The End Of Time Part 1 - Comment & Grading SPOILERS
- Thread starter Tom
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I actually really dug this episode, aside from the Master's silly powers. I found it appropriately ominous. And the ending. I was just like OMFG! Great cliffhanger! As good if not better than BOBW. At least the cliffhanger itself, if not the whole episode.
It was terrible. I'm bewildered as to how. RTD has never written a bad episode, until now. The Wilf/Doctor scene in the cafe and Simm's performance are the only good things in the episode.
The Master wears guyliner? The naked Master in a wave of water and energy? He's more camp than a row of tents. The shakey heads? The continual references to Obama that seemed cynical and sarcastic. The Narrator's continued intrustions until at the 30 minute mark you think you're going to get a cliffhanger, but you don't. Then you get the exact same cliffhanger at the end?
The Master jumping into the immortality gate casting off his "poverty". The dude slept rough for one night! If you have to use naff, gumby CGI to animate a character perhaps something's wrong with the writing? Writing that would demand a character move in such absurd, ridiculous ways?
Compare this to Bad Wolf. Replace the Daleks with Time Lords and you have the same reveal. Only it worked in Bad Wolf. And it was so very empty here.
The only redeeming feature is that if you watched Androzani 1 and 2 you would not be impressed until you saw Androzani 3 and 4. But compared to RTD's Children of Earth and The Waters of Mars -- there's just a sharp drop in quality for this episode's script.
Why were the Ood there? The main plot is 10 minutes long. Master resurrected, Master fixes Immortality Gate, Master uses IG. Time Lord reveal. Why the 45 minutes of padding? You shouldn't have padding in a regeneration story.
The Master wears guyliner? The naked Master in a wave of water and energy? He's more camp than a row of tents. The shakey heads? The continual references to Obama that seemed cynical and sarcastic. The Narrator's continued intrustions until at the 30 minute mark you think you're going to get a cliffhanger, but you don't. Then you get the exact same cliffhanger at the end?
The Master jumping into the immortality gate casting off his "poverty". The dude slept rough for one night! If you have to use naff, gumby CGI to animate a character perhaps something's wrong with the writing? Writing that would demand a character move in such absurd, ridiculous ways?
Compare this to Bad Wolf. Replace the Daleks with Time Lords and you have the same reveal. Only it worked in Bad Wolf. And it was so very empty here.
The only redeeming feature is that if you watched Androzani 1 and 2 you would not be impressed until you saw Androzani 3 and 4. But compared to RTD's Children of Earth and The Waters of Mars -- there's just a sharp drop in quality for this episode's script.
Why were the Ood there? The main plot is 10 minutes long. Master resurrected, Master fixes Immortality Gate, Master uses IG. Time Lord reveal. Why the 45 minutes of padding? You shouldn't have padding in a regeneration story.
no, they couldn't and nor could Obama take over the UK. it's 2009 not fucking 1309.
Not in real life, but the United Nations in the Whoniverse has previously been established to possess greater authority than it does in the real world -- the existence of U.N.I.T., the Valiant, having provisions for removing a sitting head of government from office if he breaks U.N. treaties, etc.
But there's no evidence that the U.S. President in the Whoniverse is ruling the U.K. In real life, frankly, the President of the United States is the world's most powerful person, and this episode just reflects that fact.
Having said that, the fact that the U.S. President is Barack Obama is interesting. In "The Sound of Drums," set in 2008, we met U.S. President-elect Arthur Coleman Winters, whom the Master later assassinated. One might presume that in the Whoniverse, Obama was Winters's vice presidential candidate who then assumed office on Inauguration Day 2009 as per the 20th Amendment.
I suspect that that might not be the case, however. Torchwood: Children of Earth rather firmly establishes that the U.S. military (with the acquiescence of U.N.I.T.) staged an unofficial coup against Her Majesty's Government in the U.K., taking control of the British Army away from the Cabinet and Prime Minister from within Downing Street itself. The U.S. military then ordered the British Army to abduct 10% of the United Kingdom's children for the 4-5-6, and it is implied that the U.S. government was doing the same thing to its own people. So in Children of Earth (which I would presume was set at least one year after the Dalek Invasion, in order for the invasion's chaos to be cleaned up), the U.S. President is implicitly cast in a villainous role.
