Hello!
The poor Ninth Doctor only lasted a single season. That was due to creative disputes - Christopher Eccleston did not get on well with the rest of the cast and crew. All the same, Eccleston's acting, and Billie Piper (Rose)'s acting is the reason that the revival has lasted more than one season. So don't skip Nine. His final adventure involved Daleks. At the end of his life, the Ninth Doctor was travelling with two companions - Rose, naturally, and Captain Jack Harkness, an ex-time-travelling conman. The Tenth Doctor makes his debut in The Christmas Invasion, and spends most of it asleep, as a result of a regeneration gone slightly wrong.
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| David Tennant in Nine's outfit actually looks a lot like one of Tennant's other roles - Barty Crouch Junior in Goblet of Fire. |
Bad Wolf
Bad Wolf starts with the Doctor waking up in a closet in the Big Brother House. No big cliffhanger from the previous episode. just BAM! Doctor in a closet. As it turns out, it's not THE Big Brother - it's the far future, on a satellite called the Game Station, broadcasting thousands of game shows. There was a transmat which captured the TARDIS, teleporting the Doctor, Rose and fellow companion Captain Jack Harkness onto the station. Rose wakes up in The Weakest Link, with a robotic Anne Robinson presiding over it...or, as Rose realises, the Anne-Droid. Someone was having fun naming that. Jack's been teleported into a future version of What Not to Wear. The Doctor and Rose separately learn what happens to those who lose the games - they get disintegrated. The Doctor is horrified and immediately attempts to leave the Big Brother house by damaging property; he gets evicted, but doesn't get disintegrated, because whoever brought him to the Game Station wants him alive. He escapes, taking fellow contestant Lynda with him. Jack escapes from What Not to Wear after learning that it also involves radical cosmetic surgery. He meets up with the Doctor and Lynda, and the three of them make it to The Weakest Link. Rose sees them and runs for it, getting disintegrated on the way. After getting arrested and fighting their way out, the Doctor, Jack and Lynda make their way to the top floor of the Game Station. Upon getting there, Jack finds the TARDIS and realises that the disintegrator beam is a secondary transmat system, sending the people being "disintegrated" to a point on the edge of the Solar System. This turns out to be a fleet of Dalek ships; the Doctor and the Daleks have a parlay, where the Doctor promises to save Rose.
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| The new Daleks |
The Parting of the Ways begins with the Doctor and Jack rescuing Rose. During the course of the rescue, they meet the Emperor of the Daleks, who survived the explosion at the end of the Time War, flung through time. He rebuilt the Dalek race through human remains - with the result that they've gone mad from self-loathing. The Doctor, Rose and Jack return to the Game Station and prepare for battle; most of the contestants and staff are sent back to Earth in shuttles. Some contestants and staff remain to fight, while others stay behind because they're convinced the Daleks are just myths. The Doctor starts building a Delta Wave - a type of super-weapon which fries the brain of anything with a central nervous system. He also sends Rose home using Emergency Protocol One - if the Doctor is facing an enemy which must never get its hands on the TARDIS, the TARDIS will return to a safe place. The safe place in this instance is Rose's home - though that makes sense, as it's the safest place for her. The Daleks arrive and the battle begins; however, they make a detour to kill those who chose not to fight, simply out of sadistic pleasure. Along the way, they also kill all the staff and contestants fighting them, including Lynda. Eventually, only Jack and the Doctor are left standing; Jack empties his guns fruitlessly into the Daleks, then is summarily exterminated. The Doctor completes the Delta Wave, just in time for the Daleks to swarm the top floor; however, knowing that he would doom Earth as well, he can't bring himself to use it.
