Aliens of London / World War 3

 

Aired on 16th April 2005 and 23rd April 2005

Written by Russell T Davies

Produced by Phil Collinson

Directed by Keith Boak

Synopsis

Coming back from their adventures, Rose is mistakenly returned home after 12 months away. In that time, her mum, Jackie, has mounted a full campaign to find her and vilified Mickey as someone who abducted her.

For a breather from the stress, the Doctor and Rose head on up to the roof of her apartment block. As they discuss their next move and the fact that nobody would believe where they'd been if they told the truth, a giant space ship zooms overhead, crashes through Big Ben and lands in the Thames.

The Doctor is fascinated with the spectacle and intends to keep out of this and watch from the side lines. As Rose's family still hark on about how she was missing, the Doctor studies the TV. It turns out the Prime Minister is missing and unusually low ranking people are being called to Downing Street.

The Doctor eventually leaves the party to get a good look at the alien that's crashed. He takes the TARDIS and lands in the mortuary. He stumbles into armed guards but thanks to his past with UNIT, he is able to get them onside quickly,  when the "alien" returns to life. It harasses the coroner but the Doctor discovers it's just a normal pig that's been augmented and bundled onto the ship. The UNIT soldiers kill it so he can't learn any more. 

He does however discover that the ship came from earth, turned around in orbit and dropped back down again. This means the crash was orchestrated.  

The Doctor returns to Rose who has meanwhile met up with Mickey, who in turn has frightened Jackie so much with stories of the Doctor that she's called the Police about him. The Doctor and co. remark that putting the world on red alert is a funny way of invading the planet. 

Inside number 10, these unimportant people are effectively given the emergency protocols in absence of the Prime Minister and head off for a secret meeting in the cabinet room. A plucky back-bencher MP Harriet Jones tries to see them (as her appointment with the PM is understandably not going to happen) but they thwart her attempts. She tries to sneak into the cabinet room to leave her agenda there and discovers the three main people involved are actually aliens using compression fields - a piece of technology that allows them to hide inside the skin of a human. The gas exchange related to this causes them to fart a lot however.

Because of Jackie's call. UNIT pick up on the Doctor and the three politicians are told about it. They summon every leading scientist to number 10 for an emergency conference.

The Doctor is caught by the Police as they go to get a look at the ship, and he and Rose are taken to Downing Street whilst Jackie and Mickey are kept at home for questioning. Once at number 10, Rose meets Harriet Jones who takes her off when she is refused entry into the conference. Harriet begins to tell Rose what she's seen. The Doctor meanwhile is taken inside the meeting room.

Back at Rose's house, the Chief Constable turns up to question Jackie, but it turns out he's one of the aliens. As Jackie is confronted by the towering monster (as it sheds it's human skin), the Doctor is electrocuted by the fake passes the trio of politicians gave them. One of the trio takes their skin off to reveal a huge green alien.  In turn, Harriet and Rose are confronted by Margaret Blaine, the female politician in the trio. She also sheds her human skin and prepares to attack.

Luckily, the Doctor manages to rip the ID badge off himself and hit the giant monster with it, causing a linked feedback through all the aliens and paralysing them, allowing Harriet and Rose to escape and Mickey to enter and save Jackie. 

The Doctor grabs the Police team and rushes back to the cabinet room, but the aliens have gotten back into their human skin and bluff their way out of it, saying the Doctor just killed the main scientists. He manages to get away by diving into a lift. The aliens order the Police to keep out of the upstairs and then they go hunting for the Doctor and co. themselves. They find Harriet and Rose but the Doctor saves them with a distraction, long enough to get to the cabinet rooms where there's a bomb proof liner to it.

Before he closes the room off, he gets the trio to admit that they are the Slitheen, a family, not a race of aliens who are here on Earth for business. 

With the bomb doors closed, the Doctor is isolated, so the Slitheen are happy with that. They call the rest of their family to them and prepare for the end of their plans.

