Bad Wolf/The Parting Of The Ways - Ranking - 106

   Bad Wolf/The Parting Of The Ways

(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 11-18/6/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Joe Ahearne)

Rank: 106

In an emoji: 📺👁

  How those reality and quiz TV placements might have gone with the other Drs:

'I'm on celebrity blankety blank?! How do you expect me to get in that box, hmm? Climb like a nanny goat? And stop pointing with that stick you'll have someone's eye out. dear dear dear. Oh and incidentally, to those of you at hoe - turn your TVs off now!' 

'There are some corners of the universe that have bred the most horrible things. Things which act against everything we believe in. Which is why, Alan Sugar, you're fired'

'Catchphrase eh? Ah yes, I shall get all these. I remember saying to Mr Chips when we first met, Chippy I said...'

'Now come on K9 I put a pound on you doing well at crufts! Gosh, doesn't that presenter over there look like Steven Taylor?'

'Bend it like Beckham? That's...not cricket! Brave heart Tegan, you're in goal'

'Oh no celebrity fit club: carrot juice carrot juice carrot juice!'

'Hmm, you really need to think ahead on this task - getting charities to work together to paint a kennel for some orhpaned Myrkas. Challenge Anneka. Come on Ace, we've got work to do'

'The Tardis seems to have taken a wrong turn Grace and left me on Fort Boyard. That mads professor over there looks just like one of my younger selves'.

'Alonsy! I know just how to win the Krypton factor! I can run around with my hands in my coat and answer questions, while I can fly a Tardis - a plane will be easy. But wait what? What What? An observation round? Oh no, I wasn't paying attention, I'm thicker than thicky Mr Thickety from Thickland Thicksylvania!'

'Strictly come dancing yes, geronimo! What do you mean I only score a two for my drunken giraffe dance?!'

'Countdown? Thirty seconds till a bomb goes off? Now come on Clara, don't interrupt me while I'm saving the world from detonation. And now the crucial conundrum: am I a good man?!' 

'15 to one? Actually I'm 13 turning into 14 who looks a bit like 10. It's complicated...'

It's the end #9 - and the moment has not been prepared for, it was pretty last minute to be honest, for reasons we’ll look into later. Well, its goodbyes all round as the first successful comeback year of New-Who comes to the grand finale of its first year and not everyone is left standing at the end. Now, this story occupies a funny place in Who history as the only story written when it was assumed that it might be a final farewell forever (shared only with ‘Power Of the Doctor’). At the time this two parter’s biggest aim was that, if DW fell flat on its face again, with the BBC only committing to making a single series that the show would give a final and more memorable goodbye this time than the 7th Doctor defeating a half-feline Master and talking about buttered toast, which is what happened when the series was cancelled without warning in 1989. It’s meant to be a complete arc in and of itself, with everything that follows very much a plan B if they were ever lucky to get a second series (something confirmed almost as soon as the viewing figures for ‘End Of the World’ held high and steady two episodes in, but nobody writing or making this series knew that at the time). You can tell, though, that even by the time they’ve come to film this story that everyone knows they’re making magic and instead of being a coda for a long-running series it becomes a requiem for a special era, one that’s been greater and more successful than anyone could possibly have hoped for. The ending, when it comes, is still my favourite regeneration – one that feels like a natural part of the story arc rather than coming out of nowhere as so many do – and very cleverly it’s written as a catch-all scene, easily altered for if the series ended right here or to accommodate whoever in the main cast wanted to come back (if indeed anyone wanted to come back at all) the way the finale is written both the Doctor and Rose could have died, survived, or either one could have left. As it happens it’s the Doctor’s turn to go, after just thirteen episodes (the shortest by far of any Doctor, bar the special case of Dr 8 who never got a full series in the first place) but it’s the perfect way for this doctor of all doctors to say goodbye, one whose been haunted by the idea of sacrifice in the time war who now gets to sacrifice himself for the person he loves more than anyone else. The Doctor-Rose romance has had a tinge of melancholy from the start and they don’t shy away from that here. Everything seems to be working though, so why did Christopher Eccleston bail at all, just when the gamble he took (and it was a gamble, given how the BBc and public at large felt about Dr Who right up until that first episode in 2005) was paying off. So why did he go? 

