End of the Line: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series Four, Part Five

We’re back, with our new Doctor Who rewatch! Today we wrap up series four with the two-part series finale, The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End. It’s not quite goodbye to the Tenth Doctor yet…but we’re getting close. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has not seen these episodes!

The Stolen Earth: After the “Bad Wolf” scene at the end of the previous episode, the Doctor and Donna rush home to Earth, to find that it is a normal Saturday.  Yet, if Donna met Rose, that means the walls of the universe are breaking down.  They return to the TARDIS, where the Doctor’s severed hand is bubbling in its jar; outside, things begin to shake.  The TARDIS shakes violently, and the Doctor finds they are in space—but the TARDIS didn’t move; the Earth did.  It’s missing, like several planets before it.

On the other side of the universe, the Earth is intact, but rattled.  At UNIT, Martha Jones learns that the sky has changed.  In Cardiff, Torchwood Three—Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, and Ianto Jones—also notice the strange sky.  At Bannerman Road, Sarah Jane Smith checks on her son Luke, and finds it is dark outside; her computer, Mr. Smith, refers her outside for a better look.   Wilfred Mott and Donna Noble see it outside their home as well; all parties have now seen the impossible in the sky.  And on a street in London, Rose Tyler materializes, carrying a large gun.  She looks up to see other worlds looming large in the sky—twenty-six of them, to be precise.

Donna fears for her family’s lives, and the Doctor can’t reassure her.  Instead, he seeks help from the Shadow Proclamation.

Mr. Smith detects two hundred ships heading for Earth.  UNIT receives notice of a Code Red Emergency; and Martha can’t reach the Doctor by phone, as the signal is being blocked.  The fleet reaches orbit as Gwen urges her family to stay safe.  Sarah Jane detects a massive space station at the center of the worlds.  Rose evades looters, then sees a screenshot of the approaching fleet.  Martha calls Jack, and determines that no one can contact the Doctor.  They discuss a UNIT plan called Project Indigo, for which Martha is in New York.  Mr. Smith detects an incoming message from the ships, which reaches everyone on all frequencies:  “Exterminate”.  Everyone panics; the Daleks have returned.

The Dalek ships invade, attacking all over Earth and killing many people.  Geneva sends a message to UNIT, placing the Earth at war via an “Ultimate Code Red”.  Aboard the space station—the Crucible—the Supreme Dalek declares it will soon be ready, and declares the Daleks to be the masters of Earth.

The Doctor and Donna reach the Shadow Proclamation’s space station, and are confronted by its Judoon guards.  Meeting with one of the Proclamation’s leaders, he finds that 24 planets are missing, not just Earth; he probes for more information, and adds Pyrovillia, the Adipose breeding planet, and the lost moon of Poosh, bringing the total to 27.  It seems planets aren’t just disappearing from space, but from time.  The Doctor adjusts the model of the missing planets, and suddenly the worlds move into a formation that sets them up likes cogs  in a machine.  The Doctor suddenly recalls that someone once tried to move Earth before.

The Daleks disable the Valiant, causing its crew to abandon ship.  Worldwide, military bases are being targeted.  UNIT pulls Martha from her post as her base is invaded by Daleks, and sends her away with Project indigo, a teleport backpack reverse-engineered from the Sontarans; her commanding officer gives her something called the “Osterhagen Key”.  As she teleports away, Jack thinks she has died, as the backpacks lack stabilizers.  The Supreme Dalek announces that Earth has been subjugated, and a voice asks it for a progress report; it reports that the Crucible is nearly ready, and the Doctor has not been reported.  The voice belongs to a figure with a clawed hand; and he has the mad Dalek Caan in restraints.  Dalek Caan predicts that the Doctor is coming.

Donna has an odd encounter with the Proclamation leader, who is aware of the beetle that was on her back.  She announces that Donna is something new, and predicts a loss yet to come for Donna.  Donna reminds the Doctor that the bees were disappearing in recent months; the Doctor says the bees are actually from another world, and were evacuating home, but they emitted a frequency that matches the transmat that moved the planet, giving them a trail they can follow.  With that clue, the Proclamation declares war, and tries to seize the Doctor and the TARDIS, declaring that he must lead them into battle; but he dematerializes before they can act on the declaration.

The Daleks round up humanity in the streets, but Wilfred intends to fight back.  He only has a paintball gun, but he knows that he can blind the Daleks with it.  Another man tries to fight back, but the Daleks destroy the man’s home with his family in it, causing Wilfred to retreat with Sylvia.  Another Dalek catches them, and he shoots its eye, but it dissolves the paint.  Just before it can kill them, Rose destroys it from behind.  She collects them to help her contact Donna and the Doctor.

The TARDIS lands in space at the Medusa Cascade.  The Doctor reflects on coming there as a child of 90 years, to visit the rift there.  The planets aren’t there, and the trail ends.  Torchwood listens as Earth surrenders and the Daleks take control of Earth.  However, Rose hears a signal on Sylvia’s computer—a familiar voice, communicating by subwave.  Mr. Smith and Torchwood catch it as well.  The voice calls Jack Harkness down for his despair—and the image resolves into Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister (yes, we know who you are).  She can communicate with everyone except Rose, who can’t make herself heard, as Sylvia lacks a webcam and microphone.  Martha Jones joins the circuit as well; no one is aware of Rose, but Rose can see and hear everyone.  Martha says that she was teleported to her mother’s home, where the laptop suddenly activated; Harriet claims responsibility for connecting everyone, using sentient subwave software which is allegedly undetectable.  Harriet forbids Martha to use the Osterhagen Key, and focuses on the Doctor instead, despite his destruction of her career.  She sets them up as “The Doctor’s Secret Army”.  Jack realizes they can boost the phone signal using the subwave and their various systems; however, this will expose Harriet to the Daleks, but she doesn’t care about her own life—only about saving the world.  The teams connect the Cardiff rift generator (for power) to Mr. Smith via the subwave, and Martha provides the Doctor’s number; Sarah Jane initiates the call.  The TARDIS receives the signal, and the Doctor tracks the signal; but the Daleks track it to Harriet’s location.  The mysterious figure warns the Dalek Supreme about the “Children of Time”, the Doctor’s friends, who stand against them.  Rose, Wilf, and Sylvia send the number as well, adding to the signal. The Daleks burst in on Harriet.  The TARDIS takes damage, but moves one second out of phase, into the future.  Harriet transfers control of the subwave to Jack, just before the Daleks confront her, and kill her, and her signal goes dark.  Around the TARDIS, twenty-seven worlds—and one massive space station—phase into existence.  The Medusa Cascade was put out of sync with the universe, but now they have found it.  The TARDIS gets the subwave signal and makes contact with everyone but Rose, who can still see them all, but can’t make contact.  Meanwhile, the mysterious figure breaks into the subwave network on audio only, and confronts the Doctor; he is revealed to be Davros, creator of the Daleks, striking fear into the Doctor and Sarah Jane, who both remember him.

The Doctor believes Davros was destroyed in the first year of the Time War, but Davros explains that Caan rescued him via emergency temporal shift.  Since then, Davros created new Daleks from his own cells, so as to keep them pure of genetic contamination.  The Doctor breaks contact and takes off, headed for Earth.  Davros sends the Daleks to find his companions on Earth; they locate Torchwood and send an extermination squad.  Jack gets a teleport base code from Martha and uses it to activate his vortex manipulator, and teleports away with a large gun.  Seconds later, the Daleks break into the Torchwood Hub on Gwen and Ianto.  Sarah Jane leaves Luke and Mr. Smith at home to go find the Doctor.  Rose, meanwhile, contacts her own support staff, who teleport her to the TARDIS’s location.  The Doctor and Donna land in London and exit the TARDIS, and find it empty.  He sees Rose arriving, and runs toward her…only to be shot down by a Dalek.  Jack teleports in and destroys the Dalek, but the damage is done…and the Doctor begins to regenerate.  They carry him into the TARDIS.

Sarah Jane is stopped by Daleks.  Daleks enter the Torchwood Hub, where Gwen and Ianto open fire on them.  The regeneration begins.

Journey’s End:  The Doctor suddenly redirects his regeneration energy into the hand in the jar, and remains unchanged.  He explains that it is a matching biological receptacle, allowing him to siphon off the remaining energy and avoid changing after healing himself—much to Rose’s pleasure.  Mickey Smith and Jackie Tyler appear and save Sarah Jane from the Daleks, while searching for Rose.  At Torchwood, the guns are ineffective; but the bullets are seen hanging in the air, and the Daleks aren’t moving.  Ianto explains it is a time lock, developed by Toshiko Sato before her death—but, though it saves them, it traps them inside.  Suddenly the TARDIS loses power, and the Daleks teleport it to the Crucible while Sarah Jane, Mickey and Jackie watch.  Mickey explains that their teleports take a half hour to recharge.  Sarah Jane, Mickey, and Jackie surrender to the Daleks, and are taken to the Crucible as well.  Martha leaves via teleport to activate the Osterhagen Key, refusing to tell her mother what it does.  She lands in Germany, and avoids German-speaking Daleks to get to a UNIT station.  The Doctor questions Rose about the future she saw in her universe, and she admits that the stars were going out.  Therefore her team built a device to transport her here, which she could do suddenly, because the dimensions began to collapse.  She says that all the timelines seem to converge on Donna.  The TARDIS lands on the Crucible, and the Daleks call the Doctor out.  He explains that he has to go out, because these Daleks are at the height of their power, and know how to overcome TARDISes and their defenses.  The others agree to step out with him, though Donna is experiencing a strange sort of trance.

The Doctor, Rose, and Jack step out to confront the Daleks, but Donna hangs back, sensing something strange—and the door closes on her, locking her in.  The Daleks deny responsibility, but intend to destroy the TARDIS anyway; they drop it through a hatch into the Crucible’s heart, where its Z-neutrino energy will destroy the TARDIS.  Things begin to burst into flame around Donna.  The Daleks make the Doctor watch the destruction.  However, Donna sees the hand in the jar start to glow, and touches it; regeneration energy floods into her, and the jar explodes.  The hand begins to regenerate, and expands into a full figure—another Doctor?!  In ten rels, the TARDIS will be destroyed; but the new Doctor makes it dematerialize.  The Daleks believe it has been destroyed, and gloat over the Doctor.  Jack opens fire on the Dalek Supreme, which kills him; the Doctor pulls Rose away, remembering that she does not know about his immortality.  Jack winks at him as he the Doctor is escorted away.

The TARDIS is safe, and the new Doctor explains that he is different—he’s a biological metacrisis, created with some of Donna’s traits when she touched the jar.  He only has one heart, as well—part Time Lord, part human.  He reminds Donna that she is special—and realizes he can see her thoughts, and knows that she really believes she is nothing special.  He concludes that they were inevitably heading to this moment, in some kind of destiny—and it’s not over yet.

Martha reaches the station, and meets its lone guard, and gains access to the Osterhagen Key control room after disabling the guard.  She connects with the other Osterhagen stations, which are already ready.  Meanwhile, Sarah Jane, Jackie, and Mickey are added to a group of prisoners on the Crucible.  The Doctor and Rose are placed in energy cells and confronted by Davros.  The Doctor realizes that Davros, too, is a captive; he is not in charge of the Daleks, and the Doctor calls him their pet.  Davros turns toward Rose, and claims to own her; he explains that Dalek Caan prophesied her presence here.  Caan predicts fire coming.  Davros explains that Caan was driven made by his view of time in his time travels, but gained some prophetic powers.  He predicts the death of one of the “children of time”; the Doctor takes this to be Donna, believing her to be dead.  Davros reveals the Daleks’ plan:  they have built a reality bomb.

Sarah Jane and Mickey escape the prisoner group, but are forced to leave Jackie behind.  The Daleks set up a test of the reality bomb, to be used on the prisoner group.  The planets align, and the field they produce together channels Z-neutrino energy in a single stream into the Crucible’s prisoner chamber, wiping out the prisoners as though they never existed.  Jackie’s device recharges at the last second, and she teleports away to join Mickey and Rose, but is unable to save any of the others.  The test is successful.  Davros explains that it cancels the electrical field of the matter it affects, dissolving the matter.  Released into the universe, the energy will break through the Medusa Cascade’s rift; all universes will fall to the field, and literally everything—reality itself—will cease to exist.  Only the Daleks will be left.  The Dalek Supreme recalls all the Daleks to the Crucible.

