In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
"The End Of The World" is a bunch of BS. Rose chooses "the future" for her first adventure, and they take the TARDIS to the scheduled end of Earth, five billion years from now. The last living human is a bitchy trampoline of stretched flesh with her brain in a jar, and there's a whole huge party with a bunch of aliens, blue people, trees people, chittering alien dwarves, whatever, but things go wrong when spiderbots attack. Using the combined might of a Britney Spears single, a sonic screwdriver, the power of Zen and undergrad literary theory, Rose and the Doctor defeat the evils of Trampolina and save everyone in attendance from the exploding sun. Good thing new viewers didn't have to deal with just this one for an entire week. At the end, we find out that the Doctor is now the only Timelord left, and they get a snack. Hopefully this one's as bad as it gets. time: two episodes again. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Rose sprints into the TARDIS with the most beautiful smile, and the Doctor -- without skipping a beat -- asks her where they're off to now: "Backwards or forwards in time. What's it going to be?" She chooses forward, of course -- the whole point of this exercise is to give her one. A future, I mean. He presses buttons and asks how far. Rose starts small: "One hundred years." The Doctor pulls levers and turns knobs. The funniest thing about this scene is how his TARDIS business gets more and more intense and baroque at every juncture. "There you go, step outside those doors, it's the twenty-second century," he grins proudly. "That's a bit boring, though; do you want to go further?" She's down. stop: "Ten thousand years in the future...the year 12,005, the New Roman Empire." Sounds nice. Rose teases him, once again, about how "impressive" he seems to find himself, and he makes an "aww" face: "I am so impressive!" There's a funny kind of wish fulfillment here, because yes, he is, but don't you wish you could tease him about it anyway? "Right, then, you asked for it," he tells her. "I know exactly where to go." He goes absolutely crazy on the console, turning wheels and pumping levers and switching switches and butting buttons. We see the TARDIS hurtling through the time vortex for the first time, and then a close-up of the Doctor's hand hitting a desk bell: "Ping!" He won't tell Rose where they are -- just gestures toward the door with a secretive face. I like this episode, on final analysis, because the whole End of the World scenario is just a MacGuffin for the revelation of the Time War stuff hinted at in the first episode, and to put Rose and the Doctor on an equal emotional plane, which is very effectively done. But now, back at the beginning of the episode, it occurs to me to wonder: is this whole bit an attempt to communicate with Rose? This exercise in pain and loss: is this the Doctor's way of telling her why he needs her so much? It's interesting, and unsettling, and kind of heartbreaking. I like it.
Rose steps out the TARDIS doors and into a smallish beige room, and the Doctor uncovers a glass viewscreen with his sonic screwdriver: it's a lovely view on Earth from space. "You lot," he says jokingly. "You spend all your time thinking about dying. Like you're going to get killed by eggs or beef or global warming or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible: maybe you survive." Or maybe, ultimately, you don't. Maybe you end up alone, traveling by yourself, with nowhere to go. "This is the year 5.5-slash-apple-slash-26. Five billion years in your future. This is the day...Hold on." The Doctor looks at his watch as we see the sun behind Earth expanding beautifully. "This is the day the sun expands. Welcome to the end of the world." Rose stares.
Credits, and then two shuttles approach an enormous cruciform installation to the tune of the Treehouse of Horror. The voice of Platform One rings out: "Shuttles 5 and 6 now docking. Guests are reminded that Platform One forbids the use of weapons, teleportation, and religion. Earth Death is scheduled for 15:39, followed by drinks in the Manchester Suite." Okay, that's hilarious. I think I would do well on a Platform.
Rose and the Doctor are walking down a corridor, leisurely: "So when it says 'guests,' does that mean people?" It depends what Rose means by "people," of course, but she's like, "Um, people? I mean 'people'?" and the Doctor's like, "Oh, then no. Aliens." He opens a door to the observation gallery as Rose tries to pin down what's going on with Platform One. He explains that it's less of a spaceship and more an observation deck where "the great and the good are gathering to watch the planet burn." Why? "Fun." They enter the gallery, and he extends his explanation: "Mind you, when I said 'the great and the good,' what I mean is the rich." There's a lot of class stuff in this episode, which is interesting because of Rose and where she comes from. Interesting that it still pings the Doctor as well, but I think that the point is that Earth has been used completely up by multinationals, and as Earth's biggest fan, he has a stake in that. So, economic interrogation via ecology, which is interesting and doesn't get much play in stories like this. I would note at this point that it's not really a coincidence that the two contemporary songs we hear in this episode are "Tainted Love" and "Toxic," nor that within the first two hours of the series we've met plastic that turns into people, and people that turn into plastic. "But hold on -- they did this once on Newsround Extra, the sun expanding," says Rose. "That takes hundreds of years!" Rose loves her science infotainment. Mickey and Jackie were probably doing shots in the other room, or down the pub watching some stupid sport together. The Doctor nods: "Millions. But the planet's now property of the National Trust. They've been keeping it preserved." He points to a "gravity satellite" down near the atmosphere that has been "holding back the sun." Rose notes that the continents are still where they are now, and the Doctor explains that, while they did shift over time, the Trust moved them back: "That's a classic Earth. But now the money's run out, nature takes over!" There are about thirty minutes left before the Earth gets "roasted," he tells her, and she naturally assumes that they are there to "jump in at the last minute" to save her. Negatory, but the Doctor says that all the people left long ago, so there's nothing to worry about on that front. It's the end of just the world. Still, Rose is creeped out: "Just me then." Hurts, doesn't it?
