Rose

Doctor Who (2005)

It'd been 9 years since we'd had new, real, live action Doctor Who on our screens. It'd been 16 years since it had existed as an ongoing series. The turn of the century had passed (without the Earth being pulled through the Eye of Harmony, thank you Doctor.) The world had changed. Television had changed.

Now, as the show emerged from the Wilderness came the question: How much would Doctor Who have changed?

Summary

London shop girl Rose Tyler lives in a world of work and food and sleep. She lives with her mother, Jackie, and has a boyfriend, Mickey, as she moves through her everyday, normal life.

Then, one day, in the basement of the department store she works in, shop dummies come to life and attack her. She's saved by a mysterious stranger who calls himself the Doctor, who proceeds to blow up the store to stop the dummies.

Now without a job, Rose meets the Doctor again when he comes to her home to track down a discarded plastic arm from the store, which turns out to still be alive and attacks them. Though the Doctor is able to stop it, Rose becomes intrigued with this mysterious man, even as he warns her to stay away from him and leaves in a mysterious blue box which disappears.

Rose researches the Doctor on the internet and meets up with Clive, a conspiracy theorist who runs a website on the Doctor. Clive shows her photos and drawings of the Doctor as a figure stretching back throughout Earth's history and warns her that he has one constant companion: Death.

While Rose is meeting with Clive, Mickey is kidnapped (by a wheelie bin) and replaced with a plastic duplicate. Later, at dinner, "Mickey" tries to press Rose for information about the Doctor, who arrives himself to rescue her and remove "Mickey's" head to track the entity controlling it: the Nestene Consciousness.

Rose follows the Doctor into the blue police box, his ship, the TARDIS, which is bigger on the inside than the outside and learns that the Doctor is an alien. The TARDIS partially tracks the signal before "Mickey's" head melts and, with Rose's help, the Doctor eventually tracks the Nestene control signal to below the London Eye.

The two of them descend into the Nestenes' underground base below the Eye, finding Mickey alive as a prisoner. The Doctor confronts the Nestene Consciousness but its servants, the Autons, get the better of him and, when it discovers the "anti-plastic" he has brought as insurance, as well as his captured TARDIS, it activates its large-scale signal, beginning its invasion of Earth. Shop window dummies begin coming to life in London, killing Clive as he's out with his family and menacing Jackie.

Rose finds the courage to intervene, swinging on a rope to distract the Autons long enough for the Doctor to free himself and the anti-plastic falls into the Consciousness, causing the base to explode (and saving Jackie as the control signal stops.) Fortunately, the Doctor is able to save Rose and Mickey via the TARDIS.

Later, the Doctor offers Rose the chance to travel with him in the TARDIS. She initially turns him down and he leaves, but when he returns, seconds later, and mentions that the TARDIS also travels in time, Rose changes her mind and runs into the TARDIS.

Crew Credits

Writer: Russell T Davies

Director: Keith Boak

Producer: Phil Collinson

A New Era

How much had Doctor Who changed? A lot. And almost not a all.

Doctor Who was brought back largely through the efforts of Russell T Davies, a man with a firm grasp on how television worked in '00s (and now, which is good, because he's going to take the helm again in a couple years.) He knows how to tell a tale and he knows how to make maximum use of television as a medium to do so. RTD was making Doctor Who for 2005, not Doctor Who for 1989, or 1974 or 1963.

No longer was Doctor Who a serial show. For the first time it was telling a largely self-contained story in a single episode. The only cliffhanger in the episode is Rose running into the TARDIS at the end (although I'd argue that it still creates that "What happens next?" sensation because the leadup to it has done such a good job of setting up the potential that comes from entering the TARDIS.)

Perhaps because of the change away from the serial format, the pace of the narrative is also much faster than that of the classic series. While there are the occasional respites from the action, the plot frequently comes toward the viewer at what probably feels like a breakneck pace if all one was used to was the pacing of the classic series. That said, the pace of the classic series got faster over the course of its almost three decade run as well. Indeed, the pace of television in general had gotten faster and it feels like Doctor Who in 2005 simply reflects that.

The special effects are, unsurprisingly, much better than those of the original series. Compare them to the effects from Survival, the final classic era serial, which had come out 16 years earlier, and it's night and day. It feels a bit funny to type those words because it's 2021 as I do so and the effects in Rose do seem a bit ropey looking back...but then it's been another 16 years since then so I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise. Special effects are always going to date. It's why, while I notice them, I don't tend to use them as a significant measure of quality.

There's also an increasing emphasis on the character of the companion, in this case Rose. As it was back in An Unearthly Child, the episode's plot is restricted very much to her point of view. But while a large portion of the episode is seeking out the mystery of what is going on, just as it was for Ian & Barbara 42 years earlier, there's a greatly increased emphasis on grounding Rose's life in the everyday, with her home, work and relatives prominently placed within the narrative. There's a distinct effort to make Rose seem like a real person, moreso than there had ever really been for companions in the classic series.

I should note that I'm not saying classic series companions never felt real at all, or that they didn't have character. They very much did, but I feel as though a lot more of that came out of performance consistency than deliberate story emphasis. Toward the end, Ace got a bit of deliberate development, but not on the same level of Rose. I'm not saying either approach is necessarily superior, just that it's clear that they're different.

All of these changes could feel extremely jarring if one had tuned in to see Rose expecting the show to feel exactly as it had when one had watched it back in the classic era. If you watch from Survival to the '96 TV Movie to Rose it's going to feel like a lot of change thrown at you at once, enough that it might feel like a different show.

But...

The world didn't go from Survival to the '96 TV Movie to Rose. Time isn't measured in Doctor Who episodes, after all, even if the theme of the show almost makes you think it should be. The world, and television evolved and changed over those 16 years. To pick up as if those 16 years hadn't happened would have been a mistake, likely one that would have caused the show to fail, IMHO.

