Dalek: Ranking - 6

 

Dalek

(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 30/4/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Robert Shearman, director: Joe Ahearne)

Rank: 6

   'Invite: Let's storm area Van Statten, they can't stop all of us! We all know they're keeping things from us in there, alien things from outer space. Well let's band together and liberate any alien life they're holding. We can run like Naruto with our arms outstretched past the security guards and...wait what does exterminate mean again? Is that alien for 'thankyou'? No wait, stop, Aaaaagh!'

The 2005 comeback was already going great. We’d seen things the old series used to do but with a bigger budget and more emotion (‘Rose’), bonkers things with CGI and a budget the old series could only have dreamed of, with oodles of new monsters to love (‘End Of The World’), re-created the past in loving detail (‘The Unquiet Dead’) and taken pot-shots at contemporary politics (‘Aliens Of London/WW3’). I already knew that the future (not to mention the past and present) was in safe hands. But then came ‘Dalek’, a story that did things with Dr Who’s biggest and baddest enemy (and by association things with Dr Who’s oldest and most central character) I hadn’t even thought were possible. This was an episode I was both anticipating and dreading, the watershed moment that might make or break the comeback, the much anticipated showdown between the Doctor and the alien that made the series, the first re-match in seventeen years on-screen, in a series where if the audience went seventeen weeks without seeing one they got restless. Ever since they were brought back for the debut 2nd Doctor story ‘Power Of the Daleks’ there’s been a saying that no new Doctor feels like a proper Doctor until they’ve fought off a horde of Daleks, so for the revival to seem legitimate and ‘proper’ Dr Who this battle needed to happen somewhere in the first season and showing them midway through the season rather than keeping them for a finale was a strong move. There was so much riding on this story it had to be special, bigger even than the other episodes around it and it had to make the Daleks seem a plausible threat for a whole new generation who’d seen an extra couple of decades’ worth of scarier, angrier CGI monsters. The Daleks are after all such an integral part of this show - if the Daleks didn’t seem a threat how could any other monster possibly match up? Yet equally if they were modernised to look like everything else a generic Dalek would put off the fans who were still on the fence about the comeback. Putting them in an Earth base, a sort of area 51 (actually Cardiff’s National Museum and a sign of how much faith the local council had in Russell’s grand vision given the series hasn’t been on air and become a hit just yet) overseen by eccentric millionaire Van Statten and setting the story as close to present day as they could get away with (just seven years!) made this story seem ‘real’ in a way that a lot of other Dalek stories just weren’t, a ‘warning’ the audience ought to heed about where the world might end up rather than pure imagination. 

 The Daleks never seem more real too, or more dangerous, even though we only ever see one. Thankfully they take all the parts that made the Daleks so successful (with the frame actually going back in time to the original 1960s designs, re-designed by Mike Tucker who’d worked on ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’) and throw in a few things that feel highly in keeping that production teams past would surely have used had they had the means and budget. The most interesting addition is a set of numbers just below the dome something the Daleks had only ever had before in the 1964 Christmas cash-in ‘The Dalek Book’ (and then because of a mistake: the artist, visiting the set of ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’, hadn’t realised they were only there for rehearsals so the director could remember which Dalek was which). It’s an odd idea that’s not generally there for future appearances but it works: this is a soldier whose come off a conveyor belt and hasn’t had the time to think for itself till now. Most of all, though, ‘Dalek’ writer Robert Shearman writes the Skaro scaries as the same cunning creations we always saw, as intelligent and driven as any human and a hundred times scarier. By 2005 The Daleks’ reputation was in a sorry state. Their creator (not Davros, the other one) Terry Nation had famously been protective of his inventions, worried that they might end up losing their power if every Granny at home was knitting cuddly Daleks and they were making endless appearances in ‘light entertainment’ shows (they do turn up in a racist Spike Milligan gag about Pakistani Daleks in the 1970s, but we try not to think about that if we can – if only because it should be the Dalek being racist and exterminating the Humans). After Terry’s death in 1997, though, we began to se why: suddenly they were everywhere, advertising batteries and chocolate bars and going all sweet and cuddly. For a generation of children they were the silly looking robots, not the most evil creatures in the universe who were so terrifying precisely because there were still living things inside their casings. Billie Piper herself was part of this generation (well, technically she’s two months younger than me but there weren’t exactly many people my age in love with this show as I remember well from having similar discussions about the Daleks looking silly on school playgrounds) and mostly laughed when people showed her pictures of Daleks after taking the role and wondered out loud how they could ever have terrified anyone. Even Dr Who itself had fallen into this trap a little, making the Doctor seem as if he was enjoying a holiday with some Dalek bashing rather than running scared for his life ( ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ I’m looking at you! Though it’s hardly the only example). 

Russell T Davies knew this well so his demands for this script were to ‘reinvent everything that made the Daleks great and banish everything that made them daft’ and most of all to make people scared of the Daleks again, so Shearman sat his wife Jane Goddard down (who, despite being part of the ‘Big Finish’ family who’d played Alpha Centauri from the ‘Peladon’ stories on audio, thought the Daleks were stupid and couldn’t understand why her husband was so excited at the commission, ) and asked her for a list of all the reasons they looked silly. ‘They couldn’t go upstairs, they have no legs’ she said. So Shearman has Rose point the same thing out – only for the Dalek to chant ‘elevate’ and glide up after her (if Shearman was like me he no doubt ranted about how The Daleks had also climbed stairs in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ but nobody watched that story because people thought Daleks were rubbish because they couldn’t climb upstairs and how wrong that was). Next Jane commented on how daft their plungers were – so one of the Dalek guards in the story does the same, before it suckers his face to death. ‘They can’t see behind them’ his wife continued, so Rob wrote in a scene where the Dalek dome swivels round. ‘Guns can damage them’ she added, so in went a scene where the Dalek disintegrates bullets easily. Basically every joke everyone could throw at the Daleks somebody does in this story – and then it gets turned upside down (Adam calls them ‘pepperpots’ early on – he isn’t doing that at the end when he’s running for his life. Hopefully neither are the audience). At last, for the first time in a long time, it feels as if someone is treating the Daleks with respect. Precisely by having the Dalek treat nobody with respect (Jane then received a thankyou by having Van Statten’s underling named ‘Goddard’ in this story!) 

In the single best move of the episode, we don’t see the damage and destruction a whole army can do but the threat caused by just one lone Dalek who was still powerful enough to destroy whole human platoons (Russell already had plans to bring back a whole Dalek army in ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’ so wanted this story to show what a threat one could be, thus upping the ante for the destruction a whole army of the blighters could cause). There’s one moment in particular that makes the Dalek such a threat in this story – the first time we see it exterminate anything. Rather than simply point and shoot a hovering Dalek absorbs a whole arsenal of weaponry without even blinking it’s eye stalk, then shoots a base’s sprinklers to their bemusement, then fires into the wet ground, electrocuting a whole battalion of soldiers in one go, ruthlessly, in order to kill as many people from one precious thunderbolt as possible, a terrific special effect (and ones we haven’t seen enough of in recent stories). If you’d never ever seen a Dalek story before this one (as a lot of the audience at home hadn’t) then you can absolutely see why this particular monster scared the Dr so much, with an unstoppable ruthless efficiency that made them stand out against everyone and everything else but an intelligence behind it too. This isn’t some army drone fooled by a bit of imagination but a smart kid turned bad. There’s none of the sense of flippancy that had underpinned so many of their stories down the years, no sense that the Dr must surely defeat them because he’s done that on screen so many times before, because everything about this story seems new and the 9th Doctor, whose always seemed so fully in control to the point of impenetrability, now looks terrified. 

Many fans wondered why Russell didn’t write this all-important story himself, but that was because he knew Shearman could pull this story off – not least because he’d already done it once with ‘Jubilee’, a Big Finish story from the 40th anniversary of 2003 that took Colin Baker’s 6th Dr into new territory, putting him at the heart of a war he could only half-remember. Big Finish were the audio company that had been started by fans in the ‘wilderness’ years when the show was off the air and I remember well buying up all the unofficial ‘audiovisual’ stories they used to sell at conventions before they got the official license from the BBC (Nicholas Briggs, for twenty years now the voice of the Daleks, was to me the voice of the 8th Doctor first, long before Paul McGann came along). Big Finish largely did what the New Adventures promised, ‘adult’ stories that wouldn’t have made it on TV in the classic series (the new one maybe not so much), but without resorting to the sex and drugs sniggering of some of the worst novels (and, indeed, ‘Torchwood’). They are, like the novels and comic strips, every bit the rollercoaster ride of the mains series, lurching from masterpiece to unlistenable horror with every roll of the dice, but at their best they pushed the returning Drs 5-8 with the original actors (and later the original Dr 4 plus 9 and 10 and impressionists for Drs 1-3, though these audios tend to work best when an actual companion ‘remembers’ their Dr speaking to them rather than an impression) further than they’d gone on TV. ‘Jubilee’ is one of the best of these early stories, released for the show’s 40th anniversary (one ignored by the BBC) and which Russell loved so much he used it in most of his pitches to the BBC about how a newer, darker Dr Who might look for modern audiences (the BBC assumed that they would just take the license off them when the show came back but Russell stuck his neck out and said how important they were for keeping the flame of Who alive and how useful they’d be to the series: it’s one of the few times he outright said ‘no’ to his paymasters). A lot of the 9th Dr’s darker edges had a home here first and perhaps the biggest change is the emotion in the stories and the fact that there’s no re-set button the way that there is on TV, with lessons learned from one story spilling over into the next. The 6th Dr, especially, goes on quite the journey, forced to face up to the fact that he’s not quite the ‘hero’ he thinks he is in his own head and mellowing slowly into maybe the warmest and cuddliest Dr of them all, but one with guilt for his past (oh for the original series to have put this 6th Dr on screen instead of the spiky acerbic one we got!) It was a smart move: the Big Finish fanbase already loved this story and Russell knew an audience of non-fans would too. Even before Big Finish Shearman was quite a big name in the CommWhonity too: he was co-editor of beloved fanzine ‘The Cloister Bell’ and even sneaks in a reference to the other editor, ‘Baywater’, which becomes the name of one of the guards. 

So Shearman became the first – to date the only – Big Finish writer hired for the new series and asked to write the new doctor and do for him what ‘Jubilee’ did for the 6th Dr. As a writer he ‘gets’ Christopher Eccleston’s timelord better than all the non-Russell writers for my money (in many ways the 6th Dr is the closest to the 9th, an angry not-so-young man scowling his way round the universe, even if they have different dress senses): this is a Doctor that isn’t just goofy ears but primal fears, someone who isn’t just harsh but someone trying so very desperately hard to be fun, but who has learnt the hard way to be too tough as a defence mechanism (as opposed to someone fun pretending to be tough or someone though pretending to be fun the way some of the other scripts had it). The 9th Dr is a trauma victim who would love nothing more than to go back to running madly round the universe writing wrongs with a wave of his sonic screwdriver and floppy scarf, but every time he does he forgets all the terrible things he once had to do in the name of war and survival and that haunts him more than the battle itself. In ‘Dalek’ Rose, like us, sees new sides of this mad stranger she’d never seen before and suddenly gets scared by what he’s capable of. Like many a soldier in WW1 and WW2 this isn’t the same man (well, timelord) who set off to war – he can’t just undo everything he’s seen, even though he so desperately wants to and the shock of seeing a Dalek unexpectedly triggers something inside him that reminds him of everything he’d been trying so hard to forget. 

