Note: Before I begin, and in case you didn’t read the intro, there will be no Classic Who here. I’m beginning from where the show rises from the dead, so to speak. After twenty-five years in the wilderness the show was rebooted, though generally speaking still linked to and a continuation of the original series. As there is such a gap between the two eras though, I’ve chosen to go with “New Who”, since although I did watch Classic Who I was very young and remember little of it (see http://www.musicbanter.com/members-j...who-thing.html for explorations of the classic era, and more) and only really came “back” to the show when it returned in 2005.
So although this should probably technically be labelled 27.1, I’m going with the consensus that sees this as a new series, and calls this season one.
1.1 “Rose”
An outer space shot zooms in on the planet Earth and from there down to Britain and into the streets of London. Scene changes to a digital alarm clock chirping 07:30 and a blonde girl awakes in a (very pink) bedroom, jumps out of bed, kisses her mother goodbye and heads off to work. We see her at work in a department store, later taking lunch with a guy we assume to be her boyfriend, then back to work. Everything moves, as you might expect, at something of a frenetic pace, but eventually it’s quitting time. As she goes to leave though she is reminded she has to carry out an errand, and while in the basement she hears a noise and goes to investigate. We learn at this point that her name is Rose.
It’s lonely and spooky down there in the basement, with only the mannequins for company, and she begins to get a little edgy, especially when she can’t find the guy she was supposed to be seeing. As in most instances when things like this happen, shadows start to look sinister and the whole place takes on a dark, creepy feeling, as if something is just waiting to jump at her from around the next corner. Of course such feelings are natural when you’re alone in the dark, but usually they’re just the product of fear and an overactive imagination. This, however, is Doctor Who, and despite what we have been told by our parents as children, down the years and decades we have learned from the good Doctor in his many guises that horrible things do lurk underneath the bed, in the locked cupboard, and that horror and danger do in fact wait for us in the dark.
As if to confirm that it is not just Rose’s imagination running wild, we see one of the dummy’s heads turn in her direction. She does not see it, though she hears the sound and the vaguely jumpy feeling that has settled over her since she came down here turns to the cold sweat of fear. This fear is heightened to fever pitch when, beyond all reason and in direct disobedience of all logic, a mannequin lurches blindly towards her! Still trying to convince herself that someone is having a laugh at her expense --- a joke in very bad taste --- she backs away from the advancing dummy, but others are following it, and more are behind her. She realises with cold dread that she is being surrounded.
Suddenly, a man looms out of the shadows, leans forward and grabs her arm, grunting one word: “Run!” She takes his arm and obeys, following him as they leg it away from the creepy store dummies. The dummies give chase but Rose and her mysterious rescuer make it to the lift before they can catch them. One of the mannequins forces its arm through the gap but the man snaps it off, throwing it to Rose as the doors close. “Plastic!” he remarks. She now not unreasonably assumes he is the one responsible, somehow, for the animated dummies, since he seems not only to know so much about them but not exactly be afraid of them either.
The man tells her he is The Doctor --- he gives no other name --- and that he will look after things now. She can go home. He seems quite dismissive of her, obviously reasoning that she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that if she remained here she would only be in the way. As she runs off she looks back as the store explodes into the night, sending orange and yellow plumes reaching up into the black sky, and shaking the ground. Back home her mother worries that she could have been hurt, while Mickey, who we see now is indeed her boyfriend, fusses over her. Another day begins and Rose realises she does not have to get up as early as she used to: she has no job now.
However she is both surprised and a little annoyed to see the man who introduced himself as The Doctor outside her front door. He for his part also looks surprised, asking her what she is doing there? She tells him she lives there and he shrugs. He goes to leave but she is not having that: he is, after all, responsible for the destruction of the department store and her current unemployed state. As she makes the tea the Doctor investigates an odd sound, which turns out to be the plastic arm she brought home. Wasn’t Mickey supposed to have thrown that away when he left? Anyway the arm possesses its own rudimentary intelligence and attacks him. Rose thinks that he’s just messing about until he manages to throw the arm off and it promptly attacks her, like an evil version of Emu. He manages to deactivate it and leaves, but the girl wants answers and follows him.
She seems worried that he appears to be taking all this on by himself, and asks him to explain what has been going on. But he tells her to forget him, and then literally disappears. She turns her back and he is gone. With a rising feeling that something momentous has just happened, or could have happened, she goes to see Mickey and searches on his computer until she comes across a post with a picture of the man she has just left, and the message “Have you seen this man? Contact Clive.” She goes to meet him, and finds this Clive is something of a conspiracy theory nut, but he has been tracking the appearances of the man known as The Doctor through news and history.
Outside, as he waits for his girlfriend, Mickey is suddenly attacked by a wheelie bin. I’m serious! It starts moving slowly towards him, then stops. He gets out of the car, approaches the bin, warily opens the lid and finds … nothing! It’s completely empty inside. But as he goes to leave he finds he is stuck to the bin. The plastic seems to stretch and elongate, like sticky toffee or tar, and he can’t let go. Moreover, the bin is pulling him back towards itself until … he’s sucked inside and the lid closes. Yes, Mickey has been eaten by a wheelie bin!
