Doctor Who: 2x08 The Impossible Planet
“Oh, if you think there’s gonna be trouble, we could always get back inside and go somewhere else…”
They both find the idea of avoiding possible trouble LUDICROUS, which is clearly the charm and the terror of time-travel generally, and of series two in particular. You can't travel without taking risks, but the Doctor and Rose seem more willing than anyone else to ignore warnings and predictions and just hold hands and jump in with both feet.
Their response when the door opens and the Ood are standing there is awesome. I also love how they pick up their “weapons,” the sonic and a chair, to fend off the Ood. There’s a moment there where they both have their tongue against their top teeth in the exact same way.
“No idea. More fun that way!”
I ADORE the colors in these two episodes. The bright safety yellow, the green lights, Rose’s magenta jacket. Even the blue pinstripes on the Doctor’s suit seem brighter than usual.
“I’m Rose, Rose Tyler, and this is the Doctor.”
Boo, Toby, you’re totally ripe for demonic possession. Really, you might as well be wearing a t-shirt that says: Totally Weak, Possess Me.
Before Ida opens up the roof, saying that the sight drives some people mad, the Doctor and Rose both just continue chilling, like, “eh, mad-shmad."
The black hole is gorgeous. AS IS THE DOCTOR'S HAIR, by the way. Damn.
They cutely reach for each other during the aftershock.
The projected image is a lot like the one they used on the early seasons of Bones, only this one-from Doctor Who, from a sanctuary base, on an impossible planet that should be pulled into a black hole, in the far future-is more realistic.
“The bitter pill. I like that.” Rose is, perhaps, having too much fun with the team’s explanation. I mean, I agree, it's poetic, but she's also telling you that you're standing on a planet that should, by all right, be careening into a black hole.
It’s sweet how Ida tells Zachary that he’s doing a good job as interim captain.
I love squinty, confused Doctor. Hello, he has a giant brain and everything should always make perfect sense and it's unacceptable and confusing when it doesn't! He's wearing his glasses and everything! He should know what's going on!
Rose and the Ood! She asks the Ood his name, and then when Scooti and Danny accuse her of being a “Friend of the Ood,” she says yeah, maybe she is: “Since when do humans need slaves?”
In “Planet of the Ood,” Donna reacts in a similar way. When they find the dying Ood in the snow, she asks him his name. And then tries to tell him her name by talking into the ball. Hee.
ROSE: Seriously? You like being ordered about?
OOD: It is all we crave.
ROSE: Why’s that, then?
OOD: We have nothing else in life.
ROSE: Yeah, well, I used to think like that. A long time ago.
DONNA: What I mean is, are there any free Ood? Are there any Ood running wild somewhere like wildebeest?
OOD: All Ood are born to serve. Otherwise we would die.
DONNA: You can’t have started like that. Before the humans, what were you like?
If they’d met in better times, these two totally would’ve started a TARDIS branch of Friends of the Ood and made the Doctor take notes at their meetings.
“It took us two years to work that out!”
“I’m very good.”
“What’s your job? Chief..dramatist?” I love the Doctor’s smirk, so delighted by Rose's joke. It reminds me of Mulder looking over at Scully in "The Goldberg Variation" after she says maybe Weems can't find his way to the door.
“So, when it comes right down to it, why did you come here? Why did you do that? Why? I’ll tell you why. Because it was there! Brilliant!” Doctor, you need a mood stabilizer.
I love how Rose is so amused by the Doctor hugging Zach as part of his “Humans are Brilliant and I Kind Of Wish I Were One” tour.
Rose is just casually leaning on the Doctor’s shoulder. It reminds me of a moment in "The Long Game" when Rose is leaning on the chair right behind his head. I'm a sucker for parallels between Nine and Ten.
“I’ve trapped you here.” Oh my God, the Doctor and Fox Mulder should go get a drink. They could have a whiskey-fueled guilt-off. The Doctor clearly has an advantage, having been alive for 900+ years, but I think that almost half a century of Mulder could give him a run for his money.
I love the clutchy way he hugs her, like: the TARDIS is gone, now she’s all I have.
It’s cute how the Doctor is hunched over by the wall, furiously writing in his little Time Lord Moleskine, trying to decipher the writing.
“I’ll have a go, yeah.” Rose is a seriously great traveler. She just sort of goes with the flow. They’re potentially stuck there, and she’s like, well, what good does freaking out do, I’ll try some of this glop they're dishing up.
I love the sort of Western strings where Ida opens the viewing window. They’re a bit Firefly-esque.
“I won’t go mad, I promise.”
“How would you know?”
One of my favorite things about Rose is that most of her scientific knowledge seems derived from Nova, or, I suppose, its British equivalent. She has no A-levels, she’s said that she wasn’t down with school, but she clearly is INTERESTED in things, and there's something fitting in the idea that she's scraped together a decent amount of pop-scientific knowledge from TV.
I love how the Doctor is like, THIS IS THE WORST THING EVER IN THE HISTORY OF ALL UNIVERSES WORST WORST WORST. And Rose is like, “Well, okay, it blows, but we're going to have to just wing it. Find a planet, get a job, live a life. What else could we do?” Like, seriously, PULL IT TOGETHER, Doctor. Jesus.
THE DOCTOR: I’d have to settle down. In a house, a proper house, with…with…with DOORS and things! Carpets! Me! Living in a house! Now that…that is terrifying.
