Doctor Who: The Finale (Warning: Spoilers)
Posted 21 July 2008 in Doctor Who by Catriona
To assuage the impatience of all of us who are still burning to discuss the Doctor Who finale, this is the place. Or, at least, the comments thread is the place.
But be warned: here be spoilers.
If you haven’t seen the episode and don’t want to spoil yourself (and I recommend not spoiling yourself in advance), don’t go near the castle. I mean, the comments.
Share your thoughts [22]
1
Catriona wrote at Jul 21, 04:06 am
I want to point out that this episode was in the back of my mind all the time we were talking about the idea of Donna’s character being ret-conned in “Partners in Crime,” in that thread.
Because while I didn’t think she was ret-conned there, she was here—with a vengeance.
And I thought it was devastating—the cruelest thing the Doctor has ever done. (I think he saw it that way, as well, based on the final shot of his face.) This hit me harder than Sarah Jane being kicked out of the TARDIS in “Hand of Fear,” actually.
Because the Doctor must have taken everything away from Donna, including her memories of her engagement . . . unless he somehow just managed to make her forget why she never married Lance. But I think not, because we know from “Partners in Crime” that she was living out of home before her engagement, and yet here she is obviously really comfortable with the idea of living in her mother’s home.
So she’s back with a mother who treats her as worthless, and a grandfather who’s going to break his heart every time he looks at her, in a life that was suffocating and dead-end.
It’s awful.
And—and I know I’m not making friends with this comment, but I have to say it—especially in the light of the way Rose ends the episode with everything she could have wanted. I know Rose had her heart broken in “Doomsday,” but she sort of annoyed me in this episode; even when she had a Doctor of her own, she came across as a little . . . whingy. And Rose didn’t used to be whingy, did she?
Poor Donna: she was so excited, and sympathetic, and generous, and so good for the Doctor. And now it’s like she’s been lobotomised.
2
Leigh wrote at Jul 21, 07:54 am
“Poor Donna: she was so excited, and sympathetic, and generous, and so good for the Doctor. And now it’s like she’s been lobotomised.”
Like an Ood :(
I found it really sad as well, to take her back to a place where she was so 2d, although i couldnt figure out how she was going to grasp the time difference (did he give her fake memories or something)
I was surprised that Rose hooked up with Doctor V2 it might be that he is almost exactly the same and has the same memories, but he isnt the same, she might have fallen in love with him with time, but just because love isnt meant to be so transferable.
3
Catriona wrote at Jul 21, 08:02 am
Exactly like an Ood! When I was watching “Planet of the Ood” last night, and the Doctor was talking about the effects of removing their hindbrains in favour of the communicator balls, I was thinking, “But that’s almost what you do to Donna!” But I didn’t want to add any spoilers.
It’s not exactly the same, I suppose, because she still has the opportunity to grow and develop, just as she would have had she not met Lance and then the Doctor, but he’s removed an enormous amount of experience and personal development, and I think it’s dreadfully sad.
I wasn’t surprised that Rose hooked up with the other Doctor, but now you mention it, I probably should have been. But, she really annoyed me at the end of that episode, and that was all I could concentrate on. And I wasn’t the only one: I could hear people around me, when we watched it in a group, whispering “Stop complaining!”
4
Nick Caldwell wrote at Jul 21, 08:06 am
I’ve worked out an elaborate narrative to give the Doctor a chance to redeem his treatment of Donna (Oh, god, I’m writing fanfic in my head) but I won’t share it, in the hope that Steven Moffat is having similar ideas.
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Catriona wrote at Jul 21, 08:10 am
Well, that’s just teasing!
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Leigh wrote at Jul 21, 08:43 am
I agree, now im wanting Nicks mental fanfic.
7
John wrote at Jul 21, 09:07 am
The thing that struck me most about the Donna thing (and yes, like everyone else, that’s what I wanted to talk about), was that while she really annoyed all of us in “The Runaway Bride,” as she developed as a character, we all grew to like her.
The character in “The Runaway Bride” was a self-obsessed, disinterested (“I was in Spain”), semi-educated shrew who—probably intentionally—set my teeth on edge. We can speculate whether it was viewer feedback, or deliberate character development, but the character in the fourth season was different: she deciphered the codes in “The Doctor’s Daughter”, she might have been “only a temp”, but she was good at what she did.
And the difference was the Doctor. Like every other companion, time spent with the Doctor developed the character, helped them realise their potential. Donna went from an insecure nobody, desperate to get a man, to the most important person in the universe, with assurance and real strength of character. And when the Doctor lobotimised she (and really, what choice did he have?) that is what she lost. The whiny chav on the phone at the end of the episode was the Donna from “The Runaway Bride”.
