ScuzzBuster.net
It's Crunchy. It's Nice.
Doctor Who: Journey's End
July 06 2008 22:53 Filed in:
Television
To set the record straight, I had a little bit of apprehension after The Stolen Earth. But I also was thoroughly jazzed by the scale of it all and the undeniably shocking cliffhanger. I really enjoyed it despite it being kind of a jumbled mess of crazy events and too many characters. It was a fanwank episode and it served a fanwanker like me quite well. My only concern was that RTD was going to cop out of it. I don’t think he did. Like the finale or not, I think he played it fair rather than just erasing or resetting a time line.
However, I am just brimming with conflicted feelings about what we’ve seen. The story continues oozing the nostalgia for recent history bringing back almost every character that’s had more than a few lines across a couple of episodes since the start. Ultimately though, what I saw was Russell T. Davies taking all his investment in the show as a writer and creator over the past four years and shoving it at the fans and saying HERE’S EVERYTHING I’VE DONE! ISN’T IT GRAND? It felt like RTD was pandering not only to the fans, but also to him-self. All the stories he’s written and concepts he’s nurtured since the start he felt we needed to rehash. Admittedly, there’s probably nothing wrong with that at face value.
What IS wrong with it in my mind is very disturbing. Before I start the laundry list, let me review what I liked.
First, I have to give huge credit to the handling of Donna’s character at the end. In my eyes, it was just as painful as Rose’s goodbye in Doomsday. We’ve seen Donna’s “death” foreshadowed all season, but what we got was a fate for her that is so wrong, so twisted, that it hurt a helluva lot more than if she had just out right died.
Watching the character grow from a brash, irritating, shallow thing into a rich, interesting person with values and admirable strengths was such a great trip with Catherine Tate over the series that I hadn’t really realized how much she had grown until it was ripped shamelessly away from her at the end by eliminating her memory of it all. I loved this resolution. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so utterly horrified for a character in the history of the show. The see the “pre” Doctor Donna gabbing away on the phone at the end was just damned painful. Cheers! RTD, you held up your end of the bargain…you in didn’t kill Donna Noble, you destroyed her while leaving her alive. Nice work. I took some balls to do that if you’ll forgive the expression.
Second, the conflict on the Dalek crucible where Davros decides that his final “gift” to the Doctor will be humble humiliation was another stroke of brilliance in the script. It’s always powerful when we see a devil’s advocate point of view of a character that we hadn’t considered before. All his work for the sake of peace and good had come at the cost of him using his companions as weapons of destruction. Whenever your hero gets kicked down a few notches by words of truth it hurts a little bit. In this case, we have Davros, the man with no legs, doing the kicking. We are reminded of the theme that was started in the very first episode of the series revival: the Doctor’s one constant companion is death. Between this and the resolution of the Donna storyline, this saved Journey’s End for me. To have this quality of writing and character examination in the same 63 minutes of planets getting towed around the universe and mind-swaps, is – well, I’ll get to all that.
Other goodness about this episode: Liz Sladen. If I could leave my wife and marry Liz Sladen I would…as long she still had K-9 with her. We’d have to dump that kid though. I really love having Liz still involved in the program, even with her own show now. Nothing will ever have the impact of her confrontation with the Doctor in front of the TARDIS in School Reunion…I still get a chill when I watch that scene. For me, that was the definitive tie that binds the new series with the old. And I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that Liz Sladen’s Sarah Jane Smith was some of the best the classic series had to offer.
Though it was pure RTD self-indulgence to include Jackie and Mickey, I was happy to see them. Of course, virtually nothing would have been lost from the story itself without them. Mickey is probably one of the best characters that RTD has nurtured over the years. He was very unlikeable and forgettable at the start of series one. we finally started warming up to him as he grew…finally cheering him on by the end of series two.
Bernard Cribbins also served this story well in addition to giving us a nice solid thread throughout the year as Donna’s grandfather. By the conclusion of Journey’s End his presence is the only slight positive that we see in Donna’s new future.
Freema was also very good throughout both episodes as Martha Jones. I still believe that she has very limited range as an actress and was really an albatross around the neck of series 3, but she’s hit just the right note this time around. It’s strongly implied as she goes off with Captain Jack at the end that she’s destined to be a regular on Torchwood this coming year, so hopefully she can maintain what she’s started and give that show a little lift.
David Tennant. I firmly believe now that Tennant is about one solid series away from surpassing or at least equaling Tom Baker as the most iconic character in the history of the series. He’s brilliant. Even when the material around him is questionable, his performances elevate the program. It’s in the best interests of the Moff and the BBC to tie David up for as much time as they can to play the role. With each passing year he plays this part, though, it’s going to be harder and harder for a new fan-base to move on to a new lead actor. Start to finish, he sells the series as well as this episode.
And now the other shoe drops.
