New Earth: Ranking - 110

                                      New Earth

(Series 2, Dr 10 with Rose, 15/4/2006, showrunner; Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: James Hawes)

Rank: 110

    How that story would really play out in a medical setting:
 'Sorry your tests for Petrifold Progression have come back negative. Have you tried taking more exercise and thinking positively? Or maybe some yoga? Yes I know you can’t move now but if you just think really hard…Sorry, the Doctor's running a bit late at the moment - that new regeneration of his you know - and I'm afraid the patients all got out and infected everyone and we're all going to die a horrible death across the entire planet, while humanity is wiped from the face of the universe. Again. So there might be a slight delay with your operation. Oh and there's a student nurse strike starting tomorrow because we aren't providing the catnip in lieu of wages we promised we would. That will be 974 quarls for you care, cash only please – in a really obscure currency no other planet has. Have a nice day' 

 

 

Here we are at the start of series two and everything is new: new Doctor, new Earth, New New New New New New New New New New New New  New New New York (to give the city its full title). There’s so much newness to get your head around: we properly get the start of the 10^th Doctor era now rather than him being asleep for half the story (as he was for ‘The Christmas Invasion’), we’ve gone further into the future ‘than ever before’ (presumably the 10^th Doctor just means with Rose though, as we don’t seem to be quite as far in the future as, say, ‘Frontios’) and it’s officially our first alien planet of the 21^st century. Hurrah! Except of course it’s not really new at all. For all his charm and his boyish looks Dr 10 still shows the same flashes of outrage and injustice and alien-ness that the 9^th Doctor did (lurking unsaid in his first appearance), the ‘far future’ is at a time when mankind has got super-nostalgic for the old days on Earth and our first alien planet looks pretty much like our futuristic architecture does now, with much the same poor weather (with buildings in New x15 York very much like the Burj Al Arab in Dubai). This is also, amazingly, our first proper alien hospital, with Dr Who’s traditional style of channel hopping’ landing us in a medical drama – amazing, really, that a location with such scope for drama and passing aliens hadn’t been used till now (it’s such an obvious idea that they do it again in ‘Smith and Jones’ and ‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’).

At the same time, though, this is Russell T Davies’ victory lap and all the things the series can do now that it’s been re-commissioned and looks safe to run for another few years, consolidating all the things that made series one such a success: the break-neck pace, the big broad characters, the high moral message at the heart of everything and the sense of fun. The modern series’ first direct sequel, to ‘The End Of The World’, it’s very much a repeat of the same ideas about how everything has a natural lifespan and everything ends, only from the point of view of a series that’s just successfully navigated its first change and has discovered mercy. Cassandra isn’t quite the wicked villainess she was before but someone who is too scared to die and even she gets a happier (albeit weird) ending this time around. ‘New Earth’ is performed with notably more confidence and swagger now that everyone knows that, yes, this will actually work though and one of the stories where Russell’s imagination soars highest now that he knows the production behind him can perform miracles, the story that’s maybe his ‘purest’ from a writing point of view rather than that of a showrunner, maybe the one story where he doesn’t have half an eye on the budget at the same time. I love all the little details that make this feel like a real universe going on just out of a camera’s eye view: the different species (some guy’s big and blue, while the nurses are evolved cats, Russell recognising the same ‘inscrutable’ look on the face of a nurse who didn’t want to give anything away looked like his friends’ pet moggy), the different but plasuible sounding illnesses (‘petrifold regression’ which turns you to stone, ‘Marconi disease’ which sounds nasty and ‘Pallidome Pancrosis’ which sounds nastier). Some Dr Who stories are written by people who clearly don’t think about their story when they’re not working on it but for Russell this story is real and packed with detail that makes it come alive, far more so than most Who stories do.

