Doomsday: Daleks, Cybermen and the Genesis Ark

I’ve watched a lot of Doctor Who, and I’ve never been wrecked by an episode the way “Doomsday” wrecked me. Fair warning: spoilers all the way down, because I don’t see how you talk about that ending without them. It’s the payoff to the enormous double cliffhanger of Army of Ghosts, and for forty minutes it’s the biggest, loudest, most gleefully fan-servicing thing the revived show has ever attempted, and then it puts everything down, walks you onto a cold grey beach in Norway and quietly breaks your heart. As a finale it’s close to perfect. As a goodbye it’s devastating.

Daleks Versus Cybermen

First, the bit every fan has wanted since roughly 1966. Four Daleks and an army of Cybermen in the same building, and the show’s smart enough to know exactly what we came for: it lets them talk first. The stand-off between the Cult of Skaro and the Cyber-Leader is a joy from start to finish, the Cybermen coolly proposing a logical alliance to conquer the universe together and the Daleks answering with the purest contempt in science fiction. “You are superior in only one respect: you are better at dying.” It’s funny, it’s chilling, and it sums up the difference between them. The Cybermen want order. The Daleks want everything else to stop existing.

Then the war starts and it’s spectacular. The Daleks have brought the Genesis Ark, a Time Lord prison ship that’s bigger on the inside, holds millions of Daleks and needs only the touch of a time traveller to unlock, and when it opens above Canary Wharf and pours its cargo into the London sky the scale is properly breathtaking. Daleks and Cybermen shooting each other out of the air over a real, recognisable city while ordinary people run for cover. I don’t think the show has ever spent a budget this well, and the fan review over at Doctor Who Reviews is every bit as gushing about that battle as I am.

What keeps it from being empty spectacle is Torchwood. Yvonne Hartman was certain she could handle whatever came through, that certainty has doomed her people, and the Institute that Queen Victoria founded to protect Britain from the Doctor ends up handing the Earth to its two worst enemies. It’s the grim, logical end of the arc the season has been quietly building since that first ominous name-drop.

Into the Void

The Doctor’s solution is beautiful in its simplicity. Everything that crossed through the Void, every Dalek and every Cyberman, came back carrying traces of it, invisible contamination clinging to them like dust. Open the breach again and reverse the flow, and every single thing that has touched that nothingness gets dragged back into it, which is a lovely bit of thinking because it turns the trip that got them here into the thing that removes them. The catch is that the Doctor and Rose have to be there holding the clamps open, standing in the pull of a void that wants to take everything with it.

And here’s the thing that makes the ending land: Rose chooses this. She’d already been sent to safety in the parallel world we first saw in Rise of the Cybermen, with Jackie, Pete and Mickey, the family she’d been offered, alive and whole and waiting, and she came straight back. She’d rather stand in the path of the apocalypse beside the Doctor than live a safe life without him. Everything Rose Tyler has become since she took a stranger’s hand in a basement in Rose is in that decision. The shop girl who ran is now the woman who refuses to.

The sequence itself is superbly staged, the howling white of the breach and the two of them clinging on while the armies of two universes stream past them into oblivion. And then Rose’s lever slips out of alignment, and she has to let go to push it back.

Bad Wolf Bay

She holds, and then she doesn’t. Watching Rose lose her grip and start to slide toward the Void is one of the most sickening things this show has ever done, and the rescue that follows is somehow crueller than the death would have been. Pete Tyler blinks in out of nowhere, catches her and carries her back into the parallel world a heartbeat before the breach seals itself for ever. She’s saved by her father, or a version of him, which is a knife-twist all of its own after everything she went through to save the real one in Father’s Day, and the universe gives Rose her dad back and takes the Doctor away in the same second.

And that’s it. No clever reversal, no last-minute technobabble, the walls between worlds are closed for good and Rose Tyler is on the wrong side of them. The image of her hammering on a blank white wall, with the Doctor on the other side of it and his forehead pressed to the concrete, is the single most painful shot of the series.

The coda is what makes it more than a good finale. Rose follows the Doctor’s voice in a dream to Dårlig Ulv Stranden, Bad Wolf Bay, a bleak wind-scoured Norwegian beach where he can appear to her one last time as a flickering projection, burning up a star just to say goodbye. And yes, that name is doing deliberate work. “Bad Wolf” was the message scattered across all of time and space in Series 1, the two words Rose herself sent back through eternity to lead her home to the Doctor when she stared into the heart of the TARDIS in The Parting of the Ways. Back then it was a promise that brought them together. Here it’s the name on the signpost of the place where they’re torn apart for good, which is just cruel, and magnificent.

They’ve got two minutes. She asks if he’s alone, he says yes, she tells him she loves him. And the Doctor, this brilliant, brittle, endlessly talkative man, says “Rose Tyler, I—” and he’s gone, the transmission dying mid-sentence.

It’s an astonishingly brave piece of writing. Every lingering look and unspoken thing since the apple grass meadow in New Earth runs straight into a sentence he never gets to finish, and Tennant plays the aftermath alone in an empty TARDIS with a single tear and absolutely no dialogue at all. Sarah Jane warned him back in School Reunion that everything has its time and everything ends, and here it is, arriving exactly as promised and hurting exactly as much as she said it would.

What the Void Leaves Behind

Not everything goes into the Void, mind you. The Cult of Skaro blink out at the last second with an emergency temporal shift, four Daleks gone to who knows where and not a single answer offered about it, which is the one loose thread the finale leaves hanging while it gets on with breaking your heart.

What the Doctor’s left with is exactly what he’s been warned about all season. He’s lost the person he loves most, and his loneliness stops being a theme and turns into a fact. There’s no last kiss, no confession completed, no comfort, just a show trusting the silence, and it’s all the more shattering for it. Rose didn’t go out as a victim of the plot either, she picked the Doctor over safety and over family and over her own survival, and the tragedy is that she was right to and it still cost her everything.

And then, because this is Doctor Who, the Doctor turns around in the wreckage of his own heart and finds a woman in a full wedding dress standing in the TARDIS, glaring at him and demanding to know where she is. No explanation, no warning, roll credits. I laughed out loud through the tears and I have absolutely no idea what to make of it. What a season. What an ending. I need a lie down.

Rating: 5/5. Enormous, exhilarating, and finally heartbreaking. The best finale the revived series has produced, and the moment this era stopped being a fun adventure show and proved it could break you. I haven’t stopped thinking about that beach.