The Doctor dies!

Not many TV shows get to kill off their main character and yet also keep him around for next year. When I first discovered Doctor Who, I was absolutely thrilled by the idea of regeneration, and soon became quite tragically dedicated to seeing all six transformations from Doctor to Doctor.¹ But I was in for disappointments. Firstly, one of them didn’t even properly exist as it had been purged from the BBC’s leaky archives. One of them happened effectively off-screen. One was triggered by a fall from an exercise bike. As I got older it amazed me that they hadn’t made a little more of it, that they hadn’t always realised what an intensely dramatic event it was.

But one can go too far. Perhaps ‘The End of TIme’ does. I guess we’ve all got to find our limits, and it’s not like Davies had any time left.²

It is a big deal. David Tennant’s arguably been the first Doctor to catch the public imagination solidly since Tom Baker.³ He deserves a good send-off. And there are some absolutely tremendous elements to ‘The End of Time Part Two’. But there’s also some massive disappointments. As far as big, rollicking adventures go, it’s probably Davies’ best since ‘Doomsday’. As is Davies’ tendency, it goes in completely different directions to its previous part, despite sharing its name. Which works both for and against it.

I’ve got headings today. The thing was getting so very long. It’s hard to keep it under control. Clearly I’ve lost my reviewing mojo and can no longer structure something longer than four paragraphs. But in my defense, last episodes are tricky. If I’ve got anything to say about Davies and Tennant, I’ve got to squeeze it in here.⁴

A Few Silly Plot Points That Didn’t Go Anywhere

Before I get onto the meat of the story, I’d like to take a look at the things that appear in part one and are completely discarded in part two. Firstly, the Ood. Well, not completely but very nearly. Who’s accelerating their development? Um. Why are they getting bad dreams? Er. Then there’s the Silver Cloak, though in fairness, the second their bus drove away for the final time it was clear they weren’t returning. Most glaring of all, Naismith and his daughter, perhaps the most pointless characters in the last five years of Doctor Who. There’s no question that they all serve their respective purposes, but it just seems a little messy to have them all dangling about with no resolution or interest as the story continues.

The Master and the Doctor

I was grumpy after ‘The Last of the Time Lords’, but the previous story did a lot to satisfy the part of me that longed for a solid Doctor/Master story. Part Two hits it out of the park. The Master usually makes the Doctor look dull in comparison, but not this week. Add to that the fun of having the psychotic Time Lord just a little tempted by the Doctor’s pleas, and suddenly their relationship has gained a lot of the tension that made the Master so interesting back in the old days.⁵ And finally, there’s the sheer wonderfulness of the Master’s final exit from the series; saving the Doctor while taking his sweet revenge. Oh alright, I know, he’ll be back one day. But for once, his death actually feels like it would make a decent ending to his terrible story.

Use of Weapons

There’s a few sacred cows in Doctor Who, and some of the fun of the new series has been watching Davies joyfully play with them. But one we hadn’t gotten to was “The Doctor never uses guns”, and it seems fitting to address the issue in the story that takes us all the way back to the Time War. In a conversation that would’ve seemed pat with any other companion, the old soldier Wilf pleads with the Doctor to take a gun into battle against the Master. Tennant and Cribbins are yet again perfectly matched, and the Doctor’s restrained emotion is some of the best work Tennant’s done. But it’s the closure of the scene that seals it as one of the finest moments in Who. Suddenly it becomes clear where the Doctor’s line is. No matter how bad things get, he doesn’t carry guns because he’s not at war. Or at least, he wasn’t until just now.

The Decision and the Door

There’s two big endings to this story, and one of them goes on a bit. It’s clearly Doctor Who‘s attempt to be The Return of the King. One ending sees off the danger, and one sees off the Doctor. They’re both good, but they’re both frustratingly flawed.

The first puts the Doctor into the position where he’s stuck between two horrible choices. Kill the Master or kill Rassilon? It’s always fun to throw the smug bastard into a situation like that. And then, he finds the unpredictable third solution. So far, so good. Except, the solution isn’t unpredictable. In fact, the only reason the audience themselves haven’t thought of it is that the dialogue leading up to it implies that it’s not an option. And so, what should be an heroic, glorious moment is slightly underwhelmed by head-scratching.

Oh yeah, and Gallifrey actually physically returns for about seven seconds, presumably giving everyone on Earth a particularly epic case of deja vu. But then, it’s the real finish… The four knocks.

Before I get to them though, let’s have a quick talk about doors. If you want to make a door that looks airtight, forbidding, immovable and ominous, why make a door that looks about as flimsy as an office cubicle? A door where you can see the gaps between the frame and the door? I don’t understand it, and I don’t want to get hung up on it, but it seems a rare disappointment from the generally awesome designs in this series.

Wilf and the Doctor’s moments together here are excellently played out. It’s moving stuff, and having the whole situation boil down to saving one life is especially nice after the series’ recent tendency to raise the stakes to higher and higher levels. The Doctor collapses, coils in a ball. Here it comes. Regeneration. Oh no, wait, no it doesn’t. Somehow the Tenth Doctor manages to go walkies first. What a lucky bastard.

Death of a Doctor

I’m divided on the coda. As the Doctor visits his old friends one last time, the distance and silence between them makes it seem alright that he’s still wandering about. He’s on death’s door. He’s barely alive. And then, he starts talking to Wilf, having proper chats, and not seeming particularly deathly at all. The tension rather seeps away at this point, and doesn’t come back until the end of his (admittedly very touching) chat with young Rose in 2005. He’s stretched it out, and it’s finally catching up with him. He’s struggling towards the TARDIS. Alone, at last, dying in the snow. And then the fucking Ood turn up. Because the only thing more poetic than the Doctor dying alone in the snow is the Doctor dying with an alien with spaghetti for a mouth singing at him.

In another move that frustrates my desire for a proper, moving Doctor-death, once the Ood sing their merry song, the Doctor is almost healthy again. He wanders back into his TARDIS and has the strength to shrug off his coat, looking more like he’s having a sulk than dying. And then he has a little cry and whinges at the universe before the moment finally takes him.

