The Stolen Earth & Journey's End by: Russell T. Davies and directed by: Graeme Harper

 

“The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” stars David Tennant as the Doctor, Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones, John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness, Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith and Billie Piper as Rose Tyler with Penelope Wilton as Harriet Jones, Adjoa Andoh as Francine Jones, Eve Myles as Gwen Cooper, Gareth Daved-Lloyd as Ianto Jones, Bernard Cribbins as Wilfred Mott, Jacqueline King as Sylvia Noble, Tommy Knight as Luke Smith, Noel Clarke as Mickey Smith, Camille Coduri as Jackie Tyler and Julian Bleach as Davros.  Dalek Operators were Barnaby Edwards, Nick Pegg, David Hankinson, and Anthony Spargo, Dalek Voices were Nicholas Briggs, Alexander Armstrong was the Voice of Mr. Smith, and John Leson was the Voice of K-9.  They were written by: Russell T. Davies and directed by: Graeme Harper with Lindsey Alford as Script Editor, Phil Collinson as Producer, and Russell T. Davies and Juile Gardner as Executive Producers.  They were originally broadcast on Saturdays from 28 June to 5 July 2008 on BBC One.

 

Russell T. Davies, Julie Gardner, and Phil Collinson all realized that after three series of Doctor Who all good things must come to an end.  The fourth series was commissioned with the same team but Collinson began shifting to an Executive Producer role for several of the production blocks that year, intent on leaving the show completely after the fourth series.  Davies and Gardner, on the other hand, committed to a series of five specials to be broadcast from Christmas 2008 to New Year’s Day 2010 to put a cap on their time on the show.  While David Tennant would ultimately leave with Davies and Gardner, early plans weren’t necessarily that Tennant would be leaving the role until after the fifth series so “The Stolen Earth” would be the last big hurrah of this team before the specials.  Davies had the idea that the planet Earth would be stolen by the Daleks and a resurrected Davros for some evil plan that would incorporate an alien conference and bring back essentially every character who had appeared in the era to join with the Doctor and companion Penny Carter plus several aliens introduced throughout the era.  This was far too ambitious to schedule and was thus scaled back, though still making an incredibly ambitious script to bring all of these actors together with scheduling.

 

Billie Piper’s scheduling became the most difficult to accommodate due to her honeymoon, though Julie Gardner was able to shift the dates around this issue, the director of this two-part finale being moved to the ninth and final production block of the series proper (the specials would be allocated their own production blocks of one episode each under series four production codes) being assigned to Graeme Harper after Euros Lyn had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts.  The final scripts were still written with many of the original cameos intact, though Penny Carter was replaced with Donna Noble early in scripting, but due to budget allocations many of these had to be cut including appearances from Elton Pope, Midshipman Frame, Margaret Blane, and the Hath, Sycorax, Vespiform, and Adipose.  Annette Badland actually recorded dialogue for her cameo, but the appearance was still cut due to the inflating budget.  “Journey’s End” also saw a Cyberman cameo as lead in to the 2008 Christmas Special, but this was cut and replaced by a post-credits teaser in editing along with Rose and the Meta-Crisis Doctor receiving a piece of the TARDIS in the resolution of the episode.

 

“The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” despite all these cuts is still ambitious and for both episodes Davies does a genuinely good job of giving all of the major characters a role to play in the story.  Some of this is by splitting appearances across episodes, the spin-off characters appearing in “The Stolen Earth” while Mickey and Jackie are only present for “Journey’s End”.  Now this does become a problem in “Journey’s End” which will be discussed later, but at least for the setup of “The Stolen Earth” there is a sense that each of these characters do have a role to play.  “The Stolen Earth” is also an episode that is entirely setup, taking the Doctor and Donna into the B-plot of the episode while the A-plot structure is exploring what is happening on the Earth with the Daleks invading and collecting people for some nefarious purpose.  The episode excels at making the Daleks an actual threat, several sequences are devoted to them exterminating people in the street and strategically dismantling the Earth’s already ineffective defenses.  The Manhattan UNIT base attack is a particular highlight as the Daleks are ruthless and Davies plays the idea that Martha Jones is scattered into atoms due to experimental technology quite well, revealing her safety at the opportune moment, though the explanation of it being a telepathic link with Martha’s mind sending her home.  The initial reveal of the Daleks also gives Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith some wonderful moments acting off her The Sarah Jane Adventures co-star Tommy Knight, but the overlapping panic intercutting between every character interrupts the pace of the episode slightly, especially as Davies repeats dialogue for different characters.

