#but it was absolutely naive on his part to think that a problem like Jethro was going to be let go

[ohjohnno]

Outrageous Fortune Reviewcap: S1E01 (”Slings And Arrows”)

The first time I watched this show, it was more as an exercise in trying to learn New Zealand slang for a writing project than anything else. It didn’t really prove useful - the characters I was researching for were upper-middle class kiwis, as opposed to the bogans depicted here - but nonetheless, the first time I watched the first episode I was too focused on my project to pay too much attention to the actual quality. Only upon rewatching did I realise that this show was great right from the get-go.

The show, for those who don’t know, centers on what is sometimes called a “crime family”. But this isn’t a Corleone or Gambino style family; this is more like what you could call a blue-collar crime family, with the main breadwinner just happening to earn most of his income through crime (in this case, mostly burglaries). They aren’t a particularly violent menace, but they are nonetheless a perpetual thorn in the side of the police, from whom they get constant and generally perfectly justified visits.

It has flaws, yes. They’re especially apparent during the first season, and they never completely go away. But it’s the cast of characters that makes this show tick, and for the most part, they’re all compelling right from the get-go. It’s a fascinating bunch of introductions - let’s take ‘em one by one. 

We have Cheryl West, introduced initially as your typical mama bear. She’s fiercely protective of her children, even as she remains very firm with them; she’s less firm with her husband, Wolfgang West, the only person in the whole episode she allows to lie to her face without challenge. (”Do you know where Van was last night?”, she asks; “no,” says an unconvincing Wolf, but she lets it pass without further comment). She claims that she loves all her children equally, and I believe her, but she’s particularly kind with Jethro West, the only one of her children who’s done everything with his life that she wanted him to. He’s on his way to being a big-shot lawyer at this stage in the show, and he seems nice; the first glimpse we get of any darkness below the surface is the revelation that he made up some Maori heritage to get hired. (Spoiler alert: this plot point gets quietly dropped pretty quickly, since, y’know, it doesn’t make any sense. One of them early flaws I mentioned.)

Cheryl is less kind to Jethro’s identical twin Van West, but that’s really only because he deserves it. Van is quickly established as The Stupid West, and accordingly provides most of the episode’s laughs, but it’s a little deeper than that; he is, specifically, the Stupid Man West, his stupidity really being almost entirely rooted in his crude, half-formed machismo and his desire to prove himself to his father. It’s clearly unhealthy - Van, and his good friend Munter (who will become more important later in the show), are clearly lacking the mental chops required for a life of crime, and Van especially is an absolutely horrible liar, which is maybe the worst possible trait a career criminal could ever have. Wolf, for his part, is very fond of him; he’s less fond of Jethro, with whom he shares only curt words (by familial standards, anyway) when he’s awaiting his court date. 

Then there’s Pascalle West, whom I’ve heard described as a “vacuous trollop” by certain online folks. I guess that isn’t entirely unfair, but it’s important to clarify what exactly is meant by that. In absolute terms, she is certainly smarter than Van, and she’s much more strong-willed and, in her own way, independent-minded. But she’s deeply naive, and her blustering confidence combines poorly with her total lack of any life experience. Her dream is to be a model, and she thinks she can use her sexuality to help her get there, Jenna Maroney style; the problem, as she discovers twice in this episode alone, is that this doesn’t really work. The handjob she gives to her photographer brings his price down only a little, and her attempt at charming the men at Work & Income leads only to them degrading her further. She’s trying to navigate a man’s world using the tools men have given her, and she’s only slowly learning that these tools were plague blankets, a false gift designed to keep her down.

And then, of course, we have my favorite of the bunch, and very possibly my favorite character in television history: Loretta West. It doesn’t take long to introduce the traits that most define her, and that will mostly continue to do so: she is intelligent, lazy, pretentious, nerdy, witty, and cruel. The cruelty is at a fairly basic baby stage at this point - mostly limited to probably-joking familial jabs and the occasional spot of ruthless blackmail - but it doesn’t take us long to discover that she’s found a way to secretly skip school for the past several months in order to focus on writing a movie script, that she views just about everyone else in the world as her intellectual inferior, and that she just loves to deliver witticisms.

                                     House of suffering and torment...

The others, at this stage, are mostly minor characters. Ted West will become more important very quickly, but for now he’s just the butt of a few softly ageist jokes; Loretta figures out that he probably burned his house down on purpose because he was lonely, and she seems to get on with him more than anyone else in the family does, but that’s the only real hint of depth we get here. Wayne Judd is firmly in antagonist mode here, serving us some lovely smug snake goodness as the righteous cop perpetually tormenting our family of lovable criminals. Eric Grady is a decidedly unlovable perverted cheapskate with a faintly sickening crush on Cheryl; he’s good because every laugh is at his expense, and so he shall remain. 