In the meantime, Rose sees the words "Bad Wolf" scrawled across a playground and realises it's a message to her. She breaks the TARDIS console open so that she can look into the heart of the TARDIS; telepathically controlling the TARDIS, she pilots it to the Game Station, just in time to save the Doctor. With the entire Time Vortex in her head, Rose can see everything; first thing she does when she reaches the Game Station is send the words 'Bad Wolf' back through time, a message to lead herself to that point. She then curb-stomps the Daleks, disintegrating them into dust. She also resurrects Jack, a little too well; he can now never die, and will always resurrect from fatal damage, given time. The sheer power running through her head starts killing her, and the Doctor extracts it from her head, pouring it into his own instead. Given that holding the Time Vortex in your head, even for a second, is fatal, I assume he used its almost limitless power to heal Rose, then he lets go of that power and releases it to the TARDIS. He carries Rose to the TARDIS and waits for her to wake up; his regeneration is close to starting, and he wants to say goodbye before he regenerates. After a rambling speech, in which he cracks jokes to make both himself and Rose feel better, he finally regenerates. Also, he left Jack behind on the satellite; this was later explained as Jack's new-found immortality being "wrong" to the Doctor. Yes, that's prejudiced - it gets called out when the Doctor and Jack reunite in a later episode.
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| The Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack. This is an earlier adventure |
The Christmas Invasion
The Christmas Invasion had a Children in Need Special before it; it featured the new Doctor trying to get Rose to trust him. He's saddened when she doesn't - perhaps he still remembers Peri, and the fact that he destroyed her trust by trying to kill her, then completely forgot that. In any case, Rose does end up trusting him pretty quickly. His regeneration starts going wrong - but he's (mostly) too manic to care, compulsively speeding up the TARDIS. As it happens, The Christmas Invasion proper starts with the TARDIS materialising in 21st-century London, bouncing off buildings and almost flattening Jackie and Mickey. That's why.
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| Zero Room time? |
When the TARDIS lands, the Doctor steps out and immediately collapses. He spends the rest of that day unconscious. Late that evening, Rose and Mickey are repeatedly attacked by robot scavengers, trying to obtain the Doctor for spare parts. At around the same time, UNIT receives a message from an alien race, called the Sycorax, who declare their intention to blackmail humanity into accepting them as their new rulers. This is not an empty threat; they captured a space probe containing information on the human race, including a vial of human blood. The probe was sent into space by humans. The Sycorax have a technology which allows them to hypnotise people with their blood; with the handy vial of blood from the probe, they can control anybody with that blood type.
In the early hours of Christmas Day, the Sycorax ship enters the atmosphere. At the same time, the threat kicks in - the Sycorax use their mind-control to force one-third of the population of the world to climb onto high surfaces. The Sycorax make contact with UNIT; the Prime Minister, Harriet Jones, offers herself as the representative of Earth and is teleported onto the ship, along with her right-hand man, a UNIT official, and the man who sent the probe. Rose, Mickey and Jackie, meanwhile, escape into the TARDIS with the Doctor. Jackie heads back outside to get food and the Sycorax teleport the TARDIS onto their ship. Rose, unaware of the teleport, heads outside and gets captured by one of the Sycorax; Mickey hears her scream and follows her. Rose steps forth as representative of Earth - she came from the TARDIS, so she speaks on behalf of the Doctor. Very well known, by this point, isn't he?
Rose tries her best to bluff the Sycorax - unfortunately, her best just makes them laugh at her. Fortunately, the Doctor's finally woken up! He breaks the hypnosis by triggering the survival instincts of the mind-controlled one-third, then steps forth as Earth's champion, battling the Sycorax leader for the fate of the planet. During the fight, he loses his hand, but regrows it and defeats the leader of the Sycorax; he then makes the rest of the Sycorax promise to leave. The Doctor and his friends get teleported back to Earth, while the Sycorax turn tail; they then get shot down as they flee. The Doctor is livid, promising to tear down Harriet's government with six words; after doing exactly that, he departs to select a new outfit and have Christmas dinner with Rose and her family. It's quite jarring.
