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25TH DECEMBER 2009 - 1ST
JANUARY 2010
(60-MINUTE CHRISTMAS SPECIAL
&
75-MINUTE NEW YEAR SPECIAL)
To date I’ve
written almost 80,000 words on the tenth Doctor’s adventures on
television. That’s more words than you’d find in a lot of novels these
days; certainly more than you’d find in a modern Doctor Who tie-in
(and I’ve written a good few thousand words on the tenth Doctor’s
adventures in those too). Suffice it to say that I care about Ten, and
so the prospect of his demise in The End of Time filled me with as
much trepidation as it did excitement. They absolutely had to get
it right.
Most
regeneration stories have sought to mitigate the audience’s
grief by focusing on the Doctor’s cheating of death, as opposed to
one of his incarnation’s being embraced by it. Even Christopher
Eccleston’s sudden, emphatic departure was with a smile as he
welcomed the promise of a new life. However, Russell T Davies’
script for The End of Time wallows in the funerary feel that goes
hand in hand with the death of a Doctor - the only regeneration tale
to really do so, save for Tom Baker’s final adventure, Logopolis.
Like Baker’s fourth Doctor, who was haunted by the spectre of his
future self, here David Tennant’s tenth Doctor is obsessed with the
prophecy of his ending song – “he will knock four times”, and then,
presumably…
“Even if I change it feels like dying. Everything I am dies and some new
man goes sauntering away...”
But whereas the aberrantly solemn fourth Doctor was resigned to his fate,
the tenth is raging against it. Davies’ script does a marvellous job of
conveying the often-ignored fact that the Doctor can die –
regeneration is a fluke for him most of the time, particularly when it
occurs as traumatically as it usually does – and as such the Doctor isn’t
just afraid at the prospect
of his incarnation being cut short, he’s
terrified by the prospect of oblivion finally beckoning.
But
even as he sits in that café, staring
at the closest thing he has to a compan-
ion and ruminating on the possibility of
regeneration, it is clear
that the prospect
fills him with almost as much horror as
death does. It’s easy to forget that the tenth Doctor may be as young as
six years old; just a
handful of heartbeats for someone of a Gallifreyan pedigree, and probably the shortest-lived of any of the Doctor’s incarnations. And Tennant
is able to put all of this angst – the scope of this injury – into
every heartfelt line that he delivers. Even when he’s being
unceremoniously carted down a flight of stairs whilst strapped to some
bizarre contraption, or
having his arse groped by June Whitfield’s “Minnie the Menace”, the sorrow
is there to be seen in his eyes. That’s his last bum pinch. That’s his
last – and “worst” – escape ever.
“Please don’t die. You’re the most wonderful man and I don’t want you to
die.”
The End of Time
also has a brooding, contemplative quality to it that put me very much in mind of Jon Pertwee’s zen-fuelled finale, Planet of the Spiders. After recent
events on Mars, the Doctor is understandably riddled with guilt and
anguish, but even this is as nothing when compared to the skeletons from
his closet that are pulled out as the story races towards its inexorable
conclusion. And this, I feel, is why Wilfred Mott is the perfect person to
share this closing adventure with the tenth Doctor. An old soldier
approaching the end of his own life, Wilfred can at least empathise with
the Doctor’s plight, if not comprehend the magnitude of it.
And Bernard Cribbins gives the performance of his life as Wilfred stumbles
his way through the final days of planet Earth. He really gives it some welly when he’s called upon to do so – the dogfight sequence in the second
episode is absolutely riotous – but, more importantly, he gives the story its heart.
Rather delightfully, Wilfred’s patent respect and affection for the Doctor
mirrors the viewers’ own, giving us that all important anchor. This unique
bond bet-ween the two characters is wonderfully depicted, their mutual
tears often saying more than even Davies’ most eloquent dialogue ever
could.
“Is that your hand, Minnie?”
But as a brace of holiday specials, The End of Time couldn’t have been
assiduously bleak. Wilfred’s troupe of Doctor-hunting geriatrics,
“The Silver Cloak”, lend the Christmas Special just enough humour to keep
it on the right side of festive, whilst the green, spiky-headed, and
unrelentingly slapstick Vinvocci are able to squeeze enough clowning around
into the New Year’s Day episode to stop children crying into their
leftover selection boxes (during the first half of the episode, at least).
