New Earth (TV story)

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New Earth was the first episode of series 2 of Doctor Who.

It served as the middle of a loose "New Earth" trilogy incorporating The End of the World and Gridlock. It featured reappearances of Cassandra O'Brien.Δ17 and the Face of Boe, both last seen in End of the World, and introduced a mystery surrounding the Face of Boe that would later be a major part of the overall story arc of series three. It was also the first BBC Wales episode to be set on an alien world (with the exception of a brief beginning scene of Rose saying her goodbyes on Earth), the entirety of series one having taken place on or in orbit of Earth.

Behind the scenes, it was the final appearance of Zoë Wanamaker, but it was the first time that actors Anna Hope and Adjoa Andoh worked on the programme. Principal photography was rocky enough to be remarked upon by two different sets of commentators. Its overruns and difficulties negatively impacted upon other episodes within its production block. (PCOM, DCOM: New Earth)

Series two also played host to a series of mini-episode prologues for each new episode, known collectively as Tardisodes. Tardisode 1, the first of these short preludes, led into New Earth.

Synopsis

In the distant future, an order of cat-nuns cure all illnesses, but the Tenth Doctor is suspicious of their methods. He must uncover the truth and save Rose from the vengeance of his old enemy, the Lady Cassandra.

Plot

The Tenth Doctor powers up the TARDIS as Rose says her goodbyes to Jackie and Mickey at the Powell Estate. Although Jackie and Mickey sadly watch the TARDIS fade away, inside the ship Rose is all smiles as she asks the Doctor where they are going next. He tells her that they are going further than they have ever gone before.

The TARDIS materialises on New Earth, in the year five billion and twenty-three. Following the destruction of Earth, humanity became nostalgic and settled on a new planet with similar gravity and atmosphere in Galaxy M87. Rose is delighted at the new world, the sight of the futuristic city of New New York in front of them and the smell of apple-grass. The Doctor points out that it's the fifteenth York since the original; it's technically New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York. Rose laughs that he's so different. "New New Doctor" he jokes back. However, the two travellers are being observed by a metal spider controlled by Chip, a small, pale man with multiple tattoos. Chip takes his orders from his mistress, Lady Cassandra, who is still alive and recognises Rose.

The Doctor and Rose head for New New York Hospital, a hospital to which the Doctor has been summoned by a telepathic message displayed on his psychic paper: "Ward 26, Please Come". The hospital is run by humanoid feline nuns belonging to an order called the Sisters of Plenitude; though Rose is a bit shocked, the Doctor tells her that the cats would find her equally strange due to her "pink and yellow" colouration. Trying to find the right ward, the Doctor and Rose enter separate lifts, which drench each of them in disinfectant liquid and powder before blowing them dry — the Doctor is completely blasé about it, while Rose, who had not been expecting the cleanse, takes a while to get used to it. Chip overrides Rose's lift controls, diverting her down to the basement. When she emerges, he beckons her forward, calling her by name. Suspicious, she grabs a metal pipe as a weapon and follows him.

In Ward 26, the Doctor is escorted by Sister Jatt, commenting that the hospital lacks the little shop he is so fond of. Sister Jatt lectures him on the vow that her order takes, which is to help and mend, as they pass a bed belonging to an incredibly fat man who appears to be turning to stone. The rather bossy woman with him, Frau Clovis, rebukes the Doctor for staring at the man, who is the Duke of Manhattan and is dying from Petrifold Regression. Sister Jatt is confident that he will be cured in no time, despite the Doctor's claims that the cure for his disease won't be available for another thousand years. She asks the Doctor if he recognises any of the patients. The Doctor, with a smile on his face, responds that he does — the Face of Boe. He is being tended to by Novice Hame, who tells the Doctor that the Face is dying of old age — the one thing the Sisters can't cure.

