Live-blogging Doctor Who, Season Two: New Earth

This live-blogging extravaganza brought to you by the fact that I still don’t know how to turn my television on (and we must have owned it for nearly a year) and by the fact that I forgot to unplug my external mouse from the laptop before moving it into the living room, causing wackiness to ensue.

Oh, and by the mysterious person on my television who looks almost exactly like Marcus Grahame in a low light but who is apparently Jack Dee, British comedian.

He doesn’t seem very funny, judging from the ten minutes of the programme I’ve just seen.

In other news, I know it’s been nearly eight years, Aaron Sorkin, but I still haven’t forgiven you for killing off Mrs Landingham just to give the President a reason to run for a second term.

I’m sure the episode will begin airing soon.

. . .

Ah! Here we are! That’s a man in a pin-striped suit turning dials in the TARDIS—yes, that’s the Doctor, all right. While Rose, outside, is once again demonstrating that she really doesn’t seem to like Mickey, at all.

And yet it’s Mickey who waits and watches for the TARDIS to leave: Jackie, who knows how things are going to go, is already walking away when it dematerialises.

And, credits!

The Doctor and Rose land on a mysterious planet in the year five billion and three. Which is just silly. And there’s New Earth—complete with apple grass. And Rose is being slightly odd in this scene . . . I can’t explain why.

And she’s being watched by a strangely tattooed man, who is keeping an eye on her through a crystal ball. Well, it looks like a crystal ball.

The Doctor is explaining about the Earth-nostalgia movement and how New Earth and New New York came about: they’re very flirty in this scene, but the Doctor is easily distracted by the hospital and the message he’s received on the psychic paper. Someone in Ward 26 wants to see him.

The Doctor, on the other hand, is showing his first obsession with the little shops that you find in hospitals (and, later, libraries).

Ah, the disinfectant scene. I’m quite partial to this scene. Rose settles down into it soon enough, and she’s really having fun in this episode, Billie Piper.

Though that’s not Ward 26—and Rose isn’t stupid (though, as Nick says, she can be bloody annoying), or she wouldn’t have picked up that metal pole. Did I mention that the nurses are giant humanoid cats? Because it seems as though that would be an important thing for me to say.

The Doctor has found the patient he has come to visit: the Face of Bo, asleep in his jar, alone with the novice who is taking care of him. The Face of Bo sleeps most of his time, these days—the Doctor claims that he only met the Face of Bo once, but those of us who have seen later episodes have our own suspicions about that.

And Rose has wandered into a different place, playing endless movies of someone she rapidly identifies as Lady Cassandra—and his tattooed human, Chip, who is a “force-grown clone.”

Ew, they salvaged her eyes? That’s . . . well, that’s not quite right, is it? Or am I being human-normative?

Well, Rose isn’t human-normative, although she did seem hung up on the whole “human” thing in the last episode—just because the Doctor can regenerate, and grow new limbs, and has two hearts, you’d think that was odd in some way.

While I’ve been nattering on about that, though, the Lady Cassandra has been transferring herself into Rose’s body: she’s quite manic in this role, Billie Piper.

ROSE/CASSANDRA: Oh my god: I’m a chav!

Flipping back to the Doctor and the Face of Bo, the novice is explaining some of the legends around the Face of Bo, especially the imparting of his last message to the lonely god. (Hint: we know what that is!)

I do laugh every time Rose/Cassandra describes herself as “living inside a bouncy castle.” And her attempts at doing “old Earth cockney.” Apples and pears? Hee!

Hang on, the Duke of Manhattan got better! I thought that petrifold regression wouldn’t be curable for another thousand years? Did I mention the Duke of Manhattan before? It’s terribly difficult to keep track of all the plot points.

(Would the Doctor honestly say, “How on earth . . .?” Wouldn’t it be more likely that he’d say, “How on Gallifrey?”)

ROSE/CASSANDRA: Never trust a nun, never trust a nurse, and never trust a cat.
NICK: These are the archest cats ever!
ME: Have you ever met a cat?

I admit, though, that these cats are creepy. Or should I say these nuns are creepy? Anyway, they’re (wow! Cassandra shows much more decolletage than Rose does) performing cures well ahead of their time, and keeping people in cells in the basement, not to mention incinerating them when they show signs of sentience.

Rose, in the interim, has found the Doctor and, seeing his new face, enthusiastically snogged him, to the apparent satisfaction of both of them. Is it just me, or does David Tennant look insanely young in this episode? Maybe it’s the relatively short hair.

The Doctor, working with advice that, coming from Rose, should make him highly suspicious, has found his way to what the nurses call “intensive care,” which is full of people suffering, apparently, every single disease in the galaxy. Which seems a little improbable to me, but what do I know?

