Real-Time Blogging Doctor Who, Season One: Rose

This should be interesting. We haven’t even put the disc in yet and Nick is already complaining. Mind, I agree with him there: the TARDIS-shaped box takes up an enormous amount of space, and the glue perished very quickly, so the insets keep falling out. I’m quite glad that the others didn’t come in, say, a Dalek-shaped box.

Nick’s now decided that these should be called recaps, but I don’t fancy doing that: I’m already a little uncomfortable, thinking about the fact that these have already been recapped on TWoP. But then I decided that, firstly, that didn’t mean I couldn’t do it, as well, and, secondly, I never cared for those recaps, anyway.

And all that before we get to the actual episode . . .

. . . which, of course, opens not with the Doctor, but with Rose (once we get past the opening credits, which were exciting enough in 2005, sixteen years after we’d last heard them on live telly, and with the slow panning down to London from outer space).

Rose, and her alarm clock—Rose looking terribly cute, actually, back before she started annoying me.

And the careful shots of the plastic dummies, just so we know what’s actually coming up.

Now Rose being adorable with Mickey on her lunch break, and now back to the work montage.

Ah, but now things are heating up, when Rose has to take the lottery money down to the basement to poor, dead, never-seen Wilson. (That’s not a spoiler, surely? Not four years on. Sorry, but Wilson is totally dead.) And you can tell it’s getting serious, because the very jaunty music has stopped as soon as the lift doors open.

Wow, I’m out of practice at this.

I find this whole scene in the basement very creepy, but then I’ve always found the (spoiler!) Autons terribly creepy. The horrible little dolls! And that black plastic armchair that suffocated people! The only thing that frightened me more in the original series was the Peking homunculus.

And now the dummies start moving, and they’re waaaay creepier than the stop-motion dolls from the 1970s. Even Rose is thoroughly freaked, backing away, until—the Doctor grabs her hand. “Run!”

Hurray!

Actually, the dummies look less realistic and less frightening when they’re running. For some reason, they look more like people and less like dummies/Autons when they’re running.

DOCTOR: Why would they be students?
ROSE: ‘Cause to get that many people dressed up and acting stupid, they have to be students.

I can’t argue with that.

And there goes the Doctor. Well, that was quick. Shall we assume he’ll be back at some point? Rose looks a little shell-shocked—and that’s before her place of work explodes, which it just did.

Well, you can’t argue with that: that’s what the Doctor does, just wanders in to a planet and creates massive quantities of chaos.

Jacki really is at her most annoying in this episode, with the nattering about Rose being “aged” and “skin like an old Bible” and “honestly, if you walked in now, you’d think I was her daughter.” I like her more in later episodes. And Mickey, too, though I don’t dispute his desire to go down the pub to see the match. Perfectly normal impulse—unless it’s Man. United playing. Or Chelsea. Or Arsenal.

Uh oh, strange scuttling sounds, and rattling cat flaps.

Oh, that’s okay—it’s only the Doctor poking through the cat flap. Which sounds like a euphemism, but isn’t.

I love this scene with Jacki:

JACKI: I’m in my dressing gown.
DOCTOR: Yes, you are.
JACKI: There’s a strange man in my bedroom.
DOCTOR: Yes, there is.
JACKI: Well, anything could happen.
DOCTOR: . . . No.

I also love the montage of the Doctor wandering around the living room while Rose makes coffee and natters on—checking his new face in the mirror (how long has it been since he regenerated?) and flipping the playing cards all over.

And if Mickey is being immature earlier in the episode, at least that explains Rose’s assumption that the Doctor is pretending to strangle himself with the plastic arm.

I wonder if this exchange between Rose and the Doctor

DOCTOR: Just “the Doctor”.
ROSE: Is that supposed to sound impressive?
DOCTOR: Yeah, sort of.

is a nod to the fact that this is the first new episode in sixteen years, a nod to all those new viewers out there who don’t automatically see the title sequence and think, “Well, obviously he’s the Doctor.)

I love Eccleston’s Doctor, the way he can flip between a thoroughly brittle manic mood, almost hysterical, to a sort of portentous solemnity that also has something hysterical about it. I’m writing this passage during the sequence when he’s walking back to the TARDIS (our first real glimpse of the TARDIS, though Rose runs past it in the street after the explosion—and the first time we hear it) when he’s explaining how he can feel the Earth hurtling through space, and that’s a good scene to explain what I mean about this Doctor.

I’ve lost the knack of explaining where the plot is while also rambling on about other things!

For the record, Rose has just checked out the Doctor on the Internet, and now Mickey is over-protectively driving her to see the chap who runs the Doctor website. (Well, his driving isn’t over-protective, but you get my point.)

