Aliens of London

Doctor Who (2005)

And we're back to the futu...errrr present...kind of. What's a year out, more or less? Surely back in the present day there will be no more weird shenanigans and all will be normal.

Well, not in Doctor Who, it won't. Aliens invade the Earth on a regular basis in this universe and London itself at least twice per month.

Summary

The Doctor and Rose return to modern day Earth, the Doctor informing her that she's been gone for 12 hours. Rose heads up to her mother's flat to check in, only to learn that she's actually been away for 12 months, and her mother has been searching for her for the past year. The Doctor and Rose are unable to give a proper account of there whereabouts for the past year, earning suspicion from the police and anger from Jackie.

Rose and the Doctor try to talk out what to do on the roof of the estate when they witness a spaceship fall from the sky, strike Big Ben and crash in the Thames. Unable to get past the police and media to investigate, they are relegated to watching the news on television like everyone else.

At 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister and others have disappeared, leaving Joseph Green acting in the role. A back-bencher named Harriet Jones attempts to gain his attention for an initiative she is proposing but he brushes her off in favor of a meeting with Margaret Blaine so they can read the emergency protocols for the situation.

The Doctor leaves the watch-party, giving Rose a key to the TARDIS as he does, and assuring Rose that he won't leave...before promptly leaving in the TARDIS. As he does so, he is noticed by Mickey Smith, who is too late to catch him before he goes.

The Doctor travels to Albion Hospital where he discovers that the "alien body" is actually a normal pig whose brain has been wired up to make it appear like an alien. He is very upset when a soldier shoots the fleeing pig in panic.

In the Cabinet room, Green, Blaine and an Oliver Charles meet with General Asquith who is furious at their lack of action about the situation. To the General's horror, the three of them find the whole situation amusing and then shed their skins before killing him. "Charles" takes Asquith's own skin to wear from now on. This is all witnessed by Harriet Jones who had snuck into the Cabinet room.

Rose learns that Mickey had been questioned repeatedly about her disappearance and that Jackie had all but accused him of murdering Rose. When the TARDIS returns, Rose tries to keep Jackie from going inside but fails and Jackie leaves in a panic. She calls an advertised government number and reports seeing an alien. When she uses the names "Doctor" and "TARDIS" it sets off alarms. The police arrive and apprehend the Doctor and Rose, though Mickey manages to slip away.

The Doctor and Rose are brought to Downing Street. Rather than being arrested, the Doctor's advice as an expert on aliens is being sought and he's called into a meeting with other experts and UNIT personnel. Rose doesn't have the clearance she needs for the meeting but Harriet Jones takes her aside and confesses to her what she's seen. Back at her flat, Jackie is questioned by a policeman who insists he be allowed to speak to her alone. Harriet takes Rose to the cabinet room and they find the body of the Prime Minister in the cupboard but are, in turn, discovered by Margaret Blaine.

In the meeting, the Doctor works out that the crash was a decoy and that the goal was to draw the experts themselves into a trap. Green and Asquith reveal themselves to be aliens and Asquith removes his skin to reveal a large, green body with big eyes and huge claws, stating that they are the Slitheen. Green then activates a charge in the experts' nametags to electrocute them. At the same time Margaret removes her skin to reveal her Slitheen body, murdering the Prime Minister's secretary before moving in on Rose and Harriet just as the policeman does the same with Jackie...

Crew Credits

Writer: Russell T Davies

Director: Keith Boak

Producer: Phil Collinson

Overview

So we're back to the show's present...sort of. That "sort of" is actually rather important, though. It represents a major difference between the modern and classic series' approaches to things. In this case it's indicative of one of the major themes of the episode: consequences.

Classic Who used to have the Doctor pick up companions, travel with them for a while and then drop them off without real consequence. When Ian and Barbara return to London, they arrive two years after they left and the only result of that is a joke about how much bus fair now costs. Dodo, Sarah Jane and Tegan are dropped back into the modern world in places and times that are geographically different from where they left, yet no time is spent on how they're going to manage to reintegrate themselves back into normal society. Ben and Polly's departure avoids the issue entirely by having them arrive back on the exact day they left.