The Doctor recognises immediately that these are not patients, but lab rats.

Ah! Rose asks the same questions as I do, and the Doctor (non)answers that plague carriers are always the last to die.

Now the Doctor is shouting at a poor novice—at least, I think she’s the novice. I find it hard to tell the nun-cats apart—who probably doesn’t actually have an active role in hospital administration. Shouldn’t he be shouting at the abbess? Or matron? Or whatever she is?

Meanwhile, the Doctor decides at this point to reveal that he knows there’s something wrong with Rose—apparently not because she snogged him while Rose has been shilly-shallying around for months, but because she doesn’t care about all these sick people.

Cassandra, however, only toys with him for a very short period of time before knocking him out with her perfume. That’s not a euphemism, by the way.

Cassandra is planning on infecting the Doctor with all the diseases that the poor people in the cells in intensive care are suffering—they’re “topped up” every ten minutes, and the Doctor’s been shoved into a spare cell.

The nurses, though, aren’t susceptible to Cassandra’s attempted extortion, and she releases all the ill patients on her level—who rapidly release every single person in intensive care.

(I wish the nun-cats wouldn’t call them “the flesh.” It’s . . . it’s just creepy.)

Nick’s of the opinion that releasing “the flesh” worked better as a threat than as “Plan B,” and I have to agree with him. Especially since these zombie people can infect you with every disease under the sun with just one touch.

There’s a lot of infecting, and running, and screaming at this point, so I’m going to ask two questions (Chip looks like dying, by the way, but he jumps in a barrel of waste):

a. How do they harvest the samples from these patients, if they can’t touch them?
and
b. How can these nun-cat nurses isolate the required antibodies to treat a particular disease, if the patients are simultaneously suffering from all of these disease?

Anyway, back in the episode, Cassandra is now in the Doctor’s body, but his taunting of Rose (“So many parts! And hardly used!”) is brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of the zombie patients.

Poor Chip, meanwhile, is stuck in one of the cells formally occupied by the zombie patients. And Rose has a psychotic nun-cat hanging off her ankle—but the nun-cat is infected by one of the zombie patients, without transferring the diseases to Rose. I’m not sure how—presumably Rose is wearing socks?

After a little back and forth, Rose manages to transfer herself to a zombie patient climbing up after Rose and the Doctor, but frantically sends herself back into Rose before the patients reach the top of the ladder—Cassandra experiences something usually described as a “character moment” before she and the Doctor reach the safer, quarantined sections in the general wards.

The Doctor calls for the intravenous solutions to every single disease, and straps them around his body before ravelling down the elevator shaft. He’s a busy little bee, this Doctor. And he talks Cassandra into going with him.

(Another question: Cassandra needed complicated technology to transfer herself into Rose’s mind, but once it’s been done once, she can just flip between people’s brains without any technological intervention and with no side effects?)

The Doctor, meanwhile, is mixing up his chemicals in the lift, and inducing the zombie patients to come into the lift for the disinfectant process—where they’re cured and can then pass the cure on to others by touch.

Wait, what?

Surely intravenous drugs don’t cure when they pass through the skin, do they? If they did, why would they be called intravenous drugs?

And, then, how can intravenous drugs and cures to horrible diseases that take at least two days to cure in the wards (as the Doctor mentioned in an earlier case, though I’ve forgotten its name already. Not the petrifold regression: another one) occur immediately?

Oh, I’m sure it’s not important.

But it is another instance of the Doctor becoming complicated with the idea of a medical Doctor, which Nick finds fascinating.

Meanwhile, the Face of Bo is feeling better, and tells the Doctor that they will meet again, for the third and final time, when he will impart his message, and then teleports off.

DOCTOR: Now that is enigmatic. That is . . . that is textbook enigmatic.

Cassandra, meanwhile, transfers into Chip’s body, but it’s all too much for him. He only has a half life, apparently, and presumably the excitement of hosting his “mistress,” who he loves, is too much for him.

So the Doctor bundles him into the TARDIS and takes him back to the party for the Thracian ambassador, the video of which Cassandra was watching earlier in the episode. She said, then, that it was the last night that someone told her she looked beautiful—and Chip/Cassandra wanders up to his/her older self, and tells her that she looks beautiful, and then collapses.

It’s rather sweet—but also strangely narcissistic. Although, since the original Cassandra doesn’t know that she’s speaking to herself, does that count as narcissism?

Either way, the Doctor and Rose wander silently into the TARDIS and off to their next adventure—which is “Tooth and Claw,” starring David Tennant’s actual Scottish accent! Hurray!