Whowatch Part 21
I have to give a big shoutout to solointhewinter's Jon Kent: Rebirth, which not only I adored but I've seen a bunch of people flip out for and go 'wait, shit, Jon Kent should be really good!' After years of being the lone 'Jon Kent Superman is not a failure, he has BEEN failed' freak, gratifying to watch folks in Twitter’s twilight days grudgingly realize the truth of my most On One take.
My Adventures With Superman! Tonight!
World Enough and Time
The Doctor Falls
Twice Upon a Time
Sean: Hello and welcome to the final entry of the Whowatch of the Moffat era! To celebrate this fantastic conclusion, we have a special guest. Give it up for the one, the only, Ritesh Babu!
Ritesh: Hello there!
Sean: Now Ritesh, as we do for all our guests, tell us: How did you get into Doctor Who?
Ritesh: I got in through friends who’d grown up watching the revival as it aired in Britain. They were the kids who’d grown up watching it live, seeing and experiencing the phenomenon of RTD’s restart. How it worked is- I’d watch one episode, and then we’d sit down and discuss and go over it, with them basically annotating and contextualizing it- who wrote it, what went on behind the scenes, what people thought of it then vs what people think of it now, and just a lot of stuff like that. It was a fun, interesting exercise done over a vast period of time, episode by episode. It was as much an excuse to chat with pals as it was anything else. That was how I discovered El[izabeth Sandifer]’s work by the way. It came recommended from pals as another extra way and layer by which to engage with Who. And here we are!
Sean: So Whowatch, but done by people cleverer than me.
Ritesh: Hah. Well, I like to think all my friends are clever, Sean. So you’re no less clever, no.
Sean: Fair enough. But anywho, let’s begin with the moment I’ve been building up to this entire project with the introduction of Doctor Who. There’s certainly been some contention on whether or not one should call Doctor Who “The Doctor” or “Doctor Who.” There’s an old joke that if you’re referring to them as Doctor Who, you’re either a new fan with no idea what’s going on with the show or you’re an old fan who understands the show completely.
David: Who would know better than her?
Sean: Ian Levine: Dark Lord of ALL!!!! [Thunderclap]
David: No. Anyway, I love all three of these, especially since this isn’t quite a three-part adventure as we…recently saw, so much as a single Thesis of Doctor Who closing out Moffat’s time broken into three acts:
Here’s why Doctor Who is an irredeemable sonofabitch
Here’s why Doctor Who is the best
Either way, we’re done
Sean: And yet, in terms of the argument, there’s a sense to which that first part is the weakest. The argument the show makes isn’t as grand as, to use a few previous examples of the show arguing Doctor Who is an irredeemable sonofabitch, Doctor Who committing mass genocide, Doctor Who killing Ace’s boyfriend, Doctor Who being such an egotistical git he decides to bend the laws of time to his will and his will alone, or the entirety of the Colin Baker era. The argument made in act 1 is “Doctor Who likes to show off” when The Master could’ve just sent Bill off to be converted.
(As an aside, I’m surprised given the number of trans people who have appeared in this series that we never talked about the trans reading of the Moffat era. From the importance of chosen names over given ones to how one’s interior appearance trumps what people see on the outside to literally making the cruelest torture in the cosmos and calling it “Conversion Therapy.” Not to mention it being the era that essentially set up the potential of a female Doctor Who as more than “Doctor Who gets suicidally drunk because he hates being a woman.”)
Ritesh: If the first part is the weakest- it is deliberately so, by which I mean, this is Steven Moffat, the guy who wrote Day Of The Doctor. The guy who had his creation plead with The Doctor to NOT be the guy who resorts to genocide. To imagine a way out and beyond that- and then has the character do it. The writer whose delight at writing the words ‘Doctor Who’ into the show itself at any point just seems to pour out (hell, consider Time Of The Doctor’s Big Question from the crack, to which Clara must respond).
