Doctor Who Discussions: Season 1 – The Long Game

Sorry, Adam, but you're the reason this episode sucks.

the long game

Simply being human doesn’t pay very well.

If there is a weak link in the first series of New Who, then it is a truth universally acknowledged that the weakness is The Long Game. Coming off the back of the beloved episode six, Dalek, it isn’t really a surprise that many fans dismiss it.

On paper, there’s nothing off with the episode. The Doctor, Rose and new boy Adam (Bruno Langley) rock up on Satellite Five – which we have already visited far into the future in the episode The End of the World – for some good old fashioned sci-fi business. The guest stars are great: Simon Pegg, Anna Maxwell Martin and Tamsin Grieg. There’s a mystery to solve, and a big old alien. So far, so Doctor Who.

Watching it back, for literally the first time since it aired in 2005 (it was the only episode of the series I had no memory of), I was once again underwhelmed. It isn’t a blinder of an episode. But I have also recently been sampling Peter Capaldi’s Doctor for the first time and I have to say – The Long Game is absolutely brilliant compared to some of the weakest of Stephen Moffat’s writing. I know we can’t really make that comparison stick – different Doctors, different showrunners, different production team. But in the grand scheme of New Who, even one of the worst episodes of Russell T Davies’ run is better than some of season eight and nine.

Anyway, I’m getting away from myself. The issue with The Long Game, I think, is that Adam is a very unlikeable character, and we spend a lot of the episode with him. I appreciate more now that he is, of course, supposed to be the worst. He is supposed to be an example of what would happen if the Doctor got it wrong and chose the wrong person to travel with. Adam is the anti-Rose. He wanders off and gets up to all sorts of mischief, not least the fact that he leaves his parents long answering machine messages explaining the technology he can see around him, with the intent to make a quick buck from it later. For the Doctor, that is unforgivable, and no one is sad to see the back of Adam when the Doctor dumps him at home in the end.

We don’t mind Adam being punished for his transgression, because in our wish fulfilling dreams, we’ve all imagined being chosen by the Doctor and going adventuring, and we are sure that we wouldn’t disgrace ourselves like Adam does. Adam himself does point out that the Doctor just left him to it and didn’t supervise him, and you do wonder for a while if he has a point. The Doctor can be very blinkered, and he’s busy in this episode trying to figure out what is going on up on the mysterious Floor 500. Then again, way back in episode two – on the very same space station – Rose spent a good chunk of the episode by herself and she didn’t go around causing the problems that Adam does here. In the end, we are left with the fact that Adam just doesn’t belong.

In a way, I had fewer problems with The Long Game on my rewatch, mostly because I was grateful that although the story drags a bit and the guest stars are underused because of Adam’s nonsense, at least we get it all over and done with in one episode and then he’s off. It would have been a lot worse, in hindsight, if he had stuck around for a while.

That being said, being retrospectively grateful for that doesn’t make this any better of an episode, so it is still a weak spot in the series. A very generous person might say that it was planned to be like that, to give you an insight into what would happen if the companion was a bad one, but there is little evidence that was the only intention.

What I do admit is that part of the reason I personally don’t like it – and probably a lot of fans feel the same – is that we are all too human ourselves, and that old daydream of going off with the Doctor is rudely interrupted by the little niggling idea that maybe we wouldn’t be good enough either. It is an uncomfortable truth, and one I do concede the episode was trying to play on.

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