 

These sequences are also essentially there to setup the situation on Earth and establish Rose Tyler jumping onto the Earth in the middle of the chaos.  Rose is paired with Wilf and Sylvia (Bernard Cribbens gets an amazing moment where he shoots a Dalek in the eyestalk with a paintball gun) for the majority of the first episode, the companions of the Doctor being brought together by Harriet Jones who has established a subwave network underneath the range of the Daleks’ transmissions in secret.  Rose is left watching these on her own as the laptop Wilf and Sylvia has doesn’t have a webcam, something that seems weird when watching this in 2023, but it's 2009 in universe and the built-in webcam wasn’t standard at this point.  Davies does bring out some of Rose’s worst traits in this one, being immediately jealous of Martha Jones for no real reason on the call, because the audience would recognize Martha as Rose’s replacement.  This is especially odd since Rose should know that the Doctor would find someone else to travel with since she was stuck in a parallel dimension.  The interplay between the characters who actually can communicate with each other is also excellent, there’s enough to explain who the spin-off characters of Luke, Gwen, and Ianto are as there was no guarantee the audience would be watching Doctor Who, Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures, and the technobabble used to get the Doctor into the little pocket these planets are in actually makes logical sense.  Penelope Wilton as Harriet Jones gets to sacrifice herself as redemption for her actions in “The Christmas Invasion”, but Davies’ idea that she may have had a trapdoor and rode away on a motorcycle is quite silly and cuts that sacrifice deep, but that was a poem and I doubt it was meant to be definitely a thing that happened.

 

This allows the characters to work out just what the Daleks are doing but ultimately it’s a way to get the Doctor and Donna who are at the Shadow Proclamation in the B-plot of the episode.  Tennant and Tate actually play their B-plot incredibly well, asking the questions in parallel with the rest of the characters through some wonderful editing, even if the audience are practically screaming it’s the Daleks.  Davies is also smart enough to write this one as the Doctor understanding things stepwise: Donna realizes that the bees are disappearing was the one odd thing happening on Earth at the time, so the Doctor uses this knowledge to get the two of them to the Medusa Cascade where they’re met with the blow of a dead trail.  They are stuck there, the Shadow Proclamation is out to get them since the Proclamation declares war on whatever force has stolen the Earth and 26 other planets for a universal configuration thing that won’t be properly explained until “Journey’s End”.  These scenes are slightly brought down due to some heavy foreshadowing with this prophetic idea that one of the companions are going to die, something that will ramp up in the second half of the episode.  Now the episode ends on a cliffhanger that is one of the bigger issues of the episode, meant to be there for shock value and spectacle: as the Doctor and Rose reunite, he is shot by a Dalek and regenerates on the TARDIS.  Now, this cliffhanger is preceded with Sarah Jane and the Torchwood base also being separately confronted with Daleks, a three-pronged cliffhanger working in the storytelling sense of seeing all of the characters we have been following this time being in danger in parallel for maximum tension.  The issue with the cliffhanger is the regeneration, it’s too big of a cliffhanger, made worse by the very next story being built around teasing if the audience will see the next Doctor who had not yet been cast when these episodes were being filmed.  This is also an episode that was broadcast months before Tennant had announced his decision to leave after the 2009 specials so it’s really a trick made for shock value bringing down the episode right at the last moment.  “The Stolen Earth” is still brilliant setup, shrouding itself in the mystery of what the Daleks are planning and bringing together characters as the focus for the world ending threat, with Davies’ signature use of the media to really fill in that danger.  7/10.

 

“Journey’s End” is where things fall apart.  Russell T. Davies as a writer on Doctor Who has been escalating the series finales for the past three years from first the Earth in the future, second the Earth in the present, and third the entire universe.  “Journey’s End” sees that escalation go to the highest point yet of every universe in the multiverse with Davros and the Daleks designing a reality bomb using 27 planets in configuration, something implied to be something happening in all universes where the Doctor, Daleks, and Davros exist, will make the atoms of the multiverse lose their charge and scatter.  This scale is impossibly big and cannot be treated by the audience as a real threat if the viewer thinks about the logistics of how this will work.  There are universes where Davros is succeeding, Rose makes that clear in “Turn Left” by having places where the stars are going out.  Davies has neglected he has written this, writing “Journey’s End” to say that it's somehow impossible for Davros to succeed, and this is all due to that expanded scale.  If Davies pulled back and really only made one universe at stake, adding in a line or two of how it affects parallel worlds in proximity to the main Doctor Who universe to explain how Rose, Jackie, and Mickey are involved, this would no longer be an issue and the premise the entire episode is balancing on wouldn’t fall apart.  It’s the little problems like this that build up over the course of “Journey’s End”, weakening the episode at its core.  Now, luckily there are aspects where the episode succeeds brilliantly so it’s not an episode that’s a total waste like “The Doctor’s Daughter” or “Last of the Time Lords”.  Davies does write a finale that feels like an ending and pushes the tragedy of Donna Noble’s exit as companion, even if he’s doing the “Doomsday” trick again in promising a character is going to die and then they don’t.

