It's Rose's first proper trip in the TARDIS. So what does the Doctor think might be an appropriate destination? Lunch at the Ritz with Oscar Wilde? Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Rings of Akhaten? No, let's show her the total obliteration of her planet... Hardly a First Date destination, surely.
If the Doctor knows precisely when the Earth will be destroyed - even down to the minute - then why doesn't he know about Platform One and what happens there that day? Where was he intending to land if not on the Platform in the first place?
The psychic paper gets introduced. A lot of people didn't like this, thinking it made things way too easy for the Doctor - though certainly not abused as much as the Sonic Screwdriver will be. Truth be told, with whole stories running to just 45 minutes, it gets him into the action quickly. He'd be locked up for most of every episode otherwise.
The Steward introduces the aliens as they arrive, and we get to see them walk (or trundle) through the doors of the reception hall. He continues to announce arrivals once the camera concentrates on the Doctor and Rose and their dialogue - but we don't see anyone else in the room save for the ones he introduced...
Cassandra is a flap of skin, eyes, mouth and brain. But she speaks. Where's the voice box? Where are the lungs?
Her plan is apparently to engineer a hostage situation, but involves sending robotic spiders out to cause irreparable damage to the Platform which will only lead to its destruction. How exactly was the hostage part of her plan to be done? She mentions compensation, so presumably suing the company which operates Platform One. They'd have to prove some sort of negligence, which could tie them all up in court for a very very long time - and she doesn't seem the sort of person who has a lot of patience when it comes to money for her cosmetic surgeries.
Also, she'd have to have stayed on the Platform to be amongst the survivors making the claim...
She then goes on to say that she has bought shares in the companies of all the attendees, as though their deaths will make her rich. But if a whole bunch of incredibly wealthy individuals died all at the same time, their deaths would probably have the opposite effect - crashing their company share price. The cumulative effect of so many high profile deaths might even crash the whole galactic economy.
Even with the teleport power booster hidden in an ostrich egg, technology can go wrong - so it's a very risky thing she does, to begin sabotaging the Platform whilst she's still on it.
It's said to be a classic Earth, yet there's a desert in the Arctic. When - and why - did the National Trust rearrange the continents, if the planet only has a relatively short time left before it's destroyed? A bit of a waste of time and money, surely. Cassandra says her father is buried in the Arctic Desert, so this classic Earth can't be all that old.
One of the nicest little character moments, which then goes on to set up the main threat from the spiders, is Rose's meeting with Raffalo, the plumbing engineer from Crespallion. And it wasn't in the original script. It was added as padding when the episode was found to be under running.
Raffalo is fixing the hot water for the Face of Boe's suite. He lives in a big tank of smoke - so what does he need hot water for exactly?
The Doctor speaks to Jabe about nautical allusions and it is suggested that he was on the Titanic when it sank, whereas just last week we saw him saving a family from going on its maiden voyage (presumably not going himself either). It may refer to two quite separate incidents with the doomed liner but, coming only a week apart, it looks contradictory.
A big one. The safety glass begins to break in the gallery where Rose is - enough to scorch the back wall. If this really is the case, then the ambient temperature in that room should be astronomically high - enough to cook her alive. Yet she hardly breaks a sweat. She doesn't even take off her jacket.
On the same subject, the Doctor is in a chamber hot enough for wood to combust. He may have some special Time Lord gift when it comes to tolerance to extremes of heat - but his clothes shouldn't have.
And whose idea was it to have those great big fans slicing across the only path to the all important computer controls? We see that the fans are in a gigantic chamber, so why not have them raised safely above the platform level - or even have them positioned one above the other rather than in a row like this?
Using air conditioning to cool a structure in space, where there is no air, is a stupid idea anyway. Wouldn't some sort of refrigeration / chemical coolant system have been more sensible?
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