I’m left travelling on my own because there’s no one else.
– There’s me . . .
Right, so: after the introductory episode in which we establish that the Doctor is alien and has a spaceship that can travel through time and space, that he’s a bit dangerous and maybe unstable, that he seems to have a special vested interest in Earth, and he’s invited Rose, a compassionate, stubborn, savvy Londoner along for the ride; now that we’ve established all that, let’s see what this baby can DO.
In the first few minutes of this episode we get another aspect of the Doctor’s personality: he likes showing off. Rose suggests they travel 100 years into the future and the Doctor one-ups her by taking her 10,000 years into the future, to “The New Roman Empire.” She recognizes his flaunting for what it is, they have a nice banter moment, and then he pulls out all the stops (almost literally — there are stops that he pulls to make the TARDIS go) and takes her to the day the sun expands and obliterates Earth.
It’s a bit much, don’t you think? She’s just left Earth. Her experience with these sorts of things is limited to a couple lame zombie-like mannequins. And now the Doctor’s brought her to a place five billion years in the future, where she’s surrounded by myriad aliens and can watch her world — all that she’s ever known — blow up.
DOCTOR: The great and the good are gathering to watch the planet burn.
ROSE: What for?
DOCTOR: Fun.
The Doctor’s plan, spontaneous as it is, affirms that he’s drawn to disaster and destruction. Yet he doesn’t seem to perceive that Rose might witness these sorts of events — and this one in particular — in a vastly different way, from a vastly different perspective. It’s like the difference between theory and practice, the oftentimes wide gulf between studying a subject and living it. The Doctor observes things from an emotional distance, his Ivory Tower — the whole universe is both his playground and his canvas, but no matter how passionate he may be about a certain species or planet, it’s not the same as being a part of it, being in it, as Rose is. Her lived experience means that she’s going to have a deeply profound reaction while watching the Earth die, and the Doctor doesn’t seem to get that.
Then again, the Doctor’s own planet has just burned as well, we learn at the end of this episode, a casualty of the war mentioned in the last episode. There must be something subconscious but just under the surface that compels him to witness the destruction of another planet that has been so dear to him. To relive the experience, perhaps as a sort of self-punishment? To keep the pain fresh? To remind himself that “everything has its time and everything dies”?
And that’s nothing to say of the other tragic and dark moments in this episode. Jabe sacrifices herself to help the Doctor reach the override switch for the sun shields. The Doctor stands by and watches The Lady Cassandra dry up and explode. She caused people to die; she deserves to die as well. Very Old Testament. Other innocents we barely get to know are killed. In the previous episode Rose asks the Doctor if his travels are always as dangerous as battling the Autons and the Nestene Consciousness. Oh, honey. You have NO IDEA.
And yet there are lovely light moments as well, including one of my favorite moments of the entire season. It’s right after Rose has it out with the Doctor, after realizing that she knows absolutely nothing about him (she tells Raffalo “I just sort of hitched a lift with this man . . . I didn’t even think about it. I don’t even know who he is . . . “) and her questions about who he is and where he’s from go unanswered, and she gets more and more upset. After she calms down a bit, makes a couple jokes about how her cell phone can’t find a signal, the Doctor takes her phone to give it a sonic boost.
DOCTOR : With a little bit of jiggery pokery . . .
ROSE: Is that a technical term, ‘jiggery pokery’?
DOCTOR: Yeah, I came first in jiggery pokery, what about you?
ROSE : Nah, I failed hullabaloo.
And just like that, they’re back on good terms. The chemistry between Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston is so good. It’s light, friendly, you can see the bonds of mutual admiration and respect grow almost from the beginning. 1
And of course we realize later why he keeps this information from her; the wounds are still too present, he can’t give voice to them yet. It’s only after she sees HER planet die, after he sees her reaction to it (“all that history, gone”), that he can tell her about his planet.
This episode also introduces The Lady Cassandra to us. She serves both as the episode’s baddy and as counterpoint to Rose. She arrives at Platform One with all the pomp of a decaying aristocracy, touting herself as “The Last Human,” crowing, “Look how THIN I am.” In Cassandra we’re supposed to see what our excessive obsession with standards of female beauty have wrought over five billion years — standards which, in Cassandra, are tied in with notions of racial purity. Her sense of self is inflated because she “kept [herself] pure,” didn’t “mingle” with other species. Rose sees right through this:
You’re not human. You’ve had it all nipped and tucked and flattened till there’s nothing left. Anything human got chucked in the bin. You’re just skin, Cassandra. Lipstick and skin.
Ah, but don’t worry — this isn’t the last we’ve seen of the “bitchy trampoline” (one of my other favorite phrases from this episode).
Face of Boe!
It’s also not the last we’ve seen of the Face of Boe, one of my favorite alien concepts — and I’m not saying that because of the role the Face plays in later episodes. It’s because, well, he’s just a face. Just a head in a jar. And yet it’s not at all goofy, not like in Futurama. You want to know more about him. He’s sponsoring the whole Watch the Earth Burn event, so he’s clearly a Face of means. Did he used to have a body? Does he come from a planet of just Faces? Do those bulbs hanging off his head grow into other Faces and that’s how his species reproduces? Is he as serene as he appears to be? Maybe he’s some sort of diplomat.
One final note: this is the first time we hear the term “bad wolf.” It comes in a background conversation at the beginning of a scene, in which we hear the Moxx of Balhoon tell the Face of Boe that “this is the Bad Wolf scenario.” If you’re watching these episodes for the first time, just keep that in mind.2
- I prefer this, frankly, to the sexually charged chemistry between David Tennant’s Doctor and a couple of his Companions, but, well, what are you gonna do. It is David Tennant, after all. ↩
- Actually, if you’re watching/re-watching these episodes along with me, would you let me know in the comments? I’ve also added a couple new features to try out, including a simple “like” button that you can click and an easy way to share this post with others if you’d like. UPDATE 6/16: I had to remove the “I Like This” button because I suspected it was causing an internal server error (don’t ask me how I figured out that plugins were responsible). ↩
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