In the end, it’s all too much for me. Farewells, singing aliens, carefully chosen last words, lottery tickets, overly dramatic music cues. The actual drama of the thing drowns. There’s some gold in the last ten minutes of ‘The End of Time’, but in many ways it makes me long for the days when the Doctor died in a simpler fashion, and I never expected that. But my issues aren’t enough to ruin the story for me. This is the episode where the Doctor fell through a glass window and pulled a gun on Rassilon. Where the Master and the Doctor teamed up for one last time. Where the Doctor sacrificed himself for a brave old man. It’s an awesome story, and what a relief that is, because Davies and Tennant deserved to go out on a high.

1. I also briefly became obsessed with seeing the Bond movie where Sean Connery changed into George Lazenby. Don’t laugh! As I understand it, explaining it as plastic surgery was briefly considered.
2. For those who care, my favourite regenerations are 9-10, 5-6, and 4-5 in that order.
3. It makes me wonder how he’ll be described down the track. Baker’s “The one in the scarf.” Will Tennant be “That cute thin one?” Every woman I talk to seems remarkably disappointed by the new guy based only on looks.
4. Or here.
5. The old, old days that is. The Master spent much of 1974-1989 as a complete loon, but was considerably more interesting in his earlier appearances. Here endeth the geek lesson.

I love a good ‘The X of Y’ title. That said, they do tend to signify what one might charitably call “traditional” Doctor Who. Base under seige. Lots of running about. People getting picked off one by one. Fun, sometimes, but often a little boring. ‘The Waters of Mars’ is in fact just that sort of thing. And yet, pleasantly, not. It’s nice to see that in his last episodes of Who ever, Davies is back to taking some risks with the Doctor’s character, in a way not seen since the heady days of series one.

Our story opens with the Doctor landing on Mars, full of beans and ready for a new adventure. However, after only a little bit of exploring, he suddenly realised he’s landed smack bang in the middle of history; the first manned colony on Mars, one of those awkward events in time that must happen.¹ And so quickly, the Doctor’s enthusiasm and wonder gives way to its disturbing and self-destructive flip-side; near-psychotic curiosity as he sticks around, forever wondering what’s going to happen next, and what on earth happened to Bowie Base One.²

The heroic and doomed humans are played well, but generally get little do do. Peter O’Brien’s Ed Gold continually verges on being interesting, but never quite gets there. The notable exception of course is Lindsay Duncan’s formidable Captain Adelaide, the ‘companion’ for the episode and one of the best characters in recent Who.³ The conversations between her and the Doctor start to peer into some of the peculiar elements of time travel that usually get swept under the rug, and provide one of the aspects of this story that elevate it above the dumb runaround it so easily could have been.

Also worth praising in ‘The Waters of Mars’ are the water creatures themselves. It may just be me, but these must surely be the best realised, scariest monsters that new Who has created. The cracked lips, the creepy eyes (well, on some of them). And what could be more terrifying than a slow dribble of water over your chin? It’s horrific when your drunk uncle Jim does it, and it’s horrific here too. It’s worth watching Doctor Who Confidential just to see how crummy they could have been, however.⁴

But the most intriguing and peculiar element of ‘Waters’ is the ending. Suddenly the story goes from being a nice but pointless base under seige story to something very special. Of course, then it sort of stops being special again next week, but I’ll get to that. Having spent the whole story telling himself he can’t interfere and has to leave, as the Doctor hears the brave humans scuttle about in abject futility, something snaps. Why does he need to follow the laws of time? Who, exactly, is defending them? HE’S in charge, dammit. HE’S the Lord of Time. All shall look upon him and despair. Nothing in the world can stop him now. It will be a deadly vengeance of deadly revenge.

It was at this point that I was tempted to reach into the TV and lend the Doctor a copy of ‘Father’s Day’, just to remind him exactly what does happen when time gets messed up these days, and how close he once came to being erased from existence. But let’s ignore that point as it’s easily handwaved.The really annoying stuff comes further on. There’s a few points of story logic which don’t fit in together as well as I’d like.

1. The Doctor can convince Adelaide that she will need to die on Mars to guarantee her daughter’s future, and for that matter, the future of the human race. This is fine. He does this sort of thing all the time.
2. If the Doctor goes loopy, Adelaide will believe what he told her first, and not his later post-revelation speeches. This is fine, too. If you tell someone you’re not going to eat a cookie, but then later start to rationalise to them why you definitely needed a cookie while you brush the crumbs from your t-shirt, then they’re unlikely to believe you. You’re just going to sound like you’re making excuses to bypass your principles.
3. The future inspired by Adelaide and her team dying bravely on Mars is generally similar to the future inspired by Adelaide and two survivors inexplicably escaping to Earth, and in one case, committing suicide inside their apartment. This seems ropier. If I go to climb Everest and die on the way up, I’m a bloody hero. If I go to climb Everest, my team dies, and the next thing people find is my dead body back at home, I’m looking highly suspicious.
4. Adelaide will be sure enough of point 3 to kill herself and make it come to pass. This seems shaky too. She’s a stubborn, single minded individual, of course. But she doesn’t seem the sort to operate on half-formed guesswork. And if she were, surely the obvious course of action for the Doctor after she shoots herself is to grab her body and drop it on Mars again, to make things look a bit more like history’s supposed to? If I were Adelaide, that’s what I’d have expected him to do. But no, apparently he needs to go have a cry instead. Doctors are so emo these days.

So, generally a bit odd, that. But still, exciting. The Doctor’s finally gone off the deep end and changed history! What horrible damage will this wreak on the universe? If you guessed something along the lines of THE END OF TIME, then I could understand why. However, with the benefit of hindsight, it turns out that the only consequence is the Doctor getting his knees a bit damp in the snow, and getting a bit mopey and stubborn. Which means that I’m not really sure how I feel about ‘The Waters of Mars’. Pointlessly interesting springs to mind. Which is a damn sight better than pointlessly boring.

