Doctor Who (2005) 2-01: New Earth

Episode:

711

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Serial:

168

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Writer:

Russell T Davies

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Director:

James Hawes

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Air Date:

15-Apr-2006

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still writing about Doctor Who, even though I probably shouldn't.

I was supposed to be focusing on my poor neglected Super Adventures site this year! I was going to give it some proper attention and play lots of long, complicated Dungeons & Dragons RPGs.

But when I covered the Doctor Who revival's first series for its 20th anniversary I knew I'd be tempted to come back to it a year later for series 2. That's exactly the kind of thing I'd do. So here I am on the 15th April 2026, writing about a story that aired exactly two decades earlier: it's the first proper episode of the David Tennant era, New Earth!

(If you want to go back even further, you can find a list of my reviews for series 1 and The Christmas Invasion by clicking THIS LINK).

New Earth was written by showrunner Russell T Davies himself, in fact it was his fifth episode in a row and he's got one more coming after this before he takes a break. Director James Hawes is back as well, after directing the actual first story in the Tennant era, The Christmas Invasion. He also did the Empty Child / Doctor Dances two-parter last year, so he seems like safe hands.

This isn't my first time watching the episode, but it may be yours so be aware that this review is going to have all of the SPOILERS. Seriously, I'll be going through it scene by scene, with pictures. I won't be spoiling anything that comes after it though, so this will be safe for first time viewers.

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A typical RTD era episode begins with a hook before the credits to get people's attention. New Earth does have a teaser, though I'm not sure I'd call it a hook as it doesn't really make you desperate to see what happens next. It doesn't have any connection to the story at all in fact, and that was apparently deliberate as they wanted something that could be attached to whatever episode they decided to air first.

Though I like the way it tells a little story of its own with just the visuals. It starts on the TARDIS parked in front of a block of flats, so we're at Rose's home. The camera moves down to show Rose with a large backpack hugging Jackie goodbye, then it zooms in to focus on poor miserable Mickey, who's losing her again. Also there are some weirdly moody shots of the Doctor playing around with the TARDIS console, getting her ready for a trip.

One thing you don't get from the teaser is any explanation of what they've been doing all this time, as this clearly doesn't continue directly after the end of The Christmas Invasion.

OPENING CREDITS

They step out of the TARDIS onto what seems like a cold windy hill in Wales, until the cartoony CGI flying cars reveal they're somewhere very different. Also the skyscrapers are a bit of a giveaway... and is that the Statue of Liberty? The Doctor reveals that this is actually New Earth, in the galaxy M87. (Though in a later story he says it's 50,000 light years away from where Earth was, so maybe M87 is just the Milky Way?)

Doctor Who loves jumping to other galaxies, it's one of the things that sets it apart from Star Trek and Star Wars. Though you wouldn't know that from series 1, which was entirely bound to the Earth. Rose visited Raxacoricofallapatorius off screen, but the series hasn't visited an actual alien world since the Cheetah Planet in the Seventh Doctor serial Survival.

It's a familiar time period though. They've arrived just 23 years after The End of the World, which took place in the year 5.5/Apple/26 (revealed here to be the year 5,000,000,000 exactly).

The two of them relax on the apple grass, sitting on the Doctor's new coat. But as they're counting how many times the word 'New' should appear in the name of New New York City, a mysterious guy with mysterious tattoos spies on them with a little droid. It's one of Lady Cassandra's CGI spider bots from The End of the World!

Congrats CGI spider bot, you're now on the list of recurring villains! Not that it actually does anything this time.

The Doctor reveals that there's a message on the psychic paper telling him to visit Ward 26 in the nearby hospital. I'm not sure if he got that before or after he chose to come here, but knowing him it was probably before.

We get lots of proper sci-fi visuals in this one! This is what we were missing last season.

The hospital isn't entirely photorealistic, but I think it works. It looks like an old sci-fi book cover, or maybe concept art for a Marvel movie. And that building on the left is Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai. Honestly, that's not the worst place to get inspiration for a futuristic world, as Star Trek Beyond filmed its Yorktown Station scenes there.