Fully recovered, Jack reconnects with Mickey, Sarah, and Jackie.  Sarah Jane reveals a secret: a special gem called a Warp Star—not a true gem, but a powerful explosive.  Meanwhile, Martha connects with the other stations, and prepares to activate the device, but waits.  She intends to give the Daleks a chance to surrender.  The new Doctor has a plan as well; he has a way to reverse the explosion onto the Crucible, killing only the Daleks.  Martha appears on the screen in Davros’s chamber, where the original Doctor can also see, and explains what the key does:  It will destroy the Earth, rupturing the machinery of the reality bomb in the process.  It is a final failsafe, a form of mercy on the human race if their suffering is too great.  Martha and Rose meet for the first time in this manner.  Jack also tunes in with his group, and threatens to use the Warp Star, which is wired into the Dalek mainframe—it will destroy the entire Crucible.  Davros confronts Sarah Jane, and gloats over her.  Davros tells the Doctor that, though he abhors violence, he transforms his friends into weapons, who then sacrifice themselves for him.  Already today it’s happened, with Harriet’s death and (ostensibly) Donna’s.  The Doctor thinks over the many who have died for him and in his adventures—LINDA, the Face of Boe, Astrid Peth, Luke Rattigan, River Song, and many others—as Davros declares his final victory:  he showed the Doctor himself.

The Daleks counter both plans by transmatting Martha, Jack, and the others into the Vault with Davros.  All are imprisoned at once; and Davros orders the Supreme Dalek to detonate the reality bomb.  Detonation will take 200 rels.

The new Doctor activates his plan, and the TARDIS materializes in the Vault.  However, Davros shoots the new Doctor with a stun weapon and traps him in an energy cell.  The weapon they were carrying is destroyed, with only 19 rels remaining.  The countdown begins—but Donna shuts down the process at the last second, and reverses Davros’s stun weapon onto himself.  He sends in the Daleks to exterminate her, but she shuts them down, spewing technobabble explanations the entire time.  She reveals that the biological metacrisis that created the new Doctor ran two ways; she herself acquired some Time Lord traits, including the Doctor’s technological skill.  The real Doctor realizes that this is what the Ood meant when the referred to “the DoctorDonna”.  She deactivates the holding cells and seals the vault.  She keeps the Daleks at bay while the two Doctors begin work.  Together the three of them begin sending the planets home using the Crucible’s systems while Jack and Mickey keep Davros at bay.  Martha and rose get rid of the Daleks in the room.  Donna explains that it was Davros’s stun beam on her that activated the Doctor’s knowledge in her brain; the Doctor explains that this is what the converging timelines were leading to.  Davros is angry at Caan for misleading him; but Caan denies wrongdoing.  He admits that he saw the Daleks throughout time, was disgusted, and decreed “No More”, leading him to manipulate timelines to lead to this moment.  The Dalek Supreme breaks in, and Jack destroys it, but destroys the magnetron system in the process; only Earth remains, but the real Doctor will have to use the TARDIS to get it home.  He heads to the TARDIS.  Caan tells the new Doctor to bring about the end of all things Dalek.  He agrees; the Crucible alone is a threat even without the bomb, and the Daleks are deadly enough on their own.  They must be destroyed.  He sets the Crucible to self-destruct.  It horrifies the real Doctor, however, who would not have committed genocide.  He gathers everyone in the TARDIS, and tries to save Davros as well, but Davros refuses, and calls the Doctor the Destroyer of Worlds.  Caan’s last words tell the Doctor that “one will still die”.  They escape just as the Crucible explodes.

The Doctor calls the Torchwood hub, where Gwen answers; he also calls Luke and Mr. Smith.  Mr. Smith is to use the rift power to link the TARDIS to Earth; K9 appears and provides the necessary TARDIS basecode.  The Doctor places five companions on the panels of the TARDIS, and takes the sixth himself—as the TARDIS was designed for six pilots—and they tow the planet back to its normal orbit.  Despite some turbulence, it arrives safely.

The TARDIS lands on Earth, discharging its various occupants back to their lives.  Sarah Jane chides the Doctor for acting like a loner, when in truth, he has an enormous family on Earth.  Mickey opts to stay on this Earth, as Rose has moved on, and his grandmother in Pete’s World has since passed away.  The Doctor deactivates Jack’s vortex manipulator again, and tells Martha to get rid of the Osterhagen Key.  He then takes Rose and Jackie back to Darlig Ulv Stranden—Bad Wolf Bay—in Pete’s World.  Jackie says goodbye, and tells the Doctor about her baby, whom she named Tony.  The real Doctor tells Rose she has to go back despite her objections; he intends to send the metacrisis Doctor with her, as he cannot tolerate a version of himself that would commit genocide, and the metacrisis Doctor needs someone to keep him humane.  It’s better for Rose, as well; she will have the Doctor she always wanted, but he won’t regenerate, and will age and die with her.  The walls of the universe are closing, and the Doctor must leave with Donna; Rose is still not convinced, and she asks both Doctors what he intended to say at their last parting.  The real Doctor refuses to say, but the new Doctor whispers it in her ear; and she answers him with a kiss.  In that moment, the real Doctor and Donna depart in the TARDIS.

Donna is enjoying her new knowledge, but the Doctor is concerned.  As he watches, her mind seems to glitch repeatedly, and she falls into distress.  She knows what is happening; her brain can’t tolerate the stress of the metacrisis.  They both know they only solution.  She fears to go back; but she must.  The Doctor tells her at the last minute that he is sorry; and then he hypnotizes her, and seals away her new knowledge.  To do so, he must also seal away all her memories of him and their time together.

He takes her home, and tells Wilf and Sylvia that the knowledge was killing her.  She will be fine now, as long as she doesn’t remember.  Remembering will burn up her brain, and so they can never tell her.  To her it must all just be a story that she missed.  He gives her credit for her deeds; but she can never know that for one moment, she was the most important woman in the entire universe.  Sylvia insists that she still is; and he tells her that perhaps she should tell Donna that sometimes.  Donna awakens and walks in, and the Doctor briefly introduces himself as John Smith, then slips out, noting that she safely does not remember him.

It is raining outside as he leaves.  Wilfred asks the Doctor what he will do now; he promises to watch out for the Doctor, and to keep his secret from Donna, but to remember on her behalf.  The Doctor departs in the TARDIS.

In my opinion, this story is and remains the best series finale to date. It does, I admit, have some stiff competition; Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways is very good, as is Utopia/The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords. Eleventh Doctor series finales are good, but don’t seem to have as much punch as this one, in my opinion. It helps that we get nearly every major cast member from not only the revived Doctor Who, but also Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures; if there’s going to be the proverbial fanwank, this is a good way to do it. Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, and Ianto Jones fill out the roster for Torchwood (as this story comes after the deaths of Owen Harper and Toshiko Sato). Sarah Jane Smith, her son Luke, the computer Mr. Smith, and K9 stand in for The Sarah Jane Adventures. From Doctor Who, of course we have the Doctor and Donna; but we also get appearances from Martha Jones, Rose Tyler, Jackie Tyler, Mickey Smith, Wilfred Mott, Sylvia Noble, Francine Jones, Harriet Jones (I am beginning to think the DW universe only has three last names…), the Daleks, and Davros, as well as Jack, Sarah Jane, and K9.

Many story arcs are revisited and/or concluded here, from the very minor to the critical. Harriet Jones dies in this story, though she goes out in the most honorable way possible, having fully redeemed herself; it’s also the final instance of the “Yes, we know who you are” running joke that pertains to her (even the Daleks make the joke!). Rose makes her final appearance in the current timeline, though we’ll see an earlier version of her briefly in an upcoming episode. Martha makes her final major appearance, though she too will get a brief appearance in an upcoming story. K9’s final appearance is here, though he persists on The Sarah Jane Adventures. We finally get to see the Shadow Proclamation onscreen, and they’re kind of useless. The Cult of Skaro meets its final end in the reappearance and subsequent death of Dalek Caan. The series arc—regarding the disappearing planets and the missing bees—is resolved, and the planets are ultimately restored. The Doctor’s severed hand is resolved, in the form of the Metacrisis Doctor—this is perhaps the longest-running plot, covering three seasons and a season of Torchwood. An explanation is finally given for the TARDIS console room layout (and the Doctor’s bad piloting)—it is meant for six pilots, which had been hinted before, but not confirmed. Donna’s story arc reaches its end, drawing in threads all the way back to The Runaway Bride, although she will get a coda of sorts in The End of Time. Mickey returns from Pete’s World, though Jackie and Rose stay; he too will get an upcoming cameo, but is otherwise finished. The ongoing thread regarding the Doctor’s conflict—that he claims to be a man of peace, but shapes his companions into suicidal weapons—reaches its resolution here.

There’s been an escalating series of threats in each series finale to this point. The Parting of the Ways sees the Daleks threaten Earth of the future, and destroy a great part of it. Doomsday doubles the threat by adding the Cybermen to the Daleks, and threatening two worlds. Last of the Time Lords makes it a universal threat by putting the Master in charge of a universe-conquering fleet. This story takes one look at those, scoffs at them and calls them amateurs, and decides to crank up the threat to the ultimate heights by threatening existence itself. It’s a fantastic story, but it creates a problem: Where do we go from here? Indeed, the next several finales will hover around this level. The End of Time (not a true finale, but serving as one for the upcoming specials) also threatens existence, but through time rather than space. The Big Bang does the same, but from the beginning of time rather than the end. The Wedding of River Song does the same, but by attacking causality instead of a point in time. The Name of the Doctor capitalizes on that concept by attacking the Doctor as a specific form of causality. Once we get to the Twelfth Doctor, we get a bit of a reset, and go back to smaller threats, because honestly, what’s left at that point? We’ve exhausted the universal threats for now, I think. This is, to put it bluntly, as extreme as it gets.

I have to give credit to Catherine Tate and David Tennant for their acting skills here. Both were required to play two parts here—their usual characters, and the hybrid versions. Both pulled it off flawlessly. Tate absorbs the Doctor’s phrasing and mannerisms as if they were her own. Tennant does the same, and adds a degree of shock at himself—he’s stunned that he’s behaving this way, it seems. In a performance of this size, it would be easy to lose those details in the multitude of scenes that had to be filmed, but they never miss a beat.

Some noteworthy things about this story: The Stolen Earth is the 750th episode of Doctor Who since its premiere in 1963. It also technically contains the Doctor’s eleventh regeneration, though that is unclear at this point, as the War Doctor had not been revealed; either way, he uses up a regeneration without actually changing here. As that regeneration is the cliffhanger between the two episodes, there is no “Next Time” preview; this had only happened once previously, in Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel. The opening credits had a record six names: David Tennant, Catherine Tate, Billie Piper, Freema Agyeman, John Barrowman, and Elizabeth Sladen. Several other guest stars are credit over the opening scene. Oddly enough, Bernard Cribbins (Wilfred Mott) and Jacqueline King (Sylvia Noble) are not so credited. Richard Dawkins makes an appearance as himself; he already has a tangential connection to Doctor Who, in that he is married to Lalla Ward, aka Romana II, who was previously married to Tom Baker. Adding to the coolness factor, Ward and Dawkins were introduced by Douglas Adams. The Time War is noted to be time-locked; I am not sure, but I think this is the first time the term is used. It actually appears twice; the Torchwood Hub is time-locked as a final defense measure, developed by Toshiko Sato before her death. Part two, Journey’s End is the longest season finale episode to date, at 65 minutes in its uncut version.

There are far too many continuity references to mention here, which is to be expected in a story of this type. However, a few that are easy to overlook: There have been references to the Medusa Cascade as a possible destination for the Doctor for some time, beginning in Last of the Time Lords. Jack’s gun (used against the Daleks) is the same one he carried in The Parting of the Ways. The Doctor’s disabling of Jack’s vortex manipulator is practically a running joke by now; it began in Last of the Time Lords, and will continue until The Day of the Doctor. The Doctor mentions someone trying to move the Earth a long time ago; this is intended to refer to the Daleks in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, but also happened at the hands of the Time Lords in The Mysterious Planet. The Doctor makes an early reference to the Nightmare Child, which will be repeated in The End of Time. Most of the missing planets were only mentioned this season, but Woman Wept was first mentioned in Series One’s Boom Town; its freezing oceans, unexplained at that time, were probably connected to its relocation here. Callufrax Minor, another missing planet, may be a reference to Calufrax, which became a component of the Key to Time in The Pirate Planet. The Doctor and Rose hint that Gwen looks familiar, a reference to Gwyneth from The Unquiet Dead, to whom Gwen is ostensibly related. The entire story is a sort of answer to Genesis of the Daleks, where Davros said he would destroy all life for the sake of the power it gave him; here, he tries to do just that. The reality bomb’s function is similar to the Valeyard’s partical disseminator (The Ultimate Foe), which is an interesting coincidence, given that many fans speculated that the Metacrisis Doctor would become the Valeyard. (I, for one, am in that camp, and would love to see that happen.)