I’m a fan of the show. But for the last two weeks, I’m a rubber band. Part of being a rubber band over the years watching Doctor Who is that you get stretched a little bit every episode. Crazy things happen in the show and it’s the nature of a sci-fi/fantasy series to do so. In Stolen Earth, my rubber band starts to stretch pretty tight. Jebus Cripes! We’ve taken the entire Earth out of orbit across the universe! I’m stretched even more. Okay, so there’s some sort of protective force-field or shell holding in the atmosphere and heat so everyone can survive. Stretching further, but I’m still with it, I’ll buy it. Twenty-Six other planets all jammed together with the Earth but there really doesn’t seem to be any catastrophic atmospheric or gravitational consequences. Okay, I’m stretched really tight now but starting to crack…I’m still suspending my disbelief because I’m enjoying it.
Now let’s jump to the Journey’s End. After commenting that the power to move a planet was something to be in awe of in last week’s episode, let’s just hook the damned planet Earth to a tow rope and tote it across the universe. This is just wrong. As grand as the scene was…it’s just plain WRONG. That’s where the rubber band broke for me. I could have dealt with just about any other way to get it back than that. Even as a long-time, die-hard fan of the show, this was just too damned silly. Hooray! Everything is back to normal save for a few broken windows and jumbled belongings. Oh, almost forgot, it’s going to rain a bit more than usual due to “atmospheric” disturbances for a while. No. I can’t swallow this one.
With all that in consideration, though, there’s another aspect to the whole “Earth-towing” scene that made it even more disturbing for the show. The Doctor should not have this kind of power. This takes the character to a whole new level at which he doesn’t belong. Going all the way back to Trial of a Time Lord, moving planets was not something you just do at a whim or all the time. But now we have the Doctor in a seriously damaged old TARDIS, just able to hitch it up and go. If the Doctor has this kind of power at his disposal, what are we supposed to see thrown at him going forward that will remotely seem like a challenge? Apart from the implausibility of it all, this was just way beyond what I want to see the Doctor able to do.
This whole thing needs to be put behind us historically, but can it?. Now we have this monkey on our back. I can just imagine watching an upcoming episode and thinking “Hell, if he can move a damned planet with the TARDIS, this particular cosmic problem should be nothing.” Ultimately, this damages the show in ways that I hope are repairable.
Okay, that’s out, my rubber band broke already, so the rest is just going to be a little rant.
The implications of a “clone” Doctor are fairly serious. It was too much for me. I can take the craziness of it all and this alone would not have broken the rubber band. However, starting with the technobabble explanation (or biobabble in this context) of how this could happen, it just felt that this was a square plot development being pounded into a round plot. I almost felt that RTD went this route only to pander to the “shipper” fans that were still longing for a romantic Rose and Doctor resolution, so he blasted over the top and gave it to them at the expense of common sense and credibility.
In fairness, Donna’s emergence with the Doctor’s intellect ultimately saving the day was a fun and playful scene that couldn’t help but make you smile, but at the end of the day we are left asking a whole boatload of philosophical and existential questions about the creation of Doctor clone and the “Doctor Donna” hybrid. This is all beyond the utter simplicity, speed, and “magic” that it happend. I hate mind swaps all the way back to New Earth. Technically, I guess this was a mind “share” but this whole energy mysticism that surrounds the Doctor now is just starting to become an annoyance.
Through this Doctor clone we finally find out that indeed, the Doctor was in love with Rose, but for all intents and purposes, the clone WAS the Doctor with all his memories. Essentially, he was the same man with a little bit of emotional scarring. Yet, this “clone” or human copy of Doctor accepts being stranded in a parallel universe with Rose…and no TARDIS. No matter how much he loved Rose, don’t we think that this clone would at least have some feelings or input on this? It almost felt that he was just kind of a “thing” for our real Doctor to with as he pleases. Nothing about how this clone was handled felt right. It left too many uneasy things to think about and try to rationalize.
Also, if there ever was a storyline that didn’t need to be taken any further, it was this one. Though Doomsday stands on it’s own merits and we will always have that final scene with the Doctor and Rose at Bad Wolf Bay as a shining moment in the series, this cheapens it a bit. As much as I wanted Billie to stay on as Rose for a while after series 2, Doomsday is where her story should have ended. It was great to see the character again, but not at this cost. Rose’s time had passed and I think we had finally gotten the sense that Doctor had moved on, but because of the accelerated pace and sheer volume of things going on in this two-parter there was no room left to explore any of this with it’s due respect. Shear will-power of great performances and chemistry between Tennant and Piper sold the final scene at Bad Wolf Bay in Journey’s End, but it was still a barely acceptable wrap-up of something that shouldn’t have been unwrapped to begin with.
I’m still amazed sometimes at the shear mix of good and bad an episode like Journey’s End can be. It’s not the first time we get this kind of mix, either. When the credits rolled, I have to admit, I was smiling and I had been entertained by the story for the most part, but it was a hollow victory for the sake of over-the-top entertainment. I could go on about how much RTD has done for Doctor Who and fandom in general over the last four years, and that can’t be taken away from him, but that is for another time. Overall, I like the vision he had for the show and the skill with which he executed it, but I’m all for seeing what new directions our quest might follow in the coming years. The first four series of Doctor Who in the 21st century will probably be remembered as another “golden age” for the program if it continues for many more years, but I don’t think any of us would complain if our historical perspective on 2005-2008 ends up being a great ramp up to an exciting new era for the show.