Rate And Discuss 4.18: The End Of Time, Part Two

[FlyingBeastie]

The only thing I found unbelieveable was Martha and Mickey - married? Pull the other one. What about her doctor fiance?

Yeah, that was VERY forced (and her HAIR!!! Dear, oh dear...)

One thing that wasn't different was that death grip Mickey had on her when they saw Tennant, "Na-unh, not again!!!"

Mickey should really move onto women who have been at least 150mi away from the Doctor and stop picking at his leftovers...

[Jason Thompson]

And the bit with Captain Jack. The whole exchange was a bit nudge-nudge wink-wink. Perhaps something may have blossomed into a long term relationship, but that scene was all rather Carry On innuendo-ish.

I disagree entirely. That whole scene was two people flirting in a bar. Where was the innuendo?

Given that they are both male I assumed a bottom would be involved.

Narrow-minded assumption, and in any case, so what? Would you have used a different word if it had been a male and a female? No, you'd probably have just said 'sex', which would have been perfectly acceptable in this case too. I'm afraid i find your choice of words somewhat offensive too.

Words aren't intrinsically offensive, it's all in the eye of the beholder.

Oh, crap.

If you choose to be offended by my wording then that's okay, but they were intended to be flippant rahter than offensive,

Words and combinations of words most certainly can be offensive, and the decent thing to do when told you have offended someone, intentionally or otherwise, is to apologise, not shift the blame in a semantic evasive manoeuvre.

And I also have absolutely no idea at what point in Jack's timeline that was supposed to be, or even Midshipman Frame's for that matter, so I don't know how recent any traumatic events were for either of them.

Given that every single one of Jack's appearances in the series have been strictly chronological for the character, it is not a huge stretch to imagine he is down because of the events of Children of Earth, is it?

The whole scene is the Doctor doing something nice for two people who have suffered horribly recently and deserve a little bit of happiness, whether that be a long term relationship or just a one-night stand.

[FlyingBeastie]

Here here

[MinaHarker]

Thank you Jason.

Zbigniev, you can't get away with being offensive by blaming it on the offended party. It doesn't work that way.

[Jason Thompson]

Overall I thought that episode was better than part 1, but still not the best episode ever by a long shot. It had some wonderful moments and performances. Bernard Cribbins was of course delightful, and I loved the idea that the Doctor survives saving the entire Universe but then dies to save one old man. It's just perfect for the character. The Master's final sacrifice was great too. Unlike part 1 it actually seemed to go somewhere, and it was nice to get an explanation for the Master's drumbeat. I also liked 'no, not the stairs! Worst rescue EVER!'

What was not so great was another example of RTD's habit of saying 'this is the end and this can never happen', and then it happens anyway. The whole of part 1 led to Donna remembering, which we were assured would burn her mind and kill her... and then it didn't, and the Doctor didn't seem remotely surprised.

The way the Doctor died also seemed odd, as he steps into yet another machine that has the amazing capability of venting radiation in a controlled manner (though the guy who designed it to vent the radiation into a room that must still have someone in it should be shot!) and absorbs the lot. Only thing is I recall him absorbing a lethal dose of radiation before (in Smith & Jones), and that only led to a comedy dance routine as he expelled it all into his shoe. OK, probably a different kind of radiation and all, but IMO it's a shame to have written such similar scenarios and give them totally different outcomes.

Now, because I know you're all expecting one or two:

From 100,000 miles up the Earth appears a LOT smaller than it did out of the window of the spaceship (Apollo astronauts could see the entire Earth out of a 9-inch round window from approximately that distance and broadcast the fact on live TV, so really someone should have known better when designing the effects shots), and switching off the power doesn't make a spaceship undetectable: we detect rocks and space junk quite easily using nothing more sophisticated than radar. Putting a planet that close to Earth would have been pretty quickly disastrous for both planets, so in retrospect maybe the Time Lords' plan to bring Gallifrey back just there might have been a bit daft.

Throwing himself out of a spaceship to crash through a glass ceiling onto a marble floor was possibly the Doctor's daftest idea ever, and soon he realises that he is not in fact a cartoon character. The green aliens also disappear as soon as they have no further function. In fact I'm not entirely sure what they were doing there anyway. Salvage? OK, but why disguise themselves and then help Naismith get the machine operational? I also still don't buy Naismith's reasons for having the machine, and the character was written purely as a cipher to explain (badly) why it was there in the first place. I could have bought his wanting to use the machine if there was actually something wrong with his daughter that the machine could fix, but just because he wanted her to live forever? Didn't ring true. And again he did nothing after he'd explained the machine.

