Doctor Who S01 E12 – Daleks Heart Reality TV

Previously: Margaret the Slitheen got a second chance at life, which basically meant becoming an egg again. Rough.
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Bad Wolf

Sweeney: This episode is off to a great start because the title is Bad Wolf which means we kick off the drinking game BEFORE we start watching. This pleases me greatly.

We start 100 years after the Simon Pegg episode. The Doctor wakes up in a tiny spinny elevator. He falls out and a girl with pigtail buns helps him up as he stumbles about, terribly confused by how he got there. Pigtails explains that he’s been “chosen” to be in some sort of Big Brother type house. The Doctor is summoned into “the diary room” where he sits down in a big red chair with a giant case of “Are you fucking kidding me?” which is a fair reaction.

Kirsti: I have two reactions to the opening scene of this episode: 1. OH MY GOD, IT’S FANNY THORNTON FROM NORTH & SOUTH!!!! and 2. The idea that Big Brother is still running several thousand years in the future is UTTERLY TERRIFYING. 

Sweeney: You know what else will probably still be on? Supernatural.

Elsewhere, in a dark room with far less club music and more silence (so, “a better place”) Rose is also waking up confused. A man asks her name and tells her to listen to the android because its word is law. She is ushered over to a reality show of her own – The Weakest Link. Someone calls out about The Android being activated and sure enough we cut to a robot that looks like the love child of Rosie and a Darth Vader lego doll. It’s been a few years since The Weakest Link was on the air, so I’m glad Rose helpfully spells it out for us: the ANNE-droid welcomes everyone to The Weakest Link.

K: The fact that Anne Robinson actually agreed to participate in this makes me ridiculously happy.

Sweeney: It’s now Captain Jack’s turn to wake up confused. Some robots are fawning over his attire (K: I laugh forever and ever because it’s Trinny and Susannah!) and he’s put through a machine called a de-fabricator which removes all his clothing, though he’s pretty well covered by other objects in the shot, which gets a major boo for me. New rule: drink every time I boo. Captain Jack makes a terrible dick joke. Boo again. Drink. (M: I’m not sure if you understand drinking games. Drinking, yes, definitely.) (S: Oh well. I’ll just keep drinking anyway.)

Big Brother. The Doctor is trying the sonic screwdriver all over the place, but to no avail – they’re trapped. Pigtails whispers to the Doctor about whether she’s popular in the outside world, introducing herself as Lynda-with-a-y.

K: Kirsti-with-an-I sympathises over her need to spell out her name all the time. 

Sweeney: He brushes her off at first but then insists that she’s sweet and that’s what everyone says about her. The Doctor is looking for a garden and suddenly he remembers the gang getting separated by a crazy white light coming through the walls. The Doctor concludes that something big is going on and he speaks into a camera telling it that the latest update from the Big Brother House is that he’s getting out and going to find his friends before finding whoever brought them there.

In a control room a guy watches pensively. He tells a woman that he needs a word with her, but she’s gotta finish something with The Weakest Link. Rose stands around nervously as the game gets counted down to starting. Realizing she’s not going anywhere, she decides to play the game for realsies. AnneDroid asks questions. The last guy gets a question wrong whose correct answer is Torchwood. IDK, that’s probably significant because spinoff. (K: And other reasons…) Rose giggles crazily when it gets to her next question that she doesn’t know the answer to. Back in the control room, the woman says it’s like Rose “knows” and the guy says it’s as if the game is running itself.

Captain Jack’s show. Is this What Not To Wear? (K: YUP.) The robots put snazzy clothes on Captain Jack and then start talking about giving him plastic surgery. Leave his pretty face alone! MAJOR BOO! (Drink.)

The Weakest Link. The woman right before Rose gets voted off and she cries and begs for another chance, but AnneDroid says she is the weakest link and opens her mouth to reveal a laser that disintegrates the woman. Rose freaks the fuck out and calls everyone sick. The last guy (the one who blew the question about Torchwood) has a meltdown, saying he refuses to play. He runs off and gets vaporized before he can get away.

Big Brother. The Doctor is chastised by his housemates for not sitting on the couch as ordered so he begrudgingly relents. Since he’s new, only the other three are up for eviction. The evictee is announced and she sadly goes to leave. The other two housemates are sad and Lynda-with-a-y tells the Doctor to stop making fun of the situation. They sit back on the couch and watch as their former housemate is vaporized. They explain to the Doctor that she was “evicted from life.” STAHP IT, SHOW. These epic cheese scene-ending lines are killing time. (Boo! Drink.)

