It’s like the stakes were raised so astronomically high that it looped right back around to having no stakes. I suppose that’s the problem with starting an episode on an ultracide: if the entire universe is already dead, then things can’t get much worse.
They absolute ruined all of it's tension by not making that the end of the penultimate episode. As it was, they did the Big Thing, but you knew it wasn't going to last, so that made it suck within the episode itself, and then fixing it was Super Easy, Barely An Inconvenience. Everyone was "dead" for what, 10-15 minutes of screen time? Yeah, messy.
>As it was, they did the Big Thing, but you knew it wasn't going to last, so that made it suck within the episode itself, and then fixing it was Super Easy, Barely An Inconvenience.
Y'know what....I'm going to say it: for all the numerous problems with the ending of Flux, I can respect it for at least not pulling this shit. The Doctor lost. Half the universe is dead. That's it.
Does the show ever really engage with that idea? Even in the final few scenes? God no. But at least it didn't just go the Super Easy, Barely an Inconvenience route.
The funny thing is that wasn’t the intent. The Doctor was implied in Eve of the Daleks to have reversed it and there were some hints in Survivors of the Flux that it would be possible. They just didn’t show it, so RTD made it have that impact in Wild Blue Yonder
Screenwriter: Oh yeah. he's just gonna pretty much drag the bad guy on a leash throughout all of time and space to everywhere he's ever been in the eleven lifetimes he's had since first meeting Sutekh, and that's pretty much all it takes I decided. Should only take about 2 minutes of screen time. Then he cuts the leash and it kills Sutekh, which he feels kinda bad about since he's not supposed to kill anyone, but we're gonna just blow by that in a few seconds too.
Producer: Wow. Wow wow wow.
This doctor has already killed the goblin king and didn’t seem to care about that, but someone killing the monster that killed the entire universe is the worst thing ever
If the Daleks are trying to kill some random side characters, I know on a meta level that it could actually happen. If they succeed, the characters will probably stay dead. There's tension there.
But if a 13 year old kid, Rose Noble and then the whole world dies, I know it will be reversed. Like you say, the tension is lost.
Russell can write working class British people really really well. When that’s the stakes, he’s brilliant. But a huge scifi concept? Nope. That’s not his kind of smart. So he’s written some great Doctor Who! But the big endings, oh dear oh dear. Russell thinks ordinary people are more worthy of interest than the giant shitty god thing that just killed everyone for no reason. Ok, so, here’s an idea Russ: Don’t use the shitty god idea! Just make the ending a character thing! Don’t end the fucking universe again! Gah. I have gone to bat for that man, as a fan, all this year. And this. Dude.
And stop with the teases and actually EXECUTE AN IDEA.
> Russell thinks ordinary people are more worthy of interest than the giant shitty god thing that just killed everyone for no reason
To be fair: that's very much in NuWho DNA. It's often the main message of Moffat's stories as well.
It's just this time the twist has left such a glaring logical hole that the emotions weren't able to cover it.
Honestly, this is kind of an issue with NuWho in general, but particularly Rusty’s writing: it wants to have it both ways. It wants to be an intimate character drama *and* a massive sci-fi epic about an ancient godlike being (*and* at times a deconstruction of big sci-fi epics) simultaneously, and it’s hardly ever satisfying when it tries to jam all of them together, because they’re contradictory on a fundamental level (and when it tries to incorporate the third, it all just starts to seem a bit self-congratulatory).
And honestly, the sci-fi epic stuff is mostly unnecessary. Despite what people (including the showrunners) seem to think, the classic series was hardly ever about universe-ending perils, except as maybe a vague background thing. So many of them were just about a handful of people in a jam they needed the Doctor’s help to fix.
Exactly. My favorite episodes all have smaller stakes with small groups, because it feels like the Doctor can actually lose, and he often does. The Cyberman 2 parter back in season 2, World Enough and Time / the Doctor Falls, Blink, Family of Blood.
All these episodes have smaller stakes where it feels like the villains could actually win, and the doctor never just outright wins, there is always loss involved. But when the entire universe dies immediately, I just don’t care anymore because it’s so impersonal.
> Ok, so, here’s an idea Russ: Don’t use the shitty god idea! Just make the ending a character thing! Don’t end the fucking universe again! Gah.
This is 100% the fundamental problem.
If he was really going to pull out "the real mystery was the friends we made along the way," it needed serious fleshing out. It needed there not to be **a god of death who has seen almost infinite mysteries including literal Satan** suddenly becoming obsessed by who some woman's mother is.
It needed room to flesh out why Ruby was able to make things snow, and what that is supposed to mean in relation to her mother.
It needed to *actually focus on that story.* And it's not like the potential isn't there: aside from the Doctor being weirdly cold and borderline cruel to Ruby beforehand("she doesn't want to see you and you'll only ruin her life by showing up" yeah thanks Doc) that scene with her and her mother was great.
Came here to say this. Torchwood was heavy. Here I felt nothing. Instantly knew its gonna be reversed. And reversed it was, using an imaginary Tardis. I'm not sure if I like the new less scifi more fantasy pivot. I might be biased because I don't remember much doctor who episodes anyways (I rarely rewatch shows, because I want to consume more different content not more of the same).
I’m genuinely angry. All this shite we’ve put up with from the right-wing bollockses, we’ve had his back. The show’s in terrible danger of not getting picked up again. AND THAT’S WHAT YOU GIVE US RUSS?? The sheer arrogance. I’m stunned. That’s cocaine-level misplaced confidence in oneself, but without the actual energy.
>The show’s in terrible danger of not getting picked up again
Where? Just because ratings have been trending downward like they'd always been and "ohhh season 3 isn't confirmed yet"? What makes this season specifically the nail in the coffin?
You can tell Russell has lot it with his OTT pre release self congratulating PR "This one is a hoot!" " Which has been over done even by his standards.
I thought Years and Years had some excellent dialogue, and good plotting mostly, it was a proper “SO TRUE DAHLING” TV moment, I enjoyed that. And it was just about people, normal people in Circumstances, Russell does that very well. Till the ending. Ah mate fark orf.
That’s the thing. Great concepts, plot, characters and then just misses the landing.
The It’s A Sin ending particularly bothered me where out of nowhere the show went from being about a group of (mostly) gay roommates in the 80s, to being about a mother dealing with her sons coming out. A secondary character, at best, becoming a lead at the last minute. Also for that episode we suddenly had a ton of “writers using the characters as mouthpieces” moments.
I could rant and rant but this season of DW had a much better ending by comparison. The episode itself indeed lacked tension but Ruby’s reunion with her Mom, and her goodbye to the Doctor I thought was very effective so at least we ended on a good note imo.
I realised last night that, and this is true so nobody argue I’ll just sit here and eat nuts at you, but one was only pleased to see him back because of when he came back. If it had been after Moffat we’d have groaned.
I think his first two series and The Giggle were great endings. But I also don't think Series 3, 4, and Empire of Death's endings were particularly bad, just messy. I will always argue that emotional and character based conclusions are more important than the logistics of it all. It's not like The End of Time which actively bothers me. Empire of Death hit its emotional moments for me, Sutekh was pretty badass and the Doctor was on fire. I also just don't really care for the final scene with Ruby and the Doctor in the TARDIS. It's no way near as bad as people are saying imo. It's not as bad as The Wedding of River Song, The Name of the Doctor, or The Battle of Raunchy Ass Vidoes for sure.
That last scene with the Doctor and Ruby in the TARDIS really, really upset me. They wrote him way out of character compared to how he had been through the rest of the season.
"We're best friends! We're such good friends! We're so close!"
"Come meet my mom and dad with me, you're my best friend!"
"Nah. I'll come by later. Byeee."
"I love you!"
"...?"
This really confused me.
I've had tons and tons of different critiques for RTD over the years. "This doesn't feel like the Doctor" is not one of them.
And the Doctor was acting *way out of character* at the end. From him basically telling Ruby her mother is better off without her and that she'll just ruin her life by interfering, to ditching Ruby at the end.
The strange thing is that these are story beats that *make sense on paper.* The Doctor has a massive 'where I go people suffer' complex that just got seriously messed with and it makes sense for him to project that onto Ruby to some extent. And he's **infamous** for just randomly ditching companions when he gets too close or just is bored of them.
But the way these scenes were written felt....jarring. Colder and crueler than the Doctor would act, and *especially* this incarnation. He went from Cosmic Hobo to Angry Eyebrows in no time flat.
I wonder if it is because the Doctor deep inside resented himself for not being as brave as Ruby when she met her mother again, and simply fall back into his habits of running off and try not to involve Ruby in his mistakes for the time being. It's kinda easy to see how Susan is haunting him for the entire season, and it's sad for him to fail her when he first abandoned her.
This is absolutely my read on it, but it still just didn't work. It felt weird and cruel and out of character for this version of the Doctor.
It's the sort of thing where execution can make or break an idea.
I'm actually going to disagree with the Giggle. The bi-regeneration just came out of nowhere and the decision to resolve everything with a game of catch just dragged the whole thing down. Plus, I just prefer the original sadder ending for 10, since that reflected the permanence of regenerating far better.
Honestly this whole season felt off the rails, and not in a good way. Doctor Who is at its best when it rides a line between fantastical and reality. This season was firmly just an episode of looney tunes. Ruby probably had the worst dialogue of any companion of the modern area. There was a freaking baby geniuses episode. The whole thing was bizarrely hard to follow and ended so flat. The new characters never developed enough for me to care.
Ncuti was wonderful though.
I agree that the whimsicality and silliness was over the top but i actually loved ruby. Shes the first companion ever that ive actually been the same age as (as in born in around the same time) I could completely relate to her throughout this season and ncuti and millie had some amazing bestie energy and great chemistry.
I didnt mind all the fantastical elements as i assumed all the weird stuff would somehow be tied into the overarching plot but i guess not...
Ruby could have been great, I don’t mind the idea of a younger companion. I don’t think they gave her enough of an introductory period and development. It was just rushed, she just felt like a plot device. She would have personality for a split second and then just go do some random thing to move the plot forward.
