Hello!
This covers the Tenth Doctor's aborted regeneration in the series 4 finale, which comprised three episodes. The trilogy concerns the Daleks - again! On top of that, it's the first Revival-era episode to feature Davros, creator of the Daleks. He apparently perished during the Time War, only to be saved by a Dalek time-travelling through the Time Lock surrounding the War. He then rebuilt the Dalek race from his own flesh. It also features a cross-over of every companion thus far in the Revival Era: for starters, Rose, Mickey and Jackie, returning from the parallel world where they had been stranded since Series 2. Captain Jack Harkness also returns, now running an alien-investigation organisation called Torchwood; after being abandoned by the Doctor in Series 1, he used a pocket time-travel device called a Vortex Manipulator to travel back to the 21st century, but he overshot and arrived in the 19th century. As a result he was forced to live through the entire 20th century waiting for a version of the Doctor who had met him and experienced the events of the end of Series 1; he eventually reunited with the Doctor in Series 3. The other Revival-era companions are Martha Jones, a medical student who travelled with the Doctor immediately after Rose left; Donna Noble, the Doctor's latest companion, and Sarah-Jane Smith, who made her return to Doctor Who back in Series 2.
Donna and the Doctor met shortly after Rose left, when she teleported into the TARDIS in the middle of her wedding (long story). At the end of that particular adventure, she declined to continue travelling with him, then spent the next year or so regretting it. They met again at the start of Series Four, after a string of coincidences, and she started travelling with him then.
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| Vanity issues. |
Turn Left is a Doctor-lite episode, where the Doctor barely appears. It starts with Donna and the Doctor at an alien market-place. Donna gets tempted into doing a palm-reading with a fortune-teller; when reading her fortune, it is revealed that, around six months before she first met the Doctor, she made a major choice. She could have turned left and got the job which resulted in her meeting the Doctor, or she could have turned right. The fortune-teller convinces her to make that choice a second time and turn right; at the same time, a beetle latches onto her back.
Well, right off the bat (my apologies), the Doctor dies in this parallel universe, for good. In the original timeline, when he stopped the alien threat during his first adventure with Donna, she saved his life by persuading him to escape before the alien's lair got flooded. Without Donna there, he didn't escape in time and died. What follows is a series of crisis after crisis. It also results in a gradual whittling down of the Doctor's allies; without the Doctor on hand, they have to pick up the slack to deal with the various crises the Doctor usually solves, and they die in the process. The calamities culminate in the stars themselves going out; at this point, Donna gets in touch with UNIT. Their new Scientific Advisor, by the way, is Rose, who's been dimension-hopping to return to the Doctor since being separated from him. Donna gets sent back in time to prevent her past self from turning right, using time-travel technology extrapolated from the TARDIS. She succeeds and pings back to the main reality, the Doctor finds her and she delivers a message Rose passed on to her just before she left the parallel world...'Bad Wolf''.
The Doctor promptly panics, declaring that it's the end of the universe. Given that Rose, during her brief omnipotence back in Series 1, saw fit to send this warning by plastering the words 'Bad Wolf' onto every surface with writing, it's not an unfair assumption.
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| This is the only appearance the Doctor makes in the alternate reality. |
The Stolen Earth
The Stolen Earth starts with the Doctor and Donna rushing back to Earth all in a dither; however, nothing's happened...yet. Practically the instant they return to the TARDIS, Earth gets snatched. The Doctor and Donna go to the Shadow Proclamation for help - the Shadow Proclamation is outer-space police. Once they're there, they learn that roughly 23 other planets have been stolen, with another three taken out of time as well as space. The Doctor and Donna follow the wavelength of the transmat which snatched Earth...but when they get to the end of the trail, there's nothing there.
Meanwhile, the Doctor's allies on Earth scramble to find out what's happened. They don't have to wait too long - it turns out that the Daleks are involved, and they broadcast a message consisting of the word "Exterminate" to humanity. The Daleks launch a full-scale invasion of Earth, starting with military institutions such as UNIT; they force Earth to surrender within three hours. Rose has also finally returned to her home dimension - she turns up just in time to save Donna's family from getting exterminated. The Doctor's allies lose hope...until Harriet Jones gets in touch with Martha, Sarah-Jane and Torchwood, using a network undetectable to the Daleks. Her plan is to use the Rift at Torchwood in conjunction with Sarah-Jane's sentient super-computer to phone the Doctor using every phone network in the world. It works, creating a signal which the Doctor locks onto; the TARDIS gets dragged into the temporal pocket hiding the planets, with Donna and the Doctor screaming the entire way. Once they've arrived, they have a catch-up with Martha, Sarah-Jane and Torchwood - though not Harriet, as the signal-boosting effort exposed the network, leading to her death. The Doctor and Donna reach Earth at last, and the Doctor sees Rose again. They run towards each other...and a Dalek appears, gunning the Doctor down. Jack arrives two seconds later and destroys the Dalek; Jack, Rose and Donna carry the Doctor into the TARDIS, where he starts regenerating. At the same time, Sarah-Jane, who set off to look for the Doctor, gets ambushed by Daleks, and Torchwood is also assailed by Daleks.
