The End Of The World

Reprinted from somewhere or other in the treasure trove of mid-seventies-to-mid-nineties fan opinion that is License Denied, there's an article by a fella named Thomas Noonan entitled 'Television, Technique and Convention.' Discussing attempts made by the production team of season 18 to move the show in a more cinematic direction, Noonan argues that 'Doctor Who is (...) essentially television, and television is a medium between stage-drama and film', and suggests that 'efforts to make the programme more like film (are) misguided.' 

1980 was a long time ago, wasn't it. I mean, Rose Tyler wouldn't even have been born then! 

Jump-cut to Doctor Who 2005. To episode two of the brand new season, 'The End of the World', to one of the most thoroughly entertaining forty-five minutes of television I've seen in absolutely ages. To the only show I can think of since Roseanne in its heyday that's had me doubled over with laughter one minute and fighting back a little tear the next. I mean, yeah, I'm used to Doctor Who being this wonderful ... but it's unexpectedly shocking to see television being this wonderful! 

It's been my opinion for a while now that Doctor Who doesn't really need TV. Certainly that's where it started, and certainly that's what Doctor Who was to me when I was a kid. But having drifted away from Who fandom around the age of twelve, returned to it around the age of twenty-two and discovered that it was still going in the form of books (and to a lesser extent audio plays) that could go places and do things that the TV show never could have done, I've always been perfectly satisfied with Doctor Who as the offscreeen 'cult' thing it's been these past fifteen years; the 'long wait' posited by the heroic slogan emblazoned on the homepage of this very site never actaully existed for me, because until The Announcement, I neither thought Who would actually find its way back to the small screen, or harboured any particular desire to see it do so. For those of us who are already fans, there's no shortage of new and old stories in various media, and that's always been enough for me. 

But what I overlooked there, and what Andrew Wixon rather wisely pointed out after I said something to this effect on the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, is that TV - in this banal, degraded stage of its history where a Channel 4 announcer can in all seriousness refer to a repeat of the first episode of Sex and the City as 'the dawn of a legend', and where bloody Ant and Dec can be considered a viable alternative to anything other than self immolation - really, really needs Doctor Who. 

(erm, those weren't Andrew's exact words, by the way) 

And what makes Doctor Who great television in 2005 is precisely that movement towards filmic technique Noonan was railing against all those years ago. Seems to me that in - as the sturdy old adage has it - trying to keep up with Star Wars, the show was moving along the right lines all along. Misjudged that one, Tommy! 

Mind you, how was he to know what TV audiences would stop accepting with the passage of time. That - for example - the idea of a science-fiction/adventure serial made on videotape would become unthinkable little more than a decade hence. It'd certainly be true to say that though the show was right to fumble in the direction of a more filmic style throughout the eighties, the fact that it needed to do so was symptomatic of a major loss of imagination on the part of audiences. But, you know, you can't control circumstances, only your reaction to them. 

It's my view that in the latter seasons of the show's 'classic' run, the Cartmel/McCoy years, the primary factor which made the show work, where it did work, was the direction. Not that there hadn't been a lot of great direction in earlier periods of the show, but by the late eighties it was no longer, for want of a better phrase, an optional extra; the halfway-house narrative between stage-drama and film was on the road to obsolecence. 

Come 2005, the residual 'stage play' element of the particular variety of television to which Classic Doctor Who (?) belonged has long since become obsolete. Or certainly appears to have done so. Noonan's hybrid style persists only in sitcom and soap opera, presumably because those formats have allegedly realistic bases, and believing that that a well-lit set is a living room doesn't amount to as great a leap of faith for a viewer as believing that this other well-lit set is a time/space machine, and that the man in the rubber suit coming through the door is an alien from another world. For the purposes of New Who, television has become a form comprised of the basic essence of the old episodic format, and the techniques of filmic storytelling. In fact, what with so many fantasy/SF movie franchises coming either in trilogies or with sequel-whoring non-endings, the only real differences between 'adventure' film and 'adventure' television seem to come down to running time and budget. 

'Forty-five minute stories' sounded short, didn't it. I suggested way back when while reviewing season 22 that if Who were on screen now it would be in the form of self-contained one-hour stories. But even to me, knocking another fifteen minutes off that seemed to be pushing it. Matthew Harris (another DWRG chappie, still at a time when this was all just speculation in our crazy minds!) looked back for precedent and found... The Awakening and The Sontaran Experiment. Somewhat lacking. 

What I think we underestimated is the extent to which the variety of 'filmic TV' to which Who now belongs is a different animal from old-school televised Who. And also, the amazing malleability of a format which we fans constantly praise as being able to do anything, and then constantly criticise for not doing the exact things that each individual one of us want it to. Myself included, I'm sure. 

Character-driven Doctor Who? That's something which has worried a few fans in the reviews I've read since the series commenced (for readers of the future, I'm writing this one between the broadcast of episodes 3 and 4!). Only a minority, I should point out. 

But, well, why not! 'Character-driven' was the way it was going when it was last on screen with Ace's hijack of season 26; it was a prime factor in the success of the New Adventures; it was the thinking behind the generally well-received 'Caught on Earth arc' in the EDAs. The very title of the first episode, Rose, was a pretty good indicator that the new show has a rather different emphasis than before (as Lawrence Miles pointed out, it's like imagining Terror of the Autons being called Jo) - but in Rose, because of having to get all the introductory I'm-the-Doctor, this is the TARDIS stuff out the way, the mixing of character-based story (bored shop assistant in a rut gets a chance to go off on a wonderful adventure with a bloke she obviously fancies) with Who's customary morality play plot (desperate alien invades Earth) unavoidably became unbalanced and the Nestene suplot - for that was what it was - ended up wafer thin and hackneyed. 

Introductions are difficult. In a way, The End of the World is (oh the irony) the real beginning of this series. Doctor Who as character-driven drama and moral drama at the same time, Doctor Who as television and film at the same time. And the amazing thing is it's done utterly perfectly straight from the off. 

On the, admittedly scant, evidence so far - and isn't fun to be reviewing a TV episode without the easy crutch of hindsight -, the storytelling focus of this new Who season is weighted more or less equally between rather slimmed down variations on the indispensable Doctor-defeating-bad-guys template, and a cumulative character drama that will, I'd imagine, become the story formed by the season as a whole. 

The Doctor-defeating-bad-guys story in this episode is a silly, camp whodunnit in space. And I have to say... it was utterly, stupendously fab! Much closer to the tone of season 17 than I'd ever dare hoped this new series would be in its initial run, and the Lady Cassandra is a wickedly funny villain who could've come right from the pen of Paul Magrs, but with a brilliantly understated sense of underlying pathos too - a cheap shot at the extremes of cosmetic surgery and at the same time a sad, stretched portrait of the lengths we'll go to to resist the brevity of our existence. 

And did I mention funny - I was chuckling throughout, even at those things that have elicited a tut from certain fans; I laughed at the iPod gag, at 'Talk to the face!', at the 'old Earth ballad', at 'the... er... human club!' Okay, the 'When I was a little boy' gag was stolen from The Simpsons. It was, nevertheless, a huge, huge relief to me to find they'd remembered to make this new series funny. 

Funny, but - and this is the main point of resemblance to the Williams era - not to an outrageous extent that pees up against the fourth wall, not in a way that undercuts the believability of the drama. 

Not mrerely 'believable' drama either; this is that 'full-blooded' gubbins RTD was on about. The Doctor quickly making an emotional connection with Jabe and then losing her to Cassandra's cheap machinations is affecting stuff. His rage, and then his coldness as he stands by and allows Cassandra to die are thoroughly believable and perfectly performed. 

('Have pity!' - a deliberate evocation, for those in the know, of Davros' plea in Genesis?) 

Perhaps even more impressive, though, is Rose's quiet plea for the Doctor to help Cassandra. Two episodes in and I gleefully retract any doubts I ever had about Billie Piper. Despite everything the 'bitchy trampoline' has done, Rose can't simply stand by and watch another human being die, and Piper's delivery of the line really brings out that sense of naked, compassionate humanity. 

Oh great; now this page'll get a load of hits from people googling 'Billie Piper naked' 

Anyhow, a compassionate impulse has always been at the core of Doctor Who, and I'm glad that, even if it's being challenged (again), it's not being forgotten. 

Course, compassion is one thing. Love is another... 

