- "Remember that Old Earth saying? 'Never trust a nun, never trust a nurse, and never trust a cat.'"
- ―Lady Cassandra
| "New Earth" | |
|---|---|
| Series Doctor Who Season 2, Episode 1 | |
| File:Doctor Who 2x1 001.jpg | |
| Air date | April 15th, 2006 |
| Writers | Russell T. Davies |
| Director | Euros Lyn |
| Producers | Russell T. Davies; Julie Gardner; Phil Collinson; Helen Vallis |
| Starring | David Tennant; Billie Piper |
| Episode guide | |
| Previous "The Christmas Invasion" |
Next "Tooth and Claw" |
New Earth is the first episode of season two of the 2005 Doctor Who revival series. It is the fifteenth episode of the series overall. This episode was directed by James Hawes and written by Russell T. Davies. It first aired on BBC HD on Saturday, April 15th, 2006. The episode saw a revisit to the five-billion period and the return of two characters from the previous season, the Face of Boe and Lady Cassandra.
Synopsis[]
At the Powell Estate, the Doctor starts up the TARDIS while Rose Tyler once again bids goodbye to her mother Jackie and boyfriend Mickey before she goes off traveling on new adventures through time and space. Both are saddened to see her go, but inside the ship Rose is all smiles as she excitedly asks the Doctor where they're going. "Further than we've ever gone before," the Doctor tells her with a grin.
The TARDIS arrives in the year 5,000,000,023 on New Earth, a lush, verdant planet much like the original, colonised by nostalgic humans following the destruction of the Old Earth. Rose marvels at the beauty of humanity's new home and confesses she is overjoyed to be traveling with the new Doctor again as the two relax in the apple-grass meadows outside New New York (the fifteenth version to the city, according to the Doctor). Before they can explore any further, however, the Doctor reveals he has received a mysterious telepathic message on his psychic paper, summoning him to a luxurious, futuristic hospital outside the city with the words "WARD 26, PLEASE COME". He and Rose set off, unaware they are being spied on by Chip, a pale creature covered in tattoos, and his mistress Lady Cassandra, who has survived her apparent death on Platform One and vows revenge on Rose.
Entering the hospital foyer, Rose is shocked to learn the building is staffed by cat nuns belong to the order of the Sisters of Plenitude, while the Doctor seems disappointed by the lack of a little shop. Shortly after, the two of them are separated and forced to take separate lifts; where they are both showered, powdered and blown dry by the hospital's built-in disinfectant system (The Doctor enjoys the experience, while Rose screams in shock and takes a moment to get used to it). Chip overrides Rose's lift and diverts her down to the hospital's deserted, derelict basement. There, he greets her by name and invites her to follow him. Suspicious, she grabs a metal poker as a weapon to defend herself.
One of the cat nuns, Sister Jatt, escorts the Doctor around Ward 26, where he finds himself fascinated by the many patients and diseases the nurses are treating with advanced medicine. Among them is the Duke of Manhattan, who is slowly turning to stone from Petrifold Regression, and the Face of Boe, whom he previously met on Platform One and is behind the summons that led him to New Earth. Left in the company of Boe's carer, Novice Hame, the Doctor is told the sleeping Face is dying of incurable old age, having lived for thousands, possibly millions of years.
Down in the basement Rose is led into an underground chamber, where she finds a film projector playing a recording of a beautiful woman at a glamorous drinks party, and recognizes her familiar voice as Cassandra's. Bitterly recalling their last encounter, Cassandra explains she survived her explosive demise onboard Platform One with help from her servant Chip, a subservient force-grown clone who smuggled her into the hospital and steals the medicine she needs to survive. Having retrieved her brain and reconstructed herself using the remaining skin from her original body, Cassandra laments her lonely existence and refers to the drinks party in the film as the last time anyone called her beautiful. She reveals to Rose she has discovered secrets held by the cat nuns, and needs her to find out more. Rose makes to leave, but is tricked into stepping into a psycho-graft, a device which allows Cassandra to force her consciousness into her arch-enemy's body.
Up in Ward 26, the Doctor listens to Novice Hame recount stories of the Face of Boe's telepathic abilities and the ancient legends surrounding the creature. In particular, one prophecy which foretells that moments before his death, the Face will impart his final secret to one like himself, a "Lonely God". The Doctor recognizes the parallels to himself, but keeps quiet. Meanwhile, Cassandra examines Rose's body in the mirror, at first with dismay, then with delight as she inspects the bouncier attributes of her curvy new form. She and Chip discover that her old brain has decayed; now only her mind survives in Rose, whose own psyche is locked away in the depths of her consciousness. Reading Rose's surface thoughts, Cassandra is angered to discover the man she saw on the hillside is the Doctor.
The Doctor, unaware that his companion has been possessed by his sinister former acquaintance, calls her on Rose's mobile to inquire on her whereabouts. Cassandra covers as best she can by adopting an unconvincing Cockney accent, and the Doctor returns to Ward 26 where the Duke of Manhattan has been miraculously cured of the disease he was previously dying of. He confronts Matron Casp, the leader of the Sisterhood, about the antidote used to heal the Duke's illness, but she remains suspiciously silent on the matter and is abruptly called away by Sister Jatt to Intensive Care.
