Doctor Who - The End of the World

Before we start ... these reviews are full of spoilers ... so if you don't want to be spoiled, look away now :) From Earth circa 2005 to the far, far future - 5.5/apple/26, according to the Doctor - where he and Rose find themselves on board an observation station - Platform 1 - in space, about to be witness to the final destruction of the Earth as the Sun expands. The End of the World could not really be more different from Rose. From the homely surroundings of familiar London we are plunged into the far future to meet up with alien races aplenty all gathering to be witness to the end of the Earth. In quick succession we are introduced to these creatures: Jabe, Lute and Coffa who are Trees from the Forest of Cheem; The Moxx of Balhoon from the solicitors' firm of Jolco and Jolco; delegates from Financial Family Five - the Adherents of the Repeated Meme; the Brothers Hop Pyleen; Mr and Mrs Pakoo; Cal 'Sparkplug' MacNannovich (who appears to be two beings); Ambassadors from the City State of Binding Light; the face of Boe; and finally Lady Cassandra O'Brien dot Delta Seventeen ... plus of course assorted blue-faced people. I was reminded a little of The Curse of Peladon with its panoply of alien creatures: the Pels, Aggedor, Alpha Centauri, Arcturus and the Martians, but unlike in that earlier story, here we get to learn very little (in fact for the most part it's just their names) about the creatures. Coming off best is Jabe the Tree and Lady Cassandra of the 708 operations, both of who get a fair amount of screen time and, especially in Jabe's case, are very well realised and characterised. Yasmin Bannerman is a wonder and a delight as Jabe. She exudes regal sexuality, and I can well understand why the Doctor seems attracted to her. It is a shame though that she takes the place of Rose as 'surrogate companion' for the best part of the episode, and one wonders why writer Russell T Davies chose to do this, and to give Rose next to nothing to do in this episode. It seems a strange decision this early on in the series to sideline one of your main characters in favour of another, ultimately one-off, character. Billie Piper's Rose shines throughout though, despite her being wandering on her own or trapped in a room for most of the episode. She gets all the best lines from 'I'm talking to a twig!' through to her summation of Lady Cassandra as a 'bitchy trampoline'. I'm not sure how she escapes from the room at the end though - the Doctor had pronounced the doors to be jammed, and yet Rose wanders into the main hall at the conclusion having got out somehow ... maybe, along with the apparent automatic mending of the damaged glass, the doors were repaired as well. However, if the Platform is able to automatically repair itself, I wonder why we need a 'plumber' to perform routine inspections. However if this function was not needed, then we would have missed Beccy Armory's superb and scene-stealing role as Raffalo, surely the cutest blue-faced alien from Crespallion ever to appear. As with Rose, the episode suffers from a need to tell a coherent story in 45 minutes, and it is all very rushed. This is not quite so pronounced here, but there are some areas where the events seem to take precidence over the plot and characterisation. We end up with a series of 'things that happen' rather than a plot. The scenes where the Doctor has to navigate the spinning air conditioning blades is straight out of the Tomb Raider games, and whoever designed this Platform obviously has a wicked sense of humour: placing the computer reset switch on the far side of the blades; making the sun shields - which are the only things keeping the occupants alive - lowerable, and making them able to be lowered from a single depression of a key on a keyboard ... most PCs won't even let you delete a file without confirming the action, so this lack of foresight on the part of the system designers seems somewhat curious. Of course, perhaps this was all a part of the sabotage caused by the spiders, but then they (or their programmer) must have had pretty expert knowledge of how the Platform worked. The effects are magnificent, and I can well appreciate the work that The Mill put into this episode. From the spiders to the external shots of the Platform, to the Sun streaming in, Cassandra, and the ventilator shaft, their work is exemplary and hard to fault. It lends everything a wide and expansive feel, which given the claustrophobic nature of the inside of the Platform is probably a good thing. In other areas, however, there are questions raised. The main aspect is the lashings of continuity (or apparent continuity) that we are handed. I have long advocated that the programme makers don't need to worry about the internal continuity of the series as it's the fans' job to make it all fit together (and also Terrance Dicks' assertion that the definition of continuity is 'as much as you can remember'). However the revelations about Gallifrey having been destroyed, a war that the Time Lords lost, and that the Doctor is now the last Time Lord all come over as being quite significant, and yet no hint of these has ever appeared in the series before. Now I am well aware that these things are part and parcel of the BBC's book range, and yet the books were bought and read by what ... 6 - 10 thousand people at most? Now we have 10 million viewers, and less than 0.1 percent will nod their heads sagely and believe to themselves that this all ties up ... Whatever background the new series is developing for the Doctor, the handling of the relevant scenes by Bannerman and Eccleston was superb, and the single tear falling from the Doctor's eye a masterstroke. I wonder if this is also referring to some underlying plotline for the series as a whole as well, and that as we reach the end, maybe we'll find out more about the war, who it was against, and how the Doctor is faring as the last of his race left alive. It's a nice idea, and proves if nothing else that to the majority of the audience, 'new' continuity can be just as valid as 'existing' continuity as they know nothing about either. Other areas of amusement: the use of the records 'Tainted Love' by Soft Cell and 'Toxic' by Brittany Spears stood out as amusing and perhaps relevant for the audience. Though I hope that they won't cause any challenges in the future with clearance rights for repeats, or date the episode too badly. One final comment: the character of the Doctor. I suspect we're starting to see some depth to him, but he's also not really like the Doctor I know from the series in the past. Would the Doctor ignore the plea of his companion and watch another being die without lifting a finger to try and help? There seemed no reason for the Doctor not to try and help Cassandra at the end, and his just standing and watching comes across as callous when the same end could have been achieved by his not realising that bringing her back to the Platform would result in her death. Likewise when Rose is asking him who he is, he seems to go off into a little sulky tantrum and won't answer her, forcing her to take the moral high ground and extend a hand of peace to him. These isolated incidents concern me a little, as perhaps they send a message to viewers that the Doctor is willing to let people die for no reason, and I feel we need to trust that the Doctor takes action to preserve life where he can, but sometimes fails because the outcomes are perhaps inevitable. This feeling also spills over into Jabe's death, which would have been avoidable if the Doctor had got Rose to help him in the ventilator duct rather than seemingly forgetting all about her. It's this lack of thought which can be seen as callousness which bothered me. Perhaps it can be explained as a by-product of the way the Doctor feels alone and adrift in the universe (as he alludes to at one point) rather than any intrinsic part of his character. Overall, The End of the World is a nice little slice of pure SF. It has some interesting characters, some of which are superbly realised (Jabe, Cassandra) and others which are just hanging as potentials (the Adherents of the Repeated Meme, the Moxx of Balhoon and most of the others). I enjoyed the episode a lot more on a second viewing. First time through it seemed to drag somewhat in the first half, but then picked up as we progressed to the end-game. Compared to Rose it's very different and overall I did enjoy it, but with reservations. But viva la difference ... I think I could have written two reviews of the episode. One wholly positive and one wholly negative ... The End of the World is very different indeed to Rose, and it looks like next week's offering, The Unquiet Dead, is different again ...