It really felt like a lazier Clara, if that’s even a thing. The actress and casting were fine, the writing, not so much.
Nah she was the same age as rose/bill. She just didnt get any introductory eps, just the single scene in space babies where she is shocked st being in space. I had the opposite problem where she already developed a personality by the time we saw her, she never grew into the companion role she was already just a good companion.
I just cope by blaming it on rtd not being used to writing for who again and also the shorter season and episode length. Surely rtd is actually a competent writer and next season will be better as he adjusts *smokes huge copium pipe*
Some very strong standalone episodes this season. 73 yards and the one with the rich racists (although I concede it pulled the wool over my eyes until I came on here).
But this seasons bad wolf turned out to be several blind kittens
Yeah. Life returned because The Doctor said that is how it works. Dragging Sut around the time stream somehow is the same as bringing death to death around time? And the sky opening looked good. But dunno how it makes sense unless the entire universe across time also saw the giant scar.
I thought/hoped it would involve the Doctor breaking his rules and doing something timey wimey, going back to change things and perhaps even interacting with his past self.
Wish that had happened. Maybe he would’ve fuck things up in a different way and had a moral crisis.
It's all how you look at it.
You can say he took him for walkies, or you can say he dragged him through the time vortex until he decided to let him disintegrate into nothingness.
It's the same as "Kang was beaten by ants". No, Kang was overrun by a literal army of giant, super-intelligent ants - which would also have insane strength due to their scale.
Has RTD done it before? Only time I can recall that he had the Doctor cross his own timeline is Father’s Day and that brought us reapers. Oooo shit imagine Sutekh vs. reapers. That’s a terrible idea, and I want it.
I still remember how I thought they were gonna be a huge part of the show the first time I saw Father's Day with how they were explained as part of something you can look at as the temporal ecosystem. It didn't hit me until like Series 10 that we never saw them again lol
Also when rose died because part of her purpose as a character is to act as a good ending for the 14th doctor, so rtd wasn't going to undo that by killing her off.
Except that in Endgame, there were actual consequences to bringing the "dusted" back. Big, franchise altering consequences.
Stories like this can work if there are consequences and conflicts
Meanwhile, this episode just undid everything and nothing bad happened to anyone. No one lost anything at all.
No consequences. No conflict.
It's a bit like the first of the new specials with 14 where they activate the dagger drive. It starts ripping up the very surface of the earth all across London (let's ignore it only followed the streets) but then they turned it off which somehow made it just... Close up all those cracks.
Though that's not even the real stakes there, those are with Donna who for years we've thought would die if she remembered. Then they just hand waved both away like magic.
It's just incredibly unsatisfying.
That one was so bad especially because there was a much better solution *so close* I fully expected that other ending while watching.
The entire episode is spend building up how Donna still subconsciously wants to help people, how she even gave up the lottery money to help others... So now she's gonna give up her Doctor-ness by using up her regeneration energy healing everyone who got hurt and essentially "regenerating" the city, right? Even is a cool callback to River giving up her regenerations to heal the Doctor.
Then the next shot shows the city magically reversing all the damage and it all falls apart...
>Then the next shot shows the city magically reversing all the damage and it all falls apart...
They could've avoided all that if there was a computer in the dagger thing was "simulating damage", cos you'd probably want that in spaceship that's gonna destroy the surroundings anyway.
This was me, I really thought oh no that's the end of Kate, who will lead UNIT after the doctor defeats Sutekh. But then everyone else died and it was clear he's gotta bring them all back because of course he has to. Future episodes can survive without a couple of previously major characters. But not without anyone in the bloody universe.
I was completely thinking it was real with Kate, and was really impressed that they would kill her off. It seemed like a realistic choice since she’s been the character for so long maybe they decided they wanted a new head of UNIT and her death would have a lot of impact. And then I was swiftly disappointed when everyone else died and I realized it wasn’t sticking
When Kate dusted, I heard my son say, "Oh, they just messed up big time. The Doctor is gonna be pissed." But then everybody dusted, and we started discussing how the Doctor would reset everything by the end. One funny moment, when the Doctor screams out the TARDIS doors at the dead universe and the screen fades to black, my son said, "and roll credits. This is the end of Doctor Who forever."
I was the same. Especially with how she died just as a background character. Not that the tension would have lasted for much longer anyway, about 10 seconds later they've essentially nuked London which is already too far for Who, nevermind wiping out the entire universe.
Honestly me either. In The Legend of Ruby Sunday she essentially tells Carla she’s only there because her mum works there and at one point says all they have her doing is researching shoplifting. Later on they tell everyone except key personnel to leave and she of course sticks around. Then in The Empire of Death we see her using a tablet presumably to control UNIT laser defense systems(guns) which you wouldn’t expect someone in her position to know how to access let alone run. Her presence made no sense nor added anything to the story so I suspect the rumors of a UNIT spin-off wherein she’ll be a character are true as that’s the only reason I can think of that they bothered having her character make an appearance.
A cynic might say it was rtd trying to show how progressive he is by shoehorning in a trans character, but as much as I think that is possible I think he just likes rose as a character so he shoehorned her into another story.
Child of a companion is a good concept that hasn’t really been done in any meaningful way yet. Sarah Jane had a son, barely shows up in the show. Amy and Rory’s daughter River, not really the “child of companion” dynamic. Rose being a youngin’ and daughter of arguably the best NuWho companion, lot of potential. We’ll see
I mean, the tension of Doctor Who rarely comes from "is the Doctor going to save these people" but "*how* is the Doctor going to save these people". The problem with this episode is that the "how" is pretty rubbish
I’d like to think that the appeal of any given Dr Who episode amounts to more than guessing whether individual guest cast members will be permanently dead by the end of the episode.
Maybe that’s just me.
Honestly, the only one I was scared for, genuinely, was Mel; I could see them killing her off for real all this time later, I was prepped to be upset. Which kinda surprised me, because she was in my bottom tier in Classic Who.
Sure.
But it all comes together to make a solid episode. You can play with or remove one of those aspects, but the others have to carry that load.
And there was precious little carrying the load for this episode.
I mean, that's nearly every doctor who episode besides finales. And even then, news outlets will make very sure that you know who's exiting the show.
Really the only examples I can think of otherwise is series 7 when Clara died multiple times before becoming a permanent companion, and the Ponds only making it halfway through the series.
Outside of that, we pretty much always know the doctor + companion and other major characters will make it out. I will say, I at least was concerned that Mel wasn't making it out of this episode when she was falling asleep in the memory Tardis.
> Outside of that, **we pretty much always know the doctor + companion and other major characters will make it out**. I will say, I at least was concerned that Mel wasn't making it out of this episode when she was falling asleep in the memory Tardis.
Which is why the writer kills off a bunch of recurring characters in a matter of seconds, it doesn’t ring true. (Same for Ruby in Rogue.)
If Flux hadn't half-assed the concept so recently, that would have been an interesting hook for a series of specials - The Doctor flying around a dying universe in his memory TARDIS saving as many people as he can, all while grappling with the knowledge that every life he saves is going to be lost anyway.
Well, the doctor still works with the understanding that every life he saves will eventually be lost anyway. This is a core character trait, I would argue.
God could you imagine if series 4 ended like that and we got the Tennant specials set in a wasteland universe with your concept. That would’ve been great
The mom reveal took away any tension from future speculation. So disappointing. Mrs Flood is gonna be a similar tease and probably just end up being a construct or another cyberperson.
Doing a big tease, after a show literally made of failing to pay off teases, I’m afraid Mrs. Flood got told to fuck off in my lounge tonight. No you fackin don’t babes I’ve seen enough. “Oooo maybe *she’s* Susan!” Oh do put a sock in it.
Same here honestly. What a way to dissuade speculation on the show you absolutely _know_ fans love to ravenously speculate over.
Wagging your finger and going "she wasn't important, everyone just thought she was!" was a truly awful cop out.
I've lost any ability to give a shit about any future mystery in this era now.
I had a similar thought for a different reason.
It was due to the way Legend of Ruby Sunday treated the potential Susan reveal and how it was a literal bait and switch to take it away and do Sutekh instead.
There were several clues and hints this series talking about Susan and it built up to a decent chunk of episode 7 being about potentially reuniting with Susan. On the other hand, there were zero clues about Sutekh.
So to swap Susan out for Sutekh at the last second and cheekily have Susan Twist say "Did you think I was family?" which was basically "Did you all think it was going to be Susan?" made me really mad. Yes we all thought it was going to be Susan because that's the story you told us Russell! Giving us a bunch of clues towards one thing and then saying "psych!" because it was actually something that there had been no clues about isn't good storytelling or a clever twist. He just lied to us.
So why would I give a shit about any future mystery if RTD has shown that at any moment he could pull the rug out from under us and reveal that the clues were bullshit. That he was lying to us, the set up didn't actually mean anything and was just a long-game plan to trick us.
The main effect this had on me was that I'm just not going to bother investing in the next story RTD tells us.
While I don’t think this season finale was as bad as GoT s8 series finale. It did feel like Dumb and Dumber’s inane philosophy of “subverting expectations” which everyone and their mom hated.
Sprinkling clues and hints so the fans can theorize and predict is *supposed* to have the pay off of the fans being right or close to the mark. Then they can go back and see all the other things they missed once they have the bigger picture.
For example, the wonderful Susan Twist being in damn near every episode since Wild Blue Yonder was a mind blowing realization. (Granted it came from a YouTube bts, but still) only for the carpet to be yanked out a bit at the end with Susan Triad *not* being Susan was disappointing
Yeah that's a valid viewpoint to have.
I personally didn't mind the Sutekh bait and switch itself. It was a cool moment imo.
I do think it was a total waste to NOT have the Doctor just learn a bloody lesson for once, take the very message from Ruby's arc to heart, and finally go and see Susan himself. It was the perfect opportunity and they squandered it.
It is a weird decision to write a storyline with the point that mysteries don't really matter and people can be uninteresting and also spend the same episode baiting the identity of another mystery character.
