An Hour of Who a Day: December 30: "The End of the World"

December 30: "The End of the World"

So now that they've established the basic format of the show, it's time for the production team to flex their muscles a bit and take us to the far future -- further, perhaps, than we've ever gone before ("perhaps" because both The Ark and Frontios seem to be set after this event¹⁶⁵, and also we have no way of knowing when some of the adventures set on other planets (like, say, The Krotons or The Armageddon Factor) took place). And so we get to see the end of planet Earth, up close and personal, five billion years in the future. This looks like Doctor Who setting up its stall and saying, "Look, it's not just alien invasions on modern-day Earth; we can go anywhere, anywhen."

The end of the world is certainly a good hook, and the cavalcade of alien visitors on Platform One, there to watch Earth burn, is a nicely varied bunch. (Although there's the moment where Rose, experiencing culture shock, remarks, "They're just so alien. The aliens are so alien." Which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that they all look humanoid, with two arms, two legs, one head, etc., except for the Face of Boe and, ironically, Cassandra.) And we get the introduction of the newest way to speed up the plot, the slightly psychic paper that lets the Doctor get in most anywhere he wants -- useful when you're regularly making stories half as long as they used to be.

But even though we're invited to gawp and stare at each alien arrival, the best parts of "The End of the World" are the character moments. We get Rose being overwhelmed at everything she's being shown (with, entertainingly, Soft Cell's cover of "Tainted Love" playing over her growing realization of where she is) and trying to explain herself to the Doctor. We also get the really sweet, quiet chat with the maintenance worker, Raffalo, which suggests that there are still some constants in the universe, even this far into the future. (You might be surprised to learn that this was an extra scene included when it was discovered the episode was running under length.) And we get the Doctor's steadfast refusal to answer questions about who he is and where he's from, which leads to the happy-go-lucky facade this Doctor's been affecting slipping for a moment. "This is who I am, right here, right now, all right? All that counts is here and now, and this is me," the Doctor barks angrily at Rose. And we see that while the Doctor pretends to be fun-loving and caring, he can be cold too; he's willing to let Cassandra die, apparently in retribution for Jabe's death. "Everything has its time, and everything dies," he says. (Note, too, how happy he seems to be when he realizes something is going wrong on Platform One. "That's not supposed to happen," he says with an intrigued smile.)

The actual plot itself is nothing too special -- although, pleasingly, the motivation behind sabotaging Platform One isn't about making a statement or a political act, but is instead about money. But they sell it really well, with lots of cracking glass and scorched marble as the raw unfiltered sunlight starts breaking through. And it's a good move to make the culprit Cassandra, rather than one of the aliens. And while the scene with the ventilation fans is incredibly dumb (and introduces some sort of special power for the Doctor that we never see again), the moment before, where Jabe tells the Doctor that she knows who he is and she's so sorry, and a tear falls from the Doctor's eye, is excellent.

Of course, that's setup for the big reveal at the end: that the Doctor is the last of the Time Lords ("There was a war and we lost"), thus becoming that old cliché the Lone Survivor. (Clearly something happened between the TV Movie and "Rose" that we don't know about yet.) But to their credit they make this work; Eccleston sells it really well, this moment of letting his guard down and letting Rose in, just a bit, and so it doesn't seem as hackneyed an idea as it could have been. Plus it gives the audience something to wonder about.

In many ways this is as calculated a piece of television as "Rose" was, only here the goal is to get the audience to accept "future" stories with strange-looking people, rather than the idea of an alien who saves the world from other alien invasions in a special machine. And like "Rose", this is an entertaining episode -- but "The End of the World" has the advantage of also feeling like it's telling its own story, rather than jumping into the middle of a different one. It's also nice to see a villain motivated by greed rather than a simple desire for power -- something we don't see enough of on Doctor Who. There are a couple less-successful moments here and there, but "The End of the World" shows that the revived BBC Wales version of the show is more than just a one-trick pony.

¹⁶⁵ A problem: the Doctor dates the events of The Ark as roughly ten million years in the future, which is a far cry from five billion. So either there was an impending Earth death that was avoided at the last minute (er, except we see the Earth burning up on-screen in "The Plague" (The Ark 2)...), or the Doctor is just really far off on his guess. (Which wouldn't be the first time -- see, for instance, his assertion in The Dalek Invasion of Earth that the events of The Daleks occurred "a million years ahead of us in the future", and then compare with comments in Planet of the Daleks (presumably contemporaneous with Frontier in Space -- so 2540 -- in order for the plot to have any hope of making sense) that the Doctor's journey into the Dalek city occurred "generations ago".)