What’s the most concise way of putting this? I adore Doctor Who, like almost no one else I know, it is a truly fabulous show I can’t get enough of. Last time I spoke about “Rose,” and why that was everything it needed to be. Everything was snappy, it wasn’t too sci-fi, it was just a simple classic bit of mind control over plastic trying to kill everyone on Earth. However, there is only one episode that sticks in my head every time I think of the show, one episode that’s silly, sci-fi, fun, a bit crap, and that’s episode two.

“The End of the World” is something I’ve used to show our own Alexx and Lisa a bit of Doctor Who villainy, loveable characters, and The Face of Boe. It is an episode with lots of moving pieces, but not much really going on. It’s not an episode with any running. There’s little to no drama aside from a bit with Rose, and it has by far one of the best human villains ever. However, we’ll get to her in a couple of minutes.

Picking up from where we left off in the last episode, though this time in the TARDIS, Rose gleefully leaps into the little blue box. The Doctor, who is playing with one of the Dragon Balls asks her when she would like to go, backwards or forwards in time? Well, it is “The End of the World” so it would be forwards five billion years into our future or as The Doctor puts it, “This is the year five point five slash apple slash twenty-six.” The exact day the sun expands and is thus, the end of the world.

Aboard Platform 1, an observation deck above the earth, where weapons, teleportation, and religion are forbidden, we meet all the players of the episode. Keep in mind, the only aliens Rose has met are the Nestene Consciousness (a blob in a vat) and The Doctor (a humanoid man), now she’s going to meet blue people, tree people, and the Lady Cassandra. The elite of the year 5.5/Apple/26, are all collecting to watch the world burn. Who are they (WARNING: Link contains language unsuitable for some), Regina George? No, they are just men, women, trees, and multiforms.

There is a reason I’m calling the characters “the players,” the entire 46 minutes is a game of Cluedo; or if you’re weird and American “Clue,” whatever that is. It’s all a mystery of something killing people and multiforms, but everyone aboard the observation platform is suspicious to us. Some more than others as the wonderfully devilish Zoë Wanamaker of My Family, Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Harry Potter, and of course, Fable 2 and 3, plays the Lady Cassandra O’Brien Dot Delta Seventeen (or simply Lady Cassandra). As well as the Adherents of the Repeated Meme and their gifts.

Of course, this all becomes a bit much for Rose, a simple young woman who’s only been off the council estate for work, friends, and boyfriends. The other side of time for the earth with crow people, blue people, shadowy governmental figures, and all is a bit scary. Once all the greetings are over and Lady Cassandra mistakes a Jukebox for an “iPod,” she runs away to figure it out. She comes across a Crespallion called Raffalo, a subservient plumber who slightly confuses Rose a bit more and comforts her by asking where she’s from. She can’t say earth with it burning below them, so she realizes how mad running into the TARDIS was.

Once Rose walks away and lets Raffalo continue her work, Raffalo finds a little robot thing in the vents. Coming out of one of the gifts by the Adherents of the Repeated Meme, this four-legged “spider-bot” has been running amok in the platform’s systems. There are many throughout the platforms vents, walls, pipes, and anywhere, all doing the evil bidding of one of the beings that is set to watch as the sun engulfs the earth in its ball of flame and anger. They pull Raffalo into the vent she was sent to check out.

Back with Rose, she’s in one of the private galleries with two of the gifts; one is a cutting of Jabe’s grandad, she’s the flirty Tree of Cheem, and one of those balls the Adherents handed her and The Doctor. Talking to the cutting of Jabe’s grandad, the spider-bot crawls out the orb to do its nefarious deeds. All the while, The Doctor is watching over the TARDIS as it’s moved from the private gallery it was in when he and Rose arrived. Moments later they are together again, though sitting on opposite sides of the stairs in the gallery.