Jamie and Zoe take that a step further by not just returning to the very moment they left but also retaining no memory of their travels in the TARDIS. With the possible exception of Ace, the consequences of leaving with the Doctor and returning simply aren't something the classic series spent much time contemplating. (Some of the non-televised media has done so, but that's a separate approach.) That's not to say the classic companions didn't feel genuine. It's just that the emphasis was rarely on their lives beyond their interactions with the Doctor.

But, right from the beginning, the new series has been taking a more grounded approach, trying to inject a realism into Rose that wasn't present in the classic companions. One of the ways in which it did that was to make it very clear that Rose has a complete life and attachments in it before she meets the Doctor. Rose may have been dissatisfied with her life but she definitely had one.

So one of the natural consequences of removing Rose from that life is that it has an effect on the people around her. Rather than shy away from that, this episode embraces it. Rose's abrupt departure, fun as it was for her (and us), was devastating to her mother and boyfriend. Jackie's life is shattered because her daughter is missing and Mickey has been treated like a murder suspect.

Because of course they have. When someone just disappears from the world, there are consequences. They leave a hole in the world.

The theme of consequences stretches through the rest of the episode as well.

While being interviewed by a policeman, the Doctor and Rose are asked, point blank, if their relationship is a sexual one. It's a question I honestly can't imagine being uttered back in the classic series days but it's also a fairly obvious one to ask. A young girl has disappeared for the year in the company of an older man. Of course that would be something people might think. The Doctor came and whisked Rose away from her life. From the perspective of those outside it, the idea that their relationship might not be platonic, is an obvious one.

The effects caused by those observing the Doctor's actions spread wider than simply his recent departure with Rose too. New viewers learn here that the Doctor has been noticed on his various trips into Earth's history and not just by Mickey or conspiracy theorists like Clive. The British Government itself has a system in place for reacting to news of the Doctor's presence. Because of course they would. In the digital age, why wouldn't they have a key word search for the combination of the words "Doctor" and "TARDIS?" It's a natural consequence of all the times we've seen the Doctor visit the Earth's past in the classic series (and later episodes of the new one.) An absence leaves a hole in the world, but a presence leaves fingerprints.

And the Doctor's presence is something to watch out for because he doesn't just appear without incident. He shows up in times of crisis, followed by "a list of the dead" as Mickey puts it. Like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, the Doctors presence is synonymous with death, destruction and chaos. One can have a debate about whether the chaos is a consequence of the Doctor's presence or just a coincidence but the correlation is there and it must certainly look like consequence to an outside observer. So if, every time he shows up, the world is in danger, it makes perfect sense that the government would want to know when he's around.

Even on a smaller scale the Doctor upends lives. Rose may have been ok with being removed from her life but doing so also turned Jackie and Mickey's next year into a disaster of worry, fear and false accusation. It's no wonder Jackie slaps him.

In the midst of all this chaos the Doctor's actions cause, it's worth noting that it's not the only effect he has. The Doctor's presence can also be reassuring. His arrival clearly has that effect on young Dr. Sato in the hospital. The episode may be focusing a lot on the negative consequences of the Doctor's actions, but they're not the only ones.

Speaking of consequences, over the course of this and the next episode, we're going to see that the Slitheen's entire plan hinges on them. The Doctor lays that out very succinctly toward the end of the episode. They've set up a domino effect of human reaction designed to move themselves into positions of power and to draw the few human experts who might pose a threat to them into a trap. And the dominos are clearly set to keep falling in the next episode. There are more consequences to come.

In addition to consequences, the episode also focuses a fair amount on the progression of the modern world since the classic series, putting front and center several things that have changed in the 9 years since we've seen the Doctor onscreen and making it clear that they will not be ignored just to recreate the classic series "feel."

