New Earth

A good, solid start to the season – not spectacular, and not as good as The End of the World, but then again sequels never do live up to the original. There was a lot of fun to be had, however, and Tennant and Piper were both on top form. Tennant can do flippancy and anger very well, and although comparisons to Tom Baker are often thrown around casually they do seem to be bearing out, albeit with the Tenth Doctor being rather more human and less aloof than the Fourth. Piper’s moments as Cassandra excelled, and she didn’t put a foot wrong throughout the entire episode whether she was being Rose or her possessor. The kiss scene – well, that was a throwaway bit of fun, although the Doctor’s reaction was intriguing – “still got it”, eh?

The central idea of the plot was interesting, but I’m not sure it was brilliantly executed. I didn’t take to the lumbering zombie-type patients, but some of the hospital stuff was very good, particularly the cat nuns, who looked absolutely stunning, a wonderful prosthetic and make-up job that has to rank as one of the best we have seen in all of the new series episodes so far. The characterisation of the nurses was also well done, in that you could see why desperation to cope with all of the diseases they had to deal with had led them to this point. It’s not a new idea, by any means – something similar was even done using clone humans for vampire food in Jon Blum and Kate Orman’s Who novel Vampire Science – but it was quite chilling. Having said that, the fact that the plague clones seemed to have been able to learn to walk and talk and think purely through a kind of process of osmosis was far too convenient for my liking, a bit of a shortcut to enable us to feel more sympathetic towards them, perhaps.

Speaking of plot devices being a little too convenient for the plot’s own good, all the body-swapping all seemed a little too easily done. Cassandra needs a massive great machine to get into Rose the first time, but then after that she can just spit herself into and out of anybody in the immediate vicinity at will? I realise that we’re not really supposed to question these things too closely, and it did of course make for the hugely entertaining shenanigans of having Piper and Tenannt playing Cassandra, but think there could have been a better way to do it.

Although it was a shame Zoe Wannamaker didn’t actually feature more she was very good, as previously, at getting across Cassandra’s character without having an actual physical presence, although of course this time we did get to see her in the flesh at an earlier period where she seems rather more sympathetic. The rest of the cast didn’t really have very much to do, with the exception of Sean Gallagher as Chip, who I thought came across very well indeed. He too had to play Cassandra eventually, and his touching little moment when she/he/it goes back in time at the end and meets her former self was very well played, although you have to wonder if giving Cassandra a heart back at that moment changes her future actions in any way, and if so would her previous actions in terms of what we’ve seen in the series still have happened? She’d already mentioned the occasion as being the last one upon which she’d been told she was beautiful, but she remembered that before she’d actually gone back and done it.

Definitely best not to think about that one too hard!

Enigma and mystery has always been one of my favourite parts of the show, so having the Face of Boe suddenly decide to get better and not impart his message after all was a nice little teaser. Irritating for the Doctor, of course, but we’ll find out eventually – Davies said a while back in DWM that when he was told of the series three commission he immediately moved one line from this episode to the beginning of series three, and it has to be this one, surely?

Visually, the episode only fell down for me a couple of times – the first lift shot looked a little old-fashioned for the year five billion and seemed to have been taken from Rose, and I could have sworn that the gantry in the intensive care unit was the same paper mill location as the Nestene Lair from that episode, or at least looked very similar to it indeed. (A listen to the commentary download confirms that it was indeed the same location). But then again, I don’t suppose it really matters, and only sad fans like us would notice such things!

Aside from that, it was stunning – the futuristic cityscape laid across the Gower Peninsula, and particularly the massed ranks of the intensive care pods showed The Mill at their very finest. Davies seems to enjoy setting them challenges and they always manage to rise to them, and with that opening scene on New Earth with its wonderful landscape you can see why they wanted to open the second series with this.

Last year the theme of the year five billion plus was everything has its time and everything dies. Now, in the wake of New Who’s great success, the caveat seems to have been added that sometimes, these endings aren’t quite as set in stone as they might previously have appeared.