This is where The Doctor is confronted with what is going on in Rose’s head, the confusion as to why everyone is so different and yet still speaking English. She also asks where he is from, and since the 9th Doctor is the one to follow John Hurt’s War Doctor, he still can’t face all that he had to do during the Last Great Time War. Once again, this is an example of Eccleston perfectly showing The Doctor’s true range as he dances to Soft Cell’s Tainted Love and worries if he’s a good man for fighting through that 400-year war between The Dalek and the Time Lords.

Following some dark realizations by The Doctor, subsequently after Rose brings up how aliens speak English and he tells her it’s part of being in The TARDIS, they move on. To which Rose brings up that she can’t argue with the designated driver or call for a taxi, The Doctor fiddles about with Rose’s old Nokia something or other. Ah, you kids with your iPods, back in my day your phone was an inch thick, weighed a ton, didn’t have a colored screen, and the only game on it was Snake. Those were the days in the year 5.5/Apple/26; but at this end of time and some of his alien tech, she can still phone back home to her mum.

With the heartfelt moment done and dusted, the entire platform shakes in what the Steward calls “turbulence,” and is shocked by it. Though it would most likely be plasma turbulence which would probably be caused by the proximity to the expanding sun, a ball of plasma that’s forever turbulent. Nonetheless, this is caused by those pesky spider-bots, one of which crawls up onto his desk, presses a button on his keyboard, and drops the sun filter on his office window. At that point, he’s practically blue mist.

The Doctor being the ever-curious one, employs Jabe to investigate a duct behind her suit. Meanwhile, Rose says she’ll “catch up with Michael Jackson,” referring to the Lady Cassandra. This is where we find out that Cassandra grew up in Los Angeles as a little boy, and we learn her stance on interspecies mingling. She goes on to tell Rose she could be thinner, to which one of my favorite lines is brought in retort, “I would rather die than be like you, a b****y trampoline.” Once again, Russell T Davies perfectly captured a character in a moment.

All the while The Doctor is with Jabe, finding out that Platform 1 has only the Steward (well, had) and it’s staff, those that own it see it as “unsinkable” in some way. Something The Doctor has seen first-hand before hitting an iceberg once before. After the bit of back and forth on Jabe’s race and history, she tries to delve into his, though unlike Rose she has tech that confirmed what he is and where he came from. While Rose might not know it, Jabe knows of the Last Great Time War and understands why having him in her presence is something special.

Though speaking of Rose, while walking through the hallways of Platform 1 she comes across the Adherents of the Repeated Meme following her chat with Lady Cassandra. In short, they knock her out and kidnap her. All the while The Doctor in the engine room with the Tree is trying to figure out the tampering little bots that he’s just found. Upstairs on the observation deck where the delegates all first met, the Lady Cassandra plays what she calls a classic earth balled, “Toxic” by one Britney of Spears. While heading back to them all, The Doctor and Jabe come across the Steward’s office where he’s still being cooked.

However, there’s one more sun filter set to drop very soon, this time in a private gallery. Meanwhile, Rose wakes up in a private gallery where a sun filter begins to descend and can only bang on the door hoping someone can save her. If only there was a tall white man with big ears and a cheeky smile who sounds like he came from the north. After a bit of fiddling about in the gallery’s exterior control panel, The Doctor gets the sun filter back up but can’t open the door. All the while Jabe has been with everyone loudly announcing that the spider-bots have taken control of the whole platform.

The Doctor strolls in with authority, takes it from her hand, after the typical Cluedo-style finger-pointing as to who killed the Steward. He points out the bots have a master on board. Putting the spider-bot back down to walk to its owner, it stands in the middle of the room looking at them all then walks to the Adherents. While that was obvious, The Doctor delivers a line that’s just too good to go amiss in 2020: “If you stop and think about it. A Repeated Meme is just an idea, and that’s all they are, an idea.” If only others would realize that and stop with the same stupid political memes or music memes, or any of them for that matter.

Once he pulls a wire out of the arm he pulls off the Meme, they drop. Now its time for the spider-bot to really head home, home to the Lady Cassandra. This is where one of the best villains of the Russell T Davies era is born as she divulges her plan of taking the rich, powerful hostage with her as one of them to mask the plan. With the plan foiled by The Doctor, she settles for killing them all as she has stock in their rival’s companies and disappears.

