Doctor Who (2005) 1-01: Rose

Episode:

697

|

Serial:

157

|

Writer:

Russell T Davies

|

Air Date:

26-Mar-2005

---

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm writing about Rose, the first episode of modern Doctor Who. Because after writing about the first eight Doctors it seemed a shame not to write about a Ninth Doctor story.

It's kind of amazing to me that this actually features the actual Ninth Doctor instead of a new First Doctor, and they didn't reset the continuity despite the huge gap between stories. This aired 9 years after the TV movie and 15 years after the final episode of the classic series. Doesn't quite beat the 18 year gap between Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Original Series but it's pretty close.

Here's some more facts for you, to save me from writing an actual introduction:

• This is the first of just three episodes of Doctor Who to have a companion's name in the title (four if you count the Feast of Steven chapter of The Daleks' Master Plan). The others are Smith and Jones and Amy's Choice.
• The episode had the shortest title in all of Doctor Who's then 42-year history until it was beaten a couple of years later by an episode called 42. I don't think that one's in any risk of getting outdone any time soon.
• If they'd kept the numbering, this would've been the first episode of season 27.
• It's the first season opener since The Ribos Operation in 1978 to introduce a new companion, and the first to also introduce a new Doctor in the same story since 1970's Spearhead from Space.
• It's the first story since Mission to the Unknown in 1965 to not feature a single returning actor (even the TV movie had Sylvester McCoy).
• It was directed by Keith Boak, the same guy who did the farting aliens in the Aliens of London two-parter and then never came back. Though to be fair he didn't write it. The episode was written by Russell T Davies, the same guy who wrote the farting aliens in the Aliens of London two-parter. Also the producer for this era.
• I'm not actually sure if I watched this episode on the day it aired, the only Doctor Who I'd seen at that point was the 1996 TV movie, so I wasn't exactly hyped. But it seems very plausible that I walked into a room with it on, saw a wheelie bin burp and then walked back out again. (I watched it a few years later though).

This is going to be a full recap review commentary full of screencaps and SPOILERS, so I'd suggest watching the episode first before reading it. In fact, to be safe you should probably watch all 696 classic episodes as well, even though I'm sure any spoilers I drop about them will be incredibly minor. And I'll be spoiling absolutely nothing about episodes that aired after it; I won't even say the words 'bad wolf' because there's no reference to them in this story at all.

---

There's no teaser for this story, it jumps straight to the opening credits, which fly down a CGI time vortex in almost exactly the same way as they did in the TV movie, and are joined by the Tardis and a brand new logo covered in lightbulbs and lens flares. I thought the logo looked cheap and tacky back in 2005 and it hasn't grown on me over time. The new arrangement of the theme's alright though, way better than the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy themes, and who doesn't like a Stargate wormhole ride?

The episode begins where very few Doctor Who stories do: in space. Sure lots of them start on alien planets, but I mean the actual vacuum of actual space. The camera hangs around to glare at the moon for a bit, before turning to reveal the Earth. Then it dives through the atmosphere and zooms down to a block of flats in London. I wish Google Maps was this smooth for me whenever I use it.

After establishing the vastness and beauty of the universe and how unimaginably tiny our lives are by comparison, it cuts to the unimaginably pink bedroom of average teenager Rose Tyler.

This was the first episode of Doctor Who to be shot with a single camera on digital video and it's a big step up from all those classic episodes I've been watching recently. It looks so... 2005! It's not quite film or HD, in fact, it's got pretty much the same vertical resolution as it did in the 80s, but it's 16:9 widescreen at least, and much more... vivid.

Very few Doctor Who stories open with someone waking up, possibly because it's a really clichéd way to begin a story, but if you're going to show someone's boring daily routine it's a good place to start. It also establishes that Rose really needs to sort her room out, as she's worse than my sister.

Rose was played by pop star Billie Piper, which seemed like a strange choice to a lot of people at the time. Not so much after we all saw she could actually act. These days people are more surprised to learn she can sing, and to be honest I'd rather listen to Honey to the Bee again than the music they've got playing now, as it's far more obnoxiously cheesy and dated.

By the way, you should check out Honey to the Bee's video (YouTube Link) sometime as they seem to have left her trapped on her own in a PlayStation demo disc menu. It's bizarre.

Anyway, Rose says goodbye to her mother Jackie on the way out and then heads to her job at a department store somewhere in an expensive looking part of London. Why London and not one of the many other fine cities in the UK, like... Cardiff for instance? My guess is that it's because it's full of landmarks. Show someone Big Ben and no matter where in the world they live they'll understand that it takes place in England... even if it was mostly filmed in Cardiff.

One minute in and it's already lunchtime, so Rose takes a break for some bizarre sandwich eating and dancing with her boyfriend Mickey in front of a fountain and a really fake looking background. Though the good thing about digital video is that I can't tell if it's been composited in or if it's just a side effect of the filter they've put over it to make it look like film.

All I know is that there's a mysterious dark blotch on the screen that's only visible when people walk in front of it. Spooky. (I guess the fountain was too bright and distracting so they darkened that spot).

Once she's done establishing that Mickey exists she returns to the shop to finish the last 7 seconds of her shift. But before she can leave she has to sort out the lottery money, so she heads into the creepy basement of the shop to find someone called Wilson. Some other series would've finished the 'day in her mundane life' montage before introducing weirdness, but this episode's got a lot of ground to cover so now it's lingering around and being all horror movie instead of cutting to the next part of her routine.

Suddenly the door locks and the mannequins start coming after her, which is a bit weird really. I mean why would they break their cover over this? Unless they've done a really terrible job of hiding Wilson's body.

Thankfully this isn't one of those scenes where someone's so sure it's a prank that they get themselves killed. Rose is suitably freaked out and she backs away, even though she's still leaning towards this being an elaborate stunt by one of her co-workers called Derek. Which makes me think that the guy's known for putting some serious work into his practical jokes. Imagine if a twist of fate had sent Derek down here to sort out the lottery cash, and he was the one to run into the Doctor. That would've been a very different first season.

Oh, I should mention that this is the point where the Doctor turns up, and the first thing he does is grab Rose's hand and say "Run!" Bit of a difference from his first appearance in An Unearthly Child, but it works.

It's going to take me a while to get used to the Ninth Doctor though. He's actually wearing regular clothes instead of a costume and his hair is short. Plus there's not a single question mark or stick of celery on the guy, thankfully, and after watching the first eight Doctors in a row it's weird to hear Christopher Eccleston being allowed to speak in his actual accent.

The two of them manage to escape into a lift, with a severed plastic arm joining them for the ride, but despite the evidence in her hands Rose still thinks that it was students pulling a prank. The Doctor seems genuinely impressed with how much sense that theory makes, which I liked, but it's wrong.

These are actually the Autons, which is an interesting choice of villain to bring back as they'd only ever been in two stories: Spearhead from Space and Terror of the Autons, both from the early 70s. In fact, Spearhead was Jon Pertwee's first story, and it's interesting that they're tying the new series in with that era specifically. This's also the Autons' final appearance in Doctor Who, I guess because once you've done shop dummies coming to life once there's not much point repeating it.

The Doctor gives away very little about who he is, but he somehow manages to insult the entire human race by saying she should go home and eat her lovely beans on toast, and then heads back inside to blow the top two floors of the building up in a huge composited explosion!

Damn, that is a non-trivial amount of explosives going up in the middle of a London shopping district. I suppose he always did like a good fire. I guess that must have been what it took to destroy the Auton relay on the roof though, either that or he's picked up some bad habits from Ace.

I hope Rose didn't get glass in her eye, because the air must be full of it after that. Also, you've got to be careful staring at explosions, because Horror at Fang Rock taught me that it can change your eye colour.

Rose runs down the street, too shocked to drop the arm she's still holding, and the camera lingers on a blue police box she didn't even notice.

In the Pertwee series this would be the point where the episode cut to UNIT investigating the situation, but this actually follows Rose back home to show some halfway realistic consequences to having your workplace blown up. She's freaked out, her mother Jackie's got compensation on the mind and Mickey rushed over to make sure that his girlfriend's okay and console her during this traumatic time then get down the pub to catch the end of the football. Well, I suppose that's realistic too. He at least disposes of the plastic arm in a dumpster for her along the way.