The Steward -- who is blue, blue like a Blue Man, with black-tinted lips and black-lined eyes and strangely white irises -- hurries toward them: "Who the hell are you?" It plays well off the "just me" line: "Just you then -- but who the fuck are you?" The Doctor's gracious about getting yelled at, usually: "Oh! That's nice, thanks." The Steward wigs out that it's a "maximum hospitality zone" (awesome concept), and that the guests are on their way in already. The Doctor holds out a small leather wallet and Obi-Wans the guy: "That's me, I'm a guest. Look, I've got an invitation! It's fine, see? The Doctor plus one. I'm the Doctor, this is Rose Tyler. She's my plus-one. That all right?" Obviously, quoth the Steward, who apologizes, and then says that, well, if the Doctor's arrived, they'd better get their Earth Death on. He runs off to get it going, and the Doctor shows Rose the paper he just flashed. It is blank: "The paper's slightly psychic. Shows them whatever I want them to see. Saves a lot of time." Rose is a sequential processor, and will be dealing with the psychic paper in about twenty minutes. For now: "He's blue." The Doctor nods and he and Rose smile at each other, because the Steward is undeniably blue.
The Steward welcomes the Doctor and Rose over the PA, and sends the staff scurrying to their posts. Now, I'm not an evil man. I am not a man who hates fun. I don't have a problem with silliness, as long as I'm not implicated in the silliness. But what you have here is a man painted blue, and little blue Oompa-Loompas in spacesuits scuttling around and talking like fucking Jawas, and there's this "Be Our Guest" music playing, and...my brain shuts down. I have to say that it was at this point that, on first viewing, I really just lost the thread altogether. They could have revealed the secret of Roan Inish or whatever and I wouldn't have cared, because: Oompa-Loompas. A really well-constructed, smartly-layered episode, tossed aside because I have a hate-on for Jawas no matter their outfits. But on review, that makes this episode even better, because it turns out that there are people who enjoy all manner of zaniness, Arthur Dent and Bring Your Towel and Ministry of Silly Whatever, The Lady Morpork of Bullshit, and those are good people, and they probably don't get off on literary tricks and emotional tropes to the same degree that I might. So this is a catch-all kind of brilliant episode, and to let one thing about it turn you off to the part of it that was made just for you is really short-sighted. So there's that. I have a really low pain threshold for that kind of humor, but that's personal. Just like every other opinion expressed here. Not that anyone would ever do anything so silly as to look to a website to find out what their opinion should be. It's like Battlestar and the spaceships and the esoteric workings of the spaceships. I realize that there are people for whom the zany, wacky antics of this show are the entire point -- and more power to them, the show will deliver on those -- but there are also people for whom those antics are beside the point. I happen to be a person who views them as somewhat counter to the point, because I am a dour old snoot, which is why I never found versions of this show altogether that interesting. If you're the kind of person for whom farting aliens are uproarious and constitute the value of this show, I daresay you've stopped reading the recap by now...
...so anyway, a bunch of aliens show up, and the Steward introduces them, and the voice overlaps the images in some places -- more of that razor-thin British editing -- so I'm not sure who anybody actually is, toward the end of the introductions. Which is fine, because one of the fifteen ingredients in this little episode that refuses to jell or develop is the How To Host A Murder part, so we don't actually have to know anything about these aliens, because they don't have agendas, because they think they are there for an art show.
"Representing the forest of Cheem, we have...Trees." The Steward pulls a nice, tiny little pause every time he calls them Trees, and it's funny every time. Three tree-people walk into the room, a beautiful woman named Jabe, and two others wearing armor, named Lute and Coffa. "There will be an exchange of gifts representing peace," the Steward notes. "If you can keep the room circulating, thank you." The chubby, blue Moxx of Balhoon enters , "from the solicitors Jolco & Jolco." The Doctor smiles cheerily at him, and Rose looks on, bewildered. Several creatures in cloaks, with long metallic claws, enter , the Adherents of the Repeated Meme from Financial Family Seven. The Doctor chuckles at the look on Rose's face. Two lizards, the brothers Hop Pyleen, are the inventors of Hyposlip Travel Systems. Something that sounds like Cal Spark Plug, two Skeksis named Mr. and Mrs. Pakoo, and some others, the Ambassadors from the City State of Binding Light. Really the only crazy-important ones are the Adherents, the Trees, and the Moxx. The rest are intricately-costumed and really well-done monster stand-ins.
Jabe approaches, her companions holding plant trays. "The Gift of Peace," she says, holding out a vessel with a small planted cutting. "I bring you a cutting of my Grandfather." The Doctor thanks Jabe and hands the pot to Rose, and then searches his pockets for a return gift. The Doctor travels light, so he pats around and clears his throat awhile before offering "air from [his] lungs" in return. He blows gently into Jabe's face, and her eyelids flutter. "How...intimate," she breathes, and the Doctor flirts that there's more where that came from. "I bet there is," smiles Jabe. Rose freaks, slightly and quietly. Just how much of an alien is the Doctor, really? The Steward introduces "the sponsor of the main event," a giant face in a giant jar the size of a Toyota Corolla, called the Face of Bo. The Moxx of Balhoon approaches the Doctor and Rose, and the Doctor cordially acknowledges him. Moxx has a squeaky voice: "My felicitations on this historical happenstance. I give you the gift of bodily salivas!" He spits directly into Rose's left eye, and the Doctor falls out laughing. "Thank you very much." As Rose wipes the spit from her eyes, the Adherents of the Repeated Meme approach them. Sigh. So I guess we're working with the knowledge of your average livejournaler. I don't wanna go into it, lest the ugly rumors that I might actually know something about something start up again, but...stay tuned for week, when the Doctor "deconstructs" something by...blowing it up. The Doctor breathes on them and one of them hands him a large silver egg, which he tosses in the air before handing it to Rose. "A gift of peace in all good faith." They are also Adherents of Repeatedly Bearing False Witness, apparently, because I'll tell you right now that it's neither.
