The Parting of the Ways

"The Parting of the Ways" is the thirteenth and final episode of the first series of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast on 18 June 2005. It was the second episode of the two-part story that featured Christopher Eccleston making his last appearance as the Ninth Doctor. The first part, "Bad Wolf", was broadcast on 11 June.

Plot

As the Dalek fleet approaches Earth, the Doctor and Jack land the TARDIS on the Dalek mothership to rescue Rose Tyler, using the tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator to protect themselves from the Dalek weapons. The Dalek Emperor, who describes himself as a god, explains that he managed to survive the Time War in a crippled ship, and rebuilt the race by harvesting genetic materials from the humans such as those delivered from the Game Station. The Doctor observes that the Daleks have gained human traits and emotion by this process and have, because of their creed and resulting self-hate, become deadlier than ever. After bringing Rose aboard, the Doctor returns the TARDIS to the Game Station and works with Jack and the remaining humans aboard to prepare for the Dalek attack.

Jack uses the extrapolator to shield the top six floors of the station and sets up defensive positions, while the Doctor attempts to create a Delta Wave generator from the transmission equipment that will fry the brain of any being in its path, though it will take time to charge up. The Doctor tricks Rose into retrieving equipment from the TARDIS, and while she is inside, uses his sonic screwdriver to direct the TARDIS to return her to her home in the 21st century, much to Rose's anguish. In a farewell hologram known as Emergency Programme One, he describes this as a procedure designed to stop the TARDIS falling into enemy hands. As the Daleks begin to invade the Station, murdering all humans on board and overrunning the defences, the Dalek Emperor contacts the Doctor. He tells him that the Delta Wave generator will kill everyone on nearby Earth as well as his fleet, but the Doctor says this is a preferable fate to enslavement to the Daleks.

Rose, back home, is met by Jackie and Mickey who try to console her. As Rose regains her composure, she spots the words "Bad Wolf" all around the area where the TARDIS has landed, and realises that it is a message rather than a warning. She enlists Mickey's help to try to open the heart of the TARDIS, hoping its telepathic circuits will recognise her desire to return to help the Doctor. Jackie, shaken by the revelation that Rose has met her late father Pete, decides to help and borrows a large tow-truck from a friend. Between the three of them, they are able to open the heart, which engulfs Rose in a white glow. The TARDIS doors slam on Mickey and Jackie as they try to enter, and then it dematerialises.

Back in the future, the Daleks break through the final defences, kill Jack and Lynda, and confront the Doctor just as the Delta Wave generator is ready. However, he cannot bring himself to activate it, and resigns himself to being killed by the Daleks. The TARDIS materialises in the room and Rose, now infused with the time vortex, steps out. Using its vast power, she spreads the words from the station's logo, "Bad Wolf", across time and space to be able to bring herself to this moment and rescue "her Doctor". The Daleks attack her, but she effortlessly disintegrates their entire fleet and brings Jack back to life. The Doctor, distraught about the consequences of all this, begs her to let go of the Vortex's power, but she is unable or unwilling to do so and begins to falter. To save her, the Doctor kisses Rose, thus inhaling the time vortex energy from her. He then exhales it back into the TARDIS and takes the unconscious Rose on board. Jack, confused by the disappearance of the Daleks and his own resurrection, turns up just in time to see the TARDIS disappear.

Rose awakens on the TARDIS to find the Doctor in pain — the residual Vortex energy is destroying every cell in his body. He tells her that he is dying, and vaguely explains the regeneration process. After praising both Rose and himself as 'fantastic', the Ninth Doctor explodes with golden energy and morphs into his next incarnation, the Tenth Doctor. The New Doctor briefly comments on his new teeth before offering to take Rose to the planet Barcelona.

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).
• Rose convinces Jackie to help her by describing the conclusion of "Father's Day".

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.^[2]
• 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)^[3] and Logopolis (1981).^[4] 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,^[5] although the circuit was not working by the time of Earthshock (1982).^[6] In Let's Kill Hitler (2011), the Eleventh Doctor confirmed that he had been lying about the temporal grace. ^[7]

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);^[8] 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).^[9] 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. 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 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.^[10] 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^[11] and again by the Cult of Skaro in "Daleks in Manhattan".^[12]
• 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 finale, "Doomsday".

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 15 June 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).^[13]

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.

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,^[14] and serve as a major plot device in "Time Crash".^[15] The Doctor himself moves in a fictitious five-dimensional setting (The Space Museum, 1964),^[16] and perhaps a six-dimensional setting (Inferno, 1970).^[17]

References

External links

• The Parting of the Ways on TARDIS Index File, an external wiki
• "The Parting of the Ways" at the BBC Doctor Who homepage
• "Bad Wolf" / "The Parting Of The Ways" at Doctor Who: A Brief History Of Time (Travel)
• "Bad Wolf" / "The Parting of the Ways" at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• "The Parting of the Ways" at Outpost Gallifrey
• "The Parting of the Ways" at TV.com
• Doctor Who Confidential — Episode 13: The Final Battle
• "They survived through me." — Episode trailer for "The Parting of the Ways"
• Watch the regeneration at the BBC website
• "The Parting of the Ways" at the Internet Movie Database

Reviews

• "The Parting of the Ways" reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
• "Bad Wolf" / "The Parting of the Ways" reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
• "The Parting of the Ways" reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide
• "Bad Wolf" / "The Parting of the Ways" reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide