1.2 "The end of the world"
As the first adventure that they had together was more really accidental and happenstance than contrived, the Doctor decides to take Rose somewhere cool for the first real experience of the universe he inhabits, and where cooler to go than to the very end of time? Five billion years into the future, the very day and time when the sun goes nova, and destroys the Earth. This is in fact a major entertainment event, and all those who can afford it have gathered to watch the Earth's final death throes. Rose, somewhat understandably, is a little overwhelmed by the sudden influx of strange looking aliens and lifeforms she never imagined existed, but which she will find out are commonplace throughout the galaxy. She is also feeling a little lonely: the Doctor has told her that there is nobody left on Earth, now that it has reached its final day, and therefore she is the only human left to witness the destruction of her home planet. You can't get much more lonely than that.
Although, technically, she isn't actually the last human left. The Lady Cassandra O'Brien ––– who is little more than a tightly stretched fold of skin held in a frame –-– with a face ––– claims that honour. She may be the last human, but she is a little unclear on Earth matters, as she speaks of the ostrich breathing fire, and presents what she tells the assemblage is an iPod, though it quite clearly an old fifties jukebox. Rose's discomfort ––– both at seeing the death of her own world and being totally out of her depth ––– really starts to hit home now, as she realises she is (according to the Doctor, anyway, and the evidence of her own eyes would seem to support that, such as they can) five billion years into the future. She is in the future. She has travelled through time. She has travelled through time into the future with a man she barely knows. What the hell is she doing? She begins to wonder if her impulsive nature might be undoing, once and for all.
On this most auspicious day, it is traditional for the guests to hand out gifts to each other, but one of the gifts, a mysterious silver sphere, seems to be anything but "a gift of peace". Strange metallic spiders are roaming through the complex, and they certainly do not seem to be up to any good. In fact, they appear to be trying to sabotage or otherwise compromise the floating space station, and when the steward hosting the event realises this they arrange for him to be killed rather messily. The Doctor realises something is wrong: there has been a jolt, and the ship is supposed to be insulated and protected against any sort of gravity effects whatsoever (can't have the honoured guests getting burned like the Earth, can we?) He's told by one of the other guests, an alien tree called Jade, who has taken a shine to him, that the entire thing is automated: there is no crew, no captain, nobody except the steward and the maintenance crew.The spaceship ––– basically a floating platform in space that they call Platform One ––– moves automatically between events of this nature, and is directed by the Corporation, whoever they may be.
Meanwhile, all of Rose's frustrations and anger come flying out of her when she confronts Cassandra, who still claims to be the last human being. Rose tells her that, after all the operations she's had she is no more human than a tree. She calls her “a trampoline with a face”, which is pretty accurate. If anyone here is human she says it's her, and she takes offence at Cassandra's claim of being a member of her race. As she stalks off, she is accosted by a group of hooded figures, the same ones who've been distributing the metallic spheres out of which the robotic spiders come. The Doctor, investigating the engine room of the ship, finally sees one of the spiders and captures it. He then runs to rescue Rose but although he stops the sun shield from descending (which exposes any part of the station without it to the searing rays of the exploding sun) he cannot get the door open. But the danger has been averted for now, and he has bigger problems. He needs to find out who has sent the little metal saboteurs, and then he uses one of them to help solve the mystery. Originally, it goes to the hooded figures, but he knows these are just, for the real criminal ––– droids used to throw suspicion from….Cassandra.
With her revealed as the real culprit, like all evil genius, she decides to tell them her plan. The original plan had been to hold everybody for ransom and collect a big payday, (with herself seen as one of the “hostages” while her hooded androids took the rap) but now that she's been exposed she says all of the dignitaries on board are just as useful to her dead as alive. She has shares in their rival companies, and their deaths will make her rich beyond even her dreams. She has also smuggled on board a teleportation device ––– strictly forbidden by the rules of Platform One -–– with which she intends to make her escape as her metallic spider robots complete the task of dropping the ship's force fields, just as the sun prepares to go nova. Luckily, with Jade's help the Doctor is able to manually raise the shields, just as the planet explodes. The day is once again saved, but Jade has sacrificed her life to save everyone.