Finally, with much pomp and circumstance and silliness, the Steward hushes the assembled "Ladies and Gentlemen...Trees...and Multiforms," with a little speech for the last guest: "Consider the Earth below. In memory of this dying world, we call forth The Last Human." The Doctor checks out Rose's reaction as the doors admit a stretched-taut sheet of human skin with eyes, a mouth and a beauty mark in the exact center, and lots of lipstick. And thus, I checked out of the episode entirely. So lazy. She has this obsession with money and with being "thin," and it's made her monstrous. That's very astute and fresh, isn't it? But the real kicker is the voice. Did you ever see The Last Unicorn, with Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels? There's a part early on where the wizard turns this tree into a woman by accident, and she has this annoying way of speaking, like a drugged-out old prostitute, and everything she says takes ten times too long, and she irritated me when I saw the movie the first time, in the theatre. This thing is worse, because she also repeats everything in this fusty, whiny way, and it's so, so irritating, and I get that she's a bad person and that she's supposed to be irritating, but the trick of art would be to make her just irritating enough without crossing the line into actively hating life when she is onscreen. "The Lady Cassandra O'Brien Dot Delta Seventeen." The Doctor laughs at her as she goes on and on and on about how "thin" she is and how she just had her chin taken off and she's so "dainty" and she doesn't "look a day over two thousand" and "moisturize me, moisturize me." And the joke, it takes one second to get, and it's a stupid joke anyway: that she's the ad absurdum of Hollywood looks-obsessed whatever. Or rather, the ad absurdum of what that idea looked like ten years ago, with the emphasis on thinness and having things removed, instead of having her be bright orange with Botox lips and a dead browline. Sometimes Queer As Folk was like this, too, though -- jokes about things that were funny years and years ago. Like joking about the Spice Girls as a group, rather than individuals. I suppose it's rather comforting, like an anachronistic Boy George joke from your grandfather, but it's also unsettling in the middle of this episode's glories, like...well, I guess like a Boy George joke from Grandpa would be unsettling too. In any case, this is when I originally declared the episode "a bunch of BS," which really just translates to "I expect better," which in turn is a compliment of sorts, I think.
Rose creeps closer for a better look at Cassandra's overall flatness as Cassandra explains that her father was a Texan and her mother was "from the Arctic Desert." Get it? Global warning? Not just a myth? Get it? Do you? "They were born on the Earth and were the last to be buried in the soil. I have come to honor them," sniff, "and say goodbye." Cassandra is horrified by the tears she's faking, and one of the mummy-gasmask bodyguards, her "surgeons," wipes her eyes. Underneath her metal frame is a jar with her brain in it. She produces her gifts: "From Earth itself -- the last remaining ostrich egg. Legend says it had a wingspan of fifty feet and blew fire from its nostrils." Rose looks mildly confused. "Or was that my third husband?" Rose rolls her eyes, the Doctor laughs, I don't even know what the joke is meant to be there. "Who knows! Oh, don't laugh!" No worries. "I'll get laughter lines!" Cassandra laughs and mumbles to herself for a few seconds, and then they wheel out a gigantic jukebox behind her. More hilarity yet to come: "According to the archives, this was called an iPod. It stores classical music from humanity's greatest composers." Rose looks amazed, and then the jukebox starts playing Soft Cell, and the Doctor dances around embarrassingly, and I wish to do myself ill so that this scene will end. Earth Death in thirty minutes. It's not that I'm unkindly disposed toward the desperately unhip -- Ryan Seacrest is my favorite thing -- but what bugs me is failing the attempt at relevance. "I haven't left my house in ten years, but I hear they have 'memes' now, let's have some of those in." That's how you end up with the lesbian vampire subculture somebody told The L Word is all the rage.
Rose looks around at all the aliens, mingling, and even the Doctor is a possible treefucker, and Earth Death is in thirty minutes, and that's it, she's all alone. Even Cassandra is a freak, obviously, and that's...not just because of the timeline they're in. Rose made her choice at the end of "Rose," but now we're looking at the consequences. It's not Earth we're talking about when we say "The End Of The World": it's Rose's. She's been initiated, on her quest, into the fraternity of the world of the Doctor, and that makes her all alone. Just like him. Adrift and alone and the only one of her kind, out here in the madness of the TARDIS and the Doctor. That's heavy. It's not really change if it doesn't hurt. She takes off as the rest of the aliens have fun, the music still playing, her experience tainted. The Doctor starts to follow her, but is stopped by Jabe, who snaps a picture of him with her tiny handheld computer before letting him go. "A gift of peace, in all good faith." The Adherents offer an egg to the Steward, but he begs off, since he's just the Steward, but they repeat their offer: "A gift of peace, in all good faith." Their claws are long. The Steward takes the egg.
Seriously, one commercial every ten seconds. Why? Jabe's in conflict with her computer on the subject of the Doctor: "Identify species. Please identify species." It whistles at her cantankerously. "Now, stop it. Identify his race. Where's he from?" Her stare gets wider as she stares at the screen, and then whispers: "It's impossible." In a cabinet nearby, one of the Adherents' metal eggs hatches a small robotic spider, which climbs away.