When Rose gets back to the car though her boyfriend is at the wheel. She doesn’t notice that he looks weird: shiny, more, well --- plastic. And he smiles like a simpleton. When she suggests pizza he grins and rolls the word around on his tongue, as if hearing it for the first time. “Peet-za!” He also seems suddenly unsure of how to drive. At the restaurant he seems more interested in the Doctor than in Rose’s problems, but when the strange man appears in person the “plastic Mickey” (lucky he wasn’t metal, eh?)
leaps into action, shaping his hands into weapons, Terminator 2-style. As they escape, they find the gate out of the yard locked but the Doctor doesn’t seem concerned. He just strolls into a blue police box, which as it happens is his time capsule, the TARDIS. Urban can tell you all about that if you want, just check
http://www.musicbanter.com/members-j...who-thing.html, but for Rose it’s a reaction the Doctor has seen many times down the centuries.
You see, in case you don’t know, the TARDIS is huge. Much much much by a factor of about a million bigger inside than out, and this always throws humans. It’s not surprising: you walk into something that’s basically the size of an old payphone kiosk you don’t expect to see room for a small city inside! But that’s what the TARDIS is: it bends time and space so that its dimensions inside bear absolutely no relationship to the outside. The Doctor uses the head of the plastic Mickey to track the signal, to find out who or what is controlling the plastic monsters. But the head melts and he only gets a partial fix.
He tells Rose that the entity that is controlling the plastic, an alien consciousness, feeds on things like oil, smoke, toxins. It needs teh Earth as , well, food basically and so will attempt to bring every piece of plastic on the planet to life. Why? I'm not entirely sure to be honest, just go with it. He has a way to stop it (Antiplastic, would you believe?) but he is stumped as to where the transmitter, which the alien needs to broadcast its signal, could be located but it should be close. When Rose figures out that the place they’re looking for is the London Eye (to the amazement of the Doctor) they descend into the sewer beneath it, in search of their adversary. Just like that, the one has become two, and the Doctor now has a companion, though not yet with a capital C. Call her an ally perhaps, a partner, a helper. But he is no longer, for the moment at least, alone.
Beneath the city they find the Nestene Consciousness”, as the Doctor calls it: a huge, bubbling, plastic alien in a vat, like lava. Rose wants him to kill it but he wants to talk to it, and approaches. Rose is overjoyed to find Mickey is still alive, though furious with the Doctor for not advising her that it was not hopeless. The Doctor knew the boy might have been kept as a “master copy”, but failed to pass on that information to his companion. After trying to get the consciousness to bugger off, unsuccessfully, the Doctor finds himself grabbed by mannequins and the antiplastic is taken from him. Seeing this as an aggressive act, the consciousness then seems to point out that it recognises the TARDIS, that it was at the war in which its planet was destroyed and it seems to blame the Doctor for this. He admits he was there but denies being responsible, but the consciousness is not listening, and he is dragged closer to the vat.
Seeing the TARDIS also spooks the alien, who activates the signal to animate every piece of plastic in the world. Rose tries to call her mother to warn her, but Jackie is already on her way into a shopping centre as the signal goes out. Shop dummies begin to come alive and go berserk, although for some reason they are now armed? Poor Clive is shot down as he realises too late that everything he has read about the Doctor’s adventures has been true. Panic ensues as shop dummies run rampant, and Jackie is menaced by three dummy brides in the street. Meanwhile, Rose refuses to leave the Doctor to his fate, despite the urging of the terror-stricken Mickey. Grabbing a chain she Indiana-Joneses across the pit, kicking out at the dummy holding the Doctor and the other one, which loses its grip on the antiplastic, dropping it right into the face of the alien consciousness.
With the signal disrupted the dummies begin to flail about, seeking instructions and directions, and Rose, the Doctor and Mickey leg it in the TARDIS just before the whole thing goes up. The Doctor offers Rose the chance of a lifetime, to come with him and explore all of time and space, but though tempted she says she has to find her mother, and Mickey is acting like a child, his mind shattered by the things he has seen. He clings to her like a limpet and she can’t leave him. Disappointed, the Doctor departs. A moment later though he returns, grinning. “Did I mention it travels in time?” he says, and Rose, seeing a chance she had surely thought slipped through her hands, a chance that only comes once in a million lifetimes, grabs it with both hands and runs towards the TARDIS.
The beginning of a beautiful, and cult partnership.
QUOTES
Rose: “So what are they? Students?”
The Doctor: “Why would they be students?”
Rose: “Because, well, to get that many people to dress up and act silly … they’ve got to be students.”
The Doctor: “That makes sense. Well done.”
(The first indication that the Doctor is impressed with the young girl. Even fleeing for what could very well be her life --- or at worst, a bad joke ---she still has the clarity of thought to be able to make a logical assessment of the situation and come to a general idea of what might be happening. She hasn’t panicked, screamed, cried or said “This isn’t happening!” She’s trying to work it out logically. Clear thought and a certain amount of fearlessness: two very important qualities in any Companion.)