The episode does a great job of introducing all the main characters, but the central plot is really only driven by Cheryl, Wolf, and, alas, Van. Wolf, at this stage of the show, is very difficult not to despise; he loves his wife, but clearly doesn’t respect her nearly as much as he believes he does, and his utterly self-certain male chauvinism passes well beyond insufferable and ends up actively loathsome. Getting sentenced, early in the episode, to four years in prison for burglary does nothing to dent his absolute certainty in the correctness of his decision-making. A prison visit from Van ends with the latter trying, in perhaps the most foolishly and (fortunately) harmlessly incompetent way possible, to get involved in some sort of drug trade; when Cheryl presses him, he repeats what Wolf told him: that “with Dad inside, somebody’s got to make the decisions around here”. Cheryl’s long-suffering exasperation with unearned male arrogance is palpable.

But Cheryl is used to it. If anything, she’s too used to it, and her frosty confrontation with Wolf in a prison visit of her own is still far more charitable than he deserves. It does, however, lead to the most important early development in the show: Wolf’s hideously gentle insistence that she “doesn’t have the balls” for the sort of criminal work he expects from Van leads her to decide that the family is going to abandon the criminal lifestyle and embrace the straight & narrow. It’s a nice ideal, but it’s gonna turn out easier said than done. There’s far too many personality defects in among this cast of characters for anything to come easy.

Now, there is one notable flaw in this episode, and it heralds bad things to come: there’s a truly terrible racist joke about an old Asian woman who turns out to know Kung Fu, and it blossoms into the presence of an entire family of dumb stereotypes and silly lowest-common-denominator sex jokes (the Hongs) that’s gonna remain the worst part of the show for the duration of the season. It’s a shame, and the writers should really have known better, but I tend to just grin and bear it. They’ll be gone soon enough, after all, and they aren’t enough to get in the way of the generally excellent writing on display here. Plus - and this is one of only a few times I’ll mention it, ‘cos otherwise it’ll get repetitive - the acting from the main cast is universally incredible, to the point where I’m genuinely kind of angry that only Antony Starr has attained proper stardom. But no matter! We soldier on. To the second episode!

#antonia prebble #siobhan marshall #robyn malcolm #antony starr #grant bowler #television #outrageous fortune #frank whitten #rachel lang #gutter black #nz

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 4, p. 3

Midnight: Davies has written a lot of epic, sometimes overblown stories, but this relatively quiet piece of terror is easily his most impressive, and it gives us more insight into the Doctor than perhaps any other episode in his time as showrunner. The supernatural presence in this episode is never defined or explained, but it never stops being terrifying. In general, the episode’s minimalism works sublimely well—the lack of spectacle and setting allows us to focus on the characters and the fear that they feel. Fear has rarely been more palpable on this show, especially in the long, chilling sequence of repeated language, and Alice Troughton’s magnificent direction and Tennant’s sublime performance keep the tension building for the entire episode. It’s one of the scariest episodes the show has ever done, but in spite of how frightening both the unknown presence and the panicking humans are, the episode isn’t completely without hope, and the pieces of light make this very dark episode much more meaningful than the straightforward piece of horror that it would otherwise have been.

The Doctor behaves here as he generally does—he’s interested in the people around him, he enjoys their company, and he’s determined to protect everyone once the danger becomes evident. If Donna had been with him, she might have balanced out his know-it-all tendencies enough to make his efforts to take charge more palatable, but on his own, the Doctor is a giant spectacle of brilliance and heroism, and some of the episode’s effectiveness lies in its understanding that in a moment of crisis, these qualities are less comforting than one might think. The Doctor doesn’t just fix problems, he does it with a flourish, and this draws attention to his personality in a way that can make him feel like part of the terror rather than a way of fighting it. I’m still not a huge fan of the depiction of Luke in the Sontaran episodes, but his bratty insistence on his own cleverness provides an interesting piece of context for the Doctor’s assertion that he should be in charge because he’s clever. The Doctor is by far the smartest and most capable person on board, but his assertiveness does come across as off-putting and perhaps inappropriate here; in the middle of a genuine panic, there are few things more terrifying than seeing someone who seems far less frightened and confused than he should be. He doesn’t really do anything wrong here; he’s had far worse moments of arrogance and narcissism at various points in the show, and he responds rationally and intelligently to the threat. He’s so busy being the hero, though, that he’s rarely seemed less human, and the lack of a human companion by his side makes this all the more dangerous.

I definitely miss Donna in this episode, but I get why this story required her absence, and I think it’s kind of awesome that she decided to sit out an adventure in favor of relaxing and enjoying herself. The need for drama means that we only really see the more thrilling pieces of the Doctor’s travels, but I’d definitely like to think that he and his companions at least occasionally put their feet up and have a margarita. Because this is mostly a companionless story, the minor characters have especial importance, and they’re an absolute triumph. I was surprisingly attached to Sky Silvestry, in spite of the fact that she becomes possessed so early in the episode that we get very little time with her actual personality. Everyone else is unusually well-rounded for one-episode characters, with the one exception of the Hostess. She is far less defined and generally easy to ignore, which makes her act of self-sacrifice all the more dramatically satisfying. She’s a startling savior, given that she’s spoken very little in the episode and has reacted far less vehemently than anyone else around her. We might have expected the more knowledgeable Dee Dee to be the one to figure things out, or even Jethro, who seems frustrated by his parents’ unwillingness to listen to his ideas. The Hostess has been a pretty unremarkable presence for the rest of the episode, and, as the Doctor remarks after she is dead, we never even learn her name. She listened, though, to the Doctor as he engaged in small talk at the start of the journey, and that’s enough to let her know how the alien presence is working even when all of the theorizing of the other characters completely fails. There have been many highly distinctive, memorable personalities on this show, but I love that we get an act of heroism here from someone who has otherwise faded into the background—this creates a surprising ending, but more importantly, it creates a brilliant disruption of the horrifying portrait of human nature that appears throughout the episode.  