Technically ‘The Christmas Invasion’ was the first story written safe in the knowledge that Dr Who was a success and was re-commissioned to run as long as people would show it, but that story was written in a hurry under the pressure of the show’s biggest highest profile timeslot so far and had the tricky task of setting up a new regeneration to boot. Series opener ‘New Earth’ has none of those burdens – it’s a return to Russell T’s second story ‘The End Of The World’, the script that more than any other was written with the belief that ‘if this is the only series of a DW comeback we ever get to make then let’s make it a good one’, but made safe in the knowledge of what worked and what didn’t and with even wilder ideas. Cassandra the world’s last surviving Human is back and she’s still the worst of us, summing up everything DW is fighting against: a vain racist beauty whose so afraid of humans mixing their blood that she’s had several centuries’ worth of plastic surgery and ended up a couple of eyes and a bit of skin, living on as the last pure human but at the cost of her humanity. Because this is one of those stories where something is happening everywhere you look. We’re in a hospital full of patients, all of whom seem to be aliens from exotic worlds (some new, some old friends), with an impossibly large set to run around in (and after a year of Cardiff Royal Infirmary filling in as everything from Earth hospitals to Alexandra Palace its actually not a hospital at all but ‘The Millennium Centre’ theatre and so much more in Cardiff) and more CGI than you shake a stick with a ping-pong ball on the end in front of a greenscreen at. On the plus side it looks gorgeous: more than even the end of the Earth in ‘The End Of the World’ this story makes Dr Who feel as if we’re in a universe that’s absolutely teeming with life, that what we see every week is just an infinitesimal spack compared to how big the universe really is. It’s not just to show off either the way a lesser writer would - a space hospital in the future would have that many different aliens passing through it. Most of all though there’s a feeling of joy and wonder, for all The Doctor’s rants at the end: because we made it. This is 2006. Most scifi shows made since the millennium, arguably since the 1980s, are dystopias: mankind is nearly always killed off by something nasty before we properly get going and even if we are in a series about a few stragglers that survive they have a hard old life, fighting nature in a struggle for survival or turned into the slaves of an alien that’s higher up the food chain than us. Even ‘Frontios’, the ‘other’ time Who did a furthest away in time story (and Russell’s own ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ to come) build on this: feeling of inevitable suffering: despite all the advances in technology mankind ends up dead miserable. Moffat and Chibnall both have a far bleaker  more sceptical view of our future. Not for Russell though, oh no. In the far future (the year 5,000,000,023 to be exact, twenty-years after ‘The End Of The World’ and thirty before ‘Gridlock’) man isn’t just surviving but thriving, part of a mass universe that, apparently, all gets along: the hospital is open to everybody and lots of the extras we pass seem part human and paid something, picking up on the lead of ‘End Of The World’ that man have become mongrels in the best possible way, with a planet that’s positively cosmopolitan. It’s part of his belief in the better side of human nature, even when individual bad people try to throw us off that path.

There’s comparatively little  scifi out there that’s actually eager to embrace the future and this is it, with Russell goading us on and saying that all our struggles now will be worth it, because look how good our great x 15 grandchildren will have it. This is the future where they can do anything – especially in medicine but if they can take away suffering and pain physically then why not advance technology in other ways too? I love this story’s sheer imagination and scale, one that’s unmatched by arguably any other story out there.  That’s matched by the most location filming of the new series so far: as well as the Gower Peninsula the basement scenes were filmed at Tredegar House in Newport, the human specimen pods were shot at a disused paper mill (the same one used for ‘Rose’) and the ‘nightclub’ with the Human Cassandra was actually a regular Who production team haunt the Ba Orient restaurant in Cardiff.  It really does feel like another world though (who would have thought it? Location filming in Wales used not to look like the past but the future – as with ‘Boom Town’ Russell’s affection for the land of his broth really shines through this story). Few Dr Who stories ever look this good. 

At the same time, though, that imagination comes at a price (doesn’t it always?) and there are umpteen compromises along the way that stop this looking as good as they want it to. The reason this is the last time that Russell lets his imagination soar to quite this extent is that this story was hell to make: it came in over budget, past deadline and pushed half the people making it to a nervous breakdown, with more things going wrong with this story than certainly any other in the comeback so far (perhaps more than any story till ‘The Power Of Three’s even more difficult birth), sadly one of the main reasons (along with the credit crunch squeezing budgets further) that we’ve never had a story with this ambition since. The script was written on the assumption that Zoe Wannamaker would love to come back and be available for filming – the first of these was true but the second wasn’t (she was busy making the Poirot episode ‘Cards On The Table’ and her ‘human’ scenes were filmed a month before when the script wasn’t quite ready – it shows - and her voice added a month after everything else here with everyone trying to react to something that isn’t there – which also shows). Getting all those costumes together on time was hard work. A stretched department made more errors than normal leading to lots of improvised changes; the claws for the cat nuns, for instance, are a pale version of what they were going to be, the first time co-producer Phil Collinson got shirty and rejected  a whole day’s filming by saying they just weren’t good enough. Billie Piper got sick, something that might well have been caused by the ‘disinfectant lift’ sequence, and her illness spread to the cast and crew until they were knocking over like nine-pins (ironic, really, that so many people couldn’t turn up to work on an actual hospital set). When the production was running badly behind time Billie’s boyfriend Amadu Sowe turned up to visit the set and look after her, but an accident meant he fell into the face of Boe and broke the prop, leading to a further delay and some hasty improvised repairs. The location filming for the outside of New¹⁵ York took place at the Glower Peninsula in Glamorgan, a place specially chosen by Russell as it was close to where he’d grown up and he always figured it looked suitably alien and untouched by man. Only he forgot to warn them about the sudden storms that were there: it rained for hours delaying the shoot and even the one that was used had to be changed (now you know you might notice the rather weird way The Doctor and Rose randomly sit down on the grass: this was because, standing up, the wind whipped round their faces so much they couldn’t see a thing). Several scenes got dropped as they ran out of time, with The Duke of Manhattan originally a much bigger character, replaced with cheaper filler scenes. ‘New Earth’ was the sort of story everyone was sick of while everyone was making it, which might be where the slight darkness in this episode comes from too: for all that its utopian there’s a sense of despair about the story, The Doctor’s growl at the end quite unlike anything David Tennant will try in the part again (the tiredness showing through?) while there are multiple stinging barbs from Russell T about how, even when technology upgrades, humans don’t. That gives ‘New Earth’ a kind of see-saw quality that’s enough to give you whiplash, as we turn from celebration to commiseration. Basically the future is a happy place to be – but as the end reveals only for the privileged few. 

