The Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Timelords: Ranking - 209

  The Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Timelords

(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 23-30/6/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Colin Teague) 

'Here is a party political broadcast on behalf of the Conservative party. Vote Saxon! Yes he's returning, the political comeback of the year! So what if he gassed the cabinet, enslaved us all and fed us to the Toclafane - that was just a misunderstanding last time and a non-story exploited by the biased left-wing media, it will better this time honest. I mean, if nothing else he got Brexit done - if only because he killed all the remain voters. That's democracy at work, that is. Remember, vote Saxon to make your problems disappear when you do!' 

Ranking: 209

 

 ( (A note before we start: unlike some fans but like Russell T I consider ‘Utopia’ a separate story not part of a 3-parter, but they are connected so if you might want to read that first because, well, spoilers).

During the time of first transmission of this story about a psychopath driven to commit evil deeds by the constant rhythm in his head, my neighbour was learning to play the drums in the bedroom next to mine. I have never felt more affinity with The Master in my life. All those other stories full of crazy plans that could never work and endless repetitive attempts to take over Earth just to annoy the heck out of the Doctor suddenly made perfect sense: he was suffering from sleep deprivation too! After the success of the Dalek and the Dalek-Cybermen revivals The Master was an obvious villain to bring back for series three and, as a timelord with regenerations too, was the perfect opportunity to be re-written for the present day in a way the monsters could never be. Here Russell T looks at all the ways he’s been done before, all the changes that have taken place in TV since the show went off the air in 1989, and decides to make him mad. Gone is the suave sophistication of the Roger Delgado or the flamboyancy of the Ainley model, or whatever the heck was going on with the catchphrase-spouting one in ‘The TV Movie’: this version is The Joker to The Doctor’s Batman, the unhinged baddy who, far from being the one in charge, can’t control himself. The finale of the 3rd  series of comeback Who relies a lot on just how mad The Master is and Russell T has clearly been doing some thinking on what motivates The Doctor’s arch nemesis (while leaving the full explanation for another couple of years). He’s also been thinking about what the series hasn’t done yet, so we finally get a first proper look at Gallifrey, with as much background lore as Russell dares without doing something stupid like, say, making The Doctor an orphan that’s the foundling of the timelords or something. There’s the new addition of the temporal schism, which eight year old time tots are taken to in order to see what they become. One boy goes mad and runs towards it. The other runs away. That’s the Doctor-Master relationship in a nutshell, what Bob Holmes and Terrance Dicks was working towards all those years. While some other changes to classic Who stick in the throat this one makes sense: John Simms’ version is more like the ‘core’ Master with all the social niceties stripped away, the basics of the character without the personality traits the other actors added. Given the backstory, it turns the story into a delayed ‘coming of age’ novel where, nearly a thousand years after leaving Gallifrey (assuming the Doctor and Master are roughly the same age and looked into the schism at roughly the same time) they’re still going their separate ways.

After all, there has to be some reason to make him keep coming back to be a thorn in the Doctor’s side when everyone else bar The Daleks have given up. The answer is: he’s jealous. The Doctor is everything he wants to be and The Master is annoyed at the way he keeps walking away from the power and love he craves. Look at the way he adopts The Doctor’s quirks, handing round jelly babies and referring to his wife as his ‘companion’: he’s basically cosplaying at The Doctor’s life without quite understanding that people worship The Doctor out of love not fear. The Master is that boy at the back of the class who wants as many friends as the popular kid at school, so bullies them into being nice to him, oblivious to the fact that this will just put people off him. I love how RTD’s Master is scripted to be The Doctor just with rules of social etiquette and empathy stripped away; he’s every bit as driven but in a darker, nastier way and really is the Doctor’s equal in ways that Ainley’s Master was never allowed to be. John Simms takes that idea and totally runs with it, surprising and scaring everyone who’d seen him in other things and even himself a little I think with how far he dove into the role of a psychopathic killer whose borderline insane. Usually The Master’s plans make little to no sense and are just something interchangeable each time for the Doctor to stop, but this one feels plausible and you spend this two-parter ticking off things you’re surprised no other writer came up with him to do: of course he’d end up prime minister. Of course he’d gas the cabinet, which are at least a symbol of democracy (even if the same incompetent self-serving morons always seem to get in every time). Of course he’d go out of his way to humiliate the Doctor and separate him from his friends. This is a Master whose been thinking through why his plans always fail and he nearly gets away with this one, taking over The Earth for one particularly harsh and gloomy year, even going to the extra trouble to ‘hide’ his real self so his return catches the Doctor totally off guard (if not the fanbase who, after series finales involving The Daleks and The Cybermen, realised it was either going to him or Davros coming back; even so the twist at the end of ‘Utopia’ is a doozy).