I thought the final fifteen minutes dragged, personally. At least they were a bonus on the runtime of the episode, but even so I was clockwatching by that point, waiting for him to actually suffer the agonsiing death that his reaction to the radiation indicated might happen and which appeared to begin pretty soon after as his wounds healed.

And what were the Ood doing in there? They seemed to serve no purpose except to give the Doctor information he could have obtained elsewhere.

OK, but was never going to live up to the hype.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Zbigniev, you can't get away with being offensive by blaming it on the offended party. It doesn't work that way.

I seem to recall Mary Whitehouse being offended by pretty much anything under the sun. I also seem to recall a lot of people very much laying the blame for that at her door. I wrote quite a lot more than that but then it would just hijack the thread in rather the wrong direction. It also involved the use of the words "bum" and "sex" several more times and that could only make matters worse too

[FlyingBeastie]

Back to Jason's comment, I like to think Ten should really be called Nine because the little bugger has cheated death more times than I can recall off the top of my head:

1. Smith & Jones- Being drained of blood
2. Smith & Jones- Radiation poisoning
3. Daleks in Manhattan- Being struck by lightening
4. Stolen Earth- Being shot by a Dalek
5. End of Time part 2- Falling what looked like STORIES and crashing through a skylight from a spaceship into the Naismith house (granted, I like that the Doctor could barely move and they kept that act up throughout the whole confrontation cos' even though he didn't die, he would at least be crippled)
6. 42- Burned from the inside out
7. 42- Freezing to death
8. End of Time part 1- Being struck by lightening from the Master- and don't tell me he went easy on him cos' that lightening was powerful enough to go boom and make flames erupt from strategic places behind Tennant!!!

erm... anyone else wanna finish it off? off the top of my head these are the only ones I remember...

[JohnMan]

Howdy! John from the US here...

Personally, I really liked these final two episodes. The biggest problem I have with RTD stories is that they usually start off good and then wander into the ridiculous. I don’t believe this happened with the “The End of Time.” (Which is a thankful surprise!)

While I believe his stories have really suffered over the last year or so, I will always be thankful to RTD for bringing my favorite television show back. I am thankful for all of the hard work he has done, etc... I wanted him and Tennant to leave the show with a good episode, and I think they did mostly because RTD didn’t try to write anything too deep. He had a simple story, which would work only if the actors where able to tell it in a convincing way….which they did because the main four are great actors! (Tennant, Cribbins, Simm, Dalton)

In my opinion, this was very good stuff mostly because RTD took a step back with his stories and just let the actors tell it instead of plot/script… VERY good.

Thanks! I look forward to our new Doc…

[WhiteCrowNZ]

Yeah - the scene with Captain Jack I was too busy reeling from the whole Mos Eisley of it all!

It did feel like a great RTD scene of what ifs,

* I remember from The Writers Tale how he'd wanted to do the Shadow Proclamation as all the aliens thus far encountered as a giant police force - but there wasn't the money, so it was just the Judhoon. So he managed to get a similar gathering of new aliens for his last episode - again a signpost for the end of a legacy, with many of them part of the mythos of the new series.

* Return of Russell Tovey who RTD would have liked to go with as a future Doctor. Though of course Doctor Who's loss is Being Humans gain - nice too to see Sinead Keenan from the same series (who took me a while to recognise her - and ironically when I did she was a cactus). I wonder how many people have now done a stint in Being Human and Doctor Who now?

Sounds like there's definitely something funny afoot in the SW of the UK - you have aliens all over Cardiff, and over the toll road, ghosts werewolves and vampires in Bristol.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

By the way - the fall from the spaceship didn't kill him as of course that glass dome broke his fall.

Okay that wouldn't work in real life, but in movie language, it does, in the same way you're more invincible to bullets if you wear a vest.

[Larry]

ok Sarah Jane and Rose would of been easy to visit but what I'd like to know is how the Doctor knew where to find Martha/Mickey and Jack.

[Paul Clement]

And so the Tennat era has ended. Unfortunately, it concluded with rather more of a damp squib than it did with a bang.