 The answer is that nobody seems to know except a small circle of people and Eccleston himself seems to have gone after agreeing to sign a non-disclosure order which means that he has only ever dropped hints. We know, though, that his issues were with the people running the show rather than the cast or the series’ format (he’s returned to be the Doctor for Big Finish audios and appear at conventions – even if he’s been quite open about doing them mainly to pay off an expensive divorce). He’s talked a lot about how proud he was to be part of bringing a successful franchise back and how that year was ‘mission accomplished’ for him in so many ways. Whatever the cause seems to have been very last minute: that year’s Christmas merchandising meant his features were everywhere (it was very weird seeing his face all over the 2006 annual the very day he turned into David Tennant) and even as late as the following Easter (when David Tennant had two episodes under his belt) it was still Dr 9’s face on everything not Dr 10’s. One of the updates on the Dr Who website during filming also has Eccleston comment that he hoped that if the comeback was successful he would play the Doctor ‘for two or three years at least’ (this is a stark contrast to everyone who asked him that during the publicity blitz week ‘Rose went out, where he bats the question away with a home and a nervy laugh, well enough for this fan not to notice anything up at the time for one). Officially we don’t know and maybe never will. But Eccleston also hinted at certain ways the show was being run that he didn’t agree with at all, saying that if he’s stayed in the role ‘I would have to blind myself to certain things I didn’t agree with’. Eccleston is by the most working class actor to play the Doctor. One of his conditions for playing the role was that his regeneration should be grittier than the olden days, with less poncing about in frilly shirts (he’s the opposite of McGann’s Doctor in so many ways). When he started in his career, as third spear carrier from the left, he was often treated badly by the people in charge who looked after their stars and treated the extras as cattle. It’s been one of his crusades to look out for people badly treated on his shows and while we don’t know the ins and outs the hints are that at least one of the directors on this series did exactly that. Eccleston angrily went to the executive producers to have him sacked – and they did nothing. So he went to Russell T – who looked the other way and kept out of it. Eccleston seems to have been further annoyed by the tight deadlines the show was being run to and the quick turns around between stories, making lots of suggestions for how things could be improved as by far the most experienced person on the team who’d worked with everyone (even more than Russell T) which were never taken up, with him mostly patted on the head and told to get on with it. Matters came to a head the week of the main filming for ‘Father’s Day’: ironically given the subject matter of that story Eccleston lost his own dad, but was given little to no time off to grieve or attend the funeral and what’s more caught a rotten cold from filming inside the drafty Church. This also happened to be the week the BBC rather smugly sent round a contract, with the rather smug assumption that he would be sure to sign given that they’d done so much for his career – and he decided to quit on the spot. Tales of what John Barrowman and Noel Clarke got up to on set and their behaviour to people has also made people wonder if they could be part of the issue too. All this is conjecture from multiple sources and there may well be more things at play here too – one thing we know it wasn’t was ‘fear of typecasting’, which is what the BBC put in their press release when he left (and pulled with an apology after Eccleston complained, admitting they hadn’t even talked to him directly - something that must have only made him all the more sure he’d done the right thing). Frustratingly, in many ways this is best performance: his Doctor gets better the higher the stakes are and they’re never higher than here; the acting when the Doctor switches from his typical burst of energy to get Rose into the Tardis then stops and walks away sadly, without saying a word, is easily his best scene and everything the 9th Doctor is: someone who just wants to have fun but knows he bears too much responsibility to let go. 

 The series’ loss as a whole is very much this story’s gain though: with stakes so high in this story it needs a sacrifice of some sort and to have the most intense Doctor effectively die in his most intense story (and the series’ most intense since a similarly grim regeneration story ‘The Caves Of Androzani ’felt right somehow. Especially the way the Doctor dies as part of a beautifully fitting finale about sacrifice, as first the Doctor saves Rose by sending her back home and, in a powerful bit of writing, watches her crumple as she faces her life going back to the way it always was before she met him, living the same empty boring life after her life had been so full, before she does what no other companion has had the guts to and breaks into the power of the Tardis to return and save him. Only, even after all she’s seen, Rose is still only human and the Doctor still does what he always promised he’d do and saves her just at the point when she’s overwhelmed. These two have been saving each other across the universe for thirteen episodes now in different ways and its the perfect way to go, the 9th Doctor’s joy at getting the last word at saving her life tinged with the sadness that he won’t ever see her as through those particular eyes ever again and a last catchphrase that both of them were ‘Fantastic’. That they certainly were. Though they’ve only been together for a year they’ve re-written the Dr Who rulebook this pair and it’s a proper wrench when he goes. Especially for a generation of fans who don’t know about the concept of regeneration at all and have to be talked through it the way that Rose is here. 