It’s that decision to make himself prime minister that hints at something else going on though. There’s always been a political streak in Russell’s writing (even though an awful lot of people complaining about RTD2 seemed to miss it in RTD1) and ‘Drums’ sounds like the showrunner having a re-think, after a year of revisiting the series through the eyes of Martha rather than Rose, of how he’d make ‘Aliens Of London’ differently with the benefit of hindsight. Politicians wouldn’t simply invade and take over without us noticing, they’d hide in plain sight, which is what The Master does here. Russell may well have been inspired by a jokey Radio Times cover that advertised the finale of series two, on the same week as the election, with the caption ‘vote Dalek’ and thought ‘that’s an idea…’ ‘Aliens’ had too much on its plate establishing the new-look series but ‘Drums’ feels as if it’s picking up from where the Cartmel/McCoy era left off, making Thatcher into the villain. This was a time of political uncertainty, an end to a period of relative stability where people weren’t quite sure what was coming next. It looked as if the following year, 2008, would be the first in a long time when both the UK and US would hold elections in the same year, with Bush Jnr legally obliged to step aside after two terms and Tony Blair hanging up his lectern after a decade in power (though in the end his successor, Gordon Brown, didn’t call an election and get an almost certain four more years in power, the way everyone expected – the credit crunch got in the way and it was 2010 before Britain went mad and chose its own psychopath in David Cameron). The general feeling amongst the public was that a mass hypnotism spell was breaking: Blair had been kept in power partly because his competitors were incompetent but also because he had come to power in 1997 (with a political campaign that started roughly where classic Who, with the ‘TV Movie’) on a wave of change,  that ‘things were going to get better’ (a slogan and a song, by the band D:Ream back when Brian Cox was playing at being a wannabe musician rather than a wannabe scientist, they actually used in that week’s ‘Confidential’ just to run the point home). He’d been elected as the non-Thatcher, non-Conservative candidate who seemed to stand for all the things that Dr Who stood for: tolerance, equality, justice, kindness, creating rather than taking things away. Several illegal wars and lies about weapons of mass destruction later and people were having second thoughts, but to admit that Blair had been just as bad was tantamount to saying that we’d all been conned. ‘Sound Of Drum’s picks up on a lot of that feeling, with even Martha and Captain Jack admitting they voted for Harold Saxon (a very un-Mastery name that Russell had had at the back of his mind for a while) without quite knowing why.  The being endorsed by celebrities, normally a more American way of going about politics, was very much a Blair thing (you might remember Oasis’ career ending the day Noel Gallagher became an invited guest at Downing Street. Sadly it wasn’t part of a ruse to spike the drinks either, which is what Jefferson Airplane once tried at a Nixon rally they’d accidentally invited Grace Slick to).

However it’s hard to imagine Blair gassing anyone directly or getting his hands dirty, while Gordon Brown would surely have fitted the pipes together wrongly and gassed himself by accident.  No, Saxon’s behaviour is much more a David Cameron thing to do. Though it might be significant that The Master as Saxon’s speeches all quote from the Conservative end of the British political spectrum (along with a line about ‘calling from beyond the stars’ which was nicked wholesale Bush Jnr’s inauguration speech): he quotes great chunks of the gung-ho speech Thatcher gave after the sinking of the Belgrano and refers to his enemies as ‘wets’ in much the same tone (Thatcher called any rebel a ‘wet’ and any supporter a ‘dry’, for reasons best known to her psychiatrist). The way that Lucy Saxon hovers, obsessed, silent, uncomfortable talking about politics and even a little scared will also strike anyone who saw the eventual 2010 political campaign was familiar too. They even get disgraced MP Ann Widdicombe on in a cameo, alongside McFly (the closest they can get to The Beatles being in ‘The Chase’ in the musical wasteland that was 2007) – it’s very ‘her’ that in her press afterwards she boasted about the morality of Dr Who and tried to score political points off it without realising she was technically on the side of the baddy. That idea of using CCTV and encouraging people to speak out against our heroes is right out of the Cameron policy textbook, of handing out Asbos unthinkingly like sweets even to people protesting genuine concerns trying to make Britain a safer place. While if any politician was driven to do mad things by the noise in his head then it’s surely Cameron (how else do you explain the Brexit vote except madness? He’s got off lightly from posterity after Boris was more obviously incompetent, but a good 80% of the problems in the life of the modern Britain reading this come from Cameron’s ill informed or panic, whether Brexit or austerity or the mishandling of a recession that made things worse or cuts to things we actually needed, like reacting to pandemics). This is a story that worries about what might happen next in such uncertain times when the world is swinging once more to the right and how there will be no way to stop this great and potentially evil unknown for four years (if you doubt Russell’s lefty politics have a read or a listen to the Rose lockdown prequel, where Boris Johnson turns out to be an Auton). The Master as prime minister? Delicious. That’s exactly what the producers and writers of the past wanted to do with Dr Who and couldn’t and now Russell is. Hurrah!

