Doctor Who: The Doctor Dances Rewatch

August 27, 2014 2:04 PM - Season 1, Episode 10

Second Part of a two parter: See Part One (The Empty Child) The Child's plague is spreading throughout wartime London, and its zombie army is on the march. The Ninth Doctor and Rose form an alliance with intergalactic con man Captain Jack, but find themselves trapped in the abandoned hospital. They head to the crash site of Jack's supposed space junk and discover the ground zero for the mysterious plague.

Trivia and so on

• Moffat had first used the line "Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh" in the second series of his 1990s sitcom Joking Apart. He reused it here as he thought it was a good line, but laments that people quote lines from this episode instead of that one
• The working title for this story was "Captain Jax".
• The bomb has the words "Schlechter Wolf" (Bad Wolf) stamped on the side.
• This is sometimes assumed to be the first episode to use a verb in the title, but that honour actually belongs to "All Roads Lead to Rome", the second episode of The Romans.

posted by Just this guy, y'know (8 comments total)

The "EVERYBODY LIVES!" ending is maybe the defining moment in terms of establishing the tone of the 9th through 11th Doctors era. It's.. well... fantastic.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:51 PM on August 28, 2014 [11 favorites]

I kind of feel like with a rewatch, the 2-parters should be smushed together. Seems like an extra 45 minutes every few weeks isn't too much to ask, and I don't think there will be a lot of discussion on the back half if we do it this way, since it's a rewatch, and many of us will remember the endings and discuss them the first week anyway.
posted by rikschell at 7:13 AM on August 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

I *still* miss Captain Jack.
posted by Space Kitty at 8:05 AM on August 29, 2014 [3 favorites]

Yeah I was pondering doing that way.
Might be better.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 9:10 AM on August 29, 2014

The Captain Jack ending totally fooled me the first time I saw this. When they cut to Jack having his last martini, I thought it was a great bittersweet counterbalance to the celebration back on Earth: Jack had grown up, and was at peace with sacrificing himself for the others.

They played it perfectly, using all the tricks in television's "no seriously this guy is about to legit die" playbook and when Rose showed up on the ship it really sold the "Everybody lives!" ending for me.
posted by Ian A.T. at 9:45 AM on August 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, the everybody lives is the scene I pick when I try to turn people onto the 9th Doctor (*my* Doctor), and usually is one of the ones I do when I'm trying to get them into DW in general.

Also a couple of years ago I was touring the Diefenbunker, which is a command & control fallout shelter, now given over for public tours. And there are a lot of mid-20C gas masks around. And old telephones. Legitimately terrifying.
posted by Lemurrhea at 11:12 PM on August 29, 2014 [2 favorites]

The "go to your room" resolution to the cliffhanger is great.

Still not sure how I feel about Nancy confessing that she's the mother being the key to the resolution.

Jack's mention of Pompeii might well be relevant to the current series.
posted by hawthorne at 7:42 AM on September 1, 2014

I really had forgotten how terrifying the mask people are. The scene where Nancy is cuffed to the table was especially frightening.
posted by ob1quixote at 12:56 AM on September 13, 2014