10.50: The End of Time, Part Two

In which we’ll forgive a lot for two amazing scenes.

Broadcast: January 2010

Watched: October 2021

“Gallifrey rises!” Until just then I hadn’t realised that “Gallifrey falls” in Day of the Doctor was a reference. 

Much more fun to watch than part one, but I don’t think it means anything at all. Again, there’s a certain amount of delaying, to hide the fact there are only really a couple of plot beats... but this time the thing we’re waiting for is the big one, and the chosen delaying tactic is “Gallifrey”, which is a lot more interesting than “June Whitfield on a minibus”.

The Time Lord stuff feels like closing the loop on RTD’s little bubble of Time War continuity. Gallifrey is beautiful; the muttering visionary is presumably a deliberate mirror of the muttering Ood in part 1. Rassilon, as we’ll find out he is, has been reframed as Darth Vader without the mask. Also, the high council looks like the Galactic Senate from Star Wars – this is deliberate, right? Oh, and suddenly the Time Lords have a billion years of history, not a mere 2 million.

Then there’s the whole business with running and hiding in a ship that looks like Starbug out of Red Dwarf. The scene between Wilf and the Doctor is brilliant. “Do you think he changed them?” is a weird, unsettling thought which Moffat comes back to, stupidly, in the season 8 finale. The Doctor muttering about how good he got at manipulating people into his dirty work, and Wilf telling him “Don’t you dare put him before them”, feels like RTD’s final statement on the moral subtext of the series, a sort of coda to Journey’s End. 

But then they mess it up because the thing that finally makes Wilf cry is not any of that, it’s how wonderful the Doctor is. Not for the first time, we’re lost in the meta text, and it becomes a story not about what’s on screen but about how Russell feels about the last five years of his career. 

Oh well, onto the big showdown! The Time Lords are so scary they can click their fingers and undo the Master’s shenanigans (although why they bother, given they’re about to destroy the Earth, isn’t massively clear); and just hearing their name is enough to make the Doctor pick up a gun. 

But... what’s it for? The scene where the Doctor keeps changing his mind as to who to fire at makes no thematic sense that I can see, which is weird as getting the emotional logic right is normally the bit RTD is good at; and the mother figure is never identified in a way that might fix that. It’s brilliantly played by all of them – Simm especially does some amazing showing-you-he’s-working-stuff-out-without-a-word acting, the “could have been king” speech is wonderfully evocative, and the tableau of the Time Lords with eyes covered is very striking. But what does the choice *mean*? It’s not “killer or coward”, it’s “pointlessly shoot X or pointlessly shoot Y”. 

The pair of “Get out of the ways” have the same problem of being brilliantly done but not in any way connecting to the story. Are we suddenly meant to be pleased the Doctor and Master have made it up? It’s like the Doctor never even listened to Wilf.

The final scene between Wilf and the Doctor *does* mean something, mind: the 10th Doctor, like the 3rd before him, is finally punished for his pride.  I love the Doctor’s gradually growing fury as he realises that Wilf has sacrificed himself for a mere extra, and now the Doctor has to sacrifice himself for Wilf. When the Doctor says “Cos that’s who you are, Wilfred – you were always this” it sounds like he means “nemesis”, but he could just as easily mean “The guy who will risk his life for a character so unimportant he doesn’t even get a line”. They’re both amazing in this scene – Tennant’s delivery of “I’m still alive”, the way Cribbins plays “just leave me” with a silent “yeah, but we both know that you won’t”. Also, Murray Gold is at his most manipulative and best.  

I go back and forth on the book tour. It felt ridiculous and indulgent at the time. Last time I watched these episodes, I did parts one and two back to back and as the lengthy epilogue to a movie it didn’t feel quite so disjointed. 

This time... it did feel like a large chunk of the episode (18 minutes, I mean come on), but I enjoyed the goodbyes so much it didn’t bother me. The Doctor looking genuinely annoyed at having to save Luke’s life; Martha and Mickey fighting a Sontaran (the show putting them together isn’t great, but I think it’s an artefact of where they sit in the mythology rather than their race, per se); Donna marrying a bit of an idiot who adores her, which is all she ever wanted, and finally getting one over on Nerys; Rose and Jackie in the snow; the Doctor getting Jack laid. The cantina scene full of aliens is what the shadow proclamation last season should have been. 

Also, I found the actual Verity Newman book signing mildly affecting, and came quite close to blubbing at the reference to Geoffrey Noble, in large part because, unlike in 2010, I’m thinking of Howard Attfield. [The actor who played Donna’s dad in her first episode, and was going to a regular, but died of cancer. His place in the story was taken by Bernard Cribbins’ Wilf.] Watched as part of a boxset, it’s a nice goodbye to the era. Although it’s still not obvious why the Doctor doesn’t talk to most of them, or how they know he’s dying. 

And then the Ood sing, for some reason, and the Doctor regenerates, and the TARDIS blows up, and that’s the RTD era done for the next 13 years or so. It is a measure of quite how skinny Tennant is that Smith looks fat in his suit. 

The new guy really isn’t good in those few lines (they’re dubbed, I know, I know). So for the next four months I thought we were in trouble. We really aren’t.

Anyway, the bits I couldn’t fit elsewhere:

• Why don’t the Masters fight among themselves, exactly? Love that he wants to turn Earth into a warship, again, though. Like in Last of the Time Lords, it implies he’s a sort of Dalek.

• Surely the Doctor falls further here than in Logopolis? How does he survive? [A fall from a great height is what did for Tom Baker’s fourth Doctor in 1981.]

• Oh, planets in the sky again! Gallifrey is bigger then Earth. Sylvia, of all people, praying to the Doctor is oddly affecting. 

• Claire Bloom as the Doctor’s mum (come on, that’s clearly who she is): that makes the Doctor Jewish.

In retrospect, the specials year never really works. Neither “the Doctor is scared to make friends” nor “the Doctor is scared to die” are particularly heroic stories, and there isn’t enough else going on to distract from that. Waters of Mars very nearly achieves greatness, but then they muck it up at the end. 

So I think it’s probably the worst year of RTD’s tenure? Season 2 has its wobbles but there’s still an energy to it that comes from the show being new rather than complacent, and it has a few truly great episodes. Sod it, some rankings:

• 3 [for storytelling] / 4 [overall]

• 1

• 2

• Specials

And now, we’re getting at least one more specials year and at least two more seasons. Looking forward to seeing how that changes things.