Moffat understands The Doctor’s capacity to be a bastard, his ability to be an arrogant man taken by hubris, full of himself. But he also recognizes his capacity to then go ‘oh shit’ and then try and make things right. He just loves The Doctor too damn much.
Sean: Equally, he might have thought he’d be repeating himself given The Apotheosis of Clara Oswald makes a more damning case against Doctor Who as anything other than a toxic person.
David: See, while I agree this is the weakest of the three, I disagree it makes a weak case. Yes, realistically The Master always would’ve just moved up the timetable to right before The Doctor arrived, but the point is clear: after bloviating so hard he gets the latest person in his duty of care killed, knowing the time-warping situation she’s under where even an eyebrow twitch will take a week, and casually hypnotically compelling her to stay in it (which may not much play out in the final outcome, but is a disturbing callback to how he first almost mindwiped her), he takes the time to do a full whiteboard presentation of the cool physics in play so everyone around him is totally clear how clever he is for having figured it out. He’ll always come around, yes, but the companions are there to pay a price in years and blood to kick him back on track.
(Also, given the context, I like that this opening to Moffat’s endgame revolves around a fucked up hospital ala The Empty Child.)
Sean: The fact that the nurses turn the dials not to help soothe the patients, but to turn off the audio on their voice boxes is one of the most fucked up ideas Steven Moffat has ever done in Doctor Who. You can just see the horror of a man who can do nothing but watch as his mother dies.
Ritesh: First off, just for clarity- The Doctor Falls > World Enough and Time > Twice Upon A Time. That’s how I rank the episodes.
But beyond that, what I dig about this is how much it plays to the show’s performer and lead. Peter Capaldi is a massive fan of Doctor Who, and perhaps the biggest fan to actually play the role (with David Tennant right behind him- both of em Scottish, how about that?), having grown up with it watching the original back in the day. And he was asked years prior to this episode ever being a thing who his favorite Who monsters/villains were that he might love to see done- who he’d love to see the show take another crack at. And Capaldi had a very clear answer- The Mondasian Cybermen. The very originals, who looked far creepier than the later, esp post-RTD/Moffat 1.0 robots look. The sort of mummified horrific monsters who felt closer to real ppl rather than just robotic outfits. He said he’d love to do that.
And lo and behold, for his and Moffat’s big final season/series and epic finale- Capaldi gets his wish. It’s kinda great.
Sean: There is, however, a controversial aspects of the story: The treatment of Bill Potts. During quarantine, Doctor Who fans had the fun idea to watch various episodes of the show with the whole world. Some writers even got involved in the process, offering behind the scenes, transcripts, and follow up short stories. And we will be touching on all of these in four entries’ time.
But when it came time to do World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, there were some concerns that it’s kinda fucked up to talk about how great an episode is when said episode centers around a Black woman being shot at a time when people were having a serious conversation about the police murdering Black people for the fourth time that year. So the two parter live tweet was scrapped in favor of an unofficial one with some, if I’m being honest, lesser stories.
(The other one to be canceled was The Unicorn and the Wasp because Gareth Roberts licks goats.)
Ritesh: It’s understandable, really. It made all the sense to shelve that episode at that point in time.
Sean: Going back to the Cybermen, this is perhaps their best outing.The ties to societal decay brought about by systems of cruelty is extremely relevant and important to the modern era where the fascists want to gut the NHS, the supreme court is making it perfectly legal to discriminate against queer people, and Donald Trump is president of the United States, a comedic punchline that’s been around since before Doctor Who was canceled. “People plus technology minus humanity.” is basically Moffat once again nicking from Charlie Brooker while also being perhaps the first time the Cybermen were ever given a coherent throughline since The Tenth Planet. It’s also notable as being a moment where Grant Morrison gets a nod for once in Doctor Who instead of Alan Moore. At the start of their comics career, Grant did some Doctor Who comics. One of which was The World Shapers, wherein the origin of the Cybermen are revealed to be from Marinus. It also contains an extremely fucked up view of the Time Lords as being willing to accept mass genocide if it meant a future where one species exists to be extremely peaceful and beneficial to the Time Lords.