We get a whacking great set piece of Big Ben being damaged as the alien ship crashes. Apart from simple being an impressive visual there's also the fact that it's an impressive visual in the story, something that prompts news and attention (and spurs those consequences the Slitheen want.) We get newscasters broadcasting it to the world. We get a public government reaction. We even get non-newscast television reactions to it, like a baking show demonstrating how to make an "alien spaceship" cake. We get UFO TV watch parties. We get the news pervading the entire culture.

We also get the Doctor and Rose having to deal with that phenomenon. They can't get by the cordon that's blocking off the spaceship precisely because it's so publicly known. They're reduced to watching it the same way everyone else does, on TV. And even there, the spaceship landing is only one of many things going on at that gathering. It's been integrated into people's lives but it's not the only thing they care about to the Doctor's annoyance.

Why's he annoyed? Because this should be a bigger deal. This, as far as he knows right now, is finally humanity's first (public) contact with alien life and they're treating it as one small conversation topic among many. They're dragging it into the realm of the normal and the domestic. More on that below...

Humor

There are a lot of jokes in this episode. More than that, there's also a lot of just...silliness. It's easily the most humor-filled episode since the show's return thus far. Yes, each of the previous episodes had humorous moments but the humor doesn't pervade the narrative in them to the degree it does here.

Indeed, there were a number of fans at the time who found the level of humor very off-putting, feeling it detracted from the plot. There are still those who feel that way about it now, for that matter. Humor is also very subjective and some people simply don't like the episode's type of humor which is arguably quite juvenile.

I wouldn't put myself in the category of not liking the episode because of its humor but I do find it very noticeable. It feels like a deliberate uptick in the humor and I don't think that's an accident. That prompted me to ask myself why RTD chose to go that route.

The most obvious answer to that is that, well, he wanted the episode to be funny. That's not an illegitimate goal in and of itself. But is it the only reason?

To answer that, I think we need to examine the jokes that bother some people the most about the episode, the fart jokes.

Humor is, as I mentioned above, subjective. Some people find fart jokes funny. Some people don't. But that's true of all humor. I suspect, however, that the presence of such jokes is there to create a bit of a dissonant feel in the audience, to balance how silly the Slitheen are acting with the cruelty of what they're actually doing.

People will sometimes discuss the "banality of evil," the idea that evil hides in the humdrum and normal rather than being obviously sinister. It's the guard at the death camp who is "just following orders," the serial killer who "seemed so normal" or the spree killer who's just the "boy next door." The evil that is not obviously evil but rather mundane. Despite its prevalence in the world, it still tends to catch us by surprise, possibly because movies and television and virtually all media have ingrained the idea into us that evil "acts evil" all the time, that bad people are obvious and identifiable. They're ugly, mustache-twirling, monologuing villains.

They're not overweight people who fart and and giggle a lot.

I distinctly recall some people, at the time of broadcast, talking about how they couldn't take the Slitheen seriously as a threat, but I rather think those people were missing the point of them. The story is playing with the banality of evil concept, reminding us that those who would do us harm are often those who don't seem particularly threatening. The Slitheen don't "act" evil...but they commit evil acts. It's reminding us that evil is defined by action, not by affectation. No matter how much they fart and laugh (and laugh at farting) they also murder people and wear their skins. No amount of farting or giggling changes that. Evil is an act, not an attitude.

But, in regards to attitude, the farting and giggling arguably makes those acts even more frightening. The Slitheen don't just murder people, they find murdering people amusing. They actively enjoy their acts of cruelty. That level of contempt and sadism actually makes them seem more evil, not less, in my book. It's one level of evil to eliminate someone for "business." It's quite another to enjoy the act of eliminating them. It's bad enough to be killed but to know that the one killing you thinks this is fun? Seems a lot worse to me. Much like the Joker over in Batman, the jokes and silliness aren't there to undercut the horror of the evil acts, but rather to emphasize just how evil the people committing them are.

And, again, they murder people and wear their skins.