The End of the World is a silly whodunnit, but it's also the second chapter of an love story that's set to progress as the series goes on. The love story of the Doctor and Rose. Oh, it'll stay between the lines - at least I shouldn't expect there'd be any of that 'hanky panky' the tabloids like to go on about. But it's shaping up as the spine of the series, and I must admit to finding it a bit moving - a fella who's been newly reconstructed as loneliest guy in the universe, taking to the interstitial road with a kindred spirit. The cool thing about this is that it works in subtle as well as overt ways - Rose's confusion and jealousy over Jabe's immediate bond with the Doctor ('You two go and pollinate') is obvious, her kidding-on-the-square reference to him as her 'date' is obvious, but other things only hit you when you think about it afterwards; could it be, for example, that the Doctor, who in this incarnation evidently isn't too good at the touchy-feely stuff, chooses to take Rose to see the end of her own planet for the very reason that it then makes it easier to tell her about the loss of his own? To make her understand by showing rather than telling? The Doctor is, after all, a man who can rely on showing things rather than talking about them. It's telling that he refuses to say what's outside those TARDIS doors at the beginning, eager for Rose to see for herself. Also, his angry 'This is me, right here, right now is what counts!' response when she questions who he is and where he's from suggests that a good part of his interest in seeing Rose enjoy the journey comes from a desire to escape from himself; to experience a sense of wonder again through her. Theres a hint, not overplayed and indeed often undercut, of this very romantic (by which I mean, Romantic) notion of the possibility of redemption though another person. 

"Perhaps a man only enjoys trouble when there's nothing else left" says Jabe. 

"There's me", says Rose. 

Rusty is indeed a great scriptwriter - pluck lines out and mix them around, they still work. 

Speaking of scripting, the emphasis on the word 'alien' is interesting - it's used very liberally in this episode, as it was in Rose, and moreso than at any time I can recall in the show's past. There's an episode coming up called Aliens of London, so I'd guess this is going somewhere. Rose actually used the phrase 'The end of the world' in that first episode when the Auton attack began, which for me adds to a nice sense of threads running in and out across stories, even if obliquely. 

What makes it all work so well, though, what binds old elements and new seamlessly together, is that filmic style I was on about. In traditional televisual terminology, (bloody hell, I sound like Henry Gordon Jago), the original run of Doctor Who was indeed a 'show'. New Who is, by contrast, an Experience; look at the number of POV shots we get from Rose's perspective, then try to remember any similiar use of the camera in the original series. The jumbled, random-looking shot of all the aliens mingling, for example, which brilliantly represents Rose's disorientation. Think of the shot we see of Rose's mum from inside the washing machine, something we'd be remembering as the height of creative direction if it had happened in the middle of Terror of the Autons or something. Compare the scuttling spider-droids to the Cybermats or the Marsh Spiders... the development of CGI, of course, means that special effects of a quality corresponding reasonably well to those of movies are now available on an - albeit inflated - TV budget (and though its fashionable among the more discerning of us geeks to diss CGI for not 'keeping it real' or whatever, let's not forget that the development of that facility is what, more than anything, has allowed Who to get back on screen at all). 'Tainted Love' and Britney Spear's 'Toxic' are used in the episode for laughs, but even then, the editing is so slickly, tightly done that the lyrics don't just waft off, they match what's going on onscreen ('Sometimes I feel I want to get away', 'There's no escape'). The bit with the Doctor gearing himself up and stepping through that fan blade is pure cinema; or more accurately, pure Star Wars. When the Doctor takes Rose back to present-day London we don't go through all the rigmarole of going back to the TARDIS, materialising on Earth and so on. Rather, we cut straight there and get a far more powerful emotional hit from the sudden contrast. None of this remarkable in terms of current day TV and movies, of course, but it's striking because we've never seen a Doctor Who narrative done this way. 

And it is genuinely powerful. Plot complexity may of necessity be lessened, but - and I don't say this merely glibly - you can't have everything. The End of the World has a thoroughly enjoyable story with characters we care about. If it sets the tone for the rest of the series I'll be more than happy, and the only other TV Who stories I can recall ending on such raw, alive emotional notes are The Curse of Fenric and Survival ... hmm, both in the last televised season; in some ways TV Who is picking up right where it left off. 

In others, of course, it's leaping into a whole new realm altogether. But in retrospect it's a place it's been heading to from, ooh, at least The Leisure Hive onward. Big screen storytelling on the small screen. 'Fits and starts' doesn't begin to cover the bumpy journey here but now, finally, it's totally at home with that fusion. 

And now, finally, I know what I'm paying my license fee for... 

Slightly trivial afterword: I do hope episode three doesn't open with the Doctor and Rose eating chips and then heading straight off to the 19th century. Remember, all this has happened for Rose on the same day she went to meet Clive - - - the girl needs sleep!