(Have you read Part one first? You can read it here.)

Bad Wolf/The Parting of The Ways by Russell T Davies

Saturday 11^th – 18^th June 2005

Bad Wolf opens with a recap of what happened on Satellite Five during The Long Game, which as I mentioned previously, was the first episode of Doctor Who I watched on the live broadcast. But now it had been transformed into the sinister Game Station where contestants play deadly versions of real-life TV shows. The winners get a big cash prize, whilst the losers get eliminated “from life”, as Lynda with a Y says. As I type this bit out, I’m currently halfway through watching Season 3 of Squid Game and am struck by how it’s still an entertaining idea to us over two decades later, albeit with the slight pivot into childhood playground games instead. Returning to Satellite Five, seeing how the Doctor’s actions hadn’t made things better, but actually worse, really felt like an escalation of the stakes to nine-year-old me.

Looking back now, I can see that there were only two actual stories that I’d seen between The Long Game and Bad Wolf, but it genuinely felt like ages back then. It was incredible to see something like that being followed up without any prior expectations. Just like with Dalek, I fell again for the plot beat where Rose has supposedly died at the hands of a deadly laser beam, probably because I knew this was the end of the series, and so I knew something quite dramatic should happen. But of course, Rose is still alive. I now rarely expect the Doctor’s companion to actually die.

And then there’s the slow-burn realisation of who’s behind all this. It’s not until the last couple of scenes where you finally see the full reveal of the Daleks, but watching it back as an adult fan makes me realise all of the clues that were there for fans, such as the golden Dalek baubles on the Dalek spaceship architecture and the distinctive humming sound of the Dalek spaceship. But for nine-year-old me, it wasn’t until the POV shot, with the now iconic blue lens filter, that made nine-year-old me finally realise it was a Dalek. And this time, there wasn’t just one of them.

The cliffhanger to Bad Wolf is also simple yet genius. The Doctor promises to Rose that he will rescue her and stop an entire army of Daleks from destroying the Earth. As a viewer, I knew he was going to do that. I believed that he really could save Rose and the Earth from all those Daleks. But I had no idea how. And to be fair, neither did those Daleks. So that’s what brings us back as viewers in the following week: to find out exactly how he’s going to do it.

I still recall sitting at the kitchen table watching the live broadcast of The Parting of the Ways because I was having my dinner as the titles started rolling. The fact I was allowed to eat my dinner WHILST WATCHING THE TELLY – which was not the norm – made this feel like a television event to me. I also noticed that the cliffhanger was not resolved before the titles, as was the case in The Doctor Dances. How could it? It needed a whole episode to resolve it. Russell has repeated this tactic time and time again, most recently in The Reality War. He also brings back an old villain, the Dalek Emperor, last seen (to only those who were alive and had tuned in) in The Evil of the Daleks (1967). The less said about how this tactic of Russell’s has aged now, the better.

As I moved from the kitchen table to the nearby sofa, I watched each of the contestants and staff members of the Game Station get picked off one-by-one as the Daleks slowly invaded the entire satellite. Poor Lynda with a Y gets asphyxiated by the vacuum of space, that man and woman on Floor 499 never get to have that drink together, Captain Jack accepts his fate once every last bullet of his has been fired.

Meanwhile, Rose gets sent back home in the TARDIS when the Doctor tricks her into thinking he has a plan to save them all. This makes the situation seem all the more desperate, because now even the Doctor doesn’t think he can save the day. But Rose doesn’t give up, she doesn’t give in. She literally gets a massive truck, with the help of her mum and her (ex-)boyfriend, and tears apart the TARDIS console, as if she’s literally ripping through time and space itself, just to go all the way back and save the Doctor. Yes, Rose is not always a perfect character, but when a moment like that happens, you can’t help but think she’s brilliant and determined and brave.

So Rose saves the Doctor, the Daleks get turned into dust, and the Doctor absorbs the power of the Time Vortex, forcing him to regenerate. I didn’t know about the regeneration. I had no idea that there were news reports flying about that Christopher Eccleston was leaving, and David Tennant was arriving in his place. Call it the blissful ignorance of a nine-year-old child who just wants to enjoy a TV show. I still like how understated the regeneration scene is, that big smile from the Doctor’s face as he declares that he was fantastic. It felt like an arc had been completed, with this Doctor coming to terms with the outcome of the Time War.