Rose explores the basement warily and finds a film of a party of several men and a blonde woman with a familiar voice. The same voice makes Rose turn to see Cassandra: a piece of skin stretched out on a frame over a brain jar. Cassandra has been reconstructed from another piece of her skin, and Chip — a force-grown clone devoted to Cassandra — smuggled her into the hospital, where he has been tending to her ever since. Cassandra has found out the Sisters are hiding something, and she needs Rose's help... or rather, her body. Using a device called a psychograft, Cassandra transfers her consciousness into Rose's mind, taking control of her body but causing her old one to die. Cassandra is initially unimpressed with her new body — protesting, "I'm a chav!" — but changes her mind after taking a good look at Rose's curves.

In Ward 26, Novice Hame tells the Doctor that legend says the Face of Boe has lived for thousands, perhaps millions of years and that he will give his dying message to a wanderer without a home. The Doctor realises that he fits the description in the legend, but says nothing. Below, Cassandra reads Rose's surface thoughts and discovers that the man with Rose is the Doctor with a new face. Believing he can help her discover the Sisterhood's secrets, she goes to meet him after placing a tiny bottle of perfume in her cleavage.

Upstairs, the Doctor is amazed to discover the Duke of Manhattan in perfect health and interrogates one of the nurses, who introduces herself as Matron Casp, on how they were able to cure him, but she evades his questions and is summoned to the Intensive Care ward by Sister Jatt. There they observe an unseen figure who pleads for help and are amazed that it can speak, before Casp orders it incinerated.

Cassandra joins the Doctor in Ward 26, and he promptly explains his confusion to "Rose"; there are various vaccines for several incurable diseases, including Marconi's Disease, which leaves the victim with bright red skin and should take years to recover from, and Pallidome Pancrosis which should kill the victim within ten minutes. Cassandra's odd behaviour in Rose's body — at one point even giving the Doctor a lusty kiss — raises the Time Lord's suspicions; though with regards to the kiss, he dizzily states "Yep. Still got it."

Through a secret terminal, they enter Intensive Care and discover the horrifying secret of the cures: hundreds of pods, each holding an artificially grown human being infected with a thousand different diseases, a human farm to breed cures. The Sisters kill any healthy enough to speak or move. The Doctor confronts Novice Hame, but she insists that these artificial humans are just "flesh", and that it was necessary to cope with the influx of patients and diseases. He demands they reverse what they have done to Rose, not realising that it is Cassandra who has taken over. Her cover blown, Cassandra reveals her identity and knocks the Doctor out with the drugged perfume hidden in her bosom.

The Sisters of Plenitude.

While the Doctor is trapped in a pod about to be injected with diseases, Cassandra tries to blackmail Matron Casp, demanding money to keep quiet about the Sisters' actions. Casp declines and threatens her physically with her rather vicious claws. In response, Cassandra has Chip release some of the plague carriers. One admonishes the Sisters before sacrificing himself to release the rest of the patients. The diseased carriers advance on the nuns, trapping Sister Jatt, who screams in agony as one of the patients touches her face and infects her; the viruses are too numerous for her immune system to cope with and she is killed instantly. Casp places the hospital under quarantine before disappearing and the exits seal themselves, much to the confusion and fright of the staff and visitors.

The patients attempt to get the people within the hospital to help them, but they cannot touch anybody without infecting them as well. Fleeing to the bowels of the hospital, Chip is separated from the Doctor and Cassandra by a group of carriers and Cassandra callously leaves him to his fate. Trapped in Cassandra's hiding place in the basement with the patients mindlessly asking for help at the doors, the Doctor demands that Cassandra leave Rose's body; she complies, going into his body instead. Rose regains her senses, seeing Cassandra adapt to the Doctor's body; Cassandra notes the Doctor has two hearts and parts that have been "hardly used". She taunts Rose, having been in her head, she knows Rose finds the Doctor attractive. Rose finds an abandoned lift shaft they can use to climb up into a ward to escape the carriers.

