Time Lords

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.

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, Part One. — doctor who the end of time part one

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.

Doctor Who: The End of Time promotional poster featuring the Tenth Doctor and ensemble cast against a cosmic background — the end of time 2 doctor who

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.

Doctor Who’s “The End of Time, Part One” is a tonally uneven but ambitious special that brings back the Master through a cult resurrection ritual, leaving him physically unstable and burning through life energy. A planetary device called the Immortality Gate allows him to overwrite every human on Earth with copies of himself, while the Time Lords, thought destroyed, are revealed to be planning their return.

The episode’s standout moment is a quiet café scene between the Doctor and Wilfred Mott, in which the Doctor describes regeneration as a form of death with unusual honesty. Bernard Cribbins and David Tennant anchor the scene without sentimentality, and it reframes the Doctor’s reckless behavior across the preceding specials as fear rather than arrogance.

Everything this era has been building toward 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 — and somewhere in the middle of it there is a two-hander in a café that is, I think, the finest scene David Tennant has ever been given.

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 on a snowy hillside in Planet of the Ood and who was standing silently in a suburban street the last time we saw him — and the Doctor arrives having spent months running in the opposite direction.

The Ood have evolved fast, too fast, and they’re dreaming. 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 the Doctor is late.

The Master, Resurrected

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, skull flickering visible beneath the skin, ravenous to the point of eating out of bins, and able to leap over buildings while crackling with blue lightning.

John Simm plays him as something closer to a starving animal than the giggling politician of The Sound of Drums, and it mostly works — though the super-powered leaping is one of the few things here that tips into silliness. What lands is the desperation. This Master is dying, permanently, and he knows it.

And the drumming in his head — the four-beat rhythm he’s complained about since he arrived — turns out not to be madness at all. It’s a signal. Someone put it there.

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 permitted to be, and she has not 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.

Then it stops dead for ten minutes and does the best thing in it.

Wilfred Mott has been looking for the Doctor. He’s assembled a squad of pensioners to comb London for him, which is exactly as funny as it sounds, and when he finally corners him the two of them sit down in a greasy spoon and talk.

And the Doctor tells him what regeneration actually means. Not the cheerful version — the truth. That some new man goes sauntering away wearing his face and his memories, and that as far as he’s concerned, that’s dying. Everything he is stops. Tennant plays it with tears running down his face and absolutely no self-pity, and Bernard Cribbins simply listens, an old soldier who has been near enough death to know better than to argue with anyone about it.

What makes it land is that Wilf doesn’t try to fix it. He doesn’t tell the Doctor it’ll be alright, or that he’ll live on in some form, or any of the comfortable things people reach for. He simply sits there and takes it seriously, and then offers him a service revolver, and is refused. Two men who have both been to a war, one of them about to lose absolutely everything, in a greasy spoon with the tea going cold between them. There’s no music under it. 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 has been told three times that his song is ending and cannot bear it. He isn’t being noble. He’s terrified.

The Master’s Race

The plot proper is the maddest thing the show has attempted. A wealthy man named Naismith has acquired alien medical technology — 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 is a planetary medical device: it rewrites a template across an entire species at once. So the Master steps into it and broadcasts himself. Every human being on Earth — every commuter, every newsreader, every member of the cabinet — becomes John Simm, grinning, in their own clothes.

It’s audacious, it’s very funny for about ninety seconds, and it’s genuinely disturbing once the novelty wears off: the total erasure of the entire human race, replaced with copies of one damaged man, played partly for laughs. Your tolerance for it will decide how you feel about this half of the story.

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 do if anyone disturbed it.

Rassilon

And then the cliffhanger, which is enormous.

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 are not gone. Rassilon and the High Council have been watching, and they have worked out a way back — and the drumbeat in the Master’s head, planted across his whole life, is the link they intend to use.

The war the Doctor ended has been mourning for five years, and it is about to come home.

The show is careful about how it plays this, too. A lesser version of the story would have staged the Time Lords’ return as salvation — the Doctor’s lost people, coming back at last, ending his loneliness at a stroke. Instead the reveal is shot like the approach of something monstrous, all shadow and scale and dread, and the only clue we’re given as to why is the expression 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. We still don’t know what it was.

What The End of Time Part One Leaves Us With

Uneven, sprawling, and containing one perfect scene. Here’s what it leaves:

The café. Ten minutes, two men, a plastic table. The most honest thing this show has ever said about regeneration.
A Master who is dying. Stripped of the swagger and reduced to hunger. Simm is very good when the script lets him be desperate rather than acrobatic.
The drums explained. Not madness — a signal, deliberately planted. A five-year-old character detail turned into a plot mechanism.
Six billion Masters. Preposterous, memorable, and tonally all over the place. You’ll either laugh or wince, probably both.
The Time Lords return. The most frightening cliffhanger the show has managed, precisely because the Doctor’s reaction to it is pure horror rather than joy.

Rating: 4/5 — Baggy and frequently ridiculous, with a middle act that’s more concept than story. But the Wilf material is extraordinary, the dread is genuine, and it earns its ending completely.

Three prophecies, a signal in a dying man’s skull, and a door opening onto a war that was supposed to be over. He’s been told four knocks. Nobody’s knocked yet.

The End of Time, Part Two: I Don’t Want to Go