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The Crimson Horror (TV story)

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The Crimson Horror was the eleventh 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. It was the 100th episode of Doctor Who since its revival in 2005.

Synopsis

In 1893, the Eleventh Doctor's old friends, Vastra, Jenny Flint and Strax find an optogram of the Doctor on a victim of the mysterious "crimson horror". They head for Yorkshire, where Jenny infiltrates Mrs Winifred Gillyflower's community of Sweetville to find what has happened to him.

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 Eleventh Doctor visible in one of his eyes.

Investigations lead them to Sweetville, an idyllic community run by Mrs Winifred 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; the process didn't work because he was not human. Gillyflower tends to dispose of such "rejects", but he has been saved by her blind daughter, Ada Gillyflower, who has become infatuated with him and describes him as "my monster".

The Doctor is able to reverse the process on himself and he and Jenny go off in search of companion Clara Oswald, who has also been preserved. This confuses Jenny, as she 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 they instead arrived in Yorkshire. They immediately got involved in the investigation of Sweetville and the red bodies piling up in the sewers. The Doctor and Clara, posing as a married couple, joined the Sweetville community to investigate, but Mrs Gillyflower imprisoned and preserved them. The process worked on Clara, but not the Doctor; 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 the planet. Ada, listening in, learns of her mother's plans and confronts her; meanwhile, Clara disables the rocket launch controls.

Holding a gun to her daughter's head, Gillyflower retreats into the rocket silo to activate a secondary launch control; she launches the rocket, but learns moments later that Vastra and Jenny have removed the poison payload. She fires at the Doctor, but misses. Strax, who has climbed the chimney from the outside, returns fire, causing Winifred Gillyflower to plummet to her death at the bottom of the silo.

As the old woman lays dying, Mr Sweet abandons his host. Ada shares final words with her mother before brutally 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, Angie and Artie Maitland, have found images of her and the Doctor in different points of time — including a nuclear submarine in 1983 and a manor house in 1974. They have found an image Clara does not recognise; it was taken in Victorian London — but she's only been to Victorian Yorkshire. The children threaten to inform their father that their nanny is a time traveller unless she takes them on a trip in her time machine.

Cast

Crew

General production staff

Script department

Camera and lighting department

Art department

Costume department

Make-up and prosthetics

Movement

General post-production staff

Special and visual effects

Sound



Not every person who worked on this adventure was credited. The absence of a credit for a position doesn't necessarily mean the job wasn't required. The information above is based solely on observations of the actual end credits of the episodes as broadcast, and does not relay information from IMDB or other sources.


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. (Upon being offered Amontillado by Mrs. Gillyflower, the Doctor's response is "No, we've had enough of that!", referencing Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado", where a character is chained up in a cell.)
  • 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).
  • This is the second episode in a row to feature a form of family abuse.
  • This is the second Victorian episode in a row to feature a knighted actor as the main villain (after Sir Ian McKellen provided the voice of the Great Intelligence in TV: The Snowmen.)

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

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.
  • One of Mrs. Gillyflower's "Pretty maids all in a row" in the flashback scene blinks.
  • The images that Clara was shown were not possible since, for both Cold War and Hide, nobody was present to take the pictures.
  • As Mrs. Gillyflower was threatening to shoot the Doctor, Clara, Vastra, and Jenny, Strax appears on top of the tower and fires a shot that causes her to fall to her death, however a moment after she landed, he was right next to the others.

Continuity

  • Clara expresses particular surprise at the last picture, as Clara herself had not been in Victorian London.

Home video releases

 
Series 7, Part 2 DVD cover.

DVD releases

The Crimson Horror was released as part of Doctor Who Series 7 Part 2 on May 22, 2013, and as part of The Complete Seventh Series on September 24, 2013.

Blu-ray releases

to be added

External links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Doctor Who Series 7: Diana Rigg Filming Pics. SFX (3 July 2012). Retrieved on 22 May 2013.
  2. ↑ Doctor Who Series 7: Diana Rigg To Guest Star. SFX (2 July 2012). Retrieved on 22 May 2013.
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