I would make a happy little sound if Mrs. Flood turned out to be Romana I. She, Sarah Jane, and Leela were my three favorite assistants in classic Who. 🙂 Oh, and Adric, 😢
William Benjamin Garnet
William G
Roger ap Gwilliam in 73 Yards:
>Amol, I'm a Welshman; I was born in Wales. And **that's what the "ap" in my name means**. It's not one of those apps you used to have on your phone in the old days. **It means "son of"**.
I don’t reckon the reveal has taken away _all_ “tension from future speculation”. :)
Honestly I think it would be cool to see Gwilliam back. I know this is way before his political campaigns in universe but having another earthbound antagonist again, and one already established as being somebody who is entirely unlikeable and irredeemable, honestly seems like something that could be used to great effect in the future for future episode plotlines.
Ya, I think the chance of a future where people stop carrying computers in their pocket is pretty low and an app structure is just better than other options, it's not like other layouts haven't been tried.
Spoilers.
Am I the only one who feels like I got screwed over, waiting to find out who the mom was just for her to be normal with some emotion is that more powerful than gods bull crap? Waited the whole season to find out this big mystery, and it's nothing. Even her mom just accepts that the Doctor is real and everything Ruby told her is real. It's like a Disney cartoon happy ending. Basically all those gods and everything were for nothing. I feel like I got told there is a good dinner waiting at home after a long day of work and throughout I'm told there is chicken, rolls, vegetables, cake, lobster etc. And I get home home it's unseasoned chicken, vegetables gone bad and one roll because the lobster was thrown away.
Yeah, I was hoping for a recovery after the wet fart that was the Sutekh reveal last week, but my issue with the Mom reveal isn't that "she's an ordinary person" isn't exciting / cool enough, it's that her being an ordinary person is not a satisfactory answer to the questions that were presented.
How does the ordinary person create the temporal skip that caused her to fast-forward past the moment where her face could have been seen?
How does the ordinary person give Ruby the ability to make it snow by daydreaming?
How does the ordinary person make Ruby's soul terrify The Maestro, when none of the billions of other ordinary people on Earth did?
And with the Mrs Drizzle sequence at the end, it's pointing towards a bullshirt "it was all a dream" ending like Bobby Ewing walking out of the shower.
When they raise the stakes to end-of-universe scale it actually deflates is as of course it'll all be undone in an instant. Like the time reversal thing with the Master.
I'm also getting a bit tired of the *there has always been x* scenarios e.g. Giggle since first screen, Family of Blood member in every mirror. Essentially tweaking the show's past to include something.
The Sister in every mirror is fine. That doesn't change anything. I'd say this trend started with the Silence in Series Six being revealed to have been here and guiding humanity the whole time, and it's been a recurring cliché ever since.
I did say "well I know they're not going to kill a kid" but there's basically nothing ever where the threat is huge that I think it will stick. Even the alien invasions that happen almost yearly don't stick. I still found it tense not because I ever thought that Sutekh would destroy the world but because I was invested in the emotional stakes of what it would take to undo it and how.
I agree with your edit. Sutekh would have been a fool villain for a whole season, slowly killing anyone who tried to fight him and the Doctor struggling to defeat him.
Yeah would definitely have been good as a longer villain arc, but you’d have to make him less powerful somehow. Can’t really have him killing everyone in the universe with death dust as soon as he lands unless you want the whole season to be just the Doctor, Ruby & Mel trying to reverse it.
True, but he didn’t originally have that level of power in the old stories, RTD “evolved” him to full god power! So it is absolutely in the writers control how powerful to make him.
I was so hyped for this week’s episode after the ending of the Legend of Ruby Sunday. Like a lot of people, I feel deflated and let down by the rushed and poor written ending.
For me the 'tension' was about how Ruby and her parentage was going to defeat Sutekh and bring everyone back - I don't think the show ever even presented it as a serious possibility that everyone was going to die, and having the whole unit base + Carla die was sort of a way of indicating that it was definitely going to be undone somehow (whereas if it was just Kate I might have believed it).
It was more like an episode where you know the doctor is going to regenerate - there isn't meant to be any tension over whether he's going to escape unscathed since you already know something is gonna happen to cause a regeneration, the tension is just about how it's going to happen
When Kate died, my hopes were up for a moment. If she, THE KATE STEWART, actually died, the stakes would become insanely high and that's a way to kick off a badass episode.
But then everyone kept dying and.... "Oh well. Never mind."
Unit and Kate dying I thought was plausible but unlikely, I like that they made it way over the top having everyone and everything ever die (the ood!) it made it more comfortable to watch in a paradoxical way
Right? I thought they might have at least made it so that all 3 (Ruby, Mel, the Doctor) were remembering it, hence the amalgamation of various items from previous doctors. The way it was done just seemed so random.
I felt the same way about the Toymaker and now I feel that way about Sutekh. Built up as the biggest bad guy ever that fans haven't seen in decades and people are so excited for only to be defeated quickly in the laziest way possible in the same amount of time it takes to beat a regular monster of the week
I agree. I paused about three minutes in and said "Oh, so there's gonna be a universe reset before the end, right? Because too many named characters have died for this not to be reversed".
In defense of Infinity War, that ending was still emotionally devastating due to the emotional connection we had with the characters, and the fact that we watched Thanos work so hard to succeed and give up so much to do it, which would usually be what our heroes would do. And besides, if you didn't know more movies were being made with some of those characters, if would feel very final, unlike this episode.
Yea, sadly. If that'd been how they ended "The Legend of Ruby Sunday" it would've at least been more effective. Or at least just the part where UNIT goes down. Then start "Empire of Death" with the spread of the dust and the chase. It would've helped. Though nothing can help that ending really outside of a total rewrite.
Thought it was unbelievable they'd kill off the Unit team, especially Kate.
Thought it was crazy they'd kill Flood without her ever doing anything, her last words challenging God himself, and we'd have to find out more about her posthumously in the next season.
When they killed Carla, tension dropped. When they went on to do Flux across all of time and space, all tension died.
With this sort of story you have to focus less on IF people are coming back and more HOW. With all the meta knowledge about shows these days like contracts and planned future seasons you can usually infer that they'll make it out and you need to suspend your disbelief a bit more or focus on the mechanics of the plot and not the production.
The interesting part is figuring out how the main character is going to think their way out of the problem at hand. The risky part is the writer managing to make it satisfying and matching the solution to the enormity of the ramped up threat.
Didn't bother me at all, in fact I thought it was pretty crazy that they'd go that far in the first place even if it was going to be undone. I actually rolled my eyes because I expected time would just be rewritten, and I was pleasantly surprised that everyone remembers the event.
Yeah, when the cloud was sweeping through the city I was like "oh shit"
When Carla died I was like "oh shit"
When Rose and Kate died I was like "well this is all getting reversed then."
I was ready to believe Kate died, but as soon as all of London started going I knew this was all getting timey wimey erased.
Then they couldn't even timey wimey erase it like... what they did made absolutely no sense what so ever.
You have a time machine. You can fix shit like that so easily with the existing rules within the show, maybe ever so slightly bending them. No instead WE BROUGHT DEATH TO DEATH. What?
Even though bringing death to death the first time didn't raise the dead from their graves and it seemed like sutekhs had to touch you to bring you death but apparently when everyone needs reviving it's enough to do a drive by.
Someone on tumblr wrote out a pretty good theory on how this Sutekh is not the Osiran Sutekh that faced the 4th Doctor, but rather a manifestation of the Doctor's own death-guilt that he's been carrying for centuries, made manifest by the salt at the edge of the universe. So the Susan Twists have only been showing up during 15's run, but all the power of story and myth stuff that's been going on this season due to the salt means that this Sutekh can project the manifestation into the pre-15 lives. So it's less that Sutekh was literally hanging around the Tardis when Adric died, but rather that the "god of death" symbolically haunted the Doctor even then, and then the events of this season allowed a psychic entity to literalize the metaphor.
yeah the second i saw rose noble turn to dust i knew it had no stakes anymore, i wish rtd wouldnt have spent so much of the episode ambling towards the ending and had actually produced a compelling set of events for both the action and the mystery rather than the increasingly overused trope of “this thing/person/moment is so important because we all considered it important rather than any intrinsic quality” because lord the rubys mom reveal was lackluster and shouldnt have had nearly as much an impact on the sutekh plot as it did
Just made a post with exactly the same point. As soon as everyone started dying, there's no stakes. We know they'll all be brought back.
Doctor who doesn't do well when it tries to do too big scale as it usually has to undo it. I much prefer when the scale and threat are more personal.
I believed that Kate was actually dead for real… until the Sundays died, and everyone else, and then it was pretty obvious that they’d all come back.
But Kate would have had such a good last line … !
“There will be birds” - amazing
Sutekh was disappointing. Expected a lot more from a literal God. Maestro was.way more powerful by the looks of things. The way he was defeated was just a rehash of last time, except he's on a lead.
Everyone dying also meant we knew we'd get a universe reboot.
Ruby's parents reveal was mega underwhelming and doesn't explain anything about how Ruby could make it snow, stop Maestro for a moment. And then she just kind of left.
The memory TARDIS was cool.
I'm fully invested in Mrs Flood and I highly suspect she's the Rani.
Overall, I think 8 episodes wasn't enough, not enough Sutekh, Sutekh making no sense, Ruby's mums reveal being underwhelming, whatever the Doctor did with the whistle and much more just led to a slightly average finale.
And still no Susan!
This was by far the best season since Capaldi and didn’t really have a bad episode as even if Space Babies was stupid it was still fun.
The final denouement and reveal of ruby’s mom naming her by pointing to a sign no one else could see was a huge let down.
I hope this mess is fixed during Christmas Special.
Yeah Sutekh coming back was cool, even for a person not the familiar with the classic series. But even I will say he felt wasted.
It would have been much more interesting if Sutekh had already “killed” the entire universe when the Doctor and Ruby landed back in present day. Sutekh could have been revealed sooner and had more screen time. The tension also wouldn’t have been brought to a halt with a UNIT death scene that you know will be reversed in the end.
All in all, I really enjoyed this season and am happy with how it turned out, but it’s a bummer that it went out on a low note.