 It was Russell who pulled that element to the front though. The initial draft was much more about the Van Stattens, with Adam as Henry’s son rather than an employee and a wife we don’t see on screen, living in an area 51 base surrounded by stolen alien tech. Shearman based him on the sort of millionaires who had more momey than sense and who had used their money to please themselves and endager lives rather than help people – for a time he was even called ‘William Fences’ in a nod to ‘Bill Gates’ before the idea got dropped! He’s not really like Bill Gates though: Van Statten is passionate and anger and full of very Human mood swings, a little like a Dalek himself – Davros even (Gates, of course, is an emotionless Cyberman viewing mankind as expendable beings to buy his gadgets). Van Statten is itself a name Russell had used before, in his penultimate series pre-Who ‘Mine All Mine’, in which a penniless taxi driver ends up discovering he’s the true heir of Swansea (it’s very much a love song to Wales and starred Gareth Lloyd David a couple of years before his recruitment to Torchwood as regular Ianto Jones). In this draft the Dalek is tortured purely to make it serve van Staten and sing ‘happy birthday’ to him (which would have been quote something in a Dalek voice). It’s a story seen much more from Adam’s point of view, as he realises how dysfunctional his family are and how hanging around hoping to inherit their millions is far more costly than getting out now penniless. One thing that didn’t change from draft to draft was the setting: an ‘area 51’ style bunker (named ‘The Cage’) full of alien weapons that have been stolen or recovered from crashed spaceships, alongside all the more interesting cultural artefacts man should be studying (my favourite scene of the episode has bunker owner Van Statten assuming he’s got hold of an alien weapon only for the Dr to show its really a musical instrument and one that sounds more convincing than anything in ‘Rings Of Akhaten’ to boot; another ‘gun’ turns out to be a hairdryer in one of my favourite DW gags – my candidates for the aliens using it are the Abominable Snowmen or The Monoids. Very Dr Who: if this was an American show they would all be weapons, but even though we’re in an American base the Whoniverse doesn’t work like that). Even so, the script was missing something to make it spark. 

And then Russell mentions the time war and the script all falls into place. Having the Doctor just running round when we didn’t see him having everyday adventures was boring – giving him something he was still recovering from when we met him, something impossibly big that couldn’t possibly be done even on the new bigger budget, raised the stakes that much more and was vastly more in keeping with the darker toned edge of other 21st century stories than the traditional ‘optimistically wandering through space’ idea. Russell wasn’t a big fan of the timelords either, overseeing mini-Gods who could swoop in and solve everything at a stroke, so instead had the most powerful race in the universe locked in a stalemate with the Daleks, the Dr’s people effectively wiped out by a genocide that’s perfectly in keeping with the way Terry Nation used to equate his creations with the Nazis (though for now its shadowy and some of the details aren’t filled in till later). In a sense too the time war is the fan’s trauma of losing their favourite show, of having the universe of the future trapped and unmoving, static. So far the comeback series has been all about looking forwards (yes, even in a story set in Victorian London), but this is the first time the Doctor stops to properly tell Rose (and us) about his past and what he got up to during the years off screen and its one of Russell T Davies’ best ideas, having the Dr be in mourning for all those ‘lost years’ alongside us. The time war element gives this story a whole layer that none of the earlier or later Dalek stories have: the last time these two met in battle unseen, it wasn’t just fighting over a planet of strangers but the Doctor’s homeworld Gallifrey and very nearly every living soul with it; this battle isn’t just to save a planet of stragglers, this time it’s personal. The 9th Dr has clearly been suffering from ptsd and survivor’s guilt (ironic, really, given that the last story of the old run was called ‘Survival’) ever since we first met him, surly and aloof and detached but with sudden howling emotional rages that come out of nowhere, usually after putting a brave face on things and trying to make a joke, but so far fans haven’t been quite sure if he was always going to turn out like that or whether this regeneration was the direct result of trauma we never saw. And now, at last, we know. Because for the first time in the new series the Doctor does something that would have been unthinkable in any of his past eight regenerations but which is entirely in keeping with this story: he comes across the final Dalek (or so we think) and gloats, triumphant in his enemy’s downfall before telling it to die. And the Dalek doesn’t react the way we’ve come to expect from any of the fourteen Dalek stories of the past: he breaks our heart, a creature of pity and suffering who in any less emotional setting would be the first person the Dr would have helped, a last soldier who knows the war is over but for whom fighting has become so much of his identity he doesn’t know what else to do anymore. Had this moment come out of the blue, had it been in the first episode, we’d all have piled on this story for contradicting the entire moral backbone of the series (the way most of us did with ‘The Timeless Child’) but no: we’ve seen flashes of this mystery across the first five stories of ‘new Who’ so the answer, when we get it, feels earned and makes total sense. The time war wasn’t just another war, it changed both Doctor and Dalek forever, it made the Dalek more vulnerable and the Dr more ruthless so that they ended up more like each other than they care to admit. 

There’s another layer upon that with this one in a long line of Dr Who stories debating the need for war and the possibilities of peace. This is only the fifth story since 9/11 and the first to approach it, with Russell T a furious critic of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were fought directly afterwards and all the ‘excuses’ America (with British support) used to do despicable things back. Bush Jnr only left office the year this story was being written and 2005 was very much an era of distrust, when people had been whipped up by speeches and media both to distrust their Muslim friends, neighbours and strangers and see terrorists round every corner. Note that Van Statten is American, not British: we had remarkably few American characters in the original series (I won’t mention Morton Dill if you don’t!) and the base is in the USA not London (or Cardiff) for a change. All the better, then, for a parable of which war the writers are taking pot-shots at here. The Dalek is, in a sense an innocent victim: even though his kind are responsible for a good half of the time war he did no harm to Van Statten but he’s been kept in his museum along with the other relics. As much as the base is like area 51 it’s also Guantanamo Bay, the place where prisoners of war were being locked up and tortured by Americans, generally without trial. Virtually none of the prisoners there had any links to 9/11 and a lot of them weren’t even from the countries where terrorist group Al Qaida had launched their attack (and most of the remainder were innocent bystanders). And yet Bush had to be seen to do something, given how angry his nation had become. Russell was horrified at the idea of politicians claiming to keep people safe by keeping people who weren’t like them in conditions that very much weren’t safe. There was an outcry at the time: people at home began to wonder if it was right to chain and torture soldiers who were only taking orders from terrorists and were real people with real homes rather than cold-blooded killers (we desperately need a sequel about the fact that place is still open, even now). When Rose makes the quip, on hearing that they are filling the base in with concrete, that it’s ‘about time’, you sense she isn’t just talking about Van Statten’s base. And yet ‘Dalek’ the story isn’t as interested in the war was it is in what comes afterwards and it ends up being more like one of those documentaries you see every so often about how two OAP from different sides of wars, their lives shaped forever by the conflict of their youth, finally meet decades after shooting at each other and end up being scared not by how different they are but how similar, the way the war they fought has never quite stopped despite the dates down in the history books, in mourning for all that was lost because of it and haunted by all the ways in which the people they’d grown up to believe were ‘the enemy’ are really people just like them. It’s a whole new way of showing this series-old conflict on screen utterly unlike any of the previous Dalek showdowns, a battle reduced in scale to being one last soldier on either side of the trench who have to decide whether they finish the war off for good or find a truce. 

 So far the 9th Doctor has been very much the teacher to Rose’s pupil but in this story, just for a second, Rose’s natural empathy and kindness and open heart (the very thing that killed the 5th Dr after all) is a reminder to the Doctor of everything he used to be. In a sense this story is a sequel to ‘Evil Of The Daleks’, as the one we see here gets a little bit of Rose’s ‘human factor’ inside him and feels ‘contaminated’ by human concepts of kindness and sacrifice. Yes Rose accidentally frees the Dalek with her kind heart but the Doctor never tells her off for it – instead he’s ashamed that he isn’t like that anymore. War does difficult things to complex people and no character is more complex than the Doctor and this story pushes him to the extreme, to the point where we see this happy, goofy Doctor, whose trying so hard to turn over a new leaf and be likeable, suddenly does something he vowed he would never do and loses control (and right in front of his ‘girlfriend’ Rose just as he’s trying to impress her too), turning momentarily into a Dalek. One of the best lines of the entire comeback is Rose, big hearted Rose who would do anything for this man, breaking down and asking ‘what are you turning into Doctor?’ And for once even this smart alecky incarnation, with an answer for everything, can’t tell her because he doesn’t know who he is himself any more. No wonder the Dalek gets in perhaps the best dig of the whole series minutes later: ‘You would make a good Dalek’ he crows, hitting the Dr right in the hearts where it hurts the most, just at his moment of greatest triumph against his mortal enemy. 

 As for the Dalek, well, it goes on a similar journey which would have seemed unthinkable years before. When I first read the Radio Times preview of series one, complete with Russell T Davies ‘spoilers’, I have to say I was concerned by the line ‘Will you weep for a poor little Dalek?’ Seriously? The xenophobic wheeling nazi metaphor in a tank? Empathy? That’s wrong isn’t it? Not the Daleks at all. Clearly this series was going to be a disaster…And yet you do, because even the worst soldiers are affected by the wars they fight and suddenly all those past seventeen Dalek stories don’t matter. This Dalek isn’t like any others we’ve ever met. He’s alone and scared, just like the Doctor. He’s a prisoner of war in a war he wasn’t even fighting this time. He’s awaiting orders that never come and, like all the best/worst soldiers, he’s trained to not think on his own, so he just doesn’t know what to do anymore, blindly following orders to fight even though they make no sense. Only with utter humiliation he’s been chained up by a lesser species and had his exterminator taken away from him so he can’t even follow his basic training (he’s like the new recruit in prisoner of war films whose fingers are still reaching for their gun automatically even though it got taken away a long time ago). This is a Dalek whose also haunted by what came before every bit as much as the Dr and wants to be free of the war, but like many a soldier he’s been taught to survive above all else so goes on a killing spree because what else is there for it to do? This is all it knows and these people are hurting it, so why should he show mercy? Suddenly this Dalek doesn’t seem such a monster – the Doctor does, giving it orders to exterminate itself when its hurt and defenceless (and in the end its Rose who acts as go-between for them both, with peaceful solutions both are too prejudiced to see). 

