Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter
Russell T Davies & Benjamin Cook

(Published 14th January 2010 - Publisher BBC Books/Ebury/Random House - ISBN-13: 9781846078613)

Just over a year after Benjamin Cook and Russell T Davies unleashed The Writer's Tale, their original book of email and text conversations on an unsuspecting public, we now have a follow up volume. A hefty tome, The Final Chapter contains the back and forth banter between the journalist and the former Doctor Who producer (that sounds odd, referring to Russell as the former producer) as the remaining David Tennant 2009 Specials commenced pre-production and through to Russell's departure to a new job in LA. The first volume, reproduced in its entirety in this paperback addition, concluding at the end of Journey's End, is supplemented with another 300 odd pages of nattering between the two of them.

Book Two opens with Russell tearing himself apart over his workload (he's simultaneously prepping the Specials, Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood: Children Of Earth) and what struck me reading the opening chapters was that it was rather obvious he had reached a tipping point trying to oversee it all. He's struggling to generate story ideas and is grabbing at some rather dubious notions for the forthcoming Specials - a Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover smacks of fanwank desperation to me - and the stress is, as he admits to himself, affecting his relationships with the other writers.

As he contemplates the scripts for the forthcoming specials, Steven Moffat is publicly announced as his successor. David Tennant has a momentary wobble when Moffat has a meeting with him and outlines the plans for Series 5/Series 1/Series Thirty One (take your pick). David is actually tempted to stay on.

We also discover that many of the criticisms that will be leveled at The End Of Time two parter were already nipping at his heels just as he was storylining them. It's The Writer's Tale co-author Ben Cook who drops the bombshell to Russell that what he thinks is a genius idea of having millions of Masters populating the Earth was already something the Wachowski brothers had done with Agent Smith in The Matrix Reloaded. Even Russell himself admits that it also bears a visual resemblance to Being John Malkovich. As Philip Pullman notes about RTD in his Foreword, "he steals from the best, which proves that he is both discriminating and unscrupulous" so are fans perhaps crying wolf a little too much when they accuse him of blatantly nicking ideas. Whether right or wrong, that's what he does and he's the first to admit that he's going with it partly because of a lack of other ideas and it didn't even occur to him he was borrowing from The Matrix.

You will also discover that the original plan for Torchwood: Children Of Earth was to include Mickey and Martha in some of the episodes and therefore the suggestion at the conclusion of Journey's End that they would be involved didn't just come out of nowhere. Freema was offered 13 episodes of Law And Order: UK and Noel got a Michael Winterbottom film just as the scripts were nearing completion thus preventng their involvement. There's an interesting discussion between Ben and Russell about how actors are booked and the precarious nature of television production deadlines, dealing with agents and booking artistes. Writing the five episodes of Torchwood turns into a huge crisis of confidence for RTD because he's running late, other writers are submitting their episodes and he hasn't got a clue how to end Day Five of the five episode arc. Ben and Russell discuss whether he writes with a definite ending already in mind or whether it's simply done by the skin of his teeth. Russell gives an example of how an ending informs the structure of a script with the death of Cassandra in New Earth. He takes up the story on 28th July 2008:

"But the gaping void of Episode 5 is staring at me and we're seriously running out of time. When I said     to you the other day that it's all my fault I'm only just beginning to realise what has happened in this     new 5 episode process. A long time back we stared, all of us together, at the emptiness of Episode 5. We had no solution. Nothing. We had bits of plot, but no story, no essence, no real reason for the show to exist."

The script remains unwritten, he does a bunk to a cinema for an entire day, literally hiding from the deadline. But nobody even notices he's gone! He admits that a number of other ideas that he'd had for other dramas had to be ransacked, including a family story set within a military coup, and there's a tone of regret that he's given them up for "the ending of a sci-fi spin off thriller". He admits, "I feel like I've cannibalised my own work".

It is only until he has dinner with Jane Tranter, where he is asked to go with her and Julie Gardner to LA after his work on Doctor Who is finished, that the crisis breaks. Simultaneously, the story ideas for Planet Of The Dead, The Waters Of Mars and The End Of Time all snap into shape and he writes a blizzard of pages for the final Torchwood scripts. It's clear that writing is still not an easy thing for him to master. He seems to spend endless days and hours prevaricating before even a word hits the page. All this whilst reminiscing about The Christmas Invasion and David Tennant mooning the paparazzi on Barry Island during the shooting of the sword fight.

In Best Laid Plans (Chapter Seventeen) Ben asks him if he regrets being known just for Queer As Folk and Russell again responds unapologetically to all those who label him a 'gay writer'. Ever since Russell took the show on he's been haunted by this particular bug-bear and he briefly addressed this weird homophobia, if indeed that is what it is, in the first book. As a counter to claims of his episodes containing 'in your face homosexuality' that supposedly aggravate certain sections of Doctor Who fandom, he draws a line in the sand here in an email on 5th October 2008:

"...it doesn't bother me at all, the gay thing. A lot of writers would die for a label! I'm proud of it, I really am, which is lucky because I reckon it's going to stick...I suspect I'll be left with the epitaph of Queer As Folk. The thing is, I think I am a Gay Writer, when I write anything.

Most crucially, I don't think it's ever affected my commissions. I'm not aware of anyone ever having said, 'He can't write that, because he's gay'. Well, it might have been thought, subtly and insidiously. When people write off my scripts as 'lightweight' I think that's bound up with their perception of my sexuality, even if they aren't conscious of that. But there's always someone who's going to say they don't like my writing because of this, that or the other. Equally they might say, 'Gay or straight, I think you're rubbish'. Fair enough. I think they're rubbish, too!"

As plans for David's leaving announcement at the NTAs come to fruition ('Operation Cobra'!) Ben suggests a suitable scheduling for the final three specials over Christmas and New Year. This is yet another instance where Ben prompts Russell and the team around him and one gets the feeling that without Ben as a sounding board Russell would tend to sink lower into his self-obsessiveness and not see the wood for the trees, as it were.

In a way, as the Doctor really does need a human companion to tell him when to stop, it seems Russell needs a friendly voice at the end of an email to tell him when his ideas stink, give him a stone cold objective view of what he's writing and, frankly, someone who can at least point out 'the bleeding obvious' to him as his brain implodes from all the work he has to do. Ben's communication, for better or worse, has gradually filtered into the way scripts are shaped, schedules are decided and provided ways for Russell to recognise when he's just wallowing a little too much in self-pity.

After someone gives Russell fleas at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, Mark Cossey, of Doctor Who Confidential, contacts him to say that former ABBA members Bjorn and Benny are such fans of Torchwood that they'd like to write a musical version with him! What was that I was saying about the 'gay agenda' earlier...?

You have to get beyond seeing this extended version of the original book as either a bouncy conversation between a talented young journalist and a grumpy, depressed writer or as just another Doctor Who cash-in. And the really fantastic bits of this book have absolutely nothing to do with Doctor Who in the end. Yes, there's all that screaming about late scripts, decisions about money, actors, special effects, edits and such. To witness how utterly barmy the life Russell has within the world of Doctor Who I'd urge you to get the book just to read the email about his panic attack trapped in front of 300 fans at the Cardiff Doctor Who Exhibition - it's disturbing and you worry for the poor man -  or the complete laugh out loud description of how 'Operation Cobra' was finally realised at the NTAs. Brilliant piece of writing, in an email, there on the page. Writing as truth.

However, the book really comes alive in Smokey The Space Penguin (Chapter Twenty) when Ben asks Russell some very straight forward questions. I dare anyone who doesn't believe Russell is a good writer to read the emails about his Swansea upbringing with the huge extended family that gravitated around the Davies household, or the one about his mum and her years of silence about the blood cancer she died from, or the one about when he realised he was gay and how he came out, and not come away knowing full well that this man can move people with words. They are precious pieces of writing. Worth their weight in gold because they get past all of Davies' showman bluster and he briefly lets you into his truly private and self contained life. It's probably the closest he'll get to actually writing an autobiography because he is very private about what goes on in his life and the big Welsh poof who says 'how marvellous' on the telly is just a version of RTD that comes with the job. There's a very different, quite complex man beneath that outer skin.

And gosh, we were lucky to get The Waters Of Mars. There were plans to cut it because the budget was short £300,000. Julie Gardner is up in arms about attending the BAFTA Children's Doctor Who Day because they won't let her in without an accompanying child. "Where am I going to get a child from? Do they think I've got one in my cellar?" A footman 'fanboys' Russell at the Palace as he goes to collect his OBE but he's more concerned that his own fanboy has been left to run riot for The End Of Time with a scene showing the Time Lords convening a meeting to stop the Master's plan (that eventually stays in the script). Ben pleads with him to include it in the script knowing full well that the resulting fangasm will be seen from space. But on the 10th December Russell emails Ben with much more important news...they've cast the Eleventh Doctor!

The scripts for The End Of Time are completed on time, the writing of them refreshingly unaccompanied by days and hours of self-doubt and lack of ideas. There is a moment where Daleks are also considered for the story, in an alliance with the Time Lords, but it doesn't have legs as an idea and Ben advises Russell not to go there. Timothy Dalton flirts with Julie Gardner, Russell pirouettes awkwardly to avoid meeting Matt Smith and a woman walking her dog on the Brandon Estate, as they film the dying Doctor with Rose, tells the BBC crew, 'Bollocks to the lot of yer!' Quite right too.

Russell is also trying to read through 12 Sarah Jane scripts and has some interesting views on one of the young writers, Joe Lidster, working on the series (he wrote Mark Of The Berserker and Madwoman In The Attic). After a meeting with him Russell is concerned about the fate of developing talent caught up in the machinery of production.

"If he doesn't start believing in himself he could get torn apart in this career...Writers have to be strong if only because there are so many forces battering them. If you're Production Company A dealing with New Writer B and you're faced with his vagueness and uncertainty...well, then Joe will become that writer complaining in the pub. What do you do, though? What do you say to make a person strong?"

