Doctor Who Confidential (2005–2011): Season 3, Episode 3 - Are We There Yet? - full transcript
NARRATOR:
It's the year 5000000053,
and the Doctor's in a bit of a jam.
It's all very grimy and nasty.
Oh, that's nice!
It's a fairly dystopian future.
DOCTOR: This must be the lower levels.
Some sort of undercity.
I like that, though. I like futures
like that. It's very Blade Runner.
-Let her go!
-I'm sorry.
It feels a lot like where we're heading.
NARRATOR: Ride along with
Doctor Who Confidential
as we play passenger and go backstage
to see the making of Gridlock.
Set billions of years in the future,
the Doctor Who production team
have transformed
this Cardiff Bay industrial warehouse
into the grimy undercity
of New New York.
This is Pharmacy Town.
What I liked about this as a location
is that if you go down to
the foundations of buildings,
you get this heavy brick
or concrete foundations.
So it has that sort
of weight and gravitas.
And then into these gaps
we can build these pharmacy booths,
which are these three green things
that you can see,
which is where
our pharmacists are trading.
The idea is this Pharmacy Town
is long defunct
and is now in a state of disrepair,
and there are only
a few pharmacists left trading.
MAN: Action.
Oh, you should have said!
How long have you been there?
It's all very grimy and bleak
and fairly nasty.
Two for the price of one.
Happy, happy, lovely happy!
Anger. Buy some anger!
Pure unbridled anger.
-Let yourself go!
-Cut!
The Doctor feels a great responsibility
for what happens to Martha.
He's brought her here,
kind of showing off a little bit,
showing off the universe to her.
And the first thing that happens,
she gets kidnapped
by some dodgy-looking characters.
Sorry. I'm really, really sorry.
We just need three, that's all.
We just need three.
-Let her go! I'm warning you!
-It's not our fault!
I'm really sorry. Sorry!
TENNANT: Obviously,
he feels responsible for that.
And then spends the rest
of the episode trying to get her back.
-Give her some sleep.
-Don't you dare!
Don't put that near me.
It's just sleep. It won't do you
any harm if you don't fight it.
That's it, come on.
PHIL COLLINSON: It's the first episode
that he's deprived of her in a way.
She's kidnapped
and I think he misses her.
And he realises that actually
he's started to become attached to her.
He's really starting
to grow to like her.
Martha!
Those people, who were they?
Where did they take her?
They've taken her to the motorway.
NARRATOR: Gridlock features some of
the largest and most complex CGI effects
of all the series so far.
Live action green screen elements
mix seamlessly with computer graphics
to create this murky motorway.
It's the first time the whole story has
been set effectively inside a CGI world.
I always wanted to break down
that invisible line
between the live action and the CG.
Even with our beautiful pictures,
there's always
a real human being saying,
"Look, there's a spaceship,"
and there's a CGI spaceship.
So, they're living inside a CG world.
They're actually part of it.
It was tricky because, ironically,
you go to tell one of
the biggest stories we've ever told
with this huge motorway tunnel,
thousands of cars,
and, actually, you end up
shooting the whole thing
in a six-foot-by-six-foot box,
'cause those cars are tiny.
So, it was one of the most small shoots.
I think Milo, Cheen and Martha
spent four days in that car,
just filming in a tiny, tiny car,
which was a nightmare,
but actually telling
a very big story around that.
He was just standing there,
breathing it in.
If you get a star name, you don't
really cover them in prosthetics
so that nobody knows who they are.
But we seem to have
a habit of doing that.
Now we've done it to Ardal O'Hanlon.
I'm used to it from working on shows
where people come in
and they're looking very silly
and dressed up funny,
but you just have
these normal conversations.
And I suppose it must look
quite odd to an outsider
if someone saw me talking to you
in a cat face
and just having
a perfectly normal conversation.
People might think that's very odd.
But I don't think it's very odd
because I'm used to it.
I've been doing it for years.
This woman stood in the exhaust fumes
for a solid 20 minutes.
By the time they found her,
her head had swollen to 50 feet.
It's actually more freakish
if you see them out of the make-up.
Because they, of course,
come here at 4:00 in the morning,
or some ridiculous hour,
to start getting into all that stuff.
By the time I roll up at 6:30, 7:00,
they are transformed already.
So I can go through a week without
ever seeing them in the real world.
And if they then come in
and there they are
as a normal human being,
that's more disorientating.
It's weirder talking to them then.
If you won't take me,
I'll go there on my own.
Probably the trickiest sequence
of the whole episode
is the Doctor's journey
from Brannigan's car...
What do you think you're doing?
...right down to the bottom
to save Martha.
It was tricky
to put together logistically.
Here's our car, that we replicated
hundreds of times,
which is why all the cars
look the same in this world.
What will happen is where the green is,
we will paint on in CGI
the rest of the thousands of cars
in the background.
We had the underside of another car
suspended probably about
10, 15 feet up off the ground.
MAN: Action!
WOMAN: He's completely insane!
And a bit magnificent.
ELECTRONIC VOICE: Capsule open.
-Who the hell are you?
-Sorry, motorway foot patrol.
Capsule open.