David: The note on the Cybermen’s home planet is one I wanna expand on, because The Doctor Falls makes an interesting choice with that - yes, technically it might’ve been where they cropped up first, but it clarifies they’re a natural emergent phenomenon among humanoid species so that barely matters. It’s actively deemphasized as important, which is something that plays into how Moffat’s structured his finales: whereas RTD went bigger each time, Moffat goes smaller and more intimate, until this last time around we don’t even have something technically small but personally important like 12 and Clara’s relationship at stake. It’s a few hundred already doomed people on a random space station under attack by the series’ ultimate second-stringer threat. Any other Doctor Who adventure, it’s just that this time The Doctor’s number appears to be up and Missy and The Master are there to laugh and to make their respective choices. After the sturm und drang of Heaven Sent and Hell Bent, this is essentially the Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?, the exhausted tale of what happens to our favorite after the big climax and their final choice in the face of oblivion (and, for that matter, heralding a crappy rejuvenation). It’s a story that I think could only work quite as well as it does in its ‘...shit, wait I have to make another season after my story’s done???’ context. It’s a narrative pushed past its limit in the same way as our leads, except instead of being crap the way “narrative pushed past its limit” would typically imply, it’s magical in what it exposes. Well, except to the one guy.
Sean: That speech is impeccable. The best performance Peter Capaldi has done in his entire career. But I’d like to highlight the work of Michelle Gomez, who I think we often give the short end of the stick to quite a bit in the Whowatch because she’s a blatantly obvious talent. She can easily move from quirky pal who’s kind of a dick (the dabbing was improv) to the most fucked up person in the room who is gleeful about being horrible to someone questioning their positionality within the cosmos. It’s an absolute triumph of a performance and the sadness in her laugh as she realizes the only way her story could end is with her getting stabbed in the back by the only person she never expected to be: himself. Not to mention the work of John Simms who does a great job as a distaff Anthony Ainely. (Complete with an unfortunate vague Eastern European accent.)
David: It isn’t a showstopper like Capaldi gets but “I loved being you. Every second of it. Oh, the way you burn like a sun. Like a whole screaming world on fire. I remember that feeling, and I always will. And I will always miss it” is right up there as some of the most powerfully emotional acting in the series. And in the end, she has the burden and honor of doing what the title character can’t: she dies for the right thing without hope, quite literally without witness, and without reward.
Ritesh: I also want to shout out Murray Gold and his tremendous composition as the guy behind the music and sound of Who through all 10 seasons of the show. The one big consistent glue and bridge between both the RTD era and the Moffat era. He’s the one who also finally leaves with this 3-part closer. And my god, the choice he makes- just the decision to have no music or anything to let Capaldi’s speech hang in the air, so we feel its weight, to let the scene play on its own, so the deafening silence and his heavy words- that’s all you hear. It’s so affecting. That there is no rousing or ‘inspiring’ music that usually accompanies The Doctor’s speeches, particularly like those of Tennant and Smith.
In the end all that is there is this- just this old man in an abyss of silence and shadow, pleading, begging- for change, for betterment, for kindness. Not a hero, not a god, not even The Doctor. Just a decent man. It strips down the entire mythologizing of The Doctor down, laying him bare to his most essentially human level, and in so doing unveils the entire magic of the character.
To quote the show- Goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit, without hope, without witness, without reward.
Good isn’t something that you just are. It’s what you do and why you do it.
And here Moffat lays that out, unfurling the heart and soul of The Doctor in a way that I think we’ve rarely seen, in a thunderous performance by Peter Capaldi, who to me is the best actor to play the Doctor. This guy is why Heaven Sent goes so hard, why Hell Bent can rip your heart out, and why everything just works. This is his gift, his final story and epic, and he just makes it sing.