Rose, in another part of the ship, looks out of a window at the raging sun, and is startled when another blue staffer enters, in a techie uniform. Between the stature and the voice and the makeup and the general demeanor, I had to take a second to remember that Ben Browder's wife doesn't randomly show up on every single show. I actually caught myself saying, "Oh look, Ben Browder's wife," because she always played this kind of character on Farscape. She looks just as insane as the Steward with the makeup. Rose apologizes for being in there, and the woman mumbles nervously that she needs permission to talk. Rose uncertainly gives her permission, and the tech thanks her, and reassures her that she's fine where she is. Rose -- this second-classer, this person not in league with the "good and great" that have been weirding her out so bad -- watches, and smiles as the woman opens up a wall panel. "What's your name?" Rose asks. She smiles and says her name is Raffalo: "I won't be long, I've just got to carry out some maintenance." She chatters as she works that there's a "tiny little glitch in the Face of Bo suite," because he's not getting hot water. Rose laughs that there are still plumbers, and Raffalo smiles easily: "I hope so! Else I'm out of a job!" Rose is just like, "Thank God there are still poor people." She asks where Raffalo is from ("Crespallion"), and whether that is a planet. "No, Crespallion's part of the Jaggit Brocade, affiliated to the Scarlet Junction, Convex 56." There's a tapping sound inside the duct as Raffalo asks where Rose is from, and then catches herself: "...If you don't mind me asking." Rose smiles and then stumbles over her answer: "I dunno, a long way away...I just sort of hitched a lift with this...man." She trances out as she tries to word it correctly; Raffalo worries about Rose's stress level. "I didn't even think about it," says Rose. "I don't even know who he is. He's a complete stranger..." She shakes herself out of it and wishes Raffalo luck with the stuff. Raffalo says goodbye and then, haltingly, thanks Rose for the permission to speak: "Not many people are that considerate." They smile at each other -- Rose! Nice to the blue-collar worker! -- and Rose takes off. Raffalo turns to the grate, calls in a problem to Control, and then sticks her head in the duct. A robot spider appears and she chuckles, asking for its ident, as the red spots of death in any language appear on her face, first one and then many as the spider is joined by one and then several friends. Raffalo registers that this is creepy, but before she can get back out, the spiders drag her all the way into the duct. Aw, I liked her. That should've been the first clue.
In his office, the Steward drops his Adherent egg on a table and has a chat through a microphone with Control, who speaks in bleeps: "What's that? Well, how should I know?" Over the loudspeaker, the Steward announces that "the owner of the blue box in private gallery 15" should "please report to the Steward's office immediately." He reminds all the guests that teleportation devices are strictly forbidden ("under Peace Treaty 5.4-slash-cup-slash-16") and gives a very British thank-you-as-punctuation. While he is talking, his egg opens up and the spider climbs up the wall behind him.
Rose is in the private gallery where they parked, throwing the egg up in the air and catching it again, when she hears the announcement of Earth Death in twenty-five minutes. "Oh, thanks," she says, and tosses the egg aside, turning her attention to the pot of Jabe's grandfather. "Hello! My name's Rose. That's a sort of plant. We might be related." She realizes what she's doing and puts it down, and then talks to herself, unnecessarily: "I'm talking to a twig." Behind her, the spider breaks out of the egg.
Meanwhile, the Doctor is supervising the guys valeting the TARDIS: "Oi now, careful with that. Park it properly. No scratches." One of them squeaks and hands the Doctor a redemption card, on the back of which is written "Have a nice day" in an alien-looking but readable script. He watches them leave as though they are crazy, and stalks off. Behind him, several metal spiders scurry up the wall behind him. Cut to a few more running along the air vent, one of which jostles the camera. Good job and a nice detail, considering they're CGI.
Rose's spider scans her hand, but she's oblivious. The Doctor enters, sending the spider back into a vent, and sits down near her on a low wall: "What do you think, then?" Having just now processed the grandfather-as-tree, she moves on to the "slightly psychic paper," and jokes that she's getting there. The Doctor laughs, and she pauses before trying to express her discomfort: "They're just...so alien. The aliens? Are so alien. You look at 'em...and they're alien." The Doctor cracks, "Good thing I didn't take you to the Deep South." (I'm told her accent is Sarf Landen, or a good try at it anyway.) Rose considers the Doctor, trying to put him into the context of this universe where there are no people, only aliens: "Where are you from?" She doesn't know it's the one question the Doctor can't ever answer again. He swallows and says in a light tone, "All over the place." He won't look at her.
"They all speak English," Rose says of the revellers, but the Doctor explains that it's "a gift of the TARDIS" -- a "telepathic field" that translates inside the brain. Rose is not at all cool with the TARDIS being in her brain. She's been on this adventure for, like, a half-hour, remember. She just made her choice and the drawbacks keep appearing like this; you'd freak, too: "Your machine gets inside my head. It gets inside and it changes my mind, and you didn't even ask?" The Doctor's thrown: "I didn't think about it like that." Now she's pissed. "No! You were too busy thinking up cheap shots about the Deep South! Who are you then, Doctor? What you called? What sort of alien are you?" Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. "I'm just The Doctor," he tells her. He sits up and turns his back on her. "From what planet?" she presses. Stop. "Well, it's not as if you'll know where it is!" he tells her. She presses and he presses back, both of them getting more and more intense. She's understandably curious, but Rose: could you please read the room? "This is who I am, right here, right now, all right?" he tells her. "All that counts is here and now, and this is me!" That's the answer. He just answered her and she doesn't even know it. I don't even know if he knows it -- I think he'd say he's being defensive, if you were watching it with him, but that usually ends up being more true anyway. "I'm here too because you brought me here, so just tell me!" she demands. He gets up and goes to the window, stomping petulantly. Earth Death in twenty minutes.
