Doctor Who (2005) 1-05: World War Three

Episode:

701

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Serial:

160

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Writer:

Russell T Davies

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Director:

Keith Boak

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Air Date:

23-Apr-2005

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm reviewing the second part of Aliens of London, which is called World War Three. It's one of the rare part 2s to have a title that ends with 3.

Giving each part of a serial its own title was nothing new for Doctor Who, there are over a hundred classic episodes with individual titles. But it did get old and they stopped doing it three seasons in, back in the First Doctor era, which means this was a bit of a break from tradition. Plus there's no name for the complete story, the closest you can get is calling it "Aliens of London/World War Three" or "the Aliens of London two-parter", so that was unusual for the series too.

I'll be going through the whole episode scene by scene, so everything past this point will be SPOILERS.

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Previously, on Doctor Who:

The Slitheen have successfully disguised themselves as members of the British government and crashed a alien ship into the Thames to engineer a crisis which puts them in charge. The Doctor and Rose were brought to Downing Street along with other alien experts. Rose was pulled away by Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North, and together they stumbled across the dead prime minister in a cupboard. Meanwhile Jackie was visited by a police officer after phoning up to report the Doctor as an alien. Unfortunately all three groups were attacked by the Slitheen, with all the alien experts being electrocuted by their own ID badges.


REVIEW

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Aliens of London spent about 2 minutes really dwelling on its cliffhanger ending, giving the audience plenty of time to worry about every main character being attacked by a Slitheen... before spoiling that they all make it out alive in the trailer 2 seconds later.

World War Three takes about 20 seconds to reveal how they survived, as the Doctor resists being electrocuted by his ID card thanks to his Time Lord physiology and sticks it onto the 'General Asquith' Slitheen, zapping him instead. In fact it zaps all of the Slitheen, no matter how far apart they are, which saves Jackie, Rose and Harriet as well! So that was bullshit convenient.

Rose and Harriet take the opportunity to make a run for it, though the Slitheen are pretty good at running too. Well, when they're CGI at least.

It's really easy to tell the difference between the computer generated aliens and the practical suits, as the CGI looks very 2005 and the suits look like the performers could barely move in them. Either way though it looks a bit goofy, and shots like this feel like they were deliberately aiming for comedy.

Though I like how Rose grabs Harriet's hand to pull her away, like she's gone into Doctor mode and she's treating her like her companion. Hang on, what happened to Ganesh? I guess the 'Margaret Blaine' Slitheen must have killed him.

Meanwhile Jackie's saved by Mickey, who just dropped by to wrap a chair around the policeman Slitheen's head and then snap a photo with his phone on the way out.

That's such a real thing to do, I love that.

Wait, why is Mickey here? I guess with the Doctor and Rose being taken away by the government in front of them it makes sense he'd go to talk to her about it.

Back in Downing Street, the Doctor gets a bunch of the soldiers to come with him to the room where the alien experts were zapped so they can catch the Slitheen.

But the naked Slitheen has just enough time to pull Asquith's skin and clothes back on before they get there and the one disguised as the prime minister blames the Doctor for killing everyone. The Doctor tries to point out that their prime minister is an alien in disguise, but I guess no one here was trained for the possibility of body snatchers or shapeshifters so it doesn't even get a consideration.

The Doctor makes a run for it, getting about halfway down the corridor before he's surrounded. Fortunately this group of soldiers is less keen on gunning down fleeing aliens than the ones in the hospital in part one, even with Asquith yelling at them. So the Doctor has plenty of time to take a step backwards into a lift, pull his screwdriver out, and get it to take him up a floor without anyone taking any action to stop him.

He arrives on the next floor in time to see a Slitheen chasing Rose and Harriet and just grins at it before closing the doors again. It's just like that time the Autons were chasing them in Rose and they used the lift to escape, except this time he forgot to save her.

I guess his options were limited, but he could've at least acted like he was concerned for her safety.