Many writers on Dr Who in any era forget what the Daleks really are, they see the metal casing and think that’s the whole monster (Douglas Adams, for one, seems to have spent the entire time script-editing ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ thinking Daleks were pure robots, with no one telling him otherwise), but there’s a tiny vulnerable lump of green goo inside that uses the tank to hide behind because it’s so scared and vulnerable and that deserves our pity (even if it would shoot us for giving it). In the same way that a lot of bullies are cowards underneath if you scratch the surface, afraid of anyone having power over them so they take control over other people and in the same way that most ring-wingers are secretly scared that people better and more able than them will take what they have away from them, so the Daleks are just trying to get the first shot in before someone does the same to the, with trauma of their own after the atomic war with the Thals that’s been a part of their story since their first story ‘The Daleks’. No other Dalek story remembers that detail quite as well as this one and of all the many sequels to the first story (including the ones written by creator Terry Nation) this one gets closest to the heart of what made that story work: you weren’t just scared of the Daleks, you pitied them too, trapped inside the machines they needed for survival but unable to experience ‘normal’ life ever again. There are lots of subtle bits of writing in this story that make you see this Dalek as more than just a ‘monster’. Given that the original Terry Nation Dalek stories started as a metaphor for prejudice and a Nazi style quest for racial purity that blinds the Daleks to everything else, it’s so poetically fitting this story, turning the tables on the Dr 9 and us older fans, makes us question all the cultural baggage we’ve heaped on this one Dalek and see history in a more modern way than we used to, seeing it as an individual, not an army, not a general, not a leader, just a footsoldier (well, wheel soldier I guess but you catch my drift). There’s even a brilliant bit of writing where the Dalek opens its casing, open and vulnerable in a way Daleks never are, enjoying the sunlight it’s been hiding from for so long before it dies (usually we only see a ‘proper’ Dalek when its casing has been destroyed), suddenly turning human at the point where it destroys itself forever because to go on living with such turmoil is just too much for it, one of the saddest scenes in all of Who, notwithstanding the fact that he was exterminating humans left, right and centre (and up and down) just a few scenes ago. Of course I was weeping. You’d have to be a, well, Dalek not to cry at scenes like that one. Cleverest of all for a story about war this tale creates a mini-one in the family household watching this on first transmission too and is a story that plays different depending which side of the sofa you’re on, just like the 1960s Dr Whos of old. If you’re little and this is all new to you then you’re instantly on the side of Rose: why is the Dr being so mean? This poor thing, its in pain, of course Rose should be helping him! And if you’re an older fan whose seen the other stories and what the Dr had to do in those to save people then you’re instantly on his side: of course he has to destroy this Dalek before it can do any harm, it’s pure evil! And like all the best Dr Who stories somehow those conflicting viewpoints have to come together to find a compromise in the end. 

Truly, though, this is one of those exceptional stories that works all the way through. Yes Van Statten is a bit of a clichéd bully, an American millionaire whose a bit shouty whose Dalek-like not because he’s pushed as far as the Doctor or the Dalek in this story but simply because he can afford not to have to worry about anyone else’ feelings (the story works better if you view him as a nerdy Bill Gates type with ideas of becoming a macho killer he was never cut out to be – good as Corey Johnson is as a swaggering Schwarzenegger the point would come over better still if they’d stuck to that idea). Even so you need a wannabe Human-Dalek contrast like Van Statten in a story like this, someone living off manipulation and instinct and greed who in his own way is less understandable a baddy than the more direct Dalek (and I love the way he’s just cast out by his underling Goddard by story’s end to become homeless and forgotten, the way he was sounding off to his scared staff earlier). Yes new boy Adam is a right pain, chatting up Rose and showing off gadgetry, something that gave me more nightmares than the Dalek at the time when I feared he was about to become a full-blown companion, but as things turn out he’s meant to be that wet behind the ears (next story ‘The Long Game’ shows up why Rose is exactly the sort of warm hearted open minded person that deserves to be travelling in the Tardis and money-grabbing Adam isn’t, but of course we at home don’t know that yet so it just looks as if Rose is acting up after a tiff with the Dr and has gone a bit loopy dragging an unsuitable boyfriend along as a backup). There’s maybe not as big a sense of what this underground base (a kind of area 51) is, how far it extends and just what else it contains beyond a single storeroom or the handful of staff we see. 

 The ‘torture’ scenes maybe go a little too far for a family audience too, the reason the first series carries a ‘12’ certificate when most of the others don’t. I know a few little ‘uns who were quite happy to see Slitheeens and Gelth blow up and were less upset than I was at the death of a talking tree, but who were deeply upset by the Doctor’s behaviour here and stopped watching, for a few weeks at least. Actually the Doctor was written to be mocking in these scenes and everyone was surprised at rehearsals when Eccleston started throwing his weight around and screaming (legend has it he was channelling his anger at his dad being poorly in the hospital and the strict Who schedule not being able to give him more than a few snatched days off to go see him he also said privately that he channelled the idea of a holocaust victim coming across a Nazi in chains; which given that Terry Nation created the Daleks partly out of his sheer hatred for all things Nazi is closer to the truth than Chris probably realised at the time). It works though: if the Doctor had just gone ‘hey ho’ so would the audience – we need to see that the Doctor is scared of a Dalek in a way that he isn’t by all the other creatures he meets. More than that we need to see the Doctor out of control not just swapping insults and it makes more sense that this particular jumpy, passionate Doctor would turn into the angry man in a leather jacket you wouldn’t want to go near after dark would end up that way. Honestly its no worse than similar scenes in ‘Vengeance On Varos’ and making a similar anti-violence point and well nobody seemed to care much about its effect on us 1980s kids (we turned out fine. Erm, mostly). Oddly enough it was Van Statten’s lines about the British ‘spooning’ that caused the most controversy and complaints about sexual connotations in a family show by Mary Whitehouse’s 21st century successors ‘mediawatch’ (to which I say…did you actually know any children in 2005?! They heard far worse than that on the playground. And you just wait till Captain Jack comes along!) Almost everything else in this story is a triumph though and ‘Dalek’ the story earns the accolade of being my favourite Dalek story from Who old series or new. 

 All the more remarkable, then, that at one stage it very nearly didn’t feature the Daleks at all until close before filming: despite okaying hippie Daleks eating kit-kats Terry Nations’ estate were still umming and ahhing about whether to sanction the use of the Daleks in the new-look series, worried that their beloved father/grandfather/uncle’s greatest creations might be tarred with the same brush of silliness if the show wasn’t any good when it came back (and if that seems harsh then, well, bear in mind the Daleks’ last official appearance before this had been in 30th anniversary special ‘Dimensions In Time’ where they’re up against that deadliest of foes: half the cast of Eastenders). So the Daleks were taken out (Shearman jokingly calling his next draft ‘Absence Of the Daleks’!) For a while the Daleks were re-written as the Toclofane, the small metal balls of hate-filled children Russell brought back for ‘Utopia’. That would have made for a perfectly good story too, but thank goodness Nation’s estate came round in the end: this is very much a Dalek story, from the tip of its chrome dome to its metal alloy wheels and to have another monster involved wouldn’t have given this story the huge big dimensions it has and it makes one of the most overused, overwritten monsters in scifi seem fresh and young again, breathing new life and ‘regenerating’ them the same way new life was breathed into the Dr a few episodes earlier. Even when Terry’s estate backed down, thanks to a copy of early rushes and scripts for other stories, the BBC still tried to dilute this script with the ending one of the few things they tried to over-rule: surely, they said, the Dalek should end up friends with Rose rather than commit suicide? But that would have been even more unthinkable Shearman stuck to his guns and demanded the script be kept as it was and the BBC, figuring that probably no one would watch anyway, rolled their eyes and let them get on with it. Indeed, it’s that brave ending that makes this story: if anything it’s ‘Bad Wolf’ that rather takes away from it, with hints that this lone Dalek really escaped and brought its pals back with it for revenge against humanity (I’d much rather think it was a rare honest Dalek, imbued with the benevolent spirit of Rose and the internet, telling the truth here). 

 If ever a story in the run of the new series made me feel that proper Dr Who was back – not just the nuts and bolts or the production values or the continuity references to past adventures but the ethos, the storytelling and understanding of what made the old series special - then ‘Dalek’ was it. A story that let me sleep safely at night knowing the ‘right’ people were in charge of my favourite show – even if, perhaps because, of it being a story that meant the Doctor and his greatest foe hating one another meant I felt like never sleeping ever again. This is a story that makes full use of the biggest change in the series since the comeback: the emotion. Rose feels the Dalek’s pain. The doctor feels guilt and regret. The Dalek finds that emotions are brutal. And somehow, even though we’d never had an emotional Dalek story before, it works because of the strong characters of all life-forms. Shearman’s script is a triumph: the old traditional view of Dalek stories was that they were good for action but bad for dialogue, given that they speak in such a spare bare monotone, but Shearman turns that on his head. This Dalek is wittier, smarter and more poetic than any of the humans. He’s much like the Doctor in fact, full of pithy one-liners that cut through to the heart of the action (we’ve had so many ‘talky’ Doctors in the years since it’s almost a shock to come back to series one and see just how much space there is in these scripts, with space for the Doctor thinking to himself rather than out loud the way the 10th 11th and 13th Doctors in particular do) and pretty much two out of three lines in this story are quotable classics that either are or deserve to be on merchandise (my favourite is Rose discussing bringing Adam along: ‘Let him come with us, he says he wants to see the stars’ ‘Well, tell him to go outside then!’) This is a really tight script, where barely a word is wasted, and without the padding common to practically every other story. It’s a huge loss to the show that Shearman hasn’t written for the series again (and not for lack of asking either, but the show as it became just grew too ‘big’ for him to be comfortable with all the extra scrutiny that goes with the job nowadays). The acting, too, sells the drama in the script: you feel every last word, every last thereat, every last twist of the drama. Even now, so many Dalek stories on, this one has never been beaten. Just when we feared we were going to get a shallow cartoon we got as adult and serious a drama as any in the show’s long history, all my doubts about the new series exterminated inside fifty minutes. Bringing back The Daleks for a series that had so much resting on it was a gamble. Bringing them back like this, in a way we’d never seen before, was an even bigger gamble. But both Davies and Shearman knew how brilliant the Daleks were when they were done ‘right’ and knew they were onto something when everyone kept coming up and touching the props during camera rehearsals, coating it with fingerprints to the point where a sign had to be added saying ‘please do not touch the Dalek – or you will be exterminated!’ Soon that idea would be playing out everywhere and I can’t tell you how proud |I was, as one of the last ‘new’ fans to join in with the old series, to pass a school playground and hear children playing at being Daleks just like I used to. That’s the moment when I knew this series was safe. The comeback series worked partly because of how consistent and adventurous it was but if it owes its success to any two episodes it’s the opener ‘Rose and this one, the story that went to places no episode had been to before, while honouring old friends (and enemies). 

 Oh and incidentally, one of my favourite details of this story is the way the Dalek effectively brings itself up to date with what’s been happening on Earth via the internet (at the same time we’re brought up to date with what’s happened with the Doctor), something that just wasn’t around for the old series. If any Dalek or indeed any other monster in the future uploads the entire internet as part of its rejuvenation process it will find I’ve written quite a lot of it via my three blogs. So if you see a Dalek walking round tutting, complaining about the Spice Girls, making bad puns and getting into flower power and taking up peace and love instead just know that you’ll have me to thank, okay?!

 POSITIVES + I love museums, the closest humans can get to time travel (old timers might have noticed we haven’t got to a certain Hartnell story set in a museum yet and I’m quickly running out of reviews) and even more so ones in the Whoniverse that collect together all sorts of artefacts on screen. Admittedly this one is more of a private collection of stolen artefacts and we don’t get to see much of this one bar a Slitheen claw and a ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ head, but even that was a thrill at a time they hadn’t come back on screen yet (for all we knew we weren’t going to get any more Dr Who post 2005 ever – its only right and proper the show’s second most important baddy should be in there somewhere). Just having things from multiple cultures, all clearly different, rubbing shoulders on a shelf says more about how big the Whoniverse is than any amount of CGI shots of planets in space. It’s an attention to detail that just didn’t need to be there for the sake of the plot and yet is there to please fans like me, because this is a show being made by fans for other fans who know what will excite the audience. I only wish we’d got this story maybe later in the run so we could have had a whole collection of props like this (the ‘old’ series props, of course, having been lost, sold, recycled, raffled or disintegrated long ago by 2005). This aspect also allows a bit of a ‘Toy Story II’ theme in there too: amazingly there were more Dr Who things to buy than ever, mostly because there were now more independent family companies making stuff beyond the old days with just a handful of big name manufacturers. Slowly, though, the merchandise range had moved on from ‘toys for you to re-create your own Dr Who adventures’ and more towards ‘collectibles that sit in a box and gather dust and money’. As a fan who’d played with so many Who toys himself Russell knew how intrinsically ‘wrong’ this was for a series that was pro-imagination and anti-greed, so the Doctor gets a rant in here about people ‘collecting’ the universe’ and bringing it down to their level without really understanding it, rather than exploring the possibilities it offers. 

