10.29: Last of the Time Lords
In which Russell’s sympathy is misplaced.
Broadcast: June 2007
Watched: September 2021
“How about that? I win.”
I can’t decide if this is a clever title, which hints at the ending, or a generic “ooooh, how closure-y” one like RTD’s other three finales.
Anyway. Amazing start - the “sol 3 extinction” voiceover, “one year later”. Very cool how it shows us a broken, brutalised world, with rockets and massive statues of the Master. Amazing world building dialogue (the last person to get out of Japan, the ruins of New York, etc.). Love that it places Martha centre stage as the hero - let’s hope the ending doesn’t do anything to undermine that, yeah?
On the Valiant, things are rather sillier. Both the Doctor as the Master’s pet, and Martha’s family in service feel kind of tacky. (I don’t think the latter is racist, but someone should maybe have considered whether it might read as such, and whether there was a better way of doing that bit.) I think the wife-beating stuff is quite tasteless, to be honest, although the Master creeping on his secretary is probably better than the TVM Master being shown as evil for taking an interest in boys. The Dobby doc effect is utterly terrible, the CGI in this looks really dated.
Thematically this is... almost coherent? The Toclafane revelation is truly horrible, the idea that humanity turned themselves into Daleks (though why the last humans can’t just go back to the start of the universe and do it again on a different planet isn’t clear). There’s weirdly a sort of dialogue with other bits of the season - the case against immortality, the role of hope and faith, whether humans within the cosmology of Doctor Who are innocents or monsters. The Doctor’s version of humanity are the former; the Master’s the latter.
And the Archangel network stuff, the idea that everyone joining together can overthrow a dictator, would sort of work. (I *love* that the macguffin gun turns out to be bullshit.) The problems are
a) I think this is RTD trying to work out why people don’t rebel, when that doesn’t really need a supernatural explanation, and
b) on screen this looks a lot like “people aren’t the real heroes, that man in a long coat is”. Martha pretty much says that out loud.
I do think it’s great that the Master’s biggest fear is still the Doctor laughing at him, only now it’s the Doctor forgiving him - it’s still the bigger boy he wants to impress, condescending to him, that he’s scared of (“It’s not fair!”). His death is a weirdly powerful moment, and Tennant is amazing in it, though the sympathy the show seems to expect us to feel is entirely unearned because the Master is a wife-beating mass murderer and surely that matters more than the fact his death makes David Tennant sad.
I have absolutely no issue with rolling back time - you can’t leave the Earth devastated, the only characters we care about remember what happened, we’ve already seen Chekhov’s Paradox Machine, this isn’t Star Trek: Voyager, it’s fine.
But judged as a whole I can’t decide if this is much cleverer than it gets credit for, or just incredibly tacky. It’s ambitious at least, which is good. But fundamentally the resolution is Doctor Who winning because everyone thinks about how much they love Doctor Who.
Other things:
Tennant’s in this so little as a recognisable figure that I wonder if this might count as Doctor-lite.
I feel like we see this particular suburban street quite a lot.
Docherty is Anna Maxwell Martin's mum in Motherland; she’s only 51 here. Also Tom Ellis is a bit all over the place now. That’s what banging Miranda will do for you I guess.
Martha says that the Doctor never asks to be thanked... yeah the showrunner does though, he’ll be doing that quite a lot these next two years.
International corner: the random shot of some Indians apparently thinking “Doctor”.
Some references: there’s a sequence that’s a dead ringer for “We fight like animals” in Survival; Jack shooting at the Toclafane feels like a conscious mirror of Parting; the Doctor's plan before the Master dies to spite him is the backstory to season 10 (Moffat strip-mining again).
Forgot to even mention Martha leaving. The fact she finally decides she's worth more and walks away, then tells the Doctor to stick it, *almost* redeems the utterly wrong-headed unrequited love plot. Oh, and she probably wants to hang out with Leo, to find out what he’s been up to as he’s visible through a window at the end but has no lines whatsoever.
Fourteen years ago I hated the Face of Boe joke, now I think it’s hilarious.
Nice of RTD to leave a trap door for the Master to come back, most writers aren’t so considerate.
Titanic. Cool.
“International corner: the random shot of some Indians apparently thinking “Doctor”.”
Of course they are; all doctors are Indian.
Ever since I found out the director for this had never done Who before or since it felt like as good an explanation as any for some of the weirder stuff (like the overuse of Dutch angles). Would also explain why the ending works on paper / when you think about it but seems quite overwrought in execution.
Also trivia which you may know, they published a New Series Adventure called "The Story of Martha" that was meant to fill in the gaps and also show the stories Martha told, except most of the stories are more depressing than inspiring...