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Meet the eponymous young lady with a lovely boyfriend and a trashy mum and a job at the department store, and see her get attacked by mannequins, quite creepy, and then she is saved by a mysterious man named The Doctor. He is very, very awesome. Her boyfriend is understanding of the fact that she immediately goes all Orlando Bloom about the mysterious Doctor, and even accompanies her to the home of another dude who is also obsessed with the Doctor, but is repaid by the above-and-beyond boyfriend behavior when he is eaten by a large trash bin. This kind of Mickey treatment will, I fear, be ongoing. Mickey comes back as a freaky rubber dude, but the Doctor figures it out and takes Rose and the parts of rubber Mickey onto his tesseract of a time machine, called the TARDIS. Doctor and Rose get super-British on each other, and he explains that all plastic on earth is now evil, and that he is going to fight it with "anti-plastic." Luckily, he is super-cute, or else this kind of talk would get him a kick in the nuts. Rose and the Doctor go have a meeting with a big pit of living plastic, and Mickey's there, and the plastic talks, and it's gross and kind of silly, but you start to figure out how much the Doctor loves humanity, which is: bunches, and that's the thing that powers the entire show. Things go crazy, and the Doctor gets snagged and the plastic invasion begins and all the mannequins freak out on you and it is creepy as shit. Rose saves her Mom, her boyfriend, her Doctor, and humanity by going all Indiana Chav on the evil plastic, causing the mannequins to do the Safety Dance, and everything blows up, for some reason. Problem solved, the Doctor asks Rose to come with him, skiving off life and boyfriend and mum and having fun and time traveling and screwing around. She says no, then yes, and runs onto TARDIS, and it's a very cool start. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
We start with the credits, which is a good place to start with an iconic, cult show like this one. Pretty exciting, very geeky, very sci-fi. The TARDIS police box whirls through the time vortex and stops in space, then goes back in, and Christopher Eccleston's and Billie Piper's names whirl up and out. You also get the episode title and the writer/showrunner, Russell T. Davies, who wrote the entire first season, I believe. Big Doctor Who fan from way back. I'm a fan from several months ago. I dimly remember seeing some of the Tom Baker and Peter Davison ones on PBS, and I've got a copy of "Enlightenment," but as for this series, I've seen it in a very peculiar order, which seems to have screwed up every possible response I have. I saw "The Christmas Invasion" first thing, so I've got my Ninth and Tenth response backwards, and then I watched "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" after that, so I've got all the Captain Jack stuff happening, and then I saw part of a couple others. None of this aliens and farting aliens and head-in-a-box aliens crap, to start with, so I had no immunity watching tonight's episodes. This was New Year's Eve, 2006, and it went late into the night. I was impressed. What those things did not really do was prepare me for the second episode, which I hated violently the first time I saw it, but it turns out on second viewing I actually might like more than this one. So that's funny. Word to the wise: think twice before having an opinion about this show on the internet.
The camera pans from the moon, over to Earth, and zooms down into the atmosphere, into the UK and then London and then into Rose Tyler's alarm clock, which reads 7:30. Wacky sci-fi music that is rollicking and suits the quick and crazy cuts starts as Rose smacks the clock. She jumps out of bed, grabs her bag, kisses her mother, grabs her keys, and leaves. The first thing Rose ever says is "Goodbye." She says it a lot. This time it's to her mum, Jackie, who is blonde and ragged and nattering and funny. A housecoat kind of mom, but with the urban tracksuit thing happening, too.
The music continues to go crazy as Rose runs down the stairs on the outside wall of her block of apartments. Then London is crazy and bustling, and Rose gets off a bus, and we pan past a bunch of mannequins, and Rose works at Henrik's, and finds it boring. Maybe it would be more fun if they just called it "Harrod's," but I think on British TV that would not be allowed. Man, can you imagine if there were no product placement on American TV? Willow would have been doing her shit on like a Smac and everybody would be listening to iGrods. Every time Rose is in there, actually working in the shop, the music goes to a tinny, quiet radio sound, and when she's gone, it comes back real again. Very effective. Davies said, "The most important thing about Rose is that she works in a shop," which I love, because there's a way in which that's true, even though in the whole series she actually works in a shop for about ten seconds total. She meets her boyfriend Mickey for lunch, they laugh and have such fun, they tease each other, they make out, he does a little dance, it's all still quite frenetic and British, they get up to leave, and Rose says again, this time to Mickey: "Goodbye."
The music gets depressing again and we get a million cuts of Rose back at work, bored, no A-levels, no future; London continues to be very exciting outside as the day passes -- this crazy-paced, "show you all of it so we can just get on with it" thing is so, so British, I love it -- and finally, Rose is just about to leave with some other girls when a security guard stops her. He hands her a package with a sturdy "Oi!" Rose is bummed and takes it downstairs on an elevator, which for some reason we look at from several angles on the outside while she makes bored faces inside. Her bored faces are like yours, only supernaturally beautiful. Once she meets the Doctor, the title for Prettiest Thing goes into sharp contention, so enjoy it while you can.
Down in the basement, Rose goes looking for "Wilson," because she needs to give him the lottery money from the security guard. Apparently this is something that is common in the UK -- and maybe here, too, for all I know -- where everybody in a group puts their money together to pool their chances ["it definitely happened at the last office I worked in" -- Wing Chun], and so Wilson is going to be the one to actually buy the batch of tickets. It's the kind of thing that doesn't glitch you out when you're watching, but I overthought when it was time to write, and I decided it was very, very confusing. Which of course it really isn't. Even Jackie Tyler understands it, Jacob. Clearly the problem is yours.
Rose knocks on a door that reads "H.P. Wilson C.E.O.," which is funny because we don't normally see "C.E.O." offices in the basement, but the gigantic electric warning sign below it would seem to suggest that "C.E.O." means something different here. He's the Chief Electrician. Rose knocks on the door and, getting no answer, starts to get really irritated. There's a noise further down the corridor, and she calls out, thinking it's Wilson. There are creepy swooshing sounds and almost-words on the soundtrack. Rose walks into a room full of shop dummies, most of them half-dressed at best, and continues to look for Wilson. This would be your first mistake. If I encounter a creepy room full of mannequins and it's after about 3 in the afternoon, I'm gonna bounce. I don't need that shit in my life. The credits of Nip/Tuck are enough to weird me out, at this point. Rose turns on the lights and gets deeper in, and the fire door slams closed behind her. She runs back and shakes the door. In the shadows, there is the sound of Jawas. She comes back down into the room, looking for the culprits, and asks if there's someone in there "muckin' about." There's a creaking behind her, and a dummy slowly moves its head. She turns around just in time to see a dummy in slacks and an open shirt step out and move toward her, walking robotically. It's mega-creepy. Worried and a little nervous, Rose fake-laughs, but two more dummies step out behind the first. "Right, I've got the joke!" says Rose. "Whose idea was this? Was it Derek's?" I would like to meet this Derek. He seems to be creatively awful, and I can respect that. More and more of the male dummies step out, alive, walking stiffly toward Rose. The female ones just stand there, glamorously bald. Backing up, Rose trips, and ends up against a wall. One dummy lifts its arm to strike her, and she screws up her face to get ready. I'd be angry, because Rose already hates the job, and thus the mannequins, you know? How unfair.