Sure, I knew it would be reversed. I didn't expect the world to stay a desolate post apocalyptic wasteland after the loss of music either. That didn't stop my enjoyment for more than a minute though. I really liked the post apocalypse storyline, the weirdness around memory itself dying. The episode had so many concepts I really liked. Every planet he ever visited, likely saving a few dozen people, turning into a source of complete destruction, his galavanting becoming the reason everything dies.
If I couldn't take a reversal ending I don't think I could have watched much longer than The Doctor Dances. It is a staple. The reversal endings I can't stand are the ones where everyone just forgets what happened because resetting the status quo is easier for the writers. They can't keep the universe dead, the show doesn't work with that. They could have had the time the monks ruled humanity remain in the public consciousness though.
Yeah, I mean, going in you know the good guy is going to triumph in the end, but the moment they started killing named characters with no other named characters there to see it, I knew it was going to be resolved with a magical fix everything reversal, which has been done so often and so frequently that I just can't forkin' stand it at this point.
Honestly, I think the jump the shark moment for me was in the Bleep the Meep episode, when the spaceship is shown shattering the earth for miles around, only for everything to be perfectly restored - roads back together undamaged with the paint perfectly aligned- because the engines were thrown into reverse. It put me in mind of one of the Care Bears movies, when the evil kids run around destroying things and just lift a tree out of the ground, roots and all, and throw it, and then during the getting better sequence the same animation is played in reverse so the tree is picked up and plopped back in place.
This was a flux level event condensed into 1 episode. It's not like it can't be done but it needs more weight to it. The sound of drums set it up better so that when you come back after the time skip you actually FEEL like there were long lasting consequences. Sutekh won for like 5 minutes and then got beat by what was essentially a game of "made you look".
I think the trouble lies within that it was 8 episodes rather than 13. We had no episodes like the silence of the library aka 2 parters it was 6 episodes of slow build up then suddenly 2 episodes of thats it tadaa which really threw me off. 5 extra episodes could have really made a difference especially with the friendship of Ruby and the doctor.
Unfortunately I think it’s the trade off for getting Doctor Who yearly again (assuming Disney don’t pull the plug after next season). I’m sure I saw at some point RTD promised no more gap years, so I’d imagine it’s a combo of ensuring there’s not another hiatus and working around Ncuti being in demand, so he can do Who alongside other projects, theatre etc.
There’s also the planned spin-offs factor that will probably become apparent next year (again, almost definitely depending on the Disney deal continuing), so those 5 ‘missing’ episodes will probably be found there instead. Though, of course that doesn’t fix the pacing of a Doctor Who season and fans’ interest in a spin off will naturally vary.
I actually enjoyed the 'Oh, everyone is dead, this will definitely be undone before the end then' element. It was very clearly signposted right from the start of the episode, as opposed to killing off major characters slowly till you get half way through the episode and suddenly realized that none of the deaths had actual consequence. The episode immediately announces that the plot isn't 'Will the Doctor save everyone?', it's 'HOW will the Doctor save everyone?'
But then where are the stakes?? A good finale should do both, and without the “will he”, we’re not invested in what to our characters because we know they’ll be fine in the end.
...what, and before you thought the Doctor was not going to defeat Sutekh?
There was literally not a second at any point in this season where I thought the Doctor wouldn't save the day at the end. That's how Doctor Who works.
True, but in Doctor Who characters can permanent die which adds some tension. Everyone dying means everyone is being revived and there is no fear of character deaths when you know nobody will remain dead. In this case you knew deaths were meaningless when Rose died.
Eh, I definitely felt the vibe of the cinema screening I went to slowly change through the episode. For context, the 15 minute intermission, the whole cinema was speculating, making jokes and the vibe was the same as the ending of infinity war if anyone went to that screening.
By the end of part 2, everyone kinda left the screening quietly during the end, I got the vibe everyone was kind of confused and unsure how to feel.
I liked the episode, but yeah it definitely suffers from the same faults as most finales, too many questions not enough answers. I lowkey expected something more akin to Parting of the ways/impossible planet.
Alas, hopefully next season improves on it's finale.
Completely killed any tension when the tragedy becomes so large you know there will be a reset
Switch. RTD has never understood subtlety. His finalies are always overblown ‘big idea’ nonsense. At the same time they can be entertaining. (I enjoyed Journey’s End for example even though it’s complete nonsense)
For this one, my favorite parts were all in the final post main plot scenes. That probably says it all
I honestly would have much preferred a "doctor talks down the monster" resolution. I figured that they were setting up a whole "what is death without life" non-duality thing.
This should of been saved for the end of this Doctor's era and in a 3-4 part arc as a finale to it. This was way too rush and too easily to spot it would be fixed in 15 minutes. :(
The issue now is, how the hell do you top this? You can't.
If they killed off Morris and Kate, I would’ve believed it. When they killed off Ruby’s mom, tension gone. Meanwhile, if they had killed Mrs Flood and Cherry, I would’ve still believed it because Cherry is old and would’ve caused a lot of emotion with her death (even if reversed)
I think it might have worked slightly better if killing everyone was the cliffhanger at the end of TLoRS, but then that is just straight up Infinity War. Would have been pretty cool to actually see Sutekh's power and then have to sit with that for a whole week before finding out how it's all resolved.
There's still no real way around it being pretty obvious that they're not going to leave everyone dead, but honestly that's kind of to be expected. Tension shouldn't just come from the threat, it can also come from seeing how the surviving characters react to that threat and how they ultimately deal with it.
Cherry: *Dies*
NO! RTD had the guts to kill off cherry???
Kate : *Dies*
Woah!? Maybe we’ve seen all we can of Kate, That’s ballsy Russell.
World: *Dies*
Yeah,This is going to be reversed isn’t it 🙄
For me it hit the same problem that The Giggle and large chunks of Big Finish and Virgin's output do - someone asks "wouldn't it be cool if this character from early on in the show came back" (to which the answer is usually "no" anyway) but then doesn't think about how/why the story would do that. When you then add on the whole "every ody dies" thing it does rob the episode of any dramatic tension and also leaves us to grumble about how characters were wasted (Why was Rose even there? Why did we get hardly any of Morris when Lenny was brilliant? What even was the point of Mrs Flood going round to the Sunday's apart from to tell us that Carla's not going to forget her mam?)
Sadly, I agree. To be honest, I knew it was coming from part 1, I feared that's what he'd do and, yeap, he went and did it.
Things just happened BECAUSE and there were a lot of things left unanswered (granted, not everything has to be explained, but meh)
Also, the ending of the ending didn't make sense, because The Doctor did his thing regardless of whether 14-Tennant "got therapy so that I can be ok" regardless. If you feel better now and you admittedly feel bad about not seeing Susan again, then maybe go visit Ruby's dad with her? No, wait, Ruby has to go because we got another actor now, oh well \*sniff\* \*vworp vworp\*.
The second everyone died I immediately thought "whelp, now it's fucking obvious that they're going to reverse time", it would have been so much better if everyone was dead for a few episodes- as someone else said it would have been better as a whole season of trying to defeat sutekh
It’s like the stakes were raised so astronomically high that it looped right back around to having no stakes. I suppose that’s the problem with starting an episode on an ultracide: if the entire universe is already dead, then things can’t get much worse.
They absolute ruined all of it's tension by not making that the end of the penultimate episode. As it was, they did the Big Thing, but you knew it wasn't going to last, so that made it suck within the episode itself, and then fixing it was Super Easy, Barely An Inconvenience. Everyone was "dead" for what, 10-15 minutes of screen time? Yeah, messy.
>As it was, they did the Big Thing, but you knew it wasn't going to last, so that made it suck within the episode itself, and then fixing it was Super Easy, Barely An Inconvenience. Y'know what....I'm going to say it: for all the numerous problems with the ending of Flux, I can respect it for at least not pulling this shit. The Doctor lost. Half the universe is dead. That's it. Does the show ever really engage with that idea? Even in the final few scenes? God no. But at least it didn't just go the Super Easy, Barely an Inconvenience route.
The funny thing is that wasn’t the intent. The Doctor was implied in Eve of the Daleks to have reversed it and there were some hints in Survivors of the Flux that it would be possible. They just didn’t show it, so RTD made it have that impact in Wild Blue Yonder
I am MASSIVELY discouraged by the amount of times I use the phrase “Super Easy, Barely an Inconvenience,” and no one gets the reference.
> Super Easy, Barely An Inconvenience Oh *really?!*
Screenwriter: Oh yeah. he's just gonna pretty much drag the bad guy on a leash throughout all of time and space to everywhere he's ever been in the eleven lifetimes he's had since first meeting Sutekh, and that's pretty much all it takes I decided. Should only take about 2 minutes of screen time. Then he cuts the leash and it kills Sutekh, which he feels kinda bad about since he's not supposed to kill anyone, but we're gonna just blow by that in a few seconds too. Producer: Wow. Wow wow wow.
This doctor has already killed the goblin king and didn’t seem to care about that, but someone killing the monster that killed the entire universe is the worst thing ever
*Adds to the list of issues.*
If the Daleks are trying to kill some random side characters, I know on a meta level that it could actually happen. If they succeed, the characters will probably stay dead. There's tension there. But if a 13 year old kid, Rose Noble and then the whole world dies, I know it will be reversed. Like you say, the tension is lost.
I didn’t hate this season. But. Russell. Cannot. Land. An. Ending.
I’d argue he did it once, back with Parting of the Ways, although that’s not a perfect episode by any means.
I've noticed RTD's endings work best when they are working towards a cast change.
Waters of Mars! But that’s a story where “the people are more important than the scifi” actually works, and there are con se quen ses.
That was almost 20 years ago.
Don't say that lol, I don't want to be old
This might be a more impactful statement if he'd been pumping out finales this whole time.
The point is that he hasn't written DW in so long that he's bungled it.
It was ok, but even that was “my characters are more interesting than any mechanism by which this narrative might actually work”.
I don't feel like Parting of the Ways has any serious flaws. He also landed the 10th Doctor.