Anyway, the Doctor, godlike lord of time and space, struggles a bit getting his coat on in the wind, and Rose helps him out. Weirdly I just saw Sarah Jane Smith help Tom Baker's Doctor put his coat on in The Hand of Fear, so I'm going to assume this is an extremely subtle reference, even though it's clearly just a consequence of filming on a cliff in Wales.

Oh, it turns out that the Lady Cassandra O'Brien.Δ17 herself has survived somehow! Though she's clearly fallen on hard times as her metal frame's gotten a bit tarnished and rusty. She mentions how much of a huge coincidence it is that her blonde assassin Rose Tyler has shown up again and calls it destiny! So that's one way to hang a lampshade on it.

This would probably be the point where a episode would normally cut to opening credits, but they've done that already, so instead she sets up a joke by saying "At last I can be revenged on that little..." "Bit rich," continues Rose in the next scene, who's surprised that the Doctor doesn't like hospitals. The script's getting a bit playful this week.

The Doctor and Rose enter the hospital, giving the production staff another opportunity to show off how great they are at picking locations. Not that they had to look too hard to find this one, as this was shot in the Wales Millennium Centre at Roald Dahl Plass in Cardiff, which is where the TARDIS was parked in Boom Town.

This is where the Doctor's love of little shops is first revealed, as he's disappointed that they don't have one. (Which is strange now that I think about it, seeing how much the cat nuns running the place appreciate money.) He points over to where the shop is in the Millennium Centre, and says he'd put it there.

Oh, I should mention that the place is run by cat nuns and Rose can't help but stop and stare at one, which is good I think.

I mean staring is bad, don't do that. But when you stop being surprised and amazed at the wonders of the space, then you've outlived your usefulness as a companion. They're there to be the audience surrogate and to let the Doctor see the Doctor Who universe through fresh eyes. Like a reaction channel on YouTube.

Also that's some good makeup. The cat people look alien, not like people with cat heads, so it's a real step above the ones in Survival.

Survival

Doctor Who was doing some actually impressive makeup in the Seventh Doctor era, like the Destroyer in Battlefield and the Ancient One in Curse of Fenric, but they didn't always knock it out of the park.

Anyway, the two have to take separate lifts, and the Doctor tries and fails to warn Rose about the disinfectant spray. Five billion years into the future and the best way they can keep the hospital sterile is to give visitors a shower.

I doubt Billie Piper was genuinely surprised by this, seeing as it's in the script, and is the point of the scene, but it certainly looks genuine.

First Rose is just shocked, then she hates everything that's happening. But you can see her thinking 'okay, this is what's going on, I get it now' and she's a lot more chill about the heating stage which dries her off. Hopefully it got any apple grass stains off the Doctor's coat as well.

It's funny how the scene is making a big deal about preventing viruses from crossing from one place to another, when the heroes routinely visit different times and planets without any concern. Though I'm sure it's been mentioned that the TARDIS has technology that takes care of it.

(I guess that feature was broken the day that Dodo took a trip to a spaceship and almost wiped an alien race out with her cold).

But Rose's lift is redirected to the basement by Cassandra and she's met by her lackey Chip, who addresses her by name and tells her to follow him. This is the point where a veteran time traveller should start spotting red flags, and Rose thankfully picks up a weapon. 

Though she does still follow him.

Meanwhile the Doctor's up in Ward 26, looking at the patients there. Like the Duke of Manhattan, who's dying from turning into a statue. 

He soon finds the person who sent for him though, and it's the Face of Boe!

It's funny how the episode treats him like a big returning character we should recognise and care about, even though his only appearance was in the background of The End of the World. It pretty much gets away with it too. I suppose a giant animatronic head in a jar sticks in the mind, plus he did get a couple of other mentions.

It turns out that he's dying of old age, after living for "thousands of years", maybe longer. Well, we already know it's a lot longer, as he was on the news in The Long Game, about 5 billion years earlier.

Rose finds Cassandra in her basement lair watching old footage of herself on an ancient film projector. I suppose she was always into billion year old antiques. 