Further, if I look back over the 26 seasons of classic Who, I see the show adapting and changing to fit the television industry as it goes. While there are still narrative links between Survival and An Unearthly Child, the television storytelling conventions between the two are very different. Indeed, I'd argue that there's actually more stylistic similarity between Survival and Rose than Survival and An Unearthly Child. Classic Doctor Who changed over time. It adapted to fit the television of the times and I firmly believe that, had Classic Who not ended, but rather continued through the '90s and onward, we'd have ended up with a style very similar to that which we got in 2005 anyway. Serialization would have been gone, pacing would have continued to speed up, effects would have been improved and there would have been a significantly increased focus on characterization.

Doctor Who's storytelling style would have continued to evolved as television

evolved...we just skipped over a big chunk of that evolution.

But the essential elements of Doctor Who, the things that make it different from other television programs, the things that give the show its unique identity, those remained. It's still about the lone, mysterious figure of the Doctor, wandering about and being drawn into situations where he has to save people and prevent evil. It's still got monsters and those monsters still insert themselves violently into the mundane world. The Doctor still has an alien and often arrogant persona. We still largely view the story through the perspective of the companion. Death really is still the Doctor's constant companion. And the TARDIS still looks like a police box, even though police box's aren't a thing anymore.

So Doctor Who has changed a great deal...and also remained the same.

Perhaps the simplest, yet most immediate example of that dichotomous state is the very first thing we see in the episode: the opening credits. The graphics are new. The logo is new. The Doctor's face, a presence for the vast majority of the classic series, is nowhere to be found (although the TARDIS is quite prominent.) Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper's names are prominent, front and center, as is frequently the case in modern television, selling the show off of their talent. The theme music has been rearranged.

But it's the same theme music.

It's easy to think that was a given but it really wasn't. There have been many revivals of old series over the years and the retention of the original series theme music for each has hardly been a universal. Battlestar Galactica didn't do it. The short-lived Flash Gordon remake didn't do it. It remains to be seen if the potential Babylon 5 reboot does it, but it'd hardly surprise me if it didn't. The recent X-Files continuation did, and I think there's a parallel to be drawn there. Both Doctor Who and the X-Files were explicitly doing a continuation of the past continuity, not just being set in the same universe but returning to the same characters.

Using the same theme music, just rearranged (as it had been several times during the classic series) is sending a distinct message: This is the same Doctor Who, just a new era.

So what's this new era like?

Overview

The very first shot of the episode is one that'll get repeated several times in the series. We start with an orbiting view of Earth and then push in very quickly before beginning to follow the life of Rose Tyler. The shot is symbolic of both the show as a whole and of the episode itself. We're going to be seeing grand, cosmic level events but we're going to see them from the point of view of the individual. Big events from a small point of view.

We then launch into a montage (cue Rocky theme) about Rose's life. This establishes the particulars of her life for the audience. We learn about where she lives and works, about her mother and her boyfriend, etc. Doing it in montage format isn't purely to condense information, though. It also informs us about Rose's perspective on her life. Everything just flies by and one day might as well be another. Rose's life is routine. Not all of it is bad, but it's all repetitive. Even the music reflects this, fast-paced but cyclical. (Although we do get a brief shot of her walking past some shop-window dummies for foreshadowing.)

The music shifts abruptly as soon as Rose goes down into the basement of the store, shifting to a more eerie vibe, signaling to the audience that the tone of the story has changed radically. It's all got a bit of a horror movie feel to it, really.

It's a slow-build horror feel, though. There are no immediate jump-scares. When the dummies start to move, it's slow enough that Rose isn't sure it's happening at first and even when it becomes clear that it really is, she starts coming up with explanations for it that don't involve living plastic dummies that intend to murder her. As was the case way back in An Unearthly Child there is another, hidden world behind the facade of normalcy in Rose's life...and it's pushing it's way to the surface slowly.

A slight digression about horror cliches: Quite often, I hear people complain about characters ignoring the conventions of horror and it leading to their demise as if the act of doing something that people do in horror movies is inherently stupid. Except that it's not. People don't live in horror movies. It's not unsafe to go down into the basement alone. I can't count the amount of times I've gone down in the basement alone to do laundry, including a few when the lightbulb had gone out. Not once was I attacked by anything down there. I've heard rustling in the bushes many, many times and it's never turned out to be anything dangerous. I use the phrase "I'll be right back" when I leave someone briefly all the time. I've managed to get right back to them every single time. I don't live in a horror movie. And the characters who do live in them don't realize they do. They think they live in the same world we do. They don't think it's stupid to go down to the basement...because it's not stupid to do that. When they hear someone rustling in the bushes and think it's probably one of their friends playing a joke it's because it's far more likely than it being a murderer. And they're telling people they'll be right back because they have every reason to believe they will be. Doing these things is not akin to ignoring basic survival instincts and characters are not stupid just for doing them. Ok, digression over.

So, having been cornered by dummies and about to be murdered in horror movie fashion, Rose is, instead, saved by a guy in a leather jacket. He grabs her hand and says "Run!"

Is there any better entrance into Doctor Who's world? Your normal world gets invaded by monsters and the Doctor tells you to run. That's the companion's life in a nutshell. The next few minutes are a whirlwind, with Rose trying to find an explanation to all this. The Doctor indulges her musings, but does not confirm them. She's trying to cling to her normal world a bit, trying to find a way in which this all can fit into what she knows. He's not shooting down her attempts, indeed he seems impressed by her ability to apply logic to the situation, but he's not letting her fully hold onto her rationalizations either. Her normal world is gone even if she's still trying to hold onto it. To reinforce this...the Doctor blows up Rose's job.

The narrative, if not the Doctor himself, lets Rose cling to her illusion of normalcy a bit longer. Her next day begins with the same shot of the alarm clock that began the previous day's montage. Although the whole montage doesn't get repeated, the next scene with her mother is very mundane. It's all about the practicalities of how she's going to find a new job and whether the cat flap's been nailed down.

