Doctor Who (2005) 1-02: The End of the World

Episode:

698

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Serial:

158

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Writer:

Russell T Davies

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Director:

Euros Lyn

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Air Date:

26-Mar-2005

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm finally getting around to the second episode of the 2005 Doctor Who revival: The End of the World! I wrote about episode 1, Rose, back in 2018 when I was covering all the modern regeneration stories leading up to the debut of the Thirteenth Doctor. Now we're about to get the Fourteenth Doctor, and I'm writing about episode 2, so at this rate I should be done with series 1 by the time the Twenty-Fifth Doctor comes around.

I'll be screencapping the whole episode and sharing my thoughts and observations as I go, so there will be SPOILERS here, but probably only really for this and Rose. I definitely won't be spoiling anything that comes after them.

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The episode begins with a recap of the previous story, Rose, mostly because the episode was running about 40 seconds short. At least that's what I've heard. It works out though, as it means we get a replay of Rose Tyler hanging up on her traumatised mother, abandoning her boyfriend, and running into a strange alien's magic box, and then the episode continues on right afterwards with her stepping through the TARDIS doors. We haven't missed one second of their adventures together.

It's just like how classic serials would start each episode by resolving the previous episode's cliffhanger, except this time we're in a brand new story. Though this kind of pre-credits teaser was pretty damn unusual for Doctor Who. There are only something like five stories in the entire classic series (including the movie) that have anything before the opening titles. Teasers became pretty much standard after this though.

Damn, they really made the console room look huge here. I don't think they could've even pulled the camera back any further than this without giving away that they only had half the room built.

I've read that the original concept for the walls was that they'd be lit to match the scenery outside the TARDIS, but I'm glad that didn't happen. At least I don't think it happened. I'm not keen on the translucent look as it is, and I think it would've made it look even more like a tent.

The close-ups we get of the console look a bit ropey as well in my opinion. I mean I know it's supposed to look rough and cobbled together from junk, but they did too good a job.

Anyway, Rose decides she wants to see the future, so we get our first glimpse at what the time vortex looks like in this era! I mean aside from the shot that's in the opening titles. Here's something I never realised when I first watched these episodes: the colour of the vortex changes depending on what direction they're travelling. When they go forward in time the vortex looks red, when they go backwards it looks blue.

The Doctor's clearly in the mood to show off to his new companion as he stops the TARDIS in 2105, a whole 100 years in the future. This also shows new viewers just how powerful his time machine is, even if he has to use a bike pump to operate it. But we're not getting to see that, as he changes his mind and takes her to 12005 instead! The new Roman Empire. Something even veteran fans had never seen in the series

But they didn't get to see it now either, as he sends the TARDIS even further.

This is the year 5.5/apple/26, about five billion years into the future. So that's a bit of a change from the very earthbound mundane setting of the first episode. It shows viewers that the TARDIS can go anywhere, no limitations. Except that they are actually still at Earth, they're just on a space station in orbit.

One of the problems with a screencap like this is that it gives you a lot of time to notice that the shadows don't seem to be facing away from the sun. My theory is that the glass is blocking most of the sunlight for their protection, and they're being lit by a spotlight. I mean they're staring right at the sun without squinting, and I couldn't even do that with a 10 watt LED light bulb.

The Doctor has a bit of a speech here about how people spend so much time worrying about what's going kill the human race that they don't imagine the impossible: that we survive. Showrunner Russell T Davies has mentioned that he's a bit more cynical these days, which is a bit worrying to me, to be honest. I don't need the Fourteenth Doctor giving a speech about how we're all totally screwed.

Anyway, the Doctor continues by revealing that this is the literal end of the world, as the sun's about to expand and consume it in nuclear fire. So that ruins Rose's mood in a hurry.

OPENING CREDITS

Oh damn, that almost looks like a Farscape effects shot. It's ancient CGI at this point, almost 20 years old, but the art design ensures that absolute photorealism isn't entirely necessary. It's pretty is what I'm saying. And detailed too: the station even has visible jets of gas firing off occasionally, presumably to make adjustments to its position.

This is Platform One and a voice-over lets us (and the shuttle occupants) know that the station doesn't allow weapons, teleportation or religion. Damn, do they have religion sensors set up to scan people's brains or something? Or do they just want to keep pentagrams, prayers and preaching off the premises?