He's clearly affected by the meeting, believing he's been too harsh with Joe, but is adamant he recognises Joe's talent and potential for the future as a showrunner. This belief in yourself  as a writer is further emphasised right at the end of the book with two very interesting emails about re-watching his own work, in these instances The Sound Of Drums and Rose. Here he is on The Sound Of Drums:

"...I can get this disconcerting draught of...well...how it must look to other people sometimes. How all unplanned it all seems. Like I'm making it up as I go along. I'm refusing on screen to do all those normal things that would make an episode more coherent, with a beginning-middle-and end wholeness."

He goes on to mention various plot elements that he recklessly deposits into the script, including concepts like the Archangel Network, the Valiant and UNIT protecting the world, that are treated as disposable or throwaway gags.

"I can see how annoying that looks. I can see how maddening that must be, for some people. Especially if you're imposing really classical script structures, and templates, and expectations on that episode, even unconsciously. I must look like a vandal, a kid or an amateur. No wonder people hate what I write....

They're not lazy, clumsy or desperate. They're chosen. I can see more traditional ways of telling those stories but I'm not interested. I've got this tumbling, freewheeling style that sort of somersaults along, with everything happening now - not later, not before - but now, now, now. I've made a Doctor Who that exists in the present tense. And I think that's exactly like the experience of watching Doctor Who. It's happening now, right in front of your eyes! If you don't like it...if you don't join in with it, then, blimey those episodes must be nonsensical."

And talking about Rose:
"It hit me watching Rose that this show is exactly what I wanted it to be and it is, in its first 45 minutes, exactly what it is now. It has never fundamentally changed. There has been no mission creep since 2005, no timidity, no reversals. There has been development and exploration but no wandering. I'm proud of that. "

In the end, Book Two does shine a little more light on the Russell T Davies we rarely see, the private man who does have a life with a partner and an extended family. But, as he himself admits, the PR version of Russell T Davies is built on a web of 'lies', a front if you like, that must be constructed as a shield to deal with everything that's thrown at him as an executive producer. Out there in the wilds of fandom some are sad to see him go and some are clearly desirous of change. Whatever they think, by reading The Writer's Tale you get some idea of the immense pressures he and the team in Cardiff have had to deal with over the last five years. I haven't enjoyed all of Russell's scripts but I'm so glad he brought the series back and now leaves it, in very robust condition, at the heart of the BBC's schedules. Doctor Who fans should be grateful for that, at least.

At the end of the book, as he moves to LA, more happy than sad that his Doctor Who days are over (he refers to himself as a 'glacier' when people continually ask him if he's sad and why he isn't sad and it sums up the distance he places between himself and the production in some ways, his defence mechanism), there's a sense of renewal; of the Doctor, of the series, of the production team and potentially of Russell himself. What irony then, that as I close the book with satisfaction, Fox announce a US version of Torchwood with a pilot episode to be written by Russell T Davies. The more things change... as they say.

Their Reward

Doctor Who: The End of Time Part Two

Of course there were things I didn't like.

For starters, the explanation we're given for how/why the Doctor "destroyed" the Time Lords and Daleks doesn't align quite right with the cryptic hints we've gotten all along. The extent to which being in the final day of a time-locked Time War means death isn't satisfactorily explored, but apparently that's the situation. The suggestions that Gallifrey "burned" at the Doctor's hands are now rather questionable, not to mention his numerous claims that he wishes he could go back and save them: see Father's Day and The Fires of Pompeii for the couple of examples I can think of at the moment. 

I really don't mind the fact that we never find out who The Woman is, or who the other person covering their eyes is. Doctor Who is all about mystery and periodically, new mystery has to be injected into the program. That's what the Time War was about, and now that it's been demystified a bit, we're due for more mystery. The Doctor's family or other Gallifreyan loved ones is as fine a direction to go in as any. But I wish the mystery had been developed in a more sensible way.

And yes, I thought the way Donna was handled was problematic, and the same goes for the Ood, and of course Mickey and Martha were just bizarre. But honestly, I can't say that any of these problems seriously impaired my enjoyment of this episode. The End of Time was huge, it was thrilling, and above all it was heartbreaking, and that was really all I wanted from it.

I think it's harder for me to see Tennant go than it is for some of the reviewers and readers of this blog, because unlike many of them I became a Doctor Who fan in 2007. Although I started with the Eccleston episodes, I watched them with the knowledge that Eccleston would be replaced by David Tennant, and so Tennant has always been the Doctor. As opposed to all of the others, whose episodes I enjoy, often just as much, and occasionally more. They're all good. I don't think there's ever been a bad Doctor (which is astonishing when you think about it, because surely you'd expect that there would be, although maybe you disagree with my high opinion of all of them), but thy aren't the Doctor. Not anymore. And now Tennant has joined them. I thought I was ready for it but I guess I wasn't.

Which is why, although other reviews are focusing on Simm’s performance, or Cribbins’s, or Dalton’s, I can’t really bring myself to do that. I think they all did marvelously, but there is one scene which dominates this episode for me. I haven’t re-watched the entire episode since the first time I saw it, but I keep re-watching the scene between the Doctor and Rose. Davies figured out a lovely way to have his cake and eat it too in terms of giving David Tennant a send-off that was both explosive and intimate, and it’s a marvelous way of putting a bow on the entire RTD era, by returning to the beginning and focusing on the everyday character moments that make the program great, and the return to where it all started, on the Powell estate, is particularly good stuff.

For me, this is the best scene in the episode, and in fact one of my favorite moments in any Doctor Who, ever. I should be ashamed of myself for saying so, because the romance between the Tenth Doctor and Rose has never really sat well with me, and consequently I haven't thought very highly of her character, but this is a lovely little scene that's going to greatly rehabilitate my respect for her. I had feared that we might see Rose rip open the gap between dimensions again, just to be with him again at the moment of his regeneration, but we get nothing so gaudy, and instead we see a return to the far-more likable (in my opinion) 2005 version of the character. 

The tone of the scene recalls that lovely bit in Time Crash where Tennant looks at Davison and explains that “you were my Doctor.” The moment here when he tells Rose “I bet you’re gonna have a really great year” breaks the fourth wall in a similar way. At the same time as it is the Doctor talking to Rose, it’s also Davies talking to the viewer of 2005, and inviting the viewer in 2010 to reflect back on the moment when they first watched his version of Doctor Who, whether they were discovering the show for the first time or coming back to it after the long wilderness years. Self-congratulatory? Utterly, on both the Doctor’s part and Davies. But damn well deserved on both counts.  It’s his reward. It’s both of their reward.

And I ate it up, because the overblown nature of it all struck me as entirely appropriate. Much as I love my Pertwee and my Davison and my McGann Big Finish audios, I’ve never known these Doctors as anything other than the Doctors of the past. In that sense, even though Tennant’s not my favorite Doctor, he’s still my Doctor, and when my Doctor dies, I’m not complaining if he burns down the TARDIS when he goes. I’m among the millions for whom Doctor Who as I know it has come to an end. 

For this reason, I don’t think I’m going to be giving an overall retrospective of the Davies era of Doctor Who, because I simply don’t have the fan experience which allows me to properly conceive it as such. For me it's not the Davies era at all, it's Doctor Who as I know it. Which is not to say I’m not excited for the future. I was fibbing above when I implied that the Rose scene was the one I’d watched most. I must have watched the Matt Smith scene more than a dozen times already, feeling a bit giddier with excitement each time. I have the most irrational optimism for the Moffat era of Doctor Who, and the tiny taste we’ve gotten of it is driving me crazy with anticipation.

But still, the little bit of Smith and Moffat is only the icing on the fabulous cake that was The End of Time Part Two. Looking back on this ramble, I’m not sure I’ve properly reviewed the story in the sense of explaining why I loved it so much, in spite its obvious flaws. I could cite the much sharper focus than the first part, or the brilliant performances all around, or the tension of the scene between the Doctor, the Master, and Rassi… the Lord President. But honestly, I probably can’t justify my love of this episode because I appreciated it on a much more visceral level than, say, Waters of Mars or Midnight or Journey’s End. The latter of these, I realize, is controversial, but I think I gave a fairly well-reasoned argument for my enjoyment of that episode in my review. I can’t do the same here, other than to say that it thrilled me and that it broke my heart.  That’s what I’ve come to expect from the finales that Davies writes. So even when he has to sacrifice a bit of story logic to get us there, I still appreciate it greatly, and now more than ever. When all is said and done, it's a great send-off to Russell T Davies and David Tennant, two men who have been instrumental in ensuring the success of Doctor Who.

Whoops Apocalypse

Reading (okay, watching) Russell T Davies' Doctor Who

The key to understanding Russell T Davies’ vision of Doctor Who can be found as early as eight minutes into the show's triumphant 2005 return. And it’s not the skittish beats of Murray Gold’s UK garage pastiche, or the rapid-edit Rose and Mickey montage, both of which would turn out to be something of a Trojan horse designed to help deliver this sci-fi curiosity to the Hollyoaks generation. It’s not even the appearance of the new, version 9.0 Doctor, now looking more like a car clamper than an Edwardian adventurer. No, the really telling moment is Jackie’s throwaway quip about Rose’s run-in with the Nestene having aged her: “Skin like an old bible,” she tells her friend on the phone. “Walk in here now, you’d think I was her daughter.”

This comment does not, on any level, make sense. A bad day at work – even one culminating in rampaging shop dummies, a dead caretaker, a giant explosion and the disembodied voice of Graham Norton – is not widely known for impacting on the texture of your skin. The colour of it maybe and, at a push, it might even turn the odd hair white. But “skin like an old bible”? It’s nonsense, whichever way you slice it. And the point is, to Russell T Davies, that doesn’t matter. So what if it doesn’t actually make sense? It’s a funny line that illuminates something of Jackie’s character – and good lines, strong characters and set-piece ‘moments’ are what Russell T Davies’ Who is all about. Unlike, say, Philip Pullman, who subscribes to the theory that everything else must serve the needs of the story, Davies decrees that the story must serve these other elements – and even, if necessary, sacrifice itself for them.

Jackie’s gag is a trivial but telling example of a trope we would see repeated countless times throughout the RTD era, right up until its dying days, when a confrontation between the Master and the Doctor on which rests the entire future of the universe (and possibly its past, too) is inexplicably put on hold in favour of some arse-squeezing nonsense with June Whitfield and the bloke from Hi-de-Hi.

