PS Creativity > Reviews > The New Series > Bad Wolf & The Parting Of The Ways

I haven't quite formed an opinion on this year's much talked about big season finale, Army of Ghosts and Doomsday. It was entertaining, but it was also indulgent and shallow and inconsequential and not much to write about. I am confident enough to say that one thing it wasn't was anywhere near as good as 2005's season finale.

I say this because I remember how last year, Parting of the Ways left me on a high and I was still mulling over its poignancy and themes months after watching it. It was a high density work that had a bit of magic in everything and that I kept finding myself thinking back to. Doomsday did nothing of the sort. Although I have watched it repeatedly, its entertainment factor was ultimately all incidental.

Bad Wolf and Parting of the Ways seemed to sum up that summer 2005 period when many of us on the Anorak Zone forum were in heated debate over whether Russell T. Davis' lean towards pandering his show to a mainstream audience with shallow points of interest made him a hack or a genius, and his season finale and all the Bad Wolf mythology it took with it suggested that he was a genius. That he'd hooked in a massive audience and then hit them unawares with something so challenging and important.

Bad Wolf starts the adventure with a parody of Reality TV with a touch of Vengeance on Varos thrown in for good measure. This has been the hotly debated aspect of the episode. Many fans were hoping that this would be an attack on Reality TV and a chance to enjoy seeing this media monster being gleefully demonised. However the ways in which the show had fun with the concept and Russell T. Davis' self-confessed love of the genre and his denials of any intended satire made this segment seem shallow and pointless and given the severity of its portrayal, it seemed a little cold blooded.

Some critics attack Reality TV for moral reasons, declaring it a harmful media institution that encourages snobbery and sadism towards the people onscreen as they crumble under pressure, bickering and insults, and to cap it off the viewer is asked to judge which of the people they like the least. Reality TV encourages us to judge people and to declare which kind of people are interesting and which kind of people are 'mediocre' or 'worthless' and deserving of ejection, and wouldn't you know it tends to be the bitchiest people who are considered the most interesting whilst the good natured are considered boring and pathetic, and I firmly believe that this translates into our own society.

Russell however is a fan of Reality TV so he is hardly likely to think of it as the spawn of all society's evils, and he even crowbars in a line of dialogue (and I use the verb 'crowbars' deliberately) about the Doctor being a fan of a Veterian Reality TV show just to keep the modern Doctor on the right side of cool. I suppose if Russell has a moral point to make about Reality TV, it is that as far as he is concerned Reality TV reflects and highlights ugly modern attitudes but does not necessarily celebrate or encourage them, and in Bad Wolf he is using Reality TV as a means of reflecting that same ugliness of society. Bad Wolf really does show up the kind of snobbery and bitchiness that characterises the Reality TV crowd. Rose is openly called 'stupid' to her face by a competing player and the Doctor's crucial line "Lynda you’re sweet. From what I've seen of your world, do you think anyone out there votes for sweet?" is clearly aimed at our society.

The atmosphere of the games is very effective at being familiar recreations but feeling uniquely futuristic and space age and this leads to the effect of making this future envisionable and an evolution of our own modern society. The Weakest Link scenes are electric, particularly because we see this through Rose's eyes and witness what appears to be a surreal dream of absurdity that quickly turns into something frightening and inescapeable. Rose's "but I voted for her" still makes me hold my breath, the Anne Droid appropriately resembles a malignant chuckie doll and when Rose inevitably gets the critical answer wrong, we like her believe we are staring death in the camera eyes.

The Doctor has landed in the Big Brother house and has a great moment of moral outrage when he first learns that Reality TV has become a 'charnel house'. I like how they quickly establish the Doctor as an active agent in an otherwise conformist and self-involved environment as he is the first to break out and is intent on causing plenty of damage from there. "Here's the latest update from the Big Brother house, I'm getting out! I'm going to find my friends, and then I'm coming to find you!"

He has a lovely banter with Lynda, his fellow escapee (not sure why the other housemate stayed behind though but then again he wouldn't exactly be pleasant company). I love how the usually curt and contemptuous Doctor struggles to not hurt Lynda's feelings and tells her that she's 'sweet', and yes the Doctor is suddenly all about being hip, trendy and macho in a way that seems out of character and feels like cheap pandering to the modern audience (particularly the aforementioned 'Bear with Me' line), but I think I've finally put my finger on it, because this is an insecure Doctor and one who after centuries of being an outsider, suddenly wants to fit in and be accepted. He needs to fit in because the Time War has rendered him disillusioned and alone. There's a loneliness and fear somewhere in there and his eccentric low-brow pop culture references are him doing his best to draw others to him.