A story like this definitely runs the risk of becoming so angsty and dark that it’s just unpleasant to watch, but I think it mostly avoids this. It’s definitely bleak, and I will say that this is not an episode that I’ve rewatched a lot—certainly less so than any of the other episodes near the top of my list. This is why, although I can definitely understand seeing this as the best episode of the reboot, for me it’s maybe sixth or seventh best, because there are other episodes that are about as brilliant and that I just like watching more than this one. Still, in spite of the bleakness, the episode ends on an intriguingly specific moment of redemption. This is partly because of the Hostess’s stunning moment of self-sacrifice, but what also really interests me about this moment is the fact that the Doctor is essentially saved by the quirks of his own self-expression. The scene makes it very clear that the Hostess realizes what has happened only when Sky begins to say the Doctor’s catchphrases: “Allons-y!” and “Molto bene!” These are generally presented as fun little pieces of dialogue, not as items of especial importance, but here they take on much more significance. The Doctor’s ego is definitely on display in this episode, and he makes clear that his status as the smartest person in the room is constantly on his mind, but it’s the tiny sparks of personality that wind up mattering here. There’s something really beautiful about having a voice so distinctive that it’s recognizably yours even if it’s been taken by force, and it’s a fitting tribute to the Doctor that it’s not his cleverness or courage that makes the difference in the end, but rather his unmistakable uniqueness. A+

Turn Left: Well, one episode after the Doctor gets a pretty clear message that his assumption that he is the world savior at all times can be obnoxious and frightening, we learn that if the Doctor wasn’t here to save us, we’d be in a terrifying dystopia within about a year and all of reality would start to disappear shortly thereafter. I still love the incisive look at the Doctor’s ego in “Midnight,” but we maybe could have followed it up with a little bit less of a validation of that ego. Anyways, the Doctor-less world is a fascinating concept, and it lets us have an entire episode focused on Donna. Some fans consider this to be among the best episodes of the reboot, and I definitely think it is one of the best ideas, but it switches with frustrating rapidity between brilliance and mediocrity, making it difficult to enjoy even the unequivocally good parts.  

           The structure of the episode is one of the items that alternates between stupidity and near-perfection. I do find the ways in which we learn of the deaths of the show’s major characters to be genuinely chilling. The fairly quiet portrayal of these events, generally conveyed through brief announcements on the news, makes for a much more heartrending sequence than what would result from a flashier depiction of the deaths. Hearing characters like Martha and Sarah Jane being killed off in a couple of sentences, as if they barely matter, is just so shocking that the deaths are very alarming, even though we know that this is an alternate universe and everything will probably go back to normal soon. The actual shape of the story doesn’t work quite as well for me, although I do love that it resolves the “something on your back” line from “The Fires of Pompeii.” The beginning has a weirdly Orientalist vibe—“Donna is attacked after naively trusting a mysterious, sinister Asian fortune-teller” sounds like the kind of story you’d expect to find in about 1897. The idea of the Trickster is interesting, but a lot of his abilities get explained on The Sarah Jane Adventures, which makes this episode a bit difficult to follow if you haven’t seen that show. In general, I really like the way that Davies creates links between Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Sarah Jane, but usually it’s possible to understand this show even if you don’t watch the spinoffs, and I’m not sure that that’s the case here. Still, the plot is more than anything else an occasion for us to watch a different version of Donna interacting with Rose, so a few moments of confusion are all right.

