"You're bad? What do you want me to do about it?"
IN THIS ONE... A future Doctor (Mark Gatiss) is annoyed by Thal-like humanoids.
REVIEW: Written by David Walliams and Mark Gatiss, The Web of Caves (a title with shades of the earlier The Curse of Fatal Death) is an amusing short starring the latter writer as a future incarnation of the Doctor. He's mostly uninterested in the alien who comes to the TARDIS door begging to be stopped as these are clearly "fans" (albeit alien ones coded to look like very campy Thals) who want attention, sort of a L.I.N.D.A. from another planet. They expose their plans and the Doctor deconstructs them and shoots them down, eventually agree to pencil them into his busy schedule. Silly stuff, but the humor isn't too far out from NuWho's tone.
Gatiss' potential Doctor is fairly generic - an Edwardian gentleman - and we never see his companion (though there's someone else in the TARDIS - I kind of like imagining it's River Song). There's a fun bit where he won't take the faux-Thals seriously until they adopt a sinister voice and it triggers immediate anxiety. He really got me in the last moments when the TARDIS disappears and reappears on the same spot (these quarries all look the same), asking "What have you got for me this time, old girl?" in a sincere, over-dramatic way. And of course, the aliens are still in earshot and it's awkward.
THEORIES: So can this story happen/have happened? Well, of course, after the extra regenerations gifted the Doctor after Doc11, there could be untold Doctors out there, who have yet to canonically be inserted into the timeline. Tom Baker's Curator is one such instance. I wouldn't place Gatiss-Doc in the Fugitive Doctor's era simply because, to him, the Daleks' scheme in The Dalek Invasion of Earth is already old news (so I'm not fooled by the black and white). A more interesting notion is that all the Doctors of the Wilderness Years (this one, the Shalka Doctor, the Doctor from Curse of the Fatal Death) are competing for existence, but Doc8 eliminates their timelines by becoming the War Doctor. They're all 9th Doctors whose histories were briefly asserted during the Time War.
REWATCHABILITY: Medium - The parody is fun and doesn't overstay its welcome, and it's especially interesting because of Gatiss' connection to the new series.
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