Mark Watches ‘Doctor Who’: S02E01 – New Earth

In the first episode of the second series of Doctor Who, the Doctor and Rose travel to New Earth, billions of years in the future, to find out who summoned the Doctor to Ward 26. There, they discover an old friend is dying, simultaneous to an old enemy gaining strength. Oh, and the nurses are cats. That, too. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Doctor Who.

One of the things I didn’t comment on when watching the first Christmas special is the immediate difference in quality in terms of cinematography. I’ll have to look back and see which review I said it on, but I thought Netflix was giving me terrible streams of series one; in reality, I’m just used to a different cinematography technique than what is used in British television and film a lot of time. However, it seems as if the show had a lot more money after Eccleston’s run, and I’m curious if any of you can shed light on this. Did it get popular enough for them to have a higher budget?

For example, when the Doctor and Rose first step out of the TARDIS and look upon New Earth, it’s sort of shocking how much the CGI has improved in just one season. Not that there aren’t a few odd moments in “New Earth”; the scenes of people “growing” diseases are kind of stiff, but by-and-large, things are much better than before.

On top of that, as the Doctor and Rose head inside the hospital where the psychic paper has directed them, we get to see the stupendous make-up work done on the Sisters of Plenitude, a group of nuns who have the heads of cats. And look, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I love that there’s no real sense of HOLY SHIT, THEY HAVE CAT FACES from anyone in this episode. This show is so quintessentially NOT American in that respect, and I love it to pieces because of that. You don’t need to explain why there are female cat faces all up in this place. It just is the way it is.

I think that I really, truly enjoyed this story for once, as it seemed to contribute equally to the pace of the show as the character interaction. The Sisters of Plenitude are strangely able to cure a whole host of illnesses that are supposed to be fatal, which interests the Doctor to no end. But he discovers the source of the message that brought him to New Earth: the Face of Boe is dying. (And for the record, this episode greatly helped to eliminate my irrational fear of the Face of Boe. He is so nice and wise!) The Face of Boe reached out across space and time to the “Lonely God,” otherwise known as our fine Doctor, to give him a message before death. I’m predicting that this message, which was never given to us in “New Earth,” is going to be a prime plot point later in this season, especially since the Face of Boe gets better and leaves, but not before saying that the third time they meet, he will share the message with the Doctor and then die. Yikes.

But I’m jumping way ahead of myself here. We find out that the infamous Lady Cassandra, who isn’t actually dead, has been hiding in the basement of the hospital. Using her assistant Chip, she manipulates it so that Rose ends up in the basement alone with her, which sets up one of the more genius things I’ve seen on television before: using a psychograft to transfer one mind to another body.

The plot itself isn’t new or wildly exciting; it’s the chance to the actors and actresses to do something so strange that I loved so much. After tricking Rose and activating the psychograft, Cassandra’s mind jumps into Rose’s body, and we get the chance to see Billie Piper show off her acting skills. From the way she conducts herself, to the way she wears her clothes, and even down to her accent, Billie Piper becomes Cassandra. It’s rather eerie how believable it is, so it makes Russell T Davies’s humorous writing all the more appreciated. The main plot of the Sisters of Plenitude’s secret is honestly creepy enough for me (PLEASE STOP CALLING THEM “FLESH” BECAUSE IT DISTURBS ME FOREVER), so I don’t know if I could have also handled psychograft goodness on top of it if it was done in a disarming way.

Also, every mention of the word “chav” made me giggle forever.

It’s strange that technically, Cassandra, through Rose, actually helps the Doctor figure out the disturbing secret behind the Sisters’ method of curing patients who should already be dead. Obviously, she is doing it for purely selfish reasons and it’s certainly quite fucked up that she steals Rose’s body to do any of this. It’s subtle, but I think that as Cassandra watches the way the Doctor moves about the hospital, the zest he has as he works to save people he’s never met and may never see again, and it affects her in a way she never could have realized without jumping bodies. Of course, it’s important to acknowledge that once she discovers the bizarre flesh-growing factory that the Sisters are using to develop cures, she immediately tries to blackmail Matron Casp to secure more money to keep herself alive. Selfish, incredibly so, sure. I can’t ignore that.

I also can’t ignore that her actions inadvertently causes her epiphany about the true nature of who she has become. When “New Earth” becomes a zombie episode of sorts, there’s a point where Cassandra is forced to inhabit the body of one of the infected humans. That’s when she experiences something she’d not felt before: the most extreme loneliness imaginable. Maybe, in a way, it reminds her of how truly alone she has become for existing in the form she does so far into the future. I think that’s why flashbacks to her life as a full-bodied human strike her so strongly. Was she always alone, even back then? Was her pursuit of a superficial life what lead her to this point?

There’s no real answer spelled out for us in “New Earth” and I like it that way. The subtext written into this episode by Davies allows us to interpret Cassandra’s eventual transformation in any number of ways, and this is how I read it. The idea of an eternal, everlasting loneliness, caused by the pursuit of perfection, seemed to be the message coded in between the lines of this script. But that’s just me. You can see it any way you like it.

THOUGHTS

• That is enigmatic! That–that is–that is textbook enigmatic!”
• There is no doubt in my mind that the greatest part of this episode is the moment that David Tennant has to pretend that Cassandra is inside of him. I can already tell that he is going to be so much fun as the Tenth Doctor, not the least because his acting is out of this world. “Oh baby, I’m beating out a samba!”
• Please tell me there is a GIF of Tennant as Cassandra. Please.
• “It’s like living inside a bouncy castle!”
• “Strictly speaking, it’s the fifteenth New York, which makes it New New New New New New….New New New New New New…New New New York.”