Rose

The supreme rule of all great drama is "start small and build." The more fantastic and convention-breaking the drama, the more important I believe this rule is. If you're going to, for example, write a story about a girl being whisked by a tornado into a bonkers fantasy over-the-rainbow land, you must start out with her being very ordinary (yet appealing) and with her in her hum-drum ordinary world, or the general audience is never going to swallow the enormous gobstopper you've got coming for them later on. The previous attempt to restart "Doctor Who" in 1996 got this very muddled. I'm extremely happy to see that in 2005, the lesson has been learned and the new attempt is off to a great start.

In "Rose," what we have in many ways is a condensed and extremely updated version of "The Wizard of Oz," with Rose herself in the Dorothy role, and the Doctor of course being the Wizard figure (except he's authentic, unlike the Oz Wizard). "Oz" itself we haven't really got to yet... that yellow brick time vortex is yet to be travelled, and will no doubt be the point of the 12 episodes which will follow, but some of Oz's denizens did pay Rose and the Doctor a call in the familiar form (well, familiar to "Doctor Who" fans) of the Nestenes and their Autons, making at least their third attempt to take over the Earth.

If you see what the story's doing, introducing everyone to Rose, the Doctor, the TARDIS, and the sort of things the Doctor gets mixed up in, then yes, the story is predictable and may even seem thin. This is especially true if we make the mistake of comparing this story to the complexities of the stories we've been used to in the non-TV years from Big Finish, Virgin, or BBC Books. Those forms can all tell their stories in shorthand because their audience understands the code. This first paragraph of the new TV era has to go the long way around for the sake of the 10 million uninitiated who may (and did) watch.

And to that I say, "so what if it does?" Once in a while, I like to just stop and think about the entire basic concept of the show and revel in the majesty of its imagination, and the heights to which an author, a cast, a design team, and a director can leap to from this most powerful springboard of a format. We have an alien who looks like us but isn't us, who loves us and defends us and can sometimes hate us too, who can take one of us anywhere in the universe to any date there's ever been or ever will be, using the most fantastic and entertaining spaceship ever imagined. Isn't that enough right there? Maybe by episode 34 we might tire even of this, but this is _episode_one_. It's called "Doctor Who - Rose." It's job is to introduce both "Rose" and "Doctor Who" in a way that will keep loads of viewers watching and wanting to tune in again next week. Nothing more and nothing less. Oh, and it's only got 44 minutes or so to do it in.

In this job it succeeds brilliantly. It starts by simply showing us Rose, and within five minutes, Billie Piper's charm and acting chops have got step one nailed. She then bumps into some Oz-like elements in the form of a gang of Autons, and gets rescued in spectacular fashion by the Wizard - Doctor.

Ah, but we're not over the rainbow yet... this story pauses to let Rose and the viewer stop and think about it all while we see more of Rose's real life, namely her mother and boyfriend and home, and get to know her and how normal and nice she is some more, and we're also shown here a little of her stronger side when she clearly stands up on her own against her mother and boyfriend. Then along come Oz and the Wizard again, invading her home briefly, and getting her curiosity going. The rest of the story continues in a similar pattern, of her moving two steps down the yellow brick road in curiosity, a step back in fear, another step forward in bravery and another step more in curiosity, then another step back. For example, she goes to see Clive and starts to swallow what he tells her, until he says the word "alien" and then she pulls back. The two biggest forward-back-forward moves she does are when she first enters the TARDIS, goes back out and walks around it, then goes back inside again, and at the very end of the story when she at first turns the Doctor down on his offer to become his latest companion, then changes her mind when he gives her a second chance. This makes Rose into a perfect companion, and every inch the Dorothy figure this episode 1 needed. Billie Piper plays it all perfectly too, switching back and forth between fear for herself or for maybe-dead-real-Mickey to excitement and enthusiasm for the weird and wonderful things she's seeing without it ever looking jarring, illogical, or non-authentic.

Right, that's Dorothy down... what of the Wizard? So far, so good. Christopher Eccleston is doing what all the Doctors have done (and should do) and fusing the writing of the basic uber-intelligent, energetic, and curious Doctor coming from the writer's script with his own character traits, such as his speech patterns, jovial body language, and that goofy grin he loves to use. There are two moments in particular that marked out this new Doctor to me the most, one small and one BIG[tm]. The small one is during the bit where he is trying to leave Rose's life with the Auton arm and she's quizzing him on who he is, and after she asks "just the Doctor?" yet again, he quickly turns, flashes that grin, waves a hand at her high in the air and says, "Helllooo!" That's the sort of tangential humor I love to see in the Doctor. The BIG moment, as anyone who watched can probably guess, is when shortly after that he takes Rose's hand and talks to her about how he can feel the Earth turning and revolving around the sun and how at any moment we could all just fall off the planet. Both the writing and the performance fuse together flawlessly here and give us a verbal sense of the awe that a man like the Doctor must feel whenever he pauses while travelling and takes stock of the whole universe around him... and that we will hopefully get to see visually in future episodes. There is of course still a lot of room for more Doctor development, but again, this is only episode _one_, and that will all come when the time is right, I feel sure.

