Aaaall byyyyy myyyyseeeeeeelf....
What We Know Going In
Doc is on his own, having left Donna Noble behind on Earth so her brain won't explode, and is now convinced that taking companions is a bad idea; seeing them all rally to explode Daleks made him queasy. So he's traveling solo.This section of Season Four is basically all holiday specials, from what I can tell beforehand. Also, every single one is written—at least in part—by Russell T. Davies.
What We Found Out
Let the ranting commence. Note #1: these reviews are mostly liveblogged, so they're pretty reactionary. Note #2: spoilers. Note #3: if you do end up watching Who, take note that "The Planet of the Dead" is not available on Netflix for reasons unknown to God or man.4.15, The Next Doctor: Oh, please, no. Please. Not another Christmas special. You can't do this to us!
Doc lands in 1851, at Christmas, so at least they tell us at once that the episode is going to be crap. As soon as he lands, someone starts screaming his name, so he takes off running. He's being hailed by a Londoner. Her name is Rosita (yes, just like Rose), she's black (yes, just like Martha), and she has a foul accent coupled with obnoxiousness (yes, just like Donna). So we've got all three of our companions wrapped up together! In 1851! I'm trying to be excited but all I can do is retch at the thought of The Hated One being intermingled with Martha and Donna. If anything could ruin them....
Then the Doctor shows up! Except this is another person who calls himself The Doctor. He's a different person, and his sonic screwdriver is just a screwdriver, and his TARDIS is a hot-air balloon. Original!Doc at first suspects he must be a future regeneration of his, and suffering amnesia. (Which settles the unanswered question of whether Doc can interact with past and future versions of himself. So huzzah for that little bit of lore, although of course it's Doctor Who, so whether it'll still be true two episodes from now is up for bets.)
Doc quickly realizes, though, that his suspicion isn't correct: Other!Doc is actually Jackson Lake, a totally normal man who lost his family when they ran afoul of the Cybermen who got dumped in 1851 because of...something, probably all the craziness going on for the last three episodes. In the event, Jackson picked up one of their souped-up thumb drives, which by all indications beamed every season of Doctor Who—yes, even the really old ones—into his head and convinced him he's a Time Lord.
What, is Russell T. Davies saying that someone who sees all the seasons and obsesses about them might eventually have a break with reality and start fantasizing about themselves being a lord of space and time? Golly. Really took a shot right at the jugular, eh?
Meanwhile, a creepy lady in red organizes the displaced Cybermen into kidnapping children as slaves to do menial labor.
Yes, you read that right. Robots kidnap children so they can power an engine. Robots—machines made to do repetitive, uncomplicated work—kidnap children off the streets so they can churn engines.
So...fer teh evulz, I guess. I mean, if I had to pick between children and robots to get the Industrial Revolution going, I'd pick kids every time.
Creepy Red Lady gets wired up to a giant mecha and uses the Power of Feminist Thinking to take over all the Cybermen. She then tries to take over the world, only for Doc to stop her about five steps in.
Just so we can note this, yes: a strong and independent woman, embittered by years of men stifling her, is made ruler of an army of mindless drones, whom she controls simply by being Too Darn Independent, and attempts to take over the world.
Ho, ho, subtlety!
In the closer, Jackson asks Doc why he doesn't have a companion anymore, to which Doc says "They leave. Or they find someone else. And eventually they forget about me. In the end, they break my heart."
WHAT.
WHAT.
NO. NO THEY DON'T.
Rose got flung into another dimension and then Doc left her with an updated/more Batmanized version of himself. Martha—okay, yes, Martha did leave and find someone else, but I'm struggling to understand why I should feel sorry for the man whose heart was broken when he was the one stringing her along. And he ditched Donna because he had to for her safety. Full stop.
GAH. WHO WRITES THIS MELODRAMATIC TRIPE?
Whoops, sorry. Never mind. 1/5
4.16, The Planet of the Dead: Doc and an unfortunate bunch of bus passengers—including an art thief, whom the Doctor fancies, and a psychic, whom he doesn't—get wormholed from London to
Despite a general lack of "big" moments or even the most rudimentary suspense, the episode keeps its feet well beneath it, brushing against some of the more serious Who themes without dipping too deeply into melodrama. And, for all that I wanted to hate him, the irritating über-geek helping Doc from the London side of the wormhole actually grew on me. 3/5
4.17, The Waters of Mars: Doc lands on Mars. Just for giggles, apparently—he seems to be there just for the scenery, and is genuinely surprised when he runs into humans. They're on Mars as the first off-Earth colonists ever, which makes them awesome.
