The End of Time

Chapter The 134th, a swansong for Ten.

Plot:

[Disclaimer: saying that The End of Time has a lot of plot is like saying Hitler was a little bit naughty: so, buckle up!] After a warning / premonition from the Ood about time coming to an end, the Doctor returns to contemporary Earth just too late to stop the resurrection of the 'Harold Saxon' incarnation of the Master, who has been brought back to life in a weird ceremony involving the cast of Bad Girls. The ceremony goes wrong, and he comes back with blond hair, a permanent hunger, and a penchant for impersonating Gollum every few minutes. He can also jump tall buildings in one bound, fire electricity bolts from his hands and keeps going all X-ray; this is burning up his energy apparently. The Doctor confronts him, but is interrupted by a bunch of pensioners, who've tracked him down on behalf of Wilf, Donna Noble's grandfather. Wilf wants the Doctor to help as he and his fellow oldies have been having mysterious nightmares.

The Doctor is suspicious, wondering why he keeps bumping into Wilf and his granddaughter as if there's some unfinished business between them (oh, what a giveaway!). He tells Wilf that he's going to die, and that it's been predicted that '"He will knock four times". The Doctor thinks this is something to do with the Master and the four-beat drum pattern that in his insanity the Master insists he can hear in his head. The Doctor leaves Wilf, and catches up with the Master again, and during a telepathic link realises it's not insanity, there really is the sound of drums in his fellow Time Lord's head. Before this can be investigated, the Master is kidnapped by goons in a helicopter. The goons work for a billionaire Joshua Naismith. Naismith has a piece of alien technology, the Immortality Gate, which he acquired from the ruins of Torchwood Canary Wharf after the Dalek Cyberman battle. He believes it will help his daughter live for ever. The gate is powered by a nuclear device which needs a operator in one of two paired radiation-shielded cubicles to operate it at all times, and that person can only exit one cubicle if someone enters the other one, one in, one out. This is explained in detail, so who knows if it might turn out to be relevant later on, what do you think? Anyway, the Master agrees to help and starts to repair the gate.

The Doctor meanwhile has tracked the Master to Naismith's mansion with Wilf's help. He and Wilf run into two of Naismith's technical team, who turn out to be disguised Vinvocci, green spiky faced aliens, who want to salvage the gate. They tell the Doctor it is a medical device for healing whole planets by sending a corrected body template that overwrites the current form of anyone on the planet. The Doctor rushes to stop things, but he's too late: the signal is sent and it turns everyone on the planet into the Master. This explains the nightmares they've been having, it was the Master in their heads (actually it doesn't explain anything really, as the nightmares were happening before the Master was resurrected, but it probably "echoed back in time" or something; things echo back in time a lot in Russell T Davies scripts). The only people immune are the Doctor and the Vinvocci, as they're not human, Donna who isn't fully human anymore after she became part Time Lord, and Wilf, who the Doctor puts in one of the radiation cubicles to screen him. Donna, chased by multiple Masters, starts to remember her adventures in the TARDIS, but a defence mechanism the Doctor put in her head knocks her out and zaps anyone in the vicinity. The other four hide out on the Vinvocci's spacecraft in orbit.

Meanwhile, the Time Lords led by President Rassilon are stuck time-locked on Gallifrey during the last day of the Time War, with the planet surrounded by Daleks. They realise they can create an escape route by manipulating the past of a Time Lord known to exist beyond the time lock: the Master. They put the repeated drum noise in the Master's head when he is young, and use it as a bridgehead to send a physical object (a Gallifreyan diamond) through time and space to Earth. The Master connects the diamond up to his machinery and sends a signal back to Gallifrey to guide them to Earth. The Doctor pilots the Vinvocci ship to England with Wilf manning laser cannons to destroy the Master's incoming missiles. The Doctor leaps out of the ship from high up in the atmosphere, and plummets smashing through the glass domed roof of the Naismith mansion, battered and bruised but still going. The Master is planning to use the Gate to make all the Time Lords into him just as he's done to the humans, but Rassilon puts a stop to that immediately, returning the humans to normal. Then, the planet Gallifrey itself appears next to Earth plunging the planet into chaos, and all the humans in Naismith's mansion flee.

