Doctor Who 1x03 - "The Unquiet Dead"

[butterfly]

"The Unquiet Dead"

written by Mark Gatiss
directed by Euros Lyn

 

General Thoughts

"The Unquiet Dead" is the formal introduction of the Doctor/Rose romance arc. They had sparks and potential in the previous two episodes, but this is the episode that brings their relationship out of subtext by having the Doctor openly say that he thinks Rose looks beautiful. It's also a really well-done episode about a genuine culture clash between the Doctor and Rose that deals with his trauma over the Time War. It is also not the last time that the Doctor will be proven resoundingly wrong about something crucial and Rose gets to see him as fallible.

 

Bechdel Test

While Gwyneth and Rose talk about looking about boy's butts and whether or not Mr. Sneed is treating Gwyneth well enough, they also talk about Rose's future and Gwyneth's situation. Gwyneth gets to ding Rose for thinking of her as a bit stupid because Gwyneth comes from an earlier time period and believes in things that Rose doesn't think exist. They have a relationship that exists outside the male characters and have a widely-ranging conversation that includes things that have nothing to do with any men.

"The Unquiet Dead" passes the Bechdel test in my book.

 

ClothesWatch

Rose Tyler

Rose dresses up in this episode. Though the dress that she wears has a lot of black in it, it also features a reddish skirt and she wears red flowers in her hair (the color of the skirt seems to shift between pink, red, and purple depending on the light, but it's in the general red family). As previously mentioned, red is very much Rose's color in the first series -- all passion and heart. Rose wears red or pink in every single episode of series one, in fact. She doesn't wear any blue in this episode -- that color become much more common for her in series two. She's the voice of human compassion in this episode (emphasis on the 'human', for the moment -- the Gelth put her off right from the start, what with inhabiting corpses and trying to attack her).

The Doctor

The Doctor goes so far as to actually change his jumper (oh, the shock). He appears to have changed to black (though it could be a very dark blue). Really, this particular section is going to be much more interesting once the Tenth Doctor shows up.

 

Themes and Arcs

The Doctor as Myth (aka 'The Lonely God')

We don't get much of the Doctor as myth in this episode. However, we do dip into the Time War and the Gelth portray themselves as 'angels' to Gwyneth. To Dickens, the Doctor calls himself "just a friend, passing through."

Words and Phases of Note

Gwyneth sees both a coming darkness and a big bad wolf when she looks into Rose's mind. This is the first episode that hints to us that Rose is going to end up with a bit of a mythic epic nature herself. Note, too, that Gwyneth says that Rose has 'flown farther than anyone'. At this point, we know for a fact that that isn't true. However, by the time we reach the end of series four, it might very well be the case.

 

Reoccurring Characters

Rose Tyler

Rose's first glimpse of 1869 shows us so much about her. She's awed and delighted -- taking a moment to press just one foot into the snow and then pull it back so that she can look at the footprint. It's clear how much she means it when she says that she loves the traveling. She finds all of this to be brilliant and wonderful and she can't imagine getting tired of it.

Rose again jumps into a situation and ends up in trouble because of it. This is an extremely common occurrance for her and, once we get to other companions, it's interesting to see how they're generally different. She notices Sneed and Gwyneth making off with the old woman and immediately sets out after them. She confronts Gwyneth outside and refuses to buy her story, insisting on checking on the old woman herself. For her troubles, Sneed chloroforms her.

When Rose wakes up in the mortuary and sees the Gelth-possessed man, her first impulse is to ask if he's all right. He's pretty creepy-looking and just climbed out of a coffin, so Rose soon realizes that he's trouble. Rose is really great in this scene -- she assesses the situation and determines that it's dangerous, then tries to escape through the door, throws a vase at the Gelth to keep them away, and calls for help.

Once the Doctor arrives, we get another moment of Rose quickly adjusting to a fact of the Doctor's life -- he's got Charles Dickens with him. Okay, she's willing to go with that. She watches the Doctor try to talk to the Gelth and then she's the one to lead the interrogation against Sneed, fully pissed off at the way he treated her.

She also continues to be very inquisitive, asking the Doctor to explain about the Rift. She talks to Gwyneth later about how she hated school, but she has such a thirst for knowledge. I suspect that, until the Doctor, she didn't have anyone who was willing to encourage her to ask questions and slake that enormous curiosity of hers. He was a gift to her in so many ways.

