N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
I do try to be positive in these blog posts — to find the good in every episode, in every story, but sometimes it’s beyond even a die-hard Who fan like me!
It’s impossible to describe just how awful Last of the Time Lords is. At the time of broadcast, I thought it was the single worst episode of Doctor Who I’d ever seen. And at this point in the marathon, that opinion still holds true. (How naive I was to think this was as bad as it could get, though.)
“Not even the Time Lords came this far.”
The Doctor, Utopia
The Master’s cringe-inducingly obvious use of popular songs (no reflection on the songs, nor indeed the use of pop music itself — I had no complaints about the use of Britney’s Toxic back in The End of the World), the Dobby Doctor (I have no words!), the Doctor’s ghostly second coming (for an atheist RTD sure likes his religious imagery), the huge big, fat reset button (“Time is reversing”, my arse!), those at the ‘eye of the storm’ being protected from the reset (again, no words!) — there is just so much to hate.
Much of the problem is that the new Master has been written as an utterly insufferable tw*t. At times Roger Delgado’s Master was almost more charming than the Doctor himself and while Anthony Ainley’s pantomime villainy was rarely subtle, it was always good fun. The brief glimpse we have of Derek Jacobi’s Master in Utopia oozes the quiet malevolence you always wanted to see from the Master, but the switch to hyperactive immaturity after the regeneration is clearly deliberate. The wounded Jacobi Master even says he’s going to emulate the Doctor and be young again. Why did he also have to dial the excitable mania up to 11 as well?
I should at this point say that none of this is really John Simm’s fault. You can’t polish a turd and a turd is precisely what he’s been given to work with here.
It’s a shame, because some of the stuff in the preceding two episodes is not bad. Utopia is actually a pretty good, tense forty-five minutes. Although I believe RTD always thought of it as a separate story, Utopia works well considered as a Seeds of Doom-style prologue to the two episodes that conclude the series. As such I too have followed the “official” numbering, which reflects this by classing the whole thing as an epic three-parter.
I liked the re-use of the fob-watch and was even prepared to forgive the painful Y.A.N.A. acronym, but of course, Utopia‘s main plus points are the reuniting of the Doctor and Jack (who’s better here than at any point in the first series of Torchwood) and the wonderful Derek Jacobi, likeable as Professor Yana, completely menacing as the Master. (By now we also know to expect that however much or little is thrown at Martha, Freema Agyeman will knock it out of the park.)
But I should have started to worry at the beginning of The Sound of Drums when the Doctor, Martha and Jack escape Utopia‘s genuinely great cliffhanger with the press of a button. Nevertheless, I stuck with it, even though the Master began to irritate from the moment he gassed his cabinet. For one, there’s also an underlying complexity to his relationship with Lucy Saxon that is not something we’ve seen much of in Doctor Who. It makes Lucy one of the more interesting supporting characters in this story.
“The Face of Boe they called me.”
Jack, Last of the Time Lords
However, once the action transfers to the Valiant in The Sound of Drums and the Master reveals his plans, it all goes horribly, horribly downhill until, in striving to trump the dramatic finales of Series One and Two, all we have is a noisy, big, empty mess of a resolution.
Even then, Jack’s revelation about The Face of Boe and Martha’s leaving scene almost make up for what’s gone before.
Almost.
These are my potential Target Library titles for Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords:
— Doctor Who and the Sound of Drums
— Doctor Who and the Sound of the Last Time Lord in Utopia
— Doctor Who and the Fob of Destiny 2