Davies’ plot is staggeringly ambitious and complex, but - for the most part
- startlingly fluent and ever so, ever so apt. The whole grand, cinematic
affair is infused with a sense of scope and majesty, typified by Timothy
Dalton’s (James Bond) suitably sonorous narration and the Ood’s disquieting bookending
of the tale.
“These events from years ago threaten to destroy this future, and the
present, and the past.
The darkness heralds only one thing – the end of time itself.”
In the foreground we have the Doctor and the Master, the last survivors of
their ancient race, both tormented in their own respective fashions. But
behind them “something vast is stirring in the dark”; an unfathomable
terror that makes even the Daleks’ recent theft of Earth look like errant mischief.
The Master’s resurrection is glorious to behold;
a gratifying reflection of The Dæmons, with the Master now being
summoned, instead of summoning. That “laughing ring” that so many speculated about following Last of the Time Lords is
now used as part
of a resplendently low-tech ceremony in order to resurrect the disembodied
renegade.
“Never dying…”
The sequence sees
Alexandra Moen reprise her role as the Master’s former wife, Lucy Saxon,
to whom fate has not been kind. Stripped of the glamour and the freedom
that she once enjoyed, the country’s former first lady is used by the Cult
of Saxon to recreate the Master’s DNA - she “bore his imprint”, evidently
- and bring him back from the dead once again.
However, though this is a far more sophisticated means of revivification
than those typically employed in the classic series (“So you escaped
from…”), I don’t think that the script was clear enough about how the
resurrection went wrong or where the
‘emo’
Master’s powers came
from. Whilst I was able to infer that his metabolism had gone into
overdrive, affording him these superhuman powers but leaving him “ripped
open” and desperately in need of sustenance, my wife was left somewhat
confounded by his tramp-munching behaviour and dramatic flashes of power
and had to resort to bombarding me with plot-related questions.
“That’s what your prophecy was: me!”
Fortunately though, she was so enraptured by John Simm’s alarming
performance that any wanting elucidation was soon of little concern to her. The
picture of mental illness painted by Simm here is frighteningly real; so
much so, in fact, that the story’s unsettling “Skeletor” shots (which I
thought were very redolent of The Deadly Assassin) came as something
a reprieve from the actor’s distressing performance! Indeed, for me Simm
out-performed even Tennant in the first half of this story.
The much-hyped Immortality Gate, however, came as something of a let down.
Its name had conjured up epic and ethereal images, and so when
it turned out to be nothing more than a high-tech alien medical device
being restored by Friar Tuck Joshua Naismith and his loopy
daughter, I felt a little deflated, to say the least.
“Breaking news. I’m everyone. And everyone in the world is me.”
By the time the Master had used the Gate to repopulate the Earth with six
billion versions of himself, I was starting to lose heart.
Last of the Time Lords had been spoiled for me by the Doctor’s
degeneration into a wizened, CG, homunculus, which I felt robbed us of
some bona fide Simm / Tennant sparring, and as its
cliffhanger approached The End of Time appeared to be pushing the
envelope to the opposite – but equally unwelcome - extreme. Granted, a
race of Masters is an extremely disturbing idea, not to mention one hell
of a pun, but it was not what I had expected or wanted from the tenth
Doctor’s final story. I wanted one Holmes, one Moriarty and one waterfall;
not John Simm and a million green screens.
But then as I waited for the howl-out to come, a question that had been
burning at the back
of my brain was suddenly and unexpectedly answered – why show us the
narrator’s face?
As this answer came, I found myself rising to my feet.
The narrator was the Lord
President
of the Time Lords!
“The Master had no concept of his greater role in events, for this was far
more than humanity’s end.
This day was the day on which the whole of creation would change forever.
This was the day...”
The logical conclusion of the Doctor’s journey in the new series, the
return of the Time Lords had always been something that I expected to
happen towards the back-end of Davies’ time as showrunner. Nevertheless,
even with the respect that I have for the outgoing production team, I
didn’t expect them to carry off the return of Gallifrey and its people
with the aplomb that they do here, and I certainly didn’t expect them to
take us back to the apex of the Last Great Time War – effectively a fan’s
wet dream. And the real beauty of it is, after five years of quality
television, every viewer is a fan now.
What I found particularly impressive is that the Time Lords are not
resurrected here in some tortuous fashion, nor is established history
subverted in some incredible manner - the Time Lords simply never died.
