Aliens of London looks at something that was never really explored in the past with Doctor Who. Throughout all of the series, we rarely, if ever, explored the consequences of travelling in time with the Doctor. The story begins with us returning to Earth, in the present day. As Rose goes to see her mother, it soon transpires that, whilst Rose has been gone for a couple of days by her perspective, by the rest of the world's perspective, she's been gone for a year. Suddenly, everything is thrown into disarray.
Jackie, Rose's mother, for instance, has spent the past year in a fair amount of shock, owing to the fact that her daughter has disappeared off the face of the Earth for an entire year. She's angry at the Doctor for taking her daughter away, angry at Rose for never letting her know where she's been, and generally reacting like a normal person would after an event such as this would have happened. It's refreshing to see this emotion as it shows that travelling with the Doctor is an action that has consequences. It is stupid to think that people can just vanish for protracted periods of time and then return as if nothing had ever happened, but it's what has been thought for the previous 700 or so episodes. Now Russell T Davies has changed all of that by pointing out what the consequences of that are, bringing an amount of reality to this fantastical situation.
But it's one of the things that Davies has done and will do throughout his time on the series. He tells stories that look at reactions to things, not the things themselves. The entire opening of this story isn't so much focussed on plot, but more on the reaction to Rose returning, and then the reaction to an alien spaceship crashing in London. It's new for the series, and a change that I'm pleased to see has been made, as it breathes new life into this fantastic programme.
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