           This is the episode in which Rose finally returns properly, after several miniature cameos throughout the season. I loved those brief appearances, which I thought were a stellar way of hinting at what was to come, but her actual return is underwhelming to the point that I sort of regret the entire decision to bring back the character. It makes sense that she is different from the Rose that we knew in seasons One and Two, as this shows the impact of working for Torchwood and of living with her loss of the Doctor. I fully understand making her more serious—and, really, I wanted them to show her changing more than she did in Season Two—but there isn’t much of an effort to make that work for the character here. If we had seen a more gradual change across Season Two, this would be more believable, but she just seems like a completely different character; aside from the brief moments when she remembers how great the Doctor’s hair was and when she first watches Donna enter the TARDIS, there’s so little of Rose’s personality here that it just feels like they cast Billie Piper in a different role. Even The Moment in “The Day of the Doctor” has a little bit more of Rose’s personality, and that is literally not Rose at all and is just an interface using Rose’s image. She doesn’t get anything interesting to do here; I love that she has clearly gotten really good at her job, but in this episode, she basically turns up, tells Donna the information that she needs to know, and then vanishes, while being annoyingly and sort of needlessly cryptic. She uses some of the Doctor’s language (“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry”) but she doesn’t have anything that reminds us of her own character, and even the Serious Rose angle goes back and forth between seeming like an awesome professional woman and putting on a weird affect that makes her look like she’s been drugged. I really find Piper’s performance odd here, but I’m assuming that Davies or the director told her to play the character like this because Billie Piper is a stunningly fabulous actress and she could have done so much better than this. On the one hand, regardless of the portrayal of Rose herself, we do get two women saving the world together, which is great. (In general, this is one of the most female-centric episodes of the reboot; Wilf and the Italian neighbor get a fair amount of screen time, but the other major characters are basically all women.) On the other hand, this is the first sustained return of Rose after her departure, and it’s a lot less great that for much of the episode, she’s just a plot device, and kind of an irritating one.

           In spite of the attention given to Rose and to the numerous character deaths, Donna is the star here, and even when I’m not thrilled about what the episode is doing with the character, it’s wonderful to see her get so much screen time. I’ve heard this referred to as the episode in which Donna stops being a joke, but I don’t think this is true at all, as she’s been a non-joke since the end of “Pompeii” at the latest. It is an interesting shift for the character, though, in that we finally get to see her in ordinary circumstances for an extended period of time; between her departure with the Doctor at the end of “Partners in Crime” and her return at the conclusion of “Journey’s End,” the Sontaran two-parter is the only time that Donna visits home, so even with an alternate universe and alternate Donna, this episode provides an important piece of context for a character who uses the TARDIS to escape from ordinary life more than any other companion. Granted, “ordinary” has taken on a new meaning here, as the world has collapsed into a dystopian mess, but we see her in a lot of situations that don’t involve dealing with the supernatural. Brief as they are, it’s nice to get scenes of Donna going out for drinks with her friends, singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” with her housemates, or railing against her employer as he fires her. It’s a little frustrating that we get this kind of material only in an alternate universe episode, as it still just leaves us with the idea that this is what Donna’s everyday life would have looked like if her life had been quite different from what it was; still, the episode conveys her sadness and hopelessness beautifully, and it is definitely the best portrayal of her relationship with her mother. The situation they are in is so terrible that Sylvia’s tendency toward complaint has more depth than it usually does, and this makes her into much less of a caricature than she is in other episodes. The episode doesn’t sugarcoat the problems between these two—Sylvia makes clear that she’s basically given up on her daughter—but their difficult relationship is nuanced and believable, and ultimately very moving.

           This episode lets us see more of the flaws that Donna had mostly overcome even by the earliest episodes of this season. In the absence of the Doctor, her tendencies toward self-centered shallowness haven’t been challenged, and it’s interesting to see more of those qualities here, although I think that one scene might go too far. I like the scene in which she just keeps yelling about her own problems while the hospital gets transported to the moon, but I’m less pleased with the scene that depicts her as somehow not realizing that immigrant labor camps are a problem until Wilf points out the obvious to her. The former scene works because lots of people tune out the suffering of others that they see on the news. Donna is definitely being portrayed as self-centered and callous here, but she’s taking on those qualities to a degree that seems believable and doesn’t make her look like a psychopath. There’s a difference, though, between ignoring the misfortunes of strangers on the news and being completely oblivious to the pain of your friends when they’re standing in front of you, and I just don’t buy that she would be quite this disengaged, even in a giant dystopia in which lots of different terrible things are happening. She thinks her housemate is loud, but she does seem to like him, and having people she knows being rounded up on a wagon and taken to forced labor camps on the grounds that they are immigrants is a pretty big thing to overlook. She does get upset about it once Wilf starts talking about “the last time,” but she swallows her neighbor’s cheerful lies about the labor camps being all right so easily that she comes across as having the awareness of a six-year-old. My concern here is that it makes the change that the Doctor produced in her seem bigger than I assumed it was. The general impression that I get of Donna is that she has quite a lot of natural empathy, courage, and generosity, but she felt like she had so little control in her life that she didn’t really make use of those qualities as much until the Doctor awoke those feelings in her and made her try harder. This scene makes it look like the Doctor basically gave her a new brain, or at least implanted some qualities in her that hadn’t existed prior to their meeting, and I would prefer to stick with the idea that the Doctor brought about an awakening in her and not a total personality transplant.