Thank you very much.
Capsule open.
Capsule open.
Excuse me! Is that legal?
(SCREECHING)
What are those shapes?
NARRATOR:
And lurking deep in the Undercity
is an old enemy of the Doctor's.
What the hell are they?
(SCREECHING)
DOCTOR: Macra.
(SCREAMING)
Trying to imagine these giant crabs
attacking the car wasn't such a big deal
because our characters never see them.
We hear them, we hear the sounds,
we're pushed by them,
we get that sort of sense of them,
which is much easier to do
than being presented with
a green screen and saying,
“Okay, there's a massive 60-foot crab,
and look scared.“
We were really overexcited with it all,
and the adrenalin's pumping,
and when Richard shouted,
"Cut, we're gonna go again,"
me and Travis went, "Yes!"
Let's go for full-on screams
and let's see what it's like, yeah?
(SCREAMING)
It was really, really scary.
It was so close,
and then the smoke came, and then
I thought something had malfunctioned.
And I was gonna shout "Cut" but
I thought, "No, it's not my department.”
(SCREAMING)
It was so much fun.
Usually TV has to be so small and subtle
and all in the eyes
and all that malarkey.
Today we've just been...
(SCREAMING)
And cut.
NARRATOR: Travelling five billion years
in the future
means the return of an old face.
The Doctor, where is he?
NARRATOR: And a very old face.
We carried Boe
over into this story so that,
even for a casual viewer,
you get a sense of
within five billion
there's a consistent world.
The Face of Boe!
I knew you would come.
In Series 2,
Russell had talked, at one point,
about the Face of Boe
having a revelation.
We shall meet again, Doctor,
for the third time, for the last time,
and the truth shall be told.
Face of Boe finally reveals his secret,
he's not quick.
You are not alone.
It shakes him, because Boe is
this incredible psychic presence
who spans the aeons,
who has seen more than perhaps
even the Doctor has ever seen.
He is literally billions of years old.
So the fact that
he's telling the Doctor this,
the Doctor can't quite dismiss it,
but at the same time
he knows there isn't anyone else.
We will come back to it.
It's gonna sink into the series.
For a while,
we won't answer it immediately.
But there are answers
on the way in this series.
Devastating answers!
Everything has its time.
Right now the Doctor is left
with this conundrum
that he knows
he's the last of his people,
and Boe has just told him that he's not.
And that doesn't make sense.
Boe is not lying, but the Doctor's
not got it wrong, either.
The truth lies somewhere in between.
Hold on.
That's nice.
She doesn't belong on this planet,
and it's all my fault.
(BANGING)
I'm not just a Time Lord.
I'm the last of the Time Lords.
It's the year 5000000053,
and the Doctor's in a bit of a jam.
It's all very grimy and nasty.
Oh, that's nice!
It's a fairly dystopian future.
DOCTOR: This must be the lower levels.
Some sort of undercity.
I like that, though. I like futures
like that. It's very Blade Runner.
-Let her go!
-I'm sorry.
It feels a lot like where we're heading.
NARRATOR: Ride along with
Doctor Who Confidential
as we play passenger and go backstage
to see the making of Gridlock.
Set billions of years in the future,
the Doctor Who production team
have transformed
this Cardiff Bay industrial warehouse
into the grimy undercity
of New New York.
This is Pharmacy Town.
What I liked about this as a location
is that if you go down to
the foundations of buildings,
you get this heavy brick
or concrete foundations.
So it has that sort
of weight and gravitas.
And then into these gaps
we can build these pharmacy booths,
which are these three green things
that you can see,
which is where
our pharmacists are trading.
The idea is this Pharmacy Town
is long defunct
and is now in a state of disrepair,
and there are only
a few pharmacists left trading.
MAN: Action.
Oh, you should have said!
How long have you been there?
It's all very grimy and bleak
and fairly nasty.
Two for the price of one.
Happy, happy, lovely happy!
Anger. Buy some anger!
Pure unbridled anger.
-Let yourself go!
-Cut!
The Doctor feels a great responsibility
for what happens to Martha.
He's brought her here,
kind of showing off a little bit,
showing off the universe to her.
And the first thing that happens,
she gets kidnapped
by some dodgy-looking characters.
Sorry. I'm really, really sorry.
We just need three, that's all.
We just need three.
-Let her go! I'm warning you!
-It's not our fault!
I'm really sorry. Sorry!
TENNANT: Obviously,
he feels responsible for that.
And then spends the rest
of the episode trying to get her back.
-Give her some sleep.
-Don't you dare!
Don't put that near me.
It's just sleep. It won't do you
any harm if you don't fight it.
That's it, come on.
PHIL COLLINSON: It's the first episode
that he's deprived of her in a way.
She's kidnapped
and I think he misses her.
And he realises that actually
he's started to become attached to her.
He's really starting
to grow to like her.
Martha!
Those people, who were they?
Where did they take her?
They've taken her to the motorway.
NARRATOR: Gridlock features some of
the largest and most complex CGI effects
of all the series so far.
Live action green screen elements
mix seamlessly with computer graphics
to create this murky motorway.
It's the first time the whole story has
been set effectively inside a CGI world.
