Doctor Who’s Modern Era Rebooted With a Truly Jarring Episode
Was "Rose" a masterpiece?
Where would we be without modern Doctor Who? In 2005, there was no Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Trek: Enterprise was running on fumes, Farscape had ended the previous year, and the biggest sci-fi show, Battlestar Galactica, was a grim, hardcore story about robots murdering the remnants of the human race. Into a landscape in which there was not a ton of uplifting sci-fi TV came a new version of Doctor Who, the venerable British series that had gone off the air in 1989 and had, briefly, been resurrected as a TV movie in 1996.
Twenty years ago, Doctor Who came back with a small, quiet episode that kicked off a massive new era not just for the Who franchise but the entirety of popular science fiction. But, looking back, does the first episode of the reborn Who — “Rose” — actually hold up?
The debut New-Who episode, “Rose,” hit the BBC on March 26, 2005, though it wouldn’t show up in the U.S. (on the Sci-Fi Channel) for another year. It was written by showrunner Russell T Davies, who, at the time, was best known for his hit series Queer as Folk. The episode referred to the Doctor’s new companion, Rose Tyler, a 19-year-old played by Billie Piper, who was then 23 years old and famous as a pop star, not an actress. The Doctor himself, the semi-immortal eponymous Time Lord, was played by Christopher Eccleston, who, by the end of the newly rebooted Season 1, would be replaced by David Tennant in the 2005 Christmas episode “The Christmas Invasion.” Infamously, Eccleston did not part on the best of terms, and to this day, he says that his condition for coming back to Who would be if the BBC were to “sack Russell T Davies.”
With the bad blood between Davies and Eccleston and the outpouring of love for David Tennant, Eccleston’s successor, watching “Rose” all this time later feels a bit awkward and like a rough draft of what the new era of Who eventually became. The story, in classic Davies form, introduced the entire universe of Doctor Who through the perspective of an aimless young person. But the key to the story here is its constant winking. The Doctor joyfully comes on screen and declares, in an almost Tom Baker-way, “Run for your life!” The episode itself finds the Doctor battling the plastic mannequin Autons, who had first appeared in another Who reboot of sorts, the first-ever color episode of the series, “The Spearhead from Space,” in 1970. In both 2005 and now, the Autons look cheap, and that’s exactly the point. In its big comeback to TV, Doctor Who had been modernized, but only by its own standards. Next to other sci-fi shows airing at the exact same time, the new version of Who looked, to non-U.K. fans, just as cheap as the old Who.
Thinking of “Rose” as a kind of early aughts period piece might be accurate had the 2005 Who season been the only season of the rebooted show. Instead, this season was laying the foundation for the show we have now. This version of the Doctor was acerbic, cranky, and less over-the-top than his predecessors. While Ncuti Gatwa changes his fit nearly every episode, and David Tennant became known for his ultra-skinny suits, Eccleston’s 9th Doctor was innocuous, like Tom Hardy’s slightly thinner brother, brooding in a leather jacket and quasi-Daniel Craig haircut. And it's his presence in “Rose” that stands out more than anything. Twenty years later, the warm, wibbly-wobbly Doctor that fans associate with Tennant, Smith, Whittaker, and Gatwa hadn’t really been established. Only Peter Capaldi’s Doctor from 2014-2017 was close to Eccleston’s dismissive and almost punk-rock approach to the character. Yes, he would save humanity, but he was sick of it.
Russell T Davies with Helen Raynor, Doctor Who script editor in 2005.
More than any other Doctor, Eccleston’s 9th Doctor was charming in the way that abrasive Britpop stars are charming; he didn’t care about people liking him. His swagger was working-class and irritated, which made his joyful “run for your life” the perfect opening line. But, despite the fact that the show tells us that this is the same man who becomes David Tennant, it’s hard to reconcile all these years later. In a sense, there’s a phantom version of Doctor Who established here, one in which Eccleston had a few more seasons, and either lightened a bit more, or didn’t.
“Rose” is by no means the best episode of Doctor Who and isn’t even the best episode of Eccleston’s all-too-brief run. And yet, the tone for his era was perfectly set. For all of its dated production value, “Rose” does establish this harder-edged version of the Doctor somewhat effortlessly. Even Davies, in looking back on “Rose” in 2010, agrees. “Of course, these episodes will age,” he wrote in his book The Writer’s Tale. “[But] this show is exactly what I wanted it to be.” In the same book, Davies also calls Rose “a powerful template.”
This makes sense. In essence, when Davies came back to Who with a new Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and a new companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), he essentially revisited the template that he himself created with “Rose.” Whether or not “The Church on Ruby Road” will be thought of as important as “Rose” in 20 years remains to be seen.
But one thing won’t change. For a decade and a half, Doctor Who, the oldest, longest-running sci-fi show ever, didn’t have new regular episodes. And then, suddenly it did. “Rose” may not be the most fantastic Who episode ever, but like the clunky movements of the villainous Autons, it does work.
