This show has spent four years building a cast of people the Doctor left behind, and “The Stolen Earth” is the episode that collects every single one of them, drops the planet into a hole in space, and lets the Daleks walk down the middle of a British street. It is enormous, gleefully overstuffed, and it ends on the most upsetting cliffhanger this show has ever attempted. As event television goes, this is about as good as it gets.
Twenty-seven planets
The Earth is gone. That’s the opening: the Doctor and Donna step out of the TARDIS into an empty patch of space where the planet ought to be, and the show plays it completely straight. No monster yet, no explanation, just an absence. It turns out Earth is one of twenty-seven worlds that have been stolen and hidden in the Medusa Cascade, arranged in a precise configuration for reasons nobody will explain until next week. The stars going out in Turn Left weren’t a metaphor after all, and something has been quietly removing pieces of the universe for weeks. The Doctor’s search takes him to the Shadow Proclamation, the galactic authority whose name he’s been bluffing his way past since his first series, and it’s a nice bit of pay-off to finally see the thing behind the phrase, complete with an imperious Architect and a barracks full of Judoon. It’s also where the sheer scale of the theft gets spelled out, and where the Doctor starts to look genuinely frightened. Donna’s contribution there, an apparently daft aside about the bees disappearing, turns out to be the thread that actually unpicks it, which is a lovely piece of misdirection at the expense of everyone in the room with a doctorate.
Everyone he ever knew
Back on the stolen Earth, the Daleks arrive in force, and the show does something it has never had the nerve to do before: full invasion. Saucers over cities, Daleks gliding down suburban roads exterminating people in their front gardens, news broadcasts collapsing mid-sentence. It’s the apocalypse the series has been circling for years, finally delivered at full scale. The domestic scale of it is what really stings. This isn’t a war fought over skylines in wide shot, it’s a Dalek hovering outside a suburban front door while a family cowers in the hallway, and Wilf Mott coming out to meet it swinging a paintball gun because it’s the only weapon in the house. Bernard Cribbins squaring up to a Dalek armed with nothing but outrage and completely the wrong equipment is simultaneously very funny and genuinely brave, and it’s precisely the note this show hits better than anything else on television.
And then it starts assembling the family. Martha Jones with UNIT in New York. Sarah Jane Smith and her son. Captain Jack with what’s left of Torchwood. Wilf and Sylvia in a garden shed with a paint gun. And Rose Tyler, arrived from a sealed universe with an enormous gun and an expression that suggests she has run out of patience entirely. Watching them all realise, separately, that the only person who can help is unreachable, and then work out how to shout loudly enough, is enormously satisfying. Each of them has been on their own since the Doctor moved on: Sarah Jane since he left her behind decades before School Reunion, Jack since he was abandoned on a space station, Rose since a beach in Norway at the end of Doomsday. The episode’s real argument is that he doesn’t just leave wreckage behind him, he leaves people who learned how to do it themselves.
The best of it belongs to Harriet Jones. Deposed, disgraced, living quietly with the ruins of the career the Doctor demolished with six words in The Christmas Invasion, she turns out to have kept a secret subwave network precisely for a day like this, and she uses it to link everyone together and boost a signal loud enough to reach him. When she meets the Daleks she holds up her ID and says “Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister,” and gets the old reply, “Yes, we know who you are”, and it’s genuinely moving rather than a gag. She dies doing the right thing, having spent three years being told by the Doctor that she was wrong. The show lets her be right.
Davros, and the street
And then the voice behind the invasion, which is a proper fanfare moment: Davros. Creator of the Daleks, believed lost in the Time War, hauled out of the jaws of something unspeakable by Dalek Caan and now sitting in the dark below his own creations, having grown a new Dalek race out of the cells of his own body. Julian Bleach is superb, quiet and courteous and faintly amused, far more unnerving than shouting would be. His relationship with the new Daleks is the interesting part: they don’t obey him, they keep him. He built them and they’ve put him in a basement. Dalek Caan, meanwhile, the last survivor of the Cult of Skaro, who fled the wreckage of Canary Wharf into an emergency temporal shift and then flew unprotected into the Time War itself, has come back completely insane, hanging in a broken casing and giggling prophecies. It’s a properly strange, unsettling image, and his rhymes about the coming darkness and the Doctor’s “most faithful companion” dying are the sort of thing you rewind and squint at.
Donna is having a strange time of it, too. Caan’s prophecies keep circling her without ever quite naming her, the Shadow Architect notices something distinctly odd about her timeline, and she spends the hour quietly unsettled by things nobody will explain to her. It’s a slow, deliberate drumbeat. The season has been pointing at Donna Noble since a dying soothsayer in Pompeii clocked something on her back, and here it starts pointing considerably harder. Whatever’s coming, it increasingly looks like it belongs to her.
The last five minutes are extraordinary. The Doctor finds the Earth. He steps out into a London street, and at the far end of it is Rose Tyler, and they see each other, and they run. It’s the reunion two seasons have been building toward and the show gives it the full slow-motion treatment, absolutely earned. And a Dalek shoots him mid-stride. Jack and Rose drag him inside the TARDIS, and the golden light starts pouring out of his hands, and he begins to regenerate on the console room floor while the people who love him stand there and watch. That’s where it stops. No resolution, no reassurance, nothing. Just an ending, and he’s shot running toward the one person he lost.
Rating: 4.5/5. Breathless, sprawling and occasionally so busy it can barely breathe, but the sheer confidence carries it. If it fumbles anything it’ll be next week’s problem; as a first half it’s close to perfect. Twenty-seven worlds in a hole in space, a madman in a basement, an old Prime Minister proved right too late, and the Doctor dying on his own floor with Rose Tyler holding him. I don’t know how they get out of this. I’m not sure they do.