In the room, the Doctor, Rose and Harriet find he Prime Minister's body. It's not been used as a Slitheen suit because he was too small.  

Rose asks if the emergency protocols say anything about a nuclear strike. Harriet Jones explains that the UN have to pass a vote to use them. 

Mickey gets in touch via the phone and the Doctor instructs him through the UNIT website. He finds out that the ship is pulsating an encrypted signal into space.  He doesn't get to fully decipher it then though, as the Police Inspector turns up and starts to attack. 

Rose frantically asks the Doctor to help save her mum. The Doctor takes all the information they know about the Slitheen and narrows their origin down to a planet known as Raxacoricofallapatorius.  He knows from this that their bodies will be made up of calcium and orders Jackie and Mickey to go into the kitchen and find anything with vinegar in it. They get a small bowl of it together and as the Slitheen bursts through the door, they throw the vinegar at it which kills it.

Now he can think the Doctor figures out that the Slitheen want the UN to launch a nuclear strike against others. They want World War 3 so that the earth is reduced to radioactive waste and the Slitheen can sell chunks of it off to intergalactic aliens as fuel. The signal pulsing into space is an advert.

Stuck in the room, the group despair. The Doctor says there's something he can do, but he doesn't like it because he could save the world but kill Rose doing it. Jackie protests, but Rose asks him to go ahead, and Harriet Jones MP for Flydale North, the only MP in attendance orders the Doctor to take action.

The Doctor with the help of Mickey, takes control of a Royal Navy submarine and launches a missile at 10 Downing Street. Because of the blast room, Harriet, Rose and the Doctor survive it, but the Slitheen are all blown up. 

In the aftermath, the Doctor realises that he does in fact know Harriet Jones by name. She will go on to become Prime Minister.

Rose goes home whilst the Doctor cancels the Slitheen advert. Jackie tries to be reasonable and invites the Doctor for tea. Rose passes the invite on, but the Doctor refuses, saying he's got a universe to see and gives Rose an ultimatum. She packs much to Jackie's upset and they walk down to the TARDIS.

Mickey has a quiet word with the Doctor and says the TARDIS travels isn't for him. The Doctor and Rose wave goodbye and say they'll be arriving back a few seconds after they've left and for Jackie not to worry. As the TARDIS fades however, Jackie waits a full minute in the quiet night before she turns solemnly around and goes home.

Trivia

• Interesting enough, this is the first story since Invasion of the Dinosaurs where an episode shares a different name

• The Police poster reveals more details about Rose - she lives on the Powel estate, and is 19yrs old

• The Prime Minister in this story was meant to be a Tony Blair lookalike, but the reality was disappointing so they didn't use many shots of him

• According to Russel T Davies, the episodes were meant to take place roughly a year ahead of when they were released, this would continue until the start of series 5.

• This is the last time sadly that UNIT will stand for United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. Apparently the real UN decided after all this time to have a problem, so the name would have to be changed

The Review

There's somewhat of a contradictory energy to these particular episodes. On the one hand, this is an amazing attempt to break new ground with Doctor Who and show us the impact of what happens to those left behind when a companion travels with the Doctor. It's heartfelt and emotional and works brilliantly. It also does something else - it boldly tries to tackle the touchy subject of aliens overtly showing themselves to us mere mortals. It's somewhat of an unspoken rule that the aliens won't be regarded again, so this is a huge commitment. Finally, we get the concept of skin riding aliens and the little used twist of them being business people. All of this is worthy of great praise...then we get the Slitheen.

I don't know what the designers were thinking about when they created these aliens but scary they are not. They look about as effective as anything from Warriors of the Deep and their faces are more like cute babies than aliens. Their CGI movement redeems them somewhat but they are disappointing.

Ultimately, these two episodes are definitely worth a watch but you take the good with the bad, and for that reason, I can't think why anyone would watch these more than once in a blue moon.