Russell wasn’t a nurse in a previous life or anything but hospitals are close to his heart. His big break on television was on the children’s series ‘Children’s Ward’, a series that resembles ‘New Earth’ more than you might expect. It is, after all, like most medical dramas about how the same regular people cope with the very different days, when they never quite know whose going to walk through the door from which walk of life or country and with which disease. It’s a very Russell series where you get to see the very best and very worst of humanity all sharing the same corridors: the heroic nurses helping children pull through, the little kid stoically battling something awful life handed to them, the doting parents, but also the people responsible for the illnesses in the first place who made a mistake, or did something deliberately, or hoped they’d get away with something and got caught. ‘New Earth’ is very much like an episode of ‘Children’s Ward’ but one where the stakes are bigger and the illnesses made up oh and the accountant up to something a bit cheeky is the last of the pure Humans still prejudiced and intent on staying alive at any costs. Hospitals, after all, are one of the few buildings all alien species would probably need – and which mankind would probably always need however far in the future we go. It’s as if Russell went back to revisit his old job with the sheer joy of knowing that he has no bounds or rules anymore, that he can invent illnesses without the hours of research that goes into writing a medical drama and populate it with as many weird aliens as he wants.

And one of them is very weird indeed. Cassandra is, sadly, where ‘New Earth’ falls down a bit. She already had the perfect story arc in ‘The End Of The World’, The 9^th Doctor made her see the error of her ways and she paid for her evil ways with a big explosion that reduced her to splinters (back in the days when series one seemed like it was the only shot at making Dr Who they would ever get so they didn’t need to worry about bringing anybody back). Having her return in an unlikely way, with a Cassandra-built assistant we never got to see last time saving her from a dustbin and rebuilding her from a piece of skin that was originally her bottom, is mad when you think about it. The idea of organ donors has been a part of Dr Who since The Cybermen arrived out of the South Pole snow in 1966 but that at least had a scientific background; there’s no way a single part of your body can still have the capacity to house your brain and spirit, not even with a ‘psychograft’ machine and not even billions of years in the future (or, just supposing that it was standard in this era, why is there a hospital at all? Why aren’t people routinely hopping into cloned body parts at home?) The most OTT villain of series one has been softened and turned into more of a fully dimensional character, which is welcome, but she still feels out of place this series (even with the even more OTT ‘Tooth and Claw’ next week and The devil to come Cassandra doesn’t feel a part of the same universe as, say Sarah Jane or Madame De Pompadour). She’s a cartoon and even looks like one, with her CGI effects and the rushed production making it feel even more as if she’s not in the same room as everyone else, with a slightly unreal quality to her. Her motivations last time were kind of understandable in a Who villain way: she wanted insurance money and considered she was doing the universe a favour by blowing up all those weird half-breeds up along the way. Now, though, what exactly is she doing skulking round a hospital, with so many of the people she tried to kill last time still there (originally The Face Of Boe was there to contrast with Cassandra, embracing the dying of the light while Cassandra clawed at it, but the idea was dropped when series three was commissioned and Russell decided there was more life in the big ol’ face yet). Is Cassandra after revenge? Is she waiting for The Doctor? Or is she just staying close to where she was repaired? Whatever the cause it seems odd that the events of the last story don’t seem to have changed her at all and that her little sub-plot never crosses over with the ‘big’ one, about the patients downstairs. It’s almost as if Russell brought Cassandra back because he was bullied into it and didn’t know what to do with her (which is kind of true: Steven Moffat wrote an introduction to ‘The End Of the World’ in the Dr Who Shooting scripts’ published for Christmas 2005 where he jokingly complained that Russell had a habit of creating interesting characters he wanted to get to know – then melted them! During his time as showrunner, of course, he famously hardly ever killed anyone – and when he did he brought them back as a hologram).  