Yet here, President Obama is seen in a thoroughly positive role. Indeed, the way the character is portrayed, I'm tempted to see him as perhaps being analogous to Prime Minister Harriet Jones -- the relatively heroic politician. Now, there's some question as to when "The End of Time" is set relative to Children of Earth. Myself, I'm inclined to make things as chronologically simple as possible, and assume that Children of Earth was set in the summer of 2010, about one year after the Dalek Invasion in the summer of 2009, and that "The End of Time, Part One" is set on Christmas 2010, about six months later, since I like to presume that apart from the one-year gap, episodes take place relative to one-another roughly as far apart as their airing dates.
That raises the question of whether or not Barack Obama was the President who implicitly ordered the abduction and enslavement of millions upon millions of British and American children and illegally seized control of the United Kingdom in Children of Earth.
Given Obama's seemingly heroic role in "The End of Time, Part One," I'm inclined to think that we're not supposed to assume that he's the same guy as the unnamed President in Children of Earth. That raises the question of just how Obama managed to become President in the Whoniverse. We do know that the 4-5-6 affair forced the British Prime Minister to resign from office once the crisis was over; perhaps something similar happened with Winters's unnamed successor?
Now, I'll happily admit that this is partially because I'm politically biased as a Democrat and an Obama supporter, but I'm inclined to speculate that Winters -- with his Bush-like American chauvenism -- was the Republican candidate for President in 2008 who won the election. Winters, I would speculate, was then assassinated by the Master aboard the Valiant before taking office while serving as the United Nations representative of Earth to the Toclafane, and was succeeded by an unnamed Republican who took office on 20 January 2009. This unnamed successor -- let's presume it's John McCain, just for simplicity's sake
-- would then have been the President in office during the 2009 Dalek Invasion. Now, I for one am surprised that the White House would have survived the invasion (though considering how small the press conference room was in "The End of Time," perhaps it didn't and it's being rebuilt?), and I'd also be awfully surprised if President McCain were to survive the Daleks. But either way, he or his successor -- presumably a Republican chosen to replace Winters's VP who was then confirmed by the Congress -- would then have been in charge a year later during the 4-5-6 crisis.I can easily see a crisis of that magnitude driving all sorts of political leaders from office in the aftermath, especially if any were involved in or complicit in the scheme to kidnap children for the 4-5-6. Perhaps a whole swath of leaders, from the White House and the House and Senate leadership, were forced to resign and/or faced criminal charges -- the Speaker, the Senate President Pro Tempore, the Majority and Minority leaders, the entire Cabinet, etc. In that sort of political chaos, legally, the first person to get elected either Speaker of the House or President Pro Tempore of the Senate would instantly be elevated to the vacant U.S. Presidency. Perhaps with the House in chaos, Senator Obama managed to whip together enough of the still-officiating Senators to get himself elected Senate President Pro Tempore, thereby instantly elevating himself to the Presidency?
Not exactly democratic, but not exactly undemocratic either. Certainly it's fair to say that the crises foisted upon it by the Whoniverse -- Time Lord assassinations, Dalek invasions, alien extortion plots -- might simply have overwhelmed the American government and led to a great deal of political chaos. A charismatic and reassuring figure like Obama would probably have generated as much attention and admiration as he did in real life, if not more so -- and given that, the idea that Obama would be spoken of so admiringly if he had only recently come to office as of Christmas 2010 is not unreasonable.
Of course, there are a lot of ways we could play around with all this, including assuming that Children of Earth actually takes place after "The End of Time," since there's no explicit date for that one that I can recall. But it's all in good fun to speculate like this.
... No, he really doesn't. They're not even similar enough characters to compare them.
Actually, they've pretty firmly established that everyone now knows about aliens and invasions and that the governments of the world have given up trying to hide it all. But what consequences would there really be? What would actually happen, other than that the economy would probably still be shit?
The governments of the world would say, what? "Well, an alien turned us all into one of him, and then another alien reversed it. We're working on a way to stop it from happening again, but, uh, yeah, remember when the Dalek invasion decimated every single military on the planet? We're not really powerful enough to fight aliens yet, but we'll try. By the way, do you think we should go to Mars and name our base there after Major Tom?"
Yeah, that really is saying something coming from me, isn't it?
Actually, I liked pretty much everything else about this episode. Really, I did. I love Wilf and seeing him as the Doctor's proper companion was wonderful.
But that entire sequence was just godawful. It really was the absolute worst thing that nuWho has ever produced. Ever. All five minutes of it were even worse and more painful than "Fear Her."
And it's really a shame, too, because it's a horrible waste of Alexandra Moen, who is not only an absolute sex goddess but an amazing actress.
Oh well.
