Writer: Russell T Davies
Director: Joe Ahearne
Script editor: Helen Raynor
The Doctor – Christopher Eccleston/David Tennant
Rose Tyler – Billie Piper
Captain Jack – John Barrowman
Voice Of Anne Droid – Anne Robinson
Voice Of Davinadroid – Davina Mccall
Voice Of Trine-E – Trinny Woodall
Voice Of Zu-Zana – Susannah Constantine
Lynda – Jo Joyner
Mickey – Noel Clarke
Jackie – Camille Coduri
Strood – Jamie Bradley
Crosbie – Abi Eniola
Rodrick – Paterson Joseph
Floor manager – Jenna Russell
Male programmer – Jo Stone-Fewings
Female programmer – Nisha Nayar
Agorax – Dominic Burgess
Fitch – Karren Winchester
Colleen – Kate Loustau
Broff – Sebastian Armesto
Controller – Martha Cope
Security guard – Sam Callis
Androids – Alan Ruscoe, Paul Kasey
Dalek operators – Barnaby Edwards, Nicholas Pegg, David Hankinson
Dalek voices – Nicholas Briggs
Daleks created by – Terry Nation
Don’t swear, you are live Channel 4400
The Ninth Doctor and his companions find themselves plucked from the TARDIS and put inside deadly versions of contemporary game shows. The Doctor wakes up in the Big Brother House where eviction means vaporisation, Rose meanwhile plays the Weakest Link with a vicious android and Captain Jack is offered novel forms of cosmetic surgery by the hosts of What not to Where. When the Doctor escapes from the Big Brother House he quickly realises that he is back on Satellite 5 in the year 200,100. He had last visited the place a century before and believed then that he had fixed the time line so that human evolution would be back on track. Instead Satellite 5 was renamed the Gamestation (run by the Bad Wolf Corporation) and the population of Earth subjected to a never-ending diet of stupefying game shows. According to Lynda (a fellow contestant on BB who escapes with him) it’s been this way ever since Satellite 5 stopped broadcasting the news; the transmissions weren’t replaced with anything else, and without any information at their disposal, the economy and governments of Earth collapsed. Now the people of Earth are stuck indoors, wasting away their lives watching deadly and brainless reality TV and game shows. This is supposed to be the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire, but history has been changed out of all recognition -- and the Doctor, sickened, realises that he’s responsible.
In the control room, the two programmers decide to look at the transmat logs to see how the travellers got on board. However, the female programmer is refused entry to Archive 6, where the logs are kept. The Controller, a pale woman hooked up by dozens of cables to the station, tells her it is out of bounds. The Controller is constantly monitoring the transmissions that flow through her and muttering almost agitatedly to herself. The male programmer tells her about the new contestants wandering around outside the games and asks for security measures, but she denies them, insisting that the travellers are “no one” and telling them to return to work and alerting them to an impending solar flare.
Archive six is out of bounds!
Reunited with Jack the Doctor tries to rescue Rose but is too late to stop her being ‘vaporised’ by the Anne Droid. The Doctor drops to his knees, stunned, staring at the small pile of dust on the floor where Rose was standing. The enraged Jack turns his gun on Rodrick and the terrified floor manager, who overrides the Controller’s commands and summons security to the room. The security chief puts a gun to the Doctor’s head, forcing Jack to drop his own gun, and all the Doctor can do is stare numbly ahead as he, Jack and Lynda are placed under arrest.
The Doctor remains silent when the guards process and interrogate the three of them, but when they are about to be transported to a lunar penal colony, the Doctor gives the word. He and Jack spring into action, knocking out the guards, grabbing weapons and heading up to Floor 500. (Interestingly this is where the Editor had his base a hundred years before in ‘The Long Game’.)