In a way, I suppose, Cassandra’s motivation is that she just wants to be loved once before she dies, that her ego wants someone to tell her she’s beautiful (in this way it mirrors the other plot about the sick patients, where in a catalogue of miseries the one that gets The Doctor is that ‘they’ve never been held’ and want to be touched, treating it as a Human right). Even if her means of going about it are despicable, Cassandra really earns your sympathy across this story as much as your hate, for if people had told her she was beautiful a few centuries earlier we might have been saved the plotlines of both of her stories. This leads to one of the craziest endings in the comeback series: dying, she enters the body of her specially built companion Chip (the ‘walking doodle’) and asks to be taken back to her younger days when she was popular. There we see Zoe Wannamaker at a party, looking glamorous and the centre of attention and Chip tells her she looks beautiful before dying in her arms. The idea, I think, is that The Doctor has shown her mercy for her crimes by letting her die on her terms, seeing how loved she was, except…the person who tells her she’s beautiful is herself. While this could be a metaphor for the importance of self healing and how you don’t’ need anyone else to fulfil you on screen it looks as if the start of Cassandra being turned into a monster starts here, as her ego thrills at the thought of being told she’s beautiful by a stranger – even though that stranger turned out to be her. As for the friends she remembers impressing none of them do anything to help the fallen stranger – a much greater ending would have been if Cassandra realised how fake and uncaring her friends really were. She also has such a monstrous ego already that almost the last thing Cassandra hears before she dies is her younger self insulting her without knowing it. Not the way I’d want to go! It also causes the sort of timey wimey paradox we’ll get every week during Moffat’s time on the show, as Cassandra creates Chip based on the image of the only person who ever loved her…which turns out to be her in Chip’s body. It’s not the ending the character deserves, especially if you remember all the harm she caused in her first appearance but also even if you feel empathy towards her it doesn’t seem quite right. Nearly always in Dr Who beauty is in the eye of the beholder, about who you are, not in the eye of yourself from the future in the body of a clone you hd specially created, that’s not as…poetic. It would have been better if Cassandra had been told she was beautiful anyway, even in Chip’s mangled body. It’s also wrong for poor Chip: this story has gone out of its way in the ‘other’ plot to say how important all life is and that even oeople grown specially to be ill deserve our love, yet Chip effectively dies when Cassandra passes into his body; even if he was going to die soon anyway The Doctor never tries to save him as Chip and he never gets a proper chance to say goodbye. The fact that he’s a volunteer shouldn’t change that either – the people in our world who are forced into medical experiments for money are volunteers too but only because they feel they have no other choice. Still, Cassandra’s slow climb from monster to victim is a trope that will happen a lot in the Russell years yet few handle it as well as Russell: even if you hated Cassandra the first time round you really care for her this second time.

The other thing to say about ‘New Earth’ is how funny it all is. That seems a strange thing to say about a story that features sick people dying, but it is, with some of Russell’s silliest writing. The Cassandra prop drove everyone crazy last time so Russell turns her part of the story into a ‘bodyswap’ episode, where she inhabits the bodies of Rose and The Doctor. Russell has asked Billie, as the returning cast member, if there was anything she wanted to do more of in series two and she’d asked for comedy, so gets a tour de force here as Russell wickedly has Cassandra comment on Rose while in her body. The comment about her being a ‘chav’ (a then-new word meaning the sort of person who grew up on a council estate and relished being poor, flunking school and quitting jobs and proud of their knock-off imitation designer clothes, more often than not living off child benefit for a run of children with different fathers) became the most quoted one from this story, but there are lots of others including being a ‘trampoline’ and – in quite a daring move for a show still being pitched at children – admires her new bouncy boobs. Billie gives one of her best performances in the role, relishing the chance to laugh at herself and uses a much posher accent than her usual one (she also wears a wonderbra that sticks her boobs out and a redder shade of lipstick as Cassandra, to make her stand and act differently!)  I love the fact, too, that The Doctor doesn’t notice she’s changed at first despite the appalling misunderstanding of 21^st century slang and Estuary English; even when snogged he thinks it’s because he’s ‘still got it’ rather than because Rose has been possessed by a horny alien that hasn’t been kissed in centuries (I love the fact, too, that he works out what’s really going on after Cassandra’s casual cruelty, instinctively knowing that Rose’s response would be ‘to be kind’, which is her biggest character strength). David Tennant has great fun, too, when Cassandra is inside him, putting on a fake accent of his own (that makes him turn all Kenneth Williams). Interestingly Cassandra-in-Rose makes her sound more adult and siren-like, but inside the impossibly old Doctor she makes him seem much younger. There’s a gag in there too about how ‘certain body parts’ belonging to The Doctor have been ‘barely used’ (something Cassandra says immediately after being inside Rose): a comment on the new regeneration that’s barely got started or the Doctor’s lack of any real love life until he meets River? 