Whilst the Doctor believed that he ended the War by destroying both the
Daleks and Gallifrey, the Time Lords had in fact used the Master of this
story to
draw Gallifrey out from behind the Time War’s
Time Lock and into this story’s present. The
events that take place on Gallifrey here aren’t
flashbacks to the final day of the War – they’re
relatively concurrent with the events depicted
on Earth. As the Ood Elder so succinctly puts it, “Events are taking
place. So many years ago and yet affecting the now”. And so by retro-spectively
implanting that distinctive drum-beat rhythm (“A rhythm of four. The
heartbeat of
a Time Lord”) into the Master’s mind when he was a child, allowing him to
summon Gall-
ifrey from behind the War’s
Time Lock once the rhythm was strong enough (i.e. when he
was numerous enough), the Time Lords secured their permanence.
“He still possesses the Moment, and he’ll use it to destroy Daleks and
Time Lords alike.”
The opening of the second instalment is simply stunning. Since 2005 every
Doctor Who’s fan imagination has run riot, frantically trying to
conjure up images of this vast, unfathomable conflict, but never did we
think we’d see it. Yet there it is, exactly as we’d imagined: the
Last Great Time War. Prophecies. Ascension. Might have beens and never wases. The
dead rising, only to die again. Murray Gold’s This Is Gallifrey
theme underscores some exquisite shots of the Time Lords’ Citadel
encircled by an elephant’s graveyard of Dalek spaceships, whilst inside its
darkened halls Lord President Rassilon – no less cruel or despotic for his
extended stay in the Divergent Universe, it seems - consults a Pythia-like
Visionary to learn of his people’s forbidden future and take steps to
prevent it.
But as Wilfred rightly says, what’s so bad about the Doctor’s people
returning? Given his manifest grief at the loss of his race and
their planet, surely he should be pleased about the prospect of their
survival? Why don’t they just have a party? Well The End of
Time answers these questions, and in doing so it paints a picture far
more tragic than the Doctor’s earlier tales of the Time War.
“You weren’t there in the final days of the war. You never saw what was
born…
The Skaro Degradations. The Horde of Travesties. The Nightmare Child.
The Could Have Been King with his Army of Meanwhiles and Never Weres...”
Here we learn that the War affected the Time Lords, and not for the
better. The clues were there to be seen going right back to The Sound
of Drums: what kind of a race would turn
to the likes of the Master to fight their war? Or, as is revealed here, to
a tyrant like Rassilon to lead them once again? What sort of race would
attempt to enact their “final sanction” and bring about the end of all
creation, just so that they may ascend to a higher plane of reality in
order to escape the horrors that they created? It is demonstrably no
better than Davros and the Daleks’ reality bomb, and that’s why the Doctor
had to try and rid the universe of both races. Yes, he remembers the Time
Lords and what they once were with great reverence and even greater
sadness, but as their return would “herald the end of time itself” he’s
hardly going to celebrate it. In fact, the Time Lords’ actions here might
even have finally put paid to the remnants of the Doctor’s survivor guilt,
leaving incoming Doctor Matt Smith with a blank canvass to paint his
Doctor upon.
And just as Davies promised, the stakes here manage to eclipse those in
Journey’s End, not just in terms of what is at stake for the whole of
creation, but also in terms of what is at stake for the Doctor. The unseen
horrors set loose above Earth are so much more chilling
than a Dalek Empire or a contingent of Cybermen. Though we may not know what a
“Skaro Degradation” or a “Nightmare Child” is, the look on Tennant’s
face as he describes these terrors is enough to eclipse anything that
we’ve ever seen on screen in the series.
“That’s what you’ve opened; right above the Earth. Hell is descending.”
Furthermore, my Christmas fears over the many manifold Masters destroying
the intimacy of the story were ill-founded in the extreme. In fact, from
the red grass of Mount Perdition to the wastelands of London town, The
End of Time is probably the most striking and tantalisingly perfect
portrayal of the Doctor / Master relationship that I’ve ever come across.
Early on in the episode, for instance, when the Doctor is a prisoner of
the
‘prime’
Master, the two characters share a truly touching moment. The Doctor’s
“you could be beautiful” speech visibly touches the Master; after all the
years of conflict, the Doctor actually appears to have gotten
through to his old friend. From then on I was rooting for the begotten old
villain to turn his wrath upon those truly deserving of it; those that
caused the madness which has blighted his many lives and vicariously
caused the suffering and death of so many others - The Time Lords.