The moment where the Doctor realises it was his fault that the Earth has become the world of hell that it is now is treated well as a dramatic moment but also as a little acorn in the grand scheme of things. There's a subtle hint at this guilt shock effect earlier on when Rose realised that her deciding vote had killed Fitch. This is what the new Doctor is, a force of fury looking for a crusade and inevitably there will be plenty of broken china, but what is done is done, since as he points out to Rose later on, he can't go back and change what has passed. He lives and accumulates the consequences of what he has done, and his point of how he would never run away when the Daleks are coming to the station emphasises how he must dig his heels into his own mess.

I think this particular story shows Christopher Eccleston’s best performance as the Doctor. I’ve recently been branching out into his other roles in Jude and Our Friends in the North and I’m fast coming to regard him as one of my favourite actors, mainly because of the roles he chooses to play. He seems geared towards important poignant and political works and takes on characters that have some heavy things to say about life and society. As the Doctor, Christopher Eccleston pins the character down to the Earthy and human. It’s like the classic performances of the Doctor in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Evil of the Daleks, Inferno and Horror of Fang Rock where we see the Doctor show a whole range of emotions like fear, anger and love that really bring the story to a tangible level of reality.

His mute acting upon believing Rose to be dead is much touted and it makes him the centre of the scene without uttering a word. Everything about the scene where the Doctor is held in custody is hellishly bleak and oppressive, the lighting, the mean spirited brutality of the guards, reminiscent of the Thal rocket scenes in Genesis of the Daleks. When the Doctor bursts into action we champion him on as he tools up with the big gun, his black expression and the flashing red lighting of the lift makes the scene boil with rage and we believe that the Doctor is going to massacre the operators and we want him to do it, to kill the evil rot of this world so that it can take hold no longer.

I must say I’ve come to really love what they did with the new Doctor’s character in making him a war-scarred, damaged goods vigilante. There’s something very real about how they nailed the character and what such a damaged man would be like. A Doctor consumed with fury, always defensive, thuggish, slightly agoraphobic, trying to hide it with false happiness. Fundamentally there was a sense that the Doctor had been disillusioned by the Time War and now believed that only violence and destruction could pacify and purify a nasty universe. His way of stalling the Auton invasion is to blow up buildings, his final plea for peace with the Nestene consciousness, of talking with the enemy was merely an old habit dying hard. He allowed Cassandra to die not so much out of revenge for the death of Jabe, but because she was too rich to ever be brought to justice which meant she would very likely kill again if he saved her.

He could be seen as a relic of old fashioned revenge and zero tolerance, come to remind us in our good natured naivety that evil still exists and our metrosexual, empathising society has forgotten how to fight it. We’ve had dark Doctors before. Patrick Troughton to me was as much Doctor Who, The Destroyer as Eccleston was, and the same is true of Sylvester McCoy, but in the Old Series the characterisation of the Doctor tended to have its source simply in the roulette wheel of the regeneration. The fact that Troughton and McCoy had the manipulative savvy and the moral courage to be able to annihilate their enemies utterly was simply down to the gifts they were mentally endowed with in their incarnation.

I’d say on that note that the reason why Troughton’s dark Doctor worked and Colin Baker’s Doctor didn’t is because Troughton carried with him the kind of noble propaganda that raleighed him to our side against those scum-breeding corners of the universe that he spoke about, whilst Colin Baker’s violence and unpleasantness was superficial and came out of the blue (and the concept of the Valeyard was taking the piss completely in the idea that the Doctor could regenerate into someone who was simply evil). But for a modern audience we would need more than that, we would need a history and experience to explain why the Doctor is so destructive and ruthless. In Power of the Daleks and Evil of the Daleks the Doctor could happily annihilate legions of Daleks in a cruel and prolongued fashion and justify it based on how the Daleks were ‘evil’. I have no qualms with that because the Doctor to me is fundamentally an outlaw who thinks outside the institution, sometimes he can be a free agent negotiating for peace, but equally he can be a vigilante or a terrorist based on what he believes is the right way.

However in the new episode Dalek, the Doctor had to have emotional scars and to have lost family to the Daleks before we could accept him behaving the same way. But the progression of the season showed the Doctor gradually regaining his humanity. In Father’s Day he couldn’t ask Pete to sacrifice himself even if he knew it would save humanity, in The Doctor Dances his prayers for a miracle are answered and the Doctor becomes the bringer of life, not death and so by Boomtown the Doctor has grown a little bit of conscience that won’t let him refuse to dine with Margaret and talk with her before taking her to her death, and in that vulnerable moment a compassionate Doctor is fully reformed by a long philosophical dinner conversation.

