Monster Movie Tributes: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series Two, Part One

I owe everyone an apology; while doing some research, I discovered that I never posted this entry.  I put it on Reddit, where these entries are cross-posted, but somehow failed to post it here.  Therefore, a few weeks later, here it is: the beginning of Series Two.  Thanks for reading!

We’re back, with our new Doctor Who rewatch! Last week we checked out the first Christmas special, The Christmas Invasion, and got a proper introduction to the Tenth Doctor. Today we begin Series Two, looking at New Earth and Tooth and Claw. We’ll also take a look at the related TARDISodes, the mini-episodes which accompany each episode of Series Two. Let’s get started!

As a reminder, each series in the new show tends to have considerably more stories than the classic seasons; therefore we’re splitting each series into parts of two or three episodes each for the sake of length.

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen this episode!

New Earth gives us the Tenth Doctor’s first excursion to another world. The planet is called New Earth, and the year is 5,000,000,023, twenty-three years after the events of The End of the World. I don’t reference that episode lightly; we’ll wrap up some threads from that episode here.

The Doctor and Rose view the city of “New New York”, actually the fifteenth after the first. He then reveals that they haven’t come here by accident; they were summoned via psychic paper. Their summoner is unknown, but he can be found in a nearby hospital, which stands outside the city. The Doctor and Rose go inside, and find it is run by the Sisters of Plenitude, a religious order composed of a catlike race of genetically altered humans. The Doctor explores a bit, sending Rose on ahead to Ward 26, the source of the summons; but she is diverted into the basement. Meanwhile, the Doctor arrives at Ward 26, and finds something remarkable: a range of deadly diseases, all subject to near-miraculous and instantaneous cures.

Rose warily enters the basement, and gets a shock in the form of an old enemy: Cassandra O’Brian dot Delta Seventeen, the last pure human. She has survived her apparent death on platform one, and received a new skin interface. Now, however, she and her servant, the forced-growth clone named Chip, capture Rose, and transfer Cassandra’s mind into her body. She goes in search of the Doctor.

The Doctor and Cassandra-in-Rose meet their summoner: The Face of Boe. However, he too is dying, and can’t speak to them. As they start to leave, Cassandra—still undetected—leads the Doctor to find the intensive care section. Inside, they discover to their horror that the hospital’s miraculous cures have a sinister side: The Sisterhood has grown a multitude of clones, then infected them with every known disease, for use as lab rats. They believe their clones are insensate, but this isn’t the case; they are quite alive, and aware. The Doctor confronts the Sisterhood, and also accuses them of altering Rose somehow; they deny it. Cassandra ultimately tires of it, and—facing attack by the matron of the Sisterhood—she sets off an alarm, and unleashes the clones.

The clones flood the hospital, chasing the Doctor and Cassandra to the higher floors. The Doctor forces Cassandra to leave Rose’s body, causing her to possess him instead. After some debate, Cassandra finds she can inhabit the clones as well, and discovers that they are not hostile, but horribly lonely; they just want to be touched. Unfortunately, their touch is deadly. The Doctor is forced to a solution: He takes all the cure solutions and places them in a tank which feeds a chemical disinfection chamber…and then he invites the clones in. Soaked in medicines, they spread the cures like wildfire among themselves, and are cured.

With a new form of life—pure humans, in the form of the clones—now filling the hospital, the police arrive and arrest the sisters. The Doctor meets with the Face of Boe, and finds him also miraculously recovered; he tells the Doctor that he has a final message for him, but this is not the time. They will meet one more time. The Face of Boe teleports away.

Cassandra is still inhabiting Rose. The Doctor orders her out, and she admits she has nowhere to go, and does not want to die. However, Chip appears, having hidden from the clones, and offers himself to her. She accepts, and joins him in his body. Being force-grown, however, he has only half a life, and the strain of the day is about to kill him. She makes a final request.

The Doctor takes her back in time to a point in her own life prior to her conversion to a skin form, a moment at which a stranger at a party called her beautiful, then died in her arms. It is a treasured memory for her. Now it becomes apparent that the stranger was Chip, or rather, Cassandra in his body. The Doctor gives her a final moment of peace, and she passes away.

Tooth and Claw finds the Doctor and Rose traveling to 1979…only to be diverted to 1879, in Scotland. They are immediately captured by a guard unit, which is protecting an important person in a coach: Queen Victoria. The Doctor introduces himself as James McCrimmon, and via psychic paper, convinces the queen that he has been sent by the local lord to help protect her on the road. They travel to a nearby manor: the Torchwood estate.

They are received by the estate’s owner, Sir Robert MacLeish; but they quickly find that he is under duress, and the estate has been taken over by an odd order of monks. The monks have a singular purpose: they want the throne.

As the full moon rises, the monks reveal their secret. They have brought a man to the estate, but he is no ordinary man; under the moon, he transforms into a werewolf. He pursues the Doctor, Rose, the queen, and Sir Robert through the estate, killing several servants, until they barricade themselves in the library. Inside, in the books, they discover that a spaceship crashed to Earth in the area sometime in the past, and the wolf originates there. It is a sort of parasite, surviving by moving from host to host. Now, it wants to infect the queen, and create an Empire of the Wolf.

The queen reveals that she is carrying a valuable treasure: the Koh-i-Noor diamond. She is taking it to the royal jewelers to be recut. Seeing it, the Doctor concocts a plan, but he needs time. Sir Robert sacrifices himself to buy him that time. The Doctor realizes that Sir Robert’s father new about the wolf, and planned for this. He built a telescope, but with too many lenses. The telescope is actually a light chamber, designed to magnify the moonlight; and the diamond, which his friend Prince Albert had cut down, is the final piece. The wolf may live on moonlight, but too much will drown it.

The wolf breaks in, and is caught in the light in the nick of time, and dies, reduced to nothingness. Still, there is one disconcerting remnant: the queen is bleeding. She denies that she was bitten, but Rose later speculates that perhaps the royal family are werewolves in her time. The Doctor acknowledges that it is unknown how haemophilia entered the family line.

The next day, the queen knights the Doctor and Rose…and then banishes them. After sending them back to the TARDIS, she declares the founding of a new institute, named for the estate, which will exist solely to counter strange and wonderful things from outside the world, things such as the Doctor himself. That estate will be called Torchwood.

New Earth was an early new-series episode for me, though not my first (I missed Series One in its first run, and began with The Girl in the Fireplace, then quickly started catching reruns of missed Series Two episodes). As such I remember enjoying it quite a bit; and it still holds up well, in my opinion. It has the distinction of being the first new series episode set on an alien world, something that I missed in first watch; all of Series One is set on Earth or near it via space stations. It links back to The End of the World by bringing back Cassandra and the Face of Boe, though the setting is of course different; and the city of New New York will—and the Face of Boe—will reappear in Gridlock, which wraps up this loose arc. (He’ll also appear in Utopia/The Sound of Drums, but only in flashback.) It also introduces the cat people, and specifically the Sisters of Plenitude, who will reappear as well; interestingly, these aren’t the first race of cat people the Doctor has encountered, as the Seventh Doctor and Ace met a similar race in Survival.

This episode is Doctor Who’s take on a zombie story. While the plague carriers aren’t zombies in the traditional sense—or even quite in the Walking Dead sense—they function essentially the same way; they shamble along with reduced intelligence and crave the contact of the living, and though they may not eat them, they certainly kill them. It’s a uniquely-Doctor Who approach; everyone else wants to exterminate them (no pun intended—no Daleks here!), but the Doctor has compassion on them and wants to save them. He does it, too, even if the science stretches credibility a bit. He has compassion on Cassandra as well, at the end, although he was more than willing to let her die at first; the show handwaves that by giving him lines about how her time is up, but essentially he’s condemning her to death. It’s been a huge but quick step from the Ninth Doctor’s “Just this once, everybody lives!” to the Tenth’s cold willingness to let someone die. Still, he makes up for it at the end, and lets her die—not at his hand, but against his will—with dignity; and in doing so, he sets the course of her life prior to this, by creating a very formative experience. It’s not quite a paradox, but it’s poetic at least.

The Face of Boe sends a message via the psychic paper, establishing a property of that item which will be reused again in the future. His mysterious illness is not explained, nor is his recovery. I keep saying “he”, because the other characters seem to consider him male, but I’m not forgetting his pregnancy as announced in The Long Game; there’s a lot we may never know about the Face of Boe.) Other diseases mentioned include Marconi’s Disease (a play on the inventor of radio), Pallidome Pancrosis (which kills within minutes of infection, establishing a basis for the instant deaths we see later in the episode), and Petrifold Regression (which turns its victims to stone). The Doctor states he dislikes hospitals; which is understandable, as he once died in one (see the television movie).

Outside of this story’s previously-mentioned arc, there are not many references to be had here. A few other planets have been called New Earth, but that hardly counts as a reference, as they are unrelated. Petrifold Regression is mentioned in the novel The Stone Rose, which also involves Ten and Rose and therefore refers back to this mention; Amy Pond will believe she has a similar-but-unnamed condition in The Time of Angels.

The TARDISode for this episode is fairly simple; it constitutes a television advertisement for the medical services of the Sisters of Plenitude.

Tooth and Claw is a significant episode, in that it formally introduces the Torchwood organization. Torchwood would make its television debut six months to the day after the release of this episode; this story would establish its origins in 1879 Scotland. (One wonders why the Scottish branch isn’t referred to as Torchwood One instead of the London branch…) Although Jack Harkness should be on Earth at this point, he does not appear, being recruited sometime after the turn of the century by Torchwood. It’s interesting that Torchwood exists specifically to counter the Doctor (and other threats like him); in the 21st century, UNIT seems to have taken up that mission, maintaining contingency plans while also keeping a good working relationship with the Doctor.

Queen Victoria, thus, becomes a very significant character for the future of the series, though she doesn’t appear again (to my knowledge, at least). However, the Doctor has met her before, offscreen; in The Curse of Peladon, the Third Doctor admits to having been at her coronation. She doesn’t seem to remember it here, or at least she does not connect it with the Tenth Doctor, and he doesn’t mention it either. She knights him, and Rose as well; it isn’t his first time, having been knighted in The King’s Demons, but that time was a sham, having been perpetrated by an impostor king. He’s wanted to be knighted as far back as The Crusade, when Ian Chesterton was knighted by Richard the Lionheart.

We get more references here. The obvious one is the assumed name of “James McCrimmon”, which is a reference to Second Doctor companion Jamie McCrimmon. (Playing the role, David Tennant used his real-life Scottish accent, the only time he does so as the Doctor; Queen Victoria later comments on his accent changing when he reverts to his usual English accent.) Werewolves have appeared in several stories across varying media; on television they appeared in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, though those werewolves did not appear to be related to this one. The wolf refers back to The Parting of the Ways when it sees Rose; it says it sees something of the wolf in her, and that she burns like the Sun. There is another new aspect of the psychic paper, which we will see again: the Doctor himself doesn’t always know what people see on it.

The related TARDISode gives us a bit of backstory, involving the spacecraft crash that brought the werewolf cells to Earth in the first place. It ends with the wolf’s first murder.

Overall, not a bad start for the Tenth Doctor, and for Series Two! With these early episodes, there isn’t much to dislike. Next time: School Reunion, and The Girl in the Fireplace! (Although my goal is to have three episodes whenever possible, The Girl in the Fireplace is immediately followed by a two-parter which I don’t want to split up.) See you there. [Note:  As I mentioned, I’ve accidentally had to post this out of order, so we’re past those upcoming episodes already.  The next post will wrap up Series Two with Fear Her, Army of Ghosts, and Doomsday.]

Split-Personality Demons: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series Two, Part Four

We’re back, with our New Doctor Who rewatch! Last time, we reviewed Series Two’s Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel, which reintroduced classic villains the Cybermen to the series, and The Idiot’s Lantern, which laid the groundwork for several future episodes. This week, we’re looking at another two-parter, The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit, and finishing up with one of Doctor Who’s most reviled episodes, Love and Monsters! We’ll also look at the related TARDISodes, mini-episodes which served as preview teasers. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen these episodes!

TARDISode 08 gives us some background on the episode and its secondary villains. We see the captain of the episode’s expedition receiving his orders, which include an ancient book. The book contains a map of sorts, drawings of a black hole, and strange writing in rune-like characters. We see an alien called an Ood standing by to serve him, and hear it issue a morbid comment about a Beast rising from a pit. This is the first appearance of the Ood in the series, kicking off a loose arc that will continue all the way to the very death of the Tenth Doctor in The End of Time.

The TARDIS lands inside a sealed base on a distant planet. Rose and the Doctor are immediately disturbed when they see the words “Welcome to Hell” written on a bulkhead, underscored by strange characters that the TARDIS won’t (or can’t) translate. They are met by several Ood, and a misunderstanding briefly results, but is quickly sorted out; then they meet the crew of the station. The Doctor recognizes the Ood, but doesn’t seem to have actually encountered them before. The crew’s captain (from the TARDISode) is dead, replaced by Acting Captain Zachary Cross Flane; also present are Science Officer Ida Scott, Security Chief Jefferson, Maintenance Officer Scooti Manista, and Archaeologist Toby Zed; a few unnamed crew also appear, mostly as security guards. An earthquake briefly interrupts them; then the crew reveals that they are orbiting a planet called Krop Tor, which should not exist. It is orbiting an enormous black hole at a distance that should have seen it fall into the gravity well long ago. There is a power source below the surface, placed there by a lost civilization, which keeps it orbiting—and the humans want it. Hence they are drilling a shaft down to it.

The Doctor and Rose wants to leave, but find that the earthquake collapsed the storage area where the TARDIS was parked—it is now lost inside the planet. With no alternative, they join the crew. Meanwhile, Toby is hearing a malevolent voice; others are hearing similar things, including Rose when an Ood tells her that “The Beast will rise”. After hearing the voice, Toby finds the ancient runes all over his skin. Rose then gets a similar voice over her phone, saying “He is awake”. The Ood then start to say similar things. It is revealed that they are a low-level telepathic race; their telepathic field usually sits at a reading of Basic 5, but now it has risen to Basic 30.

Toby, now possessed, goes out onto the surface, which has no atmosphere. Covered in the symbols, and possessed by something, he breaks a window, causing Scooti to be sucked out and killed. He returns inside, just in time for another quake. The group sees Scooti floating overhead, being pulled toward the black hole; Zach enters her death into the log.

The drill has reached the core, which seems hollow. The Ood are confined for the next phase of the mission, and the Doctor volunteers for the expedition down the shaft, along with Ida. The lift takes them down to an enormous, ornately carved cavern. Inside, they locate a large disk in the floor, which seems to be a door—but it is sealed.

The telepathic field has reached Basic 100, which should kill the Ood, but doesn’t. The Doctor asks Toby if he has translated the symbols, which are repeated on the door in the cavern. Toby’s possession manifests again, and he says they are the words of the Beast. The symbols leave his face and enter the Ood, whose eyes turn red, and they advance on the humans. Toby passes out and is dragged along. The Ood call themselves the legion of the Beast. They kill one guard via electrocution, and the others run. Underground, another quake occurs, and the door opens. The planet begins to fall toward the black hole, and the crew is backed against a sealed door, with the Ood approaching. The Doctor and Ida hear a voice proclaim “The pit is open, and I am free!”

TARDISode 09 gives us an early scene from the expedition. An unidentified crewmember sorts the dead captain’s belongings, and finds the book with the ancient runes. It burns to ash in his hands, and then hears lines about the Beast rising. He is then found by another crewmember, possibly dying, but with a few symbols on his face. Neither person is seen in the episodes, so presumably both die offscreen.