Doc quickly realizes he's landed on the day they all die. Since it's in a history book, he thinks it's a fixed point in time. (Or at least, it's a history book Doc bothered to read in detail. Ever notice how every other time he talks about "history" he's wrong? If I encounter another plotline about how the Fourth Great Human Empire isn't quite Great—or Human—or an Empire—I'm going to track Davies down and sacrifice him to Quetzalcoatl.) Also, suddenly the fixed-point thing becomes just a theory, instead of being something a Time Lord just "knows" the way it was in "The Fires of Pompeii." (Yeah, I know, I was shocked when I heard Doctor Who was playing merry nonsense with its canonical rules, too.)
Things go pancake-shaped when crew members start getting infected with an elemental-themed virus that gives them a hive mind, weird powers, and a nasty desire to kill stuff. (Does this remind you of anything?) This time it's water, as you may have guessed from the episode title. The infected people are terrifically creepy-looking, so props to the makeup department on that one. Apart from that, though, they really shouldn't be too frightening, since the base can be locked down and the villains' only move is water gun, for heaven's sake. Even so, Doc keeps repeating that "water always wins" because "water is patient."
Well, yeah, that's really useful for breaking down a steel door over the course of, like, centuries. So there's not a lot of urgency to it, right? Right?
Oh, you. You've forgotten that we're watching a Davies episode. What in heaven's name are you doing, bringing your "logic" and your "common sense" in here?
Unfettered by the fact that water takes millennia to get through anything, everyone gets abundantly worked up as they try to evade the devil-water and its minions so they can get on a shuttle back to Earth. Unfortunately, everything gets compromised by devil-water, prompting the dutiful Captain Adelaide to blow the whole thing up (because Doc told her her death spurred the human race on its journey to the stars). For a second, it looks like Doc will bow to the laws of time and let them all die. Then he decides "Screw the rules, I'm the last of the Time Lords so I decide who lives," and saves everyone who wasn't infected.
This is Bad, and Captain Adelaide recognizes it's Bad, and calls Doc out on it. Good for her, although this is one of the most interesting turns for the Doctor: he's finally let his determination to save everyone override the wisdom that not everyone can be saved. Also, after 900 years of do-goodery, he's finally dipping into the temptation of being a god. About stinking time.
Despite the ending, though, this episode can't quite wrestle its way free of some nagging lameness, particularly the illogical villains and the signature Davies melodrama. 4/5
4.18, The End of Time, Part 1: The Master is coming back. Hopefully his whole scheme doesn't get retconned into meaninglessness again. Oh, and also we have a narrator this episode, which is just...horrid. Voiceover narration is the lazy man's suspense device. It's an incredibly hackneyed technique and it doesn't speak well of the episodes to come.
Doc returns to the Ood, who have called him because they're having bad dreams portending the return of the Master. Things have gotten very out of hand because Doc "delayed."
(Delayed? What? He's...but he...he drives a time machine! He cannot be late to anything! That is how a time machine works! He doesn't even need to hurry! He can arrive whenever he wants to. That is the whole function of time travel! There doesn't need to be any urgency! There doesn't even need to be a timetable! The TARDIS is above timetables! How can the writers of a show based on time travel so grossly misunderstand the concept?)
Whatever. The Master's Secret Club of Disciples resurrect him using a totally out-of-the-blue pseudo-magical ritual. Immediately upon his return, he develops superpowers, and sets about chewing hamburgers (and the scenery). It's...really bad. I can't tell anymore if the Master is supposed to be frightening or if he's supposed to be some kind of deconstruction of the genocidal maniac, because he is so incredibly bad at being scary. He's like an extremely cheap Joker knockoff, with immortality and magic for seasoning.
Doc encounters the Master, who knocks four times (oh noes!), but Doc gets sidetracked by Donna's grandpa and a bus full of old people. We get a glimpse of Donna, who is marrying again, and a brief but deep glimpse into the Doctor's desperate loneliness. Oh, and Donna's grandpa—much like Donna—is for some mad reason a lynchpin of the universe. Maybe. I think. Possibly.