This means we actually get to see what she looked like before the flattening surgery, and she looks a lot like her voice actress Zoe Wanamaker. They apparently struggled to schedule the actress for this, and ended up filming her scenes a month or so before the rest of the filming. Fortunately they didn't need to go to plan B and replace her with someone else in the role of Cassandra's equally evil sister.

Though Cassandra is curious about what the cat nuns are up to upstairs, which is an interesting complication - one villain wondering what the other villains are up to.

I was wondering how Cassandra survived literally exploding in her previous appearance and it turns out it's what I expected: her brain was doing just fine in its jar, it was only her body that had exploded. So they just harvested some skin from her back, fished her eyeballs out of the trash, and the body horror continues.

RTD's playful dialogue also continues, as Rose says she's talking out of her... and she replies "ask not." Though I think he's done now.

Rose isn't interested in a team up, due to Cassandra's history of anti-alien racism/attempted murder etc., but that's fine...

It turns out that Cassandra only needed her to walk away into her energy field trap so she could do a 'Turnabout Intruder' and steal her body!

This was good news for the budget, as they didn't have to spend any more money animating a CGI frame of skin, and good news for Billie Piper as well, as she got to have fun and do a bit of comedy instead of constantly crying because the Doctor was being attacked by Daleks, or because he'd turned into David Tennant etc.

It's not great news for Rose. Though I suppose it could've been worse; Cassandra could've done a 'Spock's Brain' on her instead. Or a 'Brain of Morbius', I suppose they'd call it over on Doctor Who.

Hey where'd the energy trap go? It's back again in the next shot.

I'm not really keen on sci-fi plots where a disembodied consciousness possesses someone else, because how? How does that even work? She just floated in the air as glowy energy and now she's running Rose's brain? 

Perhaps they could've thought of a couple of really good technobabble words to sell me on it. "Psychograft" was a start, but it's not enough.

Anyway Cassandra is initially unsatisfied with the switch, looking in the mirror and calling Rose a chav. Who knew that word would survive 5 billion years?

But she soon sees the benefits of being in Rose's body, bobbing up and down and choosing a weird way of saying "bouncy castle". I like how her lackey, Chip, bobs up and down with her, sharing his master's enthusiasm and delight. He could've been an irritating comedy character but I think the actor did a good job avoiding being too camp and annoying.

Billie Piper's doing great as well, dropping all the naivety and humanity and becoming a confident super villain. She's great at the posh accent too... possibly because it's closer to her own, and the Rose accent is something she's been putting on this whole time.

Just then the Doctor phones her up, wondering where the hell she's gotten to. It took him long enough to think of doing this! About 14 episodes. Actually no, I remember them talking on the phone in Dalek. But the Doctor phoning his companion is still a rare event. It was even rarer in the classic series, before the invention of mobile phones.

They're handing out champagne upstairs, as the Duke of Manhattan has been miraculously cured! 
Maybe not a huge warning sign, but it's definitely got the Doctor's interest.

Cassandra was right, the cat nurses are up to something. They go to their secret room full of doors and open one to reveal a man inside reaching for help. They're fascinated about how he can talk, but not enough to keep him alive. They turn on the incinerator and move on. 

I like how this scene is filmed from the perspective of the victim, with their hands in the shot. It's pretty unusual and helps clear up any confusion about who the monster is here. Cats creating cures for the rich isn't so bad, except for the lower class zombies who have to suffer for it.

Up in the ward, Cassandra in Rose's body finally reunites with the Doctor, who is eager to tell her about the mysteries he's stumbled onto. It's like he's barely noticed that she's opened her shirt and started talking in Cockney rhyming slang.

She just says she's trying something new, and then suddenly kisses him!

The Doctor just quips that he's "still got it", so he's not entirely behaving like the asexual character he's been portrayed as in the past. It feels like every modern showrunner besides Chris Chibnall has pushed to make the Doctor a more romantic character, which Doctor/Rose shippers appreciated at least.