Rose also tries to help Gwyneth and to understand her and build some common ground. She draws herself into Gwyneth's confidence and looks for ways to identify with her, like about skipping school (with our second mention of the elusive Shireen). Rose brings up boys and Gwyneth clams up a bit -- it isn't proper, after all, for girls to speak so freely about men. Rose is very sweet and encouraging here, trying to get Gwyneth to take a few risks and get more out of her life. Gwyneth tells Rose that she talks like 'some sort of wild thing'. Rose not only accepts this, she also tells Gwyneth that maybe that's good.

Rose has only just recently escaped from the concrete cage that the Powell Estate was to her. She's a wild thing now and she's never been happier and she wants to share that happiness and that freedom with Gwyneth (we also find out that the superficial qualities that Rose looks for in a man are a nice smile and a good bum).

This is also when we learn that Rose's dad isn't just gone; he's dead. Gwyneth says that Rose has been thinking of him, more and more. She doesn't bring it up until later, but I wonder when she first thought about asking the Doctor to take her back to meet her father. Also, when Gwyneth tells Rose that her dad might be waiting for her in paradise, Rose's answer is an uncertain, "maybe". She's undecided about the afterlife and faith in general, I would guess. She's not going to assume that there's nothing afterward, but she's also not going to be planning to see her dad again in the hereafter.

Gwyneth sees into Rose's mind and what she sees very clearly spooks her. 'the coming darkness' and 'the big, bad wolf'. Both Rose and the Doctor catch on that Gwyneth is special after only one odd sentence from her -- they're observant and clever people.

When Gwyneth has brought the ghosts in and is planning on sacrificing herself, Rose refuses to leave until the Doctor promises her that he won't leave as long as Gwyneth is still in danger. As the Doctor will mention later, Rose cares very deeply about people. And when the Doctor comes out without Gwyneth, she stares at him and questions him until he explains to her what happened and why he left alone.

The Doctor

Dickens is feeling old and as though he has no new stories left to tell.

"It's never over. On and on I go... same old show. I'm like a ghost, condemned to repeat myself for all eternity."

And then he discovers a world new to him and it fills him with hope and joy. They don't explicitly make the comparison between the Doctor and Dickens, but the similarity is hard to escape -- it's actually even more clear later on, in series three.

When the Doctor gets into the theater, he heads right to the stage to gather information -- it's a good move, since that would be the best vantage point to see everything else in the room. He also tries to determine if the gas creatures have tried to communicate. It's good when they want to talk. He can't learn anything else inside, so he goes out to follow where Rose went... only to see the girl that Rose was following.

He commandeers Dickens' coach to follow the people who have taken Rose and, in the process, learns that he's with Charles Dickens. Here is where we see the Doctor's inner fanboy for the first time. He loves meeting celebrities, especially writers, and while he adores Dickens' writing, he also isn't shy about complaining about the bits that he didn't like. Dickens also wins a respectful and delighted smile from the Doctor when he affirms the importance of saving Rose over talking about books.

Later, though, he gets mad at Dickens for denying the evidence of his own eyes for the sake of his belief in a purely scientific universe. But we get to hear Dickens tell his side of the story in a very sympathetic way.

"Could it be that I have the world entirely wrong?" he asks the Doctor.

"Not wrong -- there's just more to learn." Dickens' fears here are similar to another (later) guest star's fears, however, unlike the other one, Dickens opens his mind in the end and looks forward with hope instead of fear and suspicion.

The Doctor meets the Gelth and I think that they recognize him. If not as a Time Lord, definitely as one of the 'higher' forms that they mention in their speech. And that speech is so completely scripted to appeal to the Doctor's guilt over the Time War. They get him to agree to help them without needing to offer up any evidence of their good will and he's clearly desperate to make up for some of the damage caused by the Time War.

Unfortunately, "I think it's gone a bit wrong," the Doctor says, which is a bit of an understatement. Showing pity to the Gelth and trusting them with no proof bites him in the ass, big time.

We also find out in this episode that the Doctor doesn't believe in an afterlife. "If your mother and father could look down on you..." he says to Gwyneth. This viewpoint is only reaffirmed by his actions and words in later episodes.

I would classify Rose as agnostic and the Doctor as atheist, as this point (In S2, though, the Doctor may very well be the First Acolyte of the Church of Rose). 

 

Continuing Relationships

Doctor/Rose

"I promised you a time machine and that's what you're going to get."

