A Commentary for Good Night, Part Three
And in the distance, he hears an eerie, melodic sound - like the creak of the house in the sea wind turned to song. He strides out of the room and down the corridor, following the unearthly noise. As he grows nearer, the voice - for it is a voice - grows clear. Suddenly, he stops mid-step.
The voice is Jack’s, and he is belting a late 20th century Broadway show tune at the top of his immortal lungs.
“Nothing’s quite so clear now; feel you’ve lost your way,” Jack sings as the Doctor approaches a warmly lit room. “But you are not alone,
*I was so proud of myself about this one, you have no idea. The song Jack sings is No One Is Alone from my guy Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods. Not only is it a show about fairy tales, it also contains the lyrics above, which, as you may have noticed, includes the Face of Boe’s infamous, “You are not alone” prophesy. And I gave it to Jack.
Who is, of course, played by John Barrowman, who I watched for the very first time many years ago in a Sondheim review called Putting It Together. And who may or may not one day become the aforementioned big ol’ telepathic face in a jar.
Not that the Doctor has heard that particular bit of information yet. Maybe it’s just a random shuffling of mental detritus - the words echoing around in his skull. Maybe his dreams really are just a bit prophetic. Maybe I was just being a pain in the ass.
believe me, no one is-” He stops abruptly when the Doctor appears in the doorway. “Doctor!” he cries, his grin wide and welcoming. “You’ve been missing the party.” Sure enough, there are a number of empty, suspiciously unlabeled bottles littered across the long dining room table at which Jack sits. Jack fills an empty glass from the remaining bottle with a clear, rather sluggish liquid and slides it across the table to him. “We were wondering when you’d show up.”
“Oh, thank god,” a familiar voice slurs from the floor. The Doctor looks down to see a fashionable pair of black heels sticking out from under the dining table.
*Say what you will about Martha Jones, but you have to admit that the woman has excellent taste in footwear.
“You have to save me. He won’t stop singing Sondheim.”
The Doctor crouches down and gently pokes one of the shoes. “Martha? Are you all right?”
“She’s completely rat arsed,” Jack explains.
“Am not,” she counters, and the Doctor hears her smack the Captain’s leg. “And you sound too American to say things like that.”
“Fine.” Jack smiles at the Doctor. “She’s, like, totally wasted, dude.”
“That’s better.” Martha’s face pops up at the other side of the table, her chin resting on the edge. “I am not drunk,” she tells the Doctor gravely, listing slightly to one side.
“Yes, heaven forbid you should let yourself have some fun for once,” Jack mutters, and she glares at him.
“I have fun. I saved the planet. How is that not fun?” A moment later, her expression crumbles. “Oh god. I am drunk.” She slumps back to the floor.
The Doctor sits in the nearest chair and inspects his drink warily. “Jack, what is this?”
“Alcohol,” he replies with a Hollywood grin, his elbows resting on the table, shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms. “The effective kind.”
Out of sight, Martha groans. “Intoxication has markedly deleterious effects upon the chemical reactions of the human brain.”
Jack shrugs. “So does sex.”
“I need these brain cells. I haven’t picked up a textbook in over a year.” She begins to giggle. “Think I could add ‘post-apocalyptic apostle’ to my CV?”
The Doctor reaches for the half-empty bottle of effective alcohol and sniffs the mouth. “It smells like roast beef,” he says, and Jack shrugs again.
“Maybe it was tired of smelling like clocks.”
*Mmm. Clock smell. (No, this doesn’t make any sense. Don’t even try.)
He leans back and empties his glass in one long drink. His lips pucker and he shakes his head. “Yowser. Just what the doctor ordered.”
“Did he?” Martha asks from under the table, sounding sleepy.
He shouldn’t stay here, he knows. There’s a whole house to search, room upon room of creaky furniture and moth-eaten upholstery, but it’s warm here and the lamps are bright. Jack is smiling and Martha is humming show tunes under her breath, and he can afford to stay for just one drink.
*For a moment, he can enjoy these people he cares about and put aside the grief and the loss and the obsession. Of course, it quickly goes to hell.
The Doctor takes a pull from his glass. The liquid is heavy on his tongue and tastes like nothing at all. For a moment, the room around him blurs. He blinks - once, twice, three times - and everything clears. Tied to the neck of the bottle with a thin piece of twine is a flimsy, rectangular bit of paper that was not there before. It reads, Drink Me.