At times, it was difficult not to suspect Davies took a perverse sort of pride from this casual relationship between cause and effect. He’s often spoken of being an “instinctive” writer, and the mental image of him flying along in his Cardiff flat, pages of script falling fully-formed from his head in the dead of night, is a persuasive one (even if, according to The Writers’ Tale, it’s only half the story). Christopher "Hamilton" Bidmead kicked up a heck of a hornet’s nest when he described RTD as “a first draft writer”, but there is an extent to which Davies himself seems reluctant to overwrite, to overthink, his scripts, lest they lose some of the urgency and personality that sees his work regularly lionized for its boldness, its audacity, its chutzpah and (a particular favourite of broadsheet journalists) its brio.

On other occasions, Davies has as good as admitted he thinks the mechanics of plotting and internal logic are only of concern to the hardcore internet fanbase – let’s not forget this is the showrunner who went one better than William Shatner by dismissing some of his most dedicated audience as “ming mongs”. And he’s got a point – there are times when staring into the Untempered Schishm of the Gallifrey Base (nee Outpost Gallifrey) forums threatens to send you as mad as the Master. (A random example from this week’s dispatches – people getting irate about Martha’s treatment of Tom Milligan; that’s right, - taking sides in the break-up of a fictional relationship about which we know precisely zero. The man could have been shagging a Toclafane for all we know.)

But it’s arrogant folly for Davies to assume the rest of his audience – the other nine-and-a-half million or so – don’t care about this stuff as well. Any viewer buying into a fictional concept, even one this bonkers, has a right to expect it to make sense. (And who worries more about the logic of things than children? Try wriggling out of a satisfying answer with them and they’ll ask you “Why? Why? Why?” from now until the year 5.5/apple/26.) No-one appreciates those patented RTD “moments” – a dash of gothic verse here, a lyrical paean to the possibilities of humanity there – more than me. But it’s not pedantry, pettifoggery or even the mark of a sphincter-squeezing forum fanatic to expect those things to come packaged in a watertight (or at least seaworthy) story – especially from someone who, we are often reminded, is a genius.

 One argument the man himself has trotted out ad infinitum is that too much exposition acts as a drag on the action; how many times have we heard him talk of a line of explanation that was cut because it simply got in the way? (Take June and the Hi-de-Hi man again: don’t be at all surprised to read a forthcoming RTD interview in which he says something along the lines of: “In the original edit there was a line where the Doctor said he couldn’t confront the Master while there were innocent bystanders around, so that’s why he got on the bus and went home with Wilf and co - to get them out of harm's way. But then I thought, you know what? It just slows the story down. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make any sense. It’s Christmas Day! And Julie agreed with me. She thinks I’m brilliant.”)

With Davies, it almost became part of the game for the viewer to have to fill in the blanks and, after five years of being asked to join all the dots myself, I was starting to feel like I should be earning a writers’ fee just by watching the thing. (Though, to be honest, his “never complain, never explain” credo was looking pretty specious anyway by the time The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End rolled around, as the dialogue here consisted of little but convoluted, technobabble exposition, and there were still holes in the plot – which, from my recollection, revolved around Davros bringing about “the end of reality itself”, while he and the Daleks hid round a corner - big enough to lose 27 planets in.)

This Big, Bold, Audacious writing – which is either testament to a man restlessly pushing at the boundaries of the televised adventure format, or a euphemism for someone seeing what they can get away with, depending on your point of view – also manifests itself in the scale of the stories. From the death of reality to the end of time, it’s fair to say that, for Russell T Davies, size matters. This was evident right from the get-go when he decided to set his very first future story in the year five billion. Not the year 5,000, 500,000 or even the year five million, but the year five billion. Ironically, this was predicated by a rare nod to real, actual science (the projected lifespan of the sun) but there was still a whiff of his swaggering braggadocio about it – a sense that, in the words of the Doctor, he could take us “further than we’ve ever gone before”.

After that, everything was bigger, faster, more. If Davies is satirising motorway madness, he’ll have people spend their entire lives shunting between junctions, even if it stretches credibility to breaking point. And why waste everyone’s time with a boring old moonbase when you can land an entire London hospital on the lunar surface instead? His is a universe where middle-aged women accessorise with collapsed stars and the assassination of the US President on live TV is barely a blip in the rolling news cycle for AMNN anchorwoman Trinity Wells (who really needs to have a word with her boss about the Christmas rotas).

And whereas in old-skool Who the threat might have been to a village or a colony or a base under the siege, on Davies’ watch, it’s the entire human population that succumbs to the influence of Adipose or Atmos, Sycorax or Simm. (Any cursory sops to Dr Science went out of the window pretty sharpish, too: If Davies wants to drag the entire Earth across space, with only a few swinging lampshades to show for it, or materialise Gallifrey directly above Chiswick, then who’s gonna stop him?)

In one sense, this shouty, showy, bells and whistles approach seems like a fundamental misreading of what Doctor Who actually is – because wasn’t it always the cleverer, speccier, talkier alternative to the flashy pyrotechnics of Buck Rogers, The A Team and even Star Wars? Isn’t that why we loved it in the first place? Robert Holmes famously said the Doctor was more like Sherlock Holmes than Dan Dare, whereas Davies, a voracious consumer of comic books and summer blockbusters, a man who refuses to watch films with subtitles, clearly has as much love for the Mekon as he does for The Musgrave Ritual.

But only a fool would have tried to sell the stagey, studio-bound Who of old to the iGeneration, and a more generous assessment says Davies actually allowed the show finally to live up to its true potential, by giving it the muscle to bust some blocks in its own right while maintaining enough quirky wit, keen intelligence and genuine, heartfelt passion to put cynical marketing exercises like Transformers and Spider-Man 3 to shame. A show that, in the words of Timothy Dalton no less, runs the gamut from “Coronation Street to 2001” (2000AD would have been a more appropriate reference, but we take his point) – a dichotomy perfectly summed up on New Year’s Day 2010 with an aerial dogfight lifted straight from George Lucas – but with Bernard Cribbins manning the gun in his gardening duds. (Though I’d still argue Davies went too far with some of his Christmas specials which, in their eagerness to take the place of the pre-multi channel era “big film”, were in danger of losing the show’s essence amid a bombardment of sound, fury and CGI money shots.)

Of course, this fabled mix of the domestic and the fantastic has always been Doctor Who’s trump card and, if you’re looking for evenness of tone, you’ve come to the wrong show. It’s mutability has always been one of its greatest strengths, while at the same time resulting in dramatic lurches in quality (for good or ill) not found in more consistent – but infinitely duller – episodic TV. But in the Davies era the good, the bad and the downright bonkers sat cheek by jowl like never before. Never mind the old chestnut about the show's “infinitely flexible format” serving up space opera one week and historical costume drama the next – in noughties Who, we were asked to readjust our emotional sets on a minute-by-minute basis.

For this reason, Davies’ big, grandstanding emotional scenes could occasionally feel a little forced, arriving from nowhere, like the jarring chord change in clunky prog rock epic, with only the watering of David Tennant’s eye or the swell of Murray Gold’s strings to tells us this was one of those moment when we were Meant To Be Feeling Something. The death of Lady Cassandra is a case in point – after two episodes in which she’d bounced between broad comic parody and mass murderer, all that eulogizing and final, dramatic swan dive just felt like crocodile tears. And where exactly did that whole “Time Lord Victorious” business suddenly spring from in the final reel of The Waters of Mars? (And where did it go again, for that matter?)

On other occasions, things simply got too silly to sustain any sense of verisimilitude: I loved Turn Left – undoubtedly one of Davies’ finest 45 mins – but struggled to buy into a grim “new holocaust” parable extrapolated from the Titanic falling onto Buckingham Palace – Queen, corgis, curlers and all. Then there’s Boomtown, a “bottle episode” morality play about the politics of death - framed by a story about a farting alien trying to escape a nuclear explosion on an intergalactic surf board.

It will be illuminating to contrast Davies’ love of the big, bombastic pictures he thought Doctor Who needed to compete with those shiny ITV studio floors with the approach of his successor who, judging by his track record so far, favours a less-is-more approach. To Steven Moffat, the biggest thrills are often the smallest. Davros wants to detonate reality? Ho hum. Clockwork man hiding under the bed? Anyone mind if I sleep with the light on? (Interestingly, in all his 31 episodes, RTD never actually wrote, or even tried to write, a properly scary one. Tense (Midnight), and occasionally horrific (Last of the Time Lords), but not proper horror scary (Tooth and Claw's werewolf was probably the closest we got), which is strange for a man in love with a show most famous for… well, for inspiring blogs with names like Behind The Sofa, for one.

(Disciples of The Moff Messiah might say Davies writes comedies that aren’t always that funny, while Moffatt writes horrors that just happen to be hilarious, but that’s a bit uncharitable. And we shouldn’t forget Davies’ role as midwife to all those Moffat, Cornell, Jones and Shearman crowd pleasers. His imprimatur is all over even those scripts he didn’t do a root and branch rewrite of; it’s his vision they were writing to, his bravery that allowed them to take risks.)

Whatever you think of Davies’ approach to the nuts and bolts of scriptwriting, few would dispute that, in his wider role as showrunner, he was exactly the right man for the job of restoring Doctor Who to its rightful place at the heart of the nation’s cultural radar. Back in the late 80s, fans fell like hungry wolves on a throwaway line in The Independent praising Ghost Light – today, you could fill several volumes of glowing press cuttings and five-star reviews, to say nothing of those baseline viewing figures and dizzying AI scores.

To an extent, the production team were pushing at an open door; there was a genuine appetite for Doctor Who to succeed, to the extent that everyone – the production team, the media, the fans – has colluded in selling the idea of it being “the biggest show on TV” (it isn’t – though it seems churlish to point it out, it isn’t even the biggest drama on TV). But Davies’ real triumph has been keeping that door open for five years – through constant reinvention, expert salesmanship and boundless energy (not to mention his kingmaking role in the elevation of David Tennant to freshly minted national treasure), he has worked his Welsh arse off to ensure the public love affair with New Who never waned and that, the odd mealy-mouthed Daily Mail columnist aside, the backlash never came. Today, his name is justly synonymous with the show’s success: Gallifrey Base users, DWM Mighty 200 voters and even Hugo juries may prefer Moffat but, to the public, and the mainstream media, Russell T Davies is Doctor Who.

