Series 3 ends with a finale that is one part triumph, one part misfire, and one part genuinely great character writing — and the great character writing wins. “Last of the Time Lords” picks up a full year after The Sound of Drums left the Master ruling a conquered planet, and it spends most of its running time in a genuinely bleak place before fumbling its own resolution and then recovering with two of the best scenes of the season. A frustrating, fascinating, ultimately moving hour.
The Year That Never Was
The jump is brutal and brilliantly done. A year has passed. The Master has ruled unopposed. A tenth of humanity is dead, the survivors are enslaved building a war fleet in shipyards on every continent, and the planet is a labour camp. The Doctor, aged past the point of anything recognisable, is kept in a birdcage as a pet. Jack is chained in the engine room, killed and revived over and over for sport. Martha’s family serve their captor’s meals aboard the Valiant.
It’s genuinely nasty stuff for teatime television, and the show commits to it. The Master’s rule isn’t a cartoon dictatorship; it’s petty, personal, and cruel in ways designed to humiliate specific people. Simm keeps the manic energy but there’s real sadism underneath it now, and the sight of the Doctor reduced to a wizened thing in a cage is hard to shake.
Martha Jones Walked the Earth
And then there’s Martha, who has spent that year on foot.
This is the payoff of everything the season built. She walked out of the Valiant with a broken teleport and no plan, and she has spent twelve months crossing a conquered world alone — through camps and ruins and occupied cities, hunted the entire time — telling everyone she meets about the Doctor. She has become a legend. People know her name. Freema Agyeman plays the returning Martha as harder, quieter and entirely without the eager brightness she had when she was a medical student answering a distress call in Smith and Jones. The year has cost her, and it shows. It isn’t the first time this season has asked her to endure something alone and unthanked — she spent three months as a maid in 1913, swallowing abuse and guarding a fob watch, in Human Nature — but twelve months walking across an occupied planet with a price on her head is an entirely different order of thing. She came through it, and she came back for everyone else.
It’s a magnificent thing for a companion to have done, and the episode is right to treat it as the spine of the whole story. Whatever else this finale gets wrong, it understands that Martha Jones saved the world by walking across it.
Who the Toclafane Really Are
The reveal is the cruellest idea the show has had in years, and it retroactively guts an episode I loved.
The Toclafane are humanity. Specifically, they’re the people from Utopia — the last few thousand survivors at the end of the universe, who boarded that rocket and travelled to the refuge they’d been promised, and found nothing there at all. No Utopia. Just cold and dark and the end of everything. So they cannibalised themselves down into these giggling chrome spheres to survive, and the Master brought them back through his paradox machine to slaughter their own ancestors.
That’s horrifying on every level. The hopeful, desperate people we watched queue for that rocket are the childlike voices carving up the Earth, and the last thing they ever did as human beings was give up. It also makes the Master’s plan genuinely obscene rather than merely villainous: he showed them the future, let them see there was nothing in it, and weaponised their despair.
The Word, and the Problem
Which brings us to the resolution, and I’ll be honest — it doesn’t work.
Martha’s gun turns out to be a decoy. Her real weapon is the Archangel Network: for a year she has been telling every person on Earth to think one word at one precise moment, and when six billion people simultaneously think Doctor, the psychic energy pours into him, undoes the ageing, and restores him. He rises into the air, glowing, arms outstretched, forgiving his enemy from mid-air.
The idea underneath is sound and rather lovely — the Master’s own instrument of control turned into an instrument of faith, and Martha’s year of talking to people being literally what saves everyone. But the execution tips over into something faintly ridiculous. A beatific floating Doctor haloed in golden light asks the audience to accept an awful lot on very little, and after an hour of grounded, ugly, specific misery it lands like a different programme entirely. It’s the one genuine misstep in the finale, and it’s a big one.
Forgiveness, and a Pyre
And then the episode recovers, twice.
First: Jack destroys the paradox machine, time snaps back, and the year unhappens for everyone except the handful of people who were aboard the Valiant. Only they remember. That’s a haunting idea in itself — an entire planet’s worst year erased from every memory but a dozen.
Second, and far better: the Master’s death. Cornered and beaten, he is shot by Lucy, the wife who stood beside him through all of it. And he refuses to regenerate. He could survive — he simply won’t, because surviving means the Doctor keeps him, and he would rather die than be forgiven. The Doctor, who has spent two episodes saying he only wanted his oldest friend back, holds him while he goes, and then sits alone on a burning beach beside the pyre. Tennant plays it beautifully. For all the shouting, the last of the Time Lords is now genuinely the last, and he chose none of it.
There’s an odd final beat, too: a hand reaching into the ashes to lift a ring out of the fire. Nobody explains it. I’ve no idea what to make of it, and it’s been bothering me ever since.
Martha Leaves
The best scene is saved for last. Martha packs her bag and gets out.
Not in tragedy, not torn away like Rose — she simply looks at the situation clearly and decides she’s had enough of loving a man who won’t love her back. She tells him about a friend who spent years waiting for someone who never noticed, and then says plainly that she’s not doing it any more. She has a family to put back together and a life to get on with. And she walks out of the TARDIS on her own two feet, on her own terms, promising she’ll see him again.
After a season of being second-best to a ghost, that’s a superb exit — the healthiest, most adult departure a companion has been given, and completely in character for the woman who walked the Earth.
What Last of the Time Lords Leaves Us With
A flawed finale with a great heart. Here’s what it plants:
- Martha’s year. The single most impressive thing any companion has done, and the show gives it the weight it deserves.
- Utopia’s terrible answer. There was no refuge. Humanity’s last act was to eat itself, and the Master turned that despair into a weapon.
- A Master who won’t be saved. Refusing to regenerate rather than accept forgiveness is the most character-revealing choice the show could have made for him.
- The Doctor, alone again. He wanted his friend back more than he wanted to win, and he lost anyway.
- An exit on her own terms. Martha chooses herself, which is a genuinely rare and welcome thing for this show to allow.
Rating: 3.5/5 — The floating-Doctor resolution badly undercuts an otherwise bleak and gripping finale, but the year-that-never-was, the Toclafane reveal, the Master’s death and Martha’s departure are all excellent. Series 3 has been a strong run, and it ends on more highs than lows.
A year erased, a friend burned on a beach, and a woman who walked across the world and then walked away. And then — because this show cannot help itself — a ship’s prow smashes through the TARDIS wall with the name Titanic on it, and that’s where we’re left. Of course it is.