Hey guys. I’m cheating a bit with the “blog every day” thing, but it’s been so long since I first wrote these Doctor Who posts that I thought it would be a good idea to refresh before I do the third episode of the first season. So. There it is. And here you go.

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If you’re from another planet, how come you sound like you’re from the North?
Lots of planets have a North.

'Do you want to come with me?' God, YES.

Wait, one more thing: I am totally cross stitching “lots of planets have a north” next.

Confession: Though I enjoyed the few episodes I watched, I was never a huge Doctor Who fan. If I remember correctly, in the early 80s the show came on directly after 3-2-1 Contact, and I remember getting sucked into the show because of Tom Baker, on whom I developed an enormous crush. His grin was so devilish. His manner was so dryly funny and a bit dangerous. His hair was so curly. I didn’t stand a chance. He was my first Doctor, and so enthralled was I by him that, when I realized that “regeneration” meant that someone entirely different would now be the Doctor, I completely lost interest and didn’t watch the show again.

(I realize now what I missed in Peter Davison.)

When it was announced that in 2005 BBC was bringing Doctor Who back, I was still clinging to my “No Tom Baker? No thanks!” philosophy. Silly me.

I don’t know why I turned to the SciFi Channel (as it once was known, seems like forever ago) to catch a glimpse of what Doctor Who had become — probably someone told me I should watch it — but it was the second to the last episode of the first season (yes, the one with “Ladies. Your viewing figures just went up”) and two minutes of watching Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor was enough to erase nearly all memory of Tom Baker. (Please note: this is a recurring motif.)

And fortunately SciFi was/is in the habit of running marathons, so I was able to catch up completely on the first season before the final episode. It’s possibly because I mainlined it that it remains to date my favorite season, my favorite Doctor of the new series. But I think maybe that’s not all of it. Anyway, by popular demand (OK, three people. But that’s still like 25% of my readership, and I want it to be known that I do take requests), I’m going to start writing about the new Doctor Who series starting from the beginning: with “Rose.”

It starts on Earth, in London, present day. We meet Rose first. No idea who she is, but she’s got a mom, a decent enough boyfriend, and a mundane job at a shop. Totally ordinary; she could be anybody. (Sidenote: she’s in sweats at work? At a department store? Really?) And then by chance she has to drop off the lottery money to Wilson, the store’s chief electrician who works in the basement, but he’s not answering, so she explores through plastic sheeting (listen, one thing I’ve learned about Doctor Who is that when there’s plastic sheeting around, things are not going to go well.) and then the mannequins start moving. She’s trying to pass it off as a joke but as the mannequins advance, Rose is getting more and more freaked out, and then they have her up against a door and at the last minute, someone grabs her hand and tells her to RUN. And it’s the Doctor. I love that the Doctor’s first word of this brand new series is “RUN.”

He leads her to an elevator, plastic men in pursuit, and pulls off one of their arms as the elevator doors close on it. And here’s where Rose first makes an impression on the Doctor. She thinks it could be a student prank, because it’s so many people in one place and it’s so ridiculous. I don’t know if I buy that (Improv Everywhere notwithstanding), but the Doctor likes her logical, practical mind.

And then we get to my first favorite moment of the episode, and the main reason I can watch and re-watch this episode without getting tired of it:

Doctor: I’m the Doctor, by the way. What’s your name?
Rose: Rose.
Doctor: Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!

And that’s it. He’s the Doctor. He’s so completely the Doctor. Waving the bomb in a hearty fare-thee-well.

I also love the much quieter scene where they’re walking and talking and Rose is trying to get the Doctor to tell her everything but she’s not really ready to process it, and she stops and asks, “Who ARE you?” and the camera cuts to a shot of the Doctor with the TARDIS in the background — that’s just good work there. And he takes her hand again when he tells her that he can feel the Earth revolving. And he waves goodbye to her with the plastic arm, and then the Rose theme kicks in, and you know she is NOT about to let it go. Nope. She goes straight to the nearest Internet search engine (love that Mickey’s all “Do NOT read my emails!”) and narrows down her search parameters to “Doctor blue box” and finds Clive.

Clive (a LINDA precursor, if that idea was already in Russell T. Davies‘ mind) gives us the idea that the Doctor means death. When he’s around, bad things happen. But shouldn’t it be the other way around? While most of the episodes involve the Doctor showing up somewhere just in time to see something go horribly horribly wrong, the evidence Clive shows Rose — the Kennedy assassination, the Titanic, the sketch taken just before Krakatoa erupts — indicates that the Doctor appears to enjoy traveling through time to visit historical disasters. But not to change them. To . . . watch? That’s a little dark.

But then, that’s one of the main reasons why I love the show. Yes, it is silly, sometimes immeasurably so. Yes, it’s basically sci-fi lite despite the TARDIS and outer space and freaky-deaky aliens. Yes, a lot of the time the monsters/aliens aren’t particularly scary — and the Autons in this episode are one of the least threatening monsters to appear on the show. But there’s still something menacing going on. We get glimpses of that when the Doctor pleads with the Nestene Consciousness that he couldn’t save their planet, couldn’t save any of them. Suddenly we realize that there has been a war — when the Doctor referenced it earlier, he wasn’t speaking metaphorically — and he was on the front lines, and something horrible and tragic has happened. Despite this happening during the climax of the show, it’s a little moment, one I only caught on my first re-watch.

But then he’s also so spirited, joyful, spilling over with delight at the thought of potential danger. And his love for Earth and her inhabitants is infinite — rather inexplicably, perhaps undeservedly. But even so, he is not human, and doesn’t think like a human, and his long line of companions have always helped provide that necessary element. And no matter how you feel about Rose by the end of her run, you can’t deny that she’s very good at the feelings thing. She berates the Doctor for forgetting about Mickey, for not telling her about the possibility that he’d die. And it’s Rose that swings in and saves the day, ultimately, kicking the test tube of antiplastic into the Nestene Consciousness. And defiantly demands credit from the Doctor, which he willingly gives.

Earlier, when they’re running from Plastic Mickey, Rose gets her first glimpse of the TARDIS. She freaks, runs right out again (like you do), and then returns because she’s got nowhere else to run. “It’s bigger on the inside,” she stammers. “It’s alien.” Which means the Doctor is alien. He asks if that’s all right with her and she replies without hesitation: “yeah.” She’s still FREAKED the hell out, and she has a little breakdown — “culture shock,” the Doctor sympathizes — and then she’s more or less OK. Rose’s resilience, her ability to process things quickly — makes her an ideal companion.

So of course the Doctor invites her to join him, and it’s Mickey who grabs her like a little child, physically preventing her from leaving. (I’m sure I’m not alone in really disliking Mickey at the beginning of the series.) But Rose gets a second chance and in what is probably the episode’s cheesiest moment (which still works for me, gets me every time, makes my heart skip a little) we get a slow motion shot of Rose running into the TARDIS, that huge infectious smile on her face — in this moment I defy you not to love Rose with all of your being.

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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

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