 The regeneration overshadows this story but it would still be a clever one without it and a unique one for the time (much copied since) in that it ties up so many bits from so many stories: most obviously ‘The Long Game’(given we’re back on Satellite Five’) but also Rose drawing off the character of her dead dad from ‘Father’s Day’ and using that to appeal to her mum, the ‘last time war’ clash with ‘Dalek’ and the eye of harmony that powers the Tardis and reduced Margaret Slitheen to an egg in ‘Boom Town’. Then there’s the ‘Bad Wolf’ arc that’s been mentioned since ‘The Unquiet Dead’. The quiz show’ bits even have references to characters from other stories (The Face of Boe!) which really does make it feel as if we’ve been watching individual parts of some greater whole than just a few random episodes. This seems second nature now but it was one of the biggest changes to the format between the 20th and 21st centuries: in the ‘old’ days this show few stories referred to others and if they did it was the story that had just happened or it was as a sequel to one from decades past (this happens a lot in the 1980s). This story borrows heavily from all the 1990s plus American scifi series however, with the idea of a ‘story arc’, that our main characters have been on a journey and have grown through their travels. By the timer this story went out everyone sort-of knew that Eccleston was leaving but the trick is that this story never does the obvious: he doesn’t die in a Dalek showdown, he doesn’t sacrifice himself for Rose in the cliffhanger. Indeed, for a while there we didn’t think the Daleks were coming back at all until the genuine surprise of the cliffhanger. Even bringing Captain Jack is a surprise after he positively absolutely snuffs it in a very Captain Jack way (taunting the Daleks about their variety of dialogue). This is not a straightforward simple journey from A to B but an epic that throws everything it’s got into the mix and makes this show so wide and full of variety using the best of Dr Who things old and new so that, if ever a showrunner ends up reviving it again decades down the road, they’ve got so many different avenues to explore this time, this show’s elastic format stretched to its limits. It’s a romantic drama with scifi overtones and comedy elements that feels like the payoff to a soap opera with reality TV and gameshows thrown in. If 1980s Who was cancelled for remaining too stuck in one place Russell is determined to make this series as wide open as it possibly can be. It’s also Russell drawing on every genre he’s ever written for to make this all-important episode soar and finding the ol thing all these genres have in common: that people care about other people if you get to know them well enough (yes even in reality TV and quizzes). Incidentally, had the series been cancelled right here, the very last shot would have been the 9th Dr’s promise to go to ‘B…’, just like the 1985 cancellation (when Colin Baker was paused in the middle of promising a trip to ‘Blackpool’) – instead the show is re-commissioned and it’s David Tennant who gets to grin and say ‘Barcelona’. 

 One element Russell finally get away with is a gay kiss. There was uproar in fandom when it was announced he was taking over the series – to this day people talk about him bringing a ‘gay agenda’ to the series. In the end it amounts to one kiss between the Doctor and Captain jack when the latter thinks he’s walking off to his death (and, later, a bit of flirting with the Captain of the Starship Titanic). That still got people talking in 2005 though. If Russell had an ‘agenda’ it wasn’t to make the Doctor gay as people feared thogh it was to make gay characters on screen ‘normal’. He’s long trumpeted the idea that its not that television is a reflection of society but that society is a reflection of society and how pleased he was to find out he was ‘normal’ when more daring series started depicting people like him and his homosexual friends in the 1970s. It’s the same reason ‘The Star beast’ has Rose II as a rans character: the more people there are for people to point to and go ‘see mum/dad/boss/ teacher/neighbour they’re like that on television, I’m normal!’ the better. By doing this here, in what might be his last chance, Russell makes it easier for anyone who comes afterwards. Including himself in 2023, not that he knows that yet… Weirdly the Sun said that and the sort-of kiss with Rose was ‘the timelord’s first in 41 years’. Did I miss a scene with Hartnell?!? ( The closest that year is a scene in ‘The Aztecs’ and he gets engaged, not snogged). Besides if he has a grand-daughter…No wonder the 10th doctor kisses so much by the way, I’m convinced the regenerations take on a lot of the dying thoughts of their old ones: the 6th Doctor is a little resentful he sacrificed himself for Peri so chokes her when he wakes up, the 11th Doctor remembers all that weight on his shoulders so just wants to have fun, etc. The 9th Doctor’s dying wish is ‘gee, that kiss with Rose…I wish I’d had it sooner!'

