The End Of Time: Ranking - 54

 

The End Of Time

(Christmas and New Year's Day Special, Dr 10 with Donna and Wilf, 25/12/2009-1/1/2010, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Euros Lyn)

Rank: 54

   'I don't want to go!' 

'Dr, why are you hiding under the Tardis control panel with your bottom sticking out?' 

'I heard four knocks Mr Ood, just like the prophecy - it's all over!' 

'Actually there were five knocks and its just the postman. There's a missive from Queen Elizabeth I wondering where you got to, a parking ticket from New New Earth, a TV licence fine sent by The Wire, a postcard from a Dalek from on top of the Empire State Building, a bottle of water sent from Mars, you're overdue on your library books from the planet 'Library' again and there's an invite from Rose's mum inviting you to tea' 

'Actually on second thoughts that's worse - I might hide under this table a little longer!'  

It’s the end #10 - again - but the moment has been prepared for. A bit too well in fact: we’d already had two perfect ‘ends of an eras’ under Russell T Davies as showrunner, with ‘Parting Of The Ways’ the epic heroic end you’d expect for a series finale that could have been the last Dr Who ever made and a brilliantly satisfying concluding arc with ‘Journey’s End’ that ties a neat bow round the David Tennant era, even with a year of specials to come. This one, though, this is very much Russell T’s goodbye and though it’s not regarded as highly as either by most fans its one of the most layered and intriguing Dr Who scripts of them all, a story that from the title down seems to promise being epic – not least because, at two and a quarter hours it’s the longest Who story since ‘The Two Doctors’ in 1985 (give or take the ‘Utopia’ cliffhanger which leads into the next two parts) and should, by rights, be a three parter. At times this story is every bit as epic as we were promised: the return of The master, a regeneration and the return of Gallifrey back from the dead. However in tone and feel this one instead goes for the more ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ conclusion of the Dr sacrificing himself in a small and noble way. For how do you top perfection and the huge scale of adventures we’d already seen? By admitting to your lead character being less than perfect in a story where The Master finally does the unthinkable by taking over the entire human race and undoes the time war we’ve heard so much about as it does so. As a result this is a story that’s more controversial and less instantly satisfying than either past story, especially when presented as a Christmas/New Year’s day special rather than a series finale (let’s face it, this is the most un-Christmassey story of the lot), yet in its way a lot braver and a heck of a lot more interesting. 

More than most writers Russell’s been using the Doctor as his mouthpiece – all showrunners and script editors have the Doctor talk with their ‘voice’ to one extent or another, it’s a natural part of being creative (if nothing else it’s hard to spend so much time with characters you fundamentally disagree with, for more than an episode or two at a time). The 10th Dr’s funny, sassy, charismatic, confident, enthusiastic, kind and the cleverest person in the room. He might be stick-thin, have a thick thatch of hair and be several hundred years old, but in many ways he’s the Russell T we see in interviews and at conventions, just with certain special powers. There comes a point though, in every writer’s life, if they’re honest and empathetic enough, when they reach a certain level of fame and they have to decide if they believe their own publicity and brilliance or whether they’re an ‘honest’ writer who can see the faults of the characters they’ve come to identify with. It happened with the 3rd 4th and 5th Drs to some extent but here, more than ever, it feels as if the Doctor is being tried by fate for all the things he’s got wrong, for coming to belief his own reputation, for taking too long to pass on the torch to those who are waiting in the wings to take over. Russell, one of the most empathetic and honest writers out there, has been dropping hints across the 10th Dr’s run that maybe he isn’t the perfect dashing hero that we think he is, that his need to get everyone to do the right thing as he envisions it can end up as manipulation and that if enough people do things because you tell them to inevitably at some point you’re going to be wrong and they’re going to get hurt, all because of you. The idea of consequences has been there since ‘Boom Town’ and the postmodern idea of Russell writing to fans has been there since ‘Love and Monsters’, but this story combines the two – very bravely, too, for such a ‘big’ episode with so many people watching. 

 This is the point, at the peak of their powers, when creatives tend to go bigger, go smaller, go mad, go quiet and reflective or go home. Or all five at once. ‘The End Of Time’ starts off big (the time war on screen at last!), turns small (the middle of episode two is the smallest-scale fight we’ve seen this Dr have), goes mad (the 10th Dr comes as close to a nervous breakdown and has a temper tantrum as big as any we’ve seen any Dr have on screen – and we’ve seen a few over the years), goes quiet (that elongated farewell) and only then does Russell T Davies finally go home having faced his ‘true’ self in the mirror, ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ style. Officially to nurse husband Adam, who’d been diagnosed with a brain tumour, in a move planned years in advance, but even so it’s the perfect time to stop, after making the Doctor become the greatest beacon of light in the universe and then putting him in the bravest fight of all as he faces his shadow side, because stopping here is the ‘right’ thing to do, even though Russell is such a fan part of him is desperate to carry on (I for one am not surprised he’s come back to the show – though I am surprised he’s become showrunner again so soon with all the extra work that entails). The 10th Dr we see in the run from ‘Midnight’ through to ‘Waters Of Mars’ has been slowly learning the lesson that he might not be as clever as he assumes he is. He’s still doing what he does out of the kindness of his hearts, but he’s also become cocky, arrogant, convinced that he isn’t just fate’s servant putting the pieces of the puzzle in the right place for world events but its master. And master is the right word, because The Master is who he’s slowly turning into – the darker side who thinks the universe revolves around him and should be subservient to his whim. Where ‘Parting Of The Ways’ is regeneration caused through noble sacrifice (a la ‘Cave Of Androzani’) and ‘Journey’s End’ sums up an era with a celebration of everything that made it special, ‘The End Of Time’ is more like the condemnation of ‘The War Games’ (with the 2nd Dr on trial), the spiritual regeneration of ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ (with the 3rd Dr also facing his faults) and the melancholy of ‘Logopolis’ (where it seems ‘fated’) all at once, the moment when the bill for such a reckless slapdash, dangerous lifestyle comes home to roost. The 10th Dr knows he’s about to die even without being told that by an Ood (Russell’s biggest alien creation during his time writing, making this seem even more like a self-portrait) – he senses it, he talks about openly (very different to the 3rd and 4th Drs this) and he hates it, fighting it tooth and nail at the end with an angry diatribe we’ve not heard since he woke up as Colin Baker and then admits in his dying breath ‘I don’t want to go’. He thinks of this regeneration not as a renewal but as a death, the end of ‘him’ even if it isn’t the end of the Doctor (just as Russell, perhaps, egotistically thinks of this as the end of ‘his’ Doctor even if the series he rebooted lives on). Other Doctors have accepted death in good grace but not this one – he’s angry about it, terrified at the thought of not existing anymore, in a way none of the Doctors have ever been before. 

Many fans hate this scene because they think it betrays all the good things this Dr has done but I love it: this Doctor’s always throwing himself into danger without thinking about it but this time he really is brave, for maybe the first time, because he knows what’s about to happen to him and does it anyway. Ultimately, after dancing in the shadows of being bad, he chooses to be good and do the hard thing even when it hurts him (similarly it sounds like Russell making one last defiance of fate because he doesn’t want to go either – but he knows, from what happened to his husband and the sense of time closing in on him, that he must). It’s the most emotional end we see any of the Doctors have: the 2nd is every bit as angry at the timelords changing his appearance and sending him into exile, the 3rd Doctor is every bit as guilty, the fourth as sad yet somehow calm, the 5th in just as much pain, the 9th every bit as accepting (the 1st, 6th and 7th mostly happen offscreen) but this regeneration is all those things at once. It’s one of the most emotional moments in the series indeed, recorded four times four differnt ways because it was such a key line they wanted to get it right (in the end the 3rd, mixed on was used, rather than cold harsh 2nd or the complete breakdown of the 4th that was considered too strong). The fact that he sacrifices himself for (spoilers) Wilf, a literal ‘Noble’ man himself, is the perfect ending (and a last minute substitution: originally the Dr sacrificed himself for mere technician named Keith soldier, but this way is more satisfying given the long-running strand of ‘coincidences’ around how the Doctor keeps bumping into Wilf; which was really just a means to get the characters to meet each other in practical terms). 

And if the much-criticised finale goes on a bit too long, as a dying Doctor goes back to say goodbye to all the people he’s met from all the old Russell T series and two spin-off shows along the way, well, I still find it one of the most moving sequences of all of Who; this isn’t just a Doctor saying goodbye to all his friends, or even us saying goodbye to an era of the show, it’s a writer who cares so much about all his characters that he wants to make sure that they’re all alright and safe before he goes and someone else gets to take over (similarly I like to think the Dr’s procrastination of the inevitable for a few hundred years at the start of the story is not unlike Russell commissioning the year of specials even though he knew circumstances and fate were forcing him to leave). The very ending, when the Doctor visits a pre-him Rose to give him that last bit of courage and comfort to make that last push, remembering a time when they were all naive and innocent before everything they’ve been through, is particularly well handled: it’s the most perfect circle that no earlier showrunner/script writer was quite brave enough to do, leaving all the Who toys where Russell found them for the next writer to come along and play with, but a last reminder that it was all worth it because look at how many lives were made better simply by having the Doctor in them (although that said it does seem odd that, when the Dr regenerates in ‘The Christmas Invasion’, Rose doesn’t go ‘blimey, was that you I met on the Powell estate a year ago?’ The light must be super bad in the Powell estate over new year’s). It’s the perfect ending a self-indulgent long wave goodbye that shows how much all these characters really mattered to their creator and a chance for a last bow after the curtain has come down before the audience is left to get on with their lives. 

