(Cut: the Doctor and Rose run up the street and Rose calls back to the last scene: "Oh, that's just not fair." The Doctor laughs in a clicking-his-heels kind of way, grabs Rose's hand, and takes off toward the mess. I'm not sure if that counts toward the Intimacy Bowdlerization Quotient, but I have another theory I'm working on, which is that it's not so much about making or erasing that one point as it is about...well, that there is a person or committee of persons whose job it is to make the decisions about whatever two or three minutes or whatever gets cut from the episodes for U.S. broadcast. And maybe this person or collection of persons don't have an agenda so much as a set of priorities, in the schema of which the lovely relationship between Doctor and Companion rates below other stuff, like farting fat heads of state or pigs in people clothes running around squealing. Not that it's a conscious choice, or there's anything to read into them about it, but just: "What shall we lose? Oh, this bit is pretty boring and pointless, let's just cut that." Every show has a pee break, whether it's, in my case, Buffy fighting vampires or Dawson kissing people, or anything having to do with Sheridan or Luis on Passions, obviously excepting those scenes which also include Beth Wallace, but the point is that the pee break moment is always different for every person, and that is beautiful.)

The Doctor and Rose come running up against a barricade, still miles from ground zero, and converse at length about how amazing it is and how this is First Contact and the doctor is so lucky to...be there, or something. I don't know -- he's got a time machine. I don't understand how...so the TARDIS just runs all roughshod and 1d20 over him all the time? That's how it goes? No wonder he acts like a kid all the time. What's going on? "I literally have no idea." Why aren't you on time? "I literally have no concept of time or space." Just like my last boyfriend. "Only I mean 'literally' in the literal sense." The Doctor: "This is what I travel for, Rose! To see history happening right in front of us!" He's pretty awesome at this point. Rose says that they should just TARDIS right through the traffic and gridlock, and he explains that -- instead of just saying that apparently the TARDIS listens to no man -- he doesn't want to freak anybody out with his spaceship, since the whole town is already freaked out about spaceships. Rose explains to him that the TARDIS does not look like a spaceship, and the Doctor says that, even still, "all kinds of people" will be watching, due to the emergency. "So, history's happening and we're stuck here," Rose grumps, and then suggests that they do "what everybody else does," and watch it on TV. The Doctor cocks his crotchety old hippie head with the Boy George grudges, because he didn't even think of that, because all we are today is fat cattle to the slaughter with one hand on the remote and the other in a super-sized bucket of crisps, and we don't "engage" with "history" the way they did back in Russell T Davies's day. (Russell T Davies's day? When he was twenty, which is the last year that kind of shit is cute? Was 1983. The same year the UK made seatbelts mandatory, Donna Griffiths stopped sneezing, Maurice Bishop was murdered, and fucking Thatcher won by a landslide. So yes, the grudges make sense, but I kind of thought we all agreed the "Kill Your TV" stuff was played.)