The 2008-10 Specials

David Tennant's final adventures often tend to cause some argument over fans over which was the least poor. But what do you have to say about them?

The Next Doctor. Actually for the first half I thought this was kind of fun, at least at the time. And there was a nice bit of heart to Neil Morrissey's tragic character. Miss Hartigan did seem to make a decent villainess with a dark backstory. But then it turned to absolute rot at the end by becoming a silly Transformers movie out of the blue.

Also, Morrissey's "It's all wonderful nonsense" when describing the Tardis can go eat a bag of dicks.

Planet of the Dead. Utter shit for the most part. Michelle Ryan is insufferable. The opening tunnel chase is just stupid (what bus driver would incriminate themselves by refusing to pull over for the police? Obstructing justice is a punishable offence, you know?.... Oh but Russell thinks the plebs are too stupid to know that).

The plot is so thin it makes JNT's worst seem more substantial. The treatment of UNIT is insulting and sickening, and frankly I think the Doctors of old would be positively horrified at seeing these people flagellate themselves to worship him.

Only positive is the final firefight with UNIT versus the tadpoles is actually a pretty decent action climax. But unfortunately the mood is soured again by the godawful, overlong goodbye.

I think to call this a 'special' is to abuse the term.

Waters of Mars. Probably the best of the bunch. Had some exhilarating moments and an eerie, haunting atmosphere, and the final climax did get me pumped. Adelaide was also for the most part a pretty good temporary companion.

There's still a fair amount of RTD shite in there though. Still moments of being as subtle as a sledgehammer. Namely the Doctor having to tell us Adelaide was awesome and that he 'loved' her for not resorting to shooting straight away, as if we don't get it. Oh and one of the victims just has to play their daughter's message to them again when they're trapped (incase we don't remember seeing it the first time), just to force us to cry and emote. The backstory of Adelaide being spared by a Dalek makes no sense (given their plan was to destroy the planet anyway). Nor does her decision to commit suicide to preserve this 'web of time' she only just heard about.

I think maybe it's really only the best because of Graeme Harper being behind the camera.

End of Time. Basically it's little more than a Lady Gaga music video, only stretched over two hours. With a lot of steals from Star Wars (that is, if Luke was a complete, clingy, sycophantic emotional drip about his goal to redeem Vader and give him tongue baths whilst not giving a shit about the innocent collateral he'd claimed).

Biggest issues for me were the treatment of Lady Saxon was unbelievably mean-spirited, the old folks who decide to become Tennant's fanclub are about as pointless as they are positively creepy (but not AS creepy as the incestuous subtext to the rich father and daughter).

It's terribly derivative (another giant threat falling from the sky, another secret portal gate device like in Doomsday). The Time War is stupidly retconned to suggest the Daleks were always the lesser threat, and the destruction of the Time Lords was no loss because they were always just a bunch of villainous ciphers all along. And in any case they can be brought back now anyway.

It just makes the specials seem like a completely pointless venture if RTD was that low on inspiration or character for Tennant. And really suggests (generously) he should've regenerated instead in Waters of Mars or Journey's End. This just seems to be flogging a dead emo horse. Speaking of which, Donna's presence turned out to be fucking pointless.

And I have to say, I actually had been managing to warm to Tennant after all, over Series 4. But this just soured my good will by his spiteful rant to Wilf. The long goodbye was certainly taking the piss (infact it's the ideal time for a toilet break), particularly given we'd already had decent final goodbyes to Jack, Martha, Mickey and Sarah, and it completely abuses the stakes of the Doctor being supposedly mortally wounded to have him carry on walking about, doing further Tardis journeys, and meeting people with omnipotent foreknowledge of where exactly they'll be.... for clearly as long as Russell needs him to be. And yes, Tennant's final words are pathetic ones to go out on.

Oh one more thing.

That opening visual gag with Tennant reveals he's had the classic, iconic Tardis fitted with a remote car lock is something Russell should've been burnt at the stake for, alone!

They all suck.

Hard.

I have a tiny bit of tolerance for The Next Doctor, but none for the rest. But by far the largest share of my contempt goes to End of Time.
But yeah, Ian is basically correct.