 As for the main story, well, its overshadowed by the ending but it’s still a good one. In many ways it’s a good old-fashioned fight between good and evil, The Master being resurrected in a ceremony that mirrors the one where The Master himself summoned up The Devil in ‘The Daemons’ (a similar story the series struggled to ever top in terms of the size of threat). Only this ceremony goes wrong, thanks to the bravery of his wife who counter-acts the ceremony and leaves The Master unhinged and in a raw and primal state. He even bounces around like Spring Heeled-Jack, a Victorian ‘demon’ who used to terrorise streets. The Doctor, meanwhile, holds his hands out just like Jesus on the cross when telling him to stop without fighting back when they first meet again, only to find he’s no match for the thunderbolts The Master lets fly from his fingers. In a tale all about sacrifice for the greater good, of trying hard not to fight back even when provoked, The Doctor tries hard to stem back the tide. But he’s no match for The Master, for evil’s ability to infect absolutely everybody. 

That’s via an ‘immortality gate’, a ‘Lazarus Experiment’ invention that’s supposed to extend the lifespan of anyone who uses it and it’s been hijacked by a rich family who think The Master is the right person to power it. But he isn’t, instead turning every human being into himself. It’s his greatest triumph and he didn’t even do anything to cause it: he was simply the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s a moment when the Naismiths could just have easily have kidnapped the Doctor whose standing right next to him, but they ignore him because The Doctor’s being doing good things out of sight and unrecognised whereas The Master is still recognisable as the prime minister Harold Saxon from his last appearance in ‘The Sound Of Drums’ (why though? What makes them think, especially given the run we’ve had lately in ‘our’ timeline, that the prime minister has any brains or technical knowhow at all instead of being thick as two titchy planks? I mean just imagine if this was Boris, he’d have spent a year working out how to turn the thing on). Which has made me wonder. When Dr Who came back Russell started off being quite a cutting political commentator. ‘Aliens Of London’ shows how little regard he has for politicians given how easily they are replaced by Slitheen without anyone noticing, while there are lots of digs at the Iraq-Afghanistan Wars along the way. But then he stops. He even received an OBE in 2008, the closest anyone not born into it can become accepted as a member of the ‘establishment’. But this is his last chance to have a platform as big as Who and it’s also the first Dr Who story written in the wake of the credit crunch, the moment when bankers toppled the economy by becoming too greedy and taking too much, making lives difficult for all sorts of ordinary people who had nothing to do with the economy. The story is set right at the point when President Obama (a rare appearance by an actual politician from our ‘real’ world) is about to give his solution to the crisis (‘though it won’t help the likes of you and me’ sigh two homeless men even before The Master shows up) – only he gets hijacked by evil, turned into The Master. And so, notably, are all the media reporting on him, even Russell’s regular anchorwoman Trinity Wells, so often the voice of sanity and reason in this series. Russell can see bad times ahead for everyone (‘were all suffering ‘nightmares’) and a lot of smokescreens from the people who caused the mess we’re in (‘in it together?’ Clearly not says Russell), which might be another reason why this story has such a sombre atmosphere, and his all-but last move is to infect all of us with this darker side of life, this evil which, once revealed, can’t be undone. I wonder, too, if Russell equated the timelords with the bankers: unseeing uncaring posh people in funny clothes looking down on the rest of us with detachment while we get on with our little lives and not doing anything to help solve the problems they caused even though they could have done so much more. So much more! They don’t seem to realise, in their ivory Gallifreys, the one big law that’s run through all of Dr Who in every era – that what affects one of us affects all of us. Everyone of us has to live in this world, even the rich who assume they’re immune and have taken precautions against it, ready to bind The Master up again who themselves think they’re more powerful than fate but are victims just like the rest of us. We were doing quite well during the years when he was in charge of Dr Who and putting good into the world and making the Doctor an example, but now it all seems to be for nothing. It’s the rich that are to blame for giving The Master , evil, the platform he needs to unleash his power over all of us and it might be significant that the first people he attacks are those who are already destitute and clinging on by their fingertips as well as the charity services offering them food from a humble burger van; because in this new climate there isn’t room for charity any longer (this story was also the first one to have its budget slashed because of the economic climate, so much so that a ot of this story was nearly left un-filmed; at one point Russell was offering to take a cut in salary to get scenes on screen. Series five will be the worst hit though). 

 Not that I’m blaming him or anything, or even giving him a messiah complex of his own, but it does feel as if Russell is writing out his guilt. Like the Doctor he’s been procrastinating this past year, working on peripheral fluffier pieces like Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures, animated special ‘Dreamland’, the Who Easter special ‘Planet Of The Dead’ and a sketch for John Barrowman’s ‘Tonight’s The Night’ instead of telling the major stories he ‘should’ be writing. With the Doctor around to keep the light in the world it was bouncing along ok after a difficult post 9/11 fall, but now he’s taken his eye off the ball it’s all turned to chaos and it feels as if evil is winning. The story starts with the Doctor similarly refusing the call to arms by Ood Sigma (voiced, funnily enough, by Brian Cox (no not the science one), who played Who creator Sydney Newman in the Who drama ‘An Adventure In Space and Time’ for added ‘disappointed headmaster’ vibes when you watch it back now, though nobody would have known this at the time), delaying by having unseen adventures (returned to in the comics and Biog Finish audios as well as the 10th Doctor’s storyline in ‘The Day Of The Doctor’). Only this means he’s ‘too late’ to stop The Master coming back. I’m not quite sure how that works given that the Doctor has a time machine (and a line about how the Doctor can’t go through his own timelines because of a ‘causal nexus’ is clearly nonsense, given how many stories he does it in) but it fits the themes of earlier stories like ‘Midnight’ and ‘The Waters Of Mars’: Russell’s gone on too long, fought against the fate that’s pulling him away from this series to nurse his poorly husband and taken his eye off the dangers that are out there, doing his job by fighting them off. A lot of ‘The End Of Time’ feels like showrunner and Doctor both making amends in a story that demands a lot from both of them. The idea of fate and destiny is a big one in this story too: The Doctor comments on how easily Wilf and his ‘Silver Cloak’ track him down when people usually can’t (forget LINDA, The Abzorbaloff should have hired Minnie!) and how his destiny seems tied into the person he keeps bumping into, while this story makes sense of all the premonitions people have been having about him in previous stories. The Doctor and showrunner both were always destined to end up here – and while they might delay and shilly-shally, trying to control their own destiny, this moment was always waiting for them (not least because Russell had the final scene half-ready from the moment the 10th Doctor had been cast). 

 A lot of Russell T stories are about the motivations of the baddies in them and whether they could have been stopped, with either a kind word or an explanation or being brought up right. As with so many Russell stories this one is all about greed, of wanting more (just look at the way a hungry Master wants to stuff his face with every food going). He’s the banker’s thought processes personified, ready to take more even if it means other people go without. In that sense this story is a mirror of where we near-began in ‘The End Of The World’ (even the two titles are similar): humanity used as collateral damage by egotistical beings like Cassandra who want to exploit it for themselves and live that bit longer, because time is the one great leveller that kills rich and poor alike (only in an extra dimension, with time beyond the end of just one planet). The Naismiths have taken over the immortality gate, an unexplained alien device discovered by Torchwood at the foot of Mount Snowden (and thus making Who’s new home and Russell’s childhood home the single most important place in the universe for a few precious minutes longer). They want to use it to live forever, not to benefit the world in general just their daughter. Time is a form of power you see and having that over everyone else makes them all powerful. But everything and everyone has its time and place, including Russell, including the 10th Doctor, who end this story by giving up his life because it’s ‘right’, in contrast to The Master who doesn’t care about rightness if he can live longer. It’s a neat mirror to past Who stories like ‘The Five Doctors’ and the quest for Rassilon’s tomb about the dangers of immortality. For the first time in a long time Russell casts his eye over the rich and powerful, sees how they are oblivious to the pain they cause to ordinary people, and lambasts them, OBE or not. 