The Satan Pit opens with the crew killing the three Ood that are advancing on them. In the control room, Zack discovers that the orbit has stabilized. The rest of the Ood continue to advance, killing another guard on the way. Some approach the control room; Zack has no weapons, only a bolt gun with a single bolt. He orders “Strategy 9”, which involves gathering everyone in a safe place, and opening all the airlocks, sucking the Ood out of the base. Accordingly, he orders the Doctor and Ida back to the station; they return to the lift. Rose saves Toby from execution, as the possession seems to have left him for the Ood. The power fails briefly, and the Beast speaks through the Ood and the displays. It claims to be the source of all devil myths, and says it was imprisoned before this universe by the Disciples of the Light; it brings up everyone’s hidden fears to try to weaken them. It breaks the ten-mile-long lift cable, stranding Ida and the Doctor and cutting off their communications, leaving them with just 55 minutes of air. With no options, they rig the cable to abseil into the pit, and the Doctor insists on going down.

With no power, Strategy 9 won’t work. Zack borrows power from the station’s rocket, and approves a plan to disable the Ood with a telepathic flare from their control monitor; but the monitor is in the Ood habitat unit. He sends the others through the airless service tunnels to get there, using emergency bulkheads to pump atmosphere into the successive sections. Along the way, they lose Jefferson when he is cut off. The Ood follow, and nearly get Toby, but he shows them that he is still possessed, and he escapes with Rose and Danny. The Ood nearly get Zack, but are disabled when Danny activates the flare. Zack joins the others.

The Doctor reaches the bottom of the cable, and—to Ida’s horror—disconnects himself and falls.

The crew and Rose head for the rocket. They cannot save the Doctor or Ida now, and intend to escape and make sure no one can come here again. Down below, the Doctor has survived his fall; he finds a record of the Beast’s history, and decides its claims are true. He then finds the Beast itself, chained to a wall. However, he realizes that it’s only the body—the mind has gone somewhere else. He finds two jars that not only maintain the atmosphere in the pit, but maintain the gravity field keeping the planet in orbit. Unaware that the crew is escaping, he doesn’t want to destroy them, as it would let the planet be destroyed with Rose on it. However, he decides that Rose is no victim, and he believes in her—and he smashes the jars.

The planet begins to fall in, and the Beast’s body bursts into flames. However, the rocket begins to be pulled in too. Toby is fully possessed by the Beast. Rose grabs the bolt gun, tells the Beast to go to hell, and shoots out the cockpit glass, then unclips Toby’s harness. He is sucked out, toward the black hole. Zack raises the emergency shield, saving the rest of them—but they are still being pulled in.

But all is not lost. The Doctor returns to the cavern to find it collapsing—and finds the TARDIS, which has fallen this far. He rescues Ida, then tows the rocket to safety, and reclaims Rose. The episode ends with Zack recording the final log entry, with the names of all the dead—including the Ood.

This two-parter is a great story, in my opinion. It’s one of the earliest episodes of the new series that I saw, and it’s probably the first one that I took seriously (The Girl in the Fireplace, my first episode, is a bit on the fluffy side, and I didn’t see the Cybermen two-parter until later). The idea of a historical source for demonic ideology is not new; we’ve had it as far back as The Daemons, and in other places as well; but rarely is it done this convincingly. If New Earth was Doctor Who’s take on a zombie story, and Tooth and Claw was its werewolf, this is its take on the entire horror genre, complete with jump scares and possessions. The horror-movie tropes are actually a bit overplayed here, almost to the point of parody, but there’s good reason for that: it makes the twist near the end, where the Beast is seen to be split into two entities, that much more brilliant. You think you have it all figured out, but then you find out just how wrong you are. I know nothing about Matt Jones, the writer of the episode, but I give him credit for that.

We are introduced to the Ood here, or rather, in TARDISode 08. Their appearance is rather bizarre; and I can’t help wondering how much of their future arc was planned in advance, as their spheres would eventually be revealed to be artificial second brains. They’re quite different as both villains and allies; as individuals they are all much the same, but as a species they exhibit a lot of variety in characterization over the course of the series. They appear in a number of Tenth Doctor episodes, and get a mention in the audio Babblesphere, which I reviewed yesterday, when the Eleventh Doctor lists them with other villains. They will eventually be revealed to hail from the same planetary system as the Sensorites from the serial of the same name; they appear to be somewhat related, as there are definite similarities in appearance, abilities (both are telepathic), and even planet name (Ood-Sphere versus Sense-Sphere).

 

The Beast could easily have been a stock villain (aside from its split nature, as I mentioned); but it is distinguished by its technique of turning its victims’ own internal doubts and guilt against them. It’s brief and unsuccessful here, but it goes a long way toward making this villain frightening indeed. A similar thing occurs in the audio The Shadow of the Scourge, which I reviewed on Monday (I promise the timing was not planned, but it seems to be a good week for it).

Some references: Rose mentions having been a dinner lady, seen in School Reunion. The Doctor refers to the TARDIS suffering indigestion, mirroring a line from the television movie. The Beast has a son, Abaddon, which appears in Cardiff in the Torchwood episode End of Days. The Beast itself returns in the comic story The Beast is Back in Town. Draconia gets a mention; the Third Doctor visited it in Frontier in Space, and it has been referenced often since. Daemos is mentioned, having been referenced in The Daemons. The Kaled God of War is mentioned as well. The TARDIS tractor beam appeared twice in the classic series (The Creature from the Pit, Delta and the Bannermen). The Doctor claims the Time Lords invented black holes, echoing claims in The Three Doctors and other classic stories. There’s a reference to the Beast being from a time before this universe, along with its ancient enemies the Disciples of Light. The more references I get to that time, the more fascinating it gets; eventually I’ll compile a list of pre-universe entities, both verified and possible. This also gives me my only complaint about this story, and it’s a logical one: Why would the Disciples of Light go to the trouble of creating such an elaborate trap, when they could have just let the Beast fall into the black hole and ended it? Also, when did they do this—before the universe? Then how did the planet and black hole exist? But then again, who can predict the logic of pre-universal beings?

TARDISode 10 shows us a glimpse of the villain of the upcoming episode, as he researches the Doctor, and finds the minor detective group called LINDA. He then is interrupted by his secretary, who brings him tea—and catches him at a very bad time. She appears to be killed offscreen.

Welcome to Love and Monsters, one of the most hated and reviled episodes in all of Doctor Who! We’ll take a look at why—but first, the plot.

We meet a young man named Elton Pope, who is in the middle of a life-changing event: He sees the TARDIS, then meets the Doctor and Rose Tyler. They are pursuing a monster called a Hoix; and the Doctor seems to recognize Elton. Elton runs away.

A scene cut reveals the frame story of this episode: Elton is recording a series of videos, narrating his story. He met the Doctor once before, while a child; the Doctor appeared in his house on the night his mother died. He then recounts other strange happenings; he recalls the Autons, the crash of the Slitheen ship into Big Ben, and the Sycorax ship over London last Christmas. The one common thread is the Doctor. His investigations introduce him to other people who are intrigued by the Doctor: Ursula Blake, her friend Bliss, Bridget Sinclair, and Colin Skinner. They form a group, with regular meetings, and call themselves “LINDA” (London Investigation ‘n’ Detective Agency). Eventually, with their investigation tapering off, they transform into a social group, exploring other interests.

They are interrupted by Victor Kennedy, a strange man with an aversion to physical contact. He muscles in and takes over, calling them back to their quest for the Doctor; he makes them work harder toward that goal. After their first meeting with Kennedy, Bliss disappears.

Elton finds the Doctor—in the encounter from the beginning of the episode—but runs away. Kennedy changes tactics; now, they will search for Rose instead, as she is associated with the Doctor. Elton is able to do so with ease, and meets Jackie Tyler, who quickly takes a liking to him. Over several visits, he learns more about Rose, and Jackie begins to flirt with him. This brings out his love for Ursula; but he is exposed when Jackie finds a picture of Rose in his coat, and throws him out. Meanwhile, Bridget has vanished.

Elton confronts Kennedy, saying he has destroyed the group; he also asks Ursula out. They leave, but Skinner, concerned about Bridget, stays behind; he then disappears too. However, Ursula has forgotten her phone, so they return to the meeting room. Inside, they find that Skinner has disappeared, and Kennedy has transformed.

He is revealed as an unsightly monster, who is responsible for the disappearances; he has absorbed the others, leaving only their minds and their faces on his skin. Elton calls him an Absorbaloff, which he likes. He wants to absorb the Doctor, in order to gain access to his mind and memories. He absorbs Ursula, and chases Elton into the street.

In an alley, he is about to kill Elton; but the TARDIS appears. The Doctor and Rose emerge, and—ignoring the alien—Rose confronts Elton for upsetting her mother. The Absorbaloff demands that the Doctor sacrifice himself to free Elton, but the Doctor refuses; he offhandedly remarks that the others might have something to say about that. The victims throw their effort into stopping the Absorbaloff, and he drops his cane; Elton breaks it. The Absorbaloff collapses into slime. The Doctor reveals that the cane was emitting a field that held him together; now the absorber is being absorbed into the earth.

 

The Doctor explains about his first meeting with Elton; he was hunting an elemental shade, and caught it, but not before it could kill Elton’s mother.

Later, Elton tells the camera that meeting the Doctor is dangerous; but he credits the Doctor with saving Ursula, sort of. He was able to separate her from the dying Absorbaloff, but not from the paving stone in which she was absorbed. Her face remains, and she now “lives” with Elton, in the best relationship they can manage. Elton is a bit depressed in the end, but reflects that the world, with all its problems, is better than he thought.

Few episodes have been as maligned as this one (though we’ll get another next week!). It’s hated mostly for its silly and ridiculous monster, as well as other humorous aspects. I’ll go ahead and say up front: I actually love this episode. However, that’s because I’m fine with occasional humorous stories, even if they are ridiculous. Such stories haven’t been entirely unheard of throughout the show’s history, and in all media; they’re usually a breath of fresh air to me, and a nice change. It’s mocked, as well, because the show had begun to take a more serious turn in Series Two; this story would have been at home in Series One, which is often derided for its silliness. I’m okay with that, though. I don’t particularly enjoy very grim stories, and more so in Doctor Who; if you think at all about the implications of the Doctor’s actions, you’ll find there’s enough darkness already built in without adding any.

That brings me to the theme of this episode (and yes, it does have one!). It asks the question: What’s it like for the Doctor’s bystanders? The answer appears to be “terrible”. LINDA was composed of innocent people, but their association with the Doctor, however tangential, got most of them killed. No one was untouched, not even Elton, who just had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and at an age when he could hardly be responsible, too. However, his summary at the end says what we as fans often say: that no matter how difficult the universe may be, and even when the Doctor is part of the difficulty, it’s better with him in it. It’s a theme we’ll see again and again; but this was, as far as I can tell, the first time it appeared on television. (We’ve had similar ideas from companions—Tegan, in particular, left because of the death she kept witnessing—but rarely if ever from a bystander.)

This episode introduced two concepts that continue to this day: The “Doctor-lite” and “Companion-lite” episodes. (This episode qualifies as both.) The idea was conceived to increase the number of episodes that can be produced; with the Doctor and/or companion mostly absent, two episodes could be filmed at once. While this episode is not considered great, it was successful enough to continue the concept, giving us future masterpieces such as Blink, Midnight, Turn Left, and Heaven Sent.

For an episode that is mostly disconnected from the series arc, there are a surprising number of references. Elton remembers the Auton attack (Rose), the Slitheen spaceship crash (Aliens of London), and the Sycorax ship (The Christmas Invasion). Kennedy mentions the Bad Wolf virus, which the Doctor gave to Mickey (though not by name) in World War Three, and which subsequently corrupted Torchwood’s files. The Hoix would later appear in Torchwood’s episode Exit Wounds. Jackie mentions Mickey Smith, and says that he is gone now (The Age of Steel). The Absorbaloff hails from Clom, the sister planet of Raxicoricofallapatorious, which is one of the stolen planets in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. He is therefore similar to the Slitheen, in much the same way as the Ood are similar to the Sensorites; even Rose comments on it (although: why would he know them as the Slitheen, given that that is a family name?). And, most interestingly to me, LINDA will in the future be referenced…by the Fifth Doctor, in *Time Crash, indicating that other incarnations were aware of them (although they only ever encountered Ten). Though that minisode was played for a little humor, I’m fine with accepting it as canon.

I personally don’t have any complaints, but it’s worth mentioning some of the things for which others have complained. The scene with the Hoix has a door-running scene reminiscent of Scooby-Doo, which is rather silly. There are a number of pop culture references, sometimes accomplished with momentary cutscenes. The dialogue can be silly at times, especially from Elton and Ursula; and the veiled reference to their sex life at the end is just creepy. And of course, the Absorbaloff itself is truly ridiculous, though again, I’m okay with occasional forays into ridiculousness.

Next time: We’ll look at another oft-hated episode, Fear Her; and we’ll finish out the season—and say goodbye to Rose Tyler—with Army of Ghosts and Doomsday! See you there.

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

TARDISode 08

The Impossible Planet

TARDISode 09

The Satan Pit

TARDISode 10

Love and Monsters

Enter the Cybermen: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series Two, Part Three

I usually post these on Fridays, but I’m deviating this week for the sake of another post to be made. We’ll be back on schedule next week.

We’re back, with our new Doctor Who rewatch! Last time, we reviewed Series Two’s School Reunion and The Girl in the Fireplace, which reintroduced some old friends, and gave us a new look at the progress of time. Today, we’re checking out three episodes: The two-part story Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel, and also The Idiot’s Lantern. We’ll also look at the related TARDISodes, mini-episodes which accompany each episode of Series Two. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen these episodes!

TARDISode 05 gives us something exciting: a transmission via internet from an unknown person to a radical group called the Preachers. It orders the Preachers to take down a man named John Lumic before the project he is heading can be finalized.

Rise of the Cybermen opens with the aforementioned John Lumic, a wheelchair-bound mad scientist in bad health (there’s really no other fitting description). A scientist on his staff, Dr. Kendrick, reports to Lumic about a robotic form, declaring it to be alive; but then Kendrick says that if it is life, they must report to the authorities in Geneva. Lumic orders the robot to kill Kendrick; then, he departs for Great Britain.

The Doctor, Rose, and Mickey are in the TARDIS, reminiscing about a past adventure, and generally making Mickey feel left out. Something goes wrong with the TARDIS, and it lands violently, then loses all power. The Doctor declares it dead, and says they have fallen into another universe. The TARDIS draws power from the universe, but this alternate universe is incompatible, like diesel in a gasoline engine. He is shocked, then, when Mickey finds that they are in London. It’s not the same, though; there are zeppelins in the sky, and everyone wears strange electronic pods—earpods—in their ears. Rose discovers that her father, Pete, is still alive in this universe; but the Doctor warns her not to meet with him.

Pete Tyler, as it turns out, works for John Lumic; his own health-drink company was bought out by Lumic’s Cybus Industries. As such his star has risen, and he is acquainted with the President of Great Britain (yes, president—different universe), who will be attending Jackie Tyler’s 40th birthday party that night. In the meantime, Lumic meets with the President, promoting his system of “upgrading” humanity (i.e. the robotic forms seen earlier), but is rejected.

The Doctor finds a single remaining power crystal in the TARDIS, and literally breathes new life into it (using regeneration energy—he claims to have given up ten years of life). In 24 hours, it will be able to power the TARDIS enough to go home. Mickey takes advantage of the situation and runs off to explore. Rose, meanwhile, taps into the local internet—which is run by Cybus—and learns that everyone gets daily downloads straight into their brains via the earpods, which are also a Cybus product, and practically ubiquitous. She also researches her parents, and finds out about Cybus, and about Jackie’s party. Now intrigued, the Doctor takes her to infiltrate it.

Mickey visits his grandmother, who in his own world is deceased (he is otherwise an orphan). She recognizes him, but calls him “Ricky”. He is abducted by two people in a blue van, who also mistake him for his counterpart in this universe, Ricky. They take him to meet the real Ricky, who is their leader after the loss of their previous leader. They prove to be a resistance group called the Preachers, which is opposing Cybus’s plans, although they don’t know exactly what those plans are. They do know that Cybus—via a dummy company called International Electromatics—has been abducting the homeless; they have an informant inside Cybus. And tonight, they will be crashing the party to try to get to Lumic.

