episode, with Stahlman and Gold bickering over who has governance over health and safety. It goes on: Stahlman and Sutton, Stahlman and the Doctor, the Doctor and the Brigade Leader … bicker, splutter, posture, red-faced shouting, muttering, piss, piss, piss.

The cast list credits only two women: Caroline John playing Liz Shaw, who displays skilful mastery of the art of looking half-disgusted, half-disdainful at all instances of bores at the borehole (but her days were numbered – see note above), and Sheila Dunn playing Petra Williams. Petra* is a character poorly treated in both her incarnations in this story, especially by Sutton, whom I think we are supposed to admire. He might have Stahlman’s number but he’s a chauvinistic prick whenever he talks to Petra: condescending, inappropriately flirtatious, bullying, just rude.

*See how quickly I fall into the cultural convention of calling the women by their first names, while the men are known by their surnames as if conferring higher status? If I referred to them as Shaw and Williams, and the men as Greg, Eric and Keith, nobody would know who I was talking about.

Eric (that’s Professor/Director Stahlman for those at the back) – the baddie – actually treats Petra/Dr Williams with far more professional respect than Greg does. In fact the alt-universe, described by the Doctor as ‘a bigoted world’, seems on the whole less sexist than ‘our’ more libertarian version of things. It’s also a republic, which makes it better on two scores in my opinion. But the whole 1984-style authoritarianism looks less attractive. ‘No monarchy’ seems to equate here to some sort of fascist-communist military dictatorship.

Eric treating Dr Williams with professional courtesy does not let him off the hook by the way, due to his weird geronto-gynophobia (a term I just made up in the absence of one to describe a fear of old women). I counted three examples: ‘You want us to proceed at a snail's pace like a pack of cautious old women.’ (Episode Four), ‘Sir Keith is an old woman!’ (Episode Six), ‘Safety margins are for cautious old women like Sir Keith.’ (Episode Seven).

Eric also demonstrates a fear of experts (peritophobia?), particularly those who are ‘over cautious’ or ‘crackpot’. And, when told by Greg that accidents happen, he announces that he makes ‘no allowance for incompetence’. I think we all know the type. In the words of the Doctor, ‘You, sir, are a nitwit.’

The Church on Ruby Road

As I write, there is less than a week to go until the opening broadcast of Ncuti Gatwa’s first full season as the Fifteenth Doctor. Fifteen! Sixteen when you include John Hurt. That’s a lot of Doctors. For such a long period of my childhood, for years that seemed eternal, there had only ever been four Doctors and I think I probably believed the current incumbent would be there for ever. The idea that there might one day be four times as many would have been a bit mind-boggling. And yet every single one of them feels like the Doctor. Watching all the stories out of order like this, I’m struck that I feel no conscious process of adjustment to the fact that this one character is played by a multitude of different people, in very different ways, yet it’s still recognisably the same person. It’s odd when you think about it, but seems perfectly normal when just experiencing it. There’s a thing some Christians do when they’re talking about the idea of the Trinity: they go a bit wide-eyed David Copperfield and try to explain, in a mystical voice that assumes that simple heathens will really struggle to understand, how father, son and holy spirit are somehow entirely different yet – wooooo – still the same! I’ve never really struggled to understand the concept, probably because of Doctor Who.

Maybe it’s going to be different for some people this time. I saw a tweet the other day, in response to an interview Ncuti did for Entertainment magazine, which was something along the lines of ‘Much as I love Ncuti, I don’t think this next era of Doctor Who will be for me.’ I can’t remember the exact quote or who wrote it, but the person went on to say it was nothing to do with the Doctor being black, or gay (as those who identify as ‘anti-woke’ have complained), but that they had an impression (based, apparently, on this interview) that the new series was trying too hard to be ‘stylish’ or ‘modern’. Everyone’s entitled to their opinions and all that, but (leaving aside the obvious retort that they hadn’t yet even watched the new series) one can’t help thinking: hasn’t Doctor Who always tried hard to be stylish and modern, within the context of its day? I mean, that’s been absolutely key to its longevity.