The only ending I've seen of his I loved was the ending to Children of Earth but that was Torchwood
Russell can write working class British people really really well. When that’s the stakes, he’s brilliant. But a huge scifi concept? Nope. That’s not his kind of smart. So he’s written some great Doctor Who! But the big endings, oh dear oh dear. Russell thinks ordinary people are more worthy of interest than the giant shitty god thing that just killed everyone for no reason. Ok, so, here’s an idea Russ: Don’t use the shitty god idea! Just make the ending a character thing! Don’t end the fucking universe again! Gah. I have gone to bat for that man, as a fan, all this year. And this. Dude. And stop with the teases and actually EXECUTE AN IDEA.
> Russell thinks ordinary people are more worthy of interest than the giant shitty god thing that just killed everyone for no reason To be fair: that's very much in NuWho DNA. It's often the main message of Moffat's stories as well. It's just this time the twist has left such a glaring logical hole that the emotions weren't able to cover it.
Honestly, this is kind of an issue with NuWho in general, but particularly Rusty’s writing: it wants to have it both ways. It wants to be an intimate character drama *and* a massive sci-fi epic about an ancient godlike being (*and* at times a deconstruction of big sci-fi epics) simultaneously, and it’s hardly ever satisfying when it tries to jam all of them together, because they’re contradictory on a fundamental level (and when it tries to incorporate the third, it all just starts to seem a bit self-congratulatory). And honestly, the sci-fi epic stuff is mostly unnecessary. Despite what people (including the showrunners) seem to think, the classic series was hardly ever about universe-ending perils, except as maybe a vague background thing. So many of them were just about a handful of people in a jam they needed the Doctor’s help to fix.
Exactly. My favorite episodes all have smaller stakes with small groups, because it feels like the Doctor can actually lose, and he often does. The Cyberman 2 parter back in season 2, World Enough and Time / the Doctor Falls, Blink, Family of Blood. All these episodes have smaller stakes where it feels like the villains could actually win, and the doctor never just outright wins, there is always loss involved. But when the entire universe dies immediately, I just don’t care anymore because it’s so impersonal.
> Ok, so, here’s an idea Russ: Don’t use the shitty god idea! Just make the ending a character thing! Don’t end the fucking universe again! Gah. This is 100% the fundamental problem. If he was really going to pull out "the real mystery was the friends we made along the way," it needed serious fleshing out. It needed there not to be **a god of death who has seen almost infinite mysteries including literal Satan** suddenly becoming obsessed by who some woman's mother is. It needed room to flesh out why Ruby was able to make things snow, and what that is supposed to mean in relation to her mother. It needed to *actually focus on that story.* And it's not like the potential isn't there: aside from the Doctor being weirdly cold and borderline cruel to Ruby beforehand("she doesn't want to see you and you'll only ruin her life by showing up" yeah thanks Doc) that scene with her and her mother was great.
Came here to say this. Torchwood was heavy. Here I felt nothing. Instantly knew its gonna be reversed. And reversed it was, using an imaginary Tardis. I'm not sure if I like the new less scifi more fantasy pivot. I might be biased because I don't remember much doctor who episodes anyways (I rarely rewatch shows, because I want to consume more different content not more of the same).
100% agreed. I caught myself saying “really?!” at least one. Complete cop-out.
I’m genuinely angry. All this shite we’ve put up with from the right-wing bollockses, we’ve had his back. The show’s in terrible danger of not getting picked up again. AND THAT’S WHAT YOU GIVE US RUSS?? The sheer arrogance. I’m stunned. That’s cocaine-level misplaced confidence in oneself, but without the actual energy.
>The show’s in terrible danger of not getting picked up again Where? Just because ratings have been trending downward like they'd always been and "ohhh season 3 isn't confirmed yet"? What makes this season specifically the nail in the coffin?
You can tell Russell has lot it with his OTT pre release self congratulating PR "This one is a hoot!" " Which has been over done even by his standards.
>But. Russell. Cannot. Land. An. Ending. Me watching It’s A Sin and to a lesser extent Years and Years
I thought Years and Years had some excellent dialogue, and good plotting mostly, it was a proper “SO TRUE DAHLING” TV moment, I enjoyed that. And it was just about people, normal people in Circumstances, Russell does that very well. Till the ending. Ah mate fark orf.
That’s the thing. Great concepts, plot, characters and then just misses the landing. The It’s A Sin ending particularly bothered me where out of nowhere the show went from being about a group of (mostly) gay roommates in the 80s, to being about a mother dealing with her sons coming out. A secondary character, at best, becoming a lead at the last minute. Also for that episode we suddenly had a ton of “writers using the characters as mouthpieces” moments. I could rant and rant but this season of DW had a much better ending by comparison. The episode itself indeed lacked tension but Ruby’s reunion with her Mom, and her goodbye to the Doctor I thought was very effective so at least we ended on a good note imo.
I said this exact thing for years. He really can't. The only good endings he wrote were on seasons 1 and 2. Everything else was just bad.
I realised last night that, and this is true so nobody argue I’ll just sit here and eat nuts at you, but one was only pleased to see him back because of when he came back. If it had been after Moffat we’d have groaned.
I think his first two series and The Giggle were great endings. But I also don't think Series 3, 4, and Empire of Death's endings were particularly bad, just messy. I will always argue that emotional and character based conclusions are more important than the logistics of it all. It's not like The End of Time which actively bothers me. Empire of Death hit its emotional moments for me, Sutekh was pretty badass and the Doctor was on fire. I also just don't really care for the final scene with Ruby and the Doctor in the TARDIS. It's no way near as bad as people are saying imo. It's not as bad as The Wedding of River Song, The Name of the Doctor, or The Battle of Raunchy Ass Vidoes for sure.
That last scene with the Doctor and Ruby in the TARDIS really, really upset me. They wrote him way out of character compared to how he had been through the rest of the season. "We're best friends! We're such good friends! We're so close!" "Come meet my mom and dad with me, you're my best friend!" "Nah. I'll come by later. Byeee." "I love you!" "...?"
The whole scene feels like they're just writing Ruby out of the show but then she's confirmed for season 2?
I've honestly wondered if this might be why the ending is so weird, maybe it was retrofitted so Ruby could leave before her story got too big
This really confused me. I've had tons and tons of different critiques for RTD over the years. "This doesn't feel like the Doctor" is not one of them. And the Doctor was acting *way out of character* at the end. From him basically telling Ruby her mother is better off without her and that she'll just ruin her life by interfering, to ditching Ruby at the end. The strange thing is that these are story beats that *make sense on paper.* The Doctor has a massive 'where I go people suffer' complex that just got seriously messed with and it makes sense for him to project that onto Ruby to some extent. And he's **infamous** for just randomly ditching companions when he gets too close or just is bored of them. But the way these scenes were written felt....jarring. Colder and crueler than the Doctor would act, and *especially* this incarnation. He went from Cosmic Hobo to Angry Eyebrows in no time flat.
I was very onboard with the finale but I couldn't stand that scene. Only scene of the season I just didn't like.
That scene was really bizzare and he did seem out of character.
I wonder if it is because the Doctor deep inside resented himself for not being as brave as Ruby when she met her mother again, and simply fall back into his habits of running off and try not to involve Ruby in his mistakes for the time being. It's kinda easy to see how Susan is haunting him for the entire season, and it's sad for him to fail her when he first abandoned her.
This is absolutely my read on it, but it still just didn't work. It felt weird and cruel and out of character for this version of the Doctor. It's the sort of thing where execution can make or break an idea.
Didn't the giggle end with a weird game of catch on the rooftop?
Yeah, the god of games suddenly loses a game of catch because of…? Oh, he just slipped the ball….
I'm actually going to disagree with the Giggle. The bi-regeneration just came out of nowhere and the decision to resolve everything with a game of catch just dragged the whole thing down. Plus, I just prefer the original sadder ending for 10, since that reflected the permanence of regenerating far better.
Different strokes, different folks!
Honestly this whole season felt off the rails, and not in a good way. Doctor Who is at its best when it rides a line between fantastical and reality. This season was firmly just an episode of looney tunes. Ruby probably had the worst dialogue of any companion of the modern area. There was a freaking baby geniuses episode. The whole thing was bizarrely hard to follow and ended so flat. The new characters never developed enough for me to care. Ncuti was wonderful though.
Hey now, 73 Yards sold Ruby to me.
I agree that the whimsicality and silliness was over the top but i actually loved ruby. Shes the first companion ever that ive actually been the same age as (as in born in around the same time) I could completely relate to her throughout this season and ncuti and millie had some amazing bestie energy and great chemistry. I didnt mind all the fantastical elements as i assumed all the weird stuff would somehow be tied into the overarching plot but i guess not...
Ruby could have been great, I don’t mind the idea of a younger companion. I don’t think they gave her enough of an introductory period and development. It was just rushed, she just felt like a plot device. She would have personality for a split second and then just go do some random thing to move the plot forward. It really felt like a lazier Clara, if that’s even a thing. The actress and casting were fine, the writing, not so much.
Nah she was the same age as rose/bill. She just didnt get any introductory eps, just the single scene in space babies where she is shocked st being in space. I had the opposite problem where she already developed a personality by the time we saw her, she never grew into the companion role she was already just a good companion. I just cope by blaming it on rtd not being used to writing for who again and also the shorter season and episode length. Surely rtd is actually a competent writer and next season will be better as he adjusts *smokes huge copium pipe*
Some very strong standalone episodes this season. 73 yards and the one with the rich racists (although I concede it pulled the wool over my eyes until I came on here). But this seasons bad wolf turned out to be several blind kittens
Yeah. Life returned because The Doctor said that is how it works. Dragging Sut around the time stream somehow is the same as bringing death to death around time? And the sky opening looked good. But dunno how it makes sense unless the entire universe across time also saw the giant scar.
Even before “everyone” died, the second they killed a 13 year old kid on screen I just knew they’re gonna do an Endgame reversal
I thought/hoped it would involve the Doctor breaking his rules and doing something timey wimey, going back to change things and perhaps even interacting with his past self. Wish that had happened. Maybe he would’ve fuck things up in a different way and had a moral crisis.