Rose and the Doctor have infiltrated the party, and Rose has unsuccessfully conversed with both Pete and Jackie, whose marriage is on the rocks. They are interrupted when a group of the robots crash the party, kill the president and others, and begin rounding up the guests. The guests will be converted into robot forms themselves. The Doctor, Rose, and Pete escape, and meet up with Mickey and the Preachers, but are intercepted by the robots, whom the Doctor recognizes: they are Cybermen.

TARDISODE 06 flashes back briefly, to show John Lumic issuing an order for his Cybermen to commence upgrading of the entire population.

The Age of Steel picks up immediately from the cliffhanger. The Doctor uses the power from the TARDIS power crystal to destroy the Cybermen detaining them, and the group escapes. This won’t stop the crystal from recharging, but will set it back by four hours. In the Preachers’ van, the group compares notes; the Doctor explains about the Cybermen, which originated from another source in his universe—a parallel evolution of sorts. Pete wants to rescue Jackie, but can’t. He also reveals that he is the mole that has been giving information to the Preachers. The Doctor declares that the Cybermen will be stopped tonight. Lumic has a cyberconversion factory inside the former Battersea Power Station. There, he broadcasts a signal which will initiate cyberconversion of all of London. It won’t require force—the earpods will take control of their users and cause them to come to the factory. Jackie is among the victims.

The Doctor’s group splits up to escape. Mickey and Ricky run together, but are cornered by Cybermen, and Ricky is killed. Eventually, the group meets again outside the factory and sees the crowds entering for conversion. Rose suggests removing the earpods, but the Doctor declines; it will kill the users.

Inside the factory, Lumic’s chief assistant, Crane, has removed his earpods before the signal. Lumic questions him, and he claims a malfunction, but it is only a ruse to get close to Lumic. He damages the life support systems on Lumic’s chair, sending him into shock. The Cybermen kill Crane, and then take Lumic—against his will—to be converted.

The group splits up again to infiltrate the factory. Rose and Pete go in the front door, disguised as earpod victims, to find Jackie. The Doctor and Mrs. Moore, one of the Preachers, go in through the cooling tunnels beneath to try to sabotage the conversions. Jake, the remaining Preacher, is sent to Lumic’s zeppelin to cut off the signal broadcast. Mickey once again is ignored by the Doctor; but this time he refuses to stay behind and be “the tin dog”. He chooses to go with Jake.

Mrs. Moore tells the Doctor her real name—Angela Price—and that she has a family. She once worked for Cybus, but saw plans for the upgrades, and fled, hunted by Lumic. She joined the Preachers to fight back. The Doctor reveals that the Cybermen have emotion suppression technology; otherwise they may go insane at what has been done to them. He realizes that they can be defeated by overriding the suppression and releasing their emotions; this requires a code, however. They are then confronted by Cybermen, and nearly escape; but Moore is killed, and the Doctor is apprehended. The Cybermen detect his Time Lord physiology, and take him Cybercontrol to be examined. Pete and Rose are also apprehended; but the Cyberman that captures them is revealed to be Jackie, now converted. She takes them to Cybercontrol.

Lumic is revealed to be the new Cyber Controller. Meanwhile, Mickey and Jake successfully cut off the transmission, allowing the unconverted humans to escape. Lumic is undeterred; he has factories around the world, and will force conversion on everyone. The Doctor is aware that Mickey is watching by monitor, and makes a monologue that contains clues obvious to Mickey; Mickey takes the hint and breaks into Lumic’s computer, and finds the code that will unlock the emotion suppression. He sends it to Rose’s phone, and the Doctor activates it, destroying all the Cybermen in the area. The factory is damaged in the process, and set afire. The group flees to the roof and up a rope ladder to the zeppelin; but Lumic follows them. The Doctor gives Pete—the last in line—his sonic screwdriver; Pete uses it to break the ropes, sending Lumic falling to his death.

Later, with the TARDIS temporarily restored, Rose tries to persuade Pete to join them, but he refuses, and rejects her as his daughter. Mickey also chooses to stay. He has found purpose here—there are more Cybermen to be destroyed—and his grandmother is alive as well. Rose no longer needs him, as she has given her heart to the Doctor. The Doctor warns him that they can’t return for him; the hole in the universes must be repaired when they leave. He leaves Rose’s phone with Mickey, for the code in its memory.

On the original Earth, the TARDIS materializes in Jackie’s apartment, and Rose reunites with her mother. In the alternate universe, Mickey promises Jake that he is not Ricky, and won’t try to be him; but will remember him by fighting in his name. They leave for Paris, where another cyber-factory waits.

I can’t overstate the importance of this story to the new series. First, it reintroduces the Cybermen to the series, much as Dalek and Bad Wolf did with the Daleks in Series One. These aren’t your father’s Cybermen, though; the original Cybermen came from the planet Mondas (and later Telos), the rogue twin of Earth, as far back as the First Doctor’s The Tenth Planet. Interestingly, we will see later that the Cybus Cybermen, once established in the main universe (or N-Space, to borrow the classic series terminology), will eventually encounter and merge with the Mondasian Cybermen, yielding the version we see in Nightmare in Silver. These Cybermen lack the oft-exploited breathing apparatus of the classic series; their primary weakness is in their emotional suppression. Mondasian Cybermen share this feature (as seen as far back as The Invasion), but it is much more emphasized here. The use of electricity as a literal hand weapon dates back to Tomb of the Cybermen. As well, International Electromatics is a reference to The Invasion, where a company of the same name was used by the Cybermen; it is unclear whether this is the same company, or just a reference for the audience.

Second, this story sets the groundwork for Rose’s eventual departure. I won’t say too much, as we’re approaching that story soon; but this is not the last we’ve seen of Pete Tyler or his universe. It also sets the groundwork for every Cybermen story for the next several seasons, as all future appearances are either Cybus Cybermen or the hybrid version I mentioned earlier. Interestingly, it’s not actually the first we’ve seen of them in the new series; a Mondasian Cyberman head was seen in Henry Van Statten’s museum in Dalek, and Rose comments on it here.

This is Mickey’s goodbye story, as he chooses to stay behind. It’s the fulfillment of his character growth from the whiny coward of Rose, to a strong and capable man and—dare I say it?—warrior. When next we see him, he will be an accomplished hero. It’s unfortunate that he was never able to get respect from the Doctor—he certainly deserves it—but this is a good route for him, and a great exit. (It’s also the culmination of the running “Ricky” joke from Series One—turns out he really is Ricky, in a sense.)

Torchwood gets not one, but two references, implying it exists in Pete’s world as well. That’s odd, as there are no Time Lords, and Torchwood was (in N-Space, anyway) established in response to the Doctor. On the subject of Time Lords, the Doctor states that travel between universes was once possible, but that with the death of the Time Lords, the walls of the universes closed, and now it is mostly impossible. This is also the first story since Black Orchid to feature no extraterrestrial elements other than the Doctor and the TARDIS, given that the Cybermen here originate on Earth. There’s also a reference to The Five Doctors; the Doctor refers to approaching the factory “above, between, below”, which is a reference to the nursery rhyme about the Tomb of Rassilon in that story. The Doctor asks if he has the right to destroy the Cybermen, echoing a similar dilemma with the Daleks in Genesis of the Daleks; there’s a further similarity with that story as well, in that John Lumic very much resembles Davros, with regard to his physical condition and his goals.

This story was directly inspired by a Big Finish main range story: Spare Parts, #34 in the main range, written by Marc Platt (author of Ghost Light and the novel Lungbarrow). That’s not to say the ideas were stolen, however; Platt was paid a fee for the reuse of his concepts. That story covers the origin of the Mondasian Cybermen in N-Space; and I think it’s worth a look in comparison with this episode. Therefore, my plan is to review that audio drama tomorrow, with an eye toward comparing the two.

TARDISode 07 shows us an elderly woman, whose face is stolen by a strange energy from her television. In the episode, she will be revealed to be Mrs. Connolly’s mother. The Idiot’s Lantern takes us to London, 1953, the day before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. A brief flashback introduces us to Mr. Magpie, owner of Magpie Electricals, a failing electronic shop that specializes in televisions. Mr. Magpie is attacked by an energy from the television; it seems to be alive.

The Doctor and Rose, expecting to land in New York for the Ed Sullivan show, instead find themselves in London. They witness a blanket-wrapped person being swept into a car by several men in black. They follow the car, but lose it at an apparent dead end, leaving them bewildered. Meanwhile, Mr. Magpie is seen in his shop, and is unharmed; but the announcer on the screen is speaking to him, saying her time has come.

The Doctor and Rose pose as royal inspectors, and return to the home of the Connollys, neighbors of the kidnapped person. Mr. Connolly is something of a bully, and verbally assaults the Doctor; the Doctor outmatches him, and forces Mr. Connolly to allow him to see the old woman in the attic—who has no face. They are interrupted when the men in black return and force their way in, stealing the woman away. The Doctor chases them, and this time finds his way into the place where they have gone; inside, there are a large number of faceless people locked in a cage. He is suddenly captured by the men in black, who are police investigators.

Rose has seen something strange from the Connollys’ television. Mr. Connolly ejects her from the house, but not before she sees the Magpie label on the television. She goes to Mr. Magpie’s shop and confronts him; but he allows her to be captured, and her face stolen, by the thing in the television, which calls itself “the Wire”. It feeds on brainwaves; the face theft is a side effect.

The inspectors question the Doctor, who turns the interview around and convinces them that he can help. However, Rose is brought in at that time; the Doctor swears to get to the bottom of it. They return to the Connollys’ house, where Mr. Connolly’s son, Tommy, reveals that his grandmother was watching television when her face was stolen. They go to Magpie’s shop, and find him absent. The Doctor finds a bank of televisions, which display the missing faces. Magpie returns, and the Wire appears; it states it was executed by the people of its world, but survived in this energy form. Now, it wants to absorb enough mental energy to reconstitute its body—and the televised coronation will give it the opportunity, courtesy of the altered televisions that Magpie has been selling at discount prices. It tries to absorb the Doctor, Inspector Bishop, and Tommy, but flees when it detects the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver; it realizes he is also an alien, with superior technology. However, it absorbed Bishop before fleeing.

Magpie transfers the Wire to the television broadcast antenna at Alexandra Palace, so that it can absorb all the coronation viewers. The Doctor hastily assembles a device that can stop it, but he must get there. At the antenna, he climbs its tower, and confronts the Wire; it has already killed Magpie. With Tommy’s help, he traps the wire on a Betamax cassette tape (which is thirty years ahead of its time). With the Wire defeated, its victims are freed and restored.

The Doctor tells Rose he intends to record over the tape, ending the Wire forever. Meanwhile, Mrs. Connolly has had enough abuse; she reveals that her mother, rather than her husband, owns the house, and kicks him out. However, Rose encourages Tommy to forgive his father and go to him; if the boy can save the world, perhaps he can save his father, too.

While this story is usually not rated highly—and indeed, it’s not particularly great; I’d call it average at best—it does establish some concepts that will be revisited. The idea of wirelessly absorbing people will be used to greater effect in The Bells of Saint John, where the true villain is the Great Intelligence. Magpie Electricals will long survive its founder, appearing in a great number of stories, such as The Magician’s Apprentice; Before the Flood; The Runaway Bride; Day of the Moon; The Sound of Drums; Voyage of the Damned; The Beast Below; and the audio story Hunters of Earth, as well as The Sarah Jane Adventures. In fact, it becomes something of an inside joke for the crew, as the Magpie label appears in ever more unlikely places.

We have a secondary villain in Mr. Magpie, though it can be argued he’s more victim than villain. More interestingly, there’s a tertiary villain in Mr. Connolly. While he himself is a rather sad figure, he does give us the prominent “I AM TALKING!” line, which will be used to far greater effect by the Eleventh Doctor in The Pandorica Opens.

Overall, not a great episode, but not terrible, either. My main complaint is that there’s no logical reason that the faceless people should be restored when the Wire is defeated; it would be akin to having the Absorbaloff from the upcoming (and much-maligned) Love and Monsters regurgitate its victims upon death. Still, it’s a decent story with a fair bit of human interest.

Next time: Tomorrow, I’ll post a review for Spare Parts (out of order, but relevant). Next week, we’ll look at two of my favorite episodes: The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit; and if there’s time, we’ll check out the aforementioned Love and Monsters! See you there.

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

TARDISode 05

Rise of the Cybermen

TARDISode 06

The Age of Steel

TARDISode 07

The Idiot’s Lantern

Tin Dogs and Clockwork Robots: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series Two, Part Two

I made my last post early; this one is late.  Although I got it written on Wednesday before the Thanksgiving holidays, I wasn’t able to get it posted that day.  My apologies; hopefully we’ll be back on schedule this week.

We’re back, with our new Doctor Who rewatch! Last week, we reviewed the first two episodes of Series Two: New Earth and Tooth and Claw, which took Rose Tyler and the Tenth Doctor into the past and the future, and to another world. Today, we’re looking at School Reunion, which reintroduces some old friends (and also sets up for another spinoff series), and The Girl in the Fireplace, with a new enemy! We’re also looking at the related TARDISodes, mini-episodes which accompany each episode of Series Two. Let’s get started!

As a reminder, each series in the new show tends to have considerably more stories than the classic seasons; therefore we’re splitting each series into parts of two or three episodes each for the sake of length.

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen these episodes!

School Reunion’s TARDISode, #4 in the series, finds Mickey Smith on the internet, where he’s researching strange happenings at a nearby school, Deffry Vale High School. He’s stonewalled by Torchwood’s software at one point (and again during the actual episode), but he finds enough to call Rose and the Doctor, and ask them to investigate. We end with a glimpse of one of the show’s monsters.

The episode finds Rose and the Doctor already on scene, having infiltrated the school via some time-travel-related shenanigans a few days earlier. The Doctor, in his John Smith persona, is acting as a physics teacher, while Rose is filling in for a lunchroom attendant (and eating an exorbitant number of chips). The Doctor immediately discovers that certain students are exhibiting intelligence and knowledge—especially computational skills—far beyond the level they should have obtained.

The headmaster, Mr. Finch, introduces the staff—including the Doctor—to a journalist who has been assigned to write a profile about him: one Sarah Jane Smith. The Doctor immediately recognizes her; she has aged since he last saw her, but is still the same to him. She doesn’t recognize him, however. Meanwhile, he discovers that a total of fourteen staff—including the headmaster and seven teachers—were recently replaced, prior to his arrival with Rose. At the same time, a child named Kenny enters the wrong maths classroom, and glimpses a batlike monster…which seems to become one of the teachers.

Sarah Jane, being Sarah Jane, is here for more than what she says. She breaks into the school that night, unaware that the Doctor, Rose, and Mickey have done the same; the Doctor sends Mickey to investigate a rumor about the maths classroom and its odd computers. They meet, and introductions are made; immediately there is tension between Sarah Jane and Rose. Together, they then discover something horrifying: thirteen batlike creatures, asleep in a classroom. One of them awakens, unseen, and follows them out.

Rose has discovered there is something sinister about the oil in which the food is being cooked. The Doctor says they will need to return to the TARDIS to analyze it, but Sarah Jane calls him off; she has something that will help. In her car, she reveals another old friend: K9 Mark III, now deactivated. He lived with her for years, but eventually broke down, and she lacked the parts to repair him. The Doctor does so, and K9, now reactivated, determines the oil is Krillitane oil—a byproduct of a biologically-composite race called Krillitanes. The Doctor also talks with Sarah about why he left her behind long ago; in the process, he reveals he is a Time Lord. The lone Krillitane, watching, relays all of this to Finch, who is their leader.

