
"The final act of your life is murder. But which one of us?"
Please click here for the article on The End of Time Part One.
It’s funny how the NEXT TIME trailer on Doctor Who can make me imagine all sorts of scenarios for how the next episode will play out. It’s also interesting in equal proportion to how the episode actually plays out. The NEXT TIME trailer for The End of Time Part Two had all sorts of ideas floating in my head about how the episode would look and what the storyline was all about.
It looked to me that the Time Lords would return, as they promised at the end of Part One and somehow take the Doctor and put him on some sort of trial. I assumed that The Lord President of the Timelords was speaking directly to the Doctor when he said, “The heartbeat of a Time Lord.” The Doctor is all battered from possibly being interrogated. My imagination was on fire. There is nothing better than one’s own imagination to come up with great ideas.
In reality, the episode didn’t quite reach that potential which is not the fault of the episode. It simply chose to go a different direction than that of my imagination.
The End of Time Part Two obviously picks up where Part One left off. The Master has basically turned everyone on the Earth into him with the exception of Donna, Wilf, the two Vinvocci and of course the Doctor. There is a confrontation between the Doctor and the Master. It’s a really interesting scene because it’s a very heart to heart sort of talk. The Doctor really respects the Master but the Master has the upper hand. Eventually the Doctor escapes with Wilf and the Vinvocci in the Vinvocci spaceship which is hovering above the earth but much more malevolent things are afoot.
It’s funny how the NEXT TIME trailer on Doctor Who can make me imagine all sorts of scenarios for how the next episode will play out. It’s also interesting in equal proportion to how the episode actually plays out. The NEXT TIME trailer for The End of Time Part Two had all sorts of ideas floating in my head about how the episode would look and what the storyline was all about.
It looked to me that the Time Lords would return, as they promised at the end of Part One and somehow take the Doctor and put him on some sort of trial. I assumed that The Lord President of the Timelords was speaking directly to the Doctor when he said, “The heartbeat of a Time Lord.” The Doctor is all battered from possibly being interrogated. My imagination was on fire. There is nothing better than one’s own imagination to come up with great ideas.
In reality, the episode didn’t quite reach that potential which is not the fault of the episode. It simply chose to go a different direction than that of my imagination.
The End of Time Part Two obviously picks up where Part One left off. The Master has basically turned everyone on the Earth into him with the exception of Donna, Wilf, the two Vinvocci and of course the Doctor. There is a confrontation between the Doctor and the Master. It’s a really interesting scene because it’s a very heart to heart sort of talk. The Doctor really respects the Master but the Master has the upper hand. Eventually the Doctor escapes with Wilf and the Vinvocci in the Vinvocci spaceship which is hovering above the earth but much more malevolent things are afoot.

Upon hearing that this is the last day of the Time War, the Lord President wants immediate action on how to stop their destruction. Suddenly an idea presents itself. So simple but so effective.
Ever since the Master returned in The Sound of Drums, he’s had a sound beating in his head that is driving him insane. This was never referred to in the classic series. Now as the Time Lords face final death everything becomes clear as they send the drum beating sound back in time and instill this sound into the Master’s head so he’s had this all of his life. For the fan in me, I really like this because, to me, it means that the Master we knew in the classic series never had this sound. The insinuation is that the Master was more insane than evil partly because of this beating sound in his head.. I think having the Time Lords put this into him and using him for their survival is quite good.
Now with the beat implanted in the Master, who is outside of the time-locked Time War, he is essentially a homing beacon. What makes contact between him and Gallifrey is something very small which can break through, a White Point star which is only found on Gallifrey.
Now with it, the Master can set up the portal between Earth and Gallifrey and bring over the Time Lords with the intention of turning all of them into Master people like he did with everyone on Earth. Meanwhile on the Vinvocci spaceship in orbit above the Earth, the Doctor learns of the plan via the Master boasting to the Doctor on all radio frequencies. The Doctor jumps into action and takes the ship back to Earth. It gets a little dicey here. We see a great combat scene with Wilf taking the role of a fighter pilot while blowing up missiles that are targeted on them. It’s fast paced fun and done extremely well. Now, instead of landing the ship the Doctor jumps out of the ship and ends up free falling about 150 to 200 feet before crashing through the skylight of the Naismith manor and landing in the room with the Master and the Time Lords. I hate to put on my diamond logo Doctor Who T- shirt (which is 2 sizes too small) here but in Logopolis, the Doctor falls a great distance from the Pharos Project radio telescope dish which that alone causes him to regenerate. How can the Doctor survive the crash through glass and another 20 feet here? Now, the Doctor is quite bruised, cut and bloody but the fact he could move at all is simply shocking!
The Doctor stands between The Master and the Timelords. He has a gun that was given to him by Wilf and he is either going to use it on the Master or the Time Lords. Luckily the Vinvocci got off their asses and took the time to finally land their ship so Wilf can join the Doctor. Its unfortunate Wilf didn’t just go home. The Lord President turns all the Master replicas back into human beings. The Time Lords want to bring about the end of time so they can ascend from their physical forms into higher intelligence void of any physical embodiment.
Wilf, trying to help, sees someone trapped in a chamber which has two sides. One person is in the double chamber at a time but to let him out, someone needs to go into the other side hit a button and release them. Wilf does exactly this which releases the one guy but Wilf is now trapped. Someone will have to do the same thing for him at one point.


The reward is a long sequence where he visits all the people in his (tenth) life who were important to him. This includes Martha and Mickey who are now married, Sarah Jane and Luke, Captain Jack and Verity Newman whose grandmother was The Doctor’s love interest in Human Nature/The Family of Blood. We also see Donna’s wedding in a very sweet scene of the Doctor giving them a lottery ticket bought with money he borrowed from Donna’s deceased father. We also go back to where it started at the Powell Estates in 2005 so the Doctor can visit Rose. He doesn’t mean to actually see her but stays in the shadows. I think they missed a trick when the Doctor says she will have a brilliant year, I wished he told her she was going to have a fantastic year. Finally the regeneration gets going. The Doctor is helped by song from the Ood into the TARDIS and he takes off. As the regeneration kicks in, the tenth Doctor says his final line, “I Don’t Want to Go!” and regenerates and what a regeneration it is. Due to the radiation he was exposed to, the Doctor explodes out energy in a gigantic burst which almost destroys the TARDIS creating huge fires. Part of console room collapses but the change is made and there is a new Doctor.
Truly this was an end of an era. It seemed almost implausible that Tennant would leave. As he stayed in the role, momentum kept building up for him as a star and a fixture on the BBC. When the regeneration finally happened, I doubted we would see Matt Smith but instead see Tennant winking at us and saying “Got you!”


There is something grand and rather epic in scale between this Doctor and this version of the Master facing each other. It seems like both know that neither of them will survive and maybe one of the best pairing of the Doctor and Master in the series history. Maybe it’s because they have been in a story before but not many stories. It almost seems like a re-match.
One thing I wish Russell T. Davies kept in was, according to The Writers Tale: The Final Chapter, the Daleks were meant to appear and create an alliance with the Time Lords. They also did not want to die and we would have seen in essence a Dalek Parliament. I could see Russell making this work. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Russell spoke with new showrunner Steven Moffat if he was planning on using the Daleks in Series Five. Moffat was but didn’t tell Russell he couldn’t use them; at the end of the day Russell didn’t want to steal Moffat’s thunder with there return in Series Five. Fair enough. Ultimately, The End of Time Part Two got massive ratings for BBC1 and ended the Tenth Doctor era on a massively high note.

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