Day 701: World War Three

This episode feels remarkably underrated. I loved it as a kid, mainly due to the comedy aliens, but now that I'm a bit older, it's easy to see that there's a fair but more to love than just a story about farts and it's something truly special.

For a start, it's incredibly funny. There's a fair range of jokes in this, going from the basic joke of having farting aliens to the truly great moment of the sergeant bursting into the Prime Minister's office to let them know of the crisis, only to discover that the room is filled with aliens, at which point he promptly decides that leaving would be the best course of action. The latter joke is also good because it comes in the ending sequence, where events are reaching breaking point. We then get a series of quick cuts, going from the tense scenes as the Doctor, Rose, and Harriet Jones (MP for Flydale North) try to figure out their best chance of survival, while the Slitheen flounder about and provide light relief to the otherwise frightening events. This juxtaposition makes both the Doctor's scenes feel slightly tenser, as well as the Slitheen's scenes slightly funnier, making for, although an uneven in tone sequence, a relatively even in quality series of events.

There's also the social satire present within the story. The acting Prime Minister (actually a member of the Slitheen in disguise) tries to get the Earth's nuclear codes by claiming proof that there are "Massive weapons of destruction", with clear danger present for all humans living on Earth. It's a clear comment on the Iraq War, where the war was brought about due to apparent proof of weapons of mass destruction, which may not have been fully correct. This story, then, looks at the trust that we place in our leaders, not knowing whether they have our best intentions in mind, and gives us the moral that we shouldn't rush recklessly into such an event like this.

It's telling, as well, that the only politician who Davies writes sympathetically is Harriet Jones (MP for Flydale North), who is clearly just a backbencher that just wants the best for her constituents and has no delusions of leadership. This search for people who speak truthfully, and genuinely make what they find to be the best decision for the people, and not the best decision for them, is the heart of what democracy should be about, and seeing a character like Harriet Jones (MP for Flydale North) is actually kind of life-affirming.

And all of that makes for a surprisingly underrated gem of a story that I would heartily recommend and say is clearly part of one of the best series of Doctor Who ever broadcast.

Day 700: Aliens of London

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.

Day 697: Rose

Rose is, quite simply, one of the most important episodes in Doctor Who that has ever been produced. It has to re-introduce the entire concept of the series to a brand new audience, but in such a way that it can build on what has come before so it can also attract the attention of people already familiar with the programme. And thankfully, it succeeded in this wholeheartedly.

Regarding the idea of the premise of the series, it introduces everything perfectly. We start by focussing on the life of a perfectly normal young woman, Rose, in a 3 minute long sequence as we look at her perfectly normal life. She then, whilst doing some work in a basement of a department store, encounters the Autons, causing some juxtaposition between the normal and ordinary person to the alien and extraordinary world of the Autons, and then later, the Doctor. This harks back to the first story of the entire series, An Unearthly Child, where the entire focus was on the ordinary schoolteachers discovering the extraordinary world of the Doctor. It worked then because we were able to use the schoolteachers as easy identification figures, and travel along with them as they discovered all about the Universe with the Doctor. One must also remember that it took some time for us to even trust the Doctor when the series originally started, so having an audience identification figure in the form of Rose is a strong move by Russell T Davies, writer of Rose and showrunner of the series from this point onwards.

Regarding new things to reinvigorate people already familiar with the concept, there is of course Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor. For 35 minutes or so, he plays the role as if it were a modern version of the Doctor. He's funny and charming, but can also be deadly serious when needs be, such as in the famous 'Turn of the Earth scene". He effortlessly proves himself as the Doctor, and one can easily look forward to his future time on the series. But that's not all. Because towards the end of the episode, we see him being put through pain. And not just any sort of pain, but clear emotional trauma. There was some sort of war that he fought in, and it appears that an awful lot of bad things happened in that war, which the Doctor feels guilty about. It's an interesting tack to go on for the character, and reintroduces much of the mystery that was prevalent within the first few stories with respect to the Doctor. It's enough to keep the audience watching and to keep them entertained for the next series.

And, more than all of that, Rose ensures that, once and for all, Doctor Who is back on our screens and ready to wow a whole new audience.