Doctor Who 1x02 - "The End of the World"

[Danny Stewart]

In tonight's episode of Doctor Who, the Doctor takes Rose to see Platform One in the year five billion, a space station established to watch as the Earth is engulfed by the sun. But when mechanical spiders begin to overrun and sabotage the station, the Doctor must find who is responsible before Platform One and all of its guests are destroyed!

What did you all think of tonight's episode? Personally, I thought it was marvelous! Outstanding! Christopher Eccleston really shone through in his performance. Especially the scenes dealing with what happened to Gallifrey. I was shocked to hear that it is no more, and even more surprisingly, the Doctor is the very last of the Time Lords. Very moving -- almost a tear-jerker. And before I forget, I absolutely have to say that Billie Piper continues to impress with her performance as Rose. Especially tonight's line: "There's me." Wonderful stuff, and well delivered!

[Ross Hendrie]

I thought it was great, but perhaps not quite as good as last weeks. It was still great! I loved that part where the last human said that the jukebox was an iPod lol. With classical music! lmao.

[Danny Stewart]

And how about Gallifrey, destroyed in a war? The Doctor is the last of the Time Lords, probably because he sets himself apart from them. Who could have possibly defeated the Time Lords? Hopefully a question that will be answered, if not for a while.

[Bajoran Rogue]

I saw it, and thought it was good, but one thing confuses me about the Doctor being the last of the Timelords, do they all travel through time? If so, how could they be wiped out, with all that timetraveling wouldn't they find out that something would threaten their existance? Regardless of how they would be wiped out, that makes it seem a bit wierd to me as them being wiped out should be impossible as they could find out before hand and prevent it from happening.

[Danny Stewart]

Glad you wached it, Drex! I suppose there are numerous possible answers to this. One is that the Gallifreyans (or Time Lords) were shortsighted, so they imposed a rule that they could not advance too far in time to see the events of the future. This is fact, however I do not know if it applies here. I suppose another possibility is that the race that defeated them caused some kind of major damage in time in addition to obliterating the planet (i.e. erasing a period of its existence or more). Hope that helps!

[Ross Hendrie]

Perhaps it was another race who destroyed them who were also time travellers and so were advanced enough to plan it so the Gallifreyans couldn't help themselves.

[Danny Stewart]

It is extremely likely that the race that defeated the Time Lords could travel through time. A war on a single front, space, would almost certainly be easily winnable by the Time Lords. But a war on two fronts -- space and time -- would be more of a challenge, not to mention never being dealt with before. The Gallifreyans are usually quite secluded, and prefer not to get involved in political issues throughout the galaxy.

Also, yes, the Time Lords are all quite capable of traveling through time, however most of them do not. The Time Lords have "capsules," which are just TARDISes with a less cool name, which they use to travel backwards and forwards in time for research purposes only. As the Doctor says, his people are generally quite boring. As a matter of fact, that's why he left them in pursuit of adventure in the first place. He was on the run for a while, then they sort of "tolerated" his renegade existence, then I suppose he allied with them loosely, but we all know where they are now.

[Bob Davis]

No, I haven't watched it, but I feel compelled to bring something up. I don't know the specifics of Gallifrey's downfall, but here's something:
how do we know the Time Lords didn't just take the whole planet off into another place?
Certainly ethical concerns would have limited the Time Lords, as it is too easy to destroy an entire people--whotsisname, the Voyager episode with the time weapon? Parallax?

[Danny Stewart]

Damn. We've always had a problem with Bob and the spoiler sections of my site. I'm going to have to find a way to lock him out of here so he can't read these posts before he watches the episode...

[Chris Britton]

I know this is old, but i wanted to post a comment, I thought it was a brilliant and dramatic episode, and shocking when you see Cassandra. It was great to see the acting and the plot and i can only hope that more stuff like this is in series 2.

[Danny Stewart]

I'm glad you enjoyed it, Chris. I personally found it one of the weakest of series one. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it -- quite the contrary -- but there's just so much better to be found!

[Chris Britton]

yeah, it was not the best episode i have seen, but still very good none the less.