1. It’s a funny old theory of Time, this fixed/flexible model that we’ve ended up with, but as far as I can see, it’s the only one you can have in the Doctor Who universe without ruling out great masses of story types.
2. Is it cold in space, Bowie?
3. She’s certainly a far more interesting character than the last temp, Lady Christina de Souza
4. And I don’t say that lightly. Dear God, that show’s boring sometimes. I don’t want to see a montage people setting up a special effect with a Snow Patrol soundtrack ever again.

And so it came to pass that at the end of his days, Russell T Davies finally got his crazy back.

I’ve liked a lot of Davies’ Doctor Who, but I’ve felt as the series has gone on, that a lot of his more outrageous ideas have been a little tempered, or disappeared entirely. Season four was enjoyable, consistent, and safe. And subsequently, nowhere near the awesome of earlier seasons. It doesn’t take long to realise where Davies’ priorities are when writing popular science fiction, and they’re certainly not in the science area. It seems like he writes as if you would a fairy tale; anything’s possible, but everything has a price. And as long as there’s some involving fantasy logic at the core of the story, things work well. When there isn’t, well, then you get ‘Journey’s End’.

But with ‘End of Time’, the man who blew up Number 10, opened a two-part finale with reality TV spoofs, and wrote ‘Love & Monsters’ is back with a vengeance. There’s two twists at the end of ‘The End of Time, Part One’, and while both are exciting, it’s the first which is so delightfully mad that you’re both laughing and intrigued at the same time. I won’t go into either of them here since all my guesses are probably wrong. After all, if I’d actually managed to write something about ‘Waters of Mars’ before now, I’d probably have guessed that whatever was happening this week was caused by the Doctor’s interference there, and not, as it seems, completely unrelated. So instead, I’ll focus on the individual elements of what is, really, an episode of setting up and not paying off. Prepare to be unsatisfied.

The Ood. Meh. The Ood do nothing for me. Ood Brian Cox is cooler than your average Ood but would appear to be just a big-brained exposition machine. The obvious caveat here is that it’s quite possible they’ve got something to do next week. Unfortunately, just looking at them again reminds me of ‘Planet of the Ood’ and the fact that a species has evolved which HAS TO CARRY IT’S BRAIN IN ITS HAND. Ahem. It would appear I’m still not over that.

The Master’s Return. Oh my, but this scene feels dumb. I’m not sure exactly what it is. It could be Lucy Saxon’s painfully long and undramatic piece of vaguely implausible exposition right at the end. It could be the idea that Lucy hasn’t washed her lips for a year or so. It could be that the “Potions of Saxon” sound as stupid as the ludicrous legend of the gun that could shoot the Master in ‘Last of the Time Lords’, but appear to be very real. I think it’s mostly just because it’s a lot of shouting by people who sound very silly when they shout.

It’s a shame, because as Davies alludes to in the commentary,¹ he’s playing around with the idea of the Doctor and the Master’s timelines being linked here–a concept hinted at but never really explored in the original series–and the whole idea of the Doctor rushing across the universe to catch up to events (and failing) is kind of cool. Or rather, the idea is cool when it isn’t juxtaposed with one of the lamest scenes in new Doctor Who ever.²

The Master Himself. Based purely on this story I think we have to put John Simm’s Master up on top of the “Best New Who Villain” pedestal. Yes, he’s still insane³ but he’s also amazingly sympathetic in places. It surprises me that an alien who grins like a loon, eats entire people and has previously decimated the population of the earth feels less “eeeeevil” to me than the big army doofus from Avatar. What’s particularly satisfying is getting a nice, solid, proper scene between Doctor and Master, after being cruelly denied it in ‘Last of the Time Lords’. Watch for the bit where the Master zaps the Doctor, catches him before he hits the ground, then realises what he did and drops him. Awesome stuff.⁴

Wilf. It’s nice having a male companion every now and then, but of course even more interesting to have an old one. Everyone’s going on about the scene in the café, so I won’t, except to say that I was very relieved that no one actually quite broke down. Hard-hearted bastard that I am, I wasn’t completely sold on Cribbins until ‘Turn Left’, but I’m a complete convert now and his storyline with the mysterious woman in white is the most intriguing aspect of the episode.

Lots of random old people. I guess they were almost funny. I’m letting them off only because generally everyone’s so young in Doctor Who–including next year’s Doctor. I reckon Minnie was the Tenth Doctor’s last chance for a snog though, so he’ll be totally kicking himself on New Year’s Day when he realises what got away from him.⁵

Joshua Naismith and his weird daughter. I think I may have missed something here. If I did, it was most likely the point. Seriously. These two have about three scenes where they generally act a shade peculiar in not terribly interesting ways, and then seem to get removed from the plot completely. It seems barely worth even having them in the story at this stage. Why not just have the whole thing run by the comedy aliens? Perhaps they’ll do something fascinating next week, but I somehow doubt it.

The comedy aliens. Inaccurately named. But potentially important to the plot, so they’re at least one up on the Naismiths.

Timothy Dalton. I’m not sure there’s many people out there who could speak the narration he’s given and make it sound awesome instead of stupid.⁶ He will have to work on his problem with spittle though. It’s unprofessional. Ron Howard never spat on anyone for three years of Arrested Development.

Donna’s Mum. Suddenly gets to be really funny. I didn’t see that coming. More of Donna’s Mum!

It’s tempting to say at this point: “What a lot of silly plot elements that didn’t go anywhere.” But that would be a stupid thing to say halfway through a story. That said, I’ll be disappointed if Minnie doesn’t save the universe come New Year’s Day.

