Doctor Who has, somewhat fortunately, almost never been a show about time travel. Park that nonsense with the Star Trek crowd, the Bishop says, and leave the TARDIS and its tendencies as plot device, taking us to places where some adventure might occur. So it was passing strange that your Anglican articulator looked to 'The Fires of Pompeii', with its telegraphed time-travel dilemma—should Donna-plus-one try to save the the people of the doomed city—with agreeable anticipation. And was rewarded for it.
‘The Fires of Pompeii’ does several things usefully well. It introduces us to Donna, in a way ‘The Runaway Bride’ and ‘Partners in Crime’ couldn’t, and didn’t. It augers tastily about the season to come. It gives several capable actors (one, Francesca Fowler, more than capable of lighting the Bishop’s fire) room to breathe. It allows itself to be about the thing—time travel—that Doctor Who has only really ever let itself be ostensibly about before. It introduces us to a moral quandary, though we never quite, thankfully, get to know it on a first name basis. And it tells a rather fun, if also rather plot-shy, tale. Many of these are the things fans and fan-like academics are forever claiming Doctor Who, particularly classic Doctor Who, has always done. ‘Working on many levels’, as the fellow said. Of course Doctor Who—specifically classic Doctor Who—has almost never worked on any level, despite its ample charm. So it is no surprise that a story which recalls the Doctor Who of our collective mis-remembering is so easily accepted into the fold.
But: what renders 'The Fires of Pompeii' genuine worthy—in contradistinction to the wise blind eye of forty years of prior Doctor Who—is its take on the issue of time travel: the consequences, the responsibilities, as fantastical as they may be. Because in that take it is not about closed temporal loops or grandfather paradoxes and the like but about a wedge between two people, which shows us not so much that some predicaments have difficult answers, but too often no answer at all. That the question of what to do finally becomes a question of valour may niggle, but is both right and necessary, even if it was perhaps a dash underwritten and a smidgeon overplayed.
Three performances command note: Phil Davis continues to do that thing only Phil Davis can do; always dangerous, surprising and deft with any line. Fowler makes drug use unquestionably sexy and is casually powerful, a light breeze igniting a conflagration. And Catherine Tate—who, like other dull-comedians-turned-vital-actors Jim Carrey and Bill Murray, paints ordinariness with almost spiritual colour—is in her own way as convincing as Jim Broadbent at his unapproachable best: a quiet wonder.
