Relationships In Time And Space

In consideration of the relationship between Madame Vastra and Jenny, of Doctor Who’s Paternoster Gang possibly the nearest Steven Moffat ever got to the Suicide Squad - let’s now get under the covers and take a look at his attempts to get things a bit more grown up...

- Christopher Morley

In consideration of the relationship between Madame Vastra and Jenny, of Doctor Who’s Paternoster Gang possibly the nearest Steven Moffat ever got to the Suicide Squad - let’s now get under the covers and take a look at his attempts to get things a bit more grown up...

The mention, and indeed depiction, of such an interspecies pairing is astoundingly daring, but has been made permissible in these days of more adult Who content by our outgoing showrunner himself.

For was it not he who laid the foundations with his own writing debut towards the end of Series One back in 2005 with The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, the art of shuffling about with some sense of rhythm given new meaning and bringing back some implied memories of after-dark activity for the Doctor?

As poet Robert Frost once said, “Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire”. And as the Ninth incarnation of the man who’d seemingly forgotten he could do it is quick to tell naive young Rose Tyler, “Nine hundred years old, me. I’ve been around a bit. I think you can assume at some point I’ve danced”.

The music of Glenn Miller will later be put to great use in illustrating his moves as he swings and dips his lady friend around the TARDIS console room to the strains of Moonlight Serenade, possibly by way of an apology for that lame ‘trying to resonate concrete’ excuse from their earlier alone time!

Following a quite literal parting of the ways, between Christopher Eccleston and the programme itself, with David Tennant putting what he’d learned from his appearance in BBC Three’s Casanova into practice just four episodes into his second series as the Tenth Doctor, the man from Gallifrey would get down once again.