This episode is one of the most emotional pieces of drama the new series produces and was cited by Piper and Eccleston as one of the hardest to do, purely for that reason. The idea of going back in time to see her father on his death day is one thing, but to go back a second time to prevent it happening is quite another and one that has never been explored fully in the original series (in fact, it was once ruled out as impossible because of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, but was later abandoned). Certainly the shocking effect on Rose and the later consequences of her actions made for excellent drama and a source of friction between the Doctor and Rose, because he thinks his offer of time-travel has just been used as a means to an end, comes to the fore until each realises they need the other in order to survive. The wedding setting grounds the plot in a near present reality well, with all the styles prevalent of the time, and the guest cast acquit themselves well, especially Shaun Dingwell as Rose’s father Pete. Because of the time difference there’s no appearance of Noel Clarke as Mickey, although a young Mickey is seen (and would make the age difference between him and Rose about 5 years), but we see two different sides to Jackie Tyler, the bitter, resentful woman who’s fed up with Pete’s supposed philandering and the thoughtful mother who paints Pete as a hero to the younger Rose. Camille Coduri gives her best performance yet, as do Eccleston and especially Piper, and the script by fan writer Paul Cornell is ingenious while also being witty and sombre whenever the occasion warrants. It’s also good to see a situation where the Doctor is not the one to fix things; in this case, he’s consumed by the Reaper and it’s left to Pete to do what he must in order to fix time. His death is played out touchingly and is once more testament to Piper’s acting ability.

The following two-part story, The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, are the series’ final nod to a period setting, and once again everything comes out very well. The Doctor follows a canister to London in the middle of the Blitz, but by the time the TARDIS arrives it has already crash-landed and infected a child, a child who’s intent on searching for his mummy. The Doctor and Rose become separated when he goes looking for the canister and she ends up hovering over London hanging onto a barrage balloon in the middle of an air raid, but is later rescued by Captain Jack Harkness, a fellow freelance time traveller with an invisible spaceship moored to Big Ben! The Doctor falls in with a group of urchins who answer to the oldest, Nancy, and it is from her that he finds out about and encounters the child himself, a child who can affect telephones, radios, anything with a speaker asking the same question “are you my mummy?” In order to understand what’s happening, Nancy tells him to go to the hospital and see Dr. Constantine, the only one who stayed when the infection broke out. He encounters the good doctor and examines all the patients in the ward; all of them have exactly the same unearthly injuries and their gasmasks are fused to their faces. However, Constantine himself is not immune and undergoes a horrifying change so that he too looks like his patients – complete with gasmasked face that morphs from his own face! Rose and Jack arrive and after a showdown with the patients, who the child is able to control, the threesome investigate the room the child was held in and come face to face with it. Some deft manoeuvring with their tools of the trade liberates them from danger for a while as the Doctor slowly works out what has happened; Jack lured them there with the capsule, spoils from a Chula medical ship, thinking they were Time Agents who would want it back. It was to get blown up by a bomb due to fall later that night and as far as he was concerned Jack’d get paid for goods that would no longer be his to trade. However, he has read them wrong and the capsule wasn’t empty as he supposed; thousands of medical nanogenes, microscopic particles with healing properties have escaped. The first thing they encountered was the corpse of the child and not knowing what a human should be like did what they could. They revived him and set about rewriting the DNA of all they came across in the image of that one child, right done to his purpose of finding his mummy – and they won’t stop until everyone is like that. Going to the crash site, they find the Chula canister and Jack accidentally triggers a release mechanism allowing more to escape as the child and the army of patients appears. The Doctor sends him back to his ship; Jack will have to stop the bomb while he finds a solution to the infection. It comes in the form of Nancy, who turns out to be not the child Jamie’s sister as she’s made out but in fact his underage mother. When she touches Jamie, the nanogenes surround the pair and working from Nancy’s parent DNA they rebuild Jamie as he truly should be. As the bomb is about to fall, Jack’s ship swoops in and he grabs it before heading off into space to safely dispose of it. The Doctor reprograms the nanogenes and sends them off to repair the other patients and Dr. Constantine, which they do and turn themselves off. Rose and the Doctor leave in the TARDIS, but not before the ship materialises onboard Jack’s; he is unable to get rid of the bomb or stop it exploding so they take him with them as his ship blows. Rose’s dance lessons for the Doctor don’t work out as planned at first; he appears to have two left feet until ‘In The Mood’ plays over the TARDIS’ sound system when he gets the knack once again…

