So that’s how it ends. Not in a battle, not saving a planet, not in any of the ways this Doctor would have chosen — but because an old man got stuck in a cupboard and knocked four times. “The End of Time, Part Two” is sprawling and self-indulgent and about twenty minutes longer than its plot can sustain, and it contains the single best decision this era ever made about its own hero. I’ve been waiting three prophecies for this. It did not disappoint.
The Time Lords Return
The cliffhanger from Part One pays off immediately, and the answer to the great outstanding question of the revived series turns out to be devastating.
The Time Lords are coming back. Rassilon leads them, played by Timothy Dalton at maximum contempt, and they are not the lost civilisation the Doctor has been grieving for five years. By the end of the war they had become something monstrous — and their plan, the Ultimate Sanction, is to rupture time itself, destroy all of creation, and ascend as beings of pure consciousness beyond the wreckage.
That’s why he did it. That’s the thing he’s been carrying since the very first episode: he didn’t just lose his people, he chose to burn them, because they had become worse than the Daleks and there was nobody else left to stop them. Five years of guilt reframed in about ninety seconds, and it recontextualises every quiet moment he’s had about Gallifrey since.
It also lands hard against The Waters of Mars. The Doctor spent that special deciding he was the last of the Time Lords and therefore the laws belonged to him — and here are the Time Lords, doing exactly that on a cosmic scale. Rassilon is the Time Lord Victorious with a few billion years of practice.
There’s a figure the special never explains, either — a Time Lady standing behind Rassilon who covers her face and weeps, who has been quietly appearing to Wilf throughout both halves, and who turns at the last moment to look directly at the Doctor. Nobody names her. Nobody accounts for her. She’s simply there, grieving, on the wrong side of the line, and the story lets her go without a word of explanation.
The Choice
The confrontation gives us the most loaded image the show has produced: the Doctor with a gun, turning it from Rassilon to the Master and back, unable to decide which of them to kill.
And then he shoots neither. He turns and fires at the white-point star — the diamond anchoring the link — and sends the whole lot of them back into the last day of the war. He wins by refusing the choice, which is exactly right for him.
The Master’s part in it is genuinely moving. Told that Rassilon planted the drumbeat in his head as a child, that his entire life of madness was somebody else’s engineering, he chooses his target and throws himself at Rassilon in a fury of stolen life-force, and goes back into the fire still screaming. He isn’t redeemed, exactly. He just finally gets to be angry at the right person.
Four Knocks
And then it’s over, and the Doctor is alive, and he laughs — and that’s when Wilfred Mott taps on the glass.
Four times.
Carmen told him on a London bus at the end of Planet of the Dead that he would knock four times. A soothsayer in The Fires of Pompeii and Ood Sigma in Planet of the Ood both told him his song was ending. Two years of dread, and the answer is an eighty-year-old man locked in a radiation booth, knocking politely because he doesn’t want to make a fuss.
It’s a beautiful, cruel piece of construction. The nuclear bolt is about to flood Wilf’s side of the chamber. The Doctor can take his place, and doing so will kill him.
And the Doctor’s reaction is the finest thing in the special: he refuses. Not silently, not nobly — he rages. He tells Wilf that he could do so much more, that it isn’t fair, that he’s lived a life that deserves better than dying for one old man in a box. It is petty and furious and appallingly human, and it is the most honest this character has ever been allowed to be. He’s spent five years being told he’s a legend, and faced with the bill he behaves exactly like a frightened person.
Then he says the only thing he can say — that Wilf would have done it for him — and he opens the door.
The Long Goodbye
What follows is a victory lap, and its length is the main thing people will argue about. It’s twenty minutes of a dying man going round saying goodbye to everyone he ever loved, none of whom know that’s what’s happening.
He saves Martha and Mickey. He saves Sarah Jane’s son and can’t bring himself to speak to her. He finds Jack a date in a bar. He meets a descendant of Joan Redfern and asks, carefully, whether she was happy — still carrying The Family of Blood after all this time.
He goes to Donna’s wedding, and stands in the cold outside because she can never see him, and gives her a wedding present she’ll never understand: a lottery ticket bought with money borrowed from her late father. She saved every universe there is and all he can give her is a bit of luck she can’t be told about. It’s the saddest thing in the episode, and it’s a direct payoff to the erasure at the end of Journey’s End.
And last, a council estate on New Year’s Day 2005 — and Rose Tyler, months before she ever meets him, walking home. He can barely stand. He tells her he bets she’s going to have a really great year. She has no idea who he is.
Self-indulgent? Certainly. Earned? Completely.
I Don’t Want to Go
Ood Sigma sings him to his rest, which finally makes sense of a warning delivered two years earlier on a snowfield. He drags himself into the TARDIS alone, and the last thing the Tenth Doctor ever says is not a speech about the universe or a joke or a piece of wisdom.
It’s “I don’t want to go.”
And then he burns, the console room tears itself apart, and a young man with a mop of hair sits up laughing in the wreckage.
That transition is brutally well judged. There’s no dignity anywhere in it — the console detonates, fire runs along the walls, the whole ship starts coming apart around him — and the new man’s very first reaction is undisguised delight while the room burns down. A death and a birth crashing into one another inside the same shot.
What The End of Time Part Two Leaves Us With
Overlong, overwrought, and completely devastating. Here’s what it plants:
- Why he ended the war. The Time Lords became monsters and he burned them to save everything else. Five years of grief given a reason.
- Four knocks, answered. The most ominous prophecy in the run resolves as an old man tapping on glass. Cruel, mundane, perfect.
- A hero who doesn’t want to die. His rage at the unfairness of it is the bravest writing choice in the whole era. He goes anyway, and it means more because he didn’t want to.
- The Master’s last act. Not redemption — just a man finally aiming his fury at whoever actually deserved it.
- A goodbye at full length. Twenty minutes of farewells that shouldn’t work and mostly do, ending on a woman who hasn’t met him yet.
Rating: 4.5/5 — Baggy, indulgent and about three endings too long, and I don’t care in the slightest. The knock, the rage and the last line are as good as this show has ever been.
He was told his song was ending three times and ran from it every time. In the end it wasn’t the Master, or Rassilon, or the war. It was Wilfred Mott, knocking four times because he was too polite to shout. New face next time.