*An homage, I tell you! Not stealing. Here’s a bit from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, from which I did not steal. Alice has found a tiny door, an entrance into some unknown place, but she is too large to fit through it:
There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it, (`which certainly was not here before,' said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME' beautifully printed on it in large letters.
It was all very well to say `Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. `No, I'll look first,' she said, `and see whether it's marked "poison" or not'; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked `poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
But it’s too late for the Doctor - he’s already had his drink.
In the distance, waves beat against the shore. The ocean swells.
*There’s that goshdarn ocean again. Here comes trouble.
“Oh dear,” the Doctor says.
“Oh dear,” he hears Martha murmur happily. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”
*Another direct reference to Alice. The dormouse at the mad tea party has a similar fondness for these words.
“Jack,” he says, keeping his voice carefully even, “where did you find this bottle?”
“What bottle?” Jack asks.
Sure enough, the bottle is gone. In its place stands a rather irate brown hen.
*The Doctor’s mind is occasionally an inexplicably strange place. (As is mine.)
The Doctor opens his mouth to comment on this unexpected development, but before he can speak the hen leaps, wings unfurled, from the table and flees out the door.
He turns to Jack, who is fiddling with his braces, a look of intense concentration marring his chiseled features. “Things like that aren’t supposed to happen,” the Doctor says, fairly certain that this is true. “Bottles are bottles and hens are hens.”
*Didn’t you know? He’s brilliant.
“You’d be surprised,” Jack says, winking.
*Ding!
“When,” he continues portentously, pulling his braces away from his chest with his thumbs, “is a bottle not a bottle?”
Martha snorts. “Oh, that’s too easy. Give us a bit of a challenge, would you?”
Jack releases the braces and they snap back to his chest. “Easy for you, maybe. Easy for me.” He turns to the Doctor, his expression polite and distant. “Still, you’re supposed to have the answer. She’ll be terribly disappointed if you don’t.”
There is a rustle of clothing from beneath the table. “No, I won’t,” Martha says quickly.
Jack smiles at the tabletop. “Not you, honey.”
There’s a short silence. “Right. I knew that. I always knew that.” She laughs faintly. “I don’t suppose there’s any more to drink?”
The Doctor clears his throat. “The last bottle seems to have…flown the coop.”
Martha sighs. “Pity. I had my heart set on an egg white omelet.” Then she calls out, “Oi, Jack! When is an egg not an egg?”
Jack rolls his eyes. “She thinks she’s clever,” he says to the Doctor, but the words are faint. The waves, distant though they are, have grown louder.
“Do you hear-” the Doctor begins to ask, but Martha interrupts with an annoyed squeak.
“I am clever!” Her face appears on the other side of the table again, her eyes fierce and bright. “Think about it. When is a bottle not a bottle, and an egg not an egg?”
*Bottles and eggs are both just shells for the thing inside. When is a bottle not a bottle and an egg not an egg? Well, when they’re broken, of course.
The Doctor looks to Jack, but the other man offers him no assistance. “When they’ve turned into chickens?” he guesses feebly.
*Well done, Doctor. That works too.
His friends stare at him blankly for a long moment, their wide eyes unblinking. Eventually, Jack breaks the silence. “You were right, Martha,” he says slowly. “He thinks we haven’t noticed.”
The Doctor frowns. “Haven’t noticed what?”
Martha disappears again beneath the table, shaking her head. “Honestly,” he hears her say, “how thick does he think we are?”
Jack snorts. “Humans.”
“Humans,” Martha echoes.
The Doctor stands and presses his palms flat on the table. His head echoes with the rolling drumbeat of sea against sand. “Haven’t noticed what?” he asks sharply.
“That you’re not real, of course.” Jack grins, and his even, perfect teeth gleam in the lamplight. “Did you think we wouldn’t figure it out?”
*Jack’s turn for a Creepy Dream Smile. Good job, Jack!
The Doctor takes a slow step back from the dining table. “What are you-”
“You don’t exist, not outside our heads. You couldn’t possibly.”
Martha, appearing in a chair on Jack’s left, smoothes back a piece of her hair and crosses her legs demurely at the ankle. “That’s why we have to leave. It’d just be silly to go on pretending.” She leans forward, resting an elbow on the table. “We’re not children any longer, you know,” she says, not unkindly. “You can’t expect us to stay.”