I love the Next Doctor. The Giant Cyberking is daft, but awesome. Overall I love the setting, the mystery about Jackson Lake, Miss Hartigan, the Cybermen, and Tennant is better here than in any other special. Other than the self pitying bit at the end, he is so much more confident, and dynamic.

Planet of the Dead is self indulgent. I fancy Michelle Ryan, but other than that its a bit of a lightweight, throwaway story. It might have been okay as an episode in a series, but as one of just 4 episodes per year its not acceptable.

Waters of Mars is a classic story. There are some usual RTDisms that let it down, but overall I like the story, the concept, the monsters are among the most terrifying the series ever had, and Adelieade is the best of the one off companions.

The End of Time meanwhile is one of the worst episodes ever made. It manages to be both camp and silly, and dreary and miserable at the same time.

Tennant is completely insufferable throughout. Constantly blubbing, refusing to kill the Master (even though it will save 7 billion people.) Telling Wilf he isn't remotely important, and then there's the self indulgent farewell tour.

This also IMO marked the end of the Doctor as a character as it made out that the consciousness of each incarnation is different and all that remains are the memories. What a load of shit. That turns the Doctor into the trill from Star Trek. The whole point was that the Doctors were all meant to be the same man. As I've said before if they wanted it to be a title they could have easily had William Hartnell's Doctor die, and just pass the title of the Doctor onto another member of his kind. Regeneration was created not just to replace the lead, but ensure the character went on.

That's why it was such a genius format. Plenty of shows have changed their lead, Primeval, Death in Paradise etc, but with DW they came up with the best of both worlds. The same character could go on, and be recognisable as the same character in some ways, but from a practical point of view, he looked different, and the change in outer personality allowed the actor to refresh the role, but not change it.

Its too bad the fitzroy crowd were either too stupid to get that, or just didn't care (more likely the latter.)

None of the Doctors relationships or story arcs make sense with this pointless Trill retcon.

True Who writer wrote:DOCTOR: (cough) Oh.
BRIGADIER: I just can't let you out of my sight, can I, Doctor?
DOCTOR: Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. So you recognise me, then?
BRIGADIER: Yes. Who else would it be?

LIZ: Do you know him
BRIGADIER: What No, I thought I might do, but he's a complete stranger. I've never seen him before in my life.
(The Doctor wakes.)
DOCTOR: Lethbridge-Stewart My dear fellow, how nice to see you again.
MUNRO: He knows you, sir.
BRIGADIER: But he can't do. Look here. Can you hear me Who are you
DOCTOR: Don't you recognise me
BRIGADIER: I'm positive we've never met before.
DOCTOR: Oh, dear. Oh, I can't have changed that much, surely Oh, I must see what they've done to me. Can I borrow, can I borrow a mirror, please
(Liz hands over a compact mirror.)
DOCTOR: Thank you. Oh, no! Oh, no. Well, that's not me at all.

DOCTOR: I'll tell you, I made a complete fool of that prosecuting council, though. I ridiculed his every argument. Yes, and I told him that I had the complete answer to every one his charges against me.
(And behind his back, the Doctor is using his steel wire on a hinge of the cage door.)
JO: And then what happened?
DOCTOR: Then what happened. Well, they found me guilty, changed my appearance and exiled me to Earth.
JO: And that's where you met me.

How does any of this make sense if you take this into account?

Fitzroy hack wrote:Even then, even if I change, it feels like dying. Everything I am dies. Some new man goes sauntering away, and I'm dead. What?

How does the Masters story arc make sense? He was willing to sacrifice billions of planets to gain more regenerations. If its like a death, why bother? Why was Romana so easy going in changing her appearance (okay that scene was a bit stupid, but now its even more stupid.)

The Master is also pretty crap here. I think I went easy on Simm for a while because what came after was so terrible he seemed like fucking Delgado in comparison. (The same is probably true for a lot of the RTD era.)

Still looking at it in isolation he was crap. He is a lame rehash of the Joker and Callisto, but not done nearly as well.

For those unfamiliar with those characters histories, the Joker and Callisto are cackling lunatic villains who kill for fun, but both were once decent people who were driven insane by one bad day.

