User:Neddyseagoon/sandbox/FiresofPompeii

194 – "The Fires of Pompeii"
Doctor Who episode
An adult Pyrovile bears down on the Doctor and Donna inside Mount Vesuvius.
Cast
Doctor David Tennant (Tenth Doctor)
Companion Catherine Tate (Donna Noble)
Others Peter Capaldi – Caecilius Tracey Childs – Metella Phil Davis – Lucius Sasha Behar – Spurrina Francesca Fowler – Evelina Lorraine Burroughs - Thalina Victoria Wicks – High Priestess Francois Pandolfo – Quintus Karen Gillan – Soothsayer Phil Cornwell – Stallholder
Production
Directed by	Colin Teague
Written by	James Moran
Produced by	Phil Collinson
Executive producer(s)	Russell T. Davies Julie Gardner
Production code	4.2
Series	Series 4
Running time	48 mins
First broadcast	12 April 2008
Chronology
← Preceded by "Partners in Crime" Followed by → "Planet of the Ood"

"The Fires of Pompeii" is the second episode of the fourth series of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was broadcast on BBC One on 12 April 2008.

Plot

The episode begins with the Doctor and Donna leaving the TARDIS and entering what the Doctor takes to be Rome in the 1st century. However, when the Doctor notices that none of the famous landmarks of Rome, such as the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum, are present, and Donna points out that there is only one smoking hill and not Rome's famous seven, the Doctor realises they have actually arrived in Pompeii the day before it is to be destroyed.

The Doctor is quick to want to leave the inevitable disaster, but Donna wants to help evacuate the city, saying there is plenty of time for people to get out of the city. The Doctor insists that he cannot interfere in established events, which Donna is unwilling to accept. The Doctor argues they can't tell anyone, pointing out that if Donna did try to warn the people, they would dismiss her as 'a mad old soothsayer'. However, their departure is stalled when they find that a nearby stallholder has sold the TARDIS to Caecilius and his wife Metella as a piece of "modern art". Meanwhile, a young woman dressed in red, a member of the Sibylline sisterhood, reports back on the arrival of the "blue box", which she and her fellows find is a fulfillment of a Sibylline prophecy.

At Caecilius' house, operating under the pseudonym of Spartacus, the Doctor attempts to procure the TARDIS, only to be interrupted by the arrival of the town augur, Lucius Petrus Dextrus. Dextrus is there to retrieve a marble slate with a circuit board carved into it. Upon seeing the Doctor, both he and Caecilius' prophetically-gifted daughter Evelina reveal several personal details about Donna and the Doctor, including their real names and places of origin, knowledge they claim to have gained by inhaling the fumes of the hypocausts in the city. Lucius also tells the Doctor that "she is returning", and Donna has "something on [her] back".

When Dextrus has gone, Donna finds that Evelina's skin is turning to stone whilst the Doctor is shown the hypocaust system, which is powered by hot springs from Vesuvius itself. This system, he is told, was installed after the 62 AD earthquake on Dextrus and the other soothsayers' instructions. From that time onwards, the soothsayers have been inhaling rock dust from these hypocausts and all their predictions have been entirely accurate. The Doctor and Evelina's brother Quintus break into Dextrus' house, finding more marble circuit boards which come together to form an energy converter. When Dextrus confronts them, the Doctor rips off his arm, revealing that it has turned to stone like Evelina's skin. Dextrus sends one of the "underworld gods" to pursue the Doctor.

Meanwhile, Donna learns that Evelina cannot prophesy the eruption. She tells Evelina about the eruption, which Evelina psychically passes onto the sisterhood. They and their high-priestess decide it is a false prophecy and that Donna must be killed. The Doctor and Quintus burst in a few moments later, followed by a humanoid creature made of stone and magma bursting from the hypocaust. The Doctor distracts the creature while Donna and Quintus get water to throw on it. In the confusion, Donna is kidnapped by the sisterhood. Quintus throws water on the creature as requested, which causes it to die.

The Doctor realizes Donna is missing, and confronts the sisterhood to rescue her. Conversing with their high priestess, he finds she has completely turned to stone. She reveals that she is being used as a host by one of the Pyroviles, stone aliens who crashed to earth, shattered into dust, and were re-awakened by the 62 earthquake, psychically linking to the humans of the town (one of their adult forms is the creature they saw at the villa). The Doctor is, however, unable to find how they are psychically seeing through time.

