New Earth

You know, if there was ever any question that the Doctor plays with time and space, it's all cleared up now. At the end of the "Christmas Invasion" special, they're standing outside the Tardis getting ready to go, in the dead of winter in the middle of all that "snow"...and in the beginning of this episode, when they're actually going, it's a lovely spring day with no spaceship-ashes in sight.

Why does the Doctor have companions? Why does he drag people away from their otherwise ordinary lives (and often into terrible danger) to whirl around through time and space with him? I think I know why. It's like all of time and space is a movie, and the Doctor has seen it all before. Watching a movie you've seen before, even if it's the best movie in the world, can get really boring--but if you have someone else watching it with you, someone who's never seen the movie before, then it's like the movie becomes entirely new to you as you see it through their eyes.

And that's what the Doctor's companions are to him--an audience. But not just for him, for the rest of the universe too. As long as he's got a young friend or two along, he can savor their amazement, and sights he's seen a thousand times before can seem entirely new to him. The Eccleston Doctor was too brisk, too serious, too ridden with survivor's guilt from his part in a time war that ended the entire rest of his race to appreciate it. He was never able to lighten up very far; the burden of his survival was always with him like a dark cloud. But the Tennant Doctor seems to have regenerated his world-view along with his body--and that's immediately apparent as soon as the credits are over and the Doctor and Rose step out onto an entirely new world, with a gloriously-rendered CGI city in plain view. Rose is awed, and the Doctor basks in it. And then it's off to a hospital complex to see the face of Boe...and also the face of Zoe, as Zoe Wanamaker returns to her role as Cassandra, the last surviving human. The funny thing is, though, Zoe actually has a lot less screen time than we realize, when we think about it after it's over.

The mind-swap/possession schtick has been done many, many times over the course of science fiction--at least half a dozen times in _Star Trek_ alone. (You could always tell when Brent Spiner was getting frustrated in his role as Data, because along would come another "Data gets possessed or otherwise just plain acts all crazy" episode to give him a chance to show off his range.) I wouldn't be surprised if it had even been done before in _Doctor Who_, as they've already done just about everything else. The thing about a good mind-swap show is, it has to make us suspend our disbelief in a rather unusual way. We have to _believe_ that this character, played by one actor, has been somehow "infected" with the soul of the other actor--and isn't just the same actor putting on a different mannerism. It's one hell of an acting challenge--and for all that people were prone to pooh-pooh Billie Piper's acting ability early on, she did a heck of a job with it here. It was easy to forget, over the course of the episode, that this was still Billie, just putting on different mannerisms--I found it easy to believe that this was the ghost of Zoe Wanamaker inside her head. David Tennant had less of a chance to show off, but he managed the trick just as well. As for the fellow who played Chip, well, I never saw him enough to know for sure, but he seemed to do a passable job for the lines he had.

It was great to see Cassandra again, even for just a little while. Like the best villains, she was painted in not entirely unsympathetic tones. Ironically, her portrayal here seemed to be almost the opposite of how she was portrayed in "The End of the World". In that episode, we saw her dedication to life, doing whatever it took to survive right down to becoming little more than a brain in a tank, as having made her inhuman--a coldly conniving rhymes-with-witch who thought little of killing off a space station full of spectators for the sake of her business interests. And yet here she was painted as much more human--looking back wistfully at the last time someone had ever called her beautiful, and being so shaken by her time in the mind of the infected zombie that even the Doctor, who had only moments before been railing at her to get out of Rose's body, reached out a sympathetic hand in spite of himself.

At the beginning of the episode, we could hate her. By the time her blackmail scheme against the cats fell through, we could love to hate her. Then by the end of the episode we found ourselves hating to love her, as she actually became for a time a sort of surrogate companion, helping the Doctor in his scheme to cure the zombies. I'm sure I wasn't the only viewer who wished she could have found another body to continue living. (Why on earth she couldn't just have had another brainless zombie body cloned for her from her own surviving tissue, I don't know.) The only thing that really struck a sour note for me about her appearance was her sudden change of heart at the end: "don't wanna die, don't wanna die, don't wanna die...oops, I'm in a body that's dying. I guess I've outlived my time and so I'll go ahead and die after all." It wasn't really believable for me that after all this time of trying to stay alive, she would suddenly decide so quickly to chuck it all. But the ending, where she gets to go back in time and die in her own arms, did provide a sort of fitting grace note to the character. And you never know, time travel being what it is, maybe we'll see her again after all. (It would have been funny if she had actually, at the last moment, left Chip's body and possessed _herself_, but that would probably have opened up too many chronologically weird and paradoxical areas.) Since this was an external intervention in Cassandra's timeline, I wonder if that would have changed Cassandra enough that she ended up as a different person? But that would be paradox, and which is why thinking too much about time-travel stories tends to give one a headache.

I have to wonder, given the Doctor's speeches about how it's Cassandra's time to die and so forth, whether he will be quite so sanguine when he comes to the end of his own final regeneration. After all, some of the Doctor's past adversaries have been Time Lords who were out of Regenerations--the Master for one, and his own accuser in the Trial of a Time Lord arc (which was in fact _himself_ at the end of his regenerations) for another. But I can't imagine the BBC wanting to let the show end for the sake of a little thing like running out of regenerations.

I have to admit to being very impressed by the makeup effects for the cat people. I've often wondered what anthropomorphic felines would look like in live action (being a bit of a furry fan), and this episode of Doctor Who shows them off very well. I'm still not sure how much of it was makeup and how much was CGI, but they looked very believable and real, not just like people wearing furry masks. I would have rather liked to see more of them than just this episode. Perhaps, like the Slythene, they might return at some future time. It would be a pity if they didn't.

The Face of Boe continues to be an enigmatic presence in the series. I wonder if he was always intended to be thus; he started out as just a big animatronic face in a tank, appeared a couple more times in the series, but now...he's still a big anamatronic face in a tank, only much more mysterious. And the third time he meets the Doctor will be the last time. Like the Doctor, he is the last of his race--and although he had been dying, the Doctor's actions in saving all those clone humans somehow revitalized him and showed him there was still more to see in the universe. So, in the end, the Doctor acted for the Face of Boe much as his own companions have done for him.

The storyline of "New Earth" moved along at a very rapid pace--perhaps too rapid. There was so much story-stuff to fit in, what with two different sets of villains, a Matrix-like chamber full of clone zombies, the return of the Face of Boe, and so on, none of the ideas really had room to get fully-fleshed out, or even necessarily properly explained. This episode might have done better as a two-parter, with more explanatory and exploratory material stuck in. The solution to the zombie problem felt a bit rushed and deus-ex-machina, not to mention a trifle silly and unscientific in its execution. And then the ending with Cassandra dying in her own arms was a perhaps a trifle over-sentimental. But in the end, that's kind of what _Doctor Who_ is all about, so I suppose I can't knock it too much.