Marines: I understand that we have a little less reason to celebrate here, since Series 1 was only 13 episodes, but some of those first few (or 7) were rough. Perhaps not as much on rewatch, but this little dance is for all the Snows.
We’ve covered this plenty and right from the onset, but this season really improves when you have the context of the rest of the series. Nine remains perhaps my favorite Doctor (let’s see how the rest of this rewatch goes) and he does it in a sadly short period of time. There is much you can say about that topic, about who Nine is and why, but that won’t be something we can broach until other things become clear down the line. I loved that he has a way of going instantly from happy and smiling to serious and severe.
It’s no secret that I like Rose and I love that our introduction to Doctor Who comes with a huge focus on Rose, and by extension, on humanity. I know people will disagree, but by making the series just as much about Rose as anything else, they put a young, naive “shop girl” on equal footing with this ancient, time and space traveler. It feels like the season is bookend by Rose, the pilot being named after her, and the big resolution of The Parting of the Ways coming thanks to her.
Of course, it isn’t perfect (or even great) no matter how much my nostalgia is getting in the way here. Pacing is a problem and from the onset there is no real sense of danger. It just always seems like of course there will be a solution. The stakes are never too high. Part of that is because of the revolving cast of problem-having, aliens of the week. It’s hard to invest very many feels in a 45 minute episode and just as quickly leave them for the next adventure.
It takes a while to settle into this universe and I think series 1, for better or worse takes us on quite a journey. I wouldn’t have thought that I could go from being bored to death to crying over our loss in just thirteen episodes, but that was the case in my first watch. Second watch just made me love our main cast of characters even more.
Here’s my ranking:
- The Doctor Dances – Pretty predictable, I think, having this two-parter up so high. If I could rate them together, I would. I love having Rose, Jack and the Doctor together and I think Eccleston really shines here as we get, if only briefly, a happier side of what by now had become for me a beloved character.
- The Empty Child – I’ll just use this second line to say Nancy was wonderful and the Empty Child was creepy as hell. Keep gas masks away from me forever.
- The Parting of the Ways – I was tempted to put this one way on top. I love Nine so his final episode of course punches me in the gut. It’s tragic in so many ways, from his final showdown with the Daleks to his final goodbye to Rose.
- Bad Wolf – A solid set-up episode that leaves you interested in what is to come and goes from silly to serious as it goes.
- Father’s Day – This is when I first felt like I was watching a show I liked. Again, I loved pausing for a moment in Rose’s story and one that tells us so much about her and the Doctor. A bit plot-holey to be sure, but the FEELS make up for it.
- Dalek – Eccleston in a room with a monster with a plunger for a hand. And it is magic. So much hinges on this first (for New Who) introduction to an old foe and I thought it was very well done. I probably didn’t appreciate this one as much on first watch.
- The End of the World – A slight step up over Rose and our first look at the mortality of everything up against the Doctor.
- Rose – Dialogue and the interactions between the Doctor and Rose are the saving graces.
- The Unquiet Dead – The first three episodes are more or less tied for me. I appreciate this episode I couldn’t get through, once upon a time.
- Boom Town – While I very much appreciated Margaret’s morality conversations with the Doctor, it felt almost as if the rest of the episode went, “blah, blah, blah” because those conversations were the main point.
- The Long Game – Voted most likely to be forgotten.
- World War Three – The end of the two-parter was slightly better, perhaps because it was the end.
- Aliens of London – What could’ve been a much better episode is forever tainted for me by farting aliens. Not even Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North, could save it.
Kirsti: So I’m writing this at 11.09pm on Christmas Eve, because when else do you do your Doctor Who rankings, and I’ve eaten half a bag of M&Ms and am kind of hyper on sugar, so there’s every possibility that this will make no sense. Also because I watched most of season 1 in, like, July so the details are kind of fuzzy again and everything has a nostalgia-y Instagram filter over it. For example, I wrote my list, and had the “pilot” reasonably high up the list. Then I remembered Plastic Mickey and had to reassess everything. Sigh.