But there is yet unfinished business. Reversing the polarities on the transporter Cassandra used to escape the ship, the Doctor forces her back to Platform One, where the increase in temperature brought about by her treachery starts to dry her out. With nobody to moisturise her ––– and the doctor not about to volunteer –-– she dries up and then just explodes. And so ends the life of the so-called last human.
QUOTES
The Doctor: "Sabotaging a spaceship while you're on it: how stupid is that?"
The Doctor: "After five billion years, it still all comes down to money."
Cassandra: "Force fields gone, with the Earth about to explode. At least it will be quick ––– like my fifth husband."
The Doctor: "You lot, just chill!"
(
A particularly cutting thing to say to a group of people who are waiting to die at the hands of a supernova)
Rose: "Help her."
The Doctor: "Everything has its time and everything dies."
(In this short exchange, we learn a lot about these two people. The Doctor, seeing before him a murderess who is driven by greed and financial gain, and who, in his estimation, should have been dead a long time ago anyway, is quite prepared to let Cassandra die. There is also burning revenge in his inscrutable eyes: after all, Cassandra was almost directly responsible for the death of Jade, and the Doctor does not take kindly to people who sacrifice his friends. He could of course be talking about Cassandra, he could also be talking about the Earth. It has lasted five billion years ––– how many billion of those we can't say have been without human life on the surface, but it seems to be clear that the planet has been uninhabited for a very long time ––– and perhaps in his worldview it's best that it just get vapourised now.
Rose on the other hand, can find compassion for this creature, even after the horrible things she's done. Perhaps, in a way, though she denied it earlier she may feel some affinity with Cassandra, as she is after all, in some odd way human. She is, or was, a native of Earth, and for Rose that might be enough to make a connection with the creature. This however also highlights the girl's massive capacity to forgive, and her all-embracing compassion. She does not seek revenge: she does not see a multi-murderer –– with herself as one of the intended victims ––– she just sees a creature in pain, and is prepared to do what is necessary to ease the pain and save its life.)
The Doctor: "My planet's gone. It's dead. It burned, just like the Earth. Nothing now but rocks and dust."
(A rare moment of introspection from the Doctor, when he lets go the mask and drops his defences, perhaps to let Rose know that, although he may seem all-powerful and immortal, and even invincible, he is far from such. His home planet is dead too, and in a way this can be used to link the two people, one from Earth and one from Gallifrey, in a sense of shared loss.)
Evolution of a Time Lord
Here we see how the Doctor treats many things as a big joke, a great adventure, a lark. But what he does not realise is that the companion that he brings with him is not used to such things: this is a huge culture shock for Rose ––– the ultimate culture shock really ––– and he has not even considered how she will react to it. She's never even seen an alien before (unless you count the Nestine intelligence in the first episode), and now here she is, watching the countdown to the destruction of Earth, on an alien spaceship, in the far far future. To her, this could not be seen as an adventure. This is a glimpse of what her planet has to look forward to (admittedly, millennia in the future, but it's still there, lurking in the background and now brought sharply into focus); this is a scary, weird, almost unbelievable situation that she finds herself in, and the one person to whom she should be able to turn, who can explain what's happening is simply not interested.
The Doctor is too busy enjoying himself, and showing off really. He has not taken into account Rose's feelings about this event, and you'd have to think that it is ill-advised at best, and cruel at worst, to bring a human to the day that their home planet dies. What was he thinking? Sure, it's impressive and it's exciting, but it's also very morbid. They, and all the others gathered here in this spaceship high above the planet, are basically not so much mourners at the Earth's funeral but certainly observers. That's the worst part: it's not like anybody cares about the Earth. To them, it's been here for billions of years and now it's going to explode, but they don't care. For them it's just a spectacular sight, an event to book your seat for, something to save up for perhaps or something to look forward to. Nobody will mourn the Earth, perhaps nobody will remember it, and that may be the saddest thing of all in this whole, macabre, really quite depressing scenario.