The Doctor and Rose find themselves an even more impressive window to stand at, to the annoyance of the visual effects team. This was very early on in the series and the British production crew didn't have years of experience on shows like Star Trek or Stargate to draw from. They were still working out how to make an episode like this on a TV budget, so they went a bit over the top with the green screen window shots. It didn't help that it was shot at PAL DVD resolution with DigiBeta digital cameras, so they didn't have a high-resolution image to pull clear mattes from.

The end result looks pretty good though I reckon, and the rest of the room isn't bad either. It's actually a real building in Cardiff, called the Temple of Peace. One of the big differences between this era of Doctor Who and the glossy US space operas it was trying to match, is that the US shows kept location shoots to a minimum to save money, while Doctor Who kept constructed sets to a minimum to save money.

Rose points out a few problems with what she's seeing, like the fact that Earth's continents haven't drifted (not that we can tell from the visuals). The Doctor explains that the National Trust put them back, and they've been holding the sun back too. The National Trust is hardcore in this millennium. But the Doctor got no plans to rush in and save the world this time. This is the day he finally sits back, puts his feet up, and lets the world explode.

So that's a bit of a subversion of expectations, for Rose and the audience. New viewers watching this episode for the first time come into it with the impression that Doctor Who is a show about the Doctor saving the world. But now what is it about? And why the hell did the Doctor decide it was a good idea to bring his new companion to see her planet die? It's a very... alien kind of thinking.

In fact, it's a while before he even tells her that the place has been evacuated and no one's down there anymore. This is more like an old house getting demolished rather than a tragedy on an apocalyptic scale. Kind of.

A blue-hued steward arrives and is a bit troubled by their appearance in a maximum hospitality zone but he's satisfied when the Doctor whips out a blank bit of paper and claims to be a guest, with Rose as his plus one.

For a moment it seems like the Doctor planned to bring Rose along from the beginning, but nope it's just psychic paper that shows people what he wants them to see in other to move the plot along. It's a new gadget introduced here to help reduce stories from epic four-part serials to streamlined single episodes. Rose isn't quite ready to hear about paper though, she's still stuck on the guy being blue. It's all a bit of a shock to her.

I know how she feels, as it was a shock to me when the steward began introducing the rest of the guests and the obnoxious goofy music started. I'm not used to this series one soundtrack.

The music gets the tone across though: this is all really weird and viewers aren't supposed to feel comfortable in this place. Rose is struggling enough with one Guardians of the Galaxy-tier body paint alien, she's not ready for things to go full Farscape. In fact, so many aliens are turning up that it's turning into the Star Wars cantina scene.

The Doctor's loving it though, grinning like a maniac the whole time. He's not even thrown off when it turns out they were supposed to bring gifts.

Jabe of the Forest of Cheam is a tree, and she's giving away cuttings of her grandfather. I mean I'm assuming evolved trees can be a 'she' from the way she looks compared to her entourage. I suppose the more important question is whether these cuttings are going to grow into people, like Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy.

This is one of the rare moments where the Doctor finds he has nothing in his pockets, so he has to improvise and give her a gift of breath from his lungs. She's not too disappointed, especially when he promises there's more where that came from. Damn, the classic Doctors would've never flirted with a tree. 

Next is the sponsor of this event, the Face of Boe. They made this giant prop basically to have something interesting in the background.

The Doctor's second gift comes from the Moxx of Balhoon, who spits right in Rose's face, just to make her mood even worse. She's been very calm about it all though really.

Then it's the Adherents of the Repeated Meme who've arrived bearing balls. Doctor Who doing memes before they were cool. They're a bit ominous with their dark cloaks, hidden faces and giant metal claws, and their mysterious spheres are a little suspicious too. I like their $$$ bling though. 

And the final guest is the Lady Cassandra O'Brien dot Delta Seventeen, who looks she has starred in one too many Looney Tunes cartoons. Actually, she's meant to be a parody of people who get plastic surgery to the point where they look unhealthy.

Cassandra claims to be the last human, which kind of puts a new spin on the Doctor's speech earlier about imagining that humanity survives. It's all very depressing for poor Rose, who's already feeling overwhelmed.