Rating

6 out of 10

Re-Watchability Factor

4 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• Rose (Doctor Who, Series 1)

• The Christmas Invasion (Doctor Who, Series 1 Christmas Special)

• The Sontaran Stratagem (Doctor Who, Series 4)

The Unquiet Dead

 

Aired on 9th April 2005

Written by Mark Gatiss

Produced by Phil Collinson

Directed by Euros Lyn

Synopsis

Victorian Cardiff - 1869.  In the Undertakers of Sneed and Company, an old lady who is supposed to be dead happens to re-animate with a strange blue ghostly light, kills her son and escapes the funeral home. The Undertaker calls for his servant girl, Gwyneth and moans "not again".

The Doctor, having shown Rose the far future decides to take her to the past. He tries to get her to Naples on Christmas Eve 1860, but instead she ends up in Cardiff 1869. He encourages her to change into period clothing and remarks that she looks "beautiful". He takes her off into the streets to explore. 

It's not long before the pair find people screaming. The source is a local theatre where none other than Charles Dickens is performing his tale "A Christmas Carol". It is here that the corpse of the old woman has gone. 

Not far behind them, Mr Sneed and Gwyneth turn up to grab the old woman and bring her quietly back. Rose gets too involved and panicking, Sneed chloroforms her and bundles her back to the morgue.

The Doctor hijacks a lift from a stupefied Charles Dickens' coach and off they go to find the old woman and Rose. Dickens is angry and confused but soon mellows when the Doctor tells him how brilliant he is.

Rose meanwhile wakes up in the morgue to find the old woman and now her dead son have both risen and are approaching her. 

The Doctor turns up with Charles and they barge past Sneed and Gwyneth to find the corpses risen. They speak of a need to "pity the Gelth" and leave the bodies, going into the gas lamps around the room.

The group all sit down and Sneed explains that the house has always been reported as haunted which is good for his business. The Doctor explains that this haunting is actually from the house being built upon a crack in time and space called the rift. These beings are actually aliens from another dimension. Charles cannot accept this and storms off.

After tea, Rose speaks to Gwyneth who reveals she is gifted with the "sight". She is an orphan who Sneed took in and has grown up around these strange on-goings. She knows somehow that Rose is from the future and exclaims she can see her feelings, remarking about the "big bad wolf". The Doctor, catching this, asks Gwyneth to help him contact them through a séance. 

The group all sit round and contact the Gelth. It's not long before they manifest through Gwyneth.

They explain they are a dying race - their bodies were destroyed in the last great time war and they need help to open the rift. They request the use of the dead bodies around them so they can embody the physical realm again. Rose is adamant that's wrong but the Doctor is stubborn and says he's helping save a race from extinction and using the bodies is fine. Rose protests but Gwyneth counts these things as her angels and vows to help them.

Gwyneth stands in the archway of the morgue and contacts the Gelth with her mind. They come to her and begin opening the rift. 

All of a sudden, they change from blue spectral flame to a bright orange demonic fire. They claim they number a few billion and are coming to take over the universe.

Sneed tries to stop Gwyneth but is killed by having his neck snapped. The ghosts begin to inhabit bodies and the dead begin to rise and come after them all, backing the Doctor and Rose into a corner cell. Dickens meanwhile flees in terror and incomprehension.

The Doctor apologises to Rose as the dead claw at them, and laments that after all he's seen, he's going to die in a basement in Cardiff.

Dickens outside, sees the gas lights flicker and it inspires him to have a solution. He returns to the house and turns up all the gas, filling the room with it. The Doctor catches on, telling Rose that the influx of gas will draw the Gelth out of the bodies into the air.  This is exactly what happens and together they all run out.

The Doctor hesitates and checks Gwyneth before going with him. He strikes a match and the undertakers explodes, destroying the rift opening and the bodies inside. Rose is sad that Gwyneth died inside there, but the Doctor sadly states that she died the second she opened the rift - he felt her pulse and she was gone.

Together, the Doctor, Rose and Charles Dickens walk to the TARDIS. The latter is cured of his depression and wants to go on to write again. He thanks them both and is flummoxed at them entering the Doctor's cupboard. 