           I’m also conflicted about her act of self-sacrifice that returns us to the show’s normal universe. Part of my issue with this is that the season has by this point leaned too hard on the notion that good people die protecting the Doctor. I get why this is here, because it’s going to come up in the finale, but of the past six storylines, this is the fifth to resolve things through the structure of “The Doctor is dead/about to die but someone [takes his place on the exploding Sontaran ship/jumps in front of the gun/takes the fatal charge of the library computer in his stead/throws herself out the airlock/jumps in front of a van] so that he can live.” It reads more as an attempt to build a theme than as an inability to think up a wider range of endings, but this should be a really big moment for Donna, and I think the impact is diminished by the fact that we’ve seen similar actions in so many recent episodes, especially since the scenes in “Midnight” and “Forest of the Dead” were so brilliantly done. In spite of the repetition, her moment of sacrifice is very dramatically effective, but I like it less the more that I think about it. The Donna who travels with the Doctor has been shown to be smart, compassionate, resistant to being told what to do, and good at making connections with people. She’s valuable because of who she is, and what her heart and mind bring to their adventures together. The version of Donna that we meet in this episode has a tremendous moment of embracing death for the good of the world, and she does show some quick thinking in figuring out what needs to happen, but ultimately she is valuable because her corpse causes a helpful traffic jam. It’s not even the case that she’s doing something useful and gets killed while doing it—what the story needs is a body in the right place on the road, and she allows her own body to serve that function. Her death is very meaningful here, but in the rest of the series, her life has value, and while this episode ostensibly lets Donna find a sense of heroism without the Doctor’s help, it winds up emphasizing how much her personal growth depended on the Doctor’s influence. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that Donna was fundamentally altered through her travels with the Doctor, but this episode is sometimes celebrated as an empowering vision of how Donna would have been amazing even without the Doctor, and to me this ending doesn’t really manage that.

           Sacrificing your life in order to protect a different version of yourself is an interesting psychological scenario, although the time constraints of wrapping everything up in one episode means that we don’t get to go into this very much. I can imagine that if you were feeling hopeless and valueless, news of another you running around helping to save the world would be an odd thing to experience. It might be thrilling to learn of a better version of yourself, but it could also be immensely frustrating to look around at your actual circumstances and see how different they are from this vision of your ideal self. It’s a fascinating concept, but the episode doesn’t quite have time to go into the complexities of her feelings about this. The story’s conclusion makes clear that AU Donna values the version of herself who travels with the Doctor more highly than she values herself, although the degree to which this is a world-saving act of self-sacrifice versus a somewhat self-interested attempt to take on the better version of her own life is unclear. The relationship between the two Donnas is also unclear to me; Rose denies the notion that AU Donna will simply become proper Donna, but she is able to remember the phrase “Bad Wolf” at the end, which suggests that at least some of AU Donna’s consciousness transferred into the primary Donna’s mind. I’m possibly just looking for more of a metaphor than the story is actually trying to depict, but I keep feeling like I should be able to understand more about actual Donna on the basis of what we see of her alternate self, and I never really get much insight into her beyond a general sense that she’s a good person whose life would have been much worse without the Doctor in it.

           I’ve spent a lot of time talking about problems in this episode, which might make this review reflect more negativity than I feel; in spite of my dislike of this episode’s approach to Donna, she still gets some great material. I’m not sure if a companion has ever been given as much of an emotional range to work with in a single episode, and Tate conveys the characters feelings—her hopelessness about life, her panic and terror about her role in events, her occasional moments of enjoyment in spite of everything—in a tremendously detailed, utterly believable performance. I wish that we had been given a more coherent vision of what it would be like for Donna to find some of her best qualities without the Doctor’s assistance, but there are moments in which Davies gets things exactly right, like this exchange between Wilf and Donna: “You’re not going to make the world any better by shouting at it.” “I can try.” B+

The Stolen Earth: I find it difficult to evaluate this episode, because it sets up a lot of plot developments that I wind up hating, but they don’t really go awry until the next episode. I really liked this one the first time I saw it, and I do think that it’s mostly very good, but after watching “Journey’s End,” my frustration with that episode spoils some of my enjoyment of the setup that this episode provides. Taken on its own, though, this is an exciting piece of television with a lot of lovely guest appearances, so it’s not really fair to criticize it for a subsequent episode’s problems.

           In some respects, the huge cast is a limitation of this episode, because there are just SO MANY characters that it feels like we can’t spend enough time with any of them. Watching an episode starring The Doctor, Rose, Martha, Donna, Captain Jack, Gwen, Ianto, Jackie, Mickey, Wilf, Harriet, and Sarah Jane sort of feels like being a puppy when lots of humans come into the room; you want to rush over to someone and wag your tail in excitement, but there are so many humans that it’s easiest to just sort of run around in circles. Even if the episode does pull in slightly too many directions, though, they’re mostly very good directions. Martha continues to be a much better character this season than she was in the previous one, and the episode does a great job of creating tension about how long it would take for anyone to notice that Rose is back on Earth. (Rose continues to demonstrate the skills she has honed in the parallel universe, but she seems like herself again, which makes the previous episode’s weird portrayal of the character even stranger.) My favorite return, though, is that of Harriet Jones, which goes a long way toward remedying the awfulness that happened with her character in “Christmas Invasion.” I don’t know if this was the plan all along or if this was a response to criticism of that episode, but she gets back all of the dignity and integrity that “Christmas Invasion” took away from her, and she’s just marvelous. I’m sad to see her die, but I love that she is given a thoughtful, brave, heroic death that totally redeems her from the earlier nonsense.

