Spoiler-Alert!
This article contains spoilers for the Doctor-Who-Episode “The Unquiet Dead” (NW S01E03).
About the plot
The episode begins in a funeral parlour. We see a grandson mourning at his grandmother’s open coffin and the undertaker. When the grandson asks to be alone with the dead woman for a moment, something strange and frightening happens. A blue mist rises, the woman’s face begins to glow and she opens her eyes. The completely stunned grandson is grabbed and strangled. The undertaker comes back into the room because of the sounds of fighting and manages to free the man from his grandmother’s grip. He tries to lock the supposed dead woman back into the coffin, but is overpowered by her. From his words we can infer that this is not the first such incident. The dead woman leaves the funeral home and as the blue glow grows stronger, she lets out a scream.
In a short cutscene we see the Doctor and Rose trying with some difficulty to steer the TARDIS. The Doctor manoeuvres them into what appears to be the year 1860.
Back at the Undertaker’s, he calls his maid Gwyneth and, when she appears, reproaches her for not being there. He orders her to harness the carriage and reports what has happened. Again it becomes clear that this was not the first incident of this kind and Gwyneth, speaks of the house being cursed and that they desperately need help. We also learn that the walking dead’s grandson was probably killed by her.
The TARDIS materialises in a side street and we see Rose and the Doctor lying on the ground laughing. The Doctor is convinced he has taken them both to Naples for Christmas Eve in 1860. When Rose just wants to storm out the door, the Doctor reprimands her, as she would probably cause a riot in her current clothes. So Rose is sent to the dressing room.
Meanwhile, we again see the so-far unsuccessful efforts of the undertaker and Gwyneth to find the dead woman. Due to the hopeless search, the undertaker forces his maid to use her gift, which he calls the second sight. After a brief refusal, Gwyneth senses the wandering deceased’s thoughts. She realises that shortly before her death, the wanted woman was going to see a very well-known man.
Next we see Charles Dickens sitting in his dressing room, apparently suffering from a headache. A man points out to him that Dickens needs to go on stage. Dickens complains to the man about his discomfort, which is mainly the repetition of the same performance over and over again.
Rose emerges from the dressing room again and her outfit is complimented by the Doctor. The two leave the TARDIS and step out into the snow.
Charles Dickens steps in front of an applauding audience, in which the walking dead can already be seen. She stares at the celebrated author. At the same time, Gwyneth and her employer, as well as the Doctor and Rose, pass by the theatre. Gwyneth is sure that the target of their search is inside. The Doctor buys a newspaper and notices that he has got it a bit wrong. It is not 1860 but 1869 and they are not in Naples but in Cardiff. On stage Charles Dickens is reciting from his well-known Christmas story. In the middle of the recitation, the dead woman’s face begins to glow bluish again, but this time the glow leaves her body and flies around the room. The audience panics and against the tide of people Rose, the Doctor, the Undertaker and Gwyneth enter the room. The latter grab the woman’s slumped body and carry it out of the room, with Rose in pursuit. The doctor, meanwhile, introduces himself to Dickens and asks him things about the apparition which he thinks are a bad joke.
Outside, Rose confronts Gwyneth, who tries to talk her way out of the matter. However, when Rose realises that the woman is dead, the undertaker is forced to sedate her and lock her in the car, under protest from Gwyneth, as she has already seen too much. Inside, the doctor realises that the apparition is a being made of gas. He runs outside and only sees the carriage driving away. When he hijacks Dickens’ carriage to pursue him, he also learns who the man is whose performance has been disrupted. The doctor immediately reveals himself to be an ardent admirer.
The undertaker and Gwyneth bar Rose on a table. When there is a knock at the door, the undertaker instructs his maid to turn away the knockers and hides. Meanwhile, Rose awakens from her stupor, while in the background the grandson also awakens and lunges at Rose with his grandmother. However, the Doctor and Charles Dickens are able to save her and the Doctor talks to the creatures. They ask him to open the rift, as they are weak and cannot exist in their present form.
The protagonists have an animated discussion about what has happened. Dickens does not believe what he has seen and thinks it is an illusion. Gwyneth gives the Doctor pause when she hands him a cup of tea with the words “just the way they like it”. The Doctor explains that the cause of the apparitions is a rift in the space-time continuum that is widening.
