Doomsday

Russell T. Davies and his team have done it again. “Doomsday” encapsulates everything that is good about the new series. My Dad will hate the mushy stuff, but with 95% of the episode nothing but top-drawer action, this episode truly has something for everybody. Quite simply, it is magnificent. Flawless, even.

So how can you top last year’s masterpiece, “The Parting of the Ways”? How can you go one better than 200 Dalek ships – that’s half a million Daleks – invading the Earth of the far future, the departure of a companion and a regeneration? You do the only thing you can – you take one of your own childhood fantasies, and you make it happen. Daleks vs Cybermen; “Stephen Hawking vs. the Speaking Clock”; whatever you want to call it. This kind of episode is exactly the sort of thing that fans have always dreamt of; the sort of thing that casual viewers of the show automatically assume has happened before, but in reality, even in the ‘expanded universe’ of books and audio dramas, has never, ever occurred*.

The Cybermen’s idea to form an alliance and “…upgrade the universe” together is quickly rejected by the Daleks, who interestingly come across as the bad baddies, if that makes sense. If you have the Doctor vs the Daleks or the Doctor vs the Cybermen, then it’s easy, a story of good vs bad. When you have (as the show’s unprecedented FIFTH** Radio Times cover of the year proudly proclaims) Daleks vs Cybermen, then it’s heel vs heel. Baddie vs baddie. Who’s side do you take? Many people choose to go for the underdog, but even with millions of Cybermen against four Daleks, I’d still class these relatively newborn Cybermen as underdogs any day of the week. The Daleks just electrify every scene that they are in; they raise the bar just that little bit higher; and, in “Doomsday,” they absolutely kick ass!

“This is not war! This is pest control!… You are superior in only one respect. You are better at dying!”

The banter between these two cybernetic races is a joy to listen to. From the Cybermen’s mockery of the Daleks’ “…inelegant design”, it’s very difficult to believe that there isn’t just a little bit of human emotion left inside them. The Daleks, on the other hand, are always emotional – genetically bred blobs of pure hatred. That’s why they come across as more evil than the Cybermen. Because they are! Cybermen are just automatons, doing what they have been programmed to believe is right. Of course, one could argue the same point about the Daleks, but at the end of the day Daleks can feel.

And the Daleks aren’t the only ones kicking ass. In her final episode, Billie Piper gives her best performance yet as Rose. In just forty-five minutes she shows just how far she has come since we first met her as a bored teenager in “Rose.” In the opening moments of the episode, she saves the lives of Mickey and Raj (at least temporarily) by making her knowledge of the Daleks and their Time War immediately clear. In the same vein, we get to see Mickey – an older, wiser, braver Mickey who has crossed the void (something the Doctor said was impossible) - try and save the Earth. Arguably, he has changed and grown even more than Rose has since we met them both. I knew that “The Age of Steel” wouldn’t be the last we’d see of him; he may have found himself a happy home with his alternate Grandmother, but with things left open with Pete Tyler and the Cybermen there were simply too many loose ends that just had to be tied up, and inevitably Mickey would have to play a part in that. So I called that one, but my prediction/hope about the resurrection of the Time Lords was wide of the mark – but only just. As the Daleks wheeled out “…all that remains of the Time Lord homeworld…” – a device they call the “Genesis Ark” – I thought I’d been blessed by some strange prognostic power, but alas, it was not to be.

“If these are gonna be my last words then you’re gonna listen... The God of all Daleks, and I destroyed him!”

By this point I thought Rose was a goner; gunned down by a Dalek Supreme. Once again, I was wrong. My fiancée could have been forgiven for thinking that there was something wrong with our sofa – I wasn’t behind it, I was on the edge of it, constantly jumping up and down. It was like England vs Portugal all over again, but whereas with watching England there’s always a winker like Ronaldo to spoil things, you can always have complete faith in the Doctor to save the day. Well, almost always. Just as things couldn’t getter any bleaker for Rose; for Mickey; for Earth, the Doctor waltzes in and has a bit of a chinwag and a catch-up (much to the Daleks’ annoyance) and then goes on to reveal a few important facts. Firstly, the Doctor doesn’t have a clue what this “Genesis Ark”, which is a bit of a worry.

