When I heard that an episode of Doctor Who had been scripted by Neil Gaiman, I was excited. As the man behind such works as Stardust and Coraline (which were then adapted for the big screen), Gaiman is the premier writer of Sci-Fi and Fantasy with a very unique proclivity for the extraordinary and the bizarre. It was only natural, then, that his episode of Doctor Who would be out of this Universe! Quite literally.
The Doctor’s Wife takes place in a realm outside of the Universe ( “Imagine a great big soap bubble with one of those tiny little bubbles on the outside. It’s nothing like that.”) after the Doctor receives a distress signal from another, and inexplicably alive, Time Lord. However, everything is a little ‘off’ in this extra-Universe, with patchwork people and the disembodied voice of an entity called House, spectacularly voiced by Michael Sheen (not Hugh Laurie).
It’s not long before things go wrong, and the fantastically sinister voice of Michael Sheen makes off with the TARDIS with Amy and Rory running around like two spiders trapped under a glass inside. However, all is not lost for the Doctor, now seemingly stranded in a junkyard beyond the Universe, as the soul of the TARDIS has been transferred to the body of Idris, a resident of the extra-Universe. Together, he and his humanised and temporally confined TARDIS set about devising a way to escape and reclaim the House-TARDIS.
Suranne Jones provides a magnificent performance as Idris and the personification of the TARDIS (or Sexy, as the Doctor calls her, a statement I’m strongly inclined to agree with!) in a role which seems to have been inspired by a parallel Universe Helena Bonham-Carter. The chemistry between her and Matt Smith worked splendidly, and Jone’s quirky interpretation of a time-travelling box shoved inside a human certainly helped up Smith’s game to bring about considerably the best performance he’s given as the Doctor to date.
The real triumph of this episode, though, has to be Neil Gaiman’s fantastic script. The sublime characterisation, the brilliant dialogue, and the narrative as a whole felt thoroughly intriguing and original, and I sincerely hope that this is not the last time Gaiman writes for Who.
At the end of the day, there has always been one woman for the Doctor, only one woman who could be considered his wife, and that has to be the TARDIS. The symbiotic relationship between a Time Lord and his TARDIS. Or should that be a TARDIS and her Time Lord?
If you missed the Doctor's Wife, it is available on BBC iPlayer here.
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