This was all in the script by the way, it wasn't an impulsive improvised kiss by the actors.

The two go investigate what the cat nuns are up to, with Rose offering some technical advice that she couldn't possibly know. If the Doctor wasn't suspicious before he has to be now.

They find the place where the cat nuns are storing people and the Doctor opens up a door to look at them! Probably not the safest thing to do. Especially as he reveals that they have all the diseases in the galaxy. But not the ones that spread in the air. 

In fact they mostly have the diseases that are spread instantly through touch, and this episode's not going to trick me into researching if that's even a thing.

We get the first use of a Tenth Doctor catchphrase here, as as he tells one of them "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry". I'm not keen on it, as it turns his sympathy into a running gag. At least Star Trek's Doctor McCoy waited until people were dead before saying his line. (While Doctor Who's McCoy Doctor talked his enemies to death).

The Doctor is not happy and confronts one of the cat nuns (I think it's Novice Hame, but I don't know). She explains that there were too many people with too many illnesses and they were overwhelmed. They needed a solution and this is what they came up with.

He's also a bit pissed off with how they've mind controlled Rose, as her lack of compassion is a dead giveaway (also all that other stuff she's been doing). But Cassandra quickly sprays him with some knock out perfume and seals him in one of the chambers! Man, it's a good thing he wasn't this slow when he was having dinner with Blon a few episodes ago, as he would've been dead three times in one meal.

I'm never keen on the Doctor being completely outplayed and helpless like this, because I hate it when characters are saved by luck, especially this character in particular. A 900 year old maniac who rushes into danger and can go through two adventures in one afternoon can't be this easy to beat or else it's unbelievable.

Though to be fair, this episode doesn't really give a damn about being believable.

Cassandra reveals her endgame and tries to blackmail the cat nuns. But they don't give money, only receive it, so they just threaten her with claws. (So they're called the Sisters of Plenitude (abundance) because they want an abundance of wealth, got it.)

This possibility apparently never occurred to Cassandra, but she thinks fast, releasing all the zombies and making a run for it. Nice plan Cassandra, good job.

I was wondering why they decided to go with fake looking CGI claws for this bit, when all they had to do was have a glove with claws on it and open their hand. Turns out that they apparently tried a physical prop first and it looked worse. CGI was the fix!

Survival

Funny thing is, Survival also features a hand with extending practical claws and pretty much pulled it off.

The episode also uses CGI for a shot of all the doors opening, despite having practical doors built into the set. I guess opening them all simultaneously would've been hassle they didn't need. 

Shame that it looks so rubbish, like it's from a DVD menu.

So the heroes and cats go on the run from the zombies... hang on, isn't this the lair of the Nestene consciousness from last season? 

The cat nuns show fascination with how the zombies can talk and form arguments, though we get barely any explanation why. Or why it's even important to the story that they can. There are other ways to demonstrate intelligence... and shambling towards people with their arms out isn't it. They seem aware that they're infecting and killing people, so why continue to do it? I know they're desperate for touch after being isolated forever, but why only touch healthy people?

Something else that's never explained: why is their hair so perfectly cut? These people were born in virus chambers, they've never been out, but they're all clean shaven with actual haircuts.

Anyway if they touch you, you get the plague and your skin bubbles up, instantly. That seems a bit fast to me! It's definitely too fast for one of the cat nuns, who seems to die screaming.

The Doctor and Cassandra head to her basement lair and manage to barricade themselves inside for a moment, and Cassandra finally agrees to leave Rose's body... switching over to the Doctor's body instead! Because unlike every disease in the galaxy, she can be transmitted through the air.

Well, that's it, the Doctor's been properly defeated now. Or at least he would've been if there wasn't this whole crisis going on. Just imagine if any of the Doctor's other villains had this psychograft technology though, it would be over. End of the series.

David Tennant gets his moment to have fun here, doing his own comedic impersonation of Cassandra. Which means we get the rare appearance of Rose in this story! I suppose it makes sense that after Rose got such a focus in The Christmas Invasion that they'd give the new Doctor a turn in the spotlight. The End of the World did something similar, separating the two and giving the Doctor a temporary companion so that we were following the adventure from his perspective instead of hers.

