Review: “Moon Man”, Peter Capaldi Charity Zine

It’s review time again! Today we’re covering…something a little different!

After my recent review of the Defending Earth charity anthology, I received an email from Ginger Hoesly, the host of a charity ‘zine (do we still use the apostrophe? Or is it just “zine” these days?) titled Moon Man, focusing on everyone’s favorite (twelfth) Time Lord, the esteemed Peter Capaldi. Ginger asked me if I would be willing to review the project, which is on sale now (see below for a link!). This corner of the fandom is really something with which I have no experience, and so—partly for the cause, and partly for my own curiosity—I gladly agreed. And, here we are!

Moon Man Cover Art by Rhiannon McGuiness

This zine (we’ll go with that spelling—take that, punctuation!) is, as I said, focused on Peter Capaldi rather than the Twelfth Doctor. However, the prose portion of the zine is a unique Twelfth Doctor story, and so it fits with the theme of this site. The story is accompanied by forty-one illustrations of various roles from Peter’s career, submitted by many artists in a variety of styles—I’ll be featuring a few as we go. All proceeds from the sale of Moon Man will go to the Glasgow School of Art, Peter Capaldi’s alma mater; sales are open until 29 April, and can be accessed at the link below.

As always when I cover charity projects, there will be spoilers ahead! My reason for including more spoilers in this type of review is that charity projects, unlike licensed work, don’t get the kind of long-term availability, or documentation, that licensed works get. To a very real degree, once it’s over, it’s over. I believe, though, that many charity stories are rich contributions to the greater Whoniverse, and deserve to be recorded in some way—and so I document them here as I can. But, don’t be fooled—no summary is a substitute for actually purchasing and reading the material. Check it out!

Danny Oldsen from Local Hero, art by Arianna Climaci

When I sit down to summarize the plot of a story, it’s a straightforward—if sometimes tedious—affair. You start at the beginning, point A, and work through points B and C, all the way to point Z, the end. I can’t do that today, though; because the story contained in Moon Man is something different: if I may borrow the term, it’s a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story. (I’m sure that term is copyrighted, so let me say that it’s me using it to make a comparison; the term isn’t used anywhere in the zine.) Over the course of about a dozen possible selections, the story builds through various scenes at the discretion of the reader. In the first scene, a quick trip to the shops turns into a disaster in the making for Clara Oswald and the Twelfth Doctor, as the TARDIS tries to pull itself apart. The ship is attempting to land in at least a dozen places and times, all at once! The Doctor is able to narrow it to two, but Clara is forced to make a snap decision as to which they will visit. In each of the scenes that follow, the TARDIS shuts down and refuses to budge—in one case, locking them out—until they do…something. What they must do, remains to be seen.

Randall Brown from The Hour, art by Emma J. Goddard

In one scene, the TARDIS takes them to the Happer Institute, a combined sky-and-sea observatory—but it lands them in the past, shortly before the construction of the observatory, where Clara briefly encounters an oddly familiar young man. In another, while the Doctor constructs a micro-artron detector to help them track their progress, Clara encounters a late-evening office worker named Randall Brown, who has no time for her at all. A third takes them to 1992 Scotland, where the TARDIS promptly locks them out—until they help a stranded motorist named Gavin Bellini. Clara starts to see a pattern in their stops, and snaps a picture of Gavin with the strangely-oblivious Doctor…

Gavin Bellini from Soft Top Hard Shoulder, art by Valentina Mozzo

Cardiff, 2013: The zombie apocalypse is on, despite the Doctor’s dour insistence that he’s never done this before (a lie, I might add—see my recent review for White Darkness). The TARDIS lands at a World Health Organization facility, where a few survivors wait. The Doctor ultimately leaves Clara secured in the TARDIS while he impersonates a more traditional doctor—a WHO Doctor, one might say (though Clara is having none of that!). Another place, but not far off in time: Windsor Gardens, 2017, the Doctor impersonates a Mr. Curry to get close to a strange, anthropomorphic bear…which is decidedly not of alien origin. A surge of guilt, courtesy of Clara, makes him rethink his plan, and the duo withdraw. Back to Derbyshire, 1988, where they are accosted by a young man in traditional Scottish garb, desperately seeking a set of bagpipes, much to the Doctor’s disgust—and Clara’s astonishment that the young man’s face is not familiar to the Doctor.

WHO Doctor from World War Z, art by Sochika

The TARDIS seems to be growing tired—if that is possible—as it takes them to Paris, the 1600s. And yet it’s not Paris outside when the door opens; rather, it’s Prague, 2013—but with a rather large number of people in 1600s period dress. Perhaps the TARDIS is confused? As it turns out, it’s a film shoot, for a new version of The Three Musketeers. Clara is distracted by the filming as the Doctor encounters the actor who plays Cardinal Richelieu…and criticizes his appearance. Doctor to the end! But at any rate, the TARDIS pulls itself together for another trip. This time, it travels to Rome, 1st Century A.D., where it lands in a rather colorful villa. The Doctor stays inside to work on the TARDIS while Clara has a look around; but she is stunned to see a man with not only an approximation of the Doctor’s face and voice, but exactly the same face and voice! As soon as she is free, she races back to the TARDIS, but before she can take the Doctor to look, the TARDIS lurches into motion again.

John Frobisher from Torchwood: Children of Earth, art by Sirlsplayland

2010 London finds the Doctor sitting in the office of a man who looks just like him…a spin doctor named Malcolm Tucker. He plays the role reasonably well, just oddly enough to confuse Malcolm’s coworkers as he quizzes them on events of the last two weeks. Not coincidentally, that’s how long the TARDIS has been present; but it is not the only alien presence in the area—and why is everyone getting strange headaches? Why are there new security updates on every computer first thing each morning? Still, he only has a little time to work here, as Clara keeps the real (and rather abrasive) Malcolm Tucker busy. He’s nearly successful; but he is found out by one of the coworkers, Sam, who recognizes him for his profound lackof swearing—did I mention that Malcolm could be abrasive? He confides in her that the government—perhaps all the way up to Downing Street, where there is currently an unusually high concentration of artron energy—has a virus, and not only the computers, but the individuals, are being affected. As he prepares to wage war on the virus, Sam throws in her lot with him.

Mr. Curry from Paddington, art by Sophie Iles

Fans of Capaldi’s long and storied career will have no doubt caught on long ago to what is happening in this story. I was not so lucky; I grew up in the US, and never heard of Peter Capaldi until he was selected to be the Twelfth Doctor. I still am unfamiliar with most of his work (though I’ve picked up a bit of The Thick of It, which is remarkable and fun and too vulgar to watch with the kids, meaning I don’t get to watch it often). As a consequence it took me about three or four scenes to realize what was happening. That’s not a complaint about the presentation; it’s more a lament about my own lack of foreknowledge.

Angus Flint from The Lair of the White Worm, art by Tousle

I’ve presented the scenes in a certain order above; but that’s only a concession to the summary format, and it is almost certainly the wrong order. Each “path” through the story is about four scenes long, and some endings can be reached in different ways. Because this story is a tribute to various roles, none of the scenes dig deep in terms of plot; they pass quickly. Likewise, none of the endings seem like traditional endings; rather, every scene and ending feels like the jumping-off point for a new adventure. Indeed, I’d be thrilled to see fanfiction writers (or professional writers, for that matter, in other charity projects) pick up these threads and run with them; some of them, especially the scene with Malcolm Tucker and the “zombie apocalypse” scene, seem especially promising, and I’d love to see where they go!

