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Ood Sigma

Doctor Who: The End of Time promotional poster featuring the Tenth Doctor and ensemble cast against a cosmic background

The End of Time Part Two: Rassilon, Wilf and the Four Knocks

by Hutch Morzaria January 11, 2010

written by Hutch Morzaria

This review covers The End of Time Part Two, the conclusion of David Tennant’s run as the Tenth Doctor. It follows the return of the Time Lords under Rassilon, the Master’s last stand, the answer to the four knocks prophecy and the long run of farewells before the regeneration.

The reviewer finds the episode baggy, indulgent and about three endings too long, but moved by the Doctor’s refusal to accept his fate and by Wilfred Mott’s quiet part in it. It lands at 4.5/5.

So that’s how it ends. Not in a battle, not saving a planet, not in any of the ways this Doctor would have picked, 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 also holds the single best decision this era ever made about its own hero. I’ve been waiting two years of prophecies for this, and it didn’t disappoint, even while I was rolling my eyes at the baggy bits. Plenty of Doctor Who fans were arguing it out online straight away, and I can see both sides of that fight.

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 aren’t the lost civilisation the Doctor has been grieving for five years. By the end of the war they’d 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 above 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’d 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 changes every quiet moment he’s had about Gallifrey since. It also lands hard against The Waters of Mars, where he decided he was the last of the Time Lords and the laws were therefore his to bend. Here are the Time Lords doing exactly that on a cosmic scale, and Rassilon is basically the Time Lord Victorious with a few billion years of practice.

Then the confrontation gives us the most loaded image the show has produced, the Doctor with a gun, swinging it from Rassilon to the Master and back, unable to decide which of them to kill. And he shoots neither. He 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, so he wins by refusing the choice, which is exactly right for him. The Master’s part is genuinely moving too. Told that Rassilon planted the drumbeat in his head as a child, that his whole life of madness was somebody else’s engineering, he throws himself at Rassilon in a fury and goes back into the fire still screaming. After The Sound of Drums I never expected to feel anything for him, and he isn’t redeemed exactly, he just finally gets to be angry at the right person.

There’s a figure the special never explains, a Time Lady standing behind Rassilon who covers her face and weeps, who’s been quietly appearing to Wilf throughout both halves and who turns at the last moment to look straight at the Doctor. Nobody names her and nobody accounts for her. She’s just there, grieving, on the wrong side of the line.

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 the Doctor on a London bus at the end of Planet of the Dead that he would knock four times, and Ood Sigma told him back in Planet of the Ood that his song was ending. Two years of dread, and the answer is an 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, and the only way out is for the Doctor to take his place, which will kill him.

And the Doctor’s reaction is the finest thing in the special, because he refuses. Not silently, not nobly, he rages. He tells Wilf he could do so much more, that it isn’t fair, that a life like his deserves better than ending for one old man in a box. It’s petty and furious and appallingly human, and it’s 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 would.

Bernard Cribbins deserves a lot of the credit here. Wilf spends the whole episode being the one person who sees the Doctor clearly, and he never asks for anything. Even stuck in that booth he’s more worried about the Doctor than about himself, and that’s why the refusal hurts so much when it comes. Then the Doctor says the only thing he can say, that Wilf would have done it for him, and he opens the door. I’d happily have watched the entire hour as a two-hander between those two and skipped half the plot machinery around it.

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.

A man in a black hoodie spreads his arms wide, mouth open in an exhilarated expression, bathed in green light in a dimly lit room, from Doctor Who: The End of Time. — The Doctor in The End of Time

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. Then he goes to Donna’s wedding and stands in the cold outside because she can never see him, and gives her a present she’ll never understand, a winning lottery ticket. 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 pays off the erasure at the end of Journey’s End better than anything in that finale did.

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, and she has no idea who he is. Self-indulgent? Certainly. Earned? Completely, and I’d take it over a tidy ending that skipped her. The show knows it’s asking for patience here, and it spends that patience on people we actually care about.

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 isn’t 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 and fire runs along the walls and 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, and I’ll admit I got a lump in my throat and a grin at the same time, which I wouldn’t have thought possible.

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.