 NEGATIVES - With so much subtle emotion going on in the dialogue its rather a shame that Murray Gold chooses now to become louder and more hammy than ever, drowning out some of the words with his all-singing all-dancing orchestras and choirs, plus a synthesiser he’s got out the loft to make it sound ‘Daleky’ (thankfully he never tries this again, as it never quite worked in the 1980s and certainly not in 2005). It’s all a bit loud isn’t it? I SAID IT’S ALL A BIT LOUD ISN’T IT?! Gold’s at his best across the rest of this first season, filling in the gaps of the emotions these characters aren’t telling each other (especially the 9th Dr, who leaves more gaps and silences to fill than Murray’s other talkier Drs 10-12) but here, in a story where the Dr’s already been pushed to such extremes that he’s an emotional ball of fury spitting venom, we can already see what he’s thinking more than clearly and musicians tugging at our heart-strings just get in the way of a job the script is doing far more subtly. 

BEST QUOTE: ‘You just want to drag the stars down and stick them underground, underneath tones of sand and dirt and label them. You’re about as far from the stars as you can get. And you took [Rose] down with you!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ’Jubilee’ means this is, of course, all déjà vu for the Doctor. Back in the days before the comeback this 2003 Big Finish story (#40 in the main range) already seemed ‘special’. You can see why it so appealed to Russell T that he used it in all his pitch meetings as its effectively Dr Who pared down to its essences: a Doctor versus a Dalek, re-introduced in a story that makes them chilling. All the plot beats from the final story are there: the eccentric millionaire is part of the British aristocracy and there’s no time war, but there is a big showdown in a museum where a Dalek is being tortured and it is the Doctor’s companion Evelyn (a mature history student and the single best Who companion not seen on telly) whose kindness for the tortured alien sets off events and has her questioning the Doctor’s motives when she sees how terrified and angry he is. The stakes are just as high, the tension just as palpable. However the ‘feel’ of this story is very different. The 6th Doctor might be shouty on TV but in the audio adventures he’s older and calmer, more of an eccentric grandfather than an angry young man (and it’s a part that suits Colin Baker far more), his conversations with Evelyn more banter than the bickering he had with Peri. This Doctor isn’t as scarred or as scared as the 9th Doctor – his actions are more because he knows the damage one lone Dalek can do and nobody else seems to be taking the threat seriously. With less action sequences and more supporting characters this version of the story is more of a philosophical debate. Honestly I’m not sure which approach is better – I like the depth of the audio version and loved it long before the TV one, but it’s not as if that was a disappointment: the fact that you cans see the threat of the Dalek on screen makes the TV version all the more ‘real’. Fans who like one version, however, are sure to like both. Look out for the pizza company ‘Jubilee’ that delivers to the Van Statten base by the way, a quick in-joke for fans who already had this story (though sadly nobody orders any ‘Dalek bread’ to go with it!) 

‘Sven and the Scarf’ was one of many short extras created at home by Dr Who writers and actors during the 2020 covid lockdown (I won’t say the ‘2020 pandemic’ because we’re very much still in it) as an ‘extra’ to go with whichever regular ‘Dr Who watchathon’ was taking place that week with various people on twitter talking live like some big DVD commentary and uploaded to the Dr Who Youtube channel for free (I’m amazed that to date there has yet to be a DVD or Blu-Ray collecting them). This is one of the sillier, more pointless ones, mostly because Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper were busy doing other things and while Shearman gave his blessing to the project he didn’t fancy writing it. Instead it’s Who podcast presenter (‘Type 40’) Andrew Ireland who wrote and directed this piece with Leo Flanagan (Charlie in ‘Kerblam!’) playing the part of autopsy medic Sven. Set in Van Statten’s museum shortly before the events of ‘Dalek’ and a parody of the infamous Roswell autopsy tapes (that may or may not or may be half a hoax with human-made bits attached) the millionaire with more money than sense thinks he’s got a hugely valuable artefact, one that’s passed down through the space-time continuum after seven years in orbit and which has been parcelled up with heaps of bubble wrap for extra safety precautions. Not really a spoiler, given that it’s both an obvious punchline and its in the title, but it’s the 4th Doctor’s scarf. Goodness when he lost it – down the ‘Pit’ with Erato, on the space station of ‘The Invisible Enemy’ or in e-space maybe? At least Ireland knows his Who continuity and gives us lots of extra gags: samples include ‘remnant of alien grub like organism’ which happens to look just like bubble-wrap (the Wirrn in ‘The Ark In Space’ really was made of this packaging delight!), two wires that reminds him of a conflict (the big famous speech in ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’), a piece of sponge that might be a computer – or could just be a sponge (see ‘Terror Of The Zygons’), a ‘silicone based life-form’ that makes Sven go all funny and start talking about Eldrad (see ‘The Hand Of Fear’), an alien cactus that’s nearly a mega-loss’ (see ‘Meglos’) and a scary shrunken head (actually a jelly baby!) Good fun, but it doesn’t exactly add to your enjoyment of the episode. Oh and if we’re close to the Doctor’s arrival then presumably Sven is Adam’s predecessor, the unfortunate technician who ‘burst into flames’. Which makes you wonder if the next package was from Karn or Sarn, the two ‘hottest’ planets in Dr Who (except the ones in the process of blowing up or disappearing into a sun anyway). 

 Previous ‘Aliens Of London/World War Three’ next ‘The Long Game’

Boom Town: Ranking - 81

             Boom Town

(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 4/6/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Joe Ahearne) 

Rank: 81

In an emoji: 🥚

   'You say I never look my prisoners in the eye? Well look around you, this restaurant is full of my other selves dining with monsters. There's my first self eating vitalite with a Sensorite. My second incarnation is enjoying an ice cream with an ice warrior. The 3rd Dr's forgotten about the nestene consciousness and is hiding under the table from the killer plastic forks. My 4th regeneration is chasing a Fendahl with table salt while munching on jelly babies. My 5th self is  sharing a stick of celery with a Tractator. My 6th self is enjoying a baked potato with a sontaron. The 7th Dr is having some liquorice allsorts with the Kandy Man. The 10th Dr is eating some face of Boescits with the big face himself. Dr 11 is staring at some weeping angel cakes. The 12th Dr is having a KFC boneless banquet with The Boneless. And the 13th Dr is having garlic with the Daleks'. 

 

In Boom Town (Cardiff to you!) the Boom Town rat-Slitheens have all left the sinking ship except for one and Margaret Slitheen does not like Mondays (I’m guessing this story takes place on a Monday for the purposes of the joke anyway). In ‘old’ Who DW flirted occasionally with the idea that the Dr couldn’t swan in and out of people’s lives forever willy nilly without having it come back to haunt him in some way – ‘The Ark’ restarts the story partway through to show a before and after the 1st Dr got involved and the 4th Dr causes the plot of ‘Face Of Evil’ and ends up being declared ‘The Evil One’. But more even than these stories ‘Boom Town’ looks at what happens six months after an alien invasion has been thwarted and the Dr has left – only to return. One of the best aspects of ‘Aliens In London/WWIII’ was the way in which Russell T Davies was at pains to point out that his first alien creation the Slitheen who were trying to take over the Earth weren’t all bad – we were just seeing one rogue family on the make that had grown up crooked (and every planet has at least one family like that – most of humanity’s just happened to be in power in that story, that’s all) and even they weren’t all bad, just opportunistic. Alas as episodes tick by Russell seems to forget this very Dr Who trait that not all monsters from outer space are evil – we get a string of people who want to murder us in our beds, from the Gelth to the Reavers to the Jagarafess not to mention The Daleks - but in this story we get a whole backstory exploring why the monster of the week a couple of months ago turned out the way she did. Here we return to WWIII’s most interesting character, Margaret Slitheen, and her attempts to hide in a human bodysuit in plain sight in Cardiff even after her evil plan’s been rumbled as she runs around making friends, keeping up her job and building nuclear power stations. Yes she still has a scheme to kill us all but she’s slowly losing heart as she goes native and discovers that the humans she mingles with are actual people with actual lives and not just vermin to be destroyed. And suddenly she’s not so evil now her nasty relatives are nowhere to be seen and corrupt her. She starts the story sparing a journalist after learning that she’s pregnant and has by now fallen in love with all the daft quirks of her adopted home world to the point where she’s carved out a new life for herself actually doing some good for the humans around her (give or take the nuclear power). The Doctor’s not having any of it at first – this is the more bruised, less merciful 9th incarnation after all – and for him and an equally sceptical Rose it’s only been a few episodes since Margaret Slitheen was killing people without a second thought. But time changes everything in this series and she really does seem to have genuinely changed with the space to get to know the people she was killing as friends rather than prey and with time to think over her actions. Whether this escaped convict still deserves mercy for changing too late in the day is up for debate though and that debate is right at the heart of this story, which asks all the questions Dr Who had never thought to ask before about things like the death penalty and the morals of how we treat our prisoners (Russell T Davies is a fierce opponent of capital punishment, believing in mercy for all and afraid of mistakes that happen with the justice system, a theme that’s cropped up in a few of his pre-Who shows. 

So, ‘Boom Town’ is Dr Who at its most hippie-ish then, like the days of the 1960s when the Doctor hung around Tibet and inspired six youthful revolutions before breakfast? Not quite. This story (originally called ‘Dining With Monsters’) is about second helpings but also just desserts. This doctor in particular is no mug (despite looking like a Toby Jug) and doesn’t buy anything Margaret Slitheen says to him across the story – rightly so given some of her obvious ploys but even when she’s obviously telling the truth. During the course of her ‘last super’ before the Doctor hands her over to her people to be executed she both plays on his sympathies with tales of what they actually do to prisoners (dissolve them in acid and feed them to the venom grubs from ‘The Web Planet’ while still conscious, the sort of fate too nasty even for certain politicians) and physically attacks him, but the Doctor sees every attack coming emotional and actual and just sits there with his best stony face on. Usually the Doctor leaves this sort of mopping-up operation up to other people (UNIT have their uses after all!) but here, for the first time in a long time, he has to look at one of the people he’s captured and look them in the eyes. Rose doesn’t get off the hook either and has to face the consequences of her actions in this story – it’s been a while now since she ran off with the Doctor and her mum and her ex have developed new lives without her, something she finds hard to take. But why should they live their lives waiting for her? Dr Who has always been at pains to point out that everyone is special and even the girl the Doctor chose to travel and fall for above all others is no more deserving of a full and proper life than anyone else. Rose left a void, but it’s a void that other people deserve to fill. This is a rare story in this first series when you side with comedy coward Mickey and narrow-minded mum Jackie over brave but selfish Rose and you get to see the universe through their eyes, trying to live their ordinary lives at a normal speed while Rose flits through it with tales of adventure but nothing solid for them to reach to. ‘Boom Town’ is, then, the quiet beating heart of the series, asking all the questions of the main characters they haven’t had to answer till now –in any era. That’s what I love about ‘new Who’ and the one thing it gets ‘right’ consistently over the ‘classic’ series: that idea of consequences, that even the Doctor in a space-time travel machine can’t escape the ripples of his actions. It feels as if the series has been set up to make this episode a pay-off for those thoughts. 

