Harold Saxon

So that’s what all those name-drops were for. The Sound of Drums picks up from the locked door at the end of the universe in Utopia, with the Doctor fixing up Jack’s broken vortex manipulator just in time to get the three of them out, and dumps them in an alleyway in present-day London. Which is where it turns out that Britain has just elected his oldest enemy as Prime Minister. It’s fast, funny, genuinely nasty in places, and it sets off about six months of quiet setup in the space of forty-five minutes. I loved it. And John Simm is having the time of his life.

There’s something really satisfying about how quickly it gets going, too. No slow build, no mystery about who the villain is this week, because we all saw him steal the TARDIS at the end of Utopia and the only question is what he’s done with it. The Doctor, Martha and Jack spend the first half of the episode on the run in their own country, hiding in Martha’s flat, watching the telly and trying to work out how a man nobody had heard of eighteen months ago ended up in Downing Street. It’s a bit of a thriller, a bit of a chase, with Jack reading out Saxon’s CV and a parade of celebrities on the laptop telling everyone to vote for him. Meanwhile Martha’s ringing round her family in a panic, trying to warn them before Saxon’s people get there, and her brother’s off in Brighton with no idea anything’s wrong.

Harold Saxon

The Master has had eighteen months in the twenty-first century and he’s used them well, a career, a party, a landslide and a wife. He’s Harold Saxon, the fresh-faced people’s Prime Minister, and Simm plays him as an absolute lunatic, jittery and gleeful, throwing his briefing papers in the air, singing along to the radio while he does something appalling. It’s a bold contrast with the cold, grand Master the Doctor keeps describing, and I think it works precisely because it’s so undignified. This isn’t a dark mirror of the Doctor, it’s a clever child who’s been handed a country and a lot of toys. It feels like a comment on Tennant’s Doctor as well, all the same energy and wit and eccentricity turned to a worse purpose. Same speed, same jokes, no conscience whatsoever.

Lucy Saxon is a genuinely unsettling addition to all this. She isn’t hypnotised, or at least not entirely, and she stands at his shoulder telling him how proud she is while a journalist who knows too much is killed in the next room, and her only worry afterwards is who else might know. The show never quite explains what he’s done to her, or what she thinks she’s getting out of the arrangement. And that’s far more disturbing than a tidy mind-control explanation would’ve been, because of everyone on screen she seems to be the one who chose this with her eyes open. By the end, on the Valiant, she’s looking very unhappy with all of it, and I’d love to know what’s going on in her head.

Vote Saxon

The mechanics of how he got there are the best idea in the episode. The Archangel Network, fifteen satellites and a mobile phone in every pocket in Britain, has been quietly broadcasting a low-level signal for months. Not commands, just a rhythm, a suggestion, a nudge. Vote Saxon, believe in me, over and over, until a man nobody could quite remember voting for was running the country, and the same signal hid him from the Doctor the whole time. As satire it’s about as subtle as a brick, and it’s all the more effective for it.

It also explains something the season’s been dangling since The Runaway Bride, where the name Saxon first turned up giving the order to fire on the Racnoss ship over the Thames, and again in The Lazarus Experiment, where it turns out Tish getting that job wasn’t a coincidence and his people were already briefing Martha’s mother against the Doctor. None of it was an accident, it was a campaign. Martha’s family pay for it first. Francine spent weeks being fed poison about the Doctor, and was sitting in her own front room with strangers listening in on her daughter’s phone calls back in 42.

Here she finally understands exactly what she’s been helping, and it’s far too late. She tries to lure Martha home for him, Clive shouts at her to run, and Martha has to watch from across the street while her mum and dad get bundled into a car. Watching Francine realise she handed her own family to this man is the cruellest beat in the episode. The Cabinet Room scene, where the Master puts on a gas mask and gasses his entire government while chatting away over the bodies, is where it stops being funny. Simm plays the whole thing as a joke he’s telling himself, and it’s genuinely horrible.

The boy who looked into the vortex

The best material, though, is the Doctor explaining him. At eight years old every Time Lord child was taken to stand in front of the Untempered Schism, a gap in reality where you can see the raw time vortex, unfiltered. Some were inspired, some ran away, and some went mad. The Doctor admits he was one of the ones who ran, and never stopped. And some say that’s when it all began for the Master, the drumming too, four beats, endlessly, the sound of a war drum nobody else can hear.

It’s a superb bit of Time Lord history, and it changes how I see the villain completely. He isn’t evil because the plot needs him to be, he’s someone who’s been in unbearable pain since he was a child, a wound inflicted by his own people, and it’s the most sympathetic this show has ever let this character be. The Doctor’s account of him is full of something uncomfortably close to grief, because these two grew up together and there’s nobody else left who remembers any of it. Tennant plays those scenes very quietly, and it’s the best thing he does all episode. A man trying to explain a childhood friend to people who can only see a monster, and half aware that they’re right.

When Jack offers to just walk up behind the Master and break his neck, the Doctor says flatly that he’s not there to kill him, he’s there to save him. You believe it, and it makes the whole confrontation sadder than it has any right to be. It’s a very Doctor thing to say about a man who’s just gassed a room full of people. He even manages a dig that Jack’s plan sounds like Torchwood, which is about the last laugh anyone gets for a while.

The Valiant

The last act is a proper escalation. The Master announces first contact with the Toclafane and stages the meeting aboard the Valiant, a huge flying aircraft carrier, with the American President there to take charge. The Doctor, Martha and Jack sneak aboard using TARDIS keys rigged as perception filters, which is a lovely gadget. Then it all goes wrong at once. The Master says two words and a sphere blasts the President to pieces, and then he pulls out his laser screwdriver, built with the genetic tech from Professor Lazarus’s machine, and ages the Doctor a hundred years in seconds into a frail old man. A neat, mean bit of continuity, the season’s throwaway monster-of-the-week turns out to have supplied the weapon.

Martha’s family are dragged in with their wrists tied, Jack gets killed again (not for long), and then the sky opens and six billion Toclafane pour down onto the Earth, laughing, to wipe out a tenth of the population while the Master dances to pop music on the bridge. The Toclafane are a horrible idea done beautifully, giggling chrome balls in the piping voices of delighted children, and pairing that sound with mass murder is exactly the kind of wrongness this show has done better than anybody since the gas mask kid in The Empty Child. It isn’t staged as an invasion. It’s staged as a party, which is exactly why it turns the stomach. Martha teleports out with Jack’s vortex manipulator, the only one of them left free, on a conquered planet with everyone she loves in the Master’s hands.

Rating: 4.5/5. I loved this, propulsive, witty and genuinely upsetting when it wants to be, with a villain performance that reinvents the role. It’s chaotic in places and leans hard on spectacle, but as the middle act of a finale it does everything it needs to and then some. And it’s Simm’s performance I keep coming back to, whatever else happens in it.