The Doctor then talks to Dickens about what he thinks must be illusions and gives him something to think about. In addition, Rose converses with Gwyneth and is confronted with the social circumstances and customs of the time she is visiting, throwing Gwyneth into a certain amused consternation. Through a remark about Rose’s dead father, she becomes aware of Gwyneth’s special ability. When this is revealed to her, the Doctor hears this too, explaining it by saying that she grew up close to the rift.
This gives the Doctor the idea of holding a seánce, which Dickens attends very reluctantly. The blue mist enters the room and the Doctor realises that Gwyneth is controlling the rift, not being controlled by it. Gas beings materialise behind her, astonishing those present and revealing themselves to be Gelth. They ask the doctor for help, as they are the last of their kind. The eternal war has destroyed their bodies and made them refugees. To help the Gelth, Gwyneth is to be taken to the rift and open it so that the Gelth can continue to exist in the bodies of deceased humans.
After the Gelth disappear and Gwyneth wakes up from a faint, everyone debates whether Gwyneth should open the rift and whether it is right to let the Gelth walk the earth in corpses. However, Gwyneth makes this decision herself and decides to help the Gelth.
In the morgue, the Doctor enlightens Rose that time can be rewritten. Then the Gelth show up and are happy to be helped. The Doctor makes the condition that this is only an interim solution and that he will take the Gelth to another place where they can form their own bodies.
After Gwyneth has placed herself in an archway and opened the passageway, however, the Gelth reveal their true colours and it turns out that it is an invasion. Billions of Gelth want to cross over to Earth and they all need corpses as new bodies.
How they want to obtain these bodies is then promptly shown when the undertaker, after trying in vain to get Gwyneth to close the rift, is killed by a resurrected corpse and is promptly “occupied” by a Gelth as well. The Gelth legions take possession of more and more corpses in the morgue and the Doctor and Rose can only barely escape behind an iron barred door. While the Doctor reproaches the Gelth for hoodwinking him, Dickens flees the house but is pursued by the Gelth. As he flees, he has a brilliant idea. He extinguishes the flames of the gas lights and turns on the gas at the same time. When the doctor then also rips the gas pipe out of the wall, the Gelth are drawn out of their bodies into the gas, as it is more like their natural environment.
The Doctor now tries to get Gwyneth to close the rift before the living people present suffocate. But Gwyneth cannot do this. However, she sees an opportunity to sacrifice herself and keep the Gelth in the house. Rose tries to stop her, but the Doctor realises that she was already dead. Dickens gets Rose out of the building and the Doctor makes it out too, just before Gwyneth ignites the gas with a match. At the farewell afterwards, the Doctor gives great comfort to Charles Dickens, who will die in the coming year, by revealing to him that his works will last forever.
Time should actually be linear. Actually, we experience each day only once and also only those days that are actually located in our lifetime and those again only where we are. No human being has the ability to travel to a time and place at will. However, through her newfound friendship with the Doctor, Rose is granted this chance. Having last been to the distant future, the two are about to travel back in time – and meet Charles Dickens!
The last episode, “The End Of The World”, ended with more than a few losing their lives in the face of a dying Earth as Cassandra tried to push through her selfish and highly immoral plans. This episode begins instead with death, more precisely: at a funeral home. Immediately, the problem of the episode becomes apparent: the dead don’t seem to want to stay dead. Zombies in 19th century London. We don’t know what happens to them yet, we only see how blue glowing clouds take possession of them and make them wander (and kill). The only ones who know the problem: the undertaker and his employee Gwyneth, who also has clairvoyant powers – the second sight. Who should believe that either?
SNEED: You witnessed it. Can’t keep the beggars down, sir. They walk. And it’s the queerest thing, but they hang on to scraps.
From the transcript.
(Gwyneth places the Doctor’s cup on the mantlepiece beside him.)
GWYNETH: Two sugars, sir, just how you like it.
SNEED: One old fellow who used to be a sexton almost walked into his own memorial service. Just like the old lady going to your performance, sir, just as she planned.