“Wonder what I’d be, without you?”
The climactic three-way showdown between the Doctor, the Master and
Rassilon is one of the most overwrought scenes in the history of the
series. The Master berates Rassilon with the same arrogant gusto that he
did the USA’s President Winters in The Sound of Drums, but unlike
his human counterpart there is strength behind Rassilon’s bluster. With a
flick of his gauntlet, humanity is restored, and the Master is left
cowering.
And then we have the Doctor holding Wilfred’s old service revolver in his
hand. The fact that he’s even holding a gun demonstrates just how high the stakes
are here in every possible respect, and just how agonising the Doctor’s critical
decision is going to be. Does he shoot the Master, killing the sound of
drums in his head and thus Earth’s link to Gallifrey, sending the Time Lords
and all their associated travesties back into the maelstrom of the Time
War? Or does he shoot Rassilon, and then attempt to steer his enduring
people down a different path?
“The final act of your life is murder. But which one of us?”
The scene seemed to last forever, but not in a bad way. Tennant, Simm and
particularly the venom-spitting Dalton eke out every once of tension that they possibly could have done as
the gun flits from the Master to Rassilon, and back again. And then there
is a moment; one final, Russell T Davies signature moment. The Doctor’s
own, poignant theme begins to play as one of Rassilon’s two dissenters
uncovers her face and looks straight at the Doctor. It is the same woman
that urged Wilfred to “take arms” earlier in the story; the same woman who
- in a moment of fannish fervour and with her hands covering her face - I
had taken for Paul McGann’s bushy-haired Doctor on Christmas Day.
Who is she? I don’t know. She is clearly someone dear to the Doctor;
a cousin, perhaps. Or a wife. Or maybe just an old friend or colleague;
even a former Gallifreyan President of his acquaintance. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter - she’s just another thread in the
tapestry of the mystery of the Doctor, and her mournful gaze is all that
is needed to make the Doctor’s decision for him. And who knows? Maybe the
Master’s decision too. It’s Return of the Jedi all over again…
“The time will come when you must take arms.”
With determination, the Doctor fires Wilfred’s gun at the white star
diamond anchoring the Time Lords to Earth, severing the link to behind the
Time Lock and sucking the interlopers back into the Time War to be
destroyed along with the Daleks. But as the Doctor prepares to be sucked
back into the War along with his peers, the Master strides in front of him
and uses his powers to fend off Rassilon’s fraught advance, arguably
sacrificing himself to save the Doctor’s life much like Barry Letts and
Terrance Dicks had originally envisaged all those years ago.
And if Barry Letts were here today, I’m sure he’d agree that it was a scene
worth waiting for thirty-five years for.
One bright flash later, and Gallifrey is gone. The Doctor wakes to find
that after being clipped by bullets, falling from the sky, and even
incurring the wrath of the mighty Lord Rassilon, he is still very much
alive.
But then comes the twist.
Or, I should say, the twisting of the knife.
“I’m going to die. I was told. He will knock four times.”
In the mêlée, Wilfred was trapped in the Immortality Gate’s
radiation chamber, which is just about to be flooded by radiation as the
Doctor wakes up. And, just as the Doctor starts to believe that he might
actually have avoided his prophesised demise, Wilfred knocks on the glass
to be released. Once. Twice. Three times. Four.
Euros Lyn’s direction of the Doctor’s scorching recognition is
simply transcendent. The cruel inevitability is almost overwhelming. The
Doctor has to save Wilfred, but he can only release him from his
cubicle of the chamber by entering via the corresponding cubicle and
perishing in his place. And although the arguments that Wilfred put to him
make sense – he’s old, he’s had his time, he’s not important; in short, it
isn’t worth the Doctor dying so that he can live for just a few more years
– there was never a chance that the Doctor would not sacrifice himself to
save the genial old stargazer’s life.
But that doesn’t stop him exploding with fury at the injustice of it all.
Only the good…
“This is what I get. My reward. And it’s not fair!”
David Tennant and Bernard Cribbins each deserve a BAFTA for their
performances in this bravura scene. It’s excruciating to watch but, at the
same time, masochistically compelling. The Doctor takes the old man’s
place in the chamber and prepares, for the second time in his lives, to
die a slow and painful death of radiation poisoning.