Alas what might have been another great series finale goes too far. By his own admission this is the story Russell wrote closest to the deadline, bashing the first draft of both episodes out in four days so that everyone would have something to work with. Indeed, he only got the idea for this story after staring out the window and listening to music, trying to work out The Master’s motivations when a song ‘Voodoo Child’ by Rogue Traders came on, with the reference to ‘here it comes, the sound of drums’ (it’s the one with a co-credit to Elvis Costello after nicking the riff from his song ‘Pump It Up’ for once they were actually able to get the rights to a song that inspired Russell and use it in the show where it works well. Although using The Scissor Sisters on top  as well is just cruel to actual music lovers like me. At least The Master’s not a psychopath though, not like the Celestial Toymaker who, shudder, sues The Spice Girls. They missed a trick not using ‘The Face Of Boe Selecta’ too). Around this same time Russell’s friend Neil Gorton, who as a special effects artist who’d once worked in makeup, did a lot of the bridging between costumes and computer wizardry on Who, won an award for an ‘old man’ costume he’d made for one of the character in otherwise forgotten sitcom ‘Help!’ Russell rang him up to congratulate him and asked if he could do something similar for The Doctor. The rest of the script poured from there in a hurry.
Unfortunately it shows. Russell too seems sleep deprived compared to usual, writing without his usual light touches and leaving in rough edges that would be smoothed down, so that we have is rather an uneven paced story. Having Martha as the one person who manages to escape this mad world is all fine and good, but it leaves almost an entire episode waiting for her to get back, with only a failed prison attempt to break up the monotony of The Master at his most sadistic and cruel. It’s so out of character having The Doctor sit around and waiting, while for some reason soldiers keep shooting at Captain Jack (who can’t die) rather than Martha’s family (who can). It feels as if Russell is having so much fun getting inside The Master’s head that he neglects The Doctor altogether and worse neglects Martha in what should have been her big emotional farewell. Turning The Doctor old and then speeding him up into a CGI Gollum and sticking him in a cage is exactly what The Master would do but it’s also a really bad move dramatically: it robs us of the chance to hear two fine actors going toe-to-toe until the very end and makes The Master’s rants even more ranty as he talks to himself and all David Tennant can do is wheeze like a grampus. Not least because the CGI version of an aged timelord looks ridiculous, nothing like Tennant or a timelord at all (and nothing like what Matt Smith’s Doctor will look like after a similar length of time as The Doctor). These scenes in the second episode are also way too brutal and over-the-top; usually I defend violence in fantasy and scifi shows because to be worried about that means you have to be young and impressionable enough to also believe that having two hearts and travelling in time and space in a blue box is real (and an age where you really shouldn’t be watching this), but this is slightly different because it’s happening to a character we’ve grown to love and the obvious pain The Doctor’s in is clearly taken too far (they could easily have cut five minutes of this to make the ‘usual’ timeslot I think).

I can’t help wondering too if, after three very hard years that pushed him to his limits and wondering if he’d done the right thing in bringing back this show, RTD wasn’t venting his anger at how many sleepless nights and headaches working on his favourite show was giving him and getting his own back on the central character (he’s since said in interviews that the drumming reminded him of his alarm clock, which kept intruding on his sleepless nights). That feeling of being driven by drums, by something that won’t let you rest, is as neat a metaphor as any for the act  of writing and running Dr Who is a particularly weird job: you spend your time thinking up nasty things to throw at your characters like a conveyer belt, then put things right at the end. By this point, three years in, Russell must have been wondering what weird things he’d unlocked from his unconscious but doesn’t stop it here as he keeps attacking The Doctor and coming back for more. There are so many jokes at the series and Russell’s writing too: The Master laughs at the Doctor having ‘the perfect demographic’ of companions (a girl and a boy, one black, one gay). He has The Master point and laugh at The Doctor more than feels strictly comfortable or necessary. The Master is in effect Michael Grade: the bully who won’t let people play with toys they enjoy but which he doesn’t understand and which don’t fit his vision of power and control (it’s worth remarking on the rightwing bias that slowly started creeping into the BBC under Grade once Dr Who came off around 1989 too. The BBC don’t run on advertisements like other TV stations, they rely on an automatic license fee payment that’s compulsory under law, but one which could be changed on a whim by any government who thinks they’re being too mean. The labour of the 1990s was never going to remove it – that might be a different story today – but there was a real fear the conservatives might, especially in a credit crunch). The villain wants The Doctor dead and has hypnotised everyone into obeying his wishes, while he isn’t just mean t to The Doctor he’s positively sadistic, using every excuse to attack him in a way that makes the viewer uncomfortable. There’s nothing in the world that can stop him now. 