Jackie: “I’ve got Debbie on the phone. She knows a man at the Mirror. Five hundred quid for an interview.”
Rose: “Oh great! Give it here!” (Slams down phone).
(This is a great little scene, and tells us that Rose is not the kind of gold-digging, publicity-hungry teenager who will sell her secrets for the price of a weekend in Magaluth. She is not interested in talking to any reporters, making money or drawing attention to herself. Another quality that will be needed if she is to make it as a Companion.)
Jackie (blushing): “I’m in my dressing gown.”
The Doctor: “Yes you are.”
Jackie: “There’s a strange man in my bedroom.”
The Doctor: “Yes, there is.”
Jackie: “Well … anything could happen.”
The Doctor: “No.”
The Doctor (to himself, looking at a glitzy trash celeb mag): “That won’t last: he’s gay and she’s an alien!”
The Doctor (looking in the mirror): “Ah, could have been worse. But look at the ears!”
(This is the Doctor’s ninth incarnation, and obviously the first time he has seen his new face in a mirror, although one would have assumed the TARDIS would have one. Every time he regenerates, this is a ritual the Doctor goes through: always interesting to see what he’ll look like this time around. It’s also a sly aside to the fans, as the show is at this point returning for the first time in twenty years or so, and in a sort of breaking of the fourth wall Eccleston is saying to the fans of Pertwee, Baker, Davison et al you could have done worse than me.)
The Doctor: “There you are, I’ve disarmed it. See? ‘armless!”
(This is probably the most obvious joke anyone could make about this situation. That and “let me give you a hand”...) 
Rose: “So who else knows about this?”
The Doctor: “No-one.”
Rose: “So you’re on your own?”
The Doctor: “Well, who else is there? I mean, you lot, all you do is eat chips, watch telly, go to bed, while all the time, underneath it, there’s a war going on!”
(The first indication both of the massive burden placed on the shoulders of the Doctor, and the immense loneliness of his position. There’s also a note of frustration --- disguised under a chirpy “what-can-you-do” attitude --- that he has to do all this and nobody knows, or cares. He’s like the shepherd who protects his sheep, the animals oblivious to anything but the fact that he provides food and shelter for them, unaware of the dangers that lurk beyond their fields. The Doctor is the ultimate shepherd, protecting his flock against all the predators out there who wait for their chance to strike.)
Rose: “It’s gonna follow us!”
The Doctor: “The assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn’t get through those doors. And believe me, they’ve tried!”
(Probably a reference to an earlier season, though you’ll have to check http://www.musicbanter.com/members-j...who-thing.html and ask this man…)
Rose: “Did they kill him? Mickey? Did they kill him? Is he dead?”
The Doctor: “I never thought of that.”
(A fundamental failing perhaps in the Doctor. He is not human. Remember that. He is not immortal but he has lived about nine hundred years at this point. Humans, though he has an affinity for them, are not important to him. He does not see them as equals. If anything, he sees them sort of more as pets: something to be protected but only because they can’t protect themselves, and he has grown fond of them. Constant exposure to the companionship of humans has not really softened this aspect of the Doctor over eight incarnations. From here that will begin to change, but slowly.)
Rose: “Mickey. My boyfriend. And you forgot him. Again. You were right: you are alien”
The Doctor: “Look, if I forgot the name of some stupid kid, it’s because I’m busy trying to save the lives of every stupid ape blundering about on top of this planet, all right?”
(Here the Doctor shows his true contempt for humans and what they are, or more importantly are not, capable of. Again, he sees them as mindless animals, who look to him for protection even if they don’t realise it.)
Rose: “If you’re an alien, how come you sound like you’re from the north?”
The Doctor: “Lots of planets have a north!”
(Great little line. Up to now, most if not all of the incarnations of the Doctor have been men with deep, cultured voices --- Peter Davison. Jon Pertwee. Syvester McCoy. Tom Baker. This is the first time the timelord has sounded like he comes from Lancashire!)
The Doctor: “How can you hide something that big in a city this small?”
Rose: “Hold on: hide what?”
The Doctor: “The transmitter. The consciousness is controlling every single piece of plastic, so it needs a transmitter to boost the signal.”
Rose: “What’s it look like?”
The Doctor: “Like a transmitter. Round, massive. Somewhere slap bang in the middle of London. A huge circular metal structure, like a wheel or a dish. Close to where we’re standing. Must be completely invisible.”
Rose: (indicates the London Eye over his shoulder)
The Doctor: “What? What? What is it? What? Oh. Fantastic!”
(See below under “Oops!” but also note: the Doctor thinks of London as a small city. Still, given the metropolises he has visited no doubt there are cities into which you could drop a hundred Londons or New Yorks or Beijings, and never find them again!)
The Doctor: “Am I addressing the consciousness? Thank you. Now, might I observe that you infiltrated this system by means of warp shunt technology, and so may I suggest with the greatest respect that you shunt off?”
Rose: “I got no A-Levels, no job, no future. But I tell you what I do have. Junior under-fifteens school gymnastic team. I’ve got the bronze!”