Rose: The Shop Dummies and the Man Who Says Run

Sixteen years. That’s how long it’s been since Doctor Who was a programme you could watch on a Saturday night rather than an argument you had with other people who remembered it. I stopped expecting this to happen somewhere around the middle of the nineties, and the one attempt to bring it back since then was a co-production that came and went in an evening and settled nothing. So I sat down for this with the specific dread of a person who has wanted something for a long time and is about to find out whether the wanting was the best part.

It’s good. It’s properly, unmistakably good, and it took about ten minutes to know it.

It starts with a girl going to work

The first thing the new Doctor Who does is not show you the Doctor. It shows you Rose Tyler getting up at seven, eating breakfast with her mum, catching the bus, and putting in a shift at Henrik’s department store. It’s a whole ordinary day compressed into about ninety seconds, and it’s the smartest decision in the episode. The old series would have opened on the TARDIS and expected you to keep up. This one opens on somebody whose biggest problem is that she’s been handed the chief electrician’s lottery money and has to take it down to the basement before she can go home.

And then the shop dummies start moving, and the show tells you exactly what it is. Not a monster in a rubber suit lumbering down a corridor, but the featureless plastic figures you’ve walked past in every high street in the country, standing up and closing in with no face and no sound. Whoever decided the revival should begin with Autons rather than something more famous understood the assignment. You can’t be frightened of a Dalek in your own life. You can absolutely be unsettled by a window display.

Then a hand takes hers and a voice says run, and that’s the introduction. No name, no explanation, no speech about who he is. He blows up the building she works in, hands her a plastic arm, and shuts the door in her face. I can’t think of a better way to introduce this character to somebody who has never seen him. He’s the man who turns up when the ordinary world stops behaving, and he does not slow down to explain himself.

Eccleston plays him as somebody who has lost something

I had no idea what to expect from Christopher Eccleston and I’m not sure I expected this. There’s no frock coat, no scarf, no bag of eccentric props. He’s in a leather jacket and a jumper and he has a northern accent, and the joke about that lands better than it has any right to. He grins constantly and it doesn’t reach anything. That’s the performance: a man being enormously charming at you while something underneath is plainly wrong.

The show doesn’t tell you what. There’s a moment where he catches sight of himself in a mirror and considers his own face like he hasn’t seen it before, and a moment where he talks about feeling the Earth turning underneath him, and neither is explained. When the Nestene asks him about a lost world, all he can say is that he couldn’t save it. He couldn’t save any of them. And then the subject changes and the episode carries on, and you’re left holding that.

There’s a scene where he stands in Rose’s living room being talked at by her mother, and you can see him deciding whether to be polite about it. He doesn’t quite manage. He’s dismissive of Mickey in a way that’s genuinely unkind rather than comic, and the show lets that sit rather than softening it with a joke afterwards. I don’t think we’re supposed to entirely like him yet.

I like this enormously. The previous Doctors were wise old men who had seen everything and were mostly amused by it. This one is somebody things have happened to, and he’s abrupt and rude and occasionally cruel in a way none of them were. He’s also very funny, which stops it being a slog. Whatever’s been done to him, it’s recent enough that he hasn’t finished reacting to it, and dropping a new viewer into the middle of that rather than at the start of it is a confident thing to do with a character you are not required to already know.

Billie Piper is the reason it works

I’ll admit I raised an eyebrow at the casting. I was wrong, and I was wrong quickly. Rose is not a screaming ankle-twister and she’s not a scientist drafted in to ask convenient questions. She’s a nineteen-year-old with no A-levels, a mum who talks too much, and a boyfriend who’s decent and going nowhere, and Piper plays all of that without ever making her small.

What sells it is that she does the work. She’s the one who chases down what he is, finds the man on the internet who’s been collecting sightings, and sits in a suburban shed being told this is a story about a man who brings death with him. She’s the one who spots the transmitter when the Doctor can’t, because he’s looking for something invisible and she’s looking at the skyline of the city she actually lives in. And at the end, when he’s pinned and losing, it’s Rose who swings across the gap on a chain and knocks the thing into its own vat. He doesn’t rescue her. She turns up.

Jackie and Mickey matter too, and I didn’t expect to be writing that either. The old series would have given the companion a dead family and no address. This one gives her a flat, a mother who fancies the stranger in her hallway, and a boyfriend who gets replaced by a plastic copy and then found alive in a cellar. It means her leaving costs something, which is a thing this programme has genuinely never bothered with before.

The bits that wobble

It isn’t flawless. The wheelie bin that eats Mickey is played for a belch and a joke and it’s the one moment where the episode looks cheap in the way the old series used to look cheap. The plastic Mickey that replaces him is broad enough to be a cartoon, which is a shame given how much better the real one is. And the Nestene itself, once you’re down in the lair looking at it, is a vat of glowing orange stuff that talks. The dummies upstairs are far more frightening than the thing controlling them, which is a problem the design never quite solves.

The other thing I noticed is how little the episode explains about the TARDIS. It’s a police box, it’s bigger inside, Rose walks round it once and that’s the whole of it. Nobody delivers a lecture. For a show returning after this long I’d expected far more hand-holding, and I’m glad it isn’t there, but it does mean a newcomer takes a fair amount on trust in the last ten minutes.

The forty-five minute running time is the real adjustment. The old show took four weeks to tell a story and this one takes an evening, so the plot moves at a pace that leaves no room to sit in anything. I think that’s the right call for getting an audience back, and I also think a couple of moments deserved longer than they got. Clive in particular, who spends his life documenting a man who appears throughout history and always brings disaster, is a genuinely eerie idea given about three minutes.

None of it matters much against what the episode gets right. Russell T Davies has written this for people who have never seen Doctor Who, and he’s done it without embarrassment about what the programme is. There’s no wink at the camera, no apology for the daftness. He also asks her twice — once she says no, and then he comes back and mentions the ship travels in time, and she runs. Making her refuse first, and making him come back for her, is worth more than any amount of explaining.

So it’s back, and it’s confident, and it’s the same programme rather than a respectful imitation of one. Doctor Who fans take this show a good deal more seriously than a Saturday teatime adventure strictly requires, and after forty-five minutes of it I understand why. I have no idea what war he keeps not quite talking about, or what happened to his planet, or why he looked at himself in that mirror like he was checking. I’ll be watching next week to find out, which I suppose is the entire point.