The next day Rose wakes up at the same time, except this time she's got no job to go to. In fact, she's got no involvement with much of anything at this point, but the episode's still following her around as she investigates... their catflap. Seems like the nails have fallen out.

Fortunately, the Doctor turns out to be hanging around outside her door and he's brought with him the hope that Rose is going to become involved with some kind of Doctor Who story at some point. But not too soon, as the episode's not really about evil mannequins, it's about her curiosity about the Doctor. So she invites him in to make him some tea and hopefully figure out what his deal is.

Jackie is 100% okay with having a strange handsome man in the house, especially as she's in her dressing gown, but he quickly moves past her bedroom to investigate the array of props in the living room. If this was written like the TV movie he'd be trying to explain the entire mythology of the series to Rose about now, but instead he's speed reading a book, flicking cards all over the floor, and trying to be as eccentric as he can within 30 seconds. He even checks his face in the mirror, implying that he's somehow never seen it before.

He might be on present-day Earth, fighting Pertwee's villains, but he's acting like Tom Baker on caffeine and he hasn't even had his cup of tea yet.

The comedy routine is cut short though, as he's attacked by an entirely different comedy routine involving a severed plastic arm trying to choke him. Mickey had thrown the thing out but it must have come back through the cat flap. That's what the Doctor had come to their flat for, he'd tracked it here, and the arm had presumably followed her to get to him. Makes me wonder why he'd let her walk off with it in the first place.

Sadly the tea died when they smashed the table during their attempts to subdue the arm with the sonic screwdriver. On the plus side, the sonic screwdriver is back! It made a bit of a cameo in the TV movie, but this is the first time it's appeared in an episode since it was destroyed in The Visitation 23 years earlier. Poor Six never got a chance to use the sonic.

Also making a return is the cheesy music from the start of the episode, and it doesn't sound any better over a mannequin arm fight than it did over a montage of someone working at a shop. They filmed an extra shot of Jackie drying her hair at the end of the shoot to explain why she didn't run in when the table got crushed, but sadly the drone of the hairdryer didn't drown out the music for long. Murray Gold does get much better than this though, and I wish he'd hurry up.

With his arm in hand, the Doctor goes swanning off down the street with a dumb grin on his face, ignoring all of Rose's attempts to get exposition out of him. The scene was extended to pad out the episode when it underran (that's also why there's a trailer at the end), but I've got zero problem with any of it. Especially the Doctor's explanation for who he is at the end:

"It's like when you're a kid. The first time they tell you that the world's turning and you just can't quite believe it because everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it. The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling round the sun at 67,000 miles an hour and I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world and if we let go... that's who I am. Now forget me, Rose Tyler. Go home."

Personally, I think that's great dialogue, because he told everyone from the newest viewer to the most committed fan something interesting about him that they didn't already know, without revealing a damn thing about who he is. Also, it's just a good line.

I've no idea how or when I first saw this scene, probably not as part of the episode, but I remember it being something that helped define the character for me at a time when I wanted to understand how the guy I'd seen in the TV movie could be a threat to Dalek armies and Cybermen and the other monsters that had shown up in the trailers. It confirmed that he is superhuman, with a greater sense of the mechanics of the universe... and didn't give away a whole lot more than that. But the implication that there was more to him got me curious.

It turns out that when an interesting character is being mysterious people want to know more about them, so Rose goes to Mickey's place and uses his PC to do an internet search. I wonder why she didn't just use her phone... oh right, 2005.

I love that 90s looking PC. Beige keyboards and giant 4:3 CRT monitors need to make a comeback.

For whatever reason Mickey's default search engine isn't Google or Yahoo or even AskJeeves, it's something called search-wise.net. I did some research on that and found that it doesn't exist, not even as a fake website for Doctor Who. But it did exist at the time, as a mock-up prop search engine for use in TV shows and films.

The first thing she tries searching for on the internet is 'Doctor', which is a little optimistic maybe. She gets 17,700,000 results and neither of the top two relates to a mysterious bloke with a blue box.