           There are some really lovely moments of plotting here, in which we find out what has been going on with the various missing planets mentioned throughout the season and why the bees have been disappearing. Davies has woven these ideas into the fabric of the season in a really understated way, and they come together beautifully here. He’s really very good at introducing details like this without telegraphing that they’re going to play a major role in the seasonal arc—both this and the early pieces of the Harold Saxon storyline are set up with impressive subtlety. We also get to see the Shadow Proclamation and the return of the fabulous Rhinoceros Police, so there’s plenty of great material to enjoy in this episode.

In spite of my enjoyment of most of the plot here, it does feel like the storyline that’s taking shape here is a massive departure from the rest of the season. The strong character work in many episodes has given this season a sense of intimacy, and the delights of the Tenth Doctor/Donna pairing have created a consistent sense of fun, although the last couple of episodes already started the movement away from that. Season finales tend to be big and epic, so that’s unsurprising here, but the focus on so many different characters and the sudden raising of the stakes makes this feel disconnected from most of the episodes that came before it. Still, it’s a solid piece of setup, and the final moments, in which the Doctor is shot down by a Dalek just as he finally sees Rose again, create a terrific cliffhanger. A-/B+

Journey’s End: Oh, good grief. About nine million things happen here, and a lot of them are absolute nonsense, but the frustrating thing is that the episode is occasionally brilliant, so we get a tantalizing sense of what this episode might have been like if the good elements had been grounded in a more believable story. Part of the problem is the continuation of the previous episode’s tendency to seem much bigger than the season’s storyline can support. The placement of details about disappearing bees and planets has been impeccable, but while the season has been superb at conveying the necessary exposition in a subtle manner, it has done nothing to prepare for the tone that this finale takes. Both of the next two season finales also work with crazy plots and extreme emotional intensity, but in both cases something of that tone is established at the start of the season and continues to make appearances throughout the season, so that by the time we reach the finale that energy makes sense. Here, the plot just feels like it’s overflowing from its container; I quite like the idea of a reality bomb, but if you want me to believe that by making a bunch of planets into a big space diorama and then pressing a button the Daleks can wipe out not only this universe but also all other universes as well, you really need to prepare for a story of that magnitude, and the relatively small-scale feel of much of this season doesn’t do that at all.  

In addition to seeming at odds with the tone of the season, this episode also draws upon previous seasons to an unfortunate degree. The plot is essentially this: the Daleks have been trying to destroy the universe, as they do, and the Doctor is trying to stop them. There’s a possibility of defeating the Daleks through major violence, like destroying the Earth, but the Doctor is against it because he is a man of peace. Just when it looks like the Doctor has failed and the universe is in great peril, it turns out that the Doctor’s companion, who has gone off in the TARDIS without him against her will, has unknowingly absorbed a huge amount of abilities that vastly exceed anything she has ever been able to do before. She turns up at the last minute and saves the day, her “just so human” qualities combining productively with her new powers, thus explaining a phrase that was brought up earlier in the season and creating an awesome moment in which the ordinary, working-class woman saves the world. Unfortunately, her body can’t take this influx of power for long, and so it has to be removed from her, and sadness ensues. I liked this plot when it was called “The Parting of Ways,” but this episode takes the framework from that finale and exaggerates it until it ceases to be enjoyable.

This show has repeated concepts plenty of times, and it usually works, because the constant recasting means that we can take a concept from a previous episode and see how it works differently with a new Doctor or companion. This many recycled elements in one episode, though, is just too much, and once again it doesn’t quite manage to give Donna the moment she deserves. On the one hand, I do really love the reveal of the human-Time Lord metacrisis; it’s fantastic to see Donna be the hero for a while, and after saving the world she makes the Daleks spin around, which is hilarious. There’s also a nice reference to her time as a temp, as she makes use of her quick typing skills. Unlike Rose as the Bad Wolf, she retains much of her personality even when she has acquired her new powers, and her moment of triumph is an absolute delight. On the other hand, there’s been so much attention to the idea that Donna really is special, even if she doesn’t quite believe it, and I don’t think that centering her moment of triumph on a retread of something Rose did three seasons ago conveys that specialness. After “Turn Left” concluded with her act of sacrifice that mimicked the actions of many other characters in this season, this episode really needed to give her something unique to work with, and in that sense it completely fails. I also think that Donna’s triumph is a little bit too reliant on luck. In “The Parting of Ways,” it was definitely a fortunate coincidence that Rose happened to take on godlike powers just when the Daleks were about to win, but her determination to return to the Doctor, her speech about learning a better way to live, and her collaboration with Mickey and Jackie in getting the TARDIS to open really make it seem like her absorption of power is a direct result of her own choices and values. Donna takes on new abilities here because she was in the right place at the right time, and so while it remains lovely to watch her take charge, it seems a bit unearned. (There’s also a lot of nonsense from Dalek Caan about predestination and external controlling forces, and it’s unclear to me exactly how much of a role that played in this season, but I don’t like it.) Her temp abilities (100 words per minute!) may have been useful, but she wouldn’t have been able to do any of what she accomplishes here if the metacrisis hadn’t poured a lot of knowledge into her head. It’s fun to watch her succeed, but Donna doesn’t become great so much as she has greatness thrust upon her, and I would be more satisfied by this development if Donna’s actual values and abilities played more of a role.