Sean: And, given this is a washed out Steven Moffat, he essentially gives Bill the same ending he gave Clara of becoming an immortal space lesbian. And while it would have been stronger if Heather was in another episode or two before this (say, just spitballing here, The Lie of the Land), that’s only a problem if you’re boring.
David: It’s hard to explain why Bill ultimately works here as well as she does, or what sort of ‘season arc’ to assign to her, and my final answer is to throw up my hands and go “Pearl Mackie’s just really good at her job, okay?!” She’s the archest of archetypal companions, but she’s so wildly good at that it more than puts her over to usher this past the finish line alongside Capaldi. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say she hard-carries Series 10 - even a lot of The Doctor Falls itself outside the obvious tentpole moments comes down to her coping with her situation.
Ritesh: That’s pretty much correct, I think. She brings Bill to life, and imbues the character with such charisma, charm, and a soul. Every time she’s on screen, you’re always rooting for her. You want her to succeed and do well, which is why when tragedy strikes, it hurts. And it’s also why when she is granted salvation from her fate to be an immortal amidst the stars with her love from the pilot? It does work. It’s not as effective or well done as it could be, given Heather isn’t much of a character and is more so a device, but what might be a thin script is, I think, transformed by Mackie and her interpretation of it. That’s part of the fun and joy of film/tv- the collaboration alters and transmutes the work.
Sean: I’m still a bit more sympathetic to Nardole. While he’s not my favorite character or even my favorite companion this series, he’s nevertheless got a cowardly charm to him combined with hints of him being a proper bastard one wished were explored more in the show proper. And Matt Lucas does a good job balancing the two aspects of the guy quite well. But he never amounts to more than just 'good enough, if he has to be here.'
David: Nardole’s fine.
Ritesh: He works, yeah. But that’s mostly it. He’s basically The Doctor’s Assistant.
David: So I’m told the two of you have some issues with Twice Upon A Time?
Sean: I actually quite like Twice Upon a Time. It’s not the best of Moffat’s endings for Doctor Who (that remains The Apotheosis of Clara Oswald and The Husbands of River Song), but it’s charming. I like the direction from Rachel Tallalay. The way Murray Gold remixes his tracks from previous series is a special highlight. I want that version of Doomsday on my phone right now and I’m pissed we still don’t have a Series 10 soundtrack. Mark Gattis does some of his best acting as Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart, with the monologue about death being especially heart wrenching. And it’s a quite funny story about an elder Scotsman being confronted by his younger, more sexist self and finding him both wanting and capable of interesting things. (Gee, I wonder who this is about.)
However, this is also an opportunity for me to go into an occasional feature in this series informally called:
“SEAN GETS TO BE PETTY ABOUT THE STATE OF MEDIA CRITICISM!”
Now, there’s a critic out there known as Hbomberguy who does hours long video essays about the horrors of the modern political landscape or plays Donkey Kong for five days straight. He also has a tendency to do media criticism that can be best described as “Please, for the love of god, never do media criticism again.” The most notable of these is Sherlock is Garbage and Here’s Why, an hour and a half whinge that a detective show does not function like CSI: Miami. What’s notable about the video for these purposes is that he spent the vast majority of his ire aimed squarely at Steven Moffat despite Mark Gattis being the co-creator, co-producer, writer of half the episodes, and star of all but one of them.
A few months after the video came out to much (undeserved) acclaim, Hbomberguy released another video about a Christmas story by one of the creators of Sherlock. Among his critiques of the special was a frankly absurd claim that Rusty the Dalek was Steven Moffat secretly being an egomaniacal git who “Fixed” the RTD era from within alongside several bits that wouldn’t be strange to see in a CinemaSins video.