Overall: Not the best season (though by no means bad!)—that honor still goes to series three—but by far the best finale. I could watch this one over and over. If you’ve not yet watched it, give it a try.

Next time: We move into the “year of specials”, in which there is no full series, but simply four consecutive specials. I intend to tackle each one separately, giving us a little more time with the Tenth Doctor. We’ll begin with The Next Doctor. See you there!

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; Links are below.

The Stolen Earth

Journey’s End (part 1)

Journey’s End (part 2)

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Entities and Alternate Timelines: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series Four, Part Four

We’re back, with our new series rewatch! Today we’re continuing Series Four, with this series’ companion-lite and Doctor-lite episodes, Midnight and Turn Left. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has not viewed these episodes!

Midnight:  The Doctor and Donna are vacationing on the crystalline planet of Midnight. The planet is flooded with x-tonic radiation, which will kill any living thing; therefore everything must be sealed in airtight facilities.  Donna is relaxing by an indoor pool, while the Doctor leaves on a bus tour to see the Sapphire Waterfall.  What could possibly go wrong?

The bus’s other passengers include a Professor Hobbes, going along to study the waterfall; Hobbes’ assistant, Dee Dee; the Cane Family, composed of Val, Biff, and their son Jethro; a businesswoman named Sky Silvestry, and a hostess (whose name is not given).  The bus is diverted to an alternate route due to a diamond fall on the road; the route will take about four hours.  The Doctor disables the bus’s rather irritating video entertainment system, forcing the passengers to talk to each other.  He enjoys the conversation himself, though sometimes confusing his travel companions with talk of other universes.  Dee Dee at one point talks about the lost moon of Poosh, which she has researched, leading to her selection by Hobbes as his assistant (although he essentially uses her as an errand girl).  Hobbes gives an impromptu presentation (complete with visuals!) about the planet Midnight, which has no known native life due to the radiation.  The strange circumstances mean that no one has really ever set foot on the planet; even the resort is prefabricated, having been landed intact on the planet.

The bus stops early, for reasons unknown.  The Doctor uses his psychic paper to pose as an agent of the resort’s insurance company, and gets into the cockpit.  The driver and mechanic insist there is nothing wrong with the bus, and they cannot account for the stop.  They open the window’s outer shutter briefly to check the landscape; it is beautiful but barren.  However, the mechanic believes he sees something approaching, before the shutter closes.  They have summoned a rescue vehicle, however, and now the passengers must wait.  The Doctor calms the other passengers, and assures them they will be safe; the bus uses an air recycling system, so they will not run out while they wait.

Something knocks on the hull. The Doctor calms everyone again, and Biff knocks on the door to show that the structure is sturdy; the knocking from outside repeats his pattern.  Hobbes insists nothing can be out there, but no one believes him, and they begin to panic as the knocking continues.  It moves around the hull, finally reaching a now-hysterical Sky.  It ends with a dent in the door beside her, and the lights go out; the bus rocks violently.  A screen comes on behind the Doctor briefly shows an image of Rose Tyler trying—and failing—to get the Doctor’s attention.  The hostess gives out flashlights, and Biff notices that the seats near Sky have been ripped up; Sky herself seems traumatized.  The hostess tries to check on the driver and mechanic, but when she opens the door, she finds the cabin has been ripped off, and radiation is outside.  She manages to close the door before anyone can be hurt.

The Doctor checks on Sky, who begins behaving strangely.  She repeats what anyone says to her.  The Doctor tests her on harder phrases, and finds she can do even lengthy statements perfectly, even if speaking over the other person.  The Doctor speculates that she has been taken over by the entity that was outside on the hull.  By now, as the backup generator comes on and the lights return, Sky is speaking simultaneously with everyone who speaks.  The other passengers want to throw her out, but the Doctor stops them; he thinks the entity is learning.  The passengers turn on him a bit when he won’t reveal his name or world of origin; they suggest throwing him out too if her interferes.  Suddenly, Sky stops repeating everyone else, and only focuses on the Doctor.  He suddenly realizes that now she is saying his words before he says them.

He is now the one doing the repeating, though he seems to be fighting it.  The passengers argue about whether the entity has possessed him, or whether—as he had previously suggested—it is simply stealing his voice.  They decide to throw the Doctor out, as Sky—with the Doctor repeating—encourages them; and Biff and Hobbes drag him to the door.  Sky seems to have recovered somewhat now, and tells them that the entity gets inside human heads.  The hostess catches her out, though; she is using phrases (Allons-y and Molto Bene) peculiar to the Doctor, indicating the entity is still in her, and she has in fact stolen the Doctor’s voice.  Sky realizes that she knows.  The hostess grabs Sky and sacrifices herself to drag the woman out the door and into the radiation, killing them both.

As the Doctor slowly recovers, the passengers wait in awkward tension for rescue.  As the rescue bus arrives, he realizes that no one knew the hostess’s name.  He meets Donna at the resort, though sadly.    Later they talk about the creature, what it was and where it come from, whether it lived or whether there are more.  He decides to inform the resort owners, and to suggest that they leave Midnight permanently, giving it back its peace.  Donna asks the Doctor what it was like without a voice, and he replies with “Molto bene”; she repeats the words, startling him, and he asks her never to do that.

Midnight takes home the trophy for “Creepiest Doctor Who Episode”. The classic series never really tried for this type of psychological horror (although they did try to be scary in other ways on multiple occasions), and though the revived series sometimes tries, it has yet to top this masterpiece. It’s consistently one of the highest recommended episodes of the revived series, and it’s not hard to see why. If I had to compare it a movie, the one that leaps to mind is M. Night Shyamalan’s Devil, but without the twist ending; Shyamalan’s movies catch a lot of flak, and that one is no exception, but I’m talking about its premise more than the execution. Like this episode, it involves several people trapped in a small space with inconsistent lighting…and one is not at all what he or she seems. I do think this episode does it better, however.

It’s not often we get to see the Doctor actually overwhelmed by a situation. He usually has a trick up his sleeve, or knowledge that someone else is in a position to use, or…something, anything. Let’s be completely honest, though: Here, the Doctor loses. His usual methods are wrong; there’s no saving or negotiating with the disembodied creature. He’s caught completely off guard when it takes hold of him, and he is completely stripped of anything that might be used to get him out of the situation. There’s no TARDIS, no companion, nowhere to run; he has no knowledge of the thing he’s fighting. The only reason—the ONLY reason—that he survives at all is that someone else sacrifices herself. At the end, he is haunted by all of this, and carries that trauma out of the episode.

The Midnight entity—for lack of a better term—fascinates me. We often get disembodied villains and possessions in Doctor Who, but we usually get some resolution. We know, for example, the origins of the Warp Core in Dust Breeding, and we know what came of it. As for the Midnight Entity, we just…don’t know. Where did it come from? Is it native to the planet? Was it always disembodied? What did it want? It seems to want people to die in the radiation, but why? What’s in it for the entity? Does it have a plan? Did it survive when its host died? We just have no idea. Perhaps it’s better that way; not every mystery has to be solved—that’s good storytelling. But I can’t help wondering anyway.

This is the first “companion-lite” episode, unless one counts Love and Monsters, in which both Rose Tyler and the Doctor only appeared briefly. We’ve had a few Doctor-lite episodes thus far, and will have one again with the next episode. I can’t complain; Donna’s reactions to things have been carefully cultivated all seasons, and her peak, if you will, is about to happen in the next episode; this situation would have required too much from her, and would have made the next episode feel anti-climax by comparison. This episode feels very brief; it moves quickly, and there’s enough tension to make you forget the time, so it feels like it passes quickly. That’s okay, though; the story is told perfectly in the allotted time. It is and remains one of my favorite episodes, and competes with Turn Left and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead for best story of Series Four, in my opinion.

Some continuity references: The Doctor has encountered endangered shuttle buses on alien worlds before (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) and will again (Planet of the Dead). Rose appears on a screen, but the Doctor misses it; she appeared as such before (The Poison Sky; this is also part of the series arc). The mention of the lost moon of Poosh is a part of the series arc, soon to be resolved. The Doctor knocks four times on the bus wall, a bit of early foreshadowing of his regeneration (Planet of the Dead for the first mention of the related prophecy, and The End of Time for the regeneration); this also echoes the Master’s drumbeats, as he demonstrated in The Sound of Drums by knocking on the tabletop. He mentions a friend in a different universe (Rose in Doomsday; the wiki also suggests this could refer to Romana in E-Space in Warrior’s Gate). He mentions previous companions Rose, Martha, Donna (still current, of course), as well as the TARDIS and the Medusa Cascade (which has been mentioned many times, and will be seen in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End). He uses his John Smith alias (many past appearances), but to less than stellar success. Not continuity, but worth noting: Professor Hobbes is played by David Troughton, son of Second Doctor actor Patrick Troughton (no relation to this episode’s director, Alice Troughton). This is not his first appearance; he appeared at a young age for a cameo in The War Games and in The Curse of Peladon, and has voice acted often for Big Finish Productions. Had this episode been aired as originally planned (as #8 of the series), it would have been the fiftieth story of the revived series; The War Games, Troughton’s first appearance, was the fiftieth story of the classic series. Unfortunately the order was changed, though it remains the fiftieth revived-series story to be filmed. This episode also does not feature the TARDIS, either inside or outside, the first since Genesis of the Daleks to not include it.

Turn Left:  In an alien marketplace, a fortune teller reads predicts Donna’s future.  In the process, she discovers the event that led to Donna meeting the Doctor.  She mentions being in the car with her mother at a T-intersection; Sylvia tried to persuade Donna to turn right to seek a permanent job, but Donna chose to turn left and go to her newly-acquired temp job at H.C. Clements, where she would later meet the Doctor.  The fortune teller asks what would have happened if she turned right, and Donna feels something crawl onto her back.  Under the fortune teller’s power, the past changes, causing a truck to cut off Donna’s route momentarily; in that time, Sylvia persuades her, and she turns right instead of left.

The next scene shows the Christmas party at Donna’s new job, when the Racnoss Webstar attacks.  The Webstar is destroyed by the army, though without the superlaser that was originally used at the behest of Harold Saxon; many people die.  One of the partygoers notices something terrible on Donna’s back.  Donna runs to the Thames, near where the Webstar attacked, and sees UNIT removing a body—the Doctor’s body, as he drowned in the flood that killed the embryonic Racnoss.  Rose Tyler appears and inquires about the body, seeming stunned that it was the Doctor, despite Donna’s reassurances; she disappears moments later.

Months later, Donna loses her job; the company is floundering because the Thames remains closed off, cutting them off from several major business contacts.  The Royal Hope Hospital is transported to the moon; when it reappears, the lone survivor, medical student Oliver Morgenstern, describes the events, including the death of fellow student Martha Jones.  A woman named Sarah Jane Smith had saved the situation and stopped the out-of-control MRI weapon, but had died doing so, along with her son and several young associates.  Rose appears again and tells Donna to go to the country for Christmas, and surreptitiously gives her the means to do so.

Donna accepts the advice, and takes Sylvia and Wilfred away for the holidays.  On Christmas morning, the news shows the starship Titanic crashing onto Buckingham palace, destroying most of the city.  The maid comes in and sees something on Donna’s back, but reports it in Spanish, which Donna does not speak.

Now refugees due to the radiation from the crash, Donna and her family move to a refugee village in Leeds, where they share a house with two other families.  Crisis aid from America fails to arrive when sixty million Americans are turned into juvenile Adipose.  Later on, Luke Rattigan and the Sontarans activate the ATMOS system, poisoning the atmosphere.  Donna is accosted by a soldier who sees something on her back, but he releases her upon finding nothing.  Rose meets her again, and tells her that Torchwood is on the Sontaran ship.  Jack Harkness’s team clears the air with an atmosphere converter, but dies in the process, and Jack—who is immortal—is captured by the Sontarans.  Rose refuses to identify herself, but says that she has crossed reality; she explains that in an alternate reality, Donna saved the Doctor’s life, preventing all of the intervening tragedies.  The darkness now looming threatens all universes, not just this one.  Donna leaves, but Rose tells her she will be needed—and has three weeks to decide.  She warns Donna that coming with her means Donna will die.

Over the next few weeks, England degrades into a form of martial law.  The Italian family in Donna’s house is sent to a labour camp, horrifying Wilfred, who lived through the end of World War II.  That night, through his telescope, he sees that Orion is missing from the sky, and other stars are disappearing.  Donna finds Rose and agrees to join her.