Rose feels a hand on hers, and she snaps her eyes open and sees a goofy man. "Run," he tells her. He jerks her sideways, and the dummy's hand hits a pipe, releasing steam. Rose and the guy run, and the dummies, in their various half-suits of clothes, stumble after. Some of the extras are more intense and into this than others, and their walking is quite varied. A dummy behind a grate woggles its arms at Rose and her companion through the bars as they pass, ridiculously but also scarily. The Doctor pulls Rose into an elevator, and the doors close on one of the dummies' arms. The Doctor pulls once, twice, several times, and it finally comes off in his hands, and the doors close. Rose is shocked, somehow, by the arm-pulling-off. The Doctor tosses it to her with a grin, pointing out that it's just plastic. She's still not convinced about all this: "Nice trick! Who were they then, students?" The Doctor cocks his head at her and asks why that would be, and she responds using Occam's Razor: "To get that many people dressed up and being silly, they've gotta be students." Or, you know, Groundlings. To watch movies and TV, there's not actually a difference between Groundlings and British students anyway. Have you seen Hex? Even the dead students are wisenheimers. If I can get through that show with my adoration intact, I can handle anything this show throws at me. The Doctor grins and congratulates Rose on her logic skills, but she's wrong. Rose: "Whoever they are, when Wilson finds them, he's gonna call the police." But Wilson's dead. Poor Wilson. Rose fails to see the humor in the joke, if electricians die as a result. The Doctor moves her out of the way and sonic screwdrivers the lift so the guys can't follow.
Rose indicates that she would like to get off the ride, so the Doctor wanders away, but she starts with the questions and follows: "Who are you, then? Who's that lot down there?" He explains that they are "living plastic creatures," like the Black Eyed Peas, who are being "controlled by a relay device," also like the Black Eyed Peas. The Doctor holds up some kind of gadget and explains that the relay system on the roof is no match for it. He opens a fire door for Rose, and explains that he's going upstairs to blow the mannequins up, and that he "might well die in the process," but that -- given that Rose has been bitching the entire fucking time -- she should go on home and have some "lovely beans on toast." Which is gross, but if I start bitching about British food I'll never stop, and there's no food grosser than Arby's in this world, so it would be rather provincial of me to even start. "Don't tell anyone about this, because if you do, you'll get them killed," says the Doctor, and shuts the door. I don't know why that's necessarily true, but helps in the paranoia case Rose and Clive will be building later, and I have to agree that hands-off is probably the best policy when it comes to creepy killer mannequins. As long as there's no Meshach Taylor to come mincing in, I think we'll be okay. Rose looks at the door where the Doctor just vanished, bemused, and he opens it again: "I'm the Doctor, by the way. What's your name?" She tells him, and in his best and sexiest swashbuckling tone, he says, "Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!" He slams the door.
God forbid we should get all heavy right away, but let's review the rules of the quest. If you plan on going on an epic quest, there are some things to look out for. The first one is a crazy person with magic powers, who appears out of nowhere and seems to be a nutter. He'll offer you a few chances to come along, and being a normal sort of girl, you'll tell him politely to fuck off every time but the last. The Refusal of the Call. But as these things go, he'll probably keep turning up, and weirder and weirder shit will happen, until you have to, by sheer force of inertia, play along -- and then you can't look back, because that's how they always get you. The whole Tim Hunter thing: "You have a choice! Just kidding, we slipped the red pill into your Guinness hours ago." Well. Rose seems like she would drink, like, Fresca. Her mom would drink Tab. Mickey would drink Red Bull. The Doctor would drink...something weird. Blue margaritas like yours truly, or some strange dessert wine from the 18th century. With a beer chaser. I don't know what Captain Jack drinks, but I bet it's crazy hot.
Rose runs outside the building, totally freaked and getting it together as quickly as she can. There is much zooming past of vehicles and a really jarring feeling that nobody on the outside knows how weird things just got. A taxi almost runs Rose over. She reaches the other side of the street and looks up just in time to see the top of the building explode. She runs home, past a bright blue police box. I guess technically she didn't say "goodbye" to her stupid job, but that's somewhat implied by the way it went all explody. She doesn't have a whole lot of responsibilities left.
Back at home, the reporter on News 24 is talking about how all central London is closed off for investigations, and the dummy's arm is lying on a chair. Jackie Tyler, Rose's very tacky mum, walks in wearing a track suit and yakking on the phone about Rose's exciting time, which has now become hers: "Honestly, it's aged her. Skin like an old Bible. Walking in now you'd think I was her daughter!" Not true. Jackie looks like Baby Spice's daughter, maybe, but not Rose's. Props to whoever coined "skin like an old Bible," though. That shit is hardcore. Jackie hands Rose some tea and welcomes Rose's boyfriend Mickey, who immediately starts whining: "I've been phoning your mobile! You could've been dead! It's on the news and everything! I can't believe that your shop went up!" He drops to the floor and snivels.
The thing here is twofold, the first being that the whole episode is kind of about how Rose's life is pretty nice -- nice mum, cute boyfriend -- but not so nice that she wouldn't drop it all and run off with the Doctor eventually. The appeal of the show when I was a kid was just that: "Hey, would you like to just fuck off and time-travel and have fun adventures? Isn't that better than exams?" It's not some kind of Anne McCaffrey deal -- or wait, who was the magical horsies lady? Mercedes something? It's been a long time -- where the whole world is crushing in and you must be rescued from your terrible fate; just more that living in the projects and having a stupid mall job is kind of boring, and doesn't involve living up to your potential or really using your gymnastics skills to any great effect. The second thing about Mickey is that he doesn't actually suck the whole time, but between being a thing you wouldn't feel too bad about leaving behind, and his character not yet having an arc, he's just kind of boring and irritating here. But he gets to be pretty cool, and the ways he negotiates Rose's changing circumstances make him pretty interesting and likable. However, in this episode? SHUT UP, MICKEY.
So anyway, Mickey's all over Rose with the OMG, and she just wants to forget that the whole thing happened, because it was scary and a mite ridiculous, and now she's out a job, which is depressing, and she's sick of explaining what happened. Especially considering that she doesn't know what happened exactly, because it was clearly not what actually happened, and because when the real-world interesting part -- the explosion -- happened, she was standing on the corner looking all goggly.
