The Doctor discovers monsters lurking beneath the worst traffic jam in history…

Feature by ALAN BARNES

The Doctor (David Tennant) and Martha.

Exploring the hidden depths of Doctor Who’s most intriguing stories…

Looking out onto the bottom of the fast lane, the Doctor (David Tennant) immediately identifies the monstrous crustaceans with eyes on stalks. The creatures responsible for so many deaths on New New York’s smog-shrouded orbital motorway are Macra.

Did you pinch yourself at that moment, too? Did you think, just for a second, that maybe you were having one of those Doctor Who dreams that – if we’re honest – we’ve all had once or twice, and sometimes more often? Because in 2007, if one were to have listed the 20th-century monsters one might reasonably have expected to see revived in the 21st-century series, the Macra probably wouldn’t have made the list.

But there they were: teeming hordes of computer-rendered Macra, as opposed to the prop featured in the original 1967 Macra Terror story, which – going by the evidence of the few seconds’ worth of surviving footage – might not have looked much cop on screen. “There’ll probably only be a few thousand people who’ll get the reference,” Tennant told Doctor

Who Magazine at the time. “To everyone else they’re just a big new scary monster.”

More than a few thousand, perhaps; but chances are, no more than a few hundred of those would have been able to remember watching the original Macra Terror with even the slightest clarity.

For everyone else, Gridlock made the Macra real in a way that off -screen telesnaps, or Target novelisations – or DWM articles, indeed – never could. A dream come true, in a way.

One of the smog-breathing Macra.

FIRST BROADCAST:14 April 2017

A huge, unseen attacker rocks the interior of a shabby but futuristic vehicle, Car 1-zero-hot-5. The occupants radio for help, but their call is put on hold…

00m 01sWe open on a degraded shot of TV traffic reporter Sally Calypso (Erika Macleod), seen over the monitor of the car, with a stylised Statue of Liberty in the background. Oddly enough, the next episode, Daleks in Manhattan (2007), opens with the TARDIS materialising on Liberty Island, at the base of the real-life statue.

In the shooting script, dated Monday 4 September 2006, Sally’s Traffic News was “sponsored by Eeze-E-Bone, to soothe those aches and pains”. Much of the Gridlock world pays homage to various freaky future visions from the pages of cult weekly comic 2000 AD – as writer/showrunner Russell T Davies, a long-term ‘Squaxx dek Thargo’ (Betelgeusian for ‘Friend of [alien editor] Tharg’), told DWM at the time.

Sally Calypso, for example, is “a ghost of the Halo Jones newsreader” – ie, Swifty Frisko, host of Dataday, who dispenses ‘traff ax’ to the population of floating off - Manhattan ghetto ‘The Hoop’ in The Ballad of Halo Jones (beginning in 1984; written by Alan Moore, with art by Ian Gibson).

Milo (Travis Oliver) takes Martha (Freema Agyeman) hostage.

00m 26s Stage directions described 1-zero-hot-5’s occupants, Ma (Judy Norman) and Pa (Graham Padden), as “mid-50s, thin” – but didn’t specify that they should be dressed in a pinafore and in dungarees-under-blackjacket respectively, exactly as per the subjects of Grant Wood’s 1930 painting American Gothic. Given the painting’s properly iconic status, isn’t it a little odd that Ma and Pa don’t have American accents, like Sally Calypso?

There they were: teeming hordes of computer-rendered Macra.

Graham Padden had been a priest in the final episode of Davies’ Casanova (2005), also starring David Tennant.

Terrified Ma tells Pa he shouldn’t have lied to the computer about the number of people in the car: “You said there were three of us!” As scripted, Pa began: “I know, and I’m sorry, sweetheart, I only wanted to get you home –” Whereupon he started “slamming the horn, beep-beep”.

01m 39s Originally, the opening titles led directly into a “darkened temple” scene: “Background, darkness. Slow track in on an ancient face, behind glass, wreathed in smoke…” This is the Face of Boe – last seen in New Earth (2006) and, before that, The End of the World (2005). Last time, he promised the Doctor that they would meet just once more, when he’d impart to him his great secret – hence his telepathic utterance here: “He is coming.”

02m 24s In the TARDIS, the Doctor (David Tennant) has proposed extending the single trip he promised Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) – in Smith and Jones, then reiterated in The Shakespeare Code (both 2007) – by visiting another planet in the future. Speculating about the Doctor’s home planet, Martha wonders if there are “Lots of planets in [its] sky?” – whereupon the tip of a boom mic dips into shot, covering the rightmost roundel above her head!