The next day, they return to the school. The Doctor sends Sarah Jane and Rose to look more closely at the computers, and puts Mickey on sentry duty outside with K9. The Doctor goes to confront Finch. Finch reveals himself to be a Krillitane called Brother Lassar, and admits he has permanently adopted human form, unlike the others. He says that the Doctor will soon join him. Meanwhile, Sarah Jane have an argument over the Doctor, but quickly realize their foolishness, and begin to get along better.

Lassar and the Krillitanes lock down the school with the children inside, moving to the final phase of their plan. They then devour the remaining human staff. The Doctor finds the computers are all deadlocked sealed. The Krillitanes get the students working on the computers, deciphering a strange formula that the Doctor recognizes as the Skasis Paradigm. If solved, it will grant its user godlike powers over reality, space, and time. Lassar tempts the Doctor, saying that with it he could resurrect the Time Lords. The Doctor is tempted; but Sarah Jane talks him down, and he leads Sarah Jane and Rose to try to escape.

K9 persuades Mickey to use Sarah Jane’s car to break through the doors and into the building. He and Kenny run to get the other students out, shutting down the program. As the students flee, Mickey and Kenny meet up with Rose, Sarah Jane, the Doctor, and K9 in the cafeteria, where K9 holds off the Krillitanes, but dangerously depletes his power. The others hide in a lab. The Doctor realizes the oil is the key; the Krillitanes have evolved so much that their own oil now harms them. He gets everyone out except K9. K9 volunteers to ignite the oil, but he knows it will be a sacrifice; he will have to be close when it explodes. The Doctor says his goodbyes, calls him a good dog, and leaves. As the Krillitanes and Lassar arrive, K9 shoots the barrel of oil, detonating it and destroying the school, himself, and the Krillitanes.

Sarah is heartbroken for K9, but she acknowledges his sacrifice. Later, at the TARDIS, the Doctor offers her the chance to travel with him again, but she declines, choosing to find her own life instead. However, Mickey asks to go instead; this time, the Doctor accepts, though Rose is not happy with it. As the TARDIS leaves, Sarah sees something left behind: A brand new K9, with the memories of the old, but updated systems. Overjoyed, she takes him home—after all, they have work ahead of them.

I will unashamedly say that this is one of my favorite episodes of new Doctor Who. This is mainly because I’m a huge classic series fan, and Sarah Jane and K9 were some of the earliest companions I recall from my childhood; but the episode is good in its own right as well. It was one of the earliest NuWho episodes I saw (though not the first—that honor goes to the next episode), and I’ve been delighted with it ever since. It’s hard to describe the feeling of seeing old favorite characters again after so many years; I felt something similar when the Master returned (albeit in a different body) in Utopia and when the Brigadier (albeit dead, sort of) made a cameo in Death In Heaven).

This story is littered with references, so I’ll try to be brief. Most of them come from Sarah Jane’s argument with Rose: Mummies appear in Pyramids of Mars; robots from a variety of episodes, but most notably Robot; Daleks from Genesis of the Daleks and Death to the Daleks; anti-matter monsters from Planet of Evil; dinosaurs from Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and the Loch Ness Monster from Terror of the Zygons. Rose counters with ghosts (The Unquiet Dead), Slitheen (Aliens of London/World War Three), the Dalek Emperor (The Parting of the Ways), zombies (The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances), the year five billion (The End of the World), and werewolves (Tooth and Claw). The Doctor mentions the year 5000 in connection with K9 (The Invisible Enemy), and the Sycorax ship (The Christmas Invasion). The TARDISode and the episode both show Torchwood software blocks on Mickey’s computer, a reference that will later play into the spinoff series. Sarah Jane makes reference to the car she drove in K9 and Company, the failed spinoff which established how she acquired K9. She hints at adventures that were never seen onscreen; the Doctor also says he has seen Krillitanes before, in a different form. He says he has regenerated a half dozen times since he last saw her (though some spinoff materials contradict this, as does The Five Doctors); this would naturally not include the War Doctor, whose memory he has suppressed. The Skasis Paradigm seems very similar to the Block Transfer Computations used by the Logopolitans; indeed, the techniques the students use to decode it, though executed via computer rather than by hand or verbally, seem very similar to those of the Logopolitans. Finch is aware of the Time Lords, and that the Doctor is the last, but doesn’t seem to know about the war; he still thinks of the Time Lords as peaceful and indolent, as they were before the war. K9 recognizes the Doctor despite his regenerations. There were also several tie-in websites in the real world; both Deffry Vale High School and its fictional surroundings had sites, as well as Mickey’s website, which featured tie-in material in an in-universe style. Most of all, though, this episode sets up for the eventual spinoff, The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Some great lines: “Oh my god…I’m the tin dog!” from Mickey; this realization prompts him to take a more active role and travel with the Doctor, which will cost him soon. He gets another great line when Sarah Jane and Rose are arguing: “Oh! The Missus and the ex. Every man’s worst nightmare!” The Doctor calls K9 a good dog just before his death, and he replies with Affirmative; moments later, Finch calls him a bad dog, and he gives the same reply, smugly, I might add. Sarah Jane’s farewell speech is also an emotional moment; she tells K9 that the Doctor replaced him with a new model, and then reflects, “He does that”. The Doctor tells her earlier in the episode that the reason he left her is because humans age and die, but he never does, and he can’t watch that over and over. It’s a harsh and well-done line, but a terrible reason.

The Girl in the Fireplace picks up shortly thereafter; Mickey comments that this is his first time traveling with the Doctor. It is the 51st Century, and the TARDIS has landed aboard a heavily-modified spaceship; but no crew are to be found. They quickly find a curious anomaly: an 18th-century French fireplace, leading…somewhere off the ship. A child appears on the other side; her name is Reinette, and she says the year is 1727, in Paris. She is surprised to see the Doctor, and more surprised when—weeks later from her perspective, but only minutes later from his—he comes through and awakens her. He finds a menacing, clockwork android under her bed; it wants to kill her, but says she is not complete yet. He tricks it into returning to the ship, then freezes it with a fire extinguisher. It soon recovers and teleports away.

The Doctor, Rose, and Mickey begin to investigate, with the Doctor periodically returning through the fireplace. Time is moving on the other side, but very quickly, covering years in what amounts to minutes on the ship; each time, he finds that she has aged by a number of years, and is now a young woman. He learns, too, that she is not just any woman; she is Reinette Poisson, the future Madame de Pompadour, future mistress of King Louis XV and uncrowned queen of France. She is also falling for him. To her view, she has known him all her life.

He finds that in addition to the fireplace, which allows time to progress for monitoring of Reinette’s life, there are various “time windows” on the ship, leading to different points in her life. When the droids find the correct one, they will come for her. Rose and Mickey find that the ship is riddled with human organs, serving as replacement parts. The Doctor deduces that something happened to the ship and crew; the droids are repair droids for the ship, who butchered the crew after the accident to use them as organic spare parts. They lack only one part: a brain for use as a processor. For this, they want Reinette…but why her? And why must she be a certain age?

That age is 37. The group finds a window leading to that moment; but so do the droids, who move in to claim Reinette. The Doctor sends Rose through another window, five years earlier, to warn her; but she follows Rose back onto the ship, and is duly alarmed by what she sees and hears. She chooses to return and wait. Meanwhile the Doctor finds that the ship is 37 years old, hence the correlation in age—but still, why Reinette?

He finds the window to the correct time closed. He can break through, but doing so will break the connection to the ship for all the windows, and will trap him there. And, because he is already part of events, he can’t use the TARDIS to infiltrate the time stream. He chooses to go anyway, using a horse that wandered aboard ship to break through, interrupting a party at which the droids are attacking. He tells them they are trapped as well, and have failed; with no purpose left to them, they deactivate.

Later, while talking with Reinette, he admits that he chose to be stranded so as to save her. Then, she reveals that she has kept the fireplace from her childhood, and transported it to the palace in one piece. Moving it broke its link to the ship, prior to his destruction of the windows…he is able to reactivate it and return. Before he goes, he offers to take Reinette with him, and she accepts.

He returns minutes later…but it is too late. From Reinette’s perspective, five years have passed…but history records that she died of an illness at age 42. He misses her funeral procession by five minutes. She left him a letter, though, saying goodbye, but pleading for him to return while there is time. He cannot do so.

On the TARDIS, he severs the link between times, closing the fireplace. As the TARDIS dematerializes, we see what the Doctor never knew: a portrait of Reinette on the ship’s wall, and outside, the name “SS Madame de Pompadour” on the hull. This is why the droids considered Reinette to be the same as them; the ship was named for her.

The TARDISode gives us a flashback to the event that damaged the ship, and shows the droids beginning to cannibalize the crew.

This episode is the first NuWho episode I saw, though I missed the ending at the time (I was running late for something). It was great then, and I still think it’s great now, although it’s a bit of a disaster for internal continuity (seriously: That fireplace portal is absolutely inconsistent regarding the passage of time! Two minutes at the beginning equate to a few months of Reinette’s life, but at the end, an equal time equates to about five years. Also it synchronizes with Reinette’s flow of time when he is speaking through it, but only then. This sort of thing happens continually.)

This episode is the first historical for the Tenth Doctor, although perhaps that’s overstating it, given its split time periods. It does, however, involve an actual historical character, in Madame de Pompadour, which adds some credibility. It also plays havoc with the idea that the Doctor can’t go back and change events he is part of; he says he can’t take the TARDIS back to France, but there seems to be no reason for that to be true. He can’t go back and change things already established further back in Reinette’s past, certainly, but he should be able to go to the moment of the party at the end, given that he hasn’t been there or done anything to contradict its events. Fortunately, this aspect of the “part of events” rule seems to have been discarded in later episodes. Clearly this is an episode that is better for the sake of story, but demands that you not look too deeply into the technobabble.

Reinette’s story is a sad one; although the Doctor saves her, he loses her in the end, and more to the point, she loses him. It’s our first indication that the Tenth Doctor is far from perfect, and indeed, makes mistakes quite well, a theme that we will see come to a head in The Waters of Mars a few series down the road. Indeed, sometimes I think his entire run is setting up for that story, in small ways; in the last episode, we had him drawing a distinction between himself and humanity for Sarah Jane, setting up for his eventual “Time Lord Victorious” moment. Here as well, he calls himself “the lord of time”; it’s tongue-in-cheek now, but foreshadowing worse things to come. This is a very fallible Doctor we are dealing with.

 

We are lacking in references here, perhaps making up for the glut of them in School Reunion; but Rose does reference the TARDIS translation circuits, last discussed in The Christmas Invasion, and calls the Doctor the Oncoming Storm (The Parting of the Ways). The Doctor mentions using Zeus plugs as castanets; these items appeared in The Hand of Fear, incidentally the final Sarah Jane episode of the classic series (with the exception of The Five Doctors). He mentions Cleopatra, but his encounters with her have been offscreen thus far.

Overall, both episodes are good, and I don’t have many complaints other than the fireplace’s issues. The Clockwork droids will appear again in slightly different form in Deep Breath; the Twelfth Doctor clearly connects them to this incident. Sarah Jane and K9, as well, will soon have a spinoff, and will appear again here in crossover format. These are well worth your time.

Next time: A two-parter gives us the return of the Cybermen in Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel; and if we make it there, we’ll also cover The Idiot’s Lantern! See you there.

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

School Reunion

TARDISode 3

The Girl in the Fireplace

TARDISode 4

A New Doctor for the Holidays: New Doctor Who Rewatch, “The Christmas Invasion”

We’re back, with our new Doctor Who rewatch! Last week we finished up Series One, with the Ninth Doctor. Today we begin the Tenth Doctor’s tenure, with the 2006 Christmas special, The Christmas Invasion! We’ll also take a look at the brief Children In Need charity special which bridged the gap between Series One and the Christmas special. Let’s get started!

As a reminder, each series in the new show tends to have considerably more stories than the classic seasons; therefore we’re splitting each series into parts of approximately three episodes each for the sake of length. Today is an exception, as we’ll look at the Christmas special by itself.

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen this episode!

The Children in Need special opens with a recap of the regeneration scene from The Parting of the Ways. The Tenth Doctor arrives—marveling at his new teeth—and tries to pick up right where the Ninth Doctor left off, setting course for the planet Barcelona. Rose isn’t having any of it, though; regeneration is a brand new concept to her, and she doesn’t believe that this is still the Doctor. She suggests he was switched out, or transmatted away, or even that the new Doctor is a Slitheen in a skin suit. He explains quickly, and to back up his claims, he reminds her of mutual memories of their first meeting. (This is a little unusual; typically regenerations have left him with at least a minor amount of memory loss, if only temporarily.) While this sets her mind at ease, she is still in shock, and wants to go home. He sets course for December 24, 2006, and heads for the Powell Estate (Rose’s apartment building). However, he suddenly starts to act erratically; regeneration energy wisps out of his mouth, and he seems to be in some pain and mania. Rose suggests finding Jack Harkness to help, but the Doctor brushes it off, saying Jack is busy rebuilding Earth after the Dalek attack. He throws the TARDIS into high speed, and warns her it is crashing. The cloister bell sounds, giving weight to his assertion.

The Christmas Invasion picks up immediately, on Earth. Mickey and Jackie each here the TARDIS arriving and come running; it does crash, though not catastrophically. The Doctor stumbles out and greets them, then passes out; they don’t recognize him until Rose explains, and even then they find it just as hard to believe as she did. They set him up in bed in Jackie’s apartment to recover.

Meanwhile, Britain is making history. Its Guinevere One space probe is on approach to Mars. Harriet Jones, now Prime Minister by a landslide victory, is making a speech about it—but is interrupted when the video feed cuts off. The probe has been intercepted by an unknown alien race. Harriet goes to UNIT—the agency’s first appearance in the new series, though it was mentioned in World War Three–and begins to oversee efforts to deal with the crisis. She summons help from an agency called Torchwood, of which she is not supposed to be aware. The feed is re-established, and they get their first glimpse of the aliens, who call themselves the Sycorax—and declare humanity their property.

While the Doctor recuperates, Mickey and Rose go out for some last-minute Christmas shopping, and discuss—or rather, dance around—their future and relationship. They are interrupted by an attack by androids dressed as Santa Claus; they flee back to the apartment in the chaos. As they explain to Jackie, Rose notices a Christmas tree that wasn’t there before. Jackie tells them it was anonymously delivered—and suddenly it comes to life and goes on the attack. Rose manages to awaken the Doctor just in time for him to destroy it with his sonic screwdriver. Outside, he sees the Santa robots watching, then disappearing in a transmat beam. He explains that they are like pilot fish, accompanying a larger threat; they have come for him, because he is brimming with regeneration energy, which they could use to power their technology. However, Rose has awakened him too soon, and he is still sick from regeneration; he passes out again.

Harriet confronts the Sycorax, via a rough translation program worked out by UNIT. She warns them that Earth is armed and will not surrender. In retaliation, the Sycorax take control of a third of the population, sending them to the tops of buildings and other structures and preparing them to jump off. UNIT works out that it is done via blood control, and only affects type A+ blood, of which a sample was included among other items on the Guinevere probe. Harriet makes a public broadcast about the situation, and implores the Doctor to come to Earth’s aid. Watching it on television, Rose realizes that the TARDIS is not translating the Sycorax footage, because the Doctor is unconscious and therefore out of the circuit. Harriet and her associates are then transmatted aboard the Sycorax ship to discuss surrender.