Series 1 is pretty rough going. The show is clearly trying to find its feet, to balance the expectations of Classic Who fans with the “no but seriously WTF is happening right now” confusion of new viewers. And it’s trying to work out whether it wants to be straight out children’s television, laden with fart jokes and slapstick comedy, or something more serious. The writing is rocky at times, and the special effects are typical please-help-us-we-only-have-a-tenner-left-we’d-better-cobble-something-together-from-the-shed BBC (Which I find very endearing, personally).
It’s a season that I think gets stronger on rewatches when you have more background on the Time War and just how much it impacted the Doctor, when you can therefore understand the nuances in Eccleston’s acting and how quickly something seemingly insignificant can make him switch from cheerful to morose or from broken to hopeful, when you can better appreciate how all the threads tie together. All of this is a very long winded and sugar hyped thoughts flying everywhere way of saying that I like series 1 despite its rough spots, though it’s not my favourite series.
- The Empty Child – Seriously, I love everything about this episode. It’s creepy, it’s dark, it ends really well, and it features Captain Jack Harkness. Utter fabulousness.
- The Doctor Dances – This is really only in second place because of that whole contrivance-y “everybody lives” cheesiness at the end. Other than that, I love it. Nine + Rose + Jack = GOOD.
- Bad Wolf – I actually really love the different reality TV shows concept and how our three main characters react to them. It balances the silly and the serious surprisingly well, and it leaves the audience hanging really well.
- The Parting of the Ways – The Dalek plan makes literally zero sense (“EXTERMINATE THE HUMAN RACE but, like, one person at a time through reality television”), and there are moments that are a little overdone. But there are also some great moments that set things up for the future. And Eccleston was pretty great in his farewell episode. Plus, you know, TENNANT!!!!!!!
- The End of the World – Our first trip to the future is a little rough at times and takes a while to get going. But I LOVE Cassandra, and honestly? This episode would win me over with nothing more than that “classic earth ballad”, Toxic.
- The Unquiet Dead – I think I’m one of the few people who likes this episode. I can’t in all consciousness rank it any higher, but that’s mostly because the episodes above it are so fabulous. But seriously. It’s Dickens and ghosts at Christmas time! How can you not like that??
- Father’s Day – Laden with feels, yes. An excellent example of the fact that Rose is just like any other nineteen year old girl, yes. But it’s also full of stuff about paradoxes that is NEVER mentioned again, and I just can’t get over how stupid the bat mantises looked.
- Dalek – It’s great to see the Doctor facing an old foe here, and having to deal with something else that’s the last of its kind, having to acknowledge that after the Time War? There are actually a lot of similarities between him and the Dalek. That said, one of the scenes that sticks out in my memory is when they climb the stairs to escape the Dalek, and it slowly floats into the air, and they’re all “OH NO, IT CAN STILL GET US HOLY SHIT”. I get that it’s a throwback to Classic Who, when they couldn’t do that, but it’s pretty much the worst moment of the episode and yet it’s the part that sticks out in my memory. Sigh.
- Rose – This one was well and truly rough. I love the start, with Rose just being thrown into the adventure. And I love that she saves the day in the end. Because that’s what the Doctor does – he takes ordinary people and lets them see that they’re capable of extraordinary things. But I cannot forgive Plastic Mickey. I just can’t.
- The Long Game – Meh. Adam is a douchecanoe, and is unworthy of screentime. All that saved this episode from being lower down were the guest stars. I mean, come on. Simon Pegg, Tamsin Greig AND Anna Maxwell Martin? Gold.
- Boom Town – This took a while to get going, and some of the gags were well and truly overdone. I actually enjoyed the stuff where Margaret was arguing for her freedom and the Doctor was struggling to decide how much authority he should have to punish her. But the ending with basically hitting a giant reset button and letting Margaret start over was dumb.
- Aliens of London – Only saved from 13th place by the fact that we didn’t have to see the Slitheen until, like, the last second.