Body swap and possession stories are two a penny in Dr Who (see ‘Terror Of The Zygons’ ‘The Faceless Ones’ ‘The Android Invasion’ and ‘The Rebel Flesh’ to name just four: there are dozens more): they are, after all, far cheaper than paying for alien costumes on screen all the time. I think on that score ‘New Earth’ might just be my favourite example though: it makes sense to the plot rather than just being a way to extend it, they have a lot of fun and games at the character’s expense and it happens in a story where they’ve already proved they’ve got the biggest budget going. Even without the body swapping this would be a funny story, with lots of clever puns about The Doctor being a Doctor in a medical setting (‘The Doctor will see you now’!) that it seems inconceivable they hadn’t used before, not even in the only two previous medical settings (a regenerated 3^rd Doctor in ‘Spearhead From Space’ and the space station of ‘The Invisible Enemy’). There’s also one of the all-time funniest scenes in all of Who when Rose walks into a lift and is shocked by the disinfectant pouring over her head (naughty Russell didn’t warn her in advance and it wasn’t in Billie’s script so those gasps of surprise when it happens are real! She found it funny. Until she got sick). Plus two scenes where Russell is having fun pushing the envelope of what he can get away with: not once but twice characters appear to say something rude in crossfade, but which are close enough to ‘accidents’ for them to get away with it with the censors: Cassandra spots Rose (she doesn’t recognise The Doctor) and calls him ‘that little bi…cutting to Rose saying ‘Bit rich…’ If you’re old enough to know the word ‘bitch’ that’s funny (although they did use it in ‘The End Of The World’ and no one commented on it); if you’re not then its innocent enough not to warp you for life. Similarly Rose hears about where Cassandra’s skin was taken from and jokes ‘you’re talking out of your ar…’ only for Cassandra to interrupt ‘Ask not!...’ Russell’s having fun writing this story, you can tell. Even the title’s a bit of an in-joke given how many times its been used as a concept in Dr Who before (on TV in ‘Invasion Of the Dinosaurs’ but also comic strips, books and Big Finish audios; the short-lived 6^th Doctor companion Grant even comes from a ‘New Earth’ but one that doesn’t sound much like this one).

There’s a seriousness behind the laughs too though, with a question of medical ethics. You see the supposedly heroic cat nurses (the older of whom, Sister Jatt, is played by Adjoa Andoh, who looks very different as Martha’s mum the following year) have been busy infecting poor people in the name of research so that the rich can all run around being healthy. Basically its mass genocide, even if the sick are kept just well enough to live technically it’s not what you would call living and even the morals are murkier because it is, after all, to keep other people well. The Doctor isn’t having any of it though: his morals have always been that I even one person dies to save lots of people if that’s not a choice they’re given it’s not fair and these poor people have been bred specially, with no choice or free will in the matter at all. Clearly that isn’t a problem we ever have in the present day like this and yet its’ not far removed from the way our medical system is run, especially the way poor people can earn a wage, when desperate, as a guinea pig: they might have more choice on paper than the donors in this story but when you get desperate you don’t have any choice at all. I love the idea that this is, like all the best futuristic Dr Who stories, a logical extension of what we have now, in our days of poverty-stricken people so desperate for food that they earn a wage being experimented on, with clauses that the medical industry take no liability for what might happen to them, all so that the few rich people who can actually afford the drugs that come from it get to be cured. It’s an unfair system where our own often brilliant inventions aren’t used for everyone, merely the people who can afford them. Illness is, after all, intrinsically unfair. If you get really poorly then you can’t work and you have less money – even though you need more money than the average person to pay for hospital visits and healthcare and medicines. This is also at heart a wickedly barbed comment about Britain’s health service (with a few potshots at American healthcare too – we are in the offspring of New York after all). The line of dialogue at the heart of this story is that even though technology and medicines improve so do the viruses: life is a race between the two for who gets the upper-hand, between good and evil. Even though the far future seems to be less speciesist than you’d expect its still run by a class system that rewards the rich and punishes the working classes. Fort every rich patient who cures something in a few hours that even The Doctor thinks will be fatal there’s a a whole basement of working class patients hidden away, grown specifically to run tests on as guinea pig and abandoned. Even if the science of this is a bit suspect (the ‘original’ sufferers of these illnesses are still alive, when they tend to be either the first people to die or are asymptomatic carriers for other people who get it) Britain should be in a better position to combat this than most: we have the National health Service set up after WW2 which makes care free for everybody, with none of the eye-watering life-changing bills our American cousins get.

