Four years of storytelling arrive here. “Journey’s End” — picking up from the golden light pouring out of the Doctor’s hands at the close of The Stolen Earth — is exactly the finale all that build-up suggests: enormous, overstuffed, occasionally ridiculous, and absolutely devastating when it matters. It resolves a cliffhanger with a conjuring trick, it gives the Doctor the worst thing anyone has ever said to him, and it does something to Donna Noble so cruel that I’m still angry about it. Not a flawless episode. An unforgettable one.
The Hand in the Jar
First, the regeneration. The Doctor doesn’t change — he siphons the excess energy into the severed hand he’s been carrying around in a jar since a Sycorax took it off him in The Christmas Invasion, healing himself without altering a cell. It is, unquestionably, a cheat. It’s also been sitting on the console in plain sight for two and a half years, so it’s a cheat with a receipt. I’d rather have that than a reset button, and the show immediately makes the hand load-bearing rather than leaving it as a get-out.
DoctorDonna
Because Donna touches it, and something extraordinary happens: a two-way biological meta-crisis. A second Doctor grows out of the hand — part human, one heart, wearing a blue suit and rather more impulsive than the original — and Donna, in exchange, receives a Time Lord mind on top of her own. And the DoctorDonna is magnificent. Catherine Tate playing Donna Noble with the Doctor’s intellect running underneath is the most fun the season has had: rattling through calculations at double speed, finishing his sentences, insulting him fluently in two disciplines at once. She’s the one who disables the entire Dalek fleet, spins the reality bomb into reverse, and saves every universe there is — a temp from Chiswick, doing it with a keyboard and a lot of shouting.
For a character who has spent her entire life being told she’s nothing special — by her mother, and worse, by herself — having Donna be the one who saves all of creation is a superb payoff. The season has been signposting it since a soothsayer looked at her back in The Fires of Pompeii and since a Dalek prophesied a “threefold man.” It lands.
“You Fashion Them Into Weapons”
The moral centre of the episode is Davros, and he’s superb precisely because he doesn’t fight. Strapped into his chair below the Crucible, he simply talks — and what he does is show the Doctor a roll call. Everyone in this building is prepared to die. Sarah Jane has a warp star. Jack has a bomb. Martha has a key that will crack the Earth open. Every one of them arrived at the same place: willing to commit atrocity, willing to be destroyed, because of him.
You take ordinary people and you fashion them into weapons.
It is the single most devastating thing anyone has ever said to this Doctor, and the show doesn’t give him an answer. Tennant plays it as a man watching a bill be itemised. It also lands harder because we’ve watched him earn it — the eternal punishments he handed out in The Family of Blood weren’t the act of a gentle man, and Davros has simply noticed.
The sting in the tail is that the meta-crisis Doctor then wipes out the entire Dalek fleet in a single stroke, and the real Doctor is horrified by him — which is, of course, exactly Davros’s point delivered from a different direction. A version of himself, born in battle, doing precisely what he’d never allow.
Towing the Earth Home
Then, abruptly, joy. The Earth has to be flown back into its orbit, and the TARDIS is finally piloted the way it was always meant to be flown: six people, six controls, everyone laughing. Rose, Martha, Jack, Sarah Jane, Mickey, Jackie, Donna, the Doctor — the whole ridiculous family in one room, doing something wonderful. It’s shameless fan service and I loved every second of it. After the grimness of the Crucible, the show earns a victory lap.
It’s also the clearest statement this era has made about what it was ever actually for. The Doctor has spent four years insisting he travels alone and that everyone eventually leaves — and the TARDIS turns out to fly properly, the way it was designed to, only when there are six people at the controls laughing at each other. He has never once been the whole of it.
Bad Wolf Bay, Again
And then it starts taking things away.
Rose is returned to the parallel universe, on the same grey Norwegian beach where Doomsday tore them apart — and this time she’s left there with the meta-crisis Doctor. He’s part human. One heart. He’ll age, and stop, and grow old beside her, which the real Doctor never can. And he says the thing the original couldn’t finish saying two years ago, quietly, in her ear.
It’s a genuinely clever solution and also, deliberately, an unsatisfying one — Rose gets a version of what she wanted and has to decide whether it counts. The show is honest that she’s being handed a compromise rather than a happy ending, and Billie Piper plays the ambivalence beautifully.
The Most Important Woman in Creation
And then Donna, which is where the episode becomes genuinely upsetting. A human mind cannot hold a Time Lord consciousness. She’s burning up, and there’s exactly one way to save her: the Doctor has to erase every memory of him — all of it, every trip, Pompeii, the Ood, the Library, all of it — and take her home. She begs him not to. She knows what she’s losing while she’s losing it. And she goes back to being who she was in Partners in Crime: loud, brash, a bit lost, entirely unaware that she was ever anything else. Her mother and grandfather are told she can never remember, or the burning will start again and kill her.
That’s a horrible ending, and the show knows it. Donna Noble saved every universe there is and doesn’t get to keep it. The one companion who genuinely grew — from the shouting bride who turned him down to the woman who put her hands on that lever in Pompeii — is the one who has all of it taken away, and she doesn’t even get to be sad about it. Wilf gets the last word, promising to look up at the sky for her every night, and it finished me off completely.
The Doctor walks back into the TARDIS alone, in the rain, and closes the door.
What Journey’s End Leaves Us With
Messy, enormous, and cruel in the right places. Here’s what it plants:
- A payoff two years in the making. The hand in the jar was always going to matter. Silly, and beautifully set up.
- DoctorDonna. Donna saving all of creation is the correct destination for her arc, and Tate is superb doing it.
- Davros’s accusation. “You fashion them into weapons,” unanswered. The most damning thing ever said to the Doctor, and the show lets it stand.
- Rose’s compromise. A version of him who can grow old with her. Not a happy ending — an honest one.
- Donna’s erasure. The bleakest fate the show has handed anyone. She was the most important woman in creation for about an hour and she’ll never know.
Rating: 4/5 — Too crowded, and the reality bomb is a lot of plot for a resolution that turns on one very fast keyboard. But the character work is exceptional, the Davros scenes are the best writing of the season, and the last twenty minutes are as good and as sad as this programme gets.
Everyone he ever saved in one room, laughing, flying a police box — and then a beach, and a doorstep, and a man walking off alone in the rain. Also worth noting: two separate people have now told him his song is ending, and nobody’s explained it yet.
