| Chapter The 213th, in which we witness the end of the world. So it's not just a clever name. |
Plot:
The Doctor takes Rose on her first TARDIS journey through time to an Earth-orbiting observation station, Platform One, 5 billion years into the future. An elite event for mega-rich space tourists is being held there, to witness the end of the world as the sun expands and destroys the abandoned planet. Many aliens arrive including The Face of Boe, the Moxx of Balhoon, a tree person called Jabe, and the 'last human' Cassandra, who has had so much cosmetic surgery that she's just a flap of skin on a frame, plus a brain in a jar. There is a ceremonial exchange of gifts between the attendees, but some of the gifts exchanged are little four-legged bots that come to life unseen and get into Platform One's circuits, sabotaging them. As Earth death approaches, the shields that protect the platform from the destruction of the sun's expansion fail. This is all the work of Cassandra, who teleports away from the platform leaving everyone else to die so she can reap monetary rewards (she has shares in their competitors companies). Rose is trapped in a room, nearly killed by unfiltered sunlight coming in, but the Doctor saves her. Then, he and Jabe go to the manual shield controls in the engine room, which the Doctor activates just in time, but the heat is too much for Jabe who catches fire and dies. The Doctor reverses Cassandra's teleport, and returns her to Platform One. With the heat, and without her aides to moisturise her, her skin starts to dry out. The Doctor won't step in to help, and watches her die. The Doctor returns Rose to Earth when it's still in one piece, and they have chips.
Context:
The family are just not into Doctor Who at the moment. Two out of the five of us (Better Half and boy aged 15) have not watched any of Flux yet, though the eldest child does plan to at some point. The younger children (boy of 12, girl of 9) watched and enjoyed Flux as it went out, but it hasn't caused any increase in enthusiasm for watching old stories, even those of a 2005 onwards vintage, with their old man. They are still enjoying their weekly episode of The Box of Delights (it's a Christmas tradition to watch this 1984 BBC serial in the run up to Christmas every few years), so it does seem just to be that they're Doctor Who-ed out, rather than against old television in general. Maybe a new Jodie Whittaker festive special with Daleks on January 1st will rekindle things. Anyway, this meant it was me on my own watching the DVD on an evening in December 2021.
First Time Round:
On Saturday 2nd April 2005, the day of The End of the World's debut BBC1 broadcast in the UK, the Better Half and I were visiting friends in New York and New Jersey; we stayed for a week and didn't get back to Blighty until the following Friday. Of course, this was only the second episode of the relaunched Doctor Who, and in those days it had not gathered enough momentum outside of the UK to be shown on BBC America simultaneous to, nor quite frankly even shortly after, being shown at home; the US premiere on the Sci-fi channel was not until the spring of 2006 when in the UK Christopher Eccleston had bowed out and David Tennant taken over as the titular Time Lord. This was before the days of the iplayer too, so I had to rely on the VCR timer that I'd programmed before we flew out to record this exciting new instalment (the first second episode of a new Doctor Who series since 1989). Before we went out for dinner with our friends that Saturday I went online (on my friends' home PC as this was a time before smartphones too) to various fora to check what the initial reaction was, trying not to get too spoilered; but that was the extent of what I could do to satisfy my curiosity until the following weekend. Fairly jetlagged, we came back to our home in Kent (where we lived together for a brief period while the Better Half was teaching in a school in the Medway), and I watched the recording. It was such poor quality (a fuzzy picture due to atmospheric interference) that I couldn't tell that the Doctor shed a single tear when talking to Jabe. Even through the fuzz, the story shone out, and I only had to wait a day for the next instalment.
Reaction:
There had been advance pictures of the Moxx of Balhoon from this story seen before the series started; he even made the cover of Doctor Who Magazine in the month the series returned, as I remember. I saw the significance immediately; as the opening story Rose had used an old monster, the Autons, and the only previous attempt to relaunch the show (the Paul McGann TV Movie in 1996) featured the Master, this was the first new Doctor Who monster / creature for 16 years (since the slightly underwhelming Cheetah people in final 1980s story Survival). When one's watching the episode, though, the Moxx turns out to be just one of dozens of new aliens. There's a catwalk scene, where each one is introduced and makes an entrance: tree people, a big head in a jar, a lady made of skin stretched across a frame, bird people, creatures made of wicker, creatures made of gas masks. This sequence is making a statement, I feel; like the Doctor taking the TARDIS further and further into the future in the first scene to impress Rose, the writer Russell T Davies has clearly decided that being tentative is not required. The previous episode had shop-window dummy creatures, i.e. beings that could just be people dressed up, to allow the audience identification figure Rose to be plausibly skeptical. Now, it's time to bombard her, and the viewer, with how weird this programme can get - it's not going to be gradual, it's going to be very much 'in your face'. The programme is proud of its weirdness, and confident to express this. It's a bold move, and clearly worked as people kept tuning in.