In “School Reunion” Sarah Jane said something to the effect that travelling with the doctor was dangerous, and heart-breaking, but completely worth it. Mde La Pompadour said that the Doctor was worth the monsters. And it is that privilege that Donna has lost. And that is what was tragic about the final.
8
Sam wrote at Jul 21, 09:08 am
I thought that the end with Rose was too happy. In fact the whole basic treatment with Rose I thought was too happy. At the end, when she gets her own Doctor, I felt that was ruining the perfectly heartbreaking separation left to her in Doomsday.
I just feel that with Rose in particular it was too fairy tale.
But I shared this view with another friend who has has seen it and she told me I have no heart.
Also another blog I was reading said that the episode was too full blown and they should have cut out some characters and highlighted Rose’s return more.
As for Donna, that is terribly sad and I think that The Doctor’s attitude towards it was well done but could have been accented a little more.
I guess I agree with that.
9
Lisa wrote at Jul 21, 09:20 am
I didn’t see Rose as whinging. I did see her as conflicted because she wasn’t getting the Doctor that she fell in love with. She may have kissed the second doctor, but as the first one left she still tried to follow after him.
But the Doctor had to leave her with the second version. She was devastated when she finally found him again and he started to regenerate because she knew what she was losing. The only way he could spare her from that in the future was to leave her with the one who wouldn’t regenerate. Sometimes it is easier to lose someone through death than to have them change and still be physically around.
Poor Donna. He was only trying to save her, and he was really sad about it, though why he didn’t have to wipe Rose’s memory when she absorbed the universe points to a bit of a plot hole.
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Catriona wrote at Jul 21, 09:39 am
John, that’s something I didn’t articulate well when I was talking about it, but that’s exactly what bothered me. Poor Donna doesn’t even get the heartbreak that all the other companions get (well, perhaps excluding those who leave voluntarily). Sure, Romana, Leela, Nyssa: they all made a hard decision, but it was voluntary. And for Sarah Jane (really, the only original-series companion for which this is relevant, which is why “School Reunion” worked so well) she had the memories.
Poor Donna: she gets nothing. Less than nothing. I know he didn’t have a choice, but he didn’t have a choice in a lot of other instances, either. This isn’t “Genesis of the Daleks,” where he chooses not to cross the wires; this is “Warriors of the Deep,” where there had to be a better way, even if there wasn’t.
Sam, if you don’t have a heart, I don’t, either; I agree that there was a strong fairy-tale aspect.
Lisa, I hadn’t thought of that plot hole, but you’re right. I suppose, though, that there he reversed the effect at the cost of his own life. Was Donna not worth that? Or was it not possible here? And it wasn’t just the end of the episode that made me annoyed with Rose; I think I lost patience with the possessive aspect of her personality a while ago, and it came to the fore in the first episode of the two-parter. But that is a subjective reading, I admit.
11
Tim wrote at Jul 21, 10:29 am
The more I think about it, the more angry I am about the ending. Rose gets a happy ending with her own doctor, while Donna gets nothing and is back to where she started.
And I agree that Rose seemed a bit whingy (to say the least). Plus the way Mickey was handled seemed perfunctory too. My reading of the season 2 ender was that Mickey had grown up to the point where he could hold Rose’s attention and help her get over the Doctor — and get over herself, for that matter. Obviously RTD’s Little Miss Perfect wasn’t having any of that.
I don’t think it was exactly the cruelest thing the Doctor has ever done. Clearly he thought it was necessary to save her life. But I’m far from being convinced, given the Clarketech he’s been handwaving for the last four seasons, that he couldn’t find a way to extract his consciousness from hers without wiping her memories. As Lisa points out, Rose survived swallowing the entire vortex. (The Doctor was willing to sacrifice one of his lives to save Rose on that occasion. And Donna seems to be in a much less demanding predicament.)
Hmm. Why couldn’t Donna have had the spare Doctor? Yes, the original Doctor wants to do his self-righteous ‘you’re a mass-murderer’ spiel (though by the way, imprisoning your clone in an entire universe with a woman you apparently love isn’t exactly the harshest of punishments). Yes, they’re not a couple and all, but why not just as a pal? And given that the spare Doctor can handle a Time Lord mind (even though he’s in a single-hearted near-human body himself), he could probably do some handwaving stuff to help keep her sane while decompressing her mind in a somewhat less drastic fashion.
