An Hour of Who a Day: December 29: "Rose"

December 29: "Rose"

Just to refresh your memory: in 2005 Doctor Who had been off the air for sixteen years, and while it was sort of fondly remembered by some for others it had been the brunt of a lot of criticism (it was cheap, it was silly, it wasn't very good, it was only for "sad" hardcore fans and people who already watched "cult" (aka SF/fantasy) shows and didn't have anything to offer anyone else). In other words, incoming showrunner Russell T Davies (at that point one of Britain's hottest writing talents) had his work cut out for him, to remind people why Doctor Who had at one point been the UK's most successful family show ever, and to prove that family viewing in general wasn't dead, contrary to the prevailing wisdom.

So that's probably why "Rose" sometimes looks like an incredibly calculated piece of television. It's designed to slowly ease you into the world of Doctor Who, rather than just drop you in it. Comparing it to the TV Movie (which is ostensibly doing the same thing) just highlights the changes: whereas the TV Movie started by dropping you into strange situations with alien names -- in effect highlighting its approach as a piece of genre television -- "Rose" instead begins with an ordinary girl working in a department store, living an ordinary life, and slowly introduces the unusual elements one at a time. She meets Autons (never named as such onscreen, but called that in the credits), and then a strange man called the Doctor who blows them up, and slowly but surely she's sucked into this new world that she never knew existed. This story is explicitly from Rose Tyler's point of view (the actual invasion plot -- essentially a remake of Spearhead from Space -- feels like it starts at the part three point of a 20th-century story and is generally relegated to the background, other than as motivation for the Doctor), and it's better for it.

So yes, it's carefully calculated to slowly bring the general audience into a new and different world (rather than throw them into the deep end and expect they'll swim), but the thing about "Rose" is that it's also a very entertaining piece of television. There's an energy and infectious quality to these forty-five minutes that you can't help but get wrapped up in. Billie Piper surprises by being genuine and believable -- she's not mugging at the camera but is treating this all as being in deadly earnest. And Christopher Eccleston is something of a revelation -- there are multiple layers in his performance, a veneer of (occasionally forced) cheerfulness masking a darker, more serious aspect that occasionally breaks through. This makes him incredibly watchable as he veers from happy to intense in scenes, without it ever seeming like a break in character. It's also worth noting how different he seems from his predecessors -- the hidden depths, but also the look in general (short haircut, simple leather jacket with a shirt and dark pants), which suggests that this incarnation of the Doctor is trying to blend in, rather than being deliberately eccentric. It's also designed to not seem off-putting to a casual audience.

But this all also works in terms of Doctor Who. As has been pointed out many times before, the basic focus of this episode (essentially, something strange mixes into a domestic setting in contemporary London) isn't a million miles away from the last story of the original run, Survival. You can thus envision "Rose" as on the same trajectory as the series it's continuing on from without too much difficulty -- as it should be; this shouldn't seem like a sharp break with the past. And in fact, there was a slight sense of dread for many people (myself included) before "Rose" aired -- it could have been terrible, either a self-parody or something that didn't remotely seem like the Doctor Who that had gone before. But fortunately Russell T Davies, executive producer Julie Gardner, and producer Phil Collinson have the right sensibilities. Davies and Collinson are old-school fans (Davies even wrote one of Virgin's New Adventures, Damaged Goods) and know what the spirit of the show should be like, while Gardner, a recent convert, knows what will still appeal to a broader audience (not to say that Davies and Collinson don't; this is putting it very broadly). The result is impressive, and even if it's a bit too transitional to stand up on its own (once again, this is about introducing the show and its core ideas to Rose (and therefore the audience), not about telling a self-contained story in its own right), it nevertheless hits all the right notes. There are a lot of introductions, even for the fans (a newly-regenerated Doctor (well, that's what that scene with the mirror seems to suggest), a new companion, a new completely redesigned console room, forty-five-minute episodes that are largely self-contained, a new logo¹⁶³, a new video format (16:9 and frame-removed video¹⁶⁴)...), but far and away this is an episode that is designed to make those introductions in an explosively entertaining way. Doctor Who is back.

¹⁶³ If you look at all of Doctor Who's logos over the years, a curious pattern emerges: for the first 26 years of its life (plus the 16-year interregnum), the logos, while often changing dramatically in design, all follow a basic pattern: the word "Doctor" stacked on top of the word "Who". But from 2005 on, the words are lined up side-to-side.
¹⁶⁴ The last "proper" serial, Survival, was shot on 625-line PAL video running at 50 fields (essentially half-frames) a second. (The TV Movie was shot on 35mm film running at 24 frames per second -- not that you'd really know it from looking at the finished product, which looks like everything else on Fox from that time period.) Since Survival, the visual grammar of television had changed -- film was deemed to look better than video, so video was given a "filmized" look (essentially removing frames to make it run at the same rate as film), which allowed it to look like film but still retain the advantages of video. This is the format that Doctor Who was shot in, and the "film look" continues today even while the resolution has increased from SD to HD. (Another reason why the modern HDTVs that interpolate extra frames to give a "smoother" look are a bad idea.)