And then the Doctor invades Rose's life for a second time. Not only that but, when he does so, he brings with him another attack, albeit this time by just a plastic arm. But it's an attack nonetheless. The Doctor has a bit of a Gandalf-like quality to him. When he shows up, you can be sure the monsters are on the way. They may even already be here but you haven't noticed them yet. Like Gandalf, he didn't cause the monsters to arrive, but his presence always heralds them.

Well, two encounters in and Rose can't fool herself into thinking the world's normal anymore. The Doctor may have told her to go home but she's beyond that now. From the moment she hears the sound of the TARDIS dematerializing (they didn't change that either!) she's on a quest. With that comes a shift in the structure of the episode. Up until then it had been about the slow invasion of Rose's world by the Doctor's. Now it's about Rose's search for answers about the Doctor himself. This is a clever way of approaching the story because it allows Rose to be the surrogate for the audience: She's learning about the Doctor so the audience can learn about the Doctor.

And where does Rose go to learn about the Doctor? Why the internet of course. Luckily this is back in 2005. If she'd done it today she'd likely have been directed to a bunch of YouTube videos about how the Doctor is a shadow of his former greatness.

But it's not today. It's 2005 and it directs her to a meeting with Clive, a pretty classic conspiracy theorist. I like the way Clive is presented. He's quite friendly and a reasonable at first, then becomes more dramatic and intimidating as the scene goes on. It's no surprise that Rose concludes that he's nuts. She's not just basing that on what he's saying but on his increasingly portentous demeanor as he says it. His approach has become so problematic that whether he's right or not has become immaterial to her.

Clive is right, of course, at least as far as he goes with it. No surprise, really. In fiction conspiracy theorists are right more often than not, as opposed to real life where they are...not so much. I really like Clive's presentation about the Doctor. It's teasing information out to Rose (and thus, the audience) but it doesn't go overboard, just enough to further wet our appetite. This is the first time we learn that the Doctor stretches back into Earth's history as we learn of his presence at the JFK assassination, the launch of the Titanic and the volcanic eruption at Krakatoa. Sure, Clive puts forth a rationalization that it may, effectively be a family line of "Doctors" through the ages (I'm reminded of the Phantom) but we've already seen enough strange stuff to suspect it's all the same guy. Clive's increasingly dramatic and foreboding attitude means that when he gets to the idea of the Doctor being an actual alien, he sounds so over-the-top the audience, like Rose, is left to question if that part is really worth believing.

This scene also has an interesting dual-effect on different audiences. If, like me, you're familiar with the classic series, none of this is new information. It's entertaining anyway, to see the characters piece together what we already know (and to see what gaps they still need to fill.) If. however, this is your introduction to Doctor Who, which it was for a lot of people, these are tantalizing hints of what may be, little breadcrumbs on the path to understanding.

Along those lines, I have, occasionally, seen some classic series fans express the wish that Clive had included photos or references to classic-era incarnations of the Doctor in his presentation to Rose. I...don't agree. Even as a die-hard Classic Who fan, I think restricting his research to Eccleston's incarnation of the Doctor was the right move.

Outside the narrative it was right move because this scene is, as mentioned above, largely there to give a crash course in the Doctor to the newcomers in the audience. But, inherent in that, is that they're dripping the information out a little bit at a time, in bite-sized, digestible portions that don't overwhelm them. They're getting the information as it becomes relevant to the story at hand and the fact that the Doctor has looked or could look different isn't relevant yet.

Within the narrative, it also makes perfect sense that Clive would only be familiar with a single version of the Doctor's physicality. He's doing research based on the idea that he's looking for a single figure throughout history (Yes, he says it might be an inherited title, but his rant at the end makes it clear that, deep down, Clive believes it's one man.) Further, he's doing research into a man called "the Doctor"...in other words a title that is incredibly common. He's going to need to differentiate between anecdotes about A doctor and ones that are about THE Doctor. He's going to need a common point of reference to make that differentiation, to separate other individual doctors from the one Doctor he's looking for. Well, that's easy: His Doctor looks like Christopher Eccleston. People don't just magically change their entire physical appearance. If he finds a reference to a doctor who looks like Tom Baker or Patrick Troughton, well, it's obviously not the Doctor he's looking for...his Doctor looks like Christopher Eccleston. People who look like different people are different people after all. (I would hazard a guess he might have some stories that involve other Doctors but do not contain a physical description, however.) Clive thinks the Doctor looks like Christopher Eccleston...because why would he think he ever doesn't?

Incidentally, I'm aware that the novelization version of the scene does include some references to other Doctors but, importantly, that novelization isn't written with the idea that some people reading might not know anything about Doctor Who, as the episode was.

As the story moves along, we see how caught up Rose is in all this. Even as she deliberately tries to abandon her search and start to think, once more, about how to go on with her life, she completely fails to notice how bizarre "Mickey" is acting. This is in stark contrast to the earlier scenes where she knew Mickey well enough to know he was trying to get down to the pub to watch a match or that he usually rinses his cups rather than fully washes them. She's distracted, enough so that she can't see what's blatantly obvious...that "Mickey" isn't Mickey. I've seen viewers complain that this is a plot flaw and I'll grant that Noel Clarke is playing it awfully broadly, but I do think that part of it is supposed to be how distracted Rose is, how the link she had with her normal life is being severed as she's drawn into this more fantastic world, how the extranormal has become normal.

And it's a good thing she's getting acclimatized to all the strangeness because, from this point on, it comes at her rapid-fire. The Doctor shows up again. Her "boyfriend" turns out to be a plastic duplicate and gets its head pulled off. And she sees the interior of the TARDIS.

They play coy with that one, having Rose hesitate to go inside and then faking us out by having her go in, come out and go in again before we get a good look at things. Once more, this plays double-duty, having a different effect on each audience. If you've never seen Doctor Who before, you're wondering what could be in the box at all. If you're familiar with the TARDIS, you know what'll be inside, but you're very curious as to how the look has been updated since the last time it was onscreen.