As worthy as that is, though, the best element that Russell added as a showrunner is the theme of consequences and guilt that’s been running through this story since we first heard about the time war: Dr Who has always been a series about how the ripples of our past and the ripples of other people’s carry forward with us into the present and future, of how we all bump up against each other and affect each other. Till now the Doctor’s been the only person really immune from this, being able to weave in and out of time, give or take the odd story like ‘Face Of Evil’ that happen precisely because of something he does. But here the Doctor pays a heavy price for simply wandering in and out of the lives of the people he meets and it’s his meddling and the vacuum he leaves behind that leads directly to the sacrifice, allowing the Daleks to fill the gap. This Doctor pays for his neglect of the people he left behind five stories ago eventually with his life, ‘Planet Of Spiders’ style (after all, pretending to be hard and not caring about other people is this particular regenerations’ Achilles heel, just as curiosity was the 3rd Dr’s; it’s his distance from humanity that paves the way for his downfall in the end). We’re back on ‘Satellite Five’ after the events in ‘Long Game’, with everything that’s happened the Doctor’s fault – he’s left humanity to decide their own futures after he deposed the Rupert Murdoch like alien slug the vacuum of daily fixed news bulletins, only an aimless humanity has simply filled the vacuum with reality TV. Only, following another few centuries of variations on the formats, they’ve been altered to become deadly and a means of keeping the population down.

 It’s fitting too that these two are seen off by a whole army of Daleks for the first time in the new series (and at all, barring cardboard cut outs and models, given the budgets of the old series), mere episodes after showing us how terrifying one lone Dalek can be and they look amazing: everything we’d dreamed of seeing in the olden days if only they’d had the budget. We’ve rarely seen the Doctor this frightened in any regeneration and this is, after all, a story where he loses, if only in this incarnation. When the 8th Doctor became the first to use the power of the eye of harmony inside the Tardis it seemed unearned, a careless plot resolution that came out of nowhere unless you were enough of a besotted fan to know about it in the first place – this one though has been mentioned across the series arc and feels more than earned after a series of adventuring. The Daleks are well used and nicely build on the threat of the lone Dalek seen earlier in the season and their slow relentless rise through the levels of the station mercilessly killing everyone along the way is properly chilling Dalek behaviour, showing them at their scheming conniving best. We’ve had so many stories about these Nazi metaphors hating everyone that it’s a great twist indeed that they’ve learned to hate themselves, instead worshipping their emperor Dalek like a God because he’s brought them back from the dead. Only he’s no messiah, but a very naughty Dalek: it’s Rose, as it turns out, who ends up the demi-God. What’s all the stranger, though, is that such an emotional second part is born from a first part that, when we first read the synopsis in the Radio Times before the show was even on air, seemed like a big joke. 

I still can’t believe they actually put The Doctor in the Big Brother house, while I’m even more astonished they got the makers of The Weakest Link to agree to it (complete with a scary ‘Anne-Droid’ Robinson voiced by the real thing) given how downright rude this episode is about reality TV and quizzes being the lowest of the low. It appears that negotiations over the rights to both were made more complicated – ‘Big Brother’ by the fact that’s it’s Danish (I’d love to see how that phonecall went: ‘Yes, we’re remaking an old and very British series that ended sixteen years ago and we’d like to use your music and logo in a scifi series about how vacuous television is…hello, are you there?’; as it happens TV company Endemol bent over backwards to help down to getting their graphic designers to add a spinning universe to the usual Big Brother logo, although the music was owned by another company and took nearly a year to clear, just in time for postproduction), ‘The Weakest Link’ by the fact that, even though it’s a BBC series, just before Russell started filming, host Anne Robinson happened to pick the ‘old’ Dr Who series for her ‘Room 101’ (another reality TV series quoting from George Orwell where people pick their pet hates and consign them to the depths of hell – only symbolically, thankfully in this case; in the end Ann Robinson surprised everyone by being extra helpful). As for John Barrowman turning up naked on ‘What Not To Wear’, well I’m just astonished that part even made it to television without the show being cancelled (the BBC insisted on a trim of a shot of, erm, Barrowman’s buttocks, the only changes they demanded this whole year – there’s still more of him in this story than I ever wished to see). The quiz questions are a clever mix of factual, fictional and clues to stories to come, which is a very clever way of making the Whoniverse feel connected (listen out for an obscure reference to 1993 ‘New Adventures’ book ‘Lucifer Rising’ as well as the Face of Boe).