 Talking of Rassilon, he’s back! After the first episode where, weirdly, he’s the narrator (How? Why/ Who is he even speaking to? As with ‘Parting Of The Ways’ it’s the story’s weakest moment and makes no sense given that its only the fourth Who story out of 328 being narrated by anyone, ‘The Deadly Assassin ‘ and ‘The TV Movie’ being the others). This is the first time we’ve seen any sign of Gallifrey since ‘The Ultimate Foe’ twenty-four years earlier and it’s a sight we never thought we’d get to see after all those years where the time war was in flashback. It turns out that the drumbeats The Master’s been hearing in his head (since ‘The Sound Of Drums’? Or possibly his whole life?) was all part of Rassilon’s plan to bring his home planet back into existence by leaving a ‘clue’ (which is a bit odd, really, if you watch this back to back with ‘The Five Doctors’. I mean, did he not understand his own trap?) It really does feel as if Russell is hitting the re-set button by putting the series back how he found it in 2005 and his successors Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall have both struggled to know what to do with a fully functioning Gallifrey full of all-powerful timelords: Moffat uses it for 50th anniversary story ‘The Day Of the Doctor’, making it look as if it’s going to be a regular part of the series, but then ignores it aside from the ‘Heaven Sent’ finale of series eight. Chibnall, too, makes it the location of ‘The Timeless Child’ arc, makes it a big reveal that Gallifrey has been found again, then fluffs what happens next. It seems hard to believe it now after so many Moffat and Chibnall episodes have re-written it but our first glimpse of the time war was really exciting and what in 2009 we wanted to see on screen more than anything else. Far from being an anti-climax, too, re-writing The Master before our eyes from a megalomaniac bully with controlling issues to a victim, used by Rassilon as one last way to pull Gallifrey out of time, makes perfect sense of a villain whose motivations have always been a big question mark. The Doctor’s speech, about how his arch nemesis could be tone cold brilliant if he just saw the universe instead of trying to conquer it, repeating a similar speech from ‘Colony In Space’ is lovely and fills in a lot about their relationship that was oddly absent from ‘The Sound Of Drums’. This all changes everything in how we see this character and is the biggest shift since Anthony Ainley started taking over bodies in ‘The Keeper Of Traken’: in this story The Master is no longer a pro-active power-hungry being intent on ruling other people but a victim like the rest of us, reacting to a destiny he can’t change. 

We finally get an explanation for the relentless drumming The Master hears in his head (which we assumed was simply a sign of madness during ‘The Sound Of Drums’ but turns out to be Rassilon’s lure to get him to this particular time and space to bring Gallifrey back). We hear a lot, too, about the beginnings of The Master and The Doctor and the revelation, fittingly for the rest of this episode, that The Master’s family home was quite posh (we don’t know about The Doctor’s yet, but Moffat had him living in a barn in his stories, as if a nod of the hat that he picked up on the ‘Jesus’ aspect of this tale).No wonder he went so odd staring into the schism of time if it was laced with Rassilon’s con trick. The rest of The Master’s story arc will be about his redemption from here, at least when Moffat writes for him as Missy (Chibnall goes the other way and makes the Sacha version dark and angry again; or is this an earlier regeneration?) The threat in this story is colossal: The Master, having erased all humans, looks as if he’s going to take away everything the Doctor has ever fought for his whole lives, just as the wilderness years seemed to be about to take away everything Dr Who ever achieved and everything Russell’s written. But of course it’s an end of an era, not the end of the show (despite this script being written against a backdrop of the BBC not being at all sure the series would be a success without Davies and Tennant and only half-committing to a fifth series). 

 We then think we know how the story’s going to progress from here: The Master does something truly diabolical the way he always does and that drumming is the hint we’ve been getting across the specials about how death will ‘knock four times’. He even bangs it on a steel drum when trying to get The Doctor’s attention. Only the story doesn’t go there: in true Russell T style we go from the epic to the banal but in a way that’s as if the writer is sending his own writing trademarks up for a fanbase who’ll get the joke, with the usual sort of things still happening but slightly out of kilter. The Doctor is interrupted by a bunch of people who’ve been tracking him down, only it’s not LINDA or UNIT or Torchwood but Wilf and his OAP friends. The 10th Dr often falls in love with somebody during the course of his adventures, but here its glamorous granny June Whitfield (another Tony Hancock alumni, the comedian Terry nation should have been writing for instead of imagining Daleks back in 1963), in a glorious cameo, who cheekily flirts and pinches his bottom while the Doctor looks horrified (partly because of her age you suspect – even though she’s a lot closer to his real age than Rose ever was, although even here – in a comedy moment – it fits this story’s themes of control and possession, a victim of what he usually does to other people). And The Master is just a means for Rassilon to make a comeback, the big and scary being giving humanity nightmares a pussycat compared to the roar of a lion who founded the Doctor’s home planet. And then the Doctor is put in an impossible decision, this man of good with nothing to defend humanity with except the pistol Wilf was fated to hand him, left wondering which baddy to shoot: the victim who caused all the misery or the big bad whose behind it all. He has respect for Rassilon, though, as an elder (while The master is a contemporary near enough). A lot of Dr Who stories are about whether there can ever be a justification of fighting back and for a moment you think the Doctor’s going to do it, cocking the gun and pointing it at first one then the other (although I’m amazed he doesn’t break Wilf’s gun, given its been sitting in a drawer since the latter’s national service days in the 1950s and the Doctor keeps cocking the trigger over and over – it’s the sort of scene writers learnt never to give Matt Smith, given his reputation for busting props!) It’s a repeat of perhaps the most famous Who scene of all, the one in ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ when the Doctor isn’t sure if he has the right to blow up The Daleks, still suffering as he is from the trauma of seeing the time war up close. The solution is very Doctory even though it puts himself at such risk himself and he thinks for one glorious moment he’s got away with it and defied fate and destiny and prophecy and finally defeated evil once more. Until that four-beat knock, which wasn’t from The Master at all and leaves him to make the most agonised regeneration we ever see him make, angry and defiant and worried and helpless and painful, as he asks his creator and destiny why he’s been forsaken, before finally submitting to save ‘us’, as represented by (spoilers) Wilf. It’s a powerful and fitting end, even without the sudden new found ability to stave off a regeneration until all goodbyes have been said. 

 A strong if moody script is performed well by a strong cast. John Simm gets a lot more to do in this story and is a lot better as this demented Master than he was as the psychopath in ‘Sound Of Drums’, that smug grin twisted a bit further into a rictus ‘Joker’ type smile. He was hugely patient too, shaking his head from side to side over and over thirty times (a process sped up in production) which gave the actor neckache (they’re all him, too, not CGI, though the ‘Masters’ that we look ‘down’ on in what looks like the Powell estate quadrangle are really extras wearing John Simm masks and it’s obvious, too, when you know. Oops sorry, shouldn’t have given that away then really…) The cliffhanger when The Master takes over every single person on Earth (bar Donna) is, well, a Masterpiece of CGI with hundreds of John Simms gurning for the cameras, like all those other great Russell T cliffhangers (those with certain blood groups preparing to jump to their death when the Sycorax arrive, The Master’s destruction in ‘Last Of The Timelords’), but still inventively different. After all, for those precious few minutes, he really is the ‘winner’ he’s always dreamed of being: usually the Doctor stops his diabolical schemes just in the nick of time but here he actually succeeds in taking over the entire Human race (and turning them it to the ‘Master Race’, in a pun that’s either one of the series’ best or worst depending how you look at it). Donna’s arc is well handled, picking up where her memories were wiped so cruelly in ‘Journey’s End’ with multiple Masters reminding her of her time with the Doctor, without undoing her perfect character arc. Timothy Dalton makes good use of his all-too-brief time as Rassilon, giving the character lots of earthy gravitas although like many a Moffat and Chibnall baddy to come he never actually does much except stand around chatting (my favourite bit of trivia from this series: as a big Who fan Dalton has the series theme tune as his phone ringtone; Bond fan David Tennant happened to have the Bond theme as his, causing much hilarity when they found out). June Whitfield makes the most of her only real scene, while the Vinvocci pair are rather wasted as the comedy relief, here because it was traditional to need a ‘monster’ and Russell had always wanted to bring the Zocci from ‘Voyage Of The damned’ back (Sinead Keenan taking time off from Who writer Tony Whithouse’s under-rated series ‘Being Human’; her on-screen werewolf husband Russell Tovey is the one Captain Jack is chatting up at the bar at the end). 

 Really, though, this is David Tennant’s show and he’s utterly brilliant, note-perfect in the flashes we see of his old dashing self and the newer, sadder, darker, more egotistical Dr Russell has re-written him to be here. He’s no longer a superhero in all but name but a man who knows he’s about to lose with all of his hearts and who comes closer to giving up than we’ve seen since the 6th Dr abandoned adventuring and went fishing, but somehow he digs deep anyway and does the right thing, even when it visibly hurts (my favourite scene of the whole story is the simple one where, on his last legs, the Dr crashes through a ceiling to stop The Master and comes up, scarred and wincing, a broken man running on fumes and desperation whose so used to being in control so far out of his comfort zone it’s in another universe, but still fighting because he knows what’s at stake if he doesn’t; it’s very like the best scene in ‘Seeds Of Doom’ and regeneration stories ‘Spiders’ and ‘Androzani’ but unusual for most other Dr Who stories that don’t like showing pain as a rule, especially in timelords). Catherine Tate’s cameo, along with her mum and fiancé are strong too and well integrated into the plot; at the time we really didn’t think we’d ever get to see Donna again after the way she was written out the series but somehow Russell manages it without undoing the perfect ending he gave her in ‘Journey’s End’. 