January 11, 2010 3 comments

A man in a black hoodie spreads his arms wide, mouth open in an exhilarated expression, bathed in green light in a dimly lit room

The End of Time, Part One: Everything I Am Dies

by Hutch Morzaria January 3, 2010

written by Hutch Morzaria

“The End of Time, Part One” is the first half of David Tennant’s final story as the Tenth Doctor, in which the Master is resurrected wrong, burning through his own life force, and the Ood warn the Doctor that something far worse is coming. Wilfred Mott becomes the Doctor’s companion, and the Master uses an alien device called the Immortality Gate to turn every human on Earth into a copy of himself.

The review singles out a café scene between the Doctor and Wilf as the finest of the era and enjoys the payoff of the Master’s drumbeat, while finding the “Master Race” plot tonally all over the place. It rates the episode 4 out of 5.

Everything this era has been building towards starts arriving here. “The End of Time, Part One” is a strange, lurching, tonally chaotic hour that swings from a resurrection ritual in a prison yard to a pensioner surveillance operation to six billion people turning into the same man. Somewhere in the middle of it there’s a two-hander in a café that is, I think, the finest scene David Tennant has ever been given. It’s the first half of a two-part Christmas send-off for the Tenth Doctor, and it brings back the Master and, much more surprisingly, the Time Lords. I didn’t see that last part coming at all.

The Ood are dreaming

It opens where the warnings have been pointing. The Ood summon him, Ood Sigma, who told him his song was ending in Planet of the Ood and was standing silently in a suburban street the last time we saw him, and the Doctor arrives having spent months running the other way. The Ood have evolved too fast and they’re dreaming, and time is bleeding. They show him images of a man he watched die in his arms, and of something worse behind him. Whatever’s coming has already started, and for once the Doctor is late.

The Master comes back through a genuinely nasty piece of cult business, a group of disciples, a stolen biometric imprint and a ritual that his widow Lucy sabotages at the critical moment. He died refusing to regenerate at the end of Last of the Time Lords, and he returns wrong: burning through life energy, his skull flickering visible beneath the skin, ravenous to the point of eating out of bins. John Simm plays him as something closer to a starving animal than the giggling politician of The Sound of Drums, and it mostly works. I loved that he can use his life force as a weapon, and even as a way of throwing himself across the landscape, and the skull effect is brilliant. The super-powered leaping over buildings does tip into silliness, but what lands is the desperation, because this Master is dying and he knows it.

Wilfred Mott and the Doctor in The End of Time

The drumming in his head, the four-beat rhythm he’s complained about since he first arrived, turns out not to be madness at all. It’s a signal, and someone put it there. I love it when a series is able to tie a single plot device back to something so much larger, and I have to give them credit for clearly mapping it out in advance. It turns a character quirk from years ago into the key to the whole story. That’s the kind of long game this show doesn’t always play, and it’s very satisfying when it does.

The café

Donna, meanwhile, is engaged. She’s marrying a decent, ordinary man called Shaun, she’s happy in the small way she was always allowed to be, and she hasn’t the faintest idea that she once saved every universe there is. The Doctor watches her from across a street and doesn’t go over. Sylvia and Wilf carry the secret between them like a shared wound, and Wilf’s quiet fury about it, that this extraordinary woman has been made small again and isn’t even allowed to know why, is the angriest the show has ever been about one of its own endings. Wilf has also assembled a squad of pensioners to comb London for the Doctor, which is exactly as funny as it sounds.

When he finally corners him, the two of them sit down in a greasy spoon and talk, and the episode stops dead for ten minutes to do the best thing in it. The Doctor tells him what regeneration actually means, not the cheerful version but the truth: that some new man goes sauntering away wearing his face and his memories, and as far as he’s concerned, that’s dying. Tennant plays it with tears running down his face and no self-pity at all, and Bernard Cribbins simply listens, an old soldier who’s been near enough death not to argue with anyone about it. What makes it land is that Wilf doesn’t try to fix it. He takes it seriously, offers him a service revolver and is refused, and there’s no music under any of it because it doesn’t need any.

It reframes the whole run of specials. The arrogance in The Waters of Mars, the refusal to take anyone with him, the running: it’s all a man who’s been told three times that his song is ending and can’t bear it. He isn’t being noble. He’s terrified, and the café is the first time he admits it out loud. It makes everything that came before it hurt a little more in hindsight, and it’s why I’d put this scene above anything else in his time on the show.