Though just out of curiosity I decided to do a Google search for 'Doctor' myself, and I got 1,680,000,000 results, with the top one being a list of doctors on Wikipedia that included the Doctor (right next to the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager). Also, there was a top stories panel with The Woman Who Fell to Earth reviews in it and a panel down the side about the TV show Doctor Who.

So there you go, you can type in 'Doctor' and get exactly the person you want, as long as he’s the title character in Britain's most popular and longest running sci-fi show.

She gets there in the end enough, finding herself on http://www.whoisdoctorwho.co.uk. They just had to get their 'Doctor Who' title drop in there somewhere. This fake website still exists by the way, if you're curious.

Rose finds this fuzzy picture of Christopher Eccleston intriguing so she gets Mickey to take her down to Clive's house so she can talk to him in person. There's no shot of them driving down a motorway or a shot of a map with a red line going across it so I suppose he must live close by. So that's convenient.

It’s funny how this and the final episode of classic Doctor Who both made a rare visit to the suburbs. I feel like I’m going to see the Seventh Doctor run by in the background chasing a cat.

The episode could've cut away to the Doctor at any time, he's been fairly well introduced as a character now, but nope it's sticking with Rose as the sole protagonist. Well her and Mickey now, as the camera lingers with him for a bit in the car when Rose goes to meet with the Doctor expert from the internet.

Who is this mysterious bin person who stares at him? Is he an unusually realistic Auton? A human collaborator working with the alien invaders? Some guy who had his perfectly normal bin replaced with an evil one without his knowledge? Or was the bin normal all along and just possessed by an Auton? It's never explained!

I was all set to roll my eyes that Rose had decided to meet with Clive in person without even a single email first, but the first thing she does when he answers the door is mention that they exchanged emails, so fair enough.

Also, I try not to read too much into an episode, but when the guy obsessed with the Doctor is the right age to have watched the show during the Tom Baker-era, and his wife literally says "She's read a website about the Doctor? She's a she?" I have to think they're making a bit of a dig at fans of the classic series here. But if they are it's self-depreciation, seeing as the actor's about the same age as writer/producer Russell T Davies, who is a big fan of the series himself.

The guy turns out to be a bit of a Fox Mulder, with his office/shed full of files about the mysterious Doctor. Though they're mostly photos of the Ninth Doctor looking miserable throughout history.

He has a photo of him at the assassination of JFK and with a family who chose not to travel on the Titanic at the last minute.

I like the idea of the Doctor as an urban legend. I'm not so keen on the photoshopping work. Whenever I see shots like this on a TV series I always wonder if I could've done better. And if I'm really bored I sometimes give it a shot.

Hmmm, I'm going to say kind of? But not really. I don't expect there'll be a job for me in the BBC Wales art department circa 2005.

Speaking of art, Clive's also got a drawing from 1883 on the day Krakatoa exploded.

Though this one's different as it's clearly of the 14th Doctor, played by Nicolas Cage. Also, who has time to stand still for a sketch when Krakatoa's exploding? Definitely not the Doctor, he couldn't even stand still waiting for his tea.

Clive thinks that the Doctor's an immortal alien from another world who tends to show up during disasters and he has one constant companion... but it's not Rose Tyler, it's death. So that's a bit weird. All these photos and not one of them has her in them?

Meanwhile, Mickey got lured over by the mysterious wheelie bin, which turned out to be a trap! So did the Autons do an internet search for the Doctor themselves and then decided to ambush anyone who went to visit Clive? Because I can't think of any other explanation for how they got here before Rose and Mickey.

Noel Clark did some valiant mime work here as Mickey tries to escape the sticky plastic, but in the end the wheelie bin wins, eating him up. Also, it burps afterwards, which I guess is a clue that the director thought he was making a kids show.

By the way, Noel Clark was involved in another revival of a popular British series that originally ended in the 80s, as he was in the main cast of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet for a couple of seasons. In fact, that series has Doctor Who beat as it came back after a 16 year break.