Except hope. The Doctor represents hope, even when it seems to be dead. After all, Dr Who as a series has come back from the dead when everyone assumed it was buried and there’s a sense of congratulations about this story too. By this point Dr Who is safe for the foreseeable future, with time to think after the one-shot of series one and the mad scrambling for series two. Now Russell knows Dr Who is on the air for at least another year after this and while he’s groaning at all the extra work he must also have been a little proud and possibly thinking back to when the show ended in ‘Survival’ and how differently things are now. It makes sense he’d do that now: after all this is The Master’s first appearance since then, TV Movie aside. It might be significant that we even get a reprise of The Doctor and Master wrestling ‘like animals’ where they left off in that story, a wrestle that in some fan circles has taken on a bigger significance as Dr Who wrestling for its life. The first of this story is set back in Downing Street where the first story written and filmed for the new look series took place (‘Aliens Of London’). There’s a running theme across the new series that ‘the time war’ is the show when it was off the air and The Doctor was off having darker adventures on his own without us looking, but he came back because people believed in the hope he represented. Where critics assumed Dr Who to be too ‘old’ to have any relevance to youngsters Russell knows better. Rather than fight back through Martha putting together a weapon (which The Doctor mocks for being such an obviously wrong thing for him to do, even though it’s exactly what happens in ‘Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’) The Doctor wins through patience and love, with Martha reminding people about The Doctor’s legend the same way that all the fanziners, fan fiction writers New Adventures authors, graphic novel illustrators and Big Finish audio bods kept faith alive, as a world full of fans help Russell breath him back to life again. Martha telling those stories, is ‘us’, the fans who helped keep the dream alive. All those years Dr Who survived, hiding in plain sight, while all the non-fans looked away, the perception filter allowing to exist just under the radar where people didn’t notice it was still a thing. On that level the finale is a nice moment: we get to share in the glow of The Doctor coming back to life and defeating that right wing mentality that was growing, giving us a hero to believe in at last. We all played a part in this, whether we stayed a fan from the old series or joined in for the new and stayed because we believed in what The Doctor had to say. Having the Doctor come back to life is itself a great moment, a bit of congratulations to us all for having faith.

And then Russell gets a Messiah complex a little too strong and turns The Doctor (and him, for being the one to bring him back) into Jesus, in one of the most cringeworthy scenes in the sixty years of the series (right up there with The Doctor being brought back by angels in ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ up next, while note this story’s ‘archangel’ links. Russell’s developing a Messiah complex that will bite him the following year if my reading of ‘Midnight’ is right). People don’t just believe in The Doctor, they somehow reverse The Master’s aging process and make him young again. They even put him back in the same clothes he was wearing before. Then The Doctor flies, disperses bullets and energy strikes with his hands and ends the scene by turning the other cheek and offering forgiveness to The Master. Good grief it’s tonally deaf, not just bad but really bad. I mean, they even make him levitate. I get what Russell was trying to do – that The Doctor is a figure of forgiveness, of putting things right and as his name implies healing the hurt that drives his enemies on, but this one scene can’t undo an hour of jeers, especially as this one scene is done so poorly. It’s one of those scenes where someone should have stopped him, said ‘you’ve gone a bit too far Russell’ turned off that alarm clock and put him to bed with some cocoa to come back with a fresh head in the morning. Part of the greatness of Dr Who is that he’s ordinary – for a timelord anyway. While other super heroes have special powers and great weaponry the Doctor has his wits, knowledge and learning, some psychic paper, a sonic screwdriver and some friends he inspires. He’s not Jesus. He can’t perform miracles. While a shared telepathic need for The Doctor bringing him back to life works well as an abstract and would have made for a fine spin-off novel, on television it’s just stupid. Why should everyone thinking the same thoughts affect real technology created by an alien mastermind? Unlike other Davies finales that spread its plot elements across other stories The Master’s archangel network comes out of nowhere, an unexplained bit of technology we don’t properly get to see (they could have made it the ‘time destructor’ from ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ as it does much the same thing and we oldies know about that, while newbies are sued to looking stuff up). At least the aging process was explored in ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ but even that doesn’t seem to work in the same way. There’s no logical reason why The Doctor should age into a wizened husk (and while Gorton deserves all the awards he gets this isn’t one of his better jobs on Who – this blinking gnome looks nothing like The Doctor and runs in the face of pretty much everything we know about timelord physiognomy). For all the extra budget and effect the result looks nowhere as near as good as ‘The Leisure Hive’ in 1981 and the science behind it far less sound (not that that story actually makes any sense, but it at least sounds plausible). Then time gets reversed to more or less where it all started, through a ‘paradox machine’ rigged up to the Tardis. It’s all a nonsense, full of plot holes bit enough for an Abzorbaloff to walk through.

