Day 755: The End of Time Part 1

There are many problems with The End of Time, in my opinion. Leaving behind the issues with Tennant's death, which we'll deal with in the second half tomorrow (where we'll hopefully get to some of the better parts of this story), the first half has its own myriad of issues.

I think that the largest issue is in the story's treatment of the Master. It decides that, instead of allowing the Master to be as he was before, where he was slightly unhinged but still in control of his situation, the production team decide to make the Master go completely insane. He literally jumps across the screen, turning into a mixture of Skeletor and Iron Man as he flies through wastelands, firing off electric beams as he dances. It looks impressive, but it doesn't quite allow for us to see the character as something that is engages on any sort of intellectual front. There's no equivalent scene of the phone call in The Sound of Drums, instead we're left with the Master eating turkey in less than seven seconds flat.

There's also the issue of the fact that the story is stuck with having to build up to a big finale. Normally, being part one of a two part story has not really been an issue for the Russell T Davies era, with Davies ensuring that enough happens in the first half so as to keep the audience's interest, while at the same time holding enough back for the finale to ensure that it's worth sticking around for. But the problem here is that Davies has held too much back for the finale, so we're stuck with an hour of waiting for the dual revelations that the Master has turned the human race into the Master race (which is too good a pun for me to say is a bad idea) and that the Time Lords are returning. Both of these ideas are strong, and both will be dealt with reasonably well in the second half of the story, the only problem is that the rest of the episode lacks anything meaty, instead leaving us with just the bare bones of a story.

Still, I'm fairly sure that things will improve when the second half of this story come along tomorrow. Then again, I'm also fairly sure that things will end up getting worse...