That leaves Oz, which consists of the TARDIS, the Nestene-Autons, and also the hints of an over-arching story arc and a backstory "war" that the Doctor says he fought in and which seems to have displaced the Nestenes. The TARDIS is so far handled very well, where they show us its basic abilities and properties and save its even more fantastic features for later. Again, they're starting small and building, and I can be patient. As for the Nestene-Autons... well, they're almost a sort of token villain here. We don't learn anything more about them than we did in their previous stories, and if anything, they seem to have regressed a bit in their tactics, being not able to make a very convincing Mickey replica, although to be fair, they did it very quickly and it was good enough to fool Rose, which is all it needed to do. They look, behave, and sound just as nasty as they did before, and the "mother" creature sure looks a lot better than the 1970 and 1971 ones did. The addition of child-sized Autons to their ranks was a great touch, as was the reuse of their classic sound effects, but I'm not sure they were directed all that well. They could've been much creepier than they turned out to be, and while I did find the comedy that they found in them to actually be funny, I think I prefer them when they're behaving more competently. They are not actually the point of this story of course... they're just there to be a "typical" foil to the Doctor's usual exploits, and in that they succeed just about well enough. (a bit like how the Cybermen, a Dalek, and a Yeti weren't the point in "The Five Doctors") That final element of the arc and the backstory gave us just enough to whet our appetites for future episodes, and was the perfect dash of salt for this great recipe of a show.

Story and acting-wise then I was very pleased, and pleased enough with the direction. Keith Boak seems to have got the most important things right (the Doctor, Rose, the guest cast, and the London setting), and what he got wrong (the Autons, and one or two other small missteps) wasn't all that wrong. Where I noticed his presence the most was in the pacing of it all, especially the opening act, and how much faster it was certainly than the older stories and even than other shows made today. A steady diet of this probably wouldn't be good for the whole series, but the way it was used here was very good I thought, and key in grabbing and holding that new audience's attention I'm sure.

The overall look of the finished show was better than I expected and better than the little bits I'd seen earlier on... it's very vibrant and bright and quite film-like looking, but I do still regret the decision not to shoot on either a film format or an HD-ready digital video format as this means the series' format is going to be out of date in just a few years time. I didn't mind the "techno" nature of the incidental music, just the choice of where to put it sometimes and the choice of the effect that was being gone for, which may have been out of Murray Gold's hands and in Keith Boak's. One moment in particular I didn't care for was when Rose is creeping in the cellar and the Autons are starting to awake and there's suddenly a string movement put in as though Julie Andrews is about to come bounding in with "The Sound of Music". It defused the tension instead of increasing it. (Graham Norton didn't help here either of course!) What of the much-talked-about CGI? I found it a lot more convincing with the full filmizing effect on this finished version than I did on some poorer-converted clips I saw before this, and really rather impressive in places, with the one glaring exception of the wheely-bin scene. The bit where Mickey first puts his hands on it and they stick is OK... it's what follows when the whole bin starts to undulate and open its "mouth" that looks completely unreal and not at all convincing. I've no idea what such a thing really would look like, but I can tell it wouldn't look like this... there's a sort of cartoon-like sheen to the bin at this point that completely sets it at odds with the rest of the image here. Everything else looked fine, especially the explosions (some of which were done with models I'm told... always a good move in my book), and I do want to save a special mention for the new way in which the TARDIS materializes and dematerializes, with its solidity pulsing back and forth along with the lamp on the top of the police box. Top marks also for taking the trouble to getting the sound effects exactly right and using the remastered versions provided by Mark Ayres on the Radiophonic Workshop CDs. I should also mention what I think of Murray Gold's arrangement of the theme music.... I very much like this approach he's taken, of mixing the original Delia Derbyshire-generated swooping sounds with instrumental ones in the gaps between. It's a little-remembered fact that this was in fact Ron Grainer's original intention with the original music... that Derbyshire would create these sounds that he'd then put real instruments behind them, which he abandoned when he heard the finished product she'd created, but it's nice to hear that approach actually taken and used here. I have to deduct lots of points though for his not including the "b" section/middle-8 section of the theme, which is my favorite part. I can only hope that it might turn up on a future episode (as it sometimes did in the original series... sometimes it would pop up and sometimes it wouldn't be there) or at the very least on a commercial CD release.

Scale of 1 to 10 for "Rose"... 8. Exactly what we needed, plus a bit more besides... I wouldn't say perfect, but in all the important ways, this was exactly what episode one of this new series should be. Next stop... the emerald city at the end of the world ?