Cassandra shows off by producing an "iPod" from ancient Earth filled with humanity's greatest songs. She got the name wrong, but it's still pretty impressive I reckon. This Wurlitzer jukebox is roughly 5 billion years old, so I'm amazed it hasn't turned to dust by now.

They put the Soft Cell cover of "Tainted Love" on, which isn't what I expected to be honest. I mean yeah it's not an example of history's greatest classical music, but it's a long way from being comically bad. I suppose it was chosen for its lyrics, which Rose finds a bit too relatable. The Doctor's dancing, but she feels like she's got to run away, she's got to get away. And she disappears through the door.

Also, the steward gives us an update on the countdown: Earth Death in 30 minutes.

The Doctor gives pursuit but he's stopped by Jabe who wants to do a quick scan. She's trying to identify his race for some reason but her gadget is making some uncooperative tweets. It gets there in the end and she's surprised at the answer. It's a shame she didn't catch Rose before she left, I bet finding a second human in the room would've been an interesting result as well.

Meanwhile one of the creepy memes offers the blue steward a metal sphere gift, to his confusion.

Nobody's noticed that they're starting to open up to release a mysterious four-legged CGI spider robot. So that's probably not good.

The animation's pretty decent though. Sometimes an okay-looking CGI creature will be let down by some awkward unnatural movement, but this thing scurries around convincingly.

Rose has found another window to stand beside, though another blue alien called Raffalo shows up and she starts worrying that she's wandered somewhere off-limits. It turns out that Rose has permission to be anywhere, but the alien needs her permission to talk, which explains why all the extras are being so quiet I guess.

She learns that Raffalo is a plumber, which gives her just a little bit of normality to grab onto, like a sailor thrown overboard grabbing onto a life ring. I think viewers need it at this point as well. But then Raffalo sends her adrift again by revealing that she's from the Jaggit Brocade, affiliated to the Scarlet Junction, Convex 56. I've seen 800 episodes of Star Trek and even I don't have a clue what that means.

Raffalo asks Rose where she's from, and she realises that she can't tell her. Then it dawns on her that she doesn't actually know who she's travelling with! She just made a snap decision to hitch a lift with a complete stranger.

Raffalo is instantly likeable as a character, so it's really cruel that she's the first one to die when the spiders turn nasty and swarm at her in a vent. She only wanted to register their ident! The actor, Beccy Armory absolutely nails the role, but she quit acting afterwards to work at a theatre and arts centre.

The amazing thing about Raffalo's scenes is that they were shot three months after the main block of filming when they realised that the episode was running short. The conversation with Rose seems so crucial to her arc in the story.

Then the computer voice gives us an update: Earth Death in 25 minutes.

By this point Rose, is sitting down somewhere with a nice view of her doomed planet (on a set this time, not in the Temple of Peace). She's talking to her new plant, pointing out that she's a Rose so they might be related. Unfortunately her other gift escapes and quietly scurries away to a vent behind her without her noticing. In fact, it doesn't seem like anyone's noticed that their orbs have opened.

I keep looking at the spider robot trying to figure out what's making it look less than photorealistic. The visual effects team put a lot of work into the things, even compositing a subtle reflection onto the floor, and the red flashlight eye does a lot to integrate it into the scene, but there's something not quite right.

Edited shot

I tried doing a quick edit to make the brightness of the CG shadows match the shadows under Rose's hand and I think that helped.

The Doctor arrives, all smiles, but Rose isn't as enthusiastic about the event as he was probably hoping for. I don't think it even occurred to him that it maybe wasn't a good idea to bring her to watch her planet explode on their first trip.

Rose is still struggling to process how alien the aliens are, and the Doctor makes a quip about how it's a good thing he didn't take her to the Deep South. Which isn't a bad line. But then the episode surprised me by taking it a step further and having Rose get annoyed by it, calling it a cheap shot!

She's also a little bothered when she learns that his TARDIS has been translating things inside her brain without permission. It took around 13 years for the classic series to get around to the subject of how they can understand the aliens, but this is the first time they've made it clear that the TARDIS is involved.

This line could've just been a throw-away bit of a exposition to explain a bit of the show's sci-fi premise, but it's actually escalated their argument.

