Separated and with no TARDIS, The Doctor Rose, and Captain Jack have to fight for their lives on board the Game Station, but a far more dangerous threat is lurking, just out of sight. The Doctor realises that the entire human race has been blinded to the threat on its doorstep, and Armageddon is fast approaching.
NOTES
To keep this ongoing theme a secret, this title was the last of the first series episodes to be revealed. In this episode, Rose is again wearing a red hood and “the Bad Wolf Corporation” is the name of the organisation running the GameStation.
In The Parting of the Ways The Doctor asks the Emperor Dalek to explain”Bad Wolf, ” but he cannot. The phrase is later found in graffiti surrounding Rose. After absorbing time vortex energy from the TARDIS, Rose reveals herself to be responsible for leaving the phrase”Bad Wolf” through time and space to tell herself to return to the TARDIS.
During Bad Wolf the official Doctor Who website was themed to look like the Big Brother website, and sponsored by Bad Wolf . At the end of the previous episode, Boom Town, The Doctor sets course for the planet Raxacoric ofallapatorius. Here, he claims to have travelled from
Raxacoric ofallapatorius to 14th-century Kyoto, Japan, and thence to the Game Station. However, it is possible that he’s referring to an entirely different visit to Raxacoric ofallapatorius, or that it took him longer than expected to reach the planet, in which case there is still room to fit in further adventures for the Ninth Doctor, Rose, and Jack between Boom Town and Bad Wolf. (However, Rose does explicitly state in The Parting of the Ways that Boom Town was the last time she’d seen Mickey.)
When Lynda asks how The Doctor could possibly have been alive a century ago, he jokes that he moisturises, probably as a reference to Cassandra from The End of the World.
The Face of Boe is identified as the oldest inhabitant of the Isop Galaxy, which the First Doctor visited way back in The Web Planet. When the contestants are “disintegrated” on the Game Station, a small pile of dust remains on the floor, however, as it’s later revealed that they are being transmatted away, obviously it can’t be their remains. The dust may be zanium, mentioned in The Twin Dilemma as evidence of extra-terrestrial kidnapping, the novelisation expanded on this by revealing that it’s a powdery residue that crystalises out of the space formerly occupied by a mass that has just been transmatted away.
The name Torchwood made it first appearance in the episode Bad Wolf. When Rose is playing the Weakest Link, one of the contestants is asked the question “The Kobolt pyramid is built on the ruins of what ancient Earth institute?” the player guesses wrong and the Anne-droid replies”. Torchwood“.
Dalek continuity, which was already very messy, is made a little messier here. An Emperor Dalek is first seen in the Second Doctor story, The Evil of the Daleks. From Genesis of the Daleks onward, Davros, the creatorof the Daleks, is often seen in charge of one faction of Daleks, and in Rememberance of the Daleks is even addressed as their emperor. It’s extremely murky, however, whether the Emperor from The Evil of the Daleks, the Emperor here, and Davros, are all supposed to be the same person, or three entirely different megalomaniacs in bonded polycarbite armour.
