Rose

Doctor Who made it's long-overdue return to our TV screens last night and it seems fair to suggest that Rose and the following twelve episodes constitute a real 'make or break' period in the show's history; should it flop here then it seems inconceivable that the BBC would later choose to resurrect it yet again.

What then should we make of Rose?

The opening title lacked a feel of grandeur; after a nine year absence I was hoping for something a little more impressive but it was reasonable enough. I still can't get used to the new logo however, it looks horribly amateurish. Moving onwards, the opening few minutes were fairly impressive; Rose becomes trapped in the basement with a room full of Autons and this was just the start the series needed - something to get viewers hooked from the start. The tension was destroyed somewhat by the already well-documented technical problems involving Graham Norton, however I'm sorry to say that he wasn't the real culprit in destroying any menace that the planned Auton invasion carried...

The Doctor bursts onto the scene to save Rose and it's certainly a dramatic first appearance; after maniacally telling Rose to 'run for her life' he then proceeds to blow up the entire department store. He later catches up with Rose again in a slightly surreal scene which involves him peering through the catflap. At this stage, the undertones of a very zany type of humour really rise to prominence and proceed to manifest themselves far too regularly throughout the rest of the episode. The Doctor is propositioned by Rose's mother; to the best of my knowledge the series had managed to go the previous 160 serials without something like this and it feels alarmingly out of place - as if the show feels the need to keep itself 'fresh' or 'relevant'. This certainly isn't the way to go about it; it came across as completely contrived and an attempt at cheap humour. Perhaps it wouldn't have felt so ludicrous if it was portrayed with a little more subtlety and not inside the first ten minutes of a new show but unfortunately it stood out like a sore thumb.

Things generally took a turn from the worse from here on in. We have an interesting discussion between the Doctor and Rose regarding the spinning of the Earth and this hints at a darker, more serious side to the Doctor but there is painfully little else in the next twenty minutes or so to support this proposition. What we're presented with instead is an alarmingly arrogant, self-righteous Time Lord who appears to have lost any sort of fond regard for the human species (the dislike shown here is much stronger than any previous incarnations have shown) and who isincapable of sustaining any real prolonged conversation with his companion; we instead have some throwaway dialogue that consists of Rose asking questions and the Doctor giving fairly banal responses.

Some of the problems with this episode can be overlooked as perhaps being atypical of the season - how many times will the team need to try and create a scene with a wheelie bin swallowing a human being, for instance? But other criticisms are more worrying - the completely overworked humour being a prime example: why do we need to see the wheelie bin burp afterwards? Why do we need to see the Auton Mickey swerve from side to side; it's already obvious that he's not the genuine article. There's a strong contrast here between the constant humour which really erodes away all menace from the Auton threat (compare auton Mickey with Scobie's Auton duplicate in Spearhead from Space) and humour which exists to just break up the seriousness of the situation. 

The new series risks making the mistakes already made by Doctor Who and other sci-fi shows in the past. We've seen a very confident/arrogant Doctor with a very dismissive attitude to the human species and a proposensity for zany, slapstick humour. The last Doctor who made such an immediate impact, for better or worse, was Colin Baker and we've seen the impact that such a dramatic departure from previous norms can have. Much more needs to be made of the Doctor's darker side and the humour needs to be toned down or the series will lose it's 'hide behind the sofa' appeal - the very thing that drew children into it back in 1963. 

Perhaps the biggest problem with Rose however is not the portrayal of the Doctor, which may evolve over time, but the limitations of the 45 minute format; we were presented with a very rushed serial that gave little to no explanation of the Auton threat or the antiplastic used to counter it. Despite the short duration however, the scenes involving the Doctor being held captive still somehow managed to feel overblown. While future serials won't need to introduce new characters, Rose didn't feel like 5/10 minutes short of being a complete story - it felt some way off.

As it stands, I believe the show is quite firmly in the last chance saloon and the Doctor may have encountered a threat that even he cannot prevail over. The possibility that there might be no more incarnations of the Doctor seems feasible if the problems of slapstick humour, a dislikeable Doctor and rushed feel are all not addressed quickly.