Down below, Cassandra is undeterred by Chip's warnings for her to beware the Doctor, convinced she can use his cleverness to find out more about the secrets of the Sisterhood. After giving Rose a quick makeover in the mirror to better suit her seductive new persona, she conceals a special vial of perfume in her cleavage and leaves the basement. In the secret Intensive Care department, Matron Casp and Sister Jatt examine a patient imprisoned in one of the many cells and are surprised to find it has developed speech patterns and free will. Casp immediately orders the patient incinerated.
Cassandra rejoins the Doctor in Ward 26, and he brings her up to speed on his findings; deadly diseases like Marconi's Disease and Pallidome Pancrosis are being cured in a matter of days, but the advanced medical science the nuns use to treat their patients is a closely-guarded secret. However, Cassandra's impersonation of Rose quickly arouses his suspicions, especially after she grabs him for a passionate kiss that leaves him speechless. Accessing a computer terminal (in which Cassandra's advanced technical knowledge comes in handy), the Doctor and "Rose" uncover a secret entrance to Intensive Care.
Inside, they expose the dark, awful secret that festers at the heart of the hospital: a vast complex where the Sisterhood are growing thousands of human clones as lab rats for a plague farm. The test-subjects are kept sedated inside incubator booths that are regularly pumped with every manner of disease in the galaxy; living experiments for the Sisters' miracle cures. The Doctor is appalled by the scale of suffering inflicted on the human carriers in the name of science and turns his fury on Novice Hame, who defends the order's unethical methods as a necessary shortcut to deal with the waves of disease that settlers brought with them to New Earth. Cassandra, however, is unmoved by the plight of the Sisters' guinea pigs, and this profound indifference, at complete odds with Rose's compassionate nature, is what gives her away to the Doctor. Rumbled, she knocks him unconscious with the narcotic perfume secreted down her shirt and sounds the alarm to summon the Sisters.
The Doctor awakes to find his possessed companion has placed him inside a spare incubator pod about to be flooded with diseases. Meanwhile, Cassandra attempts to blackmail Matron Casp and Sister Jatt, threatening to reveal the Sisterhood's secret unless they pay her a sizeable ransom. When the cat nuns refuse and unsheathe their claws, she has Chip open up a row of the incubator pods and release their infected occupants as an exit strategy, inadvertently freeing the Doctor as well. This back-up plan, however, soon spirals out of control once the sentient plague-carriers trigger a power surge that liberates all of the other test-subjects in Intensive Care.
The Doctor, Cassandra and Chip flee to the lower levels, while Matron Casp orders a quarantine, locking down the hospital as thousands of diseased clones begin wandering zombie-like through the building. Staff, patients and visitors alike, including Sister Jatt, are infected by the carriers' deadly touch and die horribly. Down in the basement, Cassandra heartlessly abandons Chip when he is separated from the group, and she and the Doctor barricade themselves in her dungeon lair. The Doctor orders her to leave Rose's body; left with no other option, she complies, occupying his instead. As Rose recovers, Cassandra delights in her new male form, teasing Rose with knowledge of her attraction to the Doctor before they are found again by the infected.
Rose and a Cassandra-possessed Doctor climb up an abandoned lift shaft to escape the clones, briefly waylaid by Matron Casp, who falls victim to the touch of her diseased creations and plummets to her death. Reaching the top of the ladder, Cassandra swaps bodies several times with the Doctor and Rose when the former denies her the knowledge to use his sonic screwdriver to open the lift doors. With both refusing to help unless the other's body is vacated, she briefly inhabits one of the infected test-subjects before returning to Rose once more. In doing so, however, Cassandra experiences the full extent of the pain and loneliness felt by the clones and is shaken by the epiphany: the sick humans are not hostile by nature but merely starved for touch, having being held in isolation their entire lives.
Returning to Ward 26, the Doctor and Cassandra grab all the medicines and intravenous solutions and zip-line down one of the lift-shafts to the ground floor of the hospital. There, the Doctor mixes a panacea cocktail into the lift's disinfection system which he uses to douse the carriers with. Cured of all their afflictions, the diseased humans pass on the remedy by touch to the others, effectively birthing a brand-new subspecies. Ecstatic, the Doctor points out that they are life-forms Cassandra can no longer deny, since she was instrumental in their creation.
Evening falls over New Earth, as the NNYPD arrive at the hospital to arrest the surviving Sisters (including Novice Hame) for their crimes and take the new human creatures into care. The Doctor finally meets with a reinvigorated Face of Boe back in Ward 26, only for the Face to enigmatically postpone his great secret for a third and final meeting and transport himself away. The Doctor then demands Cassandra leave Rose's body for good, but as a last resort, she takes over the body of Chip instead, who has survived the day's ordeal and willingly volunteers himself as a host for his mistress.
Rose and the Doctor are joyfully reunited, but Chip's half-life clone body is unable to take the strain of Cassandra's mind and begins to fail. Realizing she cannot go on artificially prolonging her own lifespan and that there is no longer any place for her on this new human world, Cassandra accepts her impending death at last. As a final kindness, the Doctor and Rose take the Cassandra-possessed Chip back in time to the drinks party shown in the film - the last night Cassandra was told she was beautiful. This turns out to be by Cassandra herself, in Chip's failing body, who speaks the words to her former human self. The Doctor and Rose look on as the Last Human finally dies in her own arms, before returning to the TARDIS in solemn silence.