The End of Time by: Russell T. Davies and directed by: Euros Lyn

 

The End of Time stars David Tennant as the Doctor, Bernard Cribbins as Wilfred Mottt, and John Simm as the Master with Timothy Dalton as Lord President Rassilon, Claire Bloom as the Woman, Jacqueline King as Sylvia Noble, Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, Karl Collins as Shaun Temple, David Harewood as Joshua Naismith, Tracy Ifeachor as Abigail Naismith, Silas Carson as the Voice of Ood Sigma, and Brian Cox as Voice of the Ood Elder.  It was written by: Russell T. Davies and directed by: Euros Lyn with Gary Russell as Script Editor, Tracie Simpson as Producer, and Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner as Executive Producers.  It was originally broadcast on Fridays from 25 December 2009 to 1 January 2010 on BBC One.

 

Russell T. Davies “one last hurrah” was always going to be large in scale.  The largest issue (outside of David Tennant not deciding to leave the role until late 2008, leaving Steven Moffat the job of casting the Eleventh Doctor and rewriting his first series for a new Doctor instead of what at one point would have been Tennant’s final series as the Doctor) was that Davies was unaware of when the final episode would air.  The original candidate was Christmas 2009 or Easter 2010, which would have immediately preceded the first series under Steven Moffat, so Davies sketched the idea of the Doctor saving an alien family on a spacecraft and dying of a radiation leak.  Davies was very keen on setting up the regeneration to be the Doctor saving somebody unremarkable and in an unremarkable way, but in April 2008 negotiations began with the BBC to lock plans for the final special.  Davies wished to move Steven Moffat’s first series to the autumn of 2010 and proposed a miniseries for the usual spring 2010 slot, something that Jane Tranter countered with two episodes to be aired just before Moffat’s first series, something that Davies and Gardner specifically disliked as it easily could lead to their final story overshadowing Moffat’s series with a final counter of moving their final two specials to Christmas 2009 and New Year’s Day 2010.  This decision made Davies believe that audiences would not be satisfied with a quieter end and scrapped the original plans, deciding that despite intending the ring drop of the Master’s burning body in “Last of the Time Lords” to be picked up by a successor, secured John Simm as a special guest star to reprise the role of the Master and the barebones of The End of Time is born.  Several ideas were worked through including a body swap before deciding to follow up on the ending of Donna Noble, securing Catherine Tate in a cameo and Jacqueline King and Bernard Cribbins in larger parts, Cribbins as Wilfred Mott being the one-off companion for these specials, as well as developing the first proper look at Gallifrey for the revival with the plot point of bringing back the Time Lords.  In developing the script however, Davies did something new for Doctor Who, something that would thankfully become standard for when regenerations would also hand-off production teams and that was to allow his successor Steven Moffat to write the final moments of the episode post-regeneration to introduce Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor.

 

The End of Time as a story is this attempt at writing an intricate web of a story to serve as both a Christmas and New Year’s Day special, with each episode having these varying tones, the first being action packed with spectacle while the second is an attempt to be more character focused.  These two tones don’t work nearly as well, especially since this is broadcast as a single story under one title, the first time the revival of Doctor Who would actually do that, and the only time until 2020’s Spyfall.  There’s a lot with this story that generally doesn’t work well, often things integral for making it work.  First, and foremost, it’s a story that is in general too big for itself.  Russell T. Davies had been escalating and in “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” that escalation was to the already far too big, every version of reality is at stake, and the way it is meant to get bigger is the concept of time unravelling.  Davies attempts to communicate these stakes through dialogue because how do you properly show time unravelling outside of getting quite surreal, and since this story is a special there is this utter reluctance to challenge the casual audience with something surreal.  There is exactly one monologue from Tennant in the second episode that actually does an excellent day of adding hints to the unknowable reality of the Time War, despite the line itself being one of those things that should sound silly (especially the army of meanwhiles and never weres) but because Tennant is such a good actor he sells this idea.  It’s also assisted by the sequences on Gallifrey being shot on minimalist, abstract sets that helps set the idea of the Time War on-screen, something that had largely been built up through Eccleston and Tennant’s performance through their era.  There’s also a gravitas to the Time Lords, carried by the performance of Timothy Dalton as Rassilon, despite the oddity of the immortal Rassilon being terrified of dying, something clearly done by Davies to build up the idea of the cosmic horror of the Time War while going against the one specific character trait of his other appearance in the series The Five Doctors.  The costuming of the Time Lords, while updated into very nice costumes, is sadly a bit to standardized and the idea of a Time Lord prophet feels almost contradictory.  Again, this also feels like something added to the Time War, but the prophet in particular feels almost too concrete and too much to be written as this is a special episode and we’re building up the stakes.

