Doctor Who: The End of Time

Part One

“Some new man goes sauntering away. And I’m dead.”

Oh my God. I took five pages of notes. This is going to take aaages to write. Best get started.

Crikey, it’s the end. You can tell this story’s important because it’s the only two-parter of the RTD era not to have individual episode titles. It’s also notable that a large proportion of the dialogue is in rather more heightened and literary language than usual, with large chunks of it having a metrical rhythm. This is partly due to the presence of a narrator (and, with the Elder Ood, a narrator within the narration!), but only partly. The language, and the fast-paced, highly structured narrative which takes place in more different regions of time and space than usual, gives this whole story a very rich, epic feel.

We’re bombarded from the start with a lot of evocative figures and themes- Wilf, the Master, bad dreams, the Master, a cathedral at Christmas Eve with the TARDIS as part of a stained-glass window. And the first of many appearances of a mysterious woman whose identity is never quite revealed. The presence of so many meaningful signs and portents in the pre-credits teaser leads us to expect something big. And this intensifies once the Doctor lands on the Ood-Sphere. Although there’s been a gap between stories, his behaviour follows on directly from The Waters of Mars. He’s been procrastinating, unable to accept what he knows to be his fate. He’s married and shagged Queen Elizabeth I purely to avoid being here. He knows he’s been naughty for dragging his heels, and he’s sheepish. You can tell from the gabbling. And Ood Sigma gives him a right telling off: “You should not have delayed!”

Called to the headmaster’s office, the Doctor is punished by being forced to share in a very, very bad dream: the Master is not completely dead and, in another appearance from the ultimate RTD meme, “Something vast is stirring in the dark.”

It’s glossed over a little, but the extrajudicial jailing of Lucy Saxon suggests something extremely sinister about the UK of the Whoniverse, even by comparison with the real contemporary UK, with its 42 day detention and threatened identity cards. Along with the sinister nature of UNIT, this is something which will probably come to date the RTD era. Under the Moff and the Coalition, this sort of thing seems to have gone out of fashion.

I know I’m always going on about RTD’s brilliant economy of storytelling, but the way he manages to give us so much exposition so quickly yet clearly is brilliant. The whole story behind the Master’s resurrection is explained very quickly, and the story doesn’t slow down one bit.

The Doctor runs, but events are already underway. He’s too late. Interesting (particularly as I’m currently halfway through Timelink) that his timeline and the timeline of the narrated events proceed at the same rate, and the Doctor can’t arrive at a point before the prison has exploded.

John Simm is fantastic from his very first scene, as bonkers as ever but so, so dangerous. Lucy sabotages his rebirth, but then we switch to some other chess pieces: Joshua Naismith and his daughter are themselves admirable examples of RTD’s storytelling economy. Their role in the story (the Tobias Vaughn role, as it were) is simple and functional, but they’re allowed enough personality to feel as though they’re more than that. We also have Wilf and the “Silver Cloak”, including the fantastic June Whitfield. Oh, and President Obama is about to broadcast to the world his plan for magically ending the recession. Er, how would one do that, then? Possibly the most far-fetched element in the entire story, this.

Meanwhile, the Master is homeless, in a hoodie, dying, stuck looking like the ex-prime minister, very, very hungry, mad as a biscuit, and very, very scary. And he bangs a drum. Four times. Just as inside his head. Interestingly, though, he’s not the one in control of events at this point. Neither is the Doctor, who is distracted at this point by Wilf and his mates.

The Doctor’s chat with Wilf, fantastically acted by both Tennant and Bernard Cribbins, is a big moment. There’s something about Wilf; he attracts coincidences. The Doctor confides his feelings to Wilf, and admits for the first time that regeneration “still feels like dying”. We see Donna, too, and her heartbreakingly humble life: “She’s making do.” And he even admits the things he’s been driven to do of late, with no Donna to stop him. “I thought it would be better alone. But I did some things that went wrong. I need…”

The ensuing chat between the Doctor and the much-diminished Master is most interesting, too. “I had estates,” says the Master, shortly before he’s kidnapped. “Do you remember my father’s land back home? Pastures of red grass stretching far across the slopes of Mount Perdition.” RTD is so good at this sort of poetic, throwaway texture. The drums are getting louder… and the Doctor can hear them. The drums are real. We know this will be significant.