Further evidence that the doctor is not human, and does not really understand humans ––– despite travelling with them for centuries ––– is evident in the fact that, as he tries to save Platform One from the exploding planet, he forgets all about Rose. He does attempt to rescue her, but the door is jammed, and after that you really have to say he forgets about her. So, in the end, as the screens begin to crack, the heat builds up and Rose faces certain death, she does so alone. She is surely frightened ––– terrified probably, who wouldn't be? ––– and there is no one there to reassure her, to hold her hand and tell her things will be okay. There is no knight on a white charger coming to save the day, there is nothing but the searing heat and the awful realisation that she's going to die here in the future, five billion years after she should be long dead, and that the death of her planet will take her ––– literally, the last human –– with it.
Even worse, when disaster is averted and they are reunited, the Doctor is more interested in meting out vengeance to Cassandra than asking Rose how she is, or even apologising for leaving her on her own, where she no doubt thought she would die. He actually never apologises: but then, the Doctor seldom does. It's not that he doesn't apologise
per se, he just never seems to realise that he should. To him, he was needed elsewhere and Rose should have realised that, should have known that he would save her, one way or the other. He believes completely and unreservedly in his own abilities, in his own invulnerability and expects everyone else to do the same. But Rose is only human, with human failings and human doubts, besides she hasn't known him that long: how could she know that something as trivial as the destruction of her home world and getting a supernova in the face is something this man would laugh off, something he wouldn't even consider a big deal?
Another point to note about the Doctor's attempts to rescue Rose is that, when he runs to the room in which she is trapped, he doesn't even know that it's her. When he bangs on the door and hears her voice, he greets this with a sarcastic "Oh well it
would be you, wouldn't it?" The point being, that although we would expect the Doctor, as the hero, to rush to Rose's rescue, the Time Lord will in fact go to help anyone: human, alien, android, being of pure thought ––– it matters not to him. There need be no relationship between the two; it could in fact even be his worst enemy. It doesn't matter. He is a man who saves people. It's what he does.
But the fact that he seems to have even forgotten about Rose, is not worried for her safety, shows us how, up to now, he has been used to travelling without any company. He's not used to having to check on the people who travel with him. He is quite literally used to looking out for number one. This will of course change as he gets used to Rose being in the TARDIS with him, but for now he really hasn't got the mindset to even think that she might be in trouble, to remember that it was him who brought her here, to the far future, a place she certainly does not know, where she has no friends or anybody to look out for her, and as her guide basically, he's responsible for her safety. He will be told this, in no uncertain terms, later on Earth by Rose's mother, and will realise the huge responsibility he actually carries in allowing the human to travel to all the dark, dangerous, fantastic places he goes.
TRUE COMPANION
To be fair, Rose does not exactly save the day here, or show any of the ingenuity, talent or even fearlessness that she did in the first episode. But then, you wouldn't really expect her to would you? She is terrified: her planet is about to be destroyed by our sun, and as if that was not enough, it looks like she will die here with it. Her protector, her guide has run off, and she is left to face death alone. Her initial reaction to the death of her planet is sadness, loss, followed by rising anger and indignation that such an event be made into a source of entertainment. She also upbraids Cassandra, calling herself the last human when she looks nothing like what Rose believes human should look like.
But when things go wrong, and she gets trapped, there's no resourcefulness there, not yet. Of course, there really is nothing that she could have done. The only way out of the chamber was through the door which is jammed, or to stop the sun filter from coming down, both of which were outside her control. To her credit, she doesn't panic and cry, but she's definitely terrified. She is probably also very annoyed that the Doctor left her to her fate, although as her relationship with him develops she will realise that she cannot just be a hanger-on, a damsel in distress or indeed a passenger: she will have to pull her weight in this partnership, which she will learn to do.
Perhaps even as a result of this epiphany, she will start to take charge a little more; she will start to direct her own destiny and sometimes will not accept what the Doctor says, will go against his decision, and will argue with him, most times turning out to be right. She will learn to stand on her own two feet and to show him that she's not just a shrinking violet or an annoying burden that happens to travel with him in the TARDIS. One thing she has learnt here for sure: you can certainly depend on the Doctor, but you also need to depend on yourself because sometimes he will be busy saving the day.