The moment where the Doctor throws his gun to his own hostage is one I’ve nitpicked over. It happens out of the blue, thoughtlessly as if the build up had been a trick to manipulate the audience. It would have perhaps worked for me if we’d seen the Doctor consider the moment before casting away his gun, as though he thought he was prepared to go through with the kill until he was face to face with his hostages. It is refreshing to establish that this is still our old Doctor, and I suppose it leaves some mystery about what the Doctor was actually thinking and what were his intentions when he was in the lift loading up his weapon, and given what the season has done so far to show the Doctor regaining his humanity I suppose this was something we could breeze through this time. But still I feel that the scene is played a bit too much for slapstick with the hostage unsure what to do with the gun in his hands and that felt inappropriate to me because it could have been a great moment of the Doctor winning by willpower and martyrdom, overpowering the now armed hostage with the power of words “alright so shoot me then!”. That should have been far more dramatic. Still I remain a fan of the “you’ve lost the right to even talk to me” line, it’s got an outraged potency that extends beyond its own corniness. But soon the Daleks are on the way to the station and it is cliffhanger time.

Now this represents the climax of the season- the Dalek invasion force come to obliterate the Earth. In looking back on the season it was very well planned how they'd keep the stories low key before delivering armageddon. Prior to this the stories that dealt with a global threat were either done with RTD's comical moments to give it all some levity (Rose, Aliens of London, Boomtown) or made use of a re-set button at the end (Father's Day, the Doctor Dances) and the more serious episodes dealt with a more small scale threat (End of the World, The Unquiet Dead, Dalek). In that way the series' faults so far could be excused, the constant Earthbound nature of the season worked because it gave the season a focus that would be paid off at the end, and likewise the toilet humour of Aliens of London played its part in staving off the gravitas for a later date. And the results suggested that Russell T. Davis was a genius.

I wasn't quite sold on Parting of the Ways the first time I saw it. It seemed to me to be a bit disjointed rather than driven with momentum, and yet somehow I always knew there was something special about it, and its a story that improves with repeated viewings to the point where I wonder if maybe I actually prefer it to Dalek.

At the time there was a huge buzz created by that cliffhanger as the sight of CGI armies of Daleks emerging in their droves from saucers represented how New Who could do what the Old Series never could. The Daleks' Masterplan and Evil of the Daleks had the kind of iconography that made the Daleks feel like an empirical force, and Genesis of the Daleks did likewise through the power of words. This was us finally seeing the Dalek Empire and its legions of armies.

Maybe the first Doctor/Dalek confrontation of Parting of the Ways would have been better if the Doctor had been hiding in the Tardis as he spoke and learned the facts rather than posturing outside mocking and taunting them. It seemed too easy for him too early on when the episode was trying to make the Daleks seem like death incarnate.

Still there is much to praise the scene on. As the Doctor is talking to the Daleks about their genetic majke-up, there’s a lovely bit of imagery in a focus on the line of discs of the Dalek eye stalk, resembling a microscopic strand of DNA, reminding us that the Daleks are half-organic. The Emperor’s speech about how the Daleks were able to prey on vulnerable humans is vaguely done and yet seems to really expand on the themes of The Long Game. What the Long Game had to say was that the media can have a negative influence on the shape and attitudes of society and did so in a basic and simplistic way. What is wonderful about this scene is that it actually shows metaphorically what can become of such bitter seeds. “The prisoners, the refugees, the dispossessed, they all came to us!” So firstly there is those who are stigmatised and criminalised by the media, then there’s the asylum seekers which most newspapers scream at us to close the doors to. These people become easily drawn into whatever evil force is out there. In this land of fiction, they are turned into Daleks whilst in the real world they can be brainwashed by extremists.

It’s the central idea of how the superpowers can create the various menaces that plague our society and our world, whether they be gangs of thugs on the street or Islamic terrorists. That there may indeed be twisted and evil people out there, but why do they have so many followers? What is it that draws them in and feeds their hate? We live in a world where our social system and our global influence leaves many people suffering want, anger, loss, frustration, deprivation, fear, insecurity, injustice, lack of self-determination, lack of options, ignorance, isolation and loneliness. Here the Daleks are used as a metaphor for the Al Quaeida, with the message that if we don’t reach out to those troubled people in the rest of the world, the Al Quaeida will. Even the use of the controller, plugged into the Dalek’s system since she was five is a classic representation of indoctrination and robbed individuality, and its seen as something of a miracle that she is finally willing or able to defy her masters.