 

The use of Davros here, played by Julian Bleach, sets up the resolution of what the last four series have been building up towards.  Davros through the episode is essentially the Daleks’ pet, reflecting on his use wonderfully throughout the classic series and an insane Dalek Caan has prophesized total Dalek takeover.  There’s also a red Dalek Supreme but the Daleks in this episode doesn’t actually do as much for what the episode is doing outside of the testing of the reality bomb to kill a group of humans in a genuinely horrific scene.  Bleach as Davros posits that the Doctor has built his companions and friends into soldiers, not caring with the many, many people who have died in his name, often sacrifices that the Doctor doesn’t ask for.  Davies lets this idea out into the wild here and makes the interesting decision not to really allow for a resolution to the idea.  Donna’s fate is exemplary of this while independently Martha on Earth and Jack, Sarah Jane, Mickey, and Jackie, have come up with ways to either destroy the planet Earth or the Crucible so that the Daleks cannot succeed.  It’s interesting for how these potential sacrifices, especially Martha’s, weigh on the Doctor.  Martha, in scenes where she is on her own especially, is shown to be willing to wait and use her way out as a last resort, something that is missing from the other thread of destruction.  There is a suspicion in watching “Journey’s End” that the lack of this for Jack and Sarah Jane in particular is perhaps due to time, this is an episode that was expanded to an hour and four minutes but still had things cut for time.  The lack of resolution feels as if it’s there just to reflect on the sacrifice in the final scenes involving Donna’s exit.

 

Donna’s exit from the series involves the resolution of the cliffhanger giving the Doctor the power to not regenerate by forcing the energy into his severed hand from “The Christmas Invasion” which creates a copy of the Doctor with influence from Donna’s DNA because she was still in the TARDIS when it happened (somehow the doors close when the Doctor, Rose, and Jack exit the TARDIS on the Dalek Crucible which isn’t actually made explicit, though it’s vaguely implied that the TARDIS did it because it knew what had to happen).  The DNA of the Doctor also blows back into Donna so she, the Doctor, and the Meta-Crisis Doctor are responsible for working together to destroy the Daleks and Davros.  Now this climax is essentially extreme technobabble saving the day without actually doing action as the rest of the supporting cast are just standing there to watch.  26 of the 27 planets are transported back and the Doctors and company pilot the TARDIS tethered to the Earth through the rift in Cardiff is flown back to its place in the universe.  This is the big spectacle of the episode to really pat the era itself on the back for what was supposed to be one last time (the specials all sort of become one last victory lap following this spectacle over substance format which will become an issue once I move into covering them).  Tennant, Tate, and the rest of the cast do play these scenes quite well, confident in the delivery of massively dense dialogue.  The tragedy of a Time Lord mind being forced into a human does lead to the Doctor, to save Donna’s life, erases her memories with the caveat that if she remembers, she will die.  Everyone involved in this sequence gives some of their best performances, and these scenes are some of the best.  Bernard Cribbins and Jacqueline King get the chance to shine and the moment when Donna wakes up is the real emotional gutpunch despite a GIF of the Doctor sad in the rain being for some reason the dominant image from this sequence when it’s just a fine image.  Donna’s hurts harder.  Before this happens there is also a resolution to Rose’s story, the Meta-Crisis Doctor being given to her as a consolation prize in her own universe which as an ending is quite uncomfortable to watch.  The episode treats it like it’s a good and correct thing, Rose being responsible for this other person whom she is expected to love.  It kind of diminishes the sentience and existence of the Meta-Crisis Doctor.  There’s also a lot of suspension of disbelief needed to buy the Meta-Crisis Doctor as a concept so your mileage may vary.  “Journey’s End” is a mess but it’s at the very least a very well-acted mess that proposes some ideas, even if they don’t go anywhere, in some interesting ways.  When it succeeds it knocks it out of the park, but it’s the bunch of little problems that really bring it down.  4/10.

 

Overall, “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” is probably the second best of the Russell T. Davies finales.  The ambition on display is held together by Davies understanding how to utilize characters, even if the back half loses them, and Graeme Harper’s masterful direction making it such a fun loss.  “Journey’s End” has some brilliant moments and terrible moments in particular but it’s the last time until arguably “Resolution” that the Daleks on-screen are used properly, and it has the most effective companion exit of Davies’ run on the show.  It’s truly one last hurrah despite being followed by five other one last hurrahs.  5.5/10.