Doctor Who: Season 1

Earlier today, I finished watching season 1 of Doctor Who. I first posted months ago that I was going to be watching this as a complete n00b, with almost no background on the show whatsoever. Then I watched the first two episodes, and then the Buffy Rewatch began, so I put the show aside.

But the thing is, I recently acquired a book on Doctor Who for ECW Press, my publisher, and I’ll be editing this book, written by Graeme Burk and Robert Smith?, for next spring. The manuscript is coming in soon, and I don’t want to be spoiled, so I had to redouble my efforts and get back into it. And so, I did. And just as so many people have been telling me for so long, it’s amazing. Mark Askwith at Space told me that Russell T. Davies is a big fan of Joss Whedon and there’s a definite Buffy feel to it, and he was absolutely right. As with Whedon’s work, I can laugh and tear up all in the same scene.

So first, the non-spoilery stuff for those who haven’t yet watched: if you think Doctor Who is too campy (as I previously thought), it’s not. However, many people refer to this as a kid’s show, and I just don’t see my kids watching it just yet. I was told when I started that it’s for ages 6 and up; my daughter is 6, and there are certain moments that I know would terrify her (and not in the good way that kids like to be scared). That said, I think it’s a show my kids could watch at a younger age than Buffy, for sure. Probably around age 8 or 10 would be fine.

But if you’re an adult who thinks Doctor Who is just silly, you’re mistaken. The storylines are incredibly poignant, and even the aliens (no matter how bad) have humanity to them. They might slaughter humans like they’re garbage, but they do care about something... or someone. The relationship between Rose and the Doctor is very close. She loves him, and he her, but it’s not a romantic type of love. They’re closely connected and that connection is one of the best things about the show. The time travel aspect is something that is at once fascinating and heartbreaking, depending on where or when they go. I cried more than once. I cannot wait for season 2.

And now, onto the spoilery stuff. Please stop reading if you haven’t yet watched it.

Now I’m reaching out to the Doctor Who fans out there. I’m dying to discuss this, but since it’s been years since these episodes aired, it’s probably easiest to chat with you than to seek out any old discussions on it. Perhaps I’m going to be way offbase on something – there’s a chance my favourite episodes were the ones most reviled by Doctor Who fans – but on the other hand, I know what I like and don’t like, and so I’m most interested in hearing how my tastes are similar and diverge to everyone else’s. So let’s start.

I already talked about the pilot episode, “Rose,” and “The End of the World.” Both of them were fun and endlessly campy, and I fell in love immediately with the show on the first one. I didn’t like the second one quite as much, but it showed just how far-reaching the time travel could be.

The Unquiet Dead is one where the Doctor and Rose join forces with Charles Dickens, a real-world element I loved. The Gelth – the ethereal creatures that live through the gaslights – were very creepy, and at the end where the girl is instantly killed by them (but appears to be alive) and sacrifices herself for everyone, it’s a poignant moment that signalled to the viewer that, again like Joss Whedon, Davies is not afraid to get us attached to people only to kill them off. As with many characters on the show, there’s a sense that one person can make a difference in history, but many of those heroes are unsung. We read about kings and knights in the history books, but we don’t read about the servant girl who did something extraordinary to affect the world. I really enjoyed this episode (and Simon Callow was a fantastic addition to the show).

The next two episodes weren’t favourites of mine – “Aliens of London” and “World War Three” introduced the Slitheen, a family of aliens who have ingratiated themselves into the British government. The Slitheen are giant rubbery things with three claws at the end of very long arms, and up close when you could see the actors running around in the rubber suits, my husband and I were laughing. When the cameras pulled back and you could see them running at a distance, it was clearly more CGI than in close-up. As I mentioned in the earlier post, my husband grew up watching Doctor Who with his dad... he’s not a hardcore fan – he can’t name episode titles, he doesn’t quote any dialogue, and he hasn’t watched those early episodes in years, but he certainly knows his stuff from growing up with Tom Baker as his Doctor. He seemed to like these two episodes more than I did, but he did add, “Just for the record, I don’t remember farting in the other Doctor Who episodes...”

Now, with him being such a big fan, the next episode was the one that was for him. “Dalek” is the first truly marvellous episode of the series, in my opinion. My husband was excited to see his favourite baddies again, and my only frame of reference for the Dalek was seeing models of them at fan cons, or listening to my husband saying, “Exterminate... EXTERMINATE!!!” So when the Doctor first went into the room to check out the life form the collector asked him to see, and a little blue light came on in the room and a halting screamy voice started, my husband went, “YES!” and I said, “What?” “It’s the Dalek!” The lights slowly come up, and standing there is... a garbage can. “Wait, that’s the most feared thing the Doctor knows? It’s got a whisk and a toilet plunger, how the hell can it hurt anyone?” And then I saw what the Dalek was capable of. Of course, there was a scene where they were running along and hallway and ran into a stairwell, and my husband burst into laughter. “One of the biggest jokes is that the Dalek are the most feared things in the universe, yet you can baffle them with stairs.” And then the Dalek elevated to go up the stairs, and it was crazy creepy. “They couldn’t do THAT in the old series,” my husband said, while I just shivered with just how eerie this thing was. “Does it look the same?” I asked. “Well, it’s more golden... a little shinier than I remember it, but otherwise they have absolutely nailed the voice of it and it looks the same.” “Did they always scream like that?” “Oh yes,” he said. At the end of that episode, when the little goopy octopus thing was revealed to be inside (hubby said to his knowledge we haven’t seen the inside of one, but he said he couldn’t say that with any certainty), it was beautiful. The creature tells Rose to order it to destroy itself, and she at first says no, and then does it, because the Dalek has discovered some humanity within itself, and knows it can’t go on like that. It rises up, the gold balls come off the sides, encircle him, and destroy him. Silence. Then, “They couldn’t do that in the old series, either.” ;) I LOVED the episode, but my husband said he hoped that wasn’t the last of the Dalek. I said I doubted it, if they are that important to the Doctor Who canon.