DICKENS: Morbid fancy.
DOCTOR: Oh, Charles, you were there.
DICKENS: I saw nothing but an illusion.
If it weren’t an episode of Doctor Who, you might think that someone was playing a bad joke. That some kind of trick is at work, because the walking dead don’t quite fit into our world view. This is what happens to Charles Dickens, who witnesses the events when one of the zombies sits in his audience and causes panic. He says of himself that he is committed to social issues and therefore should not concern himself with fantasies and fantasy, as only the real world counts. At the end of the episode, however, he is disabused of this notion when he learns that there is more to the world than what he had previously thought to be certain. That there will be things in the future that he could not even dream of today and that there is more between heaven and earth than the knowledge of his time conveys to him.
And although he does not really understand all this at first, he helps the doctor in his search for the abducted Rose. Meanwhile, she has been locked up in the morgue with the murderous zombies because she seemed to know too much. The persistence of the Doctor and Dickens persuade Gwyneth, who already did not approve of the murder of an innocent woman, to let them in and rescue Rose. The Doctor promptly takes on the real problem too. What disturbs the peace of the dead?
They finally manage to communicate with the gas beings, the Gelth. These tell their (apparent) story. They enter our world through a crack in the space-time structure of the undertaker’s house. They have been decimated by a catastrophe and are now looking for a new home. In order to survive, however, they need bodies. That is why they have appropriated the corpses. The doctor doesn’t think it’s a bad idea to temporarily provide the Gelth with some bodies, which are actually no longer needed, until he finds a permanent solution for them.
Rose does not see this as an option. She finds it distasteful to leave the remains of the dead to other beings and sees the deceased as having their dignity violated. The doctor tries to defend the recycling and holds out to her that it is ultimately a custom and that saving lives must take precedence over such a custom. The memory of the dead can be preserved in other ways than through their remains, but the Gelth can only be saved in this way. It may also be noted that the treatment of the bodies of the deceased can vary greatly depending on culture and religion! How the memory is best preserved cannot be clarified even in reality. It turns out that life comes first for the doctor. Rose can be persuaded by this reasoning.
The Gelth, however, need a bridge so that they can all cross from one world to another. Gwyneth, who grew up on the Rift and was able to connect to the Gelth through her second sight, volunteers to become that bridge. Rose tries to dissuade her and get the Doctor to find another solution, believing that Gwyneth would be used as a tool and a reckless victim. Besides, who knew the consequences of being the bridge for the beings? However, she has to realise that it is precisely through these efforts that she herself patronises Gwyneth and thereby downplays and suppresses her (apparently) free desire to help the beings who have always accompanied her and whom she calls her angels. Together they all go to the cellar where the crack is. Gwyneth stands under the arch where the worlds are closest and creates the bridge – the Gelth can come. Now, however, their true selves are revealed – the Gelth are not a peaceful band of survivors looking for a place to stay. They are billions of hostile beings intent on taking over Earth. Since the corpses are not enough to accommodate them all, they begin to “create” corpses of their own.
By this deception and by violating the conditions set by the Doctor, the Gelth have now made an enemy of him. They have taken advantage of the Doctor’s kindness and Gwyneth’s naivety and must now be stopped. The first approach Dickens develops shows short-term success. The leaking gas sucks the Gelth out of the dead bodies and the acute threat of zombies is averted. However, a gas-filled cellar is not a particularly life-friendly environment for humans and Timelords, and so Rose, the doctor and Charles Dickens are threatened with suffocation. Moreover, it is only a short-term solution that will not stop the Gelth for long. To finally protect Earth from their invasion, the rift must be closed and the Gelth already in this world must be destroyed. Gwyneth offers to do this by lighting a match. Again Rose wants to stop her, but the Doctor realises it is the only way.
Dickens and Rose flee the house. The Doctor stays a moment, possibly to thank Gwyneth for her sacrifice. However, he realises that Gwyneth has already sacrificed herself: she is already dead, but unlike the zombies, she is still in possession of her free will and mind. Now the doctor also flees and Gwyneth ignites the gas. She is a hero who saved the world, except that no one would ever know her name or what she had done for the world.
