Since this episode has recently increased in trivia-game value (“Name the Doctor Who episode that guest-starred both a future companion and a future Doctor.”), it seemed like the right time to give it another look. So much good stuff here that it’s hard to know where to begin. It is funny, as all of the best Doctor Whos are (the water pistol!), and heartbreaking, as all of the best Doctor Whos are.
Theologically speaking, it is an elegant illustration of that most difficult of concepts, the coexistence of predestination and free will. Headed for ancient Rome, the Doctor and Donna instead wind up in Pompeii on the day before “volcano day.” Donna wants to warn everyone, but the Doctor just wants to get out: there are certain points in time, he explains, that are fixed, unchangeable. Unfortunately, the destruction of Pompeii is one of those times. Donna, not much impressed by Fate, tries anyway to start an evacuation, but she encounters two roadblocks: the language does not yet have a word for “volcano” (it is this eruption that will give it one), and the city’s soothsayers predict a long and prosperous life for the city and its inhabitants. Donna would scoff at that last one, but for the fact that Pompeii’s soothsayers really do seem to have second sight. One of them even identifies the Doctor as “man from Gallifrey.”
The Doctor’s plan (for the Doctor, “run” is a plan) also hits a roadblock when an enterprising street merchant sells the TARDIS as “modern art” to a local businessman, Caecilius. In attempting to recover it, the Doctor learns (short version) that ancient aliens, the Pyrovile, have tunneled under Mt. Vesuvius and intend to use its power to take over the earth and transform humans into Pyrovile. The Doctor can stop them, thus saving the world, by shutting off their machine...but all of the power of Vesuvius that had been diverted will then need another outlet. In other words, Pompeii is a fixed point in time AND it is the Doctor’s choice that causes it.
As a bonus, this is also a nice example of the principle of double-effect. The Doctor does not blow up Pompeii to save the world. He turns off the Pyrovile engine to save the world, and the destruction of Pompeii is an attendant but decidedly un-willed consequence.
And yet, for all of that, the moment that haunts me is yet to come. The Doctor, furious and despairing (“Don’t you think I’ve done enough?” he snarls at Donna), and haunted by the burning of Gallifrey, heads straight for the TARDIS. But Donna, with tears in her eyes and ash in her hair, begs him to “save someone.” She has accepted what had to be done and what must be, but she rejects the Doctor’s fatalist surrender. And so Caecilius and his family are saved (and David Tennant grips Peter Capaldi’s hand and pulls him into the TARDIS).
It’s so easy (for me, at least) to be the Doctor here. To become so overwhelmed by the big picture that we think, because we can’t control that, we can’t control anything. Sometimes we all need a shorthand typist from Chiswick to remind us that we can still save someone.