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| The Doctor and Donna finally reach Earth |
Journey's End
In true Doctor Who fashion, the cliffhangers from last episode are resolved fairly quickly. Mickey and Jackie turn up and blast the Daleks attacking Sarah-Jane. Torchwood Three turns out to be protected by a Time Lock - nothing can get in, nothing can get out. And the Doctor uses the regeneration energy to heal himself, then vents the excess energy into his spare hand, the one that got chopped off in The Christmas Invasion. It fell into London back then, but Jack got hold of it and stored it until he reunited with the Doctor; when they parted ways again, the hand stayed on the TARDIS with the Doctor. The Daleks find the TARDIS and capture it, dragging it to their spaceship, called the Crucible. Sarah-Jane, Mickey and Jackie watch as the TARDIS is taken away; they surrender to the Daleks in order to be taken to the Crucible as well. Once the TARDIS is deposited inside the Crucible, it gets dropped into the core of the ship. The Doctor, Rose and Jack are safe outside; Donna, however, is still inside the TARDIS. She touches the hand in the jar, which grows into a full-size Doctor, who dematerialises the TARDIS just before it would have gotten destroyed. Biological metacrisis - the hand, infused with regeneration energy, lacked a full template with which it could repair itself. Donna touching the hand provided a template - her. So the Metacrisis Doctor is half-human.
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| Behold - the creator of the Daleks! |
The Doctor and Rose are escorted to Davros, while Jack gets exterminated. The Doctor goads Davros into telling his plan. The plan is to use the 27 stolen planets to transmit a signal which will dissolve all matter in the universe - and outside it, as well! The transmission, supposedly, would break through the rift nearby, travelling into every reality. Fittingly, it's called the Reality Bomb. Sarah-Jane, Jackie and Mickey narrowly escape being subjected to the test-run, then meet up with Jack. They make use of a Warp Star apparently given to Sarah-Jane on her travels by an alien soothsayer. A Warp Star is an explosion, 'waiting to happen'. The Warp Star is wired into the Crucible mainframe; Jack, Jackie, Mickey and Sarah-Jane hold the Daleks ransom. They aren't the only ones; Martha was given a super-weapon activator by UNIT, who she now works for. The super-weapon is a series of nuclear warheads at strategic locations beneath the Earth's crust; activating it would disintegrate the planet, reducing the Daleks to 26 planets, rather than the optimum 27. But she's doing what the Doctor would do - she gives the Daleks one chance to back down.
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| The Doctor! Sort of. |
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| The Doctor and his companions celebrate, having reached the Solar System - clockwise from the foreground: Rose, the Metacrisis Doctor, Sarah-Jane, Mickey, Jackie, Jack, Donna Noble, Martha Jones, and the original Doctor. |
One thing I really like about the trilogy is how effective the Daleks and Davros are. The Daleks, for instance, are powerful enough to defeat Earth in a matter of hours at most. This is also reflected in peoples' reactions when the Daleks announce their arrival - the entire world panics, even before the Daleks actually start attacking. What's particularly poignant is Jack and Sarah-Jane's reactions. Jack, who in his own show faced off against a primordial being of death and won, simply tells his colleagues that there's nothing to be done - they're all going to die. It's especially significant because he died because of the Daleks, though not permanently - he knows what they're capable of, so he's completely resigned to his fate, to the surprise of those around him. Sarah-Jane, equally, breaks down in tears, clutching her son. She's met the most terrifying and amazing things, such as sapiient, psychic spiders, the actual Loch Ness Monster, or actual Egyptian Gods; she's spent decades single-handedly investigating and warding off alien invasions, but a single word from the Daleks drives her to despair. It's a very powerful demonstration of just how dangerous the Daleks are.
Additionally, it serves as a powerful call-back to the scene in Power of the Daleks where the new Dalek army begins chanting 'Daleks conquer and destroy'; as I noted in the Power of the Daleks review, it brings to mind an unstoppable, remorseless army bent on killing everything. It's not surprising, therefore, that the world, and the Doctor's companions, give in to despair.