Really even more so, though, this is Bernard Cribbins’ show and he hits his peak here, the emotion we’ve seen peeking through his previous stories writ large as he stands at the Dr’s side, a fellow old soldier whose so very tired of war but willing to do what he can to protect the people he loves. The two are more alike than many realise in fact, especially if you take this Doctor as having lived 10/11ths of all the lives he expects to have (before some fiddly widdly business in ‘Time Of The Doctor’ – one of the reasons, perhaps, why this particular regeneration is so reluctant to go). Russell ‘borrowed’ Wilf’s own back story for the script and his national service in Palestine where he walked through a ‘blizzard’ (changed to a ‘blizzard of bullets here), with perhaps the best scene in the story as Wilf feels both pride and guilt at being a soldier who never had to shoot at anyone (true story) and his convincing the Doctor to take his gun anyway (he’s in great contrast to The Master, who apparently ran away from the time war but wants everyone to think he’s a fighter). We’ve said a few times that Dr Who is a baby boomer show, made by the end of the ‘war’ generation still trying to come to terms with whether the suffering was justified given that it was against such an evil foe as Hitler. This is the last time Who properly sits down and has that conversation with one of the generation who served in it and it’s very moving, especially as this show, a hippie child of the 60s, effectively sacrifices its life to save ‘them’ - after all those Hartnell stories, especially, where the ‘parents’ watching this inter-generational family show, feared the worst about what their children might do to their way of life when they took control. Who heals that generational trauma with love – not in a schmaltzy way, not even in a passive accepting way, but in gratitude for the sacrifices made. It’s great to have Wilf as a stand-in companion for one story and at last he gets a trip in the Tardis (written in after Bernard Cribbins said in interviews for series four how sad he was that he never got a chance to; his comment at the aw-inspiring interior ‘a bit dirty innit?’ and Tennant’s crestfallen face is still the best moment). 

I’m less sure about the dogfight though, which gives Wilf one ‘last’ chance to serve that’s a bit clumsily obvious after so much hinting and made a bit silly, going on a bit too long. It’s a bit yee-ha for these two largely peaceful character and, far from giving an old soldier closure that he never got to fight in combat when it mattered, it feels more like a slap in the face to the Doctor’s premise that there are always other alternatives to fighting. There are lots of little ‘problem’ scenes like that in this story actually, uncharacteristic for a writer who usually has more finesse than this and the reason, I suspect, why ‘The End Of Time’ has never had quite the same love as other Davies era finales (even though its better made than most if not all of them). The opening scene where Wilf sees The Tardis in stained glass in a church is wholly unnecessary. The scene with the Ood is, well, odd: the Doctor gets a warning about a different planet from the future that’s never properly connected to this one at all and we’ve never seen the Ood have such powers of premonitions before. Ood Sigma is presented to us, as has been hinted all series, as a figure akin to ‘The watcher’ from ‘Logopolis’ who has all the answers, but he turns out to be as clueless as everyone else, his role one of warning and of singing the Doctor ‘to sleep’ (the names, so close to the ‘Theta Sigma’ nickname the Doctor had at school according to ‘The Armageddon Factor’, turns out to be another of this story’s red herrings, a coincidence that really is a coincidence rather than a plot point). The Doctor and The Master keep having conversations, then being pulled apart from each other, then finding each other and starting again as if to go ‘and another thing…’ which is an odder way of doing things than keeping them apart and giving them one long talk. Why is The Master so keen to lure The Doctor anyway? Last time he was on Earth he went un-noticed for a year and had time to put so many plans in place he very nearly ‘won’ (he’s clearly insane in this story, but even so - that’s never stopped him trying to throw the Doctor off the scent until he’s ready before). There’s a whackingly obvious bit of exposition as the Doctor discusses the events of ‘Sounds Of The drums’ to an Ood who couldn’t care less, just so we at home can be brought up to speed with what’s been going on (though good luck trying to unravel that complex plot from these few lines if you hadn’t seen the series three finale). It’s all very clever writing a script about fate and destiny pulling people together, but it robs Russell of one of the great strengths of his writing (which his successors struggle so much with), the fluidity where scenes grow from one to another organically. A lot of this story feels like scenes forced to snap together without any linking moments: it doesn’t matter so much when the bigger story is so good it distracts you, but up close you can see all the odd bits of Lego that don’t belong together. 

 The biggest and most obvious problem is that the whole teasing cliffhanger of ‘wow, I can’t believe they’ve actually brought Gallifrey back!’ amounts to a few minutes of Timothy Dalton intoning deeply and Claire Bloom as the Dr’s mother/wife/friend/great aunt/grand-daughter Susan/Romana/random stranger/fangirl covering her eyes dramatically before being banished all over again before they’ve had much of a chance to be in the plot at all. The glimpses of the planet we get look gorgeous, every bit what fans had dreamed of seeing after the rogue model shot and dodgy special effects of stories past done with a proper budget and by effects regulars The Mill for the first time. But that’s all we get; a glimpse. Instead we get a story set very much on Earth and mostly on wasteland and stylistically that’s boring. Even the Vinvocci ship is one of the most bland and forgettable of the Davies run with no distinguishing features except turret guns. I’d hate to say that this story needs longer when the mid-regeneration epilogue alone runs for nearly twenty minutes, but if we’d had a middle episode just about Gallifrey with the Doctor running around his old stomping ground while Rassilon and The Master club together to give him an even harder time, it would have made a brilliant story even better. A bigger casualty though is what happens to The Master: before Rassilon gets involved he’s totally and utterly winning, more of a threat than he’s been since the early Delgado days now he’s extra unhinged, and then he’s simply banished into a swirling cloud and not seen again until Peter Capaldi’s day (when he’s become Missy). He sort of gives his life for the Doctor (the original plan for his demise and possibly the 3rd Doctor’s too back in 1974, had Roger Delgado not died before a final showdown could be written), but they don’t really dwell on this, the Doctor never talks about it, The Master never says what he’s up to (it could just be a mad impulse or a con trick that goes wrong) and a moment that should be one of the most powerful in the series just sort of happens. It’s a waste of both scene and character: I can see why Rassilon was written in given his importance in timelord folklore and the fact a straightforward match between the Dr and Master would be too much like the end of series 3 (when we knew The Master could be defeated) and Dalton is a lot more convincing as the founding father of the most important race in the universe than he ever was as James Bond, but he still doesn’t do anything The Master doesn’t do better. After so long being teased with it we really needed to see the time war properly too. Our long-awaited first sight of Gallifrey since ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ in 1986 amounts to...some people in funny hats round a table. Even with the budget of season 6 in 1969 they did a pretty good job of putting the most powerful planet in existence on screen – this is a real let down (especially as they went to all the effort of re-creating the Gallifreyan corridors of ‘The War Games’, but in colour, tantalisingly leading off just out of sight). Russell spent so long crafting the build up to the second part of making sure that we tune in for part two on New Year’s Day’ to see how these disparate parts belong together, that he ends up creating expectation he just can’t live up to. The second part only really gets going in the last half and before then there’s a lot of filler material in the spaceship trying to get back down to Earth and posh people talking that could easily have been cut. The biggest surprise is how, even in a story this long, there isn’t much time for the sort of classy character dialogue we’re used to from Russell, with so many scenes dealing with plot. 