The religious angle of the Daleks is also appropriate, given that the Daleks have been out of the picture for a long time it works somehow in representing them as a ludicrous, undying philosophy for a species that should have given up the fight millennia ago. The Doctor’s line “you hate your own existence” was one I immediately took for how self-hatred often leads to mindless violence and victimisation towards others and the first example that came to my head was homophobia (coupled with the evangelic metaphor), and how perhaps the worst homophobes might be self-hating closet gays. But it is reassuring for the Doctor who has suffered the loss of everything to the Daleks to recognise that the Daleks are in a worse mental state than he could ever be, and he is even able to pity them, and the moment where he has his head against the Tardis door, listening to the Dalek war cries shows how beneath all his confidence and flippancy in the face of the Daleks he’s still traumatised by the news that the Daleks have survived and that the nightmare of his existence has refused to stay dead and has caught up with him once more.

So the action kicks in, and this is where I found myself faulting the episode. The easiest point to lean on about the season finale is that they could do with being three-parters instead of two parters. There’s certainly a lot of cramming going on here and I think a first time viewing suffers for it. Once the Doctor arrives back at the games station and instructs the crew on how to reinforce the defences it is all done without a pause and I found myself missing a lot of the details. There were explanations given for why the Daleks couldn’t just nuke the space station but for those who missed them, a lot of the in-fighting on the boarded station would have seemed pointless and unnecessary, making the Daleks look incompetent. If the episode was longer maybe key points could be repeated. Then of course is the shifting back and forth between the Dalek invasion and the domestic scenes on modern Earth and how I felt for a long time that the Dalek action lacked meat because it was compromised in its screen time and its momentum. I did quite like the suggestion that the two plotlines should have had a continuous run to themselves and filled half the story each rather than cutting back and forth the way it did. Finally and most crucially I felt that the Doctor’s refusal to press the button wasn’t the grand moment it should have been because of that compromised momentum of the coming threat. I couldn’t escape the feeling that since the button was still in front of him, any moment the Doctor could change his mind and press it.

But what am I saying, I talked of how this story improved with repeated viewings and further consideration. On a superficial level repeated viewings indicate the little visual details of the Emperor’s ship and its on board operations and really reinforces the cinematic aspect of this story. There are also of course the many magic moments such as the Doctor’s reaction to realising the Delta Wave will destroy all human life, and how quickly he recaptures his composure to fool Rose- the look on his face when he drops the façade and sends Rose home, and of course the way the Doctor’s hologram turns to face Rose and advises her on the lesson of the New Series “Have a good life! Do that for me Rose, have a fantastic life!”

I really love the whole bleakness of the action, nicely reminiscent of Aliens. The first to die seem to be the most deserving, the guards who bullied Lynda, the shallow contestants like Roderick who didn’t care about the Dalek threat and was only interested in getting his money. But even so it establishes from the get go that everything about this plan is going to go wrong. The guards realise that the bastic-tipped bullets don’t work and the leading guard screams down the radio to Captain Jack “You lied to me! The bullets don’t work”, and this establishes a conflict in which the whimsical promises of the good are broken and where leaps of faith are betrayed. This culminates most poignantly with the death of Lynda, with the Doctor’s promise to protect her betrayed. She was the only one apart from Rose who was able to shed tears at the carnage and the killing, such a warm and compassionate character cast to her death in the cold vacuum of space. But what an extermination! The Daleks were stooping to a real low here in smashing the protective window, and to have the Daleks cry Exterminate in the silent vacuum of space had been a missed opportunity for too long. We can hear it even though we don’t.

I must say that in the story Dalek, it was hard to see the Dalek as being evil in nature. In that story, the Dalek killed only because it had to in order to escape. This to me was the first story to bring the sheer evil and cruelty of the Daleks before a new generation of viewers. Plugging the controller into the computer system when she was only five years old is inhuman enough on a literal level. The Daleks actually have no reason to kill the unarmed contestants or Lynda who is similarly helpless, but they do it anyway out of what appears to be classic Dalek sadism. Similarly the bombing of a pollution scarred Earth is so below the belt it’s like kicking a corpse and it reinforces how bleak this universe is. Interestingly, although the bombing of continents is represented safely on a computer map, we can look back on the season for a more vivid sense of what it must be like for the unseen innocents on Earth. We can simply think back to the German bombing raids shown in The Empty Child and imagine them on a more global scale. Although I’ve suggested that the Dalek threat got a bad start with the Doctor’s open flippancy to them, the rest of the episode does compensate with a sense of sheer nightmarish relentlessness.