ROSE: You’d have to get a mortgage!
THE DOCTOR: No.
ROSE: Oh, yes.
THE DOCTOR: I’m dying. That’s it. I am dying, it is all over.
ROSE: What about me? I’d have to get one, too! I dunno, could…could be the same one. We could both..I dunno, share. Or not, you know. Whatever. I dunno, we’ll sort something out.
THE DOCTOR: Anyway.
ROSE: We’ll see!
Whatever, you’d obviously share, nerds. The Doctor apparently hasn’t realized that they’re living together in the TARDIS. How would a non-time traveling house be any different? I also think it's interesting that the Doctor gets panicky in the moment, even though he says at several other times that he's somewhat envious of humans for this very reason. ("Father's Day," "Doomsday," "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood," and really, kind of, "Journey's End.")
“Everyone leaves home in the end.”
1. Another instance of Rose telling him her decision's been made. They might go back and visit Jackie, do the domestic thing, but she's left home.
2. This is sort of a vision of "Doomsday." This is what ultimately happens to her, again and again. This Worst Case Scenario comes true and she's trapped in the alternate universe. Only then, she isn't "stuck" with him, she's torn apart from him. And it happens again in "Journey's End," only that really is a case of "stuck with you, that's not so bad."
“Stuck with you, that’s not so bad.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
The thing is, he still doesn’t get it, he still thinks she’s going to leave him. Obviously, at this moment, she couldn't leave him if she wanted to, but I think he needs to hear her say this. I love how firm she is with her "yes," like, "case closed, buddy."
“The mysterious couple.” You said it, Danny. It’s cute how they don’t dispute the use of “couple,” or even react to it. It's so different from how he and Martha or he and Donna would've reacted. Martha would've been given the old, "Really? They thought we were a couple? Interesting, don't you think, Doctor?" sort of reaction, and Donna, of course, would've been all, "Girrrrl, please. Single, ready to mingle. Not attached to the skinny bloke."
The Doctor just stands back and lets Rose tell Danny about the weird Ood happenings, about “he is awake” on her cell phone.
I love how the Doctor steps up dramatically to the railing and repeats, “He is awake,” to see if the Oods will answer “And you will worship him” again.
It’s sort of strange how the computer voice that Scooti “talks” to ends up seeming like a character, and yet it doesn’t fall into “the computer has a mind,” because the way the voice replies to things she says is similar to the way voice-activated things reply here and now. Which makes me feel weird about voice-activated computers.
“He bathes in the black sun.” This is pretty freaky for a show that's allegedly for children.
Scooti is able to try to resist the beast, unlike the Ood and the computer, who apparently have no way to do anything but submit. She raises her hand toward the glass, as though Toby/the beast has a hold on her, but then she pulls back and runs to the door.
“I found her.” The floating effect is awesome, and was done, according to some bonus feature, by having her float in a pool.
The strings here get reused during the Doctor and Rose’s reunion.
Oh, the Doctor loves that spacesuit. Loves it. I bet he totally stashes it away in the TARDIS so he can be an astronaut for Halloween.
“We don’t even know who you are.” Why are they so much more secretive here than they usually are? I mean, it’s not like they generally go around shouting “we’re time travelers!” but they seem excessively secretive, calling the cell phone a "communication device," being very cagey about the TARDIS.
The Doctor tells Zachary that “the captain doesn’t leave the mission,” which I think is interesting, since you could reasonably say that the Doctor is the captain of his own personal mission, and yet he’s going down. I guess a captain without a ship is no longer a captain.
“I want that spacesuit back in one piece, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
The kiss on the helmet makes me feel slightly goofy. She just doesn't hesitate, and he closes his eyes with this sweet little smile on his face.
And their little waves! With half of their hands! And the Doctor’s giant space gloves!
“Well, we’ve come this far. There’s no turning back.”
“Oh, did you have to? No turning back? That’s almost as bad as ‘nothing could possibly go wrong’ or ‘this is gonna be the best Christmas Walford’s ever had.’”
Thanks to Google, I now know that Walford is where EastEnders takes place. I'd been imagining a department store in an “It’s a Wonderful Life”-type town.
Rose questions Jefferson picking up the gun. Luckily, it’s a magic gun that only hits organic things, so it won’t puncture a wall. In any case, it got me thinking about guns on Doctor Who, and how humans have to do the dirty work, particularly when we’re talking about Ten. It’s not like he tells them to, but that’s how it ends up. I love that he doesn’t do weapons, you don't want the Doctor stalking around with a gun at his waist, but on the other hand, it then falls to someone else to make horrible choices about taking up arms when it comes to that.
Even Rose winds up with a gun in series four, and Martha with the Osterhagen Key. But then it’s like…Nine was almost MORE human in that way, like being all fucked up from the Time War made him closer to being a human, more willing to act upon those impulses, do the "bad" thing. But as he “heals” and then becomes Ten, he gets further away from that. Nine picks up a gun in “Dalek” and Rose gets him to look at himself and put it down, “making him better.” By "The Parting of the Ways," given a choice between "coward and killer," he says he's "a coward, any day." When we first meet Nine, he probably easily could've gone killer rather than coward. Because he had. And TenII, who IS part-human, and who’s definitely willing to pick up a giant gun, is compared to Nine. "He's me, when we first met."
Next: 2x09 The Satan Pit!