I'm glad he didn't, because that's always the most predictable solution, and has been done multiple times before.
Better that than taking the god of death for walkies
It's all how you look at it. You can say he took him for walkies, or you can say he dragged him through the time vortex until he decided to let him disintegrate into nothingness. It's the same as "Kang was beaten by ants". No, Kang was overrun by a literal army of giant, super-intelligent ants - which would also have insane strength due to their scale.
That part was fun as hell IMO. Just needed a little more substance to it.
Has RTD done it before? Only time I can recall that he had the Doctor cross his own timeline is Father’s Day and that brought us reapers. Oooo shit imagine Sutekh vs. reapers. That’s a terrible idea, and I want it.
I still remember how I thought they were gonna be a huge part of the show the first time I saw Father's Day with how they were explained as part of something you can look at as the temporal ecosystem. It didn't hit me until like Series 10 that we never saw them again lol
Lmao almost same! I figured they were from the classic series
Well he did Time Lord math. Death^2 = Life. For some reason I cannot fathom.
Right, maths! Maths, eh? Maths, maths, maths, maths, maths, maths. Maths! Hope you're getting all this down.
Also when rose died because part of her purpose as a character is to act as a good ending for the 14th doctor, so rtd wasn't going to undo that by killing her off.
Except that in Endgame, there were actual consequences to bringing the "dusted" back. Big, franchise altering consequences. Stories like this can work if there are consequences and conflicts Meanwhile, this episode just undid everything and nothing bad happened to anyone. No one lost anything at all. No consequences. No conflict.
It's a bit like the first of the new specials with 14 where they activate the dagger drive. It starts ripping up the very surface of the earth all across London (let's ignore it only followed the streets) but then they turned it off which somehow made it just... Close up all those cracks. Though that's not even the real stakes there, those are with Donna who for years we've thought would die if she remembered. Then they just hand waved both away like magic. It's just incredibly unsatisfying.
That one was so bad especially because there was a much better solution *so close* I fully expected that other ending while watching. The entire episode is spend building up how Donna still subconsciously wants to help people, how she even gave up the lottery money to help others... So now she's gonna give up her Doctor-ness by using up her regeneration energy healing everyone who got hurt and essentially "regenerating" the city, right? Even is a cool callback to River giving up her regenerations to heal the Doctor. Then the next shot shows the city magically reversing all the damage and it all falls apart...
>Then the next shot shows the city magically reversing all the damage and it all falls apart... They could've avoided all that if there was a computer in the dagger thing was "simulating damage", cos you'd probably want that in spaceship that's gonna destroy the surroundings anyway.
I kept waiting for the Doctor to say, "Just this once, Ruby, everybody lives!!!"
The second they killed Donna’s daughter
I could *maybe* have bought Kate’s death but as soon as Rose died all the tension was gone.
This was me, I really thought oh no that's the end of Kate, who will lead UNIT after the doctor defeats Sutekh. But then everyone else died and it was clear he's gotta bring them all back because of course he has to. Future episodes can survive without a couple of previously major characters. But not without anyone in the bloody universe.
I was completely thinking it was real with Kate, and was really impressed that they would kill her off. It seemed like a realistic choice since she’s been the character for so long maybe they decided they wanted a new head of UNIT and her death would have a lot of impact. And then I was swiftly disappointed when everyone else died and I realized it wasn’t sticking
When Kate dusted, I heard my son say, "Oh, they just messed up big time. The Doctor is gonna be pissed." But then everybody dusted, and we started discussing how the Doctor would reset everything by the end. One funny moment, when the Doctor screams out the TARDIS doors at the dead universe and the screen fades to black, my son said, "and roll credits. This is the end of Doctor Who forever."
That would have been quite the epic, mic drop ending. I almost wish they'd gone with that.
I was the same. Especially with how she died just as a background character. Not that the tension would have lasted for much longer anyway, about 10 seconds later they've essentially nuked London which is already too far for Who, nevermind wiping out the entire universe.
I still don't know why she was in this story at all.
Honestly me either. In The Legend of Ruby Sunday she essentially tells Carla she’s only there because her mum works there and at one point says all they have her doing is researching shoplifting. Later on they tell everyone except key personnel to leave and she of course sticks around. Then in The Empire of Death we see her using a tablet presumably to control UNIT laser defense systems(guns) which you wouldn’t expect someone in her position to know how to access let alone run. Her presence made no sense nor added anything to the story so I suspect the rumors of a UNIT spin-off wherein she’ll be a character are true as that’s the only reason I can think of that they bothered having her character make an appearance.
A cynic might say it was rtd trying to show how progressive he is by shoehorning in a trans character, but as much as I think that is possible I think he just likes rose as a character so he shoehorned her into another story.
Child of a companion is a good concept that hasn’t really been done in any meaningful way yet. Sarah Jane had a son, barely shows up in the show. Amy and Rory’s daughter River, not really the “child of companion” dynamic. Rose being a youngin’ and daughter of arguably the best NuWho companion, lot of potential. We’ll see
I mean, the tension of Doctor Who rarely comes from "is the Doctor going to save these people" but "*how* is the Doctor going to save these people". The problem with this episode is that the "how" is pretty rubbish
No, but you immediately know there aren’t real stakes here. The Doctor saving the day is guaranteed - but the guest cast making it to the end isn’t.
I’d like to think that the appeal of any given Dr Who episode amounts to more than guessing whether individual guest cast members will be permanently dead by the end of the episode. Maybe that’s just me.
Honestly, the only one I was scared for, genuinely, was Mel; I could see them killing her off for real all this time later, I was prepped to be upset. Which kinda surprised me, because she was in my bottom tier in Classic Who.
Sure. But it all comes together to make a solid episode. You can play with or remove one of those aspects, but the others have to carry that load. And there was precious little carrying the load for this episode.
I mean, that's nearly every doctor who episode besides finales. And even then, news outlets will make very sure that you know who's exiting the show. Really the only examples I can think of otherwise is series 7 when Clara died multiple times before becoming a permanent companion, and the Ponds only making it halfway through the series. Outside of that, we pretty much always know the doctor + companion and other major characters will make it out. I will say, I at least was concerned that Mel wasn't making it out of this episode when she was falling asleep in the memory Tardis.
> Outside of that, **we pretty much always know the doctor + companion and other major characters will make it out**. I will say, I at least was concerned that Mel wasn't making it out of this episode when she was falling asleep in the memory Tardis. Which is why the writer kills off a bunch of recurring characters in a matter of seconds, it doesn’t ring true. (Same for Ruby in Rogue.)
And now it’s “how is the doctor going to CTRL + Z the things that happened”
I think the how has been pretty rubbish for a while tbh
NAH how wild would it be if they actually did all die and the rest of DW took place in a wasteland
Mad Doc: Fury Vortex
If Flux hadn't half-assed the concept so recently, that would have been an interesting hook for a series of specials - The Doctor flying around a dying universe in his memory TARDIS saving as many people as he can, all while grappling with the knowledge that every life he saves is going to be lost anyway.
Well, the doctor still works with the understanding that every life he saves will eventually be lost anyway. This is a core character trait, I would argue.
God could you imagine if series 4 ended like that and we got the Tennant specials set in a wasteland universe with your concept. That would’ve been great
Ooo like a really *really* big quarry.
Each episode a different shade of sepia, how exciting.
Just week after week it’s the Doctor landing on a random planet desperately looking for someone to talk to.
The flux already did that and they just didn’t acknowledge it at all
Lol, everyone in my family had the same reaction - “they blipped!”
my son and i too. they were thanosed!
Literally dusted, just like IW
Well they were in stark tower…
I hate that fucking unit tower.
Oh yeah, soon as I saw Rose and Lenny's character die I knew RTD was gonna play a reverse card. Did not stop me from enjoying it mind!
The mom reveal took away any tension from future speculation. So disappointing. Mrs Flood is gonna be a similar tease and probably just end up being a construct or another cyberperson.
Doing a big tease, after a show literally made of failing to pay off teases, I’m afraid Mrs. Flood got told to fuck off in my lounge tonight. No you fackin don’t babes I’ve seen enough. “Oooo maybe *she’s* Susan!” Oh do put a sock in it.
Same here honestly. What a way to dissuade speculation on the show you absolutely _know_ fans love to ravenously speculate over. Wagging your finger and going "she wasn't important, everyone just thought she was!" was a truly awful cop out. I've lost any ability to give a shit about any future mystery in this era now.
I had a similar thought for a different reason. It was due to the way Legend of Ruby Sunday treated the potential Susan reveal and how it was a literal bait and switch to take it away and do Sutekh instead. There were several clues and hints this series talking about Susan and it built up to a decent chunk of episode 7 being about potentially reuniting with Susan. On the other hand, there were zero clues about Sutekh. So to swap Susan out for Sutekh at the last second and cheekily have Susan Twist say "Did you think I was family?" which was basically "Did you all think it was going to be Susan?" made me really mad. Yes we all thought it was going to be Susan because that's the story you told us Russell! Giving us a bunch of clues towards one thing and then saying "psych!" because it was actually something that there had been no clues about isn't good storytelling or a clever twist. He just lied to us. So why would I give a shit about any future mystery if RTD has shown that at any moment he could pull the rug out from under us and reveal that the clues were bullshit. That he was lying to us, the set up didn't actually mean anything and was just a long-game plan to trick us. The main effect this had on me was that I'm just not going to bother investing in the next story RTD tells us.
While I don’t think this season finale was as bad as GoT s8 series finale. It did feel like Dumb and Dumber’s inane philosophy of “subverting expectations” which everyone and their mom hated. Sprinkling clues and hints so the fans can theorize and predict is *supposed* to have the pay off of the fans being right or close to the mark. Then they can go back and see all the other things they missed once they have the bigger picture. For example, the wonderful Susan Twist being in damn near every episode since Wild Blue Yonder was a mind blowing realization. (Granted it came from a YouTube bts, but still) only for the carpet to be yanked out a bit at the end with Susan Triad *not* being Susan was disappointing
Yeah that's a valid viewpoint to have. I personally didn't mind the Sutekh bait and switch itself. It was a cool moment imo. I do think it was a total waste to NOT have the Doctor just learn a bloody lesson for once, take the very message from Ruby's arc to heart, and finally go and see Susan himself. It was the perfect opportunity and they squandered it.