Captain Jack is left as the last man standing and I’ve barely mentioned him so far, so I’ve got some catching up to do. This is basically the story that Captain Jack was made into a companion for. In The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, Captain Jack is a strong and important guest character and shows plenty of potential for being a companion, but there again so does Nancy. In Boomtown, between the Doctor’s moral crusade and Rose’s heart to heart with Mickey, poor Jack is rendered utterly superfluous apart from cracking the odd joke and giving Mickey a cool slap on the cheek. This is where Captain Jack is called in to do what he does best. Captain Jack is there to fulfil much the same role as old Jamie as the more macho companion. He’s there to do all the things that the Doctor traditionally won’t do, such as flirting, fighting and using weapons. I always did find Captain Jack a hard character to warm to precisely because he was so shallow, and this story emphasises that aspect to him in a good way, the conflict between his selfishness and his compassion for his friends. He becomes easily lost in the tacky glamour of the Trinny and Suzanna show, and his “Well Ladies, the pleasure was all mine, which is the only thing that matters in the end” is appropriately in character, but his determination to find the Doctor emphasises how he’s becoming more responsive to the hero’s call, and his animated rage over Rose’s ‘death’ is a perfect contrast to the Doctor’s wounded silence and emphasises the sense of love and righteousness within him, which is all the more potent when coming from an initially self-serving character- he’s basically the Sixth Doctor done right.

Likewise in Parting of the Ways he gets to be the hero of the hour, despite the fact that in his own words he was ‘Much better off as a coward!’ His continued faith in the Doctor, even after learning about the consequences of the Delta Wave is another touching moment, and as the lest man standing he gives his all in a defiant showdown of emptying all his cartridges at point blank range and is even flippant in the face of extermination. What a guy! Although he is brought back from the dead, there is still something sad about his fate, abandoned on a deserted spaceship in orbit of a dead world. For a man who loved people and was able to make people love him it seems so wrong that he should have such a lonely fate.

But whilst all this is going on, Rose is back on Earth, and I’d say that Billie Piper gives the performance of the season here. I don’t know what planet Ron Mallett is on if he thinks that Billie can’t act. The key moments are her reaction to the Doctor’s hologram message, and in the moment where she becomes the ‘bad wolf’ she shows her capacity for competently playing a different character (something that New Earth capitalised on well) but more than that I love the way that she is consciously fumbling for the words in that café scene where she’s trying to explain what the Doctor meant to her. “You make a stand! You say ‘no!’” I’d say its my favourite Rose scene of them all for that reason, and also because of what is being said.

What this season has done wonderfully well is to tie together the past, present and future of Earth society. That is why the Earthbound aspect of the season has worked. The End of the World saw the Doctor take Rose to a future that was ruled by class and money, and at the end of the story he took her back to modern London, and the sight of businessmen in suits walking the same street as Big Issue sellers were a stark reminder that some things in our society never change. The angle of media propaganda in the fourth human empire in The Long Game could be a believable progression of the same media depicted in Aliens of London/World War III.

This episode shows the present and future side by side in linear progression and Rose doesn’t let us forget that the world today will shape the nightmarish future that we have seen. That today’s Reality TV can be used for evil and will become tomorrow’s charnel house, that the bitter seeds of the media will allow the Daleks to grow, and the human blindspots that the Slitheen exploited in Downing Street will still be there millennia later and will enable the Daleks to sneak into Earth’s back door. And fundamentally what Rose’s outburst is saying is that if there’s one thing that will lead the human race to ruin, it is the apathy of the common people. We have actually become a quite docile and pacified populace, and activism is something we no longer have our hearts in, and this scene really sums that up, that cry for action falling on deaf ears because everyone just wants to keep their heads down and stick at their job and forget the bad times and indignities as quickly as possible.

Despite what I said before about how the modern Earth scenes get in the way of the Dalek action, on repeated viewings they work well. Visually they are a wonderful contrast, but also they each play their part in tying up the season so far. There have been many goodbyes shared between Rose and her family, Jackie and Mickey. Too damn many if you ask me, because it made me want to shout at the screen, stop saying goodbye and go already! I think that for the first season this managed to work. The ending of World War III, where Jackie counts for ten seconds and the Tardis doesn’t come back as promised was wonderfully done, and its implications were so sinister that in the following episode, Dalek we actually believe the moment where t Rose is allegedly killed by the Dalek as if it answers our question of why the Tardis couldn’t return Rose home after those ‘ten seconds’.