1. Here’s the podcast URL if you’d like to grab it–part two’s commentary should turn up next week as well.
2. Note I didn’t just say Doctor Who. That’d be a somewhat larger call, and not one that I’m comfortable with.
3. Something that has rather hamstrung previous Masters, making them appear cartoonishly stupid. I’m looking at you, Anthony Ainley Master.
4. Not stuff which I actually explicitly noticed until Davies pointed it out in the commentary though. I’m clearly not very perceptive.
5. Unless he pashes John Simm.
6. And some of it is certainly stupid. “To the west of the north of that world”? Oh come on. Do I have to sit down with Russell and explain to him about spheres? How about “Many of the humans of that world did gather…”?

Merry Christmas, all you at home! Ahem. I’ve got to start reviewing these things a bit faster.

Anyhow. A few months back, it was Christmas, and Doctor Who brought us its fourth Christmas special. It was called ‘The Next Doctor’, and it starred David Morrissey as ‘The Doctor’. This was back before we knew about Matt Smith, so it was all a bit more interesting than it sounds now.

But only a bit. Perhaps wisely, ‘The Next Doctor’ doesn’t play for too long with the idea that Morissey could really be Doctor #11. When the Doctor lands in Victorian London at Christmas, he meets another man who calls himself the Doctor, and who seems to have watched a lot of Colin Baker episodes. The resulting confusion is milked for some excellent jokes, but is resolved quite quickly when it turns out that the real danger is the Cybermen — fallen through some crack in reality again, as they do. It’s one of Davies’ shopping-list episodes, but sadly not all the pieces really fit this time. There’s a fake Doctor, he’s interesting. There’s a villainous woman in a red dress, who’s well acted. There’s a bunch of Cybermen, and they stomp well, especially in the snow. There’s a balloon. But it doesn’t all come together as neatly as a similarly odd collection of elements did in ‘Tooth and Claw’.

Part of the problem is the connection between the heroes and the villains, or lack thereof. Both the Doctors know of the Cybermen, after a fashion, but let’s face it; there’s not much emotional connection between a human and a Cyberman. It’s why they always bring along a nasty human in the first place, like Miss Hartigan. But the Doctor doesn’t know Miss Hartigan. Jackson doesn’t know Miss Hartigan. Some characters do, but they get killed quite quickly. By having both Doctors fixated on the Cybermen, it makes her feel a little surplus to requirements.

But aside from feeling a little hollow, the episode has some marvellous set pieces. The first conversation between Doctor and not-quite-Doctor is excellent. There’s a cute montage of the previous Doctors. As I previously alluded to, the Cybermen marching through the snow is glorious. And there is something pretty impressive about the Doctor in a balloon over London fighting a giant cyberman — even if the cyberman in question is somewhat above-average implausible.¹

The core of the story is David Morrissey’s Jackson Lake, a man so desperate to escape his tragic past that he’s entered a fugue state and forgotten it all. Morrissey’s performance, once the Doctorishness subsides, is suitably emotional, but Jackson quickly becomes just a little too pathetic; partly due to the script not granting him a last gasp at heroism to save his son,² but letting the Doctor do it instead. It’s arguably realistic, but it felt wrong, in such an otherwise cheesy tale, not to give the poor man his moment in the sun.

I always feel a bit of a scrooge complaining about Christmas specials. This one isn’t bad, as such — it just feels kind of messy and disconnected. But it does have a giant robot, so it’s not all bad. Who doesn’t want a giant robot for Christmas?

1. The Cyber King seems, frankly, too awesome to have belonged to those scrappy Cybus Cybermen. Clearly they’ve been up to something. Actually, from a nerdy point of view, the whole script would have worked better if the Cybermen were proper, normal Cybermen from the classic series. Then they wouldn’t have had to suggest that the Cybes had stolen all their information on the Doctor while in the Void. It seems odd that they’d have the chance to nick all the Daleks’ Doctor Who DVDs whilst existing in a no-place gulf between dimensions.
2. His poor son, captured by Cybermen and forced to wear ridiculous amounts of eyeliner.

Some of you people newish to Doctor Who may not be aware of all the warning signs, of all the common ways to spot a ropey episode. One stands above all, in old and new Who — if someone calls a story a “romp”, then that means it sucks. “Romp” is another word for “you won’t care, it’s not particularly entertaining, but you can’t deny it’s very silly”.

‘Planet of the Dead’ is a romp. Shame. I was actually tempted to renew my brief one word review policy and write, simply, “meh”. Clearly, though, I’ve resisted. I will however, summarise the story in five words; bus, thief, stranded, desert, monsters.

I look at this story and I wonder why on earth anyone would bother to write it. Are there really people out there who have always wanted to write a story about a bunch of people being stuck in the middle of a desert and doing nothing interesting whatsoever? Davies has written two stories in the last year involving the Doctor saving a bunch of humans trapped in doomed circumstances, and I didn’t much care for the genre the first time he did it. My favourite Davies stories have involved one crazy set-up being switched around, reversed, unexpectedly twisted on its head into a completely different one. But sometimes, a big bus in the desert is just a big bus in the desert, and all they’re going to do is escape. The closest anyone comes to making an involving decision in this story is when Catherine is forced to part with her loot, and frankly, even that seems forced.

I’m being harsh, but only because this has been wearing me down for a while In the first season of Davies’ reign, even the bad episodes felt like the writers were desperate to get their ideas on the page, to write their best Who story ever. By season four, it felt like everyone was disappointingly over that phase, and sitting through a bland Christmas special¹ and now a bland Easter special have only served to confirm it.

But let me be clear. ‘Planet of the Dead’ isn’t badly made. There’s many very nice things about it. It looks gorgeous; the shift into high definition hasn’t harmed Who at all, and the Dubai filming was also a nice touch.² A London bus in the middle of the desert looks pretty impressive. Michelle Ryan is cute as a button, even if she gets some pretty average dialogue to work with.³ The random irritating civilians don’t piss me off nearly as much as I thought they would, even if one of them only seems to be psychic so that she can give the Doctor some rubbish foreshadowing at the end.⁴ The Tritovores are excellent aliens, and the funniest characters to boot, so it’s disappointing when they suddenly get wiped out about half-way through. David Tennant is still a marvellous Doctor, and almost gets you through the ropier parts of the episode with sheer charm. And there’s UNIT, of course.

