True Companion
In this section I’ll be looking at what it takes to be a proper assistant to the Doctor, why some Companions rose to the challenge and why some failed, and how each fares against the other. If we ever get that far, eventually I’ll face them all off and see who comes out on top. For now, I’m going to obviously concentrate on Rose, who is the Companion for the first two seasons, and look at the qualities that made her the perfect Companion to accompany the Doctor’s return, and how she manifested those qualities.
I’ve already spoken of how her analytical mind impressed the Doctor from the start: her ability to stay calm in a crisis --- even when facing the dummies on her own, before the Doctor showed up, her mind was trying to make sense of it, find a logical explanation for what she was seeing --- her willingness to listen to his story and her innate human sympathy for him, even though she didn’t know him. Now she shows extreme resourcefulness when, in the midst of a fight between the Doctor and what appears to be her boyfriend --- who has, let’s not forget, just had his head ripped off --- she has the presence of mind to realise that the sooner the restaurant is cleared the easier it will be for the Doctor to do what he has to, and she hits the fire alarm. Talk about a cool head! Sorry, I know: Mickey just lost his. But still.
And of course, it's her that saves the Doctor (and, by extension, her mother and the entire planet) by swinging across the chasm and helping free the Doctor, in the process killing the Nestene Consciousness. Not bad for a bimbo teenager!
Laughter is the best medicine
Not always the most humourous of shows in its original incarnation --- well, not intentionally anyway --- the “new” Doctor Who focusses rather a lot on being lighthearted at times. This could be due to its being aimed more at a family audience and its intention being more to entertain than to scare, or it could be because some of the coming episodes are quite heavy and dark. But whatever the reason, there is humour sprinkled liberally through the so-far seven seasons, each of the actors who assumes the role giving the funny side their own particular and personal twist.
The wheelie bin “eating” Mickey is one of the first of these (it even belches afterwards!), though going back, the scene where the Doctor is wrestling with the animated arm and Rose, with her back to him in the kitchen continues making the tea and jabbering on, is quite amusing. Also Jackie’s coy attempts to woo the handsome man standing just outside her bedroom, while perhaps a little sad, raise a smile too. The best part though is probably when the Doctor is searching for the transmitter and it turns out it’s been in plain sight all along! Also Rose’s comment as he says “Think of it: plastic all over the world, every artificial thing waiting to come alive. The shop window dummies, the wires, the cables, the phones” and she says “The breast implants!” The mind boggles!
Enemy Mine
A section in which I’ll look at the enemy facing the Doctor in that episode, or series of episodes. Classic Who used to have the episodes made into one overarching story, so you could have, say, “The Green Death, part one”, “The Green Death, part two”, etc. They don’t do that anymore but often a few episodes, which will all be titled differently, may go together to form one big story. In those cases, I’ll only run this section in the first part of the story, unless there is a compelling reason for me to do it in the other parts.
The foes the Doctor has faced, in this and Classic Who, range from brilliant to awful, and here I’ll be rating them on a sliding scale, giving them a Dalek rating (why not?) where five Daleks is a superb (or indeed, returning from the classic series like the Daleks themselves) enemy and one Dalek is less than pathetic. I’ll talk about their impact on the show, if any, and any future appearances they may make. I will as ever try not to give away any spoilers for future episodes, though the current writeup will always be complete, so if you’re planning to watch this series and haven’t yet got around to episode one, well too late cos you’ve already had it Spoiled! But beware and take notes for future episodes.
This one, to be fair, is not good, and for the opening episode of a series that has waited to be reborn for over two decades, it’s pretty damn weak. I mean, you can call it a “Nestene Consciousness” if you want Doctor, but it’s just really a big lump of gooey plastic, and looks like the vat Arnie fell into at the end of T2!
Evolution of a Timelord
Here I’ll be charting the progress of the Doctor’s relationship with humanity, mostly through the agency of his Companions, and how he comes to see them as less than just insects he has to protect and more as actual people, lifeforms with their own hopes and dreams and how, despite himself and perhaps to his chagrin, he begins to become just a little bit more like them, more human and less alien.
When this episode kicks off and the ninth Doctor makes his appearance, it’s clear that humanity is in his way. He’s carrying on the work of his previous incarnations, which includes saving the Earth from all dangers, domestic and foreign, as it were (mostly foreign, if you include extraterrestrial) but is a little teed off by it, particularly the fact that nobody even seems to know he exists, much less appreciates the work he does. He’s almost like someone repaying a favour for a friend, doing something he would really rather not do, even if the friend in question is himself. It’s a little as if he’s so used to saving the Earth that he feels he has to keep doing it: in many ways, it’s become something of a
raison d’etre for the Timelord.
However we do see the way he interacts with alien species. Where we might see a monster he might see something totally different. His scientific curiosity can be stirred by something we would shrink from, or fear, or loathe. He has a basic and almost unshakeable respect for life in all its forms, and only attacks if he is attacked, or if he is forced to defend. When they encounter the Nestene Consciousness Rose says “Tip your vial of antiplastic into the vat and let’s get out of here!” But the Doctor replies “I haven’t come to kill it”. And he hasn’t. He’s prepared to try to reason with it, convince it to leave this planet, and only if pushed will he resort to deadly force. It’s quite a revelation really, that the Doctor seems to care more for what we would call monsters than he does for the people he seeks to protect.
