Boom / 73 Yards / Dot and Bubble
“Trio. Trio. I want a Trio and I want one now.”
Most the posts I write for Psychic Paper are about twentieth century Doctor Who. This isn’t, as someone suggested must be the case recently, because I’m not interested in twenty first century Doctor Who. I very much am interested in twenty first century Doctor Who, and the possibility that this might seem not to be the case, is why I have, of late, snuck lines praising recent episodes into otherwise unconnected pieces. To be frank, I think the Doctor Who made and shown this century is, on the whole, not just usually better, but consistently better than that we got back when I was a time tot. If I thought of Doctor Who as two (or three) series, I’d have no hesitation in declaring that this century’s version is the better show. It’s just that I think they’re the same show, and there are only about 10 or 12 stories in that single six decade old series that I don’t think are good or interesting. A dozen or so that I wouldn’t defend on a hair trigger from the slightest put-down, and that I can’t imagine watching just for pleasure. They’re split roughly equally between the two centuries too.
It’s just that I’m one of those people who was thinking and talking and writing about Doctor Who in the decade and change when it was not just dead, but a corpse pop culture felt it had a licence to abuse (E.g. Loaded’s description of the show as “the tv equivalent of anal warts”). That means I’ve been thinking about old Doctor Who for longer, and I think the kind of Doctor Who stuff I write benefits from a long gestation. There’s also always plenty of material about any new episode immediately after it anyway, and what’s the use of a yawny oldster adding to the instant reaction pile? It’s more fun to write (and hopefully read) something about Invasion of the Dinosaurs instead. (To pick a story entirely at random.) There’s also the horrid possibility of writing some highfalutin interpretion down, only to have the writer of the episode wander over and tell you it’s all bunk. You don’t get that with Brian Hayles.
Sometimes, though, one’s habits are disrupted by current events, and after the fortnight or so that Doctor Who has had, at time of writing, I honestly feel compelled to comment on the most recent episodes.1 Or at least the most recent episodes as I type this, a couple of weeks ahead of publication. Because 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble together form an astounding pair of episodes. Link them up with Boom from the previous week and I think you have at least as strong as run of three Doctor Who stories as the we’ve ever had. And so I need to talk about them. Even to risk being told by writers I admire that I’m off my chump. Rather than finding an excuse to roll out my conviction that the title of Invasion of the Dinosaurs is a pun, referring to both the lizards that menace the regular cast and the gaggle of reactionaries that have summoned them. (Yes, it always takes a great deal of thought and precision to pick a story entirely at random.)
“A Wop Bop A Loo Bop A Lop Bam Boom!”
I only want to look at this episode relatively briefly; it’s brilliant; a beautifully played distillation and refinement of so many of the things that Steven Moffat has done well on the show. It’s both a “broken spring”2 story and “high concept”3 episode, one stuffed with mad yet weirdly plausible technology, anti-corporatism, anti-war4, children, sentimentality and rumination on the importance of the emotional ties within families.5 It’s also a story that destabilises the dislike for religion often present in Moffat scripts, by offering a sympathetic study of “faith”; one which in essence works by separating the individual person’s emotional conviction from the human created structure that might intervene between that sincere emotion and the object to which it’s attached.6
Boom’s positioning, both in the series’ run and in this post, is useful in so much as, despite all the death and horror the episode contains, and the rage it exhibits at the things that are done to people, it ends with a moment of sincere hope and sentimentality. I have always felt that Moffat’s writing exhibits a far less bleak worldview that Russell T Davies’, and have long been puzzled by fan assumption (and assertion) of the opposite. I long ago came to the conclusion that people were misled by the men’s respective demeanours in interviews. Davies’ exuberance (“Marvellous!”) and Moffat’s muttered self-depreciation go a long way.7
Now, I don’t mean this as a judgement on, or even a characterisation, of either man. It’s not even a judgement of their work. It’s a description of that work.8 I’m not the kind of idiot who channels a half-digested “death of the author” into constructing a facsimile strawman of a living writer in order to set fire to it. (I am a subtly different kind of idiot instead.)
Moffat’s pre-show runner scripts collectively have a negative death toll. They literally resurrect more people than they kill onscreen, and his scripts generally exhibit a faith (that word again) that people on the whole are good. Or at least an earnest, expressed wish for them to be good.
