About JE Smith
Location: Irving, Texas
Occupation: Freelance
Bio: JE Smith, aka Jeff S., is a forty-something guy who was born in Illinois, but has been living in the wilds of Dallas, Texas for almost twenty years. He has been a movie nut ever since seeing Escape from the Planet of the Apes at Steeleville Theater in 1971 and is also obsessed with Doctor Who, Ultraman, Star Trek, The X Files, Batman, Spider-Man, Doc Savage and many other pop culture icons. For fifteen years (1981 - 1996) he published the sf/horror filmzine Wet Paint, and tried his hand at self-publishing his own comics with Bulletproof (1999, 3 issues) and Complex City (2000 - 2003, 4 issues and a trade paperback), both of which bombed. He's been writing film reviews for almost thirty years and is just getting the hang of it. Married to the lovely Barbara for over 16 years, and owned by a sleepy cat named Max.
Posts: 171
More from this author
“You fought her off with a water pistol. I bloody love you.”
Pompeii on Volcano Day – not a great place to be. Still, Donna and the Doctor make the best of things as this adventure really heats up.
Plot Points – The Doctor and Donna arrive in ancient Rome – specifically Pompeii, on the day before Vesuvius erupts. But something strange is going on: all the “seers” in town are absolutely accurate, and a strange cult is tracking the Doctor’s movements. Could it be the work of extraterrestrials? Hmm, let me guess.
Doctor Who? – Here the Doctor provides perhaps the most cogent explanation of his temporal nature in the series’ long history: “That’s how I see the universe. Every waking second I can see what is, what was, what could be, what must not. That’s the burden of a Time Lord, Donna. And I’m the only one left.” Evalina, divining the Doctor’s identity, says, “Even the word ‘Doctor’ is false. Your real name is hidden. It burns in the stars, in the cascade of Medusa herself.”
Hey, Hey, Donna – If you haven’t forgiven the ills of “The Runaway Bride” by this point, you probably never will. Donna’s working overtime to be charming, funny, and a “conscience” for the Doctor, and, for the most part, Tate pulls it off. She’s shown to be exceptionally sympathetic and compassionate, trying everything she can to get the Doctor to try and save the people of Pompeii. This is also the start of a running gag about people assuming the Doctor and Donna are a married couple, augmented here with an extra gag about them looking like siblings.
This Year’s Arc – Apparently the Big Finale is going to have something to do with disappearing planets, as this is the second mention in as many episodes about a planet being “lost.” There’s also a cryptic comment about Donna having something “on her back.” (And we assume they don’t just mean more freckles.) Another mention of the Shadow Proclamation.
Too Cool – Did the series get a huge boost in budget this year or something? “Fires of Pompeii” has got to be one of the most lavish episodes of Doctor Who ever produced. Granted, extensive use was made of the already-standing lot at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, but still…fire-belching rock monsters, a huge underground cavern, opulent interiors… it all just looks so expensive.
Weird Science – Near the end, the Doctor and Donna are inside Vesuvius – they’re inside the heart of a volcano that’s about to erupt. Shouldn’t it be too hot in the cavern for Donna (and possibly the Doctor, though there’s been enough gobbledygook over the years about Time Lord physiology to cover it) to survive? And I know it’s being done as a dramatic device, but there are obvious anachronisms in the way the Romans talk; their speech would likely have been much more formal than this. And why is there suddenly a god-like light emanating from the TARDIS at the end? (Answer: because it looks cool.)