I always wanted to break down
that invisible line
between the live action and the CG.
Even with our beautiful pictures,
there's always
a real human being saying,
"Look, there's a spaceship,"
and there's a CGI spaceship.
So, they're living inside a CG world.
They're actually part of it.
It was tricky because, ironically,
you go to tell one of
the biggest stories we've ever told
with this huge motorway tunnel,
thousands of cars,
and, actually, you end up
shooting the whole thing
in a six-foot-by-six-foot box,
'cause those cars are tiny.
So, it was one of the most small shoots.
I think Milo, Cheen and Martha
spent four days in that car,
just filming in a tiny, tiny car,
which was a nightmare,
but actually telling
a very big story around that.
He was just standing there,
breathing it in.
If you get a star name, you don't
really cover them in prosthetics
so that nobody knows who they are.
But we seem to have
a habit of doing that.
Now we've done it to Ardal O'Hanlon.
I'm used to it from working on shows
where people come in
and they're looking very silly
and dressed up funny,
but you just have
these normal conversations.
And I suppose it must look
quite odd to an outsider
if someone saw me talking to you
in a cat face
and just having
a perfectly normal conversation.
People might think that's very odd.
But I don't think it's very odd
because I'm used to it.
I've been doing it for years.
This woman stood in the exhaust fumes
for a solid 20 minutes.
By the time they found her,
her head had swollen to 50 feet.
It's actually more freakish
if you see them out of the make-up.
Because they, of course,
come here at 4:00 in the morning,
or some ridiculous hour,
to start getting into all that stuff.
By the time I roll up at 6:30, 7:00,
they are transformed already.
So I can go through a week without
ever seeing them in the real world.
And if they then come in
and there they are
as a normal human being,
that's more disorientating.
It's weirder talking to them then.
If you won't take me,
I'll go there on my own.
Probably the trickiest sequence
of the whole episode
is the Doctor's journey
from Brannigan's car...
What do you think you're doing?
...right down to the bottom
to save Martha.
It was tricky
to put together logistically.
Here's our car, that we replicated
hundreds of times,
which is why all the cars
look the same in this world.
What will happen is where the green is,
we will paint on in CGI
the rest of the thousands of cars
in the background.
We had the underside of another car
suspended probably about
10, 15 feet up off the ground.
MAN: Action!
WOMAN: He's completely insane!
And a bit magnificent.
ELECTRONIC VOICE: Capsule open.
-Who the hell are you?
-Sorry, motorway foot patrol.
Capsule open.
Thank you very much.
Capsule open.
Capsule open.
Excuse me! Is that legal?
(SCREECHING)
What are those shapes?
NARRATOR:
And lurking deep in the Undercity
is an old enemy of the Doctor's.
What the hell are they?
(SCREECHING)
DOCTOR: Macra.
(SCREAMING)
Trying to imagine these giant crabs
attacking the car wasn't such a big deal
because our characters never see them.
We hear them, we hear the sounds,
we're pushed by them,
we get that sort of sense of them,
which is much easier to do
than being presented with
a green screen and saying,
“Okay, there's a massive 60-foot crab,
and look scared.“
We were really overexcited with it all,
and the adrenalin's pumping,
and when Richard shouted,
"Cut, we're gonna go again,"
me and Travis went, "Yes!"
Let's go for full-on screams
and let's see what it's like, yeah?
(SCREAMING)
It was really, really scary.
It was so close,
and then the smoke came, and then
I thought something had malfunctioned.
And I was gonna shout "Cut" but
I thought, "No, it's not my department.”
(SCREAMING)
It was so much fun.
Usually TV has to be so small and subtle
and all in the eyes
and all that malarkey.
Today we've just been...
(SCREAMING)
And cut.
NARRATOR: Travelling five billion years
in the future
means the return of an old face.
The Doctor, where is he?
NARRATOR: And a very old face.
We carried Boe
over into this story so that,
even for a casual viewer,
you get a sense of
within five billion
there's a consistent world.
The Face of Boe!
I knew you would come.
In Series 2,
Russell had talked, at one point,
about the Face of Boe
having a revelation.
We shall meet again, Doctor,
for the third time, for the last time,
and the truth shall be told.
Face of Boe finally reveals his secret,
he's not quick.
You are not alone.
It shakes him, because Boe is
this incredible psychic presence
who spans the aeons,
who has seen more than perhaps
even the Doctor has ever seen.
He is literally billions of years old.
So the fact that
he's telling the Doctor this,
the Doctor can't quite dismiss it,
but at the same time
he knows there isn't anyone else.
We will come back to it.
It's gonna sink into the series.
For a while,
we won't answer it immediately.
But there are answers
on the way in this series.
Devastating answers!
Everything has its time.
Right now the Doctor is left
with this conundrum
that he knows
he's the last of his people,
and Boe has just told him that he's not.
And that doesn't make sense.
Boe is not lying, but the Doctor's
not got it wrong, either.
The truth lies somewhere in between.
Hold on.
That's nice.
She doesn't belong on this planet,
and it's all my fault.
(BANGING)
I'm not just a Time Lord.
I'm the last of the Time Lords.