In the Jokers case it was his pregnant wife dying in a freak accident, and then falling into the chemicals, in Callisto's it was her family being burned to death in front of her.

The heroes in both cases, Batman and Xena feel that they can rehabilitate them, and there are odd moments of self reflection from the Joker and Callisto. They both even say "You made me" to the person responsible for their one bad day.

The Simm Master follows all of these tropes beat for beat (right down to saying YOU MADE ME), but it makes no sense for the Master. The whole point of the Master was that he didn't start out crazy, he was a nasty piece of work, whose own cowardice and lust for power, and pettiness drove him down a dark path.

To suddenly retcon in a Joker/Callisto style dynamic just further shows RTD's lack of respect or love for the original series as clearly he'd much rather have been writing the Joker or Callisto than the Master.

Tanman wrote:End of Time. Basically it's little more than a Lady Gaga music video, only stretched over two hours. With a lot of steals from Star Wars (that is, if Luke was a complete, clingy, sycophantic emotional drip about his goal to redeem Vader and give him tongue baths whilst not giving a shit about the innocent collateral he'd claimed).

I completely agree with this and everything else you said about that self indulgent shit show, but please do no compare it to Lady Gaga!

The big nosed goddess even at her most self indulgent has never produced anything as appalling as the End of Time.

PS another thing to add about the End of Time was in the making of, RTD said that since Tennant was the best actor ever to play the Doctor, then he had to make sure he would give him a piece of tv gold to go out on. He then patted himself on the chest and said "mission accomplished."

Is it any wonder that the shit show turned out the way it did.

burrunjor wrote:I completely agree with this and everything else you said about that self indulgent shit show, but please do no compare it to Lady Gaga!

The big nosed goddess even at her most self indulgent has never produced anything as appalling as the End of Time.

Well, I meant in the sense that it's more based on wild spectacle than plot.


As for the question of whether each Doctor should be the same man or a different man, I've always liked there being an ambiguity about it. There are examples where indeed the new Doctor is meant to be the same man.

But there's also moments that give it ambiguity, such as the way Troughton's Doctor in Power of the Daleks occasionally refers to his predecessor in the third person. And of course there's the question of why Davison and Colin's Doctors are so diametrically, and irreconcilably different in personality and ideology.

Maybe he is the same man, but then maybe the regeneration leads to subtle alterations in the brain, leading to certain personality traits being lost and exchanged for new ones. the memories remain constant, and are recalled as experienced as though by the same man, but is he the same man or does each different Doctor merely think they're the same because of the trick of shared memory?

That can be intriguing to ponder on, and provide an out for explanations of why the Doctor changes personality and how the Doctor of Pyramids of Mars can even be the same character as the Doctor of Warriors of the Deep.

But I will certainly agree that there was a gross unsubtlety and arrogance in RTD taking that possible, ambiguous subtext and making it canonical text.

Tanmann wrote:

burrunjor wrote:I completely agree with this and everything else you said about that self indulgent shit show, but please do no compare it to Lady Gaga!

The big nosed goddess even at her most self indulgent has never produced anything as appalling as the End of Time.

Well, I meant in the sense that it's more based on wild spectacle than plot.


As for the question of whether each Doctor should be the same man or a different man, I've always liked there being an ambiguity about it. There are examples where indeed the new Doctor is meant to be the same man.

But there's also moments that give it ambiguity, such as the way Troughton's Doctor in Power of the Daleks occasionally refers to his predecessor in the third person. And of course there's the question of why Davison and Colin's Doctors are so diametrically, and irreconcilably different in personality and ideology.

Maybe he is the same man, but then maybe the regeneration leads to subtle alterations in the brain, leading to certain personality traits being lost and exchanged for new ones. the memories remain constant, and are recalled as experienced as though by the same man, but is he the same man or does each different Doctor merely think they're the same because of the trick of shared memory?

That can be intriguing to ponder on, and provide an out for explanations of why the Doctor changes personality and how the Doctor of Pyramids of Mars can even be the same character as the Doctor of Warriors of the Deep.

But I will certainly agree that there was a gross unsubtlety and arrogance in RTD taking that possible, ambiguous subtext and making it canonical text.