Next up was The Long Game, another good one with Simon Pegg (yay!!) as The Editor. And as in real life, the editor is pure evil (aren’t all editors pure evil? Hahahaha... OK, if you’re one of my authors, don’t answer that). The corpses working at the consoles were super-creepy, but I thought Pegg made a great campy villain, and the goopy thing on the ceiling (“I call him Max”) was particularly gross. This is one the kids will love.

Father’s Day is an excellent episode that made me consider what I would have done in the same situation. If you could go back to a particular time in your family’s history and change the death of someone, would you? I’ve had a few people in my family die in accidents, and I know if I went back in time to meet them I doubt I’d be able to walk away and let nature take its course. In this episode Rose goes back to the day her father was killed by a car, when she was only a few months old. Her mother had romanticized who her father really was, and Rose finds out he was more of a sleaze than her mom ever let on, but in the end he truly cares about his daughter, and when he discovers this 19-year-old girl is in fact his daughter from the future, he knows what he has to do. On Lost, Miles explained that you can’t change the past, that whatever happened happened, but in this episode when Rose averts the accident, she opens a wound in time that sends in reapers (giant winged creatures) who decide to patch up that wound by basically destroying every living thing in their paths. To save his young family, Rose’s father goes out and sacrifices himself by standing in front of the car, restoring the lives of those who were killed that day. Years later, Rose’s mother would tell her about the day her father died, and that a young woman crouched beside him as he lay dying, but she didn’t know who that girl was. Since the earlier story was that her father had died alone, Rose was able to bring comfort to a situation without altering history, and so there’s a bittersweet ending. It was beautiful. I really loved this episode. And at that point my husband got into another show and kept wanting to watch it instead of Doctor Who, so I watched the next few episodes on my own. And the first one was just... WOW.

The Empty Child is set in 1941 during the Blitz in London, where barrage balloons hang low in the sky and children are starving because their parents have died. During air raids, the children rush into the houses where the inhabitants have rushed into bomb shelters and take a bunch of their food, but one particular group of children is being frightened by a child wearing a gas mask and saying in a haunting voice, “Mummy... are you my mummy? Mummy, I’m here... are you there, Mummy? Muuuuuummmmy.....” He’s about 4, has blond hair, and I swear if my son had a British accent he would sound just like this child. He creeped me out to no end, and I felt like I was on the verge of tears for the entire episode. Nancy, the girl who is the head of the group of children, tells the doctor it’s her little brother Jamie and that he’d died, and you can’t touch him or you’ll become like him. For me the saddest moment was when the Doctor orders everyone to their rooms, and Jamie drops his head like a scolded child and slowly walks away... I just wanted to hug the little guy, and couldn’t bear to watch him walk away alone. Meanwhile Rose has been separated from the Doctor and has met Captain Jack Harkness, who I know from Torchwood already (I only watched the first episode of that show, and didn’t really like it but I’m told I need to watch it within the context of Doctor Who... can someone tell me where season 1 of Torchwood falls in the Doctor Who canon? At what point in watching these episodes would I begin watching Torchwood?) He’s got the hots for her (and pretty much anything else with two legs), and he amazes her with his spaceship and his big gun. Pun intended.

Part 2 of this episode is The Doctor Dances, and together I think these are my favourite episodes of the season (seriously, I can still hear that child’s voice in my head). When they discover the gas masks are fusing themselves to the people’s heads, the group all comes together and are chased through the hospital by the people. There’s a hilarious scene where the Doctor finally refers to his little instrument as his sonic screwdriver, and Captain Jack is aghast that that’s the only weapon he carries through time with him. “Who looks at a screwdriver and says, ‘Hey, this could be more sonic!’??” Later when the Doctor plays a time travelling joke by switching his gun with a banana (you had to have been there), they’re trapped in a room with the batteries worn down on the gun, and Jack saying, “Well, I’ve got a banana, and you could put up a bunch of shelves in a pinch.” This episode was as funny as the previous one was scary. But at the end of the episode, I’ll admit I was reduced to tears when Nancy is cornered by little Jamie in his gasmask, and she admits tearfully that it’s actually her son. When she runs to him and hugs him against her better judgement, her love flowing from herself to him is what cures him and brings him back to life. While sci-fi fans tend to prefer less happy (more realistic) endings, I loved this one, and was right there with the Doctor as he was laughing and leaping around, saying, “Just this ONCE, nobody dies!!” Even Captain Jack appears to be about to die at the very end (right after he rides a bomb in a Dr. Strangelove allusion) and the TARDIS comes to save him. Beautiful two-parter.