However the ‘real’ punch is how bland and unlikeable the Doctor is compared to The Master in this one, who gets all the best lines. This story only works if the Doctor really is as brilliant as we’re told but you have to take most of that on, well, faith. If you’d tuned in just for these two parts you’d wonder why everyone believed in him so much, because all he does is skulk, eat chips and leave the hard stuff to his companions. Turning him into a mute CGI gnome that looks nothing like him is just silly  when you have an actor as capable as Tennant to make fiery scenes sizzle. The Doctor’s even low key responsible for this story, taking down Harriet Jones’ career at the end of ‘The Christmas Invasion’ and allowing The Master to fill up the vacuum left behind (while he has a right to be cross at the pm blowing up an alien spaceship when the Brigadier did this in ‘The Silurians’ they still worked together happily for years). In this abstract sense putting The Doctor in a cage and silencing him was exactly what the world did to Dr Who. But in plot terms it’s a huge mistake: it makes the Doctor passive and robs us of the chance to see David Tennant rebuke every point The Master makes. Tennant and Simms are great when they’re fighting down a phoneline (something they did for real, with both actors on the other end rather than stand ins) but we don’t get to see that fire in person. Generally speaking, the best part of each Master story is the moment The Doctor calmly points out all the ways he’s got things wrong. We don’t get that in this story. The Doctor even begs The Master not to die so he won’t be alone, The Master seeing this as an opportunity to have the ‘last word’ in their endless game of cat and mouse. For Martha it’s even worse: she’s had a whole series of arc of learning to be independent and to come to terms with the fact that the Doctor will never love her the way she loves him. A lot of this year has been The Doctor uncharacteristically rubbing her face in the fact he doesn’t fancy her and he does it here twice, even in celebration, trying to take The Master along out of ‘love’ and referring to the perception filter as being ‘like fancying someone who doesn’t notice you’. Surely he must have cottoned on by now – even Captain Jack picks up on her feelings and he’s, well, Captain Jack (The Doctor doesn’t look at all surprised when Martha brings it up in her second farewell speech). So why be so cruel? By rights this episode should end with her doing a Clara, taking charge and saving him in such a way that the Doctor falls for her, but all too late (while standing up to her awful family while she’s about it). Instead she’s asked to travel the word spreading word about how marvellous and wonderful the man/timelord who’s just jilted her is, while relying on other countries to give her shelter and keep her safe while she sits around telling stories and eating their biscuits. It just feels wrong for Martha, who’s a doctor herself after all and built for far better than this. Freema Agyeman is as under-rated as ever and acts her socks off with all the extra screen-time, but there’s nothing for her to do except natter. We hear about her being the ‘last survivor’ of the destruction of Japan and walking through the wastelands of New York but even with the bigger budget of the 21^st century they can’t show that beyond a CGI missile factory, so there’s no sense of what Martha’s been through (there was a spin-off book aimed at filling those bits in, which makes sense this is partly a story about how The Doctor lives on beyond the TV series, but even that skips the bits you really want to see/read).  And Earth is just one planet; we’re really not very big or important cosmically speaking. The plan would have been better if Martha had been given a space-shuttle and flown to Peladon or somewhere where lots of planets could rush to help at once and think of the Doctor.

There’s also a romantic sub-plot with the bloke from Miranda, that sadly never goes anywhere because it’s a last minute tweak: the first draft had Martha’s brother Leo waiting to meet her in hiding on the beach, with a proper meaty role for Reggie Yates as Leo, but with Russell’s story so close to the wire they hired the actors late and found he was busy. So Tom was invented to give Martha someone to bounce off, with the added twist that he was secretly working for The Master and sold her out, just when she’d fallen for him! This sub-plot was dropped when the story was over-running (Russell had to beg for an extra five minutes for ‘Last Of The Timelords’ as it was) but they should have taken out all the Scissor Sisters and failed revolts and aging Tennant parts to fit it in, because this is exactly what the story is about: a coming of age tale about learning who to trust, for ‘us’ the voting public at home and Martha. This is a story about being hypnotised into believing promises and Martha seeing through it and standing up for herself, making her own decisions, would have been the perfect end for the character. Instead she ends her time in the Tardis a little oddly, making a polite exit, then walking back to the Doctor to talk about telling her friend to get out rather than moon after someone who never loved her (even though The Doctor’s hug of gratitude is by far the closest he’s come and Martha could have told herself this in ‘Smith and Jones’ and saved her the worry). Then she says she’s leaving because she’s a Doctor and there are trauma patients who’ve witnessed the end of the world. Except they haven’t, beyond her own family (time was re-written). They dropped the ball with a lot of Martha’s character, so it’s sad to see they drop the ball with her exit too.

