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 Before this season had even begun there was a buzz about certain stories. Obviously, the Dalek story attracted a lot of attention, as did the return of the Autons. People were getting excited about a tale by Mark Gatiss about spirits in Victorian Cardiff & Russell T Davies was rumoured to be taking a major pop at the entire reality TV industry."Oh yes," we remarked, "That should be a good one!" Turns out that the rumours were correct & the end result was the triumph that was Bad Wolf.
Bad Wolf. Two words which seem to have followed the Doctor & Rose throughout their adventures this year. Were we about to finally learn their meaning? Well, yes, but not just yet, for this is a mystery that has been very cleverly sculpted by RTD, & the reasons behind it are quite obvious.
Firstly, we all know how Russell wanted the new-look Doctor Who to follow the same stylistic path trodden by Buffy the Vampire Slayer so successfully, using fast paced but emotionally driven stories & sparkling dialogue. One of Buffy's regular features was that of its main villains, generally one per season, which came to be known as the Big Bad, a phrase coined by Spike & referring to the Big Bad Wolf. So Bad Wolf implies that it is the main villain of the season, be it on screen or by virtue of stalking the TARDIS crew. Another obvious tie-in is the Walt Disney phrase from The Three Little Pigs, namely "Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" which was, of course, intended then as a way for the pigs to poke fun at the (literal) wolf. If you alter the inflection, lose the question mark & add the word "Doctor" to the beginning of the sentence it takes on a whole new meaning! So Bad Wolf is the main villain of the season & something, perhaps the main thing the Doctor fears, right? Now come on! I've already told you once..not just yet, ok? As mentioned in a previous review of mine, rumours as to the identity of Bad Wolf have been circulating amongst fans for a fair while now & Russell T Davies has taken great delight in commenting that no-one has as yet worked it out. Doctor Who fans by definition are an imaginative lot, virtually all the people working on the 2005 version of the show are fans & their flair & creativity have created THE televisual feast of the year, so if the rest of fandom hasn't sussed it yet then RTD has indeed done a fine job in stringing us along with his season-long mystery. However, despite its increasing prominence in the programme, Bad Wolf is still not the main thrust of "Bad Wolf" (if you catch my drift). It does highlight the skilful way that so many individual threads have been picked up from various points in the season though & knitted together in these final few stories. Last time out we had The Unquiet Dead / Aliens of London / World War Three tie-ins, this time the main reference is to The Long Game, particularly when the Doctor realizes that the Game Station is actually Satellite 5 100 years after Max went pop. At the conclusion of that story he was confident that, without the baleful influence of the Jagrafess, humankind would escape from its stagnation & once more begin to thrive, which certainly seemed a reasonable assumption to make at the time. However, neatly following on from last week's issues about the Doctor not staying to discover the real implications of his actions, it turns out that his defeat of the Jagrafess wasn't entirely for the good of all, for after years of being totally dependent upon the constant news feed provided by Satellite 5, the human race was left confused & uninformed when the news simply stopped coming as a result of the Doctor's influence. Instead, after the Government collapsed & the economy followed suit, someone or something started using all the old game show formats as a means of entertainment, though with a distinctly sadistic & gladiatorial edge to them.
Russell has clearly seen the way which shows such as Big Brother have been going, with contestants getting more & more ridiculous & adversarial, & taken the evolution of such programmes to a logical & frankly terrifying conclusion, hat being that people no longer play for financial or material prizes, but for their very lives. Of course, no-one would offer to put themselves at risk by applying for such shows, so in the year 200100 (a minor quibble with the new series, echoing its earliest days when time travel to the future HAD to be either in exact multiples of 100 or to a year ending in either a 50 or a 00) the people who play these games are selected at random from the entire population & transported directly into the Game Station, all except the TARDIS crew, who are specifically selected to compete. The Doctor quickly works out that since he was specifically chosen for the Big Brother house, whoever selected him doesn't want him dead just yet or they would merely have killed him straight away, so instigates his own eviction & when it fails to transpire, makes good his escape, taking Lynda (with a Y) Moss with him. Captain Jack overcomes the threat of a rather severe makeover by extracting a small blaster pistol from a place where the sun don't shine & blowing the heads off the robotic versions of Trinny & Susannah (something a fair few wouldn't mind doing to the originals.& the majority of their counterparts), while Rose is left with nowhere to run when she loses to Rodrick in the final of The Weakest Link, despite actually getting a few questions right. By this time, Jack has caught up with the Doctor & Lynda (with a Y) & they arrive just in time to watch Rose get disintegrated. Now in the good old days of 25-minute episodes, this would have made a spectacular cliffhanger ending, & I'll warrant I wasn't the only one left with jaw gaping as poor Billie was seemingly nuked & left as a pile of dust.
