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.

… Ladies.

There’s also an atypicalreview redesign coming. If I had any sense of timing at all, it’d be ready on April 4, a date to which I’m not counting the days to at all, no sir, not me. But I almost certainly don’t, q.v. paragraph one.

Finally, and because there’s no way in hell I’ll get around to reviewing it, I’ll briefly mention The Surgeon of Crowthorne, a book about murders, schizophrenics and the English Dictionary. It’s a peculiar read — constantly interesting but not particularly engrossing, if that’s possible. You get a good perspective of the almost insanely daunting task of making a comprehensive dictionary, which would be pretty tricky today, but even more ridiculous without computers. But just as interestingly, you get a good idea of how horrible it’d be to be a bit mental¹ 150 years ago.

Linking to books is trickier than linking to movies, where IMDb is king. I’ve gone with amazon.com above, but in future perhaps Shelfari will be a better bet. It’s kind of like a social networking site for reading. Is anyone else using it? I started importing my library from Delicious Library and got rather bored rather quickly.

In any case, the title didn’t match the cover for Crowthorne — which has clearly gone through some name changes in its time — but this may be fixed by the time you visit, as Shelfari allows you to suggest changes to its information a la Wikipedia, which is pretty neat. If anyone is inspired to sign up, I’m here.

1. Not the technical term, as I understand it.

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…”?

And so then I think to myself, “I’ve got my camera. I could take a picture.” Almost half of the people there had the same thought; you can even see a reasonably elderly woman taking a snap with her camera phone, presumably so she can then twitter and facebook it to her peeps. But suddenly the idea felt creepy. Had people died? Would it be wrong to be casually snapping away at the scene of a fatal accident? News photographers do it all the time, but they’re servicing the public interest, or at least managing a close approximation of it. Does my massive contingent of 29 followers count as the public? I doubt it.

Anyhow, it turns out no one died and so I vaguely regret not trying to get a good photo. But I can’t quite decide though if I’m a bit disturbed by everyone milling about and recording the event, or whether I’m impressed by them actually doing something vaguely constructive by spreading the information around their various networks.

And briefly, an old man rant: One of Channel 7 News’ leading stories today consisted of announcing that Britney Spears had entered the country, that they hadn’t been able to get an interview or footage of her, and reading out what she tweeted when she got off the plane. This followed the startling revelation that the winners of the Melbourne Cup were “happy”. If I could remember Seven’s news tagline, I’d quote it here, ironically. That’d show ‘em.

1. To Daryl. I strongly suspect that an apology would mean more if you apologised to the people you thought might have been offended by the sketch, and not to Mr Connick Jr.¹

2. To people whinging about ‘political correctness’. Call it what you like, but it seems to me that it’s only manners to avoid pointlessly offending people.

3. To people saying that if it was acceptable years ago it’s acceptable now. Lots of things used to be OK that aren’t any more. I don’t expect to see you attempt to prove your point by marrying your 13 year old cousin and taking a slave tomorrow. Console yourself in the knowledge that lots of things that used to be frowned upon are more accepted now. Enjoy them! Leave the house without your hat, vote to choose your leader, and let someone have sex with your bottom.

4. To people arguing that Harry Connick Jr may be a hypocrite. That’s not really the point here, is it?

5. To me. Admit it. You’re kind happy because now you have a morally justifiable reason to think Hey Hey sucks.

1. Do you say Jr when you only use someone’s last name? Enquiring minds want to know.

The answers to my questions turn out to be “Above”, “No”, “Serif”, “Neither” and “the coloured lights are inside it”. It hearkens back strongly to the older, simpler logos, which is nice. I see everyone at the BBC still gets excited by lens flares. I’m reasonably keen, though I’m curious to find out when they use the initials and when they use the full word. It’s certainly a nicer logo for putting on DVD spines which is obviously my main concern.

Hrmmm.

There’s not actually very much to say about a new logo. I should have covered the Apple event instead. They’re much more contentious. I went onto a Who forum to try to find crazy fans whinging that the new logo doesn’t do target disk mode, but no such luck.

The excitement never stops around here. I hope you’ll join me for the unveiling tomorrow.¹

1. No, seriously. I will actually post something tomorrow, or my name isn’t Jackson Kearney. Hang on, sorry. I mean, because my name isn’t Jackson Kearney.

Ah, Angel. We’ve had some good times together. Now, many years after you finished, I’m ready to say goodbye.¹ Luckily, you gave me a pretty good episode to say goodbye to. Alright, so things are a little contrived, a little forced; but I dealt with all my issues with that in the last review. I’m here to enjoy the near-perfect final days that every character has here, and as they were by and large awesome, that’s not a difficult task. So let me take things one at a time.

