Not Another Episode
Breakdown!
Written
by Russell T Davies
Broadcast
1st January 2010
Doctor Who episode – The
End of Time Part 2, brings us a glimpse of our ex Time Agent, Captain Jack
Harkness, drinking away his sorrows in what can only be described as the
cantina from Star Wars, with a glittering array of characters you probably
would fare better against in a fight. Well some. Probably!
End of Time was also the
last ever (at that time) series of Doctor Who that we would see the 10th
Doctor appear. However, as we all know, despite the distance of the Specials,
we were to meet him one more time in 2013. But we’re getting ahead of
ourselves.
In the years that brought
us Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble, we had the best of storylines, the
best twists and the funniest of moments, and the end of seasons when you
weren’t entirely sure what the Doctor was going to do next, but after the
announcement that Tennant would be stepping down as the Doctor and handing back
his sonic screwdriver, you knew that, he would be going out with a ‘bang and
not a whimper’.
The End of Time signified
the end of the 10th Doctor. It filled in some missing pages of what
the rest of the characters were up to. It brought yet another pang of tears and
lump in throat, when 10th wishes that Wilfred Mott had been his dad.
Catch up time…
During the last visit to
the Ood planet, the Doctor learns that his ‘song’ is about to end. So of
course, for the latter part of the series, the Doctor is going to make
absolutely sure he’s going to A: enjoy himself and B: stay the hell away from
any impending doom scenarios. However, when an Ood he meets with on the Ood
planet, informs him in their group session that the Master is returning, and
will herald ‘the end of time itself.’ The Doctor knows he has to return to
Earth and somehow stop this from happening.
Back on Earth, Wormtail
and his bunch of Death Eaters are setting about resurrecting
Voldemort…..oh…wait, no….
Back on Earth, the cult of
The Master is setting about resurrecting the rogue Time Lord using the
imprisoned Lucy Saxon, but good old Lucy, who eventually saw through the Master’s
plans, after The Last of the Time Lords episode, sabotages the plans, and in
doing so, brings back a dying rogue Time Lord with a voracious appetite that
cannot be controlled. In the explosion, Lucy and the cult are killed, but the
Master, now even stronger and with powers far greater than before, escapes.
When the Doctor tracks
down the Master on wastelands outside London, he learns that the constant
drumming inside the Master’s head is not a part of his insanity but something
implanted from outside. Trouble is, before he can do anything more about it,
armed troops drop out of the sky, take the Master and him hostage and place him
in custody of the billionaire Joshua Naismith. Naismith is in possession of an
‘immortality Gate’ an object acquired after the fall of the Torchwood
Institute. He wanted to use it to make his daughter, Abigail, immortal but
instead the Master used it to make exact copies of himself, right across the
world, from the Man on the street, to the President of the United States of
America. Every single person in the world, except the Doctor, Wilfred, and
Donna!
Now prior to these events,
Wilfred Mott receives apparition visits by a woman called Bloom who advises him
to take arms to protect the Doctor. Being the old soldier, Mott does just that,
before joining the Doctor in the TARDIS.
Also prior to this, two
aliens of the Vinvocci species are working on the medical device brought from
their own planet that Naismith believes will make his daughter immortal.
However, as we know, the
Master fixes the device and uses it to create his own ‘master race’.
Just before the credits,
in part one, Timothy Dalton, who plays Rassilon, the Lord President of the Time
Lords, continues the narration of the episode, noting that the Master’s act
against humanity is only the beginning of far greater events. He addresses the
vast chamber of Time Lords in all their regalia that it is “the day the Time Lords returned. For Gallifrey! For Victory! For the
end of time itself!”
End of Time Part 2.
Bound and gagged still,
the Doctor can only look on in horror at what is happening around the world,
from the television screens in Naismith’s mansion. The Doctor and Wilf escape
further madness from the Master by taking refuge on the Vinvocci ship just
outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, after a Vinvocci knocks out the Master and
escapes down a flight of stairs with Wilf and the Doctor. Scuppering any plans
for the Vinvocci to escape, the Doctor shuts down the ships engines with a
blast of his sonic screwdriver. For old soldier Wilfred, it’s a view of a life
time, staring down at the Earth from space, and he points out the places he
visited during his time in the War, as a young man. During a moment of personal
chit chat, the Doctor reveals how different in ages they really are, old Wilf
surprised at just how much of an age gap there is between the younger man and
himself.
‘We must look like insects to you.’ Wilf
says to the Doctor. He passes over the pistol he’d collected up when they
escaped from the Naismith’s mansion, but the Doctor refuses it. He’s not a man
of weapons, just a man of words, and the more Wilf impresses upon him, the more
he refuses.
When the Doctor tells Wilf
that he would have been proud if Wilf had been his Dad, the tears pricked my
eyes.