Characters

So much of this story is about consequences that, inevitably, some of the story focuses on "those left behind" at the end of Rose, Jackie and Mickey.

Neither character was presented in the best light in the opening episode. Mickey was presented as a neglectful and inadequate boyfriend while Jackie comes off as barely caring about her daughter beyond a surface level.

This episode does a lot to round out the characters, making them more sympathetic. Part of this is that they are presented as the victims of the consequences of Rose's departure.

Jackie has spent her entire year trying to find out what happened to her daughter which shows, at the very least, that she does care about Rose. Admittedly, she hasn't made much progress but then, how could she? She can't leaflet all of time and space.

Something that is consistent about Jackie from Rose, though, is that she's quick to anger. Her ire is immediately aimed at the Doctor once Rose returns. That's understandable, considering the obvious conclusion to draw is that the older man took advantage of her daughter for some sort of "romantic" trip for a year. I've sometimes heard people complain about Jackie slapping the Doctor (mostly because, again, it gets played for comedy) but considering that Jackie thinks the Doctor effectively kidnapped her daughter, it actually seems like a pretty tame reaction to me.

Consistent with this, we learn that, over the course of the year, Jackie aimed her anger and blame at Mickey, believing him to have killed her daughter. The fact that Mickey couldn't/wouldn't give a satisfactory answer to this accusation undoubtedly played a part in this. I won't go so far as to say this is a reasonable reaction on Jackie's part (no matter her reasons, Mickey didn't kill her daughter) but, as Mickey himself points out, he is the "most likely suspect."

Camille Coduri does a great job of playing through Jackie's gamut of emotions in this episode, not just what's mentioned above, but also Jackie's continuing despair when Rose refuses to share the details of her time away, undoubtedly leading Jackie to assume something (conventionally) traumatic happened to her. When we get to the point where Jackie calls the authorities to report the Doctor, it feels earned, because Jackie's spent the entire episode believing her daughter to be the Doctor's victim, not the Doctor's friend.

On to Mickey. Before doing so, I present, as I did for Rose, this disclaimer...

I analyze fictional narratives. That's what I do. When those narratives involve 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.)

Mickey's better this time. By that, I mean he's presented as less of a stereotypical "bad boyfriend" and more of a rounded, proactive character. We see that he genuinely missed Rose and also that he's taken the brunt of the blame for her departure. He immediately earns some sympathy from the audience based on the fact that we know he's spent a year getting blamed for something we know he didn't do. (At least I hope he earns some. Anyone who thinks someone deserves to spend a year being accused of murder because they weren't the best boyfriend probably needs to recheck their moral compass.)

Sympathy for Mickey is also generated by the fact that he continues to be a victim of the situation in this episode as well. The Doctor has limited interaction with Jackie in this episode (possibly lumping her in with his general avoidance of the "domestic") but, when he encounters Mickey, the Doctor actively berates him. The Doctor displays no sympathy for Mickey's plight at all and takes every opportunity to run him down. (More on why I think he does that below.) Sure, Mickey tries to argue back but he's far outgunned in a verbal battle against the Last of the Time Lords.

Mickey is also fleshed out a bit in that we learn that he has been spending part of the past year looking into who the Doctor is, showing him to be slightly more than just a victim. Back in Rose, we saw that Mickey owned a computer and Rose didn't (hence why she came to his house to research) and, eventually, this will get expanded into Mickey being fairly (arguably overly) skilled with them, but here it's kept to a reasonable level. He's been combing through information, trying to find out who and what the Doctor is. About the most impressive thing he's come across is that the Doctor used to work for UNIT, which probably is about as far as you can go without off-world sources. In general, though, Mickey's come across the same thing Clive had back in Rose: The Doctor's name is followed by a list of the dead.

All of that said, it's not like Mickey is entirely removed from his previous comic relief portrayal either. In Rose, Mickey's "bad boyfriend" status was largely played for laughs and he continues to be the butt of several jokes in this episode as well. While, objectively, the Doctor mocking him seems pretty cruel, it is presented in a comedic fashion (the fact that Mickey seems aware enough to realize the Doctor's winding him up even without Rose telling him so helps.)