This isn't the only bold moment in the story. There are a couple of uses of diegetic pop music, big signifiers that what we're looking at is something new. Doctor Who's always had weird aliens, but we've never seen the Doctor dad-dancing to Soft Cell before. Even better is the dramatic moment of Rose in peril being underscored by Britney Spears' Toxic, including a sweeping CGI shot of Platform One. It's thrilling. I was thrilled the first time I watched it, and this latest time too. Other new concepts introduced here that would endure are the psychic paper (minimising any wasted moments of the Doctor getting locked up or mistrusted by authority), and - biggest possible stamp of the new - the removal of the Time Lords from Doctor Who's overarching mythology. Of course, it's not just a tidying up exercise, it is used by Davies to drive the Doctor's character and actions, just as the cavalcade of aliens is used to highlight Rose's culture shock. Eccleston and Billy Piper are just so right for these characters and give it their all - every frame they appear in, together or apart, is a joy. The two-shot of their reactions to the increasingly outre aliens and their gifts - more and more shock writ on Rose's face as the Doctor's grin of glee gets wider and wider - is just one wonderful moment. I think you could freeze frame on any scene here and they'd look like heroes (I love, as another example, the late scene where Rose is looking out at the remains of the Earth floating in space, and Eccleston stands far behind across the vast room, framed leaning in the doorway). All the performances are great (Yasmin Bannerman is great as Jabe the tree, flirting with Eccleston, for example).
The story is visually sumptuous. As well as the costume and make-up of the many aliens, there is great effects work, and clever use of locations to create the five-star interiors of Platform One as well as the industrial maintenance tunnels and engine room - it really feels like the characters are interacting in a vast space. Murray Gold's music is just as effective as the pop songs used, with the waltz-time theremin theme for Platform One / Cassandra a favourite. Marshalling both performances and visuals is Euros Lyn, one of the directors consistently asked back during this era, doing his earliest work on the series: he makes every scene fizz with energy. Providing the basis for all of this, though, is a magnificent script. There's such effortless world-building in Cassandra's thrown away references to the "Arctic desert" or "The Los Angeles crevasse". There is also so much wit: "Platform One forbids the use of weapons, teleportation and religion.", "How did you get in? This is a maximum hospitality zone.", Cassandra believing a Wurlitzer is "An i-pod", "Whatever I am, it must be invisible, do you mind?", "Quick word with Micheal Jackson", "What you going to do, moisturise me?", Cassandra's last words: "I'm... too... young!", and many more. Beyond the zingers, though, there are quieter moments of true emotion, like Rose and the Doctor challenging one another, or Rose talking to her Mum on the phone across millennia, or Rose's chat with the plumber Raffalo (a lovely scene that was just added as padding when the episode was running short). Then, there's the coda where the Doctor takes Rose back to the intact Earth of her time. Interestingly, Rose doesn't answer the pertinent question of whether she's happy with the dangers of her new life; she gets distracted by chips. It's a question to which the series will return.
The script is great conceptually too. Cassandra became an instant hit, so it's easy to miss how 'out there' such a character concept was: a flap of shin stretched out on a frame, with masked attendants moisturising her every few minutes? It's pretty bizarre. Zoë Wanamaker gives the character such life and verve, and has such fun with the bitchy dialogue. Just when you think it's all a bit of laugh, though, she says something about being the last pure human, and you realise queasily the fat streak of racism that cuts through her thin, thin self. Davies constantly undercuts at precisely the moment we might be getting too comfortable. The Doctor waxes lyrical about optimism, but also watches stony faced letting a character die in front of him. Eccleston plays the trick a lot, in this story and throughout his brief time as the Doctor, bit it's always enjoyable to watch his happy face (mask?) disappear to be replaced by a cold, hard, focussed look. When the story comes to an end, it's straight in to a trailer with Victorian costumes and theatres and a coach and pair. We've done mad, it seems to say, and now we're going to show you trad. 1860s baby, old school. With two episodes done, 2005 Doctor Who had by that moment won the whole of television. It's no surprise it's still going to this day.
