Doctor Who Re-Watch: Series 2, Episode 1 - New Earth

I just realized that what with the latest Series of DW (7) and my attendance of TIFF, there has not been a new DOCTOR WHO RE-WATCH post since June. We left off with the 2005 Christmas Special (THE CHRISTMAS INVASION), which aired prior to Series 2 proper and handled the immediate post-regeneration of the 9th Doctor into the 10th. We got past Rose’s initial upset over losing the 9th when she sees what Ten has up his sleeve for the adventures. And here...we...go...

And it turns out the first adventure takes them to New York. Well, strictly speaking, it's the fifteenth New York, which makes it New New New New New New... New New New New New New... New New New York. At any rate Series 2, Episode 1, titled NEW EARTH is a humdinger. Why? You ask me. Well that’s easy. Ten and Rose ‘shippers (that would be those of us who wanted Ten and Rose to end up together)…this is where we started. Because in this episode, though it’s not technically her at the time, we got to see Rose kiss Ten. It’s a doozy of a kiss and the chemistry between David and Billie is so palpable that I dare anyone to watch the episode and not feel it.

I’ve always said that RTD’s skill is his storytelling and characters, and this episode is especially clever because he plays the long game with us and re-introduces us to The Face Of Boe. He is a big giant head with tentacles inside a large liquid filled container, whose implications to the series down the line are great once you get there. For now though he is a big mysterious head with information about the Doctor that he doesn’t have yet. He has a message for him, but knows that it can wait till the next time they meet, which he posits will be their last meeting. Knowing who the Face Of Boe is, and what he represents makes seeing him here (and then again in S3) just a joy to fans.

The episode actually acts as a quasi-sequel to the S1 episode 2 (THE END OF THE WORLD) as it brings back another person from that episode, namely the villain Cassandra. You recall her, the last human, the big piece of stretched skin on a frame who needs to be constantly moisturized. Well, turns out she survived her apparent death in S1 by using skin from her ass. Both Cassy and Boe are in a future hospital where powerful ailments are cured, and are administered to by a set of human cat nuns. Yep, human cat nuns! Did I mention DOCTOR WHO was awesome?! The Doctor and Rose arrive to find that diseases the Doctor considers incurable are being not only treated but cured. He smells a rat and the two quickly find out that not all that’s going on at the hospital is above board, and the human cat nuns are harboring some deep secrets. So if Cassandra’s not the villain, how does she fit in you ask? Well that’s easy, she brings a lot of comedy in her attempts to swap bodies to get a new one and live a new life, including both the Doctor and Rose’s bodies for a time. When she takes over Rose’s body, she unbuttons the top buttons and allows the cleavage to spill out. Cassandra is a bit randy it appears. Which takes us to her kissing Ten and giving the shippers something to strive for goal-wise.

What RTD does best here (other than inure Rose and Ten to each other from moment one and give us a solid diatribe about the evils of “a means to an end” going on in the hospital)…is he gives his previous villain closure. Cassandra jumps around bodies and eventually ends up in that of her assistant Chip, who willingly allows her to inhabit his body. But since he’s a clone the body begins to fail with a real human soul inside it, leaving Cassandra to finally have to confront the death she’s been avoiding all these years. In one of RTD’s perfect moment’s of clarity the Doctor decides to do a final favour for Cassandra, and takes her back into the past on the last night that she recalls someone calling her beautiful. The Cassandra-In-Chip’s-Body goes up to her younger self and tells her just that before finally dying in her younger self’s arms. It’s this kind of moment that RTD (and even sometimes Moffat) are good at. Here we have the villain, a woman who caused no end of heartache and almost destroyed an entire space station, and followed that up with body switching in an attempt to STEAL more life from others…and the Doctor gets right to the root of her, who she is and what makes her do the things she does. Then he makes this magnanimous gesture and allows her a moment of peace and love and beauty before she passes away. It’s interesting how we all rattle on about how the Doctor’s anger is something to behold, a terrible, shadowy growling god and if you get on that bad side you can be dealt with very harshly. But here’s where these men writing this character understand him best. His love, his compassion, and his benevolence even to his enemies (both The Master and even Davros receive this treatment as well) is a far more stunningly powerful thing to observe. Watching quiet moments like this actually make me want to be a better person. Here’s a very lonely man who COULD, if he chose, allow that loneliness to eat him up and leave only anger and bitterness…but instead when he lets love in he can be the proudest, glowing paragon of truth in the universe.

And I love that about him.

The main issue at hand, that of the nefarious way that the hospital nuns are curing diseases, is poignant as well and results in some of that anger I mentioned above, but when you finish the episode you will definitely take more away from the Cassandra plot line, and I think that was deliberate on RTD's part. Again, the man is a stellar writer and episodes like this showcase it.