The problem in this “broken spring” story is an algorithm which is meant to manage and define an acceptable casualty rate in a war zone. One which ends up being used in a situation in which there is no enemy. Actually, I’ll just let the Doctor explain it for me.
“They set up their defences and fired their warning shots into the air. ‘Watch out, we come in peace.’ Yeah? They advertised their presence. And do you know what that does, Ruby? That activates the Villengard algorithm. The acceptable casualty rate algorithm. Keeps you dying, keeps you buying. Huh? Do you get it? Huh? Do you get it? Do you get...? Do you get it? Do you get it? Do you get-get-get it? There's nobody else here. You declared war on an empty planet. There are no Kastarions in the mud, they're not in the fog. There are no Kastarions. Just the algorithm maintaining an acceptable casualty rate in the face of nothing at all. You are fighting your own hardware and it's killing you at just the right amount to keep you buying more.”
So while the people on the ground are at fault, their fault is an essentially guileless one. More, it is human intervention in this accidental process that ends a war being fought because of that process. The system is bad, but human individuals are generally good. More people and less, well, AI solves the problem and stops a war that no person actually wants to be happening.
This is what I mean about Moffat’s overall positive view of humanity, which here is linked up with the Doctor’s increased appreciation of the value of “faith” might have, which itself links up with Doctor Who’s post Wild Blue Yonder shift towards the magical and fantastical.
“Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel.”
73 Yards largely has to do without Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor9 and is instead a showcase for Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday. It cleverly makes us feel his absence by showcasing, in the two actors’ single scene together at the top of the episode, the dazzling chemistry between them as they emerge from the TARDIS onto a Welsh cliff top location. It seems like an incredibly traditional opening to a Doctor Who story, and yet it’s actually the beginning of perhaps the least traditionally Doctor Who episode in the series’ history.
That’s all to the good, of course. That’s what “Doctor Lite” episodes are for. In the 00s, during Davies’ first run in charge, the “Doctor Lite” slot offered up some of the most radically different, some of the very best, Doctor Who ever made in his own Love & Monsters and Turn Left, and Moffat’s Blink. Some have wondered why Doctor Who that conspicuously lacks Doctor Who would be so creatively successful, and I suspect it’s in part the same reason Human Nature10 is so good; they allow you to see the Doctor more clearly by looking at the space they leave when they’re not there. The presence of absence, if you like.
The Doctor barely features because he disappears after walking into a “fairy circle”, a cobweb of charms and spells found on that Welsh clifftop. Something that links 73 Yards and Boom despite their many obvious differences11 is that they are both, either by accident or by design, stories where the Doctor initiates the drama by treading on something.12 By “putting his foot in it” to borrow a phrase. Both literalise something the Doctor does rather a lot; cause upset by arriving somewhere, or by strategic use of his mouth, or both.
Visually and narratively, 73 Yards is extraordinary, pivoting from what Davies acknowledged to Doctor Who Magazine to be a “Welsh Folk Horror” playing out over days, to a dystopian political thriller playing out over decades, before circling back.13 It doesn’t just do this in genre terms, but also more literally. Eventually returning Ruby, and with her the viewer, to the location where the TARDIS landed, both spatially and then eventually temporally, with a now aged Ruby managing, by fairy means or foul, to find her way back to the moment in which the Doctor broke the fairy circle, and prevents him doing so by briefly attracting the attention of her younger self.
Thus, it seems, she both stops him disappearing and prevents herself from having to live what Davies has described, again in DWM (and also in this video) as a “penitential” life. This might imply that the “fairy circle” is not merely the circle that the Doctor breaks, the one of the clifftop, but also the circle that Ruby completes by eventually returning to a time before the Doctor did that exactly. That she balances the breaking of one circle by completing another.
It is unclear, as part of Doctor Who’s increasing embrace of the magical this year, how either fairy circle works, or exactly why Ruby should be the one to pay the price for the Doctor’s disrespect. But it doesn’t need to be clear. That isn't what it’s for. What it is for is to set up an episode where Ruby rescues the Doctor, and neither he nor she, it seems, will ever know it.14
During Ruby’s Doctorless life, which lasts some sixty years before it is unravelled, she is haunted by a black clad, white haired figure whom she later realises is always 73 yards away from her, wherever she happens to be standing. A figure whom she cannot get any closer to, but who seemingly has the ability to drive other people out of her life simply by whispering to them. Whispering something unknown.
