WHOSCALE: 7.5 out of 10
With the close of "The Waters Of Mars," most viewers were certain that the Tenth Doctor's end was near. Apart from the animated "Dreamland," this marks the only multi-part story of the revived series to feature the same episode title for all parts, with each part labeled "Part One," "Part Two," etc.
There is quite a lot to cover in this review because Davies had so much he wanted to do with this finale, being that it was also the last story he would contribute to the series. That said, virtually all of the loose ends he's left throughout the series thusfar had to be taken care of now, mainly because with Steven Moffat taking over as Executive Producer for
the series at the start of Series 5 (Season 31) wanted a clean slate to work from with the Eleventh Doctor.
John Simm reprises his role as the The Master, and his performance is as brilliant as ever. Once again, he does a magnificent job of portraying the mad Master, even more so now with a botched resurrection resulting in an insatiable appetite for food. This insatiability is so extreme that The Master resorts to cannibalism.
There is of course, a few things that I think were a bit over done or otherwise pointless in this episode. Most of these things will be nothing my readers haven't heard me rant about in previous stories penned by Russell T Davies, because they have become such a staple item for his writing.
First and foremost was probably the music for me. Throughout the episode, I had the BBC Orchestra of Wales blasting my eardrums, even at times when the on screen action was very, very subtle. One such time is the opening sequence with Wilfred in the church. Moments after the mysterious woman vanishes, and Wilfred notices the depiction of the TARDIS in the stained glass window, the music is excessively bombastic. I know I sound like a broken record about it, but this level of orchestrated music just doesn't fit the tech-savvy sci-fi that Doctor Who is meant to be. It works for films like Star Wars and StarGate, because those respective films were the first of their kind, and thus we had nothing to compare them too. In the case of Doctor Who, it's my opinion that the revived series has a select set of standards it must live up to in order of being worthy of diehard fans' acceptance. These standards were set by the original series, and thus showed the world "this is what Doctor Who is like." Fans of any kind of cult sci-fi series are always weary of remakes and resurrections, because the last decade has shown so many ill-fated attempts, with the likes of Battlestar: Galactica, Hawaii 5-0, Transformers, Star Trek, Inspector Clouseau, Beverly Hills: 90210, Dragnet, Get Smart, The Love Boat, The Twilight Zone, Knight Rider, Bionic Woman, Melrose Place, V, Dallas....the list is almost endless. There have been so many bad remakes that I had to google a list of them. At any rate, it should be no surprise that Doctor Who fans were biting their nails when it was announced that the BBC was resurrecting it. While Dudley Simpson and several others performed orchestrated music for the original series, it was always used sparingly, and when it was used, was subtle comparable to the likes of "Blink."
Enough about the music. The second Davies mark was the character introduced for comic relief aimed at the kids watching. This time, it came in the form of the Vinvocci duo Rossiter and Addams. These two characters have about the same exact role - both in story and out - as Dr. Malcolm did in "Planet Of The Dead." Their behavior is often intentionally clumsy and goofy, in much the way Mickey Smith was in "Boom Town." The original series was often dotted with humor, mainly from one-liners by The Doctor, but it seldom required characters at the forefront specifically for comic relief. As I said in an earlier review, something that Davies did not understand and Moffat did was the fact that kids of all ages didn't care that it was super scary - they KNOW it's scary. That's why their watching. Of course, those kids are too young to see the obvious difference between tones in a cannibalistic Master eating people and a duo of green, cactus-looking aliens bumbling around like a Saturday morning cartoon. Nevertheless, the younger audience praised "Blink" and "Silence In The Library" for the sheer terror those stories provided, and thought they could not see it, their reasons for liking those episodes more was because they weren't pampered every ten minutes. Moffat knows they don't want to be. Honestly, if children were so terrified of the monsters on Doctor Who, they wouldn't watch it.