Mixing Dr Who with other TV stories is something this most elastic formats has always done (as early as 1965/66 the show was messing around with Z cars and cricketing crossovers and a cowboy spoof in ‘The Gunfighters’) and while quiz shows were some of the earliest TV programmes around reality TV is the new kid on the block. Interestingly while all three shows went off the air not that long after this episode went out two of them have been revived in different formats since, suggesting that a new variation with killer robots isn’t as unlikely as it sounds. A lot of stories in this book were inspired by Nigel Kneale’s ‘Quatermass’ series from the 1950s, the show’s biggest source material with aliens lurking underground or coming to us and taking us over. This, though is one of the few stories that isn’t. Instead it’s inspired by, erm, Nigel Kneale’s ‘Year Of the Sex Olympics’ from 1968 (via the ‘Duel’ episode of Terry Nation’s ‘Blakes 7’ series) in which a bunch of people in the future only have sex programmes left on TV after drama cuts and get bored of that so executives start throwing in a random assassin to spice things up. Weirdly the more people see ‘real’ people on screen albeit in manipulated situations the less they relate: only fiction can truly tug at the heart strings. For Kneale people only care about real people when they’re suffering – they don’t have any empathy or imagination left. And to a writer like Russell losing empathy imagination is one of the worst things that can ever possibly happen. So he uses his platform to scold television as it’s been since 1989 (even though, as a writer of TV drama and soaps before getting into drama, he was responsible for quite a lot of it himself. He was even invited to appear ‘Dancing On Ice’ in his pre-Who days would you believe). It’s exactly what DW should be doing, poking fun at the problems of the time and making a serious point about how we’re all just cannon-fodder for the people in power, who think so little of us its reflected in the lowest-common-denominator programmes they makes for us and how its only a small hop from making us shame and laugh at each other for entertainment to putting us into the programmes they make by lottery then killing us. It’s ‘Vengeance On Varos’ again, but even more relevant (with 1980s video nasties updated to programmes that actually feature members of the public. If anything though Russell T is even more critical and contemptuous of what TV has become; in retrospect what seems strangest is that the BBC aired this at all – you can’t make a joke at all these days without the right-wing BBC bosses cancelling your show). I love the very dark idea that, without the news bulletins, society has collapsed and the only thing people have to do now is watch television with so many people on the planet they’re sacrificed into the deadly games themselves (in, I’d like to think, a sort of reverse version of ‘The National Lottery Draw’, which for a time was on straight after Dr Who). 

 A lot of fans find these reality TV scenes too daft, but they’re meant to: you’re meant to be shocked at something that feels so ‘real’ (even though its technically happening to fictional characters) and it all make perfect sense if you see them as a typical Russell satirical comment. So far this series has been all about making Dr Who great again and making people fall in love with it as much as he once did, but this story is to an extent his comment on how badly it’s been treated and his frustration at the death of this show in particular and family drama in general since he got into telly. The ‘truth’ of the world, that can only be told in dramas, have been replaced by programmes that serve the lowest common denominators. Since Dr Who went off the air in 1989 its place has been filled with cheap filer programmes that tell us nothing about our lives and who we are and don’t give us the same hope and optimism as Dr Who; indeed TV has (at least in 2005) grown into a bullying culture full of presenters who make a living out of being rude to people’s dress sense or just insults in general on ‘Weakest Link’, while shows like ‘Big Brother’ are there to laugh at. It might be relevant, too, that ‘Big Brother’ was George Orwell’s view of the world in ‘1984’ as published in 1948 (he just reversed the numbers during the year the book was printed); Satellite Five is us in approximately the year ‘200,100’: close enough to ‘2010’, the next big number we were going to pass at the time of transmission. All these elements were part of Russell’s first ‘pitch meeting’ with the BBC, where he wanted to show how Dr Who could mix with other programmes; he also took a copy of a Dr Who guidebook with him that fell open at the page about ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ with the Emperor Dalek, making a note of how his colleagues went ‘ooh’ at the sight of a huge Dalek. I’ve often wondered, too, if Rose is meant to represent ‘us’ the viewing public (all companions are audience representation figures to some extent but Rose is exactly the target material this show is aiming at and Russell does more thinking about how this show works than most).Rose is sent home, after the greatest experience in the galaxy, her extraordinary sights reduced to the ordinariness of watching her mum natter about the quality of her coleslaw. Everyone tells her to forget the Doctor and move on with her life, but she can’t: he’s changed her, made her want to do more with her life, to take a stand. The Doctor would literally have died if she hadn’t come back to save him. 