If that were to be the legacy, then, it would be more than enough. But the legacy is so much bigger than that. Russell T Davies put a big, beating heart into the hollow chamber that we didn’t even realise was at the centre of the old Doctor Who until he pointed it out to us. His initial series tagline of “adventures in the human race” turned out to be much more than a don’t-scare-the-horses way of selling the show to sci-fi sceptics. It was the touchstone of his vision: a joyous counterpoint to the solipsism and nihilism and irony and apathy of the decade of cynicism. It dazzled us with the infinite potential of mankind, and brought imagination, intelligence and adventure to Saturday night entertainment TV. It was made with love, and radiated it to millions in return.

And if Russell T Davies was sometimes guilty of ignoring the whole in favour of the moment… well, what moments. From the beautiful chips and friendships coda of The End of the World to the holographic Doctor telling Rose to have a fantastic life; from that devastating farewell on Bad Wolf Bay – “I’m burning up a sun, just to say goodbye” – to the whip-smart, deliciously timey-wimey first meeting with Martha Jones; from the Doctor and Donna’s hilarious mime in Partners in Crime to our hero’s heartbreaking final sacrifice, curled up like a helpless child in the bottom of that glass booth, this was television built to last. Though whether it will last five billion years, like the respective oeuvres of Soft Cell and Britney Spears, remains to be seen.

Le Seigneur Perdu De Temps

Doctor Who: The End Of Time Part 2

'This was the day the Time Lords returned'...er, well, not really. They sort of just nipped in, said hello, threatened everyone, and nipped back out again. Timothy Dalton was telling fibs. Actually, it's yet another example, and very typical indeed, of RTD allowing a chunk of his Who mythology to spring conveniently back into life only for it, 45 minutes later, to be popped back into place again with nothing terribly earth shattering having happened to the series structure. However, this time he isn't allowed to have it all his own way. Moffat is waiting in the wings impatiently looking at his watch.

Davies' regular revivification of the Cybermen, Daleks and now the Master, often within a finale set piece where the Earth, or the Universe, or reality or time or indeed the whole kit and caboodle is under threat, has always been constructed as a series of reset narratives promising much blood and thunder but never really daring to go very far at all in really shaking up the Universe. Gallifrey materialising over the skies of Earth is eventually reduced to just another hallucination caused by WiFi going crazy around the world. I imagine that's probably the billions of key strokes from fans venting their spleen on Gallifrey Base. However, this time one part of that narrative, the appearance of a new Doctor, isn't subject to his magic reset and there's nothing he can do about it. Except...delay. Busk. Vamp.

His vamping is always about spectacle and as the recent Who On Who interview with David Tennant pointed out he doesn't have much time for films with subtitles. I imagine if you offered him a choice between 2012 and a Pedro Almodovar film he'd plump for Roland Emmerich's disaster porn. Here we get that cod Millennium Falcon dogfight with the missiles, except the Millennium Falcon resembles Red Dwarf's Starbug and there's a pensioner manning the gun turrets instead of a farmboy. The associations with the Falcon are reinstated by the interior of the flight deck with those oval doorways and viewports too. Still, Wilf blasting missiles out of the sky is rather entertaining. Further busking was in evidence with all the nonsense about the Gallifreyan diamond acting as a signal for the Time Lords to cart themselves and Gallifrey across the universe.

When we get to that final 20 minutes he really goes all Proustian on us. And let's give him his due, the Doctor is the ultimate Proustian character with an ability to embody psychological or durational time rather than time on the clock or the time of physicists as the true measure of it all. Beneath the comic strip Flash Gordon bluster of The End Of Time Part 2 is a much deeper and richer narrative about memory, regret and experience. Why else would the greatest conflict spoken about in the series be called the Time War. Whilst we might criticise the overindulgence of those extended goodbyes in the coda to The End Of Time, there are some scenes that do emphasise the overall structure of Russell's view of his Doctor Who as a vast bildungsroman. The coming of age narrative he's constructed for the Doctor does after all need some form of closure but it's a pity that he feels he has to do extended versions of that initial desk clearing of Journey's End.

Let's disregard the rather odd scenes: of Martha and Mickey (it whiffs of a 'Mr And Mrs Smith Save the Universe' spin-off that we're not likely to see and really invalidates Martha's entire reason for leaving the TARDIS by falling in love and marrying Tom Milligan) and the faux Cantina scene with Captain Jack where the Doctor acts as a pimp in a crude bit of Davies' gay wishfulfillment. The most important scenes in this odyssey of  Proustian sensory associations are the ones with Verity Newman, Wilf and Donna and Rose. These don't feel forced and are more elegiac and the return to a snow covered Powell Estate in 2005 is a satisfying moment in which the Doctor concludes his voyage in search of his own authenticity, where change is finally embraced in the timely reminder from the Ood and the Doctor's regeneration signals both his status as adult and a return to adolescence with the appearance of Matt Smith and the parallel destruction and likely reconstruction of the TARDIS. The fluidity of time here suggests that the Doctor's return to the past is not just him simply remembering it as if from a distance but literally refinding the connection in his mind and experiencing it again.

Even as Davies brings his era back to the place where it all started there still remain inconsistencies and the implication that he simply isn't all that concerned with them as he feels they will no doubt be embellished upon by other authors. Thus we get no explanation about The Woman, played by Claire Bloom, and in having no explanation she's already been seen as variously Flavia, Romana or the Doctor's mother. Neither do we get an explanation for the acceleration of the Ood civilisation. There is also obfuscation here with the final conflict between Time Lords and Daleks now becoming just a huge free for all for various alien bad asses with silly science fiction names. His biggest narrative problem is Donna. As part of the triple cliff-hanger of Part One her head was about to go nuclear. Another bit of RTD vamping is required because by about ten minutes in Donna's lid had flipped and she was comatose for the rest of the episode and again very little explanation was given. Still, he didn't cheapen the devastating ending to Journey's End which would have been unforgiveable.

So strip away all the gloss and there are a number of brilliant scenes which summarise what the episode is trying to articulate beneath the visual equivalent of a song and dance routine. It's when all the extraneous noise is muted that Davies ability to write dialogue gets to shine. The Doctor's reasoning with the Master and saying that in order to experience the universe, to see all of time and space, you don't automatically assume you should possess it and bend it to your will. Which is a bit hypocritical considering the Doctor pretty much does that with Martha and Mickey, Donna and the lottery ticket and pairing up Jack and Alonso. Never mind, it's a great scene with Tennant and Simm on very good form.

This is surpassed by the lovely little scene between Wilf and the Doctor on the Vinvocci ship. A conversation between two old men, again both of them examining their place in time and space, and where their sense of self is revealed by a delving down into their subconsciousness and where the social connections, the Doctor's age and Wilf's war time exploits, become spectacle in themselves. There is also the Doctor's view of his own hubris and the self realisation that 'a Time Lord lives too long' whilst Wilf doesn't care about hubris and just wants him to save humanity. It's an amazingly good scene, full of high emotion and Bernard Cribbins once again proves what an asset he has been to the series.

The final Wrath Of Khan like exchange between Wilf and the Doctor in Naismith's mansion after all the hurly-burly is over is the real core of the drama. We see something new here, the Doctor throwing a tantrum and declaring like Harry Enfield's recalcitrant teenager Kevin that 'it's not fair!' that he has to sacrifice his life for this old duffer in the glass chamber. But it's a perfect distillation of the RTD era where the saving of a single life is a vastly important moral gesture on behalf of the Doctor. When the Doctor is bathed in the red hue of radiation it's like Superman being stripped of his powers in Superman II. At that moment the Tenth Doctor really is on borrowed time. Tennant gives a heartbreaking performance and perhaps we can after all partly excuse that last 20 minute coda as not only the Doctor's reward but a last bit of well earned sentimentality from RTD.

In the end then this entertaining but indulgent 73 minutes is symbolic of the best and worst of the RTD era. Beautifully tender drama spliced together with plotting that plays out like a game of Top Trumps. Great performances from Tennant and Cribbins, holding all this nonsense together, and highly enjoyable scenery chewing from Simm and Dalton. But now it's time to go. The delays are over, and let's face it pretty much everything since Journey's End has been a delay of the inevitable where I too would have been happy for Tennant to hand over at the end of that very similar indulgence. Tennant's cry of 'I don't want to go' sums up this whole year of waiting for the end and the sadness at his departure that has dominated the festive period. For me, it was that little moment at Donna's wedding that broke me up, where Wilf gazes at the stoic Doctor, tears brimming in his eyes, blowing him a little kiss and brings a shaking hand to his mouth in realisation that this itself is the end of time for the Tenth Doctor.

Well, sonny Jim. It's over. Immediately Matt Smith popped onto the screen there was a tangible sensation of new energy coursing through the veins of this middle aged little programme and the David Tennant era became part of that never forgotten Doctor Who continuum. Geronimo, indeed. The Doctor is dead, long live the Doctor.

Return of the Fan***king

Doctor Who: The End of Time Part 2

Well that was a blessed relief.

I'd heard some pretty wild rumours during the build-up to this episode. Bernard Cribbins is the Doctor's father (Wilfred Mott = Time Lord WTF!); Claire Bloom is the Doctor's mother; Matt Smith is going to be a rebooted 1st Doctor in a reset time-line where no one can remember anything from the past 46 years; the Master snogs the Doctor's face off to help him regenerate; and my own personal favourite, Paul McGann is seen fighting in the Time War. In a wig. Thankfully, none of this came to pass. But what remains frightening to me is the fact that all of these rumours felt entirely plausible right up until the very last moment. Even that one about President Obama urging the Doctor to change or how it all takes place in the Matrix.

The fact that none of this happened is something worth clinging to. Just think, it could have been even worse.

They didn't even bother to explain who Claire Bloom was in the end. You can happily go on imagining that she was Romana, Leela's daughter, his mom, or even Donna Temple-Noble if you are easily bewildered. Hell, she could be Omega or Flavia for all I care; it's your fanfic, you run with it. Whoever she is, her role in the plot remains vague to put it mildly (How did she manage to communicate with Wilf like that? Why didn't she warn him about the deadly closet of death? Who was the other bloke hiding his head in shame?) and for once I'm actually thankful. No explanation is preferable to an explanation concocted by RTD these days.

