What? A Doctor Who episode about Charles Dickens! Okay, twist my arm.
For those you are clearly not friends with me, Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction show about a time traveling alien who can regenerate and collects companions for the many adventures. Oh. I just made it sound creepy. Well. . . it is British therefore the budget on some of the special effects are creepy in their cheapness.
“The Unquiet Dead” is an early episode from show’s revival the mid-2000s. The Doctor (played for a single season by Christopher Eccelston, remember him) and his new companion Rose (Billie Piper before I found she had been a pop star) arrive in Victorian England during the holiday season in time to see Charles Dickens do a reading of his classic A Christmas Carol. Dickens is played by Simon Callow, a Dickens aficionado who has played the role before on the lives stage.
Dickens, by the way, really did travel the country doing live readings throughout his life. He loved the theater and believed that drama helped sell his books. However, this particular reading is interrupted by the figure of a blue-face old woman who is revealed to be a walking corpse.
As this is Doctor Who, the dead woman is not a zombie, but a body inhabited by a gaseous alien in search of a host. The alien race has taken residence in the gas lamps of a funeral parlor, the owner and maid of which are at a complete loss as to how to cover up the incident. The maid, played by Eve Myles (which is a another Doctor Who tangent I could go off on), has a connection to the aliens (the Gelth) through her sixth sense abilities.
Dickens insists on helping with the mystery, at first declaring it all illusion. Dear old Boz may have written about ghosts, but didn’t really believe in them. He questions whether his lifetime of work was truly the change he wanted it to be if the world was so much bigger. He tries to stick to his sense of reality as he points out his objections to spiritualists of the era. Authors and celebrities were often against the popular mediums of the day using tricks to make people believe they could speak to the dead. These performers were seen by many as taking advantage of the grieving.
The episode focuses a lot on the connection between the maid and the Gelth. Still, the writers made sure to repeatedly show the intelligence of Charles Dickens. Once he does accept the reality of the Gelth, he understands the concept of beings from another world pretty quickly. The Doctor repeatedly praises Dickens’s brilliance, but he does take a moment to criticize the “America” scene from Martin Chuzzlewit (which really is fair - Dickens writes about 1800s USA as if it’s a third world country). Dickens takes offense to the single criticism which is less than fair.
Instead of going into more and spoiling the whole episode, one last note on Charles Dickens depicted in this television show. The show does like so many time traveling shows do and expression Dickens’s desire to use the adventure as inspiration for his latest novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. But the most significant is the quote when thinking like a writer in the below image.