So now Harriet and Rose have to hide as three performers in big padded costumes and inexpressive baby heads try to sniff them out and say they'll kiss it better with their big green lips. I feel like Farscape did a better job with its alien suits five years earlier, but then that was a Jim Henson project so they had an unfair advantage.

Hang on, I forgot to mention the scene with the prime minister and Asquith in the lift farting and talking about wanting to be naked. Then they both strip off right there. Their skin suits I mean.

Harriet leaps out to distract them from Rose, showing what kind of hero she is. Fortunately the Doctor's the kind of hero that sneaks around and finds a fire extinguisher, which he uses to distract the Slitheen long enough for Rose to pull a curtain over Blaine's head.

They flee to the Cabinet Room on Harriet's suggestion, as the emergency protocols are there. I like her better when she's got her priorities straight (alien threat first, cottage hospitals second).

I haven't had much nice to say about the episode so far, but I like the Doctor grabbing a bottle and using it as a bluff to keep the Slitheen back and ask them questions.

The first thing we learn here is that the Doctor's an alien and lots of planets have a north, thanks to Rose and Harriet not knowing when to be quiet. Then we learn that the Slitheen are not here to invade, and that's actually their surname, not their species name! It's a lot like learning that Frankenstein was the name of the monster's creator, not the monster himself: it makes zero difference. People are going to carry on calling them what they've been calling them.

I also like the Doctor's history lesson about the Cabinet Room, just before he lowers the steel walls trapping him, Rose and Harriet inside. Oops.

More Slitheen turn up at Downing Street and we get a gag where they come through, get changed, and Blaine puts their skin suits onto coat hangers. These guys have gotten very comfy in Downing Street, they've got no worries about someone coming upstairs and catching them without their pants on.

Meanwhile Jackie and Mickey slip out, sneak past the military, and head to his flat. Mickey denies Jackie alcohol on the grounds that it's not time for a conga, but he awkwardly comforts her when she starts to cry. It's nice to see the two of them getting over hating each other.

Back in the Cabinet Room it turns out Ganesh is definitely dead, but Harriet realises that she never learned his name. See, this is why I make notes! I'm terrible at keeping track of names.

Damn, Mickey really was obsessing over the Doctor; he's turned his room into Clive's shed.

Hang on, wasn't there another scene here? I feel like I've skipped a bunch of dialogue.

Huh, it seems like my DVD version is missing a whole conversation here between Rose, Harriet and the Doctor in the Cabinet Room. I had to check the iPlayer version to make sure I wasn't imagining it.

The scene explains:

• Why the Slitheen didn't use the prime minister's skin (he was too thin).
• How the giant Slitheen fit in the human skin at all (the device around their neck shrinks them a bit).
• Why they keep farting (it's a side effect of the device).
• That the emergency protocols are no use, because everyone mentioned in them is dead.
• That the British Isles can't get access to nuclear weapons without a release code from the UN.
• How Mickey can phone them through the metal walls (Rose's phone's been upgraded).
  

So it's a little bit important and probably wasn't cut on purpose. I wonder if this is just a problem with my disc or if it's something that affected a bunch of people.

There's a nice bit here where Rose asks Mickey if her mother's okay and then immediately tells him not to put her on. These little moments are the best part of the episode for me. The Doctor grabs the phone and calls him "Ricky" then "Mickey the Idiot" before eventually getting around to asking for his help!

We heard about UNIT in part one, now Mickey has to hack into their system through their website by typing in the code... "buffalo".

That's not the only password prompt though, it's not that easy to get into a high security government site. But you just type in "buffalo" for all the rest of them as well. I guess it's a reference to the sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" (Wikipedia link), which is somehow grammatically correct.

UNIT website

But would this actually work in real life? I guess I should try it myself and see what happens. The UNIT website is still functional on archive.org, all the old Flash stuff can be emulated with Ruffle, and it does have a 'Secure Login' button.

I need to wait for Mickey to catch up though. First there's a good scene here where Jackie straight up asks the Doctor if he can promise that Rose will be safe, and he's just silent.

