Doctor Who: The Vampires Of Venice

So, you have a menace in a school in medieval Venice. Something strange, sinister and (at that point in the story) unseen. So far, so typical Doctor Who. Then you have the Doctor bursting out of a cake, and telling Rory - who is on his stag night - that he has kissed Rory's wife to be. A perfect example of the new Doctor Who.

For The Vampires of Venice, right down to its misleading title, manages to perfectly combine classic Doctor Who with new Doctor Who.

First up, we have the Doctor. Matt Smith's Doctor is the classic alien Doctor, combined with something new. A dismissive edge that is properly dismissive, not occasionally short with people. Witness him offering a wedding present to Rory and Pond: "It's either this or tokens." Then we have a Doctor who doesn't want to listen to his companions: "Stop talking, brain thinking, hush!"

And the eccentricity and surreal mystery is still there: apparently the Doctor owes Casanova a chicken. Quite why is something he doesn't offer.

Then you have Pond and Rory. On some levels, they are typical companions. They ask questions, get captured and have to be rescued, then moan a bit. But there is so much more to them than that. Firstly, we've got their relationship. They're getting married, but there is clearly some tension. Witness the response when Rory reads the psychic paper which, according to Amy's husband to be, has an odd message: "According to this I'm your eunuch." he proclaims. "Oh yeah, I'll explain later," his love retorts, invoking the dismissive phrase used by countless Doctors to countless companions across the decades. And the Doctor is aware of the competition between himself and Rory, but he makes it plain that he doesn't care. When Rory comments (about torches) "Yours is bigger than mine", the Doctor probably speaks not only for himself but an army of viewers when he says "Let's not go there."

And Amy? Well she's not just short and dismissive about Rory. When the Doctor believes he can play the part of her father, her response is quite clear: "Your daughter? You look about nine."

Traditional companions they are not.

Then we have the story. On some levels, with its photogenic vampires in a period setting, it resembles a Hammer Horror. And Doctor Who in the 1970's, with one Mr Tom Baker as its star, resembled Hammer Horror quite a bit. So when Amy says "I'll be fine" as a vampire shows its fangs behind her, the new incarnation of the show is doing nothing less than resembling on of its finest eras. Yet, while it resembles Hammer Horror, it also subverts it. The aliens aren't actually vampires, but rather (unconvincingly realised) fish creatures. As a result, they are not as creepy as they could be, and certainly not as creepy as vampires. But they were full-on Doctor Who monsters, and led to one of the best lines of the whole episode: "Blimey, fish from space have never been so... buxom", as the Doctor correctly observed.

One area in which this episode departed from the majority of the classic series, and to some extent the RTD era, was the dominance of the story arc within this plot. Put simply, the whole episode would not be happening without the story arc. Now, this in itself is nothing new, but the dominance of the story arc was made implicit with lines such as "All I can hear is silence" and explicit with lines such as "in memory of the children lost in the silence..." This episode not only referenced the story arc, but also developed it. The cracks cause the silence... and then the silence is coming. This - like other episodes in this season, have felt like installments in an episodic series rather than individual episodes with an overall motif. And that, while still having a precedent in "classic" Doctor Who, feels new.

So Vampires in Venice - a fun, breathless adventure for the Doctor and his new companions - nicely links old and new Who and has the decency to to make new Who look like a development of what went before. I dare say that The Vampires of Venice is not the most memorable episode of Doctor Who, but never mind. It did what Doctor Who should do - it was great Saturday TV, with a reverence for, but not a dependance upon, what has gone before.