It should be noted that Mark Gatiss likewise was involved in a different story released the same month regarding the Christmastime. That being The League of Gentlemen Anniversary Specials, which featured the quite frankly offensive reappearance of their blackface monstrosity who is still plotting to kidnap white women for his pleasure. That Hbomberguy decided to do the Moffat one instead when it’s clear he didn’t have much to say about it highlights how much he was gaming the larger culture’s disdain for Moffat’s work for views and the larger substantial issues regarding the Breadtube crowd and race. (Note, for example, how much time is spent in Sherlock is Garbage and Here’s Why talking about a fucking boomarang over talking about the episode where the baddies are Chinese people.)
Ritesh: Twice Upon A Time…I feel like El nailed this one with that one joke wherein she said ‘Twice Upon A Time expects you to root against Mark Gatiss and Toby Whithouse taking each other out’, and that’s about right lol.
David: Wait, that was Whithouse??? Damn, that actually does take the episode down a notch or two in my estimation.
Sean: Look, as Jack Graham can attest, not many people in England can speak German.
Ritesh: But mostly, the episode is a better conceit than it is a script. In execution it’s perhaps less effective than it should be, filled with Moffatisms that are very readily critiqued.
That said, I am immensely fond of David Bradley as The Doctor, a great piece of casting from the An Adventure In Space and Time special that Gatiss wrote, chronicling the making and creation of Doctor Who. It’s by far the best thing Gatiss has ever made, and so it’s neat to see Bradley going from playing William Hartnell playing Doctor Who to just playing Doctor Who as represented by William Hartnell in the show proper.
And the idea of looking at a younger version of you and wincing and cringing and being in pain, and also reassuring them of change, of tomorrow, telling them that it’s going to be okay- you just need to keep going? And that in turn helping remind you of that essential truth as well to reorient you? It’s good stuff!
I recall Moffat talking about how much this episode came from reading he was doing around memories and how much memories are what shape us and define us, particularly as his mother passed away during the making of Series 10, and was writing this final chunk of the story. Memory has long haunted Moffat’s work, as have mothers, whether it’s his very first episodes in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances or The Weeping Angels or River being saved in the Tennant era or just the entire Smith era period, from Amy and The Doctor to The Silence to the damn final line- "I will always remember when The Doctor was me."
Sean: It can be seen in Amy viewing her murder of Madame Kovorian as being something she did based solely on her memory of doing it, despite the events being retconned out of history. It’s there at the beginning, with Continuity Errors, a story about Doctor Who going back in time to change a single woman’s life for the sake of a library book while she remembers her life with all the contradictions created by the errors in her memory. Moffat even explores the idea outside of Doctor Who from the flawed playing with memory in Sherlock to Captain Haddock remembering his ancestor’s life to the final monologue in Coupling being delivered as our lead (and authorial stand in) remembering the birth of his first son to the Doctor Who riff in Press Gang being about the denial of memory. Even post-Doctor Who, Moffat explores that in Dracula as a thing of horror where the loss of memory is just another thing Dracula takes from Jonathan Harker for the sake of his own cruelty.
Ritesh: But here it’s even more clear and takes center stage- The idea of how we are nothing without our memories, how we are shaped and defined by them. It’s why you have the final ‘monsters’ in the episode who are not monsters at all, but are helping things along. You have The Testimony, who preserve memories, because if your memories are who you are, by preserving them, you are preserved forever.
It’s why the final gift Capaldi’s Doctor gets and had to inevitably receive to be complete, to be truly complete, is his memories. He remembers Clara again, after that loving and warm embrace he gets from Bill and Nardole’s memorial figures. In a sense, that’s why this is The First Doctor’s story, too. He is the memory of The Doctor as he is now, the memory that never was but now is- the gap in memory that is transformative, quite literally.
Moffat completes The Doctor in the end. Doctor Who is whole at the end, which is why his final speech and regeneration are so, so moving.
This could be the end of the show.
You need no more, really.