Part of me believes that the Doctor should
have
regenerated right there and then,
on the floor of
the radiation chamber. Danger, death, rebirth –
in that
order, with no messing about inbetween.
But The End of Time is more than just David
Tennant’s swansong; it’s the end of the whole Russell T Davies era, and so
I was determined to forgive nigh-on fifteen minutes of syrupy, indulgent
bumph right at the end.
“Have that on me.”
But with the best will in the world, after watching the Doctor save Martha
Smith-Jones and her new husband Mickey (!) from a Sontaran, and young Luke
Smith from his own inability
to cross the road, I was chuntering away like
there was no tomorrow. I had my head in my hands as a cheeky little
Adipose scuttled across the bar in front of Captain Jack Harkness and his latest
fancy, Voyage of the Damned’s stalwart midshipman, Alonso Frame, in
some deadbeat Cantina somewhere. Apparently no worse for wear, the Doctor
kept on showing up, saving somebody’s life (or giving them a much-needed
kick up the backside), before swanning off again to do more good deeds and
say more goodbyes.
But then came the end of Donna’s story, and suddenly I felt better
disposed towards the end of The End of Time. Travelling back in
time to borrow a pound from Donna’s late father (a lovely epitaph in
itself), the Doctor uses it to purchase a lottery ticket which he then
gives to Wilfred and Sylvia at Donna’s wedding, together with
instructions to hand it to the blushing bride. And there can’t have
been any doubt in anyone’s mind that this ticket wasn’t the
triple-rollover winning ticket. It might not’ve
been a ticket for the trip of a lifetime, but it must come
a close second for Mrs Donna Temple-Noble.
“This song is ending, but the story never ends.”
By the time Jackie and Rose appeared on my screen, my bout of cynicism had
subsided. New Year’s Day, 2005. The Powell Estate. Three months
before the ninth Doctor will meet Rose, his moribund successor tries to
pass off the final stages of radiation sickness as too much celebratory
ale as he wishes his companion-to-be a Happy New Year, masking his silent
goodbyes. Cue the waterworks.
Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the Earth of Doctor Who and
the Earth on which we all live have taken very different paths since 2005 when
the series returned (I certainly don’t recall a Dalek invasion last year,
or some madman called Saxon coming to power the year before), to
such an extent that the Earth of 2010 in Doctor Who bares little
semblance to our own. However, The End of Time at least has a
half-decent stab at giving Steven Moffat and the incoming production team a reasonably clean
slate by introducing President Obama and
the global recession into the Whoniverse. Some dialogue towards the end of
the story even refers to Sarah Jane Smith putting out a cover story to
gloss over the fleeting appearance
of Gallifrey in Earth’s skies, potentially enabling Moffat and his fellow
writers to “start small” again, should they wish to do so, and reintroduce
that unique element of terror that goes hand in hand with a plausible,
present-day threat.
“I don’t want to go.”
The regeneration itself, when it finally does come, is a feral and violent
affair. It is as if the tenth Doctor’s rage at dying so young is vented into
his regenerative energies, the excess heat setting the TARDIS interior
alright and even shattering the external windows.
“Blimey. Hair. I’m a girl. Nooo………….”
Matt Smith’s debut is short, sweet, and full of gender confusion, but
when watching The End of Time’s final scene there was never any doubt in
my mind that this young feller (and I can say that now, as for the first
time in my life, the actor playing the Doctor is actually younger than I
am. There’s a sobering thought for the new year…) is the Doctor…
though from his gun-toting, punch-throwing exploits in the trailer that
followed transmission, he looks like he might prove to be a
controversial one.
Geronimo…
To cut a 132-minute story short then, The End of Time is a
striving, exciting and thoroughly satisfying send-off for one
of the most
popular – if not the most popular – of Doctors. I
try not to be drawn into discussing favourite incarnations as
to me, they are all ultimately the same man (splendid chaps
- all of
’em),
but David Tennant has been so very superlative in the role that if I
didn’t cite him as being my favourite actor to play the part, then I’d
appear either foolish or awkward. And so I have to say, though he may have
been rude and not ginger, Tennant’s tumultuous Time Lord is one that I
fear may never be surpassed. Cue the New Man...
The final letter is
‘n’.
Then a full stop. And that’s it.
Save. Done. Good…
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