January 12: "New Earth"

Series 2 gets to its real start here with "New Earth", our first trip beyond the solar system this century -- but before we get there, there's a quick teaser.  Each episode this series has a quick scene called a TARDISode, designed for mobile phones -- the one for "New Earth" is an infomercial for the hospital we see in the episode.  (And for some reason these short scenes weren't released on the DVD...)

But yes, it's our first extra-Solar trip, with a "new new Doctor".  They don't want to go too far afield and scare off the casual viewers though, so we get another sequel story -- this time it's a sequel to "The End of the World", set about twenty years in the future (I think?  Comparing the dates given in the two stories is slightly hazy...), with the Face of Boe and Cassandra both returning, even though Cassandra appeared to be dead at the end of it.  And really, the only alien-looking creature on display, other than the Face of Boe, is the cat nurses running the hospital -- everyone else is either human or humanoid with a different color of skin.  It's even explicitly a planet called New Earth, rather than anything more exotic.  They're making this first alien planet as safe and accessible as possible.

It's not a terrible story, though -- don't misunderstand me.  It's got a lot of great moments, and David Tennant is clearly having a grand time in his first regular story as the Doctor (as opposed to being sidelined and then rediscovering himself in "The Christmas Invasion").  The joy in which he experiences the disinfecting process in the elevator is gorgeous (and Rose's initial shock at the same thing makes it even better), and the life and energy he puts into his scenes makes him incredibly watchable.  It's also interesting how much of a contrast he makes from the ninth Doctor; there was a core of steel in Eccleston's performance, as if he was afraid of letting people in too much, but Tennant's Doctor seems to be putting it all out there.  Really, the only misstep is when he's possessed by Cassandra, which strays a little too far to the camp side of things.

Billie Piper, on the other hand, is clearly having a great time playing Cassandra-in-Rose, with a posher accent and a more overtly sexualized performance.  She's almost note-perfect, and scenes like her kiss of the Doctor (which half looks like an effort to distract the Doctor and half like she just really wants to kiss him) are handled really well.  (And the Doctor's reaction is priceless: initial bemusement giving way to a sort of pride -- "Yep, still got it," he says in a pleased tone.)  The farcical body swap moments are handled very well.

The infected new humans crave physical contact. ("New Earth")
©BBC

Unfortunately, they're unwilling to make an all-out comedy, and the ostensible main "serious" plot is just a little too generic to really shine.  The basic idea is intriguing (breeding human tissue and infecting it to study it and thus create a cure), but this essentially turns into a cut-rate zombie film -- but there's little of the sheer terror and intensity needed to make this aspect truly effective.   We get a handful of shots that suggest what they could have done if they'd really gone for it, but they're really few and far between.  The gas-mask plague victims in "The Empty Child" / "The Doctor Dances" were more effective than this -- heck, the Lazars in Terminus felt more worrying than this.

And if we're going to bring up last series's standout story, it's hard to escape the feeling that the resolution here is awfully similar to the one there.  Here it's a cocktail of different disease cures (um, how would that work exactly?) instead of reprogrammed nanogenes, but the Doctor passing the cure to the new humans feels awfully derivative of that earlier tale.  It's not exactly "Everybody lives!", but it clearly wants to be (note how triumphant the Doctor is -- although "I'm the Doctor, and I cured them!" doesn't have quite the same ring).

It has a lot of problems, but "New Earth" just about manages to pull it off.  The "zombie" plot threatens to make this story collapse, but the Cassandra interplay elevates this enough to make it worth watching -- and the final scene, where the dying Cassandra goes back to see herself when she was younger and still beautiful, works far better than it has any right to: Zoë Wanamaker and Sean Gallagher (as Cassandra-in-Chip) really sell it.  It's got some fabulous make-up (the cat masks here are light years ahead of the last time they tried this, in Survival) and some impressive setpieces (like the bit where they zoom down the elevator cable) -- if the rest of the episode had been up to the caliber of these moments, this would have been a knockout.  But as it is, our first trip to an alien planet is decidedly average.