The Master race

The plot proper is the maddest thing the show has attempted. A wealthy man named Naismith has acquired an alien medical device called the Immortality Gate and hires the Master to repair it, on the reasonable assumption that a genius in chains is still a genius. The Gate rewrites a template across an entire species at once, so the Master steps into it and broadcasts himself. Every human on Earth, every commuter, newsreader and member of the cabinet, becomes John Simm, grinning, in their own clothes. It’s audacious and very funny for about ninety seconds, but I have to say it felt very Matrix to me, like watching Agent Smith copy himself into everyone, and the novelty wears off fast.

Two people are unaffected. Wilf, because he happened to be inside a shielded booth, and Donna Noble, because the mind she isn’t allowed to remember is still in there protecting her, the meta-crisis from Journey’s End doing exactly what the Doctor said it would if anyone disturbed it. It’s a lovely payoff, and a worrying one. It’s also the moment the story reminds you what it cost Donna to be forgotten. Of all the threads in this episode, that’s the one I cared about most.

Rassilon

And then the cliffhanger, which is enormous. We cut away from Earth entirely, to the last day of the Time War and a chamber of robed figures in enormous collars. The Time Lords aren’t gone. Rassilon and the High Council have worked out a way back, and the drumbeat in the Master’s head, planted across his whole life, is the link they mean to use. Being the last of the Time Lords has shaped everything about this Doctor, and the thought of them returning genuinely stopped me in my tracks.

The narration is a nice touch as well. The whole episode is framed by an unseen voice warning that this is the day the human race ends, and the reveal that it belongs to the Lord President, with Timothy Dalton giving it everything, is a great surprise. It makes the opening look completely different in hindsight. It’s the kind of trick this show does brilliantly when it bothers.

The show is careful about how it plays it, too. A lesser version would have staged the Time Lords’ return as salvation, the Doctor’s lost people coming home at last and ending his loneliness. Instead the reveal is shot like the approach of something monstrous, all shadow and scale and dread, and the only clue we get as to why is the look on his face when he understands what he’s looking at. Whatever he did at the end of that war, he did it for a reason. It’s the most frightening cliffhanger the show has managed, precisely because the Doctor’s reaction is horror rather than joy.

Rating: 4/5. Baggy and frequently ridiculous, with a middle act that’s more concept than story and a Master Race that felt a bit too Matrix for me. But the café scene is extraordinary, the drumbeat payoff is brilliant, and the dread is genuine all the way to the end. It earns its cliffhanger completely.

January 3, 2010 1 comment

A man in an orange spacesuit stands stoically in a sci-fi interior as flames burn in the foreground

Doctor Who Television

The Waters of Mars: Bowie Base One and the Flood

by Hutch Morzaria November 24, 2009

written by Hutch Morzaria

“The Waters of Mars” is the 2009 special in which the Tenth Doctor arrives at Bowie Base One, humanity’s first colony on Mars, on the day history records it being destroyed with all hands. A water-borne intelligence called the Flood begins taking over the crew, and the Doctor must decide whether to walk away from a fixed point in time or break it.

The review calls it the best of the specials, praising the Flood as a genuinely frightening monster, Lindsay Duncan as Adelaide Brooke and David Tennant’s turn as the “Time Lord Victorious”, while noting a few effects and logic niggles. It rates the episode 5 out of 5.

This is the one. After a year of specials that mostly filled the time pleasantly, “The Waters of Mars” arrives and does something the show has been circling for four years: it lets the Doctor lose. Not lose a fight, but lose himself. Five minutes in there were already two people dead, and I remember thinking it looked like one of the scariest episodes of the new series, with some of the scariest villains. It’s a horror story with a genuinely frightening monster, and then it becomes something much worse than a horror story. Its last fifteen minutes are among the most disturbing this programme has ever broadcast.

Bowie Base One

Mars, 21 November 2059. The Doctor steps out of the TARDIS in a spacesuit, delighted, and before anything else happens he’s picked up by Gadget, the base’s little wheeled maintenance robot, and trundled about by a machine with a voice like a toy. It gets a joke out of him about having known a much better robot dog, which is as close to K-9 as the show is going to say out loud, and it’s the last time anybody in this story has any fun. Then he reads a plaque and stops dead, because he knows exactly where he is and, more importantly, when. This is Bowie Base One, humanity’s first colony on another world, and today is the day it’s destroyed in a nuclear explosion with all hands.

