Four years of storytelling arrive here. “Journey’s End” picks up from the golden light pouring out of the Doctor’s hands at the close of The Stolen Earth, and it’s exactly the finale all that build-up suggests: enormous, overstuffed, occasionally ridiculous, and absolutely devastating when it matters. It resolves a cliffhanger with a conjuring trick, it gives the Doctor the worst thing anyone has ever said to him, and it does something to Donna Noble so cruel that I’m still angry about it. Not a flawless episode by any measure. An unforgettable one.
Start with the regeneration, because it isn’t one. The Doctor siphons the excess energy into the severed hand he’s been carrying around in a jar since a Sycorax took it off him in The Christmas Invasion, healing himself without altering a single cell. It is, unquestionably, a cheat. It’s also been sitting on the console in plain sight for two and a half years, so it’s a cheat with a receipt, and I’d far rather have that than a reset button. The show immediately makes the hand matter rather than leaving it as a get-out, because Donna touches it and something extraordinary happens: a two-way biological meta-crisis. A second Doctor grows out of the hand, part human, one heart, wearing a blue suit and rather more impulsive than the original. Donna, in exchange, receives a Time Lord mind on top of her own.
The DoctorDonna is magnificent
Catherine Tate playing Donna Noble with the Doctor’s intellect running underneath is the most fun this season has had. She rattles through calculations at double speed, finishes his sentences, and insults him fluently in two disciplines at once. She’s the one who disables the entire Dalek fleet, spins the reality bomb into reverse, and saves every universe there is, a temp from Chiswick doing it with a keyboard and a great deal of shouting. For a character who has spent her whole life being told she’s nothing special, by her mother and worse by herself, having Donna be the one who saves all of creation is a superb payoff. The season has been signposting it since a soothsayer looked at her back in The Fires of Pompeii and since a Dalek prophesied a threefold man, and it lands exactly as it should.
The moral centre of the episode, though, is Davros, and he’s superb precisely because he never fights. Strapped into his chair below the Crucible, he simply talks, and what he does is read the Doctor a roll call. Everyone in this building is prepared to die. Sarah Jane has a warp star. Jack has a bomb. Martha has a key that will crack the Earth open. Every one of them arrived at the same place, willing to commit atrocity and willing to be destroyed, because of him. You take ordinary people and you fashion them into weapons. It is the single most devastating thing anybody has ever said to this Doctor and the show pointedly declines to give him an answer. Tennant plays it as a man watching a bill be itemised. It lands harder because we’ve watched him earn it: the eternal punishments he handed out in The Family of Blood weren’t the act of a gentle man, and Davros has simply noticed. The sting in the tail is that the meta-crisis Doctor then wipes out the entire Dalek fleet in one stroke and the real Doctor is horrified by him, which is of course Davros’s point arriving from a second direction. A version of himself, born in battle, doing precisely what he’d never allow.
And then the cruellest ending this show has written
A human mind cannot hold a Time Lord consciousness. Donna is burning up, and there’s exactly one way to save her: the Doctor has to erase every memory of him, all of it, every trip, Pompeii, the Ood, the Library, and take her home. She begs him not to. She knows exactly what she’s losing while she’s losing it. And she goes back to being who she was in Partners in Crime, loud and brash and a bit lost, entirely unaware she was ever anything else, while her mother and grandfather are told she can never remember or the burning will start again and kill her.
That’s a horrible ending and the show knows it. Donna Noble saved every universe there is and doesn’t get to keep it. The one companion who genuinely grew, from the shouting bride who turned him down to the woman who put her hands on that lever in Pompeii, is the one who has all of it taken away, and she doesn’t even get to be sad about it. Wilf gets the last word, promising to look up at the sky for her every night, and it finished me off completely. The Doctor walks back into the TARDIS alone, in the rain, and closes the door.
So what does it leave us with? A payoff two years in the making, since the hand in the jar was always going to matter and was beautifully set up for something silly. The DoctorDonna herself, which is the correct destination for Donna’s arc and the best thing Tate has done in the part. Davros’s accusation, left standing and unanswered, the most damning thing ever said to this character. Rose’s compromise, a version of him who can grow old with her, which isn’t a happy ending so much as an honest one. And Donna’s erasure, the bleakest fate the show has handed anybody, where she was the most important woman in creation for about an hour and will never know it.
Rating: 4/5. Too crowded, and the reality bomb is an awful lot of plot for a resolution that turns on one very fast keyboard. But the character work is exceptional, the Davros scenes are the best writing of the season, and the last twenty minutes are as good and as sad as this programme gets. Everyone he ever saved in one room, laughing, flying a police box, and then a beach and a doorstep and a man walking off alone in the rain. Worth noting too: two separate people have now told him his song is ending, and nobody has explained what that means.