I like UNIT a lot. I particularly liked them in ‘The Sontaran Stratagem’, so I was a little disappointed to find that we had the as yet undeveloped Captain Magambo instead of Colonel Mace, who I had rather hoped would become Tennant’s quasi-Brigadier. This minor disappointment was soon put to bed, however, as I watched UNIT wobble along between being over-the-top Doctor-worshippers one moment (which I don’t like), and being ruthlessly willing to sacrifice the Doctor the next. The two don’t mesh well; presumably the reason that they like the Doctor so much is because he keeps saving the Earth — it certainly can’t be the amount of casualties they tend to take when he’s around. So why risk him if you can possibly help it? Or, if you did want to risk him, but your supremely irritating comedy scientist refused to, why not insist on him following out the Earth-saving plan immediately after the Doctor is safe, rather than running outside to check yourself? Perhaps this scene was messed up in the editing suite, or perhaps it was just written like this, but as soon as the bus comes through the wormhole, what little tension there was just floats away.

Doctor Who‘s first Easter special doesn’t reach that sweet spot of cross-generational entertainment⁵ that makes this show so special. In fact, it doesn’t even feel like it was aiming for it. Watching ‘Planet of the Dead’ is more like watching a good Saturday morning cartoon than watching Doctor Who. And that’s a bit disappointing.

1. Which I have not reviewed, yet. In my defence, I don’t really like writing about bland.
2. Though, really, couldn’t you do a desert with CGI?
3. There’s a bit about being “extreme” that has to be heard to be believed. Surely everyone realises that you can’t use that word any more unless you’re being ironic?
4. I say “rubbish”, but at least after giving the standard guff concerning things coming out of the dark, she also said “he will knock four times”. Which suggests a particular character to me, at least. Da da da dum.
5. It’s my new term. You could also call it ‘pixaresque’.

Russell T Davies and I have genuinely different ideas of what means “epic”. It’s taken four years to work it out, but I’m reasonably clear on it now. Russell thinks it’s defined by the scale of what you’re talking about, and I think it’s the scale of what you do.

Davies’ Doctor Who finales have consistently involved people standing around in one, perhaps two rooms, talking about the fate of some massive thing (this year, it’s the universe, but we used to settle for the Earth). Last year, the Doctor actually spent an entire year, and most of the episode, inside the large room in question. I can usually see what they’re shooting for, but frankly, a two-parter like ‘The Empty Child’ seems more epic to me, simply because the action shifts from night club, to Big Ben, to a hospital, to a bomb site, to an abandoned house, etc. By contrast, the lion’s share of ‘Journey’s End’ takes place either in the TARDIS, or in one of two rather similar looking parts of the Dalek mothership.

To an extent though, that’s all incidental. It doesn’t matter if the story’s set in just one tiny closet if it’s otherwise awesome. ‘Journey’s End’ isn’t, though. It’s passable, and it almost makes up for the lack of Doctor this time last year in an unexpected way. But once again, there’s so many things that I just don’t get. And they mar the joy of having this lovely cast dancing about my screen.

The Shadow Proclamation! The Doctor regenerating! Rose returns with mysterious powers of teleporting about! There’s still something on Donna’s back! She’s got a funny heartbeat thing going on! Oh, the massing plot threads of last week. They barely had time to do anything vaguely interesting, they were so busy setting all this stuff up. And then what happens? The Shadow Proclamation completely fail to come to war. Donna is not, in fact, still in a parallel universe. Rose just can zip about, it’s not important, and she hasn’t really got any sort of plan or objective other than “Hello, Doctor.” And those are just the minor disappointments. Let’s talk about the big one.

How, in all that’s holy, is it a thrilling plan to devise a huge cliffhanger, only to resolve it with a cop out? There’s clearly expectations created with a regeneration, exciting expectations, and NOT REGENERATING IS NOT ONE OF THOSE. I don’t get it. Is it a homage to how nothing happened last week? I’m being disingenuous; clearly, it’s designed to get everyone watching the week after, and of course, it looks like it worked. But this is Doctor Who, and it’s not exactly unpopular these days, is it? Do we need these cheap shots? I guess, if anyone knows the answer, it’s more likely to be a successful TV producer and writer than a shlub in Brunswick. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be annoyed.

So, what actually does happen this week? Well, as the Doctor’s companions nip round following their own plans,¹ the Doctor himself manages to not die, and instead, to finally do something with that grotty hand he’s been keeping in the TARDIS all this time.² Whilst the Doctor gets hauled into the Dalek ship — a ship which disappointingly looks rather less impressive on the inside than the ship three years ago — his hand becomes its very own Doctor, and comes back to save the day. Well, comes back to try to save the day.³

In the middle of all this is Davros and Dalek Caan — two shining beacons of crazy evil in a rather plodding plot. Davros is perfectly played by Julian Bleach; the ultimate mad scientist; and even gets to be insightful about the Doctor and his companions. Though the set-up to this moment is perhaps a little contrived, it’s made up for by the fact that Davros is undeniably right, to some extent. Even his ridiculously evil plan doesn’t seem too ridiculous when Julian Bleach says it. Meanwhile, Caan’s giggling insanity is a joy to listen to, and his pivotal role in events makes him perhaps the most interesting character in the story.

But then, he’s probably not, because we’ve got Donna as well. Back when I heard Catherine Tate was returning to the series, I was highly sceptical. And, it turns out, completely wrong. While part of Donna’s appeal might just be the refreshing change of a companion who doesn’t have the hots for the Doctor, Tate has to take a lot of the credit. It’s been clear for many years now that the companion has to be the heart of the series,⁴ and Donna’s emotional courage has filled that role admirably.

Which makes the final scenes all the more affecting. After muddling through the Doctor and the Doctor and Rose’s rather oddly scripted farewell, we’re treated to an epilogue which is up there with Russell T Davies’ best work on the series. Earlier in the series, I complained about all the crying. So it’s gratifying to take a break from the melodrama and have a stoic, underplayed tragedy play out — no screaming and special effects, just the Doctor quietly and sorrowfully saving his companion in the only way he can.

