Friday, 1 July 2016

Articles Not Another Episode Breakdown - Doctor Who: The End of Time, Part 2


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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