 So much so that this story, which returns to the scene of the first story filmed for new-Who (but shown 4th) feels like it was written decades later by a much subtler and thoughtful writer and all part of some grand Russell T Davies masterplan story arc, one where he would show us how nothing in the Whoniverse or our universe is ever quite as black and white as it seems on the telly and how the real moral of this show is to be kind to people when you don’t know what they’re going through, even when they’re not being kind to you; this is, after all, a rare series where the lead hero never acts out of revenge and doesn’t believe in an eye-for-an-eye, who never carries a weapon (bar a sonic screwdriver and the occasional tin dog), someone who offers mercy more times than not. It’s the perfect near-ending of the 9th Doctor’s story arc as he moves from angst-ridden wounded warrior with survivor’s guilt who hates the universe he sacrificed so many people to save in the time war to the sort of person who, mostly thanks to hanging around Rose, believes in second chances and that things can get better. Except ‘Boom Town’ was very much a last minute substitute, a deliberately low budget episode at the end of the season. Because, ah yes this is the infamous ‘difficult 11th episode’(though for some seasons such as series three, it’s the 10th): the one that’s always written in the schedules in pencil because of last-minute changes and cancellations and over-running stories, tucked away near the end of recording schedules as an afterthought. Something always seems to go wrong here (it’s same slot as ‘Fear Her’ Utopia’ and ‘Midnight', all of which had teething problems of their own). Originally this slot was meant to house a story from Stephen Fry (who not only dropped out unprofessionally late but then rudely slagged the series off in the press). Then it was a story by Russell’s friend Paul Abbott but that fell through too when ‘Shameless’ became his breakout hit (of all the writers who’ve submitted proposals for modern Who he’s the one with least idea of the series: he submitted a story proposal that undid everything Russell had carefully set up at a stroke by writing a plot that had Rose as an artificial construction bred to be the Doctor’s ‘perfect companion’. There’s a tale that Russell got the scene breakdown and rang up mock-angrily laugh-shouting ‘what the hell did you do to my creation?!’) For a while this story was what became ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ but Russell realised quickly that it would cost too much for this slot, which had to be dirt cheap with what was left over from the other episodes (which wasn’t a lot). Knuckling down to work Russell started a story that sounds a lot like what became ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, where the Doctor and Rose find themselves walking down corridors in a land so far in the future that the normal rules of science don’t apply, finding themselves revealing secrets about their guilty past as they walk – this was nixed because the technology wasn’t there to do it back then and it gave away a bit too much about these characters that other stories had already told better. Instead, with deadlines looming and time ticking, Russell wrote ‘Boom Town’ at more or less the last minute – his only script of that first year having seen how the series looked in the rushes and so was able to tweak it to the characters he saw. Most of Russell’s stories thus far had been in his head for years, even decades: this one’s turnaround from first draft to last was just weeks. 

 This particular story was inspired by two things: one is that Russell had been given the chance to act as a stand-in on Who’s first recording session (he was ‘being’ Christopher Eccleston while they set the lighting rig, although even Eccleston isn’t quite as tall as Russell) opposite Annette Badland and found himself apologising for how wasted she clearly was in a part that gave her little to do and that he would write her a bigger one next time. The other is that Wales isn’t just ‘the cheapest and most easily available place willing to make Dr Who’ anymore – it’s become a home, the place where Dr Who regenerated. So far this year we’ve only seen Cardiff standing in for London or as various alien planets with the exception of ‘The Unquiet Dead’ but even that was how the city appeared in the 19th century. Here Russell uses every trick in the book to show off his new home city at its best, repaying the favour the city took by giving Dr Who a home and being so welcoming and so proud of the series made on their doorstep, a place so wonderful even aliens fall in love with it and find themselves reformed. There’s a lot of Wales in this story – officially because it was the nearest place to film and Russell knew the area well after a year there filming, but also you suspect because he’s fallen in love with the country that had so taken to having DW made there for the first time. Among the buildings we see prominently are The Glamorgan Building, home of the city council who had been so helpful with filming requirements and Millennium Centre Square (the place where the Tardis lands) which Russell could actually see from his home writing desk. I also wonder if this story is a Russell T in-joke about the famous Pertwee quote (in a Radio Times interview no less) where he rather defensively said of the Earthbound format of the 1970s that ‘it was scarier to come across a Yeti on your loo in Tooting Bec’ than in outer space; here we start the story with a Slitheen actually on the loo in Cardiff – not Cardiff pretending to be somewhere else, but very much the actual Cardiff. Watch out too for the brilliant and heartfelt dig put in by Russell after 26 years of DW being such a London-centred series almost always made in the nation’s capital: Margaret Slitheen can hide in Cardiff because ‘London doesn’t care – the South West Coast could fall into the sea and they wouldn’t notice’ (this is the moment she realises ‘God help me, I’ve gone native!’ So native she even apparently lives in the same block as flats as Owen from Torchwood: how bad at alien hunting is he?!) A lot of people Russell had worked with that year were saying much the same to him and how pleased they were to house a series that would put them on the map that normally would be made in London automatically. Re-using an actress who’d been a proven hit and a local setting that was cheap were also big plusses for what was the lowest budgeted episode of the series (and therefore the whole of the ‘reboot’ series so far, given the extra money Who got after this). 

There’s no way even Fry, one of our celebrated intellectuals, could have come up with a script this clever: ‘Boom Town’ feels like Russell, the two-part finale finished, writing the last episode for what might be his one and only shot at writing for Dr Who (which had only been commissioned for a single series at the time) and making the most of this unexpected chance to ask the big questions that have been puzzling him all his years as a fan: what happened when the Tardis left at the end of a story? Did things go back to normal? Were the baddies changed by their experience? Was the Doctor? Would all of them have done the exact same thing if they’d known how everything turned out in the end? Being one of the more empathetic and character-driven writers for the series in any era, it’s no surprise he’s the first writer to ask out loud ‘what happens to everyone when the Dr leaves?’ It may well be writing ‘Long Game’ as a set-up for the ‘Bad Wolf’ series finale set Russell off thinking down these lines as there, too, it’s the vacuum left by the Dr’s interference that causes all the problems. That story’s a Dalek trap though, left because they know one or other Doctor will come along and try to put things right; this story returns to a tale that was deliberately written to feel very much like a traditional Dr Who story and isn’t a trap so much as an accident; Margaret Slitheen thinks she’s gotten away with her crimes and thinks she’ll never see the Dr again. It may be, too, that Russell was inspired by this story’s namesake, a 1940 Western: two men from out of town down on their luck hatch up a plan to steal drilling equipment and make their fortune by stealing from the locals, only to find the plan takes so long that they fall in love with the place and become locals themselves, desperately trying to cover up their guilty secret of why they first came into town (the story ends with the being accepted and turning their money over to the locals, before being given equipment legitimately so they can start all over again and make their own fortune). In that sense the title works as a triple pun: it not only references the film but also the earthquake that shatters the restaurant windows and Russell’s plan to put Cardiff on the tourist map and make it a ‘boom town’. 

 A lot of fans dismiss this story as the runt of the series one litter – this is, after all, the one story this year with monsters we’ve seen before in a Cardiff setting that’s become as familiar as our own back yards by episode 11 (even if meant to be somewhere else) and on a sheer spectacle level its clear how much excitement levels have dropped since we got crowd scenes of monsters in episode two when all we get is one big blast, a little bit of running and a lot of talking. But that’s precisely what I love about this story: there’s no special effects to hide behind, no big monster to be the ‘shock absorber’ that lets everyone get away with a subpar plot, no incidental character to get all the good lines. Instead it’s just a cracking script full of wit and character that goes to places no Dr Who story before or since bothered to visit. Arguably we learn more about the 9th Dr in this than his other 12 episodes put together now Russell has seen how Eccleston plays him on screen, as a tough man forever trying to break into a smile before he remembers what he’s been through. He’s deeply in love with Rose by this time and she’s brought out his compassionate side, even while Captain Jack brings out a very human streak of jealousy we’ve not seen from him before and the Slitheen brings out his callous ruthless side to boot, triggering his merciless angry side. We also see the darker flashes hinted at in ‘Dalek’ (which clearly surprised Russell when Robert Shearman came up with them but which he loved, judging by the Radio Times preview and his emails to Dr Who magazine), with the Doctor clearly stung by Margaret Slitheen’s pot-shots that the Dr’s no different from her, becoming the unelected judge and executioner of so many baddies (best put down when he talks to her about how letting some people go doesn’t automatically make her good – ‘only a killer would know that’). This is a doctor who once killed strangers at the press of a button in the time war who now has to look his enemy in the eye and you can see that it haunts him in new ways all over again, as he thinks about all the people whose eyes he didn’t see who still went through the same agonies. One of the biggest surprises in Christopher Eccleston’s brief time in the Tardis was how good this famously dark and brooding drama actor was at the comedy (he’s kind of the opposite of Jon Pertwee and Sylvester McCoy, who were hired for the laughs and ended up making their Drs more serious and darker-edged – Eccleston’s CV practically had ‘gritty kitchen sink northerner’ all over it); Russell’s clearly taken that on board and written him a comic tour de force here which he sells to perfection. The scene in the restaurant for the convicted Margaret Slitheen’s ‘last meal’ (look out for the girl dining who screams when the glass shatters by the way – that’s Billie Piper’s series double Kim Garritty in her only on-screen appearance) where Mrs Slitheen tries every trick in the book on him where he just nonchalantly stops her poisoned darts and poisoned breath without glancing up from the menu is one of the funniest Dr Who scenes of them all and a perfect example of how comedy works at its best in this series, complementing rather than subtracting from the drama and horror. This is, after all, a person so desperate to stay alive they’re resorting to desperate measures, even if they’re measures the Doctor sees coming a mile away. Only at the end does the Slitheen give up tricking him and beg for pity – and then we see a whole different side to this Doctor, one that he thought the time war had taken forever but which, mostly being around Rose, he begins to re-open up. 

