Doctor Who: "Rose"...

[fajrdrako]

rosiespark and I decided to watch Doctor Who series 1 all over again, for discussion. I never really had much chance to discuss series 1 in the first place, since I came to the show when series 2 was already under way in the UK - I was a latecomer, yes. Really a latecomer compared to all those people who have been watching since nineteen sixty-whatever.

rosiespark tells me that walkingdaydream wants to join us in the talk so I added her to my flist - hope that's all right, walkingdaydream! Nice to meet you. And of course, anyone else who wishes to join in, is welcome.

So. Doctor Who series 1, episode 1, 2005, "Rose".

I suppose you could say this was a fateful episode for me, because it was the first Doctor Who episode I saw, and it plunged me into this wonderful new fandom, but that wouldn't be true. I had seen two episodes of Doctor Who before that, and they didn't take. One was something with, I think, William Hartnell. Didn't like it, don't remember it, this was about twenty-five years ago. The other was the Paul McGann movie, which ... I'm not even sure what to say about it now. My reactions to it have changed over a decade or so. Let's just way I wasn't impressed at the time.

Having heard the new series was good, some time in the late spring of 2006 I watched "Rose". I thought the story was lame. But the characters... the set-up... the dialogue... Without being bowled over, I was intrigued. Curious. I particularly liked the Doctor. Rose seemed just a kid, but the Doctor?

I wanted more. Could hardly wait for more. I'm sure I would have denied it then still, but I was hooked. Guilty pleasure, perhaps?

So now, going back from the perspective of having seen all of series 3, and the comparative sophistication of having digested a lot of Doctor Who lore in the past year... have my reactions to it changed?

I still think the story is lame. And silly. And the dialogue, compared to some later episodes, is lame and silly in some places, and brilliant in others. It isn't just Christopher Eccleston's brilliant acting - I'll swear, he could make something worth watching out of anything. Anything!

But it isn't just him. For one thing, Billie Piper is also remarkably good, in an understated way (or perhaps an overstated way? with Rose, it's hard to be sure) that is easy to overlook because it's so in-your-face. Rose is as Rose is. The more I watch, then as now, the more I appreciate Rose, an utterly brilliant character from the beginning.

For another, the... I'm struggling for the right word here. Atmosphere, perhaps. Setting. The mixing of mundane and fantastical. The lightness with underpinnings of darkness. Bits of dialogue - both humour and drama - that rise above themselves. The set up of themes that are still unfolding.

Okay, let's take this with some detail of annotation. I watched it with occasional reference to the book Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts - which to a besotted fan like myself, is one of the most beautiful books ever. I was amused to see differences between the shooting scripts and the finished dialogue - not big differences, but interesting ones - for instance, in the book (p. 18) Mickey says to Rose, "See ya!" while in the TV show he says, "Good-bye." In another place, two scenes are transposed.

But what's really interesting is the bits of exposition that were translated into action. For instance, I love Russell T. Davies' initial description of Rose in our first introduction to her, right at the beginning. Her alarm clock has gone off. Don't we all hate the sound of alarm clocks? For obvious reasons? Don't we all know exactly what Rose is thinking and feeling at that moment? Don't we all feel the same thing? What Russell T. Davies says is:

ROSE TYLER sits up in bed, gathers herself for a second. She's 19, her bedroom's a mess, she's got another bloody day at work, and she's so much better than this.

There you have it - the major theme of series 1, and maybe of series 2. Rose's story arc, set up in its entirety. The sense of boredom and uselessness and the tedium of life - and somewhere out there, still unseen, adventure waiting to happen.

And then we come back to the very same thing in "Army of Ghosts", at the end of Rose's saga, seeing her on the bus: "For the first nineteen years of my life, nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not ever. And then I met a man called the Doctor."

Thoughts on watching:

1. It charms me that Rose's bedroom is so pink. I'm not sure why pink is a signature colour for Rose in first season - a pun on her name, perhaps? - but it works.



2. Rose kisses Jackie before going off to work. This episode sets up a lot of the Rose-Jackie relationship, one of my favourite in the series. I love Jackie; and the combination of good scripting for her, and brilliant acting by Camille Coduri, makes her incredibly real, and the nuances of the relationship between them so clear. (It's never remotely so clear regarding Francine and Martha, where the relationship is a one-note thing.) Does Jackie not work? She says (in "Doomsday") that she used to work in a shop, but she doesn't seem to work at all when we see her in series 1 or 2. Why not? Does she have some sort of pension? Pete's life insurance, perhaps? Or are we supposed to think she's on social assistance?