 That’s still not much to go ‘wrong’, though, for a story this big and with stakes so high. ‘The End Of Time’ bravely gives us almost the exact opposite of the big heroic finale we were expecting from the title on down. And yet it wasn’t the fun celebration people were expecting either but more like a funeral (especially given the BBC Christmas idents that looked so playful with reindeer next to the Tardis, snorting (the reindeer, not the Tardis. Although given ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ that’s maybe not so unlikely). Instead we get pain, humiliation, destruction, war, and evil and a lot of fans don’t like it because of that. I do though like ‘Logopolis’ it’s not how this Doctor expected to go but in many ways it’s what he deserves, having spent a regeneration defeating absolutely everything in his power, defeated by a fate outside it. Other don’t like for this story because of how relentlessly grim it all is and they have a point: there are funny scenes, such as the ‘worst rescue. Ever!’ one or multiple Masters talking to themselves, but they’re sort of tiny tension releases between the bigger scenes – a quick release as we come up for air before drowning in darkness all over again. Even ‘Spiders’ ‘Logopolis’ and ‘Androzani’, were more fun than this, taking time out for hovercraft chases or block mathematics or the Doctor being sarcastic to his executioner. The whole is oddly unpalatable and severe for Christmas Day (though the ending, on new year’s eve 2005 just before the series starts and Rose meets the Doctor, is perfect for a new year in ‘our’ world too, full of new beginnings and a second chances). Fans don’t like the way the Doctor refuses to die for Wilf either, seeing him as selfish and mean (but that’s the whole point: will this Doctor do the right thing after learning how much he’s got wrong trying to defy fate and destiny? We really need to believe he’ll refuse and carry on living: and indeed does in a whole sprawling spin-off series ‘The Timelord Victorious’ where he’s almost a villain). Far more don’t like ‘The End Of Time’ for the elongated ending that follows on from a rather rushed conclusion to the main plot. I can see that: we really didn’t need ‘Verity Newman’, named for Dr Who’s founding mother and father, and the doppelganger grand-daughter of the Dr’s sweetheart in ‘Human Nature’ – Russell was asked to take it out the final edit but sneaked it back in – it makes the ending that little bit too long and should have been kept as a DVD extra. Pairing Mickey and Martha, just so we can get a final ‘Smith and Jones’ pun as Martha finally finds her partner in crime after so long pining for the Doctor (see, umm, ‘Smith and Jones’) also feels so wrong: Martha’s fiancé Tom Mulligan seems a far more natural fit for her personality and Mickey, too, deserves more than just to be another person’s cast-offs after so long waiting for Rose (while there’s no reason given for how he came back to ‘our’ world). The rest though is sweet: the in-joke at the expense of ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ (Russell was always on at the junior cast to look left and right when crossing the road as good role models, which they never did because they new the roads were closed off for filming and there was no traffic) is fun, Donna gets her happy ending with the wedding she was robbed of when we first saw her in ‘The Runaway Bride’ plus a lottery win to boot, a lonely captain Jack, disgraced following events in Torchwoodf’s ‘Children Of Earth’ given a final chance with the Doctor setting him up on a date with Alonso from ‘The Voyage Of The Damned’ in a scene just like the famous one in Star Wars (or ‘Dragonfire’) crammed full with all the CGI monsters Russell’s created one last time (Slitheen, Hath, Adipose, Judoon, Sycorax, with Jimmy Vee from the first ever shot of the comeback series back one last time and the Murray Gold song from ‘Daleks In Manhattan’ playing; in an in-joke Russell said in one of his first interviews about the new-look series that he knew his time would be over if he started writing about Zog aliens from the planet Zog as it wouldn’t connect with people’s real lives – so this bar, on practically the last scene he ever wrote, is called the Zog bar) and of course there’s happy innocent carefree Rose before the weight of those adventures of a lifetime took their toll. What’s rather lovely is that The Sarah Jane Adventures story ‘The Death Of the Doctor’ hints that the Doctor had time to go back and do even more, visiting every single companion he ever had given what Jo says (though goodness knows how he tracked some of them down). It’s notable how many people moved their schedules round to be in this despite not having been on the show in there years some of them (only Eccleston is missing from the main players, not that they’d have been able to squeeze him in plot-wise anyway – for all the reports we hear about problems on set in series one it’s a sign that, at least by the end four years later, everyone seemed to love their time on the show). And then, finally, The Ood sing the Doctor to sleep with his own ‘theme’ from Murray Gold, while a choir of Ood chant ‘Vale Decem’ (‘Farewell Ten’ in Latin). Russell knows that in all likelihood future showrunners will never show any of his creations again so he gives us one last look at what his era meant. Yes its self-indulgent but Russell earned it; I find it all really moving I have to say, a wave goodbye to the old days before the new come along, a last thankyou from creator to fans and creations alike, before shuffling off to become someone else and do other things. 

 I really like the rest of this story too. It’s the brave last will and testament Russell T didn’t need to give us, the extra bit of learning that comes from staring into the mirror and facing your shadow side, the brave conscience that considers what this series does to both its characters and its creators, the encore that follows a barnstorming mega-stage set with fireworks that everyone was already perfectly happy with and then sends them home with deeper more inward thoughts to mull over on the way home and for the rest of their lives. It’s the epic that’s also quite tiny, the story that at long last is about Gallifrey that moves that aside to be about the Doctor instead, the big heroic dashing gesture that’s undercut by David Tennant’s ranting and scowling at the injustice of having to die, the one last great love song to the muse that’s kept Russell going across five very intense years that laughs at the preposterousness of it all. It’s the end of a time that may never be equalled in terms of love for this show, from both the people making it and the people watching (its estimated that David Tenant was on TV or radio 75 times over the week from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day, what with repeats, Confidentials, Commentaries, ‘Dreamland’, Sarah Jane Adventures story ‘The Wedding Of River Song’, two radio shows of his own, six appearances on other people’s radio shows, guest appearances on ‘Never Mind The Buzzcocks’ ‘Alan Carr’s Chatty Man’ and ‘QI’ and a ‘cpountdown’ of ‘TV’s Greatest Moments Of The Year’, and that’s not counting the fact that the Doctor was the face of that year’s BBC Christmas with an ident where he meets a herd of reindeer and uses the Tardis as a sleigh. A lot of friends who didn’t like Dr Who told me they were sick of the sight of him. Even I was having a bit of a breakdown trying to catch everything. The irony: the Doctor might not have wanted to go, but for a week it felt as if he never would). This was automatically a big deal just by being the last one. They could have turned in a generic adventure story and everyone would have been happy, probably even happier. But it wouldn’t have been as worthy for an era that was more adventurous and full of risks than it’s ever given credit for. It really didn’t need to be this good and certainly didn’t need to be this brave – and yet it was. Flawed it may be, but that was the whole point: most of all ‘End Of Time’ is the story that confesses the bravest thing Russell T and David Tennant as his mouthpiece could possibly say: the Doctor is not invincible, he doesn’t always do the right thing and neither is actually as great as their reputation wants us to think. Which of course only makes them both all the greater for having the bravery to admit that when fans would have been happier still with a simpler, more dashing work of heroism like we’d had before. This is a special story indeed that brings the curtain down on an era of Who never to be repeated, an end of a time that will never come again. 

 There’s a story that, at the read through, Steven Moffat and Matt Smith were waiting patiently for their scene at the end. ‘Follow that!’ laughed Bernard Cribbins to them good naturedly and they gave it a good go (especially in next story ‘The Eleventh Hour’, which sensibly throws all the sunshine in the universe at us after so much angst). The truth is, though, that they couldn’t, or at least not as consistently as Russell had. Even so, when the 11th Doctor arrives mid-crash and starts riffing on a whole new other level, it doesn’t feel like the intrusion it should so much as a new beginning, a chance to tell these tales all over again. Far from being the end of time, it’s a renewal, a regeneration, Dr Who no longer the butt of all the jokes the way it was at the start of 2005 but a show that was loved and respected like few others. That’s Russell’s legacy. We can afford him a long goodbye. 

 POSITIVES + There’s one last great bit of RTD mis-direction. For almost a year now we’ve had hints about how the Doctor’s death will be when ‘he knocks four times’. Fan speculation about this was heavy and one or two even guessed that it had something to do with the ‘sound of the drums’ in The Master’s head. Even the Dr seems to assume that’s how he’s going to die and the look of triumph on his face as he thinks he’s survived unscathed after all is priceless. Then its (spoilers) Wilf – lovely, heroic, loyal Wilf – who knocks four times, having shut himself (subtly, on the edge of screen) into the immortality gate that only has one way out. That’s truly brilliant, heartbreaking writing, set up so far in advance we’ve forgotten all about it, as Wilf pleads with the Dr not to die in order to save him but the Dr does anyway, because it’s the right thing to do, finding humility (eventually) even at the scene of his greatest triumph. Even the smartest of us fans didn’t see that coming. 

 NEGATIVES - Why is Claire Bloom there? While I’m glad that someone in Gallifrey is still on the Doctor’s side it would be nice to know who it is (Russell has said in scripts he thinks it’s the Doctor’s mum, but wanted it to be ambiguous)– and why Rassilon still has them round at all when they clearly disagree with him (and he has quite a temper; he’s actually much more like Omega of stories past than Rassilon here). And who come she has the power of televisions in a specific house Wilf will see on a planet she’s never visited (unless she’s the source of the Doctor’s being ‘half-human’?) Why does she insist the Doctor ;know nothing’ when realising that Gallifrey’s returned a bit quicker would have helped him out a lot? Is she that scared? If so then why risk her life to send such cryptic messages to someone so down to Earth who just doesn’t think like that? It seems an unnecessary mystery that’s never referred to again or properly solved and she’s something of a red herring in the plot, which seems as if its determined to be ‘about’ her and the message she passes on to Wilf about being armed (whereas she could have just appeared to the Doctor and told him where to shoot his sonic for all the difference it would make to the plot), but then just has her ‘hint’ at something we don’t understand but the Doctor does without really noticing which has him save the day. Again. This sort of thing is Russell’s worst habit as a writer, the big explanation that comes out of nowhere at the last minute that ignores a mystery he built up and it’s a shame to see him use it again in story that otherwise is so honest about the way he works. 

BEST QUOTE: ‘Even if I change it still feels like dying. Everything I am dies. Some new man goes sauntering away... and I'm dead’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The Doctor starts the story by telling Ood Sigma about his ‘gap year’ having fun in four different locations with references to unseen stories that Russell just knew writers were going to have fun with in different media. One of these – marrying Queen Elizabeth I – ends up on screen three years later in Steven Moffat’s 50th anniversary story ‘Day Of the Doctor’.

