Doctor Who Retrospective Review - "The Unquiet Dead"
What The Dickens I absolutely love the Doctor Who episodes that involve historical fiction. Technically, if you consider time travel to be valid, you can consider all of it to be historical fiction, but that's not the point. I'm a history nut and I love episodes like "The Unicorn and the Wasp" and "The Fires of Pompeii" as a result. This is our first brush with greatness in the New Who. The actor chosen for Charles Dickens is delightful for a few reasons, but my reason for liking him is that he never seems to break character. I remember going to a production of A Comedy of Errors when I was fourteen and the actors completely flubbed a fight scene, but stayed in-character until they had their bearings back. Every time this actor opens his mouth, I can hear the man who narrates Dickens' books. The writing is wonderful and he carries it off very well. What is best about this portrayal is that Dickens has a little bit of Scrooge in him. He does respond fairly graciously to everyone from the theater workers to the Doctor himself, but he seems a little world-weary. At the end of his Christmas adventure, he vows to make amends with his estranged family and work out the ending to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. You can almost hear him promising to "keep Christmas in heart" and we are not surprised when he pops up with a "God bless us, every one!" We don't see Charles again until Series Six when he's interviewed on telly about his sequel, but this is a great vignette about one of literature's greatest authors.