Mari: Yes, but I think that the line is kind of purposefully cheesy, but that is really more of a problem with these reality TV set-ups. I mean “eviction” is a common Brig Brother term, so they are trying to up the stakes by making it SUPER CLEAR that this is future-death-eviction, or whatever. My point is that this is less about being cheesy and more about being painfully obvious. When the Doctor was first dropped into the Big Brother house it was a great moment. Then they just talk it to death and don’t let the gag just be a “you get it or you don’t” thing, unfortunately.

Sweeney: Useful clarification, in part because that, rather than cheese, is the heart and soul of why this show and I have been struggling to get along.

The two people from the control room head elsewhere to investigate the situation further. They flirt and talk about taking time off. He says that there have been rumors for years about something being hidden up there and when the woman counters that “The Controller” would know, he says you’d have to allow for human error. She whispers in his ear that the controller hasn’t been human for years. We cut to a woman in a glowy blue room covered in wires. She looks very Minority Report. (As a total aside: I’ve been having a hard time choosing my #snarkathon 2015 movie, but I think I may have just found a winner.)

K: Every time I watch this episode, there’s a split second where I just assume it’s Tilda Swinton. Because it honestly wouldn’t be out of character for her. 

Mari: The Controller is DEFINITELY the awkward love child of The White Witch and Evanna. Excellent calls.

Sweeney: Big Brother House. The Doctor chastizes the remaining house guests for signing up for something so insane. Lynda-with-a-y says they don’t have a choice – they just get “chosen” and there are 60 Big Brother houses running around the world at any given time. The winner’s sole reward is that they get to live. The Doctor, remembering Lynda-with-a-y mentioning that a Linda-with-an-i was forcibly evicted for damaging property, decides it’s now super imperative he get the fuck out of there, so he breaks a camera with his sonic screwdriver.

What Not To Wear. Captain Jack is done going through outfits and the robots announce it’s time for the “Face Off” and they start buzzing some crazy machine tools. With that, a naked Captain Jack produces a weapon he’d hid “you don’t want to know where” and blasts the robots’ heads off.

Meanwhile, someone else is getting evaporated on The Weakest Link and they go to commercial. Rose asks the guy who helped her up why he voted that person off and he says he wants to keep Rose in because she’s stupid and thus the ideal person to go up against in the finale so that he can win and not die and also get his shiny reward from Bad Wolf Corporation. Here you go, guy, have a star:

Rose latches onto those words and how they’ve been following them around. She asks Mr. Title Star why the corporation is called that, but he’s got a don’t-know-don’t-care attitude. He’s preoccupied with not dying.

K: But, like, also WHO THE HELL KNOWS WHY CORPORATIONS ARE CALLED WHAT THEY’RE CALLED? If it’s not named after some dead rich white dude, my usual answer would be “how the fuck should I know?”. Stupid question, Rose. Stupid question. 

Sweeney: Rose goes on a weird dewy flashback of all the times they’ve seen Bad Wolf all over the universe. She wonders if this means that her being there wasn’t an accident but something that was planned. Which, you know, duh. I hate when shows (and this isn’t a Doctor Who specific grievance) give us plots like this where we have to spend 20 minutes watching the characters catch up to something that is made evident to the audience almost immediately. This is a personal preference, but I would much rather discover things like this with the characters.

Mari: A little of that, though, is spoiled viewing. For most first time watchers, I would guess that they weren’t so aware of the Bad Wolf, until when the Doctor briefly considered it in the last episode? Or perhaps a little bit before then? To anyone who was just getting hip to Bad Wolf, this would seem like a less painfully slow reveal, I think.

Sweeney: I was about to suggest that our fellow first time watchers let us know in the comments, but I guess you’re all operating on the same spoilers I am. Womp.

Big Brother. The Doctor is forcibly evicted and goes into the little eviction chamber. The countdown begins as before but nothing happens when it reaches zero. This seems like a stupid gamble. That’s his whole plan? I feel like he should have at least tried to destroy the disintegration thing or open the door or do literally ANYTHING other than stand there and wait and see if he’d get killed off. Whatever. He doesn’t. The people in the control room are confused by what seems to be some sort of unexplained system override. The Doctor THEN decides to open the door on the other side (as in, not the one leading back into the house – as in, what he should have fucking done as soon as he stepped in) and he asks Lynda-with-a-y to follow him. She hesitates, but his argument that staying is a 50/50 shot at death (at best) is a compelling one, so she follows.

Mari: I think it’s so the Doctor to step into the elevator with zero plan and kind of just stand and smile. This may just be me and all my feels reading way too much into this, but I can see how this episode gradually progresses from the Doctor not really taking this seriously, to realizing people are dying but not feeling personally in danger, to, well, what happens later.