Incidentally, other things that we are given absolutely no explanation for in the 73 minute running time include: the reason why the Ood's civilization has been unnaturally accelerated which felt like a big deal last week (any ideas?), the fact that the Simms appear to have stood around doing absolutely nothing at all for 24 hours so the humans can all reappear in the very same place, and, most importantly of all, how Donna can survive her seemingly fatal brainf**k given what we've repeatedly been told about her condition. Or are we really told to accept that she will die if she remembers her adventures, only just not the first time it happens! Incredible.

Rassi-who???

The treatment of the Time Lords is laughable. First off, we have to accept that they are the ultimate Big Bad. Not because they are a bunch of bureaucratic tossers with questionable ethics, like they were in the classic series - no, apparently they were just fine back then - it's because the Time War has transformed them into a bunch of raging psychopaths. Now this is all very well and good but the Doctor never bothered to mention this little detail before. When he kept banging on about his home planet for the last five years it was "orange skies this" and "silver trees that". Not a sausage about how his own people were were a bunch of bastards backed up with some impressive sounding nonsense like the Nightmare Child, the Great Chrono-Buffalo of Promixa Three, and the Unholy Timey-Wimey Boogey-Woogie Man. Thanks for the heads-up, Doctor. Or maybe it makes you look less of a victim who sacrificed your own people and more of a hero who committed an entirely justifiable act that seems quite reasonable to me on the face of it.

Oh look, they managed to resurrect Rassilon as well. What was the point of that exactly? Surely the not-we must have been turning to each other to offer a quizzical, "Rassi-who?" (my wife certainly did) while the rest of us are left confused as to how that little twist is even possible. Maybe it's in a Virgin New Adventure or something? What a load of old fanw**k. Why not just have a batty Lord President instead? Just like old times. Why name-drop like that at the very last moment?

The Time Lord's plan is baffling too. If they really are cut-off from the rest of the universe then how can Rassi-whatsit throw a cheap diamond from Argos into a hologram so that it can land on earth? Or did I miss something important? In the 73 minute running time. 

The Master's plan is even worse (I will turn myself into loads of Time Lords - even though I am currently loads of Time Lords!) but at least he's making it up as he goes along. Simm was actually quite good in this. Bless him.

But most baffling of all is this: the 4th Doctor falls from a gantry onto some grass and he conks it. The 10th, on the other hand, can fall twice as far (Z'ha'Dum!!!!) onto a marble floor and he's practically unharmed. To paraphrase the Master: "Pre-Pos-ter-Ous".

He will knock sixteen times...

But when those final knocks came (he will knock 16 times actually but who's counting?) I was overcome with grief. Yeah, I admit it, I started to crumble at this point: it's hardwired into me. The Doctor was going to meet his end saving an old man. One life. One single life. How very Doctor Who.

Yeah, I welled up. Incredibly, I was still crying when I noticed that the glass doors weren't even sealed. There are clearly gaps between the panes of glass so how the radiation is contained is anyone's guess. But I went with it anyway. I was practically chewing the carpet in anguish when the Doctor started raging about how it wasn't fair, and how a part of him really wanted to just leave the old fart to die. But when he bravely opened that door I was blubbing like a baby. And then he died... a bit like Spock (and Spock dying always makes me cry) and then... and then...

Look, I'm happy to cry as much as the next fanboy, but I can't do it for 20 minutes straight. It's too much to ask of me. If the Doctor had regenerated there and then I would have been happy. Well, infinitely sad, but you know what I mean. So what if the preceding 40 minutes had been utter nonsense, at least that moment would have been unforgettable and beautiful and simple and timeless - but no. Oh God no. Instead we get 20 minutes - 20 MINUTES - of Russell T. Davies slapping himself on the back in a self-congratulatory coda that simply beggars belief.

Move over Graham Crowden, this death goes on for so long you'll need two YouTube links to see it all. 

They only had 73 minutes.

These brooding farewells start off annoying (Mickey and Martha - does anyone really care?) before becoming sentimental and repetitive (didn't we say goodbye to Sarah Jane a few weeks ago?) and then downright inappropriate (you've just killed your own grandson, here, have some casual sex with some bloke the writer fancies). Some of it was cloying of course (Rose. Again.) but Jessica Hynes remains lovely, even if her character is essentially cashing in on the contents of her grandmother's attic. The mad cow.

At least we were spared the Doctor's enigmatic visits to Elton Pope, Jackson Lake, Charles Dickens, Mr. Copper, Harriet Jones (before she went bad of course) and that little girl from Fear Her. They only had 73 minutes you see. And besides, didn't we get all this end-of-an-era nonsense out of our system during Journey's End? I know I did.

This seemingly never-ending epilogue will also inevitably lose some of its poignancy when we eventually discover that the 10th Doctor enjoyed entire seasons of adventures in between those little visits via a series of Big Finish audio adventures. Watch this space.

post-regenerative trauma can be a bitch

Finally, the Doctor remembers that he's supposed to be dying (thanks to a spooky Ood and a choir) and he makes it back to the TARDIS just in time for a trademark RTD regeneration. They feel quaint already.

But all is not lost. What I continue to adore about Doctor Who is that it can still make me lurch between emotions with such ferocity and panache that it's practically impossible for me not to feel both proud and impressed. The sadness that I felt when David delivered his final line (quite beautifully, I have to say, even after somebody on Twitter pointed out that he sounds like a toddler telling an anxious parent that they don't need the toilet) was immediately overtaken by wild, giddy laughter. That look on Matt Smith's face as he jolts out of the regeneration should be worrying but I found it liberating. He could very well end up being a real McCoy if those first few seconds are any indication but we all know that it's a long way to go until March and post-regenerative trauma can be a bitch.

But didn't it feel great? A new beginning. A fresh start. And a new TARDIS by the look of it. I can't wait.

The trailer for the next series (shown after EastEnders, weirdly) looked reassuring familiar and strangely different. Daleks, vampires, what I hope and pray aren't Silurians, and the unnerving sight of the 11th Doctor waving a gun in the air. This is especially interesting given what happened in tonight's episode. I still can't take my eyes of his hair, either.

And there we have it. The end of an era. I'll be back after the weekend my final appraisal of the RTD years where I will be mixing vitriol with praise.

Until then, the story never ends... look, it's on BBC3 right now...

Galloping Gallifreys

 For all the weeks, then days of expectation …

The End of Time: Part Two

… was really just another Doctor Who story.  Thousands leading up to it, thousands hopefully to come.  In January alone, Big Finish have three stories in release, BBC Audio has an audio book read by David Tennant as well as a version of The Ice Warriors Target novel, the raft of dvd releases, and comic strips in Doctor Who Magazine, Adventures and Battles In Time (is that still going?).  By my calculation, that’s seven new stories or instalments of stories and there’ll be much the same next month, and March and the month after that.

Except The End of Time was different.  In our heart of hearts we know that all of those other releases are narrative polyfiller and reclaimed bricks, filling in gaps created in the past, whereas the television series adds whole new layers with Russell T Davies carrying the trowel and David Tennant pushing the wheelbarrow (I’ll let you decide where Julie and Phil and everyone else fit into this analogy).  It was important for them to top it off properly ready for Steven Moffat to bring in his own set of masonry and in that regard they did him and us proud.

To an extent the difficulty with the story, and this has haunted the rest of the specials, Journey’s End was the emotional summation of the past four years of the series.  At the close, after everyone had steered the TARDIS to safety and the Doctor had watched them drift off into the distance it felt like the last time.  It felt right.  If the Doctor had regenerated after leaving Donna with her family perhaps having hidden some hitherto unseen sacrifice from his friends it would have been just as perfect a fade out to the Tenth Doctor’s song as we found here.

Except Davies had some loose ends.  The shape of his sixty episodes dictated that from the moment the Ninth Doctor first spoke of the Time War with each passing burst of information in the meantime, the timelords and Gallifrey had to return in the closing episode of his tenure.  Leaving it to Moffat to sort out would have been like Anthony Reed handing off the end of the Key To Time season to Douglas Adams.  What? Oh right, bad analogy.  But the point is, having offered his spiritual conclusion, as in all of his individual stories, he needed to wind the plot up too.

And wind it up he did, like Trevor Bayliss on amphetamines.  The rigmarole, the Doctor escaping sorry, WORST. ESCAPE. EVER.) just so he can return again with a plan is a classic Doctor Who dramatic device and the Lucas-alike confrontation and chase with the missiles genuinely exciting.  The cactus aliens served their purpose as expected and Tennant got to have a final bit of humour before his long, final, drawn-out frown.  The Mill did their best to fulfil Davies’s epic demands in show the Master race with lots of CGI and virtual sets, some of which came off, some of which looked like cut-scenes from Wing Commander.

The shot of a broken Gallifrey, the landscape filled with crashed Dalek saucers certainly did have the requisite armo and filled in the gaps created by the shadows of the interiors.  I was joking last week when I suggested that Timothy Dalton was playing Rassilon, yet there he was, freed from the Divergent Universe, regenerated and Lord High President (presumably having taken the post in the absence of Romana, trapped outside of normal space as she was when last we chronologically heard of her) the population of the planet having not turned into zombies (ask Big Finish).  Sometimes the wall can get a bit crooked can’t it?

One final global threat to deal with.  I can’t help feel another writer would have had one of the humans, when faced with another planet in the sky, saying “Oh no not again” or some such, slamming the doors as they go back into his or her house.  That would have undercut another chance to see the Chiswick neighbourhood watch hugging each other with relief and since we’re in summation mode it would have been wrong for us not to have seen that one final time, concluding with a member of the family looking to the sky with gratitude, Sylvia this time.  And quite fitting that it all happened with shot from the Sonic Screwdriver blowing up a box of fantasy tricks.  Was forever thus.

I’ll admit to being slightly frustrated with the moment that the Doctor was reduced to being a whirling dervish, mutely spinning revolver cocked as he spun between a shouting Master and Rassilon.  It’s not been unknown for him to lose verbosity when faced with impossible odds but I kept recalling his opening moments with the Sycorax, and his closing chatter during the likes of The Age of Steel, The Family of Blood, hell even The Poison Sky.  That’s the Tenth Doctor I’d been expecting, defiant in his closing moments, shouting and gurning right through into the undiscovered country.

