The End of Time

Well. Yes. Thank goodness that’s over really. I mean there’s stuff to like in there, don’t get me wrong, and it’s very very VERY epic, looks amazing in HD and all that. AND it has Timothy freaking Dalton as Rassilon, which is bloody brilliant, and Bernard Cribbins also being bloody brilliant, but at the end of the day, it’s hard to say that was ‘good’.

It's flippin' Timothy Dalton!

The Master is back, brought to life by some sort of witchcraft it seems which beggars belief honestly what a load of rot. John Simms however gives a great performance over the two parts, that I can’t fault, but the things RTD writes for the Master are not particularly well thought out or interesting. In particular his need to eat, the speed at which he devours food and humans, and more so the entire plotline of turning everyone on Earth into himself. That to me was just a gimmick. Ok, probably not a cheap one, but a gimmick none the less. Then we have Barack Obama’s plan to bring about economic prosperity which is written in as if it was aimed at 6 year olds.

John Simm (the Master) is up to some odd stuff..

We have RTD’s treatment of Donna, who ends up getting married in the end as if that’s the most satisfying way to resolve her character arc. After the brilliant use of Donna over series four, finale excepted, this was really unsatisfying. Then we have the last fifteen minutes where the Doctor, knowing the end is nigh, still has time to go and see everyone he’s met during his tenth incarnation when you just want him to DIE. Well, I did, it went on forever.

Sorry to all those into Doctor Who solely because of David Tennant’s hair.

Then we have the Time Lords. And personally, despite the awesomeness of Timothy FREAKING Dalton, I think they should have stayed locked in the time war. I guess there wasn’t anything bigger to bring back and RTD wanted a big finish for himself and David Tennant. And it is epic. I’ll give him that. But sadly this episode, these episodes, are a reflection of the parts of the era that I didn’t like – the overblown finale solved by touching a button, or in this case, shooting a gun at a machine.

He doesn't want to go. Which is why, I guess, he takes so long to do it!

The Master is just weird in this. Bouncing about in the air like a jack-rabbit, eating a turkey in a few seconds, Rassilon has a bizarre metal glove which zaps people a lot, we have the Naismith guy and his daughter who are barely used and stupid typical RTD characters who merely serve a purpose in the script. BUT it is in HD, and has an awesome sequence where the Doctor pilots the space ship back to Earth and Star Wars memories are invoked as Wilfred Mott shoots a laser cannon at incoming missiles.

And David Tennant. Look, my impression actually improved of the tenth Doctor as he went along, only the first David Tennant series really annoyed me, he was just too smug and a lot of that was to do with Rose. Oh by the way, Bille Piper has clearly had work done on her lips, evident also in series 4. Those lips just looking plain creepy now. I find it very hard to reconcile that the love of the Doctor’s life is a 19 year old girl. I’m sorry, I do and that’s RTD’s fault.

So long Bernard Cribbins, it's been an honour.

Tennant works best with Donna, a wonderful balance between the two lit up the show for a year, and he’s not bad with Bernard Cribbins either, that was a wonderful piece of casting and who thought the ‘companion’ for the last Tennant adventure would be someone approaching 80 years old, and male?

The RTD era is now over. If you take the series finales out and this one, which is effectively the Daddy of all series finales, then I think generally the episodes have been excellent. His casting has been good too, David Tennant being the most popular Doctor ever, and Christopher Eccleston, in my opinion, as perfect a casting job as could be dreamt of. I really loved Eccleston as the Doctor, it was an inspired choice. Billie Piper was a risk that turned out to be genius, and Catherine Tate was even better. Freema Ageyman was less successful, she starts off well but the writing for Martha unfortunately waned, and I think to be honest, some of the things they asked her to do at the end of series 3 and when she returned in series four were a bit beyond her range.

As a writer, opinion is divided on RTD. The man who wrote the each series finale also contributed – ‘Rose’, ‘Midnight’, ‘Turn Left’, and ‘Utopia’ amongst other episodes. All brilliant in my books. He shaped the seasons well, and he got better at it each year. Series arcs, character development, all that stuff he was great at. Was there too strong an emphasis on emotions? Probably. Was the Tennant-Piper pairing grating. Definitely. But the guy brought the show back. He made it a hit. I forgive him his foibles. All of them.

As for ‘The End of Time’, I wish I could give it a great score. But it really is awful!

2/10

Silver Nemesis

Anton Differing.

Bleh. What total and utter bleh. I don’t know what to say, but this story is rubbish. The Cybermen are rubbish. Cricket glove hands and a fallibility not just to gold but to gold coins. Nazis? Totally superfluous to the plot, indulgent crap by writer Kevin Clarke who thankfully never wrote for Doctor Who again. Not his fault though that this story has a nearly identical plot with a carbon copy resolution to ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’. Andrew Cartmel, why did you let this through?

'Excellent'? No. Not even a little.

Fiona Walker as Peinforte.

