Series Rewatch: DOCTOR WHO (2005), S1E02 "The End Of The World"

Not-so-little observations, because sometimes I have a lot of words. Please forgive any changes from past to present tense, because sometimes I do that. Perhaps I was a time-traveler in a previous life?

* After an adventure in 2005, its time to travel into the far, far future onto a hospitality satellite called Platform One. To be precise, the year five point five slash apple slash twenty six, 5 billion years into the future, to watch the Earth die. Gravity satellites have held back the long-delayed expansion of the sun into a red-giant, AND the host of this event, the so-called National Trust has even moved the continents back into their 20th/21st-century configuration, because that's supposedly the "classic Earth". Makes sense, because that's the configuration for the rise of Homo Sapiens and their various cultures.

* Nice global-warming shout-out. Pity we've done so little about it in the 15 years since this episode aired. We suck.

* No, the Platform attendants are NOT Oompa Loompas. We swear! They're blue, not orange, see??

* If Rose thought getting used to the interior dimensions of the TARDIS was something, now she has to adjust to non-human people from a host of different alien worlds. Beings like The Face of Boe (YAY!), The Moxx of Balhoon, the Trees from the Forest of Cheam (they are NOT Groot, but they are trees, regardless), and the cyborg-like Adherents of the Repeated Meme. Fortunately, the meme in question has nothing to do with ☠@*#ing Tiger King or so-called Murder Hornets.

Unfortunately, the metallic spheres that are given as gifts by the Adherents contain spider-like robots that aren't up to anything good. Remember folks, DON'T. trust. silver. spheres. What? You've never seen a single PHANTASM film? "BOOOOYYYYYYYYYYYY!"

Anyway, the last guest is Cassandra, the "last-human" who has nipped and tucked herself down into a brain in a jar with a large flap of skin with eyes and a mouth. She remains a far more arresting image than ANY of the assembled extraterrestrials, and she simply cannot stop yammering on about herself. Cassandra is totally a MOOD.

* The gift of exhaled C02 from one's lungs probably would seem a bit intimate to a tree.

* After this sudden bombardment of a variety of intelligent aliens, Rose has to take a breather, because she just can't even. The Doctor makes to go after her, but is stopped briefly by Jabe who seemingly takes a photo of him, but the device is actually some sort of analyzer that whitters and whistles like a songbird while it susses things out. Its conclusions about the Doctor's species of origin leave Jabe gobsmacked.

Fortunately, following her brief panic-attack, Rose gets to have a little chat with a cute blue maintenance lass named Raffalo, which seems to help her adjust. Sadly, once Rose leaves, poor Raffalo is murderized by a cluster of those little spider-droids. But hey, while the woman playing her, Beccy Armory, may have left TV acting after Doctor WHO, she's still doing acting-type things. As of last year, she become the manager of Burnham-On-Sea’s Princess Theatre. Woo hoo!

* The Doctor finds Rose, but things get testy when she starts asking him who he actually is and where he's from, and when she finds out that the TARDIS gets into your head so you can understand any language you encounter. The Doctor, however, remains tight-lipped and huffy when it comes to any questions of a personal nature. However, the tension is eased when the Doctor upgrades Rose's mobile to give it unlimited range throughout time and space. Gotta love Jiggery Pokery. After a quick call to Jackie, the station shakes, and now the Doctor has a mystery to solve. He's always happiest when something is awry, after-all.

* The Steward follows poor, hapless Raffalo into the afterlife, because the bad-spiders fuxxored the window-blinds, and he didn't have the foresight to use the 2-million sunblock that Sarah Connor mentioned in TERMINATOR 2. As the Doctor investigates with Jabe's help, Rose has a chat with Cassandra, and finds out that aside from finding flatness fabulously flattering, the so-called last-human is also a bigoted piece of work. She leaves the "bitchy trampoline" in a huff, but ends up getting knocked out and dragged away by the adherents. See? The memes are evil. Bad, bad memes!

* We get a wonderful scene between Jabe and the Doctor where she reveals she has found out what race he belongs to, and expresses amazement that he exists at all. She tells him how deeply sorry she is for what happened to his race, and he's very touched by her empathy. Soon after, he discovers an area of infrastructure that contains huge, spinning fans over a catwalk, and shades of GALAXY QUEST flutter across the mind.

* Things start to pick up quick. The Doctor has to save Rose from sharing the Steward's fate, the Adherents are revealed as droids controlled by Cassandra, who also controls the robot spiders that have infiltrated the station's systems. She plans to cash in on the deaths of everyone aboard the Platform via her stock-options, because she's just so very, very naughty, and it costs a lot of money to stay so very, very flat. Even 5 billion years later, vanity sucks, and greed is NOT good, no matter what the hell Gordon Gekko said in WALL STREET. To hell with that guy.

Cassandra escapes via teleport, and the Doctor and Jabe race to save the station. And NOW we get back to the engine room containing the spinning fans of doom, and somewhere Sigourney Weaver is throwing a HUGE tantrum. Jabe sacrifices herself, and burns alive to give the Doctor a chance to get across the catwalk and reboot the system in order to prevent the station's total destruction. Her death gets the Doctor right square in both hearts, and it gets me too.

* Pissed off about the deaths (oops. Sorry about that, Moxx of Balhoon), particularly Jabe's, the Doctor finds Cassandra's teleport transmitter, and reverses it. However, the room is still too hot and a dry from the damage done to the station, and Cassandra rapidly begins to dehydrate and contract. Rose, to her very-human credit, asks the Doctor to save Cassandra, but he flatly refuses because "Everything has its time and everything dies. " Cassandra, shrinks too fast, and rips wide-open. Cold, Doctor. Very cold.

* When the dust has settled, and everyone else has left, Rose sadly muses over the fact that the Earth itself died while nobody was really watching, because everyone was scrambling to save their own lives. The Doctor brings her back to 2005 London where the busy crowds mill about as always. Rose sees them, but is already profoundly changed, because she realizes that permanence is an illusion, and everything, even planets, will eventually die.

Also changed by the whole event, the Doctor finally tells Rose that his planet is dead, reduced to rubble in a war that his people lost. He is the last of the Time-Lords. He asks Rose if she wants to go home because of all the danger, and she's not sure. Fortunately, the enticing scent of chips tickles her nose, and she decides that she's gonna get herself some damn chips to eat, and since the Doctor is a penniless cosmic hobo, she'll buy his too.

Great. Now I want chips too. Do I even have any french fries in the freezer??

* The episode is sometimes rated as a dud by fans, but I dunno, I've always liked it. I like that it fleshes out the Doctor for the audience a little bit, and also eases the audience (via Rose) into the notion of far-flung futures and alien creatures. And hey, we get the Face of Boe, who we'll see again about one year later. Shame we haven't seen Jabe's people again since, though.

Its also bears mentioning that the Doctor has now identified himself as the last of the Time Lords, a revelation of enormous import to the lore of the new series, and something that will greatly weigh on the character for the next few series. Its a big deal, folks.

One more thing of importance, though it just comes off as throw-away dialogue in this episode, is the Moxx of Balhoon referring to being trapped on Platform One as the "classic Bad Wolf scenario." Yeahhhhhhh.

All-in-all, while its not the greatest of episodes, I think its just fine. Its possible I'm biased because Raffalo was so blasted cute, though, so take my judgement with a grain of salt.

Credit: Screencap courtesy of kissmegoodbye.net