Rose, Mickey, and Jackie get the Doctor aboard the TARDIS, but are unable to pilot it. The Sycorax have discovered the TARDIS, however, and transmat it to their ship, leaving Jackie behind. Rose steps out—unaware of the transmat—and is captured, as is Mickey, who spills a container of tea onto the machinery by the Doctor’s unconscious form. The Sycorax take her for the owner of the TARDIS, and decide that she will speak for Earth. She tries to bluff, making them ridicule her—but suddenly, the TARDIS begins translating again, and Rose realizes the Doctor is awake. He throws open the doors of the TARDIS and joins them.The Doctor takes charge of the situation, and explains that nutrients from the vaporized tea aided his recovery. He quickly figures out the blood control situation, and shuts it down, freeing the hostages on Earth. He then orders the Sycorax to leave; and when the leader refuses, he grabs a sword from one of the guards, and challenges the leader to formal combat.

The Doctor is no slouch with a sword. He forces a change in venue, taking the combat onto the outer deck of the ship, overlooking the city. It appears he will lose; the leader cuts off his hand. However, he is still close to his regeneration, and the residual energy causes a new hand to grow. Stunned, the leader is taken aback, and the Doctor presses the attack, and defeats him. He offers the leader a chance to live, and again tells him to leave the Earth and never return. The leader agrees; however, as the Doctor walks away, the leader tries to stab him in the back. The Doctor forces him off the edge of the ship, and he falls to his death. There will be no second chances.

With the humans and the TARDIS transmatted back to London, the Sycorax ship departs. However, Harriet orders Torchwood to destroy it; they carry out the sentence with a large superlaser. Enraged, the Doctor turns on Harriet, and after castigating her—much as he once did the Brigadier, when UNIT destroyed the Silurians—he tells her he will destroy her career with just six words. He walks away, but whispers into her aide’s ear, “Don’t you think she looks tired?” This sets off a storm of controversy that soon—within days—results in her downfall via a vote of no confidence regarding her health.

The Doctor celebrates Christmas with Rose, Jackie, and Mickey; but then he must leave. It looks as though Rose will stay behind; and then, having fully accepted that this truly is the Doctor, she chooses to go with him.

Although there are some minor plot weaknesses—the Santa droids, for one, could just as easily have been eliminated with no change to the overall plot—I always felt that this story constituted a good, strong introduction for the Tenth Doctor. David Tennant is an excellent choice for the role, and indeed, for many fans, has become the definitive version of the Doctor. Like many of his predecessors (and also Matt Smith after him), he needed no adjustment period; there was no series of shaky early episodes leading up to him owning the role. He simply WAS the Doctor, from the very first moment. The story also establishes an excellent tradition: the annual Christmas special. It’s been argued that the First Doctor had the true first Christmas special, with The Feast of Steven, episode seven of The Daleks’ Master Plan (now unfortunately lost to history, although reconstructions exist); I can agree with that, but this is where it became an annual tradition, as the classic series had no other such episodes. A second tradition began here as well: that of Doctor Who’s involvement with the Children in Need fundraising efforts. The brief interlude that precedes the Christmas special adds only a little to the story, but adds much to the social impact of Doctor Who. Also, beginning with this episode, David Tennant is credited as “The Doctor” rather than “Doctor Who”; this change was at his request, and mirrors a similar change in the classic series under Peter Davison.

Several running jokes occur in this story. Jackie makes the classic “Doctor who?” joke upon seeing the Doctor’s new face, although she says it in earnest. The TARDIS crashing has become a bit of a running joke, occurring in connection with every new series regeneration with the exception of the War Doctor’s regeneration into the Ninth Doctor (as far as we know anyway; we don’t see the immediate aftermath of that regeneration. However, the TARDIS even crashed with Eight’s regeneration into War, though admittedly not under its own power). The Doctor for the first time (of many) expresses his desire to be ginger. Most conspicuously, there’s the running joke regarding Harriet Jones; every time she introduces herself, the listener responds with “Yes, I know who you are.” This includes the Sycorax leader, albeit via the translation software. This will continue through her final appearance and death in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End.

Yeah, it’s…not going to end anytime soon.

Rose’s reaction to the regeneration is perfectly understandable, given that the Doctor only told her about it seconds before it happened. In this moment, the companion is truly an audience surrogate, as many fans who had not seen the classic series would not have known what was going on. Her eventual acceptance of the new Doctor is not assured until the end; unfortunately, her choice of the Doctor again, here where it seemed like she should give him up, only serves to drive a bigger wedge between herself and Mickey, who is not as over her as he previously led us to believe.

There are a number of connections to other episodes here; some of them are connections to future stories which had not yet been written. “Sycorax” is the name of the witch in The Tempest; the Doctor will later unwittingly give Shakespeare the idea by name-dropping the Sycorax. He can analyze blood by taste; he has previously demonstrated the ability to analyze substances in this way, although the blood is a first. He is a skilled swordsman, as were the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Doctors before him; we last saw this in The King’s Demons, against the Master. Harriet makes a meta reference; she says the video signal may have been hijacked by kids, which is an allusion to the Max Headroom Signal Intrusion incident in Chicago in the 1980s. During that incident, a showing of Horror of Fang Rock was interrupted and hijacked. UNIT is re-introduced, after being referenced in Aliens of London/World War Three; it was last seen in Battlefield, and seems to have had a budget increase since then. The TARDIS’s translation ability was introduced via the Fourth Doctor long ago, but is expanded on here. The Santa droids will be used again by the Racnoss Empress in The Runaway Bride. Torchwood gets a very direct reference, which will lead into its introduction onscreen later in the series, and its spinoff as well. The Doctor’s severed hand will be seen again on Torchwood, as well as in Utopia and Journey’s End. The Doctor mentions a “great big threatening red button” which he is compelled to push; this will eventually resurface as a reference to the Moment in The Day of the Doctor, adding some depth to his offhanded comment. There are parallels between the Sycorax and Faction Paradox, especially with regard to blood control and the wearing of bone; however my knowledge of Faction Paradox is too limited to comment further. As well, a recently-released short story, The Christmas Inversion, takes place in the midst of this story, in which Jackie Tyler meets the Third Doctor.

 

Most interestingly, this story sets up a chain of terrible events which will continue all the way through the Tenth Doctor’s life. The severing of his hand, and his deposing of Harriet, will eventually lead to the rise of the Master as Harold Saxon, and to the eventual death of the Tenth Doctor at the end of the Master’s plans. For more information, check the continuity section of the TARDIS wiki’s entry for this story.

Overall, I liked this story. I felt it has something for everyone—plenty of classic references, the beginning of a new story arc, a good follow-up to Series One, and a hopeful introduction to Series Two, as well as a fair bit of setup for Torchwood. While there have been more popular specials, this one still holds its own.

Next time: We launch into Series Two with New Earth, Tooth and Claw, and School Reunion! See you there.

Parting of the Ways: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series One Finale

We’re back with our new Doctor Who rewatch! Today we’re finishing up Series One, with the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler; if you’d like to catch up, here are the entries for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four. As a reminder, each series in the new show tends to have considerably more stories than the classic seasons; therefore we’re splitting each series into parts for the sake of length. Today we’re looking at the series one finale, episodes twelve and thirteen. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen these episodes!

The episode is titled Bad Wolf, and we open cold on the Doctor, Rose and Jack. They awaken to find themselves with slight amnesia, and find they have been incorporated as contestants in several futuristic game shows. (The shows are intentional takes on shows that were popular at the time of broadcast, notably Big Brother (here featuring the Doctor), The Weakest Link (Rose), and What Not To Wear (Jack). They are mostly unchanged, with the exception of robotic versions of their real-world hosts—which, coincidentally, are voiced by said hosts.) They are stunned, but quickly recover, only to find that losing contestants don’t go home—they are vaporized.

Their intrusion isn’t unnoticed. The staff that are controlling the broadcasts have taken note of their presence, and presented their findings to the Controller—a human woman who is wired into the system to control the data. She has been there since she was five years old, and knows no other life; she only sees the data, not the individuals. She tells the staff to continue working as though nothing had changed; and she cuts off access to the nearby Archive Six.

After some adventures in their respective shows, the Doctor and Jack escape, taking another contestant—Lynda—with them. The Doctor suddenly realizes where they are: They have returned to Satellite Five, and it is the year 200,100, one hundred years after his previous visit. The satellite is now called the Gamestation; it no longer broadcasts news, but now broadcasts more than 40,000 channels of high-stakes entertainment. They try to find Rose, but are too late; losing her competition, she is disintegrated. Enraged, the Doctor and Jack head for Floor 500. There they confront the broadcast staff, and the Controller, just as a solar flare temporarily takes down the broadcast.

Under the protective silence of the flare, the Controller addresses the Doctor directly. She tells him that she serves hidden masters, but she cannot tell him who they are—they have programmed her not to reveal their name. She states that they manipulate and oppress humanity for their own ends, growing in power in the darkness of space. She tells him that they fear him, and so she has brought him here to destroy them. (How she did it is not explained, however. She somehow managed to locate the TARDIS and pluck it and its occupants from flight, all without any obvious means of time travel.) The solar flare prevents them from reading her thoughts, allowing her to privately pass this message. However, the flare ends before she can tell him where to find her masters.

Jack breaks into Archive Six, and finds the TARDIS there. He uses the equipment aboard to determine that the contestants aren’t being killed; they’re secretly being transmatted away, meaning that Rose is still alive. The Controller breaks her secrecy to reveal the coordinates to the Doctor, and is immediately transmatted away to her masters, who kill her for her betrayal. Rose, too, is there, and discovers the terrible truth: The masters are Daleks.

The Doctor locates the coordinates at the edge of the solar system, but nothing is seen there. He cuts off the cloaking wave that the station is broadcasting along with its signal, and a fleet of two hundred Dalek warships is revealed. Each contains a few thousand Daleks, bringing their total force to nearly half a million. The Daleks contact the Doctor, and threaten him to stand down or they will kill Rose; he refuses, and says he is coming to rescue her and destroy them.

The Parting of the Ways picks up immediately, with the Doctor and Jack racing to the scene in the TARDIS. They use the extrapolator from Boom Town to create a shield around the TARDIS, which allows them to materialize around Rose, then step out and speak to the Daleks with impunity. They discover that the Daleks are led by the Dalek Emperor, who somehow survived the destruction of the last day of the Time War and fell through time to come here. He has since built up his forces over a few centuries by using human dead to create new Daleks. He now considers himself the Dalek god.

The Doctor and the others escape and return to the station to stage a defense. He organizes a perimeter defense under Jack and some of the station’s crew; behind the lines, he begins to establish a Delta wave, a form of energy burst that will fry the brains of every Dalek. However, the emperor contacts him and reveals that it will be indiscriminate; it will also kill every human in its range, including those on Earth. The Doctor is willing to sacrifice Earth to destroy the Daleks; he states that humanity on its far-flung colonies will survive, but the Daleks must die here. The Daleks compare him again to them, calling him the Great Exterminator, which rankles him.

Rose and Jack are also willing to die. However, the Doctor tricks Rose into leaving in the TARDIS using an emergency program. She is returned to her home time, with Mickey and Jackie. On the station, the battle begins; the Daleks invade and slaughter everyone they can find, until only Jack and the Doctor are left. They also begin killing vast swaths of the population of Earth (offscreen, thankfully).

In 2006, Rose admits defeat. However, she suddenly realizes she is seeing Bad Wolf graffiti everywhere. She takes it as a warning, and tries to get the TARDIS to move. Remembering her experience with Blon, she reasons that she can open the heart of the TARDIS to somehow spur it to action; and with Mickey’s help (and a yellow truck) she does. The heart invades her body, and takes her over; she becomes a powerful entity that takes the Bad Wolf name, and forces the TARDIS back to the station. She arrives just as Jack is killed, leaving only the Doctor. He is horrified; she has absorbed the power of the vortex, which is too much for anyone to survive.

The entity destroys the Daleks, turning them all to dust. It scatters the Bad Wolf words through time and space, creating all the references that led them here—thus, creating itself. It restores life to Jack (and much more, as we’ll later see). Then, before Rose can be consumed by the power, the Doctor kisses her, drawing it into himself, and releasing it back into the TARDIS. It will be his final act.

Jack arrives just in time to see the TARDIS leave, stranding him here. Inside, the Doctor tells Rose the damage is too much even for him, and he will die. He explains about regeneration, when he will change to a new face. He says his goodbyes…and transforms into the Tenth Doctor.

This remains one of my favorite series finales, if not my absolute favorite. As humorous and (sometimes) off-balance as the series could be, it takes itself seriously here, even while making jokes about reality television. All season the Doctor has been venting his emotions as if he can’t control them at all; here, we see it come together, and get an idea of how truly fearsome he can be. And yet, even with that, it’s Rose who is truly to be feared, as she recklessly absorbs the vortex and becomes the Bad Wolf. For all the Doctor’s anger, it’s his sense of self-sacrifice that saves the day, as he dies to save her.

I had previously mentioned that Satellite Five had a ridiculously low number of channels for the future. That’s overcompensated here, with over 44,000. The game show parodies were cleverly done, with puns and inside jokes, even if they seem dated now. There’s a reference to Torchwood here, as the Great Cobalt Pyramid is said to stand on its ruins. And of course, there’s the obvious Bad Wolf reference, in the name of the consortium that runs the station (secretly under the Daleks, of course).

The Doctor, Rose, and Jack mention having come from Raxicoricofallapatorius (having dropped off egg-Blon as promised), then having had one more adventure, in 1338 Kyoto, from which they narrowly escaped. Thus there is no time for additional adventures involving the three of them—sorry, fanfic writers. It was good while it lasted. Jack’s sexuality is played up again, though not as jokingly as in previous episodes; I also do not want to know where he was hiding his gun, though.

Doctor Who TV series starring Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Matt Smith, Billie Piper, Karen Gillan, Freema Agyeman, Catherine Tate, Alex Kingston, Jenna Coleman, Paul Kasey, Nicholas Briggs, Arthur Darvill, Noel Clarke, John Barrowman – dvdbash.com

The Daleks have an established history of using human children as “controllers”, dating back to Day of the Daleks; this isn’t quite the same, but close, and again, their subject betrays them. We also get a connection with the transmats leaving dust behind; this happened previously in The Twin Dilemma. The Face of Boe is mentioned again, in the trivia questions. A control panel on the Dalek ship is the same as one dating all the way back to The Chase–a small but interesting connection. The Doctor tells the Daleks that their legends call him the oncoming storm; this name will recur several times in the new series, but actually dates to a Draconian phrase in the VNA novel, Love and War. (Another VNA reference is seen in the trivia questions; the planet Lucifer gets a mention, having originated in the novel Lucifer Rising.) Most interestingly, Jack recognizes the Daleks and their ships; this makes for interesting questions about the Time War. Some are answered in part two, when he explains that they were the most feared race in the universe, but suddenly vanished; the Doctor explains that they left to fight a bigger war, the Time War, which Jack implies was just a legend.

The line “And for my next trick”, seen in part two, is later reused in The Day of the Doctor. The Daleks here are post-war Daleks, making them very powerful indeed, and it’s probably that had Rose not intervened, they would have won. The Doctor faces the same choice—kill innocents to destroy the Daleks—that he faced in the war, but here he makes the other decision, and stays his hand.

The Dalek emperor is the same as in the war, but appears to not be the same as any others we have seen mentioned. The concept first appeared in The Evil of the Daleks, all the way back to the Second Doctor; Davros also called himself the emperor. As with Davros’s Imperial Daleks, the Daleks seen here are bred from human stock, and thus inherit some of the characteristics of humanity, in this case religious inclination. That part doesn’t surprise me; the only oddity is that the Emperor, who is a pure Dalek of Skaro origins (presumably), buys into it. It’s very curious, but then, we’ll see this sort of leader-worship again, if not so explicitly. As to the human stock: This issue will also reappear in the Eighth Doctor Adventures audio drama, Blood of the Daleks, where it is initiated by the human Professor Martez.

