The End of the World

Dear Gary—

“He’s blue.”

The first story Rose introduces characters; the second, The End of the World, introduces aliens. Lots of them. Including the blue steward Rose refers to. It is still about the characters though; the Doctor and Rose; their separate identities and their budding relationship.

“They’re just so alien,” Rose tells the Doctor, overwhelmed by all of the strange “ladies and gentlemen and trees and multiforms.” Like Ian and Barbara before her, Rose is processing the enormity of the Doctor’s world. Unlike Ian and Barbara, however, Rose is a willing traveler. “I just sort of hitched a lift with this man,” she tells Raffalo, realizing for the first time the rashness of her decision. And amongst all of these extraterrestrials she begins to wonder about the Doctor. “What sort of alien are you?” she asks him.

It is the question, isn’t it? As Ian posed so long ago: “Who is he? Doctor who?”

With eight preceding generations the Doctor has plenty of history for the audience to draw upon. Yet this ninth persona is an enigma. Who is he? Doctor who?

“This is who I am, right here, right now, all right? All that counts is here and now, and this is me.” The question makes the Ninth Doctor defensive. This Doctor has deep secrets to hide, dark tragedies he would rather forget. Buried beneath a confident, cocky, carefree demeanor.

On her first journey with him, the Doctor is out to impress Rose. One hundred, even ten thousand years in the future is not enough. The Doctor spins wheels and pushes levers on the TARDIS control panel and presents Rose with “the year five point five slash apple slash twenty six.” The day the Sun expands—the end of the world. It is wonderful, exciting, awe inspiring; it is also sad, catastrophic, tragic. In the same way as is the Doctor.

The Doctor is clearly delighting in the festive atmosphere, and it makes the subtle, underlying pathos all that more effective.

This complement of moods is embodied by a couple of bookending speeches by the Doctor. To begin the adventure the Doctor offers this hopeful sentiment:

“You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you’re going to get killed by eggs or beef or global warming or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible, that maybe you survive.”

He ends with this bit of mourning:

“You think it’ll last forever, people and cars, and concrete; but it won’t. One day it’s all gone; even the sky. My planet’s gone. It’s dead. It burned like the Earth. It’s just rocks and dust before its time.”

Now you well know, Gary, that I am not a big fan of the Time Lords. However, this revelation that Gallifrey is gone is monumental and heartbreaking and goes a long way in clarifying this new Doctor’s angst.

In between the bookends is a story of aliens and of Earth.

The rich and powerful of the universe have gathered on Platform One to witness the latest artistic event—Earth’s destruction. Hence the collection of aliens. In addition to the blue steward, we meet The Face of Boe, Jabe of the Forest of Cheem, the Adherents of the Repeated Meme, the Moxx of Balhoon, and the last human Lady Cassandra O’Brien. In the midst of this impressive collection are a saboteur and a whodunit right up the Doctor’s alley.

The Adherents of the Repeated Meme are the obvious villain; too obvious. They are actually the front men for the real culprit, the equally obvious Lady Cassandra.

Cassandra is superb. A special effects creature of nothing more than stretched skin with mouth, nose, and eyes; all the acting is in the voice; Zoe Wanamaker conveys the vanity and smugness of this nipped and tucked monstrosity to perfection.

Jabe is also excellently portrayed. The sympathy that develops between her and the Doctor is touching, and she affords us some of the first glimpses into the Doctor’s secrets. “Perhaps a man only enjoys trouble when there’s nothing else left,” she tells him and discloses that she knows where he is from. “Forgive me for intruding,” she says, “but it’s remarkable that you even exist. I just wanted to say how sorry I am.” The Doctor’s heartfelt and understated reactions to her reveal volumes about him.

 There is just the right dose of action as well. The race against the descending filter with Rose facing the deadly rays of the exploding sun is sufficiently tense. The positioning of the system restore switch is too conveniently located and the resultant need for the Doctor to maneuver his way past the increasingly rapid fan blades a bit of a head scratcher and makes Jabe’s heroic and poignant death much too contrived, but nonetheless the scene bristles with suspense. All the while the “Earth death in . . .” announcements contribute to the sense of doom.

Then there are the familiar touches, the new elements, and the humor. All the things that make up Doctor Who. Like the sonic screwdriver; or the psychic paper; or talking to twigs. Like the TARDIS; or Bad Wolf; or “jiggery pokery.”

The Doctor has brought Rose to a world both alien and familiar. Surrounded by blue men with the strains of Tainted Love ringing in her ears. Seated on the observation deck of a space satellite with the view of ‘Classic Earth’ before her eyes.

The Doctor, Rose discovers, is the most alien of all.

“Everything has its time and everything dies.” The Doctor can watch as Cassandra explodes. “Help her,” Rose pleads. Rose can feel compassion for the “bitchy trampoline” but the Doctor has no pity, not for her.  There is an understandable well of anger mixed in with the confidence and the pathos. “Everything has its time and everything dies.” The Earth had its time. Gallifrey wasn’t allowed to live out its natural time. Cassandra has lived well past her allotted time.

“The end of the Earth,” Rose realizes when the dust finally settles. “It’s gone. We were too busy saving ourselves. No one saw it go. All those years, all that history, and no one was even looking.”

All those years; all that history; the end of the Earth. The end of the Doctor’s adopted home. The end of his own planet has already come and gone, before its time. He can’t go back. But he can return Rose to a bustling London street full of life.

“I’m the only survivor,” he tells Rose at last. “I’m the last of the Time Lords.” Standing in a crowd of people the Doctor is alone. “I’m left traveling on my own ‘cause there’s no one else.”

Except: “There’s me.”

Rose’s first decision to run after the Doctor and into the TARDIS was a hasty one. She has now had time to consider. She is back on her home planet. He once again sets the choice before her. The Doctor is alien to her; and yet he is rapidly becoming most familiar. Can there be any doubt?

Everything has its time, Gary . . .