There’s a ridiculous fear of change, of evolution, of the new, of leaving the past behind – in Doctor Who fandom, in fandoms in general, and more widely in British culture and society. It must be so tedious for people involved in any form of creative art. I suspect that the majority of people who are worried that the new era of the show is going to pull them out of their comfort zone will be absolutely fine with it in two or three weeks’ time. Unless they are actually racist, or homophobic, just as the misogynists never came round to Jodie Whittaker, the ageists never came round to Peter Capaldi, and so on. But fuck those guys.

Anyway, I’m feeling excited for the new season. A new vibe, a new Doctor, a new companion (Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday), the return (in full season format) of Russell T. Davies as writer/showrunner. And The Church on Ruby Road has given us a taste of what it might be like. Perhaps – of course, it could also turn out to be totally different. This was a Christmas special episode and an introducing-the-new-cast episode, so it may not be typical of what will follow. But nevertheless I really enjoyed it and it was nice of the Randomiser to give me an excuse to watch it again.

The Church on Ruby Road is fairly thin in terms of plot. I remember Shaz and I both commenting on that when the credits rolled on Christmas Day. But I didn’t find that a huge problem; in fact, it was a relief after some of the overcomplex scripts of the Chibnall and Moffat years. Like watching a bit of cosy crime to soothe one’s nerves following four series of Borgen. There was a warmth to The Church on Ruby Road that seemed perfect for the day on which it was shown. Christmas Day 2023 was a lovely one for us – quiet, calm and relaxing after an especially stressful year – and this emanated just the glow we needed as the evening drew in.

Clearly, some seeds have been sown for the series that follows to grow a bit wilder. Who is Mrs Flood? Where are we going with the renewed focus on the Doctor having been abandoned then adopted as a child? And what’s the story with Ruby, a foundling left at the door of a church on Christmas Eve by a mysterious woman? (The official novel of the episode identifies the woman as Ruby’s mother, so I’m going to assume that’s who she is in the televised story.)

Our new Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, is charismatic, confident and instantly believable as the character. In my blog post on The Christmas Invasion a few months ago I wrote about how I don’t like that post-regeneration period, common to the opening stories of most of the Doctor’s incarnations, in which the Time Lord is confused and out of sorts. I’m glad to say that there has been none of that with the Fifteenth Doctor, either in this story or The Giggle – he’s bi-regenerated into a fine fettled, hale and hearty, blazing star.

Ruby has been set up with an intriguing back story, and a likeable family in Carla (Michelle Greenidge) and Cherry (Angela Wynter). Incidentally, apart from the Doctor all of the principal cast members in The Church on Ruby Road are women, a remarkable change from Inferno and a sign of positive development – within the industry of television drama at least.

It’s interesting to me that a church is central to the story – the subject of its title, no less. Much of my own life has been linked to churches – from singing in the village church choir as a boy, to an all-consuming involvement with the evangelical church as a young adult, and to nearly thirty years working in the religious book publishing industry. How the Church is presented in popular drama and the media has always interested me, and I found it quite surprising to see the positive role it plays here. General perceptions of the Church these days are of an excluding, patriarchal, abusive and alienating institution – justifiably so in some cases – but the church on Ruby Road is a place of refuge and rescue, the sanctuary that picked baby Ruby from the snow and took her into the warmth and the light, and ultimately the weapon used to vanquish evil as the Goblin King is skewered on the church spire. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised; identifying places of safety and sanctuary – homes away from home – have always been key to Davies’ writing, in Doctor Who and beyond, and we have seen previous instances in which he has recognized the unifying power of religious ritual (the hymns in Gridlock) and the church as sanctuary (in Paul Cornell’s Father’s Day, another Davies-era story).

My only criticism of this episode – and it’s an endearing annoyance rather than something to get really upset about – is that neither the church (in Ruby Road, Manchester) nor Ruby’s home street of Minto Road, Notting Hill, London look as though they are really in those places. The actual church is in a small village in Wales, and Minto Road was filmed in Bristol. I felt this through so much of Davies’ earlier seasons, in which the streets of Cardiff and other locations in South Wales failed to look like the London locations in which so many of his stories were set. It’s something about the wide open skies, an impression of cleaner air and the architectural styles – they just ain’t London.