And then there's the fact that Mickey's introduction into the episode is running headlong into a wall because he can't catch the dematerializing TARDIS. It's very classic physical comedy, though I think what really sells the joke is the way Clarke gets up and looks around to make sure no one else saw the incident, trying to maintain his dignity. Comedy-Mickey is still around. It's just no longer the only aspect to the character.

What of the erstwhile Rose herself?

For Rose, this episode is pretty much summed up by the phrase "You can't go home again." Right from the start, it's about Rose trying to return from her fantastic adventure to her normal life and finding that it's impossible. First, she learns that the very act of going on the adventure itself had unforeseen consequences to her normal life and later she finds that trying to balance the two lifestyles doesn't really work. She can't tell her mother everything, for fear of Jackie's reaction. But she also can't parse out the information as she sees fit because Jackie pushes through that to learn more. She can't return to Mickey being her boyfriend without the Doctor and Mickey pawing the ground around her. She can't fit this strange new life of hers comfortably into her previous, normal one. No matter how much she'd like to have it both ways, that's not an option.

Why not? Because, despite the fact that the new series is focusing much more on grounding the companion as a real world character, it still thematically shares something with Classic Who: Once the Doctor's world has you, it doesn't let you go. In Classic Who, more often than not, this took the form of being wholly whisked away from everything familiar and into the world of the strange, bizarre and dangerous. New Who is just taking the next logical step, the familiar being invaded (arguably corrupted) by that strange, bizarre and dangerous world. In either case, you can't go home again. Over time, we'll see Rose continue to try, but never with any real success.

Speaking of the desire to hold onto the normal in the face of the world being invaded by the strange, we're introduced to a new character in this episode who almost perfectly encapsulates that: Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North.

For story purposes, Harriet takes on a similar role to Rose's previous one, that of the normal person discovering the extent to which the bizarre has infiltrated the world. It's a relative scale of discovery in this story, with most of the world being fully aware that "aliens" exist but with only Harriet discovering their true nature and the degree to which they've insinuated themselves into the normal world.

Before she does that, however, Harriet represents an interesting perspective, one that Doctor Who has rarely been seen to explore before now: The fact that the issues and problems of the normal world don't come screeching to a halt just because something big and strange has happened. Harriet spends the beginning of the episode trying to get a piece of legislation looked at to help with Cottage Hospitals, something she rightfully presumes will still need to be dealt with after all the hubbub about the crashed alien spaceship blows over.

Because, yes, the world of the strange invades and alters the normal world but it's also true that the normal world continues on despite that. People still live their lives, they still need to work and eat and get married (or divorced), raise kids and, yes, go to the hospital. Classic Who acknowledged this in a roundabout way, by simply having the world be pretty much back to normal every time the Doctor returned to the modern era. This episode is doing so in a more immediate way, by presenting a character who reminds us that the introduction of one new, big problem doesn't make all the existing, smaller problems magically go away. (I'm reminded of the pandemic. The existence of Covid-19 didn't mean that people stopped having to deal with cancer and heart attacks and car accidents.)

So if aliens showing up doesn't mean terrestrial problems go away, what does it mean? Well, this is Doctor Who, so it means monsters and death.

And fear. Harriet is there to represent fear as well.

Rose has been around the block a bit now, as far as monsters are concerned. That's not to say she's immune to fear of them (indeed, I'm not sure any of Doctor Who's principle characters ever entirely dispense with fear, including the Doctor himself.) But Harriet experiences fear in this episode in a way that Rose can't really do anymore. It's that almost paralyzing fear that everything you thought was real isn't, and the things and people that you thought were there to keep you safe are actually monstrous and murderous.

