Doctor Who Finale Packs a Wallop

MaryAnn Johanson,  Dec 21, 2006

Have you been watching the new Doctor Who on the Sci Fi Channel? If you haven't, for gawd's sake, don't start with Friday night's finale, two episodes that wrap up the second season of the new incarnation of the show. Well, actually, I encourage everyone to get hooked on Doctor Who as soon as possible, but picking it up here could be both overwhelming and underwhelming. Good thing the Sci Fi Channel is running a marathon almost all day on Friday, December 22 -- it's not every episode from this season, but it's enough to get partly up to speed before the double-feature finale starts at 8PM Eastern.

Here's the thing: with the old Doctor Who, you could pick it up just about anywhere. It was weird, sure, so your first exposure to it could involve, say, aliens that look like giant garbage bags (and were probably made from giant garbage bags, the show was that cheaply produced). But if you stuck with it you discovered all kinds of subtext going on that the kiddies never saw that made it accidentally interesting to teens and adults.

But -- as those of us who were fans of the old version of the show were stunned to discover when Christopher Eccleston debuted as the new Doctor last year -- this is no kiddie show any longer. Show runner Russell Davies has reinvented the series as a rich tapestry of sophisticated storytelling, rife with the kind of social satire the old show sometimes indulged in but also powerful drama that wove together long threads of subplots across multiple stories: there are elements paying off in these last two final episodes that have been in play since Eccleston's first episode. (Clearly, Davies was as inspired by shows like the new Battlestar Galactica and Lost as he was by the original Who.) The Doctor is a far more complicated character than he ever was before, more alien and more inscrutable but also, ironically, more human, in some ways -- he's not remote and inaccessible, like he once was: he seems like a real person, a real man.

And that's the major difference with this Doctor: the old show, aimed at kids, was terrified to suggest that the Doctor might have more interest in his traveling companions than mere companionship. (We fans all knew what was going on even if the show itself refused to acknowledge it.) But with Rose (the fantastic Billie Piper), today's Doctor is ... well, no one word or phrase sums it up. Not in love (or maybe he is). Not merely smitten (though he probably is). There is a far deeper connection between the two than the old show ever even approached. And it's been building for two years, with two Doctors.

Which is why you'll miss the full impact of the two-hour finale if you haven't been falling in love (or whatever it is) along with the Doctor and Rose these past two years. The ads on the Sci Fi Channel and on its web site are teasing us with stuff like, "The Doctor must let Rose die!!! Must the Doctor let Rose die?? Yes, the Doctor must let Rose die!!!" But I gotta tell ya, it's worse than that. If there are fates worse than death, these two episodes -- in which, it must be said, armies of two of the series' most horrifying bad guys, the Daleks and the Cybermen, are not the most upsetting things, not by a long shot -- find them.

The old Doctor Who? It never made me cry. This one, I sobbed my eyes out. Damn you, Russell Davies. Damn you.

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MaryAnn Johanson
author of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride
minder of FlickFilosopher.com