The final episode hadn't so much been set up, as had been slowly meandered towards in the Christmas Day episode, but finally we were in position for the story to pick up some pace and take us on a real rollercoaster of a ride...and then it didn't. For some reason, RTD decided to slow things down again. The Earth, now fully populated by the Master, plods it's way through trying to find the Doctor once he is successfully rescued from their clutches. So, we end up with a large number of minutes of air time with the Doctor, Wilf and the Vinvotchi on the Vinvotchi ship doing very little, while the various Masters are doing very little while they try and then fail to find them. Now pardon me for asking the obvious question, but where the hell has any semblance of dramatic tension gone?
Finally, the Time Lords are brought back through from the timelocked Time War, with the reveal that the sound of drums the Master has heard since he was young have been the result of the Time Lord intervention so that they could one day save themselves. The Doctor is kicked into action to act once he realised that Time Lords are coming back, and we are offered up a Star Wars like sequence with Wilf and a Vinvotchi manning the guns of the ship as they descend upon the Earth. It's the long craved tension I've been watching, but it's not Doctor Who. Finally the Doctor drops through the glass roof and lands at the feet of the Master and the Time Lords, and then things get really bad. The Time Lords just stand there looking particularly unmenacing. It's only the Doctor's warning of their descent into savagery during the last days of the Time War that gives any real indication to the threat they pose. Queue a few moments of indecision while the Doctor holds a gun on the Master and Time Lords in repeated fashion, before the reveal that the President is in fact Rassilon. Now, this would be good if it wasn't for the fact that the novels and audios hadn't already set up the idea that Rassilon wasn't averse to the odd mad moment already, and it was a given that if the Time Lords were desparate enough to resurrect the Master during the Time War, that they would have tried to bring back the most powerful individual in their history too.
The whole resolution then took on a fainly surreal aspect as the Master finally decided to atatck Rassilon and back the Doctor up following a slur on his diseased mind and the realisation that the Time Lords wanted nothing to do with him. Now that's odd, why wouldn't they want him by their side when he was just about to try and turn every Time Lord into a version of himself. And so, the Time Lords and the Master apparently end up being forced back into the timelocked Time War, leaving the Doctor on the floor again.
Finally, we get a truly great scene in the story as the Doctor's relief at managing to come out of it all alive, despite warnings he was due to die. And then, when the four knock from the hand of Wilf comes, and the realisation that he hasn't escaped his fate after all comes to him. That was a momengt of great TV. His feelings as he realises that his life won't end defeating some menacing evil, or saving a whole world. That he has to give up his life to save one old man, and the fact that he does it. That was the highlight of the whole two-parter.
And then we move on. I get the feeling that the last part of the story wasn't so much Tennant's swansong as RTD's. We're taking on a journey as the Doctor goes to see, and save most of his former companions as well as the quite touching scene with the granddaughter of his love when he became human. These scenes were moments of pure indulgence, in exactly the same way that Journeys End had them, but it can be overlooked to some degree as we waited to say goodbye to the Doctor. Finally, the regeneration happened, and it was powerful. The Doctor's final sentiments were probably echoed by many a fan, myself included despite the poor conclduding story he was encumbered with. As for Matt Smith, well lets wait and see. Some people are already stating how good he's going to be based on a few seconds of screen time following the resolution. How can you really tell though. Even the trailer for the new series had very little dialogue from him. I'll wait patiently for the new series to begin and reserve judgement till then, in the hope that he will be great and that the Moffatt era of production will remove some of the faults that RTD seemed to be compelled to saddle most of his stories with.

[Si Hunt]

Now that's odd, why wouldn't they want him by their side when he was just about to try and turn every Time Lord into a version of himself.

You forgot the bit where, immediately after he made that threat, Rassillon countered it with his Gauntlet, showing that he could reverse the effect easily. So the Masters threat would have held no weight.

Some people are already stating how good he's going to be based on a few seconds of screen time following the resolution. How can you really tell though.

You can't - no one has really stated he's going to be good. Just expressed optimism based on what we've seen so far from the few minutes at the end of TeoT and the trailer.

Si.

[Paul Clement]

That first bit was irony. It's hard to believe that the Master had the gall to ask and assume he'd be taken back with open arms considering his first act against them. So, you wouldn't assume the Time Lords would take him back, hence the ironic ' why wouldn't they'.