 So even when extermination seems like its forever she becomes a God and overpowers the Michael Grade Daleks who want to exterminate this show. For a few precious seconds there the fanbase ‘are’ God, making programmes about themselves in reality TV (because it’s the only way they’re represented anymore without this show on the air) until ‘they’ force the satellite company’s hand and forcibly bring Dr Who itself back from the dead – or at least the vortex of time. This is, to me, the ‘wilderness years’ when the flickering flame of this series was kept alive by fans writing books, comic strips, audio adventures, graphic novels, fan fiction, everything that kept this show alive. Only fans can’t sustain all that power and energy forever, so the Doctor absorbs it himself, which is Russell and his fellow fans bringing the show back and running it themselves as part of the BBC. This is, remember, a show that most people at the BBC still assumed only fans would watch – it’s a Who style pat on the back to ‘us’ fans that kept the dream alive, that it couldn’t have been done without us, that its borrowing from us (that’s Who the band not Who the series: think of this story as the ‘Listening To You’ bit in ‘Tommy’ where the lead character reveals that he’s not a God but a normal kid and got his super-powers from the people who believed in him. ‘Rose’, meanwhile, starts off as ‘Baba O’Riley’, a song about the waste of teenage potential in a society that wears them out before they get a chance to climb up the ladder where their new ideas would best take fruit. It’s a key part of this series that Rose, for a while the most important human in the universe, would have remained just a shop assistant on minimum wage had she not bumped into the Doctor. Donna isn’t even that when she arrives, but a temp). This episode is a rebuttal to the age-old idea that the Doctor is the hero and the com[anions are just hangers-on: the very last scene written for this series, as a filler to pad out an under-running episode, is the scene of Rose eating chips with her mum and Mickey. It’s a good summary of everything this first series has been about: everyone is special and everyone makes a difference and everyone can do the right thing. (there’s a trimmed line where Mickey originally told her off foer thinking she could ever save the Doctor: ‘you were never equal though, he was always the captain, he made all the decisions’). 

Well, maybe. That’s the joy of Russell’s writing: it works on so many levels, almost as many as in Satellite Five. That range is one of the best things about this story. For out of this withering satire about TV that’s meant to numb our emotions comes one of the most emotional DW stories of them all. This story is Russell T Davies at his most extreme, with nearly every scene a tearjerker, but it’s also Russell’s most Steven Moffaty script, the plot twisting and turning with every throw of the dice from the rather silly episode we start off with, going from a small pessimistic tale about the emptiness of human lives that rely on reality TV to fill the void to one where humanity is at its best, full of brave ordinary people giving up their lives because it’s the right thing to do. The children’s telly aspect has really been turned down now the Slitheen have gone now and this is one of the show’s most grim and adult stories with no punches pulled or emotions spared for anyone watching. People in this story really die (even if a lot of them come back to life again). The heart of this story is the moment Rose asks the Doctor ‘he’ll be alright…won’t he?’ as Captain Jack walks off to what he thinks is certain death and the Doctor can’t reply, the scene cutting violently to Dalek action. People do what they do precisely because of the Doctor, good and bad. Captain Jack tells the Doctor ‘I wish I’d never met you – I was better off as a coward’ (he doesn’t know he’ll be revived by the Big Bad Wolf). But he does the right thing anyway. And it’s the saving of the Doctor. He’d surely be dead had he not inspired Rose to come back. Poor ‘Lynda with a Y’ too, who pays the ultimate price for following the Doctor – of all the many character deaths in DW I think her death hit me the most, because it seems so unexpected. Youdon’t even heard the Dalek that murders her: you don’t need to, the lights on the head synchronising to ‘ex-ter-min-ate’ makes us ‘hear that dialogue in our head so that for a second, we’re Lynda watching ourselves be exterminated as the glass shatters and kills her. Though I’ve never heard anybody else say it, I’m half-convinced she was waiting in the wings to be the new companion if Billie Piper decided to leave at this stage, but instead she’s a spare part once Rose comes back into the plot, so they exterminate her to get her out the way. She would have been a more decent replacement though: she’s as curious, as carefree, talkative, curious, sensitive as good with people and in the end every bit as brave as Rose – she just happened to pay for her courage with her life the first time we met her, instead of dodging death the way Rose does. I mean, the Doctor could have saved her too and sent her back in the Tardis (when she leaves you can see him thinking about it – and unlike Rose she knows what’s happening). In some ways she’s even more a product of 2005 than Rose is too, despite coming from so far in the future – or to be more accurate she’s who Rose used to be when we first met her, full of potential but unsure what to do with it and with her biggest ambition appearing on TV without getting killed. 