(The Doctor runs out and KaBOOM! The Doctor goes flying across the street.)
On the street, right after Gwyneth closed the rift.
ROSE: She didn’t make it.
DOCTOR: I’m sorry. She closed the rift.
DICKENS: At such a cost. The poor child.
DOCTOR: I did try, Rose, but Gwyneth was already dead. She had been for at least five minutes.
ROSE: What do you mean?
DOCTOR: I think she was dead from the minute she stood in that arch.
ROSE: But she can’t have. She spoke to us. She helped us. She saved us. How could she have done that?
DICKENS: There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Even for you, Doctor.
ROSE: She saved the world. A servant girl. No one will ever know.
But is she even a heroine because she gave her “life” to close the crack? After all, her heart had already stopped when she created the bridge for the Gelth. Did she even have a choice? Her life had already been forfeited… The episode does not give us an answer to these questions. Sure, the Doctor probably wouldn’t have left her behind if he had seen any other option. But is that only because she was already dead? Nor is it clear exactly what the circumstances of her death were. Is she “possessed” by the Gelth? Why is she still able to speak while the Gelth spoke through the other dead? Ultimately, as I said, these questions cannot be decided. But we have the impression that this last sacrifice may not have been as great as it seems when one first sees the episode.
Finally, we would like to mention three other motives that appeared in the episode but only played a background role:
(1) Rose and the Doctor’s relationship is put in a new light here for the first time. In a few moments, the chance becomes apparent that this friendship will deepen even further, that it will take a romantic turn.
ROSE: We’ll go down fighting, yeah?
Conversation between the doctor and Rose in the face of impending death at the hands of the Gelth.
DOCTOR: Yeah.
ROSE: Together?
DOCTOR: Yeah.
(They hold hands.)
DOCTOR: I’m so glad I met you.
ROSE: Me too.
(2) In the conversation between Rose and Gwyneth, the former realises how very different their lives are and how different the times are in which they are living. Things that Rose takes for granted, and should, are completely foreign to Gwyneth. Of course, given the injustices Rose is confronted with here, one could say that it was just the way of the times and that it was customary. However, conventionality and the fact that it is the way it is are not convincing arguments against injustice.
(Gwyneth lights the gas lamp. Rose starts the washing up.)
Conversation between Rose and Gwyneth in a storage room.
GWYNETH: Please, miss, you shouldn’t be helping. It’s not right.
ROSE: Don’t be daft. Sneed works you to death. How much do you get paid?
GWYNETH: Eight pound a year, miss.
ROSE: How much?
GWYNETH: I know. I would’ve been happy with six.
ROSE: So, did you go to school or what?
GWYNETH: Of course I did. What do you think I am, an urchin? I went every Sunday, nice and proper.
ROSE: What, once a week?
GWYNETH: We did sums and everything.
(3) We meet Charles Dickens at the beginning of the episode as a downright depressed man who believes that the world has nothing more to offer him and also that he has nothing more to offer the world. Events, however, show him that the world is more wondrous than it sometimes seems. At the end of the episode, he then wonders how much influence we have on the world at all, whether he will leave anything behind once he is gone. It’s a concern we experience quite often – both in our world and in Doctor Who’s. We all have an urgent need to leave our mark on the world and counteract the finite nature of the world (see last episode).
You have no control
From the song “History Has Its Eyes On You” from the musical Hamilton.
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story
In conclusion, we have only one thing to say: Unfortunately, we did not find the episode that good. Most of the themes dealt with are only inconsistently applied. The theme of the episode in general (and the implementation, especially in view of the CGI of 2005) is only mediocre. But we know: One day (not yet in the next episodes, but then certainly) we will be allowed to transport the full potential of the series. We hope that, despite everything, we have managed to give you a little foretaste here.
Memorable quote from this episode:
DOCTOR: Honestly, Charles. Can I call you Charles? I’m such a big fan.
From the conversation between the Doctor and Charles Dickens in the latter’s carriage.
DICKENS: A what? A big what?
DOCTOR: Fan. Number one fan, that’s me.
DICKENS: How exactly are you a fan? In what way do you resemble a means of keeping oneself cool?