But then the zombies break in and they need to escape up the extremely long ladder. Somehow a cat nun gets on between them and the zombies, so we get a scare as she grabs Rose's foot for some reason. But then she's infected and falls down the endless CGI tunnel, and the heroes get enough distance from the zombies to have a chat again.

Cassandra's kind of stuck as the Doctor refuses to use the sonic screwdriver to open the door unless she releases Rose, and possessing the Doctor doesn't help as she doesn't know how to use the sonic. So she goes to plan C: possessing one of the infected! Who briefly becomes the fourth actor in this story to play Cassandra. 

She manages to possess Rose again when they escape, but the experience has left her shaken. She could read the zombie's mind and she knows how lonely she is. She's actually giving a damn about someone other than herself! Kind of.

Some folks who'd rented this on DVD from Netflix apparently got a surprise here, as around 32 minutes in it switched to a scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning instead. Somehow. At least it happened to an episode where people were dying horribly anyway, and not something like Teletubbies.

The two of them find there's much less running and screaming up here where the rich people are, but the episode's not really feeling too judgemental about them so it's fine. Though they are trying to get the quarantine lifted so they can leave, which would be very bad for people living in the city nearby.

Fortunately the Doctor finds a solution. Actually he finds all the solutions, the IV drips containing cures, and straps them onto himself. Then he asks Cassandra to live for once and join him to save the day, which she does! Mostly because zombies have breached the defences.

They ride the cable down to that disinfectant lift established at the start (good storytelling) and mix all of the cures together so they can spray it on the zombies, healing them! (bad storytelling).

I've read that RTD's original plan was to kill them all, until he read Steven Moffat's introduction to the series 1 script book which joked about how he always killed characters off, and decided to take a swerve. The trouble is that it's done in the dumbest, easiest way possible. The Doctor doesn't figure out an answer to the problem using logic or science, he just puts all the cures into the disinfectant together and sprays everyone! Genius! Why don't we ever do this in real life?

Here's a better question, why didn't any of the cats in the room think of this? They know what the zombies are infected with, they have the cure right next to them, it's not rocket science. In fact it's barely even medical science, but it apparently works in this reality.

Oh and the cure is so good that it spreads through touch! People only need to be touched by one of the zombies in order to instantly heal and return to looking like a beautiful actor (with a very nice haircut). 

Instant symptoms is a real stretch, instant healing is absolutely impossible. Unless... the cat nuns were training nanogenes like in The Empty Child! Speedy little nanomachines that can reconstruct matter, that would've made all of the sense. Or at least more sense than we got here.

The zombies are still a bit blank, but they're cured. That's the difference between science fiction and horror I suppose - in science fiction there's a chance that the zombies can be saved and live happy post-zombie lives. With a bit of post-zombie trauma if they'd been turned into cyber-zombies.

Anyway, the Doctor tells notorious space racist Cassandra that she just helped create a new species of human, and she doesn't actually seem disgusted by the idea.

As the police arrive to arrest the cats, the Doctor and Cassandra return to the Face of Boe so he can impart his Great Secret to the Lonely God before he dies, but Cassandra transfers back to the Doctor's body! Rose tries to stop her, but really there's nothing she can do as the Doctor just walks away and is never seen again. 

Rose makes her way back to the TARDIS, but she doesn't know how to pilot it. So she eventually moves into New New York and starts a new life there. Until she catches a space disease that the Sisters of Plenitude hadn't developed a cure for and dies. A bit of a weird way to start series 2, but no one ever said Doctor Who didn't take risks.

Actually Cassandra just hangs around as the Face of Boe delivers his telepathic message, which is basically "Not yet! Later". Then he teleports off. Textbook enigmatic, as the Doctor says. Though did he bring the Doctor here because he was aware of the cat nun plot, or did he really believe he was about to die?

Cassandra tries to make the case for why she should get to keep Rose's body, at least until she finds someone younger and less common. But the Doctor says it's her time to die and she should accept that. 