At a UNIT base, Rose shows Donna the TARDIS, which is dying without the Doctor.  She places Donna in a circle of mirrors and lights, which is augmented with technology from the TARDIS.  When she switches on the lights, Donna can finally see the creature on her back: a giant beetle.  Rose calls it a “Time Beetle”, which feeds off of changes it induces in time.  Donna wants it gone, but it can’t be removed; to get rid of it, she must travel in time.  It is not only the beetle that is bending reality, but Donna herself.  Rose places her back in the circle of mirrors, which is a rudimentary time machine (as the TARDIS cannot be used).  Donna says she understands about dying now—if she changes her past, the entire world will cease to exist, to be replaced by the Doctor’s world, which is better.  Rose simply says “I’m sorry”, and sends Donna back in time.

Donna arrives four minutes prior to the decision at the intersection, and half a mile away.  She heads that direction, but realizes she won’t make it.  She sees the truck that intervened coming toward her, and realizes what Rose meant about her death; and she steps in front of the truck.

As Donna dies, Rose appears and gives her a message for the Doctor.  Donna’s younger self sees the traffic that is now backed up, and turns left instead of right.

With the timeline restored, Donna awakens in the fortune teller’s stall, and sees the time beetle fall off of her back and die.  The terrified fortune teller flees the booth.  The Doctor enters the booth and finds Donna, who hugs him, though she doesn’t know why.  He examines the beetle, and says that it is part of the Trickster’s Brigade; usually it would only affect one person, and the universe would compensate.  In Donna’s case, the changes affected the whole universe, forcing an alternate timeline. It’s not the first coincidence about Donna, and the Doctor muses on others, concluding that she and he are somehow linked.  She downplays herself, but he calls her “brilliant”, which triggers her memory of Rose’s message.  He recognizes Rose from Donna’s description, and the words that she gave to Donna:  “Bad Wolf”.  Suddenly terrified, the Doctor runs into the square, and sees the words “Bad Wolf” everywhere, even on the TARDIS.  Inside, the console room is glowing red, and the cloister bell is ringing.  The Doctor tells Donna that it is the end of the universe.

I like to think of Turn Left as Doctor Who Unbound for television. It’s the revived series’ first “what if…” scenario, unless one wishes to count Father’s Day (I personally don’t; I consider that episode a closed loop within the regular universe, not an alternate universe). We face the question of “What if Donna never saved the Doctor from the flood that defeated the Racnoss?” It goes on to highlight all the major threats to Earth since that time (The Runaway Bride), and how they played out without the Doctor. It also neatly eliminates all of the Doctor’s allies and potential allies, showing just how much the Doctor influenced their lives. Torchwood 3 (under Jack Harkness) dies defeating the Sontarans (The Poison Sky), with the immortal Jack taken captive by the Sontarans; Sarah Jane Smith and her entourage from The Sarah Jane Adventures die along with Martha Jones in the Royal Hope Hospital (Smith and Jones). UNIT continues to exist, but is severely damaged in the crash of the Titanic (Voyage of the Damned). It’s an interesting parallel with the series four finale, where all of those individuals will make guest appearances.

All of the Tenth Doctor’s companions are, at one time or another, called upon to sacrifice themselves, though it doesn’t always work out that way. For Rose, it’s mostly metaphorical; she sacrifices her happiness and her life with the Doctor by being transported to Pete’s World in Doomsday. For Martha, it’s more literal, as we’ll see in the series four finale, although it doesn’t get carried out; she also put her life on the line for a year in Last of the Time Lords. Donna, who is perhaps the most purely loyal companion of the three, literally sacrifices her life here, by dying so that history can be saved. She embraces it with eyes open, too; she has three weeks of warning that she will die. It’s hard to continue on that path of increasing intensity, therefore future companions of the Eleventh Doctor will subvert the trope; Clara, for instance, will sacrifice herself countless times through her various “shadows”, and then will ultimately be unable to sacrifice herself. Amy and Rory will several time play with the concept of sacrificing themselves not for the Doctor, but for each other. River is in the unique position of being a (sort of) companion of the Tenth Doctor as well as the Eleventh; with the Tenth Doctor, she played it straight and literal, sacrificing her life to save his, but with the Eleventh, it will be subverted, as he sacrifices his regeneration energy (representative of his life, as he points out) to fix her after saving her life from the Weeping Angels. (There may be better examples, as well—something something Pandorica—but I’m short on time and that is the one that comes to mind.)

If Midnight is creepy, Turn Left is ominous. It constitutes this series’ Doctor-lite episode. It’s a great setup for the series finale, and it accomplishes that while working in an alternate universe. It was a great bit of misdirection, as well (or at least it would have been, if not for the “next time” clips broadcast at the end). Rose’s brief appearances throughout the season could easily have been viewed as leading up to this episode, not the finale, as she has extensive appearances here; the fact that she is also in the finale could have been completely hidden until broadcast (again, if not for the next time clips). The episode does foreshadow the finale quite well—you miss a good part of the experience if you only watch the finale and skip this episode—as well as tying in with the spinoffs in progress at the time (Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures). I’ve picked at the episode’s logic with regard to the alternate universe’s events, but I can’t find any flaws to criticize; if anyone else can find a place where it breaks down, I’d like to know.

Continuity references: I’m going to skip the obvious references to episodes in this series, which admittedly is most of them. To mention them would be to spoil it for people who don’t care for that. Other than those: The Trickster’s Brigade appears in more depth in The Sarah Jane Adventures, which foreshadow this episode to some degree (Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?) There are parallels with Father’s Day, where someone Rose knew dies in her presence to repair a timeline. The Bad Wolf messages are seen again, for the first time since Bad Wolf, though they were mentioned in Doomsday. The Cloister Bell is heard again (Logopolis, et al). Lucius Dextrus mentioned something on Donna’s back in The Fires of Pompeii; that episode is not included in the list of changes here, though perhaps it should be, as the volcano only erupted because of the Doctor and Donna. The Time Beetle resembles and functions like the Eight Legs of Metebelis III (Planet of the Spiders). The circle of mirrors resemble the one used to reveal the Mara in Kinda. The Doctor’s death and the resultant problems is a bit of a recurring theme (Blood Heat, Final Genesis, The Wedding of River Song). It’s worth mentioning that Harold Saxon, aka the Master, is not included among the list of catastrophes that the Doctor was not present to prevent; he was not present to release the Master from his altered form at the end of the universe, meaning Saxon never arose.

Overall: Two great episodes, filling out a great second half to the series. There’s a definite progression in seriousness throughout the series, and these episodes fit right in, and set us up well for the finale.

Next time: We’ll see the series four finale with Stolen Earth and Journey’s End! See you there.

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

Midnight

Turn Left

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Return of the Master: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series Three, Part Five

We’re back, with our new Doctor Who rewatch! This week, we wrap up Series Three with the revived series’ first three-part story: Utopia, The Sound of Drums, and Last of the Time Lords! We’ll say goodbye to Martha (for now), and hello to another classic villain. Let’s get started!

One quick note: Beginning next week, I’ll be changing up the format of these posts to eliminate spoilers as much as possible. (I can’t promise there won’t be any at all; that’s the nature of a review—but we’ll eliminate the plot summaries, at least.) However, I opted not to begin with this week’s post, as today’s post marks the end of Series Three, just as yesterday’s post wrapped up the Destiny of the Doctor audio series. So, for today, we’ll continue as we’ve been doing, and institute the changes on Monday. Thanks again!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has not seen these episodes!

As previously seen in Boom Town, the TARDIS returns to the Cardiff spacetime rift to refuel—a shorter process than last time, as the rift has been active. Jack Harkness runs to the TARDIS and grabs onto the outside as it dematerializes. Something goes wrong inside the ship, and it begins to hurtle toward the end of time, finally coming to rest in the year 100 trillion (or perhaps beyond)—further than the Time Lords ever dared to go. Outside, Martha and the Doctor find Jack, who is dead from his exposure to the vortex—until suddenly, he revives. After some uncomfortable reintroduction, the trio sees a man running from garish humanoids, the Futurekind. They rescue him, but are forced to abandon the TARDIS and run themselves, ending up inside the nearby, human-occupied Silo base.

Inside, they meet an elderly man called Professor Yana, and his insect-like assistant, Chantho. They are welcomed warmly, as the Doctor is also a scientist; Yana eagerly enlists him to help with the final hurdles on his work in progress. There is a massive rocket inside the Silo, with a majestic purpose: it will carry the last humans to Utopia. Yana means it literally; there is a signal coming to them across the dying stars, calling the humans to a home where, hopefully, they will find a way to survive the end of the universe. The Doctor asks a departing patrol to recover the TARDIS, and sets to work, while Martha gets to know the humans and Chantho, who is the last of her kind.

While the Doctor and Jack work on some electronics near the rocket, the TARDIS arrives, and Martha assists Yana and Chantho. He tells her his life story, and of the memories he lost before he was found by the last humans. He shows her a fob watch that was found with him; and to her horror, Martha recognizes it as a chameleon arch receptacle, much like the one the Doctor possesses. Meanwhile, it is revealed that Jack cannot die, or at least not permanently, and he goes into an irradiated chamber to make repairs needed for the rocket. He survives, but as he comes back, Martha arrives. She tells the Doctor and Jack about the fob watch, theorizing that Yana is a Time Lord in disguise, a survivor of the Time War like the Doctor. Unbeknownst to them, the comm channel is open, and Yana can hear them; and their words stir memories in him. As the Doctor gets the rocket running, and it loads up and blasts off, Yana overcomes the watch’s perception filter and opens it…and learns his true identity: the Doctor’s old friend and nemesis, the Time Lord called the Master. At that moment, Martha reminds the Doctor of the Face of Boe’s last words: You Are Not Alone…YANA.

The Master locks the lab door, with the TARDIS inside with him. He opens the front gate, allowing the Futurekind inside to ravage the base. Chantho, appalled, stands up to him, and he electrocutes her; but before she dies, she shoots him. He enters the TARDIS, taking with him the an item from Jack’s travel bag: a container that holds the Doctor’s hand which was severed by the Sycorax. Just as the Doctor, Martha, and Jack get the lab door open, he locks the door, then regenerates, becoming young again. He taunts the Doctor, then leaves in the TARDIS, leaving them to die as the Futurekind break in.

In The Sound of Drums, the Doctor, Martha, and Jack materialize on 2007 Earth, courtesy of Jack’s vortex manipulator. He reveals that the Master will be here; as the Master was leaving in the TARDIS, the Doctor used the sonic screwdriver to fuse the controls so that it can only travel between 100 trillion and 2007, give or take a year or two. Martha realizes where she has heard his voice before: he is Harold Saxon, a politician with a recent and sudden rise to power—and today, he is assuming the position of Prime Minister. They see him on television making a speech; not only is he Prime Minister, but he has married a human woman, Lucy, as well. At 10 Downing Street, the Master meets with his new cabinet, and promptly kills them all with poison gas.

Martha takes Jack and the Doctor to her apartment, and they research Saxon’s rise to power. At Downing Street, a reporter meets with Saxon’s wife, Lucy, and confronts her with evidence that Saxon is not who he seems; Lucy admits it, and is in on it. Saxon enters the room, and summons several spherical robots, which kill the reporter in dramatic fashion.

The Doctor questions Martha about what she knows about Saxon, but her answers are vague, and he catches her tapping out a four-beat rhythm with her fingers. Saxon comes on the television, and they realize he is aware of them and targeting them; they escape just ahead of an explosion in the apartment. Against the Doctor’s will, Martha calls her family, not knowing they are being monitored by Saxon’s people; they try to get her to come home. She takes the Doctor and Jack to the house, where they see Saxon’s people take her parents into custody (and later her sister as well), and shoot at them. They escape, but barely. They abandon the vehicle, and Martha calls her brother, but Saxon breaks in on the call. The Doctor talks to him, and tells him how the Time War ended; he explains how he escaped. He reveals he can track them via security cameras, and they are forced to run again.

The ball-shaped creatures are the Toclafane, and they have an agreement with the Master. It will be executed at 8:02 the next morning. Meanwhile, the Doctor explains about the Master’s insanity and broken childhood, and Martha explains about the ubiquitous Archangel cell phone network, which has implanted the four-beat drumming sound in everyone’s mind. The Master himself hears that sound, and has since childhood, and it is what has driven him mad. The Doctor alters three TARDIS keys into perception filters so that they can travel unnoticed.

