The Parting of the Ways

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170b – "The Parting of the Ways"
Doctor Who episode

The TARDIS crew face the Dalek Emperor - and his army.
Cast
Doctor Christopher Eccleston (Ninth Doctor)
David Tennant (Tenth Doctor)
Companions Billie Piper (Rose Tyler)
John Barrowman (Jack Harkness)
Guest stars
Production
Writer Russell T Davies
Director Joe Ahearne
Script editor Helen Raynor
Producer Phil Collinson
Executive producer(s) Russell T. Davies
Julie Gardner
Mal Young
Production code 1.13
Series Series 1
Length 2 of 2 episodes, 45 mins
Originally broadcast June 18, 2005
Chronology
← Preceded by Followed by →
"Bad Wolf" "Doctor Who: Children in Need" (special)
"The Christmas Invasion" (episode)
IMDb profile

"The Parting of the Ways" is an episode in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast on June 18, 2005. It is the second of a two-part story. The first part, "Bad Wolf", was broadcast on June 11. This second part was Christopher Eccleston's last story as the Doctor and David Tennant's first appearance in the role, as well as the last story to feature Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman, as a regular companion until "Utopia", two years later. The episode also revealed the significance of the words "Bad Wolf", which had been inserted throughout that season's episodes.

Contents

[edit] Synopsis

As the Daleks attack the Gamestation led by their Emperor, the Doctor finds himself helpless. He knows he must make sacrifices if he is going to survive, but does this mean losing his beloved companion Rose Tyler? And who is Bad Wolf?

[edit] Plot

Continuing the cliffhanger from the end of "Bad Wolf", the Doctor and Jack travel in the TARDIS from the Game Station to the Dalek fleet as it approaches 2002nd century Earth to try to rescue Rose; Jack has rigged the TARDIS with the tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator taken from Blon Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen to act as a shield against the Dalek weapons. They land on the ship where Rose is held and defeat her captor, rescuing her. More Daleks show up but the extrapolator's shield holds, allowing the Doctor to ask them how they survived the Time War. The Dalek Emperor, a Dalek mutant suspended in a transparent tank of fluid, appears and explains that its ship survived the war due to being crippled and "falling through time"; it had to wait a very long time, then began to manipulate the human race, harvesting their organic material to rebuild its race. However, the Doctor notes that by doing this, the Daleks have gained some attributes and emotions from humans, and the fact that the Emperor denies this and claims the Daleks to be "pure and blessed" meaning they've been fanatics loathing their own genetic makeup, and are thus deadlier than ever. The Doctor immediately returns to the Game Station and begins to set up a defensive position with the help of Jack and the few remaining programmers and game show participants including Lynda, the rest having evacuated via shuttles. The Doctor begins to work to change the Game Station into a giant Delta Wave transmitter that will fry the brain of any being in its path, but only has twenty-two minutes to do what normally would take three days. Jack adjusts the extrapolator to expand the shield to include the top six floors of the Game Station, and, after kissing both Rose and the Doctor goodbye, works to set barricades and defenses with those volunteering to help arming them with guns that fire bastic bullets that should penetrate the Dalek armor casing. The Doctor manages to rig all the hardware in place for the Delta Wave, but it will still take time to build up, but then realizes he could use the TARDIS to help. He ushers Rose inside the TARDIS so that he can make the adjustments, but once she's inside, he uses his sonic screwdriver to send the TARDIS back to 21st century Earth where she will be safe, much against Rose's wishes.

Jack asks the Doctor over the radio how long until the Delta Wave is ready, but the transmission is intercepted by the Dalek Emperor, who notes that the Wave will be powerful enough to wipe out all species — Dalek or human — nearby, including the whole of the Earth. The Doctor is prepared for that sacrifice in order to wipe out the threat of the Daleks on the rest of the universe, noting that human colonies exist and the human race will still live on. As the Daleks commence their attack on the Station, the defenders coordinate with Lynda, set up in a secured observation room, to monitor their approach. They enter at Floor 494, and break through the first line of defenses, the bastic bullets ineffective, heading upwards to Floor 500 while systematically wiping out the remaining human survivors on the lower floors. Several other defensive barriers, including the "Anne Droid", prove ineffective, and even as Jack takes charge at the last stand on Floor 499 to disable one Dalek, he and the other defenders are killed as the Dalek move up to the control floor. Lynda herself is killed when a Dalek blasts out the observation window and exposes her to the vacuum of space.

