The Stolen Earth/Journey's End

The man who abhors violence, never carrying a gun. But this is the truth Doctor, you take ordinary people and fashion them into weapons.

As has been stated by many others besides me, The Stolen Earth and Journey's End were the real goodbye stories for Russell T. Davies. Yes he stuck around for another year but he tried to replicate these in a way with The End of Time and it didn't really work. These were much more of a natural end with the old sitcom style of bringing back cast that had left the show and having a big send off at the end. But even in that, it is not without it's flaws.

Plot Summary

Having been warned of trouble at the end of Turn Left, the Doctor and Donna arrive back on Earth but find everything seemingly normal. However, upon going back in the TARDIS, the Earth is instantaneously transported away and the TARDIS is left in space. Around the world, reactions are observed by Martha with UNIT in Manhattan, Jack Harkness and his fellow Torchwood team Ianto Jones and Gwen Cooper in Cardiff, Sarah Jane with her son Luke and supercomputer, Mr. Smith, in London and Wilfred and Sylvia also in London. As people notice the change in sky, Rose teleports in, just outside Wilfred and Sylvia's home.

Unable to figure out what happened, the Doctor and Donna travel to the Shadow Proclamation where they learn of twenty four other planets disappearing. While going over the list, Donna recalls that the hatchery planet of the Adipose and the planet of the Pyroviles was also missing. The Doctor adds those to the list along with the lost moon of Poosh and they are projected outward and reform themselves into a perfect engine alignment.

Above Earth, the Daleks prepare an invasion force and move towards Earth, attacking the various armed installations and rounding up humans for transport back to the Dalek command ship, the Crucible. Martha' command post is Manhattan is overrun and the commanding general fits her with a experimental teleport based off Sontaran technology. He also gives her a command disk called the Osterhagen Key. She then teleports to her mother's place in London. With the defenses down, Earth surrenders.

The Doctor and Donna try to figure out how to trace the missing planets and Donna mentions the stories of the missing bees. This triggers an idea as a certain alien insect interbreeds with Earth bees and may have warned them. They scan for signals and trace the alien signature to just outside the Medusa Cascade. The Shadow Proclamation tries to requisition the Doctor but he and Donna leave in the TARDIS before they can take control. They reappear outside the Medusa Cascade but find nothing and the end of the signal trail.

Wilfred and Sylvia step out to fight the Daleks but are rescued by Rose, looking for the Doctor. They head back to their home where Rose detects a signal from Wilfred's computer. It doesn't have a webcamera so she can only receive and not transmit. She observes as Harriet Jones, former PM, sends a signal over the subwave network and contacts Torchwood, Sarah Jane and Martha. She networks with Mr. Smith and the Cardiff rift power source to boost the phone signal to call the Doctor, which succeeds but also alerts the Daleks to Harriet Jones' location. She transfers control to Captain Jack at Torchwood just before the Daleks break into her home and kill her.

The Doctor receives the signal and contacts with Jack, Martha and Sara Jane. Wilfred and Sylvia are relieved to see Donna just behind the Doctor. As they talk, the signal is overridden by The Crucible and the Doctor sees Davros, who was rescued from death in the Time War by Dalek Caan, after escaping the events of Evolution of the Daleks. The Doctor deactivates and lands on Earth in London. The Daleks also send an attack force to the new subwave control center at Torchwood.

After landing, the Doctor and Donna exit and spot Rose who left Wilfred and Sylvia's house. The Doctor runs towards her but is shot down by a passing Dalek. The Dalek is destroyed by Jack who teleports in to help. He and Rose drag the Doctor into the TARDIS where he begins to regenerate. However, after healing the wound, the Doctor transfers the regeneration energy into the severed hand cut off by the Sycorax and recovered from the Master following Last of the Time Lords. The Daleks meanwhile move and surround the TARDIS.

Sarah Jane leaves her house to go help the Doctor but runs into a Dalek patrol. They mean to kill her but are destroyed by Mickey and Jackie Tyler who teleport in from the parallel dimension. They approach the TARDIS and see it placed in a temporal lock which drains it's power. It is then taken up to The Crucible. Knowing it's the only way to get on to the ship, Sarah Jane, Mickey and Jackie surrender to the Daleks and are put with a group of human prisoners for transport.