Anyway Rose dismisses Clive as being a bit of a nutcase, but the viewers know that it's actually the producer and director who are crazy, for thinking that plastic Mickey had any place in this story looking like this:

I like comedy in my Doctor Who and I have considerable practice in overlooking bad effects, but this is a good effect for the purposes of bad comedy and I don't appreciate that.

Maybe it's meant to show how self-absorbed Rose is as she entirely fails to notice that her boyfriend is a: clearly made of plastic, b: acting like an alien infiltrator with poor training and limited field experience. The writing doesn't match the makeup and performance so it makes Rose look like an idiot. She's trying to talk to him about how she'll need a new job and how she might get her A-Levels, and he's there grinning like an idiot saying "Babe, sugar, babe, sugar, sweetheart, babe, babe, sugar, sweetheart."

Fortunately, the Doctor runs into her for the third time, for a similar reason as the second time they bumped into each other: the Autons were tracking her because they wanted to track him down but he was tracking them.

And the Doctor just fired a champagne cork into Plastic Mickey's CGI face, complete with comedy music and sound effects. It's depressing how quickly this episode went off the rails. This is what Doctor Who would be if it actually was for 8 year olds.

Rose sees an opportunity to earn Companion Points (collect enough for a free ride in a time machine) and hits the fire alarm to get the building cleared while the Doctor grabs Plastic Mickey's plastic head.

Plastic Mickey's not too keen on having his head removed and has a bit of a fit, his hands transformed into hammers like he's a plastic T-1000. I wish I could say that the head removal effect was surprisingly great... and I actually can! The fake neck they've digitally painted on him is terrible though.

With Plastic Mickey wasting time on his smashing spree the Doctor and Rose have a chance to escape.

These are the kinds of shots you almost never got in the original series as camera lifting technology was primative and expensive. But it does spoil the scene a bit, because it makes it look like Rose picked the absolute wrong direction to run in (a locked gate) and she’s stubbornly sticking to it despite there being a street behind her.

The Doctor unlocks the Tardis and suggests they hide in there and Rose is eventually desperate to try it. So she steps inside... and the camera doesn't show anything but her reaction and the door! I've had my issues with the direction so far, but this scene is pretty much perfect, with Rose going back outside into danger to run a lap around the police box to confirm that it really is smaller on the outside.

And then they give viewers the reveal of the new look Tardis interior!

I have to admit, I've never been entirely keen on this console room. Mostly because the translucent vacuum formed wall panels look like translucent vacuum formed wall panels. I feel like they'd crack and fall off if any of the actors leaned against them.

On the plus side, it's bloody huge compared to the console rooms from the classic series (though maybe not the TV movie) and it's got some three-dimensionality to it. Also, I like the teal and copper colour scheme, I like that you can see the lightbulbs behind the Police Box sign, and I like that it's round. Plus it's been well established that the console room can change its look, and the Tardis is making all the right noises (with no bloody landing chime), so continuity is intact! And if you look really closely behind Rose the hat stand's still there too.

The Doctor sees that Rose is a bit upset and assumes it's culture shock, not considering that she's staring at her boyfriend's doppelganger's plastic head on the console and worrying about the real one. Speaking of the head, it melts all over the console while the Doctor's trying to track down the signal it's receiving, but he manages to get the Tardis to materialise close to the source before losing it entirely.

The Doctor's still too distracted trying to save the world to have time to give a damn about poor Mickey, but he does at least have time to finally (30 minutes in) give a bit of exposition, now that we're really desperate to know what's going on with him. He's an alien, the blue box is called the Tardis, it disappears in one place and reappears in another, it looks like a 50s police box because it's a disguise, and he has a northern accent because lots of planets have a north (and a Salford specifically I guess).

I love how the explanation about the Tardis' look completely deflates its mystique. It started off as this mysterious iconic object seen in the background of shots, then it was revealed to be bigger on the inside and capable of teleportation, but now the Doctor has to sheepishly defend the rubbish disguise caused by the broken chameleon circuit.

Also, it turns out that the Nestene Consciousness lost its protein planets in the war, so it's come to feed on Earth instead. He's made a vial of anti-plastic to stop them, but first he's got to find where their signal's coming from. They need to locate the giant transmitter that the Nestene have somehow hidden right in the middle of London.