Wilf sees the mysterious woman again, on the television, where only he can see her. “Only you stand at the heart of coincidence”, he’s told. He’s also told to take a gun, a highly charged item as discussed in relation to this programme! Inevitably, the Doctor is soon along to collect him, officially the oldest ever companion at 80. I love his reaction to the TARDIS.

It seems Naismith acquired the “Immortality Gate” from Torchwood after its recent fall. It seems to be some kind of medical device. He wants to use it to make his daughter immortal, never a good idea in Doctor Who. But along his underlings are a couple of Vinvocci spies, who are particularly fun characters. I love Addams and her constant exasperation.

The cliffhanger is great, as everything is reversed. From a position of powerlessness, suddenly the Master is everyone on the planet. And our narrator is revealed. It’s Timothy Dalton! He’s the Lord President of the High Council! The Time Lords are back!


Part Two

“There’s an old Earth saying, Captain. A phrase of great power and wisdom, and consolation to the soul in times of need.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Allons-y!”

We begin with a flashback to Gallifrey, and a nice CGI shot of the Citadel, the orange skies, and the mountains. Fanwank heaven! These are recognisably Time Lords, although updated, with CGI and everything. The shot of the High Council from the end of last episode reminds me very much of the Imperial Senate from the Star Wars prequels, which I must apologise for mentioning. They are, I’m sure we all agree, abominations, and I shall not mention them again.

Gallifrey is a lot more bad-ass than it used to be. Timothy Dalton’s Lord President is prone to zapping people for disagreeing with him, and there’s a rather cool prophetess, possibly inspired by the Pythia from the New Adventures, although of course she looks very much like one of the Sisterhood of Karn.

After a bit of a worry over Donna, we get another flashback of the Master as a child, technically a flashback to another flashback from The Sound of Drums. It’s recursive occlusion from Castrovalva all over again.

The Master realises; with six billion of him, he can finally triangulate the source of the drums. And we return to Gallifrey, where we get some highly satisfying answers. Oh, and in our last chance for some slapstick we get the “worst rescue ever”. I like these Vinvocci. The Doctor and Wilf are aboard their ship, and Wilf gets to gaze out of its window upon the Earth, something he’s always wanted. That’s the thing about RTD; he can do exciting, fast-paced, big stories such as this one, and yet still have time for genuinely affecting character moments. The conversation between the Doctor and Wilf is deep and insightful, with the brilliance lying in what remains unsaid. The Doctor opens himself more with Wilf than we’ve ever seen him do before. He sees the absurdity of his rejection of Wilf’s proffered gun, accepting that he’s taken lives and, which weighs heavily on his conscience at the moment, manipulated others into taking their own. And yet the symbolism of not carrying a gun has become important to him. Much as I would argue that this has only been the case since the 1980s, this knowingly hypocritical semi-pacifism has become an interesting and ambiguous side of his character.

But… the Master reveals that the source of the drums is a White Point Star. The Doctor knows this means the Time Lords are back. All the above goes out of the window and the Doctor just takes the gun. Things are clearly very, very serious. But before the seriousness starts we get a rather cool scene in which Wilf gets to fire lasers from a spaceship.

There’s another cool RTD moment; only two Time Lords vote against their plan, and they “will now stand as witness to their shame, like the Weeping Angels of old.” Like so much of the dialogue in this story, this is wonderfully poetic. Unfortunately, there’s another moment which is considerably less cool; the Doctor jumps several hundred feet, lands hard, and is only slightly hurt. WHAT? I just had my head in my hands at this point. We know the Doctor is vulnerable to gravity; that was the whole point of his regeneration in Logopolis! This is just silly. How can such a good writer as RTD, in such an otherwise excellent script, possibly commit such a howler? Perhaps he needs someone to stop him. This is a crying shame. It wouldn’t be so bad if everything else (except perhaps the end, which we’ll come to) wasn’t so perfect.

But the pieces are in place; the Doctor, the Master, and a Lord President who only now, oddly, is revealed to be Rassilon himself. And with a wave of his staff he casually undoes the Master’s takeover of the people of the Earth. The Doctor makes clear the scale of the horrors to come; Gallifrey is fading back intro existence, a fiery orange world which dwarfs the Earth. And we face horrors such as “the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Tragedies, the Nightmare Child, the Could-Have-Been-King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres”. Again, so wonderfully poetic. And deadly; the Time Lords intend to destroy time, and exist on a higher plane as beings of pure thought. This is how they planned to end the Time War, and why the Doctor had to destroy them.