Look now in fairness next season we find out she’s Palpitine’s granddaughter.
It is a weird decision to write a storyline with the point that mysteries don't really matter and people can be uninteresting and also spend the same episode baiting the identity of another mystery character.
I think with the white hood she was wearing at the end, she has something to do with the trickster
Or maybe [this person](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00r7gx6/p00r7f8b).
I would make a happy little sound if Mrs. Flood turned out to be Romana I. She, Sarah Jane, and Leela were my three favorite assistants in classic Who. 🙂 Oh, and Adric, 😢
Well she couldn’t be Romana I. She’d be either Romana III or a later regeneration. It’d be odd for Romana to be a villain at all though.
It's actually the teeth that make me think Trickster.
What about the dad reveal?
William Benjamin Garnet. So shes Ruby Garnet? Lol. Shiny.
William Benjamin Garnet William G Roger ap Gwilliam in 73 Yards: >Amol, I'm a Welshman; I was born in Wales. And **that's what the "ap" in my name means**. It's not one of those apps you used to have on your phone in the old days. **It means "son of"**. I don’t reckon the reveal has taken away _all_ “tension from future speculation”. :)
Honestly I think it would be cool to see Gwilliam back. I know this is way before his political campaigns in universe but having another earthbound antagonist again, and one already established as being somebody who is entirely unlikeable and irredeemable, honestly seems like something that could be used to great effect in the future for future episode plotlines.
Agreed, a human recurring villain would be great, and Gwilliam seems like he could be a really fun character. A kind of Lex Luthor figure perhaps.
That's what I thought too. Maybe Roger ap Gwilliam is like Ruby's brother lol
I wonder what they have on their phones instead. One of my biggest questions about this season.
Ya, I think the chance of a future where people stop carrying computers in their pocket is pretty low and an app structure is just better than other options, it's not like other layouts haven't been tried.
Spoilers. Am I the only one who feels like I got screwed over, waiting to find out who the mom was just for her to be normal with some emotion is that more powerful than gods bull crap? Waited the whole season to find out this big mystery, and it's nothing. Even her mom just accepts that the Doctor is real and everything Ruby told her is real. It's like a Disney cartoon happy ending. Basically all those gods and everything were for nothing. I feel like I got told there is a good dinner waiting at home after a long day of work and throughout I'm told there is chicken, rolls, vegetables, cake, lobster etc. And I get home home it's unseasoned chicken, vegetables gone bad and one roll because the lobster was thrown away.
Yeah, I was hoping for a recovery after the wet fart that was the Sutekh reveal last week, but my issue with the Mom reveal isn't that "she's an ordinary person" isn't exciting / cool enough, it's that her being an ordinary person is not a satisfactory answer to the questions that were presented. How does the ordinary person create the temporal skip that caused her to fast-forward past the moment where her face could have been seen? How does the ordinary person give Ruby the ability to make it snow by daydreaming? How does the ordinary person make Ruby's soul terrify The Maestro, when none of the billions of other ordinary people on Earth did? And with the Mrs Drizzle sequence at the end, it's pointing towards a bullshirt "it was all a dream" ending like Bobby Ewing walking out of the shower.
When they raise the stakes to end-of-universe scale it actually deflates is as of course it'll all be undone in an instant. Like the time reversal thing with the Master. I'm also getting a bit tired of the *there has always been x* scenarios e.g. Giggle since first screen, Family of Blood member in every mirror. Essentially tweaking the show's past to include something.
The Sister in every mirror is fine. That doesn't change anything. I'd say this trend started with the Silence in Series Six being revealed to have been here and guiding humanity the whole time, and it's been a recurring cliché ever since.
I did say "well I know they're not going to kill a kid" but there's basically nothing ever where the threat is huge that I think it will stick. Even the alien invasions that happen almost yearly don't stick. I still found it tense not because I ever thought that Sutekh would destroy the world but because I was invested in the emotional stakes of what it would take to undo it and how.
I think this is something that doctor who has lost, episode specific side characters used to die much more often.
Yeah, but no one cared about the thin fat gay married Anglican marines.
How dare you! The thin fat gay Anglican marines were a crucial part of that episode they were in!
I agree with your edit. Sutekh would have been a fool villain for a whole season, slowly killing anyone who tried to fight him and the Doctor struggling to defeat him.
Yeah would definitely have been good as a longer villain arc, but you’d have to make him less powerful somehow. Can’t really have him killing everyone in the universe with death dust as soon as he lands unless you want the whole season to be just the Doctor, Ruby & Mel trying to reverse it.
Agreed. Not difficult to tone down the scope of the sandstorms though. They did seem to grow to cataclysmic levels instantly.
True, but he didn’t originally have that level of power in the old stories, RTD “evolved” him to full god power! So it is absolutely in the writers control how powerful to make him.
I was so hyped for this week’s episode after the ending of the Legend of Ruby Sunday. Like a lot of people, I feel deflated and let down by the rushed and poor written ending.
For me the 'tension' was about how Ruby and her parentage was going to defeat Sutekh and bring everyone back - I don't think the show ever even presented it as a serious possibility that everyone was going to die, and having the whole unit base + Carla die was sort of a way of indicating that it was definitely going to be undone somehow (whereas if it was just Kate I might have believed it). It was more like an episode where you know the doctor is going to regenerate - there isn't meant to be any tension over whether he's going to escape unscathed since you already know something is gonna happen to cause a regeneration, the tension is just about how it's going to happen
When Kate died, my hopes were up for a moment. If she, THE KATE STEWART, actually died, the stakes would become insanely high and that's a way to kick off a badass episode. But then everyone kept dying and.... "Oh well. Never mind."
Unit and Kate dying I thought was plausible but unlikely, I like that they made it way over the top having everyone and everything ever die (the ood!) it made it more comfortable to watch in a paradoxical way
They did kill off an Osgood before, even though they got replaced.
It's a new season 1 so using the season to reestablish then break the status quo open is something I could see that would be appealing
When Kate died, I had an emotional reaction. It was rough. I was sad she was gone. Then everyone else died and I realized the episode had zero stakes.
I don’t understand the memory of the tardis they conveniently used as a regular tardis
Especially as it came from Ruby's memory and contained pieces of other tardises that Ruby never saw.
Right? I thought they might have at least made it so that all 3 (Ruby, Mel, the Doctor) were remembering it, hence the amalgamation of various items from previous doctors. The way it was done just seemed so random.
Iirc the doctor said the tardis was remembering itself at some point
You just know that whole spoon thing is just a setup for someone in a future episode to say "The Doctor defeated Death with a spoon"
I felt the same way about the Toymaker and now I feel that way about Sutekh. Built up as the biggest bad guy ever that fans haven't seen in decades and people are so excited for only to be defeated quickly in the laziest way possible in the same amount of time it takes to beat a regular monster of the week
I agree. I paused about three minutes in and said "Oh, so there's gonna be a universe reset before the end, right? Because too many named characters have died for this not to be reversed". In defense of Infinity War, that ending was still emotionally devastating due to the emotional connection we had with the characters, and the fact that we watched Thanos work so hard to succeed and give up so much to do it, which would usually be what our heroes would do. And besides, if you didn't know more movies were being made with some of those characters, if would feel very final, unlike this episode.
And people did die in infinity war that didn't come back
Yea, sadly. If that'd been how they ended "The Legend of Ruby Sunday" it would've at least been more effective. Or at least just the part where UNIT goes down. Then start "Empire of Death" with the spread of the dust and the chase. It would've helped. Though nothing can help that ending really outside of a total rewrite.
Imagine if they had a few epsiodes of traipsing around the empty universe, maybe some Wierd monsters that survived
Thought it was unbelievable they'd kill off the Unit team, especially Kate. Thought it was crazy they'd kill Flood without her ever doing anything, her last words challenging God himself, and we'd have to find out more about her posthumously in the next season. When they killed Carla, tension dropped. When they went on to do Flux across all of time and space, all tension died.
With this sort of story you have to focus less on IF people are coming back and more HOW. With all the meta knowledge about shows these days like contracts and planned future seasons you can usually infer that they'll make it out and you need to suspend your disbelief a bit more or focus on the mechanics of the plot and not the production. The interesting part is figuring out how the main character is going to think their way out of the problem at hand. The risky part is the writer managing to make it satisfying and matching the solution to the enormity of the ramped up threat.
Didn't bother me at all, in fact I thought it was pretty crazy that they'd go that far in the first place even if it was going to be undone. I actually rolled my eyes because I expected time would just be rewritten, and I was pleasantly surprised that everyone remembers the event.
Yeah, when the cloud was sweeping through the city I was like "oh shit" When Carla died I was like "oh shit" When Rose and Kate died I was like "well this is all getting reversed then."
I was ready to believe Kate died, but as soon as all of London started going I knew this was all getting timey wimey erased. Then they couldn't even timey wimey erase it like... what they did made absolutely no sense what so ever. You have a time machine. You can fix shit like that so easily with the existing rules within the show, maybe ever so slightly bending them. No instead WE BROUGHT DEATH TO DEATH. What?
Even though bringing death to death the first time didn't raise the dead from their graves and it seemed like sutekhs had to touch you to bring you death but apparently when everyone needs reviving it's enough to do a drive by.
Someone on tumblr wrote out a pretty good theory on how this Sutekh is not the Osiran Sutekh that faced the 4th Doctor, but rather a manifestation of the Doctor's own death-guilt that he's been carrying for centuries, made manifest by the salt at the edge of the universe. So the Susan Twists have only been showing up during 15's run, but all the power of story and myth stuff that's been going on this season due to the salt means that this Sutekh can project the manifestation into the pre-15 lives. So it's less that Sutekh was literally hanging around the Tardis when Adric died, but rather that the "god of death" symbolically haunted the Doctor even then, and then the events of this season allowed a psychic entity to literalize the metaphor.