This sudden mysteriousness of the Doctor is offset by the fact that McCoy is not very mysterious. I liked Lady Peinforte – beautifully cast, Fiona Walker was perfect. Anton Differing as De Flores, the Nazi, is hilarious as he doesn’t seem to know what his lines mean, let alone what the story is about. In fact the casting is great, but it doesn’t get them out because the script is utter shite and the story looks very very cheap. It’s supposed to be the 25^th anniversary special for Pete’s sake! Not even the brilliance of the Dolores Gray cameo can save this.

It’s just a run around for three

The Nemesis statue.

episodes, with a lot of setups for jokes and amusing situations which would work in a sketch comedy show, but there’s no substance to this at all. Everyone wants the nemesis statue and they round around fields for three episodes trying to get it and then it destroys the Cyber-fleet. This Doctor likes destroying things it seems.

Delores Gray.

Nice shots of Ace up on the gantries in the factory shooting Cybermen with coins. Pity the idea Cybermen could be so easily killed in bollocks. I mean the whole thing features some great locations, but there is no substance to the story at ALL. Terence Dudley’s scripts have more to them. ‘Delta and the Bannerman’ had more to it. Pft.

1/10

Delta and the Bannermen

Don Henderson as Gavrok

I am lost for words. Questions arise after ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ such as, is it worse than ‘Time and the Rani’? I mean honestly, this three episodes is best forgotten as one of the laziest Doctor Who productions ever. Perhaps it is not quite the depths of McCoy’s first tale, not quite, but after a decent first episode this story descends into farce, and not the entertaining kind. In fact it is pretty boring and bad, with background music worse than ‘Paradise Towers’, by the same guy, Keff McCulloch.

I don’t mind the use of rock and roll music, and the location was rather

Burton rallies the troops.

nice, but this is the most lightweight Doctor Who story ever made, with a couple of shocking deaths thrown in for what reason I am not sure, maybe the writer, Malcolm Kohll, hoped people would take the story seriously if he murdered a bus load of tourists and then moved on quickly after a brief Mel scream.

It’s not fair to Bonnie Langford to go on about her screaming. She didn’t direct the thing or write the thing after all. Mel has a good positive energy ruined by her screaming at the most insignificant things. Delta starts off with a guest appearance by Ken Dodd, who later gets shot in the back by Gavrock (Don Henderson) who spends his time spitting and eating raw meat.

There are some awful examples of dialogue in this story. Sylvester McCoy struggles over a number of lines, but that’s not his fault, the lines are purely to explain plot points and Kohll and Cartmel clearly spent no time going over them and considering that people had to say the lines.

Who is Gavrock and the Bannermen? Who is Delta and the Chimerons? Why do we care? Oh, we don’t! I like comedy in Doctor Who, honestly I do, but season 24’s comedy is not funny,

Sara Griffiths with Sylvester McCoy

quirky or endearing, but smacks of true desperation. Whereas I felt that the director and design rather than the author were responsible for ‘Paradise Towers’ turning out far poorer than it could have been, here the issues start with the scripting, the lack of detail, the lack of strong character  writing(with a couple of exceptions, Burton (Richard Burton) is wonderful for example) and pure laziness.

The Doctor runs up to Goronwy (Hugh Lloyd, a wonderful veteran actor by the way) and says we need this and that and this, he’s never met

the guy before, Goronwy replies with, ‘Ok, come this way. I’m Goronwy by the way.’ Or something to that effect and simplicity. Huh? I mean come on that’s purely amateur stuff from Kohll and Cartmel should have been all over it like a rash. Ok, this season was cobbled together very quickly and maybe there just wasn’t time, but this is what is left for Doctor Who fans to watch FOREVER. They rehearsed this stuff too, surely the actors could have taken a few liberties.

Stubby Kaye and Morgan Deare make rather fine guest appearances, so that’s something, and I thought Ken Dodd was rather amusing too. The effects went from good to dreadful. The space ship landing on Earth looks like what it is – a cut out picture lowered to a spot on the picture. No doubt it was a shot that took little time and money to achieve, and I understand that these things were in short supply, but after seeing what was possible in the previous season, it is still very disappointing.

Stubby Kaye and Morgan Deare

We have a whole back story the writer and script editor decided was irrelevant. Why the ‘Bannermen’? Because they had a sort of banner on their back? Why would eating Chimeron food turn the very wooden Billy, involved in the second-least-convincing romance in Doctor Who history with Delta (also played in a very wooden way) into a Chimeron? It makes no sense at all. Clever ending by boosting the Chimeron Princess’s song to knock out the Bannermen, I liked that. And the last shot featuring Goronwy was good. Didn’t mind most of the first episode, although when the Doctor has to comfort Ray (Sara Griffiths) McCoy appears to have no idea what he should be doing.

It looks cheap at times, the story needed a lot of work on it, it’s lightweight fluff because they had 3 episodes to fill.

2/10