 Other writers picked up on the rest: ‘Out Of Time’ (2020) is a Big Finish story in the ‘Out Of Time’ range where the 10th Doctor saw the Phosphorous Carousel of the Great Magellan Gestalt and discovers that its filled with Daleks. It’s actually quite a sad story, more in keeping with the sombre mood of ‘Waters Of Mars’ than the party mood with which the Doctor recounts it in ‘The End Of Time’, as he visits a place known as ‘The Cathedral Of Contemplation’ to think over how time is running short. While he’s there the 4th Doctor pops in for a visit too and acts in a similar mentor role to ‘The Caretaker’ in ‘Day Of The Doctor’, helping him come to terms with the regeneration prophecy even though for some odd reason the 10th Doctor never actually admits who he is. Hearing Tennant and Tom Baker together is a real treat and while the main story isn’t up to much the overall tone and its importance in the lives of both Doctors makes this a must-hear. 

 ‘The Good Companion’, meanwhile, is a 10th Doctor comic strip from 2017 in which the 10th Doctor ‘saves a planet from the red carnivorous maw’. This one’s a bit more ordinary and just seems like every other Who story going, with a space station full of ‘imposters’ and a ‘mysterious artefact’ that holds a prophecy about Earth. The most interesting aspect in context is the presence of an Ood who oversees the action and a reference to how the Doctor’s actions in this story have relaxed ‘time lock’ holding the time war in place. 

 This idea of a timelock is picked up in ‘The Shattered Hourglass’ (2020) part of Big Finish’s ‘Short Trips’ series with Neve McIntosh (Madame Vastra) reading a story about how the 10th Doctor came to name a galaxy ‘Alison’. It’s a complicated timey wimey tale that feels more like an 11th Doctor story, with Alison being the name of an aide who steps in when her superiors are ignoring the pressure on the lock and worried about what might break through. Luckily the first person to breach the barrier is the 10th Doctor himself here he confronts an ‘eater of planets’ named ‘The Hourglass’ who thinks he’d make a tasty snack. The Doctor senses its not all bad though and has Alison hold off killing it – when it changes its mind and someone suggests naming the restored galaxy after him in honour he suggests they name it after the aide instead. 

 Next, it has nothing to do with ‘The End Of Time’ as such but the day before part one went out on Christmas Eve a three minute story starring John Barrowman, making his first return to Who proper as Captain Jack in two years, in an ‘adventure advent calendar’ exclusive features on the BBC’s Dr Who website. Titled ‘A Ghost Story For Christmas’ it’s a sort of voiceover with pictures and features Jack recounting a tale of how a woman named Julia Hardwicke was sent back in time in a graveyard in much the same way Amy will in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’. More a reminder of everything the Angels can do than a true story it’s atmospheric but a bit pointless and the blurry photos of gravestones don’t really add much but it does feature Jack saying the immortal words ‘don’t blink’ and ends with a creepy warning that if we see a statue that appears to be crying in a graveyard one day ‘it might be that it’s crying for you!’ Great, thanks for that. I haven’t slept in a week. 

 Finally, what was the last bit of Dr Who that Russell T Davies wrote for the next decade (until the 2020 Dr Who Lockdowns?) The five minute sketch on John Barrowman’s show ‘Tonight’s The Night’ where members of the public were invited to make up a monster and ‘audition’. Russell found this one of the hardest bits of writing he ever did on the series unable to go back to the flippant tone needed for a competition won by Tim Ingham who was dressed as a monster named ‘Sao Til’ wearing his girlfriend’s blue tights on his head, plus her gel breast enhancers and a wine cooler having auditioned (like all the contestants) by reciting lyrics from Gloria Gaynor’s disco hit ‘I Will Survive’. In the end he got round it and just made deadline by writing a postmodern sketch in which it turns out that John Barrowman is just having fun illegally on the Tardis set with a friend pretending to be the Doctor whose really an alien, caught in the act by David Tennant who tells them both off (‘God help me, I couldn’t make it canon!’ Russell wrote in his Dr Who Magazine editorial). Russell’s last words as scripted as David walks away ‘My Tardis’ (though John Barrowman improvises a few ‘I’ll get you’ and ‘bang bangs’ for good measure). What a fitting place to end despite the oddness: it was Russell’s Tardis indeed for five glorious years. Those weren’t quite daid Tennant’s final words, though, as his very final role was In one of the best ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ episodes ‘The Death Of the Doctor’ (in which his final words as filmed were very Mary Poppinsy ‘spit spot!’ to Luke, Clyde and Rani – no, not that Rani, a human one). 

 Previous ‘The Waters Of Mars’ next ‘The Eleventh Hour’

Planet Of The Spiders: Ranking - 55

 

Planet Of The Spiders

(Season 11, Dr 3 with Sarah Jane and UNIT, 4/5/1974-8/6/1974, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writers: Robert Sloman and Barry Letts, director: Barry Letts)

Rank: 55

   'Sarah Jane Smith 

That Earthly Miss 

Was drinking her UNIT grog 

When down came a great spider 

Who was several feet tall and even wider 

And asked if she fancied a snog 

Then the Dr (her parent foster) 

Who thought he had lost her 

Set off to rescue her again 

He fell down to the floor 

Because he couldn't take anymore 

And woke up a new man (again!)'

