Journey’s End
“You’re my number one, I’d do anything for you.”
Only a handful of Doctor Who episodes have reached #1 in the television charts for the week they were first transmitted, and all of them have been this century. As the future of our show seemingly hangs in abeyance for the first time in that century (and once again through no fault of its own) it’s worth remembering that, as well as the heights of popularity it’s reached at in the last twenty years, heights inarguably higher than those scaled by twentieth century Who by almost any measure.
The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End is one of those peaks. A friend texted me immediately after transmission of The Stolen Earth demanding I join him in a pub to talk about it, as he wouldn’t be able to think of anything else while conscious and thus his wife didn’t want him in the house. That’s fan reaction, of course. But #1 for the week and an AI of 91 speaks to huge public engagement with the show and this appropriately matches the story, in which the Daleks have a plan of unprecedented scale.
Davros has devised a way to use twenty-seven stolen planets as both “an engine” and “a transmitter”. They’re set up in a specific configuration around the Daleks’ new ship the Crucible, and inside an area of space known as the Medusa Cascade. This is a “second out of sync with the rest of universe”. Using them, the Crucible will expel Z-neutrino energy across all existing realities. As Davros explains, and it’s worth quoting nearly in full because it’s so thrillingly bonkers, although here it lacks Julian Bleach’s extraordinary delivery.
“Every atom in existence is bound by an electrical field. The Reality bomb cancels it out. Structure falls apart. Full transmission will dissolve every form of matter... across the entire universe. Never stopping, never faltering, never fading. People and planets and stars will become dust, and the dust will become atoms, and the atoms will become nothing… the wavelength will continue, breaking through the Rift at the heart of the Medusa Cascade into every dimension, every parallel, every single corner of creation. This is my ultimate victory, Doctor! The destruction of reality itself!”
This will, of course, leave the Daleks safe as “the only lifeforms in existence”. We can perhaps detect the influence of Crisis on Infinite Earths here, the 1985 miniseries that rebooted DC’s comic universe, both in the threat and in how it takes a crossover to resolve the threat, with much of the casts of Doctor Who’s then two spin-offs, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, pitching up to join in the fray.
Almost all the Doctor’s friends are traumatised by facing the Daleks again. Just hearing their voices drives Sarah Jane to tears. Captain Jack is terrified, apologising to his own friends saying they’re all already dead. Martha is stunned. Only Rose can keep her cool. At least until the Doctor is shot. At which point the ENTIRE NATION lost its collective shit. Somehow, not only was the question of whether Doctor Who would regenerate a matter of national importance, that he hadn’t was headline news. That David Tennant was still Doctor Who seemed to be confirmation that a national crisis had been averted.
Despite this scale, the story manages to find space for small things, little moments of character and cunning reversals. While Davros styles himself “Lord and Creator of the Daleks” and the first half of this story tricks the viewer into thinking he’s in command, he’s actually been imprisoned in a vault by his creations. Later, when he recognises Sarah Jane Smith as someone present when the Daleks were created on Skaro, something that is somehow both absolutely unpredictable and utterly inevitable, it’s both a great character moment, an insane continuity reference and a demonstration of Doctor Who’s own cultural longevity. Still, more than fifteen years on, I don’t quite believe it happened. I smile involuntarily just to recall it.
Other lovely grace notes include a Dalek petulantly insisting both that “Daleks do not accept apologies” and that “Daleks do not answer human questions” and how after stealing the Earth they proclaim themselves “Masters of Earth” like all the way back in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, with the Doctor also recalling this earlier, failed Dalek attempt at a planet moving scheme. So did Bernard Cribbins, who starred in the beloved film version, and rung Russell T Davies to make sure he knew he’d fought the Daleks before. (As if such information was not already tattooed on the writer / producer’s brain as it is on any fan’s.) Cribbins’ brief interactions with the Daleks are a joy. It’s tempting to call them a high point of the story, but I’m not sure it has any low ones.
Due to all this referentiality, I also can't shift the feeling that the appearance and extermination of an unnamed character played by Shobu Kapoor, whose EastEnders’ character Gita met the Doctor in Dimensions in Time was done knowingly, if not necessarily with malice aforethought. Gita left Albert Square under a cloud in 1998 and it was 2025 before that show got around to confirming she hadn’t been exterminated by a Dalek. (Although maybe she was and, like her friend-on-the-show, later came back from the dead.)
In the vault with Davros is the partially disassembled Dalek Caan, last of the Cult of Skaro. Other Daleks call Caan “the abomination” (in a nod to the novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks). He rescued Davros from the Time War, where he was meant to have died “at the Gates of Elysium” when his ship flew “into the jaws of the Nightmare Child” despite the Doctor’s efforts to save him. This vivid painting with words, reminiscent of only Stephen Wyatt and Robert Holmes at his peak in old money Doctor Who, gives the viewer a vision of a Time War that could never be staged whatever the budget.
Caan saved his creator at the cost of his sanity. He “...saw time, its infinite complexity and majesty raging in his mind”. He now cannot lie (although his opinion on Big Butts remains sadly unexplored, perhaps they’ll cover this if anyone does the novelisation). He has also acquired the gift of prophecy; and perhaps an agenda of his own. The rest of the Daleks in this “New Dalek Empire” have been grown by Davros, each from a cell of his own body, and then put into new Dalek casings.
They’re led by a deep voiced Red Dalek Supreme with yellow fittings, which is capable of panic and pride, and is taunted for this by Davros. It possibly looks better than any Dalek seen on television before or since, and is seemingly killed by Captain Jack Harkness only to turn up again in The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar. It doesn’t just seem to be the prop, either. Missy explicitly identifies that Supreme as being the one who fought in the Time War, which is this one. Time travel, eh?
The Time War looms large over this story, as it does over every Dalek story that works this century. The Doctor’s horror at the Shadow Proclamation asking him to lead them into battle against the Daleks brings back traumatic memories, and later Davros is determined to bring these memories to the fore, condemning the Doctor as a hypocrite. He calls the Doctor’s companions “Children of Time” as a parallel to the Daleks being “Children of Davros”. (Itself another reference to the novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks.) He points out that the Doctor “abhors violence” but argues that in truth “You take ordinary people and you fashion them into weapons… I made the Daleks, you made this.”
It’s the same ground as covered in Boom Town, but here with the added piquancy of a new, less haunted Doctor, it being Davros, and the damage and chaos being less hypothetical. Being in a collapsing Crucible rather than a Cardiff eatery can tend to concentrate the mind. But despite everything, the Doctor tries to save Davros as, thanks to Donna Noble, the story ends with the collapse of Davros’ ambitions, rather than reality itself. Davros, though, would rather die than accept the Doctor’s hand. Even though he’s only got one of his own.
If the Last Great Time War against the Daleks does stand as a kind of proxy for the years in which Doctor Who was away from television, and I’ve long felt that surely it does, the defeat of the New Dalek Empire functions as its opposite. As the Doctor and his friends use the TARDIS to fly the Earth back home, in the first Doctor Who episode ever to be the most watched television programme of the week, both the “Children of Time” and Doctor Who’s viewers could be forgiven for entertaining an extraordinary thought - “There was a war, and we won.”
If Doctor Who can come back from its 1990s doldrums to that, anything is possible.