A notable aspect of change in The Church on Ruby Road, and interesting in the context of my observations on the mix of hard science and supernatural allegory in Inferno, is the deliberate inclusion of, for want of better words, magic and fantasy – opposites of science. Instead of aliens, robots, spaceships and computers, we have Goblins, myth, the vocabulary of rope and the science of coincidence. Davies has made a point of saying that this is something of which we are going to see more during his second tenure. In narrative terms he links it to the Doctor invoking the superstition of a protective line of salt at the edge of the universe in Wild Blue Yonder. (What’s the magical version of technobabble? Mystibabble?) In more pragmatic terms, perhaps he feels this will be a way of capturing the imagination of a wider global audience, given the popularity of fantasy, magic, superheroes and anything else that offers an escape from the realities of the world in which we live.

It's not a direction that I expected for a new era of Doctor Who, but as I’ve said before this is an ever-expanding fictional universe – the unfolding text – and I love the idea of something completely new. The Goblins are a great start, a really fun addition to the Whoniverse. Their mischief, their cuteness, their stealthy fingers and their wicked little laughter (written as ‘Snicker-Snacker. Ticker-tacker. He-he-he’ in Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson’s novelisation) is very appealing, and their modus operandi of micro-sabotaging the everyday things around us reminded me of Steve Bell’s Gremlins strip in Jackpot comic.

The Church on Ruby Road’s showstopping moment is of course its musical number, ‘The Goblin Song’, including verses sung by Ncuti and Millie. What can I really say about this? You either love it or hate it, and I don’t think it would be possible for me to convince anyone to feel or think anything different about it than they already do. Me? I absolutely love it. Am I listening to it as I write this paragraph? Yes, of course I am. It’s catchy, camp, audacious and ridiculous, and if it embodies what Doctor Who is to become over the next few weeks then I’m here for it.

He’s not a myth, he’s an actual thing.

Connections

The Doctor has always liked a song, and there are a number of examples of them improvising a ditty across the decades. None of them have been quite as front and centre as Fifteen and Ruby’s solos in ‘The Goblin Song’, but in Inferno we see the Doctor singing extracts from two songs:  ‘La donna è mobile’ from Verdi’s Rigoletto, as he arrives at the drilling project at the start of Episode One, and a bastardised version of ‘Shine On, Harvest Moon’ (‘Shine on, Martian moons …’), as he tinkers with the TARDIS console at the opening of the story’s final scene.

The connections don’t end there. Both Inferno and The Church on Ruby Road see the Doctor visit a parallel timeline in which his friends exist in much darker circumstances.

The alt-universe Brigadier – or Brigade Leader – sports a sinister eyepatch, as does one of the Goblins.

In further medical dressing connections, both Davina McCall and Sir Keith Gold end up with a broken arm in a sling.

Gloves are a feature of both stories. Stahlman has to wear special gloves to hide his plasma-infected hand, while the Fifteenth Doctor reveals a new gadget for a new era – gravity-defying ‘intelligent gloves’. 

He utilises a more familiar gadget, the sonic screwdriver, for the purpose of traffic control in both adventures. In The Church on Ruby Road he makes a traffic light turn green so Ruby’s taxi doesn’t get squished by the enormous snowman, and in Inferno he uses the sonic to open the door to his shed, allowing access for Bessie.

In both stories a monster hisses at someone on a rooftop (a Goblin at Ruby on top of her house, and a Primord at the Doctor on the roof of an industrial unit), before an exciting chase scene along the same roofs.

‘Now, someone tell me what the hell is going on here!’ was the only clip we had of the Fifteenth Doctor for more than thirteen months, following its inclusion in a trailer at the end of The Power of the Doctor (October 2022) and his debut in The Giggle (December 2023). It’s a quote that is echoed, imprecisely, in both Inferno and The Church on Ruby Road. In the 1970 story, the question of what is ‘going on’ is asked on no less than ten occasions (three times by the Brigadier, twice by Greg Sutton, and once each by the Doctor, Liz, Petra Williams, Keith Gold  and Harry Slocum). In the 2023 adventure, the question of what or who ‘the hell’ is asked on six occasions (four times by Carla, and once each by the Doctor and Ruby). ‘Going on’ isn’t used at all in The Church on Ruby Road, and ‘hell’ isn’t used at all in Inferno – although it is of course a direct translation from the Italian of the title.