Mark Watches ‘Doctor Who’: S03E02 – The Shakespeare Code

In the second episode of the third series of Doctor Who, Shakespeare and Harry Potter collide and nothing else in the world matters. Ever. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Doctor Who.

This episode isn’t particularly staggering in execution, nor is it that frightening, but good lord, it is a whole lot of fun.

I’ve said before how much I really love the episodes of Doctor Who that travel back in time and suggest an alternative explanation to events in history. So here’s me being a broken record: I really like the idea that Love’s Labour Won was actually sucked into a void with the Carrionites, who tried to embed a code to open a portal into this world and allow their kind to annihilate the earth. Maybe I’m just a fan of that sort of ridiculous story telling in general, but in general, “The Shakespeare Code” is ambitious as hell, and I appreciate that.

I say “in general” on purpose. I don’t think these scripts are meant to be fine-tuned in the same way other forms of fiction are. Pointing out plot-holes or unexplained turns would sort of render this whole project kind of boring and tedious if I went in that direction, so I am mostly ok ignoring them. MOSTLY. This is one of those times where once I thought about the story, I noticed there were a lot of weird holes in it, but all in all, traveling back in time to find out what happened to Shakespeare’s lost play was pretty damn fantastic.

Martha Jones proves to be a much different companion than Rose and the Doctor doesn’t shy away from pointing this out. I felt bad for Martha because it’s clear she’s stepped into some difficult shoes to fill for the audience and for the Doctor. Is it a stretch to say that the Doctor vocalizes what a lot of the fandom felt as she was introduced? I thought it was pretty rude of him to say, “ROSE WOULD HAVE FIGURED THIS OUT, GOSH” to here. (In his own way, of course.)

I don’t know, it’s a difficult situation all around. Surely he recognizes how much quicker Martha is to believe in the absurd things she is introduced to, right? Hopefully this isn’t continued beyond the next few episode.

The script for “The Shakespeare Code” is a lot more dense with jokes and references than usual, which is saying a lot for Doctor Who. Even right from the get-go, Gareth Roberts, who wrote this episode, references race relations as a way to identify an obvious point: how can Martha, a person a color, simply walk around London in 1599? (My heart swelled during this scene YOU ARE FIERCE AND AWESOME, MARTHA JONES).

I’m sure this episode also ticked off a bunch of Shakespeare purists with it’s HILARIOUS portrayal of the famous bard. There’s no way it’s even remotely accurate and I DO NOT CARE. EVER. I enjoy that Doctor Who can be both referential and silly about it’s portrayal of public figures throughout history, and this particular episode has quite a few running jokes about famous Shakespeare lines, Harry Potter nerdery, a great Back to the Future reference, and the ongoing joke that Shakespeare wasn’t quite as poetic and verbose when you actually spoke to him. Does it detract from the general plot? Not really, though I was more interested in the conversation than most of the Carrionite story most of the time. It was nice to have a plot that wasn’t so doom-and-gloom throughout and highlighted the witty writing I’ve come to enjoy from this show.

There’s a lot of little stuff I loved in this episode, so let’s just move on to that:

THOUGHTS

• Best line of the episode? “Come on! We can have a good flirt later!” “Is that a promise, Doctor?” “Oh, fifty-seven academics just punched the air.” a;sdkfjas;lkdfj asf;fklkldfs;j asf;fdkjas;dlkdfkls;j BRILLIANCE.
• “It’s like in those films: if you step on a butterfly, you can change the future of the human race.” “Then don’t step on any butterflies! What have butterflies done to you?”
• “So, magic and stuff? It’s a surprise, it’s all a bit Harry Potter.” “Wait till you read book seven. Oh, I cried.” I LOVE YOU FOREVER, DOCTOR, BECAUSE I TOTALLY CRIED TOO.
• “The play’s the thing. And YES, you can use that.”
• I love that the psychic paper didn’t work on Shakespeare. Which brings me to my next point:
• Watching the Doctor fan-out all over Shakespeare was probably funnier than him nerding out over Dickens.
• “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light…” “I might use that.” “You can’t. It’s someone else’s.”
• “Good old J.K.!” OH GOD I LAUGHED SO HARD.
• So, the Carrionites…do they just appear as witches? I’m not sure I understood their species at all. But they were definitely alien, just….witch-like?
• I liked that the voodoo doll things were actually DNA replication modules.
• So did this episode chronologically take place before the Doctor met Queen Elizabeth in “Tooth & Claw”? I was unsure why he said he had never met her yet when he clearly had. [AUTHOR’S EDIT: OH. OK. IT’S BECAUSE HE DIDN’T MEET QUEEN VICTORIA. OOPS.]
• I could not even count how many Shakespeare references there were in the dialogue of this episode. Too many! Bravo.