Once Rose is inside the TARDIS, in all its bigger-on-the-inside glory, we get the rest of the exposition about the Doctor, all the stuff that Clive didn't know (with a significant exception) confirming the idea that the Doctor's an alien.

Rose takes this all largely in stride. She's been slipping into the Doctor's "fantastic" world for a while now, getting more and more immersed in it, until she's reached the point where, when the Doctor asks if it's all right that he's an alien and she says "yeah" she's being completely honest and we believe her because we've gone on that journey with her.

From there we follow Rose and the Doctor as they find and confront the Nestene Consciousness and put an end to all this. In both of those processes, Rose plays an integral part. I'll talk a bit below about the differing perspectives from which the Doctor and Rose view the situation but suffice it to say for now that Rose views things on a more grounded level than the Doctor does and that's what allows her to do things like identify the London Eye as the Nestenes' antenna. She's also the key element to the actual defeat of the Nestenes, knocking the anti-plastic into the Consciousness and, well, saving the world. One of the complaints I recall hearing during the early days of the show's return was that Rose tended to save the day as much, if not more than the Doctor himself. While I don't think that's entirely borne out by the stories themselves, she does play a large part in the resolutions...and I don't think that's a problem. Rather, I think it raises the tantalizing question of what has happened to the Doctor and why he finds it so much harder to save the day himself than he used to.

That brings me to...

Characters

Let's start with the character the episode is named after, Rose Tyler. Rose is...normal. She has a normal, non-remarkable life. She has a job that isn't particularly fulfilling. She has a boyfriend she seems to like but who is far from perfect. She has a mother she lives with and who clearly both loves her and is more than a bit overbearing. She is...as I said, normal. While she isn't just like every member of the audience (not many of us are lucky enough to look as good as Billie Piper, for a start) she's got enough normalcy that most of the audience are going to find something to identify with in her. How many of us have worked unsatisfying jobs? How many of us have had a significant other who feels like they're better than being alone but not "the one?" How many of us both love our moms and simultaneously find them infuriating? I daresay those three questions cover most of the audience. Rose is enough like us that we can put ourselves into Rose's shoes for the episode and explore this new world through her. She's the perfect prototypical Doctor Who companion, the audience surrogate.

Further, Rose manages to maintain some of that normalcy once she's drawn into the Doctor's world and it turns out to be useful. Rose doesn't think in terms of science-fiction concepts. She thinks in terms of concrete, conventional action. When headless "Mickey" start menacing the restaurant, she has no idea how to deal with it, but knows to pull the fire alarm to get everyone out. She has no idea how a Nestene transmitter works, but she knows the London Eye is a big, round object like the Doctor's describing. And, as she says herself during the climax, she may not have much, but she's got her school gymnastics bronze medal...and that saves the world. When Rose says later that the Doctor would have been dead without her, she's right to be proud. He would have.

This makes Rose's normalcy and connection with the audience all the more palpable because the story's not just saying "This could be you and you could be swept up into an exciting world like this." It's also saying that your perspective, that normal, everyday one that you bring to the table, that's useful. It's important. And, by extension, you're important.

On to Mickey.

Well, actually, before going on to Mickey, I need to make a disclaimer.

I analyze fictional narratives. That's what I do. When those narratives involve performances from actors, the analysis must, necessarily, involve discussion of the actors' performances. When I'm discussing Mickey, I'm talking about the character and the actor's performance of the character. I'm not discussing Noel Clarke, the actor who plays him, outside of that context. Sometimes talking about the character necessitates talking about the Clarke's performance and will include the occasional comment about when I think his performance was particularly well judged (or if it wasn't.) But this is entirely within the context of the performance and is not meant to be, nor should it ever be interpreted to be, an endorsement or defense of Noel Clarke's behavior outside of the context of his performance as Mickey. I find the actions he is alleged to have taken absolutely deplorable and representative of the worst kind of abuses of power. (And that "alleged" is only in there because there hasn't been a court case.)

With that said...

As mentioned, this episode is almost entirely from Rose's point of view. Because of that, we see Mickey through her eyes. In the beginning of the episode, their relationship seems to be pretty good, indeed laughing and goofing around with Mickey appears to be the highlight of Rose's otherwise tedious day during the opening montage. There seems to be some genuine affection there. They also seem very friendly and close when she visits his house to use his computer to search for information on the Doctor lately. In general it seems to be a functional relationship as opposed to a dysfunctional one.

That's not to say it's perfect, obviously. When Mickey's offer to take her down to the pub turns out to be a thinly veiled attempt to catch the last few minutes of a match because Jackie's got the news on the television it's obvious that Mickey's got his own priorities in the relationship. His later attempts to act tough when Rose goes to visit Clive come off as much more about his ego than her safety. And, during the restaurant scene with "Mickey" Rose has a line, "Oh I'm sorry. Was I talking about me for once?" that implies Mickey prioritizing himself over her is not unusual.

Rose and Mickey's relationship appears to be functional, but flawed. So, like Rose, it's normal. Who among us can say their relationship is perfect? Raise your hands. Everyone who's still in the first few months of the relationship, put your hands down, That doesn't count. Ok, now all of you who are lying to save face, lower them. That's better. The very few of you who still have your hands raised...stop gloating, you lucky so-and-so's.

There is a tendency, at first blush, to see Mickey as cowardly, in addition to being a bit selfish. If I'm honest, I think this is a bit unfair. Much like I said about the conventions of horror victims above, I think we often tend to have a strange notion of how bravery should work in fiction, treating what is essentially a normal reaction to terrifying events as if it represents a rare lack of bravery. Most people, when confronted with the strange, unusual and scary, react with fear and a desire to escape/save themselves. It's the extraordinarily brave reaction that's the unusual one. It isn't that Mickey is especially lacking in bravery, but that the Doctor and Rose are exceptionally brave themselves.