 Not that this story is perfect, as hard as everyone is trying from the writing through to the acting and the direction and everything in between. As great as it is that we get a bit of everything the switch of gears from jokey I-can’t-believe-they-did-that to emotional maelstrom is the story’s own ‘weakest link’ sadly. The destructive ending comes out of the blue a bit too violently, like the Donald Cotton scripts of old, when we’re still too busy laughing to be properly scared – a rare lapse from Russell T who usually pitches these things perfectly. I’m not all that convinced by the reveal the Daleks were behind the whole scheme either: while they are quite rightly placed front and centre in the big finale, reality TV really isn’t their style at all (I mean, this scheme involves waiting nearly 200 years and patience was never high on a list of Dalek virtues; nor is letting an alien blob run the satellite in their absence, even if the idea of Rupert Murdoch being in the payroll of Daleks feels scarily likely to be honest) As for the ‘Bad Wolf’ series arc, the sign that future Rose sends to her past self to make her realise what to do, it felt right at the time – a mysterious phrase that kept popping up and which tied most of these stories together in some way, more like American scifi shows than anything DW had ever done before. The more times you re-watch this story the odder it seems though: surely Rose could have sent herself a more obvious message than ‘Bad Wolf’? Half the time people mentioned it across the series she wasn’t even in the room at the time, something made even more obvious by the use of an elongated ‘flashback’ sequence (itself deeply unusual for DW at the time, though they use it all the time nowadays). Had Rose sent herself a message along the lines of ‘if you ever find yourself taking part in a demented quiz show don’t let the Doctor leave you behind – oh and remember to open up the Tardis console to become a demi-God’ would have been more use; equally had Rose ended up in a reality TV show where she had to build houses with the Three Little Pigs the ‘Bad Wolf’ angle would have made a lot more sense. And you’re left with the perennial time-travelling conundrum about where it came from, if the past Rose didn’t know of the message to send back when she became future Rose. It really is amazing that the eye of harmony, part of a creation of one of the most scientifically advanced races the universe has ever seen, opens at all - even if it takes a truck at full welly to open. Of all the ‘Davies Et Machinas’ (sudden plot resolutions that come out of nowhere) this is one of the most blatant, however classily it’s done and not all that different to the TV Movie in basic terms: I mean, if I’d included an ending in my creative writing class where I’d built up the biggest threat ever seen in a series that promised to be built on hard science and then ended it by a lead character suddenly becoming a demi-God I’d have been given detention and made to re-write it. Plus Bad Wolf Rose really isn’t that different: it’s just Billie Piper with an oddly 1980s blowy hairdo, a golden tan and some ‘Sapphire and Steel’ type contact lenses. She doesn’t feel like an immortal superpower and to work the script desperately needs her to. 

Some of the acting is better than others too: Patterson Joseph is meant to be the comic relief, obsessed with his winning prize money, but he’s a genre too far (he became a star in ‘Timeless’, the awful 21dt century re-make of ‘the glorious 60s show ‘Time Tunnel’, which is everything I feared the Dr Who re-make would be like, missing the point, with awful cardboard cutout characters who don’t seem real at all). After praising Russell’s writing some scenes are pretty awful: the one where Eccleston quips ‘I think you need a Doctor’ while Murray Gold’s music gets all cheesy and a choir turns up out of nowhere is harder to sit through than the burping wheely bin and farting babies in downing street. ‘I sang a song and the Daleks ran away’ says the Doctor unconvincingly when Rose wakes up and asks him what happened. Making that racket I’m not surprised (in case you’re wondering, the words they sing when the Daleks first appear is, rather aptly, ‘what is happening?’ in Hebrew). As much as I make digs at the 13th Doctor for standing round not doing anything while the baddies pontificate about their awful scheme for hours, that happens here too. Oh and I’m sad we never actually get to see ‘Bear With me’ (now that’s a rare reality TV show I’d actually watch!) This is the sort of story that works best if you don’t think about it too hard.

