Note: This begins a "Watch A Doctor Who Episode A Day (ish)" series. Over the course of some weeks/months/years I've decided to watch an episode of the cult favorite a day (ish). For my few friends that I haven't convinced to love and adore this series about a mad man in a box (you know who you are) these posts will appear to be nothing but a fan girl thinking too much about her favorite television series (ish). But for you, the Converted, I hope that you'll have fun watching some episodes with me/hearing me rant about a time traveler and his faithful, TARDIS companion.
"Rose," "The End of the World," and "The Unquiet Dead"
I've always liked the idea of the Ninth Doctor more than I've liked the actual result. To be fair to the poor incarnation, I watched him after I'd watched most of David Tennant's run and Ten is a hard act to follow. But the actual premise of the Doctor's return to the small screen is pretty brilliant. Instead of just picking up where the now-cannon (ish) movie left off, with Time Lords a plenty and a content (ish) Doctor, the show begins after a war. While the Brits have let their national hero (ish) go off their screens, he's been through hell and back and he's far from the tea-sipping, book-reading Eighth Doctor that he was.
It's a pretty great idea. And I can just image the executives of BBC Wales realizing how brilliant it was when Russell T. Davies pitched it to them. And it's obvious in these first three episodes that the Doctor is a changed man. In "Rose," he picks up his first full-time companion in years and,with little more than a few warnings and some mysterious looks, whisks her away to the end of the world. The war is over and his world and people are gone, but the Doctor's anger, grief, and thirst for vengeance lead him right to the end of another world.
The man doesn't think. Rose takes the end of Earth rather badly (as I believe we all would) and if you think about it, world's end is a pretty horrible first date. Martha gets to visit Shakespeare and Rose gets to see the remnants of everything she's ever known and believed burn up into nothing. The Doctor has taken her from home into destruction because endings are all the poor guy knows anymore. And when the man finally finds someone new to blame, he lashes out and kills Cassandra. When Rose asks him to stop, this last of his kind replies: "Everything has its time and everything dies."
Why these first three episodes don't always work is the fault of its ties to Classic Who. I haven't watched nearly enough of Doctors 1-7 to speak with any authority on the matter, however many of these old Who episodes can be categorized into "alien" and "historicals"--the Doctor either encounters some new race (Daleks, for example) or he goes back in time (cavemen for the win!). In "The End Of The World," the new series falls back on the alien story line and in "The Unquiet Dead" it falls back on the historical.
Which is fine. The Dickens story is fine. But it's not great and, at points, it's even boring (Sidenote: It also will now and forever be compared to "Vincent and the Doctor" and "The Unquiet Dead" doesn't come out on top in that battle.) It's brilliant when it focuses on our New Doctor--who refuses to listen to Rose's warnings and then ponders on the fact that he, the last of his kind, the explorer of the universe, is going to die in a basement. But for the most part the episode wants to focus on the walking zombies, the blue spirit smoke, and hey! That's DICKENS! And this just isn't very interesting. The threat of the zombies never feels quiet real. They're few in number, they're befuddled by 19th century doors, and all it takes is turning out the lights and turning up the gas for them to be thwarted.
But what's obvious is that at this early stage the show didn't quiet know what to do with itself. It had made this bold move and changed the Doctor Who universe forever, but it couldn't abandon it's classic roots. At times the Doctor has to act like fan-favorite Four and be goofy and strange and crazy, but Four never lived in a universe without Time Lords. The show wants to please its old fans with historicals, but it realizes that to gain new and young fans the show has to tell the tale twisted and can't become a history lesson (which Classic Who was partially created to be). This leaves poor Nine in a strange place--caught in the rift between two different shows that share the share universe and two different generations of viewers that don't often agree with each other.
Next Up: "Aliens of London," "World War Three," and "Dalek." Or probably mostly "Dalek" because I really don't like the Slitheen.
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