Dr. Who: "Rose"

This review was commissioned by @QuietlyLurking


Ah, Doctor Who. The scifi franchise that first popularized cyborg drones who try to force-assimilate people, virtual worlds called "The Matrix," and a long list of other now-cliched concepts that most people attribute to different works. It's been on TV for longer and bounced back from more hiatuses and cancellations than Star Trek, despite not usually having more than a fraction of the latter's budget. It's had more spin-offs and soft reboots than Star Wars. But, being a family-friendly-ish British television series written pretty much entirely for British family audiences, Doctor Who has never gotten as much worldwide attention as the (mostly American) pop scifi series that have all taken inspiration from it.

As is generally the case with these legacy franchises, it's impossible for me to say "how good" Doctor Who is. When you have that many writers, directors, and showrunners handling the IP over that many decades, it is inevitable that you'll get both amazing episodes and terrible episodes. Some of the best and worst television I've ever seen have both been Doctor Who.

The vast majority of my readers have probably at least heard a bit about Doctor Who. For those few who haven't, the gist of it is that it's about an immortal, time-travelling alien adventurer who keeps his name to himself and goes only by "the Doctor." He has something of a fascination with humans, and every so often he'll recruit one or more human companions (almost always from contemporary England, for audience avatar purposes) to bring along on his escapades through space and time. He travels in a timeship that disguises itself as a 1950's police phonebox (it's supposed to be able to shapeshift to disguise itself in any environment, but the active camouflage device stopped working centuries ago, so it's stuck like that~). Often, he serves as an eleventh hour rescuer, appearing out of nowhere at times and places of crisis to save the day just to give himself a warm fuzzy feeling. Other times, his adventures are simple thrill-seeking, or (more rarely) directives from his own species' government who occasionally use the eccentric old rogue as a deniable asset.

Yes, Rick Sanchez is explicitly written as a parody of the Doctor (mixed with Doc Brown from "Back to the Future").

The 2005 relaunch of Doctor Who, following a sixteen-year hiatus from the small screen, made an extremely bold change to the nature of both the franchise and the character. It establishes that a "Great Time War" that occurred offscreen between the Doctor's previous appearance and this one (well, "between" from the Doctor's subjective perspective. He's a time traveller, after all). This war consumed the Doctor's civilization, along with that of the other very powerful time-warping species that warred with them, leaving him as possibly the last surviving member of his species. Effectively transforming him from a restless misfit to a traumatized war veteran wracked with survivor's guilt. Doctor Who is famously loose with continuity, but this change, this reframing of the character and the universe he exists in, is one that the franchise actually committed to throughout the decades since.

As luck would have it, it's the pilot episode of this 2005 series that I'll be reviewing today.

This obviously won't be a blind review. I saw "Rose" just a few months after it came out, almost twenty years ago. Unusually for me, I also won't be doing a pseudo-blind review by compartmentalizing my knowledge. The reason for this is that "Rose" is much more interesting within the context of the larger franchise than it is on its own. Notably, while this was the first Doctor Who episode I ever saw, I didn't get interested in Doctor Who until I was shown some better episodes from before and after it. It's a critically important episode in Doctor Who history, but it's not a terribly good one, and the better aspects of it are only apparent in retrospect.

Another reason I'd prefer to not do a faux-blind review is because looking at "Rose" in context also makes it a very illustrative example of then-showrunner Russel T. Davies' writing. The man was very good at some things, and very bad at others, and looking back at "Rose" I can see both the best and the worst aspects of his ensuing Doctor Who tenure foreshadowed in it.

Amusingly, Davies's strengths and weaknesses are almost the diametric opposite of the showrunner who would follow him. I think Davies' stint was better than the next guy's overall, but it's almost hard to compare them because it's such a study in opposite extremes.