He is however amazed that the thing disappears in front of his eyes.

Onboard, Rose asks the Doctor if he's concerned that Dickens will tell people, but he isn't - the following year is the year Dickens dies. He is if anything happy that he managed to inspire an old mind to new things. 

Trivia

• Originally, this story was to be somewhat darker and serious, hinting at a death of Gwyneth's younger brother but Russel T Davies asked for it to be lighter

• Although there's no official link between them, Eve Myles went on from Gwyneth to play Gwen Cooper in Torchwood. The Doctor and Rose when they meet her suggest an echo from the time rift imprinting itself on Gwen

• Mr Sneed was originally meant to be a younger character, and David Tenant was considered for the part. Luckily, that changed.

• Another change was the removal from the script a scene where the Doctor takes Rose to a devastated 2005 to show her the timeline can be re-written as a cause of their interference, just like Pyramids of Mars. It was felt that this drew too much away from the story though so it was left out

• Simon Callow is somewhat of a Dickens expert. He has played him many times on TV, has written about him and performed as him on stage. He was the perfect choice to play him in this episode.

• The mortuary is in Llandaff, which is both the area of Cardiff where the Doctor Who production offices were based, and the birthplace of Terry Nation.

The Review

This episode as with Rose, shows the true power behind the new series of Doctor Who. As this blog will show, I think there's nothing wrong with old Doctor Who, but the core beliefs and turmoil of this Doctor are all laid to bare within the story.  

The Victorian Séance and obsession with the occult are easy strings to pluck for a compelling story, and both are used to great effect to create not only a historic story, but an attempt to make a scary one too. This fits right in there with the golden age of Doctor Who with the Talons of Weng Chiang and Horror of Fang Rock, but the only difference is that where in the classic stories, the Doctor is perhaps more willing to consider (and therefore play up to the audience) the prospect of a supernatural mystery, here the Doctor from the start is confident of alien involvement. Whilst this could dampen the story, instead, the team inject an ongoing mystery into the mix to hint at a huge amount of trauma that the Doctor is undergoing.  

If I was to say anything wrong with this story, it would be that the Doctor selectively doesn't worry and is sure about Dickens keeping to his timeline but similarly seems to think that everything will work out fine in bringing over the Gelth when there's clearly no re-animated corpses in 2005. This can be put down to his guilt and shame over the Time War resulting in wishful thinking, so there's some leeway that needs to be granted.

Overall, this story after Rose is the definite point of call for the future Doctor Who stories- a must see and a pleasure to go through, told with compassion and traditional horror values.   

Rating

10 out of 10!

Re-Watchability Factor

9 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Faceless Ones 

• Talons of Weng Chiang

• The Horror of Fang Rock

• Doomsday (Doctor Who, Series 2)

• The Next Doctor (Doctor Who, The Specials)

• The Snowman (Doctor Who, Series 6)

• The Crimson Horror (Doctor Who, Series 6)

The End of the World

 

Aired on 2nd April 2005

Written by Russel T. Davies

Produced by Phil Collinson

Directed by Euron Lyn

Synopsis

To impress Rose, the Doctor takes her five billion years into the future to see the sun expand and swallow the Earth. They arrive on an orbiting space station. 

Rose is concerned about the planet, but the Doctor reassures her that all the humans have left it so it's ok for it to die, in fact, the station is hosting a party of the rich and influential who have all come to see it sent off.   

A blue skinned steward turns up and is angered because the Doctor and Rose are apparently gate crashing, but the Doctor flashes a bit of "psychic paper" at him and convinces the steward that it's his invitation.

Rose and the Doctor go and meet the other guests including the Moxx of Balhoon, the Face of Boe, living trees from the Forest of Cheem (their leader being called Jabe), Adherents of the Repeated Meme..

 and the last human - lady Casandra O'Brien.  