 

The fact that this story is two specials genuinely means that as a one last hurrah, Davies has written something that is incredibly bloated.  The previous specials have been building up the prophecy of the Doctor’s death, made explicit early on in the first episode that it will be a regeneration in the Doctor’s mind.  This is in a scene where the Tenth Doctor basically makes regeneration viewed as a literal death where the next incarnation is a completely new character, something that compounds itself with much of the Tenth Doctor’s final lines in the second episode being about how he could do so much more and the character’s final line being “I don’t want to go” just goes against the character of the Doctor as a whole, though not necessarily the character of the Tenth Doctor.  What is quite interesting about this is that this particular issue could be largely negated by playing the regeneration as a surprise, the Doctor believing that this might actually be his end.  It would add to the anger of being killed by Wilf with the “he will knock four times” being revealed to be Wilf trapped in a cabinet designed as a scientific instrument but also a death trap that it will flood with radiation all while forcing one person to be inside at all times.  The death also comes after the Doctor falling out of a spaceship, through glass, and onto hard marble without outright killing him which honestly indicates to me that the radiation sequence, while leading to the Doctor’s regeneration being a sacrifice for a friend, feels incredibly redundant.  It would also work if the 20 minute sequence of the dying Doctor visiting basically every recurring character from the era (or in one case the descendent of a major character) was either cut completely or just trimmed to be the scene at Donna’s wedding.  This sequence also just has the vastly problematic element of pairing Martha Jones and Mickey Smith as a married couple because Davies loves Smith and Jones as an idea, though these characters have before this shared so little screentime and can be read as pairing up the two recurring characters of color.  This 20-minute sequence establishes what now becomes a tradition of regenerations being an event with drawn out final sequences to reflect on the era as a whole and it's a tactic that just dos not work as a regeneration, making it too much into an in universe event as well as an out of universe event.

 

The bloat is not contained in these sequences.  The first episode in particular is bloated with these set pieces that often barely connect to one another, building the Master’s plan of changing the Earth into clones of himself using technology from these two green, spiky aliens working for this father/daughter pair (that are for some reason played by David Harewood and Tracy Ifeachor as if they are in an incestuous relationship, Harewood being directed to be especially hands on which is weird).  The Master is also decaying because the literal necromancy ritual performed by the Cult of Saxon using his DNA which somehow is still on Lucy Saxon is stopped by a magic potion that Lucy has prepared instead of just shooting him a bunch because that worked last time.  Oh, and Lucy is in prison and dies because of this when the prison explodes.  The Master is given magic lightning and jumping powers, as well as just a cannibal.  There are multiple scenes of John Simm just menacingly eating food that are actively trying to be camp but camp without the elevation that makes camp, camp.  John Simm’s performance throughout this story is just insane, but in a particularly annoying way.  So much of his dialogue is either shouting which is especially annoying, or just breaking the fourth wall again by trying to do non-elevated camp.  It’s nice that the Master does a final sacrifice for the Doctor.  There’s also a set piece on the Ood Sphere that opens the story that includes this dissonance from the tone of “The Waters of Mars” with the Doctor being especially comedic and it just doesn’t play well.  The jokes don’t land, especially if you watch this within a week of “The Waters of Mars” or are binging, which I understand was not the way it was intended, but this was aired just a month or so after the previous story.  There is also dramatic narration about how the planet Earth is coming to an end, a subplot of a woman played wonderfully by Clare Bloom intended to be the Doctor’s mother though never stated being cryptic throughout to Wilf, a comedic set piece of Wilf and his social circle finding the Doctor, several set pieces in this quarry where the Master eats some homeless people and a burger menacingly, the Doctor and Wilf sneaking into the mansion where the Master is being held (one of several sequences where a character is tied up), the transformation of the planet into the Master, and Donna remembering the Doctor.  Yes, Donna is shown to remember the Doctor and it’s such a failing since the story has continued the buildup of if this happens, she will die, but she doesn’t because the Doctor didn’t leave her defenseless and that’s then dropped.

 

So if there’s so much of The End of Time that doesn’t work, what does.  There are things to like here.  First, most of the stuff with Donna outside of her not dying is genuinely quite sweet, it’s good to see her having put her life together and the Doctor’s final act of giving her and her new husband a winning lottery ticket from her father is wonderful.  Catherine Tate and Jacqueline King, although they aren’t in the story much, are always wonderful.  Bernard Cribbins as Wilf and the specific café scene, outside of some elements involving death, is wonderful, seeing Cribbins and Tennant muse over Donna is wonderful.  David Tennant is desperately attempting to hold things together because he is a very solid actor, and some of the moments on the spaceship where things are actually allowed to calm down for a bit are good.  It’s essentially whenever the story decides to slow down and be quiet about the emotions it succeeds, but much of that is lost in bombast.  Euros Lyn’s direction and Murray Gold’s score are also top notch, even with Lyn having to use these ridiculous lightning effects in the first episode.

 

Overall, The End of Time feels like such a weird ending because it is the end of the era and the episode knows that largely to its detriment.  Watching it is like watching an assault of plot points and ideas that are barely strung together because Russell T. Davies was basically given the task of stretching a one-episode story to 2 hours and 15 minutes spread across two episodes.  It contains practically all of the issues of the Davies’ era with at least a few moments.  On reflection, while I often have said it’s the worst of Russell T. Davies’ first run as showrunner, writing this entire series of reviews has given me some appreciation for it (even if that’s very slight) and the era in general, though not without exceptions where some episodes have tanked in my estimation.  It’s an ending that doesn’t work and just is far too bombastic to the point of idiocy with glimmers of something interesting when it’s allowed to be quiet and contemplative.  2/10.