It’s a neat bit of character development we’d miss if this moment wasn’t there and the 9th Doctor simply regenerated a story later (and it’s vague whether Russell T knew this would be his last story for Christopher Eccleston or not). It’s been an unspoken rule that each regeneration of the Doctor has to ‘learn’ something before they can move on to the person they’re meant to be next, something which is underplayed in ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The ways’ because of the need to set up a really big potential ending point for the series. The first Doctor’s arc slowly moves him from self-preservationist to sacrificing himself for others. The second Doctor slowly learns the need to be responsible and doing the right thing, even when knowing what his own people might do to him (a far cry from where he starts, making jokes tooling on his recorder and trying on hats). The third Doctor learns that his curiosity gets the people around him into trouble. The fourth learns that even he can’t outrun fate and gravity forever. The fifth Doctor learns the high price of being such a given person and so on (things trip up because the 6th Doctor is effectively exterminated by Michael Grade before he’s ready – although this arc would have been the most explicit of them all had it gone the way Colin Baker and Eric Saward planned – while the 7th and 8th Doctor eras ended prematurely). This Doctor’s arc is in many ways the opposite of the 5th Doctor in ‘Caves Of Androzani’ – the time war made him a bitter, angry man afraid to feel for any other living thing in case it meant them dying too. But in the next story (spoilers) Rose literally saves him from dying (not just regenerating but dying, because there’s no way the Daleks would have stopped when he turned into David Tennant) because she cares for him so much. It’s here that Russell T shows the contrast most with who the Doctor is now compared to what he was when we first met him in ‘Rose’ and warning Rose off because he worked better alone – now he’s got a team around him and he’s ‘domesticated’ for lack of a better word, looking comfortable walking round a city in modern-day Britain with a gang and hanging around dining in restaurants. He’s healed, at peace with his actions as much as he ever can be (it wasn’t that long ago, in ‘Dalek’, he was scaring Rose with his darker side) so even the thing that would normally set him off and trigger him (Margaret pointing out that he’s a killer and not that unlike her deep down) doesn’t affect him anymore. Last minute substitution for a ‘bigger’ story ‘Boom Town’ might be but the series one arc wouldn’t work as well without it. 

 The Doctor bounces between all these many different sides in this series like an alien pinball machine and in the end, rather than be his usual decisive self, he leaves it up to the Tardis what happens next and she pops out an egg, ready to live her life all over again. The (spoilers) ending is seen by some fans as a trick and has been much criticised but I really like it: Russell’s been thinking hard about his stance on capital punishment and like many an empathetic soul before him can see where people go wrong isn’t always because of their nature but through nurture and the effect of the people around them. Freed of the need to impress her evil family Margaret Slitheen has discovered a whole way of thinking she never even knew existed and is worthy of a second chance – the ‘badness’ in her might be too ingrained to make a difference, but then she’ll end up meeting the Doctor all over again and facing the same fate. Until then the script cleverly keeps you guessing till the end whether the Dr’s really going to go through with sending Margaret Slitheen back to Raxacofalipatorious to be executed or whether he’s going to go ‘soft’ and let her go free. Indeed, of all the ending in Dr Who, this is one of my favourite: the Doctor isn’t judge jury or executioner but the bringer of hope that things will be different next time – and whether they are or not is up to you. I’m amazed, in fact, that the more Buddhist end of the Dr Who spectrum, writers like Barry Letts and Christopher bailey, hadn’t got their first. Yes it would have helped if we’d known the Tardis had this capability first, but then the Tardis should always be surprising us: it’s not like other machines and the way things turn out is entirely in keeping with the earliest Dr Who stories like ‘Edge Of Destruction’ that stress how much this is a machine that can ‘think’. 

One thing I wish had been developed more is the political satire that made ‘Aliens In London’ so memorable. Margaret Slitheen gets out of trouble repeatedly by effectively being a ‘politician’, hiding in plain sight amongst other human politicians who are just as corrupt as she is. Near the start the script throws in the fact that she’s been working on a ‘Bad Wolf’ nuclear station in the heart of Wales and conned everyone into thinking that it’s a good thing that she’s been cutting safety measures and checks. There’s even another Russell T Davies dig at the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ fiasco with the story’s best gag as a reporter challenges her about the nuclear safety test inspectors all coming to sticky ends like Dr David Kelly in real life (‘He slid on an icy patch’ ‘He was decapitated!’ ‘Well, it was a very icy patch’). I love the satirical side of Russell T’s writing, the best aspect of ‘Aliens In London’, but here it’s just another passing phase this story goes through before it turns into something else entirely and we’ve never really had it again since (well, not till lockdown when he turned Boris Johnson into an Auton anyway).

 Regardless ‘Boom Town’ is still the perfect near-end to a near-perfect series, one that delivers all the high drama, charm and comedy of the best of the returning series one but in a script that digs a little deeper than any have had the space to dig before in the newer, faster series (if this had been the olden days of four parters then this would have been the last part of ‘Aliens In London’). There are, admittedly, not as many fireworks or indeed booms and bangs in ‘Boom Town’ as in other stories, the Rose-Mickey sub-plot gets boring fast, Captain Jack needn’t have bothered to turn up at all (he’s there mostly so that he can learn about the time rift and thus launch the ‘Torchwood’ series from Cardiff in another year and a bit)and one Slitheen is maybe not as impressive as three or four. That said, though, for all the bigger budget in ‘Aliens Of London’ that story doesn’t get anything as right as this one: that’s story’s a sometimes uneasy mix of horror, politics and laughs with Slitheen who spend too much of their time farting and with arch jokes that don’t always connect and occasional dodgy effects; this is a character piece where the characters are deep, the writing is exquisite and the actors know what they’re doing that bit more and can bring so much more confidence. Even if this story gets forgotten and overlooked now, subtler than probably any other story of the five-year Davies comeback run, the rest of those stories wouldn’t be as strong without this episode there as his era’s ‘conscience’. Possibly the most under-rated story of the entire run of new-Who, this one is an under-rated gem, not the fine wine and dining of other stories perhaps but a gourmet meal on a budget that hits the taste-buds all the same. 

 POSITIVES + There have been many great actors and actresses playing the parts of Dr Who monsters down the years but Annette Badland is clearly one of the best. Russell obviously thought so too, picking up on how her Slitheen in ‘Aliens Of London’ was subtler than the other performances, a baddy who was opportunistic rather than cruel. Badland’s career was mostly spent playing sweet dotty ladies before this but she’s an excellent baddy – her sudden switches from self-pity back into cruel sneers and confident charm keep you guessing what side this Slitheen is on right till the last few minutes, but she’s also believable as a scared, sad, regretful alien too. There are very few acting roles in this story but all are excellent – a shout out to William Thomas as Mr Cleaver, becoming the first actor to appear in both ‘old’ and ‘new’ series along the way (he was the undertaker in ‘Remembrance Of Daleks’ who gives Davros a literal ‘helping hand’ and also played Gwen’s dad in Torchwood; even today there are comparatively few actors who’ve spanned both centuries of this series). 

 NEGATIVES - We said in our review of ‘Aliens Of London’ that the fart jokes smacked a little too much of children’s telly and as the first script Russell wrote for the new series seemed pitched at more of a children’s than a family audience. There are notably less fart jokes here (and less opportunities for Margaret Slitheen to undress from her human bodysuit) but these seem even more out of place somehow in what’s one of the series’ more grown-up scripts. I mean, the closest to this story in the ‘old’ Dr Who canon is ‘Face Of Evil’ and you can’t imagine Xoanon crowing ‘Who am I?!? You are the evil one Dr. Not least because you’ve taught me, a computer, how to fart!’ 

 BEST QUOTE: Margaret Slitheen: ‘This is persecution. Why can't you leave me alone? What did I ever do to you?’ Doctor: ‘You tried to kill me and destroy this entire planet’. Margaret Slitheen: ‘Apart from that!’ 

 Previous ‘The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances’ next ‘Bad Wolf/The Parting Of The Ways’

The End Of The World: Ranking - 85

      The End Of The World

(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 2/4/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Euros Lyn)

Rank: 85

   'Here we are at the end of the Earth's life. What, prey tell, has lasted from the planet's greatest poets writers, thinkers and philosophers. What's that? The Spice Girls? Zigazigah? Aaaaagh!'

 

‘Rose’, the first episode of the new revived series, had been such a relief in so many ways: it felt like Dr Who had always done, with a slightly modern twist and a bigger budget but not so much that it got in the way of all the old things that made the series great: the ideas, the action, the humour, the people and especially the imagination were all present and correct. An updated version of ‘Terror Of The Autons’ it felt as if the spirit of past series writer Robert Holmes was alive and well. It was already clear that DW was in much safer hands than it had been with the Paul McGann TV Movie (I mean, Americans? Making Dr Who? Unthinkable!) However the second episode piled a whole load of extra pressure on: was new-Who just a one episode wonder? Could it possibly sustain that run of form for a second story in a row? Was there enough of a story without making most of it about getting to know the new cast? Would this new Dr and new companion Rose continue to grow across the series? Would the storyline be as good with a new invention in place of Holmes’ old reliable monsters ‘The Autons’? Would this brave step into the unknown, after that brave step into the half-known, still feel like Dr Who? Had the budget been saved for episode one and run out already? Russell T Davies is no mug though – he’d sat through enough Dr Who revivals and revamps to know that’s what we fans’ll be thinking too so for his second story he makes it even more obviously Dr Whoy than ‘Rose’, with even more spectacle (way more aliens than we’ve ever seen in one go in old Who!), an even bigger budget and a script that now adds script editor Douglas Adams into the mix with a ‘Restaurant At The Universe’ scenario crossed with a Chris Boucher ‘Robots Of Death’ style Whodunnit that’s mad and daft and silly but also sharp and cutting with a lot to say about humanity in the future and right now. This might be the ‘end of the world’ but it’s a whole new beginning for the series, the template for all that’s possible stretched as far as it will go. 

 Our first trip into the future doesn’t do things by halves – it goes right to the very end, to the final days of humanity and the end of the Earth, where we’ve never ever been in Dr Who before (‘Frontios’ came closest). It could easily have been silly, leaving the audience behind and making them uninterested in a future so far away as to be nearly unimaginable, but Russell cleverly moulds the story into one with lots of parables about now, In the grand tradition of past Who stories. In this story he takes an old Dr Who theme of embracing who you are and rejecting immortality at the sake of your humanity, of never outstaying your welcome and making your way for the people that come after you and not holding on to things past their sell by date. It might be the year five billion but Russell T Davies shows us how little humanity has changed in that time. The planet finally dies, unseen, because we’re too preoccupied with greed and taking advantage of others to make the most of it – how human. It looks pretty darn impressive too, especially the glowing orange as it dies (which is so good an effect they use it on everything for the next decade). What’s more, though sadly we don’t get to see much of it, humanity is by now unrecognisable because we’ve mingled and interbred with all the other aliens out there which, again is as it should be: Dr Who is a series that’s all about change and a lot of this story’s best moments come from how naturally the 9th Doctor takes this all in his stride while even as open-minded and hearted a person as Rose struggles to catch up with the culture shock. 

