PHOTOS: David Tennant & Kylie Minogue In Voyage Of The Damned #ThrowbackThursday



This week's festive Throwback Thursday collection is a look back at the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas episode, Voyage Of The Damned. David Tennant's third Christmas special followed on directly from the series 3 finale Last Of The Time Lords which ended with the Titanic crashing into the TARDIS moments after Martha Jones had left the Doctor to be with her family. The Children In Need minisode, Time Crash later added an encounter with the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) between Martha leaving and the collision. 





In the opening moments of Voyage Of The Damned, the Doctor boards the Titanic to find that she is actually a gigantic space liner, based on the legendary ocean vessel, orbiting the Earth to observe the cultural phenomenon of Christmas. He quickly encounters the waitress Astrid Peth, played by Australian actress and singer Kylie Minogue, and she agrees to keep his status as a stowaway a secret. But unbeknownst to the crew and passengers on board, the ship's captain, Hardaker (Geoffrey Palmer) is under orders to sabotage the liner, an action that will not only kill most of the passengers on board, but also put the Earth below in peril. A small group of survivors, led by the Doctor, must pick their way through the wrecked ship and survive attacks from the robotic Heavenly Host. Astrid sacrifices herself to save the Doctor from the ship's crazed owner Max Capricorn (George Costigan) allowing him to gain access to the bridge and win back control of the Titanic just in time to stop it from crashing into Buckingham Palace. The Doctor tries also to save Astrid via her teleportation bracelet but the system is too badly damaged so all he is able to do is send her ghostly atomic pattern to travel for always through space. The Doctor returns to Earth with Mr. Copper (Clive Swift), who presumably later creates the Copper Foundation, developers of the Sub-Wave Network used to contact the Doctor in The Stolen Earth (S4 E12). 

The episode also stars Clive Rowe, Debbie Chazen, Jimmy Vee, Gray O'Brien, and Russell Tovey, whose character Alonso Frame not only allowed the Doctor to utter the phrase "Allons-y Alonso!", but who also reappeared briefly in The End Of Time. Bernard Cribbins too made an appearance as a newspaper vendor who turned out to be Wilfred Mott, grandfather to Donna Noble. 

The episode was written by Russell T. Davies and directed by James Strong. Music was composed by Murray Gold, who had a brief cameo appearance in the ship's band along with orchestrator and conductor Ben Foster. The episode aired on BBC One on Christmas Day at 6.50pm.



















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