We never find out what that something is. Or even if it’s the same something for every person, or a different, individual curse for each different, cursed individual. But that’s fitting too, because there are, in keeping with the genre that it invokes and becomes part of, many things about 73 Yards that we, the audience, will never know for certain. It is deliberately unknowable. A story that paradoxically both invites theories and refutes mere explanations.
Early in the episode the customers and staff in a pub in which Ruby takes refuge provide her with justification for what is happening to her. Explaining that by breaking the fairy circle and reading the charms within it, Ruby has released a creature called “Mad Jack” into the world. This scene is, until the characters themselves dismiss it as a joke, played on an English city girl by rural Welsh people, essentially congruent with everything that has happened in the episode before it.
Encouraged by the performances and direction, and by the explanation being the kind of thing that happens in the sort of story 73 Yards seems to be, we believe it as much as Ruby does. Yet the dismissal of it is very pointed; “It's racist, my dear, to be blunt,” says Enid, played by the magnificent Sian Philips, knocking down the towering jenga joke that she and the other pub regulars have built up; “People come from outside, they think we're all witches and druids. For God's sake, child, you walked into a piece of string.”
Enid, though, is being too dismissive herself. It is not just “a piece of string” and walking into it has consequences. Davies himself notes in the Doctor Who Unleashed episode for 73 Yards;“something profane has happened with the disturbance of that fairy circle. [the Doctor] has just walked through something very, very powerful.” and yes that supernatural figure IS following her, and it IS connected with the fairy circle the Doctor broke. Enid is right to dismiss stereotypes and cliche, but she says “they think we’re all witches and druids”. She doesn’t say that there’s no such thing.
Decades later, Ruby hears the term “Mad Jack” again, as part of a television interview with the Welsh politician Roger ap Gwilliam, a “terrifying” figure who “led the world to the brink of nuclear…” something. As the Doctor was saying just before he disappeared. Roger ap Gwilliam is a fascinating, paradoxical figure, unnervingly played by Aneurin Barnard. A proud Welshman who rightly states that Welsh know what it is “to be oppressed” yet one who evidences not just a strong pan-British nationalism (perhaps as an echo of the last Welsh British Prime Minister, that great imperialist15 David Lloyd George) but one who also, it seems, has a deep rooted need to destroy the world in nuclear fire.
So in Boom an algorithm starts, and then prolongs, a war for profit, in 73 Yards an individual takes the world to the brink of annihilatory war for.. what? For unknown reasons. For kicks? For revenge? As a kind of displaced suicide? I don’t mean to suggest that this is a flaw or an inadvertent omission. It’s deliberate unknowability again, and the deliberate unknowability of Roger ap Gwilliam’s makes what he plans to do all the more terrifying.
Like the algorithm on Kastarion 3, the fairy circle is, it seems, a running process. But it’s a magical one, not a mechanical one, and it’s perhaps a more benign one than it first appears. Through it, Ruby finds a way to make sense of what happened to her, aligning the Doctor’s off the cuff comment about Roger ap Gwilliam and the fairy circle’s reference to “Rest in peace, Mad Jack” and the nature of the being that’s haunting her into a form that she can take control of, transforming them into a story she can tell and ultimately, after further purgatorial decades, escape from back to the life she has lived to the life she wanted to live.
Ruby falls in with Roger ap Gwilliam’s Albion movement16 and by placing herself 73 yards from him, contrives to have the dark figure who has been following her scare him away from his life’s work. Which means a story in which an individual’s intervention in an accidental process ends a war is followed by a story in which a process intervenes in accidental human actions to prevent another, larger and more destructive war.
Which to me is an example of how a Davies script will tend to express what I find to be a bleaker view of humanity than a Moffat script. 73 Yards, it seems, like Midnight and Turn Left, despairingly believes in the awesome power of the individual to do bad, and that that potential for evil in any individual human. Unless the evil that Roger ap Gwillam represents is not human at all. That he is, despite the episode’s early strong disavowal of the idea, not a mere bad human, but a “Mad Jack” spirit contained within the circle that the Doctor broke.