In the control room, Jack and the Doctor wave the weapons at the programmers, ushering them to one side. The Doctor demands to know from the Controller who is in charge and who is responsible for killing Rose, but the Controller does not answer. The male programmer is nervous because of the large gun the Doctor is carrying, but the Doctor casually tosses him the weapon, saying he was never really going to use it. The male programmer explains that because the Doctor is not one of the staff, the Controller’s systems do not recognise him. The Controller was installed when she was five years old; she has been plugged in so long that her eyes have atrophied from disuse; all she sees is the programming. The male programmer also says that there is more going on at the station, with unauthorised transmats and encrypted signals that have been going on for years. Jack opens Archive 6, and finds the TARDIS inside. He goes into it and activates the console, discovering something that shocks him.
The female programmer insists that the Doctor release the terrified programmers, but he has no sympathy for the men and women who have been sending hundreds of people a day to their deaths, particularly when she claims that they were just doing their jobs. The station powers down momentarily as the energy from the solar flares reaches Earth, causing signal interference. For just a few moments, the station is not broadcasting -- and the Controller can speak freely to the Doctor. Her ‘masters’ have been controlling her mind all her life, but she saw the Doctor in the transmissions and brought him to the Gamestation, hiding him inside the games so he could find her. She now warns him that her masters have been hiding nearby, watching and waiting, guiding humanity from behind the scenes for centuries. Her masters fear the Doctor but she cannot tell him who they are, because she has been genetically altered to be unable to say their name. As the flare passes, Jack returns and tells the Doctor that the TARDIS worked out that the disintegrators were actually part of a secondary transmat system; people have not died, they have just been transported elsewhere, which means Rose is still alive.
Rose regains consciousness aboard an alien spacecraft, where an all too familiar heart beat sound can be heard. We then sees Rose from the point of view of one the inhabitants of the spacecraft as it approaches her, and she backs up against a wall in shock as she recognises it, and cannot believe her eyes; she claims to have seen the creature die; a tell-tale plunger shoots out to pin her up against the console . Back on the station, the Controller gives the Doctor the co-ordinates to where Rose had been transported, despite knowing that she will be revealing her subterfuge to her masters. As she shouts out the co-ordinates, the Controller is teleported away. Materialising on the same ship that Rose has been transported to, the Controller gloatingly tells her masters that they can kill her now, as she has brought about their destruction. We see an image of a domed metallic creature on the reflective surface of the wall as an energy weapon promptly kills her.
On the station, the transmat beam is traced to a point at the edge of the solar system. Although the screen appears to show empty space, there is another signal, transmitted by the satellite that is shielding what is actually there from detection. The Doctor informs everyone that these are the same people who installed the Jagrafess nearly two centuries before and have been manipulating mankind for generations, playing a long game. The Doctor cancels the shielding signal and is greeted with the sight of a huge fleet of flying saucers. Only he and Jack know what sort of creature is piloting these ships. There are 200 ships each containing more than 2,000 Daleks, a force almost half a million strong. Both the Doctor and Jack thought the Daleks had all been destroyed, but obviously they somehow survived.
Back on the saucer the Daleks realise the jig is up and open communications, which seems a little unusual but maybe they’re very polite Daleks. A lead Dalek orders the Doctor not to intervene with the Dalek stratagem or they will exterminate Rose. To the Daleks’ surprise, the Doctor simply says no. When the lead Dalek demands an explanation, the Doctor defiantly tells them that he is going to rescue Rose from the middle of the Dalek fleet, save the Earth and then ‘wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky’. The lead Dalek retorts that the Doctor has no weapons, defences or plan. The Doctor agrees ? and knows that is exactly what is scaring the Daleks to death.
The Doctor tells Rose he is on his way, and cuts the transmission. The lead Dalek states the Doctor has initiated hostile actions, and orders the invasion of Earth to begin. Thousands of Daleks gather for the invasion, all chanting their battle cry: Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate...
Predict! Predict!