Rassilon plans to destroy the entire universe, unravelling time, space and causality, until only the Time Lords are left, existing as creatures of pure consciousness. The situation is so desperate that it seems the Doctor will shoot one or both of the Master and Rassilon, but instead he destroys the machine sending the signal, returning Gallifrey back to the Time War. Before Rassllon can kill the Doctor in retaliation, the Master laser bolts the Time Lord president, angry at what has been done to him, and he disappears along with with the other Time Lords. The Doctor thinks for a moment that he's cheated death, but then he hears four quiet knocks on glass. It's Wilf, who got into one of the radiation-shielded cubicles to free a technician when everyone was panicking and fleeing. The reactor is going critical. The Doctor goes into the other cubicle, freeing Wilf, and absorbs all the radiation as it floods in.

He doesn't regenerate at first, though, and goes on a farewell tour / victory lap visiting old companions and tying up loose ends from previous stories. Finally, after he visits Rose Tyler on January 1st of 2005 (the year when she'll later meet him for the first time in his Christopher Eccleston incarnation), he sees an Ood again in the snow, who sings him to his rest. The Doctor has an explosive regeneration in the TARDIS in flight, and turns into Matt Smith just as his ship is crashing back down to Earth. Geronimo!

Context:

Watched from the Blu-rays in the Doctor Who The Complete Specials box set, the first Doctor Blu-ray purchase I ever made. Irritatingly, the two parts are on separate discs, so you can't watch them as one - long - continuous piece without getting up and switching the disc over. This didn't matter too much this time, as the family watched these on two consecutive Sundays, allowing a week before the cliffhanger was resolved (as per the original broadcast). The whole lot of us (me, the Better Half, boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7) watched both episodes, everyone enjoying it enormously.

First time round:

I can't believe it's been almost 10 years since David Tennant bowed out as Doctor Who. December 2009 saw snow everywhere across the UK, as I remember it, though it didn't quite last to the big day to make it a White Christmas. David Tennant was featured in every festive BBC1 ident, mucking about with reindeer and whatnot; it was if Doctor Who had taken over all Yuletide telly. Curious then that the story isn't really Christmassy at all. It's set at Christmas, but there's nothing thematically to link it to that period. You could easily erase the dozen or so references in the script (mostly in the first part, which aired on Christmas day 2009 - the second part, which aired on New Year's Day 2010 forgets all about it, having only one brief mention of Christmas in its hour-plus running time); it could therefore be transplanted to take place at any of time of the year without changing its shape at all.

Reaction:

Or could it? The End of Time is most definitely Christmassy in one way: it's as bloated and stuffed full of different flavours - sweet, savoury, rich, boozy - as the grossest gourmand's festive repast; it's also full of bright coloured tinsel and baubles, maybe some of them a little garish, that don't need to compliment each other too much, because it is Christmas after all. Doctor Who festive specials get a little leeway with regards to indulgence, as do the final stories of any Doctor's era, as do those that see a long-running production team waving goodbye. This story meets all three of those criteria, so the scope for excess is large, and the various call backs and plot tidy-ups and in-jokes multiply each other exponentially. Whether you can enjoy such a multi-ingredient pudding depends entirely on how much love you have for the actor and the behind-the scenes team exiting the stage. I adore David Tennant and the writing of Russell T Davies, but - in places - The End of Time might be just a little bit too much even for me.

The story pulls together plot threads from many previous shows; before the first episode was even finished, I'd noted down references to events in The Sound of Drums, Last of the Time Lords, Planet of the Ood, The Waters of Mars, Planet of the Dead, Journey's End, Doomsday, The Runaway Bride, The Sontaran Stratagem, and The Stolen Earth before giving up and setting aside my pen; there are many many more, particularly in the 'victory lap' section where Tennant visits every regular character of the previous four years. I'm sure a lot of viewers had had enough by that point, and I could understand why to an extent. I remember once reading a Doctor Who writer, maybe it was Gareth Roberts, describing Colin Baker's era - which I see, having just watched part of Trial of a Time Lord with it's scheming people in ridiculous headdresses, bears a lot of similarities to The End of Time - as becoming so gummed up with the series' own history and continuity, it was as unhealthy as the floor of a comic books store. But on first watch, and indeed on every watch up to this latest one, whenever I've started to feel that The End of Time was getting like that, there would quickly be a great scene with Bernard Cribbins, and my faith would be restored.