We start out with the Doctor having Rose help him fly the TARDIS. He asks her to hold things down and she does. He's not trying to explain anything just yet, just having her lend a hand. He's still determined to impress the hell out of her and to keep his promise to show her time and space (he makes a lot of promises to or for Rose and then nearly kills himself trying to keep them). They land in what he thinks is Naples, on Christmas in 1960, and the ride is so violent that they end up on the floor. Both of them are laughing and, not for the last time, the Doctor asks Rose if she's all right. Her answer is a cheery, "I think so. Nothing broken."

The Doctor is so delighted to have brought Rose somewhere that he thinks she'll enjoy. Also, he says, "You've seen the future, now let's take a look at the past," which makes me suspect that his choice of time and place is supposed to make up for the fact that their trip to the future went so badly (he'll do this again later, too). 

They have a conversation that lets both us and the Doctor see how perfectly suited Rose is for his life. Rose takes a moment to pause and think about being in the past, about what it is that the TARDIS can do,  and this is what she says:

Rose: "Christmas, 1960. Happens once. Just once and it's gone. It's finished. It'll never happen again. Except for you. You can go back and see days that are dead and gone, a hundred thousand sunsets ago... no wonder you never stay still."
Doctor: "Not a bad life?"
Rose: "Better with two."

This girl... she gets it. She understands why he travels. She's seen the danger and the horror, but the danger thrills her and the beauty outweighs the horror by far. It's fun and beautiful and amazing. And she gets that. She gets it and then she makes it better. She takes the Doctor's grand life and gives him something that he hasn't had before: someone who will share it with him. She's not a companion and she's not a 'plus one' -- she's a partner. She's in it for the same reasons that he is and she understands.

He's so thrilled here. He can't control his smile. He did it. He got it right and that means that Rose Tyler is smiling at him and nothing could possibly be better than sharing this moment with her.

The Doctor sends her off to get changed into 1860-appropriate clothing (note that he has no problem giving her complicated directions and believing that she can follow them -- he's already figured out that she's smart and remembers things). He calls her 'Barbarella', which cracks me up (Rose's clothes are far from skin-tight or particularly revealing --  she actually ends up showing more skin in her dress than in her 'modern' clothing). Someone has sex on the brain when he looks at Rose... which, of course, is only confirmed by his utterly blown-away look when she returns in her dress. Rose assumes that he's staring at her because she looks ridiculous (our Rose is such a tomboy at heart), but instead he actually goes ahead and makes the subtext text.

Doctor: "You look beautiful! ... considering."
Rose: "Considering what?"
Doctor: "That you're human."
Rose: "I think that's a compliment."

This is, quite possibly, where the Doctor screws himself over for series one. He just pulled a trick that we'll see someone else with a big crush attempt to play later in the series (the "I'm totally not attracted to you or your species" card). In both cases, it leads the other person to behave as though they, you know, believe the person playing the card (as well they should -- in Smallville, it annoyed me so much when Chloe pulled the 'friends!' card and then was upset when Clark backed off and was just friends with her) because even if they are attracted, playing that card means that they don't want to deal with it for whatever reason. Anyway, the Doctor does this here and has to spend basically the rest of series one convincing Rose that he didn't mean it and that her being human isn't a deal-breaker. Oh, Doctor, the ways in which you attempt to completely fuck over your chances for happiness are so unending.

Rose then heads toward the door, ordering the Doctor to stay back so that she can have the first look outside.

The Doctor discovers that he got the flight wrong and it's a bit of a come-down for him -- he was so excited to be taking Rose to Naples and doesn't feel that Cardiff makes a good substitution. Plus, he has to tell Rose that he got the time and the place wrong. So, at this point, it's a huge relief to the Doctor when the screaming starts. He knows what to do about screaming (run towards it, of course, and investigate).

Once Rose has been taken, the Doctor can't see anything else, brushing Dickens aside to try to get a coach to follow. Once inside and on their way, he finds out who Dickens is and takes a moment to gush over him... but that only lasts for a brief time and them he's back to thinking about Rose. Dickens asks who it is that they're chasing and this is the answer the Doctor gives:

"My friend. She's only nineteen. It's my fault. She's in my care and now she's in danger."

This really does sum it all up at this point. He's known Rose for roughly a day, but she's his friend. He cares about her -- what she thinks and whether or not she's happy. She's only nineteen... this is, I suspect, something that the Doctor reminds himself of often during the first series. That this human that he's falling in love with is just nineteen. She's so young -- later on, Rose blasts Sneed for being a dirty old man, and the Doctor grins at her, thrilled by her willingness to speak out (and it has to be reassuring to him because it means that when he touches Rose, she's okay with it, because she has no problem yelling at people who cross her personal boundary lines). It's his fault... this is the Doctor's primary character damage in the new Who. He really does kinda see everything as being his fault. That's the damage from the Time War, I suspect. He doesn't forgive himself. He can't. He never stops seeing himself as the one at fault, no matter how many times Rose tells him that he's not.