Cardinal Richelieu from The Musketeers, art by Melissa Dow

But, none of that is necessary here, because this is a tribute rather than a single story—and a great tribute it is, as well. The story serves as a tribute not only to the various roles, but also and especially to the Twelfth Doctor. The characterization and dialogue are spot on; Clara, especially, is as witty as ever, the Doctor as socially awkward and overbearing as ever. I’ve been uncharitable to Clara in the past; but this is early-stage Clara (the story, based on descriptions, seems to fit best in early Series 8), when she’s still very likeable, before tragedy strikes in the form of the doomed Danny Pink.

Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It, art by Raine Szramski

What stands out most of all, though, is the artwork. The range of styles is impressive; the sheer number of artist contributors caught me off guard. I’ve included a few—those connected to the story, and those most relevant to Doctor Who, but the zine is worth picking up simply for the art. (I don’t have room to credit every artist here individually, but I have tried to do so with the selections I’ve featured here.)

Lobus Caecilius from Doctor Who: The Fires of Pompeii, art by Jose Rod Mota

Overall: I didn’t know what to expect, this being my first experience with this type of work. I was pleasantly surprised. Moon Man is an entertaining story, accompanied by a phenomenal set of illustrations, and it’s worth adding to anyone’s collection. Check it out!

Moon Man, a charity zine tribute to Peter Capaldi, may be purchased here. All proceeds go to support the Glasgow School of Art. Thanks to Ginger Hoesly and her talented group of artists for putting this project together!

Entities and Alternate Timelines: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series Four, Part Four

We’re back, with our new series rewatch! Today we’re continuing Series Four, with this series’ companion-lite and Doctor-lite episodes, Midnight and Turn Left. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has not viewed these episodes!

Midnight:  The Doctor and Donna are vacationing on the crystalline planet of Midnight. The planet is flooded with x-tonic radiation, which will kill any living thing; therefore everything must be sealed in airtight facilities.  Donna is relaxing by an indoor pool, while the Doctor leaves on a bus tour to see the Sapphire Waterfall.  What could possibly go wrong?

The bus’s other passengers include a Professor Hobbes, going along to study the waterfall; Hobbes’ assistant, Dee Dee; the Cane Family, composed of Val, Biff, and their son Jethro; a businesswoman named Sky Silvestry, and a hostess (whose name is not given).  The bus is diverted to an alternate route due to a diamond fall on the road; the route will take about four hours.  The Doctor disables the bus’s rather irritating video entertainment system, forcing the passengers to talk to each other.  He enjoys the conversation himself, though sometimes confusing his travel companions with talk of other universes.  Dee Dee at one point talks about the lost moon of Poosh, which she has researched, leading to her selection by Hobbes as his assistant (although he essentially uses her as an errand girl).  Hobbes gives an impromptu presentation (complete with visuals!) about the planet Midnight, which has no known native life due to the radiation.  The strange circumstances mean that no one has really ever set foot on the planet; even the resort is prefabricated, having been landed intact on the planet.

The bus stops early, for reasons unknown.  The Doctor uses his psychic paper to pose as an agent of the resort’s insurance company, and gets into the cockpit.  The driver and mechanic insist there is nothing wrong with the bus, and they cannot account for the stop.  They open the window’s outer shutter briefly to check the landscape; it is beautiful but barren.  However, the mechanic believes he sees something approaching, before the shutter closes.  They have summoned a rescue vehicle, however, and now the passengers must wait.  The Doctor calms the other passengers, and assures them they will be safe; the bus uses an air recycling system, so they will not run out while they wait.

Something knocks on the hull. The Doctor calms everyone again, and Biff knocks on the door to show that the structure is sturdy; the knocking from outside repeats his pattern.  Hobbes insists nothing can be out there, but no one believes him, and they begin to panic as the knocking continues.  It moves around the hull, finally reaching a now-hysterical Sky.  It ends with a dent in the door beside her, and the lights go out; the bus rocks violently.  A screen comes on behind the Doctor briefly shows an image of Rose Tyler trying—and failing—to get the Doctor’s attention.  The hostess gives out flashlights, and Biff notices that the seats near Sky have been ripped up; Sky herself seems traumatized.  The hostess tries to check on the driver and mechanic, but when she opens the door, she finds the cabin has been ripped off, and radiation is outside.  She manages to close the door before anyone can be hurt.

The Doctor checks on Sky, who begins behaving strangely.  She repeats what anyone says to her.  The Doctor tests her on harder phrases, and finds she can do even lengthy statements perfectly, even if speaking over the other person.  The Doctor speculates that she has been taken over by the entity that was outside on the hull.  By now, as the backup generator comes on and the lights return, Sky is speaking simultaneously with everyone who speaks.  The other passengers want to throw her out, but the Doctor stops them; he thinks the entity is learning.  The passengers turn on him a bit when he won’t reveal his name or world of origin; they suggest throwing him out too if her interferes.  Suddenly, Sky stops repeating everyone else, and only focuses on the Doctor.  He suddenly realizes that now she is saying his words before he says them.

He is now the one doing the repeating, though he seems to be fighting it.  The passengers argue about whether the entity has possessed him, or whether—as he had previously suggested—it is simply stealing his voice.  They decide to throw the Doctor out, as Sky—with the Doctor repeating—encourages them; and Biff and Hobbes drag him to the door.  Sky seems to have recovered somewhat now, and tells them that the entity gets inside human heads.  The hostess catches her out, though; she is using phrases (Allons-y and Molto Bene) peculiar to the Doctor, indicating the entity is still in her, and she has in fact stolen the Doctor’s voice.  Sky realizes that she knows.  The hostess grabs Sky and sacrifices herself to drag the woman out the door and into the radiation, killing them both.

As the Doctor slowly recovers, the passengers wait in awkward tension for rescue.  As the rescue bus arrives, he realizes that no one knew the hostess’s name.  He meets Donna at the resort, though sadly.    Later they talk about the creature, what it was and where it come from, whether it lived or whether there are more.  He decides to inform the resort owners, and to suggest that they leave Midnight permanently, giving it back its peace.  Donna asks the Doctor what it was like without a voice, and he replies with “Molto bene”; she repeats the words, startling him, and he asks her never to do that.

Midnight takes home the trophy for “Creepiest Doctor Who Episode”. The classic series never really tried for this type of psychological horror (although they did try to be scary in other ways on multiple occasions), and though the revived series sometimes tries, it has yet to top this masterpiece. It’s consistently one of the highest recommended episodes of the revived series, and it’s not hard to see why. If I had to compare it a movie, the one that leaps to mind is M. Night Shyamalan’s Devil, but without the twist ending; Shyamalan’s movies catch a lot of flak, and that one is no exception, but I’m talking about its premise more than the execution. Like this episode, it involves several people trapped in a small space with inconsistent lighting…and one is not at all what he or she seems. I do think this episode does it better, however.

It’s not often we get to see the Doctor actually overwhelmed by a situation. He usually has a trick up his sleeve, or knowledge that someone else is in a position to use, or…something, anything. Let’s be completely honest, though: Here, the Doctor loses. His usual methods are wrong; there’s no saving or negotiating with the disembodied creature. He’s caught completely off guard when it takes hold of him, and he is completely stripped of anything that might be used to get him out of the situation. There’s no TARDIS, no companion, nowhere to run; he has no knowledge of the thing he’s fighting. The only reason—the ONLY reason—that he survives at all is that someone else sacrifices herself. At the end, he is haunted by all of this, and carries that trauma out of the episode.