As Rose is taken back to the 21st century, a holographic message from the Doctor explains that this was an emergency program, necessary to save both Rose as well as to prevent the TARDIS's technology from falling into the Dalek's hands, in the event of the Doctor's likely death. The TARDIS lands near Jackie Tyler's council estate, and Mickey comes running when he hears the sound. Rose is in tears, as she cannot get the TARDIS to respond her as to make it go back to save the Doctor. Jackie soon joins Mickey in trying to console Rose and encourage her to get on with her life, but she refuses. As she looks around, Rose sees the words "Bad Wolf" all around the area where the TARDIS is and realizes it is a message to her to try to save the Doctor. Rose notes that the Heart of the TARDIS is telepathic, and if she can look into it, she may be able to get the TARDIS to take her back. Rose and Mickey try by hand and then by trying to pull the Heart open using Mickey's car, but with no luck. Jackie asks Rose to give it up, but Rose refuses, reminded by her father Pete, and reveals to Jackie that she was there on the fateful day that Pete died. Jackie, recognizing her devotion, goes and pulls a favor with a local friend that has a heavy-duty recovery vehicle, bringing it back to the TARDIS. With it, they are able to pull the covering off the Heart of the TARDIS, and as Rose looks into it, overtaken with its light, the TARDIS doors slam closed on Mickey and Jackie, and it dematerializes.

On the Game Station, the Daleks have broken into Floor 500 just as the Doctor is ready to activate the Delta Wave. However, he cannot bring himself to pull the switch, as the Dalek Emperor taunts him he would be the "great exterminator". As the Doctor surrenders, the TARDIS rematerializes behind him, and Rose, filled with the light of the time vortex emerges. The Daleks try to fire on her, but she repulses their attacks. Rose tells the Doctor that she is the "Bad Wolf" and that to lead herself to this point, she spreads the name "Bad Wolf" throughout time and space. Then, to make sure the Doctor is safe, she waves a hand causing all the Daleks, on the station, their fleet, and on earth, to disintegrate into component atoms, ending the Dalek threat and the Time War. Rose realizes she has god-like powers, but cannot let go of them, and, unseen, brings Jack back to life. However, the power is consuming Rose's body, so to stop it, the Doctor takes Rose into his arms and kisses her, taking the Vortex energy into his body. He exhales, blowing toward the TARDIS, returning the Vortex energy back to the Heart of the TARDIS, and then takes the unconscious Rose back into the TARDIS. As Jack returns to Floor 500, he sees the TARDIS dematerializing without him.

Rose awakens on the TARDIS to find the Doctor in pain; the residual Vortex energy is destroying every cell in his body. He explains that he is dying, but will be regenerating so while they may still continue to travel, this incarnation will never see Rose again. The Doctor tells Rose that she was "fantastic", then after a pause, he claims he was too, moments before energy courses through his body. The Doctor's features change into the next incarnation, who takes a moment to reorient himself to his new body, then offers to take Rose on her next adventure to the planet Barcelona.

[edit] Cast notes

  • Jenna Russell appears as the Floor Manager, who also appeared in the previous episode. However, she is not listed in the end credits.

[edit] Continuity

  • Rose absorbing the energy of the time vortex and destroying the Daleks is similar to the resolution of the last regular Eighth Doctor comic strip story in Doctor Who Magazine. In The Flood, the Doctor is thrown into the vortex by the Cybermen, and emerges suffused with enough power to deliberately trigger a "temporal meltdown" which destroys them. He relinquishes the power to rescue Destrii, his companion at the time (DWM #346-#353).
  • This was the only story to feature the Doctor regenerating while standing up, and the fourth time that he has been seen to regenerate inside the TARDIS console room; the other stories being The Tenth Planet (1966), The Caves of Androzani (1984) and Time and the Rani (1987). The Master later regenerated in the TARDIS, also while standing up, in "Utopia" (2007).
  • A musical cue with eerie sounding vocals is heard when Rose sees the graffiti and later after she has absorbed the energy of the time vortex. On the DVD commentary of "'Rose", Russell T. Davies and Phil Collinson jokingly call this voice "President Flavia", a reference to a Time Lady character from The Five Doctors. On the soundtrack released in 2006, it was known as "The Doctor's Theme". Davies says that this voice is heard "whenever it gets too Time Lord-y". It was also heard in the 2005 series episodes "The End of the World", "Boom Town", "Bad Wolf" and in the 2005 Children in Need special.
  • In "The Age of Steel", Mickey tells Jake, "I once saved the universe in a big yellow truck."
  • Jack's temporary death marks the first time since Adric's death in 1982's Earthshock that a companion has been killed on-screen in the television series, although Grace Holloway and disputed companion Chang Lee are also killed (and revived) in the 1996 telefilm. In "Utopia" (2007), it is revealed that Rose's bringing him back to life has made him immortal.
  • John Barrowman reprises his role as Captain Jack Harkness in the Tenth Doctor stories "Utopia", "The Sound of Drums" and "Last of the Time Lords".
  • The Doctor's reference about never knowing what will occur with regeneration is similar to a statement made by the Fifth Doctor in Castrovalva.
  • The Master displays knowledge of this episode's events in "Last of the Time Lords", when comparing Rose to the Doctor's later companion, Martha Jones: "Days of old, Doctor, you had companions who could absorb the time vortex... This one's useless."