Oh, now they're using the site to find a message being transmitted on a loop from a spaceship in the North Sea, but there's no button for me to do that on the website so I can't do that.

Oh come on, I don't need a Slitheen attacking now, I'm trying to join in with the hacking!

Mickey has another badass moment where he tells Jackie that he'll take the thing on while she runs (even though he's clearly not hyped about the idea). Man, where was this guy back in Rose? That's not a criticism, I like that he has an arc.

Then there's the scene of Harriet and Rose shouting out everything they've noticed about the Slitheen so that the Doctor can deduce their planet of origin, and their vulnerabilities. It almost feels like the kids in the audience are supposed to join in and shout at their TVs, and there are no bad answers. "They're green" is good, "Their farts smell like bad breath" is also good. It makes the two of them essential to solving the problem while also showing off how incredible the Doctor's mind is.

The Doctor narrows it down to just one planet: Raxacoricofallapatorius, and I did not spell that correctly on my first try. I got really close though, just two letters wrong. Meanwhile Mickey doesn't even know whether there vinegar is in his own kitchen.

Fortunately that's where Jackie comes in! She throws a jug of pickled eggs at the Slitheen, causing him to explode, spraying green slime all over the kitchen.

Ewwww. Eww.

It's fine, the room looked like it needed cleaning anyway. It's the actors I feel sorry for.

Harriet's the one gets what happened, showing that she's actually pretty smart and well educated. She tells Rose that Hannibal crossed the Alps by dissolving boulders with vinegar. Then the three of them all have a drink of port, which the Doctor spits out.

Actually I just did a bit of research and it seems like Hannibal actually used fire-setting, which involved heating the rocks and then pouring cold liquid on them to make them shatter. But still, the cheap wine they used apparently got the job done.

The other Slitheen feel the death of their brother at the hands of Jackie Tyler, but that just makes them more determined to finish the plan. That means it's time for a press conference.

The prime minister tells the news that the alien experts were all murdered right in front of him by an alien. Which is absolutely true. Then he lies and says that their inspectors have searched and found massive weapons of destruction in the skies above, and the mothership is ready to fire in 45 seconds. They need to strike first and nuke the ship, Independence Day style.

This gives away that the whole thing is Russell T Davies giving Tony Blair's government shit for claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to deploy in 45 minutes and using this to justify sending troops to join the invasion. The story even started with an aircraft hitting a famous tower.

The Doctor opens the armoured door again and the Slitheen are very politely not charging in to kill him even though it doesn't seem like there's much stopping them.

He reckons that their plan is to scare the world into giving them the nuclear launch codes so they can launch the missiles and start World War III. The global nuclear barrage will destroy the planet, allowing them to sell the molten radioactive slag as fuel. I'm pretty sure we're a few megatons short of shattering the Earth into chunks, but whatever, the story doesn't need the Slitheen to be right.

Now everyone is waiting for the UN's response. To see if they will hand over the nuclear codes that will start Earth's first interplanetary war.

Though the Slitheen are also giddy about being in the prime minister's office and seeing his red phone.

The Doctor tells Jackie over the phone that he has figured out a way out of this, but he can't be sure that Rose won't be injured. Rose is fine with the plan, even though she doesn't know what it is, but Jackie is very much not.

But Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North, interrupts. She's the only elected official here, which makes it her call to make. Nice one Harriet Jones!

This means that the world is actually in Mickey's hands as he's the one that's going to have to do all the work (you can't access the UNIT website with Rose's 2005-era phone). They're basically using Rose's plan of nuking the Slitheen, except without the nukes. A regular missile will do, aimed right on top of their heads.

Mickey hacks into a Trafalgar Class submarine ten miles off the coast of Plymouth using the buffalo code, and then...

UNIT website

I get to fly the missile myself using the Flash minigame on the UNIT website!

It seems like something's missing though as all I've here is a map and a missile sprite which I can turn with the arrow keys. I can fly it over the UK and press the fire button to blow it up, and that's it. The end.