I suppose you could almost sum this story up in the cliché line ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ – in Nancy being an underage mum, nanogenes taking drugs just that bit too far and the music is the precursor of that description – but what this wartime romp really is is an A1 class act, and not surprisingly the main Doctor Who fan website lists these two episodes top of its new series poll. The script is inventive, witty and not afraid to pull its punches on subjects like teenage pregnancy, bi and homosexuality, mutation and warfare. The wartime look and feel is faultless both real and computer-generated – Rose’s flight over wartime London passes muster against wartime films such as Pearl Harbour – and the cast, both regulars and guests, really do make this a ‘must see’, especially Florence Hoath as Nancy and John Barrowman as Captain Jack. It’s not hard to see why it was decided to introduce Jack as a new member of the TARDIS crew because Barrowman is right at home in the character and it’s a character that works very well; in fact, he’s probably the best male companion since the first, Ian Chesterton (William Russell). His chemistry with both Piper and Eccleston is wonderful, and I find it difficult for anyone not to like the posturing tension between them for Rose’s attentions, especially in the scene comparing sonic devices. However, as the Doctor proves, it’s not what you’ve got it’s how you use it and here he has the moves just as Steven Moffatt had with the typewriter. Marvellous!

Now I have to say that after these episodes I was prepared for the series to come down to earth – no pun intended – with a bump as the final three episodes were all penned by Russell T. Davies and as he had penned what I would term the weakest scripts of the series, I was a little anxious that the series might go out on a bit of damp squib, relatively speaking. By this I mean Russell’s approach is more ‘comic strip’ to the series than the other writers. Actually that suits the final two part story quite well – we’ll come to that – but the next episode Boom Town could have been a disaster. When the TARDIS arrives in modern day Cardiff to refuel from the time rift left over from The Unquiet Dead, Mickey also arrives bearing Rose’s passport – she thinks she may need it some time. They set off for a day’s sightseeing while the ship refuels, but a chance viewing of the local paper sets that to one side. ‘Margaret Blaine’ aka Blon Fel Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen has escaped from the carnage in London and in the time they’ve been away set herself up as Cardiff’s new Lady Mayor. As part of her new duties she’s sanctioned work on the Blaidd Drwg project, a new nuclear power station for the city. When our heroes catch up with her, it seems she aims to use the resulting explosion from the badly-designed station to add to the time rift’s energy and to use an extrapolator to literally ‘surf’ her way out into the solar system. Cornered, it seems her scheme is done for as the Doctor decides to take back to her home world and let them the others of her race deal with her, even though this will mean death for her. However, even the condemned should be allowed a hearty last meal and that’s just what the Doctor grants her, taking ‘Margaret’ to dinner while Jack hooks up the extrapolator for more rapid refuelling and Rose and Mickey go into town for some time alone to sort out their own relationship; this doesn’t really happen as even though he tries to suggest he’s moved on from her, Rose knows Mickey will wait for her, whether he ought to or not. ‘Margaret’ tries various little tricks to escape the Doctor in the restaurant, but to no avail and settles for trying to reason him out of taking her home; she’s learnt her lesson she tells him and is a reformed character. He doesn’t believe it, but the point is moot; back at the TARDIS the extrapolator has gone crazy and far from helping, it’s using the TARDIS to open the rift fully – just as ‘Margaret’ planned. Tremors shake the city as they all return to the energised TARDIS. ‘Margaret’ grabs Rose and threatens to kill her if they do not let her escape as she planned. However, use of the TARDIS in this manner provokes it into opening a section of the console. ‘Margaret’ looks into the heart of the TARDIS and the resulting ‘contamination’ regresses her to childhood, in her case an egg, free to live her life over under the right choices. The Doctor and Jack manage to shut everything down and save the city, although a fair amount of structural damage has resulted along the waterfront. Mickey leaves them alone to continue their travels and the three time travellers depart in a fully-powered ship for Raxacoricofallapatorius with the infant ‘Margaret’.

Boom Town has quite a few far-fetched elements to it which I feel justifies lumping it in the section heading ‘comic strip’ but compared to the original Slitheen story works much better. This is partly because there is less actual native Slitheen in the story with only the pre-credits sequence and a section of the press conference to officially present the Blaidd Drwg project to the press actually featuring someone in Slitheen costume (oh, and Annette Badland sports a Slitheen arm in the finale) One lesson was learnt for using them; less is more, and that’s a testament to Joe Ahearne who returned to directed this episode and the final two-parter. This fact, plus the single episode length and more character-driven morality-based story i.e. what gives the Doctor the right to be judge and jury on Margaret by returning her to a death sentence, lifts Boom Town a good deal and makes it arguably the best of Davies’ own episodes in the series to that date. The ‘comic strip’ aspects such as literally surfing the explosion of the power station, becoming Mayor inside six months without anyone noticing who she is, and the enjoyable but slapstick-style chase that captures her in the first place do let it down though. Again, all the cast do wonders and I’d like to make a special note here of Annette Badland, who finally seems to be getting the work she deserves and plenty of it this year; a far cry from Charlotte in Bergerac! As Margaret she is possibly the series’ best guest villain, which considering she’s up against the Daleks is some going!