The lady is quite unusual as she's nothing more than stretched skin over a frame with a brain in a jar.

Rose is a bit overwhelmed and runs off. As she's out in the corridors she meets a janitor who is investigating a blockage. She's kind to her, but goes off to wander the station.  When she's gone, the janitor finds a host of mechanical spiders that attack her and drag her into the air vents.

The Doctor finds Rose and calms her down. He modifies her phone so she can call home whenever she wants. He is talking with her when the station shudders. He goes off to investigate, meeting Jabe who offers to accompany him.

Elsewhere, the panicking steward is killed by the same spiders who come out of the vent and lower the sun protection visors to his room.

Whilst travelling through the bowels of the station, Jabe says she's astonished to see a Time Lord alive, referring to something bad that's happened. The Doctor is moved to tears but blocks the emotion and continues, accepting her condolences. Not long after they capture one of the spiders. 

Rose likewise meets with Cassandra, but is disgusted by her arrogance so insults her and tries to leave, but is knocked unconscious by the brotherhood of the Meme. She wakes up in a viewing room with the sun visors going down. 

She screams for help and the Doctor hears her, rescuing her just in time.

They go back to the main hall and the Doctor releases the spider, telling it to go back to it's master. The thing goes to the Adherents of the Repeated meme, but the Doctor says that the Meme is just a repeated idea and reveals that the Adherents are all in fact robots which he summarily de-activates.  He instructs the spider to go to it's real master and it goes to Casandra.

Casandra, holding the other guests off with her assistants "acid" shooting moisturising guns, she explains that her cosmetic operations cost a fortune so she hatched a plan to fake being held hostage and ransom some money. Now with that foiled, she opts to teleport away whilst letting the other guests burn.

With the station about to fail and they all get burned to a crisp, the Doctor goes with Jabe to reset the computer terminals.  He has to go through some whirling fans. He could never do it, but Jabe elects to hold down a button that will slow the fans, despite the rising heat burning her to death. He honours her sacrifice and makes it through the fans to reset the computers and saves the station.

Returning to the hall, the Doctor finds a way to bring Casandra back and the heat from the air stretches her skin to the point where she ruptures and rips herself apart.

Going back to the TARDIS, Rose comments that she's sad nobody watched the Earth die. The Doctor reveals his home planet was destroyed also in a war, and that he's the last of the Time Lords.  They cheer each other up and return to the console room, ready for another adventure.

Trivia

• This episode has the most visual effects shots to date. It stands at a whopping 205 effects, where for comparison, Gladiator only had 100!  Understandably, most of the budget went on this, and Russell T. Davies said it's unlikely to be beaten in that regard

• Davies said he was inspired to write Casandra from watching all the skinny actresses attend the academy awards

• in the scripts, the janitor, Raffalo gets a more grizzly death and Rose phones her mum as she's about to be burned to a crisp as the visor lowers

• This is the first instances of the series aspects - Bad Wolf and the Great Time War. they go on to become major plot points

• This is also the first instance of the use for Psychic paper. Obviously a plot device to get things going and not bog down in proving credentials

The Review

After a solid start, it's difficult to follow up. Russel T. Davies manages it though with a logical progression in showing Rose the absolute possibilities of where they can go. 

The story is equal parts fun and intelligent, focussing on the ridiculousness of the aliens, just as much as it does with the reality of Rose's difficulty in coming to terms with the loss of the Earth and the death of her loved ones, as well as the apparent mangled corruption of what's left of her race. 

I have special love for the steward, and the Moxx of Balhoon who seems to come straight out of Hitchhikers with his gift of bodily saliva!

This was ambitious and at times feels grand in scope but it pulls it off very well, even managing to stick in the fate of the Time Lords along the way. There are bits of this if there's any criticism that do tend to drag, with half an hour to kill before "Earth Death" and the bits where Rose is moping about do get a bit tedious. 