On The Crucible, the Daleks deactivate the defenses of the TARDIS and order the people out. The Doctor, Rose and Jack all come but Donna is distracted by a heartbeat and the TARDIS door shuts before she can follow. Suspecting treachery, the Supreme Dalek drops the TARDIS into the core of The Crucible where the TARDIS will be destroyed. As the TARDIS begins to burn, Donna touches the hand filled with regeneration energy. It explodes out of it's case and a clone of the Doctor materializes. The clone brings up the TARDIS' power and dematerializes, making it look like the TARDIS was destroyed.

Jack attacks the Supreme Dalek but is gunned down. The Doctor observes him quietly coming back to life but plays along, though Rose is unaware of Jack's ability and thinks him really dead. The Doctor and Rose are taken to Davros' lair while Jack's body is dumped in the incinerator. He escapes and crawls through the ducts while the Doctor and Rose are placed in isolation cells.

As the humans arrive on The Crucible, a woman falls over, distracting the Daleks. Sarah Jane and Mickey make a dash and hide behind a door but Jackie is left in the crowd. The Supreme Dalek orders a test and Davros informs the Doctor of the new weapon, the reality bomb, which destroys the electrical connection between atoms, reducing all matter in it's field to subatomic particles. As it prepares to fire on the crowd, the thirty minute recharge on Jackie's teleport ends and she is able to teleport to Mickey and Sarah Jane while the rest of the humans are disintegrated. Jack pops out of a duct and Sarah Jane gives him a warp star that had been presented to her in the past and Jack hooks it up, preparing to destroy the ship.

On Earth, Martha teleports to Germany where she enters and activates one of the Osterhagen key stations. She radios out to the other stations and two other stations respond: one in China and the other in Africa. They ready their stations, which will trigger twenty-five nuclear warheads buried in the crust, cracking it and destroying the Earth.

At nearly the same time, Martha and Jack radio The Crucible and threaten to activate their weapons if the Daleks do not release the Doctor and return their planets. The Daleks however lock on to the signaling locations and teleport Martha, Jack, Sarah Jane and Mickey to Davros' lair. All four are placed in isolation cells similar to the Doctor and Rose. The Supreme Dalek then orders the powering of the reality bomb to full power to destroy the universe while the Daleks fall back to the protection of The Crucible.

With the failure of other options, the clone Doctor builds a small weapon and rematerializes the TARDIS in Davros' lair. He bursts out but Davros stuns him with a burst of electricity. Donna runs out to grab the weapon and Davros electrocutes her as well. Unbeknownst to him though, the electrical burst energizes the regeneration energy she absorbed from the Doctor's hand, giving her and infusion of the Doctor's mind.

Donna, with the Doctor's mind, access the control panel and deactivates the reality bomb. She then neutralizes Davros' and the Dalek's weaponry. She frees the prisoners who push the Daleks out of the way and she, the Doctor and the clone Doctor return the planets to their proper locations. Davros manages to destroy part of the control panel before they can return the Earth but he is neutralized once again. The Supreme Dalek comes down to attack but it is destroyed by a shot from Mickey.

The Doctor runs back into the TARDIS and contacts Torchwood, who had been caught in a time bubble to protect them from the Dalek attack, and Luke and Mr. Smith. Together they plan to create a reinforced energy line between the Earth and the TARDIS, allowing the TARDIS to pull the Earth across space. To access the TARDIS mainframe, Sarah Jane activates K-9, who feeds the TARDIS information to Mr. Smith. As the Doctor does this, Donna and the clone Doctor realize that the Daleks will still come after them and are highly dangerous. The clone Doctor activates a feedback loop which destroys the Dalek fleet and sets The Crucible on fire.