I think that essentially the domestics of Boomtown work well as a companion and a precedent to this story. In that story Rose was clearly drawn back to her old life when Mickey reminded her of what she’d left behind and the commitments she’d broken without thinking about it. She clearly cared about Mickey and about the small things on Earth and wasn’t yet fully ingrained in the life in the Tardis. This story shows a Rose who finally cares about nothing on Earth and just wants to get back to the Doctor and back to the life of really making a difference. She works to get the Tardis working in a mad panic, tearing herself once more from her family without saying goodbye. She says herself that her attachment to Mickey is behind her now. She’s matured.

There are other loose ends to tie up, such as the obligatory revisiting of the events of Father’s Day. It’s a wrap up episode and that’s why I was initially apprehensive about where its momentum was going, backwards or forwards? For a while I thought of it as a series of vignettes rather than a full package, but in repeated viewings it becomes a nicely homogenous struggle to save the day. It’s kind of like how I initially thought The Descent was a clever but one-trick viewing, much like Saw, until I watched it again and felt the poignant weight of its tragedy. Then there is the Bad Wolf mystery, which was the main tie between all the season’s stories as well as all the book and comic spin off material. This was something that kept even the cynical fans on their toes, wondering if this nicely subversive device would finally deliver something mind blowing to the masses that had been sucked into a disarmingly low-brow series of stories. Everyone had their theories, I personally liked the race memory idea which I thought would be nicely reminiscent of The Silurians, and I expected the season finale to be set on pre-historic Earth. But the final pay-off of Rose’s transformation into the Bad Wolf where she is able to bring about a deux et machina solution with the wave of her magic wand is a much controversial moment and I’ll be honest, a part of me still feels that it is too soft given how unremittingly gritty the story has been so far.

But before we get to that it is worth bearing in mind the Doctor’s plan to press the Delta Wave. As I said the power of the scene didn’t hit me until a few months after.

Many have said that the scene was a revisit of the classic ‘do I have the right?’ scene in Genesis of the Daleks. I’d say that it is far more than that. The approach to the moral dilemma is very similar though. Genesis of the Daleks spends its entire story length making us really fear the Daleks as an evil and relentless force, from the Time Lord’s prediction of the Daleks destroying all life in the universe one day, through the first activation of a Dalek whereupon its first instinct is to kill, to the invasion of the Thal city and the massacres. We want the Doctor to destroy the Daleks and we don’t doubt that he will, so it comes as quite a shock and a turnaround that in the last episode he refuses to do it. What’s more he asks us to consider the ferocious conflict between the Thals and the Kaleds as a microcosm for a conflicted universe and invites us to consider the Daleks as the most effective peacemaker at providing a mutual threat so that warring races might put aside their differences. It is wonderfully done and I feel that too many fans take that scene out of the context of the story it is in. It even subtly laments the fact that both Gharman and Bettan’s forces could have been united against the Daleks too, and if they weren’t on enemy lines they could have succeeded and Gharman’s men wouldn’t have all died. The ‘even evil has its place in the universe’ was in itself a groundbreakingly mature concept for the series at that point in its run.

Many have said that the Dalek saga from that point on was about going back to the Doctor’s struggle with his conscience and his question to himself ‘do I have the right’. In Destiny of the Daleks, Resurrection, and Revelation he’s usually able to do nothing and leave it to the Movellans and the mercenaries to decimate the Daleks for him, but in his hesitant attempts to kill Davros in Destiny and Resurrection, his squeamishness towards killing is exposed. In Resurrection, the Doctor communicated it with long speeches, in Destiny the Doctor communicated it with a look. Finally in Remembrance of the Daleks, the Doctor has found his method. He can destroy his enemies but only if his enemy presses the switch themselves. When the Doctor taunted Davros to press the Omega device, he was not merely being devious, but he was reassuring himself one last time that he was doing the right thing because Davros would never change. That scene also nicely revisits Davros’ ‘Yes I would do it’ moment in how the Doctor knows Davros well enough now to press his buttons.

