New Earth

Hardly an intriguing title or indeed concept, New Earth for me committed the ultimate sin of being very boring. I actually left the room to make a cup of tea about half way through it (I tend to get itchy feet during most RTD stories), round about when the Doctor's confronting one of the Sisters of Plenitude outside the human guinea-pig banks. And I lost all my interest a bit later on (despite the revivification of my cup of tea) after the cringe-inducing scene in which the Doctor is possessed by Cassandra, contorting his gangly frame in a very Kenneth Williams-esque moment – I’d half expected an ‘Oh Matron!’ to ring out from a pair of flaring nostrils. Given the camp hospital setting replete with – inexplicably cat-faced – nurses, this might have fitted the bill. The aforementioned scenes with the alternately Cassandra-ised Rose and Doctor smacked instantly of the equally atrociously executed scenes in the abysmal McCoy debut, Time and the Rani; I hate to say it, but I’d probably still rather trawl through the latter story than New Earth which, as with the first episode of last season, Rose, does not hold up to a second viewing and will be an episode I’ll probably never view a third time. Why? Because there’s absolutely no depth to it whatsoever, and not even any vague sub-text or sense of potential hidden layers either in plot or script promised by re-viewings to give me the incentive to stare somnolently through it more than twice. Detail was the key ingredient to the classic series, even in the worst ever stories such as Nightmare of Eden or Paradise Towers, there was still always an almost tangible collage of ‘detail’, layers of it to excavate through each time one viewed the story. RTD sadly offers us pretty much none in any of his episodes bar possibly The Long Game. End of the World just about staggers up to a couple of re-viewings but not much more than that, and is poisoned by its ‘Toxic’ intrusion. Funnily enough I didn’t mind Boom Town – despite its Rent-A-Ghost/Tomorrow People-style shenanigans and utterly ridiculous plot, as in this episode alone RTD wrote some truly affecting dialogue, in the restaurant scene. The woefully unimaginative, non-juxtaposition of two TV programmes that have somehow miraculously survived for thousands of years (i.e. Big Brother and The Weakest Link) in Bad Wolf was only just rescued from the realms of inexcusable absurdity by the more imaginative interpretation of Trinnie and Suzannah, and a fairly eventful and climactic final episode in Parting of the Ways. Only in the second episode did RTD deliver anything resembling polemical satire with the new religious fanaticism of the Daleks, the best contribution he’s made yet to the development of the series.

RTD’s scriptural scatter-gun tactics produce sporadic bouts of good scripting in New Earth, particularly relating to the hospital policies discussed between the Sisterhood, but again, as in his previous offerings, he misses a golden opportunity for genuine topical satire: a comment on our new PPP Trust hospitals would have been nice, and the Doctor’s witty quandary about the lack of a ‘shop’ on the ground floor and the palatial superficiality of the hospital itself, cue Rose’s line ‘hardly the NHS’, only qualify as schoolboy level satire, but not as the genuine article. Similar opportunities were missed in The Long Game (bar a couple of vaguely satirical lines from the Nurse) especially; and any topical tags in the End of the World fell completely flat on their faces, in particular the Earth being run by the National Trust when the logical progression would have been International Trust. Oh well, not everyone can be Robert Holmes I suppose. But most people can at least be Bob Baker and Dave Martin, and RTD even falls short of their scriptural standards. He is genuinely good at dialogue when he puts his mind to it, but one gets the impression he loses interest easily, even in his own story lines.

As with The Christmas Invasion, New Earth’s visual spectacle – bar the highly unconvincing spaceship graphics and obviously superimposed hospital exterior – is not enough to keep it afloat, and the plot simply fails to inspire or even particularly interest. Nothing new is being said or done that hasn’t been said or done in a Who story before. The zombies were very reminiscent of the freeze-dried corpses in Dragonfire, a comparable story in many ways, though even more preferable I feel to New Earth’s rather sterile, gimmicky filmic schlock. This music is really grating on me now too – apart from a fairly well orchestrated, though wholly inappropriate John Barry-esque score halfway through, the rest of the irritatingly tinny music either end of the episode was tacky to the ear. The music needs more menace and atmosphere; as does the direction in general.

A new smugness is forming already between Rose and the Tenth Doctor, which simply has to be abandoned. The Doctor must take the series by the scruff of its neck from now on and dominate it. Tenant is beginning to show signs of this here and there but his sudden moralistic outbursts sit oddly on his generally laidback persona, as they did with Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor too, an incarnation best suited to the polarities of clowning or introspective brooding as typified in The Curse of Fenric, but not to the face-contorting outbursts of Battlefield and Ghost Light. Let’s hope Tenant is more carefully handled. He’s a good actor, he has charisma to an extent, but I’m still not convinced by him yet. He’s one step up in suitability from Eccleston but he still would have fallen far short of my own shortlist. Nevertheless, he has the potential to make the part his own for a memorable tenure, and could well prove a fairly distinctive Doctor in time.

From what I’ve read about the next episode, Tooth and Claw, it could very well provide the redemption as a Who writer that RTD presently needs. We’ll see…

New Earth score: 4/10