It'd be something circular like a wheel and absolutely massive, but it must be completely invisible because there's no sign of it!

I can forgive the episode for making the Doctor look like an idiot here because the scene's giving viewers a chance to be the companion for a moment and say 'Doctor, look!' in their heads. It also gives Rose an opportunity to earn major Companion Points by being the audience surrogate and pointing out what everyone's thinking, and it shows that the Doctor's better when he has a partner.

Plus the Doctor's delighted when he's given the answer, not embarrassed, which makes everyone feel appreciated! And the London Eye being advanced alien technology in disguise follows on perfectly from the conversation about the Tardis' chameleon circuit. Or maybe they just saw it being built and decided to use it as their transmitter, either works.

By the way, using famous landmarks as part of a sinister plot isn't something they only started doing in the revival series. In fact, the evil computer WOTAN used the BT Tower as a transmitter way back William Hartnell's third season, in the episode The War Machines.

Speaking of things that aren't new for the revival series, the two of them hold hands and do some gleeful running down the street in front of landmarks, like in City of Death.

This was the expensive kind of location filming for them as it was in actual London at half 10 at night, hours from Cardiff. In the classic series that would mean they'd 'get their money's worth' by padding out the episode with as many shots of them running as they could. In this case though, they apparently spent their time hanging around waiting for a red bus to drive by so they could get it in shot. Quality over quantity!

Rose spots a hatch by the London Eye, so they decide to go down into the villain's lair together, apparently unconcerned that the Nestene has been sending Autons after them both all episode and this is where they live.

They find themselves in the secret Red Dwarf set under the London Eye (actually it's a disused paper mill in Cardiff), with dramatic fire jets everywhere and a big CGI plastic blob in the floor. Plus Mickey's there too! He was originally going to be a second Auton duplicate but they weren't able to film it in the end so he's actual real Mickey.

The Doctor reveals that his plan isn't to defeat the Nestene (like he did the last two times), this time he's going to pull a The Silurians and try to negotiate their peaceful departure under convention 15 of the Shadow Proclamation. Well, that's what he says he's going to do anyway, what he actually does is tell them to "shunt off". This goes about as well as you'd expect, as a pair of Autons grab him and confiscate his anti-plastic.

I really wish he'd had a more intelligent scheme here as he comes across as inept and out of his depth, and that doesn't do him or the villains any favours. But he does say something interesting here:

"I fought in the war. It wasn't my fault. I couldn't save your world! I couldn't save any of them!"

There's an interesting piece of new information that classic fans wouldn't have had any idea about. Nothing more's said about it though, so it's an extra mystery for a later episode.

The episode's been fairly down to earth up to this point but now there's a liquid plastic CGI blob and the London Eye is shooting radio waves so bright we can see them. It's so old school that I keep waiting for "An RKO Picture" to appear on screen.

At this point Jackie had been brought back into the plot thanks to the introduction of a brand new Doctor Who gadget: Rose's mobile phone. Grace had a pager in the TV movie, but here two characters were able to have an actual conversation across a distance! Well, almost, as the signal cut out before Rose could tell her mother to get back home and stay away from shop dummies.

So Jackie decides to do some late night shopping and finds herself in the middle of the Auton invasion.

The Autons finally get to smash through windows on screen! They didn't have the cash to pull this off back in Spearhead from Space, but Doctor Who got there in the end.

Though I feel like Russell T Davies hadn't seen Spearhead from Space or Terror of the Autons in a while, as in this episode the Doctor says that the Nestene can control all plastic, when in the earlier stories they were manufacturing all the killer chairs, troll dolls and daffodils they were using in their invasions. That's why the Autons in the classic series have guns in their hands, because they were built that way in a Nestene-controlled plastics factory and then sold to the shops they broke out of.

So why these guys have guns I've no idea. Though I suppose there's nothing in the episode that says they weren't constructed by the Nestene Consciousness.