This is an incredibly bloodthirsty story. Every incidental character dies, including all the humans on the station and all the Daleks. Though it happens offscreen, the Daleks are stated to be killing off large portions of Earth’s population. As well, Jack and the Doctor both die, though both live again (Jack by resurrection, the Doctor by regeneration). Only Rose, Jackie, and Mickey survive (and, I suppose, any background characters in the 2006 scenes, though they hardly bear mentioning). Jack is the fifth companion character to die onscreen, joining classic companions Katarina, Sara Kingdom, Adric, and Kamelion. (Apparently it doesn’t pay to have the letter K in your name…)

The Doctor tricks Rose into leaving in the TARDIS, by activating an emergency program. The Eleventh Doctor will later do the same to Clara Oswald in The Time of the Doctor, complete with a similar holographic interface. Clara will take equally extreme actions to return to him, as she clings to the outside of the TARDIS while in the vortex.

For the second time in this series, a Dalek compares the Doctor to the Daleks; the Emperor calls him the Great Exterminator. He doesn’t care for the comparison. The emperor states that this act of extermination will make the Doctor like him; however, the joke’s on him—he already did it once, although we haven’t yet had the specifics revealed to us. As I mentioned, he makes the opposite choice here, and chooses not to kill.

The Bad Wolf entity is fascinating. It’s set up as a parallel to the Dalek Emperor, in that both established themselves as a kind of god. However, where the Emperor merely boasted of godhood, the Bad Wolf demonstrated it, by displaying a ridiculous amount of power. Being possessed of control over time, it creates itself, by scattering the “Bad Wolf” words throughout time in such a way as to lead Rose and the Doctor here, to this moment. (This makes the entire series, to me, reminiscent of the episode Turn Left, where the point is that a myriad small choices lead up to momentous things–Doctor Who’s take on the butterfly effect, if you will.) The entity also kills the Daleks by reducing them to dust; and it brings life by command, reviving Jack from death. This will have consequences, of course, as later episodes (and the Torchwood spinoff) will show that he is now immortal, and a sort of mobile fixed point in time. At the end, the Doctor leaves him here; and it will later be revealed that this was because he finds Jack’s new nature abhorrent, offensive to his time sense, although he still respects him personally.

This is, as far as I’ve seen, the first mention of regeneration in the new series. The Doctor explains it briefly to Rose before it happens; and really, he’s explaining it to the fans, as well. New fans who missed out on the classic series would likely have no idea that he can change; and as it had already been announced that he would be leaving, it no doubt left some viewers wondering about the future of the show. This regeneration would have resolved that uncertainty, as we see the Tenth Doctor for the first time. Also, this is the first new-style regeneration, with the now-characteristic energy explosion, although we have since learned it dates back to the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration into the War Doctor. I do find it interesting that Rose seemed to maintain the vortex energy better than the Doctor; she holds it for some time before it begins to kill her, but the Doctor appears to be mortally hurt by it after just a moment—after all, he releases it back to the TARDIS almost instantly after taking it in.

And so, with that, we say goodbye to the Ninth Doctor, and hello to the Tenth. It’s been a fun ride, and far too short. Still, without the Ninth Doctor, we never would have had the good things to come; and we wouldn’t be eagerly awaiting Series Ten today. For that, though Christopher Eccleston’s time in the TARDIS was short, we thank him.

Next time: The Christmas Invasion! And possibly the beginning of Series Two. See you there!

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

Bad Wolf

The Parting of the Ways

Dancing Doctors and Future Immortals: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series One, Part Four

We’re back, with our New Doctor Who rewatch! We’re nearing the end of Series One, with the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler; if you’d like to catch up, here are the entries for part one, part two, and part three. As a reminder, each series in the new show tends to have considerably more stories than the classic seasons; therefore we’re splitting each season into parts for the sake of length. Today we’re looking at episodes nine, ten, and eleven. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen these episodes!

We open with The Empty Child, the first part of a two-part story. It’s significant for being future showrunner Steven Moffatt’s first contribution to the revived series. It also introduces one of his best and most notorious creations: Captain Jack Harkness. This story occurs during Harkness’s first documented trip through the twentieth century; at this point, he is not associated with the Torchwood organization, and is not immortal, as will be widely referenced later. He originates from the 51st century, and was at one time a Time Agent; however, he considers himself betrayed by the Time Agency, who took away two years of his memories, and now freelances as a mercenary and con man. He has access to time travel via his wrist-worn vortex manipulator, though that is not clearly explained here as yet; and he also travels with a stolen spaceship.

He sure knows how to make an entrance.

The Doctor and Rose arrive in London, 1941, during the height of the London Blitz. They have come in pursuit of an alien ship, which crashed in the middle of London, and has been mistaken for one of many bombs by the locals. The Doctor is actually unaware of this at first, failing to realize they have arrived during the Blitz (and giving us some minor comedy); but they are interrupted by an air raid. Rose, having wandered off, finds herself dangling from a barrage balloon, and is saved by Jack using his ship’s tractor beam. He at once realizes she is not from this time period, and believes that she and the Doctor are Time Agents coming to interfere with him. He attempts to sell the crashed ship to her, and reveals he was the one who caused it to come down safely; but in two hours, it will be blown up by a bomb. She leads him to the Doctor.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has found a mystery. A small child in a gas mask is following an older girl around, behaving dangerously and searching for its mother. The girl leads the Doctor to a hospital, where he speaks with the doctor on duty, and learns that many people have become like the child—and there is nothing inside them. It is like a disease, and it is spreading. The hospital doctor himself succumbs while the Doctor watches. Rose and Jack meet him there, and they are forced to try to escape. The episode ends with a cliffhanger here; if they are touched by the infected people, they too will succumb.

Not completely relevant, but too funny to pass up!

The Doctor Dances picks up immediately, and the Doctor and his companions elude the creatures and find themselves in a storeroom. Jack gets them out via the teleporter on his ship. They then make their way to the crash site, where they find the girl, Nancy, trapped—and the guards are transforming like the child, as the disease becomes airborne. However, the Doctor deduces that the ship is no battleship—it’s an ambulance, of sorts. It is filled with nanogenes, microscopic machines with the power to not only heal, but remake organic life. Escaping the crash, the nanogenes latched onto an injured child nearby and healed him; but with no preset pattern, they healed him incorrectly, creating the empty child. With the bomb about to fall on the site, the Doctor realizes that Nancy is the child’s mother, rather than his older sister as she had claimed. She accepts the child to her, and the nanogenes use her DNA to determine the correct pattern for his, healing him. The Doctor sends Jack to deal with the bomb, then updates the nanogenes to fix the other victims. He then sets the ship to blow up, eliminating the threat. Just this once, everyone lives…!

…Except Jack. He uses his ship to catch the bomb, but can’t contain it from exploding, and can’t escape. He resigns himself to death—until the TARDIS appears and snatches him away. He is stranded now, but chooses to travel with them.

This story is very significant in the history of the new series, setting up many elements that would recur. The Time Agency is not new—it was referenced as far back as The Talons of Weng-Chiang—but will get new life in the revived series, with some new backstory (most notably, that it was established in the absence of the Time Lords after the Time War, as noted in the comic Weapons of Past Destruction). Vortex manipulators appear here without much explanation, and Jack’s sonic “squareness gun” will reappear later with River Song (though not explained here, Moffatt’s intention is that it is stored in the TARDIS until River finds it). Jack will go on to be a part of Torchwood Three, and develop immortality.

There are a lot of good lines here, more than I could capture. Dr. Constantine at the hospital remarks “Before this war I was a father and a grandfather. Now I am neither. But I am still a doctor,” to which the Doctor famously replies “Yeah, I know the feeling,” a reference at minimum to his lost granddaughter Susan. Jack refers to Pompeii on Volcano Day, a reference the Tenth Doctor will repeat to Donna Noble in The Fires of Pompeii. Jack also famously remarks, on seeing the sonic screwdriver, “Who looks at a screwdriver and thinks, ooh, this could be a little more sonic?!” Rose gets in a dig at the Doctor with “The first time I met him he blew up my job. It’s practically how he communicates.” The Doctor gets her, though, with “I’ve traveled with lots of people, but you’re setting new records for ‘jeopardy-friendly’.” And, of course, his most famous line occurs near the end: “Everybody lives, Rose. Just this once, everybody lives!” We also get the famous “Are you my mummy?” line, which the Tenth Doctor will jokingly reference in The Poison Sky. Rose, as well, makes the classic “Doctor Who?” joke.

The title The Doctor Dances comes from the storeroom scene, where he dances with Rose out of jealousy over Jack. They dance again at the end, in the TARDIS. His dancing with a partner is a very uncommon thing; it only happens once in the classic series, with the one-off character Ray in Delta and the Bannermen. The Doctor also uses dancing as a euphemism for sex, in telling Rose about Jack’s home century. Jack, as the episode makes clear, is bisexual, and even not particularly concerned about the species of his partners; this will be played up in a number of later appearances, both seriously and as a bit of a joke. Further regarding the title: It represents a few rarities among episodes. It contains a verb, and it names the Doctor, both of which are very uncommon (though not unheard of!), both in the classic and new series. It is the first occurrence of each in the new series.

There’s a Bad Wolf reference in the second episode, but it’s subtle and hard to spot. The German bomb, when caught by Jack’s tractor beam, is seen to have the phrase “Schlechter Wolf” (literally, “Worse Wolf”) printed on its side. Jack, of course, gets the bomb away and into space. He is very willing to die to save everyone, though not exactly happily. I found it supremely ironic, then, that he very soon will not be able to die. He’s a fascinating character in any regard.

We finish today with Boom Town, which takes us back to Earth in 2006. The story is a sequel to World War Three, and brings back the character of Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, aka Margaret Blaine, the one Slitheen to survive the attack on Downing Street. Now, six months later, she has gotten herself selected as Lord Mayor of Cardiff, and is overseeing the construction of a new power plant. Not bad for such a short time; it’s too bad she wants to blow it all up, for both revenge and escape.

The TARDIS crew have come to Cardiff to refuel the TARDIS, using the rift that was last seen in The Unquiet Dead. The Rift will later be a central plot point in the Torchwood spin-off series. In fact, the Torchwood Three hub already exists at this point, complete with its own version of Jack Harkness; the novel The Twilight Streets will establish that Jack purposefully kept his team locked down for the day so as not to meet himself on the streets. In fact, a third Jack is also nearby, though in cryogenic storage, as seen in the Torchwood episode Exit Wounds. The TARDIS previously did not require such refueling, being powered by the central Eye of Harmony; but with the destruction of Gallifrey, that Eye was lost, and now it is rifts like this that allow the TARDIS to recharge periodically (although this is not made explicit at this time). While waiting, Rose meets up with Mickey; it ends badly, signaling the end of their relationship, though he stays around to help deal with Blon.

The Doctor captures Blon (after a great scene with a teleporter that wouldn’t be out of place on Scooby-Doo). He intends to take her home to Raxicoricofallapatorius; she insists she will be put to death if she goes there. He then determines her plan: Using an alien device called a Tribophysical Waveform Macrokinetic Extrapolator (or extrapolator, for short), she intends to use the power plant to destroy the Earth. She will then ride the shockwave to freedom in the galaxy, using the extrapolator. The Doctor stops that plan, only to find out that she lied; her real plan was to use the rift to destroy the world; and by parking the TARDIS on it, the Doctor has given her the key.

Desperate to stop her, the Doctor takes a drastic step: He opens the heart of the TARDIS, under the console, which is being supercharged by the rift. Looking into it—for it is far more than just a power source—Blon is transformed, regressed into an egg. The Doctor then closes the rift and averts the crisis. Departing—and leaving Mickey behind, alone—the travelers plan to drop the egg on Raxicoricofallapatorius, giving Blon a chance at a new life.

I’m fond of this episode, even though it isn’t ranked particularly highly among new series episodes. I like the Slitheen as villains, once we look past the flatulence jokes (which recur here, but in a more understated manner). Blon in particular is a villain with some complexity; there’s a notable scene where she intends to kill a journalist, but refrains upon finding out that the woman is pregnant. Her grief over the loss of her own family is still acute. She’s also good for some comic relief; there’s the previously mentioned teleporter scene, and her “dinner date” with the Doctor, in which she tries several times to kill him. She gets in a good line when she says to the Doctor, “What did I ever do to you?”; he replies with “You tried to kill me and destroy this entire planet.” “Apart from that!” she retorts with a tsk.

Jack’s role is toned down a bit here, though he will be instrumental again in the upcoming series finale. He’s still entertaining; and of course this episode plants the earliest seeds of the upcoming Torchwood television series, which will reuse some of the locations from this story. Mickey is at what may be his lowest point here; he attempts to reconnect with Rose, but then admits that he is seeing someone else. When challenged on it by Rose—who, not incorrectly, believes it is about her rather than the other woman—he admits that he did it because at least he knows where the other woman is. With Rose, he never knows. He comes off as petulant and downright mean to Rose, but his points are still valid—she will never choose him.

There’s a Bad Wolf reference in the name of the power plant. In Welsh, it is called “Blaidd Drwgg”, which translates to “Bad Wolf”; unlike the last foreign-language reference, the Doctor catches this one and interrogates Blon as to why she chose that name. He and Rose comment that the words seem to be following them around; but in the end he dismisses it as coincidence. Of course it isn’t, as we will see soon.

Blon’s regression to egg form has precedent: In The Leisure Hive, the villain Pangol was regressed to infancy. Also, in The Visitation, the Terileptils—like Blon—declined to be repatriated to their homeworld due to fear of execution. In that case, the Doctor allowed them to settle on another world; here he denies Blon that opportunity, stating that she will just resume her criminal activities.

Overall, these are good episodes, and I think it’s safe to say that Series One is finally finding its feet. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances are often cited as the best episodes of the series; and Boom Town, while not so highly regarded, is still well executed. It’s a good way to wrap up the week-by-week portion of the series, as the next episodes are devoted to the overall arc.

Next time: We finish Series One, and say goodbye to the Ninth Doctor—and hello to some old enemies! See you there.

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

The Empty Child

The Doctor Dances

Boom Town

The Doctor Fails: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series One, Part Three

After a lengthy delay, we’re back, continuing our New Doctor Who rewatch! It’s been a while, so if you would like to catch up, here are the entries for Series One, part one, and Series One, part two. As a reminder, each season in the new show tends to have considerably more stories than the classic seasons; therefore we’re splitting each season into parts for the sake of length. Today—and due to an upcoming two-parter that we won’t want to split up—we’re cutting down to only two episodes, episodes seven and eight of Series One. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen these episodes!

Picking up right where we left off in Dalek, we find ourselves in the far future again in The Long Game. It’s approximately the year 200,000, and humanity is squarely in the middle of the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire—or at least, it should be. It doesn’t take the Doctor long to figure out that something has gone wrong with the empire. The TARDIS lands aboard Satellite 5, a large space station orbiting the Earth. The station is responsible for television (or at least, the 2000th century equivalent) broadcasting, and especially newscasting from the far-flung reaches of the empire.

Satellite 5

The latest companion, Adam Mitchell, is overwhelmed at first by this new experience. The Doctor treats him pretty roughly, which is no surprise, given that he didn’t want Adam along in the first place. After obtaining some credits—money—for use in exploring the station, the trio finds themselves observing a newsgathering session—and get a surprise: The central computer in the session is actually the living brain of one of the news staff, “borrowed” for the purpose via an electronic port in her head. During the session, one of the staff is promoted unexpectedly, and called up to Floor 500, the near-mythical control deck of the station. Behind the scenes, we see that it is not what she expects, but then, she also has her secrets; she’s an agent working to expose corruption on the station. She finds that something else is in control—and dies for her trouble.

It doesn’t end well for poor Suki.

Separating himself from the Doctor, Adam sneaks off and attempts to acquire information that he can send home to exploit in his own time, thus vindicating the Doctor’s distrust of him. To that end, he uses the credit supply to have one of the electronic ports installed in his own head; it only appears when triggered by a finger snap.

You look happy about it now, Adam, but just wait.