Overall, another solid effort and something that was a great follow up to the first episode. I can easily see why people would continue to watch, although for the more adult of us, some of the aliens did come across as a little childish and not as threatening as maybe we were hoping for. This would not get any better in the next few episodes of this season (see Aliens of London).

Rating

7 out of 10

Re-watchability Factor

6 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Carnival of Monsters

• Utopia

• Voyage of the Damned

• The Rings of Akhaten

Rose

 

Aired on 26th March 2005

Written by Russel T Davies

Produced by Phil Collinson

Directed by Keith Boak

Synopsis

Rose Tyler has the typical life of a teenager in London. She works in a department store, has a boyfriend called Mickey, and of course, plays the lottery.  She has to take the stores lottery money to the caretaker, Wilson, at the end of the shift.  However, what makes this day different to all the rest is the fact that Wilson can't be found. Instead, she's attacked by moving shop dummy's. 

The dummy's surround her, but she's rescued by a strange man who tells her to "run". 

They get to the lift and the man pulls off one of the dummy's arms as it reaches in to grab him. 

Rose passes the attack off as students which the man says is not the case, in fact tells her Wilson is dead. He passes Rose the arm, holds up a bomb, tells her he's going to destroy a relay beacon, introduces himself as The Doctor, then tells her to run for her life. Rose does as she's told and is shocked when the entire upper floor of the department store is blown up.

It seems Rose is in a flat with her mum, Jackie. Her mum fusses about the explosion, using it as an opportunity to try and get compensation. Mickey comes around and is worried, but Rose sends him off to watch the football, saying she's fine. She asks him to throw the plastic arm away, which he does on his way out.

The next morning however, the arm comes back, scuttling in through the cat flap.  The Doctor is not far behind it, tracking it's whereabouts. Rose passes him off as an inspector wanting to know about the explosion. As Rose is making tea, the arm attacks the Doctor, choking him. 

He disables it with his sonic screwdriver and then cheerily leaves.

Rose chases after him, demanding to know who he is. He warns her to forget him, but she won't accept it, so he tells her he's here to stop some living plastic from starting a war that would result in the destruction of the human race so they could have the planet. 

He then gets into a mysterious blue box and disappears. 

Intrigued, Rose goes to see Mickey and does some research on the internet, tracing the sightings of the Doctor. She finds an add from a man in London called Clive that seems to know a lot more. 

Rose and Mickey visit Clive (Mickey reluctantly waits in the car). Clive shows Rose examples of how the Doctor has been sited through time and says ominously that death follows him. 

Whilst Rose is inside, Mickey sees a moving bin and when he investigates it, it sticks to him and sucks him inside, creating a facsimile of him. 

Rose believes Clive is nuts and invites the fake Mickey to go and get some pizza. At the restaurant, Mickey questions Rose about where the Doctor is, but is acting very weird. The Doctor shows up and confronts the Auton Mickey. It's hands turn into slabs and it attacks, but the Doctor defeats it by pulling off it's head - a fact that horrifies Rose. They run off and lock the Auton behind a door but it begins to break it down. Rose wants to break a padlock on a gate and run for it, but the Doctor shows her to the blue box. 

Rose enters it and is astonished at the size of the inside. She questions him, finding out he is an alien, the box can move places and there's an alien race called the Nestene Consciousness controlling this plastic. 

The Doctor uses the head to trace the signal it's sending out but loses it just before finding the source as the head melts.

They get to the River Thames and look around for a large dish type transmitter - Rose works out that they're using the London Eye for this purpose. Together, they run across Westminster Bridge and find the Nestene's lair under the Thames.

Rose is relieved to find the real Mickey alive, but chained up down there. 

The Doctor meanwhile asks to parley under the terms of the Shadow Proclamation. The Nestene agrees, but soon becomes aggressive as it finds the TARDIS and uncovers the fact that the Doctor is a Time Lord. The Doctor is agitated and tries to apologise profusely as he's seized by the Autons, telling the Nestene that he's not like the others and he didn't destroy their planet.

