The End of the World: Five Billion Years and a Bag of Chips

Last week the show came back and did the sensible thing: contemporary London, a shop girl, monsters made of the high street. Sane. Welcoming. The kind of episode you can show somebody who has never watched it. This week it goes five billion years into the future and kills the Earth, and I think that’s a statement of intent. There’s a documentary strand running alongside the series at the moment, a whole programme about what this show is and why it matters, and after two weeks I’d say the answer is that it can be absolutely anything it likes.

Because the point of last week was that a police box can go anywhere, and the point of this week is proving it before you’ve had a chance to get comfortable.

Straight to the end of everything

What I love is how the episode handles the offer. He asks Rose where she wants to go and she says a hundred years forward, which is what any of us would say. He does it, shrugs, and calls it mundane. Then twelve thousand years, the New Roman Empire, and she still doesn’t get out of the ship. So he stops negotiating and takes her to the year five point five billion, opens the doors on a shutter rolling back, and there’s the sun, swollen and red, about to finish the job.

Platform One is where the wealthy have gathered to watch it happen, which is a properly nasty idea and the episode doesn’t labour it. Earth has been empty for ages, kept as a heritage site by the National Trust, held in shape by gravity satellites that somebody has stopped paying for. In half an hour the money runs out and the planet goes. That’s the whole premise, and it’s bleak in a way I wasn’t expecting from episode two of a Saturday teatime series.

What sells the scale is that nobody on board treats any of it as remarkable. The staff run the event like a corporate hospitality job, the guests complain about the seating, and the destruction of the planet we all live on is item three on a running order. The Steward in particular is magnificent, fussing about protocol right up until a spider lowers his sun filter and the light comes through the window and kills him where he stands. He gets about four minutes and I was sorry when he went.

The guest list is the other pleasure. A blue-skinned Steward running the place, the diminutive Moxx of Balhoon, the enormous face in a tank called the Face of Boe, and the trees. Jabe of the Forest of Cheem is descended from a rainforest and is easily the warmest character in it. They exchange gifts, because of course they do, and the Doctor’s contribution is air from his own lungs. Jabe gives him a cutting taken from her grandfather. Nobody explains any of this and nobody needs to.

Moisturise me

And then there’s Cassandra. The last human being, apparently, except she isn’t a human being in any sense you’d recognise. She’s a sheet of skin stretched flat on a frame, with a face painted across the middle of it and a brain in a jar on the floor behind, and she has staff whose entire job is to spray her so she doesn’t crack. Seven hundred and eight cosmetic operations to get there, and the next one is booked. She calls everyone else on the station a half-breed and considers herself the only pure one left.

It’s a fantastic joke and the episode knows exactly how far to push it. Zoë Wanamaker is doing the whole thing with a voice and a painted face that can barely move, and she’s still the most vivid thing in the room. The line readings are pure Hollywood grande dame, all breathy vanity, and “moisturise me” gets funnier every single time somebody has to do it.

Underneath the gag there’s something genuinely unpleasant, which is that she’s what you get if vanity is given five billion years and unlimited money. She’s had everything human removed in order to stay human, and she’s the only one at the party who thinks she’s won. I laughed at her for most of the episode and then stopped fairly abruptly, which I suspect is the intended sequence.

Why’s it always spiders?

The Adherents of the Repeated Meme turn up in hooded robes handing out metal spheres as gifts of peace, and I want to say straight away that Adherents of the Repeated Meme is an outstanding name. The spheres crack open and let out small mechanical spiders that go straight into the ducts and start taking the station apart. The first person to find one is Raffalo, a plumber who’s been sent to clear a blockage, and who has one lovely ordinary conversation with Rose about where she’s from before the ducts take her.

That scene is doing more work than it looks. Rose has spent the whole episode being told how far from home she is, and the one person who talks to her like a normal human being is the maintenance worker, and then the maintenance worker is killed offscreen for a plot reason nobody on the station will ever care about. The rich are watching a planet die for entertainment and the staff are dying in the walls underneath them.

The Adherents turn out to be a decoy, which I should have seen coming and didn’t. They’re not a delegation at all, just remote-controlled props, and the moment the Doctor works it out he tears one apart with a single tug. Cassandra has been behind it the whole time, and her plan isn’t even a grudge. She’s taken out positions against the companies represented on the station, and if everyone here dies she profits. That’s it. She’s murdering a room full of people to cover the cost of her own upkeep.

The last of the Time Lords

The rescue costs somebody. To reset the systems the Doctor has to cross a chamber with fan blades turning in it, and Jabe holds the lever that keeps them slowed while the room heats up around her. She’s made of wood. She knows what that means and she does it anyway, and she’s gone before he’s through. The Doctor doesn’t get a speech about it. He just walks out and gets on with what he came to do, and the flatness of that is worse than a speech.

Then he reverses Cassandra’s teleport and brings her back without her attendants, into the heat, with nobody left to spray her. She begs. Rose asks him to help her. He says everything has its time and everything dies, and he stands there and lets it happen. That is a genuinely cold thing for the hero of a family programme to do, and the episode absolutely does not soften it.

And in the middle of all this he tells her. She’s been asking who he is since last week, and he finally says it: his planet is gone, burned, and there’s nobody else. He’s the last. It comes out flat and quick, standing on a present-day London street with the traffic going past, and Billie Piper plays the receiving of it beautifully. Earlier he’d patched her phone through to call her mum five billion years in the past, which is a lovely gag, and it’s also the setup for this: everyone gets to phone home except him.

The phone call deserves its own mention because it’s the best joke in the episode and it isn’t really a joke. He takes her mobile, does something to it with the screwdriver, and tells her to try it. She rings her mother, who is standing in a flat in London five billion years ago, complaining about the traffic. Rose stands there holding a phone to her ear while the sun eats the planet her mother is standing on. Then he tells her to wait until she sees the bill, which is exactly the right thing to say and exactly the wrong moment to say it, and that’s him all over.

Also, somewhere in the middle of the party, somebody says the words “bad wolf” and nothing comes of it. Probably nothing. And then the ending is chips. He’s just told her the worst thing that has ever happened to anybody and her answer is that the shops are still open and she’s hungry, and the two of them go and get chips. I’m not sure this programme has ever landed a last scene better than that.