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

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.