Jackie now has "Debbie" on the line, a friend who knows somebody from the Mirror who will give her five hundred pounds for an interview. Since she can't give an interview about living plastic and the Doctor, and because she's already sick to death of talking about it, because Jackie's tough to take -- imagine what it was like the first time Rose liked a boy, or got her period, or whatever -- Rose smiles brightly and begs her mum for the phone, and then promptly hangs it up. It's hilarious. Jackie natters on about how Rose's job is "kaput" and she's "not bailing [Rose] out," which is kind of harsh. I guess that's more of that British interfamily rudeness I've been hearing so much about. It's quite alien, speaking as an American, when you see people who don't call their parents "Sir" or "Ma'am," or stand and curtsy and/or bow whenever they enter a room, like we do here in the States. Also, after a certain age they call their teachers by their first names, instead of the more American Magister. It's a world gone fucking mad. It's anarchy, in the UK family. I've seen At Home With The Braithwaites and I know where that leads: lesbianism and getting off with total hotties. (And it occurs to me for the first time that apparently the Lottery is all they think about in Britain because their TV is: 90% National Lottery, 9% Bollinger, 1% hermaphrodite footballers' babies.) Somebody else calls immediately, and irritating Jackie answers the phone before the other person starts talking: "Beth! She's alive!" and wanders out again. Jackie goes on and on about how Rose has money coming to her, compensation for the nothing that actually happened. By the end of the series, I really like Jackie, but again: just say goodbye and get a move on already. There's living plastic to be dealt with.
Mickey abruptly segues to how tea is not the beverage Rose most needs, having been through the shock of having stood several hundred feet from an explosion she knew was coming. She needs a drink, and they should go down to the pub and get a drink, Mickey's treat. Which is a valid response. If I saw a bombing, I would think about having a drink first thing -- and Mickey doesn't even know about the Gallifreyan hottie that insinuated himself into the situation, nor the creepy dummies. That's worth at least two more drinks right there. Rose smiles, though, because she knows that this version of Mickey sucks: "Is there a match on?" He protests too much and she finally gets him to admit it, and she just tells him to head out and watch the game, so that she can chill out. She asks him to get rid of the arm on his way. They kiss and flirt and she trips him and he pushes her onto the couch and it's actually very cute. You buy them. Rose says "goodbye" again to Mickey, who pretends to strangle himself with the plastic arm, and he leaves. I hope Mickey doesn't somehow die or otherwise get involved with the living plastic! Rose shakes her head fondly and turns back to the news. The fire, it turns out, quickly ruined the entire building. A lot of times, with a classic story like this, it's your actual house that goes up in flames. Thanks for small favors it was just a stupid empty Harrod's. Outside, Mickey tosses the arm into a bin as he walks past it. It scuttles about.
The camera zooms down into the creepy arm-filled darkness, and we once again end up on Rose's workaday clock's red 7:30. That is a time in the morning that sucks even if your job didn't get blown up. She slaps the clock again, and Jackie's voice rises over the TV in the background: "There's no point in getting up, sweetheart. You've got no job to go to." That's the kind of mom that is a whole lot of fun until you end up in drug treatment with a strange pregnancy. Or, I guess, running out on your life for a good long while with strange magical aliens. Rose flops back onto her pillow and thinks about how there's nothing worse than looking for a job, especially when your mom and boyfriend are kind of lame and you have no discernible skills or future.
Later, Rose is full-on playing with an apple while her mom bugs her about the job situation. Tasty. Jackie mentions the possibility of working at Finch's, the local butcher, and Rose is not feeling that. Jackie says something interesting about how Henrik's was giving Rose "airs and graces," which I guess helps to explain why the Cockney lines and "fink"s and "fing"s sound so weird coming out of Billie Piper's mouth. There are times when it's like that Different World episode where the girl kept enunciating all the Aretha songs. Jackie: "And I'm not joking about getting compensation -- you've had genuine shock and trauma! Arianna got two thousand quid off the council just because the old man behind the desk said she looked Greek!" Rose is like, "Huh?" Jackie admits that Arianna actually is Greek, but that's not the point. There's a rattling sound in the foyer, and Rose yells at her mom that she was supposed to nail down the cat flap so that "strays" wouldn't come in. She has no idea how "stray" the strays are about to get.
Frustrated by her mum's continuing flakiness, Rose calls her a liar, even as Jackie protests that she actually did it, weeks ago. Rose investigates, and finds the screws all over the floor. Instead of apologizing for calling her mom a lazy liar, Rose stares and gapes like a codfish. The flap moves around really aggressively, and she jumps back, and then pokes it open really delicately, only to see the face of the best stray ever staring back at her. "What're you doing here?" asks the Doctor, once she gets her door open. She explains that she lives in the apartment, and even though it's a pretty awesome apartment, he asks why the hell she would do that. Good question. "I'm only at home because someone blew up my job!" she says, adorably, and the Doctor pulls out his sonic screwdriver and checks her out, because he's looking for living plastic. He knocks her on the forehead, confirms that she's a "bonehead," and takes off with an offhand smile. She pulls him inside with a quickness and shuts the door behind him.
Jackie calls out from her bedroom as Rose marches the Doctor toward the living room, but Rose tells her that he's there for the inquiry. "She deserves compensation," yawps the unstoppably pragmatic, grasping Jackie, and the Doctor ducks his head in, nodding. "Ho! We're talking millions!" He leans against the doorframe, waiting for Rose to come back and get him, and Jackie takes a good hard look at him. She finally stands up and gets all seductive: "I'm in my dressing gown." He agrees. "There's a strange man in my bedroom." He agrees with that too, and somehow keeps from adding that she has no idea. "Well," she vamps, "anything could happen." With this, the Doctor does not agree, and promptly wanders away. Jackie pulls an awesome face but stays put. The Doctor is about to be kind of insufferably whimsical, so I'm glad we don't have to deal with Jackie on top of it.