"Rose" starts out, as Doctor Who pilots often do, with the woman who is to become the Doctor's newest sidekick going about her normal life in the England of the episode's air date. Rose Tyler is a working class young adult who blew her one probable chance at upward social mobility to some teenaged bad decisions, and is now stuck within with her petulant widowed mother and working retail in a clothing store for the foreseeable future. We don't learn most of these details until later, but the actress communicates the impression of Rose's life circumstances and her less-than-graceful feelings about them very well just through her expressions and body language even before her first spoken word. The cinematography goes along with this well; the long, unbroken shots centered on Rose while her apartment, her mother, her street, and her workplace all buzz around behind her do a lot to sell the frustration, self-loathing, and ennui of an underachieving urban millennial who feels like she's already blown it for good.

This is probably Russel T. Davies' biggest strength as a storyteller. The way he does indirect characterization, and his skill at getting the actors to really sell it. Communicating a character's aspirations, fears, and inner conflicts with just a few choice camera angles and body movements.

The plot finds Rose when she goes back into the clothing store's storage basement to bring something to her boss just after closing, and stumbles into a crowd of animated fashion dummies who aren't very happy about her poking around.

They're slow-moving, but they also made a point of luring her away from the exits and cutting her off before coming in for the kill. Demonstrating intelligence that more than makes up for their limited mobility. She's saved at the last minute by a strange, ill-mannered man in a leather jacket who uses a scifi omnitool to fend off the animated dummies and drag her to safety. This is our introduction to the new incarnation of the Doctor himself, and it's with his character that Davies' skill at characterization really shows itself.

For context, series lore has the Doctor going through periodic "regenerations" as part of his technologically-enabled immortality. Every so often, he undergoes a metamorphosis, keeping his memories but changing his appearance and some aspects of his personality along with prolonging his life. Obviously, this concept was invented as a plot device to accommodate new actors. You can't have a multi-decade franchise centered on a single character without having to deal with that issue one way or another, and this is Doctor Who's way of dealing with it.

When starting a new series after a long hiatus though, the Doctor's newest incarnation has to do a lot more than usual to sell themself as both the same character you remember from years ago and NOT the same character you remember from years ago. In the case of this incarnation - the 9th Doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston - the task is made even harder by the whole Great Time War twist that transformed the Doctor in a way that no number of technobabble rejuvenation cycles ever could. Eccleston had to play a traumatized, guilt-ridden, borderline-suicidal version of the zany, adventurous rogue that returning audiences remembered.

And oh my god did he ever deliver.

The 9th Doctor is my favourite Doctor, almost entirely because of how good a job Eccleston did at capturing this.

There's a VISIBLE conflict inside of the Doctor as he reflexively lays on the quirky charm but keeps remembering that he doesn't think he can be that person anymore and stopping himself. He spends the entire rescue sequence being resentful of having to rescue yet another dumb human from yet another weird threat when he just wants it all to be over, but then - after bidding Rose goodbye outside the building - he abruptly comes back, warmly introduces himself, and then gruffly turns away and runs again. Leaving her every bit as baffled as you'd expect.

When I put it in writing "zany impish guy is now a traumatized veteran" sounds like an edgy juvenile deconstruction. It isn't, though. It really, really isn't. Part of the 9th Doctor's character arc in this season is realizing that he hasn't actually lost the goofiness, positivity, and idealism that defined his previous incarnations. It's been tempered, but it's still who he is.

As far as the episode plot goes, the Doctor grudgingly explains to Rose during their escape that the dummies are being animated by an alien hive mind known as the Nestene. The Nestene have a weird affinity for certain forms of plastic, and can animate and reshape any of it within range of the relay devices that their networked minds inhabit. Several of the Nestenes' hydrocarbon-rich worlds were collateral damage of a war that he doesn't want to talk about, so now they're looking to use Earth as a replacement. The plan being to covertly plant more of their relay devices in an expanding area of influence across the planet, then animate all the plastic at once and subjugate humanity in a surprise attack.

The Doctor was trying to plant a bomb on the device hidden in this building when the Nestene detected him. Rose's boss happened to see them move, and they had to kill him to preserve their secrecy. Now Rose is in the same boat. This is why she's going to do her best to forget everything she saw this evening and avoid attracting attention to herself henceforth.

