Doctor Who Episode Guide - The End of the World

1) Andrew Oakley (Profile)

Hmm. This starts well, as a kind of Mos Eisley Cantina meets Agatha Christie drawing-room murder mystery with a hint of Ferrero Rocher Ambassador’s Party and Restaurant At The End Of The Universe (Douglas Adams was, of course, a fairly prolific Doctor Who scriptwriter prior to his Hitchhiker series). The alien costumes are excellent and the CGI spider-robots are great. If it wasn’t for the fact that the space station set was re-used in no less than four bloody episodes of this short 13-episode series, I’d rave about that too. That’s pretty much how it pans out in one’s memory; on first viewing this is a good episode, but on repeated viewings this falls flat in comparison to much better episodes later in the series. On the plus side, there is an amusing nod towards “Galaxy Quest” in the placing of the self-destruct-cancel button on the far side of a series of killer pendulums, but even this drags a bit when compared to the action and suspense of later episodes.

2) Andrew Oakley (Profile)

As a point of reference for overseas viewers, the Doctor makes several references to “The National Trust” who apparently become responsible for curtailing continental drift in the Earth’s final years. In the UK, the National Trusts (one for Scotland, one for the rest of the UK) are real-world government bodies responsible for conserving large (by UK scale) areas of grassland and some more recent historic buildings. They are well known for turning down permission for new buildings and some argue that they keep rural areas in such a static state that they become unable to move with economic realities, becoming little more than Disneyland tourist parks. The use of the National Trust as a body so powerful in its nannying that it can turn back the tides themselves, may be the scriptwriter Russel T Davies getting his own back for a building regulation spat between the National Trust and his friend Kate Winslet.