*That* would be very, very cool! unfortunately not what happened
I agree.
If they had killed Kate, waited and then killed everyone then I feel like it would've been better
yeah the second i saw rose noble turn to dust i knew it had no stakes anymore, i wish rtd wouldnt have spent so much of the episode ambling towards the ending and had actually produced a compelling set of events for both the action and the mystery rather than the increasingly overused trope of “this thing/person/moment is so important because we all considered it important rather than any intrinsic quality” because lord the rubys mom reveal was lackluster and shouldnt have had nearly as much an impact on the sutekh plot as it did
To be fair almost every season finale has a situation where there's absolutely no hope and then magically the doctor saves everyone.
Just made a post with exactly the same point. As soon as everyone started dying, there's no stakes. We know they'll all be brought back. Doctor who doesn't do well when it tries to do too big scale as it usually has to undo it. I much prefer when the scale and threat are more personal.
I believed that Kate was actually dead for real… until the Sundays died, and everyone else, and then it was pretty obvious that they’d all come back. But Kate would have had such a good last line … ! “There will be birds” - amazing
Sutekh was disappointing. Expected a lot more from a literal God. Maestro was.way more powerful by the looks of things. The way he was defeated was just a rehash of last time, except he's on a lead. Everyone dying also meant we knew we'd get a universe reboot. Ruby's parents reveal was mega underwhelming and doesn't explain anything about how Ruby could make it snow, stop Maestro for a moment. And then she just kind of left. The memory TARDIS was cool. I'm fully invested in Mrs Flood and I highly suspect she's the Rani. Overall, I think 8 episodes wasn't enough, not enough Sutekh, Sutekh making no sense, Ruby's mums reveal being underwhelming, whatever the Doctor did with the whistle and much more just led to a slightly average finale. And still no Susan!
This was by far the best season since Capaldi and didn’t really have a bad episode as even if Space Babies was stupid it was still fun. The final denouement and reveal of ruby’s mom naming her by pointing to a sign no one else could see was a huge let down. I hope this mess is fixed during Christmas Special.
To me it just felt like the flux all over again.
The difference is that the destruction left behind by the Flux actually lasted. Well, so far anyway.
Yeah Sutekh coming back was cool, even for a person not the familiar with the classic series. But even I will say he felt wasted. It would have been much more interesting if Sutekh had already “killed” the entire universe when the Doctor and Ruby landed back in present day. Sutekh could have been revealed sooner and had more screen time. The tension also wouldn’t have been brought to a halt with a UNIT death scene that you know will be reversed in the end. All in all, I really enjoyed this season and am happy with how it turned out, but it’s a bummer that it went out on a low note.
Sure, I knew it would be reversed. I didn't expect the world to stay a desolate post apocalyptic wasteland after the loss of music either. That didn't stop my enjoyment for more than a minute though. I really liked the post apocalypse storyline, the weirdness around memory itself dying. The episode had so many concepts I really liked. Every planet he ever visited, likely saving a few dozen people, turning into a source of complete destruction, his galavanting becoming the reason everything dies. If I couldn't take a reversal ending I don't think I could have watched much longer than The Doctor Dances. It is a staple. The reversal endings I can't stand are the ones where everyone just forgets what happened because resetting the status quo is easier for the writers. They can't keep the universe dead, the show doesn't work with that. They could have had the time the monks ruled humanity remain in the public consciousness though.
Yeah, I mean, going in you know the good guy is going to triumph in the end, but the moment they started killing named characters with no other named characters there to see it, I knew it was going to be resolved with a magical fix everything reversal, which has been done so often and so frequently that I just can't forkin' stand it at this point. Honestly, I think the jump the shark moment for me was in the Bleep the Meep episode, when the spaceship is shown shattering the earth for miles around, only for everything to be perfectly restored - roads back together undamaged with the paint perfectly aligned- because the engines were thrown into reverse. It put me in mind of one of the Care Bears movies, when the evil kids run around destroying things and just lift a tree out of the ground, roots and all, and throw it, and then during the getting better sequence the same animation is played in reverse so the tree is picked up and plopped back in place.
This was a flux level event condensed into 1 episode. It's not like it can't be done but it needs more weight to it. The sound of drums set it up better so that when you come back after the time skip you actually FEEL like there were long lasting consequences. Sutekh won for like 5 minutes and then got beat by what was essentially a game of "made you look".
I think the trouble lies within that it was 8 episodes rather than 13. We had no episodes like the silence of the library aka 2 parters it was 6 episodes of slow build up then suddenly 2 episodes of thats it tadaa which really threw me off. 5 extra episodes could have really made a difference especially with the friendship of Ruby and the doctor.
Unfortunately I think it’s the trade off for getting Doctor Who yearly again (assuming Disney don’t pull the plug after next season). I’m sure I saw at some point RTD promised no more gap years, so I’d imagine it’s a combo of ensuring there’s not another hiatus and working around Ncuti being in demand, so he can do Who alongside other projects, theatre etc. There’s also the planned spin-offs factor that will probably become apparent next year (again, almost definitely depending on the Disney deal continuing), so those 5 ‘missing’ episodes will probably be found there instead. Though, of course that doesn’t fix the pacing of a Doctor Who season and fans’ interest in a spin off will naturally vary.
I actually enjoyed the 'Oh, everyone is dead, this will definitely be undone before the end then' element. It was very clearly signposted right from the start of the episode, as opposed to killing off major characters slowly till you get half way through the episode and suddenly realized that none of the deaths had actual consequence. The episode immediately announces that the plot isn't 'Will the Doctor save everyone?', it's 'HOW will the Doctor save everyone?'
But then where are the stakes?? A good finale should do both, and without the “will he”, we’re not invested in what to our characters because we know they’ll be fine in the end.
...what, and before you thought the Doctor was not going to defeat Sutekh? There was literally not a second at any point in this season where I thought the Doctor wouldn't save the day at the end. That's how Doctor Who works.
True, but in Doctor Who characters can permanent die which adds some tension. Everyone dying means everyone is being revived and there is no fear of character deaths when you know nobody will remain dead. In this case you knew deaths were meaningless when Rose died.
Sure but when the entire cast dies it's pretty obvious everyone will live. The God if Death killed everyone and there's no consequences to it.
Eh, I definitely felt the vibe of the cinema screening I went to slowly change through the episode. For context, the 15 minute intermission, the whole cinema was speculating, making jokes and the vibe was the same as the ending of infinity war if anyone went to that screening. By the end of part 2, everyone kinda left the screening quietly during the end, I got the vibe everyone was kind of confused and unsure how to feel. I liked the episode, but yeah it definitely suffers from the same faults as most finales, too many questions not enough answers. I lowkey expected something more akin to Parting of the ways/impossible planet. Alas, hopefully next season improves on it's finale.
Completely killed any tension when the tragedy becomes so large you know there will be a reset Switch. RTD has never understood subtlety. His finalies are always overblown ‘big idea’ nonsense. At the same time they can be entertaining. (I enjoyed Journey’s End for example even though it’s complete nonsense) For this one, my favorite parts were all in the final post main plot scenes. That probably says it all
I honestly would have much preferred a "doctor talks down the monster" resolution. I figured that they were setting up a whole "what is death without life" non-duality thing.
This should of been saved for the end of this Doctor's era and in a 3-4 part arc as a finale to it. This was way too rush and too easily to spot it would be fixed in 15 minutes. :( The issue now is, how the hell do you top this? You can't.
If they killed off Morris and Kate, I would’ve believed it. When they killed off Ruby’s mom, tension gone. Meanwhile, if they had killed Mrs Flood and Cherry, I would’ve still believed it because Cherry is old and would’ve caused a lot of emotion with her death (even if reversed)
I think it might have worked slightly better if killing everyone was the cliffhanger at the end of TLoRS, but then that is just straight up Infinity War. Would have been pretty cool to actually see Sutekh's power and then have to sit with that for a whole week before finding out how it's all resolved. There's still no real way around it being pretty obvious that they're not going to leave everyone dead, but honestly that's kind of to be expected. Tension shouldn't just come from the threat, it can also come from seeing how the surviving characters react to that threat and how they ultimately deal with it.
Agree. I screamed when Kate died, and when everybody died I was totally chill...
Cherry: *Dies* NO! RTD had the guts to kill off cherry??? Kate : *Dies* Woah!? Maybe we’ve seen all we can of Kate, That’s ballsy Russell. World: *Dies* Yeah,This is going to be reversed isn’t it 🙄
Yeah 100%. It just removed all the stakes. This entire episode was just a big ass mess honestly. i rate it 6/10 and that's me being generous.
Still don’t get why sutekh cares so much about who ruby’s mum is
For me it hit the same problem that The Giggle and large chunks of Big Finish and Virgin's output do - someone asks "wouldn't it be cool if this character from early on in the show came back" (to which the answer is usually "no" anyway) but then doesn't think about how/why the story would do that. When you then add on the whole "every ody dies" thing it does rob the episode of any dramatic tension and also leaves us to grumble about how characters were wasted (Why was Rose even there? Why did we get hardly any of Morris when Lenny was brilliant? What even was the point of Mrs Flood going round to the Sunday's apart from to tell us that Carla's not going to forget her mam?)
Sadly, I agree. To be honest, I knew it was coming from part 1, I feared that's what he'd do and, yeap, he went and did it. Things just happened BECAUSE and there were a lot of things left unanswered (granted, not everything has to be explained, but meh) Also, the ending of the ending didn't make sense, because The Doctor did his thing regardless of whether 14-Tennant "got therapy so that I can be ok" regardless. If you feel better now and you admittedly feel bad about not seeing Susan again, then maybe go visit Ruby's dad with her? No, wait, Ruby has to go because we got another actor now, oh well \*sniff\* \*vworp vworp\*.
The second everyone died I immediately thought "whelp, now it's fucking obvious that they're going to reverse time", it would have been so much better if everyone was dead for a few episodes- as someone else said it would have been better as a whole season of trying to defeat sutekh