Captain Adelaide Brooke and her crew die here, and the manner of their deaths becomes the story that sends Adelaide’s granddaughter to the stars and launches the whole human expansion outward. It’s one of the fixed points, the events that can’t be altered without unravelling everything downstream. The Doctor knows the names, and he recites them to a crew of living people standing in front of him. It’s the same rule he explained to Donna in the doomed streets of The Fires of Pompeii, but back then he had somebody beside him arguing, someone who forced him to save at least one family. Here, nobody argues, and that absence drives the whole episode. The nearest he gets to comfort is telling them nobody will ever forget them, which is true, and also the most useless thing you could say to someone you’ve just told is going to die today.

Lindsay Duncan is superb as Adelaide: hard, decent, exhausted and utterly unsentimental. She has a childhood memory that explains her, because during the theft of the Earth in The Stolen Earth she watched a Dalek look straight at her through a window and choose not to kill her. She’s spent her whole life treating that as an obligation. It’s a lovely, unexpected use of that story, and it makes her much more than a doomed name on a plaque. By the time she and the Doctor are squaring up, you believe she’s the only person on Mars who could stand up to him.

The Flood

The monster is one of the best the show has produced. Something ancient has been frozen in the Martian ice cap, and the base’s water filtration system has just brought it inside. The Flood is a viral intelligence that lives in water, and infection takes a single drop. The infected crack across the face, their eyes go white and water pours endlessly from their mouths, not spraying, just flowing, constantly and silently. They move slowly because they don’t need to hurry, and the design is so effective that the first proper look at one is genuinely alarming.

A Flood victim advances through the base corridors, water streaming from their face and mouth, eyes blank and white.

What makes it work as horror is the logic. This is a base full of people surrounded by the one substance they can’t live without and can’t avoid, in a place where a single leak is fatal, and the episode wrings real dread out of drips, condensation and the sound of running taps. The crew go one at a time, and each loss counts, a woman sealed in a room with a leak she can hear starting, a man watching the skin of his own hand begin to crack. Nobody gets a heroic last stand. They just get wet, and then they aren’t themselves any more. It’s the scariest the show has been in years.

I do have a few niggles, and they only bother me because the rest is so good. The water shooting out of the infected crew’s hands looks really fake, less like an alien virus and more like a hose up somebody’s sleeve. When the converted crew climb out onto the Martian surface, it’s fine that they can breathe water, but on a planet that cold, surely it would freeze? And when Gadget goes zooming across the landscape to fetch the TARDIS at the end, I couldn’t help wondering what happened to all the hills the Doctor had to climb over to reach the base in the first place. None of it spoils the episode for me. It’s just the sort of thing I shout at the telly.

The Time Lord Victorious

For a long stretch, the Doctor tries to leave. He knows what’s coming, he knows he mustn’t interfere, and so he starts walking back to the TARDIS while people he’s just met die behind him. David Tennant plays it as physical pain, a man forcing himself down a corridor, flinching at every scream and telling himself the rules exist for a reason. What breaks him is the shuttle. Adelaide gets three of her people aboard, one of them is already infected, and it goes up while everyone watches, and that’s the moment the deaths stop being a fact he’s read about and become something happening in front of him. He gets as far as the door, stops, turns around and goes back, and it plays not as heroism but as something snapping.

What follows is the most frightening thing Tennant has ever played. The Doctor decides that the laws of time were made by the Time Lords, the Time Lords are gone, and so the laws belong to him now. He tears through the base, saves Adelaide, Yuri and Mia, and lands the TARDIS in a snowy street on Earth, throwing the doors open like a conjuror. Then he says it out loud: not the last of the Time Lords but the winner, the Time Lord Victorious. It’s exhilarating for about ten seconds and then deeply horrifying, because we’ve watched it coming, from Davros telling him at the end of Journey’s End that he turns people into weapons, to four specials of him refusing anyone who might tell him to stop. The worst part is that he isn’t wrong about the facts, because there really is nobody left to stop him except himself.