In the sitting room, Rose waves off the mess and asks the Doctor if he'd like some coffee. Because what the Doctor needs is some caffeine. His ability to concentrate being so terribly stolid and helpful already. Rose starts making coffee, and the Doctor begins to flit around the room, picking things up and remarking upon them in a very ADD way. This scene feels very Doctor Who to me, for some reason, but not exactly the kind that I like. I'm sure it's uproarious for some, but that kind of thing just gets on my nerves. Like, the Doctor wanders about, picking things up and remarking upon them and putting them down and picking up other stuff and saying weird non sequiturs and not taking part in the conversation and whatever. Rose's main point is that they should go to the police, because it was clearly some kind of joke that went wrong, even though the Doctor fully said, to her face: "I am going to go blow some shit up." Rose seems to think it should be okay, even though the police found Wilson's dead body. During this, the Doctor says that the relationship between two celebrities in a gossip magazine is doomed, because the boy is gay and the girl is an alien, and I swear I can think of so many couples on both sides of the Pond about whom this is actually true that I have no idea who is meant. Then he flips through the pages of a book and pronounces the ending "sad," and then goes through Rose's mail. When she mentions Wilson's death, he's looking at himself in the mirror, checking out his new body, and so when he says it "could've been worse," Rose assumes that he means more people could have died besides Wilson, but he calls her attention to his ears. Still with the ADD but now letting us know that this body is somewhat new. When a Time Lord (just a race, not a job or title) gets properly traumatized, he regenerates into a new actor -- we're given to understand by this that the Doctor has recently regenerated. "All the same, he was nice," says Rose of Wilson. "Nice bloke." I like the attention paid, here and in the episode, to the Doctor's very shifty approaches to things. Sometimes you feel like he might cry about a person, other times he's like, "Check out my ears!" Keeps you on your toes. Now, though, he just shuffles a pack of cards and talks nonsense, while Rose asks that they get their stories straight about what happened. It's good to have a Plan B if your Plan A involves living plastic mannequins. The Doctor shoots the cards all over the place, accidentally, and Rose asks him to explain everything from the beginning. I hope she can scrounge some Ritalin, or else this is going to take for fucking ever.
The Doctor hears a scuffling noise and asks whether Rose has a cat, and then starts investigating all the nooks and crannies. The dummy's arm, which has now appeared in the apartment on its own for at least the second time, jumps out from behind the couch and grabs the Doctor by the throat. Any other show, that's when I turn it off. I get that it's silly and wacky and so very in the spirit of the show, historically, but (a) that's not funny to me, and (b) it's a mannequin arm that is attacking a grown man. Okay, actually thinking about how these are actors, pretending to be attacked by a mannequin hand, which is of course not alive, because real life is not awesome in that particular way -- that's funny. Billie Piper, star of stage and screen, and Christopher Eccleston, Shakespearean film star...attacking themselves with a crappy old mannequin hand, and having a ball doing it, is rather lovable. Maybe that's the only reason it's funny, and I was just slow to get it? I enjoy this scene more if I pretend I was there. Or, like, you're an actor, and you're doing your lines, and you're thinking about how you're going to block out and choreograph the battle with the arm, and like, what is the motivation of the disembodied arm. That's hilarious. Anyway, Rose brings in the coffee while the Doctor's fighting the arm, and doesn't really twig to it, although she does notice that apparently Mickey never threw it out, and asks the Doctor's name, and continues to be all chatty until the Doctor gets the hand off his throat and tosses it,whereupon it changes course in midair and gets Rose by the face. It's actually kind of scary, especially when they cut to Jackie in her bedroom, drying her hair and not hearing the violence. The Doctor and Rose crash through the coffee table, onto the floor, and the Doctor finally gets the hand off Rose's face. A few bleeps of the sonic screwdriver, and the arm -- which he's been shaking with his other actorly hand -- stops shaking. He tosses it to her calmly -- "It's all right, see?" -- and she stares. "Harmless!" he says brightly, and she smacks him with it.
Rose and the Doctor take off running down the stairs outside her flat, Rose chasing him about how he can't "just go swanning off" after the attack of the arm. He disagrees and continues on his way, and congratulates her on observing how the arm was moving and attacking. "You can't just walk away, that's not fair!" Rose insists. "You've got to tell me what's going on!" He blows her off and they head down the street. She threatens that she'll go to the police, reminding the Doctor that people, per him, would die if she mentioned it to anybody. Offhand, he asks, "Is that supposed to sound tough?" and they smile subtly at each other. "Sort of," she admits, and they agree that it didn't work, laughing. "Who are you?" she asks, seriously. He tells her again that he's "the Doctor," and she asks for clarification. "The Doctor," she says, and he waves and says "Hello," in his best Northern voice. He sounds like Jane Horrocks on Absolutely Fabulous. "Halloh!" He is even more impressed by himself in this moment than at any moment. Rose laughs, and asks if "the Doctor" is "supposed to sound impressive," which is a question they often ask of each other. "Sort of," he replies in kind, and they smile. "You can tell me, I've seen enough," Rose tells him. "Are you the police?" The Doctor says he is just passing through: "I'm a long way from home." That is very sad. Rose asks why the hell the plastic keeps coming for her -- "What have I done wrong?" -- and the Doctor makes fun of her for assuming it's all about her: "You got in the way, that's all." He explains that, after her interference in the shop, he and the mannequin arm have been tracking each other all over London, but that it homed in on Rose because she was connected to the Doctor. Basically, Rose interprets that it's all about him. Which, of course, it is. He's half of the name of the show. She asks who else knows about "all this plastic stuff," and the answer is: nobody. "What, you're on your own?" Rose asks. Wrong question. He gets defensive: "Well, who else is there? I mean, you lot, all you do is eat chips, go to bed, and watch telly! When all the time, underneath you, there's a war going on!" Rose grabs the arm away from him, and tells him again to start at the beginning.
Later, Rose has still got questions about their stories, because she still thinks the Doctor even believes in the actuality of police. "So, if you're gonna go with this living plastic -- and I don't even believe that, but if we do -- how did you kill it?" He explains that the thing controlling the plastic gives it life, so by sonic screwing the connection, he killed it. He clarifies for her that this is not radio, but "thought" control, and that throws her off for a few seconds, but she realizes that the question should be who's doing the controlling, but he just says it's a long story. They joke around about how the entity isn't trying to take over all of the shopping in Britain -- it's not a "price war" -- in a basic joke/joke/serious structure. What really sells it, because the jokes are ciphers, is the acting. Eccleston and Piper have a very natural chemistry, bumping into each other's shoulders and giggling as they walk down the street. He stops her dead: "They want to overthrow the human race and destroy you. Do you believe me?" No, of course not. "But you're still listening." That's all it takes when you're on an epic quest. That's why you should never listen to crazy people with magic powers. She's already in this and she doesn't even know it.
"Really though, Doctor. Tell me. Who are you?" Backed right off that whole genocide thing, I see. The Doctor smiles to himself and approaches Rose: "Do you know what we were saying? About the Earth revolving? It's like when you were a kid. The first time they tell you the world's turning, you just can't quite believe it, because everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it." He takes her hand and the music goes nuts. "The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, and the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. And I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go --" He lets go her hand. "That's who I am. Now, forget me, Rose Tyler." That's also part of the recipe -- when the mysterious messenger is the one to tell you to get lost. He waves the arm in front of her face, hilariously: "Go home." He walks off and she watches him, and then starts down the road, trailing her hand along a fence. The Doctor steps into a police box, and we hear the sound of the TARDIS engines, which we'll come to know well. When I saw my first episode -- which was "The Christmas Invasion," because my friends know what I will like and what I will love -- I couldn't even separate it from the rest of the soundtrack, and I had to be like, "What are they all looking for? How do they know the TARDIS is coming?" It sounds like a dinosaur going, "Wwa whha," or somebody hauling a long length of chain a few feet at a time. Rose runs back to the lot as fast as she can, but it's gone. She stares into the sun, looking around for the Doctor, and then walks off, hands fluttering, at a loss.
