Day 718 - New Earth

The first proper outing for the tenth Doctor and Rose sees them FINALLY leaving the planet Earth! After an entire series of Earth based stories this was quite refreshing. And to which planet do they travel? New Earth! God damn it! What's this obsession with Earth!?

The Doctor has received a message telling him to come and meet someone in the hospital of New New York. Yes that's not a typo, the city is called New New York. (Although technically it's the fifteenth New York since the original so really it should be New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York. But Doctor Who fans don't get tied up in the details..ahem..)

The patient in question, sending out the message, is the The Face Of Boe, an alien creature who had a minor role in the previous season's story The End Of The World. So minor in fact that it's only in this story that we hear him talk for the first time! He appears to be dying, having been rumoured to have lived for millions of years, and legend has it that upon his death he will speak his great secret to the "wanderer without a home".

The nurses in this hospital are cats....not sure what else I can say about that really, except that they are marginally better realised than the Cheetah people from Survival! Also being a dog lover myself (in a strictly platonic sense you understand) I have a little mistrust for cats which is proved to be correct here when we discover that they have grown thousands of humans and kept them hidden beneath the hospital in order that they can act as specimens for them to test all their treatments on. These poor people have been infected with every disease in the universe and as such don't look all that pretty.

The Face Of Boe is not the only returning character from The End Of The World however as Lady Cassandra is also investigating the hospital, purely for her own ends as she hopes to find the terrible secrets of the cat nurses and then blackmail them in order that they can pay for her extensive beauty treatments. I mean at this point Cassandra is just a piece of stretched skin, what else can she possibly have done to her??

Using some sort of techno gizmo she transports her mind inside that of Rose. Billie Piper is a really good actress. I don't think I've really mentioned that before but it shows here when she is essentially having to play two characters, both Rose and Cassandra.

At the episode's end, The Face Of Boe decides he's not dying (like it's that easy!) but promises the Doctor that they will meet a final time and his secret will be spoken. "That is enigmatic, that is text book enigmatic!"

By the end of the story the character of Cassandra has developed (I like a bit of character development) to the point where she is willing to accept her own mortality which leads us into the most touching scene of the episode where the Doctor takes her back in time (she is now inhabiting the body of her clone servant, Chip, whose body is failing her) so that she can see herself as she was when she was still pure human, prior to all the treatments that turned her into a bitchy trampoline.

I didn't love this episode but the ending is pretty damn marvellous!