[Si Hunt]

Russell said he was quite pleased/amused by the way the Master switched sides constantly during that exchange, desperate to try and come out on top! I thought that was quite good too!

Si.

[Perry Vale]

I watched it again last night, and I have to admit I under-marked it a little. I'd up my vote now from a 7/10 to a definite 8, and close to 9/10.

Having said that, it still didn't pack the emotional punch, for me at least, that TPotW did in S1. I'm an emotional guy, and can easily blub at all sorts of television/film, but this never had me shedding a tear throughout (although it was close with the Verity Newman sketch). Eccleston was the Doctor we never really got to know, Tennant the one we got to know too well (as in the Queen Bess comments elsewhere). The saddest thing about the whole thing for me was that we're never likely to see Bernard Cribbins in such a high profile role again.

[MacNimon]

What a missed opportunity. What a finale this could have been...just think, if they hadn't regenerated Jacobi's Master into John Simm, what a confrontation we could have enjoyed. Of course, Jacobi vs Dalton would have well overshadowed Tennants departure, but I felt thar RTD managed this on his own with a bit of self-indulgance in the scenes where the Doctor revisited his old friends one last time.

I\t was nice to see, but it also took away from the drama of the forthcoming regeneration. Wilf at least deserved to witness it himself, but given the explosive results it's probably just as well he didn't.

Still, it was great fun to watch and it gets 8/10 from me.

Let's hope Wilf gets to meet the 11th Doctor at least once...

[FlyingBeastie]

ok Sarah Jane and Rose would of been easy to visit but what I'd like to know is how the Doctor knew where to find Martha/Mickey and Jack.

Well, it's always been established the Doctor can see time (I mean, the red bicycle when Rose was 10 and in the TV Movie McGann talks a lot about Grace's past and supposedly knows her future) and not just the Doctor, but all Timelords can see the course of history and the future---

Which begs the question: Why the hell do they need a squawking old crone called 'The Visionary' telling them what happens in the Time War??? Dalek Caan made more sense in TSE/Journey's End but this chick had no point or purpose in being there

[WhiteCrowNZ]

Interestingly didn't David Tennant predict the future in Derren Browns show recently using auto-writing (what the soothsayer seemed to use).

I thought it kind of made sense - they obviously used someone to stare into the time vortex to "read time" and it kind of made them go a bit mad. It does have a ring of making sense to it, their mind is stuck in the time vortex, so they can predict and react to some temporal attacks from their enemies, but their sanity as with Dalek Khan is quite shredded.

Again this would also feed the idea of the Time Lords gone bad, as using someone like this as a kind of time sensitive weapon where they've lost their mind is a bit nasty.

[Stuart Wallis]

Again this would also feed the idea of the Time Lords gone bad, as using someone like this as a kind of time sensitive weapon where they've lost their mind is a bit nasty.

I wonder whether Mr. Moffatt could use this as a jumping-off point for the series; ie. having the Doctor on the run from them again, but for different reasons?

[Perry Vale]

I very much doubt it, but he could do a two-part story about the mysterious weeping angel woman called "Are you my mummy?"......

[FlyingBeastie]

I very much doubt it, but he could do a two-part story about the mysterious weeping angel woman called "Are you my mummy?"......

I believe you mean the weeping angel in the spacesuit

[WhiteCrowNZ]

I believe you mean the weeping angel in the spacesuit

Who turns out to be his wife?

[FlyingBeastie]

Who turns out to be his wife?

yup, the very same. and it turns out she's been resurrected by nano-genes.

[Paul Monk]

The way the Doctor died also seemed odd, as he steps into yet another machine that has the amazing capability of venting radiation in a controlled manner (though the guy who designed it to vent the radiation into a room that must still have someone in it should be shot!) and absorbs the lot. Only thing is I recall him absorbing a lethal dose of radiation before (in Smith & Jones), and that only led to a comedy dance routine as he expelled it all into his shoe. OK, probably a different kind of radiation and all, but IMO it's a shame to have written such similar scenarios and give them totally different outcomes.

Just a silly little thing that annoyed me and probably no-one else was the Doctor referring to the amount of radiation absorbed in rads. Rads hasn't been the accepted unit of measure of the physical effects of radiation for years. It should be grays or sieverts if he was talking about the biological effects.