The Midnight entity—for lack of a better term—fascinates me. We often get disembodied villains and possessions in Doctor Who, but we usually get some resolution. We know, for example, the origins of the Warp Core in Dust Breeding, and we know what came of it. As for the Midnight Entity, we just…don’t know. Where did it come from? Is it native to the planet? Was it always disembodied? What did it want? It seems to want people to die in the radiation, but why? What’s in it for the entity? Does it have a plan? Did it survive when its host died? We just have no idea. Perhaps it’s better that way; not every mystery has to be solved—that’s good storytelling. But I can’t help wondering anyway.

This is the first “companion-lite” episode, unless one counts Love and Monsters, in which both Rose Tyler and the Doctor only appeared briefly. We’ve had a few Doctor-lite episodes thus far, and will have one again with the next episode. I can’t complain; Donna’s reactions to things have been carefully cultivated all seasons, and her peak, if you will, is about to happen in the next episode; this situation would have required too much from her, and would have made the next episode feel anti-climax by comparison. This episode feels very brief; it moves quickly, and there’s enough tension to make you forget the time, so it feels like it passes quickly. That’s okay, though; the story is told perfectly in the allotted time. It is and remains one of my favorite episodes, and competes with Turn Left and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead for best story of Series Four, in my opinion.

Some continuity references: The Doctor has encountered endangered shuttle buses on alien worlds before (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) and will again (Planet of the Dead). Rose appears on a screen, but the Doctor misses it; she appeared as such before (The Poison Sky; this is also part of the series arc). The mention of the lost moon of Poosh is a part of the series arc, soon to be resolved. The Doctor knocks four times on the bus wall, a bit of early foreshadowing of his regeneration (Planet of the Dead for the first mention of the related prophecy, and The End of Time for the regeneration); this also echoes the Master’s drumbeats, as he demonstrated in The Sound of Drums by knocking on the tabletop. He mentions a friend in a different universe (Rose in Doomsday; the wiki also suggests this could refer to Romana in E-Space in Warrior’s Gate). He mentions previous companions Rose, Martha, Donna (still current, of course), as well as the TARDIS and the Medusa Cascade (which has been mentioned many times, and will be seen in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End). He uses his John Smith alias (many past appearances), but to less than stellar success. Not continuity, but worth noting: Professor Hobbes is played by David Troughton, son of Second Doctor actor Patrick Troughton (no relation to this episode’s director, Alice Troughton). This is not his first appearance; he appeared at a young age for a cameo in The War Games and in The Curse of Peladon, and has voice acted often for Big Finish Productions. Had this episode been aired as originally planned (as #8 of the series), it would have been the fiftieth story of the revived series; The War Games, Troughton’s first appearance, was the fiftieth story of the classic series. Unfortunately the order was changed, though it remains the fiftieth revived-series story to be filmed. This episode also does not feature the TARDIS, either inside or outside, the first since Genesis of the Daleks to not include it.

Turn Left:  In an alien marketplace, a fortune teller reads predicts Donna’s future.  In the process, she discovers the event that led to Donna meeting the Doctor.  She mentions being in the car with her mother at a T-intersection; Sylvia tried to persuade Donna to turn right to seek a permanent job, but Donna chose to turn left and go to her newly-acquired temp job at H.C. Clements, where she would later meet the Doctor.  The fortune teller asks what would have happened if she turned right, and Donna feels something crawl onto her back.  Under the fortune teller’s power, the past changes, causing a truck to cut off Donna’s route momentarily; in that time, Sylvia persuades her, and she turns right instead of left.

The next scene shows the Christmas party at Donna’s new job, when the Racnoss Webstar attacks.  The Webstar is destroyed by the army, though without the superlaser that was originally used at the behest of Harold Saxon; many people die.  One of the partygoers notices something terrible on Donna’s back.  Donna runs to the Thames, near where the Webstar attacked, and sees UNIT removing a body—the Doctor’s body, as he drowned in the flood that killed the embryonic Racnoss.  Rose Tyler appears and inquires about the body, seeming stunned that it was the Doctor, despite Donna’s reassurances; she disappears moments later.

Months later, Donna loses her job; the company is floundering because the Thames remains closed off, cutting them off from several major business contacts.  The Royal Hope Hospital is transported to the moon; when it reappears, the lone survivor, medical student Oliver Morgenstern, describes the events, including the death of fellow student Martha Jones.  A woman named Sarah Jane Smith had saved the situation and stopped the out-of-control MRI weapon, but had died doing so, along with her son and several young associates.  Rose appears again and tells Donna to go to the country for Christmas, and surreptitiously gives her the means to do so.

Donna accepts the advice, and takes Sylvia and Wilfred away for the holidays.  On Christmas morning, the news shows the starship Titanic crashing onto Buckingham palace, destroying most of the city.  The maid comes in and sees something on Donna’s back, but reports it in Spanish, which Donna does not speak.

Now refugees due to the radiation from the crash, Donna and her family move to a refugee village in Leeds, where they share a house with two other families.  Crisis aid from America fails to arrive when sixty million Americans are turned into juvenile Adipose.  Later on, Luke Rattigan and the Sontarans activate the ATMOS system, poisoning the atmosphere.  Donna is accosted by a soldier who sees something on her back, but he releases her upon finding nothing.  Rose meets her again, and tells her that Torchwood is on the Sontaran ship.  Jack Harkness’s team clears the air with an atmosphere converter, but dies in the process, and Jack—who is immortal—is captured by the Sontarans.  Rose refuses to identify herself, but says that she has crossed reality; she explains that in an alternate reality, Donna saved the Doctor’s life, preventing all of the intervening tragedies.  The darkness now looming threatens all universes, not just this one.  Donna leaves, but Rose tells her she will be needed—and has three weeks to decide.  She warns Donna that coming with her means Donna will die.

Over the next few weeks, England degrades into a form of martial law.  The Italian family in Donna’s house is sent to a labour camp, horrifying Wilfred, who lived through the end of World War II.  That night, through his telescope, he sees that Orion is missing from the sky, and other stars are disappearing.  Donna finds Rose and agrees to join her.

At a UNIT base, Rose shows Donna the TARDIS, which is dying without the Doctor.  She places Donna in a circle of mirrors and lights, which is augmented with technology from the TARDIS.  When she switches on the lights, Donna can finally see the creature on her back: a giant beetle.  Rose calls it a “Time Beetle”, which feeds off of changes it induces in time.  Donna wants it gone, but it can’t be removed; to get rid of it, she must travel in time.  It is not only the beetle that is bending reality, but Donna herself.  Rose places her back in the circle of mirrors, which is a rudimentary time machine (as the TARDIS cannot be used).  Donna says she understands about dying now—if she changes her past, the entire world will cease to exist, to be replaced by the Doctor’s world, which is better.  Rose simply says “I’m sorry”, and sends Donna back in time.

Donna arrives four minutes prior to the decision at the intersection, and half a mile away.  She heads that direction, but realizes she won’t make it.  She sees the truck that intervened coming toward her, and realizes what Rose meant about her death; and she steps in front of the truck.

As Donna dies, Rose appears and gives her a message for the Doctor.  Donna’s younger self sees the traffic that is now backed up, and turns left instead of right.

With the timeline restored, Donna awakens in the fortune teller’s stall, and sees the time beetle fall off of her back and die.  The terrified fortune teller flees the booth.  The Doctor enters the booth and finds Donna, who hugs him, though she doesn’t know why.  He examines the beetle, and says that it is part of the Trickster’s Brigade; usually it would only affect one person, and the universe would compensate.  In Donna’s case, the changes affected the whole universe, forcing an alternate timeline. It’s not the first coincidence about Donna, and the Doctor muses on others, concluding that she and he are somehow linked.  She downplays herself, but he calls her “brilliant”, which triggers her memory of Rose’s message.  He recognizes Rose from Donna’s description, and the words that she gave to Donna:  “Bad Wolf”.  Suddenly terrified, the Doctor runs into the square, and sees the words “Bad Wolf” everywhere, even on the TARDIS.  Inside, the console room is glowing red, and the cloister bell is ringing.  The Doctor tells Donna that it is the end of the universe.

