by cmdrajd » Tue Jan 12, 2010 3:36 pm
Doctor Who - The End of Time
I'll warn all of you in advance that this is more of a rant than a review. Also, if you're not familiar with Doctor Who, particularly the current David Tennant incarnation of the Doctor, most of this will be meaningless to you.
Now then...
I already posted a long post in my blog lamenting the departure of David Tennant from Doctor Who, so I'm not going to rehash that here. I loved his version of the character, and I thought the last 10-15 minutes of Part Two of The End of Time was a touching goodbye to the Tenth Doctor.
It's the almost two hours leading up to it that I have a problem with. You are writing the final adventure of a Doctor who now rivals and often beats Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor in terms of popularity and this is all you can come up with? Really, Russell T. Davies? REALLY? I have the greatest appreciation to RTD for bringing the show back in 2005 and producing several years of fantastic episodes. Also, he was the one who cast Tennant and worked to create the Tenth Doctor's personality that I have enjoyed so much.
Why then is Ten's last story (which is also RTD's last story, since he's handing the show running over to Steven Moffat) an adventure where the Doctor's involvement has almost no bearing on what happens? What does the Doctor actually do in this story? He finds out that the Master is coming back, so he races back to Earth. He's too late to stop the return and is really just a bystander as the Master is taken into custody by the rich guy's goons (Sorry. His character name is escaping me.). Ten goes on to have some very nice scenes with Wilf and then break into the rich guy's house, but he's too late to stop the Master from putting his plan into action and only ends up getting captured. The escape to the cactus alien's (as Wilf calls them) ship and the subsequent battle to get back to the rich guy's house is just so much noise. It means nothing.
The only possible impact Ten has is in this next sequence where the Time Lords, led by the Lord President James Bond (Timothy Dalton), show up through the conduit they've established with the help of the Master to escape the time lock. They undo the Master's plan in a matter of seconds. Again, Ten has no role in any of this. The only thing Ten accomplishes is getting the Time Lords and the Master talking long enough for the Master to realize that he's been used, but I have no reason to believe that the Master couldn't have figured this out on his own. Even if we say that the Master wouldn't have figured it out, we are left the sum total of Ten's useful actions in his final story boiling down to talking somebody else into doing something (I'm skipping his sacrifice to save Wilf, since that happens after the main plot of the story is over). It's a fairly pointless storyline that wastes excellent performances from Tennant, John Simm, and Bernard Cribbins.
What makes this even worse is that The End of Time comes directly after The Waters of Mars, another story where the Doctor stands around not doing much of anything until the very end, and even then his involvement changes almost nothing. He spends most of that episode saying he can't get involved in this historical event and generally being no help at all. I get the lesson he's supposed to learn about the danger of thinking he's all-powerful, but it's a long and annoying way to go to get there. And in the end, the lesson is meaningless and has no bearing on The End of Time. All the more frustrating is the fact that they didn't even do a full season in 2009. There were a grand total of four episodes including the second part of The End of Time, which aired on New Year's Day 2010. Four episodes and in three of them the Doctor is practically a useless bystander.
Ten and David Tennant deserved a far better send-off.
"I'm not insane -- my mother had me tested." - Sheldon Cooper, "The Big Bang Theory"
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