There's some nice parallels with Rose's reactions in the first episode. Like Rose in the basement of Henrik's, Harriet is almost completely paralyzed with fear when she first witnesses the Slitheen. Like Rose, once removed from the immediate situation, she is able to gather enough of her wits to reach out for help, in this case from Rose herself. But that fear is still very present and palpable. Hardly surprising, really. The Slitheen are in the same room when she's talking to Rose.

That fear is an important part of Harriet's introduction. As I mentioned back in my post on what Doctor Who is about, the world the show presents is frequently a terrifying one and the measure of a character isn't their lack of fear but how they cope with that terror. It's important that they emphasize just how scared Harriet is so that we understand just what level of effort it takes for her to reach out to Rose when she does.

All of this is carried wonderfully by Penelope Wilton's performance. She makes Harriet simultaneously humble but bold, acquiescent but persistent and terrified but brave all without making Harriet's personality seem inconsistent. She's a welcome addition to the cast.

Speaking of managing to hold a lot of contradictory impulses in a personality, while still seeming consistent, we see a lot of different facets to the Doctor's personality in this episode. He's happy, remorseful, excited, curious, bored, petty, territorial, authoritative and sneaky all in one big package. One of the great advantages of the Doctor being a character with such longevity is that he can have conflicting, sometimes even contradictory, character traits without it feeling like they're getting the character "wrong." He's very old (see below.) He's seen an awful lot and the idea that his reactions might be more complex than a single constant seems believable.

We also get something relatively new to the Doctor's personality here, namely his dislike of the "domestic." He made an offhand comment to that effect in Rose but this is the first time we see that aspect of his personality really come to the fore. When the Doctor is stuck in Jackie's flat with everyone else, trying to watch the news about the alien crash on television, you can see his utter frustration with every one around him, with their fixation on the normal, the mundane.

This is, for all intents and purposes, a "new" character trait for the Doctor, unseen in the classic series because, as mentioned above, Classic Who didn't really spend much time on the companions' previous lives and ties. That said, it seems like a reasonable extrapolation of the personality traits we've seen the Doctor display back in Classic Who. This is the man who left his own people because he was "bored" so that he could experience things in person rather than observe them from afar. He's also the man who always leaves at the end of the adventure when the excitement dies down, rather than sticking around to help with the important, but far less thrilling, process of putting everything back together again.

If anything, the Doctor's distaste for the mundane is like a reverse of the effect the Doctor's strange world has on the companions. It's his world, his viewpoint, being "invaded" by the mundane. Interestingly, the Doctor can't really handle it. He finds the mundane overwhelming to the point where he feels the need to retreat from it. The Doctor would rather face an alien mystery than a flat full of people talking about the local gossip...to the point where he's willing to deceive Rose in order to do so.

That's an interesting little scene there, where the Doctor tries to sneak off, Rose catches him and he lies to her in order to continue. It's not just a simple lie either. He makes a point of giving Rose the TARDIS key, of making a big deal of it to emotionally distract her from the fact that yes, he's ditching her. It's quite a manipulative move on the Doctor's part, arguably an underhanded one. It's a reminder that the Doctor's gift for verbal trickery, while usually reserved for foes, can work on friends as well.

Once the Doctor's out investigating. we also see another of the Doctor's more prevalent traits, his effortless authority. He goes from having a bunch of soldiers pointing guns at him to giving them orders in seconds and he does so effectively enough that he can chastise one of the soldiers for a mistake in judgment later. Like he often does, the Doctor projects the impression that he knows more about what's going on than anyone else and that frequently leads people to acquiesce to him...that he doesn't always know as much as he seems like he does notwithstanding. We see this again in the end of the episode when he takes control of the meeting of alien experts, a situation where he's ahead of almost everyone else, but not enough to to save them. He catches on that it's a trap but not until he's caught in it.

And then there's the way the Doctor treats Mickey.

Why does the Doctor treat Mickey so badly? I suppose there's the matter of the initial first impression Mickey made on him back in Rose, calling the Doctor "an alien, a thing." It's hardly most pleasant introduction although, as I mentioned in my post on Rose, Mickey's context for the meeting is very limited. He hadn't seen the Doctor's "good side" the way Rose had.

