Episode 1.04

The Doctor brings Rose back to her own time, only 12 hours after she left. Excited to be home, she rushes to see her mother – only to discover that it’s actually been 12 months, and she was listed as a missing person. Rose’s mum blames the Doctor for her disappearance, but Rose is unable to tell anyone what’s really happened. As she wonders if she is the only person on Earth who knows what she knows, an alien spacecraft roars overhead and, after smashing a great hole in Big Ben, crashes in the Thames. The Doctor is ecstatic to be watching history: mankind’s first contact with aliens. But what is really going on?

I love the way this latest incarnation of Doctor Who deals not only with exciting space adventures but the emotional impact on those left behind. When someone just up and disappears to travel with the Doctor, what happens to family and friends who wonder to where the person has disappeared? The series not only touches on this issue, but grabs it with both hands, cranking up the emotional side of it with both Rose’s mother and boyfriend expressing their fears and anger at Rose vanishing into thin air. Just when we think relationships is going to be the whole point of the episode, in roars a spaceship – a lovely piece of special effects that works perfectly – which lands in the Thames.

Nothing in Doctor Who is ever as it seems of course, and no crash landing should ever be taken at face value. Once the Doctor cops his eyes on the pilot, he knows something is afoot – but just what he’s not sure, until the final moments when realization brings him close to death.