The bit about the Master having superpowers was weird and I could have used an explanation, but it didn't bother me overly much.
Really, the only other thing I didn't like about the episode is the very idea of bringing back the Time Lords. I hated it. Always have and always will. The Doctor is just not as interesting to me if he's not the Last of the Time Lords. I really hope they're all gone by the end of "Part Two."
ETA:
Oh, and their Obama impersonator was rubbish. Really, BBC? £4.3 billion Crown corporation and you couldn't find a better Obama impersonator? Someone who actually, y'know, looked like him?
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I watched it earlier and thought it was an average start...and I didn't mind the Masters resurection scene. It was mentioned that he had written a book, I thought it was clever that maybe the book had hidden messages in it that only disciples would be able to or willing to look for.
Yeah Naismith's relationship with his daughter is most unusual...the cafe talk between Wilf and The Doctor was fantastic. Of course the ending was pretty epic IMO. Can't wait for next week.
Yeah Naismith's relationship with his daughter is most unusual...the cafe talk between Wilf and The Doctor was fantastic. Of course the ending was pretty epic IMO. Can't wait for next week.
If Wilf is a Time Lord.
Hiding as human, whatever...
Then Donna is biologically 1/4 Timelord before the Doctors graft.
So she'd have been all right after she'd calmed down from the trauma, even if the Doctor wasn't half human, if the Doctor had just given her a few moments to allow his personality to pass through her constitution.
So impetuous.
Hiding as human, whatever...
Then Donna is biologically 1/4 Timelord before the Doctors graft.
So she'd have been all right after she'd calmed down from the trauma, even if the Doctor wasn't half human, if the Doctor had just given her a few moments to allow his personality to pass through her constitution.
So impetuous.
Anyone else think that Murrary's music was terrific again...especially at the end with the Time Lord reveal. I am hoping that we'll get a specials soundtrack released next year. Hopefully in the first half of the year. Oh and I almost forgot...I loved the He-Man reference. The Doctor calling the Master Skeletor!
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I thought it was terrible. Subtle as a brick and - as usual - far too loud and in-yer-face. Mind you, that's been a staple of the new WHO - everything gets louder at the same time. The music goes through the roof, the sound effects start a-blastin' and everyone starts shouting. Decibel City Ahoy!
I am such a grumpy old git. Hehehehe.
This really hasn't been a good year for the show, IMO - none of the specials have really worked for me.
I thought it was really good. I love high concept science-fiction and I think it's something that works really well in Doctor Who. The Master race was a great example of that.
I didn't care for the "oh and by the way, the Time Lords are back" ending, though. I thought it was unnecessary. The Master race idea would have been good enough on its own for a finale.
I didn't care for the "oh and by the way, the Time Lords are back" ending, though. I thought it was unnecessary. The Master race idea would have been good enough on its own for a finale.
Well after a really stressful christmas day, and almost crashing my car on the way home from the folks', I finally sat down to watch this at 11 o'clock.
And what did RTD give me, what was his bloody Christmas present to me?
This.
This...this...
Fantastic hour of telly! Seriously I was probably just in exactly the right mood to watch it and maybe on second viewing I won't like it nearly as much, but on first viewing at least, I bloody loved it.
Sci, yes shame we didn't have more Lucy, she is gorgeous. The book of Saxon did grate a bit but, remember the MAster created an alternate history for himself as Harold Saxon detailing things he never did growing up. It's equally possible that he created a false legend stretching back hundreds of years into the bargain?
Holy shit...I can't believe I'm defending RTD to Sci...what's wrong with the universe!
Master with Heroes powers was a bit annoying but actually I liked Simm a heck of a lot more as the Master here than I did last time.
And The Master Race, oh god that was brilliant, I did not see that coming...best bit though, Timothy Dalton chewing the scenery for all he was worth, damn I love that guy!
Loved the conversation between Wilf and the Doctor, such a contradiction between how 9 faced his regeneration and how 10 is facing his.
Role on 2010 please...
And what did RTD give me, what was his bloody Christmas present to me?
This.
This...this...
Fantastic hour of telly! Seriously I was probably just in exactly the right mood to watch it and maybe on second viewing I won't like it nearly as much, but on first viewing at least, I bloody loved it.
Sci, yes shame we didn't have more Lucy, she is gorgeous. The book of Saxon did grate a bit but, remember the MAster created an alternate history for himself as Harold Saxon detailing things he never did growing up. It's equally possible that he created a false legend stretching back hundreds of years into the bargain?