After a bit, Rose follows the Doctor down to the window: "All right, as my mate Shareen says: don't argue with the designated driver." The Doctor smiles, but not in his secret back-turned way; more bitterly than that. It still stings. Rose -- when it doubt, all that -- pulls out her cell phone and makes a joke about how she can't call for a cab. The Doctor -- on a dime, this guy -- takes the phone and mumbles, "With a little bit of jiggery pokery..." He takes off the phone's back panel and does stuff to it. Rose joshes him: "Is that a technical term, 'jiggery pokery'?" He jokes that he "came in first in jiggery pokery," and asks how she did: "Nah, failed hullabaloo." He hands the phone back to Rose, and nods at her confusion.
Rose dials her mum, and we find ourselves back in Jackie's kitchen in 2005 (And, as an eagle-eyed poster pointed out, hours or days before the first episode began, not "now." Which is interesting, because: time travel. There's no "now" to be had anymore. Wherever Rose is, that's "now.") Jackie's putting laundry in the machine as she natters at her daughter: "Oh, what is it? What's wrong? What have I done now? Oh, this red top's falling to bits! You should get your money back." Rose laughs, again, to hear her mother's voice. "Go on!" Jackie demands. "There must be something, you never phone in the middle of the day!" Rose just smiles and giggles, loving her mother from so far away. "What's so funny?" Jackie asks. Rose shakes her head: "Nothing! You all right, though?" Of course she is. Rose asks what day it is, and Jackie's a scream: "Wednesday. All day. You got a hangover? Oh, I tell you what, put a quid in that lottery syndicate, I'll pay you back later." Rose mentions that she might be late coming home, and when Jackie asks if she's okay, Rose responds that she's "Fine! Top of the world!" The Doctor laughs, and the Tylers ring off. Rose lowers her phone, stunned. The Doctor: "Think that's amazing, you want to see the bill." But Rose is having deep thoughts. "That was five billion years ago. So...she's dead now. Five billion years later, my mum's dead." The Doctor calls her a "bundle of laughs," but before she can process how alone they both actually are, Platform One gives a shudder. The Doctor, nervous and ecstatic in equal amounts, relishes it: "That's not supposed to happen!" I like the Doctor, don't you?
The Steward is in his office bitching at Control: "Well, what was it? I'm just getting green lights at this end." He lies over the PA that it's "gravity pockets" causing the turbulence, and then yells that he's hosted "all sorts of events" on Platforms One, Three, Six, and Fifteen and has "never felt the slightest tremor." He expresses concern over the litigiousness of the rich, and as he continues to try to figure out what's going on, a spider makes its way down the wall. "I don't know what they look like!" he yells, and then notices a spider rattling around near his coffee mug. "I imagine they might look rather like that..." He asks the spider how it got on board, given that there were no small robotic spiders on the guest list. The spider is like, "Ahem, check under Chesney -- that's my ex-husband's name?" The spider presses a button on the Steward's console, and the voice of Platform One says, "Sun filter deactivated." The Steward starts screaming as the invisible filter keeping the supernova heat off his neck starts to drop, letting in the light and sizzling along the walls. He screams and screams and then dies. Outside, the spider escapes through an air vent.
The guests are still in the gallery, chatting with each other, and we pan past the Moxx of Balhoon telling the Face of Bo,"Indubitably, this is the Bad Wolf scenario. I find the relative laxity of the ongoing multiverse..." but as interesting as this sounds to us, we don't get to hear anything else, because Doctor and Rose enter. He's suspicious: "I know gravity pockets, and they don't feel like that." Tree Lady Jabe approaches, and the Doctor asks her what she thinks about it: "The engines, they pitched up about 30 hertz, is that dodgy or what?" Jabe's like, "The sounds of metal don't make sense, ever," and the Doctor smiles wonderfully: "Where's the engine room?" She doesn't know, but the maintenance duct (quite reminiscent of the mannequin room) just happens to be located near the Cheem suite. She offers to show the Doctor and his -- indicating Rose -- wife. "She's not my wife," says the Doctor. Partner? Concubine? Prostitute? Finally, Rose is like, "Whatever I am, it must be invisible. Do you mind?" After a second, Rose tells them that they can go "pollinate," and that she'll be fine catching up with family. "Quick word with Michael Jackson," she snorts, heading for Cassandra. The Doctor tells Rose not to start a fight, and offers his arm to Jabe: "I'm all yours." Rose turns back, smiling but piqued, and says she wants the Doctor home by midnight. He grins outrageously as they leave the gallery. Earth Death in fifteen minutes.
Spiders scatter as the Doctor and Jabe enter the maintenance duct, acting like partygoers off on a little adventure. Which I guess is what they both are, in different yet awesome ways, but there's a very "the adults on The O.C. are getting wacky again" vibe. Champagne, daring is a turn-on, all that. Jabe tells the Doctor there's no captain on Platform One. It's just the Steward and the Oompas, and "all the rest is controlled by the metal man." Meaning Control, the computer. Jabe's whole "metal is nice, but I don't really get it" is a very cool character point. The Corporation controls the computer, moving the Platforms "from one artistic event to another." The Doctor notes that there's no one from the corporation on board, but Jabe doesn't get it, because she's a deb: "They're not needed. This facility is purely automatic. It's the height of the alpha class. Nothing can go wrong." The Doctor compares it to the Titanic, which he was there for: "Unsinkable?" Jabe allows that the "nautical metaphor is appropriate." The Doctor goes on about the Titanic, in case we didn't get it, and then clarifies, "So, what you're saying is, if we get in trouble, there's no one to help us out?" Not so much, no. The Doctor grins, of course, like a madman: "Fantastic!" He takes off walking, and Tree Lady is like, "Mwah?" Behind them, a spider creeps out of its hiding place.