Following on from the end of “Bad Wolf”, the Daleks turn on Rose and demand that she predict the Doctor’s actions, but she refuses. The Daleks detect the TARDIS flying in real space towards the saucer, and launch missiles against it. The missiles detonate, but thanks to the tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator taken from Blon Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen, Jack has rigged up a force field around the TARDIS that protects it. The TARDIS materialises on board the Dalek saucer, around Rose and a single Dalek guarding her, whom Jack destroys with the gun, he improvised on the Game Station. Jack comments that the Daleks were once the greatest threat ever and then they just suddenly disappeared. The Doctor tells him that they went off to fight the Time War. As he examines the wreckage of the Dalek, he muses that since it is now apparent that the Daleks survived the Time War, the Time Lords died for nothing.
Curious to know how this has come about the Doctor boldly strides forth from the TARDIS to be met by a chorus of ‘EXTERMINATE’ and a hail of energy beams, however the extrapolator’s force field continues to protect them. The Doctor taunts the Daleks, reminding them that Dalek legends call him “The Oncoming Storm”, and even though they claim to have eliminated all emotion, he is sure that, deep inside, the Daleks still feel fear when faced with him. He asks how they survived the Time War, and is answered by a deep, booming growl: “They survived… through me.” The voice is that of the Dalek Emperor, a super size Kaled mutant suspended in a transparent tank of fluid, flanked by panels of armour and topped by an equally enormous Dalek domed head. Around it floats an entourage of black-domed Daleks. (These are the Emperor’s personal bodyguard and were first seen in ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ nearly forty years previously. These floating versions have specially adapted plungers that serve as lethal weapons).
The God of all Daleks
The Emperor explains that though the Doctor destroyed all the Daleks in the War, its ship survived: “falling through time – crippled but alive”. The surviving Daleks spent centuries hiding in “the dark space”, silently rebuilding, infiltrating Earth’s systems, harvesting humans and converting the genetic material into an army of Daleks. When Rose suggests that makes the Daleks half-human, the Daleks cry out that the remark is blasphemy. The Doctor is surprised that the Daleks even have such a concept. The Emperor declares: “I reached into the dirt and made new life. I AM THE GOD OF ALL DALEKS!” Even though it used human genetic material, only one cell in a billion was fit to be nurtured, and the Emperor insists that its manipulation resulted in the cultivation of “pure and blessed Dalek”.
Horrified, the Doctor realises that the Daleks have been driven insane by the incongruity of ‘hating their own flesh’, which makes them deadlier than ever. With the Emperor’s voice booming in their ears the travellers re-enter the TARDIS, and the Doctor sighs heavily as he slams the door on the chorus of ‘exterminate. The TARDIS returns them to Floor 500 of the Game Station.
The Doctor orders the two remaining programmers to turn up the transmitters so the Daleks cannot transmat aboard the station. Earth is ignoring the Station’s warnings since it stopped transmitting other than to revoke their licence and is virtually defenceless. Despite the Doctor’s earlier orders, Lynda Moss is still on board, unwilling to leave him. In any case, there were not enough shuttles, and there are still about a hundred people on board, on Floor Zero, including Rodrick, Rose’s main opponent in The Weakest Link, who is still looking for his prize money. The Dalek fleet begins to move towards Earth, the Emperor giving orders to purify the planet with fire and turn it into its ‘temple’.
The Doctor begins dismantling the panels in the control room. The Daleks have left him an enormous transmitter, and to Jack’s disbelief, the Doctor is proposing to build and transmit a Delta Wave, an energy wave that will fry every brain in its path. Unfortunately, a wave of this magnitude would require three days to build up. The Dalek fleet will be on them in twenty-two minutes. The Doctor has to work fast.
Jack attaches the extrapolator to the Station’s systems so the Daleks cannot just blast the Station out of the sky, but it will not prevent them from physically invading to stop the Wave. Jack concentrates the force field on the top six levels of the Station, so the Daleks will have to enter at Floor 494 and work their way up to Floor 500. Rose stays behind to help the Doctor build the Wave while the others, armed with bastic bullets which can breach Dalek casings, go down to Floor Zero to try and scare up volunteers to help hold back the Daleks. Jack kisses both Rose and the Doctor good-bye.
