What the Shakespeare Is Going On? - "The Unquiet Dead"

Guest: Author and podcaster Alan J. Porter returns to help unwrap the Ninth Doctor's first trip into the past.

The Doctor Meets a Legend

For the first time the boys can readily recall, the Doctor doesn't just name-drop a historical figure in passing — he goes toe-to-toe with one. That hook launches a lovely round-table on who each of them would most want to share a TARDIS trip (and a few drinks) with, before the trio digs into Mark Gatiss's first televised Doctor Who script: a gothic Christmas ghost story built around Charles Dickens. Fittingly, Gatiss himself was wary of putting the Doctor nose-to-nose with Dickens at first — a reluctance the episode (and the podcast) cheerfully dismantles.

The Best of the Bunch So Far

Three episodes into the new era, this is the one all three land on as the strongest yet — though they arrive by different roads. Alan counts it among his all-time favorite Who stories, full stop. Jim, seeing it for the very first time in 21 years (he remembers none of it, which may have helped), calls it the best of the three. And John, who found it a touch slow on first broadcast back in the day, has come around in a big way. The through-line: this is the episode that signaled the revival would do variety — horror, history, sci-fi, mystery — rather than chase, chase, chase.

Simon Callow Is Dickens

The hosts marvel at the casting of a man who has literally written a biography of Dickens and played him many times over — and at the choice to catch the author late in life, weary and sad, rather than young and firing on all cylinders. There's rich talk of Dickens's slow, skeptical arc from debunker to believer, and the beautifully Dickensian grace note the episode hangs on The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

A Girl Worth Keeping (Again)

Two episodes running, the show hands us a young female guest so good you wish she'd stuck around — first Jabe, now Eve Myles's Gwyneth. The trio digs into the servant girl's quiet power, the warm, funny gulf between a modern girl and a Victorian one that she and Rose bridge, and the lore this episode quietly plants: a certain Cardiff rift, a surname that'll echo through a future spin-off, a second whisper of Bad Wolf, and the first mention of Rose's father. Alan points out just how much foundation is being laid here, three episodes in, for seasons still to come.

This Is a Different Morality. Get Used to It.

The harder edges of this new Doctor come up again — the line that gives this section its name, the way he snaps at Rose, his startling lack of ceremony around the human dead — and the hosts wrestle honestly with how hard a pill that is so early on, and the gamble RTD took asking audiences to accept it. They trace the lineage back through McCoy and even Colin Baker (McCoy, as Jim puts it, walked so Eccleston could run), weigh the Gelth's sorrowful story against what they turn out to be, and briefly bat away a political reading some critics pinned on it. Plus: the glorious moment Rose takes her first careful step into the snow of the past, a "what the Dickens / what the Shakespeare" in-joke that sent Alan howling, a happy medium of a pun, and the eternal question of why a jumper is a sweater.

Also This Week

A warm welcome to new listeners who've hopped aboard for the modern run — and a very proud teacher's shout-out hiding in the mailbag. (Find more of guest Alan J. Porter's many projects — books, podcasts, and a free newsletter — over at alanjporter.substack.com.)

Coming Up Next:

Saturday (Main Feed): The End of the World — our mainstream audience gets a bang out of this one.

Monday (Patreon Exclusive 194): Music, the Memory TARDIS, the comics By Hook or By Crook, Tooth and Claw, and The Final Chapter, plus a Big Finish review of a Nev Fountain audio John can't stop raving about.

Friday (Patreon): Aliens of London / World War Three — the first modern two-parter and our first New Who cliffhanger. Rose heads home… and then a spaceship comes down into the Thames.

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