I like to think of Turn Left as Doctor Who Unbound for television. It’s the revived series’ first “what if…” scenario, unless one wishes to count Father’s Day (I personally don’t; I consider that episode a closed loop within the regular universe, not an alternate universe). We face the question of “What if Donna never saved the Doctor from the flood that defeated the Racnoss?” It goes on to highlight all the major threats to Earth since that time (The Runaway Bride), and how they played out without the Doctor. It also neatly eliminates all of the Doctor’s allies and potential allies, showing just how much the Doctor influenced their lives. Torchwood 3 (under Jack Harkness) dies defeating the Sontarans (The Poison Sky), with the immortal Jack taken captive by the Sontarans; Sarah Jane Smith and her entourage from The Sarah Jane Adventures die along with Martha Jones in the Royal Hope Hospital (Smith and Jones). UNIT continues to exist, but is severely damaged in the crash of the Titanic (Voyage of the Damned). It’s an interesting parallel with the series four finale, where all of those individuals will make guest appearances.

All of the Tenth Doctor’s companions are, at one time or another, called upon to sacrifice themselves, though it doesn’t always work out that way. For Rose, it’s mostly metaphorical; she sacrifices her happiness and her life with the Doctor by being transported to Pete’s World in Doomsday. For Martha, it’s more literal, as we’ll see in the series four finale, although it doesn’t get carried out; she also put her life on the line for a year in Last of the Time Lords. Donna, who is perhaps the most purely loyal companion of the three, literally sacrifices her life here, by dying so that history can be saved. She embraces it with eyes open, too; she has three weeks of warning that she will die. It’s hard to continue on that path of increasing intensity, therefore future companions of the Eleventh Doctor will subvert the trope; Clara, for instance, will sacrifice herself countless times through her various “shadows”, and then will ultimately be unable to sacrifice herself. Amy and Rory will several time play with the concept of sacrificing themselves not for the Doctor, but for each other. River is in the unique position of being a (sort of) companion of the Tenth Doctor as well as the Eleventh; with the Tenth Doctor, she played it straight and literal, sacrificing her life to save his, but with the Eleventh, it will be subverted, as he sacrifices his regeneration energy (representative of his life, as he points out) to fix her after saving her life from the Weeping Angels. (There may be better examples, as well—something something Pandorica—but I’m short on time and that is the one that comes to mind.)

If Midnight is creepy, Turn Left is ominous. It constitutes this series’ Doctor-lite episode. It’s a great setup for the series finale, and it accomplishes that while working in an alternate universe. It was a great bit of misdirection, as well (or at least it would have been, if not for the “next time” clips broadcast at the end). Rose’s brief appearances throughout the season could easily have been viewed as leading up to this episode, not the finale, as she has extensive appearances here; the fact that she is also in the finale could have been completely hidden until broadcast (again, if not for the next time clips). The episode does foreshadow the finale quite well—you miss a good part of the experience if you only watch the finale and skip this episode—as well as tying in with the spinoffs in progress at the time (Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures). I’ve picked at the episode’s logic with regard to the alternate universe’s events, but I can’t find any flaws to criticize; if anyone else can find a place where it breaks down, I’d like to know.

Continuity references: I’m going to skip the obvious references to episodes in this series, which admittedly is most of them. To mention them would be to spoil it for people who don’t care for that. Other than those: The Trickster’s Brigade appears in more depth in The Sarah Jane Adventures, which foreshadow this episode to some degree (Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?) There are parallels with Father’s Day, where someone Rose knew dies in her presence to repair a timeline. The Bad Wolf messages are seen again, for the first time since Bad Wolf, though they were mentioned in Doomsday. The Cloister Bell is heard again (Logopolis, et al). Lucius Dextrus mentioned something on Donna’s back in The Fires of Pompeii; that episode is not included in the list of changes here, though perhaps it should be, as the volcano only erupted because of the Doctor and Donna. The Time Beetle resembles and functions like the Eight Legs of Metebelis III (Planet of the Spiders). The circle of mirrors resemble the one used to reveal the Mara in Kinda. The Doctor’s death and the resultant problems is a bit of a recurring theme (Blood Heat, Final Genesis, The Wedding of River Song). It’s worth mentioning that Harold Saxon, aka the Master, is not included among the list of catastrophes that the Doctor was not present to prevent; he was not present to release the Master from his altered form at the end of the universe, meaning Saxon never arose.

Overall: Two great episodes, filling out a great second half to the series. There’s a definite progression in seriousness throughout the series, and these episodes fit right in, and set us up well for the finale.

Next time: We’ll see the series four finale with Stolen Earth and Journey’s End! See you there.

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

Midnight

Turn Left

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Return of the Master: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series Three, Part Five

We’re back, with our new Doctor Who rewatch! This week, we wrap up Series Three with the revived series’ first three-part story: Utopia, The Sound of Drums, and Last of the Time Lords! We’ll say goodbye to Martha (for now), and hello to another classic villain. Let’s get started!

One quick note: Beginning next week, I’ll be changing up the format of these posts to eliminate spoilers as much as possible. (I can’t promise there won’t be any at all; that’s the nature of a review—but we’ll eliminate the plot summaries, at least.) However, I opted not to begin with this week’s post, as today’s post marks the end of Series Three, just as yesterday’s post wrapped up the Destiny of the Doctor audio series. So, for today, we’ll continue as we’ve been doing, and institute the changes on Monday. Thanks again!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has not seen these episodes!

As previously seen in Boom Town, the TARDIS returns to the Cardiff spacetime rift to refuel—a shorter process than last time, as the rift has been active. Jack Harkness runs to the TARDIS and grabs onto the outside as it dematerializes. Something goes wrong inside the ship, and it begins to hurtle toward the end of time, finally coming to rest in the year 100 trillion (or perhaps beyond)—further than the Time Lords ever dared to go. Outside, Martha and the Doctor find Jack, who is dead from his exposure to the vortex—until suddenly, he revives. After some uncomfortable reintroduction, the trio sees a man running from garish humanoids, the Futurekind. They rescue him, but are forced to abandon the TARDIS and run themselves, ending up inside the nearby, human-occupied Silo base.

Inside, they meet an elderly man called Professor Yana, and his insect-like assistant, Chantho. They are welcomed warmly, as the Doctor is also a scientist; Yana eagerly enlists him to help with the final hurdles on his work in progress. There is a massive rocket inside the Silo, with a majestic purpose: it will carry the last humans to Utopia. Yana means it literally; there is a signal coming to them across the dying stars, calling the humans to a home where, hopefully, they will find a way to survive the end of the universe. The Doctor asks a departing patrol to recover the TARDIS, and sets to work, while Martha gets to know the humans and Chantho, who is the last of her kind.

While the Doctor and Jack work on some electronics near the rocket, the TARDIS arrives, and Martha assists Yana and Chantho. He tells her his life story, and of the memories he lost before he was found by the last humans. He shows her a fob watch that was found with him; and to her horror, Martha recognizes it as a chameleon arch receptacle, much like the one the Doctor possesses. Meanwhile, it is revealed that Jack cannot die, or at least not permanently, and he goes into an irradiated chamber to make repairs needed for the rocket. He survives, but as he comes back, Martha arrives. She tells the Doctor and Jack about the fob watch, theorizing that Yana is a Time Lord in disguise, a survivor of the Time War like the Doctor. Unbeknownst to them, the comm channel is open, and Yana can hear them; and their words stir memories in him. As the Doctor gets the rocket running, and it loads up and blasts off, Yana overcomes the watch’s perception filter and opens it…and learns his true identity: the Doctor’s old friend and nemesis, the Time Lord called the Master. At that moment, Martha reminds the Doctor of the Face of Boe’s last words: You Are Not Alone…YANA.