Secondly, it is confirmed what many fans suspected – the Doctor was actually a soldier in the Time War, out there on the front line. The Doctor actually put his moral scruples aside and fought. Whether this was the eighth or ninth Doctor we still don’t know, perhaps we never will – a little bit of mystery never goes amiss in this series!

“I was there at the fall of Arcadia… some day I might even come to terms with that.”

As I mentioned in my review of “Fear Her,” the writers have been much braver this year about acknowledging the show’s past, not only on TV, but now it seems, the books too that got us through the 90s. Russell T. Davies could have made any old planet name up and stuck it in that sentence, and either way ninety-nine per cent of the audience wouldn’t have been any the wiser, but he didn’t – he wrote Arcadia, and put a few smiles on the faces of Doctor Who readers worldwide.

Thirdly, my ears weren’t deceiving me in the opening minutes – “Dalek Thay…” – these Daleks have names! According to the Doctor, these four Daleks form “the Cult of Skaro” (the first time the Dalek homeworld has been mentioned in the new series!); Daleks whose mission it is to think like the enemy, so much so that they even have names. Now this small part of the episode – which to be honest, didn’t affect the plot at all; these could just as easily have been four generic Daleks – opens up so many storytelling possibilities, and will no doubt form the subject matter of many a future novel, audio or even TV episode, especially considering the Dalek Supreme’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “emergency temporal shift” before his army is sucked into the void.

“Doomsday” is certainly an appropriate title for this episode; “Armageddon” could have been another. The scenes of destruction, especially when seen from the Doctor’s purview in Canary Wharf, are absolutely staggering. When the Daleks actually open the “Genesis Ark”, and millions of the blighters come flying out of that old Time Lord prison ship (“ahh… so that’s what it was”), the Mill manage to top last year’s epic finale, at least in terms of the visual effects. Millions of Daleks flying through space is one thing, but flying through the air above London? Swarming around Canary Wharf like insects? The visuals are simply mind-blowing, and in terms of the storytelling, the stakes have never been higher. This isn’t some far off invasion in the distant future. This is here and now. This is war on Earth. Today.

“Cybermen will remove sex and class and colour and creed. You will become identical. You will become like us.”

I mentioned earlier that I think Daleks are more evil than Cybermen, as well as much more dangerous. Whilst I believe that to be the case, I think that the Cybermen are a much more frightening monster than the pepper pots from Skaro. Why? A Dalek will just gun you down, or maybe ‘mind probe’ or torture you a bit first if you’re very unlucky. Cybermen, on the other hand, take you, dissect you, remove all that is human, and turn you into a unthinking, unfeeling monster. It’s the whole Darth Vader / Borg kind of idea, only the Cybermen came first, and the Cybermen are worse. In “Doomsday,” we experience the horrors of Cyberconversion through Tracy-Ann Oberman’s character, Yvonne Hartman, the despicable face of Torchwood. Her ultimate fate is superbly written and portrayed. As she is taken for Cyberconversion, you can see the mortal dread on her face, and it’s made worse by the fact that she knows exactly what they are going to do to her. “Oh God. I did my duty! Oh God!” – you almost feel sorry for her. In the end, when she actually overcomes her Cyber conditioning to gun down her fellow Cybermen and give our heroes that little bit of extra time, you’re practically cheering her on as she bleeds an oily tear from her cybernetic eye.

“How rich? I don’t care about that. How very?”

I knew it was coming, but it didn’t make it any less dramatic. The widowed Pete Tyler is back in our universe, face to face with the widowed Jackie Tyler. Had they not ran into each other’s arms for a proper, cheesy, Hollywood kiss the rules of poetics would have needed seriously revising. Even this absolutely epic, dramatic scene – a scene that has been in the making since “The Age of Steel”; no, earlier, since “Father’s Day,” really – is infused with just that little bit of humour. “There was never anyone else,” says Jackie as the Doctor, Rose and Mickey all bite their lips and try not to laugh.