Let’s go back one final time to that scene in the pub. When Enid is winding Ruby up she says that “The clifftops are a boundary between the land and the sea. A liminal space, neither here nor there, where rules are suspended.” and while she herself dismisses it as a joke, there’s enough echoes between that and what the Doctor says at the opening (e.g. his describing “a war between the land and the sea”) to give us pause, even if we haven’t heard Davies’ own words in Doctor Who Unleashed. Is “Mad Jack” returned to the circle by Ruby’s actions, and sealed within it by her return to 2024 and her preventing the Doctor from stepping on the circle?
We know that the Ruby who travels backwards through time does have some impact on cause and effect, and that it is not solely stopping the Doctor from breaking the circle. Even before the Old Ruby appears in the present at the end, 2024 Ruby has already said that she’s “been to Wales three times” when the first time this scene played out she said she’d “been to Wales twice”.
Are we to perhaps infer from the montage of Old Ruby travelling back through to time that she experiences her life again, but in reverse? And that the reason that she is able to stop the circle being broken is because when Young Ruby sees her for the first time at the end of the story in a shot which is not present the first time these events play out, it is because that appearance is for Old Ruby after all her subsequent ones that it seems will now never happen, exactly because she is travelling backwards in time.
I don’t know. Neither do you. Probably. We could go round in circles for decades on this. Perhaps we, collectively, as a fandom will. I hope so. For me Kate Lethbridge Stewart defines 73 Yards’ dramaturgy when she says -
“That's what we do, all of us, we see something inexplicable and invent the rules to make it work."
What’s she’s describing, I think, is not just the process whereby Ruby takes control of the narrative, but the process that the episode forces on those of us trying to engage with it. We draw lines, we create theories, we invent the rules, only to realise something from the episode rules it out, or doesn’t fit, or doesn’t say what we thought it did a moment ago. It’s certainly what I’ve been doing in this section of this post. Circling and re-circling before running to the beginning, try to track out a course. Forge a path. Like the ancient coastal path on which the TARDIS arrives in the story’s opening and closing scene.
I make no claims to Welshness, either by virtue of blood or soil, the traditional components of nationalism (and nationalism is, after all, one of the topics of 73 Yards). But I have family links to a small stretch of south Wales, and have been visiting it all my life. Which is why I watched 73 Yards in a house from which I could, just about, see the cliff on the Sir Benfro coastal path walk, just above Tenby, where the TARDIS lands in 73 Yards opening scene.
This would, in the ordinary course of things, be an amusing coincidence and little more. But the essential nature of this episode quickly made it feel like more than that. No, it makes it feel more like that, hundreds of a miles and millions of minutes away from that time and place; not least because at the exact point that the episode unexpectedly turned around and became about a general election campaign in which a right wing candidate makes authoritarian promises on defence, someone texted me, breaking an embargo, to let me know that the Conservative Party was proposing to bring back conscription.
I glanced at the hillside through the window, and began to wonder if the episode was writing me.
“It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about.”
After all that, I was expecting something a bit more ordinary and a bit more explicable the next week and that’s what the trailer seemed to promise. Something colourful with monsters. Monsters I suspected might be Tractators. Because if you’re the writer / producer who brought back the Macra in 2007, bringing back the Tractators in 2024 is a mere bagatelle. But instead we get something equally strange, equally strong, but in a completely different way.
We’re “Doctor Lite“ again, with the episode having a substitute protagonist, Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cook). Interestingly, while Boom and 73 Yards are about the consequences of the Doctor not looking where he puts his feet, Dot and Bubble has him guiding Lindy, who as the inhabitant of a permanently plugged in society does not know where or even how to tread without assistance. That feels relevant. As does how Lindy is, like the Ruby of 73 Yards, ultimately always watched. Never alone.
Lindy, Lindy-with-a-Y in what feels like a deliberate link to one of Davies’ most appealing characters, initially presents as a Sally Sparrow17 type figure before almost immediately evidencing much darker character traits. But the episode, while presenting said traits clearly and in plain sight, also encourages us not to dwell on them too much, in order to slowly nudge us towards its astounding final scene, when the violently racist nature of Lindy and the society in which she lives is openly stated for the first time.18
In the Doctor Who Unleashed episode for Dot and Bubble, Davies calls Lindy “a monster”, just as he did Val Cane in his earlier Midnight. There, as in the immediately following Turn Left, the capacity for monstrousness within ordinary people was in part his topic. Here in Dot and Bubble we have a society in which, broadly, everyone is a monster. Because society itself is monstrous. Whereas Moffat has bad systems with good people trapped inside them, and Davies often presents us with the capacity for individual evil within systems that are broadly functional, here we have a society where everyone’s capacity for individual evil has been actualised. The people are bad because the system is bad because the people are bad. Ouroboros. Another circle.