There’s simply too much here that’s an easy cop out and doesn’t fit with other stories. We hear about Martha’s long walk to freedom but we don’t actually see much of it. Having this entire story take a year to unfold is a then-new idea for Who that Moffat will run with, but there’s no real sense of that passing time beyond a clock countdown that comes and goes – these characters ought to be exhausted, desperate. The Master doing nasty things to Martha’s family ought to make us hate him all the more, but we don’t know Martha’s family as well as Rose’s (or Donna’s to come) and don’t like much of what we see, so the point is lost. That perception filter is a bit bonkers too. I mean, the Tardis keys hung round your neck and a bit of quick jiggery-pokery means you can turn invisible? That’s not science, that’s silliness. There’s nothing to stop The Master simply removing it if The Doctor tried it, plus everyone who votes for Saxon would still remember and wonder where he went. Plus it would have changed the ending of almost every previous Dr Who story yet The Doctor doesn’t struggle to find out how to build it or go through a ‘key to time’ quest to build it, he just produces it as if there’s a Tardis cupboard full of them. What’s happened to UNIT in this era? They used to hide alien invasions to protect the public, but now they have a whacking spaceship  - no wonder taxpayers are getting a bit shirty about where their expenses are going by the time of ‘Lucky Day’ (although I love the fact that their logo is just like the British Rocket Group from Quatermass, which is what the early UNIT were based on). Also, if The Master (not a technological genius the way The Rani or even The Doctor is) can create a paradox machine and an archangel network, then couldn’t every timelord have had a bash? Does its existence mean the time war could have been reversed by timelords holding hands and believing in each other and, say, singing Paul McGann’s praises and bringing him back to life? Then there’s how much of the ‘plot’ The Doctor had time to tell Martha when he whispers in her ear where The Master can hear it, complete with ruse that she’s really after a weapon. They must have set this up in advance, but in that case why whisper at all? Also, can timelords simply refuse to regenerate the way The Master does?

 In which case why doesn’t, say the 8^th Doctor do that in ‘Night Of The Doctor’ rather than fight in an unwinnable war? I’m not convinced about Jack being revealed as The face of Boe either, a last minute idea that wasn’t part of the original plan: it’s odd that Boeface wouldn’t recognise The 9^th Doctor and Rose in ‘The End Of the World’, the 10^th Doctor in ‘New Earth’ or Martha in ‘Gridlock’. Plus Jack’s whole arc is that it’s impossible for him to die, ever, in any circumstance – but didn’t he just do that in ‘Gridlock’? Why deliver such a cryptic message as ‘you are not alone’ now? It’s all a bit odd and smacks a bit too much of ‘I’ve been working hard at this project for ten months and I need to sleep and get my life back; yeah Terrance Dicks got away with worse, that’ll do’. At the time it seemed like burning The Master’s body on a funeral pyre like a Viking was odd and out of character too, but Moffat’s quick eyes seized upon this as the cornerstone for ‘The Impossible Astronaut’, that species would love to have access to a timelord’s regenerative powers). Director Colin Teague does his best to keep things moving, but even he struggles (not helped by a nasty fall at home roughly three-quarters of the way through shooting which put him in the hospital: veteran director Graeme Harper took over while for the rest of his time on Who the former was known as ‘Tumble Teague’ to the crew).  

Which is a real shame because there’s a lot about this story, particularly in the first episode, to love. The shots of The Doctor and Master’s childhood is incredibly well done, just long enough to tease and tantalise us without giving too much away (even though the classic series edged closer towards the pair being brothers, a cut line from ‘Planet Of Fire’ that Russell makes fun of here when Martha suggests it). They even use the robes like the ones in ‘The War Games’ while the actors are excellent (William Hughes, the one playing the young Master, was playing a young David Tennant as Casanova in a Russell T series of the same name a couple of years before). The idea of a phone network that’s secretly brainwashing people into who to vote for is the perfect explanation for how we get the politicians we do. The shots of The Doctor Martha and Jack abandoned, forgotten and on the run with nothing but a kerosene lamp and fish and chips while they plot their way back from nothing is the best scene in the story: all those worlds saved and now they count for nothing. The gleeful sight of The Master in a gas mask giving the thumbs up as he gasses half of  Downing Street is priceless and oddly satisfying. The Master and wife Lucy dancing to Rogue Traders’ ‘Voodoo Child’ while the world burns around him (definitely didn’t have that on my Dr Who bingo list) is an iconic shot, far far better than the too-on-the-nose gag about The Master dancing to ‘Ra Ra Rasputin’ while dressed as him earlier this year. The in-jokes to old references abound (the Master’s ‘people’s of Earth please attend’ speech is presumably the one he never finished in ‘Logopolis’ as it starts the same way); The Master watching The Teletubbies  is a throwback to Delgado’s Master watching The Clangers in ‘The Sea Devils’ and is hilarious and proof that this show really is being made by fans just like us). The ‘dummy’ where it looks as if Martha’s been sent after a big gun, only she hasn’t (because the Doctor never uses guns) is a great bluff.  The fact that (spoilers) it’s The Master’s wife, used and abused throughout this story (and sports a black eye throughout the second half, though it’s never mentioned because this sis still, just about, made with children in mind), who finally kills him while The Doctor desperately tries to make him regenerate so he won’t carry the burden of being the last timelord, is the perfect end – ait doesn’t matter your public reputation, what you do in private and who you are really will get you in the end. Like ‘The Pirate Planet’ you’ve been ‘hypnotised’ by the anger of Martha’s mum and tenant emoting into looking the other way so you don’t see notice the smallest quietest figure in the room. Even the Toclafane, originally created as a plan B replacement for the Daleks in series one when it looked as if getting the rights from Terry Nation’s estate were about to fall through, are convincing copycats: tiny spheres that used to be children, like updated Quarks (‘The Dominators’) but better.