Then Cassandra realises that Chip would be a willing victim and takes his body! I have to be honest, I think the guy playing Chip is probably the most convincing Cassandra. He makes it seem very natural instead of like an actor having fun.

The Doctor immediately changes his tune, saying that they can put her in a skin tank so she can stand trial. There won't be time for that however, as Chip's force-grown-cloned body has reached its limit and he's dying. Cassandra's okay with that now though. 

So the Doctor decides to be kind(?) by taking Cassandra back to when her home movie was recorded so that she can die in her own arms! 

It's kind of messed up but also kind of moving, with Chip-Cassandra able to tell herself that she looks beautiful without all the surgery, and past-Cassandra showing compassion for the nice man who's dying on the floor. Cassandra got what she needed both times, from herself. It's such a memorable ending that it deserves a better episode.

The Doctor took a bit of a risk that she wouldn't just possess someone else though! She could've possessed her past self, caused a paradox, and it would've been Father's Day all over again.


CONCLUSION

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You can say there are two kinds of people watching science fiction:

Group A doesn't mind if the episode contradicts lore, breaks the laws of reality, doesn't logically make sense etc. as long as it puts the characters in situations where they can have fun. They're the 'the good thing about science fiction is that literally anything can happen!' people.

Group B likes to be able to suspend their disbelief and get into the drama. It's fine if characters are having fun as long as they're able to take the setting and science seriously. They're the 'the good thing about science fiction is that you can immerse yourself in an alternate world!' people.

Well actually I suppose everyone's somewhere between the two, and where they land depends on the things that matter to them personally. Every viewer has their own 'shark jump' threshold, the point where they think 'okay this has gotten too absurd now, I'm out'. For example a doctor may not appreciate New Earth much, because any resemblance to reality is entirely coincidental. It's really bloody stupid.

This isn't the first time Doctor Who's done something this dumb and it won't be the last, but I've never felt like this is 'just what the series is like'. I'm not going to repeat to myself "It's just a show, I should really just relax", because honestly I expect a little more from Britain's #1 science fiction series than I do from Mystery Science Theater 3000 skits.

They could've just explained it by having the nuns training nanogenes to make cures, I would've been able to go along with that. Cassandra could've been transferring her mind into a cloud of nanogenes too, that would explain how that works. Combine the two ideas, and you explain why the zombies have magically acquired the knowledge of how to speak. That's just what I came up with off the top of my head, I'm sure a professional science fiction writer could do better.

Anyway, I'd seen this episode before and I remembered little pieces of it, but I was very surprised that Cassandra had her own scheme going on that was separate to what the cat nurses were up to. In fact she's basically the companion in this one! This is bad news for Rose, who barely appears, but making Tennant's Doctor the protagonist this time was probably the right move.

Did Cassandra need a redemption arc? I think anyone can have a redemption arc really, whether I want them to or not, even if it was really rushed. You can't run a mile in someone else's shoes without developing a little bit of empathy I suppose, and she didn't get that far on her journey. She would've been happy to walk off with another woman's body at the end if that was an option. The ending is more interesting and memorable than the main plot, so I guess I have to call it a win, even if the tonal shifts in this episode are wild.

Overall I thought the episode was... alright. It kept my attention and I can appreciate that, plus it was nice to see the actors having fun. David Tennant brings a new vibe to the series, like he was supposed to. He's less tormented and somehow also less goofy, but still a bit alien in his own way. It's just a shame that I couldn't get into it because of how inexplicable it is.

I mean... why do the bio-engineered zombies have proper hairstyles? Nothing makes sense!


RATING

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There's a lot to like about this one and a lot to dislike, but I'd say the good slightly outweighs the bad so I'm giving it...

  5/10

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NEXT EPISODE

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's Tooth and Claw, the second episode of the second series of Doctor Who's second era. Will it be a second-rate story or second to none? I'll let you know what I think on the twenty-second of April.

Also, if you've got a second, please leave a comment with your own thoughts about New Earth.