Then I realised that he needed that attitude for the Master to talk himself into sacrifice because he’s the man who would, a beat signposted earlier when the Doctor chillingly acknowledged Davros’s allegation about how he’d manipulate situations so that someone else would die a heroic death.  That’s the richness of Davies’s writing; behaviour which in isolation seems out of character or even a retcon when taken in conjunction with previous episodes is nothing of the sort.  When Wilf reminds the Doctor of his veneration of his people, the timelord shouts that it’s how he chose to remember them, it seems inconsistent, until you remember Gridlock.  He’s always lied to himself and others about these things.

Which is why, in the final analysis, the writer wasn’t going to make the Doctor’s death knell some fall out from a shooting frenzy with the Master and the timelords.  As cultural commentators and writers more talented than me have already noted, if Davies has done nothing he’s proved that sci-fi can and does work with a mass audience if you give it small consonants and make it about people. Despite the broadstrokes, the moments which impressed in The End of Time were between the old men, the Doctor and Wilf, the Doctor and the Master, as the realities of what they’ve seen and done came to the fore, all three actors nakedly bringing a reality to these larger than life characters. 

Davies said during Confidential that he always knew the Tenth Doctor wouldn’t lose his life at the hands of the big epic story, but a smaller choice.  A beautifully shot and directed scene (vintage Euros Lynn), with the Doctor almost metafictionally recognising the same thing, railing against the world.  It’s the same choice the Doctor always has to make in the end – will he sacrifice himself to save one person?  He could just go.  He’s a timelord.  He’s a god.  But as with Rose at the close of The Parting of the Ways, he can’t.  He has a conscience.  He’s made promises.  Unlike Margaret Slitheen who sometimes let them walk away, for the Doctor, everybody lives (if he can make it happen).  Even this one man.

That’s the point when The End of Time finishes.  Or at least when the Doctor heads off in the TARDIS with his regeneration expectation.  After that we’re into an epilogue, the deliberate epilogue.  Like I said, functionally it’s not doing much more than the close of Journey’s End, it’s an indulgence.  But why the hell not?  If The Lord of the Rings films can have a dozen endings after nine-twelve hours of screen time (depending on which version you’re watching), the Russell T Davies years probably deserve an extra twenty minutes, the Doctor holding back his regeneration, if only to explain why Mickey and Martha didn’t join Torchwood after all.

Oh there they are in their own gun-toting spin-off, married, the Mr & Mrs Smith-Jones of the Whoniverse chasing aliens in an industrial power plant straight out of the Pertwee years.  I can’t be alone in thinking at some stage this would have looked like a more palatable spin-off than Torchwood though I can’t help feeling sorry for Thomas Milligan who she’s clearly turfed over in favour of the more exciting life.  Was it like Brief Encounter but with Mickey’s uzi and bug hunts rather than shopping and trips to the movie and a Weevil instead of Dolly Messiter?  Noel Coward wouldn’t have stood for it.

A wink towards The Sarah-Jane Adventures.  Something else entirely towards Torchwood.  In his diary The Writer’s Tale, Davies notes his disappointment at not being able to afford to create the version of the Shadow Proclamation he had in his head with all of the returning aliens.  Well he has now, by giving the Whoniverse its own alien-rich dvd freeze frame friendly Mos Eisley (expect a list of cameos on the wikipedia by the end of the night).  It was unlikely that the Doctor’s convenient absence during Children of Earth and Jack’s reaction thereof were hardly going to be explained in the mother series and on reflection it’s ok that there wasn’t animosity, cushioned presumably by the introduction to Alonso. 

More surprises.  A cute nod to Human Nature, proving once and for all that the Tenth Doctor does do families and the final meeting with Rose bookending the Doctor’s story in a way we’ve not seen before and in a weird way would have been like Tegan turning up for Caves of Androzani.  But as with all of this, it suits the Russell T Davies era.  He apparently hummed and harred over how to bring Rose and her Mum back what with them being in the alternate universe but actually this was the perfect ending, which he suggested himself way back in the public transport and chips flashback that opened Doomsday. 

The final scene, the final line.  He’s alone again.  Well, alone with the TARDIS.  I finally cried when he touched the controls of the console for a final time.  Having established that regeneration is like death, "I don't want to go” is a final act of defiance, like his petulant rant in the face of Wilf earlier, and a continuation of his gusto during his first false regeneration.  No spare hand for the energy to be sucked into this time.  Prophesises are finally getting the better of him.  It also seems to answer what the kids are probably pleading at home “We don’t want you to go…”

My response on Twitter recently to the bizarre criticism of Tennant's ubiquitousness over Christmas was that if nothing else he's been a grand ambassador for the series (with the follow-on that since the franchise is big enough now to have his own embassy, we should be able to keep him on in that capacity).  But the show would have fallen apart if he hadn't also been a bloody good actor, naturally likeable in that way which makes people want to watch the programme each week.  Like all of his predecessors he redefined the part and in a way that none of them could because he was a fan.  A proper fan.  And probably still is.

Then, like generations of children before them, they’re greeted by a new face in those familiar clothes and Steven Moffat’s first lines for his new version of an old creation.  Typical of Moffat to gamely recall elements of the Davies years and his two Doctor’s comments on their appearance (the nose, still not ginger).  Matt Smith apparently channelling the Tenth Doctor in his opening scenes, though its nice to hear that he’ll be using the old fashioned RP.  Geronimo, indeed.  Hooray!  Some of the internet goons are already beginning the negative talk.  Give him a chance.

But even after all of this, Davies likes to leave his mysteries, something fior the kids to ponder or for Moffat to pick up on.  It’s not just the appearance of a new new new Doctor which reminds us that the series, the story continues.  Who was that mystery timelady?  Was she the Doctor’s mother?  Romana?  The Rani?  Susan?  Iris Wyldetyme?  Another one of his daughters?  How could she seemingly circumvent the timelock and appear to Wilf dressed in River Song white?  Mores to the point, who was the other 'weeping' timelord?  Brax?  Vancel?  Maxil?  Someone else whose name sounds like a spot cream?  Perhaps, like Jack’s missing two years, we’ll never know the implications.

During the recent Radio 2 interview, Who on Who?, David asked Davies what his taste in movies was.  Russell regretfully explained that he wasn’t a film buff and that his tastes were rather coarse that he wouldn’t go to see what he “still describes as art house films” or with subtitles.  He goes for spectacle.  An unkind critic would throw those words back at him and suggest that’s why his version of Doctor Who was often simplistic in its plotting and reliant on set pieces.  Except that the public attitude to films is much the same as his, they like spectacle too and if by giving them that, RTD has made Doctor Who a popular success again, what is there to complain about?

Its been fantastic.

Next Time: “Ok, what have you got for me this time?”

The Planet That Cried Wolf

"That's the trouble with regeneration stories. You never quite know what you're going to get."

There are few things in life more fraught with difficulty than pulling off a Doctor Who regeneration story. A feat perhaps only surpassed in the hardness stakes by promoting a fund raising benefit gig on behalf of Gary Glitter, or acting as public relations officer for a Bolivian cannibal or by being a Gordon Brown speech writer.

The fable of planet that cried (Bad) Wolf.

Should you revisit previous examples of the genre to understand how to craft a fitting exit or just do the usual and grasp at a few loose ends left untidily dangling like an amateur Brazilian wax gone wrong in an attempt to give some sort of closure to a period of history that shall be forever called the RTD era?

Doctor Who: The End of Time, Part I

I like to think of this version of Who, not as the Welsh series, but as the Zimbabwean series (mainly because everything's hyper inflated to the point of losing any sort of value). They'll say things like "the stories are global in nature" and "it's got a cinematic feel" where what they actually mean is they've gotten hold of a series of cheap captions, some stock footage and have employed 3 street urchins to babble throughout behind you belting the back of your seat - turning your kidneys into pate - whilst you're trying to enjoy the spectacle.

The Majestic Asterism of the Imperious Obfuscation

Those of us of a certain age can remember when the Doctor would sacrifice himself to save a single person. These days he doesn't seem to be interested unless the number of people in jeopardy outnumber the toes on a 4 trillion footed hyper gibbon from the Majestic Asterism of the Imperious Obfuscation (see - anyone can make this stuff up [two parts Rutger Hauer's lines towards the end of Blade Runner to one part Douglas Adams]).

That said I was fully braced for another sensory onslaught with peril on an unimaginable level (unimaginable to all but those who'd witnessed the last four season finales) that made no sense. And I wasn't disappointed. Six billion humans in jeopardy - check. Impending Universal doom - check. Another final day of planet Earth - check. How many final days has Earth seen now? It's basically the fable of planet that cried (Bad) Wolf.

And I think that's why I basically enjoyed it. Yes. That's right. Enjoyed it.

Nerys. She was the Doctor all along.

Even screwing my face up and screaming out in agony at some very suspicious dialogue ("Hold on... does that mean she be called Temple Noble") didn't stop me laughing like a drain at the Master's elaborate build up to what was a very weak gag (John Simm there, being paid by the maniacal cackle). Even the quite frankly bizarre decision to not only name check Obama, but also include an audio clip of the President, didn't derail my enjoyment. By that point, another bacon brazil and a quick shout out to all the Voord in the 'Hood and I wouldn't have batted an eyelid. There's a spoof DVD extra in there somewhere, taking the form of a fast moving West Wing style walk and talk featuring an embattled BBC Washington bureau hack who is dispatched to persuade an official from the Obama administration to let them use an audio clip of the Prez.

And so to part two. In which I confidently predict that Donna's friend Nerys will be revealed to have been the Doctor all along, that Wilf will turn out to be Omega or Rassilon or some shit like that, the Doctor's regeneration will be sparked as a result of an argument over as parking space, Captain Jack will get Little Captain Jack out on tele and slap a Menoptra around the mandibles with it and Russell himself will finally make a cameo appearance - in the part he was born to play - as The Terrible Zodin herself.

Happy New Year.