[edit] The TARDIS

  • The idea that the TARDIS console directly harnesses the energies which drive the ship (the heart of the TARDIS) and is at least in some sense alive and self-aware dates back to The Edge of Destruction (1964). It was re-introduced in "Boom Town", which also established some of the uses to which those energies could be put in extremis.[1] This is a concept which has also been explored in a number of spin-offs, particularly in the Big Finish Productions audio play, Zagreus.
  • The depiction of the Vortex energy Rose uses to defeat the Daleks and revive Captain Jack is superficially similar to the energy used by the TARDIS to revive Grace and Chang Lee in the 1996 television movie.
  • Rose claims that the TARDIS has no defences. However, earlier stories in the original series have established that the TARDIS is protected by a force field generator of considerable strength (The Armageddon Factor, 1979, among others). In addition, the TARDIS has a Hostile Action Displacement System (HADS), seen in The Krotons (1969), which teleports it away from potentially devastating attacks.
  • The TARDIS's ability to materialise around an object and have that object appear in the Console Room was previously demonstrated in The Time Monster (1972) and Logopolis (1981). Although both instances involved the Doctor's TARDIS materialising around the Master's TARDIS and creating a recursive loop, the second showed the Master's TARDIS materialising around a real police box. This is the first time on television that a Dalek has been seen inside the TARDIS.
  • Jack destroys the Dalek in the TARDIS with his one-shot weapon. In The Hand of Fear (1976) the Doctor claims that the inside of the TARDIS exists in a state of temporal grace which prevents weapons from being fired inside it, although the circuit was not working by the time of Earthshock (1982).

[edit] Daleks

  • The last Dalek story to feature an Emperor — who was the Daleks' creator, Davros — was Remembrance of the Daleks (1988). The Emperor in this episode represents a return to an earlier concept of the Daleks' leader, seen in The Evil of the Daleks (1967); whenever the Daleks had an on-screen leader in later appearances, it was a Dalek Supreme or Davros.
  • The use of human genetic material or body parts in the creation of new Daleks was pioneered by Davros in the Sixth Doctor serial Revelation of the Daleks (1985) but without the problems associated with the human factor in the Second Doctor story The Evil of the Daleks (1967). The idea that the genetic material alone is responsible for the human values is a feature of biological determinism, an element of the nature versus nurture debate.
  • This episode shows the Daleks not only hovering, but flying through the vacuum of space.
  • Jack tells his defenders that their ammunition consist of bastic bullets, which can penetrate Dalek casings. Bastic bullets were first mentioned as having this property in Revelation of the Daleks.
  • The Doctor claims that he is known in Dalek legend as "The Oncoming Storm", a title that first appeared in the Virgin New Adventures novel Love and War by Paul Cornell (who wrote the episode "Father's Day"). In the novel, the title was applied to the Doctor by the Draconians, although it is possible either they or the Daleks appropriated the title from one another. In the spin-off media, the better known title of the Doctor in Dalek lore is the Ka Faraq Gatri, the "Bringer of Darkness" or "Destroyer of Worlds", first used in Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of his serial Remembrance of the Daleks.
  • The Emperor refers to the TARDIS-infused Rose as the "Abomination". In Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of his story Remembrance of the Daleks, the same term is applied to the Special Weapons Dalek.
  • The Emperor Dalek's final words are "I cannot die!", the same words said by Davros at the conclusion of Resurrection of the Daleks (1984) when he is apparently dying from a virus. In Davros's case, he survived to return another day, but whether this Emperor does remains to be seen. He is mentioned later in "Doomsday" by Rose and the Doctor and again by the Cult of Skaro in "Daleks in Manhattan".
  • Several new Dalek phrases were heard this episode, in addition to Bad Wolf's "Alert, alert! We are detected!" These were "Worship him!" and "Do not blaspheme!" These seem to be strictly limited to the followers of the god-complex Emperor Dalek, however.
  • In contrast to "Dalek", the normal humans seem aware of the existence of the Daleks with Rodrick commenting "They were wiped out thousands of years ago", alluding to possible previous Dalek invasions of Earth or other such activity.
  • The Daleks remain the only Doctor Who villains to have faced every incarnation of the Doctor. With the exception of Paul McGann, the Daleks have been seen in the televised stories of all of the Doctors. Only the voices of the Daleks were heard when they "exterminated" the Gordon Tipple incarnation of the Master at the beginning of the Doctor Who television movie (1996). The Eighth Doctor has also faced the Daleks in several Big Finish Productions (as voiced by McGann) audio plays and BBC books, and the Tenth Doctor made his debut at the end of this story before facing the Daleks in the 2006 Season finale, "Doomsday".