Now that I think about it, it's a good job that Mickey and Jackie were attacked by a Slitheen, because I don't think a voice on a phone alone would've convinced them to launch a missile at Downing Street. You need a bit more evidence of an alien takeover before you pull that trigger.

They recorded these shots of the missile flying over the the city using a helicopter, though obviously the missile had to be composited in later. I don't think it would've worked having a fake missile on a stick attached to the front.

The Cabinet Room they're in is armoured but a missile strike is maybe a bit much for it, so Rose gets her turn to be the hero as she mentions that in an earthquake you're told to get under a door frame. Everyone else in the building is screwed though, no one thought to tell them about the missile coming in!

Actually someone hits the fire alarm and starts an evacuation so it's fine.

The Slitheen have to get their pants back on first though. So when someone comes in to warn the prime minister he catches them naked. At least this means that he can back up Harriet's claim of alien infiltrators later. It just occurred to me that you don't get many stories about people trapped in Downing Street calling in an missile strike on themselves to kill body-snatching aliens before they can get the nuclear codes.

There's apparently some compositing going on in this shot as they only built three costumes, but I couldn't tell.

Nice Matrix shot with the door getting blasted off. Here's the explosion I was waiting for last episode! The streak continues.

Rose - Nestene consciousness explodes due to anti-plastic, taking their lair with them.
The End of the World - The Earth explodes (and then Cassandra explodes as a result of the heat).
The Unquiet Dead - The house explodes due to a gas leak.
Aliens of London/World War III - Downing Street explodes.

The Cabinet Room gets tossed around and wrecked, but the cupboard remains intact and the heroes emerge from the ruins.

Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North takes control of the situation, letting the UN know that the crisis is over.

It's funny that the episode ends with so much of the British government killed by aliens and it still kind of feels like a happy ending. To be fair most of them got stuck in traffic when the Slitheen decided not to airlift them in.

I checked and this is actually what you'd see if you left Downing Street and walked down the street. (It's also right next to Big Ben, where the spaceship hit). It's pretty amazing that they got to shut this place down for a couple of hours and film here.

Harriet has had a complete character arc in two episodes, going from a humble back bencher to a strong leader who doesn't hesitate to come out and give a speech to reassure the nation that everything's okay. And it's at this point that the Doctor finally remembers who she is. She's the next prime minister, architect of Britain's Golden Age, elected for three successive terms. It's 2006 now, so she could stick around until... 2021 maybe. That's Jodie Whittaker's last season.

Jackie's not so impressed with her, as she knows that it was her daughter who saved the world. Not exactly true, but she helped!

The episode was running a bit short so they added this extra scene of Rose and Jackie chatting at home. It was a surprise to me that this wasn't originally in the episode, as it might not have anything to do with the alien plot, but it's an important part of the story of Rose coming home.

Jackie has come to terms with the fact that Rose isn't going to leave the Doctor and now she's trying to meet her halfway and find out what the Doctor would like for dinner. She was going to make shepherd's pie but for all she knows he eats grass and safety pins.

But the Doctor's calling (with a little TARDIS picture on the phone) and he's eager to go out on another adventure already. When Rose tells him that Jackie is cooking, he tells her to put her on a slow heat, so he's definitely not trying to meet anyone halfway.

I'm glad that Rose doesn't just walk out on Jackie without saying a word at least. I mean she does disappear without a word, but it turns out that she's in her room packing.

The Doctor seems to have made peace with Mickey at least. He even gives him a disc to destroy any mention of him on the internet.

Oh, he sorted out the Bad Wolf graffiti as well, in accordance with BBC guidelines when it comes to showing consequences of anti-social behaviour. I don't know how the Doctor tracked the kid down, but... he's the Doctor.

It turns out that the human race have dismissed the whole business with the aliens as a hoax, which is impressive considering that the prime minister was murdered and when the next prime minister asked for nuclear codes to stop an alien invasion the whole of Downing Street got blown up. But hey, weird things happen all the time just fine without aliens being involved.