Adelaide’s answer

Then Adelaide, the only person in the episode with a steady moral compass, looks at him and is appalled. She doesn’t thank him. She tells him no one should have that much power, and then she walks into her house and shoots herself, restoring the fixed point with her own hand so that her granddaughter still looks up at the stars. It’s a shocking, brutal piece of writing, and it lands like a slap, with the arrogance draining out of him in real time. Then Ood Sigma appears at the end of the street, the Ood who told him in Planet of the Ood that his song was ending, and the Cloister Bell tolls. With the four knocks from Planet of the Dead still hanging over him, the Doctor runs for the TARDIS like a frightened man.

Rating: 5/5. Frightening, morally serious and genuinely shocking, with a monster I loved and a central performance that turns the hero into the villain without ever losing the thread. It doesn’t move the bigger story on much beyond the Ood and those four knocks, and the water effects wobble, but I don’t care. Easily the best of the specials, and one of the finest hours the revived series has produced.

November 24, 2009 5 comments

Doctor Who Television

Planet of the Ood: The Brain They Cut Out

by Hutch Morzaria April 28, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

Planet of the Ood is the third episode of the fourth series of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor and Donna land on the Ood Sphere in the year 4126 and find out why the gentle, servile Ood have always been so willing to serve. The piece covers the sales-conference setting, the hindbrain reveal, the Ood Brain and the red-eye outbreaks, and the ominous line Ood Sigma leaves the Doctor with.

It lands on a blunt, angry anti-slavery story that works because it treats the trade as ordinary business, with Catherine Tate’s Donna carrying most of the emotional weight. The verdict is 4/5: not the most elegant script of the season and the villains are broad, but the central idea is superb.

Two years ago, in a cramped base orbiting a black hole, the Doctor met a species of soft-spoken servants who told him they had nothing else in life, and he pulled a face and let it go. “Planet of the Ood” is the episode that goes back and picks that thread up, and the answer it finds is genuinely horrible. It’s Doctor Who doing an angry, unsubtle, thoroughly deserved anti-slavery story, and so far it’s the best thing the season has done with Donna.

The Sales Conference

The TARDIS lands on the Ood Sphere in the year 4126, in the snow, outside a facility belonging to Ood Operations, a human company that breeds, processes and sells Ood across the three galaxies. There’s a sales conference on. There are lanyards. There’s a marketing executive with a clipboard cheerfully explaining the product range, and a catalogue of translator-ball voices at different price points.

That’s the smartest choice the episode makes. The horror isn’t gothic or exotic, it’s procurement. Bulk orders, quarterly targets, a friendly rep called Solana walking buyers round the showroom, slavery rendered as an unremarkable line of business staffed by people who’ve just never thought about it very hard. Nobody in that building thinks of themselves as a monster, which is exactly why it’s so uncomfortable to sit through.

Donna is appalled, and her being appalled is the spine of the hour. After Partners in Crime and a very shouty return to the TARDIS I wasn’t sure how much of her was the loud version and how much was the person underneath, and this is where the person underneath turns up. She asks the obvious questions, why do they serve, why does nobody mind, what happens to the ones who stop being useful, and she refuses to be soothed by the answers. Then the Doctor turns it on her with the sharpest line in the episode: who does she think made the clothes she’s wearing?

It’s a cheap shot in one sense and completely fair in another, and the episode is brave enough to leave it sitting there. Donna doesn’t have a comeback. Neither do I. It’s a rare occasion when this show puts a properly uncomfortable idea in front of a family audience on a Saturday evening and then declines to tidy it away before the credits, and I’d like to see a lot more of that. And it’s a fair bit sharper than the “aliens are people too” lecture I was half expecting from the setup, mainly because the Doctor doesn’t get to be the good guy in that exchange.

The Doctor drifts around the showroom for a good while before he says anything, and I liked that. He and Donna pass themselves off as visitors, and the comedy of two people nodding politely at a product catalogue they find sickening does a lot of the early work for the script. You feel the episode holding its temper, waiting, which makes the moment it stops being polite that much more effective. It’s a slow-burn opening for a season that’s mostly been in a hurry, and it gives the story room to breathe before it gets nasty.