- World War Three – The highlight of this episode was Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North. Particularly when she schools the Doctor on proper drinks passing etiquette. Everything else was rubbish.
Sweeney: Unless you’ve skipped all the recaps and you’re just dropping by for the rankings, it’s not surprise that I consider this milestone very, very dance party worthy. WE DID IT! I DID IT!
(Angel dancing gif is perfect both because it’s delightful and I could watch it forever and also because it reminds me that I am a TV warrior. A survivor, friends. Scars and all.)
I’m entering the next season very tentatively, in part because I’m starting to feel that this show hinges on a schtick that just isn’t for me. I don’t usually regard myself as one who cares that much about world building – any fantasy story that dedicates multiple pages to describing the local fauna will quickly lose my interest – but the lack of internal cohesion here, the fact that every. single. episode. seemed to be resolved by some insane Deus Ex Machina almost makes me long for that. Almost. Not really. I definitely prefer this to that.
I’m also not a big fan of what feels like speeches as substitute for storytelling. Again, I dig a good speech. Buffy has more than a few that I adore. Her “it’s gonna choke on me” speech is actually the very epitome of letting a good speech pull the rug over a bullshit mess of a plot and I fucking love that speech. Still, there’s a limit. And just as Buffy started to rack up some real misses in season 7 because there just weren’t enough speeches to cover up the contrivance, this show has similarly left me cold when the Doctor stops to soliloquize about the thing could have been conveyed by the episode if everything wasn’t pure random bullshit. Except unlike the 7th season of Buffy, I’m going into this without any feelings for the characters (I actually liked Rose a lot more back around the 2nd or 3rd episode.)
My trepidation comes because I’ve said all this. I say it every week. I’m as tired of saying it as you are of hearing it, and I’m not sure what else there is to say if this is what the show is going to continue to be. I said before that I only want to do this for as long as I feel like I’ve got new things to say – I don’t need to like the show, but it’s important that I don’t get too repetitive. That said, I would also really like for the show to turn some sort of corner. I’m prepared for the speeches to remain epidemic, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that there’s more actual story to back it up.
And with that, a look back at the season through my bitter, cynical eyes:
- The Empty Child – This one belongs on a separate list for me. I LOVE NANCY SO MUCH AND I JUST WANTED A SPINOFF WITH NANCY RUNNING AROUND LIKE SOME KIND OF ROBIN HOOD. This is probably the only episode of the season that I truly enjoyed from start to finish.
- The Doctor Dances – Stupid ending is stupid, but I appreciated the rest.
- The Parting of the Ways – Still hate most of the Doctor’s conversation with time-vortex!Rose, and the Bad Wolf resolution, but I loved all the small moments with the different humans who sacrificed themselves and time-vortex!Rose destroying Daleks was pretty badass.
- Bad Wolf – The reality show stuff was fun.
- Father’s Day – The only episode that made me tear up. Plenty of small moments that I appreciated, however much I hate the first 5 minutes.
- Dalek – Still not sold on the flying plungers, and it was here that I think I started to turn on Rose because she started to seem a little less naive than downright stupid. One of the more cohesive plots, though. Maybe I’m making that up – I don’t really remember.
- Boom Town – I still don’t understand why the farting aliens warranted a THIRD EPISODE, but whatever. Definitely the best of the three, for whatever that’s worth.
- The Long Game – This episode suffered from some heavy-handedness but also did a few things with a bit more subtlety, which I appreciated. The ending gag was cute too.
- The End of the World – I think that it’s probably a good thing that I kind of forgot about this episode.
- World War Three – The better half of farting aliens, if only because it meant an end. Sort of.
- Aliens of the North – Obviously I find the race to the bottom a very, very close one. Farting aliens were fucking awful. This is narrowly saved by having some of Rose’s most likable moments of the season. Or, actually, when Harriet Jones made Rose vaguely likable. Whatever.
- The Unquiet Dead – Zombie grandmas, guys. Zombie grandmas.
- Rose – This episode is the reason I started this show and gave it up forever ago. It remains pretty terrible.
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