Damaged Goods (serial)

Damaged Goods was the seventh and final story of Season 35 of Doctor Who. It was written by Russell T Davies, directed by Colin Cant and featured Michael French as the Doctor and Laurie Holden as Sammy Thompson.

Synopsis
The year is 1999 and there’s a deadly new narcotic on the streets of London. As part of their investigations the Doctor and his companion, Sammy move into the Quadrant, a rundown housing estate.

An ancient alien menace has been unleashed, a menace somehow linked to a local gang leader known as The Capper, a charmed young boy called Gabriel and his mother Winnie, the enigmatic Frei Foundation, and Eva Jericho, a woman driven to the brink of madness.

As London descends into an apocalyptic nightmare, the Doctor must uncover the truth about the residents of the Quadrant and a desperate bargain made one dark Christmas Eve.

Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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Cast

 * The Doctor - Michael French
 * Sammy Thompson - Laurie Holden

Crew

 * Created by Sydney Newman, Donald Wilson and C.E. Webber
 * Executive Producer - David Renwick
 * Writer - Russell T Davies
 * Producer - Susan Belbin
 * Script Editor - Steven Moffat
 * Director - Colin Cant
 * Director of Photography - Geoff Harrison
 * Production Designer - John Asbridge
 * Visual Effects - Orange Tree VFX
 * Make-Up Designer - Vanessa White
 * Casting Director - Andy Pryor
 * Music - Julian Stewart Lindsay
 * Costume Designer - James Baylan
 * Edited by - Mark Lawrence
 * Original Theme Music - Ron Grainer
 * Title Music - Julian Stewart Lindsay
 * Title Sequence by Mike Tucker

Memorable Quotes
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Development

 * Davies partly based the story on the musical, Blood Brothers, which both feature a plot centring around two children, split at birth and one being sold to a richer family. "The whole thing is one great big response to Blood Brothers, because I think Blood Brothers is kind of nonsense, in that Blood Brothers has a very simple view of the world where the rich child grows up happy, and the working class child grows up sad. While I think it's a great musical, I also think it's terribly simple. Damaged Goods kind of turns that on it's head, saying that the one who's rich has a terrible life, and the one who's surrounded by love is the one of the working class estate. There's also a bit of Les Misérables in there. Right at the very end, you see the Leathers walking across the wasteland, and Mrs Leather, is picking up skulls and is taking the gold teeth out of them. That's the husband and wife in Les Mis who are venal and criminal, and they survive everything that's thrown at them, and that's exactly what the Leathers do; Mrs Leather strides through the destruction of a whole city, and ends up making a profit from gold teeth. So there's a lot of that in there."
 * The opening of the story came from an image that Davies had in his mind for a while: "I always had that image where it starts at like midnight on Christmas Eve, in the snow, with someone handing over a baby, under a streetlight. That's just one of those images that has been with me for quite a few years. It's such a great image - a modern estate, but something Dickensian happening, something old fashioned and dark, a child being handed over illegally from one family to another. And also the fact that this was witnessed and not remembered properly, that was one of the ideas in my head; that someone would see this, a child would see this, at midnight, in the snow - how romantic, dark and romantic! - so someone witnessed something they don't understand till many years later, when they realise what was happening under streetlight. That was my starting point, and then that decided certain things, like it was going to be set in the modern day, it's set on Earth.. it all really stemmed from that."


 * Moffat commented: "What really stood out for me, when reading the story-line for the first time, was the story of Winnie Tyler and Eva Jericho - those two women, their stories - so we shifted the focus of the story to centre more around them."

Pre-Production
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Production

 * The Capper, was played by Peter Barrett and he features both a chilling physical appearance and voice: "The voice just took off really," he recalls, "It went through various stages - the upper register, then right down to the lower register - but it thought it was becoming more comic than anything else, so I tried to find a pitch that made it more scary. With any great villain, you can't just play him as a villain - you've got to understand him, and his vulnerabilities, and what makes him human. That's what gets under people's skin more than anything really - when they can relate to people. It's a real crisis sometimes, when you're relating to an absolute monster, and you can actually see their point of view. "

Post-Production
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Reaction

 * Part One received a 7-Day Viewing Figure from BARB of 9.12m viewers. It ranked at 33rd over the week.
 * Part Two received a 7-Day Viewing Figure from BARB of 9.23m viewers. It ranked at 28th over the week.
 * Part Three received a 7-Day Viewing Figure from BARB of 9.56m viewers. It ranked at 22nd over the week.
 * Speaking in 2012, Davies recalled: "I was heartless! Absolutely heartless. Watching it back, I was shocked at the fact I'd killed off Bev Tyler and it was brutal. If I was doing it now, or even in my time as Script Editor, I would have let her live. If you're going to kill a 14-year-old, that should be centre stage, and she should be sacrificing herself - she should be magnificent. But she was just knocked over like a vase falling off a mantelpiece. I was young, it was the fifth television show I worked on, and I was inexperienced. When you're young, you kind of think all death and disaster is marvellous and brilliant. You sit there, all grown up, thinking 'that's what the world is like'. But then you get older, you get... I don't think you get softer, but you get wiser, and actually, the world isn't all death and disaster. I know see the point is in writing, to find moments that aren't death and disaster. That actually, happier endings are one of the most beautiful things about fiction, and you don't need to kill everyone."
 * Ira Steven Behr commented, in 2012: "When I first watched it, I thought it was kind of extraordinary. I thought it was very dark, very nihilistic, and at the edge of what you'd think the show could do."
 * Joseph Lidster spoke about Damaged Goods fondly, stating: "I remember it at the time, really standing out, as the show had recently done a lot of alien worlds and really strange sci-fi concepts and for someone who isn't a huge sci-fi fan, I loved that it was about mad things that were happening on Earth. It was real people in a mad situation. I remember it feeling like my childhood, and then it just goes apocalyptic towards the end, which was absolutely terrifying at the time. It's so grown-up and mature. It's a story set in the real world and the people in it are so real. If it were the generic stock guard that you can get in Doctor Who, the story would be heavily different."

Story Notes

 * This was the last story produced by Susan Belbin.



Continuity

 * The Doctor says that he is "the definitive article." (DW: Robot)