The Enemy Within You Without You

Doctor Who: The End of Time Part 1 

The most distinctive part of The End of Time is the way it jumps from half-formed idea to half-formed idea seemingly at random. We have no fewer than three secret earth-based operations: the Cult of Saxon, the Naismith Whatever, and the Silver Cloak; not to mention those seemingly inconsequential cactus aliens, and, oh yeah, thousands of Time Lords along with billions of copies of the Master. If there's a plot, in which these elements are coherently weaved together, then it certainly hasn't started yet. Whether the lack of focus in this script is a feature or a bug, or to put it in more specific terms, whether it bespeaks an apropos sense of restlessness or mainly just shit storytelling, I'm going to reserve judgment until I see the rest of the story.

I echo the sentiments of Stuart and Frank: I completely understand why you might hate this episode, but I don't hate it. Then again, I don't love it either. Thus far this is approximately on the level of "The Enemy Within" or "The telemovie" or "that thing with McGann:" There are things about it that I like, and that I hate, but I can't bring myself to form a strong opinion about it either way. McGann's performance, the TARDIS design, the version of the theme tune, the regeneration scene, great. The resurrections, the American-ness, the Doctor being half human, not so much. The same is the case here (although Simm completely fails to dreeeesss for the occaaaasion). This is a collection of moments, and some of the moments are good, but some are cringeworthy. And so I can't like the thing as a whole. Yet. Because it isn't a whole yet. But what I've seen so far I mostly enjoyed. I'd by lying if I said I enjoyed every minute, and that there was nothing that made me cringe outright but there was enough in this episode to keep me entertained, intrigued, and excited for next week's episode.

Which, of course, is exactly the point of this episode. More so than any other outing, even Turn Left, this episode functions largely as a teaser trailer for what we'll be seeing next week. If there's any coherence to the narrative, we won't be able to see it except in hindsight. And from the return to the multi-part story naming convention of yesteryear, it's clear that this is something that RTD wants us to bear in mind. So in the spirit of the narrative [insert "restlessness" or "utter shit" here, depending on your opinion] of the episode, rather than a coherent review I can only offer some disjointed remarks.

• I loved John Simm as the Master in series three, and I love him just as much here. I have absolutely no problem with the flying and the lightning, and I think the botched resurrection provides an adequate explanation for the Master's energy instability.
• The scene in the cafe between the Doctor and Wilf was the best part of the episode, for the reasons that have already been mentioned and will continue to be mentioned. I will belabor the point no further.
• There is a certain lack of economy to any script that introduces a clandestine organization, kills off that clandestine organization, and then introduces another clandestine organization all within the space of five minutes. The first one is all about resurrection, and the second one is about immortality. Completely different, see? But conveniently, the second clandestine organization needs, as a means, the very thing the first clandestine organization had as its end: The resurrected Master. Why the script couldn't simply have one clandestine organization get the whole job done in one fell swoop is beyond me.
• For that matter, the "Book of Saxon" thing could have been all right if they hadn't insisted on playing it so straight, but they did and as a result it was pretty awful. If they really must have gone with the potion/antipotion thing then, in TV Tropes parlance, they ought to have lampshaded it, but they failed to do so. The resurrection of the Master was far too big a deal to have been handled in the way it was, but once again I might be way off base and maybe there will be further developments with regard to what's going on here.
• Donna's "death" was the thing that set the Doctor on the dark and lonely path we've seen him on in the specials, and so I've always thought it fitting that she should reappear in the finale to play a role in the Doctor's redemption. The only problem is that, with the exception of one scene (the aforementioned cafe scene), the dark, lonely version of the Doctor we've seen hinted at in the specials, and that Waters of Mars led us to believe was going to be an important part of the specials, is completely undercut by the usual David Tenant schtick. Furthermore, Donna gets little screen time. I'm hoping that these will both be corrected in the finale.
• There was a lot of borrowing in this episode. A lot. In a comment on Stuart's review, Dave Sanders pointed out the similarities between this episode and Army of Ghosts. The similarity between the cactus folk and Bannakaffalatta is analagous to the Raxicoricofallapatorius/Clom thing from Love and Monsters. The stupid hubris of Naismith is a (much less interesting) copy of Richard Lazarus from The Lazarus Experiment. The Immortality Gate is functionally the same as the nanogenes from The Doctor Dances. And I could swear for a moment that Clare Bloom was playing the Wire from The Idiot's Lantern. There are other strikingly familiar elements as well. It makes me wonder whether the writing is just lazy and unoriginal, or whether there's some kind of significance to the recurring motifs. It's probably the former.
• Probably the biggest problem with a lot of this episode, aside from the poor story structure, was that a lot of what ended up on that shoddy structure seemed like pointless fluff. Why the Oodsphere? Why Obama? Why the Silver Cloak? Why those silly cactus things? Some of these will probably be developed (most notably the last one, and the first one), but the bit with Obama seems completely idiotic and pointless, and the Silver Cloak bit, while genuinely delightful, is superfluous: If we're meant to believe that Wilf and the Doctor are bound by some sort of mysterious force to keep meeting over and over, then wouldn't that idea come across more forcefully if Wilf was acting alone?
• The Timothy Dalton narration, I thought, was quite effective, and the bit at the middle of the episode in which he sums up what's going on does a decent job of helping the viewer navigate the messy plot, while also (perhaps intentionally?) highlighting the mess of it all.
• The return of the Time Lords was really rather obvious (based on how Davies does these big events), and the big question now is whether they're here to stay. Davies has a habit of shaking up the status quo only to put it back the way it was, which fans refer to, quite rightly, as the reset button. But wouldn't the ultimate reset button be for Davies to restore the Whoniverse back to the condition in which he found it? Either way, whatever status quo we find at the end of the story is the one we'll be seeing for the Moffatt era and beyond. At the moment, I think it could go either way, and that's something I'm kind of excited about, but we'll know in a couple of days.
• Is it possible that this entire episode has happened inside the Matrix? Or perhaps the whole RTD era has!

There have been accusations that this episode moved too slow, but in spite of this (or perhaps because of it) there's a lot going on and I haven't even come close to commenting on it all. I have no idea how any of this is going to come together into a coherent whole next week, but it simply must. I refuse to believe that this script is anywhere near as much of a mess as it seems right now. And you know what? That's exactly how I felt while watching Children of Earth: Day One. It was never really clear to me how all of the pieces fit together, and only on a second viewing, after seeing the rest of the series, was I able to follow the episode with an understanding of the grand design. Am I saying that this episode was as good as Children of Earth? By no means; it wasn't anywhere near as tense or engaging. I'm saying that I reserve judgment for a few more days.

Digging A Hole

Doctor Who: The End of Time Part 1

Is this how Jan Vincent-Rudzki felt when he watched The Deadly Assassin? 

I'll begin on a positive note: Bernard Cribbins was great. But let's face facts, Bernard Cribbins reading the telephone directory would have been nothing less than enthralling. He's bullet proof. Stick him in Paradox and he'd still be watchable. And besides, Bernard is the only man on the planet who can pull off a ridiculous moonwalk as he backs into a mini-bus and still maintain something that resembles dignity. OK, maybe Lionel Blair on a good day, but still.

Cribbins steals every scene he's in. He's so damnably good in that bit the fans are already calling "the cafe scene" that David Tennant is forced to cry a little, just so he can compete. This was actually the most interesting exchange in the episode: the revelation that the Doctor actively resents the man that he will eventually become and how he's not looking forward to "dying" really struck a chord. For an all-too-brief moment the episode felt suitably elegiac and doom-laden, with added hints that the head-scratchingly bizarre Doctor-Donna meta-crisis might actually make some kind of sense next week. I just pray that Claire Bloom is playing Romana and not {preposterous rumour removed} but I'm not holding my breath. I also hope that the TARDIS isn't dyslexic and she was trying to warn us about Bad Wilf all along...

Stick Bernard Cribbins in Paradox and he'd still be watchable...

Sadly, the indomitable Cribbins aside, the rest of the episode is complete and utter bobbins.

We begin with a trip to the Oodsphere, where the bloke who does the adverts for Pizza Hut (what a coup!) reminds us that Alexandra Moen really is a terrible actress. She must play a important role in the story though, so stick with it. We are also led to believe that immediately after the closing moments of The Waters of Mars, when the cloister bell was tolling and the Doctor gritted his teeth and proclaimed a defiant "No!" to the laws of the universe, he immediately nipped back in time so he could shag Elizabeth I. How very heroic.

But the Master's resurrection is easily the stupidest thing in the first 15 minutes of this episode; which is really saying something. Magic potions! Magic kisses! An hilarious exchange about an anti-potion subplot! All mashed-up with the sillier bits from The Omen III, Prisoner Cell Block H, Harry Potter and Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time. Yes, the episode goes batshit crazy even before we've had a chance to settle down. It also makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. If the Master had really planned for this eventuality why didn't he just secrete some of his DNA in his ring? The idiot. You'd have thought he have learnt something after turning himself into a bloody snake.

However, I must admit that it was a stroke of genius to reveal that the identity of mysterious person who picked up that ring at the end of The Last of the Time Lords - something that had kept fandom's tongues wagging for years - was actually a non-speaking extra that we'd never actually seen before. OK, hands up - who saw that coming?

Anyway, the Master ends up skulking around in a junkyard with some new superpowers. And why not? If you are going to use magic why not go the whole hog and throw in some cool superpowers as well. I know, why not make him telepathic while you're at it, just like in True Blood? Or haven't you got to that boxset yet? Too busy watching The Matrix Trilogy on Blu Ray, I bet. Oh well.

The Master's plan is remarkably simple at first: terrorise tramps and eat plenty of hamburgers. This detail is quite amusing. The fact that the Master has to disguise himself after unsuccessfully ruling over the country fairly recently is a neat, logical touch. Simm's performance is also mesmerising at times, especially during his long overdue chat with the Doctor, but just when you think that we are finally getting somewhere, Joshua Naismith turns up to fast-track a nefarious plan that took the Master months to cook up the last time. How nice of him.

The Naismith subplot is as unsavoury as it is convienient. There's a faint whiff of incest about the whole affair (his daughter? really?) and the handy properties of the alien tech is either something that will be ingeniously resolved in part two or a Deux Ex Machina Gate. It's too early to call.

The episode goes batshit crazy before we've had a chance to settle down.