Connectivity:
Both this story and Logopolis involve characters witnessing the destruction of celestial bodies in space. Both stories involve the villain attempting to engineer a hostage situation by sabotaging technical equipment. Cassandra's plan in The End of the World is more sensible than the Master's in Logopolis, but that's not much of a stretch.
Deeper Thoughts:
Early Christmas Gifts (of Peace in all Good Faith) - Part 1. In blog posts passim, I've tried to explain the mentality of the collector as objectively as I can from my position trapped fully within that madness. Here then is another cautionary tale that sometimes the gift of completionism just keeps giving. This year, I have had rekindled my obsession with collecting the Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories. I'd gone for decades with almost all of these, but it didn't matter to me that the collection was not complete, as there wasn't a novelisation published for every story, so the collection couldn't ever be complete anyway. This was rectified by BBC Books in March of this year, though; the last remaining TV titles (a couple of 80s Daleks stories by Eric Saward, the prose version of Douglas Adams Tom Baker story The Pirate Planet, and an updated version of the TV Movie novelisation) were finally published on the Target imprint alongside some novelisations of stories from post the 2005 relaunch too. I bought these, read them, and reviewed them (see Deeper Thoughts sections of The Pirate Planet and The Awakening for the details and my reviews of that batch), and that was that. Ah, completion! Except, no. That threw the spotlight on the last couple of books that I did not have. These were long out of print and therefore reasonably expensive to obtain, and could be argued to not be Target books as they were released when the publisher Virgin books were adopting a new cover style under their own name. But they did have the Target logo on the inside cover, and they were versions of two TV stories broadcast between 1963 and 1989, when all the other stories of those years were present in my collection.
This internal argument - were these titles part of my overall target (see what I did there) or not - continued at the back of my mind for a while. My resolve weakened after a few months, and I bought, read and reviewed both books (prose adaptations of the two Patrick Troughton Dalek stories, Evil and Power) by August - see Deeper Thoughts of The Sun Makers for more details. So. glorious completion ensued and I was finally satisfied? Again, no. Even as I wrote the review, I was minded of one last novelisation (this time of a radio serial The Paradise of Death starring Jon Pertwee from 1993), and wrote in the blog the following words: "I wonder how long I'll hold out before I crack and buy that too." Up to October 2021 as it turned out, by which time I had bought, read and reviewed that title (see Deeper Thoughts of The Sea Devils). All the novelisations were done now, but you can probably guess where I headed next. There were a few Target books that weren't Doctor Who broadcast story novelisations per se. There were novelisations of unproduced scripts, but I had all those; there were quiz and crossword books, but I had all those too; there was even a travel book (see the Deeper Thoughts of this blog post for more details) that I also already had in my collection. But. There were also three books in a short lived offshoot "The Companions of Doctor Who" that Target published in 1986 and 1987. I didn't have those. Now I do. It seemed neater and tidier to my completionist mindset to finish off my collection before 2021 was out, so I bought second-hand copies of each (they're not nearly as expensive as the Troughton Dalek stories or Paradise of Death, and - let's face it - are much less likely to ever get reprinted either).
The Target novelisations had been a minor publishing phenomenon of the 1970s and 80s, but as that second decade wore on, and less stories were being made for the TV per year, it became obvious that the revenue stream would eventually run dry. A full range of original novels was the obvious replacement, and it would come to pass in 1991 with the Virgin New Adventures, only when the TV show had been put into mothballs indefinitely. In the middle of the 1980s, though, as more of a supplement to the main range, this short run of original novels set in the world of Doctor Who, but not featuring the Doctor, was tried out. The first of these was Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma by Tony Attwood, published in May 1986. I remember flicking through the book in a shop with curiosity when it first came out. I read a part of the introduction by Turlough actor Mark Strickson where he said that any actor would rather play the Doctor than a companion - that stuck in my mind. Back then, though, I decided to save my pennies for Doctor Who books that featured Doctor Who, and did not buy it. Had I done so, I'd have found that it was the longest Target book published up to that point. It was also the first ever original Doctor Who novel (only short stories and novellas had previously been published). As such, it is a definite precursor to the Virgin novels to come. It's also very similar to some examples of that range in that it's convoluted, impenetrable, and - both tonally and in story structure terms - completely unlike Doctor Who.