When he hears Rose's voice in the mortuary, he heads right for it, not slowing down for anything until he reaches her, not even the locked door giving him pause. He pulls Rose away from the Gelth and spends the rest of the scene with his arm around her, while she holds onto his jacket lapel. No personal space.

Later, at the seance, the Doctor makes a pun about Gwyneth being a 'happy medium' and grins over at Rose, asking her to be his in-joke person. She's amused despite herself. When the Gelth mention the Time War, she looks over at the Doctor and his brief return glance is full of ghosts. He hates himself for what he did in the war. And Rose has figured that out.

"She's exhausted and she's not fighting your battles," Rose says about Gwyneth. Rose has realized just how strongly guilt is driving the Doctor. And this argument is one that the Doctor has no response to -- it hits too close to home. Rose is fiercely protective of Gwyneth, while the Doctor is equally determined to do something to help the Gelth.

The Doctor gets to be on firmer ground when Rose questions the morality of the Gelth using corpses as hosts. Saving lives matters more to the Doctor than respecting dead bodies. I really enjoy this discussion of theirs because each of them has a strong argument. They both have valid points. The Doctor tries for a low blow by threatening to take Rose home, but it's shown to be hollow just a moment later when he softens his voice and tries to explain his perspective again (Rose doesn't seem to take the threat very seriously either).

Rose remains firm on her first point, though, the one that the Doctor can't argue: that Gwyneth isn't there to be used.

It's Gwyneth who breaks the deadlock when she declares that she gets to have a say in the decision and that she wants to help the Gelth.

And the Doctor compromises -- he reminds Gwyneth that she does have a choice and, when they get down to the morgue, he tells the Gelth that this isn't going to be a permanent solution. That they'll need to make bodies of their own at some point. He bends for Rose.

As the Gelth show their true colors, we can see Rose holding onto the Doctor's arm, possibly for comfort. He's also very quick to pull her away from Sneed and the Gelth once they start attacking and to place himself protectively in front of her in a very obvious way.

"It's all my fault. I brought you here."
"It's not your fault. I wanted to come."

What Rose says here is such a defining character note -- she takes full responsibility for her choice to travel with the Doctor and she never blames him for the danger and horror that she faces in the journey. She always reassures him that she chose to come with him, that she knew about the danger, and that she doesn't blame him. Rose's sense of personal responsibility is very strong and it's a very admirable part of her character.

"We'll go down fighting, yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Together?"
"Yeah."

With these words, Rose makes them into a partnership (which is what she always thinks of them as -- she's not the Doctor's assistant; they are equal partners). They're in this thing together. She's very consistent about this and tries over and over to make it clear to the Doctor how much she really does mean it (he doesn't really seem to understand until the eleventh hour in the S2 finale).

She and the Doctor lace their fingers firmly together and the Doctor makes it clear to Rose how very grateful he is to know her ("I'm so glad I met you."). In such a short time, she's changed him from not caring whether he lives or dies to being desperate to live. He cares again about whether or not he keeps breathing, because he wants to keep breathing with her.

Afterwards, when Rose kisses Dickens farewell on the cheek, the Doctor's reaction is priceless. He's turned away when the actual kiss happens, so all he knows is that Rose did something that Dickens calls, "so modern". He has this hilarious, slightly baffled look on his face and he glances between Dickens and Rose several times, as though trying to work out exactly what happened. And back in the TARDIS proper, he's once again glancing over at Rose to see her reactions to what he's doing.

He is, always, intensely aware of her.

General Squee

Billie Piper

She is so stunningly beautiful in this episode. She's always gorgeous, but she really glows here.

Christopher Eccleston

The Doctor really starts to pine for Rose beginning with this episode and CE makes us feel every ounce of his longing.

All the Rest

Gwyneth and Dickens both get to be quite heroic. Eve Myles does an absolutely amazing job as Gywneth -- it's easy to see why they asked the actress to join Torchwood.

The Doctor/Rose romance has officially gotten off the ground. And in the next episode, "Aliens of London", Jackie Tyler has a few words for the Doctor about the way he spirited off her daughter.

Comments

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

I love Nine but... once you've seen his outfit once, that's about all you can say about it. Ten's look has so many more options (plus, he dresses up to go undercover in more ways than just changing his shirt on occasion).