So it's come around at last: David Tennant's last go as the Doctor, and the first appearance of Matt Smith as the same. By this point, you've likely read a million reviews with detailed play-by-plays, so we'll skip all that and go right to the high points:
- Wilf is wonderful, even if it was his poor judgement that finished the poor Doctor off.
- Donna is still wonderful, even if she was forced by story necessity to hardly be there at all. And her mom finally had a moment of decency, and even smiled.
- Cacti make fun diversions, especially when one of them is the girlfriend of a werewolf in a different show.
- The Timelords are all bat-shit crazy. Like, really, entirely, completely mad. And it's kind of awesome, because they were always so... upright, almost stick-in-the-mud before-- and there was always the trouble of corruption.
- Rose. What a clean, simple, beautiful last glimpse.
- Lucy Saxon. She didn't get much of a story, but she was there and it was lovely to see her again-- and see her strong and sharp-witted.
- The Silver Cloak was awesome, and serves as proof that the Doctor inspires change, even when you're aged well past the impressionability of youth. And anyone can organize anything in his name.
- It was awesome to see the Doctor doing something nice for everyone before he went, and it was a great relief that Russel didn't try to shove them all into one all-encompassing scene where no one would have the time to say anything.
- Matt Smith was great. Right off the bat, he was manic and unsteady, as we've come to expect from a freshly-regenerated Doctor.
- The Doctor misses family. We always knew this, of course, but it was much more real when he was sitting down with Wilf, with no one else to talk to, working through the acceptance of what has to happen. he wants someone to be his dad. And it was heartbreaking.
- New Tardis! Well, old Tardis getting trashed in the violence of an unwilling death, but that means we get something different next time, when repairs are made, and that will be interesting.
And now... the lowlights.
- Even watching both halves as one whole, watching it like a movie instead of two separate episodes, it was sort of all over the place, with almost too much going on.
- Saxon / the Master set up a secret society to ensure his own return? And they did it through weird ancient alchemy? And then they were never mentioned again and didn't really matter except for the purpose of brining him back?
- There were funny little aliens taking over the experiment that they didn't know would involve the Master, but they also didn't know what it was for?
- The Master... he's better when he's smug and sharp and the sort of insane that he's got control of; this desperate Master isn't up to the Doctor's level, and if he wasn't trying to hard to save him, it wouldn't have been a contest at all. But what was really weird was the Force Lightning and flying. WTF? W. T. F?
- The Ood. Something was accelerating them, and then was never mentioned again. We assume it was the fact that in the past, all humans became the Master, and therefore, no one enslaved the Ood to begin with, but if that's the case, why did the Ood still know him, and why did nothing else change in the timeline-- and why did the Doctor need the Ood Dreaming to tell him that something that drastic was happening? If it wasn't the human-change problem, what was it? Why wasn't it ever mentioned again?
- And while we're on the topic: A planet full of six billion Masters should have pulled itself apart within minutes. The Master doesn't follow anyone's orders, and we find it hard to believe that he'd follow even his own. If they were all him, and not a hive-mind sort of thing (which the necessity of communications networks seems to imply), they shouldn't want the same thing in the same way, especially not when they were all patterned after the crazy Master.
- What happened to Donna's brain melting? Self-defense mechanism, okay, that's the Doctor being nice and protecting her, but the fact that she started to remember and then nothing much happened just makes it look like the Doctor lied to everyone to keep them quiet.
- Timelords? Oh, they're coming back and opening up the whole story again, leaving Eleven with much more on his place then Ten had-- oh, wait, no they aren't. Sorry. Never mind. Nothing to see here.
- The End just kept going. He wasn't killed by a stray bullet in the quarry. He wasn't killed by the Master. He wasn't killed by the fall from a re-entering spacecraft, nor did he get killed by the kamikaze thing he tried to do with it. It wasn't the Timelords that finished him off. He wasn't even really killed by the radiation that actually did do it. He had time to go visit all his previous companions and do something nice for them, to stand there long enough for each of them to see him, and then to move on to the next one. Forty-Five minutes of accepting death, and most of it didn't really have any semblance of a death scene. Not until the end, when that one line "I don't want to go" almost made it all better.
It was an uneven and weird last episode. Lots of build up, not much pay off. Weirdness around the edges and a lot of story parts that seem to have just been dropped. But it's over. It's definitely over, and something new is happening now. Russel has packed up all his ideas and it's now time for someone else to play in this world-- and waiting until spring to see how it goes is going to be torture.
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