It gives me no pleasure to say this, but Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma is not only the least enjoyable Doctor Who book I've read, it's a contender for the least enjoyable book I've read ever. The one thing of note that ever cut through about the book as part of the history of Doctor Who is that the main villain was called Rehctaht (i.e. Thatcher backwards, a reference to the UK Prime Minister in 1986, Margaret Thatcher). That might have indicated a playful nature regarding the story, but alas this would be a false impression. The book takes itself very seriously. It's a space opera where Turlough roams to various planets and time zones (he's invented his own time travel mechanism using knowledge cribbed during his time with the Doctor) to investigate a link between his home planet Trion and Earth, which he thinks is due to nefarious activity by a race called the Gardsormr. This is all described using some no doubt thoroughly researched science about gravity and time and nuclear force that just left me cold. Turlough's backstory is fleshed out: he is part of the elite intelligentsia on Trion who engage in study for practical purposes. This doesn't really fit with the Turlough seen on TV, but that's fair enough - this is a different medium. It does mean though that he has dialogue such as "Do me the honour of at least realising that I too have studied a little of ultimate unified theory", and that he realises a key character is not who they say they are because "When I said 'G equals M to the power minus one by L cubed by T to the power of four'" the interloper corrected him and said it was actually T to the power two. (I'm not shitting you, that's an actual plot point and section of dialogue verbatim.) There's also extensive use of slow scientific method painfully described in microscopic detail, when what this reader craved was for something to happen, anything to happen, with some rapidity.
There are no real monsters or villains featured. The Gardsormr turn out not to be monsters at all, but instead are a quirk of time travel, people from the future trying to repair damage done by others (which they do in a long-drawn out way involving breeding and burying creatures to fertilise soil, and this is all revealed agonisingly slowly). The main villain Rehctaht was the person who took over Trion and caused Turlough to be exiled to Earth in the TV series, so she logically has to be out of the way before the start of the story. In the book's one concession to adventure story tropes, Rehctaht returns from appearing to be dead, having been manipulating events secretly before that. This means though that the forces of antagonism are diffuse and seemingly uncoordinated through most of the narrative. Rehctaht is revealed only about 20 pages before the end, the climax of the story, and Turlough kills her without much difficulty. There's then a resolution where Turlough uses his time machine to avert the damage that Rechtaht has done (nuclear explosions on Earth and Trion) that goes on for pages and pages with Turlough creeping about a maze, and being experimented on. Of course, there are no absolutes in writing, so what I really mean is you'd have to be very clever to structure a narrative like that and have it be satisfying, but I'm going to use a shorthand for my position thus: you can't do that! You can't have the climax be easy and swift, then have the post climax resolution long and drawn out. You can't go from the reveal and defeat of the antagonist to long passages where the hero creeps around mysterious corridors. Mysterious corridors are best used earlier in a narrative. It's just another of the terrible pacing problems that the story has from beginning to end.
It doesn't quite end there. The Time Lord that has accompanied Turlough through his adventures, the Magician (yes, really), who I've not mentioned before as he adds nothing to proceedings up to this point apart from gnomic utterances that irritate Turlough (and this reader too), takes Turlough to another timeline where he can live happily ever after with his love interest, who got killed in his prime timeline. I don't think it makes sense by any of the usual rules of time travel stories, but anyway it's a terrible cheat: if one can do that, why bother with any consequences at all? Just hop over to another timeline whenever things get rough. There's other issues too: loose ends and odd asides that make it feel like the text needed more editing before publication, odd choices of POV where events that are happening to one character are recounted or reacted to by other characters who are less close to the action, or less interesting, or both. It almost seems like it's a deliberate act to keep the reader at a distance. When I compare this to The End of the World, another space-set story that might alienate an unwary audience, it just hammers home how good the choices were in the TV show's script to make things immediate and witty, and to make the jeopardy meaningful. I had to start in on the next book, Harry Sullivan's War by Ian Marter, immediately after the Turlough book just to check that they weren't all going to be as bad. Thankfully, based on its first couple of chapters, it's much better, though it does have its own flaws (more about them next time...).
In Summary:
Full of aliens, but not alienating; in fact, it's rather "Fantastic!".