Some people online have suggested the (I quote them19) “the racism angle” of the story felt “tacked on” or “forced”. Which is frankly a testament only to their inability to parse fiction. The nature of Finetime is hinted at, and often foregrounded, in almost every line, and every image, of the story. Every action. From Lindy’s initial blocking of the Doctor, via her failure to recognise him the second time, to her horror that the Doctor and Ruby are sharing a space. The relentlessly white nature of friendship group is, while something common in much twentieth century television, something which is unlikely to happen in modern television by accident. Even the British nationalist movement led by Roger ap Gwilliam in 73 Yards is conspicuously multiethnic. This overt whiteness is unambiguously deliberate. Thus it has deliberate meaning.
The security the Doctor can’t get through? It’s detected the colour of his skin. It’s even there in the way that Ricky September20 is written like the Doctor, given a Doctor type role and Doctor type lines (“I will get you out of here, I promise.”) and Lindy listens to him instantly. Because he’s a white guy who kinda looks like David Bowie circa Let’s Dance rather than Ncuti Gatwa.
One of the things this structure, this near constant drip of momentarily disruptive indications of prejudice, captures extraordinarily well is how many encounters with racism are, until the penny drops, essentially a series of slightly confusing micro-aggressions that one struggles to parse in the absence of the context that the other person is a dumb old ethno-racist. Think of MP Dawn Butler’s shocking anecdote about a fellow member of parliament telling her that she shouldn’t be using the members only lift in the Palace of Westminster, as they assumed she was a cleaner but crucially they thought they were being kind by letting her use it anyway.
Finetime isn’t, of course, merely a racist society. All societies, and regardless of the dominant ethnic group, are structurally racist, by accident or by design, in some ways, big or small. Dot and Bubble contains numerous building hints that Finetime is something even more shocking. Ricky mentions “.. the great abrogation” and abrogation means “the repeal of a right or agreement” and how the underground corridors where the escapees of Finetime gather were used during it. There is vague talk of “decontamination” and later the statement that Doctor will “contaminate” the planet. This is not merely a racist or apartheid society. This is a post ethnic genocide state. One that has successfully completed a different kind of annihilatory programme.
It’s easy (ish) to write a story about how racism is wrong. It’s much harder to write a story about how racism is stupid, and which shows racism as stupid, and how that stupidity harms stupid racists, as well as the people against whom they’re prejudiced. Not as much, obviously. Not as directly. But in a real way nonetheless. In that that kind of base and stupid hatred erodes the soul, erodes the personality and the capacity to be human.
Dot and Bubble reaches its dramatic zenith and optimism nadir in the staggering scenes when Gatwa’s Doctor offers the ultimate example of “They go low, we go high”.21
“I don’t care what you think, and you can say whatever you want. You can think absolutely anything. I will do anything IF YOU WILL JUST ALLOW ME TO SAVE YOUR LIVES.”
And then they patronise him, and set off to die anyway, because they are quite literally too stupid to live. It’s unimaginably more shocking than the racism of Rosa (2018), which was located where a liberal conscience would expect to find it, in the past. The villain of that episode was trying to change history because his side have lost. On Finetime they’ve won, and all it’s cost them is themselves.
What is fascinating about the Doctor’s reaction to this, is that it is as much exasperation at Lindy and her friends’ refusal to be saved as it is rage at the grave insult to his personhood. That Time Lords’ can change appearance to the extent that they can migrate between ethnic and gender groups as defined by the society in which Doctor Who is made is now a well established part of the series. But while the Gatwa Doctor is visually “a black man” to the audience and the other characters, but what he is not is “a human being of African descent” with the experience of that prejudice that that includes.22
What that means in terms of the Doctor’s character is that to be subject to this prejudice, this particular oppression is new to him in a way that it isn’t, that it cannot be to, well, to take the obvious example, the actor playing him. It’s incredible writing by Davies, obviously no stranger to different structural prejudices and oppressions himself, about a specific prejudice of which he is aware, but to which he is not personally subject. Just as the Doctor himself has not been, until now.23 This is not just Doctor Who’s most direct engagement with ethno-racism it is, remarkably, an engagement that can only really be done within Doctor Who.