I don't think it was ever even hinted that they were different people in the original series. All of the actors who played the role certainly always treated it as the one character, and when you look at how its written that's how it comes across.

Patrick Troughton referring to his predecessor in the third person is just a result of post regenerative trauma (it was meant ot be a red herring for viewers at the time, but later in the story the viewers are indeed shown that he is the same man, when the Dalek ( a non biased source) recognises him as the Doctor.

With Colin meanwhile the regeneration is meant to have gone wrong as a result of the poison that killed 5. 5 is unsure if he will regenerate, saying it feels different this time because the poison is so strong.

As a result 6 doesn't just feel the usual post regenerative trauma, he goes temporarily mad after the regeneration. When he finds out that he tried to choke Peri, he is horrified saying that he would never do that (which doesn't make sense if the writers intended him to be a different man. How would he know that he is incapable of that if he is a new person? Maybe the new Doctor/man is?)

By the end of the story 6 claims to have stablisied, but there are hints that he never fully stablises (like in Attack when Peri mentions his mind being in pieces.) Still after the Twin Dilemma, Colin's core character is no different to the other Doctors.

Like 1,2,3,4 and 5 he kills when he has too, is interested in exploring the universe, is asexual, an older more practical character etc. Its just his outer persona is a bit rougher around the edges than Davison.

Again its a fine balance to find of making the Doctors outer persona different as a result of the shake up, but in New Who the changes are too big for the Doctor collectively to be the same character.

Even then though New Who contradicts itself. In some episodes they do make out that the Doctors are all the same person like when 11 phones Clara, or ironically when 10 first talks to Rose, but then when its convenient for some melodrama, we get the I don't want to go crap from Tennant and Capaldi.

burrunjor wrote:I don't think it was ever even hinted that they were different people in the original series. All of the actors who played the role certainly always treated it as the one character, and when you look at how its written that's how it comes across.

Patrick Troughton referring to his predecessor in the third person is just a result of post regenerative trauma (it was meant ot be a red herring for viewers at the time, but later in the story the viewers are indeed shown that he is the same man, when the Dalek ( a non biased source) recognises him as the Doctor.

But that's the point. They made it a red herring to emphasize the ambiguity and maintain some mystery or mystique to who the Doctor is now and what really happened to his previous self, and to keep us somewhat in the dark about what regeneration is and means. And by the end of the story, we still are. As it should be.

The Dalek likewise never says what it recognizes in the Doctor. Does it recognize him as a Time Lord? Does it recognize something invisibly residual from Hartnell's incarnation? Does it recognize the Doctor's soul somehow, or just some remnant of it?

If there was a dead certainty about it, and no mystery to ponder, then it would be a far less interesting concept and be far less interesting storytelling. Doctor Who didn't thrive for 50 years and enthrall millions of imaginations by spelling everything out and eliminating any and all ambiguities.

I think this video best explains what I mean

The Next Doctor is probably the least shit one. I'm not actually sure if I've watched it since it aired.

My review for The End Of Time Part 2: I voted very good!

I thought it was well executed overall and the scene between Wilf and the Doctor was reminiscent of the cafe scene with McCoy in Remembrance Of The Daleks. Simm were superb and I loved the human race all becoming the Master!

The only weak points were the lipstick and the Doctor having a few cuts after jumping from the spaceship. I enjoyed the last 20 minutes although holding back the regeneration diminished its impact a little, but I'll give them the indulgence of scenes with the other characters as they marked the end of an era. 10 years later and it still holds up as a excellent end to RTD's magnificent 5 year tenure.

Rani wrote:10 years later and it still holds up as a excellent end to RTD's magnificent 5 year tenure.

Would've been longer if he hadn't gotten the sack.

Tanmann wrote:

Rani wrote:10 years later and it still holds up as a excellent end to RTD's magnificent 5 year tenure.

Would've been longer if he hadn't gotten the sack.

Your source?

Tanmann wrote:

Rani wrote:10 years later and it still holds up as a excellent end to RTD's magnificent 5 year tenure.

Would've been longer if he hadn't gotten the sack.

Your source?

Tanmann wrote:www.thefuckingobvious.com

Link doesn't work.