The character arc that began from S1E1 with RTD’s revival finds a culmination here, as Tennant/RTD’s final words of "I don’t want to go" are reversed with "Doctor, I let you go." The weary war hero of glory and grandeur transformed into the quiet post-war old man of acceptance. He who paves the way ahead for what must be. The man who suffers, so that others don’t have to.
It’s a good ending, and it’s a beautiful conclusion for Talalay/Moffat/Capaldi/Gold all together.
David: I’m so glad to read all of that from you, because it really needs to be emphasized this isn’t just some janky meta-wankery episode about Moffat leaving Who.
It is, however, also a meta-wanky episode about Moffat leaving Who.
That isn’t a complaint! There are moments in isolation where it appears to nudge up to that: Capaldi not wanting to regenerate out of nowhere (the No Prize might suggest Smith was at peace with it because he was supposed to be the affable, lovable face of The Doctor whereas Capaldi is immediately defined as the mask being ripped off, but c'mon), or the big speech about how The Doctor is single handedly what prevents Evil from completely triumphing over Good, which is I suppose true in the context of Doctor Who the TV series as an enclosed cosmos. Bringing back around the Good Dalek to contrast where 12 started, beings made of memories of stuff that happened in the show (with the interesting choice to I believe deliberately mix their sound poorly as a way of selling their alien-ness), the conclusion being ending a war for a moment the way the series returned with him having bloodily concluded one.
But along with bringing in the first Doctor as a way of contextualizing that forward march as good and inevitable - as well as, yes, being more importantly a way of framing memory and personal growth for The Doctor personally and more broadly thematically - the big important twist here is that The Doctor isn’t necessary. People other than them can make a positive difference, at the end of time or in the trenches in a moment that’s the hardest the show’s gotten me emotionally since Forest of the Dead. In a sense, you could say it’s Moffat psyching himself up to leave with a reminder that there are things that matter besides Doctor friggin’ Who. But more importantly, it’s that the actions of The Doctor only matter where they intersect with basic human kindness. It’s the tale of them as a narrative engine relying on cleverness and companions meeting them as a story that only matters in how it’s received, and it does so so cleanly and so beautifully it fully justifies an ending of The Doctor giving a speech to themselves and the viewer on the rules of how Doctor Who is supposed to work. If The Doctor Falls displayed the core need to be addressed, for kindness in a world frequently without it, Twice Upon A Time rearticulates the ethos of how The Doctor goes about trying to address that and how they succeed.
Ritesh: In a very real sense, this finale is a crystallization of that iconic line and beautiful idea from Moffat’s very first Who story.
In The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Doctor cries in delight- EVERYBODY LIVES, ROSE! JUST THIS ONCE! EVERYBODY LIVES!
And so they do here. Everybody lives, in the end. Everybody is preserved via testimony. All of their memories, who they are, were, could be, all saved, like River Song at the end of days. Everybody lives.
I remember Peter Capaldi talking about Doctor Who once in this great interview, which I’ll link here, and he says something quite blunt and honest. That while it’s not fashionable to say and it’s not terribly marketable, so he’s not encouraged a ton to say it- Doctor Who is about Death. That’s what it is about at its essence, that’s why he believes people are drawn to it, and it’s at the core of the character and the show for him. What do you do? How do you deal with it? And how do you move on?
And we see that throughout the show.
Perhaps that’s why it’s fitting then that Moffat, writing through his mother’s death, finds the culmination of his own aspirational lines from his very first story- everybody lives.
Sean: And so we reach the end of the Moffat era. Not with a bang, as the poets would say. As with the previous time we had an end of an era, I come bearing gifts. Two stories that mark alternatives to the way things went. The first, a serious attempt at bringing Doctor Who back from the Wilderness of novels and audio dramas with The Scream of the Shalka. Written by Paul Cornell, it’s honestly among his weaker works. While the idea of the Shalka is quite clever and there are some good character beats, it’s not his strongest work.