The Brain in Their Hands

Then the reveal, and it changes everything we saw back in The Impossible Planet.

The Ood aren’t a naturally servile species. They’re born with a secondary hindbrain that they carry in their hands, a soft globe of tissue held out and offered, the organ that connects them telepathically to one another. It’s the most defenceless thing imaginable, a creature that walks around holding its own brain in its palms as an act of trust. And Ood Operations cuts it off. Every single one. They amputate the hindbrain and bolt on a translator sphere, and what’s left is docile, obedient and marketable.

It lands like a punch precisely because we’ve spent two years mildly uncomfortable about the Ood without ever asking why. The polite servants who said they had nothing else in life had been surgically deprived of everything else in life. The Doctor’s little flicker of unease back then turns out to have been the right instinct, badly under-acted upon, and the guilt is written all over him here, particularly given how many Ood he watched die in The Satan Pit without ever asking what had been done to them. A sequel that goes back and makes the original more disturbing is rare, and this one does it without a single flashback.

Donna’s reaction to the hindbrain is the best work Catherine Tate has done so far. She asks to be shown one, then she can’t look at it, then she makes herself look anyway. It isn’t played as shrieking, it’s a woman deliberately forcing herself to understand something and being changed by it. It’s also a neat flip on the usual companion beat, because she isn’t frightened of the alien in front of her, she’s frightened of what people like her did to it. The Doctor, for once, hasn’t got a comforting speech ready.

The Song

Underneath the facility is the rest of the answer, the Ood Brain, an enormous shared telepathic organ in a pit at the heart of the world that links the entire species into one consciousness. Ood Operations has kept it suppressed under a dampening field for a very long time, because a connected Ood is not a sellable Ood. The “red-eye” outbreaks turn out to be the natural rage of a species leaking through the barrier, and the circle, as the Ood keep saying, must be broken.

The outbreaks work as straight horror in their own right, placid servants straightening up mid-task, eyes burning crimson, translator spheres suddenly playing a very different song. There’s an unpleasant sequence involving a member of staff that the episode declines to linger on and equally declines to soften. And because we know by that point exactly what was done to these creatures, the violence reads less like monstrousness and more like something several centuries overdue. Not everyone will be comfortable with me saying that about a Saturday teatime show, but I’m not taking it back.

The Doctor’s anger is worth a mention too. He’s furious in this one, properly furious, but it’s a tired kind of fury, the anger of somebody who’s seen a version of this before and knows the next one is already being planned. Tennant plays it low and quiet rather than shouting, and I think that’s the right call. When the Doctor raises his voice these days it’s usually a performance, and here he doesn’t bother.

Mr Halpen is a good, banal villain. Not a sadist, just a second-generation executive protecting a family business and irritated by the disruption to his quarter. His fate is the episode’s one moment of real relish: he’s been quietly dosed for a while with a “hair loss tonic” that’s been slowly converting him, and he turns into an Ood right in front of us. The Doctor’s deadpan reaction is perfect, the poetic justice is completely earned, and it’s the closest the hour comes to a laugh.

When the barrier falls the Ood are freed, and they sing. The song of captivity that’s been humming mournfully under the whole episode turns into something joyful, and the show lets it play, unhurried, in a story that spent most of its length being furious. It’s a lovely ending, and other fans who caught it live seem to have landed on much the same spot.

“Your Song Must End Soon”

And then the sting. As the Doctor and Donna leave, Ood Sigma thanks them, promises the Ood will sing of them forever, and adds, without any emphasis, that the Doctor’s song must be ending soon.

That’s the second time in a fortnight the show has pointed at somebody and said something ominous. A week earlier the prophet in The Fires of Pompeii said there was something on Donna’s back, and now an Ood says the Doctor’s song is running out, on a different planet and in a different millennium. Once is atmosphere. Twice, from unconnected sources and pointing at different people, is the show telling us something.

The Doctor brushes it off. Donna clocks it. I’ve no idea what it means and I’ve now heard it twice, which is exactly two more times than I’m comfortable with.

Rating: 4/5. Not the most elegant script of the season, and the villains are broad, but the central idea is superb and the anger behind it is real. The hindbrain reveal is the most quietly horrifying thing this show has done in a while.

April 28, 2008 4 comments