Do five awesome minutes make up for an otherwise disappointing and disjointed episode? I don’t know, but I have to admit that despite any flaws, ‘Journey’s End’ probably throws enough elements into the mix to make everyone happy, at least for a bit. And at the end of his last full season of Doctor Who, I can see why Davies would want that.

1. Okay, I just want a quick moment with the Osterhagen Key. On this one day in the increasingly improbable history of the Earth, it was probably a not-completely-awful plan, in that it was either the Earth or the Universe, and the choice was clear. On any normal day, it’s the biggest single risk to the planet imaginable.
2. Seriously. If I cut off my toenails, I don’t keep them in the living room on display. And even if I did, if somehow someone had almost killed me with the bloody things, then I’d move them.
3. I watched ‘Not Fade Away’, the last Angel episode, the other day. Doctor B’s plan to charge at Davros without firing his weapon or doing much at all reminds me of Wesley’s piss-poor plan to kill a sorcerer with his pocket knife. When you can feel the writer making a character stupid to advance the plot, it’s off-putting. On a side note, I’m seriously overdue reviewing that episode.
4. Which makes the Doctor the head? Or perhaps, wind, fire, water and earth.

It’s Doctor Who season finale time again. In the old days, this was often the point where they had a massively ambitious script, but had run out of money to actually film it with. These days they’re curious beasts. Davies has now overseen four of them, and every time, he aims for an epic story with masses of emotion and action. To an extent, he always gets there; and yet, every time we get here, it’s fallen short of what came before. It’s like Davies has run out of whichever secret sauce was joining his nutty finale-thoughts when he made ‘The Parting of the Ways’. Or, every time, he tries to increase his ‘epic’ quotient, and the heart of the story struggles to pull it all together.

‘The Stolen Earth’ is particularly upsetting, as it’s clearly meant to be epic, and in many ways, it is — and yet unlike ‘Bad Wolf’, or ‘The Sound of Drums’, it doesn’t really tell many interesting stories in its own right. In fact, it feels uncomfortably like an episode full of exposition. The scale of everything is huge, but nothing’s happening. Let us take for example Rose Tyler. As I’ve mentioned, she was suitably awesome in her return last episode, all mysterious and commanding. This week, she watches TV and whinges that she doesn’t have a webcam, before trying to call her ex. Thrilling stuff.¹ Perhaps she’ll get to do more next week?²

Ah well, she must be sidelined because everyone else is doing stuff. Sarah Jane? Hm. Listening to the radio and going for a drive doesn’t really count. Captain Jack? Lounging around the Torchwood Hub. Martha? Well, she travels from New York to Germany, so she’s no slouch I guess. Excitingly, we’re told that she’s dead by Jack for absolutely no reason, after which her condition is upgraded to “alive”.

Ah ha. It must be the Doctor and Donna who are doing everything. It’s so obvious. Having carelessly lost the Earth, they then visit the Shadow Proclamation, who in a peculiar twist, turn out to be not very shadowy at all. In fact, they look disturbingly like the sort of futuristic, brightly coloured, elite humanoid society that Classic Who used to trot out all the time, most often in the form of Gallifrey. Let us judge not by appearances though — for between them, the Doctor, Donna and Mrs Shadow work out that planets are being stolen! And where are they being taken? Follow the bees, says the Doctor, in a rather disappointing and bizarre resolution to the whole bee mystery thing. They do, and the Doctor finds himself at the Medusa Cascade, which is closed, so he gives up.

It feels wrong even writing that, frankly. Yes, our Doctor, the one we had all that faith in last year and turned into Jesus, gives up because he comes up against a locked door too big for the Sonic Screwdriver. Oddly, it’s played like it’s a dramatic moment, even though presumably no one in the audience has any idea why this particular cosmic door is providing more of a challenge than all of the other ones the Doctor gets through all the time. Luckily, all his friends call him on his mobile and suddenly he can get in. It feels wrong writing that, too.

There’s two moments in ‘The Stolen Earth’ which are genuinely awesome and involving, and feel like they could have been part of a much better episode. One is the Dalek fleet’s cries coming through the radio and scaring the bejeezus out of all and sundry. The other is the Doctor and Rose running towards each other, finally and beautifully reunited, but not quite. But even after both these awesome moments, nothing much happens. In a nutshell; the Doctor normally lands on the planet in question at the start of the story. In ‘The Stolen Earth’, he doesn’t get there until the end — but he’s missed no action whatsoever, because all anyone was doing in the meantime was trying to work out where the heck he was. When I look at it like that, it all seems very odd. I’m bemused even now.

What’s that? I forgot Harriet Jones? I’d feel bad if she hadn’t been a completely pointless addition to the episode.³

1. There is of course almost nothing made of whether she had a plan, and how much she knew about “the darkness”, or indeed the whole ‘Bad Wolf’ thing. Disappointing for someone desperate to see Rose kicking arse after her general mopiness in ‘Doomsday’.
2. A clue; no.
3. I mean, why couldn’t Sarah have contacted everyone? Or if you do want the Prime Minister back, why not actually give Penelope Wilton something to do, rather than just playing at forum administrator? Amusing and intriguing theories about how she might have been working for the Daleks were going round the internet afterwards. Like so much speculation on ‘Journey’s End’, things just weren’t quite that interesting.

I don’t like parallel universes. Well, actually, I like the Donnie Darko kind of parallel universe which has to die so that ours might live. I don’t like perfectly legitimate masses of universes extending out in all directions from our reality — it tends to make the ‘normal’ universe seem dramatically more inconsequential.¹ Doctor Who has been leaning predominantly towards the latter recently,² so it’s nice to have one of the former. Today, a parallel world is created and wiped out by the same person; the destroyer of realities and useless temp, Donna Noble.

I remember she’s a temp, because she’s told me about a hundred billion times.