The NHS is, in Russell’s eyes, one of our strengths as a nation: Martha Jones is an aspiring NHS Doctor and everything The Doctor ever wanted in a companion, patient clever and kind while it’s an NHS hospital kidnapped and taken to The Moon that sees off the Judoon (and is about as capable as any base under siege we ever see). Harriet Jones became MP for Flydale North on the back of a popular campaign to make pay-care more affordable for the people in her constituency. It’s the our-world version of The Doctor, people making strangers better and saving lives for nothing more than a basic wage and a cup of tea. At the same time, though, the NHS has slowly become a pale shadow of its former glory. Underfunded by successive governments, understaffed with staff hacked off at the long hours poor pay and rude patients and waiting times that make you feel as if time’s stood still, it’s not what it used to be (Rose herself comments early on the hospital ‘doesn’t look very NHS’ as by her day most tended to be in run-down buildings decades old) and tends nowadays to be a system used only by the poor while the rich get to have their operations quickly by ‘going private’ at exorbitant costs that would make Lumic feel sick (I bet he got that first Davros-like bath-chair on the NHS though). At the time it seemed far-fetched that so many members of the public would look the other way and pretend not to know about half a population being kept in a hospital unwell, but one pandemic on (that’s still raging unchecked with everyone going la-la-la I’m not listening whenever the subject’s brought up) and I’m starting to think that if anything Russell’s a bit too kind here about the lengths people go to in order to stay ignorant. I mean, at least this hospital has actual PPE for the cat nuns rather than some political Slitheens inventing a new company to manufacture them and then take lots of money to not bother and instead sit back in the Bahamas, their green skin slowly turning brown.

There’s another theme too about when it becomes selfish to cling onto life. The final currency in life, as in so many Dr Who stories, isn’t money but time because we all go in the end (bar regenerations): the moral of the story is to make it a good one so you don’t end up like Cassandra, clinging to your deathbed and refusing to go but go in peace. Cassandra has lived too long already, while the poor people in the basement never got a chance to live before getting sick. Cassandra already had a natural lifespan and is clinging to life because she didn’t use it properly. As with other Who stories about the dangers of immortality (‘The Five Doctors’ and ‘The Lazarus experiment’) all the body swapping in the world won’t save the problem that you need to actively live a good life, no matter how long you’ve got. The great thing about the change between seasons though, is that it’s not clear-cut. Cassandra is, rightly, horrified at the hypocriticalness of a timelord who can change his body telling her when she has to die.  At the back of this story too is the sort of thing that Russell could never ever have said on ‘Children’s Ward’, that resources in medical care should depend not on who can pay for them but how much life the person got to have: it’s one thing to give life saving drugs to a toddler who never got to see any life at all, but quite another to extend the life of a 100 year old by a few more days at vast expense. Heavy stuff for a supposed children’s series on at a Saturday teatime and yet it works, precisely because it’s in an episode with so much fun and games. I wonder, too, if Russell’s starting point for this story wasn’t closer to home, an injoke for fans. Are the cat people related to the Cheetah People of ‘Survival’? And is it significant that Dr Who’s ‘we’re back!’ story of triumphant goes back to the same basic ideas of survival at all costs and the survival of the fittest, with a race that look much the same as the last BBC story of the 20^th century? Only with a much bigger budget this time and a sense that the series is no safe, so secure that they can do anything (like pay for a comparatively expensive set of cat costumes for starters rather than getting them cheap). ‘Survival’ was in art a story about feminine intuition – and there are few more traditionally feminine jobs than being a nurse with all the connotations of being matronly (at least in the days before Rory was one in series five). That story too was about how everything has its time to die and how we should just accept it with grace, a struggle as it was when it was our series that was dying. ‘New Earth’ is a story with much the same message but from a slightly different perspective: it isn’t the time you’ve  got that matters but what you do with it.