She finally asks him what sort of alien he is and where he's from, and this really pisses him off! The Doctor can be a bit evasive about things, but this has to be the first time he's actually gotten angry at a companion for wanting to know a few basic facts. In fact, he gets up and walks away to the other side of the room. It's a big hint that something really traumatic happened to him during that mysterious Time War that happened while the series was off-air.

Earth Death in 20 minutes.

The countdown doesn't quite tick down in real-time by the way, as it's only been two and a half minutes since the 25-minute notification, but it's pretty close. And the Earth does actually explode 20 minutes from now.

Rose sees that she's hit a nerve and tries to make peace, saying her mate told her some advice: don't argue with the designated driver. And it's not like she can call for a taxi. Talking about the phone brings the Doctor out of his depressed mood and he leaps into action, giving her Nokia 3200 an upgrade.

You only get a glimpse of the device the Doctor puts in the phone, but here's a nice clear screencap of it, so you can see that it looks like... I dunno, a black rectangle with a cylinder on either side? It seems a bit weird that replacing the battery allows it to transmit through time, but I guess it acts as a cell tower for the phone to talk to. It's a lot more useful as a gift than air from his lungs, so I'm glad he held onto it.

The Doctor's never had a companion from the 21st century with a mobile phone before so there's never been any need to do this before now. It didn't seem like most of the companions had anyone they wanted to talk to anyway.

Rose phones Jackie and we get a fancy shot from inside her washing machine. I never gave shots like this much thought, until I learned how much effort goes into creating them. They couldn't just put a camera into a washing machine, not in 2004, and it's not CGI either. So it seems like they took a washing machine apart to get exactly 3 seconds of footage.

Jackie is weirdly calm, considering that she was just attacked by shop mannequins and her daughter never came home, but there's a clue to explain why that's so subtle that I completely missed it the first time around. She tells Rose to put a quid into the lottery pool they've got going at work, which blew up at the start of episode one. Or will blow up, from Jackie's point of view: the events of episode one haven't happened yet. The device in the phone is pretty clever, but it's got the timing out by almost a day.

Incidentally Rose really is talking to her mother in the past here; Jackie's side of the conversation was shot a month earlier as Camille Coduri was flying off to Spain to film a movie. So the episode was basically shot over 5 months, with the main block of filming being two weeks. The American series I write about typically had about 6-7 days of filming for each episode, while Red Dwarf episodes took two days, so they spent a fair bit of time on this.

The Doctor was probably hoping that being able to talk to someone back home would cheer Rose up, but now her mind's been blown by the fact that her mother died 5 billion years ago. I mean it seems obvious, but it's only now that the reality is really sinking in. This is something Russell T Davies brought to the series; previous companions didn't really think about this stuff.

Meanwhile, the steward watches as the little 4-legged spider creature pressed a button on his keyboard. A button that apparently cannot be un-pressed. The sun filter on the window comes down, exposing him to the full brightness of an expanding sun. It's not great for him, but at least it probably made the shadows look more realistic.

So that's actor Simon Day's work done for the episode. Though he did return to Doctor Who years later to play Rump in the episode Face the Raven. He also played Commander Randy Navarro in the Red Dwarf episode Holoship.

The episode cuts back to the observation room, where the Doctor and Rose return just a little too late to catch the Moxx talking to someone about the 'Bad Wolf scenario'

The Doctor asks Jabe what she thinks about the weird shaking they just had. The sounds of metal aren't really her area of expertise, but she can take him to the maintenance duct to check it out. She offers to take Rose as well but isn't sure of the right word to refer to her. Wife? Partner? Concubine? Prostitute?

Rose decides she's going to go off and talk to "Michael Jackson" for a while instead, which shows she's getting more comfortable now. She even makes a quip to the Doctor, saying she wants him home by midnight.

Earth Death in 15 minutes.

Part of the reason that the episode was running so short is because Cassandra was a pain in the ass to animate and they had to cut a lot of her scenes. But she still gets to have a decent conversation with Rose, about how she used to live on Earth when she was a little boy. What Rose really wants to know is what happened to the human race and it turns out that their final fate was a racist's worse nightmare: they just interbred with aliens. Humanity is actually doing fine, it did survive, it just doesn't reach Cassandra's level of 'purity' anymore.