Dumb Stuff – I don’t mind the idea that the Doctor would use a water pistol, but why does he have it on his person? There’s obviously no way he could have anticipated heat-specific monsters, and is never seen to enter the TARDIS again once the adventure begins. And, as Martha once pointed out, it is a very tight suit, and not a lot of room for extraneous gear. (True, there was a bit in “The Runaway Bride” about him having pockets that were bigger on the inside, like the TARDIS, but I assumed that was supposed to be a joke.) And while the editing makes it look like the Doctor destroys one of the rock monsters with the squirt gun (after it only “stung” the High Priestess) – which would certainly qualify as a Dumb Thing – I believe the implication is that it only holds off the monster long enough for he and Donna to pass, which is still Slightly Dumb, but I can live with it. And this one is somewhat open to interpretation: the Sisterhood (and other seers in town) don’t foresee the eruption of Vesuvius because the Pyroviles are planning to suck up the explosion’s fury and use it to their own purposes – fair enough, and kind of nifty idea. But what the various seers do see instead is simply normality (“The sun rises, the sun sets, nothing unusual” says Evalina) – shouldn’t they be seeing all the screaming and bloody horror of the Pyroviles turning everyone to stone and overrunning the planet? (The Doctor’s lightning-fast explanation of why the seers were able to predict the future doesn’t really indicate how much control the Pyroviles have over it, but sort of indicates that it was incidental rather than intentional.) Oh, and about that “house gods” tablet at the end – pretty accurate carving, no? Almost as if they had access to some publicity photos…. (Thanks to Sarah Hadley for that one.)
Classic Who – The TARDIS being considered a work of “modern art” is a sly nod to a similar joke in “City of Death” (17.2), which featured John Cleese and Eleanor Bron as art critics. The Sisterhood of the Sybilline is highly reminiscent of the Sisterhood of Karn from the Tom Baker story “The Brain of Morbius” (13.5), and also has echoes of the Mentiads from Douglas Adams’ superb “The Pirate Planet” (16.2). The Doctor references the William Hartnell story “The Romans” (2.4) by claiming “a little” responsibility for the Great Fire of Rome, which was depicted at the end of that story. Also, the Doctor’s arrival being foretold in a prophecy is a staple of the classic series.
Classic Who: Big Finish – The Doctor in Pompeii is a very classical Doctor Who-ish sort of idea… so much so that it’s already been done (but not to worry, in the classic series, the Doctor witnessed the destruction of Atlantis in no less than three separate, and often contradictory, stories). Big Finish is a UK-based company that has been producing officially licensed full cast Doctor Who audio plays since 1999, using many of the show’s original actors, including four previous Doctors. “The Fires of Vulcan” (2000) was a Seventh Doctor/Mel story which saw the pair arrive in Pompeii the day before the eruption, sending the Doctor into a fit of melancholy, because he knows that thousands of years later – 1980 to be exact – the TARDIS will be unearthed in the ruins of Pompeii. Thus, he assumes that he will die here. Despite the similar title and a few vaguely similar scenes at the beginning, the new episode is in no way an adaptation of the audio play. “Vulcan” has no science fiction element at all (it’s what the fans call a pure “historical”) and is concerned mainly with political machinations, and Mel getting captured and escaping as many times as possible. [As of this writing, only two Big Finish stories have been adapted for the new series, both of them very loosely: Rob Shearman’s excellent “Jubilee” was the basis for “Dalek” (1.6), and Marc Platt’s “Spare Parts” was the inspiration for the two-parter “Rise of the Cybermen”/“The Age of Steel” (2.5, 2.6).]
Final Answer – Now this is more like it. Very traditional in structure, and shot through with cool ideas (the people of Pompeii being turned to stone before the eruption, a power converter made of marble tablets, the eruption being used to fuel an alien plot), “Pompeii” is a knockout. True, there are some terrible jokes (“T.K. Maximus,” “Don’t get yourself in a lava,” references to Spartacus and Fawlty Towers) and some clunky dialogue (Caecilius’ line at the end, as he invents the word “volcano” is one of the most tortured bits of scripting since the new series began), and it’s off-putting at first hearing the Pompeiians speaking like modern folk. But the story quickly takes hold, and makes the most of its opulent production values. The characters are engaging, the pace is brisk, and the conclusion is one of the most emotionally powerful in the series’ long history – for a time we really do believe that the Doctor will leave no survivors. Catherine Tate continues to impress, making Donna far more three-dimensional than I would have originally thought possible. This is the best mix of spectacle and emotion since last season’s “Human Nature”/”Family of Blood,” and it works beautifully.