The Doctor leaves the observation deck with Jabe in hand and heads back to where they found the spider-bot in the engine room. Now it’s time for the proper action side of Who to kick in, the kind of crappy but loveable run through an area with comedically large fans that would look out of place on a wind turbine. Jabe sacrifices herself by holding down the switch that slows them down just enough for The Doctor to jump through them. Just before the final one, she burns to death releasing the switch, yet was enough to allow The Doctor enough time to jump through and get the shields up before the earth’s death.

Filled with enough anger The Doctor storms into the observation deck where Rose has wandered dazed and confused. He tells the others in the Trees of Cheem party of Jabe’s death and talks his way through Cassandra’s exit plan. This is something he’s got just enough knowledge of to know that she would have needed a local signal to boost it through the barriers set up for the platform. One of her many gifts has something hidden within itself, a little device that would boost the signal and could, in turn, be reversed bringing her back.

Steadfast in his anger and she in her righteous indignation of what a “pure human” is they are at loggerheads. With the temperature rising and her skin drying out, all that The Doctor has to do is wait and she’ll dry up, tension will rise, and she will pop. Once she’s cleaned up and everyone has departed, all that is left is The Doctor and Rose. Rose is trying to figure out the meaning of life as she’s seen the other end of time itself. To which The Doctor takes her back to a busy high street full of people going about their lives, being badgered about buying The Big Issue.

This is where The Doctor finally opens up about himself to Rose, his planet was destroyed by the Last Great Time War, a war that makes him question if he’s a good man or not. The last of the Timelords, alone, with a homeworld that was turned to dust over a silly little war. Confronted with that, he asks Rose if she wants to continue traveling following the death, destruction, and horror that is The Doctor trying to save not only humans but other species. Though before he’s getting her back in that blue box she wants chips, proper good old chips that are half a potato with their thickness.

Not much of a big explosive ending is it? However, it is another episode that did all it set out to do and did it well. On the whole, the first episode was to pull eyes to the show, but the second was to show what it really is with all the weird space nonsense and time travel. A key to the series as a whole at this point was Eccleston’s on point acting of a fun yet troubled Doctor that doesn’t know if he is a good man, coupled with Davies sharp and pinpoint writing.

Of course, much like America’s Nielsen ratings, the UK has the Audience Appreciation Index (AI) which for these first two episodes are the lowest the series goes and the whole show does from here on out. The only other episode to hit this “low” score of 76 out of 100 is Russell T Davies wonderfully stupid episode in series 2, “Love and Monsters.” I’ll say it now, these three episodes that hit 76 are some of the peaks that the Russell T Davies era hits. There are more fantastic episodes, but they don’t hit the point the Doctor Who Venn Diagram of crap, fun, and sci-fi which these three did so well.

Once again, I think this episode did everything it needed to. You’ll find magnificent work from Eccleston, and there’s a complete lack of chaff. Overall the episode is another 8 out of 10 for me. Of course, there’s the sci-fi hand waving as to Rose escaping the room she was trapped in, a bit of misunderstanding of turbulence in space, and some fleshing out that could have been done with another couple minutes. However, the episode, as I’ve said, doesn’t hang around on an idea for too long and is better off for it.

So next time it is Mark Gatiss’ episode “The Unquiet Dead,” an episode I wasn’t too enthralled by at the time, and wasn’t excited to come back every time I have. It’s just another one of those episodes we jump back in time to diddle with a historical character, much like “Tesla’s Night of Terror,” though this time it will be Dickens. It will also be the last semi-standalone episode for a short while, as following that we’ve got a two-parter, then “Dalek” which leads into “The Long Game” and its Willy Wonka take on time travel, followed by the next standalone episode “Father’s Day.” It shall be interesting.

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Doctor Who "The End of the World"

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Sharp writing.
• Great character moments
• Fun sci-fi character designs.

Cons

• How does Rose escape?