“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”
Journey’s End had explosions, special effects, emotion and punch-the-air moments aplenty. They were all massively entertaining, and I cheered when K9 appeared just as much as the next fan. Who’d have thought that Russell T Davies could have written a finale that would make Last of the Time Lords look restrained?
But although it made great entertainment, it wasn’t particularly good storytelling. I really enjoyed it, but I’m not convinced it was much good. Here’s why…
I think the biggest weaknesses of this story lie largely with the ending, which is unfortunate, because endings are so important. A good ending is what lifts a story beyond a collection of interesting events, and makes it satisfying and meaningful. The ending is one of the most important parts of any story, and the hardest to get right. You’ll remember a good ending forever, but a bad ending can wreck an entire story.
The ending doesn’t completely spoil Journey’s End, which is packed full of great scenes, good characters and dialogue and so on. But because of the weak ending, it doesn’t manage to integrate and resolve the themes and plot. It saps the tale of meaning and significance, and because of that is the least satisfying series finale so far.
In Last of the Time Lords, the conflict between the Doctor and Master actually was essentially an argument about the nature and future of humanity. The Master’s plan was to make humanity into “the greatest monsters of them all” by turning them into Toclafane, which humanity has the potential to become if driven by fear. The Doctor defeated him through humanity’s potential to have near-godlike power when united and driven by hope. The story, while acknowledging our capacity for evil, was ultimately an affirmation of human potential for good, and so, whatever other flaws it may have had, it had something meaningful to say as a piece of art.
Journey’s End doesn’t give the conflict between Davros and the Doctor the same weight and meaning. The big question raised is the effect of the Doctor on his companions. Davros accuses him of turning his companions into weapons, challenging the Doctor about all the people who have died for him in what’s an interesting and powerful scene.
But it has diddly-squat to do with Davros’ evil plan to destroy the whole of reality. His plan doesn’t mean anything, though it would be easy to tweak the script to hint at the ultimate self-destructiveness of evil, in contrast to the creativity that the Doctor inspires (or should inspire, again, the story isn’t all it could be here). Theme runs separately from plot.
For the story to be satisfying, it needed to resolve this conflict between Davros and the Doctor, to counter it through the actions of the Doctor and his companions. But although Donna defeats Davros as far as the plot goes through pressing some buttons, there’s no effective counterargument to his claim.
Russell T Davies claimed on Confidential that there’s “no answer” to Davros’ accusation that the Doctor turns his companions into weapons. But traditionally there are two moral responses to war and violence. One is pacifism – and the Doctor may be guilty of many things, but this isn’t one of them – and the other, which this story seems to forget, is chivalry.
The Doctor has never been a pacifist. The Doctor has always sought the peaceful solution first, but doesn’t shy away from fighting for what he believes in. As the Second Doctor said, “Some corners of the universe have bred the most terrible things, things that stand against everything we believe in… they must be fought”.
But although the Doctor is a fighter, he is not a butcher or a warmonger. The series has, on the whole, recognised that it’s possible, though difficult, to fight the monsters without becoming a monster yourself. “Coward” or “killer” aren’t the only two options, contrary to what the Emperor Dalek claims in Parting of the Ways. It’s possible to fight with honour, to treat your enemy fairly, and to remember that some actions are still unacceptable even in the most desperate of situations.
This story seems to forget this, and resorts to a mushy moral equivalence where the Doctor blowing up a weapon of universal destruction makes him a “Destroyer of Worlds” on a par with the Daleks. Davros’ over the top “I name you eternally… the destroyer of worlds!” might carry a bit more weight if the Doctor hadn’t just saved the entire multiverse.
It also confuses being willing to die for something, and willing to kill for something, which are two very different things. The Doctor inspiring Jabe the Tree Person to sacrifice herself to save the lives of everyone on Platform One, for example, is a rather different moral dilemma to inspiring his companions to be willing to blow up the Earth or the Crucible, but the two things are treated interchangeably.
To resolve the thematic conflict, Donna needed to become like the Doctor not in his abilities (specifically the ability to turn any piece of nearby technology into a “Defeat the Villains” button), but becoming like him morally. For the ending to be thematically satisfying, she needed to defeat the Daleks with heroism, with honour and courage and sacrifice, not technobabble alone.
Technobabble solving the plot isn’t necessarily a problem in itself. Russell T Davies usually does technobabble quite well, going all the way back to the “anti-plastic” in Rose. The technobabble in the previous finales – Rose becoming a Time Godess, the Void becoming a giant vacuum cleaner, and the Archangel Network turning the Doctor into Jesus – worked because they had at least some semblance of logic behind them, but more importantly, the plot fitted with the themes, and so the endings were satisfying. They made sense as myth and fairytale, if not as science.
The themes at work in the showdown between the DoctorDonna and the Daleks were the Doctor’s influence on his companions, and how an ordinary person can save the world. Good ideas, good themes, but badly integrated into the story. Saving the world through typing doesn’t make sense on any level, as science or story.
This brings me on to another problem: Donna’s fate, specifically having her mind wiped of all her adventures with the Doctor, sits awkwardly with both plot and themes. Rather than being a natural consequence of the story so far, it’s an arbitrary imposition. There’s no more reason for Donna to have a memory wipe than for Rose to have one at the end of Parting of the Ways, other than to a contrivance to give us an emotional ending and leave the Doctor on his own in the TARDIS.
In Parting of the Ways, Rose takes on the forbidden powers of a god, and must pay with her life, but the Doctor dies for her, becoming a new man. That price of victory, the cost of godhood, makes sense on a very mythic and primal level, and is part and parcel of the climax. But if “an ordinary person can save the world” is what Davies was aiming for, then wiping Donna’s memory, and all her character development, hardly seems in keeping with that. It is a shocking and upsetting exit for Donna, but it doesn’t seem to mean anything. It’s just a senseless accident that only results indirectly from the climax to the story, rather than the kind of mythic storytelling Russell T Davies has previously employed in the series finales.
Russell does a good job of burying these weaknesses in plotting and theme and structure under a whole host of exciting and crowd-pleasing moments. It’s big, loud and fun, and most people – myself included – were very entertained by it. It got almost 10 million viewers, and an extraordinary Appreciation Index of 91, making it the most watched and most enjoyed programme of the week, an unprecedented combination. These weaknesses only qualify, rather than disqualify, this story’s otherwise astonishing success.
But weaknesses they remain. Perhaps I’m just an idealist, but shouldn’t we all want Doctor Who not only be barnstormingly fun and popular entertainment, but at the same time, to actually mean something?