Actor Zoe Wanamaker did a good job of making Cassandra kind of hateable, but I'm not sure she went far enough here, considering Rose's extreme reaction. She takes real offence to being told that she could have some plastic surgery to flatten her chin, saying that she'd rather die, before calling her a 'bitchy trampoline'. Then Rose brags that she's the true last human, because all that's left of Cassandra is lipstick and skin.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Jabe are wandering down one of the station's maintenance corridors, played by the basement of BBC Wales. The episode is going with the Alien approach of having the living areas dressed up nicely and the engineering sections being a lot more spartan.

The Doctor's clearly happy that there's no one else coming to help as it means that it's up to him to solve this problem. Going to see the Earth explode was a treat for Rose, but he's happiest when he's fixing things and saving the day.

As they're talking he gives the computer a scan with his sonic screwdriver, which gives us a good look at the gadget and of the weird, almost unreadable font they use in the year 5 billion.

I like that the Doctor talks differently to Jabe than he does to Rose. She's more on his level, he doesn't have to explain the universe to her. In fact, she knows even more than he thinks she does, as she scanned him earlier. She tells him that the device revealed what species he is... but there's no need to say it out loud. These first two episodes really build up the mystery of what exactly the Doctor is, even though it's been pointed out already that the name wouldn't mean anything to humans.

Jabe puts a hand on his arm and tells him how sorry she is about what happened to his people. She might be the first person to ever do that.

So it's no wonder that he's so shaken when it cuts to his close-up. Christopher Eccleston does a great job of showing how traumatised the character is without even moving or saying a word. Especially considering that this was a green screen shot filmed afterwards.

The two of them get access to the inner workings of the platform and we get to see how terrible the design is.

I mean having a walkway over a chasm with no handrails is very Star Wars, but having giant fan blades spinning across it is straight-up Galaxy Quest. The Doctor justifies its basic design by saying it's old fashioned and retro, but I don't think engineers in any time period would miss the obvious solution of moving the walkway a little bit to the side. Or just lowering it by a couple of meters. 

Though the VFX team earned some bonus points here by having the blades reflected by the floor. They also put a robot spider on the wall, but Jabe flicks it down with a vine from her arm like Spider-Man.

Meanwhile, Rose is wandering the corridors, maybe looking for the Doctor. Unfortunately, what she finds is the Adherents of the Repeated Meme and one of them knocks her out with their metal claw! Which is interesting. I mean, we know that they're the ones who brought the spiders onboard, but why go after Rose in particular?

Earth Death in 10 minutes.

Back at the party, Cassandra decides to mourn the passing of the Earth with one of humanity's traditional ballads: "Toxic". It kind of feels like a deliberate dig at Rose to me somehow, maybe because Billie Piper was kind of like the British Britney Spears for a while. Or maybe because it plays over shots of Rose stuck in a death trap.

Rose wakes up to find the sun filter on the window descending, exposing the room she's in to the full heat of the sun. Though only in the bits that the rays hit, everything else is still fairly cool. Fortunately, the Doctor's in the hallway outside and he's able to save her with his sonic! Well, he's able to get the sun filter back up anyway.

If you've ever wanted to hear a computer voice say "Sun filter descending," and "Sun filter rising," over and over again, this is the scene for you.

Earth Death in 5 minutes.

Hey, the lighting on the little spider robot suddenly looks perfect. In fact, it's just like a real physical prop that the actor is holding his hand.

The Doctor brings the robot Jabe caught to the party, because all the suspects are gathered there and it's time to find out who the real criminal mastermind is!

Is it the Face of Boe, who invited everyone there? Is it Jabe, who has been suspiciously helpful this whole time? Is it the Moxx of Balhoon, who has just been kind of there in the background? Is it the bitchy trampoline?

The Doctor's pretty sure that the spider bot is going to scurry to its master (and not just wander off to do its job), so he drops it on the floor and it walks over to... the Adherents of the Repeated Meme! 

The lead meme goes to smack the Doctor with his claw, but the Doctor just grabs it, tears it off, and then snaps a cable to make them all collapse! That's a pretty big design flaw. The Doctor points out that a repeated meme is just an idea, so they were never real. Just more remote-controlled robots, like the spiders.

He gives the little spider bot a nudge this time it scurries over to its true master: Cassandra.

