New Earth

Before we watched "New Earth", which we visited digital-owning friends to see, we finally got the chance to "press the red button", gulped away spoiler fears, and were treated to a medley of clips and teaser shots from the series of Doctor Who that lies ahead of us. If you haven't seen it, I won't give anything away, but all I will say is that it made me more excited about new Doctor Who than I have been for some years - and that includes during the hype surrounding "Rose". I can't really explain why. Perhaps it was the darkness of it all, the Harry Potter/Star Wars/Hollywood meets Buffy EXPENSE of everything. Doctor Who had never seemed like this before - nightmarish, sinister and deeply, deeply frightening. And those were just the bits with Sladen in. No, the one phrase that sprung to mind, and it would be repeated by a certain member of the production team in that nights "Confidential", was "raising the bar". It immediately made last years Doctor Who look... amateur. Yes, it was that good.

I got none of the feel of that wonderful trailer in "New Earth", which played like an exact continuation of Series 1.

But hang on. Let's just stop for a moment. Series 1 was, of course, great. It may well be that I was lured into something of a false excitement with the push of that red button - let's not forget that trailers are, by their very definition, all the best bits. Maybe it was just a great trailer. "New Earth" was typical RTD though - lashings of great stuff almost (but not quite) smothering a rather dodgy plot underneath. It's the "Storm Warning" factor again - if you glue so many wonderful set pieces together and make the whole thing with so many flawlessly designed sets and creatures, well then you've almost got a story already. The Cat People were superb, especially when glancing pitifully back at the Doctor and Rose as they were led away at the end. New Earth itself made for a suitably awe-inspiring first story setting, ignoring the fact that I feel rather cheated that our first foray away from Earth is a planet which has been made to look like Earth! Cassandra was as well played and as deliciously quotable as ever. When I talked about "Parting of the Ways" last year I wondered whether it really MATTERED that none of it, to be fair, made sense, not when it was all so entertaining. Well, I let that one through the net, so I really don't think I should do it again. I shouldn't BE wondering. Beneath the lovely interplay between the Doctor and Rose (Billie is to die for as a companion when she smiles so sweetly at him and says how much she loves being with him; you never got that from Dodo) lurks a story which we must - simply must - discuss.

It took me until after the episode finished to "get" the business with the 'infected' human lab rats - that description being the clue of course. Despite them appearing to just be stuck in tanks with no sign of any research or experimentation going on, they were there to be used as guinea pigs for finding cures to major diseases. Only in a childlike mind would this equate to anyone visiting the hospital being 'instantly' cured of any disease. The second point is why there were thousands of incubated humans all with 'every human disease'. Why did they not all die? Why did they not have one disease each (how do you cure one disease when the patient has got a dozen others as well)? And in true kids TV style, this is represented as people who have, very simply, horribly blistered skin. Before I make my third point, we need to also stop and discuss all this disease business. My Dad e-mailed me after the episode and wondered "wasn't it a bit scary for kids?". But he got it wrong - we know from past experience that this is the wrong kind of scary. It's not hide-behind-the-sofa monster-coming-to-get-you-horror. It's disease-blood-dismemberment horror. It's gruesome. The very idea of someone being infected with every human disease is very real and very unpleasant. Not just frightening, but unpleasant. I feel like a bad sport for pointing this out, but I have to because I fear some, maybe quite a few, kids will have leaped to the conclusion in their minds. Are these people with AIDS? Are the Doctor and Rose now spending Saturday nights being chased by AIDS victims? Because that's what kids - especially today - know as a disease. I happily didn't especially jump to this conclusion while watching, it was only when a friend admitted his youngster had to leave the room that I wondered if this was the sort of connection that may have been made in some young minds.

Phew eh? This is a bit heavy for the premier night of new, kids-orientated, CBBC-plugged Doctor Who. But I've still got a third point you know, and that, as in common with more than a couple of RTD written episodes last year, was the denouement. There should, one hopes, be a difference between Doctor Who being written for children, and it being written childishly. It's the difference between keeping the kids happy and excluding your older viewers. At the end of this, the Doctor tips the 'antidotes' for all the diseases, handily stored in a number of brightly coloured bags, into a big tank and sprays the resultant solution onto one of the 'disease' victims. Magically, he then touches all the others and they are cured. To say nothing of Cassandra and her ability to zoom from body to body as a magic puff of smoke. This is Doctor Who as plotted in the head of a wonderfully innocent nine year old, and perhaps that's good. Because that same imagination has given us a funny, imaginative, entertaining episode called "New Earth". Or perhaps it's very bad.

The episode was almost saved by RTD wheeling out another example of his forte - a character's story meeting a touching and just end. Featuring Zoë Wannamaker in person was a masterstroke, as she was told, for the only time, how beautiful she was. I can't explain why I found this sequence so lovely, but it struck a chord somehow. We will all one day look back at photographs or film and, even though we never considered it at the time, we will think how beautiful we were. To see the 'past Cassandra' sequences from the point of view of someone whose beauty has gone was to step into those shoes, and to be able to go back and BE THERE, in the midst of happy times gone by, at the end of your life... I just liked this ending very much.

We roared, we cheered and we clapped. But quietly I wished I wasn't able to think intelligently about what was actually happening, because to do so was acknowledging the farcical run-around non-logic of this heroic, charming adventure. "New Earth" was a lovely, shiny apple with a distinctly rotten core.