The aftermath of this spectacular sequence was one of the high spots of the series as Jack reacts by shouting & threatening whilst the Doctor is stunned & the powerful & emotional musical score of Murray Gold plays over the carefully fading dialogue, emphasizing the utter helplessness & despair he feels at what seems to be the death of his young friend. Of course, as in the "good old days", you knew that the Doctor & his companion would live to fight another day, but 3 times now this season we have witnessed scenes which seemed to signal the end of either the Doctor or Rose. In Dalek we had the scene where the Dalek seemingly shoots Rose off camera, in Father's Day the Doctor gets "eaten" by a Reaper & of course here Rose is "disintegrated". Superbly written & filmed sequences each & every one which merely emphasize to the viewer that our heroes really do face the prospect of death & a swift exit from the show each & every week.
The Doctor, Jack & Lynda (with a Y) are arrested & in a small but neat nod to the original series are sentenced to a prison term on the Lunar Penal Colony, last seen in Frontier In Space. Of course, these days, with merely 45 minutes to play with, such a lengthy plot divergence would be impossible, so the Doctor & Jack swiftly overpower the guards & make their way to the control centre on the infamous Floor 500, the Doctor armed with Jack's enormous weapon (a phrase with which he would doubtless be quite delighted).
The last time we saw the Doctor toting a gun was in Dalek, when he was genuinely prepared to use it in his unreasoning state. Here, however, he is back to his pacifistic best, casually tossing the cannon to the Male programmer & leaving Jack to deal with all the firearm action whilst he gets some useful information from the Controller, who turns out to have been the one responsible for bringing the TARDIS crew back to Satellite 5 as a means of stopping her "masters", the ones who have been watching & shaping the Earth for so many, many years, they are the real power behind the Game Station, the ones who installed the Jagrafess in the first place, all the time using their fiendish cunning to sap the will & the strength from humanity, whilst at the same time abducting countless millions for their own devilish ends. The Controller, linked up to the central computer of the Game Station & also connected to her masters, knows of their fear of the Doctor, so when the opportunity arose to transport him into the games, using the superior technology at her disposal, she grasped it, aided by the occasional solar flare activity which masked her thoughts & actions from her puppet masters. It is during just one such solar flare that she is able to tell the Doctor a little of what she knows, whilst Jack locates the TARDIS & makes a discovery of his own, that the so-called disintegrator is actually a trans-mat system, meaning that Rose is still alive, much to his own & the Doctor's eternal gratitude.
Alive she may be, but as the Doctor & Jack hug each other in delight, Rose herself comes to in a metal room to the sound of a rhythmic throbbing which would be only too familiar to those of us who have followed the series for so many years. She awakens to find herself facing a nightmare, a terror she thought was long dead & her disbelief is paramount. She backs against a wall as a suckered metal arm menaces her in a pretty faithful reproduction of a truly historic moment from the show's past, some 41½ years previously. In one last desperate act of rebellion, the Controller reveals the coordinates of Rose's whereabouts, only to find herself transported to that very location, where she finally meets her masters, claiming to have brought about their destruction & finally able to smile just one time before she is relieved of her lifelong duties in the most final way. The Doctor cancels the blocking signal on the station's scanners, revealing an enormous army of spinning saucer-shaped spacecraft on the edge of the solar system. It is a sight he recognizes only too well, as does Jack & neither of them can believe their eyes, for the ships should no longer exist, having supposedly all been wiped out in the last great Time War. Of course, the Doctor knew that one of them had survived, having fallen through time to the early 21st century on Earth & subsequently destroying itself after an unfortunate bonding session with young Rose, & that fact alone should have alerted him to the fact that it wasn't the only survivor, & having had many centuries to regroup & the raw materials of millions of human game show victims to utilize, he does not have to face just one this time, but with 2,000 or more per ship & approximately 200 ships sat right in front of him, the Doctor now faces the prospect of having to fight somewhere in the region of half a million Daleks.