I like Clive’s son—“Dad! It’s one of your nutters!”—but his wife’s “She? She read a website about the Doctor, and she’s a she?” just makes me a little cranky. (Yes, there are girl Doctor Who fans, and, no, you don’t need to assume that a Doctor Who convention is just going to be sad men in anoraks standing around shuffling their feet.)

Clive is showing his photographs and pictures to Rose, and Nick wonders what the Doctor was doing at Kennedy’s assassination. I wonder that, too. He wasn’t assassinating the U.S. President, presumably, so what?

Ah, the wobbly wheelie bin. No, Mickey, don’t get out of the car! You fool! Oh, you know something bad’s going to happen when it’s a wobbly wheelie bin.

This sequence with the bin isn’t entirely convincing to me—and as I type those words, Nick says, “You know, given the requirements, I don’t think ILM could have done better with that.” But the strips of plastic attached to Mickey’s hands I like—they’re kind of creepy and mundane at the same time, but the wobbling bin itself—especially in the panoramic shots—isn’t convincing.

Mickey’s post-Auton make-up is fabulous, though—the shift in the eyebrows and eyes and the shininess of the skin. I love it. Very uncanny (in a Freudian sense).

On the other hand, the scene where the cork hits Mickey in the forehead is deeply unconvincing.

(While Mickey wrecks the restaurant, I want to know more about this boy for whom Rose left school. Who was he? Why is he never mentioned again? Why would she have to leave school? I want back-story, dammit!)

And Rose is inside the TARDIS for the first time, and completely and utterly freaked out. Can’t say I blame her.

When did the assembled hordes of Ghengis Khan try to get through the TARDIS doors? I don’t remember that episode.

Oh, dear: Rose is breaking down. Poor girl.

Damn, these two are self-absorbed. We’ve already had Rose’s “I’m sorry, I thought we were talking about me” line at the dinner table, and now the Doctor’s insisting “Yeah, culture shock—oh, what? Your boyfriend? Oh, him.”

Sorry, Doctor: I love you, but Rose has a point—a Police Public Call Box is not a good disguise. It wasn’t even really a good disguise in the 1960s.

And now we have the first real running scene of the new season: the Doctor and Rose, tearing along hand-in-hand towards the London Eye. It reminds me, vaguely, of all the running through Paris that the Doctor (the Fourth) and Romana do in “City of Death.” As always, with Russell T. Davies, I wonder if it’s deliberate homage.

And they’re underneath the streets, looking down on the Nestene Consciousness.

NICK: This is a setting they keep coming back to. Spaceship interiors, cellars . . .
ME: I think it’s the new series’ quarry, myself.

Oh, and Mickey’s still alive. Which is good, I suppose, though Mickey didn’t grow on me for quite some time.

The Doctor probably shouldn’t call us “dumb apes” and “stupid little people,” when he’s always claimed to be so fond of us.

This scene is odd: this hysteria when he’s talking about the Time War in some detail for the first time is heart-breaking, but the image of the Doctor as a diplomat doesn’t really work for me here. Maybe because he’s not very good at diplomacy? Or perhaps he’s just tentative in the role here, coming out of an uncomfortable role as a soldier?

While I’m pondering that, vaguely, the Nestene Consciousness has activated its Auton warriors, and they’ve killed poor old Clive. Why? Because he’s the only person other than Jacki and Mickey that we’ve seen in any detail this episode, and the implication is that we’ll feel sorrier for someone we know? Or because they recognise that he, like Rose, has had contact with the Doctor, albeit virtually?

Of course, Jacki is at risk, too, from the hyper-creepy Auton brides.

But that’s all right, Rose knows what she needs to do. I do feel a little sorry for the Nestene Consciousness, though. It’s controlling the Autons, and the Autons have always been mindless killing machines, but it doesn’t look like a nice death—it looks intensely painful, and the poor thing is only a refugee from a destroyed planet.

Oh, well—it’s dead now, so there isn’t much point worrying about it.

Rose, when your mother is trying to tell you not to leave the house because it’s dangerous, you probably shouldn’t hang up on her. She’ll be having a panic attack right now.

Now, now, Mickey: aliens are people, too, in the broadest sense of the word.

And while I’m writing that, Rose is turning down a trip in what she thinks is a spaceship. Because she’s an idiot. Who seriously turns down a chance to travel in the TARDIS, even if their boyfriend isn’t invited? (Sorry, Nick!)

Ah, but when the Doctor turns up again and tells her it’s a time machine, as well, then she’s off—and I love that grin of sheer joy on her face. But that exchange with Mickey (“Thanks.” “For what?” “Exactly.”) doesn’t leave me with a good impression of the newest companion.

And that’s “Rose”! Sometime in the not too distant future (that is, probably next Sunday), it’ll be “The End of the World.”