But I think there's something more to it than that. I think that, for the Doctor, Mickey (and to a lesser extent Jackie) represents a tie Rose still has to her previous life. The shift in character dynamics, from Classic to New Who, where we now focus more on the personal life of the companion, isn't just an outside-the-fiction change. This is as new for the Doctor as it is for the audience. He's used to picking up a companion and that companion's energy being almost entirely focused on him and their adventures. (Even the rare companions that would sometimes return home in the classic series, like Sarah Jane, didn't involve the Doctor in the ties of their personal life.)

In a sense, I feel like that's what the Doctor is trying to get back to. The events of Classic Who represent a sort of idealized life for him, one from before he had to fight in the Time War, one where his responsibilities didn't stretch beyond the individual adventure he was engaged with at the time. I've heard it occasionally said that Rose is sort of the Sarah Jane of her era. Well, I think the Doctor wants her to be exactly that. She represents the possibility of recapturing the lifestyle he loved most and he's unwilling to see that possibility threatened.

And Mickey represents precisely that kind of threat. He's a direct link to Rose's previous life, another man she has great affection for and thus not a tie she's entirely willing to cut. The Doctor may have taken her rejection of Mickey at the end of Rose as final (Rose may even have thought so at the time) but we see here that it's all much more messy and complicated than that. She feels bad about leaving him and how much it hurt him. She is also genuinely happy to see him and clearly still attracted to him. The choice was not clear cut, the tie not severed...and the Doctor sees that.

Mind you, I don't believe the Doctor is fully cognizant of his own motivations in this case. I don't think the Doctor actively ruminates on the emotional wounds the Time War inflicted upon him and how to heal them. (Quite the opposite, actually, I suspect he avoids thinking about the war as much as possible.) I don't think he's actively trying to "groom" Rose into Sarah Jane Mark II, nor do I think he looks at Mickey and thinks "I must sever that link so I can have Rose all to myself." No, I suspect this is all happening on a more subconscious level and the result is that Mickey just...bothers him, whether that's justified or not.

So the Doctor throws a bit of a tantrum and treats Mickey like crap, running him down every chance he gets, even to the point of calling him the wrong name. It's petty and childish and on the level of schoolyard bullying...and very Doctor. The Doctor has very high-minded parts of his personality. His idealism and willingness to step in to help the underdog is admirable, but he's no saint and never has been. As I mentioned above, this episode highlights the fact that some of the Doctor's personality traits contradict each other. If anything, it leans more firmly on the "negative" ones and the way the Doctor treats Mickey definitely falls into that category.

Luckily the ability to play such things falls right into Christopher Eccleston's wheelhouse. He's never been an actor to shy away from playing the less-than-savory aspects of a character and the Doctor is no exception. Indeed, there are times when it feels like the meaner sides of the Doctor are the ones he's more comfortable playing. He's captivating as he's tricking Rose with the key. He's commanding when he's chastising the soldier. He's impressive as he tells Joseph Green to stop farting while he saves the world.

He does, however, inject some fairly constant humor into the situations. One of the reasons the Doctor's treatment of Mickey in the episode is palatable to the audience is that, despite their pettiness, a lot of the insults the Doctor hurls at Mickey are actually funny. Mickey's previous appearances had already set him up as a bit of a "victim comic relief" so the audience goes in primed for this.

Little Tidbits

-The whole effect of Rose's departure could be demonstrated if one were to simply watch Rose, then skip to this episode, effectively only giving us Jackie and Mickey's side of the story. Come to think of it, a "those left behind" marathon for the Rose era could be an interesting exercise, watching only the modern episodes and noting the effect Rose's (and eventually Mickey's) has on Jackie.

-It does vaguely occur me that the consequences of Rose's disappearance might have been very different if she hadn't called her mother at the end of Rose and thus assured Jackie that she's safe. Without that call, everyone might have assumed Rose had died during the mannequin attack that night.