I can't say how obvious it was that she was the villain as I already knew it from the start. That's one of the downsides of watching a series out of order. But she's definitely the person I'd want to be the villain

The Doctor's not feeling too threatened by her goons, saying "What are you going to do, moisturise me?" So she reveals that their sprayers can also spray acid... which seems kind of dangerous. Don't get those two mixed up. It also makes them a weapon, which are forbidden on Platform One.

It turns out that Cassandra was trying to create a hostage situation so she could make a fortune from the compensation. Which is also what Jackie kept trying to get for Rose last episode when her job blew up. Incidentally, Cassandra's still pissed off about Rose, as she doesn't want any rivals claiming that they're the last human. So that explains why she tried to have her killed. In fact, she's still trying to have her killed, along with everyone else here.

Turns out that she bought shares in their rival companies under the theory that they'd triple once they were dead, and now she's going to teleport out of the sabotaged space station and let them all burn. Teleportation is also forbidden on Platform One but, as she points out, she's kind of a bad person.

Earth Death in 2 minutes.

The spider bots explode, shutting down the station's main forcefield. The sun filter's still on but that's not going to help them if the window cracks.

So the Doctor and Jabe race back down to engineering to save the day. He's really smart, so he's already figured out that the switch to restore the computer is on the other side of the fans. Unfortunately, he's too dumb to figure out how to keep the lever that slows the fans held down. Seriously, I think even I could've solved this one.

Jabe volunteers to hold the lever, even though heat levels are rising and she's made of wood, and she tells him to stop wasting time... Time Lord. His species is finally revealed! So the Doctor starts stepping through the fans.

Then the woman's arm sets on fire! Sympathetic characters have had some pretty horrific deaths on Doctor Who before (poor Clive was gunned down in front of his kids last episode), but they're not often burned alive.

The weird thing is, it doesn't even seem to be that hot in there. I mean their clothes aren't bursting into flame and the Doctor isn't getting horrifically burned. He is going to get horrifically sliced up though at this rate as the blades are spinning up to speed again.

Damn, you can see her burning in the background. Well I mean you can't really make anything out, she's out of focus, but she's glowing bright and it's surprisingly dark for a family show. Weird how can't see the Doctor's clothes blowing though, considering how fast this fan's moving now.

Earth Death in 5 seconds.

The Doctor's having a bit of trouble getting through the last fan blade and I guess there's not enough time to drop down to the edge and climb along, so he tries something different. He closes his eyes, mysterious Time Lord music starts playing, and he just steps through at the exact right time.

I'm kind of torn on this scene, to be honest. On the one hand, I'm not sure it's even possible to step through a blade spinning that fast, no matter how well you time it. On the other hand, it's a total Luke Skywalker 'use the Force' moment and I'm a sucker for people tapping into their powers to pull off something amazing. The Doctor's main superpower is his intelligence, but I don't mind him having a few bonus powers as well, considering how much danger the guy survives on a daily basis.

And the Earth explodes!

This means that for Rose and the Doctor it's been just over 35 minutes since they escaped the Nestene Consciousness exploding last episode. It's been a busy night for them.

Fortunately, the Doctor got the system restored and the forcefield goes up in the nick of time. The exoglass in the windows is self-repairing as well, so the guests are safe.

Oh damn, the blue guy burned up in the sun! Sorry, I realise that doesn't narrow it down much. The blue guy who spat on Rose at the start burned up, and by the look of things he wasn't the only one. I feel like this tragedy could've been avoided if they'd just... stepped out of the room. Rose was locked inside her room, what was their excuse?

Rose is out now by the way, but the Doctor doesn't stop to see if she's okay. He walks right over to the other two trees to give them the bad news about Jabe. Rose doesn't need to ask what happened, she gets it.

Then the Doctor works to get Cassandra teleported back into the room, without her acid-spraying sidekicks.

Cassandra tells the Doctor that he's passed her test and is eligible to join the Human Club! The woman only really cares about four things: being thin, being human, being rich and being moisturised. In fact, she claims that she'll be able to get away with murder because her victims weren't technically people!

I really don't get her line of thought here. She's the self-proclaimed last human, literally everyone else is an alien by her standards. She'll be going to alien court to be tried by aliens. Except not really, as it turns out that she's even more vulnerable to the heat than Jabe was and there's no one around to moisturise her now.