Rose goes to Mickey's flat, like he's going to be at all comforting, and the first thing he does is welcome her and then slap her ass and order her to remove her clothing. He does this with a rather charming and laddish air, so it doesn't come off as bad as you might think, but there's a horny basic-hetero level to his interactions with Rose that's a bit oversimplified, considering the complete lack of conflict it's going to generate when Rose gets all Companionate. She tells him to shut up and he offers her coffee. "Only if you wash the mug," she tells him. "And I don't mean rinse, I mean wash." Her fondness and basic uninterest in his bullshit is really refreshing. I love how she's one of those shopgirls that has a fella, you know? "Yeah, that's Mickey. He'll be drunk soon." She asks to use his computer, and he laughs that she'll use any excuse to get in the bedroom, and when she closes the door behind her, he gets a hilarious worried face: "Don't read my emails!" Maybe he responded to one of those penis enlargement spam emails. Or maybe I'm only assuming everybody gets those.
Mickey's room is a disaster, of course. Rose types "Doctor" into the most generic search engine ever, and unsurprisingly, it doesn't immediately produce a Doctor Who website or anything. "Doctor Living Plastic," that's just like Nip/Tuck and the later seasons of ER. She searches "Doctor Blue Box" and hits bingo. If you'd like to know what she sees, I suggest you do the same. At the bottom she sees a link to "contact Clive," and she does so.
Mickey drives Rose to Clive's house in a yellow Bug as Rose explains once again that "Clive" has a wife and kids and telling him not to come in with her. The suckiness of Mickey in this episode is a good reason to leave him in the car, but also: you don't want to talk about mysterious time-traveling phone booths in front of your boyfriend, no matter how sucky he is. That's a good way to end up alone. Mickey demurs, calling Clive possibly "an internet lunatic murderer," but Rose smiles and jumps out of the car anyway. Mickey watches the whole time, and tosses some meanness at a random man on the street.
A little boy answers Clive's door: "Dad! It's one of your nutters!" Clive talks crazy, like Linda in Nighty Night. I thought it was a Welsh accent but I was apparently wrong. (Did you know I taught myself Welsh? That's like the Daily Double trivia question of things about me. Consider it your object lesson in how boring Lubbock, Texas actually is. I pick up and lose languages really quickly, if I don't use them, and dead languages are hard to keep current on so I'm pretty rusty now, but I do remember that the first sentence I put together was "I believe you're in league with the butcher," because that's the always the first sentence you should learn when you learn a new language.) I wish everybody talked like that hot dude on Black Books and then all I would watch is British TV. Clive appears and introduces himself, and Rose immediately tells him that Mickey is in the car in case of a sudden murder. Clive smiles and waves, and his wife calls down from upstairs, "Oh it's something to do with the Doctor! She's been reading the website." Overjoyed, Clive drags Rose back to the shed, as wife Caroline comes down the stairs chuckling that it's finally a "she" dorking out about the Doctor. Yeah, that's funny and all, but I wonder how funny Caroline would find this if she'd gotten a gander at Rose first. She chuckles ironically and shuts the door, as Mickey watches from the street, still suspicious.
Clive shows Rose around the shed and gets really chatty about how "sensitive" his top-secret materials are, so he couldn't just send it to her, because it would get "intercepted," but anyway, if you're super-bright and clever and crazy as a shithouse like Clive, you might notice that the Doctor is everywhere: "Political diaries, conspiracy theories, even ghost stories." We'll see several examples of all three this season. What we won't see is how come all the pictures are of Christopher Eccleston, which is the new body. But then, we don't need it, because: time travel. I suppose Rose is lucky she's not in any of the pictures, or else he'd go all Galaxy Quest on her ass. "No first name, no last name. Just 'the Doctor.' Always 'the Doctor.' And the title seems to have been passed down from father to son; it appears to be an inheritance." Clive indicates a picture, and Rose nods that it's her particular version, even though they're all Eccleston. He expands the picture, which is from "the Washington public archive," and we see that it was taken in a crowd in Dealey Plaza 1963. (Good job, Doctor.) Clive shows Rose a picture of a family in April 1912, of the Doctor with a family that randomly cancelled their reservations on the Titanic. There's a sketch of the Doctor in 1883 looking very Byronic "on the coast of Sumatra, on the very day Krakatoa exploded." They keep talking about how it must be a lineage of Doctors, fathers and sons, and then Clive goes dark: "The Doctor is a legend woven throughout history. When disaster comes, he's there. He brings a storm in his wake. And he has one constant companion." Hee! A hot chick or robotic dog, of course! But Clive doesn't know that part: "Death."
Outside the house, where Clive is telling Rose his theories and warning her of horrible dangers, Mickey is being eaten by a spooky garbage can. He's boredly waiting in the Bug, and then notices the bin shuffling around, and when he investigates, he finds it empty. He turns, confused, but his hands are stuck to the bin, and there's a struggle, and the bin is very taffyish and creepy, and finally it opens its lid and yanks Mickey inside. Then it...burps. Not my thing, again. This is all intercut together, but the drama of this edit depends on us caring whether or not Mickey lives or dies (not yet possible) and us not knowing that the Doctor is clearly fucking awesome (impossible from second one).
Clive lectures Rose that if the Doctor's back, then we're all in danger. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is what we call that. Also known as the J. Jonah Jameson defense. Clive follows up this basic causal fallacy with a turn of phrase: "If he's singled you out, if the Doctor's making house calls...then God help you." Rose asks who Clive really finks the Doctor is, and Clive admits that he finks it's the same, immortal guy, who is also an alien, which is additionally "from another world." Rose thinks, and smiles sadly at him.
Outside, Rose is bitching all the way to the car, where Mickey has been replaced by a shiny piece of plastic in the shape of Mickey: "All right, he's a nutter! Off his head, complete online conspiracy freak. You win!" She sits without her powers of observation. Living plastic? Sure thing. Sonic screwdriver? Absolutely. Fathers and sons throughout history so similar as to be identical? You bet. Time-traveling police box? Okay, possibly. It definitely teleports. But...an alien? Absolutely not. That would just be crazy. Besides this lack of introspection, she's also unable to notice that her boyfriend is now from Lazytown. Off on the thing, Rose suggests pizza for dinner. Mickey squawks and rumbles, "Pizzaaa! P-p-peeeeeeeza!" and then drives off down Clive's road, veering and wobbling back and forth.