Further, they also understand much more about the situation than Mickey does, Rose because the Doctor has explained a lot of it to her and the Doctor because he's the Doctor. So while it's tempting to act as if all three were exposed to the exact same circumstances and Mickey's the one who crumbled under the pressure, that's not actually what happened.

Next up is the one and only Jackie Tyler.

I know that there's a faction of Doctor Who fandom that really adores Jackie. It's also pretty obvious that the showrunner, RTD, adores the character. I'm a lot less enamored of her, if I'm honest. I don't actively despise her, mind you, but if this had been the only time Jackie had appeared, I confess that I wouldn't have been overly upset by that.

Despite all that, I do recognize that Jackie serves a definite purpose in this episode. She's there precisely to emphasize the boringness, superficiality and general spite of Rose's normal life.

In later episodes we'll get more concrete examples of the fact that Jackie loves her daughter but in this one, Jackie's love, like Mickey's, is presented as conditional and selfish. Her first reaction to Rose losing her job is to draw a line in the sand declaring that she's unwilling to help her daughter. Sure, she'll share advice on how to game the system to Rose's advantage, but nothing that requires help from Jackie herself is on the table.

Further, when she does try to offer practical advice to her daughter, it's oddly belittling. Jackie thinks that Rose's previous job was "giving her airs and graces." Rose worked as a shop girl. Jackie thinks shop girl is a job above her daughter's station. Even leaving aside the idea of seeing that as an especially posh occupation, there's the wider issue that Jackie views it as important that Rose doesn't get above herself at all. Rather than hoping for a future where her daughter aims high and achieves her dreams, it's more important to Jackie to advise her daughter to aim low, to remember her place. I know this is a personal value judgment, but I honestly think that's a terrible approach to parenting and a horrible way to look at your child.

But it serves the purpose of showing the audience that Rose's future, if she stays in this life, is limited. Even the people who love her are actively holding her back.

Despite all of that, the story places Jackie in jeopardy at the end of the story, as she's in the midst of the attack of the mannequins. It's not a brief sequence either. The episode keeps cutting back to it, emphasizing the danger she's in. It'd be easy for the episode to kill her off (as it did Clive in the beginning of the sequence) rather than assume the audience is going to care if this woman, who's displayed almost no positive traits, survives or not. Heck, I'm pretty sure the original show would have killed her off, thus placing Rose into that orphan archetype that so many Classic Who companions fall into.

Instead, she lives. More than that, she's the face of saving everyone. Her jeopardy is used as a stand in for the jeopardy that all the normal people of the world are facing. That last bit, I think is important. The show is establishing something. This story is not going to be about pretending that people are perfect or even overwhelmingly good. But it is going to be about saving them anyway. It's about holding the line between the monsters and humanity even when humanity falls far short of the ideal. It's not making karmic value judgments about who should and shouldn't be saved. Even flawed people are still people.

Which brings us to the Doctor himself.

Our perspective on the Doctor is pretty limited in this episode. The near total restriction to Rose's point of view means that we don't see the science fiction part of the story from the Doctor's viewpoint. For instance, if this were a Jon Pertwee story, I'd have expected a fairly lengthy sequence involving the creation of the "anti plastic" that he intends to use against the Nestenes. But we skip all that. He just has it. This isn't a flaw in the story. It's just not relevant to Rose's experience of the Doctor which is what the episode is about.

We meet the Doctor in a whirlwind of activity, saving Rose, escaping mannequins and blowing up Rose's work. The dialogue and action move fast in this scene and that's not accidental. This isn't an exposition scene so the audience can understand what's going on (that'll come later) but rather an experiential scene so we can join Rose in her utter confusion and almost inability to keep up with what's going on around her.

Even as all that happens, however, the Doctor makes an impression. Let's face it, the Doctor always makes an impression, doesn't he? To start with, he's heroic, saving Rose. Next, he doesn't sugarcoat things, telling Rose that Wilson is dead without any preamble or comfort. Third, when he and Rose talk in the elevator, he's subtly evaluating her, noting that her conclusion about a student prank is intelligent. That she's wrong isn't really relevant. The Doctor knows that Rose doesn't actually have enough information to suss out what's going on. What's important is that he's impressed by what she's doing with the information that she does have. It's interesting to contemplate whether the Doctor is evaluating Rose deliberately at this point or if it just arose spontaneously. I'm inclined to believe the latter.

The Doctor's own observations aren't without flaw, it's worth noting. He's so caught up in the situation that he apparently fails to notice the plastic arm that Rose is walking off with, something that will come back to bite him later (but will also, to the audience's advantage, force him into Rose's orbit again.)

I think it's rather important, actually, that the Doctor is presented, right from the get go, as very impressive, but not perfect. He makes mistakes. He can be absent minded. He's a flawed hero. In truth, he's always been that. Back in the earliest days of the classic series he had more flaws that virtues. But he's never been portrayed as intellectually or morally perfect.

Chief among the Doctor's flaws is his perspective. The Doctor, as we meet him in Rose, views things from a wide perspective. He wants to save humanity, but his opinion on individual humans...well, he calls them "stupid apes." That says it all, really. The Doctor embraces "Big Picture" thinking. Not only that but he actively eschews looking at things from a more intimate perspective. "Can we keep the domestics outside, please?"

The Doctor is very wedded to this larger scale worldview. The whole "turn of the Earth" speech, is about it, about how he experiences the world in ways that transcend the minute, limited ways that humans do. He walks the same Earth the humans do, but he sees things they don't and, importantly, doesn't see all the small things that they do. And, when we meet him, he's ok with that. As he says himself, "That's who I am."

But, importantly, the events of the episode impress upon him the usefulness of that perspective that he's abandoned. When Rose finally sets foot in the TARDIS, part of that scene is expositional, explaining things to Rose is explaining them to the audience. In addition, the Doctor is also (deliberately, this time) evaluating whether Rose can cope with all this new information. He's judging her intelligence via her recognition of the alien nature of his ship and himself as well as her open-mindedness via her acceptance of that alien nature. But the scene is also demonstrating something else...that the Doctor himself is missing an essential empathy for the very beings he's trying to save. He values saving them as a group, but it didn't even occur to him to think of the consequences of a single death, like Mickey's.