After the rescue, Rose has just barely managed to convince herself she imagined that entire episode before being shown that she was not imagining that entire episode.

This is another detail that's more interesting in series context. Different incarnations of the Doctor have had different policies regarding (nonlethal) violence. Some of them were willing and able to throw down. Others were much stricter pacifists. Using a bespoke weapon like a bomb in this way - even against a non-vital component of the Nestene hive mind - is an anomaly. That his mind would even go to explosives as the solution is very much a result of him having just come out the other side of a war.

After this point, the episode increasingly shows its cracks. Like I said, despite its strong opening, "Rose" is not a great Doctor Who episode overall, and it shows Davies' flaws as well as his merits. Like his intrusive low-brow humor, his characters picking up the idiot ball whenever the plot gets stuck, and his soon-to-be-infamous asspull resolutions.

When she fled the explosion, Rose unthinkingly held onto the severed arm of a dummy that got cut off during the chase. Back home, she discards it in a nearby dumpster. The next morning, it comes crawling into her apartment, and the Doctor tracks it back to there. The special effects for them grappling with this severed arm are...not great, to say the least. Par for the course for most of Doctor Who's history, but still, in most of the shots its very obviously just the actors strangling themselves with an unmoving plastic arm.

There's also this incredibly cringeworthy scene during the Doctor's housecall when he meets Tyler's mother Jackie, and - with zero buildup or hesitation - Jackie starts trying to get him to fuck her right then and there. Think like, cheesy porno style come-ons. It's not funny, or creepy, or anything else that a scene like this one might have theoretically been going for. I think (based in large part on my exposure with other Davies episodes) that humor was the intention, but it's just too stilted and character-breaking to succeed at that. It's just cringe.

There is some other humor in the house call sequence that works much better. Unsurprisingly, the source of it is the Doctor, once again being a gruff, world-weary version of the zany space clown archetype. There are so many great lines here, and the way he bounces off of Rose is just perfect. One memorable part was when he's digging through some old magazines hunting for the arm, and while glancing at the covers mumbles things like "oh, heartwarming story. Pity how it ends" and "they're together? Yeah right, he's gay and she's an alien."

For some stronger examples of snappy dialogue, there are a couple of dialogue bits between the Doctor and Rose from later in the episode that gained something approaching memetic status. A more serious instance is this monologue where Rose follows the Doctor out of her apartment after he deals with the arm and once again tries to get him to tell her who and what she is, and he once again is visibly struggling with his desire for companionship versus his desire to be alone and/or die.

Rose: Really though, Doctor. Tell me. Who are you?

The Doctor: Do you know like we were saying? About the Earth revolving? It's like when you're a kid. The first time they tell you that the world's turning and you just can't quite believe it because everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it. 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...That's who I am. Now forget me, Rose Tyler. Go home.

Eccleston's delivery is, again, as important for this scene's power as the script itself is. That monologue could very easily have come across as pretentious and braggarty, but the actor makes you believe that he's just telling it like it is.

For a more comical example, this one really did achieve minor meme status in the 2000's:

Rose: If you are an alien how come you sound like you're from the North?

The Doctor: Lots of planets have a North.

Once again, Rose tries to go following after the Doctor. Once again, she is rebuffed. This time though, it's Rose who actively keeps trying to re-involve himself despite the Doctor's warnings, clearly more afraid of the ennui and mediocity of her normal life than she is of being mauled by plastic-controlling aliens. She runs an internet search for this Doctor character, and finds photos and illustrations of the man she recognizes on a bunch of conspiracy forums. One of the people gathering data about this figure lives in London, and she makes a point of contacting him and arranging an in-person interview.