The Master gets captured by a filthy rich man who's procured souped-up alien medical technology. He wants the Master to complete it, since right now it can only heal wounds, and he wants an immortality machine. The Master fixes it up, but it turns out the device isn't designed to fix single bodies: it fixes whole planets. The Master flips it on, gets inside, turns the entire world into himself, and then laughs himself silly. All I can say to this is...meh. None of this will have happened as of next episode, will it? Everything will be conveniently explained away so it never occurred?
Meanwhile, our narrator turns out to be an orator speaking to a crowd...of Time Lords.
They're back! The Time Lords are back! And James Bond is their King! This is...well...hrm...this really came out of nowhere, didn't it?
Also, wow, that's what passes for a Time Lord speech? It was literally a narration of the episode's events. An overwritten, inflated, prosaic, pretentious narration of what happened/is going to happen on an insignificant planet.
Melodramarrific, packed full of transgressions of common sense, and the return of the Master, who used to be a villain and is now just kind of a weird homeless guy. Blech. 2/5
4.19, The End of Time, Part 2: Turns out the Time Lords haven't "returned," per se. The last day of the Time War happens to coincide with this day in human history, or something like that. King Time, or whatever, has charisma to spare (a welcome change from the desperately ham-fisted Master) and is convinced Earth has the key to preventing his death—oh, and the destruction of his species—at the hands of...the Doctor? Turns out Past!Doc is prophesied to use "the moment" to end the Time War wholesale. Daleks, Time Lords: they're all gonna die. (This is a fascinating detail, by the way, and explains a lot about the Doctor's allergy to lethal force if it turns out he was the one who murdered his entire species.)
To prevent the destruction, King Time sends a signal backward in time to implant a constant, irrepressible drumbeat into the Master's head (which has now driven him stark-raving mad). He also flings a Gallifrey diamond onto Earth so he and his council can follow it out of the time-lock, presumably a side effect having to do with the Time War.
Meanwhile, Doc and Grandpa Noble escape the Master's clutches onto a salvage ship with cactus-aliens who don't matter much. They hear the Master realize the Time Lords are coming, which sends Doc into a trembling frenzy somewhere between terror and murderous rage. He takes a gun.
He takes a gun.
The Doctor is meeting his race, and he takes a gun. That detail alone speaks volumes about how threatening a villain they are. (We finally got a threatening villain!)
King Time, armed with his Gauntlet of Instadeath, lands on Earth with his council. They drag the planet of Gallifrey in their wake, setting it on a collision course with Earth. Remarkably, this doesn't immediately cause vast earthquakes, tsunamis, or general mayhem (though it does produce lasting migraines for anyone who knows any basic astronomy or physics or, you know, how gravity actually works).
Anyway, Doc confronts King Time and the Master with a gun, threatening to kill either one of them, since this will magically send the whole threat back where it came from. That's quite a cheap way to get rid of them, but at least it forces Doc to choose between whom he must kill, so I suppose I'm at peace with it. He'll shoot either King Time—who is unrepentantly evil, let's remember—or the Master—who is evil, but almost entirely as a result of the madness King Time cursed him with. Your choice, Doc: omnicidal maniac or pathetic madman?
Nope, sorry, just kidding, Doc takes a third option. He shoots a machine and sends everyone back. King Time tries to kill him, only for the Master to stop him with his force-lightning powers.
Ugh. Well, there you go, folks. Yet another cheap, quick, diseased climax from Russell T. Davies.
But wait! It gets worse!
In all the confusion, Grandpa Noble got locked in a glass box connected to the Super Healing Machine from last episode. It's gone haywire and it's going to flood the glass box with 50,000 rads, and for some reason (cough cough cheap melodrama cough) the only way to let someone out of the box is to send someone else in. So Doc has to take Grandpa Noble's place. That's okay, though, right? We established in "Smith and Jones" that Doc can just expel radiation out of his foot. It's tough on the soles, sure, but no muss no fuss apart from melted rubber. Right? Right? Right?
Just kidding again! Everyone knows that such rules are only viable in-episode. Even the regeneration mechanic is up for editing if they feel like it.
Doc takes Grandpa Noble's place, gets pumped full of radiation, and has just enough time to appear to every member of Team Doc, as a sort of vague farewell, before he must regenerate. First he visits Martha and Mickey, who are fighting Sontarans and are also married. (I feel as though I should hate this pairing, but I really don't. I think they work well together. Although I do wonder what happened to her last fiancé.) Next he sees Sarah Jane Smith and her son (whom he saves from being run over), Cap'n Jack (on whom he bestows a tip that will help him get laid), Donna Noble and family (to whom he gives a winning lottery ticket, hooray for time travel), and...wait for it...you knew this was coming...it just had to, Davies just couldn't let this one go...he visits Rose in 2005. She's remarkably not annoying, so three cheers for that.