           This storyline does allow for some very good things. Dalek Caan’s involvement is sort of interesting, even if it is explained so quickly that it doesn’t make as much of an impact as it could. In addition to sort of enjoying Donna’s moment of world-saving, in spite of my reservations about it, I also love what this episode does with Martha, whose reluctant but determined effort to use the Osterhagen Key is one of the most compelling pieces of the episode. I was constantly aggravated by the third season’s focus on her jealousy of Rose, but when she finally learns of her predecessor’s return, she simply says “Oh my God, he found you!” and looks genuinely happy for the Doctor. It’s a small moment, but a really beautiful one, and an indication of how much better the writing has been for Martha this season. I also really love the scene in which all of the characters fly the TARDIS together in order to tow the Earth back to its proper spot; yes, it’s cheesy, but it’s awfully sweet. Even if I’m frustrated with some of the ways in which the characters are used here, this really is a marvelous ensemble of people, and seeing them together is a nice reminder of how many supremely likeable figures Davies has created for us.      

           I would also say that some of the things that the episode tends to get criticized for don’t strike me as all that bad. The Doctor regenerating into himself does make the previous episode’s cliffhanger look like a pretty contrived piece of drama, but the regeneration energy and its effect on the severed hand are important later in the episode, so I can see the value of this development. It sort of messes with the rules of regeneration as we’ve come to understand them, but it’s a pretty ambiguous process anyways, so I don’t think it’s inexcusable to shift them a bit here. The severed hand itself is a particularly good piece of plotting, as Davies has been building this into the narratives of both this show and Torchwood across several seasons. I’m not even as troubled by Donna’s memory erasure as some people are. The complaints against this tend to take the form that the Doctor removing her memories even while she is directly saying, “No, no, no” has a sort of rape-like quality to it, as he is completely ignoring her wishes about how to deal with her body and mind. I can see this, but I can also understand why the Doctor would feel like he should act in this way. She could be seconds away from dying, and so there isn’t time for him to get into an argument with her about why it’s better for her to live, and I can imagine the Doctor’s desperation to avoid bringing her corpse home to Wilf. It absolutely should be her choice, but while I think this is a problematic moment, the Doctor is making a decision that I can imagine a decent person making in a moment of crisis, so it’s a dark scene that avoids making him into a monster. It also is a genuinely tragic ending to Donna’s story—probably the saddest thing this show has done that doesn’t eventually get reversed. Having her save the world but retain no memory of it is an awful fate for someone who enters the show with very little self-esteem, and her reversion to her former more callous self is just heartbreaking. The erasure of her memory is wonderfully acted by both Tate and Tennant, and even if I have some doubts about this as an ending for Donna I am really moved by the whole sequence. Her casual goodbye to the Doctor at her home is probably the saddest moment of the entire episode, and it’s one of the few things in this episode that at least partly seems like it is tragic because of what it means to her and not because of what it means to the Doctor.

           This is an unfortunately rare thing in an episode that turns basically everybody else (and sometimes Donna too) into ways of understanding the Doctor’s guilt and loneliness. What I am most bothered by is what Davies does to poor Rose. She does get some gorgeous scenes early in the episode, especially the moment in which she takes the Doctor’s hand while it looks like the TARDIS is being destroyed, but her final scene is appalling. I don’t object at all to having her wind up with the Doctor clone, but the manner of getting them together is just so awful that I can’t imagine what anyone was thinking. Rose Tyler has always been fiercely determined to make her own choices about her life. The Doctor sent her away at the end of Season One, and she used a big truck to pull the TARDIS open in order to get back to him. She winds up being taken to the parallel universe at the end of Season Two, but when the Doctor first sneaks one of the universe-travel devices around her neck and sends her there, she comes right back. Even when she has landed in the parallel universe, she keeps trying to return to him. She has fought so hard to be able to make her own choices about her life even in seemingly hopeless situations, which is why it’s so odd to watch her care so little about her own agency in her last moments on the show. I get that the gaps between universes are closing and so there isn’t time for a lot of discussion, but the Doctor could have at least asked her what she wanted to do. Instead, he just takes the TARDIS right to the parallel universe and then, once they’re there, he informs her that she’s going to help the banished Doctor clone to get over his inner violence, but it’s ok because they can date. She very briefly objects to this on the grounds that the Doctor clone isn’t the man that she knew, but it takes about four seconds for her to go along with the plan, and having the two Doctors repeat the conversation from the end of “Doomsday” so that the clone can say “I love you” doesn’t take the place of giving Rose the chance to think about what she wants. The whole sequence comes across as extremely manipulative and creates the sense that our Doctor is refusing to say he loves her just to make sure that Rose follows the plan. I also assume that the entire notion of banishing the clone to this parallel world is a similar ruse, as the Doctor has committed genocide before, and so the only reason to banish him is to create the circumstances necessary for Rose to stay in the parallel world. (Or maybe he does genuinely think that the other Doctor is truly dangerous? I honestly can’t tell what his ethical position is here.) She looks a bit cruel for kissing the other Doctor in front of him, and he looks awfully controlling, especially since he scampers while they’re kissing instead of saying goodbye. I can’t believe that Donna was on the Doctor’s side here; the Donna we’ve had all season would be shouting at the Doctor and probably throwing sand at him at this point. I get that the Doctor is being all noble and this solution is probably best for Rose in the long run, but he works so hard to force the resolution that Rose gets to play only a very small role in determining her own future. He interferes with Donna’s decision-making in a moment of crisis in which she was otherwise about to die, but he takes charge of Rose’s life when, even with the clock ticking, there was enough time to give her more of a choice—and she doesn’t even seem to mind. Rose Tyler is one of the most beloved characters in the history of this show, and one of the biggest reasons why the reboot became so successful, and she deserved a much better ending than one that essentially involves saying “I don’t have to care about my autonomy anymore, because the Doctor can be my boyfriend now!”