Rose and Cassandra watch the sun and Earth in the gallery. Cassandra is really invested in her claim to fame: "Soon, the sun will blossom into a red giant, and my home will die. That's where I used to live, when I was a little boy. Down there. Mummy and Daddy had a little house built into the side of the Los Angeles Crevice." Nice little inclusive swipe there at her total mutability. She sighs: "I had such fun." Rose asks where the rest of humanity went, and Cassandra replies, "Mankind has touched every star in the sky." Rose asks if that doesn't mean that Cassandra's not, in fact, the actual Last, but she goes all Slytherin/Mudblood on Rose with a quickness: "I am the last pure human. The others...mingled." She makes as disgusted a face as a CGI tablecloth of skin can muster: "Oh, they call themselves 'New Humans' and 'Proto-humans' and 'Digi-humans' -- even 'Human-ish' -- but you know what I call them? Mongrels." Rose is grossed out, because back home, that's called National Front. There's a lovely double entendre here: "Right. And you stayed behind." Not getting Rose's meaning, Cassandra replies that she's kept herself "pure." Again showing her wit and skill with barbed meaning, Rose pretends to change the subject while actually calling Cassandra a total asshole: "Mm. How many operations have you had?" (The "Mm" in that line translates as a very British "Right. So tell me again how pure?") Cassandra has had 708 surgeries, and week she's having her "blood bleached," so that's 709. Cassandra asks whether that's why Rose is chatting her up: "You could be flatter, Rose. You've got a little bit of a chin poking out." Rose, grimly and somewhat disgusted, says that she'd rather die, but Cassandra assures her that it doesn't hurt. This is a really good scene, and they're both so well written, that I will not bitch about Cassandra in this paragraph. Rose: "No, I mean it: I'd rather die. It's better to die than live like you -- a bitchy trampoline." Cassandra blows her off and Rose takes her on: "I was born on that planet. And so was my mum [dead], and so was my dad [not sure yet], and that makes me officially the Last Human Being in this room. Because you're not human. You've had it all nipped and tucked and flattened until there's nothing left. Anything human got chucked in the bin. You're just skin, Cassandra. Lipstick and skin. Nice talking with you." That's my girl. She takes off, and the Adherents of the Repeated Meme watch her leave the gallery altogether.
"So tell me, Jabe. What's a tree like you doing in a place like this?" Heh. Jabe says that she's there to show respect for the Earth, which is maybe the best character point of all, because of what Rose says later about how there's no one left to give witness to her passing. Jabe's so complex and delightful, being able to manage this as simultaneously an art exhibit, a network opportunity, and a sacred and meaningful farewell to the place we all started. The Doctor asks if she's not really there for the networking, and she admits that there's a certain necessity of having to be seen at the right occasions, "in case [her] share prices drop," as the Doctor says. "I know you lot. You've got massive forests everywhere, roots everywhere, and there's always money in land." Talk about a hate-on for the multinationals. Dude, Doctor. Remember 1990 in America when everybody got so ecologically-minded that the whole country was bored with it by 1992? From my understanding, the whole multinationals argument was the same thing in the UK, around that time. Which is kind of where Russell Davies lives. He's a great storyteller with the timeless themes, and this show makes me cry a lot, but his references and grudges are...similarly timeless. Not that they're not important, it's just weird. Boy George again.
"You respect the Earth as family," Jabe explains. "So many species evolved from that planet. Mankind is only one. I'm another. My ancestors were transplanted from the planet down below. And I'm a direct descendant of the tropical rainforest." What a fucking awesome concept. Even the Doctor is impressed. He sonic screwdrivers a panel with that same alien script on it, and begins looking at readouts. The more Jabe talks, the harder the Doctor concentrates; the further he retreats. "And what about your ancestry, Doctor? Perhaps you could tell a story or two...Perhaps a man only enjoys trouble when there's nothing else left...I scanned you earlier. The metal machine had trouble identifying your species -- refused to admit your existence." The Doctor pretends to concentrate, but a shadow crosses his face. "Even when it named you, I wouldn't believe it. But it was right." He stops scanning, sadness so deep in his eyes you wish the farting aliens would show up. Jabe whispers, awed, "I know where you're from. Forgive me for intruding, but it's remarkable that you even exist." She reaches out: "I just want to say how sorry I am." That's great drama, that there, because you could have put it together, but the way things are left out, it hits you in a non-verbal place anyway. The Doctor's eyes fill with tears and he places his hand over Jabe's, and a tear falls down his cheek. He finishes up, and they head to the engine room. The Galaxy Quest joke about why would you ever have a hallway with pounding things at set intervals: there are huge fans circulating all the way down the corridor. At least this makes sense, as a venting room for the engines, but it's still a funny visual. In Russell Davies's world, they've just learnt about Frogger. The Doctor notes that it's a bit cold down there. Not for long.
The Adherents of the Repeated Meme snatch Rose.
The Doctor calls the fans "a great bit of air conditioning, sort of nice and old-fashioned." Perhaps "retro," he says. He sonics a wall panel and a spiderbot falls out and skitters away. The Doctor tries to sonic it off the wall as Jabe asks whether it's part of the "retro," and finally shoots a vine up at it, bringing the beastie down into the Doctor's hand. I wish she were a Companion some time later. Well: time travel. Could still happen, I guess. The Doctor congratulates Jabe on the liana, and she blushes: "Thank you! We're not supposed to show them in public." He grins and figures that the spiders are for sabotage. Earth Death in ten minutes. "And the temperature's about to rocket. Come on."