It's the end #3 - and the moment has not only been prepared for, it's an inevitable consequence of everything that came before. Describing the concept of regeneration to non-fans is difficult at best: after all, what other programme can change its leading man or woman and continue with a whole new character that’s the same yet different? What’s more every regeneration hits differently. Some regenerations feel like a death (1>2, 10>11, 11>12, 12>13), some like a punishment (2>3, 8>War), some are moments of pure and noble sacrifice (4>5, 5>6, 9>10) and, erm, some are just a few fuzzy effects at the start of a scene because they’d just sacked the leading man without filming something in advance (6>7). While there are even better regeneration stories around than ‘Planet Of The Spiders’, in terms of a regeneration its my favourite. This one really isn’t a death so much as a regeneration in the dictionary sense of the word (and its worth remembering that this is the first DW story that actually uses the word – the first is called a ‘renewal’ and the second doesn’t have a name), a transformation as the Doctor faces not his biggest baddest enemy but his deepest darkest fears in a plot that’s propelled by his weaknesses and brought on by nobody more than himself. For starters its the only time to date when the Dr’s been helped on his way by a spiritual guru, given a final ‘push’ by Cho-Je (an amazing performance by Kevin Lindsay; rather fittingly he’s getting some sort of karma of his own for Pertwee blowing him up when he was Sontaron commander Linx in ‘The Tine Warrior’ four stories earlier; no other actor in DW got to play two parts this different to each other until ‘Commander Maxil’ became the 6^th Dr and even they’re superficially more similar than this). It’s perfectly keeping with the end of the ‘Buddhist’ eras of the series as the Doctor becomes a whole new person precisely because of how much he grows, the idea behind the philosophy being that if you can face your darkest phobias and free yourself of them then you can live your live without the crushing weight of fear and become a ‘new man’ starting your life over. Which is pretty accurate for what happens here. What’s left vague though is exactly what this great fear is: if you so wish to see it that way then its alien arachnids from outer space, but more than that its the Dr’s greed and curiosity that’s been putting the people around him in danger since the first DW story; this regeneration in particular has always had a somewhat slapdash approach to safety and of all the Dr’s has one of the biggest egos (he was quite a so and so to Jo sometimes, though Sarah Jane is much more of an equal – especially in this story where she does the sort of investigating the Dr normally would). Jon Pertwee’s Dr was such a heroic and dashing figure that most fans expected him to die in an equally dashing way saving the universe and some fans are sorry he doesn’t, but that’s something he did in every other story – in this adventure he learns to save himself, which is somehow much more satisfying and special. The cause too isn’t some evil monster but a spider – admittedly an alien spider with special powers, but still a spider. There’s a longstanding folk tale that annoying spiders and stealing brings bad luck on the perpetrator: in this story the 3^rd Dr’s done both, with the revelation that his quick trip to Metebelis 3 in ‘The Green Death’ and the blue crystal he brought back for Jo wasn’t as straightforward as it seems. Metebelis is a scary place full of flying insects and huge great arachnids and the Doctor doesn’t so much find the crystal as take it under everyone’s (six pairs of) eyes; Jo, more spiritually aware than most companions, accepted the crystal at first but has since sent it back and when a clairvoyant helping the Dr out at UNIT HQ handles it all he can see are whacking great spiders before it gets nicked by a cult trying to tap into its power. It’s not just the Dr whose going through a karmic renewal though: three stories ago Mike Yates betrayed his pals as part of ‘Operation Golden Age’ that tried to reject the inevitability of change and return to the past complete with dinosaurs. Since then he’s been recovering in (where else?) a Buddhist retreat, where he’s come to make his peace with living in the present, no matter how difficult. Only, by one of those coincidences that makes up a lot of 3^rd Dr plots, the retreat has become over-run with baddies who have been acting most shiftily and he’s called in Sarah Jane to go undercover and report on it (you have to say its notable he doesn’t go straight to the Dr or the Brig who he’s known much longer; then again as Sarah Jane doesn’t have the same lengthy connections they did perhaps the betrayal doesn’t sting quite so much). From there ‘Spiders’ becomes much like every other 3^rd Dr story, which is no bad thing, just with spiders where the aliens would be and DW’s second monastery as a setting rather than the usual home counties invasion (this story has a lot more in common with ‘The Abominable Snowman’ and the idea that mystical disembodied voices aren’t always a force for good than many fans give it credit for). As one last summary of the era but bigger than ever its great: there’s even a whole episode with a chase sequence that in other stories would last for a scene. A lot of fans find it pointless but here it works as one last party piece of the era viewers knew they would probably never get to see again done bigger and better than ever, involving cars, boats, gyroplanes and The Whomobile hovercraft, Pertwee’s own licensed car ‘The Ghost’ partly funded by the BBC in return for featuring in stories and various in-person events (and yes, he was legally allowed to drive it on main roads, though that didn’t stop many policemen down the years asking to see his license for it). It’s a greatest hits record rather than a full story in and of itself: there’s a plot that takes place mostly in a cellar (like ‘The Daemons’), involves a crystal (like ‘The Time Monster’), involves insects (‘The Green Death’) and the humans get turned into hairy beasties (like ‘Inferno’, all season finales), but at the same time ‘Spiders’ has a story that feels distinct from all of them and about something bigger, all about change and gaining symbolic inner wisdom by fighting your inner demons rather than, say, gaining actual victory by fighting your outer demons (and giant maggots and the God Kronos and a parallel world). Less forgivably, there’s a whole bunch of comedy yokels after five years of seeing one or two and more unfortunate stereotypes than you can poke a manglewurzle at. The best scenes of all though have even less to do with the plot and are all character pieces. Pertwee gets lots of great scenes with his co-stars, particularly the Brigadier (and after five years of friction tinged with respect its lovely to see them have time off watching music hall acts while the Dr researches clairvoyancy – this might be the best Dr-Brig scene of them all as they gently tease each other), while Sarah Jane gets to be the eager curious optimist the Dr usually is while he grows sadder and quieter. There’s lots of the spills and thrills everyone associates with this era but also the intellectual and spiritual plot that underlines this era’s best stories too – its only missing Jo and The Master to make it seem like a 3^rd Dr highlights reel. Indeed the script is a replacement for an initial thought of ‘one last showdown’ with The Master that had only reached a vague outline when Roger Delgado died in a car crash. Rather sweetly the production team have his presence in there anyway by hiring his widow Kismet as one of the spider voices, a sweet gesture that brought her some much needed income (the taxi Roger was riding in at the time of his dodgy Turkey film production wasn’t insured so she got none of the compensation you’d expect). Overall its a rather sweet and moving goodbye and by the time the 3^rd Dr wakes up as the 4^th we feel as if we’ve gone on a journey with him, as moving as any across time and space. However there’s a big arachnid shaped hole with this story that prevents it being the absolute masterpiece it deserves to be and that’s the spiders: this era’s biggest weakness tends to be how monsters are realised on screen and while the chief spider might call herself ‘The Great One’ she’s less convincing than almost all the other monsters we’ve had these past five years (it’s probable that spiders were chosen following the success of the giant maggots in the previous season finale but they were a lucky break that looked really good on screen almost by accident; real spiders were vetoed in case they scared the audience for good and the puppets have to talk in time with moving their legs, which are all too visibly worked by strings). Even an all-powerful spider queen seems like small fry compared to past greats the Dr survived: I mean, three years ago he was even defeating the Devil (with a bit of hep from Jo). Hard as everyone tries (and the voices are great!) it still feels slightly anti-climactical as show-downs go. It’s not just a case of six legs bad, two legs good either: another problem are the one-dimensional ‘heavies’ in the Buddhist retreat, who don’t seem to have got the memo about how to blend in inside a retreat full of spiritual enlightenment at all and feel as if they’ve wandered in from a 1920s gangster movie. This is a story about how bad people and behaviours change you so that you’re a different person by the time you survive them, but nobody really learns anything in this story beyond the Dr and Yates. And Tommy, who creates a different kind of a problem - he’s almost unrecognisable by the end of the story, but he’s one of the most troubling incidental characters in all of DW: what in 1974 was greeted as a progressive stance of depicting learning disabilities on screen just seems condescending now, with John Kane switching from ‘backward’ to ‘bright’ from the power of the crystal partway through, as if he’s only now become a ‘real’ person in a way that just feels ‘wrong’ nowadays (good as John Kane is you can still he’s acting). Even that’s handled better than some people say though if you take his character as someone who delivers karma of his own: had the baddies been nice to Tommy or had Sarah Jane been horrible then he wouldn’t have sacrificed himself for her and the Doctor’s sake to set up the final ‘act’ of the story; its just the way they do it, all stutters and gurning, that feels misplaced (it’s an odd juxtaposition that the Barry Letts-Terrance Dicks era is so progressive in so many ways, with its Buddhist and live and let live philosophies, and yet almost casually insults more people than any other; in other words this is one of those ‘greatest hits’ sets that can’t avoid sticking on some rum B-side nobody likes in there nobody likes too). Unusually, too, new-Who covers the same ground better in the sort-of-sequel ‘Turn Left’, where its Donna with the spider on her back (although its really about the Dr again and his absence). These are the reasons why I’ve never loved this story in quite the same way I do fellow regeneration stories like ‘The Tenth Planet’ ‘The War Games’ ‘Logopolis’ ‘Androzani’ or ‘The End Of Time’ (even if its better than the lukewarm material Drs 11-13 got in their finales). However, even that fits somehow: had this story been perfect then it wouldn’t have summed up this era so well (an era when budgets were stretched past breaking point even more than normal) or fitted a plot that’s all about embracing your flaws and not letting them define or defeat you. However daft you find the spiders, however over-long the chase parts and however simple the main plot really is when you take the Metebelis elements out of it, with less sub-plots than normal, the ending is truly moving as a broken Doctor, his cells decaying, dies in the arms of his greatest friends, sure in his convictions and loved and revered by all in stark contrast to the lonely way the 3^rd Dr came to Earth in ‘Spearhead From Space’. And even if you somehow missed the ending and all the symbolism that went on before it then ‘Spiders’ is still a cracking six-legged beast, full of some really clever dialogue, some great performances and (a) very big heart(s) that manage to fit in some of DW’s most moving of all scenes without ever falling into the trap of being fake or maudlin. The whole is a most fitting funeral for the 3^rd Dr’s era that still manages at times to feel like a celebratory party before the show regenerates all over again and takes off to pastures new.

+The 3^rd Dr, even more than the others, is the regeneration that’s always perfectly controlled and where the only thing that usually gets ruffled are his shirt sleeves. So to see him spend so much of his last two episodes being worked as a puppet against his will, controlled by a cackling spider, hits differently to seeing, say, Dr 12 have an emotional outburst or Dr 5 looking defeated in their farewell stories. Pertwee actually looks scared and reveals how much of his Dr really is an acting job not just him (as daft as that sounds) - this is new ground, even in the era’s final hour and without saying a word it makes the stakes running into the last cliffhanger that much higher. Pertwee never gets enough credit for his work in the series – he’s often the best thing in it but rarely more so than here where the script asks one hell of a lot from him but he delivers it all. In the space of three hours he manages to veer from charming and witty in the 1^st episode to his usual action hero, to the more sensitive, vulnerable soul at the end. Practically no one else could have topped this and won an audience over after such a tour de force: thankfully for the longevity of the series Tom Baker, turning up in the final few frames, was one of the few actors who could.

- Sarah starts the story well, as she does all of season 11, a plucky reporter going undercover who stays firm even in the face of scary locals and a psychic tractor running her off the road (don’t ask: its that kind of a story). However after that and with so little room for sub-plots writers Letts and Sloman don’t quite know what to do with her so they have the spiders possess her and rather all too obviously keep her out the way. Sarah Jane will become the most brainwashed/controlled companion of the lot and while she’ll get there in time (her control by Eldrad in her final story ‘The Hand Of Fear’ is chilling) for now being brainwashed just means she’s walking lopsidedly and slurring her speech as if she’s drunk. Normally we’d barely notice and put it down to ‘Dr Who acting’, but this happens to be in the same story where the Dr’s possession is one of the scariest of all.  

Vengeance On Varos: Ranking - 56

 

Vengeance On Varos

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri, 19-26/1/1985, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Phillip Martin, director: Ron Jones)

Rank: 56

   'Well, Arak, what's today's review like then?'

 'Oh Etta, I've given up reading them. Dr this, Dr that, too much violence, not enough violence, sardonic interplay of postmoderism principles underlying a multi-dimensional script, its the same every day. particularly this one. I think they get an alien in to write them some weeks' 

'Well, I like to marvel at the perspicacity of his wit' 

'Huh that writer lost his wits the second month when he tried to defend 'Time and The Rani!' 

'Only 56 reviews to go. What are we going to read when they're over?' 