The Master locks the lab door, with the TARDIS inside with him. He opens the front gate, allowing the Futurekind inside to ravage the base. Chantho, appalled, stands up to him, and he electrocutes her; but before she dies, she shoots him. He enters the TARDIS, taking with him the an item from Jack’s travel bag: a container that holds the Doctor’s hand which was severed by the Sycorax. Just as the Doctor, Martha, and Jack get the lab door open, he locks the door, then regenerates, becoming young again. He taunts the Doctor, then leaves in the TARDIS, leaving them to die as the Futurekind break in.

In The Sound of Drums, the Doctor, Martha, and Jack materialize on 2007 Earth, courtesy of Jack’s vortex manipulator. He reveals that the Master will be here; as the Master was leaving in the TARDIS, the Doctor used the sonic screwdriver to fuse the controls so that it can only travel between 100 trillion and 2007, give or take a year or two. Martha realizes where she has heard his voice before: he is Harold Saxon, a politician with a recent and sudden rise to power—and today, he is assuming the position of Prime Minister. They see him on television making a speech; not only is he Prime Minister, but he has married a human woman, Lucy, as well. At 10 Downing Street, the Master meets with his new cabinet, and promptly kills them all with poison gas.

Martha takes Jack and the Doctor to her apartment, and they research Saxon’s rise to power. At Downing Street, a reporter meets with Saxon’s wife, Lucy, and confronts her with evidence that Saxon is not who he seems; Lucy admits it, and is in on it. Saxon enters the room, and summons several spherical robots, which kill the reporter in dramatic fashion.

The Doctor questions Martha about what she knows about Saxon, but her answers are vague, and he catches her tapping out a four-beat rhythm with her fingers. Saxon comes on the television, and they realize he is aware of them and targeting them; they escape just ahead of an explosion in the apartment. Against the Doctor’s will, Martha calls her family, not knowing they are being monitored by Saxon’s people; they try to get her to come home. She takes the Doctor and Jack to the house, where they see Saxon’s people take her parents into custody (and later her sister as well), and shoot at them. They escape, but barely. They abandon the vehicle, and Martha calls her brother, but Saxon breaks in on the call. The Doctor talks to him, and tells him how the Time War ended; he explains how he escaped. He reveals he can track them via security cameras, and they are forced to run again.

The ball-shaped creatures are the Toclafane, and they have an agreement with the Master. It will be executed at 8:02 the next morning. Meanwhile, the Doctor explains about the Master’s insanity and broken childhood, and Martha explains about the ubiquitous Archangel cell phone network, which has implanted the four-beat drumming sound in everyone’s mind. The Master himself hears that sound, and has since childhood, and it is what has driven him mad. The Doctor alters three TARDIS keys into perception filters so that they can travel unnoticed.

The Master has announced on television that the Toclafane have made contact, and will arrive in the morning. The US president arrives and assumes control of the situation under UN authority. He relocates to UNIT’s flying aircraft carrier, the Valiant, and the Master and Lucy join him there. The Doctor, Martha, and Jack sneak aboard with the vortex manipulator. They find the TARDIS aboard, but it has been transformed into a paradox machine—a device for maintaining an otherwise-unstable paradox.

When the Toclafane arrive, they will only deal with the Master. He orders them to kill the president, and resumes control. He captures the Doctor, Jack, and Martha, having been unaffected by the perception filters. He kills Jack, with his laser screwdriver—an improvement over the sonic, allegedly—and gloats about getting to do so repeatedly. He brings in Martha’s family to watch his victory. He reveals that he funded Richard Lazarus’s experiments in aging, then engineered the technology into the screwdriver. He uses the screwdriver to age the Doctor into an old man. He activates the paradox machine, opening a massive rift to the future in the sky, and billions of Toclafane pour through; he orders them to kill one-tenth of the population. Unseen, Jack revives and gives Martha his vortex manipulator, and she teleports away.

In Last of the Time Lords, a year has passed. The Master has built a fleet of ships, and is preparing to send them out to conquer the universe. Each one has the power to create a black hole, destroying any opposition. He plans to create a new Gallifrey and a new empire, forged in his image. Earth is enslaved and largely ruined. Aboard the Valiant, the Doctor, with Martha’s family and Jack, surreptitiously stages an attack on the Master, but it fails.

Martha has walked the earth for a year, and her legend has grown. She returns to Britain and meets a man named Tom, who takes her to meet one Professor Docherty, who can help her capture a Toclafane. With difficulty, they do so, and manage to get it open; they discover that the misshapen being inside was once human. The Toclafane are the human remnants from Utopia, transformed and regressed, and totally devoted to the Master. Martha reveals she has a gun that uses four chemicals, which will kill a Time Lord and suppress his regeneration. With it she plans to kill the Master. However, Docherty betrays her presence to the Master, who has her son in custody. That night, Martha is captured by the Master, who destroys the gun; he is about to kill Martha when Tom sacrifices himself to save her. The Master reconsiders, and delays her death until the Doctor and her family can watch, as the fleet launches. He takes her back to the Valiant, and prepares for his moment of triumph.

Moments before launch, Martha laughs at him. The gun was a ruse, and the resistance was aware that Docherty would betray her; it was all a ruse to get her here, now, with the Doctor. Her year of travel was used to plant one order in the minds of the people: at the moment the fleet is activated, everyone on Earth will think one word together: “Doctor.” The Doctor, meanwhile, spent the last year attuning himself to the still-active Archangel network. The combined psychic intent of humanity, amplified by the network, sends a surge of power into the Doctor, restoring him to health and youth, and letting him deflect the Master’s attacks. He backs the Master into a corner…and embraces him, forgiving him. Meanwhile, Jack breaks free and takes some loyal soldiers to destroy the paradox machine, but the Toclafane delay him. The Master uses the vortex manipulator—taken from Martha—to teleport himself and the Doctor to Earth. He has a remote for the fleet, and will activate their black hole convertors—if he can’t have the world, no one will. The Doctor manages to teleport them back to the Valiant, just as Jack destroys the paradox machine. Instantly time reverts to the minute when the machine was activated a year earlier, leaving no casualties except the just-killed president—and no Toclafane can come through the rift except the few that were already present. Only the Valiant and those aboard are unaffected; no one on Earth will remember the year that never was.

The Doctor declares that he will take the Master in custody and be responsible for him. However, Lucy Saxon—now long since disabused of her loyalty to the Master—shoots the Master. The Doctor begs him to regenerate, but in a final moment of selfish victory, he chooses not to, and dies.

The Doctor cremates the Master, but later, an unidentified woman takes the Master’s ring from the embers of the fire. Jack explains that he will stay on Earth with Torchwood, as the Doctor cannot reverse his immortality. However, the Doctor disables the time-travel and teleport functions on the vortex manipulator, ensuring he will get in less trouble. Jack leaves the Doctor and Martha with a cryptic comment that indicates he may one day become the Face of Boe.

Finally facing her feelings for the Doctor, and that they will never be resolved, Martha chooses to stay on Earth as well, and return to her life, family, and studies. However, she leaves her phone with the Doctor, and insists that he respond if she calls him. The Doctor—who has recovered the severed hand from Jack—prepares to leave—and as he does not have his shields up, he is rattled when the TARDIS crashes…into the Titanic.