The Doctor ignores Rose's pleas to save her, saying "Everything has its time and everything dies."

Then he lets her explode! Not exactly what you'd expect from a heroic pacifist, but I guess the heat can make anyone a bit cranky. Especially after they've just watched their friend burn to death. Plus she tried to incinerate Rose, twice. RIP the last human. Except only her skin exploded, not her brain in the jar underneath, so that's going to still be alive.

Rose is a bit depressed that the world exploded and no one was watching (she was looking at a window but she closed her eyes for a moment), so the Doctor brings her back home. 

They walk into a busy street, right into the middle of normality, but Rose's perspective has been changed by her experience. I like the way the two actors are just standing there as everyone walks around them, out of focus. It really makes it feel like they're on another level of awareness to the rest of the world, and so are we. We've all been on the same journey.

The Doctor gives Rose the opposite of his optimistic speech at the start of the episode, saying that none of this will last forever. Then he finally opens up and tells her the secret that was too painful to say earlier: his own world was destroyed and his people didn't survive it. Cassandra wasn't really the last human, but he is the last of the Time Lords. Even with a time machine, there are some things he can't fix.

This is a pretty big reveal for fans of the classic series! It's like watching a Star Trek movie and learning that Vulcan got blown up. His homeworld hasn't been a big part of the series but he's never been completely alone like he is now. For the first time in a long time, something has really stuck with him and left him shaken. 

Rose has to decide whether she wants to keep travelling with the Doctor, now that she knows how dangerous and traumatic it can be. She decides... that she wants chips. Before they get back in the box they're having chips.

CONCLUSION

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The End of the World is about two different stories that barely connect. One is a standard Doctor Who story about the Doctor going around with his new companion Jabe trying to solve the mystery of what robot spiders are doing on a space station parked next to an exploding star, while also trying to save a woman locked in a room about to be cooked, and make it through an assault course of spinning blades.

The other story is about the Doctor taking his new companion Rose on her first trip through time and space and screwing it all up. But Rose's story doesn't go the way you might expect from a madcap comedic science fiction series, as the episode actually deals with the reality of her very 'TV fantasy' choice to jump in the magic box with a strange man. For me, this is where the episode really comes to life, in Rose's conversations with the Doctor. Just those two, standing in front of a window, burning through the visual effects budget. Turns out that Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper are pretty good actors with a lot of chemistry, actually.

I'm not going to say that the episode shows a huge step up in sophistication when it comes to how the companions are depicted. Ian, Barbara, Leela, Sarah Jane, Ace etc got plenty of development in the classic series. But it's rare to have an episode that's focused on the characters more than the plot, and we would've never gotten a scene in the classic series where someone just phones their mother and has a chat. I mean there is still a lot of plot here, and it's very goofy, but the core of the episode is about what the characters are going through emotionally and it really worked for me. 

On the other hand, this is definitely a huge step up in sophistication when it comes to how the aliens and space stations are depicted. It was clearly shot in 2004 on DVD-resolution video and looked kind of cheesy even at the time, but it's a massive improvement over the classic series. They sunk a lot of time and cash into this episode, because they knew it had to sell the series to all the people who were on the fence after episode one and prove its potential. Honestly, I think it looks better than what Star Trek: Enterprise was doing around this time, as it's so much more vibrant and creative and interesting to look at.

In fact, it seems like they made a deliberate effort to make this as bizarre and mad and dreamlike as they could, so it really feels like Rose has fallen down the rabbit hole and us along with her. It's a real contrast to the fairly mundane and down-to-earth first episode, like they've taken a character from East Enders and dragged them into Star Wars. In fact, that's the revived series in general really, mixing a bit of Buffy into the classic Doctor Who recipe to create something with a bit more mainstream appeal.

Overall, I reckon the episode really shows off what RTD's Doctor Who is about. It's goofy, ridiculous, witty, intelligent, insightful and emotional. It gets you to care and doesn't get too absurd like some of RTD's later episodes do. It's not my absolute favourite story in series one, that'd be the Empty Child two-parter, but it's in second place for sure.

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NEXT TIME

I'm sure I'll be getting back to Doctor Who later this year but right now I'm jumping franchises again, this time back to Babylon 5. Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the movie A Call to Arms.

Please leave a comment if you feel like it.