There’s one last pureblood still standing though who refuses to accept how things are and she’s one of Dr Who’s great xenophobes, up there with Davros and any number of cyber-controllers, but with the added character trait that rather than just being straightforward and ranting she can actually ‘do’ sarcasm. Zoe Wannamaker was the first big name to get involved with the new-look series and was no doubt expecting something closer to her standard roles on telly: a slightly harassed mother in over her head. She was one of the first big celebs to take a chance on this new series that nobody except the people making it expected to be a hit and having her was quite a coup at the time (in the week this episode was on the papers were full of her guest appearance and still not that fussed about the series as a whole). Clashes with other projects meant she wasn’t able to be there and recorded all her lines early, but unlike a lot of voiceovers it feels as if she’s in that room and inhabiting that body (well, what’s left of it). I wish I’d been in the room when that job offer was being made too: ‘Err Zoe, the BBC here, you remember that weird children’s series that got cancelled in the 1980s because people stopped watching it? They ‘re thinking of bringing it back and have written in a part as the oldest human alive and everyone immediately thought of you! Hello?...Hare you there?...) Zoe’s gamble (and let’s face it, this was a gamble) is rewarded when she gets the part of a lifetime in Cassandra, whose wicked and evil and (spoilers) ready to kill all sorts of aliens for pure greed, a motivation true for humanity in every era it seems. She’s obsessed with her looks and her own importance and a prime example of a DW character who can’t see the bigger picture beyond herself, that mankind has moved on from such right-wing views and prejudices a long time ago (in a throwaway line Cassandra says a parent once came from Texas. Of course they did. Yeehaw!) Russell also throws in a very Dr Whoy idea that simply wasn’t a thing when old-Who was on the air: cosmetic surgery. Cassandra’s willing to commit awful atrocities to stay pure (she’s had 708 operations), to the point where Russell brings things to their logical scifi conclusion and makes her a sheet of skin with some eyes and a mouth. She really is the worst of us, not because she’s a monster, but because she’s got her priorities all muddled and can’t find it in her heart to embrace differences. So she lives on, clinging on to life, even though she’s reduced to being just a thin sheet of stretched skin afraid of every wrinkle, the logical scifi extension of all our own preoccupations in the 21st century. Though to Cassandra she’s the only ‘true’ human in existence, the kicker is that Rose finds her less human than the weird looking aliens and talking tress walking around and she’s right to because Cassandra, though human through and through, is inhumane. Having plastic surgery has made her, well, plastic but to Cassandra’s she’s oblivious how silly she looks and still thinks she looks gorgeous (Russell has said since that he wrote this story after watching The Oscars and concerned at how many previously beautiful women looked gaunt and sick where they once glowed with life, particularly Nicole Kidman, saying ‘It’s like we’re killing these women in public – we watch while you die’). Yet what Russell also does is also make Cassandra quite a pitiable character deserving of our sympathies (after all she was just born in the wrong time: there are all sorts of Cassandras walking about today and were in 2005). It’s such a clever idea that enables Russell T to make so many good points about ourselves and our role in the universe. We’re really not that special or extraordinary, except for the very fact that we’re alive now, in this special and extraordinary universe. 

Though Cassandra steals the show and gets all the best lines there are plenty of other things to gawp at too. Russell knew that one of the complaints thrown at Dr Who was that the small BBC budget meant we only ever got two or three bedraggled looking aliens in any one story so he sets out showing the Dr Who equivalent of the world-building in Star Trek or Star Wars, announced and then wheeled out in a scene that seems to go on forever, like Eurovision or an Olympics opening ceremony, evidence that the universe is teeming with life. They don’t just make up the numbers though: Russell has sn ability to let you understand and care for these characters in minutes so that it feels like they’ve lived a whole life before we meet them. Dr Who has had so many other gifted writers but no other shave this ability as consistently. Its most on display here because there’s so many of them. The Moxx of Balhoon is our first blue alien (an in-joke this: in the old days blue used to be the colour used for special effects, so that anything blue against a screen disappeared to be covered over in effects; nowadays its green more often than not, which is why so many modern DW aliens have shifted tones slightly to brown being the default). He was scripted to be a large puddle on the floor but this was a special effect too far so he’s Jimmy Vee in costume. He doesn’t do much but he has a lot of background, working as a lawyer (her certainly looks as if he’s built for a deskbound job if you know what I’m saying), while – oddly given Russell’s 2023 decision to kick Davros out of his wheelchair and have him stand on his own two feet in case people see it as a disabled slur, the Moxx is pushed around by everyone from his wheelchair. Then there’s The Face Of Boe, a big old face in a jar and though a throwaway joke here there’s much much more about him in the series to follow not least (spoilers) that he might well be future character Captain Jack in the future, calcified because the season finale dooms him to immortality (apparently not what Russell was thinking when he wrote this script but it mirrors well Cassandra’s plight, desperate to stay alive while Jack is condemned to life against his will and would rather die given the guilt and shame he carries around with him). Russell’s not spoken about this either but I like to think he’s a sort of vague memory of The Rills from ‘Galaxy 4’ who, were considered the most obscure monster in ‘old’ Who, with such a single grainy photograph existing in 2005 (though a full episode starring them was discovered and returned to the archives in 2012). Like them ol’ big head is a face in a jar that has to be filled with a particular kind of smoke to stay alive and while he doesn’t say anything here in future episodes he’ll share the Rills’ surprising ability to talk in proper received pronunciation English. He was a bit of a last minute dilemma too and evidence of just how ‘new’ making this series was to everyone: Russell hadn’t yet started his infamous ‘tone meetings’ where people from every department met up at the start of a story to decide on things and it was discovered, very late in the day, that no one had built Boe yet: props, models and costumes all thought it was the job of another department; considering it was thrown together at the last minute it’s amazing how good it looks. Why so many faces by the way, with Boe and Cassandra? It’s almost as if humanity has evolved to follow smartphones and we don’t need bodies anymore as part of our identity, just a face… 

Then there’s Raffalo the blue caretaker who was added at the last minute when the expense of Cassandra meant a lot of her speeches had to be trimmed down, but as will happen a lot in new Who this last minute added scene, written months after the rest, is the best. We need this scene where we learn that Earth in the year five billion still has a hierarchy of the rich and their employees who are servants and not allowed to speak so we can feel outraged. It helps Rose’s character a lot, too, that after her understandable culture shock at first she wanders off to talk to everyone she can and ignores the protocols of the day by treating everyone as equals, because she’s Rose and as a working class girl feels more at home there than talking to emperors and queens; Raffalo’s delight at someone actually talking to her rather than down at her is the most Dr Whoy moment of all in this story and the point where I knew beyond doubt this show was in safe hands. We also finally get a sentient tree in DW that isn’t embarrassing (Jabe feels like an attempt to win old Dr Who fans over who are still scarred by ‘The Mark Of The Rani’ by saying ‘look it’s alright, the ideas of the old days were good ones even if the execution was sometimes a bit lousy, but we can put that right now, hush, don’t worry!’ and has the tree flirt with the Doctor rather than outright grope the companions for good measure too). Jabe doesn’t get many lines (poor actress Yasmin Bannerman would have had a miserable time under all that makeup and those prosthetics) but Russell makes the most of the ones she gets: as with all of Russell’s writing he sketches a whole backstory in just a few lines, with little details like the fact she’s not supposed to show her roots in polite society (an extension of the 2005 obsession with dying hair?) and that she had ancestors from trees on Earth that really sell the idea that she had a life off-screen before we met her. In other words Russell takes the best of all the writers from Dr Whos past but throws into the mix this ability he can do better than anyone. 

 Other races we see in just this one story but don’t learn much about include ambassadors from the City State of Blinding Light (pig-like aliens wearing what seem like masks who look as if someone was truing to re-make the ‘Alien Autopsy’ video and got it slightly wrong), the Hop Pyleen Brothers (reptiles who look as if they’ve wandered in from ‘Deep Space Nine’), Mr and Mrs Pacoo (space vultures who look hungry), Cal Sparkplug and his un-named plus one (the dudes in giant timelord like robes with hoods over their faces) and students from class 55 at the University of Rago (who have various masks and faces but are dressed in the same white robes). We never see this many different alien species in Dr Who again, brief shots of previously seen monsters in ‘The Pandorica Opens’ aside, and certainly never have before; it feels like the big showy-odd moment this new series needs, that proves to a whole new audience that the Whoniverse really is teeming with life and there are lots of aliens to see not just one and that they actually have the budget to show them unlike the olden days (while providing lots of extra mileage for any writers if there’s ever a second ‘wilderness years’ if the series gets cancelled again). It feels not unlike the shows that every young (and sometimes not so young) fan makes up at home when they aren’t restricted by budget and can throw all their ideas and inventions and figurines into the mix to tell a truly epic story. And just to prove that this really is the same show there’s even a crawl through a ventilation shaft, just like everyone’s folk memories of Dr Who (even though it only ever happened a handful of times). 

 One of the best things the 21st century series did that the 20th one only touched on was that we get to see the regulars grow: The 9th Dr, who was almost cuddly back on Earth during ‘Rose’, reveals for the first time just what a weight he carries on his shoulders from his past and while the references to the time war every five minutes will become irritating in future episodes it gives you a real frisson of anticipation the first time we hear about what was going on for the Dr when the show was off the air. For the Doctor, as with so many fans, it was a traumatic time filled with anger and frustration and an absence of the thing you loved and the Doctor’s still coming to terms with it all. He’s not yet convinced that Rose is his salvation either and seems to almost resent her being around and holding him back. Rose, too, is more than just the wide-eyed hopeful of her first story as she holds her own against Cassandra and the Doctor, while worrying about what she’s just got herself into with a grumpy timelord whose suddenly seems so different. While her best character trait is her ability to understand and identify with anyone from any race or timezone, her second her trait of teasing the Dr and treating him as the kid who needs looking after while she’s the proper adult – a real joke given their 600 odd year age difference and her lack of experience that ends up seeming like a plotpoint by the time ‘bad Wolf’ turns up and Rose is in control of everything in the universe and sending herself messages back in time. Rose’s worst trait is her impetuousness and she begins to wonder whether she did the right thing by travelling with a stranger. In many ways the Doctor’s uncharacteristically cruel or at least oblivious by taking her to see the end of the world – what he sees as a beautiful natural end to a perfectly rounded story she sees as the end of everything and everyone she loved. Only a call home puts her mind at rest at the thought that everyone she ever knew has been dead and forgotten for billions of years (the bill must be quite literally astronomical if roaming charges are still a thing, though maybe all of Rose’s bills will be postdated 5 billion years in the future?) It’s at one with a story that’s about making the most of the present, whenever your present happens to be, and not waiting for a better time to come along and make your life worth living – because it’s worth living now, a neat riff on the age-old idea of Who being about the past, present and future intermingled (a cut scene from ‘Rose’ had her mention an odd call from her daughter that was going to be revealed as this one, but was dropped for timing reasons). This is a story that, over and above the alien spectacle, is about his trauma at being the last of his kind and Rose’s shock on finding out who the last of her kind turns out to be. 

 In one sense this is a very bleak view of the future, the equal of the dark scripts written by Bob Holmes and seems to be the antithesis of Star Trek’s optimism; even five billion years in the future Earth is still hampered by such human frailties as greed and prejudice and the planet is run as a commercial venture, overseen by the few people with money to see it even though Earth (and the universe outside it) ought to be there for everyone. We never do get those AI robots to give us a cushy life; instead there are still maintenance workers living a stressful mundane haphazard life for the rich who pay to keep them alive. ‘Platform One’ is just a platform for the rich and the posh to be seen by their followers, the Earth turned into one big club with an exclusive membership list and Russell clearly doesn’t want to be in the orbit of any planet that would accept hi but keep others out. Watching this story it’s easy to wonder if we’ve evolved at all in all that time, still divided into haves and have-nots far more than we’re divided over race or gender or species. 

 And yet that’s only half the story. What’s great about this story though is that Russell T is an optimist about humanity at heart (even if he hates how a lot of individual humans behave) and rather than kill off the Earth in a B-movie rush that no future episodes can ever match instead it’s a celebration that the Earth lasted longer than anyone ever expected it to and that the planet dies a natural death after a long life, as it should be (and unlike Cassandra), the ageing great-great-grandparent twinkling out of existence now that its children are grown and safe and exploring the far reaches of the universe and all the newer stars that have grown since our day. The Doctor gives a gloriously heartwarming speech about how humanity outlasted the Earth and had time to set off to the stars having adventures and creating hybrid species of our own. All the worries that were present in 2005 (the environment, mad cow disease, wars, nuclear accidents) don’t stop us because we made it (there was a cut scene, dropped when Cassandra cost so much every time she opened her mouth, that tied this era in with the adventures ‘The Ark’ and ‘The Ark In Space’, where humanity had left the Earth and found new homes already). There’s even the nice twist that ‘the trust’ (The International Trust?) had bought up the earth and stapled the continents back to how they used to be in Rose’s day, so presumably there are still charities in the future as well as rich people. Somehow, despite everything that goes wrong for humanity in this episode, you leave it feeling uplifted, though at the same time this isn’t some airy fairy unlikely future either. For a series that was still so young it hadn’t quite worked out what it was yet, this is a very clever way of giving us both. 