           This isn’t the only way in which this episode comes across as disrespectful toward its female characters. Davros is mostly wasted here, as he is really just used to tell the Doctor to feel bad about himself, but the most irritating thing about his function in this episode is that he asks the Doctor and, implicitly, the audience, to see the other characters almost entirely in terms of what they reveal about the Doctor. Martha’s principled, quietly determined consideration of destroying her own planet in order to save the rest of the universe, Sarah Jane’s acquisition of the Warp Star, and the efforts of all of the other returning companions all become ways of reminding the Doctor that he can’t shake the association with violence. The Doctor does try to defend them, saying that they’re trying to help, but the episode seems to take Davros’s critique pretty seriously. The montage of guilt, in which the Doctor remembers the deaths of numerous (mostly female) characters from the past few seasons, is even worse.  I don’t usually find this show to be particularly bad in terms of fridging, although it does happen on occasion; there are plenty of female characters who die, but the show isn’t excessive about it, and many of them die in ways that are meaningful to their own stories and not just methods of propping up the Doctor’s narrative. The montage of character deaths, though, essentially digs up the corpses of a lot of women and chucks them into a giant freezer. Even beautifully done scenes, like the deaths of River and the Hostess, suffer from being placed into a montage of reasons for the Doctor to feel guilty, removing these deaths from the narratives of those characters and presenting them as stepping-stones in the Doctor’s moral journey.            

The Doctor has plenty of flaws, and this version of him arguably has more than some of the other regenerations. He has a tendency to be narcissistic, arrogant, and oblivious to other people’s feelings. He’s still a wonderful, charming, admirable hero, but these flaws are there and it usually works well when people point them out. The fact that people sometimes die in proximity to him is not really among these flaws—there are occasional exceptions, like “Human Nature,” but it’s usually the case that if the Doctor wasn’t around, a lot more people would die. It also isn’t really a problem that he takes smart, brave people and gives them the ability to fight back against evil beings who are trying to destroy the whole of reality. I don’t get the sense that Sarah Jane, Martha, and the rest are being needlessly violent, they’re just trying to be practical in a fight against literally the worst thing that could possibly happen. Granted, Davros is not exactly someone you’d expect to have spot-on moral advice, but the show and the Doctor seem to believe pretty strongly in his words, and this means that the show has to embrace the notion that the ways in which many of its major figures have developed in recent years basically just serve as reasons to be skeptical of the Doctor. There isn’t any meaningful sense of doubt on the part of the characters themselves—Martha, for instance, gets some fascinating material throughout the episode, but there’s never any real attention to her potential concerns about the kind of person she’s become as a result of the path that the Doctor put her on. Nobody else’s feelings matter much here; the Doctor has a moment of tremendous moral doubt, and everyone else just gets pulled in as an illustration of that guilt.

And then we get the mass exodus of people, which is done in the most annoying way possible. Sarah Jane’s nice comment that the Doctor acts lonely but actually has a huge family just winds up becoming tragically ironic, and it takes forever, and the last twenty minutes feel like a never-ending epilogue. The whole episode is just weirdly structured, like going to an  ABBA concert and then having Coldplay come out to do an encore that’s half as long as the rest of the concert. What feels like the climax of the story occurs well before the end, and then we get another one, sort of, and even if pieces of it work well the whole thing is just a mess. Eventually, we get to the end, and the Doctor is being sad and lonely in the rain, and it makes a great meme but I don’t think there’s anything in the world that isn’t a symbol of the Doctor’s guilt and grief at this point; the Earth basically just exists as a large-scale reminder that he has flaws, without any sense that the Doctor is aware of what his actual bad qualities are or how he could fix them. There are a lot of amazing characters in this episode, but in the end, they’re just ways of breaking the Doctor’s hearts, and Davies has never done a bigger disservice to the genuinely lovely world he created than this. C

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