Anyhow, this week, she runs into possibly the most painfully over the top soothsayer you ever did meet, and gets herself into a pickle.³ What if she’d never met the Doctor? What if her not meeting him caused him to die? What kind of world would she be living in? What kind of person would she be? What kind of computer graphics from old episodes could we re-use?

I’ve seen it pointed out that while ‘Turn Left’ does reference a lot of previous episodes, it’s unfortunate in that most of them aren’t the good ones. My memories of ‘Voyage of the Damned’, ‘The Sontaran Stratagem’ and ‘Partners in Crime’ aren’t so rosy that seeing them from different angles does much for me.⁴ Luckily, while it does appear like Doctor Who‘s equivalent of a clip show, the story of an Earth without the Doctor is a nicely played one, for the most part.

I like the idea that the world minus Doctor gets worse in an ethical way as well as a ‘destroyed by monsters’ way. It’s perhaps the ultimate iteration of the idea that the Doctor’s ultimate strength is his influence on those around him.⁵ I like the character of Rocco Colasanto; initially seeming like a one-note character, and then being more moving in five seconds than anyone else in the show has managed all year. I like Billie Piper. I especially like Billie Piper when she’s Rose playing at being the Doctor and getting to do all the explaining. Of course, it seemed particularly nifty at the time — as if we were dovetailing into pieces of the final two parter, which would explain things like how Rose is travelling all over England instantly, and how she’s gotten back, and her relationship with UNIT, and what she knows about ‘the darkness’. In some alternate universe, I’m actually up to date and you’ve read my review of ‘Journey’s End’. You poor sods in this universe will just have to surmise that I was a shade disappointed when Rose completely failed to be any sort of protagonist at all after this episode.⁶

Overall though, this is Donna’s story, and Catherine Tate does a marvellous and moving job this week; words I really didn’t expect to be writing many moons ago. Not ten minutes after Rocco made me sad, Donna’s journey from doomed to hopeful to doomed again made a fair assault on the old tear glands. Of course, she does do a lot of obnoxious shouting as well, but it’s alternate universe obnoxious shouting, and it’s making a point, so you can almost look past it.

So — aside from a severe case of ‘Utopia Syndrome’, ‘Turn Left’ is different, interesting, and perfectly paced as the lead-up to the final two parter of the season. It gives Catherine Tate a chance to really shine, it gives Billie Piper a chance to play a confident, cool Rose, and it gives the audience another break from the usual formula.⁷

It does, however, have a ridiculously awful looking giant beetle in it.

1. See Stargate’s Ripple Effect, if you dare.
2. Regardless of how much sense it makes. There’s a few points regarding Rose’s universe that need to be made somewhere, but I’ll save them for ‘Journey’s End’, since I’ll most likely be generally unenthusiastic there anyway.
3. Chipo Chung was seriously awful. Everyone in Confidential seemed to be really nice to her because she had to wear prosthetics last year as Chantho. But dear God in heaven: “What are you? What will you become?” Yikes.
4. It’s certainly not as powerful as similar moments in Love & Monsters.
5. Apparently, some English folks weren’t so keen on the idea that England becomes a fascist state so readily, but sadly I can’t find the link again.
6. Luckily for me, we had a pretty cool cliffhanger around this time last year, which was then bizarrely squandered. I say lucky, because if not for that preparation, the idea that you could suddenly bring back the whole “Bad Wolf” thing after three years’ break and go completely and awesomely nuts with it without actually following up on it the next week would have been completely incomprehensible to me.
7. It’s almost a shame that ‘Midnight’ and ‘Turn Left’ are scheduled next to each other — spreading them out amongst the more traditional stories might have made for a more balanced season.

The story goes that once upon a time, Tom Baker declared that he didn’t really need a companion; a cabbage on his shoulder asking him “What’s that, Doctor?” would be quite sufficient.

While the show did try this in the seventies with ‘The Deadly Assassin’, the lack of companion was quickly filled by an unlikely bunch of old Time Lords. In ‘Midnight’, the role never quite gets filled, and our hero almost dies for it. Traditionally speaking, I’ve always assumed the Doctor needed companions for, well, companionship. It turns out, they’re pretty handy just for keeping him alive, too.

A while back, I read an interesting piece from Jonathan Blum on how fans were riled by the Doctor being short with UNIT in ‘The Sontaran Stratagem’. It’s worth reading, but in short his theory goes like this; when you’re a child, you cheer when the Doctor treating stuffy grown ups and authority figures with disdain. When you grow up, get a job, get yourself some politics, and find yourself in a position of authority, it occurs to you that if the Doctor wandered into your life, he wouldn’t like you any more than he liked Random Grumpy Official #2. ‘Midnight’ looks at things from the other side of the fence. If you were a normal person in a horrible situation, would you really like the Doctor? Or would he just be an annoying, arrogant git who tends to get people killed?

Let’s back up a bit. The Doctor takes a trip over a crystal planet. As should be clear to him by now, any innocent holiday he tries to take is bound to result in horrible deaths for all nearby. In this case, the transport breaks down, and a mysterious force tries to get inside before they can get moving again. Will everyone survive? Will the looming threat be genuinely scary? Will the Doctor meet a convenient cabbage?

‘Midnight’s central protagonist is an interesting concept. It’s also based on what might well be the Most Irritating Thing Ever. I assume everyone, at some point, had a brother or sister or friend who would endlessly repeat what you said, just to shit you.¹ This week’s monster is that annoying little creep. It makes for dramatically uncomfortable television; yes, Sky, you are more truly terrifying than any number of squat potato-headed clones, but you also call to mind several of the more horrid moments from my own personal dawn of time.

The assorted cast do a decent job of being perhaps the most annoyingly normal people ever featured in Doctor Who. As things get worse, each of them — no matter how much potential or kindness they seemed to show — starts to crack, and blame the arrogant outsider. Russell T Davies has said he wrote ‘Midnight’ as a response to his own ‘Voyage of the Damned’, simply to ask: would people really band together heroically in a disastrous situation? ‘Midnight’ suggests the other side of the coin, but not unequivocally. As a result of this, the story is one of the more thought-provoking scripts this year.

