Day 747 - The Shakespeare Code

It's been over 6 years since this episode was first broadcast and I've only just realised that the title is a take off of The Da Vinci Code! What a moron!

So as the title suggests, Martha and the Doctor travel back in time and meet William Shakespeare. Each series of the new series seems to have an episode devoted to meeting a famous historical figure. Here it's Shakespeare, before this we met Queen Victoria and before that it was Charles Dickins.

Its nice to see Martha's ethnicity gets a mention at the start of the episode. It would have been weird not to at least mention that black people weren't exactly treated well this far back in history. she says "I'm not exactly white" to which the Doctor replies "I'm not even human, just walk round like you own the place. It seems to work for me." Brilliant! 

Shakespeare is a fun character to meet and we see many of his more famous line interwoven into the story. Its also great how he is shown to be of a supreme intelligence with the psychic paper not working on him etc. It can be a bit of a cliche to portray historical figures as less intelligent than ourselves and so its cool here when at the end of the story Shakespeare reveals he twigged on pretty much straight away that the Doctor was an alien and Martha was a human from the future.

The alien threat is a trio of Carrionites who pretty much have all the quality of witches and are using the power of Shakespeare's words to bring more of their kind into our world. The explanation being that they developed in such a way to use language where we would use mathematics. It's sort of works I guess.

Queen Elizabeth is also mentioned several times throughout the episode but is not seen until the very end. She is not exactly pleased to see the Doctor for reasons unknown to both us and him and its cool that this got addressed in the 50th anniversary episode which saw the tenth Doctor meeting her again...or for the first time. Time travel is complicated!

The unrequited love that Martha is developing for the Doctor is further evidenced here. Staying over in the house of Shakespeare, they are only given one bed to sleep in and the Doctor makes several callous remarks clearly showing how oblivious he is to how Martha feels for him. It doesn't help that he is still talking about Rose! Adric must be spinning in his grave...well if he had a grave and wasn't splattered all over prehistoric Earth...