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

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< Doctor Who‎ | Recap‎ | S27
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.

"Then stop wasting time, Time Lord."

Sometimes I feel I've got to
Run away
I've got to
Get away

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