Speaking of the pepperpots, it had long since been rumoured that they would return at the end of the series and indeed this was the case. Prior to Boom Town I was worried that the final two episodes, Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways, may not be that good for them as I’ve said, especially as one part of the storyline was rumoured to include gameshows; a friend of mine deliberately didn’t watch either episode when they were transmitted as he disliked the idea immensely. It was only after I pointed out he’d missed the Daleks, a bucket load of continuity tie-ups and the start of a new Doctor that he relented…

In Bad Wolf the Doctor finds himself trapped in a version of Big Brother, Rose comes to on the Weakest Link set and Jack finds himself ready to be made over by Trinny and Susannah on What Not To Wear – but all is not as it seems and all the shows are deadly variants of their 21^st century originals. Eviction from Big Brother has you evicted from life, voted off in the Weakest Link has you blasted to atoms by a mechanical Anne Robinson and it’s not just your clothes that get made over by the robotic Trine-E and Zu-Zana. Why have they been brought here and where is the TARDIS? The Doctor remembers some powerful teleport reaching into the ship and snatching them, so far from wanting them dead there must be a reason for it – and he aims to find out. Getting himself evicted, he tests his theory – and isn’t destroyed. Escaping with fellow contestant Lynda, he finds they are on a version of Satellite Five, 100 years on from the events of the TARDIS’ last visit. Here, on the renamed Gamestation, thousands of channels of gameshows are beamed to Earth, and everyone is a potential contestant. Once more, humanity has diverged from the future mapped out for them and in the Doctor’s memory – and it seems because of what he did when they were last there, destroying the Jagrafess. Jack also escapes from his robotic hostesses, picking up a powerful weapon en route and locating the Doctor and Lynda goes looking for Rose, who has made it to the final but has lost out to fellow contestant Rodrick. She tries to escape as the Doctor and Jack come in but the Anne Droid atomises her. Stunned and distraught at her death, the three are captured and held in the brig, but it’s not long before they escape and head for the nerve centre on Floor 500. The Doctor discovers the games are all watched over by the Controller, a young woman wired into the system and it is her that brought them here and hid them in the games so they could not be found by her ‘masters’. Jack locates the TARDIS and also deduces some good news; Rose is not dead, merely teleported away somewhere leaving the appearance she is dead. The personnel on Floor 500 tell the Doctor of their suspicions about activity with the teleporter and as a result he is able to reveal where the transmissions have been aimed – and what at. For under an invisible shield he peels away the Doctor reveals a massive spaceship; a Dalek mothership and with it many other smaller ships, a potential force of up to a quarter of a million Daleks. The Time Lords may have been destroyed in the Time War, but the Daleks didn’t perish as the Doctor hoped. A transmission comes in from the Dalek fleet, telling the Doctor to back down from attempting to attack them or Rose will be killed. He refuses; he’ll rescue Rose and destroy every Dalek there, because that’s what needs to be done… In the concluding episode, he and Jack put the TARDIS on a collision course with the Dalek mothership, which launches missiles. They fail to find their target, as using the discarded Slitheen extrapolator to provide the ship with a forcefield, they materialise around her and one of the Daleks. Jack blasts the Dalek to bits and Rose is saved, but even so she has yet to meet the architect of the invasion and stepping outside – still protected by the forcefield, she, the Doctor and Jack come face to face with the now unshrouded giant Dalek Emperor. He tells them that his crippled ship fell through time when the main fleet was destroyed with the Time Lords and has since been rebuilding his forces – from humans harvested over the years, firstly by the Jagrafess and then by the games on Gamestation. Now, with enough of an army and ships to stamp out all resistance, they are ready to take Earth. The Doctor, Rose and Jack return to the Gamestation to put together a weapon to use to destroy the fleet, but the delta wave the Doctor comes up with he knows he’ll have no time to make directional; it will destroy both Daleks, humans – and a Time Lord when activated. But at least there will be no more Daleks whereas other human colonies survive in other solar systems; he will finally win. However, he tricks Rose into returning to the TARDIS and activates Emergency Programme One by remote control to take her home; his parting message generated by the ship leaves her in no doubt of what will happen. Mickey hears the ship materialising on the estate and comes running to comfort the distraught Rose. Back in the future, Jack has sorted out some defences to give the Doctor time to finish the delta wave, but slowly they are overwhelmed. On Earth, Rose refuses to quit, and when she finds the words that have followed them throughout the course of their adventures scrawled over the ground once more she rationalises that instead of the warning they have supposed all along, perhaps it’s really a message, a message that she can still make a difference in the future – if she can get back there. Remembering that the TARDIS is telepathic, she decides if she can get the console to open as it did itself to ‘Margaret’, she can make contact and give it instructions to return. They try and open the stubborn panel, but not even a towing chain attached to the lock and the other end to Mickey’s straining Mini Cooper is strong enough! The Daleks advance slowly up the Station and kill all in their path, finally getting to Floor 500. Not giving up, Jackie calls in a favour and gets Rose a big tow truck with enough power to finally rip the lock off the timeship’s panel. It opens and Rose looks into the heart of the ship as it takes off, leaving Mickey and Jackie behind. Taking guidance from her, the TARDIS returns to Gamestation where all but the Doctor are dead and he is about to use the completed delta wave – or would do if he hadn’t admitted that he’s unable to kill all those on Earth. Surrounded by Daleks, it looks like he’s going to be exterminated when the TARDIS materialises and Rose emerges, possessed by the raw energy of the Time Vortex. She is the ‘Bad Wolf’ of the messages, words from the station logo that she has scattered through time and space as a message to herself. Now she has the power – and she is prepared to use it, destroying all the Daleks and even giving life back to those humans who have died like Jack. But the power is killing her and only the Doctor’s power to take her place, infusing his body through a kiss with that within her and then dispersing it back into the TARDIS, can save her. He takes the unconscious Rose aboard and dematerialises, leaving Jack behind. However, although between them they may have saved the day, it is the last action for this Doctor; even a Time Lord can’t absorb all the energy from the Vortex and survive unharmed, but he needed to do just that to save her life. Now it’s time to say goodbye, and leave the gobsmacked Rose to stare in wonder as he regenerates into a completely different form in front of her eyes…