There's a minor plot hiccup here, in the "Doctor" search getting her the same recognizable incarnation of the Doctor that she met. The Ninth Doctor actually ends up having a very short career before being forced to regenerate, most of it onscreen, with his dialogue implying that he had his previous regeneration just very shortly before the beginning of "Rose." Any conspiracy nuts tracking the Doctor through the historical record would be much, much more likely to zero in on one of his other incarnations, whose photos and sketches Rose would obviously not recognize.

The bigger problem from this point on, though, is Rose's boyfriend Mickey.

...

I forgot how fucking weird this show was about Mickey. Like, when I first watched "Rose" as a dumb, apathetic, not-very-critically-minded nineteen year old, I still realized that the show was being fucking weird about Mickey. Rewatching it today, it's worse than I remembered.

The show decides from the beginning that Mickey is a useless, needy loser who Rose is better off without, and Rose herself seems to be struggling to avoid that conclusion herself before finally embracing it in the episode's final scene. And sure, he's written as kind of a self-centered jerk.

But...he's also constantly driving Rose around when she needs to go somewhere. Letting her borrow his computer because she got her own laptop stolen. Etc, etc. All while she treats him with barely suppressed contempt. He has some unpleasant characteristics, but like...he also clearly cares a lot about her and does what he can to accommodate her, and she has zero appreciation for it. It's not just her, either. The show itself treats him with contempt. Like, when he drives Rose off to meet the conspiracy forum guy (Mickey is worried about Rose going alone into a strange man who she just met on the internet's house. And is framed as being in the wrong for doing so. Which, um. Excuse me show, but what the fuck?) and the Nestene attack him trying to get at Rose. It's specifically a plastic dumpster that they animate and attack him with, and they specifically abduct him by sucking him inside and literally "throwing him in the trash."

Having the dumpster let out a cartoony belch after it swallows him just adds an extra dose of unfunny low-brow humor that doesn't even make sense in context (we later find out that he wasn't eaten at all, just abducted) to the weird spitefulness toward the Doctor's normie rival.

And yeah, "rival." Because, for some fucking reason, Mickey is written like an unsuccessful romantic rival for Rose's affection. Even though the Doctor's interest in human companions has almost never been romantic or sexual in nature. The Doctor himself treats Mickey with total contempt from the moment he lays eyes on him onward, in a way that he notably does not behave toward any other rando humans he interacts with, and it...god, it literally feels like someone's cuckold fetish.

The final bit of dialogue in the episode has Mickey begging Rose not to go adventuring with the Doctor (after the latter has finally relented and allowed Rose to come with him if she wishes), seemingly as much out of concern for her safety as desire to keep her near himself. And...

Rose: Thank you.

Mickey: For what?

Rose: Exactly.

*Rose turns her back on him and runs off into the Doctor's timeship*

Mickey is also the only black character in this episode.

Now, I don't quite know the nuances of British anti-black racism and whether it differs from American anti-black racism. To my American eyes, the way Micki is being written and treated by the story doesn't align with the usual stereotypes. If anything, looking at the script without the casting, you'd peg him as a whiny little white boy stereotype before anything else. But at the same time, the one black guy in an otherwise white cast getting repeatedly - literally and figuratively - thrown in the trash is...I don't know. Even without the racial aspect, this would be fucking weird. With the racial aspect, it's even fucking weirder.

...

Anyway, after Rose comes out of the conspiracy guy's house, Mickey has been replaced by a plastic replica of him piloted by a Nestene interrogator. This dummy-Mickey has shiny skin, painted-on hair, unblinking eyes, and a near-frozen rictus grin, and also acts nothing like the original. Rose doesn't notice anything wrong until after he's driven her home and then subsequently taken her out to a restaurant hours later.

Is this supposed to be much less obvious to the characters than it is to the audience, with the cues being a shorthand to make sure we understand what happened? If so, they way, way, WAY overdid it, in a way that disrespects the audience's intelligence. Is the joke supposed to be that Rose is an oblivious idiot who doesn't notice the most obvious doppleganger in the world? The episode doesn't treat her like an idiot. It isn't written in a way that makes her the butt of the joke. She isn't written as unobservant or oblivious at all, outside of this one sequence. Is the joke supposed to be that she cares so little about *Mickey specifically* that she doesn't notice his replacement where she would notice anyone else's? In that case, that just makes the episode's spiteful treatment of Mickey even more over-the-top and what the fuck.

