DOCTOR WHO, SERIES 1 EPISODE 2:

THE END OF THE WORLD

Doctor: Ninth (Christopher Eccleston)

Companion: Rose

May 2023

Sometimes I feel almost spoiled that these were the first two episodes of the new show. Are they revolutionary? Not necessarily. But they really show the best of what Doctor Who can be.

The End of the World is the first time anyone’s actually traveled in the TARDIS on television since 1989. The creators of this show in 2005, trying desperately to show everyone that Doctor Who can be cool, actually, and that this show fucks, send us immediately to the destruction of Earth 5 billion years in the future. Which is a neat party trick.

This is the first time we’ve seen the classic “show up somewhere for a bit of sightseeing and whoops suddenly something’s gone very wrong and now people are dying” formula in the new series, a formula I actually just reviewed another (less successful) instance of in Smile some nine seasons and twelve years later. Here, oddly enough, this format appears polished to a mirror gleam’s perfection: every character has their place, every interaction has its purpose. There is no fat to trim here.

There is more to talk about, though, so let’s dive in. Firstly, this is Rose’s first time going anywhere of note in the TARDIS, and by extension the anticipated audience’s. And the focus is very clearly on Rose’s very human, very normal reactions to jumpstarting her to an extremely alien place and time. She has a great scene with someone who’s actually a very minor character (a blue-skinned plumber lady who I like) where she comes to terms with the fact that no, she really doesn’t know who this man is who spirited her off to the other end of her planet’s history, and she doesn’t know anyone here and everyone she’s ever known is technically now dead. And this leads to one of many really great moments: when Rose is grieving this, the Doctor looks at her, fiddles with her phone, and gives her the ability to call whoever she wants. And she has a phone conversation with her mom, five billion years ago. And it’s short, and sweet, and really one of the most devastatingly emotional scenes we’ve seen so far. This is not even halfway through the episode.

The creators make the smart choice to toss us into a place where we can see a wide variety of aliens: trees, the Face of Boe, the Moxx of Balhoon, Lady Cassandra O’Brien dot Delta 17; it’s the Mos Eisley Cantina scene of this new show, the “hey check out all the weirdos in our weird and wild and wonderful universe,” and it works great. Not only that, a couple of these characters are spotlighted: notably, Cassandra, the “last human,” an obvious satire of repeated plastic surgeries to match beauty standards; and Jabe, one of the trees. Jabe can get it but don’t tell anyone I said that

Jabe is great throughout: she plays both a pseudo-companion role to the Doctor here as well as being an impetus for beginning to talk about his backstory, which will be slowly disseminated to us over the course of the season or so. She’s a charming and helpful character, and after saying that I half expect myself to say “I wish we had more of her”, but really she slots in precisely where she’s needed as a character excellently, as we see the Doctor play off a different type of person. She also ends up fulfilling a more traditional companion role in the latter half of the episode, where Rose is imperiled and basically doesn’t get to do anything for a sequence of ten minutes or so. This isn’t too bad! Obviously I wish she got a more active role here, but it’s okay—ten minutes, while proportionally still about 1/4 of the episode’s runtime, is a lot less time than the same proportion of companion-being-stuck in the classic series. Also, basically the entire rest of the episode is dedicated to her reactions to this strange new place. In that way, The End of the World is very much a sequel to Rose, as she continues to be our primary protagonist, but is now shifting to share the spotlight with the Doctor. Here, for the first time, we get entire scenes following just him and not Rose at all, after all, and he gets to be the hero in the end whereas Rose was last time. Oh, and the dynamic between Billie Piper’s Rose and Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor is just wonderful, by the way—it’s no wonder they were able to restart a cult classic series based off the backs of these two stars. They’re both downright brilliant!

At some point later we’re going to have to talk about the romance...plot? Is it a romance plot, or just heavy subtext? I really forget, it’s been a long time. At some point, we’re going to have to talk about it, but I don’t want to here: we haven’t seen nearly enough of it yet anyways. Here it feels like they’re transitioning from being thrown together by happenstance and ideas of what could come into being actual friends. Which is really sweet!

Oh! Right! Lady Cassandra! She’s the other alien we get a focus on. She’s very clearly a mocking of the sort of constantly-chasing-beauty-standards at the expense of personal health or even wellbeing here, and it’s frankly still an effective mockery in 2023, eighteen years later? Going in, I was afraid there was going to be some really dated stuff about surgery in general, and obviously Rose has a conversation with her where she’s very much against having what Cassandra did to herself done to her (“I would rather die” and all that), but it feels impossible to take as anything other than a thematic touching on how plastic surgery to make yourself fit beauty standards is bad. Let’s be clear, here: I am very much a pro-surgery person, if that person wants it. I think if you want anything from a nose job to leg-lengthening surgery (or beyond!) you should be able to get it. I think the problem is that you shouldn’t feel obligated to get it in order to appear more beautiful to other people, and to fit reductive societal beauty standards. I don’t think this applies to surgeries like, for instance, facial feminization surgery or other gender confirmation surgeries (and yes, I’m including things like breast augmentations and even those leg-lengthening surgeries it was in the news that the uber-rich were getting a while ago for cis people as well as trans people. Anyone can feel better in their gender!)—surgeries for your own personal benefit and to become who you want to be, rather than who society wants you to be.

While we’re on the subject of Lady Cassandra and transness, I do want to briefly touch on the reading that states that she’s a transphobic caricature: this is based partially on how in a throwaway line, she states something along the lines of “when I was a boy on Earth” however many hundreds of years ago, and the character being a caricature of someone who’s had a lot of surgeries doesn’t help that reading. Nevertheless, I think this is an exceptionally negative reading of the character: to me, at least, a trans woman (for what it’s worth), it comes off as nothing more than a small joke about how she’s out of touch with what it means to be human. Like, are there potentially gross implications in the idea that “having a lot of surgeries means you aren’t human?” Absolutely. But Cassandra does not feel like a character created intentionally or even unintentionally to reinforce that reading: she’s a sentient flap of skin, for goodness’ sake. Much more accurate, to me, feels the idea of her chasing this impossible social standard of beauty as a character description. Anyway, that’s just my two cents.

There are a lot of other little things. I love the way the Doctor works the TARDIS: it's somewhere between a train engineer and a pushcart. Rose talking to a plant is hilarious. The notes about Earth being held by a natural preservation trust until the money runs out is honestly kind of fascinating. There's just a lot to love here.

Oh, and the Britney Spears “Toxic” traditional ballad joke is just brilliant.

Overall thoughts:

At the end of the day, The End of the World is simply a really solidly fantastic episode of Doctor Who. It is crisp. And I highly recommend it. Doctor Who showed us a fantastic pilot, introing us to its world through the eyes of a regular 19-year-old girl, and now it shows us a fantastic more traditional episode of Doctor Who, where the Doctor-and-companion show up in an alien place and solve a problem—but it keeps it grounded in that same reality. I really like it—I might even like it more than I liked Rose. Who can say! Well. Me, probably. But this is a keeper for sure.

Next up is The Unquiet Dead and our first modern trip to the past! And Charles Dickens!