This story finally proved that Russell T. Davies was up there with his co-authors on the series and could provide a real blockbuster to close with, wrapping up many of the continuity loose ends purposely left as footprints throughout the other stories and doing Doctor Who big style; the original only ever managed 10,000 Daleks at one go (models of course) whereas here we get an invasion force that surely is worthy of the name. The Dalek Emperor, in just the same way as the contaminated Dalek in Dalek, lifts the metal meanies back to being more than just Davros’ henchmen and take the racial purity baton from Dalek on a stage by claiming most of the army is born of human cells. We even get Dalek religion of sorts, with the Emperor claiming to be God – you can’t get much bigger than that. Oh, and special mention must be made of Anne Robinson getting blown up – shame it doesn’t happen to the real thing!

Christopher Eccleston rounds off his innings as the Doctor with a wonderful performance and some great final dialogue that shows his admiration for Rose and how wonderful she is – and he was too. I could enthuse about Piper’s performance and Barrowman too, but I seem to have done that a lot already. This production is the nearest the series comes to epic and honestly, there’s nothing to fault it as far as I can see.

It’s a real shame that Eccleston chose to do no more than one season and whatever reason he had for not continuing I think he may one day look back and think he made a big mistake. He promised us “the trip of a lifetime” in the trailers and this is what we got. It’s so nice to finally see something hyped to the max actually deliver all that’s promised and so much more, and it’s so great that all the prejudices about effects, costumes, stories and performances that either fans or critics – or both – had before it began have been laid to rest. As a fan of the original, I wanted it to succeed but was prepared for it not to do so; how glad I am to be able to say ‘I WAS WRONG,’ capital letters, underlined, ten feet high.

Now with David Tennant as the new Doctor – and a confirmed fan himself – a Christmas special to look forward to (now confirmed it seems for Christmas Day itself), and a third series and second special confirmed as well way ahead of time, perhaps the BBC themselves have finally learned what an asset the series is to have in their Saturday night arsenal. Again, “it’s about time”…

UPDATE:

Having seen the special pre-Christmas Invasion segment on the charity telethon Children In Need on Friday 18th November, I am sure he will continue to take the series forward and be an admirable successor to Christopher Eccleston. Welcome David, good luck and we'll be watching, have no doubt!

article copyright PPS / M.Hearn 2005