The Doctor says that the human race are idiots, what else is new. But there are exceptions... like Mickey. Aww, he's finally showing him some respect! In fact he invites him to join them, but Mickey admits he's too scared so the Doctor does him a favour and pretends to Rose and Jackie that he doesn't want him to come along.

I like how the series has earned this moment. The Doctor could've been nice to him from the start, but it means more if Mickey wins him over. And Mickey was the one who saved the world this time, he's proven his worth. He was a total hero in this episode, saving Jackie, hacking computers. His only flaw was not knowing where the vinegar was in his own kitchen.

Man, they really went the extra mile with the TARDIS dematerialisations back in the early episodes, with the light flashing, the box being translucent, Jackie's hair blowing, and a little distortion effect as it goes. By the Matt Smith era it pretty much just fades away.

The episode ends with Rose telling a worried Jackie that the TARDIS is a time machine and she'll be back in 10 seconds. It's pretty obvious that Jackie's going to count to 10, Rose won't reappear, and she'll continue being worried, but it still works. I also like how Mickey sits back on his bin and carries on waiting.

Good ending, in my opinion.


CONCLUSION

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I'm a big science fiction fan, you've probably picked that up already from the clues hidden around the site. In fact I've always been more interested in the big dramatic plot-driven action stories than the ones about characters talking about their personal issues.

So it's pretty impressive that the Aliens of London/World War Three two-parter managed to lose me during the alien invasion scenes, but had my full attention when it was just Jackie and Rose talking, or the Doctor and Mickey even. Like the first part, this feels like a drama and a kids show awkwardly welded together and it would've been so much stronger for me if they'd dropped the farting aliens with zips on their foreheads that hang their human skin on coat hangers, and come up with something better. Just like how Rose would've been better without Plastic Mickey and the burping wheelie bin. The soap opera is more interesting than the space opera.

The political satire wasn't that fascinating to me either, with the aliens lying about massive weapons of destruction to manipulate the world into launching a first strike. I appreciate that it's trying to be about something, but it's almost like RTD just wanted to vent his frustration by blowing up an imaginary Downing Street on TV.

But I really did like all the stuff with Jackie and Mickey. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that this a must watch episode because of it. The classic series never dealt with the consequences of a companion coming home and visiting her family. We never saw their parents learning about the Doctor and how dangerous he is. This was all brand new territory for the series and it doesn't sugar coat anything. Jackie's daughter goes missing for a year and when she returns she's with a dangerous alien. Mickey's accused of murder and his reputation is destroyed. And the Doctor just leaves the domestics outside and gets ready for the next adventure, because he lives in a different world.

Camille Coduri is just too grounded and sympathetic for her scenes to be dragged down into farce, which is funny considering that she's been the comic relief in episodes up to now. Jackie's an interfering mother who literally turns the doctor in to the government and doesn't want Rose to have fun adventures and yet I just want someone to give the poor woman a hug. Christopher Eccleston also does a great job playing a hero who can be dick to people, who can be thoughtless and dismissive and childish, without losing sympathy himself.

And Harriet's a lot better in this one I think, now that she's with the intelligent characters instead of the goofy aliens. It's a shame the actors couldn't do anything to make them more than basic cartoon villains.


RATING

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Like the first part, I'm giving this a slightly positive 6/10.

Though to be fair I'm not an eight year old and I don't know what I would've thought about it if I'd seen it as a kid. Maybe the Slitheen would've been my favourite bad guys. Though maybe the Jackie stuff would've bored me and I still would've been lukewarm on it overall, I don't know.

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NEXT EPISODE

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it looks like we're going into a high-tech underground bunker in the latest Doctor Who story The Well!

But before that, do you have anything you feel like saying about World War III? The episode I mean. Did you like it? Hate it? Was it just a bit mediocre?

Warning: comments may contain SPOILERS for stuff.