On Floor Zero, only a few join the defenders. Others do not believe that the Daleks still exist. Jack warns them all to stay on Floor Zero and keep quiet, even if they start to hear the sounds of battle above, hopefully the Daleks will not notice them. On Floor 500, the Delta Wave starts its build-up, but when the Doctor checks to see how long it will need to build, he hangs his head in dismay. Rose asks why the Doctor can’t go back to the day before to warn people, but the Doctor explains that he cannot because than he would become part of events. Then he smiles and tells her she is a genius and says it can work if he can use the TARDIS to cross his own timeline. He ushers her into the TARDIS and tells her to stay there while he powers up the Station. Once he exits the TARDIS, however, his expression turns sombre, and he points the sonic screwdriver at the ship, making it dematerialise with Rose on board.
Inside, Rose realises too late that the Doctor has set the TARDIS in motion, sending her away from the Game Station to safety. A hologram of the Doctor materialises before the console, delivering a message that the Doctor recorded in case of extreme emergency. In such circumstances he’s likely to die facing an enemy that cannot be allowed to get its hands on the TARDIS -- and he’s sending Rose home, with instructions to let the TARDIS sit on the street corner and die unnoticed. The hologram turns and looks directly into Rose’s eyes, and the Doctor tells her to have a fantastic life. The TARDIS then materialises on the street corner where Rose’s father was killed in a car accident, and despite Rose’s desperate attempts to reactivate the console, it does not take off again. Outside, Mickey comes running down the street, having heard the distinctive sound of the TARDIS arriving, and Rose hugs him, weeping.
When Jack contacts Floor 500, he finds that the Doctor has sent Rose away. When Jack asks if the Delta Wave will be ready, the Dalek Emperor breaks in on the transmission, noting that whilst the Wave can possibly be completed in time, it will not be able to discriminate between human and Dalek; it will wipe all Daleks and humans within its long range. The Doctor replies that there are colonies in space and the human race will survive, but the whole universe is in danger if he lets the Daleks live. Jack tells the Doctor to keep working, and defiantly tells the Emperor that he will never doubt the Doctor. The Doctor questions the Emperor on how it managed to scatter the words “Bad Wolf” through history, but the Emperor replies that these words were not part of its design.
Mickey and Jackie Tyler take Rose to a nearby fast-food restaurant to celebrate her return, but all she can think about is the Doctor, trapped and fighting for his life thousands of years in the future. She can’t live an ordinary life any more, not now that the Doctor has shown her a better way to live -- a way that means standing up against evil, rather than running away or giving up and just letting bad things happen. Mickey and Jackie may not want to admit it, but she knows they understand what she’s talking about. Upset, Rose storms out of the restaurant, failing to notice the words “Bad Wolf” scribbled across a poster in the window behind her -- but as Mickey follows her and tries to convince her to accept an ordinary life with him, she realises that the phrase has been graffito-tagged across the entire neighbourhood, on the asphalt and on the walls. The same phrase has been following her around since she first started travelling with the Doctor, and for the first time, it occurs to her that it might be a message, telling her that it’s not too late to get back to the Doctor. She already knows that the TARDIS is telepathic and she has seen the console open to reveal its heart. Perhaps if she can open up the console again, she can communicate directly with the TARDIS and persuade it to return for the Doctor. She’s willing to risk her life for that and although Mickey is hurt when she tells him that there’s nothing for her back home, he agrees to help her do what she feels she must.
Jack places Lynda in an observation deck, which has a heavy door that will hopefully hold the Daleks out for a time. From the deck, Lynda will monitor the Station’s sensors and update the rest of the humans on the Daleks’ progress. Through the window, they see the fleet decelerate into Earth orbit, and thousands of Daleks begin to stream out from the saucers towards the Station. The Daleks force the airlock on Floor 494, and begin to work their way up, taking the internal lasers off-line and ruthlessly exterminating the first batch of defenders, their bastic bullets having no effect as they melt against the Dalek force-fields.
