Doctor Who End of Time Part 1
Spoiler alert……..
Writing about part 1 of a 2 part episode is always difficult because you never really get the full picture of the story. Part 1 is always consist of setups and cliffhangers. That is the case here with part 1 of End of Time. What made this particularly an un even episode is that it is also a Christmas special episode! We tend to forget that Doctor Who was a family show in all its history and still is one after the revival. Its Christmas special were always a little bit more silly than usual with a little bit more comedy on top of all the usual mayhem and aliens. Unfortunately with this combination, it just made the tone of this “ending” of Doctor Who all over the place.
As we saw from the last special “The Water of Mars” the tone of the show started to get much heavier because the end is near. That inevitable hopelessness is almost too much to bear, as the brief scene in this episode where the Doctor and Wilfred was talking in the cafe showed. The manic re-appearance of the Master also added to the “heaviness” because this re-born Master is crazier than ever! He even took on a gollum like persona that is rather disturbing. With the foreshadowing of the return of the Time Lords. This should be a heavy episode from beginning to end, and yet the event happening was way more silly than ever to be treated seriously. The Master’s successful plan to wipe out all human being and turn everyone on planet earth into him is just too out there. Also because putting all kind of dresses Jon Simm just made him too laughable! The usual right mix of comedy and seriousness is not present, and with this quite frankly silly plot, I just don’t know how to make of it! Hopefully part 2 will remedy that!
Another problem of End of Time part 1 is that it just doesn’t measure up to the previous fantastic part 1 of the 4th season finale “the Stolen Earth!” Both are part 1 of a finale, but Stolen Earth has tons of action and before the end of it every single guest stars has been throw onto the screen! This time around, even someone as important as Donna has less than a few lines – which I know is necessary since she did not regain her memory until the last minute of the show, there couldn’t be too much interaction going on. But it just, in comparison, this one just sparkle less. Of course the 2nd part of 4th season finale “Journey’s End” wasn’t as satisfying as “Stolen Earth” indicated, so maybe the writer made a conscious decision this time around to hold off all the big guns until part 2 to make it much more explosive.
I do like the idea of having this 80 years old grandpa as Doctor’s companion this time, it showed a different kind of interaction that we never really see. I also liked the tiny mentioning of the end of Torchwood that tie into the finale of the 3rd season miniseries of Torchwood. The big question I got out of this episode is that how come Wilfred wasn’t affected by the Master’s transformation like the rest of humanity? We all know why Donna is not affected, but Wilfred should be just a regular human being, unless I am missing something. I assume all other human characters that we loved were transformed as well – that includes, Martha, Mickey, Gwen, Sarah Jane and her kids. The only ones I can excluded from the list is Captain Jack because he’s not on earth, and Rose and her family because they are in the parallel universe, and maybe Sarah Jane’s son Luke because he’s a manufactured human. But then again Martha and Sarah Jane could have potential escaped this fate because of their extensive traveling among the stars that might alter their DNA a little differently. There’s too much speculation! as I mentioned this is just part 1 and you just don’t have the entire picture. There is one thing I wanted to say though, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of reason they can come up with to have all the Time Lords survived the Time War and were able to be hidden so well that both the Doctor and the Master and the face of Boa and the Daleks, none of them know!
One last thought: why put Obama into the episode when all the previous political figures on the show from Presidents to Prime Ministers were all fictional? this made no sense what so ever especially when Doctor Who was never about realism.
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