Doctor Who: Journey's End

[purplecat]

For WHO DAILY, everyone else skip to below the line.

<lj user=louisedennis> thought <a href="http://louisedennis.livejournal.com/80036.html">it had some obvious flaws but was enjoying it too much to care</a>

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I some ways I feel I could re-type much of my review of The Stolen Earth here. It has some obvious flaws even on a cursory examination but I was enjoying it far too much at the time to really care.

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In some ways I'm tempted to write a sort of retrospective reaction post here. I could write things like "OK, so that is a really bad resolution to the regeneration cliffhanger... unless of course that hand turns out to be significant later on in the episode"; "... and thousands of Doctor/Rose shippers can now die happy."

What I do think is interesting is how much more accepting I am of this episode than I was of Parting of the Ways way back at the end of season 1. Because in many ways they are very similar with Parting of the Ways being, undeniably, tauter and less sprawling. The bottom line is that each one has a plot which consists of some technobabble which then allows a group of actors to emote in some particular way. You know technobabble, technobabble, technobabble which means the Doctor feels oh so guilty then technobabble, technobabble, technobabble which means everyone is oh so happy technobabble technobabble technobabble some of us are happy-ish in a bittersweet kind of way oh no! technobabble technobabble how tragic! In the process both seem to treat characters, ideas and set-up in a cavalier way discarding things in a fairly perfunctory manner once they've lost interest in them (witness the way Journey's End never really explains why Rose has been popping up on TV screens all season mouthing "Doctor"). Parting of the Ways had the advantage that it was restricting its emotional moments to the interactions between the Doctor and Rose and was avoiding the temptation to throw in random characters and references simply because they could. These days I've accepted that technobabble, technobabble, character moment is about the best I can accept from a Davies script and, as a result, find I appreciate them much more for what they actually are. I think I have a better time watching Doctor Who as a result.

On the other hand I've always felt that Doctor Who has struggled to tell a consistent story about its characters (in contrast to the much derided Primeval which has had a much stronger grip, I think, on who its characters are and where they are going). So even once you accept that the plot is about the development of the characters and not about the events that surround them (hence the technobabble, technobble, oh no how terrible nature of the scripting) the story fails to convince. We were told lots in the surrounding literature that season one was about the growth of Rose and the Doctor's recovery from survivor guilt. In that light Rose's transformation into Bad Wolf and the Doctor's decisive inaction make a sort of thematic sense. And possibly, just possibly, if you put Rose, Dalek and then Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways together in sequence you get that but mostly Rose was, pretty consistently, Rose from Rose and the Doctor was, pretty consistently, the Doctor from Rose. However I thought the character stories in Journey's End actually worked and, in a way, we got a pay off for the Bad Wolf transformation. Apart from Rose (and Donna) everyone else had moved on and built a life of adventure without the Doctor. Even Mickey had finally moved on to construct a life without Rose. But for Rose everything continues to be about getting back to the Doctor whatever the cost to the exclusion, apparently, of all other considerations. Even the "Doctor's soul is revealed" moment which was fairly poor in many respects was quite cleverly put together (if you ignore all the "Doctor's soul" bits). What Davros thinks people have learned is to destroy, but what they have actually learned is to give the enemy a chance for negotiation first.

As well as Parting of the Ways it is interesting to compare Journey's End to Davies' other season closers Doomsday and Last of the Time Lords. I would maintain that I enjoyed it more than Parting of the Ways but that is because, I think, I'm more accustomed to the sort of show I should expect here than because it is necessarily better (despite my point about character development). As for the other two, to be honest, I recall very little of Doomsday beyond the final scene on the beach and the head of Torchwood becoming a Cyberman. I thought the Martha walks the Earth half of Last of the Time Lords was great but that all the bits on the Valiant before Martha turned up were pretty terrible. I'm actually pretty forgiving of the whole Doctor as Tinkerbell business though I can see why many people found it risable. There is no doubt in my mind that Journey's End was superior to Last of the Time Lords.