The other thing that ‘Midnight’ explores, as I mentioned before, is whether random people would trust the Doctor. He’s alone this time, and there’s no young, trustworthy cutie hanging about and acting like he’s marvellous. As Davies points out in Confidential, despite his general affability, not one of them quite becomes friends with him before things go to hell, and once they do, none of them find his “I’m so clever, I’ll solve this, I do this all the time” routine particularly convincing. Is this just because of the malignant influence of Sky’s possessor? Or is his companion supposed to be there not just to connect with the audience, but to the people he meets?²

To take a slight detour; I watched Speed again the other day and started to notice the people on the bus displaying tendencies towards ‘Midnight’ style behaviour. But they trusted Sandra Bullock, and Sandra Bullock trusted Keanu the Outsider. So they trusted Keanu. Even when one of them got exploded. What this all means, I’m not sure, but it doesn’t explain why Sandra Bullock keeps doing such crappy movies. Ahem. What were we talking about? Oh yes.

Between being set almost entirely in one room, and involving an almost entirely verbal threat, ‘Midnight’ feels very much like Doctor Who: The Stage Play. It’s a fascinating exploration of the Doctor’s interaction with people, and of paranoia in general, but it’s also the Doctor stuck in one place with a bunch of really irritating people for 45 minutes. As they say; your mileage may vary.

1. To be honest, I probably dealt said awfulness more than receiving it.
2. Or, were they just a bunch of tools who would have turned on him in any case?

Oh dear! It’s Steven Moffat’s worst story ever! Luckily, as it’s Moffat, it’s still damn good. Just not so awesome that I can drop off a one word review and move on. So; ‘Silence in the Library’ fails to satisfy lazy reviewers. But otherwise…

Well, for a start, it’s a Doctor Who story set inside a library, but it’s not about books. I mean, yes, there’s a bunch of them in it, but their main impact is… well, is unexpected, and not strongly related to their function as reading material.¹ As is typical for a Steven Moffat script, it’s actually about quite a few things. Depressingly, it’s refreshing for a Who script to be overflowing with ideas; the scripts this year, ‘Fires of Pompeii’ aside, have been entertaining but uniformly workmanlike, with no more than one fascinating idea per forty-five minutes. The two parts of ‘Library’ average ten times that.

Let’s start with the monsters; because you can’t have the Doctor without the monsters. The Vashta Nerada have the coolest name of any creature in Who for some time, and are also the cheapest you ever did see. Or rather, didn’t see. Luckily, shadows are pretty emotive things, and making them viciously lethal works, generally.² They get somewhat forgotten in the second part, sadly, and ultimately I felt like they had more potential than they got to display. I mean, we could have had some freaking huge shadows. I’m just saying.

In the second part, the shadows take a back seat to Donna’s own personal Matrix. It’s a particularly effective little story, giving Catherine Tait some interesting emotions to play with, and providing a much more interesting way to explain the plot than having the Doctor draw a circle and point to the middle of it. Though obviously he did that too, for some reason. The real fun here though, was watching characters on television respond to the usual abbreviated narrative conventions of television with surprise. It took me about a week to stop being vaguely amused at all the characters on every other show not noticing their peculiar way of skipping incidental moments in their lives.

And sprinkled all over these elements is the peculiar mystery of Professor River Song, future friend to the Doctor³ and all round good time archaeologist. Despite being played well by Alex Kingston, she isn’t quite as cool as the shadows. For a start, the audience is perhaps just as perturbed as the Doctor that they’re meeting someone out of sequence, and the script’s so busy making the Doctor suspicious and wary of the stranger with the bulky screwdriver that the viewers aren’t likely to really take to her. Hopefully, if she turns up again, we’ll get to actually be introduced to her.

I like Moffat. His plots are solid and his ideas are bountiful. His peculiar aversion to murdering his characters, however, becomes a bit strained here. Frankly, I like a spot of death. ‘Silence in the Library’ has a nice, poignant ending, and then another one, which on first passing feels a bit grotesque.⁴ Miss Evangelista has a lonely, tragic plot, which is then trivially undone. The hilarious Dr Moon is killed by Cal’s tantrum, but comes back later⁵ because everything’s so gosh darned happy now. Death just won’t stick in the library.

These minor quibbles aren’t enough to spoil it for me, though. There’s wonderful moments running through the whole story, from the tragedy of Miss Evangelista’s death, to the metatextual humour of Cal grinning at the Doctor’s heroics and hiding her face in fear, to the first time the Doctor’s name is spoken on screen. It’s a joyful ride, and I can’t help but think that Doctor Who‘s future is in safe hands.

As long as Steven starts killing people.

1. It’s vaguely disappointing to have the Doctor enter a library planet and for the best book he mentions be Monty Python’s Big Red Book. I like to think of his tastes as vaguely eclectic, but, well, his little list at the start is somewhat overly poppy for a man who might have read every book ever written.
2. It looks like the production team didn’t quite have the time to keep track of every shadow though. There are those in this world who will automatically start checking whether the characters in a story cross shadows when they’re specifically told not to. These people will find what they’re looking for.
3. Or, she tortured him to death with his own screwdriver until he revealed his name. Let’s not rule it out.
4. Well, in a way. River’s essentially dead, but gets to live out her afterlife in the same constructed world we were just rooting for Donna to escape from. However, on reflection, she does have access to every book ever written. This is my idea of a good heaven, but what we actually see of it makes her appear like a single mum with three kids for eternity. This is not my idea of a good heaven. As I mentioned before; books in this story appear to be limited to peculiar little objects that get made from trees and then thrown at you. Even Cal, the girl placed inside the library because she loved books so, is continually parked in front of the telly. It’s all a bit disjointed.
5. Being a computer program, Dr Moon’s resurrection is of course more understandable, but I list it simply to illustrate the pattern.