I’m a lifelong fan of the Master, and when I learned that he would be appearing in the revived series, I was thrilled. I wasn’t disappointed when the episode aired, and Utopia has become one of my favorite episodes. Derek Jacobi’s portrayal of the elderly Master is, in a word, terrifying, even though he doesn’t do much. He’s ruthless and evil as though he has to make up for lost time, which I suppose he does. He’s very much like the classic version of the Master, especially during the Delgado years, bitter and cold and full of rage. It’s a shame that we didn’t get more time with him in the role, although I understand that he plays a different incarnation in the Big Finish audios (I haven’t reached them yet, but I am looking forward to it). John Simm gets much more flak for his portrayal, I suspect because he is the polar opposite of Jacobi, Delgado, and others. Where they are reserved, he is unleashed. In them, the insanity glows; in him, it blazes. I, for one, love both versions, though it goes against popular opinion; no one should expect one incarnation to be the same as the others, as we know from years with the Doctor. It doesn’t seem strange to me that Simm’s Master should be unhinged, capricious, or wildly cruel. He’s still the Master—still very evil, and still very much in control of the situation, even if not entirely in control of himself. It’s completely brilliant, coming and going. (We’ll deal with the other side of Simm when we get to The End of Time.)

Simm’s version of the Master is more than just a maniac, though. I talked in last week’s post about the religious metaphors in this season’s presentation of the Doctor, especially as seen in Human Nature/The Family of Blood. I stand by what I said there, and I think it was leading up to this story, where the messiah imagery is fully executed. If the Doctor’s experience with the Chameleon arch represents his death, temptation, and resurrection, then this story represents his second coming, in the form of his restoration from old age. I find it interesting that when Martha refers to the population’s thoughts about the Doctor, the Master refers to it as “prayer”. And in true messianic fashion, he chooses not to judge, but to forgive. (That’s not entirely consistent with the biblical narrative—all the parts are there, but in the wrong order—but that’s a topic for another time.) If all that is true, then the Master is the antichrist in this metaphor. I’ve mentioned in other places that “anti-“ doesn’t simply mean “against”, it also means “in place of”, and here we see both aspects. The Master is certainly against the Doctor, and even makes early attempts to kill him; but he’s also very similar to the Doctor, and would supplant him if he could. He’s young, of similar stature and physique to the Doctor, and dresses similarly (suits and ties). He has his own screwdriver. He has a fob watch like the Doctor’s. He eats Jelly Babies, a dig at the Doctor’s past lives. He even mimics the Doctor’s mannerisms; when Lucy challenges him on the success rate of the Archangel network, we get this… Lucy: “You said Archangel was 100%!” Master: <sharp intake of breath, tilting head> “Well…99…98?” It’s a mannerism and mode of speech that we’ve seen the Tenth Doctor use a dozen times or more.

In light of those points, I noticed something else here, though I doubt this was intentional. It’s long been theorized—and canonized in the VNAs—that the Leader in the Inferno universe was a version of the Doctor, who took power in Britain. I think that the Master, here, is an exploration of the same idea: What would happen if the Doctor went dark and stole power? This series wasn’t ready for a dark Doctor, something that has only been sincerely attempted once, via the Valeyard; but by substituting the Master, we can play with the idea, without committing.

This story is, naturally, the revelation of the Saxon arc that’s been playing out slowly since Love and Monsters. I won’t call it the resolution, because…spoilers for The End of Time–we’ll get there. Some recapping takes place, especially with regard to his involvement in shooting down the Racnoss Webstar. There’s also acknowledgement of Torchwood, though the team doesn’t appear here, Saxon having sent them “on a wild goose chase in the Himalayas”. We will, however, see them in Journey’s End. This story fits in the middle of an arc that really began with The Parting of the Ways, runs through Torchwood series one, and will not conclude until The End of Time, depending on your perspective. I wonder how much of that was planned in advance.

Some random observations and references: Jack knows a lot about regeneration, but I don’t recall it ever being explained to him in detail, and he has not witnessed it. The scene where the advisors are killed is reminiscent of Aliens of London with the Slitheen. The Doctor and the Master are a creepy sort of bromance, and it could only get creepier if one of them became a woman…oh wait. The Master refers to the Dalek Emperor taking control of the Crucible during the War; this will be expanded in Journey’s End. The Master’s monologue at the end of The Sound of Drums is echoed in Rassilon’s monologue (slight spoiler, sorry) at the end of The End of Time, part one. What an impossible coincidence, that the Toclafane Martha takes down should be the one child that she spoke to in the Silo! This is unintentionally a Doctor-lite episode (Last of the Time Lords), as David Tennant only actually appears at the beginning and end, with a CGI mini-Doctor in the middle. There’s a lot of foreshadowing of next season, with the recovery of the ring, and mentions of the Medusa Cascade and Agatha Christie. Lucy exists solely to mock the Doctor’s habit of taking companions; the Master even partially acknowledges this. As well, there are indications that he may have abused her during their year on the Valiant, which helps explain her betrayal at the end.

There’s more I could say, but I think that’s enough. Again, it’s one of my favorite stories, and I could go on much longer. What a way to end an excellent series!

Next time: In addition to some format changes, we’ll look at the Time Crash mini-episode, and then we’ll examine the Christmas special, Voyage of the Damned, before launching into Series Four. See you there!

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

Utopia

The Sound of Drums

Last of the Time Lords

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Cybermen Vs. Daleks: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series Two Finale

  

We’re back, continuing our New Doctor Who rewatch! This week, we’re wrapping up Series Two with the final three episodes. We’ll examine the two-part Series Two finale, Army of Ghosts and Doomsday, in which we say goodbye (for now) to Rose Tyler; but first, we’ll examine one of Doctor Who’s most hated episodes, Fear Her. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has not watched these episodes!

TARDISode 11 sets up the story with a clip from a sensationalist crime-tip show called Crime Crackers. It gives a quick overview about a case of several missing children, and also gives us the name of the street on which the story takes place, Dame Kelly Holmes Close. It closes with a glimpse of the monster in the closet of the main character.

It’s 2012, and London is hosting the summer Olympic games! In less than a day, the Olympic torch will pass through the neighborhood of Dame Kelly Holmes Close on its way to the stadium. The residents are preparing, but all is not well; several children have gone missing, all very suddenly. Rose and the Doctor arrive to see the games, but are distracted by missing-child flyers.

A girl named Chloe Webber lives on the street with her mother; her father is out of the picture, ostensibly long dead. Chloe loves to draw, but she has a secret: When she draws someone, they disappear, transported into her drawing. Rose, meanwhile, is attacked by an odd creature, resembling a large pencil scribble; the Doctor stops the creature, and determines that it isn’t real, but resulted from a strange residual energy. It’s not of Earth—and it leads them to Chloe. They talk with her and her mother, and the Doctor hypnotizes Chloe; he learns that she is being inhabited by an alien creature called an Isolus, which gives her her strange power. The Isolus are a long-lived swarm race; they are empathic, and thrive on their bonds with one another. This one, a juvenile, was separated from the swarm, and crashed its pod ship on Earth; it bonded with Chloe, craving emotional contact. It chose Chloe because they were both very lonely. It’s not evil, only hostile; and even so, it’s simply a defensive mechanism as carried out by a scared child. There’s a problem, however. Chloe’s loneliness is a result of years of abuse at the hands of her now-absent father; and she has drawn him on her closet wall—and the drawing has come to malevolent life.

The Doctor discovers that the pod ship can heal itself with enough heat and empathic connection. He returns to the TARDIS and puts together a device to locate it. However, the Isolus, clinging to Chloe, fears to leave; it makes her draw the Doctor, and he and the TARDIS vanish, breaking the device in the process. Rose is left to solve the crisis alone.

