Speaking of "The End Of The World," those weird metal spiders that were carried by the Adherents of the Repeated Meme (which, somebody pointed out, is: the best description of Bad Wolf yet) are running around in the apple grass, simply loving it, and the man watching and ordering them around is camp as fuck with lines all over him, and his name is Chip. "Human! She's pure-blood human. Closer. Closer!" He zooms in on Rose, where she and the Doctor are lying on the apple grass simply luxuriating in the magnificence of whatever. Cat nuns go! What is the problem here? I like this episode but I feel slapped a lot right now. "So, the year five billion. The sun expands, the Earth gets roasted," the Doctor reminds Rose. She smiles and rocks: "That was our first date!" They giggle. "We had chips!" Yeah, and then SciFi cut the last three seconds for no fucking reason! Stupidly! "So anyway: planet gone, all rocks and dust, but the Human Race lives on, spread out across the stars. Soon as the Earth burns up -- oh yeah -- they get all nostalgic, big revival movement...but find this place!" He sits up. "Same size as the Earth, same air, same orbit. Lovely! Call goes out, the humans move in!" This is the fantasy of the exile. Just like that lost home, only better. If the End of Earth was a call for sympathy, this is a delusional cocktail party. What's the city called? Oh, that's a lark: "New New York...Strictly speaking, it's the fifteenth New York since the original. So that makes it New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York." Rose smiles down at the Doctor, remembering everything since the end of the world. "What?" he asks, and she just grins: "You're so different." They giggle some more. The metal spider watches them and tries not to fucking barf.

Cassandra! New New York's own Myra Breckenridge, apparently having survived her own explosion. "Impossible. I recognize that child. Her face. Show me her face!" Count the times you hear the word "face" in this episode, and remember that this is the first episode after several months, going by original airdate. The Pudsey Cutaway and Christmas Special talked at length about every possible way to get there, with David Tennant's face replacing beloved Eccleston. This episode does a really cool job of turning that on itself and making it a valid point of entry in its own right. It's about reaching across the Shroud of Turing and seeing if the person you love still resides behind a strange face, and it's about proving to yourself that you, and they, are human. Faces and touching are the new blood and words. But Chip can't manage to get to Rose's face, though he screams the word a hundred times. Rose stands, asking if they can visit New New York -- "so good they named it twice" -- and the Doctor says that, first, they need to hit the hospital, which he identifies by the big green moon on the side -- "universal symbol for hospitals" in 5 billion 23 -- and here's why: he pulls out the slightly psychic paper, and it reads Ward 26 -- Please Come. "Someone wants to see me," he says. Rose, as though this is her first rodeo, is like, "Hmm! And I thought we were just sight-seeing. Come on then! Let's go and buy some grapes!" I don't know what the hell Rose is talking about. She links their arms and they go skipping gaily off into hell. The spider follows; Cassandra finally sees Rose Tyler's face -- "that dirty blonde assassin!" -- and Chip's like, "She's coming here, Mistress!" and Cassandra, who is somehow the least irritating person onscreen right now, in a violent reversal of expectation, goes off about how it's "beyond coincidence," it's "destiny," and she will finally be "revenged on that little bi--"