The Doctor is unsure, pointing the gun first at the Master, then at Rassilon. The Master’s “You never would, you coward!” seems to be a deliberate echo of the last regeneration- a very nice touch. Then the Doctor sees the mysterious woman, reacts, reflects, and simply shoots the machine which links this room to Gallifrey. And the Master, angry at what Rassilon has done to his life, seems to sacrifice himself to gain his revenge. It’s a dramatic ending. And suddenly the Doctor is alive, and fine, and can’t believe it.

And then there are four knocks. And silence. And another four knocks. Wilf is still inside the booth, waiting to be flooded with radiation. His only hope of survival means the Doctor’s death. It’s the perfect storm, and very cruel. The Doctor immediately realises the bitter irony, and reacts with rage. I’m reminded of what Lady Shelley said in her review of The Waters of Mars about the Doctor going through the seven stages of grief; is this where he finds acceptance? It’s certainly a brave speech. The Doctor is allowed to be very self-centred here, and even unlikeable. We even get a “Well, it’s not fair.”

The Doctor is dying, and we get an extended series of visits to his mates. Yes, this is self-indulgent, and yes, it was an idea that should have been nipped in the bud but, as so often with RTD, the execution is so brilliant that it sort of works. So we get to see Mickey and Martha, now married (what?!!) looking at the Doctor at a distance, as though he were the Watcher. There’s a brief moment with Sarah Jane. And even Captain Jack, with Alonso, in a Mos Eisley-style cantina filled with monsters of the RTD era. We even, oddly, get Jessica Hynes as “Verity Newman”. And Donna’s fate actually kind of works; the winning lottery ticket, bought with a pound “borrowed” from the late Geoffrey Noble. Appropriately, given Tennant's recent role as Hamlet, Ood Sigma sings him to his sleep: “This song is ending, but the story never ends.” One last poetic flourish from RTD. And it’s over. I think the Doctor’s last line is misjudged, and it’s a shame that the regeneration is the same as last time, but what a send-off. Although why the TARDIS should be set on fire I have no idea.

This is, for the most part, sublime. It’s only the falling scene and the self-indulgence of the final scenes, something almost redeemed in the execution, that disappoints. But this still manages a 5/5, if not a particularly high one. “Event” stories often disappoint, but if we take out the negatives, everything else is truly magnificent here.

Doctor Who: Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords

Utopia



“It’s like I’ve got a sports car, you’ve got a space hopper.”

I watched this episode on Tuesday and ended up filling up two pages of my notebook while watching it, which was twice as much as usual. I then started to write it up, and realised that these three episodes were in one single thread. Gulp. I’ve since watched the other two and made similarly expansive notes, so this is going to be a bit long.

There’ll be some proper nostalgia coming up later on, but the episode begins with a couple of welcome nods to the recent past. Once again the Doctor lands at the Cardiff rift to fill up the tank, and once again… it’s Jack! This doesn’t quite tally with the corresponding scene at the end of the first series of Torchwood, but never mind. Jack clinging on to the TARDIS as it vworps through the vortex is top stuff.

I like this alien planet, and I like the Futurekind… the overall vibe reminds me of Nottingham Rock City and other Midlands rock clubs I used to visit back in the ‘90s. So more nostalgia then. It’s the very far future, close to the unspecified end of the universe, and the Doctor is nervous- there are no longer any Gallifreyan laws for him to break, Frontios-style, but he clearly feels he’s being naughty by daring to be here.

The Doctor is not exactly pleased to see Jack again, for reasons which are not immediately revealed, but Jack is immediately back to his old self, dropping the world-weariness he showed on Torchwood. And where before I used to criticise this as an inconsistency in character, the Marathon has changed my mind. What we’re seeing here is a Jack who relishes the weight of his heavy responsibilities being lifted from his shoulders in a situation where he knows he can leave all that to the Doctor. I still think Jack was too miserable in Torchwood, but it isn’t inconsistent characterisation.

We learn a lot about him here. He used his vortex manipulator to travel from Satellite Five to Earth in 1869, and then waited 139-odd years for a version of the Doctor coinciding with his own time stream to crop up, deliberately placing himself by the Cardiff rift where the Doctor was bound to appear sooner or later. Blimey.

And then Derek Jacobi appears. Bloody hell. Forty-four years of Doctor Who plus spin-offs and forty-four years of great actors appearing, but this instantly tops everything. I would mention how great Jacobi is, but that would be a tautology.