3. I love the scene (without dialogue) where Rose meets Mickey for lunch at Trafalgar Square. It sets up so much about their relationship and character, at its best. Which shares aspects of its worst. It's so very playful.



4. The shooting script describes Mickey as 'laddish'. I never remember or understand exactly what that means. Immature?



5. So we get the spooky bit where Rose is wandering the basement of Henrick's with the lottery money, with spooky dummies stalking her and Wilson nonresponsive and doors closing.... and then, fateful moment, the Doctor is there saying "Run!" and they run and it all begins. I found myself this time trying to track what happened to the lottery money. Right before the Doctor appears, when the dummies are menacing her, the bag of money is in her right hand. When she starts running, holding the Doctor's hand, it's gone. I guess she dropped it right before he appeared.



6. There are, in the world of television, some great first-meeting scenes. One is the first meeting of Mulder and Scully in X-Files: "Nobody down here but the FBI's most unwanted." One is the meeting of Duncan MacLeod and Methos in the Highlander episode "Methos": "...Methos?" "Mi casa es su casa." Or in Smallville, Clark Kent and Lex Luthor, meeting as Lex's speeding car hits Clark on the bridge and he goes over. I love moments like those. And I love this one: "Run!" So they run. Sets the tone for so much.



7. Just for the record, I love their initial dialogue, in the elevator. In fact I probably love all the Doctor/Rose dialogue in this episode - it's close to banter, but it's edged, it's mysterious, it's both a meeting of minds and a contrast of human and alien. I love the way the Doctor's viewpoint is just out of synch with the human, so Rose is struggling to understand him, and intrigued, and instinctively trusting. How soon does she realize just how strange he is? How soon does she realize he is an alien?



8. I don't understand why Jackie calls the person on the phone "Debbie-on-the-end" - is that a reference I don't know?



9. I like the contrast here, that Mickey and Jackie both - though the love Rose - are quite self-serving in their reactions. Jackie wants money for Rose in compensation. Mickey wants to watch the match at the pub. The Doctor has his own agenda, but it isn't that he's out for something.



10. The scene the next day where the Doctor comes to visit Rose's flat does so much to characterize him. The bit about the ears implies he hasn't looked in mirrors much since his last regeneration. We get some wonderful lines ("He's gay and she's an alien"), the byplay with the cards, and a bit of dialogue I particularly love:"What are you doing here?"
    "I live here."
    "Well, what do you do that for?"
    "Because I do."
    And I love the line, "someone blew up my job." When does she later say, "It's practically his way of saying hello?"



11. I usually hate puns but I do get a kick out of the Doctor's "Armless" line. And this might be a good place to point out that I love it that they had Christopher Eccleston use his natural accent, it adds so much to the role - I can't imagine his Doctor with another accent, and I think Ten would be much better with the Scottish accent that is natural to David Tennant.



12. Compared to most of the rest of this, I don't much like the moment of cluelessness when Rose thinks the Doctor is joking (like Mickey did) about being strangled by the plastic hand; just as I don't much like his later moment of cluelessness when he doesn't see the London Eye. (Conceptually, anyway. I love the way Eccelston acts that moment.)



13. In the following scene, the brilliant lines just follow fast and furious. "Ten out of ten for observation." Or:

    Doctor: "Is that supposed to sound tough?"
    Rose: "...Sort of."
    Followed by: Rose: "Is that supposed to sound impressive?"
    Doctor: "...Sort of."

    
    And in retrospect, his line "I'm a long way from home," is quite moving. And the double -dialogue of "the entire world revolves around you" which ends with the exchange:

    Rose: "You're full of it."
    Doctor: "Sort of, yeah."

    
    I says so much about them both: that she's impressed with him, but won't let it go to her head; that he's got a streak of self-deprecation entwined with his self-confidence.



14. And this scene includes that bit of monologue that I love so much I want to quote just for the fun of it:

    It's like when you were a kid. The first time they tell you 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.

    But it is, of course, already way too late for that.



15. For the first time here I really noticed the theme of the TARDIS noise. The TARDIS is of course a whole mythic theme in itself, but this show uses the noise it makes so effectively. Rose hardly notices the TARDIS when she first sees it. Then she hears it, and has to go running back - arriving too late to see it. I am reminded specifically of two other times when the sound of the TARDIS makes people run: when Mickey and Jackie hear it at the beginning of "The Christmas Invasion", and when Captain Jack hears it at the end of "End of Days".



