The End Of The World

It’s been a long while since televised Doctor Who ventured out into space with hordes of weird and wonderful alien creatures ready to confront the viewer. That Russell T Davies and the rest of the BBC Wales production team decided to leap in and create such a story for only the second episode of the relaunched Doctor Who could be regarded as either brave or foolhardy – the audience had become expectant of a high standard of visual effects from such ventures in recent years, and even in 2005, on a BBC budget, or even a British television budget in general, matching US television space opera and Hollywood movies was never really going to be on the cards.

So it’s a tribute to all involved that they get away with it – the CGI may not be Hollywood stuff but it more than passes muster, the only example which I felt looked a little cartoonish being Cassandra’s mouth, but as Zoe Wannamaker was so busy making such a great character out of her I don’t suppose too many people were really that fussed by it. By turns filthy, bitchy, vain and devious, Cassandra is a wonderful example of just how well-written the dialogue and how well-created the visuals of new Doctor Who can be.

She’s not alone in the alien stakes, however – officiated over by the Steward, played with great relish by Simon Day, all manner of strange beings are gathering on Platform One, to watch the end of the planet Earth, which is now we are told owned by the National Trust. The National Trust of where is another matter of course, but it’s a harmless cultural reference that is amongst many to sneak into the script and go unquestioned – unquestioned because they’re so joyous and they make us laugh. The labelling of the likes of Britney Spears and Soft Cell as ‘classical music’ may be a steal from Vicki’s line about the Beatles in The Chase, but I’ll forgive Russell T Davies that for the equally good one about the jukebox being an iPod – history, it seems, always gets the details wrong.

The alien creatures are what this episode was perhaps always going to be judged by from the point of view of a channel-hopping viewer, so we are indeed lucky that they look so good. The Face of Boe, the Trees, and of course the near-legendary Moxx of Balhoon. Never has a Doctor Who monster’s appearance been so eagerly-awaited, given all of Davies’ cheeky hints and throwaway remarks about the character in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine over the past eighteen months or so. I have to admit I expected there to be no such character, or if there were for it merely to be referred to but never seen, but no – here the Moxx is in all his small blue glory, although in the event he only gets a few lines on screen before eventually being fried to a crisp.

That the Moxx does get so little to say and do is however mainly due to the all-round excellence of the supporting characters and the actors who portray them in general, making this surely one of the most textured and realistic ofDoctor Who’s forays into the far future and the depiction of alien races. It’s already looking as if any ‘Best Supporting Character’ poll at the end of this season is going to be hotly contested, and two of those who will doubtless feature in the final reckoning turn up here, in the forms of the plumber and Jabe.

Yasmin Bannerman is nothing short of sensational as Jabe, treating the role of a tree person – which, let’s face it, must hardly be any actor’s dream role – with great seriousness and sensitivity. Bannerman’s performance coupled with Russell T Davies’ dialogue is wonderful, and her obvious rapport with Eccleston’s Doctor makes the scenes between the two of them a joy to behold, the most obvious example being the wonderful sequence where Jabe confronts the Doctor with her knowledge of who he is, and consoles him on what has happened to his race. This makes her demise towards the end of the episode all the more poignant, and really rather upsetting, packing more of an emotional impact than the deaths of most other supporting characters from down the years.

The plumber has a much smaller part to play, but is also wonderfully portrayed, and helps Rose to realise what this episode is partially all about her learning – that ‘aliens are people too’, so to speak. The only missed-step with this character is the fact that Rose never learns of her demise, which would perhaps have reinforced the message and underlined her sympathy for the plumber, both for Rose herself and for the watching audience.

Rose is also involved with what I felt was probably the main structural fault of the episode, in that after she’s been saved by the Doctor from the lowering of the sun shield she’s simply left locked in a room on her own with no way of getting out, sitting out the end of the episode without much to say or do, and there’s no explanation of how she does eventually get out, although we can I suppose assume that some of the Platform’s crew eventually opened the door for her. 

This wasn’t the only plot point that niggled, however – the ease and convenience of the transmat recall device to bring Cassandra back, and the fact that there’s a big handy ‘computer reset’ button located at the other end of a Galaxy Quest-style obstacle also grated. The biggest problem I had, however, was the overuse of the sonic screwdriver as an all-purpose ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card – exactly the sort of easy option John Nathan-Turner regarded it as and why he had it written out of the series. It’s not that I don’t like it as a device – it’s always been a nice contrast to other heroic TV characters that the Doctor carries a tool rather than a weapon – but I think it could be produced a little more sparingly. The psychic paper was another instance of such a device, but as it seems likely to be a one-off I’ll let that one go.

Such flaws are, however, easily made up for by everything else in the episode. Whilst I’d hope for tighter plotting in other episodes, the scintillating dialogue, packed with wit and vigour and really making all of the characters come alive, the wonderful creation of the aliens and the sets and the ideas behind the episode mean there’s so much here to like that criticism begins to feel a little bit churlish. Best of all, there’s that wonderful sense of mystery and enigma about the Doctor, which should always be at the very heart of the series, back again – more mention of this mysterious ‘war’ which he spoke to the Nestene Consciousness about last week, his confession to Rose that he is the last of his people and the fact that his planet has been destroyed. Where all this is leading I can only guess at, but it’s wonderful to have that sense of uncertainty back in the programme in a narrative form once more.

It wasn’t the only poignancy to the episode, however – Rose’s realisation that the world she knew is five billion years dead after her miraculous phone call to her mother, and later her lines about nobody seeing as the Earth died are all equally as affecting. All that history, and nobody saw it go… Well, if nobody saw that, plenty saw this End of the World, and I’m sure most of them will, like me, are very glad to have done so.