The End Of The World

It's a sorry state of affairs when the National Trust no longer has the money to keep the Earth together as a conservation site. If the Doctor can find the money for a mammoth phone bill to Rose's Mum, couldn't he have spared some for his favourite planet? Even if he used it all up on the phone call, couldn't he have started some relief aid from the assembled alpha creatures turning up for gifts and a sun tan? Bad (wolf?) financial planning, if you ask me. He should have spoken to Clive at the Abbey...oh, that’s right; he got shot by living plastic. This continuity is killing me.

It is far better, then, to have continuity through a Time War arc bubbling away than in house style. Suddenly, Doctor Who has contrast. Doctor Who on speed has been replaced by Doctor Who with a social conscience. There are sound bites of political correctness so we can all bask in the fading light of the world, firmly in front of the sofa. Wealth (chinless wonders), vanity, revenge and racism (‘Mongrels’) fly by, as the central story trundles on as if Pip and Jane Baker have been brought in to sketch an Agatha Christie outline whilst Russell T Davies gets the characters firmly embedded. This time one has to care. This time it is all about understanding the adjustment. It is still not about story or suspense, because, let’s face it, a human trampoline setting up a sting to pay for yet more cosmetic surgery is probably more a statement of intent, rather than a plot. An alluded repeated meme, if you will.

The whole script is an opportunity to give a gift of the air from the show’s lungs (sic). In its witty, impish way, it is about solidifying the character of the Doctor and Rose. It is about reminding the audience that there is a hero on Platform One who feels the force, the cold, and has watched Galaxy Quest and knows the override switch is in the same place.. It is about Rose understanding exactly what we she has got herself into; to give her a sense of perspective; to make her understand that everything has its time. Rewritten history is Toxic, and Rose is in a soft cell. She has to survive this, and to do that she has to grow.

The Doctor, meanwhile, has to prove that he is not gay. There is ample time for him to spend time with his woody friend – er – Jabe (outstanding performance, by the way, from Yasmin Bannerman), and to use those method acting skills to get all wistful about the loss of one world, so that he can juxtapose this with the loss of the one he is just whisked Rose away from. In fact, loss is another strong agenda throughout, if that be planetary, humanoid, or plain simply the loss of a good moisturiser (you can never get the staff to teleport back when the ostrich egg is cooked, can you?) In between, he gets all pissed off and undertakes a particularly brutal act, and does a lot of derring-do as one comes to expect from everyone’s favourite socially defective fruit loop, which given he has very little real-time to accomplish it all, is quite an outstanding job.

Black curtains aside, the standard of production on this episode was equally outstanding. There were so many money shots in terms of visual effects, direction and performance that one feels the heat. Euros Lyn’s direction, in particular, seemed to dovetail the dialogue with thought and sympathy, bringing together scenes with an empathy rarely seen in family drama. Whilst there is a mood to gush emphatically, the Mill should be happy as a Dyson ball with the work accomplished here. Murray Gold, also, seems to have released himself from the Hot Gossip soundtrack in Rose to compose some lovely themes for this episode. All three areas pull together to bring together the best, hope-inspiring final 10 minutes of Doctor Who seen in many a moon, or should that be floating continent.

Most impressive of all has to be the simplest of writing devices –everything has its time. Thankfully this is clearly not the case with this new regenerated Who. Under this umbrella, the episode took its shape, and negotiated the tricky path that is the second episode. Having set the right agenda, it then showed how you can make stories set in space mean something to an audience firmly grounded on a planet where reality TV, and light entertainment, are getting high on the equivalent of Skol and chips. The end of the world managed to, in the right hands, bring it all back home.