Day 102: Destruction of Time

The Time Destructor, the force that has been driving the series for the past 12 episodes, has finally been activated. As Mavic Chen goes fully bonkers, so too does the world, decaying into dust. And whilst the Doctor tells Steven and Sara to go to the TARDIS, but Sara goes back to help him with the Time Destructor. As they make their way back to the TARDIS, the temporal forces become to great, and Sara decays into a pile of dust, while the Doctor is only saved by chance when Steven throws the Time Destructor into reverse.

I hope that you'll forgive me for making that paragraph exposition heavy, but the truth of the matter is that al, of this that has happened is astonishing. Characters have died, not just random allies, but people who we assumed would live. Bret Vyon, Katarina, Sara. They're all dead now. We haven't really expected Doctor Who to be this dark before, it's sometimes mistaken for fun adventures either through history or through space. But the past 3 storylines have had impossibly dark endings as we witness things go horribly wrong for the characters within the story. It's perhaps due to the story editor, Donald Tosh, or the producer John Wiles, both of whom have been recent additions to Doctor Who and have made the show darker. The show can still be fun, yes, you only have to watch The Myth Makers or most of the Spooner penned episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan, but it also knows when to be serious. It knows that while sometimes we can be fun and happy, and that's good, but there's darkness behind the smiles. And Doctor Who can show that. When I first embarked on watching The Daleks' Master Plan, I was worried. It was 12 episodes long, the 2nd longest in Doctor Who history. What I had not realised, however, was that thanks to everyone involved, from Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner, to John Wiles and Donald Tosh with wonderful performances from William Hartnell, Peter Purves, Kevin Stoney, Jean Marsh, and Nicholas Courtney, with, when we can appreciate it, some beautiful direction from Douglas Camfield, I've realised that this is an astounding story. And with that impossibly dark ending, leaving the Doctor regretful and Steven in shock, I can only hope that their next adventure is a bit more kind to them.