The Crimson Horror (TV story)

The Crimson Horror
Doctor:	Eleventh Doctor
Companion(s):	Clara
Featuring:	Jenny, Vastra, Strax
Main enemy:	Winifred Gillyflower Mister Sweet
Main setting:	Yorkshire, 1893
Key crew
Writer:	Mark Gatiss
Director:	Saul Metzstein
Producer:	Marcus Wilson
Release details
Story number:	236
Premiere broadcast:	4 May 2013
Premiere network:	BBC One
Format:	1x45 minute episode
Production code:	3.12
Doctor Who television stories
← Previous	Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS
Next →	Nightmare in Silver
Production order
← Previous	Cold War
Next →	The Great Detective

The Crimson Horror was the twelfth episode of the seventh series of Doctor Who produced by BBC Wales. It featured the return of Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint and Strax, who were last seen in The Snowmen. The episode marked the 100th episode of the revived series of Doctor Who, started in 2005.

Synopsis

A new project - Sweetville - has been opened, but only the perfect humans are allowed to live there. While Jenny, Vastra and Strax are trying to find out what is behind the project, Winifred Gillyflower, the project manager, is promoting the project. But who is the real manager? And who is the mysterious Mister Sweet? and more importantly, what has happened to the Doctor and Clara?

Plot

Madame Vastra and her partners, Jenny and Strax, investigate "the Crimson Horror" — a mysterious condition leaving victims with red skin and preserved like statues — after discovering that one victim has the image of the Doctor visible in one of his eyes.

Investigations lead them to Sweetville, an idyllic community run by Mrs. Gillyflower and her never-seen "silent partner", Mr. Sweet, apparently as a home for the chosen few to help them survive the coming apocalypse. Jenny goes undercover as a convert and infiltrates Sweetville, where she discovers the Doctor, chained up in a cell, but only partially preserved due to the process not working due to him not being human; Gillyflower tends to dispose of such "rejects", but he has been saved by her blind daughter, Ada, who has become infatuated with who she describes as "my monster."

The Doctor is able to reverse the process on himself and he and Jenny go off in search of Clara, who has also been preserved (this confuses Jenny as she last saw Clara killed by the ice woman months earlier). The Doctor tells Jenny that he and Clara were actually aiming to visit London in 1893, but arrived to Yorkshire. They immediately get involved in the investigation of Sweetville and the red bodies piling up in the sewers. The Doctor and Clara, posing as a married couple, join the Sweetville community to investigate, but Mrs. Gillyflower imprisons and preserves them. The process worked on Clara, while the Doctor's process wasn't finished. Ada locked him away, keeping him as her "special monster".

The preservation process on Clara is successfully reversed, and Madame Vastra says the substance used to create the "Crimson Horror" effect is the poison of the red leech, a parasite the Silurians considered a major threat 65 million years ago. The Doctor and Clara confront Mrs. Gillyflower, who explains her plan and reveals that Mr. Sweet is in fact a red leech who has attached himself to her chest; their plan is to launch a rocket into the skies over England and spread the leech's poison over much of the planet. Ada, listening in, learns of her mother's plans and confronts her while Clara disables the rocket launch controls.

Holding a gun to her daughter's head, Gillyflower retreats into the rocket silo (disguised as a chimney) to activate a secondary launch control; she launches the rocket, but learns moments later that Vastra and Jenny have removed the poison payload. She decides to shoot the Doctor, but misses. Strax, who has climbed the chimney/silo from the outside, returns fire, causing Gillyflower to fall to the bottom of the silo.

As the old woman lay dying, Mr. Sweet abandons his host. Ada shares final words with her mother before killing the parasite with her cane.

Later, the Doctor returns Clara to her 21st century home, where she discovers that the two children she helps care for have discovered images of her and the Doctor in different points of time — including a nuclear submarine in 1983 and a manor house in 1974. They also have found an image Clara does not recognise that is apparently her (but is in fact her Victorian self that died.). The children threaten to inform their father that their nanny is a time traveller unless she takes them in her time machine.

Cast

• The Doctor - Matt Smith
• Clara - Jenna-Louise Coleman
• Mrs Gillyflower - Dame Diana Rigg
• Ada - Rachael Stirling
• Madame Vastra - Neve McIntosh
• Jenny - Catrin Stewart
• Strax - Dan Starkey
• Angie - Eve De Leon Allen
• Artie - Kassius Carey Johnson
• Edmund & Mr Thursday - Brendan Patricks
• Amos - Graham Turner
• Effie - Olivia Vinall
• Abigail - Michelle Tate
• Urchin Boy - Jack Oliver Hudson

References

Cultural references from the real world

• Thomas Thomas, who uses the language of a modern GPS, is an obvious reference to the popular real-world GPS service, TomTom.
• Sweetville is based on the real-world model village of Saltaire, Yorkshire, founded in 1851 by wool industrialist Titus Salt. Titus also had a daughter called Ada, after whom a street in the village is named. Sweetville's name may also reflect the model village of Bournville whose name was later used for a brand of sweet, a chocolate bar.
• "The Repulsive Case of the Red Leech" is an unrecorded Sherlock Holmes adventure, mentioned in The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez.
• Upon returning from her adventure, Clara picks up a toy robot from the Transformers line, specifically a Galvatron action figure.
• Several real world foods available in the 19th century are mentioned, including: Amontillado, Pontefract cakes, tea and seed cakes.
• The episode contains the DWU's first surviving glimpse of a guinea, since The Highlanders is lost.
• Real northern locations are mentioned, including Bradford and Buckden Pike.
• Vastra's client continually faints when exposed to any unexpected or shocking events. This is a satire of how women were culturally perceived to act in the Victorian era.

