The End of Time [Spoilers]

[Captain Seafort]

Part 2 starts in four hours. I'm surprised not to see a thread for part 1, but there you go.

Predictions, anyone?

[Nutso]

U.K. only?

[Captain Seafort]

British Isles I think, given that Sionnach can get it, but not the States unfortunately (at least not as far as I'm aware).

[colmquinn]

I wasn't terribly impressed as a whole with part 1 but then again I haven't really thought too much of the last series or two
But it was nice to see

the time lords making a comeback, how long they keep em there is another matter

[Captain Seafort]

I wasn't terribly impressed as a whole with part 1 but then again I haven't really thought too much of the last series or two

It wasn't too bad, but it was pretty obvious that most of it was just setting up the real story in part 2.

it was nice to see

the time lords making a comeback, how long they keep em there is another matter

Not only should they keep them, they should have brought them back in the series 30 finale, and had the Daleks defeated but not destroyed. One of the biggest problems with the new series is it's all-or-nothing approach to it's villains - for example repeatedly bringing back the Daleks en mass, but then having to destroy them within the story to prevent them wiping out the universe. You can only do this so often before it becomes stupid, as the Davros story demonstrated. The only force capable of keeping them in check at a strategic level are the Time Lords, so the only way to end future Dalek stories with them defeated but not destroyed, allowing them to return repeatedly without ever-more implausible excuses, is to restore the Time Lords.

On a slightly different note, I wonder if the Lord President will be killed and regenerate into Pierce Brosnan?

[colmquinn]

That would be cool as regenation scene, or even

Roger Moore

[kostmayer]

Is that timelord fellow who just approached Timothy Dalton the chap who played the alternate Dave Lister in the Red Dwarf Episode "The Inquisitor"?

And David Jacobi should have stayed as the Master - he was much scarier then John Simms.

[colmquinn]

My opinion of that episode is as follows

If you shoveled up all the shit from a big heard of elephants, added all the filth from a huge pig farm you wouldn't have enough shit to equal that episode.

What a way to ruin the Timelords RTD so the people after you can't use them. I thought that Rassalon was long dead on Gallifrey? Maybe I missed the episode where it said he was resurrected and made president again?

God the ending was longer than the Return of the king with its 500 false endings!

I know thats just a gut reaction and I may mellow with time but sometimes you gotta just go with you first reaction.

That should be clear enough.

[Captain Seafort]

Seconded. What could have been a great way to reset things, reverse the effects of the Time War, and remove the tendency to resurrect Daleks every other episode only to have them wiped out again (which they did once too often last time), made things worse. I can now foresee not only the Daleks, but the Time Lords themselves turning up every other season, only to be wiped out and then brought back over and over again. There is no bloody point in wiping out a major enemy if it's so obvious that they'll be brought back in the near future.

The entire regeneration was a shambles - up until the image of Ten lying in the plastic box, it was fine. Very TWoK-ish, and I was convinced that he would regenerate there and then. Instead he jumps up, dusts himself off, and goes gallivanting round the planet seeing what everyone's up to. Then, you have him collapse in the snow after seeing Rose, and think "now he's going to regenerate", but no, he gets up, goes into the Tardis, wanders round for a bit, and then regenerates, trashing the console room in the process. And he then has to go and strike the bloody "Official RTD-approved Regeneration Pose".

It's a pity, because with just a few tweaks it could have been great. Scrap all the stuff about the Time Lords turning into psychopath. Have the Master try and bring them back after he received the diamond so he could depose Lord President Bond and become ruler of Gallifrey and time itself. Big scrap, Master looses, but nicks a Tardis and bugs out. Wilf gets stuck in the box, so the Doctor does his Spock routine, collapses, and regenerates there and then. Alternately, if you want to keep the runaround with the companions, have the Time Lords thank the Doctor for helping bring them back, but point out that blowing up Gallifrey as he did the first time round isn't the done thing, so he's to be forced to regenerate. Do the runaround, Doctor returns to the Tardis and regenerates, cue Matt Smith. RTD would even get his Official Regeneration Pose again, since it would be a lot less irritating and more understandable if the regeneration was due to the Time Lords rather than severe injuries.

To give people a heads-up, at 1200 GMT tomorrow I'll stick a spoiler tag in the title and stop spoilerising the text

[kostmayer]

Been following #drwho on Twitter - I haven't seen so many crying females since Stephen Gately came out of the closet.

