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NEXT (DOCTOR WHO)
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8TH JULY 2006
(45-MINUTE EPISODE, PART 2 OF
2)
Russell T Davies and his team have done it again. Doomsday
encapsulates every-
thing that is so
spectacular about the revived series. My Dad will doubtless hate the mushy
stuff but, even so, with ninety-five per cent of the episode nothing but
top-drawer action, this one truly has something for everybody. Quite
simply, it’s magnificent. Flawless, even.
So how can you
top last year’s climactic masterpiece, The Parting of the Ways? How
can you go one better than having two hundred Dalek saucers – nigh on half
a million Daleks – invading the Earth of the far future, the departure of
a companion, and a regeneration? You do the only thing that you can – you
take one of your own childhood fantasies, and you make it happen.
“It’s
like Stephen Hawking versus the Speaking Clock!”
Daleks versus
Cybermen is exactly the sort of thing that fans have always dreamed about
seeing; the sort of apparently obvious thing that casual viewers of the
series automatically assume has happened before at some point, but in
reality has never, ever occurred. What
is so rewarding
though is that it has been pulled off with such style; Davies even teases
us with the alarming notion of a Dalek / Cybermen alliance that could
“upgrade the universe” before the inevitable antagonism ensues.
Whilst in itself
the banter between the two cybernetic races is a joy to listen to, what I
found especially interesting is that the narrative revolves around two
antipathetic races blasting
the hell out of
each other. If you have the Doctor versus the Daleks, or the Doctor versus
the Cybermen, then there is no question as to who the viewer roots for;
however, when you have (as the unprecedented fourth and fifth Radio
Times’
covers of the season proudly proclaim) Daleks versus Cybermen, then it
should really be heel versus heel.
“This is not war! This is pest control!”
Yet the Daleks
are clearly borne out as the ‘baddest’ baddies here, the sheer depths of
their evil overwhelming the Cybermen’s cold logic in every scene that they
share. Ultimately the Cybermen are just automatons, doing what they have
been programmed to believe is right
(though
from their mockery of the Daleks’ “inelegant design”, it’s admittedly a
little difficult to believe that there isn’t at least some vestige of
human conceit left inside of them). One could of course argue the same
about the Daleks, but at the end of the day Daleks can feel, and I
think it’s this factor that proves decisive here.
Doomsday’s
scenes of devastation are absolutely staggering to behold. When the Daleks
open their “Genesis Ark” prison ship, and millions of their number come
flooding out of it to spread across the London sky, I think that the Mill
manage to top their superlative work on last year’s epic finale. Millions
of Daleks flying through space is one thing, but flying through the air
above London? Swarming around Canary Wharf like insects? The visuals are
simply mind-blowing, and in terms of the storytelling, the stakes have
never been higher. This is not some far off invasion in the distant
future; this is here and now. This is war on Earth.
“Oh God. I did my duty! Oh God!”
For
me though, the real horror of Doomsday lies not with
its visceral
scenes of futuristic war-fare but in some of its
more restrained
moments. For instance, we experience
the horrors of
Cyberconversion first hand through Tracy-
Ann Oberman’s
despicable face of Torchwood, Yvonne
Hartman. The
character’s fate is perfectly scripted and
portrayed; as
she is taken for Cyberconversion, you can
see the mortal
dread on her face, and it is made so much
worse due to the
fact that she knows exactly what they
are going to do
to her. You almost feel sorry for the poor
woman.
And in the end,
when Yvonne somehow overcomes her
Cyberconditioning and guns down her fellow Cybermen,
allowing our
heroes just that little bit of extra time that they
need, you are
literally cheering her on as she sheds an oily
tear from her
cybernetic eye.
“If these are gonna be my last words then you’re gonna listen.
The God of all Daleks, and I destroyed him!”
Furthermore,
it really
is a remarkable skill to be able to keep your viewers on tenterhooks
throughout an entire episode. With his unremitting script for Doomsday,
Davies almost sadistically refuses to let the viewer relax for an instant.
From the moment that Rose got in the Black Dalek’s face, I kept thinking
“it’s gonna happen now; she’s gonna die”. Indeed,
my fiancée could
have been forgiven for thinking that there was something wrong with our
sofa – I wasn’t behind it; I was hovering on the edge of it, constantly
jumping up and down.
It was like
England versus Portugal all over again, save for one decisive factor.
Whereas with watching England there is always a little winker like Ronaldo
to spoil your day, you can always have complete faith in the Doctor to
save the day.
Just as things
couldn’t getter any bleaker for
Rose, for Mickey, and indeed for the whole
planet, the Doctor waltzes in to chamber, has
a bit of a nonchalant
chinwag with his friends
(much to the Daleks’ annoyance) and then goes on
to drop a couple of pretty hefty bombshells.
Firstly, what
many viewers have long-suspected
is confirmed – the Doctor was
actually a
soldier in the Time War, out there fighting on the front line. David
Tennant’s haunted performance as he recalls horrifying events on Arcadia (Deceit)
that we are not privy to, and probably never will be, is absolutely
mesmerising.
“I was there at the fall of Arcadia. Some day I might even come to terms
with that.”
Secondly, my
ears were not deceiving me in the opening minutes of the episode.
According to the Doctor, these four Daleks form the Cult of Skaro - Daleks
whose mission it is to think like the enemy, so much so that they even
have names. Now this small part of the episode – which to be honest,
didn’t affect the larger plot at all; these could just as plausibly have
been four generic Daleks – opens up so many storytelling possibilities,
and will no doubt form the subject matter of many a future story,
especially considering Dalek Sec’s (the Black Dalek) sly “emergency
temporal shift” before his army is sucked into the Void at the end of the
story.