The Doctor hurries everyone into the TARDIS and appeals to Davros to come with them. Davros curses him and refuses. Dalek Caan, who had arranged everything to ensure the destruction of his own race, shouts a warning that one of his companions still must die. The TARDIS leaves The Crucible as it explodes and pulls the Earth across space and places it back in it's proper orbit.

The Doctor lands on Earth and drops of Martha, Jack, and Sarah Jane. Mickey also comes with them as his grandmother has passed away in the parallel dimension and he feels he has no place there. The Doctor then lands the TARDIS in the parallel dimension in Bad Wolf Bay to return Rose and Jackie, informing them that access between the dimensions will be sealed once more. He also sends the clone Doctor, who, being half human, will age and not regenerate. Rose accepts him as a substitute for the Doctor and the three are left as the TARDIS takes off again.

On the TARDIS, Donna's mind begins to become overwhelmed as the Doctor's mind is too great for her human brain. Knowing that she will die if he doesn't, though she begs him not to, he purges her mind of her knowledge of him, leaving her as she was before being transported to the TARDIS at the beginning of The Runaway Bride. He returns her to Wilfred and Sylvia's and tells them that they must never reveal what happened to her.

Donna wakes and assumes that she missed things once again. She dismisses the Doctor with a bare glance and he leaves the house. Wilfred however sees him off, saluting him as he goes. The Doctor then dematerializes in the TARDIS, alone once more.

Analysis

It's a bit cliché to talk again about how RTD starts off a story like a house on fire but always peters out. But the cliché does apply to this story as it has in previous ones. However, I would note that I don't think the fall off here was as bad as some fans make it. It is still a good story and still fundamentally entertaining even if there are some sour notes in the second half.

I'll just go ahead and cut to the chase, the problem in Journey's End is the tone shift. The Stolen Earth and the first 30 minutes or so of Journey's End played like a solid sci-fi adventure story. There was a small cheese factor but the overall tone was mostly dark and serious with some real weight behind the various moments such as the Doctor getting shot by a stray Dalek, the Daleks destroying a house with a family inside it and the death of Harriet Jones.

That tone continued until the arrival of Doctor-Donna. While I love Donna, the flippancy that suddenly took over regarding the situation and her own cavalier attitude towards the situation was just so jarring. Millions of people had died and they are laughing and pushing the Daleks and Davros around like the props they actually are. I don't even mind the usual complaint people have about the shut down being a single button on a panel in Davros' lair. For me, it is all about the flippancy of the moment.

The silliness gets compounded with the TARDIS towing the Earth across space. That just seems a bridge too far and how do you reconcile that silly, cartoony tone with the idea of Daleks mowing people down or even what happens to Donna later? The story was dark and brooding, then it got silly, then pukingly saccharine, then dark and depressing again. It's just so inconsistent in what it thinks the audience should feel about it that it becomes aggravating.

So let's jump to the saccharine moment: leaving Rose on Bad Wolf bay a second time. I'm fairly open about not liking Rose very much but I appreciated the emotion of that scene in Doomsday. There was raw feeling and even if you didn't like Rose, you could appreciate the loss she was feeling with regard to the Doctor. Fast forward two years later and while Rose is dropped off again, she now gets the clone Doctor to grow old with while keeping her parents and little brother. Not only did this throw all the emotion of the first scene into the garbage, it wasn't done particularly well because it was noticeable dubbed with studio recordings (presumably due to the wind issues). It was just the show bending over backwards once more to give the spoiled brat that is Rose whatever she wants.

I say spoiled brat because while Rose was improved in most of her appearances in Series Four, the scene where she is listening to the discussion between Harriet Jones and the others, she can't help but talk about how she was important as well. Her resentment about the status of Martha as a companion of the Doctor who has gone on to better things shows that petulant side of Rose that I couldn't stand when she was a regular companion.

A third point where Rose bothered me was when the Doctor was preparing to regenerate. Of the three of them, Rose should have been the least bothered by his regeneration. She was close to the Ninth Doctor, who selected her in the first place. Her mourning over the potential loss of the Tenth Doctor spoke to her shallowness regarding the Tenth Doctor. She knew that the Doctor would still be the Doctor, but it was the physical appearance and nuances of the Tenth Doctor's personality that she really liked. She mourned over the potential death of the Tenth Doctor because it was that form and not the Doctor himself that she desired. Again, it was just a reinforcement of the shallowness of Rose.