By the same token, when Rose finds Mickey alive and says it to the Doctor he nods and said it was a possibility, as the consciousness might want to make copies of him. But she is angry that he did not bother to mention this to her, to give her hope. Did he fail to say it because he didn’t want to give her
false hope? You’d like to say he did, but in reality he really just was not that bothered about Mickey. He doesn’t know him like he’s starting to get to know Rose, and he certainly doesn’t, at this point anyway, care about him. So he doesn’t figure in the Doctor’s plans. The fact that he’s alive is a bonus --- for Rose, but not for him. It would not matter to him had Mickey died. He’s just not important enough to worry or care about.
A long and lonely life
And here we’ll be looking at the Doctor’s romantic relationships, not just with various Companions but with other humans or even aliens. After all, it’s a lonely task he has set himself and spending all that time alone in a blue box hurtling through space and time with a nubile female, even if she is alien to him, the odd romantic thought must cross his mind. These thoughts get stronger as the series develops, though here of course he wouldn’t even consider such a thing.
This is why,when Rose’s mother flirts with him as he stands outside her bedroom, he laughs at the concept. It’s not that he doesn’t think she’s attractive or sexy, but to him she’s an alien lifeform --- and in his estimation, a far lower one than he --- and the idea of becoming intimate with such a lifeform just doesn’t even cross his mind. Of course, this doesn’t make him any friends with Jackie, who thinks he’s spurning her.
Oops!
There are occasions though when the Doctor, despite living for almost a millennium and having, as Marvin the Paranoid Android would put it, a brain the size of a planet, is out-thought by the “lower lifeform”. Sometimes it’s a case of being unable to see the forest for the trees, his inability to stand back and look at a situation from a totally different angle. Sometimes it’s just being incapable of thinking as humans do. Much of what we base our decisions on is not only logic, but instinct, intuition, a gut feeling. Call it what you will, it defies most mathematical expressions and appears in no textbooks, but often its use is what can turn the tide in any given situation. These are the times when the Doctor may realise, just for a moment, that smart as he is, these “stupid apes” can sometimes show him a thing or two.
He makes a classic blunder here as he tells Rose in exasperation that he can’t believe that the alien consciousness could hide a massive transmitter in plain sight. What would it be like, Rose asks, and he says massive, round, bang in the middle of London. Like a wheel, a dish, close to where they are now. He shrugs: it must be completely invisible, he decides, as Rose eyes the huge, circular, metal form of the London Eye over his shoulder….
Even then, it takes him three looks before he realises what she’s indicating. Brain the size of a planet, indeed!
FAMILY
Like most, if not all dramas, Doctor Who is based solidly around the idea of family. Although much of the time it’s just Rose and the Doctor, they are in themselves something of a small family, and when they return to Earth they often join family life. So Rose’s mother, later father, her boyfriend, and any other figures in her life are all pulled into the story. As with this section as it runs in my other series writeups, I’ll be delving into the relationships between the characters, particularly familial ones, here.
JACKIE
A typical mother, Jackie’s one main concern is her only daughter. When she hears about the explosion at the shop, Jackie is frantic until she confirms Rose is okay. Then she tries to arrange an interview which will get her some money, as she no longer has a job. Later, after the attack of the killer dummies, her first thought when Rose rings her is not to tell her about how she faced death, came close to being killed, but to warn her daughter, to protect her, as is a mother’s natural instincts.
This behaviour will harden as she realises that Rose’s decision to go off with the Doctor is putting her in danger, and her attitude towards the mysterious man she once tried unsuccessfully to seduce will become cold and angry, like a lioness defending her cub against predators.
MICKEY
Though he will not remain in the show past the first season, Mickey is Rose’s boyfriend but comes across as quite childish in ways. He’s very happy-go-lucky and probably doesn’t realise how fortunate he is to have Rose. When he drops Rose off at Clive’s, he acts the macho boyfriend, trying to protect her, though really he’s not a tough guy. Not yet. Seems everyone wants to protect Rose. But after his experiences with the Nestene Consciousness, he regresses, becoming less a child and more a baby, clinging to Rose for something familiar, something friendly, something human. In a very un-macho show of selfishness, he entreats her not to go with the Doctor when he offers, but though she acquiesces initially, even her fondness for Mickey (I doubt it is or ever was or will be love) can’t stop her from running towards her destiny, and Mickey must now know that he comes a very distant second to the odd man in the blue police box.
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!
I have to take issue with the activation of the dummies. Okay I know this is a sci-fi show and sort of meant to be for kids, and much of it is played firmly tongue-in-cheek, but that’s no excuse for lazy writing, one of my bugbears. When the Nestene Consciousness sends its signal the Doctor tells Rose it’s supposed to activate every piece of plastic on the planet. Why then is it that only the dummies come to life? And why, for the love of God, have they suddenly got weapons built in? Shop dummies aren’t generally fitted with automatic weapons, so why are these? That’s never explained, ever. And that annoys me. It won’t be the only thing that does about this series, despite my love of it, and any others will be noted here.
Also, didn’t Mickey take the plastic arm and throw it away? How come then it is in Rose’s house when the Doctor calls the next morning? Did it somehow claw its way out of the bin, make it back to the house and lie there in wait?