This is presented to the audience as a flaw in the Doctor, even if it's not one he fully acknowledges. He's actually pretty aggressive in defending his worldview (although he does give Rose credit for saving him at the end.)

Perhaps no sequence in the episode demonstrates this dichotomy of worldviews than the simple bit where the Doctor explains what the Nestene transmitter looks like but can't actually recognize it. He's so focused on the big picture that it takes him three tries to catch on to what she's trying to point out to him. He's just not getting it because he's so removed from the perspective of those he's trying to save. True, Rose would never have known what to look for if he hadn't explained it, but he'd also never have found it on his own.

One of the things I'd worried about, slightly, when the show came back, was that the Doctor might be portrayed as more conventionally heroic and less flawed than I'd remembered him. During my formative years, watching Classic Doctor Who, I'd always really liked that the Doctor had ongoing and consistent flaws. He was arrogant. He was smug. He was judgmental. He was often forgetful. He was frequently thoughtless. He was rude, and not only to the villains. He was the very definition of a flawed hero.

When we think of flawed heroes, we often think of them in terms of having faults that they overcome in order to triumph in the narrative. The arrogant hero learns to be more humble. The judgmental hero learns to be more openminded. The rude hero learns to be more kind. The flaws are presented as obstacles for the hero to overcome. To be a hero, you must conquer your flaws.

Now, I've no objection to stories like that. But I also note that such an approach treats heroism like a quest for moral/ethical perfection. Being a hero is equated to being without flaws. But none of us are without flaws. More than that, real flaws of personality are not confronted once, overcome and then banished from the persona forever. Real flaws are constant and ongoing.

I have a fear of heights. I have, nevertheless, forced myself to climb up high on occasion when the situation requires it. That fear did not go away the first time I made myself climb on a away. On the contrary, my fear of heights has only increased as I've gotten older. On a trip to my childhood home, I once noted a tree that I used to climb when I was a kid and realized that the idea of climbing it now was absolutely terrifying. The act of overcoming my fear in one instance did not make it go away. Why not? Because flaws are not just obstacles to be overcome. They're...well, flaws. They're inherent and continuing weaknesses in ourselves. The trick, in real life, is not to overcome our flaws so they'll go away, but to learn to function with those flaws present. I can't make my fear of heights go away. But I can climb ladders despite being frightened.

And the Doctor is a hero despite his flaws. Personally, I find that much more relatable than a hero who conquers their flaws and becomes a moral/ethical paragon. I'm never going to be a paragon, no matter how much I try. But doing some good despite my flaws. That's an aspiration that's achievable.

So what are the Doctor's flaws?

As mentioned, the Doctor thinks on a macro scale. He sees the big picture but has trouble with a more grounded, individual point of view. He not only finds this difficult (he literally didn't think about the consequences of Mickey's "death") but actively rejects it ("Can we leave the domestics outside, please?")

It's not just the Doctor's perspective that's on a macro scale, but his ethics. The Doctor is interested in saving humanity, as a whole, on principle but his empathy for individual humans seems very limited. He feels it necessary to give the Nestene Consciousness a choice to leave, but the consequences of not simply killing it outright to all the individual humans on the planet are largely ignored in favor of that larger scale principle of choice.

The Doctor's also moody. He doesn't like to be questioned about his motives or his methods. When Rose points out his lack of empathy for the personal level he gets sullen and defensive. He goes from gleefully explaining what's going on to rudely dismissing her questions ("Disappears here, reappears there, you wouldn't understand.") When she's focused on his alien perspective, he falls back on calling humans "stupid apes." But as soon as her questions become less morally probing, when they're about why the TARDIS looks like a police box, rather than why he forgot her boyfriend "died," he immediately gets more friendly again.

Tied with his moodiness, the Doctor's consistently arrogant. He's the smartest guy in the room...no, make that city...no, make that planet, and he's not even shy about letting people know that. This moody arrogance doesn't limit itself to his conversations with Rose either. Despite his need to give the Nestenes "a chance" he enters that conversation with an incredibly confrontational attitude. He may feel, on principle, that he needs to offer them the chance to willingly leave but it's clear that, on a more practical level, he doesn't expect them to do so.

Why not? Because in addition to being moody and arrogant, the Doctor's also very judgmental. I mentioned, above, how Mickey has so much less context about what's going on than Rose and thus how his panic makes sense, but the Doctor either doesn't take that into account or just doesn't care. He decides that Mickey's not worth his time and thus that Mickey's "not invited." He regards humans and "stupid apes" even if he thinks they're worth saving and, as mentioned, clearly goes into the conversation with the Nestene Consciousness so sure that it will reject his offer that the offer itself doesn't really sound genuine.

These aren't new traits, of course. The Doctor's been arrogantly judging people since the days when he was played by William Hartnell. As I said, one of my small fears when the show returned is that, in an effort to make the character more palatable to audiences in 2005, that aspect would be lost and the Doctor's rough edges would be sanded down so that he became a more fair-minded and (to me) generic hero. I was pleasantly surprised when that didn't happen.

Of course, most of the Doctor's flaws have reasons behind them. He's so much older and and so much smarter than anyone else he knows that it makes sense to him to trust his snap judgments about things. Once the Doctor has decided what he thinks of someone, whether it be a flirty mother, a scared boyfriend or an alien consciousness invading the Earth, that judgment is pretty much set and there's little to no room for adjustments.

Except for Rose. Throughout the episode, as he learns more about her, the Doctor is clearly more and more impressed by her, to the point where he's even willing to acknowledge that she was able to resolve a situation that he was not.