“What is it with the glasses?”

Davies rattles off the exposition about “void stuff” in about thirty economical seconds and the die is cast – everyone goes back to “Pete’s World” to live happily ever after. Mother, father, daughter, daughter’s ex. Only daughter isn’t happy about that. Daughter immediately pushes the button and sends herself back to our world – she is willing to lose her mother and her father - who have miraculously just been reunited after years apart - to stand by the Doctor. To stand by the man she loves.

“…the last story I’ll ever tell.”

The explosive end to “Doomsday” gives ‘edge-of-the-seat’ a whole new meaning. Watching the Doctor and Rose hang on for dear life as the Void sucks in Daleks, Cybermen, as well as everything and everyone touched by the “void stuff” is gut-wrenching in the extreme.

“This is the story of how I died.”

They couldn’t...? To kill her would have been bad enough, but to send her to Hell with a million Daleks and Cybermen would have been much too much. But for a minute there… David Tennant and Billie Piper both deserve a BAFTA on that one scene alone! Their faces. Their blood curdling screams as Rose’s fingers slip and she is sucked into… the arms of her Dad. Pete Tyler makes the last minute save. Rose survives. But…

That touching, soulful new composition by Murray Gold plays and the Doctor and Rose each find themselves staring at a plain, blank white wall – a whole universe between them. A whole universe that, thanks to the sealing of the breach, can never be crossed again. Rose is inconsolable, but at least she has her family. She has Mum and Dad. She has Mickey. She even has Mickey’s old Gran. If, at some point before she met the Doctor, somebody told her that she would be rich beyond her wildest dreams, living with her Mother and her long-dead Father, with a baby brother or sister on the way, she’d have thought them mad – but she’d certainly have wanted to believe them. The Doctor may have been cruelly ripped away from her, but she has everything else that she could have ever wanted. As for the Doctor; as for the lonely God…

And so we come full circle. There’s a beautiful symmetry in Rose sitting up in bed, just as she did in the first scene of “Rose” way back when. Only this time she’s had a dream. She has to follow a voice.

“Here I am at last, and this is the story of how I died.”

My sister called it right – a metaphorical death it was. Satan lied. Officially dead in our world, Rose begins her new life in another as she stands in Bad Wolf Bay, staring across a beach; staring across a universe at the fading projection of the man she loves, who is ”…burning up a sun just to say goodbye.” As always, Davies’ dialogue is beyond perfect. Rose asks the Doctor if he can come through to her world, and he bluntly replies, “two universes would collapse.” Rose says, “So?” It just sums it all up; Rose and the Doctor… love in general.

“I love you,” says Rose, overcome by emotion.

“Quite right too,” says the Doctor with a smile on his face, doing his best Han Solo impression. “And I suppose, if there’s one last chance to say it, Rose Tyler…” and then he’s savagely ripped away by the currents of our universe. Heartbreaking! The Doctor stands in his TARDIS alone, a single tear running down his cheek. He never told her. In Doctor Who terms, “Doomsday” is the King of all tearjerkers. It is quite simply, the end of an era.

“Will I ever see you again?”

“You can’t.”

And then suddenly, the Doctor looks up and a strange, disgruntled woman (Catherine Tate) is in the TARDIS wearing a wedding dress. Once again, humour crops up even at the most dramatic moment and rounds off the season in a much more upbeat fashion. Rose and her family may be gone, but the Doctor will go on, just as he’s always done. The same old life.

And what about us, the fans? Life after Billie? It’s almost as daunting as thinking about life after Eccleston, but look what a star David Tennant has proven himself to be. I hope he stays in the role for years and years and years. He’s superb. The world of Who marches on and we have “The Runaway Bride” to look forward to at Christmas, and then Freema Agyeman’s new companion Martha Jones next spring, along with the return of the Ice Warriors, Shakespeare, and I’m sure the Dalek Supreme will turn up again at some point. And if I remember right, the Face of Boe still has a secret to tell…

* I’m 99% per cent sure! I still haven’t quite got through all the books yet!

** Including “The Christmas Invasion” cover in December 2005.