Sweeney: On the other side, the Doctor has a big zoomy camera dun-dun-dun moment as he realizes that he’s been in this place before – it’s Satellite 5. Lynda-with-a-y marvels at him calling it that. It’s “The Game Station” now – hasn’t been Satellite 5 for about a hundred years. The Doctor confirms that time, adding that he was there then. Lynda-with-a-y is incredulous about him having been there a hundred years ago. The Doctor wonders about the crazy amount of energy he’s detecting there.

K: He also makes a silly little Cassandra joke about how he looks good for his age because “I moisturise”. It made me giggle. 

Sweeney: Ah, I totally didn’t catch that as a callback. The line was cute even without the connection, but that’s even better.

He asks Lynda-with-a-y where his friends might have ended up and she says there are hundreds of games they could be in, and she rattles of a list, none of them being the actual games they ended up in. Lynda-with-a-y asks who the Doctor really is and also wonders if she can come with him when he gets free and wanders off again. While the Doctor is searching around Lynda-with-a-y flips a switch illuminating a giant “BAD WOLF CORPORATION” sign.

Control room. More frantic worrying. The guy finally goes to Minority Report to tell her what’s going on. She tells him to just continue working. No security will be called in because the people wandering out of their games are “no one.” The lady from the control room puts her hand on a scanner and Minority Report tells her that she and her co-worker are out of bounds and must return to work.

Captain Jack is just finishing assembling a big menacing gun out of the robot parts. He checks a little scanner and spots a person with two hearts, meaning he’s identified the Doctor and runs off to find him.

The Doctor and Lynda-with-a-y look down at Earth through a window and she shares the bleak state of affairs on Earth, though she doesn’t find it bleak – there are 10,000 channels to watch! The Doctor is so confused because this is supposed to be the fourth great human empire – he set everything right himself 100 years ago. Lynda-with-a-y says that 100 years ago is actually when it all started because the news channels all went dark and there was no information to take its place. Governments and economies collapsed. Horrified, the Doctor realizes that he made this world.

The last episode was clearly meant to set us up for this. I wish they had done a little less of their usual thing of sledgehammering the message into us, but hamfisted execution aside, the that-to-this build there was a nice touch. The “what if you’re actually fucking everything up?” question is one that they have hinted at in less frustrating ways throughout the season and for however much I’ve faulted the show’s pacing elsewhere, this is a good point to tackle the question directly.

(I liked a thing! Drink anyway.)

K: It gave me feels for poor, sad PTSD-y Nine. He just wanted to help, and make everything better. Instead, he made it all worse for millions of people. Womp womp. 

Sweeney: The Weakest Link. Another contestant vaporized, leaving Rose alone with Mr. Title Star, who tells her that tactical voting is now over and she’s on her own.

Captain Jack finds the newly-in-crisis Doctor and Lynda-with-a-y. (K: Do Jack’s very tight leather trousers warrant a bad girl styling tag?! Because I kind of feel like they should.) (S: YES, DEFINITELY.) The Doctor is hella grumpy as he tries to search a computer for Rose. He snaps at Captain Jack for flirting with Lynda-with-a-y because “flirt” is the only setting he has. Captian Jack hands the Doctor his little gadget but it’s not compatible, so they tear open the computer. Tearing things apart: time tested troubleshooting. The Doctor says that this whole Bad Wolf thing is tied up with him – somebody is manipulating his entire life, and now Rose is stuck inside whatever it is.

The Weakest Link. In the final round, Rose is getting questions wrong. The Doctor finds the floor she’s on and Lynda-with-a-y realizes immediately the Rose is with the Anne-droid which is srsbsns. We cut back and forth between the questions of the final round and the Doctor trying to get to their floor. The Doctor tries to get into the room as Rose is answering her final question. She gets it wrong. She’s about to get vaporized just as the Doctor enters. She runs to him and…gets vaporized. Well shit. Didn’t see that coming. There’s lots of shouting, mostly from Captain Jack, as the Doctor falls to the ground and scoops up Rose’s ashes. The Doctor looks utterly defeated as he and Captain Jack are arrested.

Later, in a cell, he’s interrogated and asked the purpose of his sonic screwdriver and how he got on board. Lynda-with-a-y tries to stick up for him, but is promptly shut up. The Doctor says nothing. We see his mugshot being taken.

He remains silent as he’s asked if he understands what’s happening. The guard opens a door and the Doctor turns to Captain Jack and says, “Let’s do it.” They quickly overpower the guards and reclaim their weapons. And some new ones, I guess.

In Minority Report’s main room, the control room people are pleading with her as she continues to tell them to STFU and get back to work. The Doctor and Captain Jack barge in, demanding answers. The Doctor tells control room dude to calm the fuck down because he’s not going to shoot them. He sends Captain Jack to secure doors while he tries to get answers from Control Room Dude who explains that Minority Report only recognizes the existence of staff. Also, much like those drug babies in Minority Report, being plugged into the machine is the only life this woman has ever known. Control Room Dude confirms that he’s kept a log of years worth of funny business happening on The Game Station.