Anyway, once again the Doctor rescues Rose from the Nestene, and there's a hurried action-y sequence to tie up the episode plot. There are some cool bits in here, like Rose's proper introduction to the Doctor's signature bigger-on-the-inside vehicle.

It's well done, on both the Doctor's end and on Rose's.

Rose helps the Doctor figure out that the Nestene are using the London Fairgrounds Ferris Wheel as a projector dish for their main city-wide (or...country-wide? worldwide? it's unclear) signal projector. Why were they bothering to put smaller relays in shopping malls if they already had a big one whose range totally envelops theirs? No idea, the show totally drops that plot point in favor of the threat of the big Ferris Wheel projector. We later see that this big projector is indeed capable of fine-tuned manipulation of huge numbers of plastic things at much further range, so it's not like they even needed the smaller ones for improved precision or the like.

Still, the scene where the Doctor brings Rose into a hidden London Underground lair beneath the Ferris Wheel is a good one. Both in terms of set design, and in scriptwriting and acting.

That basin of molten yellow stuff is the primary Nestene Consciousness node on Earth. Through it, the Doctor can request an audience with the Nestene Overmind itself rather than its more limited individual consciousnesses. An audience which the Nestene grant. We can only understand the Doctor's side of the conversation (the Nestene speak in weird hissing and gibbering noises from the molten pit, while the Doctor replies in English), but once again there's some amazing subtle character work on display here.

The Doctor tries appealing to both interstellar law and to the Nestenes' own cultural mores to convince them that they should abort the invasion of Earth, while carefully dancing around both the reason for their invasion and his own identity. Just from hearing half of the dialogue, the audience can infer that the Nestene are very much refugees on their back foot, making moral and logistical compromises that they normally wouldn't on account of their desperate situation (this is somewhat contradicted by earlier appearances of the Nestene in older Doctor Who series which had them as pretty ruthless and imperialistic by default, but like I said, Doctor Who has always been loose with that type of continuity). It briefly seems like the Doctor might even be getting through to the Overmind, before it puts him together with that timeship its agents just found. It now identifies him as a member of one of the warring godtech-wielding species responsible for its own people's current situation. At which point it loses any and all patience for being condescended to or moralized at by him. And man, Eccleston really makes you feel second-hand self loathing with his end of the performance.

It also, in that moment, recontextualizes his insistence on trying to reason with the Overmind even after it's made it clear through its underlings that it really doesn't care to be reasoned with. The Doctor has always tried diplomacy first and force second (if not third or even fourth). That's been a huge part of his character from day one. But, the desperation with which he attempts it here, the pain and bullheaded-insistence even after hearing so many "nos" and fleeing so many violent encounters with these Nestene, combined with his palpable shame and self-loathing when it identifies his species...it's raw. We see now why the Doctor is trying to stop himself from taking on more companions and going off on more lighthearted adventures like he always used to. Much of the universe now sees his kind - the Gallifreyans, sometimes known as Time Lords to outsiders - as a race of genocidaires whose own final disappearance from the timestream comes as a relief, and - whatever role he himself played in the war - he does not consider himself to be totally innocent of that collective legacy.

...

The specifics of the Great Time War are quite a bit more nuanced than that, when you know the whole story. The aliens that the Gallifreyans were fighting against - the Daleks - are pretty much Genocide Incarnate, and stopping them would justify almost any amount of collateral damage.

On the other hand, we also learn that while the Gallifreyans were obviously much better than the Daleks, their conduct in the war was still far from justified. They were already portrayed as a morally lazy and decadent people by default when they appeared in previous series. During the Great Time War, we learn, their callousness with regards to collateral damage came to far exceed the necessary, and as their culture militarized they came to take on a much more actively supremacist view of themselves than they'd had before. Some collateral damage was unavoidable. Some sacrifices had to be made. But the Gallifreyans did not take any pains whatsoever to avoid what they could or to determine which sacrifices were in fact necessary.