On Floor 495, the Daleks encounter the Anne Droid from The Weakest Link, and it effectively manages to dispose of three Daleks before another one shoots its head off. To Lynda’s horror, instead of flying up to 496, the Daleks travel down to Floor Zero, exterminating everyone left there. In the TARDIS, Jackie tries her hand at persuading Rose to give up, but Rose tells her that Pete, her father, would not have given up; she knows this because she met him. Jackie does not believe this, until Rose reminds her that a blonde girl was there holding Pete’s hand when he died and Jackie saw her from a distance; that girl was Rose. Shaken, Jackie rushes out of the TARDIS.
On 2002nd century Earth, the fleet descends, bombarding the planet, the outlines of the continents distorting on Lynda’s screen as they are devastated by the Dalek bombing. The Emperor proclaims that it has created Heaven on Earth. On Floor 499, Jack organises the last stand against the Daleks, telling the defenders to concentrate fire on the Dalek eyestalks. This works against one Dalek, but the others overwhelm the barricades, killing everyone but Jack, who retreats towards Floor 500, still firing vainly at the oncoming Dalek squads. As a Dalek squad begins to cut through the doors to Lynda’s position, another squad floats in space outside the window of the observation deck. One Dalek fires at the window, shattering the glass and subjecting Lynda to explosive decompression.
Meanwhile in the 21st Century, Mickey has chained his car to the TARDIS console and tries to pull it open, but even at maximum revs, his car’s engine isn’t powerful enough. Jackie tries to convince her daughter once more that there’s nothing she can do, but Rose insists that her dad would never give up -- and she knows that, because she’s met him. Rose tells her mother that the Doctor took her back to be with her father on the day he died, and Jackie, overwhelmed, rushes out of the TARDIS. Rose can’t think of any other way to open the TARDIS console, and despite his concerns, Mickey is upset to see her on the verge of giving up; however, just as she’s about to lose all hope, Jackie comes driving up in a heavy-duty rescue vehicle she’s borrowed from a friend named Rodrigo. Jackie has accepted that her daughter is right, and she tosses the keys to Mickey, telling him to get on with it before she changes her mind.
Jack runs out of ammunition and is exterminated at the doorway to Floor 500 just as the Doctor finishes readying the Delta Wave. The Daleks glide into the control room, and when the Doctor threatens to activate the Wave, the Emperor dares him to do so, to become like him; the Great Exterminator-to make the choice between coward and killer. The Doctor hesitates, and then says he would be a coward any day. As the Doctor prepares for extermination, the TARDIS materialises behind him. The doors open, the light from the TARDIS’s heart spilling out into the control room, and in the middle of it all is Rose, glowing brightly. In answer to the Doctor, Rose tells him she looked into the TARDIS and it into her. The Doctor tells her that she looked into the time vortex, something no one is supposed to see.
Goddess Rose
Suffused with power, Rose easily stops a Dalek blast dead, and forces the destructive beam back. As the Emperor calls her “the abomination”, Rose explains that she is the Bad Wolf and proceeds to scatter the name of the Game Station’s owners through time and space, to lead herself to this point. She can now see all of time and space: the past, present and possible future; all she wants is the Doctor to be safe and protected from the Daleks. The Doctor, desperate, warns Rose to let go of the power before it destroys her, but she refuses to stop until he is safe. The Doctor once told her that everything dies eventually -- and with a gesture, Rose uses the power within her to unmake the Daleks and finally put an end to the legacy of the Time War. As the Emperor desperately protests that it is immortal, the entire fleet comes apart and vanishes, becoming less than dust. As the Doctor begs her to stop, Rose waves her hand, and Jack is restored to life down on Floor 499. But the power is becoming too much for her to handle, and the Doctor realises that it’s going to kill her if he doesn’t do something. He thus takes Rose in her arms and kisses her, drawing the power out of her body and into his. Rose collapses, and the Doctor exhales, breathing the power of the Time Vortex back into the TARDIS where it belongs. He then staggers back, weakened, but still strong enough to carry Rose into the TARDIS. The bewildered Jack hears the TARDIS dematerialising, and rushes up to Floor 500; however, he’s too late, as the TARDIS has gone, leaving Jack the only one alive on the Game Station.