But then David Tennant shows up, to my somewhat annoyance, and acts like he’s the Doctor now. Nope, not to nine-year-old me. #NotMyDoctor. I am now amused by the fact that this sort of happened again in 2022, although I at least had some prior warning that time around. The it just ends with a caption on screen seating “Doctor Who will return in The Christmas Invasion”. It’s a very sensible title, because I didn’t need to ask when the next episode was, it would be on at Christmas. But I wasn’t done with the Ninth Doctor just yet, because I wanted books and DVDs so I can see more of his adventures. And lucky for me, there were still six episodes for me to watch.

Rose by Russell T Davies

The End of the World by Russell T Davies

The Unquiet Dead by Mark Gatiss

Aliens of London by Russell T Davies

World War Three by Russell T Davies

c. Monday 25^th July 2005

It’s July. It’s the summer holidays. And it’s my birthday. I can recall sitting on the floor of Aunty Jenny’s living room as I unwrapped two Doctor Who DVDs called Volume 1 and Volume 2. A quick glance at the Wikipedia page for ‘List of Doctor Who home video releases’ says these DVDs had been out for just over two months and one month respectively. So at last, I could sit down and watch how the adventures of the Ninth Doctor and Rose actually started, their first trips into the future and the past, and then their first two-part story with a big ol’ alien invasion in London, before returning to the episode that had kick-started my entire obsession with the show. As far as I was concerned, Christmas had come early. I’ll never get that much new TV Doctor Who in a single day ever again.

I still have those two DVDs sat on my shelves, one of them even has a couple of autographs on them. I have never wanted to part with them due to their sentimental value. I’m somewhat amused now that I collect the DVD and Blu-Ray season-long boxsets now but back then as a child, all I ever collected were those individual DVD volumes. I didn’t have any interest in the special features, behind-the-scenes content, not even a passing thought for Doctor Who Confidential. I just wanted to watch those episodes.

Boom Town by Russell T Davies

c. September 2005

Here it is. At last. My finale to the Ninth Doctor era.

I’m not exactly sure when I got this DVD but I’m convinced it was before Christmas so I probably begged my mum to buy it for me once I spotted on the shelves at a supermarket or WHSmith. Wikipedia tells me it was released in the UK on 5 September 2005, so I doubt it took me more than a month to finally get my hands on what I personally consider to be my first “lost” episode of Doctor Who, all thanks to that unavoidable week-long primary school trip. Nobody else thinks of Boom Town as a “lost” episode, but to me its existence was remarkable because I just thought Rose, Captain Jack and the Doctor when straight from The Doctor Dances to Bad Wolf.

As I said before, it was also fitting that I got to watch this after Aliens of London/World War Three so I had the context about Margeret, the Slitheen and all that jazz. I’m not sure what I would have made of it without that context. It’s not my favourite episode, but it’s still great stuff – a surprise bonus of an episode. It ends with the Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack setting off into the universe, now with a refuelled TARDIS and a Slitheen egg to drop off somewhere. Part of me still likes to think they’re out there still having adventures, as if they just somehow peeled off from the show’s core narrative. Like some sort of, I dunno, ‘bigeneration’ I suppose. Like that would ever happen!

The Christmas Invasion by Russell T Davies

Sunday 25^th December 2005

Despite my resistance to their being a new Doctor, I still tune in to watch the show like the gullible ten-year-old that I was. How I fell for it being ‘the same show’ with the same title card and the same theme music, even though the lead actor had completely changed, I’ll never know. But I tuned in anyway. The Tenth Doctor jumps out of the TARDIS doors still wearing Nine’s leather jacket and V-neck jumper, before shortly being put into some pyjamas. But it’s clever how the story is carried by Rose, her family as well as Harriet Jones, now Prime Minister of the UK, and her team. Like I had time to process that my Doctor had gone now, sleeping somewhere off-screen, much like the Tenth Doctor is actually doing, whilst the episode’s plot continued at-pace.

By the end, I’ve come to accept that there is no going back. The Doctor now looks like David Tennant and he claims the future was going to be ‘fantastic.’ A next time trailer delivers on that promise, with flying cars, clockwork droids, bat creatures, a howling werewolf, and a woman called Sarah-Jane Smith with a robot dog called K-9. I was at least vaguely aware of those last two names, having done my homework reading the Monsters and Villains reference book by Justin Richards. Once again, the show has worked its magic on me yet again. I think about how there’s going to be more Doctor Who in the not-too-distant future and that everything is going to be alright.

Next month: Our Favourite Mathematical Companion