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Alright here it comes, my hottest Doctor Who take which I bring up from time to time and nobody ever believes I mean it. Allow me to lay out why Love & Monster is the most important episode of Doctor Who in the revival era.
People have said a lot about Love & Monsters, it's one of the most controversial eps. Like lots of the cult eps, received wisdom holds that it’s terrible, a small sector love it, and all anyone remembers is Marc Warren puts his cock in a paving slab.
What is rarely raised by either its fans or its detractors, though, is that it was the most important moment in the history of the show post revival.
No really.
And the reason why is perfectly encapsulated by the use of an ampersand in the title.
No. Really.
No really.
And the reason why is perfectly encapsulated by the use of an ampersand in the title.
No. Really.
Trivia Time: The word ‘and’ appears in four Doctor Who story titles before Love & Monsters, each time stylised as a word. In Love & Monsters it appears stylised as an ampersand, the only time this occurs. Remember this.
Love & Monsters is the most 'Who' story of the first two years. Doctor Who had always reinvented itself and taken weird risks, unafraid of how it looked. Historically, many rough patches correlate to times it played safe (tho one can’t deny the opposite also happened)
In 2005 they brought back the show, a huge risk in and of itself, and the first season does plenty of experimentation, because it *had* to, to work out what Doctor Who even is in 2005. It needed a burping bin and a walking corpse to discover the shape of itself in the new era.
But you can also see it's casting about for reference points, taking from successful American myth arc SF, drawing writers from safe hands and people close to DW. The least 'safe' is Rob Shearman, and they had him remake one of the most successful audios from the wilderness years
By S2, they know what worked from the initial staking out, and the start of S2 feels VERY like carbon copy S1. Skipping Rose, it's near a one-to-one correlation. End of the World / New Earth, The Unquiet Dead / Tooth and Claw, mid-season brings in the next famous old DW monster.
The structure of the series is broadly the same in the distribution of one and two parters and what sort of stories they're telling. S2 is, largely, let's-do-S1-again with little tweaks based on what they learned. The biggest tweak being David Tennant of course.
But behind the scenes, you have this thing where they do a Blue Peter contest, riding the crest of publicity for the return of DW, to design a monster.
At the same time, hey, S1 was SO successful, they want a 60 minute Christmas special. Only there's no money for it so it has to be made as part of the S2 production block. Which means they need to make an episode but have barely any filming time left with the leads.
And so they do the most Doctor Who thing possible.
The thing that more than anything like the TARDIS or daleks or cybermen or anything else thus far cemented that this was *really* Doctor Who.
They lean INTO the problem.
The thing that more than anything like the TARDIS or daleks or cybermen or anything else thus far cemented that this was *really* Doctor Who.
They lean INTO the problem.
Instead of mitigating it, let's not hide this kid's monster in the background, let's put it FRONT AND CENTER. Give it a ridiculous planet. Cast a popular comedian, have him go full panto. Make the entire thing a celebration of the absurdity of an 8yo kid’s design being focal!
Let's make a POINT of the absence of the Doctor and Rose! And make up a whole new bunch of protagonists out of nowhere! And tell the story from *their* unreliable perspective! (Which in turn gives a credible context to the ridiculous monster.)
And let’s put a side character front and center, and use this chance to focus on her, and get a new perspective on HER! And let's give it an ELO soundtrack! And a bad karoake COVER of an ELO soundtrack!
LET’S USE AN AMPERSAND IN THE TITLE!!!!!
They took an array of metatextual demands, and they said, OK, so let's make the *whole thing* a metatextual story ABOUT what Doctor Who is to the fans, assembled in the most Doctor Who way possible. ‘Anything and everything’. Running with ideas without cynicism or self-doubt.
RTD did what every Doctor Who producer before him had done, when faced with a smorgasbord of weird issues and problems: He didn't mitigate, he didn't hark to formula, he didn't look to the most secure option. He decided to make the weirdness the heart of the thing.
Love & Monsters is all in. Every aspect is as unashamed of its idiosyncrasy as it can be (including the title!) The whole thing is celebrating its own absurdity. If at any moment it tried to present itself as plausible it'd collapse, but every time, it chooses the ridiculous.
The problems, the risks, the absurdity of the whole endeavour, more than anything else, is the thing that has defined the show, always. At its most sublime, by owning it, making it an asset. RTD got that and knew exactly what he was doing. Love & Monsters is ABOUT what he's doing
It's a barely veiled story about Doctor Who fans. It doesn't try and defend itself by ever going 'No but really this is serious drama'. Its defence, when it comes, is in the final lines Elton says:
'When you're a kid, they tell you it's all... grow up. Get a job. Get married. Get a house. Have a kid, and that's it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It's so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better.'
And it *worked*. As much as many people hate it, and most think it's a bizarre disjunct, well... it IS! But the 'Doctor-lite' stories became a fixture themselves, and the preparedness to do complete nonsequitur, or focus on some odd element, or etc, became A Thing Doctor Who Does
And in turn, that made future seasons more confident when THEY did a bizarre thing, some of which would themselves become A Thing Doctor Who Does in turn. Doctor Who stagnates without that cycle; there's historical evidence of the fact (S16, 22, 24...)
If RTD hadn't done Love & Monsters, the show probably wouldn't have stuck around. Maybe it would run for five seasons, broadly in the mould of 2005. Maybe longer. Ten years? But in the end the shape of its boundaries would have become fully defined, and it would have faded away.
(Let’s also take a moment to acknowledge that the show could go in one week to this from pseudo-intellectual edgelord broodfest The Satan Pit.)
The best episode of Doctor Who ever made is one in which Peter Capaldi spends 60 minutes walking around a castle talking to himself, and that episode would never have existed if RTD hadn't had the audacity to make Love & Monsters ~10 years earlier.
There’s no better symbol for what Love & Monsters is, and means, than that ampersand.
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P.S. Even if you don't enjoy it, I think you should respect it (this is my attitude towards The Silurians frex) But I really enjoy it! It's one of the most memorable first airings for me. I remember watching it with my brother, marvelling that this was what DW was doing today).
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