Rating the Doctor Who Finales

Over four years ago, viewers in the UK (and people worldwide who naughtily downloaded stuff from the internet) were treated to the series one finale of Doctor Who. Had the show been unsuccessful that could’ve been the end of it, but no – Doctor Who‘s return to television was nothing short of a triumph. Four years later it is one of the most successful shows on British television, and we’re not far off from seeing David Tennant’s tenure as the Tenth Doctor (the new series’ second) come to an end.

With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to dissect in the finales in order, from my personal least-favourite to the finale I consider the best of the bunch so far. So here we go, then.

A word of warning: If you haven’t seen much of Doctor Who and want to avoid spoilers, I would advise you to give this article a miss.

In fourth place…

“Army of Ghosts” / “Doomsday”

When the parallel “Pete’s World” Cybermen appeared earlier in the series, we were offered a two-part story with a fantastic set-up in the first episode and an absolutely horrendous climax in the second, rather like spending an hour carefully setting up some fine, hand-crafted, diamond-encrusted bowling pins and then failing utterly to hit any of them even when you’ve been given a ruddy great big bowling ball and the Kiddie Bumpers have been put up on the sides. “Army of Ghosts” and “Doomday”, by comparison, make the aforementioned Cybermen two-parter seem positively spectacular in comparison.

Nothing about this story works at all. From the attempt to build “tension” by having Rose appear at the beginning of the story and tell us that she dies (which fails whichever way you look at it), to the “ghosts” and the absolutely rubbish ghost-related television shows that are presented early on in the show, to the involvement of Torchwood… nothing works. Nothing seems to make sense. The entirety of the second part seems to be little more than Russell T Davies spilling his load all over Who canon by having the Daleks and the Cybermen fighting each other for no real reason.

The biggest problem, however, is perhaps the over-reliance on the “parallel universe” element. Fans objected when Davies brought in parallel Cybermen, who seem to be the current series’ only Cybermen, and while I don’t agree about the “purity of canon” argument (largely because Doctor Who doesn’t have canon in the strictest sense) I do think that relying on the parallel universe stuff stood in the way of coming up with a great story. It also allowed for the Great Big Reset Switch at the end – really more of a lever in this story, though – and we all know how much Russell T Davies likes his Clean Endings.

By the end of the episode, the Doctor has lost Rose. And, in all honesty, I couldn’t care less. During the second series she had become a far less interesting character. She’d become cocky, arrogant, snobby, with a serious self-entitlement problem. Michelle recently watched the second series for the first time recently and after she’d watched “Army of Ghosts” she told me that she wished Rose would actually die in the following episode. I can’t say I disagree with this sentiment.

A shame she hadn’t died really, because her death would’ve had a direct impact on the story in third place, which is…

“The Stolen Earth” / “Journey’s End”

Riddled with gaping plot holes, terrible dialogue, and some awful, awful writing, “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” is two hours of utter shash. Virtually nothing about it makes  sense. At least “Army of Ghosts” / “Doomsday” was internally consistent, this is just… ridiculous. If the series two finale was Davies spilling his load, then this finale was him spilling his load into his hands and then systematically rubbing it into the eyes of every single Who fan.

The crossover with Torchwood and The Sarah-Jane Adventures doesn’t work, leaving two utterly fantastic characters sitting on the sidelines (Gwen and Ianto are wasted here, which is a pity considering they are perhaps more interesting characters than our esteemed Captain Jack), and bringing Rose back so easily robs her departure at the end of series two of any real emotional core that it may have had.

One element I honestly do not have a problem with was the inclusion of the Metacrisis Doctor – the second, half-human Tenth Doctor grown from his severed hand. While it was predictable, I did enjoy what they did with the character. Giving him a little spark of Donna offered us a nice twist on the character, and his actions destroying the Dalek fleet not only allowed him to do what the real Doctor who couldn’t, but also further cemented some of my own theories about what happened during the Time War proper (which I will go into at some point in the future).

Were it not for the brilliant and emotionally devastating end of the final part, wherein Donna has the memory of her time with the Doctor erased to stop her from exploding or whatever the silly technobabble explanation was, followed by the Doctor’s conversation with her Grandfather… well, this finale would definitely be the worst. But the rueful fate of Donna Noble is nothing short of the show’s greatest tragedy, elevating this finale just a smidgen above the second series climax.