Anyone who thought that we'd seen the last of Terry Nation's greatest creations was sadly deluding themselves. The Daleks are one of the biggest feathers in the Doctor Who cap & as long as the show is on the air & Terry Nation's estate continue to allow their usage, the Daleks will be with us. They have always had a particular menace, no-one can really put their fingers on just why. They are a ridiculous shape, with appendages totally unsuitable for almost everything. They move painfully slowly & until recently could be stopped by placing a small brick in their path. Their vocabulary is singularly dull & uninspired & they are constantly defeated by the Doctor, yet their appeal is enormous, the terror they exude is palpable. Scarcely a man, woman or child alive, particularly in this country, does not recognize them instantly & can do a passable impression of them. It may be because they do not resemble your standard man-in-a-rubber-suit style monster, it may be because they glide smoothly (terrain permitting) & silently, it may be because their voices are so chilling, or because they are merciless, unremitting killing machines. It may be because despite their many defeats, they never give up, have total belief in their own superiority & just despise the entirety of creation. It may be a combination of all of these or something else altogether, but whatever the reason, the Daleks are the ultimate Doctor Who monster & can lay claim to being one of the greatest monsters of any description in the history of science fiction, horror & fantasy. We have seen their Genesis, when the Doctor had the chance to stop their development before it had even started, but didn't & was ultimately unable to halt their creation, we have seen their supposedly ultimate destruction in a massive civil war on Skaro, we have seen their creator manipulate their genetic make-up, segmenting their ranks & causing 2 separate factions intent on the destruction of the other & we have witnessed the annihilation of their home planet at the Doctor's (& Omega's) hand. We now know that they were all but destroyed in a massive Time War which may or may not have seen the end of the Time Lords & Gallifrey, yet here they are, in all their glory, butcher & meaner than ever &, with the advent of CGI technology, in numbers previously unimaginable. The ultimate threat. Which makes the Doctor's defiance of them all the more impressive.
When the Daleks order the Doctor's surrender under threat of Rose's extermination, he simply says no. All eyes turn to him, the Daleks, Rose, the others in the Game Station, countless millions watching at home. The Daleks don't get it. They think they hold all the cards, so in their logical way of thinking the Doctor HAS to surrender. His refusal takes them by surprise & gives us possibly the best quote of the series to date. "This is what I'M going to do. I'm going to rescue her. I'm going to save Rose Tyler from the middle of the Dalek fleet & then I'm going to save the Earth & then, just to finish off, I'm going to wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky!!!" The Daleks still don't get it. The Doctor has no weapons, they tell him, no defences & no plan. "Yeah!!" he agrees, "And doesn't that just scare you to death!!" Which quite clearly it does as the Daleks ignore Rose & all their threats to exterminate her & busy themselves with commencing the invasion of Earth, leading to one of the greatest ever cliffhanger endings in the history of Doctor Who as the cries of "Exterminate" chorus around the ship & the camera pans back to reveal literally thousands of Daleks, milling around the ship, hovering, all chanting, each Dalek's lights flashing on & off & all (unlike with their massive army on Spirodon) moving independently! For once this season, the Doctor seems about to take direct action to solve the problem himself, rather than relying on someone else coming up with a solution. Because he has been a little impotent in the action stakes (possibly as a result of the Time War & its repercussions), when he does become a decisive action-hero, it seems all the more impressive, because we contrast it to his previous track record. The question hanging on our lips at the end of Bad Wolf was "Can he save Rose & the Earth from the Dalek menace?".well, yes, of course, because ultimately the hero always does in these situations, but at what cost?????
» Review by Miles Northcott, Copyright 2005.
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After weeks of name dropping Bad Wolf had a lot to live up to. I wanted this episode
to explain why the Doctor and Rose had been seeing those
two words everywhere they went. To an extent it did,
though we have so many more unanswered questions. Was
it the controller who was sending secret messages through
time? I was happy to see Rose remember her Bad Wolf
encounters. 
)
