My thoughts on the Doctor Who finale (season 4)

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I was working (from home) last night, scheduled to run some tests after a major systems maintenance. Most of the following was written between 10pm and 2am while I was setting up the preliminaries and checking in for progress updates. And re-watching “Journey’s End” and the Confidential on iPlayer - make the BBC see we’re there!).

It was flawed. Some holes were large enough to drive a truck through. But it was also pure genius at times. I’m still totally Doctor Who’d out. So here some incoherent observations. Do I have to say, don’t read on if you don’t want to be spoilered?

• Much darker than The Stolen Earth. Even while re-watching I only laughed out loud once (at “What?! Who invented THAT? Well, someone called Osterhagen I suppose. Martha, are you insane?”)
• Music used to good effect inserting a jarring note into moments of triumph.
• Really glad RTD didn’t use yet another reset button. Relieved in fact.
• That cop-out regeneration! RTD says it himself in the Confidential: he just wanted the biggest cliffhanger imaginable — and this, dear RTD, sums up your limitation as a writer! People are bound to bedisappointed if huge cliffhangers lead up to one-minute pat solutions (like in Silence in the Library, Utopia, Doomsday…)! To your honour, the availability of stored regeneration energy then became a major plot point, but the harm was done.
  
• “Exterminieren” as the German translation of “exterminate” — well. It’s a bit dodgy, but the word (like German equivalents of just about anything that’s a Latinate word in English or French) is in German dictionaries. Canonically you’d say “ausrotten“, but hell, “exterminate” would be unidiomatical English, too, for shooting a person (except if you’re a Dalek).
• It made sense that the Daleks would speak German in Germany. Contrary to what I’ve read online, their German isn’t grammatically incorrect (though it has an English accent). What they’re saying is “Exterminieren, exterminieren! Halt, sonst werden wir sie exterminieren. Sie sind jetzt ein Gefangener der Daleks.” (”Exterminate, exterminate! Stop, otherwise we will exterminate you. You’re now a prisoner of the Daleks.”) They use the formal “sie” as an address, which is weird, and isn’t as snappy as I’d expect Gestapo-Daleks to be, but it’s a fair stab at German. As for Martha’s German, it was fine and believable for an army-trained special-op.
• It did NOT make sense to label a place as “60 miles outside Nuremberg”. Dear Doctor Who team, go and look up the population density of Germany (almost identical to that of the UK on the average). A draw a sixty-mile circle around Nuremberg gets you half-way to Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Praha, Erfurt or Munich. The cities or major towns of Würzburg, Inglostadt and Regensburg lie right on the edge of the circle. Also, if you want to resurrect the Nuremberg-Nazi reference, “5 miles outside of Nuremberg” is far enough to find picturesque mansions inside spooky forests. (I lived the first 20 years of my life inside that circle, so that one ticks me off more than it would others. It is irrelevant for my enjoyment of the episode. End Germany rant here!)
• I didn’t get a good view of the Crucible in The Stolen Earth. Reminded me a bit of the Death Star this time.
• We knew that, but RTD needs some physics lessons if he’s ever to write sci-fi again. “Z-neutrino energy” is not quite as bad as the fluid mechanics in The Poison Sky, but neutrinos are notthe elementary particle of choice for bomb-making: they’re really reluctant to interact with matter at all, let alone blow it apart. Then there was the planetary alignment field, excessive amounts of technobabble, and the strange gravitational properties of the Moon, patiently waiting for the Earth’s return, yeah sure!
• Masterful pacing of the episode with the moral climax happening between 30-33min (the “revelation of the Doctor’s soul”), followed by the action climax, and the tear-jerkers.
• I got wet eyes in the flying-the-Tardis scene.
• What gave this finale more depth and breadth than a great romp & enjoyable spectacle, and indeed excuses for me many of the gaffes, was the wrapping-up of the “what is the nature of humanity” and “what makes us resort to violence and destruction” theme. It was Kevin Marks who pointed out the essence of why I love some of the newer sci-fi and fantasy: addressing questions of morality heads-on, without preachiness or, $deity forbid, religion as “the solution”. This episode, or indeed entire series, adds a layer: the moral ambiguity of the doctor himself. And there were some terrible moments. Sarah Jane, the one of the children of time who most consistenly choses the non-violent option, turning into a suicide bomber. Wow, that hit home.
• Something that’s been occurring to me all through this season are the parallels between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Doctor. Both are lost without their friends and would be unable to complete the extraordinary feats they have to. The fundamental difference is not that Buffy is a teenage girl and the Doctor wise and old. The difference is that Buffy is fundamentally a normal human, and the Doctor is essentially not.
• Around 45min: Tardis needs OpenID! Or OAuth, rather.
• Donna crushing on Captain Jack, who does not even give her a first let alone second look (she must be the only humanoid being in the entire universe!) fell totally flat. Except possibly at the end, when she’s succumbing to that manic, insane state.
• As Billie Piper says herself in the Confidential, her kissing the Doctor 2 on Bad Wolf Bay feels wrong, because he is a different person from the one she’s in love with, even though the two share memories and physical appearance.
• As for Donna’s fate… I was expecting her to be the one to be killed, firstly from elimination, and also because of all the foreshadowing up to and including the episode’s very title. When she and Doctor 1 finally were alone in the Tardis, I still expected her to literally die, and in one of two ways. Either just from physical collapse, the likely version and would have been the equivalent of a companion dying in battle. Or by going out of her mind, becoming a megalomaniac and potentially an evil renegade timelord, teaming up with the Master, why not, and being killed by the Doctor — impossible to pull off inside an already over-full episode. What really happened was more terrible and tragic than either of these. If we are the sum of our actions, choices and experiences, then Donna, who had grown from a stunted personality into nothing less than a heroine, suffers a fate that is, indeed, arguably worse than death. I held my breath wondering if the doctor was about to rather kill her.

It’s been a slightly odd season. Unlike previous ones, there was not a single episode I found abominably bad. Some were playing up to fans, which I can’t help at the same time enjoying and disliking. There were none that gave me the same sort of feeling as “Blink” or even “Gridlock” did. As an arc, the series created an uneasiness that was, however, spectacularly well played out in the finale. Hats off.

(Oh, and I’m glad Tennant is staying, at least for a bit, and very curious if Moffat will be able to live up to his considerable talent.)

chris @ July 6, 2008