Looking at Doctor Who in its cultural context, one could definitely see this thread as the thoughts of a 21st century Englishman looking back at the British Empire's war against Nazi Germany and asking himself whether or not he has anything to be proud of. It doesn't align perfectly (unlike the Gallifreyan vs. Dalek conflict, the sins of England and Germany differed more in degree than they did in kind), but the vibe is a pretty strong fit.

...

The real Mickey is down in the lair, alive, unhurt, and um...apparently just sort of sitting there, not even tied up or anything.

I'd say that Rose rescues Mickey here, but I'm not entirely clear on what sort of action she performed to "rescue" him, so...iunno?

When the Doctor's negotiations with the Overmind go south, it has some drones grab him and discovers the bottle of deadly anti-Nestene poison he had with him as a plan B. It seems to fly into a panic, and...animates all the mannequins (and presumably other large plastic objects) within its sphere of influence (how big is that, exactly? City? Country? Planet?) and makes them just start killing random people left and right.

Why didn't it kill Mickey, if its doppleganger had already been foiled and it had no further need to keep him alive for observation and copying?

Also, it makes some of its new vessels form machine guns out of their arms and shoot people. An ability that would have come in really, really handy during some earlier chases. And also during this next action sequence that's about to happen in its lair. I don't know why it can do this at some times but not at others.

...

I said before that Russel T. Davies has a problem with asspull resolutions. This sequence reminds me that he also had a problem with asspull escalations. Often in stories that didn't even require that escalation at all to establish their stakes.

...

Anyway, Rose plucks up the courage to grab a chain and swing down at the mannequins holding the Doctor by the railing, kicking them off of him and knocking them along with the poison vial one of them had seized into the basin containing the primary node. The Nestene vessel on Earth is destroyed, and the plastic constructs all de-animate.

Why did the Nestene just ignore Rose and Micki until she did that, when it had a bunch of units in the room and it was already killing every other human it could see? Why didn't it have some one of its units shoot them and/or the doctor if it can give them guns at a moment's notice, rather than completely ignoring them and just having some of its drones sort of shake the Doctor around for a while? Don't think about it, there's nothing to think about.

So. Rose proves herself capable of rising to the occasion, and also has repaid the Doctor for saving her own life, forcing him to acknowledge her as someone to take seriously despite his haze of bitterness and depression. Humanity has defended its own against an aggressor, rather than a Gallifreyan unilaterally condemning a victim. By episode's end, he's actually the one asking her to join him, rather than the reverse as it's been until now. Seeing admirable new people grow into their own amid the ashes of the Great Time War has reignited a little spark of his old optimism; a spark that will continue to grow throughout the rest of the season as Rose helps him work through his trauma. Rose, for her part, has gained both an escape from the frustration and ennui, and a helpful example of where despair could otherwise have ended up taking her.

Also, fuck Mickey I guess. Sigh.


As I said, this episode is pretty mediocre on its own, with the clever snappy dialogue between Rose and the Doctor only somewhat compensating for the childish attempts at humor, the empty flailing escalation and resolution, and whatever the fuck is going on with Mickey. As a window into who the Doctor is and where he's at in this point of his life though, and also as an introduction to Rose and how she complements him, it's brilliant.

Subtle, compelling character work, threaded through the illogical plots and around the periodic out-of-character bouts of idiocy. That's Davies' run of "Doctor Who" in a nutshell. There are individual episodes that do much better on the plotting and tonal fronts, but by and large those are the scripts not written by Davies himself. Really, I think this series would have been better if Davies limited himself to direction and "big scope" concept work and character arc plotting, while staying away from the nitty gritty of the scripts.

In short, "Rose" is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get for the subsequent era of Doctor Who. Showcasing the good and the bad in one concise, honest sampler.