There's a missing scene here, in the broadcast, in which the aliens mill around in the gallery and Cassandra calls out: "The planet's end. Come gather! Come gather! Bid farewell to the cradle of civilization. Let us mourn her with a traditional ballad." And then "Toxic" starts playing, either way. The thing about the "Toxic" is that, if you listen overmuch to the radio or whatever, you might hate the song. I don't mind it, either way. But the way it's used here is fantastic, really. It fits all the shots together in a really great way and sells the suspense well. Frankly, I wish it had played over many more of the scenes and danger and stuff. Follow your instincts. The Doctor and Jabe hurry towards the Steward's office as another corridor fills with smoke, the staff coughing and squealing. The Doctor sonics the Steward's sun filter back up, and they smell the smell of barbecued blue guy. The Doctor notes that another sun filter is going to be dropping.
"Toxic" is playing loudly in the room where the Adherents stashed Rose, as she wakes up. Her sun filter starts to descend, and she runs to the door. Outside, the Doctor arrives and hears her screaming. "It would be you," he jokes to her screaming, and tries to answer the door. He finally sonics the sun filter to rise, but it only works long enough to show us the burnt-out damage above the fire line, then starts dropping again. "The computer's getting clever," says the Doctor, and Rose tells him to stop "mucking about." They yak at each other for a while, and finally Rose has to go lie down on the floor closer to the windscreen, screaming that the locks have melted. The room gets brighter and brighter as the filter descends. The Doctor finally just jams the whole screwdriver into the panel wires outside. The filter rises, but the door can't open. He tells Rose not to go anywhere and runs off. Rose: "Where're am I gonna go? Ipswich?" Earth Death in five minutes.
Jabe's metal machine confirms that the spiders have infiltrated the entirety of Platform One. Everybody in the gallery gasps, and Cassandra asks how that can even be: "Our private rooms are protected by a code wall." Again, she asks for moisturizing, again, twice, again, irritating. The Moxx of Balhoon asks for the Steward, and Jabe has to freak them out further by telling them he's dead. They all freak out, because aristocrats always depend on the underclass for their structure and survival, blah blah blah, they are effete. Cassandra blames the Face of Bo for everything, because he sponsored the event. The Face shakes back and forth, because she is full of it. "Talk to the face! Talk to the face!" yells Cassandra. That part was funny.
The Doctor brings us back to the parlor mystery non-plot for a second and puts a spider down on the floor. Which would be more interesting if any of these people had an agenda or a personality, but as far as we know, none of them do, which pretty much invalidates the point. But this scene is not the point of the episode, so it's fine. The spider heads toward Cassandra, who makes a sketchy face, and then it crawls over to the feet of the Adherents. Cassandra, obnoxiously: "The Adherents of the Repeated Meme. J'accuse!" The Doctor then "explains" that a "meme" is just an idea, so they don't really exist or something, and then he unplugs one of their arms and they all drop and disappear, and whatever. This isn't, like, a graduate-level concept but you gotta be pretty lazy to drop this kind of thing in like it's something shiny. Or maybe we've just found the secret place where I dork out and try to explain to you the difference between a Mark II and a Mark VII Viper while you stare at me, bored out of your mind. At least linguistics and literary theory don't show up this baldly or lazily on TV that often. The Doctor nudges the spider again, and this time it heads for Cassandra. She opines that the Doctor was "the school swot and never got kissed," and he raises his eyebrows at her. She calls her surgeons to arms, and they raise their moisturizing tanks, and the Doctor is unimpressed, because his skin is fine but who can't use a little moisturizing? Cassandra's like, "But with acid!" She explains, unnecessarily, that the whole cast of aliens carried her spiders through the code walls into their suites and that's how they took over everything. She admits that her original plan was to manufacture a hostage situation, including her own self, and the Doctor cluck-clucks that even after "five billion years, "it still comes down to money." Cassandra explains that it's not cheap looking totally flat and stupid, and additionally brags that she, and not Rose, is the Last Human. Like we care! She is really out of touch with what is impressive to people at this point. The Moxx of Balhoon shouts for her arrest and she calls him a pixie and tells him to shut up. Earth Death in three minutes. She and her surgeons teleport out after she shuts down the forcefields protecting Platform One. The Doctor and Jabe resolve to find a system restore switch for Control, to get the fields back on. The Doctor tells the gallery to "just chill," and it sounds every bit as cool as you think.
Earth Death in two minutes. Jabe and the Doctor are back in the maintenance duct again. The voice of Platform One informs them that the heat levels are "critical." Actually, the voice of Platform One informs them of a bunch of things, almost constantly, and becomes kind of annoying. At the engine room, the Doctor realizes that the reset switch is at the other end of the fan corridor, which we could have assumed. He pulls down a manual lever from the wall, and the fans slow down, but as soon as he lets go, it snaps back up. Jabe takes over holding it down, and the Doctor shakes his head at her: "You can't. The heat's going to vent through this place." She knows. "Jabe, you're made of wood," says the Doctor. Would be funny, but it's mostly scary. "Then stop wasting time, Time Lord," says Jabe. They smile sexily at each other, and she watches him go.
Viewscreens all over the Platform start cracking. The Doctor dodges under the first fan and stares up at the one. The glass in Rose's window starts to crack. Rays of sunlight burst in and burn holes around her as she screams. The Doctor is still stuck between the fans. He looks back at Jabe, now breathing hard and sweating, and ducks under the second fan. The Moxx of Balhoon is bathed in light, and screams himself to death. Sunlight continues to arc all around Rose. The Doctor stands before the last fan. Back at the lever, Jabe shakes, and her hand bursts into flame. The Doctor looks back at her screams, shocked. She drops, dead, and the lever snaps up. The fans start to spin so fast they're blurry, as they try to cool the unshielded Platform. The walls around Rose continue to burn as the voice of Platform One counts down the expansion of the sun. "Planet explodes in 10...9..." The Doctor closes his eyes and the music and tone change drastically, as he calms himself before the fan blade. "8...7...6...5...4..." Rose breathes in slow motion, getting ready to die. The Doctor, to the tune of a Time Lord song, steps calmly though the fan blade, still with eyes closed, and sprints over and pulls the reset switch. "...1." The force fields around the Platform resets, the planet is engulfed in fire.