-We card-carrying members of the Doctor Who OCD fan club (who never forget to carry our cards, of course) note that the Doctor's claim to be 900 years old is, of course, wrong, since he was over that age in Time and the Rani back in the classic series. His exact age was a plot point in that story so, of the two ages, this must be the one that's wrong. The question is...does that matter? If you've read my post on continuity, you already know my own answer to that. To quote Terrance Dicks, "Continuity is what we could remember on a good day." If we want to play the "How can we make it fit together?" game (and why not? It's fun.) then it's worth noting that the Doctor's declarations about his age have been inconsistent all through the classic series, with The Ribos Operation heavily implying that he lies about his age to appear younger anyway.

-The Bad Wolf reference in this episode is much more obvious, with the words being graffitied onto the TARDIS itself. It almost has the feel of "better make this big in case the audience hasn't been catching on to the subtle stuff."

-We get a couple "future cameos" in this episode. Albion Hospital makes its first appearance and will return later this season (but earlier in time.) In addition, we get the first appearance of Naoko Mori as "Dr. Sato" who will, of course, go on to have a much more prominent role in Torchwood. I've never been entirely sure if the character was already intended to be in the spinoff at this point or if it was just that they were impressed by Mori's performance and remembered her come time to cast Torchwood. I vaguely suspect the latter, both because this was shot early enough that I doubt the spinoff was very concrete yet and because Dr. Sato acts as a medical doctor in this story and a computer expert in Torchwood (though they do retroactively explain that.)

-The search for the "alien" in Albion Hospital makes good use of classic horror techniques, keeping it in shadow, showing its point of view, etc. It's very effective. Then, of course, it's all deliberately undercut by the fact that it turns out to be a pig in a spacesuit. Even leaving aside the obvious Pigs in Space gag, it's undercut within the fiction as well, with it not turning out to be a real alien at all. Very clever on multiple levels. Plus, it's always good when Captain Link Hogthrob gets work.

-Ever since I first saw this episode, I have wondered why the Slitheen are...well, fat. Given the nature of their technology, it seems as though you could have thinner actors portray them (and still keep the fart jokes.) RTD has never said anything to lead me to believe he harbors any prejudice against overweight people. Indeed, not to talk out of turn, but he's not a particularly small person himself. (Meaning no offence. I'm quite large myself.) I thought about it a bit and came to the conclusion that it might be there as a sort of shorthand for the audience. Once the body-type of potential Slitheen is established, it creates a feeling in the audience where every larger character could potentially be one. I do wonder if maybe the story could have benefited from the presence of a larger character who did not turn out to be a Slitheen, although the best candidate for that would be Harriet Jones and I'm not sure I'd want to give Penelope Wilton up. In a more industry-sense, it occurred to me having the Slitheen all be overweight does have the upshot of providing work for larger actors, flying in the face of television's need to exclusively throw "beautiful" (read thin) people at us all the time. Still, this is all speculation. I honestly don't have any real insight into what was behind the choice.

-The Doctor pulls a "Batman" on Dr. Sato, disappearing when she very briefly turns to look at something else. That takes skills. Good thing he's had 9(+) centuries to perfect them.

-UNIT shows up...well, sort of. They use the name and we see some people in uniforms. Mickey mentions the Doctor having worked for them in the past as well but this honestly doesn't have the feel of a real UNIT story. The UNIT characters are all faceless and effectively don't interact with the regulars, just there to be trapped and electrocuted at the end. It'll be a while before we get what feels like a real UNIT return.

-Back when I examined An Unearthly Child, I mentioned how much I love cliffhangers. One of the things that had felt a little "off" to me when the show returned was the lack of real cliffhangers. I missed that feeling of "what happens next?" Well, this episode makes up for it with not a single, not a double, but a triple cliffhanger. Rose and Harriet are menaced by the Slitheen Margaret and Jackie is being attacked by the Slitheen policeman and The Doctor is being electrocuted by Joseph Green, Slitheen...

What happens next? And next? And next?

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