The Top 10 Modern Doctor Who Episodes

[h2]5. The End of Time: Part 2[/h2]

Written by Russell T Davies

“Look at you. Not remotely important! But me? I could do so much more! So much more! But this is what I get. My reward. Well it’s not fair! … Oh, I’ve lived too long.”

“The End of Time,” when taken as a whole, is a strange Doctor Who story. The first part of this two-part send-off to David Tennant and the Russell T Davies era is one of the single worst episodes in the modern show’s history. It’s awful, presenting an awkward and untenable influx of clunky exposition just as things should be wrapping up, and the convolutions involved with bringing back John Simm’s ‘Master’ and executing his evil, incredibly stupid plan – I want to punch the television every time he says ‘Master Race’ – are nigh unwatchable.

And then, on the flipside, Part 2 turned out to be one of the show’s very best installments, a nearly perfect hour-and-fifteen-minutes of television, and the single best Doctor Who episode Davies ever wrote. Perhaps that is reflective of the Davies era as a whole – the man routinely delivered astonishingly bad episodes next to wondrous masterpieces – but the split between the two halves is so absurdly bipolar that unlike other two-parters, I prefer to judge them separately, and mostly pretend the first half doesn’t exist at all.

In any case, “The End of Time” is simply a great Doctor regeneration story, one that delivers big action – the “Allons-y” spaceship climax and arrival of the Time Lords – and even bigger pathos – the Doctor’s final trip through the lives of his companions, giving one last gift to each of them – all in service of sending out the beloved Tenth Doctor with the biggest bang possible. David Tennant is tremendous throughout, as he always was in this part, but historically, the Tenth Doctor had been a messy characterization (on the writers’ side, not Tennant’s), and his tenure on the show had been marked by erratic storytelling that never quite found a unified center for the character, the way Davies did with Christopher Eccleston and Moffat has done with Matt Smith.

What amazed me most about “The End of Time,” then, is how Davies managed to contextualize so much of this messiness, defining the Tenth Doctor in his final hours by the internal conflict between his selfish and selfless sides, and demonstrating how this constant inner strife made him so many different things – needy, brave, impulsive, brilliant, isolated, romantic – to so many people. The sequence right before the Doctor absorbs the radiation to save Wilfred’s life is one of the single best scenes in the show’s long history, perfectly performed by Tennant as he rages against both fate and his own conflicting instincts, and while the work Davies does here doesn’t necessarily forgive prior dramatic missteps – the stupidity with the Doctor and Rose near the end of her run is inexcusable – “The End of Time” does allow me to view the Tenth Doctor era as a more unified whole than I ever previously could. This is a fantastic episode, and an absurdly high bar for Steven Moffat to reach when he writes Matt Smith’s upcoming regeneration episode.

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