The Master has announced on television that the Toclafane have made contact, and will arrive in the morning. The US president arrives and assumes control of the situation under UN authority. He relocates to UNIT’s flying aircraft carrier, the Valiant, and the Master and Lucy join him there. The Doctor, Martha, and Jack sneak aboard with the vortex manipulator. They find the TARDIS aboard, but it has been transformed into a paradox machine—a device for maintaining an otherwise-unstable paradox.

When the Toclafane arrive, they will only deal with the Master. He orders them to kill the president, and resumes control. He captures the Doctor, Jack, and Martha, having been unaffected by the perception filters. He kills Jack, with his laser screwdriver—an improvement over the sonic, allegedly—and gloats about getting to do so repeatedly. He brings in Martha’s family to watch his victory. He reveals that he funded Richard Lazarus’s experiments in aging, then engineered the technology into the screwdriver. He uses the screwdriver to age the Doctor into an old man. He activates the paradox machine, opening a massive rift to the future in the sky, and billions of Toclafane pour through; he orders them to kill one-tenth of the population. Unseen, Jack revives and gives Martha his vortex manipulator, and she teleports away.

In Last of the Time Lords, a year has passed. The Master has built a fleet of ships, and is preparing to send them out to conquer the universe. Each one has the power to create a black hole, destroying any opposition. He plans to create a new Gallifrey and a new empire, forged in his image. Earth is enslaved and largely ruined. Aboard the Valiant, the Doctor, with Martha’s family and Jack, surreptitiously stages an attack on the Master, but it fails.

Martha has walked the earth for a year, and her legend has grown. She returns to Britain and meets a man named Tom, who takes her to meet one Professor Docherty, who can help her capture a Toclafane. With difficulty, they do so, and manage to get it open; they discover that the misshapen being inside was once human. The Toclafane are the human remnants from Utopia, transformed and regressed, and totally devoted to the Master. Martha reveals she has a gun that uses four chemicals, which will kill a Time Lord and suppress his regeneration. With it she plans to kill the Master. However, Docherty betrays her presence to the Master, who has her son in custody. That night, Martha is captured by the Master, who destroys the gun; he is about to kill Martha when Tom sacrifices himself to save her. The Master reconsiders, and delays her death until the Doctor and her family can watch, as the fleet launches. He takes her back to the Valiant, and prepares for his moment of triumph.

Moments before launch, Martha laughs at him. The gun was a ruse, and the resistance was aware that Docherty would betray her; it was all a ruse to get her here, now, with the Doctor. Her year of travel was used to plant one order in the minds of the people: at the moment the fleet is activated, everyone on Earth will think one word together: “Doctor.” The Doctor, meanwhile, spent the last year attuning himself to the still-active Archangel network. The combined psychic intent of humanity, amplified by the network, sends a surge of power into the Doctor, restoring him to health and youth, and letting him deflect the Master’s attacks. He backs the Master into a corner…and embraces him, forgiving him. Meanwhile, Jack breaks free and takes some loyal soldiers to destroy the paradox machine, but the Toclafane delay him. The Master uses the vortex manipulator—taken from Martha—to teleport himself and the Doctor to Earth. He has a remote for the fleet, and will activate their black hole convertors—if he can’t have the world, no one will. The Doctor manages to teleport them back to the Valiant, just as Jack destroys the paradox machine. Instantly time reverts to the minute when the machine was activated a year earlier, leaving no casualties except the just-killed president—and no Toclafane can come through the rift except the few that were already present. Only the Valiant and those aboard are unaffected; no one on Earth will remember the year that never was.

The Doctor declares that he will take the Master in custody and be responsible for him. However, Lucy Saxon—now long since disabused of her loyalty to the Master—shoots the Master. The Doctor begs him to regenerate, but in a final moment of selfish victory, he chooses not to, and dies.

The Doctor cremates the Master, but later, an unidentified woman takes the Master’s ring from the embers of the fire. Jack explains that he will stay on Earth with Torchwood, as the Doctor cannot reverse his immortality. However, the Doctor disables the time-travel and teleport functions on the vortex manipulator, ensuring he will get in less trouble. Jack leaves the Doctor and Martha with a cryptic comment that indicates he may one day become the Face of Boe.

Finally facing her feelings for the Doctor, and that they will never be resolved, Martha chooses to stay on Earth as well, and return to her life, family, and studies. However, she leaves her phone with the Doctor, and insists that he respond if she calls him. The Doctor—who has recovered the severed hand from Jack—prepares to leave—and as he does not have his shields up, he is rattled when the TARDIS crashes…into the Titanic.

I’m a lifelong fan of the Master, and when I learned that he would be appearing in the revived series, I was thrilled. I wasn’t disappointed when the episode aired, and Utopia has become one of my favorite episodes. Derek Jacobi’s portrayal of the elderly Master is, in a word, terrifying, even though he doesn’t do much. He’s ruthless and evil as though he has to make up for lost time, which I suppose he does. He’s very much like the classic version of the Master, especially during the Delgado years, bitter and cold and full of rage. It’s a shame that we didn’t get more time with him in the role, although I understand that he plays a different incarnation in the Big Finish audios (I haven’t reached them yet, but I am looking forward to it). John Simm gets much more flak for his portrayal, I suspect because he is the polar opposite of Jacobi, Delgado, and others. Where they are reserved, he is unleashed. In them, the insanity glows; in him, it blazes. I, for one, love both versions, though it goes against popular opinion; no one should expect one incarnation to be the same as the others, as we know from years with the Doctor. It doesn’t seem strange to me that Simm’s Master should be unhinged, capricious, or wildly cruel. He’s still the Master—still very evil, and still very much in control of the situation, even if not entirely in control of himself. It’s completely brilliant, coming and going. (We’ll deal with the other side of Simm when we get to The End of Time.)

Simm’s version of the Master is more than just a maniac, though. I talked in last week’s post about the religious metaphors in this season’s presentation of the Doctor, especially as seen in Human Nature/The Family of Blood. I stand by what I said there, and I think it was leading up to this story, where the messiah imagery is fully executed. If the Doctor’s experience with the Chameleon arch represents his death, temptation, and resurrection, then this story represents his second coming, in the form of his restoration from old age. I find it interesting that when Martha refers to the population’s thoughts about the Doctor, the Master refers to it as “prayer”. And in true messianic fashion, he chooses not to judge, but to forgive. (That’s not entirely consistent with the biblical narrative—all the parts are there, but in the wrong order—but that’s a topic for another time.) If all that is true, then the Master is the antichrist in this metaphor. I’ve mentioned in other places that “anti-“ doesn’t simply mean “against”, it also means “in place of”, and here we see both aspects. The Master is certainly against the Doctor, and even makes early attempts to kill him; but he’s also very similar to the Doctor, and would supplant him if he could. He’s young, of similar stature and physique to the Doctor, and dresses similarly (suits and ties). He has his own screwdriver. He has a fob watch like the Doctor’s. He eats Jelly Babies, a dig at the Doctor’s past lives. He even mimics the Doctor’s mannerisms; when Lucy challenges him on the success rate of the Archangel network, we get this… Lucy: “You said Archangel was 100%!” Master: <sharp intake of breath, tilting head> “Well…99…98?” It’s a mannerism and mode of speech that we’ve seen the Tenth Doctor use a dozen times or more.

In light of those points, I noticed something else here, though I doubt this was intentional. It’s long been theorized—and canonized in the VNAs—that the Leader in the Inferno universe was a version of the Doctor, who took power in Britain. I think that the Master, here, is an exploration of the same idea: What would happen if the Doctor went dark and stole power? This series wasn’t ready for a dark Doctor, something that has only been sincerely attempted once, via the Valeyard; but by substituting the Master, we can play with the idea, without committing.

This story is, naturally, the revelation of the Saxon arc that’s been playing out slowly since Love and Monsters. I won’t call it the resolution, because…spoilers for The End of Time–we’ll get there. Some recapping takes place, especially with regard to his involvement in shooting down the Racnoss Webstar. There’s also acknowledgement of Torchwood, though the team doesn’t appear here, Saxon having sent them “on a wild goose chase in the Himalayas”. We will, however, see them in Journey’s End. This story fits in the middle of an arc that really began with The Parting of the Ways, runs through Torchwood series one, and will not conclude until The End of Time, depending on your perspective. I wonder how much of that was planned in advance.

Some random observations and references: Jack knows a lot about regeneration, but I don’t recall it ever being explained to him in detail, and he has not witnessed it. The scene where the advisors are killed is reminiscent of Aliens of London with the Slitheen. The Doctor and the Master are a creepy sort of bromance, and it could only get creepier if one of them became a woman…oh wait. The Master refers to the Dalek Emperor taking control of the Crucible during the War; this will be expanded in Journey’s End. The Master’s monologue at the end of The Sound of Drums is echoed in Rassilon’s monologue (slight spoiler, sorry) at the end of The End of Time, part one. What an impossible coincidence, that the Toclafane Martha takes down should be the one child that she spoke to in the Silo! This is unintentionally a Doctor-lite episode (Last of the Time Lords), as David Tennant only actually appears at the beginning and end, with a CGI mini-Doctor in the middle. There’s a lot of foreshadowing of next season, with the recovery of the ring, and mentions of the Medusa Cascade and Agatha Christie. Lucy exists solely to mock the Doctor’s habit of taking companions; the Master even partially acknowledges this. As well, there are indications that he may have abused her during their year on the Valiant, which helps explain her betrayal at the end.

There’s more I could say, but I think that’s enough. Again, it’s one of my favorite stories, and I could go on much longer. What a way to end an excellent series!

Next time: In addition to some format changes, we’ll look at the Time Crash mini-episode, and then we’ll examine the Christmas special, Voyage of the Damned, before launching into Series Four. See you there!

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

Utopia

The Sound of Drums

Last of the Time Lords

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Cybermen Vs. Daleks: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series Two Finale

  

We’re back, continuing our New Doctor Who rewatch! This week, we’re wrapping up Series Two with the final three episodes. We’ll examine the two-part Series Two finale, Army of Ghosts and Doomsday, in which we say goodbye (for now) to Rose Tyler; but first, we’ll examine one of Doctor Who’s most hated episodes, Fear Her. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has not watched these episodes!

TARDISode 11 sets up the story with a clip from a sensationalist crime-tip show called Crime Crackers. It gives a quick overview about a case of several missing children, and also gives us the name of the street on which the story takes place, Dame Kelly Holmes Close. It closes with a glimpse of the monster in the closet of the main character.

It’s 2012, and London is hosting the summer Olympic games! In less than a day, the Olympic torch will pass through the neighborhood of Dame Kelly Holmes Close on its way to the stadium. The residents are preparing, but all is not well; several children have gone missing, all very suddenly. Rose and the Doctor arrive to see the games, but are distracted by missing-child flyers.

A girl named Chloe Webber lives on the street with her mother; her father is out of the picture, ostensibly long dead. Chloe loves to draw, but she has a secret: When she draws someone, they disappear, transported into her drawing. Rose, meanwhile, is attacked by an odd creature, resembling a large pencil scribble; the Doctor stops the creature, and determines that it isn’t real, but resulted from a strange residual energy. It’s not of Earth—and it leads them to Chloe. They talk with her and her mother, and the Doctor hypnotizes Chloe; he learns that she is being inhabited by an alien creature called an Isolus, which gives her her strange power. The Isolus are a long-lived swarm race; they are empathic, and thrive on their bonds with one another. This one, a juvenile, was separated from the swarm, and crashed its pod ship on Earth; it bonded with Chloe, craving emotional contact. It chose Chloe because they were both very lonely. It’s not evil, only hostile; and even so, it’s simply a defensive mechanism as carried out by a scared child. There’s a problem, however. Chloe’s loneliness is a result of years of abuse at the hands of her now-absent father; and she has drawn him on her closet wall—and the drawing has come to malevolent life.

The Doctor discovers that the pod ship can heal itself with enough heat and empathic connection. He returns to the TARDIS and puts together a device to locate it. However, the Isolus, clinging to Chloe, fears to leave; it makes her draw the Doctor, and he and the TARDIS vanish, breaking the device in the process. Rose is left to solve the crisis alone.

She deduces that the pod, when it crashed six days earlier, was attracted to the nearest heat source—a patch of fresh pavement. She digs in the spot, and finds the pod. She returns to Chloe, but the Isolus is trying to draw the whole world—six billion people—so it will never be lonely. She sees the drawing of the Doctor, which has changed—he is showing her the Olympic torch, which is passing by at that time. Rose throws the pod into the torch, which is not only representative of heat, but also the emotional attention and connection of everyone watching—and it restores itself. The Isolus leaves Chloe and returns to the pod, releasing everyone in the drawings.