Cribbins' performance as Wilf, and his interplay with David Tennant, is far and away the best thing about this story. Tennant certainly doesn't slouch through it, but I think it's fair to say that all of his greatest work in the show's lead role is in earlier stories, and this is more an Elvis in Vegas greatest hits package than anything startlingly new (with the exception of maybe a couple of brief moments, one of which I'll cover later). There are so many notable Wilf / Doctor scenes, all of them magnificent in their quietude amidst the noise: the scene in the cafe, Wilfred in space, watching the sun rise over planet Earth, his reminiscences of his national service (based on Cribbins' personal history); best of all, there is the scene in the second episode where Wilf is offering the Doctor a gun to defend himself, and his voice cracks "Please don't die - you're the most wonderful man and I don't want you to die", and after that emotional climax the scene builds even further as - when the Doctor realises it's Time Lords that he's facing, he takes the gun after all. Magic. Although Cribbins is an ever dependable presence, it was still something of a gamble to cast him in such a key serial as the primary companion - a role normally played by someone much younger, and usually female. It pays off here, bringing a new dynamic into play.

Davies, as can be read in more detail in the collected correspondence of Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter by Davies and Benjamin Cook, struggled with what was the correct ending for Tennant's Doctor - giving up his life to save the universe, or to save just one individual. He in the end decided - much in the spirit of The End of Time's everything but the kitchen sink approach - to do both. That the individual is wonderful cuddly Wilf, and his brave action in saving someone else has spelt the Doctor's doom, is a beautiful irony.  Perhaps mindful of breaking up the sentimentality of the moment (particularly as he's going to up the sentimentality to great heights elsewhere), Davies has the Doctor initially kick against this fate, with a magnificently petulant speech, moaning about how life isn't fair. This is a very interesting choice, and one of the few moments I referred to earlier where Tennant gets to deliver something different and new - he isn't quite the perfect hero, but does what he has to anyway. It works, just about, because he wearily realises he's being a dick before too long, with the quiet line: "I've lived too long".

The saving the universe bits aren't quite so successful. Timothy Dalton is a good villain, though he - like much else in the story - is turning up his performance to way beyond 11 (see the spittle flecks leaping out of him during the speech at the end of the first episode). John Simm's final act of aggression, turning on the Time Lords as he - and we - realise that he has been made into a monster ties up his plot very efficiently, and probably explains why it was necessary to leave a lengthy gap before the character, and the actor, could return. The supervillain stuff - turning into a skeleton,  jumping high, firing energy bolts - is not so successful, either in terms of the quality of the effects work or the sense of it within the logic or emotion of the script. The bizarre black magic rituals used to bring him back from the dead are probably best forgotten altogether. Turning everyone in the world into John Simm, though, is such a wonderful idea, a wonderful visual and perfectly realised, that I can forgive any other missteps for the character. Getting a lovely groan-worthy Cracker level joke out of it ("There is no human race, there is only the Master race!"), is just the icing on the Christmas cake.

I don't mind the 20 minute victory lap section at the end, particularly on this watch. At the time, it was somewhat undercut by there having been a big reunion of most of these characters only a few months earlier (in The Stolen Earth / Journey's End - the two-part finale of Tennant's last full season), but watched in isolation, it feels warranted as the story marked the end of a significant era. If I was to cut anything, it wouldn't be that. The subplot of the mysterious woman appearing to Wilf (Claire Bloom), who may or may not be the Doctor's Mum, doesn't work particularly well for me, breaks the rules set up in the drama (nothing can escape Time War Gallifrey except through the Master's drumbeat signal), and doesn't have a proper resolution. As atmospheric as some of those bits are, I'd cut them all out. I'd also cut back on some of the messiness of the Master plot: the subplot with President Obama's international address, the homeless Master eating everything in a scary way, even the Naismiths - none of it really adds much. A bit more discipline there might have made for a less indulgent running time, and therefore the final few minutes wouldn't feel like they're it dragging out too long.

Connectivity: 

Time Lords, Time Lords, Time Lords! The robes, the collars, the portentous speeches, the treachery... plus, both stories include green aliens interested in making profit from salvage, and the main bad guy's mind being transferred into multiple other bodies. 