There’s a lot more this story gets right than it gets wrong then and like the drumming the script gets in your head so you go along with the bits that don’t and adjust. The abstract idea, of this being Dr Who the series coming back to life after years decaying in a cage, is a good idea: in a funny way it’s the sister to ‘Time Crash’ written by Moffat around the same time, both finding ways to pay homage to the greatest show in the galaxy, albeit in very different ways. The acting by all concerned is top notch. It’s only later, when the drums have been packed away for another day, you realise that a lot of it just didn’t make much sense at all (I still blame next door’s drumming and sleep deprivation for making me miss this first time round) and especially how much better it would have been with David Tennant properly in it. The cruelty just goes too far and makes you uncomfortable, the plot is too easily solved and it doesn’t do justice to the excellent portrayals of David Tennant, Freema Agyeman or John Simms. Or Nicola McAuliffe as journalist Vivien Rook who has a very early exit for such a big name (she’d have made a good Master herself, especially as an authoritarian prime minister in the Thatcher mould, but no one’s thinking of regenerating male timelords into females just yet). The abstract behind this story is sound – it’s making this work on television that it falls down, a coming of age tale where two boys still don’t grow up and where Martha still doesn’t quite find her independence. Had Russell had more time to write it then it might yet have been on a par with his other finales – instead it’s too rushed, too awkwardly place and in parts too upsetting to give you the same sense of joy and wonder, the difference between an inspired but patchy first draft and a last. A quick postscript: this episode was planned to be broadcast live in Trafalgar square on a huge screen, the first time Dr Who had done this and co-ordinated for pride week so there would be a big parade with lots of fans (including John Barrowman). A nice idea ruined by driving rain and the DVD that had been specially sent getting stuck in the player (a tight curfew meant that even as it was fixed quite quickly it was too late to show it). That’s rather a metaphor for this story perhaps, best laid intentions going wrong, although why forty minutes of torturing David Tennant and turning him into a goblin would have been uplifting communal viewing and encouraged new viewers to check the series out anyway is a moot point. What should have been a celebration messes up the ending so badly that all you take away is the cruelty.

POSITIVES + The drumming that pushes The Master on is a great bit of ret-conning that unlike, say, ‘The Timeless Child’ subplot, only adds to what we know rather than takes away from it. Cleverly, it sounds like the opening beats of the Doctor Who theme tune, suggesting that it’s a side effect of the time vortex we see at the start of every episode and hints that The Doctor has these same impulses too but keeps them at bay. It all makes even more sense in ‘The End Of Time’ when we learn that Rassilon put the drumming in The Master’s head (and making him seem more of a victim than a villain, even with all the many many lives lost along the way. I mean, let’s not forget The Master’s part in ‘Logopolis’ alone, which has the biggest Dr Who body count of them all even though hardly any are seen on screen).

NEGATIVES -  All those Saxon clues added up to this? We’ve been hearing about this shadowy figure since ‘The Runaway Bride’ but nowhere do any of the clues link back to The Master. It seems weird in retrospect we didn’t get Simms’ face staring out from posters given that The Doctor doesn’t recognise him. Russell got the name from an aborted series about ancient Brits and thought it was a good sturdy English name, useful for a baddy, which it is. Just not this baddy. The Master was never English in the way The Doctor was: even when he stopped being played by Roger Delgado (a true Londoner but of Spanish descent) he was played with a sense of the exotic about him. It’s also the clumsiest of all the RTD1 ‘clue’ arcs, without the surprise of ‘bad Wolf’, the intrigue of missing bees or the ambiguity of the four knocks. It’s just a name.  

BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘They used to call it the Shining World of the Seven Systems. And on the continent of Wild Endeavour, in the mountains of Solace and Solitude, there stood the Citadel of the Time Lords. The oldest and most mighty race in the universe. Looking down on the galaxies below, sworn never to interfere, only to watch. Children of Gallifrey were taken from their families at the age of eight to enter the Academy. Some say that's where it all began, when he was a child. That's when the Master saw eternity. As a novice, he was taken for initiation. He stood in front of the Untempered Schism. It's a gap in the fabric of reality through which could be seen the whole of the vortex. We stand there, eight years old, staring at the raw power of time and space, just a child. Some would be inspired. Some would run away. And some would go mad’. Martha: ‘What about you? Dr: ‘Oh, the ones that ran away, I never stopped’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Easily the best and arguably the most important of all of Dr Who’s extracurricular charity specials is ‘Timecrash’ broadcast in the gap between ‘Last Of The Timelords’ and ‘Voyage Of The Damned’. ‘Timecrash’ is a mini masterpiece,  a gorgeous self-indulgent hug by Steven Moffat that, little did we know it at the time, features David Tennant with his future father-in-law Peter Davison. The 10^th Doctor’s Tardis has crash landed into the 5^th Doctor’s Tardis, with both timelords forgetting to put their shields up (The 10^th Doctor still forgets at the end, leading directly into the Starship Titanic crashing in the next story). It’s a great moment when the 10^th Doctor flies round the controls only to bump into the 5^th Doctor, looking a bit older and saggier thanks to the ‘time distortions’.  The first appearance of a ‘classic Doctor’ in the ‘new’ series it’s a powerful exercise in nostalgia as the 10^th Doctor is in awe of his younger self; the 5^th Doctor, meanwhile, thinks his older self is a ‘fan’ from ‘LINDA’ (as per ‘Love and Monsters') thanks to his being ‘let’s face it being pretty marvellous’. As ever with multi-Doctor stories it’s not long before they start bickering (‘Hey I’m The Doctor, I can save the universe with a kettle and some string and look at me, I’m wearing a vegetable!’ ‘Oh no you changed the desktop theme – what is it this time? Coral?’) but there’s a real affection behind the words too as the 10^th Doctor talks about everything he got from his predecessor, like his half-moon glasses and his voice going all squeaky when he gets excited, while Tennant and Moffat both get to tell Davison ‘you know what – you were my Doctor’. ‘To days to come’ smiles the 5^th Doctor.  ‘All my love to long ago’ adds the 10^th Doctor. Sweet and a lovely and timey wimely reminder of how we always carry our past and who we used to be around with us and how the show has changed so much –yet stayed exactly the same. Most risqué line and one I’m surprised they got away with: The 5^th Doctor asks the 10^th ‘Does The Master still have that rubbish beard?’ The 10^th Doctor replies ‘No, well a wife!’ (a ‘beard’ being slang for a gay man’s female partner in a desperate attempt to cover up their sexuality and stop people talking about them). One other oddity too: since when did the 5^th Doctor ever travel alone?!? Even so, it’s gorgeous. Some fans still refer to this story by its working title never shown on screen, ‘Pudsey Cutaway’ (in reference to ‘Mission To The Unknown’ being titled ‘Dalek Cutaway’ in the original notes; Pudsey being the bear with one eye whose the mascot of Children In Need, for whose charity telethon this piece was originally made). Available on the ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ DVD and the series four set and arguably the highlight of both. 

There’s an entire book of short stories dedicated to Martha’s long walk round the world, ‘Martha’s Story’, published alongside the finale (2007) and written by a whole host of old friends like Robert Shearman, Dan Abnett, David Roden, Simon Jowett, Steve Lockley and Paul Lewis. It’s a nice idea that doesn’t quite come off: the wraparound story of Martha travelling the globe doesn’t add more than what was in the original story (we jump from the destruction of Japan with Martha the lone survivor, the only part of the book that’s like what you expect, to Martha suddenly arriving in Britain again the way she does in ‘Last Of the Timelords’, as if this was going to be a bigger book and they ran out of space) and each writer seems to be more interested in what Martha is wearing rather than how she feels, which is just weird (they seem to be fixated on her earrings for some reason). There’s no sense of her growing into independence or her slow realisation that she’s as capable as The Doctor, the way the TV story suggested. Also, the anecdotes Martha chooses don’t sound all that inspiring (then again it’s a difficulty of the finale that The Doctor isn’t the usual moral compass across series three he usually is: the closest we get is saving the world from Judoon in ‘Smith and Jones’). The stories themselves also seem to have borrowed from the dark sadistic feel of the main story, full of depressing tales of dead dogs, starved kids, exhausted parents or tortured soldiers, apart from one where she saves a little girl and returns her to her parents despite the seriousness of her mission (because The Doctor would always help the smaller stories along the way). The best story by far is Shearman’s ‘The Frozen Wastes’, about a trip to the North Pole by weather balloon. The gem though isn’t the main story (which is the usual ‘never give up on your dreams, kids’ narrative) but the backstory, with a great opening of a childhood Martha on her swing enjoying the sensation of being ‘weightlesness’ and in space, before her brother Leo pushes her too hard and she breaks her arm, keeping calm while everyone around her panics (and fascinated by her first trip to a hospital). It’s the only point in the book where Martha actually sounds like Martha, even though we’ve never seen her young. There are other problems: it’s a bit weird that this book is titled ‘Martha’s Story’ rather than ‘Martha Telling The Doctor’s Story’, while the tension the writers try to build up about what might happen if Martha fails is also, of course, null and void if you’ve seen the TV episodes and know how things turn out. A nice idea then, but badly executed.   

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