Rose climbs up the lift shaft with a now Cassandra-controlled Doctor, pursued by the carriers. Matron Casp tries to stop them, grabbing Rose's foot under the mistaken assumption she's Cassandra. However, before she can do anything else, a carrier touches her and the infected Matron falls screaming down the shaft to her death. As the Doctor is blocking his thoughts from Cassandra, she goes back into Rose so he can use the sonic screwdriver to open the door. The Doctor demands Cassandra leave Rose, so she shifts her consciousness back to him again. Rose tells Cassandra to do something or they both will die. To her disgust, Cassandra transfers herself to a plague carrier so that the Doctor can finally use the sonic screwdriver to unseal the lift doors, then jumps back into Rose. Cassandra is shocked by the loneliness of the carriers, having read the surface thoughts of the carrier she had possessed — not being able to touch or be touched all their lives.

The Doctor and Cassandra reach Ward 26, which seems to be the only place still untouched by the carriers. Frau Clovis reveals a device she is using to try and contact New New York to help them, but the Doctor refuses to allow it as every single disease in the galaxy is contained within the hospital and if the quarantine is breached then the whole planet will be at risk. He grabs all of the intravenous solutions, straps them to his body, then slides down the shaft to the lift car with Cassandra, where he empties the solutions into the disinfectant reservoir. He opens the doors, luring several plague carriers inward as Cassandra starts the shower. The spray drenches the carriers, curing them, and the Doctor encourages them to pass it on; they wander back out to spread the cure to the others. A new race is born: the new humans.

The surviving Sisters are arrested by the New New York Police Department, including Novice Hame, and the cured new humans are taken into care. The Doctor remembers the Face of Boe and returns to him in Ward 26. No longer dying, the Face tells him telepathically that he had grown tired of the universe, but the Doctor has taught him to look at it anew. The Doctor asks the Face about his message but is told it can wait for their third and final meeting. The Face then teleports himself away.

The Doctor orders Cassandra to leave Rose's body at once, telling her to end it. In response, Cassandra sobs and tells the Doctor she doesn't want to die. Chip then appears, having preserved himself for Cassandra; he volunteers his own body as her new vessel. Despite multiple protests from the Doctor, Cassandra transfers her consciousness into Chip, freeing Rose at last. Unfortunately, his "half-life" body quickly fails, and Cassandra accepts her impending true death; New Earth has no place for people like her and Chip anymore.

The Doctor does one last favour for Cassandra, taking her back to the party seen in the film earlier, to the last time anyone had called her beautiful, to re-witness her life as it was in its prime. "Chip" approaches the Cassandra of the past and sincerely remarks on her beauty, before collapsing into the younger Cassandra's arms as she comforts "him". As Cassandra finally dies, the Doctor and Rose silently leave in the TARDIS.

Cast

Crew

General production staff

Script department

Camera and lighting department

Art department

Costume department

Make-up and prosthetics

Movement

Casting

General post-production staff

Special and visual effects

Sound



Not every person who worked on this adventure was credited. The absence of a credit for a position doesn't necessarily mean the job wasn't required. The information above is based solely on observations of the actual end credits of the episodes as broadcast, and does not relay information from IMDB or other sources.
          

According to the DVD commentary, Sarah Davies, an uncredited production runner on this episode, was also an uncredited extra. She played one of the patients.


References

Individuals

  • The Ambassador of Thrace hosted a party Cassandra once attended.
  • Cassandra refers to herself as a chav while inside Rose's body.
  • The Duke of Manhattan has a butler.
  • The Doctor remarks how he dislikes hospitals but he likes their shops.
  • Rose mentions her cousin Mo from the Peak District when saying goodbye to Jackie.

Plants

Diseases and illnesses

Cultural references

  • Rose refers to Chip as Gollum.

Foods and beverages

  • The Duke of Manhattan offers the Doctor a glass of champagne.

