TV with MeeVee: Totally Frakked: Doctor Who -- Facetime With The Doctor

Doctor Who
Title: "Gridlock"
First Aired (US): 07/21/07

It's flashback time for "Doctor Who" fans; "Gridlock" takes us back to New Earth, and reunites us with one of the most ridiculous and excellent "Doctor Who" creatures, The Face Of Boe. Things have changed on New Earth when Martha and The Doctor arrive. They find themselves in the lower city, where desperate, impoverished New Earthers attempt to get out of Dodge by taking the clogged expressways.

Just as The Doctor and Martha are getting their bearings and turning down insistent drug dealers, a young couple appears and kidnaps Martha. The Doctor tries to give chase, but they get away from him. After learning from their friendly neighborhood drug dealers that Martha's been kidnapped so that the couple can get into the worst fast lane in history, The Doctor takes his trusty sonic screwdriver and busts into the expressway, determined to rescue his new companion.

In the meantime, Martha is informed by her captors that they'll drop her off after they use her to travel to New Brooklyn, the only hitch is that ten mile journey is expected to take about six years. Despite the situation, Martha's convinced The Doctor will come and save her, I'm not sure I'd be so confident in her position.

There wouldn't be much story if Martha wasn't right, of course, and the Doctor does indeed come after her. He busts in on Cat Person and his human wife who have been driving for 12 years and learns about the eternal gridlock of the motorway. He quickly surmises that the system has broken down, and no help is waiting in the wings for the New Earthers on the road. Apparently along with being drug addicts, the New Earthers are the stupidest humans in history, since it seems like anyone who paid attention for five minutes would notice there was something amiss. After attempting to convince the couple to take him down, The Doctor heads off, jumping from car to car in an effort to make his way down to the fast lane to find Martha.

Down in the fast lane, things are not looking good. Ghastly noises come from all around the vehicle as Martha and her kidnappers try to make their way. They're even warned by another driver to climb back up into the slow lanes. They don't take the advice, even despite the fact that the warning cuts off when the other driver is attacked. As The Doctor discovers when he comes to the bottom of the slow lane, the noise comes from Macra, an old school crab-monster enemy that the second doctor battled back in the 60s. While Martha and her "friends" attempt to escape their crabby clutches, The Doctor is kidnapped by Novice Hame -- a Cat Woman from the original New Earth episode -- who insists that he must come with her.

Novice Hame takes The Doctor to see the ailing Face of Boe, who is slowly dying in his big glass jar. New Earth above has been wiped out by a virus that killed them so quickly there was only time to seal off the motorway and quarantine the people below. Novice Hame and the big face have been keeping the city running since then. Despite being theoretically the oldest being in the universe, and pretty clever, the Face of Boe apparently hasn't considered the problem very carefully, since The Doctor figures out how to solve the problem in about 2 minutes. Oh well, I guess that's why he's The Doctor.

The motorway exits are opened, and all the New Earthers, including Martha and her kidnappers, who cheerfully release her. They also conveniently drop her off at the senate building, where she's reunited with the Doctor and introduced to Novice Hame and the Face of Boe. The Face gave his last burst of power to aid The Doctor in his plan, and so takes a dramatic moment to keel over and die. Well, he doesn't exactly keel over, he mostly just lies there. Giant heads aren't so mobile. Before dying, the Face tells The Doctor that what he believes is wrong, he's not alone.

In the epilogue, Martha insists on getting some answers from The Doctor. He's been shining her on about Gallifrey and himself, clearly unwilling to get into the gritty details of his life story with someone who he still plans to return to her home. She asks him what the Face of Boe meant, and he fesses up, telling her that Gallifrey is gone and he's the last of the time lords. It's a nice bonding moment for the two, sometimes all it takes is an intergalactic giant head to bring two people together.

I'm sad that the chemistry between the two characters hasn't yet matched what we saw in the season opener. The Doctor is his usual frenetic, brilliant, intense self and Martha remains compelling, but they're just not meshing as well as it's clear they can. Maybe the dying act of the Face will stir things up again.

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