Just thank your lucky stars that Doctor Who isn't made in 3D. Tennant's jaw would give you one hell of a headache after the first five minutes. And if you were ever in any doubt that this is some SERIOUS SHIT we're dealing with here just check out Tennant's determined grimace as he chases Simm through that secret level from Super Mario Brothers. The Master must be stopped! Time itself is in danger! Oh, hang on a minute, there's just enough time to be sexually assaulted by June Whitfield!

But it's Christmas, isn't it? You have to have a pointless celebrity cameo and some enforced comedy to lighten the mood. It's the law. Besides, it's either that or patronising thick working class stereotypes in Welsh caravans and that's simply too close to home to contemplate. Or perhaps they were simply trying out another potential spin-off, something they could put out in the Quincy timeslot: The Silver Cloak Investigates, or something. Quick! Somebody get Frank Windsor on the phone before he dies.

This madness reaches a brain-levelling crescendo in the final 10 minutes. Yes, it actually gets madder. Just when you think you've seen it all, you still haven't seen John Simm in a badly fitting dress clapping like a seal. It's mental. But where was the shot of Simm in a pram?

Actually, if you extrapolate from what we are shown on screen (an entire housing estate populated by John Simm) then your mind will be left with some really weird images that may take some time to dislodge: John Simm discovering himself shagging himself; John Simm as a Victoria's Secret model in the middle of a calendar shoot; John Simm as Gwen and Rhys's baby. My head was shaking just as fast as everyone elses, believe me. And is it just me or is that effect they used for the transformation infuriatingly naff? All that's missing is a Hanna-Barbara comedy sound effect. It's probably on the same CD that features the mechanical door effect from Doom. And I know they have that.

Seriously, I have never been so embarrassed to be a Doctor Who fan as I was when that Obama lookalike starting holding his head in what looked like shame to me. And when I was at university I made my flat mates watch Silver Nemesis. 

You tell him to stop spitting! He's Timothy ****ing Dalton!

A final "**** me" climax was inevitable, of course. This was Russell's last opportunity to deliver a cliffhanger. Do you really think he'd play things down at this late stage? How do you top Daleks versus Cybermen or a fake-out regeneration anyway? The ending to this one had to go one step further and there was only one logical step left for Russell to take.

And so, the episode concludes with a "surprise" appearance by the Time Lords, spearheaded by Timothy Dalton and Spit the Dog. Hey! He's Timothy Dalton! You tell him to stop spitting! He's Timothy ****ing Dalton!

The Time Lords are made to look like a bunch of Daleks hanging around on Coruscant and they'll probably end up being the ultimate bad guys, which will makes the 10th Doctor's interminable pining for Gallifrey throughout his tenure look a bit stupid in retrospect.

I haven't given up hope, though. Maybe Russell has got whatever it is he ate out of his system. Maybe we've been set up beautifully for a heart wrenching finale that will force me to reevaluate this incoherent drivel.

Or maybe we'll just get Midshipman Frame's head spinning in space as John Simm gives Tennant the kiss of life and Barack Obama orders him to regenerate. 

Hold on tight. Normality will be resumed in 73 minutes...

Spitting Image

Doctor Who: The End Of Time Part 1

I suspect Part One of The End Of Time is going to be one of those 'marmite' episodes. You either love it or you really hate it. With the latter camp I can almost sympathise because the episode is far from perfect and certainly has its faults. But there are moments when it soars and breathtakingly scales the heights. Part of the problem with Russell T Davies' script is that it's entirely comprised of build up to the story proper, and I don't think that kicks into gear until Part Two, and all we are left with is much scene setting as the narrative bounces around for about half an hour before settling into something resembling a plot. And not a terribly good one at that.

There's also a strange tone to the whole episode, suffused as it is with a religio-political theme, telling the tale of the rise of an Aryan Time Lord and his fascist monoculture, a suggestion of some kind of Holy war in heaven between the Doctor and the Master and then the emergence of a reactionary, equally right wing, High Council of Gallifrey. The well used, post-2005 theme of faith in the Doctor is seeded into the story right at the beginning when Wilf enters the church and is told the story of the 'sainted physician' coming to Earth and 'smoting the demon'. Heavy handed religious symbolism isn't one of RTD's strengths and he's quite unfocused here struggling to articulate the bigger ideas about the Far Right's rise to power and our worries about the political direction the world has taken about war and peace, about the respect for liberty and diversity, and on the equitable development of nations.

The story's framing narration by Time Lord President Dalton is an attempt to once again place the events in the story on a global, nay this time, (Who)niversal scale. It sees the resurrection of the Master, rampant with narcissistic greed and acquisition, billionaire Naismith's 'Fighting The Future' post Torchwood manifesto realised as a home grown capitalism ('the king is in his counting house') with a multinational reach to acquire alien technology and a Time Lord army striking out in a "victory for Gallifrey" frontal assault on its intended targets who are a weak and divided Doctor and Wilf and a united and insurgent world of Masters.

The problem is that for a great deal of screen time a lot of this is lost amongst long scenes of exposition set on the Ood Sphere (which simply serves to recap the story of The Last Of The Time Lords), lots of scenes of David Tennant and John Simm running, and an extremely silly Harry Potter meets Prisoner Cell Block H convergence with the scenes set in the women's prison. It's here that any resemblance to coherent plotting goes right out of the window with the resurrection of the Master by the Governor (looking very much like Prisoner Cell Block H's Erica Davidson but minus the Lady Penelope posh accent) and the officers of Broadfell, including a Joan 'The Freak' Ferguson lookalike in Miss Trefusis. I was half expecting Alexandra Moen's Mrs Saxon to at least tell them all to 'rack off!' at the thought of bringing her husband back to life.

Extremely dubious occult reincarnation aside (the Secret Books Of Saxon, some rather horrible blue looking liquid and a trace of Boots No 7 lipstick), it's Mrs Saxon's convenient and long winded retort to all of this camp nonsense 'And I was never that bright but my family had contacts. People who were clever enough to calculate the opposite' that glaringly show up RTD's crass pulp pretensions as she is handed the anti-reincarnation potion, hurls it at Harry and blows Broadfell to pieces. Incredibly silly stuff but a very guilty pleasure.

How this translates into giving the Master X Men like powers or a predilection for hamburgers isn't properly explained. John Simm flying around and hurling lightning bolts at the Doctor is simply window decoration until we get to their face off proper. It's redeemed by the sweet Bernard Cribbins and his Silver Cloak agents tracking down the Doctor and sparing us any more long takes of Tennant and Simm running around derelict dockyards. Minnie pinching the Doctor's bum is a wonderfully irreverent moment.

At the heart of the episode is that scene in the cafe. An intimate duologue between the Doctor and Wilf that demonstrates RTD's real gift for economy and dialogue, exposing the heart of the story, and that sits like an ocean of calm in this sea of bombast. Cribbins is an extremely skillful actor and dominates the scene but Tennant matches him in that rather sorrowful moment of verisimilitude with the 'some new man goes sauntering away' line. It's further compounded by his confession that he' did some things and they went wrong' as a reference perhaps to the events in The Waters Of Mars and it's very moving when Wilf reaches out to a clearly distraught Doctor who knows his time is up.

Simm as The Master also mirrors a similar scene from The Last Of The Time Lords in which the Doctor wistfully remembered the glories of the citadel on Gallifrey, but here describes their youthful freedom in the fields of Gallifrey, and then echoes Wilf's tearful cry of 'look at us now'. Finally the Doctor does hear those drums pounding in his enemy's head and perhaps recognises it as a signal for the impending arrival of the Time Lords out of the darkness. Two peers meet in a derelict wasteland after two old men meet in a cafe. Two good scenes back to back.

Ultimately we end up back at Naismith's mansion, the Master trussed up like an intergalactic Hannibal Lecter, and he and his daughter's attempt to get the so called Immortality Gate operational. Back at the Noble household, Wilf arms himself and takes a ride in the TARDIS. A last companion for the Tenth, Wilf works delightfully well ('I thought it'd be cleaner' he says of the TARDIS interior) and there are some lovely light comedic moments as he runs off from Sylvia and leaves her talking to empty air. With all the pieces pushing into place, we're then introduced to the alien Vinvocci salvage team, sadly another weak and irrelevant component of the plot, and lots and lots of dull exposition from Joshua Naismith.

Once the Master has repaired the Gate and freed himself, the final ten minutes is utterly bonkers. And hilarious. The 'Being John Simm' sequence does outstay its welcome but the sight of multiple Masters jumping up and down, many of them in frocks and high heels, clapping and laughing as the entire population of Earth (including a poor Obama lookey-likey and Trinity Wells) is turned into the 'Master race', is bizarre, unsettling and very funny. What the Master is intending to do with an entire population of his selves and how Donna will survive her mind exploding recall as she sees this transformation is not yet clear but just as you think the titles are about to crash in, Spitting Timothy Dalton announces from his Phantom Menace senate building, packed with robed Gallifreyans, that the Time Lords are on their way. You'll have either laughed yourself silly by now or thrown a shoe at the telly and growled 'Barrowman!' with a clenched fist in the air. Personally, I spent most of the time doing the former.

Mad. Completely mad.

RTD's take on globalisation in The End Of Time proposes that ultimate power becomes concentrated around two symbolic figures of faith (the Master and the Doctor), that institutions (Gallifrey and the Time Lords, Naismith) become a corrupt force for decentralising the universe ('something vast stirring in the dark' that appears to want to actually 'end' time) and the people caught in the middle (Wilf and Donna) are left to try and affirm their cultural identities on an Earth run and populated by millions of blonde haired Nick Griffins. Wilf, for example, is radicalised by Claire Bloom's alternative Queen's speech, in a moment where as Alvin Toffler once noted 'if you don't have a strategy, then you end up being part of someone else's strategy' and as the episode hurtles toward its cliffhanger the imminent frying of Donna's mind suggests a woman once again emerging from passive acceptance of her lot to the restoration of the hard won independence of Series 4.

It'll be interesting to see a plot develop out of this string of events and ideas. Will the Doctor have to destroy the Time Lords all over again and sacrifice himself to do so? Will the Time Lords remove the Tenth from the time stream using a great big reset button? Will John Simm stop laughing?