As for the Doctor himself, I quite liked him in this. He got dark and brooding and I always appreciate him in those situations. I also liked that, unlike Rose, he balanced out praise for everyone. He lavishes praise twice on Donna for her contributions when the try to figure things out at the Shadow Proclamation. He praises Martha and all the other contributors in their fight against the Daleks, showing no favoritism and working together. I would have liked to see him offer a bit more of a contribution in the final equation but it all works fairly well in the end.

All of the rest of the companions do well. I remember watching this story for the first time and actually thinking about watching Torchwood because I enjoyed Ianto and Gwen in this story. Other information I heard about Torchwood dissuaded me but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy it. I liked Jack a bit more than Martha but both were still good. Jackie and Mickey didn't do much except for rescue Sarah Jane at the beginning of Journey's End so they were a bit wasted but that's not the actor's fault. Donna also was pushed into the background a bit after leaving the Shadow Proclamation but with so many others pulling focus, that a bit understandable. I did enjoy the scene between her and the clone Doctor as he mimics her outrage and speech patterns. That was an amusing little scene.

The clone Doctor was fine. I don't really understand why people get bent out of shape about him. Obviously they had to avoid the proper regeneration of the Tenth Doctor and funneling the regeneration energy into a clone seemed perfectly fine. I also appreciated that he did what the regular Doctor could not and that was to destroy the Daleks properly. The Doctor is outraged at what the clone has done, but he raises a good point in that there are millions of Daleks, just as dangerous as before and now no Time Lords to oppose them. Genocide may be a sin in the eyes of the damaged Tenth Doctor, but how many lives would have been lost if the Daleks been permitted to continue? I side with the clone in this case. That he gets stuck with Rose is not his fault.

This story also saw the return of Davros and he had both excellent and silly moments. In a way, he was a microcosm of the whole story. Some of my favorite moments are Davros quietly taunting the Doctor, exposing him to his true nature. But then he goes and dials it up to eleven and goes way over-the-top. I compare it to not being able to fully decide whether to channel the Davros from Genesis of the Daleks or to give over to the ranting Davros of Revelation of the Daleks. I'm also not sure why he suddenly got Emperor Palpatine power in the form of projected lightening. That seemed a bit odd. Overall good, but not without flawed moments.

The overall story as I said worked well aside from the tone shifts. I felt bad for Donna but understood why they had to write her out the way she was. Whether you liked the Doctor Donna or not, Donna was fully prepared to keep travelling with the Doctor in either capacity. Only her outright death or other great tragedy would have stopped her. I suspect that her outright death was debated but that would have vindicated Sylvia and crushed Wilfred so I can understand keeping her alive. Those final moments between the Doctor and Wilf were very good and the clear impetus in making Wilf a proper companion in The End of Time. That everyone agrees that those moments between him and the Doctor were the best parts of The End of Time justifies that decision.

So overall, I'd say that the story is fun but the first part outpaces the second. As much as I dislike Rose and as much as I dislike the hokey tone the story takes for those few minutes, the majority of both parts work very well. I would also say that Journey's End does well in that it ends on a true and somber note and that does quite a bit to mitigate the overt silliness of the previous fifteen minutes.

This is the proper RTD farewell and he does a good job with that send off. Obviously there are better Tenth Doctor stories but it handles the epic scope fairly well and will give you a pretty good ride, even if there are a few bumps in the road here and there.

Overall personal score: The Stolen Earth - 4.5 out of 5; Journey's End - 3 out of 5

Turn Left

There is something on your back.

Doctor-lite stories have evolved nicely since the misfire that was Love and Monsters. It is not often that Doctor Who plays with the "what if" card but when it does it usually does it well. Turn Left is an interesting exploration of how things would have evolved had Donna never met the Doctor and he died in the aftermath of the sans Donna The Runaway Bride.