'Dunno' 

(The screen shows static)

 

 The 6^th Doctor’s masterpiece next and one of DW’s most original stories which both delivers a critique of that very 1980s moral dilemma of video nasties and accidentally creates ‘Gogglebox’ twenty years early. This is a world that’s recognisably like ours, only taken a stage further: in this democracy everyone has to serve out their term as governor and if the people at home don’t like their policies they can subject them to torture. Which is a particular problem when a brown alien slug named Sil arrives paying lots of money in return for the local resources, even if it means a much harder life for the local inhabitants (kind of like the Conservative party donors today – and indeed in Margaret Thatcher’s day when this show went out). As much as people refer to it as ‘dystopian’ I think it could work in the future rather nicely: it would soon sort out our lot of tyrants and despots and stop them being in politics only to please their mates and get rich I can tell you. Phillip Martin’s script crackles with ideas that had never been seen in the series before and which indeed could never have been done before the mid-1980s: this is the era when videos contained gory material you would never be allowed to broadcast on TV in case children were watching, so what better series to make your point in than DW, still ‘officially’ a children’s series but one increasingly watched by grown-ups. ‘Varos’ has some of the finest characters 1980s Who has to offer and unlike a lot of stories in the John Nathan-Turner era has some excellent actors and actresses perfectly cast to play them too. Alien, unlikeable, brown, slimy, disgusting and with an evil laugh, David Cameron would have approved of Sil’s underhanded tactics here, pretending to be the saviour of the planet Varos when really he’s undermining its resources and putting the ‘I,/Me’ into its ‘Mines’. This conniving alien slug could have been an annoying caricature, an alien concerned with nothing except profits, but Phillip Martin’s clever script gives him some softer edges that almost make him likeable. It was a clever move, for instance, to make him a character who thinks he looks dignified and brilliant, then saddle him with a faulty translator circuit that makes him look like an idiot without him knowing. Then there’s the Governor, a noble man who started off wanting to do well but now will just to do anything to survive, hanging on in power and ruled by slugs: again, the Conservative party of 1985 really wasn’t that removed from ours in 2023 (we desperately need a sequel if you’re watching Russell T!) Martin Jarvis gets the meatiest of his three DW roles as the nice gentlemanly Governor having a crisis of confidence in public (the sort of part he always plays, but in a situation pushed to extremes you never get to hear in radio 4 dramas) whilst Nabil Shaban is word and laugh-perfect as Sil, one of the best actors the show ever had.

Phillip Martin only ever got two DW scripts on screen and its a crying shame because he could write characters better than anybody still left writing for Who in this era; as we said in ‘Mindwarp’ his greatest strength is that he can take grotesque caricatures of people and then slowly fill in the gaps so that they have more depth than characters usually get in 90 minutes, turning a world that seems outlandish and cartoonish at first becomes more subtle and real by degrees. This is a world that solves its problems with violence and where if you don’t like it there must be something wrong with you –a world that if you disagree with it can ‘devolve’ you by turning you into an animal, through acceleration of certain strands in your DNA. Even the much-criticised scene of the Dr knocking two guards into an acid bath is a gruesome death caused by an accident, added because violence is a way of life and TV shows, especially in 1985, taken as proof of how unnecessarily vilent the show had become (even though that’s the whole sodding point). There’s also a ‘Greek chorus’ who comment on the action and (uniquely in the whole of DW or a part this substantial) never get to meet the Dr, instead commenting on the story the way the viewers would be at home, only they’ve become desensitised to the point where they enjoy seeing people squirm and writhe in pain (best line when discussing an execution: ‘You’re thinking of that other one. He wasn’t blind. Well, not in the beginning anyway’).Which leads us onto another point: this might be the most meta and postmodern DW story of the whole of the original run (and beaten only by ‘Love and Monsters’ in ‘new-Who’). The Doctor and Peri are rightly horrified that people are made to watch the horror that unfolds on this planet, broadcast live into people’s homes, a world that keeps people in place by making them afraid and having part of this world’s no-go areas make people hallucinate their fears. Only, of course, that’s exactly what the viewer is doing; those viewers we see on screen are really ‘us’ commenting that its not as violent as it used to be (in Varos’ pre-Mary Whitehouse days perhaps) and complaining that there isn’t as much blood and guts as in other weeks. The playful script also plays up the cliffhangers of old, with the one and only one in this story (in the only 20^th century series to use of 45minute episodes) ending with the Dr drowning on dry land watched by the governor in the control room who yells ‘Cut!’ right at the point we switch to the credits. It’s a very different way of doing the things DW always does, laughing at us for laughing at it, and it works so well it’s a surprise no one tried it again (there’s something similar going on in ‘Dragonfire’ what with literally dangling Sylvester McCoy over a cliff and naming characters after postmodernist theorists, but it doesn’t try anything quite as brave as this). There’s another less-well remembered joke midway through the second chorus when, by necessity the script has had to introduce a couple of talky sequences to get all the plot points facing in the right direction for the big finale and Arrak and Etta sit around bitching about how its all become dull! For all that though the ending when the regime has been overthrown and their screen turns blank, leaving with nothing but a vacuum in their lives is really quite sad, as well as a bit eerie given that DW will itself be ‘rested’ at the end of the year. The 6^th Dr gets to do a lot of flouncing around and acting shocked in this story, which gives Colin Baker his best platform for his permanently outraged Dr, shouting at a world that won’t listen to him and he’s met his match in Sil, his antithesis in a way The Master had stopped being in this era, a character ready to argue back at him but one driven by control rather than freedom and misery rather than joy. A lot of writers for the 6^th Dr don’t really understand him (something script editor Eric Saward confessed later – and he pretty much created him!) but Phillip Martin gets him completely: he’s a timelord who has none of the sense of doubt the others (sometimes) have but unlike his close cousin the 4^th Dr he doesn’t see the absurdism in the world either. For him, more than any other regeneration, his adventures a crusade and a moral wrong he just has to right. He’s a professor who sees the rest of the universe as his classroom of pupils and isn’t above lecturing them and punishing them when they get things wrong. He’s a more black-and-white Dr than the others, despite his multi-coloured costume, without as much mercy as the others. Which is a problem against more nuanced, pitiable characters like Davros or The Board, but perfect for a character as downright nasty as Sil and a planet so obviously ‘wrong’ as Varos. That, perhaps, is why this is the only DW story to have the word ‘vengeance’ in the title: he doesn’t so much save the day and put things right by removing the baddies as avenge the people who’ve suffered under this regime, every bit as much as the political system hurts people it disagrees with. Only, of course, the Dr is morally right and un-corruptable. Colin Baker is often the best thing in his era, but never more than here when he gets to be the Dr he was always meant to be, smarter and more learned than your average monster and not afraid to show it. Poor Peri goes through the works here as she often did, but with more humanity than she usually gets, not just letched over by pervy aliens but actively transformed by them (she’s half-turned into a bird, a fascinating detail: the machine, you see, is meant to fixate on the subject’s subconscious and picks up on the fact Peri wants to ‘fly away’ from all her problems, which is after all how she came to be in the Tardis; the script’s one flat note is that it doesn’t do more with this subplot and have the Doctor at least acknowledge it when he rescues her. It would also have been interesting to see what he might have been). Again, Peri is one of DW’s great companions and Nicola Bryant one of its best actresses, even if she never gets the chance toshow just what she can do; along with debut ‘Planet Of Fire’ though this is Peri at her best, sarcastic and sulky as the monsters try to have their way with her and with a put-down equal to everyone trying to put her six feet under. Also, remember the Doctor’s speech in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ that a ‘peri’ was a fallen angel who needed to repent? What he missed out was that the literal translation of ‘Peri’ is ‘wing’; with any other writer of this most depressingly average of seasons I’d assume that to be a coincidence, but given how erudite his scripts are Phillip Martin he probably looked this stuff up. We can all learn a lot from Varos it seems; not least the fact that a DW script can be this daring and postmodern without it getting in the way of telling a good story, which rattles along at quite a pace and makes a lot of salient points in such an entertaining way this viewer sitting at home has no reason to complain. Michael Grade clearly hadn’t seen or – more likely – understood ‘Vengeance on Varos’ when he cancelled the show at the end of this season for being ‘too violent’ and ‘not very good’. This is, more than anything, an attack on the very violence he was complaining about, but done in better and subtler ways than a monster as one-dimensional as Grade could ever understand. The result is a brilliant inventive and creative story in an era when, more than any other in the 20^th century, DW had fallen into a rut and was recycling its own ideas, with ‘Vengeance on Varos’ vastly under-rated all round.

+ So many positives to choose from here but let’s just hear it for Sil one more time: we raved about both character and actor under ‘Mindwarp’ but there are so many more details to choose from that make him seem like a ‘real’ character in a way so many of the others don’t. The tank he sits on to breathe water the way we breathe air. The way he splays his hands out like a fish’s gills every time he gets annoyed. The faulty circuit that makes him say ‘govennnnyeurrr’ every time he thinks he’s being clever. The marsh-minnows (really died peaches) that he grazes on across the story. And oh that laugh, which is chillingly alien and sluglike. Sil is a rare case of a writer being on top form coming up with ideas and an actor on top form adding more details on top. We need Sil back in the series and quick!

- The Doctor, Peri and two of the rebels (one of them played by Sean Connery’s son) are terrified because of a light distortion that’s made them afraid of…a fly. Even when huge, flies aren’t that threatening and the Doctor’s used enough to holovisions and giant ants and butterflies alike to recognise a mirage of a fly when he sees one.