Series 2, Episode 13 (Finale Part 2 of 2) - "Doomsday"

WARNING: THIS ANALYSIS MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT WATCHED DOCTOR WHO OR AT THE VERY LEAST HAVE NOT SEEN THIS EPISODE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

At long last, part 2 of 2 of the Series 2 Finale.


So, to recap, Part 1 ended with the Void Ship finally opening, and who should appear but...the Daleks, the Doctor's worst enemy. This episode takes place after that. It again opens with a cold open that is similar to the one in "Army of Ghosts," featuring Rose standing on a beach and addressing the viewer in voice-over, ending with "This is the story of how I died."

The main plot of this episode is the Battle of Canary Wharf, a.k.a. a flat-out war where the always-angry, destruction-obsessed Daleks and the emotionless robotic Cybermen have at it with each other, and heaven help any human who gets in the way.



Meanwhile, there's the issue of the breach between worlds through which the Void Ship and the Cybermen got through, which the Doctor needs to fix.

Rose's taunting of the Daleks is probably one of my favorite moments from this episode. She basically tells the Daleks that she killed the Emperor, who is considered to be the creator deity of the Daleks and is thus held in high reverence by the whole Dalek race. She delivers this info with all the smirking satisfaction it deserves too. A "Take that!" moment if there ever was one. Great acting on Billie Piper's part.



Another funny part of this ep (and also I think the previous one) is that the Doctor is frequently seen wearing these retro 3D glasses. The kind with the one blue lens and one red lens that they had before they started making the clear plastic ones we use to watch 3D movies today. It is explained later that these seemingly normal glasses can be used to see "Void stuff," particles that collect around anyone who has traveled through the Void (which is basically anyone that has traveled to any parallel worlds, as doing so in this series requires traveling through the Void). This becomes key in the episode, as Rose, among other characters, has accumulated a pretty fair amount of Void stuff.



Anyway, so as the episode begins, Rose, her friend Mickey (who apparently jumped over from whatever parallel world he had been in since earlier in the series), and a Torchwood scientist encounter the Daleks, and as said before, Rose taunts them. The Daleks try to get either Rose or Mickey to touch the "Genesis Ark" they brought with them, to get it to wake up. Rose remembers an earlier incident when she woke up a broken Dalek with just her touch, and figures the Daleks want her to do the same with the Ark. She stalls, however, until the Doctor can find them.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is discussing humanity (and supposedly a truce) with the Cybermen Captain, when he is rescued by some commandos led by some blond-haired dude named Jake. They take the Doctor back to their world, a parallel Earth where Torchwood also exists, via these things on necklaces that look like the Staples "That was easy" buzzers, only yellow. There they meet Pete Tyler, Rose's dad, who is very much alive in this world, and try to discuss what to do. It's determined that the Doctor must try to close the breach connecting our world to the parallel world, even if it means cutting off contact between the two worlds for good.

Jackie, Rose's mom, meanwhile manages to escape getting turned into a Cyberman (Torchwood's head honcho, Yvonne, isn't so lucky), runs into the Doctor and his group and has an emotional reunion with the parallel-version of her late husband, who somehow recognizes her even though they're not married in the parallel world.

The Doctor then manages to free Rose, Mickey, and the Torchwood scientist from the Daleks, thanks to Rose stalling the Daleks from killing them. Rose asks him about the Ark, which the Daleks claim is Time Lord technology, but he doesn't know anything about it. He then sicks the Cybermen on the Daleks using the Sonic Screwdriver, allowing Rose and co to escape. Mickey, however, accidentally touches the Ark in his flight, activating it.

An even bigger, worldwide-scale battle then begins, with the Daleks taking off into the sky with the Ark, which is revealed to be a Time Lord prison ship full of captured Daleks, and, like the TARDIS, bigger on the inside than on the outside. Meaning that millions of Daleks now get unleashed on the world - not to mention the 5 million Cybermen still on the loose. Naturally, chaos ensues.

The Doctor then sets about trying to close the breach, producing a couple magnetic hooks he intends to attach to the wall. He explains that the breach is in such a condition that everything with Void stuff on it will get sucked into the breach when he tries to close it. Since he himself is covered in the stuff, he's going to use the hook to hang on to for dear life. He then tells Jake and his team, Mickey, and the Tyler family to escape to the parallel world. Rose, naturally, says she's going to stay with him instead and help him, but the Doctor slips a parallel-world-jumping device around her neck anyway, and they all jump to the other world. Rose is like "oh no you don't" and jumps back. The Doctor then has to resign himself to the fact that she's not going to leave and tells her to start up some program to open the breach and then to pull one of the levers the Torchwood people were using to open and close the breach for the "ghost shifts," while he pulls the other lever.