On board, Rose awakens, remembering little of what has transpired. As she tries to figure out what happened, the Doctor notices a small ripple of energy sweeping across the back of his hand and his expression clouds momentarily. Turning back to Rose, he tells her that he was going to take her to so many places, like Barcelona ? the planet, not the city ? and perhaps he will, just not as he is now. Rose does not understand what the Doctor is talking about, until he buckles over in pain. The Doctor tells her that the vortex energy is destroying every cell in his body. He will regenerate, but this incarnation will not see her again. The Ninth Doctor’s last words to Rose are, “Before I go, I just want to tell you: you were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And you know what? So was I.”
The regenerartion game
With that, blazing energy courses through his body, and before Rose’s astonished eyes, his features shift and change, his hair becoming longer and his general appearance becoming younger. The new Doctor says “Hello,“ swallows, and adds, “New teeth. That’s weird. Now, where was I?”
“Oh, that’s right,“ grins the Tenth Doctor, “Barcelona!”
Russell T. Davies had conceived the idea of a game show themed story for Doctor Who way back in 2002 when Laura Mackie Head of Drama Serials at the BBC approached him to see what new shows he would like to run for the beeb. [1] When it came to develop the idea for the first series of the regenerated Doctor Who he quickly worked in the elements of the Bad Wolf motif that had figured largely in the preceding episodes, changing the name from ‘Gameshow World’ to ‘Bad Wolf’ in the process. He also knew that it was likely that Christopher Eccleston would only be staying with Who for one season and so The Parting of the Ways was conceived as an vehicle for the Ninth Doctor’s regeneration.
When RTD approached Channel 4 and Endemol for permission to use the Big Brother themed parody they proved most helpful and provided the series not only with Davina McCall to provide the voice for her unseen robot double. Their real life presenters, providing plenty of copy for newspaper spoilers in the weeks running up to the story’s broadcast, also voiced the other parodies.
A funky sixties Dalek saucer designed by Ron Turner
As if the prospect of Dalek invasion was not frightening enough, RTD offers us the potentially more nightmarish scenario that reality television will be around for the next two hundred thousand years. With shows like ‘Big Brother’ and ‘The Weakest Link’ set to run for the next few geological eras, enslavement by the Daleks looks positively benign in comparison. This was certainly one of the aspects of the story hardest to stomach, that and the tabloid friendly hype that buzzed around this storyline.
I guess the trouble is that RTD is so obviously enamoured of Reality TV that any pretence that this was supposed to be a parody (a parody of a parody) soon falls down and we are left with basically a homage to despicable television. But than again, as RTD has shown repeatedly, his impresario instincts have paid off in terms of shifting Doctor Who from quaint obscurity into mainstream culture. So was started a trend that has continued since then of using episode twelve as a chance to plant some celebrity cameos, something seen this year with the delights of Anne Widecombe and McFly getting their Who moments.
Despite of all this and the relative unfuturistic future we are presented with Bad Wolf works rather well as an episode and all of the regulars put in superb performances. Maybe it was worth all that tabloid crassness in order to see a huge Dalek fleet portrayed in a way that we could have only seen in comic book form previously.