Story notes

• This story marks the first time in the revived series that a companion's associates have successfully deduced the person's time-travelling affairs with the Doctor's on their own, along with the Doctor's ability to time-travel, without questioning the Doctor directly or getting a firsthand experience of the TARDIS. Artie and Angie Maitland discovered pictures of Clara's travels from TV: Cold War, Hide, and a picture of Clara during her Victorian life (TV: The Snowmen) on the Internet, which exposed her secret.
• Likewise to the above, Clara sees herself in a past life for the first time by looking at the Victorian era photo of herself in London (TV: The Snowmen), cluing her in that she really has lived more than one life, which the Doctor confronted her over in their last adventure, but she later forgot due to the day being rewritten. (TV: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS).
• The Doctor is generally much friendlier to Clara, now that he knows she doesn't have control over her multiple lives. He stops treating her like a ghost and treats her as his companion.
• Although Jenny and Vastra both question the Doctor concerning how Clara is alive, he neither explains anything to them, nor is she ever present for these questions. Thus despite having met, Vastra and Jenny do not know that this is a different person and not the same one revived in some manner, and Clara gains no knowledge of her past life from the pair.
• This story is the first to feature Vastra, Jenny, and Strax that was not written by Steven Moffat.
• This story marked the 100th Doctor Who episode since the programme's revival in 2005.
• Filming for this episode began on 2 July 2012.
• Diana Rigg is credited as "Dame Diana Rigg," the first time such an honourific has been included in a Doctor Who screen credit (by contrast, Sir Michael Gambon was not identified as such in TV: A Christmas Carol).

Ratings

"The Crimson Horror" was first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC One on 4 May 2013. Overnight ratings showed that it was watched by 4.61 million viewers live.

Filming locations

• Bute Town, Caerphilly
• Roath Lock Studios, Cardiff

Production errors

If you'd like to talk about narrative problems with this story — like plot holes and things that seem to contradict other stories — please go to this episode's discontinuity discussion.

• Vastra's veil is far more transparent than it was apparently meant to be, given the reactions to the revelation of her non-human appearance.

• We hear the crowd at the meeting singing the poem (sometimes referred to as a hymn) "Jerusalem" (also known as "And did those feet in ancient time"). Although William Blake wrote the poem around 1804 Hubert Parry's melody was not composed until 1916, 23 years after the story was set.

• The image of the Doctor's face in the dead man's eye at the beginning of the episode is different from when it was shown in the flashback.

• The images that Clara was shown were not possible since, for both Cold War and Hide, nobody was present to take the pictures.

Continuity

• The Doctor mentions that the TARDIS used to be worse about landing at its intended destination, saying that he “once spent a long time trying to get a gobby Australian to Heathrow Airport.”, referencing the Fifth Doctor's travels with Tegan Jovanka and repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to return her to her own time. (TV: Four to Doomsday, et al.)
• Just after referencing Tegan, the Doctor uses his fifth incarnation's often-used phrase "Brave Heart..." to Clara. (TV: Earthshock, et. al.)
• The Doctor does a Northern accent again. He briefly put on a Northern accent in TV: The Rebel Flesh. His ninth incarnation naturally spoke with a Northern accent. (TV: Rose et al.) Clara also briefly speaks with a Northern accent when they are touring Sweetville.
• Pictures on Angie's laptop are from TV: Cold War, Hide, and The Snowmen.
• The Doctor is once again aided by Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint and Strax. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War, The Snowmen)
• Strax chants the Sontaran battle cry, "Sontar-ha!" when he attacks the brainwashed humans surrounding the Doctor and Jenny. (TV: Sontaran Stratagem /The Poison Sky, et al.)
• The superstition of an eye retaining the last image it sees was previously referenced by the Fourth Doctor, who then used a similar process to read the last images recorded in the brain of a deceased Wirrn. (TV: The Ark in Space)
• Strax refers to Jenny as a "fleshy boy," showing he still has issues with differentiating genders. (TV: The Snowmen, The Battle of Demon's Run: Two Days Later)
• Gillyflower says "you do keep turning up like a bad penny young man". The Doctor once attempted to say that he turned up like a bad penny to Melissa Heart, but he said "Bad Wolf" instead. (PROSE: The Clockwise Man).
• Gillyflower has an organ. The Tenth Doctor played an organ to stop Lazarus. (TV: The Lazarus Experiment). The Sixth Doctor's TARDIS turned into an organ, which he played too. (TV: Attack of the Cybermen).
• An illness that turns your skin red was seen before, which may or may not have been from here. (TV: New Earth).

Home video releases

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External links

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