Its also replete with redheads fed up with the Ginger comments.

[kostmayer]

Assuming that was Mickey and Martha on the alternate Cybermen infested Earth, how did the Doctor get back there?

[Captain Seafort]

Assuming that was Mickey and Martha on the alternate Cybermen infested Earth, how did the Doctor get back there?

Who said they were on the alternate Earth? Both Martha and Mickey ended up on the main universe Earth in Journey's End.

[colmquinn]

Snip..

Did they not come back in a previous ep A Previous Episode...

(I'm not spoilering that - if you can guess plot from that then good luck to you!)

[kostmayer]

I don't recall, but I'll take your word for it. Makes a nice change, Mickey stealing the Doctors woman for a change.

[Sionnach Glic]

Well that was fucking atrocious. Yet so typically RTD.

Jesus, where do I even start?

Part 1 was very promissing. The Master was back, Tennant knew he was going to die, and Wilfred was tagging along (fuck the airheads, he should be the next companion 8) ). There was some mystery machine whose purpous was built up nicely, and it ends with it being Tennant and Wilfred versus the Master Race. That alone could have been a great final episode.

So what do they do with it? Toss that threat out the window in 15 minutes, as Dalton turns up, wiggles his glove (does anyone else thinks that the glove looked a lot like the Ressurection Glove from Torchwood? ) and the problem just goes away.

So it turns out that the Time Lords are the real bad guys of the finale, and that they want to destroy the universe to kill off their enemies and ascend (when the hell did this turn into Stargate?).

Now the Doctor now has a pretty tough choice - he has to violate his morals and kill the Master to cut the link. Oh, no, wait. There's another option so that the Doctor doesn't have to do it at all.

Dalton goes to kill Tennant, with us thinking that this is how the Doctor will die. But then the Master jumps to the rescue, fights off Dalton and they all get sucked back into the time-lock thingy.

So now the Doctor finds Wilfred locked in the box that's about to be filled with radiation, and there's no way to get him out without sacraficing himself (who the fuck designed that system?). I actualy really liked this bit. The Doctor could just walk away and leave Wilfred to his fate. Indeed, he'd be perfectly justified in doing so, as he his life is worth so much more than Wilfred's. But that's not the man he is, so he ignores Wilfred's pleas to leave him to his fate and sacrafices himself. At the end he's left lying on the floor, killed by a fatal dose of radiation.

But wait! He's actualy alright for now, so he goes off in what can only be described as RTD masturbatorily yelling "Hey! Look at all the great characters I made up!" and we get an obnoxious montage that seems to be almost as long as the rest of the bloody episode was.

So finaly he staggers back to the TARDIS and dies. Cue that bloody RTD-standard Regeneration Pose (here's hoping we don't see that again) and....stuff starts blowing up. What the fuck? Why is the TARDIS falling apart? Why is it falling towards Earth's surface? What the fuck? I don't recall ever seeing this happen during a regeneration. Was Tennant's persona just too powerful for the TARDIS to contain when it was unleashed from the Doctor's body?

So we get the new Doctor, who does a Tennant-esque "what do I look like now?" routine while the TARDIS is on the verge of going Chernobyll, or something. I still think he looks weird.

All in all, it was a big pile of awful. Utterly typical of RTD - he gives us a great premise in the first part, then fucks it all up in the second.

I think the biggest problem with this finale is that it was constantly trying to one-up itself.

First we have the Doctor hunting down the ressurrected and unstable Master. Cool, a big showdown between them could be a great finale.

Then the Master is captured by some evil wealthy people who have a strange alien device. Okay, cool. Someone with the resources to contain a mad Time Lord could be a very dangerous foe.

Oh, but now all the humans in the world bar two have turned into clones of the Master. Okay, still pretty damn cool. How's the Doctor going to get out of this one?

No, wait, the problem's magiced away by the return of the Time Lords, who are all cartoonishly evil now. The Doctor is saved from making any hard choices to resolve the matter, and the problem's solved.

So now the Doctor's dying, but we can't just let it end on a simple but poignant note, we have to try and throw some "saddening" montage into the end that doesn't work because it goes on far too long. Ugh.

Part one gets a 4/5 for me. I quite liked it.
Part two gets a 0/5. Utterly horrible.

One thing I did like though was the Doctor giving Donna a lotto ticket for her wedding present.

Alright gents, no more spoilerisation please - it's in the title now so there's no need. Seafort