Doctor Who: Script To Screen 2011 / Death Is The Only Answer

Script To Screen 2011

Alone in the TARDIS, the eleventh Doctor appeals to British primary school children to write a three-minute story for him to star in, which they will then get to see being filmed. He seems pretty definite that everyone is in danger and he needs them to do this to solve it, although he's his usual defensive self when it comes to the details. It's got to be said, even though he's reading the whole thing, Matt Smith is really on form here.

Death Is The Only Answer

After changing his clothes, the Doctor finds his fez, despite it having been destroyed by River in The Big Bang. He then gets visited by his old friend Albert Einstein, who claims that the fez is his, and he wants it back. Along with his toothbrush. Unfortunately the toothbrush got exterminated by the Daleks.

Einstein is trying to build his own time machine, and accidentally becomes an ood, who keeps on repeating the phrase "Death is the only answer." The Doctor restores him to being a human again and returns him to 18th September 1945 circa 2 o'clock (the day after Hiroshima's typhoon), unaware that a piece of green slime from Einstein's machine still squelches along the TARDIS floor.

Given his cheerful demeanour, presumably the danger that the Doctor alluded to in Script To Screen is now resolved.

I regret to report that I didn't understand this, either time. Perhaps the fact of the story's existence is more what matters. In the later Script To Screen 2012 the Doctor seems to retcon this tale into freeing him from the Land of Fiction, so very possibly. The slime at the end still bothers me though, because it's a cliffhanger that will probably never get resolved. Is it too much to ask for another minisode to tie this up?

Top marks though have to go to the cast - Matt Smith, Nickolas Grace and Paul Casey - who play the whole thing with as much if not more conviction than a regular episode. Smith and Casey's ease I can understand, but how does Grace do that? How does he walk in as though he's been living in the TARDIS longer than Matt Smith?

Maybe all this is the reason why Einstein blanked the seventh Doctor in Time And The Rani.