The Doctor swallows hard, the roar of the ocean in his ears. “I wish you would.”
Jack crosses his arms over his chest. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
“If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side,” Martha says. She turns to Jack. “Speak of the devil, do you have the time?”
Jack chuckles. “I have all the time in the world, doll. I’m Eternal.”
She nods politely, her chin resting on her hand. “How nice for you. Is that just a title, or does it come with a hat?”
*The poor man really deserves a nice hat.
The Doctor’s feet are wet. He looks down to find seawater surging up from between the wooden floorboards, brine and foam swirling around his feet, his ankles, his knees. Kelp twines about his legs as the dining room disappears beneath the waves. The sea has followed him here.
*Stealing from Carroll again:
…her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, `and in that case I can go back by railway,' she said to herself. (Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station.) However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high.
`I wish I hadn't cried so much!' said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. `I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.'
“Martha!” he cries, panic lending his voice an unusual sharpness. “Jack, where are you?” The water has risen to his waist, and he struggles against the current, fighting to reach them.
A wave rolls past, and on the crest ride Martha and Jack. He watches in amazement as they bob calmly by, still seated in their wooden chairs. Martha sips from a china tea cup and winces; without speaking, Jack leans across the space between them and passes her a sugar bowl. She adds a spoonful to her cup and takes another drink, seemingly oblivious to the seawater lapping at her knees. She turns to the Doctor and smiles. “We haven’t believed in stories like you for such a long time. It was lovely of you to stop by, though.”
*Don’t you think, if you were Jo Grant or Tegan Jovanka or Mickey Smith, that there would come a time when you thought of your days with the Doctor as a vivid but entirely unreal dream? Just a story? Because real life, grown up life, is about houses with carpets and beans on toast and living every day with your feet on the ground - and it’s not nearly as easy or as simple as the Doctor makes it sound. It’s consuming and dull and sometimes absolutely lovely, and most nights the stars are nothing but pinpricks of light, if you can see them at all. And don’t you think that maybe you’d forget about him and his blue box and the stars - not all of it, not the fact of him, just the meat and the bones and the reality of it - and simply live your life day after day?
And don’t you think he knows that you will?
(Sarah Jane didn’t. Neither did Jack, or Donna. Neither will Rose or Martha. But give them time, he thinks.)
The sea overtakes him, and he is swallowed by darkness.
The voice is Jack’s, and he is belting a late 20th century Broadway show tune at the top of his immortal lungs.
“Nothing’s quite so clear now; feel you’ve lost your way,” Jack sings as the Doctor approaches a warmly lit room. “But you are not alone,
*I was so proud of myself about this one, you have no idea. The song Jack sings is No One Is Alone from my guy Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods. Not only is it a show about fairy tales, it also contains the lyrics above, which, as you may have noticed, includes the Face of Boe’s infamous, “You are not alone” prophesy. And I gave it to Jack.
Who is, of course, played by John Barrowman, who I watched for the very first time many years ago in a Sondheim review called Putting It Together. And who may or may not one day become the aforementioned big ol’ telepathic face in a jar.
Not that the Doctor has heard that particular bit of information yet. Maybe it’s just a random shuffling of mental detritus - the words echoing around in his skull. Maybe his dreams really are just a bit prophetic. Maybe I was just being a pain in the ass.
believe me, no one is-” He stops abruptly when the Doctor appears in the doorway. “Doctor!” he cries, his grin wide and welcoming. “You’ve been missing the party.” Sure enough, there are a number of empty, suspiciously unlabeled bottles littered across the long dining room table at which Jack sits. Jack fills an empty glass from the remaining bottle with a clear, rather sluggish liquid and slides it across the table to him. “We were wondering when you’d show up.”
“Oh, thank god,” a familiar voice slurs from the floor. The Doctor looks down to see a fashionable pair of black heels sticking out from under the dining table.
*Say what you will about Martha Jones, but you have to admit that the woman has excellent taste in footwear.
“You have to save me. He won’t stop singing Sondheim.”
The Doctor crouches down and gently pokes one of the shoes. “Martha? Are you all right?”
“She’s completely rat arsed,” Jack explains.
“Am not,” she counters, and the Doctor hears her smack the Captain’s leg. “And you sound too American to say things like that.”
“Fine.” Jack smiles at the Doctor. “She’s, like, totally wasted, dude.”