Despite that terrifically stupid climax and all the cheesy melodrama, this episode is easily the strongest of the lot. Tennant bleeds pathos, and seeing him give his silent farewell to all his companions is a straight shot to the feels. Farewell, Tennant. Like Eccleston before you, you were the only reliably good thing throughout this season. Even when everything sucked—even when all you had to work with were Russell T. Davies and Rose Tyler—you pulled through like the camp-champ you are. Matt Smith has big Converse sneakers to fill. 4.5/5
What's Good?
At least this is a quick answer: Tennant. Tennant, Tennant, Tennant. The end of his tenure as the Doctor is something he finds very stirring, and he uses the passion to draw us in. He owns every single scene, even when those scenes were clearly written by someone drunk.
In addition, Doc as a character finally got some really meaty development and is seeing significant challenges—namely his impending death and his choice between breaking the laws of time or letting people die. So in that sense, these specials are almost worth watching. Unfortunately...
What's Bad?
Russell T. Davies writes every one of these episodes, and he's wildly erratic. Though some of Doc's character development is powerful, most of the time, this miniseries feels like exactly what it is: a set of Christmas specials. Everything—everything everything everything—is solved by Deus ex Doctorus. Even when it seems like he could solve things by being clever, or by utilizing skills he has, or by manipulating things, he still solves stuff without having to do any real work. The solution always drops neatly into his lap, resolving all of the tension without any need for, y'know, tension.
Also, apparently Davies heard the term "suspense" while he was writing these last episodes, and thought he'd give it a whirl. Unfortunately, he was unaware that "prophecy" is in its death throes as a suspense device. It ranks right up there with "overdramatized narration," which also features heavily into his swan song episodes.
And, finally, we have the endemic problem of Doctor Who: rules which change to fit the drama. The only constant laws in the Whoniverse are "The Doctor wins" and "It's dramatic." Generally speaking, this is okay. That's something to be expected in any story universe: gravity and cause-effect and atomic structure are often part of the universe, but "protagonist wins" and "drama always increases" are perfectly valid additions to the story physics.
The trouble, though, happens when those two laws become more fundamental than any other law. Laws like "The Doctor must regenerate into a new body" or "A fixed point in time is an actual phenomenon which Time Lords can sense" or "Creating a paradox causes problems" or "The sonic screwdriver can open anything unless it is deadlocked" or "The Doctor can expel radiation out through his foot."
Every single one of the laws above has been broken in the last four seasons, and every time it happens I tear out more of my hair. If I had a beard, it would be patchwork because of all the ripping I was doing to it.
Perhaps I'm biased. I'll admit freely that I subscribe to Sanderson's First Law, which states simply that "your ability to solve plot problems with a magic system [where "magic system" = "any kind of extraordinary mechanic nonexistent in the real world"] is directly proportional to how well your audience understands the rules therein." Sanderson's Second Law, which is similar, says basically that "magic" is made more interesting when it's sharply limited.
This is my problem with Davies' Who. There are no limits to his magic; he just does whatever happens to need doing. There aren't any mechanics to speak of, just problems and solutions tailored to them. The story is robbed of all tension before it even gets off the ground because we, the audience, know that Doc will just solve this thing like he always does: by punching some buttons in the TARDIS and cranking out a potion (or a gun, or a tracking device, or whatever) that will solve everything. It's disappointing, and it cheats us, the audience, out of really getting involved with the story. We don't need to worry about anything. Everything is going to be okay.
So, then...
Is it quality? No.
Is it family-friendly? I mentioned in my review of the first season that it ought to be criminal to subject young minds (or any minds) to the scripts of Russell T. Davies. When I saw "Gridlock," I revised my opinion: maybe Davies could write something good. I have now landed back where I started, and concluded that even blinds pigs will find truffles at some point.
Is it daring? Surprisingly, yes. Doc's character growth explores heretofore-unseen territory, which is fascinating.
What's the rating? 5.7/10.
Farewell, Tennant; you will be missed, and smitten ladies everywhere will cite you as the one true Doctor forever and always.
Davies...well, you're gone, so there's that.
Avanti!
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