Given what they did with Rose and various other characters this season, though, I’m not ruling out the possibility that Donna might come back again later.
And it’s a shame that all that stuff overshadows what was, for the most part, a smashing season finale.
12
Catriona wrote at Jul 21, 10:46 am
I thought you wouldn’t like this ending, Tim, when you brought up the ret-conning in “Partners in Crime.”
I was saying to Nick that I really didn’t want Donna to die—although I knew, living as I do with the biggest Doctor Who spoiler-freak on the planet, that she wouldn’t be around for the specials next year.
I was worried, because we haven’t had a dead companion in this new series (although lots of dead near companions/acquaintances), except for Captain Jack, and he didn’t stay dead for long.
But why wasn’t there an alternative to this? I pointed to Romana and Nyssa above: they left because they found another calling. Or Leela: marrying a man in gold wellies wouldn’t be my idea of a good time, but it worked for her.
There must have been another way. Why couldn’t she have found a vocation on an alien planet?
I don’t know: I’m just cranky about the whole thing.
13
Tim wrote at Jul 21, 11:25 am
I would have preferred her to die, really. Though RTD may have been banking on that — set us up to brace ourselves for Donna heroically sacrificing herself, then pull out the metaphorical carpet from under our feet.
14
Catriona wrote at Jul 21, 11:30 am
You might be right on that; I must admit, Dalek Khan’s emphasis on the “one will die” reminded me of the refrain about Rose dying in battle during season two.
15
Matthew Smith wrote at Jul 21, 11:33 am
Devastated. A real downer and seeing the doctor alone just staring at nothing before the credits roled.
I think that Donna maybe won’t remember but I hope that she developed some instincts and some kind of underlying change at a subconscious level that makes her into a new person. I think she will turn up as the office manager at Torchwood helping them get their files sorted out and making sure Jack behaves himself.
16
Catriona wrote at Jul 21, 11:54 am
But isn’t sorting the files and making sure that Jack behaves himself Ianto’s job?
In terms of underlying change at a subconscious level, I have a nasty feeling that the braying phone call at the end undercut that reading. She really did seem to have slipped right back into the character she was at the beginning of “The Runaway Bride.”
17
Sam wrote at Jul 22, 10:45 am
I wonder if the nearly-regeneration at the end of Stolen Earth prevented The Doctor from doing the same to Donna as he did to Rose at the end of season 1?
Just a thought, I don’t think it actually excuses the treatment of Donna though.
18
Catriona wrote at Jul 22, 12:18 pm
It may simply not have been possible to reverse what happened to Donna in the same way as he reversed the effects of Rose absorbing the Time Vortex. I suppose we have to assume that if he could have done something other than what he did, he would have.
I think my complaints about the end of this episode is really in the decisions outside the episode rather than within it; I don’t suppose the Doctor could have done anything else (hence my comparison to “Warriors of the Deep,” above) but I do think that Russell T. Davies could have.
I just don’t think it was a good way for Donna to go out.
19
tigtog wrote at Aug 6, 03:54 am
I’m certainly on the same page with the majority opinion here, then. Curse you RTD!
I can understand, from a series management point of view, why they gave Rose the fairytale ending – it’s to get the Rose-maniacs off their backs about bringing Billie Piper back as a full-time companion. She’s moved on, they’ve moved on, it’s a great “what more do you freaks want?” conclusion. I too think it could have been done better, but I can forgive them for doing it as they did.
But ret-conning Donna so she lost all that magnificence? There had to be a better way (and damn it, I wanted her to track down her bloke from the library). I can’t forgive RTD for this one. I too have several fanfic ideas in my head as to how Donna could be unretconned and redeemed, and I’m just really hoping that it happens eventually.
20
Catriona wrote at Aug 6, 04:03 am
Tigtog, I too was hoping that maybe she’d meet up with the library bloke, again: that could have been a good and satisfying reason for her to leave.
As far as the Rose ending, I’m more in geek-love with Steven Moffat than ever after his comments (at Comic Con, I think, but I’ve lost the link) that you had to admire the Doctor’s moxie in getting rid of a clingy ex-girlfriend by fobbing her off with a clone.
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tigtog wrote at Aug 6, 06:09 am
Ha! Oh yes, the Moff does have his moments, doesn’t he?
22
Nick Caldwell wrote at Aug 6, 10:04 am
I had, I confess, also thought that the Doctor might be able to arrange for chap-with-the-stutter’s life to intersect with the post-amnesiac Donna, somehow.