One quick point too: a lot of modern fans don’t like the 10^th Doctor, finding him smug and arrogant, as if his ego wasn’t cleverly written in from the first as the source of his greatest downfall and causes the meltdown before his regeneration, ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ style about what he needs to change the most (again I’m convinced each regeneration at least partly becomes what their predecessor was missing the most. That’s why the 10th Doctor is so much better and more charming around people than the sometimes awkward 9^th Doctor and why the 11^th Doctor has almost no ego at all, at least at first, dressing in the most uncool clothing going and dancing like nobody’s watching. Even when they are).  It was there in ‘The Christmas Invasion’ but could have been passed off as regeneration angst; here it’s clearly ego. The Doctor checks his hair, smiles when Cassandra kisses him and walks into a room assuming he can fix everything and his way is the only way. Russell writes this in on a small scale for now (The Doctor quibbling with the layout of an impossibly grand hospital and saying where he’d put a gift shop) but by the end The Doctor is already playing God, choosing when Cassandra dies. He even has an unfortunate ‘Jesus style’ moment at the end of this episode (Broadcast Easter week 2006) when he cures the patients around him with the laying on of hands. In a few years’ time it’s the same messiah complex that will see the 10^th Doctor try to change fixed history in ‘The waters Of Mars and briefly considering himself more important than Wilf in ‘The End Of Time’. Tjose moments didin’t come out of nowhere, they started from small seeds here, as Cassandra’s ego did too. The great thing, though, is that David Tennant doesn’t just play the 10^th Doctor as a heartless egotistical sod but as a three dimensional character aware of his limitations and with oodles of charm and bundles of energy. You’d still follow this man (well, timelord) to the ends of the Earth and put your life in your hands (which is where I think they went slightly wrong with Drs 12 and 13 whose flaws are so powerful they outweigh their good points on occasion, but that’s another story).  

‘New Earth’ is a different kind of story then, sometimes telling its tale with laughs and sometimes with real burning injustice and rage. It’s a story that, partly because of the problem in making it, never quite gets the tone right (it’s a silly fluffy story about big deep everlasting human themes of death and rebirth and making way for new things to come along) and the ending especially stretches credulity to breaking point (just in case you ever think of trying it, no bunging every bottle in your medicine cupboard into a bucket when you’re sick and you can’t find a cure probably wont help and will almost certainly make you sicker). You can tell, too, that for all of Russell’s big ideas the budget simply isn’t there the way it was for ‘The End Of the World’ (still the most expensive Who story ever, adjusting for inflation) and as an episode built to show off more than normal that’s a bigger problem than it would be with some other episodes. Chip, too, is underserved: he needs a better background than just being Cassandra’s ‘servant’ and creation – we see plenty of evidence that he’s devoted to her but never fully find out why (especially when a younger Cassandra is downright rude about his appearance) and you crave for a scene where he stands up to her. After all, even if Cassandra ‘creates’ him (after the man she meets at the party who was nice to her, so it turns out) he seems to have free will. For me prequel ‘End Of The World’ is still superior too, if only because there are even more aliens kicking about and more of an emphasis on Cassandra’s twisted belief in purity in a future where humanity has intermingled with other species. Those are the things that prevent ‘New Earth’ form being perfect though – they don’t get in the way of a story that’s really good fun, makes lots of important points and rattles along at top speed, the first fruits of a series that finds DW brimming with confidence in a way it hadn’t since at least the mid-1970s.

Nevertheless the basics of this episode I love: I adore the fact that once again, even in the far far future, on a new new world, with dizzying technological advances, mankind has done nothing to combat the same old problems of greed and selfishness that have plagued us since time immemorial. For all the setting this one is a timeless episode recognisable by every era (I reckon even the cavemen of ‘An Unearthly Child’ would relate to the some-tribes have some-tribes-don’t morality) and its hard not to feel for everyone in this story who are all victims in a way – the Cat nurses who do good as well as harm and try to forget what they’re doing, Cassandra who was never held enough in her lifetime, Chip who  - like most teenagers – never asked to be born, the patient clones suffering from some weird disease that makes you levitate while beeping in morse code against your will (I’m amazed I haven’t caught that one yet. Covid’s probably in there somewhere too. Maybe the hiccups. Most of those patients definitely have some form of m.e. too given their tired walk and lethargic groaning  while one of them definitely walks with my dyspraxic waddle). Most of all I love the ambition and confidence, something Dr Who hasn’t had in night on thirty years, even if there are already signs that its gone a bit too far (the tie-in model of an exploded Cassandra, which was basically an empty frame, was one of many things that made me question my sanity as a fan). New Earth, new Doctor, new inventive setting but in every other way thankfully this is Dr Who same as last time, as a moral crusade righting the wrongs of society and shining s torch on where we’re going wrong as a species, all the sorts of things Dr Who was born for, told with a lightness of touch that also makes it a pleasure to watch.  – only even bigger and in many ways even better (at least till they get a bit too ambitious and things start to go downhill in the series’ second half). After a 1980s and 1990s when Dr Who was sick and fading fast it feels as if the series has never been in ruder health or better hands.