Yana (gosh, what a peculiar name) is a likeable old buffer, a scientist and quietly a genius, with a female companion who quietly adores him. Remind you of anyone? He’s definitely human, though. I love the scenes in which the Doctor is in awe of his genius- Tennant really shines here. Yana has no real hope that he can ever get the ship to fly but, naturally, the Doctor has the solution. Oh, and Yana hears an ever-present sound of drums…

Oh, and Chantho’s great, too. I love her animatronic mandibles. It’s going to be a huge effort to get to the end of this review without talking like her, but I’m going to try.

For all that the actual plot and surroundings pretty much take a back seat to the story of Yana and the regulars here, it’s a well-realised and sketched out future, perhaps the ultimate in RTD’s determination top make future life look tough. There’s one unfortunate moment, though- apparently human evolution has led them to spends time as clouds of gas and a million years as downloads, but they “always revert to the same shape.” Aaargh! Once again an RTD script causes me to point out that that’s not how natural selection works!

The episode’s otherwise great, mind, and full of nice character moments. It reminds me of Boom Town in that respect, actually. The Doctor’s chat with Jack about his immortality is incredible; Jack simply undercuts the Doctor’s dislike of his immortality (everything has its time and everything dies) by pointing out that he’s prejudiced. And the Doctor immediately realises he’s wrong. It’s a great moment for both characters, and enables them to re-establish their friendship. Oh, and we get our first reference to “a fixed point in time”. Interesting. There’s a more general piece of possible foreshadowing in the Doctor’s admission that a Time Lord who looked into the heart of the TARDIS, as Rose did, would become a “vengeful god”. It almost feels as though the entire character arc for this Doctor can be summed up in these words.

Yana, meanwhile, hears from Martha about her and the Doctor’s lifestyle, and seems to be quite affected by it. Ruminating on time, he plays with his watch, which looks rather familiar…

This is such a charged and awesome moment. As soon as we hear Delgado’s voice from The Dæmons we know who Yana really is. The double whammy of the watch and the flashback to the Face of Boe immediately shows this to be a superbly handled season arc far surpassing anything we’ve seen in the previous two seasons. Oh, and it’s the Master!!!

Jacobi’s performance utterly changes from the minute the watch is opened, and the Master shows how evil he is by being nasty to that lovely Chantho. But she eventually shoots him, and he regenerates into John Simm. Blimey! I don’t think there’s been a single episode of the “new” series which left me more gobsmacked than this one when watching it unspoiled on its original transmission. And before the Master hops off in the Doctor’s TARDIS, leaving our heroes stranded in mortal peril, there are some more hints of what the nest two episodes will bring. The Master clearly knows all about the mysterious Utopia, and Martha knows the voice of the new Master…



The Sound of Drums



“I like it when you use my name.”

Well, that’s a quick, and in hindsight rather obvious, resolution to the cliffhanger. Still, on with the story: the Master is Harold Saxon, the prime minister, and in his timey-wimey way has been a shadowy figure plotting behind the scenes since The Runaway Bride, and indeed the Captain Jack Harkness episode of Torchwood. That’s good subplotting!

Oh, and I love David Tennant’s delivery of “The Master and his wife?” It speaks volumes…

John Simm is great in the cabinet scene. His Master is a total nutter, of course, but his unpredictability makes him genuinely scary. And, just to underline hoe evil he is, he’s been endorsed by Ann Widdecombe. Sends a shiver down me spine, that does. And sop does his discordant musical theme, courtesy of Murray Gold.

It’s rather clever how the Master seems to have appeared just 18 months ago and used a satellite-controlled low level satellite field to subtly brainwash people to not notice how blatantly dodgy he is. And the fact, revealed early on, that the Doctor locked the TARDIS between now and the future of Utopia is ultimately going to lead to some quite clever timey-wimey plot stuff.

The plot strand of Martha’s betrayal by her mother at the hands of Saxon finally comes to a head- and interestingly it’s her hitherto useless father who’s brave enough to warn her of the danger. Our three TARDISeers are now fugitives, as a charged phone conversation between our two Time Lords clearly shows. It seems the Master was regenerated especially to fight in the Time War, but proceeded to run very far away. That’ll be a whole new regeneration cycle, then. And also our first hint that the Time Lords of this era may not be all sweetness and light.