Catherine Tate pretty much stole the show though, I thought, as her half of the Doctor Donna though David Tennant was chasing her pretty hard in places. I felt that, even without the different coloured suits you got a sense that he was portraying two very similar but slightly different people; the human Doctor seeming gawkier and less self-assured than the Time Lord version. While I enjoyed Tate's performance I did feel that Donna's storyline was a little unsatisfactory. For instance I would have liked the human time-lord meta-technobabble crisis to have arisen because she did something clever rather than staggering around in the dissolving TARDIS until the hand started floating around and glowing. If you want to make a point about how special she is anyway it would have been an idea to show her being special anyway in this, her swansong. I was also not entirely happy at the way the Doctor chose to wipe her mind despite her very clearly stated desire that he shouldn't. I've seen people argue elsewhere that she was not of sound mind and therefore incapable of making an informed decision between the choices in front of her but, if that was the intent, it was not the way the scene was portrayed. Of course, this being NuWho, we know that, should Tate ever want to return to the show that mindwipe will turn out to be entirely impermanent and it was a solution that holds a shred of hope which death did not. However, that is not the way it was portrayed within the fiction though there is a suggestion at the end that, with the support of Wilf and Sylvia, Donna could nevertheless grow to be the person we saw in spite of the mind wipe.

And why, oh why, did they have to suggest that Donna was the only being in the Universe Jack didn't fancy. It wasn't even made particularly funny.

Other downsides (excluding the technobabble): The Daleks were wasted, reduced to mindless "we want to destroy everything" bad guys. The relationship between them and Davros briefly looked interesting and was then entirely ignored. If you know your Who lore their behaviour was an almost logical extrapolation from their extreme xenophobia but in the story they were reduced to the most cardboard cut-out of evil villains. The acting on the part of a lot of the companions was rather lacklustre, especially when compared to most of the guest cast, Tennant and Tate. Having spent most of last episode attempting to arrive in the right place, the Doctor spent most of this episode incarcerated. Like the Lord of the Rings films, the episode spent too long on a self-indulgent and drawn out aftermath.

Of course, as a fan, I loved the bringing together of companions. I was less sure about some of the references - was it really necessary to spend precious seconds explaining away the fact that Gwen Cooper looks the same as Gwyneth from The Unquiet Dead? "an old Cardiff family" indeed! I loved the Doctor/Donna interplay. I loved the pay-off in the resolutions to the stories of all the companions lives. On the other hand I also recall discussion pieces by fans working in television in the years when there was no Doctor Who on our screens and their pretty much unanimous opinion that Doctor Who needed to free itself from the burden of continuity if it was to survive. In particular, that under John Nathan-Turner, the show played too much to the fans who understood references to twenty-year old episodes and old monsters. I started this review comparing Journey's End to The Parting of the Ways. It's also quite interesting to compare to John Nathan-Turner's continuity multi-Doctor multi-Companion fest, The Five Doctors. Of course, much of that involved the Doctor and his companions going for a hike across the welsh countryside. Maybe JNT's problem was not the continuity but just that he didn't think big enough. However on viewing Journey's End you have to accept that either Russell Davies got it monumentally wrong or that JNT's problem was not the continuity - you can't have it both ways!

I also have to say here that I felt I had much to be relieved about. In particular no reset button was used. I couldn't quite believe there would be one, that having been the resolution to Last of the Time Lords and Turn Left but I find the decisions of the Cardiff Production team sufficiently variable in soundness that I couldn't quite exclude it as a possibly. Nor was Donna revealed to have been special because she was part Time Lord the whole time, well that is slightly arguable, but it seemed clear to me from the way it was portrayed that we were supposed to believe that Donna really was special as a human. Maybe part of my enjoyment was partly just from the relief that that wasn't happening.

So, in summary, I thought much of the acting was great, I thought the character writing was more assured and consistent than it often is in NuWho. I thought what plot there was was completely stupid but I wasn't expecting anything else. Lots of the get outs I feared would happen didn't. If nothing else I admired the sheer gusto and chutzpah of what was going on even when the grumpy old fan part of my brain was shouting "but this was where JNT went wrong". Of course the grumpy old fan liked those bits of the JNT era at the time. It's just in retrospect that we've constructed a theory that states the general public doesn't like this kind of thing. I think the AI (audience appreciation index, I think) figures for The Stolen Earth (which were unprecedentedly high) show that, presented in the right way, continuity is not a turn-off for the general public. Cramming quite so many characters and set pieces into one hour may prevent you presenting a focused piece of drama, but it managed to avoid being simply sound and fury and was a ride that was worth enjoying just for what it was.