POSITIVES + The Face of Boe is a great invention, even if his popularity seems unlikely to say the least: he’s an animatronic head in a jar that’s massive, an alien of very few words (and most of those mimed slightly out of synch with the backing tape), who gets to have very little bearing on the plot. And yet he’s still one of my favourite characters, exactly the sort of thing that stops Dr Who seeming like other series – leave it to lesser channels to do such boring and bland things as stories that only exist to be story arcs or weave clever plots, this is a universe populated by random people who just exist. The Dr Who universe is full of characters like this who are there because they’re ordinary people (to a point) going about their ordinary lives, because even in the future and on a re-generated version of New York the future is going to be full of ordinary people living going about their daily lives, rather than just people who live to serve the plot. It’s what makes Dr Who seem real, even when its in a story about petrifold regression and cat nuns. Plus what other show would even think of giving us a giant face in a jar?

NEGATIVES - Not really a negative point but...Why are these nurses all cats? There’s nothing particular nurse-like about cats and no reason is ever given for why they’ve moved in to live alongside humanity and take care of them (especially after we ‘disgraced’ ourselves in ‘End Of The World’) Why did a race so far across the universe spawn from cats anyway? It feels as if we’re about to be promised some backstory why, both here and in sequel ‘Gridlock’, something along the old folk tradition that cats travelled the stars at night and had adventures on other planets, but it never quite comes. The costumes too are a bit suspect, certainly compared to other ‘animal’ costumes like Rhino Judoon or even Gram doggies, never quite seeming real. Nor, unforgivably, do they use the pun that they ‘aren’t feline furry well’. I mean come on people, Dr Who invented dad jokes. 20^th century?   

BEST QUOTE: Cassandra: ‘It's goodbye trampoline, hello blondie!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: If you’re reading these reviews in order then welcome to the Tardisodes! They were an idea tried out across the second series to maintain interest in the series (and originally called ‘vortexts’) by giving fans a ‘sneak peak’ of the following episode with a minute long prequel to the episode that gave a hint without giving the full game away. They were planned to capitalise on the rise of mobile phones and downloads which, back in 2006, felt as scifi as anything on Dr Who but video services cost a packet back then so most people just watched them on the Dr Who website instead. They’re not there anymore and, weirdly, aren’t on the series two box sets either but you can still find them on Dr Who forums and youtube at the time of writing. ‘New Earth’ was the first to get one with the official and decidedly un-catchy name of ‘Tardisode 1’ and its one of the best, basically a promotional advert for the Hospital on New New York. It sounds great! All those plush clinical surroundings, cat nurses on hand and the promise that they can cure anything (hospital motto: ‘We never lose a patient’). Surely it’s too good to be true? Err, ah, well, about that…Don’t worry, just ignore all the screaming at the end, it will be fine, honest). Just to rub the ‘carry On Doctor Who’ link home the illness mentioned on screen is Hawtrey disease’, named by writer Gareth Roberts after a Charles Hawtrey biography he was reading at the time. Even though it looks like a bit of an afterthought, shot in a single boot cupboard with one hospital bed rather than the full hospital of the other episodes, it’s certainly attention grabbing and utterly unlike anything else on TV. There’s no way you would miss this – no time for ‘patients’, cancel all appointments! 

Petrifold regression was a key plot point in what’s probably my favourite of the 21^st century original Dr Who novels ‘The Stone Rose’ by Jacqueline Raynor and it’s a clever bit of tie-in work between the novels and TV too given that the original hardback was published just two days before ‘New Earth’ was on TV. Mickey seems an unlikely museum-goer but he’s got a job as a volunteer at The British Museum (which seems natural in the context of the novel somehow) and is shocked to find a 2000 year old stone statue that looks just like Rose. Naturally he calls in The Doctor to come and take a look. Intrigued, The Doctor sets off for Ancient Rome and tracks down a local sculptor named Ursus whose sculptures are all shockingly lifelike. So lifelike in fact that The Doctor suspects he’s turning real people into stone. Which means that Rose might be next! It’s a neat ‘Space Museumy’ style plot about trying to avoid a path where Rose dies and not knowing what the right one is. There’s also a lot of time travel which makes it seem almost like a Steven Moffat book, as an alien known as GENIE based in the 23^rd century turns out to be the one giving the Roman ‘special powers’. We still get a nice lot of historical scene-setting though, including a very 10^th Doctory rant about the horrors of slavery (particularly impressive given that The Doctor had only had one on TV when this book was published!) A tense, gritty high-stakes yet still funny and often silly book, this debut 10^th Doctor novel set the bar super high, so high no book has fully matched it page by page, strong from beginning to end. It is, at the time of writing, the best selling Dr Who novel ever, out the entire sixty year run – and quite right too. The audio book is quite special too, with David Tennant having a whale of time doing lots of voices.

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