One thread remains unresolved. The malevolent drawing in the closet, no longer restrained, is now coming to kill Chloe. Rose is instrumental in helping Chloe to use the last of her power to banish it.

Still, the Doctor is missing. Rose thinks he is lost forever—until she sees him on television, reclaiming the dropped torch, and lighting the Olympic flame.

Although I wouldn’t call it a favorite episode, I’ve struggled to understand what it is that makes this episode so reviled. It seems very average to me. It’s hampered a little by the fact that it lacks a cohesive villain; Chloe and the Isolus are lonely and damaged children, but they aren’t evil—the harm they cause is more selfish, and more of a defensive mechanism. I suspected that the dislike was due to the absurdity of the episode; but there are far more absurd stories out there (like, for example, Love and Monsters, which I covered last week). The episode does concern child abuse as a secondary theme, which I will admit does not translate well to television entertainment (and rightly so); but it’s downplayed somewhat here. In fact, it could have been omitted entirely without harming the story; the subplot with the drawing in the closet was unnecessary at best, and awkward at worst. (The drawing and its behavior is a bit overdone, but that makes sense in context—it’s not what really happened to Chloe, it’s her childhood perception of it.) But again, this is nothing new—many episodes try to do too much in the allotted time, many of them better received than this.

This is another episode, like Father’s Day, where the Doctor actually loses, and it’s up to the companion to save him. Those stories don’t come often, but they’re always interesting to me; the Doctor’s life, phenomenal as it is, truly hangs by a thread sometimes. Here, Rose wins the battle, but it’s more or less by chance; it hangs on the fact that the torch procession was passing by at that moment, which is a little too much coincidence perhaps. I did have to wonder why Chloe removed the Doctor and the TARDIS, but not Rose; as Rose was the one who invaded her bedroom earlier, I would think she would see Rose as an equal threat.

In the real world, David Tennant of course did not appear at the Olympics in 2012, or carry the torch; however, Matt Smith (as the Eleventh Doctor) did, giving a bit of poetic finality to this appearance. In universe, the Doctor makes a Star Trek reference to the Vulcan hand sign; when he hypnotizes Chloe, he does it in a way that mimics the Vulcan mind meld. We get a few continuity references: the Doctor refers to the nuns from New Earth, and says he’s not a cat person. He mentions the Shadow Proclamation, as he has done a few times before, notably in Rose. He refers to his lost family, stating that he was a dad once; the last such reference was in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. The year 2012 was last visited in Dalek and its sequel, The Long Game; failed companion Adam Mitchell hails from that year.

This episode, I will admit, is logically weak, for reasons that I cited above. It is an engaging story, in my opinion; it’s made all the more emotionally weighty by the realization that our villains are really just scared, lonely children. It could benefit from some tightening, however, and from trimming out the closet-drawing plotline. Otherwise, it’s not too bad—the low point of the series, perhaps, but still acceptable.

TARDISode 12 is a brief recap of the Torchwood references throughout the series. It is presented as a journalist submitting a story to his editor; at the end, the journalist is taken away by Torchwood agents and committed as insane.

In Army of Ghosts, the Doctor and Rose return to 2007 to visit Jackie Tyler; but they are shocked when Jackie reveals the presence of a visible ghost, ostensibly that of her father. The ghosts are all over the world, and appear at the same times every day, remaining for a few minutes at a time. It’s been going on for months, to the point that people accept the ghosts as normal now.

Strange things are happening elsewhere in the city, as well. At the Canary Wharf skyscraper—called “Torchwood Tower” by its insiders—a strange sphere resides in a sealed lab, under analysis by scientist Rajesh Singh. It has no mass, no radiation, and all scans fail to detect it—it’s as if it doesn’t exist. It does display some kind of barrier that prevents touch. Elsewhere in the tower, it is revealed that Torchwood is responsible for the presence of the ghosts; under leader Yvonne Hartman’s direction, a large machine with two levers is used to make them appear and disappear in an event called a “ghost shift”. Two of her workers, Gareth and Adeola, are clandestinely seeing each other; on one of their rendezvous, they go to a plastic-sheeted area under construction. Adeola vanishes, confronted by a Cyberman. Later, she and Gareth return to their desks, now wearing Bluetooth devices on both ears.

Jackie confronts Rose about her potential future, and they argue. The Doctor assembles a device; and at the next ghost shift, he traps one of the ghosts briefly for analysis. He traces the disturbance to Torchwood; but Torchwood has also located him, and recognized the TARDIS. The Doctor and Rose—with Jackie unwittingly still aboard—take the TARDIS to Torchwood tower, where the Doctor is promptly taken prisoner. He passes Jackie off as Rose, leaving Rose on the TARDIS, which is moved to a basement. Hartman claims the Doctor and the TARDIS as property of Torchwood; their motto is, “if it’s alien, it’s ours.” She also claims credit for destroying the Sycorax, using alien technology.

Adeola leads another worker to be taken by the Cybermen. Meanwhile, Hartman explains about Torchwood’s existence, and takes the Doctor and Jackie to view the sphere. Several times, beginning here, the Doctor wears 3D glasses, though he doesn’t explain it yet. He explains that the sphere is a voidship, which travels through the void outside the universes; the Elementals once called the void the Howling, and others have called it Hell. He recommends sending it back where it came from, but how? Hartman explains that it came through at a point now housed in the building’s upper floors, behind the mechanism seen earlier; she shows him. She says the ghosts came after it, and they have been experimenting since. The Doctor cautions them to stop the ghost shifts, as it may destroy the universe with a little more strain; finally Hartman breaks and cancels the next shift. However, Adeola and the other converted workers restart the countdown.

Rose—the real Rose, that is—sneaks into the sphere lab, but is caught. However, she gets a shock: Singh’s lab assistant on hand is Mickey Smith! He explains that the Cybermen were nearly defeated in his world, but that they suddenly vanished, only to be detected here. With the sphere having opened the breach, not only can the Cybermen pass through, but also, his world’s version of Torchwood developed a technology to pass through—and Mickey is here on reconnaissance. He believes the sphere is occupied by Cybermen, and prepares to blast them—just as the sphere starts to open.

Upstairs, the ghost shift starts. The Doctor realizes what has happened, and stops the earpods on the workers; they collapse, already dead. But the shift is already under way, at higher power than ever before. The ghosts appear fully, all over the world, and are revealed to be Cybermen. They begin to attack.

Downstairs, the sphere opens, revealing a terrible sight: a strange machine, and four Daleks. Their leader gives the command to exterminate the humans.

TARDISode 13, the final entry for the series, shows a new broadcast about the Cybermen incursion. It is interrupted…by Daleks.

As Doomsday opens, the Daleks are about to kill Singh, Mickey, and Rose, when Rose reveals her knowledge of the Daleks and the Time War, causing them to stop. The Dalek leader decides to keep her alive, but kills Singh after extracting information from him. It refers to the machine as the Genesis Ark.

The Cybermen have likewise captured Jackie, Hartman, and the Doctor. They broadcast a message demanding surrender, stating they will upgrade everyone on Earth; but a battle is breaking out between the British Army and the Cybermen in London. The Cyberleader notices the presence of the Daleks, and sends a few Cybermen to investigate. The Doctor watches the confrontation—which represents the height of attitude on the part of both Cybermen and Daleks, incidentally—and realizes the stakes have just risen. Declining an alliance, the Daleks determine to destroy the Cybermen as well as the humans; they kill the advance Cybermen. Seeing Rose’s reactions, they press her for information, and she identifies the Doctor, which scares the Daleks (as much as they ever feel fear, anyway).

Jackie and Hartman are taken for conversion. Hartman is converted, but before Jackie can be upgraded, a group of soldiers appear and take out the Cybermen in the breach room. The group is led by Jake, formerly of the Preachers, from the alternate universe. Jackie gets free and escapes. Jake fills the Doctor in on the transport devices they use, and recent history. Pete Tyler arrives, and takes the Doctor back across to his world’s Torchwood Tower, where he explains further: though Britain is enjoying a golden age, temperatures are rising catastrophically, which they have determined is due to the breach. He enlists the Doctor’s help in defeating the Cybermen (and the Daleks too, though Pete doesn’t know them) and closing the breach. He explains that in his world, it’s been three years, where here it was only about one year. They then return.

The Daleks reveal that the Genesis Ark is of Gallifreyan origin, and that it contains “the future”. They try to get Rose to touch it—thus providing time energy to open it—but are unsuccessful. The Doctor arrives, and banters with them, identifying them as the Cult of Skaro, a Dalek “think-tank” of sorts that disappeared from the Time War. Now he knows how they escaped, in the voidship.When they threaten him, he uses his Sonic Screwdriver to destroy the doors of the lab and let the team from Pete’s world in to fight the Daleks. Mickey is bumped into the Ark; as he has also been a time-traveler, this is enough to open it. It levitates into the sky, and it is revealed that it is bigger on the inside; it disgorges millions of Daleks who were imprisoned inside. The Daleks and Cybermen begin to battle each other.

Jackie reconnects with them, and sees Pete for the first time, instantly upsetting his determination not to connect with her. Pete wants to escape back to his world, considering the situation lost; but the Doctor reveals that his glasses show a sort of trace of the void on everyone who has traveled into it. He can use the machine to suck those traces—and everyone who carries them—back into the void, eliminating both Daleks and Cybermen; but the humans must get clear first. He sends Jackie and Rose with the others, against Rose’s will—she knows that when the breach closes, she will never see the Doctor again. He himself may be pulled in, too. She instantly teleports back, and begins to help him with the machine. Meanwhile, the converted Hartman guards the door, her sense of duty overpowering her conversion. (It’s not shown what happens to her afterward, but presumably she is pulled through—she never traveled through the void, but her cyber body would have been brought through with the advance guard.)

The Doctor puts magnetic clamps on the walls to cling to; then he and Rose activate the levers. Daleks and Cybermen are pulled in. Rose’s lever breaks free, however, and she is forced to grab it and lock it in place. She loses her grip and is pulled in; but Pete teleports across at the last second, grabs her, and teleports back out. She is left trapped in the alternate universe as the breach seals.

Months later, in Pete’s world, Rose sees the Doctor in a dream. She follows his directions to a beach in Norway called Darlig Ulv Stranden, which translates to “Bad Wolf Bay”. She sees the image of the Doctor there; he is using a rapidly-closing crack in the universal wall to contact her, burning up a supernova to do so. He tells her goodbye, and she admits to loving him; he is about to say the same, but vanishes before he can get the words out.

In the TARDIS, he takes a moment to mourn the end of their time together; but he is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a woman in a wedding dress. “What?!” is all he can say.

This series finale rivals The Parting of the Ways in many ways. While we don’t see the Doctor regenerate, we do so a total change in supporting characters. Rose departs (quite against her will, I might say), taking with her Jackie, Mickey, and Pete, all of whom had reached semi-regular status. We’ll see some of them again in cameo form, but their traveling days are over, so to speak. Interestingly, both of the Tenth Doctor’s future regular companions appear here, in one form or another; Freema Agyeman, who will play Martha Jones, plays Torchwood staffer Adeola Oshodi, who will later be retconned as Martha’s cousin. Catherine Tate makes her first appearance as Donna Noble, though her name is not yet revealed. This story also provides the resolution of the season-long Torchwood arc, ending with the downfall of Torchwood One. That destruction, later called the Battle of Canary Wharf, leads to the rise of Torchwood Three in Cardiff, which features in the spinoff Torchwood, and features the return of Captain Jack Harkness. (In related news, keep an eye out for Big Finish’s upcoming “Torchwood: Before the Fall” audio set, which is set at Torchwood One prior to this story. Personally, I’d love to see Yvonne Hartman square off against Kate Lethbridge-Stewart of UNIT—Big Finish, get on this!)

I find it interesting to observe how series finales go in Doctor Who. The classic series, with its more episodic/serialized format, rarely used season-long story arcs, and when it did it was often not well received (Trial of a Time Lord, anyone?). The revived series does use such arcs, but I can’t help feeling that it lives with the memory of cancellation; therefore every series arc neatly wraps up all of its threads. It doesn’t always end happily, as is evident here; and sometimes some of those threads are picked back out by later specials (I’m looking at you, Time of the Doctor, with your crack in the wall); but every series finale constitutes a point where, were the series as a whole to end, we could be mostly satisfied. This one is no exception; again, as far as we know, the Daleks and Cybermen have all been wiped out, and the Doctor is alone, with Torchwood visibly destroyed, and with no companions with whom he has unresolved business. The appearance of Donna at the end doesn’t negate that resolution; it just gives us a tag on which to hang the next series, should the next series come.

