DOCTOR WHO, SERIES 1 EPISODES 4-5:

ALIENS OF LONDON/WORLD WAR III

Doctor: Ninth (Christopher Eccleston)

Companion: Rose

August 2023

Screencap from Aliens of London: a large gray alien spaceship soars over London, seen from below.

This is weird.

So Aliens of London/World War III is a two-parter—the first multi-parter of the new show!—but that’s frankly one of the most easily overlooked things about it on a rewatch. I’m going to try to keep this one brief.

There’s really two things to talk about here that are both at odds and intertwined throughout this story: first, there’s the political intrigue/alien primary plot; then, there’s the Jackie-and-Mickey what’s-been-happening-for-the-past-year human-interest subplot. And one of these is, speaking frankly, a lot better than the other.

This story finally gives a fair shake to Mickey and Jackie, which is so extremely welcome. I mentioned in my writeup of Rose that Mickey kind of gets done dirty by the first episode, something that became all the more clear on a rewatch with my friend. He’s traumatized! Give him a break! Here, however, with a year passed off-screen, he’s allowed to have not only a major impact on the plot as well as multiple clever moments, but an actual emotional arc throughout against the Doctor, which is pulled off and works really well. So too for Jackie’s arc with Rose—all of the human interaction in this story, in fact, is handled excellently, touching and funny and moving all at once. It’s also Doctor Who dipping its toes into the realm of the television series as a continuous story, rather than the purer episodic nature of the original show (by and large) or the closer to episodic nature of the first three episodes. Characters’ arcs from previous episodes continue and build and grow throughout this one. I was legitimately touched at the final goodbye sequence—it’s so nice that they get an actual goodbye this time!

Which makes the other half of the episode seem all the worse in comparison.

Screencap from Aliens of London: Mickey, Rose, and the Doctor look at a readout on the TARDIS console.

To be clear, it’s not a total dumpster fire: the plotting is fine, the runarounds are goofy but that’s okay, Doctor Who can be goofy fun sometimes, and some of the stuff (especially with regard to Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North) is actually quite excellent and lovely. The problem comes with the villains, and I apologize for burying the lede here, but this is the most patently fatphobic episode of Doctor Who probably to date. Let’s make all the villains fat people who fart a lot! Let’s not interrogate this even a tiny bit, I guess! It is gross as hell when you can look at a newly-introduced character and know that the story intends you to read them as a villain based entirely on their body type. It is disgusting that this show attempts to pull that. And worse is the fact that it’s tied to such an excellent character piece, when Mickey and Jackie are on screen. It sucks so bad. It cannot be overstated.

The Slitheen will return, once in the show itself and repeatedly in the spinoff Sarah Jane Adventures, and I can only hope that they are better handled there. Maybe, just maybe, the sci-fi compression suits that let the eight-foot aliens fit in a human skin aren’t so delicately aligned as to only fit fat people, because that is a tremendous leap of logic and it is fucking obvious what’s going on there. Pathetic.

Overall Thoughts:

Unfortunately, despite its truly excellent character work—and I must stress it is excellent character work!—this is easily the worst story of Series 1 so far, and I expect it to remain there throughout the entire season. Serious content warning for some gross-ass fatphobia throughout. It’s a pity that the aliens are the worst part of Aliens in London.

(P.S. You may have noticed I’ve skipped an installment! I may come back and write about it later, but my ranking for The Unquiet Dead is listed on the main Doctor Who subpage.)