The episode's been fairly lightweight and jokey up to this point, but there's a surprise shift of tone here, as it starts racking up a body count. And the first character to die is poor Clive! At least he got to realise he was right before he was gunned down: if you see the Doctor it really does mean a disaster is about to happen! Also if you see a fire engine driving by with its sirens on, that probably means there's a fire.

Speaking of fire... two minutes of Auton rampage and everything’s ablaze! Jackie's somehow still alive, but not for long as Autons in wedding dresses are lining up in a firing squad to gun her down.

While all this has been going on a whole lot of nothing has been happening for Rose and the Doctor. He's still being restrained by Auton, Rose and Mickey are still watching from the sidelines, and it seems like they're just killing time until Jackie's on the verge of being executed. It's not great television.

With Mickey terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought this is Rose's time to step up as the hero of the story, so she reveals that she does actually have one skill besides folding clothes: she came third in an under-sevens gymnastics contest. Then she pulls a The Lost World: Jurassic Park and uses gymnastics to save the Doctor!

Well actually she swings down from a chain, but it gets the job done.

Four and a half long minutes after first being grabbed, the Doctor's stunt double flips an Auton into the CGI blob while Rose kicks the other one in, along with the anti-plastic. Their long scenes featuring nothing but struggling are over.

Killing the Nestene blob deactivates all the Autons and saves Jackie, and the Doctor grins like an idiot now that the creature he was trying to save is dead and the place is exploding for no obvious reason.

Actually, it's mostly just the ceiling.

This sequence really confused me as it keeps cutting to show bits of the ceiling blowing up, without any explanation about what's causing the explosions or why it's only happening up there, well away from the creature that got anti-plastic'd. It's not a great scene really as it seems to only exist to create a bit of urgency as the three of them run to the Tardis (which the Autons thoughtfully brought down for them).

But it got a lot more impressive to me once I found how it was done. The ceiling you're looking at here is a giant physical model! They built it to look like the location, with tiny pipes and miniature posters on the walls, and then started blowing it up. I honestly had no idea, as it looks 100% convincing to me. It really stands up under scrutiny.

Once Rose's safe she calls Jackie to make sure she's alright too, and then immediately hangs up on her! What the hell Rose? Your mum only went out to look up how you could get compensation for your job exploding and now that she's gone through a major traumatic event herself you're going to pull a Mickey and bail on her? Not cool.

At least Rose decides to turn down the Doctor's call to adventure so she can look after poor Mickey, who's struggling to deal with getting eaten by a bin, being kidnapped by mannequins and then nearly blown up. The Tardis vroop vroop's away and Rose gets on with being one of those one-off characters whose life temporarily intersected with the Doctor's for one brief adventure.

So that explains why Rose never turned up in any of the photos Clive found.

But then the Doctor comes back to point out that the Tardis is also a time machine and that's enough to get Rose to abandon her boyfriend and mother and run into the box for episodic adventures. Even after he admitted with a grin that it's always this dangerous.

Poor Mickey. Last thing she said to him was basically "Thanks for nothing," and she didn't even say that much to Jackie. It plays out like she's escaping a pair of people who've been holding her back, like Harry Potter finally getting to go to Hogwarts, but the two characters are too likeable for that to work, so Rose comes off as being kind of a terrible person.

She could've at least phoned her mother to tell her where she's going! Judging by past companions there's a 14% chance of her leaving to marry someone she's barely met and never coming home, a 14% chance of her dying, and only an 11% chance she'll actually make it back on the same day she left.

By the way, that's composited background in the Tardis, not a backlit backdrop this time. Not that it'd been a backdrop before now as we'd never been able to see the console room from the outside before this episode. That's something not even the TV movie did.


CONCLUSION

---

Instead of Rose they could've called this one An Unearthly Man (or Doctor Who if they wanted to annoy me) as it's all about an ordinary human investigating a strange man with unusual knowledge and abilities, focusing on the companion instead of the title character. In fact Christopher Eccleston's only in around 50% of the story, and it felt like less.