Equally, it hammers home how monstrous Davros is - this is what he's unleashed on the universe, and he's unrepentant, even as their hatred of anything non-Dalek sees them locking Davros, their own creator, in a vault within the Crucible. It creates a fascinating contrast with the Doctor and his companions - both have created 'the ultimate weapons'. Davros created the Daleks, the ultimate in racial cleansing; the Doctor created a group of people willing to do whatever it takes to defend the universe - even if it means destroying their home planet. Much like the Doctor himself, really! Davros even notes this parallel - the Doctor's companions have been transformed from ordinary men and women into soldiers, ruthlessly dedicated to doing the right thing, Though at the same time, Davros gets the wrong end of the stick - the Doctor's companions are trying to help the universe, not destroy it, and they're acting out of love and respect for the Doctor and his ideals. Moreover, the Doctor is guilt-stricken at the idea that he has, willingly or not, turned ordinary people into killers. Davros, by comparison, is remorseless over what he's done; indeed, he gloats at the prospect of annihilating everything. Moreover, Davros highlights the Doctor's hypocrisy in refusing weapons, but shaping people into weapons; at the same time, the narrative exposes Davros' own hypocrisy - he calls Martha, Jack, Sarah-Jane, Mickey and Jackie monsters for being willing to sacrifice billions to save trillions. This is in spite of his own creations planning to destroy everything out of a belief that they are inherently superior; the irony of this statement, however, is lost on Davros. Similarly, the narrative underlines Davros' inability to comprehend good; he calls the companions monsters for being willing to destroy the Crucible and the Earth to prevent his plan, but as soon as their threat is negated, they're suddenly pathetic. He fails to realise that they only failed because they gave the Daleks a chance to take a different option. Instead, he calls mercy a weakness, not understanding that that 'weakness' is the reason he's still alive.
Overall, I really like the ending trilogy of Series 4. I particularly like getting to see multiple companions meeting up and working together. Also, the sequence where the Doctor and his companions fly Earth home is one of my favourite scenes in the entire show - the Doctor and his TARDIS and his companions, operating in perfect harmony and unity. It feels like the Doctor couldn't possibly rise any higher - which is doubly effective, as it makes the departures even sadder.
I think it's a fitting send-off for that era of the show - while the Doctor did not regenerate properly until the specials, Series 4 was the last full season of David Tennant, not to mention Russell T. Davies' last season as showrunner. I don't have much to criticise about the three episodes - my main criticism would be that the Doctor essentially forces Donna to undergo the mind-wipe. Another criticism would be the genocide discussion - as the Metacrisis Doctor points out, the Daleks are powerful enough to destroy everything, with or without a Reality Bomb. Additionally, the Doctor has done that sort of thing before, when the race wiped out would wipe out others, and has done it to the Daleks multiple times, once even with the same method. I specifically highlighted that by phrasing it the exact way I did in the Power of the Daleks review. It just makes it look like the original Doctor thinks it's OK for him to do it, but not anybody else...which is a concerningly arrogant perspective. Added to that, this arrogance ironically ends up making the Doctor uncomfortably similar to Davros - who legitimately believes that he has the right to destroy all of reality to feed his own ego.
Overall, I would rate Turn Left 8/10, The Stolen Earth 9/10 and Journey's End 9/10.
Random observations:
-In Turn Left, Rose has mastered the art of Technobabble; it's quite fun to see. The moment's slightly ruined when she says something, then confesses she doesn't know what that means, it just sounds like something the Doctor would say.
-The Eleventh Doctor later criticised the Tenth Doctor for having vanity issues - while that's not untrue, given his stated reason for not going through with the regeneration, I feel compelled to defend the Doctor's intelligence. In fairness to him, there was a potentially reality-ending threat and the Daleks to sort out - he couldn't afford to be struggling with post-regenerative sickness with a serious crisis on his hands.
-On the note of the regeneration, all three of the companions who witness it are totally confused - Rose and Jack know how it should work, so don't get why the Doctor hasn't changed, while Donna had no idea that regeneration as a concept even existed until the Doctor got shot, so has no idea what to expect. It's rather amusing.
-At the end of Journey's End, the Doctor criticises Sylvia, Donna's mother, for not being a good mother; Sylvia's reaction is hysterically arrogant. Her eyes bulge with fury and she practically yells at him to get out of her house - or would have done, if Donna didn't turn up at that moment. As it is, she says that she wants the Doctor out in a seriously cold tone. Completely unconcerned that she's done a number on her only child's self-esteem - what's important is somebody said she wasn't a good mother!
-In the video game series Half-Life, in between Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2, Earth got invaded by an alien interdimensional race called the Combine, or the Universal Union; it took the Combine seven hours to subjugate an Earth weakened by a month of meteorological catastrophes and other invasions. Here, it took the Daleks about three hours to subjugate an Earth at full strength, leading me to conclude that the Daleks could have wiped the floor with the Combine.
-It also further justifies the Metacrisis Doctor's point - the Daleks here are strong enough to accomplish a planetary invasion in less time than a multiversal, inter-dimensional, super-advanced empire.
-I don't like the Doctor forcibly erasing Donna's memories - while it was a choice between that or letting her die, it's treated as unambiguously OK, if slightly iffy, too much for my liking. Especially as Donna was fully willing to die, and the framing of the next scene positions the Doctor as a victim.
-There's a spin-off show called Torchwood, centring around Captain Jack. The first season finale is Jack's battle against that primordial being I mentioned earlier.
Regeneration count - shot by a Dalek (Tenth to Tenth Doctor), 1 of 12 regenerations remaining.
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