Languages

Story notes

  • Working titles for the episode were Body Swap and The Sunshine Camp.
  • It is implied by the Doctor in The Runaway Bride that he stayed at the Powell Estate with Rose and Jackie between The Christmas Invasion and this episode.
  • This is the first story of the revived series to be set on an alien planet. Ironically, the first non-Earth planet the Doctor visits in the revived series is called New Earth (all on-camera locations up to that point were either Earth or space stations or spaceships in orbit around Earth).
  • This is the first Doctor Who episode to have an accompanying Tardisode. These short prelude scenes were made available online and via mobile phone a week prior to the broadcast. In the case of New Earth, the Tardisode consisted of a faux commercial advertising the Sisters of Plenitude's services.
  • Immediately after the episode, a commentary for the episode, featuring David Tennant, Russell T Davies and Phil Collinson, was made available on the official website for viewers to download and listen to alongside the repeat. The same thing was done for The Christmas Invasion.
  • According to David Tennant on the audio commentary, Billie Piper wore a Wonderbra and a slightly different shade of lipstick in the scenes where Cassandra was in Rose's body. He also mentioned that Billie kept on wearing the Wonderbra for a bit longer after Cassandra was no longer possessing Rose.
  • The words "bitch" and "arse" are implied, although not actually said. In both cases, the character (Cassandra and Rose, respectively) is cut off in their dialogue and the words are implied by the next word in the script. Cassandra, when talking of Rose, calls her "that little..." and then the scene cuts to Rose whose first words are "bit rich". Later, Rose tells Cassandra she is "talking out of [her]..." and Cassandra interrupts, "Ask not!"
  • When Cassandra takes over the Doctor's body she references to some parts that have been "hardly used", a reference to the perceived asexual nature of the Doctor. This may also refer to the fact that this is a newly regenerated body, and that he hasn't really had a chance to "use" most of the parts very much at this point.
  • The scene showing Rose kissing the Doctor was featured in one of the trailers and raised a stir in fan circles, despite the "kiss" shared by the Ninth Doctor and Rose in The Parting of the Ways. Ultimately, we learn it's actually Cassandra doing the kissing while possessing Rose. Rose and the Doctor never do kiss on screen in that fashion, though Rose will eventually kiss the Meta-Crisis Tenth Doctor in Journey's End.
  • This episode marks the first appearance of a running joke about the Tenth Doctor's love of the "little shops" found in hospitals and museums.
  • This episode marks the first use of the recurring phrase "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry" in the series.
  • The exterior shots of the lift car as Rose descends to the basement are stock footage recycled from Rose.
  • When the wall drops, the sound made is recycled from the movement of the Daleks.
  • Russell T Davies explains during the audio commentary that in the original script, the Face of Boe was going to die in this episode and the only way for the Doctor to cure all the diseased was to kill them all. But then he read Steven Moffat's introduction segment in The Shooting Scripts book, in which Moffat good-naturedly mocked Davies by stating he "creates interesting characters and then melts them". This made Davies decide to have them all survive instead.
  • Davies also originally intended for the Face of Boe to tell the Doctor "You are not alone" in this episode. However when Billie Piper decided she would be leaving at the end of series 2 he opted to save this message and revelation for Gridlock, the following series.
  • This is the only season opener featuring the Tenth Doctor, and the only one during Russell T Davies' tenure as showrunner, to include a cold open.
  • The voice Billie Piper does for Cassandra is her natural accent.
  • Russell T Davies said of the episode "I promised Billie [Piper] an episode in which she'd be funny. So episode one of the new series is very much based around comedy for Billie."
  • Rose suddenly has her hair up at the end of the episode, to hide the fact that Billie Piper is still wearing her hair extensions from The Christmas Invasion.
  • Cassandra's face and body was put in during post-production by The Mill.
  • The producer's and director's credits have been amended slightly since The Christmas Invasion, so that now the credit is in lower case and the name of the crewmember is in capitals. This was the result of a suggestion from a Doctor Who Magazine editor, who felt the previous arrangement had made the job seem more important than the crewmember.
  • According to Russell T Davies on the episode commentary, Cassandra's earlier self bases Chip on the man who had praised her beauty at the party — Chip himself. Where the "pattern" for Chip comes from in the first instance is thus unclear, creating an ontological paradox.
  • Billie Piper didn't know she was going to be hit with water in the lift, Russell T Davies kept it in the final cut as he thought it was too funny to cut it.
  • Because production fell behind schedule, several scenes were dropped. Many of these concerned the Duke of Manhattan and Frau Clovis. Originally, they first appeared in the hospital foyer when the Doctor initially arrives; as scripted, the Doctor immediately earns the Sisters of Plenitude's disfavour when he saves the Duke's life. Later, Clovis mutinies when the Duke refuses to help defend the hospital against the Intensive Care patients. Another scene that would've been cut would've been a scene that bridged the gap between the Doctor and Rose leaving the hospital with Cassandra and arriving at the party where she dies in Chip's body. The missing scene would've had the Doctor making clear he hadn't forgotten the deaths Cassandra caused on Platform One during The End of the World and added more context to Cassandra's death scene.
  • A longer version of the scene where a Cassandra-possessed Rose rejoins the Doctor in Ward 26 originally had her meeting the Duke of Manhattan. As with the Doctor, the Duke's butler would have offered "Rose" a glass of champagne, prompting her to slip out of character and replying "Oh, moisturise me".
  • A brief scene involving the Face of Boe was cut immediately following on from the snog between Cassandra and the Doctor. It saw Novice Hame noticing the Face of Boe had opened his eyes and heading off to find the Doctor, thus explaining why she happens to walk in right as the Doctor and Cassandra pass through the secret entrance leading to Intensive Care.
  • Cassandra's servant was envisioned as a dwarf named Zaggit, but as the character's importance grew during the scripting process, he developed into Chip.
  • In the commentary, David Tennant noted that the TARDIS has moved since The Christmas Invasion. He speculates that there might have been many off-screen adventures, or (observing that it no longer seems like Christmas in the introduction) perhaps that the Doctor "lived there for a bit".

