Plot:
The newly regenerated tenth Doctor takes Rose on another trip to the year 5-billion+ era, following a message received on the psychic paper from the dying Face of Boe. After the events of The End of the World, another planet has been colonised to become New Earth. They land there, near the city of New New York, and visit a hospital run by Cat nuns. Meanwhile, their sparring partner from that previous story Lady Cassandra - the last 'pure' human, who's prolonged her life with unnatural amounts of cosmetic surgery until she is just a flap of skin and a brain - traces the TARDIS travellers, with help from a cloned assistant, Chip, and her metallic spiders. She kidnaps Rose and transplants her brain contents into Rose's using a psycho-graft, then rejoins the Doctor operating Rose's body. The Doctor's suspicions have been aroused by the Cat nun's medicine, which is centuries ahead of its time. They break in to the 'intensive care' area to find it contains cell after cell, thousands of humans being grown to be a lab rats, infected with every disease in existence. Cassandra-Rose reveals herself and tries to blackmail the cats not to reveal the grim edifice their success is built upon, but inadvertently releases all the lab rat humans, who swarm the hospital, killing everyone they touch. The Doctor manages to mix up a miracle cure and save everyone, slightly hindered by Cassandra body-swapping into him, back into Rose and even into one of the infected people at one point. The crisis over, Chip willingly lets Cassandra take his body, but it is rapidly dying; Cassandra accepts her fate, and the Doctor takes her to her last fond memory, where she dies as Cassandra-Chip, in the arms of her younger self.
Context:
Context:
The family is going through one of those phases, which happen occasionally , where they are just not interested in Doctor Who; no matter whether it's ancient or modern, regardless of Doctor or monster. Even though it was a David Tennant one, and he's very popular in our house, I could not tempt them to watch with me. So, I viewed this one on my own from the DVD (haven't invested in up-scaled blu-rays of the early new series episodes as yet, but may when they're cheaper).
First time round:
I watched this live on its BBC1 broadcast in 2006, while also taping it onto a blank VHS tape for future re-watching. Talk about one foot in the past (and I will talk a bit more about how New Earth has one foot in its - more recent - past in due course). As a viewing experience, this had more in common with how I consumed the later 1980s stories, like The Curse of Fenric (more on that later too), than how I viewed the majority of the 21st century Doctor Who episodes. The year 2006 superficially doesn't feel that long ago to me, but New Earth came before the launch of the BBC iplayer, and before our purchase of a recorder with a hard-drive, both of which revolutionised the way television was watched. I still dutifully save each new episode to a folder on the PVR, only deleting them once I've bought a Blu-ray copy much later, but it's more out of habit than anything else: the episodes are available all year round to stream at the touch of a button.
Thinking more about those times, I realise just how long ago 2006 was - we'd only recently got broadband. We'd moved in to a new place late in 2005 (we being just the Better Half and me, no kids yet at that point), taking the opportunity to set up a more 21st century internet package. We'd only been in that place for a matter of weeks when we celebrated our first Christmas there, and watched the first ever Doctor Who Christmas special of my lifetime (The Christmas Invasion). I remember after the broadcast in the evening playing the interactive Doctor Who game Attack of the Graske, revelling in my new bandwidth. This means that the 2006 run was the first ever series I watched after leaving the dusty relics of the dial-up era behind. The ability to watch streamed content without buffering, as well as creating the circumstances where something like the iplayer would thrive, also allowed me an unimpeded watch of the "Tardisode" that went online in the run up to New Earth. These were an experiment: one short online teaser scene per story, and they were pretty unremarkable. I only remember the first few, so I may have stopped watching them altogether later on.
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Reaction:
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This is very much Cassandra's show, but interestingly Wanamaker's hardly in it, though her performance informs the whole story - this is because of one of the more contentious aspects of New Earth: the 'body swap' humour. It's not true body swapping, of course, it's only one way - though having Wanamaker in the CGI skin frame playing the Doctor or Rose might have been fun, it would have been effects heavy, and the production team clearly want to get rid of the need for that expensive CGI as soon as possible. So, the stars of the show get to ham it up and show us their comic chops as Cassandra zaps into them throughout. I can see why it put some fans' teeth on edge, but generally, it's perfectly good, well played and doesn't in any way deflect from the drama of the piece. In places, it's laugh out loud funny ("I'm a chav!"), and you'd have to be very stony-hearted not to at least smile at Billie Piper as Cassandra as Rose doing her Eliza Doolittle cockney. Tennant is not quite so successful playing Cassandra to my mind, but he still has great timing as the Doctor. After Cassandra-Rose snogs him (another contentious moment), when he adds quietly "Yep, still got it", it's another laugh out loud moment for me.
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Connectivity:
Both New Earth and Terminus take place in medical institutions harbouring a dark secret; both take the maybe tasteless approach of using a group of unwell people as a 'monster' in the story, who shamble around like zombies after fearful characters who flee so as to avoid getting infected. In both stories, everyone ends up being cured in the end. New Earth has cat people, Terminus has a dog man.
Deeper Thoughts:
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Chris Chapman, centre of stage |
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"Dick!!!" |
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L to R: Johnson, Briggs, Fiddy |
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L to R: Fiddy, Ayres |
What was then shown was a spruced up version of the 2003 extended feature-length omnibus Fenric. My more detailed feelings about the story are here. Of the added scenes, one thing that stood out was in the scene about thought experiment The Prisoner's Dilemma; this version extends the doctor's line as broadcast by five words as highlighted: "Based on a false premise, don't you think, like all zero sum games". Now, The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't a zero sum game, that's the whole point of it; so, it's irritating (probably only to me, mind) that a mistake avoided in the original has been reintroduced in the newer version. Watching with an audience usually highlights more comedy than you notice when watching alone, but even with that boost the sombre Fenric doesn't have them rolling in the aisles. The only big (and probably unintentional) laughs were for all Janet Henfrey's lines as Miss Hardaker. I hadn't seen it as quite as 'large' a performance before, and it did seem a little unfair, but I'm glad people got their yucks where they could! Mark Ayres was interviewed by Dick once the story finished, and went into the history of the various special edition versions of the story. Far too much material was shot than could be used, and the eventual broadcast version was cut and rearranged mercilessly. Ayres - who as the composer of the show worked closely with director Nick Mallet and knew his original planned edit - had the idea in the early 1990s of making a VHS omnibus version which reinstated the material and put everything back into script order. John Nathan-Turner, who worked on the VHS range at the time, wasn't sold on the idea, and the half-way house episodic and slightly extended version was the result. Finally, in 2003, the DVD version was made, which fulfilled the original intention. MArk said that he resisted the temptation to "do a George Lucas" and, apart from upscaling it to HD, has only made two or three minor adjustments.
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L to R: Cartmel, Aldred, Johnson |
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In Summary:
New Earth is great, Showman is great, The Curse of Fenric is great; it's almost Christmas, and all is happy (at least until Friday 13th December, anyway).