The Auton's find a vial of anti-plastic in the Doctor's coat, but he assures them he wasn't going to use it. The Nestene doesn't believe him and prepares to kill him. It starts up invasion plans by awakening every mannequin in London that begin to rampage the public, harassing Jackie Tyler and unfortunately killing Clive in front of his own family.

Rose saves him by  swinging down on a chain and knocking the Auton's into the molten form of the Nestene, releasing the vial of anti-plastic onto it. The poison kills the Nestene and sets off a chain reaction. 

The Doctor ushers Rose and Mickey into the TARDIS and takes them away from the site, materialising into an alleyway. He offers Rose the chance to come with him, but not Mickey. 

Rose refuses at first, but finds it impossible to resist as the Dcotor says the TARDIS can also travel in time.

She kisses Mickey one final time, then races into the ship.

Trivia

• This is the first time in the new series we get to see the TARDIS interior - it's drastically different than previous incarnations and is referred to a the "coral desktop theme" by fans

• We see the Sonic Screwdriver re-introduced for the first time since The Visitation. It brings with it all the old problems, but it's a nice return

• This is one of the only episodes in the new series to feature the titles before the episode.  From this point on, there's a teaser opening sequence before them

• None other than Nicholas Briggs made his debut here as the voice of the Nestene Consciousness.  He would go on to be crowned as the definitive voice of the Daleks and the Cybermen, but this was far from his first involvement with the series.  Indeed, he had been one of the ones who led the charge in keeping the Doctor Who dream alive by making independent spin offs in the 90s and is a founding member of Big Finish audios.

•  This is also of course, the start of Russel T. Davies' tenure on the show as Producer.  He also wrote Doctor Who novels in the 90s and also made a children's show very much in the vein of Doctor Who called Dark Season. He in turn would pull in his fellow writers from Big Finish and Virgin books to write episodes

•  And of course, we need to mention Christopher Eccleston, who was chosen by Davies to take the Doctor in a whole new direction and have a fresh start. 

•  The original episode underran by some minutes, so they added the scene where the Doctor explains things to Rose whilst walking.

• The underground base of the Autons was actually a disused mill in Cardiff. It had to be cleaned out because it was so old, so scenes were shortened - if all had run to plan, we would have seen an additional Auton Mickey in that scene

The Review

And so, after a failed attempt at an American hybrid TV movie, a god-awful abomination combined with the set of Eastenders that I refuse to acknowledge (although John Nathan-Turner wanted it to have a proper production code to follow on from Survival and make it Canon), and one rather purposefully hilarious attempt for Red Nose Day, Doctor Who is finally back on British TV!

So, why did this one succeed where the others failed?  I think there's a lot of truth to the fact that this story picked up on the idea that you don't need an "origin" story to be successful on a first episode.  This one perfectly picks up on the Doctor's mystery and really manages to re-capture that fantastical element that hasn't been seen since the very first episode in 1963. It does this by showing us the Doctor popping in and out of Rose's life and giving him somewhat of a mystical James Bond persona. It makes us WANT to know more, and when she meets that bloke in his house and he says death follows this bloke she's met, it just adds even more to it.

This even goes into the TARDIS - measure it against the massive exposition we saw in the TV movie about it compared to the Ninth Doctor's rather clipped explanation of "disappears here, reappears there". It gives us just enough explanation to keep going and very effectively drip feeds us information if we're totally new to it, and allows pop culture to fill in the blanks for the rest of us.

The Autons are nice to see, but none of them are particularly scary or effective, they're there for that added bit of nostalgia, but at least they're relevant to the plot and their use of killing that bloke is a sledgehammer to us - showing there's a real threat and highlighting his words - it is dangerous to know the Doctor.

Micky, facsimile aside, is also great, and Billie Piper proves everyone wrong about her acting talent. Both characters have totally believable reactions and there's even bits of humour worked in.

All in all, the only thing to make this absolutely top notch would be to have cut down on the CGI with the wheelie bin and weird copy of Micky. The rest is bang on and a great start to the new series.