Goodbye, Gunn. You have, on occasion, been the most boring character on the show, but then you’re usually the most normal, and it’s important to ground things. In particular, you’ve been on a hell of an interesting journey this year — but it’s nice to have you as the conscience of the group now that Wesley’s returned to his borderline psychotic self. It’s also good to have you and Anne (nee Chanterelle) restating that beautiful, simple philosophy that’s been running through the show since day one; that the smallest good deed matters no matter what massive, horrible things might be threatening humanity.

Goodbye, Lorne. You had one awesome year on Angel, where you were mysterious and cool, with a hint of malevolence. Then you had three years as a lame and repetitive source of one-liners. You get something vaguely interesting to do in this final chapter, but it’s not your moment at all, it’s Angel’s (though it doesn’t really, to me, feel like it belongs to either of you). You have truly been hurt by the inviolate rule of “keep a character around regardless of whether you’ve thought of something interesting to do with them”.

Goodbye, person who looks like Lindsay, sounds like Lindsay, and acts like some schizophrenic² moustache-twirling, revenge obsessed loon. I can’t express how completely unnecessary it was for you to come back, or how disappointing it was that you came back such a shadow of your former self. Finally, in this story, you get one last glimmer of your former glory as a character who refuses to be pigeon-holed as good or evil. And then Angel gets Lorne to shoot you. Apparently, because you have a tendency to turn evil, and are unlikely to seek redemption. What a fucking hypocrite that blood-sucking prick is.

Goodbye, Illyria. You were the one truly cool aspect of this season, even though we had to lose Fred to get you. Angel had a pretty good run, but if there’s one thing that really made the idea of a sixth season interesting, it was you.³ It was nice to see Fred and Wes finally get together, but much more awesome to see the far more fascinating and disturbing relationship between you and Wes develop. And we get an ending of sorts to that plotline here — a moving and peculiar one, even if it is based on what seems ridiculous stupidity on the part of my favourite character:

Goodbye, Wesley. It’s been great. You may well take the honour of being the one character in all of Joss Whedon’s shows with the most interesting and consistent character development. It’s a shame then, that in your last hurrah, the brains of the group comes up with a plan that amounts to no more than “walk in, start shooting, hope for the best.” This from the man whose clever strategies allowed him to storm a Pylean castle three years ago. What kind of a backup plan is a pen-knife? I was screaming at my television set. I’m still annoyed now, and it’s been five years for heaven’s sake. Luckily for you, every other bit apart from that is rather good.

Goodbye, Spike. I didn’t want you here. You might have been one of the best things about Buffy‘s last year, but bringing you into Angel seemed like some kind of invasion from the crummy show to the good show. Pleasantly, the story of Angel and Spike has been rich in potential ever since the bleached blonde one turned up in Sunnydale. Unexpectedly, by the end of the season Spike’s almost become Angel’s conscience, or at least, the voice of the part of Angel that likes to see things in black and white. It’s this element of Spike that’s prominent this week, though happily there’s also a little bit of time to pay off the roots that were explored back in ‘Fool for Love’ when he finds time to recite his poetry on his last day.

Goodbye, Harmony. You were evil, and often slightly annoying evil, but every now and then, very funny evil. I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of you becoming a regular, for similar reasons to my resistance to Spike. And yet, you end on a high; betraying Angel and then getting indignant when he accuses you of being the sort of person who’d betray him.

Goodbye, Angel. You’ve come a long way. Once upon a time, you were just a cliched, brooding love interest for Buffy. Now, you’re a conflicted, intriguing, heroic, petty, interesting character. Who’d have thought? I said bad things about you earlier, but if I keep that out of my mind (and I do try) then you have a wonderful swan-song, with one final, truly awesome and satisfying fight. But what’s really satisfying this week though is to see you finally have a happy moment with your son. Oh, the pain we’ve gone through to get to this point. Crappy sideplots with sub-par Wolfram and Hart flunkies. Hours of angst-ridden, torturous moments with a sullen teenager. Bloody murders and attempted suicides. But finally, they can hang out in a cafe and joke around. It’s as close to a happy ending as our soulful vampire hero is ever going to get, and if Angel’s learned one thing over the last five years, it’s that he’s got to appreciate these things when they come to him.

Goodbye, Angel. What a good show you were. Sure, you had your rough patches, but there’s not been another TV show that’s mixed such comic book adventure stories, excellent action and violence, involving characters, and had it all work together so well. I kind of miss you.⁴

1. If by “ready” you mean “can be bothered”. It’s, um, been a while. I mean, it’s been a while since I even wrote “It’s, um, been a while.” No other review has had a gestation period this long.
2. I know that’s not what the word means. But I don’t have another word to use in its place. Frankly, I feel at this point it’d be less effort to rename the condition.
3. Mind you, I thought the same of Anya in Buffy, and it turned out she was just a bunch of one-liners on legs.
4. Although if you could just teach the British to choreograph fight scenes as well as you did it’d help no end.