Deeper Thoughts:

The cents and pennies of an ending. A number of Doctor Who stories I've covered for the blog of late have backed up a theory that a lot of fans and commentators have - Doctor Who finds endings much more difficult than beginnings. This isn't surprising, really, as endings are in general difficult for everyone; I remember reading someone - maybe William Goldman - hitting the nail on the head by saying that endings need to be both inevitable and surprising. That's a hell of a trick to pull off. Another way of explaining the inevitability dimension is that a successful ending must be of a continuous piece with the drama that proceeds it, it can't be 'tacked on'; it isn't just a jarring change of story logic that can make something feel tacked on, a reduction in production values towards the end can do it too. Classic Doctor Who is particularly susceptible to this - the money has a tendency to run out, so even rather lavish productions such as the recently reviewed The Web of Fear end up with people standing about having tiny static squabbles in the studio to resolve what earlier has been played out on a much larger filmic canvas. Frontios - though it didn't have such budget or scale - has some grandiloquent speechifying at the start, with characters facing off in a satisfyingly theatrical manner, but still ends up with minor fisticuffs against clumsy monsters. For an ending that has no budget pressure, but seems to come from nowhere in a story logic way, then I don't think one needs to look much further than a frog on a dining room chair. 

Beginnings are much easier for Who, as the show tends to use mystery and intrigue, which are much cheaper to deploy than conflict and spectacle - a POV shot here, a glimpse of a claw there, shadows. This can be dangerous, though, as it sets up a debt that eventually should be paid back to the viewer, lest they feel short-changed. Sooner or later, there must be a reveal or at the very least explanation of what all the mystery and intrigue were about. If it's a giant woodlouse with the power to control gravity, then you're in trouble. The stories where explanations are not forthcoming - Midnight, say - are notable for being few and far between. Another where there are no immediate explanations, and also covered recently, is Mindwarp. Its ending is inevitable and surprising for the four episodes it rounds off, but unfortunately that's only episode 8 of 14. Sooner or later, there had to be some payback to the viewer about the truth of the Matrix evidence. Once that was delivered, Mindwarp's ending didn't fit within the wider piece, not really for reasons of story logic, but more of tone. Trial has a happy ending, and to have left Mindwarp's original ending unchanged would have been too bleak.  So, alas, the most dramatic thing to happen in fourteen weeks didn't happen at all. The Curse of Fenric has a similar issue, the ending is perfectly inevitable and surprising (Ace is one of Fenric's wolves as she - unknown to her - comes from the cursed area too) and the tone is right. But the efforts to fit this within the wider narrative of a long-running character arc are clearly tacked on (what exactly does the chess set in Lady Peinforte's study have to do with anything?!).

The End of Time has a different issue, and one it has in common with a lot of dramatic works of recent years. It has too many endings, and the cumulative effect is undermining. They're not really endings, of course, more resolution scenes after the plot climax has been reached. In its efforts to tie up years of story, it throws everything at the viewer and some of it is going to disappoint. Martha and Mickey are happily married and still fighting the good fight: yep I can just about buy that though it doesn't feel that inevitable for either character, as they'd not really met when we last saw them; Jack is sad what with living forever and everyone around him dying, but hooking him up with a hot guy will sort that out. Hmm, really? Donna was a better person when her horizons were expanded by travel, but she has lost all that, so she gets some material wealth in the form of a winning lottery ticket. Does that work? It could do, but I'm invested in the character enough that I'd like more certainty. That's key: if I'm invested in the characters, I'll forgive all this (and I did). If I'm not, as I wasn't particularly when watching The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in the cinema, for example, with it's forty-seven resolution scenes dragging out an already bum-numbing running time towards eternity, then I'm less forgiving.

This is a modern malaise. It was definitely William Goldman who wrote - quoting his frequent collaborator George Roy Hill - "If you can’t tell your story in an hour fifty, you better be David Lean.” But that was referring to film-making in the 1970s; major releases now regularly breach the two and a half hour mark, let alone show 1 hour 50's worth of discipline. To pick a couple of random recent examples, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is 2 hours 40, and much as I love some of his work Tarantino is no David Lean. 'It - Part 2' is 2 hours 49 - two hours and forty-nine minutes!!!! And it is already the second part of a book adaptation divided into two films. Nobody can edit anymore, so if the films are expanding and audiences are forgiving, why not let the resolution scenes expand too. The film has effectively finished, but we can have five scenes tying up loose ends, why not? Well, because any decent script should be structured not to leave so many loose ends, or at least not to be too worried about them at the end. The best wrap-up of a film I've ever seen is North by Northwest. Hitchcock manages to save his protagonist and romantic interest character and marry them off in one cut and twenty seconds of footage, and he still finds time for a very naughty visual pun. I recommend it, and I hope modern directors can someday soon find some of the same economy of storytelling.

In Summary:

Overstuffed, yes, but it's no turkey!