Ratings

  • 8.62 million viewers (UK final)[2]

Filming locations

  • The exterior shots of New Earth were filmed on the Gower Peninsula.
  • The hospital foyer scenes were filmed inside the Wales Millennium Centre which appeared in the previous series episode Boom Town. When the Doctor asks about the shop and points to where he would put it, he points to the location of the centre's own Portmeirion shop (so-called because it sells the unique Portmeirion china produced in the Welsh resort village of the same name that was once used as a filming location for The Masque of Mandragora).
  • The scenes taking place inside Cassandra's basement lair were filmed in the cellar of Tredegar House in Newport. The location was previously used for Harriet Jones's televised speech in The Christmas Invasion.
  • The location for the pods containing the human specimens was the disused (and since-demolished) Ely Paper Mill in Grangetown, Cardiff, which was previously used as the base of the Nestene Consciousness in Rose.
  • The drinks party the Doctor and Rose take Cassandra (as Chip) to at the end was filmed at the Ba Orient dim-sum restaurant on Mermaid Quay in Cardiff Bay. As the sequence was filmed during the day, the building was covered with black drapes to simulate night-time.
  • One of the New New York hospital buildings uses a slightly edited image of the Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai.

Production errors

If you'd like to talk about narrative problems with this story — like plot holes and things that seem to contradict other stories — please go to this episode's discontinuity discussion.
  • When the camera zooms out when Rose is captured and Cassandra is about to "go" into Rose, the psychograft disappears, but in the next shot of Rose, it is there again.
  • Before the Doctor and Rose/Cassandra open one of the booths, behind the Doctor there is an empty booth. In the next shot, there is clearly one of the Flesh occupying it.
  • At 5.30 Rose enters the right-hand lift but at 6.20 she leaves the left hand one.
  • Despte being soaked, powdered and blow-dried during the disinfection process, Rose's mascara remains unsmudged.
  • Rose/Cassandra removes Rose's blue jacket off-screen to better show off her new body, but when she later returns to the basement with the Doctor, the jacket is nowhere to be seen.

Continuity

DVD releases

Series 2 Volume 1: DVD Cover

Footnotes

  1. ↑ The title "Fran" appears to be misspelled in the credits. In dialogue, she is clearly named Frau Clovis - and a trading card of the character also uses Frau.
  2. ↑ Doctor Who - consolidated ratings

External links

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