Doctor Who: The Unquiet Dead – how well suited is it for Christmas?
By James Aggas
The Unquiet Dead may not be a special episode, but it was still set at Christmas. How well does it suit for Doctor Who Christmas viewing?
While all of his successors up to Thirteen were given Doctor Who Christmas specials, Christopher Eccleston just seemed to miss out on those. However, he was given one Christmas adventure, at least: The Unquiet Dead.
It’s kind of funny to think of the Doctor visiting Christmas time during April 2005. Especially since, in all the following adventures afterwards, the only times the Doctor visited Christmas at all were in the actual Christmas specials. Even the Victorian adventures, such as The Next Doctor or The Snowmen were Christmas specials instead of regular episodes.
It has to be said that Christmas may not be quite as focused on as in those other two stories, especially during the second half of the episode. There’s more focus on the ghosts and zombies at the funeral home, and Christmas is put to one side as a result.
But there are still plenty of good Christmas-y moments, at least. Charles Dickens reading A Christmas Carol is certainly a real highlight in terms of getting the Christmas spirit just right.
Simon Callow as Charles Dickens.
(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.
Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)
Charles Dickens
In fact, Simon Callow’s performance as Charles Dickens is probably one of the strongest points of the episode. Having a writer who’s forced to face creatures and monsters that he believes should only exist in fiction is a fascinating idea, and Callow makes Dickens’s slow and gradual acceptance of it great to watch.
If I’m honest, Mark Gatiss’s first episode of Doctor Who will always be his best. I don’t think anything he’s done since has come quite as close. He gets just the right mix of key Doctor Who elements in – ghosts, zombies and a wonderfully Victorian setting, covered in snow.
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In some ways, I wish that The Unquiet Dead had been an actual Christmas special. Particularly as specials have been given more time to tell their stories, lasting for an hour instead of just forty-five minutes. Because The Unquiet Dead includes a lot, perhaps too much to really let the plot breathe, at times. But it’s still a very enjoyable Doctor Who adventure.
While set at Christmas time, The Unquiet Dead admittedly isn’t the most Christmas-y of adventures. But it is, at least, still a very enjoyable one. An episode that captures the spirit of the horror of the Hinchcliffe era, while of course fitting very nicely into (what was at the time) a brand new era. Not a bad little episode at all.
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How well do you think The Unquiet Dead manages as a Christmas story? Is it a highlight for you from Christopher Eccleston’s series? Let us know in the comments below.