I won’t go into references to this series’ episodes, as we’ve discussed them as they came up. However, there are some references to previous episodes. The cutting-through-plastic by the Cybermen is a nod to The Tomb of the Cybermen. The Time War gets a significant reference, and the Fall of Arcadia is first mentioned here; it will be expanded upon in The Day of the Doctor. The Void, under one name or another, will be mentioned in several future episodes (Daleks in Manhattan, The Next Doctor, The Big Band) and several audios. The Elementals were last referenced in Enlightenment; they call the Void “the Howling”, which may be a reference to the “Howling Halls” mentioned in Love and Monsters. Rose mentions the Gelth, last seen in The Unquiet Dead. We get a flashback glimpse of a planet we haven’t seen before, as Rose is talking to Jackie—that adventure was never recorded. Harriet Jones is mentioned, having maintained her rise to power in Pete’s world. The Doctor mentions being at Pete and Jackie’s wedding; but if this is a reference to Father’s Day, it’s incorrect, as that was someone else’s wedding. We get the first appearance of the Doctor’s “Allons-y!” catchphrase, which appears many times in the future. While the rift at Torchwood Tower is not the same as the one at Cardiff, the idea of opening and closing it at will is carried over into the Torchwood series.

There’s little to complain about here. This episode will have echoes through several upcoming series of Doctor Who, and through Torchwood as well. Overall, it’s a strong, emotional exit for Rose and company, and it adds depth to the Doctor, as he deals with the loss of Rose through the next few companions. Otherwise, at this point, the future is unknown, and the sky is the limit—and we have a wedding to catch.

Next time: The 2007 Christmas Special, The Runaway Bride! See you there.

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

TARDISode 11

Fear Her

TARDISode 12

Army of Ghosts

TARDISode 13

Doomsday

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Parting of the Ways: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series One Finale

We’re back with our new Doctor Who rewatch! Today we’re finishing up Series One, with the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler; if you’d like to catch up, here are the entries for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four. As a reminder, each series in the new show tends to have considerably more stories than the classic seasons; therefore we’re splitting each series into parts for the sake of length. Today we’re looking at the series one finale, episodes twelve and thirteen. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen these episodes!

The episode is titled Bad Wolf, and we open cold on the Doctor, Rose and Jack. They awaken to find themselves with slight amnesia, and find they have been incorporated as contestants in several futuristic game shows. (The shows are intentional takes on shows that were popular at the time of broadcast, notably Big Brother (here featuring the Doctor), The Weakest Link (Rose), and What Not To Wear (Jack). They are mostly unchanged, with the exception of robotic versions of their real-world hosts—which, coincidentally, are voiced by said hosts.) They are stunned, but quickly recover, only to find that losing contestants don’t go home—they are vaporized.

Their intrusion isn’t unnoticed. The staff that are controlling the broadcasts have taken note of their presence, and presented their findings to the Controller—a human woman who is wired into the system to control the data. She has been there since she was five years old, and knows no other life; she only sees the data, not the individuals. She tells the staff to continue working as though nothing had changed; and she cuts off access to the nearby Archive Six.

After some adventures in their respective shows, the Doctor and Jack escape, taking another contestant—Lynda—with them. The Doctor suddenly realizes where they are: They have returned to Satellite Five, and it is the year 200,100, one hundred years after his previous visit. The satellite is now called the Gamestation; it no longer broadcasts news, but now broadcasts more than 40,000 channels of high-stakes entertainment. They try to find Rose, but are too late; losing her competition, she is disintegrated. Enraged, the Doctor and Jack head for Floor 500. There they confront the broadcast staff, and the Controller, just as a solar flare temporarily takes down the broadcast.

Under the protective silence of the flare, the Controller addresses the Doctor directly. She tells him that she serves hidden masters, but she cannot tell him who they are—they have programmed her not to reveal their name. She states that they manipulate and oppress humanity for their own ends, growing in power in the darkness of space. She tells him that they fear him, and so she has brought him here to destroy them. (How she did it is not explained, however. She somehow managed to locate the TARDIS and pluck it and its occupants from flight, all without any obvious means of time travel.) The solar flare prevents them from reading her thoughts, allowing her to privately pass this message. However, the flare ends before she can tell him where to find her masters.

Jack breaks into Archive Six, and finds the TARDIS there. He uses the equipment aboard to determine that the contestants aren’t being killed; they’re secretly being transmatted away, meaning that Rose is still alive. The Controller breaks her secrecy to reveal the coordinates to the Doctor, and is immediately transmatted away to her masters, who kill her for her betrayal. Rose, too, is there, and discovers the terrible truth: The masters are Daleks.

The Doctor locates the coordinates at the edge of the solar system, but nothing is seen there. He cuts off the cloaking wave that the station is broadcasting along with its signal, and a fleet of two hundred Dalek warships is revealed. Each contains a few thousand Daleks, bringing their total force to nearly half a million. The Daleks contact the Doctor, and threaten him to stand down or they will kill Rose; he refuses, and says he is coming to rescue her and destroy them.

The Parting of the Ways picks up immediately, with the Doctor and Jack racing to the scene in the TARDIS. They use the extrapolator from Boom Town to create a shield around the TARDIS, which allows them to materialize around Rose, then step out and speak to the Daleks with impunity. They discover that the Daleks are led by the Dalek Emperor, who somehow survived the destruction of the last day of the Time War and fell through time to come here. He has since built up his forces over a few centuries by using human dead to create new Daleks. He now considers himself the Dalek god.

The Doctor and the others escape and return to the station to stage a defense. He organizes a perimeter defense under Jack and some of the station’s crew; behind the lines, he begins to establish a Delta wave, a form of energy burst that will fry the brains of every Dalek. However, the emperor contacts him and reveals that it will be indiscriminate; it will also kill every human in its range, including those on Earth. The Doctor is willing to sacrifice Earth to destroy the Daleks; he states that humanity on its far-flung colonies will survive, but the Daleks must die here. The Daleks compare him again to them, calling him the Great Exterminator, which rankles him.

Rose and Jack are also willing to die. However, the Doctor tricks Rose into leaving in the TARDIS using an emergency program. She is returned to her home time, with Mickey and Jackie. On the station, the battle begins; the Daleks invade and slaughter everyone they can find, until only Jack and the Doctor are left. They also begin killing vast swaths of the population of Earth (offscreen, thankfully).

In 2006, Rose admits defeat. However, she suddenly realizes she is seeing Bad Wolf graffiti everywhere. She takes it as a warning, and tries to get the TARDIS to move. Remembering her experience with Blon, she reasons that she can open the heart of the TARDIS to somehow spur it to action; and with Mickey’s help (and a yellow truck) she does. The heart invades her body, and takes her over; she becomes a powerful entity that takes the Bad Wolf name, and forces the TARDIS back to the station. She arrives just as Jack is killed, leaving only the Doctor. He is horrified; she has absorbed the power of the vortex, which is too much for anyone to survive.

The entity destroys the Daleks, turning them all to dust. It scatters the Bad Wolf words through time and space, creating all the references that led them here—thus, creating itself. It restores life to Jack (and much more, as we’ll later see). Then, before Rose can be consumed by the power, the Doctor kisses her, drawing it into himself, and releasing it back into the TARDIS. It will be his final act.

Jack arrives just in time to see the TARDIS leave, stranding him here. Inside, the Doctor tells Rose the damage is too much even for him, and he will die. He explains about regeneration, when he will change to a new face. He says his goodbyes…and transforms into the Tenth Doctor.

This remains one of my favorite series finales, if not my absolute favorite. As humorous and (sometimes) off-balance as the series could be, it takes itself seriously here, even while making jokes about reality television. All season the Doctor has been venting his emotions as if he can’t control them at all; here, we see it come together, and get an idea of how truly fearsome he can be. And yet, even with that, it’s Rose who is truly to be feared, as she recklessly absorbs the vortex and becomes the Bad Wolf. For all the Doctor’s anger, it’s his sense of self-sacrifice that saves the day, as he dies to save her.

I had previously mentioned that Satellite Five had a ridiculously low number of channels for the future. That’s overcompensated here, with over 44,000. The game show parodies were cleverly done, with puns and inside jokes, even if they seem dated now. There’s a reference to Torchwood here, as the Great Cobalt Pyramid is said to stand on its ruins. And of course, there’s the obvious Bad Wolf reference, in the name of the consortium that runs the station (secretly under the Daleks, of course).

The Doctor, Rose, and Jack mention having come from Raxicoricofallapatorius (having dropped off egg-Blon as promised), then having had one more adventure, in 1338 Kyoto, from which they narrowly escaped. Thus there is no time for additional adventures involving the three of them—sorry, fanfic writers. It was good while it lasted. Jack’s sexuality is played up again, though not as jokingly as in previous episodes; I also do not want to know where he was hiding his gun, though.

Doctor Who TV series starring Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Matt Smith, Billie Piper, Karen Gillan, Freema Agyeman, Catherine Tate, Alex Kingston, Jenna Coleman, Paul Kasey, Nicholas Briggs, Arthur Darvill, Noel Clarke, John Barrowman – dvdbash.com

The Daleks have an established history of using human children as “controllers”, dating back to Day of the Daleks; this isn’t quite the same, but close, and again, their subject betrays them. We also get a connection with the transmats leaving dust behind; this happened previously in The Twin Dilemma. The Face of Boe is mentioned again, in the trivia questions. A control panel on the Dalek ship is the same as one dating all the way back to The Chase–a small but interesting connection. The Doctor tells the Daleks that their legends call him the oncoming storm; this name will recur several times in the new series, but actually dates to a Draconian phrase in the VNA novel, Love and War. (Another VNA reference is seen in the trivia questions; the planet Lucifer gets a mention, having originated in the novel Lucifer Rising.) Most interestingly, Jack recognizes the Daleks and their ships; this makes for interesting questions about the Time War. Some are answered in part two, when he explains that they were the most feared race in the universe, but suddenly vanished; the Doctor explains that they left to fight a bigger war, the Time War, which Jack implies was just a legend.

The line “And for my next trick”, seen in part two, is later reused in The Day of the Doctor. The Daleks here are post-war Daleks, making them very powerful indeed, and it’s probably that had Rose not intervened, they would have won. The Doctor faces the same choice—kill innocents to destroy the Daleks—that he faced in the war, but here he makes the other decision, and stays his hand.

The Dalek emperor is the same as in the war, but appears to not be the same as any others we have seen mentioned. The concept first appeared in The Evil of the Daleks, all the way back to the Second Doctor; Davros also called himself the emperor. As with Davros’s Imperial Daleks, the Daleks seen here are bred from human stock, and thus inherit some of the characteristics of humanity, in this case religious inclination. That part doesn’t surprise me; the only oddity is that the Emperor, who is a pure Dalek of Skaro origins (presumably), buys into it. It’s very curious, but then, we’ll see this sort of leader-worship again, if not so explicitly. As to the human stock: This issue will also reappear in the Eighth Doctor Adventures audio drama, Blood of the Daleks, where it is initiated by the human Professor Martez.

This is an incredibly bloodthirsty story. Every incidental character dies, including all the humans on the station and all the Daleks. Though it happens offscreen, the Daleks are stated to be killing off large portions of Earth’s population. As well, Jack and the Doctor both die, though both live again (Jack by resurrection, the Doctor by regeneration). Only Rose, Jackie, and Mickey survive (and, I suppose, any background characters in the 2006 scenes, though they hardly bear mentioning). Jack is the fifth companion character to die onscreen, joining classic companions Katarina, Sara Kingdom, Adric, and Kamelion. (Apparently it doesn’t pay to have the letter K in your name…)

The Doctor tricks Rose into leaving in the TARDIS, by activating an emergency program. The Eleventh Doctor will later do the same to Clara Oswald in The Time of the Doctor, complete with a similar holographic interface. Clara will take equally extreme actions to return to him, as she clings to the outside of the TARDIS while in the vortex.

For the second time in this series, a Dalek compares the Doctor to the Daleks; the Emperor calls him the Great Exterminator. He doesn’t care for the comparison. The emperor states that this act of extermination will make the Doctor like him; however, the joke’s on him—he already did it once, although we haven’t yet had the specifics revealed to us. As I mentioned, he makes the opposite choice here, and chooses not to kill.