Donna and the Doctor escape down the hypocaust, making their way to the volcano's core. As they run, Donna attempts to convince the Doctor to stop the Pyrovile from causing Pompeii's eruption, but he again refuses, as it is a fixed point in history and must happen. Dextrus and the cult of Vulcan take the circuit boards to the mountain. In the centre of the mountain, Donna and the Doctor find an escape pod. Dextrus informs him that the Pyroviles intend not to launch a rocket back home via the eruption (their home planet of Pyrovilia having been "taken"), but to remain on and conquer Earth. The Doctor and Donna then lock themselves in the pod, where they find the Pyrovilians are using Vesuvius's power to set up a fusion matrix to convert millions of humans into Pyroviles — this will stifle the eruption, which is why the soothsayers have been unable to see it. The Doctor explains he can switch off the Pyrovilian circuitry and thus save the world, but in so doing he will cause the eruption and the deaths of himself, Donna and 20,000 people. Donna argues that causing the eruption may not kill the Pyroviles, but the Doctor retorts that nothing in Vesuvius will survive as the volcano will erupt with the force of 24 nuclear weapons. They choose the latter as the lesser of two evils, and destroy the circuitry. Vesuvius erupts, destroying the Pyroviles and freeing the psychically-gifted from their control including the Sisterhood and Evelina, who can know see the coming eruption. The volcano blasts the pod a fair distance away,leaving the Doctor and Donna unharmed, and they return to Pompeii to make their escape. Donna tells fleeing citizens to run to the hills, not the waterfront (many Vesuvius refugees died instantly in beach shelters as the eruptions prevented evacuation ships from approaching shore) and both Donna and the Doctor eventually make their way to the TARDIS.

On their way, the Doctor ignores the Caecilius family's pleas for help and de-materialises the TARDIS with himself and Donna on board. He is confronted by Donna, who tearfully tries to convince him to go back and save the town. The Doctor refuses, replying that history is back on track and everyone will die; even if he wanted to change history, which he does, he cannot, just like he cannot bring back Gallifrey. Donna insists that, at the very least, he could save the Caecilius family, to which he complies. They and the family watch the eruption from the surrounding hills — the Doctor explains that Evelina's visions were caused by a rift in time made by the explosion, echoing back into the Pyrovilian alternative future, and that rift is now closed. He promises that Caecilius and Pompeii will be remembered, and Caecilius coins the word volcano for the first time. The Doctor and Donna leave, with him acknowledging that she was right in that "sometimes I need someone" to stop and humanise him. Six months later, the Caecilius family is in Rome, with Caecilius back in business, Evelina a healthy and happy teenager once again, Quintus having given up his dissolute ways to train as a doctor, and Donna and the Doctor worshipped as the family's household gods, with the TARDIS as their temple.

Continuity

• A previous Big Finish audio storyline, The Fires of Vulcan (featuring the Seventh Doctor and Mel) shares the same historical setting and event.
• In the pre-credits sequence, the Doctor can be heard referring to the day of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius as "volcano day". In the 2005 episode "The Doctor Dances", Captain Jack Harkness also uses the phrase "Volcano Day" in relation to the Pompeii eruption.
• Gallifrey - first mentioned by name in the revived series in "The Runaway Bride" - is mentioned by name, as is its destruction "by fire" in the Time War.
• This episode is not the first occurence of the TARDIS being mistaken for 'modern art', having previously been done so in the Fourth Doctor adventure, City of Death.
• The Doctor refers to having been in Rome previously, and states that the Great Fire of Rome was "nothing to do with me - well, a little bit" - this refers to the First Doctor's accidental responsibility for it in The Romans.
• The Medusa Cascade, referred to by the Master in "Last of the Time Lords" is mentioned.
• The Doctor mentions the Shadow Proclamation, when ordering a Pyrovile using a human host to reveal its species. It has been mentioned before in "Partners in Crime", "The Christmas Invasion", "Fear Her" and "Rose".
• The Doctor refers to San Francisco and its San Andreas Fault. The Eighth Doctor visited San Francisco in the TV Movie.
• The Doctor's explanation of fixed points in time addresses an issue dating back to The Aztecs, concerning the mutability (or lack thereof) of established history.
• The formulation of Time Lord as "Lord of Time", here used by Evelina, was also used by the Doctor himself in "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "The Family of Blood".
• The Doctor's acknowledging that Donna was right in that "sometimes I need someone" to stop and humanise him, quoting some of her last words to him in "The Runaway Bride".