Perhaps it's not so much that the Doctor's impression of Rose changes but that the repeated encounters they have over the course of the story mean that the Doctor's impression of her is formed more slowly than with the other characters and is thus more nuanced.

Either way, the Doctor's relationship with Rose is very different to that of anyone else in the story, a bond of trust and reliance building over the course of the episode, symbolized perfectly by the moment where he reaches out to hold her hand as they cross the bridge. It's very important that it's him reaching out to her in that moment. Her reaching toward him would be her pleading for his acceptance. If they'd reached mutually it would imply a level of equality in the relationship that doesn't yet exist. But the Doctor reaching for Rose is the Doctor explicitly acknowledging that her perspective is valuable and inviting her to assume a role in his life. Those of us who grew up watching Classic Who knew exactly what that role was called: companion.

The Choice

But will Rose accept that companion role? It's easy to take for granted that she will, especially if one's a fan of Classic Who and is used to companion introduction stories. But this episode does tease us with the notion that she might actually say no by...well, having her say no the first time he asks. Given that the TV Movie had ended with the companion character actually declining to travel with the Doctor, it has a bit of bite to it, as there's some precedent for the situation.

Given the whole theme of this episode, highlighting that moment of choice is almost a necessity. The entire story has been about the normal world vs, the fantastic, the mundane vs. the extraordinary.

We know that Rose finds her life largely boring so it might seem as though the choice should be easy for her and, indeed, we can see that she really does want to say yes. The Doctor recognizes that. Heck, he even sells the fact that it will be dangerous as a "plus." Dangerous? Yes. Boring? No. But the episode has also highlighted that it's Rose's connection to the normal realities of life that create the very perspective that the Doctor values. That tie is strong and she clearly feels a responsibility to it, enough so that she initially turns the Doctor down.

You can tell he's hurt. The series hasn't even begun to explore the whole Time War backstory yet but even without that it's very obvious that the Doctor has been traveling on his own for a long time, probably longer than he ever had during the classic series. Like someone who hasn't dated in a long time, it obviously took a great deal of mental and emotional effort for the Doctor to even ask Rose to come with him. And she said no. He tries to hide it, but it's obvious, not just to the audience but to Rose as well.

So he leaves.

How long is he gone? Onscreen it's a few seconds, but the TARDIS is a time machine. He could have been gone for minutes, hours, days, weeks? (I haven't heard any of the Big Finish audios starring Eccleston yet but I'd be very surprised if some of them weren't set during this gap.) Certainly, when he returns, his attitude has changed. When he left he was hurt and rejected. When he comes back. he's more assured, adding in the information about time travel like a salesman tossing in a final incentive. And then he just leaves the door open for her with confidence he hadn't been displaying just a few seconds earlier.

And it works. It works so quickly that it's blindingly obvious that this is the choice Rose wanted to make the first time. And, let's face it, it's the choice we all wanted her to make too.

Little Tidbits

-There's a little bit when Rose goes to check the cat flap in the apartment where she flips her hair out of the way to do so. However, Billie Piper specifically flips it so that the camera can see her face, rather than out of the sightline between her and the cat flap (indeed, she's actually flipping it into that sightline.) That bit always amuses me because it screams "This is a television show!"

-The scene where Jackie tries to seduce the Doctor and he flatly rejects her feels, to me, like throwing a bone to old school Who fans, many of whom associate the Doctor with asexuality. I must admit that I've never been tremendously wedded to the notion that the Doctor needs to be portrayed as asexual. When watching Classic Who it always felt to me like the subject of sexuality was something the show itself was avoiding, as opposed to the Doctor, in particular, rejecting it. Nevertheless, I do recognize that it's an aspect of the character that some people found very appealing. Asexual or not, I do find the scene funny.

-As Rose is getting some coffee, we get a bit of a crash course in some of the Doctor's abilities. For those who'd seen the earlier series, it's more like a refresher. We see him read incredibly fast (and that he recognizes a celebrity as an alien.) We see his dexterity as he shuffles the cards...followed by his fallibility as he loses control of them. In short, we're reminded that this is the same Doctor. He just looks different.

-Speaking of which, this scene also gives us the bit where the Doctor looks in the mirror and comments on what he looks like, with particular emphasis on his dissatisfaction with the size of his ears. When this episode aired, this was widely interpreted to mean that the Doctor had only recently regenerated and was thus still getting used to his new look. However, not long after, I began to see a lot of reinterpretation of that moment to the idea that the Doctor had just recently gotten a haircut. I don't think it's a coincidence that this reinterpretation started happening about the same time we learned that Christopher Eccleston was only going to play the Doctor for one season. I think the idea, especially for those who really took to his approach, that his incarnation's lifespan was so shortlived didn't sit well...so they decided that it didn't, that he's just talking about a haircut and has actually lived a longer period, complete with many more adventures that can be expanded on in book, comic and audio form.

The only problem I have with this is....why would we need to know the Doctor just got a haircut? Everything else in that sequence is there to reference the Doctor's capabilities. Russell T Davies, the writer and showrunner, is masterful at making his dialogue serve multiple purposes. Indeed, his dialogue virtually always serves a purpose. What's the purpose of telling the audience the Doctor just got his haircut? If he's just regenerated, there's a reason for the line to be there. If he hasn't...why have the line at all?

-Silliness. Doctor Who has always had a bit of silliness. From giant ants and butterfly men to comedy yokels and Daleks who have difficulty with math, from a megalomaniacal cactus to an executioner made of sweets, Doctor Who has never felt the need to sell itself on utter seriousness. The bizarre, the surreal and the outright goofy have always been a part of its stock and trade. Right from the start we see that this is going to still be the case. One of the earliest action sequences in the episode is the attack of a plastic arm (complete with it being really obvious that Eccleston is just holding it against his own throat.) Then we get the infamous burping wheelie bin that eats Mickey.. And then there's plastic Mickey himself, so overdone that it's hard to take seriously.