It's interesting to compare this to the TV movie as they have an entirely different approach to dealing out lore. The TV movie was very keen on telling viewers all about the Doctor right from the opening narration and had him continually trying to wear down his disinterested companion with exposition and backstory until she finally gave in and believed him around an hour in. Rose, on the other hand, is all about the protagonist eagerly trying to find out who the Doctor is and what his deal is, because he won't tell her! He's returned to being the mysterious man in the blue box again, who isn't all that keen on company or telling people all the facts. It only takes half an hour for the Doctor to give her vague explanation of who he is and who the villains are, this isn't Lost, but writer Russell T Davies understood that answers are worthless until you take the time to make the viewer care about the question. And he knew that ain't anyone going to care about complicated science fantasy weirdness right off the bat either, so there's no Eye of Harmony absurdity this time either.

The episode is a great argument against resetting continuity as this is perfectly approachable as a new viewer. You need to know nothing to get onboard with this story and it doesn't overwhelm with unnecessary mythology. RTD understood that there'd be plenty of time to mention UNIT and Gallifrey and Daleks and all that, and people would be a lot more interested to hear about them later when they've gotten more invested. Withholding information likely worked for the fans who already knew the drill as well, because there was no guarantee that this new series would be faithful to the continuity, so slowly discovering that it all lines up must have been satisfying. The episode's mercifully free of obnoxious references to classic Who as well, but it gets the important things right, like the Tardis looking the same on the outside and making the same sound when it materialises. Plus the episode did throw one curveball that even the most obsessive fans didn't know about, with the reveal that the Doctor's a veteran of a war now. Might explain why his manic eccentricity comes off a bit like an act, though either way Christopher Eccleston is extremely Doctory in this story. He's got the Fourth Doctor's madness and grin combined with a bit of the First Doctor's misanthropic side and the Third Doctor's condescension.

The Ninth Doctor isn't all that impressive as a hero in this story, but then he doesn't have to be because he's not the protagonist, Rose is. She has to be the one who spots the clues, makes choices and saves the day, because it's her story and she has to prove to herself and the Doctor that she's up to the task. And it couldn't be a particularly difficult task or else she wouldn't seem like an average person anymore. In fact, Rose is maybe the most average relatable companion in the series so far and a lot of that is due to the fact that the episode takes the time to give her a normal life, a mother and a boyfriend, and then doesn't kill them both off so that she'll be free to go travelling. It really cares about her life and what she's going through in a way that the classic series typically didn't, and to be honest I feel like I learned more about Jackie and Mickey in this one episode than I did about Mel during her entire run.

To be fair though, Rose is a double-length episode... kind of. The revival series switched to the typical 45 minute episode format here, with the effect that it feels more like a typical TV series than the classic series did with its long serials split into 25 minute chapters. I was curious to see if it felt too fast paced to me after sitting through a classic series marathon, but nah. It's not rushed, it's efficient. Plus it looks far better than the original stories did, even if it hasn't aged as well as the HD stories from five years later. The thing that dates it the most though is that bloody soundtrack, which I have to admit is a very authentic classic series problem for an episode to have. It's the same composer as the rest of this era, he just hadn't found the right tone yet. Perhaps because the tone of this episode is all over the place. Sometimes it's got a burping wheelie bin, sometimes it's got a dad getting gunned down in front of his family.

Is it a better introduction to the series than the TV movie? Absolutely. But the question is: if I'd seen this when it aired in 2005 would I have continued to watch the series? Seeing as I still haven't seen all of series one I'd have to answer 'no', but I can't say I didn't enjoy it either. 80s Doctor Who could've used a few more stories this good. But it feels a bit like a pilot to a kids show, and that's the biggest thing that put me off back in the day. Folks say that Doctor Who has always been a kids show meant to keep 8 year olds entertained and after seeing a few clips I believed them and stayed clear of it. But I've seen the classic series now and I know that's just some weird lie people keep spreading as part of a conspiracy to confuse me. It's a family series, and Auton Mickey and his bin were too childish for it.

---

COMING SOON

Doctor Who carried on to The End of the World... but I'm not reviewing that any time soon. Instead, I'm jumping to The Christmas Invasion!

Leave me a comment, leave me a comment, leave me a comment, leave me a comment, leave me a comment. Oh go on, leave me a comment.