The third issue is not much a common Davies mark as it is the way he treated Tennant's regeneration. With all previous Doctors, the regeneration process was never a time of sorrow, because the man wasn't dying, just changing his outward appearance and maybe his behavior a little. The memories, knowledge, and soul was always still there. However, Davies knew that there were atleast a few million fan girls out there already broken hearted that their precious David Tennant...errr...Doctor was soon meeting his end. Because of that, Tennant's regeneration was treated as exactly that - an end. The scene with Wilfred and The Doctor in the cafe' verbally illustrates this, with a teary-eyed Doctor out right saying that he would cease to exist, that he would die, and another man takes his place and flies away. This is perhaps the biggest misconception of what regeneration is ever. If each incarnation did as Davies depicts and utterly died, to be replaced with a new man, then each incarnation would be totally and absolutely different from the last, with no recollection of his previous adventures. This served as a sort of early morning brain washing for the Tennant lovers, and instantly struck them with a sense of hatred for the newcoming Matt Smith. As a result, many fans were protesting, saying that the show would no longer be Doctor Who and that it would suck after Matt Smith took over, even though they had not even seen Matt in anything yet. The way the regeneration from Eccleston into Tennant is the way it should have been handled here. Rather than have a long, grueling build-up, it should have been on the spot and last minute, like all of Tennant's predecessors. It felt like a lot what Davies was doin
g with Tennant's final hours was specifically aimed at broken hearted teenagers, who only needed to see one tear from The Doctor before they buried their face in the sofa bawling.
Naturally, this episode contains some meaningless drama, namely the scene where The Doctor meets The Master in the wasteland for a second time. The Master pulls a Emperor Palpatine move and shoots lightning at The Doctor, causing climatic explosions behind him, which he doesn't even seem to notice. The Master gets enough of being mocked, and lands a shot right in The Doctor's chest. Strangely, this is enough to knock him down, but he soon recovers.
The transition from human race into Master race was done well, i thought. Rather than some fancy CGI light show that regeneration has become, it was more of a camera trick. It was neat how once the process had started, the people would fluctuate between person and Master before ultimately becoming a doppleganger of The Master.
The final scene shows the narrator of the episode to be James Bond....err....Lord Bond....errr...James Rassilon....err...anyway, Timothy Dalton stars as a Time Lord in a final scene that can be described as nothing less than a rip off from the senate scene from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
With that left only one final installment in the RTD era.
There is quite a lot to cover in this review because Davies had so much he wanted to do with this finale, being that it was also the last story he would contribute to the series. That said, virtually all of the loose ends he's left throughout the series thusfar had to be taken care of now, mainly because with Steven Moffat taking over as Executive Producer for
the series at the start of Series 5 (Season 31) wanted a clean slate to work from with the Eleventh Doctor.John Simm reprises his role as the The Master, and his performance is as brilliant as ever. Once again, he does a magnificent job of portraying the mad Master, even more so now with a botched resurrection resulting in an insatiable appetite for food. This insatiability is so extreme that The Master resorts to cannibalism.
There is of course, a few things that I think were a bit over done or otherwise pointless in this episode. Most of these things will be nothing my readers haven't heard me rant about in previous stories penned by Russell T Davies, because they have become such a staple item for his writing.
First and foremost was probably the music for me. Throughout the episode, I had the BBC Orchestra of Wales blasting my eardrums, even at times when the on screen action was very, very subtle. One such time is the opening sequence with Wilfred in the church. Moments after the mysterious woman vanishes, and Wilfred notices the depiction of the TARDIS in the stained glass window, the music is excessively bombastic. I know I sound like a broken record about it, but this level of orchestrated music just doesn't fit the tech-savvy sci-fi that Doctor Who is meant to be. It works for films like Star Wars and StarGate, because those respective films were the first of their kind, and thus we had nothing to compare them too. In the case of Doctor Who, it's my opinion that the revived series has a select set of standards it must live up to in order of being worthy of diehard fans' acceptance. These standards were set by the original series, and thus showed the world "this is what Doctor Who is like." Fans of any kind of cult sci-fi series are always weary of remakes and resurrections, because the last decade has shown so many ill-fated attempts, with the likes of Battlestar: Galactica, Hawaii 5-0, Transformers, Star Trek, Inspector Clouseau, Beverly Hills: 90210, Dragnet, Get Smart, The Love Boat, The Twilight Zone, Knight Rider, Bionic Woman, Melrose Place, V, Dallas....the list is almost endless. There have been so many bad remakes that I had to google a list of them. At any rate, it should be no surprise that Doctor Who fans were biting their nails when it was announced that the BBC was resurrecting it. While Dudley Simpson and several others performed orchestrated music for the original series, it was always used sparingly, and when it was used, was subtle comparable to the likes of "Blink."