Rating

8 out of 10

Re-Watchability Factor

7 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• Spearhead from Space

• Terror of the Autons

• The TV Movie

• Love and Monsters

Ninth Doctor Episodes

 

Summary


Series One Episodes

Rose

The End of the World

The Unquiet Dead

Aliens of London / World War Three

Dalek

The Long Game

Father's Day

The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances

Boom Town

Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways

My Time with the Eighth Doctor

 

The TV Movie
By 1996 we were all begging for someone to have a go at reviving the show. When it was advertised as a special, nobody really knew what to expect, but we knew that it would probably be better funded, and something different to what had gone before. In the case of the movies, that's absolutely what we got, we just didn't know how different it would be from Doctor Who and how run of the mill it would end up being compared to shows like Buffy.

The saving grace of this attempt was that at least Producer, Phillip Segal had attempted to keep some of the stuff from the old show in there. The downside is that certainly at the beginning, he overplayed it, throwing in any old bits like the sonic screwdriver, and tons of the Prydonian symbol, as well as crowbarring in mention of the Daleks in the most stupidest place ever.

Once you get over the quite boring start and watch like 45 minutes of it, then it turns into something of a standard US romp which is watchable, but just doesn't make much in the way of sense at all.

Coming out of the show, McGann would have years of work ahead getting a good chance to play his version of the Doctor and that's about it.

Night of the Doctor 

Everyone was so excited about this as it dropped, which was exactly the point. The Production Team had used this webisode as a great bit of a marketing ploy for the upcoming Day of the Doctor feature. 

What a shame then that it's not really got much substance to it beyond the first 5 minutes or so. Obviously, they wouldn't have the budget to do anything massive, so we're left with conversations in a cave and on a spaceship, but still, little justification is given for anything here and the result of it is to massively undermine the future doctor's angst and what made them (the ninth doctor specifically) so great.

Beyond?

Okay, okay. I'm going to hold my hands up here and say that I have never read one of the BBC books with the Eighth Doctor, I've not read the comics, and I've only listened to one, maybe two of the audios.  I've never had the urge to to be frank.  However, that doesn't mean they're not good. Hailed by fans all around as great pieces of the universe and well worth checking out.

The comics even feature the first lesbian companion in the whole of the franchise.

The Doctor

There's a world of difference between the Doctor we see in the TV movie and the one in the Night of the Doctor.  This is clearly intentional because the ongoing Time War has sapped the child like joy out of him and turned him cynical and jaded over time. Because I haven't seen or heard any of the other stories, I can't tell you which, if any. is the personality he usually has. 

Out of the two however, the TV movie version clearly shines as the better, with more attraction to want to be around and promises of great adventures to be had. It is a shame there was not more from him but there is a vast catalogue to go at now if you don't mind making it up in your mind.

Favourite Moment

A bit like cheating, I know, but my actual favourite moment was seeing a lot more sensibly dressed McCoy on screen in a great, gothic style TARDIS.  It was intriguing to me and I was a little sad that we couldn't have actually had more adventures with this specific version of the Doctor if I'm honest.

Worst Moment

So many to choose from eh? I would think it's the over the top acting and terrible line from Eric Robert's version of the Master. "I always drezzz for the occasion".  Why?  You're not staying in that body are you?

Favourite Story

The TV Movie

Out of the two, it's got to be this hasn't it?  There's more that happens here because it's got a tremendously larger budget.

Worst Story

The TV Movie

This is also true because there are some god-damn awful conveniences in it such as the atomic clock, the overlooking of medical professionals to his two hearts, the fact that he's half human and his own race's technology only works with human input.  Awful details make this a far more tedious watch than it should have been

Favourite Companion

Grace

Out of the two, she was the more fleshed out....barely

Worst Companion

Chang Lee

An interesting start, but someone who's not even bothered when his mates are shot and killed, and who's gullable to fall for the Master's Schemes like that, and get 5 million dollars out of it. Pah!