The End Of The World

After the promising, but uneven 'Rose' I was hoping that 'The End of the World' would settle down and get onto more even keel. The trailer looked good, with Christopher Eccleston much less manic and more Doctor like than in the first episode. What we got was something even better than I could have imagined.

The plot was simple but effective, with the Doctor and Rose journeying to the Year 5 Billion to a space station where the galactic elite are gathering to witness the end of the world. Of course nothing is that simple and the Doctor and Rose are soon mixed up in a murderous plot that threatens them all. But that's not the meat of the episode. The real meat is of course is around the mystery of the Doctor.

The major revelation of the episode is the Doctor is now the 'last' of the Time Lords. The rest and Gallifrey having been destroyed by war, sometime in the Doctor's recent past. The evasiveness of the Doctor when Rose asks where he came from hints at something, a later conversation with one of the alien guests hints that its something bad and in the final scene the Doctor reveals to Rose what happen and its not good. All of these scenes are played wonderfully by Christopher Eccleston, from the grief to the melancholy, he nails it perfectly.

It's also clear that Eccleston could potentially be the best Doctor so far. He once again successfully integrates elements from the previous incarnations, while charting his own course. In the final scene where he utters that "everything has its time and everything dies", you could almost hear the words being uttered by Sylvester McCoy's Doctor in some New Adventure. It's a performance of genius and a shame that he won't be doing more after this season (and the rumored special).

But the real genius is that of Russell T Davies. It's now clear that his plan for reinventing Who is to take the elements from the old series that worked, clean them up for a new audience, while in the process jettisoning the festering swamp of continuity of that dogged the latter years. By getting rid of Gallifrey, he neatly and quickly gets rid of some of the worst of the baggage, gives the Doctor a new motive for traveling and taking a companion, while setting up some mystery for future episodes to explore. I'm sure that at some point we'll find out who took out Gallifrey (my money would be on the Daleks), but for now its a nice juicy dangler.

Of course nothing is perfect. As with the first episode Ecleston sometime plays the humor a little to clumsy, and can be a bit too manic at times. He needs to settle down a little and play it more subtly. Also I'm not sure that 45 minutes is the right length for the series. An extra 5 minutes would give a little room to breath as everything is a little breakneck when crammed into 45 minutes.

But these are all things that can be worked on. It's clear from this episode that the Doctor is well and truly back, and lets hope that the series can maintain this level of quality.

(ps: When I say the 'last' I mean until the Master shows up again)