“That’s better.” Martha’s face pops up at the other side of the table, her chin resting on the edge. “I am not drunk,” she tells the Doctor gravely, listing slightly to one side.
“Yes, heaven forbid you should let yourself have some fun for once,” Jack mutters, and she glares at him.
“I have fun. I saved the planet. How is that not fun?” A moment later, her expression crumbles. “Oh god. I am drunk.” She slumps back to the floor.
The Doctor sits in the nearest chair and inspects his drink warily. “Jack, what is this?”
“Alcohol,” he replies with a Hollywood grin, his elbows resting on the table, shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms. “The effective kind.”
Out of sight, Martha groans. “Intoxication has markedly deleterious effects upon the chemical reactions of the human brain.”
Jack shrugs. “So does sex.”
“I need these brain cells. I haven’t picked up a textbook in over a year.” She begins to giggle. “Think I could add ‘post-apocalyptic apostle’ to my CV?”
The Doctor reaches for the half-empty bottle of effective alcohol and sniffs the mouth. “It smells like roast beef,” he says, and Jack shrugs again.
“Maybe it was tired of smelling like clocks.”
*Mmm. Clock smell. (No, this doesn’t make any sense. Don’t even try.)
He leans back and empties his glass in one long drink. His lips pucker and he shakes his head. “Yowser. Just what the doctor ordered.”
“Did he?” Martha asks from under the table, sounding sleepy.
He shouldn’t stay here, he knows. There’s a whole house to search, room upon room of creaky furniture and moth-eaten upholstery, but it’s warm here and the lamps are bright. Jack is smiling and Martha is humming show tunes under her breath, and he can afford to stay for just one drink.
*For a moment, he can enjoy these people he cares about and put aside the grief and the loss and the obsession. Of course, it quickly goes to hell.
The Doctor takes a pull from his glass. The liquid is heavy on his tongue and tastes like nothing at all. For a moment, the room around him blurs. He blinks - once, twice, three times - and everything clears. Tied to the neck of the bottle with a thin piece of twine is a flimsy, rectangular bit of paper that was not there before. It reads, Drink Me.
*An homage, I tell you! Not stealing. Here’s a bit from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, from which I did not steal. Alice has found a tiny door, an entrance into some unknown place, but she is too large to fit through it:
There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it, (`which certainly was not here before,' said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME' beautifully printed on it in large letters.
It was all very well to say `Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. `No, I'll look first,' she said, `and see whether it's marked "poison" or not'; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked `poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
But it’s too late for the Doctor - he’s already had his drink.
In the distance, waves beat against the shore. The ocean swells.
*There’s that goshdarn ocean again. Here comes trouble.
“Oh dear,” the Doctor says.
“Oh dear,” he hears Martha murmur happily. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”
*Another direct reference to Alice. The dormouse at the mad tea party has a similar fondness for these words.
“Jack,” he says, keeping his voice carefully even, “where did you find this bottle?”
“What bottle?” Jack asks.
Sure enough, the bottle is gone. In its place stands a rather irate brown hen.
*The Doctor’s mind is occasionally an inexplicably strange place. (As is mine.)
The Doctor opens his mouth to comment on this unexpected development, but before he can speak the hen leaps, wings unfurled, from the table and flees out the door.
He turns to Jack, who is fiddling with his braces, a look of intense concentration marring his chiseled features. “Things like that aren’t supposed to happen,” the Doctor says, fairly certain that this is true. “Bottles are bottles and hens are hens.”
*Didn’t you know? He’s brilliant.
“You’d be surprised,” Jack says, winking.
*Ding!
“When,” he continues portentously, pulling his braces away from his chest with his thumbs, “is a bottle not a bottle?”
Martha snorts. “Oh, that’s too easy. Give us a bit of a challenge, would you?”
Jack releases the braces and they snap back to his chest. “Easy for you, maybe. Easy for me.” He turns to the Doctor, his expression polite and distant. “Still, you’re supposed to have the answer. She’ll be terribly disappointed if you don’t.”
There is a rustle of clothing from beneath the table. “No, I won’t,” Martha says quickly.
Jack smiles at the tabletop. “Not you, honey.”
There’s a short silence. “Right. I knew that. I always knew that.” She laughs faintly. “I don’t suppose there’s any more to drink?”
The Doctor clears his throat. “The last bottle seems to have…flown the coop.”