Captain Jack goes into “Archive 6” against the protestations of staff. He holds up his guns in the general, “Duh,” fashion I’d expect. Inside that room he finds the TARDIS. Inside, he sad pandas at Rose’s denim jacket and then sees something surprising. But it’s not time for us to know yet.

Control Room Lady is telling the Doctor to stop terrorizing staff and the Doctor’s all, “Oh, you mean the staff that murders contestants on the daily?” and when she insists they’re just doing their jobs he tells her she’s lost her speaking privileges. Awesome. (I liked another thing. Drink again. My rules.)

K: That line was fabulous. Because “but that’s the way we’ve always done it” is one of the most dangerous statements on earth. 

Sweeney: Suddenly, Minority Report starts talking, asking for the Doctor. She explains that solar flares are briefly hiding her from her masters. She doesn’t know who they are, but they’ve been controlling her thoughts for her entire life. She’s been blind but she saw him and knew she could hide him in the games, counting on him to find her. She says that her masters have been hiding in dark places, guiding the human race and now they are so strong. They fear the Doctor, though. She doesn’t ever say who her masters are, though, and the flare ends. Control Room Dude says it’ll be two years before the next solar flare.

Captain Jack bursts back in saying that he found the TARDIS and it worked the whole thing out. There’s something the Doctor needs to see. He has Lynda stand in a spot and pushes a button that gets her zapped. The Doctor is horrified for a second but Captain Jack pushes another button and she reappears beside the Doctor. Captain Jack explains that the zap doesn’t disintegrate people – it transports them across space and time, meaning that Rose is still alive…somewhere.

Wait, so what was all the dirt the Doctor was sadpanda-ing over?

K: Contrivance Dust. Duh. Or, like, Floo Powder?

Mari: The laser’s bad reaction to peroxide?

Sweeney: Anyway, speaking of Rose, she wakes up and is terrified by what she sees. Based on the blue screen we then see her through, I’m guessing the suped up plungers are back.

Minority Report starts calling out coordinates to the Doctor, even though she’s no longer protected by solar flares. Not sure if she finishes in time or not, but she gets zapped right out of there. She wakes up in a room like the one Rose woke up in. Sure enough, I see the reflection of a Dalek as Minority Report tells her masters they can kill her because she’s already brought their destruction.

In the control room, Captain Jack flirts with Control Room Guy. Captain Jack pulls up a visual on the screen of where the zappy thing is sending people. It looks like nothing is there, but the Doctor says that’s just because it’s being hidden. He fiddles with the controls and ta-da they can see: spaceships. Lots of spaceships. Captain Jack and the Doctor are both incredulous because those ships were, to their knowledge all destroyed. And yet, there they are: 200 ships with over 2,000 Daleks aboard each one.

K: I ask one of my eternal Doctor Who related questions: HOW THE FUCK DID DALEKS MANAGE TO BUILD ANYTHING WHEN ALL THEY HAVE IS A PLUNGER AND A WHISK? But also, why were they killing off humans one at a time? That seems like a ridiculously complex and stupidly long term plan for extermination…

Mari: Those silly Daleks probably just really love reality TV.

Sweeney: They fucking would.

Speaking of, those Daleks are aware that they have been detected. They open communications with the control room, with Rose standing beside them. They tell the Doctor that their fleet is almost finished and he will not intervene because they have Rose as their prisoner. The Doctor says, “No,” and when they ask him to explain, he’s all, “No.” Just over and over again, “NO!” Like, when I ask you to explain the thing, repeating the thing isn’t explaining the thing. But the Doctor was just buying time to work up to his good speech. He vows to rescue Rose Tyler and also destroy all the Daleks with sheer force of will and tenacity. We pan out and see all the Daleks rising up and crying exterminate. END.

It’s with a bit of I’ve-been-burned-before weariness that I say that I liked this episode. It pulled on bits from episodes I did not enjoy and while I don’t think those episodes are any stronger for having contributed to this one (because their structural sloppiness isn’t improved by being fodder for the building of this plot) but certainly this episode is stronger for those shitty ones, if that makes sense. It’s only part 1, so there’s not much more to say than that.

As with the previous two-parter, I am, if nothing else, actually looking forward to the next episode. Progress. It’s been a two-steps-forward-one-stop back kind of progress, but at least the net result is forward movement.

Onward.

 

Next time on Doctor Who: The Doctor sends Rose home to safety as he finishes the fight on satellite five in S01 E13 – The Parting of the Ways.