The writer
also should be given a great deal of credit for pulling off what is, in
essence, a colossal balancing act. Tasked with tearing the Doctor and Rose
apart as well as setting
the series’ two
most iconic alien menaces at each other’s throats, Doomsday still
has the time to resolve Jackie and Pete Tyler’s unique tale, and do so in
inspirational fashion.
“How rich? I don’t care about that. How very?”
We all knew that
it was coming, but it didn’t make it any less dramatic. The widowed Pete
Tyler is back in our universe, face to face with the widowed Jackie Tyler.
Had they not ran into each other’s arms for a full-on, cheesy, Hollywood
kiss, then the rules of poetics would have needed some serious revision.
But in true Doctor Who style, even such a momentous, dramatic scene
is undercut with a little bit of wanton levity: “there was never anyone
else”, whispers Jackie as the Doctor, Rose and Mickey all bite their lips
and try not to laugh.
“What is it with the glasses?”
The
story’s climax is agonisingly perfect. The Doctor
rattles off all
the necessary exposition about “Void stuff”
in just about
twenty economical seconds and with that
the die is cast
– everyone is going to “Pete’s World” to
live happily
ever after. Mother, father, daughter, her ex... Only daughter isn’t happy
about that. Daughter pushes
her reset button
and sends herself back to our world.
She is willing
to leave behind her mother and father,
who have just
been reunited after years apart, to stand
by the Doctor.
To stand by the man that she loves.
Billie Piper
gives her best performance yet as Rose.
In just
forty-five minutes she shows just how far she has
come since we
first met her as a bored 2005 teenager,
constantly
flouting death and courting danger as she plays her part in saving the
world. But with just minutes
to go, I thought
that she’d finally come undone. Watching
the Doctor and
Rose hang on for dear life as the Void
sucked in
Daleks, Cybermen, as well as everything and everyone touched by the “Void
stuff”
(including Rose)
was one of the most gut-wrenching experiences of television watching that
I’ve ever had.
“This is the story of how I died.”
To kill Rose
would have been bad enough, but to send her to Hell with a million Daleks
and Cybermen would have been far too much. But for a minute there, I
really thought it was on the cards - Tennant and Piper each deserve a
BAFTA on the strength of that one scene alone! Their faces. Their
mutual, blood curdling scream as Rose’s fingers slip and she is sucked
into… the arms of her Dad. Pete Tyler makes the last minute save and Rose
survives, but
as a result of
this timely intervention she’s trapped in Pete’s World. The breach is
sealed.
Forever.
That touching,
soulful new composition by Murray Gold plays and the Doctor and Rose each
find themselves staring at the same plain, white wall; the universe
between them reflected in a slight nuance of stage lighting.
Rose is
inconsolable, but at least she has her family. She has her Mum and Dad.
She even has Mickey and his old Gran. If, at some point before she met the
Doctor, some-body had told her that she’d be rich beyond her wildest
dreams, living
with her mother and her long-dead father
in a luxurious
mansion, she would have thought them mad.
But she would have wanted
to believe them. The Doctor may have been viciously ripped away from her,
but she has everything else that she could have ever wanted.
And so we come
full circle. There is a beautiful symmetry in Rose sitting up in her bed,
just as she did in the first scene of Rose over two years ago now.
Only this time she has had a dream. She has to follow the voice.
“Here I am at last, and this is the story of how I died.”
Officially dead
in our world, Rose begins her new life in another as she stands in Bad
Wolf Bay, staring across a beach; staring across a universe at the fading
projection of the man she loves, who is “ burning up a sun just to say
goodbye”. As always, Davies’ dialogue is lyrically superb. Rose asks the
Doctor if he can come through to her world, and he bluntly replies, “two
universes would collapse”. Rose just says, “so?” and it just sums it all
up; the Doctor and Rose, love in general.
“I love you”, Rose splutters through a veil of tears.
“Quite right too”, quips the Doctor with a cheeky but sorrow-tipped smile
on his face,
doing his best
Han Solo impression. “And I suppose, if there’s one last chance to say it,
Rose Tyler…” and
then he is brutally torn away by the currents of our universe. The Time
Lord stands in his TARDIS alone, a single tear running down his cheek. He
never told her.
And then
suddenly, the Doctor looks up to find a disgruntled woman wearing a
wedding dress (Catherine Tate) frowning at him. Once again, humour crops
up even at the most ostensibly inopportune moment and rounds off the
season in a bizarre, upbeat fashion.
Rose and her
family may be gone, but the Doctor will go on, just as he has always done.
The same old
life. The lonely God.
“What?”
Altogether then,
Doomsday is the crowning jewel in what has turned out to be a
peerless season of television drama, but sadly it’s a crowning jewel that
comes
at a price: no more Billie, no more Rose.
Life after
Billie Piper is almost as daunting a thought as life after Christopher
Eccleston, but we have to remember that the magic of Doctor Who is
that it will march on irrespective of its cast. For every star that bows
out, no matter how bright, there will always be another waiting to take
his or her place - just look what a star David Tennant has proven himself
to be. And with The Runaway Bride to look forward to at Christmas,
and then Freema Agyeman’s new companion Martha Jones to follow next
spring, there is certainly plenty of excitement ahead. And, if I remember
rightly, the Face of Boe still has a secret to tell…
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