 So why am I still blubbing when the pay-off is so comparatively bad? Why did even mortal enemy Michael Grade, who cancelled the show in 1989, write a grovelling yet characteristically condescending email to Russell to say how much he enjoyed it? (missing the joke that, surely, he’s the Emperor Dalek who had the, ahem, baubles to exterminate the show)? Well, this story hits just the right emotional moments across its first 85 minutes that it just has enough momentum to push us over the cliff when the ending comes. You’re so busy feeling things that you don’t have time to see the logic holes. It helps that both Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper sell this story so well, particularly the actual regeneration itself. It helps that the story gains momentum bit by bit. Russell’s greatest strength as a writer is his ability to make you care about characters even if they barely say anything or do anything and that never works more than here as the last few people are left to make a stand. It helps that most of the supporting cast do too. It helps that we know from ‘Dalek’ how the stakes are so high this time. It helps that thanks to ‘Long Game’ we know the main set up of this world already so we don’t have to spend time exploring a world all over again. It makes all the difference in the world that it’s all so beautifully written. The ‘Anne Droid’ is one of my favourite Dr Who puns ever (and the robot even looks like Anne Robinson, red and metal and angry).To be honest this is the sort of story you’re so wrapped up in at the time that they could have stuck the Myrka in the middle of it and I wouldn’t have batted an eye: this is a first-class finale from one of Dr Who’s best series old or new, a story that feels every big and epic as the end of a Doctor and a first full-on showdown with the Daleks deserves to be. This was truly a special period of a special show and is only a lesser story in our rankings because there are so many great ones of past and future still to go, including a few that build even higher on this story’s foundations. If this has been the true end, if Dr Who had ended her with thirteen episodes only fans had seen them, well, what a wonderful way to go. Instead though it’s a while new beginning as the show gets bigger and bigger and bigger from hereon in. No wonder people were still talking about this show as the event of the year when Christmas came around six months later and Dr Who became more central to the mainstream public than it had been since 1972... 

 POSITIVES + Only the third cliffhanger of the revival (huge whopping spoilers) is one of the very best. Things look hopeless. Rose has been exterminated by the Anne Droid robot and the Doctor gives up in mourning. Only for her to re-materialise as part of a Dalek trap, the tin-cans from Skaro looking as smug as any non-humanoid can be as they taunt the Doctor about how they’ve baited him into a trap he can’t turn down and they’ve won. Only for Christopher Eccleston to go all ‘Abslaam Daak Dalek Killer’ and promise to wipe them out. He doesn’t know how yet, things seem impossible, they’ve had a two hundred year headstart setting this trap on him and he’s improvising wildly, but the very fact that there’s a chance of saving Rose gives the Doctor hope again and his promises to save her suddenly scares all the Daleks into silence. They’re actually scared of a Doctor this confident, with the stakes against him, even though they’ve already demonstrated that they’re one of the greatest threats the universe has to offer. They could have ended the episode anywhere at the two times you think Rose is going to die, but instead they save it for that line instead when they’re quaking in their ball-bearing boots. Of course you’re coming back next week after that to see just how the Doctor does it. How could you not?! Although just materialising the Tardis around her ith a force-field we’d never heard about is a bit of a copout too now I think about it). 

 NEGATIVES - Alas, given that the plot is all about how much Rose and The Doctor care for each other, this story keeps them apart for a good 85 of the 100 minutes which is a waste of the last time we ever see them together. Notably both Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston raise their game when they share screen-time and both flail a little compared to their best when they spend so much of this story apart and spend it with other people. Their kiss is oddly un-passionate given we’ve waited a whole series for it too (Eccleston snogs Barrowman with more gusto!) 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘The TARDIS can never return for me. Emergency Programme One means I'm facing an enemy that should never get their hands on this machine. So this is what you should do: let the TARDIS die. Just let this old box gather dust. No one can open it, no one will even notice it. Let it become a strange little thing standing on a street corner. And over the years, the world will move on, and the box will be buried. And if you want to remember me, then you can do one thing. That's all, one thing. Have a good life. Do that for me, Rose. Have a fantastic life’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Two Big Finish short trips continue the story from Jackie’s point of view after Rose returns home with the ‘human’ version of the 10^th Doctor. ‘The Siege Of Big Ben’ and especially ‘Flight Into Hull’ (both 2018) are must-hears if you enjoy Jackie’s take on the world as the events she’s seen haven’t changed her one bit in one of Big Finish’s funniest stories.

One oddity in the Whoniverse is 8^th Doctor comic strip ‘The Flood’ (2005), the last to run before Russell T Davies took over the franchise. Initially he okayed it with Dr Who Magazine that they would get to run the 8^th Doctor> 9^th Doctor regeneration (this being years before Steven Moffat came up with The war Doctor) and they had a section all ready to go, before deciding themselves at the last minute that it would be better to end on a cliffhanger. A cliffhanger that really mirrors the events of this regeneration: The Doctor absorbs the time vortex so that the Cybermen don’t get to undo the history of Earth. He doesn’t turn orange and sparkly and there’s no ‘Bad Wolf’ but otherwise everything is spookily similar. Spookily because Russell T has always professed his innocence at repeating the idea, even though he was consulted on it (and he’s always remarkably free about crediting other sources when they’ve inspired him).
 
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