Upon investigating further, the Doctor and Rose find themselves admitted to Floor 500, where they meet the Editor, a slick and oily human in charge of the station. He himself only works for the true master, though: a massive, dangerous creature with a high metabolism—and therefore requiring constant cold temperatures—called the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe. The Editor reveals that the Empire is neither human nor particularly great, because, for 91 years, the Jagrafess has been manipulating its development for profit. And now, thanks to Adam’s access of the systems, it knows all about the Doctor, and wants the TARDIS. The Doctor and Rose and Adam are all rescued, however, by one of the surviving news staff, when she interrupts the Editor’s access, and pumps heat into the Jagrafess’s room. This causes it to explode—and in a final bit of revenge from the agent’s barely-animate corpse, the Editor is trapped and killed with it. The Empire is now free to resume its development.

Hello, Jagrafess!

Full of anger, the Doctor returns Adam to his parents’ home. He destroys the tape Adam had made of exploitable data, but warns him that he will have to live a quiet life, because all it takes is a snap of the fingers to expose his secret. Adam expects to be able to do just that…until his mother comes in and snaps her fingers just seconds later.

Oops.

There’s a Bad Wolf reference early in this episode; one of the television broadcasts in the background refers to the “Bad Wolf channel”, which is carrying an exclusive on the Face of Boe’s pregnancy. (That creature—whether the rumor about it being an ancient Jack Harkness is true or not—is incredibly long-lived; its previous appearance is billions of years later than this.) As well—though it hasn’t been revealed at this point—this episode sets up for the series one finale, which will return the Doctor to Satellite 5.

Nobody said this had to make sense.

I feel compelled to say something about human history here. I’ve made a project throughout these rewatches of trying to figure out the basic course of future history. There are five major periods to which Doctor Who makes repeated reference, though not always in detail. There is the colonization period, from about 2100 to 2500 AD; and the Earth Empire, which grows out of the colonization period and lasts until about 3000 AD. These two periods were portrayed often in the classic series, although occasional trips into the further future also occurred (but without delving much into the greater scene of humanity). The Earth Empire, if named according to NuWho conventions, would have been synonymous with the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire. The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire was in existence by the 42nd century, and was the first truly intergalactic empire, encompassing three galaxies. It is the galaxy in which the Ood served as slaves, as seen in Planet of the Ood, and was concurrent with the Earth Alliance, a smaller political body seen in the audio Invasion of the Daleks. The Third Great and Bountiful Human Empire has not been seen onscreen, but appeared in the comics with the Eleventh Doctor, who described it as “neither great, nor bountiful, nor overwhelmingly human”; it occurs in the 78th and 79th centuries, and though we haven’t seen it addressed, it is possible that some classic stories may occur here. Then, it is a long period—more than a hundred thousand years—before we come to the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire, seen here; we don’t get an accurate accounting of its size, as the Doctor describes it a bit poetically, so we can’t really compare it to the previous Empires. It remains to be seen if any of these empires will be further fleshed out, but we know this is not the end; another intergalactic civilization exists at the time of The End of the World, and I have said in various places that I think that that civilization is the Empire seen fighting the Cybermen in Nightmare in Silver. I mention all of this here because it is a topic I expect to recur often during this rewatch.

Father’s Day takes us to another new frontier: Rose’s personal past. We’ve met her mother, Jackie; now we learn that her father, Pete Tyler, died at a young age, killed by a hit-and-run driver. Knowing he died alone and in pain, Rose wants to be there for him, even if he doesn’t know her; and against his better judgment, the Doctor allows it. In fact, he allows it twice, as she balks the first time—and on the second attempt, she saves his life instead. This creates a paradox, and trouble for everyone.

Bad idea, Rose, no matter how it seemed at the time.

We actually have an exact date for this episode—in fact, we have both birth and death dates for Pete Tyler: September 15, 1954 to November 7, 1987, the date of this story. En route to a friend’s wedding at the time of his original death, he was struck and killed, until Rose changed it all. So, what are these massive, demonic creatures that suddenly appeared, and started killing people without a trace? And why is the interior of the TARDIS suddenly gone?

How do you misplace the inside of a TARDIS?!

The Doctor rushes Rose, Jackie, Pete, their friends, and—shockingly to Rose—the infant version of Rose, into the church, and barricades the doors. The ancient stone of the building is enough to keep the creatures—called Reapers—out for now, but not for long. The Doctor is very angry with Rose, and tells her that her stupid actions have caused this problem. The creatures are like white blood cells responding to a wound to cleanse it; however, this wound is in time itself. The Doctor explains that a person’s actions are fixed in time once carried out, and that one cannot change her own personal history without causing a paradox. These creatures, therefore, will kill everyone to repair the damage—and they are trapped there without the TARDIS. He laments that the Time Lords would once have prevented this, but they are gone, thanks to him. He also tells Rose not to make contact with her infant self—this will cause a further paradox, and will let the Reapers in.

THESE creatures.

Anachronisms begin to happen. Music and phone calls from other times begin to appear on present-day devices. Rose finds herself in contact with the child version of her ex-boyfriend, Mickey, and suspects she has imprinted herself on him, possibly leading to his later love for her. The Doctor sets in motion a plan to recover the TARDIS using its key, but it is eventually interrupted. As the truth comes out about Rose’s identity, Pete and Jackie argue, and Pete—not knowing the danger—presses the infant Rose into the adult Rose’s hands. The creatures materialize inside the church, and the Doctor—being the oldest thing there—sacrifices himself to let the others escape.

Rose, meet Rose.

Throughout this time, Pete has been seeing something strange out the windows: The car that should have struck him keeps reappearing as if on a loop. He realizes that the only way to fix time is to let his death occur. Jackie objects, showing her true love for him for once, but he insists; he tells her that his sacrifice will allow her to raise Rose properly. The three share a final embrace…and he throws himself in front of the car.

Because that’s how dads roll.

Time is instantly repaired, and the Doctor and the TARDIS are restored. Lesson learned, Rose departs again with him…and we close with Jackie telling the young Rose about her father, and the mysterious girl who stayed with him while he died, then vanished.

Mystery girl.

For me, this story competes with Dalek as the high point of series one. Besides being a good and entertaining—and, I admit, an emotional—story, it gives us some foundational concepts which we will see repeatedly throughout the upcoming seasons. It re-establishes the First Law of Time, which will be further explored in later episodes—the law that states that you cannot change your own timeline, due to the risk of paradox. It also establishes—though not in so many words—the concept of fixed points, events which must occur and cannot be altered, as later explored in The Waters of Mars. As well, it establishes that some things can be changed; the hit-and-run driver stops and takes responsibility for his actions after Rose’s intervention. As well, we get some setup for the four-part series two finale, from Rise of the Cybermen to Doomsday. There is also another Bad Wolf reference; the phrase is written across a poster for an upcoming concert.

Bad Wolf, and crossing your own timeline.

What I find most interesting about both these episodes is their similarity in basic structure. Both episodes hinge on a companion making a terrible mistake, and both times the Doctor has to intervene and set it right. However, in both episodes, the Doctor fails to save the day (in Father’s Day, he actually dies trying). In both cases, it is up to incidental characters to save the Doctor and Rose and the entire situation—Cathica in The Long Game, Pete in Father’s Day. In both episodes, exploitation of time travel is a critical issue; Adam attempts to exploit future knowledge for financial gain in the present, and the Doctor accuses Rose of exploiting him and the TARDIS for an opportunity to save her father. The parallel is interesting, and though Adam is ejected from the TARDIS, there’s really nothing to distinguish Rose’s actions from his, though the Doctor allows her to stay. (Adam will get another appearance, as a villain, in the comics.)

Overall, comparing the two episodes, I preferred the latter. However, The Long Game was decent, and also is necessary to establish the season finale, so I can’t complain. I like the ongoing Bad Wolf arc; I remember being very intrigued on my first viewing. Not so pleasant: The Doctor is at his angriest in these episodes, and takes it out on those closest to him (for example, we get another “stupid ape” exclamation, aimed at Rose). This is not his fanatical hatred of the Daleks; it’s simple bitterness, and it reduces him. Still, he will recover soon.

Angry all the time!

Next time: popular two-parter The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, and the return of an old enemy in Boom Town. Also, Captain Jack Harkness! See you there.

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

The Long Game

Father’s Day

It’s Not Over Yet: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series One, Part Two

We’re back, continuing our New Doctor Who rewatch! This week, we’re continuing our review of Series One, with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor and Billie Piper as companion Rose Tyler. As a reminder, each season in the new show tends to have considerably more stories than the classic seasons; therefore we’re splitting each season into parts for the sake of length. Today we’re looking at episodes four, five, and six. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen these episodes!

So long, Big Ben!

So far, we’ve traveled with Rose and the Doctor to the past and the future. Now, we accompany them on Rose’s most difficult journey yet: Home. In Aliens of London, she returns to her neighborhood, expecting that twelve hours have passed. Instead, she learns the hard way that it’s been twelve months. Jackie and Mickey have spent the intervening time searching for her, and posting flyers, and dealing with the police. The reunion is cut short, though, by an alien spaceship crashing into Big Ben, then landing in the Thames.

Touchdown!

The Doctor and the others get caught up in the action, only to find out that the ship isn’t what it seems, nor is the body recovered from it. Instead, it’s a decoy; and the real aliens, in the guise of government officials, are already in power. They’re the Slitheen family, from the planet Raxicoricofallapatorius; and though they can convincingly disguise themselves as humans, they’re given away by the ineffective gas exchangers on their suits, which compress them to a manageable size. The Doctor and Rose also meet Harriet Jones, an MP from Flydale, who has a significant future ahead of her. The episode ends with a cliffhanger, as the Slitheen attempt to put all of Britain’s alien experts to death…and the Doctor among them.

Welcome, Tosh!

We get our third Bad Wolf reference here, as a child paints it on the TARDIS. We also meet a doctor by the last name of Sato; this character will be prominent in Torchwood as Toshiko Sato. In that show she’s a technology expert, not a medical doctor; the discrepancy is explained offscreen, in that she was covering for Torchwood’s newly-acquired medical doctor, Owen Harper, who was hung over. It seems like an odd choice for a coroner, but who am I to judge? For the record, I love Owen and Tosh in Torchwood, and I wish they hadn’t been killed off. The scene with the fake alien escaping the morgue is very reminiscent—possibly deliberately—of the scene of the Eighth Doctor doing so in the television movie. The Doctor makes a throwaway line about Mickey’s real name being Rickey…but is it a throwaway? Next season will reveal something interesting about that, when the TARDIS crosses universes in Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel. UNIT gets a mention here, but the Doctor states that, although he once worked with him, they wouldn’t recognize him now. To my knowledge, the Ninth Doctor never works with UNIT. The TARDIS key, first seen here up close, has reverted to the Yale key of the early classic series; in the movie, it was the spade-type key favored by the Third Doctor. This is not new; however, this series will eventually establish that it’s not just a key, but a bit of linked technology; it glows when the TARDIS approaches, and has other properties as well. The Doctor claims to be 900 years old, but various materials indicate that he’s probably lying; he should be older than that. Note that various incarnations have claimed that age, and they can’t all be true.

That’s not a good look for you, Harriet. Try to show some dignity.

From this point forward, all episodes set in the contemporary world are actually set one year in the future from their broadcast dates, give or take. This will continue until The End of Time, when the writers took advantage of the year without a full series to synchronize the timelines again. The net effect for Rose, of course, is that she just simply loses this entire year. Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, for what it’s worth, are also synchronized with Doctor Who. This episode, incidentally, is the 700th episode of Doctor Who; it’s also the first two-parter of the new show.

Ah, yes, the Slitheen. Can’t forget them.

World War Three picks up right where Aliens of London leaves off. The Doctor escapes the trap—although the other experts don’t, sadly—and reconnects with Rose and Harriet. They find themselves trapped by choice in the Cabinet room of 10 Downing Street, which is protected by steel walls that keep out the Slitheen—but also keep them in. Cornered, he communicates with Mickey and Jackie by telephone, and saves them from a Slitheen; he deduces their homeworld, and realizes they are calcium-based, allowing Mickey to kill it with a mix of substances in Mickey’s apartment. He then gets Mickey to log onto UNIT’s network using the Doctor’s own credentials, and commandeers a missile. After some debate with Jackie—and an order from Harriet—the Doctor, via Mickey, does the only thing left to do: He fires the missile at 10 Downing Street, where the Slitheen are gathered…and also where he and the others are trapped. Thanks to the quick thinking of Rose, the trio survive…and the Slitheen are destroyed. At the Doctor’s suggestion, Harriet takes charge of the situation, which will soon lead to her election as Prime Minister, with three terms ahead of her; the Doctor states she will initiate Britain’s golden age. Privately he offers Mickey a place in the TARDIS; Mickey refuses, stating that life is not for him, but he asks the Doctor to not tell Rose it was his choice. The Doctor honors the request, and tells Rose that he won’t let Mickey join them. Despite Jackie’s objections, Rose leaves again in the TARDIS.

Jackie and Rickey, I mean, Mickey.

Jackie gets a lot of flak, but her demands about Rose—to know she’s safe—are really not unreasonable. Although she’s flaky on the surface, beneath it she truly cares about Rose, and is willing to fight for her, and I give her credit for that. Mickey, as well, in his own way does the same; he only refuses to travel because he knows when he’s outmatched. In his own depth, he’s far more loyal and competent than Rose ever appreciates. Harriet Jones is presented here as something of a fixed point, though that term isn’t used; but later episodes will indicate that it is far from fixed, as the Tenth Doctor destroys her career almost on a whim. The calcium-based life form that the Slitheen prove to be, stretches real-world credibility quite a bit; but they’re decent enemies anyway, getting several reappearances here and on The Sarah Jane Adventures. In fact, one Slitheen—Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, to be exact—will be seen again this series in Boom Town.

Don’t take it off!

This episode and its prequel got a lot of criticism for the low humor, especially in regard to the Slitheen’s artificial flatulence. It’s been argued that this is because the series was just beginning to find its voice and tone, and that’s a fair assessment. I would also say that I think the show is well served by having a wide range with regard to tone; a show with this loose a grip on continuity and its own rules would be tanked if it became too serious.

The Mysterious “Metaltron”, better known as a Dalek.

We’ll finish today with Dalek. Longtime fans had to be wondering if the Doctor’s perennial arch-enemies would reappear; and they did, in terrifying style. The Doctor and Rose find themselves in the year 2012, under the Utah desert, in the personal museum of Henry Van Statten. It’s not just any museum; it’s a space museum, one might say—and in fact, it constitutes a bit of a reference to the classic serial titled The Space Museum (one of my personal favorites). The Doctor and Rose are quickly captured; the arrogant Van Statten goes easy on them, however, when he discovers that the Doctor is more than he seems. He takes them to see the prize of his collection: a living Dalek. The Doctor’s reaction, however, reveals more than he would have liked; and Van Statten restrains him for study. Meanwhile, Rose, having made friends with a researcher named Adam Mitchell, goes to the Dalek—which she does not recognize—and talks to it. When she touches it, it incorporates her DNA—affected by time travel—and revitalizes itself, and escapes.

Henry Van Statten, the Martin Shkreli of his universe. Isn’t that face just punchable?

Van Statten is forced to accept the Doctor’s help as the Dalek goes on a rampage. It’s Rose, however, who ultimately is responsible for the Dalek’s defeat, or rather, its self-defeat. Having absorbed some of her DNA, it is developing a bit of human perspective, and is appalled by this change in itself. Still, it can’t destroy itself without orders; and it chooses to accept them from the Doctor, and annihilates itself. Van Statten, for his stupidity, gets his comeuppance; his own staff leave him in a public place with his memory wiped. They then choose to shut down the facility and fill it with concrete. The Doctor and Rose are free to go on their way, but they don’t go alone; at Rose’s urging, the Doctor reluctantly takes Adam Mitchell with them.