But as I said, the Doctor’s moral dilemma here is something more fresh and modern and relevant to the world we live in. It is not so much a question of whether he can destroy the Dalek race in one blow, because by this point after the destruction of Gallifrey, the Doctor’s ‘do I have the right?’ line of thought has given way to ‘if only I had done it’. If the story hung on the Doctor’s mercy towards the Daleks then the fact that Rose annihilates them all wouldn’t be the cause for celebration that it becomes. The moral question comes from the fate of the surviving humans on Earth. When we first learn that the Delta Wave will destroy the humans on Earth too, we are reminded by the Doctor that those humans are a lost cause and always were from the moment the Daleks arrived. Those humans will be a tragic sacrifice but a necessary one.

There is a trend in modern science fiction for slightly shady heroes who are able to win through with morally questionable tactics. We see it in Deep Space Nine, Babylon Five and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it is regarded as something challenging and realistic. Some Doctor Who fans can proudly declare that this all started with Doctor Who, particularly in stories like Power of the Daleks and The Silurians where the ‘good guys’ win through pre-emptive strikes, duplicitous tactics and indiscriminant annihilation. I think my favourite 'dangerous hero' moment of the old series was the first scene with the wheelchair-bound Dortmum and ends with him on guard duty, pulling a knife and ready to stab the first Roboman who comes near him. The Doctor himself was about to crack a wounded caveman’s skull with a rock in his first story and towards the end of his years he was engineering the destruction of planets.

I think people were looking forward to this coming to the fore again with the Doctor willing to engineer total annihilation. How cool it would be for the Doctor to destroy himself and take all the Daleks with him in one brave last stand. It’s about sacrifice and moral courage and it’s romantic and we are behind it a hundred percent. It therefore comes as quite a surprise that ultimately the Doctor can’t press the switch, even when he’s backed into a corner and left with nothing to lose somehow his humanity means more to him. Remember that in Father's Day and The Doctor Dances the Doctor was all about saving as many people as he can and reminding people that they're all important.

Consider what the Doctor was about to do and consider the world we live in today. The Doctor was about to kill the innocents on Earth, the very people he was meant to be protecting from the Daleks. He was going to kill the innocents to get at the guilty, and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing in the War on Terror. Even the image of future Earth as a poisoned and crippled planet ties in with how we see the middle east as a no man’s land, as though it makes it easier to live with decimating a country that’s already on its last legs. We’ve been bombing civilians to get at criminals and many people think that is necessary and right. Pretentious, melodramatic it may be but some young men can't feel special about themselves unless they're cramming as much weight into their words as they can. The fact is we’ve always been able to wax poetical about collateral, about accidental deaths and putting innocents to sacrifice for a ‘greater good’ and that is the problem, we can actually make ourselves feel good about it and it’s nothing to feel good about at all.

Although the Daleks would seem distinctly autonomous, at their best the Daleks have been completely savage. In stories like Power of the Daleks and Genesis of the Daleks they are motivated entirely by hatred and sadism, and I feel this story revisits that in a manner appropriate to modern times, or at least the way we perceive modern times in the days of happy slappers and suicide bombers. There is a sense that although we’ve never been strangers to violence, that in the modern world violence is no longer something that is being contained. That the perpetrators of violence no longer seem to adhere to any kind of codes of morality, and the police and military seem incompetent at neutralising the menace, and as mentioned above we as a people are no longer as vigilant, stern or resilient as we once were. The Ninth Doctor seems to represent how the Doctor has to adapt to a more dangerous and predatory world. He has to be more macho and shrewd, tough like leather and always on the defence. He’s not the kind of Doctor that chavs on the street could have a go at, Peter Davison and Patrick Troughton might be a different story. So might William Hartnel in-fact. Within that macho view and insecurity, the yearning to annihilate the savage elements and damn the innocents caught in the crossfire is at its most susceptible to propaganda and the rallying call. Despite the progress of left wing thought there’s still a lot of young men joining the army these days, and it’s largely down to insecurity.

That’s why the Doctor’s presence as the last positive male role model we have left on TV is so crucial, his masculinity is key. That’s why his refusal to press the button is so beautifully done. It’s subversively done but when you get to its full meaning, it becomes a slap in the face. The Doctor is saying ‘no!’ The Doctor is not going to kill innocents even if they are a lost cause. He’s going to give them a chance, to let them live to the last moment, and that’s centrally what his plan was. To stall the Daleks till the last moment, but the Daleks got in early and there was still some life left on Earth. It is wonderful to see this macho Doctor step down from his macho stance and admit to being a coward whilst saying it with dignity because he did it out of compassion and love. And again this is important in a story about the expectations of Reality TV and how Reality TV celebrates and promotes bitchiness and ruthlessness and mocks and ejects the good and the regular. Here we have the Doctor with all eyes on him, with the humans fighting for him, the Daleks watching him and the viewers at home watching him, and yet he is still proud of his compassion and surprises us all with his individuality.