The Cybermen are about to break in, but they are stopped by Yvonne (now a Cyberman) who has somehow regained control of her soul. She buys the Doctor and Rose some time by confronting the other Cybermen and blocking them from going through the door to where the Doctor and Rose are, declaring she has fought for "Queen and Country" and crying one last oily tear of remorse:



The Doctor and Rose open the breach, and then grab onto the hooks for dear life, just as the Daleks burst through the window. The millions of Daleks start getting sucked into the breach, as do (supposedly) the Cybermen, though the main "Cult of Skaro" Daleks (the original 4 Daleks that attacked) escape through a emergency time rift they just happened to have access to.

And then the awful thing happens. Rose's lever starts to slip the other way, so she lets go of the hook with one hand so she can grab the lever. Unfortunately, this causes her to start losing her grip, and she ends up having to hang onto the lever for dear life. But it ultimately fails her. And this happens:



Yep, Rose gets pulled into the breach (she has Void stuff on her, remember?). The Doctor realizes what's happening and has a big NOOOOOOO! moment.

But Rose gets sucked in anyway, and just before the breach closes parallel world-Pete Tyler jumps in from his world, catches her, and takes her with him. The Doctor wanders to the wall where the breach had been in a shocked daze, leaning against the wall devastated, while Rose does the same in tears in the other world. Pete Tyler notes that those buzzer devices no longer function, a sign that the breach has been closed.

The Doctor then walks away, and on the other world Pete and the others try to comfort Rose.

Some time passes, and Rose narrates that some time after the previous incidents she had a dream that the Doctor was calling her name. She tells Pete, her mom Jackie, and Mickey - the only ones that would understand - and they set out in her dad's Hummer-sized SUV to follow the voice. They track it to a small bay about 50 miles outside of Bergen, Norway (how they got across the water to Norway is not explained), the same place Rose was seen during the cold opens for this episode and the previous one. The bay, we learn later, is called Dårlig Ulv Stranden, which in Norwegian translates (roughly) to "Bad Wolf Bay," yet another nice reference to the "Bad Wolf" arc in Series 1.



Once there, the Doctor appears as a ghostly projection. Rose runs to him. The Doctor explains that he's found the last breach between our world and the parallel world, and is using it to see her one last time and say goodbye, orbiting the TARDIS around a supernova to do so (he quips that he's "burning up a sun just to say goodbye"). She comments sadly that he looks like a ghost, so he uses the Sonic Screwdriver to up his resolution so that he looks more lifelike. He's still just a projection, though, so he tells Rose she can't touch him. Plus, they only have 2 minutes before the breach closes. They quickly make small talk. Rose tells the Doctor her mother is three months pregnant and then jokes that she is back working as a shop girl, before finally revealing that she's going to put her knowledge of aliens to good use by working at the parallel world's re-opened version of Torchwood. The Doctor is impressed, calling her "Rose Tyler: Defender of the Earth" while cracking a smile.

The Doctor, however, has news of his own. He tells Rose that, back on her home world, she's listed as having died during the Battle of Canary Wharf. Rose, in tears, asks him if they will ever see each other again, to which the Doctor replies she can't. She asks him what he plans to do now, and he says he will keep on traveling, alone. She breaks down and confesses to him that she loves him. The Doctor is touched, and then says,

Quite right, too. [Pause] And I suppose, if it's my last chance to say it: Rose Tyler...

And then the breach closes and his projection cuts off. Literally, he says "Rose Tyler..." and then it cuts off. As they called it in one of the specials, it's like "the worst dropped call ever." I agree. Even executive producer Julie Gardner said she believed the Doctor was going to say "I love you" back (according to the episode commentary), and supposedly he gets another chance when Rose makes an appearance at the end of Series 4, so I'll look forward to that.

This video shows the majority of the scene:



Even though I kinda knew what was going to happen to Rose in this episode already from the specials, I was still sad about the end of this episode. I mean, the Doctor and Rose seemed like such the perfect couple, and then to get torn away like that....that stinks. I mean, I know that Billie Piper was leaving the show and they had to write Rose out somehow, but man what a whammy of an ending, huh?

For some reason, this episode reminded me a lot of the episode "Worlds Apart" from season 4 of Fringe. In that episode, the two worlds - ours and the "Other Side" - are faced with a dilemma where both worlds are in jeopardy thanks to the plans of the menace David Robert Jones, who utilizes former Cortexiphan patients and their parallel world doppelgangers to cause earthquakes on both sides. The only way to save everything is to shut down the bridge that Peter created between the worlds, despite the fact that the existence of the bridge is helping the Other Side to recover from the damage it sustained due to the two worlds' fight for energy - some of the previously "ambered" areas are being reopened, for example. In the end, even though neither side really wants to cut off contact with the other, they decide to do it cause frankly they don't really have a choice if they want to save their worlds. The end result is a little happier though in that Peter decides to stay in our world. Anyway, I thought the two episodes were similar. Actually, Fringe and Doctor Who are probably similar in lots of ways. I should do a comparison some time.

Well, that's all I have to say about this episode. More next time!

Screencaps are from the website Sonic Biro.