Plot Summary

Donna and the Doctor are visiting a planet and they split up to do some sampling. Donna enters a fortune teller's house who prompts her to recall the point in her life where she made a decision that resulted in her meeting the Doctor. She focuses on the moment when she ignored her mother and turned left at an intersection, leading her to get the job in which she eventually met the Doctor. The fortune teller tells her to focus on turning right as something sneaks behind her and latches on to her back.

Six months after turning right, Donna is celebrating Christmas with some coworkers, having just gotten a promotion in her job. One of the women is fixated as she keeps thinking that she sees something on Donna's back. Suddenly, London is attacked by the webbed star ship of the Racnoss. The army manages to destroy it and Donna rushes towards the action while everyone else runs away. There she sees the army taking away the body of the Doctor, although she doesn't know who the Doctor is at this point. He was drowned in the flooding and failed to regenerate.

As Donna turns away, she sees a blonde woman run up and asking about the Doctor. Donna tells her that the Doctor is dead. Rose turns away but notes Donna's name. Donna asks hers but she disappears before saying anything.

Several months later, Donna is being laid off. Everyone is distracted as a hospital has disappeared. It reappears several hours later with only a sole survivor. That survivor notes how a colleague named Martha saved his life and how a woman named Sarah Jane Smith had stopped another woman from using an MRI to destroy the hospital. He also reports of the search by "space rhinos," triggering Wilfred's interest. Rose also reappears to Donna, telling her to use the raffle ticket she still has and use her winnings to take the family out of London for Christmas.

At Christmas, Donna, her mother and grandfather head to an inn north of London. A maid enters and is immediately unnerved by something on Donna's back. They are distracted though as the television reports a replica of the Titanic is crashing into London. The feed is suddenly lost, but the whole family sees a mushroom cloud appear where London once was.

With most of southern England irradiated, the family is relocated to Leeds where they share a house with several other families, including a large Italian one headed by the jovial Rocco Colasanto. Wilfred is buoyed by the thought that the Americans have promised aid to help Britain. However, this is dashed a few days later when over sixty million Americans are killed in the birth and collection of the Adipose children.

A couple of months later, Rose appears again as army soldiers are seen trying to disable toxic gas coming from the cars. Rose leads Donna away and informs her of the Torchwood team's demise as they destroy the ATMOS system and the Sontaran ship. Rose also tells Donna that she is the special key and in three weeks will agree to come with her to stop all this, although Donna must die.

Three weeks later, the Colasanto family is relocated to an internment camp with Wilfred noting that this was how the Nazis started. He and Donna try to find solace in looking through his telescope but they observe the stars disappearing. Donna then acquiesces and goes with Rose when she reappears.

Rose and UNIT take Donna to a facility with the dark TARDIS. They have used technology scoured from it to create a time machine. They first show Donna the time beetle on her back. Freaked out, she begs them to turn the machine off. Rose then tells her that the only way to get rid of it is to fix the universe by having her go back in time and forcing herself to turn left at that intersection. Donna agrees although Rose again alludes that she will have to die.

The time machine sends Donna back to four minutes before she makes the turn but also deposits her half a mile away from the intersection. She runs as hard as she can but realizes that she won't make it to stop herself. Remembering what Rose said, she steps in front of an oncoming truck. The truck crashes into her and cars begin to back up towards the intersection. Seeing the traffic, the intersection Donna turns left. As the original Donna dies, Rose reappears and whispers two words into her ear. Donna reawakens in the fortune teller's shop, the failure to change having killed the beetle and the teller flees in terror.

The Doctor enters and Donna tells him what happened. He notes the beetle is part of the Trickster's Brigade (a Sarah Jane Adventures villain) and how is usually just creates a blip in time that that universe compensates for to feed. Donna however generated a parallel universe. Talking about that triggers Donna's memory and she recalls Rose. As Donna talks of her the Doctor becomes concerned, demanding to know her name. Donna recalls she said "Bad Wolf." As she does so, the Doctor runs back to the TARDIS with warning signs flashing everywhere. Confused, Donna asks what is wrong and the Doctor states that it's the end of the universe.