As the "exoglass" in the viewscreens self-repairs and Rose opens her eyes, the fan blades return to normal, and the Doctor walks back across. He looks at Jabe's body, smoking still, for a long time.
Rose returns to the observation gallery, where many of the aliens are dead or severely injured. The Doctor glances at Rose on his way in, but goes right over to Jabe's companions, telling them what happened. He returns to Rose a new Doctor that we have not seen before. "You all right?" she asks. If by "all right" you mean "very fucking hardcore," then yes. "Yeah, I'm fine. I'm full of ideas, I'm bristling with them. Idea number one: teleportation through five thousand degrees needs some kind of feed. Idea number two: this feed must be hidden nearby." He cracks open the ostrich egg, revealing whatever that is that he is talking about. "Idea number three: if you're as clever as me, then a teleportation feed can be reversed." He does something to it, and Cassandra reappears mid-gloat: "Ooh, you should have seen their little alien faces..." The Doctor welcomes her, and she gets awkward. "So. You...passed my little test? Bravo. This makes you eligible to join the...er, the Human Club." The Doctor reminds her that people died, and that she murders them, and she pulls...this is rough, because what she pulls is the Rose card, from earlier this evening. Very Flannery O'Connor, that: make a good guy say the same thing as the bad guy, and it telescopes out so far that it comes off the page and hits you in the face. "Wait, am I a racist too? Would I say that too?" I love stories that do that. "That depends on your definition of 'people,'" Cassandra simpers. "And that's enough of a technicality to keep your lawyers dizzy for centuries. Take me to court then, Doctor! And watch me smile, and cry, and flutter..." The Doctor mentions that she's also creaking. Her skin is quickly tightening, getting whiter and whiter and constricting in on herself. "Ah! I'm drying out! Oh, sweet heavens! Moisturize me! Moisturize me!" Rose watches in horror; everybody else...watches. "Where are my surgeons? My lovely boys! It's too hot!" She gets red and blotchy. Gross. The Doctor reminds Cassandra that it was she who raised the temperature, but Cassandra pathetically begs for mercy. It's not entirely easy for the Doctor -- but if Jabe and the Moxx hadn't died, I don't know if he could at all. Rose whispers to the Doctor, asking for help for Cassandra, but the Doctor sees a symmetry: "Everything has its time. And everything dies." Cassandra shrivels up and explodes disgustingly -- and hilariously -- screaming that she is too young to die. The Doctor leaves, cold and still angry.
The shuttles take off from Platform One, which is closing down for maintenance. Rose stands alone in the gallery, staring out the window watching the Earth burn, sad and bedraggled, head cocked to the side. The Doctor watches her from the doorway, leaning against the post, in shadow. The asteroids of Earth float past. Rose hears the Doctor coming to stand with her, and turns around: "The end of the Earth. It's gone. And we were too busy saving ourselves. No one saw it go." The Doctor looks at her. Rose: "All those years, all that history. And no one was even looking. It's just..." He holds out his hand and says, comfortingly, "Come with me." They walk slowly out of the gallery.
TARDIS opens on 2005, and Rose steps out into the London crowds, newly appreciative, a little sad. The Doctor stands beside her. There's a cry from a baby; the people are beautiful. She stands in the river of them. "You think it'll last forever. People, and cars and concrete. But it won't. One day, it's all gone." Already happened, when she kissed Mickey goodbye. They look up. "Even the sky." The Doctor thinks to himself, realizing that he can trust her with the truth, now that she's seen what she has, and given up what she has, and tells her, "My planet's gone." She turns to look at him -- after all the jiving and jumping, he's talking about home. The music from the engine room begins again -- which is what makes me think that what he did in there was Time Lordish in some way -- and he comes clean: "It's dead. It burned like the Earth. It's just rocks and dust. Before its time." Rose is very sympathetic, wondering how it happened. "There was a War. And we lost." He doesn't tell her with whom the War was fought, so she clears her throat and asks about his people. "I'm a Time Lord," he tells her. "I'm the last of the Time Lords. They're all gone. I'm the only survivor. I'm left traveling on my own, because there's no one else." Rose mentions the obligatory -- herself -- and she smiles a very sweet, close-lipped smile. "You've seen how dangerous it is," he says. "Do you want to go home?" She thinks and thinks, and then resolves to break the tension by not answering: "I don't know. I want...Oh! Can you smell chips?" He laughs and his voice is so thankful: "Yeah. Yeah!" She shakes her head, eyes wide. "I want chips." The Doctor smiles at her and agrees that he does too. Rose: "Right, then. Before you get me back in that box, chips it is, and you can pay." The Doctor travels light: "No money." Rose grins and bumps his shoulder. "What sort of date are you? Come on then, tightwad, chips are on me. We've only got five billion years til the shops close." He smiles deeply, and they walk off down the street together laughing, and then SciFi sucks. The broadcast cuts off the last second as they walk into the crowd: Rose nuzzling her head against the Doctor's shoulder.
So there's the end of Rose's world, which happened at the beginning of the episode. And there's the end of Earth, which we saw. There's the end of Gallifrey, which we finally heard about for sure. There's the end of Jabe, and Cassandra, the end of purity and "purity," the end of Rose's Companion interview, the end of the Doctor's "not a crazy alien monster" interview, end of distrust, end of fear. End of loneliness. If you live in all times and places simultaneously, I imagine that last one's a pretty big world. I'm glad it's ended.