7.14: Death Comes to Time
In which the Doctor dies. No, really.
Broadcast: July 2001-May 2002
Listened (watched?): May 2021
“I am not familiar with your primitive religions.”
I sort of get the vibe that this is something you’d need to hear/watch multiple times to get the full value out of it, which is mildly problematic because it... isn’t quite interesting enough.
It starts really well. First episode gave me a proper shock-of-the-new, seriously-why-didn’t-I-listen-at-the-time thing. I love the energy, the scale, the ambition – getting Big Name Genre actors for cameos (Jaqueline Pearce, Anthony Stewart Head, even getting Nick Courtney back), so much movement, so many settings. I quite like that it’s episodic – it feels less like a story than a sort of final season. Tannis is a lot of fun; it’s good to hear Stephen Fry in Doctor Who.
But it does slightly get lost in its own back passage. The endless scenes of Ace training with Yoda/Casmus are actually not very interesting, and Aldred isn’t good enough to make them so. It’s sort of a movie without video which makes it hard to follow the action sometimes and feels like an odd choice for what was, primarily, designed as a radio play. There are long stirring musical bits that should clearly be accompanied by video that isn’t there. [There’s “animation”, but it’s just a series of comic strip panels with a soundtrack.]
And I’m really not sold on the story. The idea of Time Lords as gods can sort of be reconciled to what went before, but still screws the morality of the series by requiring that the Doctor be holding back from using his powers to save people the whole time. Also, the idea of a “Last Doctor Who Story!!!” feels very 2001, since that was kind of the nadir, when energy was dissipating but the new series was still not in sight. It works on that basis, maybe, but by definition it can’t go anywhere. The idea that the makers would kill Doctor Who but use it as a springboard to launch a story about another rogue Time Lord who is, let’s be honest, just Doctor Who again feels quite arrogant and also point missing.
I can see why [name of friend with bad opinions redacted] loves it – it’s the most Star Wars-influenced Doctor Who ever. But I think it’s a bit of a showkiller. It’s one of a whole slew of stories c2000-2 [see also: The Burning] that seem to have decided the problem with Doctor Who is all the Doctor Who stuff, and to chuck it out and start again, thus over estimating their ability to tell baby from bathwater. Everyone bruised by the movie’s failure I guess.
Other things.
McCoy is fantastic in this, playing the Doctor as old and tired, though every time he calls Antimony “my boy” I winced. Aldred is... not great in this. Nice to hear the Brig.
Ace says she’d never kill a man, which is weird because by this point she’d killed loads of the f*ckers.
Not sure what the Antimony thread is for? “The Doctor built himself a son – but we’re not going to go anywhere with that”, righto.
Interesting that what is intended as a sort of final Doctor Who story there are neither Daleks nor monsters nor time travel. It’s just Star Wars.
There is probably fun to be had imagining this as a part of the Time War. But you can say that about almost any apocryphal stuff from the interregnum.
The other big hit about this being included in continuity is the fact the Doctor dies at the end, but… “Did you see his body?” The Doctor is obviously not actually dead.