At dinner, in a nice restaurant, Rose has apparently left the mystery behind, and is contemplating a job at the hospital canteen: "That's it then, dishing out chips? ...I could do A Levels..." It's almost like she has an ambition of some kind. That's over immediately: "I dunno. It's all Jimmy Stone's fault. I only left school because of him, and look where he ended up. What do you think?" I wonder if we'll ever hear more about that. It's interesting. I wonder about Jackie, and what Rose's father was like. Jackie's not all that old. The whole time, Rubber Mickey's staring at Rose, all shiny and creepy: "So, where did you meet this Doctor?" She begs his pardon for bringing up her life and future for a sec, but he continues: "Because I reckon it started back at the shop, am I right? Is he something to do with that?" She resists, he pushes. "I'm not going on about him, Mickey, really I'm not, because...I know it sounds daft, but I don't think he's safe. He's dangerous." Not an alien or anything, but unsafe and traveling in the company of haunted dummies. Mickey glitches out majorly, from a variety of angles. "But you can trust me, sweetheart/babe/sugar/darling/sugar," he blurts in a bunch of voices. Rose looks confused at this. "You can tell me anything. Tell me about the Doctor and what he's planning, and I can help you, Rose. Because that's all I really wanna do, sweetheart/babe/sugar/sweetheart." Rose is like, "Your damage would be?"
But before Mickey can stutter out something crazy, a waiter approaches with a bottle of champagne. Mickey ignores him and goes back to questioning Rose: "Where's the Doctor?" He grabs her hand, squelching all rubbery. The waiter, rebuffed by Mickey, holds the bottle out to Rose. "It's not ours," she says, distracted, having finally noticed that Mickey's being weird. "Mickey, what is it? What's wrong?" He gets really insistent about needing to know "how much" Rose knows about the Doctor and the situation, and the waiter once again busts into the conversation: "Doesn't anybody want this champagne?" Mickey, exasperated, finally looks up at the waiter -- who is, of course, the Doctor. Mickey figures it out almost immediately, and the Doctor starts to shake the bottle: "Don't mind me. I'm just toasting the happy couple. On the house!" He pops the cork, and it hits Mickey in the middle of his forehead. The rubber absorbs it with a silly boing sound, and Mickey fishes around in his mouth for a second with his tongue before he spits it out of his mouth. Rose finally figures out that he's been replaced or turned into a dummy. Or more properly, an Auton. "...Anyway," says Mickey, and his hands become giant mallets. He smashes the table, and Rose screams. The Doctor grabs the Auton by the head and, after a brief struggle, pulls it right off. Pop! The head says stuff meant to be threatening, causing some some patrons to squeal, but the Doctor grins wildly. The body keeps smashing things with its huge mallet fists, causing even more chaos. Rose pulls the fire alarm and starts yelling at everyone to get out. They all run, and Rose and the Doctor make for the back of the restaurant. Behind them, the body keeps bashing things in and smashing stuff. It's awesome.
Rose and the Doctor run through the kitchen and out of a back exit, the Auton's body close behind. The Doctor locks a door behind them with his screwdriver, while Rose looks around for a way out of the yard. Shaking a pair of locked gates violently, she orders the Doctor to get them open with "that tube thing." He clarifies that it's a sonic screwdriver, but says they should just "go in here." There's a bright blue police box in the middle of the yard. He unlocks it as the door they came out of begins to dent and strain. Rose runs closer and once more looks at him crazy: "We can't hide inside a wooden box!" Because the Doctor's weird commands have resulted in so many wrong turns so far. She goes back to rattle the gate, screaming her head off.
After yet another commercial break, Rose runs into the TARDIS and slams the door behind her. A few steps in, after looking around for a moment, she turns and runs straight back out again. Too weird. I love that. She walks around and around the police box, making the point that it's much larger inside than outside, and the Auton finally makes a hole in the door, so Rose runs back inside TARDIS again. "It's gonna follow us!" she shouts to the Doctor, who is doing all kinds of unspecified business at various boards and switches. We pull back and see the whole chamber for the first time, as the music swells. The Doctor is wiring Rubber Mickey's head into the machinery. "You see, the arm is too simple, but the head's perfect -- I can use it to trace the signal back to the original source." Rose is grossed out and has many questions, which he gives her leave to ask as the Doctor wires her boyfriend's head into the board. "The inside's bigger than the outside?" Yes. "It's alien." Yup. Is the Doctor an alien? Yes. She stares at him, and he asks if that's all right; without skipping a beat, she matter-of-factly breathes, "Yeah." He explains TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space), but she starts sobbing immediately. "That's okay," says the Doctor. "Culture shock. Happens to the best of us." Of course, he is still kind of not getting how her boyfriend is now made of rubber. I really love just how profoundly Mickey does not register on the Doctor's radar. Rose pulls herself together enough to get hysterical: "Did they kill him? Mickey? Did they kill Mickey? Is he dead?" The Doctor's like, "Oh right." She reminds him of how Mickey is her boyfriend, and that he has pulled off Mickey's head, and that it is kind of assy to assume that she's crying because he has such a cool car. "And now you're just going to let him melt?" she shouts, and we hear the sounds of Mickey's head boiling down. The Doctor wigs out and screams like a freak and runs around the console, pressing buttons and switching switches and yanking levers. After stabilizing the signal between Mickey's head and the transmitter, he starts up the TARDIS engines. Which rarely take more than a few seconds to get where they're going, of course, because of how it's teleportation and/or time travel, so they stop almost immediately, and the Doctor runs out of there without another word.
Rose chases after the Doctor, because it's not safe in the yard behind the restaurant, but on exiting she finds herself standing on London Bridge. The Doctor dejectedly reveals that he's lost the signal again, and Rose requests clarification on how they're now overlooking the Thames: "Does it fly?" He barely nods in her direction: "Disappears there, reappears here, you wouldn't understand." Sounds rather simple, really. She asks him what about the blindly smashing Auton, still on the loose, and he tells her to drop it because the body melted along with the head. He's snippy due to having lost the signal. She sighs, sad, because she will have to tell Mickey's mother about his rubberizing, beheading, and eventual liquidation. Rough. The Doctor looks at her questioningly, and Rose reminds him of Mickey for, like, the fifth time: "I'll have to tell his mother he's dead, and you just went and forgot him. Again!" He rolls his eyes at her, and she gets creeped out. "You were right, you are alien," she murmurs, and turns away. "Look, if I did forget some kid called Mickey..." begins the Doctor, almost-apologetically, but she's not having it, and she gets very rough on him: "Yeah, he's not a kid." Doctor doesn't have time for her mess: "...It's because I'm trying to save the life of every stupid ape blundering on top of this planet, all right?" "All right!" she yells back. "Yes, it is!" he yells, and they chill out. ("All right" in the UK is like "Aloha" in Hawai'i, or "Smurf" in the Smurf Village. Or "awesome" in a Jacob recap. It means it all. Seventeen words for, in this case, "attitude.") Rose shakes her head disbelievingly and asks why, if he's a total alien, he sounds like he's from the North. "Lots of planets have a North," he scoffs. He folds his arms indignantly and looks away. She asks -- this is funny -- what a "police public call box" is, on behalf of everybody watching, and he's all smiles again. "It's a telephone box from the 1950s." He pats the TARDIS fondly, grinning: "It's a disguise." It's like three jokes, one inside the . Rose smiles and shakes her head at him indulgently, due to the non-disguise it always was, and the even-less-of-a-disguise that it is in 2005.
