The Crimson Horror

This week the Doctor and Clara take a trip up North and are joined by Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax to fight Mrs Gillyflower and the Crimson Horror! As usual there will be spoilers so if you haven’t yet seen the episode I suggest you look away now!

The episode began with the Paternoster Row gang deciding they should head up to Yorkshire after the image of the Doctor is imprinted on a dead man’s eye. And it is no ordinary corpse as the man’s skin is bright red. They begin to investigate, sending Jenny in to pose as a potential worker at the mysterious Sweetville factory. Eventually she finds the Doctor, virtually paralysed and with bright red skin. It turns out Mrs Gillyflower has a symbiotic relationship with an evolved form of an ancient leech and is planning to wipe out humanity with leech poison, preserving only the best looking for her new world using a diluted version.

All in all, a bonkers episode! Interestingly fans seem to have a rather split opinion on it. The thing with this episode is that it didn’t try to do anything particularly new and had no part to play in the plot arc, it was just a jolly good romp. Should Doctor Who be allowed to do that? Well that’s up to you but for me it has always been part of the show and always should be!

The episode had a heavy focus on the Paternoster Row gang. We first met them in 2011’s A Good Man Goes to War. Back then Strax, the Sontaran, had been forced to be a nurse during a war by the Doctor, knowing how much of an insult he would see it as. Jenny is a Victorian Chambermaid with a very intimate relationship with Silurian Madame Vastra.

The trio then returned to fight the Great Intelligence in The Snowmen and made their third appearance in this episode. It’s not the last we’ll see of them either as they will be back in the series finale, The Name of the Doctor. The trio are great fun- Vastra and Jenny are pretty bad-ass, as Jenny demonstrated today. Strax is hilarious, largely because he is a warrior who doesn’t get to do much fighting. The funniest moment of the episode involved Strax, when a small boy told him detailed directions much like a Satnav. When asked his name the boy said it was “Thomas, Thomas”. TomTom, geddit?

The great guest cast was rounded off by Diana Rigg and her daughter Rachel Stirling. Rigg is best known for her role as Emma Peel in British spy drama The Avengers and as a Bond Girl in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service but the modern audience might know her better for her role in Game of Thrones. Diana Rigg was excellent as the sinister Mrs Gillyflower- interestingly this is the first time in her whole career where she got to speak in her real accent. Mark Gatiss wrote the episode especially for the mother and daughter.

As with the rest of this run, tonight’s episode featured some references to the show’s past. The first came when talking about the eye of a dead person retaining an image of the last thing it sees. The Fourth Doctor discussed this is the fantastic story The Ark in Space and he too said it was not impossible and managed to access the last image. A bigger reference came when the Doctor spoke to Clara about a gobby Australian. This harks back to the Fifth Doctor era when companion Tegan was desperate to get to Heathrow Airport to become an air-hostess. She eventually made it there in Time-Flight. The Doctor even says “Braveheart, Clara” just like he used to say to Tegan.

The final scene of the episode was a little unusual as it seemed only to serve the purpose of setting up the next episode. Angie and Artie, the two children Clara nannies for had found photos of her from Cold War and Hide.That’s the trouble with only travelling to the fairly recent past, you might get noticed! Angie and Artie will join the Doctor and Clara in next week’s episode, which is written by Neil Gaiman and sees the return and re-invention of the Cybermen. Gaiman’s last Who episode, The Doctor’s Wife, quickly became a fan favourite and from the reviews so far this looks like it will do the same.

More on that next week though! Angie and Artie also managed to find a photo of the Victorian version of Clara. It is the first time modern Clara has any inclination there might be another version of her. The Doctor has not exactly been subtle about it either, visiting a empathetic psychic and trying to get back to Victorian London to solve the mystery. It seems possible that during the course of the next episode Clara is going to find out about the other hers, or if not then than in the finale.

That’s all for today but do join us next week for Nightmare in Silver!