![]() ![]() There’s something respectable about Moffat’s approach any time he needs a fleet of Cybermen or Daleks, they appear with little regard to canonical explanation. Davies liked being conclusive about defeating his Big Bads, which means every time they need to be resurrected, there’s an increasingly tenuous reason for their return. Feel free to add your own question marks to any of the above.Īlready, this is way too complicated. After being reborn in a tornado of light, the Master is poisoned by his human ex-wife, leaving his haggard, unstable form to scurry around junkyards with bleached blonde hair, an insatiable hunger, and a frequently glowing skeleton. Urgently, the Doctor heads for Earth, where he’s reunited with the elderly Wilfred, the grandfather of his latest companion Donna, whose memory the Doctor wiped after she became genetically spliced with his DNA. There’s no better choice for a Doctor’s final adventure Daleks can be so impersonal, if you want to hit a Time Lord where it hurts, bring back the man who knows him best. The Doctor is told by his good friends the Ood (through a lovely Brian Cox cameo) that his archenemy and fellow Time Lord, the Master, is returning. I just wish it was pulled off more smoothly. It’s chock-full of intended and unintentional silliness, and after stumbling its way to the finish line, it ends on a series of back-to-back high notes. Themes of fate and sacrifice clash against wacky hijinks. ![]() So it’s fitting that the two-part special “The End of Time” encapsulates the best and worst of the Davies era and the Tennant incarnation. But the seams in both the scripts and production aligned Davies’ tenure closely with the classic Doctor Who run, where they shot for the moon and worked around their limitations to create an exciting universe out of reusable sets and many, many corridors. Besides overplaying broad comedy, tonal whiplash was common, derivations of popular sci-fi stories were guaranteed, and frequently a big, explosive story usually resolved with every character standing in one room talking to each other (a screenwriting trap I have yet to learn how to avoid). Some problems he couldn’t help (credit has to be given to production designers for scraping every penny possible from a tiny BBC budget piggy bank), but others were uniquely his. We’re meant to see his flaws.īut not everything characteristic of Davies’ era was golden. In an appropriate act of out-of-time subversion, Tennant’s penultimate adventure sees him deal a fiery sermon at how powerful his loneliness has made him-not unlike those repeated at twice the length and half the meaning in the following Steven Moffat era-before he is dealt a thundering hubristic blow that makes him reconsider his place in time and space. The Doctor wasn’t there to cure every ill that plagued time and space, he was there to show you empathy and kindness, more likely to show you the limits of his powers than the awesome nature of them. The most startling moments weren’t climactic confrontations or impassioned, overwritten speeches, but the tender moments where lost people reached out for help. They’d burst with affable charisma and bounce off each other with overpowering chemistry. Like the inside of the Doctor’s time machine, rooms always felt bigger with Davies’ characters in them. Sure, Doctor Who would still be a sweet, cheeky, bit-too-clever sci-fi adventure, but something unmistakable about the characters, the mood and the stories told would go away. Across a two-part special on Christmas 2009 and New Year’s Day 2010, not only did Tennant explode into a new, even skinnier version, the show’s steward and pioneer Russell T. And yet, like a struggling but stubborn driving student, all things must eventually pass. At the end of Season 1, I was convinced I’d never be on board with Christopher Eccleston’s replacement-but soon into the debut season of the skinny, spiky-haired, Scottish prettyboy David Tennant, a new love was born within me. I was borderline hysterical about Doctor Who for the first five years of its revived tenure. Fresh off the back of a stumbling Obi-Wan Kenobi, and resolute that a certain magical world has ceased to conjure any joy, you could empathize with the caution with which I regard the regeneration of my only other childhood obsession: Russell T. We’ve reached a point of legacy entertainment saturation where our familiarity with how safe the return of beloved characters will be played triggers more hesitance than excitement. ![]()
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