Revenge of the Slitheen

TARDIS Coordinates: September 24, 2007

Watching “Revenge of the Slitheen,” I realize that I actually kind of miss this.

Oh, not the Slitheen. As enemies go, well, they’re all right; just another bunch of corrupt invaders with a Kryptonite weakness, really, but they’re properly menacing and resourceful and usually give an episode an appropriately suspenseful veneer. No, what I’ve missed is an enemy who can hand in a truly panto performance. I’ve missed that grotesquerie, that cackling Grand Guignol of the Snidely Whiplash sort, offered by actors who are clearly having all the fun in their roles. My God, just watch Martin Ellis in any scene he’s in. He’s the funniest thing I’ve seen on Doctor Who in a while.

There was another interesting thing I picked up on – “Aliens of London” used a mixture of costumes and CGI, while the Slitheen in this serial were entirely practical effects. I’m sure this was mostly cost-cutting, as was re-using an off-the-shelf Doctor Who monster in the first place, which also would have acted as a ratings booster for the fledgling series. With all of this in mind, “Revenge of the Slitheen” resembles nothing so much as those wonderfully camp Doctor Who episodes we embraced in the 1970s, a two-episode callback to a time when the series relied on its scripts and performances to sell what its budget couldn’t, and handed in some of its best work as a result. This serial was comic genius from beginning to end, without surrendering one bit of its sense of suspense and mystery.

The Slitheen are back, and boy are they pissed off. We’re reminded that this is a family of criminals on the run from their own people (the Judoon are name-checked), and that they lost rather a large branch of their family when the Doctor blew up Downing Street. The child-Slitheen, played by Jimmy Vee, is fascinating – we don’t often see the children of the monsters, but there’s a whole encyclopedia’s worth of implications here – imagine being raised in the kind of environment that creates monsters like the Slitheen. On our planet, we consider no child irredeemable, because children are almost all potential. The idea that there are monsters who are also children, a tidy reflection of our schoolgirl heroine, knits vast complexities into the narrative. Children aren’t evil; they’re naughty. So those complexities, and how they’re resolved, merits exploration.

All indications are that Korst Gog Thek Lutiven-Day Slitheen survived the end of the episode, which is good; Doctor Who is frequently a bloodbath for the monsters, but it’s important that Sarah Jane, in a narrative conceived for a younger audience, always finds that third path, and gives the most iredeemable of bad guys a chance. (Also, hey, recurring villain.) It’s better in the context of this show to give the bad guys a swat on the nose and send them back where they came from.

A long time ago, I pointed out that Doctor Who never comes across as a children’s show, despite how it’s marketed. “Revenge of the Slitheen” does somewhat wear its target audience on its sleeve, if only because most of it is set in and around a high school and most of its cast are too young to drive. However, being a children’s show shouldn’t limit its audience. (Practical wisdom is that Alan Jackson is in the cast because he’s a hottie.) “Revenge of the Slitheen” amply demonstrates that this is a show that no grownup should be ashamed to watch, and that Doctor Who fans of every generation will enjoy.