An inside view.

This episode is one of the very few places that establish Rose’s age. When the Doctor says they are in “Utah, 2012”, Rose comments that she should be 26. Given that it’s seven years after her point of origin in 2005, she would be 19; and the Doctor later directly states that that is her age. This episode also gives us a far more advanced Dalek than any we saw in the classic series; in addition to its hovering capability (which is not new, but may not be well known), it possesses enormous memory banks and capacitors, enough to absorb all the electricity on the west coast, and the entire content of the internet. It possesses shields that make it resistant to all types of projectile fire; self-repair systems that can generate new material out of pure energy; and a complex self-destruct system. It’s also our first view in this series of a Kaled mutant (and probably our clearest in the show overall to this point), and our first view of a Dalek shell that isn’t “flip-top”. The “EL-E-VATE!” moment in the episode had to come as a shock to many viewers, and it’s still suspenseful today. (Related: In The Tom Baker Years VHS clip show from the nineties, Tom Baker—while watching clips of his old episodes—commented that one had to work hard at pretending to be afraid of the Daleks, when you knew that all you had to do to defeat them was go upstairs. Hilarious commentary, but alas, Tom, things have changed!)

You would make a good Dalek.

The Dalek’s erratic firing in connection with its fear sets the stage for the Series Nine revelation that emotion triggers the Daleks’ weapon systems (The Witch’s Familiar). It’s never really spelled out—anywhere that I can recall, not just here—what kind of energy is in a Dalek beam, but there is clearly an electrical component, as it electrocutes the security force under the sprinklers. For all the complaints by fans in later seasons that the Daleks aren’t scary anymore, I have to say, THIS Dalek is terrifying. Even the Doctor is terrified, and justifiably so, having recently (as far as we can be sure) come off the Time War, where “everyone lost”. His PTSD gets the better of him briefly, but he recovers well enough for now. He’s shaken by the Dalek’s comment that “you would make a good Dalek”; it’s a sentiment we’ll hear repeatedly. The Doctor is many things, but a soft man, he is not.

“EL-E-VATE!”

I’m going to voice an opinion that doesn’t seem to be popular among current fans: I prefer the lighter, humorous tone of Series One, especially when compared to the grim, tense, deadly-serious tone of the Capaldi era. Part of the issue, in my opinion, is that eleven years of this series have pushed the stakes higher and higher, with every series caught in the trap of having to outdo the previous series. When the stakes are universe-spanning in every episode, it’s hard to be lighthearted. Certainly there is a place for that kind of storytelling (in the series-long sense), and I’m not opposed to it on principle, nor will I mock anyone for preferring it; but I like this format better. As I mentioned before, Aliens of London and World War Three get a lot of flak for their low humor; but I’m okay with that. I wouldn’t want every episode to be quite on that level, but I enjoyed watching them; they were fun. Then, when you take episodes like that and follow up with a story like Dalek, you get an idea of the range of which this show is capable. Dalek is not a funny episode at all; it has its tense moments, and it’s full of action and death. But the very fact of having that variety in one series is what makes the darkness here acceptable; we can have that darkness, and then take a breath, and we’re not drowning in it all the time. I think that’s fantastic. (For the record, I consider Dalek to be, hands-down, my favorite episode of Series One. So I suppose it’s not the tone, it’s the execution.)

Diana Goddard. A truly dangerous woman.

Some things I liked: The new Daleks are amazing. It had to feel almost a waste to audiences at the time to see the last Dalek destroyed; of course we know now that they’ll be back, but audiences then didn’t know that. Harriet Jones is an interesting character, but maybe a bit one-dimensional; I couldn’t help wondering if that’s why later writers removed her from office and from the series—all her stories had been told. The Slitheen aren’t bad villains, though I have yet to see what The Sarah Jane Adventures does with them; I feel like they would have been better accepted by fans if not for the fart jokes. I would love to have seen Diana Goddard—Henry Van Statten’s assistant and eventual judge—again, possibly in a UNIT story; she’s a frightening, cold-hearted, clever individual. Not bad episodes, overall.

Next time: Because of an upcoming two-parter that I would otherwise have to split up, we’ll trim it to two episodes: The Long Game and Father’s Day. See you there!

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

Aliens of London

World War Three

Dalek

The War Is Over: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series One, Part One.

Welcome back to my Doctor Who rewatch! Recently we completed the classic television series, and it was great. Twenty-six years of television yields a show with a wealth of lore and background. But, what happens when that show is cancelled, only to be revived sixteen years later? Let’s find out!

To that end, I’ve decided to continue on into the revived, 2005-era series of Doctor Who. This series, while connecting nicely to its predecessor, is really a different animal, and those differences are going to count in this review. For one, I’ll be using the preferred modern term “Series” instead of “Season” as I did in the classic series—“Series One”, “Series Two”, etc. Obviously that gets a bit confusing with regard to the television series as a whole; for that I’ll probably switch over and just say “show”. It’s necessary, though, as the numbering system resets; we wouldn’t want to confuse Series One of the revived series with Season One of the classic series. For another change, the format is different now; where the classic show utilized a serialized format, with multiple short episodes per story, the revived show tends to limit stories to one forty-five-minute episode, with occasional two- or three-parters. With that said, we get more stories per series than we did with the latter two-thirds of the classic show. In light of that, I won’t be able to do an entire series per post; they would be far too long, and I’m already verbose enough. I expect to do about three episodes per post; at about thirteen episodes per series, that’s a comfortable rate that should let me post once a week. As I’m also reviewing audio dramas, I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew.

This week, we’re looking at Series One, from 2005, and covering the first three episodes: Rose, The End of the World, and The Unquiet Dead. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen these episodes! (I should have been saying that all along.)

After a long hiatus (nine or sixteen years, depending on your point of view), Doctor Who returns with the simply-titled Rose. It’s not a deep story, but it moves fast! Nineteen-year-old Rose Tyler works in a shop, hangs out with her boyfriend Mickey Smith, and argues with her mother, Jackie…until the shop dummies start menacing her in the basement at her job. Everything changes, though, when a strange and compelling man grabs her hand and says, “Run!” It’s non-stop from there, as her encounter with the Doctor and the menacing Autons takes her further from life as she’s known it. In the end, she leads the Doctor to a confrontation with the Nestene Consciousness that controls the Autons, and saves his life…and flies away with him.

“RUN!”

We get some new characters here, including Rose, her mother Jackie, and her skeptical and protective boyfriend Mickey…but none more fascinating than the Doctor. This Doctor is a brand new man, possibly literally; there’s a scene where he looks at his reflection as though he’s seeing it for the first time, though that’s been debated hotly ever since. The BBC and showrunner Russell Davies made the decision not to bring back Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor—first seen in the 1996 movie, and popularized since by the audios, novels, and comics—instead choosing a clean start with Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor. It really is a clean break, as well, as we immediately get the startling revelation that he is all alone—his people, the Time Lords (not named here) are gone. Longtime fans would have been stunned at that revelation. Eccleston’s Doctor is clean-cut and spare compared to McGann’s; no more Victorian costumes, no more long hair, instead he prefers simple clothing, a black leather jacket, and a buzzed head. He’s spare in personality, as well; he’s blunt and forthright (“Is it always like this?” “Yeah.”), and honestly, offensive sometimes. He can be rude, but not in the flamboyant manner of the Sixth Doctor; he’s more of an immovable object, hard and unforgiving.

“Is it always like this?” “Yeah.”

Of course, there’s a good reason for it, though we don’t know it yet: He’s just survived a war. The massive and far-flung Last Great Time War—not named here, but we’ll get there soon—has been time-locked and therefore wiped from the memory of much of the universe; but the Doctor remembers. He can never forget. In a very real sense, he has post-traumatic stress disorder; he doesn’t scream or lash out, but he keeps himself buttoned up tight, because he knows the man he could be if he let it out. Opinions of Eccleston may vary, but there’s absolutely no question that he was the Doctor for the hour, here, and he is—to borrow his favorite word—fantastic.

It…may have taken Rose a while to realize he was fantastic.

The Autons and the Nestene Consciousness are the villains here, for the first time since The Auton Invasion. They’re interesting to me; this is only their third appearance onscreen, but every appearance has been a season/series premiere, and twice it’s been the premiere for a new Doctor. They’re similar to their previous appearances; you can’t do much with shop dummies, I suppose. However, we do see them in other forms here; anything plastic they can control, so we see them control a garbage bin, and even produce a speaking duplicate of Mickey. They’re defeated with anti-plastic, a corrosive chemical, but it won’t be the last we see of them. There’s an interesting reference to their worlds having been destroyed; it’s not spelled out, but understood later that they were destroyed in the Time War.

Autons! Autons everywhere! But seriously, people died here.

Other noteworthy things: The new sonic screwdriver appears, and it’s beautiful. If this is, as the theory goes, the Ninth Doctor’s first adventure, then it really is a brand-new screwdriver; it differs from the one the War Doctor will eventually be seen to carry at the time of his regeneration. The Shadow Proclamation is first mentioned, and the terminology makes it sound more like a treaty or declaration than an organization; I suppose this could be metonymy, the idiomatic practice where a thing becomes identified by one of its features. The Doctor first uses his “I AM TALKING!” line which will be more common under Matt Smith. Rose makes the first in a long line of “bigger on the inside” comments about the TARDIS (she actually says “The inside’s bigger than the outside”). The Doctor calls humans “stupid apes”—something he will do often in moments of anger—and then makes his famous “Lots of planets have a north!” line. The TARDIS interior can be seen through the open doors, something the classic series could not do convincingly, and mostly never tried.

“It’s a scientific instrument, not a water pistol!”

I wanted to say a bit more about the question of whether this is the first adventure of the Ninth Doctor. I like to think it is; the scene with his reflection seems very clear to me, though some staff for the show have said otherwise. I feel that the existence of photos of the Ninth Doctor at past events, does not mean they happened earlier in his lifetime; they could easily be offscreen adventures in the future. To that end, it’s worth mentioning that he briefly dematerializes the TARDIS without Rose before taking her with him; it’s been suggested that some offscreen adventures take place without her during that gap. Certainly there’s precedent for it; the Fourth Doctor most likely visited Leela’s homeworld for the first time while Harry Sullivan was knocked out in Robot (we see him returning in the TARDIS). Nevertheless, if anyone disagrees, that’s fine as well.

Not bad, not bad at all.

Rose’s first real adventure in the TARDIS takes her to The End of the World, literally. After brief stops in the years 2105 and 12,005 (which the Doctor states to be the New Roman Empire; note that this is after the time frame of the Earth Empire seen often in the classic show), they land in the year 5.5/apple/26, five billion years in Rose’s future. It’s the day the Earth is to be destroyed by the expanding Sun, which technically should already have happened. (The Sun has been held back by gravity-controlling satellites.) It’s not the furthest in time we will ever go—multiple adventures will take the Doctor to the end of time itself—but it’s still impressive, and not often beaten. We land on Platform One, a hospitality and viewing station which will be used to view the death of the planet.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel…well, honestly, like I might be sick, but whatever.

At this point in history, pure humans are considered to be mostly extinct; or rather, they’ve interbred and/or genetically engineered themselves into related but dissimilar races—it’s played for comedic effect when the Doctor gets hit on by a human tree (no, really). The Lady Cassandra O’Brien dot Delta Seventeen (I’ll dispense with the symbols for convenience’s sake) is considered to be the last pure human, and even she has surgically altered herself to the point of being unrecognizable—she’s essentially a tank of organs attached to a face of stretched skin (or as Rose puts it, a “bitchy trampoline”; they will have a short rivalry hereafter, which is arguably Rose’s fault, as she starts the fight). Of course, later episodes—especially Utopia–will establish that pure humans exist nearly all the way to the end of time. I see no contradiction; the universe is a big place, and it’s not impossible that other pure humans exist elsewhere, but are unknown to the bulk of the populace.

Human trees. Yes, really.

Cassandra proves to be the villain here, as she attempts to extort the guests for money to fund her continued body modification. She is thwarted by the Doctor at the last second, and appears to die; but she’ll be back.

Cassandra and Rose.

We’re introduced to the Face of Boe, who will figure significantly into the Tenth Doctor’s life (and might be Jack Harkness!). The architecture of Platform One is very reminiscent of the Imperator’s ship in Nightmare in Silver, which is still several years in our future. There’s no clear indication of when that story takes place, but I’ve always felt—based on the advanced state of the Cybermen and other technology—that it must be far in the future. It’s stated to be a thousand years after the Cyber-Wars, but I don’t believe they are the same Cyber-wars as have previously been noted to be in the 26th century; in that century, the Earth’s populated range of worlds was small, but these wars are said to involve many galaxies. Therefore I would submit that Nightmare in Silver is contemporary with The End of the World, or close to it.

The Face of Boe!

The Doctor shows an intimate grasp of time, possibly even slowing it by force of will so that he can step through the final fan even with his eyes closed; perfect timing or not, that fan was moving too fast to allow passage otherwise. (Never mind that it visibly doesn’t reach the floor, and he could have crawled under.) The Time War is first mentioned here, but not by name; it’s evident that some people remember it, but many do not. We first see psychic paper here. The Doctor cries for the first time in either television series. Also, the phrase “Bad Wolf” makes its first appearance, in an offhand remark by a background character; we’ll see it often this series. I like this episode a lot; it’s one of the earliest NuWho episodes I watched (although in reruns), and I’m fond of it.

Pictures of the Doctor stepping through the fan were surprisingly hard to find. This is the closest I could get.

The Unquiet Dead takes us on Rose’s first trip into the past. It’s Cardiff at Christmas, 1869; the Doctor was aiming for 1860 Naples, Italy, but missed—hardly an uncommon occurrence. Though set at Christmas, it’s not a Christmas special; the wiki states—and I am inclined to agree—that it’s the closest thing Eccleston has to a Christmas special, as he left before the 2005 Christmas season. We get our first mention of the time-space rift at Cardiff, which will become a major plot point for the Torchwood spinoff. By coincidence, Eve Myles, who plays the housemaid Gwyneth here, will later play co-lead Gwen Cooper in Torchwood; in-universe, Gwen, who grew up near the rift, was sort of imprinted with Gwyneth’s features as a side effect, though they are not actually related.

Charles Dickens appears as a character here; his experiences here are a reference to his short novel, A Christmas Carol, but not the inspiration for the book, as he has already written it. His experience here is eerily parallel to that of Vincent Van Gogh in Vincent and the Doctor, even to the point that both characters will die within a year of their experience with the Doctor. I’ve also compared this episode previously with several others, including Hide and Ghost Light.

The man himself.

The plot begins with the dead reviving, causing problems in town, and especially at a local funeral parlor. The dead are being possessed by the disembodied Gelth, aliens from a doomed world who have come through the rift; their world was destroyed in the Time War, here named for the first time. However, most of their survivors are trapped on the other side of the rift; they need it opened to come through, and the serving girl Gwyneth—who has a form of telepathy—can open it. As soon as she does so, however, the Gelth reveal their true colors—literally—and their greater numbers, and attempt to wipe out humanity so as to claim the Earth. Gwyneth sacrifices herself to close the rift and destroy them.

Not as nice as they seem, those Gelth.

Gwyneth gives us our second “Bad Wolf” reference, in regard to Rose’s thoughts. The Doctor makes a groaner of a pun, stating that “I love a happy medium!” in reference to Gwyneth. Dickens makes a funny line when he shouts “What the Shakespeare?!” in an obvious play on the phrase “What the dickens?”—which, incidentally, predates him and has nothing to do with his name. This foray into the past arguably puts the idea into Rose’s head to visit her deceased father (Father’s Day). And finally, Dickens concludes with “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Even for you, Doctor.” Which just about sums up everything you need to know about Doctor Who and why we all watch it.

Next time: Aliens of London, World War Three, and Dalek! See you there.

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

Rose

The End of the World

The Unquiet Dead