Skin of Evil

My thoughts on The End of the World:

I loved it, but with reservations.

The aliens were phenomenal -- high-fantasy bizarreness in the living trees and the Face of Boe meet space opera camp in the Moxx of Balhoon and the, erm, slightly darker blue people. Some of the others were less vivid, though, and I'd actually have preferred to lose a handful and ended up with a less crowded but more convincing party.

By contrast, the design of Station One was desperately uninspired and mundane. The exterior shots were good, but looked more like something from a couple of hundred years' time (cf Babylon 5, for instance) than five billion years'. The interior looked exactly like the inside of the Time Lords' space station did in 1985 (and it wasn't at all impressive then). Something from the far, far, far, far future had better look astonishingly different if it's going to persuade me of its bona fides.

In fact, physical appearances aside, there was very little to suggest that such a mind-frying quantity of time had passed. Not only are there still humans, but they use names like "O'Brien" and "Los Angeles"; not only are there still rich and poor, but they still fulfil the functions of "shareholders" and "plumbers". I realise that this -- the perennial survival not only of humanity but of its less admirable institutions such as the class divide -- was part of the point Davies was making, but again it needed to work an awful lot harder in order to convince me.

I was disappointed on first viewing at what seemed a badly thought-through plot -- it seemed that RTD was privileging the character moments (at which this series genuinely excels) over coherent plotting. In retrospect, and on a second viewing, I think that this was simply a case of details of motivation and execution being left implicit rather than spelled out, which is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the episodes' shorter run-time. (One needs to assume, for instance, that Lady Cassandra keeps a tighter rein on her drones than is immediately apparent, so that the Adherents of the Repeated Meme's apparently unmotivated attempt to bump off Rose is Cassandra's direct revenge for Rose's insulting her. This makes somewhat more sense of the scene where the Doctor uses the spider robot to identify the person responsible for the plot.) It's still annoying that the Doctor can change the function of any object with the twist of a knob or the hum of a screwdriver, though.

I'm still puzzled as to why New Who seems so reluctant to show on-screen deaths of sympathetic characters -- something Classic Who was never reticent about. They're either shown in extreme long-shot (Jabe's death by fire) or else the camera cuts away at a crucial moment (Raffalo, like Clive in the previous episode). This seems particularly odd given the gruesome explicitness of Cassandra's demise.

The supporting characters were great -- Lady Cassandra and Jabe especially, but also the likeable walk-on-get-bumped-off part of Raffalo. In fact the script generally was splendid, with lots of witty dialogue (Lady C: "I'm not just a pretty face!") and clever character touches. The Eccleston Doctor gains an entire extra dimension at a stroke, when in response to Jabe's sympathy his inane grin suddenly falls away and reveals the despair beneath. (I also really liked, for some reason, his twinned speeches about humanity's contradictory assumptions about the future.) Jabe's self-sacrifice did suffer somewhat from being a tad contrived -- if the companion hadn't been inconveniently imprisoned, Rose would have been there instead and wouldn't have burst into flames -- but was emotionally effective all the same.

Some of the other character moments seemed to me to be walking a finer line. Some of Rose's dialogue in the final scene (particularly when she calls the Doctor "tightwad" in a remarkably Acesque way) did make me wonder for the first time whether Ms Piper quite has the range for these quieter, more reflective moments. And I thought the mobile phone scene, while touching, came awfully close to breaking the suspension of disbelief, as one moment Rose is isolated in the unthinkably distant future, the next her Mum's doing the laundry. Again I realise that this was a deliberate attempt to heighten the contrast and Rose's alienation, but for me it served to collapse that gap instead. Perhaps, if the Station One interior sets had looked less like the sort of thing you might find in a 21st century TV studio, this wouldn't have been such a problem.

It should go without saying, though, that this is so much better than very nearly all of Classic Who as to constitute some kind of apotheosis. If I seem to be picking on the negative points here, it's because I feel a certain sense of frustration that such a magnificent series -- which, on its showing so far, I love -- still has avoidable flaws which let it down.

I loved the pop music, though.