Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Inferno Episode Seven

Long story is looooooong!

The stock footage from the start of each episode now makes sense, it was foreshadowing the destruction of the evilverse which is only just now happening.

After the cliffhanger reprise there is a hard cut to the Doctor lying on the floor having sleeps - it is going to be very, very disappointing if the last four parts turn out to have been only a dream, mew.
He is back in the UNITverse, which we can tell when UNITverse Liz with her UNITverse hair comes in and sees him.

Stahlman is still the Health & Safety Executive's worst nightmare, even saying to Petra

"Safety margins are for cautious old women like Sir Keith."

When Greg and Petra together try to talk some sense to him, the close ups make it really obvious he is a properly mad scientist obsessed with reaching "Penetration Zero at the earliest possible moment."
Even they notice it now. Unlike a lot of mad scientists who are mad, evil, or mad and evil just to give a story a good baddy... er, I mean a decent baddy... er, no, oh you know what I mean, mew... unlike those, Stahlman's increasing monomaniacal obsession is caused by the green slime.

Stahlman describes Greg as

"One of Sir Keith's little army of experts. Well, we don't need your advice, Mr Sutton. Now that ridiculous Doctor has gone, Sir Keith himself has gone, why don't you follow their example? And then we might make some progress?"

Now, who does that remind me of?

Image of Michael Gove deleted under guidance from
the Cat Health & Safety Executive (CHASE)

Do you think he also must have touched the green slime?

There's an explosion and an alarm goes off. In the hut the Brigadier is there with Liz when the Doctor wakes up. He knows it is "number two output pipe blown" because he has already seen it happen in his dream the evilverse. The Brigadier confirms by telephone that this is indeed what has happened and is amazed the Doctor knows. He then mumbles about "reverse all systems" before going back to sleep.

Liz passes what the Doctor said on to Greg, and he says the same thing the other Greg already said in episode 4 when it happened in the evilverse:

"It's not such a crazy idea. It's been done before."

The Doctor wakes up, properly this time, and when he sees Liz and the Brigadier he says

"You know, you really do look better with that moustache."
"Delirious, poor chap."

LOL! He tells them where he has been, and once accidentally calls the Brigadier "Brigade Leader."

Sir Keith comes in with a bandaged arm. The Doctor says "so you're not dead?" and that this is "excellent, excellent!"

"Well, yes, yes, I think so too."

says Sir Keith, deadpan. The Doctor talks to himself (and us) about what this means:

"Yes, of course, of course. An infinity of universes, ergo an infinite number of choices. So free will is not an illusion after all. The pattern can be changed."

Then he turns to Sir Keith:

"Sir Keith, unless we do something very, very quickly indeed, there's going to be a disaster."
"How do you know, Doctor?"
"Because I've already seen it."

They go to the control room to stop Stahlman, but the Doctor jeopardises the mission when he goes on a rampage and attacks a panel to try and stop the drilling. The Brigadier is forced to have UNIT mannys take him away.

Even when Sir Keith tries to take charge, Stahlman refuses to relinquish control or stop the drilling. Stahlman chases all the other mannys out of the drill room, saying he wants to do it all by himself, then he closes the door. Once he is alone, Stahlman starts noming the green slime.

The Doctor uses Venusian Karate to Blake the two UNIT mannys taking him away, then runs for it. He goes up on the roof to hide from them, but that is exactly where the green manny is.

Just like he did in the evilverse, the Doctor gets the conveniently nearby fire extinguisher with which to extinguish the green manny.

The Doctor comes back into the studio. Even with everything that has happened, Sir Keith will not order the drilling shut down without Stahlman's agreement, and says "we have no proof of an emergency situation."

Stahlman opens the door and gives them all the proof they need, because he has become fully green and hairy. He hits the Doctor with a chair, then Greg and the Doctor fire extinguish him - and I get the impression that Greg had been wanting to do that to Stahlman for a while, lol.

Petra obeys the Doctor's order to shut down the drilling, while an extra behind her forgets what he is supposed to be doing and just looks confused. The drill keeps going anyway, because Stahlman has smashed one of the sets of controls, so the Doctor has to try and make it work. The countdown voiceover manny sounds disappointed when he has to report

"Attention! Attention! Countdown drilling stopped at minus thirty five seconds."

The emergency is over, so the scene moves on to the hut where the Doctor and Liz are working on the TARDIS console. The Brigadier and Sir Keith come in.

Sir Keith says goodbye, as he won't see the Doctor again until he plays Henry Gordon Jago in Talons of Weng-Chiang, but the Brigadier stays to argue with the Doctor about whether he should use the nuclear power to make one last trip with the TARDIS console before they switch the power off for good. This ends when the Doctor says

"Goodbye, Liz. I shall miss you, my dear. But I've had about all I can stand of this pompous, self-opinionated idiot here."

The Doctor and the console disappear, but the Brigadier and Liz only have time to exchange a few words before he comes back in.

He says the console only took him

"A few seconds forward in time, and a few hundred yards due east in space."
"The rubbish tip?"
"The rubbish tip."

What's so good about Inferno?

Inferno is one of the archetypal parallel universe stories in sci-fi TV, along with Star Trek's Mirror, Mirror and Red Dwarf's, er, Parallel Universe.

Considering the number of Doctor Who stories there are, it is perhaps surprising there haven't been more based around the concept of alternative versions of settings and characters we know. But then it would be tough for them to live up to the high standard set by Inferno, which does it so well on the first attempt - creating an interesting, and chilling, alternate police state Britain where our UNIT heroes are thuggish villains, all drawn in a few lines of dialogue between the Brigade Leader and the Doctor:

"I have full authority. Defence of the Republic Act, 1943."
"Republic?"
"Yes."
"Then what's happened to the Royal..."
"Executed. All of them."

And then there is the Inferno project itself, which starts off seeming like the sort of scientific research centre typical of the era, not dissimilar to the one most recently seen in Doctor Who and the Silurians, which we might reasonably expect to end up under some kind of siege from the green mannys or something, but instead it escalates into one of the most apocalyptic, high stakes stories evar - in the evilverse, we even see the Doctor lose!

This gives the story the kind of dramatic power that it is rare to see. On top of that, while a lot of Doctor Who stories see self-sacrifice from minor characters, such as might be expected of Greg or Petra, Inferno has it from main character Liz. And we also see our expectations further subverted when we get the opposite behaviour from the evilverse counterpart of the Brigadier, the one character who (aside from the Doctor) we know best.

While I know this is hardly an original observation, I am bound to say that it is interesting that there was no alternative Doctor in the evilverse. Perhaps there just wasn't room for one in the story with all the other plot elements - the evilverse already filled up the equivalent of a full four-part story within the context of a seven-parter. Dealing with opposition from an evil Doctor could have made it even longer, or conversely a second good Doctor (played by a different actor perhaps?) could have helped our Doctor shorten it.
Explanations for the evilverse-Doctor's non-presence have been provided in spinoff media (I believe it was Paul Cornell who suggested in one of his novels that an evil Doctor was the "precious dictator" that Greg referred to), but I think the simplest explanation is that that universe's Doctor would have had nothing to do with the evil mannys of the Republic.

I note there was no evilverse Captain Hawkins either, mew.