Holy shit...I can't believe I'm defending RTD to Sci...what's wrong with the universe!
Master with Heroes powers was a bit annoying but actually I liked Simm a heck of a lot more as the Master here than I did last time.
And The Master Race, oh god that was brilliant, I did not see that coming...best bit though, Timothy Dalton chewing the scenery for all he was worth, damn I love that guy!
Loved the conversation between Wilf and the Doctor, such a contradiction between how 9 faced his regeneration and how 10 is facing his.
Role on 2010 please...
I've skimmed most of the thread, so apologies if I repeated/have missed something...
...but I thought while some parts were good, such as the cafe scene, John Simm in general and Donna's Timelord subconscious (hell, I even loved the idea that Wilf is armed and ready thanks to the psychic woman from the Easter special) but the narration became a bit annoying, the 'Cactus' types didn't seem to be there for any purpose (yet, it's hard to say with only half of the story completed) and the re-birth of the Master was a little weak - but... the return of the Timelords and the idea of (yet again) a bigger picture at work seemed to work for me.
Though that could be down to hoping we were all right right since seeing the Daltan in the robes backstage pic from a while back. Simm seemed to enjoy being everyone in the world more than I did, my GF had a giggle at him jumping with glee in womens clothing, but overall it felt ike too much padding/waiting.
I like the idea that the Master and the Doctor might still need to join forces in the end (though possibly unlikely) and that such a big non-Dalek related game changer is coming into effect, but... it wasn't the best. But I won't judge completely until I've seen the whole picture. This is only half of the story, so I'm willing to wait before I give the thumbs up or down on this.
As for Daltons spitting, I didn't think it made him manic or powerful or whatever, I just thought of Gary Oldman in friends 'announciating'.
...but I thought while some parts were good, such as the cafe scene, John Simm in general and Donna's Timelord subconscious (hell, I even loved the idea that Wilf is armed and ready thanks to the psychic woman from the Easter special) but the narration became a bit annoying, the 'Cactus' types didn't seem to be there for any purpose (yet, it's hard to say with only half of the story completed) and the re-birth of the Master was a little weak - but... the return of the Timelords and the idea of (yet again) a bigger picture at work seemed to work for me.
Though that could be down to hoping we were all right right since seeing the Daltan in the robes backstage pic from a while back. Simm seemed to enjoy being everyone in the world more than I did, my GF had a giggle at him jumping with glee in womens clothing, but overall it felt ike too much padding/waiting.
I like the idea that the Master and the Doctor might still need to join forces in the end (though possibly unlikely) and that such a big non-Dalek related game changer is coming into effect, but... it wasn't the best. But I won't judge completely until I've seen the whole picture. This is only half of the story, so I'm willing to wait before I give the thumbs up or down on this.
As for Daltons spitting, I didn't think it made him manic or powerful or whatever, I just thought of Gary Oldman in friends 'announciating'.
I have to agree with Timby, Arrgh and Sci (on the Master recovery scene, at least) – this was just bizarre, and not in a good way. I feel like these last two specials have been imported from some parallel reality where Doctor Who is exactly the same, except for somehow being shit as a result. All the elements that make for really good OTT Who are there, but they don't work. At all. And did the music feel really off to anybody else? There were several key scenes where I thought the soundtrack was completely wrong: goofy and stupid and inappropriate. Murray Gold has always been a good fit for the show, but I'm starting to be glad he's not coming back for season 5.
The cliffhanger was great, however. I'm still hopeful for part II.
The cliffhanger was great, however. I'm still hopeful for part II.
On the Master's 'superpowers'. Everyone' making a big fuss about this, I don't quite get why.
The resurrection went wrong thanks to Lucy, she didn't succeed. The Doctor said something along the lines of the Master's body being "torn open". Hence the extra madness, the endless hunger and the access to lifeforce he wouldn't normally have. He's burning through this regeneration, maybe several regenerations.
Granted he doesn't need to be leaping about the place and throwing bolts. I simply took it that RTD wanted to make it much harder for him to be caught or stopped while being even madder, and there may be a payoff in Pt 2.
The resurrection went wrong thanks to Lucy, she didn't succeed. The Doctor said something along the lines of the Master's body being "torn open". Hence the extra madness, the endless hunger and the access to lifeforce he wouldn't normally have. He's burning through this regeneration, maybe several regenerations.
Granted he doesn't need to be leaping about the place and throwing bolts. I simply took it that RTD wanted to make it much harder for him to be caught or stopped while being even madder, and there may be a payoff in Pt 2.
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