Boom Town is next, and once again... the Slitheen. Ugh. I wasn’t very thrilled by it until a moment in the bathroom when the Slitheen women hears another woman talking about her family, and instead of ripping the woman apart, which she’s about to do, she changes her mind, and you can see how sad she is to be the last of her family. This is an episode where good and evil aren’t so clearly separated, and the Doctor accompanies the woman back to her planet where she will be executed without trial. Discussions of who’s better than the other one ensue, and in the end she tries to trick them all, but in a shocking moment, we see that the TARDIS is a life form with a soul, and when she looks into the heart of it, the TARDIS’s telepathic sense reads her thoughts and gives her what she wants – she’s reduced to an egg and allowed to start her life over again. I was glad to have this episode, because it cast a new light on the earlier Slitheen episodes. Although I’ll still be happy if I never see them again.

Next up was Bad Wolf, a slightly cheesy but still very funny episode that was a send-up of British game shows and reality shows, specifically Big Brother, Weakest Link, and Trinny and Susannah. While I personally cannot stand What Not to Wear, my best friend watches the British version of it all the time, and she fills me in on it. So I had the context for that show (and thought it was particularly funny that the android Trinny had small boobs and the android Susannah had much larger ones, just like their human counterparts). I loved that Tanya Branning from EastEnders was in this one as Lynda (OK, yes, I do watch trashy British TV, although I haven’t seen EE in ages), and when Rose was disintegrated I thought she really HAD died, although I muttered to myself out loud, “I could have SWORN she was in the first Tennant season!” but I second-guessed myself and assumed she must be dead. Watching the Doctor’s reaction was very touching, and that’s the moment (if it wasn’t clear by his jealousy with Rose’s relationship with Jack in the previous episodes) when you know how much he loves Rose. This episode ended with the Daleks (YES!) and the Emperor of them all, and I must admit, when you see a bunch of them, they are rather terrifying.

This episode led us into the finale, The Parting of the Ways, where the Doctor sends Rose away and she simply can’t go back to her old life. After having seen what she’s seen, it’s understandable – how could you possibly go back to Council flats and fish and chips after you’ve seen the things she’s seen (cue Roy Batty speech)? Mickey, her former boyfriend, is someone who’s popped up throughout the series as the poor guy left behind, but who will always be waiting for her like a loyal puppy. But in this episode, when Rose tells him there’s absolutely nothing for her there, he knows it’s over. He helps her out of love, and I wonder if we’ll see him again in season 2? He’ll probably still hang out with Jackie for a while, but I don’t know if he will still be a part of her life or not. Rose, like the Slitheen in Boom Town, looks into the eye of the TARDIS, and what she sees... is like a Tralmafadorian in Slaughterhouse-Five. She can suddenly see all of time laid out before her like a plateau of simultaneous acts, and when she emerges from the TARDIS, all glowy-eyed, and Dalek-destroying, I wasn’t sure what the heck was happening. The Doctor kisses her and takes back from her everything that is inside... but that means he can no longer be the Doctor that we know.

Last summer I was at the Polaris convention (which seemed to be 50% about Doctor Who) and had a conversation with Cindy, who posts here as SenexMacDonald, and she was telling me the Doctor regenerated. I’d always thought it was like how they change characters in soap operas: “Today the Doctor will be played by David Tennant” and you just accept it’s the same guy, different actor. But she told me no, it’s much more than that, and a vital part of who he is. Watching the Doctor regenerate at the end of this episode was amazing and sad. I really loved Eccleston a lot – he was my first Doctor, after all – and while I know the fans really love Tennant, I was sad to see him go.

Now, I do have to mention one thing I don’t absolutely love, and that’s Rose. While I think she’s great, and the companion is certainly (for me) a conduit through which the viewer can discover all the things that normally we’d be asking, my husband actually said if she fell into a burning pit of snakes he’d be pretty happy. I said, “Why, she’s not that bad,” and he said he thought she was immensely annoying. As the season went on, I began thinking the same thing. I don’t know if it’s Rose herself, or the actress playing her, or what it is. When I thought she’d been killed in Bad Wolf, I was upset, but that’s more because I was worried about the Doctor’s reaction than anything else.

In any case, I loved this season. The finale was mindblowing, The Empty Child is something that will probably be with me forever, and the poignancy of Father’s Day and Dalek raise it above most other shows on TV right now. I can’t wait to get into S2 now. What did you think of season 1? Please leave comments below and tell me what you thought of these episodes... did you like the Slitheen more than I did? Is The Empty Child a favourite episode of other fans? Please don’t leave any spoilers for future seasons, however... I don’t want to know anything that’s happening in the future.

On to the first Christmas special!!