So which of the remaining finales comes in second place? I won’t leave you drumming your fingers…

“Utopia” / “The Sound of Drums” / “The Last of the Time Lords”

That ridiculous ending aside, I adored this finale. Utopia has all the groundwork for a classic-era Doctor Who story – humans surviving on the fringe of the Universe, a vaguely threatening race of human-like aliens threatening to eat everyone, a chain-link fence that holds out everything – but it flips that all on its head when we see Professor Yana’s fob watch, a marvellously clever callback to the “Human Nature” / “The Family of Blood” two-parter earlier in the series. And then Yana… is… the Master. I love it. That scene sends chills down my spine every time.

I must confess that the cliffhanger at the end of “Utopia” is resolved a little too easily, but it was necessary in order to move the story back to the present day. Which is fine, because then we see John Simm truly come to life as the Master. He’s brilliant, maniacal, insane, a genius. For the first time in the show’s entire history the Master isn’t just some two-dimensional moustache-twirling villain bent on causing havok for the same of causing havok. He’s out on a mission.

The Toclafane are perhaps a bit of a dead donkey, as my friend Ray pointed out to me last night, but the fact of the matter is that the Master needs them. He may have had the TARDIS but he could only use it to go to Earth in 2006/07 or to the end of the Universe, and I imagine that in trying to rebuild the Time Lord empire he would happily take any help he could get. Unless it was from the Doctor, naturally.

My only gripe with the entire three-parter is the Doctor’s rejuvenation at the end of the third part. Russell T Davies has been accused of Deus Ex Machina writing in the past, and I don’t believe he’s ever quite crossed that line yet regardless of fan complaints, but this is the closest he has come to date. The Doctor just kind of gets better at the end of the third part and stops the Master, simply because He Can. It’s lazy writing, and I have difficulty seeing past it. It’s probably the only real dip in quality over the entire three-parter.

Even so, the series three finale doesn’t come close to the winning finale, which by a process of elimination is…

“Bad Wolf” / “The Parting of the Ways”

Aside from some ropey dialogue in “Bad Wolf” where Lynda (with a “y”) lists off some of the television shows airing in the future, I absolutely love this finale. It has the most rewatch value of the four, it ties up almost everything that happens in the first series beautifully, and it displays Russell T Davies’ writing at its best. The first series of the show was marred (although that may not be the right word) with an incredibly tight budget, which required some creative writing at times. Davies couldn’t afford to pull off the sort of spectacle that became the show’s trademark from the second series onwards and instead we are left with interesting characters, compelling drama, and very sharp dialogue. The budget concerns occurred in series four, where it affected a single episode rather than the entire series, and we got the Davies-penned episode “Midnight”, which may be his greatest work on the show to date.

Instead of further dissecting this finale, I will turn my attention instead to the ending of the finale itself and why it isn’t a Deus Ex Machina. This is a common complaint about Davies’ finales – the ending seems to resolve itself too quickly. The complaint is moot however, because most of the people who use the term “Deus Ex Machina” don’t seem to know what the term actually means. Specificially it translates as “God out of the machine”, and was often used in Greek tragedy to just bring the story abruptly to a halt.

This hasn’t happened in Doctor Who ye, largely because there aren’t any Greek Gods in the show.

In more modern parlance, its where the story simply resolved itself because it has to. Something, or someone, just appears out of nowhere with all of the answers and the story concludes. All of Davies’ finales have had the resolution of the finale seeded carefully, either in the finale episode itself or across the series, as is the case with the first series. Now, Davies’ resolutions may not be very well written – the Doctor’s rejuvenation in the series three finale is a prime example of this – but they are by no means a Deus Ex Machina. No truer is this than in the first series finale, where the elements that make up the resolution stretch back all the way to the show’s second episode. That’s twelve episodes in which to seed the idea. The TARDIS console opening up itself appears in the eleventh episode of the show, “Boom Town”, where it actually was a Deus Ex Machina in order to get rid of both the episode’s principle antagonist and the earthquake caused by the Rift, but even still it’s a seed for a core element of the finale.

So, in conclusion: Davies is a lazy writer, but he at least seeds his ideas before he executes them. Which is more than can be said for certain other Who writers, such as Helen Raynor.

I’m not the first person to make this argument, and the usual response is for people to bicker about what a Deus Ex Machina actually is. People invariably find themselves quoting the Wikipedia article on the subject. My response here is this: don’t. Don’t even bloody bother. There are plenty of places online where you can debate this matter to your heart’s content, and this is not one of them.