Amongst the non-celebrity supporting cast Lynda (Jo Joyner) seems to be one to watch, as well as having the honour of being one of the few people the Doctor has openly flirted with, she also seemed potential companion material. Unfortunately her character meets a grisly end in ‘The Parting of the Ways’, flung out into space when the Daleks decompress the part of the Gamestation she is in. Martha Cope also puts in a good performance as the Controller, an unfortunate human female who has been wired up to a computer since the age of five. This seems like a nod in the direction of ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ where a young girl was connected to the Dalek battle computer. (Apparently RTD was inspired by ‘Minority Report’ for the overall appearance of the Controller). It seems that it was she who ‘transmatted’ the Doctor and his companions to the Game Station (Satellite 5 a century after ‘The Long Game’), where she hid them in the stations continual out put of deadly game shows. Apparently the Daleks don’t watch reality TV, something very much in their favour it has to be said.
When it comes to ‘The Parting of the Ways’ one is presented with a real emotional tour de force from Russell T. Davies and some spectacular acting from Eccleston in his Who swan-song. This episode is not without its controversial aspects as well, many fans disliking the dues ex machina cop out of giving Rose the power of the time vortex. However, there is an argument that in a way this isn’t a miracle resolution as it took the concerted efforts of Mickey, Rose and Jackie Tyler to prise open the console of the TARDIS so that Rose could speak to its soul. Than in the process of saving the Doctor from the Daleks, Rose inadvertently kills him, a significant irony as she also resurrects Captain Jack and later we learn that this makes him virtually immortal.
The Daleks are particularly well portrayed in this story and Nicolas Briggs delivers us more of his vocal talents, giving us a slightly different kind of Emperor Dalek and his fanatical fundamentalist followers. I enjoyed the way that the Emperor neatly sidestepped the issue of his Daleks being ‘half-human’ or certainly derived from human origins with a cry of ‘blasphemy’ and the claim that his Daleks were one hundred per cent ‘blessed’. Daleks in denial, now that is an interesting concept, perhaps even more interesting is whether a human derived Dalek is a Dalek at all, in their world view the slightest deviation is said to be anathema. However with the Emperor freely admitting he has been filleting humans for centuries to build up his army of Daleks it is fairly obvious he can’t lay any claim to Dalek purity-civil wars have been fought for less. So well done to Russell T. Davies for explaining that one away by introducing the wicked idea that those in power will often distort the truth to their own advantage.
These more esoteric elements of the story are penned in by the underlying ‘soap opera’ storyline; this can seem frustrating at times almost as if the real story is not the monsters and the spaceships as Rose puts it at one point. (This was one of Billie Piper’s best moments on screen) I guess for RTD these stories, fantastic as they are, can only find plausibility in the real emotional struggles of the characters on screen. This explains why we have this massive diversion of Rose returning to the Powell Estate halfway through the story and then fighting desperately with her own helplessness and the indifference of the others around her to get back to where the Doctor is.
Joe Ahearne makes a good job of keeping the emotional tension simmering throughout both episodes, and he even slips in a few nods to Dalek continuity in the process, such as the POV shots in ‘Bad Wolf’ where Rose is menaced by a sucker arm much like Barbara in the first Dalek serial. Other nods to the past include the big lights and occasional claws the Daleks sport and a Dalek equivalent of the Praetorian Guard with black domes. We even get a sequence of a Dalek about to cut through a door; but given that this is modern Who and we don’t have time to sit around for this to happen, a posse of Daleks floats by the window and kill Lynda instead. Now that is evil.
Eccleston, as I have already said makes a great deal of his last story, his Doctor is a complex character riven by strong emotions. This is portrayed beautifully in the climax where we have the puzzle of me why he does not throw the switch on his doomsday device when the Daleks have him surrounded. Why the Doctor, having seen the Daleks melt the continents on Earth, and faced with the prospect of humanity being harvested and turned into Daleks, decides not to push the plunger at the last minute seems hard to comprehend. He is given the choice of ‘killer’ or ‘coward’ and opts for the coward option, even though we know that when he last fought the Daleks he destroyed his own world and his own people in order to stop them. Maybe the fact that he is unable to do this to Earth at the end reflects how much of an attachment he has formed with this lowly little planetoid. I guess if he did push the plunger the controversy would have been even more intense as it would have reinforced the idea of the Doctor as ruthless warrior, which is something he should never be.
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