Tennant gives everyone an absolutely incredible performance in his first proper episode. He’s note perfect. Watching NEW EARTH is like a window into the man we know will become voted the best Doctor ever in history. A boy who grew up watching the 4th and 5th Doctor’s himself, comes to play the character and absolutely knocks it out of the park week after week. Well that all starts here, with that quiet moment at the tail end of this episode.

Next Time: Queen Victoria is “not amused” in TOOTH & CLAW!

Doctor Who Re-Watch: Series 2, Episode 1 - The Christmas Invasion

Ah THE CHRISTMAS INVASION, thou art a weird duck. The first episode of Series 2, the first full episode with David Tennant in the lead as the 10th Doctor is quite good. But it’s still an odd duck since it’s technically what will come to be called a Doctor-lite episode down the line.

Sidenote: Doctor-lite: These are episodes that existed during the tight shooting schedule when David and Billie or down the road Freema or Catherine would be shooting other episodes and the need to get done more shooting in less time was high (this is info I’ve gleaned from Russell T. Davies book A WRITER’S TALE, which is a must-read if you are at all interested in the behind the scenes of the show) so they would craft an episode that only marginally included the Doctor (prime examples are BLINK, and LOVE & MONSTERS).

THE CHRISTMAS INVASION is a different type of this because it wasn’t a scheduling conflict that made it be Doctor-lite but rather the fact that the violent and taxing process of the 9th Doctor’s regeneration into the 10th Doctor had left the Time Lord bedridden and unconscious for the majority of the running time.

Where the episode benefits from this most is in the fact that Rose Tyler, her mum Jackie and her boyfriend Mickey Smith get a chance to really shine front and center solving a large part of the mystery in the narrative (this time an invasion of the Sycorax) on their own before the Doctor even wakes up.

Let’s get the plot out of the way, which for a Christmas Special is serviceable, if one of the more lackluster ones from the stellar Series 2. While the Doctor is convalescing, Rose and Mickey go Christmas shopping, only to be attacked by Santa robots! When they escape home the Doctor briefly wakes only to defeat the robots and mention it’s the residual regeneration energy that is drawing the things to him. Prime Minister Harriet Jones (whom you’ll all recall became Prime Minister after the incident with the Slitheen in Series 1) has sent a probe into space to Mars, but little known to her it has been gobbled up by the Sycorax warship on its way to earth to invade. The Sycorax arrive and hypnotize people all over London to position themselves on the tops of buildings with the threat that they will make the humans jump if those in charge don’t surrender half the human population to the aliens to become their slaves. This plotline slowly gets undone by the discovery that all the hypnotized humans have the same blood type (that of the type that was on the probe the ship gobbled up), and the eventual moving of the Doctor to the TARDIS where he finally wakes. Upon learning of the plot, the Doctor challenges the Sycorax leader to a swordfight (in borrowed pajama’s yet!) where he subsequently loses his hand. Being so close to the tail end of his regeneration though the hand grows back, and the Doctor is able to vanquish the leader in the confusion. Pretty standard stuff, but not at all unpalatable either. Decent and entertaining, if kind of a prologue to the rest of the Series.

Like I said above though, the spot where this ep shines best is with Rose and Co. All three of them spend a lot of time trying to come to terms with the regeneration, since the idea of it is so alien to them as humans. This person seems to be the same on some levels, but on most others including his looks he is also quite different.  There is a CORE that makes him a Time Lord and some very specific rules he follows, but otherwise all bets are off. The 9th Doctor is gone and in his place is a stranger. Compound this with the adoration that Rose had already begun to have for the 9th Doctor, this further complicates her own feelings. Imagine falling for someone only to have them change their face and parts of their personality. It would be bizarre to say the very least. Both Jackie and Mickey have an equally difficult time with it, but naturally on a different level than Rose. I think Jackie's reaction is probably the funniest (though that's usually the case with Camille Coduri's spot on delivery of lines) since she is truly baffled by this turn of events. I’ve always maintained that this is one of the areas where Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor missed a bit of a boat as he was freshly introduced to Amy Pond without her having known him before. I like the fact that companions have to deal with regeneration like Rose & Co. do here, and it hearkens back to Adric, Nyssa and Tegan having to see the 4th Doctor regenerate into the 5th, and again later when Peri watched the 5th regenerate into the 6th at the end of the CAVES OF THE ANDROZANI.

Now, it’s no secret that David Tennant is my favourite Doctor. I'm a card carrying, die-hard, flag waving, David Tennant fan. He likely always will be, and so THE CHRISTMAS INVASION holds a special place in my heart as his proper introduction, but there is a part of me that wishes he was in it more. That said, his scenes in the finale are very good and you can see where he is headed as the Doctor. Over the next few eps he will begin to solidify both his final look (with hair all “sticky uppy” as Wilfred Mott would call it later), his mannerisms and his personality, but in this ep he gets his wardrobe (Brown and Blue suits, plus Chuck Taylors and a long brown coat) which would become so iconic that I have personally cosplayed as him twice.

Next Time: We get more meat with the latest Doctor when he and Rose visit a future New York in NEW EARTH.