David: The Robo-Master is admirably messed up. I liked the conceit of a living Great Filter. But oh my god this was physically unpleasant to watch, Ritesh is the animation snob in the room but this was wildly bad even given its context as a 2003 flash animation. Cornell seemed to be going for what would end up being the propulsiveness of modern Who, and kudos on him for looking a bit into the future, but everything is working against it visually even before getting to the near-total lack of score.
Sean: Remember kids: The BBC will never give Doctor Who a budget. And that’s why RTD sold it out to Disney.
David: I guess I’m glad David Tennant got to be a guard torn apart by a brainwashed mob, I’m sure that was a thrill at the time, but this distinctly belongs in the pit of apocrypha into which it’s fallen.
(The ‘ninth Doctor’s’ Ra’s Al Ghul-ass drip though? Immaculate.)
Sean: My other gift is, of course, THE CURSE OF THE FATAL DEATH!
David: It is a no-fooling tragedy that Jonathan Pryce was apparently correct that this blacklisted him from ‘real’ Doctor Who, because oh my god dude is a fucking fantastic The Master. A lot of the comedy here ages…well look it makes dude-with-tits jokes in 1999, you can figure it out for yourself.
Sean: Sadly, Coupling doesn’t do any better.
David: But broadly speaking this rules, a wonderfully heartfelt pisstake that even basically ends, as Moffat’s first filmed Who work, with a variation on the speech Bill is going to end up making 18 years later. I don’t know that I have a ton to say about it beyond that it’s a delight that it exists, and that I welcome and appreciate any delay from…what’s coming.
Sean: I’ve told my tale all the way to the end, and am satisfied. It was (I set my watch and warrant on it) the kind only a good God would save for last, full of monsters and marvels and voyaging here and there. I can stop now, put my pen down, and rest my weary hand (although perhaps not forever; the hand that tells the tales has a mind of its own, and a way of growing restless). I can close my eyes to Gallifrey and all that lies beyond Gallifrey. Yet some of you who have provided the ears without which no tale can survive a single day are likely not so willing. You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the love-making all confused with the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking (the orgasm is, after all, God’s way of telling us we’ve finished, at least for the time being, and should go to sleep). You are the cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens, where tired characters go to rest. You say you want to know how it all comes out. You say you want to follow Doctor Who down to Earth; you say that is what you paid your money for, the show you came to see.
I hope most of you know better. Want better. I hope you came to hear the tale, and not just munch your way through the pages to the ending. For an ending, you only have to turn to the last page and see what is there writ upon. But endings are heartless. An ending is a closed door no man (or Time Lord) can open. I’ve written many, but most only for the same reason that I pull on my pants in the morning before leaving the bedroom—because it is the custom of the country.
And so, my dear Constant Reader, I tell you this: You can stop here. You can let your last memory be of seeing Doctor Who, Bill, and Clara in Flanders Field, together again for the first time, listening to the soldiers' choir sing “Silent Night.” You can be content in the knowledge that sooner or later K-9 (probably a canine version with a short neck, an odd red-ringed eye, and a bark that sometimes sounds eerily like speech) will also enter the picture. That’s a pretty picture, isn’t it? I think so. And pretty close to happily ever after, too. Close enough for government work, as Missy would say.
Should you go on, you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken. I have one key left on my belt, but all it opens is that final door, the one marked “Other” What’s behind it won’t improve your love-life, grow hair on your bald spot, or add five years to your natural span (not even five minutes). There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal “Once upon a time.”
Endings are heartless.
Ending is just another word for goodbye.
David: …okay but seriously how bad is this gonna get
Sean: I’ll explain later.
David: Nods
Next Time: Would you still?
Very well, then, come. (Do you hear me sigh?) Here is Doctor Who, at the end of the Modern era. See it, I beg.
See it very well.
Here is Doctor Who at sunset.