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

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.

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.