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| Hello! |
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| Goodbye... |
Overall, I really enjoyed Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways. It's a lot of fun. One of the best things about the two-parter is the fact that it really demonstrates the Doctor's trauma from the Time War; for instance, during his 'conference' with the Daleks, he declares his intention to wipe every last Dalek out of the sky - he's shouting and practically foaming at the mouth. Another moment is when he's returned to the TARDIS after rescuing Rose; he's slumped motionless against the doors, while the Daleks' chant echoes all around him. It shows how he's still affected by what he saw and suffered in the War, and the pain of losing his people. On that note, he can't bring himself to use the Delta Wave; knowing that it would kill everything on Earth, he can't bring himself to perform a repeat of what he did (or didn't do...) on the last day of the Time War. Similarly, he's so traumatised by losing so many of his loved ones, both during and before the War, that when Rose is seemingly disintegrated, he completely shuts down, making no effort to fight back against the security guards arresting him. Later, when he, Jack and Lynda fight their way out of the arrest, the Doctor takes a break from his usual non-violence and throws a guard into a wall; this sudden violence is unexpected, given the Doctor's usual pacifism, and highlights the fact that the Ninth Doctor is far more embittered than most incarnations of the Doctor, more willing to get violent when he needs to. This anger is further emphasised when one of the staff-members justifies what happened to Rose and other disintegrated contestants as "just doing our jobs"; the Doctor actually shouts at the person making that statement, declaring that they no longer even have the right to talk to him!
Equally, I like the fact that, when constructing the Delta Wave, he wrestles with a pipe for a few seconds, then looks up with an expression of manic glee. Just before he removes the Time Vortex from Rose's head, he says that she needs a Doctor - he can't resist making a bad pun. When he's about to regenerate, he's cracking jokes all through his farewell. In these two episodes, you see a light-hearted side of the Doctor which is present in the preceding series, but with greater scarcity than in the past; as illustrated, this does a good job of presenting a more jaded, cynical Doctor. Conversely, travelling with Rose has made the Doctor happier, it's made him more open to the wonders of the universe again - such that, even on the edge of death, he's staying light-hearted. At the same time, he unflinchingly saves his companion from death, knowing that it seals his own fate as well, because that's who the Doctor is - never cruel, never cowardly, always willing to help people. Indeed, the regeneration scene is one of the only regeneration scenes in the entire show to be unambiguously positive; while other Doctors see their regeneration as, to varying degrees, death, the Ninth Doctor appreciates it as a new opportunity, another chance at life.
I enjoyed The Christmas Invasion; it does a good job of introducing the Tenth Doctor. This despite the fact that he's asleep for most of it! The Christmas Invasion, like Castrovalva before it, focuses primarily on the Doctor's friends, their reaction to his change, and how to save the day with the Doctor incapacitated. Rose's attitude, indeed, is quite different to that of the Classic companions, with the possible exception of Ben. She initially doesn't believe that he's the Doctor; later on, she starts to lose faith in him, due to his being comatose during a crisis. The Christmas Invasion also shows another aspect of the post-regenerative process: while other post-regeneration episodes just depict the Doctor behaving more or less normally by the end, The Christmas Invasion showcases that, when your entire mental and physical make-up is rewritten, you don't actually know what sort of person you are. When he makes his appearance, fully healed, the Doctor rambles about the fact that he doesn't know what he's like; he also, during the ramble, has a go at Rose for losing faith in him. It's harsh but understandable - when you don't even know who you are as a person, the last thing you need is the people who do know you giving up on you. Ironically, that little outburst does illustrate what sort of person the new Doctor is - he's immediately overcome with remorse, fretting that maybe he's become someone who's frequently rude to his loved ones, indicating that, whatever else, he's as compassionate as ever.