The Bad Wolf entity is fascinating. It’s set up as a parallel to the Dalek Emperor, in that both established themselves as a kind of god. However, where the Emperor merely boasted of godhood, the Bad Wolf demonstrated it, by displaying a ridiculous amount of power. Being possessed of control over time, it creates itself, by scattering the “Bad Wolf” words throughout time in such a way as to lead Rose and the Doctor here, to this moment. (This makes the entire series, to me, reminiscent of the episode Turn Left, where the point is that a myriad small choices lead up to momentous things–Doctor Who’s take on the butterfly effect, if you will.) The entity also kills the Daleks by reducing them to dust; and it brings life by command, reviving Jack from death. This will have consequences, of course, as later episodes (and the Torchwood spinoff) will show that he is now immortal, and a sort of mobile fixed point in time. At the end, the Doctor leaves him here; and it will later be revealed that this was because he finds Jack’s new nature abhorrent, offensive to his time sense, although he still respects him personally.

This is, as far as I’ve seen, the first mention of regeneration in the new series. The Doctor explains it briefly to Rose before it happens; and really, he’s explaining it to the fans, as well. New fans who missed out on the classic series would likely have no idea that he can change; and as it had already been announced that he would be leaving, it no doubt left some viewers wondering about the future of the show. This regeneration would have resolved that uncertainty, as we see the Tenth Doctor for the first time. Also, this is the first new-style regeneration, with the now-characteristic energy explosion, although we have since learned it dates back to the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration into the War Doctor. I do find it interesting that Rose seemed to maintain the vortex energy better than the Doctor; she holds it for some time before it begins to kill her, but the Doctor appears to be mortally hurt by it after just a moment—after all, he releases it back to the TARDIS almost instantly after taking it in.

And so, with that, we say goodbye to the Ninth Doctor, and hello to the Tenth. It’s been a fun ride, and far too short. Still, without the Ninth Doctor, we never would have had the good things to come; and we wouldn’t be eagerly awaiting Series Ten today. For that, though Christopher Eccleston’s time in the TARDIS was short, we thank him.

Next time: The Christmas Invasion! And possibly the beginning of Series Two. See you there!

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

Bad Wolf

The Parting of the Ways

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Dancing Doctors and Future Immortals: New Doctor Who Rewatch, Series One, Part Four

We’re back, with our New Doctor Who rewatch! We’re nearing the end of Series One, with the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler; if you’d like to catch up, here are the entries for part one, part two, and part three. As a reminder, each series in the new show tends to have considerably more stories than the classic seasons; therefore we’re splitting each season into parts for the sake of length. Today we’re looking at episodes nine, ten, and eleven. Let’s get started!

Spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen these episodes!

We open with The Empty Child, the first part of a two-part story. It’s significant for being future showrunner Steven Moffatt’s first contribution to the revived series. It also introduces one of his best and most notorious creations: Captain Jack Harkness. This story occurs during Harkness’s first documented trip through the twentieth century; at this point, he is not associated with the Torchwood organization, and is not immortal, as will be widely referenced later. He originates from the 51st century, and was at one time a Time Agent; however, he considers himself betrayed by the Time Agency, who took away two years of his memories, and now freelances as a mercenary and con man. He has access to time travel via his wrist-worn vortex manipulator, though that is not clearly explained here as yet; and he also travels with a stolen spaceship.

He sure knows how to make an entrance.

The Doctor and Rose arrive in London, 1941, during the height of the London Blitz. They have come in pursuit of an alien ship, which crashed in the middle of London, and has been mistaken for one of many bombs by the locals. The Doctor is actually unaware of this at first, failing to realize they have arrived during the Blitz (and giving us some minor comedy); but they are interrupted by an air raid. Rose, having wandered off, finds herself dangling from a barrage balloon, and is saved by Jack using his ship’s tractor beam. He at once realizes she is not from this time period, and believes that she and the Doctor are Time Agents coming to interfere with him. He attempts to sell the crashed ship to her, and reveals he was the one who caused it to come down safely; but in two hours, it will be blown up by a bomb. She leads him to the Doctor.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has found a mystery. A small child in a gas mask is following an older girl around, behaving dangerously and searching for its mother. The girl leads the Doctor to a hospital, where he speaks with the doctor on duty, and learns that many people have become like the child—and there is nothing inside them. It is like a disease, and it is spreading. The hospital doctor himself succumbs while the Doctor watches. Rose and Jack meet him there, and they are forced to try to escape. The episode ends with a cliffhanger here; if they are touched by the infected people, they too will succumb.

Not completely relevant, but too funny to pass up!

The Doctor Dances picks up immediately, and the Doctor and his companions elude the creatures and find themselves in a storeroom. Jack gets them out via the teleporter on his ship. They then make their way to the crash site, where they find the girl, Nancy, trapped—and the guards are transforming like the child, as the disease becomes airborne. However, the Doctor deduces that the ship is no battleship—it’s an ambulance, of sorts. It is filled with nanogenes, microscopic machines with the power to not only heal, but remake organic life. Escaping the crash, the nanogenes latched onto an injured child nearby and healed him; but with no preset pattern, they healed him incorrectly, creating the empty child. With the bomb about to fall on the site, the Doctor realizes that Nancy is the child’s mother, rather than his older sister as she had claimed. She accepts the child to her, and the nanogenes use her DNA to determine the correct pattern for his, healing him. The Doctor sends Jack to deal with the bomb, then updates the nanogenes to fix the other victims. He then sets the ship to blow up, eliminating the threat. Just this once, everyone lives…!

…Except Jack. He uses his ship to catch the bomb, but can’t contain it from exploding, and can’t escape. He resigns himself to death—until the TARDIS appears and snatches him away. He is stranded now, but chooses to travel with them.

This story is very significant in the history of the new series, setting up many elements that would recur. The Time Agency is not new—it was referenced as far back as The Talons of Weng-Chiang—but will get new life in the revived series, with some new backstory (most notably, that it was established in the absence of the Time Lords after the Time War, as noted in the comic Weapons of Past Destruction). Vortex manipulators appear here without much explanation, and Jack’s sonic “squareness gun” will reappear later with River Song (though not explained here, Moffatt’s intention is that it is stored in the TARDIS until River finds it). Jack will go on to be a part of Torchwood Three, and develop immortality.

There are a lot of good lines here, more than I could capture. Dr. Constantine at the hospital remarks “Before this war I was a father and a grandfather. Now I am neither. But I am still a doctor,” to which the Doctor famously replies “Yeah, I know the feeling,” a reference at minimum to his lost granddaughter Susan. Jack refers to Pompeii on Volcano Day, a reference the Tenth Doctor will repeat to Donna Noble in The Fires of Pompeii. Jack also famously remarks, on seeing the sonic screwdriver, “Who looks at a screwdriver and thinks, ooh, this could be a little more sonic?!” Rose gets in a dig at the Doctor with “The first time I met him he blew up my job. It’s practically how he communicates.” The Doctor gets her, though, with “I’ve traveled with lots of people, but you’re setting new records for ‘jeopardy-friendly’.” And, of course, his most famous line occurs near the end: “Everybody lives, Rose. Just this once, everybody lives!” We also get the famous “Are you my mummy?” line, which the Tenth Doctor will jokingly reference in The Poison Sky. Rose, as well, makes the classic “Doctor Who?” joke.

The title The Doctor Dances comes from the storeroom scene, where he dances with Rose out of jealousy over Jack. They dance again at the end, in the TARDIS. His dancing with a partner is a very uncommon thing; it only happens once in the classic series, with the one-off character Ray in Delta and the Bannermen. The Doctor also uses dancing as a euphemism for sex, in telling Rose about Jack’s home century. Jack, as the episode makes clear, is bisexual, and even not particularly concerned about the species of his partners; this will be played up in a number of later appearances, both seriously and as a bit of a joke. Further regarding the title: It represents a few rarities among episodes. It contains a verb, and it names the Doctor, both of which are very uncommon (though not unheard of!), both in the classic and new series. It is the first occurrence of each in the new series.

There’s a Bad Wolf reference in the second episode, but it’s subtle and hard to spot. The German bomb, when caught by Jack’s tractor beam, is seen to have the phrase “Schlechter Wolf” (literally, “Worse Wolf”) printed on its side. Jack, of course, gets the bomb away and into space. He is very willing to die to save everyone, though not exactly happily. I found it supremely ironic, then, that he very soon will not be able to die. He’s a fascinating character in any regard.

We finish today with Boom Town, which takes us back to Earth in 2006. The story is a sequel to World War Three, and brings back the character of Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, aka Margaret Blaine, the one Slitheen to survive the attack on Downing Street. Now, six months later, she has gotten herself selected as Lord Mayor of Cardiff, and is overseeing the construction of a new power plant. Not bad for such a short time; it’s too bad she wants to blow it all up, for both revenge and escape.

The TARDIS crew have come to Cardiff to refuel the TARDIS, using the rift that was last seen in The Unquiet Dead. The Rift will later be a central plot point in the Torchwood spin-off series. In fact, the Torchwood Three hub already exists at this point, complete with its own version of Jack Harkness; the novel The Twilight Streets will establish that Jack purposefully kept his team locked down for the day so as not to meet himself on the streets. In fact, a third Jack is also nearby, though in cryogenic storage, as seen in the Torchwood episode Exit Wounds. The TARDIS previously did not require such refueling, being powered by the central Eye of Harmony; but with the destruction of Gallifrey, that Eye was lost, and now it is rifts like this that allow the TARDIS to recharge periodically (although this is not made explicit at this time). While waiting, Rose meets up with Mickey; it ends badly, signaling the end of their relationship, though he stays around to help deal with Blon.

The Doctor captures Blon (after a great scene with a teleporter that wouldn’t be out of place on Scooby-Doo). He intends to take her home to Raxicoricofallapatorius; she insists she will be put to death if she goes there. He then determines her plan: Using an alien device called a Tribophysical Waveform Macrokinetic Extrapolator (or extrapolator, for short), she intends to use the power plant to destroy the Earth. She will then ride the shockwave to freedom in the galaxy, using the extrapolator. The Doctor stops that plan, only to find out that she lied; her real plan was to use the rift to destroy the world; and by parking the TARDIS on it, the Doctor has given her the key.

Desperate to stop her, the Doctor takes a drastic step: He opens the heart of the TARDIS, under the console, which is being supercharged by the rift. Looking into it—for it is far more than just a power source—Blon is transformed, regressed into an egg. The Doctor then closes the rift and averts the crisis. Departing—and leaving Mickey behind, alone—the travelers plan to drop the egg on Raxicoricofallapatorius, giving Blon a chance at a new life.

I’m fond of this episode, even though it isn’t ranked particularly highly among new series episodes. I like the Slitheen as villains, once we look past the flatulence jokes (which recur here, but in a more understated manner). Blon in particular is a villain with some complexity; there’s a notable scene where she intends to kill a journalist, but refrains upon finding out that the woman is pregnant. Her grief over the loss of her own family is still acute. She’s also good for some comic relief; there’s the previously mentioned teleporter scene, and her “dinner date” with the Doctor, in which she tries several times to kill him. She gets in a good line when she says to the Doctor, “What did I ever do to you?”; he replies with “You tried to kill me and destroy this entire planet.” “Apart from that!” she retorts with a tsk.

Jack’s role is toned down a bit here, though he will be instrumental again in the upcoming series finale. He’s still entertaining; and of course this episode plants the earliest seeds of the upcoming Torchwood television series, which will reuse some of the locations from this story. Mickey is at what may be his lowest point here; he attempts to reconnect with Rose, but then admits that he is seeing someone else. When challenged on it by Rose—who, not incorrectly, believes it is about her rather than the other woman—he admits that he did it because at least he knows where the other woman is. With Rose, he never knows. He comes off as petulant and downright mean to Rose, but his points are still valid—she will never choose him.

There’s a Bad Wolf reference in the name of the power plant. In Welsh, it is called “Blaidd Drwgg”, which translates to “Bad Wolf”; unlike the last foreign-language reference, the Doctor catches this one and interrogates Blon as to why she chose that name. He and Rose comment that the words seem to be following them around; but in the end he dismisses it as coincidence. Of course it isn’t, as we will see soon.

Blon’s regression to egg form has precedent: In The Leisure Hive, the villain Pangol was regressed to infancy. Also, in The Visitation, the Terileptils—like Blon—declined to be repatriated to their homeworld due to fear of execution. In that case, the Doctor allowed them to settle on another world; here he denies Blon that opportunity, stating that she will just resume her criminal activities.

Overall, these are good episodes, and I think it’s safe to say that Series One is finally finding its feet. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances are often cited as the best episodes of the series; and Boom Town, while not so highly regarded, is still well executed. It’s a good way to wrap up the week-by-week portion of the series, as the next episodes are devoted to the overall arc.

Next time: We finish Series One, and say goodbye to the Ninth Doctor—and hello to some old enemies! See you there.

All episodes may be viewed on Dailymotion; links are below.

The Empty Child

The Doctor Dances

Boom Town

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