The End Of The World

What’s certain by this stage is that Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who is intended for the Harry Potter generation. What with the wheelie bin episode last week, and the campy munchkin theme that plays over our introduction to the ‘little blue men’, it’s evident that this is a universe that has aspirations towards being cute as well as scary, funny, dramatic and all those other buzzwords we’ve been fed in recent months. Of course, Harry Potter is all of these things, but what the music seems to be saying is, ‘Yeah, yeah, there’s blue men in it – it’s science fiction – but Harry Potter’s a bit silly too, and you like that, don’t you? Go on, it’s ironic. They’re cute!’ Doctor Who isn’t really about irony. It’s about wit, and the music has none. It shouldn’t dominate and intrude like this.

Perhaps we can just ‘blame’ Murray Gold for the score, and move on, because ‘The End of the World’ had much to recommend.

The Doctor, I’m starting to realise, has problems. I love those old articles in Doctor Who Magazine where each Doctor gets a bit of amateur psychoanalysis. Pertwee, we find, is going through a mid-life crisis. Tom is actually mad, and tells lies. Davison is an old man in a young man’s body, hence his difficulties at being ‘the Doctor’. With Eccleston, it’s clear something’s gone terribly wrong. He shouts at Rose when she asks about his past, and has no compassion for the soon-to-explode Cassandra. It seems he’s trying hard to become what the Doctor he once was, but his past – the war – makes this near-impossible. He’s the last Time Lord now (perhaps with some exceptions), and he’s got nothing to rebel against. This is the loneliest we’ve ever seen him, and his attitude’s starting to undercut the flighty stories he’s strolling through. He’s also the most human Doctor we’ve had.

It’s only the second episode, and Rose is already my favourite character. It’s such a surprising performance from Billie Piper, full of wonderful choices that seem at once to break the rules and to be genuinely instinctive. Either Russell T Davies has been highly specific in his scripts, or she’s a great actress. I’m surprising myself here, and I was one of her defenders. Rose doesn’t know what she wants, but she’s the first companion to really notice this, and actually have an attitude to the universe that’s believably ambiguous.

The story this week was almost as slight as last time, but the jokes were (mostly) good ones, and the characters didn’t suffer too badly from the inevitable economy of the writing. The Moxx of Balhoon was fantastically irrelevant, but at least he was an interesting colour, since colour was the only real purpose of most of the creatures on Platform One. The ‘moments of tension’, like last week, were somewhat forced and unsubtle, but they made character stuff possible, and gave it some sense of importance. It’s like he’s in communion with the Holy Spirit when the Doctor steps through the third fan, but it’s probably that he has some psychic connection with time, partially lost with Gallifrey. Euros Lynn handles this beautifully; it would have been less good with Keith Boak’s frenetic sound-and-fury approach to direction last week.

Moral problems and emotional issues that look set to stretch forward into the rest of the series are already starting to creep in, but for the most part ‘The End of the World’ was crazy fun, with some spectacular special effects. The death of the Earth even had some drama invested in its visuals. The story was almost weird, if not for the almost-irritating score. And I suspect only Russell T Davies could get away with ending the world to the sound of Britney Spears. I wouldn’t be anywhere else.