16. When Rose goes to Mickey's flat, why does he tell her not to read his e-mails?



17. The scene with Clive. In retrospect, I am reminded of Elton - putting Elton not in Clive's role, but in Rose's. Love the kid's line: "Dad! It's one of your nutters."
    
    And I like the way Clive is something of a Cassandra. Ominous. So much so that Rose doesn't believe him, decides he's a nutter himself. I love the line about Death being the Doctor's constant companion, but even more I like, "If the Doctor's making housecalls... then God help you."
    
    Clive is the only person actually known to us you is killed by the Nestene Consciousness. Is it a judgement on him for doubting the Doctor?



18. Mickey as plastic man: another bit that seems particularly lame to me. (And Rose again is clueless.) I rather like how it begins, though, with Mickey's hands being stuck on the lid of the trash bin. There's something convincingly nightmarish about that part. Otherwise - the scene where plastic-Mickey makes his hands into cleavers reminds me of some of the more hokey graphics of 1960s Marvel comics, where villains like the Sand-man or the Super-Skrull used to do that. Knowing that Russell T. Davies is a fan of these comics explains a lot.



19. Again in the shooting script, I love Davies' decription of the TARDIS here, at Rose's first sight of the interior: the whole place humming with suppressed energy.



20. Significant interplay about whether the Doctor should or does care about Mickey's fate, and the underlying question of how much Rose cares. Yes, she cares, but she's not dwelling on it either as they run off to the London Eye. I am a little confused about Mickey's mother, when Rose is fussing about telling her what happened: I thought we learned in "The Rise of the Cybermen" that she wasn't around, and Mickey was raised by his gran. Well, the mother wasn't dead, so maybe she reappeared when Mickey was grown. Or maybe it was just a retcon. (Not the Torchwood kind.)



21. Antiplastic. Of all the lame ideas in the episode, I love that one the most.



22. The best bit of the London Eye conversation is the moment where - for the first time - the Doctor says, "Fantastic!"



23. Love Rose's line: "The breast implants." Cracks me up. So... realistic, so insidious, so suited to Rose's quirky humour and her sense of the mundane and the bizarre.



24. The Doctor: "I'm not here to kill it. I've got to give it a chance." Nice ambivalence, when the Nestene C. sees the antiplastic and quite rightly throws a fit and the Doctor claims he wasn't going to use it. (Yeah, right.) There is an ambivalence to this whole scene that I find interesting and maybe don't entirely understand. How serious is the Doctor about destroying the Nestene Consciousness and saving everyone on Earth? Was he as helpless as he seemed? Was he manipulating Rose? I like the implications here - never fully clarified - that he is, or can be, extremely machivellian, and deceitful.


I love the way the Doctor switches back and forth from a rather formal, courtly politeness (with legalistic implications) to his own casual, forthright manner.

I love, absolutely love, the line, "I couldn't save your world. I couldn't save any of them." We don't, on first hearing this, understand the reference to the Time War. We don't realize that the Doctor is thinking of his own people too, and knows his own guilt.


25. The only thing I like about the scenes of the dummies attacking London is the bit at the end, where one of the dummies is lying there with its leg stuck up in the air.



26. When Rose says, "The end of the world," is that a foreshadowing of the next episode?



27. In the climactic scene, I like it that the Doctor appears to be giving up (I'm not convinced he is, but I'm not sure he isn't, either) - though why it would help Rose to run at this point is a mystery. If the Nestene Consciousness has taken over the planet, where could Rose run to?



28. I love it when the Doctor says with total glee, "Now we're in trouble!"



29. I loved the moment where Mickey runs in terror out of the TARDIS. I like Mickey's exaggerated cowardice throughout this section. At the time, it mostly seemed like a contrast to Rose and the Doctor. In retrospect, it's a great contrast to what Mickey himself eventually becomes - a hero. But here, it's Rose who gets to be the hero.



30. I like the way Rose has to make a decision between what she thinks she ought to do and what she wants to do. This choice is another recurring theme through the series.



31. I love the ending. Absolutely love it. In the language of series 2 or 3, she makes her choice, lured by the fateful words, "It also travels in time." But it wasn't those words that made her change her mind, I don't think. It was the fact that the Doctor came back to give her another chance to make the right decision.

I do go on and on, don't I? I'm sure there's more I'd like to say, but enough is enough... for the moment.

Comments

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I liked how the Doctor didn't argue that Rose is the 'woman he loves.' :)

I liked that too. And still do.