This episode leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It has some good ideas… well at least one good idea… maybe just the one good idea. Even this isn’t that interestingly explored however.

The hospital on New New York has seemingly cured all known illnesses, however there is a dark secret involved in how. The cat nuns who run the hospital have a secret ward with seemingly thousands of artificially grown humans who have been infected with thousands of diseases and are apparently used to farm the cures. The cat nuns insist that they’re not real humans, and are just ‘flesh’ used for the betterment and wellbeing of the real humans. The Doctor sees living creatures in agonising pain, and decides he’s going to free them from it.

So here there’s an interesting concept, that raises a few interesting moral questions. Then the disease ridden flesh get released and essentially just become a zombie horde that can infect people with a single touch (killing them almost instantly) and need to be run from. It’s an ok threat I guess. But they very quickly become a lot less interesting then they were introduced as.

I’ll address my minor complaint before getting into my larger issues. The effects in this episode can be bad. I mean its Doctor Who, so I’ve learnt to suspend my disbelief when it comes to the effects on this show. The classic series was frequently a show whose scope and imagination can often be too much for its budget, so I’m used to seeing some janky effects. But those effects often had a certain charm that to some extent compensated for how unrealistic they looked. The CGI in this episode (specifically when characters contract all the diseases and when the Doctor ziplines down the elevator shaft) stretch my suspension of disbelief to its limit and lack any sort of charm. The show in 2006 was also very capable of doing better. It’s distracting, but it ultimately isn’t episode ruining.

What is episode ruining (IMO) is the Cassandra of it all. I honestly don’t see why she needs to be in the story at all, let alone be such a major part of it. I know she and her sidekick Chip are basically responsible for the infected horde getting released, but you could easily write a number of other ways for them to get out. I’ve honestly already forgotten how she even survived ‘The End of the World’, although I assume it has something to do with her new ability to transfer her consciousness into new bodies.

Speaking of this new ability, this is her primary use in the episode. With her ability to transfer her consciousness she effectively turns the episode into a body swap comedy by repeatedly inhabiting Rose and the Doctors bodies. However the comedy here is very broad and at times a bit uncomfortable. Basically all of the humour is just that Cassandra is horny. I was never one of those people who shipped the Doctor and Rose, mostly because I never liked them as a romantic couple. It definitely doesn’t help that the idea of the pair having a sexual relationship is basically introduced this way (at least the notion that Rose is attracted to the Doctor) and I honestly hate it here.

Billie Piper does an ok job of portraying Cassandra in Rose’s body. David Tennant on the other hand camps it up to a cringe-inducing degree (his hearts are apparently beating out a samba). It’s bewildering to me that you’re still establishing David Tennant as the face of the show, and in the opening episode of his first season this is what he’s been written to perform.

I haven’t even talked about the ending of the episode. I find this ending to be really weird and a completely unearned failure. Immediately after Cassandra takes over Roses body, Cassandra’s own body is destroyed. So she must inhabit someone’s body or die. Her sidekick Chip volunteers his own body, but he’s dying. So the Doctor takes Cassandra back in time, to when she looked like an actually human still. Here Chip/Cassandra tells past Cassandra she looks beautiful, before Chip/Cassandra dies. I think it makes sense for how a character as narcissistic as Cassandra would want to die. But why is the show working so hard to give Cassandra of all characters a happy ending. She was an outright villain who murdered people in her first appearance, and is a selfish hindrance throughout this story. I never saw any redemption for her. I understand that she was already investigating the cat nuns, but when she finds out their secret her immediate thought is to try and blackmail the nuns so there’s no redemption there. Was it supposed to be when she inhabits the body of one of the infected and feels its loneliness? Because honestly if she can’t empathise with these beings without having to literally possess one and feel first hand their plight, then that isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for her as a character. If the point is that she’s changed by the experience, well I never feel any real change. She’s still completely self-serving. Yes she assists the Doctor afterwards, but she needs the Doctor to succeed, otherwise she’ll likely die.

So I don’t care about Cassandra getting a happy ending. I don’t feel she deserves one and I never thought she did anything to redeem herself. This also feels out of character for the Doctor. Just one episode ago he was saying ‘no second chances’, but here he’ll go out of his way to give a happy ending to a murderer. The Doctor was appalled that the nuns were artificially breeding humans for their selfish gain, but he’s ok with Chip (who Cassandra callously leaves to die earlier in the episode btw), a character that was also artificially bred and now being used for someone else’s selfish gain, sacrificing his own consciousness so that Cassandra can tell herself she looks beautiful. This whole ending isn’t nearly as satisfying as the show seems to think it is and like basically everything Cassandra related in this story, I wish it wasn’t there.