She deduces that the pod, when it crashed six days earlier, was attracted to the nearest heat source—a patch of fresh pavement. She digs in the spot, and finds the pod. She returns to Chloe, but the Isolus is trying to draw the whole world—six billion people—so it will never be lonely. She sees the drawing of the Doctor, which has changed—he is showing her the Olympic torch, which is passing by at that time. Rose throws the pod into the torch, which is not only representative of heat, but also the emotional attention and connection of everyone watching—and it restores itself. The Isolus leaves Chloe and returns to the pod, releasing everyone in the drawings.

One thread remains unresolved. The malevolent drawing in the closet, no longer restrained, is now coming to kill Chloe. Rose is instrumental in helping Chloe to use the last of her power to banish it.

Still, the Doctor is missing. Rose thinks he is lost forever—until she sees him on television, reclaiming the dropped torch, and lighting the Olympic flame.

Although I wouldn’t call it a favorite episode, I’ve struggled to understand what it is that makes this episode so reviled. It seems very average to me. It’s hampered a little by the fact that it lacks a cohesive villain; Chloe and the Isolus are lonely and damaged children, but they aren’t evil—the harm they cause is more selfish, and more of a defensive mechanism. I suspected that the dislike was due to the absurdity of the episode; but there are far more absurd stories out there (like, for example, Love and Monsters, which I covered last week). The episode does concern child abuse as a secondary theme, which I will admit does not translate well to television entertainment (and rightly so); but it’s downplayed somewhat here. In fact, it could have been omitted entirely without harming the story; the subplot with the drawing in the closet was unnecessary at best, and awkward at worst. (The drawing and its behavior is a bit overdone, but that makes sense in context—it’s not what really happened to Chloe, it’s her childhood perception of it.) But again, this is nothing new—many episodes try to do too much in the allotted time, many of them better received than this.

This is another episode, like Father’s Day, where the Doctor actually loses, and it’s up to the companion to save him. Those stories don’t come often, but they’re always interesting to me; the Doctor’s life, phenomenal as it is, truly hangs by a thread sometimes. Here, Rose wins the battle, but it’s more or less by chance; it hangs on the fact that the torch procession was passing by at that moment, which is a little too much coincidence perhaps. I did have to wonder why Chloe removed the Doctor and the TARDIS, but not Rose; as Rose was the one who invaded her bedroom earlier, I would think she would see Rose as an equal threat.

In the real world, David Tennant of course did not appear at the Olympics in 2012, or carry the torch; however, Matt Smith (as the Eleventh Doctor) did, giving a bit of poetic finality to this appearance. In universe, the Doctor makes a Star Trek reference to the Vulcan hand sign; when he hypnotizes Chloe, he does it in a way that mimics the Vulcan mind meld. We get a few continuity references: the Doctor refers to the nuns from New Earth, and says he’s not a cat person. He mentions the Shadow Proclamation, as he has done a few times before, notably in Rose. He refers to his lost family, stating that he was a dad once; the last such reference was in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. The year 2012 was last visited in Dalek and its sequel, The Long Game; failed companion Adam Mitchell hails from that year.

This episode, I will admit, is logically weak, for reasons that I cited above. It is an engaging story, in my opinion; it’s made all the more emotionally weighty by the realization that our villains are really just scared, lonely children. It could benefit from some tightening, however, and from trimming out the closet-drawing plotline. Otherwise, it’s not too bad—the low point of the series, perhaps, but still acceptable.

TARDISode 12 is a brief recap of the Torchwood references throughout the series. It is presented as a journalist submitting a story to his editor; at the end, the journalist is taken away by Torchwood agents and committed as insane.

In Army of Ghosts, the Doctor and Rose return to 2007 to visit Jackie Tyler; but they are shocked when Jackie reveals the presence of a visible ghost, ostensibly that of her father. The ghosts are all over the world, and appear at the same times every day, remaining for a few minutes at a time. It’s been going on for months, to the point that people accept the ghosts as normal now.

Strange things are happening elsewhere in the city, as well. At the Canary Wharf skyscraper—called “Torchwood Tower” by its insiders—a strange sphere resides in a sealed lab, under analysis by scientist Rajesh Singh. It has no mass, no radiation, and all scans fail to detect it—it’s as if it doesn’t exist. It does display some kind of barrier that prevents touch. Elsewhere in the tower, it is revealed that Torchwood is responsible for the presence of the ghosts; under leader Yvonne Hartman’s direction, a large machine with two levers is used to make them appear and disappear in an event called a “ghost shift”. Two of her workers, Gareth and Adeola, are clandestinely seeing each other; on one of their rendezvous, they go to a plastic-sheeted area under construction. Adeola vanishes, confronted by a Cyberman. Later, she and Gareth return to their desks, now wearing Bluetooth devices on both ears.

Jackie confronts Rose about her potential future, and they argue. The Doctor assembles a device; and at the next ghost shift, he traps one of the ghosts briefly for analysis. He traces the disturbance to Torchwood; but Torchwood has also located him, and recognized the TARDIS. The Doctor and Rose—with Jackie unwittingly still aboard—take the TARDIS to Torchwood tower, where the Doctor is promptly taken prisoner. He passes Jackie off as Rose, leaving Rose on the TARDIS, which is moved to a basement. Hartman claims the Doctor and the TARDIS as property of Torchwood; their motto is, “if it’s alien, it’s ours.” She also claims credit for destroying the Sycorax, using alien technology.

Adeola leads another worker to be taken by the Cybermen. Meanwhile, Hartman explains about Torchwood’s existence, and takes the Doctor and Jackie to view the sphere. Several times, beginning here, the Doctor wears 3D glasses, though he doesn’t explain it yet. He explains that the sphere is a voidship, which travels through the void outside the universes; the Elementals once called the void the Howling, and others have called it Hell. He recommends sending it back where it came from, but how? Hartman explains that it came through at a point now housed in the building’s upper floors, behind the mechanism seen earlier; she shows him. She says the ghosts came after it, and they have been experimenting since. The Doctor cautions them to stop the ghost shifts, as it may destroy the universe with a little more strain; finally Hartman breaks and cancels the next shift. However, Adeola and the other converted workers restart the countdown.

Rose—the real Rose, that is—sneaks into the sphere lab, but is caught. However, she gets a shock: Singh’s lab assistant on hand is Mickey Smith! He explains that the Cybermen were nearly defeated in his world, but that they suddenly vanished, only to be detected here. With the sphere having opened the breach, not only can the Cybermen pass through, but also, his world’s version of Torchwood developed a technology to pass through—and Mickey is here on reconnaissance. He believes the sphere is occupied by Cybermen, and prepares to blast them—just as the sphere starts to open.

Upstairs, the ghost shift starts. The Doctor realizes what has happened, and stops the earpods on the workers; they collapse, already dead. But the shift is already under way, at higher power than ever before. The ghosts appear fully, all over the world, and are revealed to be Cybermen. They begin to attack.

Downstairs, the sphere opens, revealing a terrible sight: a strange machine, and four Daleks. Their leader gives the command to exterminate the humans.

TARDISode 13, the final entry for the series, shows a new broadcast about the Cybermen incursion. It is interrupted…by Daleks.

As Doomsday opens, the Daleks are about to kill Singh, Mickey, and Rose, when Rose reveals her knowledge of the Daleks and the Time War, causing them to stop. The Dalek leader decides to keep her alive, but kills Singh after extracting information from him. It refers to the machine as the Genesis Ark.

The Cybermen have likewise captured Jackie, Hartman, and the Doctor. They broadcast a message demanding surrender, stating they will upgrade everyone on Earth; but a battle is breaking out between the British Army and the Cybermen in London. The Cyberleader notices the presence of the Daleks, and sends a few Cybermen to investigate. The Doctor watches the confrontation—which represents the height of attitude on the part of both Cybermen and Daleks, incidentally—and realizes the stakes have just risen. Declining an alliance, the Daleks determine to destroy the Cybermen as well as the humans; they kill the advance Cybermen. Seeing Rose’s reactions, they press her for information, and she identifies the Doctor, which scares the Daleks (as much as they ever feel fear, anyway).

Jackie and Hartman are taken for conversion. Hartman is converted, but before Jackie can be upgraded, a group of soldiers appear and take out the Cybermen in the breach room. The group is led by Jake, formerly of the Preachers, from the alternate universe. Jackie gets free and escapes. Jake fills the Doctor in on the transport devices they use, and recent history. Pete Tyler arrives, and takes the Doctor back across to his world’s Torchwood Tower, where he explains further: though Britain is enjoying a golden age, temperatures are rising catastrophically, which they have determined is due to the breach. He enlists the Doctor’s help in defeating the Cybermen (and the Daleks too, though Pete doesn’t know them) and closing the breach. He explains that in his world, it’s been three years, where here it was only about one year. They then return.

The Daleks reveal that the Genesis Ark is of Gallifreyan origin, and that it contains “the future”. They try to get Rose to touch it—thus providing time energy to open it—but are unsuccessful. The Doctor arrives, and banters with them, identifying them as the Cult of Skaro, a Dalek “think-tank” of sorts that disappeared from the Time War. Now he knows how they escaped, in the voidship.When they threaten him, he uses his Sonic Screwdriver to destroy the doors of the lab and let the team from Pete’s world in to fight the Daleks. Mickey is bumped into the Ark; as he has also been a time-traveler, this is enough to open it. It levitates into the sky, and it is revealed that it is bigger on the inside; it disgorges millions of Daleks who were imprisoned inside. The Daleks and Cybermen begin to battle each other.

Jackie reconnects with them, and sees Pete for the first time, instantly upsetting his determination not to connect with her. Pete wants to escape back to his world, considering the situation lost; but the Doctor reveals that his glasses show a sort of trace of the void on everyone who has traveled into it. He can use the machine to suck those traces—and everyone who carries them—back into the void, eliminating both Daleks and Cybermen; but the humans must get clear first. He sends Jackie and Rose with the others, against Rose’s will—she knows that when the breach closes, she will never see the Doctor again. He himself may be pulled in, too. She instantly teleports back, and begins to help him with the machine. Meanwhile, the converted Hartman guards the door, her sense of duty overpowering her conversion. (It’s not shown what happens to her afterward, but presumably she is pulled through—she never traveled through the void, but her cyber body would have been brought through with the advance guard.)

The Doctor puts magnetic clamps on the walls to cling to; then he and Rose activate the levers. Daleks and Cybermen are pulled in. Rose’s lever breaks free, however, and she is forced to grab it and lock it in place. She loses her grip and is pulled in; but Pete teleports across at the last second, grabs her, and teleports back out. She is left trapped in the alternate universe as the breach seals.

Months later, in Pete’s world, Rose sees the Doctor in a dream. She follows his directions to a beach in Norway called Darlig Ulv Stranden, which translates to “Bad Wolf Bay”. She sees the image of the Doctor there; he is using a rapidly-closing crack in the universal wall to contact her, burning up a supernova to do so. He tells her goodbye, and she admits to loving him; he is about to say the same, but vanishes before he can get the words out.

In the TARDIS, he takes a moment to mourn the end of their time together; but he is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a woman in a wedding dress. “What?!” is all he can say.

This series finale rivals The Parting of the Ways in many ways. While we don’t see the Doctor regenerate, we do so a total change in supporting characters. Rose departs (quite against her will, I might say), taking with her Jackie, Mickey, and Pete, all of whom had reached semi-regular status. We’ll see some of them again in cameo form, but their traveling days are over, so to speak. Interestingly, both of the Tenth Doctor’s future regular companions appear here, in one form or another; Freema Agyeman, who will play Martha Jones, plays Torchwood staffer Adeola Oshodi, who will later be retconned as Martha’s cousin. Catherine Tate makes her first appearance as Donna Noble, though her name is not yet revealed. This story also provides the resolution of the season-long Torchwood arc, ending with the downfall of Torchwood One. That destruction, later called the Battle of Canary Wharf, leads to the rise of Torchwood Three in Cardiff, which features in the spinoff Torchwood, and features the return of Captain Jack Harkness. (In related news, keep an eye out for Big Finish’s upcoming “Torchwood: Before the Fall” audio set, which is set at Torchwood One prior to this story. Personally, I’d love to see Yvonne Hartman square off against Kate Lethbridge-Stewart of UNIT—Big Finish, get on this!)

I find it interesting to observe how series finales go in Doctor Who. The classic series, with its more episodic/serialized format, rarely used season-long story arcs, and when it did it was often not well received (Trial of a Time Lord, anyone?). The revived series does use such arcs, but I can’t help feeling that it lives with the memory of cancellation; therefore every series arc neatly wraps up all of its threads. It doesn’t always end happily, as is evident here; and sometimes some of those threads are picked back out by later specials (I’m looking at you, Time of the Doctor, with your crack in the wall); but every series finale constitutes a point where, were the series as a whole to end, we could be mostly satisfied. This one is no exception; again, as far as we know, the Daleks and Cybermen have all been wiped out, and the Doctor is alone, with Torchwood visibly destroyed, and with no companions with whom he has unresolved business. The appearance of Donna at the end doesn’t negate that resolution; it just gives us a tag on which to hang the next series, should the next series come.

I won’t go into references to this series’ episodes, as we’ve discussed them as they came up. However, there are some references to previous episodes. The cutting-through-plastic by the Cybermen is a nod to The Tomb of the Cybermen. The Time War gets a significant reference, and the Fall of Arcadia is first mentioned here; it will be expanded upon in The Day of the Doctor. The Void, under one name or another, will be mentioned in several future episodes (Daleks in Manhattan, The Next Doctor, The Big Band) and several audios. The Elementals were last referenced in Enlightenment; they call the Void “the Howling”, which may be a reference to the “Howling Halls” mentioned in Love and Monsters. Rose mentions the Gelth, last seen in The Unquiet Dead. We get a flashback glimpse of a planet we haven’t seen before, as Rose is talking to Jackie—that adventure was never recorded. Harriet Jones is mentioned, having maintained her rise to power in Pete’s world. The Doctor mentions being at Pete and Jackie’s wedding; but if this is a reference to Father’s Day, it’s incorrect, as that was someone else’s wedding. We get the first appearance of the Doctor’s “Allons-y!” catchphrase, which appears many times in the future. While the rift at Torchwood Tower is not the same as the one at Cardiff, the idea of opening and closing it at will is carried over into the Torchwood series.

There’s little to complain about here. This episode will have echoes through several upcoming series of Doctor Who, and through Torchwood as well. Overall, it’s a strong, emotional exit for Rose and company, and it adds depth to the Doctor, as he deals with the loss of Rose through the next few companions. Otherwise, at this point, the future is unknown, and the sky is the limit—and we have a wedding to catch.

Next time: The 2007 Christmas Special, The Runaway Bride! See you there.

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

TARDISode 11

Fear Her

TARDISode 12

Army of Ghosts

TARDISode 13

Doomsday

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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.]

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.

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

Children In Need Special

The Christmas Invasion

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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

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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

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