Analysis

Turn Left has it's ups and downs but it's the type of story that every companion should have: a character study that allows them to breathe and develop, especially in a way that is independent of the Doctor. Not that being with the Doctor is bad, but it is nice to see a companion act in a way that is not influenced by the Doctor now and again. This story is probably also the most Doctor-lite of all the Doctor-lites as he is only in the first thirty seconds at the beginning and the last two minutes at the end. Any shots of the Doctor during the rest of the episode are taken from previous episodes (mostly The Runaway Bride).

It was also a nice way to bring Rose back without offering disrespect to the drama of the goodbye moment in Doomsday (as would be done at the end of the season in Journey's End). It makes sense that in a parallel universe created around Donna, it would offer a thinner veil that Rose could break through and act as the Doctor surrogate. In the end, she gets left out again as the veil is returned to it's original strength (at least until Stolen Earth).

Donna has another one of her nice moments in this episode as well. She starts more like her stroppier self as she is unchanged by the Doctor, but there is emotional growth as the world comes crashing down. This culminates when she is shown the time beetle on her back and her reaction of fear and horror mixed with the refusal to believe that she is special is quite good. Yet it is also still mixed with Donna's humor which gives much needed levity.

On that note, this is a bleak episode to watch. It more or less has to be since it needs to highlight how important the Doctor is but there are moments that are just down right horrifying. The nuclear blast in London is pretty bad, but I think the moment that just hits you hardest is when the Colasanto family is taken away. Nearly everyone in the story had been pretty dour but Rocco expressed happiness in the face of dark times. Then he is taken away and he still stays happy for Donna. It is not until he salutes Wilf that that moment even breaks him. The tragedy of that scene just oozes out without being melodramatic. In a way, it reminded me of the scene near the end of Life is Beautiful where Guido maintains the illusion to his son that he is just playing a game with the soldiers as he is being led off to be shot. The episode doesn't get in to whether the Italians are actively being disposed of or just being held, but it is not hard to imagine that it might come to that point in that timeline.

There are only two points in this story that bother me. The first is the unconvincing way that Donna changes her mind to turn right. That might be down to direction but Donna starts the conversation so feisty and Sylvia isn't any worse than she normally is but Donna just rolls over and concedes. Now obviously in the real timeline, she blew her mother off so it shouldn't be too different, but it just feels wrong to have Donna concede so easily.

My second is one that others have mentioned and that is the Doctor's death. I don't recall the situation in The Runaway Bride being so dire as to that the Doctor would have died without Donna. I can think of more obvious situations where the Doctor would have died when he was with Martha but this was supposed to be about Donna so I can leave that point. It is also hard to imagine that things would have been so bad as to prevent him from regenerating. The half-hearted aside of it happening too fast seems like garbage to me as well. The only point that makes sense to me would be that if the chamber flooded, drowning the Doctor, his regeneration wouldn't have mattered as there still wouldn't have been air to breathe. We've seen enough instances where the Doctor is vulnerable during regeneration (with The Impossible Astronaut providing a direct example of total death in the midst of regeneration) so drowning in a sealed chamber could be seen as a way to kill the Doctor properly. But it still seemed a bit off to me. At the very least, it could have been explained better by the UNIT soldiers. Any story where I have to fill in a better explanation than the one provided is falling a bit short.

Despite the shortcomings and other small bits, this is a pretty good episode. It makes for a good intro into the finale, even if the finale didn't quite live up to all the expectations. It is not an episode to watch for a first timer as there is too much dependence on knowing the Tenth Doctor era to understand the story. But once you've been through, it is a perfectly good story to pull down and enjoy from time to time.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5

The End of Time

I don't want to go.

The End of Time was the swan song of the Tenth Doctor and producer Russell T. Davies and boy does it show. There is a bit of a history with Doctor Who that when a producer leaves there is a bit of a self-indulgence, whether that's in story flourish or overspending on budget. Couple that with the spectacle that accompanies a Doctor leaving and you can either have a brilliant show or a hot mess. This one swings wildly between the two extremes.