A friend of mine observed that they thought Carla Sunday’s face as she stared at her daughter from the back of a Taxi in 73 Yards was the most frightening thing they had ever seen in Doctor Who. It’s a good shout. But it’s a moment that has a parallel of its own in Dot and Bubble. In the look of superiority, of contempt, even of pity that stupid racist Lindy Pepper-Bean gives Doctor Who as she sails aways to certain death with her whimsical trumpet carrying friend on a boat about as well-equipped for the future as the average carriage on a theme park ride. It’s the terrifying face of someone who is both very certain and very, very wrong.
For a programme as old as Doctor Who is to be turning out episodes like these, as honest, angry, powerful and strange as these three back-to-back mid season episodes, two of which are further inhibited in production terms by having limited access to the series new and incendiary lead actor is frankly astonishing. For them to come from the two writers who have both written more Doctor Who than anyone else other than each other?
Doctor Who, eh? Bloody hell.
I’m typing this before the transmission of either Rogue or The Legend of Ruby Sunday. Who knows what delights they have in store for us! You do. But not me. Time travel.
I.e. a story in which much of the threat or mystery is driven by a malfunctioning machine or system. Doctor Who’s first is The Edge of Destruction (1964), but Moffat has made the genre his own.
Defined by producer / writer Don Simpson (1943-96) as “an idea you can hold in the palm of your hand” in this case removing the Doctor’s ability to run up and down lots of corridors.
Which is distinct from the much more common “war is hell” genre, with which it is often confused.
Although Moffat’s definition of “family” is wide and all-embracing, it’s not the reactionary shibboleth of those who advocate “family values”.
Moffat might be a self-described atheist, but his work feels very much culturally influence by the Scottish protestantism around which he grew up, and Boom is not an exception.
I have never met Davies, so have literally no idea what he is like off-camera.
And, as I say, and to a lesser extent, the personae they exhibit in interviews
Per Doctor Who Magazine, it was shot while he was finishing other projects, as the first episode of the production block, following The Giggle.
Human Nature’s other influences include, of course, Superman II and the Gospels.
Style, genre, level of involvement for the Doctor, setting, the way Boom is generally told through close ups shot in a studio and 73 Yards makes extensive use of wide angle lenses on location, etc.
A recurring motif this series, with Ruby’s invocation of A Sound of Thunder (1952) in Space Babies. This being the classic “tread on a butterfly in the past and alter all history” story.
The episode in effect slides from something akin to A Warning to the Curious (both the original M R James story and the 1972 BBC television version) and The Dead Zone (Cronenberg’s film, more than the story or the television spin off) remaining uniquely itself by the way it combines and juxtaposes what seem like its two primary influences; or perhaps just examples of the kind of things by which the episode is influenced.
Although the new, young Ruby’s actions in the final frames suggest some sense of something having happened, even if it’s not knowledge.
“Great meaning large or even immense, we mean it in the pejorative sense!” to quote a golden age The Simpsons.
The name is a Roman term for the island of Britain, seemingly derived from the Latin “Albion” (white) itself explained as a reference to the chalk cliffs of dover beloved of British nationalist mythology. It also suggests the fringe Scottish nationalist party Alba, itself led by a politician who has been subject of serious allegations of sexual assault, like Gwilliam. It is also the name of a magical sword in the folk horror inflected children’s drama Robin of Sherwood (1984-86).
The substitute protagonist of Moffat’s Blink. But you knew that.
I won’t say “revealed”, because you really can get there on your own long before that.
But don’t want to name them, because what would be the point in that. The point is just that this reaction exists.
Ricky is a fascinating character in his own right. Perhaps this season’s best guest character. Of whom more perhaps another time.
A phrase coined by Michelle Obama to describe not sinking to your opponents level in politics.
There’s a version of this of observation at my brother in law’s blog. Ta, Ya.
Experiences of Jo Martin’s incarnation which have not been presented onscreen and which Gatwa’s cannot remember notwithstanding.