 It looks gorgeous too. It’s a sign of how much support Who was getting from the Welsh council so early on, before success was assured, that this story was allowed to be filmed in the civic building given the wonderful name ‘The Welsh Temple Of Peace and Light’ (nowadays re-named ‘Peace and ‘Health’), which is just a fancy name for a sort of unofficial town hall really, where visiting dignitaries can be taken out of the Welsh rain and away from the riff-raff. It was built as the headquarters of a charity that researched TB in 1910 and designed by namesake David Davies (no relation) before being turned into a WW1 memorial. It gives ‘Platform One’ a sense of scale and size and poshness as befits a rich vantage point in space and the series will return to it five more times, making it one of the most recognisable locations in the series. Forget The TV Movie too: this is the closest we’ve ever come to an actual Dr Who Movie on a Hollywood budget and scale and there are more special effects in this episode than any other ever made: everywhere you look there’s a spider scuttling or an alien wandering past a CGI backdrop of stars. The reason we never got as many again wasn’t an issue of money but time: Russell under-estimated just how much he overstretched the independent graphics company The Mill but was shocked when we called in the office to find chief animator Paul Burton asleep on a couch; the deadline was so tight that he’ hadn’t gone home in three days and was snatching hour naps where he could. 

 Of course, there are downsides to the new format too, a lot of which are felt here more than ‘Rose’. The 45 minutes of screentime isn’t long enough to get to know these characters, especially as there are so many of them. The ‘Whodunnit’ aspect isn’t used as well as it might have been: compared to ‘Robots Of Death’ and ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’ it’s easy to see who the murderer is, because (spoilers, not that you need them) Cassandra’s not exactly subtle about her prejudices and all the red herrings along the way, of sights of people in cloaks looking shifty, aren’t convincing enough to throw you off the scent (I mean, it’s not going to be the Face of Boe is it? A big head in a jar in the middle of a room has lots of eyewitnesses). Not for the last time in the modern series (or indeed the old one for that matter) Cassandra’s scheme is bonkers too. Her great grand scheme is that very Human method of insurance fraud, but she’s not going to make much money if all the richest people in this segment of the galaxy die and burn and crash the economy with them. Plus, as the only survivor, she’s a shoe-in for arrest from the Judoon tax police so will find it hard to spend her ill gotten gains anyway (as the only person whose a stretched piece of skin she’s not exactly hard to spot. What’s she going to do, wesr a fake moustache and glasses to disguise her features?) Modern Who’s reliance on catchphrases comes on hard and fast here and will never quite let go. For the Dr everything, every few minutes it seems, is ‘fantastic’, while Cassandra says ‘moisturise me’ so many times it feels like that’s half the script and there are a few clunky lines along the way – most of them Cassandra being bitchy, a trait which wears almost as thin as she does. The scene of the Dr trying to run away from his biggest fan trying to chop him and his friend up for firewood also goes on a little too long: this is such a talky episode that that it needs some action in it but this one scene is so long that it makes everything feel top-heavy. There are times, too, when the programme shifts from adult drama to children’s television - not as excessively as ‘Rose’ or ‘Aliens Of London’ but still enough times to make you puzzled, as if Russell’s been ordered to start writing his script down and has forgotten the sort of adult-ish programmes made for children he used to watch when he was young. The Cassandra model is oddly static compared to the sort of things Dr Who will pull off later in the run and is basically a piece of unconvincing rubberlike skin with two googly eyes and a mouth, as if they’ve been stuck on with stickers, animated by not terribly convincing CGI. As it happens Zoe Wannamaker is good enough to make Cassandra come alive just from her voice but I must say some of the leaked photographs from this story (and the Radio Times feature) didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. There are other problems that hampered this story too, despite the budget, which made it seem even more like old Who: the bubbles in the face of Boe’s tank, which worked fine in rehearsals, stopped during filming and had to be dropped, while the Moxx’s wheelchair stopped working early on and had to be pulled on a string, As brilliant as maybe 75% of this story is, as much as it has you pumping the air and celebrating the fact that this is a real Dr Who story well told, full of drama jeopardy and morals, the other 25% leaves you going ‘what the?!’ A quick anecdote too that’s one of the best about the series: a production mix-up meant that Rhodri Morgan, then first minister for Wales, was booked for an interview on ‘Dragon’s Eye’, a sort of Welsh equivalent of ‘Watchdog’ about consumer rights and current affairs, but he was led to the wrong department where the Who costume designers thought he was one of the extras playing the trees…Oops. 

 Still, if that’s all that goes wrong then, well, it’s not ‘The End Of The World’ as it were: this second story of the new run is an enjoyable story in its own right but where it really wins is making you believe that this really is a series that can go anywhere in time and space and it will look magical and believable wherever they go. That won’t always be true as it happens and as things turn out there will be a lot more episodes set in contemporary London than anyone was expecting, with a definite lack of alien worlds and a general air of cheapness in the rest of the run after this story blew the budget so spectacularly, but we weren’t to know that yet: for now this is a story that’s reassuringly like Dr Who always used to be when it was great, only it looks better than we ever dreamed it could, with a bigger budget and in many ways an even bigger ambition, but the same strong messages as the old series at its best. It looks as if they’d finally put one of those gonzo Dr Who comic strips with lots of aliens on screen, only with the heart and logic of the TV stories at their best. Other stories will get better at doing each one of these genres individually, but for now throwing all of these styles into the mix and capturing fans who loved any or all of them was very much the way to go: every previous Dr Who story had to be stingy and throw us just enough to keep us watching but Russell throws everything at us at once. We’d debated long and hard what stories from the past the new series might resemble and now we get lost of them all thrown together at once: the morality tale, the end of humanity, a horror story, a detective story, an emotional story an effects driven story, a character-led story. ‘And this is just episode two’ it seems to say ‘Just think what will happen if you’re still watching by the time of the season finale!’ It’s Important to the future of this series to show just how widespread and normal alien life is in the Whoniverse and on that score ‘End Of The World’ delivers more than we could ever have dreamed of back in the wilderness years. ‘Everything has its time and everything dies’ runs the main plot, but not Dr Who it seems, it’s a series that’s regenerated before our eyes. It’s a near-perfect second episode that shows us a bit of everywhere and then brings us safely home for tea (and chips – a lot of fans don’t like this final scene but I do, proof that ordinary life goes on but extraordinary life is out there somewhere and the gap between the two isn’t so huge. Plus wanting chips made Rose feel like one of us). Watching this episode on first transmission, more than any other old or new, gave me the feeling that this show can run forever. 

 POSITIVES + The psychic paper is one of the best things Russell T brought to new-Who (he brought the sonic screwdriver back for the first time since 1982 as well). With most stories 50minutes total now rather than 100-odd something in the plot has to give and having a psychic paper that reveals whatever the person expects to see saves on all those old plot devices of having the Doctor looked up because nobody knows who he is and nobody believes him. In future stories it also acts as a means of getting messages from passing psychic aliens, a sort of credit card and an oyster card so the Dr can get on a bus that crashes on an alien desert in ‘Planet Of The Dead’ (don’t ask). It’s also a nicely eccentric sort of invention any of the old Doctors would have carried had any of the past writers been clever enough to think of it and it leads to many a joke in the series along the way when needed to (the best gags are in ‘The Lodger’ where Craig is shocked to find the Doctor has a house reference from The Archbishop of Canterbury and in ‘The Christmas Carol’ where Dr 11 claims to be a ‘mature and responsible adult’ and finds the psychic paper has stopped working because that lie was just too big for it to cope with!) 

 NEGATIVES - I can’t let this column go without commenting that the thought that the last record from the 20th century that still exists billions of years in the future is Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ is...disappointing to say the least (though it’s a relief it isn’t The Spice Girls). Even the soundtrack is an attempt to show off: the last time Dr Who could afford an actual song the audience would have recognised on the TV soundtrack it was ‘The Beatles’ ‘Paperback Writer’ playing on a jukebox in a club in ‘The Faceless Ones’ back in 1967. The other records listed on Cassandra’s jukebox all date from 1979 weirdly enough, the year Russell turned sixteen (often said to be the perfect age for pop music, when you’re the key demographic audience before you’re all washed up at seventeen!) Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’, funnily enough, has never been released as a 7” vinyl single – even now when everything is, hit of flop alike (the 12” ‘Toxic’ album is out on vinyl, for instance) - and had to be mocked up by the production team. While far from Russell’s only obsession with weird faceless pop at the time it felt a bit…rude. Billie Piper, you see, was ‘our’ Britney Spears and was enjoying a stunning run of success when she was 15-17, and our youngest homegrown talent to get a run of #1s since the 1950s (although, as so often happens, her best songs were written when sales were in decline – while her early songs are all too obviously tweaked by a middle aged manager to appeal to bratty weenies her later stuff is really quite good and thoughtful. I happily had the title track of ‘Walk Of Life’ on my mp3 player long before she got a part in Who and if you’ve read my other books on music you’ll know how snobbish my tastes can be). It was partly Britney who killed off Billie’s career, so having ‘Toxic’ playing whole Rose is nearly illuminated and ‘over-exposed’ to death seems a tad cruel. Then again, maybe Russell was writing all this deliberately given that the ‘other’ thing that scuppered Billie’s music career was her anorexia which she desperately tried to keep out of the papers as she existed on a diet of diet coke, coffee, cigarettes and tissue paper – and whose killing her in this story but a stretch of skin obsessed about her weight? In context having this story end with Billie running off to happily eat chips is either an awkward slap in the face or a celebration that she’s back to ‘normal’ now. In real life Billie survived by dropping out of sight with her eccentric much-older new boyfriend that’s part lover part mentor…no, not the Doctor, radio DJ Chris Evans (with whose she split up while filming this series, which might be why her tiffs with the Doctor are so emotionally charged across the year). If Russell ends up having Rose come back in the series and marrying Davros who has his own channel on Satellite Five where he gets to rant about wokeness gone mad in the 51st century and how aliens should stay purebloods we’ll know that he really was using Billie’s life as fuel for his writing. BEST QUOTE: ‘You think it'll last forever, the people and cars and concrete. But it won't. One day it's all gone, even the sky. My planet's gone. It's dead. It burned like the Earth. It's rocks and dust before its time’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The start of a loose trilogy followed by ‘New Earth’ and ‘Gridlock’ in series 2 and 3. The Doctor first picks up the psychic paper from the psychic forests of Boda – at least according to a 2021 short story starring the 13th Doctor ‘Paper Moon’, the title story in an anthology of the same name designed for younger readers. This is the Doctor’s return visit (she comments that ‘this paper’s got me out of more scrapes than Ryan’s had Yorkshire puddings!’) and stars The Producers, guardians of the forest and make sure only the most deserving species have access to its magical properties in a story short on plot but big on character. 

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