Enough about the music. The second Davies mark was the character introduced for comic relief aimed at the kids watching. This time, it came in the form of the Vinvocci duo Rossiter and Addams. These two characters have about the same exact role - both in story and out - as Dr. Malcolm did in "Planet Of The Dead." Their behavior is often intentionally clumsy and goofy, in much the way Mickey Smith was in "Boom Town." The original series was often dotted with humor, mainly from one-liners by The Doctor, but it seldom required characters at the forefront specifically for comic relief. As I said in an earlier review, something that Davies did not understand and Moffat did was the fact that kids of all ages didn't care that it was super scary - they KNOW it's scary. That's why their watching. Of course, those kids are too young to see the obvious difference between tones in a cannibalistic Master eating people and a duo of green, cactus-looking aliens bumbling around like a Saturday morning cartoon. Nevertheless, the younger audience praised "Blink" and "Silence In The Library" for the sheer terror those stories provided, and thought they could not see it, their reasons for liking those episodes more was because they weren't pampered every ten minutes. Moffat knows they don't want to be. Honestly, if children were so terrified of the monsters on Doctor Who, they wouldn't watch it.
The third issue is not much a common Davies mark as it is the way he treated Tennant's regeneration. With all previous Doctors, the regeneration process was never a time of sorrow, because the man wasn't dying, just changing his outward appearance and maybe his behavior a little. The memories, knowledge, and soul was always still there. However, Davies knew that there were atleast a few million fan girls out there already broken hearted that their precious David Tennant...errr...Doctor was soon meeting his end. Because of that, Tennant's regeneration was treated as exactly that - an end. The scene with Wilfred and The Doctor in the cafe' verbally illustrates this, with a teary-eyed Doctor out right saying that he would cease to exist, that he would die, and another man takes his place and flies away. This is perhaps the biggest misconception of what regeneration is ever. If each incarnation did as Davies depicts and utterly died, to be replaced with a new man, then each incarnation would be totally and absolutely different from the last, with no recollection of his previous adventures. This served as a sort of early morning brain washing for the Tennant lovers, and instantly struck them with a sense of hatred for the newcoming Matt Smith. As a result, many fans were protesting, saying that the show would no longer be Doctor Who and that it would suck after Matt Smith took over, even though they had not even seen Matt in anything yet. The way the regeneration from Eccleston into Tennant is the way it should have been handled here. Rather than have a long, grueling build-up, it should have been on the spot and last minute, like all of Tennant's predecessors. It felt like a lot what Davies was doin
g with Tennant's final hours was specifically aimed at broken hearted teenagers, who only needed to see one tear from The Doctor before they buried their face in the sofa bawling.Naturally, this episode contains some meaningless drama, namely the scene where The Doctor meets The Master in the wasteland for a second time. The Master pulls a Emperor Palpatine move and shoots lightning at The Doctor, causing climatic explosions behind him, which he doesn't even seem to notice. The Master gets enough of being mocked, and lands a shot right in The Doctor's chest. Strangely, this is enough to knock him down, but he soon recovers.
The transition from human race into Master race was done well, i thought. Rather than some fancy CGI light show that regeneration has become, it was more of a camera trick. It was neat how once the process had started, the people would fluctuate between person and Master before ultimately becoming a doppleganger of The Master.
The final scene shows the narrator of the episode to be James Bond....err....Lord Bond....errr...James Rassilon....err...anyway, Timothy Dalton stars as a Time Lord in a final scene that can be described as nothing less than a rip off from the senate scene from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
With that left only one final installment in the RTD era.
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