Some people get really bothered by this. They feel it punctures the verisimilitude for the show to embrace such obvious goofiness. I...don't share those feelings. Doctor Who, to me, is something that can hit every note and blatant, goofball comedy is not an exception to that. Nor do I think that, conceptually, the concepts of silliness and terror are mutually exclusive. The burping wheelie bin still swallows Mickey whole (and, at that point in the story we don't have any reason to believe it didn't kill him.) If I get eaten by an alligator, I'm not going to be less dead if it lets out a big belch after it's swallowed me. Dangerous things don't cease to be dangerous if they happen to also be a bit silly. The need to keep those concepts separate, to me, plays into the "evil is always ugly" myth, something that isn't true in real life and I don't feel needs to be "true" in fiction.

-Speaking of silliness, there is a tendency for fandom to think of Eccleston's version of the Doctor as almost monolithically grim. Every time I go back and watch his episodes, though, I am reminded that there is a lot more humor in his performance than I had remembered. Eccleston plays the serious parts of the character very well and I think that's part of why we remember him that way. He does seem slightly less comfortable with the humor, I'll admit (although, in retrospect, that fits very well with the point the Doctor is at in his life) but the humor is far more present and, bluntly, effective in Eccleston's era than I usually remember.

-How did Rose explain the broken table to her Mom?

-Eccleston's Doctor has what is probably the most normal "look" of any incarnation. Leather jacket, jumper, black trousers and boots. It's a far cry from the more eccentric outfits the Classic series Doctors wore. I'll admit it took some getting used to on my part. Like the slight discomfort with humor, though, it's something that makes a lot of sense, given what we'll later learn about the current state of the Doctor's life.

-I mentioned, above, some elements of Classic Who that had changed in this new version, and a few that had stayed the same. Chief among the latter is the sound the TARDIS makes. I think it's easy to take this for granted, as if it was a given, but there's certainly no reason it couldn't have been altered or updated the same way the opening credits or the opening theme had been. For that matter, they could have altered the police box prop itself. Back in 1963, it was a commonplace enough object that everyone understood what it was but that's hardly the case in 2005. Indeed, the Doctor has to explain what it is to Rose (and thus, the audience.) Keeping these things is a way of letting the audience know that, while this is a great jumping on point for the adventures of the Doctor, the makers of the show haven't forgotten the rich history behind it. They may be changing things, but they're making sure the show's essential iconography is intact.

-Clive's wife laughing at the idea of a "she" taking an interest in a Doctor Who website is very funny in retrospect. There are ways in which Doctor Who fandom is very much the same now as it has always been. But there are also ways in which it has changed and one of the larger changes is that the percentage of female fans of the show is tremendously larger than it was before 2005.

-The sonic screwdriver is back! It looks a little different than in the classic series (though it actually had some slight alterations over the course of that too) but it's back. It's tempting to add this to the list of things that "stayed the same" above, but the sonic screwdriver hadn't been a presence for the last seven seasons of the classic series. Nevertheless, I feel as though its return is the result of the same thinking. The sonic screwdriver is a part of the show's central iconography. It's one of the key things people think of when they think of Doctor Who and thus it is reintroduced.

-The TARDIS interior is very large, much larger than it had ever been during the classic years. While far from a copy, the columns and design of the central console put me very much in mind of that design from the TV Movie (particularly in how the central column connects to the ceiling rather than just attaching below.) I won't fib and say that this is may favorite console room design. (My favorite from the new series is the late Smith/Capaldi era design and my favorite TARDIS interior ever is the all-too short lived wood-paneled version from Season 14 of the classic series.) Nevertheless, it does have a very nice sense of scale to it. When Rose walks through the doors, she's not greeted with a room that's just a little too big to fit within the police box walls, but a massive space that, frankly, blows her mind a bit. It also looks a bit...run down. The console, which used to be very neat and organized, looks like a bit of a hodge-podge and we've never been able to see the police box doors on the interior side before, not even in the TV Movie. The whole thing immediately gives the impression of something wondrous but also something old, something that might not be what it once was, like it's been battered and weathered by age (and a war?)

-If one wants to talk about things that have changed since the classic series, I can't imagine any classic Doctor with Eccleston's northern accent. That said, it doesn't bother me at all. I never find Eccleston difficult to understand whatsoever.

-I mentioned that the Doctor's attempt to negotiate with the Nestenes doesn't seem entirely sincere but the fact that he feels the need to try it at all strikes me as significant. It fits perfectly with the Doctor's recent emergence from the Time War, a conflict that saw no negotiation, no dialogue, just violence, that sickened him even before its terrible conclusion. That he would feel the need to at least make an attempt to end a conflict without violence is unsurprising. Unfortunately, that same history might explain why he's less than wholehearted in the attempt. The war has also ground him down to the point where, on a deep level, he may no longer believe the avoidance of conflict is even possible, even if he feels obligated to make a show of trying.

-Speaking of the Time War, we don't get much about it here. There's a few, tantalizing hints, just enough to wet the appetite.

-I don't like to dwell on the negative, but I will say that I think there's a bit too much blatant expository dialogue from the Doctor just as the Nestene invasion really begins, particularly as he explains to Rose what's going on. It feels a bit like Trek technobabble.

-Poor Clive. The very moment that confirms all his beliefs is the moment that kills him. Death is the Doctor's constant companion indeed.

-They kept the sounds associates with the Auton "hand" guns from the classic series, both as they open and as they fire. That's a nice touch.

-Jackie is menaced by three Autons in wedding dresses. That's right, folks. Marriage = death.

-There's no better indication of how far Rose has been drawn into the Doctor's world than the phone call she makes to make sure that her mother is safe. It's just long enough to hear Jackie's voice and confirm that she's alive and no more. It's still important to Rose that the people from her normal life are protected, but she's entirely lost interest in actually being a part of that life. Contrast that with the look of absolute pride when the Doctor thanks her for saving him. It's the Doctor's world she wants to prove herself in now, not the normal one.

And it is gonna be...Fantastic!

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