That is why the deux et machina ending is important because it emphasises the theme of finding another way. The Daleks are despatched with ease with no consequences or cost to the innocent because the Doctor wouldn’t settle for anything else- it’s about morality and if we look upon the deux et machina ending in its literal translation as ‘God from the machine’, then the episode works because it is centrally about an act of faith. It’s about moral decisions and about a good man’s soul in a cynical world. It’s about the Doctor’s faith in morality whilst evil reigns, Rose’s faith in the Doctor whilst apathy and the mundane reigns. That’s why it’s a beautiful story and why it stayed with me long after it was broadcast, and I think it stayed with a lot of the new viewers of the series too and I must say I’m proud of that. The power of this story will probably stay with them, just like Genesis of the Daleks stayed with me when I first saw it at eleven, like The Dalek Invasion of Earth stayed with me when I was seventeen, like Inferno stayed with me when I was eighteen.

But that’s not entirely the end because it is time for the Doctor to regenerate. The deux et machina ending has actually come at a price after all for the Doctor must sacrifice one of his lives in order to save Rose, and so he regenerates. I did feel that the regeneration scene was also rushed and was a victim of time constraints, but like everything else that makes up the warts and all of this story I’ve grown to love, my opinion has changed. It is appropriate that the Doctor’s regeneration should be so sudden because it wrenches him from us and leaves us with many questions about what was a guarded character who we never fully got a chance to know, but we loved him because he so earnestly wanted to be loved, and the fact that he was so off-beat and didn’t quite master a natural charisma made him seem that more real and that more special for giving it his all anyway, and so it conveys mystery and poignancy and a sense of a life lived too fast. It’s beautifully done.

The new series might have failed miserably. People might not have been interested, it might have got poor ratings and in which case this could have been the last TV episode of Doctor Who. But if it had, what a great last episode it could have been. A cinematic battle against the Daleks, some in-jokes at fandom (I never really got the ‘blasphemy’ and ‘half human’ gag until it was pointed out to me), the Daleks vanquished once and for all, the companion trying to get the Tardis working, representing the fan in all of us desperately trying to bring the spirit of the Doctor back to life, just as much as the controller bringing the Doctor to the gamestation in an act of faith to a legend, and best of all is the magic moment where the Doctor is finally surrounded by Daleks but he closes his eyes and embraces his fate “Perhaps it’s time!”. I must say I love the music in that scene too, it’s like a burst of frefreshing rainfall and it just seems to sum up the weight of the modern electronic and plugged in world where emotions are live wired, where life is fast-paced and fragile.

The final season of Sylvester McCoy might have given Doctor Who a great finish, and one that would resound for years to come with ever potent themes, but it was never able to do something this cinematic and epic. Something that lived up to the Dalek space battles of the TV Century 21 comics. This would have been Doctor Who coming back just once to say something about our world today that everyone needs to hear. I like to think that those moments were tailor made to give something lasting to the fans, should this be the end of the series. It’s kind of like how The War Games was written with the possibility in mind that Doctor Who might not get another season after this. If so the final conclusion where the Doctor is exhiled to 20th century Earth and forced to change his appearance but we don’t get to see his new face would have been something special for the young fans. A bit of food for their imagination, because they could wonder if that meant that the Doctor was now out there among us and could be anyone. What if the Doctor was some stranger on the bus? What if that tramp on the street was the very man who’d saved the Earth dozens of times.

But if it did continue then it left us hungry for more and as I said before, it made me believe for a while that Russell T. Davis was a genius. Having said all that needed to be said between Rose and her family, it seemed like we could put that domestic side to rest and say goodbye to the Powell estate. The Earthbound nature of the series had paid off and now we could go to virgin territories of the outer universe. The childish slapstick hi-jinks of Aliens of London had given way to something far more mature and dark and potent and suggested that things could only get better.

For the record they didn’t quite.

I finally have decided to stop watching the New Series because I don’t think its going in the right direction. I don’t like what its becoming and I expect more of the redundant same old to come next year. But still I like to look back on this story and remember a time last year when it seemed like the New Doctor Who could change the face of Television and change the way people look at the world. To remember a time when I believed that Russell T. Davies was a genius.

Originally posted by transvamp on Septemebr 25th2006 at 6:20pm.

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