Another thing I like about The Christmas Invasion is the foreshadowing of the Doctor's darker side. Harriet does something that he, personally, doesn't agree with, so he tears down her government, changing history in the process. At another point, he readily acknowledges the fact that he doesn't know when to stop - this idea of the Doctor needing somebody to stop him when he went too far becomes prevalent towards the end of his run. There's also the fact that he destroys an innocent woman's career and upends history, then calmly goes off to get changed - the ability to go and do something trivial after doing something like that is borderline sociopathic, and therefore not often something you see heroes do. Equally, just before the Sycorax leader charges him, the Doctor's chattering about satsumas, having found one in the pocket of his dressing gown. He hears the Sycorax leader charging from behind and immediately, unhesitatingly sends the leader falling to his doom, before stating that he doesn't give second chances - the shift from chatty and jovial to mercilessly angry is jarringly swift, and, concerningly, becomes a trademark of that incarnation.
Moreover, what I find interesting about this darkness is that, in some senses, it's a carry-over from the Ninth Doctor; the Ninth Doctor was embittered, cynical, prone to outbursts of anger - such as the aforementioned sequence where he throws a guard into a wall. The Tenth Doctor, despite his fresh perspective on life, still carries some of that darkness - it emphasises that the Ninth Doctor's anger hasn't gone away, just because the Doctor's regenerated. Additionally, it's an interesting reflection of how gaining a new perspective on life won't necessarily heal any trauma you might have, and that's OK. That's something I've found to be true for me. When I was being bullied, I had fairly low self-esteem. I thought my friends didn't care about me; I didn't think I mattered to anybody outside my family. I got a new perspective on that; I know that people do care about me. And still, three years on from the end of the bullying, I still have self-esteem issues; it frustrates me, sometimes, because I know that there's no real reason to doubt. At the same time, stuff like that takes years and years to heal, and it's not always linear - thoughts can be very scarring. So the takeaway is that you shouldn't be frustrated if it takes longer than expected to heal - so long as you are healing, you're on the right path.
Overall, I'd rate Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways and The Christmas Invasion at 8/10.
Random observations:
-When Rose learns that the Doctor is dying, she asks if there's anything that can be done. As there is, in fact, something Time Lords can do to escape death, and the Doctor's already done it nine times, he's rather offended by the assertion that he's sitting around waiting for death. "Yeah, I'm doing it, now!" is his exasperated response.
-At one point, Rose notes that the Daleks are half-human, being made from the remains of dead humans; all the Daleks promptly start shouting at her for blaspheming. Meta-wise, it's a pretty good indication of the fan response to the Doctor being half-human in the TV movie.
-The Doctor casually mentions being on the Game Station a hundred years previously; Lynda notes that he's looking good for 100+, to which he remarks that he moisturises - it's a reference to a previous episode. It's amusing that he goes with 'long-lived' rather than 'time-traveller'.
-Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways finally explains why the Doctor can't just hop in the TARDIS and use time-travel to solve crises - once he arrives, he becomes part of events; therefore, changing the events will change his own personal time-line, causing a paradox.
-There's two funny moments during Rose's discussion with her mum and Mickey after she's been sent home which I quite like:
-The first is when Mickey, in an effort to jump-start the conversation, says that a new pizza shop has opened, and Jackie's response is "What does it sell?" Surprisingly enough, it turns out that it sells pizza.
-The second is when Rose storms out at the end of the scene - you have to wonder what that looked like to others in the restaurant.
-I actually agree with Harriet regarding the spaceship. After all, the Sycorax would likely go on to enslave more people. Added on to that, their leader - their representative - couldn't keep an oath sworn on the lives of his people. How likely was it that the rest could or would keep their word?
-At one point in The Christmas Invasion, the civilian in charge of the probe remarks that the Sycorax probably aren't Martians; the probe was supposed to explore Mars before getting hijacked. The Major emphatically agrees - for the record, UNIT has met Martians, during the Third and Fourth Doctor's eras. They're tall and clad in green amour, and go by the name Ice Warriors - so look nothing like the Sycorax.
-At the end of The Christmas Invasion, the Doctor says that the renewed travels with Rose will be "Fantastic" - he uses Nine's catchphrase, proving that he is still the same man, in many senses.
-Regeneration count - absorbed the Time Vortex (Ninth to Tenth Doctor). 2 of 12 regenerations remaining.
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