Martha sighs. “Pity. I had my heart set on an egg white omelet.” Then she calls out, “Oi, Jack! When is an egg not an egg?”
Jack rolls his eyes. “She thinks she’s clever,” he says to the Doctor, but the words are faint. The waves, distant though they are, have grown louder.
“Do you hear-” the Doctor begins to ask, but Martha interrupts with an annoyed squeak.
“I am clever!” Her face appears on the other side of the table again, her eyes fierce and bright. “Think about it. When is a bottle not a bottle, and an egg not an egg?”
*Bottles and eggs are both just shells for the thing inside. When is a bottle not a bottle and an egg not an egg? Well, when they’re broken, of course.
The Doctor looks to Jack, but the other man offers him no assistance. “When they’ve turned into chickens?” he guesses feebly.
*Well done, Doctor. That works too.
His friends stare at him blankly for a long moment, their wide eyes unblinking. Eventually, Jack breaks the silence. “You were right, Martha,” he says slowly. “He thinks we haven’t noticed.”
The Doctor frowns. “Haven’t noticed what?”
Martha disappears again beneath the table, shaking her head. “Honestly,” he hears her say, “how thick does he think we are?”
Jack snorts. “Humans.”
“Humans,” Martha echoes.
The Doctor stands and presses his palms flat on the table. His head echoes with the rolling drumbeat of sea against sand. “Haven’t noticed what?” he asks sharply.
“That you’re not real, of course.” Jack grins, and his even, perfect teeth gleam in the lamplight. “Did you think we wouldn’t figure it out?”
*Jack’s turn for a Creepy Dream Smile. Good job, Jack!
The Doctor takes a slow step back from the dining table. “What are you-”
“You don’t exist, not outside our heads. You couldn’t possibly.”
Martha, appearing in a chair on Jack’s left, smoothes back a piece of her hair and crosses her legs demurely at the ankle. “That’s why we have to leave. It’d just be silly to go on pretending.” She leans forward, resting an elbow on the table. “We’re not children any longer, you know,” she says, not unkindly. “You can’t expect us to stay.”
The Doctor swallows hard, the roar of the ocean in his ears. “I wish you would.”
Jack crosses his arms over his chest. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
“If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side,” Martha says. She turns to Jack. “Speak of the devil, do you have the time?”
Jack chuckles. “I have all the time in the world, doll. I’m Eternal.”
She nods politely, her chin resting on her hand. “How nice for you. Is that just a title, or does it come with a hat?”
*The poor man really deserves a nice hat.
The Doctor’s feet are wet. He looks down to find seawater surging up from between the wooden floorboards, brine and foam swirling around his feet, his ankles, his knees. Kelp twines about his legs as the dining room disappears beneath the waves. The sea has followed him here.
*Stealing from Carroll again:
…her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, `and in that case I can go back by railway,' she said to herself. (Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station.) However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high.
`I wish I hadn't cried so much!' said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. `I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.'
“Martha!” he cries, panic lending his voice an unusual sharpness. “Jack, where are you?” The water has risen to his waist, and he struggles against the current, fighting to reach them.
A wave rolls past, and on the crest ride Martha and Jack. He watches in amazement as they bob calmly by, still seated in their wooden chairs. Martha sips from a china tea cup and winces; without speaking, Jack leans across the space between them and passes her a sugar bowl. She adds a spoonful to her cup and takes another drink, seemingly oblivious to the seawater lapping at her knees. She turns to the Doctor and smiles. “We haven’t believed in stories like you for such a long time. It was lovely of you to stop by, though.”
*Don’t you think, if you were Jo Grant or Tegan Jovanka or Mickey Smith, that there would come a time when you thought of your days with the Doctor as a vivid but entirely unreal dream? Just a story? Because real life, grown up life, is about houses with carpets and beans on toast and living every day with your feet on the ground - and it’s not nearly as easy or as simple as the Doctor makes it sound. It’s consuming and dull and sometimes absolutely lovely, and most nights the stars are nothing but pinpricks of light, if you can see them at all. And don’t you think that maybe you’d forget about him and his blue box and the stars - not all of it, not the fact of him, just the meat and the bones and the reality of it - and simply live your life day after day?
And don’t you think he knows that you will?
(Sarah Jane didn’t. Neither did Jack, or Donna. Neither will Rose or Martha. But give them time, he thinks.)
The sea overtakes him, and he is swallowed by darkness.