Fan reaction to this story is generally middling to negative. Time has helped it a bit. After the long wait between the poorly received Planet of the Dead, expectations were kicked into high gear with the fabulous The Waters of Mars. People were expecting a dramatic crisis with dark wrestling between forces which would require the sacrifice of the Doctor. Instead, this is a piece of whimsy with melancholy touches that then wallows in it's own importance for the last ten minutes.

Things get off on the wrong foot almost immediately with the resurrection of the Master. There have been rumors that the Master was not in the first draft of this episode and he was inserted later. Some more time needed to be taken in this because his resurrection is done more or less though magic which is very, very out of place in Doctor Who. It didn't help that the acting in the resurrection scene was rather poor as well.

This in turn led to a number of over-the-top scenes between the Master and the Doctor. There was some action but it lacked authenticity. Interspersed in these scenes there are cuts to Gallifrey just before the last day of the Time War where President Rassilon (played by Timothy Dalton) is looking for a way to escape the destruction that the Doctor is bringing and the time lock that prevents its change. It was probably this point that confused me the most. If a section of space-time is locked, how can anything escape it (i.e. the diamond from Rassilon's sceptre)? That was lazy writing in my opinion.

Eventually the Master converts all of humanity to look and think like him, except for Wilfred, who is with the Doctor, and Donna, who is protected due to her conditioning to protect her mind from the events of Journey's End. This was probably the lowest point of the episode. John Simm's Master was over-the-top to begin with. This was just silliness and whatever dangerous cliffhanger they were going for was completely lost in the farcical nature of the whole thing.

Things got a bit better in part two as the story then turned into a big chase with guns and missiles firing. There is a big confrontation at the end and the Master gets so angry at being used by Rassilon that he beats back the Time Lords and closes the breach in the time-lock. With the Master gone, humanity reverts back to normal. Then comes the self indulgence.

Wilf is trapped and the Doctor can only get him out if he bathes himself in radiation. He rants at the injustice of it all and then saves Wilf. He then goes on a grand tour of past companions. We only see those that were pertinent to the RTD era, but it is implied that he saw some old ones (such as Jo Grant) as well. After ten minutes of this indulgence, the Tenth Doctor finally regenerates into the Eleventh Doctor.

The greatest crime of this story is it's silliness. Aside from the resurrection of the Master scene and the "Master Race" scene, it is well acted and there is an attempt by the characters to take things as seriously as they can. In fact, there are two great scenes with the Doctor and Wilf that are thoughtful and poignant. In both, there is a discussion regarding mortality and it's touching to see a 900+ Time Lord getting fatherly advice from Wilf. But the quality of these scenes unfortunately reinforces the poorer quality of the rest.

They also stand in odd contrast to the Doctor's nasty hissy fit when he realizes that despite winning, he must now die to save one man. If he had just looked sad and spelled things out simply with Wilf begging him not to do it as he was an old man (as it was in the second part of the scene), it would have been so much more powerful. But instead, the Doctor lets the angry, bitter man out; blaming Wilf for what is going to happen before softening and getting in to the booth. The two scenes do not juxtapose with each other and it is probably one of the worst moments the Tenth Doctor has ever shown.

The visitation scenes with the companions are somewhat touching, but they go on too long. Rather than seeing every companion in the RTD era, it would have been more touching to holding it to two or three: Sarah Jane, Donna's wedding and the last scene with Rose. I could have done without the last scene with Rose, but I understand Rose's relationship with the fans and the Tenth Doctor to grouse too much about it. When the regeneration finally comes, some of the sadness is lost with a "just get on with it" vibe replacing it.

Despite most of my comments having a negative tone, I did not despise this one as much as others did. It's more of lost opportunity. With all the good that RTD did in bringing back the show and with as many good stories that the Tenth Doctor was in, it is just a shame that the final adventure was so weak, especially in contrast to the strength that had come just one story earlier. I could watch this one again and enjoy it to some degree, but it's not going to be high on the list.

Overall personal score: 2 out of 5