Best of all, the Master now prefers the Teletubbies to the Clangers…

Never mind that, though- it’s only a flashback but for the first time since the series came back we get to see Gallifrey! In CGI! And it all looks completely right, with Time Lords in Prydonian(?) robes and everything!! Plus there’s a bit of mythology with the continent of Wild Endeavour and the Untempered Schism. We’re shown the Master as an eight-year old boy (no Looms, it seems, fellow NA fans) and told that the drums began to sound once he’d looked into the schism. The Doctor ran away, of course; a coward, every time. Wonderful stuff.

There’s also a bit I’d forgotten where Jack tells the Doctor about his Torchwood connection, and the Doctor’s not at all pleased. Jack protests that Torchwood are not what they were, sort of implying he’s only been involved post-Canary Wharf. Hmm.

Then we get more cool stuff: the Valiant, the paradox machine, the Master acting all silly in front of the American president, the Master’s laser screwdriver (“Who’d have sonic?”) before the arrival of the mysterious Toclafane spheres. One gripe regarding the next bit, though; even I know the difference between a president and a president elect in the USA. As with the Aliens of London two-parter, RTD seems strangely ignorant of political institutions.

Still, at this point things are going very well indeed…



Last of the Time Lords



“Human race. Greatest monsters of them all!”

…But sadly the payoff doesn’t quite work. It’s a pity; the build-up, not only in the previous two episodes but right through the season, has been great. But as a finale this is flawed.

There still a lot that’s great, of course. It’s a brave move to have a year pass between episodes; this gives a real sense (deeply ironic, of course!) that all of these events matter and will have long-term consequences. And it gives Martha, in her final episode as a regular, to be magnificent.

We’re introduced to the status quo; the Master is keeping Martha’s family as servants, Jack as a prisoner and the aged Doctor as a pet. Most horrifyingly, there are plenty of subtle signs of domestic abuse in his relationship with Lucy. Her fate is particularly horrifying, particularly as we come to see how she came to be with the Master.

The escape plan fails, as we knew it would, because the Master’s laser screwdriver has “isomorphic controls”! He and the Doctor then have a quick chat about Axons and Sea Devils before the Doctor is turned into a little Gollum. Oh dear. This crosses a line into silliness.

It’s a great moment when Martha and her new, er, “friend”, Tom Milligan, capture a Toclafane and discover what it is; an evolved and infantilised human from utopia. The monsters are in fact humans from the future, exterminating their own ancestors; this is what the paradox machine is for. This is very clever, timey-wimey plotting of a sort not often said to be associated with RTD.

Martha seems to be on a quest to assemble parts for a gun with which to kill the Master but, betrayed, she is captured, and all seems lost. But it seems this was a cover story, and the real plan was to get the entire population of the planet to, er, pray at a certain time so that the Doctor can be restored, arms outstretched, and forgive the Master. Gosh, do you reckon there might just be a certain subtext here? This doesn’t feel right, which is a problem as it’s the main climax to the whole series. Still, again we get some clever plotting; the whole idea feels misguided but it was done well.

The paradox machine is destroyed, thereby pressing a great big reset button. It’s the only possible resolution, really, but it’s hard to get away from the fact it rather devalues what we’ve just seen. I don’t like the Doctor’s reaction to the Master’s overemphasised “death” either, great though Tennant is at playing it. I can accept that the two of them are close in a way, and that they’re the only two Time Lords left, but we all know the Master’s indestructible (cue the ring scene), and this degree of mourning is really rather excessive. On the other hand, I suppose it’s good preparation for a certain other part Tennant is to play in a year or so’s time…

Jack returns to his team, with Torchwood implicitly receiving the Doctor’s blessing. This makes me somewhat uncomfortable; as we’ve seen, the team are not necessarily a force for good. The hints about Jack’s future are… interesting though!

The misguided unrequited love strand of the season means the only way for Martha to keep her dignity at this point is to leave, and that she does. And I’m glad that she gets a final speech making it explicit to him why she’s doing so. Still, she makes sure they can phone each other; this is not a final parting.

It’s all over except for the “what, what, what”. For once, an RTD episode works well plotwise but doesn’t quite succeed when it comes to theme and character. It’s a pity, as the build-up has been great. The previous two episodes would both have been 5/5’s, Utopia a very high one indeed, but this flawed conclusion drags the whole thing down to a 4/5.

As for the season, at 4.375/5 it enters the chart at number 12, a pretty good placing. But as far as internal coherence and ongoing plot arcs are concerned this has outstripped any previous season, and in Human Nature and Blink it has given us the finest two Doctor Who stories yet.