Plans Within Plans: Why Russell T. Davies Is My Master Now

The other night I told Erica something that I took for granted. I told her that Russell T. Davies, writer executive producer for the new Doctor Who series, doesn't think in terms of episodes. He thinks in terms of entire seasons, whole series. Seeds for what will happen months and years down the road are planted in innocuous places here and there. This isn't just a David Lynch Twin Peaks fiasco, where each episode is aimlessly weird for weirdness's sake, or more recently exemplified by those half-wits at Lost who seem to have taken a great premise and stretched it into absurdity, writing themself into a corner then picking that corner up and throwing it off a cliff. No, folks. Russell has a plan.

There's another writer out there who does the exact same thing. You may have heard of him. He's a guy called "Joss Whedon". Whedon made a name for himself among the uppermost pantheon all of nerddom when it was shown that he was weaving the Dawn storyline into Buffy the Vampire Slayer as far back as season three, and there were plenty of clues that the little things in Firefly were going to come back in a big big way had that show survived more than a dozen or so episodes.

But Joss isn't what I'm on about right now. Russell is.

I say this because Davies had a plan for all of Doctor Who series two and he knew rather precisely how it was going to end.

And I have proof of this.

I choose not to spoil it here and now because the U.S. hasn't finished series two yet. (This Friday's episode on The Sci-Fi Channel is "Love & Monsters", which coincidentally corresponds with the first full day of the Smoke-Free Ohio initiative. There will be blue sky that day, indeed, my friends.)

Rather than ruin it for you, I'll simply point out that last night I finally had the pleasure of hearing the full version of "Song For Ten", the piece of music that was first heard in the 2005 Christmas special "The Christmas Invasion". This was the song played over the Tyler Christmas dinner as the Tenth Doctor tries to pick out his new wardrobe:

"Well I woke up today and the world seemed a restless place
It could have been that way for me
And I wandered around and I thought of your face
That Christmas looking back at me"

It's a touching song, and certainly one that seems fitting for a Christmas episode. They fade out the song right as the television starts airing an interview with PM Harriet Jones talking about how she looks and feels perfectly healthy and Ten does something crazy: he puts on a big honkin' pair of glasses and pays attention to the telly.

Now I know why they cut the song there.

If you listen to the rest of the song immediately after that point, the verses they left out of "The Christmas Invasion" are appropriate to the last episode of the series, not the Christmas special. This means that Russell had figured out how to end series two back before they had even finished the Christmas special a year earlier. He was so sure of the direction the series was going to take that he actually had a chance to incorporate it into the incidental music. This certainly explains the hesitance the Doctor Who production team had when pressed for details about where the song came from and when it was going to be made available.

Damn you, Russel T. Davies! You got me again!

When I finally had a chance to really listen to "Song for Ten", I had a full-on Detective Kujan moment from The Usual Suspects. Kobayashi, Quartet, Redfoot, Guatemala, "Song for Ten".

Cue dropping coffee cup here.