Doctor Who/Recap/S27/E02 The End of the World

"You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you're gonna get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming, or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible. Like, maybe you survive. This is the year 5.5/apple/26, five billion years in your future, and this is the day... Hold on... This is the day the sun expands. Welcome to the end of the world."

- The Doctor

Rose expresses a wish to visit the future, and the Doctor cheerfully obliges... but scorns her idea of a mere hundred years in the future in favour of five billion years. Nothing succeeds like excess!

It's the year 5.5/Apple/26 when the Doctor and Rose materialise aboard Platform One, a cruciform space station orbiting a dying star. The star is, in fact, our sun; and in a few minutes, it will finally expand and consume the Earth. This is considered high entertainment in the future -- Snuff Film writ large -- so there's a collection of the rich aboard the platform. The guests include a giant face in a jar called The Face Of Boe (who will become important later); the last pure human, Lady Cassandra O'Brien.Δ17 (who will also become important later) and a group of tree people. One of them, Jabe, twigs to the Doctor's oddness, and persuades her PDA to identify his species.

The Doctor seems well at ease in this company, but Rose is completely at sea. She wanders off and has a few second thoughts about this adventure business, as she realises that she is five billion years in the future in the company of a manic alien.

While Rose is off having her pity party, some serious weirdness is transpiring aboard the platform. Little spider robots are crawling all over the place, pulling fun pranks like lowering the space station's sun visors so as to give anyone unfortunate enough to be around a fatal suntan.

The Doctor rejoins Rose, and they watch doomed Earth spin. Rose anxiously presses the Doctor for more information on his people, homeworld, etc.; the Doctor snaps at her for excessive nosiness, gives her mobile an upgrade to make up for it, then goes off to explore the station.

The station's overheating badly what with all the sun filters being down, and when the Doctor tries to raise them, he finds that the power's gone out. Fortunately, there's a redundant power generator on one end of a Death Course. Unfortunately, someone needs to hold down the Death Course-deactivating switch in order for someone else to have a fighting chance. Fortunately, Jabe's around! Unfortunately, she's made of wood, so she catches fire and dies, and the Death Course is reactivated. Fortunately, the Doctor's a Time Lord, so with enough effort, he can walk through the remaining few whirling blades of death and hit the big red button!

Space station saved, the Doctor and Rose go out for chips. The Doctor confides that his home planet is destroyed, and that he's the Last of His Kind. So that's why he's been a bit moody recently. Unfortunately, it'll take another six years before we find out exactly what happened.

Tropes:
"Announcement: Guests are reminded that Platform 1 forbids the use of weapons, teleportation, and religion."
 * Absolute Xenophobe: Lady Cassandra--and how.
 * Amazing Technicolor Population
 * Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: This brief announcement at the beginning.

""Then stop wasting time, Time Lord.""
 * Beware the Nice Ones: This is the first example in the new series that shows the Doctor is not a man you want to be on the bad side of.
 * Brain In A Jar: Cassandra's.
 * Combat Tentacles: Jabe retrieves one of the "peace" drones by extending a vine, then apologizes--"I'm not supposed to show them in public."
 * Continuity Nod: The Doctor makes reference to being on the Titanic, which was established last episode.
 * Death Course
 * Earthshattering Kaboom: The Doctor's not here to save Earth this time.
 * Future Imperfect: A jukebox is called an iPod, and an ostrich is pretty much called a dragon.
 * Heroic Sacrifice: Jabe

"Sometimes I feel I've got to
 * I'm Standing Right Here: "Whatever I am, it must be invisible."
 * Jaccuse
 * Nice to The Waiter: Rose is kind enough to give a drudge permission to speak (!).
 * Obviously Evil: Lady Cassandra
 * Plant Aliens: "Representing the Forest of Cheem, we have...trees." Jabe is a direct descendant of the Tropical Rainforest.
 * Scenery Porn: Not being familiar with running a sci-fi series, Russell T. Davies spent a quite disproportionate amount of the series one budget on this episode. All the money is right up on screen, but later episodes did suffer a bit for it. But it did help win over legions of both new and old fans
 * Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Albeit a less Egregious example than in The Long Game and Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways.
 * Soundtrack Dissonance: "Toxic"
 * "Baby, can't you see? I'm calling / a guy like you Should wear a warning / It's dangerous, I'm fallin'" doesn't fit the scene?
 * Stock Episode Titles: 31 uses
 * Suspiciously Apropos Music: Rose is handling her first trip into space and the future quite well -- until they fire up the "iPod" and it starts playing a song from her own time, and she suddenly gets a massive case of culture shock and runs out of the room. The song is "Tainted Love":

Run away

I've got to

Get away"


 * Trojan Horse: the metal "peace" gifts; the ostrich egg.
 * The X of Y
 * Wham! Line: The Doctor is the last of his WHAT?!?
 * Who Needs Their Whole Body?: Certainly not Cassandra.