"Okay. And this living plastic, what's it got against us?" asks Rose, as she and The Doctor loiter about outside the TARDIS, still standing on London Bridge. He says it's got nothing against them at all: "It loves you. You've got such a good planet! Lots of smoke and oil, plenty of toxins and dioxins in the air...perfect. Just what the Nestene Consciousness needs. Its food stock was destroyed in the war, all its protein plants rotted, so Earth: dinner!" episode has a similarly eco-friendly bad guy/set of circumstances. Interesting. It makes sense that the immortal Doctor -- who, with nothing better to do, has always tended to focus on Earth and its lovely inhabitants -- would see environmentalism altogether differently from your average. It's hard to make that work without seeming overly sincere, but I think there are only a few really preachy bits, and this isn't one of them. A plastic-based consciousness would for sure love Earth, for all those reasons and more. Hell, Paris Hilton and most of Hollywood already live on dioxins and red dye #3. Well, orange dye at least. Asked whether there's a way to stop it, the Doctor proudly produces a tube of blue liquid from a pocket: "Anti-Plastic!" It is the amazing grin that accompanies this pronouncement that sells it. "Anti-Plastic?" asks Rose. Yes. But first the Doctor's got to find the transmitter that the Consciousness is using to control all the plastic. Rose stands opposite the Doctor, framed by the London Eye, as he explains that it should look like a transmitter, "round and massive, slap bang in the middle of London." He paces, continuing: "A huge circular metal structure, like a dish. Like a wheel. Close to where we're standing." Rose stares at the Eye. "Must be completely invisible," he muses. She nods toward the Eye, and the Doctor turns and looks at it several times without comprehending. He keeps asking her what she's trying to say, and finally it clicks. "Oh. Fantastic!" he grins, and takes off.
Hand in hand, laughing joyfully, Rose and the Doctor run across London Bridge toward the Eye. I like them best when they're like this: wild and happy and just getting on with it. "Think of it," says the Doctor, once they've reached the Eye. "Plastic, all over the world. Every artificial thing waiting to come alive. The shop-window dummies, the phones, the wires, the cables..." Rose nods: "The breast implants..." He shakes that off: "Still, we've found the transmitter. The Consciousness must be somewhere underneath." Rose finds the entrance, and they head into the underground. As usually happens in this sort of story, toward the end.
At the bottom of the ladder, everything is red and creepy. The Doctor leads the way into a huge chamber, at the bottom of which is a big pit full of glowing orange goo: "The Nestene Consciousness, that's it, inside the vat. A living, plastic creature." Rose is easy-breezy: "Well, then. Tip in your anti-plastic and let's go." But that's not how the Doctor rolls. (This week.) "I'm not here to kill it," he tells Rose. "I've got to give it a chance." Even the Doctor can't muster a whole lot of enthusiasm or belief in this strategy. The Doctor leans over a lower railing and addresses the giant glob: "I seek audience with the Nestene Consciousness, under peaceful contract according to Convention 15 of the Shadow Proclamation." It wobbles and roars. "Thank you. If I might have permission to approach." Rose spots Real Mickey as she paces, and runs down to him, much to the Doctor's disdain. "Doctor, they kept him alive!" she cries. The Doctor admits that they would have likely done that to maintain the copy. Rose is aghast that he never told her this -- but then, when the copy melted, what would have been the point? -- and the Doctor asks her, peevishly and hilariously, "Can we keep the domestics outside, thank you?" ("Domestic" as in "dispute," not "aid" or "kitchen help" or whatever.)
As Rose helps Mickey up, the Doctor addresses the Consciousness: "If I might observe, you infiltrated this civilization by means of warp shunt technology. So, may I suggest, with the greatest respect, that you shunt off?" The beastie gets pissed, and so does the Doctor: "Oh don't give me that, it's an invasion, plain and simple! Don't talk about constitutional rights!" The plastic whirls a head-shape around and calls the Doctor "Time Lord," and he cuts it off: "I. Am. Talking. This planet is just starting. These stupid little people have only just learnt how to walk, but they're capable of so much more. I'm asking you on their behalf -- please, just go." When has that kind of thing ever worked on a bastard like the NC? Never, that's when. Two Autons approach the Doctor from behind, as Rose yells a warning, and they immediately discover his anti-plastic. Ouch. He tries to explain that it's just "insurance," that he wasn't going to use it, but you can't blame the NC for ignoring him and getting more and more angry. As the Doctor apologizes and tries to explain further, the TARDIS is also uncovered. The plastic goes insane and we hear a lot of what sounds like gibberish but is actually totally depressing and important: "That's not true! I should know, I was there! I fought in the War -- it wasn't my fault! I couldn't save your world! I couldn't save any of them!" Chaos. The Doctor yells to Rose a partial explanation -- that the NC is scared to death of the TARDIS, because it's a "superior technology," and that it is scared enough to be going "to the final base" and starting the invasion. He tells her to run. Again.
Instead, Rose...dials a number on her mobile. The times and places Rose pulls out that phone. It gives me hives. Jackie's coming out of a police station. "Oh, there you are, I was just gonna phone. You can get compensation. I said so! I've got this document thing off the police -- don't thank me!" Considering how much I like Jackie by the end, I wish she were more here than a robot going, "Suck some money off the state! I am a terrible parent!" over and over, but c.x. the stuff with Mickey, again: she has to suck, but not so bad that you dislike her. Ennui, not abuse. Ascertaining that her mother is in town doing what she calls "some late-night shopping," Rose orders her to go home immediately, due to the invasion starting and whatnot. Jackie laughs and says goodbye and heads into a shopping mall. Beneath the London Eye, the Consciousness sends out its signal, and electric bolts of light shoot all over the place. Rose calls it the end of the world, but she has no frame of reference.