Historical references

• The episode places a Sibylline sisterhood and the Sibylline religion in Pompeii, and it as being a cult founded by "Sibyl". The Sibyl was in fact an oracle of Apollo based at Cumae, rather than a goddess or religious figure of her own right, whilst the Sibylline oracles were kept in Rome.
• As they watch the eruption, the Doctor tells Caecilius that "you will be remembered" in thousands of years' time. Whilst this also a general reference to the rediscovery of Pompeii in the 18th century, it also refers to Caecilius, Quintus and Metella specifically, who are attested in the archaeological record. Their house has been found and (without Evelina, who is an invention) they feature in the Cambridge Latin Course Book I, a Latin textbook widely used in secondary school education in Britain, which is set in Pompeii and in which the whole family (barring Quintus) die in the eruption. There is in fact no archaeological evidence as to whether or not the family died in the eruption, and as such the Doctor's saving them is not per se 'changing history'.
• Caecilius is shown here as a marble merchant, when he was in fact an auction middle-man and banker.
• Caecilius disapprovingly refers to Quintus mixing with "Etruscans and Christians". Christianity in Pompeii is not attested, but has been a running theme in fictional depictions of the city since the novel The Last Days of Pompeii.
• Lucius Petrus Dextrus is an augur, an attested priestly position in Roman society, and vestal virgins, amphorae, haruspexes, the Appian Way, Alexandria, a thermopolium and the Roman consumption of ants in honey and dormice and attitudes to "dignity in death" are also referenced.
• The Doctor refers to going to Rome to see the Colosseum, Pantheon and Circus Maximus, and Donna refers to going to Pompeii's amphitheatre to make a public announcement of the eruption.
• The Doctor refers to San Francisco as another example of where, like Pompeii, humans chose not to move away from a natural disaster area (though, due to its similarity to Latin, Caecilius takes this to be the name of a new local restaurant).
• Lucius Petrus Dextrus is not an attested historical figure, and his name is similar to that of the punning cod-Latin of Up Pompeii (loosely translating from Latin and Greek as "stone right arm").
• The Doctor refers to Donna's Roman dress as a toga, when in fact it is a stola or chiton. For a Roman woman to wear a toga was seen as a mark of shame or prostitution.
• Donna's instructions to the fleeing inhabitants of Pompeii to evacuate to the hills not the beach is based on Pliny the Younger's account of the eruption. The sea level rose due to pumice from the eruption and his uncle's warships could thus not reach the beach to carry out a rescue, whilst massed skeletons in beach huts (of those awaiting a rescue by sea) have been found in the nearby town of Herculaneum.
• The Doctor's statement that the Romans have no word for volcano is correct but, though Caecilius' derivation of it from the Roman fire god Vulcan is correct, they in fact continued to have no word for it even after the eruption. The first use of the word "volcano" in English is attested by the Oxford English Dictionary as occurring in 1613, and its equivalents in other languages also only appeared at this time.

Outside references

• Donna asks Evelina if she shops at TK Maximus, a pun on TK Maxx.
• Trapped in the heart of the volcano, Donna refers to one of the Pyroviles as "Rocky IV", referencing the film.
• Caecilius's love for modern art references that of Charles Saatchi and other British collectors of "Britart".
• Cultural stereotypes of Welsh speech, such as "There's lovely" and "Look you", are repeatedly referenced by the Roman characters, as a result of the TARDIS's translation circuit rendering any use of Latin by the Doctor and Donna into the nearest 79 AD equivalent to English, that is, "Celtic" (ie Welsh).
• During one of the tremors, Caecilius instructs his family to take 'positions' - to prevent vases and busts from crashing to the floor. The instruction and respose matches exactly a scene from the 1964 film Mary Poppins, where the Banks family follow the instruction during the cannon fire of the Banks' neighbour Admiral Boom.
• When asked to identify himself, the Doctor states "I'm...Spartacus" to which Donna adds, "And so am I." This is a reference to the film Spartacus and to the scene in it in which all the slaves declare "I'm Spartacus!"
• Apologising for Donna's manners, the Doctor states "don't mind her, she's from Barcelona", referencing Basil Fawlty's catchphrase from Fawlty Towers.
• The names of Caecilius and his family are taken from the fictional Pompeiian family used in the Cambridge Latin Course, a series of textbooks published by the Cambridge University Press.

Production

In August 2007, a pre-filming location recce for this episode was interrupted by a fire in Rome's Cinecittà, on sets previously used for the filming of the HBO/BBC TV series Rome. However, the fire did not reach the parts of the sets which the Doctor Who team intended to use.

External links

• "The Fires of Pompeii" at the BBC Doctor Who homepage