[edit] Production

  • This was the first episode in this series which was not given a press screening prior to the broadcast. Radio Times stated, "No preview tape was available for this episode." The episode was, however, screened for BAFTA on June 15, 2005.
  • Endemol and Channel 4 are thanked in the end credits for the use of the Big Brother format and logo respectively, though these are featured only in the opening recap and not in the episode itself.
  • According to Russell T. Davies in Doctor Who Magazine, Jack was left behind because they wanted to explore the effects of the regeneration on Rose (noting that Jack would have taken the regeneration "in his stride"). Jack returned in the Doctor Who spin-off series Torchwood, which began broadcast in October 2006.
  • In an interview in Doctor Who Magazine, Russell T. Davies stated that an alternate ending for this episode was written and filmed, with the intention that it would be shown to press previewers to hide the secret of the regeneration. This idea was abandoned when Eccleston's departure was revealed earlier than planned. The "false" ending would have featured similar dialogue to the televised final scene, but the TARDIS would have scanned Rose and the viewers would have seen the display read: "LIFEFORM DYING". Davies considered this scene inferior to the one actually shown, but suggested that it might be suitable as an extra on a DVD some day. On the DVD commentary, executive producer Julie Gardner and Billie Piper briefly discuss this ending, which Gardner describes as featuring Rose's death; unlike Davies, Gardner expresses doubts that it will be issued on DVD (it was not included in the Series 1 DVD set).
  • David Tennant's portion of the regeneration scene was actually filmed much later than Eccleston's, and without the presence of Billie Piper. Tennant's segment was recorded with him speaking to a piece of sticky tape indicating Piper's eyeline and then edited into the broadcast version.
  • Upon translation into Italian, this episode was renamed Padroni dell'universo (Masters of the Universe) [1].

[edit] Outside references

  • Rose's actions create a predestination paradox. The words "Bad Wolf" tell her to try to get back to the Doctor, and her doing so gives her the ability to leave the words through time as messages to herself, which she then does. Although it can be argued that the phrase "Bad Wolf" originates with the Badwolf Corporation, it can also be argued that she somehow prompted the creation of the phrase through her powers in the first place, thereby also introducing an ontological paradox. Ontological paradoxes were explored in "Blink", where the Doctor explains that space-time is not strictly cause-to-effect, and serve as a major plot device in "Time Crash". The Doctor himself moves in a fictitious five-dimensional setting (The Space Museum, 1964), and perhaps a six-dimensional setting (Inferno, 1970).

[edit] References

  1. ^ Levine, Ian (Producer). Over the Edge (the making of The Edge of Destruction) [DVD documentary].

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
The TARDIS Index File has information related to:

[edit] Reviews

v • d • e
Dalek television stories
First Doctor
Second Doctor
Third Doctor
Fourth Doctor
Fifth Doctor
Sixth Doctor
Seventh Doctor
Ninth Doctor
"Dalek" • "Bad Wolf" / "The Parting of the Ways"
Tenth Doctor
Minor appearances
See also
v • d • e
Doctor Who: Regeneration television stories
First Doctor
Second Doctor
Third Doctor
Fourth Doctor
Fifth Doctor
Sixth Doctor
Seventh Doctor
Eighth Doctor
Ninth Doctor
"The Parting of the Ways"
Tenth Doctor
Other characters
Planet of the Spiders • Destiny of the Daleks • "Utopia"
See also
v • d • e
Doctor Who series 1 episodes
"Rose" • "The End of the World" • "The Unquiet Dead" • "Aliens of London" • "World War Three" • "Dalek" • "The Long Game" • "Father's Day" • "The Empty Child" • "The Doctor Dances" • "Boom Town" • "Bad Wolf" • "The Parting of the Ways"