Clive and Caroline are in the mall, talking about boring stuff with their kid in tow. What is late-night shopping anyway? People do this with their kids? Caroline gasps when she sees one of the mannequins moving around, but when they notice that all the dummies are moving, she giggles. That stops when the dummies start punching their way through the glass. Every screenplay I ever decided not to write ends with a riot in a shopping mall, because that's naturally where my brain goes, because that's my two favorite things: riots, and the shopping mall. Violent chaos and conspicuous consumption. (There's a reason I love The Apprentice so much -- and why I'm dying for Suburban Shootout to start.) So this part is already awesome. Anyway, the screaming starts and all the dummies are being scary, and Clive is having a bittersweet moment of realizing that everything he thought, all his conspiracy Doctor stuff, was real. Even if his conclusions are completely off. One of the mannequins turns toward him, its hand flipping open to reveal a gun port. His face here...it's one of the most touching and good parts of the episode. It's not quite "oh, fuck" and it's not quite "fuck off," it's like, both of those sprinkled on top of a "well, fuck." Like he just realized that, while he was right about the death and destruction, he didn't complete the thought until just now. Clive is of course shot in front of his wife and child, and it's very sad -- despite him having been in exactly two scenes in this entire show, and completely wrong about everything and dorky in both -- because of that face he makes right there. Dear, dear Clive. At least we got to see him, which is more than that Wilson bloke could ask for.
The Doctor is still an Auton hostage, and still yelling at Rose to leg it. Rose is still at a loss. The building starts to collapse around them, the ceiling comes in, the stairs get messed up, the TARDIS is locked. Mickey continues to suck.
The mall is going nuts with screams and shooting dummies in all manner of sporting and casual apparel. Clive's little kid screams like a lady, but I wouldn't say anything, because he's been through a lot tonight. Jackie stands at the bottom of the escalator looking dumb, then apparently realizes that everybody is dying, and runs off, for some reason hurling her shopping onto the escalator, going up. Knowing her, she'll be back at the burned ruins tomorrow, like, "I don't have a gift receipt, but I returned them only minutes after purchase. I deserve store credit at the least."
Mickey and Rose hang out uselessly at the door of the TARDIS.
Jackie runs outside and finds herself in a scene from Escape From New York. No, L.A. All the dummies crowd outside and start killing people. She collapses outside a bridal shop, and three identical brides in blonde wigs with Uma Thurman bangs -- "fringes," I mean -- come through the window at her, and she screams. In my mind, two of the dummies are always really mean to the other one because she keeps insisting her name is "Sharon."
Rose watches the Doctor struggle to get his anti-plastic for a while, then finally gets her shit together, and stands up, and makes a resolved face. Mickey has apparently seen this face before, and tells her to just leave the Doctor to his death.
In the high street, the brides hold out their creepy arms and point them at poor Jackie.
Rose picks up an axe as Mickey's yelling, "There's nothing you can do!" but it's too late: she's all Buffied up: "I've got no A Levels. No job. No future." No job, no rent to pay, no home, no worthwhile boyfriend, no mum. She's already said goodbye and she didn't even know it. Might as well try "superhero." Jackie cowers as the brides advance. Rose hacks at a chain on the wall with her axe. "But I tell you what I have got: Jericho Street Junior School under-sevens gymnastic team. I got the bronze!" The chain comes loose and Rose swings across the gap on it, over the Consciousness. She kicks the Autons, one then the other, into the Consciousness, and the anti-plastic falls into it and spills out. The NC starts to writhe and scream as Rose touches down, safe in the Doctor's arms. "Now we're in trouble," he quips, as the Consciousness gets all rumbly and explody-looking.
The signal from the Eye stops transmitting, and all the Autons start doing a hilarious and very cool-looking Safety Dance. It is a very fine line with these things, but mannequins doing a crazy robot dance wearing weird clothes during a full-on flaming riot is a can't-miss.
Rose, the Doctor and Mickey run to the TARDIS and Rose spares a grin at the very freaking-out Consciousness before she goes in and closes the door. Just before the NC and the whole underground area goes up in flames, TARDIS disappears.
The dummies all fall to the ground twitching. Jackie walks through the now-still destruction, looking quite the worse for wear. She does desperation really well, because it's her normal mode. I would probably lie down in or near a Banana Republic until somebody else cleaned it all up. That place is really soothing.
Mickey falls backward out of the TARDIS in an alleyway, looking just as scared and useless as he did when he wasn't hanging with the good guys. He's had a hard day, I guess. Rose, of course, immediately rings her mother. It's funny, because Jackie answers all shrieking and freaking, and telling her daughter to get indoors because it's not safe: "There were all of these things! And they were shooting!" and Rose just laughs with relief and hangs up on her. I like that: "Check. Bye." She shoots a little disdain Mickey's way, but he's still whimpering. The Doctor stands in the TARDIS doorway and brags: "Nestene Consciousness?" He snaps his fingers. "Easy." Rose points out how the episode defies the status quo: "You were useless in there. You'd be dead if it wasn't for me!" He agrees and thanks her, then says he's off: "Unless, uh..." He shrugs like it's no big deal. "I don't know...you could come with me." She considers him, hands in her pockets. "This box isn't just a London hopper," he says, getting more excited, "It goes anywhere in the universe, free of charge." Mickey screams that the Doctor's an alien, a thing, and the Doctor barely gives him a glance. "He's not invited." Back to Rose: "What do you think? You could stay here and fill your life with work and food and sleep, or you could go, uh...anywhere." She asks whether it's always that dangerous, and the Doctor's infectious grin goes wide: "Yeah!" Mickey puts his arms around Rose's knees like a douchebag and continues to whine. Rose shakes her head. "I've gotta go and find my mum...someone's gotta look after this stupid lump..." She laughs and pats Mickey on the back, where he cowers mindlessly. So dumped, dude. The Doctor makes a sad face, but clears it up immediately: "Okay. See you around." They look at each other for a good long time, and Rose -- Billie Piper is really a good actress indeed; the acting is the best thing about the show -- hasn't made up her mind yet, but she's scared. The Doctor closes the door but never breaks his gaze. Rose looks at the closed door as the engines rev and the TARDIS disappears. Rose stares at the space where it was, realizing how bad she just fucked up.
Rose helps Mickey stand, still staring after the TARDIS, and as they walk away, the dinosaur sound comes back. This is in the stories, too. Rose and Mickey turn around again and see the TARDIS reappear. The Doctor pops his head out, smiling again: "By the way -- did I mention, it also travels in time?" It wouldn't matter what he says now, and they both know it. Rose smiles and the Doctor grins back, and retreats, leaving the door ajar. Rose turns to Mickey and thanks him. Not even Mickey can understand what the hell she'd be thanking him for: "Thanks for what?" Exactly. "Exactly," she smiles, but she says it very sweetly, and there it is. He's very nice, and so is her mom, but they're not so nice that you should have to give up magic. She kisses his cheek and turns around, sprinting in slow motion toward the TARDIS with the most beautiful, joyful smile on her lovely face...