Across the Universe, on
the planet Gallifrey, during a meeting with the Lord President Rassilon, a
message was sent to Earth.
‘A star fell from the sky.’ The Master’s
voice echoes through the ship. ‘Don’t you want to know where from? Because now
it makes sense, Doctor. The whole of my life. My destiny. The star was a
diamond. And the diamond is a white point star.’ This intrigues the Doctor, as
there’s no other planet that would contain such a gem. ‘And I have worked all
night dissecting my new gift. Now the star is mine. I can increase the signal.
And use it as a life line. Do you get it now? Do you see? Keep watching,
Doctor. This should be spectacular. Over and out.’
Scrambling to his feet,
the Doctor knew exactly what that would mean. The Time Lords were returning,
and Earth was their destination. Which meant, that the Doctor HAD to return to
Earth, and more significantly, Naismith’s mansion and end what he’d started
back on Gallifrey.
Bringing the ship back to
life, he mans the controls, which lights up the radar like a Christmas tree.
Missiles are sent after him, but with two gunners in control, Wilfred and the
Vinvocci soon make shrift work of them.
With no way to actually
teleport into the mansion, there’s only one thing left that the Doctor can do.
Armed with Wilfred’s pistol, the Doctor glances at Wilf before hauling himself
out of the ship and freefalls through the glass dome directly in front of the
Immortality Gate. His clothes ripped to shreds from the glass, and the sharp
stop on the tiles, the Doctor slowly and painfully sits up.
In front of him at the
Immortality gate are those who have teleported down from Gallifrey, the planet
so close to Earth that it terrifies the human population below.
Determined not to leave
the Doctor at the hands of the Master, Wilfred insists that Addams, the female
Vinvocci lands the ship.
In all his madness, the
Master fails to grasp that all along, the Time Lords were looking at a way to
come back. Desperate to join them, he begs them to take him, but Rassilon looks
upon the Master with disgust. As the Doctor deliberates between shooting
Rassilon or the Master, he looks towards the woman hiding her face, the woman
Bloom, who he recognises, but if she is who we think she is, why must she hide
her face, and is she really what we think she is?
Turning the gun on the
Master, he fires at the white point star, sending the Time Lords back to
Gallifrey, and with them, the Master, firing all his anger back at Rassilon.
With the world back as it
should be, doppelganger template snapped, returning all humans back to their
original state, the Doctor wakes up. He’s surprised. He should be dead – if the
prophecy is correct. The four knocks would have signified the Master. He laughs
at how lucky he is, until he hears it, and the laughter turns to a gut
wrenching sickness. Locked in the radiation chamber, Wilfred knocks four times.
Disappointed, the Doctor
erupts in anger, dashing papers from the desk. Of all the people. Unable to
grasp what it signified until it was too late, Wilf begs the Doctor to not step
inside the other chamber which would release him. But it’s the Doctor, and he
would never forgive himself if he just walked away and left old Wilf to die.
Taking in the radiation
from the isolation chamber into his system, the Doctor knows that his time is
short. Taking Wilfred back home, he tells him that it won’t be the last time he
sees him, and true to his word, he returns on the day of Donna’s wedding to
give Wilfred and Sylvia Noble a lottery ticket he had bought for Donna with
money from her long since departed Dad, which would set her up for life.
Distraught that it would be the last time Wilfred would ever meet the Doctor,
he salutes the Time Lord before the Doctor returns to the TARDIS.
The Doctor, wanders back
down memory lane, saving Martha Jones and Mickey Smith who are now married,
from a Sontaran attack. He rescues Luke Smith from a near fatal car accident
after he steps into the road, while talking on his phone, and waves a fond
farewell to Sarah Jane Smith. At an alien cantina, with Adipose, Hath and
Judoon to name but a few creatures socialising, he introduces Captain Jack
Harkness to Midshipman Alonso Frame. Which means that, perhaps he really did
know about the 456 and the sacrifices that had cost Jack his family and lover.
He visits Verity Newman’s
book signing and asks if Joan was happy, when she informs him that she was, he
smiles enigmatically. After Wilf’s final meeting he visits Rose Tyler three
months before she meets the 9th Doctor and informs her that she’ll
have “a really great year.”
And as he staggers across
the snow covered ground, Ood Sigma appears and tells him that the Universe will
sing him to sleep and that “this song is ending, but the story never ends.”
“I don’t want to go.”
As regenerations go, the
whole body changing also brought an end to the coral struts of the TARDIS,
including blowing the hexagonal lights and setting fire to the console. Soon it
was goodbye 10th and hello 11th, and the gangly legs of
Matt Smith checking to see if he were ginger yet, before realising that, oh
yeah, they were crashing. Grabbing the controls, he screams his trademark
catchphrase:
‘Geronimo!’
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